The Stark Munro Letters - Arthur Conan Doyle (free ebook reader for pc TXT) 📗

them, I shall look upon them as a lot of infernal blockheads. Eh, Munro, what?”

I could only say again that I thought he took a very low view of the profession, and that I disagreed with every word he said.

“Well, my boy, you may disagree as much as you like, but if you are going to work with me you must throw etiquette to the devil!”

“I can’t do that.”

“Well, if you are too clean handed for the job you can clear out. We can’t keep you here against your will.”

I said nothing; but when we got back, I went upstairs and packed up my trunk, with every intention of going back to Yorkshire by the night train. He came up to my room, and finding what I was at, he burst into apologies which would have satisfied a more exacting man than I am.

“You shall do just exactly what you like, my dear chap. If you don’t like my way, you may try some way of your own.”

“That’s fair enough,” said I. “But it’s a little trying to a man’s self-respect if he is told to clear out every time there is a difference of opinion.”

“Well, well, there was no harm meant, and it shan’t occur again. I can’t possibly say more than that; so come along down and have a cup of tea.”

And so the matter blew over; but I very much fear, Bertie, that this is the first row of a series. I have a presentiment that sooner or later my position here will become untenable. Still, I shall give it a fair trial as long as he will let me. Cullingworth is a fellow who likes to have nothing but inferiors and dependants round him. Now, I like to stand on my own legs, and think with my own mind. If he’ll let me do this we’ll get along very well; but if I know the man he will claim submission, which is more than I am inclined to give. He has a right to my gratitude, which I freely admit. He has found an opening for me when I badly needed one and had no immediate prospects. But still, one may pay too high a price even for that, and I should feel that I was doing so if I had to give up my individuality and my manhood.

We had an incident that evening which was so characteristic that I must tell you of it. Cullingworth has an air gun which fires little steel darts. With this he makes excellent practice at about twenty feet, the length of the back room. We were shooting at a mark after dinner, when he asked me whether I would hold a halfpenny between my finger and thumb, and allow him to shoot it out. A halfpenny not being forthcoming, he took a bronze medal out of his waistcoat pocket, and I held that tip as a mark. Kling!” went the air gun, and the medal rolled upon the floor.

“Plumb in the centre,” said he.

“On the contrary,” I answered, “you never hit it at all!”

“Never hit it! I must have hit it!”

“I am confident you didn’t.”

“Where’s the dart, then?”

“Here,” said I, holding up a bleeding forefinger, from which the tail end of the fluff with which the dart was winged was protruding.

I never saw a man so abjectly sorry for anything in my life. He used language of self-reproach which would have been extravagant if he had shot off one of my limbs.

Our positions were absurdly reversed; and it was he who sat collapsed in a chair, while it was I, with the dart still in my finger, who leaned over him and laughed the matter off. Mrs. Cullingworth had run for hot water, and presently with a tweezers we got the intruder out. There was very little pain (more to-day than yesterday), but if ever you are called upon to identify my body you may look for a star at the end of my right forefinger.

When the surgery was completed (Cullingworth writhing and groaning all the time) my eyes happened to catch the medal which I had dropped, lying upon the carpet. I lifted it up and looked at it, eager to find some topic which would be more agreeable. Printed upon it was—

“Presented to James Cullingworth for gallantry in saving life. Jan. 1879.”

“Hullo, Cullingworth,” said I. “You never told me about this!”

He was off in an instant in his most extravagant style.

“What! the medal? Haven’t you got one? I thought every one had. You prefer to be select, I suppose. It was a little boy. You’ve no idea the trouble I had to get him in.”

“Get him out, you mean.”

“My dear chap, you don’t understand! Any one could get a child out. It’s getting one in that’s the bother.

One deserves a medal for it. Then there are the witnesses, four shillings a day I had to pay them, and a quart of beer in the evenings. You see you can’t pick up a child and carry it to the edge of a pier and throw it in. You’d have all sorts of complications with the parents. You must be patient and wait until you get a legitimate chance. I caught a quinsy walking up and down Avonmouth pier before I saw my opportunity. He was rather a stolid fat boy, and he was sitting on the very edge, fishing. I got the sole of my foot on to the small of his back, and shot him an incredible distance. I had some little difficulty in getting him out, for his fishing line got twice round my legs, but it all ended well, and the witnesses were as staunch as possible. The boy came up to thank me next day, and said that he was quite uninjured save for a bruise on the back. His parents always send me a brace of fowls every Christmas.”

I was sitting with my finger in the hot water listening to this rigmarole. When he had finished he ran off to get his tobacco box, and we could hear the bellowing of his laughter dwindling up the stair. I was still looking at the medal, which, from the dents all over it, had evidently been often used as a target, when I felt a timid touch upon my sleeve; it was Mrs.

Cullingworth, who was looking earnestly at me with a very distressed expression upon her face.

“You believe far too much what James says,” said she.

“You don’t know him in the least, Mr. Munro. You don’t look at a thing from his point of view, and you will never understand him until you do. It is not, of course, that he means to say anything that is untrue; but his fancy is excited, and he is quite carried away by the humour of any idea, whether it tells against himself or not. It hurts me, Mr. Munro, to see the only man in the world towards whom he has any feeling of friendship, misunderstanding him so completely, for very often when you say nothing your face shows very clearly what you think.”

I could only answer lamely that I was very sorry if I had misjudged her husband in any way, and that no one had a keener appreciation of some of his qualities than I had.

“I saw how gravely you looked when he told you that absurd story about pushing a little boy into the water,”

she continued; and, as she spoke, she drew from somewhere in the front of her dress a much creased slip of paper. “Just glance at that, please, Dr. Munro.”

It was a newspaper cutting, which gave the true account of the incident. Suffice it that it was an ice accident, and that Cullingworth had really behaved in a heroic way and had been drawn out himself insensible, with the child so clasped in his arms that it was not until he had recovered his senses that they were able to separate them. I had hardly finished reading it when we heard his step on the stairs; and she, thrusting the paper back into her bosom, became in an instant the same silently watchful woman as ever.

Is he not a conundrum? If he interests you at a distance (and I take for granted that what you say in your letters is not merely conventional compliment) you can think how piquant he is in actual life. I must confess, however, that I can never shake off the feeling that I am living with some capricious creature who frequently growls and may possibly bite. Well, it won’t be very long before I write again, and by that time I shall probably know whether I am likely to find any permanent billet here or not. I am so sorry to hear about Mrs. Swanborough’s indisposition. You know that I take the deepest interest in everything that affects you.

They tell me here that I am looking very fit, though I think they ought to spell it with an “a.”

VIII.

1 THE PARADE, BRADFIELD, 6th April, 1882.

I am writing this, my dear Bertie, at a little table which has been fitted up in the window of my bedroom.

Every one in the house is asleep except myself; and all the noise of the city is hushed. Yet my own brain is singularly active, and I feel that I am better employed in sitting up and writing to you, than in tossing about upon my bed. I am often accused of being sleepy in the daytime, but every now and then Nature gets level by making me abnormally wakeful at night.

Are you conscious of the restful influence which the stars exert? To me they are the most soothing things in Nature. I am proud to say that I don’t know the name of one of them. The glamour and romance would pass away from them if they were all classified and ticketed in one’s brain. But when a man is hot and flurried, and full of his own little ruffled dignities and infinitesimal misfortunes, then a star bath is the finest thing in the world. They are so big, and so serene and so lovely. They tell me that the interplanetary spaces are full of the debris of shattered asteroids; so, perhaps, even among them there are such things as disease and death. Yet just to look at them must remind a man of what a bacillus of a thing he is—the whole human race like some sprinkling of impalpable powder upon the surface of one of the most insignificant fly-wheels of a monstrous machine. But there’s order in it, Bertie, there’s order! And where there is order there must be mind, and where there is mind there must be sense of Justice. I don’t allow that there can be any doubt as to the existence of that central Mind, or as to the possession by it of certain attributes. The stars help me to realise these. It is strange, when one looks upon them, to think that the Churches are still squabbling down here over such questions as whether the Almighty is most gratified by our emptying a tea-spoonful of water over our babies’ heads, or by our waiting a few years and then plunging them bodily into a tank. It would be comic if it were not so tragic.

This train of thought is the after-swell from an argument with Cullingworth this evening. He holds that the human race is deteriorating mentally and morally. He calls out at the grossness which confounds the Creator with a young Jewish Philosopher. I tried to show him that this is no proof of degeneration, since the Jewish Philosopher at least represented a moral idea, and was therefore on an infinitely