Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 94

I am sorry to say that I have had to be measured for a suit of clothes, especially as I suppose they can scarcely make very good ones here; I had no option in the matter though, and no doubt I wd need a suit to see uncle Conan and the London people in. I don’t think they are particularly dear here.

One of my English friends here sent for one of Cook’s tickets and got it from England. It is a wonderful saving. He is going a very roundabout way from here to Lucerne, then right up the Rhine to Cologne, then to Brussels, Ostende and London, and he got this ticket which is valid for a month for 120 francs or £4. 15 about. Don’t you think it would be at the same time a very satisfactory and economical arrangement if you went to his agent at Edinburgh, there is one at the Cockburn hotel, and bought me a ticket from here to London, and then sent it to me. Then I would need to get at most a pound here for hotels, etc, and thus we could manage the whole journey for £5! That would be a masterpiece of economy.

I think we could make a route to pass through Strasburgh. It is not much out of the way, and would indeed be interesting with its fortifications and cathedral clocks.

Tell Doctor Waller I have worked right through Roscoe, and at 11.45 A.M. today I finished the last example of the last chapter, having written out in full all the others. I did it in six weeks doing a chapter a day. I got on famously with organic chemistry, but I wish I could say as much for conic sections and bursary matter. I conquered the parabola but the ellipse is a terrible fellow. I won’t do any more chemistry now this month, but devote it to geometry and mathematics.

I could not wish for a more delightful companion from London than Lottie; it would be jolly to escort her home, and also to spend a day or two with her in London, which I have often described to her.

The vacations begin on the 27^th tho’ I won’t start till Friday the 28^th. We are having detestable weather, and, as I explain to the Germans, though they do call England ‘the land of mist and rain’, you see more of both commodities in a month here than in a year in England.

Pray do not let my coming spoil any little plans you had for visiting Dr W—’s mother. As long as I have my meals and conic sections, you know, I am provided for, and it would be quite a novelty to change the old order of things for once.

Conan Doyle was neither the first nor last young student to find his goals hindered by mathematics and geometry, and their infuriatingly defiant conic sections, but he may be the only one to turn the experience into one of literature’s notorious villains, the nemesis of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Professor James Moriarty.