Chapter TWENTY-THREE: Stowell in London

Victor Stowell had been more than a week in London. Fortune had favoured him from the first. The Home Secretary (a tall, spare, elderly man, with a clean-shaven face of rather severe expression) rose when Stowell entered his room as if a spirit had appeared before him. "My youth again," the young man thought, but it was a different matter this time.

"Has anybody ever told you that you resemble your father, Mr. Stowell?"

It turned out that the old Deemster and the Home Secretary (a barrister before he became a statesman) had been in chambers together in the Middle Temple while reading for the bar, and that the politician had never lost respect for the man who, in spite of brilliant promise of success in England (he might have become an English High Court Judge with six times his Manx salary), had returned to the obscurity of his little island and the service of his own people.

"You have high traditions to live up to, young man. Sit down."

Then came the subject of the interview. The authorities had satisfied themselves that on the score of legal capacity the Governor's recommendation was not unjustified. The only serious difficulty was Stowell's youth. The principles on which the Crown selected elderly and even old (sometimes very old) men for the positions of Judges were simple and sound. First, seniority of service, and next, maturity of character, so as to avoid the dangers that come from the temptations, the trials, even the turbulent emotions of early life, which might easily conflict with the calm of the judicial office. Still, these principles could be too rigidly followed--particularly in remote colonies and small dependencies where the range of suitable selection was limited.

After this came a personal catechism, the old man looking at the young one over the rims of his tortoise-shell spectacles. Married? Not yet. Expect to be? Yes, Sir. Soon? Not, not for a long time. How long? Six weeks at least, Sir.

The ends of the severe mouth rose perceptibly, and in any other face they might have broken into a smile.

Daughter of the Governor, isn't she? Yes, but that isn't her chief characteristic, Sir. What is? That she is the loveliest and noblest woman in the world.

"Oh!"

Again the severe mouth relaxed, and the Home Secretary asked Stowell where he was staying. Stowell told him (the Inns of Court Hotel, Holborn) and he made a note of it.

"Remain there until you hear from me again, Mr. Stowell, and meantime say nothing about this interview to anybody."

"Not anybody whatever, Sir?"

The Home Secretary's stern old face became genial and charming as he rose and held out his hand.

"Well, that supreme being, perhaps .... Good day!"

"So here I am, my dear Fenella," wrote Stowell, "back in the bedroom of my hotel, telling you all about it. How long I may have to remain in London, goodness knows, therefore I propose to tell you something about my ways of life while I wait.

"Such a change in me! When I was in London last (with Alick Gell, you remember) I spent my days and nights in the hotels, restaurants, theatres and music-halls that are the lovely and beloved world of woman. It is the world of woman still, but quite another realm of it.

"Two nights ago I strolled westward along Oxford Street, and thought (with a lump in my throat) about De Quincey and his Ann. Then, cutting through Clare Market to the Temple and finding the gate closed, I tipped the porter to let me walk through the Brick Court, and stood a long half hour before a house in the silent little square, thinking of the day when the women of the town sat on the stairs while poor Noll (Oliver Goldsmith) lay dead in his rooms above. And then, coming out into Fleet-street (midnight now) where the big printing presses were throbbing behind dark buildings, I tried to think I saw the great old Johnson, God bless him, picking up the prostitute from the pavement, carrying her home on his back and laying her on his bed.

"Last night I strolled eastward to look at the outside of the Settlement in which you used to be Lady Warden (in the unbelievable days before you came back to Man), and returning by a dark side street, I came upon a queue of women crouching in the cold before the doors of a Salvation Shelter. They were waiting for four in the morning when they would have a fighting chance of one of the beds (_i.e._, boxes like open coffins lying cheek by jowl on the floor of a big hall) after the washerwomen who were then asleep in them would get up and go to work.

"But the climax came this morning (Sunday morning) when I went to service at the Foundling Hospital. Such a sweet scene--at first sight at all events. The little women, like little nuns, in their linen caps and aprons, singing like little angels in their sweet young voices. But my God, what tragedy lurked behind that picture also!

"I did not hear much of the sermon for thinking of the mothers of these 'children of shame' and the conditions under which they must have given birth to them--sometimes in a garret, in secret, alone, driven to dementia by a sense of impending shame. How often a poor miserable girl in the degradation of childbirth (which should be the crown of a woman's glory) must have been tempted to kill her child in fear of the fate that awaited both it and her! And to think of the giant arm of the mighty law coming down on a creature like that to punish her! Lord, what crimes are committed in the name of Justice!

"There you are now! That's what you've done for me. 'Deed you have though. It's truth enough, girl. You've opened my ears to the cry of the voice of suffering woman, and that is the saddest sound, perhaps, that breaks on the shores of life. And the moral of it all is that if I do become a Judge (God knows I'm almost afraid to hope for it) you must be my helper, my inspirer, the tower of my strength.

"Oh, my darling, how much I love you! It seems to me that I lost all my life until I came to love you. How well I recall the blessed day when I loved you first! It was the first time I saw you--the first time really. Don't you remember? In the glen, that glorious autumn afternoon. The vision has followed me ever since and I wish I could blot out every day of my life when I have not thought of you.

"There you are again! You see what you've done, ma'am. But I'm not always on the heights. What do you think? I've bought a motor car, and every morning I go up to Hampstead with a teacher to learn to drive.

"It is for our honeymoon. You called me a Viking once, and I'm not going to be a Viking for nothing. As soon as you are mine, mine wholly, I am going to pick you up and carry you off to all the inaccessible places in the island--the bent-strewn plains of Ayre, where a lighthouse-man lives alone with his wife and nothing else save the sea for company; the shepherd's hut on Snaefell, where there is nothing but the sky, and the sandy headlands of the Calf with the mists of the Atlantic sweeping over them.

"Meantime, think of me in a box of a bedroom five storeys up, with the roaring tide of London traffic running, like a Canadian river, sixty feet below, and write--write, write! Tell me what is happening in the 'lil islan'' which is lying asleep to-night in the Irish Sea. God bless it, and all the kind and cheery souls in it! God bless it for evermore!

"STOWELL."

II

"MY DEAR VICTOR,--You cannot imagine what a joy your letter was. Do you know it was my first love-letter? Of course I behaved like a dairymaid--took it up to bed, put it on my pillow and said, 'You are Victor, you know,' and laid my cheek on it.

"Whatever have you done to make me so foolish? Was it only half of you (the physical half) that went away, leaving the spirit half with me? I want the other half, though, the substantial half, so tell your Home Secretary (I like him) to hurry up and send you home.

"You do wrong not to see the beautiful women, dear. The woman who is afraid of her husband looking at other women is building her house on the sand. I should like to say to myself, 'He has seen the loveliest women in the world, yet he comes back to me.'

"All the same I love you for looking at the darker side of woman's life. It is more apparent in the greater communities, but it is here, too, and that is why I am looking eagerly forward to your appointment as Deemster, which will make you a creator of the law as well as an administrator of it. You must have no misgivings, though. Why should you? A man who has a stainless scutcheon is just what women want for their champion. And if I may help you how happy I shall be!

"You ask what is happening in the island. Well, apart from politics (of which I know nothing except that they seem to be always the same story) the only thing of consequence is the case of a young woman charged with the murder of her illegitimate child.

"She is a country girl who, having run away from home some months ago, returned recently very ill and was put to bed, and remained there until arrested. But in the meantime the body of a new-born infant was found under a large stone half a mile away, and it is said to have been hers.

"She denies all knowledge of the child, but the medical testimony seems to be sadly against her, and there is some direct evidence also, though it is not above the suspicion of being tainted by malice.

"She has been up before the High Bailiff and committed to the next sitting of the General Gaol Delivery, so you are likely to hear more of the case. Poor thing, whatever her sin, she has already had a fearful punishment, for she is very ill, having apparently exposed herself to dreadful sufferings in the hope of preventing her baby from being born alive.

"She is now in the prison hospital, and this morning I drove over to see her. A good-looking girl, almost beautiful (with the sort of beauty which attracts the less worthy side of a certain type of man), but her cheeks are now terribly thin and pale, and her big black eyes (her finest feature) have that wild look which one sees in a captured animal that gazes and gazes.

"I liked the girl, but she did not seem to like me. In fact she shrank from me (the only girl who ever did so) and when I tried to be nice to her, and asked her to trust me, and to tell me who was responsible for her condition, so that I might find him and fetch him to her, she broke into a flood of fierce denial.

"Either the girl is a great story-teller or she is a great heroine, and I am half inclined to think she may be both. My guess would be that she is trying to shield the guilty man. The clothes she had worn were better than a farm girl could afford to buy, and that suggests that her fellow-sinner belongs to a class above her.

"Isn't it shocking that the law provides no punishment for the man who ruins a girl's life--ruining her soul at the same time, for that is what it often comes to. But, please God, you will be on the bench, so she is sure to have justice.

"Our Society has decided to undertake her defence, but we are at a loss whom to employ. We cannot afford a high fee either--ten or fifteen guineas at the outside. Can you suggest anybody?

"I intend to be present at the trial, and to stand by the girl's side, for she will have nobody else, poor creature. But oh, how I wish I might plead for her! Although her fellow-sinner will not stand for judgment, how I should like to tear the mask from his face and cry in open court, 'Thou art the man!'

"Good-night, dear! It's 10 p.m., and such delicious dreams are waiting for me upstairs. Bring your motor-car back, and when the time comes (I shall not keep you long) you may carry me off to wherever you please.

"Listen, I am going to say something. There is not much in the heart of a woman that you don't know already, but I am about to let you into a secret. The woman who does not want her husband (if only he loves her) to control her, command her, and do anything and everything he likes with her, isn't really a woman at all--she's only a mistake for a man!

"Victor, after that burst of nonsense I cannot conclude without telling you again how much I love you. I love you for yourself, just yourself alone, quite apart from anything you may do or have done, whether good or bad, right or wrong, and I shall go on loving you whatever may happen to you in the future, whether you become Deemster or not, go up or go down.

"But when I think of the life that is so surely before you, and that I shall walk through it by your side, perfectly united with you, sharing the same hopes and aims and desires, enjoying the same sunshine and weathering the same storms, I have a vision of happiness that makes me cry for joy.

"Come back to me soon, dearest. The spring is here in all her youthful beauty; the daffodils are nodding; the gorse on the hedges is a blaze of gold; the sky is blue; the sea is lying asleep under a divine shimmer of sunshine, and your island--your island that is going to be so proud of you--is waiting to clasp you to her heart.

"And so am I, my Victor!

"FENELLA."

III

"MY OWN DEAR FENELLA,--I am so troubled about the young woman who is to be charged with the murder of her child that (time being short) I must write at once on the subject. It looks like a case of the temporary mania which so often prompts women to take life (their own or their children's) in the hope of avoiding shame.

"God, when I think of it, that in all ages of the world tens of thousands of women have gone through that fiery furnace and that never one man since the days of Adam has come within sight of it, I want to go down on my knees to the meanest and lowest of them as the martyrs of humanity.

"Infanticide is of course a serious crime in any country, and especially serious in the Isle of Man now, when the Governor has made up his mind to show no mercy to persons guilty of fatal violence. But the killing of a new-born child is usually treated as felonious homicide. Therefore, if you carry out your intention of standing by the girl's side, you may safely tell her (in order to save her from possible shock) that even a verdict of guilty will not mean death.

"How I wish you could plead for the poor thing! But instruct counsel for the defence and you will really be pleading, and I, for one, if I am present, will hear your quivering voice in every word he says.

"As for the choice of an Advocate--why not Alick Gell? He has not had too many chances, poor chap, and it will hearten him (he was rather down when I saw him last) to be entrusted with a serious case like this.

"Tell him to look up Galabin and Murrell on Forensic Medicine--he'll find both in the Law Library. The first step is to make sure that the poor creature (I assume she is not too well educated) has not mistaken infanticide for concealment; and the next, to insist on proof of 'a live birth,' which it is practically impossible to establish (except on the girl's confession) in a case of solitary delivery.

"Yes, you are almost certainly right in thinking she is trying to shield the guilty man, and, criminal though she is, she may be (as you say) an absolute heroine. In that event I trust it may not fall to my lot to try her. God save me from sitting in judgment on a woman who stands silent in her shame to shield the honour of the man she loves!

"But as for hunting down the guilty man, that (don't you think so?) is perhaps another matter. If it has to be done at all it is only a woman--a pure and stainless woman--who has a right to do it. No man who knows himself, and how near every mother's son of us has been to the verge of the pit, will be the first to throw a stone. You remember--'But for the grace of God there goes John Wesley.' Oh, my darling, how can I ever be grateful enough for what you have done for me....

* * * * * * *

"Helloa! The page boy has just been up with a letter from the Home Secretary. 'I have the pleasure to inform you that the King has been pleased to approve of your appointment to the position of the Deemster of the Isle of Man....'

"How glorious! Here I have been all day saying to myself, 'Who, in God's name, are you that you should be Judge over anybody?' and now I'm glad--damned glad, there is no other word for it.

"I shall telegraph the news to you in a few minutes, but I feel as if I want to take the first boat home and become my own messenger. That is impossible, for I have to call on the Lord Chancellor to-morrow about my Commission. And then I have to see to the transport of my car, and the purchase of my Judge's wig and gown. But wait, only wait! Three days more I shall have you in my arms.

"My respectful greetings to the Governor. Say I know how much I owe to him for this unprecedented appointment. Say, too, I shall hold myself in readiness for the ceremony of the swearing-in, whenever he desires it to take place; also for the next Court of General Gaol Delivery if Deemster Taubman is still down with his rheumatism.

"And now bless you again, dearest, for all your beautiful faith in me. God helping me, I'll do my best to deserve it. But you must be my guardian watcher, my sentinel, my star.

"What a dear old world it is, darling! It seems as if there ought to be no suffering of any kind in it now--now that the sky is so bright for you and me.

"VICTOR."

"P.S. _Important_. Don't forget to employ Gell in that case of the girl who killed her baby. Alick's her man. _Mind you, though--he must compel her to tell him everything._"