Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 139

George Budd, a year ahead of Conan Doyle at Edinburgh, and from a medical family, was a fierce player on the rugby field. Calling Budd ‘Cullingworth’ in Memories and Adventures (and in The Stark Munro Letters), Conan Doyle noted his ‘bulldog jaw, bloodshot deep-set eyes, over-hanging brows, and yellowish hair as stiff as wire which spurted up above his brows’.

‘He was born for trouble and adventure,’ Conan Doyle continued, but ‘for some reason he took a fancy to me.’ Budd had a paranoid streak, was given to brawls, ran off with and married an underaged ward of Chancery, and in his initial practice in Bristol, lived beyond his means. He ran out on his debts there and set up a new practice in Plymouth. And after Conan Doyle returned from Africa, Budd wired him to join what he described as a colossal success.

‘A second even more explosive telegram upbraided me for delay and guaranteed me £300 the first year,’ said Conan Doyle. ‘This looked like business, so off I went’—against his mother’s advice. In Plymouth he discovered that Budd, ‘half genius and half quack, had founded a practice worth several thousand pounds’. That it conformed little to the ethics of medicine did not escape his notice, though; Memories and Adventures and The Stark Munro Letters describe Budd’s methods vividly. Writing to Dr Hoare, who also doubted Budd, Conan Doyle assured him of the practice’s success in glowing terms.