There was even a sort of perfection about it. She had taken such a perfect revenge upon the two men in her life. Some women never forgive. «I would not give him my hair for a bowstring at the end. I would not raise a finger to save him dying.» Christian had joined Arnold in France, as I learnt much later. But no doubt the will that powered that hammerblow had been forged much earlier. When I glimpsed it at the start of my narration it was already steely strong. There was, almost, no surprise here. What did surprise me was the strength of Rachel's feeling for myself. There must have been, to create such a great hate, a very considerable degree of love. I had simply not noticed that Rachel loved me. She must have cared deeply to be able, in order to destroy me, to lie so hugely and so consistently. I ought to have been moved to reverence. Later perhaps I was. No, I do not exactly «blame,» though neither do I «condone.» I am not sure what «forgiveness» means. I have cut attachments, I have «let her off,» I feel no thrilling connection of resentment between us. In some blank way I even wish her well. Forgiveness is often thought of as an emotion. It is not that. It is rather a certain kind of cessation of emotion. So perhaps I do indeed forgive. It matters little what words one uses here. In fact she was an instrument which did me a very great service.
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.
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 courtroom.) 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 absent-minded. 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'etre 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 simpleminded lies and half-lies in his anxiety to defend me that he be came 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 onto 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 Baling?»
«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.
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 courtroom, 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.