Arthur & George

by Julian Barnes

  “Five foot ten and all.”

  “Not too hard to spot, then.”

  “You’d think, wouldn’t you?”

  They walked him the hundred and fifty yards from the police station, through crowds whose mood appeared to be mainly one of curiosity. There was an old woman shouting incoherent abuse at one point, but she was taken away. At the court Mr. Litchfield Meek was waiting for him: a solicitor of the old school, lean and white-haired, known equally for his courtesy and his obduracy. Unlike George, he did not expect a summary dismissal of the case.

  The magistrates appeared: Mr. J. Williamson, Mr. J. T. Hatton and Colonel R. S. Williamson. George Ernest Thompson Edalji was charged with unlawfully and maliciously wounding a horse, the property of the Great Wyrley Colliery Company, on August 17th. A plea of not guilty was entered, and Inspector Campbell was called to present the police evidence. He described being summoned to a field near the Colliery at about 7 a.m. and finding a distressed pony which subsequently had to be shot. He went from the field to the prisoner’s house, where he found a jacket with bloodstains on the cuffs, whitish saliva stains on the sleeves, and hairs on the sleeves and breast. There was a waistcoat with a saliva patch. The pocket of the jacket contained a handkerchief marked SE with a brownish stain in one corner, which might have been blood. He then went with Sergeant Parsons to the prisoner’s place of business in Birmingham, arrested him, and brought him to Cannock for interrogation. The prisoner denied that the clothing described to him had been what he was wearing the previous night; but on being told that his mother had confirmed this to be the case, had admitted the fact. Then he was asked about the hairs on his clothing. At first he denied there were any, but then suggested he might have picked them up by leaning on a gate.

  George looked across at Mr. Meek: this was hardly the tenor of his conversation with the Inspector yesterday afternoon. But Mr. Meek was not interested in catching his client’s eye. Instead he got to his feet and asked Campbell a few questions, all of which seemed to George innocuous, if not positively friendly.

  Then Mr. Meek called the Reverend Shapurji Edalji, described as “a clerk in holy orders.” George watched his father outline, in a precise way but with rather long pauses, the sleeping arrangements at the Vicarage; how he always locked the bedroom door; how the key was hard to turn, and squeaked; how he was a very light sleeper, who in recent months had been plagued with lumbago, and would certainly have woken had the key been turned; how in any case he had not slept beyond five in the morning.

  Superintendent Barrett, a plump man with a short white beard, his cap held against the swell of his belly, told the court that the Chief Constable had instructed him to object to bail. After a brief consultation, the magistrates remanded the prisoner to appear before them again the following Monday, when arguments for bail would be heard. In the meantime he would be transferred to Stafford Gaol. And that was that. Mr. Meek promised to visit George the next day, probably in the afternoon. George asked him to bring a Birmingham paper. He would need to know what his colleagues were being told. He preferred the Gazette, but the Post would suffice.

  At Stafford Gaol they asked what religion he belonged to, and also whether he could read and write. Then he was told to strip naked and instructed to place himself in a humiliating posture. He was taken to see the Governor, Captain Synge, who told him he would be housed in the hospital wing until a cell became available. Then his privileges as a prisoner on remand were explained: he would be allowed to wear his own clothes, to take exercise, to write letters, to receive newspapers and magazines. He would be allowed private conversations with his solicitor, which would be observed by a warder from behind a glass door. All other meetings would be supervised.

  George had been arrested in his light summer suit, his only headgear a straw hat. He requested permission to send for a change of clothing. This, he was told, was against the regulations. It was a privilege for a prisoner on remand to retain his own clothes; but this should not be understood as conveying the right to build up a private wardrobe in his cell.

  THE GREAT WYRLEY SENSATION, George read the next afternoon. VICAR’S SON IN COURT. “The sensation which the arrest caused throughout the Cannock Chase district was evidenced by the large crowds which yesterday frequented the roads leading to the Great Wyrley Vicarage, where the accused man resided, and the Police Court and Police Station, Cannock.” George was dismayed at the idea of the Vicarage being besieged. “The police were allowed to search without warrant. So far as can be ascertained at present the result of the search is a quantity of bloodstained apparel, a number of razors, and a pair of boots, the latter found in a field close to the scene of the last mutilation.”

  “Found in a field,” he repeated to Mr. Meek. “Found in a field? Has someone been putting my boots in a field? Quantity of blood-stained apparel? Quantity?”

  Meek seemed astonishingly calm about all this. No, he did not intend to ask the police about the supposed discovery of a pair of boots in a field. No, he did not propose asking the Birmingham Daily Gazette to publish a retraction concerning the amount of bloodstained clothing.

  “If I may make a suggestion, Mr. Edalji.”

  “Of course.”

  “I have, as you may imagine, had many clients in positions similar to yours, and they mostly insist upon reading the newspaper accounts of their case. It sometimes makes them a trifle over-heated. When this occurs, I always advise them to read the next column along. It often seems to help.”

  “The next column along?” George shifted his gaze two inches to the left. MISSING LADY DOCTOR was the heading. And beneath it: NO CLUE TO MISS HICKMAN.

  “Read it aloud,” said Mr. Meek.

  “ ‘No clue as to the disappearance of Miss Sophie Frances Hickman, a lady surgeon at the Royal Free Hospital, has yet emerged . . .’ ”

  Meek made George read the whole column to him. He listened attentively, sighing and shaking his head, even sucking in his breath from time to time.

  “But Mr. Meek,” said George at the end, “how am I to tell if any of this is true either, given what they say about me?”

  “That is rather my point.”

  “Even so . . .” George’s eyes were reverting magnetically to his own column. “Even so. ‘The accused man, as his name implies, is of Eastern origin.’ They make me sound like a Chinaman.”

  “I promise you, Mr. Edalji, if ever they say you are a Chinaman, I’ll have a quiet word with the editor.”

  The following Monday, George was taken from Stafford back to Cannock. This time the crowd on the way to court seemed more turbulent. Men ran alongside the cab, jumping up and peering in; some thumped on the doors and waved sticks in the air. George grew alarmed; but the escorting constables acted as if it were all quite normal.

  This time Captain Anson was in court; George became aware of a neat, authoritative figure staring fiercely at him. The magistrates announced that they would require three separate sureties, given the gravity of the charge. George’s father doubted he could find so many. The magistrates therefore adjourned to Penkridge that day week.

  At Penkridge the magistrates specified their bail terms further. The sureties required were as follows: £200 from George, £100 each from his father and mother, and a further £100 from a third party. But this was four sureties, not the three they had announced at Cannock. George felt it was all a charade. Not waiting for Mr. Meek, he stood up himself.

  “I do not desire bail,” he told the magistrates. “I have had several offers, but I prefer not to have bail.”

  Committal proceedings were then set for the following Thursday, September 3rd, at Cannock. On the Tuesday Mr. Meek came to see him with bad news.

  “They are adding a second charge, that of threatening to murder Sergeant Robinson at Hednesford by shooting him.”

  “Have they found a gun next to my boots in the field?” asked George incredulously. “Shooting him? Shooting Sergeant Robinson? I’ve never touched a gun in my life, and I’ve
never to my knowledge laid eyes on Sergeant Robinson. Mr. Meek, have they taken leave of their senses? What on earth can it possibly mean?”

  “What it means,” replied Mr. Meek, as if his client’s outburst had been a simple, measured question, “What it means is that the magistrates are certain to commit. However weak the evidence, it’s most unlikely they could now discharge.”

  Later, George sat on his bed in the hospital wing. Disbelief still burned in him like an ailment. How could they do this to him? How could they think that? How could they begin to believe that? George was so new to feeling anger that he did not know against whom to direct it—Campbell, Parsons, Anson, the police solicitor, the magistrates? Well, the magistrates would do for a start. Meek said they were certain to commit—as if they had no mental capacity, as if they were glove puppets or automata. But then, what were magistrates anyway? They scarcely qualified as members of the legal profession. Most were just self-important amateurs dressed in a little brief authority.

  He felt thrilled by his contemptuous words, and then immediate shame at his own excitement. This was why wrath was a sin: it led to untruth. The magistrates at Cannock were doubtless no better and no worse than magistrates anywhere else; nor could he remember them uttering a word from which he could fairly dissent. And the more he thought of them, the more his professional self began taking over again. Incredulity weakened to mere vivid disappointment, and then to a resigned practicality. It was clearly much better that his case went to a higher court. Barristers and graver surroundings were required to deliver the proper justice and the proper rebuke. Cannock magistrates’ court was quite the wrong setting. For a start, it was scarcely bigger than the schoolroom at the Vicarage. There was not even a proper dock: prisoners were obliged to sit on a chair in the middle of the court.

  This was where he was placed on the morning of September 3rd; he felt himself observed from all quarters, uncertain whether his position made him look more like the classroom scholar or its dunce. Inspector Campbell gave evidence at length, but departed little from what he had previously said. The first new police testimony came from Constable Cooper, who described how in the hours after the discovery of the injured animal he had taken possession of one of the prisoner’s boots, which had a peculiarly worn-down heel. This he had compared with footprints in the field where the pony was found, and also with marks close to a wooden footbridge near the Vicarage. He had pressed Mr. Edalji’s boot-heel down into the wet earth and found, when he withdrew the boot, that the prints matched.

  Sergeant Parsons then agreed that he was in charge of the band of twenty special constables deployed to pursue the gang of mutilators. He told how a search of Edalji’s bedroom had disclosed a case of four razors. One of them had wet, brown stains on it, and one or two hairs adhering to the blade. The sergeant had pointed this out to Edalji’s father, who had commenced wiping the blade with his thumb.

  “That’s not true!” shouted the Vicar, rising to his feet.

  “You must not interrupt,” said Inspector Campbell, before the magistrates could respond.

  Sergeant Parsons continued with his evidence, and described the moment when the prisoner was put into the Newton Street lock-up in Birmingham. Edalji had turned to him and said, “This is a bit of Mr. Loxton’s work, I suppose. I’ll make him sit up before I am done.”

  The next morning, the Birmingham Daily Gazette wrote of George:

  He is 28 years of age but looks younger. He was dressed in a shrunken black and white check suit, and there was little of the typical solicitor in his swarthy face, with its full, dark eyes, prominent mouth, and small round chin. His appearance is essentially Oriental in its stolidity, no sign of emotion escaping him beyond a faint smile as the extraordinary story of the prosecution unfolded. His aged Hindoo father and his white-haired English mother were in court, and followed the proceedings with pathetic interest.

  “I am twenty-eight but look younger,” he remarked to Mr. Meek. “Perhaps that is because I am twenty-seven. My mother is not English, she is Scottish. My father is not a Hindoo.”

  “I warned you against reading the newspapers.”

  “But he is not a Hindoo.”

  “It’s near enough for the Gazette.”

  “But Mr. Meek, what if I said you were a Welshman?”

  “I would not hold you inaccurate, as my mother had Welsh blood.”

  “Or an Irishman?”

  Mr. Meek smiled back at him, unoffended, perhaps even looking a little Irish.

  “Or a Frenchman?”

  “Now there, sir, you go too far. There you provoke me.”

  “And I am stolid,” George continued, looking down at the Gazette again. “Isn’t that a good thing to be? Isn’t stolid what a typical solicitor is meant to be? And yet I am not a typical solicitor. I am a typical Oriental, whatever that means. Whatever I am, I am typical, isn’t that it? If I were excitable, I would still be a typical Oriental, wouldn’t I?”

  “Stolid is good, Mr. Edalji. And at least they didn’t call you inscrutable. Or wily.”

  “What would that signify?”

  “Oh, full of devilish low cunning. We like to avoid devilish. Also diabolical. The defence will settle for stolid.”

  George smiled at his solicitor. “I do apologize, Mr. Meek. And I thank you for your good sense. I am likely to need more of it, I fear.”

  On the second day of the proceedings, William Greatorex, a fourteen-year-old scholar of Walsall Grammar School, gave evidence. Numerous letters written over his signature were read out in court. He denied both authorship and knowledge of them, and could even show that he had been in the Isle of Man when two of them had been posted. He said that it was his custom to take the train every morning from Hednesford to Walsall, where he was at school. Other boys who generally travelled with him were Westwood Stanley, son of the well-known miners’ agent; Quibell, son of the Vicar of Hednesford; Page, Harrison and Ferriday. The names of all these boys were mentioned in the letters which had just been read out.

  Greatorex stated that he had known Mr. Edalji by sight for three or four years. “He has often travelled to Walsall in the same compartment as us boys. Quite a dozen times, I should think.” He was asked when was the last time the prisoner had travelled with him. “The morning after two of Mr. Blewitt’s horses were killed. It was June 30, I think. We could see the horses lying in the field as we went by in the train.” The witness was asked if Mr. Edalji had said anything to him that morning. “Yes, he asked me if the horses that had been killed belonged to Blewitt. Then he looked out of the window.” The witness was asked if there had been any previous conversation with the prisoner about the maimings. “No, no, never,” he replied.

  Thomas Henry Gurrin agreed that he was a handwriting expert of many years’ standing. He gave his report on the letters that had been read out in court. In the disguised writing he found a number of peculiarities very strongly marked. Exactly the same peculiarities were found in the letters of Mr. Edalji, which had been handed to him for comparison.

  Dr. Butter, the police surgeon, who had examined the stains on Edalji’s clothing, stated that he had performed tests which revealed traces of mammalian blood. On the coat and waistcoat he found twenty-nine short, brown hairs. These he compared with hairs on the skin of a Colliery pony maimed the evening before Mr. Edalji was arrested. Under the microscope they were found to be similar.

  Mr. Gripton, who was keeping company with a young lady near Coppice Lane, Great Wyrley, on the night in question, gave evidence that he saw Mr. Edalji, and passed him at about nine o’clock. Mr. Gripton was not quite certain of the spot.

  “Well,” asked the police solicitor, “give us the name of the nearest public house to the place you saw him.”

  “The old police station,” replied Mr. Gripton cheerily.

  The police sternly stopped the laughter which greeted this remark.

  Miss Biddle, who wished to make it clear that she was engaged to Mr. Gripton, had also seen Mr. Edal
ji; so had a number of other witnesses.

  Details of the mutilation were given: the wound to the Colliery Company’s pony was described as being of fifteen inches in length.

  The prisoner’s father, the Hindoo Vicar of Great Wyrley, also gave evidence.

  The prisoner stated: “I am perfectly innocent of the charge, and reserve my defence.”

  On Friday 4th September, George Edalji was committed for trial at the Stafford Court of Quarter Sessions on two counts. Next morning, he read in the Birmingham Daily Gazette:

  Edalji looked fresh and cheerful, and, sitting in his chair in the middle of the court, he conversed briskly with his solicitor with a keen discrimination of evidence, proceeding from thorough legal training. Mostly, however, he sat with arms folded and legs crossed, watching the witnesses with stolid interest, one boot raised and exhibiting plainly to the spectator the curious wearing down of one heel, which is one of the strongest links in the chain of circumstantial evidence against him.

  George was glad still to be regarded as stolid, and wondered if he could effect a change of footwear before the Court of Quarter Sessions.

  He also noted another newspaper’s description of William Greatorex as “a healthy young English boy, with a frank, sunburnt face, and a pleasing manner.”

  Mr. Litchfield Meek was confident of an eventual acquittal.

  Miss Sophie Frances Hickman, the lady surgeon, was still missing.

  George

  George spent the six weeks between the committal proceedings and the Quarter Sessions in the hospital wing of Stafford Gaol. He was not discontented; he thought it the correct decision to refuse bail. He could hardly have carried on his business with such charges hanging over him; and while he missed his family, he judged it best for all of them that he stayed in safe custody. That report of crowds besieging the Vicarage had alarmed him; and he remembered fists pounding on the cab doors as he was driven to court in Cannock. He would not be able to count himself safe if such hotheads sought him out among the lanes of Great Wyrley.