Arthur and George (46 page)

“Are you suggesting that on the night of the outrage there was . . . some sexual purpose or manifestation?”

“Not directly, no. But you are asking me what I believe happened and why. Let us admit, for the moment, much of what you claim about the young man. He was a good student, a son who honoured his parents, who prayed in his father’s church, who did not smoke or drink, who worked hard at his practice. And yet you in return must accept the likelihood of another side to him. How could there not be, given the peculiarity of his breeding, his intense isolation and confinement, his excessive urges? By day he is a diligent member of society. And then by night, every so often, he yields to something barbaric, something buried deep within his dark soul, something even he probably does not understand.”

“It’s pure speculation,” said Doyle, though there was something about his voice—something quieter and less confident—that struck Anson.

“You instructed me to speculate. You will admit that I have seen more examples of criminal behaviour and criminal purpose than you. I speculate on that basis. You have insisted on the fact that Edalji is of the professional class. How often, you implicitly asked, did the professional classes commit crimes? More often than you would believe, was my answer. However, I would return the question to you in a different form, Sir Arthur. How often do you find happily married men, whose happiness naturally involves regular sexual fulfilment, committing crimes of a violent and perverted nature? Do we believe that Jack the Ripper was a happily married man?

“No, we do not. I would go further. I would suggest that if a normal healthy man is continually deprived of sexual fulfilment, for whatever reason and under whatever circumstances, it may—I only say may, I put it no stronger—it may begin to affect the cast of his mind. I think this is what happened with Edalji. He felt himself in a terrible cage surrounded by iron bars. When would he ever escape? When would he ever achieve any kind of sexual fulfilment? In my view, a continuous period of sexual frustration, year after year after year, can start to turn a man’s mind, Doyle. He can end up worshipping strange gods, and performing strange rites.”

There was no reply from his famous guest. Indeed, Doyle seemed quite puce in the face. Perhaps it was the effect of the brandy. Perhaps for all his worldly airs the man was a prude. Or perhaps—and this seemed the most likely—he saw the overwhelming force of the argument ranged against him. In any case, his eyes were trained on the ashtray as he crushed out the perfectly smokeable length of a very decent cigar. Anson waited, but his guest had now transferred his gaze to the fire, unwilling or unable to reply. Well, that seemed to be the end of that. Time to move to more practical matters.

“I trust you sleep soundly tonight, Doyle. But be warned that some believe Green Hall to be haunted.”

“Really,” came the reply. But Anson could tell Doyle’s mind was far away.

“There is supposedly a headless horseman. Also the crunching of coach wheels in the gravel of the drive, and yet no coach. Also the ringing of mysterious bells, and yet no bells have ever been found. Tommyrot, of course, sheer tommyrot.” Anson found himself feeling positively blithe. “But I doubt you are susceptible to phantoms and zombies and poltergeists.”

“The spirits of the dead do not trouble me,” said Doyle in a flat, tired voice. “Indeed, I welcome them.”

“Breakfast is at eight, if that suits you.”

As Doyle retired in what Anson took to be defeat, the Chief Constable swept the cigar butts into the fire and watched them briefly flare. When he got to bed, Blanche was still awake, rereading Mrs. Braddon. In the side dressing room her husband tossed his jacket across the clothes horse and shouted through to her, “Sherlock Holmes baffled! Scotland Yard solves mystery!”

“George, don’t bellow so.”

Captain Anson came tiptoeing through in his braided dressing gown with a vast grin on his face. “I do not care if the Great Detective is crouching with his ear to the keyhole. I have taught him a thing or two about the real world tonight.”

Blanche Anson had rarely seen her husband so light-headed, and decided to confiscate the key to the tantalus for the rest of the week.

Arthur

Arthur’s rage had been building since the moment the door of Green Hall closed behind him. The first leg of his journey back to Hindhead did little to alleviate it. The Walsall, Cannock & Rugeley line of the London & North Western Railway amounted to a constant series of provocations: from Stafford, where George was condemned, through Rugeley where he went to school, Hednesford where he supposedly threatened to shoot Sergeant Robinson in the head, Cannock where those fools of magistrates committed him, Wyrley & Churchbridge where it all began, then past fields grazed by what could be Blewitt’s livestock, via Walsall where the source of the conspiracy must surely be found, to Birmingham where George had been arrested. Each station on the line had its message, and it was the same message, written by Anson: I and my kind own the land around here, and the people, and the justice.

Jean has never seen Arthur in such a temper. It is mid-afternoon, and he bangs the tea service around as he tells his story.

“And do you know what else he said? He dared to assert that it would do my reputation no good if my . . . my amateur speculations were to be broadcast. I have not been treated with such condescension since I was an impecunious doctor in Southsea attempting to persuade a rich patient that he was entirely healthy when he insisted on being at death’s door.”

“And what did you do? In Southsea, I mean.”

“What did I do? I repeated that he was as fit as a fiddle, he replied that he didn’t pay a doctor to tell him that, so I told him to find a different specialist who would diagnose whatever ailment he found it convenient to imagine.”

Jean laughs at the scene, her amusement tinged with a little regret that she was not there, could never have been there. The future lies ahead of them, it is true, but suddenly she minds not having had a little of the past as well.

“So what will you do?”

“I know exactly what I shall do. Anson thinks that I have prepared this report with the intention of sending it to the Home Office, where it will gather dust and be slightingly referred to in some internal review which may finally see the light of day when we are all dead. I have no intention of playing that game. I shall publish my findings as widely as it is possible to do. I thought of it on the train. I shall offer my report to the
Daily Telegraph,
who I daresay will be happy to print it. But I shall do more than that. I shall ask them to head it ‘No Copyright,’ so that other papers—and especially the Midland ones—may reproduce it
in extenso
and free of charge.”

“Wonderful. And so generous.”

“That’s by the by. It’s a matter of what’s most effective. And furthermore, I shall now make Captain Anson’s position in the case, his prejudiced involvement from the very beginning, as clear as a bell. If he wants my
amateur speculations
on his activities, he shall have them. He shall have them in the libel court if he wishes. And he may very well find that his professional future is not as he imagines after I’ve finished with him.”

“Arthur, if I may . . .”

“Yes, my dear?”

“It might be advisable not to turn this into a personal vendetta against Captain Anson.”

“I don’t see why not. Much of the evil has its origins with him.”

“I mean, Arthur dear, that you must not let Captain Anson distract you from your primary purpose. Because if he did, then Captain Anson would be the first to be contented.”

Arthur looks at her with pride as well as pleasure. Not just a useful suggestion, but a damned intelligent one into the bargain.

“You are quite right. I shall not scourge Anson more than will serve George’s interests. But he shall not remain unscourged either. And I shall put him and his entire police force to shame with the second part of my investigation. Things are becoming clearer as to the culprit, and if I can demonstrate that he was under Anson’s nose since the beginning of the affair, and that he did nothing about it, what course will be left to him but resignation? I shall have the Staffordshire Constabulary reorganized from end to end by the time I’m finished with this business. Full steam ahead!”

He notices Jean’s smile, which seems to him both admiring and indulgent, a powerful combination.

“And talking of which, my darling, I really do think we should set a wedding date. Otherwise people might take you for an unconscionable flirt.”

“Me, Arthur? Me?”

He chuckles, and reaches for her hand. Full steam ahead, he thinks, otherwise the whole boiler room might just explode.

Back at Undershaw, Arthur took up his pen and settled Anson’s hash. That letter to the Vicar—“I trust to be able to obtain a dose of penal servitude for the offender”—had there ever been such a gross prejudging by a responsible official? Arthur felt his temper rising as he recopied the words; felt also the coolth of Jean’s advice. He must do what was most effective for George; he must avoid libel; equally, he must make the verdict on Anson absolute. It had been a long time since he had been so condescended to. Well, Anson would find out what that felt like.

Now, [he began] I have no doubt that Captain Anson was quite honest in his dislike of George Edalji, and unconscious of his own prejudice. It would be folly to think otherwise. But men in his position have no right to such feelings. They are too powerful, others are too weak, and the consequences are too terrible. As I trace the course of events, this dislike of their chief’s filtered down until it came to imbue the whole force, and when they had George Edalji they did not give him the most elementary justice.

Before the case, during it, but also afterwards: Anson’s arrogance had been as boundless as his prejudice.

I do not know what subsequent reports from Captain Anson prevented justice being done at the Home Office, but this I do know, that instead of leaving the fallen man alone, every possible effort was made after the conviction to blacken his character, and that of his father, so as to frighten off anyone who might be inclined to investigate the case. When Mr. Yelverton first took it up, he had a letter over Captain Anson’s signature, saying, under date Nov. 8, 1903: “It is right to tell you that you will find it a simple waste of time to attempt to prove that George Edalji could not, owing to his position and alleged good character, have been guilty of writing offensive and abominable letters. His father is as well aware as I am of his proclivities in the direction of anonymous writing, and several other people have personal knowledge on the same subject.”

Now, both Edalji and his father declare on oath that the former never wrote an anonymous letter in his life, and on being applied to by Mr. Yelverton for the names of the “several other people” no answer was received. Consider that this letter was written immediately after the conviction, and that it was intended to nip in the bud the movement in the direction of mercy. It is certainly a little like kicking a man when he is down.

If that doesn’t dish Anson, Arthur thought, nothing will. He imagined newspaper editorials, questions in Parliament, a mealy-mouthed statement from the Home Office, and perhaps a lengthy foreign tour before some comfortable yet distant billet was found for the former Chief Constable. The West Indies might be the place. It would be a sadness for Mrs. Anson, whom Arthur had found a spirited table-companion. But she would doubtless survive her husband’s rightful humiliation better than George’s mother had been able to withstand her son’s wrongful humiliation.

The
Daily Telegraph
published Arthur’s findings over two days, the 11th and 12th of January. The newspaper laid it out well, and the compositors were on their best behaviour. Arthur read his words through again, all the way to their thundering conclusion:

The door is shut in our faces. Now we turn to the last tribunal of all, a tribunal which never errs when the facts are fairly laid before them, and we ask the public of Great Britain whether this thing is to go on.

The response to the articles was tremendous. Soon the telegram boy could have found his way to Undershaw blindfolded. There was support from Barrie, Meredith, and others in the writing profession. The correspondence page of the
Telegraph
was filled with debate about George’s eyesight and the defence’s dereliction in failing to introduce it. George’s mother added her own testimony:

I always spoke to the solicitor employed for the defence of the extreme short sight of my son, which has been from a child. I considered that sufficient proof at once, if there had been no other, that he could not have gone to the field, with a so-called “road” impossible even to people with good sight, at night. I felt this so much that I was distressed that no opportunity was given me when giving evidence to speak on his defective sight. The time allowed me was very short, and I suppose people were tired of the case . . . My son’s sight was always so defective that he bent very close to the paper in writing, and held a book or paper very close to his eyes, and when out walking he did not recognize people easily. When I met him anywhere I always felt I must look for him, not he for me.

Other letters demanded a search for Elizabeth Foster, anatomized the character of Colonel Anson, and dilated upon the prevalence of gangs in Staffordshire. One correspondent explained how easily horse hairs might work themselves loose from inside the lining of a coat. There were letters from one of George’s fellow passengers on the Wyrley train, from Onlooker of Hampstead NW and from A Friend to Parsees. Mr. Aroon Chunder Dutt MD (Cantab.) wished to point out that cattle maiming was a crime entirely foreign to the Eastern nature. Chowry Muthu MD of New Cavendish Street reminded readers that all India was watching the case, and that the name and honour of England were at stake.

Three days after the second
Telegraph
article appeared, Arthur and Mr. Yelverton were received at the Home Office by Mr. Gladstone, Sir Mackenzie Chambers and Mr. Blackwell. It was agreed that the proceedings should be considered private. The conversation lasted an hour. Afterwards, Sir A. Conan Doyle stated that he and Mr. Yelverton had met with a
courteous and sympathetic reception,
and that he was
confident
the Home Office would do all it could to clear the matter up.