Part 1

REBECCA JARRETT.

BY JOSEPHINE E. BUTLER.

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.”—MATTHEW xxiii. 23.

“And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This Man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.”—LUKE xv. 2.

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[Illustration: [Fleuron]]

REBECCA JARRETT.

The trial is over. Our tongues are now loosed; and we can speak. And we _will_ speak. The whole nation will speak, I doubt not, for William Stead, about whose noble sacrifice of himself there is only one opinion. It is not needful for me to add my mite of testimony to the character of that man, whom I am proud to have called my friend for many years.

What I have to do is to speak of REBECCA JARRETT. I am prompted to do so by my love and pity for her; and also in response to multitudes of letters pouring in upon me, from men and women alike, expressing an opinion of her differing very much from that given in all the “leaders” of the London Press on the morning after the verdict.

And now I am about to speak the exact truth. I shall not attempt to clear her from the blame which attaches to her on account of her wavering in regard to truth under the cross-examination, nor for the distinct falsehood which she uttered when pressed about her past life. All I wish to do is to present the exact truth about her, in justice to herself, and to Mr. Stead, for whom she acted; and also to give some incidents of personal history, which may tend not only to palliate these departures from truth of which she was guilty, but to show that the situation in which she was placed was pathetic—even tragic—and one from which there was, humanly speaking, no escape.

I accept gladly such an amount of contempt, or half-scornful pity, as has been publicly expressed for myself on account of my having been duped, as is supposed, by this poor woman. While sitting in the Court during the Judge’s summing up, and observing how for the moment all alike—the good, bad, and indifferent—who were present, as well as the outside world, had for the time rounded upon this poor woman; and how she was made, so to speak, the residuary legatee of all the errors and mistakes committed by the other prisoners in the dock; and observing that this poor creature—the “fallen woman”—was made the scapegoat, the convenient burden-bearer, upon whose shoulders execration, and blame, and contempt might be heaped _ad libitum_ without protest from any—I thought, What a picture this is of the condition of the world at large!

Down all the ages, since that hour when Christ and the outcast woman were face to face in the Temple, and every man in the surrounding crowd was pointing the finger of scorn at her, the world has continually been pointing the finger at this typical figure of woe, as the scapegoat upon whom, justly or unjustly, the sins and miseries of society must be heaped. The question has always been, “What shall we do with her?” Never till this last “new era” has dawned upon us, has it been asked, “What shall we do with _him_?”—him, her companion in sin. And now at last this woeful figure stands forth, perhaps for the first time in the world’s history, as a fellow-worker in a great and noble cause for the emancipation of women from galling slavery to vice and to the hard judgment of men.

My thoughts were many and deep: but a great calm pervaded my soul; for above all the scorn and contempt expressed for that woman, in which I was glad to be to some extent included—above all the wrangling and injustice of that Court—I saw, as on a throne of light, the figure of _her_ Saviour and _mine_; and I recalled that scene when He, sitting at the dinner-table of Simon the Pharisee, was judged with the same worldly-wise pity and scorn which was now falling upon Rebecca and me. Simon, the gentleman, the man of the world, the righteous man, said, “This man (Christ), if he were a prophet (or even if he were a man of any common sense or knowledge of the world), would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth Him; for she is a sinner.” I heard the whispers near me, “If Mrs. Butler had not been such a fool, she would have known what kind of woman this is, and would never have trusted her.” And I was _well content_.

It is very probable that if that poor woman of the city, who was a sinner, who washed the feet of Jesus with her tears, had been called a few weeks later into a Court of Law in Jerusalem, and been placed for one long day and-a-half face to face with a sharp and clever Attorney-General, to answer concerning her past life, she also might have stumbled and wavered, in order to save other poor sinners like herself, whom she would have necessarily involved in any full revelation of her past. And yet all the time she loved God; and her sins, which were many, were forgiven her.

I shall give a brief sketch of the life of REBECCA JARRETT, without entering into the details of its darkest incidents, which have been already sufficiently dragged to light at the Old Bailey. I think that, after reading it, any impartial person, knowing anything of our poor human nature, will say that, if she misled Mr. Stead, as the verdict of the Jury declares, she did not mislead him intentionally. She was put in an exceptionally difficult position for a person of her poor education and miserable antecedents. Her head ached and her brain reeled under those long hours of cross-examination, and her memory (never a good one) often failed her; but I, who knew her most intimately, here record my profound and unshaken conviction that throughout her heart was true—true to the cause which she had learned to love as we do—true to me, and true to Mr. Stead, whom she had heartily desired to help in the work which she had learned to see to be necessary.

The public has not had a fair chance of judging of the whole case, the newspaper reports having been imperfect, and in many cases one-sided. It is no pleasure to me or to my fellow-workers to speak ill of Mrs. Armstrong and Mrs. Broughton; but in justice to Rebecca, the extraordinary nature of their evidence ought to be recalled. Mrs. Armstrong stated, under cross-examination, “If I said that, then, at Bow Street, I told a lie.”[1] She accused her little daughter of having told a lie; she accused Mrs. Broughton of having told a lie.

Footnote 1:

With regard to failure of memory, it will be remembered that the newspaper reports stated that Mrs. Armstrong, when under cross-examination, contradicted her own previous evidence six times, besides contradicting her husband, her daughter, and Jane Farrer.

Mr. Stead cross-examined Mrs. Armstrong somewhat closely as to what specific statements, or allusions, or clue of any kind, there were in the “Lily” paragraph of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ article, which first kindled her suspicions, and led her to conclude that her child was the victim referred to. Stead’s avowed object in this was to show the Jury that unless Armstrong had really sold her child, and had therefore _a guilty conscience_, it was strange for her to alight on the “Lily” paragraph as referring to herself and her daughter.

Thereupon the Judge stopped Stead with this remark:—“I suppose you will contend by and by that this child was sold, and that, knowing that, you took it to rescue it from evil. I suppose that is the story that will be told; but _it does not appear to me that the question of what passages caused her to identify ‘Lily’ as her daughter will help the defence you must by and by set up_.”

Now, it must be obvious to every impartial person that if Stead could have shown by the witnesses’ evidence that there was not sufficient in the article to justify her in assuming “Lily” was her daughter _unless she had a guilty knowledge of the transaction described_, he would have rebutted one of the charges brought against him. And yet the Judge checked the examination!

The Judge waited until this point had been further pressed upon Armstrong by Stead, and then remarked to Stead:—“I think you have got _enough_ now to enable you to urge upon the Jury that the conduct of Mrs. Armstrong was not consistent with that of an honest and affectionate mother.”

All this seemed to have slipped out of the memory of the Judge when he pleaded so tenderly for these witnesses, saying that there were certainly some discrepancies in their evidence; but what could they expect from poor ignorant women under severe cross-examination? The same leniency was not asked for by the Judge in the case of Rebecca, whose “discrepancies” were of a somewhat different nature from those of the witnesses above named.

Now, regarding that terrible falsehood of which so much has been said—and which, as Rebecca said, was forced out of her by the Prosecution, in order to discredit the whole of her evidence—I must give a few words of explanation, such as they are. The motive for that lie was one which I have heard several good men say almost forces one to respect the poor woman. It will be recollected that certain companions of her former life—men—had come down to Winchester, and during a period, from a fortnight to three weeks, had haunted our neighbourhood and shaken Rebecca’s nerves and feelings exceedingly by their threats. These were her former friends and companions of many years past, bound to her, as she was to them, by ties of natural affection, which are often exceedingly strong among the most criminal classes. The very fact that they are themselves the pariahs of society sometimes increases that strong affection. In Rebecca that affection resembles almost the fierce love of the tigress for those whom her natural instinct leads her to defend.

The following are the facts, which contrast curiously with the hypothesis of the Attorney-General, distinctly stated in Court, that “the man Sullivan was a myth.” The man Sullivan, with others, believing Rebecca to be in a good position, probably making money—and fearful that her breach with them, which she had declared to them must be final, would lead to inconvenient consequences to themselves—used threats which, doubtless, they might have carried out had they had the opportunity. After a time I reluctantly appealed for protection to the Winchester police, who acted most kindly towards us, watching these men, and keeping a kind of guard over Rebecca.

The annoyance continued, however, for some time; and she became sad and troubled in appearance. She came to us one day and said, “I have made up my mind; I can bear it no longer. They are my old friends, and I am grieved for them; I want them to turn over a new leaf and be good men. Will you let me send all my girls from the cottage for the forenoon to the House of Rest, so as to leave me quietly alone in the cottage? I will then ask my old friends in, and have it out with them.”

I agreed, though not without some fear, for I had learned to understand the conflicting motives which worked in poor Rebecca’s mind—the intense love for her old friends and relatives, opposed by the inward vow never to return to them, and to break with all her past sinful life and companionships.

She carried out her plan, however. The men came in, and sat on chairs placed for them opposite to her. She spoke to them long and earnestly. She pleaded with them for their own souls’ sake; she told them of what God had done for her; she showed them in the cottage the proofs of the kind of life she was now living, and of the mission she was carrying out, under our auspices. They could not mistake the character of that little home of peace and love—the Bibles and hymn-books lying about, the texts on the walls, the neatness, the evidences of industry, the cheap contrivances to make the poverty of the place even tasteful and attractive. The men were touched for the moment. They saw the reality of what she had stated to them concerning her change of life. They left her quietly, but not before she had renewed to them her solemn promise never to bring them into trouble; and this time the promise was made, not as formerly, but in the name of the God whom she had learned to love, and as a Christian and a changed woman. The men were understood to receive her assurance as a proof of the sincerity of her change of heart, their natural feelings being, “Oh, now that you have turned a good woman, of course you will show us up.” It must be apparent how solemn were the feelings in Rebecca’s heart of the obligation never to harm them by any revelation made by her or step taken by her.

They afterwards went back from their better state of mind, and renewed their persecution: and this it was that decided us to send Rebecca away for a time from Winchester. A proof of my confidence in her may be seen in this—that I refused to give up the mission work and the cottage so long as there was a hope of her returning to it. I kept a place open for her; and it was not true, as Inspector Borner endeavoured to represent it in Court, that she had fled from fear of discovery, and that the cottage had been hastily closed. It was not given up for some three or four weeks later; and Rebecca herself wrote a letter from Jersey giving detailed advice as to what she thought we had better do, namely, to send “Katie” to one situation, “Emily” to another, and so on: and then, as she said, “Shut up the cottage until better times.”

Bearing in mind Rebecca’s solemn promise, made as a reformed woman and a Christian, and then following her to the witness-box on the first day of cross-examination, we can see how terrible was the position in which she was placed. She was ignorant of the old and well-known method of prosecuting Counsel, to take a poor man or woman whose life has been a bad one, all through the past years, and drag out of him or her confessions which the questioner knows well how to use.

The questioner knows perfectly well that there are points at which the wretched witness will hesitate, and that he has probably grave reasons for concealing certain facts about which he is asked; and so possibly a falsehood is forced out, and then the prosecutor, in a tone of high and outraged virtue, points out that not one single word of all that that perjured witness says can now be believed.

We, Rebecca’s friends, saw the device in advance; we saw the fatal snare laid for her: but she, poor soul! did not. She answered truly as far as she could, until it came to the giving of an address which would have involved _others_ in trouble. Then there flashed across her the promise made in her evil days, and the promise made later from better motives, under her new character. There rose afresh in her mind the desire that those to whom she had given her promise should see that a reclaimed woman would not break her word. She was standing between two oaths—the first, made to her old friends; the second, made in the witness-box, to speak “nothing but the truth.”

Reader, were you ever in such a position?—between two solemn promises, both of which you desired to keep, but which were opposed the one to the other? If you ever were, you can feel for this weak young convert to truth, and you can pity her weakness. Yes, she told a lie. She looked across the Court at me with an expression on her pale face which I shall never forget.

That night, on returning to her lodgings, she spent several hours on her knees, weeping as if her heart would break; no word of consolation availed for her. It was in vain to try to comfort her. She cried, and screamed to God, “O God, I have told a lie; I have perjured myself in the witness-box; I have lied before the world; I have ruined this cause, and I have got all my kind friends into trouble! And yet, O God, Thou knowest _why_ I did it—oh, Thou knowest _why_ I did it. Look into my heart; Thou knowest why I did it!”

She was very stupid—very blundering. What she ought to have done was, on the first day of cross-examination to refuse, as she did on the second day, to give any evidence at all concerning years long passed, which had nothing whatever to do with the case of Eliza Armstrong. She was not sharp enough to see that. Meanwhile, Inspector Borner had been sent down by the Government to the places mentioned, and came back with the triumphant news that she had given a false address.

In the witness-box, on the second day, poor Rebecca, seeing the snare into which she had fallen, in a voice full of pain, said to the Attorney-General:

“You forced that lie out of me; you make people tell lies.”

Then she took up the attitude which she ought to have assumed at first, of a distinct refusal to say one other word concerning her past life.

“If you want to know about that,” she said, “you have got to find it out for yourself.”

During the whole of that day she was cross-examined; she suffering in health, her head aching, and her brain reeling. Any one who has ever been, for only a quarter of an hour, under the ruthless cross-examination of a Government Prosecutor, knows something of what it is. With all the desire in the world to speak the exact truth, one feels one may be any moment tripped up, especially by the repeated demand to answer, “Yes or No;” a demand which sometimes cannot possibly be obeyed consistently with truth.

I do not attempt to deal in detail with the discrepancies between the evidence given by Rebecca, concerning her account given to Mr. Stead of her transaction in Charles Street, and Mr. Stead’s own account of that given in the _Pall Mall Gazette_. I must say that those discrepancies do not seem to me so very extraordinary as the Judge or the Attorney-General appeared to believe them to be. Let us recall the circumstances.

I saw Mr. Stead frequently during the time of his “descent into hell.” I say now, as I have said before, that that man combines the deepest tenderness of a compassionate woman with the manly indignation and wrath of a man—a father, whose feelings are outraged by crimes committed against innocent maidens, the helpless, and the young. At the time that he was making his investigations, those who saw him were sometimes almost afraid for his reason. He scarcely slept. We know what his nights were, when he, a pure-minded man, nurtured in the most refined and sternly Christian home, was going through the agony of visiting the infamous houses of the West End, where the leaders of the conspiracy of gold and lust reign triumphant. He was night after night seeing sights which made his brain reel and his heart bleed. At times he was tempted to give up all faith in God, in justice, in the atoning sacrifice, and the love of Christ.

“It is a sham,” he would cry, “a horrible sham, the whole of our professed Christianity and civilization.”

He felt as a man walking on the thin crust of a burning volcano, which might at any moment break under the feet of our people and let them down into the gulf beneath. His eyes were like burning coals within his brain. He had to pass rapidly from one part of his work to another with scarcely any interval of rest. He himself has confessed he did not take notes at the time of his conversation with Rebecca. An interval of some weeks passed before he wrote the story, which he, however, confidently believed he was writing truly as from Rebecca’s lips.

Rebecca herself, true as steel at her heart, was, as Mr. Stead has said, “muddled and confused in brain.” The troubles and long illnesses of her past life have not left her with the best of memories or the clearest power of expression. Between those two there arose some confusion in the recital of certain facts; but to me it appears that these facts were not vital to the case. She distinguished between the terms “brothel” and “bad house,” and Mr. Stead did not. Mr. Stead stated that she told him a certain house was a brothel. In the witness-box she said, “No, it was not; but it was a ‘bad house.’” The one term in her mind represented a house where immoral persons reside for immoral purposes; the other more of the character known in France as a house of assignation.

But the lines between the two expressions were not to her so distinct as they might seem to the learned Judge; nor, indeed, are they at all clearly defined by the police in their occasional raids upon the vices of the poor, and their more than occasional overlooking of the houses of ill-fame to which rich and high-placed profligates resort. The police apply these terms with remarkable freedom, in accordance with certain principles which guide them in their official action.

While Rebecca was speaking, in answer to the Judge, of her old friend Broughton, she had, I believe, before her mind the promise she told us had been made to “Nancy,” that she would not get her into trouble. This accounts for her evidence against Nancy having been softened down in the Court, and thus not wholly agreeing with the description of her former friend which she had given to Mr. Stead. Here, again, the motive of regard enters for her former friends and companions whom she desired to spare. No one can say, who saw her under that fearful day of cross-examination, that Rebecca tried to shelter _herself_. She was forced in the most cruel manner to speak of her past life, and of incidents and shameful things in it which had no bearing whatever on the present case. But she did not shrink from what affected herself. Her wavering began and ended where loyalty to her old friends came in.

In the month of May, while talking to Rebecca of the way in which God had drawn her out of her wretched life, I asked her several questions, and she replied, “I will write some day for you a little history of my life in my poor way.” “This is just for yourself,” she said. She did so; and turning over my papers to-day I find an old copy-book in which there is the following record in her own handwriting, and with her own poor defective spelling and grammar. I give it as it is:—

“THE HISTORY OF A RESCUED WOMAN.