MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES

  [Illustration: ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE.

  _Nelson Evans, Los Angeles._
  _Taken in America, 1923._]

  MEMORIES AND
  ADVENTURES

  BY
  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

  BOSTON
  LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
  1924

  _Copyright, 1924_,
  BY ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

_All rights reserved_

Published September, 1924

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                                            PAGE

  I EARLY RECOLLECTIONS                                 1

  Extraction--“H.B.”--Four Remarkable Brothers
  --My Mother’s Family Tree--An Unrecognized
  Genius--My First Knockout--Thackeray--The
  Fenians--Early Reading--My First Story.

  II UNDER THE JESUITS                                  8

  The Preparatory School--The Mistakes of Education
  --Spartan Schooling--Corporal Punishment--
  Well-known School Fellows--Gloomy Forecasts--
  Poetry--London Matriculation--German School--A
  Happy Year--The Jesuits--Strange Arrival in Paris.

  III RECOLLECTIONS OF A STUDENT                       17

  Edinburgh University--A Sad Disappointment--
  Original of Professor Challenger--Of Sherlock
  Holmes--Deductions--Sheffield--Ruyton--Birmingham
  --Literary Aspirations--First Accepted Story--
  My Father’s Death--Mental Position--Spiritual
  Yearnings--An Awkward Business.

  IV WHALING IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN                       29

  The _Hope_--John Gray--Boxing--The Terrible
  Mate--Our Criminal--First Sight of a Woman--A
  Hurricane--Dangers of the Fishing--Three
  Dips in the Arctic--The Idlers’ Boat--Whale
  Taking--Glamour of the Arctic--Effect of Voyage.

  V THE VOYAGE TO WEST AFRICA                          42

  The _Mayumba_--Fearful Weather--An Escape
  --Hanno’s Voyage--Atlantis--A Land of Death--
  Blackwater Fever--Missionaries--Strange
  Fish--Danger of Luxury--A Foolish Swim--The
  Ship on Fire--England Once More.

  VI MY FIRST EXPERIENCES IN PRACTICE                  52

  A Strange Character--His Honeymoon--His Bristol
  Practice--Telegram from Plymouth--Six
  Amusing Weeks--A Deep Plot--My Southsea Venture
  --Furnishing on the Cheap--The Plot Explodes.

  VII MY START AT SOUTHSEA                             59

  A Strange Life--Arrival of My Brother--I Buy Up
  a Shop--Cheap Servants--Queer Patients--Dangers
  of Medical Practice--Income Tax Joke--My
  Marriage--Tragedy in My House--A New Phase.

  VIII MY FIRST LITERARY SUCCESS                       67

  New Outlook--James Payn--Genesis of Holmes--“A
  Study in Scarlet”--“Micah Clarke”--Disappointments
  --Andrew Lang--Cornhill Dinner--Oscar Wilde--
  His Criticism of Himself--“The White Company.”

  IX PULLING UP THE ANCHOR                             77

  Psychic Studies--Experiments in Telepathy--My
  First Séances--A Curious Test--General Drayson
  --Opinion on Theosophy--A. P. Sinnett--W. T.
  Stead--Journey to Berlin--Koch’s Treatment
  --Brutality of Bergmann--Malcolm Morris--
  Literary Society--Political Work--Arthur
  Balfour--Our Departure.

  X THE GREAT BREAK                                    88

  Vienna--A Specialist in Wimpole Street--The
  Great Decision--Norwood--“The Refugees”
  --Reported Death of Holmes.

  XI SIDELIGHTS ON SHERLOCK HOLMES                     96

  “The Speckled Band”--Barrie’s Parody on Holmes
  --Holmes on the Films--Methods of Construction
  --Problems--Curious Letters--Some Personal
  Cases--Strange Happenings.

  XII NORWOOD AND SWITZERLAND                         111

  Psychic Research Society--Psychic Leanings
  --Literary Circles in London--Young Writers
  --Henry Irving--A Great Blow--Davos--“Brigadier
  Gerard”--Major Pond--American Lecturing
  in 1894--First Lecture--Anti-British
  Wave--Answer to Prayer.

  XIII EGYPT IN 1896                                  121

  Life in Egypt--Accident--The Men Who Made
  Egypt--Up the Nile--The Salt Lakes--Adventure
  in the Desert--The Coptic Monastery--Colonel
  Lewis--A Surprise.

  XIV ON THE EDGE OF A STORM                          130

  The Storm Centre--To the Frontier--Assouan
  --Excited Officers--With the Press Men--A
  Long Camel Ride--Night Marches--Halfa--Gwynne
  of the “Morning Post”--Anley--A Sudden
  Voyage--Apricots and Rousseau.

  XV AN INTERLUDE OF PEACE                            140

  Hindhead--“A Duet”--A Haunted House--A
  Curious Society--Preternatural Powers--The
  Little Doctor--The Shadow of Africa.

  XVI THE START FOR SOUTH AFRICA                      148

  The Black Week--Volunteering--The Langman
  Hospital--The Voyage--Bloemfontein--Sir
  Claude de Crespigny--The Epidemic--Advance
  to the Water Works.

  XVII DAYS WITH THE ARMY                             160

  Pole-Carew--Tucker--Snipers--The Looted Farm--
  Taking of Brandfort--Artillery Engagement--
  Advance of the Guards--The Wounded Scout--The
  Dead Australian--Return.

  XVIII FINAL EXPERIENCES IN SOUTH AFRICA             174

  Military Jealousies--Football--Cracked Ribs--
  A Mutiny--De Wet--A Historian under Difficulties
  --Pretoria--Lord Roberts--With the Boers--
  Memorable Operation--Altercation.

  XIX AN APPEAL TO THE WORLD’S OPINION                184

  Misrepresentation--A Sudden Resolve--Reginald
  Smith--A Week’s Hard Work--“The Cause
  and Conduct of the War”--Translations--German
  Letter--Complete Success--Surplus.

  XX MY POLITICAL ADVENTURES                          195

  Central Edinburgh--A Knock-out--The Border
  Burghs--Tariff Reform--Heckling--Interpolations
  --Defeat--Reflections.

  XXI THE YEARS BETWEEN THE WARS                      204

  “History of the War”--Sir Oliver Lodge--
  Military Arguments--“Sir Nigel”--The Edalji
  Case--Crowborough--The Oscar Slater Case.

  XXII THE YEARS BETWEEN THE WARS                     222

  Constantinople--The Night of Power--A Strange
  Creature--Dorando--Dramatic Adventures--The
  Congo Agitation--Olympic Games--Divorce
  Reform--Psychic Experience--Speculation.

  XXIII SOME NOTABLE PEOPLE                           236

  President Roosevelt--Lord Balfour--Mr. Asquith
  --Lord Haldane--George Meredith--Rudyard
  Kipling--James Barrie--Henry Irving--Bernard
  Shaw--R. L. S.--Grant Allen--James
  Payn--Henry Thompson--Royalty.

  XXIV SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF SPORT                    262

  Racing--Shooting--A Fish Story--Boxing--Past
  and Present--Carpentier and France--The Reno
  Fight--Football--Golf with the Sirdar--Billiards
  --Cricket--W. G. Grace--Queer Experiences
  --Tragic Matches--Humiliation--Success
  in Holland--Barrie’s Team--A Precedent--Motor
  Accidents--Prince Henry Tour--Aviation--The
  Balloon and the Aeroplane--Ski--Over
  a Precipice--Rifle Shooting.

  XXV TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS IN 1914                  287

  Baseball--Parkman--Ticonderoga--Prairie Towns
  --Procession of Ceres--Relics of the Past--A
  Moose--Prospects for Emigrants--Jasper Park--
  The Great Divide--Algonquin Park.

  XXVI THE EVE OF WAR                                 304

  The Prologue of Armageddon--The “Prince Henry”
  Race--Bernhardi--“England and the Next
  War”--“Danger”--General Sir H. Wilson--The
  Channel Tunnel--Naval Defects--Rubber
  Collars--Mines--Willie Redmond.

  XXVII A REMEMBRANCE OF THE DARK YEARS               323

  Nightmares of the Morning--The Civilian Reserve
  --The Volunteers--Domestic Life in War Time--
  German Prisoners--Cipher to Our Prisoners--Sir
  John French--Empress Eugenie--Miracle
  Town--Armour--Our Tragedy.

  XXVIII EXPERIENCES ON THE BRITISH FRONT             335

  Lord Newton--How I Got Out--Sir W. Robertson--The
  Destroyer--First Experience of Trenches--Ceremony
  at Bethune--Mother--The Ypres
  Salient--Ypres--The Hull Territorial--General
  Sir Douglas Haig--Artillery Duel--Kingsley--Major
  Wood--Paris.

  XXIX EXPERIENCES ON THE ITALIAN FRONT               353

  The Polite Front--Udine--Under Fire--Carnic
  Alps--Italia Irredenta--Trentino--The Voice
  of the Holy Roman Empire.

  XXX EXPERIENCES ON THE FRENCH FRONT                 360

  A Dreadful Reception--Robert Donald--Clemenceau
  --Soissons Cathedral--The Commandant’s
  Cane--The Extreme Outpost--Adonis--General
  Henneque--Cyrano in the Argonne--Tir
  Rapide--French Canadian--Wound Stripes.

  XXXI BREAKING THE HINDENBURG LINE                   373

  Lloyd George--My Second Excursion--The Farthest
  German Point--Sir Joseph Cook--Night
  before the Day of Judgment--The Final Battle--
  On a Tank--Horrible Sight--Speech to Australians
  --The Magic Carpet.

  XXXII THE PSYCHIC QUEST                             387

ILLUSTRATIONS

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE                         _Frontispiece_

                                                     PAGE

MY MOTHER AT 17                                        12

STEAM-WHALER _Hope_                                    36

STAFF OF THE LANGMAN HOSPITAL                         156

LADY CONAN DOYLE                                      222

THE FAMILY IN THE WILDS OF CANADA                     298

KINGSLEY CONAN DOYLE                                  350

ON THE FRENCH FRONT                                   364

CHAPTER I

EARLY RECOLLECTIONS

 Extraction--“H. B.”--Four Remarkable Brothers--My Mother’s Family
 Tree--An Unrecognized Genius--My First Knockout--Thackeray--The
 Fenians--Early Reading--My First Story.

I was born on May 22, 1859, at Picardy Place, Edinburgh, so named
because in old days a colony of French Huguenots had settled there. At
the time of their coming it was a village outside the City walls, but
now it is at the end of Queen Street, abutting upon Leith Walk. When
last I visited it, it seemed to have degenerated, but at that time the
flats were of good repute.

My father was the youngest son of John Doyle, who under the _nom de
crayon_ of “H. B.” made a great reputation in London from about 1825 to
1850. He came from Dublin about the year 1815 and may be said to be the
father of polite caricature, for in the old days satire took the brutal
shape of making the object grotesque in features and figure. Gilray and
Rowlandson had no other idea. My grandfather was a gentleman, drawing
gentlemen for gentlemen, and the satire lay in the wit of the picture
and not in the misdrawing of faces. This was a new idea, but it has
been followed by most caricaturists since and so has become familiar.
There were no comic papers in those days, and the weekly cartoon of
“H. B.” was lithographed and distributed. He exerted, I am told, quite
an influence upon politics, and was on terms of intimacy with many of
the leading men of the day. I can remember him in his old age, a very
handsome and dignified man with features of the strong Anglo-Irish,
Duke of Wellington stamp. He died in 1868.

My grandfather was left a widower with a numerous family, of which
four boys and one girl survived. Each of the boys made a name for
himself, for all inherited the artistic powers of their father. The
elder, James Doyle, wrote “The Chronicles of England,” illustrated
with coloured pictures by himself--examples of colour-printing which
beat any subsequent work that I have ever seen. He also spent thirteen
years in doing “The Official Baronage of England,” a wonderful monument
of industry and learning. Another brother was Henry Doyle, a great
judge of old paintings, and in later years the manager of the National
Gallery in Dublin, where he earned his C.B. The third son was Richard
Doyle, whose whimsical humour made him famous in “Punch,” the cover of
which with its dancing elves is still so familiar an object. Finally
came Charles Doyle, my father.

The Doyle family seem to have been fairly well-to-do, thanks to my
grandfather’s talents. They lived in London in Cambridge Terrace. A
sketch of their family life is given in “Dicky Doyle’s Diary.” They
lived up to their income, however, and it became necessary to find
places for the boys. When my father was only nineteen a seat was
offered him in the Government Office of Works in Edinburgh, whither he
went. There he spent his working life, and thus it came about that I,
an Irishman by extraction, was born in the Scottish capital.

The Doyles, Anglo-Norman in origin, were strong Roman Catholics. The
original Doyle, or D’Oil, was a cadet-branch of the Staffordshire
Doyles, which has produced Sir Francis Hastings Doyle and many other
distinguished men. This cadet shared in the invasion of Ireland and
was granted estates in County Wexford, where a great clan rose of
dependants, illegitimate children and others, all taking the feudal
lord’s name, just as the de Burghs founded the clan of Burke. We can
only claim to be the main stem by virtue of community of character and
appearance with the English Doyles and the unbroken use of the same
crest and coat-of-arms.

My forbears, like most old Irish families in the south, kept to the
old faith at the Reformation and fell victims to the penal laws in
consequence. These became so crushing upon landed gentry that my
great-grandfather was driven from his estate and became a silk-mercer
in Dublin, where “H. B.” was born. This family record was curiously
confirmed by Monsignor Barry Doyle, destined, I think, for the highest
honours of the Roman Church, who traces back to the younger brother of
my great-grandfather.

I trust the reader will indulge me in my excursion into these family
matters, which are of vital interest to the family, but must be tedious
to the outsider. As I am on the subject, I wish to say a word upon my
mother’s family, the more so as she was great on archaeology, and had,
with the help of Sir Arthur Vicars, Ulster King of Arms, and himself a
relative, worked out her descent for more than five hundred years, and
so composed a family tree which lies before me as I write and on which
many of the great ones of the earth have roosted.

Her father was a young doctor of Trinity College, William Foley, who
died young and left his family in comparative poverty. He had married
one Katherine Pack, whose death-bed--or rather the white waxen thing
which lay upon that bed--is the very earliest recollection of my life.
Her near relative--uncle, I think--was Sir Denis Pack, who led the
Scottish brigade at Waterloo. The Packs were a fighting family, as was
but right since they were descended in a straight line from a major in
Cromwell’s army who settled in Ireland. One of them, Anthony Pack, had
part of his head carried off at the same battle, so I fear it is part
of our family tradition that we lose our heads in action. His brain was
covered over by a silver plate and he lived for many years, subject
only to very bad fits of temper, which some of us have had with less
excuse.

But the real romance of the family lies in the fact that about the
middle of the seventeenth century the Reverend Richard Pack, who was
head of Kilkenny College, married Mary Percy, who was heir to the Irish
branch of the Percys of Northumberland. By this alliance we all connect
up (and I have every generation by name, as marked out by my dear
mother) with that illustrious line up to three separate marriages with
the Plantagenets. One has, therefore, some strange strains in one’s
blood which are noble in origin and, one can but hope, are noble in
tendency.

But all this romance of ancestry did not interfere with the fact that
when Katherine Pack, the Irish gentlewoman, came in her widowhood
to Edinburgh, she was very poor. I have never been clear why it was
Edinburgh for which she made. Having taken a flat she let it be known
that a paying-guest would be welcome. Just at this time, 1850 or
thereabouts, Charles Doyle was sent from London with a recommendation
to the priests that they should guard his young morals and budding
faith. How could they do this better than by finding him quarters with
a well-born and orthodox widow? Thus it came about that two separate
lines of Irish wanderers came together under one roof.

I have a little bundle of my father’s letters written in those
days, full of appreciation of the kindness which he met with and
full, also, of interesting observations on that Scottish society,
rough, hard-drinking and kindly, into which he had been precipitated
at a dangerously early age, especially for one with his artistic
temperament. He had some fine religious instincts, but his environment
was a difficult one. In the household was a bright-eyed, very
intelligent younger daughter, Mary, who presently went off to France
and returned as a very cultivated young woman. The romance is easily
understood, and so Charles Doyle in the year 1855 married Mary Foley,
my mother, the young couple still residing with my grandmother.

Their means were limited, for his salary as a Civil Servant was not
more than about £240. This he supplemented by his drawings. Thus
matters remained for practically all his life, for he was quite
unambitious and no great promotion ever came his way. His painting was
done spasmodically and the family did not always reap the benefit,
for Edinburgh is full of water-colours which he had given away. It is
one of my unfulfilled schemes to collect as many as possible and to
have a Charles Doyle exhibition in London, for the critics would be
surprised to find what a great and original artist he was--far the
greatest, in my opinion, of the family. His brush was concerned not
only with fairies and delicate themes of the kind, but with wild and
fearsome subjects, so that his work had a very peculiar style of its
own, mitigated by great natural humour. He was more terrible than Blake
and less morbid than Wiertz. His originality is best shown by the fact
that one hardly knows with whom to compare him. In prosaic Scotland,
however, he excited wonder rather than admiration, and he was only
known in the larger world of London by pen and ink book-illustrations
which were not his best mode of expression. The prosaic outcome was
that including all his earnings my mother could never have averaged
more than £300 a year on which to educate a large family. We lived in
the hardy and bracing atmosphere of poverty and we each in turn did our
best to help those who were younger than ourselves. My noble sister
Annette, who died just as the sunshine of better days came into our
lives, went out at a very early age as a governess to Portugal and
sent all her salary home. My younger sisters, Lottie and Connie, both
did the same thing; and I helped as I could. But it was still my dear
mother who bore the long, sordid strain. Often I said to her, “When you
are old, Mammie, you shall have a velvet dress and gold glasses and sit
in comfort by the fire.” Thank God, it so came to pass. My father, I
fear, was of little help to her, for his thoughts were always in the
clouds and he had no appreciation of the realities of life. The world,
not the family, gets the fruits of genius.

Of my boyhood I need say little, save that it was Spartan at home
and more Spartan at the Edinburgh school where a tawse-brandishing
schoolmaster of the old type made our young lives miserable. From the
age of seven to nine I suffered under this pock-marked, one-eyed rascal
who might have stepped from the pages of Dickens. In the evenings home
and books were my sole consolation, save for week-end holidays. My
comrades were rough boys and I became a rough boy, too. If there is any
truth in the idea of reincarnation--a point on which my mind is still
open--I think some earlier experience of mine must have been as a stark
fighter, for it came out strongly in youth, when I rejoiced in battle.
We lived for some time in a _cul de sac_ street with a very vivid
life of its own and a fierce feud between the small boys who dwelt on
either side of it. Finally it was fought out between two champions, I
representing the poorer boys who lived in flats and my opponent the
richer boys who lived in the opposite villas. We fought in the garden
of one of the said villas and had an excellent contest of many rounds,
not being strong enough to weaken each other. When I got home after
the battle, my mother cried, “Oh, Arthur, what a dreadful eye you
have got!” To which I replied, “You just go across and look at Eddie
Tulloch’s eye!”

I met a well-deserved setback on one occasion when I stood forward to
fight a bootmaker’s boy, who had come into our preserve upon an errand.
He had a green baize bag in his hand which contained a heavy boot, and
this he swung against my skull with a force which knocked me pretty
well senseless. It was a useful lesson. I will say for myself, however,
that though I was pugnacious I was never so to those weaker than myself
and that some of my escapades were in the defence of such. As I will
show in my chapter on Sport, I carried on my tastes into a later period
of my life.

One or two little pictures stand out which may be worth recording.
When my grandfather’s grand London friends passed through Edinburgh
they used, to our occasional embarrassment, to call at the little flat
“to see how Charles is getting on.” In my earliest childhood such a
one came, tall, white-haired and affable. I was so young that it seems
like a faint dream, and yet it pleases me to think that I have sat on
Thackeray’s knee. He greatly admired my dear little mother with her
grey Irish eyes and her vivacious Celtic ways--indeed, no one met her
without being captivated by her.

Once, too, I got a glimpse of history. It was in 1866, if my dates are
right, that some well-to-do Irish relatives asked us over for a few
weeks, and we passed that time in a great house in King’s County. I
spent much of it with the horses and dogs, and became friendly with the
young groom. The stables opened on to a country road by an arched gate
with a loft over it. One morning, being in the yard, I saw the young
groom rush into the yard with every sign of fear and hastily shut and
bar the doors. He then climbed into the loft, beckoning to me to come
with him. From the loft window we saw a gang of rough men, twenty or
so, slouching along the road. When they came opposite to the gate they
stopped and looking up shook their fists and cursed at us. The groom
answered back most volubly. Afterwards I understood that these men
were a party of Fenians, and that I had had a glimpse of one of the
periodical troubles which poor old Ireland has endured. Perhaps now, at
last, they may be drawing to an end.

During these first ten years I was a rapid reader, so rapid that some
small library with which we dealt gave my mother notice that books
would not be changed more than twice a day. My tastes were boylike
enough, for Mayne Reid was my favourite author, and his “Scalp Hunters”
my favourite book. I wrote a little book and illustrated it myself in
early days. There was a man in it and there was a tiger who amalgamated
shortly after they met. I remarked to my mother with precocious wisdom
that it was easy to get people into scrapes, but not so easy to get
them out again, which is surely the experience of every writer of
adventures.

CHAPTER II

UNDER THE JESUITS

 The Preparatory School--The Mistakes of Education--Spartan
 Schooling--Corporal Punishment--Well-known School Fellows--Gloomy
 Forecasts--Poetry--London Matriculation--German School--A Happy
 Year--The Jesuits--Strange Arrival in Paris.

I was in my tenth year when I was sent to Hodder, which is the
preparatory school for Stonyhurst, the big Roman Catholic public school
in Lancashire. It was a long journey for a little boy who had never
been away from home before, and I felt very lonesome and wept bitterly
upon the way, but in due time I arrived safely at Preston, which was
then the nearest station, and with many other small boys and our
black-robed Jesuit guardians we drove some twelve miles to the school.
Hodder is about a mile from Stonyhurst, and as all the boys there are
youngsters under twelve, it forms a very useful institution, breaking a
lad into school ways before he mixes with the big fellows.

I had two years at Hodder. The year was not broken up by the frequent
holidays which illuminate the present educational period. Save for
six weeks each summer, one never left the school. On the whole, those
first two years were happy years. I could hold my own both in brain
and in strength with my comrades. I was fortunate enough to get under
the care of a kindly principal, one Father Cassidy, who was more human
than Jesuits usually are. I have always kept a warm remembrance of
this man and of his gentle ways to the little boys--young rascals many
of us--who were committed to his care. I remember the Franco-German
War breaking out at this period, and how it made a ripple even in our
secluded back-water.

From Hodder I passed on to Stonyhurst, that grand mediæval
dwelling-house which was left some hundred and fifty years ago to the
Jesuits, who brought over their whole teaching staff from some college
in Holland in order to carry it on as a public school. The general
curriculum, like the building, was mediæval but sound. I understand it
has been modernized since. There were seven classes--elements, figures,
rudiments, grammar, syntax, poetry and rhetoric--and you were allotted
a year for each, or seven in all--a course with which I faithfully
complied, two having already been completed at Hodder. It was the usual
public school routine of Euclid, algebra and the classics, taught in
the usual way, which is calculated to leave a lasting abhorrence of
these subjects. To give boys a little slab of Virgil or Homer with
no general idea as to what it is all about or what the classical age
was like, is surely an absurd way of treating the subject. I am sure
that an intelligent boy could learn more by reading a good translation
of Homer for a week than by a year’s study of the original as it is
usually carried out. It was no worse at Stonyhurst than at any other
school, and it can only be excused on the plea that any exercise,
however stupid in itself, forms a sort of mental dumb-bell by which one
can improve one’s mind. It is, I think, a thoroughly false theory. I
can say with truth that my Latin and Greek, which cost me so many weary
hours, 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. My classical education left me with a horror
of the classics, and I was astonished to find how fascinating they were
when I read them in a reasonable manner in later years.

Year by year, then, I see myself climbing those seven weary steps and
passing through as many stages of my boyhood. I do not know if the
Jesuit system of education is good or not; I would need to have tried
another system as well before I could answer that. On the whole it
was justified by results, for I think it turned out as decent a set
of young fellows as any other school would do. In spite of a large
infusion of foreigners and some disaffected Irish, we were a patriotic
crowd, and our little pulse beat time with the heart of the nation.
I am told that the average of V.C.’s and D.S.O.’s now held by old
Stonyhurst boys is very high as compared with other schools. The Jesuit
teachers have no trust in human nature, and perhaps they are justified.
We were never allowed for an instant to be alone with each other, and
I think that the immorality which is rife in public schools was at a
minimum in consequence. In our games and our walks the priests always
took part, and a master perambulated the dormitories at night. Such a
system may weaken self-respect and self-help, but it at least minimizes
temptation and scandal.

The life was Spartan, and yet we had all that was needed. Dry bread
and hot well-watered milk were our frugal breakfast. There was a
“joint” and twice a week a pudding for dinner. Then there was an odd
snack called “bread and beer” in the afternoon, a bit of dry bread
and the most extraordinary drink, which was brown but had no other
characteristic of beer. Finally, there was hot milk again, bread,
butter, and often potatoes for supper. We were all very healthy on this
_régime_, on Fridays. Everything in every way was plain to the verge
of austerity, save that we dwelt in a beautiful building, dined in a
marble-floored hall with minstrels’ gallery, prayed in a lovely church,
and generally lived in very choice surroundings so far as vision and
not comfort was concerned.

Corporal punishment was severe, and I can speak with feeling as I think
few, if any, boys of my time endured more of it. It was of a peculiar
nature, imported also, I fancy, from Holland. The instrument was a
piece of india-rubber of the size and shape of a thick boot sole. This
was called a “Tolley”--why, no one has explained, unless it is a Latin
pun on what we had to bear. One blow of this instrument, delivered with
intent, would cause the palm of the hand to swell up and change colour.
When I say that the usual punishment of the larger boys was nine on
each hand, and that nine on one hand was the 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. I think, however, that it was good
for us in the end, for it was a point of honour with many of us not
to show that we were hurt, and that is one of the best trainings for a
hard life. If I was more beaten than others it was not that I was in
any way vicious, but it was that I 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. I deserved all I got for what I did, but I did it because I was
mishandled.

I do not remember any one who attained particular distinction among my
school-fellows, save Bernard Partridge of “Punch,” whom I recollect
as a very quiet, gentle boy. Father Thurston, who was destined to be
one of my opponents in psychic matters so many years later, was in
the class above me. There was a young novice, too, with whom I hardly
came in contact, but whose handsome and spiritual appearance I well
remember. He was Bernard Vaughan, afterwards the famous preacher. Save
for one school-fellow, James Ryan--a remarkable boy who grew into a
remarkable man--I carried away no lasting friendship from Stonyhurst.

It was only in the latest stage of my Stonyhurst development that I
realized that I had some literary streak in me which was not common to
all. It came to me as quite a surprise, and even more perhaps to my
masters, who had taken a rather hopeless view of my future prospects.
One master, when I told him that I thought of being a civil engineer,
remarked, “Well, Doyle, you may be an engineer, but I don’t think you
will ever be a civil one.” Another assured me that I would never do
any good in the world, and perhaps from his point of view his prophecy
has been justified. The particular incident, however, which brought
my latent powers to the surface depended upon the fact that in the
second highest class, which I reached in 1874, it was incumbent to
write poetry (so called) on any theme given. This was done as a dreary
unnatural task by most boys. Very comical their wooings of the muses
used to be. For one saturated as I really was with affection for
verse, it was a labour of love, and I produced verses which were poor
enough in themselves but seemed miracles to those who had no urge in
that direction. The particular theme was the crossing of the Red Sea by
the Israelites and my effort from--

    “Like pallid daisies in a grassy wood,
    So round the sward the tents of Israel stood”;

through--

    “There was no time for thought and none for fear,
    For Egypt’s horse already pressed their rear.”

down to the climax--

    “One horrid cry! The tragedy was o’er,
    And Pharaoh with his army seen no more,”--

was workmanlike though wooden and conventional. Anyhow, it marked what
Mr. Stead used to call a signpost, and I realized myself a little. In
the last year I edited the College magazine and wrote a good deal of
indifferent verse. I also went up for the Matriculation examination of
London University, a good all-round test which winds up the Stonyhurst
curriculum, and I surprised every one by taking honours, so after all
I emerged from Stonyhurst at the age of sixteen with more credit than
seemed probable from my rather questionable record.

Early in my career there, an offer had been made to my mother that my
school fees would be remitted if I were dedicated to the Church. She
refused this, so both the Church and I had an escape. When I think,
however, of her small income and great struggle to keep up appearances
and make both ends meet, it was a fine example of her independence of
character, for it meant paying out some £50 a year which might have
been avoided by a word of assent.

[Illustration: MY MOTHER, AT 17.

_Drawn by Richard Doyle, July 1854._]

I had yet another year with the Jesuits, for it was determined that
I was still too young to begin any professional studies, and that I
should go to Germany and learn German. I was despatched, therefore,
to Feldkirch, which is a Jesuit school in the Vorarlberg province of
Austria, to which many better-class German boys are sent. Here 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.

I began badly, however, for on the first night of my arrival I was kept
awake by a boy snoring loudly in the dormitory. I stood it as long as
I could, but at last I was driven to action. Curious wooden compasses
called _bett-scheere_, or “bed-scissors,” were stuck into each side of
the narrow beds. One of these I plucked out, walked down the dormitory,
and, having spotted the offender, proceeded to poke him with my stick.
He awoke and was considerably amazed to see in the dim light a large
youth whom he had never seen before--I arrived after hours--assaulting
him with a club. I was still engaged in stirring him up when I felt
a touch on my shoulder and was confronted by the master, who ordered
me back to bed. Next morning I got a lecture on free-and-easy English
ways, and taking the law into my own hands. But this start was really
my worst lapse and I did well in the future.

It was a happy year on the whole. I made less progress with German
than I should, for there were about twenty English and Irish boys who
naturally balked the wishes of their parents by herding together. There
was no cricket, but there were toboganning and fair football and a
weird game--football on stilts. Then there were the lovely mountains
round us, with an occasional walk among them. The food was better than
at Stonyhurst and we had the pleasant German light beer instead of
the horrible swipes of Stonyhurst. One unlooked-for accomplishment I
acquired, for the boy who played the big brass bass instrument in the
fine school band had not returned, and, as a well-grown lad was needed,
I was at once enlisted in the service. I played in public--good music,
too, “Lohengrin,” and “Tannhäuser,”--within a week or two of my first
lesson, but they pressed me on for the occasion and the Bombardon, as
it was called, only comes in on a measured rhythm with an occasional
run, which sounds like a hippopotamus doing a step-dance. So big was
the instrument that I remember the other bandsmen putting my sheets and
blankets inside it and my surprise when I could not get out a note. It
was in the summer of 1876 that I left Feldkirch, and I have always had
a pleasant memory of the Austrian Jesuits and of the old schools.

Indeed I have a kindly feeling towards all Jesuits, far as I have
strayed from their paths. I see now both their limitations and their
virtues. They have been slandered in some things, for during eight
years of constant contact I cannot remember that they were less
truthful than their fellows, or more casuistical than their neighbours.
They were keen, clean-minded earnest men, so far as I knew them, with a
few black sheep among them, but not many, for the process of selection
was careful and long. In all ways, save in their theology, they were
admirable, though this same theology made them hard and inhuman upon
the surface, which is indeed the general effect of Catholicism in its
more extreme forms. The convert is lost to the family. Their hard,
narrow outlook gives the Jesuits driving power, as is noticeable in the
Puritans and all hard, narrow creeds. They are devoted and fearless and
have again and again, both in Canada, in South America and in China,
been the vanguard of civilization to their own grievous hurt. They
are the old guard of the Roman Church. But the tragedy is that they,
who would gladly give their lives for the old faith, have in effect
helped to ruin it, for it is they, according to Father Tyrrell and the
modernists, who have been at the back of all those extreme doctrines
of papal infallibility and Immaculate Conception, with a general
all-round tightening of dogma, which have made it so difficult for the
man with scientific desire for truth or with intellectual self-respect
to keep within the Church. For some years Sir Charles Mivart, the last
of Catholic Scientists, tried to do the impossible, and then he also
had to leave go his hold, so that there is not, so far as I know,
one single man of outstanding fame in science or in general thought
who is a practising Catholic. This is the work of the extremists and
is deplored by many of the moderates and fiercely condemned by the
modernists. It depends also upon the inner Italian directorate who
give the orders. Nothing can exceed the uncompromising bigotry of
the Jesuit theology, or their apparent ignorance of how it shocks
the modern conscience. I remember that when, as a grown lad, I heard
Father Murphy, a great fierce Irish priest, declare that there was sure
damnation for every one outside the Church, I looked upon him with
horror, and to that moment I trace the first rift which has grown into
such a chasm between me and those who were my guides.

On my way back to England I stopped at Paris. Through all my life
up to this point there had been an unseen granduncle, named Michael
Conan, to whom I must now devote a paragraph. He came into the family
from the fact that my father’s father (“H. B.”) had married a Miss
Conan. Michael Conan, her brother, had been editor of “The Art Journal”
and was a man of distinction, an intellectual Irishman of the type
which originally founded the Sinn Fein movement. He was as keen on
heraldry and genealogy as my mother, and he traced his descent in some
circuitous way from the Dukes of Brittany, who were all Conans; indeed
Arthur Conan was the ill-fated young Duke whose eyes were put out,
according to Shakespeare, by King John. This uncle was my godfather,
and hence my name Arthur Conan.

He lived in Paris and had expressed a wish that his grandnephew and
godson, with whom he had corresponded, should call _en passant_. I ran
my money affairs so closely, after a rather lively supper at Strasburg,
that when I reached Paris I had just twopence in my pocket. As I could
not well drive up and ask my uncle to pay the cab I left my trunk at
the station and set forth on foot. I reached the river, walked along
it, came to the foot of the Champs Élysées, saw the Arc de Triomphe in
the distance, and then, knowing that the Avenue Wagram, where my uncle
lived, was near there, I tramped it on a hot August day and finally
found him. I remember that I was exhausted with the heat and the
walking, and that when at the last gasp I saw a man buy a drink of what
seemed to be porter by handing a penny to a man who had a long tin on
his back, I therefore halted the man and spent one of my pennies on a
duplicate drink. It proved to be liquorice and water, but it revived
me when I badly needed it, and it could not be said that I arrived
penniless at my uncle’s, for I actually had a penny.

So, for some penurious weeks, I was in Paris with this dear old
volcanic Irishman, who spent the summer day in his shirt-sleeves, with
a little dicky-bird of a wife waiting upon him. I am built rather on
his lines of body and mind than on any of the Doyles. We made a true
friendship, and then I returned to my home conscious that real life was
about to begin.

RECOLLECTIONS OF A STUDENT

 Edinburgh University--A Sad Disappointment--Original of Professor
 Challenger--Of Sherlock Holmes--Deductions--Sheffield--Ruyton--
 Birmingham--Literary Aspirations--First Accepted Story--My Father’s
 Death--Mental Position--Spiritual Yearnings--An Awkward Business.

When I returned to Edinburgh, with little to show, either mental or
spiritual, for my pleasant school year in Germany, I found that the
family affairs were still as straitened as ever. No promotion had come
to my father, and two younger children, Innes, my only brother, and
Ida, had arrived to add to the calls upon my mother. Another sister,
Julia, followed shortly afterwards. But Annette, the eldest sister, had
already gone out to Portugal to earn and send home a fair salary, while
Lottie and Connie were about to do the same. My mother had adopted the
device of sharing a large house, which may have eased her in some ways,
but was disastrous in others.

Perhaps it was good for me that the times were hard, for I was wild,
full-blooded, and a trifle reckless, but the situation called for
energy and application, so that one was bound to try to meet it.
My mother had been so splendid that we could not fail her. It had
been determined that I should be a doctor, chiefly, I think, because
Edinburgh was so famous a centre for medical learning. It meant another
long effort for my mother, but she was very brave and ambitious where
her children were concerned, and I was not only to have a medical
education, but to take the University degree, which was a larger matter
than a mere licence to practise. When I returned from Germany I found
that there was a long list of bursaries and scholarships open for
competition. I had a month in which to brush up my classics and then I
went in for these, and was informed a week later that I had won the
Grierson bursary of £40 for two years. Great were the rejoicings and
all shadows seemed to be lifting. But on calling to get the money I was
informed that there had been a clerical error, and that this particular
bursary was only open to arts students. As there was a long list of
prizes I naturally supposed that I would get the next highest, which
was available for medicals. The official pulled a long face and said:
“Unfortunately the candidate to whom it was allotted has already drawn
the money.” It was manifest robbery, and yet I, who had won the prize
and needed it so badly, never received it, and was eventually put off
with a solatium of £7, which had accumulated from some fund. It was
a bitter disappointment and, of course, I had a legal case, but what
can a penniless student do, and what sort of college career would he
have if he began it by suing his University for money? I was advised
to accept the situation, and there seemed no prospect of accepting
anything else.

So now behold me, a tall strongly-framed but half-formed young man,
fairly entered upon my five years’ course of medical study. It can be
done with diligence in four years, but there came, as I shall show, a
glorious interruption which held me back for one year. I entered as a
student in October 1876, and I emerged as a Bachelor of Medicine in
August 1881. Between these two points lies one 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. The whole system of teaching, as I look back upon it, seems
far too oblique and not nearly practical enough for the purpose in
view. And yet Edinburgh is, I believe, more practical than most other
colleges. It is practical, too, in its preparation for life, since
there is none of the atmosphere of an enlarged public school, as is the
case in English Universities, but the student lives a free man in his
own rooms with no restrictions of any sort. It ruins some and makes
strong men of many. In my own case, of course, this did not apply,
since my family lived in the town, and I worked from my own home.

There was no attempt at friendship, or even acquaintance, between
professors and students at Edinburgh. It was a strictly business
arrangement by which you paid, for example, four guineas for Anatomy
lectures and received the winter course in exchange, never seeing
your professor save behind his desk and never under any circumstances
exchanging a word with him. They were remarkable men, however, some
of these professors, and we managed to know them pretty well without
any personal acquaintance. There was kindly Crum Brown, the chemist,
who sheltered himself carefully before exploding some mixture, which
usually failed to ignite, so that the loud “Boom!” uttered by the class
was the only resulting sound. Brown would emerge from his retreat with
a “Really, gentlemen!” of remonstrance, and go on without allusion to
the abortive experiment. There was Wyville Thomson, the zoologist,
fresh from his _Challenger_ expedition, and Balfour, with the face and
manner of John Knox, a hard rugged old man, who harried the students in
their exams, and was in consequence harried by them for the rest of the
year. There was Turner, a fine anatomist, but a self-educated man, as
was betrayed when he used to “take and put this structure on the handle
of this scalpel.” The most human trait that I can recall of Turner was
that upon one occasion the sacred quadrangle was invaded by snowballing
roughs. His class, of whom I was one, heard the sounds of battle
and fidgeted in their seats, on which the Professor said: “I think,
gentlemen, your presence may be more useful outside than here,” on
which we flocked out with a whoop, and soon had the quadrangle clear.
Most vividly of all, however, there stands out in my memory the squat
figure of Professor Rutherford with his Assyrian beard, his prodigious
voice, his enormous chest and his singular manner. He fascinated and
awed us. I have endeavoured to reproduce some of his peculiarities in
the fictitious character of Professor Challenger. He would sometimes
start his lecture before he reached the classroom, so that we would
hear a booming voice saying: “There are valves in the veins,” or some
other information, when the desk was still empty. He was, I fear, a
rather ruthless vivisector, and though I have always recognized that a
minimum of painless vivisection is necessary, and far more justifiable
than the eating of meat as a food, I am glad that the law was made more
stringent so as to restrain such men as he. “Ach, these Jarman Frags!”
he would exclaim in his curious accent, as he tore some poor amphibian
to pieces. I wrote a students’ song which is still sung, I understand,
in which a curious article is picked up on the Portobello beach and
each Professor in turn claims it for his department. Rutherford’s verse
ran:

    Said Rutherford with a smile,
    “It’s a mass of solid bile,
      And I myself obtained it, what is more,
    By a stringent cholagogue
    From a vivisected dog,
      And I lost it on the Portobello Shore.”

If the song is indeed still sung it may be of interest to the present
generation to know that I was the author.

But the most notable of the characters whom I met was one Joseph Bell,
surgeon at the Edinburgh Infirmary. Bell was a very remarkable man in
body and mind. He was thin, wiry, dark, with a high-nosed acute face,
penetrating grey eyes, angular shoulders, and a jerky way of walking.
His voice was high and discordant. He was a very skilful surgeon, but
his strong point was diagnosis, not only of disease, but of occupation
and character. For some reason which I have never understood he
singled me out from the drove of students who frequented his wards and
made me his out-patient clerk, which meant that I had to array his
out-patients, make simple notes of their cases, and then show them in,
one by one, to the large room in which Bell sat in state surrounded
by his dressers and students. Then I had ample chance of studying his
methods and of noticing that he often learned more of the patient by
a few quick glances than I had done by my questions. Occasionally the
results were very dramatic, though there were times when he blundered.
In one of his best cases he said to a civilian patient: “Well, my man,
you’ve served in the army.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Not long discharged?”

“No, sir.”

“A Highland regiment?”

“Aye, sir.”

“A non-com. officer.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Stationed at Barbados?”

“Aye, sir.”

“You see, gentlemen,” he would explain, “the man was a respectful man
but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would
have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an
air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his
complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.” To
his audience of Watsons it all seemed very miraculous until it was
explained, and then it became simple enough. It is no wonder that after
the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in
later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases
on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal. Bell took
a keen interest in these detective tales and even made suggestions
which were not, I am bound to say, very practical. I kept in touch with
him for many years and he used to come upon my platform to support me
when I contested Edinburgh in 1901.

When I took over his out-patient work he warned me that a knowledge
of Scottish idioms was necessary and I, with the confidence of youth,
declared that I had got it. The sequel was amusing. On one of the
first days an old man came who, in response to my question, declared
that he had a “bealin’ in his oxter.” This fairly beat me, much to
Bell’s amusement. It seems that the words really mean an abscess in the
arm-pit.

Speaking generally of my University career I may say that though I
took my fences in my stride and balked at none of them, still I won
no distinction in the race. I was always one of the ruck, neither
lingering nor gaining--a 60 per cent man at examinations. There were,
however, some reasons for this which I will now state.

It was clearly very needful that I should help financially as quickly
as possible, even if my help only took the humble form of providing
for my own keep. Therefore I endeavoured almost from the first to
compress the classes for a year into half a year, and so to have some
months in which to earn a little money as a medical assistant, who
would dispense and do odd jobs for a doctor. When I first set forth to
do this my services were so obviously worth nothing that I had to put
that valuation upon them. Even then it might have been a hard bargain
for the doctor, for I might have proved like the youth in “Pickwick”
who had a rooted idea that oxalic acid was Epsom salts. However, I had
horse sense enough to save myself and my employer from any absolute
catastrophe. My first venture, in the early summer of ’78, was with a
Dr. Richardson, running a low-class practice in the poorer quarters of
Sheffield. I did my best, and I dare say he was patient, but at the
end of three weeks we parted by mutual consent. I went on to London,
where I renewed my advertisements in the medical papers, and found a
refuge for some weeks with my Doyle relatives, then living at Clifton
Gardens, Maida Vale. I fear that I was too Bohemian for them and they
too conventional for me. However, they were kind to me, and I roamed
about London for some time with pockets so empty that there was little
chance of idleness breeding its usual mischief. I remember that there
were signs of trouble in the East and that the recruiting sergeants,
who were very busy in Trafalgar Square, took my measure in a moment and
were very insistent that I should take the shilling. There was a time
when I was quite disposed to do so, but my mother’s plans held me back.
I may say that late in the same year I did volunteer as a dresser for
the English ambulances sent to Turkey for the Russian War, and was on
the Red Cross list, but the collapse of the Turks prevented my going
out.

Soon, however, there came an answer to my advertisement: “Third
year’s student, desiring experience rather than remuneration,
offers his services, &c., &c.” It was from a Dr. Elliot living in a
townlet in Shropshire which rejoiced in the extraordinary name of
“Ruyton-of-the-eleven-towns.” It was not big enough to make one town,
far less eleven. There for four months I helped in a country practice.
It was a very quiet existence and I had a good deal of time to myself
under very pleasant circumstances, so that I really trace some little
mental progress to that period, for I read and thought without
interruption. My medical duties were of a routine nature save on a few
occasions. One of them still stands out in my memory, for it was the
first time in my life that I ever had to test my own nerve in a great
sudden emergency. The doctor was out when there came a half-crazed
messenger to say that in some rejoicings at a neighbouring great house
they had exploded an old cannon which had promptly burst and grievously
injured one of the bystanders. No doctor was available, so I was the
last resource. On arriving there I found a man in bed with a lump of
iron sticking out of the side of his head. I tried not to show the
alarm which I felt, and I did the obvious thing by pulling out the
iron. I could see the clean white bone, so I could assure them that the
brain had not been injured. 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. On the whole I
had a happy time at Ruyton, and have a pleasing memory of Dr. Elliot
and his wife.

After a winter’s work at the University my next assistantship was a
real money-making proposition to the extent of some two pounds a month.
This was with Dr. Hoare, a well-known Birmingham doctor, who had a
five-horse City practice, and every working doctor, before the days of
motors, would realize that this meant going from morning to night. He
earned some three thousand a year, which takes some doing, when it is
collected from 3_s._ 6_d._ visits and 1_s._ 6_d._ bottles of medicine,
among the very poorest classes of Aston. Hoare was a fine fellow,
stout, square, red-faced, bushy-whiskered and dark-eyed. His wife was
also a very kindly and gifted woman, and my position in the house was
soon rather that of a son than of an assistant. The work, however,
was hard and incessant, and the pay very small. I had long lists of
prescriptions to make up every day, for we dispensed our own medicine,
and one hundred bottles of an evening were not unknown. 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. I
had my own visiting list, also, the poorest or the most convalescent,
and I saw a great deal, for better or worse, of very low life. Twice
I returned to this Birmingham practice and always my relations with
the family became closer. At my second visit my knowledge had greatly
extended and I did midwifery cases, and the more severe cases in
general practice as well as all the dispensing. I had no time to spend
any money and it was as well, for every shilling was needed at home.

It was in this year that I first learned that shillings might be earned
in other ways than by filling phials. Some friend remarked to me that
my letters were very vivid and surely I could write some things to
sell. I may say that the general aspiration towards literature was
tremendously strong upon me, and that my mind was reaching out in
what seemed an aimless way in all sorts of directions. I used to be
allowed twopence for my lunch, that being the price of a mutton pie,
but near the pie shop was a second-hand book shop with a barrel full
of old books and the legend “Your choice for 2_d._” stuck above it.
Ofter the price of my luncheon used to be spent on some sample out of
this barrel, and I have within reach of my arm as I write these lines,
copies of Gordon’s Tacitus, Temple’s works, Pope’s Homer, Addison’s
Spectator and Swift’s works, which all came out of the twopenny box.
Any one observing my actions and tastes would have said that so strong
a spring would certainly overflow, but for my own part I never dreamed
I could myself produce decent prose, and the remark of my friend, who
was by no means given to flattery, took me greatly by surprise. I
sat down, however, and wrote a little adventure story which I called
“The Mystery of the Sassassa Valley.” To my great joy and surprise it
was accepted by “Chambers’ Journal,” and I received three guineas.
It mattered not that other attempts failed. I had done it once and I
cheered myself by the thought that I could do it again. It was years
before I touched “Chambers’” again, but in 1879 I had a story, “The
American’s Tale,” in “London Society,” for which also I got a small
cheque. But the idea of real success was still far from my mind.

During all this time our family affairs had taken no turn for the
better, and had it not been for my excursions and for the work of
my sisters we could hardly have carried on. My father’s health had
utterly broken, he had to retire to that Convalescent Home in which
the last years of his life were spent, and I, aged twenty, found myself
practically the head of a large and struggling family. My father’s life
was full of the tragedy of unfulfilled powers and of undeveloped gifts.
He had his weaknesses, as all of us have ours, but he had also some
very remarkable and outstanding virtues. 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. When he passed away a few years later I am sure that
Charles Doyle had no enemy in the world, and that those who knew him
best sympathized most with the hard fate which had thrown him, a man
of sensitive genius, into an environment which neither his age nor
his nature was fitted to face. He was unworldly and unpractical and
his family suffered for it, but even his faults were in some ways the
result of his developed spirituality. He lived and died a fervent son
of the Roman Catholic faith. My mother, however, who had never been a
very devoted daughter of that great institution, became less so as life
progressed, and finally found her chief consolation in the Anglican
fold.

This brings me to my own spiritual unfolding, if such it may be
called, during those years of constant struggle. I have already in my
account of the Jesuits shown how, even as a boy, all that was sanest
and most generous in my nature rose up against a narrow theology and
an uncharitable outlook upon the other great religions of the world.
In the Catholic Church to doubt anything is to doubt everything, for
since it is a vital axiom that doubt is a mortal sin when once it has,
unbidden and unappeasable, come upon you, everything is loosened and
you look upon the whole wonderful interdependent scheme with other
and more critical eyes. Thus viewed there was much to attract--its
traditions, its unbroken and solemn ritual, the beauty and truth of
many of its observances, its poetical appeal to the emotions, the
sensual charm of music, light and incense, its power as an instrument
of law and order. For the guidance of an unthinking and uneducated
world it could in many ways hardly be surpassed, as has been shown in
Paraguay, and in the former Ireland where, outside agrarian trouble,
crime was hardly known. All this I could clearly see, but if I may
claim any outstanding characteristic in my life, it is that I have
never paltered or compromised with religious matters, that I have
always weighed them very seriously, and that there was something in
me which made it absolutely impossible, even when my most immediate
interests were concerned, to say anything about them save that which
I, in the depth of my being, really believed to be true. Judging it
thus by all the new knowledge which came to me both from my reading
and from my studies, I found that the foundations not only of Roman
Catholicism but of the whole Christian faith, as presented to me in
nineteenth century theology, were so weak that my mind could not build
upon them. It is to be remembered that these were the years when
Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill were our
chief philosophers, and that even the man in the street felt the strong
sweeping current of their thought, while to the young student, eager
and impressionable, it was overwhelming. I know now that their negative
attitude was even more mistaken, and very much more dangerous, than the
positive positions which they attacked with such destructive criticism.
A gap had opened between our fathers and ourselves so suddenly and
completely that when a Gladstone wrote to uphold the Gadarene swine, or
the six days of Creation, the youngest student rightly tittered over
his arguments, and it did not need a Huxley to demolish them. I can
see now very clearly how deplorable it is that manifest absurdities
should be allowed to continue without even a footnote to soften them
in the sacred text, because it has the effect that what is indeed
sacred becomes overlaid, and one can easily be persuaded that what is
false in parts can have no solid binding force. There are no worse
enemies of true religion than those who clamour against all revision
or modification of that strange mass of superbly good and questionable
matter which we lump all together into a single volume as if there were
the same value to all of it. It is not solid gold, but gold in clay,
and if this be understood the earnest seeker will not cast it aside
when he comes upon the clay, but will value the gold the more in that
he has himself separated it.

It was, then, all Christianity, and not Roman Catholicism alone, which
had alienated my mind and driven me to an agnosticism, which never for
an instant degenerated into atheism, for I had a very keen perception
of the wonderful poise of the universe and the tremendous power of
conception and sustenance which it implied. I was reverent in all
my doubts and never ceased to think upon the matter, but the more I
thought the more confirmed became my non-conformity. In a broad sense
I was a Unitarian, save that I regarded the Bible with more criticism
than Unitarians usually show. This negative position was so firm that
it seemed to me to be a terminus; whereas it proved only a junction on
the road of life where I was destined to change from the old well-worn
line on to a new one. Every materialist, as I can now clearly see, is
a case of arrested development. He has cleared his ruins, but has not
begun to build that which would shelter him. As to psychic knowledge, I
knew it only by the account of exposures in the police courts and the
usual wild and malicious statements in the public press. Years were
to pass before I understood that in that direction might be found the
positive proofs which I constantly asserted were the only conditions
upon which I could resume any sort of allegiance to the unseen. I must
have definite demonstration, for if it were to be a matter of faith
then I might as well go back to the faith of my fathers. “Never will
I accept anything which cannot be proved to me. The evils of religion
have all come from accepting things which cannot be proved.” So I said
at the time and I have been true to my resolve.

I would not give the impression that my life was gloomy or morbidly
thoughtful because it chanced that I had some extra cares and some
worrying thoughts. 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.
On one occasion I got into a row which might have been serious. I was
waiting on the gallery steps with a great line of people, the shut
door still facing us. There were half a dozen soldiers in the crowd and
one of these squeezed a girl up against the wall in such a way that she
began to scream. As I was near them I asked the man to be more gentle,
on which he dug his elbow with all his force into my ribs. He turned on
me as he did so, and I hit him with both hands in the face. He bored
into me and pushed me up into the angle of the door, but I had a grip
of him and he could not hit me, though he tried to kick me in cowardly
fashion with his knee. Several of his comrades threatened me, and one
hit me on the head with his cane, cracking my hat. At this moment
luckily the door opened and the rush of the crowd carried the soldiers
on, one sympathetic corporal saying, “Take your breath, sir! Take your
breath!” I threw my man through the open door and came home, for it was
clearly asking for trouble if I remained. It was a good escape from an
awkward business.

And now I come to the first real outstanding adventure in my life,
which is worthy of a fresh chapter and of a more elaborate treatment.

CHAPTER IV

WHALING IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN

 The _Hope_--John Gray--Boxing--The Terrible Mate--Our Criminal--First
 Sight of a Woman--A Hurricane--Dangers of the Fishing--Three Dips
 in the Arctic--The Idlers’ Boat--Whale Taking--Glamour of the
 Arctic--Effect of Voyage.

It was in the _Hope_, under the command of the well-known whaler, John
Gray, that I paid a seven months’ visit to the Arctic Seas in the year
1880. I went in the capacity of surgeon, but as I was only twenty years
of age when I started, and as my knowledge of medicine was that of an
average third year’s student, I have often thought that it was as well
that there was no very serious call upon my services.

It came about in this way. One raw afternoon in Edinburgh, whilst I
was sitting reading hard for one of those examinations which blight
the life of a medical student, there entered to me one Currie, a
fellow-student with whom I had some slight acquaintance. The monstrous
question which he asked drove all thought of my studies out of my head.

“Would you care,” said he, “to start next week for a whaling cruise?
You’ll be surgeon, two pound ten a month and three shillings a ton oil
money.”

“How do you know I’ll get the berth?” was my natural question.

“Because I have it myself. I find at this last moment that I can’t go,
and I want to get a man to take my place.”

“How about an Arctic kit?”

“You can have mine.”

In an instant the thing was settled, and within a few minutes the
current of my life had been deflected into a new channel.

In little more than a week I was in Peterhead, and busily engaged, with
the help of the steward, in packing away my scanty belongings in the
locker beneath my bunk on the good ship _Hope_.

I speedily found that the chief duty of the surgeon was to be the
companion of the captain, who is cut off by the etiquette of the
trade from anything but very brief and technical talks with his other
officers. I should have found it intolerable if the captain had been
a bad fellow, but John Gray of the _Hope_ was a really splendid man,
a grand seaman and a serious-minded Scot, so that he and I formed a
comradeship which was never marred during our long _tête-à-tête_. I
see him now, his ruddy face, his grizzled hair and beard, his very
light blue eyes always looking into far spaces, and his erect muscular
figure. Taciturn, sardonic, stern on occasion, but always a good just
man at bottom.

There was one curious thing about the manning of the _Hope_. The man
who signed on as first mate was a little, decrepit, broken fellow,
absolutely incapable of performing the duties. The cook’s assistant, on
the other hand, was a giant of a man, red-bearded, bronzed, with huge
limbs, and a voice of thunder. But the moment that the ship cleared the
harbour the little, decrepit mate disappeared into the cook’s galley,
and acted as scullery-boy for the voyage, while the mighty scullery-boy
walked aft and became chief mate. The fact was, that the one had the
certificate, but was past sailoring, while the other could neither read
nor write, but was as fine a seaman as ever lived; so, by an agreement
to which everybody concerned was party, they swapped their berths when
they were at sea.

Colin McLean, with his six foot of stature, his erect, stalwart figure,
and his fierce, red beard, pouring out from between the flaps of his
sealing-cap, was an officer by natural selection, which is a higher
title than that of a Board of Trade certificate. His only fault was
that he was a very hot-blooded man, and that a little would excite him
to a frenzy. I have a vivid recollection of an evening which I spent in
dragging him off the steward, who had imprudently made some criticism
upon his way of attacking a whale which had escaped. Both men had had
some rum, which had made the one argumentative and the other violent,
and as we were all three seated in a space of about seven by four, it
took some hard work to prevent bloodshed. Every now and then, just as
I thought all danger was past, the steward would begin again with his
fatuous, “No offence, Colin, but all I says is that if you had been a
bit quicker on the fush----” I don’t know how often this sentence was
begun, but never once was it ended; for at the word “fush” Colin always
seized him by the throat, and I Colin round the waist, and we struggled
until we were all panting and exhausted. Then when the steward had
recovered a little breath he would start that miserable sentence once
more, and the “fush” would be the signal for another encounter. I
really believe that if I had not been there the mate would have hurt
him, for he was quite the angriest man that I have ever seen.

There were fifty men upon our whaler, of whom half were Scotchmen
and half Shetlanders, whom we picked up at Lerwick as we passed. The
Shetlanders were the steadier and more tractable, quiet, decent, and
soft-spoken; while the Scotch seamen were more likely to give trouble,
but also more virile and of stronger character. The officers and
harpooners were all Scotch, but as ordinary seamen, and especially as
boatmen, the Shetlanders were as good as could be wished.

There was only one man on board who belonged neither to Scotland
nor to Shetland, and he was the mystery of the ship. He was a tall,
swarthy, dark-eyed man, with blue-black hair and beard, singularly
handsome features, and a curious, reckless sling of his shoulders when
he walked. It was rumoured that he came from the south of England, and
that he had fled thence to avoid the law. He made friends with no one,
and spoke very seldom, but he was one of the smartest seamen in the
ship. I could believe from his appearance that his temper was Satanic,
and that the crime for which he was hiding may have been a bloody one.
Only once he gave us a glimpse of his hidden fires. The cook--a very
burly, powerful man--the little mate was only assistant--had a private
store of rum, and treated himself so liberally to it that for three
successive days the dinner of the crew was ruined. On the third day
our silent outlaw approached the cook with a brass saucepan in his
hand. He said nothing, but he struck the man such a frightful blow that
his head flew through the bottom and the sides of the pan were left
dangling round his neck. The half-drunken, half-stunned cook talked of
fighting, but he was soon made to feel that the sympathy of the ship
was against him, so he reeled back, grumbling, to his duties while the
avenger relapsed into his usual moody indifference. We heard no further
complaints of the cooking.

I have spoken of the steward, and as I look back at that long voyage,
during which for seven months we never set foot on land, the kindly
open face of Jack Lamb comes back to me. He had a beautiful and
sympathetic tenor voice, and many an hour have I listened to it with
its accompaniment of rattling plates and jingling knives, as he cleaned
up the dishes in his pantry. He had a great memory for pathetic and
sentimental songs, and it is only when you have not seen a woman’s
face for six months that you realize what sentiment means. When Jack
trilled out “Her bright smile haunts me still,” or “Wait for me at
Heaven’s Gate, sweet Belle Mahone,” he filled us all with a vague sweet
discontent which comes back to me now as I think of it. To appreciate
a woman one has to be out of sight of one for six months. I can well
remember that as we rounded the north of Scotland on our return we
dipped our flag to the lighthouse, being only some hundreds of yards
from the shore. A figure emerged to answer our salute, and the excited
whisper ran through the ship, “It’s a wumman!” The captain was on the
bridge with his telescope. I had the binoculars in the bows. Every one
was staring. She was well over fifty, short skirts and sea boots--but
she was a “wumman.” “Anything in a mutch!” the sailors used to say, and
I was of the same way of thinking.

However, all this has come before its time. It was, I find by my log,
on February 28 at 2 p.m. that we sailed from Peterhead, amid a great
crowd and uproar. The decks were as clean as a yacht, and it was very
unlike my idea of a whaler. We ran straight into bad weather and the
glass went down at one time to 28.375, which is the lowest reading
I can remember in all my ocean wanderings. We just got into Lerwick
Harbour before the full force of the hurricane broke, which was so
great that lying at anchor with bare poles and partly screened we were
blown over to an acute angle. If it had taken us a few hours earlier
we should certainly have lost our boats--and the boats are the life of
a whaler. It was March 11 before the weather moderated enough to let
us get on, and by that time there were twenty whalers in the bay, so
that our setting forth was quite an occasion. That night and for a day
longer the _Hope_ had to take refuge in the lee of one of the outlying
islands. I got ashore and wandered among peat bogs, meeting strange,
barbarous, kindly people who knew nothing of the world. I was led back
to the ship by a wild, long-haired girl holding a torch, for the peat
holes make it dangerous at night--I can see her now, her tangled black
hair, her bare legs, madder-stained petticoat, and wild features under
the glare of the torch. I spoke to one old man there who asked me the
news. I said, “The Tay bridge is down,” which was then a fairly stale
item. He said, “Eh, have they built a brig over the Tay?” After that I
felt inclined to tell him about the Indian Mutiny.

What surprised me most in the Arctic regions was the rapidity with
which you reach them. I had never realized that they lie at our very
doors. I think that we were only four days out from Shetland when we
were among the drift ice. I awoke one morning to hear the bump, bump of
the floating pieces against the side of the ship, and I went on deck
to see the whole sea covered with them to the horizon. They were none
of them large, but they lay so thick that a man might travel far by
springing from one to the other. Their dazzling whiteness made the sea
seem bluer by contrast, and with a blue sky above, and that glorious
Arctic air in one’s nostrils, it was a morning to remember. Once on one
of the swaying, rocking pieces we saw a huge seal, sleek, sleepy, and
imperturbable, looking up with the utmost assurance at the ship, as if
it knew that the close time had still three weeks to run. Further on we
saw on the ice the long human-like prints of a bear. All this with the
snowdrops of Scotland still fresh in our glasses in the cabin.

I have spoken about the close time, and I may explain that, by an
agreement between the Norwegian and British Governments, the subjects
of both nations are forbidden to kill a seal before April 3. The reason
for this is that the breeding season is in March, and if the mothers
should be killed before the young are able to take care of themselves,
the race would soon become extinct. For breeding purposes the seals
all come together at a variable spot, which is evidently pre-arranged
among them, and as this place can be anywhere within many hundreds of
square miles of floating ice, it is no easy matter for the fisher to
find it. The means by which he sets about it are simple but ingenious.
As the ship makes its way through the loose ice-streams, a school
of seals is observed travelling through the water. Their direction
is carefully taken by compass and marked upon the chart. An hour
afterwards perhaps another school is seen. This is also marked. When
these bearings have been taken several times, the various lines upon
the chart are prolonged until they intersect. At this point, or near
it, it is likely that the main pack of the seals will be found.

When you do come upon it, it is a wonderful sight. I suppose it is the
largest assembly of creatures upon the face of the world--and this
upon the open icefields hundreds of miles from the Greenland coast.
Somewhere between 71 deg. and 75 deg. is the rendezvous, and the
longitude is even vaguer; but the seals have no difficulty in finding
the address. From the crow’s nest at the top of the main-mast, one
can see no end of them. On the furthest visible ice one can still see
that sprinkling of pepper grains. And the young lie everywhere also,
snow-white slugs, with a little black nose and large dark eyes. Their
half-human cries fill the air; and when you are sitting in the cabin of
a ship which is in the heart of the seal-pack, you would think you were
next door to a monstrous nursery.

The _Hope_ was one of the first to find the seal-pack that year, but
before the day came when hunting was allowed, we had a succession of
strong gales, followed by a severe roll, which tilted the floating ice
and launched the young seals prematurely into the water. And so, when
the law at last allowed us to begin work, Nature had left us with very
little work to do. However, at dawn upon the third, the ship’s company
took to the ice, and began to gather in its murderous harvest. It is
brutal work, though not more brutal than that which goes on to supply
every dinner-table in the country. And yet those glaring crimson pools
upon the dazzling white of the icefields, under the peaceful silence
of a blue Arctic sky, did seem a horrible intrusion. But an inexorable
demand creates an inexorable supply, and the seals, by their death,
help to give a living to the long line of seamen, dockers, tanners,
curers, triers, chandlers, leather merchants, and oil-sellers, who
stand between this annual butchery on the one hand, and the exquisite,
with his soft leather boots, or the savant, using a delicate oil for
his philosophical instruments, upon the other.

I have cause to remember that first day of sealing on account of the
adventures which befell me. I have said that a strong swell had arisen,
and as this was dashing the floating ice together the captain thought
it dangerous for an inexperienced man to venture upon it. And so, just
as I was clambering over the bulwarks with the rest, he ordered me
back and told me to remain on board. My remonstrances were useless,
and at last, in the blackest of tempers, I seated myself upon the top
of the bulwarks, with my feet dangling over the outer side, and there
I nursed my wrath, swinging up and down with the roll of the ship.
It chanced, however, that I was really seated upon a thin sheet of
ice which had formed upon the wood, and so when the swell threw her
over to a particularly acute angle, I shot off and vanished into the
sea between two ice-blocks. As I rose, I clawed on to one of these,
and soon scrambled on board again. The accident brought about what I
wished, however, for the captain remarked that as I was bound to fall
into the ocean in any case, I might just as well be on the ice as on
the ship. I justified his original caution by falling in twice again
during the day, and I finished it ignominiously by having to take to
my bed while all my clothes were drying in the engine-room. I was
consoled for my misfortunes by finding that they amused the captain to
such an extent that they drove the ill-success of our sealing out of
his head, and I had to answer to the name of “the great northern diver”
for a long time thereafter. I had a narrow escape once through stepping
backwards over the edge of a piece of floating ice while I was engaged
in skinning a seal. I had wandered away from the others, and no one saw
my misfortune. The face of the ice was so even that I had no purchase
by which to pull myself up, and my body was rapidly becoming numb in
the freezing water. At last, however, I caught hold of the hind flipper
of the dead seal, and there was a kind of nightmare tug-of-war, the
question being whether I should pull the seal off or pull myself on.
At last, however, I got my knee over the edge and rolled on to it. I
remember that my clothes were as hard as a suit of armour by the time I
reached the ship, and that I had to thaw my crackling garments before I
could change them.

This April sealing is directed against the mothers and young. Then, in
May, the sealer goes further north, and about latitude 77 deg. or 78
deg. he comes upon the old male seals, who are by no means such easy
victims. They are wary creatures, and it takes good long-range shooting
to bag them. Then, in June, the sealing is over, and the ship bears
away further north still, until in the 79th or 80th degree she is in
the best Greenland whaling latitudes. There we stayed for three months
or so, with very varying fortunes, for though we pursued many whales,
only four were slain.

There are eight boats on board a whaler, but it is usual to send out
only seven, for it takes six men to man each, so that when seven are
out no one is left on board save the so-called “idlers” who have not
signed to do seaman’s work at all. It happened, however, that aboard
the _Hope_ the idlers were rather a hefty crowd, so we volunteered to
man the odd boat, and we made it, in our own estimation at least, one
of the most efficient, both in sealing and in whaling. The steward, the
second engineer, the donkey-engine man, and I were the oars, with a
red-headed Highlander for harpooner and the handsome outlaw to steer.
Our tally of seals was high, and in whaling we were once the lancing
and once the harpooning boat, so our record was good. So congenial
was the work to me that Captain Gray was good enough to offer to make
me harpooner as well as surgeon, with the double pay, if I would come
with him on a second voyage. It is well that I refused, for the life is
dangerously fascinating.

[Illustration: STEAM-WHALER “HOPE.”]

It is exciting work pulling on to a whale. Your own back is turned to
him, and all you know about him is what you read upon the face of the
boat-steerer. He is staring out over your head, watching the creature
as it swims slowly through the water, raising his hand now and again
as a signal to stop rowing when he sees that the eye is coming round,
and then resuming the stealthy approach when the whale is end on. There
are so many floating pieces of ice, that as long as the oars are quiet
the boat alone will not cause the creature to dive. So you creep slowly
up, and at last you are so near that the boat-steerer knows that you
can get there before the creature has time to dive--for it takes some
little time to get that huge body into motion. You see a sunken gleam
in his eyes, and a flush in his cheeks, and it’s “Give way, boys! Give
way, all! Hard!” Click goes the trigger of the big harpoon gun, and
the foam flies from your oars. Six strokes, perhaps, and then with
a dull greasy squelch the bows run upon something soft, and you and
your oars are sent flying in every direction. But little you care for
that, for as you touched the whale you have heard the crash of the gun,
and know that the harpoon has been fired point-blank into the huge,
lead-coloured curve of its side. The creature sinks like a stone, the
bows of the boat splash down into the water again, but there is the
little red Jack flying from the centre thwart to show that you are
fast, and there is the line whizzing swiftly under the seats and over
the bows between your outstretched feet.

And this is the great element of danger--for it is rarely indeed that
the whale has spirit enough to turn upon its enemies. The line is
very carefully coiled by a special man named the line-coiler, and it
is warranted not to kink. If it should happen to do so, however, and
if the loop catches the limbs of any one of the boat’s crew, that man
goes to his death so rapidly that his comrades hardly know that he has
gone. It is a waste of fish to cut the line, for the victim is already
hundreds of fathoms deep.

“Haud your hand, mon,” cried the harpooner, as a seaman raised his
knife on such an occasion. “The fush will be a fine thing for the
widdey.” It sounds callous, but there was philosophy at the base of it.

This is the harpooning, and that boat has no more to do. But the
lancing, when the weary fish is killed with the cold steel, is a more
exciting because it is a more prolonged experience. You may be for half
an hour so near to the creature that you can lay your hand upon its
slimy side. The whale appears to have but little sensibility to pain,
for it never winces when the long lances are passed through its body.
But its instinct urges it to get its tail to work on the boats, and
yours urges you to keep poling and boat-hooking along its side, so as
to retain your safe position near its shoulder. Even there, however, we
found on one occasion that we were not quite out of danger’s way, for
the creature in its flurry raised its huge-side-flapper and poised it
over the boat. One flap would have sent us to the bottom of the sea,
and I can never forget how, as we pushed our way from under, each of
us held one hand up to stave off that great, threatening fin--as if
any strength of ours could have availed if the whale had meant it to
descend. But it was spent with loss of blood, and instead of coming
down the fin rolled over the other way, and we knew that it was dead.
Who would swap that moment for any other triumph that sport can give?

The peculiar other-world feeling of the Arctic regions--a feeling so
singular that if you have once been there the thought of it haunts
you all your life--is due largely to the perpetual daylight. Night
seems more orange-tinted and subdued than day, but there is no great
difference. Some captains have been known to turn their hours right
round out of caprice, with breakfast at night and supper at ten in
the morning. There are your twenty-four hours, and you may carve them
as you like. After a month or two the eyes grow weary of the eternal
light, and you appreciate what a soothing thing our darkness is. I can
remember as we came abreast of Iceland, on our return, catching our
first glimpse of a star, and being unable to take my eyes from it,
it seemed such a dainty little twinkling thing. Half the beauties of
Nature are lost through over-familiarity.

Your sense of loneliness also heightens the effect of the Arctic
Seas. When we were in whaling latitudes it is probable that, with the
exception of our consort, there was no vessel within 800 miles of
us. For seven long months no letter and no news came to us from the
southern world. We had left in exciting times. The Afghan campaign
had been undertaken, and war seemed imminent with Russia. We returned
opposite the mouth of the Baltic without any means of knowing whether
some cruiser might not treat us as we had treated the whales. When we
met a fishing-boat at the north of Shetland our first inquiry was as
to peace or war. Great events had happened during those seven months:
the defeat of Maiwand and the famous march of Roberts from Cabul to
Candahar. But it was all haze to us; and, to this day, I have never
been able to get that particular bit of military history straightened
out in my own mind.

The perpetual light, the glare of the white ice, the deep blue of the
water, these are the things which one remembers most clearly, and the
dry, crisp, exhilarating air, which makes mere life the keenest of
pleasures. And then there are the innumerable sea-birds, whose call is
for ever ringing in your ears--the gulls, the fulmars, the snow-birds,
the burgomasters, the loons, and the rotjes. These fill the air, and
below, the waters are for ever giving you a peep of some strange new
creature. The commercial whale may not often come your way, but his
less valuable brethren abound on every side. The finner shows his 90
feet of worthless tallow, with the absolute conviction that no whaler
would condescend to lower a boat for him. The mis-shapen hunchback
whale, the ghost-like white whale, the narwhal, with his unicorn horn,
the queer-looking bottle-nose, the huge, sluggish, Greenland shark, and
the terrible killing grampus, the most formidable of all the monsters
of the deep,--these are the creatures who own those unsailed seas. On
the ice are the seals, the saddle-backs, the ground seals and the huge
bladdernoses, 12 feet from nose to tail, with the power of blowing
up a great blood-red football upon their noses when they are angry,
which they usually are. Occasionally one sees a white Arctic fox upon
the ice, and everywhere are the bears. The floes in the neighbourhood
of the sealing-ground are all criss-crossed with their tracks--poor
harmless creatures, with the lurch and roll of a deep-sea mariner. It
is for the sake of the seals that they come out over those hundreds
of miles of ice; and they have a very ingenious method of catching
them, for they will choose a big icefield with just one blow-hole for
seals in the middle of it. Here the bear will squat, with its powerful
forearms crooked round the hole. Then, when the seal’s head pops up,
the great paws snap together, and Bruin has got his luncheon. We used
occasionally to burn some of the cook’s refuse in the engine-room
fires, and the smell would, in a few hours, bring up every bear for
many miles to leeward of us.

Though twenty or thirty whales have been taken in a single year in
the Greenland seas, it is probable that the great slaughter of last
century has diminished their number until there are not more than a few
hundreds in existence. I mean, of course, of the right whale, for the
others, as I have said, abound. It is difficult to compute the numbers
of a species which comes and goes over great tracts of water and among
huge icefields, but the fact that the same whale is often pursued by
the same whaler upon successive trips shows how limited their number
must be. There was one, I remember, which was conspicuous through
having a huge wart, the size and shape of a beehive, upon one of the
flukes of its tail. “I’ve been after that fellow three times,” said the
captain, as we dropped our boats. “He got away in ’71. In ’74 we had
him fast, but the harpoon drew. In ’76 a fog saved him. It’s odds that
we have him now!” I fancied that the betting lay rather the other way
myself, and so it proved, for that warty tail is still thrashing the
Arctic seas for all that I know to the contrary.

I shall never forget my own first sight of a right whale. It had
been seen by the look-out on the other side of a small icefield, but
had sunk as we all rushed on deck. For ten minutes we awaited its
reappearance, and I had taken my eyes from the place, when a general
gasp of astonishment made me glance up, and there was the whale _in
the air_. Its tail was curved just as a trout’s is in jumping, and
every bit of its glistening lead-coloured body was clear of the water.
It was little wonder that I should be astonished, for the captain,
after thirty voyages, had never seen such a sight. On catching it we
discovered that it was very thickly covered with a red, crab-like
parasite, about the size of a shilling, and we conjectured that it was
the irritation of these creatures which had driven it wild. If a man
had short, nailless flippers, and a prosperous family of fleas upon his
back, he would appreciate the situation.

Apart from sport, there is a glamour about those circumpolar regions
which must affect everyone who has penetrated to them. My heart goes
out to that old, grey-headed whaling captain who, having been left
for an instant when at death’s door, staggered off in his night gear,
and was found by nurses far from his house and still, as he mumbled,
“pushing to the norrard.” So an Arctic fox, which a friend of mine
endeavoured to tame, escaped, and was caught many months afterwards
in a gamekeeper’s trap in Caithness. It was also pushing norrard,
though who can say by what strange compass it took its bearings? It
is a region of purity, of white ice and of blue water, with no human
dwelling within a thousand miles to sully the freshness of the breeze
which blows across the icefields. And then it is a region of romance
also. You stand on the very brink of the unknown, and every duck that
you shoot bears pebbles in its gizzard which come from a land which the
maps know not. It was a strange and fascinating chapter of my life.

I went on board the whaler a big, straggling youth, I came off it a
powerful, well-grown man. I have no doubt that my physical health
during my whole life has been affected by that splendid air, and
that the inexhaustible store of energy which I have enjoyed is to
some extent drawn from the same source. It was mental and spiritual
stagnation, or even worse, for there is a coarsening effect in so
circumscribed a life with comrades who were fine, brave fellows, but
naturally rough and wild. However I had my health to show for it, and
also more money than I had ever possessed before. I was still boyish in
many ways, and I remember that I concealed gold pieces in every pocket
of every garment, that my mother might have the excitement of hunting
for them. It added some fifty pounds to her small exchequer.

Now I had a straight run in to my final examination, which I passed
with fair but not notable distinction at the end of the winter session
of 1881. I was now a Bachelor of Medicine and a Master of Surgery,
fairly launched upon my professional career.

CHAPTER V

THE VOYAGE TO WEST AFRICA

 The _Mayumba_--Fearful Weather--An Escape--Hanno’s Voyage--
 Atlantis--A Land of Death--Blackwater Fever--Missionaries--Strange
 Fish--Danger of Luxury--A Foolish Swim--The Ship on Fire--England once
 more.

It had always been my intention to take a voyage as ship’s surgeon
when I had taken my degree, as I could in this way see something of
the world, and at the same time earn a little of the money which I so
badly needed if I were ever to start in practice for myself. When a
man is in the very early twenties he will not be taken seriously as a
practitioner, and though I looked old for my age, it was clear that I
had to fill in my time in some other way. My plans were all exceedingly
fluid, and I was ready to join the Army, Navy, Indian Service or
anything which offered an opening. I had no reason to think that I
would find a billet upon a passenger ship and had nearly forgotten that
I had my name down, when I suddenly received a telegram telling me
to come to Liverpool and to take medical charge of the African Steam
Navigation Company’s _Mayumba_, bound for the West Coast. In a week I
was there, and on October 22, 1881, we started on our voyage.

The _Mayumba_ was a trim little steamer of about 4,000 tons--a giant
after my experience in the 200-ton whaler. She was built for commerce,
carrying mixed cargoes to the coast and coming back with palm oil in
puncheons, palm nuts in bulk, ivory and other tropical products. What
with whale oil and palm oil there certainly seemed to be something
greasy about my horoscope. There was room for twenty or thirty
passengers, and it was for their behoof that I was paid some £12 a
month.

It was well that we were seaworthy, for we put out in a violent gale,
which became so bad as we emerged from the Mersey that we were forced
into Holyhead for the night. Next day, in vile and thick weather,
with a strong sea running, we made our way down the Irish Sea. I shall
always believe that I may have saved the ship from disaster, for as I
was standing near the officer of the watch I suddenly caught sight of a
lighthouse standing out in a rift in the fog. It was on the port side
and I could not imagine how any lighthouse could be on the port side
of a ship which was, as I knew, well down on the Irish coast. I hate
to be an alarmist, so I simply touched the mate’s sleeve, pointed to
the dim outline of the lighthouse, and said: “Is that all right?” He
fairly jumped as his eye lit upon it and he gave a yell to the men at
the wheel and rang a violent signal to the engine-room. The lighthouse,
if I remember right, was the Tuskar, and we were heading right into a
rocky promontory which was concealed by the rain and fog.

I have been lucky in my captains, for Captain Gordon Wallace was one
of the best, and we have kept in touch during the later years. Our
passengers were mostly for Madeira, but there were some pleasant
ladies bound for the Coast, and some unpleasant negro traders whose
manners and bearing were objectionable, but who were patrons of the
line and must, therefore, be tolerated. Some of these palm oil chiefs
and traders have incomes of many thousands a year, but as they have no
cultivated tastes they can only spend their money on drink, debauchery
and senseless extravagance. One of them, I remember, had a choice
selection of the demi-monde of Liverpool to see him off.

The storms followed us all the way down the Channel and across the
Bay, which is normal, I suppose, at such a time of year. Everyone
was seasick, so as doctor I had some work to do. However, before we
reached Madeira we ran into fine weather and all our troubles were soon
forgotten. One never realizes the comfort of a dry deck until one has
been ankle-deep for a week. I missed the sea-boots and rough-and-ready
dress of the whaler, for when one is in blue serge and gilt buttons one
does not care to take a ducking. Just as we thought, however, that we
were all right a worse gale than ever broke over us, the wind luckily
being behind us, so that it helped us on our way. With jib, trysail
and main staysail, which was as much as we could stand, we lurched
and staggered, swept every now and then by the big Atlantic combers,
which were phosphorescent at night, so that flames of liquid fire came
coursing down the decks. Very glad we were when after a week of storm
we saw the rugged peaks of Porto Sancto, an outlier of Madeira, and
finally came to anchor in Funchal Bay. It was dark when we reached our
moorings and it was good to see the lights of the town, and the great
dark loom of the hills behind it. A lunar rainbow spanned the whole
scene, a rare phenomenon which I have never seen before or since.

Teneriffe was our next stopping-place, Santa Cruz being the port of
call. In those days it did a great trade in cochineal, which was
derived from an insect cultivated on the cacti. When dried they
furnished the dye, and a packet of the creatures averaged £350 at
that time, but now I suppose that the German aniline dyes have killed
the trade as completely as whaling has been killed by the mineral.
A day later we were at Las Palmas, capital of Grand Canary, whence,
looking back, we had a fine view of the famous Teneriffe Peak some 60
miles away. Leaving Las Palmas we were in the delightful region of the
northeast trade-winds, the most glorious part of the ocean, seldom
rough, yet always lively, with foam-capped seas and a clear sky. Day by
day it grew hotter, however, and when we lost the Trades, and sighted
the Isle de Los off the Sierra Leone coast, I began to realize what the
Tropics meant. When you feel your napkin at meals to be an intolerable
thing, and when you find that it leaves a wet weal across your white
duck trousers, then you know that you really have arrived.

On November 9 we reached Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, our
first port of call upon the African Main--a lovely spot but a place of
death. Here our ladies left us, and indeed it was sad to see them go,
for female lives are even shorter than male upon the coast. I speak of
the days of malaria and blackwater fever, before Ronald Ross and others
had done their great work of healing and prevention. It was a truly
dreadful place in the early eighties, and the despair which reigned in
the hearts of the white people made them take liberties with alcohol
which they would not have dared to take in a healthier place. A year’s
residence seemed to be about the limit of human endurance. I remember
meeting one healthy-looking resident who told me that he had been there
three years. When I congratulated him he shook his head. “I am a doomed
man. I have advanced Bright’s disease,” said he. One wondered whether
the colonies were really worth the price we had to pay.

From Sierra Leone we steamed to Monrovia, which is the capital of the
negro republic of Liberia, which, as the name implies, was founded
mainly by escaped slaves. So far as I could see it was orderly enough,
though all small communities which take themselves seriously have a
comic aspect. Thus at the time of the Franco-German War, Liberia is
said to have sent out its single Customs boat, which represented its
official Navy, and stopped the British mail-ship in order to send word
to Europe that it did not intend to interfere in the matter.

It is a very monotonous view, for whether it is the Ivory Coast or
the Gold Coast, or the Liberian shore, it always presents the same
features--burning sunshine, a long swell breaking into a white line
of surf, a margin of golden sand, and then the low green bush, with
an occasional palm tree rising above it. If you have seen a mile, you
have seen a thousand. As I write now, these ports at which we stopped,
Grand Bassam, Cape Palmas, Accra, Cape Coast Castle, all form the
same picture in my mind. One incident only I can remember. At some
small village, the name of which I have forgotten, there came off a
tall young Welshman in a state of furious excitement; his niggers had
mutinied and he was in fear of his life. “There they are waiting for
me!” he cried, and pointed to a dusky group upon the distant beach. We
offered to take him on, but he could not leave his property, so all we
could do was to promise to send a gunboat up from Cape Coast Castle.
I have often wondered how such people got on after the German menace
compelled us to draw in all our outlying fleets.

This coast is dotted at night with native fires, some of them of great
extent, arising no doubt from their habit of burning the grass. It is
interesting that in Hanno’s account of his journey down the coast--the
only piece of Carthaginian literature which has reached us--he talks
also of the fires which he saw at night. As he speaks of gorillas it is
probable that he got as far as the Gaboon, or south of the Line. He
saw great volcanic activity, and the remains of it is still visible at
Fernando Po, which is almost all volcanic. In Hanno’s time, however,
the hills were actually spouting fire and the country was a sea of
flame, so that he dare not set foot on shore. I have wondered sometimes
whether the last cataclysm at Atlantis may not have been much later
than we think. The account of Plato puts it at about 9000 B.C., but it
may well have been a gradual thing and the last spasm have been that
of which Hanno saw the traces. All this activity which he described is
exactly opposite the spot where the old continent was supposed to have
been.

Our ships have rough-and-ready ways as they jog down the coast. Once we
moved on while a hundred native visitors were still on board. It was
funny to see them dive off and make for their canoes. One of them had a
tall hat, an umbrella, and a large coloured picture of the Saviour--all
of which he had bought at the trading booths which the men rig up in
the forecastle. These impedimenta did not prevent him from swimming
to his boat. At another minor port, since we were pressed for time,
we simply threw our consignment of barrel staves overboard, knowing
that soon or late they would wash up on the beach, though how the real
owner could make good his claim to them I do not know. Occasionally the
native scores in this game. Some years ago, before Dahomey was annexed
by the French, the captain took the oil casks on board at Whydah by
means of a long rope and a donkey engine, an ingenious way of avoiding
the surf, which came to a sudden stop when a company of the famous
Amazons appeared and threatened to fire upon the ship if they did not
pay their dues to the surf boats in the ordinary fashion.

I had myself to pay my dues to the climate, for on November 18 I find
an eloquent gap in my diary. We had reached Lagos, and there, rolling
in a greasy swell off that huge lagoon, the germ or the mosquito or
whatever it was reached me and I was down with a very sharp fever. I
remember staggering to my bunk and then all was blotted out. As I was
myself doctor there was no one to look after me and I lay for several
days fighting it out with Death in a very small ring and without a
second. It speaks well for my constitution that I came out a victor.
I remember no psychic experience, no vision, no fears, nothing save a
nightmare fog from which I emerged as weak as a child. It must have
been a close call, and I had scarcely sat up before I heard that
another victim who got it at the same time was dead.

A week later found me, convalescent and full of energy once more, up
the Bonny River, which certainly never got its name from the Scotch
adjective, for it is in all ways hateful with its brown smelling stream
and its mango swamps. The natives were all absolute savages, offering
up human sacrifices to sharks and crocodiles. The captain had heard the
screams of the victims and seen them dragged down to the water’s edge,
while on another occasion he had seen the protruding skull of a man who
had been buried in an ant-heap. It is all very well to make game of the
missionaries, but how could such people ever be improved if it were not
for the labours of devoted men?

We called at Fernando Po, and later at Victoria, a lovely little
settlement upon the Main, with the huge peak of the Cameroons rising
behind it. A dear homely Scotch lassie was playing the part of
missionary there, and if she did not evangelize she at least civilized,
which is more important. It lies in a beautiful bay studded with
islands and well wooded all round. For some reason the whole style of
the scenery changes completely here, and it is the more welcome after
the thousand miles of monotony to the north. All this land went, for
some reason, to Germany later, and has now reverted to the French,
who are not, as a rule, good Colonial neighbours. I went ashore at
Victoria, and I cannot forget my thrill when what I thought was a
good-sized blue bird passed me and I found that it was a butterfly.

To reach Old Calabar we had to steam for 60 miles up the Old Calabar
River, the channel lying so near the shore that we brushed the trees
on one side. I lay in wait with my rifle, but though I saw the swirl
of several alligators none emerged. Old Calabar seemed the largest
and most prosperous place we had visited, but here also the hand of
death was over all, and it was “eat, drink, and be merry” for the old
and unsatisfactory reason. Here again we met one of these young lady
pioneers of civilization. Civilization is the better, but it is a stern
and dreadful call which summons a woman to such a work.

Getting a canoe, I ascended the river for several miles to a place
called Creektown. Dark and terrible mangrove swamps lay on either side
with gloomy shades where nothing that is not horrible could exist.
It is indeed a foul place. Once in an isolated tree, standing in a
flood, I saw an evil-looking snake, worm-coloured and about 3 feet
long. I shot him and saw him drift down stream. I learned later in life
to give up killing animals, but I confess that I have no particular
compunctions about that one. Creektown is in native territory, and the
King sent down a peremptory order that we should report ourselves to
him, but as it sounded ominous and might mean a long delay we got our
paddles out and were soon back in British waters.

I had a curious experience one morning. A large ribbon-shaped fish,
about 3 or 4 feet long, came up and swam upon the surface near the
ship. Having my gun handy, I shot it. I don’t think five seconds could
have elapsed before another larger and thicker fish--a big catfish, I
should say--darted up from the depths, seized the wounded fish by the
middle, and dragged it down. So murderous is the food-search, and so
keen the watch in Nature! I saw something similar in the mixed tank of
an aquarium once, where a fish stunned himself by swimming against the
glass front, and was instantly seized and devoured by his neighbour. A
strange fish to which I was introduced at Calabar was the electrical
torpedo fish. It is handed to you in an earthenware saucer--a quiet
little drab creature about 5 inches long--and you are asked to tickle
its back. Then you learn exactly how high you can jump.

The death-like impression of Africa grew upon me. One felt that the
white man with his present diet and habits was an intruder who was
never meant to be there, and that the great sullen brown continent
killed him as one crushes nits. I find in my diary:

    “Oh Africa, where are the charms
      That sages have seen in thy face?
    Better dwell in Old England on alms
      Than be rich in that terrible place.”

The life aboard ship, however, was an easy and, in some ways, a
luxurious one--too luxurious for a young man who had his way to make
in the world. Premature comfort is a deadly enervating thing. I
remember considering my own future--I stood upon the poop with a raging
thunderstorm around me--and seeing very clearly that one or two more
such voyages would sap my simple habits and make me unfit for the hard
struggle which any sort of success would need. The idea of success in
literature had never crossed my mind. It was still of medicine only
that I thought, but I knew by my Birmingham experience how long and
rough a path it was for those who had no influence and could not afford
to buy. Then and there I vowed that I would wander no more, and that
was surely one of the turning-points of my life. A “Wander-Jahr” is
good, but two “Wander-Jahre” may mean damnation--and it is hard to
stop. I find that on the same day of fruitful meditation I swore off
alcohol for the rest of the voyage. I drank quite freely at this period
of my life, having a head and a constitution which made me fairly
immune, but my reason told me that the unbounded cocktails of West
Africa were a danger, and with an effort I cut them out. There is a
certain subtle pleasure in abstinence, and it is only socially that it
is difficult. If we were all abstainers as a matter of course, like the
real Mahomedans, none of us would ever miss it.

I did a mad thing at Cape Coast Castle, for, in a spirit either of
bravado or pure folly, I swam round the ship--or at least for some
length along her and back again. I suppose it was the consideration
that black folk go freely into the water which induced me to do it. For
some reason white folk do not share the same immunity. As I was drying
myself on deck I saw the triangular back fin of a shark rise to the
surface. Several times in my life I have done utterly reckless things
with so little motive that I have found it difficult to explain them to
myself afterwards. This was one of them.

The most intelligent and well-read man whom I met on the Coast was
a negro, the American Consul at Monrovia. He came on with us as a
passenger. My starved literary side was eager for good talk, and it
was wonderful to sit on deck discussing Bancroft and Motley, and then
suddenly realize that you were talking to one who had possibly been a
slave himself, and was certainly the son of slaves. He had thought a
good deal about African travel. “The only way to explore Africa is to
go without arms and with few servants. You would not like it in England
if a body of men came armed to the teeth and marched through your land.
The Africans are quite as sensitive.” It was the method of Livingstone
as against the method of Stanley. The former takes the braver and
better man.

This negro gentleman did me good, for a man’s brain is an organ for
the formation of his own thoughts and also for the digestion of other
people’s, and it needs fresh fodder. We had, of course, books aboard
the ship, but neither many nor good. I cannot trace that I made any
mental or spiritual advancement during the voyage, but I added one more
experience to my chaplet, and I suppose it all goes to some ultimate
result in character or personality. I was a strong full-blooded young
man, full of the joy of life, with nothing of what Oliver Wendell
Holmes calls “pathological piety and tuberculous virtues.” I was a man
among men. I walked ever among pitfalls and I thank all ministering
angels that I came through, while I have a softened heart for those who
did not.

Our voyage home--oil-gathering from port to port on the same but
reversed route--was uneventful until the very last stride, when just as
we were past Madeira the ship took fire. Whether it was the combustion
of coal dust has never been determined, but certainly the fire broke
out in the bunkers, and as there was only a wooden partition between
these bunkers and a cargo of oil, we were in deadly danger. For the
first day we took it lightly, as a mere smoulder, and for a second and
third day we were content to seal the gratings as far as possible, to
play down on it with the hose, and to shift the coal away from the
oil. On the fourth morning, however, things took a sudden turn for the
worse. I copy from my log book:

“January 9. I was awakened early in the morning by the purser, Tom
King, poking his head in at my door and informing me that the ship was
in a blaze, and that all hands had been called and were working down
below. I got my clothes on, but when I came on deck nothing was to be
seen of it save thick volumes of smoke from the bunker ventilators,
and a lurid glow down below. I offered to go down, but there seemed
to be as many working as could be fitted in. I was then asked to call
the passengers. I waked each in turn, and they all faced the situation
very bravely and coolly. One, a Swiss, sat up in his bunk, rubbed his
eyes, and in answer to my remark: ‘The ship is on fire!’ said: ‘I have
often been on ships that were on fire.’ ‘Splendide mendax’--but a good
spirit! All day we fought the flames, and the iron side of the ship
was red-hot at one point. Boats were prepared and provisioned and no
doubt at the worst we could row or sail them to Lisbon, where my dear
sisters would be considerably surprised if their big brother walked in.
However, we are getting the better of it, and by evening those ominous
pillars of smoke were down to mere wisps. So ends an ugly business!”

On January 14 we were in Liverpool once more, and West Africa was but
one more of the cinema reels of memory. It is, I am told, very much
improved now in all things. My old friend and cricket companion, Sir
Fred. Guggisberg, is Governor at Accra and has asked me to see the old
ground under very different auspices. I wish I could, but the sands
still run and there is much to be done.

CHAPTER VI

MY FIRST EXPERIENCES IN PRACTICE

 A Strange Character--His Honeymoon--His Bristol Practice--Telegram
 from Plymouth--Six Amusing Weeks--A Deep Plot--My Southsea
 Venture--Furnishing on the Cheap--The Plot Explodes.

I have now come to the temporary end of my voyages, which were to be
renewed in years to come, and I have reached the time when, under very
curious circumstances, I endeavoured to establish myself in medical
practice. In a book written some years afterwards called “The Stark
Munro Letters,” I drew in very close detail the events of the next
few years, and there the curious reader will find them more clearly
and fully set out than would be to scale in these pages. I would only
remark, should any reader reconstruct me or my career from that book,
that there are some few incidents there which are imaginary, and that,
especially, the whole incident of the case of a lunatic and of Lord
Saltire in Chapter IV occurred to a friend and not to myself. Otherwise
the whole history of my association with the man whom I called
Cullingworth, his extraordinary character, our parting and the way in
which I was left to what seemed certain ruin, were all as depicted.
I will here simply give the essentials of the story, and retain the
fictitious name.

In my last year of study at Edinburgh I formed a friendship with this
remarkable student. He came of a famous medical family, his father
having been a great authority upon zymotic disease. He came also of a
famous athletic stock, and was a great Rugby forward himself, though
rather handicapped by the Berserk fury with which he would play. He
was up to international form, and his younger brother was reckoned
by good judges to be about the best forward who ever donned the
rose-embroidered jersey of England.

Cullingworth was as strong mentally as physically. In person he was
about 5 ft. 9 in. in height, perfectly built, with a bulldog jaw,
bloodshot deep-set eyes, overhanging brows, and yellowish hair as
stiff as wire, which spurted up above his brows. He was a man born for
trouble and adventure, unconventional in his designs and formidable in
his powers of execution--a man of action with a big but incalculable
brain guiding the action. He died in early middle age, and I understand
that an autopsy revealed some cerebral abnormality, so that there was
no doubt a pathological element in his strange explosive character.
For some reason he took a fancy to me, and appeared to attach an undue
importance to my advice.

When I met him first he had just indulged in one of his wild escapades,
which ended usually in a fight or in a transitory appearance in a
police court, but on this occasion was more serious and permanent.
He had run off with a charming young lady and married her, she being
a ward in Chancery and under age. However, the deed was done and
all the lawyers in the world could not undo it, though they might
punish the culprit. He told me how he and the lady had gone over a
Bradshaw with the intention that when they came on a station of which
neither of them had ever heard, they would make for that place and
spend their honeymoon there. They came therefore upon some awful
name, Clodpole-in-the-Marsh or something of the kind, and there
they sojourned in the village inn. Cullingworth stained his yellow
hair black, but the stain took in some places and not in others,
so that he looked as if he had escaped from Barnum’s show. What
Clodpole-in-the-Marsh could have thought of such an extraordinary
couple I cannot imagine, and it is probably the one occasion on which
it ever buzzed. I cannot think of any surer way of getting publicity
than that which Cullingworth took to avoid detection. In London they
would have been perfectly unobserved. I remember that for years
Cullingworth’s hair presented curious iridescent tints which were the
remains of his disguise.

He brought his bride safely to Edinburgh, where they hired a flat and
lived in it without furnishing it save for the absolutely needful.
I have dined with them there on an apple dumpling, seated on a pile
of thick volumes as there was no chair. We introduced them to a few
friends, did what we could for the lonely lady, and finally they
drifted off, and for a time we heard no more.

Just before I started for Africa I got a long telegram from
Cullingworth imploring me to go to Bristol as he needed my advice.
I was in Birmingham and I set forth at once. When I reached Bristol
he conducted me to a fine mansion, and there poured out his tale of
woe. He had started in great style, hoping to rally the remains of
his father’s patients, but his money had run out, he was dunned by
his tradespeople, there were no patients, and what was he to do? We
had a joyous riotous time for two days, for there was an exuberant
atmosphere about the man which rose above all trouble. The only advice
I could give was that he should make a composition with his creditors.
I heard afterwards that he assembled them, addressed them in a long and
emotional speech, reduced them almost to tears with his picture of the
struggles of a deserving young man, and finally got a unanimous vote of
confidence from them with full consent that he should pay at his own
leisure. It was the sort of thing that he would do, and tell the story
afterwards with a bull’s roar of laughter which could be heard down the
street.

When I had been back a couple of months from Africa, I received another
telegram--he always telegraphed and never wrote--which ran in some such
way as this: “Started here last June. Colossal success. Come down by
next train if possible. Plenty of room for you. Splendid opening.” The
telegram was stamped Plymouth. A second even more explosive telegram
upbraided me for delay and guaranteed me £300 the first year. This
looked like business, so off I went.

The events of the next six weeks, in the late spring and early
summer of 1882, were more fitted for some rollicking novel than for
the sober pages of a veracious chronicle. The conditions which I
found at Plymouth were incredible. In a short time this man, half
genius and half quack, had founded a practice worth several thousand
pounds of ready money in the year. “Free consultations but pay for
your medicine,” was his slogan, and as he charged a good price for
the latter it worked out all the same in the end. The mere words
“Free Consultations” attracted crowds. He used drugs in a heroic
and indiscriminate manner which produced dramatic results but at
an unjustifiable risk. I remember one instance where dropsy had
disappeared before a severe dose of croton oil in a way that set all
the gossips talking. People flocked into the town from 20 and 30 miles
round, and not only his waiting rooms, but his stairs and his passages,
were crammed. His behaviour to them was extraordinary. He roared and
shouted, scolded them, joked them, pushed them about, and pursued
them sometimes into the street, or addressed them collectively from
the landing. A morning with him when the practice was in full blast
was as funny as any pantomime and I was exhausted with laughter. He
had a well-worn volume on Medical Jurisprudence which he pretended
was the Bible, and he swore old women on it that they would drink no
more tea. I have no doubt he did a great deal of good, for there was
reason and knowledge behind all that he did, but his manner of doing
it was unorthodox in the extreme. His wife made up the prescriptions
at a pigeon-hole at the end of a passage and received the price which
was marked on the label carried down by the patient. Every evening
Cullingworth walked back to his great residential house upon the Hoe,
bearing his bag of silver, his coat flying, his hat on the back of his
head, and his great fangs grinning up at every doctor whose disgusted
face showed at a window.

Cullingworth had rigged me up a room, furnished with one table and
two chairs, in which I could take surgical or other cases which he
did not care to handle. I fear that my professional manners were very
unexciting after his more flamboyant efforts, which I could not imitate
even if I would. I had, however, a steady dribble of patients, and it
looked as if I might build something up. I went up country once, and
operated upon an old fellow’s nose which had contracted cancer through
his holding the bowl of a short clay pipe immediately beneath it. I
left him with an aristocratic, not to say supercilious organ, which was
the wonder of the village, and might have been the foundation of my
fame.

But there were other influences at work, and the threads of fate were
shooting out at strange unexpected angles. My mother had greatly
resented my association with Cullingworth. Her family pride had been
aroused, and justly as I can now see, though my wanderings had left
me rather too Bohemian and careless upon points of etiquette. But I
liked Cullingworth and even now I can’t help liking him--and I admired
his strong qualities and enjoyed his company and the extraordinary
situations which arose from any association with him. This resistance
upon my part, and my defence of my friend, annoyed my mother the more,
and she wrote me several letters of remonstrance which certainly dealt
rather faithfully with his character as it appeared to her. I was
careless of my papers and these letters were read both by Cullingworth
and his wife. I do them no injustice in saying this, for they finally
admitted it. Apparently he imagined--he was a man of strange suspicions
and secret plottings--that I was a party to such sentiments, whereas
they were actually called forth by my defence of him. His manner
changed, and more than once I caught his fierce grey eyes looking
furtively at me with a strange sullen expression, so much so that I
asked him what was the matter. He was actually scheming my ruin, which
would be nothing financially, since I had nothing to lose, but would be
much both to my mother and me if it touched my honour.

One day he came to me and told me that he thought my presence
complicated his practice and that we had better part. I agreed in all
good humour, assuring him that I had not come to hurt him and that I
was very grateful for what he had done, even if it came to nothing.
He then strongly advised me to go into practice myself. I replied
that I had no capital. He answered that he would see to that, that he
would allow me a pound a week until I got my feet under me, and that
I could repay it at leisure. I thanked him warmly, and after looking
at Tavistock I finally decided that Portsmouth would be a good place,
the only reason being that I knew the conditions at Plymouth, and
Portsmouth seemed analogous. I boarded an Irish steamer, therefore,
and about July of 1882 I started off by sea, with one small trunk
containing all my earthly possessions, to start practice in a town in
which I knew no single soul. My cash balance was under £10, and I knew
not only that I had to meet all present expenses upon this, but that
I had to furnish a house upon it. On the other hand the weekly pound
should easily cover all personal needs, and I had the devil-may-care
optimism of youth as to the future.