第50章 CHAPTER XIX AN INCIDENT(3)

"Oh, I 'm making a mistake? I 'll take your name and address, please; we have to report these things.""By all means," said Shelton, angrily giving it. "I spoke to her first.""Perhaps you'll come up to the court tomorrow morning, and repeat that," replied the policeman, with incivility.

Shelton looked at him with all the force at his command.

"You had better be careful, constable," he said; but in the act of uttering these words he thought how pitiable they sounded.

"We 're not to be trifled with," returned the policeman in a threatening voice.

Shelton could think of nothing but to repeat:

"You had better be careful, constable."

"You're a gentleman," replied the policeman. "I'm only a policeman.

You've got the riches, I've got the power."

Grasping the woman's arm, he began to move along with her.

Shelton turned, and walked away.

He went to Grinnings' Club, and flung himself down upon a sofa. His feeling was not one of pity for the woman, nor of peculiar anger with the policeman, but rather of dissatisfaction with himself.

"What ought I to have done?" he thought, "the beggar was within his rights."He stared at the pictures on the wall, and a tide of disgust surged up in him.

"One or other of us," he reflected, "we make these women what they are. And when we've made them, we can't do without them; we don't want to; but we give them no proper homes, so that they're reduced to prowl about the streets, and then we run them in. Ha! that's good--that's excellent! We run them in! And here we sit and carp. But what do we do? Nothing! Our system is the most highly moral known.

We get the benefit without soiling even the hem of our phylacteries--the women are the only ones that suffer. And why should n't they--inferior things?"

He lit a cigarette, and ordered the waiter to bring a drink.

"I'll go to the Court," he thought; but suddenly it occurred to him that the case would get into the local papers. The press would never miss so nice a little bit of scandal--"Gentleman v. Policeman!"And he had a vision of Antonia's father, a neighbouring and conscientious magistrate, solemnly reading this. Someone, at all events, was bound to see his name and make a point of mentioning it too good to be missed! And suddenly he saw with horror that to help the woman he would have to assert again that he had spoken to her first. "I must go to the Court!" he kept thinking, as if to assure himself that he was not a coward.

He lay awake half the night worrying over this dilemma.

"But I did n't speak to her first," he told himself; "I shall only be telling a lie, and they 'll make me swear it, too!"He tried to persuade himself that this was against his principles, but at the bottom of his heart he knew that he would not object to telling such a lie if only guaranteed immune from consequences; it appeared to him, indeed, but obvious humanity.

"But why should I suffer?" he thought; "I've done nothing. It's neither reasonable nor just."He hated the unhappy woman who was causing him these horrors of uncertainty. Whenever he decided one way or other, the policeman's face, with its tyrannical and muddy eyes, rose before him like a nightmare, and forced him to an opposite conviction. He fell asleep at last with the full determination to go and see what happened.

He woke with a sense of odd disturbance. "I can do no good by going," he thought, remembering, aid lying very still; "they 're certain to believe the policeman; I shall only blacken myself for nothing;" and the combat began again within him, but with far less fury. It was not what other people thought, not even the risk of perjury that mattered (all this he made quite clear)--it was Antonia.

It was not fair to her to put himself in such a false position; in fact, not decent.

He breakfasted. In the room were some Americans, and the face of one young girl reminded him a little of Antonia. Fainter and fainter grew the incident; it seemed to have its right proportions.

Two hours later, looking at the clock, he found that it was lunch-time. He had not gone, had not committed perjury; but he wrote to a daily paper, pointing out the danger run by the community from the power which a belief in their infallibility places in the hands of the police--how, since they are the sworn abettors of right and justice, their word is almost necessarily taken to be gospel; how one and all they hang together, from mingled interest and esprit de corps. Was it not, he said, reasonable to suppose that amongst thousands of human beings invested with such opportunities there would be found bullies who would take advantage of them, and rise to distinction in the service upon the helplessness of the unfortunate and the cowardice of people with anything to lose? Those who had in their hands the sacred duties of selecting a practically irresponsible body of men were bound, for the sake of freedom and humanity, to exercise those duties with the utmost care and thoroughness . . . .

However true, none of this helped him to think any better of himself at heart, and he was haunted by the feeling that a stout and honest bit of perjury was worth more than a letter to a daily paper.

He never saw his letter printed, containing, as it did, the germs of an unpalatable truth.

In the afternoon he hired a horse, and galloped on Port Meadow. The strain of his indecision over, he felt like a man recovering from an illness, and he carefully abstained from looking at the local papers.

There was that within him, however, which resented the worsting of his chivalry.