These shifting statements, like Dr. Watson’s war wound, have provoked much comment over the years. It is difficult to tell whether the confusion arises from Conan Doyle’s generosity, or Robinson’s actual contributions, or some combination of the two. It appears that Robinson received some payment for his role in the novel’s evolution. The writer Archibald Marshall claimed that Conan Doyle signed over one-quarter of the initial profits to Robinson. Marshall wrote: “As I put it to Bobbles at the time, ‘Then if you write “How do you do?” Doyle gets six shillings and you get two.’ He said he had never been good at vulgar fractions, but it sounded right, and anyhow what he wrote was worth it.”
Marshall’s statement certainly implies that Robinson shared in the composition. If so, it seems he placed no great value on his efforts. In describing the week he spent with Conan Doyle in Devon, Robinson made no claims to authorship. “He made the journey in my company shortly after I had told him, and he had accepted from me, a plot which eventuated in the Hound of the Baskervilles,” Robinson wrote. “How well he turned to account his impressions will be remembered by all readers of the Hound.”
Indirectly, Robinson gave the impression that he played a more substantial role. He presented Harry Baskerville with an inscribed copy of the cook—“with apologies for using the name.” Very occasionally his byline identified him as the “Joint Author” of The Hound. After his death, he was quoted as having claimed to have written “most” of the first installment of the book, which included chapters one and two.
If Robinson made such a statement, one can understand Conan Doyle’s need to reassert his own claim over the manuscript, even if it meant diminishing his acknowledgment to Robinson. Possibly Robinson sketched out preliminary drafts or source material, and later exaggerated his role as his ego and professional circumstances demanded. If so, no evidence is currently available. The surviving portions of the manuscript are all in Conan Doyle’s hand.
If Robinson did, in fact, let it be known that he wrote a portion of the novel, it is curious that he should have laid claim to the first two chapters. Together they form the very model of the classic Baker Street curtain-raiser. When a visitor leaves his walking stick, but not his calling card, Holmes invites Watson to gather whatever clues he can from the stick. Watson, attempting to apply his friend’s methods, offers a series of plausible conjectures, building a portrait of a middle-aged country practitioner. Holmes appears greatly impressed. “Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it,” he announces. “I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.”
“Has anything escaped me?” Watson asks proudly. “I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?”
The answer leaves him crestfallen: “I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided toward the truth.”
Holmes goes on to correct Watson’s misapprehensions in glorious detail, concluding that the owner of the stick is actually “a young fellow under thirty, amiable, unambitious, absent-minded, and the possessor of a favourite dog, which I should describe roughly as being larger than a terrier and smaller than a mastiff.” Presently, the young and amiable Dr. James Mortimer appears—with his dog in tow—to consult on the recent death of Sir Charles Baskerville, and its possible connection to an ancient Baskerville family curse.
The consultation ends with perhaps the most classic passage in the entire Holmes saga. Dr. Mortimer, having related how the body of Sir Charles came to be discovered, tells Holmes that no one observed any traces on the ground around the body. But Mortimer himself did observe a strange cluster of markings, and it is for this reason that he has come to Baker Street:
“Footprints?”
“Footprints.”
“A man’s or a woman’s?”
Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered:
“Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”
If these words were not written by Conan Doyle, at least one biographer will eat his deerstalker hat.
After its serialization in The Strand, The Hound of the Baskervilles appeared in book form and became a massive best-seller. This success brought new pressure to bear for further Holmes adventures. Within months, Conan Doyle received an offer he could scarcely afford to refuse. Years earlier, the King of Bohemia had offered Sherlock Holmes carte blanche in the matter of the Irene Adler photograph. Now the American magazine Collier’s Weekly extended virtually the same terms to Conan Doyle. The magazine bid $25,000 for six new Sherlock Holmes stories, or $30,000 for eight, or $45,000 for a series of thirteen. Greenhough Smith sweetened the deal with a promise of a further £100 per thousand words. Even in today’s market, this would be a respectable sum. At the time, it was staggering. Bowing to the inevitable, Conan Doyle signaled his acceptance with a laconic postcard: “Very well. A.C.D.”
The Ma’am, after pleading so strenuously for the detective’s life, now expressed reservations about his return, fearing that Sherlock Holmes could not possibly live up to his own reputation. “I don’t think you need have any fears about Sherlock,” Conan Doyle assured her. “I am not conscious of any failing powers, and my work is not less conscientious than of old.… I have done no short Sherlock Holmes stories for seven or eight years and I don’t see why I should not have another go at them.”
Initially, at least, Holmes showed no ill effects from his mishap in Switzerland. Conan Doyle still complained of the difficulty in manufacturing suitable plots, but the long layoff had refreshed his ingenuity. His own life, it seems, provided some inspiration, as many of the new stories were to feature secret love affairs. Conan Doyle also had the advantage of discussing—and occasionally borrowing—the plots his brother-in-law Willie Hornung was devising for his popular Raffles series.
In later years, Conan Doyle would be sensitive to charges that the new Holmes stories had not measured up. “The most trenchant criticism of the stories as a series came from a Cornish boatman,” he later wrote in an article for The Strand, “who remarked to me: ‘When Mr. Holmes had that fall he may not have been killed, but he was certainly injured, for he was never the same afterwards.’” Whenever possible, he answered his critics directly. In “The Adventure of the Priory School,” Holmes examines the track left by a bicycle’s tires and announces which direction the rider had gone. “I had so many remonstrances upon this point,” he noted, “varying from pity to anger, that I took out my bicycle and tried.” He found that his readers were right and he was wrong. Nevertheless, he remained fond of the later efforts. Whenever he was asked to list his favorite Holmes adventures, he took care to include examples from the post-Reichenbach period.
For the moment, as he sat down to begin the new series, there remained the difficulty of retrieving Sherlock Holmes from his watery grave. Conan Doyle handled this with exceptional panache in “The Adventure of the Empty House.” The story opens with the news of the murder of the Honorable Ronald Adair, an event in which “all London was interested, and the fashionable world dismayed.” As Dr. Watson contemplates this mystery, he is confronted by an elderly bookseller, armed with a copy of The Origin of Tree Worship, who proves to be none other than a disguised Sherlock Holmes. Watson, after a brief fainting spell, demands to know how his friend “succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss.” The answer, though implausible, is no less delightful in its utility. Holmes, we learn, has a useful knowledge of baritsu, the Japanese system of wrestling, which enabled him to slip out of Professor Moriarty’s grasp and thus avoid falling into the chasm. He then scrambled up a sheer cliff to avoid leaving footprints, and allowed the world to think him dead so that he might avoid the vengeance of Moriarty’s henchmen.
The manner in which Holmes occupied himself during this interval—known to Sherlockians as “The Great Hiatus”—is a so
urce of enduring delight to his admirers: “I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum, the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office. Returning to France, I spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the south of France.”
At least, as he himself might have said, the two years had not been without features of interest. Conan Doyle credited Jean Leckie with providing the basic plot for the story, but the breezy style and wit suggests that the author had learned to enjoy his famous creation once again. Both Collier’s and The Strand promoted “The Adventure of the Empty House” with undisguised glee. “Sherlock Holmes Returns!” announced a handbill in America. “The Tale of his Marvellous Escape will appear in Collier’s Household Number for October.” The Strand took a similar tone: “The news of his death was received with regret as at the loss of a personal friend. Fortunately, that news, though based on circumstantial evidence which at the time seemed conclusive, turns out to be erroneous.”
Even as Holmes and Watson settled back into the rooms at Baker Street, an important transition had taken place. For the author, and for the rest of the world, a new century had begun. For Sherlock Holmes, only two years had elapsed. He was now a figure of the past, rooted in the era of gaslight, swirling fog, and hansom cabs, rather than the modern, forward-looking detective who first captured the public’s imagination. With this decision, the longevity of Sherlock Holmes was assured. As Vincent Starrett, perhaps the greatest of all Sherlockians, was to write in a poem called “221B”:
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.
The new Sherlock Holmes adventures made a welcome change from Conan Doyle’s other best-seller of this period: the five-hundred-page volume on The Great Boer War. As the war had not yet ended when Conan Doyle’s chronicle appeared in October 1900, the book carried the subtitle of “An Interim History of the Boer War.” Interim or not, the book stands as a rigorous work of military scholarship, drawing together field reports, battle maps, troop statistics, and casualty data. It appeared too prematurely to be regarded as the definitive history of the conflict, as Conan Doyle had hoped, but it was enormously influential in helping to usher in an era of military reforms. Conan Doyle’s history, and an article he published in Cornhill Magazine, called attention to many of the outmoded tactics that had proven ineffective in South Africa. His list of suggested reforms ranged from camouflage and artillery placement to the abandonment of anachronistic cavalry swords and lances. He also counseled the formation of civilian rifle clubs, so that future generations of British soldiers might learn to shoot as well as their Boer counterparts had. In the latter instance Conan Doyle led the way by establishing an Undershaw Rifle Club on his own property, supplying all the weapons and ammunition himself, and holding practice sessions twice a week. Lord Roberts himself supported the proposal, and visited Hindhead to inspect Conan Doyle’s target range.
In his article for Cornhill Magazine, Conan Doyle emphasized the need to move toward a more democratic, less class-conscious military. “Above all,” he wrote, “let us have done with the fuss and feathers, the gold lace, and the frippery! Let us have done also with the tailoring, the too-luxurious habits of the mess, the unnecessary extravagance which makes it so hard for a poor man to accept a commission!” Here, Conan Doyle spoke with some heat. His own wealth made it possible to provide his brother Innes, a career officer, with the luxuries needed to keep pace with his fellow officers. Conan Doyle felt strongly that his brother would have been no less deserving if he himself had remained a humble Southsea physician.
With the benefit of historical hindsight, Conan Doyle’s proposals appear modest and sensible, but they provoked a great deal of heated discussion at the time. Conan Doyle primed the debate in the letters column of the Times of London. He pressed his agenda with “some freedom and possibly even some bitterness,” but though his views mirrored those of many officials, the military establishment as a whole dismissed him as a presumptuous civilian. In 1902 a royal commission was appointed, but reforms were slow in coming.
To some extent, Conan Doyle courted controversy where the military was concerned. When Boer guerrilla parties began derailing British supply trains, killing and injuring many soldiers, Conan Doyle wrote to the Times to suggest a solution. “Would it not be perfectly feasible to put a truck full of Boer irreconcilables behind every engine which passes through a dangerous part of the country?” he asked. “Such a practice as I suggest would infallibly put an end to it, and is so obvious that it is difficult to imagine why it has not been done. The Germans in 1870 continually carried French hostages in the trains.” The suggestion was not popular, but this did not greatly concern him. “Let both sides wear the gloves,” he told his critics, “or let both sides take them off.”
If Conan Doyle’s suggestion was ugly, the war in South Africa had turned uglier still. As the conflict wore on, and the outmanned Boers fell back entirely on guerrilla raids, the British responded in kind. Boer farms were burned, and crops and livestock were destroyed. Reports of rape and looting were rampant. Boer women and children, as they were burned out of their homes, were herded into concentration camps, ostensibly for their own protection. When typhoid and measles swept the camps, an appalling death toll was recorded.
In Britain and abroad, loud protests were heard. W. T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, published a pair of pamphlets—“Shall I Slay My Brother Boer?” and “Methods of Barbarism”—in which he attacked the British actions in South Africa. These diatribes created a climate of suspicion and uncertainty at home, while a wave of impassioned reports in the foreign press sparked anti-British sentiment abroad. Conan Doyle had known Stead ever since his fact-finding trip to Berlin years earlier, but he felt it his duty to stem what he called an “extraordinary outbreak of defamation.” In January 1902 he began writing a pamphlet entitled “The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Conduct.” Drawing heavily on eyewitness statements and army documents, Conan Doyle completed the task in only eight days. The finished “pamphlet” ran to sixty thousand words, which made it longer than The Hound of the Baskervilles.
He would have preferred, Conan Doyle said, to see a government official take up the defense of British policies, but this had not happened. “For some reason, which may be either arrogance or apathy, the British are very slow to state their case to the world,” he wrote. “In view of the persistent slanders to which our politicians and our soldiers have been equally exposed, it becomes a duty which we owe to our national honour to lay the facts before the world.”
In the booklet, Conan Doyle tried to address the criticisms point by point. A chapter called “The Farm-Burning” answered charges that troops were causing wanton destruction to Boer property, and quoted official dispatches to show that such activity had been prohibited at the early stages of the campaign. Only when private homes had become staging areas for guerrilla assaults, Conan Doyle argued, did the burnings begin. “Guerrilla warfare cannot enjoy all its own advantages and feel none of its own defects,” he wrote. “It is a two-edged weapon, and the responsibility for the consequences rests upon the combatant who first employs it.”
A chapter on “The Concentration Camps” casts the matter of Boer internment as a moral obligation: “[W]hen large numbers of farmhouses were destroyed under the circumstances already mentioned, it became evident that it was the duty of the British, as a civilised people, to form camps of refuge for the women and children where, out of reach, as we hoped, of all harm, they could await the return of peace.” He went on to detail the exact quantities of meat, flo
ur, coffee, sugar, and milk allotted to every inhabitant, in an attempt to illustrate their humane treatment. He made no effort to deny the high mortality rate of the camps, but went on to state, with some authority, that this tragedy was the result of disease, and that the British army had done no better where their own troops were concerned. “I cannot believe,” he concluded, “that any impartial mind can read the evidence without seeing that the British Government was doing its best under difficult circumstances to carry out the most humane plan possible, and that any other must involve consequences from which a civilised nation must shrink.” This is a point that has troubled the British conscience ever since; if Conan Doyle’s words read as an apologia, he intended to show—as he truly believed—that the intention had been honorable. It must be added that the phrase “concentration camp” had not yet acquired the horrific resonance of the present day.
Conan Doyle’s thoughts on the “Further Charges Against British Troops,” which included accusations of rape, were not as admirably balanced. W. T. Stead and others had written that incidents of rape were widespread and had not met with appropriate condemnation from officials. “It is an unpleasant fact,” Stead had written, “but it has got to be faced like other facts. No war can be conducted—and this war has not been conducted—without exposing multitudes of women, married and single, to the worst extremities of outrage. It is an inevitable incident of war.” Conan Doyle examined a handful of reports, and quoted at length from Boer prisoners and impartial witnesses in an effort to discredit the charges. He attempted to show a disparity between the published reports and the actual facts; in one instance, he claimed the accused soldier had done no more than use “coarse terms in his conversation.” In cases where the charges were found to be true, he reported, severe punishments had been given. Conan Doyle’s findings were true so far as he could verify them, but subsequent investigations showed that the army’s record was not quite as unblemished as he might have hoped.
Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle Page 28
