He also knew that the Home Office was flooded with petitions from every gaol in the country. Four thousand Memorials were sent in annually; and a further thousand arrived from other sources on behalf of prisoners. But the Home Office was neither equipped nor empowered to retry a case; it could neither interview witnesses, nor hear counsel. All it could do was examine paperwork and advise the Crown accordingly. This meant that a free pardon was a statistical rarity. It might perhaps be different if there were some court of appeal, able to take a more active part in overturning injustice. But as things stood, the Vicar's belief that a frequent reiteration of innocence, backed up by the power of prayer, would bring about his son's release struck George as naive.
It grieved him to admit the fact, but George found his father's visits unhelpful. They disturbed the orderliness and calm of his life, and without orderliness and calm he did not think he could survive his sentence. Some prisoners counted off each day until their future release; George could only get through prison life by treating it as the only life he had or could ever have. His parents upset this illusion, as did his father's hopeful trust in Mr Yelverton. Perhaps if Maud were allowed to visit him by herself, she would fill him with strength, whereas his parents filled him with anxiety and shame. But he knew this would never be permitted.
The searches continued, the rub-downs and the dry baths. He read more history than he knew existed, had despatched all the classic authors and was now proceeding through the lesser ones. He had also read his way through entire runs of the Cornhill Magazine and the Strand. He was beginning to worry about exhausting the library's resources.
One morning he was taken to the Chaplain's office, photographed in both full face and profile, then instructed to grow a beard. He was told that in three months' time he would be photographed again. George could work out for himself the purpose of this record: it would be there for the police if he gave them future reason to search for him.
He did not like growing a beard. He had worn a moustache since Nature permitted, but had been ordered to shave it off at Lewes. Now he did not enjoy the daily prickle that spread across his cheeks and under his chin; he missed the feel of the razor. Nor did he like the look of himself with a beard: it gave him a criminal mien. There were remarks from the warders about him having a new hiding place. He carried on picking coir and reading Oliver Goldsmith. There were four years of his sentence left.
And then things suddenly became confusing. He was taken to be photographed, both full face and in profile. Then he was sent to be shaved. The barber told him he was lucky not to be in Strangeways, where they would charge him eighteen pence for the service. When he returned to his cell, he was ordered to collect his few belongings together and be ready for a transfer. He was driven to the station and put on a train with an escort. He could scarcely bring himself to look at the countryside, whose existence seemed to mock him, as did every horse and cow within it. He understood how men went mad from missing ordinary things.
When the train reached London, he was put in a cab and driven to Pentonville. There he was told that he was being prepared for discharge. He spent a day locked up by himself – the most miserable day, in retrospect, of his entire three years in gaol. He knew he should be happy; instead, he was as bewildered by his release as he had been by his arrest. Two detectives came and served him with papers; he was ordered to report to Scotland Yard, there to receive further instructions.
At ten thirty on the morning of October 19th, 1906, George Edalji left Pentonville in a cab with a Jew who was also being released. He did not enquire whether the fellow was a real Jew, or just a prison Jew. The cab dropped his fellow passenger at the Jewish Prisoners' Aid Society, and took him on to the Church Army's Aid Society. Prisoners who had joined such societies qualified for a double gratuity upon release. George was handed £2 9s. 10d. Officers of the Society then took him to Scotland Yard, where the terms of his release on licence were explained. He was to supply the address where he would be staying; he was to report once a month to Scotland Yard; and he was to inform them in advance of any plans to leave London.
A newspaper had sent a photographer to Pentonville to obtain a snapshot of George Edalji leaving the prison. By mistake the man photographed a prisoner released half an hour before George; and so the newspaper printed a picture of the wrong man.
From Scotland Yard he was driven to meet his parents.
He was free.
Arthur
And then he meets Jean.
He is a few months short of his thirty-eighth birthday. He is painted that year by Sidney Paget, sitting straight-backed in an upholstered tub chair, frock coat half open, fob chains on show; in his left hand a notebook, in his right a silver propelling pencil. His hair is now receding above the temples, but this loss is made irrelevant by the compensating glory of the moustache: it colonizes his face above and beyond the upper lip and extends in waxed toothpicks out beyond the line of the earlobes. It gives Arthur the commanding air of a military prosecutor; one whose authority is endorsed by the quartered coat of arms in the top corner of the portrait.
Arthur is the first to admit that his knowledge of women is that of a gentleman rather than a cad. There were certain boisterous flirtations in his early life – even an episode which had to do with flying fish. There was Elmore Weldon who, if it was not an ungentlemanly observation, did weigh eleven stone. There is Touie who, over the years, became a companionable sister to him and then, suddenly, an invalid sister. There are, of course, his real sisters. There are the statistics of prostitution which he reads at his club. There are stories told over port which he sometimes declines to hear, stories involving, for instance, private rooms in discreet restaurants. There are the gynaecological cases he has seen, the confinements he has attended, and the cases of disease among Portsmouth sailors and other men of low morals. His understanding of the sexual act is diverse, though related more to its unfortunate consequences than to its joyful preliminaries and processes.
His mother is the only woman to whose governance he is prepared to submit. With other members of the sex he has been, variously, large brother, substitute father, dominant husband, prescribing doctor, generous writer of blank cheques and Father Christmas. He is solidly content with the separation and distinction of the sexes as developed by society in its wisdom through the centuries. He is resolutely against the notion of votes for women: when a man comes home from work, he does not want a politician sitting opposite him at the fireside. Knowing women less, he is able to idealize them more. This is as he thinks it should be.
Jean therefore comes as a shock to him. It is now a long time since he looked at a young woman as young men habitually do. Women – young women – it seems to him, are meant to be unformed; they are malleable, pliant, waiting to be shaped by the impress of the man they marry. They hide themselves; they watch and wait, they indulge in decorous social display (which should always fall short of coquetry) until such time as the man makes apparent his interest, and then his greater interest, and then his especial interest, by which time they are walking alone together, and the families have met, and finally he asks for her hand and sometimes, perhaps, in a last act of concealment, she makes him wait upon her answer. This is how it has all evolved, and social evolution has its laws and its necessities just as biological evolution does. It would not be thus if there were not a very good reason for its being thus.