murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to
his career, than being detected in adultery. With this kind of
background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which
make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer. Most of
the crimes mentioned above have a touch of this atmosphere, and in three
cases, including the one I referred to but did not name, the story
approximates to the one I have outlined.
Now compare the Cleft Chin Murder. There is no depth of feeling in it. It
was almost chance that the two people concerned committed that particular
murder, and it was only by good luck that they did not commit several
others. The background was not domesticity, but the anonymous life of the
dance-halls and the false values of the American film. The two culprits
were an eighteen-year-old ex-waitress named Elizabeth Jones, and an
American army deserter, posing as an officer, named Karl Hulten. They
were only together for six days, and it seems doubtful whether, until
they were arrested, they even learned one another's true names. They met
casually in a teashop, and that night went out for a ride in a stolen
army truck. Jones described herself as a strip-tease artist, which was
not strictly true (she had given one unsuccessful performance in this
line); and declared that she wanted to do something dangerous, "like
being a gun-moll." Hulten described himself as a big-time Chicago
gangster, which was also untrue. They met a girl bicycling along the
road, and to show how tough he was Hulten ran over her with his truck,
after which the pair robbed her of the few shillings that were on her. On
another occasion they knocked out a girl to whom they had offered a lift,
took her coat and handbag and threw her into a river. Finally, in the
most wanton way, they murdered a taxi-driver who happened to have ?8 in
his pocket. Soon afterwards they parted. Hulten was caught because he had
foolishly kept the dead man's car, and Jones made spontaneous confessions
to the police. In court each prisoner incriminated the other. In between
crimes, both of them seem to have behaved with the utmost callousness:
they spent the dead taxi-driver's ?8 at the dog races.
Judging from her letters, the girl's case has a certain amount of
psychological interest, but this murder probably captured the headlines
because it provided distraction amid the doodle-bugs and the anxieties of
the Battle of France. Jones and Hulten committed their murder to the tune
of V1, and were convicted to the tune of V2. There was also considerable
excitement because--as has become usual in England--the man was
sentenced to death and the girl to imprisonment. According to Mr.
Raymond, the reprieving of Jones caused widespread indignation and
streams of telegrams to the Home Secretary: in her native town, "SHE
SHOULD HANG" was chalked on the walls beside pictures of a figure
dangling from a gallows. Considering that only ten women have been hanged
in Britain this century, and that the practice has gone out largely
because of popular feeling against it, it is difficult not to feel that
this clamour to hang an eighteen-year-old girl was due partly to the
brutalizing effects of war. Indeed, the whole meaningless story, with its
atmosphere of dance-halls, movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and
stolen cars, belongs essentially to a war period.
Perhaps it is significant that the most talked-of English murder of
recent years should have been committed by an American and an English
girl who had become partly Americanized. But it is difficult to believe
that this case will be so long remembered as the old domestic poisoning
dramas, product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy
did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong
emotions behind them.
HOW THE POOR DIE
In the year 1929 I spent several weeks in the H?pital X, in the fifteenth
ARRONDISSEMENT of Paris. The clerks put me through the usual third-degree
at the reception desk, and indeed I was kept answering questions for some
twenty minutes before they would let me in. If you have ever had to fill
up forms in a Latin country you will know the kind of questions I mean.
For some days past I had been unequal to translating Reaumur into
Fahrenheit, but I know that my temperature was round about 103, and by
the end of the interview I had some difficulty in standing on my feet. At
my back a resigned little knot of patients, carrying bundles done up in
coloured handkerchiefs, waited their turn to be questioned.
After the questioning came the bath--a compulsory routine for all
newcomers, apparently, just as in prison or the workhouse. My clothes
were taken away from me, and after I had sat shivering for some minutes
in five inches of warm water I was given a linen nightshirt and a short
blue flannel dressing-gown--no slippers, they had none big enough for
me, they said--and led out into the open air. This was a night in
February and I was suffering from pneumonia. The ward we were going to
was 200 yards away and it seemed that to get to it you had to cross the
hospital grounds. Someone stumbled in front of me with a lantern. The
gravel path was frosty underfoot, and the wind whipped the nightshirt
round my bare calves. When we got into the ward I was aware of a strange
feeling of familiarity whose origin I did not succeed in pinning down
till later in the night. It was a long, rather low, ill-lit room, full of
murmuring voices and with three rows of beds surprisingly close together.
There was a foul smell, faecal and yet sweetish. As I lay down I saw on a
bed nearly opposite me a small, round-shouldered, sandy-haired man
sitting half naked while a doctor and a student performed some strange
operation on him. First the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen
small glasses like wine glasses, then the student burned a match inside
each glass to exhaust the air, then the glass was popped on to the man's
back or chest and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow blister. Only after
some moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something
called cupping, a treatment which you can read about in old medical
text-books but which till then I had vaguely thought of as one of those
things they do to horses.
The cold air outside had probably lowered my temperature, and I watched
this barbarous remedy with detachment and even a certain amount of
amusement. The next moment, however, the doctor and the student came
across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying
the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few
feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an
animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two
men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital
before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without
speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only
put on six glasses in my case, but after doing s
o they scarified the
blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a
dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated,
disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I
reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But no, not a bit
of it. There was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice,
seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses
had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as
tight as a strait-jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward
in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic
grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice
was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied
for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don't
happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is
severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes
this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you
can't get it off. This is the period the onlookers enjoy most. During the
last five minutes, I noted, a sort of numbness supervenes. After the
poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust
beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep, and to the best of
my knowledge this was the only night of my life--I mean the only night
spent in bed--in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.
During my first hour in the H?pital X I had had a whole series of
different and contradictory treatments, but this was misleading, for in
general you got very little treatment at all, either good or bad, unless
you were ill in some interesting and instructive way. At five in the
morning the nurses came round, woke the patients and took their
temperatures, but did not wash them. If you were well enough you washed
yourself, otherwise you depended on the kindness of some walking patient.
It was generally patients, too, who carried the bed bottles and die grim
bedpan, nicknamed LA CASSEROLE. At eight breakfast arrived, called
army-fashion LA SOUPE. It was soup, too, a thin vegetable soup with slimy
hunks of bread floating about in it. Later in the day the tall, solemn,
black-bearded doctor made his rounds, with an INTERNE and a troop of
students following at his heels, but there were about sixty of us in the
ward and it was evident that he had other wards to attend to as well.
There were many beds past which he walked day after day, sometimes
followed by imploring cries. On the other hand if you had some disease
with which the students wanted to familiarize themselves you got plenty
of attention of a kind. I myself, with an exceptionally fine specimen of
a bronchial rattle, sometimes had as many as a dozen students queuing up
to listen to my chest. It was a very queer feeling--queer, I mean,
because of their intense interest in learning their job, together with a
seeming lack of any perception that the patients were human beings. It is
strange to relate, but sometimes as some young student stepped forward to
take his turn at manipulating you he would be actually tremulous with
excitement, like a boy who has at last got his hands on some expensive
piece of machinery. And then ear after ear--ears of young men, of girls,
of negroes--pressed against your back, relays of fingers solemnly but
clumsily tapping, and not from any one of them did you get a word of
conversation or a look direct in your face. As a non-paying patient, in
the uniform nightshirt, you were primarily A SPECIMEN, a thing I did not
resent but could never quite get used to.
After some days I grew well enough to sit up and study the surrounding
patients. The stuffy room, with its narrow beds so close together that
you could easily touch your neighbour's hand, had every sort of disease
in it except, I suppose, acutely infectious cases. My right-hand
neighbour was a little red-haired cobbler with one leg shorter than the
other, who used to announce the death of any other patient (this happened
a number of times, and my neighbour was always the first to hear of it)
by whistling to me, exclaiming "NUM?RO 43!" (or whatever it was) and
flinging his arms above his head. This man had not much wrong with him,
but in most of the other beds within my angle of vision some squalid
tragedy or some plain horror was being enacted. In the bed that was foot
to foot with mine there lay, until he died (I didn't see him die--they
moved him to another bed), a little weazened man who was suffering from I
do not know what disease, but something that made his whole body so
intensely sensitive that any movement from side to side, sometimes even
the weight of the bedclothes, would make him shout out with pain. His
worst suffering was when he urinated, which he did with the greatest
difficulty. A nurse would bring him the bed bottle and then for a long
time stand beside his bed, whistling, as grooms are said to do with
horses, until at last with an agonized shriek of "Je fissel" he would get
started. In the bed next to him the sandy-haired man whom I had seen
being cupped used to cough up blood-streaked mucus at all hours. My
left-hand neighbour was a tall, flaccid-looking young man who used
periodically to have a tube inserted into his back and astonishing
quantities of frothy liquid drawn off from some part of his body. In the
bed beyond that a veteran of the war of 1870 was dying, a handsome old
man with a white imperial, round whose bed, at all hours when visiting
was allowed, four elderly female relatives dressed all in black sat
exactly like crows, obviously scheming for some pitiful legacy. In the
bed opposite me in the farther row was an old bald-headed man with
drooping moustaches and greatly swollen face and body, who was suffering
from some disease that made him urinate almost incessantly. A huge glass
receptacle stood always beside his bed. One day his wife and daughter
came to visit him. At sight of them the old man's bloated face lit up
with a smile of surprising sweetness, and as his daughter, a pretty girl
of about twenty, approached the bed I saw that his hand was slowly
working its way from under the bedclothes. I seemed to see in advance the
gesture that was coming--the girl kneeling beside the bed, the old man's
hand laid on her head in his dying blessing. But no, he merely handed her
the bed bottle, which she promptly took from him and emptied into the
receptacle.
About a dozen beds away from me was Num?ro 57--I think that was his
number--a cirrhosis-of-the-liver case. Everyone in the ward knew him by
sight because he was sometimes the subject of a medical lecture. On two
afternoons a week the tall, grave doctor would lecture in the ward to a
party of students, and on more than one occasion old NUM?RO 57 was
wheeled in on a sort of trolley into the middle of the ward, where the
doctor would roll back his nightshirt, dilate with his fingers a huge
flabby protruberance on the man's belly--the diseased liver,
I
suppose--and explain solemnly that this was a disease attributable to
alcoholism, commoner in the wine-drinking countries. As usual he neither
spoke to his patient nor gave him a smile, a nod or any kind of
recognition. While he talked, very grave and upright, he would hold the
wasted body beneath his two hands, sometimes giving it a gentle roll to
and fro, in just the attitude of a woman handling a rolling-pin. Not
that NUM?RO 57 minded this kind of thing. Obviously he was an old
hospital inmate, a regular exhibit at lectures, his liver long since
marked down for a bottle in some pathological museum. Utterly
uninterested in what was said about him, he would lie with his
colourless eyes gazing at nothing, while the doctor showed him off like
a piece of antique china. He was a man of about sixty, astonishingly
shrunken. His face, pale as vellum, had shrunken away till it seemed no
bigger than a doll's.
One morning my cobbler neighbour woke me up plucking at my pillow before
the nurses arrived. "NUM?RO 57!"--he flung his arms above his head.
There was a light in the ward, enough to see by. I could see old NUM?RO
57 lying crumpled up on his side, his face sticking out over the side of
the bed, and towards me. He had died some rime during the night, nobody
knew when. When the nurses came they received the news of his death
indifferently and went about their work. After a long time, an hour or
more, two other nurses marched in abreast like soldiers, with a great
clumping of sabots, and knotted the corpse up in the sheets, but it was
not removed till some time later. Meanwhile, in the better light, I had
had time for a good look at NUM?RO 57. Indeed I lay on my side to look at
him. Curiously enough he was the first dead European I had seen. I had
seen dead men before, but always Asiatics and usually people who had died
violent deaths. NUM?RO 57's eyes were still open, his mouth also open,
his small face contorted into an expression of agony. What most impressed
me, however, was the whiteness of his face. It had been pale before, but
now it was little darker than die sheets. As I gazed at the tiny,
screwed-up face it struck me that this disgusting piece of refuse,
waiting to be carted away and dumped on a slab in the dissecting room,
was an example of "natural" death, one of the things you pray for in the
Litany. There you are, then, I thought, that's what is waiting for you,
twenty, thirty, forty years hence: that is how the lucky ones die, the
ones who live to be old. One wants to live, of course, indeed one only
stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought
then, that it's better to die violently and not too old. People talk
about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even
approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? "Natural" death,
almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful. Even at
that, it makes a difference if you can achieve it in your own home and
not in a public institution. This poor old wretch who had just flickered
out like a candle-end was not even important enough to have anyone
watching by his deathbed. He was merely a number, then a "subject" for
the students' scalpels. And the sordid publicity of dying in such a
place! In the H?pital X the beds were very close together and there were
no screens. Fancy, for instance, dying like the little man whose bed was
for a while foot to foot with mine, the one who cried out when the
bedclothes touched him! I dare say "JE PISSE!" were his last recorded
words. Perhaps the dying don't bother about such things--that at least
would be the standard answer: nevertheless dying people are often more or
less normal in their minds till within a day or so of the end.
In the public wards of a hospital you see horrors that you don't seem to
meet with among people who manage to die in their own homes, as though