Gerald Kersh - The Best of Gerald Kersh

After that nothing of the trial stuck in his mind except Sumner Concord’s peroration, and Mr Justice Claverhouse’s verdict.

The peroration was something like:

‘Here was a beast. He tortured this woman. She trusted him and gave him her life. He accepted it brutally and threw it away. She had been beautiful. He had battered her with his great bony fists into the woman you see before you. That face was offered to Tooth in the first flush of its beauty. He beat it into the wreck and ruin of a woman’s face – the wreck, the ruin that you see before you now. She did not complain. He mocked and humiliated her. She was silent. She wept alone. He made her an object of pity, this mad and murderous bully, and she said nothing. He deserted her, leaving her with two young sons whom she loved very dearly: she was sick and weak, and still she never spoke! The prosecution has raised its voice: Martha Tooth suffered in silence. She worked for her children, happy to bring home a little bread in her poor cracked hands.

‘You have heard the evidence of those who have known her. She was a woman without stain, a woman undefiled. But when, at last, she went ill – dear God, what was she to do? She wanted nothing for herself. But there were her children. Her husband was prosperous. She asked him only for bread for his children – he laughed in her face. He struck her and ordered her to go. She pleaded – and he beat her. She cried for mercy and he abused her, reproaching her for the loss of her beauty, the beauty he himself had savagely beaten away.

‘At last, driven mad by despair, she picks up the first thing that comes to hand, a pair of scissors, and tries – poor desperate woman – to kill herself. Laughing, he takes her by the throat. These hands, strong enough to break a horseshoe, are locked about her frail throat. Imagine them upon your own, and think!

‘She struggles, she cannot speak, she can only struggle while he laughs in her face, because these murderous thumbs are buried in her windpipe. She strikes out blindly, and this great furious hulk of bestial manhood collapses before her. Sixteen stone of bone and muscle falls down, while seven stone of wretchedness and sickness stands aghast.

‘And looking down she sees the scissors embedded in that bull neck. By some freak of chance – by some act of God – she has struck the subclavian artery and the great beast has fallen. She runs blindly away, weeping bitterly, half demented with anguish, and when the police find her (which was easy, since she had not attempted to conceal herself) she is crying, and the blood in the basin is her own blood. The children lie asleep and she begs the police to take her away, to take her away anywhere out of this world. She asks for nothing but death, and there, there is the pity of it! …’

After an absence of twenty-five minutes the jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty.

Then, although everyone said he had known from the beginning that Martha Tooth would be acquitted, London went wild with delight. The Sunday Extra sent Munday Marsh to offer the bewildered woman five hundred pounds for her life-story. Pain of the Sunday Briton offered a thousand. She shook her head wearily and dispiritedly. ‘Twelve hundred and fifty,’ said the Sunday Briton. The Extra said: ‘Fifteen hundred.’

‘I can’t write stories,’ said Martha Tooth. ‘Anyway——’

‘I can,’ said Pain.

‘Calm, gentlemen, calm,’ said the sardonic voice of John Jacket. They turned, and saw him dangling an oblong of scribbled paper between a thumb and a forefinger. ‘I’ve got it.’

The Sunday Special had given Jacket authority to pay as much as two thousand pounds for Martha Tooth’s story. Ten minutes before Munday Marsh arrived, Jacket had bought the story for six hundred pounds.

‘Oh well,’ they said, without malice, and went away. Pain said: ‘To-day to thee, to-morrow to me, Jack,’ and they shook hands. Ainsworth of The People said nothing: he knew that in a year’s time the whole business would be forgotten, and then, if he happened to need a human-interest murder-feature, he could re-tell the story from the recorded facts.

So John Jacket wrote fifteen thousand words – four instalments, illustrated with photographs and snapshots – under the title of DIARY OF AN ILL-USED WOMAN. What Jacket did not know he invented: Martha Tooth signed every thing – she still could not understand what it was all about. Soon after the first instalment was published she began to receive fan-mail: half a dozen religious leaflets, letters urging her to repent, prophecies concerning the Second Coming, and proposals of marriage, together with frantically abusive notes signed Ill-used Man. She also received parcels of food and clothes, and anonymous letters enclosing postal orders. An old lady in the West Country, saying that she had wanted to kill her husband every day for forty years, enclosed sixty twopenny stamps.

Martha Tooth was taken in hand by a lady reporter, who carried her off to a beauty parlour, compelled her to have her hair waved, and showed her how to choose a hat. In three weeks she changed; paid attention to her finger-nails and expressed discontent with the Press. The press, she complained, wouldn’t leave her alone, and everyone wanted to marry her. Before the fourth instalment appeared she had received eleven offers of marriage. Martha Tooth had become whimsical, smiled one-sidedly, and took to lifting her shoulders in a sort of shrug. ‘Men,’ she said, ‘men! These men!’

After the fourth week, however, she got no more letters. She was out of sight and out of mind.

She went to the offices of the Sunday Special to see Jacket. Someone had told her that she ought to have got thousands of pounds for her story, and that there was a film in it. When she told Jacket this, he drew a deep breath and said:

‘Mrs Tooth. Your story is written, read, and wrapped around fried fish, and forgotten. You forget it too. Be sensible and forget it. You’ve lived your story and told your story. Go away and live another story.’ He added: ‘With a happy ending, eh?’

She went away. Soon, a paragraph on the gossip page of an evening newspaper announced that she had married a man called Booth. Her name had been Tooth – there was the story. Mrs Tooth married Mr Booth. He was a market-gardener, and, strangely enough, a widower. Mr Booth had proposed to her by letter.

John Jacket had forgotten the Tooth case when Mr Wainewright came to see him for the second time, twelve weeks later.

It struck Jacket as odd that Mr Wainewright was wearing a jaunty little green Tyrolean hat and a noticeable tweed suit.

‘Is it fair?’ asked Wainewright. ‘Where do I come in?’

‘Come in? How? How d’you mean, where do you come in?’

‘Well,’ said Mr Wainewright, shuffling his feet, ‘I mean to say … I hear that Tooth’s good lady got thousands and thousands of pounds.’

‘A few hundreds, George,’ said Jacket.

‘It isn’t that, Mr Jacket. It’s——’

‘The credit?’ asked Jacket, twitching an ironic lip.

‘Who is she to be made a heroine out of?’ asked Wainewright, looking at his finger-tips.

‘What exactly are you trying to get at, George?’ asked Jacket.

‘Get at? Who, me? Nothing, Mr Jacket.’

‘Then what do you want? What do you want me to do?’

Mr Wainewright looked at the ball of his right thumb and shook his head. ‘There was nothing about me at all in the papers,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a story, too.’

‘Be a pal,’ said Jacket, ‘and go away. I’ve got work to do, George, old man, work. So be a pal.’