“Why not let him give all the sixteen explanations?” I suggested carelessly. “He would love to do it.”
Astbury and the eminent solicitor looked annoyed at my flippancy.
However, as it turned out, Providence had a task for me in that case after all, for the Good Man came to me and told me that he was so frightened of Astbury that he would really like me to examine him.
“I never seem to say what they want me to,” he said, naïvely.
And in the end, it being clear that no form of examination of the witness could make the Manilla bill business any better or worse, the Good Man had his own way, and he and I collaborated in the matter. We had a rehearsal. It went like this. I asked the Good Man, “What about the Manilla bills; tell me all about them?”
The Good Man started off—I remember I smoked two cigars of say five and seven-eighths during his answer. It was then, I think, that he added the seventeenth explanation, less convincing than the others. I timed him. He was a rapid speaker, and then I worked it out in folios—I felt sure the drama of it was right, and I determined we would play it out in our own simple way. I fancy the saner spirits among us washed their hands of the
enterprise altogether, but even in a Chancery Court a good comedy well played is irresistible. And the Good Man was really an excellent witness. My part was not a speaking one. I merely slipped him from the leash, so to speak, and away he went.
I remember the indignant tones in which he swept aside the suggestion of fraud and started out to victory. The shorthand writers toiled after him, panting and breathless. It was like a fine course at Altcar, run with vigour and mettle. At the end of the first explanation he paused, though only for a second, and I could see our opponents pitying us—but he was off again, heading to the opposite bank, and the reporters after him with dismay in their faces—and our opponents were laughing at his contradictions. But not for long. One after another came the various possible explanations, always prefaced by a kindly smiling desire to say all he knew and keep nothing back that could be told. At one moment the Vice-Chancellor asked him to repeat one of the theories of the finance of the matter. He did so. The Vice-Chancellor said he really could not understand it, so the Good Man repeated it again, and three pages were added to the shorthand note. I reckoned before we had finished that the Good Man had spoken about forty pages of shorthand notes, and in cross-examination the other side added another twenty, and an eighteenth new explanation of the Manilla bills, which may perhaps have been only a variant of the eleventh. But the case was won. The Vice-Chancellor had heard
the Good Man speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and knew that he was honest. It was a triumph of drama over law, and it was the Good Man’s own victory.
At the hearing in the Court of Appeal, the shorthand note was read and commented upon for several days, and the Manilla bills reduced the Court to a state of bewildered amazement. They knew the rights and wrongs of the subject, for those were elementary, but they could not understand the Good Man’s evidence. Like the average manager who reads a play in manuscript, they could not appreciate the drama of it. And then A. L. Smith—so like him—said “Let’s have a look at him.” And he gave a second show of the Manilla bills in the Court of Appeal. I was a judge then, but when I heard they had sent for the Good Man to give evidence I knew all was well. For as soon as he came into the presence of the Master of the Rolls the case was over. If there was one man on the bench who knew an honest man when he saw him it was A. L.