The Lily Hand and Other Stories (21 page)

He said at my shoulder, as I was going: ‘Don't take it to heart, son. It's the world's fault as much as his.' As if he thought I understood, but I didn't understand.

And then I saw the photograph. It was a big one, standing on a table near the door, where I'd seen only the back of it as I came in. It was a woman, three-quarter length, with her hands folded in her lap.

After that, I did understand, I understood everything. Especially the price he'd paid for it.
‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!'

My God, but she was lovely! She was one of the loveliest things I've ever seen, even this much of her, and it was old and a bit faded. After all, she'd been dead going on for twenty years. A youngish woman in a hand-knitted jumper and dark skirt, with great gentle black eyes and curly hair, and in all the lines of her bones that extreme, spare delicacy you see sometimes among the women of the ports. She had the warmest and kindest of smiles, and the look of her eyes was something children would have run to. And the hands, linked so tranquilly in her lap, had the very folds of those hands Felipe had made famous all over the world, trying to get her off his conscience, and her beauty out of his eyes – the white jade hands of character, the lily hands.

Only these hands were black.

A Question of Faith

The last train was due at 9.50, and the walk from the station to the prison gate took about a quarter of an hour. From the moment when he heard the train whistling its way distantly round the curve, the Governor became a little distracted, and his replies to his friend's questions shrank to monosyllables. When the clock pushed an indifferent hand over the rim of ten and caught its breath for the chime, he began to listen with an intent and sharply-focused eagerness which made conversation impossible.

Wyndham sat back into silence and watched him steadily for several minutes, but whatever it was he waited to hear, the night still did not provide it.

He was young to be in charge of a regional training prison, and in himself he was as much an experiment as the closed stone world he ruled. To be three years in office and still on trial is a tightrope act for any man to have to perform. The Governor showed the signs, Wyndham thought, studying him affectionately after two years of absence, in his too finely drawn thinness, the instant passion of his reactions to sound and movement, his burning weariness of eye.

No doubt they had argued, when he was appointed, that a young and enthusiastic man was needed for such a social revolution as this, a man with a vocation, as well as legal qualifications and academic honours. This kind of life ate men. The Governor was a keeper who fed himself daily to his animals, but, like all sacramental meals, his substance remained inexhaustible.

The clock smoothed its face as complacently as a cat, and now it said a quarter past ten, and still the expected, whatever it was, did not happen. The Governor leaned back from the fireside chair to take the telephone from its cradle.

‘Excuse me, won't you? One of my fellows was due in by that train. Hullo, Willetts, has Bayford checked in yet?' His face mirrored the negative reply. ‘Yes, I heard it – it seemed to be well on time. He may have missed the connection at Lowbridge. No doubt he'll be in later on. No, we'll give him a few hours grace. I'll call you.'

He hung up, and sat frowning into the fire for a moment under his tired eyelids.

‘One of your home leavers?' asked Wyndham.

‘Yes. He has two months of a five-year sentence left to run, and he's been home on the usual ice-breaking trip. It saves them from dying of gate fever – terror of not being wanted back, not finding any place waiting for them.'

‘Supposing one of them failed to report back?'

‘No one ever has.'

‘What's the matter, then? Are you afraid this fellow might be the first?'

‘Oh, no. I have absolute faith in him,' said the Governor simply.

‘It's a lucky man who can say that of his best friend. What's he like, this chap Bayford?'

‘Oh, young – unlucky – unhappy. His care history reads like a tract for the times. He's illegitimate, never knew his father. Mother was never much use to him. When he was three she got the county authorities to take the kid, and went more or less candidly on the streets. Married some miserably bad lot of her own calibre, and when Harry was in his last year of school and looked as if he might be profitable, they suddenly began taking an interest in him.

‘You'd hardly credit,' said the Governor, in a detached tone which was belied by his shadowed eyes, ‘how easy it is for worthless parents to win their children back again. Every boy wants his mother, I suppose he'll go to quite a lot of trouble to shut his eyes to the suspicion that she might not be worth having. And he'd never been officially taken from her, she had only to claim him and he was hers. Only the boy himself could have saved himself, and then only if he'd been the most exceptional of boys. They lived on him, and neglected him, and knocked him about for three years, and by that time he could hardly keep his eyes shut any longer.

‘So he looked for a bit of companionship and pleasure somewhere else, and found it in the wrong places, like so many others. At eighteen he went to Borstal. He'd already been on probation and made a mess of that. The magistrate went out of his way to lecture him about what the younger generation owes to its elders, and how it's letting them down.' A faint smile touched his lips at the thought.

‘At twenty-one he got five years for his share in a gang job. The only piece of luck he ever had was that the gun failed to go off, otherwise it might have been murder. Two years ago he was transferred to us.'

‘And you think you've done well with him? He doesn't sound desperately promising material to me.'

‘He's earned full remission since he's been here. It's been hard going, but it was worth it.'

The Governor recalled with a flash of intense pain the closed, inimical face, so young, so withdrawn, and the burning of the half-veiled eyes, terribly resigned yet more terribly vulnerable, which had confronted him at his first interview with Harry Bayford.

‘He was intact morally, you see. He'd understood everything he did; there was a mind there to appeal to. All that was really necessary was to be utterly honest oneself – not always an easy thing to do.'

‘I'm not completely sold on this idea of agreeing with young thugs who plead that the whole world's against them.' Wyndham softened his dissension with a smile, for they were old friends.

‘He never pleaded anything, he just endured us. But the whole world
has
been against him, you know. I did what might have been the wrong thing with another man,' confessed the Governor. ‘I grew fond of him. With Harry it was the right thing. It surprised him when he'd thought he was past surprise, and it disarmed him when he'd thought his armour was complete. Generosity is Harry's vice and virtue – he pays you back double whatever you offer him, whether it's trust or violence.'

‘Well, if you have absolute faith in him, what are you afraid of?'

The Governor did not attempt to deny the anxiety which filled him, but only looked up under his thin hand with a wry smile, and said: ‘To tell you the truth, I have not quite so absolute a trust in society as I have in Bayford.'

‘I can quite see,' said Wyndham, laughing, ‘why you still have the twenty-foot wall. It's to defend your children from the world outside.'

A quarter to eleven, and still nothing, no ringing of the telephone bell, no knock at the door, to break the tension of this waiting. Wyndham wondered if it was like this every time one of the prisoners went out to take his first distrustful look at the world again, and how, if it was, his friend's constitution could stand the strain. He wished a message would come soon, before the Governor disintegrated before his eyes.

‘It would be a serious blow to you, apart from your concern for the boy himself, if he should fail to report back,' he said sympathetically.

‘There are plenty of people and organizations waiting for something like that to happen,' admitted the Governor. ‘I doubt if one lapse could provide enough capital for them to damage us, but I'd rather not give them the chance to try.'

He started up abruptly from his chair as the telephone rang, and scooped it from its cradle with an eagerness he did not attempt to disguise. ‘This will be him. Excuse me!'

He identified himself briefly, and then sat listening, the relief in his face stiffening into a new and grave anxiety. He was silent for several minutes with the receiver at his ear, and then he said sharply: ‘Please hold everything until I get out there myself. Yes, I'll come at once. I should appreciate it very much if you'll let me talk to him.'

Wyndham was on his feet and at his friend's elbow as he pressed down the rest and held it there for a minute. ‘What's happened? Not an accident?'

‘No. No accident.' He lifted the receiver again. ‘Get my car out at once, please. I shall be away a couple of hours or so. No, thanks, I'm driving myself.'

And to Wyndham he continued, as he hung up once more: ‘The police picked him up for housebreaking at Hampton's Corner, about an hour ago. Householder caught him on the premises, apparently. He's gone to earth inside himself, and won't say anything. I've got to go.'

‘But my dear chap, what can you do about it? If he's let you down like that.'

‘I'm not convinced that he has. That's why I've got to go.'

‘But Hampton's Corner – that isn't on his way here from Lowbridge at all, it's on the Stapleton road. And if he was actually caught in the house.'

‘Yes, all that! The place is ten miles out of his way; the police are sure of their man. Only I'm sure of my man, too. But even if I believed we'd got all the facts, I should still have to go. Look, don't wait up for me, old man, I may be some time. I'm sorry your first night here had to be broken up like this.'

‘Like me to come with you?' offered Wyndham, out of sheer unwillingness to see him drive off alone with his bitter disappointment.

‘That's uncommonly kind of you, Tom, but no, thanks, I'd better go alone. Wish me luck!'

But so far as belief in his luck was concerned, he knew that his friend's wish was fruitless. And as he slid behind the wheel of the big car and drove it out through the slowly unfolding gates in the high wall, he knew that he was the one creature in the world who believed in Harry Bayford's innocence of all intent to offend. His loneliness did not frighten him; he was used to being alone. No wife, no family, no hierarchies of friends; he belonged to his vocation more exclusively, more rigidly, than any monastic to his cloister.

In his anxiety to have all the details, to confront and confute them, he drove at considerably more than thirty even through the town. Speed was terribly important, for he was like a vital witness trying to forestall an execution; all he knew was that Harry Bayford, whatever his past record, would not, for any inducement which could have been offered him, have committed a crime this night. But he knew that so well that it was all the evidence he needed. Others, the sceptical Stapleton police for instance, who did not love the new prison methods, would need a great deal more convincing.

The little town was half-asleep already, but within the police station there was a bright, gratified wakefulness. They were waiting for him, they ushered him in at once to the Superintendent, who tempered the triumph of his smile with a sympathetic regret, so far as he was able, and told him the whole story.

‘It's a large house, right on the corner there, where the lane from the junction comes out on the high road. The constable going off duty was cycling by the gates when he heard somebody blowing a police whistle, and he dived back and in at the gate just in time to see this fellow Bayford vaulting out of a ground-floor window, left of the front door – it's the living room. The lights were on in the room, and the householder – he's our local bank manager, name of Simpson – came to the window after him, still blowing away for help. Our man collared Bayford, and between them they got him back into the house.

‘This was just about ten o'clock, according to the constable. Simpson says he was just putting on some coffee in the kitchen, which is at the back of the house, and waiting for his wife to come home from a bridge party at a friend's up the road, and when it struck ten he thought he'd stroll along and meet her – it's only a hundred yards or so. As he came through the hall he heard somebody moving about softly in the living room in the dark, and having his suspicions he went and got the whistle before he crashed into the room and switched the lights on.

‘Bayford was at the bureau, but as soon as the lights went on he streaked for the window, which was open. Obviously he got in that way. That's all. Nothing missing, so far as Simpson's been able to judge yet – seems he was interrupted too soon.'

The Governor, balancing his hat with absent care upon his crossed knees, asked in a mild tone: ‘And what does Bayford say?'

‘Hardly a word. At first he did babble that he wasn't stealing, that he hadn't taken anything, but by the time they got him inside again he'd turned dumb and sulky. All he'll say now is what's the use, nobody's going to believe him. He's made up his mind he's had it, you know, sir. I'm sorry, this is a bad letdown for you. We got his name and record from the papers and letters he had on him, and that's why we got on to you. But he won't add anything. We've been trying to get him to tell his side of it for half an hour now.'

The Governor nodded resigned understanding of this silence.

‘I appreciate your calling me, and letting me butt in like this. I'd like to ask you to try and keep an open mind about Bayford. That's all I'm asking. I don't expect you to take my word for it that if he says he wasn't there to steal he's telling you the simple truth. But I will ask you to take my word for it that if he says that to me,
I
shall believe it. And I'll ask you to do us both the justice of assuming that I have solid reasons for feeling so sure of him. I've known him intimately for two years now, and what I feel about him is the result of experience, not sentiment.'