Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 55

This is my last letter this year. I will be at Edinburgh on Wednesday at quarter past five. I will take care of everything. I will get my trunk and get a cab and drive to you. don’t let Lottie and Cony go to bed till I come, please!

I have arranged everything about my clothes I am to take two suits home with me the suit I got some time ago and my old grey clothes. my brown ones are completely worn out. I will, I think have to get some more clothes for next year. All the schoolbooks are taken up now I’m as happy as a lark. I hope I will find you all well and comfortable when I return I also hope that Papa will get some vacation and then we will go walks together. won’t I pitch into Walter Scott’s novels.

Conan Doyle’s liking for Sir Walter Scott had been growing for months, fanned by early exposure to Ivanhoe and Rob Roy. Over the summer, as he ‘pitched into’ the rest of Scott, Conan Doyle felt a powerful stirring of the imagination. ‘They were the first books I ever owned,’ he said, ‘long before I could appreciate or even understand them. But at last I realized what a treasure they were.’ Just as future generations of schoolboys would read Sherlock Holmes by the glow of flashlights, Conan Doyle found himself huddling up among the ‘glorious brotherhood’ of the Waverley novels: ‘I read them by surreptitious candle-ends in the dead of the night, when the sense of crime added a new zest to the story.’

When he returned to Stonyhurst in the autumn he had a new respect and passion for history. There was little sign of this new studiousness on the return journey, however, as he and Jimmy Ryan set off firecrackers in the train carriage.