The Fountain Overflows (41 page)

“You will be surprised to see how practical I am,” said my father. “Now listen. About a year ago you were with your uncle in the Strangers’ Dining Room, giving a party for some Frenchman, when I was dining with Cresson. We greeted one another. Afterwards I saw out of the corner of my eye that he asked you who I was, and you told him. What did you tell him about me?”

“W-what did I say about you?” stammered Mr. Pennington, with a sideways glance at me.

“What did you say about me?”

“Why, that you are the most brilliant controversial writer of your time, and that you edited a small suburban newspaper, but the national newspapers quoted your leaders, and I reminded him that it was you who had written the Turner pamphlet. Well, of course, he didn’t like that.”

“I am sure he didn’t. I thought myself that if I got Turner out of Calcutta Jail it would have been enough. All that compensation was not necessary. The man was a scoundrel. I refused to receive him on his return to England. But the public demanded it. And in principle they were right. He had been the victim of completely unconstitutional practices. But go on. What else did you tell him?”

“I said,” sighed Mr. Pennington, “that you were incorruptible.”

“I think you probably put it some other way. Tell me your exact words.”

“A year ago,” pleaded Mr. Pennington, “how can I remember? Oh, well, I said you were incorruptible, that if you took a bribe you would be too intellectually honest to give value for it.”

“Why, that’s almost an epigram, Pennington,” said Papa. “You’re coming on nicely. But I could not be better pleased that you etched my portrait on the tablet of your uncle’s mind; and I am even gratified to imagine that you employed fiercer acids than you own. But now listen, I have written a pamphlet on the trial of Queenie Phillips. I have described it exactly as I have described it to you, but I write a good deal better than I speak. The pamphlet is as good as anything Swift wrote. It will not be the talk of London, but it will be the talk of Fleet Street, which is a better thing. I have not said that Queenie Phillips is innocent, because she is not. But I have related how her servants perjured themselves in their evidence against her so that my young daughter here would have known they lied; and I have related how the judge nearly fell off the bench in his slavering desire to whip them on from perjury to perjury. I have related how, from day to day, the old satyr raved against what has destroyed him, and that if Queenie Phillips is hanged she will be the victim of a judicial murder, for what happened in the Central Criminal Court when she stood in the dock was not a trial.”

“But, I say, you’ll stand trial yourself if you publish that!” exclaimed Mr. Pennington.

“Yes, indeed,” said my father. “I will be sent to prison.”

I have never known such ecstasy. My father was all we thought him. A thousand candles were lit in my head, the blood rushed hot and icy through my veins, and my eyes were full of tears. But as my vision cleared, I saw that Mr. Pennington was not gazing at my father, awed by his courage, as I had thought he must, but was looking at me; and there was pity in his face. Smiling, I wondered why. Then it occurred to me that I had no idea what would happen to Mamma and the rest of us if Papa went to prison. Certainly Papa would not be able to go on editing the
Lovegrove Gazette
in a cell; and though Mamma had often said that she could not understand why Mr. Morpurgo continued to employ Papa in view of his frequent derelictions of duty, and had said he must either admire Papa very much or care not at all what happened to the
Lovegrove Gazette,
he would surely rebel at paying a salary to an editor who was so completely prevented from even appearing to perform his functions. Neither Mary nor I was anything like ready to be a concert pianist, and we had learned in the last year or so that our confidence in our powers to support ourselves and our family in comfort by going into factories or shops was unfounded. I looked through Mr. Pennington’s kind face into bleakness, and had to force myself to hold my head high, and say, “Mamma and my sisters and my little brother will be very proud if Papa goes to prison.”

Well, that was true. Papa must be doing the right thing, if it averted horror from Aunt Lily and Nancy. And as for the principle involved, of course it was right to go to prison for the sake of a cause. That I felt so strongly that my feeling was localized, I could touch it, somewhere near the breastbone; and this was one of the rare cases where grown-ups did not contradict one’s instincts but actually confirmed them. Our history books were full of people like John Bunyan, who had, as the historians put it in their particular English, “languished in dungeons” rather than renounce their beliefs. If Papa went to prison to save Queenie, and it meant that we were suddenly left with nothing to live on, well, this was the application of that principle to us. Any sufferings that came to us would be martyrdom of the same order as my father’s, though less, as we ourselves were less than he.

Still, it would have helped if Papa had seemed to hear what I had said. But he continued, “When I go to prison, however, that will not be the end of this affair. For I have written a second pamphlet which will be published as soon as the jail doors close on me. In this I do not attack Mr. Justice Ludost as much as I attack your uncle the Home Secretary. It will be impossible to suppress this pamphlet. It is not contempt of court to attack a politician, and I have been scrupulously careful to avoid making any statement which could possibly be the basis for a prosecution under the libel laws. You may remember how impossible it was to prosecute me for any statement made in the Turner pamphlet. That was so partly because they were all true, partly because I exercised an ingenuity which really gave the pamphlet a parallel existence in the spheres of literature and the game of chess. It will, you realize, be generally known that I have been sent to prison for saying that Mr. Justice Ludost is mad and that his conduct of the trial of Queenie Phillips was shameful. My second pamphlet will reprint reports in northern newspapers which give accounts of what happened at the trials of certain women criminals which took place before Mr. Justice Ludost on the Northern Circuit during the last few weeks. They provide evidence that the man is mad. But I shall not say so. I shall simply say that certain persons present at these trials laid the facts revealed in these cuttings before the Home Secretary. Some of those trials took place in your constituency and several of your constituents wrote to you about them. You and he got those letters, for you acknowledged them.”

“Now how can you know that?” wondered Mr. Pennington.

“After the first morning of the trial I got to work,” said my father. “I found out what had been his last circuit, and I sent Langham—”

“What, do you still hunt in couples?” asked Mr. Pennington, with intense distaste.

“The world will think he comes off far better in this business than you do,” said my father. “He believes in liberty, and he takes my word for truth, and he went up north and at my direction found the historic truth in the places where it is warehoused by the bale and nobody ever looks for it, the offices of local newspapers. There were the reports you saw; and the men who had written to you and to your uncle had written to their local newspapers also, and could be traced, and were still angry. I have to own that several of them were your political opponents, and I would not stake my life on the purity of their resentment, but what they did serves my purpose.”

“But these northern trials were nothing like as bad as what you say happened at the Old Bailey!” protested Mr. Pennington. “And it’s very awkward, my uncle found out there was nothing he could do. There’s no way of removing a judge.”

“The northern trials were nothing like so bad as the trial of Queenie Phillips,” my father agreed, “and indeed your uncle is quite helpless. There is no way of removing a judge, nor should there ever be, lest barbarism come back again, and politicians try to deprive the people of their liberties. But let us remind you that every sentence in the second pamphlet will have a force superior to argument. It will be written by a man in prison, and that is always a great thing with the mob. I will write with the authority of a martyr; and I will have behind me the support of quite a number of reasonable citizens who prefer judges to be in their right mind, and of a huge army of idiots who believe Queenie Phillips to be innocent. For no better causes than these, people will believe every word I write and make a saint and hero of me, and will think your uncle a monster, and you another, though on a smaller scale. Say that Mr. Brackenbird will be a minotaur, Queenie Phillips having been by that time converted by popular legend into a virgin sacrifice, and you will be a gryphon, a mirror monster, but still a monster. When Mr. Justice Ludost is certified as insane, as he certainly will be in a very short time, the popular image of you two will not be improved, and it will be very black indeed if in the meantime you have hanged Queenie. I have written this pamphlet as well as I have ever written anything in my life and the dirt will stick to you both till the day you die.”

“I could remind you,” said Mr. Pennington, “that I once did you a kindness.”

“You would not balance a kindness, however considerable both you and I might think it, against a tribunal which would preserve the law from the corruption of the flesh,” my father said. “Or,” he added as an afterthought, “against the life of Queenie Phillips. For surely you understand what I’m telling you.”

“No, except that it’s disagreeable.”

“I have been trying to convey to you that neither the first nor the second pamphlet will be published if Queenie Phillips is reprieved,” said my father, “but that they will be issued later in one form or another unless your uncle withdraws his opposition to the establishment of a Court of Appeal. Now my daughter and I must go. The first pamphlet will be issued in three days’ time. Ten thousand of each are in the printing.”

“This is blackmail,” said Mr. Pennington.

“I understand that blackmailers hear that superfluous remark constantly,” said my father, “but I never hear of any but the least intelligent practitioners of the art begging their bread from door to door. I shall expect your uncle to reprieve Queenie Phillips.”

“My uncle is not a man you can threaten.”

“I do not hope that he will give in to my threats,” said my father. “When he reads my pamphlet he will see that Mr. Justice Ludost did in fact behave like a lunatic and that Queenie Phillips had nothing that could be called a trial, and he will not wish to defend what is morally indefensible. Then my threats will help the parts of him which are not on the same moral level to come to an agreement. But we must go.”

Mr. Pennington, however, seemed reluctant to part from us. “I say,” he said. “You pamphleteers. You really are an extraordinary race. You and Wilkes and Voltaire and Mirabeau—”

“And Milton,” suggested my father. “As unpleasant a set of men as I can imagine.”

“But you believe all you say, don’t you?” persisted the large, puzzled man. “You mean you’d go to prison for the sake of all this, don’t you? Oh, I believe you. When I came up and you were asleep, I looked at your face and really you—” He gave up. By a weak gesture he indicated that he had found my father more admirable then than when awake. “And there’s so much you don’t seem to think of.” I guessed, from a wavering of his gesture, that he meant me. “Can’t you,” he demanded, “just be a writer and not keep getting into all these fights? Our lot could find you work to do. You’re a magnificent writer. I’ll never forget that first article of yours I ever saw. Why, the other evening I read it again, and in spite of all that’s happened I think it’s wonderful, there’s nobody like you. . . .”

But my father had turned away, in what looked like an arrogant refusal to discuss the challenge he had laid down. His arrogance might have had another appointment elsewhere. But the truth was that he was too tired to go on talking. As he and I went along the corridor between the statues and the frescoes he complained that the floor was rocking under his feet, and that it was not within the strength of any man to write as much as he had written within the last three days. Out in the street his strained eyes blinked at the afternoon light and he said he felt too sick to start on the journey home. We turned our backs on the towers and spires and might of St. Stephen’s, and tried to find some shelter in the mediocre London lying before us not likely to involve us in too great expense. At the corner of Victoria Street there was a tea-shop in a basement, which looked as if it might be dark; and there we found a table in a shaded alcove. Papa asked for specially strong tea and drank cup after cup, and sat back in his chair, and muttered, and forgot me.

I thought how oddly things worked out for the best. In an attempt at decorative fantasy somebody had twisted strands of purple and green cloth round the electric bulbs and the trick looked hideous, but created a half-light in which Papa could rest his eyes and doze. I looked at him to satisfy myself that he was really sleeping and it struck me how fragile was this man who planned to go to prison. No candles were lit in my head this time, but I was again exalted by his bravery. And again I was chilled by his vast indifference to my fate. He had woven a cobweb of thoughts and feelings about his intention to run the risk of imprisonment, and not one of these thoughts and feelings related to me or to any of his family, I had a glorious father, I had no father at all. Moreover, I had understood enough of the conversation in the central lobby to realize that my father had on some occasion treated Mr. Pennington badly, and that his dealings with him during the present crisis were hardly too scrupulous. The force which had taken Aunt Clara’s furniture out of our lives had often been at work elsewhere, and was active at the present moment. But it was how working to protect Aunt Lily and Nancy from a cruel grief. Papa was brave, he was cruel, he was dishonest, he was kind, he said he had ordered ten thousand copies of each pamphlet when he had ordered two thousand, he had this terrible cold way of mentioning Queenie as an afterthought. I might have added to the list of his paradoxical qualities that he was penniless and discredited and enormously powerful; for twenty-four hours later Mr. Brackenbird reprieved Queenie Phillips.