Читать книгу Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters - Daniel Stashower, Исмаил Шихлы - Страница 95

I am longing to get a proper letter from you, though you must find it hard to find time even to write postcards. I am getting on very well with my work, to which the twelve labours of Hercules were child’s play, and am anxiously expecting the conic section book, which will be rather a tough fellow, I fear. I ought to attain one of my two objects, either to win the bursary, or distinguish myself at the chemistry examination, and either will give me a good start in my medical career, while both would be supreme felicity.

I get up very often at four in the morning now, as we are allowed to go and study by a dormitory window at that hour. I think that if you ever did happen to see a nice cheap little alarm clock—like Willie’s—it would save poor Baa a cold in the head, which she would certainly get if she had to come to knock me up at all sorts of unearthly hours in the morning,* for I never could succeed in waking myself, and no wonder when for seven years I have always been awakened by being battered with a policeman’s rattle, which treatment though generally effective is anything but soothing.

It is getting tremendously hot—such heat as we never experience in England. Two days ago we went up a mountain about a couple of thousand feet high; we got up in an hour and a quarter, and raced down in little more than ten minutes. It was like an oven the whole time. The whole place is infested with frogs which jump about in the ditches on each side of the road, like the grasshoppers in England. There was one I caught in a drinking trough on the top of the mountain, though how it managed to hop up there is rather incomprehensible. We have plenty of lizards too, and toads and bats and cockroaches and all sorts of nice little creatures.

I will, if I can get one, enclose a photograph of the band in this. You see me on the right hand with my little instrument. As you will perceive it is the largest instrument, and a fine deep bass. It is splendid work for the chest blowing at it.

Those who distinguished themselves by always gaining the first note in everything during May get a ‘card of honour’. I have got one and will send it next letter. Our names were read out with great pomp in the chapel yesterday.

Conan Doyle’s final letter from Feldkirch survives only as a fragment, but indicates that his school life was hardy physically as well as mentally—describing an astonishing trek in which he and his comrades ‘plodded manfully’ over many miles of rough terrain at the end of the school year.