Arthur Conan Doyle: His Life and Art E-Book

Hesketh Pearson

• Herausgeber: Perfect-Life Biographies
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Conan Doyle (1859-1930) will always be remembered for the character of Sherlock Holmes, but he was a prolific writer—of short stories, of science fiction and historical fiction1including The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard. In his comprehensive biography, Pearson considers how his life is reflected in his books—including his background as a doctor and his enduring (and public) belief in spiritualism.

Leseprobe

Arthur Conan Doyle: His Life and Art

Hesketh Pearson

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 — A British Celt

Chapter 2 — Some Odd Jobs

Chapter 3 — Doctor Budd

Chapter 4 — Doctor Doyle

Chapter 5 — While Waiting

Chapter 6 — Sherlock Holmes

Chapter 7 — Friends and Fame

Chapter 8 — The Brigadier

Chapter 9 — The Man of Action

Chapter 10 — Titanic

Chapter 11 — The Man in the Street

Chapter 12 — The Last Phase

Chapter 1 — A British Celt

Conan Doyle was Irish by descent, Scottish by birth, and English by adoption. Being of a plastic nature all three nations helped to mold his character, which included the chivalry and enthusiasm of the first, the pride and perseverance of the second, the stubbornness and humor of the third. Naturally he did not pass through life without having his chivalry described as absurdity, his pride as conceit, his stubbornness as stupidity. The truth will emerge as we proceed.

His grandfather, John Doyle, left Dublin for London in the year 1815 and soon (as “H.B.”) made a reputation as a caricaturist. A reaction against the ruthless drawings of Gillray and Rowlandson was setting in, and John Doyle’s pleasing pencil led the fashion. “My grandfather was a gentleman, drawing gentlemen for gentlemen,” wrote Conan Doyle. John’s policy resulted in prosperity, and his four sons inherited his gift. The eldest, James, wrote and illustrated in color The Chronicles of England and misspent thirteen years in compiling The Official Baronage of England. The second son, Henry, noted as a judge of old paintings, became manager of the National Gallery in Dublin. The third, Richard, illustrated The Newcomes, was famous as a contributor to Punchy and designed the cover of that periodical. We are primarily concerned with the youngest son, Charles, a civil servant, who spent his spare time painting. His whimsical moments brought forth fairies, but in darker moods his imagination grappled with “wild and fearsome subjects,” which displayed power, morbidity and humor in about equal proportions. At the age of nineteen Charles got a job in the Government Office of Works at Edinburgh, where, in 1855, he married Mary Foley, also of Irish parentage, who traced her descent, via the families of Pack and Percy, from the Plantagenets. They were living in a small flat at Picardy Place, Edinburgh, when their son, Arthur Conan Doyle, was born on May 22nd, 1859.

At first Charles and Mary could get along comfortably enough on his £240 a year. But when the family was increased by three girls and a boy life became difficult. Charles was not helpful. Though he sometimes managed, by the sale of a few pictures, to add another £50 to his income, he suffered from what is euphemistically termed the artistic temperament: that is, he took very little interest in his job and not much interest in his home; he lived in the clouds; and when his son writes that “even his faults were in some ways the result of his developed spirituality,” it is permissible to guess that the many paintings he gave away were exchanged for the sort of hospitality that engenders benevolence. He was, his son tells us, “a tall man, long-bearded, and elegant; he had a charm of manner and a courtesy of bearing which I have seldom seen equalled. His wit was quick and playful. He possessed, also, a remarkable delicacy of mind which would give him moral courage enough to rise and leave any company which talked in a manner which was coarse... He was unworldly and unpractical and his family suffered for it.”

Fortunately for their children his wife’s temperament was not artistic. Though Irish and Catholic, like her husband, the climate of Scotland seems to have hardened her into one of those remarkable women, unremarked in North Britain, who feed, clothe, and educate a family on an income that the neediest government would not trouble to tax. She was also, like many Celts, proud of her lineage, a pride which was inherited by her first son; but

They that on glorious ancestors enlarge

Produce their debt instead of their discharge,

and Arthur discharged the debt to his with interest.

His childhood was Spartan, but he was sturdy. When seven years old he went to school and for two years endured laceration from a schoolmaster whose resemblance to a Dickensian character did not atone for the pain he inflicted. Arthur was, if anything, toughened by the treatment, and during out-of-school hours he engaged in many fights with his contemporaries. A love of battle was in his blood, and not even the experience of being knocked senseless by a heavy boot concealed in a bag, with which a bookmaker’s assistant tried to brain him, lessened his desire to put up his fists on the least provocation, especially in defense of those who were being bullied by stronger boys than themselves.

Along with his warlike tendencies went a keen taste for reading, and it was rumored that “a special meeting of a library committee was held in my honor, at which a bylaw was passed that no subscriber should be permitted to change his book more than three times a day.” He loved Mayne Reid, whose Scalp Hunters he read again and again. In after years he recalled how he had reveled in those tales of adventure: “I do not think that life has any joy to offer so complete, so soul-filling as that which comes upon the imaginative lad, whose spare time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a corner with his book, knowing that the next hour is all his own. And how vivid and fresh it all is! Your very heart and soul are out on the prairies and the oceans with your hero. It is you who act and suffer and enjoy. You carry the long small-bore Kentucky rifle with which such egregious things are done, and you he out upon the topsail yard, and get jerked by the flap of the sail into the Pacific, where you cling on to the leg of an albatross, and so keep afloat until the comic boatswain turns up with his crew of volunteers to handspike you into safety. What a magic it is, this stirring of the boyish heart and mind! Long ere I came to my teens I had traversed every sea, and knew the Rockies like my own back garden. How often had I sprung upon the back of the charging buffalo and so escaped him. It was an everyday emergency to have to set the prairie on fire in front of me in order to escape from the fire behind, or to run a mile down a brook to throw the bloodhounds off my trail. I had creased horses, I had shot down rapids, I had strapped on my moccasins hind-foremost to conceal my tracks, I had lain under water with a reed in my mouth, and I had feigned madness to escape the torture. As to the Indian braves whom I slew in single combats, I could have stocked a large graveyard, and, fortunately enough, though I was a good deal chipped about in these affairs, no real harm ever came of it, and I was always nursed back into health by a very fascinating young squaw. It was all more real than the reality. Since those days I have in very truth both shot bears and harpooned whales, but the performance was flat compared to the first time that I did it with Mr. Ballantyne or Captain Mayne Reid at my elbow.”

He displayed an early taste for verse by learning Macaulay s “Lay of Horatius” by heart, and such was its effect on his mind that he could reel it off almost verbatim when past fifty. Once he came into close touch with literature, but as he cannot have been more than four at the time he was unaffected by the contact. A chubby-looking, white-haired giant of a man called to see his father, and for several minutes the future creator of Sherlock Holmes sat poised on the knee of the famous author of Vanity Fair, who whiled away the time by making his gold repeater watch strike a hundred o’clock for the youngster’s entertainment. Not content with reading, the boy began to write, and there is a suggestion of the later romanticist in the theme of his first attempt: “I was six at the time, and have a very distinct recollection of the achievement. It was written, I remember, upon foolscap paper, in what might be called a fine bold hand — four words to the line — and was illustrated by marginal pen- and-ink sketches by the author. There was a man in it, and there was a tiger. I forget which was the hero, but it didn’t matter much, for they became blended into one about the time when the tiger met the man. I was a realist in the age of the Romanticists. I described at some length, both verbally and pictorially, the untimely end of that wayfarer. But when the tiger had absorbed him, I found myself slightly embarrassed as to how my story was to go on. ‘It is very easy to get people into scrapes, and very hard to get them out again,’ I remarked, and I have often had cause to repeat the precocious aphorism of my childhood. On this occasion the situation was beyond me, and my book, like any man, was engulfed in my tiger.” At the age of nine he went to Hodder, preparatory school for Stonyhurst, where Roman Catholic boys imbibe as much truth as is thought good for them. On his journey to Preston, in Lancashire, he was overcome with homesickness and wept copiously. At Preston he joined a crowd of other boys and was driven the remaining twelve miles under the guardianship of a black-robed Jesuit. Except for the summer holidays of six weeks he remained for two years at Hodder, where he was fairly happy, his principal being “more human than Jesuits usually are.” The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War during his incarceration at Hodder gave him an imaginative escape from the thralldom of lessons. Passing on to Stonyhurst he began to suffer in the cause of education. He wasted countless hours on Latin and Greek, which left him with a hatred of Greek only equaled by his loathing of Latin. He slaved away at Euclid and algebra, and finished up with an abhorrence of Euclid only equaled by his detestation of algebra. At the end of his life he wrote: “I can say with truth that my Latin and Greek... have been little use to me in life, and that my mathematics have been no use at all. On the other hand, some things which I picked up almost by accident, the art of reading aloud, learned when my mother was knitting, or the reading of French books, learned by spelling out the captions of the Jules Verne illustrations, have been of the greatest possible service.” The bodily nourishment provided by the Jesuits was as uninteresting as the mental, their principle being that dry knowledge could only be absorbed with dry food. Breakfast consisted of bread and a mixture of hot water and milk. Butcher’s meat for dinner, fish on Fridays, with pudding twice a week. For tea, a piece of bread and something called “beer” but only resembling it in appearance. Supper brought a repetition of well-diluted milk, bread, butter, and quite often a sybaritic indulgence in potatoes. Perhaps the Jesuits felt that the effects of this diet might lead to disorder in the dormitories, which were always patrolled by a master at nighttime. In fact the boys were never left to themselves for a moment, the priests taking part in their games, their walks, and their talks.

Even so the rigorous demands of religion were unsatisfied, and when good behavior could not be secured by over-exercising the brain and under-exercising the belly, sterner measures were applied. The instrument of correction, Doyle had cause to remember, “was a piece of india-rubber of the size and shape of a thick boot sole... One blow of this instrument, delivered with intent, would cause the palm of the hand to swell up and change color. When I say that the usual punishment of the larger boys was nine on each hand, and that nine on one hand was an absolute minimum, it will be understood that it was a severe ordeal, and that the sufferer could not, as a rule, turn the handle of the door to get out of the room in which he had suffered. To take twice nine upon a cold day was about the extremity of human endurance.”Young Doyle was constantly subjected to this barbarous punishment. He doubted whether any boys of his time endured more of it, the reason being that he had “a nature which responded eagerly to affectionate kindness (which I never received), but which rebelled against threats and took a perverted pride in showing that it would not be cowed by violence. I went out of my way to do really mischievous and outrageous things simply to show that my spirit was unbroken. An appeal to my better nature and not to my fears would have found an answer at once.” His frequent penances were stamped in the memory of a schoolfellow, now Sir Bernard Partridge, who writes to me: “I recall him at Stonyhurst College as a thick-set boy, with a quiet manner, and a curious furtive smile when he was visited with one of the school penalties, such as leaving his desk and kneeling in the middle of the classroom with his books. He was, I fancy, rather lazy in his studies, never taking a prominent place in his form: but his brain was very nimble, and he was constantly throwing off verses and parodies on college personalities and happenings — some of which I thought worth keeping.”

Doyle did not think much of his verses, though some stuff he turned out as a task on the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites was so far in advance of the average boy’s efforts that it made him realize his literary bent. Among his comrades he became popular as a yarn-spinner, and this he turned to good account: “There was my début as a story-teller. On a wet half-holiday I have been elevated on to a desk, and with an audience of little boys all squatting on the floor, with their chins upon their hands, I have talked myself husky over the misfortunes of my heroes. Week in and week out those unhappy men have battled and striven and groaned for the amusement of that little circle. I was bribed with pastry to continue these efforts, and I remember that I always stipulated for tarts down and strict business, which shows that I was born to be a member of the Authors’ Society. Sometimes, too, I would stop dead in the very thrill of a crisis, and could only be set agoing again by apples. When I had got as far as ‘With his left hand in her glossy locks, he was waving the bloodstained knife above her head, when —’ or ‘Slowly, slowly, the door turned upon its hinges, and with eyes which were dilated with horror the wicked Marquis saw —’ I knew that I had my audience in my power.”

One letter he wrote while at Stonyhurst was preserved by his mother. The date is July 1873:

My Own Dear Mama,

I have been to the Taylor, and I showed him your letter, explaining to him that you wanted something that would wear well, and at the same time look well. He told me that the blue cloth he had was meant especially for Coats, but that none of it would suit well as Trousers. He showed me a dark sort of Cloth, which he said would suit a blue coat better than any other Cloth he has, and would wear well as trousers. On his recommendation I took this Cloth. I think you will like it, it does not show dirt, and looks very well, it is a sort of black and white very dark Cloth. You must write and tell me beforehand if you are going to meet me at the station. I know nothing about the train yet, but I will let you know when I learn. My Examen is finished, so I have finished all my work for the year, but of course it is kept profoundly secret who has got a prize. I trust I am among the Chosen few.

I hope you and the bairns are making the best of your vacation, as I suppose you can scarcely call the time when I am at home vacation.

I have never known a year pass so quickly as the last one, it seems not a month ago since I left you, and I can remember all the minutest Articles of furniture in the house, even to the stains on the wall. I suppose I will have to perform for Frank the office I have so often performed for Lottie and Cony, namely, that of rocking her to sleep. I suppose he is out of his Long Clothes now.

We are going to have bathing during schools this evening, which is a nice prospect. This is the Golden time of one’s life at Stonyhurst, the end of the year. Every Thursday is a holiday, and we are having Splendid weather.

I will now say Good-bye and remain your Affece son

A. C. Doyle.

In his last year he edited the College magazine, and at the end of his time amazed everyone by taking honors in the London Matric. He left Stonyhurst at the age of sixteen.

Long before he had managed to convince the authorities that he was not an ideal candidate for holy orders, his mother had been told that his schooling would cost her nothing if he were dedicated to the Church. As this would have saved her about £50 a year, no one could have blamed her for closing with the offer. But she may have remembered how often he had said to her, “When you are old, Mammie, you shall have a velvet dress and gold glasses and sit in comfort by the fire”; or she may have been cooling towards the Roman faith; or, more probably, her conscience would not let her sell the soul of her boy. Anyhow she refused, and her son lived to bless her for the act and to make her later life comfortable.

While struggling with algebra and Greek and all the rest of the nonsense Doyle made a discovery, the joy of which more than counterbalanced the anguish of his lessons. This discovery, though he could not realize it at the time, settled his future career, decided the form of much of his literary work, and never ceased, through all the years of his life, to console and sustain him. The learning of history, like everything else at school, was repellent to him; but one day he dipped into a volume of Macaulay’s Essays, and was enthralled. A new world was revealed to him, a vivid fascinating world quite unlike the gray and monotonous business that had bored him so much in class, and history suddenly became a living thrilling subject, “an incursion into an enchanted land.” Then there were Scott’s novels, the first books he had ever owned. For years they had remained unread; but at Stonyhurst they became his companions. He read them by “surreptitious candle ends in the dead of night, when the sense of crime added a new zest to the story.” He always thought Ivanhoe the second greatest historical novel in the English language. We shall come to the first later on.

His last year with the Jesuits was spent at Feldkirch in Austria. Pausing in London on the way, the first thing he did was to visit Westminster Abbey in order to see Macaulay’s grave. “It was the one great object of interest which London held for me. And so it might well be, when I think of all I owe him.” At Feldkirch “the conditions were much more humane and I met with far more human kindness than at Stonyhurst, with the immediate result that I ceased to be a resentful young rebel and became a pillar of law and order.” He did not, however, make a good impression on the first night of his arrival, because a master discovered him poking another fellow in the dormitory with a stick; and although he had the excuse that the boy’s loud snoring prevented him from going to sleep, he was gravely admonished. It is possible, as he says, that he became more amenable to discipline at Feldkirch than at Stonyhurst, but a newspaper that he founded and edited had a brief career because it lived up to its motto, “Fear not, and put it in print.”

On the whole he enjoyed his year in Austria. He did not learn much German, because the score or so of English and Irish boys at the school got together and were as insular as their own countries; but he played football and went tobogganing and walked among the mountains and had real beer to drink and joined the school band, in which, being a hefty youth, he had to play a big brass bass instrument called the bombardon, which sounded “like a hippopotamus doing a step dance.”

Leaving in the summer of 1876, he stopped at Paris on his way home. His godfather and grand-uncle, Michael Conan, who lived in Paris and whose name he had acquired at the font, wished to see him. Doyle had indulged in a rollicking farewell supper with a few other youths at Strasbourg, and had exactly twopence left when he got to Paris. He did not fancy the prospect of driving to the Avenue Wagram and asking his uncle to pay for the cab, so left his luggage at the station and tramped. It was a sweltering August day and by the time the Arc de Triomphe came in sight he was exhausted. On seeing another pedestrian buying a penny drink from a man who carried a tin on his back, he halved his capital and did the same; and though the drink turned out to be liquorice and water it helped him on his way. After spending a few “penurious weeks” with his “dear old volcanic” uncle, he returned home, with nothing of value to show for his schooling except the encouraging valediction of a Stonyhurst master, who had called him up on the last day of term and addressed him thus: “Doyle, I have known you now for seven years, and I know you thoroughly. I am going to say something which you will remember in after-life. Doyle, you will never come to any good.”

Chapter 2 — Some Odd Jobs

He returned to poverty in Edinburgh. His father was still painting, still in the clouds, still producing children, and still earning £240 a year. Another boy and another girl had arrived while Arthur had been laboriously wasting his time, and one more girl was on the way. Though his eldest sister was sending home her salary as a governess from Portugal, and two other sisters were shortly to follow suit, the domestic prospect was bleak, and the question arose: what was to be done with Arthur? A lesser woman might have insisted that he should begin to earn money at once, and Arthur’s physique would have suggested a steady salary in the coal-heaving or furniture-removing line, but his mother was ambitious and took a longer view. Edinburgh having such a high reputation for medical learning, it was decided that he should be a doctor and take his degree at the University; and as examinations for several scholarships were to be held a month or so after his arrival, he swotted away at his classics, entered for one of them, and soon heard that he had gained the Grierson bursary, which meant £40 for two years. It seemed that Greek and Latin were about to justify the time he had spent on them, and jubilation reigned in the Doyle household, but on applying for the money he was told that there had been a clerical error, the Grierson bursary being open only to arts students. He naturally assumed that he would be granted the next- best possible prize for medical students, but was informed that “the candidate to whom it was allotted has already drawn the money.” This placed him in a tricky position. He had a good case, but did not think it would forward his career if he began it by taking legal proceedings against his University; so he suppressed his rage and resentment and tried to assuage his disappointment by accepting a solatium of £7.

Entering the University in October 1876, he commenced the “long weary grind at botany, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, and a whole list of compulsory subjects, many of which have a very indirect bearing upon the art of curing.” We need not follow him on his dreary course, which, however, was brightened by books that had nothing whatever to do with the tedious themes of his professional study, for the medical tomes on his shelves were not nearly so well thumbed as Thackeray’s Esmond, Meredith’s Richard Feverel, and Washington Irving’s Conquest of Granada. He gradually collected a small library of his own, each volume of which stood for a sacrificed lunch. Every day, on the way to his classes, he gazed into one of those fascinating second-hand bookshops which no one with literary leanings can pass without a pause or a pang. Outside the door was a large tub crammed with tattered volumes at threepence apiece. Now threepence was the precise sum that Doyle was able to spend on his midday sandwich and glass of beer, so he had to choose between literature and lunch. Whenever he approached that tub a combat raged between the appetite of a youthful body and the hunger of a busy mind. The body won five times out of six, but when the mind was in the ascendant he spent a delightful five minutes choosing his volume from amongst a litter of almanacs, textbooks, and works of Scottish theology. In this way he picked up Gordon’s translation of Tacitus, Pope’s translation of Homer, Addison’s works, Clarendon’s History, Swift’s Tale of a Tub, Gil Bias, Temple’s essays, the poems of Churchill and Buckingham, and other stores for mental dissipation.

He made a new acquaintance in his student days: Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose Autocrat, Poet, and Professor at the Breakfast Table captivated him. “Never have I so known and loved a man whom I had never seen. It was one of the ambitions of my lifetime to look upon his face, but by the irony of Fate I arrived in his native city just in time to lay a wreath upon his newly turned grave.” It was the leaven of science, especially medical science, which made the books so attractive to him, and he preferred Wendell Holmes to Charles Lamb because “there is a flavor of actual knowledge and of practical acquaintance with the problems and affairs of life, which is lacking in the elfin Londoner.” It was perhaps not wholly chance that led him to name his most famous creation after the American essayist. The outstanding feature of Doyle’s character was its simplicity and innocence, and he was deeply impressed, as only a simple man can be, by any display of knowledge, using that term not in its intuitive but in its instructive or informatory sense. Though he was but partly conscious of the fact, it was this aspect in the novels of Walter Scott and Charles Reade that chiefly appealed to him and was to influence his own historical romances. His obligations to Macaulay and Edgar Allan Poe were of the same kind. If, he once said, he had to name the few books which had really influenced his own life, he would put Poe’s stories second only to Macaulay’s essays. Macaulay seemed to know everything; Poe seemed to deal with everything; and Doyle mistook the memory of the first for profundity, the fancy of the second for imagination.

It is hardly surprising that such a man should have been so much impressed by the professors of Edinburgh University that he popularized two of them in his books and attributed vast intellectual powers to the dons who figure therein. To any but the simplest and most easily gulled individual the average professor is about as far from one’s conception of a superhuman or an electric force as it is possible for a man to be. But if one of Doyle’s professors is not a demi-god, then he has to be a demi-devil. Of the two he was to portray at length in several books, Doctor Bell (Sherlock Holmes) and Professor Rutherford (Challenger), we shall speak later. Here we may illustrate the point by reference to minor sketches of the good don and the bad don. The first is Professor Maracot, who appears in a story called The Maracot Deep, one of the last Doyle ever wrote. We are told that he “lives on some mental mountain-top, out of reach of ordinary mortals.” From this state of abstraction he is suddenly called upon to play the man of action: “I tell you he took hold of that ship and everyone and everything in it, and bent it all to his will. The dry, creaking, absent-minded scholar had suddenly vanished, and instead there emerged a human electrical machine, crackling with vitality and quivering from the great driving force within. His eyes gleamed behind his glasses like flames in a lantern.” In a crisis which unnerves and prostrates everyone else he again shows his mettle: “The quiet scholar has been submerged, and here was a superman, a great leader, a dominant soul who might mold mankind to his desires... Upon his face there was a look of such power as I have never seen upon human features yet.” Our second example is the devil-don, Professor Moriarty, who appears in The Memoirs ofSherlock Holmes. Endowed by Nature “with a phenomenal mathematical faculty,” at the age of twenty-one “he wrote a treatise upon the Binomial Theorem which has had a European vogue.” Holmes calls him the cleverest rogue in Europe, the greatest schemer of all time, the possessor of a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations, and sums him up in this fashion: “He is the Napoleon of crime... a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations and he knows well every quiver of each of them.” Obviously the creator of Moriarty, Maracot, Challenger, and Holmes was greatly struck by the professors at Edinburgh University.

As one would expect, Doyle quickly followed the scientific drift of the period and became an agnostic. His nature demanded a belief in something, and as one usually obtains what is essential to one’s nature he eventually got what he wanted, but his simple and susceptible mind was overwhelmed by the information recently poured out by Darwin, Huxley and others, all of which went to prove that the Bible had not given a very scientific account of Creation, and that the orthodox conception of Hell was humbug. This was a great relief after the Jesuits, one of whom had horrified him by declaring that everyone outside the Church of Rome was eternally damned, for he was much too kindly disposed towards his fellow-creatures to believe in a God with a diabolical nature. While ceasing to be a Catholic he did not become an atheist. His trusting, ingenuous, reverent nature favored the idea of a beneficent power behind the universe, but under the influence of Huxley and the rest he reached a point where, before believing anything, he required proofs. “The evils of religion,” he thought, “have all come from accepting things which cannot be proved,” and he called himself a materialist for the odd and artless reason that he could not believe in personal survival after death.

Certainly there was nothing very spiritual in his appearance. At the age of twenty-one he was over six feet in height, brown-haired, gray-eyed, broad, and forty- three round the chest; he weighed “over sixteen stone in the buff,” and had the strength of a bullock. Not perhaps altogether aware that he was doing so, he described himself at this period in the first of his novels to survive, The Firm of Girdlestone: “The long, fine curves of the limbs, and the easy pose of the round, strong head upon the thick, muscular neck, might have served as a model to an Athenian sculptor. There was nothing in the face, however, to recall the regular beauty of the East. It was Anglo-Saxon to the last feature, with its honest breadth between the eyes and its nascent mustache... Shy, and yet strong; plain, and yet pleasing; it was the face of a type of man who has little to say for himself in this world, and says that little badly, but who has done more than all the talkers and the writers to ring this planet round with a crimson girdle of British possessions.” Naturally a man of this sort was a sportsman, and Doyle never missed an opportunity to box with anyone who cared to take him on, and at one time played as a forward in the University Rugby team. He must have studied a lot in his spare time, but one has the impression that he instantly dropped his medical books if there was the least chance of a bout with the gloves. “I had an eager nature which missed nothing in the way of fun which could be gathered, and I had a great capacity for enjoyment. I read much. I played games all I could. I danced, and I sampled the drama whenever I had a sixpence to carry me to the gallery.” He became a great admirer of Henry Irving, whom he saw frequently in Hamlet, The Lyons Mail and other plays. But playgoing in those days was not unattended with danger, and once his strength and manliness were called upon. A dense crowd was waiting at the gallery door and a soldier made a girl scream by jamming her against the wall. Doyle remonstrated with him and was rewarded by a dig in the ribs. The soldier was about to follow this up when Doyle hit him clean in the face with both hands. The soldier drove him into an angle of the door and tried to kick him, but Doyle gripped him tightly. The situation was becoming unpleasant because the soldier’s friends were showing hostility, one of them striking at Doyle’s head with a cane and cracking his hat; but relief came with the opening of the door, through which Doyle flung his man; and then, feeling that his reception inside would be inhospitable, he saved his sixpence for another night and went home.

Meanwhile, those sixpences had to be earned, and he did his best to help the family as well by getting work as a medical assistant. For this purpose he compressed a year’s classes into six months and advertised his services as a doctor’s assistant for the time so saved. Knowing very little, and wishing to gain experience, he started by offering himself for nothing; but the first doctor who took him on valued his assistance at less than nothing, and after three weeks spent among the poorer classes of Sheffield in 1878 he left for London, where he stayed with some Doyle relations in Clifton Gardens, Maida Vale. He mooned about the metropolis for several weeks with empty pockets, often visiting the dock district where he watched the shipping and talked with the sailors who had roamed the world. He longed for adventure, and if it had not been for the thought of all that his mother had done for him he would have obliged the Trafalgar Square recruiting sergeants who liked the look of him, taken the Queen’s shilling and joined the Army. For that matter he did “volunteer as a dresser for the English ambulances sent to Turkey for the Russian war” late in ‘78, but the Turks did not hold out long enough for him to dress them. He felt humiliated by the lack of pence in his pocket. “It affects me in so many petty ways,” he complained. “A poor man may do me a kindness, and I have to seem mean in his eyes. I may want a flower for a girl, and must be content to appear ungallant. I don’t know why I should be ashamed of this, since it is no fault of mine, and I hope that I don’t show it to anyone else that I am ashamed of it; but I don’t mind confessing that it hurts my self-respect terribly.” He was passing through that awkward phase common to so many young men whose bodily growth has outrun their spiritual development: “The shrinking, horrible shyness, alternating with occasional absurd fits of audacity which represent the reaction against it, the longing for close friendship, the agonies over imaginary slights, the extraordinary sexual doubts, the deadly fears caused by non-existent diseases, the vague emotion produced by all women, and the half-frightened thrill by particular ones, the aggressiveness caused by fear of being afraid, the sudden blacknesses, the profound self-distrust.”

His next job was in a small Shropshire place called Ruyton-of-the-eleven-towns, where he stayed for four months, had little to do, and spent most of his time reading. It was here that his professional ability was first put to the test. During some festivities in a large country-house an old cannon burst and a bystander received a portion of it in his head. The doctor being out when the semi-demented messenger arrived, Doyle rushed to the scene, concealed his alarm at the sight, extracted the iron from the man’s head, and was greatly relieved to find that the brain had not been injured, as he could see the clean white bone of the skull. “I then pulled the gash together, staunched the bleeding, and finally bound it up, so that when the doctor did at last arrive he had little to add. This incident gave me confidence, and, what is more important still, gave others confidence.”

After that he got what he called “a real money-making proposition.” Hard work, long hours, endless prescriptions to make up for the poorest classes of Aston, Birmingham; but he earned some £2 a month. “On the whole I made few mistakes, though I have been known to send out ointment and pill boxes with elaborate directions on the lid and nothing inside.” The doctor and his wife liked their assistant, treated him as a son, and he returned to them on two later occasions, seeing a lot of low life, doing all the dispensing, and eventually taking on midwifery and the more serious cases in general practice.

While at Birmingham he began to write stories. The urge to do so was strong within him, and when a friend, struck by the vividness of his letters, advised him to try his hand at it, he knocked off an adventure yarn called The Mystery of the Sassassa Valley, sent it to Chambers’ Journal, and to his amazement received £3,3s. He tried again for the same magazine, but though his next few attempts were not successful, he did not lose heart. “I had done it once and I cheered myself by the thought that I could do it again.” London Society published his second story, The American’s Tale, in ‘79. The small check was welcome, but it did not occur to him that he could ever be a success as a writer, and he never dreamed that he could himself “produce decent prose.”