Arthur & George

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 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.
    He took down
Memories and Adventures
, Sir Arthur’s autobiography, a stout, midnight-blue volume, published six years previously. It fell open where it always did, at page 215. ‘In 1906,’ he read yet again, ‘my wife passed away after a long illness … For some time after these