Arthur & George (54 page)

Maud sensed this. And if, back then, he had kept things from her, she had also kept things from him. She would never tell him of the morning Father had called her into his study and announced that he feared greatly for the mental stability of her brother. He said George had been under much strain and was refusing to take the slightest holiday; so he would propose over dinner that brother and sister take a day trip to Aberystwyth, and whether she wanted to or not she was to concur and insist that they must, absolutely must go. And this was what had happened. George had politely yet stubbornly refused his father, then yielded to the pleas of his sister.

It had been a piece of scheming quite untypical of the Vicarage. But more shocking to Maud had been Father’s assessment of George’s condition. To her he had always been the reliable, conscientious brother; while Horace was the frivolous one, who lived life on a whim, who lacked stolidity. And as it turned out, she had been right and Father wrong. For how could George have survived his ordeal if he had not possessed much greater mental fortitude than Father ever attributed to him? But these were thoughts Maud would always keep to herself.

“There was one matter on which Sir Arthur was profoundly wrong,” George declared suddenly. “He opposed votes for women.” Since her brother had always supported female suffrage during the time it had been an issue, this opinion came as no surprise to Maud. Rather, it was the fierceness in his voice that was unaccountable. George was now looking away from his sister in embarrassment. The trail of memory, and all that came with it, had set off in him the tenderest of emotions towards Maud, and a realization that these had been, and would continue to be, the strongest feelings of his life. But George was neither skilled nor easy at conveying such thoughts, and even this most indirect of confessions disturbed him. So he rose, folded the
Herald
unnecessarily, handed it back, and went downstairs to his office.

There was work to be done, but instead he sat at his desk thinking about Sir Arthur. They had last met twenty-three years ago; still, the link between them had somehow never been broken. He had followed Sir Arthur’s writings and doings, his travels and campaigns, his interventions in the public life of the nation. George often agreed with his pronouncements—on divorce reform, the threat from Germany, the need for a Channel Tunnel, the moral necessity of returning Gibraltar to Spain. He permitted himself, however, to be frankly dubious about one of Sir Arthur’s lesser-known contributions to penal reform: the proposal that hardened recidivists in His Majesty’s gaols should all be transported to the Scottish island of Tiree. George had cut articles from the newspapers, followed Sherlock Holmes’s continuing exploits in
The Strand Magazine,
and borrowed Sir Arthur’s latest books from the library. Twice he had taken Maud to the cinema to watch Mr. Eille Norwood’s remarkable impersonation of the consulting detective.

He remembered, the year they first came to Borough High Street, buying the
Daily Mail
solely to read Sir Arthur’s special despatch on the marathon race at the London Olympics. George could not have been less interested in athletic endeavour, but he was rewarded by a further insight—if any more were needed—into the nature of his benefactor. Sir Arthur’s description had been so vivid that George read it again and again until he could picture it in his head like a newsreel. The vast stadium—the expectant crowd—a small figure enters ahead of all the others—an Italian in a state of near collapse—he falls, he rises, he falls again, he rises again, he staggers—then an American enters the stadium and begins to catch him up—the plucky Italian is twenty yards from the tape—the crowd is hypnotized—he falls again—he is helped up—willing arms propel him through the tape before the American can catch him. But the Italian has, of course, broken the rules by accepting assistance and the American is declared the winner.

Any other writer would have left it at that, pleased with his success at evoking the drama of the moment. But Sir Arthur was not any other writer, and had been so touched by the Italian’s bravery that he started a subscription for the man. Three hundred pounds had been contributed, which enabled the runner to open a baker’s shop in his native village—something a gold medal would never have been able to effect. This was typical of Sir Arthur: generous and practical in equal parts.

After his success with the Edalji Case, Sir Arthur had involved himself in other judicial protests. George was rather ashamed to admit that his feelings towards subsequent victims consisted of envy verging occasionally on disapproval. There was Oscar Slater, for instance, whose case took up years and years of Sir Arthur’s life. The man had, it was true, been wrongly accused of murder, and nearly executed, and Sir Arthur’s intervention had spared him the gallows and eventually gained his release; but Slater was a very low sort of fellow, a professional criminal who had shown not an ounce of gratitude towards those who had helped him.

Sir Arthur had also continued to play the detective. Only three or four years ago there had been the curious case of the woman writer who disappeared. Christie, that was her name. Apparently a rising star of detective fiction, though George had not the slightest interest in rising stars, as long as Holmes was still compiling his casebook. Mrs. Christie had vanished from her home in Berkshire, and her car was found abandoned some five miles from Guildford. When three police forces could find no trace of her, the Chief Constable of Surrey had called in Sir Arthur—who had, in his time, been Deputy Lieutenant of the county. What happened next surprised many people. Did Sir Arthur interview witnesses, scour the trampled ground for footprints, or cross-examine the police, as he had done in the famous Edalji Case? Not a bit of it. He had contacted Christie’s husband, borrowed one of the missing woman’s gloves, and taken it off to a psychic who had laid it against his forehead in an attempt to locate the woman. Well, it was one thing—as George had proposed to the Staffordshire Constabulary—to use real bloodhounds to sniff out a trail, quite another to employ psychic ones who merely stayed at home and sniffed gloves. George, on reading of Sir Arthur’s novel investigative techniques, had felt quite relieved that more orthodox ones had been applied in his own case.

However, it would take a great deal more than a few such eccentricities to dent George’s utter respect for Sir Arthur. He had it as a young man of thirty, newly released from prison; and he had it still as a fifty-four-year old solicitor, his moustache and hair now quite grey. The only reason he was able to sit here at his desk on a Friday morning was because of Sir Arthur’s high principles, and his willingness to convert them into action. George’s life had been returned to him. He had a full set of law books, a satisfactory practice, a choice of hats, and a splendid—some might even say gaudy—fob chain strung across a waistcoat that each year felt a little tighter. He was a householder, and a man who had his opinions about matters of the day. He did not have a wife, it was true; nor did he have long lunches with colleagues who cried “Good old George!” as he reached for the bill. Instead, he had a curious kind of fame, or half-fame, or, as the years had passed, quarter-fame. He had wanted to be known as a lawyer, and he had ended up being known as a miscarriage of justice. His case had led to the setting-up of the Court of Criminal Appeal, whose decisions over the last two decades had elaborated the common law of crime to an extent widely recognized as revolutionary. George was proud of his association—however unintentional it had been—with this event. But who was aware of it? A few people would respond to his name by shaking his hand warmly, treating him as a man who once, long ago, had been famously wronged; others looked at him with the eyes of farm boys or special constables in country lanes; but most nowadays had never heard of him.

At times he resented this, and felt ashamed of his resentment. He knew that in all his years of suffering, there had been nothing he longed for more than anonymity. The Chaplain at Lewes had asked him what he missed, and he had replied that he missed his life. Now he had it back; he had work, enough money, people to nod to in the street. But he was occasionally nudged by the thought that he deserved more; that his ordeal should have led to more reward. From villain to martyr to nobody very much—was this not unfair? His supporters had assured him that his case was as significant as that of Dreyfus, that it revealed as much about England as the Frenchman’s did about France, and just as there had been Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards so there were those for and against Edalji. They further insisted that in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle he had as great a defender, and a better writer, than the Frenchman Émile Zola, whose books were reportedly vulgar and who had run away to England when threatened in his turn with gaol. Imagine Sir Arthur scuttling off to Paris to evade the whim of some politician or prosecutor. He would have stayed and fought and made a great noise and shaken the bars of his cell until the prison collapsed.

And yet, for all this, the name of Dreyfus had constantly increased in fame, and was known around the globe, while that of Edalji was scarcely recognized in Wolverhampton. This was partly his own doing—or lack of doing. After his release he was frequently asked to address meetings, to write newspaper articles, and give interviews. He invariably declined. He did not wish to be a spokesman, or the representative of a cause; he did not have the temperament for the public platform; and having once recounted his sufferings for
The Umpire,
he felt it immodest to do so again whenever invited. He had considered preparing a revised edition of his book on railway law, yet felt that this too might be exploiting his notoriety.

But more than this, he suspected that his obscurity was something to do with England itself. France, as he understood it, was a country of extremes, of violent opinion, violent principles and long memories. England was a quieter place, just as principled, but less keen on making a fuss about its principles; a place where the common law was trusted more than government statute; where people got on with their own business and did not seek to interfere with that of others; where great public eruptions took place from time to time, eruptions of feeling which might even tip over into violence and injustice, but which soon faded in the memory, and were rarely built into the history of the country. This has happened, now let us forget about it and carry on as before: such was the English way. Something was wrong, something was broken, but now it has been repaired, so let us pretend that nothing much was wrong in the first place. The Edalji Case would not have arisen if there had been a Court of Appeal? Very well, then: pardon Edalji, establish a Court of Appeal before the year is out—and what more remains to be said about the matter? This was England, and George could understand England’s point of view, because George was English himself.

He had written twice to Sir Arthur since the wedding. In the last year of the war his father had died; on a chilly May morning he was buried close to Uncle Compson, a dozen yards from the church where he had officiated for more than forty years. George felt that Sir Arthur—having met his father—would wish to know; in reply he had received a brief note of condolence. But then, a few months later, he read in the newspaper that Sir Arthur’s son Kingsley, having been wounded on the Somme and left in a weakened state, had like so many others been carried off by influenza. A mere fortnight before the Armistice was signed. He wrote again, a son who had lost a father to a father who had lost a son. This time he received a longer letter. Kingsley had been the last name of a bitter roll-call. Sir Arthur’s wife had lost her brother Malcolm in the first week of the war. His nephew Oscar Hornung had been killed at Ypres, along with another of his nephews. His sister Lottie’s husband had died on his first day in the trenches. And so on, and so on. Sir Arthur listed those known to himself and his wife. But in closing he expressed the certainty that they were not lost, merely waiting on the farther side.

George no longer counted himself a religious person. If he was any sort of Christian at all, it was not down to the vestiges of filial piety; it was down to fraternal love. He went to church because it gave Maud pleasure that he did so. As far as the afterlife went, he thought he would wait and see. He was suspicious of zeal. He had been somewhat alarmed at the Grand Hotel when Sir Arthur had talked so intensely about his religious feelings, which were scarcely germane to the matter in hand. But this had at least prepared George for the subsequent news that his benefactor had become a fully-fledged Spiritualist and was planning to devote his remaining years and energies to the movement. Many right-thinking people were grossly shocked by the announcement. If Sir Arthur, the very ideal of an English gentleman, had restricted himself to a little genteel Sunday-afternoon table-turning among friends, they might not have minded. But this had never been Sir Arthur’s way. If he believed something, he wanted everyone else to believe it as well. This had always been his strength and sometimes his weakness. So there had been mockery from every direction, with impertinent newspaper headlines asking
HAS SHERLOCK HOLMES GONE MAD
? Wherever Sir Arthur lectured, there were counter-lectures from opponents of every stripe—Jesuits, Plymouth Brethren, angry materialists. Only the other week Bishop Barnes of Birmingham had attacked the “fantastic types of belief” currently proliferating. Christian Science and Spiritualism were false creeds which “drove the simple to resuscitate moribund ideas,” George had read. Yet neither mockery nor clerical rebuke could ever deter Sir Arthur.

Though George was instinctively sceptical about Spiritualism, he declined to side with the attacks on it. While he did not think himself competent to judge such matters, he knew how to choose between Bishop Barnes of Birmingham and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He remembered—and it was one of his great memories, one he had always imagined sharing with a wife—the conclusion of that first meeting at the Grand Hotel. They had stood to say goodbye, and Sir Arthur had naturally towered over him, and this large, forceful, gentle man had looked him in the eye and said, “I do not think you are innocent. I do not believe you are innocent. I
know
you are innocent.” The words were more than a poem, more than a prayer, they were the expression of a truth against which lies would break. If Sir Arthur said he knew a thing, then the burden of proof, to George’s legal mind, shifted to the other fellow.