Whatever the pamphlet’s strengths and weaknesses, Conan Doyle had stated the British position with passion and great eloquence. In the Times, he appealed for contributions to assist in translating the work and distributing it abroad. Money poured in from all quarters—including, it was said, a sub-rosa contribution of £500 from Edward VII. “It was not long before we had the most gratifying evidence of the success of these efforts,” he noted in his autobiography. “There was a rapid and marked change in the tone of the whole Continental press, which may have been a coincidence, but was certainly a pleasing one.”
A considerable sum remained when production and distribution ceased later that year, so Conan Doyle proposed that a fund be established to bring worthy South African students to Edinburgh University. This was perhaps his finest moment of the entire episode. Regrettably, nothing seems to have come of the idea.
Conan Doyle’s talents as a public crusader had now come into full flower. As with his earlier warnings about Koch’s tuberculosis cure and his subsequent efforts with the spiritualist movement, he showed himself to be a formidable propagandist. The public showed a natural interest in anything he might say, and Conan Doyle’s lucid style and narrative power gave authority to whatever cause he might espouse. He had gone into the elections in Edinburgh in search of “some big purpose” in life. For the moment, he had found that purpose in what he called “an appeal to the world’s opinion.” He would always consider the episode one of the “most pleasing and complete” of his life.
On October 24, 1902, in recognition of his services to the Crown during the war, Conan Doyle presented himself at Buckingham Palace to receive a knighthood. At first, he felt strongly inclined to refuse the honor. He disparaged the title as “the badge of the provincial mayor,” and believed that the “big men”—such as Kipling and Chamberlain—would not stoop to accept such honorifics. “All my work for the State would seem tainted if I took a so-called reward,” he wrote to his mother. “I tell you it is unthinkable. Let us drop the subject.”
The Ma’am would not drop the subject. She pelted her son with reproachful letters, and traveled to Hindhead to press her case in person. In the end, she wore him down. To refuse the honor, she said, would constitute an insult to the king.
Certainly His Majesty would have been disappointed. He was extremely fond of Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures were said to be among the few stories he ever finished reading. Earlier in the year, at a royal command performance of Gillette’s play, the king summoned the actor to the royal box at the intermission and kept him talking so long that the audience grew restless. Of all the names on the Honours List, then, one assumes that Conan Doyle’s brought a particular satisfaction to the monarch.
If Conan Doyle accepted his knighthood under duress, there was some consolation at the ceremony itself. Oliver Lodge, the distinguished physicist who shared an interest in spiritualism, was also being honored that day. “[W]e plunged at once into psychic talk,” Conan Doyle recalled, “which made me forget where I was, or what I was there for.”
He returned to the earthly plane in time for the investiture, but found he had difficulty adjusting to his new status as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “I feel,” he told Innes, “like a new-married girl who isn’t sure of her own name. They have also made me Deputy-Lieutenant of Surrey, whatever that means.” In his autobiography he said nothing of his discomfiture, dwelling instead on the many letters and telegrams of congratulation he received. One in particular, from the editor H. A. Gwynne, compared his efforts in the war to those of a successful general. “This may well be the exaggeration of friendship,” Conan Doyle wrote, “but it is at least pleasing to know that those who were in a position to judge did not look upon me as a mere busybody who butts in without due cause.”
* * *
Many years later, when the Ma’am was long dead, Conan Doyle allowed himself a discreet final word on the subject. In “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” Dr. Watson mentions in passing that Sherlock Holmes had been offered a knighthood—and that he had refused the honor. Though Watson was notoriously vague about dates, in this instance he fixed it precisely. It was 1902, “shortly after the conclusion of the South African War.”
18
The Bondage of Honor
That paladin of lost causes found in the dubious circumstances of the case a matter after his own heart.
—WILLIAM ROUGHEAD, AUTHOR OF “TRIAL OF OSCAR SLATER,” ON CONAN DOYLE
One winter day in 1904, as Conan Doyle drove through the gates of Undershaw in his twelve-horsepower Wolseley “motoring machine,” the car clipped a gatepost, bounced onto a steep slope, and rolled over on top of him. His brother Innes, who had been riding with him, was thrown clear of the open passenger compartment. Conan Doyle, who had learned to drive only a short time earlier, was trapped underneath. For a moment, the car’s steering column caught the brunt of the impact, which undoubtedly saved his life. Before he could scramble free, however, the steering column sheared off, pinning him facedown in the gravel drive with much of the car’s weight settling across his back and shoulders. “I felt the weight getting heavier moment by moment,” he recalled, “and wondered how long my vertebrae could stand it.” Before the question could be answered, a crowd of men gathered to raise the car and pull him free.
Conan Doyle’s lucky escape, according to some of his admirers, owed much to his superb physical conditioning. He had taken a course of “muscular development” with a famous bodybuilder named Eugene Sandow, and it was thought that his enhanced physique enabled him to withstand the weight of the overturned car. As the Wolseley weighed more than a ton, one must allow that luck probably played a greater role.
Conan Doyle required a great deal of luck where his car was concerned. “[T]he secret of safe brakes had not yet been discovered,” he wrote, “and my pair used to break as if they were glass. More than once I have known what it is to steer a car when it is flying backwards under no control down a winding hill.” This does not seem to have discouraged him. Motoring was a new sport, and he wanted to participate. He had traveled all the way up to Birmingham to take delivery of the Wolseley, and drove the 170 miles back to Hindhead as a form of self-tutorial. “I had invested in the sort of peaked yachting cap which was considered the correct badge of the motorist in those days,” he recalled, “but as I paced the platform of New Street Station a woman removed any conceit I might have over my headgear by asking me peremptorily how the trains ran to Walsall. She took me for one of the officials.”
He may have looked like a railway conductor, but he did not display the same competence with heavy machinery. While demonstrating the new car for his mother, Conan Doyle managed to slam into a cartload of turnips. The Ma’am, unperturbed by the sudden shower of vegetables, continued with her knitting. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Conan Doyle also became one of the first men in Britain ever to receive a speeding ticket, prompting an angry letter to the Daily Mail. Undeterred, he expanded his motor fleet to include a second, more powerful car and a motorcycle.
Motoring was only one of Conan Doyle’s enthusiasms in those days. In 1902 he had taken off from London’s Crystal Palace as a passenger in a hot air balloon, reaching an altitude of 6,000 feet before touching down in a field some twenty-five miles away. “A man has a natural trepidation the first time he leaves the ground,” he admitted. “[F]or the first minute or so one feels very strange, and keeps an uncommonly tight grip of the side-ropes.” Later, he would also make a noisy ascent in an early biplane, an experience he did not enjoy quite as much. Having seen the ground from this new vantage, however, he expressed the hope of making a parachute jump one day. “I think the man who first tried coming down in a parachute was the pluckiest man on earth,” he told a twenty-two-year-old interviewer named P. G. Wodehouse. “I should like to try it, just for the sake of one great experience!”
Airplanes featured prominently in his short story “The Horror of the Heights,” which appeared some years later, but most of
his fiction of this period dealt with heroes of the past. A new series of Brigadier Gerard stories began running in The Strand in 1902, which were collected the following year as The Adventures of Gerard. The Return of Sherlock Holmes appeared in 1905, gathering together thirteen of the revived detective’s new adventures.
At the end of 1905, The Strand began the serialization of Sir Nigel, Conan Doyle’s latest historical effort. The novel emerged as a sort of prelude to The White Company, reintroducing many of the same characters as it traced the early career of Nigel Loring. Once again Conan Doyle paid an affectionate tribute to his mother in the form of Dame Ermyntrude, who counsels the young Nigel on “the emptiness of sordid life, the beauty of heroic death, the high sacredness of love and the bondage of honour.”
Conan Doyle had great hopes for the book, which appeared at the end of the following year. Initially he had considered forgoing the lucrative serialization rights, although this strategy had done no favors for A Duet. Any lingering doubts about serial publication vanished when the American rights sold for $25,000. As he told a newspaper interviewer, “One must live, after all.”
The book sold extremely well, and Kipling himself wrote to say that he had read it “at one gulp.” Once again, however, Conan Doyle felt disappointed by the critical reception. He filled a scrapbook with glowing reviews, but most of them treated the novel as a routine adventure tale. Conan Doyle had aimed higher, and considered the book his “high-water mark in literature.” His heart must have quailed when he reached the end of a cordial notice in The Bookman: “In short,” the reviewer proclaimed, “Sir Nigel is the boy’s book of the year.”
Soon after Sir Nigel made its debut in The Strand, Conan Doyle was compelled to return to politics for the general election of 1906. In spite of his loss in Central Edinburgh, he had shown himself to be a great asset to the Liberal Unionist party. A personal appeal from Joseph Chamberlain induced him to accept the candidacy for the Scottish “Border Burghs,” consisting of the small towns of Galashiels, Hawick, and Selkirk.
Once again, Conan Doyle contested a Liberal stronghold, and once again the Liberal Unionists had allied with the Conservatives on a central issue. This time, the devisive issue of free trade versus tariff reform dominated the campaign. It was a subject of some concern to the constituency, many of whom were employed by the local wool industry.
The party elders had approached Conan Doyle well in advance, and in the months leading up to the campaign he made several trips north to lay the groundwork for his campaign. Politicking in the Border Burghs proved especially grueling, since every speech and appearance had to be repeated in each of the three towns. Conan Doyle gamely took part in the annual tradition of “common riding,” a horse race of sorts to mark the boundaries of the community grounds in Hawick. Still an unseasoned rider, he “nearly made the acquaintance of the Hawick turnpike.” Afterward, he was surprised to read a press account that had him dancing a lively hornpipe before the voters. Actually, he had been tapping his foot to keep time with an “interminable ballad.”
Conan Doyle’s opponent, “Tommy” Shaw, was so certain of his victory that he scarcely troubled himself to appear, consigning most of his campaigning to a deputy. As it turned out, Shaw’s confidence was entirely justified—Conan Doyle lost the election by a margin similar to his Edinburgh defeat. The result could hardly be counted as surprising; the election also saw a resounding defeat of the Conservative government.
This marked the end of Conan Doyle’s political career, and he felt no regret in giving up the “vile business” of electioneering. “And yet,” he wrote, “I was deeply convinced that public service was waiting for me somewhere.” For the moment, the nature of that public service remained obscure.
In Sir Nigel, the young hero speaks of proving his love through honorable feats. “I take my oath,” he declares, “that I will do three deeds in your honour as a proof of my high love before I set eyes upon your face again, and these three deeds shall stand as a proof to you that if I love you dearly, still I will not let the thought of you stand betwixt me and honourable achievement!” Conan Doyle might just as easily have spoken these words to Jean Leckie. He still loved her, but the bondage of honor he owed to Louisa still kept them apart. In the meantime, he would show himself worthy of her sacrifice through a series of manly, virtuous trials such as politics, sports, and even, if need be, jumping out of an airplane.
By the time of Conan Doyle’s second parliamentary candidacy, he and Jean had known each other for nearly nine years. Whatever pleasure they found in each other’s company was shadowed by an unspoken truth: their hopes for future happiness constituted a deathwatch for Louisa. The strain took its toll on both of them. At times, Conan Doyle wondered if it might be better for all concerned if Jean left him for a younger, available man. She assured him that she would not. As Conan Doyle told his mother, “The dear soul gets these fits of depression (it is her artistic nature), and then her remorse is terrible and she writes, poor soul, as if she has done some awful thing. I never love her more than at such moments.”
At the same time, Conan Doyle remained committed to Louisa’s care and happiness, so that his soul, as he confided to the Ma’am, “is inevitably rather wrenched in two all the time. I am most careful at home and I am sure that at no time have I been anything but most considerate and attentive. But the position is difficult, is it not?” Meanwhile, all of his own anxieties and desires were subsumed in furious activity. At one stage he spoke of the need to “steady myself down” with rigorous study of the French writer Ernest Renan. “That, with plenty of golf and cricket, ought to keep me right—body and mind.”
In the end, golf and French literature were not enough. His black moods became more frequent, and longer in duration. “Nothing could exceed his energy when the working fit was upon him,” he had written of Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, “but now and again a reaction would seize him, and for days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting-room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night.”
In the spring of 1906, Louisa’s health took a turn for the worse. Sensing that the end was near, she called her daughter, Mary, to her bedside. Mary must not be shocked or surprised, Louisa said, if her father should marry again. If he did, the dying woman insisted, he would have her blessing. There is no reason to suppose that Louisa knew of her husband’s attachment to Jean. For thirteen years, however, she had realized he would almost certainly outlive her. Throughout their marriage, her family’s happiness had been her greatest concern, and this had not changed as she prepared for death. ‘[N]o man could have had a more gentle and amiable life’s companion,” Conan Doyle once wrote of her. He may not have felt the same “union of souls” that he did with Jean, but he loved Louisa and treasured the early years of happiness they had shared.
In June, Louisa began slipping in and out of delirium. Conan Doyle issued hopeful bulletins to the family—“Better; sat up to tea; I hope for the best”—but at the end of the month it was clear she was fading. She died on July 4, at the age of forty-nine, with her husband and mother at her bedside. “She told me that she had no pain and was easy in her mind,” Conan Doyle noted in his journal. “I was much in her room after her death and standing by her body I felt that I had done my best.”
He may have wished to believe so, but as his wife was laid to rest in Hindhead, the cumulative stresses of the thirteen-year illness sent Conan Doyle to his lowest ebb. Tortured by insomnia, he grew weak and listless. His work ceased. The intestinal complaint of his South Africa days returned to plague him. He carried flowers to his wife’s grave and spent dark hours alone with his thoughts. It would be months before he roused himself.
Toward the end of 1906, as Conan Doyle glanced through the logjam of papers and correspondence on his desk, a magazine article caught his attention. It concerned a young man named George Edalji, who had been accused in a strange series of cattle mutilations. Having been imprisoned for the crime and then released wi
thout explanation, Edalji was seeking to prove his innocence in the matter. His appeals to police and government officials had gone unanswered, so Edalji now appealed to the public for help in clearing his name. Suddenly, Conan Doyle found, after the long “days of darkness,” he felt able to turn his energies toward “an entirely unexpected channel.”
Conan Doyle often protested that he possessed none of the deductive talent of Sherlock Holmes. Nevertheless, over the course of his career a number of true-life crimes were referred to him. If a problem especially intrigued him, or if he detected any miscarriage of justice, he would readily use his abilities and influence in service of the victim. Like Holmes, he possessed a powerful memory and an encyclopedic knowledge of crime. Once, when he read a report of a young bride found dead in her bathtub, he noted a disturbing parallel to an earlier drowning. He communicated with Scotland Yard, helping to draw attention to a serial killer who came to be known as “The Bluebeard of the Bath.” Closer to home, Conan Doyle once put his talents to use in defending a luckless collie named Roy, who had been accused of killing a sheep. He was able to demonstrate that the canine defendant, who suffered from a debilitating illness, could not have committed the crime. The magistrate dismissed the case, and Roy went free.
George Edalji’s troubles were more serious. At the time, Edalji was a thirty-year-old solicitor living with his parents in Great Wyrley, near Birmingham. His father, the Reverend Shapurji Edalji, was a Parsee Indian who had embraced the Church of England. He and his English wife had three children, of whom George was the eldest. An Indian vicar was something of an oddity in Birmingham at that time, and the family came in for a great deal of racial abuse, usually in the form of shouted insults, cruel practical jokes, or trash strewn in their yard.
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle Page 29