by Неизвестный
Pray do not let my coming spoil any little plans you had for visiting Dr W—’s mother. As long as I have my meals and conic sections, you know, I am provided for, and it would be quite a novelty to change the old order of things for once.
Conan Doyle was neither the first nor last young student to find his goals hindered by mathematics and geometry, and their infuriatingly defiant conic sections, but he may be the only one to turn the experience into one of literature’s notorious villains, the nemesis of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Professor James Moriarty.
to Mary Doyle FELDKIRCH, JUNE 1, 1876
I am longing to get a proper letter from you, though you must find it hard to find time even to write postcards. I am getting on very well with my work, to which the twelve labours of Hercules were child’s play, and am anxiously expecting the conic section book, which will be rather a tough fellow, I fear. I ought to attain one of my two objects, either to win the bursary, or distinguish myself at the chemistry examination, and either will give me a good start in my medical career, while both would be supreme felicity.
I get up very often at four in the morning now, as we are allowed to go and study by a dormitory window at that hour. I think that if you ever did happen to see a nice cheap little alarm clock—like Willie’s—it would save poor Baa a cold in the head, which she would certainly get if she had to come to knock me up at all sorts of unearthly hours in the morning,* for I never could succeed in waking myself, and no wonder when for seven years I have always been awakened by being battered with a policeman’s rattle, which treatment though generally effective is anything but soothing.
It is getting tremendously hot—such heat as we never experience in England. Two days ago we went up a mountain about a couple of thousand feet high; we got up in an hour and a quarter, and raced down in little more than ten minutes. It was like an oven the whole time. The whole place is infested with frogs which jump about in the ditches on each side of the road, like the grasshoppers in England. There was one I caught in a drinking trough on the top of the mountain, though how it managed to hop up there is rather incomprehensible. We have plenty of lizards too, and toads and bats and cockroaches and all sorts of nice little creatures.
I will, if I can get one, enclose a photograph of the band in this. You see me on the right hand with my little instrument. As you will perceive it is the largest instrument, and a fine deep bass. It is splendid work for the chest blowing at it.
Those who distinguished themselves by always gaining the first note in everything during May get a ‘card of honour’. I have got one and will send it next letter. Our names were read out with great pomp in the chapel yesterday.
Conan Doyle’s final letter from Feldkirch survives only as a fragment, but indicates that his school life was hardy physically as well as mentally—describing an astonishing trek in which he and his comrades ‘plodded manfully’ over many miles of rough terrain at the end of the school year.
to Mary Doyle (fragment) FELDKIRCH
and plodded on manfully. In the level country we formed ranks and marched singing German songs. As we all had our alpenstocks over our shoulders, and our tunes were somewhat lugubrious, I think we must have resembled a body of Cromwell’s pikemen, marching into action while singing the old hundredth, or some other psalm. However at last we got back to our ‘alma mater’ and as we were let sleep on till six o’clock today, I am quite fresh again, and only have some insignificant blisters. The whole distance was 42 miles, and such miles, done in 14 hours.
Now to business. I got your postcard and am anxiously expecting a letter to tell me whether you will buy me the Rorschach-Basle-Paris route. If so I intend to start on the Wednesday (26th) evening for Lindau and sleep there. Next morning bath in the lake, and start by steamer to Rorschach, so as to see the lake, and then I arrive at Basle at 7.15, and get to Paris next day.
The procurator refuses to give anybody any money on any account. Therefore when you enclose the ticket or means of buying it, pray send the travelling expenses. Perhaps two English pound notes are not too much, as I will be very careful and economical, but sometimes one incurs expense for the luggage, and the residue will go to pay my ticket from London home. However you can judge yourself better than I can on this point.
I am glad the cartes pleased you. I am getting quite gaunt, I assure you, as you may notice in the division photograph. There is nothing like alpine excursions for reducing spare flesh.
Love to all, best regards to Doctor Waller.
[P.S.] From that mountain I saw Baden, Austria, Switzerland, Bavaria, and Würtemburg.
He made his way back to England through Paris, paying a long-awaited visit to his uncle Michael Conan and aunt Susan in the Avenue Wagram off the Etoile. He arrived at their door with only a penny left in his pockets, he remembered, but had a wonderful visit of several weeks.
‘Then I returned home,’ he said, ‘conscious that real life was about to begin.’
* * *
*Biographers have believed, based on Conan Doyle’s testimony and surviving school records, that he began in 1868, but his letters home indicate that he started in 1867 instead.
*Who Mrs Russel was, and why she had fallen out of young Arthur’s favour, is unknown.
ŸHis younger sisters Lottie and Connie. Connie had been born only that month, on the 4th.
ŸHis older sister Annette.
*The Red Lion Inn in Preston served as a staging point for boys travelling back and forth from the school, and as a clearing house for deliveries from home.
*Perhaps ‘The Golden Goose’ by the Brothers Grimm, which begins with a grey-haired man in a forest, asking each of three brothers in turn to share his cakes and wine.
*Ann Standish was a member of the school staff catering to the boys’ needs, judging from references to her in Conan Doyle’s letters. (Perhaps a nurse, considering the time young Arthur appears to have spent in the infirmary?)
*The Cloister and the Hearth, by Charles Reade, 1861; one of Conan Doyle’s favourite historical novels for its treatment of a fifteenth-century man’s loyalties divided between family and Church.
*‘Pinned’: apparently Stonyhurst slang for ‘enjoyed’ or ‘liked’. While Conan Doyle uses it repeatedly in letters from Stonyhurst, he did not after leaving it.
ŸA concerned marginal note by his mother—to whom is not apparent—on the letter reads: ‘Don’t suppose he meant regular big bottles. Mine were all small.’ The sanctioned amount of alcoholic beverages, not to mention tobacco, is in stark contrast to today’s standards.
*No wonder Conan Doyle suffered injuries: in his day Stonyhurst played an especially rugged version of football with origins in Elizabethan times. The rules, obscure and only lightly enforced, allowed each side to field as many as seventy players. The result was often a general melee, especially during a ‘Squash’—an enormous pileup of players designed to knock opponents to the ground or force the ball between the goalposts. Sometimes losing teams put a second ball into play surreptitiously, causing further confusion and hotly contested goals. When the dust finally settled the winners were feted with pancakes and lemonade.
*Years later, during rehearsals of a play based on his Brigadier Gerard stories about Napoleon’s wars, he was incensed when a group of soldiers, ostensibly returning from battle, marched onstage in pristine uniforms. ‘These men are warriors, not ballet dancers!’ he exclaimed, and at his insistence, their expensive costumes were taken outside to be ripped and dragged through the dirt, to give them a properly authentic appearance.
*Mary Burton, a family friend whose surname was bestowed on Lottie, had rented the Doyles her house at Liberton Bank, on the southern side of Edinburgh, at the time young Arthur attended the dreaded Newington Academy. Her brother was the Scottish historian John Hill Burton, whose son William Kinnimond Burton, three years older than Arthur, became one of his best friends until his early death in 1899 in Japan, while a professor of engineering at Imperial University there. As young
men they shared an interest in photography, and ‘Willie’ Burton (sometimes WKB in these letters) may have introduced Conan Doyle to the British Journal of Photography, which published articles by him in the late 1870s and 1880s. Conan Doyle dedicated his 1890 novel The Firm of Girdlestone to Burton.
ŸHe reported his father’s exploit to his uncle James in London, who replied September 5th in a way that speaks to the hazy view that the London Doyles had of their brother Charles by now: ‘That same papa may think it nothing to kill only one snipe,’ James wrote, ‘but I should be long enough out before achieving so much. Give him my compliments when you see him, and ask him if he remembers such an individual as me? And say that a note in this direction would not be thrown away.’
*‘Pepper’s Ghost’ was an elaborate stage illusion of the time involving an angled mirror to create the appearance of ghosts on stage. Presumably Stonyhurst staged a simplified version.
*See Out of the Shadows: The Untold Story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s First Family, by Georgina Doyle (Ashcroft, B.C.: Calabash Press, 2004), pages 19-20.
*Ann Standish had been part of the Stonyhurst community far back enough to be called as a witness, for Arthur reported in a letter in July, ‘She appears to have nothing to say, and to have said it. She was in a dreadful fright before going. She had a vague idea that the Judge suspected she was Arthur Orton in disguise. She could scarcely be persuaded to get into the cab to drive off. She pinned her journey, putting up at the best hotels, at the expense of government, and receiving 10/ a day for nothing.’
*We do not know the precise nature of the accident. James Ryan, ‘an extraordinary boy who grew to be an extraordinary man’, was the one lifelong friend Conan Doyle made at Stonyhurst.
*‘The first thing I did when I first came to London was to go and see [Macauley’s] tomb at Westminster Abbey,’ he said at an Authors Club dinner in 1896. He revisited the event in an 1899 novel, A Duet. Macauley ‘was the object of my hero worship when I was a boy,’ he said—first for Macauley’s essays, and then his verse.
*But if he wrote some letters home from Feldkirch in French, they have not survived.
*A bursary was a stipend or scholarship won by competitive examination, and, because of the family’s limited financial means, of great importance to Conan Doyle when he reached medical school at Edinburgh University.
*‘Baa’, actual name unknown, is clearly, from this reference and others, a servant. While money was short in the Doyle household, labour was also cheap, and the Doyles, even in their straitened circumstances, often had domestic help. They were gentlefolk, even if poor.
2
The Medical Student
(1876-1882)
THE MEDICAL LOVE SONG
My heart at each systole swelling
Still murmurs its passion for you—
The Venous side, dear, is thy dwelling,
A temple untainted and true
And there by the fossa ovalis
Where the mitral your chamber shall screen
There ’mid reduced hæmoglobin
Oh that is your palace, my queen
—A. CONAN DOYLE, MB CM
Conan Doyle was ‘wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless’ when he entered Edinburgh University in October 1876. Edinburgh was famous for literature as well as medicine, and also there at the time were friends of later years, like Robert Louis Stevenson and James Barrie. ‘Strange to think that I probably brushed elbows with them,’
Conan Doyle mused later on; but he found medical school one ‘long weary grind at botany, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, and a whole list of compulsory subjects, many of which have a very indirect bearing upon the art of curing.’
Attending Edinburgh University meant living at home for him—an economy that meant no letters to his mother about the experience. Nor have letters to others about his medical school life been found.
He did look back at Edinburgh in his novel The Firm of Girdlestone, written in the 1880s. She ‘may call herself with grim jocoseness the “alma mater” of her students,’ its narrator muses, but she
conceals her maternal affection with remarkable success… There is symbolism in the very look of her, square and massive, grim and grey, with never a pillar or carving to break the dead monotony of the great stone walls. She is learned, she is practical, and she is useful. There is little sentiment or romance in her composition, however.
A lad coming up to an English University finds himself in an enlarged and enlightened public school… [H]is University takes a keen interest in him. She pats him on the back if he succeeds. Prizes and scholarships, and fine fat fellowships are thrown plentifully in his way if he will gird up his loins and aspire to them.
There is nothing of this in a Scotch University… [Edinburgh] is a great unsympathetic machine, taking in a stream of raw-boned cartilaginous youths at one end, and turning them out at the other as learned divines, astute lawyers, and skilful medical men. Of every thousand of the raw material about six hundred emerge at the other side. The remainder are broken in the process.
In later years, after giving up medicine for literature, he took a more measured view of the experience, and of the value he felt he had derived from it. ‘There are few phases of medical life, from the sixpenny dispensary to the two-guinea prescription, of which I have not had personal experience,’ he told the students at St Mary’s Hospital, London, in a 1910 talk entitled The Romance of Medicine, assuring them that medicine
tinges the whole philosophy of life and furnishes the whole basis of thought. The healthy skepticism which medical training induces, the desire to prove every fact, and only to reason from such proved facts—these are the finest foundations for all thought. And then the moral training to keep a confidence inviolate, to act promptly on a sudden call, to keep your head in critical moments, to be kind and yet strong—where can you, outside medicine, get such a training as that?…And then there is another way in which it acts. It sets a very high standard of strenuous work. You may not consider this altogether an advantage while you do it, but it remains a precious heritage for life. To the man who has mastered Grey’s Anatomy, life holds no further terrors… All work seems easy after the work of a medical education.
What exists in letters are the interstices of his medical studies, from his attempt to win the bursary, through assistantships to several doctors, one of whom became a second father to him, to taking the plunge finally into medical practice of his own, as junior partner to someone he had known at Edinburgh—Dr George Budd, whose methods of practising medicine were controversial, and whose personality was volcanically paranoid. Conan Doyle not only entered Edinburgh at age seventeen, but, in the custom of the day, started studying medicine without further academic ado. During the two months at home after returning from Feldkirch, though, while his mother was away on a visit, he prepared himself to compete for the bursary whose £40 would mean much to him and his family.
to Mary Doyle 2 ARGYLE PARK TERRACE, EDINBURGH, SEPTEMBER 1876
It seems very strange and quite an inversion of our usual states that I should be writing from home, and you the absentee. We are all jogging along very comfortably; you need not be afraid of my feeling lonely, for I am closeted in my room nearly the whole day, and would be if you were here, so it comes to the same in the end. My chief relaxation is sometimes at evening when I go out into the kitchen and read ‘Midshipman Easy’ to Baa and Lottie; but I am beginning to consider it cruel to do it, as I am every evening in expectation of Baa’s breaking a blood vessel with laughing.
I went to Mr Walker on the Monday. His terms are 2 guineas a month but he lends me plenty of books. I was compelled to get 2 books from Livingstone, one second hand a Greek dictionary, the other new (a very small book) Blackie’s Greek conversations. Mr Walker has dispirited me awfully. He says that very often as many as 50 candidates go in for it, and that the high school curriculum leads, as it were, up to the bursary, and they generally secure it. Mr Walker is a young man and helps
me very much; he did not get this identical bursary but one of £20.
Baby is pretty good considering, Innes behaves wonderfully well. Lottie is, as she always is, a brick. Baa is cooking very well, and seems to enjoy acting as keeper of the house. Arthur is behaving so so. Papa is very quiet and nice; I don’t know about the Graphics money. I gave him your letter to read this morning, and when he came to that part I think he looked uncomfortable. However he is all that could be desired. Much as we all desire you back, pray make the best of the chance, and get a good mouthful of English air which is better than this stuff here.
You must thank the Dr heartily for his kindness in giving [me] the flute. I don’t deserve it unless I win this bursary, in spite of all high schools and bugbears.
to Dr Bryan Charles Waller 2 ARGYLE PARK TERRACE, SEPTEMBER 9, 1876
Many thanks for your kind letter, which went far towards restoring my equanimity, which was rather shaken by Mr Walkers statements. I had no idea there would be so many competitions, but I suppose three quarters of them go in without a vestige of a chance. Mr Walker is a very jolly fellow; he is very good at mathematics, though I don’t think his classical knowledge is very brilliant, and we are continually having long arguments over some disputed sense or word.* I do a Latin & Greek exercise every day, learn a chapter of Livy and Xenophon’s ‘Cyropaedia’, and a certain quantity of Euclid and Algebra. In fact I seldom emerge from my cell except for meals and sometimes in the evening when I petrify our small family circle by reading Poe’s Tales. I hope you will excuse the liberty I have taken in making use of the ‘university calendars’ from your room. The bursary examen is in them, and I have done last year’s for practise. I found it easy enough, my only fear is that others may find it easier still. It is indeed, as you say, a very great consolation to know that I will never more need mathematics. Classics I like, and I shall always try to keep up my knowledge of them, but mathematics of every sort I detest and abhor.