Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 115

I am sure you are eager to have a full and detailed account from your own correspondent of Clifton House and its inhabitants. I was shockingly disappointed at the street, as disappointed as Mark Twain was when first he saw a grisette in Paris. I had pictured to myself a semirural quiet suburban road, instead of which this is a busy shop-lined, tramway railed thoroughfare. Moral—don’t picture things to yourself. I am reconciled to the bustle now; in fact I like it.

I am just beginning to feel a little at home. I’m afraid I don’t domesticate easily. Reginald Ratcliff is a fine little fellow, stout, jolly, black haired. Reginald has plenty of spondulick* (Vide Dixon’s Johnsonary); he must make the four figures and something over, for he has five horses, and a nice though small house. R is nearer forty than thirty.

Mrs Hoare is very amiable and nice; a well read kind-hearted woman. There are two very spoilt little children, though it seems to me they had so little good to start upon, that there was very little to spoil.

Bourchier is a fool, an inane simpering fool. One of those haw-haw demme my soul idiots. He wants a kicking, which I should be happy to accommodate him with at the shortest notice. He is a great and glorious LKAQCI;* about 30 years old, affects a languid fashionable air, and lisps about the havoc he has made among the sex. An objectionable fellow.

My duties are not at all arduous, and I think I am going to be very cheerful here. I won’t have time for cricket however. Dr Drummond lives very near us, and I am going along to give him my note. I don’t think I will visit Dr Gam Gee Jeejeebhoy (that’s the name of an interesting Indian Rajah). ; He hangs out a great way off, and I don’t feel much inclined to go.

My poor umbrella is done for, I am afraid. The Phil is the only place I could have left it, and they say they haven’t got it. Never mind buying one, I don’t need it here.

We are all smokers here luckily which is a great thing. Hoare is really an excellent fellow, very kind and considerate. His fees would make the Doctor’s hair curdle.

All kind remembrances to Greenhill Place, and to Mrs Drummond. One never learns how to appreciate friends until one has been thrown on one’s own resources, without even an acquaintance in a big city. Love to all, remember me to Dr

[P.S.] Now, Lottie Ag. o. osewe I ghs 7 Pou N ds & ¹/₂ i ts ow nweig HT.

Horton dictates his prescriptions, and strides off to bed with his black clay pipe in his mouth. He is the most abandoned smoker I have ever met with, collecting the dottles of his pipes in the evening, and smoking them the next morning before breakfast in the stable yard.

—The Stark Munro Letters

Sherlock Holmes was, as I expected, lounging about his sittingroom in his dressing-gown, reading the agony column of The Times and smoking his before-breakfast pipe, which was composed of all the plugs and dottles left from his smokes of the day before, all carefully dried and collected on the corner of the mantelpiece.

—‘The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb’