by Alec Waugh
His voice had risen and his cheeks had flushed, and Merrick’s heart had sunk as he had listened to him. For a moment at the very beginning he had detected signs of wavering. But Eagar had brooded too long over the injustice that he had felt to have been done to him. The venom had gone too deep. He felt himself to be an ill-used and persecuted man: he could no longer see the case in true perspective. The moment he began to discuss it he must lose his temper and his head. Merrick felt his task to be hopeless, but he continued.
“That may or may not be true,” he said. “I’m naturally not in a position to judge. It’s never any use going back over the past. What we’ve got to do is to take the situation as it stands, and try and see how it can be got out of with the least pain to every one. A fight can only damage every one. And if you don’t like the idea of the case appearing as it is now, it would be easy enough to change the charge to one of desertion. No one would think any the worse of you for that.”
It was a suggestion that earlier in the case might have been made successfully, but again Eagar merely laughed.
“So that’s your tack now, is it?” he said. “Marian knew quite well to begin with that I should never agree to one of those collusive desertion cases. So she trumped up that ridiculous cruelty charge. When she sees it doesn’t work, she switches across and asks me to be chivalrous and desert her. No, no, Merrick. You ask me what I’m hoping to get out of this case, which is going to cost me a great deal of money and mix me up in a great deal of scandal. In reply I assure you that I’m not going to sit quiet and let anyone take my good name away. Marian’s frightened. Well, let her be. She started this. If anyone’s to draw out of it, she can.”
“And let your marriage stand?”
“I’m well enough content with it.”
Merrick looked marvelling at him. “Do you really believe,” he said, “that after all this, feeling about her as you do, there can be any happiness for you together?”
Eagar shrugged his shoulders. “These are early days yet,” he said. “We’ve got a long while ahead of us. This should be a lesson to her, it’ll teach her sense. She’ll make quite a decent wife, I daresay, before I’m through with her.” Then his face clouded and the ugly, vindictive look came back into it. “It’ll be the hell of a fine lesson for her. She thought she could do any damned thing with me she liked. She’ll know she can’t now.”
It was useless to prolong the talk. With a sick heart Merrick turned away. The fight would have to go through, and it would grow squalider week by week. What was it about the law, that everything it touched it must befoul? Could it leave nothing clean? He recalled the Herbert Eagar he had met two months back, a decent, simple fellow, sincerely worried because his wife had left him, anxious to make amends, wanting her back because he loved her. And now there was this other Eagar tyrannical and spiteful, fighting for the mere sake of fighting, wanting his wife back so that he might be revenged on her. A dirty business. And yet it had been clean enough to start with. He remembered Marian’s recoil from the idea of bringing the cruelty charge in court. That was how one always felt at the beginning and then the mosquito of contention stung you and you lost your sense of what was and was not decent. You were in a fight. You took the weapon that lay handiest. A thing was good evidence or bad evidence. And your managing clerk regretted that a man had not been more of a cad than he had been, that he had not struck a woman with his clenched fist. And you quarrelled with your father. And now he was on his way to Marian to decide what further counter-accusations could be brought against her husband. And his heart was heavy, and the lovely summer evening mocked him with its peace and beauty. The contrast was so acute.
Everything around him was so lovely. The pale blue of the sky, whitened where the sharp outline of chimney pot and gable cut it; the pale sky with the soft dove-coloured clouds drifting across it lazily; and the sun growing redder and larger as it sank and the light lying almost level along the grass between the trees; and the leaves upon the branches greeny-gold; and young people walking slowly side by side across the park; and the big shops closing, and Piccadilly thronged with people hurrying home to their gardens and tennis courts and rivers; to white flannels and the soft northern twilight, to the approach of night, and the slow silencing of the birds. On all sides of him peace and beauty and in his heart heaviness and gain-giving. ‘He saw the road and where it led.’ There would be weeks of anxiety and strain, the mustering of fresh charges, the countering of an opponent’s moves, the conferences with counsel, the slow marshalling of an attack.
And then the scene in court, with the room packed, and the gallery twittering with prurient curiosities, and the reporters busy with their pencils, and Marian in the witness-box enduring the ordeal of a cross-examination, making heaven knew, what impression there. He remembered what impression she had made upon him at that first party. Wanton and wild, that was how he had seen her. He remembered his father’s comment on her, the typical modern girl, a mistress and not a wife. And how else would the public see her, under the light of that ruthless cross-examination? The questions that would be set her, the questions to which her conduct had made her liable. A girl who kissed lightly, who dined alone in men’s flats, had baths even in men’s flats. Even if she won her case, what reputation would be left her? He could picture the headlines across the evening papers, the jokes in music halls. It would take her years to live it down. And that Marian should be subjected to that,—Marian!
He had told her little of the case’s recent developments, not wishing to worry her till it was strictly necessary, and he found her waiting him, in the pleasant two-roomed service flat that she had taken temporarily, gaily expectant of a happy evening. And as he saw her curled happily into the corner of a chesterfield, he winced at the mental picture of her standing in a few weeks’ time in the corner of a witness-box. It was one of those things that one just couldn’t bear to picture.
“I’m afraid,” he said,“that I’ve bad news for you.”
And he explained to her what had been happening during the last few weeks, told her of her husband’s counter-charges, of his interview with Rutterthorpe, the conference between Bradshaw and his father and his vain attempt at a reconciliation with her husband.
As he began to describe his interview with her husband Marian looked up quickly.
“What,” she said, “you’ve been to see my husband. But wasn’t that fearfully unprofessional?”
He laughed.
“It was rather, I suppose.”
“Not more than rather?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Rather is a relative term,” he said.
She looked at him curiously.
“Not more than rather,” she repeated. “But isn’t it the kind of thing that you might get into pretty serious trouble over if it got found out?”
“It won’t be found out unless your husband tells his solicitors.”
“And is he likely to?”
Again Merrick shrugged his shoulders. Under the strain of his talk with Eagar, teased by the bitterness of defeat, he had almost forgotten to consider what might be for himself the consequences of that defeat.
“How likely,” Marian persisted, “is Herbert to tell his solicitors?”
“The betting, I should say, was fifty-fifty.”
“And if he does tell, how serious would it be for you?”
He hesitated, then smiled and rather charmingly.
“Quite serious,” he said.
“It might make trouble for you with your father?”
“Yes.”
“So much trouble that you might have to leave his firm?”
“Possibly.”
Probably, would have been the correcter answer. He did not see, indeed, how he could hope to be retained after so deplorable a betrayal of trust. Almost certainly if Eagar spoke to Ephraim, he would have to go. And that would mean the leaving of Marian alone with no one but Bradshaw and his father to protect her interests. It was the first tim
e he had seen it from that angle. Marian alone. It might be, he reflected bitterly, that his recklessness had done no more for Marian than hand her over to the care of those who took no more than a detached and legal interest in her. It might be that because of it she was worse off than she had been before. A sorry business.
But her eyes, clear and searching, were fixed upon him.
“You knew that,” she said, “and yet you went.”
She spoke slowly, incredulously, as though she were speaking her thoughts aloud. She hesitated as though there were more that she had to say, then suddenly, as though she had changed her mind, “Please tell me the rest,” she said.
He told her and she listened quietly, leaning forward on the sofa, her elbows upon her knees, her hands stretched out in front of her. When he had finished she looked up; her eyes thoughtful and her forehead creased.
“And now,” she said, “you want me to give you something that will make my evidence seem stronger. But I don’t see how I can. There wasn’t anything.”
The look in her eyes was puzzled and appealing. And it was that look that made up Merrick’s mind for him. As his eyes met hers, as he realized all that that look implied of innocence and freshness, he knew very well that he could never allow her to be dragged through the ignominy of such a case as this. She was clean now and she must remain so. She must not be smirched by contact with a mind like Bradshaw’s; the long interviews, during which Bradshaw’s questioning would dive her into her past, searching out grievances, poisoning her thoughts, placing new constructions on ignored moments, making her, as Ephraim had made her husband, spiteful and ruthless and vindictive, leaving her for the rest of her life possibly with a warped and envenomed attitude towards the world. Day by day he would be watching the destruction of something fine and clean. And he couldn’t. That was all there was to it; he couldn’t.
“If I could think of anything,” Marian was saying, “of course I’ld tell you, I’ld have told you at the beginning, but there really wasn’t anything. Apart from that one occasion, and then perhaps he’d been drinking, I don’t know, he was pretty patient with me.”
Merrick smiled to himself, as he imagined how Bradshaw would have parried that admission. He would have rubbed his hands together, cocked his head over on one side. “Yes, yes,” he would have answered, “but let’s go back over it all carefully. Are you sure, are you quite sure, that there wasn’t. I don’t say such an incident as the one you have told us of, but some occasion when he was a little rough, a little abrupt, shall we say, with you?” And he would ferret about, stirring up old animosities, like a dentist probing a decayed tooth until he strikes the nerve. That would have been Bradshaw’s game. Well, it should not be his.
“You needn’t worry about that,” he said.
“There won’t be any need to rake up old quarrels.” She raised her eyebrows in surprise.
“I thought,” she said, “that you’d come round to see if I couldn’t remember some new evidence for you.”
“I came round to tell you what had happened, to tell you what was my father’s view of it, what our managing clerk had thought of it.”
“Just that. Not to find new evidence?”
“No.”
“Then you think we shall be able to win the case without?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “We might win it, we might not. That’s not the point; the point is how much we’ld lose, either way.”
She looked at him, curiously, a puzzled, interrogative expression on her face. “I don’t follow,” she said slowly. “If it’s a question of money, I suppose it would cost a lot, but I don’t mind selling out capital.”
Merrick smiled. “It’s not that,” he said. “It’s not a question of money.”
He was sitting beside her on the sofa, and leaning forward he took one of her hands in his, and as he spoke in a low, quiet voice, his fingers stroked softly the smooth, soft palm. “Money’s nothing to do with it,” he said. “I don’t know how much the case would cost; anyhow it would be your husband that would be paying for it. I don’t know whether you’ld win or lose it. That’s neither way. What I do know is this: that if I allowed you to go on with this case I’ld never forgive myself.”
Marian started. “Not go on with it!”
“I should never, never forgive myself if I let you.”
“Although you’ld be making quite a considerable amount of money out of it?”
“Quite.”
“And although there’s quite a reasonable chance that I should win?”
“Quite.”
“Isn’t that rather curious advice, then, for a solicitor to give a client?”
“I don’t think of you in that way, as just a client.”
She laughed, a little nervously, but she made no attempt to withdraw her hand. Instead she seemed to lean a little nearer to him.
“Then how do you think of me?” she said.
Her face, so lovely and so flowerlike; so wilful and so wistful, was very close to his; but the time had not come to answer her question otherwise than obliquely. “My dear,” he said; and as he spoke, her fingers folded themselves twiningly over his. “I’ve not been in this business very long: but I’ve been in it long enough to know what the law’s like and what the law does to people. You will hear it said, I know, that doctors and lawyers are vultures preying on the unsuspecting layman. That doctors make diseases where there aren’t any, and lawyers make quarrels where there aren’t any. And I daresay that in the past I’ve been like a lot of others. If people have come to me wanting to fight, I’ve let them fight. They didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for and I did. But one must live. If people have got to learn a lesson they might as well learn it to my profit rather than to someone else’s. And I daresay that if this were an ordinary case I should feel I’d done my duty when I’d explained to my client the type of publicity that she’d got to look for. If she was prepared for it, I’ld be content to let her carry on. It should be her look out, I’ld say. But, Marian, when it’s a question of you, I just can’t think that way.”
The fingers that were twined about his contracted and, “No?” her lips whispered, so faintly that scarcely more than a breath was passed between them.
“If it were the case of anybody else,” said Merrick, “I would shrug my shoulders about it all. But I can’t stand by and see you get drawn into a thing like this. There’s no such thing as a clean fight. And I’m not going to let you stand in the witness-box and have put to you the questions that the cheap Sunday papers will reprint to be sniggered over by servant girls; I’m not going to have you made the subject of tap-room limericks. I’m not going to see your photograph with cheap captions under it reprinted all over England; so that you would be afraid to walk in the streets for fear of being recognized, so that whenever you left a room you would be wondering what they would start saying about you the instant you were away; so that you would grow suspicious and self-conscious and distrustful. For this is the kind of case that the reporters would leap at: the kind of case that would make that of you. All that evidence about taking baths in a man’s flat, can’t you see the opportunities that that would give them?”
He had begun by speaking quietly, but he felt too strongly to restrain the pitch and eagerness of his voice; his eyes were bright and his cheeks flushed as he concluded.
“Then you are advising me,” she said, “to let the marriage stand?”
It was the same question that he had set to Eagar, but it was only now, with the softness of her hand in his, and in his ears the softness of her voice, and before his eyes that face ordinarily so gay but now so pensive, that he realized the full implication of that question, realized to the full why it was that it was impossible for him in Marian’s case to stand by and shrug his shoulders as he would in that of anybody else; why he could not let her, as he would have any other client, fight her way to the ignominy of the witness box. Let the marriage stand; let her go back to E
agar; out of his own life for ever? That was as unthinkable a picture as that other one of Marian in the box, with the questions of the opposing counsel throwing their net about her, with the pencils of the reporters scraping across paper; with the placards of the evening papers shrieking her personality across a world.
“No, no,” he cried, “not that!”
“My dear, what else is there?”
He did not hesitate. He saw the issue clearly. She must not be allowed to fight the case; and to return to her husband, to go out of his life for ever, that too was an impossibility. There was, though, a third alternative.
“There are other ways than that,” he said. “You’ll drop your case, but it won’t be so that you can go back to your husband. It’ll be to go away and out of England, to where you can be free and lead the life you choose, and while you’re away he can divorce you, and it’ll be very quiet and there’ll be no talk; and when you come back, every one will have forgotten all about it.”
He spoke softly, but in a way jestingly; and as he spoke he played with her fingers, delicately, as though they were a toy, as though it were a game that they were playing. And she responded to his mood.
“A divorce,” she said. “But mustn’t there be a co-respondent first?”
“I wasn’t suggesting that you should go alone.”
They spoke laughingly, but the light in their eyes was tender; they knew each other well enough to be able to talk in shorthand.
“My dear,” she said, and though her lips were smiling they were trembling, “this is rather a serious matter. Are you quite sure that you’re as much in love as that?”
