Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 104

I was surprised at not getting a letter on my birthday, however that is all right now. I am enjoying myself very well, working in the mornings and walking out after dinner. Both uncle [Richard] and aunt [Annette] are very kind. I arrived on the Saturday evening and dined at Clifton Gardens on the Sunday. Uncle [James] looks very weary with his work and grey. Aunt Jane looks uncommonly well, ‘Time writes no wrinkles on her azure brow.’* I fancy I made a favourable impression there.

Since then I have seen a good deal of London. On my birthday I went to see Irving in his latest success ‘Louis XI’. A most ghastly sight it was, and has made quite an impression on me. Louis may have been a very bad man, but this I fancy must be an exaggeration of history. The death scene is an awful bit of dramatic art, no vulgar horror about it, but the general effect none the less thrilling for that. Yesterday during the Queen’s birthday I went to see the guards parade. There was a very distinguished staff, including the crown prince of Germany, Sir Garnet Wolseley, the Duke of Cambridge, ; and many other men I was curious to see. The crown prince is a splendid looking man, and had a very picturesque uniform, snow white with one blue sash, and his plumed helmet. I dare say he is sorry that Hoedel did not polish off the old boy the other day. ;

The clubs and public buildings were illuminated in the evening, but I have not seen a single firework. They have invented an atrocity called the ‘Lady Teazer torpedo’. This is a leaden bottle, like an artist’s moist colour bottle, full of water. If you squeeze this a jet of water flies out and the great joke at night is to go along the street squirting at everybody’s face, male or female. Everyone is armed with these things, and nobody escapes them. I was simply drenched last night; it is astonishing the good humour with which everyone allows it. I saw ladies stepping out of carriages to parties drenched and seeming to enjoy it highly.

I am reading Trollope’s ‘American Senator’ aloud to Aunt Annette & ‘McCauley’s life and letters’ to myself. His letters are glorious, such swing and go in them, and many of them interlarded with rhymes.

I hope something may turn up for me; I am, you know, willing to do anything. Pray underrate my qualifications, rather than overrate them. Better lose the place than sail under false colours.

Generosity is not, I think, one of Richardson’s virtues. He made me pay my washing bill, & never allowed me a farthing for cab fares in my journey. I never told him I was going to London, for I was convinced that if I did he would refuse me the proper fare. He was the most uninteresting companion I ever met. He boasts that he has not opened a novel for ten years, nor seen a play in his life. McCauley says that judicious novel reading rubs off the roughnesses of a character & improves it more than an equal amount of heavier reading. I can quite believe it from what I have seen.