The Narrative of John Smith

by Arthur Conan Doyle

  ‘So bad,’ said I, ‘that unless in case of actual attack I cannot

  conceive how any war can be justified.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said the old soldier rising and throwing the stump of his cigar into the grate, ‘that is for the authorities to decide. If they are wrong – why, the responsibility rests with them. It isn’t for the troops to begin moralising about their orders. I’ve often thought that if statesmen had seen a little real fighting they would not declare war with such a light heart. As for us, if we are ordered to Cabul, why to Cabul we must go, if the whole seven deadly sins stood in the way. Besides, wars and pestilences are the prunings of Providence. Perhaps the human tree grows better when its branches are freely lopped. That’s camp-fire philosophy.71 Goodbye. I’ll look in from time to time if I don’t bore you, and see how you get on.’

  CHAPTER 3

  THE DEMON has let go of my ankle this morning but has clutched me by the wrist with his red-hot paw and has left the part hot and pringling. A thick, yellow vapour rolls sluggishly down the street, hanging in heavy folds about the house-tops, as though a great counterpane had been spread over the sleeping city. Solid mud, liquid mud, volatilized mud – all is dreary and miserable.72 Clearly it is not a day when any sensible disease could be induced to take its departure out of a warm, comfortable human economy. I must wait with such patience as I may, consoling myself with the fact that I can hobble about the room now without any particular pain.

  There is an empty house at the other side of the street which has a depressing effect upon me.73 There is a deep-lying sense of the fitness of things in every man’s nature, which causes a vague feeling of annoyance and irritation when his eye rests upon that which is profitless and useless. An idle man, a closed factory, a laid-up vessel and an untenanted house have all something repugnant in them. This particular house stares across at me with two great glassy vacuous eyes, in one of which a cataract has developed in the shape of a ‘to let’ card. If I were a richer man I would pay for a caretaker in order to put some soul into the empty body.

  As the fog lifts, I can make out that my little friend opposite is hard at work upon the paintings. Poor lass, she goes to work with as much care and importance upon her face as though she had been entrusted with a thousand-pound commission. She has her little easel and her canvas, her colours and her brushes – the latter all new from the colour-shop in honour of the great order which she has received. They are all set out with much precision and nicety. Now she comes over to the window, and sits with her much-troubled meditative head supported on her hands. What is her subject to be? Here is a great and weighty question for one small woman to decide. She wonders, no doubt, what Mrs Rundle’s particular taste in art may be. Good Mrs R as a matter of fact would admire the coloured supplement to the Graphic in a new frame very much more than she would the ‘Assumption’ of Murillo in an old one – but then my little friend does not know that. She must think my landlady an ardent connoisseur and art-critic, otherwise why should she lay out so large a sum upon original paintings when she might get a grand, flaring oleograph,74 like a spectrum analysis, for half the money, containing all the colours in nature laid on with a brilliancy which Nature has not yet been able to arrive at. Hullo, the head comes up, and she looks hard across at our house, running her eye over the whole front. Ha, my dear, I can read your thoughts! You are wondering whether a picture of this dingy smoke-dried old edifice would be acceptable to its owner. Apparently the inspection is not satisfactory, for down goes the anxious head again. Shall it be a ‘girl at the well,’ or a ‘woodland scene’ or the ‘village green’? The old gentleman is looking anxiously at her over the top of his newspaper, fearing perhaps with the petty selfishness of age that she may give the thing up in despair, and that the precious sovereign will have to be returned. At last, however, she has an idea and gets fairly to work, to her companion’s evident relief. It is a landscape, I should judge, from the long sweeping strokes.

  By the way, I trust she won’t draw a fishing boat or anything appertaining to one. No doubt they are very picturesque objects but when one has seen about fifty thousand of them, drawn in fifty thousand styles by fifty thousand different artists, one’s thirst for them becomes satiated. If I should never see another I should not pine for want of them. ‘Arrival of a smack in a storm.’ That was the title of one of the pictures in a small colonial collection, but on looking up expecting to see the inevitable brown lug-sail and bearded mariner I was agreeably surprised to find that the sketch represented a domestic disagreement which had ended by the strong-minded wife administering what is known to the fancy75 as a ‘nose-ender’ to her unfortunate spouse.76 The idea was original and the artistic handling superb. The middle distance was effectively portrayed and the chiaro-obscuro all that could be desired. The management of the light and shade, especially of the light of resentment in her eye, and of the shade which some previous attack had left upon her husband’s optic, was remarkably effective. The arrangement of the lady’s drapery, and the power of perspective and foreshortening by which the artist expressed the flattening of the most prominent feature of the gentleman’s countenance, reminded us of Fra Angelico at his best. Some little blame must however be mixed with our own praise. The table in the centre of the room has a decidedly wooden look, the poker is somewhat stiff and there is a want of spirit about the empty gin bottle upon the mantelpiece. There now – after that I think when this gout leaves me I shall apply for the billet of art-critic for any of our learned weeklies.

  The Colonies! Ah me, what a flood of memories and thoughts and regrets the word brings with it! What recollections of sad days and of happy ones, of good men and of bad, of flush times and of misery. There is no dead-level of existence over there. Fortune shuffles up the cards pretty often and at every deal the game fluctuates and changes. The best men and the worst that I have ever known live under the Southern Cross. All Old England’s best flowers and all her worst weeds have been carried across the seas.

  I was a very young fellow at the time of the gold-rush in Australia77 and the harum-scarum happy-go-lucky life suited my Bohemian disposition to a nicety.78 One needs the elasticity of youth to stand an existence of that kind. When a man’s cartilage has all turned to bone he does not adapt himself to circumstances with the same readiness. Sheep-tending and cattle-driving, digging at Ballarat and bursting the proceeds at Melbourne on bad spirits at a guinea a bottle are all occupations which are a little trying to the constitution. Worst of all was it when, having paraded up and down Collins Street for a week or two, getting rid of our money with both hands, we found ourselves some fine morning with empty pockets and with no means of returning to the mines or of travelling up country. We would lie by then in the slums, living as best we could and waiting for some lucky chance, or the advent of some trustful ‘new chum’ with lending proclivities, to provide us with the means of getting back to our work.

  The incidents of one of these intervals of enforced idleness – most spirit-subduing of all conditions – are still fresh in my recollection. There were four of us, all penniless, all waiting for something to turn up, and all sleeping at night in empty hogsheads or any other shelter we could find. One of our number was an Englishman of good birth who retained through all his colonial experiences a drawl, an eyeglass, a pair of long Dundreary whiskers, and even some appearance of fashion in the cut of his old coat and threadbare trousers. One night, hungry and cheerless, we met together and found that among the four of us we had just money enough to provide some sort of coarse meal. The small sum was handed over with many exhortations and admonitions to our English swell, who advanced boldly into one of the principal butcher’s shops while we stood palpitating outside. With jaunty step, flourishing cane, and eyeglass duly adjusted, our ambassador swaggered round the shop pricing the primest joints in a lordly way while the tradesman waited respectfully for his commands. ‘You’ve nothing over two shillings a pound, hey?’ asked the customer sternly. ‘That is our price for p
rime joints, sir.’ ‘And what do you charge for – aw – lights, hey?’ ‘Four pence a pound, sir,’ said the tradesman in surprise. ‘Then weigh me out three pounds of lights,’ said our swell, laying a shilling upon the counter. He was leaving with his purchase when the butcher, unable to restrain his astonishment any longer, exclaimed, ‘Surely, sir, you are not going to eat that!’ ‘I have a dawg,’ explained our messenger as he hurried out with his parcel to where his three hungry and impatient companions were eagerly awaiting him. ‘I have a dawg’ became a sort of cant phrase in the camp after that, whenever anyone wished to put the blame of his actions upon another.79

  I remember that the sailors of a merchant vessel which was unloading sacks of potatoes on Melbourne quay were surprised to see our aristocratic-looking friend leaning against their pile of bags and watching them through his eyeglass as they worked. They may have thought it an act of condescension on the part of this gaudy mortal that he should take an interest in their labours. When they discovered afterwards that he had slit one of the bags with his penknife and that he had departed with his coat tails and his high hat crammed full of their vegetables, they were probably less gratified at his notice. I don’t know that these little vignettes of the past are of much interest to anyone, but they may serve to add a dash of life to the day book of an invalid. In those wild old days we were not very strait-laced, but we managed to get a good deal of amusement out of life. You remember the American Humourist’s wise and witty aphorism: ‘Virtuous people are happy – but they are never very happy.’ That may, however, be balanced by the fact that the virtuous man, conscious of his own integrity, can never be wholly and completely miserable.

  Talking of humour, how very difficult it is to define in what that very subtle quality consists or whence it comes. I have been reading of late Emerson’s ‘Essay upon the Comic,’ and very sad and depressing reading it is.80 To explain a joke is proverbially dangerous but to analyse one and to show by hard rules why we should laugh and when we should laugh is a prelude to melancholy madness. Yet when a man, on account of certain words falling upon his tympanum, is straightway taken with violent spasms of his diaphragm and convulsions of every muscle of his body, accompanied by hideous facial grimaces and considerable uproar, it is only natural that he and his friends should desire to know what the cause of the phenomenon might be. Supposing that only one mortal was endowed with the sense of humour and that all the rest of the human race was uniformly grave, what consultations would be held, and clinical lectures delivered, whenever the humorous one indulged in an outburst of merriment. In that case laughter would be placed among the nervous diseases somewhere between hysteria and epilepsy, and large doses of asafoetida and bromide of potassium would soon take the fun out of the patient.

  How strange to trace the course of a joke in the human economy. Entering through the eye or ear, it travels along the optic or auditory nerve to the brain where it is referred to some special humourous centre – which, by the way, is wanting in five men and nine women out of every ten. Thence it travels at the ascertained rate of 147 feet per second (vide Rutherford on nerve force81) along the great jocular or phrenic nerve, until it reaches the diaphragm or breathing muscle which separates the chest from the abdomen. This great muscle, responding to the nervous stimulus, begins to contract violently – and that’s where the laugh comes in.

  When you hear of a politician exclaiming ‘that thousands of pounds are being squandered upon education, while many a poor man in the country has not money enough to buy whisky,’ or when you read that the sentence ‘Mr Gladstone has burned his boats and his bridges’ has been reported in the daily papers as ‘Mr Gladstone has burned his coats and his breetches,’ you feel inclined to laugh. It is the unexpected and novel character of each assertion which produces this effect, just as an unexpected finger poked between your ribs makes you squirm and writhe. Again, when Mr Clemens82 tells us ‘never to put off till tomorrow what we can possibly postpone until the day after tomorrow,’ it is clearly the daring unconventionality of the remark which sets us tittering. Emerson recognises this element of surprise in the Comic. Carlyle, who had a vein of grim but very genuine humour in his composition, defines the quality as being ‘a sympathy with the underside’ – a description which is subtle to the verge of incomprehensibility. Old Thomas was never very strong on definitions. His explanation of Genius, as being ‘an infinite capacity for taking pains,’ has been often quoted, but is, I take it, the most symmetrically and completely false definition which has ever been advanced, though as a statement of what genius is not it is crisp and concise.83 I have only known one or two men in my life who might come under the category, and the predominant features of their characters were that they had the power of arriving at results intuitively and instinctively, which would cost other men much trouble and labour.84 Genius is a strong inborn hereditary mental aptitude in any particular direction.

  What is humour? – what is genius? I’ll give you a third, and a tougher and more vital conundrum. What is instinct? When we have made that point clear we shall have gained a master-key which will open up a good many of the secrets of nature.

  Why is it that the young chicken begins to peck, the pointer to point or the baby to suck without requiring any tuition? Though use has blunted our appreciation of instinct, this is one of the most mysterious of problems. No one has communicated to this dog, chicken or baby what they are to do, and yet they set to work of their own accord exactly as their parents did before them. The young creature, considered individually and alone, can know nothing of the uses of the organs with which Nature has endowed it. Any knowledge it has can only come from its being one of a series and from its being so closely connected with its ancestors that their experience is practically its experience also.

  What is instinct then? You know how Edwin Arnold answers the question in one of the most brilliant of his essays.85 ‘Instinct is memory,’ says he – as pregnant a combination of three words as ever was put together. Instinct is memory. This puppy who points is no new dog but one who has lived through all the centuries – a graft from the life of her mother, who was a graft from the life of her mother and so through countless ages. When we view the lower forms of animal life the truth of the principle becomes apparent. The amoeba is a little morsel of colourless jelly which propagates its species by dividing down the centre and so splitting into two young amoeba, each of which having grown to the size of their parent repeats the process of generation. Now in the case of this simple organism it is quite plain that the creature is eternal, and that the amoeba of today is not only a descendant of the amoeba of prehistoric time, but is actually the same creature. The amoeba cannot die. So in the case of higher and more complex forms of life, although the method of generation is less primitive, it may be none the less true that the individual is eternal. That our memory can recall little of a former existence is hardly surprising when we consider how dim and imperfect is our recollection of the first few years of the very life which we are leading now.

  What a weight Arnold’s theory imparts to the most trivial things – if anything can be said to be trivial in this universe! The chicken which scrapes in our backyard is no creature of yesterday but is the primitive fowl, hatched in the dawn of the ages and destined to live until the close of time – though the little empty head is too busy with worm-seeking and grain-picking to be conscious of its ever-recurring existences. Even in that picking and seeking, however, it shows us plainly that it has acquired knowledge which can only be referred to some foregoing experience.

  There is a remark of Crabbe Robinson in his highly interesting journal which has a bearing on this subject. ‘We can hardly allow a future eternity,’ says he, ‘without supposing that we have eternally existed. A thing could not be created in time for eternity.’86 That statement has a ring of truth about it and, taken with Arnold’s theory, supplies food for much high thought. It is time to get onto another siding, though, or we may find ourselves in dark places.
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  I wish Science would try and make up her mind as to what is and what is not true. I object to the scientific bully with his mouth full of figures and statistics, who reeks with contempt if he finds that you believe in the theory of yesterday and yet is ready to commit assault and battery upon you if you hint that his explanation of today may not be absolutely final. Couldn’t our scientific friends draw up two tables, one of what they know for certain and the other of what is open to question? I am afraid the printer wouldn’t have a very big job in striking off the first, though he might exhaust his stock of paper over the other. I don’t care about taking a tenant into my brain, and then just when he is snugly settled down, finding him to be worthless and having to evict him.87

  Now take the sun for example.88 Ever since I first took to milk I have had it driven into me that the sun was an enormous mass of burning matter, which warmed us just as any other great fire would do. When I grew up I read voluminous scientific treatises which reasserted and confirmed the teachings of the nursery. Have I not committed to memory the weight of the sun, and the amount of fuel which that weight represents, and how long it will last, and what will happen when it snuffs out – together with gorgeous descriptions of incandescent hydrogen and molten helium and other such madness? What details have I not collected together, and docketed and stored away in the pigeon-holes of my memory to the exclusion of other matter? And what is the end of it all? Why, the other day, happening to babble some of this information to a friend well posted in modern science, he looked at me with as much interest as if I were a Calopterus gracilis or some other curious fossil. ‘There are still people alive then,’ said he, ‘who believe that the sun is on fire.’ ‘I always thought so,’ said I, feeling particularly small. ‘My dear fellow,’ he observed compassionately, ‘it is a vulgar error which has exploded some time ago. If it were on fire, where are the stokers who trim it so carefully that it never blazes too much or too little – more on this side or on that? Where are the ashes produced by such a combustion? Where is the oxygen to feed the flame? Where is the—’ ‘But where does the heat come from?’ I cried. ‘Why, it is generally supposed by advanced scientists to arise from an electrical influence which the sun exercises upon our atmosphere. A galvanic battery will heat a wire at a distance but does not become hot itself. It’s the same with the sun. The heat of a fire won’t pass through glass and the heat of the sun will. That shows that they are entirely different. Don’t let anyone know that you thought the sun was on fire or they’ll wonder where you have been shut up all this time.’ ‘It’s a mean fraud,’ said I indignantly. ‘Here have I been reckoning up how many billion tons of fuel there are left, and bustling round to do what I could to keep it alight, and waking up at night in a fright for fear it should want looking after, and now it turns out that, as like as not, it is a glittering iceberg.’ It shook my confidence in the solar system. I have never felt the same towards the sun since, and I never will again.