George
In the Solicitors' Final Examinations George receives Second Class Honours, and is awarded a Bronze Medal by the Birmingham Law Society. He opens an office at 54 Newhall Street with the initial promise of some overflow work from Sangster, Vickery amp; Speight. He is twenty-three, and the world is changing for him.
Despite being a child of the Vicarage, despite a lifetime of filial attention to the pulpit of St Mark's, George has often felt that he does not understand the Bible. Not all of it, all of the time; indeed, not enough of it, enough of the time. There has always been some leap to be made, from fact to faith, from knowledge to understanding, of which he has proved incapable. This makes him feel a sham. The tenets of the Church of England have increasingly become a distant given. He does not sense them as close truths, or see them working from day to day, from moment to moment. Naturally, he does not tell his parents this.
At school, additional stories and explanations of life were put before him. This is what science says; this is what history says; this is what literature says… George became adept at answering examination questions on these subjects, even if they had no real vivacity in his mind. But now he has discovered the law, and the world is beginning finally to make sense. Hitherto invisible connections – between people, between things, between ideas and principles – are gradually revealing themselves.
For instance, he is on the train between Bloxwich and Birchills, looking out of the window at a hedgerow. He sees not what his fellow passengers would see – a few intertwined bushes blown by the wind, home to some nesting birds – but instead a formal boundary between owners of land, a delineation settled by contract or long usage, something active, something liable to promote either amity or dispute. At the Vicarage, he looks at the maid scrubbing the kitchen table, and instead of a coarse and clumsy girl likely to misplace his books, he sees a contract of employment and a duty of care, a complicated and delicate tying together, backed by centuries of case law, all of it unfamiliar to the parties concerned.
He feels confident and happy with the law. There is a great deal of textual exegesis, of explaining how words can and do mean different things; and there are almost as many books of commentary on the law as there are on the Bible. But at the end there is not that further leap to be made. At the end, you have an agreement, a decision to be obeyed, an understanding of what something means. There is a journey from confusion to clarity. A drunken mariner writes his last will and testament on an ostrich egg; the mariner drowns, the egg survives, whereupon the law brings coherence and fairness to his sea-washed words.
Other young men divide their lives between work and pleasure; indeed, spend the former dreaming of the latter. George finds that the law provides him with both. He has no need or desire to take part in sports, to go boating, to attend the theatre; he has no interest in alcohol or gourmandising, or in horses racing one another; he has little desire to travel. He has his practice, and then, for pleasure, he has railway law. It is astonishing that the tens of thousands who travel daily by train have no useful pocket explicator to help them determine their rights vis-a-vis the railway company. He has written to Messrs Effingham Wilson, publishers of the ' Wilson 's Legal Handy Books' series, and on the basis of a sample chapter they have accepted his proposal.
George has been brought up to believe in hard work, honesty, thrift, charity and love of family; also to believe that virtue is its own reward. Further, as the eldest child, he is expected to set an example to Horace and Maud. George increasingly realizes that, while his parents love their three children equally, it is on him that expectation weighs the heaviest. Maud is always likely to be a source of concern. Horace, while in all respects a thoroughly decent fellow, has never been cut out for a scholar. He has left home and, with help from a cousin of Mother's, managed to enter the Civil Service at the lowest clerical level.
Still, there are moments when George catches himself envying Horace, who now lives in diggings in Manchester, and occasionally sends a cheery postcard from a seaside resort. There are also moments when he wishes that Dora Charlesworth really did exist. But he knows no girls. None comes to the house; Maud has no female friends he might practise acquaintance on. Greenway and Stentson liked to boast experience in such matters, but George was often dubious of their claims, and is glad to have left those two behind. When he sits on his bench in St Philip's Place eating his sandwiches, he glances admiringly at young women who pass; sometimes he will remember a face, and have yearnings for it at night, while his father growls and snuffles a few feet away. George is familiar with the sins of the flesh, as listed in Galatians, chapter five – they begin with Adultery, Fornication, Uncleanness and Lasciviousness. But he does not believe his own quiet hankerings qualify under either of the last two heads.
One day he will be married. He will acquire not just a fob watch but a junior partner, and perhaps an articled clerk, and after that a wife, young children, and a house to whose purchase he has brought all his conveyancing skills. He already imagines himself discussing, over luncheon, the Sale of Goods Act 1893 with the senior partners of other Birmingham practices. They listen respectfully to his summary of how the Act is being interpreted, and cry 'Good old George!' when he reaches for the bill. He is not sure exactly how you get to there from here: whether you acquire a wife and then a house, or a house and then a wife. But he imagines it all happening, by some as yet unrevealed process. Both acquisitions will depend upon his leaving Wyrley, of course. He does not ask his father about this. Nor does he ask him why he still locks the bedroom door at night.
When Horace left home, George hoped he might move into the empty room. The small desk fitted up for him in Father's study when he first went to Mason College was no longer adequate. He imagined Horace's room with his bed in it, his desk in it; he imagined privacy. But when he put his request to Mother, she gently explained that Maud was now judged strong enough to sleep by herself, and George wouldn't want to deprive her of that chance, would he? It was now too late, he realized, to put in evidence Father's snoring, which had got worse and sometimes kept him awake. So he continues to work and sleep within touching distance of his father. However, he is awarded a small table next to his desk, on which to place extra books.
He still retains the habit, which has now grown into a necessity, of walking the lanes for an hour or so after he gets back from the office. It is one detail of his life in which he will not be ruled. He keeps a pair of old boots by the back door, and rain or shine, hail or snow, George takes his walk. He ignores the landscape, which does not interest him; nor do the bulky, bellowing animals it contains. As for the humans, he will occasionally think he recognizes someone from the village school in Mr Bostock's day, but he is never quite sure. No doubt the farm boys have now grown into farm-hands, and the miners' sons are down the pit themselves. Some days George gives a kind of half-greeting, a sideways raising of the head, to everyone he meets; at other times he greets no one, even if he remembers having acknowledged them the day before.
His walk is delayed one evening by the sight of a small parcel on the kitchen table. From its size and weight, and the London postmark, he knows immediately what it contains. He wants to delay the moment for as long as possible. He unknots the string and carefully rolls it round his fingers. He removes the waxed brown paper and smooths it out for reuse. Maud is by now thoroughly excited, and even Mother shows a little impatience. He opens the book to its title page: