Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life 9781399519199

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Round the Red Lamp

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The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle Series Editor: Douglas Kerr Titles available in this series: Memories and Adventures Edited by Douglas Kerr The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes Edited by Jonathan Cranfield Round the Red Lamp, Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life Edited by Roger Luckhurst www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-the-edinburgh-edition-ofthe-works-of-arthur-conan-doyle

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the edinburgh edition of the works of arthur conan doyle general editor douglas kerr

Round The Red Lamp Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life by

Arthur Conan Doyle

edited by

Roger Luckhurst

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Roger Luckhurst 2023 © the text in this edition Edinburgh University Press, 2023 Cover image: Arthur Conan Doyle and Edinburgh by Linda Dryden Cover design: Stuart Dalziel Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 12/14 Adobe Arno Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 3995 1918 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 3995 1919 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 3995 1920 5 (epub) The right of Roger Luckhurst to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). T H E E S TAT E

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T H E E S TAT E

An example of Arthur Conan Doyle’s logotype sat with the Conan Doyle Estate text, this is the only font that can be used in conjunction with the official mark.

An example of Arthur Conan Doyle’s logotype sat with the Conan Doyle Estate text, this is the only font that can be used in conjunction with the official mark.

Further information on application of the brand can be obtained from [email protected]

Further information on application of the brand can be obtained from [email protected]

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Contents General Editor’s Preface���������������������������������������������������������������������������������vii Acknowledgements������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ ix A Chronology of the Life of Arthur Conan Doyle�������������������������������������� x Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xix Genesis and Composition����������������������������������������������������������������������xxi Publication History�������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xxv Reception�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������xxviii Medical Context������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ xxxv Literary Doctoring������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� xl The Realism versus Romance Debate�������������������������������������������������� xlv Round the Red Lamp The Preface��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 3 Behind the Times���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 7 His First Operation�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������11 A Straggler of ’15���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������17 The Third Generation�������������������������������������������������������������������������������30 A False Start������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������39 The Curse of Eve���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������51 Sweethearts������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������61 A Physiologist’s Wife��������������������������������������������������������������������������������67 The Case of Lady Sannox������������������������������������������������������������������������85 A Question of Diplomacy�����������������������������������������������������������������������94 A Medical Document���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 107 Lot No. 249��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 117 The Los Amigos Fiasco������������������������������������������������������������������������� 147 The Doctors of Hoyland����������������������������������������������������������������������� 154 The Surgeon Talks���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 164 An Essay on the Text������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 171 Appendices����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 178 1 Additional Stories added to the Crowborough Edition�������������� 178 ‘Crabbe’s Practice’ (1884)������������������������������������������������������������� 178 ‘My Friend the Murderer’ (1882)������������������������������������������������ 190 2 Preface to the Author’s Edition (1903)������������������������������������������ 206

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contents

3 One-Act Play Adaptations���������������������������������������������������������������� 207 Foreign Policy (1893)���������������������������������������������������������������������� 207 Waterloo (1894)������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 220 4 Conan Doyle’s Essays and Letters in the Medical Press�������������� 235 ‘Gelseminum as a Poison’ (1879)������������������������������������������������ 235 ‘Notes on a Case of Leucocythaemia’ (1882)��������������������������� 236 ‘Life and Death in the Blood’ (1883)������������������������������������������ 237 ‘The Contagious Diseases Act’ (1883)��������������������������������������� 243 ‘American Medical Diplomas’ (1884)���������������������������������������� 244 ‘The Remote Effects of Gout’ (1884)����������������������������������������� 245 ‘Compulsory Vaccination’ (1887)����������������������������������������������� 245 ‘Compulsory Vaccination’ (1887)����������������������������������������������� 248 ‘The Consumption Cure’ (1890)������������������������������������������������� 251 ‘Dr Koch and His Cure’ (1890)��������������������������������������������������� 253 Apparatus�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 264 Abbreviations used in the Apparatus������������������������������������������������� 264 Emendations and Variations���������������������������������������������������������������� 264 Explanatory Notes���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 285

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General Editor’s Preface Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing has always been popular, but until recent years it has received scant attention from scholars. Now that he is beginning to be recognized as one of the most important writers of his generation, and his books are not just widely read but studied by students and critics all over the world, the time is ripe for the first scholarly critical edition of Conan Doyle’s works. Appropriately this is being undertaken by the Press of Edinburgh University, for he was a native of the city and a student of its university from 1876 to 1881. While Conan Doyle is remembered primarily for the Sherlock Holmes stories, which defined the genre of crime fiction and introduced one of the world’s best-known fictional characters, his contributions as a writer and as a public figure were astonishingly broad and diverse. He was a campaigner for justice, an advocate of sport, an indefatigable traveller, a propagandist for British wars, and a proselytiser of Spiritualism. His writing reflects this variety of experience. He wrote in the genres of science fiction, horror, ghost stories, medical realism, detective fiction, adventure fiction, military history, poetry, journalism and autobiography. There is a need for an accurate and authoritative edition of this body of writing, and the Edinburgh Conan Doyle will be unique as a series of critical editions of Conan Doyle’s works. He was a professional author, with no other source of income once he had made the momentous decision, in 1891, to retire from medicine and live by his pen. He belonged to a busy and sociable literary culture which served a well-educated reading public of unprecedented size. This public had an appetite for magazines, from the prestigious Cornhill to the popular Tit-Bits, and it was common for writers like Conan Doyle, with the help of the first generation of professional literary agents, to publish instalments of their work in periodical form before they appeared as books. Conan Doyle’s own relationship with the Strand Magazine is wellknown, but his work appeared in scores of serial outlets, and his books too came out under the imprint of dozens of publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic. These different and developing print institutions, and his many collaborators, editors, publishers, illustrators, and critics, ensure that a study of Conan Doyle’s writing opens a broad window on to the literary and cultural history of his time. Meanwhile the range of topics vii

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general editor’s preface

he wrote about in his stories gives a sense of how his society thought of itself, its tastes and ideals, and its anxieties and fears. The extent of Conan Doyle’s writing posed a problem, and it was decided early in the planning stage that this edition should not be a Complete Works. (Of the collections published in his lifetime and supposedly under his supervision, neither the thirteen-volume Author’s Edition of 1903 nor the twenty-four-volume Crowborough Edition of 1930 claimed to be comprehensive.) Quite a lot of his writing was frankly ephemeral; though it is all interesting, some of it would not enhance his literary reputation if republished. Even so, in order to keep the edition to a manageable size, difficult decisions have had to be made. This edition has striven not only to include Conan Doyle’s best writing, but also to offer a sense of the prodigious range of his output, a variety which easily stands comparison with that of his near contemporaries Stevenson and Kipling. To give a biographical context for his writings, Memories and Adventures is the first volume to be published in this edition. So here alongside Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger and Brigadier Gerard we have medical and military stories, historical fiction, tales of mystery and imagination, campaigns against injustice, journalistic dispatches and Spiritualist polemic. These are all presented here in texts as authoritative as scholarship can make them, each volume having besides an extensive introduction, a textual essay giving a full history from conception to the various published incarnations and their critical reception, and a textual apparatus laying out in full the variations and emendations of the text from manuscript, if available, through serial publication and on to the books. Here the interested reader can study not only the final flourishing of Conan Doyle’s work but also its organic development, the hundreds of textual decisions involved in its process. Selection notwithstanding, the intention has been to present Conan Doyle’s literary work as a whole in such a way as to enable a clear judgement of his achievement.

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Acknowledgements At Edinburgh University Press, the instigator of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle was Jackie Jones. As the edition began to take shape, it passed into the capable hands of Michelle Houston, with assistance from Adela Rauchova. It is guided by an expert editorial board, the immensely supportive General Editor Douglas Kerr, and advised by anonymous reviewers. To all of these I extend grateful thanks. For particular points of reference, my thanks to Jonathan Cranfield, Cliff Goldfarb, Simon Guerrier, Simon John James, Darryl Jones, Douglas Kerr, Christine Ferguson, James Machin, Scott McCracken, Hartley Nathan and Jonathan Wild. Work on getting the initial text of the first edition into shape was done by David Edgar. The last stages were overseen in detail by James Machin. Both set a pace for me that ensured this work got done. Editorial material was considerably improved by Douglas Kerr’s suggestions. This particular edition has been funded by awards from the Birkbeck College Faculty of Arts research fund and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. I am also grateful to the Modern Humanities Research Association for enabling the appointment of James Machin as a research assistant in 2020–21. Working alongside James on Conan Doyle’s medical fiction in Round the Red Lamp and The Stark Munro Letters has made this a genuinely collaborative project. Our editions of these texts are designed to dovetail.

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A Chronology of the Life of Arthur Conan Doyle 1847 Catherine Foley (née Pack) moves to Edinburgh from Ireland with her daughters Mary and Catherine. 1849 Charles Altamont Doyle, youngest son of the political cartoonist John Doyle (H.B.), moves to Edinburgh from London to work at the Scottish Office of Works. 1855 Marriage of Charles Altamont Doyle and Mary Josephine Foley at St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Edinburgh. 1859 Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, third child and elder son of Charles and Mary Doyle, born at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh (22 May), and baptized at St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral. 1866 ACD attends Newington Academy, Edinburgh. 1867 ACD, aged 8, enrolled at Hodder House in Lancashire, the preparatory school for Stonyhurst College. 1869 ACD, aged 10, begins five years of studies at Stonyhurst. 1874 First visit to London. 1875 ACD passes the matriculation examination for London University. He begins a year’s study at Stella Matutina, a Jesuit college in Feldkirch, Austria. 1876 Charles Doyle retires from the Office of Works with a pension of £150 per year. ACD returns to Edinburgh, where Bryan Charles Waller is lodging with the Doyle family. On Waller’s advice, in October he begins his studies in the Edinburgh University Medical School, aged 17. 1877 Waller leases 23 George Square, Edinburgh, as a ‘consulting pathologist’, and the Doyle family move in with him. ACD, a medical student at Edinburgh, becomes surgeon’s clerk to Joseph Bell at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. x

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1878 ACD works for three weeks as unpaid assistant to Dr Charles Richardson of Sheffield. Spends two months in London, visiting his Doyle relatives. Works for four months as unpaid assistant to Dr Henry Elliott in Ruyton-XI-Towns, Shropshire. 1879 Charles Doyle a patient at Fordoun House, near Montrose. On completing his second year of clinical study, ACD takes a further assistantship with Dr R. R. Hoare in a busy practice in Birmingham. He begins to write for publication, and submits ‘The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe’ to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, without success. His first published story, ‘The Mystery of Sasassa Valley’, appears in Chamber’s Journal (Sept). His letter, ‘Gelseminum as a Poison’, published in the British Medical Journal (Sept). 1880 ACD serves for seven months (Feb–Aug) as a surgeon on the Greenland whaling ship Hope, of Peterhead. 1881 Charles Doyle committed to Blairenro House, Drumlithie, Aberdeenshire, a home for alcoholics (Mar). ACD graduates MB, CM (Edin.). He serves as surgeon on the cargo steamer Mayumba (Oct–Jan 1882), on a voyage from Liverpool to West Africa. Two stories published in the Christmas issue of London Society. 1882 ACD joins his friend George Turnavine Budd in his medical practice in Plymouth (May), then moves to Southsea, Portsmouth ( June) and sets up in practice for himself. His brother Innes, aged 9, comes to live with him at 1 Bush Villas, Elm Grove, Southsea. Mary Doyle and the rest of the family leave Edinburgh to live on the Masongill estate of Bryan Waller in Yorkshire. 1883 ACD writing and publishing stories, including ‘The Captain of the Pole-Star’ (Temple Bar, Jan) and ‘J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement’ (Cornhill, Jan 1884). 1885 Charles Doyle certified and transferred from Blairenro House to the Royal Lunatic Asylum, Montrose, under a detention order. ACD publishes ‘The Man from Archangel’ (London Society, Jan). Submits his thesis, on tabes dorsalis, and is awarded Edinburgh University MD. xi

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Meets Louisa (Touie) Hawkins, sister of his patient John Hawkins. They marry at Masongill (Aug). 1886 The Firm of Girdlestone completed ( Jan). A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story, completed (May), the copyright eventually purchased by Ward, Lock & Co. for £25 (Oct). ACD’s first interest in psychic phenomena. 1887 A Study in Scarlet published as the main feature in Beeton’s Christmas Annual (Nov). 1888 Book edition of A Study in Scarlet published by Ward, Lock ( July). The Mystery of Cloomber serialized in Pall Mall Budget and Pall Mall Gazette and published (Ward and Downey, Dec). 1889 A daughter, Mary Louise Conan Doyle, born. ACD’s first historical novel, Micah Clarke, published by Longmans, Green (Feb). Death of George Turnavine Budd. At a dinner in the Langham Hotel, London, Joseph Stoddart, managing editor of Lippincott’s Magazine, commissions short novels from ACD and Oscar Wilde. 1890 The Sign of Four published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (Feb) and as a book by Spencer Blackett (Oct). The Captain of the Polestar and Other Stories (Longmans, Green, Mar) and The Firm of Girdlestone (Chatto and Windus, Apr), also published. ACD visits Berlin to report on Robert Koch’s vaunted cure for consumption (Nov). On his return he announces he will be leaving his Southsea practice. He acquires a literary agent, A. P. Watt. First issue of Strand Magazine published. 1891 Charles Doyle transferred to the Royal Edinburgh Asylum as a private patient. The White Company serialized in the Cornhill ( Jan– Dec). After a brief spell studying in Vienna, ACD moves his family to London and sets up as an eye specialist at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, off Harley Street. After a bout of influenza, he quits his practice, deciding to live by his pen, and moves the family to the suburb of South Norwood. The first six Sherlock Holmes adventures published in the Strand, from July. The White Company (Smith, Elder, Oct) and Beyond the City (in the Christmas number of Good Words) published. xii

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1892 Friendship with J. M. Barrie begins. The Doings of Raffles Haw (Cassell, Mar), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Newnes, Oct), and The Great Shadow (Arrowsmith’s Christmas Annual) all published. Charles Doyle transferred to the Crichton Royal Asylum, Dumfries, with a diagnosis of dementia. Arthur Alleyne Kingsley Conan Doyle born. 1893 More Holmes tales in the Strand. ACD joins the Society for Psychical Research. The Refugees published (Longmans, Green, May). Holidays with Touie in Switzerland (Aug) and visits the Reichenbach Falls. Touie diagnosed as suffering from consumption (tuberculosis). Death of Charles Doyle at the Crichton Royal, Dumfries, aged 61. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes published (Newnes, Dec), including ‘The Adventure of the Final Problem’ in which Holmes apparently dies. 1894 First performance of ACD’s play A Story of Waterloo, starring Henry Irving. ACD investigates a haunted house in Dorset for the Society for Psychical Research. Lecture tour in America, accompanied by his brother Innes (Sept–Dec). Visits Rudyard Kipling in Vermont. The first Brigadier Gerard story in the Strand. Publication of Round the Red Lamp (Methuen, Oct) and The Parasite (Archibald Constable, Dec). The Stark Munro Letters serialized in the Idler (Oct 1894–Nov 1895). 1895 The Stark Munro Letters published by Longmans, Green (Sept). ACD and Touie travel to Egypt (Nov). 1896 The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard published by Newnes (Feb). ACD accompanies Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian expeditionary force up the Nile as a war correspondent for the Westminster Gazette (Apr). Rodney Stone published by Smith, Elder (Nov). 1897 Meeting with Jean Leckie. Uncle Bernac published by Smith, Elder (May). The family move into Undershaw, Hindhead, Surrey (Oct). 1898 The Tragedy of the Korosko (Feb) and Songs of Action (June) published by Smith, Elder. xiii

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1899 A Duet published by Grant Richards (Mar). ACD elected chairman of the Authors’ Club (May) and member of the MCC ( June). The drama Sherlock Holmes first performed by the American actor William Gillette. Outbreak of the South African (Second Boer) War. 1900 Serves with the volunteer-staffed Langman Field Hospital in South Africa (Feb–July), and helps to deal with an enteric (cholera) epidemic in Bloemfontein. The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport published by Smith, Elder (Mar). In the October general election, ACD stands unsuccessfully as Liberal Unionist candidate for Edinburgh Central. His history of The Great Boer War published by Smith, Elder (Oct), though the war is not yet over. 1901 Sherlock Holmes returns in The Hound of the Baskervilles (Strand, Aug 1901–Apr 1902), written with the assistance of Bertram Fletcher Robinson. 1902 ACD publishes The War in South Africa – Its Cause and Conduct (Smith, Elder, Jan), defending Britain’s actions in the war, and supervises its translation and dissemination. The Hound of the Baskervilles published by Newnes in March. ACD knighted by King Edward VII. 1903 ACD buys a motor car. Adventures of Gerard published (Newnes, Sept). New Holmes stories in the Strand. Author’s Edition published in twelve volumes by Smith, Elder and in thirteen by D. Appleton of New York. 1905 The Return of Sherlock Holmes published by Newnes (Mar). ACD receives honorary LL.D from Edinburgh University. Sir Nigel serialized in the Strand (Dec 1905–Dec 1906). 1906 ACD stands as Unionist candidate for parliament for the Border Boroughs, again defeated ( Jan). Touie (Louise, Lady Conan Doyle) dies ( July). Sir Nigel published by Smith, Elder (Nov). 1907 The Story of Mr. George Edalji (Daily Telegraph, Jan). ACD working to clear Edalji’s name. Through the Magic Door, his book about reading, xiv

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published by Smith, Elder (Nov). Marriage to Jean Leckie (the second Lady Conan Doyle) (Sept). They move to Windlesham, Crowborough, Sussex (Dec). 1908 Round the Fire Stories published by Smith, Elder (Sept). 1909 Birth of Denis Percy Stewart Conan Doyle, ACD’s first child with Jean. The Fires of Fate, a play based on the novella The Tragedy of the Korosko, opens at the Shakespeare Theatre, Liverpool, and transfers to the Lyric Theatre, London ( June). ACD becomes President of the Divorce Law Reform Union. Works with E. D. Morel and Roger Casement for the Congo Reform Association, and publishes The Crime of the Congo (Oct). 1910 The House of Temperley (adapted from the novel Rodney Stone) followed by The Speckled Band at the Adelphi Theatre, London, leased by ACD for six months. Death of George Newnes. Adrian Malcolm Conan Doyle born. 1911 ACD takes part in the Prince Henry tour, an Anglo-German motoring competition. Songs of the Road (Mar) and The Last Galley (Apr) published by Smith, Elder. In a letter to the Belfast Evening Telegraph (Sept), ACD declares he is now in favour of Irish Home Rule. 1912 The Lost World, which introduces Professor Challenger, serialized in the Strand (Apr–Nov) and published in October by Hodder and Stoughton. The Case of Oscar Slater published by Hodder and Stoughton (Aug). Birth of Jean Lena Annette Conan Doyle. 1913 An essay, ‘Great Britain and the Next War’, published in the Fortnightly Review (Feb). The Poison Belt, the second Challenger story, published by Hodder and Stoughton (Aug). The House of Temperley filmed. 1914 ACD and Jean tour the United States and Canada (May–July). With the outbreak of war with Germany in August, ACD helps to form a local civilian reserve force, later enlisting as a private in the 6th Royal xv

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Sussex Volunteer Regiment. The Valley of Fear, the last Holmes novel, serialized in the Strand (Sept–May 1915). ACD and other authors invited by the new Propaganda Bureau to further the war effort with their writing. ACD produces the pamphlet To Arms! (Hodder and Stoughton, Sept), and begins a busy programme of patriotic speeches, lectures, and pamphlets about the War. 1915 Begins writing his history of The British Campaign in France and Flanders (commencing serial publication in the Strand in Apr 1916). The Valley of Fear published by Smith, Elder ( June). 1916 ACD writing patriotic pamphlets and agitating for body armour, improved weaponry, and the building of a Channel Tunnel. Reports for the Daily Chronicle from the British, Italian and French front lines: A Visit to Three Fronts published by Hodder and Stoughton (Aug). Kingsley wounded in the Battle of the Somme ( July). Sir Roger Casement hanged for treason, despite pleas for reprieve from ACD and some others. ACD makes public his belief in Spiritualism in Light magazine (Nov). 1917 First of many lectures on Spiritualism (Sept). A new Holmes collection, His Last Bow, published by John Murray (Oct). 1918 The New Revelation, ACD’s first Spiritualist book, published by Hodder and Stoughton (Apr). ACD visits the Australian section of the Western Front (Sept), and witnesses the start of the decisive Allied counter-offensive. Death of Kingsley Conan Doyle, of pneumonia, two weeks before the Armistice. 1919 Death of ACD’s brother, Brigadier-General Innes Doyle, of pneumonia (Feb). ACD travels the country lecturing on Spiritualism. The Vital Message published by Hodder and Stoughton (Nov). 1920 Sixth and final volume of The British Campaign in France and Flanders published by Hodder and Stoughton ( Jan). ACD debates Joseph McCabe, of the Rationalist Press Association, at the Queen’s Hall, London (Mar). Meets Harry Houdini (Apr). Embarks on lecture tour of Australia and New Zealand (Aug). ‘Fairies Photographed: An xvi

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Epoch-Making Event’ appears in Strand Christmas number. Death of ACD’s mother Mary Doyle (Dec). 1921 The Wanderings of a Spiritualist, about his travels in Australia and New Zealand, published by Hodder and Stoughton (Sept). First Sherlock Holmes films starring Eille Norwood made by the Stoll Company. First appearance at séances of ACD’s spirit guide Pheneas. 1922 Lecture tour of the United States and Canada (Apr–July). Publication of The Coming of the Fairies (Hodder and Stoughton, Sept), The Poems of Arthur Conan Doyle ( John Murray, Sept) and The Case for Spirit Photography (Hutchinson, Dec). 1923 Another North American tour (Mar–Aug), lecturing on Spiritualism. Memories and Adventures serialized in the Strand (Oct 1923–July 1924). 1924 ACD mounts an exhibition of works by his father, Charles Altamont Doyle, at the Brooke Galleries in London ( Jan). Memories and Adventures published by Hodder and Stoughton (Sept). 1925 The Psychic Bookshop opened in Victoria Street, London. Film of The Lost World premiered in New York (Feb). The Land of Mist serialized in the Strand ( July 1925–Mar 1926). ACD buys a house at Bignell Wood, Lyndhurst, in the New Forest. 1926 The Land of Mist published by Hutchinson (Mar). The History of Spiritualism published in two volumes (Cassell, June). 1927 Pheneas Speaks published by the Psychic Press (Mar). ‘The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place’, the last Holmes tale, appears in the Strand (Apr). The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes published ( John Murray, June). Oscar Slater released from prison. 1928 ACD attends the Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal where Oscar Slater’s sentence is quashed ( July). The Complete Sherlock Holmes xvii

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a chronology of the life of arthur conan doyle

Stories published by John Murray (Oct). Embarks on a tour of South and East Africa (Nov 1928–Apr 1929). 1929 ACD’s 70th birthday (May). The Maracot Deep and Other Stories, his last collection of tales, published by John Murray ( July). Our African Winter published ( John Murray, Sept). ACD taken ill while touring Holland and Scandinavia. 1930 ACD resigns from the Society for Psychical Research after thirty-six years ( Jan). The Edge of the Unknown, essays on psychic matters, published by John Murray ( June). ACD dies at Windlesham, after a heart attack, on 7 July. Thousands attend his memorial service at the Albert Hall. Posthumous publication of a second edition of Memories and Adventures ( John Murray), and the 24-volume Crowborough Edition (Doubleday, Doran).

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Introduction Arthur Conan Doyle’s Round the Red Lamp, Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life is an eclectic collection of fifteen short stories, first published in October 1894. Its title (which came to Conan Doyle late in the process of revision) refers to the red lamp that typically signalled the presence of a general practitioner willing to treat walk-ins for a small fee, and usually found in poorer areas of towns.1 Conan Doyle therefore mined his experience as a medical student (at Edinburgh, 1876–81), as a medical assistant in Sheffield, Birmingham and Plymouth (various short-term posts taken up between 1877 and 1881), and as a provincial GP with his own practice in Southsea (1882–90) for two books in 1894. First, while wintering in Davos with his tubercular wife, he wrote the transparently autobiographical The Stark Munro Letters, based on his medical partnership with the volatile and eccentric Dr George Turnavine Budd. This was serialized in the Idler from October 1894 and published as a book in 1895. Also in Davos and back in London, Conan Doyle then worked up this collection of stories loosely linked by medical themes. He considered Stark Munro a significant work, a portrait of the artist as a young man. Round the Red Lamp had less of a place in his own sense of his body of work. There are some good reasons for the relative obscurity of Round the Red Lamp in the Conan Doyle canon. It is a hybrid, interstitial work, which appeared in the midst of his success with his historical novels and the Sherlock Holmes serializations in the Strand Magazine. It was pitched as a series of medical stories for Jerome K. Jerome at the Idler, but some of the stories were too ‘strong’ for the magazine, and Jerome wanted ones ‘less sad’, so only four appeared there.2 Others were sold in 1

In his memoirs, Conan Doyle recalls having to buy his first red lamp for his GP practice in Southsea ‘on tick’ since he was so poor. Memories and Adventures (London: Hodder, 1924), 63. Other titles for the collection suggested in letters earlier in 1894 included Dream and Drama, Bypaths of Life or Crimson Lights; see Jon Lellenberg, Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters (London: HarperCollins, 2007), 327. By June 1894, he seemed to be deciding between Under the Red Lamp or Round the Red Lamp when he sent a sketch of cover ideas to Methuen. 2 Conan Doyle wrote to his mother on 2 May 1894: ‘I am busy over my Medical book. I shall also modify at least one of those strong stories to make them less painful’, cited in Lellenberg, Arthur Conan Doyle, 332–3. This was ‘The Curse of Eve’, which Jerome had accepted but with the caution, ‘Let us have others a little less sad. I dread the effect upon the sensitive reader’, cited in Lellenberg, Arthur Conan Doyle, 334. xix

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the magazine market by Conan Doyle’s agent A. P. Watt to Black & White, Harper’s Monthly or the Illustrated London News. ‘A Physiologist’s Wife’ was the earliest published, in 1890 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. It had been Conan Doyle’s lifelong ambition to appear in Blackwood’s, which had also helped establish the genre of the episodic series of medical tales with Samuel Warren’s hugely influential Diary of a Late Physician (1830–37). Six of the stories – those most focused on medical matters – were original to the collection, pulling its medical theme together. However, the best-known contribution of the book in the 1890s was ‘A Straggler of ’15’, the sentimental tale of an ancient survivor of the battle of Waterloo. It is not a medical story at all, and became the basis for a one-act play, A Story of Waterloo, bought outright for £100 by the Lyceum theatre manager Bram Stoker. Stoker’s boss, Sir Henry Irving, made the old soldier in Waterloo one of his most celebrated performances in a glittering career (it so often reduced audiences to tears that a convention arose whereby the lights-up after the final curtain was delayed). Perhaps this is why the jacket for the George Newnes sixpenny edition of Round the Red Lamp in 1913 featured an illustration for the story ‘Waterloo’. The play has been significant in late Victorian theatre history, but remains relatively obscure in Conan Doyle scholarship.3 After the renewed interest in the late Victorian Gothic revival from scholars a hundred years later, two of Conan Doyle’s most gruesome stories, and those judged least successful by his early readers, ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’ and ‘Lot No. 249’, were frequently detached from this original context and anthologized separately as exemplars of the Gothic.4 The collection barely coheres, then, but this is what makes it so fascinating. It is caught between ‘facts’ and ‘fancies’, between medical realism and Gothic flights. It has tales typical of light, sentimental entertainment, work famously championed by George Newnes at the Strand, but also has challenging stories with daring, even transgressive medical content, including a story about childbirth and three about syphilis. In 1894 3

W. D. King, Henry Irving’s Waterloo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and David Skene-Melvin (ed.), Waterloo: A Case-Book on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Historical Play (Toronto: Toronto Reference Library, 1998). 4 See, for instance, their appearance in Arthur Conan Doyle, Gothic Tales, ed. Darryl Jones (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2018), and Late Victorian Gothic Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2005). xx

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Conan Doyle was publicly defending George Moore’s scandalous novel Esther Waters, which had been refused by the W. H. Smith circulating library on moral grounds, and he advocates for what sounds suspiciously like the notorious liberties taken by Tolstoy or Zola in the confrontational avant-garde of literature. Round the Red Lamp had a brief preface defending the ‘realism’ of this representation of the ‘darker side’ of medical life, and many reviewers received the book as part of this ethical challenge pursued by the avant-garde. If it has associations with the dread determinism and explicit horrors of the Naturalist School, the collection has also been claimed as proto-modernist by Tabitha Sparks, who argues that the book is full of ambiguous and irresolute stories, rewriting the place of the doctor in Victorian literature.5 James Krasner notes that it is full of markedly ‘more ambivalent’ tales than the mastery and control on display in the Sherlock Holmes series.6 Round the Red Lamp is thus on a cusp between realism and romance and between Victorian and modern sensibilities. But it is also a remarkable record – composed of short works between 1890 and 1894 – of the moment of transition between Conan Doyle’s first profession as medic and the final turn to his second as writer. GENESIS AND COMPOSITION In 1890 Arthur Conan Doyle was still a general practitioner in Southsea, albeit one with a best-selling historical novel, Micah Clarke, in print, a collection of short stories for the prestigious Longmans imprint, The Captain of the Polestar, and a commission from Lippincott’s Magazine for what became The Sign of Four, published in February 1890. In November 1890 he read about the frenzied anticipation around the celebrated German doctor Robert Koch, who was shortly to announce a revolutionary treatment for tuberculosis. Conan Doyle travelled to Berlin to witness this historic event. In Memories and Adventures, he suggested that this was an entirely impulsive decision.

5

Tabitha Sparks, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), where the conclusion is subtitled ‘Arthur Conan Doyle’s Medical Modernism’, 157–62. 6 James Krasner, ‘Arthur Conan Doyle as Doctor and Writer’, Mosaic, 33:4 (2000), 19–34, at 21. xxi

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Koch had been a provincial doctor, working far from the prestigious institutions of Berlin, and yet had become world-famous for identifying the anthrax bacillus in 1876. Koch started the heroic years of the discoveries of bacteria that would transform public health and the perception of experimental medicine. He was just about the best model of medical success for an ambitious provincial GP such as Conan Doyle. In Berlin, Conan Doyle in fact missed the main event: the lecture was vastly over-subscribed and English visitors were treated coldly, given that German medics, in these intensely nationalistic times, held that the poor advice of the eminent British medical expert Sir Morell Mackenzie had killed the young emperor Frederick III in 1888. Rebuffed from Koch’s lecture, Conan Doyle was nevertheless able to examine some of Koch’s patients in clinics in Berlin. He wrote a rather cool assessment of the success of the Koch treatment for the Daily Telegraph (see Appendix). This was decidedly not a cure, he emphasized, despite all the hype. This was also the view of most medical experts, who sympathized with Koch. The announcement of his findings had been made too early, for political and nationalistic reasons which won out over medical caution. Conan Doyle also wrote a piece on Koch for the December issue of the Review of Reviews (see Appendix). He then travelled home.7 Within a day of his return to Southsea, Conan Doyle had announced to the local press that he was abandoning his general practice and executing his plan to study ophthalmology in Vienna and Paris, with a view to being an eye specialist in London. This was not as impulsive a decision as Conan Doyle later suggested: he had mused on precisely this plan in 1888 in a letter to his sister Lottie.8 He had also worked for several years on developing a specialism in ‘correcting refractions and ordering glasses’ for astigmatism at the eye hospital in Portsmouth under Dr Vernon Ford.9 The final catalyst for his decision, though, was undoubtedly travelling with Dr Malcolm Morris to Berlin. Morris had started out as a provincial general practitioner, but had since become a highly successful consultant dermatologist with a grand house in Harley Street. Conan 7

See Thomas Goetz, The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure T. B. (New York: Penguin, 2014). 8 See Lellenberg, Arthur Conan Doyle, 253. 9 See Geoffrey Stavert, A Study in Southsea: The Unrevealed Life of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle (Portsmouth: Milestone, 1987), 109–10. xxii

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Doyle knew him already, because he had referred patients with skin complaints to him in the past. Morris combined this consultancy with a successful writing and editing career, and latterly a significant role in public health campaigns, offering Conan Doyle a model of twin professions beyond the hard slog, low pay and long hours of general practice. Morris’s obituary recalled: ‘His own early struggles made him ever sympathetic towards younger men.’10 From January to March 1891, Conan Doyle stayed in rooms in Vienna with his wife (but not his first young child), and followed his plan to attend lectures in the morning (in a technical German he found hard to follow) and write The Doings of Raffles Haw in the afternoons – a commission for the new journal Answers, which paid the rent. After twelve weeks he left Vienna and merely visited (rather than studied with) the famous Swiss oculist Edmund Landolt in Paris. By the end of March 1891, Conan Doyle had taken rooms in Montague Place in Bloomsbury, and was renting consulting rooms at 2 Devonshire Place, Upper Wimpole Place, at the epicentre of the London medical world clustered around Harley Street.11 It was a bold attempt to move up the hierarchy of medicine for the lowly general practitioner to become a consultant. Famously, Conan Doyle recounted that for a month ‘not a single patient ever crossed the threshold of my room’.12 He did, however, continue his studies at Westminster Ophthalmic Hospital, partly to make connections with the leading specialists of the day. As he knew from his own experience in Southsea and from the literature of medical life from Samuel Warren onwards, it took time, courage and patience to generate referrals and build a practice. In the end, he kept his consulting rooms for slightly less than a month. In his first week, in April, Conan Doyle sent off ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ to A. P. Watt, who secured £36 for the story from the Strand, which agreed to take five more to make a series. The first story was followed by ‘A Case of Identity’ (11 April), ‘The Red-Headed League’ (20 April) and ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ (27 April). 10

‘Sir Malcolm Morris, KCVO, FRCS (Ed.)’, British Medical Journal, 1 March 1924, 407–9, at 407. 11 For the significance of Conan Doyle’s address, see Roger Luckhurst, ‘Arthur Conan Doyle and Medical London: Reading the Topography of Round the Red Lamp’, Victoriographies, 11:3 (2022), 295–313. 12 Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, 96. xxiii

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Watt secured a rate of £4 per thousand words for serialization, which already placed the part-time writer Conan Doyle among the highest paid in the London literary market.13 Conan Doyle’s plan to be a consultant oculist was ended by the Russian flu, the pandemic that had already killed his elder sister Annette in Lisbon in January 1890. Struck down in the first week of May, he described his near-death experience in Memories and Adventures as a transformative event, from which he returned determined to abandon medicine for fulltime writing. By the end of June, he had given up his consulting rooms and lodgings in London and was in South Norwood, the suburban idyll he celebrated in Beyond the City, published at the end of 1891. With the arrival of international copyright law in July 1891, which secured income from America, and the publication of The White Company in October, Peter McDonald estimates that Conan Doyle earned £1500 in his first (half-)year as a professional writer. In 1882 he had earned £150 from his general practice in Southsea, and never made more than £300 a year for the next eight years. Influenza might have been the occasion rather than the cause of his decision: the writing career now looked financially secure for a middle-class professional who had hitherto had to count his pennies anxiously throughout his whole adult life. By 1894 Conan Doyle was a prolific professional author and clubbable gent with a large network of literary friends, from James Barrie and Walter Besant, via Jerome K. Jerome, Rudyard Kipling and Andrew Lang, to Israel Zangwill. He was comfortably wealthy, with earnings from serialization rights, UK, Colonial and US editions, plays, and lecture tours in America. He had become an international literary star, a newfangled ‘celebrity author’ often profiled in the popular newspapers. His fame had escalated with the second collection of Holmes stories for the Strand, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, which appeared in December 1893. That winter he stayed in Davos, after his wife’s diagnosis of tuberculosis, and worked steadily to mine his early medical years for Stark Munro and the tales in Round the Red Lamp, having seemingly killed off Sherlock Holmes for good in ‘The Final Problem’. Although medical doctors and professors continued to feature in many of his works (Leslie Klinger notes that there

13

See Peter D. McDonald, ‘The Adventures of the Literary Agent: Conan Doyle, A. P. Watt, Holmes and the Strand in 1891’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 30:1 (1997), 17–26. xxiv

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are 31 doctors in the Holmes stories alone), 1894 proved to be the most intensive phase of reflection on medicine and his own medical career.14 PUBLICATION HISTORY Round the Red Lamp was commissioned for the Idler as a series of loosely connected medical stories (Conan Doyle had been introduced to the group of writers associated with Idler in London in 1892). The editor, Jerome K. Jerome, warned Conan Doyle that the content needed to be less ‘strong’, less medically realistic and confrontational, given the light tenor of the journal. Jerome had no problems later serializing The Stark Munro Letters, but these medical tales clearly clashed with his conception of the journal. By the time Round the Red Lamp was first published in book form by Methuen in 1894, it had become a more eclectic collection of stories, and it was filled out with tales that he had published between 1890 and 1894. The organization was not always obvious and some of the material was surprisingly challenging for an author apparently situated with the romance revivalists, such as fellow Scots Robert Louis Stevenson and Andrew Lang. Cassell’s, his first choice of publisher, proved unwilling to publish the collection. This suggests an unusually troubled genesis for an author able to publish pretty much anything he wrote and to command impressive advances for his work. Methuen published the book on 23 October 1894 in a print-run of 6,000 copies. In keeping with the Edinburgh University Press edition policy, the base text is this first edition. The American edition appeared a month later through Appleton, with a slight alteration to the preface to explain the meaning of the ‘red lamp’ in the title to an American audience. Conan Doyle wrote to his mother from Boston at the start of a tour in November 1894 that it had already sold about ten thousand copies in the States.15 The 1894 Methuen collection has an improvised quality. Conan Doyle was distracted and over-committed at the height of his first flush of fame. While the Idler published only four of the tales, another five on loosely medical themes were taken from the journals Black & White, the 14

Leslie Klinger, ‘Sherlock Holmes Among the Doctors’, Baker Street Journal, 65:4 (2015), 16–22. 15 Conan Doyle, 20 November 1894, in Lellenberg, Arthur Conan Doyle, 333. xxv

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Gentlewoman, Blackwood’s Magazine, the Illustrated London News and Harper’s Monthly Magazine. Many of these were heavily illustrated, and in strikingly different late Victorian journal styles, some with very dramatic page layouts. These first journal publications emphasize the stories’ very different styles and tones. The remaining six stories were published for the first time in Round the Red Lamp, which Conan Doyle worked on while in Davos. He kept initially to his principle of not reprinting any of his early stories from the 1880s, although some of these had overt medical themes. Perhaps because of the strong reaction of some reviewers to the explicit medical material in some of the tales (see ‘Reception’ below), Conan Doyle revised the collection for the Author’s Edition of 1903. In the reissue and reshuffling of his short stories in the 1922 Murray collections, the contents of Round the Red Lamp were broken up and redistributed. Eight of them made it into Tales of Adventure and Medical Life, with ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’ placed in Tales of Mystery and Terror and ‘The Los Amigos Fiasco’ and ‘Lot No. 249’ placed in Tales of Twilight and the Unseen. This emphasizes again the eclectic shifts of tone in the original collection. In his 1924 autobiography Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle replays his life as a medical student and general practitioner in Southsea and the frustrated attempt to rise up the medical pecking order to become a London eye specialist. In this account, he reveals some of the sources for the stories in Round the Red Lamp, and these are fascinating to compare with their fictional versions. In the final collected edition of Conan Doyle’s lifetime, the Crowborough Edition (1930), volume 21 collected Round the Red Lamp alongside The Green Flag, and for the first time added two early stories of medical life, ‘Crabbe’s Practice’ from his first London Society stories in 1882, and ‘My Friend the Murderer’ from the 1884 Christmas special of the Boy’s Own Paper (he almost completely rewrote ‘Crabbe’s Practice’ for republication, however). These two stories are included in Appendix 1 to show the collection in its most extended version. Round the Red Lamp did not really survive as a distinct volume in subsequent reissues of Conan Doyle’s work, reflecting its hybrid nature. It was first revived as a collection by the medical researchers Alvin Rodin and Jack Key, who issued an expanded edition in 1992 under the title Conan Doyle’s Tales of Medical Humanism and Values: Round the Red Lamp, Being Facts and Fancies of Medial Life, with Other Medical Short Stories. Fifteen xxvi

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years later in 2007 Robert Darby put together an excellent edition for Valancourt Press, which also reassembled the volume and contains the 15 tales, and an appendix of three further stories including ‘Crabbe’s Practice’ and also ‘The Surgeon of Gaster Fell’ and ‘The Retirement of Signor Lambert’ (but not ‘My Friend the Murderer’), because they all involve medical themes. In Darby’s edition there is also an excellent appendix of ‘Medical Non-Fiction’, which collects together some of Conan Doyle’s short essays and letters to the medical press from 1879 to his 1910 lecture ‘The Romance of Medicine’. This exercise in collecting the non-fiction is worth repeating for this edition, since it rounds out the picture of Conan Doyle’s emergence as a fiction writer from this medical context.16 His attempts to make it as a provincial general practitioner, one willing to publish research and case studies to make a name for himself, make these pieces from his first professional world important, but they also thematically overlap with the stories in Round the Red Lamp. Two stories from Round the Red Lamp made it to the London stage as one-act plays. This was another common route to further capitalize on fiction in the 1890s. This edition contains the play-texts of these two short dramas. The sentimental ‘A Straggler of ’15’, reworked as Waterloo, is very important, since it was sent to Bram Stoker at the Lyceum as a vehicle for his boss, Henry Irving. Stoker paid £100 for the copyright, and shortened the play so that it could run in double-bills, often with Irving’s other signature piece, The Bells. The performance of the last survivor of Waterloo became Henry Irving’s party piece, a play that he performed many hundreds of times, including in his very last season. Its sentimental death scene was a great favourite for audiences. The play and the performance became the target of George Bernard Shaw’s scorn, and there is a lot of theatre history scholarship on how Waterloo became a foil for advocates of the New Theatre. The play was published after Irving’s death in 1907 by Samuel French, and this text is reprinted here. The other adaptation from Conan Doyle’s collection came from the story ‘A Question of Diplomacy’, but was far less successful. It was performed at Terry’s Theatre in 1893 as a short play titled Foreign Policy in 16

I have collected the letters and notes Conan Doyle sent to the medical press during his years as a general practitioner, and his treatment of medical issues in the wider press up to 1894. His lecture to students, ‘The Romance of Medicine’ from 1910, is reproduced in the Edinburgh edition of The Stark Munro Letters, edited by James Machin. xxvii

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a mixed programme that included plays by Conan Doyle’s close friend J. M. Barrie and a short piece by Thomas Hardy. The bill ran only for six nights. The Lord Chancellor’s Office records of play-texts in the British Library has Conan Doyle’s twenty-page typed manuscript of the play. His adaptation remains close to the original story, but amplifies the comic tone and is an interesting variant that has not been published before. RECEPTION It is worth spending some time on the first reviews of Round the Red Lamp, as it caused controversy on publication, given its odd shifts of tone between comedy, gossip, sentimental anecdote, Gothic horror and Naturalist explicitness in tales about difficult childbirth, the death-sentence of syphilis, or the surgeon’s loss of nerve. In ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’, Conan Doyle dramatizes a punitive female disfiguration to punish a sexually promiscuous woman in startlingly overt terms (using the Freudian principle of displacement, this is surely a symbolic narrative about female circumcision). In ‘A Surgeon Talks’, the first symptoms of tertiary syphilis prompt a surgeon to write to several mistresses to warn them of their likely infection. In ‘The Third Generation’, a young scion of a noble family commits suicide when he discovers he has hereditary syphilis and risks contaminating his bride-to-be. Readers such as Rudyard Kipling admired these gestures of realism. But this was exactly the kind of material that had resulted in the English publisher of Émile Zola, Henry Vitzetelly, being imprisoned for three months for obscenity in 1889. Explicit treatments of sexual morality had started to get writers such as Thomas Hardy and George Moore into trouble with the traditional arbiters of literary taste, the circulating libraries. The forces of cultural conservatism also worked through the National Vigilance Association, formed in 1885, which had successfully brought prosecutions of publishers and music halls on moral grounds. Many reviewers of Conan Doyle’s book placed it in this context, including some of the medical journals of the time. The earnest Liberal journal The Speaker warned in a fiction round-up that Round the Red Lamp was ‘a book which will excite something of the spirit of controversy among its readers’ and asked the key question which hovered over many of the first responses: ‘Ought the tragical realities and the painful commonplaces of the sick-room and the death-bed to be made xxviii

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the theme of fiction?’ Conan Doyle’s book was a great advance in the ‘realism’ of the medical tale established by Samuel Warren in the 1830s, but the reviewer veered away in relief to the sentiment of ‘A Straggler of ’15’, the book’s only clear ‘masterpiece’.17 The London Evening Standard, in one of the earliest reviews, offered a sustained critique of a collection it considered ‘in tact and in good taste . . . singularly deficient’. It notes that Conan Doyle’s Preface warns the reader of some of its dark content, but, the reviewer thunders: We maintain that some of its pages are rendered sickening and disgusting by the medical details with which they are carelessly, or perhaps carefully, intersected. By all means let us have, if we must have, the strange, the horrible and the weird as elements to be used occasionally in our daily fiction; but what is to be gained by giving to a general audience the technical details of a ghastly operation for a ghastly disease? There seems to be a particular objection to the stories focused on surgical operations, and the jocular tone of some of the medical anecdotes, rather than the more overt Gothic elements of the book. In a telling section, the review continues: This sort of thing . . . would be all very well in the columns of a medical journal, or told to a party of professional men with a taste for such details, but it is, we contend, unfit for publication in a work of fiction meant for the general public: to say that it is meant for a special one is all nonsense, while it stands in piles on every important railway bookstall. It is not good art, and it is not even clever, except with a cleverness that might display in giving directions for the cutting and stitching of a coat. The metaphor of trade, eliding the lowly tailor and the lowly surgeon, firmly places Conan Doyle’s popular fiction at the same vulgar social level. Round the Red Lamp is associated with the cultural panic of degeneracy and decline that would make the translation of Max Nordau’s 17

‘Fiction’, The Speaker, 1 December 1894, 605. xxix

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notorious jeremiad Degeneration a best-seller just a few months later, in spring 1895. The review continues: To put some of the subjects to be found in Mr Conan Doyle’s book before the general public is both cruel and demoralising, and suggests that we, who do our executions in private, are beginning to do our hospital operations in the street, for the benefit of the middle-class young people, who delight in his stories.18 The review breezily dismisses Conan Doyle’s feeble stabs at what it calls the ‘Poe effect’ in ‘Lot No. 249’ or ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’, and once again singles out ‘A Straggler of ’15’ as the saving grace of the collection. The influential reviewer George Saintsbury was stronger in his condemnation of ‘Lady Sannox’, declaring it ‘repulsive’ and the whole book ‘a distinct disappointment’.19 The fact that Conan Doyle ‘talks shop in his latest book’ – another association with vulgar trade – was a matter of disappointment also in the Leeds Mercury: ‘We like him so well in his usual mood, and owe him so deep a debt for relaxation, that we are sorry to have to quarrel with him on the present occasion.’ It warns that Round the Red Lamp will be ‘disconcerting to people of sensitive nerves. Most of the stories in the volume . . . are morbid and pessimistic, and therefore hardly suit either the temperament or reputation of the author. The surgeon is too much in evidence.’20 ‘He skates over very thin ice occasionally’, another provincial review in the Cheltenham Looker-On warned: ‘to many people of nervous temperament and slightly morbid habit of thought, I think it is possible that the book might be infinitely harmful, the very fascination of its powerfully drawn sketches of the ills which flesh is heir to, rendering it additionally dangerous’.21 Much later, even his home journal for the origin of the project, the Idler, published a jaunty if still negatively inflected review by W. L. Alden. Alden warned that the book should be read ‘only with the greatest of caution’: ‘hypochondriacs may possibly find Round the Red Lamp 18

Round the Red Lamp review, London Evening Standard, 7 November 1894, 2. George Saintsbury, ‘New Novels’, The Academy, 8 December 1894, 471–2, at 471. 20 ‘Literary Arrivals’, Leeds Mercury, 19 November 1894, 8. 21 Review, Cheltenham Looker-On, 17 November 1894, 15. 19

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all the more interesting for the reason that their ingenious nerves will furnish a running commentary, vividly illustrating the author’s descriptions by reproducing all the early and late symptoms of locomotor ataxia, angina pectoris, and other select diseases’.22 This review gently satirizes the theme of the baleful influence of demoralizing books that was strong in fin-de-siècle culture, but all the same suggests that Round the Red Lamp might have the same sort of corrupting influence as the little yellow book that Lord Henry Wotton gives to Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (the book commissioned from Wilde at the same dinner that also secured Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four for Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890). Unusually, then, given his fame as a historical novelist and romancer, in the literary reviews for Round the Red Lamp Conan Doyle is placed on the side of the avant-garde, among those (like George Moore or Oscar Wilde) who were pushing at the boundaries of taboos and explicit representation. This is a consistent view among reviewers. Under the striking title ‘Novel Diseases’, the Globe complains that Conan Doyle has become a member of the Literary Vigilance Society, demanding ever more shocking realism in fiction. ‘The truth is that we do not want the truth – always.’23 Two days later, the Globe gleefully reported that ‘Dr Conan Doyle’s grisly volume of pathological detail, “Round the Red Lamp”, has received castigation in a good many quarters already, and now comes the “Medical Magazine”.’24 Over at the Pall Mall Gazette, the reading of the collection is framed as a horrific nightmare: ‘Here we awoke. The candle was burned out, and Conan Doyle’s last volume was lying on the floor. We had an unpleasant sensation of having witnessed or undergone several nauseous operations on diseased bones or growths.’25 Wider afield, the New York Times took note of the Appleton Edition, which had been released in honour of Conan Doyle’s lecture tour in America. Yet Round the Red Lamp provoked similar anxiety about its explicitness: ‘the best that can be said of some of the stories, though all are well told, is that they are not half as bad as the unprinted doctors’ stories every man of mature years has heard. It is still doubtful if it is good 22

W. L. Alden, ‘The Book Hunter’, The Idler, June 1895, 793–800, at 796–7. ‘Novel Diseases’, The Globe, 13 December 1894, 1–2, at 2. 24 The Globe, 15 December 1894, 6. 25 ‘Reviews’, Pall Mall Gazette, 13 November 1894, 4. 23

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literary art to put such things in books.’26 Conan Doyle’s last story in the collection, ‘The Surgeon Talks’, stages precisely such a meeting of doctors who share anecdotes of the trade, as if needing to create the appropriate professional milieu for these ‘club tales’. Perhaps surprisingly, the medical press did not exactly embrace the collection either. The Lancet – not always a great defender of general practitioners – reviewed the book in a general column on Christmas books. The reviewer criticized the title as misleading, as the red lamp, used only in poor areas, implies a book on doctoring in poor or slum areas and perhaps the expectation of a more social realist mode. The reviewer finally judges the book as falling between two audiences: ‘In some of the stories he has gone into medical detail to an extent that should unfit the stories for popularity, while, on the other hand, as clinical stories or scientific contributions, they are not informatory.’27 Similarly, the Medical Magazine attacked the book for ‘this, the most offensive, form of realism’. A short editorial raged: It is high time that something were done to check the ever-growing tendency to thrust professional details of every kind under the eyes of a curious but ignorant public. We are surprised that a writer of such repute and undoubted ability as Dr. Conan Doyle should have descended to such depth as to give to the public (for whatever may be said it has been given to the public) a work containing such unnecessary minutiae of some of the less inviting facts of medical life . . . A prolific writer of undoubted imaginative power, as Dr. Conan Doyle is, can have no need to resort to such a means of bookmaking; and we consider it all the more deserving of reproach in one who has had the advantage of medical training, and who should have felt himself still under some of the restraints which impel medical men to keep such details from the common and uninstructed investigation of the public.28 Yet in the professional journal for doctors in general practice, the Practitioner, there was a fulsome tribute to the book, likely written by 26

‘A Physician’s Yarns’, New York Times, 11 November 1894, 23. ‘Christmas Books’, The Lancet, 15 December 1894, 1444. 28 Editorial ‘“Round the Red Lamp”: A Protest’, Medical Magazine, 3:6 (December 1894), 616. 27

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Conan Doyle’s friend Malcolm Morris, who was the editor. Published in 1895 after the publication of The Stark Munro Letters, the review partly responds to the implication that Round the Red Lamp is on the side of the avant-gardists and Decadents. ‘There is nothing of the “degenerate” in Conan Doyle,’ the reviewer answers, ‘he is one of the healthiest of writers.’29 He insists that Conan Doyle displays ‘the manliness and healthiness of tone that mark all his writing. His work does not smell of the dissecting-room.’30 The review recalls that the realistic medical details of some of the tales ‘were, indeed, a little too realistic for the “irresponsible, indolent reviewers,” but to the medical reader they are all delightful as a presentiment of the details of professional life in the new and transfiguring light of art’.31 Even so, in the review Morris offered far more detail about the virtues of Stark Munro and much less on the stories in Round the Red Lamp. Scholarly critical work on the medical associations of Arthur Conan Doyle tends to find it hard to escape the powerful gravitational pull of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Round the Red Lamp gained little notice for many years, except as ballast for studies of John Watson, MD, retired army surgeon and latterly general practitioner. But medical doctors have always been interested in Round the Red Lamp, and with the emergence of the sub-field of Medical Humanities, the collection has re-emerged as a distinct artefact. It is no longer so much that ‘little-known collection’ that rests in obscurity as portrayed by Tabitha Sparks in 2013.32 How it has been treated reflects the development of models for exploring the interaction of literature and medicine. At first, medical historians and medics with a sideline in literary studies tended to see Round the Red Lamp very instrumentally, as raw material to mine for the representation of Victorian medicine, as in, for instance, the early contribution of the American medics Alvin Rodin and Jack Key in The Medical Casebook of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle (a vital resource for this edition).33 Other 29

‘A Medico-Literary Causerie: Our Medical Novelist’, The Practitioner, new series II ( July–December 1895), 471–5, at 472. 30 Ibid., 471. 31 Ibid., 472. 32 Sparks, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel, 257. 33 Alvin E. Rodin and Jack D. Key, Medical Casebook of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle (Malabar, FL: Robert Krieger, 1984). xxxiii

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medical journals have reclaimed the author as an ophthalmologist, or carried short essays on Conan Doyle’s representation of syphilis in his stories, perhaps because he gained his MD in 1885 for a thesis on tabes dorsalis, then key to a diagnosis of advancing syphilis.34 In contrast, literary histories on the figure of the Victorian doctor in fiction that include Conan Doyle were initially more interested in the ambiguous social status of the general practitioner, rather than the medical content: cultural history, rather than the history of science. Lawrence Rothfield’s discussion of ‘medical realism’ in Victorian fiction points the way towards a better integration of literary and medical discourse (explored below, in the ‘Literary Doctoring’ section). Douglas Kerr’s emphasis on Arthur Conan Doyle’s middle-class identity amid the rise of the professional class usefully articulated the professions of medicine and author together, making Round the Red Lamp a pivotal text.35 Round the Red Lamp is now more likely to be a reference point in engagements with the Victorian period via the Medical Humanities.36 And since the formulation of a distinct ‘Medical Gothic’ in the burgeoning field of Gothic Studies, the darker stories of Round the Red Lamp, dismissed as tasteless by its first reviewers, have come to the fore.37 It was the liveliness of the Gothic field, as well as the revolution in cheaper on-demand

34

J. G. Ravin and C. Migdal, ‘Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Author was an Ophthalmologist’, Survey of Ophthalmology, 40:3 (1995), 237–44. See also Arthur Silverstein and Christine Ruggere, ‘Dr Arthur Conan Doyle and the Case of Congenital Syphilis’, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 49:2 (2006), 209–19, and O. Somasundaram, ‘Neuro Syphilis: Portrayals by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’, Indian Journal of Psychiatry, 51:3 (2009), 235–7, which examines the three stories focused on syphilis in Round the Red Lamp. 35 Douglas Kerr, Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 36 See, for instance, Keir Waddington and Martin Willis, ‘Pharmacology, Controversy, and the Everyday in fin-de-siècle Medicine’, in Literature and Medicine Vol II: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Clark Lawlor and Andrew Mangham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 135–55. 37 A distinctive medical Gothic has emerged in twenty-first-century criticism. For discussions, see William Hughes, ‘Victorian Medicine and the Gothic’, in Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 186–201, and Andrew Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). xxxiv

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printing, that allowed the Valancourt Press, a specialist imprint, to reissue Round the Red Lamp in 2007. MEDICAL CONTEXT It helps to understand the tenor of many of the stories in Round the Red Lamp to have a broad sketch in mind of the transformations of the medical profession in the nineteenth century. In many ways, Arthur Conan Doyle’s career exemplified the state of the profession by the late Victorian period. In 1800 there were essentially three tiers of medicine: physicians, surgeons and apothecaries.38 The physicians were a tiny London elite of gentlemen, numbering barely more than two hundred, who jealously guarded entry to the Royal College, a notoriously corrupt and nepotistic institution. The surgeons were of a distinctly lower status, often despised as ‘sawbones’ in a lowly profession, but beginning to rise in standing with the emergence of experimental and clinical science and the systematic study of human anatomy. They were also forever associated in the popular imagination with the gruesome trade in ‘bodysnatching’ after the sensational case of Burke and Hare, grave-robbers and murderers who supplied Edinburgh medical schools with bodies in the 1820s, a practice ended by the 1832 Anatomy Act, although the grisly case cast a long shadow over Victorian popular culture. Apothecaries, who made up prescriptions and dispensed drugs, were lowly tradesmen, difficult to distinguish from the host of druggists, herbalists and other ‘quacks’ marketing dubious treatments and cures without regulation. Few people encountered physicians except the very wealthy; most were treated by hybrid ‘surgeon-apothecaries’, doctors who diagnosed and made up their own drug treatments. This awkward hyphenated term was slowly replaced by ‘general practitioner’ from the 1820s. Medicine was an essential element of the reform agenda pursued by dissident Quakers, Benthamites and others in Victorian England. The 38

For quick orientations, see Roy Porter, ‘The Medical Profession and the State in the Nineteenth Century’, in Disease, Medicine and Society in England 1550–1860, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 48–60, and S. E. D. Shortt, ‘Physicians, Science and Status: Issues in the Professionalisation of Anglo-American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century’, Medical History, 27 (1983), 51–68. xxxv

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Apothecaries Act of 1815 introduced a Society that restricted the sale of medicines to those legitimated by a licensing system. Medical schools attached to systematic university education and teaching hospitals blossomed in many major cities after centuries of resistance. An Edinburgh medical degree, as taken by Conan Doyle, retained the prestige of being one of the oldest and most respected in the British Isles. In contrast, the older pathway into doctoring, through apprenticeship to an established doctor, began to fall away very fast. It had been the most common route in 1800; one hundred years later it was rare and anomalous. ‘Mad-doctoring’ in asylums, fallen to a scandalous state and exposed by Quaker reformists in the late eighteenth century, became regulated under a succession of Lunacy Acts and the formation of a Lunacy Commission. In 1823 Thomas Wakley, from outside the London medical elite, founded the Lancet journal as an outraged weekly exposing bad practice and pressing for medical reform, as did the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, formed in 1832, and which became the British Medical Association in 1856. These were the vehicles for a growing rank-and-file of middle-class doctors, which increased pressure for reform on the conservative bastions of the Royal Colleges. The result was the Medical Act of 1858, which created a single medical register, to be policed by a General Medical Council. It was only possible to practise if your name appeared in the register, and the GMC had the power to disbar doctors for malpractice. The GMC was granted very little legal power, much to its frustration, to challenge heterodox therapeutics such as homeopathy, mesmerism or other health fads and fashions. One of the major effects of the Medical Act was to create a different hierarchy in medicine, divided between an elite of consultants and the mass of general practitioners. The term ‘consultant’ eroded the distinction between physician and surgeon. Consultants were attached to prestigious university and hospital posts, appointed to prominent public health committees, and charged large fees for ‘referrals’ or to an exclusive wealthy clientele in their private practices. They were a metropolitan elite clustered around Harley Street in London. Outside this group were the growing ranks of general practitioners, many of whom struggled to establish a practice and a decent living in a ruthless open market. It is surely significant that Round the Red Lamp includes many sympathetic portraits of general practitioners, but that surgeons (Douglas Stone in ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’) or specialist consultants (Horace Selby in ‘The Third xxxvi

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Generation’) or university experimentalists (Professor Ainslie Grey in ‘The Physiologist’s Wife’) are callous, indifferent or pompous figures. Yet this new hierarchy also allowed for more mobility: it was now possible for a provincial GP to climb their way from a lowly background to the eminence of physician to Queen Victoria with grand consulting rooms in Harley Street – as, for instance, Sir James Paget recounted in his 1903 memoirs. Malcolm Morris had also triumphed this way, a route he advised Conan Doyle to follow as they sped towards Berlin to see the general-practitioner-turned-world-famous-experimental-scientist Robert Koch in November 1890. After eight years in Southsea, never earning more than £300 a year, Conan Doyle was prepared to try this route in 1891, although he must have acknowledged the risk of taking this unlikely path to success, and had only undertaken it after his writing career looked more secure. General practitioners were an intrinsic part of the rise of professional society in Victorian England. Their status steadily shifted towards respectability, yet they remained to the end of the century in an ambiguous social position. They were ‘socially insecure’ and ‘marginal’ men, one historian judges.39 Early in the century, the reformist Thomas Wakley dismissed the GP as ‘a man so preposterous as to understand both physic and surgery’, and ‘fit only to become a subordinate’. They were ‘a kind of mongrel doctor’.40 Lady Warwick gave a precise location for the rising professional class in her advice that ‘Doctors and solicitors might be invited to garden parties, though never, of course, to lunch or dinner.’41 In another telling analogy, Walter Rivington, in his 1888 survey of the profession, called GPs ‘the rank and file of the medical army, of which physicians and surgeons, and obstetricians, and the more select of the specialists, are the generals and officers’.42 As Rivington identified the oculist as one of the select specialisms, Conan Doyle was seeking a promotion from private to officer class. His move from Southsea to London was as much about status as financial security. 39

Irvine Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner 1750–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 202, 203. 40 Wakley, cited in Loudon, Medical Care, 204. 41 Lady Warwick’s advice cited in Anne Digby, The Evolution of British General Practice 1850–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41. 42 Walter Rivington, The Medical Profession of the United Kingdom (Dublin: Fannin, 1888), 279. xxxvii

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The main difficulty Conan Doyle faced in his choice of profession as a general practitioner was that he was riding a wave of expansion in numbers emerging from the new university medical schools that had grown up in major population centres such as Liverpool and Sheffield. It meant that the profession was becoming overcrowded, making it more difficult to run a sustainable practice and earn a reasonable living after years of training. Between 1881 and 1911, the number of doctors in Britain increased by 62% (more than double the rate of increase in law, for comparison). The theme of overcrowding was particularly strong in the medical journals in the late 1880s, the years Conan Doyle contemplated his move into specialism to escape the apparently fixed ceiling on his income in Southsea. In the Lancet, an editorial comment in July 1890 was titled ‘Overcrowding in the Medical Profession’, warning that ‘the conditions of competition are pressing severely in many quarters’, and that with ever-increasing medics on the passlists, a ‘Darwinian principle’ of ‘survival of the fittest’ was emerging.43 The professional journals also carried a lot of scandalized discussion about the rearguard action of the Royal College councils to preserve their elite control over numbers, where they continued to deny voting rights to ordinary members. No alleviation of Conan Doyle’s pinched circumstances was likely to come from these closed shops. The context of financial pressure drove – in part – the antipathy towards opening the profession to women, another major debate that dominated Conan Doyle’s time in the profession, dealt with in Round the Red Lamp in the story ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’. There were social and often moral objections made to women doctors by the male gatekeepers: too much learning typically ‘unsexed’ women, it was claimed, disturbing their delicate nervous systems; the hard labour and long hours of general practice were beyond the capacity of women.44 The inevitable intimacy of the doctor–patient relationship made it impossible for many to conceive of a female doctor treating male patients (women doctors might be suffered if they specialized in treating women and children, since this could be accepted more as an extension of their traditional nursing role). Yet 43

‘Overcrowding in the Profession’, The Lancet, 5 July 1890, 28. For discussion of the allegedly dangerous effects of education on female health in Victorian medical and psychiatric discourse, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980 (London: Virago, 1987).

44

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pioneers such as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson set up the London Medical School for Women in Bloomsbury in 1874, producing a small but steady stream of trained medical women. During Conan Doyle’s time as a medical student, Sophia Jex-Blake was also pressing for women to be allowed into Edinburgh medical school. They were eventually allowed to study in Edinburgh and then through the University of London in the 1870s, although there was gender segregation in classes that remained firmly in place into the 1920s. Despite the panic over opening up the profession to the other half of the population, only 258 women were on the Medical Register by 1900. It was the gender disturbance to the hard-fought gains of the black-coated closed cadres of male professionals and their institutions that blocked women’s progress. 1894, the year Round the Red Lamp was published, was also the year of the scandalous New Woman, a significant phenomenon in English culture of the fin de siècle.45 Medicine played a prominent part in creating the stereotype of the mannish, over-educated, strident feminist, demanding entry to the professions. The tenor of Conan Doyle’s story of Verrinder Smith in ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ may seem to adopt a quite liberal position on the question of female doctors (she is clearly a better educated medic than the local doctor, James Ripley, as she has studied in the major European centres of advanced research), but her refusal to marry and her anomalous interest in pursuing the latest medical research convey the author’s ambiguous stance on women in medicine. Conan Doyle’s preference for chivalric models of muscular masculinity – as modelled in the strapping medical student Abercrombie Smith, the hero of ‘Lot No. 249’ – left him in the conservative cultural majority on the issue.46 45

See Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). There are a cluster of novels from this time that focus on women and medicine: Arabella Keneally, Dr Janet of Harley Street (1894), Annie E. Swan, Elizabeth Glen, M.B.: The Experiences of a Lady Doctor (1894), and its sequel, Mrs Keith Hamilton, M. B.: More Experiences of Elizabeth Glen (1897), and Graham Travers (the pseudonym of Margaret Todd), Mona Maclean: Medical Student (1900). Sarah Grand, who helped popularize the term ‘the New Woman’ in 1894, published The Heavenly Twins (1893), which was explicit about the problems of sexually transmitted diseases in marriage – a topic that recurs in RTRL. 46 See Diana Barsham, Arthur Conan Doyle and the Meaning of Masculinity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), particularly the chapter ‘Tortured Bodies and Nervous Narratives: The Novels of the 1890s’, 143–89. xxxix

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The squeezed financial state of general practitioners was really only resolved in 1911 with the emergence of a National Insurance system implemented by Lloyd George, which secured a basic salary for medics from the state for the first time. Conan Doyle therefore qualified at almost the worst time of laissez-faire medicine, part of a large generational glut of doctors from an expanding middle class. There was no prospect of a National Insurance system in 1890, although Conan Doyle did, like other general practitioners, earn money through piece-work health assessments for local insurance companies. As late as 1928, though, a guidebook called How to Start in General Practice still warned that ‘any district is hazardous as the profession is overcrowded’.47 Jumping ship seemed to be a rather sanguine financial calculation by the cautious accountant that was always part of Conan Doyle’s make-up. LITERARY DOCTORING Round the Red Lamp emerged within a cluster of late Victorian literary representations of the doctor, and its variations in tone, from sentimentality to social realism and Gothic horror, reflect different cultural legacies from the doctors in the fiction that burgeoned with professionalization in the nineteenth century. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine helped establish the episodic form of the doctor’s casebook with the serialization of Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (1830–37). Warren had studied medicine, although he switched to law; during its anonymous run in the journal, there was much speculation that these diary entries were ‘real’ cases, so new and authentic did they seem in their intimate details. When published together in book form under Warren’s name the volume was an international best-seller across Europe and America, prefaced with an anxious statement about its morality. The series marked a significant new place for the doctor in literary culture. The form of the open-ended episodic serial with a doctor at the centre remained popular throughout the nineteenth century, particularly in penny dreadful forms. The explosion of new magazines in the 1880s

47

I. G. Briggs, How to Start in General Practice, cited by Digby, Evolution of British General Practice, 96. xl

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supported not only Conan Doyle’s fictionalized case histories of John Watson, but other popular series, such as the cases of ‘Clifford Halifax, M.D.’, Stories from the Diary of a Doctor, which were co-written by the physician Edgar Beaumont and the prolific woman writer L. T. Meade, and published as collections in 1894 and 1896. Round the Red Lamp was part of a recognizable sub-genre, though not quite as coherent as the Halifax serials. Lawrence Rothfield has proposed that the nineteenth-century realist novel as a whole depended in a foundational way upon the emergence of medical knowledge as a more rigorous experimental science, a new regime of truth, the diagnosis of signs and symptoms, and a radical reorientation of the understanding of biological and social bodies, most clearly laid out by the French scientist Claude Bernard in his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865).48 In this way, the works of Flaubert, Balzac and George Eliot can be incorporated into a putative ‘medical realism’. Claude Bernard’s text was also the explicit basis for Émile Zola’s manifesto ‘The Experimental Novel’, which aligned Naturalism completely with medical etiology and epidemiology. Some of the formulations from Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic are productive spaces for thinking about how Victorian fiction and medicine overlapped, given a new epoch of experimental medicine which involved ‘the opening up of the concrete individual’ in new ways, and proposed ‘a new outline of the perceptible and statable: a new distribution of the discrete elements of corporeal space’.49 While these promise productive angles on Conan Doyle’s fiction (Rothfield’s study includes a whole chapter on the Sherlock Holmes stories as sites of crisis in this form of realism), I want to take a more limited, literal-minded route for the place of medicine in Victorian literary fiction, and how this might feed into Round the Red Lamp. Let me identify three strands of the representation of doctoring in Victorian literature that Conan Doyle inherited. The first is the entry of the medic into the conventional marriage plot of domestic realism. As Tabitha Sparks suggests, the ambiguous social position of the doctor – and particularly the general practitioner – makes for effective 48

Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth Century Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 49 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1994), xiv, xviii. xli

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dramatic action in the dominant form of the domestic realist novel. The eligibility of a young general practitioner, new in town, creates the affectionate comedy of Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Doctor Harrison’s Confession’ (1851), although the marriage plot darkens considerably with the unhappy marriages of general practitioners in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864) or George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872). Social status and respectability are also crucial to Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne (1858), the book that confirmed his reputation as the faithful chronicler of the new middle class. Dr Thorne’s many professional abilities aside from medicine and administering drugs include the managing of family secrets and reputations. But it is George Eliot’s portrait of the unhappy Dr Lydgate in Middlemarch that suggests to Sparks a growing incompatibility of the research ambitions of the experimental scientist with the social and domestic demands of marriage and the reproduction of a stable social order. This split widens by the late Victorian period, with texts full of cruel, secretive doctors of medicine conducting horrific, anti-social experiments on themselves, as in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886); on their wives, as in Arthur Machen’s gruesome ‘The Inmost Light’ (1894); or on the monstrously tortured beast-men of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Conan Doyle’s collection includes a number of doctors frustrated in their marriage hopes (‘The Doctors of Hoyland’, ‘The Physiologist’s Wife’), where doctoring is deemed incompatible with domesticity, in accord with this theme. It seems to coincide at points with that reductive cultural binary which places science and society at opposite poles (perhaps figured most overtly in Wilkie Collins’s melodrama, Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time (1882)). A second strand, however, uses the professional doctor not as a figure isolated from society but precisely as a new and significant form of social glue in the vast, alienating conglomeration of the Victorian city. It is strongest in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), where the earnest, honest but relatively lowly Allan Woodcourt comes into contact with everyone in the social hierarchy from the humble street sweeper Jo to the imperious Lady Dedlock. Woodcourt seems to embody the kind of mid-century reformist spirit that Dickens vocally supported. In Little Dorrit (1857) there is an explicit lengthy meditation on this social function of the physician: xlii

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Few ways of life were hidden from Physician, and he was oftener in its darkest places than even Bishop. There were brilliant ladies about London who perfectly doted on him . . . who would have been shocked to find themselves so close to him if they could have known on what sights those thoughtful eyes of his had rested within an hour or two, and near to whose beds, and under what roofs, his composed figure had stood . . . Many wonderful things did he see and hear, and much irreconcilable moral contradiction did he pass his life among . . . Where he was, something real was.50 This ability of the general practitioner to cut across all social levels shares the project of the realist novel itself, at least as it is conceived by theorists such as György Lukács, who suggests it is the form best suited to representing the social totality.51 With the doctor, the rise of the professional society created exactly the figure – alongside the detective, of course – able to move across the social whole with some meaningful purpose. This is one of the few figures who might just about hold together the diverse stories of Round the Red Lamp, although the fracturing and ambiguities that abound in the collection hint that realism has reached the limits of its coherence and is morphing into something else. There are echoes of the English version of Naturalism in the work of George Moore or George Gissing, and this also feeds into Conan Doyle’s story ‘The Curse of Eve’ in Round the Red Lamp. The story is precisely located in the improving streets of Hoxton in North London, but it also offers a careful typology of the hierarchy of general practitioners and consultants who become involved in a difficult childbirth. This was the story that Conan Doyle ultimately shifted from a pessimistic and deterministic Naturalist trajectory (the child died in the early version) towards a much lighter resolution, a confusing shift of mode. The third strand of literary doctoring to identify is the way in which medical discourse was insistently implicated in the Gothic mode in the nineteenth century. There is a powerful founding portrait of the immoral, asocial experimental doctor in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), an updated medicalized version of the Dr Faustus story or the Promethean 50

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. Steven Wall and Helen Small (London: Penguin, 1998), Book II, Chapter 25, 734–5. 51 Lukács, however, was critical of the later scientism or medicalization of realism in Zola and the Naturalists. See Rothfield’s discussion of Zola in chapter 5 of his Vital Signs. xliii

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myth. Victor Frankenstein feeds into the monstrous doctors that populated the ‘penny bloods’ of the 1820s and 1830s, which Anna Gasperini has noted teem with doctors in the 1840s, from Thomas Rymer’s Manuscripts from the Diary of a Doctor to the murderous basement surgery conducted by the demon barber of Fleet Street, Sweeney Todd. Gasperini suggests that this horror in relation to doctors persisted from the era of body snatching, supposedly brought to an end by the 1832 Anatomy Act. The new Act extended the use of ‘pauper’ bodies for medical dissection. Popular resentment drove the fear of doctors who might come to desecrate rather than protect the bodies of the poor.52 In these melodramatic serials the figure of the doctor is often split between two representatives of the profession: a malign medic offset by a benign one. In the 1860s, Sensation Fiction was also populated by corrupt mad-doctors, whose legal powers of committal over innocent wives and heiresses made them menacing instruments of carceral power (as in, most famously, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White). In the 1880s the closed, anxious and paranoid professional circles of medicine and law do their best to contain the horrors that emerge from their circle in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). And this vision of the monstrous doctor spilled over into the real world with the Jack the Ripper murders in the winter of 1888, in which the mutilations of the murdered women gave rise to the suspicion that the perpetrator might be a medical doctor. Another important element of this later Victorian Gothic vision of medicine was the anti-vivisection movement, which routinely portrayed laboratory scientists and experimental medics as inhuman and unfeeling, their training dismantling basic forms of sympathy with animals and their fellow human beings.53 In 1894, this was an abiding theme in Arthur Machen’s scandalous body horrors written for the Keynotes series, The Great God Pan and ‘The Inmost Light’. By the late Victorian Gothic revival, the morcellating gaze of the indifferent doctor is never far from sharpening into forms of murderous violence. Popular Gothic fiction abounds with medical monsters (Guy Boothby’s Dr Nikola or H. G. Wells’s Dr Moreau). Darryl Jones suggests that the Gothic mode allowed Conan Doyle ‘to explore, from 52

See Anna Gasperini, Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy: The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2019). 53 See Richard D. French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). xliv

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the very beginning of his career, those possibilities of metaphysics and extreme states of being, disallowed within the realist economy of orthodox literary fiction’.54 Round the Red Lamp suggests that he pushes at the limits of taste in the ‘darker side’ of realism, but those limits at times force Conan Doyle closer to the anti-realism of the Gothic. His haughtily indifferent consultant Horace Selby or the dashing yet arrogant Douglas Stone occupy a spectrum that becomes overtly Gothic with the dangerously secretive Oxford student Edward Bellingham in ‘Lot No. 249’. Bellingham’s pursuit of the occult or esoteric knowledge of Ancient Egypt has a direct lineage from those other university students tempted down the wrong path of hermetic secrets, Dr Faustus and Victor Frankenstein. From Conan Doyle’s earliest attempts at fiction, medical students are menaced by forces that exceed what he called the ‘medical materialism’ that he felt was the core philosophical underpinning of his Edinburgh training.55 From ‘John Barrington Cowles’ (1884) to The Parasite (which came out after Round the Red Lamp in 1894), the power of medicine and science risk being outdone by supernatural forces. Round the Red Lamp mixes these three medical legacies together in a way that almost guarantees confusing and abrupt shifts of tone and register, a book to bewilder the idle reader in its eclectic modes. In another way, we can say the collection was falling between the poles of the contemporaneous debate set up as a battle between realism and romance. THE REALISM VERSUS ROMANCE DEBATE It is a common literary historical narrative to note that the long hegemony of the three-volume realist novel comes crashing to an end in 1894 with the eclipse of the model of reading through lending libraries and the rise of the shorter, mass-market, single volume sold directly to the public at much cheaper prices.56 What thrives in this new mass 54

Darryl Jones, ‘Introduction’, Gothic Tales, x. Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures, 83. 56 For this account of literary context, see Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Fontana, 1991), Peter McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Philip Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 55

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market is the revival of the romance form, associated with a clutch of ‘best-sellers’ (a new term for a new era): Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Jekyll and Hyde (1886), H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1886), or Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886). Sensational literary careers were fostered by the new mass weekly or monthly magazines that sold in their hundreds of thousands and made their publishers the new cultural arbiters: George Newnes at Tit-Bits (1881) and the Strand (1891); W. T. Stead at the Review of Reviews (1890); Arthur Pearson at Pearson’s Magazine (1896); or Alfred Harmsworth at the Daily Mail (1896) and the host other newspapers and magazines in his stable. Arthur Conan Doyle’s career was built from a brilliant exploitation (by him and by his agent from 1890, A. P. Watt) of these new mass-market possibilities. The romance revival was not just a result of a new economic imperative. There was also a strong ideological justification for the revival of the romance form, influentially argued by the literary critic and arbiter Andrew Lang. In his essay ‘Realism and Romance’ (1886), Lang argues that the realist novel had become decadent, interior, overanalytic and neurotic. His target was evidently the work of Henry James, but he also names Dostoevsky, and Émile Zola was surely in his sights when he argues that ‘the tendency of Realism in fiction is often to find the Unpleasant Real much more abundant than the Pleasant Real’.57 In contrast, the revived romance form of Stevenson and Haggard is full of thrusting, healthy, virile male heroes who are extensive not intensive, and who appeal to the ‘ancestral barbarism of our natures’ with bloodthirsty adventures.58 Haggard pitched in to this debate with ‘About Fiction’, in which he denounced the ‘naturalistic school’ as both suspiciously French and effeminate: ‘About their work is an atmosphere like that of the boudoir of a luxurious woman, faint and delicate.’59 In Lang, particularly, there is a distinctly anthropological and racial defence of the romance, which embeds it in a robust and

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Andrew Lang, ‘Realism and Romance’ (1886), extracted in The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–1900, ed. S. Ledger and R. Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 99–104, at 101. 58 Lang, ‘Realism and Romance’, 102. 59 H. Rider Haggard, ‘About Fiction’, Contemporary Review, February 1887, 172–80, at 175. xlvi

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energetic lineage from northern climes, the kind of language Ruskin used to defend the Gothic.60 Conan Doyle has been typically located on the side of the romance revival, because of his mastery of genre, popular narrative and the economics of the new forms of publishing. There is also an overt investment in a racial identification of romance forms with the north (Conan Doyle’s Celtic roots, his Arctic adventures, his sojourns in Norway or the Alps). His fiction self-consciously explores models of reinvigorated imperial masculinity. Yet the dalliance of Round the Red Lamp with medical realism and Naturalism complicates this picture. In a private letter to James Payn in March 1894, Conan Doyle described Round the Red Lamp as ‘realistic’ in the mode of Gustave Flaubert or Leo Tolstoy. He distinguished these writers from those he considered beyond the pale: Guy de Maupassant or Émile Zola (he was willing to see the stage version of Thérèse Raquin, but not accompanied by his wife).61 Tolstoy was a risqué association nevertheless: W. T. Stead’s insistence on publishing the English translation of Tolstoy’s The Kreuzer Sonata in the first year of the Review of Reviews had prompted George Newnes to abandon this joint venture and set up the uncontroversial middlebrow Strand in 1891 instead. Conan Doyle’s public letters in defence of George Moore in 1894 suggest a greater boldness in expressing his views. Moore had denounced the circulating libraries in 1885 in a polemic called Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals. The metaphor of coddling literature in the nursery again emphasizes the link between Naturalism and medicine: literature needs to align with the honesty and unvarnished truth of the doctor, not with the suffocating ministrations of the nursery nurse. In retaliation, W. H. Smith’s routinely refused to carry many of Moore’s novels. It happened to Esther Waters in April 1894, with Smith’s censor (the splendidly named William Faux) objecting to the depiction of Esther’s experience of a lying-in hospital where she gives birth to an illegitimate child. It was 60

See Robert Fraser, Victorian Quest Romance: Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling and Conan Doyle (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998). Ruskin’s essay ‘On the Nature of the Gothic’ appeared in The Stones of Venice (1851–53). For reflections on the northernness of the Gothic, see Roger Luckhurst, ‘North’, in Gothic: An Illustrated History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2021), 143–50. 61 Letter to James Payn, 22 March 1894, in Lellenberg, Arthur Conan Doyle, 327. xlvii

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more likely an objection to Moore’s denunciation of Christian morals in the treatment of such women, targeting precisely the respectable middle class that W. H. Smith’s library serviced. Conan Doyle wrote to the Daily Chronicle in May 1894 to call Esther Waters ‘a great and very serious book’, ‘good both in literature and ethics – and if it is to be placed outside the pale of legitimate fiction, it is difficult to say how any true and serious work is to be done within it’.62 This defence of Moore was not especially exceptional. Most reviewers in papers across the political spectrum had praised the novel, and W. H. Smith’s action seemed heavy-handed. The culture was to change profoundly with the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde the following year, however. The punishment meted out to Wilde had a freezing effect on the literary avant-garde. Yet Conan Doyle’s defence of Moore does give us a glimpse into his ambitions to be considered a serious as well as a popular novelist, and the distress precipitated by the eclipse of his ‘serious’ historical novels by the Sherlock Holmes serials. Peter McDonald reads Conan Doyle as emblematic of the split between ‘purists’ and ‘profiteers’, the emergent order of high and low fiction in the new publishing ecology at the end of the century. The clash of tones and styles in Round the Red Lamp conveys this fracture most eloquently in its disjointedness: it is what makes it a key text in his early phase as a professional author.

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Conan Doyle, ‘“Esther Waters” and the Libraries’, 1 May 1894, in The Unknown Conan Doyle: Letters to the Press, ed. John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green (London: Secker, 1986), 43. Conan Doyle wrote again on 3 May 1894, maintaining his defence. xlviii

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Round the Red Lamp Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life

By

a. conan doyle author of ‘micah clarke’, ‘the white company’, ‘the adventures of sherlock holmes’, etc.

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The Preface [Being an extract from a long and animated correspondence with a friend in America.] ‘i quite recognise the force of your objection that an invalid, or a woman in weak health, would get no good from stories which attempt to treat some features of medical life with a certain amount of realism. If you deal with this life at all, however, and if you are anxious to make your doctors something more than marionettes, it is quite essential that you should paint the darker side, since it is that which is principally presented to the Surgeon or Physician. He sees many beautiful things, it is true; fortitude and heroism, self-sacrifice and love, but they are all called forth (as our nobler qualities are always called forth) by bitter sorrow and trial. One cannot write of medical life and be merry over it. ‘Then why write of it, you may ask? If a subject is painful why treat it at all? I answer that it is the province of fiction to treat painful things as well as cheerful ones. The story which wiles away a weary hour fulfils an obviously good purpose, but not more so, I hold, than that which helps to emphasise the graver side of life. A tale which may startle the reader out of his usual grooves of thought, and shocks him into seriousness, plays the part of the alterative and tonic in medicine, bitter to the taste, but bracing in the result. There are a few stories in this little collection which might have such an effect, and I have so far shared in your feeling that I have reserved them from serial publication. In book form the reader can see that they are medical stories, and can, if she or he be so minded, avoid them.—Yours very truly, ‘A . CONAN DOYLE.

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‘P. S.—You will see that nearly half of the contents have not appeared before.’

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Contents BEHIND THE TIMES, ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 7 HIS FIRST OPERATION, ���������������������������������������������������������������������������11 A STRAGGLER OF ’15, �������������������������������������������������������������������������������17 THE THIRD GENERATION, �������������������������������������������������������������������30 A FALSE START, ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������39 THE CURSE OF EVE, ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������51 SWEETHEARTS, �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������61 A PHYSIOLOGIST’S WIFE, �����������������������������������������������������������������������67 THE CASE OF LADY SANNOX, �������������������������������������������������������������85 A QUESTION OF DIPLOMACY, ������������������������������������������������������������94 A MEDICAL DOCUMENT, .������������������������������������������������������������������� 107 LOT NO. 249, ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 117 THE LOS AMIGOS FIASCO, ����������������������������������������������������������������� 147 THE DOCTORS OF HOYLAND, ��������������������������������������������������������� 154 THE SURGEON TALKS, ������������������������������������������������������������������������� 164

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Behind the Times my first interview with Dr James Winter was under dramatic circumstances. It occurred at two in the morning in the bedroom of an old country house. I kicked him twice on the white waistcoat and knocked off his gold spectacles, while he, with the aid of a female accomplice, stifled my angry cries in a flannel petticoat and thrust me into a warm bath. I am told that one of my parents, who happened to be present, remarked in a whisper that there was nothing the matter with my lungs. I cannot recall how Dr Winter looked at the time, for I had other things to think of, but his description of my own appearance is far from flattering. A fluffy head, a body like a trussed goose, very bandy legs, and feet with the soles turned inwards—those are the main items which he can remember. From this time onwards the epochs of my life were the periodical assaults which Dr Winter made upon me. He vaccinated me, he cut me for an abscess, he blistered me for mumps. It was a world of peace, and he the one dark cloud that threatened. But at last there came a time of real illness—a time when I lay for months together inside my wicker-work basket bed, and then it was that I learned that that hard face could relax, that those country-made creaking boots could steal very gently to a bedside, and that that rough voice could thin into a whisper when it spoke to a sick child. And now the child is himself a medical man, and yet Dr Winter is the same as ever. I can see no change since first I can remember him, save that perhaps the brindled hair is a trifle whiter, and the huge shoulders a little more bowed. He is a very tall man, though he loses a couple of inches from his stoop. That big back of his has curved itself over sick beds until it has set in that shape. His face is of a walnut brown, and tells of long winter drives over bleak country roads with the wind and the rain in his teeth. It looks smooth at a little distance, but as you approach him you see that it is shot with innumerable fine wrinkles, like a last year’s apple. They are hardly to be seen when he is in repose, but when he laughs his face breaks like a starred glass, and you realise then that, though he looks old, he must be older than he looks. How old that is I could never discover. I have often tried to find out, and have struck his stream as high up as George the Fourth and even of the Regency, but without ever getting quite to the source. His mind must

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have been open to impressions very early, but it must also have closed early, for the politics of the day have little interest for him, while he is fiercely excited about questions which are entirely prehistoric. He shakes his head when he speaks of the first Reform Bill and expresses grave doubts as to its wisdom, and I have heard him, when he was warmed by a glass of wine, say bitter things about Robert Peel and his abandoning of the Corn Laws. The death of that statesman brought the history of England to a definite close, and Dr Winter refers to everything which had happened since then as to an insignificant anti-climax. But it was only when I had myself become a medical man that I was able to appreciate how entirely he is a survival of a past generation. He had learned his medicine under that obsolete and forgotten system by which a youth was apprenticed to a surgeon, in the days when the study of anatomy was often approached through a violated grave. His views upon his own profession are even more reactionary than his politics. Fifty years have brought him little and deprived him of less. Vaccination was well within the teaching of his youth, though I think he has a secret preference for inoculation. Bleeding he would practise freely but for public opinion. Chloroform he regards as a dangerous innovation, and he always clicks with his tongue when it is mentioned. He has even been known to say vain things about Laennec, and to refer to the stethoscope as ‘a newfangled French toy.’ He carries one in his hat out of deference to the expectations of his patients; but he is very hard of hearing, so that it makes little difference whether he uses it or not. He always reads, as a duty, his weekly medical paper, so that he has a general idea as to the advance of modern science. He always persists in looking upon it, however, as a huge and rather ludicrous experiment. The germ theory of disease set him chuckling for a long time, and his favourite joke in the sick-room was to say, ‘Shut the door, or the germs will be getting in.’ As to the Darwinian theory, it struck him as being the crowning joke of the century. ‘The children in the nursery and the ancestors in the stable,’ he would cry, and laugh the tears out of his eyes. He is so very much behind the day that occasionally, as things move round in their usual circle, he finds himself, to his bewilderment, in the front of the fashion. Dietetic treatment, for example, had been much in vogue in his youth, and he has more practical knowledge of it than any one whom I have met. Massage, too, was familiar to him when it was new to our generation. He had been trained also at a time when instruments were in a 8

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rudimentary state and when men learned to trust more to their own fingers. He has a model surgical hand, muscular in the palm, tapering in the fingers, ‘with an eye at the end of each.’ I shall not easily forget how Dr Patterson and I cut Sir John Sirwell, the County Member, and were unable to find the stone. It was a horrible moment. Both our careers were at stake. And then it was that Dr Winter, whom we had asked out of courtesy to be present, introduced into the wound a finger which seemed to our excited senses to be about nine inches long, and hooked out the stone at the end of it. ‘It’s always well to bring one in your waistcoat pocket,’ said he with a chuckle, ‘but I suppose you youngsters are above all that.’ We made him President of our Branch of the British Medical Association, but he resigned after the first meeting. ‘The young men are too much for me,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand what they are talking about.’ Yet his patients do very well. He has the healing touch—that magnetic thing which defies explanation or analysis, but which is a very evident fact none the less. His mere presence leaves the patient with more hopefulness and vitality. The sight of disease affects him as dust does a careful housewife. It makes him angry and impatient. ‘Tut, tut, this will never do!’ he cries, as he takes over a new case. He would shoo death out of the room as though he were an intrusive hen. But when the intruder refuses to be dislodged, when the blood moves more slowly and the eyes grow dimmer, then it is that Dr Winter is of more avail than all the drugs in his surgery. Dying folk cling to his hand as if the presence of his bulk and vigour gives them more courage to face the change; and that kindly, wind-beaten face has been the last earthly impression which many a sufferer has carried into the unknown. When Dr Patterson and I, both of us young energetic and up-to-date, settled in the district, we were most cordially received by the old doctor, who would have been only too happy to be relieved of some of his patients. The patients themselves, however, followed their own inclinations, which is a reprehensible way that patients have, so that we remained neglected with our modern instruments and our latest alkaloids, while he was serving out senna and calomel to all the countryside. We both of us loved the old fellow, but at the same time, in the privacy of our own intimate conversations, we could not help commenting upon this deplorable lack of judgment. ‘It is all very well for the poorer people,’ said Patterson, ‘but after all the educated classes have a right to expect that their medical man

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will know the difference between a mitral murmur and a bronchitic rale. It’s the judicial frame of mind, not the sympathetic, which is the essential one.’ I thoroughly agreed with Patterson in what he said. It happened, however, that very shortly afterwards the epidemic of influenza broke out, and we were all worked to death. One morning I met Patterson on my round, and found him looking rather pale and fagged out. He made the same remark about me. I was in fact feeling far from well, and I lay upon the sofa all the afternoon with a splitting headache and pains in every joint. As evening closed in I could no longer disguise the fact that the scourge was upon me, and I felt that I should have medical advice without delay. It was of Patterson naturally that I thought, but somehow the idea of him had suddenly become repugnant to me. I thought of his cold, critical attitude, of his endless questions, of his tests and his tappings. I wanted something more soothing—something more genial. ‘Mrs Hudson,’ said I to my housekeeper, ‘would you kindly run along to old Dr Winter and tell him that I should be obliged to him if he would step round.’ She was back with an answer presently. ‘Dr Winter will come round in an hour or so, sir, but he has just been called in to attend Dr Patterson.’

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His First Operation it was the first day of the winter session, and the third year’s man was walking with the first year’s man. Twelve o’clock was just booming out from the Tron Church. ‘Let me see,’ said the third year’s man, ‘you have never seen an operation?’ ‘Never.’ ‘Then this way, please. This is Rutherford’s historic bar. A glass of sherry, please, for this gentleman. You are rather sensitive, are you not?’ ‘My nerves are not very strong, I am afraid.’ ‘Hum! Another glass of sherry for this gentleman. We are going to an operation now, you know.’ The novice squared his shoulders and made a gallant attempt to look unconcerned. ‘Nothing very bad—eh?’ ‘Well, yes—pretty bad.’ ‘An—an amputation?’ ‘No, it’s a bigger affair than that.’ ‘I think—I think they must be expecting me at home.’ ‘There’s no sense in funking. If you don’t go to-day, you must to-morrow. Better get it over at once. Feel pretty fit?’ ‘Oh, yes, all right!’ The smile was not a success. ‘One more glass of sherry, then. Now come on or we shall be late. I want you to be well in front.’ ‘Surely that is not necessary.’ ‘Oh, it is far better! What a drove of students! There are plenty of new men among them. You can tell them easily enough, can’t you? If they were going down to be operated upon themselves they could not look whiter.’ ‘I don’t think I should look as white.’ ‘Well, I was just the same myself. But the feeling soon wears off. You see a fellow with a face like plaster, and before the week is out he is eating his lunch in the dissecting rooms. I’ll tell you all about the case when we get to the theatre.’ The students were pouring down the sloping street which led to the infirmary—each with his little sheaf of note-books in his hand. There were

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pale, frightened lads, fresh from the High Schools, and callous old chronics, whose generation had passed on and left them. They swept in an unbroken, tumultuous stream from the University gate to the hospital. The figures and gait of the men were young, but there was little youth in most of their faces. Some looked as if they ate too little—a few as if they drank too much. Tall and short, tweed coated and black, round-shouldered, bespectacled and slim, they crowded with clatter of feet and rattle of sticks through the hospital gate. Now and again they thickened into two lines as the carriage of a surgeon of the staff rolled over the cobblestones between. ‘There’s going to be a crowd at Archer’s,’ whispered the senior man with suppressed excitement. ‘It is grand to see him at work. I’ve seen him jab all round the aorta until it made me jumpy to watch him. This way, and mind the whitewash.’ They passed under an archway and down a long, stone-flagged corridor with drab-coloured doors on either side, each marked with a number. Some of them were ajar, and the novice glanced into them with tingling nerves. He was reassured to catch a glimpse of cheery fires, lines of whitecounterpaned beds and a profusion of coloured texts upon the wall. The corridor opened upon a small hall with a fringe of poorly-clad people seated all round upon benches. A young man with a pair of scissors stuck, like a flower, in his buttonhole, and a note-book in his hand, was passing from one to the other, whispering and writing. ‘Anything good?’ asked the third year’s man. ‘You should have been here yesterday,’ said the out-patient clerk, glancing up. ‘We had a regular field day. A popliteal aneurism, a Colles’ fracture, a spina bifida, a tropical abscess, and an elephantiasis. How’s that for a single haul?’ ‘I’m sorry I missed it. But they’ll come again, I suppose. What’s up with the old gentleman?’ A broken workman was sitting in the shadow, rocking himself slowly to and fro and groaning. A woman beside him was trying to console him, patting his shoulder with a hand which was spotted over with curious little white blisters. ‘It’s a fine carbuncle,’ said the clerk, with the air of a connoisseur who describes his orchids to one who can appreciate them. ‘It’s on his back, and the passage is draughty, so we must not look at it, must we, daddy? Pemphigus,’ he added carelessly, pointing to the woman’s disfigured hands. ‘Would you care to stop and take out a metacarpal?’ 12

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‘No thank you. We are due at Archer’s. Come on;’ and they rejoined the throng which was hurrying to the theatre of the famous surgeon. The tiers of horse-shoe benches, rising from the floor to the ceiling, were already packed, and the novice as he entered saw vague, curving lines of faces in front of him, and heard the deep buzz of a hundred voices and sounds of laughter from somewhere up above him. His companion spied an opening on the second bench, and they both squeezed into it. ‘This is grand,’ the senior man whispered; ‘you’ll have a rare view of it all.’ Only a single row of heads intervened between them and the operating table. It was of unpainted deal, plain, strong and scrupulously clean. A sheet of brown waterproofing covered half of it, and beneath stood a large tin tray full of sawdust. On the further side, in front of the window, there was a board which was strewed with glittering instruments, forceps, tenacula, saws, canulas and trocars. A line of knives, with long, thin, delicate blades, lay at one side. Two young men lounged in front of this; one threading needles, the other doing something to a brass coffeepot-like thing which hissed out puffs of steam. ‘That’s Peterson,’ whispered the senior. ‘The big, bald man in the front row. He’s the skin-grafting man, you know. And that’s Anthony Browne, who took a larynx out successfully last winter. And there’s Murphy the pathologist, and Stoddart the eye man. You’ll come to know them all soon.’ ‘Who are the two men at the table?’ ‘Nobody—dressers. One has charge of the instruments and the other of the puffing Billy. It’s Lister’s antiseptic spray, you know, and Archer’s one of the carbolic acid men. Hayes is the leader of the cleanliness-andcold-water school, and they all hate each other like poison.’ A flutter of interest passed through the closely-packed benches as a woman in petticoat and bodice was led in by two nurses. A red woollen shawl was draped over her head and round her neck. The face which looked out from it was that of a woman in the prime of her years, but drawn with suffering and of a peculiar bees-wax tint. Her head drooped as she walked, and one of the nurses, with her arm round her waist, was whispering consolation in her ear. She gave a quick side glance at the instrument table as she passed, but the nurses turned her away from it. ‘What ails her?’ asked the novice.

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‘Cancer of the parotid. It’s the devil of a case, extends right away back behind the carotids. There’s hardly a man but Archer would dare to follow it. Ah, here he is himself!’ As he spoke, a small, brisk, iron-grey man came striding into the room, rubbing his hands together as he walked. He had a cleanshaven face of the Naval officer type, with large, bright eyes, and a firm, straight mouth. Behind him came his big house surgeon with his gleaming pince-nez and a trail of dressers, who grouped themselves into the corners of the room. ‘Gentlemen,’ cried the surgeon in a voice as hard and brisk as his manner. ‘We have here an interesting case of tumour of the parotid, originally cartilaginous but now assuming malignant characteristics, and therefore requiring excision. On to the table, nurse! Thank you! Chloroform, clerk! Thank you! You can take the shawl off, nurse.’ The woman lay back upon the waterproofed pillow and her murderous tumour lay revealed. In itself it was a pretty thing, ivory white with a mesh of blue veins, and curving gently from jaw to chest. But the lean, yellow face, and the stringy throat were in horrible contrast with the plumpness and sleekness of this monstrous growth. The surgeon placed a hand on each side of it and pressed it slowly backwards and forwards. ‘Adherent at one place, gentlemen,’ he cried. ‘The growth involves the carotids and jugulars, and passes behind the ramus of the jaw, whither we must be prepared to follow it. It is impossible to say how deep our dissection may carry us. Carbolic tray, thank you! Dressings of carbolic gauze, if you please! Push the chloroform, Mr Johnson. Have the small saw ready in case it is necessary to remove the jaw.’ The patient was moaning gently under the towel which had been placed over her face. She tried to raise her arms and to draw up her knees but two dressers restrained her. The heavy air was full of the penetrating smells of carbolic acid and of chloroform. A muffled cry came from under the towel and then a snatch of a song, sung in a high, quavering, monotonous voice.    ‘He says, says he,    If you fly with me      You’ll be mistress of the ice-cream van;      You’ll be mistress of the—’ 14

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It mumbled off into a drone and stopped. The surgeon came across, still rubbing his hands, and spoke to an elderly man in front of the novice. ‘Narrow squeak for the Government,’ he said. ‘Oh, ten is enough.’ ‘They won’t have ten long. They’d do better to resign before they are driven to it.’ ‘Oh, I should fight it out.’ ‘What’s the use. They can’t get past the committee, even if they got a vote in the House. I was talking to—’ ‘Patient’s ready, sir,’ said the dresser. ‘Talking to McDonald—but I’ll tell you about it presently.’ He walked back to the patient, who was breathing in long, heavy gasps. ‘I propose,’ said he, passing his hand over the tumour in an almost caressing fashion, ‘to make a free incision over the posterior border and to take another forward at right angles to the lower end of it. Might I trouble you for a medium knife, Mr. Johnson.’ The novice, with eyes which were dilating with horror, saw the surgeon pick up the long, gleaming knife, dip it into a tin basin and balance it in his fingers as an artist might his brush. Then he saw him pinch up the skin above the tumour with his left hand. At the sight, his nerves, which had already been tried once or twice that day, gave way utterly. His head swam round and he felt that in another instant he might faint. He dared not look at the patient. He dug his thumbs into his ears lest some scream should come to haunt him, and he fixed his eyes rigidly upon the wooden ledge in front of him. One glance, one cry, would, he knew, break down the shred of self-possession which he still retained. He tried to think of cricket, of green fields and rippling water, of his sisters at home—of anything rather than of what was going on so near him. And yet, somehow, even with his ears stopped up, sounds seemed to penetrate to him and to carry their own tale. He heard, or thought that he heard, the long hissing of the carbolic engine. Then he was conscious of some movement among the dressers. Were there groans too breaking in upon him, and some other sound, some fluid sound, which was more dreadfully suggestive still? His mind would keep building up every step of the operation, and fancy made it more ghastly than fact could have been. His nerves tingled and quivered. Minute by minute the giddiness grew more marked, the numb, sickly feeling at his heart more distressing. And then suddenly, with a groan, his head pitching forward and his brow

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When he came to himself he was lying in the empty theatre with his collar and shirt undone. The third year’s man was dabbing a wet sponge over his face, and a couple of grinning dressers were looking on. ‘All right,’ cried the novice, sitting up and rubbing his eyes; ‘I’m sorry to have made an ass of myself.’ ‘Well, so I should think,’ said his companion. ‘What on earth did you faint about?’ ‘I couldn’t help it. It was that operation.’ ‘What operation?’ ‘Why, that cancer.’ There was a pause, and then the three students burst out laughing. ‘Why, you juggins,’ cried the senior man, ‘there never was an operation at all! They found the patient didn’t stand the chloroform well, and so the whole thing was off. Archer has been giving us one of his racy lectures, and you fainted just in the middle of his favourite story.’

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A Straggler of ’15 it was a dull October morning, and heavy, rolling fog-wreaths lay low over the wet, grey roofs of the Woolwich houses. Down in the long, brick-lined streets all was sodden and greasy and cheerless. From the high buildings of the Arsenal came the whirr of many wheels, the thudding of weights, and the buzz and babel of human toil. Beyond, the dwellings of the workingmen, smoke-stained and unlovely, radiated away in a lessening perspective of narrowing road and dwindling wall. There were few folk in the streets, for the toilers had all been absorbed since break of day by the huge, smoke-spouting monster, which sucked in the manhood of the town, to belch it forth, weary and work-stained, every night. Stout women, with thick, red arms and dirty aprons, stood upon the whitened doorsteps, leaning upon their brooms, and shrieking their morning greetings across the road. One had gathered a small knot of cronies around her, and was talking energetically, with little shrill titters from her audience to punctuate her remarks. ‘Old enough to know better!’ she cried, in answer to an exclamation from one of the listeners. ‘Why, ’ow old is he at all? Blessed if I could ever make out.’ ‘Well, it ain’t so hard to reckon,’ said a sharp-featured, pale-faced woman, with watery-blue eyes. ‘He’s been at the battle o’ Waterloo, and has the pension and medal to prove it.’ ‘That were a ter’ble long time agone,’ remarked a third. ‘It were afore I were born.’ ‘It were fifteen year after the beginnin’ of the century,’ cried a younger woman, who had stood leaning against the wall, with a smile of superior knowledge upon her face. ‘My Bill was a-saying so last Sabbath, when I spoke to him o’ old Daddy Brewster, here.’ ‘And suppose he spoke truth, Missus Simpson, ’ow long agone do that make it?’ ‘It’s eighty-one now,’ said the original speaker, checking off the years upon her coarse, red fingers, ‘and that were fifteen. Ten, and ten, and ten, and ten, and ten—why, it’s only sixty and six year, so he ain’t so old after all.’ ‘But he weren’t a new-born babe at the battle, silly!’ cried the young woman, with a chuckle. ‘S’pose he were only twenty, then he couldn’t be less than six-and-eighty now, at the lowest.’

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‘Ay, he’s that—every day of it,’ cried several. ‘I’ve had ’bout enough of it,’ remarked the large woman gloomily. ‘Unless his young niece, or grand-niece, or whatever she is, come to-day, I’m off; and he can find some one else to do his work. Your own ’ome first, says I.’ ‘Ain’t he quiet, then, Missus Simpson?’ asked the youngest of the group. ‘Listen to him now,’ she answered, with her hand half raised, and her head turned slantwise towards the open door. From the upper floor there came a shuffling, sliding sound, with a sharp tapping of a stick. ‘There he go back and forrard doing what he call his sentry-go. ’Arf the night through he’s at that game, the silly old juggins. At six o’clock this very mornin’ there he was beatin’ with a stick at my door. “Turn out guard,” he cried, and a lot more jargon that I could make nothing of. Then what with his coughin’ and ’awkin’ and spittin’, there ain’t no gettin’ a wink o’ sleep. Hark to him now!’ ‘Missus Simpson! Missus Simpson!’ cried a cracked and querulous voice from above. ‘That’s him!’ she cried, nodding her head with an air of triumph. ‘He do go on somethin’ scandalous. Yes, Mister Brewster, sir.’ ‘I want my morning ration, Missus Simpson.’ ‘It’s just ready, Mister Brewster, sir.’ ‘Blessed if he ain’t like a baby cryin’ for its pap,’ said the young woman. ‘I feel as if I could shake his old bones up sometimes,’ cried Mrs Simpson viciously. ‘But who’s for a ’arf of fourpenny?’ The whole company were about to shuffle off to the public-house, when a young girl stepped across the road and touched the housekeeper timidly upon the arm. ‘I think that is No. 56 Arsenal View,’ she said. ‘Can you tell me if Mr Brewster lives here?’ The housekeeper looked critically at the newcomer. She was a girl of about twenty, broad-faced and comely, with a turned-up nose and large, honest, grey eyes. Her print dress, her straw hat with its bunch of glaring poppies, and the bundle she carried had all a smack of the country. ‘You’re Norah Brewster, I s’pose,’ said Mrs Simpson, eyeing her up and down with no friendly gaze. ‘Yes; I’ve come to look after my grand-uncle Gregory.’ ‘And a good job too,’ cried the housekeeper, with a toss of her head. ‘It’s about time that some of his own folk took a turn at it, for I’ve had 18

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enough of it. There you are, young woman! in you go, and make yourself at home. There’s tea in the caddy, and bacon on the dresser, and the old man will be about you if you don’t fetch him his breakfast. I’ll send for my things in the evenin’’.’ With a nod she strolled off with her attendant gossips in the direction of the public-house. Thus left to her own devices, the country girl walked into the front room and took off her hat and jacket. It was a low-roofed apartment with a sputtering fire, upon which a small brass kettle was singing cheerily. A stained cloth lay over half the table, with an empty brown teapot, a loaf of bread, and some coarse crockery. Norah Brewster looked rapidly about her, and in an instant took over her new duties. Ere five minutes had passed the tea was made, two slices of bacon were frizzling on the pan, the table was rearranged, the antimacassars straightened over the sombre brown furniture, and the whole room had taken a new air of comfort and neatness. This done, she looked round curiously at the prints upon the walls. Over the fireplace, in a small, square case, a brown medal caught her eye, hanging from a strip of purple ribbon. Beneath was a slip of newspaper cutting. She stood on her tiptoes, with her fingers on the edge of the mantelpiece, and craned her neck up to see it, glancing down from time to time at the bacon which simmered and hissed beneath her. The cutting was yellow with age, and ran in this way:— ‘On Tuesday an interesting ceremony was performed at the barracks of the third regiment of guards, when, in the presence of the Prince Regent, Lord Hill, Lord Saltoun, and an assemblage which comprised beauty as well as valour, a special medal was presented to Corporal Gregory Brewster, of Captain Haldane’s flank company, in recognition of his gallantry in the recent great battle in the Lowlands. It appears that on the ever-memorable 18th of June, four companies of the third guards and of the Coldstreams, under the command of Colonels Maitland and Byng, held the important farmhouse of Hougoumont at the right of the British position. At a critical point of the action these troops found themselves short of powder. Seeing that Generals Foy and Jerome Buonaparte were again massing their infantry for an attack on the position, Colonel Byng dispatched Corporal Brewster to the rear to hasten up the reserve ammunition. Brewster came upon two powder tumbrils of the Nassau division, and succeeded, after menacing the drivers with his musket, in inducing them to convey their

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powder to Hougoumont. In his absence, however, the hedges surrounding the position had been set on fire by a howitzer battery of the French, and the passage of the carts full of powder became a most hazardous matter. The first tumbril exploded, blowing the driver to fragments. Daunted by the fate of his comrade, the second driver turned his horses, but Corporal Brewster, springing upon his seat, hurled the man down, and urging the powder cart through the flames, succeeded in forcing his way to his companions. To this gallant deed may be directly attributed the success of the British arms, for without powder it would have been impossible to have held Hougoumont, and the Duke of Wellington had repeatedly declared that had Hougoumont fallen, as well as La Haye Sainte, he would have found it impossible to have held his ground. Long may the heroic Brewster live to treasure the medal which he has so bravely won, and to look back with pride to the day when in the presence of his comrades he received this tribute to his valour from the august hands of the first gentleman of the realm.’ The reading of this old cutting increased in the girl’s mind the veneration which she had always had for her warrior kinsman. From her infancy he had been her hero, and she remembered how her father used to speak of his courage and his strength, how he could strike down a bullock with a blow of his fist, and carry a fat sheep under either arm. True that she had never seen him, but a rude painting at home, which depicted a squarefaced, clean-shaven, stalwart man with a great bearskin cap, rose ever before her memory when she thought of him. She was still gazing at the brown medal and wondering what the ‘dulce et decorum est’ might mean, which was inscribed upon the edge, when there came a sudden tapping and shuffling upon the stair, and there at the door was standing the very man who had been so often in her thoughts. But could this indeed be he? Where was the martial air, the flashing eye, the warrior face which she had pictured. There, framed in the doorway, was a huge, twisted old man, gaunt and puckered, with twitching hands, and shuffling, purposeless feet. A cloud of fluffy white hair, a red-veined nose, two thick tufts of eyebrow and a pair of dimly-questioning, wateryblue eyes—these were what met her gaze. He leaned forward upon a stick, while his shoulders rose and fell with his crackling, rasping breathing. ‘I want my morning rations,’ he crooned, as he stumped forward to his chair. ‘The cold nips me without ’em. See to my fingers!’ 20

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He held out his distorted hands, all blue at the tips, wrinkled and gnarled, with huge, projecting knuckles. ‘It’s nigh ready,’ answered the girl, gazing at him with wonder in her eyes. ‘Don’t you know who I am, grand-uncle? I am Norah Brewster from Witham.’ ‘Rum is warm,’ mumbled the old man, rocking to and fro in his chair, ‘and schnapps is warm and there’s ’eat in soup, but it’s a dish o’ tea for me. What did you say your name was?’ ‘Norah Brewster.’ ‘You can speak out, lass. Seems to me folk’s voices isn’t as loud as they used.’ ‘I’m Norah Brewster, uncle. I’m your grand-niece come down from Essex way to live with you.’ ‘You’ll be brother Jarge’s girl! Lor’, to think o’ little Jarge having a girl!’ He chuckled hoarsely to himself, and the long, stringy sinews of his throat jerked and quivered. ‘I am the daughter of your brother George’s son,’ said she as she turned the bacon. ‘Lor’, but little Jarge was a rare un,’ he continued. ‘Eh, by Jimini, there was no chousing Jarge. He’s got a bull pup o’ mine that I gave him when I took the bounty. You’ve heard him speak of it, likely?’ ‘Why, grandpa George has been dead this twenty year,’ said she, pouring out the tea. ‘Well, it was a bootiful pup—ay, a well-bred un, by Jimini! I’m cold for lack of my rations. Rum is good, and so is schnapps, but I’d as lief have tea as either.’ He breathed heavily while he devoured his food. ‘It’s a middlin’ goodish way you’ve come,’ said he at last. ‘Likely the stage left yesternight.’ ‘The what, uncle?’ ‘The coach that brought you.’ ‘Nay, I came by the mornin’ train.’ ‘Lor’, now, think o’ that! You ain’t afeard of those new-fangled things! To think of you coming by railroad like that! What’s the world a-comin’ to?’ There was silence for some minutes while Norah sat stirring her tea and glancing sideways at the bluish lips and champing jaws of her companion.

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‘You must have seen a deal of life, uncle,’ said she. ‘It must seem a long, long time to you!’ ‘Not so very long, neither. I’m ninety come Candlemass, but it don’t seem long since I took the bounty. And that battle, it might have been yesterday. I’ve got the smell of the burned powder in my nose yet. Eh, but I get a power o’ good from my rations!’ He did indeed look less worn and colourless than when she first saw him. His face was flushed and his back more erect. ‘Have you read that?’ he asked, jerking his head towards the cutting. ‘Yes, uncle, and I’m sure you must be proud of it.’ ‘Ah, it was a great day for me! A great day! The Regent was there, and a fine body of a man too! “The ridgment is proud of you,” says he. “And I’m proud of the ridgment,” say I. “A damned good answer too!” says he to Lord Hill, and they both bust out a-laughing. But what be you a-peepin’ out o’ the window for?’ ‘Oh, uncle, here’s a regiment of soldiers coming down the street, with the band playing in front of them.’ ‘A ridgment, eh? Where be my glasses? Lor’ but I can hear the band, as plain as plain. Here’s the pioneers an’ the drum-major! What be their number, lass?’ His eyes were shining and his bony, yellow fingers, like the claws of some fierce old bird, dug into her shoulder. ‘They don’t seem to have no number, uncle. They’ve something wrote on their shoulders. Oxfordshire, I think it be.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ he growled. ‘I heard as they’d dropped the numbers and given them new-fangled names. There they go, by Jimini! They’re young mostly, but they hain’t forgot how to march. They have the swing—ay, I’ll say that for them. They’ve got the swing.’ He gazed after them until the last files had turned the corner and the measured tramp of their marching had died away in the distance. He had just regained his chair when the door opened and a gentleman stepped in. ‘Ah, Mr Brewster! Better to-day?’ he asked. ‘Come in, doctor! Yes, I’m better. But there’s a deal o’ bubbling in my chest. It’s all them toobes. If I could but cut the phlegm, I’d be right. Can’t you give me something to cut the phlegm?’ The doctor, a grave-faced, young man, put his fingers to the furrowed, blue-corded wrist. 22

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‘You must be careful,’ he said; ‘you must take no liberties.’ The thin tide of life seemed to thrill rather than to throb under his finger. The old man chuckled. ‘I’ve got brother Jarge’s girl to look after me now. She’ll see I don’t break barracks or do what I hadn’t ought to; why, darn my skin, I knew something was amiss! ‘With what?’ ‘Why, with them soldiers. You saw them pass, doctor—eh? They’d forgot their stocks. Not one on ’em had his stock on.’ He croaked and chuckled for a long time over his discovery. ‘It wouldn’t ha’ done for the Dook!’ he muttered. ‘No, by Jimini! the Dook would ha’ had a word there.’ The doctor smiled. ‘Well, you are doing very well,’ said he. ‘I’ll look in once a week or so and see how you are!’ As Norah followed him to the door, he beckoned her outside. ‘He is very weak,’ he whispered. ‘If you find him failing you must send for me.’ ‘What ails him, doctor?’ ‘Ninety years ails him. His arteries are pipes of lime. His heart is shrunken and flabby. The man is worn out.’ Norah stood watching the brisk figure of the young doctor and pondering over these new responsibilities which had come upon her. When she turned, a tall, brown-faced artilleryman, with the three gold chevrons of sergeant upon his arm, was standing, carbine in hand, at her elbow. ‘Good-morning, miss!’ said he, raising one thick finger to his jaunty, yellow-banded cap. ‘I b’lieve there’s an old gentleman lives here of the name of Brewster, who was engaged in the battle o’ Waterloo?’ ‘It’s my grand-uncle, sir,’ said Norah, casting down her eyes before the keen, critical gaze of the young soldier. ‘He is in the front parlour.’ ‘Could I have a word with him, miss? I’ll call again if it don’t chance to be convenient.’ ‘I am sure that he would be very glad to see you, sir. He’s in here, if you’ll step in. Uncle, here’s a gentleman who wants to speak with you.’ ‘Proud to see you, sir—proud and glad, sir!’ cried the sergeant, taking three steps forward into the room, and grounding his carbine while he raised his hand, palm forwards, in a salute.

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Norah stood by the door, with her mouth and eyes open, wondering whether her grand-uncle had ever, in his prime, looked like this magnificent creature; and whether he, in his turn, would ever come to resemble her grand-uncle. The old man blinked up at his visitor, and shook his head slowly. ‘Sit ye down, sergeant,’ said he, pointing with his stick to a chair. ‘You’re full young for the stripes. Lordy, it’s easier to get three now than one in my day. Gunners were old soldiers then, and the grey hairs came quicker than the three stripes.’ ‘I am eight years’ service, sir,’ cried the sergeant. ‘Macdonald is my name—Sergeant Macdonald, of H. Battery, Southern Artillery Division. I have called as the spokesman of my mates at the gunners’ barracks to say that we are proud to have you in the town, sir.’ Old Brewster chuckled and rubbed his bony hands. ‘That were what the Regent said,’ he cried. ‘“The ridgment is proud of ye,” says he. “And I am proud of the ridgment,” says I. “And a damned good answer, too,” says he, and he and Lord Hill bust out— a-laughin’’.’ ‘The non-commissioned mess would be proud and honoured to see you, sir,’ said Sergeant Macdonald. ‘And if you could step as far you’ll always find a pipe o’ baccy and a glass of grog awaitin’ you.’ The old man laughed until he coughed. ‘Like to see me, would they? The dogs!’ said he. ‘Well, well, when the warm weather comes again I’ll maybe drop in. It’s likely that I’ll drop in. Too grand for a canteen, eh? Got your mess just the same as the orficers. What’s the world a-coming to at all!’ ‘You was in the line, sir, was you not?’ asked the sergeant respectfully. ‘The line?’ cried the old man with shrill scorn. ‘Never wore a shako in my life. I am a guardsman, I am. Served in the third guards—the same they call now the Scots Guards. Lordy, but they have all marched away, every man of them, from old Colonel Byng down to the drummer boys, and here am I a straggler!—that’s what I am, sergeant, a straggler! I’m here when I ought to be there. But it ain’t my fault neither, for I’m ready to fall in when the word comes.’ ‘We’ve all got to muster there,’ answered the sergeant. ‘Won’t you try my baccy, sir?’ handing over a sealskin pouch. Old Brewster drew a blackened clay pipe from his pocket, and began to stuff the tobacco into the bowl. In an instant it slipped through his 24

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fingers, and was broken to pieces on the floor. His lip quivered, his nose puckered up, and he began crying with the long, helpless sobs of a child. ‘I’ve broke my pipe,’ he cried. ‘Don’t, uncle, oh, don’t,’ cried Norah, bending over him and patting his white head as one soothes a baby. ‘It don’t matter. We can easy get another.’ ‘Don’t you fret yourself, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘ ’Ere’s a wooden pipe with an amber mouth, if you’ll do me the honour to accept it from me. I’d be real glad if you will take it.’ ‘Jimini!’ cried he, his smiles breaking in an instant through his tears. ‘It’s a fine pipe. See to my new pipe, Norah. I lay that Jarge never had a pipe like that. You’ve got your firelock there, sergeant.’ ‘Yes, sir, I was on my way back from the butts when I looked in.’ ‘Let me have the feel of it. Lordy, but it seems like old times to have one’s hand on a musket. What’s the manual, sergeant, eh? Cock your firelock—look to your priming—present your firelock—eh, sergeant? Oh, Jimini! I’ve broke your musket in halves!’ ‘That’s all right, sir,’ cried the gunner laughing ‘you pressed on the lever and opened the breech-piece. That’s where we load ’em, you know.’ ‘Load ’em at the wrong end! Well, well, to think o’ that! And no ramrod neither! I’ve heered tell of it, but I never believed it afore. Ah, it won’t come up to Brown Bess. When there’s work to be done you mark my word and see if they don’t come back to Brown Bess.’ ‘By the Lord, sir,’ cried the sergeant, hotly, ‘they need some change out in South Africa now. I see by this mornin’s paper that the Government has knuckled under to these Boers. They’re hot about it at the non-com. mess, I can tell you, sir.’ ‘Eh, eh,’ croaked old Brewster. ‘By Gosh! it wouldn’t ha’ done for the Dook; the Dook would ha’ had a word to say over that!’ ‘Ah, that he would, sir!’ cried the sergeant; ‘and God send us another like him. But I’ve wearied you enough for one sitting. I’ll look in again, and I’ll bring a comrade or two with me if I may, for there isn’t one but would be proud to have speech with you.’ So, with another salute to the veteran, and a gleam of white teeth at Norah, the big gunner withdrew, leaving a memory of blue cloth and of gold braid behind him. Many days had not passed, however, before he was back again, and during all the long winter he was a frequent visitor at Arsenal View. He brought others with him, and soon through all the lines

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a pilgrimage to Daddy Brewster’s came to be looked upon as the proper thing to do. Gunners and sappers, linesmen and dragoons, came bowing and bobbing into the little parlour, with clatter of side-arms and clink of spurs, stretching their long legs across the patchwork rug, and hunting in the front of their tunics for the screw of tobacco, or paper of snuff which they had brought as a sign of their esteem. It was a deadly cold winter, with six weeks on end of snow on the ground, and Norah had a hard task to keep the life in that time-worn body. There were times when his mind would leave him, and when, save an animal outcry when the hour of his meals came round, no word would fall from him. As the warm weather came once more, however, and the green buds peeped forth again upon the trees, the blood thawed in his veins, and he would even drag himself as far as the door to bask in the life-giving sunshine. ‘It do hearten me up so,’ he said one morning, as he glowed in the hot May sun. ‘It’s a job to keep back the flies, though! They get owdacious in this weather and they do plague me cruel.’ ‘I’ll keep them off you, uncle,’ said Norah. ‘Eh, but it’s fine! This sunshine makes me think o’ the glory to come. You might read me a bit o’ the Bible, lass. I find it wonderful soothing.’ ‘What part would you like, uncle?’ ‘Oh, them wars.’ ‘The wars?’ ‘Ay, keep to the wars! Give me the Old Testament for chice. There’s more taste to it, to my mind! When parson comes he wants to get off to something else, but it’s Joshua or nothing with me. Them Israelites was good soldiers—good growed soldiers, all of ’em.’ ‘But, uncle,’ pleaded Norah, ‘it’s all peace in the next world.’ ‘No, it ain’t, gal.’ ‘Oh, yes, uncle, surely!’ The old corporal knocked his stick irritably upon the ground. ‘I tell ye it ain’t, gal. I asked parson.’ ‘Well, what did he say?’ ‘He said there was to be a last fight. He even gave it a name, he did. The battle of Arm—Arm—’ ‘Armageddon.’ ‘Ay, that’s the name parson said. I ’specs the third guards’ll be there. And the Dook—the Dook’ll have a word to say.’ 26

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An elderly, grey-whiskered gentleman had been walking down the street, glancing up at the numbers of the houses. Now, as his eyes fell upon the old man, he came straight for him. ‘Hullo’ said he, ‘perhaps you are Gregory Brewster?’ ‘My name, sir,’ answered the veteran. ‘You are the same Brewster, as I understand, who is on the roll of the Scots Guards as having been present at the battle of Waterloo?’ ‘I am that man, sir, though we called it the third guards in those days. It was a fine ridgment, and they only need me to make up a full muster.’ ‘Tut, tut, they’ll have to wait years for that,’ said the gentleman heartily; ‘but I am the colonel of the Scots Guards, and I thought I would like to have a word with you.’ Old Gregory Brewster was up in an instant with his hand to his rabbitskin cap. ‘God bless me!’ he cried, ‘to think of it; to think of it.’ ‘Hadn’t the gentleman better come in?’ suggested the practical Norah from behind the door. ‘Surely, sir, surely; walk in, sir, if I may be so bold.’ In his excitement he had forgotten his stick, and as he led the way into the parlour, his knees tottered, and he threw out his hands. In an instant the colonel had caught him on one side and Norah on the other. ‘Easy and steady,’ said the colonel, as he led him to his arm-chair. ‘Thank ye, sir; I was near gone that time. But, Lordy, why, I can scarce believe it. To think of me, the corporal of the flank company, and you the colonel of the battalion! Jimini! how things come round, to be sure.’ ‘Why, we are very proud of you in London,’ said the colonel. ‘And so you are actually one of the men who held Hougoumont?’ He looked at the bony, trembling hands, with their huge, knotted knuckles, the stringy throat, and the heaving, rounded shoulders. Could this, indeed, be the last of that band of heroes? Then he glanced at the half-filled phials, the blue liniment bottles, the long-spouted kettle, and the sordid details of the sick room. ‘Better, surely, had he died under the blazing rafters of the Belgian farm-house,’ thought the colonel. ‘I hope that you are pretty comfortable and happy,’ he remarked after a pause. ‘Thank ye, sir. I have a good deal o’ trouble with my toobes—a deal o’ trouble. You wouldn’t think the job it is to cut the phlegm. And I need

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my rations. I gets cold without ’em. And the flies! I ain’t strong enough to fight against them.’ ‘How’s the memory?’ asked the colonel. ‘Oh, there ain’t nothing amiss there. Why, sir, I could give you the name of every man in Captain Haldane’s flank company.’ ‘And the battle—you remember it?’ ‘Why, I sees it all afore me every time I shuts my eyes. Lordy, sir, you wouldn’t hardly believe how clear it is to me. There’s our line from the paregoric bottle right along to the snuff box. D’ye see? Well, then, the pill box is for Hougoumont on the right, where we was; and Norah’s thimble for La Haye Sainte. There it is all right, sir, and here were our guns, and here, behind, the reserves and the Belgians. Ach, them Belgians!’ He spat furiously into the fire. ‘Then here’s the French where my pipe lies, and over here, where I put my baccy pouch, was the Proosians a-comin’ up on our left flank. Jimini! but it was a glad sight to see the smoke of their guns.’ ‘And what was it that struck you most, now, in connection with the whole affair?’ asked the colonel. ‘I lost three half-crowns over it, I did,’ crooned old Brewster. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if I was never to get that money now. I lent ’em to Jabez Smith, my rear rank man, in Brussels. “Only till pay-day, Grig,” says he. By Gosh! he was stuck by a lancer at Quarter Brass, and me with not so much as a slip o’ paper to prove the debt! Them three half-crowns is as good as lost to me.’ The colonel rose from his chair laughing. ‘The officers of the Guards want you to buy yourself some little trifle which may add to your comfort,’ he said. ‘It is not from me, so you need not thank me.’ He took up the old man’s tobacco pouch and slipped a crisp banknote inside it. ‘Thank ye, kindly, sir. But there’s one favour that I would like to ask you, colonel.’ ‘Yes, my man.’ ‘If I’m called, colonel, you won’t grudge me a flag and a firing party?’ ‘All right, my man, I’ll see to it,’ said the colonel. ‘Good-bye; I hope to have nothing but good news from you.’ ‘A kind gentleman, Norah,’ croaked old Brewster, as they saw him walk past the window; ‘but, Lordy, he ain’t fit to hold the stirrup o’ my Colonel Byng!’ 28

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It was on the very next day that the old corporal took a sudden change for the worse. Even the golden sunlight streaming through the window seemed unable to warm that withered frame. The doctor came and shook his head in silence. All day the man lay with only his puffing blue lips and the twitching of his scraggy neck to show that he still held the breath of life. Norah and Sergeant Macdonald had sat by him in the afternoon, but he had shown no consciousness of their presence. He lay peacefully, his eyes half-closed, his hands under his cheek, as one who is very weary. They had left him for an instant, and were sitting in the front room where Norah was preparing tea, when of a sudden they heard a shout that rang through the house. Loud and clear and swelling, it pealed in their ears, a voice full of strength and energy and fiery passion. ‘The guards need powder,’ it cried and yet again, ‘The guards need powder.’ The sergeant sprang from his chair and rushed in, followed by the trembling Norah. There was the old man standing up, his blue eyes sparkling, his white hair bristling, his whole figure towering and expanding, with eagle head and glance of fire. ‘The guards need powder,’ he thundered once again, ‘and, by God, they shall have it!’ He threw up his long arms and sank back with a groan into his chair. The sergeant stooped over him, and his face darkened. ‘Oh, Archie, Archie,’ sobbed the frightened girl, ‘what do you think of him?’ The sergeant turned away. ‘I think,’ said he, ‘that the third guards have a full muster now.’

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scudamore lane, sloping down riverwards from just behind the Monument, lies at night in the shadow of two black and monstrous walls which loom high above the glimmer of the scattered gas-lamps. The foot-paths are narrow, and the causeway is paved with rounded cobblestones so that the endless drays roar along it like so many breaking waves. A few old-fashioned houses lie scattered among the business premises, and in one of these— half-way down on the left-hand side—Dr Horace Selby conducts his large practice. It is a singular street for so big a man, but a specialist who has an European reputation can afford to live where he likes. In his particular branch, too, patients do not always regard seclusion as a disadvantage. It was only ten o’clock. The dull roar of the traffic which converged all day upon London Bridge had died away now to a mere confused murmur. It was raining heavily, and the gas shone dimly through the streaked and dripping glass, throwing little yellow circles upon the glistening cobblestones. The air was full of the sounds of the rain, the thin swish of its fall, the heavier drip from the eaves, and the swirl and gurgle down the two steep gutters and through the sewer grating. There was only one figure in the whole length of Scudamore Lane. It was that of a man, and it stood outside the door of Dr Horace Selby. He had just rung and was waiting for an answer. The fanlight beat full upon the gleaming shoulders of his waterproof and upon his upturned features. It was a wan, sensitive, clear-cut face, with some subtle, nameless peculiarity in its expression—something of the startled horse in the white-rimmed eye, something, too, of the helpless child in the drawn cheek and the weakening of the lower lip. The man-servant knew the stranger as a patient at a bare glance at those frightened eyes. Such a look had been seen at that door before. ‘Is the doctor in?’ The man hesitated. ‘He has had a few friends to dinner, sir. He does not like to be disturbed outside his usual hours, sir.’ ‘Tell him that I must see him. Tell him that it is of the very first importance. Here is my card.’ He fumbled with his trembling fingers in trying to draw one from the case. ‘Sir Francis Norton is the name. Tell him that Sir Francis Norton of Deane Park must see him at once.’ 30

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‘Yes, sir.’ The butler closed his fingers upon the card and the halfsovereign which accompanied it. ‘Better hang your coat up here in the hall. It is very wet. Now, if you will wait here in the consulting-room I have no doubt that I shall be able to send the doctor in to you.’ It was a large and lofty room in which the young baronet found himself. The carpet was so soft and thick that his feet made no sound as he walked across it. The two gas-jets were turned only half way up, and the dim light with the faint aromatic smell which filled the air had a vaguely religious suggestion. He sat down in a shining leather arm-chair by the smouldering fire and looked gloomily about him. Two sides of the room were taken up with books, fat and sombre, with broad gold lettering upon their backs. Beside him was the high, old-fashioned mantelpiece of white marble, the top of it strewed with cotton wadding and bandages, graduated measures and little bottles. There was one with a broad neck, just above him, containing bluestone, and another narrower one with what looked like the ruins of a broken pipe stem and ‘Caustic’ outside upon a red label. Thermometers, hypodermic syringes, bistouries and spatulas were scattered about, both on the mantelpiece and on the central table on either side of the sloping desk. On the same table to the right stood copies of the five books which Dr Horace Selby had written upon the subject with which his name is peculiarly associated, while on the left, on the top of a red medical directory, lay a huge glass model of a human eye, the size of a turnip, which opened down the centre to expose the lens and double chamber within. Sir Francis Norton had never been remarkable for his powers of observation, and yet he found himself watching these trifles with the keenest attention. Even the corrosion of the cork of an acid bottle caught his eye and he wondered that the doctor did not use glass stoppers. Tiny scratches where the light glinted off from the table, little stains upon the leather of the desk, chemical formulae scribbled upon the labels of some of the phials—nothing was too slight to arrest his attention. And his sense of hearing was equally alert. The heavy ticking of the solemn black clock above the mantelpiece struck quite painfully upon his ears. Yet, in spite of it, and in spite also of the thick, old-fashioned wooden partition walls, he could hear voices of men talking in the next room and could even catch scraps of their conversation. ‘Second hand was bound to take it.’ ‘Why, you drew the last of them yourself.’ ‘How could I play the queen when I knew the ace was against me.’ The phrases came in little spurts, falling back into the dull murmur of conversation. And then

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suddenly he heard the creaking of a door, and a step in the hall, and knew with a tingling mixture of impatience and horror that the crisis of his life was at hand. Dr Horace Selby was a large, portly man with an imposing presence. His nose and chin were bold and pronounced, yet his features were puffy—a combination which would blend more freely with the wig and cravat of the early Georges, than with the close-cropped hair and black frockcoat of the end of the 19th century. He was clean shaven, for his mouth was too good to cover, large, flexible and sensitive, with a kindly human softening at either corner, which, with his brown, sympathetic eyes, had drawn out many a shame-struck sinner’s secret. Two masterful little bushy side whiskers bristled out from under his ears, spindling away upwards to merge in the thick curves of his brindled hair. To his patients there was something reassuring in the mere bulk and dignity of the man. A high and easy bearing in medicine, as in war, bears with it a hint of victories in the past, and a promise of others to come. Dr Horace Selby’s face was a consolation, and so, too, were the large, white, soothing hands, one of which he held out to his visitor. ‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting. It is a conflict of duties, you perceive. A host to his guests and an adviser to his patient. But now I am entirely at your disposal, Sir Francis. But, dear me, you are very cold.’ ‘Yes, I am cold.’ ‘And you are trembling all over. Tut, tut, this will never do. This miserable night has chilled you. Perhaps some little stimulant—’ ‘No thank you. I would really rather not. And it is not the night which has chilled me. I am frightened, doctor.’ The doctor half turned in his chair, and he patted the arch of the young man’s knee as he might the neck of a restless horse. ‘What, then?’ he asked, looking over his shoulder at the pale face with the startled eyes. Twice the young man parted his lips. Then he stooped with a sudden gesture and turning up the right leg of his trousers he pulled down his sock and thrust forward his shin. The doctor made a clicking noise with his tongue as he glanced at it. ‘Both legs?’ ‘No, only one.’ ‘Suddenly?’ ‘This morning.’ 32

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‘Hum!’ The doctor pouted his lips, and drew his finger and thumb down the line of his chin. ‘Can you account for it?’ he asked briskly. ‘No.’ A trace of sternness came into the large, brown eyes. ‘I need not point out to you that unless the most absolute frankness—’ The patient sprang from his chair. ‘So help me God, doctor,’ he cried, ‘I have nothing in my life with which to reproach myself. Do you think that I would be such a fool as to come here and tell you lies. Once for all, I have nothing to regret.’ He was a pitiful, half-tragic and half-grotesque figure as he stood with one trouser leg rolled to the knee, and that ever-present horror still lurking in his eyes. A burst of merriment came from the card-players in the next room and the two looked at each other in silence. ‘Sit down!’ said the doctor abruptly. ‘Your assurance is quite sufficient.’ He stooped and ran his finger down the line of the young man’s shin, raising it at one point. ‘Hum! Serpiginous!’ he murmured, shaking his head; ‘any other symptoms?’ ‘My eyes have been a little weak.’ ‘Let me see your teeth!’ He glanced at them, and again made the gentle clicking sound of sympathy and disapprobation. ‘Now your eye!’ He lit a lamp at the patient’s elbow, and holding a small crystal lens to concentrate the light, he threw it obliquely upon the patient’s eye. As he did so a glow of pleasure came over his large, expressive face, a flush of such enthusiasm as the botanist feels when he packs the rare plant into his tin knapsack, or the astronomer when the longsought comet first swims into the field of his telescope. ‘This is very typical—very typical indeed,’ he murmured, turning to his desk and jotting down a few memoranda upon a sheet of paper. ‘Curiously enough I am writing a monograph upon the subject. It is singular that you should have been able to furnish so well marked a case.’ He had so forgotten the patient in his symptom that he had assumed an almost congratulatory air towards its possessor. He reverted to human sympathy again as his patient asked for particulars. ‘My dear sir, there is no occasion for us to go into strictly professional details together,’ said he soothingly. ‘If, for example, I were to say that you have interstitial keratitis, how would you be the wiser? There are indications of a strumous diathesis. In broad terms I may say that you have a constitutional and hereditary taint.’

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The young baronet sank back in his chair and his chin fell forwards upon his chest. The doctor sprang to a side table and poured out half a glass of liqueur brandy which he held to his patient’s lips. A little fleck of colour came into his cheeks as he drank it down. ‘Perhaps I spoke a little abruptly,’ said the doctor. ‘But you must have known the nature of your complaint, why otherwise should you have come to me?’ ‘God help me, I suspected it—but only today when my leg grew bad. My father had a leg like this.’ ‘It was from him, then?’ ‘No, from my grandfather. You have heard of Sir Rupert Norton, the great Corinthian.’ The doctor was a man of wide reading with a retentive memory. The name brought back instantly to him the remembrance of the sinister reputation of its owner—a notorious buck of the thirties, who had gambled and duelled and steeped himself in drink and debauchery until even the vile set with whom he consorted had shrunk away from him in horror, and left him to a sinister old age with the barmaid wife whom in some drunken frolic he had espoused. As he looked at the young man still leaning back in the leather chair, there seemed for the instant to flicker up behind him some vague presentiment of that foul old dandy with his dangling seals, many-wreathed scarf, and dark, satyric face. What was he now? An armful of bones in a mouldy box. But his deeds—they were living and rotting the blood in the veins of an innocent man. ‘I see that you have heard of him,’ said the young baronet. ‘He died horribly, I have been told, but not more horribly than he had lived. My father was his only son. He was a studious man, fond of books and canaries and the country. But his innocent life did not save him.’ ‘His symptoms were cutaneous, I understand.’ ‘He wore gloves in the house. That was the first thing I can remember. And then it was his throat, and then his legs. He used to ask me so often about my own health, and I thought him so fussy, for how could I tell what the meaning of it was. He was always watching me—always with a sidelong eye fixed upon me. Now, at last, I know what he was watching for.’ ‘Had you brothers or sisters?’ ‘None, thank God!’ 34

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‘Well, well, it is a sad case, and very typical of many which come in my way. You are no lonely sufferer, Sir Francis. There are many thousands who bear the same cross as you do.’ ‘But where is the justice of it, doctor?’ cried the young man, springing from his chair and pacing up and down the consulting-room. ‘If I were heir to my grandfather’s sins as well as to their results, I could understand it, but I am of my father’s type; I love all that is gentle and beautiful, music and poetry and art. The coarse and animal is abhorrent to me. Ask any of my friends and they would tell you that. And now that this vile, loathsome thing—Ach, I am polluted to the marrow, soaked in abomination! And why? Haven’t I a right to ask why? Did I do it? Was it my fault? Could I help being born? And look at me now, blighted and blasted, just as life was at its sweetest! Talk about the sins of the father! How about the sins of the Creator!’ He shook his two clenched hands in the air, the poor, impotent atom with his pin-point of brain caught in the whirl of the infinite. The doctor rose and placing his hands upon his shoulders he pressed him back into his chair again. ‘There, there, my dear lad,’ said he. ‘You must not excite yourself! You are trembling all over. Your nerves cannot stand it. We must take these great questions upon trust. What are we, after all? Half evolved creatures in a transition stage; nearer, perhaps, to the medusa on the one side than to perfected humanity on the other. With half a complete brain we can’t expect to understand the whole of a complete fact, can we, now? It is all very dim and dark, no doubt, but I think that Pope’s famous couplet sums the whole matter up, and from my heart, after fifty years of varied experience, I can say that—’ But the young baronet gave a cry of impatience and disgust. ‘Words, words, words! You can sit comfortably there in your chair and say them—and think them too, no doubt. You’ve had your life. But I’ve never had mine. You’ve healthy blood in your veins. Mine is putrid. And yet I am as innocent as you. What would words do for you if you were in this chair and I in that. Ah, it’s such a mockery and a make-belief. Don’t think me rude though, doctor. I don’t mean to be that. I only say that it is impossible for you or any other man to realise it. But I’ve a question to ask you, doctor. It’s one on which my whole life must depend.’ He writhed his fingers together in an agony of apprehension. ‘Speak out, my dear sir. I have every sympathy with you.’

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‘Do you think—do you think the poison has spent itself on me? Do you think that if I had children that they would suffer?’ ‘I can only give one answer to that. “The third and fourth generation,” says the trite old text. You may in time eliminate it from your system, but many years must pass before you can think of marriage.’ ‘I am to be married on Tuesday,’ whispered the patient. It was Dr Horace Selby’s turn to be thrilled with horror. There were not many situations which would yield such a sensation to his well seasoned nerves. He sat in silence while the babble of the card-table broke in upon them again. ‘We had a double ruff if you had returned a heart.’ ‘I was bound to clear the trumps.’ They were hot and angry about it. ‘How could you?’ cried the doctor severely. ‘It was criminal.’ ‘You forget that I have only learned how I stand to-day.’ He put his two hands to his temples and pressed them convulsively. ‘You are a man of the world, Doctor Selby. You have seen or heard of such things before. Give me some advice. I’m in your hands. It is all very sudden and horrible, and I don’t think I am strong enough to bear it.’ The doctor’s heavy brows thickened into two straight lines and he bit his nails in perplexity. ‘The marriage must not take place.’ ‘Then what am I to do?’ ‘At all costs it must not take place.’ ‘And I must give her up!’ ‘There can be no question about that?’ The young man took out a pocket-book and drew from it a small photograph, holding it out towards the doctor. The firm face softened as he looked at it. ‘It is very hard on you, no doubt. I can appreciate it more now that I have seen that. But there is no alternative at all. You must give up all thought of it.’ ‘But this is madness, doctor—madness, I tell you. No, I won’t raise my voice! I forgot myself! But realise it, man! I am to be married on Tuesday—this coming Tuesday, you know. And all the world knows it. How can I put such a public affront upon her? It would be monstrous.’ ‘None the less it must be done. My dear sir, there is no way out of it.’ ‘You would have me simply write brutally and break the engagement at the last moment without a reason? I tell you I couldn’t do it.’ 36

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‘I had a patient once who found himself in a somewhat similar situation some years ago,’ said the doctor thoughtfully. ‘His device was a singular one. He deliberately committed a penal offence, and so compelled the young lady’s people to withdraw their consent to the marriage.’ The young baronet shook his head. ‘My personal honour is as yet unstained,’ said he. ‘I have little else left, but that at least I will preserve.’ ‘Well, well, it’s a nice dilemma and the choice lies with you.’ ‘Have you no other suggestion?’ ‘You don’t happen to have property in Australia?’ ‘None.’ ‘But you have capital?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then you could buy some—to-morrow morning, for example. A thousand mining shares would do. Then you might write to say that urgent business affairs have compelled you to start at an hour’s notice to inspect your property. That would give you six months, at any rate.’ ‘Well, that would be possible—yes, certainly it would be possible. But think of her position—the house full of wedding presents—guests coming from a distance. It is awful. And you say that there is no alternative.’ The doctor shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, then, I might write it now, and start to-morrow—eh? Perhaps you would let me use your desk. Thank you! I am so sorry to keep you from your guests so long. But I won’t be a moment now.’ He wrote an abrupt note of a few lines. Then, with a sudden impulse, he tore it to shreds and flung it into the fireplace. ‘No, I can’t sit down and tell her a lie, doctor,’ he said rising. ‘We must find some other way out of this. I will think it over, and let you know my decision. You must allow me to double your fee as I have taken such an unconscionable time. Now, good-bye, and thank you a thousand times for your sympathy and advice.’ ‘Why, dear me, you haven’t even got your prescription yet. This is the mixture, and I should recommend one of these powders every morning and the chemist will put all directions upon the ointment box. You are placed in a cruel situation, but I trust that these may be but passing clouds. When may I hope to hear from you again?’ ‘To-morrow morning.’ ‘Very good. How the rain is splashing in the street. You have your waterproof there. You will need it. Good-bye, then, until to-morrow.’

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He opened the door. A gust of cold, damp air swept into the hall. And yet the doctor stood for a minute or more watching the lonely figure which passed slowly through the yellow splotches of the gas-lamps, and into the broad bars of darkness between. It was but his own shadow which trailed up the wall as he passed the lights, and yet it looked to the doctor’s eye as though some huge and sombre figure walked by a manikin’s side, and led him silently up the lonely street. Doctor Horace Selby heard again of his patient next morning and rather earlier than he had expected. A paragraph in the Daily News caused him to push away his breakfast untasted, and turned him sick and faint while he read it. ‘A Deplorable Accident,’ it was headed, and it ran in this way:— ‘A fatal accident of a peculiarly painful character is reported from King William Street. About eleven o’clock last night a young man was observed, while endeavouring to get out of the way of a hansom, to slip and fall under the wheels of a heavy, two-horse dray. On being picked up, his injuries were found to be of the most shocking character, and he expired while being conveyed to the hospital. An examination of his pocket-book and card-case shows beyond any question that the deceased is none other than Sir Francis Norton of Deane Park, who has only within the last year come into the baronetcy. The accident is made the more deplorable as the deceased, who was only just of age, was on the eve of being married to a young lady belonging to one of the oldest families in the south. With his wealth and his talents the ball of fortune was at his feet, and his many friends will be deeply grieved to know that his promising career has been cut short in so sudden and tragic a fashion.’

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A False Start ‘is doctor horace wilkinson at home?’ ‘I am he. Pray step in.’ The visitor looked somewhat astonished at having the door opened to him by the master of the house. ‘I wanted to have a few words.’ The doctor, a pale, nervous young man, dressed in an ultra-professional, long black frock-coat, with a high white collar cutting off his dapper sidewhiskers in the centre, rubbed his hands together and smiled. In the thick, burly man in front of him he scented a patient, and it would be his first. His scanty resources had begun to run somewhat low; and, although he had his first quarter’s rent safely locked away in the right-hand drawer of his desk, it was becoming a question with him how he should meet the current expenses of his very simple house-keeping. He bowed, therefore, waved his visitor in, closed the hall door in a careless fashion, as though his own presence thereat had been a purely accidental circumstance, and finally led the burly stranger into his scantily-furnished front room, where he motioned him to a seat. Doctor Wilkinson planted himself behind his desk, and, placing his finger-tips together, he gazed with some apprehension at his companion. What was the matter with the man? He seemed very red in the face. Some of his old professors would have diagnosed his case by now, and would have electrified the patient by describing his own symptoms before he had said a word about them. Doctor Horace Wilkinson racked his brains for some clue, but Nature had fashioned him as a plodder—a very reliable plodder, and nothing more. He could think of nothing save that the visitor’s watch-chain had a very brassy appearance, with a corollary to the effect that he would be lucky if he got half-a-crown out of him. Still, even half-a-crown was something in those early days of struggle. Whilst the doctor had been running his eyes over the stranger, the latter had been plunging his hands into pocket after pocket of his heavy coat. The heat of the weather, his dress, and this exercise of pocket rummaging had all combined to still further redden his face, which had changed from brick to beet, with a gloss of moisture on his brow. This extreme ruddiness brought a clue at last to the observant doctor. Surely it was not to be attained without alcohol. In alcohol lay the secret of this man’s trouble. Some little delicacy was needed, however, in showing him

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that he had read his case aright, that at a glance he had penetrated to the inmost sources of his ailments. ‘It’s very hot,’ observed the stranger, mopping his forehead. ‘Yes. It is weather which tempts one to drink rather more beer than is good for one,’ answered Doctor Horace Wilkinson looking very knowingly at his companion from over his finger-tips. ‘Dear! dear! You shouldn’t do that.’ ‘I! I never touch beer.’ ‘Neither do I. I’ve been an abstainer for twenty years.’ This was depressing. Doctor Wilkinson blushed until he was nearly as red as the other. ‘May I ask what I can do for you?’ he asked, picking up his stethoscope and tapping it gently against his thumb-nail. ‘Yes, I was just going to tell you. I heard of your coming, but I couldn’t get round before—’ He broke into a nervous little cough. ‘Yes?’ said the doctor encouragingly. ‘I should have been here three weeks ago, but you know how these things get put off.’ He coughed again behind his large, red hand. ‘I do not think that you need say anything more,’ said the doctor, taking over the case with an easy air of command. ‘Your cough is quite sufficient. It is entirely bronchial by the sound. No doubt the mischief is circumscribed at present, but there is always the danger that it may spread, so you have done wisely to come to me. A little judicious treatment will soon set you right. Your waistcoat, please, but not your shirt. Puff out your chest, and say ninety-nine in a deep voice.’ The red faced man began to laugh. ‘It’s all right, doctor,’ said he. ‘That cough comes from chewing tobacco, and I know it’s a very bad habit. Nine and ninepence is what I have to say to you, for I’m the officer of the Gas Company, and they have a claim against you for that on the metre.’ Doctor Horace Wilkinson collapsed into his chair. ‘Then you’re not a patient?’ he gasped. ‘Never needed a doctor in my life, sir.’ ‘Oh, that’s all right.’ The doctor concealed his disappointment under an affectation of facetiousness. ‘You don’t look as if you troubled them 40

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much. I don’t know what we should do if everyone were as robust. I shall call at the Company’s offices and pay this small amount.’ ‘If you could make it convenient, sir, now that I am here, it would save trouble—’ ‘Oh, certainly!’ These eternal little sordid money troubles were more trying to the doctor than plain living or scanty food. He took out his purse, and slid the contents on to the table. There were two half-crowns and some pennies. In his drawer he had ten golden sovereigns. But those were his rent. If he once broke in upon them he was lost. He would starve first. ‘Dear me!’ said he, with a smile, as at some strange, unheard-of incident, ‘I have run short of small change. I am afraid I shall have to call upon the Company, after all.’ ‘Very well, sir.’ The inspector rose, and with a practised glance around, which valued every article in the room, from the two-guinea carpet to the eight-shilling muslin curtains, he took his departure. When he had gone, Doctor Wilkinson rearranged his room, as was his habit a dozen times in the day. He laid out his large Quain’s Dictionary of Medicine in the forefront of the table, so as to impress the casual patient that he had ever the best authorities at his elbow. Then he cleared all the little instruments out of his pocket-case—the scissors, the forceps, the bistouries, the lancets—and he laid them all out beside the stethoscope, to make as good a show as possible. His ledger, day-book and visitingbook were spread in front of him. There was no entry in any of them yet, but it would not look well to have the covers too glossy and new, so he rubbed them together and daubed ink over them. Neither would it be well that any patient should observe that his name was the first in the book, so he filled up the first page of each with notes of imaginary visits paid to nameless patients during the last three weeks. Having done all this, he rested his head upon his hands and relapsed into the terrible occupation of waiting. Terrible enough at any time to the young professional man, but most of all to one who knows that the weeks, and even the days, during which he can hold out are numbered. Economise as he would, the money would still slip away in the countless little claims which a man never understands until he lives under a roof-tree of his own. Dr Wilkinson could not deny, as he sat at his desk and looked at the little heap of silver

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and coppers, that his chances of being a successful practitioner in Sutton were rapidly vanishing away. And yet it was a bustling, prosperous town, with so much money in it that it seemed strange that a man with a trained brain and dexterous fingers should be starved out of it for want of employment. At his desk Doctor Horace Wilkinson could see the never-ending double current of people which ebbed and flowed in front of his window. It was a busy street, and the air was for ever filled with the dull roar of life, the grinding of the wheels, and the patter of countless feet. Men, women and children, thousands and thousands of them, passed in the day, and yet each was hurrying on upon his own business, scarce glancing at the small brass plate, or wasting a thought upon the man who waited in the front room. And yet how many of them would obviously, glaringly have been the better for his professional assistance. Dyspeptic men, anaemic women, blotched faces, bilious complexions, they flowed past him, they needing him, he needing them, and yet the remorseless bar of professional etiquette kept them for ever apart. What could he do? Could he stand at his own front door, pluck the casual stranger by the sleeve, and whisper in his ear, ‘Sir, you will forgive me for remarking that you are suffering from a severe attack of acne rosacea, which makes you a peculiarly unpleasant object. Allow me to suggest that a small prescription containing arsenic, which will not cost you more than you often spend upon a single meal, will be very much to your advantage.’ Such an address would be a degradation to the high and lofty profession of medicine, and there are no such sticklers for the ethics of that profession as some to whom she has been but a bitter and a grudging mother. Doctor Horace Wilkinson was still looking moodily out of the window, when there came a sharp clang at the bell. Often it had rung, and with every ring his hopes had sprung up, only to dwindle away again, and change to leaden disappointment, as he faced some beggar or touting tradesman. But the doctor’s spirit was young and elastic, and again, in spite of all experience, it responded to that exhilarating summons. He sprang to his feet, cast his eyes over the table, thrust out his medical books a little more prominently, and hurried to the door. A groan escaped him as he entered the hall. He could see through the half-glazed upper panels that a gipsy van, hung round with wicker tables and chairs, had halted before his door, and that a couple of the 42

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vagrants, with a baby, were waiting outside. He had learned by experience that it was better not even to parley with such people. ‘I have nothing for you,’ said he, loosing the latch by an inch. ‘Go away!’ He closed the door, but the bell clanged once more. ‘Get away! Get away,’ he cried impatiently, and walked back into his consulting-room. He had hardly seated himself when the bell went for the third time. In a towering passion he rushed back, flung open the door. ‘What the—’ ‘If you please, sir, we need a doctor.’ In an instant he was rubbing his hands again, with his blandest professional smile. These were patients, then, whom he had tried to hunt from his doorstep—the very first patients, whom he had waited for so impatiently. They did not look very promising. The man, a tall, lank-haired gipsy, had gone back to the horse’s head. There remained a small, hardfaced woman with a great bruise all round her eye. She wore a yellow silk handkerchief round her head, and a baby, tucked in a red shawl, was pressed to her bosom. ‘Pray step in, madam,’ said Doctor Horace Wilkinson, with his very best sympathetic manner. In this case, at least, there could be no mistake as to diagnosis. ‘If you will sit on this sofa, I shall very soon make you feel much more comfortable.’ He poured a little water from his carafe into a saucer, made a compress of lint, fastened it over the injured eye, and secured the whole with a spica bandage, secundum artem. ‘Thank ye kindly, sir,’ said the woman, when his work was finished; ‘that’s nice and warm, and may God bless your honour. But it wasn’t about my eye at all that I came to see a doctor.’ ‘Not your eye?’ Doctor Horace Wilkinson was beginning to be a little doubtful as to the advantages of quick diagnosis. It is an excellent thing to be able to surprise a patient, but hitherto it was always the patient who had surprised him. ‘The baby’s got the measles.’ The mother parted the red shawl, and exhibited a little, dark, blackeyed gipsy baby, whose swarthy face was all flushed and mottled with a dark red rash. The child breathed with a rattling sound, and it looked up at the doctor with eyes which were heavy with want of sleep and crusted together at the lids. ‘Hum! Yes. Measles, sure enough—and a smart attack.’

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‘I just wanted you to see her, sir, so that you could signify.’ ‘Could what?’ ‘Signify, if anything happened.’ ‘Oh, I see—certify.’ ‘And now that you’ve seen it, sir, I’ll go on, for Reuben—that’s my man—is in a hurry.’ ‘But don’t you want any medicine?’ ‘Oh, now you’ve seen it, it’s all right. I’ll let you know if anything happens.’ ‘But you must have some medicine. The child is very ill.’ He descended into the little room which he had fitted as a surgery, and he made up a two-ounce bottle of cooling medicine. In such cities as Sutton there are few patients who can afford to pay a fee to both doctor and chemist, so that unless the physician is prepared to play the part of both he will have little chance of making a living at either. ‘There is your medicine, madam. You will find the directions upon the bottle. Keep the child warm and give it a light diet.’ ‘Thank you kindly, sir.’ She shouldered her baby and marched for the door. ‘Excuse me, madam,’ said the doctor nervously. ‘Don’t you think it too small a matter to make a bill of? Perhaps it would be better if we had a settlement at once.’ The gipsy woman looked at him reproachfully out of her one uncovered eye. ‘Are you going to charge me for that?’ she asked. ‘How much, then?’ ‘Well, say half-a-crown.’ He mentioned the sum in a half jesting way, as though it were too small to take serious notice of, but the gipsy woman raised quite a scream at the mention of it. ‘’Arf-a-crown! for that?’ ‘Well, my good woman, why not go to the poor doctor if you cannot afford a fee?’ She fumbled in her pocket, craning awkwardly to keep her grip upon the baby. ‘Here’s sevenpence,’ she said at last, holding out a little pile of copper coins. ‘I’ll give you that and a wicker footstool.’ ‘But my fee is half-a-crown.’ 44

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The doctor’s views of the glory of his profession cried out against this wretched haggling, and yet what was he to do? ‘Where am I to get ’arf-a-crown? It is well for gentle-folk like you, who sit in your grand houses, an’ can eat an’ drink what you like, an’ charge ’arf-a-crown for just saying as much as “‘Ow d’ye do?” We can’t pick up ’arf-crowns like that. What we gets we earns ’ard. This sevenpence is just all I’ve got. You told me to feed the child light. She must feed light, for what she’s to have is more than I know.’ Whilst the woman had been speaking, Doctor Horace Wilkinson’s eyes had wandered to the tiny heap of money upon the table which represented all that separated him from absolute starvation, and he chuckled to himself at the grim joke that he should appear to this poor woman to be a being living in the lap of luxury. Then he picked up the odd coppers, leaving only the two half-crowns upon the table. ‘Here you are,’ he said brusquely. ‘Never mind the fee; and take these coppers. They may be of some use to you. Good-bye!’ He bowed her out, and closed the door behind her. After all, she was the thin edge of the wedge. These wandering people have great powers of recommendation. All large practices have been built up from such foundations. The hangers-on to the kitchen recommend to the kitchen, they to the drawing-room, and so it spreads. At least he could say now that he had had a patient. He went into the back room and lit the spirit-kettle to boil the water for his tea, laughing the while at the recollection of his recent interview. If all patients were like this one it could easily be reckoned how many it would take to ruin him completely. Putting aside the dirt upon his carpet and the loss of time, there were twopence gone upon the bandage, fourpence or more upon the medicine, to say nothing of phial, cork, label and paper. Then he had given her fivepence, so that his first patient had absorbed altogether not less than one sixth of his available capital. If five more were to come he would be a broken man. He sat down upon the portmanteau and shook with laughter at the thought, while he measured out his one spoonful and a half of tea at 1s. 8d. into the brown earthenware teapot. Suddenly, however, the laugh faded from his face, and he cocked his ear towards the door, standing listening with a slanting head and a sidelong eye. There had been a rasping of wheels against the curb, the sound of steps outside, and then a loud peal at the bell. With his teaspoon in his hand he peeped round the corner and saw with amazement

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that a carriage and pair were waiting outside, and that a powdered footman was standing at the door. The spoon tinkled down upon the floor, and he stood gazing in bewilderment. Then, pulling himself together, he threw open the door. ‘Young man,’ said the flunkey, ‘tell your master, Doctor Wilkinson, that he is wanted just as quick as ever he can come to Lady Millbank, at The Towers. He is to come this very instant. We’d take him with us, but we have to go back to see if Doctor Mason is home yet. Just you stir your stumps and give him the message.’ The footman nodded and was off in an instant, while the coachman lashed his horses, and the carriage flew down the street. Here was a new development! Doctor Horace Wilkinson stood at his door and tried to think it all out. Lady Millbank, of The Towers! People of wealth and position, no doubt. And a serious case, or why this haste and summoning of two doctors? But, then, why in the name of all that is wonderful should he be sent for? He was obscure, unknown, without influence. There must be some mistake. Yes, that must be the true explanation; or was it possible that someone was attempting a cruel hoax upon him. At any rate, it was too positive a message to be disregarded. He must set off at once and settle the matter one way or the other. But he had one source of information. At the corner of the street was a small shop where one of the oldest inhabitants dispensed newspapers and gossip. He could get information there if anywhere. He put on his wellbrushed top hat, secreted instruments and bandages in all his pockets, and without waiting for his tea, closed up his establishment and started off upon his adventure. The stationer at the corner was a human directory to everyone and everything in Sutton, so that he soon had all the information which he wanted. Sir John Millbank was very well known in the town, it seemed. He was a merchant prince, an exporter of pens, three times mayor, and reported to be fully worth two millions sterling. The Towers was his palatial seat, just outside the city. His wife had been an invalid for some years, and was growing worse. So far the whole thing seemed to be genuine enough. By some amazing chance these people really had sent for him. And then another doubt assailed him, and he turned back into the shop. 46

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‘I am your neighbour, Dr Horace Wilkinson,’ said he. ‘Is there any other medical man of that name in the town?’ No. The stationer was quite positive that there was not. That was final, then. A great good fortune had come in his way, and he must take prompt advantage of it. He called a cab, and drove furiously to The Towers, with his brain in a whirl, giddy with hope and delight at one moment, and sickened with fears and doubts at the next, lest the case should in some way be beyond his powers, or lest he should find at some critical moment that he was without the instrument or appliance which was needed. Every strange and outré case of which he had ever heard or read came back into his mind, and long before he reached The Towers he had worked himself into a positive conviction that he would be instantly required to do a trephining at the least. The Towers was a very large house, standing back amid trees, at the head of a winding drive. As he drove up, the doctor sprang out, paid away half his worldly assets as a fare, and followed a stately footman who, having taken his name, led him through the oak-panelled, stained-glass hall, gorgeous with deers’ heads and ancient armour, and ushered him into a large sitting-room beyond. A very irritable-looking, acid-faced man was seated in an armchair by the fireplace, while two young ladies in white were standing together in the bow window at the further end. ‘Hullo! hullo! hullo! What’s this—heh?’ cried the irritable man. ‘Are you Dr Wilkinson? Eh?’ ‘Yes, sir. I am Dr Wilkinson.’ ‘Really, now. You seem very young—much younger than I expected. Well, well, well, Mason’s old, and yet he don’t seem to know much about it. I suppose we must try the other end now. You’re the Wilkinson who wrote something about the lungs? Heh?’ Here was a light! The only two letters which the doctor had ever written to The Lancet—modest little letters thrust away in a back column among the wrangles about medical ethics, and the inquiries as to how much it took to keep a horse in the country—had been upon pulmonary disease. They had not been wasted, then. Some eye had picked them out and marked the name of the writer. Who could say that work was ever wasted, or that merit did not promptly meet with its reward? ‘Yes, I have written on the subject.’ ‘Ha! Well, then, where’s Mason?’ ‘I have not the pleasure of his acquaintance.’

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‘No? That’s queer, too. He knows you, and thinks a lot of your opinion. You’re a stranger in the town, are you not?’ ‘Yes. I have only been here a very short time.’ ‘That was what Mason said. He didn’t give me the address. Said he would call on you and bring you, but when the wife got worse, of course I inquired for you and sent for you direct. I sent for Mason, too, but he was out. However, we can’t wait for him, so just run away upstairs and do what you can.’ ‘Well, I am placed in a rather delicate position,’ said Dr Horace Wilkinson, with some hesitation. ‘I am here, as I understand, to meet my colleague, Dr Mason, in consultation. It would perhaps hardly be correct for me to see the patient in his absence. I think that I would rather wait.’ ‘Would you, by Jove! Do you think I’ll let my wife get worse while the doctor is coolly kicking his heels in the room below? No, sir, I am a plain man, and I tell you that you will either go up or go out.’ The style of speech jarred upon the doctor’s sense of the fitness of things, but still when a man’s wife is ill much may be overlooked. He contented himself by bowing somewhat stiffly. ‘I shall go up, if you insist upon it,’ said he. ‘I do insist upon it. And another thing, I won’t have her thumped about all over the chest, or any hocus-pocus of the sort. She has bronchitis and asthma, and that’s all. If you can cure it, well and good. But it only weakens her to have you tapping and listening; and it does no good, either.’ Personal disrespect was a thing that the doctor could stand, but the profession was to him a holy thing, and a flippant word about it cut him to the quick. ‘Thank you,’ said he, picking up his hat, ‘I have the honour to wish you a very good day. I do not care to undertake the responsibility of this case.’ ‘Hullo, what’s the matter now?’ ‘It is not my habit to give opinions without examining my patient. I wonder that you should suggest such a course to a medical man. I wish you good day.’ But Sir John Millbank was a commercial man, and believed in the commercial principle that the more difficult a thing is to attain the more valuable it is. A doctor’s opinion had been to him a mere matter of guineas. But here was a young man who seemed to care nothing either for his wealth or title. His respect for his judgment increased amazingly. 48

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‘Tut! tut!’ said he; ‘Mason is not so thin-skinned. There! there! Have your way! Do what you like and I won’t say another word. I’ll just run upstairs and tell Lady Millbank that you are coming.’ The door had hardly closed behind him when the two demure young ladies darted out of their corner, and fluttered with joy in front of the astonished doctor. ‘Oh! well done, well done!’ cried the taller, clapping her hands. ‘Don’t let him bully you, doctor,’ said the other. ‘Oh, it was so nice to hear you stand up to him. That’s the way he does with poor Doctor Mason. Doctor Mason has never examined mamma yet. He always takes papa’s word for everything. Hush, Maude, here he comes again.’ They subsided in an instant into their corner, as silent and demure as ever. Doctor Horace Wilkinson followed Sir John up the broad, thickcarpeted staircase, and into the darkened sick-room. In a quarter of an hour he had sounded and sifted the case to the uttermost, and descended with the husband once more to the drawing-room. In front of the fireplace were standing two gentlemen, the one a very typical, clean-shaven, general practitioner, the other a striking-looking man of middle age, with pale blue eyes and a long red beard. ‘Hullo, Mason! You’ve come at last!’ ‘Yes, Sir John! And I have brought, as I promised, Doctor Wilkinson with me.’ ‘Doctor Wilkinson! Why, this is he.’ Doctor Mason stared in astonishment. ‘I have never seen the gentleman before,’ he cried. ‘Nevertheless I am Doctor Wilkinson—Doctor Horace Wilkinson, of 114 Canal View.’ ‘Good gracious, Sir John!’ cried Dr Mason. ‘Did you think that in a case of such importance I should call in a junior local practitioner! This is Dr Adam Wilkinson, lecturer on pulmonary diseases at Regent’s College, London, physician upon the staff of the St Swithin’s Hospital, and author of a dozen works upon the subject. He happened to be in Sutton upon a visit, and I thought I would utilise his presence to have a first-rate opinion upon Lady Millbank.’ ‘Thank you,’ said Sir John, dryly. ‘But I fear my wife is rather tired now, for she has just been very thoroughly examined by this young gentleman. I think we will let it stop at that for the present, though, of course, as you

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have had the trouble of coming here, I should be glad to have a note of your fees.’ When Dr Mason had departed, looking very disgusted, and his friend, the specialist very amused, Sir John listened to all the young physician had to say about the case. ‘Now, I’ll tell you what,’ said he, when he had finished. ‘I’m a man of my word, d’ye see? When I like a man I freeze to him. I’m a good friend and a bad enemy. I believe in you, and I don’t believe in Mason. From now on you are my doctor, and that of my family. Come and see my wife every day. How does that suit your book?’ ‘I am extremely grateful to you for your kind intentions toward me, but I am afraid there is no possible way in which I can avail myself of them.’ ‘Heh! what d’ye mean?’ ‘I could not possibly take Dr Mason’s place in the middle of a case like this. It would be a most unprofessional act.’ ‘Oh, well, go your own way!’ cried Sir John, in despair. ‘Never was such a man for making difficulties. You’ve had a fair offer and you’ve refused it, and now you can just go your own way.’ The millionaire stumped out of the room in a huff, and Dr Horace Wilkinson made his way homeward to his spirit-lamp and his one-andeightpenny tea, with his first guinea in his pocket, and with a feeling that he had upheld the best traditions of his profession. And yet this false start of his was a true start also, for it soon came to Dr Mason’s ears that his junior had had it in his power to carry off his best patient and had forborne to do so. To the honour of the profession be it said that such forbearance is the rule rather than the exception, and yet in this case, with so very junior a practitioner and so very wealthy a patient, the temptation was greater than is usual. There was a grateful note, a visit, a friendship, and now the well-known firm of Mason & Wilkinson is doing the largest family practice in Sutton.

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The Curse of Eve robert johnson was an essentially common-place man, with no feature to distinguish him from a million others. He was pale of face, ordinary in looks, neutral in opinions, thirty years of age, and a married man. By trade he was a gentleman’s outfitter in the New North Road, and the competition of business squeezed out of him the little character that was left. In his hope of conciliating customers he had become cringing and pliable, until working ever in the same routine from day to day he seemed to have sunk into a soulless machine rather than a man. No great question had ever stirred him. At the end of this snug century, self-contained in his own narrow circle, it seemed impossible that any of the mighty, primitive passions of mankind could ever reach him. Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilisation and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below. Johnson’s wife was a quiet little woman, with brown hair and gentle ways. His affection for her was the one positive trait in his character. Together they would lay out the shop window every Monday morning, the spotless shirts in their green cardboard boxes below, the neckties above hung in rows over the brass rails, the cheap studs glistening from the white cards at either side, while in the background were the rows of cloth caps and the bank of boxes in which the more valuable hats were screened from the sunlight. She kept the books and sent out the bills. No one but she knew the joys and sorrows which crept into his small life. She had shared his exultations when the gentleman who was going to India had bought ten dozen shirts and an incredible number of collars, and she had been as stricken as he when, after the goods had gone, the bill was returned from the hotel address with the intimation that no such person had lodged there. For five years they had worked, building up the business, thrown together all the more closely because their marriage had been a childless one. Now, however, there were signs that a change was at hand, and that speedily. She was unable to come downstairs, and her mother, Mrs Peyton, came over from Camberwell to nurse her and to welcome her grandchild. Little qualms of anxiety came over Johnson as his wife’s time approached. However, after all, it was a natural process. Other men’s wives went through

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it unharmed, and why should not his? He was himself one of a family of fourteen, and yet his mother was alive and hearty. It was quite the exception for anything to go wrong. And yet in spite of his reasonings the remembrance of his wife’s condition was always like a sombre background to all his other thoughts. Doctor Miles of Bridport Place, the best man in the neighbourhood, was retained five months in advance, and, as time stole on, many little packets of absurdly small white garments with frill work and ribbons began to arrive among the big consignments of male necessities. And then one evening, as Johnson was ticketing the scarfs in the shop, he heard a bustle upstairs, and Mrs Peyton came running down to say that Lucy was bad and that she thought the doctor ought to be there without delay. It was not Robert Johnson’s nature to hurry. He was prim and staid and liked to do things in an orderly fashion. It was a quarter of a mile from the corner of the New North Road where his shop stood to the doctor’s house in Bridport Place. There were no cabs in sight so he set off upon foot, leaving the lad to mind the shop. At Bridport Place he was told that the doctor had just gone to Harman Street to attend a man in a fit. Johnson started off for Harman Street, losing a little of his primness as he became more anxious. Two full cabs but no empty ones passed him on the way. At Harman Street he learned that the doctor had gone on to a case of measles, fortunately he had left the address—69 Dunstan Road, at the other side of the Regent’s Canal. Johnson’s primness had vanished now as he thought of the women waiting at home, and he began to run as hard as he could down the Kingsland Road. Some way along he sprang into a cab which stood by the curb and drove to Dunstan Road. The doctor had just left, and Robert Johnson felt inclined to sit down upon the steps in despair. Fortunately he had not sent the cab away, and he was soon back at Bridport Place. Doctor Miles had not returned yet, but they were expecting him every instant. Johnson waited, drumming his fingers on his knees, in a high, dim lit room, the air of which was charged with a faint, sickly smell of ether. The furniture was massive, and the books in the shelves were sombre, and a squat black clock ticked mournfully on the mantelpiece. It told him that it was half-past seven, and that he had been gone an hour and a quarter. Whatever would the women think of him! Every time that a distant door slammed he sprang from his chair in a quiver of eagerness. His ears strained to catch the deep notes of the doctor’s voice. 52

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And then, suddenly, with a gush of joy he heard a quick step outside, and the sharp click of the key in the lock. In an instant he was out in the hall, before the doctor’s foot was over the threshold. ‘If you please, doctor, I’ve come for you,’ he cried; ‘the wife was taken bad at six o’clock.’ He hardly knew what he expected the doctor to do. Something very energetic, certainly—to seize some drugs, perhaps, and rush excitedly with him through the gaslit streets. Instead of that Doctor Miles threw his umbrella into the rack, jerked off his hat with a somewhat peevish gesture, and pushed Johnson back into the room. ‘Let’s see! You did engage me, didn’t you?’ he asked in no very cordial voice. ‘Oh, yes, doctor, last November. Johnson, the outfitter, you know, in the New North Road.’ ‘Yes, yes. It’s a bit overdue,’ said the doctor, glancing at a list of names in a note-book with a very shiny cover. ‘Well, how is she?’ ‘I don’t—’ ‘Ah, of course, it’s your first. You’ll know more about it next time.’ ‘Mrs Peyton said it was time you were there, sir.’ ‘My dear sir, there can be no very pressing hurry in a first case. We shall have an all-night affair, I fancy. You can’t get an engine to go without coals, Mr Johnson, and I have had nothing but a light lunch.’ ‘We could have something cooked for you—something hot and a cup of tea.’ ‘Thank you, but I fancy my dinner is actually on the table. I can do no good in the earlier stages. Go home and say that I am coming, and I will be round immediately afterwards.’ A sort of horror filled Robert Johnson as he gazed at this man who could think about his dinner at such a moment. He had not imagination enough to realise that the experience which seemed so appallingly important to him, was the merest everyday matter of business to the medical man who could not have lived for a year had he not, amid the rush of work, remembered what was due to his own health. To Johnson he seemed little better than a monster. His thoughts were bitter as he sped back to his shop. ‘You’ve taken your time,’ said his mother-in-law reproachfully, looking down the stairs as he entered. ‘I couldn’t help it!’ he gasped. ‘Is it over?’

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‘Over! She’s got to be worse, poor dear, before she can be better. Where’s Dr Miles?’ ‘He’s coming after he’s had dinner.’ The old woman was about to make some reply, when, from the halfopened door behind a high whinnying voice cried out for her. She ran back and closed the door, while Johnson, sick at heart, turned into the shop. There he sent the lad home and busied himself frantically in putting up shutters and turning out boxes. When all was closed and finished he seated himself in the parlour behind the shop. But he could not sit still. He rose incessantly to walk a few paces and then fell back into a chair once more. Suddenly the clatter of china fell upon his ear, and he saw the maid pass the door with a cup on a tray and a smoking teapot. ‘Who is that for, Jane?’ he asked. ‘For the mistress, Mr Johnson. She says she would fancy it.’ There was immeasurable consolation to him in that homely cup of tea. It wasn’t so very bad after all if his wife could think of such things. So light-hearted was he that he asked for a cup also. He had just finished it when the doctor arrived, with a small black leather bag in his hand. ‘Well, how is she?’ he asked genially. ‘Oh, she’s very much better,’ said Johnson, with enthusiasm. ‘Dear me, that’s bad!’ said the doctor. ‘Perhaps it will do if I look in on my morning round?’ ‘No, no,’ cried Johnson, clutching at his thick frieze overcoat. ‘We are so glad that you have come. And, doctor, please come down soon and let me know what you think about it.’ The doctor passed upstairs, his firm, heavy steps resounding through the house. Johnson could hear his boots creaking as he walked about the floor above him, and the sound was a consolation to him. It was crisp and decided, the tread of a man who had plenty of self-confidence. Presently, still straining his ears to catch what was going on, he heard the scraping of a chair as it was drawn along the floor, and a moment later he heard the door fly open and someone come rushing downstairs. Johnson sprang up with his hair bristling, thinking that some dreadful thing had occurred, but it was only his mother-in-law, incoherent with excitement and searching for scissors and some tape. She vanished again and Jane passed up the stairs with a pile of newly aired linen. Then, after an interval of silence, Johnson heard the heavy, creaking tread and the doctor came down into the parlour. 54

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‘That’s better,’ said he, pausing with his hand upon the door. ‘You look pale, Mr Johnson.’ ‘Oh no, sir, not at all,’ he answered deprecatingly, mopping his brow with his handkerchief. ‘There is no immediate cause for alarm,’ said Doctor Miles. ‘The case is not all that we could wish it. Still we will hope for the best.’ ‘Is there danger, sir?’ gasped Johnson. ‘Well, there is always danger, of course. It is not altogether a favourable case, but still it might be much worse. I have given her a draught. I saw as I passed that they have been doing a little building opposite to you. It’s an improving quarter. The rents go higher and higher. You have a lease of your own little place, eh?’ ‘Yes, sir, yes!’ cried Johnson, whose ears were straining for every sound from above, and who felt none the less that it was very soothing that the doctor should be able to chat so easily at such a time. ‘That’s to say no, sir, I am a yearly tenant.’ ‘Ah, I should get a lease if I were you. There’s Marshall, the watchmaker, down the street, I attended his wife twice and saw him through the typhoid when they took up the drains in Prince Street. I assure you his landlord sprung his rent nearly forty a year and he had to pay or clear out.’ ‘Did his wife get through it, doctor?’ ‘Oh yes, she did very well. Hullo! Hullo!’ He slanted his ear to the ceiling with a questioning face, and then darted swiftly from the room. It was March and the evenings were chill, so Jane had lit the fire, but the wind drove the smoke downwards and the air was full of its acrid taint. Johnson felt chilled to the bone, though rather by his apprehensions than by the weather. He crouched over the fire with his thin white hands held out to the blaze. At ten o’clock Jane brought in the joint of cold meat and laid his place for supper, but he could not bring himself to touch it. He drank a glass of the beer, however, and felt the better for it. The tension of his nerves seemed to have reacted upon his hearing, and he was able to follow the most trivial things in the room above. Once, when the beer was still heartening him, he nerved himself to creep on tiptoe up the stair and to listen to what was going on. The bedroom door was half an inch open, and through the slit he could catch a glimpse of the clean-shaven face of the doctor, looking wearier and more anxious than before. Then he rushed downstairs like a lunatic, and running to the

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door he tried to distract his thoughts by watching what was going on in the street. The shops were all shut, and some rollicking boon companions came shouting along from the public-house. He stayed at the door until the stragglers had thinned down, and then came back to his seat by the fire. In his dim brain he was asking himself questions which had never intruded themselves before. Where was the justice of it? What had his sweet, innocent little wife done that she should be used so? Why was nature so cruel? He was frightened at his own thoughts, and yet wondered that they had never occurred to him before. As the early morning drew in, Johnson, sick at heart and shivering in every limb, sat with his great-coat huddled round him, staring at the grey ashes and waiting hopelessly for some relief. His face was white and clammy, and his nerves had been numbed into a half conscious state by the long monotony of misery. But suddenly all his feelings leapt into keen life again as he heard the bedroom door open and the doctor’s steps upon the stair. Robert Johnson was precise and unemotional in everyday life, but he almost shrieked now as he rushed forward to know if it were over. One glance at the stern, drawn face which met him showed that it was no pleasant news which had sent the doctor downstairs. His appearance had altered as much as Johnson’s during the last few hours. His hair was on end, his face flushed, his forehead dotted with beads of perspiration. There was a peculiar fierceness in his eye, and about the lines of his mouth, a fighting look as befitted a man who for hours on end had been striving with the hungriest of foes for the most precious of prizes. But there was a sadness too, as though his grim opponent had been overmastering him. He sat down and leaned his head upon his hand like a man who is fagged out. ‘I thought it my duty to see you, Mr Johnson, and to tell you that it is a very nasty case. Your wife’s heart is not strong, and she has some symptoms which I do not like. What I wanted to say is that if you would like to have a second opinion I shall be very glad to meet anyone whom you might suggest.’ Johnson was so dazed by his want of sleep and the evil news that he could hardly grasp the doctor’s meaning. The other, seeing him hesitate, thought that he was considering the expense. ‘Smith or Hawley would come for two guineas,’ said he. ‘But I think Pritchard of the City Road is the best man.’ ‘Oh, yes, bring the best man,’ cried Johnson. 56

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‘Pritchard would want three guineas. He is a senior man, you see.’ ‘I’d give him all I have if he would pull her through. Shall I run for him?’ ‘Yes. Go to my house first and ask for the green baize bag. The assistant will give it to you. Tell him I want the A.C.E. mixture. Her heart is too weak for chloroform. Then go for Pritchard and bring him back with you.’ It was heavenly for Johnson to have something to do and to feel that he was of some use to his wife. He ran swiftly to Bridport Place, his footfalls clattering through the silent streets, and the big dark policemen turning their yellow funnels of light on him as he passed. Two tugs at the night-bell brought down a sleepy, half-clad assistant, who handed him a stoppered glass bottle and a cloth bag which contained something which clinked when you moved it. Johnson thrust the bottle into his pocket, seized the green bag, and pressing his hat firmly down ran as hard as he could set foot to ground until he was in the City Road and saw the name of Pritchard engraved in white upon a red ground. He bounded in triumph up the three steps which led to the door, and as he did so there was a crash behind him. His precious bottle was in fragments upon the pavement. For a moment he felt as if it were his wife’s body that was lying there. But the run had freshened his wits and he saw that the mischief might be repaired. He pulled vigorously at the night-bell. ‘Well, what’s the matter?’ asked a gruff voice at his elbow. He started back and looked up at the windows, but there was no sign of life. He was approaching the bell again with the intention of pulling it, when a perfect roar burst from the wall. ‘I can’t stand shivering here all night,’ cried the voice. ‘Say who you are and what you want or I shut the tube.’ Then for the first time Johnson saw that the end of a speaking tube hung out of the wall just above the bell. He shouted up it,— ‘I want you to come with me to meet Doctor Miles at a confinement at once.’ ‘How far?’ shrieked the irascible voice. ‘The New North Road, Hoxton.’ ‘My consultation fee is three guineas, payable at the time.’ ‘All right,’ shouted Johnson. ‘You are to bring a bottle of A.C.E. mixture with you.’ ‘All right! Wait a bit!’

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Five minutes later an elderly, hard-faced man, with grizzled hair flung open the door. As he emerged a voice from somewhere in the shadows cried,— ‘Mind you take your cravat, John,’ and he impatiently growled something over his shoulder in reply. The consultant was a man who had been hardened by a life of ceaseless labour, and who had been driven, as so many others have been, by the needs of his own increasing family to set the commercial before the philanthropic side of his profession. Yet beneath his rough crust he was a man with a kindly heart. ‘We don’t want to break a record,’ said he, pulling up and panting after attempting to keep up with Johnson for five minutes. ‘I would go quicker if I could, my dear sir, and I quite sympathise with your anxiety, but really I can’t manage it.’ So Johnson, on fire with impatience, had to slow down until they reached the New North Road, when he ran ahead and had the door open for the doctor when he came. He heard the two meet outside the bedroom, and caught scraps of their conversation. ‘Sorry to knock you up—nasty case—decent people.’ Then it sank into a mumble and the door closed behind them. Johnson sat up in his chair now, listening keenly, for he knew that a crisis must be at hand. He heard the two doctors moving about, and was able to distinguish the step of Pritchard, which had a drag in it, from the clean, crisp sound of the other’s footfall. There was silence for a few minutes and then a curious drunken, mumbling sing-song voice came quavering up, very unlike anything which he had heard hitherto. At the same time a sweetish, insidious scent, imperceptible perhaps to any nerves less strained than his, crept down the stairs and penetrated into the room. The voice dwindled into a mere drone and finally sank away into silence, and Johnson gave a long sigh of relief, for he knew that the drug had done its work and that, come what might, there should be no more pain for the sufferer. But soon the silence became even more trying to him than the cries had been. He had no clue now as to what was going on, and his mind swarmed with horrible possibilities. He rose and went to the bottom of the stairs again. He heard the clink of metal against metal, and the subdued murmur of the doctors’ voices. Then he heard Mrs Peyton say something, in a tone as of fear or expostulation, and again the doctors 58

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murmured together. For twenty minutes he stood there leaning against the wall, listening to the occasional rumbles of talk without being able to catch a word of it. And then of a sudden there rose out of the silence the strangest little piping cry, and Mrs Peyton screamed out in her delight and the man ran into the parlour and flung himself down upon the horsehair sofa, drumming his heels on it in his ecstasy. But often the great cat Fate lets us go, only to clutch us again in a fiercer grip. As minute after minute passed and still no sound came from above save those thin, glutinous cries, Johnson cooled from his frenzy of joy, and lay breathless with his ears straining. They were moving slowly about. They were talking in subdued tones. Still minute after minute passing, and no word from the voice for which he listened. His nerves were dulled by his night of trouble, and he waited in limp wretchedness upon his sofa. There he still sat when the doctors came down to him—a bedraggled, miserable figure with his face grimy and his hair unkempt from his long vigil. He rose as they entered, bracing himself against the mantelpiece. ‘Is she dead?’ he asked. ‘Doing well,’ answered the doctor. And at the words that little conventional spirit which had never known until that night the capacity for fierce agony which lay within it, learned for the second time that there were springs of joy also which it had never tapped before. His impulse was to fall upon his knees, but he was shy before the doctors. ‘Can I go up?’ ‘In a few minutes.’ ‘I’m sure, doctor, I’m very—I’m very—’ he grew inarticulate. ‘Here are your three guineas, Doctor Pritchard. I wish they were three hundred.’ ‘So do I,’ said the senior man, and they laughed as they shook hands. Johnson opened the shop door for them and heard their talk as they stood for an instant outside. ‘Looked nasty at one time.’ ‘Very glad to have your help.’ ‘Delighted, I’m sure. Won’t you step round and have a cup of coffee?’ ‘No, thanks. I’m expecting another case.’ The firm step and the dragging one passed away to the right and the left. Johnson turned from the door still with that turmoil of joy in his heart. He seemed to be making a new start in life. He felt that he was

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a stronger and a deeper man. Perhaps all this suffering had an object then. It might prove to be a blessing both to his wife and to him. The very thought was one which he would have been incapable of conceiving twelve hours before. He was full of new emotions. If there had been a harrowing there had been a planting too. ‘Can I come up?’ he cried, and then, without waiting for an answer, he took the steps three at a time. Mrs Peyton was standing by a soapy bath with a bundle in her hands. From under the curve of a brown shawl there looked out at him the strangest little red face with crumpled features, moist, loose lips, and eyelids which quivered like a rabbit’s nostrils. The weak neck had let the head topple over, and it rested upon the shoulder. ‘Kiss it, Robert!’ cried the grandmother. ‘Kiss your son!’ But he felt a resentment to the little, red, blinking creature. He could not forgive it yet for that long night of misery. He caught sight of a white face in the bed and he ran towards it with such love and pity as his speech could find no words for. ‘Thank God it is over! Lucy, dear, it was dreadful!’ ‘But I’m so happy now. I never was so happy in my life.’ Her eyes were fixed upon the brown bundle. ‘You mustn’t talk,’ said Mrs Peyton. ‘But don’t leave me,’ whispered his wife. So he sat in silence with his hand in hers. The lamp was burning dim and the first cold light of dawn was breaking through the window. The night had been long and dark but the day was the sweeter and the purer in consequence. London was waking up. The roar began to rise from the street. Lives had come and lives had gone, but the great machine was still working out its dim and tragic destiny.

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Sweethearts it is hard for the general practitioner who sits among his patients both morning and evening, and sees them in their homes between, to steal time for one little daily breath of cleanly air. To win it he must slip early from his bed and walk out between shuttered shops when it is chill but very clear, and all things are sharply outlined, as in a frost. It is an hour that has a charm of its own, when, but for a postman or a milkman, one has the pavement to oneself, and even the most common thing takes an ever-recurring freshness, as though causeway, and lamp, and signboard had all wakened to the new day. Then even an inland city may seem beautiful, and bear virtue in its smoke-tainted air. But it was by the sea that I lived, in a town that was unlovely enough were it not for its glorious neighbour. And who cares for the town when one can sit on the bench at the headland, and look out over the huge blue bay, and the yellow scimitar that curves before it. I loved it when its great face was freckled with the fishing boats, and I loved it when the big ships went past, far out, a little hillock of white and no hull, with topsails curved like a bodice, so stately and demure. But most of all I loved it when no trace of man marred the majesty of Nature, and when the sun-bursts slanted down on it from between the drifting rainclouds. Then I have seen the further edge draped in the gauze of the driving rain, with its thin grey shading under the slow clouds, while my headland was golden, and the sun gleamed upon the breakers and struck deep through the green waves beyond, showing up the purple patches where the beds of seaweed are lying. Such a morning as that, with the wind in his hair, and the spray on his lips, and the cry of the eddying gulls in his ear, may send a man back braced afresh to the reek of a sick-room, and the dead, drab weariness of practice. It was on such another day that I first saw my old man. He came to my bench just as I was leaving it. My eye must have picked him out even in a crowded street, for he was a man of large frame and fine presence, with something of distinction in the set of his lip and the poise of his head. He limped up the winding path leaning heavily upon his stick, as though those great shoulders had become too much at last for the failing limbs that bore them. As he approached, my eyes caught Nature’s danger signal, that faint bluish tinge in nose and lip which tells of a labouring heart.

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‘The brae is a little trying, sir,’ said I. ‘Speaking as a physician, I should say that you would do well to rest here before you go further.’ He inclined his head in a stately, old-world fashion, and seated himself upon the bench. Seeing that he had no wish to speak I was silent also, but I could not help watching him out of the corners of my eyes, for he was such a wonderful survival of the early half of the century, with his low-crowned, curly-brimmed hat, his black satin tie which fastened with a buckle at the back, and, above all, his large, fleshy, clean-shaven face shot with its mesh of wrinkles. Those eyes, ere they had grown dim, had looked out from the box-seat of mail coaches, and had seen the knots of navvies as they toiled on the brown embankments. Those lips had smiled over the first numbers of ‘Pickwick,’ and had gossiped of the promising young man who wrote them. The face itself was a seventy-year almanack, and every seam an entry upon it where public as well as private sorrow left its trace. That pucker on the forehead stood for the Mutiny, perhaps; that line of care for the Crimean winter, it may be; and that last little sheaf of wrinkles, as my fancy hoped, for the death of Gordon. And so, as I dreamed in my foolish way, the old gentleman with the shining stock was gone, and it was seventy years of a great nation’s life that took shape before me on the headland in the morning. But he soon brought me back to earth again. As he recovered his breath he took a letter out of his pocket, and, putting on a pair of horn-rimmed eye-glasses, he read it through very carefully. Without any design of playing the spy I could not help observing that it was in a woman’s hand. When he had finished it he read it again, and then sat with the corners of his mouth drawn down and his eyes staring vacantly out over the bay, the most forlorn-looking old gentleman that ever I have seen. All that is kindly within me was set stirring by that wistful face, but I knew that he was in no humour for talk, and so, at last, with my breakfast and my patients calling me, I left him on the bench and started for home. I never gave him another thought until the next morning, when, at the same hour, he turned up upon the headland, and shared the bench which I had been accustomed to look upon as my own. He bowed again before sitting down, but was no more inclined than formerly to enter into conversation. There had been a change in him during the last twentyfour hours, and all for the worse. The face seemed more heavy and more wrinkled, while that ominous venous tinge was more pronounced as he panted up the hill. The clean lines of his cheek and chin were marred by 62

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a day’s growth of grey stubble, and his large, shapely head had lost something of the brave carriage which had struck me when first I glanced at him. He had a letter there, the same, or another, but still in a woman’s hand, and over this he was moping and mumbling in his senile fashion, with his brow puckered, and the corners of his mouth drawn down like those of a fretting child. So I left him, with a vague wonder as to who he might be, and why a single spring day should have wrought such a change upon him. So interested was I that next morning I was on the look out for him. Sure enough, at the same hour, I saw him coming up the hill; but very slowly, with a bent back and a heavy head. It was shocking to me to see the change in him as he approached. ‘I am afraid that our air does not agree with you, sir,’ I ventured to remark. But it was as though he had no heart for talk. He tried, as I thought, to make some fitting reply, but it slurred off into a mumble and silence. How bent and weak and old he seemed—ten years older at the least than when first I had seen him! It went to my heart to see this fine old fellow wasting away before my eyes. There was the eternal letter which he unfolded with his shaking fingers. Who was this woman whose words moved him so? Some daughter, perhaps, or grand-daughter, who should have been the light of his home instead of— I smiled to find how bitter I was growing, and how swiftly I was weaving a romance round an unshaven old man and his correspondence. Yet all day he lingered in my mind, and I had fitful glimpses of those two trembling, blue-veined, knuckly hands with the paper rustling between them. I had hardly hoped to see him again. Another day’s decline must, I thought, hold him to his room, if not to his bed. Great, then, was my surprise when, as I approached my bench, I saw that he was already there. But as I came up to him I could scarce be sure that it was indeed the same man. There were the curly-brimmed hat, and the shining stock, and the horn glasses, but where were the stoop and the grey-stubbled, pitiable face? He was clean-shaven and firm lipped, with a bright eye and a head that poised itself upon his great shoulders like an eagle on a rock. His back was as straight and square as a grenadier’s, and he switched at the pebbles with his stick in his exuberant vitality. In the button-hole of his well-brushed black coat there glinted a golden blossom, and the corner of a dainty red silk handkerchief lapped over from his breast-pocket. He

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might have been the eldest son of the weary creature who had sat there the morning before. ‘Good morning, sir, good morning!’ he cried with a merry waggle of his cane. ‘Good morning!’ I answered; ‘how beautiful the bay is looking.’ ‘Yes, sir, but you should have seen it just before the sun rose.’ ‘What, have you been here since then?’ ‘I was here when there was scarce light to see the path.’ ‘You are a very early riser.’ ‘On occasion, sir; on occasion!’ He cocked his eye at me as if to gauge whether I were worthy of his confidence. ‘The fact is, sir, that my wife is coming back to me to-day.’ I suppose that my face showed that I did not quite see the force of the explanation. My eyes, too, may have given him assurance of sympathy, for he moved quite close to me and began speaking in a low, confidential voice, as if the matter were of such weight that even the sea-gulls must be kept out of our councils. ‘Are you a married man, sir?’ ‘No, I am not.’ ‘Ah, then you cannot quite understand it. My wife and I have been married for nearly fifty years, and we have never been parted, never at all, until now.’ ‘Was it for long?’ I asked. ‘Yes, sir. This is the fourth day. She had to go to Scotland. A matter of duty, you understand, and the doctors would not let me go. Not that I would have allowed them to stop me, but she was on their side. Now, thank God! it is over, and she may be here at any moment.’ ‘Here!’ ‘Yes, here. This headland and bench were old friends of ours thirty years ago. The people with whom we stay are not, to tell the truth, very congenial, and we have little privacy among them. That is why we prefer to meet here. I could not be sure which train would bring her, but if she had come by the very earliest she would have found me waiting.’ ‘In that case—’ said I, rising. ‘No, sir, no,’ he entreated, ‘I beg that you will stay. It does not weary you, this domestic talk of mine?’ ‘On the contrary.’ 64

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‘I have been so driven inwards during these few last days! Ah, what a nightmare it has been! Perhaps it may seem strange to you that an old fellow like me should feel like this.’ ‘It is charming.’ ‘No credit to me, sir! There’s not a man on this planet but would feel the same if he had the good fortune to be married to such a woman. Perhaps, because you see me like this, and hear me speak of our long life together, you conceive that she is old, too.’ He laughed heartily, and his eyes twinkled at the humour of the idea. ‘She’s one of those women, you know, who have youth in their hearts, and so it can never be very far from their faces. To me she’s just as she was when she first took my hand in hers in ’45. A wee little bit stouter, perhaps, but then, if she had a fault as a girl, it was that she was a shade too slender. She was above me in station, you know—I a clerk, and she the daughter of my employer. Oh! it was quite a romance, I give you my word, and I won her; and, somehow, I have never got over the freshness and the wonder of it. To think that that sweet, lovely girl has walked by my side all through life, and that I have been able—’ He stopped suddenly, and I glanced round at him in surprise. He was shaking all over, in every fibre of his great body. His hands were clawing at the woodwork, and his feet shuffling on the gravel. I saw what it was. He was trying to rise, but was so excited that he could not. I half extended my hand, but a higher courtesy constrained me to draw it back again and turn my face to the sea. An instant afterwards he was up and hurrying down the path. A woman was coming towards us. She was quite close before he had seen her—thirty yards at the utmost. I know not if she had ever been as he described her, or whether it was but some ideal which he carried in his brain. The person upon whom I looked was tall, it is true, but she was thick and shapeless, with a ruddy, full-blown face, and a skirt grotesquely gathered up. There was a green ribbon in her hat, which jarred upon my eyes, and her blouse-like bodice was full and clumsy. And this was the lovely girl, the ever youthful! My heart sank as I thought how little such a woman might appreciate him, how unworthy she might be of his love. She came up the path in her solid way, while he staggered along to meet her. Then, as they came together, looking discreetly out of the

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furthest corner of my eye, I saw that he put out both his hands, while she, shrinking from a public caress, took one of them in hers and shook it. As she did so I saw her face, and I was easy in my mind for my old man. God grant that when this hand is shaking, and when this back is bowed, a woman’s eyes may look so into mine.

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A Physiologist’s Wife professor ainslie grey had not come down to breakfast at the usual hour. The presentation chiming-clock which stood between the terracotta busts of Claude Bernard and of John Hunter upon the dining-room mantelpiece had rung out the half-hour and the three-quarters. Now its golden hand was verging upon the nine, and yet there were no signs of the master of the house. It was an unprecedented occurrence. During the twelve years that she had kept house for him, his youngest sister had never known him a second behind his time. She sat now in front of the high silver coffeepot, uncertain whether to order the gong to be resounded or to wait on in silence. Either course might be a mistake. Her brother was not a man who permitted mistakes. Miss Ainslie Grey was rather above the middle height, thin, with peering, puckered eyes, and the rounded shoulders which mark the bookish woman. Her face was long and spare, flecked with colour above the cheek-bones, with a reasonable, thoughtful forehead, and a dash of absolute obstinacy in her thin lips and prominent chin. Snow-white cuffs and collar, with a plain dark dress, cut with almost Quaker-like simplicity, bespoke the primness of her taste. An ebony cross hung over her flattened chest. She sat very upright in her chair, listening with raised eyebrows, and swinging her eye-glasses backwards and forwards with a nervous gesture which was peculiar to her. Suddenly she gave a sharp, satisfied jerk of the head, and began to pour out the coffee. From outside there came the dull thudding sound of heavy feet upon thick carpet. The door swung open, and the Professor entered with a quick, nervous step. He nodded to his sister, and seating himself at the other side of the table, began to open the small pile of letters which lay beside his plate. Professor Ainslie Grey was at that time forty-three years of age— nearly twelve years older than his sister. His career had been a brilliant one. At Edinburgh, at Cambridge, and at Vienna he had laid the foundations of his great reputation, both in physiology and in zoology. His pamphlet, ‘On the Mesoblastic Origin of Excitomotor Nerve Roots,’ had won him his fellowship of the Royal Society; and his researches, ‘Upon the Nature of Bathybius, with some Remarks upon

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Lithococci,’ had been translated into at least three European languages. He had been referred to by one of the greatest living authorities as being the very type and embodiment of all that was best in modern science. No wonder, then, that when the commercial city of Birchespool decided to create a medical school, they were only too glad to confer the chair of physiology upon Mr. Ainslie Grey. They valued him the more from the conviction that their class was only one step in his upward journey, and that the first vacancy would remove him to some more illustrious seat of learning. In person he was not unlike his sister. The same eyes, the same contour, the same intellectual forehead. His lips, however, were firmer, and his long, thin lower jaw was sharper and more decided. He ran his finger and thumb down it from time to time, as he glanced over his letters. ‘Those maids are very noisy,’ he remarked, as a clack of tongues sounded in the distance. ‘It is Sarah,’ said his sister; ‘I shall speak about it.’ She had handed over his coffee-cup, and was sipping at her own, glancing furtively through her narrowed lids at the austere face of her brother. ‘The first great advance of the human race,’ said the Professor, ‘was when, by the development of their left frontal convolutions, they attained the power of speech. Their second advance was when they learned to control that power. Woman has not yet attained the second stage.’ He half closed his eyes as he spoke, and thrust his chin forward, but as he ceased he had a trick of suddenly opening both eyes very wide and staring sternly at his interlocutor. ‘I am not garrulous, John,’ said his sister. ‘No, Ada; in many respects you approach the superior or male type.’ The Professor bowed over his egg with the manner of one who utters a courtly compliment; but the lady pouted, and gave an impatient little shrug of her shoulders. ‘You were late this morning, John,’ she remarked, after a pause. ‘Yes, Ada; I slept badly. Some little cerebral congestion, no doubt due to over-stimulation of the centres of thought. I have been a little disturbed in my mind.’ His sister stared across at him in astonishment. The Professor’s mental processes had hitherto been as regular as his habits. Twelve years’ continual intercourse had taught her that he lived in a serene and 68

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rarefied atmosphere of scientific calm, high above the petty emotions which affect humbler minds. ‘You are surprised, Ada,’ he remarked. ‘Well, I cannot wonder at it. I should have been surprised myself if I had been told that I was so sensitive to vascular influences. For, after all, all disturbances are vascular if you probe them deep enough. I am thinking of getting married.’ ‘Not Mrs O’James?’ cried Ada Grey, laying down her egg-spoon. ‘My dear, you have the feminine quality of receptivity very remarkably developed. Mrs O’James is the lady in question.’ ‘But you know so little of her. The Esdailes themselves know so little. She is really only an acquaintance, although she is staying at The Lindens. Would it not be wise to speak to Mrs Esdaile first, John?’ ‘I do not think, Ada, that Mrs Esdaile is at all likely to say anything which would materially affect my course of action. I have given the matter due consideration. The scientific mind is slow at arriving at conclusions, but having once formed them, it is not prone to change. Matrimony is the natural condition of the human race. I have, as you know, been so engaged in academical and other work, that I have had no time to devote to merely personal questions. It is different now, and I see no valid reason why I should forego this opportunity of seeking a suitable helpmate.’ ‘And you are engaged?’ ‘Hardly that, Ada. I ventured yesterday to indicate to the lady that I was prepared to submit to the common lot of humanity. I shall wait upon her after my morning lecture, and learn how far my proposals meet with her acquiescence. But you frown, Ada!’ His sister started, and made an effort to conceal her expression of annoyance. She even stammered out some few words of congratulation, but a vacant look had come into her brother’s eyes, and he was evidently not listening to her. ‘I am sure, John,’ she said, ‘that I wish you the happiness which you deserve. If I hesitated at all, it is because I know how much is at stake, and because the thing is so sudden, so unexpected.’ Her thin white hand stole up to the black cross upon her bosom. ‘These are moments when we need guidance, John. If I could persuade you to turn to spiritual—’ The Professor waved the suggestion away with a deprecating hand. ‘It is useless to reopen that question,’ he said. ‘We cannot argue upon it. You assume more than I can grant. I am forced to dispute your premises. We have no common basis.’

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His sister sighed. ‘You have no faith,’ she said. ‘I have faith in those great evolutionary forces which are leading the human race to some unknown but elevated goal.’ ‘You believe in nothing.’ ‘On the contrary, my dear Ada, I believe in the differentiation of protoplasm.’ She shook her head sadly. It was the one subject upon which she ventured to dispute her brother’s infallibility. ‘This is rather beside the question,’ remarked the Professor, folding up his napkin. ‘If I am not mistaken, there is some possibility of another matrimonial event occurring in the family. Eh, Ada? What!’ His small eyes glittered with sly facetiousness as he shot a twinkle at his sister. She sat very stiff, and traced patterns upon the cloth with the sugar-tongs. ‘Dr James McMurdo O’Brien—’ said the Professor, sonorously. ‘Don’t, John, don’t!’ cried Miss Ainslie Grey. ‘Dr James McMurdo O’Brien,’ continued her brother inexorably, ‘is a man who has already made his mark upon the science of the day. He is my first and my most distinguished pupil. I assure you, Ada, that his “Remarks upon the Bile-Pigments, with special reference to Urobilin,” is likely to live as a classic. It is not too much to say that he has revolutionised our views about urobilin.’ He paused, but his sister sat silent, with bent head and flushed cheeks. The little ebony cross rose and fell with her hurried breathings. ‘Dr James McMurdo O’Brien has, as you know, the offer of the physiological chair at Melbourne. He has been in Australia five years, and has a brilliant future before him. To-day he leaves us for Edinburgh, and in two months’ time he goes out to take over his new duties. You know his feeling towards you. It rests with you as to whether he goes out alone. Speaking for myself, I cannot imagine any higher mission for a woman of culture than to go through life in the company of a man who is capable of such a research as that which Dr James McMurdo O’Brien has brought to a successful conclusion.’ ‘He has not spoken to me,’ murmured the lady. ‘Ah, there are signs which are more subtle than speech,’ said her brother, wagging his head. ‘But you are pale. Your vasomotor system is excited. Your arterioles have contracted. Let me entreat you to compose 70

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yourself. I think I hear the carriage. I fancy that you may have a visitor this morning, Ada. You will excuse me now.’ With a quick glance at the clock he strode off into the hall, and within a few minutes he was rattling in his quiet, well-appointed brougham through the brick-lined streets of Birchespool. His lecture over, Professor Ainslie Grey paid a visit to his laboratory, where he adjusted several scientific instruments, made a note as to the progress of three separate infusions of bacteria, cut half-a-dozen sections with a microtome, and finally resolved the difficulties of seven different gentlemen, who were pursuing researches in as many separate lines of inquiry. Having thus conscientiously and methodically completed the routine of his duties, he returned to his carriage and ordered the coachman to drive him to The Lindens. His face as he drove was cold and impassive, but he drew his fingers from time to time down his prominent chin with a jerky, twitchy movement. The Lindens was an old-fashioned, ivy-clad house which had once been in the country, but was now caught in the long, red-brick feelers of the growing city. It still stood back from the road in the privacy of its own grounds. A winding path, lined with laurel bushes, led to the arched and porticoed entrance. To the right was a lawn, and at the far side, under the shadow of a hawthorn, a lady sat in a garden-chair with a book in her hands. At the click of the gate she started, and the Professor, catching sight of her, turned away from the door, and strode in her direction. ‘What! won’t you go in and see Mrs. Esdaile?’ she asked, sweeping out from under the shadow of the hawthorn. She was a small woman, strongly feminine, from the rich coils of her light-coloured hair to the dainty garden slipper which peeped from under her cream-tinted dress. One tiny well-gloved hand was outstretched in greeting, while the other pressed a thick, green-covered volume against her side. Her decision and quick, tactful manner bespoke the mature woman of the world; but her upraised face had preserved a girlish and even infantile expression of innocence in its large, fearless, grey eyes, and sensitive, humorous mouth. Mrs O’James was a widow, and she was two-and-thirty years of age; but neither fact could have been deduced from her appearance. ‘You will surely go in and see Mrs Esdaile,’ she repeated, glancing up at him with eyes which had in them something between a challenge and a caress.

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‘I did not come to see Mrs. Esdaile,’ he answered, with no relaxation of his cold and grave manner; ‘I came to see you.’ ‘I am sure I should be highly honoured,’ she said, with just the slightest little touch of brogue in her accent. ‘What are the students to do without their Professor?’ ‘I have already completed my academic duties. Take my arm, and we shall walk in the sunshine. Surely we cannot wonder that Eastern people should have made a deity of the sun. It is the great beneficent force of Nature—man’s ally against cold, sterility, and all that is abhorrent to him. What were you reading?’ ‘Hale’s Matter and Life.’ The Professor raised his thick eyebrows. ‘Hale!’ he said, and then again in a kind of whisper, ‘Hale!’ ‘You differ from him?’ she asked. ‘It is not I who differ from him. I am only a monad—a thing of no moment. The whole tendency of the highest plane of modern thought differs from him. He defends the indefensible. He is an excellent observer, but a feeble reasoner. I should not recommend you to found your conclusions upon “Hale.” ’ ‘I must read Nature’s Chronicle to counteract his pernicious influence,’ said Mrs O’James, with a soft, cooing laugh. Nature’s Chronicle was one of the many books in which Professor Ainslie Grey had enforced the negative doctrines of scientific agnosticism. ‘It is a faulty work,’ said he; ‘I cannot recommend it. I would rather refer you to the standard writings of some of my older and more eloquent colleagues.’ There was a pause in their talk as they paced up and down on the green, velvet-like lawn in the genial sunshine. ‘Have you thought at all,’ he asked at last, ‘of the matter upon which I spoke to you last night?’ She said nothing, but walked by his side with her eyes averted and her face aslant. ‘I would not hurry you unduly,’ he continued. ‘I know that it is a matter which can scarcely be decided off-hand. In my own case, it cost me some thought before I ventured to make the suggestion. I am not an emotional man, but I am conscious in your presence of the great evolutionary instinct which makes either sex the complement of the other.’ ‘You believe in love, then?’ she asked, with a twinkling, upward glance. 72

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‘I am forced to.’ ‘And yet you can deny the soul?’ ‘How far these questions are psychic and how far material is still sub judice,’ said the Professor, with an air of toleration. ‘Protoplasm may prove to be the physical basis of love as well as of life.’ ‘How inflexible you are!’ she exclaimed; ‘you would draw love down to the level of physics.’ ‘Or draw physics up to the level of love.’ ‘Come, that is much better,’ she cried, with her sympathetic laugh. ‘That is really very pretty, and puts science in quite a delightful light.’ Her eyes sparkled, and she tossed her chin with the pretty, wilful air of a woman who is mistress of the situation. ‘I have reason to believe,’ said the Professor, ‘that my position here will prove to be only a stepping-stone to some wider scene of scientific activity. Yet, even here, my chair brings me in some fifteen hundred pounds a year, which is supplemented by a few hundreds from my books. I should therefore be in a position to provide you with those comforts to which you are accustomed. So much for my pecuniary position. As to my constitution, it has always been sound. I have never suffered from any illness in my life, save fleeting attacks of cephalalgia, the result of too prolonged a stimulation of the centres of cerebration. My father and mother had no sign of any morbid diathesis, but I will not conceal from you that my grandfather was afflicted with podagra.’ Mrs O’James looked startled. ‘Is that very serious?’ she asked. ‘It is gout,’ said the Professor. ‘Oh, is that all? It sounded much worse than that.’ ‘It is a grave taint, but I trust that I shall not be a victim to atavism. I have laid these facts before you because they are factors which cannot be overlooked in forming your decision. May I ask now whether you see your way to accepting my proposal?’ He paused in his walk, and looked earnestly and expectantly down at her. A struggle was evidently going on in her mind. Her eyes were cast down, her little slipper tapped the lawn, and her fingers played nervously with her chatelain. Suddenly, with a sharp, quick gesture which had in it something of abandon and recklessness, she held out her hand to her companion.

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‘I accept,’ she said. They were standing under the shadow of the hawthorn. He stooped gravely down, and kissed her glove-covered fingers. ‘I trust that you may never have cause to regret your decision,’ he said. ‘I trust that you never may,’ she cried, with a heaving breast. There were tears in her eyes, and her lips twitched with some strong emotion. ‘Come into the sunshine again,’ said he. ‘It is the great restorative. Your nerves are shaken. Some little congestion of the medulla and pons. It is always instructive to reduce psychic or emotional conditions to their physical equivalents. You feel that your anchor is still firm in a bottom of ascertained fact.’ ‘But it is so dreadfully unromantic,’ said Mrs O’James, with her old twinkle. ‘Romance is the offspring of imagination and of ignorance. Where science throws her calm, clear light there is happily no room for romance.’ ‘But is not love romance?’ she asked. ‘Not at all. Love has been taken away from the poets, and has been brought within the domain of true science. It may prove to be one of the great cosmic elementary forces. When the atom of hydrogen draws the atom of chlorine towards it to form the perfected molecule of hydrochloric acid, the force which it exerts may be intrinsically similar to that which draws me to you. Attraction and repulsion appear to be the primary forces. This is attraction.’ ‘And here is repulsion,’ said Mrs O’James, as a stout, florid lady came sweeping across the lawn in their direction. ‘So glad you have come out, Mrs Esdaile! Here is Professor Grey.’ ‘How do you do, Professor?’ said the lady, with some little pomposity of manner. ‘You were very wise to stay out here on so lovely a day. Is it not heavenly?’ ‘It is certainly very fine weather,’ the Professor answered. ‘Listen to the wind sighing in the trees!’ cried Mrs Esdaile, holding up one finger. ‘It is Nature’s lullaby. Could you not imagine it, Professor Grey, to be the whisperings of angels?’ ‘The idea had not occurred to me, madam.’ ‘Ah, Professor, I have always the same complaint against you. A want of rapport with the deeper meanings of nature. Shall I say a want of imagination. You do not feel an emotional thrill at the singing of that thrush?’ 74

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‘I confess that I am not conscious of one, Mrs Esdaile.’ ‘Or at the delicate tint of that background of leaves? See the rich greens!’ ‘Chlorophyll,’ murmured the Professor. ‘Science is so hopelessly prosaic. It dissects and labels, and loses sight of the great things in its attention to the little ones. You have a poor opinion of woman’s intellect, Professor Grey. I think that I have heard you say so.’ ‘It is a question of avoirdupois,’ said the Professor, closing his eyes and shrugging his shoulders. ‘The female cerebrum averages two ounces less in weight than the male. No doubt there are exceptions. Nature is always elastic.’ ‘But the heaviest thing is not always the strongest,’ said Mrs O’James, laughing. ‘Isn’t there a law of compensation in science? May we not hope to make up in quality for what we lack in quantity?’ ‘I think not,’ remarked the Professor, gravely. ‘But there is your luncheon-gong. No, thank you, Mrs Esdaile, I cannot stay. My carriage is waiting. Good-bye. Good-bye, Mrs O’James!’ He raised his hat and stalked slowly away among the laurel bushes. ‘He has no taste,’ said Mrs Esdaile—‘no eye for beauty.’ ‘On the contrary,’ Mrs O’James answered, with a saucy little jerk of the chin. ‘He has just asked me to be his wife.’ As Professor Ainslie Grey ascended the steps of his house, the hall-door opened and a dapper gentleman stepped briskly out. He was somewhat sallow in the face, with dark, beady eyes, and a short, black beard with an aggressive bristle. Thought and work had left their traces upon his face, but he moved with the brisk activity of a man who had not yet bade good-bye to his youth. ‘I’m in luck’s way,’ he cried. ‘I wanted to see you.’ ‘Then come back into the library,’ said the Professor; ‘you must stay and have lunch with us.’ The two men entered the hall, and the Professor led the way into his private sanctum. He motioned his companion into an arm-chair. ‘I trust that you have been successful, O’Brien,’ said he. ‘I should be loath to exercise any undue pressure upon my sister Ada; but I have given her to understand that there is no one whom I should prefer for a brotherin-law to my most brilliant scholar, the author of “Some Remarks upon the Bile-Pigments, with special reference to Urobilin”. ’

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‘You are very kind, Professor Grey—you have always been very kind,’ said the other. ‘I approached Miss Grey upon the subject; she did not say No.’ ‘She said Yes, then?’ ‘No; she proposed to leave the matter open until my return from Edinburgh. I go to-day, as you know, and I hope to commence my research to-morrow.’ ‘On the comparative anatomy of the vermiform appendix, by James McMurdo O’Brien,’ said the Professor, sonorously. ‘It is a glorious subject—a subject which lies at the very root of evolutionary philosophy.’ ‘Ah! she is the dearest girl,’ cried O’Brien, with a sudden little spurt of Celtic enthusiasm—‘she is the soul of truth and of honour.’ ‘The vermiform appendix—’ began the Professor. ‘She is an angel from heaven,’ interrupted the other. ‘I fear that it is my advocacy of scientific freedom in religious thought which stands in my way with her.’ ‘You must not truckle upon that point. You must be true to your convictions; let there be no compromise there.’ ‘My reason is true to agnosticism, and yet I am conscious of a void—a vacuum. I had feelings at the old church at home between the scent of the incense and the roll of the organ, such as I have never experienced in the laboratory or the lecture-room.’ ‘Sensuous—purely sensuous,’ said the Professor, rubbing his chin. ‘Vague hereditary tendencies stirred into life by the stimulation of the nasal and auditory nerves.’ ‘Maybe so, maybe so,’ the younger man answered thoughtfully. ‘But this was not what I wished to speak to you about. Before I enter your family, your sister and you have a claim to know all that I can tell you about my career. Of my worldly prospects I have already spoken to you. There is only one point which I have omitted to mention. I am a widower.’ The Professor raised his eyebrows. ‘This is news indeed,’ said he. ‘I married shortly after my arrival in Australia. Miss Thurston was her name. I met her in society. It was a most unhappy match.’ Some painful emotion possessed him. His quick, expressive features quivered, and his white hands tightened upon the arms of the chair. The Professor turned away towards the window. 76

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‘You are the best judge,’ he remarked; ‘but I should not think that it was necessary to go into details.’ ‘You have a right to know everything—you and Miss Grey. It is not a matter on which I can well speak to her direct. Poor Jinny was the best of women, but she was open to flattery, and liable to be misled by designing persons. She was untrue to me, Grey. It is a hard thing to say of the dead, but she was untrue to me. She fled to Auckland with a man whom she had known before her marriage. The brig which carried them foundered, and not a soul was saved.’ ‘This is very painful, O’Brien,’ said the Professor, with a deprecatory motion of his hand. ‘I cannot see, however, how it affects your relation to my sister.’ ‘I have eased my conscience,’ said O’Brien, rising from his chair; ‘I have told you all that there is to tell. I should not like the story to reach you through any lips but my own.’ ‘You are right, O’Brien. Your action has been most honourable and considerate. But you are not to blame in the matter, save that perhaps you showed a little precipitancy in choosing a life-partner without due care and inquiry.’ O’Brien drew his hand across his eyes. ‘Poor girl!’ he cried. ‘God help me, I love her still! But I must go.’ ‘You will lunch with us?’ ‘No, Professor; I have my packing still to do. I have already bade Miss Grey adieu. In two months I shall see you again.’ ‘You will probably find me a married man.’ ‘Married!’ ‘Yes, I have been thinking of it.’ ‘My dear Professor, let me congratulate you with all my heart. I had no idea. Who is the lady?’ ‘Mrs O’James is her name—a widow of the same nationality as yourself. But to return to matters of importance, I should be very happy to see the proofs of your paper upon the vermiform appendix. I may be able to furnish you with material for a footnote or two.’ ‘Your assistance will be invaluable to me,’ said O’Brien, with enthusiasm, and the two men parted in the hall. The Professor walked back into the dining-room, where his sister was already seated at the luncheon-table. ‘I shall be married at the registrar’s,’ he remarked; ‘I should strongly recommend you to do the same.’

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Professor Ainslie Grey was as good as his word. A fortnight’s cessation of his classes gave him an opportunity which was too good to let pass. Mrs O’James was an orphan, without relations and almost without friends in the country. There was no obstacle in the way of a speedy wedding. They were married, accordingly, in the quietest manner possible, and went off to Cambridge together, where the Professor and his charming wife were present at several academic observances, and varied the routine of their honeymoon by incursions into biological laboratories and medical libraries. Scientific friends were loud in their congratulations, not only upon Mrs Grey’s beauty, but upon the unusual quickness and intelligence which she displayed in discussing physiological questions. The professor was himself astonished at the accuracy of her information. ‘You have a remarkable range of knowledge for a woman, Jeannette,’ he remarked upon more than one occasion. He was even prepared to admit that her cerebrum might be of the normal weight. One foggy, drizzling morning they returned to Birchespool, for the next day would re-open the session, and Professor Ainslie Grey prided himself upon having never once in his life failed to appear in his lecture-room at the very stroke of the hour. Miss Ada Grey welcomed them with a constrained cordiality, and handed over the keys of office to the new mistress. Mrs Grey pressed her warmly to remain, but she explained that she had already accepted an invitation which would engage her for some months. The same evening she departed for the south of England. A couple of days later the maid carried a card just after breakfast into the library where the Professor sat revising his morning lecture. It announced the re-arrival of Dr James McMurdo O’Brien. Their meeting was effusively genial on the part of the younger man, and coldly precise on that of his former teacher. ‘You see there have been changes,’ said the Professor. ‘So I heard. Miss Grey told me in her letters, and I read the notice in the British Medical Journal. So it’s really married you are. How quickly and quietly you have managed it all!’ ‘I am constitutionally averse to anything in the nature of show or ceremony. My wife is a sensible woman—I may even go the length of saying that, for a woman, she is abnormally sensible. She quite agreed with me in the course which I have adopted.’ ‘And your research on Vallisneria?’ 78

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‘This matrimonial incident has interrupted it, but I have resumed my classes, and we shall soon be quite in harness again.’ ‘I must see Miss Grey before I leave England. We have corresponded, and I think that all will be well. She must come out with me. I don’t think I could go without her.’ The Professor shook his head. ‘Your nature is not so weak as you pretend,’ he said. ‘Questions of this sort are, after all, quite subordinate to the great duties of life.’ O’Brien smiled. ‘You would have me take out my Celtic soul and put in a Saxon one,’ he said. ‘Either my brain is too small or my heart is too big. But when may I call and pay my respects to Mrs Grey? Will she be at home this afternoon?’ ‘She is at home now. Come into the morning-room. She will be glad to make your acquaintance.’ They walked across the linoleum-paved hall. The Professor opened the door of the room, and walked in, followed by his friend. Mrs Grey was sitting in a basket-chair by the window, light and fairy-like in a loose-flowing, pink morning-gown. Seeing a visitor, she rose and swept towards them. The Professor heard a dull thud behind him. O’Brien had fallen back into a chair, with his hand pressed tight to his side. ‘Jinny!’ he gasped’—‘Jinny!’ Mrs Grey stopped dead in her advance, and stared at him with a face from which every expression had been struck out, save one of astonishment and horror. Then with a sharp intaking of the breath she reeled, and would have fallen had the Professor not thrown his long, nervous arm round her. ‘Try this sofa,’ said he. She sank back among the cushions with the same white, cold, dead look upon her face. The Professor stood with his back to the empty fireplace and glanced from the one to the other. ‘So, O’Brien,’ he said at last, ‘you have already made the acquaintance of my wife!’ ‘Your wife,’ cried his friend hoarsely. ‘She is no wife of yours. God help me, she is my wife.’ The Professor stood rigidly upon the hearthrug. His long, thin fingers were intertwined, and his head sunk a little forward. His two companions had eyes only for each other.

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‘Jinny!’ said he. ‘James!’ ‘How could you leave me so, Jinny? How could you have the heart to do it? I thought you were dead. I mourned for your death—ay, and you have made me mourn for you living. You have withered my life.’ She made no answer, but lay back among her cushions with her eyes still fixed upon him. ‘Why do you not speak?’ ‘Because you are right, James. I have treated you cruelly—shamefully. But it is not as bad as you think.’ ‘You fled with De Horta.’ ‘No, I did not. At the last moment my better nature prevailed. He went alone. But I was ashamed to come back after what I had written to you. I could not face you. I took passage alone to England under a new name, and here I have lived ever since. It seemed to me that I was beginning life again. I knew that you thought I was drowned. Who could have dreamed that fate would throw us together again! When the Professor asked me—’ She stopped and gave a gasp for breath. ‘You are faint,’ said the Professor,—‘keep the head low; it aids the cerebral circulation.’ He flattened down the cushion. ‘I am sorry to leave you, O’Brien; but I have my class duties to look to. Possibly I may find you here when I return.’ With a grim and rigid face he strode out of the room. Not one of the three hundred students who listened to his lecture saw any change in his manner and appearance, or could have guessed that the austere gentleman in front of them had found out at last how hard it is to rise above one’s humanity. The lecture over, he performed his routine duties in the laboratory, and then drove back to his own house. He did not enter by the front door, but passed through the garden to the folding glass casement which led out of the morning-room. As he approached he heard his wife’s voice and O’Brien’s in loud and animated talk. He paused among the rosebushes, uncertain whether to interrupt them or no. Nothing was further from his nature than play the eavesdropper; but as he stood, still hesitating, words fell upon his ear which struck him rigid and motionless. ‘You are still my wife, Jinny,’ said O’Brien; ‘I forgive you from the bottom of my heart. I love you, and I have never ceased to love you, though you had forgotten me.’ 80

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‘No, James, my heart was always in Melbourne. I have always been yours. I thought that it was better for you that I should seem to be dead.’ ‘You must choose between us now, Jinny. If you determine to remain here, I shall not open my lips. There shall be no scandal. If, on the other hand, you come with me, it’s little I care about the world’s opinion. Perhaps I am as much to blame as you. I thought too much of my work and too little of my wife.’ The Professor heard the cooing, caressing laugh which he knew so well. ‘I shall go with you, James,’ she said. ‘And the Professor—?’ ‘The poor Professor! But he will not mind much, James; he has no heart.’ ‘We must tell him our resolution.’ ‘There is no need,’ said Professor Ainslie Grey, stepping in through the open casement. ‘I have overheard the latter part of your conversation. I hesitated to interrupt you before you came to a conclusion.’ O’Brien stretched out his hand and took that of the woman. They stood together with the sunshine on their faces. The Professor paused at the casement with his hands behind his back and his long black shadow fell between them. ‘You have come to a wise decision,’ said he. ‘Go back to Australia together, and let what has passed be blotted out of your lives.’ ‘But you—you—’ stammered O’Brien. The Professor waved his hand. ‘Never trouble about me,’ he said. The woman gave a gasping cry. ‘What can I do or say?’ she wailed. ‘How could I have foreseen this? I thought my old life was dead. But it has come back again, with all its hopes and its desires. What can I say to you, Ainslie? I have brought shame and disgrace upon a worthy man. I have blasted your life. How you must hate and loathe me! I wish to God that I had never been born!’ ‘I neither hate nor loathe you, Jeannette,’ said the Professor, quietly. ‘You are wrong in regretting your birth, for you have a worthy mission before you in aiding the life-work of a man who has shown himself capable of the highest order of scientific research. I cannot with justice blame you personally for what has occurred. How far the individual monad is

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to be held responsible for hereditary and engrained tendencies, is a question upon which science has not yet said her last word.’ He stood with his fingers’-tips touching, and his body inclined as one who is gravely expounding a difficult and impersonal subject. O’Brien had stepped forward to say something, but the other’s attitude and manner froze the words upon his lips. Condolence or sympathy would be an impertinence to one who could so easily merge his private griefs in broad questions of abstract philosophy. ‘It is needless to prolong the situation,’ the Professor continued, in the same measured tones. ‘My brougham stands at the door. I beg that you will use it as your own. Perhaps it would be as well that you should leave the town without unnecessary delay. Your things, Jeannette, shall be forwarded.’ O’Brien hesitated with a hanging head. ‘I hardly dare offer you my hand,’ he said. ‘On the contrary. I think that of the three of us you come best out of the affair. You have nothing to be ashamed of.’ ‘Your sister—’ ‘I shall see that the matter is put to her in its true light. Good-bye! Let me have a copy of your recent research. Good-bye, Jeannette!’ ‘Good-bye!’ Their hands met, and for one short moment their eyes also. It was only a glance, but for the first and last time the woman’s intuition cast a light for itself into the dark places of a strong man’s soul. She gave a little gasp, and her other hand rested for an instant, as white and as light as thistle-down, upon his shoulder. ‘James, James!’ she cried. ‘Don’t you see that he is stricken to the heart?’ He turned her quietly away from him. ‘I am not an emotional man,’ he said. ‘I have my duties—my research on Vallisneria. The brougham is there. Your cloak is in the hall. Tell John where you wish to be driven. He will bring you anything you need. Now go.’ His last two words were so sudden, so volcanic, in such contrast to his measured voice and mask-like face, that they swept the two away from him. He closed the door behind them and paced slowly up and down the room. Then he passed into the library and looked out over the wire blind. The carriage was rolling away. He caught a last glimpse of the woman 82

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who had been his wife. He saw the feminine droop of her head, and the curve of her beautiful throat. Under some foolish, aimless impulse, he took a few quick steps towards the door. Then he turned, and, throwing himself into his study chair, he plunged back into his work. There was little scandal about this singular domestic incident. The Professor had few personal friends, and seldom went into society. His marriage had been so quiet that most of his colleagues had never ceased to regard him as a bachelor. Mrs Esdaile and a few others might talk, but their field for gossip was limited, for they could only guess vaguely at the cause of this sudden separation. The Professor was as punctual as ever at his classes, and as zealous in directing the laboratory work of those who studied under him. His own private researches were pushed on with feverish energy. It was no uncommon thing for his servants, when they came down of a morning, to hear the shrill scratchings of his tireless pen, or to meet him on the staircase as he ascended, grey and silent, to his room. In vain his friends assured him that such a life must undermine his health. He lengthened his hours until day and night were one long, ceaseless task. Gradually under this discipline a change came over his appearance. His features, always inclined to gauntness, became even sharper and more pronounced. There were deep lines about his temples and across his brow. His cheek was sunken and his complexion bloodless. His knees gave under him when he walked; and once when passing out of his lecture-room he fell and had to be assisted to his carriage. This was just before the end of the session; and soon after the holidays commenced, the professors who still remained in Birchespool were shocked to hear that their brother of the chair of physiology had sunk so low that no hopes could be entertained of his recovery. Two eminent physicians had consulted over his case without being able to give a name to the affection from which he suffered. A steadily decreasing vitality appeared to be the only symptom—a bodily weakness which left the mind unclouded. He was much interested himself in his own case, and made notes of his subjective sensations as an aid to diagnosis. Of his approaching end he spoke in his usual unemotional and somewhat pedantic fashion. ‘It is the assertion,’ he said, ‘of the liberty of the individual cell as opposed to the cell-commune. It is

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the dissolution of a co-operative society. The process is one of great interest.’ And so one grey morning his co-operative society dissolved. Very quietly and softly he sank into his eternal sleep. His two physicians felt some slight embarrassment when called upon to fill in his certificate. ‘It is difficult to give it a name,’ said one. ‘Very,’ said the other. ‘If he were not such an unemotional man, I should have said that he had died from some sudden nervous shock—from, in fact, what the vulgar would call a broken heart.’ ‘I don’t think poor Grey was that sort of a man at all.’ ‘Let us call it cardiac, anyhow,’ said the older physician. So they did so.

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The Case of Lady Sannox the relations between Douglas Stone and the notorious Lady Sannox were very well known both among the fashionable circles of which she was a brilliant member, and the scientific bodies which numbered him among their most illustrious confrères. There was naturally, therefore, a very widespread interest when it was announced one morning that the lady had absolutely and for ever taken the veil, and that the world would see her no more. When, at the very tail of this rumour, there came the assurance that the celebrated operating surgeon, the man of steel nerves, had been found in the morning by his valet, seated on one side of his bed, smiling pleasantly upon the universe, with both legs jammed into one side of his breeches and his great brain about as valuable as a cap full of porridge, the matter was strong enough to give quite a little thrill of interest to folk who had never hoped that their jaded nerves were capable of such a sensation. Douglas Stone in his prime was one of the most remarkable men in England. Indeed, he could hardly be said to have ever reached his prime, for he was but nine-and-thirty at the time of this little incident. Those who knew him best were aware that famous as he was as a surgeon, he might have succeeded with even greater rapidity in any of a dozen lines of life. He could have cut his way to fame as a soldier, struggled to it as an explorer, bullied for it in the courts, or built it out of stone and iron as an engineer. He was born to be great, for he could plan what another man dare not do, and he could do what another man dare not plan. In surgery none could follow him. His nerve, his judgment, his intuition, were things apart. Again and again his knife cut away death, but grazed the very springs of life in doing it, until his assistants were as white as the patient. His energy, his audacity, his full-blooded self-confidence—does not the memory of them still linger to the south of Marylebone Road and the north of Oxford Street? His vices were as magnificent as his virtues, and infinitely more picturesque. Large as was his income, and it was the third largest of all professional men in London, it was far beneath the luxury of his living. Deep in his complex nature lay a rich vein of sensualism, at the sport of which he placed all the prizes of his life. The eye, the ear, the touch, the palate, all were his masters. The bouquet of old vintages, the scent of rare exotics,

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the curves and tints of the daintiest potteries of Europe, it was to these that the quick-running stream of gold was transformed. And then there came his sudden mad passion for Lady Sannox, when a single interview with two challenging glances and a whispered word set him ablaze. She was the loveliest woman in London, and the only one to him. He was one of the handsomest men in London, but not the only one to her. She had a liking for new experiences, and was gracious to most men who wooed her. It may have been cause or it may have been effect that Lord Sannox looked fifty, though he was but six-and-thirty. He was a quiet, silent, neutral-tinted man, this lord, with thin lips and heavy eyelids, much given to gardening, and full of home-like habits. He had at one time been fond of acting, had even rented a theatre in London, and on its boards had first seen Miss Marion Dawson, to whom he had offered his hand, his title, and the third of a county. Since his marriage this early hobby had become distasteful to him. Even in private theatricals it was no longer possible to persuade him to exercise the talent which he had often shown that he possessed. He was happier with a spud and a watering can among his orchids and chrysanthemums. It was quite an interesting problem whether he was absolutely devoid of sense, or miserably wanting in spirit. Did he know his lady’s ways and condone them, or was he a mere blind, doting fool? It was a point to be discussed over the teacups in snug little drawing-rooms, or with the aid of a cigar in the bow windows of clubs. Bitter and plain were the comments among men upon his conduct. There was but one who had a good word to say for him, and he was the most silent member in the smokingroom. He had seen him break in a horse at the University, and it seemed to have left an impression upon his mind. But when Douglas Stone became the favourite all doubts as to Lord Sannox’s knowledge or ignorance were set for ever at rest. There was no subterfuge about Stone. In his high-handed, impetuous fashion, he set all caution and discretion at defiance. The scandal became notorious. A learned body intimated that his name had been struck from the list of its vice-presidents. Two friends implored him to consider his professional credit. He cursed them all three, and spent forty guineas on a bangle to take with him to the lady. He was at her house every evening, and she drove in his carriage in the afternoons. There was not an attempt on either side to conceal their relations; but there came at last a little incident to interrupt them. 86

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It was a dismal winter’s night, very cold and gusty, with the wind whooping in the chimneys and blustering against the window-panes. A thin spatter of rain tinkled on the glass with each fresh sough of the gale, drowning for the instant the dull gurgle and drip from the eves. Douglas Stone had finished his dinner, and sat by his fire in the study, a glass of rich port upon the malachite table at his elbow. As he raised it to his lips, he held it up against the lamplight, and watched with the eye of a connoisseur the tiny scales of beeswing which floated in its rich ruby depths. The fire, as it spurted up, threw fitful lights upon his bold, clear-cut face, with its widely-opened grey eyes, its thick and yet firm lips, and the deep, square jaw, which had something Roman in its strength and its animalism. He smiled from time to time as he nestled back in his luxurious chair. Indeed, he had a right to feel well pleased, for, against the advice of six colleagues, he had performed an operation that day of which only two cases were on record, and the result had been brilliant beyond all expectation. No other man in London would have had the daring to plan, or the skill to execute, such a heroic measure. But he had promised Lady Sannox to see her that evening and it was already half-past eight. His hand was outstretched to the bell to order the carriage when he heard the dull thud of the knocker. An instant later there was the shuffling of feet in the hall, and the sharp closing of a door. ‘A patient to see you, sir, in the consulting-room,’ said the butler. ‘About himself?’ ‘No, sir; I think he wants you to go out.’ ‘It is too late,’ cried Douglas Stone peevishly. ‘I won’t go.’ ‘This is his card, sir.’ The butler presented it upon the gold salver which had been given to his master by the wife of a Prime Minister. ‘“Hamil Ali, Smyrna.” Hum! The fellow is a Turk, I suppose.’ ‘Yes, sir. He seems as if he came from abroad, sir. And he’s in a terrible way.’ ‘Tut, tut! I have an engagement. I must go somewhere else. But I’ll see him. Show him in here, Pim.’ A few moments later the butler swung open the door and ushered in a small and decrepid man, who walked with a bent back and with the forward push of the face and blink of the eyes which goes with extreme short sight. His face was swarthy, and his hair and beard of the deepest

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black. In one hand he held a turban of white muslin striped with red, in the other a small chamois leather bag. ‘Good evening,’ said Douglas Stone, when the butler had closed the door. ‘You speak English, I presume?’ ‘Yes, sir. I am from Asia Minor, but I speak English when I speak slow.’ ‘You wanted me to go out, I understand?’ ‘Yes, sir. I wanted very much that you should see my wife.’ ‘I could come in the morning, but I have an engagement which prevents me from seeing your wife to-night.’ The Turk’s answer was a singular one. He pulled the string which closed the mouth of the chamois leather bag, and poured a flood of gold on to the table. ‘There are one hundred pounds there,’ said he, ‘and I promise you that it will not take you an hour. I have a cab ready at the door.’ Douglas Stone glanced at his watch. An hour would not make it too late to visit Lady Sannox. He had been there later. And the fee was an extraordinarily high one. He had been pressed by his creditors lately, and he could not afford to let such a chance pass. He would go. ‘What is the case?’ he asked. ‘Oh, it is so sad a one! So sad a one! You have not, perhaps, heard of the daggers of the Almohades?’ ‘Never.’ ‘Ah, they are Eastern daggers of a great age and of a singular shape, with the hilt like what you call a stirrup. I am a curiosity dealer, you understand, and that is why I have come to England from Smyrna, but next week I go back once more. Many things I brought with me, and I have a few things left, but among them, to my sorrow, is one of these daggers.’ ‘You will remember that I have an appointment, sir,’ said the surgeon, with some irritation; ‘pray confine yourself to the necessary details.’ ‘You will see that it is necessary. To-day my wife fell down in a faint in the room in which I keep my wares, and she cut her lower lip upon this cursed dagger of Almohades.’ ‘I see,’ said Douglas Stone, rising. ‘And you wish me to dress the wound?’ ‘No, no, it is worse than that.’ ‘What then?’ ‘These daggers are poisoned.’ 88

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‘Poisoned!’ ‘Yes, and there is no man, East or West, who can tell now what is the poison or what the cure. But all that is known I know, for my father was in this trade before me, and we have had much to do with these poisoned weapons.’ ‘What are the symptoms?’ ‘Deep sleep, and death in thirty hours.’ ‘And you say there is no cure. Why then should you pay me this considerable fee?’ ‘No drug can cure, but the knife may.’ ‘And how?’ ‘The poison is slow of absorption. It remains for hours in the wound.’ ‘Washing, then, might cleanse it?’ ‘No more than in a snake bite. It is too subtle and too deadly.’ ‘Excision of the wound, then?’ ‘That is it. If it be on the finger, take the finger off. So said my father always. But think of where this wound is, and that it is my wife. It is dreadful!’ But familiarity with such grim matters may take the finer edge from a man’s sympathy. To Douglas Stone this was already an interesting case, and he brushed aside as irrelevant the feeble objections of the husband. ‘It appears to be that or nothing,’ said he brusquely. ‘It is better to lose a lip than a life.’ ‘Ah, yes, I know that you are right. Well, well, it is kismet, and must be faced. I have the cab, and you will come with me and do this thing.’ Douglas Stone took his case of bistouries from a drawer, and placed it with a roll of bandage and a compress of lint in his pocket. He must waste no more time if he were to see Lady Sannox. ‘I am ready,’ said he, pulling on his overcoat. ‘Will you take a glass of wine before you go out into this cold air?’ His visitor shrank away, with a protesting hand upraised. ‘You forget that I am a Mussulman, and a true follower of the Prophet,’ said he. ‘But tell me what is the bottle of green glass which you have placed in your pocket?’ ‘It is chloroform.’ ‘Ah, that also is forbidden to us. It is a spirit, and we make no use of such things.’

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‘What! You would allow your wife to go through an operation without an anaesthetic?’ ‘Ah! she will feel nothing, poor soul. The deep sleep has already come on, which is the first working of the poison. And then I have given her of our Smyrna opium. Come, sir, for already an hour has passed.’ As they stepped out into the darkness, a sheet of rain was driven in upon their faces, and the hall lamp, which dangled from the arm of a marble Caryatid, went out with a fluff. Pim, the butler, pushed the heavy door to, straining hard with his shoulder against the wind, while the two men groped their way towards the yellow glare which showed where the cab was waiting. An instant later they were rattling upon their journey. ‘Is it far?’ asked Douglas Stone. ‘Oh, no. We have a very little quiet place off the Euston Road.’ The surgeon pressed the spring of his repeater and listened to the little tings which told him the hour. It was a quarter past nine. He calculated the distances, and the short time which it would take him to perform so trivial an operation. He ought to reach Lady Sannox by ten o’clock. Through the fogged windows he saw the blurred gas lamps dancing past, with occasionally the broader glare of a shop front. The rain was pelting and rattling upon the leathern top of the carriage, and the wheels swashed as they rolled through puddle and mud. Opposite to him the white headgear of his companion gleamed faintly through the obscurity. The surgeon felt in his pockets and arranged his needles, his ligatures and his safety-pins, that no time might be wasted when they arrived. He chafed with impatience and drummed his foot upon the floor. But the cab slowed down at last and pulled up. In an instant Douglas Stone was out, and the Smyrna merchant’s toe was at his very heel. ‘You can wait,’ said he to the driver. It was a mean-looking house in a narrow and sordid street. The surgeon, who knew his London well, cast a swift glance into the shadows, but there was nothing distinctive,—no shop, no movement, nothing but a double line of dull, flat-faced houses, a double stretch of wet flagstones which gleamed in the lamplight, and a double rush of water in the gutters which swirled and gurgled towards the sewer gratings. The door which faced them was blotched and discoloured, and a faint light in the fan pane above it served to show the dust and the grime which covered it. Above, in one of the bedroom windows, there was a dull yellow glimmer. 90

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The merchant knocked loudly, and, as he turned his dark face towards the light, Douglas Stone could see that it was contracted with anxiety. A bolt was drawn, and an elderly woman with a taper stood in the doorway, shielding the thin flame with her gnarled hand. ‘Is all well?’ gasped the merchant. ‘She is as you left her, sir.’ ‘She has not spoken?’ ‘No, she is in a deep sleep.’ The merchant closed the door, and Douglas Stone walked down the narrow passage, glancing about him in some surprise as he did so. There was no oilcloth, no mat, no hat-rack. Deep grey dust and heavy festoons of cobwebs met his eyes everywhere. Following the old woman up the winding stair, his firm footfall echoed harshly through the silent house. There was no carpet. The bedroom was on the second landing. Douglas Stone followed the old nurse into it, with the merchant at his heels. Here, at least, there was furniture and to spare. The floor was littered and the corners piled with Turkish cabinets, inlaid tables, coats of chain mail, strange pipes, and grotesque weapons. A single small lamp stood upon a bracket on the wall. Douglas Stone took it down, and picking his way among the lumber, walked over to a couch in the corner, on which lay a woman dressed in the Turkish fashion, with yashmak and veil. The lower part of the face was exposed, and the surgeon saw a jagged cut which zigzagged along the border of the under lip. ‘You will forgive the yashmak,’ said the Turk. ‘You know our views about woman in the East.’ But the surgeon was not thinking about the yashmak. This was no longer a woman to him. It was a case. He stooped and examined the wound carefully. ‘There are no signs of irritation,’ said he. ‘We might delay the operation until local symptoms develop.’ The husband wrung his hands in incontrollable agitation. ‘Oh! sir, sir!’ he cried. ‘Do not trifle. You do not know. It is deadly. I know, and I give you my assurance that an operation is absolutely necessary. Only the knife can save her.’ ‘And yet I am inclined to wait,’ said Douglas Stone. ‘That is enough!’ the Turk cried, angrily. ‘Every minute is of importance, and I cannot stand here and see my wife allowed to sink. It only

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remains for me to give you my thanks for having come, and to call in some other surgeon before it is too late.’ Douglas Stone hesitated. To refund that hundred pounds was no pleasant matter. But of course if he left the case he must return the money. And if the Turk were right and the woman died, his position before a coroner might be an embarrassing one. ‘You have had personal experience of this poison?’ he asked. ‘I have.’ ‘And you assure me that an operation is needful.’ ‘I swear it by all that I hold sacred.’ ‘The disfigurement will be frightful.’ ‘I can understand that the mouth will not be a pretty one to kiss.’ Douglas Stone turned fiercely upon the man. The speech was a brutal one. But the Turk has his own fashion of talk and of thought, and there was no time for wrangling. Douglas Stone drew a bistoury from his case, opened it and felt the keen straight edge with his forefinger. Then he held the lamp closer to the bed. Two dark eyes were gazing up at him through the slit in the yashmak. They were all iris, and the pupil was hardly to be seen. ‘You have given her a very heavy dose of opium.’ ‘Yes, she has had a good dose.’ He glanced again at the dark eyes which looked straight at his own. They were dull and lustreless, but, even as he gazed, a little shifting sparkle came into them, and the lips quivered. ‘She is not absolutely unconscious,’ said he. ‘Would it not be well to use the knife while it would be painless?’ The same thought had crossed the surgeon’s mind. He grasped the wounded lip with his forceps, and with two swift cuts he took out a broad V-shaped piece. The woman sprang up on the couch with a dreadful gurgling scream. Her covering was torn from her face. It was a face that he knew. In spite of that protruding upper lip and that slobber of blood, it was a face that he knew. She kept on putting her hand up to the gap and screaming. Douglas Stone sat down at the foot of the couch with his knife and his forceps. The room was whirling round, and he had felt something go like a ripping seam behind his ear. A bystander would have said that his face was the more ghastly of the two. As in a dream, or as if he had been looking at something at the play, he was conscious that the Turk’s hair and beard lay upon the table, and that Lord Sannox was 92

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leaning against the wall with his hand to his side, laughing silently. The screams had died away now, and the dreadful head had dropped back again upon the pillow, but Douglas Stone still sat motionless, and Lord Sannox still chuckled quietly to himself. ‘It was really very necessary for Marion, this operation,’ said he, ‘not physically, but morally, you know, morally.’ Douglas Stone stooped forwards and began to play with the fringe of the coverlet. His knife tinkled down upon the ground, but he still held the forceps and something more. ‘I had long intended to make a little example,’ said Lord Sannox, suavely. ‘Your note of Wednesday miscarried, and I have it here in my pocket-book. I took some pains in carrying out my idea. The wound, by the way, was from nothing more dangerous than my signet ring.’ He glanced keenly at his silent companion, and cocked the small revolver which he held in his coat pocket. But Douglas Stone was still picking at the coverlet. ‘You see you have kept your appointment after all,’ said Lord Sannox. And at that Douglas Stone began to laugh. He laughed long and loudly. But Lord Sannox did not laugh now. Something like fear sharpened and hardened his features. He walked from the room, and he walked on tiptoe. The old woman was waiting outside. ‘Attend to your mistress when she awakes,’ said Lord Sannox. Then he went down to the street. The cab was at the door, and the driver raised his hand to his hat. ‘John,’ said Lord Sannox, ‘you will take the doctor home first. He will want leading downstairs, I think. Tell his butler that he has been taken ill at a case.’ ‘Very good, sir.’ ‘Then you can take Lady Sannox home.’ ‘And how about yourself, sir?’ ‘Oh, my address for the next few months will be Hotel di Roma, Venice. Just see that the letters are sent on. And tell Stevens to exhibit all the purple chrysanthemums next Monday, and to wire me the result.’

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A Question of Diplomacy 5

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the foreign minister was down with the gout. For a week he had been confined to the house, and he had missed two Cabinet Councils at a time when the pressure upon his department was severe. It is true that he had an excellent undersecretary and an admirable staff, but the Minister was a man of such ripe experience and of such proven sagacity that things halted in his absence. When his firm hand was at the wheel the great ship of State rode easily and smoothly upon her way; when it was removed she yawed and staggered until twelve British editors rose up in their omniscience and traced out twelve several courses, each of which was the sole and only path to safety. Then it was that the Opposition said vain things, and that the harassed Prime Minister prayed for his absent colleague. The Foreign Minister sat in his dressing-room in the great house in Cavendish Square. It was May, and the square garden shot up like a veil of green in front of his window, but, in spite of the sunshine, a fire crackled and sputtered in the grate of the sick-room. In a deep-red plush arm-chair sat the great statesman, his head leaning back upon a silken pillow, one foot stretched forward and supported upon a padded rest. His deeplylined, finely-chiselled face and slow-moving, heavily-pouched eyes were turned upwards towards the carved and painted ceiling, with that inscrutable expression which had been the despair and the admiration of his Continental colleagues upon the occasion of the famous Congress when he had made his first appearance in the arena of European diplomacy. Yet at the present moment his capacity for hiding his emotions had for the instant failed him, for about the lines of his strong, straight mouth and the puckers of his broad, overhanging forehead, there were sufficient indications of the restlessness and impatience which consumed him. And indeed there was enough to make a man chafe, for he had much to think of and yet was bereft of the power of thought. There was, for example, that question of the Dobrutscha and the navigation of the mouths of the Danube which was ripe for settlement. The Russian Chancellor had sent a masterly statement upon the subject, and it was the pet ambition of our Minister to answer it in a worthy fashion. Then there was the blockade of Crete, and the British fleet lying off Cape Matapan, waiting for instructions which might change the course of European history. And there were those three unfortunate Macedonian tourists, whose friends were 94

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momentarily expecting to receive their ears or their fingers in default of the exorbitant ransom which had been demanded. They must be plucked out of those mountains, by force or by diplomacy, or an outraged public would vent its wrath upon Downing Street. All these questions pressed for a solution, and yet here was the Foreign Minister of England, planted in an arm-chair, with his whole thoughts and attention riveted upon the ball of his right toe! It was humiliating—horribly humiliating! His reason revolted at it. He had been a respecter of himself, a respecter of his own will; but what sort of a machine was it which could be utterly thrown out of gear by a little piece of inflamed gristle? He groaned and writhed among his cushions. But, after all, was it quite impossible that he should go down to the House? Perhaps the doctor was exaggerating the situation. There was a Cabinet Council that day. He glanced at his watch. It must be nearly over by now. But at least he might perhaps venture to drive down as far as Westminster. He pushed back the little round table with its bristle of medicinebottles, and levering himself up with a hand upon either arm of the chair, he clutched a thick, oak stick and hobbled slowly across the room. For a moment as he moved, his energy of mind and body seemed to return to him. The British fleet should sail from Matapan. Pressure should be brought to bear upon the Turks. The Greeks should be shown—Ow! In an instant the Mediterranean was blotted out, and nothing remained but that huge, undeniable, intrusive, red-hot toe. He staggered to the window and rested his left hand upon the ledge, while he propped himself upon his stick with his right. Outside lay the bright, cool, square garden, a few well-dressed passers-by, and a single, neatly-appointed carriage, which was driving away from his own door. His quick eye caught the coat-ofarms on the panel, and his lips set for a moment and his bushy eyebrows gathered ominously with a deep furrow between them. He hobbled back to his seat and struck the gong which stood upon the table. ‘Your mistress!’ said he as the serving-man entered. It was clear that it was impossible to think of going to the House. The shooting up his leg warned him that his doctor had not overestimated the situation. But he had a little mental worry now which had for the moment eclipsed his physical ailments. He tapped the ground impatiently with his stick until the door of the dressing-room swung open, and a tall, elegant lady of rather more than middle age swept into the chamber. Her hair was touched with grey, but her calm sweet face had all

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the freshness of youth, and her gown of green shot plush, with a sparkle of gold passementerie at her bosom and shoulders, showed off the lines of her fine figure to their best advantage. ‘You sent for me, Charles?’ ‘Whose carriage was that which drove away just now?’ ‘Oh, you’ve been up!’ she cried, shaking an admonitory forefinger. ‘What an old dear it is! How can you be so rash? What am I to say to Sir William when he comes? You know that he gives up his cases when they are insubordinate.’ ‘In this instance the case may give him up,’ said the Minister, peevishly; ‘but I must beg, Clara, that you will answer my question.’ ‘Oh! the carriage! It must have been Lord Arthur Sibthorpe’s.’ ‘I saw the three chevrons upon the panel,’ muttered the invalid. His lady had pulled herself a little straighter and opened her large blue eyes. ‘Then why ask?’ she said. ‘One might almost think, Charles, that you were laying a trap! Did you expect that I should deceive you? You have not had your lithia powder.’ ‘For Heaven’s sake, leave it alone! I asked because I was surprised that Lord Arthur should call here. I should have fancied, Clara, that I had made myself sufficiently clear on that point. Who received him?’ ‘I did. That is, I and Ida.’ ‘I will not have him brought into contact with Ida. I do not approve of it. The matter has gone too far already.’ The lady seated herself on a velvet-topped footstool, and bent her stately figure over the Minister’s hand, which she patted softly between her own. ‘Now you have said it, Charles,’ said she. ‘It has gone too far—I give you my word, dear, that I never suspected it until it was past all mending. I may be to blame—no doubt I am; but it was all so sudden. The tail end of the season and a week at Lord Donnythorne’s. That was all. But oh! Charlie, she loves him so, and she is our only one! How can we make her miserable?’ ‘Tut, tut!’ cried the Minister impatiently, slapping on the plush arm of his chair. ‘This is too much. I tell you, Clara, I give you my word, that all my official duties, all the affairs of this great empire, do not give me the trouble that Ida does.’ ‘But she is our only one, Charles.’ 96

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‘The more reason that she should not make a mésalliance.’ ‘Mésalliance, Charles! Lord Arthur Sibthorpe, son of the Duke of Tavistock, with a pedigree from the Heptarchy. Debrett takes them right back to Morcar, Earl of Northumberland.’ The Minister shrugged his shoulders. ‘Lord Arthur is the fourth son of the poorest duke in England,’ said he. ‘He has neither prospects nor profession.’ ‘But, oh! Charlie, you could find him both.’ ‘I do not like him. I do not care for the connection.’ ‘But consider Ida! You know how frail her health is. Her whole soul is set upon him. You would not have the heart, Charles, to separate them?’ There was a tap at the door. The lady swept towards it and threw it open. ‘Yes, Thomas?’ ‘If you please, my lady, the Prime Minister is below.’ ‘Show him up, Thomas.’ ‘Now, Charlie, you must not excite yourself over public matters. Be very good and cool and reasonable, like a darling. I am sure that I may trust you.’ She threw her light shawl round the invalid’s shoulders, and slipped away into the bedroom as the great man was ushered in at the door of the dressing-room. ‘My dear Charles,’ said he cordially, stepping into the room with all the boyish briskness for which he was famous, ‘I trust that you find yourself a little better. Almost ready for harness, eh? We miss you sadly, both in the House and in the Council. Quite a storm brewing over this Grecian business. The Times took a nasty line this morning.’ ‘So I saw,’ said the invalid, smiling up at his chief. ‘Well, well, we must let them see that the country is not entirely ruled from Printing House Square yet. We must keep our own course without faltering.’ ‘Certainly, Charles, most undoubtedly,’ assented the Prime Minister, with his hands in his pockets. ‘It was so kind of you to call. I am all impatience to know what was done in the Council.’ ‘Pure formalities, nothing more. By the way, the Macedonian prisoners are all right.’ ‘Thank goodness for that!’

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‘We adjourned all other business until we should have you with us next week. The question of a dissolution begins to press. The reports from the provinces are excellent.’ The Foreign Minister moved impatiently and groaned. ‘We must really straighten up our foreign business a little,’ said he. ‘I must get Novikoff ’s Note answered. It is clever, but the fallacies are obvious. I wish, too, we could clear up the Afghan frontier. This illness is most exasperating. There is so much to be done, but my brain is clouded. Sometimes I think it is the gout, and sometimes I put it down to the colchicum.’ ‘What will our medical autocrat say?’ laughed the Prime Minister. ‘You are so irreverent, Charles. With a bishop one may feel at one’s ease. They are not beyond the reach of argument. But a doctor with his stethoscope and thermometer is a thing apart. Your reading does not impinge upon him. He is serenely above you. And then, of course, he takes you at a disadvantage. With health and strength one might cope with him. Have you read Hahnemann? What are your views upon Hahnemann?’ The invalid knew his illustrious colleague too well to follow him down any of those by-paths of knowledge in which he delighted to wander. To his intensely shrewd and practical mind there was something repellent in the waste of energy involved in a discussion upon the Early Church or the twenty-seven principles of Mesmer. It was his custom to slip past such conversational openings with a quick step and an averted face. ‘I have hardly glanced at his writings,’ said he. ‘By the way, I suppose that there was no special departmental news?’ ‘Ah! I had almost forgotten. Yes, it was one of the things which I had called to tell you. Sir Algernon Jones has resigned at Tangier. There is a vacancy there.’ ‘It had better be filled at once. The longer delay the more applicants.’ ‘Ah, patronage, patronage!’ sighed the Prime Minister. ‘Every vacancy makes one doubtful friend and a dozen very positive enemies. Who so bitter as the disappointed place-seeker? But you are right, Charles. Better fill it at once, especially as there is some little trouble in Morocco. I understand that the Duke of Tavistock would like the place for his fourth son, Lord Arthur Sibthorpe. We are under some obligation to the Duke.’ The Foreign Minister sat up eagerly. 98

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‘My dear friend,’ he said, ‘it is the very appointment which I should have suggested. Lord Arthur would be very much better in Tangier at present than in—in—’ ‘Cavendish Square?’ hazarded his chief, with a little arch query of his eyebrows. ‘Well, let us say London. He has manner and tact. He was at Constantinople in Norton’s time.’ ‘Then he talks Arabic?’ ‘A smattering. But his French is good.’ ‘Speaking of Arabic, Charles, have you dipped into Averroes?’ ‘No, I have not. But the appointment would be an excellent one in every way. Would you have the great goodness to arrange the matter in my absence?’ ‘Certainly, Charles, certainly. Is there anything else that I can do?’ ‘No. I hope to be in the House by Monday.’ ‘I trust so. We miss you at every turn. The Times will try to make mischief over that Grecian business. A leader-writer is a terribly irresponsible thing, Charles. There is no method by which he may be confuted, however preposterous his assertions. Good-bye! Read Porson! Good-bye!’ He shook the invalid’s hand, gave a jaunty wave of his broad-brimmed hat, and darted out of the room with the same elasticity and energy with which he had entered it. The footman had already opened the great folding door to usher the illustrious visitor to his carriage, when a lady stepped from the drawingroom and touched him on the sleeve. From behind the half-closed portière of stamped velvet a little pale face peeped out, half-curious, half-frightened. ‘May I have one word?’ ‘Surely, Lady Charles.’ ‘I hope it is not intrusive. I would not for the world overstep the limits—’ ‘My dear Lady Charles!’ interrupted the Prime Minister, with a youthful bow and wave. ‘Pray do not answer me if I go too far. But I know that Lord Arthur Sibthorpe has applied for Tangier. Would it be a liberty if I asked you what chance he has?’ ‘The post is filled up.’ ‘Oh!’ In the foreground and background there was a disappointed face. ‘And Lord Arthur has it.’

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The Prime Minister chuckled over his little piece of roguery. ‘We have just decided it,’ he continued. ‘Lord Arthur must go in a week. I am delighted to perceive, Lady Charles, that the appointment has your approval. Tangier is a place of extraordinary interest. Catherine of Braganza and Colonel Kirke will occur to your memory. Burton has written well upon Northern Africa. I dine at Windsor, so I am sure that you will excuse my leaving you. I trust that Lord Charles will be better. He can hardly fail to be so with such a nurse.’ He bowed, waved, and was off down the steps to his brougham. As he drove away, Lady Charles could see that he was already deeply absorbed in a paper-covered novel. She pushed back the velvet curtains, and returned into the drawing-room. Her daughter stood in the sunlight by the window, tall, fragile, and exquisite, her features and outline not unlike her mother’s, but frailer, softer, more delicate. The golden light struck one-half of her high-bred, sensitive face, and glimmered upon her thickly-coiled flaxen hair, striking a pinkish tint from her closely-cut costume of fawn-coloured cloth with its dainty cinnamon ruchings. One little soft frill of chiffon nestled round her throat, from which the white, graceful neck and well-poised head shot up like a lily amid moss. Her thin white hands were pressed together, and her blue eyes turned beseechingly upon her mother. ‘Silly girl! Silly girl!’ said the matron, answering that imploring look. She put her hands upon her daughter’s sloping shoulders and drew her towards her. ‘It is a very nice place for a short time. It will be a stepping stone.’ ‘But oh! mamma, in a week! Poor Arthur!’ ‘He will be happy.’ ‘What! happy to part?’ ‘He need not part. You shall go with him.’ ‘Oh! mamma!’ ‘Yes, I say it.’ ‘Oh! mamma, in a week?’ ‘Yes indeed. A great deal may be done in a week. I shall order your trousseau to-day.’ ‘Oh! you dear, sweet angel! But I am so frightened! And papa? Oh! dear, I am so frightened!’ ‘Your papa is a diplomatist, dear.’ 100

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‘Yes, ma.’ ‘But, between ourselves, he married a diplomatist too. If he can manage the British Empire, I think that I can manage him, Ida. How long have you been engaged, child?’ ‘Ten weeks, mamma.’ ‘Then it is quite time it came to a head. Lord Arthur cannot leave England without you. You must go to Tangier as the Minister’s wife. Now, you will sit there on the settee, dear, and let me manage entirely. There is Sir William’s carriage! I do think that I know how to manage Sir William. James, just ask the doctor to step in this way!’ A heavy, two-horsed carriage had drawn up at the door, and there came a single stately thud upon the knocker. An instant afterwards the drawing-room door flew open and the footman ushered in the famous physician. He was a small man, clean-shaven, with the old-fashioned black dress and white cravat with high-standing collar. He swung his golden pince-nez in his right hand as he walked, and bent forward with a peering, blinking expression, which was somehow suggestive of the dark and complex cases through which he had seen. ‘Ah,’ said he, as he entered. ‘My young patient! I am glad of the opportunity.’ ‘Yes, I wish to speak to you about her, Sir William. Pray take this arm-chair.’ ‘Thank you, I will sit beside her,’ said he, taking his place upon the settee. ‘She is looking better, less anaemic unquestionably, and a fuller pulse. Quite a little tinge of colour, and yet not hectic.’ ‘I feel stronger, Sir William.’ ‘But she still has the pain in the side.’ ‘Ah, that pain!’ He tapped lightly under the collar-bones, and then bent forward with his biaural stethoscope in either ear. ‘Still a trace of dullness—still a slight crepitation,’ he murmured. ‘You spoke of a change, doctor.’ ‘Yes, certainly a judicious change might be advisable.’ ‘You said a dry climate. I wish to do to the letter what you recommend.’ ‘You have always been model patients.’ ‘We wish to be. You said a dry climate.’ ‘Did I? I rather forget the particulars of our conversation. But a dry climate is certainly indicated.’ ‘Which one?’

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‘Well, I think really that a patient should be allowed some latitude. I must not exact too rigid discipline. There is room for individual choice— the Engadine, Central Europe, Egypt, Algiers, which you like.’ ‘I hear that Tangier is also recommended.’ ‘Oh, yes, certainly; it is very dry.’ ‘You hear, Ida? Sir William says that you are to go to Tangier.’ ‘Or any—’ ‘No, no, Sir William! We feel safest when we are most obedient. You have said Tangier, and we shall certainly try Tangier.’ ‘Really, Lady Charles, your implicit faith is most flattering. It is not everyone who would sacrifice their own plans and inclinations so readily.’ ‘We know your skill and your experience, Sir William. Ida shall try Tangier. I am convinced that she will be benefited.’ ‘I have no doubt of it.’ ‘But you know Lord Charles. He is just a little inclined to decide medical matters as he would an affair of State. I hope that you will be firm with him.’ ‘As long as Lord Charles honours me so far as to ask my advice I am sure that he would not place me in the false position of having that advice disregarded.’ The medical baronet whirled round the cord of his pince-nez and pushed out a protesting hand. ‘No, no, but you must be firm on the point of Tangier.’ ‘Having deliberately formed the opinion that Tangier is the best place for our young patient, I do not think that I shall readily change my conviction.’ ‘Of course not.’ ‘I shall speak to Lord Charles upon the subject now when I go upstairs.’ ‘Pray do.’ ‘And meanwhile she will continue her present course of treatment. I trust that the warm African air may send her back in a few months with all her energy restored.’ He bowed in the courteous, sweeping, old-world fashion which had done so much to build up his ten thousand a year, and, with the stealthy gait of a man whose life is spent in sick-rooms, he followed the footman upstairs. As the red velvet curtains swept back into position, the Lady Ida threw her arms round her mother’s neck and sank her face on to her bosom. ‘Oh! mamma, you are a diplomatist!’ she cried. But her mother’s expression was rather that of the general who looked upon the first smoke of the guns than of one who had won the victory. 102

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‘All will be right, dear,’ said she, glancing down at the fluffy yellow curls and tiny ear. ‘There is still much to be done, but I think we may venture to order the trousseau.’ ‘Oh! how brave you are!’ ‘Of course, it will in any case be a very quiet affair. Arthur must get the license. I do not approve of hole-and-corner marriages, but where the gentleman has to take up an official position some allowance must be made. We can have Lady Hilda Edgecombe, and the Trevors, and the Grevilles, and I am sure that the Prime Minister would run down if he could.’ ‘And papa?’ ‘Oh, yes; he will come too, if he is well enough. We must wait until Sir William goes, and, meanwhile, I shall write to Lord Arthur.’ Half an hour had passed, and quite a number of notes had been dashed off in the fine, bold, park-paling handwriting of the Lady Charles, when the door clashed, and the wheels of the doctor’s carriage were heard grating outside against the kerb. The Lady Charles laid down her pen, kissed her daughter, and started off for the sick-room. The Foreign Minister was lying back in his chair, with a red silk handkerchief over his forehead, and his bulbous, cotton-wadded foot still protruding upon its rest. ‘I think it is almost liniment time,’ said the Lady, shaking a blue crinkled bottle. ‘Shall I put on a little?’ ‘Oh! this pestilent toe!’ groaned the sufferer. ‘Sir William won’t hear of my moving yet. I do think he is the most completely obstinate and pig-headed man that I have ever met. I tell him that he has mistaken his profession, and that I could find him a post at Constantinople. We need a mule out there.’ ‘Poor Sir William!’ laughed Lady Charles. ‘But how has he roused your wrath?’ ‘He is so persistent—so dogmatic.’ ‘Upon what point?’ ‘Well, he has been laying down the law about Ida. He has decreed, it seems, that she is to go to Tangier.’ ‘He said something to that effect before he went up to you.’ ‘Oh, he did, did he?’ The slow-moving, inscrutable eye came sliding round to her. The Lady’s face had assumed an expression of transparent obvious innocence, an intrusive candour which is never seen in nature save when a woman is bent upon deception.

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‘He examined her lungs, Charles. He did not say much, but his expression was very grave.’ ‘Not to say owlish,’ interrupted the Minister. ‘No, no, Charles; it is no laughing matter. He said that she must have a change. I am sure that he thought more than he said. He spoke of dulness and crepitation, and the effects of the African air. Then the talk turned upon dry, bracing health resorts, and he agreed that Tangier was the place. He said that even a few months there would work a change.’ ‘And that was all?’ ‘Yes, that was all.’ Lord Charles shrugged his shoulders with the air of a man who is but half convinced. ‘But of course,’ said the Lady, serenely, ‘if you think it better that Ida should not go she shall not. The only thing is that if she should get worse we might feel a little uncomfortable afterwards. In a weakness of that sort a very short time may make a difference. Sir William evidently thought the matter critical. Still, there is no reason why he should influence you. It is a little responsibility, however. If you take it all upon yourself and free me from any of it, so that afterwards—’ ‘My dear Clara, how you do croak!’ ‘Oh! I don’t wish to do that, Charles. But you remember what happened to Lord Bellamy’s child. She was just Ida’s age. That was another case in which Sir William’s advice was disregarded.’ Lord Charles groaned impatiently. ‘I have not disregarded it,’ said he. ‘No, no, of course not. I know your strong sense, and your good heart too well, dear. You were very wisely looking at both sides of the question. That is what we poor women cannot do. It is emotion against reason, as I have often heard you say. We are swayed this way and that, but you men are persistent, and so you gain your way with us. But I am so pleased that you have decided for Tangier.’ ‘Have I?’ ‘Well, dear, you said that you would not disregard Sir William.’ ‘Well, Clara, admitting that Ida is to go to Tangier, you will allow that it is impossible for me to escort her? ‘Utterly.’ ‘And for you? ‘While you are ill my place is by your side.’ 104

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‘There is your sister?’ ‘She is going to Florida.’ ‘Lady Dumbarton, then?’ ‘She is nursing her father. It is out of the question.’ ‘Well, then, whom can we possibly ask? Especially just as the season is commencing. You see, Clara, the fates fight against Sir William.’ His wife rested her elbows against the back of the great red chair, and passed her fingers through the statesman’s grizzled curls, stooping down as she did so until her lips were close to his ear. ‘There is Lord Arthur Sibthorpe,’ said she softly. Lord Charles bounded in his chair, and muttered a word or two such as were more frequently heard from Cabinet Ministers in Lord Melbourne’s time than now. ‘Are you mad, Clara!’ he cried. ‘What can have put such a thought into your head?’ ‘The Prime Minister.’ ‘Who? The Prime Minister?’ ‘Yes, dear. Now do, do be good! Or perhaps I had better not speak to you about it any more.’ ‘Well, I really think that you have gone rather too far to retreat.’ ‘It was the Prime Minister, then, who told me that Lord Arthur was going to Tangier.’ ‘It is a fact, though it had escaped my memory for the instant.’ ‘And then came Sir William with his advice about Ida. Oh! Charlie, it is surely more than a coincidence!’ ‘I am convinced,’ said Lord Charles, with his shrewd, questioning gaze, ‘that it is very much more than a coincidence. You are a very clever woman, my dear. A born manager and organiser.’ The lady brushed past the compliment. ‘Think of our own young days, Charlie,’ she whispered, with her fingers still toying with his hair. ‘What were you then? A poor man, not even Ambassador at Tangier. But I loved you, and believed in you, and have I ever regretted it? Ida loves and believes in Lord Arthur, and why should she ever regret it either?’ Lord Charles was silent. His eyes were fixed upon the green branches which waved outside the window; but his mind had flashed back to a Devonshire country-house of thirty years ago, and to the one fateful evening when, between old yew hedges, he paced along beside a slender girl,

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and poured out to her his hopes, his fears, and his ambitious. He took the white, thin hand and pressed it to his lips. ‘You, have been a good wife to me, Clara,’ said he. She said nothing. She did not attempt to improve upon her advantage. A less consummate general might have tried to do so, and ruined all. She stood silent and submissive, noting the quick play of thought which peeped from his eyes and lip. There was a sparkle in the one and a twitch of amusement in the other, as he at last glanced up at her. ‘Clara,’ said he, ‘deny it if you can! You have ordered the trousseau.’ She gave his ear a little pinch. ‘Subject to your approval,’ said she. ‘You have written to the Archbishop.’ ‘It is not posted yet.’ ‘You have sent a note to Lord Arthur.’ ‘How could you tell that?’ ‘He is downstairs now.’ ‘No; but I think that is his brougham.’ Lord Charles sank back with a look of half-comical despair. ‘Who is to fight against such a woman?’ he cried. ‘Oh! if I could send you to Novikoff! He is too much for any of my men. But, Clara, I cannot have them up here.’ ‘Not for your blessing?’ ‘No, no!’ ‘It would make them so happy.’ ‘I cannot stand scenes.’ ‘Then I shall convey it to them.’ ‘And pray say no more about it—to-day, at any rate. I have been weak over the matter.’ ‘Oh! Charlie, you who are so strong!’ ‘You have outflanked me, Clara. It was very well done. I must congratulate you.’ ‘Well,’ she murmured, as she kissed him, ‘you know I have been studying a very clever diplomatist for thirty years.’

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A Medical Document medical men are, as a class, very much too busy to take stock of singular situations or dramatic events. Thus it happens that the ablest chronicler of their experiences in our literature was a lawyer. A life spent in watching over death-beds—or over birth-beds which are infinitely more trying—takes something from a man’s sense of proportion, as constant strong waters might corrupt his palate. The overstimulated nerve ceases to respond. Ask the surgeon for his best experiences and he may reply that he has seen little that is remarkable, or break away into the technical. But catch him some night when the fire has spurted up and his pipe is reeking, with a few of his brother practitioners for company and an artful question or allusion to set him going. Then you will get some raw, green facts new plucked from the tree of life. It is after one of the quarterly dinners of the Midland Branch of the British Medical Association. Twenty coffee cups, a dozen liqueur glasses, and a solid bank of blue smoke which swirls slowly along the high, gilded ceiling gives a hint of a successful gathering. But the members have shredded off to their homes. The line of heavy, bulge-pocketed overcoats and of stethoscope-bearing top hats is gone from the hotel corridor. Round the fire in the sitting-room three medicos are still lingering, however, all smoking and arguing, while a fourth, who is a mere layman and young at that, sits back at the table. Under cover of an open journal he is writing furiously with a stylographic pen, asking a question in an innocent voice from time to time and so flickering up the conversation whenever it shows a tendency to wane. The three men are all of that staid middle age which begins early and lasts late in the profession. They are none of them famous, yet each is of good repute, and a fair type of his particular branch. The portly man with the authoritative manner and the white, vitriol splash upon his cheek is Charley Manson, chief of the Wormley Asylum, and author of the brilliant monograph—‘Obscure Nervous Lesions in the Unmarried.’ He always wears his collar high like that, since the half-successful attempt of a student of Revelations to cut his throat with a splinter of glass. The second, with the ruddy face and the merry brown eyes, is a general practitioner, a man of vast experience, who, with his three assistants and his five horses, takes twentyfive hundred a year in half-crown visits and shilling consultations out of the

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poorest quarter of a great city. That cheery face of Theodore Foster is seen at the side of a hundred sick-beds a day, and if he has one-third more names on his visiting list than in his cash book he always promises himself that he will get level some day when a millionaire with a chronic complaint—the ideal combination—shall seek his services. The third, sitting on the right with his dress-shoes shining on the top of the fender, is Hargrave, the rising surgeon. His face has none of the broad humanity of Theodore Foster’s, the eye is stern and critical, the mouth straight and severe, but there is strength and decision in every line of it, and it is nerve rather than sympathy which the patient demands when he is bad enough to come to Hargrave’s door. He calls himself a jawman, ‘a mere jawman,’ as he modestly puts it, but in point of fact he is too young and too poor to confine himself to a specialty, and there is nothing surgical which Hargrave has not the skill and the audacity to do. ‘Before, after, and during,’ murmurs the general practitioner in answer to some interpolation of the outsider’s. ‘I assure you, Manson, one sees all sorts of evanescent forms of madness.’ ‘Ah, puerperal!’ throws in the other, knocking the curved grey ash from his cigar. ‘But you had some case in your mind, Foster.’ ‘Well, there was only one last week which was new to me. I had been engaged by some people of the name of Silcoe. When the trouble came round I went myself, for they would not hear of an assistant. The husband who was a policeman, was sitting at the head of the bed on the further side. “This won’t do” said I. “Oh yes, doctor, it must do,” said she. “It’s quite irregular, and he must go,” said I. “It’s that or nothing,” said she. “I won’t open my mouth or stir a finger the whole night,” said he. So it ended by my allowing him to remain, and there he sat for eight hours on end. She was very good over the matter, but every now and again he would fetch a hollow groan, and I noticed that he held his right hand just under the sheet all the time, where I had no doubt that it was clasped by her left. When it was all happily over, I looked at him and his face was the colour of this cigar ash, and his head had dropped on to the edge of the pillow. Of course I thought he had fainted with emotion, and I was just telling myself what I thought of myself for having been such a fool as to let him stay there, when suddenly I saw that the sheet over his hand was all soaked with blood; I whisked it down, and there was the fellow’s wrist half cut through. The woman had one bracelet of a policeman’s handcuff over her left wrist and the other round his right one. When she had been 108

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in pain she had twisted with all her strength and the iron had fairly eaten into the bone of the man’s arm. “Aye, doctor,” said she, when she saw I had noticed it. “He’s got to take his share as well as me. Turn and turn,” said she.’ ‘Don’t you find it a very wearing branch of the profession?’ asks Foster after a pause. ‘My dear fellow, it was the fear of it that drove me into lunacy work.’ ‘Aye, and it has driven men into asylums who never found their way on to the medical staff. I was a very shy fellow myself as a student, and I know what it means.’ ‘No joke that in general practice,’ says the alienist. ‘Well, you hear men talk about it as though it were, but I tell you it’s much nearer tragedy. Take some poor, raw, young fellow who has just put up his plate in a strange town. He has found it a trial all his life, perhaps, to talk to a woman about lawn tennis and church services. When a young man is shy he is shyer than any girl. Then down comes an anxious mother and consults him upon the most intimate family matters. “I shall never go to that doctor again,” says she afterwards. “His manner is so stiff and unsympathetic.” Unsympathetic! Why, the poor lad was struck dumb and paralysed. I have known general practitioners who were so shy that they could not bring themselves to ask the way in the street. Fancy what sensitive men like that must endure before they get broken in to medical practice. And then they know that nothing is so catching as shyness, and that if they do not keep a face of stone, their patient will be covered with confusion. And so they keep their face of stone, and earn the reputation perhaps of having a heart to correspond. I suppose nothing would shake your nerve, Manson.’ ‘Well, when a man lives year in year out among a thousand lunatics, with a fair sprinkling of homicidals among them, one’s nerves either get set or shattered. Mine are all right so far.’ ‘I was frightened once,’ says the surgeon. ‘It was when I was doing dispensary work. One night I had a call from some very poor people, and gathered from the few words they said that their child was ill. When I entered the room I saw a small cradle in the corner. Raising the lamp I walked over and putting back the curtains I looked down at the baby. I tell you it was sheer Providence that I didn’t drop that lamp and set the whole place alight. The head on the pillow turned, and I saw a face looking up at me which seemed to me to have more malignancy and wickedness

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than ever I had dreamed of in a nightmare. It was the flush of red over the cheek-bones, and the brooding eyes full of loathing of me, and of everything else, that impressed me. I’ll never forget my start as, instead of the chubby face of an infant, my eyes fell upon this creature. I took the mother into the next room. “What is it?” I asked. “A girl of sixteen,” said she, and then throwing up her arms, “Oh, pray God she may be taken!” The poor thing, though she spent her life in this little cradle, had great, long, thin limbs which she curled up under her. I lost sight of the case and don’t know what became of it, but I’ll never forget the look in her eyes.’ ‘That’s creepy,’ says Doctor Foster. ‘But I think one of my experiences would run it close. Shortly after I put up my plate I had a visit from a little hunch-backed woman, who wished me to come and attend to her sister in her trouble. When I reached the house, which was a very poor one, I found two other little hunched-backed women, exactly like the first, waiting for me in the sitting-room. Not one of them said a word, but my companion took the lamp and walked upstairs with her two sisters behind her, and me bringing up the rear. I can see those three queer shadows cast by the lamp upon the wall as clearly as I can see that tobacco pouch. In the room above was the fourth sister, a remarkably beautiful girl in evident need of my assistance. There was no wedding ring upon her finger. The three deformed sisters seated themselves round the room, like so many graven images, and all night not one of them opened her mouth. I’m not romancing, Hargrave; this is absolute fact. In the early morning a fearful thunderstorm broke out, one of the most violent I have ever known. The little garret burned blue with the lightning, and thunder roared and rattled as if it were on the very roof of the house. It wasn’t much of a lamp I had, and it was a queer thing when a spurt of lightning came to see those three twisted figures sitting round the walls, or to have the voice of my patient drowned by the booming of the thunder. By Jove, I don’t mind telling you that there was a time when I nearly bolted from the room. All came right in the end, but I never heard the true story of the unfortunate beauty and her three crippled sisters.’ ‘That’s the worst of these medical stories,’ sighs the outsider. ‘They never seem to have an end.’ ‘When a man is up to his neck in practice, my boy, he has no time to gratify his private curiosity. Things shoot across him and he gets a glimpse of them, only to recall them, perhaps, at some quiet moment 110

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like this. But I’ve always felt, Manson, that your line had as much of the terrible in it as any other.’ ‘More,’ groans the alienist. ‘A disease of the body is bad enough, but this seems to be a disease of the soul. Is it not a shocking thing—a thing to drive a reasoning man into absolute Materialism—to think that you may have a fine, noble fellow with every divine instinct and that some little vascular change, the dropping, we will say, of a minute spicule of bone from the inner table of his skull on to the surface of his brain may have the effect of changing him to a filthy and pitiable creature with every low and debasing tendency? What a satire an asylum is upon the majesty of man, and no less upon the ethereal nature of the soul.’ ‘Faith and hope,’ murmurs the general practitioner. ‘I have no faith, not much hope, and all the charity I can afford,’ says the surgeon. ‘When theology squares itself with the facts of life I’ll read it up.’ ‘You were talking about cases,’ says the outsider, jerking the ink down into his stylographic pen. ‘Well, take a common complaint which kills many thousands every year, like G. P. for instance.’ ‘What’s G. P.?’ ‘General practitioner,’ suggests the surgeon with a grin. ‘The British public will have to know what G. P. is,’ says the alienist gravely. ‘It’s increasing by leaps and bounds, and it has the distinction of being absolutely incurable. General paralysis is its full title, and I tell you it promises to be a perfect scourge. Here’s a fairly typical case now which I saw last Monday week. A young farmer, a splendid fellow, surprised his friends by taking a very rosy view of things at a time when the whole country-side was grumbling. He was going to give up wheat, give up arable land, too, if it didn’t pay, plant two thousand acres of rhododendrons and get a monopoly of the supply for Covent Garden—there was no end to his schemes, all sane enough but just a bit inflated. I called at the farm, not to see him, but on an altogether different matter. Something about the man’s way of talking struck me and I watched him narrowly. His lip had a trick of quivering, his words slurred themselves together, and so did his handwriting when he had occasion to draw up a small agreement. A closer inspection showed me that one of his pupils was ever so little larger than the other. As I left the house his wife came after me. “Isn’t it splendid to see Job looking so well, doctor,” said she; “he’s that full of

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energy he can hardly keep himself quiet.” I did not say anything, for I had not the heart, but I knew that the fellow was as much condemned to death as though he were lying in the cell at Newgate. It was a characteristic case of incipient G. P.’ ‘Good heavens!’ cries the outsider. ‘My own lips tremble. I often slur my words. I believe I’ve got it myself.’ Three little chuckles come from the front of the fire. ‘There’s the danger of a little medical knowledge to the layman.’ ‘A great authority has said that every first year’s student is suffering in silent agony from four diseases,’ remarks the surgeon. ‘One is heart disease, of course; another is cancer of the parotid. I forget the two other.’ ‘Where does the parotid come in?’ ‘Oh, it’s the last wisdom tooth coming through!’ ‘And what would be the end of that young farmer?’ asks the outsider. ‘Paresis of all the muscles, ending in fits, coma and death. It may be a few months, it may be a year or two. He was a very strong young man and would take some killing.’ ‘By the way,’ says the alienist, ‘did I ever tell you about the first certificate I ever signed? I stood as near ruin then as a man could go.’ ‘What was it, then?’ ‘I was in practice at the time. One morning a Mrs Cooper called upon me and informed me that her husband had shown signs of delusions lately. They took the form of imagining that he had been in the army and had distinguished himself very much. As a matter of fact he was a lawyer and had never been out of England. Mrs Cooper was of opinion that if I were to call it might alarm him, so it was agreed between us that she should send him up in the evening on some pretext to my consulting room, which would give me the opportunity of having a chat with him and, if I were convinced of his insanity, of signing his certificate. Another doctor had already signed, so that it only needed my concurrence to have him placed under treatment. Well, Mr Cooper arrived in the evening about half an hour before I had expected him, and consulted me as to some malarious symptoms from which he said that he suffered. According to his account he had just returned from the Abyssinian Campaign, and had been one of the first of the British forces to enter Magdala. No delusion could possibly be more marked, for he would talk of little else, so I filled in the papers without the slightest hesitation. When his wife arrived, after he had left, I put some questions to her to complete the 112

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form. “What is his age?” I asked. “Fifty,” said she. “Fifty!” I cried. “Why, the man I examined could not have been more than thirty!” And so it came out that the real Mr Cooper had never called upon me at all, but that by one of those coincidences which take a man’s breath away another Cooper, who really was a very distinguished young officer of artillery, had come in to consult me. My pen was wet to sign the paper when I discovered it,’ says Dr Manson, mopping his forehead. ‘We were talking about nerve just now,’ observes the surgeon. ‘Just after my qualifying I served in the Navy for a time, as I think you know. I was on the flag-ship on the West African Station, and I remember a singular example of nerve which came to my notice at that time. One of our small gunboats had gone up the Calabar river, and while there the surgeon died of coast fever. On the same day a man’s leg was broken by a spar falling upon it, and it became quite obvious that it must be taken off above the knee if his life was to be saved. The young lieutenant who was in charge of the craft searched among the dead doctor’s effects and laid his hands upon some chloroform, a hip-joint knife, and a volume of Grey’s Anatomy. He had the man laid by the steward upon the cabin table, and with a picture of a cross section of the thigh in front of him he began to take off the limb. Every now and then, referring to the diagram, he would say: “Stand by with the lashings, steward. There’s blood on the chart about here.” Then he would jab with his knife until he cut the artery, and he and his assistant would tie it up before they went any further. In this way they gradually whittled the leg off, and upon my word they made a very excellent job of it. The man is hopping about the Portsmouth Hard at this day. ‘It’s no joke when the doctor of one of these isolated gunboats himself falls ill,’ continues the surgeon after a pause. ‘You might think it easy for him to prescribe for himself, but this fever knocks you down like a club, and you haven’t strength left to brush a mosquito off your face. I had a touch of it at Lagos, and I know what I am telling you. But there was a chum of mine who really had a curious experience. The whole crew gave him up, and, as they had never had a funeral aboard the ship, they began rehearsing the forms so as to be ready. They thought that he was unconscious, but he swears he could hear every word that passed. “Corpse comin’ up the ’atchway!” cried the Cockney sergeant of Marines. “Present harms!” He was so amused, and so indignant too, that he just made up his mind that he wouldn’t be carried through that hatchway, and he wasn’t, either.’

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‘There’s no need for fiction in medicine,’ remarks Foster, ‘for the facts will always beat anything you can fancy. But it has seemed to me sometimes that a curious paper might be read at some of these meetings about the uses of medicine in popular fiction.’ ‘How?’ ‘Well, of what the folk die of, and what diseases are made most use of in novels. Some are worn to pieces, and others, which are equally common in real life, are never mentioned. Typhoid is fairly frequent, but scarlet fever is unknown. Heart disease is common, but then heart disease, as we know it, is usually the sequel of some foregoing disease, of which we never hear anything in the romance. Then there is the mysterious malady called brain fever, which always attacks the heroine after a crisis, but which is unknown under that name to the text books. People when they are over-excited in novels fall down in a fit. In a fairly large experience I have never known anyone do so in real life. The small complaints simply don’t exist. Nobody ever gets shingles or quinsy, or mumps in a novel. All the diseases, too, belong to the upper part of the body. The novelist never strikes below the belt.’ ‘I’ll tell you what, Foster,’ says the alienist, ‘there is a side of life which is too medical for the general public and too romantic for the professional journals, but which contains some of the richest human materials that a man could study. It’s not a pleasant side, I am afraid, but if it is good enough for Providence to create, it is good enough for us to try and understand. It would deal with strange outbursts of savagery and vice in the lives of the best men, curious momentary weaknesses in the record of the sweetest women, known but to one or two, and inconceivable to the world around. It would deal, too, with the singular phenomena of waxing and of waning manhood, and would throw a light upon those actions which have cut short many an honoured career and sent a man to a prison when he should have been hurried to a consulting-room. Of all evils that may come upon the sons of men, God shield us principally from that one!’ ‘I had a case some little time ago which was out of the ordinary,’ says the surgeon. ‘There’s a famous beauty in London society—I mention no names—who used to be remarkable a few seasons ago for the very low dresses which she would wear. She had the whitest of skins, and most beautiful of shoulders, so it was no wonder. Then gradually the frilling at her neck lapped upwards and upwards, until last year she astonished 114

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everyone by wearing quite a high collar at a time when it was completely out of fashion. Well, one day this very woman was shown into my consulting-room. When the footman was gone she suddenly tore off the upper part of her dress. “For God’s sake do something for me!” she cried. Then I saw what the trouble was. A rodent ulcer was eating its way upwards, coiling on in its serpiginous fashion until the end of it was flush with her collar. The red streak of its trail was lost below the line of her bust. Year by year it had ascended and she had heightened her dress to hide it, until now it was about to invade her face. She had been too proud to confess her trouble, even to a medical man.’ ‘And did you stop it?’ ‘Well, with zinc chloride I did what I could. But it may break out again. She was one of those beautiful white-and-pink creatures who are rotten with struma. You may patch but you can’t mend.’ ‘Dear! dear! dear!’ cries the general practitioner, with that kindly softening of the eyes which had endeared him to so many thousands. ‘I suppose we mustn’t think ourselves wiser than Providence, but there are times when one feels that something is wrong in the scheme of things. I’ve seen some sad things in my life. Did I ever tell you that case where Nature divorced a most loving couple? He was a fine young fellow, an athlete and a gentleman, but he overdid athletics. You know how the force that controls us gives us a little tweak to remind us when we get off the beaten track. It may be a pinch on the great toe if we drink too much and work too little. Or it may be a tug on our nerves if we dissipate energy too much. With the athlete, of course, it’s the heart or the lungs. He had bad phthisis and was sent to Davos. Well, as luck would have it, she developed rheumatic fever, which left her heart very much affected. Now, do you see the dreadful dilemma in which those poor people found themselves? When he came below 4000 feet or so, his symptoms became terrible. She could come up about 2500, and then her heart reached its limit. They had several interviews half way down the valley, which left them nearly dead, and at last, the doctors had to absolutely forbid it. And so for four years they lived within three miles of each other and never met. Every morning he would go to a place which overlooked the chalet in which she lived and would wave a great white cloth and she answer from below. They could see each other quite plainly with their field glasses, and they might have been in different planets for all their chance of meeting.’ ‘And one at last died,’ says the outsider.

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‘No, sir. I’m sorry not to be able to clinch the story, but the man recovered and is now a successful stockbroker in Drapers Gardens. The woman, too, is the mother of a considerable family. But what are you doing there?’ ‘Only taking a note or two of your talk.’ The three medical men laugh as they walk towards their overcoats. ‘Why, we’ve done nothing but talk shop,’ says the general practitioner. ‘What possible interest can the public take in that?’

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Lot No. 249 of the dealings of Edward Bellingham with William Monkhouse Lee, and of the cause of the great terror of Abercrombie Smith, it may be that no absolute and final judgment will ever be delivered. It is true that we have the full and clear narrative of Smith himself, and such corroboration as he could look for from Thomas Styles the servant, from the Reverend Plumptree Peterson, Fellow of Old’s, and from such other people as chanced to gain some passing glance at this or that incident in a singular chain of events. Yet, in the main, the story must rest upon Smith alone, and the most will think that it is more likely that one brain, however outwardly sane, has some subtle warp in its texture, some strange flaw in its workings, than that the path of nature has been overstepped in open day in so famed a centre of learning and light as the University of Oxford. Yet when we think how narrow and how devious this path of nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-paths into which the human spirit may wander. In a certain wing of what we will call Old College in Oxford there is a corner turret of an exceeding great age. The heavy arch which spans the open door has bent downwards in the centre under the weight of its years, and the grey, lichen-blotched blocks of stone are bound and knitted together with withes and strands of ivy, as though the old mother had set herself to brace them up against wind and weather. From the door a stone stair curves upward spirally, passing two landings, and terminating in a third one, its steps all shapeless and hollowed by the tread of so many generations of the seekers after knowledge. Life has flowed like water down this winding stair, and, waterlike, has left these smooth-worn grooves behind it. From the long-gowned, pedantic scholars of Plantagenet days down to the young bloods of a later age, how full and strong had been that tide of young English life. And what was left now of all those hopes, those strivings, those fiery energies, save here and there in some old-world churchyard a few scratches upon a stone, and perchance a handful of dust in a mouldering coffin? Yet here were the silent stair and the grey old wall, with bend and saltire and many another heraldic device still to be read

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upon its surface, like grotesque shadows thrown back from the days that had passed. In the month of May, in the year 1884, three young men occupied the sets of rooms which opened on to the separate landings of the old stair. Each set consisted simply of a sitting-room and of a bedroom, while the two corresponding rooms upon the ground-floor were used, the one as a coal-cellar, and the other as the living-room of the servant, or scout, Thomas Styles, whose duty it was to wait upon the three men above him. To right and to left was a line of lecture-rooms and of offices, so that the dwellers in the old turret enjoyed a certain seclusion, which made the chambers popular among the more studious undergraduates. Such were the three who occupied them now—Abercrombie Smith above, Edward Bellingham beneath him, and William Monkhouse Lee upon the lowest storey. It was ten o’clock on a bright spring night, and Abercrombie Smith lay back in his arm-chair, his feet upon the fender, and his briar-root pipe between his lips. In a similar chair, and equally at his ease, there lounged on the other side of the fireplace his old school friend Jephro Hastie. Both men were in flannels, for they had spent their evening upon the river, but apart from their dress no one could look at their hard-cut, alert faces without seeing that they were open-air men—men whose minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly and robust. Hastie, indeed, was stroke of his college boat, and Smith was an even better oar, but a coming examination had already cast its shadow over him and held him to his work, save for the few hours a week which health demanded. A litter of medical books upon the table, with scattered bones, models and anatomical plates, pointed to the extent as well as the nature of his studies, while a couple of single-sticks and a set of boxing-gloves above the mantelpiece hinted at the means by which, with Hastie’s help, he might take his exercise in its most compressed and least distant form. They knew each other very well—so well that they could sit now in that soothing silence which is the very highest development of companionship. ‘Have some whisky,’ said Abercrombie Smith at last between two cloudbursts. ‘Scotch in the jug and Irish in the bottle.’ ‘No, thanks. I’m in for the sculls. I don’t liquor when I’m training. How about you?’ ‘I’m reading hard. I think it best to leave it alone.’ Hastie nodded, and they relapsed into a contented silence. 118

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‘By the way, Smith,’ asked Hastie, presently, ‘have you made the acquaintance of either of the fellows on your stair yet?’ ‘Just a nod when we pass. Nothing more.’ ‘Hum! I should be inclined to let it stand at that. I know something of them both. Not much, but as much as I want. I don’t think I should take them to my bosom if I were you. Not that there’s much amiss with Monkhouse Lee.’ ‘Meaning the thin one?’ ‘Precisely. He is a gentlemanly little fellow. I don’t think there is any vice in him. But then you can’t know him without knowing Bellingham.’ ‘Meaning the fat one?’ ‘Yes, the fat one. And he’s a man whom I, for one, would rather not know.’ Abercrombie Smith raised his eyebrows and glanced across at his companion. ‘What’s up, then?’ he asked. ‘Drink? Cards? Cad? You used not to be censorious.’ ‘Ah! you evidently don’t know the man, or you wouldn’t ask. There’s something damnable about him—something reptilian. My gorge always rises at him. I should put him down as a man with secret vices—an evil liver. He’s no fool, though. They say that he is one of the best men in his line that they have ever had in the college.’ ‘Medicine or classics?’ ‘Eastern languages. He’s a demon at them. Chillingworth met him somewhere above the second cataract last long, and he told me that he just prattled to the Arabs as if he had been born and nursed and weaned among them. He talked Coptic to the Copts, and Hebrew to the Jews, and Arabic to the Bedouins, and they were all ready to kiss the hem of his frock-coat. There are some old hermit Johnnies up in those parts who sit on rocks and scowl and spit at the casual stranger. Well, when they saw this chap Bellingham, before he had said five words they just lay down on their bellies and wriggled. Chillingworth said that he never saw anything like it. Bellingham seemed to take it as his right, too, and strutted about among them and talked down to them like a Dutch uncle. Pretty good for an undergrad. of Old’s, wasn’t it?’ ‘Why do you say you can’t know Lee without knowing Bellingham?’ ‘Because Bellingham is engaged to his sister Eveline. Such a bright little girl, Smith! I know the whole family well. It’s disgusting to see that brute with her. A toad and a dove, that’s what they always remind me of.’

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Abercrombie Smith grinned and knocked his ashes out against the side of the grate. ‘You show every card in your hand, old chap,’ said he. ‘What a prejudiced, green-eyed, evil-thinking old man it is! You have really nothing against the fellow except that.’ ‘Well, I’ve known her ever since she was as long as that cherry-wood pipe, and I don’t like to see her taking risks. And it is a risk. He looks beastly. And he has a beastly temper, a venomous temper. You remember his row with Long Norton?’ ‘No; you always forget that I am a freshman.’ ‘Ah, it was last winter. Of course. Well, you know the towpath along by the river. There were several fellows going along it, Bellingham in front, when they came on an old market-woman coming the other way. It had been raining—you know what those fields are like when it has rained— and the path ran between the river and a great puddle that was nearly as broad. Well, what does this swine do but keep the path, and push the old girl into the mud, where she and her marketings came to terrible grief. It was a blackguard thing to do, and Long Norton, who is as gentle a fellow as ever stepped, told him what he thought of it. One word led to another, and it ended in Norton laying his stick across the fellow’s shoulders. There was the deuce of a fuss about it, and it’s a treat to see the way in which Bellingham looks at Norton when they meet now. By Jove, Smith, it’s nearly eleven o’clock!’ ‘No hurry. Light your pipe again.’ ‘Not I. I’m supposed to be in training. Here I’ve been sitting gossiping when I ought to have been safely tucked up. I’ll borrow your skull, if you can share it. Williams has had mine for a month. I’ll take the little bones of your ear, too, if you are sure you won’t need them. Thanks very much. Never mind a bag, I can carry them very well under my arm. Good-night, my son, and take my tip as to your neighbour.’ When Hastie, bearing his anatomical plunder, had clattered off down the winding stair, Abercrombie Smith hurled his pipe into the wastepaper basket, and drawing his chair nearer to the lamp, plunged into a formidable green-covered volume, adorned with great coloured maps of that strange internal kingdom of which we are the hapless and helpless monarchs. Though a freshman at Oxford, the student was not so in medicine, for he had worked for four years at Glasgow and at Berlin, and this coming examination would place him finally as a member of his profession. With his firm 120

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mouth, broad forehead, and clear-cut, somewhat hard-featured face, he was a man who, if he had no brilliant talent, was yet so dogged, so patient, and so strong that he might in the end overtop a more showy genius. A man who can hold his own among Scotchmen and North Germans is not a man to be easily set back. Smith had left a name at Glasgow and at Berlin, and he was bent now upon doing as much at Oxford, if hard work and devotion could accomplish it. He had sat reading for about an hour, and the hands of the noisy carriage clock upon the side table were rapidly closing together upon the twelve, when a sudden sound fell upon the student’s ear—a sharp, rather shrill sound, like the hissing intake of a man’s breath who gasps under some strong emotion. Smith laid down his book and slanted his ear to listen. There was no one on either side or above him, so that the interruption came certainly from the neighbour beneath—the same neighbour of whom Hastie had given so unsavoury an account. Smith knew him only as a flabby, pale-faced man of silent and studious habits, a man, whose lamp threw a golden bar from the old turret even after he had extinguished his own. This community in lateness had formed a certain silent bond between them. It was soothing to Smith when the hours stole on towards dawning to feel that there was another so close who set as small a value upon his sleep as he did. Even now, as his thoughts turned towards him, Smith’s feelings were kindly. Hastie was a good fellow, but he was rough, strong-fibred, with no imagination or sympathy. He could not tolerate departures from what he looked upon as the model type of manliness. If a man could not be measured by a public-school standard, then he was beyond the pale with Hastie. Like so many who are themselves robust, he was apt to confuse the constitution with the character, to ascribe to want of principle what was really a want of circulation. Smith, with his stronger mind, knew his friend’s habit, and made allowance for it now as his thoughts turned towards the man beneath him. There was no return of the singular sound, and Smith was about to turn to his work once more, when suddenly there broke out in the silence of the night a hoarse cry, a positive scream—the call of a man who is moved and shaken beyond all control. Smith sprang out of his chair and dropped his book. He was a man of fairly firm fibre, but there was something in this sudden, uncontrollable shriek of horror which chilled his blood and pringled in his skin. Coming in such a place and at such an hour, it brought a thousand fantastic possibilities into his head. Should

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he rush down, or was it better to wait? He had all the national hatred of making a scene, and he knew so little of his neighbour that he would not lightly intrude upon his affairs. For a moment he stood in doubt and even as he balanced the matter there was a quick rattle of footsteps upon the stairs, and young Monkhouse Lee, half dressed and as white as ashes, burst into his room. ‘Come down!’ he gasped. ‘Bellingham’s ill.’ Abercrombie Smith followed him closely down stairs into the sittingroom which was beneath his own, and intent as he was upon the matter in hand, he could not but take an amazed glance around him as he crossed the threshold. It was such a chamber as he had never seen before—a museum rather than a study. Walls and ceiling were thickly covered with a thousand strange relics from Egypt and the East. Tall, angular figures bearing burdens or weapons stalked in an uncouth frieze round the apartments. Above were bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl-headed statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs, and strange, beetlelike deities cut out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche and shelf, while across the ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was slung in a double noose. In the centre of this singular chamber was a large, square table, littered with papers, bottles, and the dried leaves of some graceful, palm-like plant. These varied objects had all been heaped together in order to make room for a mummy case, which had been conveyed from the wall, as was evident from the gap there, and laid across the front of the table. The mummy itself, a horrid, black, withered thing, like a charred head on a gnarled bush, was lying half out of the case, with its clawlike hand and bony forearm resting upon the table. Propped up against the sarcophagus was an old yellow scroll of papyrus, and in front of it, in a wooden arm-chair, sat the owner of the room, his head thrown back, his widely-opened eyes directed in a horrified stare to the crocodile above him, and his blue, thick lips puffing loudly with every expiration. ‘My God! he’s dying!’ cried Monkhouse Lee distractedly. He was a slim, handsome young fellow, olive-skinned and dark-eyed, of a Spanish rather than of an English type, with a Celtic intensity of manner which contrasted with the Saxon phlegm of Abercrombie Smith. ‘Only a faint, I think,’ said the medical student. ‘Just give me a hand with him. You take his feet. Now on to the sofa. Can you kick all those 122

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little wooden devils off? What a litter it is! Now he will be all right if we undo his collar and give him some water. What has he been up to at all?’ ‘I don’t know. I heard him cry out. I ran up. I know him pretty well, you know. It is very good of you to come down.’ ‘His heart is going like a pair of castanets,’ said Smith, laying his hand on the breast of the unconscious man. ‘He seems to me to be frightened all to pieces. Chuck the water over him! What a face he has got on him!’ It was indeed a strange and most repellent face, for colour and outline were equally unnatural. It was white, not with the ordinary pallor of fear, but with an absolutely bloodless white, like the under side of a sole. He was very fat, but gave the impression of having at some time been considerably fatter, for his skin hung loosely in creases and folds, and was shot with a meshwork of wrinkles. Short, stubbly brown hair bristled up from his scalp, with a pair of thick, wrinkled ears protruding on either side. His light grey eyes were still open, the pupils dilated and the balls projecting in a fixed and horrid stare. It seemed to Smith as he looked down upon him that he had never seen nature’s danger signals flying so plainly upon a man’s countenance, and his thoughts turned more seriously to the warning which Hastie had given him an hour before. ‘What the deuce can have frightened him so?’ he asked. ‘It’s the mummy.’ ‘The mummy? How, then?’ ‘I don’t know. It’s beastly and morbid. I wish he would drop it. It’s the second fright he has given me. It was the same last winter. I found him just like this, with that horrid thing in front of him.’ ‘What does he want with the mummy, then?’ ‘Oh, he’s a crank, you know. It’s his hobby. He knows more about these things than any man in England. But I wish he wouldn’t! Ah, he’s beginning to come to.’ A faint tinge of colour had begun to steal back into Bellingham’s ghastly cheeks, and his eyelids shivered like a sail after a calm. He clasped and unclasped his hands, drew a long, thin breath between his teeth, and suddenly jerking up his head, threw a glance of recognition around him. As his eyes fell upon the mummy, he sprang off the sofa, seized the roll of papyrus, thrust it into a drawer, turned the key, and then staggered back on to the sofa. ‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘What do you chaps want?’

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‘You’ve been shrieking out and making no end of a fuss,’ said Monkhouse Lee. ‘If our neighbour here from above hadn’t come down, I’m sure I don’t know what I should have done with you.’ ‘Ah, it’s Abercrombie Smith,’ said Bellingham, glancing up at him. ‘How very good of you to come in! What a fool I am! Oh, my God, what a fool I am!’ He sunk his head on to his hands, and burst into peal after peal of hysterical laughter. ‘Look here! Drop it!’ cried Smith, shaking him roughly by the shoulder. ‘Your nerves are all in a jangle. You must drop these little midnight games with mummies, or you’ll be going off your chump. You’re all on wires now.’ ‘I wonder,’ said Bellingham, ‘whether you would be as cool as I am if you had seen—’ ‘What then?’ ‘Oh, nothing. I meant that I wonder if you could sit up at night with a mummy without trying your nerves. I have no doubt that you are quite right. I dare say that I have been taking it out of myself too much lately. But I am all right now. Please don’t go, though. Just wait for a few minutes until I am quite myself.’ ‘The room is very close,’ remarked Lee, throwing open the window and letting in the cool night air. ‘It’s balsamic resin,’ said Bellingham. He lifted up one of the dried palmate leaves from the table and frizzled it over the chimney of the lamp. It broke away into heavy smoke wreaths, and a pungent, biting odour filled the chamber. ‘It’s the sacred plant—the plant of the priests,’ he remarked. ‘Do you know anything of Eastern languages, Smith?’ ‘Nothing at all. Not a word.’ The answer seemed to lift a weight from the Egyptologist’s mind. ‘By the way,’ he continued, ‘how long was it from the time that you ran down, until I came to my senses?’ ‘Not long. Some four or five minutes.’ ‘I thought it could not be very long,’ said he, drawing a long breath. ‘But what a strange thing unconsciousness is! There is no measurement to it. I could not tell from my own sensations if it were seconds or weeks. Now that gentleman on the table was packed up in the days of the eleventh dynasty, some forty centuries ago, and yet if he could find his tongue, he would tell us that this lapse of time has been but 124

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a closing of the eyes and a reopening of them. He is a singularly fine mummy, Smith.’ Smith stepped over to the table and looked down with a professional eye at the black and twisted form in front of him. The features, though horribly discoloured, were perfect, and two little nut-like eyes still lurked in the depths of the black, hollow sockets. The blotched skin was drawn tightly from bone to bone, and a tangled wrap of black coarse hair fell over the ears. Two thin teeth, like those of a rat, overlay the shrivelled lower lip. In its crouching position, with bent joints and craned head, there was a suggestion of energy about the horrid thing which made Smith’s gorge rise. The gaunt ribs, with their parchment-like covering, were exposed, and the sunken, leaden-hued abdomen, with the long slit where the embalmer had left his mark; but the lower limbs were wrapt round with coarse yellow bandages. A number of little clove-like pieces of myrrh and of cassia were sprinkled over the body, and lay scattered on the inside of the case. ‘I don’t know his name,’ said Bellingham, passing his hand over the shrivelled head. ‘You see the outer sarcophagus with the inscriptions is missing. Lot 249 is all the title he has now. You see it printed on his case. That was his number in the auction at which I picked him up.’ ‘He has been a very pretty sort of fellow in his day,’ remarked Abercrombie Smith. ‘He has been a giant. His mummy is six feet seven in length, and that would be a giant over there, for they were never a very robust race. Feel these great knotted bones, too. He would be a nasty fellow to tackle.’ ‘Perhaps these very hands helped to build the stones into the pyramids,’ suggested Monkhouse Lee, looking down with disgust in his eyes at the crooked, unclean talons. ‘No fear. This fellow has been pickled in natron, and looked after in the most approved style. They did not serve hodsmen in that fashion. Salt or bitumen was enough for them. It has been calculated that this sort of thing cost about seven hundred and thirty pounds in our money. Our friend was a noble at the least. What do you make of that small inscription near his feet, Smith?’ ‘I told you that I know no Eastern tongue.’ ‘Ah, so you did. It is the name of the embalmer, I take it. A very conscientious worker he must have been. I wonder how many modern works will survive four thousand years?’

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He kept on speaking lightly and rapidly, but it was evident to Abercrombie Smith that he was still palpitating with fear. His hands shook, his lower lip trembled, and look where he would, his eye always came sliding round to his gruesome companion. Through all his fear, however, there was a suspicion of triumph in his tone and manner. His eye shone, and his footstep, as he paced the room, was brisk and jaunty. He gave the impression of a man who has gone through an ordeal, the marks of which he still bears upon him, but which has helped him to his end. ‘You’re not going yet?’ he cried, as Smith rose from the sofa. At the prospect of solitude, his fears seemed to crowd back upon him, and he stretched out a hand to detain him. ‘Yes, I must go. I have my work to do. You are all right now. I think that with your nervous system you should take up some less morbid study.’ ‘Oh, I am not nervous as a rule; and I have unwrapped mummies before.’ ‘You fainted last time,’ observed Monkhouse Lee. ‘Ah, yes, so I did. Well, I must have a nerve tonic or a course of electricity. You are not going, Lee?’ ‘I’ll do whatever you wish, Ned.’ ‘Then I’ll come down with you and have a shake-down on your sofa. Good-night, Smith. I am so sorry to have disturbed you with my foolishness.’ They shook hands, and as the medical student stumbled up the spiral and irregular stair he heard a key turn in a door, and the steps of his two new acquaintances as they descended to the lower floor. In this strange way began the acquaintance between Edward Bellingham and Abercrombie Smith, an acquaintance which the latter, at least, had no desire to push further. Bellingham, however, appeared to have taken a fancy to his rough-spoken neighbour, and made his advances in such a way that he could hardly be repulsed without absolute brutality. Twice he called to thank Smith for his assistance, and many times afterwards he looked in with books, papers and such other civilities as two bachelor neighbours can offer each other. He was, as Smith soon found, a man of wide reading, with catholic tastes and an extraordinary memory. His manner, too, was so pleasing and suave that one came, after a time, to overlook his repellent appearance. For a jaded and wearied man he was 126

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no unpleasant companion, and Smith found himself, after a time, looking forward to his visits, and even returning them. Clever as he undoubtedly was, however, the medical student seemed to detect a dash of insanity in the man. He broke out at times into a high, inflated style of talk which was in contrast with the simplicity of his life. ‘It is a wonderful thing,’ he cried, ‘to feel that one can command powers of good and of evil—a ministering angel or a demon of vengeance.’ And again, of Monkhouse Lee, he said,—‘Lee is a good fellow, an honest fellow, but he is without strength or ambition. He would not make a fit partner for a man with a great enterprise. He would not make a fit partner for me.’ At such hints and innuendoes stolid Smith, puffing solemnly at his pipe, would simply raise his eyebrows and shake his head, with little interjections of medical wisdom as to earlier hours and fresher air. One habit Bellingham had developed of late which Smith knew to be a frequent herald of a weakening mind. He appeared to be forever talking to himself. At late hours of the night, when there could be no visitor with him, Smith could still hear his voice beneath him in a low, muffled monologue, sunk almost to a whisper, and yet very audible in the silence. This solitary babbling annoyed and distracted the student, so that he spoke more than once to his neighbour about it. Bellingham, however, flushed up at the charge, and denied curtly that he had uttered a sound; indeed, he showed more annoyance over the matter than the occasion seemed to demand. Had Abercrombie Smith had any doubt as to his own ears he had not to go far to find corroboration. Tom Styles, the little wrinkled manservant who had attended to the wants of the lodgers in the turret for a longer time than any man’s memory could carry him, was sorely put to it over the same matter. ‘If you please, sir,’ said he, as he tidied down the top chamber one morning, ‘do you think Mr Bellingham is all right, sir?’ ‘All right, Styles?’ ‘Yes sir. Right in his head, sir.’ ‘Why should he not be, then?’ ‘Well, I don’t know, sir. His habits has changed of late. He’s not the same man he used to be, though I make free to say that he was never quite one of my gentlemen, like Mr Hastie or yourself, sir. He’s took to talkin’ to himself something awful. I wonder it don’t disturb you. I don’t know what to make of him, sir.’

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‘I don’t know what business it is of yours, Styles.’ ‘Well, I takes an interest, Mr Smith. It may be forward of me, but I can’t help it. I feel sometimes as if I was mother and father to my young gentlemen. It all falls on me when things go wrong and the relations come. But Mr Bellingham, sir. I want to know what it is that walks about his room sometimes when he’s out and when the door’s locked on the outside.’ ‘Eh? you’re talking nonsense, Styles.’ ‘Maybe so, sir; but I heard it more’n once with my own ears.’ ‘Rubbish, Styles.’ ‘Very good, sir. You’ll ring the bell if you want me.’ Abercrombie Smith gave little heed to the gossip of the old manservant, but a small incident occurred a few days later which left an unpleasant effect upon his mind, and brought the words of Styles forcibly to his memory. Bellingham had come up to see him late one night, and was entertaining him with an interesting account of the rock tombs of Beni Hassan in Upper Egypt, when Smith, whose hearing was remarkably acute, distinctly heard the sound of a door opening on the landing below. ‘There’s some fellow gone in or out of your room,’ he remarked. Bellingham sprang up and stood helpless for a moment, with the expression of a man who is half incredulous and half afraid. ‘I surely locked it. I am almost positive that I locked it,’ he stammered. ‘No one could have opened it.’ ‘Why, I hear someone coming up the steps now,’ said Smith. Bellingham rushed out through the door, slammed it loudly behind him, and hurried down the stairs. About half-way down Smith heard him stop, and thought he caught the sound of whispering. A moment later the door beneath him shut, a key creaked in a lock, and Bellingham, with beads of moisture upon his pale face, ascended the stairs once more, and re-entered the room. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, throwing himself down in a chair. ‘It was that fool of a dog. He had pushed the door open. I don’t know how I came to forget to lock it.’ ‘I didn’t know you kept a dog,’ said Smith, looking very thoughtfully at the disturbed face of his companion. ‘Yes, I haven’t had him long. I must get rid of him. He’s a great nuisance.’ ‘He must be, if you find it so hard to shut him up. I should have thought that shutting the door would have been enough, without locking it.’ 128

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‘I want to prevent old Styles from letting him out. He’s of some value, you know, and it would be awkward to lose him.’ ‘I am a bit of a dog-fancier myself,’ said Smith, still gazing hard at his companion from the corner of his eyes. ‘Perhaps you’ll let me have a look at it.’ ‘Certainly. But I am afraid it cannot be to-night; I have an appointment. Is that clock right? Then I am a quarter of an hour late already. You’ll excuse me, I am sure.’ He picked up his cap and hurried from the room. In spite of his appointment, Smith heard him re-enter his own chamber and lock his door upon the inside. This interview left a disagreeable impression upon the medical student’s mind. Bellingham had lied to him, and lied so clumsily that it looked as if he had desperate reasons for concealing the truth. Smith knew that his neighbour had no dog. He knew, also, that the step which he had heard upon the stairs was not the step of an animal. But if it were not, then what could it be? There was old Styles’s statement about the something which used to pace the room at times when the owner was absent. Could it be a woman? Smith rather inclined to the view. If so, it would mean disgrace and expulsion to Bellingham if it were discovered by the authorities, so that his anxiety and falsehoods might be accounted for. And yet it was inconceivable that an undergraduate could keep a woman in his rooms without being instantly detected. Be the explanation what it might, there was something ugly about it, and Smith determined, as he turned to his books, to discourage all further attempts at intimacy on the part of his soft-spoken and ill-favoured neighbour. But his work was destined to interruption that night. He had hardly caught up the broken threads when a firm, heavy footfall came three steps at a time from below, and Hastie, in blazer and flannels, burst into the room. ‘Still at it!’ said he, plumping down into his wonted arm-chair. ‘What a chap you are to stew! I believe an earthquake might come and knock Oxford into a cocked hat, and you would sit perfectly placid with your books among the ruins. However, I won’t bore you long. Three whiffs of baccy, and I am off.’ ‘What’s the news, then?’ asked Smith, cramming a plug of bird’s-eye into his briar with his forefinger.

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‘Nothing very much. Wilson made 70 for the freshmen against the eleven. They say that they will play him instead of Buddicomb, for Buddicomb is clean off colour. He used to be able to bowl a little, but it’s nothing but half-vollies and long hops now.’ ‘Medium right,’ suggested Smith, with the intense gravity which comes upon a ’varsity man when he speaks of athletics. ‘Inclining to fast, with a work from leg. Comes with the arm about three inches or so. He used to be nasty on a wet wicket. Oh, by the way, have you heard about Long Norton?’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘He’s been attacked.’ ‘Attacked?’ ‘Yes, just as he was turning out of the High Street, and within a hundred yards of the gate of Old’s.’ ‘But who—’ ‘Ah, that’s the rub! If you said “what,” you would be more grammatical. Norton swears that it was not human, and, indeed, from the scratches on his throat, I should be inclined to agree with him.’ ‘What, then? Have we come down to spooks?’ Abercrombie Smith puffed his scientific contempt. ‘Well, no; I don’t think that is quite the idea, either. I am inclined to think that if any showman has lost a great ape lately, and the brute is in these parts, a jury would find a true bill against it. Norton passes that way every night, you know, about the same hour. There’s a tree that hangs low over the path—the big elm from Rainy’s garden. Norton thinks the thing dropped on him out of the tree. Anyhow, he was nearly strangled by two arms, which, he says, were as strong and as thin as steel bands. He saw nothing; only those beastly arms that tightened and tightened on him. He yelled his head nearly off, and a couple of chaps came running, and the thing went over the wall like a cat. He never got a fair sight of it the whole time. It gave Norton a shake up, I can tell you. I tell him it has been as good as a change at the sea-side for him.’ ‘A garrotter, most likely,’ said Smith. ‘Very possibly. Norton says not; but we don’t mind what he says. The garrotter had long nails, and was pretty smart at swinging himself over walls. By-the-way, your beautiful neighbour would be pleased if he heard about it. He had a grudge against Norton, and he’s not a man, from what 130

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I know of him, to forget his little debts. But hallo, old chap, what have you got in your noddle?’ ‘Nothing,’ Smith answered curtly. He had started in his chair, and the look had flashed over his face which comes upon a man who is struck suddenly by some unpleasant idea. ‘You looked as if something I had said had taken you on the raw. By-the-way, you have made the acquaintance of Master B. since I looked in last, have you not? Young Monkhouse Lee told me something to that effect.’ ‘Yes; I know him slightly. He has been up here once or twice.’ ‘Well, you’re big enough and ugly enough to take care of yourself. He’s not what I should call exactly a healthy sort of Johnny, though, no doubt, he’s very clever, and all that. But you’ll soon find out for yourself. Lee is all right; he’s a very decent little fellow. Well, so long, old chap! I row Mullins for the Vice-Chancellor’s pot on Wednesday week, so mind you come down, in case I don’t see you before.’ Bovine Smith laid down his pipe and turned stolidly to his books once more. But with all the will in the world, he found it very hard to keep his mind upon his work. It would slip away to brood upon the man beneath him, and upon the little mystery which hung round his chambers. Then his thoughts turned to this singular attack of which Hastie had spoken, and to the grudge which Bellingham was said to owe the object of it. The two ideas would persist in rising together in his mind, as though there were some close and intimate connection between them. And yet the suspicion was so dim and vague that it could not be put down in words. ‘Confound the chap!’ cried Smith, as he shied his book on pathology across the room. ‘He has spoiled my night’s reading, and that’s reason enough, if there were no other, why I should steer clear of him in the future.’ For ten days the medical student confined himself so closely to his studies that he neither saw nor heard anything of either of the men beneath him. At the hours when Bellingham had been accustomed to visit him, he took care to sport his oak, and though he more than once heard a knocking at his outer door, he resolutely refused to answer it. One afternoon, however, he was descending the stairs when, just as he was passing it, Bellingham’s door flew open, and young Monkhouse Lee came out with his eyes sparkling and a dark flush of anger upon his olive

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cheeks. Close at his heels followed Bellingham, his fat, unhealthy face all quivering with malignant passion. ‘You fool!’ he hissed. ‘You’ll be sorry.’ ‘Very likely,’ cried the other. ‘Mind what I say. It’s off! I won’t hear of it!’ ‘You’ve promised, anyhow.’ ‘Oh, I’ll keep that! I won’t speak. But I’d rather little Eva was in her grave. Once for all, it’s off. She’ll do what I say. We don’t want to see you again.’ So much Smith could not avoid hearing, but he hurried on, for he had no wish to be involved in their dispute. There had been a serious breach between them, that was clear enough, and Lee was going to cause the engagement with his sister to be broken off. Smith thought of Hastie’s comparison of the toad and the dove, and was glad to think that the matter was at an end. Bellingham’s face when he was in a passion was not pleasant to look upon. He was not a man to whom an innocent girl could be trusted for life. As he walked, Smith wondered languidly what could have caused the quarrel, and what the promise might be which Bellingham had been so anxious that Monkhouse Lee should keep. It was the day of the sculling match between Hastie and Mullins, and a stream of men were making their way down to the banks of the Isis. A May sun was shining brightly, and the yellow path was barred with the black shadows of the tall elm-trees. On either side the grey colleges lay back from the road, the hoary old mothers of minds looking out from their high, mullioned windows at the tide of young life which swept so merrily past them. Black-clad tutors, prim officials, pale reading men, brown-faced, straw-hatted young athletes in white sweaters or manycoloured blazers, all were hurrying towards the blue winding river which curves through the Oxford meadows. Abercrombie Smith, with the intuition of an old oarsman, chose his position at the point where he knew that the struggle, if there were a struggle, would come. Far off he heard the hum which announced the start, the gathering roar of the approach, the thunder of running feet, and the shouts of the men in the boats beneath him. A spray of half-clad, deep-breathing runners shot past him, and craning over their shoulders, he saw Hastie pulling a steady thirty-six, while his opponent, with a jerky forty, was a good boat’s length behind him. Smith gave a cheer for his friend, and pulling out his watch, was starting off again for his 132

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chambers, when he felt a touch upon his shoulder, and found that young Monkhouse Lee was beside him. ‘I saw you there,’ he said, in a timid, deprecating way. ‘I wanted to speak to you, if you could spare me a half-hour. This cottage is mine. I share it with Harrington of King’s. Come in and have a cup of tea.’ ‘I must be back presently,’ said Smith. ‘I am hard on the grind at present. But I’ll come in for a few minutes with pleasure. I wouldn’t have come out only Hastie is a friend of mine.’ ‘So he is of mine. Hasn’t he a beautiful style? Mullins wasn’t in it. But come into the cottage. It’s a little den of a place, but it is pleasant to work in during the summer months.’ It was a small, square, white building, with green doors and shutters, and a rustic trellis-work porch, standing back some fifty yards from the river’s bank. Inside, the main room was roughly fitted up as a study—deal table, unpainted shelves with books, and a few cheap oleographs upon the wall. A kettle sang upon a spirit-stove, and there were tea things upon a tray on the table. ‘Try that chair and have a cigarette,’ said Lee. ‘Let me pour you out a cup of tea. It’s so good of you to come in, for I know that your time is a good deal taken up. I wanted to say to you that, if I were you, I should change my rooms at once.’ ‘Eh?’ Smith sat staring with a lighted match in one hand and his unlit cigarette in the other. ‘Yes; it must seem very extraordinary, and the worst of it is that I cannot give my reasons, for I am under a solemn promise—a very solemn promise. But I may go so far as to say that I don’t think Bellingham is a very safe man to live near. I intend to camp out here as much as I can for a time.’ ‘Not safe! What do you mean?’ ‘Ah, that’s what I mustn’t say. But do take my advice, and move your rooms. We had a grand row to-day. You must have heard us, for you came down the stairs.’ ‘I saw that you had fallen out.’ ‘He’s a horrible chap, Smith. That is the only word for him. I have had doubts about him ever since that night when he fainted—you remember, when you came down. I taxed him to-day, and he told me things that made my hair rise, and wanted me to stand in with him. I’m not

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strait-laced, but I am a clergyman’s son, you know, and I think there are some things which are quite beyond the pale. I only thank God that I found him out before it was too late, for he was to have married into my family.’ ‘This is all very fine, Lee,’ said Abercrombie Smith curtly. ‘But either you are saying a great deal too much or a great deal too little.’ ‘I give you a warning.’ ‘If there is real reason for warning, no promise can bind you. If I see a rascal about to blow a place up with dynamite no pledge will stand in my way of preventing him.’ ‘Ah, but I cannot prevent him, and I can do nothing but warn you.’ ‘Without saying what you warn me against.’ ‘Against Bellingham.’ ‘But that is childish. Why should I fear him, or any man?’ ‘I can’t tell you. I can only entreat you to change your rooms. You are in danger where you are. I don’t even say that Bellingham would wish to injure you. But it might happen, for he is a dangerous neighbour just now.’ ‘Perhaps I know more than you think,’ said Smith, looking keenly at the young man’s boyish, earnest face. ‘Suppose I tell you that some one else shares Bellingham’s rooms.’ Monkhouse Lee sprang from his chair in uncontrollable excitement. ‘You know, then?’ he gasped. ‘A woman.’ Lee dropped back again with a groan. ‘My lips are sealed,’ he said. ‘I must not speak.’ ‘Well, anyhow,’ said Smith, rising, ‘it is not likely that I should allow myself to be frightened out of rooms which suit me very nicely. It would be a little too feeble for me to move out all my goods and chattels because you say that Bellingham might in some unexplained way do me an injury. I think that I’ll just take my chance, and stay where I am, and as I see that it’s nearly five o’clock, I must ask you to excuse me.’ He bade the young student adieu in a few curt words, and made his way homeward through the sweet spring evening, feeling half-ruffled, half-amused, as any other strong, unimaginative man might who has been menaced by a vague and shadowy danger. There was one little indulgence which Abercrombie Smith always allowed himself, however closely his work might press upon him. Twice a week, on the Tuesday and the Friday, it was his invariable custom to 134

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walk over to Farlingford, the residence of Doctor Plumptree Peterson, situated about a mile and a half out of Oxford. Peterson had been a close friend of Smith’s elder brother Francis, and as he was a bachelor, fairly well-to-do, with a good cellar and a better library, his house was a pleasant goal for a man who was in need of a brisk walk. Twice a week, then, the medical student would swing out there along the dark country roads, and spend a pleasant hour in Peterson’s comfortable study, discussing, over a glass of old port, the gossip of the ’varsity or the latest developments of medicine or of surgery. On the day which followed his interview with Monkhouse Lee, Smith shut up his books at a quarter past eight, the hour when he usually started for his friend’s house. As he was leaving his room, however, his eyes chanced to fall upon one of the books which Bellingham had lent him, and his conscience pricked him for not having returned it. However repellent the man might be, he should not be treated with discourtesy. Taking the book, he walked downstairs and knocked at his neighbour’s door. There was no answer; but on turning the handle he found that it was unlocked. Pleased at the thought of avoiding an interview, he stepped inside, and placed the book with his card upon the table. The lamp was turned half down, but Smith could see the details of the room plainly enough. It was all much as he had seen it before—the frieze, the animal-headed gods, the hanging crocodile, and the table littered over with papers and dried leaves. The mummy case stood upright against the wall, but the mummy itself was missing. There was no sign of any second occupant of the room, and he felt as he withdrew that he had probably done Bellingham an injustice. Had he a guilty secret to preserve, he would hardly leave his door open so that all the world might enter. The spiral stair was as black as pitch, and Smith was slowly making his way down its irregular steps, when he was suddenly conscious that something had passed him in the darkness. There was a faint sound, a whiff of air, a light brushing past his elbow, but so slight that he could scarcely be certain of it. He stopped and listened, but the wind was rustling among the ivy outside, and he could hear nothing else. ‘Is that you, Styles?’ he shouted. There was no answer, and all was still behind him. It must have been a sudden gust of air, for there were crannies and cracks in the old turret. And yet he could almost have sworn that he heard a footfall by his very side. He had emerged into the quadrangle, still turning the matter over in

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his head, when a man came running swiftly across the smooth-cropped lawn. ‘Is that you, Smith?’ ‘Hullo, Hastie!’ ‘For God’s sake come at once! Young Lee is drowned! Here’s Harrington of King’s with the news. The doctor is out. You’ll do, but come along at once. There may be life in him.’ ‘Have you brandy?’ ‘No.’ ‘I’ll bring some. There’s a flask on my table.’ Smith bounded up the stairs, taking three at a time, seized the flask, and was rushing down with it, when, as he passed Bellingham’s room, his eyes fell upon something which left him gasping and staring upon the landing. The door, which he had closed behind him, was now open, and right in front of him, with the lamp-light shining upon it, was the mummy case. Three minutes ago it had been empty. He could swear to that. Now it framed the lank body of its horrible occupant, who stood, grim and stark, with his black shrivelled face towards the door. The form was lifeless and inert, but it seemed to Smith as he gazed that there still lingered a lurid spark of vitality, some faint sign of consciousness in the little eyes which lurked in the depths of the hollow sockets. So astounded and shaken was he that he had forgotten his errand, and was still staring at the lean, sunken figure when the voice of his friend below recalled him to himself. ‘Come on, Smith!’ he shouted. ‘It’s life and death, you know. Hurry up! Now, then,’ he added, as the medical student reappeared, ‘let us do a sprint. It is well under a mile, and we should do it in five minutes. A human life is better worth running for than a pot.’ Neck and neck they dashed through the darkness, and did not pull up until panting and spent, they had reached the little cottage by the river. Young Lee, limp and dripping like a broken water-plant, was stretched upon the sofa, the green scum of the river upon his black hair, and a fringe of white foam upon his leaden-hued lips. Beside him knelt his fellow-student Harrington, endeavouring to chafe some warmth back into his rigid limbs. ‘I think there’s life in him,’ said Smith, with his hand to the lad’s side. ‘Put your watch glass to his lips. Yes, there’s dimming on it. You take one arm, Hastie. Now work it as I do, and we’ll soon pull him round.’ 136

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For ten minutes they worked in silence, inflating and depressing the chest of the unconscious man. At the end of that time a shiver ran through his body, his lips trembled, and he opened his eyes. The three students burst out into an irrepressible cheer. ‘Wake up, old chap. You’ve frightened us quite enough.’ ‘Have some brandy. Take a sip from the flask.’ ‘He’s all right now,’ said his companion Harrington. ‘Heavens, what a fright I got! I was reading here, and he had gone for a stroll as far as the river, when I heard a scream and a splash. Out I ran, and by the time that I could find him and fish him out, all life seemed to have gone. Then Simpson couldn’t get a doctor, for he has a game-leg, and I had to run, and I don’t know what I’d have done without you fellows. That’s right, old chap. Sit up.’ Monkhouse Lee had raised himself on his hands, and looked wildly about him. ‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘I’ve been in the water. Ah, yes; I remember.’ A look of fear came into his eyes, and he sank his face into his hands. ‘How did you fall in?’ ‘I didn’t fall in.’ ‘How, then?’ ‘I was thrown in. I was standing by the bank, and something from behind picked me up like a feather and hurled me in. I heard nothing, and I saw nothing. But I know what it was, for all that.’ ‘And so do I,’ whispered Smith. Lee looked up with a quick glance of surprise. ‘You’ve learned, then!’ he said. ‘You remember the advice I gave you?’ ‘Yes, and I begin to think that I shall take it.’ ‘I don’t know what the deuce you fellows are talking about,’ said Hastie, ‘but I think, if I were you, Harrington, I should get Lee to bed at once. It will be time enough to discuss the why and the wherefore when he is a little stronger. I think, Smith, you and I can leave him alone now. I am walking back to college; if you are coming in that direction, we can have a chat.’ But it was little chat that they had upon their homeward path. Smith’s mind was too full of the incidents of the evening, the absence of the mummy from his neighbour’s rooms, the step that passed him on the stair, the reappearance—the extraordinary, inexplicable reappearance of the grisly thing—and then this attack upon Lee, corresponding so closely to the previous outrage upon another man against whom Bellingham

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bore a grudge. All this settled in his thoughts, together with the many little incidents which had previously turned him against his neighbour, and the singular circumstances under which he was first called in to him. What had been a dim suspicion, a vague, fantastic conjecture, had suddenly taken form, and stood out in his mind as a grim fact, a thing not to be denied. And yet, how monstrous it was! how unheard of! how entirely beyond all bounds of human experience. An impartial judge, or even the friend who walked by his side, would simply tell him that his eyes had deceived him, that the mummy had been there all the time, that young Lee had tumbled into the river as any other man tumbles into a river, and that a blue pill was the best thing for a disordered liver. He felt that he would have said as much if the positions had been reversed. And yet he could swear that Bellingham was a murderer at heart, and that he wielded a weapon such as no man had ever used in all the grim history of crime. Hastie had branched off to his rooms with a few crisp and emphatic comments upon his friend’s unsociability, and Abercrombie Smith crossed the quadrangle to his corner turret with a strong feeling of repulsion for his chambers and their associations. He would take Lee’s advice, and move his quarters as soon as possible, for how could a man study when his ear was ever straining for every murmur or footstep in the room below? He observed, as he crossed over the lawn, that the light was still shining in Bellingham’s window, and as he passed up the staircase the door opened, and the man himself looked out at him. With his fat, evil face he was like some bloated spider fresh from the weaving of his poisonous web. ‘Good evening,’ said he. ‘Won’t you come in?’ ‘No,’ cried Smith, fiercely. ‘No? You are busy as ever? I wanted to ask you about Lee. I was sorry to hear that there was a rumour that something was amiss with him.’ His features were grave, but there was the gleam of a hidden laugh in his eyes as he spoke. Smith saw it, and he could have knocked him down for it. ‘You’ll be sorrier still to hear that Monkhouse Lee is doing very well, and is out of all danger,’ he answered. ‘Your hellish tricks have not come off this time. Oh, you needn’t try to brazen it out. I know all about it.’ Bellingham took a step back from the angry student, and half-closed the door as if to protect himself. ‘You are mad,’ he said. ‘What do you mean? Do you assert that I had anything to do with Lee’s accident?’ 138

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‘Yes,’ thundered Smith. ‘You and that bag of bones behind you; you worked it between you. I tell you what it is, Master B., they have given up burning folk like you, but we still keep a hangman, and, by George! if any man in this college meets his death while you are here, I’ll have you up, and if you don’t swing for it, it won’t be my fault. You’ll find that your filthy Egyptian tricks won’t answer in England.’ ‘You’re a raving lunatic,’ said Bellingham. ‘All right. You just remember what I say, for you’ll find that I’ll be better than my word.’ The door slammed, and Smith went fuming up to his chamber, where he locked the door upon the inside, and spent half the night in smoking his old briar and brooding over the strange events of the evening. Next morning Abercrombie Smith heard nothing of his neighbour, but Harrington called upon him in the afternoon to say that Lee was almost himself again. All day Smith stuck fast to his work, but in the evening he determined to pay the visit to his friend Doctor Peterson upon which he had started upon the night before. A good walk and a friendly chat would be welcome to his jangled nerves. Bellingham’s door was shut as he passed, but glancing back when he was some distance from the turret, he saw his neighbour’s head at the window outlined against the lamp-light, his face pressed apparently against the glass as he gazed out into the darkness. It was a blessing to be away from all contact with him, but if for a few hours, and Smith stepped out briskly, and breathed the soft spring air into his lungs. The half-moon lay in the west between two Gothic pinnacles, and threw upon the silvered street a dark tracery from the stone-work above. There was a brisk breeze, and light, fleecy clouds drifted swiftly across the sky. Old’s was on the very border of the town, and in five minutes Smith found himself beyond the houses and between the hedges of a May-scented Oxfordshire lane. It was a lonely and little frequented road which led to his friend’s house. Early as it was, Smith did not meet a single soul upon his way. He walked briskly along until he came to the avenue gate, which opened into the long gravel drive leading up to Farlingford. In front of him he could see the cosy red light of the windows glimmering through the foliage. He stood with his hand upon the iron latch of the swinging gate, and he glanced back at the road along which he had come. Something was coming swiftly down it.

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It moved in the shadow of the hedge, silently and furtively, a dark, crouching figure, dimly visible against the black background. Even as he gazed back at it, it had lessened its distance by twenty paces, and was fast closing upon him. Out of the darkness he had a glimpse of a scraggy neck, and of two eyes that will ever haunt him in his dreams. He turned, and with a cry of terror he ran for his life up the avenue. There were the red lights, the signals of safety, almost within a stone’s-throw of him. He was a famous runner, but never had he run as he ran that night. The heavy gate had swung into place behind him, but he heard it dash open again before his pursuer. As he rushed madly and wildly through the night, he could hear a swift, dry patter behind him, and could see, as he threw back a glance, that this horror was bounding like a tiger at his heels, with blazing eyes and one stringy arm out-thrown. Thank God, the door was ajar. He could see the thin bar of light which shot from the lamp in the hall. Nearer yet sounded the clatter from behind. He heard a hoarse gurgling at his very shoulder. With a shriek he flung himself against the door, slammed and bolted it behind him, and sank half-fainting on to the hall chair. ‘My goodness, Smith, what’s the matter?’ asked Peterson, appearing at the door of his study. ‘Give me some brandy!’ Peterson disappeared, and came rushing out again with a glass and a decanter. ‘You need it,’ he said, as his visitor drank off what he poured out for him. ‘Why, man, you are as white as a cheese.’ Smith laid down his glass, rose up, and took a deep breath. ‘I am my own man again now,’ said he. ‘I was never so unmanned before. But, with your leave, Peterson, I will sleep here to-night, for I don’t think I could face that road again except by daylight. It’s weak, I know, but I can’t help it.’ Peterson looked at his visitor with a very questioning eye. ‘Of course you shall sleep here if you wish. I’ll tell Mrs Burney to make up the spare bed. Where are you off to now?’ ‘Come up with me to the window that overlooks the door. I want you to see what I have seen.’ They went up to the window of the upper hall whence they could look down upon the approach to the house. The drive and the fields on either side lay quiet and still, bathed in the peaceful moonlight. 140

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‘Well, really, Smith,’ remarked Peterson, ‘it is well that I know you to be an abstemious man. What in the world can have frightened you?’ ‘I’ll tell you presently. But where can it have gone? Ah, now look, look! See the curve of the road just beyond your gate.’ ‘Yes, I see; you needn’t pinch my arm off. I saw someone pass. I should say a man, rather thin, apparently, and tall, very tall. But what of him? And what of yourself? You are still shaking like an aspen leaf.’ ‘I have been within hand-grip of the devil, that’s all. But come down to your study, and I shall tell you the whole story.’ He did so. Under the cheery lamplight, with a glass of wine on the table beside him, and the portly form and florid face of his friend in front, he narrated, in their order, all the events, great and small, which had formed so singular a chain, from the night on which he had found Bellingham fainting in front of the mummy case until his horrid experience of an hour ago. ‘There now,’ he said as he concluded, ‘that’s the whole black business. It is monstrous and incredible, but it is true.’ Doctor Plumptree Peterson sat for some time in silence with a very puzzled expression upon his face. ‘I never heard of such a thing in my life, never!’ he said at last. ‘You have told me the facts. Now tell me your inferences.’ ‘You can draw your own.’ ‘But I should like to hear yours. You have thought over the matter, and I have not.’ ‘Well, it must be a little vague in detail, but the main points seem to me to be clear enough. This fellow Bellingham, in his Eastern studies, has got hold of some infernal secret by which a mummy—or possibly only this particular mummy—can be temporarily brought to life. He was trying this disgusting business on the night when he fainted. No doubt the sight of the creature moving had shaken his nerve, even though he had expected it. You remember that almost the first words he said were to call out upon himself as a fool. Well, he got more hardened afterwards, and carried the matter through without fainting. The vitality which he could put into it was evidently only a passing thing, for I have seen it continually in its case as dead as this table. He has some elaborate process, I fancy, by which he brings the thing to pass. Having done it, he naturally bethought him that he might use the creature as an agent. It has intelligence and it has strength. For some purpose he took Lee into his confidence; but Lee, like a decent Christian, would have nothing to do with such a business. Then they had a row, and Lee vowed that he

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would tell his sister of Bellingham’s true character. Bellingham’s game was to prevent him, and he nearly managed it, by setting this creature of his on his track. He had already tried its powers upon another man—Norton— towards whom he had a grudge. It is the merest chance that he has not two murders upon his soul. Then, when I taxed him with the matter, he had the strongest reasons for wishing to get me out of the way before I could convey my knowledge to anyone else. He got his chance when I went out, for he knew my habits, and where I was bound for. I have had a narrow shave, Peterson, and it is mere luck you didn’t find me on your doorstep in the morning. I’m not a nervous man as a rule, and I never thought to have the fear of death put upon me as it was to-night.’ ‘My dear boy, you take the matter too seriously,’ said his companion. ‘Your nerves are out of order with your work, and you make too much of it. How could such a thing as this stride about the streets of Oxford, even at night, without being seen?’ ‘It has been seen. There is quite a scare in the town about an escaped ape, as they imagine the creature to be. It is the talk of the place.’ ‘Well, it’s a striking chain of events. And yet, my dear fellow, you must allow that each incident in itself is capable of a more natural explanation.’ ‘What! even my adventure of to-night?’ ‘Certainly. You come out with your nerves all unstrung, and your head full of this theory of yours. Some gaunt, half-famished tramp steals after you, and seeing you run, is emboldened to pursue you. Your fears and imagination do the rest.’ ‘It won’t do, Peterson; it won’t do.’ ‘And again, in the instance of your finding the mummy case empty, and then a few moments later with an occupant, you know that it was lamplight, that the lamp was half turned down, and that you had no special reason to look hard at the case. It is quite possible that you may have overlooked the creature in the first instance.’ ‘No, no; it is out of the question.’ ‘And then Lee may have fallen into the river, and Norton been garrotted. It is certainly a formidable indictment that you have against Bellingham; but if you were to place it before a police magistrate, he would simply laugh in your face.’ ‘I know he would. That is why I mean to take the matter into my own hands.’ ‘Eh?’ 142

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‘Yes; I feel that a public duty rests upon me, and, besides, I must do it for my own safety, unless I choose to allow myself to be hunted by this beast out of the college, and that would be a little too feeble. I have quite made up my mind what I shall do. And first of all, may I use your paper and pens for an hour?’ ‘Most certainly. You will find all that you want upon that side table.’ Abercrombie Smith sat down before a sheet of foolscap, and for an hour, and then for a second hour his pen travelled swiftly over it. Page after page was finished and tossed aside while his friend leaned back in his arm-chair, looking across at him with patient curiosity. At last, with an exclamation of satisfaction, Smith sprang to his feet, gathered his papers up into order, and laid the last one upon Peterson’s desk. ‘Kindly sign this as a witness,’ he said. ‘A witness? Of what?’ ‘Of my signature, and of the date. The date is the most important. Why, Peterson, my life might hang upon it.’ ‘My dear Smith, you are talking wildly. Let me beg you to go to bed.’ ‘On the contrary, I never spoke so deliberately in my life. And I will promise to go to bed the moment you have signed it.’ ‘But what is it?’ ‘It is a statement of all that I have been telling you to-night. I wish you to witness it.’ ‘Certainly,’ said Peterson, signing his name under that of his companion. ‘There you are! But what is the idea?’ ‘You will kindly retain it, and produce it in case I am arrested.’ ‘Arrested? For what?’ ‘For murder. It is quite on the cards. I wish to be ready for every event. There is only one course open to me, and I am determined to take it.’ ‘For Heaven’s sake, don’t do anything rash!’ ‘Believe me, it would be far more rash to adopt any other course. I hope that we won’t need to bother you, but it will ease my mind to know that you have this statement of my motives. And now I am ready to take your advice and to go to roost, for I want to be at my best in the morning.’ Abercrombie Smith was not an entirely pleasant man to have as an enemy. Slow and easy-tempered, he was formidable when driven to action. He brought to every purpose in life the same deliberate resoluteness which had distinguished him as a scientific student. He had laid his studies aside for a day, but he intended that the day should not be wasted.

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Not a word did he say to his host as to his plans, but by nine o’clock he was well on his way to Oxford. In the High Street he stopped at Clifford’s, the gun-maker’s, and bought a heavy revolver, with a box of central-fire cartridges. Six of them he slipped into the chambers, and half-cocking the weapon, placed it in the pocket of his coat. He then made his way to Hastie’s rooms, where the big oarsman was lounging over his breakfast, with the Sporting Times propped up against the coffee-pot. ‘Hullo! What’s up?’ he asked. ‘Have some coffee?’ ‘No, thank you. I want you to come with me, Hastie, and do what I ask you.’ ‘Certainly, my boy.’ ‘And bring a heavy stick with you.’ ‘Hullo!’ Hastie stared. ‘Here’s a hunting-crop that would fell an ox.’ ‘One other thing. You have a box of amputating knives. Give me the longest of them.’ ‘There you are. You seem to be fairly on the war trail. Anything else?’ ‘No; that will do.’ Smith placed the knife inside his coat, and led the way to the quadrangle. ‘We are neither of us chickens, Hastie,’ said he. ‘I think I can do this job alone, but I take you as a precaution. I am going to have a little talk with Bellingham. If I have only him to deal with, I won’t, of course, need you. If I shout, however, up you come, and lam out with your whip as hard as you can lick. Do you understand?’ ‘All right. I’ll come if I hear you bellow.’ ‘Stay here, then. It may be a little time, but don’t budge until I come down.’ ‘I’m a fixture.’ Smith ascended the stairs, opened Bellingham’s door and stepped in. Bellingham was seated behind his table, writing. Beside him, among his litter of strange possessions, towered the mummy case, with its sale number 249 still stuck upon its front, and its hideous occupant stiff and stark within it. Smith looked very deliberately round him, closed the door, locked it, took the key from the inside, and then stepping across to the fireplace, struck a match and set the fire alight. Bellingham sat staring, with amazement and rage upon his bloated face. ‘Well, really now, you make yourself at home,’ he gasped. Smith sat himself deliberately down, placing his watch upon the table, drew out his pistol, cocked it, and laid it in his lap. Then he took 144

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the long amputating knife from his bosom, and threw it down in front of Bellingham. ‘Now, then,’ said he, ‘just get to work and cut up that mummy.’ ‘Oh, is that it?’ said Bellingham with a sneer. ‘Yes, that is it. They tell me that the law can’t touch you. But I have a law that will set matters straight. If in five minutes you have not set to work, I swear by the God who made me that I will put a bullet through your brain!’ ‘You would murder me?’ Bellingham had half risen, and his face was the colour of putty. ‘Yes.’ ‘And for what?’ ‘To stop your mischief. One minute has gone.’ ‘But what have I done?’ ‘I know and you know.’ ‘This is mere bullying.’ ‘Two minutes are gone.’ ‘But you must give reasons. You are a madman—a dangerous madman. Why should I destroy my own property? It is a valuable mummy.’ ‘You must cut it up, and you must burn it.’ ‘I will do no such thing.’ ‘Four minutes are gone.’ Smith took up the pistol and he looked towards Bellingham with an inexorable face. As the second-hand stole round, he raised his hand, and the finger twitched upon the trigger. ‘There! there! I’ll do it!’ screamed Bellingham. In frantic haste he caught up the knife and hacked at the figure of the mummy, ever glancing round to see the eye and the weapon of his terrible visitor bent upon him. The creature crackled and snapped under every stab of the keen blade. A thick yellow dust rose up from it. Spices and dried essences rained down upon the floor. Suddenly, with a rending crack, its backbone snapped asunder, and it fell, a brown heap of sprawling limbs, upon the floor. ‘Now into the fire!’ said Smith. The flames leaped and roared as the dried and tinderlike débris was piled upon it. The little room was like the stoke-hole of a steamer and the sweat ran down the faces of the two men; but still the one stooped and worked, while the other sat watching him with a set face. A thick,

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fat smoke oozed out from the fire, and a heavy smell of burned resin and singed hair filled the air. In a quarter of an hour a few charred and brittle sticks were all that was left of Lot No. 249. ‘Perhaps that will satisfy you,’ snarled Bellingham, with hate and fear in his little grey eyes as he glanced back at his tormentor. ‘No; I must make a clean sweep of all your materials. We must have no more devil’s tricks. In with all these leaves! They may have something to do with it.’ ‘And what now?’ asked Bellingham, when the leaves also had been added to the blaze. ‘Now the roll of papyrus which you had on the table that night. It is in that drawer, I think.’ ‘No, no,’ shouted Bellingham. ‘Don’t burn that! Why, man, you don’t know what you do. It is unique; it contains wisdom which is nowhere else to be found.’ ‘Out with it!’ ‘But look here, Smith, you can’t really mean it. I’ll share the knowledge with you. I’ll teach you all that is in it. Or, stay, let me only copy it before you burn it!’ Smith stepped forward and turned the key in the drawer. Taking out the yellow, curled roll of paper, he threw it into the fire, and pressed it down with his heel. Bellingham screamed, and grabbed at it; but Smith pushed him back, and stood over it until it was reduced to a formless grey ash. ‘Now, Master B.,’ said he, ‘I think I have pretty well drawn your teeth. You’ll hear from me again, if you return to your old tricks. And now good morning, for I must go back to my studies.’ And such is the narrative of Abercrombie Smith as to the singular events which occurred in Old College, Oxford, in the spring of ’84. As Bellingham left the university immediately afterwards, and was last heard of in the Soudan, there is no one who can contradict his statement. But the wisdom of men is small, and the ways of nature are strange, and who shall put a bound to the dark things which may be found by those who seek for them?

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The Los Amigos Fiasco i used to be the leading practitioner of Los Amigos. Of course, everyone has heard of the great electrical generating gear there. The town is wide spread, and there are dozens of little townlets and villages all round, which receive their supply from the same centre, so that the works are on a very large scale. The Los Amigos folk say that they are the largest upon earth, but then we claim that for everything in Los Amigos except the gaol and the death-rate. Those are said to be the smallest. Now, with so fine an electrical supply, it seemed to be a sinful waste of hemp that the Los Amigos criminals should perish in the old-fashioned manner. And then came the news of the electrocutions in the East, and how the results had not after all been so instantaneous as had been hoped. The Western Engineers raised their eyebrows when they read of the puny shocks by which these men had perished, and they vowed in Los Amigos that when an irreclaimable came their way he should be dealt handsomely by, and have the run of all the big dynamos. There should be no reserve, said the engineers, but he should have all that they had got. And what the result of that would be none could predict, save that it must be absolutely blasting and deadly. Never before had a man been so charged with electricity as they would charge him. He was to be smitten by the essence of ten thunderbolts. Some prophesied combustion, and some disintegration and disappearance. They were waiting eagerly to settle the question by actual demonstration, and it was just at that moment that Duncan Warner came that way. Warner had been wanted by the law, and by nobody else, for many years. Desperado, murderer, train robber and road agent, he was a man beyond the pale of human pity. He had deserved a dozen deaths, and the Los Amigos folk grudged him so gaudy a one as that. He seemed to feel himself to be unworthy of it, for he made two frenzied attempts at escape. He was a powerful, muscular man, with a lion head, tangled black locks, and a sweeping beard which covered his broad chest. When he was tried, there was no finer head in all the crowded court. It’s no new thing to find the best face looking from the dock. But his good looks could not balance his bad deeds. His advocate did all he knew, but the cards lay against him, and Duncan Warner was handed over to the mercy of the big Los Amigos dynamos.

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I was there at the committee meeting when the matter was discussed. The town council had chosen four experts to look after the arrangements. Three of them were admirable. There was Joseph McConnor, the very man who had designed the dynamos, and there was Joshua Westmacott, the chairman of the Los Amigos Electrical Supply Company, Limited. Then there was myself as the chief medical man, and lastly an old German of the name of Peter Stulpnagel. The Germans were a strong body at Los Amigos, and they all voted for their man. That was how he got on the committee. It was said that he had been a wonderful electrician at home, and he was eternally working with wires and insulators and Leyden jars; but, as he never seemed to get any further, or to have any results worth publishing he came at last to be regarded as a harmless crank, who had made science his hobby. We three practical men smiled when we heard that he had been elected as our colleague, and at the meeting we fixed it all up very nicely among ourselves without much thought of the old fellow who sat with his ears scooped forward in his hands, for he was a trifle hard of hearing, taking no more part in the proceedings than the gentlemen of the press who scribbled their notes on the back benches. We did not take long to settle it all. In New York a strength of some two thousand volts had been used, and death had not been instantaneous. Evidently their shock had been too weak. Los Amigos should not fall into that error. The charge should be six times greater, and therefore, of course, it would be six times more effective. Nothing could possibly be more logical. The whole concentrated force of the great dynamos should be employed on Duncan Warner. So we three settled it, and had already risen to break up the meeting, when our silent companion opened his month for the first time. ‘Gentlemen,’ said he, ‘you appear to me to show an extraordinary ignorance upon the subject of electricity. You have not mastered the first principles of its actions upon a human being.’ The committee was about to break into an angry reply to this brusque comment, but the chairman of the Electrical Company tapped his forehead to claim its indulgence for the crankiness of the speaker. ‘Pray tell us, sir,’ said he, with an ironical smile, ‘what is there in our conclusions with which you find fault?’ ‘With your assumption that a large dose of electricity will merely increase the effect of a small dose. Do you not think it possible that it 148

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might have an entirely different result? Do you know anything, by actual experiment, of the effect of such powerful shocks?’ ‘We know it by analogy,’ said the chairman, pompously. ‘All drugs increase their effect when they increase their dose; for example—for example—’ ‘Whisky,’ said Joseph McConnor. ‘Quite so. Whisky. You see it there.’ Peter Stulpnagel smiled and shook his head. ‘Your argument is not very good,’ said he. ‘When I used to take whisky, I used to find that one glass would excite me, but that six would send me to sleep, which is just the opposite. Now, suppose that electricity were to act in just the opposite way also, what then?’ We three practical men burst out laughing. We had known that our colleague was queer, but we never had thought that he would be as queer as this. ‘What then?’ repeated Peter Stulpnagel. ‘We’ll take our chances,’ said the chairman. ‘Pray consider,’ said Peter, ‘that workmen who have touched the wires, and who have received shocks of only a few hundred volts, have died instantly. The fact is well known. And yet when a much greater force was used upon a criminal at New York, the man struggled for some little time. Do you not clearly see that the smaller dose is the more deadly?’ ‘I think, gentlemen, that this discussion has been carried on quite long enough,’ said the chairman, rising again. ‘The point, I take it, has already been decided by the majority of the committee, and Duncan Warner shall be electrocuted on Tuesday by the full strength of the Los Amigos dynamos. Is it not so?’ ‘I agree,’ said Joseph McConnor. ‘I agree,’ said I. ‘And I protest,’ said Peter Stulpnagel. ‘Then the motion is carried, and your protest will be duly entered in the minutes,’ said the chairman, and so the sitting was dissolved. The attendance at the electrocution was a very small one. We four members of the committee were, of course, present with the executioner, who was to act under their orders. The others were the United States Marshal, the governor of the gaol, the chaplain, and three members of the press. The room was a small brick chamber, forming an outhouse to the Central Electrical station. It had been used as a laundry, and had an oven

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and copper at one side, but no other furniture save a single chair for the condemned man. A metal plate for his feet was placed in front of it, to which ran a thick, insulated wire. Above, another wire depended from the ceiling, which could be connected with a small metallic rod projecting from a cap which was to be placed upon his head. When this connection was established Duncan Warner’s hour was come. There was a solemn hush as we waited for the coming of the prisoner. The practical engineers looked a little pale, and fidgeted nervously with the wires. Even the hardened Marshal was ill at ease, for a mere hanging was one thing, and this blasting of flesh and blood a very different one. As to the pressmen, their faces were whiter than the sheets which lay before them. The only man who appeared to feel none of the influence of these preparations was the little German crank, who strolled from one to the other with a smile on his lips and mischief in his eyes. More than once he even went so far as to burst into a shout of laughter, until the chaplain sternly rebuked him for his ill-timed levity. ‘How can you so far forget yourself, Mr Stulpnagel,’ said he, ‘as to jest in the presence of death?’ But the German was quite unabashed. ‘If I were in the presence of death I should not jest,’ said he, ‘but since I am not I may do what I choose.’ This flippant reply was about to draw another and a sterner reproof from the chaplain, when the door was swung open and two warders entered leading Duncan Warner between them. He glanced round him with a set face, stepped resolutely forward, and seated himself upon the chair. ‘Touch her off!’ said he. It was barbarous to keep him in suspense. The chaplain murmured a few words in his ear, the attendant placed the cap upon his head, and then, while we all held our breath, the wire and the metal were brought in contact. ‘Great Scott!’ shouted Duncan Warner. He had bounded in his chair as the frightful shock crashed through his system. But he was not dead. On the contrary, his eyes gleamed far more brightly than they had done before. There was only one change, but it was a singular one. The black had passed from his hair and beard as the shadow passes from a landscape. They were both as white as snow. And yet there was no other sign of decay. His skin was smooth and plump and lustrous as a child’s. 150

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The Marshal looked at the committee with a reproachful eye. ‘There seems to be some hitch here, gentlemen,’ said he. We three practical men looked at each other. Peter Stulpnagel smiled pensively. ‘I think that another one should do it,’ said I. Again the connection was made, and again Duncan Warner sprang in his chair and shouted, but, indeed, were it not that he still remained in the chair none of us would have recognised him. His hair and his beard had shredded off in an instant, and the room looked like a barber’s shop on a Saturday night. There he sat, his eyes still shining, his skin radiant with the glow of perfect health, but with a scalp as bald as a Dutch cheese, and a chin without so much as a trace of down. He began to revolve one of his arms, slowly and doubtfully at first, but with more confidence as he went on. ‘That jint,’ said he, ‘has puzzled half the doctors on the Pacific Slope. It’s as good as new, and as limber as a hickory twig.’ ‘You are feeling pretty well?’ asked the old German. ‘Never better in my life,’ said Duncan Warner cheerily. The situation was a painful one. The Marshal glared at the committee. Peter Stulpnagel grinned and rubbed his hands. The engineers scratched their heads. The bald-headed prisoner revolved his arm and looked pleased. ‘I think that one more shock—’ began the chairman. ‘No, sir,’ said the Marshal ‘we’ve had foolery enough for one morning. We are here for an execution, and a execution we’ll have.’ ‘What do you propose?’ ‘There’s a hook handy upon the ceiling. Fetch in a rope, and we’ll soon set this matter straight.’ There was another awkward delay while the warders departed for the cord. Peter Stulpnagel bent over Duncan Warner, and whispered something in his ear. The desperado started in surprise. ‘You don’t say?’ he asked. The German nodded. ‘What! No ways?’ Peter shook his head, and the two began to laugh as though they shared some huge joke between them. The rope was brought, and the Marshal himself slipped the noose over the criminal’s neck. Then the two warders, the assistant and he

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swung their victim into the air. For half an hour he hung—a dreadful sight—from the ceiling. Then in solemn silence they lowered him down, and one of the warders went out to order the shell to be brought round. But as he touched ground again what was our amazement when Duncan Warner put his hands up to his neck, loosened the noose, and took a long, deep breath. ‘Paul Jefferson’s sale is goin’ well,’ he remarked, ‘I could see the crowd from up yonder,’ and he nodded at the hook in the ceiling. ‘Up with him again!’ shouted the Marshal, ‘we’ll get the life out of him somehow.’ In an instant the victim was up at the hook once more. They kept him there for an hour, but when he came down he was perfectly garrulous. ‘Old man Plunket goes too much to the Arcady Saloon,’ said he. ‘Three times he’s been there in an hour; and him with a family. Old man Plunket would do well to swear off.’ It was monstrous and incredible, but there it was. There was no getting round it. The man was there talking when he ought to have been dead. We all sat staring in amazement, but United States Marshal Carpenter was not a man to be euchred so easily. He motioned the others to one side, so that the prisoner was left standing alone. ‘Duncan Warner,’ said he, slowly, ‘you are here to play your part, and I am here to play mine. Your game is to live if you can, and my game is to carry out the sentence of the law. You’ve beat us on electricity. I’ll give you one there. And you’ve beat us on hanging, for you seem to thrive on it. But it’s my turn to beat you now, for my duty has to be done.’ He pulled a six-shooter from his coat as he spoke, and fired all the shots through the body of the prisoner. The room was so filled with smoke that we could see nothing, but when it cleared the prisoner was still standing there, looking down in disgust at the front of his coat. ‘Coats must be cheap where you come from,’ said he. ‘Thirty dollars it cost me, and look at it now. The six holes in front are bad enough, but four of the balls have passed out, and a pretty state the back must be in.’ The Marshal’s revolver fell from his hand, and he dropped his arms to his sides, a beaten man. ‘Maybe some of you gentlemen can tell me what this means,’ said he, looking helplessly at the committee. Peter Stulpnagel took a step forward. 152

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‘I’ll tell you all about it,’ said he. ‘You seem to be the only person who knows anything.’ ‘I am the only person who knows anything. I should have warned these gentlemen; but, as they would not listen to me, I have allowed them to learn by experience. What you have done with your electricity is that you have increased this man’s vitality until he can defy death for centuries.’ ‘Centuries!’ ‘Yes, it will take the wear of hundreds of years to exhaust the enormous nervous energy with which you have drenched him. Electricity is life, and you have charged him with it to the utmost. Perhaps in fifty years you might execute him, but I am not sanguine about it.’ ‘Great Scott! What shall I do with him?’ cried the unhappy Marshal. Peter Stulpnagel shrugged his shoulders. ‘It seems to me that it does not much matter what you do with him now,’ said he. ‘Maybe we could drain the electricity out of him again. Suppose we hang him up by the heels?’ ‘No, no, it’s out of the question.’ ‘Well, well, he shall do no more mischief in Los Amigos, anyhow,’ said the Marshal, with decision. ‘He shall go into the new gaol. The prison will wear him out.’ ‘On the contrary,’ said Peter Stulpnagel, ‘I think that it is much more probable that he will wear out the prison.’ It was rather a fiasco and for years we didn’t talk more about it than we could help, but it’s no secret now and I thought you might like to jot down the facts in your case-book.

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The Doctors of Hoyland 5

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doctor james ripley was always looked upon as an exceedingly lucky dog by all of the profession who knew him. His father had preceded him in a practice in the village of Hoyland, in the north of Hampshire, and all was ready for him on the very first day that the law allowed him to put his name at the foot of a prescription. In a few years the old gentleman retired, and settled on the South Coast, leaving his son in undisputed possession of the whole country side. Save for Doctor Horton, near Basingstoke, the young surgeon had a clear run of six miles in every direction, and took his fifteen hundred pounds a year, though, as is usual in country practices, the stable swallowed up most of what the consulting-room earned. Doctor James Ripley was two-and-thirty years of age, reserved, learned, unmarried, with set, rather stern features, and a thinning of the dark hair upon the top of his head, which was worth quite a hundred a year to him. He was particularly happy in his management of ladies. He had caught the tone of bland sternness and decisive suavity which dominates without offending. Ladies, however, were not equally happy in their management of him. Professionally, he was always at their service. Socially, he was a drop of quicksilver. In vain the country mammas spread out their simple lures in front of him. Dances and picnics were not to his taste, and he preferred during his scanty leisure to shut himself up in his study, and to bury himself in Virchow’s Archives and the professional journals. Study was a passion with him, and he would have none of the rust which often gathers round a country practitioner. It was his ambition to keep his knowledge as fresh and bright as at the moment when he had stepped out of the examination hall. He prided himself on being able at a moment’s notice to rattle off the seven ramifications of some obscure artery, or to give the exact percentage of any physiological compound. After a long day’s work he would sit up half the night performing iridectomies and extractions upon the sheep’s eyes sent in by the village butcher, to the horror of his housekeeper, who had to remove the débris next morning. His love for his work was the one fanaticism which found a place in his dry, precise nature. It was the more to his credit that he should keep up to date in his knowledge, since he had no competition to force him to exertion. In 154

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the seven years during which he had practised in Hoyland three rivals had pitted themselves against him, two in the village itself and one in the neighbouring hamlet of Lower Hoyland. Of these one had sickened and wasted, being, as it was said, himself the only patient whom he had treated during his eighteen months of ruralising. A second had bought a fourth share of a Basingstoke practice, and had departed honourably, while a third had vanished one September night, leaving a gutted house and an unpaid drug bill behind him. Since then the district had become a monopoly, and no one had dared to measure himself against the established fame of the Hoyland doctor. It was, then, with a feeling of some surprise and considerable curiosity that on driving through Lower Hoyland one morning he perceived that the new house at the end of the village was occupied, and that a virgin brass plate glistened upon the swinging gate which faced the high road. He pulled up his fifty guinea chestnut mare and took a good look at it. ‘Verrinder Smith, M. D.,’ was printed across it in very neat, small lettering. The last man had had letters half a foot long, with a lamp like a firestation. Doctor James Ripley noted the difference, and deduced from it that the new-comer might possibly prove a more formidable opponent. He was convinced of it that evening when he came to consult the current medical directory. By it he learned that Doctor Verrinder Smith was the holder of superb degrees, that he had studied with distinction at Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, and finally that he had been awarded a gold medal and the Lee Hopkins scholarship for original research, in recognition of an exhaustive inquiry into the functions of the anterior spinal nerve roots. Doctor Ripley passed his fingers through his thin hair in bewilderment as he read his rival’s record. What on earth could so brilliant a man mean by putting up his plate in a little Hampshire hamlet. But Doctor Ripley furnished himself with an explanation to the riddle. No doubt Dr Verrinder Smith had simply come down there in order to pursue some scientific research in peace and quiet. The plate was up as an address rather than as an invitation to patients. Of course, that must be the true explanation. In that case the presence of this brilliant neighbour would be a splendid thing for his own studies. He had often longed for some kindred mind, some steel on which he might strike his flint. Chance had brought it to him, and he rejoiced exceedingly. And this joy it was which led him to take a step which was quite at variance with his usual habits. It is the custom for a new-comer among

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medical men to call first upon the older, and the etiquette upon the subject is strict. Doctor Ripley was pedantically exact on such points, and yet he deliberately drove over next day and called upon Doctor Verrinder Smith. Such a waiving of ceremony was, he felt, a gracious act upon his part, and a fit prelude to the intimate relations which he hoped to establish with his neighbour. The house was neat and well appointed, and Doctor Ripley was shown by a smart maid into a dapper little consulting room. As he passed in he noticed two or three parasols and a lady’s sun bonnet hanging in the hall. It was a pity that his colleague should be a married man. It would put them upon a different footing, and interfere with those long evenings of high scientific talk which he had pictured to himself. On the other hand, there was much in the consulting room to please him. Elaborate instruments, seen more often in hospitals than in the houses of private practitioners, were scattered about. A sphygmograph stood upon the table and a gasometer-like engine, which was new to Doctor Ripley, in the corner. A bookcase full of ponderous volumes in French and German, paper-covered for the most part, and varying in tint from the shell to the yolk of a duck’s egg, caught his wandering eyes, and he was deeply absorbed in their titles when the door opened suddenly behind him. Turning round, he found himself facing a little woman, whose plain, palish face was remarkable only for a pair of shrewd, humorous eyes of a blue which had two shades too much green in it. She held a pince-nez in her left hand, and the doctor’s card in her right. ‘How do you do, Doctor Ripley?’ said she. ‘How do you do, madam?’ returned the visitor. ‘Your husband is perhaps out?’ ‘I am not married,’ said she simply. ‘Oh, I beg your pardon! I meant the doctor—Dr Verrinder Smith.’ ‘I am Doctor Verrinder Smith.’ Doctor Ripley was so surprised that he dropped his hat and forgot to pick it up again. ‘What!’ he gasped, ‘the Lee Hopkins prizeman! You!’ He had never seen a woman doctor before, and his whole conservative soul rose up in revolt at the idea. He could not recall any Biblical injunction that the man should remain ever the doctor and the woman the nurse, and yet he felt as if a blasphemy had been committed. His face betrayed his feelings only too clearly. 156

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‘I am sorry to disappoint you,’ said the lady drily. ‘You certainly have surprised me,’ he answered, picking up his hat. ‘You are not among our champions, then?’ ‘I cannot say that the movement has my approval.’ ‘And why?’ ‘I should much prefer not to discuss it.’ ‘But I am sure you will answer a lady’s question.’ ‘Ladies are in danger of losing their privileges when they usurp the place of the other sex. They cannot claim both.’ ‘Why should a woman not earn her bread by her brains?’ Doctor Ripley felt irritated by the quiet manner in which the lady cross-questioned him. ‘I should much prefer not to be led into a discussion, Miss Smith.’ ‘Doctor Smith,’ she interrupted. ‘Well, Doctor Smith! But if you insist upon an answer, I must say that I do not think medicine a suitable profession for women and that I have a personal objection to masculine ladies.’ It was an exceedingly rude speech, and he was ashamed of it the instant after he had made it. The lady, however, simply raised her eyebrows and smiled. ‘It seems to me that you are begging the question,’ said she. ‘Of course, if it makes women masculine that would be a considerable deterioration.’ It was a neat little counter, and Doctor Ripley, like a pinked fencer, bowed his acknowledgment. ‘I must go,’ said he. ‘I am sorry that we cannot come to some more friendly conclusion since we are to be neighbours,’ she remarked. He bowed again, and took a step towards the door. ‘It was a singular coincidence,’ she continued, ‘that at the instant that you called I was reading your paper on “Locomotor Ataxia,” in the Lancet.’ ‘Indeed,’ said he drily. ‘I thought it was a very able monograph.’ ‘You are very good.’ ‘But the views which you attribute to Professor Pitres, of Bordeaux, have been repudiated by him.’ ‘I have his pamphlet of 1890,’ said Doctor Ripley angrily. ‘Here is his pamphlet of 1891.’ She picked it from among a litter of periodicals. ‘If you have time to glance your eye down this passage—’

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Doctor Ripley took it from her and shot rapidly through the paragraph which she indicated. There was no denying that it completely knocked the bottom out of his own article. He threw it down, and with another frigid bow he made for the door. As he took the reins from the groom he glanced round and saw that the lady was standing at her window, and it seemed to him that she was laughing heartily. All day the memory of this interview haunted him. He felt that he had come very badly out of it. She had showed herself to be his superior on his own pet subject. She had been courteous while he had been rude, self-possessed when he had been angry. And then, above all, there was her presence, her monstrous intrusion to rankle in his mind. A woman doctor had been an abstract thing before, repugnant but distant. Now she was there in actual practice, with a brass plate up just like his own, competing for the same patients. Not that he feared competition, but he objected to this lowering of his ideal of womanhood. She could not be more than thirty, and had a bright, mobile face, too. He thought of her humorous eyes, and of her strong, well-turned chin. It revolted him the more to recall the details of her education. A man, of course, could come through such an ordeal with all his purity, but it was nothing short of shameless in a woman. But it was not long before he learned that even her competition was a thing to be feared. The novelty of her presence had brought a few curious invalids into her consulting rooms, and, once there, they had been so impressed by the firmness of her manner and by the singular, newfashioned instruments with which she tapped, and peered, and sounded, that it formed the core of their conversation for weeks afterwards. And soon there were tangible proofs of her powers upon the country side. Farmer Eyton, whose callous ulcer had been quietly spreading over his shin for years back under a gentle régime of zinc ointment, was painted round with blistering fluid, and found, after three blasphemous nights, that his sore was stimulated into healing. Mrs Crowder, who had always regarded the birthmark upon her second daughter Eliza as a sign of the indignation of the Creator at a third helping of raspberry tart which she had partaken of during a critical period, learned that, with the help of two galvanic needles, the mischief was not irreparable. In a month Doctor Verrinder Smith was known, and in two she was famous. Occasionally, Doctor Ripley met her as he drove upon his rounds. She had started a high dog-cart, taking the reins herself, with a little tiger 158

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behind. When they met he invariably raised his hat with punctilious politeness, but the grim severity of his face showed how formal was the courtesy. In fact, his dislike was rapidly deepening into absolute detestation. ‘The unsexed woman,’ was the description of her which he permitted himself to give to those of his patients who still remained staunch. But, indeed, they were a rapidly-decreasing body, and every day his pride was galled by the news of some fresh defection. The lady had somehow impressed the country folk with almost superstitious belief in her power, and from far and near they flocked to her consulting room. But what galled him most of all was, when she did something which he had pronounced to be impracticable. For all his knowledge he lacked nerve as an operator, and usually sent his worst cases up to London. The lady, however, had no weakness of the sort, and took everything that came in her way. It was agony to him to hear that she was about to straighten little Alec Turner’s club foot, and right at the fringe of the rumour came a note from his mother, the rector’s wife, asking him if he would be so good as to act as chloroformist. It would be inhumanity to refuse, as there was no other who could take the place, but it was gall and wormwood to his sensitive nature. Yet, in spite of his vexation, he could not but admire the dexterity with which the thing was done. She handled the little wax-like foot so gently, and held the tiny tenotomy knife as an artist holds his pencil. One straight insertion, one snick of a tendon, and it was all over without a stain upon the white towel which lay beneath. He had never seen anything more masterly, and he had the honesty to say so, though her skill increased his dislike of her. The operation spread her fame still further at his expense, and selfpreservation was added to his other grounds for detesting her. And this very detestation it was which brought matters to a curious climax. One winter’s night, just as he was rising from his lonely dinner, a groom came riding down from Squire Faircastle’s, the richest man in the district, to say that his daughter had scalded her hand, and that medical help was needed on the instant. The coachman had ridden for the lady doctor, for it mattered nothing to the Squire who came as long as it were speedily. Doctor Ripley rushed from his surgery with the determination that she should not effect an entrance into this stronghold of his if hard driving on his part could prevent it. He did not even wait to light his lamps, but sprang into his gig and flew off as fast as hoof could rattle. He lived rather nearer to the Squire’s than she did, and was convinced that he could get there well before her.

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And so he would but for that whimsical element of chance, which will for ever muddle up the affairs of this world and dumbfound the prophets. Whether it came from the want of his lights, or from his mind being full of the thoughts of his rival, he allowed too little by half a foot in taking the sharp turn upon the Basingstoke road. The empty trap and the frightened horse clattered away into the darkness, while the Squire’s groom crawled out of the ditch into which he had been shot. He struck a match, looked down at his groaning companion, and then, after the fashion of rough, strong men when they see what they have not seen before, he was very sick. The doctor raised himself a little on his elbow in the glint of the match. He caught a glimpse of something white and sharp bristling through his trouser leg half way down the shin. ‘Compound!’ he groaned. ‘A three months’ job,’ and fainted. When he came to himself the groom was gone, for he had scudded off to the Squire’s house for help, but a small page was holding a gig-lamp in front of his injured leg, and a woman, with an open case of polished instruments gleaming in the yellow light, was deftly slitting up his trouser with a crooked pair of scissors. ‘It’s all right, doctor,’ said she soothingly. ‘I am so sorry about it. You can have Doctor Horton to-morrow, but I am sure you will allow me to help you to-night. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw you by the roadside.’ ‘The groom has gone for help,’ groaned the sufferer. ‘When it comes we can move you into the gig. A little more light, John! So! Ah, dear, dear, we shall have laceration unless we reduce this before we move you. Allow me to give you a whiff of chloroform, and I have no doubt that I can secure it sufficiently to—’ Doctor Ripley never heard the end of that sentence. He tried to raise a hand and to murmur something in protest, but a sweet smell was in his nostrils, and a sense of rich peace and lethargy stole over his jangled nerves. Down he sank, through clear, cool water, ever down and down into the green shadows beneath, gently, without effort, while the pleasant chiming of a great belfry rose and fell in his ears. Then he rose again, up and up, and ever up, with a terrible tightness about his temples, until at last he shot out of those green shadows and was in the light once more. Two bright, shining, golden spots gleamed before his dazed eyes. He blinked and blinked before he could give a name to them. They were only 160

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the two brass balls at the end posts of his bed, and he was lying in his own little room, with a head like a cannon ball, and a leg like an iron bar. Turning his eyes, he saw the calm face of Doctor Verrinder Smith looking down at him. ‘Ah, at last!’ said she. ‘I kept you under all the way home, for I knew how painful the jolting would be. It is in good position now with a strong side splint. I have ordered a morphia draught for you. Shall I tell your groom to ride for Doctor Horton in the morning?’ ‘I should prefer that you should continue the case,’ said Doctor Ripley feebly, and then, with a half hysterical laugh,—‘You have all the rest of the parish as patients, you know, so you may as well make the thing complete by having me also.’ It was not a very gracious speech, but it was a look of pity and not of anger which shone in her eyes as she turned away from his bedside. Doctor Ripley had a brother, William, who was assistant surgeon at a London hospital, and who was down in Hampshire within a few hours of his hearing of the accident. He raised his brows when he heard the details. ‘What! You are pestered with one of those!’ he cried. ‘I don’t know what I should have done without her.’ ‘I’ve no doubt she’s an excellent nurse.’ ‘She knows her work as well as you or I.’ ‘Speak for yourself, James,’ said the London man with a sniff. ‘But apart from that, you know that the principle of the thing is all wrong.’ ‘You think there is nothing to be said on the other side?’ ‘Good heavens! do you?’ ‘Well, I don’t know. It struck me during the night that we may have been a little narrow in our views.’ ‘Nonsense, James. It’s all very fine for women to win prizes in the lecture room, but you know as well as I do that they are no use in an emergency. Now I warrant that this woman was all nerves when she was setting your leg. That reminds me that I had better just take a look at it and see that it is all right.’ ‘I would rather that you did not undo it,’ said the patient. ‘I have her assurance that it is all right.’ Brother William was deeply shocked. ‘Of course, if a woman’s assurance is of more value than the opinion of the assistant surgeon of a London hospital, there is nothing more to be said,’ he remarked.

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‘I should prefer that you did not touch it,’ said the patient firmly, and Doctor William went back to London that evening in a huff. The lady, who had heard of his coming, was much surprised on learning his departure. ‘We had a difference upon a point of professional etiquette,’ said Doctor James, and it was all the explanation he would vouchsafe. For two long months Doctor Ripley was brought in contact with his rival every day, and he learned many things which he had not known before. She was a charming companion, as well as a most assiduous doctor. Her short presence during the long, weary day was like a flower in a sand waste. What interested him was precisely what interested her, and she could meet him at every point upon equal terms. And yet under all her learning and her firmness ran a sweet, womanly nature, peeping out in her talk, shining in her greenish eyes, showing itself in a thousand subtle ways which the dullest of men could read. And he, though a bit of a prig and a pedant, was by no means dull, and had honesty enough to confess when he was in the wrong. ‘I don’t know how to apologise to you,’ he said in his shame-faced fashion one day, when he had progressed so far as to be able to sit in an arm-chair with his leg upon another one; ‘I feel that I have been quite in the wrong.’ ‘Why, then?’ ‘Over this woman question. I used to think that a woman must inevitably lose something of her charm if she took up such studies.’ ‘Oh, you don’t think they are necessarily unsexed, then?’ she cried, with a mischievous smile. ‘Please don’t recall my idiotic expression.’ ‘I feel so pleased that I should have helped in changing your views. I think that it is the most sincere compliment that I have ever had paid me.’ ‘At any rate, it is the truth,’ said he, and was happy all night at the remembrance of the flush of pleasure which made her pale face look quite comely for the instant. For, indeed, he was already far past the stage when he would acknowledge her as the equal of any other woman. Already he could not disguise from himself that she had become the one woman. Her dainty skill, her gentle touch, her sweet presence, the community of their tastes, had all united to hopelessly upset his previous opinions. It was a dark day for him now when his convalescence allowed her to miss a visit, and darker 162

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still that other one which he saw approaching when all occasion for her visits would be at an end. It came round at last, however, and he felt that his whole life’s fortune would hang upon the issue of that final interview. He was a direct man by nature, so he laid his hand upon hers as it felt for his pulse, and he asked her if she would be his wife. ‘What, and unite the practices?’ said she. He started in pain and anger. ‘Surely you do not attribute any such base motive to me!’ he cried. ‘I love you as unselfishly as ever a woman was loved.’ ‘No, I was wrong. It was a foolish speech,’ said she, moving her chair a little back, and tapping her stethoscope upon her knee. ‘Forget that I ever said it. I am so sorry to cause you any disappointment, and I appreciate most highly the honour which you do me, but what you ask is quite impossible.’ With another woman he might have urged the point, but his instincts told him that it was quite useless with this one. Her tone of voice was conclusive. He said nothing, but leaned back in his chair a stricken man. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said again. ‘If I had known what was passing in your mind I should have told you earlier that I intend to devote my life entirely to science. There are many women with a capacity for marriage, but few with a taste for biology. I will remain true to my own line, then. I came down here while waiting for an opening in the Paris Physiological Laboratory. I have just heard that there is a vacancy for me there, and so you will be troubled no more by my intrusion upon your practice. I have done you an injustice just as you did me one. I thought you narrow and pedantic, with no good quality. I have learned during your illness to appreciate you better, and the recollection of our friendship will always be a very pleasant one to me.’ And so it came about that in a very few weeks there was only one doctor in Hoyland. But folks noticed that the one had aged many years in a few months, that a weary sadness lurked always in the depths of his blue eyes, and that he was less concerned than ever with the eligible young ladies whom chance, or their careful country mammas, placed in his way.

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‘men die of the diseases which they have studied most,’ remarked the surgeon, snipping off the end of a cigar with all his professional neatness and finish. ‘It’s as if the morbid condition was an evil creature which, when it found itself closely hunted, flew at the throat of its pursuer. If you worry the microbes too much they may worry you. I’ve seen cases of it, and not necessarily in microbic diseases either. There was, of course, the well-known instance of Liston and the aneurism; and a dozen others that I could mention. You couldn’t have a clearer case than that of poor old Walker of St Christopher’s. Not heard of it? Well, of course, it was a little before your time, but I wonder that it should have been forgotten. You youngsters are so busy in keeping up to the day that you lose a good deal that is interesting of yesterday. ‘Walker was one of the best men in Europe on nervous disease. You must have read his little book on sclerosis of the posterior columns. It’s as interesting as a novel, and epoch-making in its way. He worked like a horse, did Walker—huge consulting practice—hours a day in the clinical wards—constant original investigations. And then he enjoyed himself also. “De mortuis,” of course, but still it’s an open secret among all who knew him. If he died at forty-five, he crammed eighty years into it. The marvel was that he could have held on so long at the pace at which he was going. But he took it beautifully when it came. ‘I was his clinical assistant at the time. Walker was lecturing on locomotor ataxia to a wardful of youngsters. He was explaining that one of the early signs of the complaint was that the patient could not put his heels together with his eyes shut without staggering. As he spoke, he suited the action to the word. I don’t suppose the boys noticed anything. I did, and so did he, though he finished his lecture without a sign. ‘When it was over he came into my room and lit a cigarette. ‘“Just run over my reflexes, Smith,” said he. ‘There was hardly a trace of them left. I tapped away at his knee-tendon and might as well have tried to get a jerk out of that sofa-cushion. He stood with his eyes shut again, and he swayed like a bush in the wind. ‘“So,” said he, “it was not intercostal neuralgia after all.” ‘Then I knew that he had had the lightning pains, and that the case was complete. There was nothing to say, so I sat looking at him while 164

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he puffed and puffed at his cigarette. Here he was, a man in the prime of life, one of the handsomest men in London, with money, fame, social success, everything at his feet, and now, without a moment’s warning, he was told that inevitable death lay before him, a death accompanied by more refined and lingering tortures than if he were bound upon a Red Indian stake. He sat in the middle of the blue cigarette cloud with his eyes cast down, and the slightest little tightening of his lips. Then he rose with a motion of his arms, as one who throws off old thoughts and enters upon a new course. ‘“Better put this thing straight at once,” said he. “I must make some fresh arrangements. May I use your paper and envelopes?” ‘He settled himself at my desk and he wrote half a dozen letters. It is not a breach of confidence to say that they were not addressed to his professional brothers. Walker was a single man, which means that he was not restricted to a single woman. When he had finished, he walked out of that little room of mine, leaving every hope and ambition of his life behind him. And he might have had another year of ignorance and peace if it had not been for the chance illustration in his lecture. ‘It took five years to kill him, and he stood it well. If he had ever been a little irregular he atoned for it in that long martyrdom. He kept an admirable record of his own symptoms, and worked out the eye changes more fully than has ever been done. When the ptosis got very bad he would hold his eyelid up with one hand while he wrote. Then, when he could not co-ordinate his muscles to write, he dictated to his nurse. So died, in the odour of science, James Walker, aet. 45. ‘Poor old Walker was very fond of experimental surgery, and he broke ground in several directions. Between ourselves, there may have been some more ground-breaking afterwards, but he did his best for his cases. You know McNamara, don’t you? He always wears his hair long. He lets it be understood that it comes from his artistic strain, but it is really to conceal the loss of one of his ears. Walker cut the other one off, but you must not tell Mac I said so. ‘It was like this. Walker had a fad about the portio dura—the motor to the face, you know—and he thought paralysis of it came from a disturbance of the blood supply. Something else which counterbalanced that disturbance might, he thought, set it right again. We had a very obstinate case of Bell’s paralysis in the wards, and had tried it with every conceivable thing, blistering, tonics, nerve-stretching, galvanism, needles, but all

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without result. Walker got it into his head that removal of the ear would increase the blood supply to the part, and he very soon gained the consent of the patient to the operation. ‘Well, we did it at night. Walker, of course, felt that it was something of an experiment, and did not wish too much talk about it unless it proved successful. There were half-a-dozen of us there, McNamara and I among the rest. The room was a small one, and in the centre was the narrow table, with a mackintosh over the pillow, and a blanket which extended almost to the floor on either side. Two candles, on a side-table near the pillow, supplied all the light. In came the patient, with one side of his face as smooth as a baby’s, and the other all in a quiver with fright. He lay down, and the chloroform towel was placed over his face, while Walker threaded his needles in the candle light. The chloroformist stood at the head of the table, and McNamara was stationed at the side to control the patient. The rest of us stood by to assist. ‘Well, the man was about half over when he fell into one of those convulsive flurries which come with the semi-unconscious stage. He kicked and plunged and struck out with both hands. Over with a crash went the little table which held the candles, and in an instant we were left in total darkness. You can think what a rush and a scurry there was, one to pick up the table, one to find the matches, and some to restrain the patient who was still dashing himself about. He was held down by two dressers, the chloroform was pushed, and by the time the candles were relit, his incoherent, half-smothered shoutings had changed to a stertorous snore. His head was turned on the pillow and the towel was still kept over his face while the operation was carried through. Then the towel was withdrawn, and you can conceive our amazement when we looked upon the face of McNamara. ‘How did it happen? Why, simply enough. As the candles went over, the chloroformist had stopped for an instant and had tried to catch them. The patient, just as the light went out, had rolled off and under the table. Poor McNamara, clinging frantically to him, had been dragged across it, and the chloroformist, feeling him there, had naturally clapped the towel across his mouth and nose. The others had secured him, and the more he roared and kicked the more they drenched him with chloroform. Walker was very nice about it, and made the most handsome apologies. He offered to do a plastic on the spot, and make as good an ear as he could, but McNamara had had enough of it. As to the patient, we found him 166

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sleeping placidly under the table, with the ends of the blanket screening him on both sides. Walker sent McNamara round his ear next day in a jar of methylated spirit, but Mac’s wife was very angry about it, and it led to a good deal of ill-feeling. ‘Some people say that the more one has to do with human nature, and the closer one is brought in contact with it, the less one thinks of it. I don’t believe that those who know most would uphold that view. My own experience is dead against it. I was brought up in the miserablemortal-clay school of theology, and yet here I am, after thirty years of intimate acquaintance with humanity, filled with respect for it. The evil lies commonly upon the surface. The deeper strata are good. A hundred times I have seen folk condemned to death as suddenly as poor Walker was. Sometimes it was to blindness or to mutilations which are worse than death. Men and women, they almost all took it beautifully, and some with such lovely unselfishness, and with such complete absorption in the thought of how their fate would affect others, that the man about town, or the frivolously-dressed woman has seemed to change into an angel before my eyes. I have seen death-beds, too, of all ages and of all creeds and want of creeds. I never saw any of them shrink, save only one poor, imaginative young fellow, who had spent his blameless life in the strictest of sects. Of course, an exhausted frame is incapable of fear, as anyone can vouch who is told, in the midst of his sea-sickness, that the ship is going to the bottom. That is why I rate courage in the face of mutilation to be higher than courage when a wasting illness is fining away into death. ‘Now, I’ll take a case which I had in my own practice last Wednesday. A lady came in to consult me—the wife of a well-known sporting baronet. The husband had come with her, but remained, at her request, in the waiting-room. I need not go into details, but it proved to be a peculiarly malignant case of cancer. “I knew it,” said she. “How long have I to live?” “I fear that it may exhaust your strength in a few months,” I answered. “Poor old Jack!” said she. “I’ll tell him that it is not dangerous.” “Why should you deceive him?” I asked. “Well, he’s very uneasy about it, and he is quaking now in the waiting-room. He has two old friends to dinner to-night, and I haven’t the heart to spoil his evening. To-morrow will be time enough for him to learn the truth.” Out she walked, the brave little woman, and a moment later her husband, with his big, red face shining with joy came plunging into my room to shake me by the hand. No, I respected her wish

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and I did not undeceive him. I dare bet that evening was one of the brightest, and the next morning the darkest, of his life. ‘It’s wonderful how bravely and cheerily a woman can face a crushing blow. It is different with men. A man can stand it without complaining, but it knocks him dazed and silly all the same. But the woman does not lose her wits any more than she does her courage. Now, I had a case only a few weeks ago which would show you what I mean. A gentleman consulted me about his wife, a very beautiful woman. She had a small tubercular nodule upon her upper arm, according to him. He was sure that it was of no importance, but he wanted to know whether Devonshire or the Riviera would be the better for her. I examined her and found a frightful sarcoma of the bone, hardly showing upon the surface, but involving the shoulder-blade and clavicle as well as the humerus. A more malignant case I have never seen. I sent her out of the room and I told him the truth. What did he do? Why, he walked slowly round that room with his hands behind his back, looking with the greatest interest at the pictures. I can see him now, putting up his gold pince-nez and staring at them with perfectly vacant eyes, which told me that he saw neither them nor the wall behind them. “Amputation of the arm?” he asked at last. “And of the collar-bone and shoulder-blade,” said I. “Quite so. The collar-bone and shoulder-blade,” he repeated, still staring about him with those lifeless eyes. It settled him. I don’t believe he’ll ever be the same man again. But the woman took it as bravely and brightly as could be, and she has done very well since. The mischief was so great that the arm snapped as we drew it from the night-dress. No, I don’t think that there will be any return, and I have every hope of her recovery. ‘The first patient is a thing which one remembers all one’s life. Mine was commonplace, and the details are of no interest. I had a curious visitor, however, during the first few months after my plate went up. It was an elderly woman, richly dressed, with a wickerwork picnic basket in her hand. This she opened with the tears streaming down her face, and out there waddled the fattest, ugliest, and mangiest little pug dog that I have ever seen. “I wish you to put him painlessly out of the world, doctor,” she cried. “Quick, quick, or my resolution may give way.” She flung herself down, with hysterical sobs, upon the sofa. The less experienced a doctor is, the higher are his notions of professional dignity, as I need not remind you, my young friend, so I was about to refuse the commission with indignation, when I bethought me that, quite apart from medicine, we 168

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were gentleman and lady, and that she had asked me to do something for her which was evidently of the greatest possible importance in her eyes. I led off the poor little doggie, therefore, and with the help of a saucerful of milk and a few drops of prussic acid his exit was as speedy and painless as could be desired. “Is it over?” she cried as I entered. It was really tragic to see how all the love which should have gone to husband and children had, in default of them, been centred upon this uncouth little animal. She left, quite broken down, in her carriage, and it was only after her departure that I saw an envelope sealed with a large red seal, and lying upon the blotting pad of my desk. Outside, in pencil, was written:—“I have no doubt that you would willingly have done this without a fee, but I insist upon your acceptance of the enclosed.” I opened it with some vague notions of an eccentric millionaire and a fifty pound note, but all I found was a postal order for four and sixpence. The whole incident struck me as so whimsical that I laughed until I was tired. You’ll find there’s so much tragedy in a doctor’s life, my boy, that he would not be able to stand it if it were not for the strain of comedy which comes every now and then to leaven it. ‘And a doctor has very much to be thankful for also. Don’t you ever forget it. It is such a pleasure to do a little good that a man should pay for the privilege instead of being paid for it. Still, of course, he has his home to keep up and his wife and children to support. But his patients are his friends—or they should be so. He goes from house to house, and his step and his voice are loved and welcomed in each. What could a man ask for more than that? And besides, he is forced to be a good man. It is impossible for him to be anything else. How can a man spend his whole life in seeing suffering bravely borne and yet remain a hard or a vicious man? It is a noble, generous, kindly profession, and you youngsters have got to see that it remains so.’

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An Essay on the Text INTRODUCTION This edition of Conan Doyle’s 1894 collection of short stories, Round the Red Lamp, Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life, follows the policy of the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle in using the first London book edition (in this case published by Methuen) as the base text (E1). Variants from the journal versions of some of the stories ( JV) and the Author’s Edition of 1903 (AE), the John Murray collections of short stories from 1922 ( JM), and the manuscript (MS) where available have been collated with E1. Any significant decisions about excisions or changes of emphasis between these versions are noted in the Apparatus. There survives a fair copy handwritten manuscript of one story, ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ (MS), although this is unenlightening other than on Conan Doyle’s attitude towards punctuation (see below). Appendix 1 includes two stories later added to the 1930 Crowborough edition of RTRL, which represents the most expanded version of the collection. ‘My Friend the Murderer’ was one of Conan Doyle’s earliest publications in London Society magazine in 1882. ‘Crabbe’s Practice’ has a more complicated history. This story was first published in the Boy’s Own Paper in 1884. Conan Doyle did not often choose to reprint early stories, but for the Tales of Adventure and Medical Life, published in the 1922 JM volumes that disassembled and reframed his short stories into new thematic collections, he did return to and revise ‘Crabbe’s Practice’. Perhaps signalling his dissatisfaction with his early attempts at fiction, Conan Doyle virtually rewrote the tale line by line, a relatively unusual occurrence in his career. These emendations were considered far too extensive to track in detail. It was this 1922 version of the story from JM that was added to the 1930 Crowborough edition of Round the Red Lamp. Since it did not appear in the first edition of RTRL in 1894, but did so in the expanded 1930 edition, this volume has chosen to reprint this JM version, as reflecting the author’s latest intention for the work in the context of his medical fiction. Appendix 2 contains Conan Doyle’s very brief second preface of 200 words to the 1903 AE. Appendix 3 contains the texts of two stories that were converted into one-act plays, Foreign Policy (a version of 171

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‘A Question of Diplomacy’) and Waterloo, sometimes also called A Story of Waterloo, which was a version of ‘A Straggler of ’15’. Foreign Policy was performed only a handful of times in 1893, and the script only survives as the typewritten MS sent, as required for licensing, to the Lord Chamberlain’s office. This is now in the British Library Manuscripts collection, from which this text has been transcribed, with obvious errors of spelling silently corrected and a standardization of the layout. The play Waterloo was actually the most successful part of Round the Red Lamp in the immediate years after publication, since the role of the ancient Corporal Brewster became a signature piece of the leading London actor, Henry Irving. Conan Doyle sold the script outright to the Lyceum Theatre manager, Bram Stoker, for £100. For this edition, I have reprinted the version of the play-text published by Samuel French in 1907, the year after Irving died. Finally, Appendix 4 contains a gathering of Conan Doyle’s short principal non-fiction contributions to the press on medical matters while he was still a general practitioner up to 1891. None were reprinted by Conan Doyle, so they are taken from their initial publications. They offer interesting insights into his early attempts to present himself as a medical professional, offering his own research or intervening in matters of public debate on health matters, until his decision to turn to writing professionally. For Conan Doyle, the coming together of this collection of loosely medical tales was not straightforward. Initially he seemed to want to model the collection on the success of his serializations of other stories, such as those about Sherlock Holmes in the Strand. The plan seemed to be to serialize these stories in the new journal the Idler edited by his friends Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr. But only four stories appeared there, and after the first were published Jerome pleaded with Conan Doyle to make the rest ‘less sad’ and without the medical realism that made some of the details too ‘strong’. The Idler stories are ‘Sweethearts’, ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’, ‘The Los Amigos Fiasco’ and ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’. As a consequence of failing to get a regular slot in the Idler for this series, either Conan Doyle or his new agent, A. P. Watt, sold some of the stories to other journals. When putting the stories together for a collection, Conan Doyle went back to stories that had been previously published and that loosely fitted his theme. He remained dissatisfied with his earliest short stories from the 1880s, however, and did not include them even 172

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if they had a medical theme. ‘A Straggler of ’15’ appeared first in Black & White magazine in March 1891. ‘A False Start’ appeared in the Christmas edition of the Gentlewoman in 1891, ‘A Physiologist’s Wife’ appeared in Blackwood’s in 1890 (fulfilling a lifelong ambition of Conan Doyle to publish in the Edinburgh journal), ‘A Question of Diplomacy’ appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1892 and ‘Lot No. 249’ appeared in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in September 1892. When working in a sustained way on Round the Red Lamp in the summer of 1894, Conan Doyle included six stories not previously published elsewhere: ‘Behind the Times’, ‘His First Operation’, ‘The Third Generation’, ‘The Curse of Eve’, ‘A Medical Document’ and ‘The Surgeon Talks’. These pulled the book together into a coherent overarching structure, starting with the initial horrors of being a medical student (‘His First Operation’) and ending with the bunch of knowing, slightly jaded professional doctors gossiping in the later story (‘A Medical Document’). Round the Red Lamp was first published in book form in October 1894 in London by Methuen, alongside, as had already become Conan Doyle’s standard practice with the new security of international copyright, an American edition. It had mixed reviews (see the introduction), and perhaps this dictated some of the further editorial decisions about minor changes of emphasis in the AE of 1903. It is noticeable that when publishing the stories alongside the related medical novel, The Stark Munro Letters, in a single volume (which is how it appeared in both the Author’s Edition and the Crowborough Edition), Conan Doyle devoted much more time to defending the literary value and interest of Stark Munro – regarding it as an innovative study or psychological portrait of a young professional man – and spent little time on Round the Red Lamp. To Conan Doyle in his first years as a professional author, perhaps the collection was simply a way of capitalizing again on his prolific short story sales in the magazines, and so held less intrinsic value as an aesthetic object. He broke up and redistributed the stories for the 1924 short-story collections, which were grouped under different themes. Round the Red Lamp was reconvened in the 1930 collected Crowborough Edition, with a couple of additions from the early part of his career, included in Appendix 1. This scattered origin has meant that I have decided to follow strictly the E1 in including no illustrations. Many of these tales were illustrated in their journal forms, but in highly eclectic styles, from the throwaway 173

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wispy sketches that regularly punctuate the Idler stories, largely there to break up the double columns of text visually, to the elaborate and very dramatic page designs and bold illustrations of the more visual journals, Black & White or the Illustrated London News. These images are collected together anyway under the short story titles in the extremely valuable online resource, the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia, and can be viewed there. PUNCTUATION AND STYLE As Douglas Kerr notes in his comments on the manuscript of Memories and Adventures in this Edinburgh edition, Conan Doyle wrote fast and punctuated lightly, and was seemingly happy for his editors to convert his loose sentences, largely bereft of commas, into the conventions of print. These varied across specific journals, the English first edition and later Author’s Edition, where local conventions might, for instance, hyphenate words in different ways. Some journal versions were also set quickly and contain evident transcription errors, mistaken words or words misread from his handwritten manuscripts, or missing words and phrases, typos and misspellings. The first book edition was published at a time when there was a typographical trend in presenting surnames beginning with ‘Mc’ or ‘Mac’ by using a forward-facing apostrophe to represent a superscript ‘c’. In ‘A Physiologist’s Wife’, for example, the name McMurdo was presented as M‘Murdo. To avoid confusion, I have used the former style throughout this edition. The majority of very minor variations have not been noted in the Apparatus, and obvious errors in E1 have been silently corrected, and I have tried to restrict variations and emendations only to moments that have any impact on meaning. It is worth tracking how Conan Doyle’s corrections tend to follow through from journal versions to E1 to AE a process of pruning back extra adjectives or unnecessary clauses as he finds a leaner and more muscular style as he settles into his writing career. There are no major cuts or rewritings in these stories across their iterations, except for the substantial revision Conan Doyle made of ‘Crabbe’s Practice’ when he eventually decided to rescue it for the most expansive version of RTRL. But there are a handful of intriguing moments where he responded to a sense – as he indicated in his preface – that some of the medical details were too ‘realistic’ for the reading public, and needed 174

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to be slightly toned down. After the largely superficial corrections made to the Author’s Edition, Conan Doyle made no significant changes to the stories in this collection. Whereas he might work and rework texts such as Memories and Adventures, the stories in these tales are largely unchanged, perhaps suggesting that he felt them to be less central to his writing identity. TEXTUAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE STORIES IN SEQUENCE All of the key textual variations and emendations are listed in the apparatus, and I only want to comment on the most substantive changes here. ‘Behind the Times’ includes only one major excision of an anecdotal passage towards the end of the story; ‘His First Operation’ remained very much the same through its iteration in E1 and AE and the reprints after. The extensive corrections after the journal publication of ‘A Straggler of ’15’ reflect a rather lackadaisical setting by the Black & White journal, but also show how Conan Doyle edits back baggy sections and phrases to cut to the core of the story. He also subtly reworked the ending in the Author’s Edition, the better to emphasize the sentimental pulling on the heartstrings in the conclusion of the story. Given that Conan Doyle’s story can be compared also to the play-text in this edition, it is possible to track the subtle ability to intensify the pathos of the famous closing scene. The theatre version has been described by W. D. King as ‘an apotheosis of the spirit of the nineteenth-century English theatre, in the form of a heroic actor amidst a thunderous crowd, thrilling the emotions, illuminating the ideal’.1 In George Arthur’s reminiscences of the effect of the play, published in 1936, he recalled: When the curtain sank there was a silence, intensely significant but almost unbearable in its tension; men who had never before been ‘moved by theatrical stuff ’ were furtively wiping their eyes, women were quite unashamedly ‘having a good cry’, a wave of emotion swept the whole house . . . the stage manager knew his job and kept the drop down until people had a little recovered themselves and were able to 1

W. D. King, Henry Irving’s Waterloo: Theatrical Engagements with Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, Ellen Terry, Edward Gordon Craig, Late-Victorian Culture, Assorted Ghosts, Old Men, War and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 10. 175

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give Irving an ovation which . . . exceeded anything he had hitherto enjoyed.2 It is clear that Conan Doyle learned from the ability of Irving to evoke this emotional response, and this is reflected in the reworked ending of the story from the 1903 edition, included in the Apparatus. George Bernard Shaw began to define his theatre of ‘realism’ against the reactionary ‘idealism’ of plays such as Waterloo and actors such as Irving, so this edition allows for an examination of how this debate might have impacted on Conan Doyle’s process of revision. Despite the subject matter of ‘The Third Generation’ – hereditary syphilis – Conan Doyle had sufficiently mastered his elliptical approach to the subject in the journal version to necessitate very few excisions or additions in later publication. ‘A False Start’ was based directly on autobiographical experience, and the story can be fruitfully compared to the depiction of the same beginnings of general practice that he narrates in ‘My Start at Southsea’, chapter 7 of Memories and Adventures in 1924. He adds slightly more concrete detail in the AE on the nature of the doctor’s precarious situation at one point, but also excludes the abrupt fantasy closure of the young physician’s marriage into money that completed the journal version (perhaps a neater conclusion better suited to the magazine format). ‘The Curse of Eve’ and the sentimental ‘Sweethearts’ have no significant changes. ‘A Physiologist’s Wife’ is typically more wordy in the first journal version, with some heavy-handed direct references to Darwin and evolutionary thought on sexual differentiation and Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal (1872) removed to create the lighter touch of E1 or AE. ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’ might perhaps be considered at the ‘strong’ end of the spectrum of this collection, a dark and nasty tale about the punishment of female sexuality, yet puzzlingly Jerome K. Jerome published it in the Idler, and Conan Doyle made only one or two minor changes from JV to E1, with a slightly more explicit detail later dropped from AE. ‘A Question of Diplomacy’ has very few changes, and the play script in Appendix 4 is also fairly ruthless in its use of existing dialogue transposed from story to play. ‘A Medical Document’ also features a weird and thrilling autobiographical anecdote 2

George Arthur, From Phelps to Gielgud: Reminiscences of the Stage through Sixty-Five Years (1936), cited by King, Irving’s Waterloo, 11. 176

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about visiting a malignant bed-ridden girl that can be compared to Conan Doyle’s later version of the same event in Memories and Adventures. ‘Lot No. 249’, by far the longest tale in the collection, appeared first in Harper’s with some effective illustrations and a dynamic page layout. The conversion to E1 again shows Conan Doyle’s wish to edit down and streamline the headlong thrust of the story. He also worked through the story for the AE in 1903, cutting out all specific reference to Oxford University, even though the topography of the city, its colleges and the river Isis are clearly recognizable. Perhaps this decision suggests his awareness of his growing global readership, and a desire to be less specific in setting. ‘The Los Amigos Fiasco’ remains largely untouched in its various iterations, as does the final story, ‘The Surgeon Talks’. This leaves only the penultimate story, ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ to discuss. The Harry Ransom Collection in Austin, Texas, holds the manuscript of this story, which is handwritten. By the time he submitted the text of his play Foreign Policy to the Lord Chancellor’s office for approval in 1893, Conan Doyle was using typewriters for his manuscripts. Yet the manuscript of ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ is clearly a fair copy, with noticeably few corrections of the text. There is evidence that two pages have been cut out, yet the text remains continuous. It flows in Conan Doyle’s thankfully very readable handwriting, with only the most necessary commas inserted. This manuscript does not give us the opportunity to see Conan Doyle composing a tale in real time – it is a neat and final fair copy to submit to the journal. Indeed, it is stamped at the end by the office of the Idler and marked for return to the author. In a way, this leaves the reader with the stories of Round the Red Lamp largely speaking for themselves. It is a fascinating transitional collection early in Conan Doyle’s career, but because he was more invested elsewhere (in letting his historical novels live, and in deciding to kill off Sherlock Holmes in 1893), the stories are less constrained by any clinching insights from textual scholarship, and instead are a record of an author at a crossroads between the professions of medicine and literature, and between the styles of realism and romance.

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Appendix 1: Additional Stories added to the Crowborough Edition Crabbe’s Practice

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i wonder how many men remember Tom Waterhouse Crabbe, student of medicine in this city. He was a man whom it was not easy to forget if you had once come across him. Geniuses are more commonly read about than seen, but one could not speak five minutes with Crabbe without recognizing that he had inherited some touch of that subtle, indefinable essence. There was a bold originality in his thought, and a convincing earnestness in his mode of expressing it, which pointed to something higher than mere cleverness. He studied spasmodically and irregularly, yet he was one of the first men—certainly the most independent thinker—of his year. Poor Crabbe—there was something delightfully original even in his mistakes. I can remember how he laboriously explained to his examiner that the Spanish fly grew in Spain. And how he gave five drops of Sabin oil credit for producing that state which it is usually believed to rectify. Crabbe was not at all the type of man whom we usually associate with the word ‘genius.’ He was not pale nor thin, neither was his hair of abnormal growth. On the contrary he was a powerfully built, squareshouldered fellow, full of vitality, with a voice like a bull and a laugh that could be heard across the meadows. A muscular Christian too, and one of the best Rugby forwards in Edinburgh. I remember my first meeting with Crabbe. It gave me a respect both for his cool reasoning powers and for his courage. It was at one of the Bulgarian Atrocity meetings held in Edinburgh in ’78. The hall was densely packed and the ventilation defective, so that I was not sorry to find that owing to my lateness I was unable to get any place and had to stand in the doorway. Leaning against the wall there I could both enjoy the cool air and hear the invectives which speaker after speaker was hurling at the Conservative ministry. The audience seemed enthusiastically unanimous. A burst of cheering hailed every argument and sarcasm. 178

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There was not one dissentient voice. The speaker paused to moisten his lips, and there was a silence over the hall. Then a clear voice rose from the middle of it: ‘All very fine, but what did Gladstone—’ There was a howl of execration and yells of ‘Turn him out!’ But the voice was still audible. ‘What did Gladstone do in ’63?’ it demanded. ‘Turn him out. Show him out of the window! Put him out!’ There was a perfect hurricane of threats and abuse. Men sprang upon the benches shaking their sticks and peering over each other’s shoulders to get a glimpse of the daring Conservative. ‘What did Gladstone do in ’63?’ roared the voice; ‘I insist upon being answered.’ There was another howl of execration, a great swaying of the crowd, and an eddy in the middle of it. Then the mass of people parted and a man was borne out kicking and striking, and after a desperate resistance was precipitated down the stairs. As the meeting became somewhat monotonous after this little divertisement, I went down into the street to cool myself. There was my inquisitive friend leaning up against a lamp-post with his coat torn to shreds and a pipe in his mouth. Recognizing him by his cut as being a medical student, I took advantage of the freemasonry which exists between members of that profession. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘you are a medical, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ he said; ‘Thomas Crabbe, a ’varsity man.’ ‘My name is Barton,’ I said. ‘Pardon my curiosity, but would you mind telling me what Gladstone did do in ’63?’ ‘My dear chap,’ said Crabbe, taking my arm and marching up the street with me, ‘I haven’t the remotest idea in the world. You see, I was confoundedly hot, and I wanted a smoke, and there seemed no chance of getting out, for I was jammed up right in the middle of the hall, so I thought I’d just make them carry me out; and I did—not a bad idea, was it? If you have nothing better to do, come up to my digs and have some supper.’ ‘Certainly,’ said I; and that was the foundation of my friendship with Thomas Crabbe. Crabbe took his degree a year before I did, and went down to a large port in England with the intention of setting up there. A brilliant career seemed to lie before him, for besides his deep knowledge of medicine, acquired in the most practical school in the world, he had that indescribable manner which gains a patient’s confidence at once. It is curious how seldom the two are united. That charming doctor, my dear madam, who pulled the young Charley through the measles so nicely, and had such a

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pleasant manner and such a clever face, was a noted duffer at college and the laughing-stock of his year. While poor little Dr. Grinder whom you snubbed so, and who seemed so nervous and didn’t know where to put his hands, he won a gold medal for original research and was as good a man as his professors. After all, it is generally the outside case, not the inside works, which is noticed in this world. Crabbe went down with his young degree, and a still younger wife, to settle in this town, which we will call Brisport. I was acting as assistant to a medical man in Manchester, and heard little from my former friend, save that he had set up in considerable style, and was making a bid for a high-class practice at once. I read one most deep and erudite paper in a medical journal, entitled ‘Curious Development of a Discopherous Bone in the Stomach of a Duck,’ which emanated from his pen, but beyond this and some remarks on the embryology of fishes he seemed strangely quiet. One day to my surprise I received a telegram from Mrs. Crabbe begging one to run down to Brisport and see her husband, as he was far from well. Having obtained leave of absence from my principal, I started by the next train, seriously anxious about my friend. Mrs. Crabbe met me at the station. She told me Tom was getting very much broken down by continued anxiety; the expenses of keeping up his establishment were heavy, and patients were few and far between. He wished my advice and knowledge of practical work to guide him in this crisis. I certainly found Crabbe altered very much for the worse. He looked gaunt and cadaverous, and much of his old reckless joyousness had left him, though he brightened up wonderfully on seeing an old friend. After dinner the three of us held a solemn council of war, in which he laid before me all his difficulties. ‘What in the world am I to do, Barton?’ he said. ‘If I could make myself known it would be all right, but no one seems to look at my door-plate, and the place is overstocked with doctors. I believe they think I am a D.D. I wouldn’t mind if these other fellows were good men, but they are not. They are all antiquated old fogies at least half a century behind the day. Now, there is old Markham, who lives in that brick house over there and does most of the practice in the town. I’ll swear he doesn’t know the difference between locomotor ataxia and a hypodermic syringe, but he is known, so they flock into his surgery in a manner which is simply repulsive. And Davidson down the road, he is only an L.S.A. Talked about epispastic paralysis at the Society the other night—confused it with liquor epispasticus, you know. Yet that fellow makes a pound to my shilling.’ 180

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‘Get your name known and write,’ said I. ‘But what on earth am I to write about?’ asked Crabbe. ‘If a man has no cases, how the world is he to describe them? Help yourself and pass the bottle.’ ‘Couldn’t you invent a case just to raise the wind?’ ‘Not a bad idea,’ said Crabbe thoughtfully. ‘By the way, did you see my “Discopherous Bone in a Duck’s Stomach”?’ ‘Yes; it seemed rather good.’ ‘Good, I believe you! Why, man, it was a domino which the old duck had managed to gorge itself with. It was a perfect godsend. Then I wrote about embryology of fishes because I knew nothing about it and reasoned that ninety-nine men in a hundred would be in the same boat. But as to inventing whole cases, it seems rather daring, does it not?’ ‘A desperate disease needs desperate remedies,’ said I. ‘You remember old Hobson at college? He writes once a year to the British Medical and asks if any correspondent can tell him how much it costs to keep a horse in the country. And then he signs himself in the Medical Register as “The contributor of several unostentatious queries and remarks to scientific papers!”’ It was quite a treat to hear Crabbe laugh with his old student guffaw. ‘Well, old man,’ he said, ‘we’ll talk it over to-morrow. We mustn’t be selfish and forget that you are a visitor here. Come along out and see the beauties (save the mark!) of Brisport.’ So saying he donned a funereal coat, a pair of spectacles, and a hat with a desponding brim, and we spent the remainder of the evening roaming about and discussing mind and matter. We had another council of war next day. It was a Sunday, and as we sat in the window, smoking our pipes and watching the crowded street, we brooded over many plans for gaining notoriety. ‘I’ve done Bob Sawyer’s dodge,’ said Tom, despondingly. ‘I never go to church without rushing out in the middle of the sermon, but no one knows who I am, so it is no good. I had a nice slide in front of the door last winter for three weeks, and used to give it a polish up after dusk every night. But there was only one man ever fell on it, and he actually limped right across the road to Markham’s surgery. Wasn’t that hard lines?’ ‘Very hard indeed,’ said I. ‘Something might be done with orange peel,’ continued Tom, ‘but it looks so awfully bad to have the whole pavement yellow with peel in front of a doctor’s house.’

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‘It certainly does,’ I agreed. ‘There was one fellow came in with a cut head one night,’ said Tom, ‘and I sewed him up, but he had forgotten his purse. He came back in a week to have the stitches taken out, but without the money. That man is going about to this day, Jack, with half a yard of my catgut in him—and in him it’ll stay until I see the coin.’ ‘Couldn’t we get up some incident,’ said I, ‘which would bring your name really prominently before the public?’ ‘My dear fellow, that’s exactly what I want. If I could get my name into the Brisport Chronicle it would be worth five hundred a year to me. There’s a family connection, you know, and people only want to realize that I am here. But how am I to do it unless by brawling in the street or by increasing my family? Now, there was the excitement about the discopherous bone. If Huxley or some of these fellows had taken the matter up it might have been the making of me. But they took it all in with a disgusting complacency, as if it was the most usual thing in the world, and dominoes were the normal food of ducks. I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he continued, moodily eyeing his fowls. ‘I’ll puncture the floors of their fourth ventricles and present them to Markham. You know that makes them ravenous, and they’d eat him out of house and home in time. Eh, Jack?’ ‘Look here, Thomas,’ said I, ‘you want your name in the papers—is that it?’ ‘That’s about the state of the case.’ ‘Well, by Jove, you shall have it.’ ‘Eh? Why? How?’ ‘There’s a pretty considerable crowd of people outside, isn’t there, Tom?’ I continued. ‘They are coming out of church, aren’t they? If there was an accident now it would make some noise.’ ‘I say, you’re not going to let rip among them with a shotgun, are you, in order to found a practice for me?’ ‘No, not exactly. But how would this read in to-morrow’s Chronicle?— “Painful occurrence in George Street.—As the congregation were leaving George Street Cathedral after the morning service, they were horrified to see a handsome, fashionably dressed gentleman stagger and fall senseless upon the pavement. He was taken up and carried writhing in terrible convulsions into the surgery of the well-known practitioner Dr. Crabbe, who had been promptly upon the spot. We are happy to state that the 182

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fit rapidly passed off, and that, owing to the skilful attention which he received, the gentleman, who is a distinguished visitor in our city, was able to regain his hotel and is now rapidly becoming convalescent.” How would that do, eh?’ ‘Splendid, Jack—splendid!’ ‘Well, my boy, I’m your fashionably dressed stranger, and I promise you they won’t carry me into Markham’s.’ ‘My dear fellow, you are a treasure—you won’t mind my bleeding you?’ ‘Bleeding me, confound you! Yes, I do very much mind.’ ‘Just opening a little vein,’ pleaded Tom. ‘Not a capillary,’ said I. ‘Now, look here; I’ll throw up the whole business unless you give me your word to behave yourself. I don’t draw the line at brandy.’ ‘Very well, brandy be it,’ grumbled Tom. ‘Well, I’m off,’ said I. ‘I’ll go into the fit against your garden gate.’ ‘All right, old man.’ ‘By the way, what sort of a fit would you like? I could give you either an epileptic or an apoplectic easily, but perhaps you’d like something more ornate—a catalepsy or a trade spasm, maybe—with miner’s nystagmus or something of that kind?’ ‘Wait a bit till I think,’ said Tom, and he sat pulling at his pipe for five minutes. ‘Sit down again, Jack,’ he continued. ‘I think we could do something better than this. You see, a fit isn’t a very deadly thing, and if I did bring you through one there would be no credit in it. If we are going to work this thing, we may as well work it well. We can only do it once. It wouldn’t do for the same fashionably dressed stranger to be turning up a second time. People would begin to smell a rat.’ ‘So they would,’ said I; ‘but hang it, you can’t expect me to tumble off the cathedral spire in order that you may hold an inquest on my remains! You may command me in anything reasonable, however. What shall it be?’ Tom seemed lost in thought. ‘Can you swim?’ he said presently. ‘Fairly well.’ ‘You could keep yourself afloat for five minutes?’ ‘Yes, I could do that.’ ‘You’re not afraid of water?’ ‘I’m not much afraid of anything.’ ‘Then come out,’ said Tom, ‘and we’ll go over the ground.’

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I couldn’t get one word out of him as to his intentions, so I trotted along beside him, wondering what in the wide world he was going to do. Our first stoppage was at a small dock which is crossed by a swinging iron bridge. He hailed an amphibious man, with top-boots. ‘Do you keep rowing-boats and let them out?’ he asked. ‘Yes, sir,’ said the man. ‘Then good-day’; and to the boatman’s profound and audible disgust we set off at once in the other direction. Our next stoppage was at the jolly Mariner’s Arms. Did they keep beds? Yes, they kept beds. We then proceeded to the chemist’s. Did he keep a galvanic battery? Once again the answer was in the affirmative, and with a satisfied smile Tom Crabbe headed for home once more, leaving some very angry people behind him. That evening over a bowl of punch he revealed his plan—and the council of three revised it, modified it, and ended by adopting it, with the immediate result that I at once changed my quarters to the Brisport Hotel. I was awakened next day by the sun streaming in at my bedroom window. It was a glorious morning. I sprang out of bed and looked at my watch. It was nearly nine o’clock. ‘Only an hour,’ I muttered, ‘and nearly a mile to walk,’ and proceeded to dress with all the haste I could. ‘Well,’ I soliloquized as I sharpened my razor, ‘if old Tom Crabbe doesn’t get his name in the papers to-day, it isn’t my fault. I wonder if any friend would do as much for me!’ I finished my toilet, swallowed a cup of coffee, and sallied out. Brisport seemed unusually lively this morning. The streets were crowded with people. I wormed my way down Waterloo Street through the Old Square and past Crabbe’s house. The cathedral bells were chiming ten o’clock as I reached the above-mentioned little dock with the iron swinging bridge. A man was standing on the bridge leaning over the balustrades. There was no mistaking the heartbroken hat rim and the spectacles of Thomas Waterhouse Crabbe, M.B. I passed him without sign of recognition, dawdled a little on the quay, and then sauntered down to the boathouse. Our friend of yesterday was standing at the door with a short pipe in his mouth. ‘Could I have a boat for an hour?’ I asked. He beamed all over. ‘One minute, sir,’ he said, ‘an’ I’ll get the sculls. Would you want me to row you, sir?’ 184

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‘Yes, you’d better,’ I replied. He bustled about, and in a short time managed to launch a leaky-looking old tub, into which he stepped, while I squatted down in the sheets. ‘Take me round the docks,’ I said. ‘I want to have a look at the shipping.’ ‘Aye, aye, sir,’ said he, and away we went, and paddled about the docks for the best part of an hour. At the end of that time we turned back and pulled up to the little quay from which he had started. It was past eleven now and the place was crowded with people. Half Brisport seemed to have concentrated round the iron bridge. The melancholy hat was still visible. ‘Shall I pull in, sir?’ asked the boatman. ‘Give me the sculls,’ said I. ‘I want a bit of exercise—let us change places,’ and I stood up. ‘Take care, sir!’ yelled the boatman as I gave a stagger. ‘Look out!’ and he made a frantic grab at me, but too late, for with a melodramatic scream I reeled and fell over into the Brisport dock. I hardly realized what it was I was going to do until I had done it. It was not a pleasant feeling to have the thick, clammy water closing over one’s head. I struck the bottom with my feet, and shot up again to the surface. The air seemed alive with shouts. ‘Heave a rope!’ ‘Where’s a boat-hook?’ ‘Catch him!’ ‘There he is!’ The boatman managed to hit me a smart blow on the head with something, an oar, I fancy, and I went down again, but not before I had got my lungs well filled with air. I came up again, and my top-booted friend seized me by the hair of my head as if he would tear my scalp off. ‘Don’t struggle!’ he yelled, ‘and I’ll save you yet.’ But I shook him off and took another plunge. There was no resisting him next time, however, for he got a boat-hook into my collar, and though I kept my head under water as long as possible I was ignominiously hauled to land. There I lay on the hard stones of the quay, feeling very much inclined to laugh, but looking, no doubt, very blue and ghastly. ‘He’s gone, poor chap!’ said someone. ‘Send for a doctor.’ ‘Run, run to Markham.’ ‘Quite dead.’ ‘Turn him upside down.’ ‘Feel his pulse.’ ‘Slap him on the back.’ ‘Stop,’ said a solemn voice—‘stop! Can I be of any assistance? I am a medical man. What has occurred?’ ‘A man drowned,’ cried a score of voices. ‘Stand back, make a ring— room for the doctor!’ ‘My name is Dr. Crabbe. Dear me, poor young gentleman! Drop his hand,’ he roared at a man who was making for my pulse. ‘I tell you in such

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a state the least pressure or impediment to the arterial circulation might prove fatal.’ To save my life I couldn’t help giving a very audible inward chuckle at Tom’s presence of mind. There was a murmur of surprise among the crowd. Tom solemnly took off his hat. ‘The death rattle!’ he whispered. ‘The young soul has flown—yet perchance science may yet recall it. Bear him up to the tavern.’ A shutter was brought, I was solemnly hoisted on to the top of it, and the melancholy cortège passed along the quay, the corpse being really the most cheerful member of the company. We got to the Mariner’s Arms, and I was stripped and laid in the best bed. The news of the accident seemed to have spread, for there was a surging crowd in the street, and the staircase was thronged with people. Tom would only admit about a dozen of the more influential of the townspeople into the room, but issued bulletins out of the window every five minutes to the crowd below. ‘Quite dead,’ I heard him roar. ‘Respiration has ceased—no pulsation— but we still persevere, it is our duty.’ ‘Shall I bring brandy?’ said the landlady. ‘Yes, and towels, and a hip bath and a basin—but the brandy first.’ This sentiment met with the hearty approbation of the corpse. ‘Why, he’s drinking it,’ said the landlady, as she applied the glass to my lips. ‘Merely an instance of a reflex automatic action,’ said Tom. ‘My good woman, any corpse will drink brandy if you only apply it to the glossopharyngeal tract. Stand aside and we will proceed to try Marshall Hall’s method of resuscitation.’ The citizens stood round in a solemn ring, while Tom stripped off his coat and, climbing on the bed, proceeded to roll me about in a manner which seemed to dislocate every bone in my body. ‘Hang it, man, stop!’ I growled, but he only paused to make a dart for the window and yell out, ‘No sign of life,’ and then fell upon me with greater energy than ever. ‘We will now try Sylvestre’s method,’ he said, when the perspiration was fairly boiling out of him; and with that he seized me again and performed a series of evolutions even more excruciating than the first. ‘It is hopeless!’ he said at last, stopping and covering my head reverently with the bedclothes. ‘Send for the coroner! He has gone to a better land. Here is my card,’ he continued to an inspector of 186

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police who had arrived. ‘Dr. Crabbe of George Street. You will see that the matter is accurately reported. Poor young man!’ And Tom drew his handkerchief across his eyes and walked towards the door, while a groan of sympathy rose from the crowd outside. He had his hand upon the handle when a thought seemed to strike him, and he turned back. ‘There is yet a possible hope,’ he said, ‘we have not tried the magical effects of electricity—that subtle power, next of kin to nervous force. Is there a chemist’s near?’ ‘Yes, Doctor, there’s Mr. McLagan just round the corner.’ ‘Then run! run! A human life trembles in the balance—get his strongest battery, quick!’ And away went half the crowd, racing down the street and tumbling over each other in the effort to be first at Mr. McLagan’s. They came back very red and hot, and one of them bore a shining brown mahogany box in his arms which contained the instrument in question. ‘Now, gentlemen,’ said Tom, ‘I believe I may say that I am the first practitioner in Great Britain who has applied electricity to this use. In my student days I have seen the learned Rokitansky of Vienna employ it in some such way. I apply the negative pole over the solar plexus, while the positive I place on the inner side of the patella. I have seen it produce surprising effects; it may again in this case.’ It certainly did. Whether it was an accident or whether Tom’s innate reckless devilry got the better of him I cannot say. He himself always swore that it was an accident, but at any rate he sent the strongest current of a most powerful battery rattling and crashing through my system. I gave one ear-splitting yell and landed with a single bound into the middle of the room. I was charged with electricity like a Leyden jar. My very hair bristled with it. ‘You confounded idiot!’ I shouted, shaking my fist in Tom’s face. ‘Isn’t it enough to dislocate every bone in my body with your ridiculous resuscitations without ruining my constitution with this thing?’ and I gave a vicious kick at the mahogany box. Never was there such a stampede! The inspector of police and the correspondent of the Chronicle sprang down the staircase, followed by the twelve respectable citizens. The landlady crawled under the bed. A lodger who was nursing her baby while she conversed with a neighbour in the street below let the child drop upon her friend’s head. In fact, Tom might have founded the nucleus of a practice there and then. As it was, his usual presence of mind carried him through. ‘A miracle!’ he yelled from the window. ‘A miracle! Our friend

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has been brought back to us; send for a crib.’ And then sotto voce, ‘For goodness’ sake, Jack, behave like a Christian and crawl into bed again. Remember the landlady is in the room and don’t go prancing about in your shirt.’ ‘Hang the landlady,’ said I, ‘I feel like a lightning conductor—you’ve ruined me!’ ‘Poor fellow,’ cried Tom, once more addressing the crowd, ‘he is alive, but his intellect is irretrievably affected. He thinks he is a lightning conductor. Make way for the cab. That’s right! Now help me to lead him in. He is out of all danger now. He can dress at his hotel. If any of you have any information to give which may throw light upon this case my address is 81 George Street. Remember, Dr. Crabbe, 81 George Street. Goodday, kind friends, goodbye!’ And with that he bundled me into the cab to prevent my making any further disclosures, and drove off amid the enthusiastic cheers of the admiring crowd. I could not stay in Brisport long enough to see the effect of my coup d’état. Tom gave us a champagne supper that night, and the fun was fast and furious, but in the midst of it a telegram from my principal was handed in ordering me to return to Manchester by the next train. I waited long enough to get an early copy of the Brisport Chronicle, and beguiled the tedious journey by perusing the glowing account of my mishap. A column and a half was devoted to Dr. Crabbe and the extraordinary effects of electricity upon a drowned man. It ultimately got into some of the London papers, and was gravely commented upon in the Lancet. As to the pecuniary success of our little experiment I can only judge from the following letter from Tom Crabbe, which I transcribe exactly as I received it: What Ho! My resuscitated Corpse; You want to know how all goes in Brisport, I suppose. Well, I’ll tell you. I’m cutting Markham and Davidson out completely, my boy. The day after our little joke I got a bruised leg (that baby), a cut head (the woman the baby fell upon), an erysipelas, and a bronchitis. Next day a fine rich cancer of Markham’s threw him up and came over to me. Also a pneumonia and a man who swallowed a sixpence. I’ve never had a day since without half a dozen new names on the list, and I’m going to start a trap this week. Just let me know when you are going to set up, and I’ll manage 188

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to run down, old man, and give you a start in business, if I have to stand on my head in the water-butt. Good-bye. Love from the Missus.          Ever yours,            Thomas Waterhouse Crabbe,                     M.B. Edin. 81 George Street, Brisport.

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‘Number 43 is no better, Doctor,’ said the head warder, in a slightly reproachful accent, looking in round the corner of my door. ‘Confound 43!’ I responded from behind the pages of the Australian Sketcher. ‘And 61 says his tubes are paining him. Couldn’t you do anything for him?’ ‘He is a walking drug shop,’ said I. ‘He has the whole British pharmacopoeia inside him. I believe his tubes are as sound as yours are.’ ‘Then there’s 7 and 108, they are chronic,’ continued the warder, glancing down a blue slip of paper ‘And 28 knocked off work yesterday—said lifting things gave him a stitch in his side. I want you to have a look at him, if you don’t mind, doctor. There’s 31 too—him that killed John Adamson in the Corinthian brig—he’s been carrying on awful in the night, shrieking and yelling, he has, and no stopping him either.’ ‘All right, I’ll have a look at him afterward,’ I said, tossing my paper carelessly aside, and pouring myself a cup of coffee. ‘Nothing else to report, I suppose, warder?’ The official protruded his head a little further into the room. ‘Beg pardon, Doctor,’ he said, in a confidential tone, ‘but I notice as 82 has a bit of a cold, and it would be a good excuse for you to visit him and have a chat, maybe.’ The cup of coffee was arrested half-way to my lips as I stared in amazement at the man’s serious face. ‘An excuse?’ I said. ‘An excuse? What the deuce are you talking about, McPherson? You see me trudging about all day at my practice, when I’m not looking after the prisoners, and coming back every night as tired as a dog, and you talk about finding an excuse for doing more work.’ ‘You’d like it, Doctor,’ said Warder McPherson, insinuating one of his shoulders into the room. ‘That man’s story’s worth listening to if you could get him to tell it, though he’s not what you’d call free in his speech. Maybe you don’t know who 82 is?’ ‘No, I don’t, and I don’t care either,’ I answered, in the conviction that some local ruffian was about to be foisted upon me as a celebrity. ‘He’s Maloney,’ said the warder, ‘him that turned Queen’s evidence after the murders at Bluemansdyke.’ 190

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‘You don’t say so?’ I ejaculated, laying down my cup in astonishment. I had heard of this ghastly series of murders, and read an account of them in a London magazine long before setting foot in the colony. I remembered that the atrocities committed had thrown the Burke and Hare crimes completely into the shade, and that one of the most villainous of the gang had saved his own skin by betraying his companions. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘O yes, it’s him right enough. Just you draw him out a bit, and he’ll astonish you. He’s a man to know, is Maloney; that’s to say, in moderation;’ and the head grinned, bobbed, and disappeared, leaving me to finish my breakfast and ruminate over what I had heard. The surgeonship of an Australian prison is not an enviable position. It may be endurable in Melbourne or Sydney, but the little town of Perth has few attractions to recommend it, and those few had been long exhausted. The climate was detestable, and the society far from congenial. Sheep and cattle were the staple support of the community; and their prices, breeding, and diseases the principal topic of conversation. Now as I, being an outsider, possessed neither the one nor the other, and was utterly callous to the new ‘dip’ and the ‘rot’ and other kindred topics, I found myself in a state of mental isolation, and was ready to hail anything which might relieve the monotony of my existence. Maloney, the murderer, had at least some distinctiveness and individuality in his character, and might act as a tonic to a mind sick of the commonplaces of existence. When, therefore, I went upon my usual matutinal round, I turned the lock of the door, which bore the convict’s number upon it, and walked into the cell. The man was lying in a heap upon his rough bed as I entered, but, uncoiling his long limbs, he started up and stared at me with an insolent look of defiance on his face which augured badly for our interview. He had a pale, set face, with sandy hair and a steely-blue eye, with something feline in its expression. His frame was tall and muscular, though there was a curious bend in his shoulders, which almost amounted to a deformity. An ordinary observer meeting him in the street might have put him down as a well-developed man, fairly handsome, and of studious habits—even in the hideous uniform of the rottenest convict establishment he imparted a certain refinement to his carriage which marked him out among the inferior ruffians around him. ‘I’m not on the sick-list,’ he said, gruffly. There was something in the hard, rasping voice which dispelled all softer illusions, and made

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me realize that I was face to face with the man of the Lena Valley and Bluemansdyke, the bloodiest bushranger that ever stuck up a farm or cut the throats of its occupants. ‘I know you’re not,’ I answered. ‘Warder McPherson told me you had a cold, though, and I thought I’d look in and see you.’ ‘Blast Warder McPherson, and blast you, too!’ yelled the convict, in a paroxysm of rage. ‘O, that’s right,’ he added in a quieter voice; ‘hurry away; report me to the governor, do! Get me another six months or so— that’s your game.’ ‘I’m not going to report you,’ I said. ‘Eight square feet of ground,’ he went on, disregarding my protest, and evidently working himself into a fury again. ‘Eight square feet, and I can’t have that without being talked to and stared at, and—O blast the whole crew of you!’ and he raised his two clinched hands above his head and shook them in passionate invective. ‘You’ve got a curious idea of hospitality,’ I remarked, determined not to lose my temper, and saying almost the first thing that came to my tongue. To my surprise the words had an extraordinary effect upon him. He seemed completely staggered at my assuming the proposition for which he had been so fiercely contending—namely, that the room in which he stood was his own. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said; ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. Won’t you take a seat?’ and he motioned toward a rough trestle, which formed the headpiece of his couch. I sat down, rather astonished at the sudden change. I don’t know that I liked Maloney better under this new aspect. The murderer had, it is true, disappeared for the nonce, but there was something in the smooth tones and obsequious manner which powerfully suggested that the witness of the Queen, who had stood up and sworn away the lives of his companions in crime. ‘How’s your chest?’ I asked, putting on my professional air. ‘Come, drop it, Doctor, drop it!’ he answered, showing a row of white teeth as he resumed his seat upon the side of the bed. ‘It wasn’t anxiety after my precious health that brought you along here; that story won’t wash at all. You came to have a look at Wolf Tone Maloney, forger, murderer, Sydney-slyder, ranger, and government peach. That’s about my figure, ain’t it? There it is, plain and straight; there’s nothing mean about me.’ 192

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He paused as if he expected me to say something; but, as I remained silent, he repeated once or twice, ‘There’s nothing mean about me.’ ‘And why shouldn’t I?’ he suddenly yelled, his eyes gleaming and his whole satanic nature reasserting itself. ‘We were bound to swing, one and all, and they were none the worse if I saved myself by turning against them. Every man for himself, say I, and the devil take the luckiest. You haven’t a plug of tobacco, doctor, have you?’ He tore at the piece of ‘Barrett’s’ which I handed him, as ravenously as a wild beast. It seemed to have the effect of soothing his nerves, for he settled himself down in the bed and reassumed his former deprecating manner. ‘You wouldn’t like it yourself, you know, Doctor,’ he said; ‘it’s enough to make any man a little queer in his temper. I’m in for six months this time for assault, and very sorry I shall be to go out again, I can tell you. My mind’s at ease in here; but when I’m outside, what with the government and what with Tattooed Tom of Hawkesbury, there’s no chance of a quiet life.’ ‘Who is he?’ I asked. ‘He’s the brother of John Grimthorpe, the same that was condemned on my evidence; and an infernal scamp he was, too! Spawn of the devil, both of them! This tattooed one is a murderous ruffian, and he swore to have my blood after that trial. It’s seven years ago, and he’s following me yet; I know he is, though he lies low and keeps dark. He came up to me in Ballarat in ’75; you can see on the back of my hand here where the bullet clipped me. He tried again in ’76, at Port Philip, but I got the drop on him and wounded him badly. He knifed me in ’79, though, in a bar at Adelaide, and that made our account about level. He’s loafing round again now, and he’ll let daylight into me—unless—unless by some extraordinary chance some one does as much for him.’ And Maloney gave me a very ugly smile. ‘I don’t complain of him so much,’ he continued. ‘Looking at it in his way, no doubt it is a sort of family matter that can hardly be neglected. It’s the Government that fetches me. When I think of what I’ve done for this country, and then of what this country has done for me, it makes me fairly wild—clean drives me off my head. There’s no gratitude nor common decency left, Doctor!’ He brooded over his wrongs for a few minutes, and then proceeded to lay them before me in detail.

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‘Here’s nine men,’ he said; ‘they’ve been murdering and killing for a matter of three years, and maybe a life a week wouldn’t more than average the work that they’ve done. The Government catches them and the Government tries them, but they can’t convict; and why?—because the witnesses have all had their throats cut, and the whole job’s been very neatly done. What happens then? Up comes a citizen called Wolf Tone Maloney; he says “The country needs me, and here I am.” And with that he gives his evidence, convicts the lot, and enables the beaks to hang them. That’s what I did. There’s nothing mean about me! And now what does the country do in return? Dogs me, sir, spies on me, watches me night and day, turns against the very man that worked so very hard for it. There’s something mean about that, anyway. I didn’t expect them to knight me, nor to make me colonial secretary; but, damn it, I did expect that they would let me alone!’ ‘Well,’ I remonstrated, ‘if you choose to break laws and assault people, you can’t expect it to be looked over on account of former services.’ ‘I don’t refer to my present imprisonment, sir,’ said Maloney, with dignity. ‘It’s the life I’ve been leading since that cursed trial that takes the soul out of me. Just you sit there on that trestle, and I’ll tell you all about it; and then look me in the face and tell me that I’ve been treated fair by the police.’ I shall endeavour to transcribe the experience of the convict in his own words, as far as I can remember them, preserving his curious perversions of right and wrong. I can answer for the truth of his facts, whatever may be said for his deductions from them. Months afterward, Inspector H. W. Hann, formerly governor of the gaol at Dunedin, showed me entries in his ledger which corroborated every statement. Maloney reeled the story off in a dull, monotonous voice, with his head sunk upon his breast and his hands between his knees. The glitter of his serpent-like eyes was the only sign of the emotions which were stirred up by the recollection of the events which he narrated. You’ve read of Bluemansdyke (he began, with some pride in his tone). We made it hot while it lasted; but they ran us to earth at last, and a trap called Braxton, with a damned Yankee, took the lot of us. That was in New Zealand, of course, and they took us down to Dunedin, and there they were convicted and hanged. One and all they put up their hands in the dock, and cursed me till your blood would have run cold to hear them—which was scurvy treatment, seeing that we had all been pals 194

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together; but they were a blackguard lot, and thought only of themselves. I think it is as well that they were hung. They took me back to Dunedin gaol, and clamped me into the old cell. The only difference they made was, that I had no work to do and was well fed. I stood this for a week or two, until one day the governor was making his rounds, and I put the matter to him. ‘How’s this?’ I said. ‘My conditions were a free pardon, and you’re keeping me here against the law.’ He gave a sort of a smile. ‘Should you like very much to go out?’ he asked. ‘So much,’ said I, ‘that, unless you open that door, I’ll have an action against you for illegal detention.’ He seemed a bit astonished by my resolution. ‘You’re very anxious to meet your death,’ he said. ‘What d’ye mean?’ I asked. ‘Come here, and you’ll know what I mean,’ he answered. And he led me down the passage to a window that overlooked the door of the prison. ‘Look at that!’ said he. I looked out, and there were a dozen or so rough-looking fellows standing outside in the street, some of them smoking, some playing cards on the pavement. When they saw me they gave a yell and crowded round the door, shaking their fists and hooting. ‘They wait for you, watch and watch about,’ said the governor. ‘They’re the executive of the vigilance committee. However, since you are determined to go, I can’t stop you.’ ‘D’ye call this a civilized land,’ I cried, ‘and let a man be murdered in cold blood in open daylight?’ When I said this the governor and the warder and every fool in the place grinned, as if a man’s life was a rare good joke. ‘You’ve got the law on your side,’ says the governor; ‘so we won’t detain you any longer. Show him out, warder.’ He’d have done it, too, the black-hearted villain, if I hadn’t begged and prayed and offered to pay for my board and lodging, which is more than any prisoner ever did before me. He let me stay on those conditions; and for three months I was caged up there with every larrikin in the township clamouring at the other side of the wall. That was pretty treatment for a man that had served his country! At last, one morning, up came the governor again.

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‘Well, Maloney,’ he said, ‘how long are you going to honour us with your society?’ I could have put a knife into his cursed body, and would, too, if we had been alone in the bush; but I had to smile, and smooth him and flatter, for I feared that he might have me sent out. ‘You’re an infernal rascal,’ he said; those were his very words, to a man that had helped him all he knew how. ‘I don’t want any rough justice here, though; and I think I see my way to getting you out of Dunedin.’ ‘I’ll never forget you, governor,’ said I; and, by God, I never will! ‘I don’t want your thanks nor your gratitude,’ he answered; ‘it’s not for your sake that I do it, but simply to keep order in the town. There’s a steamer starts from the West Quay to Melbourne to-morrow, and we’ll get you aboard it. She is advertised at five in the morning, so have yourself in readiness.’ I packed up the few things I had, and was smuggled out by a back door, just before daybreak. I hurried down, took my ticket under the name of Isaac Smith, and got safely aboard the Melbourne boat. I remember hearing her screw grinding into the water as the warps were cast loose, and looking back at the lights of Dunedin as I leaned upon the bulwarks, with the pleasant thought that I was leaving them behind me forever. It seemed to me that a new world was before me, and that all my troubles had been cast off. I went down below and had some coffee, and came up again feeling better than I had done since the morning that I woke to find that cursed Irishman that took me standing over me with a six-shooter. Day had dawned by that time, and we were steaming along by the coast, well out of sight of Dunedin. I loafed about for a couple of hours, and when the sun got well up some of the other passengers came on deck and joined me. One of them, a little perky sort of fellow, took a good long look at me, and then came over and began talking. ‘Mining, I suppose?’ says he. ‘Yes,’ I says. ‘Made your pile?’ he says. ‘Pretty fair,’ says I. ‘I was at it myself,’ he says; ‘I worked at the Nelson fields for three months, and spent all I made in buying a salted claim which busted up the second day. I went at it again, though, and struck it rich; but when the gold wagon was going down to the settlements, it was stuck up by those cursed rangers, and not a red cent left.’ 196

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‘That was a bad job,’ I says. ‘Broke me—ruined me clean. Never mind, I’ve seen them all hanged for it; that makes it easier to bear. There’s only one left—the villain that gave the evidence. I’d die happy if I could come across him. There were two things I have to do if I meet him.’ ‘What’s that?’ says I, carelessly. ‘I’ve got to ask him where the money lies—they never had time to make away with it, and it’s cachéd somewhere in the mountains—and then I’ve got to stretch his neck for him, and send his soul down to join the men that he betrayed.’ It seemed to me that I knew something about that caché, and I felt like laughing; but he was watching me, and it struck me that he had a nasty, vindictive kind of mind. ‘I’m going up on the bridge,’ I said, for he was not a man whose acquaintance I cared much about making. He wouldn’t hear of my leaving him, though. ‘We’re both miners,’ he says, ‘and we’re pals for the voyage. Come down to the bar. I’m not too poor to shout.’ I couldn’t refuse him well, and we went down together; and that was the beginning of the trouble. What harm was I doing any one on the ship? All I asked for was a quiet life, leaving others alone and getting left alone myself. No man could ask fairer than that. And now just you listen to what came of it. We were passing the front of the ladies’ cabins, on our way to the saloon, when out comes a servant lass—a freckled currency she-devil— with a baby in her arms. We were brushing past her, when she gave a scream like a railway whistle, and nearly dropped the kid. My nerves gave a sort of jump when I heard that scream, but I turned and begged her pardon, letting on that I thought I might have trod on her foot. I knew the game was up, though, when I saw her white face, and her leaning against the door and pointing. ‘It’s him,’ she cried; ‘It’s him! I saw him in the court-house. Oh, don’t let him hurt the baby!’ ‘Who is it?’ asked the steward and half a dozen others in a breath. ‘It’s him—Maloney—Maloney, the murderer—O, take him away— take him away!’ I don’t rightly remember what happened just at that moment. The furniture and me seemed to get kind of mixed, and there was cursing,

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and smashing, and some one shouting for his gold, and a general stamp round. When I got steadied a bit, I found somebody’s hand in my mouth. From what I gathered afterwards, I conclude that it belonged to that same little man with the vicious way of talking. He got some of it out again, but that was because the others were choking me. A poor chap can get no fair play in this world when once he is down—still, I think he will remember me till the day of his death—longer, I hope. They dragged me out on to the poop and held a damned court-martial— on me, mind you; me, that had thrown over my pals in order to serve them. What were they to do with me? Some said this, some said that, but it ended by the Captain deciding to send me ashore. The ship stopped, they lowered a boat, and I was hoisted in, the whole gang of them hooting at me from over the bulwarks. I saw the man I spoke of tying up his hand, though, and I felt that things might be worse. I changed my opinion before we got to the land. I had reckoned on the shore being deserted, and that I might make my way inland, but the ship had stopped too near the Heads, and a dozen beach-combers and suchlike had come down to the water’s edge and were staring at us, wondering what the boat was after. When we got to the edge of the surf the cockswain hailed them, and after singing out who I was, he and his men threw me into the water. You may well look surprised—neck and crop into ten feet of water, with sharks as thick as green parrots in the bush, and I heard them laughing as I floundered to the shore. I soon saw it was a worse job than ever. As I came scrambling out through the weeds, I was collared by a big chap with a velveteen coat, and half a dozen others got round me and held me fast. Most of them looked simple fellows enough, and I was not afraid of them; but there was one in a cabbage tree hat that had a very nasty expression on his face, and the big man seemed to be chummy with him. The dragged me up the beach, and then they let go their hold of me and stood round in a circle. ‘Well, mate,’ says the man with the hat, ‘we’ve been looking out for you some time in these parts.’ ‘And very good of you, too,’ I answers. ‘None of your jaw,’ says he. ‘Come, boys what shall it be—hanging, drowning, or shooting? Look sharp!’ This looked a bit too like business. ‘No, you don’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve got Government protection and it’ll be murder.’ 198

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‘That’s what they call it,’ answered the one in the velveteen coat, as cheery as a piping crow. ‘And you’re going to murder me for being a ranger?’ ‘Ranger be damned!’ said the man. ‘We’re going to hang you for peaching against your pals, and that’s an end of the palaver.’ They slung a rope round my neck and dragged me up to the edge of the bush. There were some big she oaks and bluegums, and they pitched on one of these for the wicked deed. They ran the rope over a branch, tied my hands, and told me to say my prayers. It seemed as if it was all up, but Providence interfered to save me. It sounds nice enough sitting here and telling about it, sir, but it was sick work to stand with nothing but the beach in front of you, and the long white line of surf, with the steamer in the distance, and a set of bloody-minded villains round you thirsting for your life. I never thought I’d owe anything good to the police; but they saved me that time. A troop of them were riding from Hawkes Point Station to Dunedin, and hearing that something was up, they came down through the bush and interrupted the proceedings. I’ve heard some bands in my time, doctor, but I never heard music like the jingle of those traps’ spurs and harness as they galloped out on to the open. They tried to hang me even then, but the police were too quick for them, and the man with the hat got one over the head with the flat of a sword. I was clapped on to a horse, and before evening I found myself in my old quarters in the city gaol. The governor wasn’t to be done, though. He was determined to get rid of me, and I was equally anxious to see the last of him. He waited a week or so until the excitement had begun to die away, and then he smuggled me aboard a three-masted schooner bound to Sydney with tallow and hides. We got far away to sea without a hitch, and things began to look a bit more rosy. I made sure that I had seen the last of the prison, anyway. The crew had a sort of an idea who I was, and if there’d been any rough weather, they’d have hove me overboard like enough; for they were a rough ignorant lot, and had a notion that I brought bad luck to the ship. We had a good passage, however, and I was landed safe and sound upon Sydney Quay. Now just you listen to what happened next. You’d have thought they would have been sick of ill-using me and following me by this time— wouldn’t you, now? Well, just you listen. It seems that a cursed steamer

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started from Dunedin to Sydney on the very day we left, and got in before us, bringing news that I was coming. Blessed if they hadn’t called a meeting—a regular mass meeting—at the docks to discuss about it, and I was marched right into it when I landed. They didn’t take long about arresting me, and I listened to all the speeches and resolutions. If I’d been a prince there couldn’t have been more excitement. The end of all was that they agreed that it wasn’t right that New Zealand should be allowed to foist her criminals upon her neighbours, and that I was to be sent back again by the next boat. So they posted me off again as if I was a damned parcel; and after another eight hundred mile journey I found myself back for the third time moving in the place that I was started from. By the time I had begun to think that I was going to spend the rest of my existence travelling about from one port to another. Every man’s hand seemed turned against me, and there was no peace or quiet in any direction. I was about sick of it by the time I had come back, and if I could have taken to the bush I’d have done it, and chanced it with my old pals. They were too quick for me, though, and kept me under lock and key, but I managed, in spite of them, to negotiate that caché I told you of, and sewed the gold up in my belt. I spent another month in gaol, and then they shipped me abroad a bark that was bound for England. This time the crew never knew who I was, but the captain had a pretty good idea, though he didn’t let on to me that he had any suspicions. I guessed from the first that the man was a villain. We had a fair passage, except a gale or two off the Cape, and I began to feel like a free man when I saw the blue loom of the old country, and the saucy little pilot-boat from Falmouth dancing toward us over the waves. We ran down the Channel, and before we reached Gravesend I had agreed with the pilot that he should take me ashore with him when he left. It was at this time that the captain showed me that I was right in thinking him a meddling disagreeable man. I got my things packed, such as they were, and left him talking earnestly to the pilot, while I went below for my breakfast. When I came up again we were fairly into the mouth of the river, and the boat in which I was to have gone ashore had left us. The skipper said the pilot had forgotten me; but that was too thin, and I began to fear that all my old troubles were going to commence once more. It was not long before my suspicions were confirmed. A boat darted out from the side of the river, and a tall cove with a long black beard came aboard. I heard him ask the mate whether they didn’t need a mud-pilot to 200

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take them up in the reaches, but it seemed to me that he was a man who would know a deal more about handcuffs than he did about steering, so I kept away from him. He came across the deck, however, and made some remark to me, taking a good look at me the while. I didn’t like inquisitive people at any time, but an inquisitive stranger with glue about the roots of his beard is the worst of all to stand, especially under the circumstances. I began to feel that it was time for me to go. I soon got a chance, and made good use of it. A big collier came athwart the bows of our steamer, and we had to slacken down to dead slow. There was a barge astern, and I slipped down by a rope and was into the barge before any one missed me. Of course I had to leave my luggage behind me, but I had the belt with the nuggets round my waist, and the chance of shaking the police off my track was worth more than a couple of boxes. It was clear to me now that the pilot had been a traitor, as well as the captain, and had set the detectives after me. I often wish I could drop across those two men again. I hung about the barge all day as she drifted down the stream. There was one man in her, but she was a big, ugly craft, and his hands were too full for much looking about. Toward evening, when it got a bit dusky, I struck out for the shore, and found myself in a sort of marsh place, a good many miles to the east of London. I was soaking wet and half dead with hunger, but I trudged into the town, got a new rig-out at a slop-shop, and after having some supper, engaged a bed at the quietest lodgings I could find. I woke pretty early—a habit you pick up in the bush—and lucky for me that I did so. The very first thing I saw when I took a look through a chink in the shutter was one of those infernal policemen, standing right opposite and staring up at the windows. He hadn’t epaulets nor a sword, like our traps, but for all that there was a sort of family likeness, and the same busybody expression. Whether they followed me all the time, or whether the woman that let me the bed didn’t like the looks of me, is more than I have ever been able to find out. He came across as I was watching him, and noted down the address of the house in a book. I was afraid that he was going to ring at the bell, but I suppose his orders were simply to keep an eye on me, for after another good look at the windows he moved on down the street. I saw that my only chance was to act at once. I threw on my clothes, opened the window softly, and, after making sure that there was nobody

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about, dropped out onto the ground and made off as hard as I could run. I travelled a matter of two or three miles, when my wind gave out; and as I saw a big building with people going in and out, I went in too, and found that it was a railway-station. A train was just going off for Dover to meet the French boat, so I took a ticket and jumped into a third-class carriage. There were a couple of other chaps in the carriage, innocent-looking young beggars, both of them. They began speaking about this and that, while I sat quiet in the corner and listened. Then they started on England and foreign countries, and such like. Look ye now, Doctor, this is a fact. One of them begins jawing about the justice of England’s laws. ‘It’s all fair and above-board,’ says he; ‘there ain’t any secret police, nor spying, like they have abroad,’ and a lot more of the same sort of wash. Rather rough on me, wasn’t it, listening to the damned young fool, with the police following me about like my shadow? I got to Paris right enough, and there I changed some of my gold, and for a few days I imagined I’d shaken them off, and began to think of settling down for a bit of rest. I needed it by that time, for I was looking more like a ghost than a man. You’ve never had the police after you, I suppose? Well, you needn’t look offended, I didn’t mean any harm. If ever you had you’d know that it wastes a man away like a sheep with the rot. I went to the opera one night and took a box, for I was very flush. I was coming out between the acts when I met a fellow lounging along in the passage. The light fell on his face, and I saw that it was the mud-pilot that had boarded us in the Thames. His beard was gone, but I recognized the man at a glance, for I’ve a good memory for faces. I tell you, Doctor, I felt desperate for a moment. I could have knifed him if we had been alone, but he knew me well enough never to give me the chance. It was more than I could stand any longer, so I went right up to him and drew him aside, where we’d be free from all the loungers and theatre-goers. ‘How long are you going to keep it up?’ I asked him. He seemed a bit flustered for a moment, but then he saw there was no use beating about the bush, so he answered straight, ‘Until you go back to Australia,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know,’ I said, ‘that I have served the Government and got a free pardon?’ He grinned all over his ugly face when I said this. 202

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‘We know all about you, Maloney,’ he answered. ‘If you want a quiet life, just you go back where you came from. If you stay here, you’re a marked man; and when you are found tripping it’ll be a lifer for you, at the least. Free trade’s a fine thing but the market’s too full of men like you for us to need to import any!’ It seemed to me that there was something in what he said, though he had a nasty way of putting it. For some days back I’d been feeling a sort of home-sick. The ways of the people weren’t my ways. They stared at me in the street; and if I dropped into a bar, they’d stop talking and edge away a bit, as if I was a wild beast. I’d sooner have had a pint of old Stringybark, too, than a bucketful of their rotgut liquors. There was too much damned propriety. What was the use of having money if you couldn’t dress as you liked, nor bust it properly? There was no sympathy for a man if he shot about a little when he was half-over. I’ve seen a man dropped at Nelson many a time with less row than they’d make over a broken window-pane. The thing was slow, and I was sick of it. ‘You want me to go back?’ I said. ‘I’ve my order to stick fast to you until you do,’ he answered. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t care if I do. All I bargain is that you keep your mouth shut and don’t let on who I am, so that I may have a fair start when I get there.’ He agreed to this, and we went over to Southampton the very next day, where he saw me safely off once more. I took a passage round to Adelaide, where no one was likely to know me; and there I settled, right under the nose of the police. I’ve been there ever since, leading a quiet life, but for little difficulties like the one I’m in for now, and for that devil, Tattooed Tom of Hawkesbury. I don’t know what made me tell you all this, Doctor, unless it is that being lonely makes a man inclined to jaw when he gets a chance. Just you take warning from me, though. Never put yourself out to serve your country; for your country will do precious little for you. Just you let them look after their own affairs; and if they find difficulty in hanging a set of scoundrels, never mind chipping in, but let them alone to do as best they can. Maybe they’ll remember how they treated me after I’m dead, and be sorry for neglecting me. I was rude to you when you came in, and swore a trifle promiscuous; but don’t you mind me, it’s only my way. You’ll allow, though, that I have cause to be a bit touchy now and again when I think of all that’s passed. You’re not going, are you? Well, if you must, you must; but I hope you will look

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me up at odd times when you are going your round. O, I say, you’ve left the balance of that cake of tobacco behind you, haven’t you? No: it’s in your pocket—that’s all right. Thank ye, Doctor, you’re a good sort, and as quick as a hint as any man I’ve met.’ A couple of months after narrating his experiences, Wolf Tone Maloney finished his term, and was released. For a long time I neither saw him nor heard of him; and he had almost slipped from my memory, until I was reminded, in a somewhat tragic manner, of his existence. I had been attending a patient some distance off in the country, and was riding back, guiding my tired horse among the boulders which strewed the pathway, and endeavouring to see my way through the gathering darkness, when I came suddenly upon a little wayside inn. As I walked my horse up toward the door, intending to make sure of my bearings before proceeding further, I heard the sound of a violent altercation within the little bar. There seemed to be a chorus of expostulation or remonstrance, above which two powerful voices rang out loud and angry. As I listened, there was a momentary hush, two pistol shots sounded almost simultaneously, and with a crash the door burst open and a pair of dark figures staggered out into the moonlight. They struggled for a moment in a deadly wrestle, and then went down together among the loose stones. I had sprung off my horse, and, with the help of half a dozen rough fellows from the bar, dragged them away from one another. A glance was sufficient to convince me that one of them was dying fast. He was a thick-set burly fellow, with a determined cast of countenance. The blood was welling from a deep stab in his throat, and it was evident that an important artery had been divided. I turned away from him in despair, and walked over to where his antagonist was lying. He was shot through the lungs, but managed to raise himself up on his hand as I approached, and peered anxiously up into my face. To my surprise, I saw before me the haggard features and flaxen hair of my prison acquaintance, Maloney. ‘Ah, Doctor!’ he said, recognizing me. ‘How is he? Will he die?’ He asked the question so earnestly that I imagined he had softened at the last moment, and feared to leave the world with another homicide upon his conscience. Truth, however, compelled me to shake my head mournfully, and to intimate that the wound would prove a mortal one. Maloney gave a wild cry of triumph, which brought the blood welling out from between his lips. ‘Here, boys,’ he gasped to the little group 204

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around him. ‘There’s money in my inside pocket. Damn the expense! Drinks round. There’s nothing mean about me. I’d drink with you, but I’m going. Give the Doc. my share, for he’s as good—’ Here his head fell back with a thud, his eye glazed, and the soul of Wolf Tone Maloney, forger, convict, ranger, murderer, and Government peach, drifted away into the Great Unknown. I cannot conclude without borrowing the account of the fatal quarrel which appeared in the columns of the West Australian Sentinel. The curious will find it in the issue of the 4th October 1881: ‘Fatal Affray.—W. T. Maloney, a well-known citizen of New Montrose, and proprietor of the Yellow Boy gambling saloon, has met with his death under rather painful circumstances. Mr. Maloney was a man who had led a chequered existence, and whose past history is replete with interest. Some of our readers may recall the Lena Valley murders, in which he figured as the principal criminal. It is conjectured that during the seven months that he owned a bar in that region, from twenty to thirty travellers were hocussed and made away with. He succeeded, however, in evading the vigilance of the officers of the law, and allied himself with the bushrangers of Bluemansdyke, whose heroic capture and subsequent execution are matters of history. Maloney extricated himself from the fate which awaited him by turning Queen’s evidence. He afterward visited Europe, but returned to West Australia, where he has long played a prominent part in local matters. On Friday evening he encountered an old enemy, Thomas Grimthorpe, commonly known as Tattooed Tom, of Hawkesbury. Shots were exchanged, and both were badly wounded, only surviving a few minutes. Mr. Maloney had the reputation of being not only the most wholesale murderer that ever lived, but also of having a finish and attention to detail in matters of evidence which has been unapproached by any European criminal. Sic transit gloria mundi!’

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Appendix 2: Preface to the Author’s Edition 5

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These stories have all some bearing, more or less direct, upon medical men and medical subjects. In looking them over I am struck by the fact that within the covers of one book I have used two entirely different methods of literary treatment. Five of the stories, ‘His First Operation,’ ‘The Third Generation,’ ‘The Curse of Eve,’ ‘A Medical Document,’ and ‘The Surgeon Talks,’ are strictly – some would say too strictly – realistic. The others are all tinged with romance. Holding, as I do, that the ultimate object of all fiction is interest, and that it is immaterial by what method or device you gain your end, so long as you do gain it, I have not concerned myself about this variety of treatment, and I have hoped that it might even have a good effect, since the lighter papers may relieve the intolerable grimness of medical truth. One of the short sketches, ‘A Straggler of ’15,’ has had the good fortune to furnish Sir Henry Irving with the materials for his ‘Story of Waterloo,’ in which a great artist has shown how much may be made of the slightest studies. A. Conan Doyle Undershaw, Hindhead, 1901.

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Appendix 3: One-Act Play Adaptations Foreign Policy Lord Chamberlain’s Office Name of play: ‘Foreign Policy’ (1 act) Theatre: Terry’s Date of Licence: 1 June 1893

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Dramatis Personae The Secretary of Foreign Affairs Lady Clara (his wife) Lady Ida (his daughter) The Prime Minister Sir William (a fashionable Physician) Curtain rising discovers the dressing room of the Foreign Secretary. Blue books, papers, and official boxes are littered about. On a table near the fireplace are several medicine and liniment bottles, cotton wadding and bandages. Beside it stands a large invalid’s chair with a leg-rest in front. Lady Clara and Lady Ida are arranging the cushions on it. Lady Ida Lady Clara Lady Ida Lady Clara Lady Ida Lady Clara Lady Ida Lady Clara Lady Ida Lady Clara Lady Ida

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Then Papa had a better night? His foot is less irritable. (impulsively) Then, dear mama, could you—could you I did not say he was less irritable, Ida. But you know you could persuade him. Your father, my dear, is a man of very strong character. Ah, but my mother— (taking her by the hand and leading her forward) Come now, child, is it really so very serious? I could not give him up, mother. Not for your father’s sake? He is everything to me.

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Lady Clara Not for my sake? Lady Ida Ah, mother, you would not ask me. Lady Clara Lord Arthur has no money. Lady Ida But think of how he loves me! And we would need very little money! You can’t think how simple our tastes are. We were planning it out yesterday. A tiny, tiny little cottage, mother, with the furniture all in flowered cretonne, and curtains of chintz, and a billiard board to amuse him in wet weather. Then if we gave a little dance – (a bell rings angrily) Lady Clara Ah there is his bell Lady Ida You will not speak to him, mother? Lady Clara He will not hear of it, I am convinced. But I will try. (exit) Lady Ida Darling, darling mother! (goes over to window and looks eagerly out) I thought I heard his carriage! Ah, it is hardly time. Enter the Foreign Secretary in a dressing gown leaning on his wife’s shoulder. One foot is swathed in cotton wadding and he has a stick in his left hand. The two women help him down into his chair. For. Sec. (irritably) Steady! Steady! Don’t joggle it. Lady Ida Oh it is such a lovely day outside, papa, you cannot help getting better. All the little birds— For. Sec. For goodness sake don’t chatter, Ida. Lady Clara Run away downstairs, dear. Cut a few flowers in the conservatory for papa’s room. (exit Ida, looking wistfully at her mother) Don’t you think, dear, that you are a little rough with Ida? For. Sec. She is such a chatterbox. Lady Clara Ah, Charles, she is our only one. For. Sec. That is why I notice it so, I suppose. Lady Clara You are in a bad humour, Charles. For. Sec. (angrily dashing down the paper which he has been trying to unfold) I suppose you think the situation is one to promote high spirits, Clara! Lady Clara You will be out in a few days, dear. For. Sec. A few days, and the cabinet at a standstill for want of me. A pretty time this to desert the chief. Why Novikoff ’s 208

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protocol has not been answered yet! And there is the Afghan frontier, and the position of that boundary mountain. Lady Clara Well the mountain won’t move. For. Sec. Won’t it? You don’t know what Russian charts are. Lady Clara You will be worse if you worry. For. Sec. Can I help it? There is the British Fleet waiting instructions at Cape Matapan, and no one has the least grasp of the situation except myself. To think that I – I, a man who have prided myself on some little strength of will – should be tied down to a chair, by a tiny little morsel of inflamed gristle. Are my soul and my intellect to be eternally subordinated to a single joint of my big toe? Clara, I shall overcome it. (struggles to his feet) Lady Clara Oh Charles, Charles, what will Sir William say? For. Sec. (walking slowly with his stick) There! You see, Clara, the soul can rise above it! (walks towards the window) I am myself again. I shall go to the Cabinet. We shall take an energetic course in Crete. In Afghanistan we shall put down our foot—ow!—The colchicum, Clara, the colchicum! (he leans against window curtains and drinks medicine) Lady Clara (anxiously) Are you better, dear? For. Sec. (groaning) Sir William was right after all, I fear. Lady Clara You know dear, the Prime Minister promised to come and tell you what was going on. For. Sec. He should be here now! Perhaps that is his carriage at the door! (looks out of window) What is the meaning of this, Clara? Lady Clara (taking powder off table) What is the matter, dear? For. Sec. (sternly) Whose carriage is that? Lady Clara It looks like Lord Arthur’s. For. Sec. What! When I have forbidden him the house! Lady Clara He does not enter the house, Charles. For. Sec. What then? Lady Clara He occasionally hands in a few flowers. Do have some lithia powder! For. Sec. Have I not already made my wishes sufficiently clear upon this subject?

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Lady Clara Yes, yes! Let me beg you, Charles, to have some lithia. For. Sec. I hoped that I had—! Lady Clara This one spoonful! For. Sec. For heaven’s sake, take it away! (limps back to his chair) This matter has gone too far! I will not have it! Lady Clara (leaning over the back of his chair) You have said it, dear! It has gone too far! I give you my word, Charles, that I had no inkling of it until the mischief was done. It was so sudden. The tail end of the season, and a week at Lord Donnybrook’s. Oh, Charlie, she loves him so, and she is our own little girlie. For. Sec. (slapping the arm of his chair) I will not hear of it! I tell you once and for all that I will not have it! Lady Clara But Ida— For. Sec. I give you my word—my solemn assurance, Clara—that Ida’s affairs give me more trouble than those the vast Empire. Lady Clara But Lord Arthur Sibthorpe is of excellent birth – the son of a Duke. For. Sec. The poorest of Dukes. Lady Clara With a pedigree to the heptarchy. For. Sec. And neither prospects nor profession. Lady Clara Oh, Charlie, you could find him both. For. Sec. I do not care for the connection. Lady Clara But her whole soul is set upon him, dear. You know how frail her health is! You remember what Sir William said about her lungs. Oh you would never have the heart to separate them.

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Enter footman

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Footman The Prime Minister is below, my lady. Lady Clara Show him up, James. (exit footman) You must not excite yourself over public matters, dear. Be very good and cool and reasonable like a darling. I am sure that I may trust you (puts her light shawl round his shoulders, and exit into bedroom. Enter Prime Minister at other door.) 210

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P. M. (with a flower in his buttonhole and boyish gaiety of manner) My dear Charles! (shaking hands) A little stronger, eh? Almost ready for harness again? For. Sec. I am longing for work. P. M. We miss you sadly both in the cabinet and in the House. Quite a storm brewing over this Afghan business. The Times took a nasty line this morning. For. Sec. So I saw! P. M. Well, we must let them see that the country is not quite ruled from Printing House Square yet. We must keep our own course. For. Sec. Most undoubtedly. P. M. The Cretan business is settled. For. Sec. Thank Goodness! P. M. It proved the merest fizzle. But the question of a dissolution begins to press. The reports from the provinces are most encouraging. For. Sec. We must straighten things up a little at the Foreign Office. I should not wish my successor to find them tangled. P. M. You will be your own heir, my dear Charles. But when are we to see you? For. Sec. Sir William won’t hear of it. The little energy that the gout leaves is sapped by his colchicum. P. M. You are so irreverent, Charles! With a bishop I can feel at my ease. He is not beyond the reach of argument. But a doctor with his stethoscope and thermometer is a thing apart. Your reading does not impinge upon him. He is serenely above you. And then of course he takes you at an unfair advantage. With health and strength one might cope with him. By the way I have some departmental news. For. Sec. Ah! P. M. Sir Algernon Jones has resigned at Tangier. We must choose a minister. For. Sec. The sooner the better! The longer delay the more applicants. P. M. Ah Charles, patronage is a deadly thing. Every vacancy makes one doubtful friend and a dozen very positive

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enemies. Who so venomous as the disappointed placeseeker? The Duke of Tavistock is anxious to have it for his younger son, Lord Arthur Sibthorpe. For. Sec. (sitting up) Excellent! The very appointment I should have suggested. Lord Arthur would be very much better in Tangier than in—in— P. M. (smiling) Belgrave Square. For. Sec. Well let us say London. P. M. Well if you recommend it— For Sec. I do most strongly. P. M. Then it is done. For. Sec. And he should go out in a week. P. M. Certainly. Sir Algernon Jones returns at once. For. Sec. Is that the Algernon Jones who rowed in the same college eight as we did in— P. M. No dates, my dear Charles I entreat. Jones was at college with us, but it was his brother Sidney who rowed. He got his blue. For. Sec. My dear sir, it was Algey Jones who pulled against Cambridge. You remember his catchy stroke. P. M. Catchy! He had a lovely swing, and wonderfully quick recover. For. Sec. No, no, not this man I mean. He had a style of his own— all arm and no back. You must remember him. Sat in his boat like this (seizes his stick and holding it over the arm of his chair begins to row). P. M. (taking his stick and sitting down in another chair) My dear Charles, you are confusing two men. He has as long a sweep as I had, and you’ll allow that that was an honest one. Now this was his style. (rows) For. Sec. This more like (rows) Enter Lady Clara and Lady Ida.

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P. M. We had rowed ourselves back forty years or so, Lady Clara. Lady Clara You must put me in the boat when you do that. P. M. (in a courtly fashion) A quite unnecessary voyage for you, Lady Clara. But don’t imagine that all our time was spent so frivolously. For. Sec. We even made an appointment for an acquaintance of yours. Lord Arthur Sibthorpe is to go to Tangier as our representative. Lady Ida Oh! P. M. Goodbye, my dear Charles! You cannot fail to improve with such a nurse. Lady Clara It is time you had your footbath. Do not let Sir William find you neglecting his instructions. (leads him into bedroom) P. M. Goodbye, Lady Ida. (bows and goes to door) Lady Ida Oh sir, you will not think me presumptuous. But what sort of place is Tangier. P. M. A place of extraordinary interest. Catherine of Braganza and Colonel Kirke will occur to your memory. Burton has written well on Northern Africa. I dine at Windsor so I am sure, Lady Ida, that you will forgive me if I tear myself away. (exit) Lady Ida To Tangier! To Africa! Oh, Arthur! Arthur! (sobs in curtains)

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Enter Lady Clara who comes across and lays hand on her shoulder. Lady Clara (soothingly) Silly girl! Silly girl! It is a very nice place for a short time. It will be a stepping stone. Lady Ida But in a week, Mama! Poor dear Arthur! Lady Clara He will be happy. Lady Ida What!! Happy to part! Lady Clara He need not part. You shall go with him. Lady Ida Oh, Mama! Lady Clara Yes, I say it. Lady Ida Oh mama, in a week!

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Lady Clara Yes, indeed. A great deal may be done in a week. I shall order your trousseau today. Lady Ida Oh, you dear sweet angel! But I am so frightened! And Papa! Oh, dear, I am so frightened. Lady Clara Your papa manages the British Empire, dear. Lady Ida Yes, Ma. Lady Clara But between ourselves I think that I can manage him. How long have you been engaged, child? Lady Ida Ten weeks, Mama. Lady Clara Then it is quite time it came to a head. You must go to Tangier as the Minister’s wife. (goes over to writing desk and prepares to write letters) You have only to sit on the settee, child, and let me manage everything. I think I hear Sir William on the stair. I do think that I know how to manage Sir William. (enter the Doctor) Good morning, Sir William. Sir W. Good morning, Lady Clara. Where is our patient today? Lady Clara He has his foot in the lithia bath. Sir W. Ah, yes! Very right! (swings his eyeglasses) Ah, here is my young patient! I am glad of this opportunity. Lady Clara Yes, I wish to speak to you about her, Sir William. Pray take the armchair! Sir W. Thank you, I will sit beside her. (feels pulse) Lady Ida is certainly less anaemic and has a fuller pulse. Quite a little tinge of colour, and yet not hectic. Lady Ida I feel stronger, Sir William. Lady Clara But she still has the pain. Sir W. Ah, that pain! (taps her chest and then listens with binaural stethoscope) Still a trace of dullness! Still a faint crepitation! (Lady C. is dashing off letters) Lady Clara You spoke of a change, Doctor. Sir W. Certainly a judicious change might be advisable. Lady Clara You said a dry climate. I wish to do to the letter what you may recommend. Sir W. You are model patients. Lady Clara We wish to be. A dry climate, you said. Sir W. Did I? The particulars of our conversation have escaped me. But a dry climate is certainly indicated. 214

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Lady Clara Which one? Sir W. I think really that a patient should be allowed some latitude. I must not exact too rigid discipline. There is room for individual choice – the Engadine, Central Europe, Egypt, Algiers. Lady Clara I hear that Tangier is also recommended. Sir W. Oh yes, certainly. It is very dry. Lady Clara You hear, Ida. Sir William says that you are to go to Tangier. Sir W. Or any— Lady Clara No, no, Sir William. We feel safest when we are most obedient. You have said Tangier, and Tangier it shall be. Sir W. Really, Lady Clara, this implicit faith is most flattering. It is not everyone who would sacrifice their own pre­ possessions so absolutely. Lady Clara We know your skill and your experience, Sir William. Ida shall try Tangier. I am convinced that she will be benefitted. Sir W. I have no doubt of it. Lady Clara But you know Lord Charles. He is just a little inclined to decide medical matters as he would an affair of state. I hope that you will be firm. Sir W. (pompously) As long as Lord Charles honours me so far as to ask my advice I am sure that he would not place me in false position of seeing that advice disregarded. Lady Clara Still you must be firm on the point of Tangier. Sir W. Having deliberately formed the opinion that Tangier is the best place for our young patient, I do not think that I shall readily change my conviction. Lady Clara Of course not. Sir W. I shall speak to Lord Charles about it. Lady Clara You will find him in his room.

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(exit Doctor) Lady Ida Oh, Mama, what a diplomatist you are! Lady Clara (busily sealing up letters) All will be right, dear. (seals up another one) There is still much to be done, but I have ventured to order the trousseau.

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Lady Ida Oh, you brave darling! Lady Clara It must be a very quiet affair. Arthur must get a license. I do not approve of hole-and-corner marriages, but where the gentleman has to take up an official position it is different. (scribbles another letter) Lady Ida What dress shall I wear, Mama? Lady Clara Oh, a travelling dress. Lady Ida Fawn coloured. Lady Clara I should recommend buff. Lady Ida Oh I should like to have fawn. Lady Clara Buff. Lady Ida Here we are arguing about the dress! And papa has not even given his permission. Enter Sir William with dignity. Lady Clara How do you find your patient, Sir William? Sir W. To be frank, Lady Clara, I find him very trying.

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(bell rings) Lady Clara Ah, it is for me. Ida you can go down with the Doctor! See that this note is sent. Sir W. (stiffly) Lady Clara, I wish you a very good day. (exeunt Sir William and Ida) Lady Clara seals up another letter. Then she goes across to the bedroom door at which the Foreign Secretary appears as at first. She conducts him to his chair, which is moved more forward. For. Sec. Clara, I really cannot stand Sir William. I do think that he is the most completely obstinate and pig-headed man that I have ever seen. Lady Clara Poor Sir William. (laughing) For. Sec. I tell him that he has mistaken his profession. I could find him a post at Constantinople. We need a mule out there. Lady Clara How has he roused your wrath, dear? 216

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For. Sec. (angrily) He is so confoundedly persistent and dogmatic. Lady Clara About what? For. Sec. He must needs lay down the law about Ida. She is to go to Tangier by his decree. Lady Clara Yes, he said something to that effect before he went in to see you. For. Sec. (suspiciously) Oh, he did, did he? Lady Clara He examined her lungs, Charles. He did not say much but his expression was very grave. For. Sec. Not to say owlish. Lady Clara No, no, Charles, it is not a laughing matter. I am sure that he thought more than he said. He spoke of dullness and crepitation, and the effects of the African air. The talk turned on dry bracing health resorts and he agreed that Tangier was the place. For. Sec. (suspiciously) And that was all? Lady Clara That was all. (he shrugs his shoulders) But of course dear, if you think it better she should not go she shall not. We are absolutely in your hands. The only thing is that if she should get worse we might feel a little uncomfortable afterwards. Sir William evidently thought the matter critical. Still there is no reason why he should influence you. It is a little responsibility however. If you free me from any of it, so that afterwards— For. Sec. My dear Clara, how you do croak! Lady Clara That is the last thing I wish to do, Charles. But you remember what happened to Lord Bellamy’s child. She was just Ida’s age. That was another case in which Sir William’s advice was disregarded. For. Sec. (irascibly) But I have not disregarded it. Lady Clara No, no, of course not. I know your strong sense, and your good heart too well, dear. You were very wisely looking at both sides of the question. That is what we poor women cannot do. It is emotion against reason as I have often heard you say. We are swayed this way and that, but you men are persistent and so have your own way with us. But I am so pleased that you have decided for Tangier.

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For. Sec. Have I? Lady Clara Well, dear, you said that you should not disregard Sir William. For. Sec. Well, Clara, admitting that Ida is to go to Tangier will allow that it is impossible for me to escort her. Lady Clara Utterly. For. Sec. And for you? Lady Clara My place is by your side. For. Sec. There is your sister. Lady Clara She is out of the country. For Sec. Lady Dumbarton? Lady Clara She is out of the question. For Sec. Well then, who can you possibly ask. You see, Clara, the fates fight against Sir William. Lady Clara (going behind his chair and passing her arms over his shoulders) There is Lord Arthur! For. Sec. You are mad, Clara! Who can have put such an idea into your head. Lady Clara You did. For. Sec. I? Lady Clara Yes, dear. Now do, do be good! Or perhaps I had better not speak to you any more about it. For. Sec. Well, I really think you have gone rather far to retreat. You say that I suggested it. Lady Clara Well, it was you who said that Lord Arthur was to go there. Then came Sir William and insisted that Ida should go there too. Oh, Charlie, it is surely more than a coincidence. For. Sec. I am well convinced that it is more than a coincidence. You are a very clever woman, my dear. A born manager and organiser. Lady Clara (toying with his hair) Think of our own young days, Charlie. What were you then? A poor man—not even Minister at Tangier. But I loved you, and I believed in you, and have I ever regretted it? Ah, Charlie, Ida loves and believes in Lord Arthur, and why should she ever regret it either? For. Sec. (shows signs of indecision. He takes his wife’s hand and half raises it to his lips. Then raises it and kisses it.) Clara, you 218

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have been a good wife to me. (she stoops over and kisses his forehead) For. Sec. Clara, deny it if you can! You have ordered the trousseau. Lady Clara (pinching his ear) Subject to your approval. For. Sec. You have written to the Archbishop! Lady Clara It is not posted yet. For. Sec. You have sent a note to Lord Arthur. Lady Clara How could you tell that? For. Sec. He is waiting downstairs. Lady Clara No, but I fancy that is his carriage. For. Sec. (with a gesture of despair) Who is to fight against such a woman! Oh, if I could send you to Novikoff. He is too much for any of my men. But, Clara, I cannot have them up here. Lady Clara Not for your blessing? For. Sec. No, no. Lady Clara It would make them so happy. For Sec. I cannot stand scenes. Lady Clara What you wish shall be done. It is the one rule of my life. For. Sec. Say no more! I have been weak over the matter. Lady Clara Oh, Charlie, you who are so strong! For. Sec. You have outflanked me, Clara. It was very well done. I must congratulate you! Lady Clara (kissing him) You know I have been studying a very clever diplomatist for thirty years.

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Curtain A. Conan Doyle 12 Tennison Road South Norwood

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Waterloo 5

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Produced at The Prince’s Theatre, Bristol, on September 21st, 1894. with the following cast, at the Lyceum Theatre, London, on May 4th, 1895. Dramatis Personae Corporal Gregory Brewster (aged 96) . . . Sergeant Archie McDonald, R. A. . . . Colonel James Midwinter, Royal Scots Guards . . . Norah Brewster, the Corporal’s grandniece . . .

Mr. Henry Irving. Mr. Fuller Mellish. Mr. Haviland. Miss Annie Hughes.

All the Costumes, Wigs and Properties used in this Play may be obtained from C. H. Fox, 27 Wellington Street, Strand, London, W. C. 2. WATERLOO SCENE.— A front room in a small house in Woolwich. Cooking range at fire. Above the fire a rude painting of an imposing military man in a red coat with a bearskin. On one side a cutting from a newspaper framed. On the other a medal, also within a frame. Bright fire-irons, centre table, Bible on small table in window, wooden armchair with cushion, rack holding plates, etc. June, 1881.

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(Curtain rising discovers the empty room; door opens, and enter Norah Brewster, a country girl, with a bundle of her effects. She looks timidly about her, and then closes the door. Basket on bandbox. During dialogue takes hat and cloak off and puts them on sideboard L., takes apron out of basket, chair R. of door, and puts it on.) Norah

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And this is Uncle Gregory’s (crosses to fire-place). Why there’s his portrait just above the fire-place, the very same as we have it at home—and there is his medal by his portrait. Oh, how strange that I should have a house all to myself. Why it’s next door to being married. I suppose uncle isn’t up yet, they said that he was never up before ten. Well thank goodness that housekeeper has lit the fire before she went away. She seems to have been a nice sort of a party, she does. Poor old uncle! 220

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he does seem to have been neglected. Never mind! I’ve come to look after him now. Let me see if everything is ready for uncle when he does come. Won’t he be surprised to see me. Of course he would have had mother’s letter to say I was coming, but he wouldn’t think I’d be here so early. (At table R. C.) I wonder what makes the milk look so blue. (At drawer at back R. C.) Oh my! what nasty butter. I’m so glad I brought some other butter with me. (Takes pat of butter off plate puts it in basket. Takes pat out of basket, and puts it on plate.) Now for the bacon. Oh, what a cruel piece! Why, our Essex pigs would blush to own bacon like that! (Puts rasher in frying-pan and puts pan on hob.) Now I’ll make the tea if the kettle boils. Kettle doesn’t boil. Never mind, I’ll warm the pot. (Puts water out of kettle on fire in pot and pot on table.) Dear old uncle (looking at portrait), don’t he look grand! They must have been awful brave folk to dare to fight against him. I do hope I’ll be able to make him happy. (Knock down in flat, L. C.). Oh, dear! A knock! I wonder who it is! (Knock again.) I suppose I must see who it is. (Up to door in flat R. C. opens it.)

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(Enter Sergeant McDonald.) Sergeant (saluting) Beg your pardon, Miss, but does Corporal Gregory Brewster live here? Norah (timidly) Yes, sir. Sergeant The same who was in the Scots Guards? Norah Yes, sir. Sergeant And fought in the battle of Waterloo? Norah Yes, the same, sir. Sergeant Could I have a word with him, Miss? Norah He’s not down yet. Sergeant Ah, then, maybe I’d best look in on my way back. I’m going down to the butts, and will pass again in an hour or two. Norah Very well, sir. (Going out.) Who shall I say came for him? (Sergeant returns and places carbine L. of sideboard L.) Sergeant McDonald’s my name—Sergeant McDonald of the Artillery. But you’ll excuse my mentioning it, Miss: there was some talk down at the Gunners’ barracks that the old gentleman was

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not looked after quite as well as he might be. But I can see how that it’s only foolish talk, for what more could he want than this? Norah Oh, I’ve only just come. We heard that his housekeeper was not very good to him, and that was why my father wished me to go and do what I could. Sergeant Ah! he’ll find the difference now. Norah (bustling about putting tea in pot) Two for uncle and one for the pot. We were all very proud of Uncle Gregory down Leyton way. (Takes teapot to fire and fills it from kettle.) Sergeant Aye, he’s been a fine man in his day. There’s not many living now who can say that they fought against Napoleon Boneypart. Norah Ah, see, there’s his medal hung up by his portrait. Sergeant (after her) But what’s that beside the medal. Norah (standing on tiptoe, and craning her neck) Oh, it is a piece of print, and all about uncle (Brings frame). Sergeant Aye, it’s a slip of an old paper. There’s the date, August, 1815, writ in yellow ink on the corner. Norah (takes down medal) It’s such small print. Sergeant (front of table) I’ll read it to you. Norah Thank ye, sir! Sergeant (clears his throat impressively) ‘A heroic deed.’ That’s what’s on the top. ‘On Tuesday an interesting ceremony was performed at the barracks of the third regiment of guards, when in the presence of the Prince Regent, a special medal was presented to Corporal Gregory Brewster— Norah (R. of Sergeant) That’s him! That’s uncle! Sergeant ‘To Corporal Gregory Brewster of Captain Haldane’s flank company, in recog—recognition of his valor in the recent great battle. It appears that on the ever memorable 18th of June, four companies of the third Guards and of the Coldstreams, held the important farmhouse of Hugymount at the right of the British position. At a critical period of the action these troops found themselves short of powder, and Corporal Brewster was dispatched to the rear to hasten up the reserve am— ammunition. The corporal returned with two tumbrils of the Nassau division, but he found that in his absence the how— howitzer fire of the French had ignited the hedge around the 222

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farm, and that the passage of the carts filled with powder had become almost an impossibility. The first tumbril exploded, blowing the driver to pieces, and his comrade, daunted by the sight, turned his horses; but Corporal Brewster, springing into his seat, hurled the man down, and urging the cart through the flames, succeeded in rejoining his comrades. Long may the heroic Brewster— Norah Think of that, the heroic Brewster! Sergeant ‘Live to treasure the medal which he has so bravely won, and to look back with pride to the day when, in the presence of his comrades, he received this tribute to his valor from the hands of the first gentleman of the realm.’ (Replaces the paper.) Well, that is worth being proud of. (Hands back frame, she puts it on mantel.) Norah And we are proud of it, too. Sergeant Well, Miss, I’m due at the butts, or I would (taking carbine) stay to see the old gentleman now. (Up to door.) Norah (following) I don’t think he can be long. Sergeant Well, he’ll have turned out before I pass his way again, good day, Miss, and my respects to you, Miss.

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(Exit Sergeant McDonald, door in flat L. C.) Norah (looking through door after him) Oh, isn’t he a fine man! I never saw such a man as that down Leyton way. And how kind he was! Think of him reading all that to me about uncle (Coming L.) It was as much as to say that uncle won that battle. Well, I think the tea is made (over to fire) now, and— Corporal (without entering) Mary, Mary,—I wants my rations. Norah (aside) Lord, ’a mercy! (Enter Corporal Gregory Brewster, tottering in, gaunt, bent, and doddering, with white hair and wizened face. He taps his way across the room, while Norah, with her hands clasped, stares aghast first at the man, and then at his picture on the wall.)

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Corporal (querulously) I wants my rations! The cold nips me without ’em. See to my hands. (Holds out his gnarled knuckles.) 223

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Norah (gets round behind table) Don’t you know me, grand-uncle? I’m Norah Brewster, from down Essex way. Corporal Rum is warm, and schnapps is warm, and there’s ’eat in soup, but gimme a dish of tea for choice. Eh? (Peers at the girl.) What did you say your name was, young woman? (Sits R. of table.) Norah (L. of table) Norah Brewster. Corporal You can speak out, lass. Seems to me folks’ voices ain’t as strong as they was. Norah (back of chair) I’m Norah Brewster, uncle. I’m your (takes up bacon) grand-niece, come from Essex way to live with you. (Takes bacon out of pan on fire, puts on plate.) Corporal (chuckling) You’re Norah, hey? Then you’ll be brother Jarge’s gal, likely? Lor, to think o’little Jarge havin’ a gal! Norah (putting bacon on table) Nay, uncle. My father was the son of your brother George. (Pouring out tea.) Corporal (mumbles and chuckles, picking at his sleeves with his trembling hands) Lor, but little Jarge was a rare un! (Draws up to the table while Norah pours out the tea.) Eh, by Jimini, there was no chousing Jarge! He’s got a bull-pup o’ mine that I lent him when I took the shillin’. Likely it’s dead now. He didn’t give it ye to bring, may-be? Norah (R. of table, and glancing ever wonderingly at her companion) Why, grandpa Jarge has been dead this twenty years. Corporal (mumbling) Eh, but it were a bootiful pup—bootiful! (Drinks his tea with a loud supping, Norah pours out second cup.) I am cold for the lack o’ my rations. Rum is good and schnapps, but I’d as leaf have a dish o’ tea as either. Norah I’ve brought you some butter and some eggs in the basket. Mother said as I was to give you her respec’s and love, and that she’d ha’ sent a tin o’ cream, but it might ha’ turned on the way. (R. Sets chair L. of fireplace.) Corporal (still eating voraciously) Eh, it’s a middlin’ goodish way. Likely the stage left yesterday. Norah The what, uncle? Corporal The coach that brought ye. Norah Nay, I came by the mornin’ train. Corporal Lor’ now, think o’ that. The railway train, heh? You ain’t afeard o’ them new-fangled things! By Jimini! to think of your 224

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comin’ by railway like that. Why, it’s more than twenty mile. (Chuckling.) What’s the world a comin’ to? (Puffs out his chest and tries to square his shoulders.) Eh, but I get a power o’ good from my rations! Norah Indeed, uncle, you seem a deal stronger for them. (Up to table and begins to clear things away.) Corporal Aye, the food is like coals to that fire. But I’m nigh burned out, lass, I’m nigh burned out. Norah (clearing the table) You must ha’ seen a deal o’ life, uncle. It must seem a long long time to you. Corporal Not so very long, neither. I’m well over ninety, but it might ha’ been yesterday that I took the bounty. And that battle, why, by Jimini, I’ve not got the smell of the burned powder out o’ my nose. Have you read that? (Nodding to the cutting.) Norah Yes, uncle, and I’m sure that you must be very proud of it. Corporal (stands looking at it) Ah, it was a great day for me—a great day! The Regent he was there, and a fine body of a man too. (Tries to stuff some tobacco into his pipe.) He up to me and he says, ‘The ridgement is proud of ye,’ says he.—And I’m proud o’ the ridgement,’ says I. ‘And a damned good answer, too,’ says he to Lord Hill, and they both bust out a laughin’. (Coughs and chuckies, and points up at the mantelpiece.) Norah What can I hand you, uncle? (Gets bottle and spoon from mantelpiece.) Corporal A spoonful from that bottle by the brass candlestick, my girl! (Drinks it.) It’s paregoric, (music) and rare stuff to cut the phlegm. (Norah looks out of the window.) But what be you a peepin’ out o’ the window for? (Norah pushes window up, music louder.) Norah (excitedly) Oh, uncle, here’s a regiment o’ soldiers comin’ down the street. Corporal (rising and clawing his way towards the window) A ridgement! Heh! Where be my glasses? Lordy, I can hear the band as plain as plain. Bands don’t seem to play as loud now-a-days though as they used. (Gets to the window.) Here they come, pioneers, drum-major, band! What be their number, lass? (His eyes shine, and his feet and stick tap to the music.)

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Norah

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They don’t seem to have no number, uncle. They’ve something wrote on their shoulders. Oxfordshire, I think it be. Corporal Ah, yes. I heard as they had dropped the numbers, and given them new-fangled names. (shakes his head) That wouldn’t ha’ done for the Dook. The Dook would ha’ had a word there. (band up to ff). There they go, by Jimini! They’re young, but they hain’t forgot how to march. Blessed if I can see the light bobs though! (band dim to pp). Well, they’ve got the swing, aye, they have the swing (gazes after them until the last files have disappeared). Norah (helping him) Come back to your chair, uncle. Corporal Where be that bottle again. It cuts the phlegm. It’s the toobes that’s wrong with me. Joyce says so, and he is a clever man. I’m in his club. There’s the card, paid up, under yon flat iron. (band stops. Suddenly slapping his thigh.) Why, darn my skin, I knew something was amiss. Norah Where, uncle. Corporal In them soldiers. I’ve got it now. They’d forgot their stocks. Not one o’ them had his stock on (chuckles and croaks). It wouldn’t ha’ done for the Dook would ha’ had a word there. No, by Jimini, the Dook would ha’ had a word there. (Door opens and Sergeant appears beckoning comrade.) Norah (peeping towards the door) Why, uncle, this is the soldier who came this morning—one of them with the blue coats and gold braid. Corporal Eh, and what do he want? Don’t stand and stare, lass, but go to the door and ask him. (She approaches the door, which is half open. Sergeant McDonald of Artillery, his carbine in his hand, steps over the threshold and salutes.) Sergeant Good day again to you, miss. Is old gentleman to be seen now? Norah Yes, sir. That’s him. I’m sure he’ll be very glad to see you. Uncle, here is a gentleman who wants to speak with you. Sergeant Proud to see you, sir—proud and glad, sir ! (Steps forward, grounds his carbine and salutes—Norah, half frightened half attracted, keeps her eyes on the visitor.) 226

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Corporal (blinking at the Sergeant) Sit ye down, sergeant, sit ye down! (Shakes his head.) You are full young for the stripes, Lordy, it’s easier to get three now, than one in my day. Gunners were old soldiers then, and the grey hairs came quicker than the three stripes.

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(Sergeant puts carbine by window, Norah takes off apron, folds it up, puts it in basket.) Sergeant I am eight years’ service, sir. McDonald is my name, Sergeant McDonald of H. Battery, Southern Artillery Division. I have called as the spokesman of my mates to say that we are proud to have you in the town, sir. (Norah finishes clearing table, table cloth folded in drawer of dresser.) Corporal (chuckling and rubbing his hands) That was what the Regent said. ‘The ridgement is proud of you,’ says he. ‘And I am proud of the ridgement,’ says I. ‘A damned good answer, too,’ says he, and he and Lord Hill bust out a-laughin’. Sergeant The non-commissioned mess would be proud and honoured to see you, sir. If you could step as far you will always find a pipe o’ baccy and a glass of grog awaitin’ you. Corporal (laughing until he coughs) Like to see me, would they, the dogs! Well, well, if this warm weather holds I’ll drop in—it’s likely that I’ll drop in. My toobes is bad to-day, and I feel queer here (slapping his chest). But you will see me one of these days at the barracks. Sergeant Mind you ask for the non-com. mess. Corporal Eh? Sergeant The non-com. mess. Corporal Oh, lordy! Got a mess of your own, heh, just the same as the officers. Too grand for a canteen now. It wouldn’t have done for the Dook. The Dook would have had a word there. Sergeant (respectfully) You was in the Guards, sir, wasn’t you? Corporal Yes, I am a guardsman, I am. Served in the 3rd Guards, the same they call now the Scots Guards. Lordy, sergeant, but they have all marched away, from Colonel Byng right down to the drummer boys, and here am I, a straggler—that’s what

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I call myself, a straggler. But it ain’t my fault neither, for I’ve never had my call, and I can’t leave my post without it. Sergeant (shaking his head) Ah, well, we all have to muster up there. Won’t you try my baccy, sir? (Hands over pouch.) Corporal Eh? Sergeant Try my baccy, sir? (Corporal Brewster tries to fill his clay pipe, but drops it. It breaks, and he bursts into tears with the long helpless sobs of a child.) Corporal I’ve broke my pipe! my pipe! Norah (running to him and soothing him) Don’t uncle, oh don’t! We can easy get another. Sergeant Don’t you fret yourself, sir, if you—you’ll do me the honour to accept it. ’Ere’s a wooden pipe with an amber mouth. Corporal (his smiles instantly bursting through his tears, Sergeant gets carbine) Jimini! It’s a fine pipe! See to my new pipe, gal! I lay that Jarge never had a pipe like this. Eh, and an amber mouth, too! (Mumbles with it in his mouth.) You’ve got your firelock there, sergeant. Sergeant Yes, sir, I was on my way back from the butts when I looked in. Corporal Let me have the feel of it! Sergeant Certainly. (gives carb.) Corporal Lordy, but it seems like old times to have one’s hand on a musket. What’s the manual, sergeant? Eh? Cock your firelock! Present your firelock! Look to your priming! Heh, sergeant! (The breech on being pressed flicks open. Norah is now top of table looking on.) Oh, Jimini! I’ve broke your musket in halves. Sergeant (laughing) That’s all right, sir ! You pressed on the lever and opened the breech-piece. That’s where we load ’em, you know. Corporal Load ’em at the wrong end! Well, well, to think of it! and no ramrod neither. I’ve heard tell of it, but I never believed it afore. Ah! It won’t come up to Brown Bess. When there’s work to be done you mark my words, and see if they don’t come back to Brown Bess. Sergeant (rising) But I’ve wearied you enough for one sitting. I’ll look in again, and I’ll bring a comrade or two with me, if I may, for 228

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there isn’t one but would be proud to have speech with you. (Salutes. Exit.) My very best respects to you, Miss. Norah Oh, Uncle, isn’t he noble and fine? (Up to door, looks after him.) Corporal (mumbling) Too young for the stripes, gal. A sergeant of gunners should be a growed man. I don’t know what we are comin’ to in these days. (Chuckling.) But he gave me a pipe, Norah! A fine pipe with an amber mouth. I’ll lay that brother Jarge never had a pipe like that. Norah (aside nodding towards the door) To think that he will be like Uncle in sixty years, and that Uncle was once like him. (Forward to window L.) He seems a very kind young man, I think. He calls me ‘Miss’ and Uncle ‘sir,’ so polite and proper. I never saw as nice a man down Essex way. Corporal What are you moonin’ about, gal! I want you to help me move my chair to the door, or maybe yon fancy chair will do. It’s warm, and the air would hearten me if I can keep back the flies. They get owdacious in this weather and they plague me cruel. Norah The flies, Uncle. (He moves feebly across to where the sunshine comes in at the door, and he sits in it. Norah helps him.) Corporal Eh, but it’s fine! It always makes me think of the glory to come. Was it today that parson was here? Norah No, Uncle. (Kneels on his L.) Corporal Then it was yesterday. I get the days kind o’ mixed. He reads to me, the parson does. Norah But I could do that, Uncle. Corporal You can read too, can you? By Jimini, I never seed such a gal. You can travel by railroad and you can read. Whatever is the world comin’ to? It’s the Bible he reads to me. (Norah runs, gets Bible, and kneels again.) Norah (opening the Bible) What part would you like to hear? Corporal Eh?

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(Norah repeats.) Corporal Oh, them wars. 229

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Norah The wars! Corporal Aye, keep to the wars; ‘Give me the Old Testament, parson,’ says I, ‘there’s more taste to it,’ says I. Parson, he wants to get off to something else, but it’s Joshua or nothing with me. Them Israelites was good soldiers, good growed soldiers, all of ’em. Norah But, Uncle, it’s all peace in the next world. Corporal No, it ain’t, gal. Norah Oh, yes, Uncle, surely. Corporal (irritably knocking his stick on the ground) I tell ye it ain’t, gal. I asked parson. Norah Well, what did he say? Corporal He said there was to be a last final fight. Norah Fight? Corporal Why, he even gave it a name, he did. The battle of Arm— Arm—The battle of Arm— Norah Armageddon. Corporal Aye, that was the name. (Pauses thoughtfully.) I ’spec’s the 3rd Guards will be there. And the Dook—the Dook’ll have a word to say (Sinks back a little in his chair. Norah shuts window, puts Bible back.) Norah What is it, Uncle? You look tired. Corporal (faintly) Maybe I have had air enough. And I ain’t strong enough to fight agin the flies. Norah Oh, but I will keep them off, Uncle. Corporal They get owdacious in this weather. I’ll get back to the corner. But you’ll need to help me with the chair. (Knock.) Chairs are made heavier than they used to be. (Is in the act of rising when there comes a tap at the door, and Colonel Midwinter (civilian costume) puts in his head.) Colonel Corporal Colonel Corporal Colonel Corporal

Is this Gregory Brewster’s? Yes, sir. That’s my name. Then you are the man I came to see. Who was that, sir? Gregory Brewster was his name. I am the man, sir. 230

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Colonel And you are the same Brewster, as I understand, whose name is on the roll of the Scots Guards as having been present at the battle of Waterloo? Corporal The same Brewster, sir, though they used to call it the 3rd Guards in my day. It was a fine ridgement, sir, and they only want me now to make up a full muster. Colonel (cheerily) Tut! tut! they’ll have to wait years for that. But I thought I should like to have a word with you, for I am the Colonel of the Scots Guards.

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(Corporal springing to his feet and saluting, staggers about to fall. The Colonel and Norah prevent it. Norah on his L.) Colonel Steady, steady. (leads Brewster to other chair). Easy and steady . . . Corporal (sitting down and panting) Thank ye, sir. I was near gone that time. But, Lordy, why I can scarce believe it. To think of me a corporal of the flank company, and you the colonel of the battalion! Lordy, how things do come round to be sure.

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(Norah helps him into chair R. of table. Colonel gets by fireplace.) Colonel Why, we are very proud of you in London— Corporal That’s what the Regent said. ‘The Regiment is proud of you,’ said he. Colonel And so you are actually one of the men who held Hougoumont? (Norah sits L. of table with needlework, taken from her basket.) Corporal Yes, colonel, I was at Hougoumont. Colonel Well, I hope that you are pretty comfortable and happy. Corporal Thank ye, sir, I am pretty bobbish when the weather holds, and the flies are not too owdacious. I have a good deal of trouble with my toobes. You wouldn’t think the job it is to cut the phlegm. And I need my rations, I get cold without ’em. And my jints, they are not what they used to be. Colonel How’s the memory?

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Corporal Oh, there ain’t anything amiss there. Why, sir, I could give you the name of every man in Captain Haldane’s flank company. Colonel And the battle—you remember that? Corporal Why I sees it afore me, every time I shuts my eyes. Lordy, sir, you wouldn’t hardly believe how clear it is to me. There’s our line right along from the paragoric bottle to the inhaler, d’ye see! Well then, the pill box is for Hougoumont on the right, where we was, and the thimble for Le Hay Saint. That’s all right, sir. (Cocks his head and looks at it with satisfaction.) And here are the reserves, and here were our guns and our Belgians, then here’s the French, where I put my new pipe, and over here, where the cough drops are, was the Proosians a comin’ up on our left flank, Jimini, but it was a glad sight to see the smoke of their guns. (Norah helps him into chair.) Colonel And what was it that struck you most, now, in connection with the whole affair? Corporal I lost three half-crowns over it, I did. I shouldn’t wonder if I were never to get the money. I lent them to Jabez Smith, my rear rank man at Brussels. ‘Grig!’ says he, ‘I’ll pay you true, only wait till pay-day.’ By Jimini, he was struck by a lancer at Quarter Brass, and me without a line to prove the debt. Them three half-crowns is as good as lost to me. Colonel (laughing) The officers—of the Guards, want you to buy— yourself—some little trifle, some little present which may add to your comfort. It is not from me, so you need not thank me. (Slips a note into the old man’s baccy pouch. Crosses to leave.) Corporal Thank you kindly, sir. But there’s one favour I’d ask you, Colonel. Colonel Yes, corporal, what is it? Corporal If I’m called, Colonel, you won’t grudge me a flag and a firing party. I’m not a civilian, I’m a Guardsman, and I should like to think as two lines of the bear-skins would be walkin’ after my coffin. Colonel All right, corporal, I’ll see to it. (Corporal sinks back in his chair.) I fear that I have tired him. He is asleep, I think. Good-bye, my girl; and I hope that we may have nothing but good news from you. (Exit Colonel.) 232

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Norah

Thank you, sir, I’m sure I hope so too. Uncle, uncle! Yes, I suppose he is asleep. But he is so grey and thin, that he frightens me. Oh, I wish I had someone to advise me, for I don’t know when he is ill and when he is not.

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(Enter Sergeant McDonald abruptly.) Sergeant Good day, Miss. How is the old gentleman? Norah Sh! He’s asleep, I think. But I feel quite frightened about him. Sergeant (going over to him) Yes, he don’t look as if he were long for this life, do he? Maybe a sleep like this brings strength to him. Norah Oh, I do hope so. Sergeant I’ll tell you why I came back so quick. I told them up at the barracks that I’d given him a pipe, and the others they wanted to be in it too, so they passed round, you understand, and made up a pound of baccy. It’s long cavendish, with plenty o’ bite to it. Norah How kind of you to think of him! Sergeant Do you always live with him? Norah No, I only came this morning. Sergeant Well, you haven’t taken long to get straight. Norah Oh, but I found everything in such a mess. When I have time to myself I’ll soon get it nice. Sergeant That sounds like marching orders to me. Norah Oh, how could you think so? Sergeant Tell me, Miss, have you ever been over a barrack? Norah No, I’ve been on a farm all my life. Sergeant Well, maybe, when he comes up you would come up with him? I’d like to show you over. Norah I’m sure I’d like to come. Sergeant Well, will you promise to come? Norah (laughing) You seem quite earnest about it. Sergeant Well, maybe I am. Norah Very well, I’ll promise to come. Sergeant You’ll find us rough and ready. Norah I’m sure it will be very nice. Sergeant Not quite what young ladies are accustomed to. Norah But I am no young lady. I’ve worked with my hands every day that I can remember.

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Corporal (in a loud voice) The Guards need powder. (Louder.) The Guards need powder! (Struggling to rise.) Norah Oh, I am so frightened. Corporal (staggering to his feet, and suddenly flashing out into his old soldiery figure) The Guards need powder, and, by God, they shall have it! (Falls back into chair. Norah and the Sergeant rush towards him.) Norah (sobbing) Oh, tell me, sir, what do you think of him. Sergeant (gravely) I think that 3rd Guards have a full muster now. Curtain. Slow. Time 45 minutes.

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Appendix 4: Conan Doyle’s Essays and Letters in the Medical Press

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Gelseminum as a Poison Sir,—Some years ago, a persistent neuralgia led me to use the tincture of gelseminum to a considerable extent. I several times overstepped the maximum doses of the text-books without suffering any ill effects. Having recently had an opportunity of experimenting with a quantity of fresh tincture, I determined to ascertain how far one might go in taking the drug, and what the primary symptoms of an overdose might be. I took each dose about the same hour on successive days, and avoided tobacco or any other agent which might influence the physiological action of the drug. Here are the results as jotted down at the time of the experiment. On Monday and Tuesday, forty and sixty minims produced no effect whatever. On Wednesday, ninety minims were taken at 10.30. At 10.50, on rising from my chair, I became seized with an extreme giddiness and weakness of the limbs, which, however, quickly passed off. There was no nausea or other effect. The pulse was weak but normal. On Thursday, I took 120 minims. The giddiness of yesterday came on in a much milder form. On going out about one o’clock, however, I noticed for the first time that I had a difficulty in accommodating the eye for distant objects. It needed a distinct voluntary effort, and indeed a facial contortion, to do it. On Friday, 150 minims were taken. As I increased the dose, I found that the more marked physiological symptoms disappeared. To-day, the giddiness was almost gone, but I suffered from a severe frontal headache, with diarrhoea and general lassitude. On Saturday and Sunday, I took three drachms and 200 minims. The diarrhoea was so persistent and prostrating, that I must stop at 200 minims. I felt great depression and a severe frontal headache. The pulse was still normal, but weak. From these experiments I would draw the following conclusions. 1. In spite of a case described some time ago in which 75 minims proved fatal, a healthy adult may take as much as 90 minims with perfect immunity.

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2. In doses of from 90 to 120 minims, the drug acts apparently as a motor paralyser to a certain extent, causing languor, giddiness, and a partial paralysis of the ciliary muscle. 3. After that point, it causes headache, with diarrhoea and extreme lassitude. 4. The system may learn to tolerate gelseminum, as it may opium, if it be gradually inured to it. I feel convinced that I could have taken as much as half an ounce of the tincture, had it not been for the extreme diarrhoea it brought on. Believe me, yours sincerely, Clifton House, Aston Road, Birmingham.

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A.C.D.

Notes on a Case of Leucocythaemia To the Editor of THE LANCET SIR,— As the causation of this rare and curious disease has been as obscure hitherto as its treatment has been futile, your readers may be interested by a case which seems to throw some light upon both points. The patient, a well-built man, twenty-nine years of age, came to my friend Mr. Hoare complaining of a large tumour, which extended across his abdomen from the right costal border to the left anterior superior spine of the ilium. This proved upon examination to be an enormously hypertrophied spleen, the hilum being represented by a deep notch a little above the level of the umbilicus. The account of the patient was that some years before he had had a sharp attack of ague at Aspinwall, on the American coast, and that he had never entirely shaken off its effects. The swelling, however, had appeared recently, and attained its large proportions in the course of a few weeks. On examining the blood under the microscope we found that the leucocytes were enormously increased in number, almost filling up the interspaces of the rouleaux, while the coloured corpuscles were ill-formed, and diminished not only relatively, but also in the aggregate. The proportion of white to red was calculated at one to seven. None of the other blood glands were affected, and the only symptoms complained of were referable to pressure of the tumour, principally dyspepsia and vomiting from its interference with the stomach, and pain in the legs from compression of the lumbar plexus. The liver was slightly 236

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enlarged and tender, but the secretion of bile appeared to be unaffected. The heart was weak and had a well-marked functional murmur. Excessive marasmus was another leading feature of the case, the patient having fallen from fourteen to eleven stone in a few weeks. Having given both iron and quinine a fair trial, and found them equally inefficacious, we have now had recourse to arsenic in large doses, in combination with the iodide and chlorate of potash. This mode of treatment, combined with a liberal diet, and strict attention to the state of the bowels, has been remarkably efficacious. The tumour has already diminished in size, and some of the more distressing secondary symptoms have been alleviated. The principal interest of the case lies, I think, in the connexion to be traced between the malarious poison and the subsequent leucocythaemia, a connexion which seems to show that this obscure disease is intimately allied to ordinary ‘ague-cake,’ if not a mere modification of that pathological condition, determined by some idiosyncracy of constitution or temperament.

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I am, Sir, your obedient servant, Aston, March, 1882. A. COWAN DOYLE, M.B., C.M. EDIN.

Life and Death in the Blood Had a man the power of reducing himself to the size of less than the onethousandth part of an inch, and should he, while of this microscopic stature, convey himself through the coats of a living artery, how strange the sight that would meet his eye! All round him he would see a rapidly flowing stream of clear transparent fluid, in which many solid and well-defined bodies were being whirled along. These are the smooth straw-coloured elastic discs which act simply as mechanical carriers of oxygen and jostle through their brief existence without any claim to a higher function than that of the baker’s cart, which carries round the necessaries of life, and is valuable not for itself, but for its burden. Here and there, however, on the outskirts of the throng, our infinitesimal spectator would perceive bodies of a very different character. Gelatinous in consistence, and irregular in shape, capable of pushing out long prehensile tentacles with which to envelop its food and draw it into its interior, this creature would appear from his point of view as a polyp of gigantic proportions and formidable aspect. No differentiated organs are to be seen in it, save a dark mass of

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pigment in its centre, which may represent some rudimentary visual or auditory apparatus. Digestion is its strong point, for it has the power of seizing upon any oily particle which may drift in its direction, and of introducing it into its interior by the simple method of surrounding it without any preliminary ceremony of swallowing. Small hope for our poor little mite of humanity should one of these floating stomachs succeed in seizing him in its embrace. They are slow and ungainly in their motions, however, and drift glutinously along, clinging to the edges of the stream, and occasionally impaling themselves upon the projecting angle when the artery divides into two branches. Now and again they protrude an excrescence which gradually separates itself by a constriction at the base, and hurries away into the blood stream as an independent organism. These creatures are the leucocytes, or white corpuscles, and in spite of their being very much less numerous than the carriers of oxygen, there are still several millions of them within the healthy human body. In certain diseased conditions they multiply enormously until they outnumber the straw-coloured discs. When removed and placed upon a surface kept at the same temperature as that to which they have been accustomed, they are capable of carrying on an independent existence for some time. They have indeed a prototype, wandering at large, from which they are hardly recognisable, viz. the tiny amoeba which may be washed from damp moss and detected under the microscope. This then is the only creature possessing the attributes commonly associated with life, which is found in healthy human blood; but in diseased conditions numerous others appear, differing from each other as widely as the flounder does from the eel, and presenting an even greater contrast in the effects which they produce. The existence of these little organisms, which lie upon the debateable ground between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, may have been suspected by our forefathers; but it is only in the last few years that their presence has been clearly demonstrated, and their relation to disease duly appreciated. I propose to glance at some of the work done of late in this direction—work which has opened up a romance world of living creatures so minute as to be hardly detected by our highest lenses, yet many of them endowed with such fearful properties that the savage tiger or venomous cobra have not inflicted one fiftieth part of the damage upon the human race. There is a disease named seven days’ fever, which, though rare in Britain, is not uncommon in the Emerald Isle, as well as in Russia, India, and other 238

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places where the fare of the lower orders is exceptionally poor and scanty. Let us go to the bedside of some poor fellow suffering from this complaint, and having once more assumed our microscopic proportions, let us inspect personally the condition of his circulation. We see again the transparent serum, the busy yellow discs, the languid omnivorous pieces of jelly; but what is this? Writhing their way among the legitimate corpuscles there are countless creatures, thin and long, with snake-like body and spiral motion. They are the spirilla of relapsing fever, discovered by Obermeier in 1872. Where have they come from, and why are they here? Ah, that is the question to which science is even now striving to give a definite answer. They were not in the blood before, but they are there now in all their grim obtrusive reality, and the fever was coincident with their appearance. In a week they die, and the fever passes away; but as Dr. Haydenreich, of St. Petersburg, has pointed out, they leave their young behind them, which take seven days to mature. After this short respite, then the patient is once again prostrated by a fresh brood, which in turn gives rise to another; and so the horrible process goes on until either the race dies away, or their victim is exhausted. It was not a human ailment, but one common among cattle, which first drew the attention of the scientific world to the terrible power possessed by these tiny organisms. Splenic fever, since identified as one of the plagues of Egypt, has long been a bugbear of Continental farmers. The extreme virulence and infectiousness of this disease had often invited speculation, but it was not until about the year 1850 that Dr. Devaine discovered a very minute rod-like creature in the blood of the afflicted animals, which he conjectured to be the true cause of the disease, though he did not see his way to demonstrating the fact. A young German, Koch, of Woolstein, a name which he has written for ever across the annals of medicine, took up the broken thread of Devaine’s researches, and succeeded in proving what his French rival had surmised. Starting upon the supposition that these little creatures were not necessarily confined to the blood, but would live and multiply in any medium which was nutritious and warm, he made a suitable animal infusion, and introduced a small quantity of infected blood. In a few days the fluid which had been clear became turbid, and he found it to be swarming with countless millions of the Bacillus anthracis, as the organism is named, all derived apparently from the few which chanced to be in the original drop of blood. By taking a little of this fluid and introducing it into a second bowl of the cultivating medium he produced a

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second generation, and from that a third, each as virulent as the first. A drop injected into an animal brought on all the characteristic and deadly symptoms of splenic fever. In the course of these researches, Koch found that the organism appeared in three forms, as rods, as round spores, and as long branching filaments; and he made the extremely important discovery that while in the two former cases they were extremely poisonous, in the form of filaments they became absolutely innocuous. The first great step was won when Koch found himself able to cultivate the infection, as he might grow monkshood or any vegetable poison in the soil of his back garden. This advantage was quickly followed up. If the young German had found the breach, there were many ready to rush into it. In England, Klein demonstrated the existence of an organism in the disease known as pigtyphoid, and succeeded in cultivating it apart from the body. In France, Toussaint, of Toulouse, extracted the cause of the epidemic among fowls, called ‘fowl-cholera,’ and bred it in an animal infusion. The time was evidently approaching when these countless myriads, who had maintained their independence so long, should at last be forced to acknowledge man as the lord of creation. It was at this crisis that the great Pasteur brought his gigantic intellect to bear upon the subject. By his investigations on the parasites of silkworms, and the causes of fermentation, he had already proved himself to possess indomitable patience and a rare scientific intuition; but it was not until he had launched out upon this new and congenial field that he came out in his true light as one of the master minds of the century. Turning his attention first to the organism discovered by Toussaint in fowl-cholera, he cultivated it in chicken broth, as Koch had done the Bacillus anthracis. He produced, as he had expected, a most infective infusion which rapidly caused the death of any animal inoculated. Upon leaving the fluid to stand for a month exposed to the air, however, he discovered that its virulent properties were very much decreased, and at the end of six: months it became absolutely innocuous. And now he came upon his great discovery. If a few drops of this innocuous material be introduced into an animal’s system, it is protected for ever afterwards against the original disease. This was a gigantic step, as proving that vaccination as a preventive to small-pox was not a mere isolated eccentricity of nature, but part of an endless system, did we but know how to procure the antagonistic materials. 240

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Many a man might have rested upon his laurels, but the active brain of Pasteur hurried on to consider the analogous case of the organism cultivated by Koch in splenic fever. Again he made his infusion, again he allowed it to stand until it became weakened, or ‘attenuated,’ to use his expression, and again he found to his inexpressible delight that a healthy animal inoculated with this attenuated material was secured for ever against the disease. Here was a great commercial fact. The proofs were overpowering. Government took the matter in hand, and France will soon be a million per annum the richer, that sum representing the yearly loss from the ravages of the disease. We have seen that for the extirpation of this pestilential little rod, three great men had to bring their minds to bear upon it. Devaine saw it, Koch isolated it, Pasteur tamed it. In this work of theirs they conferred a blessing upon men as well as on animals. The bacillus is a creature of cosmopolitan tastes. The butcher who cuts up the diseased carcase and gets one drop of its juices on to a raw surface of his body dies of malignant pustule—one of the most awful maladies that flesh is heir to. The tanner or wool sorter who works with the infected skin, and inhales air laden with the poisonous particles, is struck down by wool-sorter’s disease. To these, as well as to cattle, the attenuated virus brings relief. One great thinker stimulates the latent powers of many others. A troop of French worthies have followed in the steps of their chief, and made the last few years redound to the honour of their country. Arloing, Cornevin, and Thomas, of Lyons, have attenuated the organism of another deadly cattle disease, named the ‘Maladie de Chabert,’ after its discoverer, and have by inoculation demonstrated the possibility of stamping it out. Galtier and Pasteur himself have been working at hydrophobia, and their researches are most interesting. No doubt, by attenuating the poison, they will be able to inoculate for this malady too, so that from being the most intractable it will become the most docile of diseases; for remember that inoculation would in all probability be effective even if applied after the bite of the rabid animal. Hitherto we have been considering organisms which affect animals rather than man, and it was natural that these should be the first to be brought under human control, for we have unlimited powers of experimenting upon them. Having established a certain number of facts as a working basis, savants were now able to turn their attention to our own diseases, content to reason by analogy where they were unable to demonstrate by experiment. It was but yesterday, as it were, that scientific

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investigation was directed into this channel, and yet enormous strides have been made. Toussaint and Koch have demonstrated the existence of a little rod-like creature in tubercle or consumption, which swarms in the diseased lungs, and which, if transferred to another body, will establish itself and breed, thereby proving the malady to be really an infectious one. Whether by inoculating with the weakened infusion they can ward off the disease in a family predisposed to develop it, remains to be seen, but is a perfectly feasible supposition. Another interesting series of experiments has been undertaken by Klebs and Tomassi Crudelli, in the marsh lands of the Campagna. Suspecting the existence of an organism in the swamps which gave rise to ague and remittent fever when introduced into the blood, they examined the soil very carefully, selecting it from the most unhealthy situations. They soon found the creature not only among the damp earth, but also in the air which emanated from the marsh. This organism was also cultivated and showed itself to be amenable to human influences. This is but a hasty glance at what has been done of late years towards subjecting the fishes of the blood. I have not even mentioned the researches of Chauveau, Burdon-Sanderson, and other eminent inquirers. All tend, however, towards the one object. Given that a single disease, proved to depend upon a parasitic organism, can be effectually and certainly stamped out, why should not all diseases depending upon similar causes be also done away with? That is the great question which the scientific world is striving to solve; and in the face of it how paltry do war and statecraft appear, and everything which fascinates the attention of the multitude! Let things go as they are going, and it is probable that in the days of our children’s children, or even earlier, consumption, typhus, typhoid, cholera, malaria, scarlatina, diphtheria, measles, and a host of other diseases will have ceased to exist. It is true that in many of these cases the organism has not only never been cultivated, but has not been detected by the highest microscopic powers, yet we are almost as certain of its presence as if we saw it, and it is those very infinitesimal creatures which have proved to be the most virulent in their effects and the most difficult to destroy. All honour then to the men striving in generous rivalry to strike at the very root of the foul tree whose branches the physicians of other ages have been content to prune; not only for the energy and sagacity which they have displayed, but for the dogged courage with which they have worked for years among fluids, the inoculation 242

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with which meant in many cases a horrible and lingering death to the workman. A. CONAN DOYLE.

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The Week. Topics of the Day. The Contagious Diseases Act SIR,—As an ounce of fact is proverbially superior to an indefinite quantity of theory, I think that I am justified in citing one or two instances of the effects of the present suspension of the Acts. Being in practice as a medical man in the town most affected by the measure, I am able to speak with some authority on the subject. Last week a large transport entered Portsmouth Harbour with time-expired men from India. Upon the same day several diseased women left the hospital presumably with the intention of meeting that transport, and there was no law to prevent it. I say that if an unfortunate soldier, coming home to his native land after an absence of years, and exposed to such temptations, should yield to them, and entail disease upon himself and his offspring, the chief fault should not lie at his door. It surely emanates logically from those hysterical legislators who set loose these bearers of contagion, and their like, upon society. For fear delicacy should be offended where no touch of delicacy exists, dreadful evils are to result, men to suffer, children to die, and pure women to inherit unspeakable evils. Loose statements and vague doctrines of morality may impose upon hasty thinkers, but surely, when the thing is reduced to its simplest terms, it becomes a matter of public calamity that these Acts should be suspended for a single day, far more for an indefinite period. The apostles of free trade in infection have worked to such good purpose that within a few weeks the streets of our naval stations have become pandemonia, and immorality is rampant where it lately feared to show its face. Property has depreciated near all the public-houses since the suspension of the Acts, on account of the concourse of vile women whose uproar and bad language make night hideous. I venture to say that, were the old laws enforced again to-morrow, there would still in a hundred years’ time be many living who could trace inherited mental or physical deformity to the fatal interregnum which the champions of the modesty of harlots had brought about.

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Sir,—In ventilating the question of sham degrees and American diplomas you do the public a great service. In all other trades and professions an incompetent man is a mere inconvenience, of more harm to himself than to others. It is different, however, in medicine. There, a blunder in diagnosis or an error in treatment means death to the unfortunate sufferer. It is obviously impossible for the poor and uneducated to distinguish between a qualified practitioner and a quack who has appropriated some highsounding title. In order to protect them, therefore, it is necessary that the law and the force of public opinion should be brought into play. The so-called ‘University of Philadelphia’ might stand as a type of these sham examining boards. The university consisted of a small body of speculative parchment-mongers who did a roaring trade in worthless diplomas until the Government of the United States discountenanced them. They then established agencies in Europe and continued their dishonest traffic. Anyone who could muster the necessary dollars was free to their degree and might then pose as the equal of the bona fide practitioners who had expended hundreds of pounds and years of his life in obtaining his qualification. It is true that in practising on the strength of their bogus degree they rendered themselves liable to the Apothecaries Act. This, however, is seldom put in force, for the reason that the prosecutor too often finds his opponent a man of straw, and has to bear the expense of the proceedings. There is a body called the Medical Defence Association, which occasionally comes down upon these gentry and gibbets one to act as a scarecrow to the others. The public Press, however, is the best of all defences, for by ventilating the question it opens the eyes of those who might become dupes. It is no question of the comparative merits of British and American degrees. An M.D. of a good Transatlantic college is always respected in England, and any man might be proud to hail from the school of which Gross, Sayre, and Austin Flint are shining lights. It is against sham degrees that we protest, which enable a man to cover his ignorance by an imposing title, and to decide matters of life and death without being competent to do so.

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I remain, Sir, sincerely yours, A. C. D. 244

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The Remote Effects of Gout Sir,—I read with much interest the description of the relation of certain diseases of the eye to gout, as reported last week in THE LANCET. Mr. Hutchinson has remarked in his lecture on the obscure non-arthritic effects which gout may produce in the children of gouty parents, without any ordinary gouty symptoms. I have had two cases lately in my practice which illustrate his remarks so well that I cannot forbear from quoting them. A Mr. H— came to me suffering from chronic eczema and psoriasis. He attributed it himself to the great changes of temperature and profuse perspirations incidental to his business. I put him on arsenic and afterwards on iodide of potash, without much benefit. He told me that he had never had any gouty symptoms in his life. Shortly afterwards his married daughter, Mrs. B—, consulted me on certain intense pains in her eyes, accompanied by temporary congestion and partial blindness, which attacked her whenever her digestion was deranged. Recognising this to be a gouty symptom, and bethinking me of the obscure skin disease which afflicted the father, I made somewhat minute inquiries into the previous family history. I then found that the grandfather of Mrs. B— and the father of Mr. H— had been a martyr to gout for many years, and had eventually died of a form of Bright’s disease, which I have no doubt from the description was the ‘contracted granular kidney’ so intimately associated with gout. These cases are, I think, interesting as showing the protean character of the disease, extending over three generations. The grandfather was thoroughly gouty; the father had skin affections without any other gouty symptom; the third generation exhibited eye symptoms and nothing else. I may mention that both cases improved rapidly upon colchicum and alkalies. —Yours sincerely, Southsea, Nov. 24th, 1884. A. CONAN DOYLE, M.B., C. M.

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Compulsory Vaccination Sir,—From time to time some champion of the party which is opposed to vaccination comes forward to air his views in the public Press, but these periodical sallies seldom lead to any discussion, as the inherent weakness of their position renders a reply superfluous. When, however, a gentleman

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of Colonel Wintle’s position makes an attack upon what is commonly considered by those most competent to judge to be one of the greatest victories ever won by science over disease, it is high time that some voice should be raised upon the other side. Hobbies and fads are harmless things as a rule, but when a hobby takes the form of encouraging ignorant people to neglect sanitary precautions and to live in a fool’s paradise until bitter experience teaches them their mistake, it becomes a positive danger to the community at large. The interests at stake are so vital that an enormous responsibility rests with the men whose notion of progress is to revert to the condition of things which existed in the dark ages before the dawn of medical science. Colonel Wintle bases his objection to vaccination upon two points: its immorality and its inefficiency or positive harmfulness. Let us consider it under each of these heads, giving the moral question the precedence which is its due. Is it immoral for a Government to adopt a method of procedure which experience has proved and science has testified to conduce to the health and increased longevity of the population? Is it immoral to inflict a passing inconvenience upon a child in order to preserve it from a deadly disease? Does the end never justify the means? Would it be immoral to give Colonel Wintle a push in order to save him from being run over by a locomotive? If all these are really immoral, I trust and pray that we may never attain morality. The colonel’s reasoning reminds me of nothing so much as that adduced by some divines of the Scottish Church, who protested against the induction of chloroform. ‘Pain was sent us by Providence,’ said the worthy ministers, ‘and it is therefore sinful to abolish it.’ Colonel Wintle’s line of argument is that smallpox has been also sent by Providence and that it becomes immoral to take any steps to neutralise its mischief. When once it has been concisely stated, it needs no further agitation. In the second place is the mode of treatment a success? It has been before the public for nearly a hundred years, during which time it has been thrashed out periodically in learned societies, argued over in medical journals, examined by statisticians, sifted and tested in every conceivable method, and the result of it all is that among those who are brought in practical contact with disease, there is a unanimity upon the point which is more complete than upon any other medical subject. Homoeopath and allopath, foreigner and Englishman, find here a common ground for agreement. I fear that the testimony of the Southsea ladies which Col. Wintle quotes, or that of the district visitors which he invokes, will hardly counter-balance this consensus of scientific opinion. 246

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The ravages made by smallpox in the days of our ancestors can hardly be realised by the present sanitary and well-vaccinated generation. Macaulay remarks that in the advertisements of the early Georgian era there is hardly ever a missing relative who is not described as ‘having pock marks upon his face.’ It was universal, in town and in country, in the cottage and in the palace. Mary, the wife of William the Third, sickened and died of it. Whole tracts of country were decimated. Now-a-days there is many a general practitioner who lives and dies without having ever seen a case. What is the cause of this amazing difference? There is no doubt what the cause appeared to be in the eyes of the men who having had experience of the old system saw the Jennerian practice of inoculation come into vogue. When in 1802 Jenner was awarded £30,000 by a grateful country the gift came from men who could see by force of contrast the value of his discovery. I am aware that anti-vaccinationists endeavour to account for the wonderful decrease of smallpox by supposing that there has been some change in the type of the disease. This is pure assumption, and the facts seem to point in the other direction. Other zymotic diseases have not, as far as we know, modified their characteristics, and smallpox still asserts itself with its ancient virulence whenever sanitary defects, or the prevalence of thinkers of the Colonel Wintle type, favour its development. I have no doubt that our recent small outbreak in Portsmouth would have assumed formidable proportions had it found a congenial uninoculated population upon which to fasten. In the London smallpox hospital nurses, doctors and dressers have been in contact with the sick for more than fifty years, and during that time there is no case on record of nurse, doctor, or dresser catching the disease. They are, of course, periodically vaccinated. How long, I wonder, would the committee of the Anti-Vaccination Society remain in the wards before a case broke out among them? As to the serious results of vaccination, which Colonel Wintle describes as indescribable, they are to a very large extent imaginary. Of course there are some unhealthy children, the offspring of unhealthy parents, who will fester and go wrong if they are pricked with a pin. It is possible that the district visitors appealed to may find out some such case. They are certainly rare, for in a tolerably large experience (five years in a large hospital, three in a busy practice in Birmingham, and nearly six down here) I have only seen one case, and it soon got well. Some parents have an amusing habit of ascribing anything which happens to their children, from the whooping-cough to a broken leg, to the effects

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of their vaccination. It is from this class that the anti-vaccinationist party is largely recruited. In conclusion I would say that the subject is of such importance, ancestors call and our present immunity from smallpox so striking, that it would take a very strong case to justify a change. As long as that case is so weak as to need the argument of morality to enforce it I think that the Vaccination Acts are in no great danger of being repealed. It was Yours faithfully, A. CONAN DOYLE, M.D., C.M. Bush Villa, July 14th, 1887

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Sir,—Colonel Wintle’s second letter appears to me to contain a Jumble of statistics and quotations, some of which do not affect the question at all, while others tell dead against the cause which he is championing. If there is such a consensus of testimony that there was a marked diminution of pock-marked faces between the years 1815 and 1835, is it not a fact that these are the very years when the fruits of Jenner’s discovery might be expected to show itself upon the rising generation? Colonel Wintle’s argument appears to be that it was a mere coincidence that the disease should begin to diminish; at the very time when the new treatment was adopted by a considerable section of the public. The medical profession holds that it was cause and effect—an explanation which has been amply borne out by subsequent experience. The Colonel seems to think that because we still suffer from occasional epidemics of smallpox that proves the system of vaccination to be a failure. On the contrary, the most clinching argument in its favour is furnished by these very epidemics, for when their results come to be tabulated they show with startling clearness the difference in the mortality between those who have and have not been vaccinated. The unvaccinated not only contract the disease more readily, but it attacks them in a far more virulent form. The Sheffield case recorded by ‘Common Sense’ is a remarkable and recent example of this well-known fact. The protection afforded by vaccination is in exact proportion to the thoroughness of the original inoculation. I suppose the most determined anti-vaccinationist 248

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would hardly venture to suggest that the statistics of hospitals are cooked in order to annihilate their particular fad. Here are Marson’s tabulated results of the cases treated at the Smallpox Hospital during twenty years, and if Colonel Wintle can ignore them, I am puzzled to know what evidence would be accepted by him as conclusive. A glance at the subjoined table will show that there is a most exact correspondence between the degree of vaccination and the degree of mortality:— of those with 4 vaccine marks ......... 5 per cent died of those with 3 vaccine marks ......... 1.9 of those with 2 vaccine marks ......... 4.7 of those with 1 vaccine marks ......... 7.7 With none, but professing to have been vaccinated ......... 23.3 Non-vaccinated patients ......... 37 Here it will be seen that the death-rate varies from less than one in a hundred among the well-vaccinated to the enormous mortality of 37 per cent. among Colonel Wintle’s followers. These figures, remember, are taken from no single outbreak, where phenomenal conditions might prevail, but they represent a steady average drawn from twenty years of London smallpox. I might quote other corroborative tables of statistics, but I feel that if the foregoing fails to convince no other evidence is likely to succeed. Colonel Wintle remarks that London and Liverpool are more afflicted by smallpox than any other towns and deduces from that an argument against vaccination. The reason for the prevalence of the disease is of course that they have a larger floating population than any other English city and that therefore it is more difficult to enforce the vaccination acts. With all the zeal in the world a public vaccinator cannot eliminate smallpox in a large port with a constant influx of foreigners and seamen. Anti-vaccinationists harp upon vaccine being a poison. Of course it is a poison. So is opium, digitalis, and arsenic, though they are three of the most valuable drugs in the pharmacopoeia. The whole science of medicine is by the use of a mild poison to counteract a deadly one. The virus of rabies is a poison, but Pasteur has managed to turn it to account in the treatment of hydrophobia. As to fatal cases following vaccination, medical men are keenly alive to the necessity of using the purest lymph, and no candid enquirer can deny that some deplorable cases have resulted in the past from the neglect of

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this point. Such incidents are as painful as they are rare. Every care is now used to exclude a possibility of a strumous or syphilitic taint being communicated, these being the only constitutional diseases which have been ever known to be conferred. As I said in my previous letter, there are some children who will fester and inflame if they are picked with a pin, and these occasionally have their hereditary weakness brought out by the vaccination. Such stray cases, however, even if we allowed Colonel Wintle’s extreme estimate of one a week, bear an infinitesimal proportion to the total amount of good done. At present if a child dies of any cause within a certain time of its vaccination the anti-vaccinators are ready to put it down as cause and effect. Convulsions, whether arising from worms, or teething, or brain irritation, are all ascribed to the pernicious effect of what the literature of the league terms ‘that filthy rite.’ In conclusion, there is no reason why Colonel Wintle should not hold his own private opinion upon the matter. But he undertakes a vast responsibility when, in the face of the overwhelming testimony of those who are brought most closely into contact with disease, he incites others, through the public press, to follow the same course and take their chance of infection in defiance of hospital statistics. Only the possession of an extremely strong case can justify a man in opposing medical men upon a medical point, and this is of all points the one which should be most cautiously approached, as the welfare of the whole community is at stake. Should I put forward some positive and dogmatic views upon the rifling of guns or the trajectory of a shell, Colonel Wintle, as an artillerist, would be justified in demanding that I should produce some good reasons for the faith which was in me. The tendency of the scientific world, if we may judge from the work not only of Pasteur and Koch, but also of Burdon-Sanderson, Toussaint, and others, lies more and more in the direction of preventive methods of inoculation to check zymotic disease. In opposing that tendency Colonel Wintle, however much he may persuade himself to the contrary, is really opposing progress and lending himself to the propagation of error. To anyone who wishes to know exactly the evidence upon which the practice of vaccination is based I should recommend ‘The Facts about Vaccination,’ published by the National Health Society, 44, Bernersstreet, London. A. CONAN DOYLE, M.D., Bush Villa, Southsea 250

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The Consumption Cure Sir,—It may, perhaps, be not entirely out of place for an English physician who has had good opportunities of seeing the recent development of the treatment for tuberculosis in Berlin to say something as to its present position and probable results. Great as is Koch’s discovery, there can be no question that our knowledge of it is still very incomplete, and that it leaves large issues open to question. The sooner that this is recognised the less chance will there be of serious disappointment among those who are looking to Berlin for a panacea for their own or their friends’ ill-health. I have seen the cases under Professor Bergmann’s treatment, those under Professor Bardeleben at the Charité Hospital, and those of Dr. Levy at his Clinical Cluss, in the Prentzlauer Strasse. This series of cases, taken together with the observations of the assistant physicians and students who have seen most of the treatment, enables one to form some opinion, however imperfect, as to the weaker and stronger points of the system. In the first place, as to the obtaining of the all-important lymph. I called upon Dr. A. Libbertz, to whom its distribution had been entrusted, and I learned that the present supply is insufficient to meet the demands of the German hospitals, and that it will be at least six weeks before any other demands could be supplied. A pile of letters upon the floor 4ft across and as high as a man’s knee gave some indication of what the future demand would be. These, I was informed, represented a single post. Now as to what may fairly be expected from the lymph when this initial difficulty has been got over. It must never be lost sight of that Koch has never claimed that his fluid kills the tubercle bacillus. On the contrary, it has no effect upon it, but destroys the low form of tissue in the meshes of which the bacilli lie. Should this tissue slough in the case of lupus, or be expelled in the sputum in the case of phthisis, and should it contain in its meshes all the bacilli, then it would be possible to hope for a complete cure. When one considers, however, the number and the minute size of these deadly organisms, and the evidence that the lymphatics as well as the organs are affected by them, it is evident that it will only be in very exceptional cases that the bacilli are all expelled. By the cessation of the reaction after injection you can tell when the tubercular tissue is all cleared out from the system, but there is no means by which you can tell how far the bacilli have also been got rid of. If any remain

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they will, of course, cause by their irritation fresh tubercular tissue to form, which in turn may be destroyed by a new series of injections. But, unfortunately, it is evident that the system soon establishes a tolerance to the injected fluid, so that the time must, apparently, come when the continually renewed tubercle tissue will refuse to respond to the remedy, in whatever strength it may be applied. Here lies the vast difference between Koch’s treatment of consumption and the action of vaccine in the case of smallpox. The one is (for a time at least) conclusive, while in the other your remedy does not touch the real seat of the evil. To use a homely illustration, it is as if a man whose house was infested with rats were to remove the marks of the creatures every morning and expect in that way to get rid of them. Professor Koch himself admits that the bacillus is untouched, and there has not been time yet to see how far its presence will re-establish the old state of things. There is, however, grave reason to fear that it may at least possibly have the effect which I indicate. Another objection—though a much slighter one—is that the process stirs into activity all those tubercular processes which have become dormant. In one case which I have seen the injection, given for the cure of a tubercular joint, caused an ulcer of the cornea, which had been healed for twenty years, to suddenly break out again, thus demonstrating that the original ulcer came from a tubercular cause. No doubt the ultimate effect of the injection would be beneficial to the corneal ulcer, as well as to the joint, but it is none the less somewhat trying to the patient to have all his varied ailments brought to a head simultaneously. It may also be remarked that the fever and reaction after the injection is in some cases so very high (41° Centigrade, or over 108° Fahr.) that it is hardly safe to use it in the case of a debilitated patient. So much as to the more obviously weak points of the system. Others may develop themselves as more experience is gained. On the other hand, its virtues are many, and it represents an entirely new departure in medicine. There can be no question that it forms an admirable aid to diagnosis. Tubercle, and tubercle alone responds to its action, so that in all cases where the exact nature of a complaint is doubtful a single injection is enough to determine whether it is lupus, scrofula, phthisis, or any of the manifold forms, of tubercle. This alone is a very important addition to the art of medicine. Lupus and joint afflictions (scrofulous) undoubtedly get great benefit, but Koch himself cannot tell how far this is temporary and how far permanent. In the early stages of phthisis, again, it causes a rapid change for the 252

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better. When cavities are formed, however, Koch himself says that the aid of the surgeon should be employed, which means an extensive and serious operation. Whatever may be thought of the system, there can be but one opinion as to the man himself. With the noble modesty which is his characteristic, he has retired from every public demonstration. Leaving other men to expound his views, he immures himself once more in his laboratory, and I can say from experience that it is impossible for the stranger in Berlin to see the man whom, of all others, he would most wish to meet. I hope that perhaps these remarks may be of some practical value to those of your readers who may have some personal reason for desiring to know exactly what is thought in Berlin of the recent discovery.—I am, Sir, your obedient servant, A. CONAN DOYLE, M.D. Central Hotel, Berlin, Nov. 17

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Dr Koch and his Cure 20

By A. CONAN DOYLE. To the Englishman in Berlin, and indeed to the German also, it is at present very much easier to see the bacillus of Koch, than to catch even the most fleeting glimpse of its illustrious discoverer. His name is on every lip, his utterances are the constant subject of conversation, but, like the Veiled Prophet, he still remains unseen to any eyes save those of his own immediate co-workers and assistants. The stranger must content himself by looking up at the long grey walls of the Hygiene Museum in Kloster Strasse, and knowing that somewhere within them the great master mind is working, which is rapidly bringing under subjection those unruly tribes of deadly micro-organisms which are the last creatures in the organic world to submit to the sway of man. The Recluse of Kloster Strasse

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The great bacteriologist is a man so devoted to his own particular line of work that all descriptions of him from other points of view must, in the 253

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main, be negative. Some five feet and a half in height, sturdily built, with brown hair fringing off to grey at the edges, he is a man whose appearance might be commonplace were it not for the vivacity of his expression and the quick decision of his manner. Of a thoroughly German type, with his earnest face, his high thoughtful forehead, and his slightly retroussé nose, he looks what he is, a student, a worker, and a philosopher. His eyes are small, grey, and searching, but so sorely tried by long years of microscopic work that they require the aid of the strongest glasses. A married man, and of a domestic turn of mind, his life is spent either in the complete privacy of his family, or in the absorbing labour of his laboratory. He smokes little, drinks less, and leads so regular a life that he preserves his whole energy for the all-important mission to which he has devoted himself. One hobby he has, and only one, derived very probably from the hereditary influence of a long series of mountain-dwelling ancestors. He is a keen mountaineer, and never more happy than when, alpinestock in hand, he is breathing in the invigorating air of the higher Alps. Visitors at Pontresina last year may have observed there a quiet little sturdy gentleman, tweed-suited and bespectacled, who vanished early from the hotel to reappear jaded and travel-stained in the evening; but few would have surmised that the energetic climber was none other than the renowned Professor of Berlin. It might perhaps be possible to trace some analogy between the clear and calm atmosphere of scientific thought and those still and rarefied regions in which Tyndall loves to dwell and Koch to wander. The Koch Laboratory

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To his own private sanctum few, as has already been remarked, can gain access, but in the Kloster Strasse there is his public laboratory, in which some fifty young men, including several Americans and Englishmen, are pursuing their studies in bacteriology. It is a large square chamber, well lit and lofty, with rows of microscopes bristling along the deal tables which line it upon every side. Bunsen burners, reservoirs of distilled water, freezing machines for the cutting of microscopic sections, and every other conceivable aid to the bacteriological student, lie ready to his hand. Under glass protectors may be seen innumerable sections of potatoes with bright red, or blue, or black, smears upon their white surfaces where colonies of rare bacilli have been planted, whose growth is watched and recorded from day 254

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to day. All manner of fruits with the mould and fungi which live upon them, infusions of meat or of sugar peopled with unseen millions, squares of gelatine which are the matrix in which innumerable forms of life are sprouting, all these indicate to the visitor the style of work upon which the students are engaged, and the methods by which they carry them out. Here, too, under the microscope may be seen the prepared slides which contain specimens of those bacilli of disease which have already been isolated. This one, stained with logwood, where little purple dots, like grains of pepper, are sprinkled thickly over the field, is a demonstration of that deadly tuberclebacillus which has harassed mankind from the dawn of time, and yet has become visible to him only during the last eight years. Here, under the next object-glass, are little pink curved creatures, so minute as to be hardly visible under the power of 700 diameters which we are using. Yet these pretty and infinitely fragile things are the accursed comma-bacilli of cholera, the most terrible scourge which has ever devastated the microbe-ridden earth. Here, too, is the little rod-shaped filament of the Bacillus anthracis, the curving tendrils of the Obermeyer spirillus, the great spores of Bacillus prodigiosus, and the jointed branches of Aspergillus. It is a strange thing to look upon these utterly insignificant creatures, and to realize that in one year they would claim more victims from the human race than all the tigers who have ever trod a jungle. A satire, indeed, it is upon the majesty of man when we look at these infinitesimal and contemptible creatures which have it in their power to over throw the strongest intellect and to shatter the most robust frame. A special section exists in connection with the laboratory for experiments upon the effects which the bacteria have upon animal life and here the action of all infusions and injections is checked by their use upon guinea-pigs before being used upon human subjects. The Early Days of Dr. Koch Professor Koch is forty-seven years of age. In 1843 he saw the light at Clausthal, where his father was an official in the employ of a mining company. From the age of nineteen to twenty-three he studied at Göttingen, where he was brought under the influence of the famous Jacob Henle. Henle was an all-round man of science, who had gained his laurels as an anatomist, but who held enlightened and advanced views on many medical points. Among other things, he held very strongly that

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the influence of plant life in its lower forms would be found to underlie many of the diseases to which the human frame is liable. It is more than probable that to Henle’s suggestions may be traced that line of thought which in the case of Koch has led to such great results. After taking his degree, Koch became assistant physician at the hospital of Hamburg, and shortly afterwards he started in private practice in the little town of Langenhagen, in Hanover. Thence he migrated to Wollstein, where, in a little village, he settled down to the humdrum life of a country doctor. He was then twenty-nine years of age, strong and vigorous, with all his great powers striving for an outlet, even in the unpropitious surroundings in which he found himself. To him it must seem but yesterday that he drove his little cob and ramshackle provincial trap along the rough Posen roads to attend the rude peasants and rough farmers who centre round the village. Never, surely, could a man have found himself in a position less favourable for scientific research— poor, humble, unknown, isolated from sympathy and from the scientific appliances which are the necessary tools of the investigator. Yet he was a man of too strong a character to allow himself to be warped by the position in which he found himself, or to be reverted from the line of work which was most congenial to his nature. Looking round, he saw that in one respect, at least, he might claim an advantage over his scientific brethren. If they had chemicals, laboratories, instruments, microscopes, he, at least, had cattle—nothing but cattle. To cattle, therefore, he turned himself, and soon proved that work of first-class importance might be achieved among these humblest of patients. The Discovery of the Bacillus Anthracis

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Splenic fever, which has been surmised to have been one of the plagues of Egypt, has long been a bugbear of Continental farmers. The extreme virulence and infectiousness of this disease had often invited speculation, but it was not until about the year 1850 that Dr. Devaine discovered a very minute rod-like creature in the blood of the afflicted animals, which he conjectured to be the true cause of the disease, though he did not see his way to demonstrating the fact. This was the broken enquiry which Koch now took in hand with the most successful results. Starting upon the supposition that these little creatures were not necessarily confined to the blood, but would live and 256

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multiply in any medium which was nutritious and warm, he made a suitable animal infusion, and introduced a small quantity of infected blood. In a few days the fluid, which had been clear, became turbid, and he found it to be swarming with countless millions of bacillus anthracis, as the organism is named, all derived apparently from the few which chanced to be in the original drop of blood. By taking a little of this fluid, and introducing it into a second bowl of the cultivating medium, he produced a second generation, and from that a third, each as virulent as the first. A drop injected into an animal brought on all the characteristic and deadly symptoms of splenic fever. In the course of these researches Koch found that the organism appeared in three forms—as rods, as round spores, and as long branching filaments; and he made the extremely important discovery that while in the two former cases they were extremely poisonous, in the form of filaments they became absolutely innocuous. A great step was won when Koch found himself able to cultivate the infection, as he might grow monkshood or any vegetable poison in the soil of his back garden. It is a matter of history how Pasteur enlarged upon Koch’s results, how he found that a weaker infusion might be made, which would render the animal innocuous to the more virulent type of the disease, and how France has been millions of pounds the richer for the vast number of animals who have been inoculated against the plague. Here was indeed a worthy rivalry between France and Germany—a contest as to which should confer the greatest benefits upon mankind. Koch’s paper upon anthrax appeared in Cohn’s ‘Communications on the Biology of Plants,’ and instantly drew widespread attention to the writer, as did a second paper shortly afterwards upon the preserving and photographing of bacteria. At the University of Bonn In the year 1880 Koch finally abandoned his country practice, and came to the University of Bonn, as assistant to Professor Finkelnburg. Before leaving Wollstein he had published a research over those microorganisms which infest wounds. Lister’s antiseptic system of surgery had been founded upon the presumption that such creatures exist, but Koch was the first to absolutely demonstrate it. His research was of importance not only for its results, but also on account of the additions which it made to our knowledge of the technical management of

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the microscope. Koch was the first to show the extreme importance of using certain staining agents, which enabled the bacteria to be more easily distinguished by the fact that they took a deeper tint than the tissues in which they lay. He was also the first to use the oil immersion method, by which the object glass is screwed down upon a drop of oil which condenses the light upon the object which is being examined. He Finds the Bacillus of Tubercle

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In the scientific atmosphere of Bonn, Koch found himself at last in a thoroughly congenial situation, and was soon at work again with his microscopes and his solutions. In 1882 he announced and demonstrated the bacillus of tubercle. Important as this discovery has proved, by being the one end of the chain which led to the idea of inoculation, it was also of great service to physicians as putting into their hands an exact means of testing as to whether any given illness be tubercular or not. The presence of the little rod-like body is conclusive as a sign of true phthisis as distinguished from fibroid pneumonia, or any other wasting disease. In his recent report he complains, with some truth, that physicians have not sufficiently used this weapon which he has placed in their hands. He also was able to prove beyond all doubt that the condition known as scrofula and the skin disease known as lupus were both distinguished by the presence of the bacillus, and were therefore all different manifestations of the same disease. It is an affair of yesterday how brilliantly he has proved by the bedside what he had deduced in the laboratory. And the Cholera Bacillus

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In 1883 cholera, after a rest of ten years, hovered once more over the eastern portion of Europe. It appeared first in Damietta, whence it spread rapidly over Egypt. The German Government sent out a commission, with Koch at its head, to investigate the disease upon the spot. Before they had come to any definite conclusions, however, the cholera abated. With the thoroughness and patience which characterizes all Koch’s work, he obtained leave to follow the cholera to India, where it is endemic, and to study it at its source. Here he succeeded in isolating and demonstrating the comma bacillus. Whether in this case also the finding of the cause of 258

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mischief may be the first step towards the discovery of its antidote time alone can show. It is at least well within the limits of reasonable hope. At Berlin Honours now crowded thick and fast upon the discoverer, but even as poverty had failed to drive him from his life’s work, so the greater trial of success was unable to relax his diligence. Appointed Professor of Hygiene and of Bacteriology in the University of Berlin, he quietly settled down to the investigation upon tubercle, which had been interrupted by his journey to India. For four years he pursued his silent studies, until he was able, at the recent medical congress at Berlin, to announce that they were almost complete, and that he would shortly give them to the world. The announcement was perhaps unfortunate, for it aroused such immense interest, and gave rise to so many circumstantial but fictitious rumours as to the efficacy of his treatment, that he was compelled, in order to prevent widespread disappointment, to give his discovery to the public rather earlier than he would otherwise have done. And now as to the real value of that treatment—a question of the most vital importance to so many thousands of sufferers and so many hundreds of thousands of anxious relatives. Before entering into so grave a question, I may perhaps explain what grounds I have upon which to form an opinion. I had the good fortune to be the first English physician to arrive in Berlin after the announcement of Koch’s discovery, and I had opportunities of seeing all the cases which are under treatment in Von Bergmann’s wards, the clinical wards of Dr. Levy in the Prantzlauer Strasse, and under Dr. Bardeleben at the Charité Hospital. From these combined sources, I may fairly say that I had some material from which to draw a deduction.

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The Courtesy of Von Bergmann The stranger in Berlin is somewhat lost among the number of hospitals and clinical classes which make the city a great centre of teaching. My letters of introduction were to gentlemen who showed me the greatest kindness, but who were not medical men, and knew little, therefore, as to the means by which I might attain my end. Hearing, however, that Professor Von Bergmann intended to give a lecture upon the Sunday night

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on the cases under his treatment, I adopted the course which seemed to me to be the most direct and the most likely to be successful. Putting myself in the position of a German medical man who was seeking information in London, I thought it best to go straight to the Professor and explain to him my difficulty. No doubt it would have succeeded in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, but Von Bergmann unfortunately was the hundredth man. Never at any time remarkable for the suavity of his manners, he is notoriously gruff to our fellow-countrymen, and sees a Morell Mackenzie in every travelling Briton. No one can come in contact with him without at once seeing the difficulty which any colleague would have in working with him, and understanding where the blame lay in the painful controversy which followed the late Emperor’s decease. ‘There’s no place,’ he shouted, in answer to my modest request that after travelling 700 miles I might be admitted to his lecture. ‘Perhaps you would like to take my place. That is the only one vacant.’ Then, as I bowed and turned away, he roared after me, ‘The first two rows of my clinik are entirely taken up by Englishmen.’ As I happened to know that the only Englishmen at his lectures were Mr. Malcolm Morris, of St. Mary’s, and Dr. Pringle, of the Middlesex Hospital, I was as little impressed by his accuracy as by his courtesy. Patients under Treatment

25

30

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As it happened, however, there was among the knot of students who overheard the incident an American gentleman, Dr. Hartz, of Michigan, who, on the good old principle that blood is thicker than water, at once lent me his powerful aid. Through his kind assistance I was enabled next morning to turn the Professor’s flank by seeing in his wards the same cases which he had lectured upon the night before. A long and grim array they were of twisted joints, rotting bones, and foul ulcers of the skin, all more or less under the benign influence of the inoculation. Some of the ulcers were nearly healed, and I was assured by the assistant surgeons, and by Dr. Hartz, that where I now saw a white cicatrix drawing over the gap, there had formerly been nothing but disease and putrescence. Here and there I saw a patient, bright-eyed, flushed, and breathing heavily, who was in the stage of reaction after the administration of the injection; for it cannot be too clearly understood that the first effect of the virus is to intensify the symptoms, to raise the temperature 260

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to an almost dangerous degree, and in every way to make the patient worse instead of better. Dr. Levy’s Classrooms From Von Bergmann’s wards we made our way to Dr. Levy’s Clinik, where again a similar series of cases were presented to us. The rooms were small, and, what with the press of the doctors, the crowd of patients seeking admission, and the number of sufferers who already occupied the beds, it was a somewhat trying atmosphere. The same scene was to be witnessed at the Charité Hospital, save that it was to the students rather than to the doctors that the teaching was addressed. What the Remedy Does As to the efficacy of the treatment, the scepticism with which it has been encountered in some quarters is as undeserved as the absolute confidence with which others have hailed it. It must never be lost sight of that Koch has never claimed that his fluid kills the tubercle bacillus. On the contrary, it has no effect upon it, but destroys the low form of tissue in the meshes of which the bacilli lie. Should this tissue slough in the case of lupus, or be expelled in the sputum in the case of phthisis, and should it contain in its meshes all the bacilli, then it would be possible to hope for a complete cure. When one considers, however, the number and the minute size of these deadly organisms, and the evidence that the lymphatics as well as the organs are affected by them, it is evident that it will only be in very exceptional cases that the bacilli are all expelled. By the cessation of the reaction after injection you can tell when the tubercular tissue is all cleared out of the system, but there are no means by which you can tell how far the bacilli themselves have been got rid of. If any remain they will, of course, cause by their irritation fresh tubercular tissue to form, which in turn may be destroyed by a new series of injections. But, unfortunately, it is evident that the system soon establishes a tolerance to the injected fluid, so that the time must apparently come when the continually renewed tubercle tissue will refuse to respond to the remedy, in whatever strength it may be applied. Here lies the vast difference between Koch’s treatment of consumption, and the action of vaccine in the case of small-pox. The one is for a time at least conclusive,

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while in the other your remedy does not treat the real seat of the evil. It continually removes the traces of the enemy, but it still leaves him deep in the invaded country. 5

10

15

One of its Dangers Another objection, though a much lighter one, is that the process stirs into activity all those tubercular centres which have become dormant. In one case which I have seen, the injection, given for the cure of a tubercular joint, caused an ulcer of the eye, which had been healed for twenty years, to suddenly break out again, thus demonstrating that the original ulcer came from a tubercular cause. It may also be remarked that the fever and reaction after the injection is in some cases so very high (41 deg. Cent. or nearly 104 deg. Fahr.) that it is hardly safe to use it in the case of a debilitated patient. So much as to the more obviously weak points of the system. Others may develop themselves as more experience is gained. On the other hand, its virtues are many, and it represents an entirely new departure in medicine.

20

25

30

35

Its Advantages There can be no question that it forms an admirable aid to diagnosis. Tubercle, and tubercle alone, responds to its action, so that in all cases where the exact nature of a complaint is doubtful, a single injection is enough to determine whether it is scrofulous, lupous, phthisical, or in any way tuberculous. This alone is a very important addition to the art of medicine. Of its curative action in lupus there can be no question, though I have heard Dr. Koeler, the Berlin specialist upon skin affections, express a doubt as to the permanency of the cicatrix. This point, however, will be very shortly settled in England by the outcome of the case which Mr. Malcolm Morris, the well-known specialist, took over to Berlin. As far as this case has progressed there can be no doubt that the result has been astonishingly successful. In the case of true phthisis of the lungs, which is of more immediate importance in these islands, the evidence is so slight that we can only regard it as an indication and a hope, rather than a proof. It is obvious that the difficulty of getting rid of the tubercular matter is enormously 262

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increased when the diseased products are buried deeply in a vital organ. It may prove that even here the specific action of the remedy may triumph over the degenerative process, but it would be an encouraging of false hopes to pretend that this result is in any way assured.

5

The Demand for the Lymph Lastly, as to the obtaining of the all-important lymph. I called upon Dr. A. Libbertz, to whom its distribution has been entrusted, and I learned that the present supply is insufficient to meet the demands, even of the Berlin hospitals, and that it will be months before any other applicants can be supplied. A pile of letters upon the floor, four feet across, and as high as a man’s knee, gave some indication as to what the future demand would be. These, I was informed, represented a single post. Whatever may be the ultimate decision as to the system, there can be but one opinion as to the man himself. With the noble modesty which is his characteristic, he has retired from every public demonstration; and with the candour of a true man of science his utterances are mostly directed to the pointing out of the weak points and flaws in his own system. If anyone is deceived upon the point it is assuredly not the fault of the discoverer. Associates say that he has aged years in the last six months, and that his lined face and dry yellow skin are the direct results of the germ-laden atmosphere in which he has so fearlessly lived. It may well be that the eyes of posterity, passing over the ninety-year-old warrior in Silesia, and the giant statesman in Pomerania, may fix their gaze upon the silent worker in the Kloster Strasse, as being the noblest German of them all.

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Apparatus ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE APPARATUS E1 The first English edition, published in London by Methuen in 1894. Base text AE

Author’s Edition of the text, 1903

JV

Journal version

MS

Handwritten manuscript of ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ GENERAL PRINCIPLES

Each entry in the list below is keyed to the text by page and line number. There have been silent corrections of any obvious typesetting errors in E1 to avoid an unnecessarily long emendations list. A global decision has been made not to note contraction of Doctor to Dr between different versions, and I have avoided noting shifting conventions on compound words such as ‘to-day’ and ‘to-morrow’. In the MS of ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’, Doyle underused commas and these were inserted in most sentences by his editors – these have not been individually noted. EMENDATIONS AND VARIATIONS Behind the Times 7.14 7.15 8.18 8.26 8.34 8.36 9.3–10

inwards] E1 inward AE onwards] E1 onward AE inocculation] E1 inoculation AE He always persists] E1 He persists AE his bewilderment] E1 his own bewilderment AE any one] E1 anyone AE I shall not easily forget how Dr Patterson and I cut Sir John Sirwell, the County Member, and were unable to find the stone. It was a horrible moment. Both our careers were at stake. And then it was that Dr Winter, whom we 264

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10.5

had asked out of courtesy to be present, introduced into the wound a finger which seemed to our excited senses to be about nine inches long, and hooked out the stone at the end of it. ‘It’s always well to bring one in your waistcoat pocket,’ said he with a chuckle, ‘but I suppose you youngsters are above all that] E1 passage removed AE afterwards] E1 afterward AE His First Operation

11.1 14.20–1 14.27

the winter session] E1 a winter session AE backwards and forwards] E1 backward and forward AE in case it is necessary to remove the jaw] E1 clause removed AE A Straggler of ’15

17.5–6 17.6 17.7–8 17.8 17.8 17.13 17.14

17.16 17.20 17.25 17.25–6

Long, brick-lined] E1 long, straight, brick-lined JV high buildings] E1 AE high, dark buildings JV thudding of weights] E1 AE thudding of huge weights JV the buzz and babel] E1 AE the myriad buzz and babel JV the dwellings] E1 the sordid dwellings AE work-stained] E1 workstained AE Stout] E1 AE. Extra sentence: Little groups of children straggled to school, or loitered to peep through the single front windows at the hypertrophied Bibles, balanced upon small three-legged tables, which were their usual adornment JV One had gathered] E1 AE One, stouter, redder, and dirtier than the rest, had gathered JV Why] E1 AE Extra sentence: If he hain’t no sense now, I ‘specs he won’t learn much on this side o’ Jordan JV ter’ble] E1 JV terrible AE remarked a third . . . born] E1 AE Extra dialogue: ‘It were a ter’ble long time agone; remarked a little fat person, with her skirt tucked up and a pair of list slippers, very much down at the heels. ‘It were afore I were born.’ 265

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17.30 17.36–7 18.1 18.4 18.9 18.9–10 18.11 18.23 18.23 18.25 18.25 18.26 18.30 18.31–2 18.32 18.33 18.37 19.5 19.16 19.17–18 19.18 19.32

‘Afore your mother were born or thought of;’ cried the first speaker. ‘I b’lieve it were a hundert year agone’ JV Daddy Brewster, here.] E1 AE Extra dialogue: ‘To hear you talk, one ’ud think your Bill was the only Bill there was;’ exclaimed the pallid woman, snappishly JV young woman] E1 AE fat woman JV ay] E1 AE Aye JV work.] E1 AE Extra sentence: ‘Why, my old man is only just pickin’ up from the tripod fever, and Sammy home from school with the brownchitis.’ JV slantwise towards the open door] E1 AE slantwise JV floor there came] E1 floor came AE forrard] E1 forrards JV AE young] E1 AE fat JV the young woman.] E1 AE Extra sentence: ‘A baby! He’s more trouble than twins,’ cried Mrs. Simpson viciously. ‘I feel as if I could shake his old bones up sometimes. JV who’s] E1 AE whets JV arf of] E1 AE ’alf pint of JV public-house, when a young girl] E1 AE public-house, young girl JV newcomer] E1 AE new comer JV turned-up nose and large, honest, grey eyes] E1 AE turned-up nose and large grey eyes JV its] E1 AE a JV the bundle she carried] E1 the bundle which she carried JV AE the housekeeper] E1 AE the fat housekeeper JV With a nod she strolled off] E1 AE With a nod she caught up her tattered bonnet from a peg and strolled off JV prints upon the walls] E1 AE prints which hung upon the walls JV hanging from a strip of purple ribbon] E1 AE with a strip of purple ribbon JV a slip of newspaper] E1 AE a slip of small newspaper JV farmhouse] E1 farm-house AE 266

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19.35 20.14 20.18 20.18 20.18 20.19 20.19

20.23 20.23 20.24 20.28 20.32–3

20.34 20.34–5 20.35 20.37 21.1 21.3–4 21.5 21.6 21.7 21.10

dispatched] E1 despatched AE comrades] E1 AE comrades in arms JV old cutting] E1 AE old yellow cutting JV in the girl’s mind] E1 AE in Norah’s mind JV veneration] E1 AE deep reverence with JV kinsman] E1 AE relative JV From her infancy he had been her hero, and she remembered how her father used to speak of his courage and his strength, how he could strike down a bullock with a blow of her fist, and carry a fat sheep under either arm.] E1 AE From her infancy he had been her ideal, her hero, and hence she had begged to be sent to his aid when the death of his housekeeper had made it necessary that some one should be with him. JV never seen him] E1 AE never yet seen him in the fleshJV a rude painting] E1 AE a rude and faded painting JV a great bearskin cap, rose ever before her memory] E1 an enormous bearskin cap, rose ever when JV upon the stair] E1 AE on the stair JV a huge, twisted old man, gaunt and puckered, with twitching hands, and shuffling, purposeless feet] E1 AE a stooping, twisted old man, gaunt and thin, with trembling hands, and shuffling, purposeless gait JV two thick tufts] E1 AE two projecting tufts JV watery-blue eyes] E1 AE blue eyes JV rose and fell with his crackling, rasping breath] E1 AE rose and fell as he breathed with a crackling rasping sound JV he crooned] E1 AE he cried JV his distorted hands] E1 AE his hand JV with wonder in her eyes] E1 AE with great wondering eyes JV Witham] E1 AE Leyton JV mumbled the old man, rocking to and fro] E1 AE crooned the old man, rocking himself to and fro JV it’s a dish o’ tea for me] E1 AE a dish o’ tea—a dish o tea JV You can speak out, lass. Seems to me folk’s voices isn’t as loud as they used.] E1 AE Speak out, lass for my ’earin’ ain’t what it was JV 267

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21.12–13 21.14 21.14 21.17 21.17–18 21.19 21.20–1 21.22 21.22 21.24 21.27

21.28 21.31 21.33 21.34 21.36–7 22.1 22.1 22.3

I’m Norah Brewster, uncle. I’m your grand-niece come down from Essex way to live with you.] E1 AE Extra sentence not in JV You’ll be brother Jarge’s girl!] E1 AE Norah Brewster, eh? Then you’ll be brother Jarge’s girl JV think o’ little Jarge having a girl] E1 AE think of little Jarge haven’ a girl JV daughter of your brother George’s son] E1 AE daughter of your brother Jarge’s son JV as she turned the bacon] E1 AE as she deftly turned the bacon on the dish JV he continued] E1 AE he went on JV I gave him when I took the bounty. You’ve heard him speak of it, likely?] E1 AE I lent him when I took the shilling. Likely it’s dead now. He didn’t give it to ye to bring? JV George] E1 AE Jarge JV dead this twenty year,’ said she, pouring out the tea] E1 dead this twenty years,’ cried Norah, pouring out the old man’s tea JV Well, it was a bootiful pup—ay, a well bred un] E1 Eh, but it were a beautiful pup—by Jimini, a beautiful pup JV He breathed heavily while he devoured his food.] E1 AE Replaces sentence: ‘I’ve got two pounds of butter, and some eggs in the bundle,’ cried Norah, ‘Mother said as I was to give you her respec’s and love, and that she’d ha’ sent a tin o’ Leyton cream, but it ’ud have turned on the way.’ JV It’s a middlin’ goodish way you’ve come,’ said he at last.] E1 AE Eh, it’s a middlin’ goodish way’ said he, supping loudly at his tea JV brought you] E1 AE brought ye JV afeard] E1 AE afeared JV To think of you] E1 AE By Jimini, to think of you JV while Norah sat stirring her tea] E1 AE as Norah sat by the fire stirring her tea JV You must have] E1 AE you must ha’ JV said she.] E1 AE she said at last JV ninety come Candlemas] E1 AE ninety come next Candlemass JV 268

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22.5

I’ve got the smell of the burned powder in my nose yet] E1 AE By Jimini, I’ve got the smell of the burned powder in my nose! JV 22.8 His face was flushed and his back more erect] E1 AE There was a little fleck of pink upon either cheek, and a spark of animation in his eyes JV 22.9 jerking his head towards the cutting] E1 jerking his head in the direction of the paper cutting JV toward the cutting AE 22.10 I’m sure you must be] E1 AE I am sure that you must be JV 22.13 say I] E1 AE says I JV 22.14 a-laughing] E1 AE a-laughin’. Extra two sentences: A spoonful from that bottle by the brass candlestick, my dear. It’s paregoric and it cuts the phlegm. JV 22.16 ‘Oh, uncle] E1 AE, ‘Oh, grand-uncle,’ the girl cried, clapping her hands JV coming down the street, with the band playing in front of them] E1 AE comin’ down the street, with the band playin’ at the head JV 22.16–17 Lor’] E1 AE Lordy JV 22.18 Here’s the pioneers an’ the drum-major!] E1 AE Here they come, pioneers, drum-major, band JV 22.21 his bony, yellow fingers, like the claws] E1 AE his great boney hand, like the claw JV 22.27 how to march.] E1 AE Extra sentence: Blessed if I can see the light bobs, though. JV 22.27 ay] E1 AE aye JV 22.28 They’ve got the swing] E1 AE They have the swing JV 22.30 ‘their marching had died away in the distance.’] E1 AE. In JV, the doctor’s arrival and next scene is absent, with the text instead running: ‘Where be that bottle?’ he continued, stumping his way back to the wooden arm-chair on the further side of the fireplace. ‘It cuts the phlegm. It’s the toobes that’s wrong with me. Joyce says so, and he be a clever man. I’m in his club. There’s the card, paid up, under yon flat-iron. Why, my darn skin!’ he broke out suddenly, slapping his withered thigh; ‘I knew as something was amiss!   ‘Where uncle?’ 269

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  ‘In them soldiers. I’ve got it now. They’d forgot their stocks. Not one of ’em had his stock on.’ He croaked and chuckled for a long time over his discovery. ‘It wouldn’t ha’ done for the Dook,’ he muttered, ‘no, by Jimini! The Dook would ha’ had a word there.’   ‘Why uncle,’ cried Norah, ‘here be a soldier at our door.’ E1 then picks up the scene at para 78 with ‘Good morning, miss!’ 23.37 and grounding his carbine] E1 AE grounding his carbine JV 23.38 forwards] E1 JV forward AE 24.7 full young] E1 AE young JV 24.14 bony hands] E1 AE boney hands JV 24.26 coming] E1 AE comin’ JV 24.33 ain’t my fault neither, for I’m ready to fall] E1 AE ain’t my fault neither, for I’ve never been called, and I’m ready to fall JV 24.35 Won’t you try] E1 AE Would you try JV 25.28 By Gosh] E1 AE By Jimini JV 25.37 during all the long winter] E1 AE through all the long winter JV 25.38 Arsenal View.] E1 AE Extra sentence: There came a time at last when it might be doubted to which of the two occupants his visits were directed, nor was it hard to say by which he was most anxiously awaited. JV 26.10 save an animal outcry] E1 AE save for an outcry JV 26.11 fall from him.] E1 Extra sentence: save vague ramblings and mumblings. He was a white-haired child, with all a child’s troubles and emotions. JV 26.20 E1 AE adds scene of Bible-reading, absent from JV 27.1–3 An elderly, grey-whiskered gentleman had been walking down the street, glancing up at the numbers of the houses. Now, as his eyes fell upon the old man, he came straight for him.] E1 He was seated there one afternoon upon his camp-stool, when there came an elderly, grey-whiskered gentleman, swinging his cane, and glancing up at the numbers of the houses. JV 27.4 ‘Hullo,’ said he,] E1 ‘Hullo,’ said he, when he came abreast of the old man, JV 270

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27.6 27.25

who is on the roll] E1 who’s name is on the role JV Jimini! how things come round] E1 AE Lordy, but how things come round JV 28.1 And the flies! I ain’t strong enough to fight against them] E1 AE And my joints—they ain’t what they ought to be JV 28.9–1 pill box] E1 AE pillbox JV 28.21 By Gosh] E1 By Jimini JV 28.28 banknote] E1 bank note AE, JV 28.33 firing party?] E1 AE Extra sentence: I’m not a civilian; I’m a guardsman—I’m the last of the old third guards. When I’m gone they’ll have a good muster yonder JV 28.37–8 hold the stirrup o’ my Colonel Byng] E1 AE black the boots o’ my old Colonel Byng JV 29.1–26 It was on the very next day . . . full muster now.’] E1 AE reworks the final scene from the journal version, moving the earlier scene with the curate in JV to the end, which ends in this way: Early in May the veteran’s breathing grew more laboured, and he had a sore struggle for air. For weeks on end he lay gasping, propped with pillows, until his feeble spark of life was but a flickering thing, which any hour might extinguish. The young curate of the parish used to come in of an evening and read the Bible to him, but he seemed to take little notice of it for the most part. Only the chapters about Joshua and the wars of the Israelites appeared to fix his attention, and he held his trembling hand up to his ear for fear of missing a word of them.   ‘I say,’ he croaked one night; ‘what’s that great fight that is to be?’  ‘Armageddon?’   ‘Aye, that’s the word. That’s the great battle in the other world ain’t it?’   ‘It is the great final fight,’ said the curate. ‘It is said to be typical of the struggle between good and evil.’   The old man lay silent for a long time. ‘I s’pects the third guards’ll be there,’ he remarked, at last. ‘And the Dook—the Dook’ll have something to say.’   It was the 18th of June, the anniversary of the great victory, when things came at last to a crisis with the old 271

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soldier. All day he had lain with nothing but his puffing blue lips, and the twitching of his scraggy neck to show that he still held the breath of life. Norah and Sergeant Macdonald had sat by him in the afternoon, but he had shown no consciousness of their presence. He lay peacefully, his eyes half-closed, his hands under his cheek, as one who is very weary.   They had left him for an instant, and where sitting in the front room where Norah was preparing the tea, when of a sudden they heard his footstep in the room above, and a shout that rang through the house. Loud and clear and swelling, it pealed in their ears, a voice full of strength and energy and fiery passion. ‘The guards need powder,’ it cried, and yet again, ‘the guards need powder.’   The sergeant sprang from his chair and rushed upstairs, followed by the trembling Norah. There was the old man standing by his bedside, his blue eyes sparkling, his white hair bristling, his whole figure towering and expanding, with eagle head and glance of fire. ‘The guards need powder,’ he thundered once again, ‘and by God they shall have it.’ He threw up his long sinewy arms, and sank back with a groan upon his pallet. The sergeant stooped over him, and his face darkened.   ‘Oh, Archie, Archie,’ sobbed the frightened girl, ‘what do you think of him?’   The sergeant turned away. ‘I think,’ said he, ‘that the third guards have a full muster now.’ The Third Generation 30.1 30.13 30.13 31.9 31.32 31.37 32.1 32.8

riverwards] E1 riverward AE regard] E1 consider AE as] E1 to be AE arm-chair] armchair AE mantelpiece] E1 fireplace AE knew the ace] E1 knew that the ace AE the creaking] E1 a creaking AE frockcoat] E1 frock-coat AE 272

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32.13 32.27 33.2 33.11 33.21 33.32 34.1 34.14 35.5 35.25 35.35 36.1–2 36.10 36.27 36.38 37.27 38.18

upwards] E1 upward AE and he patted] E1 and patted AE he asked briskly] E1 he said briskly AE rolled to the knee] E1 rolled to his knee AE Now your eye!] Now the eye! AE towards] E1 toward AE forwards] E1 forward AE instantly to him] E1 to him instantly AE his chair] E1 the chair AE think that Pope’s] E1 think Pope’s AE any other man] E1 any man AE think that if I] E1 think if I AE in upon them again] E1 in again upon them AE towards] E1 toward AE the last moment] E1 this last moment he said rising] E1 said he rising AE the most shocking character] E1 a most shocking character AE A False Start

39.10 39.12 39.16 39.17 39.26 39.36 40.13 40.33 41.24–5 41.35

frock-coat] E1 JV frockcoat AE his first.] E1 AE his first patient. JV house-keeping] E1 AE housekeeping JV closed the hall door] E1 JV closed the door AE clue] E1 JV clew AE clue] E1 JV clew AE thumb-nail] E1 JV thumbnail AE metre] E1 JV meter AE visiting-book were spread] E1 AE visiting-book were laid out JV numbered. Economise] E1 AE Journal version adds: numbered. There should be no debts. On that he was determined. He lived alone, without servant or housekeeper, he brushed his own floor, cooked his own scanty food, and slipped out in the dead of the night with chamois leather and paste-pot to polish his own brassplate, slinking in again, like a criminal, when he heard the 273

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41.37 41.37 42.1 42.3 42.3–4 42.8–9 42.11–12 42.33–4 44.1 44.13 44.33 45.6 45.6 45.7 45.35 46.6 46.11 46.13 46.29 46.33 48.9 48.36–7 49.22–3 49.34 49.36

heavy footstep of the policeman coming round the corner. His fare was simple enough—bread and tea morning and night, with tinned corned meat or salmon, or perhaps some fresh fish cooked over a spirit lamp, for his dinner. Yet JV rooftree] E1 roof-tree AE JV Dr Wilkinson] E1 AE He JV Sutton] E1 AE Birchespool JV prosperous town] E1 AE prosperous Midland town JV so much money in it that it seemed strange that a man] E1 AE so much money in it that a man JV the grinding of the wheels, and the patter of countless feet. Men, women] E1 AE the grinding of the and children JV hurrying upon their own business, scarce glancing at the small brass plate, or] E1 AE hurrying on upon their own without wasting a thought JV exhilarating summons] E1 AE exhilarating summons at the bell JV see her] E1 see him JV AE Sutton] E1 AE Birchespool JV a fee] E1 AE the fee JV ’ard] E1 AE hard JV sevenpence] E1 AE seven-pence JV She must feed] E1 AE ‘By heaven, she must feed JV towards] E1 JV toward AE Lady Millbank] E1 Lady Sarah Millbank JV flew down the street] E1 AE flew off down the street JV Lady Millbank] E1 AE Lady Sarah Millbank JV Sutton] E1 AE Birchespool JV His wife] E1 AE Lady Sarah, his wife JV rather delicate position] E1 AE rather delicately placed JV been to him a mere matter of guineas] E1 AE seemed to him to be a mere matter of guineas JV I have brought, as I promised, Doctor Wilkinson] E1 AE I have brought, Doctor Wilkinson JV Sutton] E1 AE Birchespool JV dryly] E1 drily JV AE 274

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49.36 49.36 50.22 50.31 50.31

I fear my wife] E1 AE I think my wife JV toward] E1 AE towards JV eightpenny] E1 AE eight-penny JV Sutton] E1 AE Birchespool JV Sutton.] E1 AE. Journal version adds extra concluding sentence: Dr. Mason is growing old, and will be retiring some day, and it is said that his junior partner is likely to be engaged to the younger daughter of Sir John Millbank, but whatever good fortune may come upon him he will still look back to those Bohemian days, when a single silver coin was all that stood between him and ruin, as not the least pleasant of his life. JV The Curse of Eve

51.27 53.27 54.18 55.26 56.11 58.34 60.16

exultations] E1 exultation AE afterwards] E1 afterward AE small black leather bag] E1 black leather bag AE downwards] E1 downward AE great-coat] E1 greatcoat AE clue] E1 clew AE towards] E1 toward AE Sweethearts

61.1 62.6 62.13 62.34 62.18 64.7 65.1 65.1 65.2 65.25 65.27

hard] E1 AE ill JV corners] E1 AE corner JV almanack] E1 AE almanac JV formerly] E1 AE before JV fine] E1 AE sweet JV have you been here] E1 AE you have been here JV inwards] E1 JV inward AE these few last days] E1 AE these last few days JV a nightmare it has been! Perhaps] E1 AE Journal versions adds: a nightmare it has been! She was very good in writing, but still it was dreadful. Perhaps JV afterwards] E1 JV afterward AE towards] E1 JV toward AE 275

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66.1

both his his hands, while she] E1 AE Journal version adds clause: both his hands, like a child when its little journey is done, while she, shrinking JV A Physiologist’s Wife

67.11 67.24 68.36 69.16–17

69.29

70.25 70.30 70.38 71.20

72.6 72.11 72.13 72.13

youngest] E1 younger AE JV backwards and forwards ] E1 JV backward and forward AE in astonishment] E1 AE in undisguised astonishment JV Matrimony is the natural condition of the human race.] E1 AE Journal version adds: Matrimony is the natural condition of the human race and indeed of all races save those lower forms of life which preceded the differentiation of sex. JV Not listening to her.] E1 AE Journal versions adds: ‘Frown,’ he muttered, thoughtfully,—‘frown!’ Rising from the table, he turned over the pages of a thick volume which lay upon a desk in the window. Then, with a quick nervous gesture, he drew down his left shirt-cuff, and wrote hurriedly across it. The memorandum was ‘Frown—what origin? Vide Darwin, “Expression of Emotions”—drawing forward of occipito-frontalis.’ His sister waited patiently, for she was accustomed to see him dive down every scientific by-path which led out of the main track of conversation. JV ebony] E1 AE jet JV towards] E1 JV toward AE contracted. Let me entreat . . .] E1 AE Journal version adds: . . . contracted.’ He scribbled again upon his shirt-cuff. ‘Let me entreat . . . JV To the right was a lawn, and at the far side,] E1 AE Journal version adds: To the right was a lawn, with the long chalkmarks of tennis, but without the net. At the far side of the lawn, JV academic] E1 AE academical JV Hale] E1 AE Beale JV Hale] E1 AE Beale JV Hale] E1 AE Beale JV 276

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72.19 72.27 73.25 74.34 74.21 74.34 75.25 76.38 77.5 78.7 78.35 79.7 79.20 79.24–5 80.5 81.19 82.23 82.29 82.30 83.2 83.3–5

83.20 83.28

Hale] E1 AE Beale JV paced] E1 AE passed JV that] E1 AE this JV chatelain] E1 JV chatelaine AE towards] E1 JV toward AE whisperings] E1 AE whispering JV with dark, beady eyes] E1 AE with beady black eyes JV towards] E1 JV toward AE and liable] E1 AE and she was liable JV academic] E1 AE academical JV go the length] E1 AE go to the length JV Questions of this sort] E1 AE Sexual questions of this sort JV towards] E1 JV toward AE astonishment and horror] E1 AE utter astonishment and horror JV you have made me mourn] E1 AE you made me mourn JV paused at] E1 AE stood on JV the woman’s intuition] E1 AE a woman’s intuition JV He turned her quietly away from him] E1 AE He smiled gently and turned her quietly away from him JV ‘I am not an emotional man] E1 AE ‘It is a little sudden,’ he said. ‘But I am not an emotional man JV the curve of her beautiful throat] E1 AE the long curve of her beautiful arm JV Under some foolish, aimless impulse, he took a few quick steps towards the door. Then he turned, and, throwing himself into his study chair, he plunged back into his work.] E1 AE. Journal version has instead: ‘She is weeping,’ he muttered. ‘She is sorry to leave me.’ Then he pulled down his left cuff and scribbled a memorandum. It was: ‘Influence of emotion upon the lachrymal secretion—how and why?’ day and night were one] day and night was one JV in Birchespool] E1 AE at Birchespool JV The Case of Lady Sannox

85.7 85.15

confrères] E1 confréres JV AE cap] E1 AE cup JV 277

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apparatus

85.33 86.10 86.11 87.36 89.25–6 89.27 89.32 90.10 90.35 91.1 91.11 92.26 93.7 93.8–9

His vices] E1 AE And his vices JV neutral-tinted man, with thin lips] E1 AE neutral-tinted man, this lord, with thin lips JV home-like] E1 AE quiet, home-like JV decrepid] E1 JV decrepit AE must be faced] E1 it must be faced JV AE bistouries] E1 AE bistourie JV shrank] E1 AE shrunk JV towards] E1 JV toward AE towards] E1 JV toward AE towards] E1 JV toward AE grey] E1 AE gray JV would be painless] E1 will be painless JV AE forwards] E1 JV forward AE His knife tinkled down upon the ground, but he still held the forceps and something more] E1 JV Sentence removed AE A Question of Diplomacy

94.9 94.22 96.25 96.31 97.13 97.13 97.38 99.21 99.28 99.28 99.30 100.3 100.10 100.25 101.12 101.24 102.10 102.20 102.28

wheel] E1 AE tiller JV upwards towards] E1 JV upward toward AE The lady] E1 AE His Lady JV Donnythorne’s] E1 AE Donnybrook’s JV The lady] E1 AE Lady Clara JV towards] E1 JV toward AE Thank goodness] E1 AE Thank God JV elasticity and energy] E1 AE elastic energy JV the great folding door] E1 AE the great door JV Lady Charles] E1 AE Lady Clara JV Lady Charles] E1 AE Lady Clara JV Lady Charles] E1 AE Lady Clara JV Lady Charles] E1 AE Lady Clara JV towards] E1 JV toward AE afterwards] E1 JV afterward AE She] E1 AE Lady Ida JV Lady Charles] E1 AE Lady Clara JV cord] E1 AE string JV she] E1 AE Lady Ida JV 278

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apparatus

103.14 103.16 103.16 103.20 103.27 103.36 104.15 104.19 105.27

the Lady Charles] E1 AE the Lady Clara JV kerb] E1 JV curb AE Charles] E1 AE Clara JV said the Lady] E1 AE said Lady Clara JV Charles] E1 AE Clara JV The Lady’s face] E1 AE Lady Clara’s face JV afterwards] E1 JV afterward AE afterwards] E1 JV afterward AE coincidence] E1 AE coincidence, Lady Clara JV A Medical Document

109.18 110.13 110.14 110.19–20

110.32 114.15 114.38 116.6

afterwards] E1 afterward AE in her trouble] E1 who was very ill AE hunched] E1 hunch AE a remarkably beautiful girl in evident need of my assistance. There was no wedding ring upon her finger.] E1 a remarkably beautiful girl in such a state that it would be inhuman to leave her AE the unfortunate beauty] E1 the mysterious beauty AE anyone do so] E1 anyone to do so AE upwards and upwards ] E1 upward and upward AE towards] E1 toward AE Lot No. 249

117.15–16 117.19 117.22 117.24 117.25 117.37 118.7 118.16 119.35–8

the University of Oxford] E1 JV this English University AE upwards] E1 JV upward AE Old College in Oxford] E1 JV Old College AE downwards] E1 JV downward AE grey] E1 AE gray JV grey] E1 AE gray JV servant, or scout] E1 servant, or gyp JV servant AE briar-root pipe] E1 AE brier-root pipe JV ‘Why do you say you can’t know Lee without knowing Bellingham?’   ‘Because Bellingham is engaged to his sister Eveline. Such a bright little girl, Smith! I know the whole family 279

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well. It’s disgusting to see that brute with her. A toad and a dove, that’s what they always remind me of.’] E1 AE Journal version runs: ‘That sort of thing doesn’t mean much in the East, though. It was just their way of saying that they were surprised and pleased to find a foreigner who knew something of their history and language. But how do you come to know this fellow?’   ‘Well, I come from Applesford, you know, and so does young Monkhouse Lee. His father is vicar there, and he has a sister, Eveline Lee, who is as nice a little girl as you would wish to see. When Lee began to be chummy with Bellingham, he asked him down to stay at the vicarage, and I saw something of him. The mischief of it is that he’s managed in some way to get the better of little Eveline, and she is engaged to him. What she can see in the fellow! But it’s my belief that there are many women, and Eveline Lee is among them, who are so unselfish, and so gentle, and so frightened of giving pain, that if their fathers’ gardeners were to propose to them, they would accept them for fear of hurting their feelings if they refused. Well, I suppose they know their own business best, but it makes a man grind his teeth. A dove and a toad—that’s what I always think of.’ 120.25 gossiping when I] E1 AE gossiping like a —— old woman when I JV 120.27 share it] E1 AE spare it JV 120.36 at Oxford] E1 AE at the College JV 121.6 at Oxford] E1 AE at the College JV 121.20 towards] E1 JV toward AE 121.21 sleep as he did. Even now] E1 AE sleep as he did. He could even see him at times, for when the moon lay behind the turret, and cast its black length across the green quadrangle lawn, each window stood out upon the shadow as a yellow glimmering square, and at the centre of this golden frame, Smith could sometimes see the blurred outline of the sunken head and rounded shoulders of the worker beneath him. Even now JV 280

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apparatus

121.22 121.30 122.19 123.3 123.7 123.15 123.36 124.4 124.24 124.27 124.30 125.2 126.4 126.33 127.37–8

128.4

131.18 131.21 132.21 132.28

towards] E1 JV toward AE towards] E1 JV toward AE slung] E1 AE hung JV I heard him cry out. I ran up.] E1 AE I heard him cry as I ran up JV water over him] E1 AE water on him JV grey] E1 AE gray JV into a drawer, turned the key,] E1 AE into a drawer, locked the drawer, JV Ah, it’s Abercrombie Smith] E1 AE Ah, it’s Mr. Abercrombie Smith JV frizzled it] E1 AE frizzled it up JV Smith] E1 AE Mr. Smith JV the time that you ran down,] E1 AE the time that you came down JV He is a singularly fine mummy, Smith] E1 AE He is a singularly fine mummy, Mr. Smith JV gruesome] E1 AE grewsome JV afterwards] E1 JV afterward AE disturb you. I don’t know what to make of him] E1 AE Journal version adds: disturb you. And for days sometimes he’ll keep his door locked, so as I can’t even make the bed; and then again he’ll have it open the same as ever—wide open so as all who pass can see his mummies and things: I don’t know what to make of him JV relations come. But Mr. Bellingham] E1 AE Journal version adds: relations come. There was poor Mr. Williams, who went mad in ’47. And Mr. McAlister in ’62. Brain softening from overwork, they said. He lived in this very room. I don’t speak of the delirium tremenses which I’ve had, three on each floor, and four on the lowest. But Bovine Smith] E1 AE He clattered off, with a trail of smoke behind him like a steamer, while bovine Smith JV which hung round] E1 AE which seemed to hang JV the banks of the Isis] E1 JV the banks of the river AE towards] E1 JV toward AE 281

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132.29 132.37–8 133.5 133.12 133.20 135.1 135.2 135.8–9 135.13 136.6 136.19 136.23 136.29 136.34 136.36 137.8 137.10 137.11 137.11 137.29 138.32 139.12 139.13 139.17

139.18 139.30 139.34

Oxford meadows] E1 JV meadows AE Smith gave a cheer for his friend] E1 AE Smith gave a bellow of approval JV Harrington of King’s] Harrington of Merrion’s JV small] E1 AE little JV should] E1 AE would JV Doctor] E1 AE the Reverend JV out of Oxford] E1 JV from the town AE ’varsity or the latest developments of medicine or of surgery.] E1 AE ’varsity or the latest black-letter which the book-dealers had sent to his host. JV chanced] E1 AE happened JV King’s] E1 JV Merrion AE towards] E1 JV toward AE and was still staring] E1 AE and still stood staring JV Neck and neck they dashed] E1 AE Away they dashed, neck and neck JV Harrington, endeavouring] E1 AE Harrington, and their old housekeeper, endeavoring JV the lad’s side] E1 AE his side JV had gone for a stroll] E1 AE went out for a stroll JV gone] E1 AE gone out of him JV Then Simpson] E1 AE Then Mrs. Simpson JV for he has a game-leg] E1 AE for she has a game-leg JV I should] E1 AE I would JV Monkhouse Lee] E1 AE Mr. Monkhouse Lee JV briar] E1 AE brier JV Next morning] E1 AE On the next day JV night before. A good walk] E1 AE Journal version adds: night before. It was the first time that he had ever failed to put in an appearance, and he knew that Peterson would be expecting an explanation for his absence the previous evening. A good walk JV jangled nerves.] E1 AE jangled nerves after all that had occurred. JV Oxfordshire lane] E1 JV lane AE Farlingford] E1 JV Parlingford AE 282

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140.36 141.17 141.3 141.31 142.4 142.14 144.2 144.37 145.10 145.23 146.5 146.23 146.25 146.28 146.29

whence they could look down upon the approach to the house] E1 AE whence they could overlook the whole front of the house JV Doctor] E1 AE The Reverend JV first words he said were] E1 AE first words he said was JV afterwards] E1 JV afterward AE towards] E1 JV toward AE Oxford] E1 JV the town AE Oxford] E1 JV his rooms AE placing his watch] E1 AE placed his watch JV colour of putty] E1 AE color of clay JV towards] E1 JV toward AE grey] E1 AE gray JV grey] E1 AE gray JV return] E1 AE go back JV Old College, Oxford] E1 JV Old College AE afterwards] E1 JV afterward AE The Doctors of Hoyland

154.21 154.32 157.28 158.8 158.26 159.26–7 159.36 161.26 162.6 162.23–4 163.31 163.38

mammas] E1 JV AE mamas MS the night performing] E1 JV AE the night sometimes performing MS towards] E1 MS JV toward AE showed herself] E1 shown herself MS JV AE afterwards] E1 MS JV afterward AE And this very detestation] E1 JV AE forms opening sentence of next para MS hoof] E1 JV AE hoofs MS It struck me during the night] E1 JV AE I sometimes think struck through and replaced with: It struck me during the night MS he would vouchsafe] E1 JV AE which he would vouchsafe MS inevitably] E1 JV AE necessarily MS always] E1 JV AE ever MS mammas] E1 JV AE mamas MS 283

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The Surgeon Talks 164.14 165.28 168.24–5

so busy in keeping up] E1 so busy keeping up AE afterwards] E1 afterward AE very well since. The mischief was so great that the arm snapped as we drew it from the night-dress. No, I don’t think] E1 very well since. No I don’t think AE

284

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Explanatory Notes The Preface 3.1 Preface For the 1903 Author’s Edition, in which The Stark Munro Letters and Round the Red Lamp were published together, ACD added a second preface of a few hundred words, focusing solely on the value of Stark Munro as a study (rather than a mere ‘story’) of a young man’s material and spiritual development. He had nothing further to say about Round the Red Lamp in this edition. 3.4 a friend in America ACD’s The Stark Munro Letters, published in the following year, used the same device of letters written to an American friend. The form of private correspondence allowed more latitude in the medical content of the books. 3.9 realism ACD’s Preface signals that he was already aware of the adverse reactions to some of the explicit medical content of his work: the plan for serialization in the Idler had been disrupted by his editor Jerome K. Jerome, who found some of the content too ‘strong’. In 1894, ACD was a public participant in the continuing debate over the ethics and aesthetics of ‘realism’ and Naturalism, having defended the publication of George Moore’s novel Esther Waters earlier in 1894. The Preface situates RTRL in those debates, and many reviewers, who took objection to the explicitness of ACD’s stories, also evoked this context. Some suggested that the warning to sensitive and/or women readers in the Preface did not work. For the late Victorian debate over realism and Naturalism, see the Introduction. 3.23 alterative ‘Medicines which gradually restore the nutrition of the body to a healthy condition, without producing evacuations, or immediately exerting any very evident action upon the nervous system’ (Quain’s Dictionary of Medicine). These Explanatory Notes will use the 1902 edition of Quain’s Dictionary of Medicine to retain a sense of how medical terms and illnesses were understood at the time of the composition of the stories. 3.25–6 I have reserved them from serial publication See the publication history of RTRL in the Introduction. 3.33 P.S. Jerome K. Jerome commissioned the series, but in the end published only four of the stories while others appeared elsewhere. See 285

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Introduction. In the Appleton Edition in America, the P.S. was changed to read: ‘P.S.—You ask about the Red Lamp. It is the usual sign of the general practitioner in England.’ Behind the Times First published in Round the Red Lamp, October 1894. 7.16 vaccinated me The first vaccine in England was developed in the 1790s for smallpox. In the late Victorian period vaccination remained a contested preventative measure, the subject of medical and public controversy. ACD as a general practitioner published strong defences of vaccination in the local press, marking him out as a modern medic (see Appendix 4, ‘Compulsory Vaccination’). 7.16–17 cut me for an abscess Treatment was typically to make an incision into an abscess to allow it to drain. 7.17 blistered me for mumps An infection of the salivary glands, typical in children. Victorian doctors recommended little intervention and bed rest, except in more severe cases, where heat was applied to the skin around the parotid gland to relieve inflammation. The virus causing mumps was not identified until 1908. 7.37–8 George the Fourth and even of the Regency George IV ruled 1820–30. The narrow definition of the Regency era refers to his proxy status as monarch between 1811 and 1820, as his father George III was insane and deemed unable to rule. 8.4 the First Reform Bill . . . and the Corn Laws The First Reform Bill, a major extension of the franchise, was in 1832; Robert Peel finally repealed the divisive Corn Laws (brought in after the end of the war with France in 1815) in 1846. 8.13–14 apprenticed to a surgeon . . . a violated grave The nineteenth century’s major reform of medical education began with the Apothecaries Act in 1815, but formal examination and official licensing through recognized medical bodies only finally replaced apprenticeship with the Medical Act of 1858. Dr Winter’s age is better indicated by the reference to his anatomical study of bodies taken from the grave. The scandal of ‘body snatching’ became notorious with the case in Edinburgh in 1828 of Burke and Hare, two men who supplied anatomical schools with dead bodies stolen from graveyards before moving on to murder on demand. The scandal was generated by the growth in medical education. 286

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Strict rules that only the bodies of executed criminals could be used for anatomical study led to a severe shortage. This stimulated the Anatomy Act of 1832, which extended the provision of bodies for study beyond criminals to paupers. It interlocked with the new Poor Laws to provide a steady supply of bodies. Religious objections to the practice continued throughout the century, and in 1888 the GP Edward Berdoe, writing under a pseudonym, exposed the contempt towards human remains and the illegal disposal of bodies and body parts in anatomy schools in his book St Bernard’s: The Romance of a Medical Student. 8.16–18 Vaccination . . . inoculation Inoculation is the direct introduction of a pathogen into the body in order to build immunity. It came to be considered much riskier than vaccination, where a weakened version of the pathogen is introduced. The development of vaccines for specific diseases accelerated in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly after the innovations of Louis Pasteur (1822–95). In the 1790s, Edward Jenner coined the term vaccine from vacca (cow), when he noticed that the lesser illness of cowpox could protect humans from the much more deadly smallpox. 8.18 bleeding Bleeding was common in ancient and early modern medicine as a method for relieving hot vapours from the ill body. Although the use of medicinal leeches and cupping to draw blood to the surface of the skin still had advocates, these were no longer orthodox treatments in the nineteenth century. 8.19 chloroform Chloroform was first used as an anaesthetic in 1847 by Scottish physician Sir James Young Simpson. Before the innovative use of ether and chloroform in the 1840s, surgeons operated on conscious patients, and both the nerve required, and the speed of surgery, were central to the heroic self-image of surgeons over other medical practitioners. 8.21 Laennec René Laennec (1781–1826) was a French doctor and the inventor of the stethoscope in 1816. It became a symbol of medical modernity in the Victorian period. 8.28 germ theory The rejection of germ theory (the idea that some diseases are communicated by micro-organisms) associates the old doctor with opponents of this modern theory. Germ theory was propounded by Louis Pasteur in the 1850s, and later by Robert Koch in Berlin in the 1880s. ACD had travelled to Berlin to see Koch reveal his new ‘cure’ for tuberculosis, based on germ theory, in 1890. ACD wrote 287

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up his experiences in newspaper reports on Koch (see Appendix 4). In England, modern germ theory was still strongly opposed by influential figures such as Florence Nightingale, who had redesigned the nation’s hospitals on the mistaken assumptions of the ‘miasma theory’ (that disease was caused by ‘bad air’). However, medics associated with modern advances in Britain, such as Joseph Lister, supported the germ theory. Controversy over Lister’s use of antiseptics in surgery (to avoid infection from germs) feature in the following story, ‘His First Operation’. 8.30 Darwinian theory Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, first proposed in print in 1859, remained controversial, since the mechanism of evolution (genes) had not yet been found, but it was a broadly accepted thesis for biological development in scientific circles by the 1880s. 8.35 Dietetic treatment Medical amelioration through diet. As today, there were various dietary fashions that came in and out of vogue in the nineteenth century. 8.37 Massage The medicalization of massage therapy occurred in the course of the nineteenth century, with professional bodies for mechanotherapy or physiotherapy set up in the 1880s and 1890s. 9.4–5 find the stone In the era before anaesthetic and antiseptic, gallstone surgery was thought to succeed best with a quick and decisive act of removal; the longer the operation, the greater the likelihood of infection and death. 9.11 British Medical Association The BMA, founded in 1832, was one of the principal vehicles for modern reform of the medical profession. It campaigned to protect the practice of medicine from the host of ‘quacks’ and unlicensed ‘irregulars’. Its publication, the British Medical Journal, issued weekly, reported the latest advances in treatment and research. 9.15 that magnetic thing Used in the loose sense of charisma, magnetism also evokes the controversial treatment associated with Mesmerism, which claimed to manipulate an energy called ‘animal magnetism’. The Mesmerist recharged the energies of the ill patient by making magnetic passes over the body. Mesmerism was firmly pushed to the margins of medical orthodoxy in the 1840s, although it retained important advocates. 9.32 alkaloids Many of these plant-based medicines, such as morphine, strychnine, digitalis, ergot and quinine, were used in the 288

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nineteenth century to treat bodily pain. All required expert medical attention, as an incorrect dose could have fatal results. 9.33 senna and calomel Dried senna leaves were used traditionally as a laxative, and still form the basis of treatment. Calomel was mercury chloride. It was used as a treatment for a wide variety of illnesses in the nineteenth century, and in increasingly ‘heroic’ doses, which did relieve some symptoms but could also cause massive mercury poisoning. It was still being widely used in the 1890s, as the poisonous effects of mercury were only understood in the early twentieth century. 10.1 mitral murmur and a bronchitic rale A disorder of the mitral valve in the heart; a rale is the crackling sound heard in the lungs. 10.5 epidemic of influenza ACD’s abortive attempt to become an eye specialist in London in the spring of 1891 was cut short by a nearfatal bout of influenza. The ‘Russian flu’ pandemic of that winter, which recurred for several winters, killed one million people, and in England victims included the poets Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. It killed ACD’s sister Annette in 1889. 10.16 Mrs Hudson Sherlock Holmes’s housekeeper was also called Mrs Hudson, and had first appeared in The Sign of the Four (1890). His First Operation First published in Round the Red Lamp, October 1894. 11.6 Tron church Christ’s Kirk at the Tron was opened in 1641, and was a principal parish church in the centre of Edinburgh. It was destroyed by fire in 1824. Its clock-tower was a major landmark on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. 11.10 Rutherford’s historic bar Famous bar in Edinburgh, which still retains its nineteenth-century timber frontage. 11.38 the infirmary The Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh had close ties to the university, which had become a leading centre of medical training due to its emphasis on practical experience. This is where Joseph Bell, who employed ACD as a clerk, worked. The university was also surrounded by extramural anatomy schools, where a small fee allowed entry to lecture demonstrations of surgery or dissection. 12.10 Archer Rodin and Key suggest that this figure might be modelled on Joseph Lister, and suggest that Hayes might be James Simpson, who was one of Lister’s opponents. In a letter to his mother, 289

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ACD refers to Robert Lawson Tait (1845–99) as a deadly rival of Lister, publicly rejecting the use of carbolic spray as an antiseptic after 1878. 12.25 popliteal aneurism The popliteal artery passes through the knee and supplies blood to the calf, knee and thigh. A rupture or aneurysm can cause fatal blood loss. 12.25–6 Colles’ fracture Fairly common fracture of the radius bone in the forearm, named after the Irish doctor Abraham Colles, who first described it in 1814. 12.26 spina bifida Spina bifida is a birth defect that occurs when the spine and spinal cord do not form properly, in the most severe cases leaving a portion of the spinal cord open along the middle and lower back. Quain’s Dictionary of Medicine suggested in 1902 that most cases were fatal to newborns, who died within days or weeks of birth, although surgery was sometimes attempted on less serious cases. 12.26 tropical abscess A reference to tropical pyomyositis, a disease often seen in tropical countries, which is characterized by suppuration within the skeletal muscles, manifesting as single or multiple abscesses. It was first described by the German doctor Julius Scriba in 1885. 12.26 elephantiasis Elephantiasis is the enlargement and hardening of limbs or body parts due to tissue swelling, producing serious deformity. The most famous case at the time was Joseph Merrick (1862–90), who was known as ‘The Elephant Man’ and was rescued from freak shows by the London surgeon Frederick Treves, as detailed in Treves’s memoir The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923). 12.34 carbuncle An inflammatory swelling starting in the skin follicles and spreading to the adjacent areas of skin. Surgical excision was recommended for larger instances, although not, Quain’s Dictionary suggests, for those ‘exceeding an orange in size’. 12.37 pemphigus Skin disease characterized by large, fluid-filled eruptions, which are itchy and painful. Quain’s Dictionary suggests antiseptic treatment, which required ‘utmost care and patience on the part of both nurses and medical attendant’. 12.38 metacarpal Large bone of the hand. 13.15 tenacula A sharp-pointed hook with a handle used mainly in surgery for seizing and holding parts (such as arteries). 13.15 canula A small tube for insertion into a body cavity, duct or vessel. 290

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13.15 trocars Hollow tubes through which other surgical instruments can be inserted into the body. 13.20 Anthony Browne Rodin and Key, who first collected Round the Red Lamp together in a modern edition, speculate in their notes that this figure is based on P. H. Watson, who was named by Bell as the first surgeon to operate on a larynx in this way. 13.25 dressers Assistants to the surgeon, who prepare patients for surgery in theatre. 13.26 the Puffing billy . . . Lister’s antiseptic spray Joseph Lister (1827–1911) was the founder of antiseptic surgery, pioneered when he was professor first at Edinburgh and then Glasgow. He introduced a steam spray in the 1860s, named after the early steam engine Puffing Billy, which was meant to ensure that the atmosphere in a surgical theatre was antiseptic. Lister’s views were modern and contentious: many surgeons passionately opposed him. Later, when the importance of an antiseptic environment had been accepted, he discontinued the use of the carbolic spray, when the sterilization of hands and equipment was considered more important. 13.27 Hays This most likely represents a figure such as the Edinburgh obstetrician, James Simpson, who was a firm opponent of Lister’s views on antiseptics. 14.1 cancer of the parotid The parotid glands are the largest salivary glands in the mouth. 14.2 carotids This names the two main arteries which carry blood to the head and neck, and their two main branches. 14.23 jugulars . . . ramus of the jaw The large veins in the neck and the vertical portion of the lower mandible that form the moveable hinge joints of the jaw. 14.35–8 He says, says he, / If you fly with me / You’ll be mistress of the ice-cream van Likely to be a fragment of music hall song, bubbling up to the surface. There was an entire sub-genre of popular songs about British women lured away by exotic Italian men who were associated with the ice-cream trade. A Straggler of ’15 First published in Black & White, 21 March 1891. 17.5–7 Woolwich . . . Arsenal Woolwich Arsenal in south-east London, south of the Thames, was used for gun storage from the 1540s; 291

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just over a hundred years later it was considerably expanded to include gunpowder storage and a range to prove guns for the Board of Ordnance, which was independent of the army and navy. It became the home of the Royal Artillery in 1720. Its grounds were further expanded throughout the eighteenth century to become a key complex of Britain’s military machine. It was renamed the Royal Arsenal in 1805. 17.30 Daddy Brewster The details of the action of the old soldier at the Battle of Waterloo are likely based on the story of Private Joshua Brewer of the Royal Waggon Train. This is clearly the basis for ACD’s story of Gregory Brewster, although with some significant changes of detail. 18.11 sentry-go Sentry duty 19.17–18 brown medal . . . purple ribbon Every British soldier present at the Battle of Waterloo was awarded a medal, an award suggested by the Prince Regent in 1816. About 39,000 medals were struck, but these were silver and on a red ribbon. The exploits of Gregory Brewster in the story, supplying the 3rd Guards with ammunition to hold Hougoumont Farm, follows closely the actions of Private Joshua Brewer in the real battle. Brewer was given the Waterloo Medal, but there was also a story that Brewer was awarded a special medal for his act of bravery in the presence of the Prince Regent himself. Weirdly, there is an extant silver medal in the Royal Logistic Corps Museum, marked: ‘Reward of Bravery to Cpl. Brewster, R. W. T. [Royal Waggon Train], From the Officers of the Coldstream Gds. for his Action at Waterloo, June 18 1815’ – but this was likely struck after the Conan Doyle story was published, since it uses the name Brewster. 19.25–6 Prince Regent, Lord Hill, Lord Saltoun The Prince Regent served as proxy monarch between 1811 and 1820, as his father George III was insane. He became George IV in 1820. General Rowland Hill, First Viscount Hill (1772–1842), was a career soldier who commanded the Second Corps at the Battle of Waterloo, leading the charge against the French Imperial Guard. He rose to be Commander in Chief of the British Army in 1828. Alexander George Fraser, the 17th Lord Saltoun (1785–1853), was a captain in the First Regiment of Guards that came under sustained fire in the orchard at Hougoumont Farm and was knighted for his service there. He went on to command a brigade during the First Opium War in 1841. 19.31 Colonels Maitland and Byng General Sir Peregrine Maitland (1777–1854) commanded the First Corps at the Battle of Waterloo. 292

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John Byng, First Earl of Stafford (1772–1860) commanded the Second Guards Brigade at the Battle of Waterloo. 19.32 Farmhouse of Hougoumont Château d’Hougoumont, because it had a walled compound, became a vital advanced position for British forces to protect their right flank during the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. It came under sustained artillery fire from French forces, as Napoleon wanted the position completely destroyed. The British commander, the Duke of Wellington, ordered the farm building to be held at any cost, and reinforcements repelled both infantry and cavalry attacks for the whole day. Hougoumont was a crucial strategic hold for the British troops, and Napoleon’s commanders over-committed troops to its gain, significantly weakening their chances of winning the overall battle. Rather like the heroic defence at Rorke’s Drift in the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879, such actions became an essential part of the martial ideology of the British Empire: a small group of brave British soldiers save the day. 19.36 hasten up the reserve ammunition This element of the story is borrowed from the actions of Private Joshua Brewer during the battle. 20.26–7 dulce et decorum est Shortened version of the line from Roman poet Horace, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for the homeland’. It was already used extensively as a sentiment in the eighteenth-century classical revival, but the centrality of the phrase to martial ideology was strongest in the nineteenth century. It was famously repudiated as the ‘old Lie’ in Wilfred Owen’s poem titled with the phrase, published after his death in 1918. 22.26 new-fangled names The Cardwell Reforms (1868–74) and the Childers Reforms (1881) modernized the army, and created a professional force in the manner of the new Prussian army, doing away with the gentlemanly-amateur commission systems that were in operation for officers at the time of Waterloo and that survived until the Crimean War in the 1850s. It completely reorganized regiments under new names. 23.10 stocks High leather neck ‘stocks’ were part of the uniform of soldiers and Royal Marines in the early nineteenth century, intended partly to protect from injury by a sword, but also to improve a soldier’s bearing, by straightening the back. They were uncomfortable and unpopular among troops. 24.7–8 three now than one In the army ranks, one stripe is a corporal and three stripes a sergeant. 293

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24.19 non-commissioned mess Non-commissioned officers were appointed on merit from the lower ranks, whereas gentlemen were appointed as commissioned officers direct from military academies. In mess halls the officers would dine separately from the men, with separate messes also for commissioned or non-commissioned status. 24.28 shako From the Hungarian term csako for a peaked hat, this is a tall, cylindrical hat with a visor and badge, and often decorated with a plume. They had nearly died out among infantry troops in the British Army before the First World War, but have remained part of ceremonial dress in many armed forces. 24.29–30 third guards . . . Scots Guards The Third Regiment of the Foot Guards had been named during Queen Anne’s reign, and were stationed at Hougoumont Farm at the Battle of Waterloo. They returned to their older name, the Scots Guards, under reforms in 1877. 25.13 butts Mound on which artillery targets were placed on a practice range. 25.19 breech-piece Another sign of age: army rifles became predominantly breech-loading by the 1840s, replacing older guns loaded via the muzzle, and which had to be primed to fire after each bullet. Breech-loaders allowed for easier loading and rapid fire, escalating the casualties in battle. 25.22 Brown Bess Nickname of the British Army’s muzzle-loading flintlock musket, which remained in use for over a hundred years, from 1722 to 1838. 25.25 South Africa now Probably a reference to the First Boer War (1880–81) in which a small volunteer force of Boers, armed with modern German guns and sharpshooter training, defeated the British Army over the annexation of the Transvaal to the British Empire. Tensions remained high, leading to the Second Boer War (1899–1902), which again started with a series of catastrophic defeats for the British Army, unable to adapt to the modern guerrilla tactics of the Boers. 26.2 sappers, linesmen and dragoons Sappers are combat engineers, who prepare field defences or assist in the breaching of fortifications. Linesmen were infantry organized in two to four ranks of foot soldiers who would advance side by side in rigid alignment, in order to maximize the effect of their firepower. This was a conventional mode of engagement from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The British Army discovered the limits of the tactic in a number of defeats 294

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in the second half of the Victorian period, but was slow to abandon it. Dragoons are mounted infantry; that is, they are mobilized on horses but fight as infantry on foot. 26.26 Joshua Sixth book of the Old Testament, which contains accounts of the battles fought by the Israelites: an appropriate military history for an old soldier. 28.9 paregoric bottle A tincture of opium commonly prescribed to alleviate pain. 28.21 Quarter Brass Rendition of Quatre Bras, where a battle took place between Wellington’s and Napoleon’s forces two days before Waterloo, on 16 June 1815. The Third Generation First published in Round the Red Lamp, October 1894. 30.1 The Third Generation The title is an echo of the biblical curse of the Old Testament God, where at Exodus 34:7 it is warned that God will visit ‘the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation’. This moral framework converges with emergent Victorian thinking about biological inheritances, and the passing on of conditions to offspring. This story focuses on syphilis, and there was strong recognition of hereditary syphilis, but also a lively dispute in the 1870s and 1880s about whether it could travel (as in this story) down to the third generation. It could not – it is passed only from mother to child in pregnancy – but this was only determined in the twentieth century. 30.4 Scudamore Lane No such street exists near the Monument, at the heart of the old City of London, and its location would have made it an unusual address for a prominent doctor. It is a long way from the grand houses of society doctors on Harley Street and its surrounding streets in the West End. Perhaps this is an apt address, however, since the patients would not wish to advertise consulting a doctor with a specialism in sexually transmitted diseases. This oblique paragraph hints at the evasions the story will take, since it is focused on syphilis without ever naming it. 30.10 Horace Selby Richard Dalby suggests in his edition of RTRL that one possible model for this striking figure could be Sir Alfred Cooper, a society doctor who specialized in the treatment of syphilis, 295

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publishing Syphilis and Pseudosyphilis in 1884 (revised in 1895). He also wrote the long entry on syphilis for Quain’s Dictionary. The DNB records that Cooper ‘was highly regarded by the profession and was trusted as a broadminded confidant by his patients’. He was knighted for his services to medicine by one of his patients, Edward VII. Another key work of the era was Jonathan Hutchinson’s Syphilis (1887). Hutchinson’s list of symptoms for ‘congenital syphilis’ are used by Selby in the story. ACD gained his MD at Edinburgh with his thesis ‘An Essay Upon the Vasomotor Changes in Tabes Dorsalis’. The thesis contributed to the contemporary medical debate about whether tabes dorsalis, a degeneration of the nerves in the dorsal columns of the spinal cord, was caused by syphilis. ACD’s professional interest in this sexually transmitted disease converges in this and the last story of RTRL, ‘The Surgeon Talks’. 31.15 bluestone Copper sulphate, commonly used in the nineteenth century as an emetic. 31.16 ‘Caustic’ Quain’s Dictionary defines caustics as ‘Substances or measures which destroy organic tissues with which they may be brought in contact’ and which ‘are chiefly employed to destroy unhealthy, exuberant or malignant growths’. 31.17 bistouries Surgical knives, deriving from the French word for dagger. 31.21 red medical directory This is Kelly’s London Medical Directory, an essential guide to every aspect of the medical profession in the capital, growing to five volumes in the 1893 edition. 31.22 glass model of a human eye This illustrative model is presumably used to explain to patients the effect of diseases, such as syphilis, on the eye. Ocular problems, such as clouding of the cornea, were used as an early indication of signs of hereditary syphilis. ACD had hoped to specialize as an oculist. 32.33 his shin The young man is showing a lesion on the skin, one of the typical early symptoms of syphilis. Congenital or hereditary syphilis was marked by major skin lesions, but also deformities of bone development, including in the shin bone, the tibia. 33.2 Can you account for it? Selby is asking the young lord whether he has recently had premarital sex, being infected that way perhaps via an infected prostitute. This could indicate whether his symptoms are those of primary rather than hereditary syphilis. It is an extremely indelicate but necessary question to ask. 296

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33.16 serpiginous A skin lesion with a wavy (or ‘creeping’) margin, often taken as a symptom of hereditary syphilis. Quain’s Dictionary defines serpiginous as a ‘term used in connection with certain morbid conditions, such as ulcers or eruptions, when they spread in a creeping manner’. 33.19–21 teeth . . . eye Selby also checks sites identified as markers of congenital syphilis. Jonathan Hutchinson suggested that a set of symptoms in eyes, ears and teeth, known as the ‘Hutchinson triad’, were key to identifying the hereditary version of the disease. ‘Hutchinson’s teeth’ describes a condition in which the incisors and molars take on a triangular or peg-like appearance, are widely spaced, and have weakened enamel. 33.26 first swims into the field of his telescope In his study, Conan Doyle: Writing, Profession and Practice, Douglas Kerr suggests an echo in this phrase of the poem by the medical student John Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’: ‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.’ 33.36 interstitial keratitis A disease of the eye: corneal scarring due to chronic inflammation of the corneal stroma. For Hutchinson, it is the defining sign of hereditary syphilis. 33.37 strumous diathesis Diathesis is a hereditary or constitutional predisposition to suffer a group of diseases, an allergy or other disorder. ‘Strumous’ points to the hereditary tendency to chronic inflammations of the glands of the lymphatic system – sometimes associated with ‘scrofula’, a diagnosis then falling into disuse. 34.12 The great Corinthian In the Regency Period, a Corinthian was an upper-class enthusiast for sport, such as those depicted in ACD’s boxing novel Rodney Stone (1896). It might also be a reference to the Corinthian Club set up in Glasgow in 1752. 34.30 cutaneous That is, on the skin. The ‘pox’ frequently left lesions on the skin, often on the hands and face, and black spots signalled the presence of the disease. 35.25 Pope’s famous couplet This thought is left unfinished, but perhaps the doctor is reaching for Alexander Pope’s couplet from An Essay on Criticism, ‘Good nature and good sense must ever join; / To err is human, to forgive, divine.’ Rodin and Key nominate: ‘Ask you what provocation I have had? / The strong antipathy of good to bad.’ 36.4 the trite old text Biblical curse, as at Exodus 34:7, in which God will visit ‘the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation’. 297

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38.14–15 King William Street Main street connecting Bank to London Bridge, and thus the first major street Sir Francis would meet after leaving Selby’s house near the Monument. A False Start First published in the Christmas edition of The Gentlewoman, December 1891. 39.12 it would be his first This is a directly autobiographical story. In Chapters 6 and 7 of Memories and Adventures, ACD focuses on the very tight expenses of his first weeks up as a medical practitioner, noting that he had ‘bought a red lamp on tick’ (that is, on credit) for his first practice address in Southsea in June 1882. His letters of the time and later reminiscences are particularly focused on his precarious finances in the first months and years of his general practice. The incident with the gypsy returns also in The Stark Munro Letters. 39.25 before he had said a word This attribute of his old professor, Joseph Bell (1837–1911), is frequently claimed to have been a key source for the deductive logic of Sherlock Holmes. Bell’s ‘strong point’, ACD recalls in Memories and Adventures, ‘was diagnosis, not only of disease, but of occupation and character’. ACD worked as Bell’s outpatient clerk at the Edinburgh Infirmary and observed him in action. The comedy of Wilkinson’s resolute failure to diagnose his early patients in the manner of Bell is a joke on ACD’s own early ineptitude: more Watson than Holmes. 41.19 Quain’s Dictionary The successful doctor Sir Richard Quain edited the pre-eminent medical reference work in the late Victorian period, the first edition in one volume appearing in 1882. 42.20 acne rosacea . . . arsenic Quain’s Dictionary defines this as ‘a chronic inflammation of the face, attended with sensations of burning or stinging, and leading to a permanent enlargement of vessels and the formation of pimples’. Listed treatments do not suggest arsenic, however. The making up of medicines and selling them to patients was a crucial element of income for a general practitioner. 42.37 gipsy van This anecdote is repeated in chapter 7 of Memories and Adventures, ‘My Start in Southsea’. 43.23 spica bandage, secundum artem A strip of material such as gauze used to protect, immobilize, compress or support a wound or 298

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injured body part. The Latin tag means ‘in the manner of the trade’ – i.e. professionally. 44.4 certify Measles was one of the infectious diseases that by the 1890s was subject to public health notifications and isolation measures, in an attempt to stop their spread. Rodin and Key suggest that this implies that the ‘gipsy’ mother wants to register the presence of measles so that she would not be implicated if the baby died. 44.22 make a bill of The bane of a Victorian doctor’s life was the number of unpaid bills for consultations and medicines. In Memories and Adventures, the ‘gipsy’ family also succeed in gaining free medicine and a sixpence from the cash-strapped ACD. 47.13 trephining Trephining, or trepanning, was the abandoned method of boring holes in the skull as a form of treatment to relieve headaches or treat madness. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the London doctor Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton speculated that early man had used trepanation as a primitive treatment. Victorians expressed confidence in their modern medical methods by contrasting them with pre-modern techniques. 47.30 The Lancet ACD also began to send in short notices of interesting cases to medical journals in the 1880s in the hope of establishing a medical reputation. See Appendix 4. The Curse of Eve First published in Round the Red Lamp, October 1894. title The Curse of Eve The title echoes the Old Testament Book of Genesis 3:16 ‘Unto the woman He said: I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in pain thou shalt bring forth Children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.’ ACD read out this story to the Authors’ Club, which had been founded by Walter Besant and others in 1891. Lellenberg quotes the reminiscence of the journalist Ralph Blumenfeld, the editor of the Daily Express, who was present at the reading: ‘Dr Conan Doyle rose to read from a new story which he had just completed. It was all about obstetrics and the terror of a household in which a woman was about to become a mother; all about the husband’s agonies, the doctor’s embarrassments and professional distress – I forget the details, but [remember] a long, gloomy, ghastly 299

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dissertation which . . . made me feel unhappy and cold. Finally, the big man with the rough voice stopped talking and sat down abruptly. Walter Besant turned to me and said: “Have you ever heard worse?” I had not.’ In the early version, the wife dies in labour, as you might expect in a Naturalist tale about the fateful determinism of social circumstances. But as a consequence of the reaction at the Authors’ Club, ACD changed the ending of the story. On 2 May 1894 he wrote to his mother, ‘I shall also modify at least one of those strong stories to make them less painful.’ This was another instance where ACD discovered that medical ‘realism’ was not appreciated by his general readership. 51.7 New North Road This locates the story in the working-class district of Hoxton, north of the old City of London. It was the centre of the furniture trade in the nineteenth century. Charles Booth’s ‘poverty map’ of London in 1890 shows the street lined with relatively affluent houses. A visiting doctor calls it later in the story ‘an improving quarter’. 51.35 Camberwell Originally a village south of the City of London, the area was incorporated into Greater London by 1889. 52.6 Bridport Place This street is near the Regent’s Canal in Hackney. The streets in the following few paragraphs enable the reader to precisely map the drama of searching for the doctor in the streets of Hoxton and Hackney. 52.7 retained five months in advance The story shows the structure of arrangements for medical doctors attending the birth of children in the nineteenth century. A fee reserves the doctor in advance: Johnson has to go up through the hierarchy of medical expertise and social class, the fee increasing each time, as the case becomes more complicated. The role of the midwife is barely mentioned, even though historically it was informal networks of experienced women who supervised births, and still did so in working-class communities. In this story, Jane is attended by her mother. As part of the process of medical professionalization in the nineteenth century, medical certification increasingly eclipsed the role of women, as ‘obstetrics’ became a recognized specialism. The Obstetrical Society was founded in 1826 and by mid-century the royal medical colleges had established examinations for midwifery that excluded women. 54.23 thick frieze overcoat Coarse woollen cloth. 55.18 typhoid Local outbreaks of typhus were frequently associated with poor drainage in working-class areas of London in the nineteenth century. 300

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57.4 A.C.E. mixture This is a standard medical mixture for anaesthetic effect: usually, 1 part alcohol, 2 parts chloroform and 3 parts ether, although other proportions were used in commercial versions. It was first used in the 1860s, and was recommended by the British Medical Journal to aid childbirth in the 1880s. 57.15 City Road The major thoroughfare linking Hoxton and Shoreditch with Islington, this had grander houses, set back from the main street: a wealthier area. 57.29 speaking tube Speaking tubes that amplified the voice through a flexible pipe began to be used in large domestic houses in the nineteenth century: again, an indicator of a wealthier area of town. 57.35 three guineas, payable at the time A guinea was a gold coin, value £1 and 1 shilling. This was a large sum, and ‘payable at the time’ indicates that the doctor wishes to be paid upfront. Unpaid bills were a perennial problem for doctors at all levels of society, but here there might be a suspicion a lowly outfitter might not be able to pay the large fee for the consultation. 58.27 sweetish, insidious smell The vapour of the A.C.E. mixture. Sweethearts First published in The Idler, June 1894. 61.14–15 town . . . unlovely were it not for its glorious neighbour Likely a reflection of ACD’s view of the relation of Portsmouth and Southsea. 62.1 brae Scottish term for a hill-slope: perhaps this indicates that the doctor is a Scot or had Scottish medical training. 62.10 mail coaches Mail coaches began to decline after the first use of the railways to transport post in 1830. The last regular mail coach service in England ended in 1846. 62.12 Pickwick Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club were issued as a monthly serial over twenty months, 1836– 37. The success of this format helped establish the commercial serial form for Victorian fiction. 62.15 the Mutiny The Indian Mutiny (as it was called at the time) was an uprising against British colonial rule in 1857, brutally suppressed by 1859. It was a defining trauma of the British Empire. 62.16 Crimean winter The Crimean War, fought by a British and Ottoman alliance against the Russians, lasted from October 1853 to 301

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February 1856. There were catastrophic casualties from outbreaks of disease, particularly among the British troops. These led the volunteer nurse Florence Nightingale to campaign for major reforms to hospital design and the treatment of infectious diseases, leading her to become a central figure in nineteenth-century medicine. 62.17 death of Gordon Major-General Charles Gordon (1833– 85) was one of the most celebrated soldiers of the nineteenth century, driven by an evangelical fervour, often to the extent of ignoring the orders of his superiors. When he was besieged in Khartoum in Sudan by an Islamic uprising, the British government, with great reluctance, eventually funded a vast relief expedition up the Nile to rescue him. This cost millions, and the skirmishes as it travelled along the path of the Nile resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. The relief expedition arrived too late: Gordon had been killed two days before. This glorious failure was a defining part of late Victorian imperial ideology: Gordon’s reputation as hero of Empire was skewered in Lytton Strachey’s book Eminent Victorians (1918). ACD’s dislike of Egypt and the Sudan are expressed in The Tragedy of the Korosko (1898). A Physiologist’s Wife First published in Blackwood’s Magazine, September 1890. In Memories and Adventures, ACD noted that this ‘was written when I was under the influence of Henry James’. 67.4 Professor Ainsley Grey There are some incidental details that suggest that the physiologist’s areas of research interest might have been modelled on the biologist Thomas Huxley (though Huxley was happily married). Dalby also suggests that the prominent palaeontologist Sir Richard Owen (1804–92) might also have been a model, but ACD’s training in Edinburgh would have provided many models for the emotionally repressed and anti-human man of science. This had become a conventional trope of the culture, most schematically explored in Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1882). 67.6 Claude Bernard . . . John Hunter Claude Bernard (1813– 78) was an eminent French physiologist, widely credited with helping to secure the experimental method in the laboratory, establishing the basis for empirical science, and for critical research on the function of the liver and the vasomotor system. He provided the model of methodological 302

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approach that Emile Zola wished to translate to literature in his manifesto essay, ‘The Experimental Novel’, in 1880. Despite British censorship of Zola’s work, ACD was defending this kind of realism in the press in the 1890s. John Hunter (1728–93) was a Scottish doctor and a leading anatomist. He built up a private collection of anatomical specimens, still displayed at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow and at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. 67.21 Quaker-like The dissenting Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, observed equality between men and women, but also advocated modesty and simplicity in dress. 67.38 Bathybius . . . Lithcocci In 1868, the biologist T. H. Huxley announced that he had discovered the existence of the ‘primordial slime’ from which all life had emerged from the oceans. He named the substance Bathybius Haeckelii after the German scientist Ernst Haeckel, whose work had persuaded Huxley of dynamic processes of evolution, and who had speculated on this Urschleim, or primordial slime. The substance was a material underpinning for Huxley’s ‘The Physical Basis of Life’ (1868), an essay that became one of the most widely read statements of the new biology after Darwin. By 1872, however, Huxley’s claims about Bathybius Haeckelii were unravelling and he withdrew his findings. Lithococcus are a species of small freshwater snails. 68.28 the superior or male type By mid-century, the new authority of science meant that biological explanations could be applied to cultural formations, so that social inequalities or gender differences became selfevident natural or biological conditions. This was also a frequent basis for the argument against opening the medical profession to women, a theme taken up later in RTRL in ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’. 69.5 all disturbances are vascular ACD’s satirical rendition of the reductive biological explanations of human emotional life, which regarded psychological states as epiphenomenal effects of biological conditions. 69.8 feminine quality of receptivity In much Victorian scientific and cultural thought, women’s biological organization was regarded as more refined and sympathetic or receptive than that of the male. As a result, though, female nerves were considered to suffer disturbance or derangement more easily. 70.6–7 differentiation of the protoplasm That is, the origin of all life from the founding substance (proto + plasm), differentiation being the process of dynamic evolution. 303

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70.16 McMurdo The first book edition was published at a time when there was a typographical trend for presenting surnames beginning with ‘Mc’ or ‘Mac’ by using a forward-facing apostrophe to represent a superscript ‘c’. In ‘A Physiologist’s Wife’, for example, the name McMurdo was presented as M‘Murdo. To avoid confusion, I have used the former style throughout this edition. 70.21 bile-pigments . . . urobilin This attractive prospect for marriage works on human excretion. Bile pigments are the coloured products of the breakdown of the blood pigment haemoglobin that are excreted in bile. The two most important bile pigments are now called bilirubin, which is orange or yellow, and its oxidized form biliverdin, which is green. Mixed with the intestinal contents, they give the brown colour to the faeces. Urobilin is the further breakdown of these excretions, which gives the yellow colour to urine. 71.8 bacteria Bacteria were first discovered in the seventeenth century, but ACD was writing at a time when the study and identification of the bacterial sources of many major diseases was developing. ACD had travelled to the famous laboratory of Robert Koch in Berlin in 1890 as a doctor and part-time journalist to cover the announcement of a possible identification of the tuberculosis bacterium (see the Introduction). 71.9 microtome A cutting tool that allowed for the preparation of extremely thin sections of specimens to be examined under the microscope. Continual advancements in precision were made throughout the nineteenth century. 71.24 Esdaile Given ACD’s interest in hypnotism in his early fiction, perhaps an echo of Dr James Esdaile (1808–59), the Scottish doctor who pioneered the medical use of hypnotism in India, wrote a short study of case histories, and was promptly forgotten until the end of the century’s revival of medical debates on the efficacy of hypnotism. 72.23 scientific agnosticism Another echo of Huxley, who coined the term ‘agnosticism’ in 1869, formed as the antithesis of ‘gnostic’ religious belief. It was supposedly a position of neutrality or bracketing of the frameworks of theism from the natural sciences. In Memories and Adventures, ACD discusses his training in medicine as having given him a standard ‘materialist’ framework, one that began to break down in the 1880s during his time as a general practitioner. 73.3 psychic . . . material These distinctions rely on the strict meaning of ‘psychic’ as relating to mind or spirit, separate from matter. 304

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‘Psychic’ began to acquire stricter psychological meanings in the 1840s, but by the 1870s it was also used in spiritualist circles with the older sense. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, tried to use ‘psychic’ in a very expansive sense, and again in opposition to a reductive materialist stance. 73.20 cephalalgia Technical medical term for headache, although its use here indicates the pedantic scientific precision of a pompous professor. 73.22 diathesis Any hereditary or congenital condition. 73.23 podagra Technical term for gout, another needless technicality for everyday conversation. Quain’s Dictionary observes that ‘Gout, once established, may be transmitted through several generations, even when every endeavour is made to eradicate it; and if the malady is intensified by pernicious habits, it is likely to become a permanent legacy.’ 73.28 atavism In biology, the recurrence of the disease or constitutional symptoms of an ancestor after the intermission of one or more generations. It was a term coined in the 1820s by Antoine-Nicolas Duchesne, from Latin atavus ‘ancestor, forefather,’ from at- (beyond) + avus (grandfather). By the late nineteenth century, it had also acquired a sense of ‘degeneration’, the risk of sliding backwards down the generations to an earlier, cruder, less civilized and less moral type. The solution to the mystery in ACD’s The Hound of the Baskervilles centrally rests on this idea of atavism. 74.9 medulla and pons The medulla is the lower part of the brainstem; the pons (the Latin for ‘bridge’) is situated between the midbrain and the medulla. 74.18–20 Love . . . elementary forces This turn in Grey’s discourse echoes Goethe’s idea of ‘elective affinities’, the title of his 1809 novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften, in which he compares human love with chemical affinities. The grand metaphysical claim that love was the primal, underpinning force of the universe was made in the speculative writings of ACD’s contemporary (and poet and psychical researcher) F. W. H. Myers, as in his conclusion to Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903). 75.8 avoirdupois The weight measurement system based on pounds and ounces. 75.9 two ounces less This physiological reductionism was a typical argument for the inferior intellectual capacities of women. 305

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76.8 vermiform appendix The human vermiform (‘worm-like’) appendix was considered in the late Victorian era as a key instance of a residual organ that illustrated the evolutionary process. It is no longer necessarily considered a vestige of evolutionary change, but as having a continued function for the gut. 78.38 vallisneria The freshwater aquatic plant eelweed. In the Victorian period, it was commonly used in aquaria. 79.10 Celtic . . . Saxon ACD was particularly alert to the distinction often held between the dreamy and romantic Celtic sensibility and the more phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon one. His Irish inheritance and literary ambitions made him predisposed to celebrate the Celtic, but his model of masculinity was typically Anglo-Saxon. He stages this tension in several early medical or scientific stories, perhaps most overtly in two stories focused on Celtic susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion, ‘John Barrington Cowles’ and The Parasite. 84.12 cardiac To the very last, the repression of emotion by the technical language of medicine continues the cover-up of Professor Grey’s inner life. The Case of Lady Sannox First published in The Idler, November 1893. 85.31 south of Marylebone Road and the north of Oxford Street That is, the centre of medical London, where Harley Street became the location for the consulting rooms of the most successful society doctors. 86.13 Miss Marion Dawson There were several scandalous liaisons between male aristocrats and actresses in the 1890s, but this affair has echoes of the marriage of Sir Bruce Meux, 3rd Baronet, to the actress and ‘hostess’ Val Rees. She became Lady Valerie Meux and was an eccentric and scandalous presence in London’s upper-class social life in the 1880s and 1890s. Her lowly and obscure origins as an illegitimate child and her profession as a hostess left her outside many respectable social circles. She inherited the wealth of the Meux brewing dynasty after her husband died of alcoholism in 1900. She spent quite a lot of the inheritance on racing horses and a collection of Ancient Egyptian artefacts. 86.23 bow windows of the clubs A reference to the bow window added in 1811 to the front elevation of the gentleman’s club White’s in St James’s Street. It is the oldest London club, and associated with 306

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aristocrats and Conservatives. The bow window commands views of the street and became a famous location where Beau Brummell held court until his downfall in 1816. It also played a central role in the downfall of Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2022. 87.17 heroic measure A last-gasp course of medical treatment with high risk of causing further damage or fatality. Requiring nerve, it matches the reputation of Douglas Stone. 87.30 Smyrna The ancient city of Smyrna, now Izmir, is Turkey’s second city. It was important for both the Greek and Roman empires. 88.21 the daggers of Almohades Almohades is a Spanish corruption of the Arabic Al-Muwahhidu, an Islamic sect founded in the twelfth century by Mahommed Ibn Tumart and premised on strict religious observance. An empire founded in his name stretched from Morocco to Egypt. ACD might be invoking the memory of the movement’s jihad, or Holy War, against Christian Europe. His low opinion of Arabic Africa is made plain in the chapter on Egypt in Memories and Adventures and his tale of kidnap, The Tragedy of the Korosko. 89.25 kismet The Turkish word for destiny or fate, imported into English in the nineteenth century. It ultimately derives from the Arabic word qisma, meaning portion or lot. 89.27 bistouries Surgeon’s scalpels, deriving from the French word for dagger. 89.36 chloroform Islamic dietary rules forbid the use of khamr, or intoxicants – a prohibition that is mostly focused on alcoholic drinks derived from grapes, but can incorporate other substances. The surgeon should perhaps be suspicious: if chloroform is forbidden, why has the woman been dosed with Smyrna opium? 90.8 Caryatid Stone carving of a draped female figure, often used as a pillar in architecture to support the entablature. 90.14 spring of his repeater Repeater watches have a separate button which sounds the hour and minute in chimes. They were used to tell the time in the dark. 91.22 yashmak The Turkish word for veil; the mysterious gent relies on Stone respecting the Islamic tradition of women wearing a veil in public. 93.6 morally Lord Sannox invokes the idea of ‘moral insanity’, defined in Quain’s Dictionary as ‘the disorder of certain patients, which is manifested by insane actions and conduct rather than by insane ideas, 307

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delusions or hallucinations. Such persons are sometimes said to be whole and perfect in intellect, though unsound in the moral and emotional part of their brain.’ This avowedly cultural construction of moral insanity was often used to suggest that women displaying acts outside the narrow confines of feminine behaviour were displaying signs of moral lunacy. The pathologization of sexual behaviours was a particular focus: this was the era when the new discourse of sexology coined new terms, such as ‘nymphomania’. In the 1892 Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, Gustave Bouchereau defined nymphomania as ‘a morbid condition peculiar to the female sex, the most prominent character of which consists in an irresistible impulse to satisfy the sexual appetite’. However, as a moral insanity, Bouchereau warns that ‘surgical operations’ such as ‘clitoridectomy’ (surgical removal of the clitoris), ‘nymphotomy’ (surgical removal of the labia minora) or ‘oophorectomy’ (surgical removal of the ovaries) are ‘useless, and some of them are even to be condemned’. In the 1860s, the London doctor Isaac Baker Brown had proposed clitoridectomy as a suitable treatment for insanity in women, particularly in his On Surgical Diseases in Women (1861) and On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Women (1866). However, there was disapproval of this procedure among professional obstetricians, and Baker Brown’s clinic closed. Clitoridectomy nevertheless remained a form of treatment for the moral insanity of women into the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud, a medical doctor working to develop his new psychoanalytic method in Vienna in the 1890s, began to propose that sexual anxieties were frequently displaced symbolically, so that the mouth or head often stood in for the genitals (as in his essay ‘The Medusa’s Head’). Lord Sannox’s brutal disfigurement of his wife’s lips might fit into this symbolic sexual schema. 93.32–3 Purple chrysanthemums In the elaborate Victorian language of flowers, violet chrysanthemums were typically sent as a ‘get well soon’ message to those recovering from illness or surgery. Lord Sannox ostentatiously ignores red chrysanthemums, the traditional symbol of love. A Question of Diplomacy First published in The Illustrated London News, summer 1892. ACD wrote the one-act play Foreign Policy based on this short story, which had a very short run in London in 1893 (see Appendix 3). 308

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94.4 the Foreign Minister The two holders of the post of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs at the time of writing and publication were Archibald Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery (August 1892–March 1894) and John Woodhouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley (March 1894–June 1895), both Liberals. 94.4 gout Quain’s Dictionary defines gout as ‘characterised ordinarily by a peculiar inflammation of the joints . . . attended by the deposit of urate of sodium in their structures, affecting especially the smaller joints, and at first more particularly the . . . great toe, but afterwards extending to other joints’. It was typically associated with over-indulgence in rich foods and alcohol, but also with a wide array of other exciting causes, including ‘excessive mental work, worry, or anxiety; emotional causes, sudden, powerful, or depressing, such as joy, rage, fright, or grief ’. Acute attacks were managed by rest; longer term treatment was through dietary control. Quain’s Dictionary recommends: ‘The affected parts in acute gout should be kept entirely at rest, and placed in a comfortable position, supported by pillows, and either horizontal or elevated.’ Gout was considered to be a hereditary disposition. In ACD’s first attempt at a novel, The Narrative of John Smith, the events are recollected during a period of rest enforced by gout. 94.16 Cavendish Square London square that had some of the grandest houses in London, often occupied by aristocratic families. The politician Henry Herbert Asquith lived there; it was also at the centre of medical London, with the most exclusive doctors situated in Harley Street, which at its southern end runs into the square. The Royal Society of Medicine is also located nearby in Wimpole Street. 94.32 Dobrutscha The mouth of the River Danube, now in Romania, had been a contested strategic waterway for centuries, with the rivalry over access intensifying in the nineteenth century between the Russian, Habsburg and British empires. Attempts to establish an international navigation treaty were intensified after the Crimean War in the 1850s. 94.35–6 blockade of Crete By the 1890s, British policy was to support the Ottoman Empire’s continued possession of the island, despite uprisings of the Greek population and the demands for the island to become part of Greece. Naval blockades were a common tactic. Cape Matapan was a key strategic port on the southern tip of mainland Greece. In 1897, three years after ‘A Question of Diplomacy’ was published, an International Squadron was formed by Europe’s Great Powers, including 309

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France and Britain, to defend the Christians on the island and support the rule of the Ottomans against the Greek attempt to seize the island. 94.38 Macedonian tourists Kidnap was a common problem in the Mediterranean, where bandits often held Western tourists for ransom (banditti were central to the imagined terrors of British Gothic novels set in southern Europe, for instance). Macedonia was considered particularly lawless in this regard. 96.2 passementerie Elaborate French lace trimmings to dress. 96.18 lithia powder Patent medical treatments for gout included the use of lithium carbonate, thought to react with the urate of sodium crystals of gout and dissolve them. It was also used to treat kidney stones. Quain’s Dictionary, however, notes that ‘Salts of potassium and lithium are used for special purposes in gout, but how they act is a matter of controversy.’ 97.3 Heptarchy The seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England. 97.3 Debrett Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage traces the family heritage of English aristocratic titles and families, and was first published in 1802. 97.4 Morcar The Earl of Northumberland, until the Norman invasion of 1066. He submitted to the rule of William the Conqueror, but was continually suspected of fomenting rebellion, and probably died in prison in 1087. 97.30–1 Printing House Square Former site of the King’s Printer off Queen Victoria Street, it became the location of The Times of London, the most important newspaper in the late nineteenth century. 98.6 Novikoff’s Note The Russian name Novikov is a common one, and probably not intended to identify an individual. Diplomatic Notes outlined policy positions and proposals. The Russian Empire’s ambassador to the United Kingdom between 1884 and 1902 was Baron Egor Staal. 98.7 Afghan frontier After the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–80, the British and Russians eventually agreed to establish a new line demarcating their respective spheres of influence. In 1893, the North-West Frontier Province was established as a buffer zone. 98.10 colchicum The medicine derived from this plant, alkaloid colchicine, is used to treat gout. It is also highly toxic, and had to be used sparingly. 98.17 Hahnemann Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843) was the founder of homeopathy, a heterodox medical system that opposed 310

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mainstream allopathic treatments. It was popular during the nineteenth century. This interest of ACD’s fictional Prime Minister echoes the interest in homeopathy of William Gladstone, whose fourth and final premiership ran from 1892 to 1894. Gladstone was treated by the homeopath Dr James Manley Gully, who also treated Charles Darwin and John Ruskin. 98.22 Early Church Another indication that the Prime Minister is Gladstone, a passionate evangelical Christian, whose beliefs directed his politics, often leading to controversial stances. 98.23 twenty-seven principles of Mesmer Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) was a Swiss-born doctor who proposed a new medical treatment which used ‘animal magnetism’ to cure his patients. Mesmer put his patients into trance states and made ‘passes’ over their body, transferring invisible magnetic energy from his healthy body to that of the sick patient. In 1779, Mesmer published his 27 ‘Propositions Concerning Animal Magnetism’ as an outline of his principles. ‘Mesmerism’ caused a scandal in Paris, where Mesmer’s claims were investigated and dismissed by an investigative committee in 1784. In England, orthodox medicine closed ranks against Mesmeric treatment in the 1840s, even though its medical benefits were espoused by prominent figures such as Charles Darwin and Harriet Martineau. In the 1890s, medical authorities were still battling over the legitimacy of Mesmerism and the new scientific interest in hypnotism, which Ernest Hart of the British Medical Journal denounced as ‘the new witchcraft’. The Prime Minister’s interest in Mesmer’s 27 principles is suitably abstruse. 98.34–5 trouble in Morocco The French colonized Morocco in the 1840s, but it remained an unstable sphere of influence for many of the European powers, contested by France, Spain and Britain. The British had signed an agreement for its citizens to live and trade in Morocco in 1856. By the 1890s the rule of the sultan was weak, the central government impoverished, and territorial claims and disputes were multiplying. 99.10 Averroes Latinized name of the Muslim scholar Ibn Rushd (1126–98). Another gently satirical dig at Gladstone’s eclectic interests. 99.19 Read Porson! Richard Porson (1759–1808), classical Greek translator and scholar. 100.4–5 Catherine of Braganza Daughter of John IV, King of Portugal, she married Charles II of England in 1662. As a Catholic, she was suspected of anti-British sentiment, and after the death of Charles 311

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in 1685 she eventually chose exile. The marriage agreement between the imperial powers included the passing of the vital strategic port of Tangiers to the British. 100.5 Colonel Kirke Percy Kirke (1646–91) was appointed colonel of the newly formed Second Tangier Regiment in 1680, and then Governor of Tangier in 1682. 100.11 Paper-covered novel A relatively recent innovation as a result of direct sales of books to a mass market (1894, the year Round the Red Lamp was published, is often marked as the year the three-volume novel, borrowed through lending libraries, finally ceased to be the dominant form). This is another gentle dig at the Prime Minister’s eclectic interests, from high classical scholarship to lowly popular fiction. 101.25 hectic A hectic colouring was usually indicative of tuberculosis, which was often marked by a fever. It was often seen as heightening feminine beauty in the Victorian period, a linkage of the fragility of youthful bloom with early death. 101.29 biaural stethoscope René Laennec invented the stethoscope in 1816, but the first to use both ears was designed by Irish doctor Arthur Leared in 1851, and this became the standard device. 101.30 crepitation Quain’s Dictionary has ‘A sensation or sound of crackling. It may be observed in morbid states of the bones, joints or subcutaneous tissue; but the term is more frequently applied to a physical sign connected with the lungs.’ 102.3 Engadine, Central Europe, Egypt, Algiers The main nineteenth-century treatment for tuberculosis, before the bacillus had been identified and antibiotic medication developed, was a rest cure at a sanatorium in an environment where the air was thought to be clean and curative. Since there was an epidemic of TB throughout Europe, these sanatoria appeared in lots of different environments after the 1850s – in the crisp air of the mountains or the dry heat of deserts. Many wealthy English tubercular patients were sent abroad to these sanatoria during the cold and damp English winters. The writer John Addington Symonds lived in Davos in Switzerland between 1877 and his death in 1893. It was a well-known resort. ACD’s first wife Louisa, who had been diagnosed with TB, wintered in Davos in 1894. More temperate climates meant that southern France and Italy were also popular health resorts. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the essay ‘Ordered South’ in 1874, about his wintering in Menton on the French Riviera, a popular place for the tubercular 312

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wealthy to seek winter respite (artist Aubrey Beardsley died in Menton, and modernist writer Katherine Mansfield also wintered there). The Upper Engadine Valley in Switzerland is one of the highest valleys in Europe, over 6,000 feet above sea level, and home to the health resorts of St Moritz and other retreats often recommended to tubercular patients for their clean, dry air. Central Europe might refer to the many sanatoria in Germany or Poland. ACD travelled to Egypt in the winter of 1895, seeking a warmer climate for his tubercular wife, and they stayed in a hotel within walking distance of the Pyramids at Giza (Louisa was to live until 1906). There were also several winter sanatoria in Egypt where Europeans could rest out the winter. The heat of Algiers also meant it was a popular destination for TB patients, and the Pasteur Institute in the city later conducted vaccination experiments on the colonized population in the interwar period. 102.32 ten thousand a year The mark of an extremely successful society doctor. As a general practitioner, ACD reported in Memories and Adventures that he had never made more than £300 a year in his eight years as a professional. 103.20–1 liniment . . . bottle Quain’s Dictionary recommends: ‘During recovery [from gout], benefit may be derived from careful friction with some stimulating liniment, application of iodine, shampooing, gentle passive movements, douching with salt and water, or the application of a light bandage.’ Victorian medicines conventionally came in blue glass bottles. 103.25 Constantinople That is, a diplomatic position in the court of the Ottoman Empire, which was always a tricky posting given the fragile and shifting alliances between the English and the Ottomans for much of the nineteenth century. 105.12–13 Lord Melbourne’s time Melbourne served as Whig Prime Minister from 1835 to 1841. He was a close advisor to Queen Victoria in her first years on the throne. A Medical Document First published in Round the Red Lamp, October 1894. 107.6 a lawyer This is a reference to Samuel Warren, a barrister and author of several legal textbooks who was better known as the author of Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician, which was serialized in 313

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Blackwood’s Magazine, 1832–37. Its episodic tales of the ‘secrets’ of medical life made it an international success, widely translated in Europe. It was initially published anonymously, and widely considered to be the indiscreet ‘true’ stories of a medical man. 107.17 British Medical Association The BMA, the professional body for doctors, had its origins in the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, founded in 1832. This first name and the initial exclusion of London doctors indicated that pressures for professionalization and reform came from outside the conservative grip of the London medical colleges. The PMSA soon became a national organization, renamed the BMA in 1836. Its journal, The Lancet, was a campaigning reformist journal. 107.21 stethoscope-bearing top hats The stethoscope, the mark of a modern medical man, was often carried inside the top hat, a technique that Dr Watson employs in ACD’s early Holmes story, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. 107.32 Wormley Asylum . . . ‘Obscure Nervous Lesions in the Unmarried’ Wormley Asylum seems to be ACD’s invention, as is the semi-plausible title of Manson’s psychophysiological monograph. 107.37–8 twenty-five hundred a year in half-crown visits Another model for becoming wealthy in general practice was to scale up in dense urban populations, where smaller fees could be multiplied. ACD gained experience as a trainee medic in a Birmingham general practice that he said made £3,000 out of the charge of 3s. 6d. per visit. The Plymouth practice of George Turnavine Budd, which ACD joined in 1882 for six short weeks before a falling-out, also promised this kind of wealth, as fictionalized in ACD’s The Stark Munro Letters. However, the GP in this story is rescued from rapacity by his willingness to do charitable work among the poor. 108.11 a mere jawman A dentist, lower down the status scale in medicine. 108.18 puerperal Puerperal insanity was a form of madness associated with childbirth. Quain’s Dictionary reports that it was found in ‘5 and 6 per cent of the women admitted to asylums’ and suggested that it was caused by ‘an inheritance of neuroses or insanity. Some observers place this as high as 50 per cent. In many cases puerperal insanity is the expression of the presence of the neuropathic diathesis, and its subjects are “degenerates” whose nervous system gives way first at the puerperal 314

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epoch.’ It presented as either ‘maniacal excitement’ or ‘melancholic depression’. What we now call post-natal depression is given a very different etiology. 109.11 alienist Term used in English from the 1840s to denote what is now called a professional psychiatrist. It was borrowed from the French term aliéniste, in use slightly earlier, and sounded better than ‘mad doctor’. 109.13–14 put up his plate That is, sets up his practice and announces it with a brass plate on the door (and a red lamp for general practice). ACD describes furnishing his Bush Villas practice for £4 and fixing his plate to the door in chapter 6 of Memories and Adventures. 109.37–8 a face looking up at me This scene is taken directly from ACD’s personal experience. He tells the story in chapter 7 of Memories and Adventures of his encounter with a 19-year-old girl with ‘a pair of brown sullen eyes, full of loathing and pain’, whose mother longs that ‘God would take her’. 111.5 Materialism Materialism tended to be associated in Victorian England with a dogmatic atheism, usually associated with dangerous French and German freethinkers and men of science. Few English writers openly embraced the term. ACD, at the opening of his discussion of his turn towards Spiritualism in the 1880s in chapter 9 of Memories and Adventures, mentions in passing: ‘Educated as I had been during my most plastic years in the school of medical materialism, and soaked in the negative views of all my great teachers, I had no room in my brain for theories which cut right across every fixed conclusion that I had formed.’ 111.22 to know what G. P. is General Paralysis of the Insane, or General Paresis, was associated with the late stages of syphilis, so this is a coded discussion of the epidemic of sexually transmitted disease which filled asylums with paralysed patients in England in the 1890s. It was the commonest cause of death in asylum patients for much of the nineteenth century. Quain’s Dictionary defines General Paralysis as ‘A disease of the nervous system especially affecting the brain; characterised clinically by progressive generalised loss of power and sensation . . . almost invariably fatal and presenting post-mortem evidence of organic changes in the brain and spinal cord and their membranes.’ 112.11 parotid The parotid gland creates saliva in the mouth. 112.18 first certificate Under the terms of the 1774 Lunacy Act, it was required that two doctors independently examine and declare a person insane, resulting in compulsory committal to an asylum. 315

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112.34–5 Abyssinian Campaign . . . Magdala The 1868 punitive invasion of the Abyssinian Empire by British troops in response to British missionaries and others being held hostage by Emperor Tewodros. The entry of British troops into Magdala, and the subsequent looting of its treasures, proved controversial at the time and has remained so. There is still a campaign to repatriate the Ethiopian artefacts looted during the raid. 113.9 Navy for a time The role of ship’s surgeon was a common way for young medics without family means to gain a wage and experience. ACD travelled as ship’s surgeon to the Arctic whaling grounds in 1880, taking time out of his study at Edinburgh University, and then again along the coast of West Africa from October 1881 to January 1882, after he graduated. His grim experience of disease in Africa caused him to give up any idea of being a ship’s doctor. 113.12 Calabar river River in Nigeria, the port city of Calabar being once one of the key centres of the slave trade. From 1884 to 1906, Old Calabar was the headquarters of the Niger Coast Protectorate, effectively part of the British Empire. The wealth of palm oil, timber and ivory exports from the west coast of Africa made it a disputed territory for rival colonial powers. 113.17 Grey’s Anatomy Gray’s Anatomy remains the classic textbook for medical students, and was first published in 1858. 113.25 Portsmouth Hard The Hard is in an area of Portsmouth originally known as Portsmouth Common. It is thought that the Hard came to be named due to the clay that was deposited on the coastline at low tide, which was rolled and dried until hard in order to create a slipway. The Portsmouth naval yard was the epicentre of British naval operations. 114.12 Brain fever Foster is possibly complaining about the convenient symbolic ‘brain fevers’ of characters such as Emma Bovary, or Pip in Great Expectations. It also features in one of ACD’s own stories, ‘The Naval Treaty’, published the year before in 1893. There was a common belief that emotional shock could produce ‘brain fever’, but this was not an official medical diagnosis, and there is no entry for the term in Quain’s Dictionary. 114.16 shingles or quinsy, or mumps Shingles is a herpes viral infection that causes skin rashes. Quinsy was a popular term for what is now called tonsilitis. Mumps is a viral infection causing painful swelling of the glands in the mouth. 316

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114.28 of waxing and of waning manhood Again, this reads like a seemingly coded comment about epidemic syphilis and its effects on national manhood. 115.5–6 rodent ulcer . . . serpiginous Quain’s Dictionary defines rodent ulcer as ‘a kind of tumour; but its exact position among other forms of new-growth is still not absolutely decided’. It is now an obsolete term for basal cell carcinoma, or skin cancer. Serpiginous means ‘creeping’ – so a sore or apparent blemish that is growing in an irregular way. 115.12 zinc chloride If the growth was considered too dangerous to cut out with a knife, the next treatment was to apply a zinc chloride paste to the affected parts. 115.14 rotten with struma Tuberculosis. Struma was another term for scrofula, understood by the late nineteenth century as a chronic local tubercular infection. Quain’s Dictionary defines scrofula as ‘a term applied to a supposed hereditary tendency to slowly progressive chronic inflammations’, but adds that the term was ‘rapidly falling into disuse’. 115.26 phthisis Particularly applied to tuberculosis of the lung. 115.26 Davos Famous for its TB sanatoria, high up in the Swiss Alps, recommended for its clean air. 115.27 rheumatic fever Quain’s Dictionary defines this as ‘an acute disease; caused by certain infective, diathetic or climatic influences; and characterised by fever, sweats, acute shifting inflammatory and other nutritional changes in connection with the joints and related structures, and certain of the viscera, particularly the heart’. 116.2 Drapers Gardens The area of the old City of London called Drapers Hall Gardens was built over after 1873, and the buildings became part of the financial centre. Lot No. 249 First published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, September 1892. 117.16 Oxford Many of the details in the story refer to the topography of Oxford and the customs of Oxford University, but in his revised Author’s Edition in 1903, ACD removed all the specific references, perhaps a mark of his global readership less than ten years later. 117.32 Plantagenet days The Plantagenet family held the English throne from 1154 to 1485. 317

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117.38 bend and saltire In heraldry, a bend is a wide band of colour running left to right on the family shield. A saltire is a diagonal cross in the shape of the letter X. 118.23 stroke The stroke is the strongest rower in a boat team, and sits closest to the cox. The team adopt the rhythm and speed of the stroke, who thus is the leader of the crew. 119.15 cad ACD chooses his slang carefully. The OED defines a cad in this sense as: ‘“Cads, low fellows, who hang about the college to provide the Etonians with anything necessary to assist their sports.” So at Oxford, applied by collegians to town-lads of the same description, and contemptuously to townsmen generally.’ 119.19–20 evil liver Probably a reference to excessive use of alcohol, but Quain’s Dictionary also notes that both primary and hereditary syphilis cause major problems with liver function. 119.24 second cataract The length of the river Nile was measured by its six cataracts – places where the river is shallow, rocky and difficult to navigate. The second cataract is below the temple at Abu Simbel, and located in the Sudan. This is much further than most English visitors would travel, and Sudan was the centre of an Islamic uprising that was still ongoing when this story appeared, only being brutally crushed at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. 119.28 hermit Johnnies The Egyptian deserts were home to early Christian ascetics and the place where the earliest Christian monastic communities developed for the contemplation of God in the wilderness. 120.37 Glasgow and at Berlin World-renowned centres of medicine and materialist philosophy. Oxford and Cambridge focused on Classical and theological training, and only reluctantly added medical degrees, centuries after other universities had become centres of excellence. It marks Abercrombie Smith as a man of modernity and reason, although the paragraph goes on to reassure that, like ACD, he is not a ‘showy genius’ in his academic studies. 121.26 beyond the pale To go beyond the bounds of acceptable or customary behaviour. The phrase has been in use in English since the sixteenth century, but it acquired a racial tenor during the nineteenth century. In 1888, Rudyard Kipling’s first collection of Anglo-Indian tales, Plain Tales from the Hills, included a short story titled ‘Beyond the Pale’, which begins: ‘A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the 318

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Black. . . This is the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent every-day society, and paid for it heavily.’ 122.13 a thousand strange relics Private collections of Egyptian artefacts were common in nineteenth-century England, after the Egyptomania that followed in the wake of the defeat of Napoleon in Egypt in 1802. Napoleon’s expedition had gathered an extraordinary amount of booty since his invasion in 1798, but this was transferred to English ownership as the price of peace, and many of the treasures ended up in London. As early as 1807, poet Robert Southey complained in his Letters to England: ‘everything must now be Egyptian: the ladies wear crocodile ornaments, and you sit upon a sphinx in a room hung around with mummies, and with the long black lean-armed long-nosed hieroglyphical men, who are enough to make the children afraid to go to bed’. By the 1890s, figures such as Rider Haggard and Lady Meux had substantial private collections and both had a close relationship to Ernest Wallis Budge, the Keeper of the Egyptian Rooms at the British Museum. Wallis Budge tripled the size of the national collection by using a network of contacts in Egypt. 122.35 Spanish . . . type In Victorian racial taxonomies, Spanish was often thought to bear a ‘Moorish’ taint from the centuries of occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. In some taxonomies, the southern European races of Italy, southern France and Spain were grouped with North Africans to produce a suspect ‘Mediterranean’ race. This discourse favoured the Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon or Nordic races as the most virile and robust. ACD’s Abercrombie Smith embodies this type. 124.23 Balsamic resin Incense derived from the bark of shrubs and trees of the Styrax family. It was used as a perfume in Ancient Egypt, but also had medicinal and preservative properties, so was associated with mummification processes. 124.37 Eleventh dynasty The dynasty of rulers of Upper Egypt, commencing with Mentuhotep I c. 2135 BCE, and ending with Mentuhotep IV, who died c. 1991 BCE. 125.5 nut-like eyes Mummification involved the removal of soft tissue such as the eyeballs, but they were replaced with eyes painted on clay or stone, placed over the eyelids. Perhaps ACD was thinking of the well-preserved, lifelike royal mummy of Seti I, whose body was among the royal cache sensationally rediscovered in 1881. Seti’s mummified corpse was on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. There are no eyes, but the slits of the eyelids are uncannily well preserved. 319

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125.15 myrrh A gum resin from small trees not native to Egypt, but traded from the Horn of Africa. It was used as an incense, but also as an analgesic medicine, and it was also used in the mummification process. 125.15 cassia Spice made from the bark of the evergreen cassia tree, grown much further east. It was traded for its perfume and medicinal properties, and was also used in mummification processes. 125.29 natron A naturally occurring mixture of sodium carbonates, chlorides and sulfates, which was mined as a preservative in Egypt in the Natron valley. The ritual process of mummification involved saturating the body in natron baths for forty days to preserve tissue. 128.16 Beni Hassan Beni Hasan is an ancient cemetery in Upper Egypt, close to Minya. It was used principally during the Middle Kingdom and has high-caste tombs cut into the rock. 129.20 disgrace and expulsion Overnight stays of female guests were strictly forbidden in Oxford college rooms (women were allowed to study at Oxford from the 1870s, but the first degree awarded was later still, in 1920). 129.37 bird’s-eye Bird’s Eye was a common brand of pipe tobacco. 130.34 garrotter The garrotte was the favoured form of execution by strangulation during the Spanish Inquisition, using a rope tightened by twisting a stick. A garrotter was the term used for a thief or assassin who killed using this method. It entered English in the nineteenth century, but the use of the foreign term is significant. 131.34 sport his oak Phrase used at Oxford University, meaning to shut the wooden outer door of one’s room as a sign that one does not want to be disturbed. 132.36 a steady thirty-six Rowing at 36 strokes per minute. 133.15 oleograph Colour prints, designed to look like hand-painted oils, produced by preparing a separate stage for each colour to be used and printing one colour over another. It was a popular nineteenthcentury technique for commercial prints. 138.11 blue pill Blue mass or the blue pill was a common treatment for many disorders from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, but most particularly for syphilis and its effects on the liver. Because it was composed of 33% mercury it fell into disuse once the dangers of mercury poisoning were better understood. 146.29–30 last heard of in the Soudan The date of 1884 may be significant. The Mahdist Uprising in the Sudan began in March 1884, 320

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and resulted in the famous siege of General Gordon at Khartoum and his eventual demise in 1885. The Sudan would have been an extremely dangerous place for a white European to be in these years. The Los Amigos Fiasco First published in The Idler, December 1892. 147.4 Los Amigos A fictional town, but it signals an American town likely situated in the south-west, given the Spanish name. 147.13 news of electrocutions in the East Judicial executions by electrocution were relatively new in America, the first being conducted on William Kemmler in August 1890 in Auburn Prison, New York. It was meant to be a modern, civilized mode of execution to succeed the primitive method of hanging. The technique had been developed by two doctors, Alfred Southwick and George Fell, in Buffalo, New York in the 1880s, who experimented by electrocuting hundreds of dogs. The risk of fatal electrocution became central to the bitter rivalry between Thomas Edison (who favoured direct current) and George Westinghouse (who favoured alternating current). Edison would electrocute dogs at public demonstrations of the risks of alternating current, and also worked hard to associate Westinghouse with executions. The Kemmler execution was gruesomely botched, as the first ‘fatal’ level of current left him still breathing, forcing a second attempt which burst Kemmler’s blood vessels and set his hair on fire. Failure to kill prisoners continued to haunt this method of execution, and in an echo of this tale, lawyers for Willie Francis in 1946 argued that because he had survived electrocution it was illegal to attempt to conduct a re-execution. ACD had used the idea of electricity to revive a corpse in his earlier tale, ‘Crabbe’s Practice’ (see Appendix 1). Later, in 1912, ACD began his campaign on behalf of Oscar Slater, convicted of murder and sentenced to death, by publishing the pamphlet The Case of Oscar Slater. 148.7 Germans German settlers, often religious dissenters, formed a major proportion of the northern European white settlers in America in the nineteenth century. 148.11 Leyden jars A Leyden jar stores a high-voltage electrical charge between conductors on the inside and outside of a glass jar. It was central to early electrical experiments and was named after the town of Leiden, where it was invented in 1745. 321

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152.20 euchred To euchre is an American slang term, meaning to outwit or cheat another player at cards. The Doctors of Hoyland First published in The Idler, April 1894. 154.6 Hoyland There is a village called Hoyland in Yorkshire, in the North of England, but the story is set in the south, in Hampshire. 154.12 Fifteen hundred pounds a year A modestly successful practice (ACD never made more than £300 a year), based on a captive market. 154.24 Virchow’s Archives Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) was an influential German pathologist, cell theorist and medical reformer, credited with the founding of social medicine. He co-founded the academic journal Archiv für Pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für Klinische Medicin in 1847, which was retitled Virchow’s Archiv in 1903. This hints at a modern continental education for James Ripley. 154.32–3 iridectomies Surgical removal of section of the eye. 155.22–3 Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin and Vienna . . . Lee Hopkins scholarship Centres of medical research excellence, with the Lee Hopkins perhaps an echo of the Johns Hopkins University medical research centre in Baltimore, already a world-leading centre for laboratory-based research. 156.15 Sphygmograph Mechanical device used to measure blood pressure, invented in Germany in the 1850s, with significant technical improvements emerging in the 1880s and 1890s, suggesting a cuttingedge machine. 156.30 I am Doctor Verrinder Smith Women were excluded from professional medical training in Britain, and any reforms were resisted by the colleges of medicine for much of the nineteenth century, once they were given the right to license professionals by the Medical Act of 1858. In America, the British-born Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman MD to graduate in 1849, having been rejected by every medical school bar one. Britain was even more conservative. The medical pioneer Elizabeth Garrett Anderson could not attend medical school in Britain, but had realized that there was no bar on women studying to become a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries, and she passed their examinations in 1865 (they promptly changed the rules to exclude women explicitly). In 1869, 322

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after heavy lobbying, Edinburgh University allowed seven women to commence their studies for a medical degree (although final awards were not granted). This group included the feminist Sophia Jex-Blake, who had just published the essay ‘Medicine as a Profession for Women’. Jex-Blake went on to found medical schools for women to train in the profession, one in London in 1874 and one in Edinburgh in 1886. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson left England to study on the continent, where women were allowed into some medical schools, and she was the first British woman to gain an MD at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1870. Anderson renamed her Dispensary for Women and Children in London the New Hospital for Women in 1872. Anderson quietly joined the British Medical Association in 1873 as its first woman member, but controversy erupted in 1875 when there was an attempt to block her from speaking at the annual BMA conference. At that meeting, a vote to allow women members was defeated; another motion in 1878 was also defeated. In 1870, the British Medical Journal denounced the ‘lady-doctor’ as a ‘traitress to her sex’. The pressure for reforms continued, and in 1877 the King’s and Queen’s College of Physicians of Ireland opened its medical licensing to women doctors. By the end of the 1870s, the Lancet was lamenting that ‘the medical-women question is perennial. It knows no limits; we encounter it at every turn.’ Another key advance was the founding of the National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the Women of India in 1885. The exclusion of male doctors from treating Hindu women in purdah in India under the British Empire led to opportunities for women doctors in the colonies. In fictional terms, the century moved from Mary Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864), to novels featuring women doctors, Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892) and Arabella Kenealy’s Dr Janet of Harley Street (1893). Dr Janet has the surname ‘Doyle’. There remained strong professional and cultural resistance to women doctors into the 1890s, but there was a notable change of view in the British Medical Association, which finally voted overwhelmingly to include women from 1892. Punch still satirized the dangerously masculine traits of this new creature, however, a professional form of the New Woman, named in 1894, a figure who was often ridiculed in the press. By 1892 there were still only 135 women on the Medical Register in Britain. Dr Ripley’s initial response of disbelief and then contempt is in keeping with the stodgy male majority of his profession. 323

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157.30 your paper on ‘Locomotor Ataxia’ Locomotor ataxia was another name for tabes dorsalis, generally taken as a sign of syphilis in its advanced stages, when it attacks the spinal cord and causes, as Quain’s Dictionary lists: ‘incoordination of movement, peculiar pains, defective sensibility, and loss of muscle-reflex action’. Tabes dorsalis was the subject of ACD’s own MD thesis. ACD was also willing to use it as the cause of the brevity of career of some literary men. In Through the Magic Door, ACD suspects that William Shakespeare died of locomotor ataxy, ‘which is the special scourge of the imaginative man’. 158.28–30 callous ulcer . . . zinc ointment . . . blistering fluid Dr Smith is indeed ahead of the game with a new treatment. By 1902, Quain’s Dictionary recommended for callous ulcers that ‘The ulcerated surface may be stimulated by the application of a fly-blister to the surface, or still better to the thickened parts around the edges of the ulcer.’ 158.35 two galvanic needles Dermatologists still sometimes use this technique, which is called ‘electrodessication’. This would have been one of the new applications of electricity in the 1890s. 159.21 tenotomy knife To correct a congenital club foot in a child, a small knife is used to cut the achilles tendon. 163.22–3 Paris Physiological Laboratory Another marker of Dr Smith’s modern ideas: the older generations of medics, particularly in general practice, would have considered their practice as entirely divorced from the experimental techniques of the laboratory. The new empirical and experimental science that developed in the laboratories of Paris and Berlin was far in advance of the Anglo-American medical schools, although by the 1890s the link between theory and practice was gaining dominance. The Surgeon Talks First published in Round the Red Lamp, October 1894. 164.10 Liston and the aneurism Robert Liston (1794–1847) was a surgeon famed for the speed of his operations in the days before anaesthetic: he was known as the ‘fastest knife in the West End’, conducting amputations in 2½ minutes. He performed the first public demonstration of an operation on an anaesthetized patient in London in 1846. The reference here is to his published work on aneurism, and his death from an aneurism in 1847. 324

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164.17 sclerosis on the posterior columns Illness that affects the dorsal or posterior columns of the spinal cord, which often leads to loss of sensation in the limbs. 164.21 De mortuis, of course An abbreviation of the saying De mortuis nihil nisi bonum, ‘Do not speak ill of the dead’ (a more literal translation would be: ‘Of the dead, say nothing but good’). 164.25–6 locomotor ataxia Locomotor ataxia was another name for tabes dorsalis, generally taken as a sign of syphilis in its advanced stages, when it attacks the spinal cord and causes ‘incoordination of movement, peculiar pains, defective sensibility, and loss of muscle-reflex action’ (Quain’s Dictionary). 164.28 without staggering This is known as the Romberg test, or Romberg’s sign, which diagnoses sensory ataxia, a gait disturbance caused by abnormal proprioception – and one of the key signs of syphilis. The Romberg test is used to demonstrate the effects of posterior column disease on postural control. Posterior column disease involves selective damage to the posterior column, known as tabes dorsalis. The test is used for the clinical assessment of patients with disequilibrium or ataxia from sensory and motor disorders. In the Romberg test, the patient stands upright and is asked to close their eyes. A loss of balance is interpreted as a positive Romberg sign. The test was described in 1846 by Moritz Heinrich Romberg, the German doctor who coined the term tabes dorsalis. 164.36 intercostal neuralgia Pain felt in the dorsal nerves, which can produce multiple interpretations as to cause. Quain’s Dictionary notes: ‘pains of a stabbing, plunging or electric-shock-like character are often experienced in the intercostal spaces in the course of tabes [dorsalis]’. This is again a pointer to the effects of syphilis. 165.5–6 lingering tortures . . . Red Indian stake Reference to horrified early reports of Native American techniques of ritual torture of enemies, said to take place over several nights and to involve slow and progressive mutilation of the body, starting with the limbs and moving inwards towards the vital organs. This is a ‘savage’ vision of the slow, progressive effects of the death sentence resulting from syphilis before cures were effective. 165.22 ptosis Quain’s Dictionary: ‘A drooping or falling of the upper eyelid, with inability to raise it, due to paralysis of the third cranial nerve.’ 165.25 æt. Abbreviation for aetatis, meaning ‘at the age of ’. 325

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165.33 portio dura The paralysis of this nerve to the facial muscles was a classic sign of late-stage, tertiary syphilis. 165.37 Bell’s paralysis A paralysis of muscles of the face due to disease or injury, causing a fixed leer, as it pulls up one or both sides of the mouth. It is named after Sir Charles Bell, who presented cases to the Royal Society of London in 1829. It was usually treated with blister behind the ear, but Quain’s Dictionary focuses mostly on stimulation of the nerve by electricity. Nowhere does it suggest that removal of the ear itself might improve the condition. ACD produced several narratives featuring severed ears, including ‘How the Brigadier Lost His Ear’ and the Holmes story, ‘The Cardboard Box’. Appendix 1: Additional Early Stories Added to the Crowborough Edition (1930) Crabbe’s Practice This story was first published in the Boy’s Own Paper, 1884. ACD did not often choose to reprint his very early stories. However, for the Tales of Adventure and Medical Life, published in 1922 for the John Murray volumes that disassembled and reframed his short stories into new thematic volumes, ACD did return to ‘Crabbe’s Practice’. Perhaps signalling his continued dissatisfaction with his early attempts at fiction, ACD virtually rewrote the tale line by line, a relatively unusual departure from his writing practice. It was this 1922 version of the story that was added to the 1930 Crowborough edition of Round the Red Lamp. Since it did not appear in the first edition of RTRL in 1894, but did so in the expanded 1930 edition, this volume has chosen to reprint this later version, as reflecting the author’s latest intention for the work in the context of his medical fiction. 178.22 Spanish fly The crushed bodies of the blister beetle, Lytta vesicatoria (neither Spanish nor a fly), were used by apothecaries for centuries as an aphrodisiac. The pulp of the beetle contained an irritant that stimulated the genital organs, and so was mistakenly used as a treatment for impotence. 178.22 Sabin oil This is an extract of Juniperus sabina, which is poisonous, and was used as an agent to destroy worms in animals. It was also used to induce abortion. 326

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178.28 A muscular Christian too The Victorian model of masculinity associated with the public school ethos, simple rugged belief and patriotic service to the state. It was most associated with Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Thomas Arnold at Rugby school, and the writings of novelist and priest Charles Kingsley. It was clearly ACD’s model of masculinity, too, as represented in Round the Red Lamp by Abercrombie Smith in ‘Lot No. 249’. 178.32 Bulgarian Atrocity meetings in ’78 The Bulgarian atrocities referred to the brutal suppression of a Christian uprising by Ottoman troops, who massacred thousands of Christians in the spring of 1876. Since British diplomacy was aligned with the Ottoman Empire, there was a groundswell of protest in England about the persecution of Christians. Many eyewitness accounts and books were written on the subject (including an account by Bram Stoker’s brother, George, a doctor who treated the wounded). As a direct consequence of these international protests, Bulgaria emerged as an independent nation in 1878. 179.5 ‘What did Gladstone do in ’63?’ Gladstone wrote the pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and The Question of the East in 1876, and spoke regularly on the atrocities. The dissenting question from Crabbe might plausibly refer to Gladstone’s time as a cabinet minister under Lord Palmerston (1859–65), who followed the policy of supporting the Ottoman Empire as a strategic bulwark. Crabbe could be accusing Gladstone of hypocrisy, but we soon find out that there is no particular significance to 1863 at all. 179.32–3 a large port in England These details match those of ACD’s friendship and brief service with the charismatic doctor George Turnavine Budd, as detailed in The Stark Munro Letters. 180.12 Discopherous Bone Possibly means to say disciphorous bone, which is any form with a flat, disc-like structure. 180.30 D.D. Could mean a Dental Diploma (or a Doctor of Divinity?) rather than an MD. 180.34 locomotor ataxia Locomotor ataxia was another name for tabes dorsalis, generally taken as a sign of syphilis in its advanced stages, when it attacks the spinal cord and causes, as Quain’s Dictionary lists: ‘inco-ordination of movement, peculiar pains, defective sensibility, and loss of muscle-reflex action’. Tabes dorsalis was the subject of ACD’s own MD thesis. 327

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180.36 L.S.A. Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries, giving the right to dispense medicines only; a lower status than MD. 180.37–8 epispastic paralysis . . . liquor epispasticus Epispastic paralysis was caused by the application of a blistering agent to the body. Liquor epispasticus was a nineteenth-century liquid preparation rubbed on to the skin and designed to cause blistering – producing rapid vesication to the applied area. 181.18–19 contributor . . . to scientific papers As a young general practitioner, this was precisely the tactic ACD used to plump up his medical reputation. 181.29 Bob Sawyer’s dodge A reference to Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, in which Bob Sawyer is the comically incompetent dispensing apothecary and medical student who sets up as a doctor in Bristol and has to resort to increasingly desperate scams to increase his practice and avoid bankruptcy. 182.14 Huxley Interest from Thomas Henry Huxley, the leading man of science of the day, would have secured any young man’s scientific career. 183.8 bleeding you The ancient practice of bleeding a patient to restore the balance of the humours was rapidly dying out, and marks Crabbe as something of an incompetent medic. 183.18 epileptic or apopletic Epileptic seizure was also known as the Falling Sickness, a neurological condition that causes loss of consciousness and convulsions. Apoplexy was the medical term for a stroke – of being ‘struck down’ – usually as a result of a brain haemorrhage. 183.19 catalepsy . . . miner’s nystagmus Catalepsy was understood as a disease of the nervous system, causing trance-like states and collapse into unconsciousness. Nystagmus is a disturbance of the eye, associated with some occupations that required repetitive eye movements which developed into a disorder. Quain’s Dictionary reports that ‘Miner’s nystagmus is the most common, but it occurs in other occupations involving continued strain on the movements of the eyes.’ 185.34 What has occurred? The rescue of those apparently drowned and revived to life was the quintessence of the humanitarian act in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Society for the Recovery of those Apparently Drowned was established in 1774, and became the Royal Humane Society. The Society awarded medals and printed citations for those heroes who had rescued others from the water (one 328

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was awarded to Bram Stoker, for jumping into the Thames in an attempt to save someone). The Society also issued medical directions for how to resuscitate the apparently drowned. 186.25–6 glossopharyngeal tract The glossopharyngeal nerve delivers a variety of functions to the mouth, including swallowing. 186.26 Marshall Hall Marshall Hall (1790–1857) was an English physician who specialized in the study of reflex action. In 1856, he published Asphyxia, Its Rationale and its Remedy, which included directions on how to revive an apparently drowned person, and he also published Prone and Postural Resuscitation in Drowning and other forms of Apnea or Suspended Respiration (1857). Not to be confused with ACD’s friend, the barrister Edward Marshall Hall. 186.33 Sylvestre’s method Likely a reference to Dr Henry Silvester (1828–1908), who challenged Hall’s methods of resuscitation in an article in the Lancet in 1859. He later became the lead medic at the Royal Humane Society. 187.7 electricity The famous demonstrations by Galvani of the electrical effect on the nerves of frogs’ legs in the 1790s were followed by experiments on the bodies of recently hanged criminals. The use of electricity to resuscitate the heart was explored on dogs by Carl Ludwig in 1850 and then advanced by the English surgeon Thomas Green in 1872. He used a galvanic battery to revive patients. Again, this is cutting-edge science. 187.17 Rokitansky of Vienna Carl von Rokitansky (1804–78) was a leading pathologist in Vienna. Crabbe is trying to associate himself with the most advanced experimental training on the continent. 188.34 erysipelas Bacterial infection of the skin. My Friend the Murderer First published in London Society, 1 December 1882. 190.6–7 Australian Sketcher Invented newspaper title. 190.16 in the Corinthian brig In the holding cell of the ship. 190.37 Queen’s evidence In English (and colonial) law, evidence for the prosecution that is given by a participant in or accomplice to the crime being tried in return for a reduced sentence. 190.38 Bluemansdyke A reference back to ACD’s earlier colonial short story, ‘The Gully of Bluemansdyke’, which had been published in London Society in December 1881. 329

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191.4 Burke and Hare The notorious case of the Edinburgh body snatchers, William Burke and William Hare, occurred in Edinburgh in 1827–28. Burke and Hare killed at least 15 people by smothering them (a practice that became known as ‘burking’) and sold their bodies to the burgeoning market of medical schools in Edinburgh. They were arrested on suspicion of murder, but it was only when Hare turned King’s evidence that Burke was convicted and publicly executed before a huge crowd. The story was retold hundreds of times in popular pamphlets, broadsides and ballads throughout the nineteenth century. 191.13 little town of Perth Founded in 1829, the Australian settlement of Perth expanded when it served as a penal colony from 1849. The influx of thousands of prisoners turned a backwater into a significant settlement. Prison labour built Perth Gaol itself in the 1850s, and it was still in operation at the time ACD published the story. 192.2 bushranger Australian National Dictionary has early use as ‘One who engages in armed robbery, escaping into, or living in, the bush in the manner of an outlaw; orig. an escaped convict subsisting in the bush, often by resort to robbery.’ 192.36 Sydney-slyder Australian slang dictionaries do not carry this term. The slang use of ‘sly’ suggests illegal behaviour, especially related to activities around alcohol; a ‘sly grog shop’ refers to alcohol sold illegally without a licence, so ‘slyder’ may refer to this set of meanings. 192.37 Government peach Hotten’s Dictionary of Slang from 1913 defines peach as a slang term meaning to inform against or betray. From ‘impeach’, with peach ‘confined principally to the conversation of thieves and the lower orders’. 193.24 Ballarat An Australian town in Victoria, a boomtown after gold was discovered nearby in the 1850s. The backstory of the Holmes tale ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes involves prospectors at Ballarat. 193.25 Port Philip The bay in Victoria, where white settlers moving over from Tasmania founded Melbourne in the 1830s. 194.8 beaks Slang term for judges. 194.26 Dunedin City on the South Island of New Zealand. 194.33 trap Shorthand term for trapper, or hunter. 195.35 larrikin Slang term common in Australia and New Zealand for a boisterous, often badly behaved young man. The Australian National 330

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Dictionary defines it as ‘A young, urban rough, esp. a member of a street gang; a hooligan.’ 196.34 Nelson fields When flecks of gold were found near the settlement of Nelson in New Zealand in 1856, the discovery prompted a brief gold rush. Another followed in 1864. These were notoriously lawless times for prospectors. In one incident, the Burgess gang robbed and murdered prospectors at Nelson in 1866, and four were later hanged when one of the gang turned Queen’s evidence against the rest. 198.28 a cabbage-tree hat Cabbage-tree hats were made out of the leaves of the local cabbage-tree palm, and were particularly associated with mobs of lawless young men in the colonies. 199.3 a ranger Shortened term for ‘bushranger’, an outlaw living in the bush. 199.7 She-oaks and blue-gums She-oak is a tree native to Australia; blue-gum is a eucalyptus tree, also native to the region. 203.3 when you are found tripping it’ll be a lifer for you The threat of a life sentence on conviction. 203.10 Pint of old Stringybark Stringybark is an Australian term for a eucalyptus tree, but came to be used allusively as an emblem for the unsophisticated, remote or uncivilized. It was also slang for poor-quality beer, blamed for loutish behaviour and the drunken antics of urban ruffians in Australia. 205.18 hocussed Slang term meaning that someone is stupefied, usually with drugs, and typically for a criminal purpose. 205.31 Sic transit gloria mundi Conventional sentiment in Latin, meaning ‘So pass the glories of the world’. Appendix 2: Preface to Round the Red Lamp (1903) First published in the 12-volume Author’s Edition for London: Smith, Elder, and Co. in 1903. RTRL was paired with The Stark Munro Letters as volume 11 of the edition. This brief preface suggests that ACD had already gained distance on the literary debates about realism and Naturalism that dominated when RTRL was first published in 1894. He now situates the stories of ‘medical realism’ more happily with tales where ‘romance’ dominates, suggesting an ease with the eclectic tone of the collection. 331

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Appendix 3: One-Act Play Adaptations Foreign Policy Foreign Policy, a one-act adaptation of ‘A Question of Diplomacy’, was performed only a handful of times at Terry’s Theatre in 1893. The typed script of the play was sent to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office as required by law. It was granted a licence for performance without changes on 1 June 1893. The script survives in typewritten form in the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection in the British Library, from which this transcription has been made. Obvious errors have been silently corrected and the layout of the script standardized. There are no substantial additions made to the details of the short story. For explanatory notes on the political and diplomatic details in the drama, please refer to the notes for the story, above. Waterloo ACD sold the rights to this one-act dramatization of his story, ‘A Straggler of ’15’, to the Lyceum Theatre manager Bram Stoker for £100 in 1894. It was shortened and shaped for a one-act play for the principal player of the theatre, Henry Irving. His performance as Brewster became one of his signature roles in the last decade of his career, a celebrated performance that often reduced audiences to tears. After Irving died in 1906, the publisher of play scripts, Samuel French, published an edition of the play in 1907, from which this text is taken. The layout of the script has been standardized for consistency. There are no substantial additions made to the military details of the story. The details of Brewster’s role in the celebrated clash at Hougoumont Farm during the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 are outlined in the notes to the story, above. 234.11 Curtain. Slow. A convention arose at performances that the curtain and the raising of the lights in the auditorium were given more time than usual, so that members of the audience could dry their tears and recover from the overwhelming sentiment of the last moments of the play. 332

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Appendix 4: Conan Doyle’s Essays and Letters to the Medical Press Gelseminum as a Poison First published in the British Medical Journal, 20 September 1879, 483. 235.7 Gelseminum A drug usually used in the treatment of facial neuralgia, and sometimes for malaria and in heart conditions. Its active agent, gelsemine, is extracted from plants related to the gelseminum genus. It is poisonous in large quantities, and is closely related to strychnine. 235.15 symptoms of an overdose might be Experiments conducted on the experimenter were relatively common practice in Victorian medicine, although ACD’s experiment with apparently lethal doses of poison was perhaps risky enough to merit publication in the BMJ. ACD is following advice about making a name for oneself as a young doctor by publishing notices in the medical press (see the story ‘Crabbe’s Practice’, in Appendix 1). 235.17 Minims A unit of volume in the imperial system of measurement: it is 1⁄60 of a fluid drachm or 1⁄480 of a fluid ounce. 235.32 Drachms A unit of weight used by apothecaries, equivalent to 60 grains or one eighth of an ounce. 236.3 Ciliary muscle The ciliary muscle is a ring of smooth muscle in the eye’s middle layer that controls adjustment of the eye for viewing objects at varying distances. 236.13 Clifton House, Aston Road As a medical student, ACD took several positions to fund his studies, including at the Birmingham practice of Dr Reginald Ratcliffe Hoare, where he made up prescriptions for the large and successful practice among what he called ‘low life’ in Memories and Adventures. A blue plaque was erected in 1956 to mark the location of Clifton House, long since lost to development. Notes on a Case of Leucocythaemia First published in The Lancet, 25 March 1882, 490. 236.15 Leucocythaemia This was the then-current term in British medicine for what is now known as leukaemia. Quain’s Dictionary defined it as ‘A disease, characterised by a considerable and persistent increase in the number of white corpuscles in the blood, associated with 333

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enlargement of the spleen and disease of the medulla of the bones, or with enlargement of the lymphatic glands.’ ACD’s letter (the journal misspells his surname) speculates on whether exposure to malaria might be related to the later onset of leucocythaemia. 236.22 My friend Mr. Hoare The Birmingham doctor for whom ACD worked as a medical student, initially in 1879. 236.27 ague The popular term for malarial fever. 236.32 rouleaux The aggregation of red blood cells into stacks, visible under the microscope, and a general indicator of disease. 237.2 marasmus Term for general wasting of the body. 237.13 ‘ague-cake’ Term for an enlarged spleen as a result of malarial infection. 237.18 M. B., C. M. Conan Doyle’s name is misspelt in the original. Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery (Magister Chirurgiae), degrees ACD received from Edinburgh in 1880. Life and Death in the Blood First published in Good Words, March 1883, 178–81. The earliest long journalistic essay by ACD on the advances in microbiological science, which would lead to his trip to Berlin in 1890 to witness the eminent biologist Robert Koch make his announcement about a possible new treatment for tuberculosis. The trip prompted ACD’s decision to abandon his medical practice and try to become a specialist in ophthalmology. 238.37 seven days’ fever This is relapsing fever, so-called because the fever appears to break but keeps returning over the course of a week. Quain’s Dictionary defines it as ‘an acute infectious disease due to the presence of a minute parasite, the Spirillum Obermeieri’. It notes that ‘Epidemics have occurred in India and in Egypt, and were once common in the British Isles. The most extensive epidemics have arisen in Ireland in times of famine’ – hence ACD’s reference to the ‘Emerald Isle’. 239.8 spirilla A bacterium named after its twisted or spiral appearance (a spirochaete), and first identified as a source of relapsing fever by Otto Obermeier in Berlin in 1872, at the beginning of the European revolution in the understanding of microbiology. 239.13 Dr Haydenreich ACD refers to Dr Heydenreich, who published an important German monograph on relapsing fever in Berlin 334

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in 1877, widely discussed in English scientific journals (ACD misspells several names in this article). 239.20 splenic fever Another term for a specific presentation of anthrax, the disease caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, and once the scourge of cattle farming. 239.23 Dr Devaine ACD refers to Casimir-Joseph Davaine (1812– 82), who first observed, with Pierre Rayer, the bacterium Bacillus anthracis in 1850, and demonstrated that it could be transmitted between animals in 1863. 239.27 Koch of Woolstein Robert Koch (1843–1910) was the perfect model for ACD’s ambitions: a lowly general practitioner in a provincial practice, who nevertheless beat the leading experimental institutions of the world in Berlin to make key discoveries about the biological processes of bacterial infections. In chapter 9 of Memories and Adventures, ACD relates his impulsive decision to travel to Berlin in 1890 to meet Koch and witness his announcements about tuberculosis, which resulted in the last two articles in this appendix. 240.12 Klein Emmanuel Edward Klein (1844–1925) was a Croatian doctor, educated in Austria, who became a key figure in the emergence of the microbiological study of disease in England. In 1878 he read a paper to the Royal Society regarding the isolation of the bacterium for what was called pig typhoid or swine fever. Klein, however, was more famous in England in the 1870s and 1880s as the exemplar of an indifferent, cruel, Teutonic experimental scientist in his public defence of the need for the vivisection of animals to advance clinical knowledge. His testimony to a parliamentary inquiry became the model of the amoral ‘mad scientist’ for the anti-vivisection movement. 240.20 Pasteur Louis Pasteur’s (1822–95) work to consolidate the ‘germ theory’ of disease, displacing the predominant miasmatic theory, made him a world-famous man of science after a succession of public demonstrations of how disease was transmitted. He developed a vaccine for anthrax in France, which he publicly demonstrated in 1881. 240.26–7 Toussaint in fowl-cholera Jean Joseph Henri Toussaint (1847–90), a veterinarian in Toulouse, identified the bacterium for fowl cholera or avian cholera. He sent his sample to Louis Pasteur in 1879, and this was central to Pasteur’s breakthrough with regard to using attenuated vaccines to build up immunity, as displayed in his public demonstration of 1881. Unlike Koch, Toussaint’s contribution to this breakthrough 335

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was completely overlooked, and the bacillus he discovered, Pasteurella multocida, carries Pasteur’s name. Toussaint published only two further papers and died young in 1890. His role was belatedly recognized a generation later. 241.15–16 malignant pustule Another name for anthrax, but focused on the development of inflamed swellings and leaking lesions on the skin that mark the progress of the disease in humans. 241.18 wool-sorter’s disease Anthrax can be transmitted through close and persistent proximity to livestock, so it tended to be associated with specific trades, such as wool-sorting. 241.22–3 Arloing, Cornevin and Thomas of Lyons . . . named the ‘Maladie de Chabert’ Chabert’s Disease, or blackleg, another disease of cattle, sheep and goats marked by the swelling and discoloration of limbs, was first identified as distinct from anthrax by Philibert Chabert in 1782. However, it was not definitively identified as a distinct bacillus (Clostridium chauvoei) until the researches of Auguste Chauveau and the French team Saturnin Arloing, Charles Cournevin and J.-B. Thomas at the prestigious National Veterinary School of Lyon in 1880. 241.25–6 Galtier . . . hydrophobia Pierre-Victor Galtier (1846–1908), another researcher at the National Veterinary School, developed a vaccine for rabies, known in the nineteenth century as hydrophobia. 242.3 tubercle or consumption Distinct forms of tuberculosis, manifested on the skin in a tubercle or in the lungs in consumption. 242.8 feasible supposition The great hope that Koch’s identification of the tuberculosis bacillus would produce a breakthrough did not materialize. Effective treatments did not emerge until much later, in the 1940s. 242.10 Klebs and Tomassi Crudelli The microbiologists Edwin Klebs (1834–1913) and Corrado Tomassi-Crudeli (1834–1900), who identified the bacilli for typhoid and diphtheria in Rome, and then claimed that they had identified the bacillus for malaria in 1879. This was disproved in 1881, and the mystery of the transmission of malaria was solved only later, in 1898. 242.12 remittent fever Another name for malaria, which was recognized as an illness with a distinct rhythm to its stages of fever. 242.19 Chauveau Auguste Chauveau (1827–1917) was a French veterinarian and microbiologist, and the bacillus Clostridium chauvoei was named after him. From 1865, Chauveau made a series of important 336

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discoveries about the transmission of bovine tuberculosis to humans through the food chain, making a crucial shift in food processing that saved many lives. 242.19 Burdon-Sanderson John Burdon-Sanderson was an Edinburgh-trained physiologist, who specialized in the study of epidemic outbreaks, including diphtheria in 1858 and cholera in 1866. In 1871, he observed that some bacterial growth was stopped by penicillium, an insight built on when Alexander Fleming developed penicillin in 1928. 242.28 scarlatina In this list of familiar epidemic diseases, scarlatina is the older term for scarlet fever. The Contagious Diseases Act First published in The Medical Times and Gazette, 16 June 1883, 671–2. 243.6 Contagious Diseases Act The Contagious Diseases Act was passed in 1864, with its provisions extended in 1866 and again in 1869. The Act was introduced as an attempt to regulate ‘common prostitutes’ in order to reduce the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases in the British Army and Navy. They were first applied to garrison towns and ports, but the coverage was extended over time to other public spaces. The Contagious Diseases Act required women suspected of prostitution to register with the police and submit to an invasive medical examination. The Act gave the police the power to determine who was a prostitute. If the woman was found to be suffering from a venereal disease, she would be confined to a ‘lock hospital’ until pronounced free of disease. The alternative to agreeing to the examination was three months’ imprisonment (extended to six months in the 1869 Act) or hard labour. The Acts did not enforce the examination of men. ACD speaks strongly in defence of the Act, because it had become the focus of a sustained campaign to repeal it, led by the feminist Josephine Butler and her Ladies’ National Association. Butler considered that the Act led to the unjust treatment of women, who, without recourse, could be stopped anywhere in public on suspicion of being a prostitute, severely curtailing their freedom of movement and subjecting them to a drastic violation of their privacy. It also exposed the presumptions of the law, in which women, not men, were assumed to be guilty of transmitting sexual diseases. ACD speaks as a medical professional, concerned (as several stories in RTRL show) with the effects of the spread of venereal disease. 337

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But the essay also exposes his anti-feminist stance, denouncing ‘hysterical legislators’ for thinking of repealing a law that controlled women’s freedoms. ACD was on the losing side: the Act was repealed in 1886. 243.16 time-expired That is, people formerly in military service who have completed their term of enlistment. 243.36 a hundred years’ time This echoes the concern with hereditary syphilis in the story ‘The Third Generation’ in RTRL, in which the disease was presumed to pass down at least three generations (it can be passed directly from infected mother to foetus, but no further – but this was not yet known). American Medical Diplomas First published in The Evening News, Portsmouth, 23 September 1884, 2. 244.4 sham degrees and American diplomas Medicine in the nineteenth century underwent a rapid process of professionalization that was policed through the careful control of licences to practise as a doctor, given only by recognized medical colleges or authorities. The journals of the new profession constantly sought to protect these professional requirements and expose threats and demand prosecution of unlicensed medical practice. In this letter to his local newspaper, ACD responds to the scandal that emerged in 1880 regarding the traffic in diplomas from the ‘University of Philadelphia’. Two reporters from the Philadelphia Record were told by the Dean of the Philadelphia University of Medicine and Surgery that they could pay $100 for a signed diploma that would allow them to practise as doctors with no formal training of any kind. Several more exposés that year prompted a letter from the Secretary of State William M. Evans to the Pennsylvania state government to intervene to stop the damage done by the sale abroad of fraudulent medical diplomas. ACD demonstrates his professional medical identification in his local public sphere. 244.22 Apothecaries Act The 1815 Apothecaries Act was the first major legal attempt to ensure minimal training and licensing of apothecaries, who effectively served as general practitioners at the time. It became a requirement to hold L.S.A. status (a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries). 244.25 Medical Defence Association A group formed in the 1870s that used the law to defend aggressively the rights of medical professionals. It was independent of the British Medical Association. 338

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244.31–2 Gross, Sayre, and Austin Flint Samuel D. Gross (1805–84) was a surgeon and leading medical reformer. Lewis Sayre (1820–1900) was a New York surgeon and public health official, who helped found the American Medical Association, of which he became president in 1880. Austin Flint (1812–86) was the founder of several medical schools in America, including the Bellevue in New York. He is seen as the key figure in professionalizing American medical training. The Remote Effects of Gout First published in The Lancet, 29 November 1884, 978–9. 245.7 children of gouty parents Another indication of ACD’s interest in possibly hereditary conditions. Quain’s Dictionary records that ‘Gout, once established, may be transmitted through several generations, even when every endeavour is made to eradicate it; and if the malady is intensified by pernicious habits, it is likely to become a permanent legacy.’ This note has links to the gout-suffering Foreign Secretary in ‘A Question of Diplomacy’ and the grim inheritance from a grandfather explored in ‘The Third Generation’. 245.22–3 Bright’s disease . . . contracted granular kidney A disease of the kidney, named after the surgeon Richard Bright, who first described the condition in 1829. Later physicians began to understand these kidney problems as a cluster of symptoms that might be ascribed to different conditions, of which ‘contracted granular kidney’ was one. A lively public dispute over the etiology of contracted granular kidney was fought between the eminent doctors Sir George Johnson and Sir William Gull in the 1870s, after the publication of Johnson’s Lectures on Bright’s Disease. 245.28–9 calchicum and alkalies Colchicum is a genus of plants that contain toxic amounts of the alkaloid colchicine, which is used pharmaceutically to treat gout. Compulsory Vaccination First published in The Evening Mail, Portsmouth, 15 July 1887, 3. 245.33 Compulsory Vaccination Vaccination for smallpox was made compulsory for newborn children by Act of Parliament in 1853. Smallpox vaccination had been trialled by Edward Jenner in experiments from 1798 onwards. The provisions of the Act were tightened and 339

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extended in 1867 and again in 1871. This was part of a concerted attempt to extend the control of the state over public health (what we might call, after Foucault, the ‘biopolitics of control’ over large populations). After the fines introduced by the 1871 Act particularly, an anti-vaccination movement emerged. There were middle-class Liberals and libertarians, who objected to the infringement of personal liberty by the coercion of the state – such as the leading objector, Alfred Milnes, of the National Liberal Club. There was also a substantial working-class movement that saw compulsory vaccination as part of the humiliating interference in private family life exercised by the Poor Law Commissioners (compulsory education up to the age of 14 had also just been enacted in 1870, with a network of inspectors to ensure compliance with the law). Some had ethical objections – the cowpox injection offended vegetarians and some religious dissenters. There was also a fear of the vaccination process, undertaken at specific public stations. Vaccination involved the use of a medical lancet to ‘score’ the body of the child in several places and then rub in lymph fluid taken from a previously vaccinated child. The risk of infection from other diseases was downplayed, though obviously there were instances of this. Objectors were fined substantially (20 shillings – a week’s wages for a working man), their property was seized, and many were imprisoned – the martyrs of the movement. These harsher interventions increased in the 1880s as medical understanding and breakthroughs in treatments for epidemic diseases began to offer the possibility of large-scale control of epidemics for the first time. Medical professionals commonly argued for compulsory vaccination, and a ‘conscientious objector’ clause was only added to the vaccination law in 1898, and this was only enforced from 1907. As a result, groups such as the National Anti-Vaccination League had large followings in workingclass districts of London and northern industrial towns. The peak was probably the giant gathering in Leicester in 1885, which attracted over 80,000 people. The movement issued pamphlets, the journal the Vaccination Inquirer, and commonly crossed over with other dissenting movements such as spiritualism. 246.1 Colonel Wintle ACD takes aim at a middle-class antivaccination figure, Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Tritton Wintle, who lived in Southsea on the South Parade. He was a Royal Artillery officer, who had retired with this honorary rank to Southsea in 1883 from the army in Bengal. In July 1887, he was summoned to court for his refusal to 340

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vaccinate his newborn son. The Portsmouth Telegraph reported that in a letter to the local Vaccination Office, Wintle ‘stated that he and his wife had abstained from eating flesh, fish, fowl, or salt, and from drinking intoxicants for a number of years, and that as the child’s blood was pure they did not intend to have it made impure by inoculation’ (9 July 1887). He was fined 10 shillings for non-compliance, which he declared he would refuse to pay, preferring to go to prison for his principles. Another act of defiance in November 1887 resulted in another court date, at which he tried to argue, unsuccessfully, that vaccination was ‘illegal’, and he was fined 20 shillings with 9 shillings costs. He paid this time (Portsmouth Telegraph, 19 November 1887). His letter to the Evening Mail expressed a typical anti-vaccination position, yet the local press remarked that it was unusual for an educated middle-class professional to hold this view. ACD was evidently exercised enough to articulate the standard view of the medical profession on the vital importance of compulsory vaccination. 246.22 Scottish Church . . . protested against . . . chloroform When Dr James Simpson revealed to the Edinburgh Medico-Chirurgical Society in a lecture in 1847 that he had used chloroform as an anaesthetic to ease the pain of childbirth, the Calvinist Church called this invention ‘Satanic’. This was because it viewed childbirth as the ‘curse of Eve’, quoting Genesis 3:16: ‘Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.’ The Church interpreted ‘sorrow’ as pain; Simpson replied it simply meant ‘toil’ and that its pain could be alleviated. 246.34–5 Homoeopath and allopath Conflicting medical philosophies: the minority view of homeopathy (treating like with like) gained many supporters in the nineteenth century, including a privately supported hospital in London, while the orthodox medical view was allopathic (treatment to counter the symptoms of the illness). 247.2–3 Macaulay The eminent historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his History of England from the Accession of James II, volume IV, remarked: ‘The smallpox was always present, filling the churchyards with corpses, tormenting with constant fears all whom it had stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the bighearted maiden objects of horror to the lover.’ 247.6 Mary Mary II, wife of William III, died of smallpox in London in 1694. 341

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247.11 Jennerian practice A reference to pioneer doctor Edward Jenner. Inoculation is the direct introduction of a pathogen into the body in order to build immunity. It came to be considered much riskier than vaccination, in which a weakened version of the pathogen is introduced. Confusingly, it was Edward Jenner who coined the term vaccine from vacca (cow), when he noticed that the lesser illness of cowpox could protect humans from the much more deadly smallpox. The development of vaccines for specific diseases accelerated in the second half of the nineteenth century. 247.17 zymotic diseases ‘Zymotic’ was a term introduced into medical discourse in the 1840s, meant to denote contagious diseases regarded as developing after infection, by a process analogous to fermentation. It was connected to the miasmatic theory of disease, and is no longer in use. 247.21 small outbreak In 1872, over 500 people had died during a smallpox outbreak. Being a port town, Portsmouth was at risk of early exposure to epidemic diseases. Small outbreaks of smallpox had been contained in the early 1880s. 247.23 London smallpox hospital London opened the first dedicated smallpox hospital in the 1750s, and it had moved several times before ending up in Highgate, away from the close air of the City of London. Compulsory Vaccination First published in The Hampshire County Times, 27 July 1887, 5. ACD responds to A. T. Wintle’s several letters in local newspapers; this note was immediately followed by another long rant by Wintle about vaccination, giving Wintle the last word. 249.2 Marson’s tabulated results Dr James F. Marson was the Surgeon to London’s Small-Pox and Vaccination Hospital, which issued annual figures of the number of cases seen. 249.37 the purest lymph Vaccination was performed by rubbing in lymph fluid from previously vaccinated children, which could result in the passing on of other infections in rare cases, as ACD acknowledges here. The transmission of congenital syphilis or scrofula was a particular concern, implying that a disastrous moral taint might be carried from one child to another. 342

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250.13 the league terms A reference to the National Anti-Vaccination League, founded in 1866. 250.27–8 Pasteur and Koch . . . Burdon-Sanderson, Toussaint See annotations to 242.20 for Pasteur, 239.27 for Koch, 242.19 for BurdonSanderson and 240.26–7 for Toussaint. 250.29 zymotic See annotations to page 247.17 above. 250.34 National Health Society The Society was founded in 1871 by Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to gain a medical degree in the United States. The Consumption Cure First published in The Daily Telegraph, 20 November 1890, 3. ACD impulsively decided to travel to Berlin for the Tenth International Medical Congress in November 1890, to witness an announcement by the lowly general practitioner, now world-leading epidemiologist, Robert Koch, who promised a major advance in the treatment of tuberculosis. In Memories and Adventures ACD recalls dropping in on the famous editor W. T. Stead, at his offices in Norfolk Street off The Strand, and pitching the idea of reporting the event for Stead’s new magazine venture, the Review of Reviews. The resulting report follows this letter he wrote to the Daily Telegraph, another indication that ACD could now command space in the national press. 251.9 disappointment Robert Koch’s November announcement was built up by the mainstream press, partly as a result of the fierce competition between European states to be first to announce major scientific discoveries and ‘miracle’ cures. Koch merely announced that he had been able to extract lymph from tubercular patients that might form the basis of a remedy in other patients, although he emphasized that this was an experimental hypothesis, and that he was nowhere nearer eradicating the bacillus from the human system. The majority of the press declared it to be a ‘cure’, but ACD’s caution about this claim proved to be entirely correct. This was in keeping with much of the medical press, the British Medical Journal emphasizing in its communications Koch’s careful and modest claims. 251.12 Bergmann’s treatment Ernst von Bergmann (1836–1907) was a leading surgeon and professor at the University of Berlin. 251.13 Bardeleben Karl von Bardeleben (1849–1919) was a comparative anatomist, then based in Berlin. 343

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251.13 Charité This remains the leading major research hospital in Berlin. 251.13 Dr Levy Dr W. Levy’s private surgical clinic on Prenzlauer Strasse in Berlin (a bohemian and Jewish area of the city) was a regular reference point for medical visitors, since Levy was involved directly in the experiments to inject ‘Koch’s fluid’ experimentally into children. 251.19 Libbertz Dr A. Libbertz conducted the majority of the experiments with lymph fluid under the direction of Koch. In his ‘Further Communication on a Remedy for Tuberculosis’ for the British Medical Journal (22 November 1890), Koch notes: ‘Doctors wishing to make investigations with the remedy at present, can obtain it from Dr. A. Libbertz, Lueneburger Strasse, 28, Berlin, N. W., who has undertaken the preparation of the remedy.’ This no doubt explains the gigantic ‘pile of letters’ ACD describes later in this paragraph when he visits Libbertz. 251.29–30 in the case of lupus ACD follows Koch’s examples of tubercular conditions in his lecture demonstration of November 1890. Lupus erythematosus presents as ‘a cutaneous inflammatory eruption of a special type, characterised by the evolution of more or less rounded, often rather tender . . . discs, or somewhat raised and infiltrated patches, which tend to spread excentrically to a limited extent, and to leave a notable atrophy in their wake’ (Quain’s Dictionary). 251.30 in the case of phthisis The form of tuberculosis that presents through the tissue of the lungs. 252.6–8 the vast difference between . . . consumption and . . . smallpox Smallpox vaccine was delivered once, and appeared to give lifetime immunity. The great challenge for those researching tuberculosis, in contrast, was the rapid ‘tolerance’ that the bacillus developed to vaccines. 253.8 impossible for the stranger in Berlin to see the man In Memories and Adventures, ACD recalls his inability to find a way in to hear Robert Koch deliver his historic lecture, the whole point of his journey to Berlin. Dr Koch and His Cure First published in Review of Reviews 2 (December 1890), 552–6. The Review of Reviews was W. T. Stead’s latest monthly journal venture, which he had just begun after ending his stint as editor of the Pall Mall 344

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Gazette. Stead was by this time one of the most important journalists of the era, able to change government policy with his campaigns, build up careers and knock them down. He was also a perennial outsider, a Northern dissenter who took on the London establishment (he was imprisoned as a result of his exposé of child prostitution in 1885). Like ACD, Stead would shortly become a leading advocate of Spiritualism. He was the most famous man to die on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Stead published monthly biographical portraits of inspiring heroes of the age in the Review of Reviews. The life story of Robert Koch, the provincial doctor who bested a conservative establishment, would have appealed to Stead just as much as it did to ACD. 253.26–7 like the Veiled Prophet Popular 1817 poem by the Irish poet Thomas Moore, ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’ (also known as Lalla Rookh). 254.15 alpinestock An Alpenstock is a long wooden pole with an iron spike tip, used by shepherds for travel on snowfields and glaciers in the Alps. 254.17 Pontresina Mountain village in the Swiss Alps. 254.23 Tyndall John Tyndall (1820–93) was a leading physicist and vocal public proponent of the new authority of science. His ‘Belfast Address’ of 1874 caused controversy by essentially demanding that the Church cede its cultural authority to science. He constantly denounced Spiritualism and its belief in supernatural interventions from a materialist standpoint that ACD had already largely abandoned. In 1856, Tyndall travelled to the Swiss Alps for the first time for scientific research, but ended up making annual visits for the rest of his life. He became a pioneering Alpine mountaineer (he was in the team that reached the top of the Weisshorn for the first time in 1861 and was among the first teams to climb the Matterhorn in 1868). 255.14 comma-bacilli of cholera . . . ACD quickly runs through a taxonomy of the different forms taken by micro-organisms when viewed under the microscope. The ‘Comma-Bacillus’ was a term coined by Robert Koch to describe the rod-shaped organisms responsible for the release of toxins that caused cholera. The rods had a distinctive curve, hence ‘comma’. Quain’s Dictionary notes, however: ‘The name “commabacillus”, by no means a good one, as the organism bears little resemblance to a printer’s comma, has been universally adopted.’ 345

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255.16 rod-shaped filament of the Bacillus anthracis Rod-like forms of bacteria tended to be called a bacillus, as in anthrax. 255.17 curving tendrils of the Obermeyer spirillus A bacterium named after its twisted or spiral appearance, and first identified as a source of relapsing fever by Otto Obermeier in Berlin in 1872. 255.18 jointed branches of Aspergillus Not bacteria, but a genus of fungus. Aspergillus was first isolated in 1729 by the Italian priest and biologist Pier Antonio Micheli, who thought that the fungi under a microscope looked like an aspergillum, a sprinkler for holy water used in Church ritual. It derives from the Latin spargere (to sprinkle). 255.21 A satire, indeed A sentiment that pre-dates H. G. Wells’s sardonic end to his 1898 The War of the Worlds, in which the Martian invasion is defeated not by man but by lowly bacteria. 255.36 Jacob Henle Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle (1809–85), German pathologist and physician, and early proponent of the germ theory of disease, which underpinned the later advances of microbiology. 256.29 splenic fever Another term for anthrax. 256.32 Dr Devaine Casimir-Joseph Davaine (1812–82), who isolated the bacteria Bacillus anthracis in 1850, and demonstrated that it could be transmitted between animals in 1863, but left it to Koch to show how it transferred to humans. 257.17 Pasteur Louis Pasteur’s famed demonstration on cattle took place in 1881, and definitively established the germ theory as the basis for epidemic diseases. 257.24 Cohn’s ‘Communications’ Robert Koch’s key paper on the anthrax bacillus was published in 1876. Cohn’s Communications refers to Ferdinand Cohn, one of the founders of the field of microbiology. 257.32 Professor Finkelnburg Professor Carl Maria Finkelnburg (1832–96) was a prominent expert in psychiatry and diseases relating to public hygiene, appointed as Extraordinary Professor at the University of Bonn in 1880. 257.34 Lister’s antiseptic system Joseph Lister (1827–1911), Edinburgh and Glasgow university professor and the founder of antiseptic surgery. 258.22 scrofula . . . lupus Scrofula was a serious inflammation of the lymphatic glands, and lupus a skin condition, both understood after Koch as versions of tubercular infection. 346

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259.23–4 the first English physician Dramatic journalistic licence, given that thousands of medics were in Berlin at the time for the international congress, and ACD travelled with Malcolm Morris, the medic who wrote up Koch’s lecture for the British Medical Journal. 259.25 I had opportunities As the note to his Daily Telegraph letter explains above, ACD had to take these opportunities to visit other clinics involved in Koch’s experimental trial because he was not able to get in to the main event, the lecture on Koch’s new findings. 259.37–8 Professor von Bergmann Ernst von Bergmann (1836–1907) was a leading surgeon and professor at the University of Berlin. 260.9 Morell Mackenzie ACD explains in Memories and Adventures that he was at a continual disadvantage in Berlin, because of his British nationality. The leading British throat specialist Sir Morell Mackenzie had in May 1887 been asked to attend the crown prince of Germany, who became Emperor Frederick III. Mackenzie’s misdiagnosis effectively killed the emperor, leading to much animosity against British doctors in Germany. The German physicians who attended the crown prince in early 1887 diagnosed his condition as cancer of the throat. Mackenzie insisted that the disease was not cancerous, and that an operation was unjustifiable. His expert opinion was adopted, and the crown prince went to England for treatment. In November, however, his German doctors again insisted that the disease was cancer. Mackenzie suggested that it had become malignant since his first examination, in consequence of the irritating effect of the treatment by the German doctors. The crown prince became emperor on 9 March 1888 but died on 15 June. His son, the new Kaiser, wanted Mackenzie arrested for his incompetence. A violent quarrel raged between Mackenzie and the German medical world. The German doctors published an account of the illness; Mackenzie replied with a work entitled The Fatal Illness of Frederick the Noble (1888), a publication that caused him to be censured by the Royal College of Surgeons. 260.25 Dr Hartz, of Michigan Henry Jasper Hartz was a Germanborn physician, who had received his MD in Detroit in 1889, and was pursuing postgraduate studies at universities in Bonn as well as Berlin and Vienna. The editor of Review of Reviews would have liked this moment of Anglo-American alliance, since W. T. Stead was a strong advocate of the creation of a worldwide commonwealth of the white races, bringing Great Britain and America together. 347

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explanatory notes

261.6  Dr Levy Dr W. Levy’s surgical clinic was on Prenzlauer Strasse in Berlin, where children with tuberculosis were involved in Koch’s experiments. 262.29  Dr Koeler A lecture raising doubts about Koch’s remedy by fellow Berlin medic Dr Koehler was published in the Lancet on 13 December 1890. 263.8–9  Dr A. Libbertz Dr. A. Libbertz conducted the majority of the experiments with lymph fluid under the direction of Koch, and consequently received the avalanche of mail requesting samples.

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