“The three judges sat in a row on the bench.
They were rather impressive in their scarlet robes and black squarish caps.
Two were middle-aged men and never opened their mouths.
The presiding judge was a little old man, with the wrinkled face of a monkey, and a tired, flat voice, but he was very observant; he listened attentively, and when he spoke it was without severity, but with a passionless calm that was rather frightening.
He had the exquisite reasonableness of a man who has no illusions about human nature, but having long since learnt that man is capable of any vileness accepts the fact as just as much a matter of course as that he has two arms and two legs.
When the jury went out to consider their verdict we journalists scattered to have a chat, a drink or a cup of coffee.
We all hoped they wouldn’t be too long, because it was getting late and we wanted to get our stuff in.
We had no doubt that they’d find Berger guilty.
One of the odd circumstances I’ve noticed in the murder trials I’ve attended is how unlike the impression is you get about things in court to that which you get by reading about them in the paper.
When you read the evidence you think that after all it’s rather slight, and if you’d been on the jury you’d have given the accused the benefit of the doubt.
But what you’ve left out of account is the general atmosphere, the feeling that you get; it puts an entirely different colour on the evidence.
After about an hour we were told that the jury had arrived at a decision and we trooped in again.
Berger was brought up from the cells and we all stood up as the three judges trailed in one after the other.
The lights had been lit and it was rather sinister in that crowded court.
There was a tremor of apprehension.
Have you ever been to the Old Bailey?”
“No, in point of fact, I haven’t,” said Charley.
“I go often when I’m in London.
It’s a good place to learn about human nature.
There’s a difference in feeling between that and a French court that made a most peculiar impression on me.
I don’t pretend to understand it.
At the Old Bailey you feel that a prisoner is confronted with the majesty of the law.
It’s something impersonal that he has to deal with, Justice in the abstract.
An idea, in fact.
It’s awful in the literal sense of the word.
But in that French court, during the two days I spent there, I was beset by a very different feeling, I didn’t get the impression that it was permeated by a grandiose abstraction, I felt that the apparatus of law was an arrangement by which a bourgeois society protected its safety, its property, its privileges from the evil-doer who threatened them.
I don’t mean the trial wasn’t fair or the verdict unjustified, what I mean is that you got the sensation of a society that was outraged because it feared, rather than of a principle that must be upheld.
The prisoner was up against men who wanted to safeguard themselves rather than, as with us, up against an idea that must prevail though the heavens fall.
It was terrifying rather than awful.
The verdict was guilty of murder with extenuating circumstances.”
“What were the extenuating circumstances?”
“There were none, but French juries don’t like to sentence a man to death, and by French law when there are extenuating circumstances capital punishment can’t be inflicted.
Berger got off with fifteen years’ penal servitude.”
Simon looked at his watch and got up.
“I must be going.
I’ll give you the stuff I wrote about the trial and you can read it at your leisure.
And look, here’s the article I wrote on crime as a form of sport.
I showed it to your girl friend, but I don’t think she liked it very much; anyhow, she returned it without a word of comment.
As an exercise in sardonic humour it’s not so dusty.”
vii
SINCE HE HAD NO WISH to read Simon’s articles in Lydia’s presence, Charley, on parting from his friend, went to the Dome, ordered himself a cup of coffee, and settled himself down to their perusal.
He was glad to read a connected account of the murder and the trial, for Lydia’s various narratives had left him somewhat confused.
She had told him this and that, not in the order in which it had occurred, but as her emotion dictated.
Simon’s three long articles were coherent, and though there were particulars which Charley had learnt from Lydia and of which he was ignorant, he had succeeded in constructing a graphic story which it was easy to follow.
He wrote almost as he spoke, in a fluent journalistic style, but he had managed very effectively to present the background against which the events he described had been enacted.
You got a sinister impression of a world, sordid, tumultuous, in which these gangsters, dope traffickers, bookies and racecourse touts lived their dark and hazardous lives.
Dregs of the population of a great city, living on their wits, suspicious of one another, ready to betray their best friend if it could be of advantage to themselves, open-handed, sociable, gaily cynical, even good-humoured, they seemed to enjoy that existence, with all its dangers and vicissitudes, which kept you up to the mark and made you feel that you really were living.
Each man’s hand was against his neighbour’s, but the alertness which this forced upon you was exhilarating.
It was a world in which a man would shoot another for a trifle, but was just as ready to take flowers and fruit, bought at no small sacrifice, to a third who was sick in hospital.
The atmosphere with which Simon had not unskilfully encompassed his story filled Charley with a strange unease.