Arthur & George

days of darkness I was unable to settle to work until the Edalji case came suddenly to turn my energies into an entirely unexpected channel.’ George always felt a little uneasy at this beginning. It seemed to imply that his case had come along at a convenient moment, its peculiar nature being just what was required to drag Sir Arthur from a slough of despond; as if he might have reacted differently – indeed, not at all – had the first Lady Conan Doyle not recently died. Was this being unfair? Was he scrutinizing a simple sentence too closely? But that was what he did, each day of his professional life: he read carefully. And Sir Arthur had presumably written for careful readers.
    There were many other sentences which George had underlined with pencil and annotated in the margin. This, of his father, for a start: ‘How the Vicar came to be a Parsee, or how a Parsee came to be the Vicar, I have no idea.’ Well, Sir Arthur did once have an idea, and a very precise and correct idea, because George had explained his father’s journey at the Grand Hotel, Charing Cross. And then this: ‘Perhaps some Catholic-minded patron wished to demonstrate the universality of the Anglican Church. The experiment will not, I hope, be repeated, for though the Vicar was an amiable and devoted man, the appearance of a coloured clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situation.’ George found this unfair; it practically blamed his mother’s family, in whose gift the parish had been, for the events that occurred. Nor did he like being characterized as a ‘half-caste son’. It was doubtless true in a technical sense, but he no more thought of himself in those terms than he thought of Maud as his half-caste sister, or Horace as his half-caste brother. Was there not a better way of putting it? Perhaps his father, who believed that the world’s future depended upon the harmonious commingling of the races, could have come up with a better expression.
    ‘What aroused my indignation and gave me the driving force to carry the thing through was the utter helplessness of this forlorn little group of people, the coloured clergyman in his strange position, the brave, blue-eyed, grey-haired mother, the young daughter, baited by brutal boors.’ Utter helplessness? You would not think from this that Father had published his own analysis of the case before Sir Arthur had even appeared on the scene; nor that Mother and Maud were constantly writing letters, rallying support and obtaining testimonials. It seemed to George that Sir Arthur, while deserving of much credit and thanks, was rather too determined to annex for himself the whole credit and thanks. He certainly diminished the long campaign by Mr Voules of
Truth
, not to mention Mr Yelverton, and the memorials, and the petition of signatures. Even Sir Arthur’s account of how he first became aware of the case was manifestly faulty. ‘It was late in 1906 that I chanced to pick up an obscure paper called
The Umpire
, and my eye caught an article which was a statement of his case, made by himself.’ But Sir Arthur had only ‘chanced to pick up’ this ‘obscure paper’ because George had sent him all his articles with a long covering letter. As Sir Arthur must have very well known.
    No, George thought, this was ungracious of him. Sir Arthur was doubtless working from memory, from the version of events he had himself told and retold down the years. George knew from taking witness statements how the constant recounting of events smoothed the edges of stories, rendered the speaker more self-important, made everything more certain than it had seemed at the time. His eye now sped through Sir Arthur’s account, not wishing to find any more fault. The words ‘travesty of Justice’ near the end were followed by: ‘The
Daily Telegraph
got up a subscription for him which ran to some
£
300.’ George allowed himself a slightly taut smile: it was the very sum that had been raised the following year by Sir Arthur’s appeal on behalf of the Italian marathon runner. The two events had touched the heart of the British public to exactly the same measurable degree: three years’ false imprisonment with penal servitude, and falling over at the end of an athletic race. Well, it was no doubt salutary to have your case put in true perspective.
    But two lines later there was the sentence which George had read more than any other in the book, which