________________________________________________
_ The next morning she was glad and proud that she had not yielded
to a scare. For he was most strangely and obviously better. He had
slept heavily, and she had slept a little. True that Daniel was
condemned to death! Leaving Daniel to his fate, she was conscious
of joy springing in her heart. How absurd to have asked herself:
"Will he ever come down those stairs again?"!
A message reached her from the forgotten shop during the morning,
that Mr. Lawton had called to see Mr. Povey. Already Samuel had
wanted to arise, but she had forbidden it in the tone of a woman
who is dangerous, and Samuel had been very reasonable. He now said
that Mr. Lawton must be asked up. She glanced round the bedroom.
It was 'done'; it was faultlessly correct as a sick chamber. She
agreed to the introduction into it of the man from another sphere,
and after a preliminary minute she left the two to talk together.
This visit of young Lawton's was a dramatic proof of Samuel's
importance, and of the importance of the matter in hand. The
august occasion demanded etiquette, and etiquette said that a wife
should depart from her husband when he had to transact affairs
beyond the grasp of a wife.
The idea of a petition to the Home Secretary took shape at this
interview, and before the day was out it had spread over the town
and over the Five Towns, and it was in the Signal. The Signal
spoke of Daniel Povey as 'the condemned man.' And the phrase
startled the whole district into an indignant agitation for his
reprieve. The district woke up to the fact that a Town Councillor,
a figure in the world, an honest tradesman of unspotted character,
was cooped solitary in a little cell at Stafford, waiting to be
hanged by the neck till he was dead. The district determined that
this must not and should not be. Why! Dan Povey had actually once
been Chairman of the Bursley Society for the Prosecution of
Felons, that association for annual eating and drinking, whose
members humorously called each other 'felons'! Impossible,
monstrous, that an ex-chairman of the 'Felons' should be a
sentenced criminal!
However, there was nothing to fear. No Home Secretary would dare
to run counter to the jury's recommendation and the expressed wish
of the whole district. Besides, the Home Secretary's nephew was
M.P. for the Knype division. Of course a verdict of guilty had
been inevitable. Everybody recognized that now. Even Samuel and
all the hottest partisans of Daniel Povey recognized it. They
talked as if they had always foreseen it, directly contradicting
all that they had said on only the previous day. Without any sense
of any inconsistency or of shame, they took up an absolutely new
position. The structure of blind faith had once again crumbled at
the assault of realities, and unhealthy, un-English truths, the
statement of which would have meant ostracism twenty-four hours
earlier, became suddenly the platitudes of the Square and the
market-place.
Despatch was necessary in the affair of the petition, for the
condemned man had but three Sundays. But there was delay at the
beginning, because neither young Lawton nor any of his colleagues
was acquainted with the proper formula of a petition to the Home
Secretary for the reprieve of a criminal condemned to death. No
such petition had been made in the district within living memory.
And at first, young Lawton could not get sight or copy of any such
petition anywhere, in the Five Towns or out of them. Of course
there must exist a proper formula, and of course that formula and
no other could be employed. Nobody was bold enough to suggest that
young Lawton should commence the petition, "To the Most Noble the
Marquis of Welwyn, K.C.B., May it please your Lordship," and end
it, "And your petitioners will ever pray!" and insert between
those phrases a simple appeal for the reprieve, with a statement
of reasons. No! the formula consecrated by tradition must be
found. And, after Daniel had arrived a day and a half nearer
death, it was found. A lawyer at Alnwick had the draft of a
petition which had secured for a murderer in Northumberland twenty
years' penal servitude instead of sudden death, and on request he
lent it to young Lawton. The prime movers in the petition felt
that Daniel Povey was now as good as saved. Hundreds of forms were
printed to receive signatures, and these forms, together with
copies of the petition, were laid on the counters of all the
principal shops, not merely in Bursley, but in the other towns.
They were also to be found at the offices of the Signal, in
railway waiting-rooms, and in the various reading-rooms; and on
the second of Daniel's three Sundays they were exposed in the
porches of churches and chapels. Chapel-keepers and vergers would
come to Samuel and ask with the heavy inertia of their stupidity:
"About pens and ink, sir?" These officials had the air of
audaciously disturbing the sacrosanct routine of centuries in
order to confer a favour.
Samuel continued to improve. His cough shook him less, and his
appetite increased. Constance allowed him to establish himself in
the drawing-room, which was next to the bedroom, and of which the
grate was particularly efficient. Here, in an old winter overcoat,
he directed the vast affair of the petition, which grew daily to
vaster proportions. Samuel dreamed of twenty thousand signatures.
Each sheet held twenty signatures, and several times a day he
counted the sheets; the supply of forms actually failed once, and
Constance herself had to hurry to the printers to order more.
Samuel was put into a passion by this carelessness of the
printers. He offered Cyril sixpence for every sheet of signatures
which the boy would obtain. At first Cyril was too shy to canvass,
but his father made him blush, and in a few hours Cyril had
developed into an eager canvasser. One whole day he stayed away
from school to canvas. Altogether he earned over fifteen
shillings, quite honestly except that he got a companion to forge
a couple of signatures with addresses lacking at the end of a last
sheet, generously rewarding him with sixpence, the value of the
entire sheet.
When Samuel had received a thousand sheets with twenty thousand
signatures, he set his heart on twenty-five thousand signatures.
And he also announced his firm intention of accompanying young
Lawton to London with the petition. The petition had, in fact,
become one of the most remarkable petitions of modern times. So
the Signal said. The Signal gave a daily account of its progress,
and its progress was astonishing. In certain streets every
householder had signed it. The first sheets had been reserved for
the signatures of members of Parliament, ministers of religion,
civic dignitaries, justices of the peace, etc. These sheets were
nobly filled. The aged Rector of Bursley signed first of all;
after him the Mayor of Bursley, as was right; then sundry M.P.'s.
Samuel emerged from the drawing-room. He went into the parlour,
and, later, into the shop; and no evil consequence followed. His
cough was nearly, but not quite, cured. The weather was
extraordinarily mild for the season. He repeated that he should go
with the petition to London; and he went; Constance could not
validly oppose the journey. She, too, was a little intoxicated by
the petition. It weighed considerably over a hundredweight. The
crowning signature, that of the M.P. for Knype, was duly obtained
in London, and Samuel's one disappointment was that his hope of
twenty-five thousand signatures had fallen short of realization--
by only a few score. The few score could have been got had not
time urgently pressed. He returned from London a man of mark, full
of confidence; but his cough was worse again.
His confidence in the power of public opinion and the inherent
virtue of justice might have proved to be well placed, had not the
Home Secretary happened to be one of your humane officials. The
Marquis of Welwyn was celebrated through every stratum of the
governing classes for his humane instincts, which were continually
fighting against his sense of duty. Unfortunately his sense of
duty, which he had inherited from several centuries of ancestors,
made havoc among his humane instincts on nearly every occasion of
conflict. It was reported that he suffered horribly in
consequence. Others also suffered, for he was never known to
advise a remission of a sentence of flogging. Certain capital
sentences he had commuted, but he did not commute Daniel Povey's.
He could not permit himself to be influenced by a wave of popular
sentiment, and assuredly not by his own nephew's signature. He
gave to the case the patient, remorseless examination which he
gave to every case. He spent a sleepless night in trying to
discover a reason for yielding to his humane instincts, but
without success. As Judge Lindley remarked in his confidential
report, the sole arguments in favour of Daniel were provocation
and his previous high character; and these were no sort of an
argument. The provocation was utterly inadequate, and the previous
high character was quite too ludicrously beside the point. So once
more the Marquis's humane instincts were routed and he suffered
horribly.
On the Sunday morning after the day on which the Signal had
printed the menu of Daniel Povey's supreme breakfast, and the
exact length of the 'drop' which the executioner had administered
to him, Constance and Cyril stood together at the window of the
large bedroom. The boy was in his best clothes; but Constance's
garments gave no sign of the Sabbath. She wore a large apron over
an old dress that was rather tight for her. She was pale and
looked ill.
"Oh, mother!" Cyril exclaimed suddenly. "Listen! I'm sure I can
hear the band."
She checked him with a soundless movement of her lips; and they
both glanced anxiously at the silent bed, Cyril with a gesture of
apology for having forgotten that he must make no noise.
The strains of the band came from down King Street, in the
direction of St. Luke's Church. The music appeared to linger a
long time in the distance, and then it approached, growing louder,
and the Bursley Town Silver Prize Band passed under the window at
the solemn pace of Handel's "Dead March." The effect of that
requiem, heavy with its own inherent beauty and with the vast
weight of harrowing tradition, was to wring the tears from
Constance's eyes; they fell on her aproned bosom, and she sank
into a chair. And though, the cheeks of the trumpeters were puffed
out, and though the drummer had to protrude his stomach and arch
his spine backwards lest he should tumble over his drum, there was
majesty in the passage of the band. The boom of the drum,
desolating the interruptions of the melody, made sick the heart,
but with a lofty grief; and the dirge seemed to be weaving a
purple pall that covered every meanness.
The bandsmen were not all in black, but they all wore crape on
their sleeves and their instruments were knotted with crape. They
carried in their hats a black-edged card. Cyril held one of these
cards in his hands. It ran thus:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF DANIEL POVEY A TOWN COUNCILLOR OF THIS
TOWN JUDICIALLY MURDERED AT 8 O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING 8TH FEBRUARY
1888 "HE WAS MORE SINNED AGAINST THAN SINNING."
In the wake of the band came the aged Rector, bare-headed, and
wearing a surplice over his overcoat; his thin white hair was
disarranged by the breeze that played in the chilly sunshine; his
hands were folded on a gilt-edged book. A curate, churchwardens,
and sidesmen followed. And after these, tramping through the dark
mud in a procession that had apparently no end, wound the
unofficial male multitude, nearly all in mourning, and all, save
the more aristocratic, carrying the memorial card in their hats.
Loafers, women, and children had collected on the drying
pavements, and a window just opposite Constance was ornamented
with the entire family of the landlord of the Sun Vaults. In the
great bar of the Vaults a barman was craning over the pitchpine
screen that secured privacy to drinkers. The procession continued
without break, eternally rising over the verge of King Street
'bank,' and eternally vanishing round the corner into St. Luke's
Square; at intervals it was punctuated by a clergyman, a
Nonconformist minister, a town crier, a group of foremen, or a few
Rifle Volunteers. The watching crowd grew as the procession
lengthened. Then another band was heard, also playing the march
from Saul. The first band had now reached the top of the Square,
and was scarcely audible from King Street. The reiterated glitter
in the sun of memorial cards in hats gave the fanciful illusion of
an impossible whitish snake that was straggling across the town.
Three-quarters of an hour elapsed before the tail of the snake
came into view, and a rabble of unkempt boys closed in upon it,
filling the street,
"I shall go to the drawing-room window, mother," said Cyril.
She nodded. He crept out of the bedroom.
St. Luke's Square was a sea of hats and memorial cards. Most of
the occupiers of the Square had hung out flags at half-mast, and a
flag at half-mast was flying over the Town Hall in the distance.
Sightseers were at every window. The two bands had united at the
top of the Square; and behind them, on a North Staffordshire
Railway lorry, stood the white-clad Rector and several black
figures. The Rector was speaking; but only those close to the
lorry could hear his feeble treble voice.
Such was the massive protest of Bursley against what Bursley
regarded as a callous injustice. The execution of Daniel Povey had
most genuinely excited the indignation of the town. That execution
was not only an injustice; it was an insult, a humiliating snub.
And the worst was that the rest of the country had really
discovered no sympathetic interest in the affair. Certain London
papers, indeed, in commenting casually on the execution, had
slurred the morals and manners of the Five Towns, professing to
regard the district as notoriously beyond the realm of the Ten
Commandments. This had helped to render furious the townsmen.
This, as much as anything, had encouraged the spontaneous outburst
of feeling which had culminated in a St. Luke's Square full of
people with memorial cards in their hats. The demonstration had
scarcely been organized; it had somehow organized itself,
employing the places of worship and a few clubs as centres of
gathering. And it proved an immense success. There were seven or
eight thousand people in the Square, and the pity was that England
as a whole could not have had a glimpse of the spectacle. Since
the execution of the elephant, nothing had so profoundly agitated
Bursley. Constance, who left the bedroom momentarily for the
drawing-room, reflected that the death and burial of Cyril's
honoured grandfather, though a resounding event, had not caused
one-tenth of the stir which she beheld. But then John Baines had
killed nobody.
The Rector spoke too long; every one felt that. But at length he
finished. The bands performed the Doxology, and the immense
multitudes began to disperse by the eight streets that radiate
from the Square. At the same time one o'clock struck, and the
public-houses opened with their customary admirable promptitude.
Respectable persons, of course, ignored the public-houses and
hastened homewards to a delayed dinner. But in a town of over
thirty thousand souls there are sufficient dregs to fill all the
public-houses on an occasion of ceremonial excitement. Constance
saw the bar of the Vaults crammed with individuals whose sense of
decent fitness was imperfect. The barman and the landlord and the
principal members of the landlord's family were hard put to it to
quench that funereal thirst. Constance, as she ate a little meal
in the bedroom, could not but witness the orgy. A bandsman with
his silver instrument was prominent at the counter. At five
minutes to three the Vaults spewed forth a squirt of roysterers
who walked on the pavement as on a tight-rope; among them was the
bandsman, his silver instrument only half enveloped in its bag of
green serge. He established an equilibrium in the gutter. It would
not have mattered so seriously if he had not been a bandsman. The
barman and the landlord pushed the ultimate sot by force into the
street and bolted the door (till six o'clock) just as a policeman
strolled along, the first policeman of the day. It became known
that similar scenes were enacting at the thresholds of other inns.
And the judicious were sad. _
Read next: BOOK II CONSTANCE: CHAPTER V - ANOTHER CRIME: PART V
Read previous: BOOK II CONSTANCE: CHAPTER V - ANOTHER CRIME: PART III
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