'I promise you, Mr Edalji, if ever they say you are a Chinaman, I'll have a quiet word with the editor.'
The following Monday, George was taken from Stafford back to Cannock. This time the crowd on the way to court seemed more turbulent. Men ran alongside the cab, jumping up and peering in; some thumped on the doors and waved sticks in the air. George grew alarmed; but the escorting constables acted as if it were all quite normal.
This time Captain Anson was in court; George became aware of a neat, authoritative figure staring fiercely at him. The magistrates announced that they would require three separate sureties, given the gravity of the charge. George's father doubted he could find so many. The magistrates therefore adjourned to Penkridge that day week.
At Penkridge the magistrates specified their bail terms further. The sureties required were as follows: £200 from George, £100 each from his father and mother, and a further £100 from a third party. But this was four sureties, not the three they had announced at Cannock. George felt it was all a charade. Not waiting for Mr Meek, he stood up himself.
'I do not desire bail,' he told the magistrates. 'I have had several offers, but I prefer not to have bail.'
Committal proceedings were then set for the following Thursday, September 3rd, at Cannock. On the Tuesday Mr Meek came to see him with bad news.
'They are adding a second charge, that of threatening to murder Sergeant Robinson at Hednesford by shooting him.'
'Have they found a gun next to my boots in the field?' asked George incredulously. 'Shooting him? Shooting Sergeant Robinson? I've never touched a gun in my life, and I've never to my knowledge laid eyes on Sergeant Robinson. Mr Meek, have they taken leave of their senses? What on earth can it possibly mean?'
'What it means,' replied Mr Meek, as if his client's outburst had been a simple, measured question, 'What it means is that the magistrates are certain to commit. However weak the evidence, it's most unlikely they could now discharge.'
Later, George sat on his bed in the hospital wing. Disbelief still burned in him like an ailment. How could they do this to him? How could they think that? How could they begin to believe that? George was so new to feeling anger that he did not know against whom to direct it – Campbell, Parsons, Anson, the police solicitor, the magistrates? Well, the magistrates would do for a start. Meek said they were certain to commit – as if they had no mental capacity, as if they were glove puppets or automata. But then, what were magistrates anyway? They scarcely qualified as members of the legal profession. Most were just self-important amateurs dressed in a little brief authority.
He felt thrilled by his contemptuous words, and then immediate shame at his own excitement. This was why wrath was a sin: it led to untruth. The magistrates at Cannock were doubtless no better and no worse than magistrates anywhere else; nor could he remember them uttering a word from which he could fairly dissent. And the more he thought of them, the more his professional self began taking over again. Incredulity weakened to mere vivid disappointment, and then to a resigned practicality. It was clearly much better that his case went to a higher court. Barristers and graver surroundings were required to deliver the proper justice and the proper rebuke. Cannock magistrates' court was quite the wrong setting. For a start, it was scarcely bigger than the schoolroom at the Vicarage. There was not even a proper dock: prisoners were obliged to sit on a chair in the middle of the court.
This was where he was placed on the morning of September 3rd; he felt himself observed from all quarters, uncertain whether his position made him look more like the classroom scholar or its dunce. Inspector Campbell gave evidence at length, but departed little from what he had previously said. The first new police testimony came from Constable Cooper, who described how in the hours after the discovery of the injured animal he had taken possession of one of the prisoner's boots, which had a peculiarly worn-down heel. This he had compared with footprints in the field where the pony was found, and also with marks close to a wooden footbridge near the Vicarage. He had pressed Mr Edalji's boot-heel down into the wet earth and found, when he withdrew the boot, that the prints matched.
Sergeant Parsons then agreed that he was in charge of the band of twenty special constables deployed to pursue the gang of mutilators. He told how a search of Edalji's bedroom had disclosed a case of four razors. One of them had wet, brown stains on it, and one or two hairs adhering to the blade. The Sergeant had pointed this out to Edalji's father, who had commenced wiping the blade with his thumb.
'That's not true!' shouted the Vicar, rising to his feet.
'You must not interrupt,' said Inspector Campbell, before the magistrates could respond.
Sergeant Parsons continued with his evidence, and described the moment when the prisoner was put into the Newton Street lock-up in Birmingham. Edalji had turned to him and said, 'This is a bit of Mr Loxton's work, I suppose. I'll make him sit up before I am done.'
The next morning, the Birmingham Daily Gazette wrote of George:
He is 28 years of age but looks younger. He was dressed in a shrunken black and white check suit, and there was little of the typical solicitor in his swarthy face, with its full, dark eyes, prominent mouth, and small round chin. His appearance is essentially Oriental in its stolidity, no sign of emotion escaping him beyond a faint smile as the extraordinary story of the prosecution unfolded. His aged Hindoo father and his white-haired English mother were in court, and followed the proceedings with pathetic interest.
'I am twenty-eight but look younger,' he remarked to Mr Meek. 'Perhaps that is because I am twenty-seven. My mother is not English, she is Scottish. My father is not a Hindoo.'
'I warned you against reading the newspapers.'
'But he is not a Hindoo.'
'It's near enough for the Gazette.'
'But Mr Meek, what if I said you were a Welshman?'
'I would not hold you inaccurate, as my mother had Welsh blood.'
'Or an Irishman?'
Mr Meek smiled back at him, unoffended, perhaps even looking a little Irish.
'Or a Frenchman?'
'Now there, sir, you go too far. There you provoke me.'
'And I am stolid,' George continued, looking down at the Gazette again. 'Isn't that a good thing to be? Isn't stolid what a typical solicitor is meant to be? And yet I am not a typical solicitor. I am a typical Oriental, whatever that means. Whatever I am, I am typical, isn't that it? If I were excitable, I would still be a typical Oriental, wouldn't I?'
'Stolid is good, Mr Edalji. And at least they didn't call you inscrutable. Or wily.'
'What would that signify?'
'Oh, full of devilish low cunning. We like to avoid devilish. Also diabolical. The defence will settle for stolid.'
George smiled at his solicitor. 'I do apologize, Mr Meek. And I thank you for your good sense. I am likely to need more of it, I fear.'
On the second day of the proceedings, William Greatorex, a fourteen-year-old scholar of Walsall Grammar School, gave evidence. Numerous letters written over his signature were read out in court. He denied both authorship and knowledge of them, and could even show that he had been in the Isle of Man when two of them had been posted. He said that it was his custom to take the train every morning from Hednesford to Walsall, where he was at school. Other boys who generally travelled with him were Westwood Stanley, son of the well-known miners' agent; Quibell, son of the Vicar of Hednesford; Page, Harrison and Ferriday. The names of all these boys were mentioned in the letters which had just been read out.
Greatorex stated that he had known Mr Edalji by sight for three or four years. 'He has often travelled to Walsall in the same compartment as us boys. Quite a dozen times, I should think.' He was asked when was the last time the prisoner had travelled with him. 'The morning after two of Mr Blewitt's horses were killed. It was June 30, I think. We could see the horses lying in the field as we went by in the train.' The witness was asked if Mr Edalji had said anything to him that morning. 'Yes, he asked me if the horses that had been killed belonged to Blewitt. Then he looked out of the window.' The witness was asked if there had been any previous conversation with the prisoner about the maimings. 'No, no, never,' he replied.