Arthur & George

pay,’ says Maud. ‘Poor man.’
    ‘No, neither of those is the problem. He had money enough to pay, but he refused to. Let me explain. Counsel for Payelle argued that he had fulfilled his legal requirements by buying a ticket, and it was the company’s fault if all the train doors were too narrow for him except the first-class ones. The company argued that if he was too fat to get into one kind of compartment, then he should take a ticket for the sort of compartment he could get into. What do you think?’
    Horace is quite firm. ‘If he went into a first-class compartment, then he has to pay for going into it. It stands to reason. He shouldn’t have eaten so much cake. It’s not the railway’s fault if he’s too fat.’
    Maud tends to side with the underdog, and decides that a fat Frenchman comes into this category. ‘It’s not his fault he’s fat,’ she begins. ‘It might be a disease. Or he may have lost his mother and got so sad he ate too much. Or – any reason. It wasn’t as if he was making someone get out of their seat and go into a third-class compartment instead.’
    ‘The court was not told the reasons for his size.’
    ‘Then the law is an ass,’ says Horace, who has recently learned the phrase.
    ‘Had he ever done it before?’ asks Maud.
    ‘Now that’s an excellent point,’ says George, nodding like a judge. ‘It goes to the question of intent. Either he knew from previous experience that he was too fat to enter a third-class compartment and bought a ticket despite this knowledge, or he bought a ticket in the honest belief that he could indeed fit through the door.’
    ‘Well, which is it?’ asks Horace, impatiently.
    ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t say in the report.’
    ‘So what’s the answer?’
    ‘Well, the answer here is a divided jury – one for each party. You’ll have to argue it out between you.’
    ‘I’m not going to argue with Maud,’ says Horace. ‘She’s a girl. What’s the real answer?’
    ‘Oh, the Correctional Court at Lille found for the railway company. Payelle had to reimburse them.’
    ‘I won!’ shouts Horace. ‘Maud got it wrong.’
    ‘No one got it wrong,’ George replies. ‘The case could have gone either way. That’s why things go to court in the first place.’
    ‘I still won,’ says Horace.
    George is pleased. He has engaged the interest of his junior jury, and on succeeding Saturday afternoons he presents them with new cases and problems. Do passengers in a full compartment have the right to hold the door closed against those on the platform seeking to enter? Is there any legal difference between finding someone’s pocketbook on the seat, and finding a loose coin under the cushion? What should happen if you take the last train home and it fails to stop at your station, thereby obliging you to walk five miles back in the rain?
    When he finds his jurors’ attention waning, George diverts them with interesting facts and odd cases. He tells them, for instance, about dogs in Belgium. In England the regulations state that dogs have to be muzzled and put in the van; whereas in Belgium a dog may have the status of a passenger so long as it has a ticket. He cites the case of a hunting man who took his retriever on a train and sued when it was ejected from the seat beside him in favour of a human being. The court – to Horace’s delight and to Maud’s dissatisfaction – found for the plaintiff, a ruling which meant that from now on if five men and their five dogs were to occupy a tenseated compartment in Belgium, and all ten were the bearers of tickets, that compartment would legally be classified as full.
    Horace and Maud are surprised by George. In the schoolroom there is a new authority about him; but also, a kind of lightness, as if he is on the verge of telling a joke, something he has never done to their knowledge. George, in return, finds his jury useful to him. Horace arrives quickly at blunt positions – usually in favour of the railway company – from which he will not be budged. Maud takes longer to make up her mind, asks the more pertinent questions, and sympathizes with every inconvenience that might befall a passenger. Though his siblings hardly amount to a cross-section of the travelling public, they are typical, George thinks, in their almost complete ignorance of their rights.

Arthur
    He had brought detectivism up to date. He had rid it of the slow-thinking representatives of the old school, those ordinary