Eight Weeks in the Summer of Victoria's Jubilee

by Bob Biderman

  Z shakes his head. As much as he questioned the motives of the Guardians, he cannot bring himself to contemplate the terrible idea that these men, however foolish or misguided, might have actually done what Krantz’s addled mind had brought him to suggest. For all their vain stupidity, Z feels he still has them to thank for his hearth and home, with good friends and a blossoming career, safely ensconced in the bosom of empire, here in the greatest city in the world, London, England.

  CHAPTER 30

  IT IS MORNING. Z is in Hayward’s office. A space has been cleared amongst the clutter, giving him a small area to work in. He is helping to prepare a six page pamphlet which is to be distributed in an attempt to build support for Lipski’s reprieve.

  But how are they to begin? How are they to make these several pages of print do the job that’s required? For that to happen, Z argues, the pamphlet must be clear, powerfully incisive and compelling. He suggests that perhaps they might open with an admission that the judge’s final instructions had taken the defence by surprise and there was no opportunity for them to comment on it to the jury, thereby implying that the trial had ended unfairly without accusing Fitzjames Stephen directly of an unwarranted intrusion, even though, of course, it was.

  Hayward and Myers then outline the most contentious issues that would force any right-minded observer to rethink the safety of the verdict and Z, taking notes, quickly formulates a series of crucial questions, to be set out in bold, followed by a short response: (1) Why did Rosenbloom not hear anything considering the fact that he was in the room above and the partition dividing the Angels’ room from the staircase leading to Lipski’s room was only a quarter inch thick? (2) Why did Schmuss leave after a few minutes when there were plenty of raw sticks lying about and he was a man apparently in abject need? (3) Can one have confidence in the identification of Lipski in the hospital as the person who purchased the acid when according to the statement of the hospital nurse he was taken straight up to the bed where the prisoner lay and on which a detective was sitting? (4) Where did all the acid come from that caused the damage? (Certainly not from the single vial!) (5) How could Lipski have covered up his own coat with Mr Angel’s coat and then crawled under the bed, dragging an eggbox after him? (6) Were not the abrasions on Lipski’s elbows because of his struggle while on his back? (7) How is it that Mrs Angel’s bedding was marked with acid mixed with blood, but acid mixed with blood was not found on Lipski or his coat? (8) Was the door to the Angels’ room, in fact, locked? And, even if it was, couldn’t anyone, as the experts had stated, easily have turned the key from the outside – especially someone like Schmuss who was trained as a locksmith?

  Words. Z steers away from turgid sentences while thinking to himself that words can simply be words or they can magically transmute into something more, something resonant, something beyond the syllables, the vowels or consonants, like the pigments used to make a painting or the symbols used to formulate a musical composition. And it’s that touch of alchemy Z tries for. But can magic be imposed? Or must it simply happen? He is trying to be workmanlike and the result sounds to him so wooden and pedantic. Yet if these words are to do their job they must be cultivated, they must be nurtured, they must be honed and winnowed.

  Still, he must constrain himself. He doesn’t take easily to tendentious argument; but there is a life at stake, he keeps reminding himself. And to save a life, anything is justified. It is, after all, in the Jewish tradition that life is sacred and even Biblical pronouncements must consider this as uppermost. Words, therefore, must find a balance between the sacred and profane, even if it is an uneasy one. But words are important to him and, therefore, he treats them with respect. And, even more, he feels responsible for them – which, though honourable, can also be dangerous.

  There is a fine, old grandfather clock standing in the far corner of Hayward’s office. Its rich walnut case is in need of polish and the brass fittings are tarnished but the glass door behind which the pendulum resides has been kept clean, unlike the clock face itself, which leads Z to think that someone was more interested in seeing the swing of the pendulum than the actual minute.

  For a moment he finds himself hypnotised by the rhythm of the suspended weight, a silvery disk like a metallic sun in a flattened orbit swinging side to side instead of round and round, and he realises that the progress of time is different than the passage of the hour. The circular motion of the dial, the face of time, defines a moment and freezes it for an instant till another instant in the future can be comprehended. But the eternal rhythm of the pendulum, swinging back and forth and back again, forever and forever, conveys an idea of timelessness.

  Time, however, is something in short supply as far as Lipski was concerned. Eternity would come soon enough. And Z forces himself to look away from this grand reminder of mortality cast in faded wood and tarnished brass and concentrates, once more, on his task at hand.

  With a flourish, he completes his final phrase and hands it on to Myers to inspect. Myers makes a few notations and then passes it to Hayward who reads it over and nods his head in satisfaction. Hayward appreciates Z’s style and feels not the slightest tinge of envy or resentment even though words are his trade too – though in a different sense. For Hayward they’re semantic tools, precise and formalistic, practical and tedious, with meanings archaically defined in dusty tomes dating back to the Henries and the Richards.

  But this pamphlet is neither writ nor brief. It is a clarion call to arms. It must touch that inner self wherein the conscience slumbers and passions may be roused.

  So corrections made, off it shoots. There is a sense of urgency. No time to waste. (A notion further emphasised by Hayward’s throbbing metronome.) First, hand carried by a runny-nosed messenger boy to the copyist and then to the publisher, already primed and waiting, where the type is set. A printer, cloth cap pulled jauntily over his forelock, his brow liberally smudged with lampblack, holds a page proof up to the bright electric light, thinks fleeting about that poor, unlucky Jew who’s the subject of his endeavour, before signalling his OK, the press can roll. And then, in a fog of acrid ink, the pamphlet pages start to fly, one by one, from the great clattering cylinders of the Koenig-Bauer High-Speed Litho Machine, the pride of this busy workshop set away in the backstreets near Cheapside – just one of hundreds of small, independent printing enterprises churning away in the heart of London.

  The old mahogany clock hasn’t long to wait before a delivery wagon pulls up in front of Hayward’s law office and two strong men, one painfully thin, the other the colour of ruby red ale, trundle up the stairs with bales of printed matter tied up with coarse hemp and still having that redolent odour of something fresh off the press.

  On receipt, Myers takes out his penknife and rips open one of the packages. He pulls out several of the newly printed pamphlets and passes them around. There is a slight frisson in the room, an electrical tingle, as their little manifesto is passed from hand to hand. It has created a large dent in their meagre defence budget, but if it does its job well they all feel it certainly would have been worth it.

  They quickly set to work addressing envelopes and stuffing pamphlets within. A number are immediately hand delivered to the editorial offices of the daily newspapers that huddle greedily together in the vicinity of New Grub Street. A few are sent further afield to the Jewish weeklies. Cunninghame Graham has arranged for a copy to be sent to the Home Secretary with a supporting letter written by an elderly, Liberal MP, not directly associated with the ‘trouble makers’.

  The pamphlet is also to be shown that evening to an old acquaintance of Hayward’s, Sir Edward Clarke, an attorney who the year previous had been responsible for saving Adelaide Bartlett from the hangman’s noose with such adeptness at countering the monumental evidence against his pretty client that even though she was happily acquitted of poisoning her husband, nobody really believed she was innocent (bringing a famous surgeon to remark, ‘Now th
at it is all over, she should tell us in the interests of science how she did it’).

  Sir Edward, as Hayward would later tell them, read the pamphlet, looked up, furrowed his brow and said that a copy should be sent immediately to the trial judge. Hayward, of course, reminded him that this sort of direct communication by the solicitor was without precedent. And Sir Edward had told him to damn precedent and just do what needs to be done. Sir Edward, of course, as he had become Solicitor General, could have passed it on to the judge himself, but that would have also been unprecedented. And Sir Edward, as helpful as he was, wasn’t going to put his own reputation on the line for an impoverished East End Jewish immigrant (as he would some years later for the likes of Oscar Wilde) but time was of the essence and, if it was a respite they were after, then Hayward would just have to bloody well send it.

  Hayward that very evening took a deep breath and did what he was advised. With the pamphlet, he enclosed a personal letter to Justice Stephen, excusing himself for this most unusual action by saying that he had been encouraged by the judge’s well-known reputation for fair-play and as there were only days to spare, he felt that the judge would understand the urgency of placing this new information before him, which, for various reasons, hadn’t come out during the trial.

  Myers read the letter after it was written. So did Z. Both of them thought it good and encouraged Hayward to send it.

  It was duly sealed and sprinkled, and given to the delivery boy (whose nose continued to drip, but, thankfully, not on the package) and sent off with good wishes and a blessing of eternal hope, however tenuous.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE BUSTLE OF Cheapside faded away as night fell and buildings emptied of their masters – the accountants, the brokers, the lawyers, the scribes – who made their way by cab back to their cloistered homes or, in the case of those harried staff on the lower rungs of God’s immutable hierarchy, by train to some dreary outlying suburb. Then the streets of that fanciful square mile, the heart of the far flung British Empire where an endless flood of paper was processed each and every day affecting, in some mysterious manner, the lives of a tea picker in Darjeeling, a sheep-sheerer from the Australian outback, a Shanghai opium trader, an African diamond miner and a coolie laying railway track to take fatted cattle from the Argentinean Pampas to a dirty slaughterhouse in Buenos Aires – those narrow streets so filled with monied energy, those offices flowing with oceans of inky blood, emptied, each and every one. And then all was quiet. All was serene. Even a stray dog caught in a focused beam of moonlight was left alone as it lifted its hind leg to pee against a sculptured plinth supporting the heroic representation of some Conquering Lord of the Realm on Horseback.

  Cheapside was now at peace with itself, with God and with Mammon. Quiet and Darkness ruled; shadows wandered in the stillness of the night, spirits of the plague and long forgotten Romans. Everywhere but one: deep into the night, while all surrounding was asleep, the office of John Hayward, Solicitor, 27 King Street, Cheapside EC, second floor, had its gaslights still burning.

  People were coming and going at all hours. Food was brought in – bread, butter, pickles, mustard, onions, chicken, ale. The air stank of strong cheese and stale tobacco. A kettle full of water atop a kerosene stove was always on the boil. Some people were sleeping at their desks in mangy clothes, competing with the cheese for supremacy of odour. The place was a mess. Rubbish – nutshells, butts of cigars and cigarettes, discarded wads of paper – littered the floor. But one could sense a feeling of heightened energy existed. This little office, once an ordinary solicitor’s domain, with all the boring implications, now was alive, vital, empowered, buzzing with vigour and crackling with fire.

  Hayward’s office had become Lipski Defence Central. Over the days since the end of the trial, something remarkable had happened. Instead of the letdown and lethargy that comes from defeat, a new determination had arisen coupled with a shifting mood on the streets of the East End. During the trial, the focus had been on the event itself and the grisly details of the murder. But after the verdict was in, after the swift and brutal ending when the curtain was drawn, the props were packed up, the stage lights were doused and all that was left was an emptiness in the chamber, at the dock – where once the judge and jury sat, there now was just a hollowness that already had begun to rot and a residue with its sour, lingering smell had begun to trail out the door and down the streets and alleyways and back into the ghetto. And back inside the ghetto, people’s nostrils had begun to burn and their eyes began to water from the acrid stink that had become ever stronger as each day passed and the clocks ticked off the seconds till the man they once had all abhorred would be hung in the cold morning light for a murder he may or may not have committed.

  This realisation had hit the ghetto like a thunderbolt. Suddenly, overnight, petitions with scrawled signatures supporting a reprieve began to pour into Hayward’s cramped chambers. And so came the volunteers – workers, traders, teachers, do-gooders – people from all walks of life who asked how they could help to stop this young, immigrant Jew swinging from the gallows.

  Not everyone was convinced, of course. But there were enough to send out crews of canvassers, to the markets, to the shops, to the bath houses, to the synagogues, the shules. And everywhere little knots of people gathered, like clumps of flotsam, to argue and debate about that luckless young man and whether some vile injustice was being enacted upon him.

  Even the Jewish weeklies that had kept their silence earlier on because they were loath to stir things up in an atmosphere where foreign Jews were being vilified as the reason native Englishmen went jobless – even these cringing vehicles of the cowering middle classes had begun to have second thoughts. Some now came out in support of a reprieve because ‘it is no great honour for the Jews when one of them is hanged.’ But still a gnawing fear that some demonic box had now been opened and, once that the lid was off, who knew what would start crawling out of it. ‘When an ordinary person kills a person everything is quiet,’ wrote the editor of Die Tsukunft, a popular Yiddish weekly, ‘it will not occur to anyone to call another person by the name of the murderer. But when Lipski is sentenced to death, the ordinary people taunted other Jews by shouting “Lipski!” at them. Two weeks ago, Saturday, it happened in Brick Lane. Last Saturday in Church Lane there was a great fight between Jews and locals and all because of him...’

  Sides had been firmly drawn. On one, the crowds bayed, ‘Hang the Jew!’ and jeered at all the other ‘Lipskis’ whose features seemed to define them as his brethren. On the other, there were those horrified that one more Israelite would be nailed to the cross, without a benevolent God to save him (not that God seemed to be in the habit of saving Jews from crucifixions).

  The shadowy East End streets, normally perilous enough, were now doubly rife with danger. Mothers kept their children inside claustrophobic houses. Men walked quickly to their work, avoiding certain roads and nervously glancing over their shoulder to see who, if anyone, was following them. Women stayed away from pubs. People seemed to roam the streets in groups and few went anywhere without a friend escorting them.

  But in the city at large, the case had yet to take hold. People still ate their breakfasts at leisure and read the morning press with more interest given to the latest stock offering for a new fangled device to mass produce boots using a patented automatic riveter then to a story buried deep in the pages of the Times about some Jew found guilty of a capital offence who would be punished accordingly as justice had dictated.

  Back in Hayward’s office, the morning had arrived and faint rays of blemished sun filtered through the grubby windowpanes. The sounds of early horses clip-clopping down Kings Street were heard, along with the shouts of newspaper vendors and the tramping of the first battalions, the lowly paid army of cleaners, scullery maids, runners, handymen – all those needed to start the Cheapside day.

  As the morning dawned, there was a quickening of pac
e. The rum was passed around from hand to hand and the coffee brewed, allowing them to shake off the long night’s aches and stiffness. And then, back to work. They were going through the schedule of the day when a rapping sounded at Hayward’s office door, the handle turned, and a little messenger boy, not more than twelve, with a too big cap flopping over his face, came in to deliver an official-looking packet to John Hayward, Esq and, having been given a farthing for his trouble, the little messenger boy, with a toothsome grin, tipped his cap and bounced out again.

  All eyes were on Hayward as he carefully opened the envelope with the glistening sword-like implement handed him by Myers, took the letter out, unfolded it, perused it quickly, refolded it and slipped it back inside its enclosure.

  All eyes were on him as he pursed his lips. All was silence. The only thing they were certain of, those others in the room, was what had been delivered by the messenger lad was very important. And finally when Hayward spoke, what he said brightened the room with a smile from his cracked lips instead of his usual gently formed frown. For he announced that Justice Stephen had requested a meeting. (Cheers!) And that the meeting would be held at the Law Courts , right after adjournment, on the 8th of August, Monday afternoon.

  CHAPTER 32

  HOPE, THAT JOYOUS spring of all endeavours, had come in the form of a scribbled letter from the judge. That he had requested a meeting, gave heart to Lipski’s rag-tag committee of defenders. The pamphlet had clearly done its job and now that the gnawing questions that lingered on after the trial were in the public domain, the issue of respite had been given wings to fly above the tawdry world of legalisms (though awkwardly, perhaps – something like a rooster who wishes to soar but hasn’t yet found the proper aerodynamic know-how).