Arthur & George (8 page)

Arthur

Arthur began to write more professionally. As he put on literary muscle, his stories grew into novels, the best of them naturally being set in the heroic fourteenth century. Each page of work would be read aloud to Touie after supper, and the completed text sent to the Mam for editorial comment. Arthur also took on a secretary and amanuensis: Alfred Wood, a master from Portsmouth School, a discreet efficient fellow with the honest look of a pharmacist; an all-round sportsman too, with a very decent cricket arm on him.

But medicine remained Arthur’s current livelihood. And if he was to advance in his profession, he knew it had become time to specialize. He had always prided himself, through every aspect of his life, in looking carefully; so it did not require a spirit voice, or a table leaping into the air, to spell out his chosen calling—ophthalmologist. He was not a man to prevaricate or palter, and knew at once where best it was to train.

“Vienna?” repeated Touie wonderingly, for she had never left England. It was now November; winter was coming on; little Mary was beginning to walk, as long as you held her sash. “When do we leave?”

“Immediately,” replied Arthur.

And Touie—bless her—merely rose from her needlework and murmured, “Then I must be quick.”

They sold up, left Mary with Mrs. Hawkins, and took off to Vienna for six months. Arthur signed up for a course of eye lectures at the Krankenhaus; but quickly discovered that the German learned while walking along flanked by two Austrian schoolboys whose phraseology was often less than choice did not fully prepare a fellow for rapid instruction littered with technical terms. Still, the Austrian winter provided fine skating, and the city excellent cakes; Arthur even knocked off a short novel,
The Doings of Raffles Haw,
which paid all their Viennese expenses. After a couple of months, however, he admitted that he would have been better off studying in London. Touie responded to the change of plan with her usual equanimity and despatch. They returned via Paris, where Arthur managed to put in a few days’ study with Landolt.

Thus able to claim he had been trained in two countries, he took rooms in Devonshire Place, was elected a member of the Ophthalmological Society, and waited for patients. He also hoped for work passed on by the big men in the profession, who were often too busy to calculate refractions for themselves. Some regarded it as mere donkey-labour; but Arthur considered himself competent in this field, and counted on overflow work drifting his way.

Devonshire Place consisted of a waiting room and a consulting room. Yet after a few weeks he began to joke that both were waiting rooms, and that he, Arthur, was the one doing the waiting. Idleness being repugnant, he sat at his desk and wrote. He was now well-apprenticed in the literary game, and turned his mind to one of its current bedevilments: magazine fiction. Arthur loved a problem, and the problem went like this. Magazines published two kinds of stories: either lengthy serializations which ensnared the reader week by week and month by month; or single, free-standing tales. The trouble with the tales was that they often didn’t give you enough to bite on. The trouble with the serializations was that if you happened to miss a single issue, you lost the plot. Applying his practical brain to the problem, Arthur envisaged combining the virtues of the two forms: a series of stories, each complete in itself, yet filled with running characters to reignite the reader’s sympathy or disapproval.

He needed therefore the kind of protagonist who could be relied upon to have regular and diverse adventures. Clearly, most professions need not apply. As he turned the matter over in Devonshire Place, he began to wonder if he hadn’t already invented the appropriate candidate. A couple of his less successful novels had featured a consulting detective closely modelled on Joseph Bell of the Edinburgh Infirmary: intense observation followed by rigorous deduction was the key to criminal as well as to medical diagnosis. Arthur had initially called his detective Sheridan Hope. But the name felt unsatisfactory, and in the writing Sheridan Hope had changed first into Sherringford Holmes and then—inevitably as it seemed thereafter—into Sherlock Holmes.

George

The letters and hoaxes continue; Shapurji’s plea to the malefactor to examine his conscience seems to have acted as further provocation. Newspapers announce that the Vicarage is now a boarding house offering rock-bottom terms; that it has become a slaughterhouse; that it will despatch free samples of ladies’ corsetry on request. George has apparently set up as an oculist; he also offers free legal advice and is qualified to arrange tickets and accommodation for travellers to India and the Far East. Enough coal is delivered to stoke a battleship; encyclopaedias arrive, along with live geese.

It is impossible to continue for ever in the same state of nerves; and after a while the household almost turns its persecution into a routine. The Vicarage grounds are patrolled at first light; goods are refused at the gate or returned; explanations are given to disappointed customers for esoteric services. Charlotte even becomes adept at appeasing clergymen summoned from distant counties by urgent pleas for assistance.

George has left Mason College and is now articled to a firm of Birmingham solicitors. Each morning, as he takes the train, he feels guilty for abandoning his family; yet the evenings bring no relief, merely another form of anxiety. His father has also chosen to respond to the crisis in what seems to George a peculiar fashion: by giving him short lectures on how the Parsees have always been much favoured by the British. George thus learns that the very first Indian traveller to Britain was a Parsee; that the first Indian to study Christian theology at a British university was a Parsee; so was the first Indian student at Oxford, and later the first woman student; so was the first Indian man presented at Court, and, later, the first Indian woman. The first Indian to enter the Indian Civil Service was a Parsee. Shapurji tells George about surgeons and lawyers trained in Britain; about Parsee charity during the Irish famine and later towards suffering millworkers in Lancashire. He even tells George about the first Indian cricket team to tour England—Parsees every one of them. But George is quite without interest in cricket, and finds his father’s stratagem more desperate than helpful. When the family is required to toast the election of a second Parsee Member of Parliament, Muncherji Bhownagree in the constituency of North-East Bethnal Green, George finds a shameful sarcasm rising within him. Why not write to the new MP and suggest he help prevent the arrival of coal, encyclopaedias and live geese?

Shapurji is more concerned about the letters than the deliveries. Increasingly, they seem to be the work of a religious maniac. They are signed by God, Beelzebub, the Devil; the writer claims to be eternally lost in Hell, or earnestly desiring that destination. When this mania begins to show violent intent, the Vicar fears for his family. “I swear by God that I will murder George Edalji soon.” “May the Lord strike me dead if mayhem and bloodshed do not ensue.” “I will descend into Hell showering curses upon you all and will meet you there in God’s time.” “You are nearing the end of your time on this Earth and I am God’s chosen instrument for the task.”

After more than two years of persecution, Shapurji decides to approach the Chief Constable again. He writes an account of events, encloses samples of the correspondence, points out respectfully that a clear intention to murder is now being expressed, and asks for the police to protect an innocent family thus threatened. Captain Anson’s reply ignores the request. Instead he writes:

I do not say that I know the name of the offender, though I have my particular suspicions. I prefer to keep these suspicions to myself until I am able to prove them, and I trust to be able to obtain a dose of penal servitude for the offender; as although great care has apparently been exercised to avoid, as far as possible, anything which would constitute any serious offence in law, the person who writes the letters has overreached himself in two or three instances, in such manner as to render him liable to the most serious punishment. I have no doubt that the offender will be detected.

Shapurji hands his son the letter and asks his opinion. “On the one hand,” says George, “the Chief Constable maintains that the hoaxer is skilfully using his knowledge of the law to avoid committing any actual offence. On the other hand, he seems to think that clear offences liable to result in penal servitude have already been committed. In which case the hoaxer is not such a clever fellow after all.” He pauses and looks at his father. “He means me, of course. He believes I took the key and he now believes that I wrote the letters. He knows I am studying law—the reference is clear. I think, to be honest, Father, the Chief Constable might be more of a threat to me than the hoaxer.”

Shapurji is not so sure. One threatens penal servitude and the other threatens death. He finds it hard to keep bitterness against the Chief Constable out of his thoughts. He still has not shown George the vilest of the letters. Could Anson really believe that George wrote them? If so, he would like to be told in what way it is an offence to write an anonymous letter to yourself threatening to murder yourself. He worries night and day about his first-born son. He sleeps badly, and often finds himself out of bed, urgently and unnecessarily checking that the door is locked.

In December of 1895 an advertisement appears in a Blackpool newspaper offering the entire contents of the Vicarage for sale by public auction. There will be no reserve price on any item as the Vicar and his wife are eager to dispose of everything prior to their imminent departure for Bombay.

Blackpool is at least a hundred miles as the crow flies. Shapurji has a vision of the persecution spreading throughout the whole country. Blackpool might be only the beginning: next it will be Edinburgh, Newcastle, London. Followed by Paris, Moscow, Timbuctoo—why not?

And then, as suddenly as it began, it stops. No more letters, no unwanted goods, no hoax advertisements, no intemperate brothers in Christ on the doorstep. For a day, then a week, then a month, then two months. It stops. It has stopped.

TWO

Beginning with
an Ending

George

The month the persecutions stop marks the twentieth anniversary of Shapurji Edalji’s appointment to Great Wyrley; it is followed by the twentieth—no, the twenty-first—Christmas celebrated at the Vicarage. Maud receives a tapestry bookmark, Horace his own copy of Father’s
Lectures on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians,
George a sepia print of Mr. Holman Hunt’s
The Light of the World
with the suggestion that he might hang it on the wall of his office. George thanks his parents, but can well imagine what the senior partners would think: that an articled clerk of only two years’ standing, who is trusted to do little more than write out documents in fair copy, is hardly entitled to make decisions about furnishing; further, that clients come to a solicitor for a specific kind of guidance, and might well find Mr. Hunt’s advertisement for a different kind distracting.

As the first months of the new year pass, the curtains are parted each morning with the increased certainty that there will be nothing but God’s shining dew upon the lawn; and the postman’s arrival no longer causes alarm. The Vicar begins to repeat that they have been tested with fire, and their faith in the Lord has helped them endure this trial. Maud, fragile and pious, has been kept in as much ignorance as possible; Horace, now a sturdy and straightforward sixteen-year-old, knows more, and will privately confess to George that in his view the old method of an eye for an eye is an unimprovable system of justice, and that if he ever catches anyone tossing dead blackbirds over the hedge, he will wring their necks in person.

George does not, as his parents believe, have his own office at Sangster, Vickery & Speight. He has a stool and a high-top desk in an uncarpeted corner where the access of the sun’s rays depends upon the goodwill of a distant skylight. He does not yet possess a fob watch, let alone his own set of law books. But he has a proper hat, a three-and-sixpenny bowler from Fenton’s in Grange Street. And though his bed remains a mere three yards from Father’s, he feels the beginnings of independent life stirring within him. He has even made the acquaintance of two articled clerks from neighbouring practices. Greenway and Stentson, who are slightly older, took him one lunchtime to a public house where he briefly pretended to enjoy the horrible sour beer he paid for.

During his year at Mason College, George paid little attention to the great city he found himself in. He felt it only as a barricade of noise and bustle lying between the station and his books; in truth, it frightened him. But now he begins to feel more at ease with the place, and more curious about it. If he is not crushed by its vigour and energy, perhaps he will one day become part of it himself.

He begins to read up on the city. At first he finds it rather stodgy stuff, about cutlers and smiths and metal manufacture; next come the Civil War and the Plague, the steam engine and the Lunar Society, the Church and King Riots, the Chartist upheavals. But then, little more than a decade ago, Birmingham begins to shake itself into modern municipal life, and suddenly George feels he is reading about real things, relevant things. He is tormented to realize that he could have been present at one of Birmingham’s greatest moments: the day in 1887 when Her Majesty laid the foundation stone of the Victoria Law Courts. And thereafter, the city has arrived in a great rush of new buildings and institutions: the General Hospital, the Chamber of Arbitration, the meat market. Money is currently being raised to establish a university; there is a plan to build a new Temperance Hall, and serious talk that Birmingham might soon become a bishopric, no longer under the see of Worcester.

On that day of Queen Victoria’s visit, 500,000 people came to greet her, and despite the vast crowd there were neither disturbances nor casualties. George is impressed, yet also not surprised. The general opinion is that cities are violent, overcrowded places, while the countryside is calm and peaceable. His own experience is to the contrary: the country is turbulent and primitive, while the city is where life becomes orderly and modern. Of course Birmingham is not without crime and vice and discord—else there would be less of a living for solicitors—but it seems to George that human conduct is more rational here, and more obedient to the law: more civil.

George finds something both serious and comforting in his daily transit into the city. There is a journey, there is a destination: this is how he has been taught to understand life. At home, the destination is the Kingdom of Heaven; at the office, the destination is justice, that is to say, a successful outcome for your client; but both journeys are full of forking paths and booby traps laid by the opponent. The railway suggests how it ought to be, how it could be: a smooth ride to a terminus on evenly spaced rails and according to an agreed timetable, with passengers divided among first-, second- and third-class carriages.

Perhaps this is why George feels quietly enraged when anyone seeks to harm the railway. There are youths—men, perhaps—who take knives and razors to the leather window straps; who senselessly attack the picture frames above the seats; who loiter on footbridges and try to drop bricks into the locomotive’s chimney. This is all incomprehensible to George. It may seem a harmless game to place a penny on the rail and see it flattened to twice its diameter by a passing express; but George regards it as a slippery slope which leads to train wrecking.

Such actions are naturally covered by the criminal law. George finds himself increasingly preoccupied by the civil connection between passengers and the railway company. A passenger buys a ticket, and at that moment, with consideration given and received, a contract springs into being. But ask that passenger what kind of contract he or she has entered into, what obligations are laid upon the parties, what claim for compensation might be pursued against the railway company in case of lateness, breakdown or accident, and answer would come there none. This may not be the passenger’s fault: the ticket alludes to a contract, but its detailed terms are only displayed at certain main-line stations and at the offices of the railway company—and what busy traveller has the time to make a diversion and examine them? Even so, George marvels at how the British, who gave railways to the world, treat them as a mere means of convenient transport, rather than as an intense nexus of multiple rights and responsibilities.

He decides to appoint Horace and Maud as the Man and Woman on the Clapham Omnibus—or, in the present instance, the Man and Woman on the Walsall, Cannock & Rugeley Train. He is allowed to use the schoolroom as his law court. He sits his brother and sister at desks and presents them with a case he has recently come across in the foreign law reports.

“Once upon a time,” he begins, walking up and down in a way that seems necessary to the story, “there was a very fat Frenchman called Payelle, who weighed twenty-five stones.”

Horace starts giggling. George frowns at his brother and grips his lapels like a barrister. “No laughter in court,” he insists. He proceeds. “Monsieur Payelle bought a third-class ticket on a French train.”

“Where was he going?” asks Maud.

“It doesn’t matter where he was going.”

“Why was he so fat?” demands Horace. This
ad hoc
jury seems to believe it may ask questions whenever it likes.

“I don’t know. He must have been even greedier than you. In fact, he was so greedy that when the train pulled in, he found he couldn’t get through the door of a third-class carriage.” Horace starts tittering at the idea. “So next he tried a second-class carriage, but he was too fat to get into that as well. So then he tried a first-class carriage—”

“And he was too fat to get into that too!” Horace shouts, as if it were the conclusion to a joke.

“No, members of the jury, he found that this door was indeed wide enough. So he took a seat, and the train set off for—for wherever it was going. After a while the ticket collector came along, examined his ticket, and asked for the difference between the third-class fare and the first-class fare. Monsieur Payelle refused to pay. The railway company sued Payelle. Now, do you see the problem?”

“The problem is he was too fat,” says Horace, and starts giggling again.

“He didn’t have enough money to pay,” says Maud. “Poor man.”

“No, neither of those is the problem. He had money enough to pay, but he refused to. Let me explain. Counsel for Payelle argued that he had fulfilled his legal requirements by buying a ticket, and it was the company’s fault if all the train doors were too narrow for him except the first-class ones. The company argued that if he was too fat to get into one kind of compartment, then he should take a ticket for the sort of compartment he could get into. What do you think?”

Horace is quite firm. “If he went into a first-class compartment, then he has to pay for going into it. It stands to reason. He shouldn’t have eaten so much cake. It’s not the railway’s fault if he’s too fat.”

Maud tends to side with the underdog, and decides that a fat Frenchman comes into this category. “It’s not his fault he’s fat,” she begins. “It might be a disease. Or he may have lost his mother and got so sad he ate too much. Or—any reason. It wasn’t as if he was making someone get out of their seat and go into a third-class compartment instead.”

“The court was not told the reasons for his size.”

“Then the law is an ass,” says Horace, who has recently learned the phrase.

“Had he ever done it before?” asks Maud.

“Now that’s an excellent point,” says George, nodding like a judge. “It goes to the question of intent. Either he knew from previous experience that he was too fat to enter a third-class compartment and bought a ticket despite this knowledge, or he bought a ticket in the honest belief that he could indeed fit through the door.”

“Well, which is it?” asks Horace, impatiently.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t say in the report.”

“So what’s the answer?”

“Well, the answer here is a divided jury—one for each party. You’ll have to argue it out between you.”

“I’m not going to argue with Maud,” says Horace. “She’s a girl. What’s the real answer?”

“Oh, the Correctional Court at Lille found for the railway company. Payelle had to reimburse them.”

“I won!” shouts Horace. “Maud got it wrong.”

“No one got it wrong,” George replies. “The case could have gone either way. That’s why things go to court in the first place.”

“I still won,” says Horace.

George is pleased. He has engaged the interest of his junior jury, and on succeeding Saturday afternoons he presents them with new cases and problems. Do passengers in a full compartment have the right to hold the door closed against those on the platform seeking to enter? Is there any legal difference between finding someone’s pocketbook on the seat, and finding a loose coin under the cushion? What should happen if you take the last train home and it fails to stop at your station, thereby obliging you to walk five miles back in the rain?

When he finds his jurors’ attention waning, George diverts them with interesting facts and odd cases. He tells them, for instance, about dogs in Belgium. In England the regulations state that dogs have to be muzzled and put in the van; whereas in Belgium a dog may have the status of a passenger so long as it has a ticket. He cites the case of a hunting man who took his retriever on a train and sued when it was ejected from the seat beside him in favour of a human being. The court—to Horace’s delight and to Maud’s dissatisfaction—found for the plaintiff, a ruling which meant that from now on if five men and their five dogs were to occupy a ten-seated compartment in Belgium, and all ten were the bearers of tickets, that compartment would legally be classified as full.

Horace and Maud are surprised by George. In the schoolroom there is a new authority about him; but also, a kind of lightness, as if he is on the verge of telling a joke, something he has never done to their knowledge. George, in return, finds his jury useful to him. Horace arrives quickly at blunt positions—usually in favour of the railway company—from which he will not be budged. Maud takes longer to make up her mind, asks the more pertinent questions, and sympathizes with every inconvenience that might befall a passenger. Though his siblings hardly amount to a cross section of the travelling public, they are typical, George thinks, in their almost complete ignorance of their rights.

Arthur

He had brought detectivism up to date. He had rid it of the slow-thinking representatives of the old school, those ordinary mortals who gained applause for deciphering palpable clues laid right across their path. In their place he had put a cool, calculating figure who could see the clue to a murder in a ball of worsted, and certain conviction in a saucer of milk.

Holmes provided Arthur with sudden fame and—something the England captaincy would never have done—money. He bought a decent-sized house in South Norwood, whose deep walled garden had room for a tennis ground. He put his grandfather’s bust in the entrance hall and lodged his Arctic trophies on top of a bookcase. He found an office for Wood, who seemed to have attached himself as permanent staff. Lottie had returned from working as a governess in Portugal and Connie, despite being the decorative one, was proving an invaluable hand at the typewriter. He had acquired a machine in Southsea but never managed to manipulate it with success himself. He was more dextrous with the tandem bicycle he pedalled with Touie. When she became pregnant again, he exchanged it for a tricycle, driven by masculine power alone. On fine afternoons he would project them on thirty-mile missions across the Surrey hills.