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 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 made up for any inaccuracies and false emphases, which offered balm to one whose suffering had been so humiliatingly quantified. Here it was: 'He came to my wedding reception, and there was no guest I was prouder to see.' Yes. George decided to take Memories and Adventures with him to the service, in case anyone objected to his presence. He did not know what Spiritualists looked like – let alone six thousand of them – but he doubted he looked like one himself. The book would be his passport in case of difficulty. You see, here on page 215, this is me, I am come to bid him farewell, I am proud to be his guest once more.
On Sunday afternoon, shortly after four o'clock, he turned out of No. 79 Borough High Street and headed for London Bridge: a small brown man in a blue business suit, with a dark blue book tucked under his left arm and a pair of binoculars over his right shoulder. A casual observer might think he was going to a race meeting – except that none was held on a Sunday. Or could that be a birdwatching book under his arm – yet who went birdwatching in a business suit? He would have made a strange sight in Staffordshire, and even in Birmingham they might have put him down for an eccentric; but nobody would do so in London, which contained more than enough eccentrics already.
When he first moved here, he had been apprehensive. About his future life, of course; about how he and Maud would manage together; about the magnitude of the city, its crowds and its noise; and beyond this, about how people would treat him. Whether there would be lurking ruffians like those who had pushed him through a hedge in Landywood and damaged his umbrella, or lunatic policemen like Upton threatening to do him harm; whether he would encounter the race prejudice Sir Arthur was convinced lay at the bottom of his case. But as he crossed London Bridge, which he had been doing now for more than twenty years, he felt quite at his ease. People generally left you alone, either from courtesy or indifference, and George was grateful for either motive.
It was true that inaccurate assumptions were habitually made: that he and his sister had recently arrived in the country; that he was a Hindoo; that he was a trader in spices. And of course he was still asked where he came from; though when he replied – to avoid discussing the finer points of geography – that he was from Birmingham, his interlocutors mostly nodded in an unsurprised way, as if they had always expected the inhabitants of Birmingham to look like George Edalji. Naturally there were the kind of humorous allusions that Greenway and Stentson went in for though few to Bechuana Land but he regarded this as some inevitable normality, like rain or fog. And there were even some people who, on learning that you came from Birmingham, expressed disappointment, because they had been hoping for news from distant lands which you were quite unable to supply.