by Неизвестный
‘From that time onwards I read and thought a great deal,’ he said, looking back, ‘though it was not until the later phase of my life that I realized where all this was tending.’ The degree of his conviction would rise and fall during the years to come, but apparently he did not write home about the séances he attended. Whether this was due to discretion, given a knowledge of his mother’s views on the subject, or as a result of open disagreement about it, is unclear, but his letters to his mother concentrated instead upon medicine, literature, finances, and family.
to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA
We always think the last critique the best—but I really do think that the Spectator caps the lot. I have ordered a Spectator for you & another for the girls that you may have it in extenso. This extract gives an imperfect idea of the general kindness which distinguishes it. I also send Lang’s kind letter over it. I send the Boston Beacon U.S.A. which please send back. Retaining the copyright in the States doubles our profits which is good. From the 1000 sold in England we must deduct 100 gratis copies—leaves a balance of about £25.
Give the boy my love—I hope he is wiring in. The secret of success, tell him, is to concentrate your whole energy upon whatever you do, work or play.
Still working hard at the Middle Ages and at the Eye.
to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA
We expect Connie down by the end of this week and shall be wonderfully pleased to see her. I am as busy as possible over Girdlestone & Co. Have done more than 70 pages of the third volume so that I am really within sight of the end. I think it is fairly good as light literature goes nowadays.
I sent you on the sketches—there was no letter. There were two sketches for me—one pen and ink and one coloured—neither of them bad though somewhat unfinished. Don’t give any away, dear. I still much regret those which Mrs Dowie got. I wrote to my father thanking him for the ones he consigned to me & I had a note from him yesterday—very nice indeed with many kind messages to Touie.
[P.S.] Papa in his letter seemed fairly contented with his lot.*
to Mary Doyle SOUTHSEA
I am still hard at work upon the middle ages reading Commine’s Chronicles & La Chronicle Scandaleuse of Jean de Troyes, tho’ there is nothing very scandalous therein. Also reading Lecroix’s Middle Ages, a very fine French work which will be a great help to me. I hope it will all lead up to something decent.
Payn has ‘A Physiologists Wife’ but I have not heard from him. He has not paid me for ‘Thoth’ neither has ‘Cloomber’ paid me, neither has the Study in Scarlet pictures, bar the fiver which I sent you, neither of course has Longman, so money has been somewhat tight. There ought to be some coming in some day.
I lunch with Sir W Crossman today—the inner circle of Liberal Unionists. Have had an absurd verse in my head all day
‘You are old, boozy William,’ the young man said, ‘And you drink something stronger than tea. But I cannot help asking, if you are our head, Pray what can our other end be?’*
I dare say you were right to write to the Athenaeum—yet it does not do to be thin skinned. I am sure that whatever you did you did with tact.†
Have been reading ‘The Deemster’. It is very good indeed—quite first class.‡ Aunt A wrote congratulating me about Micah, and regretting my decision about Baby. I shall take no notice of the latter, for I do not wish to pain her.À
Baby flourishes—enormous in size, pink cheeks, blue eyes, very smooth skin, makes articulate noises with some approach to speech. She is wonderfully forward, & strong. Got a perambulator for her last week. Touie is very well, tho’ the nursing tries her a little—I think.
Unmentioned in surviving letters is one of 1889’s most important events for his career: an invitation to dine at London’s grand Langham Hotel on August 30th, from J. M. Stoddart, the editor of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in Philadelphia, whom Conan Doyle found ‘an excellent fellow’. The other guests were an Irish MP named Thomas Patrick Gill, and no less a literary lion than Oscar Wilde, who was
already famous as the champion of aestheticism. It was indeed a golden evening for me. Wilde to my surprise had read Micah Clarke and was enthusiastic about it, so that I did not feel a complete outsider. His conversation left an indelible impression upon my mind. He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say.
Out of that dinner came commissions for The Picture of Dorian Gray by Wilde, and from Conan Doyle a second Sherlock Holmes novel, which would be entitled The Sign of the Four. By early October he had finished it, to appear in Lippincott’s in the new year, and as a book from the firm of Spencer Blackett in October 1890.
Micah Clarke ‘met with a good reception from the critics and the public,’ said Conan Doyle, ‘and from that time onward I had no further difficulty in disposing of my manuscripts.’ It helped him find a publisher for The Firm of Girdlestone at last, and Longmans agreed to bring out a collection of his stories from the 1880s under the title The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’. ‘We are expecting “The Captain of the Pole Star” out now very shortly,’ Touie told Lottie in February 1890, ‘and “The Sign of the Four” about Easter.’ Waiting to be finished was Angels of Darkness, a play based on the American section of A Study in Scarlet (a flashback set in Utah explaining the killer’s reasons for seeking revenge), but in the meanwhile he worked furiously at The White Company, ‘an even bolder and more ambitious flight’ as an historical novel than Micah Clarke.
Then tragedy struck when his sister Annette ‘died just as the sunshine of better days came into our lives’. She had gone ‘at a very early age as a governess to Portugal and sent all her salary home,’ he mourned in Memories and Adventures, and had died of influenza ‘at the very moment when my success would have enabled me to recall her from her long servitude.’
to Amy Hoare SOUTHSEA, FEBRUARY 1890
I know that we have your sympathy in our grief for the loss of our dear Annette. She died on the 13th of influenza, complicated by pneumonia. I wired offering to go through, but my sister there and my mother both thought I could do no good, as two good doctors were in attendance. I went to London & saw my mother off. She reached Lisbon 3 days before the end, but it is doubtful whether A ever recognized her. We can hardly realise it yet—she was the prop of the family—the pick and flower of our little flock. She died just as Innes passed his preliminary. It was as if some higher power saw that she had done her work—her mission was fulfilled—and so called her away to the rest which she had earned. What nobler or more unselfish life could be imagined.
And for a while, his newfound success as a writer seemed to mean nothing to him.
to Amy Hoare SOUTHSEA, MARCH 13, 1890
We want you to send us down Reg, and promise to let you have him again in as good or better condition than you send him. It seems useless to write to him about it, so I apply to you. Touie would write also but she is down with Rheumatism for a day or two. If you can bring him that would be better still. My only dread is that you would be uncomfortable in this wee house. I may be away at Easter but before and after we are fixtures.
Have you seen my new outrage. ‘The Captain of the Polestar’ is its name. Should you inquire for it at your library I should be grateful. Longman told me today that he was not hopeful about the book, so he only had 750 bound—and lo they were sold out on the very first day. Micah has sold nearly 10,000 and the sale increases. But why bore you with this. I think the profession of writing a very demoralising one, and more likely to turn a man into an egoist & a prig than anything else.
Writing The White Company pulled him out of this mood. Of all his novels, it gave him the most pleasure, he declared near the end of his life: ‘I was young and full of the first joy of life and action, and I think I got some of it into my pages. When I wrote the last line, I remember that I cried: “Well, I’ll never beat that”, and threw the inky pen at the opposite wall, which was papered with duck’s-egg green! The black smudge was there for many a day.’* To Lot
tie, on July 5, 1890, he wrote:
I have finished my great labour, & The White Company has come to an end. The first half is very good, the next quarter is pretty good, the last quarter very good again, and it ends with the true heroic note. Rejoice with me, dear, for I am as fond of Hordle John, and Samkin Aylward and Sir Nigel Loring, as though I knew them in the flesh, and I feel that the whole English speaking race will come in time to be so also.
And though he smarted at some of the reviews after the book came out, when he looked back thirty years later in Memories and Adventures, he was satisfied. ‘I knew in my heart that the book would live and that it would illuminate our national traditions,’ he said: ‘Now that it has passed through fifty editions I suppose I may say with all modesty that my forecast has proved to be correct.’*
Family was still a concern. Innes, now seventeen and aiming at an army career, was finishing his secondary schooling at Richmond School in North Yorkshire. At the end of the school year his headmaster told the Mam that he was ‘sorry to part with Innes. He is one of the nicest boys I have ever had to do with.’ He had yet to pass the entrance exams to become an officer cadet, but ‘with a hard Term’s work I am sure he will next time’.
Their mother took that on herself that summer, telling Conan Doyle that ‘I am working a little in the evenings with the dear boy at French and History. He enjoys being at home. He has that large couch bed in the morning room and the bath room is his dressing room—very tidily arranged.’ And he was a pleasure to have there: ‘He keeps one jolly. “Tell Connie that I suppose she does not want to get married before Christmas and after that she can do it as soon as she likes.” I said “How about the money”—“Oh” said he “I shall borrow some on my expectations!” Very grand!’ But Innes’s idea of his expectations did not altogether convince his older brother, who wrote that autumn:
Dearest Boy—
I never hear anything about your work, and it makes me uneasy. I do hope that you are pegging into it—for it would be a very serious thing if you fail to pass. Remember that if you do go through you will have all your life then for sport or riding or cricket or what you will, but that the success of your whole life depends upon the use that you make of just these few months that are passing. If you are weak on any subject then work from morning to night, holidays or no holidays, at that one until you are strong at it. You have lots of brains, as I know well, and all you want is steady undeviating industry. Think of nothing else then, I beg you, until this is done. Put your heart and soul into it. You will find that work becomes a pleasure when you stick close to it, and you will feel proud of yourself afterwards when you can look back and see that every day has been well spent. Once in the Sappers your position is assured, and you will have a rare good time in a noble profession.*
James Payn, despite his antipathy toward historical novels, accepted The White Company for The Cornhill, paying Conan Doyle an enormous-seeming £200 for serial rights. In October, The Sign of the Four came out as a book, with Conan Doyle telling the publisher that ‘I like the style and get up very much. I trust our venture will have a success’—especially since this time he would be paid royalties. But he still hesitated to put his old plan, to leave Southsea for London, into motion. Then two things happened.
First, before October was out, he was rocked by a letter he received from out of the blue. He told the Mam about it, though his letter dealt first with preparations for The White Company to appear serially in the new year, and also with progress on his play Angels of Darkness:
I send you the first three proofs of the White Company. If in the corrected proofs—that is in the first and third you should see anything amiss let me know of it. Hand them over to the Doctor with my compliments for he said that he would like to look over them. I want them back whenever you have finished with them this is of importance as they are necessary for correcting the other proofs.
I have done what may prove to be a very big stroke since I wrote to you last. I have finished my play ‘The Angels of Darkness’. I had two really good acts done a year ago but could not satisfy myself as in the denouement. Two days ago it suddenly came to me and with a spurt of work I finished the piece. It will do very well now, I think and the end is worthy of the beginning. It is of course founded upon the Study in Scarlet. I have already written to Terry about it. If they put it on in London you must come up for the first night.
But then he turned to a letter that reduced him to tones of awe:
I had such a kind letter from Lawson Tait yesterday—a man with whom I never exchanged a word in my life. He said that He and Lord Coleridge were both great admirers of my ‘Study in Scarlet and of my ‘Sign of Four’. He spoke in the kindest way of them. I must send you the letter which I am now about to answer.
Though Angels of Darkness would disappoint him,* this letter exhilarated him.
Lawson Tait was the physician who had revolutionized abdominal surgery. John Duke, first Baron Coleridge, was a nephew of the poet, and the Lord Chief Justice of England. They were men at the very heads of their professions, with names recognizable to anyone who read newspapers, and in America also, for they had transatlantic reputations. They were not the sort of men one would expect to read ‘shilling shockers’, let alone write a fan letter to the author of one. Yet they had gone to the trouble to let the young author of two not terribly successful detective stories know that they saw something special in them, and in him, and that they hoped to hear further from him about Mr Sherlock Holmes.
For A. Conan Doyle the writer it was a restorative more powerful than any flask of Dr Watson’s brandy; and it was followed by a second experience equally heady for A. Conan Doyle, M.D. In Berlin, Dr Robert Koch, who in 1882 had identified the bacillus causing tuberculosis (often called ‘consumption’), announced that he had discovered a cure, to be demonstrated by his colleague Dr Bergmann in November. As Conan Doyle later recalled in Memories and Adventures:
A great urge came upon me suddenly that I should go to Berlin and see him do so. I could give no clear reason for this, but it was an irresistible impulse and I at once determined to go. Had I been a well-known doctor or a specialist in consumption it would have been more intelligible, but I had, as a matter of fact, no great interest in the more recent developments of my own profession, and a very strong belief that much of the so-called progress was illusory. However, at a few hours’ notice I packed up a bag and started off alone upon this curious adventure.
I went on to Berlin that night and found myself in the Continental express with a very handsome and courteous London physician bound upon the same errand as myself. We passed most of the night talking and I learned that his name was Malcolm Morris and that he also had been a provincial doctor, but that he had come to London and had made a considerable hit as a skin specialist in Harley Street. It was the beginning of a friendship which endured.
But in Berlin, there was no room for him at the demonstration. He applied to the British ambassador, but ‘had a chilly reception and was dismissed without help or consolation’. The Times correspondent covering the event sympathized but could not get him a ticket either. ‘I conceived the wild idea of getting one from Koch himself and made my way to his house,’ Conan Doyle said, but Dr Koch ‘remained a veiled prophet, and would see neither me nor anyone else. I was fairly at my wits’ end.’
The next morning, after failing to bribe his way in, he waited outside the hall in hopes of appealing to Koch’s associate Dr Bergmann directly.
Finally every one had gone in and then a group of men came bustling across, Bergmann, bearded and formidable, in the van, with a tail of house surgeons and satellites behind him. I threw myself across his path. ‘I have come a thousand miles,’ said I. ‘May I not come in?’ He halted and glared at me through his spectacles. ‘Perhaps you would like to take my place,’ he roared, working himself up into that strange folly of excitement which seems so strange in the heavy German nature. ‘That is the only place left. Yes, yes, take my place
by all means. My classes are filled with Englishmen already.’ He fairly spat out the word ‘Englishmen’ and I learned afterwards that some recent quarrel with Morel MacKenzie over the illness of the Emperor Frederick had greatly incensed him. I am glad to say that I kept my temper and my polite manner, which is always the best shield when one is met by brutal rudeness. ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I would not intrude, if there was really no room.’ He glared at me again, all beard and spectacles, and rushed on with his court all grinning at the snub which the presumptuous Englishman had received. One of them lingered, however—a kindly American. ‘That was bad behaviour,’ said he. ‘See here! If you meet me at four this afternoon I will show you my full notes of the lecture, and I know the cases he is about to show, so we can see them together tomorrow.’
‘I attained my end after all,’ Conan Doyle shrugged, and said, ‘I studied the lecture and the cases, and I had the temerity to disagree with every one and to come to the conclusion that the whole thing was experimental and premature.’
He was but a young unknown general practitioner, while Dr Koch would win the Nobel Prize for his 1882 discovery. But ‘from all parts, notably from England, poor afflicted people were rushing to Berlin for a cure, some of them in such advanced stages of disease that they died in the train. I felt so sure of my ground and so strongly about it that I wrote a letter of warning to The Daily Telegraph, and I rather think that this letter was the very first which appeared upon the side of doubt and caution.’
‘I came back a changed man,’ he continued in Memories and Adventures. ‘I had spread my wings and had felt something of the powers within me.’* The world and his future looked different to him now. During the trip he had discussed his old plan with his new friend Dr Malcolm Morris, who had ‘assured me that I was wasting my life in the provinces and had too small a field for my activities’.