He buys himself a Roc motorbicycle, which proves mightily insubordinate, and which Touie will not allow the children near; then a chain-driven twelve-horse-power Wolseley, which is much applauded and does regular damage to the gateposts. This new motoring machine has rendered his carriage and horses redundant; though when he mentions this obvious fact to the Mam, she is outraged. You cannot put a family crest on a mere machine, she argues, let alone one which suffers the regular indignity of breaking down.
Kingsley and Mary are granted liberties not available to most of their friends. In summer they go barefoot, and may roam anywhere within a five-mile radius of Undershaw as long as they are home for meals, clean and tidy. Arthur has no objection when they make a pet of a hedgehog. On Sundays he will often announce that fresh air is better for the soul than liturgy, and enlist one of them as his caddie; a ride in the high dogcart to Hankley Golf Course, an erratic progress with a heavy golf bag, and then the reward of hot buttered toast in the club house. Their father will readily explain things to them, though not always the things they need or want to know; and he does so from a great height, even when he is on his knees beside them. He encourages self-sufficiency, sports, riding; he gives Kingsley books about great battles in world history, and warns him of the perils of military unpreparedness.
Arthur’s forte is solving things, but he cannot solve his children. None of their friends or schoolmates has a private monorail; yet Kingsley, with infuriating politeness, lets slip that it does not go fast enough, and perhaps the carriages should be bigger. Mary, meanwhile, climbs trees in a manner incompatible with female modesty. They are not bad children in any way; as far as he can assess the matter, they are good children. But even when they are well-mannered and properly behaved, what Arthur has not counted on is their relentlessness. It is as if they are always expectant—though of what, he cannot tell, and he doubts they can either. They are expectant of something he cannot provide.
Arthur privately thinks that Touie should have taught them more discipline; but this is a reproach he cannot make, except in the mildest terms. And so the children grow up between his erratic authoritarianism and her benign approving. When Arthur is in residence at Undershaw, he wants to work; and when he stops work, he wants to play golf or cricket, or have a quiet 200-up with Woodie on the billiards table. He has provided the family with comfort, security and money; in exchange he expects peace.
He does not get peace; still less from inside himself. When there is no chance of seeing Jean for a while, he tries to bring her close by doing what she would like doing. Because she is a keen horsewoman, he enlarges his stable at Undershaw from one horse to six, and begins riding to hounds. Because Jean is musical, Arthur decides to learn the banjo, a decision Touie greets with her normal indulgence. Arthur now plays the Bombardon tuba and the banjo, though neither instrument is famed for its ability to accompany a classically trained mezzo-soprano voice. Sometimes he and Jean arrange to read the same book while they are apart—Stevenson, Scott’s poems, Meredith; each likes to imagine the other on the same page, sentence, phrase, word, syllable.
Touie’s preferred reading is The Imitation of Christ. She has her faith, her children, her comfort, her quiet occupations. Arthur’s guilt ensures that he behaves towards her with the utmost consideration and gentleness. Even when her saintly optimism seems to border on a monstrous complacency, and he feels a rage gathering within him, he knows he cannot inflict it upon her. To his shame, he inflicts it upon his children, upon servants, caddies, employees of the railway and idiot journalists. He remains utterly dutiful towards Touie, utterly in love with Jean; yet in other parts of his life he becomes harder and more irritable. Patientia vincit reads the admonition in stained glass. Yet he feels he is growing a stony carapace. His natural expression is turning into a prosecutor’s stare. He looks through others accusingly, because he is so used to looking through himself.
He begins to think of himself geometrically, as being located at the centre of a triangle. Its points are the three women of his life, its sides the iron bars of duty. Naturally, he has placed Jean at the apex, with Touie and the Mam at the base. But sometimes the triangle seems to rotate around him, and then his head spins.
Jean never offers the slightest complaint or reproach. She tells him that she cannot, will not, ever love another person; that waiting for him is not a trial but a joy; that she is entirely happy; that their hours together are the central truth of her life.
“My darling,” he says, “Do you think there was ever such a love story as ours since the world began?”
Jean feels her eyes fill with tears. At the same time, she is a little shocked. “Arthur dearest, it is not a sporting competition.”
He accepts the rebuke. “Even so, how many people have had their love tested as we have? I should think our case was about unique.”
“Does not every couple think their case unique?”
“It is a common delusion. Whereas with us—”
“Arthur!” Jean does not think boastfulness appropriate to love; she is inclined to find it vulgar.
“Even so,” he persists, “even so I feel sometimes—no often—that there is a Guardian Spirit watching over us.”
“So do I,” Jean agrees.
Arthur does not find the notion of a Guardian Spirit fanciful, or even a banality. He finds it plausible and real.
Nevertheless, he needs an earthly witness to their love. He needs to offer proof. He takes to forwarding Jean’s love letters to the Mam. He does not ask permission, or regard this as breaching a confidence. He needs it to be known that their feelings for one another are still as fresh as ever, and their trials not in vain. He tells the Mam to destroy the letters, and suggests a choice of method. She may either burn them, or—preferably—tear them into tiny pieces and scatter them among the flowers at Masongill Cottage.
Flowers. Each year, without fail, on the 15th of March, Jean receives a single snowdrop with a note from her beloved Arthur. A white flower once a year for Jean, and white lies all the year round for his wife.
And all the time, Arthur’s fame increases. He is a clubman, a diner-out, a public figure. He becomes an authority on worlds beyond literature and medicine. He stands for Parliament as a Liberal Unionist in Edinburgh Central, where defeat is tempered by the recognition that much of politics is a mudbath. His views are canvassed, his support counted on. He is popular. He becomes more popular when he reluctantly submits to the joint will of the Mam and the British reading public: he resuscitates Sherlock Holmes and despatches him in the footprints of an enormous hound.
When the South African War breaks out, Arthur volunteers as a medical officer. The Mam does everything to dissuade him: she thinks his large frame a sure target for the Boer bullet; further, she judges the war nothing but a dishonourable scramble for gold. Arthur disagrees. It is his duty to go; he is acknowledged to have the strongest influence over young men—especially young sporting men—of anyone in England bar Kipling. He also thinks that this war is worth a white lie or two: the nation is getting into a fight which is a rightful one.
He leaves Tilbury on the Oriental. He is to be looked after on his adventure by Cleeve, the butler from Undershaw. Jean has filled his cabin with flowers, but will not come to say farewell; she cannot face a parting amid the thronged and thumping cheerfulness of a transport. As the whistle sounds for visitors to leave the ship the Mam bids him a tight-mouthed goodbye.
“I wish Jean had come,” he says, a small boy in a hulking suit.
“She is in the crowd,” the Mam replies. “Somewhere. Hiding. She could not trust her feelings, she said.”
And with that she goes. Arthur rushes to the rail, furious and impotent; he watches his mother’s white cap as if it will lead him to Jean. The gangplank is withdrawn, the ropes unslung; the Oriental pulls away, the hooter bellows and Arthur can see nothing and nobody through his tears. He lies down in his floral, fragrant cabin. The triangle, the triangle with iron bars, whirls inside his
head, until it comes to rest with Touie at its apex. Touie, who instantly and devotedly approved this project, like every other he has ever undertaken; Touie, who asked him to write, but only if he has time, and who made no fuss. Dear Touie.
On the voyage out, his mood slowly lifts, as he begins to understand more fully why he has come. As a duty and example, of course; but also for selfish reasons. He has become a pampered and rewarded fellow, who needs some cleansing of the spirit. He has been safe too long, has lost muscle, and requires danger. He has been among women too long, and too confusingly, and yearns for the world of men. When the Oriental docks to take on coal at Cape de Verde, the Middlesex Yeomanry instantly organizes a cricket match on the first piece of flattened ground they can find. Arthur watches the game—against the staff of the telegraph station—with joy in his heart. There are rules for pleasure and rules for work. Rules, orders given and received, and a clear purpose. That is what he has come for.
At Bloemfontein the hospital tents are on the cricket field; the main ward is the pavilion. He sees much death; though more men are lost to enteric than to the Boer bullet. He takes five days’ leave to follow the army’s advance north, across the Vet river towards Pretoria. On his return, south of Brandfort, his party is stopped by a Basuto on a shaggy mount, who tells them of a British soldier lying wounded at some two hours’ distance. They buy the fellow as a guide for a florin. There is a long ride through maize fields then out across the veldt. The wounded Englishman turns out to be a dead Australian: short, muscular, with a yellow waxen face. No. 410, New South Wales Mounted Infantry, now dismounted, his horse and his rifle gone. He has bled to death from a stomach wound. He lies with his pocket watch set up before him; he must have seen his life tick away by the minute. The watch has stopped at one o’clock in the morning. Beside him stands his empty water bottle, with a red ivory chessman balanced on the top of it. The other chessmen—more likely to be loot from a Boer farmstead than a soldier’s pastime—are in his haversack. They gather his effects: a bandolier, a stylograph pen, a silk handkerchief, a clasp-knife, the Waterbury watch, plus £2 6s. 6d. in a frayed purse. The sticky body is slung over Arthur’s horse, and a swarm of flies attends them on the two-mile ride to the nearest telegraph post. There they leave No. 410, New South Wales Mounted Infantry, for burial.
Arthur has seen all kinds of death in South Africa, but this is the one he will always remember. A fair fight, open air, and a great cause—he can imagine no better death.
On his return, his patriotic accounts of the war bring approval from the highest ranks of society. It is the interregnum between the old Queen’s death and the new King’s coronation. He is invited to dine with the future Edward VII and seated beside him. It is made clear that a knighthood is on offer in the Coronation Honours List if Dr. Conan Doyle would care to accept it.
But Arthur does not care to. A knighthood is the badge of a provincial city mayor. The big men do not accept such baubles. Imagine Rhodes or Kipling or Chamberlain accepting such a thing. Not that he considers himself their equal; but why should his standards be lower than theirs? A knighthood is the sort of thing fellows like Alfred Austin and Hall Caine grab at—if they are lucky enough to be given the chance.
The Mam is both disbelieving and furious. What has it all been for, if not for this? Here is the boy who blazoned cardboard shields in her Edinburgh kitchen, who was taught each step of his ancestry back to the Plantagenets. Here is the man whose carriage harness bears the family crest, whose hallway celebrates his forebears in stained glass. Here is the boy who was taught the rules of chivalry and the man who practises them, who went to South Africa because of the fighting blood in him—the blood of Percy and Pack, Doyle and Conan. How dare he decline to become a knight of the realm, when his whole life has been aimed towards such a consummation?
The Mam bombards him with letters; to every argument, Arthur has a counter-argument. He insists that they drop the matter. The letters cease; he pronounces himself as relieved as Mafeking. And then she arrives at Undershaw. The whole house knows why she has come, this small, white-capped matriarch who is the more dominant for never raising her voice.
She lets him wait. She does not take him aside and suggest a walk. She does not knock on his study door. She leaves him alone for two days, knowing how the wait will operate on his nerves. Then, on the morning of her departure, she stands in the hallway with the light streaming through the glass escutcheons which shamefully omit the Foleys of Worcestershire, and asks a question.
“Has it not occurred to you that to refuse a knighthood would be an insult to the King?”
“I tell you, I cannot do it. As a matter of principle.”
“Well,” she says, looking up at him with those grey eyes which strip him of years and fame. “If you wish to show your principles by an insult to the King, no doubt you can’t.”
And so, with the week-long Coronation bells still echoing, Arthur is herded into a velvet-roped pen at Buckingham Palace. After the ceremony he finds himself next to Professor—now Sir—Oliver Lodge. They might discuss electromagnetic radiation, or the relative motion of matter and ether, or even their shared admiration for the new monarch. Instead, the two new Edwardian knights talk about telepathy, telekinesis and the reliability of mediums. Sir Oliver is convinced that the physical and the psychical are as close as the shared letters of the two words suggest. Indeed, having recently retired as president of the Physical Society, he is now president of the Psychical Society.
They debate the relative merits of Mrs. Piper and Eusapia Paladino, and whether Florence Cook is more than just a skilful fraud. Lodge describes attending the Cambridge sittings, at which Paladino was put through her paces, under strictest conditions, in a sequence of nineteen seances. He has seen her produce ectoplasmic forms; also guitars playing themselves as they float through the air. He has watched a jar full of jonquils being conveyed from a table at the far end of the room, and being held, without any palpable means of support, beneath each of the sitters’ noses in turn.
“If I were to play devil’s advocate, Sir Oliver, and say that conjurers have offered to reproduce her exploits, and in some cases have succeeded in doing so, how would you reply?”
“I would reply that it is indeed possible that Paladino resorts to trickery on occasion. For instance, there are times when the expectation of the sitters is great and the spirits prove unforthcoming. The temptation is plain. But this does not mean that the spirits which do move through her are not genuine and true.” He pauses. “You know what they say, Doyle, the scoffers? They say: from the study of protoplasm to the study of ectoplasm. And I reply: then remember all those who did not believe in protoplasm at the time.”
Arthur chuckles. “And may I ask where you currently stand?”
“Where I stand? I have been researching and experimenting for nearly twenty years now. There is still much work to be done. But I would conclude, on the basis of my findings so far, that it is more than possible—indeed probable—that the mind survives the physical dissolution of the body.”
“You give me great heart.”
“We may soon be able to prove,” continues Lodge with a collusive twinkle, “that it is not just Mr. Sherlock Holmes who is able to escape evident and apparent death.”
Arthur smiles politely. That fellow is going to dog him to the gates of St. Peter, or whatever the equivalent turns out to be in the new realm that is slowly being made palpable.
There is little far niente in Arthur’s life. He is not a man to spend a summer’s afternoon in a deckchair with a hat pulled down over his face, listening to the bees bothering the lupins. He would make as hopeless an invalid as Touie makes a successful one. His objection to inactivity is not so much moral—in his view, the Devil makes work for hands both idle and occupied—as temperamental. His life contains great bouts of mental activity, followed by great bouts of physical activity; in between he fits his social and family life, both of which he takes at a lick. He even sleeps as if it
were part of life’s business, rather than an interlude from it.
So he has few means of recourse when the machine overstrains itself. He is incapable of recuperating with an idle fortnight on the Italian lakes, or even a few days in the potting shed. He plunges instead into moods of depression and lassitude, which he seeks to hide from Touie and Jean. He shares them only with the Mam.
She suspects that he is more than usually troubled when he proposes a visit on his own account, rather than as a way of making a rendezvous with Jean. Arthur takes the 10:40 from St. Pancras to Leeds. In the luncheon car, he finds himself thinking, as he increasingly does, about his father. He now acknowledges the harshness of his youthful judgement; perhaps age, or fame, has made him more forgiving. Or is it that there are times when Arthur feels on the edge of nervous collapse himself, when it seems that the normal human condition is to be on the edge of nervous collapse, and that it is mere good fortune, or some quirk of breeding, that keeps anyone from falling? Perhaps if he did not have his mother’s blood in him, he might go—might already have gone—the way of Charles Doyle. And now Arthur begins to realize something for the first time: that the Mam has never criticized her husband, before or since his death. She does not need to, some might say. But even so: she, who always speaks her mind, has never been heard to say ill of the man who caused her so much embarrassment and suffering.
It is still light when he arrives at Ingleton. In the early evening they climb up through Bryan Waller’s woodland and emerge on to the moor, gently scattering a few wild ponies. The large, erect, tweeded son aims words down at the red coat and neat white cap of his sure-footed mother. From time to time she picks up sticks for the fire. He finds this habit of hers vexing—as if he could not afford to buy her a cord of the finest firewood whenever she needs it.
“You see,” he says, “there is a path here, and over there is Ingleborough, and we know that if we climb Ingleborough we can see across to Morecambe. And there are rivers whose course we can follow, which always flow in the same direction.”
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