Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters
Page 54
I saw Nelson yesterday. He was rather better than I feared. One feels that Ida should be there. I dont think they can move him for some time. He is very emaciated but full of spirit.
Innes is here & plays cricket with me today. Then he goes north.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM
I send £100 with best love. There is no money I get such good value for. Innes is in great form. Poor Nelson still very weak. I have not utterly lost all hope but the chances are poor. The fear now is lest Ida knock up. I gave all advice I could yesterday, but she naturally hates to leave him.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, OCTOBER 14, 1908
We are all well here—dear Jean in excellent spirits, but her appetite & sleep not so good as I could wish.
I go to Innes tomorrow (Thursday) and then from Camberley to London to see Nelson. Return here Friday evening. Tonight I give a lecture here on Gibbon.
I have done an excellent prize fighting story ‘The Lord of Falcon-bridge’. I never did a better. I am busy also improving the last act of ‘Fires of Fate’ which may prove a winner yet.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM
I go down in the motor today to fetch my wandering bird & bring her back tomorrow. The house is indeed dull without her.
We are building out the kitchen wing of the house so as to have two more bedrooms. It will be done in a month. The bedrooms will be above. Below a store room & book room. When the crisis comes we shall want more room. The darling is very brave and sensible so I trust all will be well, but am naturally uneasy. We must guard above all from after effects. Both Lottie & Dodo have felt them badly.
The children return on Monday. They have had a very joyous round of visits & write cheery letters. I told you about K’s five prizes, did I not?
We have nine little tropical birds in one big cage which are a very great joy. I thought if she had them in her room when she is bad it would cheer her up.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, OCTOBER 20, 1908
It will be over in good time on Wednesday and if you are ready to depart in the afternoon, it will do splendidly.
There is a room on the ground floor, which saves all stairs and has hot & cold water. At the front by the door. Would you like that? Then there is Mary’s room. And there is a very small bright bachelor room next it. You can choose whichever you like. There is a married suite in the front which is our only double set so we keep it clear for the married. But you shall have that also if you prefer it with the only proviso that no ink is allowed in there, as the colours are rather light and dainty. You as a housekeeper will appreciate that. Whereas in the other rooms, especially the lower ones, nothing matters. Your breakfast too would be served hotter down below. But you shall say the word.
Nelson Foley died on January 3, 1909. In the midst of his final illness, Conan Doyle had been ill too, leading to surgery and a painful recuperation the same month. ‘Today I have been allowed for the first time to write a letter,’ he wrote on January 19th to his old literary hero George Meredith,
and my first is to you to tell you how touched I was by your kind thought. Indeed when I read your letter I felt it was worth all the pain. I was operated on for internal hemorrhoids, a minor operation and yet attended, I am told, by more painful after effects than almost any other in surgery. I had a week of unbroken pain of an obscene & hateful description but I learned the blessings of morphia. Surely it is an argument for design that an inert vegetable should produce that which is so absolutely needful for a suffering human. Now I can only complain of discomfort which will in a week or two be a mere memory. Once more all thanks to you, dear master of us all, for your kind word at a bad time.*
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, FEBRUARY 1, 1909
Yesterday I had a small supplementary operation and today I feel I am a new man. A very few days now will restore me to perfect health.
I have been by no means idle during my illness. On the contrary my brain has been particularly bright. During three weeks I have bought my neighbour’s land for £1400. This will give me room for garage, stables & chauffeurs house (all ready built & only wanting some small alteration) on my own land & next door, so it will pay for itself very handsomely & be a great convenience.
2. I have made my will thoroughly so as to safeguard all interests, present and to come.
3. I have opened up negotiations for representing Edinburgh University in Parliament.
4. I have written two new long poems, and propose to bring out a new volume of verse this year. I have also at least one good new story in my head. All my papers also have been brought up to date. So really I dont think I have lost much by my illness.
Now I will stay at home & work until Jean’s trouble is over. Everything is ready. Such a pretty nursery!
Jean’s first child, a son, was born on March 17th—and a skirmish over what to name him broke out with the ancestry-minded Mam.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, MARCH 1909
My idea of a name was James Denis Pack Conan Doyle. We should call him Denis. The James is for Mr Leckie. How’s that?
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, MARCH 1909
Our own chief trouble about Percy is that it is already in use. If you have one grandson called Percy surely that meets the case. Why have two cousins with the same name? However we are most anxious to do what you want. As you say there is lots of time.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, MARCH 1909
Neither Jean nor I can refuse anything you want so Percy let it be. His full name (latest edition) will be Denis Stewart Percy Conan Doyle.
Jean does splendidly, and the Boy looks 3 weeks old.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, APRIL 1909
The lovely ladle has arrived. It is much admired. Jean will write about it. We have 10 Colonial visitors today so our hands are full.
Baby is in capital form. I have never seen so bright and intelligent a child. His head too is wonderfully domed. He will do deeds if he lives.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, EARLY MAY 1909
All goes very well, dearie. The boy slowly puts on ounces. He is now 8 pounds. He is a delicately & beautifully built creature with a really perfectly modelled head.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, MAY 19, 1909
A curious incident occurred lately which would interest you. You remember the ‘Family Portrait’ which came from the Scotts, as I understand it, in Ireland. I had it cleaned & hung. Last week Jean’s Uncle Dick Leckie who is a dilettante saw it & at once said ‘why that is Lord Strafford’. I got Uncle James’ Baronage out which had an engraving of Strafford, and there could be no doubt. Apparently the said engraving was taken from a picture very like mine & was described as ‘after Van Dyke’. The question in my mind is whether this may not be the original Van Dyke. If it is not then it is one of several copies. I shall get an expert’s opinion.
I have another expert of the British Museum coming on Monday to advise me about the fossils we get from the quarry opposite. Huge lizard’s tracks.
Huge lizard’s tracks! Fossils intrigued Conan Doyle as early as 1873, when he wrote home from school: ‘We passed through some curious pits where excavations were being made for fossils. I found there a most curious stone, all covered with petrified worms, whose coils I could see distinctly.’ But he was equally intrigued in middle age by fossils near his new home in Sussex, and he pursued his interest with naturalists such as Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, director of the Natural History Museum until recently.* The fossils in the neighbourhood gave Conan Doyle an idea for one of his most successful novels.
Also on his mind was the staging of The Fires of Fate, ‘a modern morality tale in four acts’ based on The Tragedy of the Korosko. It opened at Liverpool’s Shakespeare Theatre on June 11th, and moved to London’s Lyric the next week. ‘Play keeps up very well but I understand it is only this week that we get a real indication,’ Conan Doyle told Innes on July 21st: ‘Frohman [the American producer of Sherlock Holmes] gives very good terms and £500 on account… I don’t mind what they say about the mo
rality but am amazed at the mixed cynicism and obtuseness of some of the critics.’
to Mary Doyle HOTEL METROPOLE, LONDON, JUNE 10, 1909
I dont know the theatre. The Adelphi Hotel is the address. We go tomorrow, Friday morning. All is chaos at present but it will smooth out all right. We regard Liverpool as simply dress rehearsals with audiences—an education for London.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, JUNE 1909
Baby is nearly 10 pounds now—so he progresses. He is a splendid chap! Such dignity! And such a head! He will surely do something great.
If there is a fair chance of coming here dont come to Liverpool. My reason is that we can only get there very late on Thursday—must leave on Sunday & shall be tied to the theatre all day. I should see so little. If you come south it will either have disappeared by then nor be worth your seeing.
to Mary Doyle ADELPHI HOTEL, LIVERPOOL, MID JUNE 1909
Play went very well but we will get it even better for London.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, JUNE OR JULY 1909
Baby is splendid. He is as chubby a boy as ever you saw—and bright as a pin.
The play goes well. I think we have a valuable property. I may tell you that I own it, as well as getting Authors fees. So we shall do well. It is funny to see the people who for 2 years have refused it now wringing their hands.
When will you come to see it?
Its run in London ended October 8th, probably sooner than Conan Doyle hoped. It had been, said a critic for the Westminster Gazette, ‘a sincere effort to use the stage for noble purposes’, but while Conan Doyle always regarded it as some of his best work, ‘it was produced in a very hot summer. I carried it at my own expense through the two impossible holiday months, but when Lewis Waller, who played the hero, returned from a provincial tour to London, he was keen on some new play and my “Fires” were never really burned out.’ The play did not open in New York until the awkward date of December 28th, and closed in three weeks.
By then Conan Doyle had another piece for the theatre in the works, his ‘boxing play’, The House of Temperley; and even while Fires of Fate was contending with critics, Conan Doyle had embraced another controversy with an August 18th letter to the Times headed ‘England and the Congo’.
‘It arose,’ he said in Memories and Adventures, ‘from my being deeply moved by reading evidence concerning the evil rule, not of Belgium, but of the King of the Belgians in the Congo.’ Leopold II had subverted the Congo Free State—created by the Congress of Berlin, and guaranteed by Britain—into a fiefdom run as a slave state, using massacres and maimings to subjugate its people to forced labour on rubber plantations. The helpless Congolese were being championed by a crusading journalist, E. D. Morel, assisted by a former British consul there, an intrepid Irishman, Roger Casement. ‘The greatest crime ever committed in the history of the world,’ Conan Doyle called it, ‘yet we who not only could stop it but who are bound by our sworn oath to stop it do nothing.’
‘My article made such a hit that Northcliffe wanted me to go out as Special Commissioner,’ Conan Doyle told his mother, referring to Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, one of England’s press lords, and owner of The Times along with the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, and other newspapers and magazines.
‘Have other work to do,’ he demurred, but he spent a good detail of his time on the Congo controversy, through 1910 and 1911, and into 1912, with Morel and Casement as stalwart allies. Morel he respected greatly; Casement he admired so much that he based a character in his next big novel on him. The Crime of the Congo, as Conan Doyle called it in a lengthy pamphlet published in October, aroused his indignation even more strongly than the Edalji case. It was ‘crime unparalleled in its horror’, he insisted to an American editor, ‘a mixture of wholesale expropriation and wholesale massacres all done under an odious guise of philanthropy. There is not a grotesque, obscene, or ferocious torture which diseased human ingenuity could invent which has not been used against these harmless and helpless people.’
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, OCTOBER OR NOVEMBER 1909
I am hard at the Congo. I have (1) written to the President, U.S. & had a very handsome acknowledgment (2) written to the German Emperor (3) to sixty American papers, a circular letter (4) Two letters to Petit Bleu in Brussels (5) Two to Times (6) The book, the proofs of which I hope to get today (7) Great number of private appeals (8) Arranged German & French translations.
So I dont think I could do more. I intend to speak at a number of meetings—one at Hull—in November.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, NOVEMBER 1909
All goes well, dear. We got the Duke of Norfolk through your plan. I am now angling for Archbishop Bourne. The British Gov said they would not act before the New Year so we have to get the country red hot by then. I think it is on the way to it.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, NOVEMBER 30, 1909
I am back after my Odyssey. I have no engagement now till Brighton on Dec 12th. But the Boxing Play is in full rehearsal so I shall have plenty to think of. The Fires of Fate will come out in Chicago on Dec 6th, so we may have a little boom in plays.
Apart from this we are much excited over our Autowheel. It is a small invention which turns an ordinary bike into a motor bike at will.* We showed it at the Stanley Show and it made a tremendous sensation, and is the talk of the Cycle world. We have the success and we are now concerned to handle it wisely and well. I think that there should be a fortune in it when once we can get them turned out. Wall & Co have the patent rights of the whole world, and I am 2/3 of Wall & Co, holding 60 out of 90 shares. It gives us all an excellent chance of building castles in the air.
Baby expands like a flower. He is splendid. They say he is the image of me, but I can see a lot of subtle expressions which I have only seen in you, so we share him. It is funny to think of a bit of both our souls in that dear little body. He has a beautiful nature.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, DECEMBER 1909
Just a word of love, dearest Mam, for Xmas. I am very rushed or would send long letter. Rehearsals all day. It goes splendidly so far as we can judge. I am very keen that you should see it. I send £5 for Xmas present. Next year will be a very eventful year financially for us. Everything seems to be coming to a head at once. But at present things are slow—but sure. Jean splendid.
‘Temperley goes well,’ Conan Doyle told Innes toward the end of February 1910: ‘If we can do this in Lent we have high hopes after Easter.’
‘No Congo play,’ he added, ‘but another Holmes one.’ The Stonor Case was the name he gave to an adaptation of his classic Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Speckled Band’, but it was still unfinished when he wrote to his mother after a much-needed vacation in Cornwall. (Where he found inspiration for another Holmes story, ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’, for that December’s Strand.)
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, APRIL 6, 1910
I am so very sorry if I have seemed remiss in writing. It is, as you say, some time, but every day has brought its task.
Physically I am splendid. The holiday at Mullion did me a world of good. Since then I have dieted myself carefully, and what a difference it makes to body and mind. The thing is to eat plenty of lean meat, and then the body consumes its own fat, which is doing it no good. Avoid all stodge, and bread, butter, and all other flatulent things. Such a difference at once!
I have been busy at many things but most of all at a new long Holmes play which should be a great hit. I have done quite half and it promises splendidly. I have many literary schemes also in my head.
to Mary Doyle HOTEL METROPOLE, LONDON, APRIL 21, 1910
I am very sorry if you expected me to write to you about Innes’ Majority. I did write to him. I’ll try and be more regular in my correspondence with you. It is not want of will.
My little play ‘A Pot of Caviare’ went on as curtain raiser to Temperley and did very well. It is gruesome but interesting and dramatic, I hope. Things have been shocking in London, with a general slump
in all plays. We are about the only one which weathered the storm, and now with the season before us we hope to increase continually. What with Xmas time, General Election, Lent &c we have hardly ever had a fair chance. We have now reached 120 performances.
Conan Doyle’s House of Temperley was not popular with women because of the boxing, but worse befell when King Edward VII, already confined to bed by bronchitis, suffered a series of heart attacks and died on May 6th.* The national mourning ‘killed it outright’, Conan Doyle wrote in his memoirs.
to Mary Doyle WINDLESHAM, EARLY MAY 1910
We are all very uneasy about the King’s illness. It would be a blow if he passed away. Apart from the national loss the present London season was to have been one of the gayest on record. Let us trust that all will not be clouded at the last.
Even as I wrote the words I had a telephone from Stewart to say that the position was most critical—I fear that means that it is desperate. I can hardly realise yet how far reaching the consequences may be.
Jean is keeping very well and cheery, while our little boy is a perpetual joy. He is really a splendid little fellow.
Kingsley went back to Eton a few days ago. He is a fine chap, much bigger than I, but has somewhat outgrown his strength, weakening his heart a little, very much as Innes did. I mean to keep him at Eton till the end of summer & then give him a year in Switzerland, as you did me, before he begins his medical classes. Thus his health will be built up, and he will have time for his Matric Examination.