That afternoon in Arosa, a group of villagers turned out to witness the approach of the hardy trio. To their surprise, Conan Doyle and the Brangers had long since arrived, and were in fact finishing up a pleasant lunch as the crowd gathered. “I would not grudge them any innocent amusement,” Conan Doyle wrote, “but, still, I was just as glad that my own little performance was over before they assembled with their opera-glasses.” If Conan Doyle’s dignity had been spared, the seat of his trousers had not. For the remainder of the day, he admitted, “I was happiest when nearest the wall.”
Later, while signing a hotel register, Tobias Branger paid his new friend an apt tribute. Under the heading for “profession,” he entered the German word Sportesmann after Conan Doyle’s name. The gesture greatly pleased Conan Doyle, who had developed a sincere admiration for his rugged instructors. “They are both men of considerable endurance,” he remarked in The Strand, “and even a long spell of my German did not appear to exhaust them.”
Conan Doyle did not introduce the sport of skiing to Switzerland, as has often been reported, nor was he the first Briton to strap on a pair of skis in that country. He did, however, do more than any man of his time to popularize the sport. His account of his ski adventure, accompanied by eight photographs, would be reprinted many times in Britain and America. In it, he assured his readers that the thrill of skiing came “as near to flying as any earth-bound man can.” He felt certain, he continued, that this new sport would soon find an enthusiastic following. “This is not appreciated yet,” he admitted, “but I am convinced that the time will come when hundreds of Englishmen will come to Switzerland for the ‘ski’-ing season, in March and April.”
Within ten years, Conan Doyle’s prediction would be borne out. With the founding of a Davos English Ski Club in 1903, the village was on its way to becoming an internationally renowned ski resort. As Tobias Branger would write, “Arthur Conan Doyle gave the impulse that led to the crossing of mountains and gave proof of the practical utility of ski.”
Today, a plaque in Davos pays tribute to Conan Doyle’s role in bringing the attractions of the Swiss Alps to the attention of the world. It concludes with a fitting testimonial to the man in the distressed knickerbockers. He was, to the citizens of Davos, “The pattern of a perfect gentleman.”
Conan Doyle, Sportesmann, would have been pleased.
12
A Skeleton in the Garden
I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as fraud.
—CARL JUNG, NOTE FOR AN ADDRESS TO THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
In the early months of 1894, as Louisa’s health continued to improve, Conan Doyle’s work schedule accelerated. He had two novels in the pipeline—the autobiographical Stark Munro Letters and a “mesmeric and hypnotic mystery” called The Parasite. He also prepared a collection of medical stories, entitled Round the Red Lamp, and began crafting a new series character, Brigadier Gerard, drawing on his interest in the Napoleonic era.
As these projects advanced, business obligations began to call him back to London for periodic visits. Conan Doyle undoubtedly felt reluctant to abandon Louisa for any length of time, but he must also have welcomed these opportunities to renew his contacts in London and to escape, however briefly, the climate of sickliness in Davos.
Louisa herself must have enjoyed the respite when, in April, her doctors permitted her a trip to South Norwood to see the family. Within two months, however, she returned to Davos under the care of her sister-in-law, Lottie.
Though the chaos of the previous year seemed to be receding, Conan Doyle still felt an inner turbulence. “I had everything in those few years to make a man contented,” he wrote, “save only the constant illness of my partner. And yet my soul was often troubled within me. I felt that I was born for something else, and yet I was not clear what that something might be. My mind felt out continually into the various religions of the world. I could no more get into the old ones, as commonly received, than a man could get into his boy’s suit.” It cannot be entirely coincidental that he chose this moment to join the Society for Psychical Research, a decision that marked a turning point of his life.
Conan Doyle made his application in November 1893, one month after the death of Charles Doyle. Six years had passed since he published his letter in Light declaring his interest in spiritualism. In the interim, Conan Doyle had corresponded with several of the Society’s founding members, including F. W. H. Myers, whose study entitled Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death was to become a cornerstone of psychic research.
In the tumult of Vienna, London, and The Strand, Conan Doyle had had little time for the table-turning and mind-reading exercises of Southsea. Now, in Davos, surrounded by the sick and dying, it was natural that his thoughts should have returned to the subject of “life beyond the veil.”
Conan Doyle’s decision to join the Society for Psychical Research—thereby making a public declaration of his interest in spiritualism—has drawn much comment over the years. Unlike the obscure Southsea doctor who had stated his convictions to the readers of Light, Conan Doyle now had a global reputation as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the embodiment of cold logic. Then as now, his detractors have considered it unseemly, and perhaps a trifle witless, that such a man should suddenly profess an interest in spirits.
Such attitudes are based in part on a false assumption—that Conan Doyle had allied himself with a group of cranks and social pariahs. In fact, the opposite is true. At the time that Conan Doyle joined the S.P.R., its leading lights were prominent in the world of science, and its newly elected president was no less a figure than Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister. Much had changed in Conan Doyle’s life since his first encounter with Balfour, when he defended the politician against hecklers at the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society. Now, in joining the S.P.R., he stood shoulder to shoulder not only with Balfour, but also with the philosopher William James, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, and the scientists Oliver Lodge and William Crookes. Conan Doyle’s long-established interest in spiritualism, on top of his recent misfortunes, made it natural enough that he should sign on when he did. If, however, his interest had been restricted to social climbing, he could have done worse than to join the S.P.R.
A Sherlock Holmes story called “The Naval Treaty,” published in 1893, suggests that Conan Doyle took a keen interest in the career of Arthur Balfour. The story features a character named Percy “Tadpole” Phelps, an old school chum of Watson’s, whose uncle is a Conservative party powerhouse named Lord Holdhurst. Contemporary readers would have noted the parallel to Balfour’s own uncle, the Conservative Foreign Secretary Robert Cecil, to whom Balfour owed his early cabinet appointments. At the time of the story’s publication, Robert Cecil’s pattern of family patronage had become so prominent that it gave rise to the expression: “Bob’s your uncle.”
Like Conan Doyle, Balfour had compelling reasons to take an interest in spiritualism. As a young man, he had become engaged to a beautiful young woman named May Lyttelton, a niece of William Gladstone. A short time later, a violent attack of typhoid fever claimed her life. In his grief, Balfour sought to restore contact with his dead fiancée through séances, but he soon grew frustrated and disenchanted by a series of transparently fake mediums.
Though he despaired of ever communicating with Miss Lyttelton, Balfour remained interested in psychic research. His brother-in-law was Henry Sidgwick, another founding member of the S.P.R., and it was undoubtedly through him that Balfour became involved in the organization’s affairs.
Conan Doyle admired Balfour enormously, and came to regard him as one of the “great ones of earth.” A favorite anecdote of his later years involved their subsequent meeting at the home of Lord Burnham, of the prominent newspaper family, who had recently installed an elaborate Turkish bath. At his host’s insistence, Conan Doyle took a long steam, then withdrew to the drying room wearing nothing but a pair of towels, o
ne knotted around his head and the other roughly approximating a toga. “Presently the door opened,” he recalled, “and entered Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister of England. He knew nothing of the house or its ways, and I can remember the amazement with which he gazed at me. Lord Burnham following at his heels introduced me, and I raised the towel from my head. There were no explanations, and I felt that he went away with the impression that this was my usual costume.”
Presumably Conan Doyle wore trousers at their later meetings, and the two men developed a strong mutual admiration over the years. Balfour’s opinions carried a great deal of weight with Conan Doyle. Early in 1894, the journal of the S.P.R.—Transactions of the Society for Psychical Research—reprinted an address by Balfour on the subject of mesmerism. The young politician discoursed at length on “these half-seen phenomena” that might exist “outside the world, as we have, from the point of science, been in the habit of conceiving it.” Paraphrasing Shakespeare, Balfour concluded that “there are things in heaven and earth not hitherto dreamed of in our scientific philosophy.”
Balfour’s address seems to have reawakened Conan Doyle’s interest in the subject, inspiring the “mesmeric and hypnotic” story that became The Parasite. If Conan Doyle took inspiration from his new associates, there can be little doubt that the gentlemen of the S.P.R. saw great potential in having a world-famous novelist in their midst. Upon joining the Society, Conan Doyle began corresponding with the distinguished physicist Oliver Lodge, a pioneer of radio telegraphy. Today, their letters are preserved in the archives of Cambridge University. The envelope of one early letter bears a scrawled notation to Lodge from his associate and fellow spiritualist J. Arthur Hill: “He may be very useful,” Hill said of Conan Doyle, “as a doctor & a Sherlock Holmes, his testimony will have great weight with the public or with a magistrate.”
In those early days, Conan Doyle seemed perfectly happy to make himself useful in this way. Already, however, the seeds of his later extremism had been planted. Commenting on Lodge’s account of a spirit séance, and its possible value as a proof of spiritualism, Conan Doyle chided Lodge for his conservatism. “My only possible criticism was that you seemed to speak too guardedly,” he wrote. “After all, it is, if established (and what more can be demanded to establish it) infinitely the most important thing in the history of the world.”
Within months of joining the S.P.R., while on one of his visits to England from Davos, Conan Doyle was invited to lend his talents as a Sherlock Holmes. A man named Colonel Elmore, a veteran of the Second Afghan War, had written to the Society to complain of strange goings-on at his home in Dorset. Eerie noises were disturbing the household at night. The sound of chains dragging across a wooden floor could be heard in the small hours, along with the fearful moaning of a soul in torment. Colonel Elmore seemed inclined to attribute these happenings to rats, but his wife and their adult daughter were highly agitated. Most of their household staff had deserted them, and even the family dog could not be compelled to enter certain rooms of the house.
Colonel Elmore had signed a long-term lease on the property and could not afford to move. He had contacted the S.P.R. as a last resort. The idea of a ghost hunt greatly appealed to Conan Doyle, who set out from Paddington Station with two highly regarded members of the Society, Dr. Sydney Scott and Mr. Frank Podmore. Podmore, who produced a book called Apparitions and Thought Transference that year, had already established himself as an eminence in the field of psychic research. Together with F. W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney, he had compiled a groundbreaking study of spirit phenomena called Phantasms of the Living, published in 1886. This monumental undertaking collected hundreds of reports of paranormal occurrences, many of them involving near-death experiences, and attempted to identify common elements that might yield to scientific analysis.
Podmore seems to have gathered a great deal of information concerning the Dorset case. “I remember,” Conan Doyle said, “that it took us the whole railway journey from Paddington to read up the evidence as to the senseless noises which had made life unendurable for the occupants.”
Arriving in Dorset, the three investigators noted that Colonel Elmore appeared to be a steady, no-nonsense sort of person, unlikely to be carried away by imaginative fancies. The old soldier had asked that his visitors conceal the true purpose of their visit, so as not to further alarm his wife and daughter. Accordingly, Conan Doyle and his companions pretended to be old army friends, and their dinnertime conversation was restricted to various military campaigns in Afghanistan.
After a rubber of whist in the cards room, the three investigators decided to turn in early, claiming that the country air had made them drowsy. As the household fell quiet, Conan Doyle, Podmore, and Scott made silent preparations for the night ahead. They fastened the windows, bolted the doors, and strung lengths of thread across to the stairs and passages to show if anyone passed during the night.
The three men took turns on watch through the night, but heard nothing unusual. Dr. Scott returned to London the following day, but Conan Doyle and Podmore remained. On the second night, a “fearsome uproar” broke the silence of the house. “It was like someone belabouring a resounding table with a heavy cudgel,” Conan Doyle reported. “It was not an accidental creaking of wood, or anything of that sort, but a deafening row.” Conan Doyle rushed from his bedroom carrying a lamp. He and Podmore hurried to the kitchen, where the sounds appeared to be centered, but they found nothing out of the ordinary. The doors were still bolted, the windows remained fastened, and the threads had not been disturbed.
By now Colonel Elmore and his wife and daughter had been roused, but they could add nothing to the puzzle. Conan Doyle and Podmore made a pretense of returning to bed, but instead sat up waiting for fresh outbreak of the tumult. The rest of the night passed without incident.
Here, Conan Doyle’s account takes a strange turn. He left the house, he said, unsatisfied with the results and unable to shed any light on the mystery. He insisted that he felt uncertain about what he had heard, and could not rule out the possibility that he and his friends had not been the victims of some elaborate practical joke. “But there was a sequel to the story,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Some years later the house was burned down, which may or may not have a bearing upon the sprite which seemed to haunt it, but a more suggestive thing is that the skeleton of a child about ten years old was dug up in the garden.”
The child’s skeleton, Conan Doyle believed, offered a possible explanation for the strange happenings. “There is a theory,” he explained, “that a young life cut short in sudden and unnatural fashion may leave, as it were, a store of unused vitality which may be put to strange uses.”
Conan Doyle’s account, like most of his spiritualist writings, is fascinating as far as it goes. The details of his story are consistent with many other reports gathered by the S.P.R. over the years. The conclusion he posited, concerning the restless spirit of the girl buried in the garden, is familiar today as poltergeist phenomena—a word that literally means “noisy ghost.” One could wish for amplification of certain details, but at first reading Conan Doyle appears to have made a sober and fair-minded assessment of the situation, without insisting too much on a spiritualist interpretation.
There was, however, another side to the story. Over the years, the episode of Colonel Elmore and his haunted house became enormously important to Conan Doyle. He gave an account of the experience in his autobiography, and offered variations on the tale in two of his spiritualist tracts—The New Revelation and The Edge of the Unknown. The story also featured in dozens of his spiritualist lectures in cities all over the world. It is not difficult to understand why he placed so much emphasis on this one incident. He liked to claim, in later life, that his fascination with spiritualism came as the result of decades of study, rather than a latter-day conversion. He had little evidence of this, however, apart from his youthful letter to Light, his early membership in the S.P.R., and this one quasi-official “investigation
.” Each time he repeated the tale, he reinforced his own credentials as a fair-minded investigator with a lifetime of experience.
In all those repetitions, however, Conan Doyle always withheld one crucial detail. For years, he insisted that he had uncovered no earthly explanation for the “fearsome uproar” that night. At the time, it seems, he told a different story. According to his friend Jerome K. Jerome, Conan Doyle returned from Dorset claiming to have discovered a more prosaic explanation for the odd noises. In this version of the tale, Conan Doyle not only solved the mystery, he also unmasked a human perpetrator—Colonel Elmore’s daughter.
“Doyle always had a bent toward the occult,” Jerome remarks in his autobiography. “He told me a curious story.” In Jerome’s rendition of the events, which he apparently had from Conan Doyle’s own lips, the story took an unexpected twist. Although the events unfolded much as Conan Doyle had related, the Colonel’s daughter—“an unmarried woman of about five and thirty”—behaved in a suspicious manner after the household had been roused. After insisting that she had heard nothing, and that the others had simply imagined the disturbance, she suddenly burst into a violent fit of weeping. According to Jerome, this stirred Conan Doyle’s detective instincts, and inspired him to set a trap. “The next night they laid their plans,” Jerome wrote, “and discovered, as Doyle had suspected, that the ghost was the daughter herself.”
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle Page 19
