I got mixed up in that crowd seething with an animosity as senseless as
things of the street always are, and it was while I was laboriously
making my way out of it that the pressman of whom I spoke was jostled
against me. He did me the justice to be surprised. "What? You here!
The last person in the world . . . If I had known I could have got you
inside. Plenty of room. Interest been over for the last three days. Got
seven years. Well, I am glad."
"Why are you glad? Because he's got seven years?" I asked, greatly
incommoded by the pressure of a hulking fellow who was remarking to some
of his equally oppressive friends that the "beggar ought to have been
poleaxed." I don't know whether he had ever confided his savings to de
Barral but if so, judging from his appearance, they must have been the
proceeds of some successful burglary. The pressman by my side said 'No,'
to my question. He was glad because it was all over. He had suffered
greatly from the heat and the bad air of the court. The clammy, raw,
chill of the streets seemed to affect his liver instantly. He became
contemptuous and irritable and plied his elbows viciously making way for
himself and me.
A dull affair this. All such cases were dull. No really dramatic
moments. The book-keeping of The Orb and all the rest of them was
certainly a burlesque revelation but the public did not care for
revelations of that kind. Dull dog that de Barral--he grumbled. He
could not or would not take the trouble to characterize for me the
appearance of that man now officially a criminal (we had gone across the
road for a drink) but told me with a sourly, derisive snigger that, after
the sentence had been pronounced the fellow clung to the dock long enough
to make a sort of protest. 'You haven't given me time. If I had been
given time I would have ended by being made a peer like some of them.'
And he had permitted himself his very first and last gesture in all these
days, raising a hard-clenched fist above his head.
The pressman disapproved of that manifestation. It was not his business
to understand it. Is it ever the business of any pressman to understand
anything? I guess not. It would lead him too far away from the
actualities which are the daily bread of the public mind. He probably
thought the display worth very little from a picturesque point of view;
the weak voice; the colourless personality as incapable of an attitude as
a bed-post, the very fatuity of the clenched hand so ineffectual at that
time and place--no, it wasn't worth much. And then, for him, an
accomplished craftsman in his trade, thinking was distinctly "bad
business." His business was to write a readable account. But I who had
nothing to write, I permitted myself to use my mind as we sat before our
still untouched glasses. And the disclosure which so often rewards a
moment of detachment from mere visual impressions gave me a thrill very
much approaching a shudder. I seemed to understand that, with the shock
of the agonies and perplexities of his trial, the imagination of that
man, whose moods, notions and motives wore frequently an air of grotesque
mystery--that his imagination had been at last roused into activity. And
this was awful. Just try to enter into the feelings of a man whose
imagination wakes up at the very moment he is about to enter the tomb . . . "