The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (58 page)

I did at times accuse her, then withdrew my accusations. It is not altogether easy to save oneself at the expense of another, even justly. I felt at times, it is hard to describe this, almost mad with guilt, with a sort of general guilt about my whole life. Put any man in the dock and he will feel guilty. I rolled in my guilt, in the very filth of it. Some newspapers said I seemed to enjoy my trial. I did not enjoy it, but I experienced it very intently and fully. My ability to do this was dependent upon the fact that capital punishment had by this time been abolished in England. I could not have faced the hangman with equanimity. The vague prospect of prison affected me, in my enhanced and vivid new consciousness, comparatively little. (It is in fact impossible to imagine beforehand what prolonged imprisonment is like.) I had been forcibly presented with a new mode of being and I was anxious to explore it. I had been confronted (at last) with a sizeable
ordeal
labelled with my name. This was not something to be wasted. I had never felt more alert and alive in my life, and from the vantage point of my new consciousness I looked back upon what I had been: a timid incomplete resentful man.

My counsel wished me to plead guilty, and if I had done so a verdict of manslaughter might conceivably have been achieved. (Perhaps Rachel expected this.) I insisted on pleading not guilty, but refused also to offer any coherent account of myself or of what had happened. I did in fact at one point tell the whole truth in court, but my truth was by then so surrounded by my own prevarications and lies that it was never seen to stand out with its own self – guaranteeing clarity. (And it was greeted with such vociferous cries of disgust that the public gallery had to be cleared.) I had decided that I could not accuse myself, but I would not accuse anyone else either. This proved to be, from the point of view of telling any plausible story, an impossible position. In any case, everyone, the judge, the jury, the lawyers, including my own counsel, the press and the public had all made up their minds before the trial even began. The evidence against me was overwhelming. My threatening letter to Arnold was produced and the most damning part of it, which contained an explicit reference to a blunt instrument, was read out with a blood – curdling intonation. But I think what impressed the jury most of all was my having torn up all Arnold’s books. The fragments were actually brought into court in a tea chest. After that I was done for.

Hartbourne and Francis, in their different ways, did what they could for me. Hartbourne’s line, worked out after discussions with my lawyer, was that I was insane. (‘That cock won’t fight, old man!’ I shouted to him across the court room.) His evidence for this view was rather slender. It appeared that I frequently cancelled appointments. (‘Then are we all mad?’ said the prosecuting counsel.) I had forgotten to attend a party which had been arranged in my honour. I was moody and eccentric and absentminded. I imagined myself to be a writer. (‘But he is a writer!’ said the prosecuting counsel. I applauded.) My apparently calm reaction to my sister’s death, which the insanity lobby also tried to use, was later taken over by the prosecution as a proof of my callousness. The climax and
raison d’être
of the theory was that I had killed Arnold in a brain storm and then forgotten all about it! And if I had displayed uncertainty and clutched my head more often this idea might have been at least worth entertaining. As it was, I appeared as a liar but not as a lunatic. I calmly and lucidly denied that I was mad, and the judge and the jury agreed with me. Hartbourne believed me guilty of course.

Francis alone did not believe me guilty. However, he was able to render little assistance. He marred his evidence by crying all the way through, which made a bad impression on the jury. And as a ‘character witness’ he was not exactly a felicitous performer. The prosecutor sneered at him openly. And he told so many simple – minded lies and half – lies in his anxiety to defend me that he became in the end something of a figure of fun, even to my own side. The judge treated him with heavy irony. It was, to say the least, unfortunate for me that Francis had not been with me when Rachel telephoned.Francis, latching on to this, soon started saying that he had been: but was then quite unable to give any account of what had happened which could stand up to the simplest queries from the prosecution. The jury clearly believed that Francis was my ‘creature’ and that I had somehow ‘put him up to it’. And the prosecution soon tied him in a knot. ‘Why then did you not accompany the accused to Ealing?’ ‘I had to go out to buy tickets for Venice.’ ‘For
Venice
?’ ‘Yes, he and I were just going to go to Venice together.’ (Laughter.) In fact, all that Francis managed (quite involuntarily) to contribute to the argument was another sinister theory about my motives, to the effect that I was a homosexual, madly in love with Arnold, and that I had killed him out of jealousy! Some of the lewder newspapers ran this idea for a while. However the judge, probably out of consideration for Rachel’s feelings, did not highlight it in his final summing up.

Christian was one of the stars of the case. She always dressed with great care, wearing, as the papers soon noticed, a different ensemble every day. ‘A smart rich woman’ was just what the journalists wanted, and she even achieved during the days of the trial a kind of fame which stood her in good stead later when she decided to set up in business in
haute couture
. In fact she probably developed the idea at this very time. She was very concerned about me. (She too quite evidently believed me guilty.) But she just could not help enjoying the trial. She was in all appearance a ‘good witness’. She spoke clearly and firmly and lucidly, and the judge, who patently found her attractive, complimented her on her evidence. The jury liked her too, there were several men who always exchanged glances when she appeared. However, in the hands of a clever public prosecutor she was easily made to damage my case without even noticing. Questioned about our marriage, she was made to convey the impression that I was a thoroughly unstable person if not indeed a ‘nasty bit of work’. (‘You would describe your former husband as an intense man?’ ‘Oh awfully intense!’) At one point her sheer idiotic self – satisfaction moved me so much that I shouted out ‘Good old Chris!’ The judge reacted as to a molester of virtuous womanhood. A Sunday paper offered her a large sum of money for her ‘story’, but she refused.

Rachel, for whom everyone felt such lively sympathy, was not made to appear very much. When she did there was a sort of sigh of reverent appreciation. And the odd thing is that I too, even then, felt a kind of reverence for her as if she were the instrument of a god. At the time I thought that this feeling was an aspect of some frivolous sense of guilt. Later on I saw it differently. There was something magnificent about Rachel. She did not avoid my eye or act in the mechanical or dreamlike way which might have been expected. She behaved with a modest simplicity and an air of gentle quiet exact truthfulness which moved everybody, myself included. I remember when she had said: There is fire in me,
fire.
I had not then conceived how fiercely and purely that fire could burn.

It never entered anyone’s head that she could have had a motive for killing her husband. Marriage is a very private place. I had myself destroyed the only piece of solid evidence for such a view. (Arnold’s letter about Christian.) The excellence of her marriage, assumed by all, was piously touched upon by some witnesses. It was unnecessary to stress it. Equally, it was never suggested that I had any designs upon my victim’s wife. Delicacy, everywhere so manifest in this model trial, forbade any such notion, though it might have seemed obvious enough as a speculation. Even the newspapers, so far as I know, did not pursue it, possibly because the idea that it was Arnold whom I loved was more amusing. And delicacy, as it so often does, usurped the place of truth.

More felicitously, as a result of a spontaneous conspiracy of silence, Julian’s name was simply not mentioned at all. No one had any reason to bring her in since, on the one hand, I was in bad enough trouble anyway, and, on the other, that story could only do me harm. So Julian vanished. It was as if the whole fantastic scene in the Old Bailey court room, the robed and wigged celebrants, the sober yet histrionic witnesses, the quiet gleeful public, were all part of a machinery of magic designed to dematerialize her and make her as if she had never been. Yet at moments her paramount reality in that scene was such that I wanted to shout out her name again and again. However I did not. This silence at least which was enjoined was also achieved. Those who know will understand how in a curious way I was almost relieved to think how she had now been made perfect by being removed into the sphere of the impossible. This idea indeed provided a focus of contemplation which alleviated the awful sufferings of that time.

In a purely technical sense I was condemned for having murdered Arnold. (The jury were out of the room for less than half an hour. Counsel did not even bother to leave their seats.) In a more extended sense, and this too provided fruit for meditation, I was condemned for being a certain awful kind of person. I aroused horror and aversion in the bosom of the judge and in the bosoms of the honest citizens of the jury and the sturdy watchdogs of the press. I was heartily hated. In sentencing me to life imprisonment the judge gave general satisfaction. It was a mean crime of an unusually pure kind: to kill one’s friend out of envy of his talents. And poor Priscilla, risen from the grave, seemed to point her finger at me too. I had failed as a friend and I had failed as a brother. My insensibility to my sister’s plight and then to her death was attested by several. The defence, as I said, did their best to use this as proof of mental unbalance. But the general view was simply that it proved me a monster.

It is not, however, my purpose here to describe the trial, or even to attempt in any detail to describe my state of mind. On the latter subject a few words will suffice. Anyone who is quite suddenly on public trial for a murder he has not committed is likely to be in a disturbed state. Of course I protested my innocence. But I did not (and this too may have influenced the jury) protest it with quite the frenzied passion which might have been expected from an innocent person. Why? The notion of actually
assuming
Arnold’s death (and ‘confessing’) did occur to me an aesthetic possibility. If I
had
killed him there would have been a certain beauty in it. And to an ironical man what could be prettier than to have the aesthetic satisfaction of having ‘committed’ murder, without actually having had to commit it? However truth and justice alike forbade this course. And (as ought to have been obvious to the judge and jury) it is psychologically impossible for a man of my temperament to lie in a moment of crisis. Of course it was partly that I felt I was guilty of
something
wicked. This picturesque explanation certainly had some force, perhaps simply because of the appeal of the picturesqueness to my literary mind. I had not willed Arnold’s death but I had envied him and (sometimes at least) detested him. I had failed Rachel and abandoned her. I had neglected Priscilla. Dreadful things had happened for which I was in part responsible. During the trial I was accused of being unconcerned that two people had died. (At some moments, as the defence pointed out, the prosecution seemed to be accusing me of
two
murders.) The court saw me as a callous fantasy – ridden man. In fact I meditated profoundly upon my responsibility. But guilt is a form of energy and because of it my head lifted and my eyes glowed. There are perhaps moments in any man’s life when there is no substitute for the discipline of guilt. Much later, my dearest friend, it was you who pointed out to me that, without realizing it, I surrendered myself to the trial as to a final exorcism of guilt from my life.

I gave myself up to the course of events with a certain resignation and without screams of protest, for another and deeper reason too, which had to do with Julian. Or perhaps there were two reasons here, one lying above the other. Or perhaps three. What did I believe that Julian thought about what had happened? In a strange way I was almost entirely agnostic about what Julian thought. I did not imagine that she saw me as a murderer. But neither did I expect her to defend me by accusing her mother. My love for Julian had somehow brought about this death. (This piece of causality I was quite clear about.) And my responsibility for it I was prepared to lodge for ever in the mystery of my love for Julian and her love for me. That was part of it. But I also felt something like this, that the emergence of my life out of quietness into public drama and horror was a necessary and in some deep sense natural outcome of the visitation with which I had been honoured. Sometimes I thought of it as a punishment for the failure of my vow of silence. Sometimes, shifting the same idea only very slightly, it seemed more like a reward. Because I loved Julian something huge had happened to me. I had been given the privilege of an ordeal. That I suffered through her and for her was, in addition, a delightful, almost frivolous comfort.

The court saw me, as I have said, as a fantastical man. Little did they know how fantastical I was, though not in their crude sense. It is the literal truth that the image of Julian was not absent from my mind for a single second during the waking hours of those terrible days. I apprehended at the same time her absolute presence and her absolute absence. There were moments when I felt as if I were being literally torn to pieces by love. (What must it be like to be eaten by a large animal? I felt I knew.) This pain, from which I almost fainted, once or twice came upon me when I was addressing the court, and abruptly stopped my utterance, thereby giving comfort to the insanity lobby. Perhaps the only thing which made me survive this period of thinking about Julian was the complete absence of hope. A grain of hope present at that time would have killed me.

The psyche, desperate for its survival, discovers deep things. How little most so – called psychologists seem to know about its shifts and its burrowings. At some point in a black vision I apprehended the future. I saw this book, which I have written, I saw my dearest friend P.L., I saw myself a new man, altered out of recognition. I saw beyond and beyond. The book had to come into being because of Julian, and because of the book Julian had to be. It was not, though indeed time matters little to the unconscious mind, that the book was the frame which she came to fill, nor was she the frame which the book filled. She somehow was and is the book, the story of herself. This is her deification and incidentally her immortality. It is my gift to her and my final possession of her. From this embrace she can never now escape. But, and this is not to belittle my darling, I saw much more than this in the black glass of the future. And this is, if I can express it, the deepest reason why I accepted the unjust judgement of the court.