The Butcher Shop

by Jean Devanny

  There was a long silence, and then Messenger said: “You will always be welcome in my home,” and left the room.

  With his arms about his wife he told her of her lover’s decision. She stared at him suspiciously as though she doubted his honesty, then tore herself from his embrace and darted about from one object to another with a strange accretion of energy. Two fiery spots came into her cheeks.

  Patiently the man besought her to control herself for the children’s sake.

  “I’ll try,” she answered; “I’ll try, believe me. Do you know, Barry, I just don’t know, now, where those children came from.” She sat down and tried to compose herself. She had a real fear that she was going mad.

  Messenger stayed with her, trying by all manner of means to interest her, to strengthen her. He believed that once Glengarry was out of the house she would be better, and decided to ask the man to go the very next morning. He brought the baby, a dear wee toddler, to her. It almost broke his heart to see her impatience with it. He tried to awaken her motherhood, her love for Harry, whom she had worshipped, and whom he pictured to her now as pining for his mother. A true picture.

  “You know, Margaret,” he said, “Harry only lives for you. If you won’t let me go away, you must do your ‘bit’ for the kiddies’ sake. You must play the game.”

  “Yes,” she answered in a deep big voice that startled Messenger. “I must play the game—the game of the property wife.” Her tone excited her own wonder. That was not her voice; it was a man’s voice. She glanced obliquely at Barry. He looked away from her eyes. “You take the baby back to the nursery and stay with the children, Barry,” she said. “I will rest. I should really prefer to be alone, dear.”

  He left her unwillingly. The fear came to him, too, that she might be losing her reason. He took the baby back to the nursery and left the house, walking anywhere, letting his jealousy and its kindred emotions run riot within him. He blamed himself, too, now. He should have acted in the beginning, when he first suspected. He should have forced her to go away somewhere and got rid of Glengarry in her absence. He tried to find the man blameworthy, so that he might go to him and fight. Fight was what he wanted now—the struggle of man to man in primeval fashion. But, believing as he did that Glengarry had acted “honourably,” he could find no basis for blame. No, it was just one of those terrible accidents that ravel the even skein of individual life. He walked for hours until fatigue pulled him to the ground. And no sooner did he sit down to rest than the thought of the distraught woman at home dragged him to his feet again in a frenzy of desire to give her comfort. He gauged her distress by his own.

  Hour after hour Margaret paced up and down her room asking herself, without ever finding answer, what she could do to rid her mind of its disorder. And often as she would say to herself that she must be calm and determined and forget that the man she loved was leaving her, the poignancy of the fact would crush reason out of her and leave her shaking as with palsy. She had forgotten now that time had ever existed when she was not crazed with mingled yearning and hatred for her lover.

  She would see him. She would appeal to him herself. She would upbraid him and curse him in the name of all the Margarets in the world.

  She opened the door. Little Harry was sitting on the floor without, just sitting there like a mouse watching his mother’s door. Margaret did not notice that his face was thin, that his eyes lit up at sight of her. She did not notice the joy of his: “Mother!”

  She looked at him calculatingly and then said cunningly: “Run and find Mr. Glengarry for me, Harry, there’s a darling, and tell him to come here.”

  He jumped up gladly. “Oh, Mummy, yes, if you will kiss me.”

  She kissed him, and he ran off, looking back at her with longing eyes. He came back shortly to say that Glengarry would not come. She slammed the door in his face. The boy sat down on the floor again with a dull, pained wonder in his eyes and waited.

  There Barry found him. The father picked him up and carried him to his sisters at play, telling him that Mother was ill, with a strange illness that made her forget everybody, but that she would soon be better again.

  Harry told his father of the message that he had taken to Glengarry. The finding of the boy and that message roused a terrible anger in the patient man, and this time it was directed against his wife. No excuse whatever could he find for the neglect of and cruelty towards the boy. He kept away from her, not trusting his tongue or even his capacity for withholding blows from her with that dreadful anger upon him.

  And she was alone with the fiends of hell. As darkness closed down she pulled the curtains of her window aside and tried to suck palliation from the elements, from the earth that was her mother, from the calm of the mighty universe that kept the pigmy souls of men in leading strings.

  When Messenger came at last to her she was standing there before the night. He had calmed his anger, and now approached her with his old loving manner. She said merely: “Look, you man, who owns the souls of women, look out here and ask yourself is there any sense in life at all?”

  “You are beside yourself, Margaret. Come to bed and rest. We shall go away from here for a year, starting to-morrow afternoon.”

  The last vestige of her womanhood forsook her. “Yes,” she flared coarsely. “And leave him here with Miette.”

  In disgust he stepped back. He blinked his eyes as though the sight of her was obnoxious. “My God, Margaret! Isn’t it enough that the man has refused you when you have offered yourself like any common strumpet to him? Do you want me to despise you utterly?”

  She saw him through a red haze. Yes, there he was, sticking up for the man, clinging to his own sex against the woman. Well, she would fix him. “Refused me, did he?” she taunted. “Why, he came into my bed. He has been in my bed and I in his!” And now, utterly deranged, she flung her head back and laughed shrilly. She did not notice the man slink away from her with the hand of death writ large upon him.

  All night through she sat dumbly in a straight-backed chair. She had ceased to think long since. She knew but dully that Barry had not returned.

  And shortly after dawn, while she was still seated there, there came a hurry and scurry upon the stair, and then her door opened swiftly and Jimmy came in. He was grey of face and haunted-looking. He did not seem to notice the peculiarity of her sitting there at that time. In truth he didn’t notice it, for he was in mortal terror.

  “Lady! Lady!” he whispered. “Something has happened to Barry.”

  She moved her lips, colourless as putty, and he heard a faint: “Yes?”

  He shook her. “Something has happened to Barry! Oh, Lady! Barry is dead! He is drowned! Scotty found him in the dam when he was on the way to the far paddock.”

  At that she rose up, very calm and collected. “Dead, did you say, Jimmy? Barry is drowned?”

  “Yes, Lady.”

  The Maori had seen at last that there was something dreadfully amiss here, too. He backed away from her with terrified eyes. What had come to Maunganui? Had they all gone mad?

  “So.” She looked all round the room as though searching for something, then stood struggling with thought.

  At last she looked up at him with eyes that made Jimmy mutter: “Why, you are dead too,” and said slowly: “Then there is something to be done, Jimmy, there is something to be done.”

  “Yes, Lady. Oh, yes. Oh, Lady, what is the matter with you?”

  She went to Barry’s dressing-table and pulled out a drawer.

  Jimmy said: “I shall go and tell Glengarry, Lady.” He was shaking like a leaf. He wiped his hand across his brow and beads of sweat flew off it.

  “No, Jimmy. I shall tell Glengarry. You go down and see to Barry. I shall tell Glengarry.”

  She spoke strongly. She had taken up something from the drawer and now moved towards the door. He followed her out, dreadfully fascinated. He felt a peculiar urge to stick to her, to prevent her from telling Glengarry. He pulled at her sleeve. “Lady, let m
e tell Glengarry. It is my place.”

  She turned on him imperatively. “Jimmy, go away from me. Am I not mistress here?”

  He slunk away unwillingly, crept half-way down the stairs, then turned back. That urge was irresistible. The horror of Barry’s death faded into nameless terror of something worse. The superstitious kernel of the man came up through the pakeha’s training and stayed his steps at the top of the stairs. “Run away! Run away!” it told him. “A fearsome monster walks with the woman.” He struggled with his childish terror, with his great black eyes almost bolting from his head. Then with an effort he rushed forward; but as he ran there came to his ears a faint gurgling sound.

  Glengarry’s door was open. Jimmy stopped in the doorway. Beside the Scotsman’s bed stood the woman, looking down at the bed, and in her hand was that which brought from Jimmy’s lips an awful, blood-curdling screech of purest terror and grief. It tore through the house from room to room, and was heard by the early risers at the yard.

  Margaret turned to him and held out the dripping razor blade.

  And the wonder of it to Jimmy was that she was again the old Margaret, again the radiant, glorious woman. “See, Jimmy,” she said in her old soft, deep tones. “See. I have revenged Barry, and I have revenged the Margarets of the world. Never again shall man claim property rights in me.”

  She walked to him, past him, and back to her room.

  And Jimmy saw that Glengarry’s throat was cut from ear to ear.

  THE BANNING OF THE BUTCHER SHOP

  Jean Devanny had reason to be puzzled at the reason for the banning of The Butcher Shop. Although it was found by the Censorship Appeal Board in New Zealand to be ‘an indecent document within the meaning of the Indecent Publications Act 1910’, that Act does not throw any light on the nature of the objection to the book. Its definition concerns itself with the nature of the document, not of indecency: ‘ “Indecent document” means any book, newspaper, photograph, print, or writing, and any paper or other thing of any description whatsoever, which has printed or impressed upon it, or otherwise attached thereto, or appearing, shown, or exhibited in any manner whatsoever thereon, any indecent word, statement, or significant sign, or any indecent picture, illustration, or representation’.1 The importation of such indecent documents was prohibited under Section 46 of the Customs Act 1913; and it was partly under the same section of the same Act and partly under a war-time amendment of the Regulation of Trade and Commerce Act which extended the Government’s powers to restrict imports, that an Order-in-Council was made on 10 May 1921 forbidding the importation of ‘any document which incites, encourages, advises, or advocates violence, lawlessness, or disorder, or expresses any seditious intention.’2 Mrs Devanny might have had good reason for suspecting that the objection to her book was political rather than moral.

  William Downie Stewart was Minister of Customs from 1921 to 1928. In his Life and Times of Sir Francis Bell he explains why he accepted the view of the Attorney-General, concerned at the entry of revolutionary, socialist, and seditious literature, that it was more effective to cut off the supply at source, by means of the Customs Act, than to prosecute booksellers.3 Consequently it was his responsibility to provide machinery by which books, if the need was felt, could be judged by people more qualified to do so than the Comptroller of Customs. He set up in 1923 a board of censors, known as the Censorship Appeal Board, consisting of two librarians, and a bookseller; presumably it was called an Appeal Board because its function was to pronounce on such books as were referred to it by the Comptroller of Customs. The men appointed to this Board were Charles Wilson, Parliamentary Librarian; Herbert Baillie, Wellington Public Librarian; and Henry Charles South, President of the Booksellers’ Association and manager of the New Zealand Bible and Book Society shop at 71 Willis Street. These appointments were not gazetted, or so far as I can find, publicly announced; and secrecy, or at least reticence, was a feature of the system from its inception. The Minister explained that the British system, by which the indecent book was seized by the police and its seller prosecuted before a magistrate, created undesirable publicity for the book, ‘whereas under our procedure here hardly anyone knows of the existence of the book’.4

  Downie Stewart illustrated his Department’s procedure by an episode that occurred in May 1926:

  A book was sent out from Home, but before it arrived we received a cable from some individual in London warning us that the book was coming and asking us to intercept it. The book arrived in due course, and I had letters from a number of prominent Anglican clergymen objecting to it. The Board of Censors had the book before them and after consultation with the booksellers the latter agreed that the book should not be allowed to circulate.5

  The book was not The Butcher Shop, as might have been suspected by the Leader of the Labour Party, Harry Holland (who moved in the same Wellington social circles as Jean and Hal Devanny), when he asked the name of the author. It was a novel by Shane Leslie, The Cantab, reflecting in a style of wit and paradox that could be taken for impiety, a Cambridge undergraduate’s questioning of the Christian ministry he was about to undertake. But if one were to substitute a letter from an editor for the letters from clergymen, the procedure followed was almost identical.

  On 1 March 1926 the Prime Minister’s secretary, Frank David Thomson, who was with a ministerial party inspecting irrigation works in Central Otago, received, readdressed, a cable from London:

  Instruct watch for new novel entitled ‘Butchers Shop’ by Jean Devanny Wellington lady Publishers Duckworth, London, alleged depiction station life New Zealand disgusting indecent communistic

  Bert (London)6

  The cable reflects the confusion of motives that marked the reception of the novel: affronted national sensitivity as well as moral and political objections. Whoever Bert may have been,7 his cable was quoted in full when on 27 March the Comptroller of Customs forwarded a copy of The Butcher Shop to Charles Wilson, Chairman of the ‘Board of Censorship’. From the start then the terms in which the novel was judged reflected the same confusion.

  A shipment of the book, however, had reached Auckland, and it included a review copy for the New Zealand Herald. The editor, R. M. Hacket, sent his copy to the Minister of Customs for the attention of the censor. It was a ‘fair sample’ of the ‘pernicious literature’ his readers sometimes complained about in his correspondence columns. ‘We have not reviewed it because anything we could say would likely enough be a good advertisement for it. It is pretty rotten stuff.’8

  By 26 April the Board had reached its decision. Since Charles Wilson, recently retired from his post at the General Assembly Library, had just left for a visit to England, it was signed by the Acting Chairman, H. C. South.

  The Board considers this a bad book all round—sordid, unwholesome and unclean. It makes evil to be good. We are of opinion that it should be banned.9

  In the same letter the Board gave its opinion that Leon Trotsky’s Where is Britain Going? published in the same month as The Butcher Shop, should not be banned because it was ‘enlightening’ as a ‘frank statement of what Sovietism stands for’.

  There was no public announcement of the Board’s decision. But the Christchurch Sun picked it up from local Customs officials, and The Press next day reported it too—the only two newspapers, so far as I know, to report the decision or to protest.10 Neither the writer of an editorial in the Sun nor a columnist in The Press—both had read the book—could understand why it had been singled out from many others circulating that might have been found equally offensive, and both guessed that the reason was that the story was set in New Zealand. Such too was the view of Seton Crisp in the Sydney Bulletin, who mocked the protectiveness of New Zealand authorities towards the reading public. Crisp found the novel ‘crude enough, Heaven knows, but behind it all there is, for those who choose to look for it, sincerity and a certain grim strength’.11 He quoted a personal letter from Jane Mander expressing apprehension as to the reception in store for th
e book from ‘those gentle souls’ who had been horrified by her own novels. An articulate and eloquent protest against the ban appeared in the Victoria University College student publication Spike, and Mrs K. A. Coleridge of the Library at the Victoria University of Wellington tells me it was ‘almost certainly’ written by J. C. Beaglehole, then a graduate of the University about to leave for England. This article is not only an arraignment of censorship itself but contains the only competent analysis of the novel made in New Zealand at the time. ‘What any of these gentlemen knows about literature I have been unable to discover. They apparently enjoy a certain standing as critics of morals. This is a melancholy reflection.’12

  An interview with Jean Devanny was reported in the New Zealand Times and this was reprinted in the Christchurch Sun and Otago Witness.13 In the New Zealand Free Lance Nelle Scanlan, the sentimental novelist, reported another interview, thought by the writer in Spike to be ‘ineffably patronising’. Nelle Scanlan presented Jean Devanny as ‘the busy housewife … as far removed from any suggestion of coarseness or brutality as one could well imagine … [with] a quick intelligence, a keen knowledge of. life on its rougher side’, but (it was suggested) not yet old and wise enough to lose her intense enthusiasm for her belief in ‘scientific socialism’.14

  Jean Devanny’s reaction to the ban was initially one of hurt and disappointment, but on reflection she was not surprised. Three quotations from interviews reflect her responses, two of them contemporary, the third four years after:

  The authoress, Mrs Jean Devanny, is a resident of Garrett street, Wellington, and she feels very hurt by the action of the board.

  To a pressman who called on her the other day Mrs Devanny freely expressed her views. ‘No reason,’ she said, ‘has been given me as to the reason why the book is banned. It seems very strange, because the book has been so well received by the English reviewers, and I have had some beautiful letters from responsible people in the Old Country. Also, I have been invited, since my book appeared, to join the Authors’ Association.’