The Narrative of John Smith

by Arthur Conan Doyle

  Concealed them in its eddy.

  A squadron of British horse that night

  Galloping hard through the shadowy light

  Came on the scene of that last stern fight

  And found the Corporal lying

  Silent and grim on the trampled sand,

  With his rifle grasped in his stiffened hand,

  Like a sentry waiting his last command

  Mid a ring of the dead and dying.153

  And still when twilight shadows fall

  After the evening bugle call

  In bivouac and in barrack hall

  They tell the tale of the Corporal

  His death and his devotion.

  And when they speak of him they say

  That perhaps a hidden meaning lay

  In the words he spoke, and that the day

  When his rough bold spirit passed away

  Was the day that he won promotion.

  CHAPTER 6

  WORK A MAN can bear with, but rest is very exhausting. Here have I been lying idle for six long days, and I am as heartily weary as a man can be. But the Doctor is very consoling. Tomorrow if I continue to improve I am to have an hour and a half in the open air. I can walk quite comfortably up and down the room.

  ‘Why don’t you find the bacterium of rheumatism, Doctor,’ said I. ‘If you could manage to sterilise that, we would build a monument to you as high as the Eiffel Tower.’

  ‘Who knows?’ said he, laughing. ‘Who knows? It has been considered to arise from chemical change, but one of these little invisible miscreants may prove to be at the bottom of it.’

  ‘How preposterous it seems,’ I remarked. ‘We are like some defenceless country with open frontiers, exposed to the invasion of every wild tribe of microbes who choose to attack us.’

  ‘Very true. But you have an admirably drilled standing army for your defence.’

  ‘In my case, then,’ said I, ‘the standing army appears to have been defeated, and I am falling back upon my auxiliary forces.’

  ‘Not at all. It has been a contest of six days, but your guards have been victorious. You have read, I presume, the recent investigations on the subject of the functions of the leucocytes.’

  ‘No, I have not seen them.’

  ‘They outdo the wildest dreams of Romance. You know what a leucocyte is? They are little microscopic jelly-like creatures which are found drifting along in our bloodstream.’

  ‘White blood corpuscles?’

  ‘Exactly so. There are millions of them in the human body, but their function has never been made out, and the general view among physiologists was that they were purposeless little blobs of jelly, or at least that they performed some very minor office in the system. It has now, however, been very clearly made out by recent experiment that these creatures are the most trusty and energetic friends of the human race – the special bodyguards and household troops which garrison his system.’

  ‘And how that?’ I asked.

  And here the manuscript ends, mid-page.

  NOTE ON THE MANUSCRIPT

  THIS TEXT has been published from an untitled manuscript that was among the Conan Doyle papers sold at auction in 2004 and acquired by the British Library. This manuscript, we may safely assume, constitutes the novel as Conan Doyle reconstructed it from memory after it had been lost in the post on its way to the publishers.

  The manuscript is written in four A4 sized notebooks which are hardcover and bound in black cloth. Filled with neat and easily readable handwriting, the 154 pages they contain have been numbered by Conan Doyle. The manuscript appears to be part fair copy and part working document. The first half of the first notebook shows evidence of reasonably thorough re-working: there are a number of words – in some cases a number of lines – crossed out and re-written on almost every page; at a couple of points some marginal revisions have also been added. There are also several pages in the first notebook where parts of a page (often half or more) have been cut away. By contrast, the text in the latter half of the first notebook and in the remaining notebooks shows only the odd word or couple of words crossed out and corrected. Many of the pages are completely clear.

  The evidence of the physical manuscript, then, clearly demonstrates that this is a rewriting and that Conan Doyle at some point was engaged in revising his text, doing a more thorough job on the early stages before other projects took his attention elsewhere. The unfinished nature of the text (Chapter 6 in the fourth notebook comprises only two pages, written in a different ink from the rest of the manuscript) also underlines that this was a work-in-progress for Conan Doyle.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. An expression commonly applied in Scotland and the north of England to enterprises begun in youthful ardour without experience. Sir Walter Scott, one of Conan Doyle’s earliest literary enthusiasms, had used it in Rob Roy.

  2. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, ed. Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley (New York: Penguin Press; London: HarperPress, 2007), p. 167.

  3. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1924), p. 17.

  4. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, p. 173.

  5. Ibid., p. 229.

  6. Ibid., p. 207.

  7. Ibid., p. 229.

  8. ‘I have written 130 pages of the novel, but have laid it aside pro tem in favour of a short story which may do for Cornhill. I wrote 8 pages of it yesterday and so far it is very good.’ Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, p. 202.

  9. Ibid., p. 224.

  10. His eldest son, Kingsley, was studying medicine there at the time.

  The Narrative of John Smith

  1. Gout, a far more common complaint those days, was something Conan Doyle encountered in his medical studies, and kept up with, publishing a letter about ‘The Remote Effects of Gout’ in the Lancet for 29 November 1884. In 1899 he made another protagonist someone laid up by gout, in the story ‘A Question of Diplomacy’ in his medical stories collection Round the Red Lamp. ‘We [novelists] do not fly to extremes in our literary ailments,’ he joked before a London audience of medical men in 1905: ‘The only example which I know to the contrary is gout, which in all our pages only occurs in the ball of the big toe. For some reason it is usually treated as a semi-comic disease, which tends to prove that the novelist has not himself suffered from it. The gouty, irascible gourmand is one of our necessary puppets, and I am sure he has every reason to be irascible if contempt is invited for his very serious and painful malady.’

  2. For Conan Doyle, a snuff-box appears to have been an insignia of the Victorian physician as much as the stethoscope became. ‘Time was, my dear colleague,’ says a physician in his 1926 novel The Land of Mist, ‘when a snuff-box was as much a part of my equipment as my phlebotomy case.’

  3. Colchicum and alkalis are both mentioned as treatments for gout in Conan Doyle’s 1884 Lancet article. The first may have been of particular interest to him, because colchicum had been used by mid-nineteenth-century British poisoner Catherine Wilson, a nurse who murdered patients after being written into their wills, and was hanged for one of these murders in 1862. ‘When a doctor goes wrong he is the first of criminals,’ declared Sherlock Holmes in the story ‘The Speckled Band,’ and Conan Doyle was aware that nurses also had criminally useful knowledge, as doctors did.

  4. An opiate, therefore addictive.

  5. Not all Conan Doyle’s characters would have been averse to such languid periods: Sherlock Holmes could spend days at a time lying on the sofa at Baker Street.

  6. A statement Conan Doyle could make about himself until very late in his life.

  7. John Milton. Conan Doyle used his observation again in his 1889 psychic novel The Mystery of Cloomber.

  8. Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

  9. ‘We lived in the hardy and bracing atmosphere of poverty,’ Conan Doyle wrote of himself and his siblings in his 1924 autobiography Memories and Adventure
s, ‘and we each in turn did our best to help those who were younger than ourselves.’ The following four hundred words express a key element of Conan Doyle’s lifelong philosophy, though it was a genteel poverty in which he was raised in Edinburgh. Nor did many children of poverty get to attend England’s leading Jesuit boarding school Stonyhurst College as he did, starting in 1867. See Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, ch. 1.

  10. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the poet, historian and politician. ‘When I visited London at the age of sixteen the first thing I did after housing my luggage was to make a pilgrimage to Macaulay’s grave where he lies in Westminster Abbey,’ Conan Doyle wrote in Through the Magic Door.

  11. Presumably Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton (1573–1624), and a patron of Shakespeare, whose sole surviving son Henry, the fourth Earl (1607–1667), had only daughters.

  12. Conan Doyle never had a bustling practice of his own, but had worked several times during medical school and immediately afterwards for Dr Reginald Ratcliffe Hoare of Birmingham, who became a second father to Conan Doyle for years. His practice was such a one: ‘a five-horse city practice,’ Conan Doyle said of it, which ‘meant going from morning to night.’

  13. Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian and critic (1795–1881), was one of Conan Doyle’s favourite and most frequently quoted writers. Carlyle handed over most of his private papers before his death to the historian and biographer James Anthony Froude (1818–1894). A close friend, later his executor, Froude had undertaken editions of Jane Carlyle’s letters and Carlyle’s reminiscences as well as a full-scale biography (the Life of Carlyle, published in two parts), all of which appeared in an intense concentration of activity beginning one month after Carlyle’s death and ending in 1884. Froude’s Life caused considerable controversy on account of its frankness of treatment, particularly about his subject’s failings of character and unhappy marriage, which damaged Carlyle’s reputation. By the time Conan Doyle was writing the Narrative he would have read most or all of these (he reports reading the Life in a letter home), and seems, in the passages here, to be directly defending his hero against Froude’s claims.

  14. Thomas Fuller (1608–1661), churchman, historian, author of The Holy State and the Profane State (1642), but misquoted here, the original being: ‘Anger is one of the sinews of the soul; he that wants it hath a maimed mind.’

  15. Quoting (not precisely accurately) an 1845 letter by Carlyle in Froude’s Thomas Carlyle: A History of His Life in London. Thatkraft, from German historical writings, might be translated as active power, or force.

  16. Thin soup or gruel.

  17. The sort of thing Sherlock Holmes might have said, but here the sitting-room that John Smith describes is a close approximation of Conan Doyle’s front room at Bush Villas in Southsea, down to the painted green walls and his own ‘17 well framed pictures 17 vases quite aesthetic,’ as he referred to them in a letter home to his mother.

  18. Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville (1835–1885), whose work included Franco-Prussian War subjects, perhaps appealing to Conan Doyle who had championed the French cause in school. Noel Paton (1821–1901) was a Scottish painter in the Pre-Raphaelite style whose use of fairies and mythology may have appealed to Conan Doyle since his father and his uncle Richard Doyle were also well known for such subject matter.

  19. Characters of Charles Dickens’s in Our Mutual Friend.

  20. Some of the objects he discusses next did have direct autobiographical value for him. While the Roman amphora did not represent a personal visit to Italy as yet, the Arctic memorabilia were items and experiences he acquired in six months’ service as ship’s surgeon aboard the Greenland whaler Hope, February to August 1880, during which time he said he had come of age (22 May 1880) ‘at 80 degrees north latitude’: ‘I went on board a big, straggling youth,’ he said in Memories and Adventures, but ‘came off it a powerful, well-grown man.’ Later, before coming to Southsea, he did another stint as ship’s surgeon on the passenger-carrying freighter Mayumba to West Africa, where he had contracted a near-fatal tropical fever.

  21. Inquisitive, gossipy people.

  22. Hollands refers to gin by the originating country’s name, probably the older ‘genever’ variety different from the dry gins produced in England by this time.

  23. It would be welcome to know how autobiographical this incident is; it may well be. But much of our knowledge of Conan Doyle’s early life comes from his frequent letters home to his mother, and while attending medical school at Edinburgh University he lived at home, and didn’t write many letters to others that have come to light. He did box in these days, taking boxing gloves along on the Hope, and boxing with its crew members for the exercise and sport.

  24. A double jab to the head.

  25. Many years later, in 1907, Conan Doyle would write an entire book, Through the Magic Door, about his library and the books and writers it contained: ‘I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns,’ he began: ‘Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more.’ Here, he mentions some favourites of his youth, including a few he will say more about in subsequent passages of this manuscript. They are the more elevated ones here, forgoing mention of other indisputable favourites of his early years like Edgar Allan Poe and Alexandre Dumas. William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) was a philosopher whose The Martyrdom of Man Sherlock Holmes once handed to Dr Watson: ‘Let me recommend this book – one of the most remarkable ever penned,’ discussing it further on a second occasion in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Charles Darwin, of course, was the great naturalist whose theory of evolution Conan Doyle had embraced in medical school despite his Roman Catholic upbringing.

  26. The Roman writer Horace.

  27. By 1883–84 Conan Doyle had visited London several times, most notably in his mid-teens, when he stayed with his artistically distinguished London uncles. But he had not lived there so far, making this reference to Marylebone interesting: the district includes Baker Street, to be made the home of Sherlock Holmes when Conan Doyle wrote A Study in Scarlet in 1885. In Baker Street in 1874 the teenage Conan Doyle had visited Madame Tussaud’s wax museum, whose chamber of horrors particularly pleased him: ‘I have been also to Madam Tussaud’s, and was delighted with the room of Horrors, and the images of the murderers,’ he wrote home to his mother.

  28. These lines are a fragment from a paragraph cut out of the previous page of manuscript.

  29. Though humble things, gas-pipes were on his mind. For one thing, he could not initially afford gas lighting when he took Bush Villas in June 1882, and was left for some months with candles for night-time illumination. (And when he did have it laid on, its expense strained his resources.) Also: ‘When the Gas and Water Gazette asked him to translate a German submission, Conan Doyle drew on his shaky schoolboy German to produce an article entitled “Testing Gas Pipes for Leakage.” Years later, in a speech to the Authors’ Club, he would claim that this had been the great breakthrough of his career, rather than A Study in Scarlet, as one might have supposed. For the first time, he noted dryly, a publisher had asked for his services, rather than the other way around.’ (Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle, Holt, New York, 2000, pp. 82–3.)

  30. The London Aquarium was another sight he wrote home about as a teenager. Surprising about this reference is its flippancy regarding drunkards. His own father Charles Altamont Doyle’s excessive drinking had caused the family pain and hardship, especially after his career as an artist and draughtsman terminated early, and it led to Charles Doyle’s institutionalization for the remainder of life.

  31. ‘Tab’: northern British slang for a cigarette.

  32. Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819–1900), Astronomer Royal for Scotland, was the progenitor of theories about the Great
Pyramid’s design and construction which had a considerable vogue. Conan Doyle was always fascinated by such things, and in Southsea was already under the influence of a retired major-general named Alfred Drayson who was an amateur astronomer of some repute, author of controversial theories about the creation of the world, and the man who introduced Conan Doyle to psychic research at this time.

  33. Lady Teazle and Mrs (actually also Lady) Sneerwell are characters from the 1777 play The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816). While Conan Doyle did not publish or even complete this rewriting of his first novel, this passage indicates that he kept the manuscript at hand for years, drawing from it occasionally for other writings of his. The preceding passage went into his semi-autobiographical novel of 1895, The Stark Munro Letters, and two years before that into his contribution to a non-fiction anthology entitled My First Book. Conan Doyle also transferred to The Stark Munro Letters more or less intact the earlier passage on pp. 21–2, the following one on p. 24 about dermoid cysts, plus ch. 2, pp. 34–5 and 38; ch. 3, p. 60; ch. 4, pp. 77–8; and ch. 5, pp. 87–8 and 108–12.

  34. An issue which never ceased to rumble inside Conan Doyle. In his 1912 novel The Lost World, for example, his great scientist character Professor Challenger says to a rival: ‘No, Summerlee, I will have none of your materialism, for I, at least, am too great a thing to end in mere physical constituents, a packet of salts and three bucketfuls of water.’

  35. Conan Doyle speaks for himself. However far-ranging his reading and writing, he was a life-long athlete and outdoorsman, devoting a chapter of his autobiography Memories and Adventures to his experiences in those areas.

  36. Mrs Rundle is a precursor of Mrs Hudson, Sherlock Holmes’s landlady at Baker Street. Their real-life inspiration was Conan Doyle’s own housekeeper at Bush Villas, a Mrs Smith, who like Mrs Rundle occupied the basement of the house, and whom he mentioned frequently in his letters home during these years.