The Narrative of John Smith

by Arthur Conan Doyle

  ‘But not just yet awhile,’ said Dr Julep with a twinkle of the eyes, jumping up and putting on his hat. ‘Things jog along in their own way ohne hast und ohne rast.103 It will be a terrible long time yet before the world is ripe. Even death won’t teach us anything, but will only set us working under fresh guises and in new combinations, until the great consummation comes. And however we work or in whatever form we contribute to this all-important end, we are equally fulfilling a lofty mission. If in the lapse of years and the endless change of matter our molecules, or some of them, helped to form a door handle or an earthenware pot, we are none the less playing as dignified a part in the great scheme as now. All works to the one end. There is no small and there is no great in nature. The breaking of a pane of glass is as important an event in the working-out of the all-comprehensive problem, as is the death of a man. And now, my dear friend, I must positively run away from you and your dangerously fascinating problems. No imprudence, remember: plain living, no wine, perfect rest and regular medicine. Don’t imagine that you are quite out of the woods yet. Adieu!’

  Adieu, my cheery little physician, adieu! I declare when I hear a man put forward views which are not founded upon the idea that the Divine being is a Moloch or a fiend, my very soul leaps within me. I feel as though he had brought a whiff of bracing air into the room with him. The inane doctrine of fearing the source of all good, and of loving what we cannot comprehend, is a great stifling nightmare which has weighed us all down too long. All things are being woven into one beautiful harmonious pattern, and though we see so small a section of it that we cannot comprehend the symmetry of the whole vast design, yet the day will come when it will be completed and when we may appreciate it, and understand how we have contributed towards it. Perhaps evil and sin and pain may prove to be merely the dark background which is necessary to make the bright design stand out hard and clear.

  Death is an ugly word, but from my experience – and I have seen many deathbeds – it is not usually a very painful process. In many cases a man dies without having incurred during the whole of his fatal illness as much actual pain as would have arisen from a whitlow104 or an abscess of the jaw. And it is just those deaths which seem most terrible to the onlooker which are the least so to the actual sufferer. When a man is overtaken by an express and shivered into fragments, or when he falls from a fourth floor window and is dashed into a jelly, the unfortunate spectators are convulsed with horror. Yet it is very doubtful if the deceased, could he return to life, would be able to remember anything at all about the transaction. There are a few complaints, notably cancer and some abdominal ailments, which cause considerable pain before proving mortal; but the various fevers, apoplexy, blood poisonings of every variety, lung diseases and in fact the great majority of serious maladies are not commonly characterised by much suffering. I remember some thirty years ago passing through the wards of the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary105 and seeing the actual cautery applied in a case of spinal disease. The white hot iron was pressed firmly into the patient’s back, without any anaesthetic being used to deaden the pain, and what with the terrible sight and the nauseating smell of burned flesh, I felt sick and faint. Yet to my astonishment the patient never flinched or moved a muscle of his face, and on my enquiring afterwards he informed me that the proceeding was absolutely painless, a remark which was corroborated by the operating surgeon. ‘The nerves are so completely and instantaneously destroyed,’ he explained, ‘that they have no time to convey a painful impression.’ I have often thought since then that many other things in nature which appear to us to be very harsh and cruel, might perhaps take quite another complexion if we had the testimony of the people principally concerned. David Livingstone, lying torn and mangled under the claws of the lion, must have been a horror-inspiring spectacle, and yet he has left it on record that his own sensations were pleasurable rather than otherwise. I am very sure that if the newly born infant and the man who had just died could compare their experiences, the former would have proved to be the greatest sufferer. It is not for nothing that the first thing that the newcomer into this planet does is to open its toothless mouth and protest energetically against the decrees of fate.

  ‘There is nothing small in Nature and there is nothing great,’ says Julep. It sounds a little paradoxical, but when I come to look into it I can see exactly what he is driving at. He means, I take it, that every tiniest as well as every largest thing is working to one end, each in its own place, and that that end is of such enormous majesty and importance as to render everything else subordinate and insignificant. The small things which we might be tempted to look upon as ludicrous or unsavoury are of as much intrinsic importance as the weightiest which the human mind can conceive. The slime left by a snail upon a gravel path has as definite a function in the scheme of creation as has the Milky Way, and the cuttings of a man’s nails are as much part of Nature’s stock in trade and as necessary for the correct working out of her calculations as are Jupiter and all his moons. The little screws look very insignificant beside the big piston, but if you removed all your screws where would your engine be then?

  I daresay if we only knew a little more about the matter we would find that the large things in Nature are arranged on exactly the same lines and under the same laws as what we presume to call the small ones. For example, that the millions of heavenly bodies have taken up exactly the same positions in the firmament which as many grains of sand would do if they were removed from the action of gravitation and allowed to arrange themselves in vacuo. I remember once looking through a microscope at the crystals of snow, and shortly afterwards through a telescope at those nebulae which according to some astronomers are the raw material of the worlds of the future. In the infinitesimally small ice-spicules, and in the indescribably vast masses of vapour, there was a marvellous coincidence of shape. Nature had built them on the same design but on different scales. Look at what is called the dumb-bell nebula, and then at the feathery snow crystals, and then, if you have the chance, at the ultimate fibrils which form your own muscles, and you will see how fond Nature is of repeating her patterns, and what a wonderful uniformity there is running through all creation.

  Good Mrs Rundle, the lodging-house keeper, came up to lay my luncheon and is glad to see me so much better. I think I have mentioned that she is a widow handicapped in the race of life by three children. It is no wonder, poor soul, if her face is a little hard and so puckered up with wrinkles that it looks as though her skin had been made for a larger woman, and she had been compelled to take in tucks in it. Every one of those lines is a record of some fresh trial. Evil fate has scratched its memoranda all over her face as Robinson Crusoe cut the days and weeks into the post. If we could read that grim register we should perhaps be inclined to smile at the petty things which can have such an effect on a human being. Genuine griefs there have been, no doubt. The face in her portrait downstairs taken ten years ago is as smooth as a child’s, and the sudden death of her life-partner was the beginning of those ominous lines. When once, however, Destiny takes to chalking things up, it is astonishing how quickly the score runs up, and what small worries may add to it. That little line beneath the eye dates from the day when the very eligible young tenant disappeared at the end of his month and left behind him a dilapidated hair-trunk containing a sewer grating, half a dozen bricks, and a fifty-six pound weight. That other one beside it made its appearance when little Mary caught the scarlatina and the first-floor front, who had been reckoned upon as a fixture, moved out at once for fear of infection. There is one little scratch for the rise in coals, and another to mark the day when the Major fell down the back stairs, and another which dates from the time when my predecessor in the second floor announced his intention of departing forthwith unless one of Johann Lehman’s pupils would cease worrying an unfortunate violin, whose frightful screams and wails had aroused the compassion of the whole neighbourhood. What a catalogue of little miseries, all of them real enough and grave enough to her at the time
, are chronicled in that mesh work of wrinkles. The peine forte et dure106of daily life has crushed all the soul out of her. Poor dumb inarticulate creature, from her anxious joyless eyes to the ends of her worn and distorted fingers she is a walking protest against the thought that this life is anything but a fleeting and transient stage which leads to something higher. If this existence were to prove to be the be-all and end-all with her, then Creation would be nothing more than a grim joke upon the part of the Creator.

  Strange how women love to talk of what has been saddest in their lives. Even in the lowest orders a man usually keeps his past griefs to himself while a woman cackles them forth to anyone who will listen to her. When a wound has skinned over, a not unpleasant titillation is caused by touching it, and so perhaps they derive some mental satisfaction from dwelling on the memory of former misfortune. The one great blow which Mrs Rundle has had in her life was the sudden death of her husband, and yet she cannot lay the cloth for my luncheon without pouring every detail of the matter into my ears.

  ‘Which we’d had words in the morning,’ said she, ‘and he slammed the door that hard that he brought down the terrar-cottar statuette beside the hatstand which I’d given two and threepence to an Italian for only the week before. It was a beautiful statuette, and after the funeral Mr Mason the decorator round the corner had it joined together as good as new, only that he put the left arm wrong side foremost which gave it a kind of constrained and twistified sort of attitude. I has just a-finished the laying of the dinner when Mr Browning of the firm comes driving to the door in a growler.107 “Your husband’s very ill, Mrs Rundle,” says he. “I think you has best come back with me,” says he. Lor’ it’s all like a dream after that, or as if I’d read it in a book, the gentleman’s grave kind face, and the long drive with the rattling of the wheels and the jingling of the windows! Then the narrow door, and the stone steps and the little office, and someone saying “Better not let her up!” They tried to hold me back but I broke through them and there he was, lying on three chairs cold and stiff with a handkerchief over his face and his waistcoat all unbuttoned. I felt real ashamed that he hadn’t a cleaner shirt on, with all those gentlemen looking. We were taken back together – I don’t rightly remember how, and they laid him out in the back room, but they put him in a draught between the door and the window, so when they were all gone I moved him into his own corner. It wasn’t till I went into the parlour and saw the plate laid for him and his knife and fork and beer jug, and the long cherry-wood pipe108 standing ready by the side of the fire, that it came home to me that the poor dear was really gone and that I should never hear his voice again. Ah, sir, he was a dear good husband to me and I haven’t a word to say against him – though he did break the terrar-cottar statuette.’

  The poor soul has evidently got the two calamities so coupled in her mind that she cannot discuss the one without conjuring up the other. That thought of hers too about the dirty shirt when she saw her husband lying dead was characteristic and distinctive. It was not heartlessness, but merely want of imagination. Her mind would not rise to the conception of death, but the soiled linen was well within its range and made an instant appeal to it. It’s the fine dust of daily petty worries and troubles which plays the deuce with the delicate human machine. We may rouse our souls to some supreme effort, but we cannot steel them against the slow sapping of a sordid commonplace existence. Joan of Arc or Charlotte Corday would soon lose their heroism if condemned to keep a boarding house.109

  There have been theological difficulties downstairs. Dicky and Tommy have been bringing their infantine doubts to their mother who responded – after the fashion of very august ecclesiastical assemblies – by rapping them upon the head with a thimble and threatening to send them to bed. Dicky, who has had a book on natural history with coloured plates presented to him, wants to know what the carnivorous animals lived upon while they were in the Ark. Mary, the little girl, suggested potted meat and was met by wild derision from the two small Colensos.110 Tommy wants to know who Adam and Eve’s children married. Susan the scullery maid, who goes to the Sunday school, suggested Potiphar’s wife and then explained that she was thinking of something else, while the cook’s contribution to the debate was the remark that ‘she never seed what things was coming to!’ Finally the whole question was referred to the second-floor lodger – raised to a higher level, as they say in Parliament – but the wily invalid refused to commit himself. The only practical outcome of the discussion was a resolution supported by landlady, lodger, cook and housemaid that children should be seen and not heard, with an addendum that children should never talk about what they don’t understand – a maxim which, if universally applied, would rather limit the field of human conversation.

  It is all very well to treat this matter lightly but there is a graver side to it as well. The little episode is typical of a process which is going on in every land and has been in every time. It is the moulding of the natural into the conventional – the stamping out of the free healthy impulses of the human mind. A steady pressure is brought to bear upon the child’s bump of enquiry111 until it is quite atrophied away and the mind left mutilated for life. There are very very few who can resist this insidious process, which robs a man of his individuality almost before he knows that he has an individuality to lose. Those two little youngsters in twenty years’ time would probably be honestly shocked to hear anyone propounding the questions which they are asking now, and yet they will be as far away from finding an answer to them. Their present frame of enquiry is a more healthy one than their eventual state of satisfied ignorance. Mother’s teaching is at the root of all the conservatism of the world – and every budding intellect has a natural bias towards radicalism and free thought. Woman’s influence is the brake which is perpetually keeping the human coach from thundering away too precipitately down the road of progress. I know that if I were a leader of the Tory Party I would hurry up the question of female suffrage, for of every million of the new electors nine hundred and fifty thousand would be reactionists to the backbone.112 Did you ever know a woman who was of the opinion that Cromwell may have had some justification for cutting off his good-looking sovereign’s head? The feelings of the sex set in favour of right divine, unquestioning obedience, implicit faith, and mediaevalism generally – and their influence upon the young generation is the strongest influence upon this earth.

  Talking of Charles and his lost cause, it is strange how in this world you will invariably get a body of men to support any idea or doctrine, however absurd or grotesque it may be. No doubt there are thousands living in England now who consider that the Stewarts113 were a most ill-used and persecuted family and that they were shamefully treated by an ungrateful country. Joe Smith with his tablets of beaten gold,114 or the missing heir with his budget of palpable lies,115 have no difficulty in arousing enthusiasm among great crowds of followers. If a man were to stump the country and announce that the moon really was a green cheese – caused by the gradual caseation of the Milky Way – he would soon find himself the leader of a new school of thought. There actually is an imbecile in existence who asserts that the earth is flat and who has persuaded many people to adopt his views.116 As long as there are two sides to a question, so long you will find staunch minorities who attach themselves to obsolete or unpopular opinions. Why, even Cain has had his apologists. Schlegel117 narrates that the Cainites were a powerful body in Central Asia and that a relic of them is still found among the Ishudes, who tell the story of the first murder with a strong party bias, representing Abel as a mean pitiful fellow who richly deserved his fate. No man is too stupid or too wicked not to have a following. It is an exemplification of the clever French aphorism Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l’admire.118

  Miss Oliver sits in the window opposite with her back turned to the street so that the light may fall full upon her easel. If she could only put upon canvas her own graceful dark-clad figure and the rich coil of her bronze-coloured hair showing up against
the ivory whiteness of her neck, she would produce a picture worthy of the Salon. It is a pleasure to me to watch those busy fingers working away so energetically and to think that I am the unknown motive power which has set them going. She has come to the third little daub now, as I reckon, and will have finished by nightfall. Two days’ work for a guinea is not very much, but I have no doubt, poor lass, that she is in high feather about it. I shall look up some of my friends when I get about and see if I cannot persuade them to give her an order for a few of her studies from nature.

  Why is it that mediocrity has such an affection for nature? I confess that I can’t see where all this admiration comes in. When one sees a group of tourists at Chamonix or the Righi open-mouthed and wonder-eyed,119 protesting to each other that the great masses of stone and of congealed water in front of them have had an elevating effect upon their mind, one cannot but marvel at the minds which could be elevated by such means. An elevation of the earth or a depression in it, an accumulation of water in a hollow or the falling of it over a ledge, are all pleasant to an eye accustomed to a uniform landscape and the monotony of city streets, but beyond this merit of variety what is there to recommend it? The human mind should be so enormously superior to, and so infinitely grander than, any mere earthly phenomenon, that it degrades itself and loses its true position whenever it professes to be awestruck or subdued by any combination of matter. There is, I freely own, a fit and proper reverence due to all created things, as being dim reflections of the Creator, but the mind, being the highest and noblest of all his works, must ever be held far above the whole united firmament. Nature is a marvellous thing but not so marvellous as your own entity. Beware of the soul becoming a flunkey where it should be a master. What is size and time and distance to the ethereal elastic spirit which dwells within us? Chateaubriand and Co. have raved about the ‘soul-subduing’ wonders of Niagara – 700 yards of river falling over 150 feet of rock – but in virtue of my superiority I can lie upon this sofa and can conjure up the image of a fall which shall extend from horizon to horizon, and the summit of which shall be higher than the eye can reach, and eternally veiled by its own curtain of spray. Instead of Niagara dwarfing the human mind, the human mind can very readily dwarf Niagara. Mount Everest you say is seven and twenty thousand feet in height, but my mind can evolve clearly the image of a gigantic peak which shoots its snow-clad crest to the very verge of our terrestrial atmosphere. What if the planet Uranus is 1,800,000,000 miles from us, in the twinkling of an eye my fancy can transplant me past it, and I find myself gazing out at the unknown void beyond, and back at our own sun which shines dimly in the remotest distance. There are only two thoughts which the human intelligence cannot attain – eternity and infinitude.120 At all else, from the spores of a sea weed to the grouping of the constellations, it can look down with the intelligent superiority of one, who if not absolute owner, is at least tenant in possession. The attitude of the man of the future towards his surroundings will not be one of wonder and debasement, but rather of high-handed command. We have not realised yet our own towering position in the Universe, or how absolutely all things inanimate are subordinate to us. There will prove to be a deep meaning in the conception of a faith which is capable of transplanting the mountains. Our souls, even during life, may perhaps refuse to be fettered to this petty globe, and may make excursions into its own outlying dominions beyond the uttermost stars. The uncontested phenomena of clairvoyance and of modern spiritualism,121 and the inexplicable powers possessed by the higher esoteric Buddhists,122 are small straws which show the set of the current of coming progress. What says the wise Emerson? ‘A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. The kingdom of man over nature he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.’123