Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 119

I know I am behaving very badly as a correspondent, but if you knew how little time I have, and how thoroughly fagged out I am before that little comes, you would excuse my delinquencies. How I am going to pass this exam I don’t know, but I suppose I’ll manage to scramble through somehow. Baird, my fellow assistant, is leaving on March 15^th and I must stay a few days to put the newcomer through his facings. Don’t you talk so glibly about Ireland & July & being capped. We must not crow until we are out of the wood.

I am sorry to hear Jimmy has been ill—but I am thoroughly disgusted with the whole gang of them. Two letters and a Xmas card all unanswered and unnoticed. It’s enough to make a fellow cynical.

Tell Conny her letter was charming as her letters always are. She must not think I was ungrateful for the pretty necktie—The fact is my gratitude was too deep for words. I thought I would break down if I attempted to express it. I shall write to her next.

So Currie goes in the Hope. I shouldn’t think Currie will care much about sleeping with the mates—I should strongly object. I must write to him before he goes. He is a good fellow.

I wonder if Tottie really has influence enough to get me this appointment in the Iberia. You would think that something might be made in fees out of these wealthy old dons. What screw does the surgeon get aboard? You have to pay for your uniform I suppose.

I shall have to buy a pair of dancing boots this week as I am going to a ball on Friday. I have only £2/5 in the bank so I am not coining money. I feel down on my luck. Herbert Keyworth my particular chum is going out to squat in Australia on Tuesday—I’d go and squat beside him for two pence.

My only amusement lately has been a couple of lectures. One was on Dale and Enracht—a soft affair. The other was capital ‘Does Death end all?’ by Cooke the Boston ‘Monday lecturer’. A very clever thing indeed. Though not convincing to me.*

Conan Doyle’s sisters were constantly on his mind. Annette (‘Tottie’), two years older than him, was working as a governess in Portugal now, and sending her pay home to help with her younger sisters’ schooling—it being understood that they would follow in that genteel if humble line of work themselves once they were old enough. From his sisters Conan Doyle learned about the nature and also the occasional perils of their work, and made one of Sherlock Holmes’s most endearing clients a governess, Violet Hunter in ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’. ‘I confess,’ Holmes tells Miss Hunter after hearing about the new position she has been offered, ‘that it is not the situation which I should like to see a sister of mine apply for.’

To economize Conan Doyle had striven to compress five years of study into four, but when his classmate C. A. Currie was unable to go as the ship’s surgeon on the Hope, an Arctic whaler, he leapt at the chance, despite the postponement it meant for graduating on his original schedule.

He spent some six months at sea, from the end of February to midAugust 1880, in the first ‘glorious’ adventure of his life, one that he recorded not only in two letters home, but in a handwritten illustrated diary as well. He turned twenty-one years old during the arduous voyage under Captain John Gray of Peterhead, Scotland, coming of age (as he wrote later) ‘at 80 degrees north latitude’. The voyage gave him real responsibility, and in addition to doctoring the crew, he also took an active part in the sealing and whaling on which the Hope’s success, and the crew’s pay, depended. He worked harder than ever before, experiencing intense loneliness and comradeship alike in what seemed like another world. ‘I went on board a big, straggling youth,’ he said in Memories and Adventures, but ‘I came off it a powerful, well-grown man.’