Arthur and George (7 page)

A broken soup tureen containing a dead blackbird appears on the kitchen step two afternoons later. The following day a bailiff arrives to distrain goods in favour of an imaginary debt. Later, a dressmaker from Stafford comes to measure Maud for her wedding dress. When Maud is silently brought before him, he asks politely if she is to be the child-bride in some Hindoo ceremony. In the midst of this scene, five oilskin jackets arrive for George.

And then, a week later, three newspapers publish a response to the Vicar’s appeal. It is in a black box and headed
APOLOGY
. It reads:

We, the undersigned, both residing in the parish of Great Wyrley, do hereby declare that we are the sole authors and writers of certain offensive and anonymous letters received by various persons during the last twelve months. We regret these utterances, and also utterances against Mr. Upton the sergeant of police at Cannock, and against Elizabeth Foster. We have examined our consciences as requested and beg forgiveness of all those involved and also of the authorities, both spiritual and criminal.

signed,
G. E. T. Edalji and Fredk. Brookes.

Arthur

Arthur believed in looking—at the glaucous eye of a dying whale, at the contents of a shot bird’s gizzard, at the facial relaxation of a corpse who was never to become his brother-in-law. Such looking must be without prejudice: this was a practical necessity for a doctor, and a moral imperative for a human being.

He liked to tell how he had been taught the importance of careful looking at the Edinburgh Infirmary. A surgeon there, Joseph Bell, had taken a shine to this large, enthusiastic youth and made Arthur his out-patient clerk. His job was to muster the patients, take preliminary notes, and then lead them to Mr. Bell’s room, where the surgeon would be sitting among his dressers. Bell would greet each patient, and from a silent yet intense scrutiny try to deduce as much as possible about their lives and proclivities. He would declare that this man was by trade a French polisher, that one a left-handed cobbler, to the amazement of those present, not least of the patient himself. Arthur remembered the following exchange:

“Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Not long discharged?”

“No, sir.”

“A Highland regiment?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Stationed at Barbados?”

“Aye, sir.”

It was a trick, yet it was a true trick; mysterious at first, simple when explained.

“You see, gentlemen, the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.”

Arthur had been educated, during those most plastic years, in the school of medical materialism. Any residue of formal religion had been expunged; yet he remained metaphysically respectful. He admitted the possibility of a central intelligent cause, while being unable to identify that cause, or understand why its designs should be brought to fulfilment in such roundabout and often terrible ways. As far as the mind and the soul went, Arthur accepted the scientific explanation of the day. The mind was an emanation of the brain, just as bile was an excretion of the liver—something purely physical in character; while the soul, as far as such a term could be admitted, was the total effect of all the hereditary and personal functionings of the mind. But he also recognized that knowledge never stayed still, and that today’s certainties might become tomorrow’s superstitions. Therefore, the intellectual duty to continue looking never ceased.

At the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, which met every second Tuesday, Arthur encountered the city’s more speculative minds. Telepathy being much under discussion, Arthur found himself one afternoon sitting in a curtained and unmirrored room with a local architect, Stanley Ball. They placed themselves back to back and several yards apart; Arthur, with a drawing pad on his knee, sketched a shape and attempted by a powerful concentration of the mind to convey the image to Ball. The architect then drew whatever form his own mind seemed to propose. Then they reversed the procedure, with the architect as shape-despatcher and the doctor as recipient. The results, to their astonishment, showed a matching significantly above the random. They repeated the experiment enough times for a scientific conclusion to be reached: namely that, given a natural sympathy between conductor and receiver, thought-transference could indeed take place.

What might this mean? If thought could be transferred across distance without any evident means of conveyance, then the pure materialism of Arthur’s teachers was, at the very least, too rigid. The congruence of drawn shapes he had achieved with Stanley Ball did not allow the return of angels with shining swords. But it nevertheless raised a question, and a stubborn one at that.

Many others were simultaneously pushing at the ironclad walls of a materialist universe. The mesmerist Professor de Meyer, who was famous—according to the Portsmouth newspapers—across the continent of Europe, came to town and induced various healthy young men to do his bidding. Some stood with their mouths agape, incapable of closing them despite laughter from the auditorium; others fell to their knees and were unable to rise without the Professor’s permission. Arthur inserted himself into the line of candidates on stage, but Meyer’s technique left him unmesmerised and unimpressed. It smacked more of vaudeville than of scientific demonstration.

He and Touie began attending seances. Stanley Ball was often present; also General Drayson the Southsea astronomer. They found the instructions for conducting a circle in
Light,
the weekly psychical paper. Proceedings would begin with a reading of the first chapter of Ezekiel: “Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go.” The prophet’s vision—of the whirlwind and the great cloud and the brightness and the fire and the four cherubim each with four faces and each with four wings—prepared those present to be receptive. Then it was the flickering candle, the felty dimness, the concentration of mind, the emptying of self and the communal waiting. Once, a spirit answering to the name of Arthur’s great-uncle appeared behind him; on another occasion, a black man with a spear. After a few months, spirit lights became occasionally visible, even to him.

Arthur was uncertain how much evidential weight should be granted to these collaborative circles. He was more convinced by an elderly psychic he met at the house of General Drayson. After various preparations of a rather thespian nature, the old man went into a heavy-breathing trance and began dispensing both advice and spirit communications to his small, hushed audience. Arthur had come fully armed with scepticism—until the misted-over eyes were directed towards him, and a frail, distant voice pronounced the words,

“Do not read Leigh Hunt’s book.”

This was more than uncanny. For some days, Arthur had been privately wondering whether or not to read Hunt’s
Comic Dramatists of the Restoration.
He had not discussed the matter with anyone; and it was hardly a dilemma with which he would bother Touie. But then to be given such a precise answer to his unvoiced question . . . It could not be a magician’s trick; it could only have happened through the ability of one man’s mind to gain access in a so far inexplicable way to another man’s mind.

Arthur was so persuaded by the experience that he wrote it up for
Light.
Here was further proof that telepathy worked; for the moment, nothing more. This much so far he had seen: what was the minimum, not the maximum, that could be deduced? Though if reliable data continued to accrue, then more than the minimum might have to be considered. What if all his previous certainties became less certain? And what, for that matter, might the maximum turn out to be?

Touie regarded her husband’s involvement in telepathy and the spirit world with the same sympathetic and watchful interest that she brought to his enthusiasm for sport. The laws of psychical phenomena seemed to her as arcane as the laws of cricket; but she sensed that with each a certain result was desirable, and amiably presumed that Arthur would inform her when such a result had been obtained. Besides, she was now much absorbed in their daughter, Mary Louise, whose existence had come about through the application of the least arcane and least telepathic laws known to mankind.

George

George’s “apology” in the newspaper affords the Vicar a new line of inquiry. He calls on William Brookes, the village ironmonger, father of Frederick Brookes, George’s supposed co-signatory. The ironmonger, a small, rotund man in a green apron, takes Shapurji into a storeroom hung with mops and pails and zinc baths. He removes his apron, pulls out a drawer and hands over the half dozen letters of denunciation his family has received. They are written on the familiar lined paper torn from a notebook; although the penmanship varies more.

The top letter is in a childish, unconfident scrawl. “Unless you run away from the black I’ll murder you and mrs brookes I know your names and I’ll tell you wrote.” Others are in a hand which, even if disguised, seems more forceful. “Your kid and Wynn’s kid have been spitting in an old woman’s face at Walsall station.” The writer demands that money be sent to Walsall Post Office in recompense. A subsequent letter, pinned to this one, threatens prosecution if the demand is not met.

“I assume you sent no money.”

“Course not.”

“But you showed the letters to the police?”

“Police? Not worth their time or mine. It’s just kids, isn’t it? And as it says in the Bible, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will ne’er harm me.”

The Vicar does not correct Mr. Brookes’s source. He also senses something idle about the man’s attitude. “But you didn’t merely put the letters in a drawer?”

“I asked around a bit. I asked Fred what he knew.”

“Who is this Mr. Wynn?”

Wynn is apparently a draper who lives up the line at Bloxwich. He has a son who goes to school at Walsall with Brookes’s boy. They meet on the train each morning and usually return together. A while ago—the ironmonger does not specify how long—Wynn’s son and young Fred were accused of breaking a carriage window. Both swore it was the work of a boy called Speck, and eventually the railway officials decided not to press charges. This happened a few weeks before the first letter arrived. Perhaps there was some connection. Perhaps not.

The Vicar now understands Brookes’s lack of zeal in the matter. No, the ironmonger does not know who Speck is. No, Mr. Wynn hasn’t received any letters himself. No, Wynn’s boy and Brookes’s boy are not friends with George. This last is hardly a surprise.

Shapurji describes the exchange to George before supper, and pronounces himself encouraged.

“Why are you encouraged, Father?”

“The more people involved, the more likely the scoundrel is to be discovered. The more people he persecutes, the more probable it is he will make a mistake. Do you know of this boy called Speck?”

“Speck? No.” George shakes his head.

“And I am also encouraged in one respect by the persecution of the Brookes family. This proves it is not merely race prejudice.”

“Is that a good thing, Father? To be hated for more than one reason?”

Shapurji smiles to himself. These flashes of intelligence, coming from a docile boy who is often too much turned in on himself, always delight him.

“I will say it again, you will make a fine solicitor, George.” But even as he pronounces the words, he is reminded of a line from one of the letters he has not shown his son. “Before the end of the year your kid will be either in the graveyard or disgraced for life.”

“George,” he says. “There is a date I wish you to remember. The 6th of July 1892. Just two years ago. On that day Mr. Dadabhoy Naoroji was elected to Parliament for the Finsbury Central district of London.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Mr. Naoroji was for many years Professor of Gujerati at University College London. I was briefly in correspondence with him, and am proud to say that he had words of praise for my
Grammar of the Gujerati Language.
”

“Yes, Father.” George has seen the Professor’s letter brought out on more than one occasion.

“His election was an honourable conclusion to a most dishonourable time. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, said that black men should not and would not be elected to Parliament. He was rebuked for it by the Queen herself. And then the voters of Finsbury Central, only four years later, decided that they agreed with Queen Victoria and not with Lord Salisbury.”

“But I am not a Parsee, Father.” In George’s head the words come back: the centre of England, the beating heart of the British Empire, the flowing bloodline that is the Church of England. He is English, he is a student of the laws of England, and one day, God willing, he will marry according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England. This is what his parents have taught him from the beginning.

“George, this is true enough. You are an Englishman. But others may not always entirely agree. And where we are living—”

“The centre of England,” George responds, as if in bedroom catechism.

“The centre of England, yes, where we find ourselves, and where I have ministered for nearly twenty years, the centre of England—despite all God’s creatures being equally blessed—is still a little primitive, George. And you will furthermore find primitive people where you least expect them. They exist in ranks of society where better might be anticipated. But if Mr. Naoroji can become a university professor and a Member of Parliament, then you, George, can and will become a solicitor and a respected member of society. And if unfair things happen, if even wicked things happen, then you should remember the date of the 6th of July 1892.”

George thinks about this for a while, and then repeats, quietly yet firmly, “But I am not a Parsee, Father. That is what you and Mother have taught me.”

“Remember the date, George, remember the date.”