Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 135

I am being bullied in this house. They are taking advantage of a simple visitor and making him lose his valuable time writing letters to a distant relative. My Birmingham mother has collared me, stolen my novel, dragged me to a table and confronted me with a sheet of notepaper so that I am in for it. I have not had a single letter here except your enclosure so I have absolutely no news for you. Oh yes I have by the way. On the evening that I arrived here the Boss and I were standing at the door smoking our evening pipe when a cab drove up to the door out of which stepped Claud Augustus Currie. He had come up to apply in propria persona. We have put him up at Aspinal’s in Gravelly Hill* for a month when the berth will be vacant for him. Everyone here is as jolly as ever. Mrs D gave me a grand frame to put Elmore’s likeness in—by the way I have not heard from that young lady for six days. The cheques for L.S. will be payable to you and sent to you. I want you to pay McLaren & Williamson first if it is all the same to you, as it is just as well to keep up the credit of the rising generation. I am still full of the S. American scheme. Poor Elmore wants me to take £500 from her and start there but I don’t see it—unless I fail by my own unaided exertions.

[P.S.] By the way I have no money.

That Elmore Weldon had money of her own did not make her less attractive to Conan Doyle, but his comments, and what followed, make clear that he was determined to win his own way in the world.