Arthur and George (31 page)

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 The gangplank is withdrawn, the ropes unslung; the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.”

The Mam does not know what to make of these topographical platitudes. They are most unlike Arthur.

“And were we to miss the path and get lost on the Wolds, we could use a compass and a map, which are easily obtainable. And even at night there are stars.”

“That is all true, Arthur.”

“No, it is banal. It is not worth saying.”

“Then tell me what you wish to say.”

“You brought me up,” he replies. “There was never a son more devoted to his mother. I say that not as self-praise, merely as a statement of fact. You formed me, you gave me my sense of myself, you gave me my pride and what moral faculties I have. And there is still no son more devoted to his mother.

“I grew up surrounded by sisters. Annette, poor dear Annette, God rest her soul. Lottie, Connie, Ida, Dodo. I love them all in their different ways. I know them inside out. As a young man, I was not unfamiliar with female company. I did not debase myself as many another fellow did, but I was neither an ignoramus nor a prude.

“And yet . . . and yet I have come to think that women—other women—are like distant lands. Except that when I have been to distant lands—out on the veldt in Africa—I have always been able to find my bearings. Perhaps I am not making sense.”

He stops. He needs a reply. “We are not so distant, Arthur. We are more like a neighbouring county which you have somehow forgotten to explore. And when you do, you are not sure if the place is much more advanced or much more primitive. Oh yes, I know how some men think. And perhaps it is both and perhaps it is neither. So tell me what you wish to say.”

“Jean is struck down with bouts of low spirits. Perhaps that is not the right way to describe them. It is physical—she has migraines—but it is more a kind of moral depression. She behaves, she talks as if she has done some awful thing. I never love her more than at such moments.” He attempts to take a deep breath of Yorkshire air, but it sounds more like a great sigh. “And then I fall into black moods myself, but I merely loathe and despise myself for them.”

“And at such times no doubt she loves you just as much.”

“I never tell her. Perhaps she guesses. It is not my way.”

“I would not expect otherwise.”

“I think at times I shall run mad.” He says it calmly but bluntly, like a man giving a weather report. After a few paces, she reaches up and slips her arm through his. It is not one of her gestures, and it takes him by surprise.

“Or if not run mad, die of a stroke. Explode like the boiler of a tramp steamer and just sink beneath the waves with all hands.”

The Mam does not answer. It is not necessary to refuse his simile, or even to ask if he has seen a doctor for chest pains.

“When the fit is on me, I doubt everything. I doubt I ever loved Touie. I doubt I love my children. I doubt my literary capability. I doubt Jean loves me.”

This does call for an answer. “You do not doubt that you love her?”

“That, never. That, never. Which makes it worse. If I could doubt that, then I could doubt everything and sink happily into misery. No, that is always there, it has me in its monster grip.”

“Jean does love you, Arthur. I am quite certain of it. I know her. And I have read her letters that you send.”

“I think she does. I believe she does. How can I know she does? That’s the question that tears at me when this mood descends. I think it, I believe it, but how can I ever know it? If only I could prove it, if either of us could prove it.”