The Mystery of The Mystery of Cloomber
The Mystery of The Mystery of Cloomber is an article written by Owen Dudley Edwards published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 2, No. 2) in autumn 1991.
A scholarly analysis arguing that The Mystery of Cloomber was written much earlier than usually believed, likely in 1882–1883 rather than 1888. The article traces textual revisions, narrative technique, biographical context, and thematic evolution to situate the novel within Arthur Conan Doyle's artistic development.
The Mystery of The Mystery of Cloomber
- 'There's ane thing that I havena spoken aboot yet, but that should be set doon'
- 'Statement of Israel Stakes'
- The Mystery of Cloomber
- It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky
- Louis MacNeice, Bagpipe Music (1937)
- Doyle then moved on to Buddhism, and showed what its devotees could do in The Mystery of Cloomber. The scientist, says he, should 'look to the East, from which all great movements come', where the savants are many thousand years ahead of him in all the essentials of knowledge'; and he concludes that 'the occult philosophy has been the work of the very cream of humanity.' After reading the novel some readers would prefer a philosophy that comes from the very beer of humanity. Briefly, an English officer, in the course of his duty in the East, kills a Buddhist holy man. From that moment he is doomed, and spends the rest of his life fleeing and hiding from the other holy men who are on his track and who at intervals convey to him by signals that he cannot escape his fate. At last they come for him in a boat which is conveniently wrecked on the lonely bit of Scottish coast where he has fortified himself in a large house, the implication being that Buddhist holy men can create a storm at sea as easy as winking. He makes no resistance, follows them obediently, and comes to a sticky end in a bog. The chronicler is not in a position to inform us whether the soldier's last regrets were that he failed to make a clean sweep of holy men while serving in the East.
Arthur Conan Doyle began his career as story-teller by entertaining his fellow-schoolboys, so it seems appropriate that the only biographical discussion hitherto, until Geoffrey Stavert's A Study in Southsea, received by what now appears to have been his first novel, should be so cheerfully Philistine a schoolboy response. Hesketh Pearson did tackle it, which is more than can be said for the rest of us; he confused remarks of its chief narrator, John Fothergill West, with judgments by its author, which was characteristic of him; he ascribed its composition vaguely to the late 1880s, which was consistent with the external evidence available to him, and its publication lazily to the mid-1890s, which was not; he was amusing; and he was unfair. It seems to require some sort of appropriate chorus: 'Ha, ha, ha!' 'Well tried, Parson!' 'Pretty good, you fellows, what?' 'Kick Pearson, somebody.' 'Yaroop!'
The Mystery of Cloomber was first serialised in the Pall Mall Budget starting in August 1888, then in the Pall Mall Gazette in September 1888, and published in book form by Ward and Downey on 17-31 December 1888. These data are self-evidently from the invaluable Richard Lancelyn Green and John Michael Gibson, A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle, pp.12-15. They state it was 'written between April and July 1888', possibly from its mention in an undated letter from ACD to his mother mentioning the need to copyright Micah Clarke; that letter, in the Conan Doyle MSS now closed to the public pending legal arbitration, is quoted only in fragment by John Dickson Carr and Pierre Weil-Nordon, without further discussion of the book. The allusion would seem in fact to be Cloomber's preparation for publication. Internal and external evidence argue for a much earlier date for its composition, so much so that I conclude it antedates all of Arthur Conan Doyle's other novels including The Firm of Girdlestone (which the bibliographers tell us 'The author began writing ... at the beginning of 1884 ... and had finished ... by November 1885' (ibid., p.33).)
The textual variations of The Mystery of Cloomber have hitherto received no discussion known to me in any public print, but there appear to be three distinct phases:
(a) The Pall Mall text. Apart from its natural division into instalments which frequently do not correspond to the chapters also present, each instalment is headed by the epigraph:
- There is a scientific incredulity which surpasses in imbecility the obtuseness of the clodhopper.
This is credited to 'Baron Hellenbach', who was, more correctly, Freiherr Lazar Hellenbach von Paczolay (1827-1887), an Austrian nobleman, author, and patron of spiritualism, one of whose proteges performing under. his auspices, the ailing American H. Bastian, was reported in the London Daily News 13 February 1884 as having been exposed in pseudo-spiritualist trickery by the Archduke Johannes and his nephew Kronprinz Rudolf, heir to the Austrian throne. (Rudolf committed suicide with his lover the Countess Marie Vetsera on 30 January 1889, thus causing a Scandal in Bohemia, and indeed all over the Austrian Empire.)
The last few lines of the main narrative include the sentence:
- I, John Fothergill West, can confidently answer that science is wrong and invite the reader's attention to that pithy, if disrespectful, aphorism of Baron Hellenbach which I have placed at the head of my narrative.
The main text is followed by 'The Occult Philosophy, an addendum by Mr Mordaunt Heatherstone.'
(b) The Ward and Downey text. This omits the epigraph at all points, and the above-quoted sentence is altered from 'that pithy' to 'a pithy' and ends after 'Hellenbach'. A new chapter is included, 'Statement of Israel Stakes', preceding the chapter 'Narrative of John Easterling, F.R.C.P. Edin.'. This necessitated the alteration of the preceding chapter supposedly by John Fothergill West from the sentence with which it ended:
- I now proceed to give the statement furnished me by one who had the means of knowing something of what was going on inside Cloomber during the months that I was observing it from without.
to:
- I think that there cannot be a better moment than this to hand the narrative over to those who had the means...
etc to 'without', followed by:
- The evidence of the two individuals whose statements I shall now lay before the reader, does not, it is true, amount to very much, but there are a few notable facts contained in it, and it corroborates and amplifies my own experience.
- Israel Stakes, the coachman, proved to be unable to read or write, but Mr Mathew Clark, the Presbyterian Minister of Stoneykirk, has copied down his deposition, duly attested by the cross set opposite to his name. The good clergyman has, I fancy, put some slight polish upon the narrator's story, which I rather regret, as it might have been more interesting, if less intelligible, when reported verbatim. It still preserves, however, considerable traces of Israel's individuality, and may be regarded as an exact record of what he saw and did while in General Heatherstone's service.
The chapter thus concludes, and the Stakes chapter ensues. Another change is that Dr Easterling's chapter recording a medical visit to General John Berthier Heatherstone has a new paragraph of introduction from West and, near its close, from Heatherstone. The General, speaking of the Indian 'low-caste conjurers', goes on to say that 'the men who have trod the higher path are as far superior to us in knowledge as we are to the Hottentots or Patagonians.' The Pall Mall next line 'Soon after I rose to take my departure.'
- Illustration for The Mystery of Cloomber by Charles Altamont Doyle, as it appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette, 19 September 1888, supposedly showing John Fothergill West, his father and the shipwrecked captain and mate; using himself as model for Captain Meadows (seated left, at front) and Conan Doyle for West junior (second to right).
- Christopher Roden has suggested that the person drawn by Charles Altamont Doyle, seated second to left, bears a striking resemblance to Wilkie Collins, and that this may have been a subtle acknowledgement by Conan Doyle's father.
- Illustration reproduced by kind permission of The National Library of Scotland.
now becomes:
- 'You speak as if you were well acquainted with them', I remarked. 'To my cost, I am,' he answered. I have been brought in contact with them in a way which I trust no other poor chap ever will be. But, really, as regards odyllic force, you ought to know something of it, for it has a great future before it in your profession. You should read Reichenbach's 'Researches on Magnetism and Vital Force', and Gregory's 'Letters on Animal Magnetism'. These, supplemented by the twenty-seven Aphorisms of Mesmer, and the works of Dr Justinus Kerner, of Weinsberg, would enlarge your ideas.'
- I did not particularly relish having a course of reading prescribed for me on a subject connected with my own profession, so I made no comment, but rose to take my departure.
There are other, minor divergences. The numerous illustrations (including one by Charles Altamont Doyle) in the Pall Mall text (noted in Bibliography), all line drawings, are gone. A new paragraph ('It is my intention... affidavits') is now inserted between the very first and second paragraphs of the book. Its purport is to introduce the idea of several narrators.
(c) The Newnes Sixpenny Copyright Novels text (June 1909), previously serialised in the Novel Magazine (December 1908-April 1909); this was also used in the Hodder and Stoughton Sevenpenny Library (February 1913) and in an edition sold by Hodder for two shillings, presumably around that time. This follows Newnes practice (noted by Richard Lancelyn Green in general) of removing casual textual allusions to the name of the creator: Conan Doyle, here firmly in Irish Catholic tradition, freely invoked God leaving ambiguous the piety or profanity of the proceeding, as in:
- 'My God!' I cried, 'what has happened?'
when Mordaunt Heatherstone in the third last chapter comes flying down the road to the Wests to announce the disappearance of his father, the General. The Pall Mall text actually uses it to caption an illustration. But the Newnes-Hodder text sternly alters it to:
- 'What has happened?' I cried.
(The secularist Pall Mall had 'animal' for 'brute' in the final chapter regarding a dog.) The allusion to Hellenbach is now deleted in its entirety, that sentence ending 'science is wrong.' The passage preceding the Stakes chapter is now shorn of the sentence beginning 'The evidence of the two individuals' and ending 'my own experience.'. The 'addendum' ascribed to Mr Mordaunt Heatherstone' is omitted. The whole text is broken up into much shorter paragraphs, e.g. the first paragraph of the book is now three, the second (added in the Ward and Downey text) is also now three, etc.
As the Newnes revision in conformity with Sir George Newnes's Congregationalist background indicates, editors rather than author responsible for some, and perhaps most, variations. The Pall Mall had something of a campaign against the use of Scots dialect in fiction in the late 1880s, and hence cut the Stakes chapter, entirely in Scots and it seems too much to credit the author with having produced an additional chapter between Pall Mall publication in September 1888 and book publication in December; in any case Ward and Downey are unlikely to have accepted the book after serialisation and yet slotted it into their list for pre-Christmas appearance (though they dated in '1889'). Other newspaper changes may have been made in the Pall Mall office in the light of space truncation by unexpected if welcome small advertisements, especially on 17 September 1888 when the Easterling chapter was printed. But the Hellenbach repeated epigraph would seem to have been deleted by Ward and Downey in the process of book production, with an alteration by Conan Doyle in proof, later slated for deletion if he marked up the published text for possible revisions as he sometimes did, or removed by Newnes in the course of editorial reparagraphing for the cheap edition, or omitted by joint decision. The Ward and Downey textual allusion to an authority let alone an unquoted aphorism of his, likely to be unfamiliar to readers, suggests last-minute haste by an author forced to accept the loss of his epigraph. The Occult Philosophy, the Mordaunt Heatherstone addendum, which adds nothing to the story save the arguments sympathetic to alleged oriental achievements in theosophy, must again have been the victim of Conan Doyle mature reflections on appropriate future omissions, or Newnes insistence that the sixpenny buyer did not want it and might be inhibited from purchase by it should s/he turn to the end of the book and ponder its obviously non-fictional heavy argument, or a combination of both. As we shall see, Conan Doyle had his reasons for desiring, or at least readily acquiescing in, its disappearance.
But if the book was written long before 1888, do signs exist of possible improvement or alteration of text immediately before publication in either serialised or book form? It is my thesis that the whole work, including the Stakes chapter, was completed in 1883.
The only obvious point of subsequent revision, apart from the chapter- titles, as we shall see, is one phrase 'the late Sir Alexander Grant', in the fifteenth last paragraph from the story's end. Grant, Principal of the University of Edinburgh from 1868, died in office on 30 November 1884, so that the passage, if written before that date, must have been amended subsequently, a revision obviously crying out for its making if the narrative were to preserve any appearance of contemporaneity. Grant's death is the only evident allusion to a contemporary person and event, although real-life events and people receive mention in the context of the first Afghan War of 1841, in which the penultimate chapter, an extract from General John Berthier Heatherstone's day-book, is placed.
We may begin by establishing the dates of the narratives within the book itself. A quarter-century after the first publication of The Mystery of Cloomber, the Hodder & Stoughton Sevenpenny Library edition (February 1913) commenced with its list of 'Dramatis Personae' concluding
- Scene Wigtownshire
- Date About 1890
But this date is misleading, as indeed is the frontispiece overleaf depicting John Fothergill West throwing the great stone into the hole at Cree in the last chapter, alongside a cloth-capped, moustached figure of small resemblance to the description of his actual companion, Mordaunt Heatherstone, son of the General (in chapter 4 of the text) as
- Tall and muscular, with a keen, dark face, and sharp, finely cut features, he might have stepped out of a canvas of Murillo or Velasquez. There were latent energy and power in his firm-set mouth, his square eyebrows, and the whole pose of his elastic, well-knit figure. his black hair was all flecked and dashed with streaks of grey.
The frontispiece shows no attempt to rival Murillo or Velasquez, but its artist seems to have striven after a country labourer or peasant in middle life whose protruding brown hair was uniform in colour. Mordaunt Heatherstone was 23, and was hatless in the episode in question. The local guide had refused to accompany the young men to the hole itself, and was in any case 'a towsy-headed fellow with a great mop of yellow hair and a straggling beard'. Neither side of that frontispiece constitutes a Herculean attempt at authenticity, and neither reflects Conan Doyle's authority or even interest. He had kept Cloomber out of the Author's Edition of his Collected Works (Smith, Elder).
The frontispiece was used on the Hodder & Stoughton dust-jackets, but was reversed in the two-shilling edition such that the stone is now about to be flung from right to left.
The Mystery of Cloomber consists of a narrative of John Fothergill West, in which he included (apart from the addendum, stated by 'Mordaunt Heatherstone' to have been inserted when the work was in proof):
- (i) The statement of Israel Stakes (an illiterate), former coachman- gardener in the employ of General J.B. Heatherstone at Cloomber, copied and authenticated by the Reverend Mathew Clark, Presbyterian Minister of Stoneykirk, in Wigtownshire',
- (ii) The narrative of John Easterling, F.R.C.P. Edin.,
- (iii) The day-book of John Berthier Heatherstone, for 1 to 10 October 1841, with an additional note written after 'Forty years have passed'.
This last might imply the additional note tipped the date of most of the book's events at least into 1882, but the letter to John Fothergill West from the General enclosing the day-book extract and postscript speaks of the writer living nearly forty years' after 5 October 1841, the date on which he killed the holy man Ghoolab Shah. Ghoolab's three disciples took final vengeance on Heatherstone a few hours after he wrote that letter; their strong sense of ritual would have led them to an obvious anniversary. 'Their accursed astral bell has been ringing my knell for two-score years' notes the same letter. So General Heatherstone died on 5 October 1881.
Stakes spoke of taking up his employment on 'last May twel'month', in his statement, and Easterling dated his sole visit to General Heatherstone at Cloomber as 'about the beginning of September of last year' in his narrative, so these documents are supposed to derive from 1 July 1882, or later.
The book's conclusion speaks of John Fothergill West having been married to Gabriel Heatherstone for some months' at the time of writing. His sister Esther West is to marry Mordaunt Heatherstone 'upon the 23rd of the month. Even if a year's interval for mourning be allowed for the first of these nuptials, we must suppose composition of the work to have been completed by John Fothergill West in the first half of 1883 at the latest. But nothing is definitely later than 1 July 1882.
This does not determine the same date for the book's actual completion by Arthur Conan Doyle: the events of A Study in Scarlet, as far as Watson is concerned, notoriously begin in 1879 and cannot be later in concluding than 1882, with all due respect to Watson's recovery from his wound, near-mortal illness from enteric fever, voyage home, period of uneconomic convalescence before settling for shared lodgings at Baker Street, and interval in joint Occupancy preceding the first conversation on the science of deduction; but Conan Doyle wrote the story in 1886. Its unique supposed use of Watson's Reminiscences requires some sort of interval, no doubt, but later stories consistently divide events from date of Watson narration and of Conan Doyle writing, often by several years. Other proofs are needed.
The Mystery of Cloomber is in its execution a very inexperienced work. Let us take the names. Once he got going, Conan Doyle played with music, mystery and symbol in his choice of names. It is surely very early days indeed in his creative life which exhibit such limits to his imagination as a coupling of 'West' and 'Easterling'. Both are narrators, and both names appear at the outset, the first and fourth to be stated, respectively. No symbol can be intended. Both are former residents of Edinburgh, Easterling's arrival in Wigtownshire preceding West's by some time. 'Ling' is an old name for 'heather', and 'Heatherstone' is the second surname to appear in the text in which it will be central and also a narrator's. The auctorial hand is untried, and the creative mind is in its infancy. 'Ormond Sacker' may not suggest much maturity in the science of nomenclature, but the maturity consists in having learned to discard Ormond Sacker in favour of John H. Watson, not to refrain from thinking the name in the first place. Maturity is not, as so many have assumed, a proficiency in prophylactics.
But we might suspect that the choice of names was made long before the story was concluded. So let us turn to the end. Having determined that General Heatherstone is dead, John Fothergill West and Mordaunt Heatherstone return to their relatives:
- For weeks my poor Gabriel hovered between life and death, and though she came round at last, thanks to the nursing of my sister and the professional skill of Dr John Easterling, she has never to this day entirely recovered her former vigour. Mordaunt, too, suffered much for some time, and it was only after our removal to Edinburgh that he rallied from the shock which he had undergone.
- As to poor Mrs Heatherstone, neither medical attention nor change of air can ever have a permanent effect upon her. Slowly and surely, but very placidly, she has declined in health and strength, until it is evident that in a very few weeks at the most she will have rejoined her husband and restored to him the one thing which he must have grudged to leave behind...
- I have been married for some months to my dear Gabriel, and Esther is to become Mrs Heatherstone upon the 23rd of the month. If she makes him as good a wife as his sister has made me, we may both set ourselves down as fortunate men.
This is the child story-teller: I-married-her-my-sister-will-marry-her-brother-their-mother-will-be-dead-soon-but-that-is-nice-because-her-husband-must-miss-her. It is absolutely appropriate in child story-telling with its requirement of definite endings, generational displacement and assurance of succession: the last sentence may be intended to imply the imminence of a subsequent generation. It is archetypal in its implication of rites of passage and natural childlike ambition for power and procreation; Grimm's Fairy Tales can be similarly visualised as folklore inheritance and child narration. An adult narration, even on the thriller level, will not bear it, and Stephen Leacock was to classify the symptom by inclusion in his literary toxicology, Nonsense Novels:
- Gertrude and Ronald were wed. Their happiness was complete. Need we say more? Yes, only this. The Earl was killed in the hunting-field a few days after. The Countess was struck by lightning. The two children fell down a well. Thus the happiness of Gertrude and Ronald was complete.
- Gertrude the Governess: or, Simple Seventeen
- [The Earl and Countess are Ronald's parents and the children are his siblings and Gertrude's pupils]
If anything the imminence of Mrs Heatherstone's death neck-and-neck with her son's marriage out-banalises Leacock by the use of a sliding-scale. The conclusion is clear; the ending, like the beginning, is creative work by a novelist in leading-strings.
Can we date its composition more exactly? Here we may look at a distinct feature of Conan Doyle's youthful work, not in its weakness but in its conspicuous strength. He showed very early proficiency in the use of a distinctive narrator as chorus-figure: Dr Watson is unmatched in literature for the sheer efficiency of the work he has to do in fifty-six separate works as narrator (he is not the narrator in four; he sets the initial scene in The Gloria Scott and The Musgrave Ritual); and he is in full control from the first.
So by the time of Watson's creation in A Study in Scarlet in 1886, Conan Doyle had reached maturity in this respect. He had worked with other narrators in earlier short stories, and so far as is known the first-person narrative was his choice in the first short story for which he sought publication (the oldest surviving candidate being The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe (1878?), the unpublished manuscript in the Blackwood Papers, National Library of Scotland)).
His first achievement of conspicuous merit in this direction, That Little Square Box appeared in London Society for Christmas, 1881; apart from that story's own superiority to all of his previous work (and the earliest he sought to keep in print throughout his life), the narrator has character of his own vital for the development of the plot, not simply being as previously a person with a story to tell largely independent of his own individual traits. Oddly enough, the unpublished NLS MS, although childish and crude, has rudiments of a narrator whose curiosity and contrast to his investigator friend move the cumbersome machinery, as in an infinitely more subtle way Watson's convalescent pursuit of a fleeting interest and personal irritation at Holmes mobilise the development of A Study in Scarlet. None of the first published stories can make such claims until That Little Square Box, but here the plot turns on a self-pitying, malingering, poltroon narrator with delusions of impending dynamite destruction of the ship on which he travels. The source of inspiration sounds like an exasperating patient and the leap of imagination needed to see events from his distorted viewpoint was easily within the capacities of a very good analyst of medical case-histories.
Probably fairly late in the next year, 1882, Conan Doyle wrote The Captain of the Pole Star (Temple Bar, January 1883), with a conventional narrator of his own temper, attainments and experience writing in journal form: he had used such a medical witness before, but the growing conviction of a scientific observer as to the intrusion of supernatural phenomena is now delicately and effectively measured. The next major short story, J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement, famous for its solution to the real and unsolved mystery of the Mary Celeste, was apparently written in 1883 (Cornhill, January 1884): the New England doctor narrator is credibly American in his highly sensational narrative (so much so that some readers assumed him to be a real person) though the outstanding passage is the confession of the mass-murderer.
But a much more ambitious speaker-protagonist was The Man from Archangel, from 1884 (London Society, January 1885). The narrator, a ferocious scientific anchorite on the Caithness coast, is a triumph in comic self-revelation. He does not get in the way of the narrative, and indeed his peculiarities are needful as appropriate foil for the man from Archangel whose unrequited love is as obsessive as the narrator's misanthropy. All of these stories show the influence of Herman Melville, in this case so constructively as seemingly to set up two warring spiritual children born of Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick. With 'Maister M'Vittie', the 'mad laird o' Mansie', Conan Doyle's maturity in deployment of the narrator as subordinate hero had arrived.
The Mystery of Cloomber apart from the addendum has four narrators, of whom General Heatherstone as tragic hero lies outside proto-Watson enquiry. It is obvious that the plot, with its three Indian priests pursuing vengeance across the ocean to Britain, owes heavy inspiration to Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, and the multi-narrator method derives from here also. It is not simply imitation: the Collins derivation for Heatherstone's day-book is in part the introduction narrative recounting the murder of a temple priest by John Herncastle at the storming of Seringapatam, and it shows rather finer sensitivity to psychological pressures on a military mind, but the day-book is weaker that its other source in The Moonstone, the journal of the opium addict Ezra Jennings. But this seems deliberate. To make Heatherstone's account of his occult persecution static in a single final entry where the Jennings narrative by the needs of The Moonstone's plot must be progressive, is sound enough: most of what we learn of the effects of General Heatherstone's ordeal is from the witness of others, and the most truly horrific effects have to be guessed at, as to their continuous impact. The problem in execution is that the two main Watsonian narrators, West and Easterling, are weak figures. Easterling's one point of testimony is competent, but there is no distinctive character to this doctor such as Conan Doyle showed in his medical student recording The Captain of the Pole Star, or in his subsequent work such as Round the Red Lamp or Dr Watson's narratives. West is if anything a self-contradictory figure: his remarks on his father are unsympathetic (to the point of making the publication of his text improbable) and his occasional sneers at the money-mindedness of the Scottish lower classes (in connection with Stakes, or Fullarton whose dog is required to track the General and his abductors to the hole at Cree) are consistent, but while revealing an unpleasant strain of censoriousness (inviting our sympathy with his future wife) these traits have no part in the main story, where otherwise he is simply a helpful, competent and self-important individual with a slight sense of humour. The character ingredients are evident in their recipe form, but they show no professional culinary talents in the blending. As a man in love West is nowhere convincing to the level of Watson in The Sign of Four, or even the student John M'Alister Ray in Pole Star whose grace-note allusions to his Flora make so subtle a foil to the Captain's devouring lost love.
The decisive comparison by which The Mystery of Cloomber falters badly is with John M'Vittie as narrator of The Man from Archangel, no lover, certainly, and yet not wholly destitute of love for the girl he saves from the sea and ultimately fails to save from the man. It is a fairly long short story, running to 10.000 words. And in one respect, the two works are deeply allied. Both describe a storm on a Scottish coast, although at opposite poles of the mainland. We may allow for some intentional difference in style to mark the characters of the narrators, certainly with style playing a considerable part in character-revelation in The Man from Archangel, but with stylistic inadequacy hardly intended for a similar purpose in Cloomber. Here, then, are West's and M'Vittie's descriptions:
| The Mystery of Cloomber Chapter XI
|
The Man from Archangel Paragraphs 8ff.
|
The two texts now become almost identical for several sentences:
- Every spar and rope and writhing piece of cordage showed up hard and clear under the vivid/livid light which sputtered and flickered from the highest portion of the forecastle.
'Vivid' is Cloomber; 'livid' is Archangel.
- Beyond the doomed ship, out of the great darkness came the long, rolling lines of big/black waves, never ending, never tiring, with a petulant tuft of foam here and there upon their crests.
'Big' is Cloomber; 'black' is Archangel.
- Each as it reached the broad circle of unnatural light appeared to gather strength and volume and to hurry on more impetuously until with a roar and a jarring crash it sprang upon its victim. Clinging to the weather shrouds well could distinctly see ten or a dozen/some ten or twelve frightened seamen who, when the light revealed our/my presence, turned their white faces towards us/me and waved their hands imploringly.
'Ten or a dozen' is Cloomber; 'some ten or twelve' is Archangel.
| The poor wretches had evidently taken fresh hope from our presence, though it was clear that their own boats had either been washed away or so damaged as to render them useless. | I felt my gorge rise against these poor cowering worms. Why should they pre- sume to shirk the narrow pathway along which all that is great and noble among mankind has travelled? |
It will, I trust, be evident that Cloomber was written before Archangel: nobody in his senses, certainly not a craftsman of Conan Doyle's professionalism, would alter the superiorities of the Archangel text for the insipidities of the Cloomber. The revisions are an exercise in creative writing themselves: of the last quoted, how much better 'some ten or twelve frightened seamen' than 'ten or a dozen frightened seamen' - the maintenance of the same style of counting keeps the number subordinate to the drama as it should be, while 'ten or a dozen' is fussy, recalls egg-purchases, breaks up the rhythm essential to hold the tension of the wreck and rescue. Again 'black waves' is immeasurably superior to 'big waves' the 'black' is a new dimension of menace, the 'big' an unimaginative reiteration: after all, the ship was hardly likely to be menaced by long, rolling lines of little waves. And 'livid' is a delicious improvement on 'vivid': reworking on that minute a scrutiny reminds us that Conan Doyle was the pupil of Joseph Bell, who was the pupil of James Syme, who was the greatest microsurgeon of his day.
So The Mystery of Cloomber was written before 1885.
The wreck-narratives now divide from the philanthropy of the Wests to the malevolence of M'Vittie, each successfully performing their rescue-work. But before either may intervene, they note on the doomed ship figures apart from the cowering seamen, three unconcerned and (as it turns out) mystically possessed orientals in Cloomber, one tall man disdaining rope or bulwark in Archangel. The grouping here is strikingly reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland, with its astounding portrayal of the ecstatic nun charged with divine love where the crew are in fear. The mysticism in Cloomber, and the height in Archangel, for the figures whose spiritual integrity immunises them from commonplace cowardice, additionally link Conan Doyle and Hopkins.
- Sister, a sister calling
- A master, her master and mine!—
- And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling;
- The rash smart sloggering brine
- Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one;
- Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine
- Ears, and the call of the tall nun
- To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm's brawling.
The theme is continued throughout the remainder of the poem (that being Stanza 19), in its own ecstatic anguish. Hopkins had been the friend of Father Cyprian Splaine, Conan Doyle's form-master for all but his final year at Stonyhurst when Hopkins was a novice at the nearby Jesuit house of St Mary's. On 7 December 1875, the Deutschland was wrecked in the North Sea, near Harwich, its victims including five Franciscan nuns forced into exile from Germany by the Falck Laws of Bismarck's Kulturkampf. Hopkins, almost certainly on his own initial burning need to express his response, was encouraged by his superior, the Very Rev. James Jones, S.J., at his present house of studies in North Wales, to break his seven years' poetic silence: the resultant extraordinary poem was sent to the Jesuit periodical, The Month, which after some weeks rejected it. It would remain unpublished for over forty years, Hopkins dying in 1889. But it occasioned some comment among the Jesuits, widespread enough for Splaine to write Hopkins for a sight of it; it was sent to him at Hopkins's request by Robert Bridges in 1879, and Hopkins wrote Bridges on 21 August 1884 that Splaine 'showed it to others... but he afterwards acknowledged to me that in my handwriting he found it unreadable; I do not think he meant illegible.'
None of this is very promising, even if Hopkins and Conan Doyle had met at Stonyhurst, and the similarity of Inspector Stanley Hopkins and Gerard Manley Hopkins remains a teasing hint that perhaps they did. (If so, it was the result of association of ideas: the lachrymose John Hopley Neligan in Black
Peter is reminiscent of Splaine (and Hopkins), his middle name is also mildly Hopkins-y, and it is the story in which Stanley Hopkins first appears.) The name 'Gerard' has a much more eminent Conan Doyle association, and the utter contrast of Brigadier and poet is no barrier to that; but there are also contemporary Stonyhurst associations of 'Gerard' as surname if not covering Conan Doyle's school years. (And there is Conan Doyle's favourite historical novel, The Cloister and the Hearth.) What is quite certain, however, is that the wreck of the Deutschland would have excited outstanding attention at the Jesuit institution at Feldkirch, where Conan Doyle was a student when it occurred. Mass would probably have been said for the victims, sermons are very likely to have made much of the incident. Here were five martyrs to the cruel state policies of the victor over Austria in the war of a decade before, with obvious morals for the consequences of legalised anti-Catholicism; Feldkirch, as an Austrian town, could not be certain of permanent immunity against such policies, of which the Emperor Joseph II had given his Catholic subjects a taste in the last century. Conan Doyle was happy at Feldkirch, and liked the Austrian Jesuits. Such news would certainly have prompted wishes for the English press reports, and The Times would probably have been procured. Its despatch from Harwich, printed on 11 December 1875, contained the sentence:
- Five German nuns, whose bodies are now in the dead-house here, clasped hands and were drowned together, the chief sister, a gaunt woman 6 feet high, calling out loudly and often 'O Christ, come quickly! till the end came.
- Jesu, heart's light,
- Jesu, maid's son,
- What was the feast followed the night
- Thou hadst glory of this nun?—
- Feast of the one woman without stain.
- For so conceived, so to conceive thee is done;
- But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain,
- Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright.
- Well, she has thee for the pain, for the Patience;
- but pity of the rest of them!
- Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the
- Comfortless unconfessed of them—
- No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence
- Finger of a tender, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of
- Maiden could obey do, be a bell to, ring of it, and
- Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest,
- does tempest carry the grain for thee?
Either Conan Doyle saw the poem, via Splaine or some other, or the wreck of the Deutschland itself inspired his creative powers in addition to its explosive impact on the artistic consciousness of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The use of The Mystery of Clcomber in preparing The Man from Archangel extends to baptising the narrator. We do not learn it until Easterling's narrative, but M'Vittie had been the name of the original seigneur of Cloomber Hall, 'a wealthy Glasgow merchant of strange tastes and lonely habits', whose solitude, indeed, raised insufficient architectural defences to content his successor General Heatherstone.
The preparation of The Man from Archangel implies that the manuscript of The Mystery of Cloomber itself had been set aside to act for the moment as a storehouse of future material: Conan Doyle would hardly have sought simultaneous publication for two stories containing what was largely the same shipwreck at opposite ends of the Scottish coast. Then, in 1888, with A Study in Scarlet published as firm proof of his launch as a novelist, Cloomber was sent out with only the most rapid of revisions, ignoring even such textual improvements used in Archangel as would be appropriate to the novel. Some chapter titles use the form employed in Micah Clarke; we can readily assign their creation to April-June 1888, when Conan Doyle's mind was certainly full of Micah Clarke. The table of contents is the only sign of that proximity in time evident to me.
Ward and Downey and the Pall Mall papers accepted Cloomber and paid the money, and Conan Doyle thankfully bade farewell to it. His failure to do much with its revision is its own comment on his disenchantment with it. His major interest at this point was the completed Micah Clarke. He did need to get Cloomber out rapidly: if his reputation were to improve as he hoped its publication even only a few years later might do him positive harm, especially as critics might comment on its similarity and inferiority to The Moonstone. He inserted the words 'the late' before Principal Grant's name he had clearly written the work while the Edinburgh Principal was alive, as The Man from Archangel was certainly on its way to London Society well before Grant's death on 30 November 1884. In passing, could there be a clearer proof of immaturity than the inclusion of the name of one's own university head as the only name from contemporary life in one's novel? But although the appointment of Grant's successor, Principal Sir William Muir, the orientalist educator and organiser of the Indian Mutiny defences of the siege of Agra, must have revived allusion to his previous part in the foundation of the Chair of Sanskrit at Edinburgh, Conan Doyle left unchanged the sentence in Cloomber's eleventh paragraph that there was 'no chair of Sanskrit in any of Scotland's universities. Muir and his brother had founded the Sir James Shaw Professorship of Sanskrit at Edinburgh University in 1862, and doubtless the Edinburgh medical world though little about it; so the mistake would be natural, but any close reading of the text after 1885 with Principal Muir in the vision of Edinburgh alumni, should have resulted in the elimination of so obvious and unnecessary a blunder in a work using another Edinburgh Principal's real name, and therefore making claims of authenticity in Edinburgh University's references.
The maturity in The Man from Archangel as revision of The Mystery of Cloomber and the sheer distance between its narrator and the novel's M'Vittie can take his place without apology (not that one can imagine him apologising) alongside the best and most self-revelatory of Collins's Moonstone narrators where the Cloomber comparisons wilt militate against a later date than 1 July 1884 for Cloomber. So we have to think of some point in the two years from 1 July 1882, when Conan Doyle established his house in Southsea. It suggests composition in a period of relative inactivity: this means that if it is Southsea, it is probably very early and lonely Southsea, with little professional or personal interruption. This is when people write their first novels.
But this was when he was writing The Narrative of John Smith, was it not? The book that disappeared in the Royal Mail. Or, if you prefer it, the book that went west.
The Narrative of John West would not have been as good a selling-title as The Mystery of Cloomber. But it begins as though that might once have been its title:
- I, John Fothergill West, student of law in the University of St Andrews, have endeavoured in the ensuing pages to lay my statement before the public in a concise and business-like fashion.
A version of the story could well have been lost in the post. And Conan Doyle's failure to remember what was in Smith seems most satisfactorily explained by a failure to remember it was renamed Cloomber i.e., when memories of Smith's plot came back to him he identified them only as Cloomber (which he was not greatly anxious to remember either). On the other hand, the failure to remember the plot of Smith does seem incredible if Smith had not become altered or confused with something else, for which Cloomber's new composition-time now makes it the prime candidate. Error in recollection on such a question is highly probable after only a few years: I have noted just such errors in my own autobiographical draftings.
This rules out a political plot for Smith, which Conan Doyle seemed to recall while remembering little more. Cloomber is not directly political but it is preoccupied with imperial, religious and ethical questions. It is formally more Catholic and more Scottish than anything else written by Conan Doyle. None of the parties are described as Catholics, but Heatherstone could have inspirational antecedents among the old Stonyhurst boys' records as recalled in the Jesuit and schoolboy gossip, and Mordaunt Heatherstone before his father's final crisis responds as a Catholic boy of that day might have done (and the younger Conan Doyle in a different paternal crisis may have done):
- '... I lay down without undressing, reading St Thomas à Kempis, and praying from my heart that the night might pass safely over us.
St Thomas à Kempis, otherwise The Imitation of Christ, has the advantage that as each of its sentences is to be pondered it can summon up great concentration which can instantaneously be broken. It is also interesting that in paying his respects to oriental knowledge on the elimination of self, Conan Doyle makes this unexpected and rather touching allusion to a great work of Catholic self-abnegation. Much of the future writings would show some continued Catholic influence, as in Holmes's occasional appearance as a confessor outside man-made law, but this homage is quite exceptional.
The other notable indication of the writer's Edinburgh Catholic back- ground is the natural product of inter-faith rivalry, in the ribald allusions to Israel Stakes's Calvinism. It is very much the outsider's picture West as editor has the Presbyterian Minister of Stoneykirk' as Stakes's amanuensis (the name obviously a joke recalling Stonyhurst) when 'Church of Scotland', 'Free Church', 'United Free Church' or some such other title would be correct. Stakes is civil about this dignitary, but his real theological admiration is given to 'the preenciples and practice o' the real kirk o' the Covenant, for which may the Lord be praised!', which a minister sharing his views would surely not lampoon by phonetic spelling. To this devotion he stresses he owes his illiteracy. His true pastor is the Rev. Donald McSnaw, evidently a very free kirkman indeed, though not unmindful of material support:
- When the cook said she didna think muckle o' John Knox, and the ither that she wouldna give saxpence tae hear the discourse o' Maister Donald McSnaw o' the true kirk, I kenned it was time for me tae leave them tae a higher Judge.
But Stakes's populist theology is apposite, if entertaining:
- As tae the young folks, I kenned weel that they didna bide in the groonds, and that they were awa' whenever they got a chance wi' Maister Fothergill West tae Branksome, but the general was too fu' o' his ain troubles tae ken aboot it, and it didna seem tae me that it was pairt o' my duties either as coachman or as gairdner tae mind the bairns. He should have lairnt that if ye forbid a lassie and a laddie to dae anything it's just the surest way o' bringin' it aboot. The Lord foond that oot in the gairden o' Paradise and there's no muckle change between the folk in Eden and the folk in Wigtown.
Stakes's contribution to the general's theological problems is an early and slightly clumsy use of a technique Conan Doyle would later perfect, to induce earthly laughter and unearthly fear simultaneously:
- It was weary wark to lie listenin' tae his clatter and wonderin' whether he was clean daft, or whether maybe he'd lairnt pagan and idolatrous tricks oot in India, and that his conscience noo was like the worm which gnaweth and dieth not. I'd ha' speered frae him whether it wouldna ease him to speak wi' the holy Donald McSnaw, but it might ha' been a mistake, and the general wasna a man that you'd care tae mak' a mistake wi'.
The thought of Heatherstone, already on record as fixing on his gate the notice
- GENERAL AND MRS. HEATHERSTONE
- HAVE NO WISH
- TO INCREASE
- THE CIRCLE OF THEIR ACQUAINTANCE
being invited to increase it to the inclusion of yet another (and presumably equally obdurate) holy man, is hair-raising in itself. But the line on the 'worm which gnaweth and dieth not' is horribly appropriate to the General's actual fate, and to his undoubted crime. On the other hand, Conan Doyle seems to have made Stakes a little too Catholic in his use of the word 'holy' for his minister, agreeably related as it is to the General's oriental pursuers. Stakes's rude remarks on the factor seem imbued with the Catholic doctrine of justification by good works:
- he's a close man and a hard one at a bargain which shall profit him leetle in the next life, though he lay by a store o' siller in this. When the day comes there'll be a hantle o' factors on the left side o' the throne, and I shouldna be surprised if Maister McNeil found himsel' amang them.
The Stakes statement, although crudely stage-Scots, is far the best thing in the book, in point of narration, and displays in Conan Doyle an unexpected proficiency in comic-tragic effects realised by exploration of the Scots language. Its derivation runs all the way from 'Wandering Willie's Tale' in Scott's Redgauntlet to the Kailyard in full bloom. Unlike all else, it is an end, not a beginning: old Madge's scattered utterances in The Man from Archangel and a few passages elsewhere (e.g., Our Midnight Visitor, The Yellow Face, The Great Shadow) are all that would eventuate of a talent doomed by his departure to England. It required his proximity in time to recall its character with continuous fidelity, so that here again we have a case for late 1882 or 1883. Conan Doyle would speak for all of his life with a Scots accent, but that is not the same as speaking the Scots language, and even here he insured against any errors by West's condescending word on the document: 'The good clergyman has, I fancy, put some slight polish on the narrator's story, which I rather regret, as it might have been more interesting, if less intelligible, when reported verbatim.' But it is clearly an attempt at that.
Some of the entertainment arises from Stakes's cool rendering of the Charterhouse-educated Heatherstone in his own vernacular:
- ... Servants is spoilt noo-a-days', says he, by ower muckle eddication.... Weel, weel', says he, maybe we'll gie ye a rise if ye suit. Meanwhile here's the han'sel shillin' that Maister McNeil tells
me it's the custom tae give...
But Stakes's portrait of the General is grim, and unrelieved by the natural readiness of the Wests, anxious to assert their social equality, to believe the best of a military hero. It is from Stakes the full sense of Heatherstone's guilt is first conjured:
- ... he was aye the same, wi' a face as dour and sad as a felon when he feels the tow roond his neck.'
Even his open-handedness is recognised by the acute Stakes as suspicious, for all of West's sneering stress on the peasant cupidity:
- ... he agreed tae the extra twal' pund a year as easy as though it were as many bawbees. Far be it frae me tae think evil, but I couldna help surmisin' at the time that money that was so lightly painted wi was maybe no' so very honestly cam by.
And this is important, for the story is lifted from mere fable of supernatural vengeance by Heatherstone's career in India and his God-given conviction of his right as conqueror. Stakes reminds us that the pickings would have been good. The General's day-book before he kills the holy man abounds with allusions to Cromwellian precedent, and the Cromwellian record most readily adduced in Conan Doyle's family background combined ruthlessness towards Irish life and rapacity towards Irish wealth.
(There is a case for very slight revision having taken place with respect to the Stakes narrative, but after despatch of the manuscript to Ward and Downey, not before. The addendum's allusion to proofs may be relevant here. The editors of the Pall Mall, hostile to Scots dialect, doubtless justified omission of the Stakes chapter on the ground that it added nothing to the salient facts needed to follow the progress of the story. The passages of introduction to the Stakes and Easterling narratives, almost entirely missing from the Pall Mall text, may have been added in part at proof stage to strengthen the case for their inclusion by Ward and Downey, especially if the book publishers in their turn were querying the Scots dialect.
This would account for the somewhat apologetic tone of the new material. The point was, of course, that Stakes might add nothing to the main plot, especially if Easterling's narrative is included, but he made valuable contributions to the atmosphere especially in his tense description of his eavesdropping and to the little grains of detail by which readers could measure the impact of the very peculiar persecution to which General Heatherstone was being subjected. Moreover, whatever his general misgivings about the work, Conan Doyle would have been right to insist that Stakes's statement with its revelation of his character and attitudes was one of the best things in it. The new material probably did not include the discussion of Stakes's illiteracy and its necessitous requirements, but the sentence (later discarded, perhaps as unduly fussy) beginning 'The evidence of the two individuals', noted above, seems a likely proof interpolation. The introductory matter for the Easterling chapter would have been a simple proof insertion, and would balance the existence of prefatory work specific to Stakes. All of this seems fairly mechanical and argues little personal interest in the text, apart from the just estimate of the literary value of the narrative of Stakes. Conan Doyle was ready to add trimmings, but not to engage in any major revision which, in view of the progress of his literary sophistication, was likely to demand drastic surgery if a professionalization of some portions, such as the storm, were attempted with the inevitable consequence of anatomical discord should their improvement stand on its own.)
Neither in Stakes's Calvinism nor in Heatherstone's Cromwellianism is there anything of the sensitive and at appropriate moments sympathetic exploration of a late seventeenth-century Puritanism in Micah Clarke. Heatherstone's day-book in India is naked self-revelation of a bloodthirsty brute; in terms of literary economy this is clever enough. The General, like his notice, is somewhat repellent, but however difficult it may be to warm to him (or to any of the thinly-drawn characters apart from Stakes), he is intended to elicit some pity. Now, at the hour of his greatest appeal, when his destruction is certain, we get him as he was in 1841 in the raw:
- If I had my way I would hang one at the mouth of every ravine as a warning to the gang. They are personifications of the devil to look at ... Woe betide them if they fall into my hands. I would give them as short a shrift as ever a Highland cateran got from a Glasgow judge. ... A line from Calcutta Daisy... I hope Pollock won't be squeamish, or truckle to the hysterical party at home. The towns should be laid in ashes and the fields sown with salt. It is hard when others are gaining glory and experience to be stuck in this miserable valley. I have been out of it completely. Proposed to shoot our informant, so as to prevent his playing the double traitor and reporting our proceedings. The Children of Israel seem to have been the only people who ever carried war to its logical conclusion Cromwell in Ireland. No doubt these fellows at the Front will have C.B.'s and knighthoods showering upon them thick and fast, while we poor devils, who have had most of the responsibility and anxiety, will be passed over completely. ... Took nine to four on Cleopatra for the Calcutta Cup.. who can compare with us as vermin killers? ... except with their black, contorted, mocking faces, their fierce gestures, and their fluttering garments, they would have made a study for any painter who wished to portray Milton's conception of the army of the damned. ... A great pile of boulders was heaped up at the very end of the pass, and among these our fugitives were skulking, entirely demoralised apparently, and incapable of resistance. They were useless as prisoners, and it was out of the question to let them go, so there was no choice but to polish them off.
Then he kills the unarmed old mystic who attempts to bar his passage, being aided by a crushing blow on the saint's head from a gunner. His comments, it would seem deliberately, are banal as well as sanguinary:
- His blood be upon his own head! He would be alive now if he had not interfered, as the constables say at home, 'with an officer in the execution of his duty'. ... They tell me that he was living in this very cave when Tamerlane passed this way in 1399, with a lot more bosh of that sort. ... Well, he has gone where he will learn that the gospel of peace and good will is superior to all his Pagan lore. Peace go with him.
The irony of the last sentence is that peace goes from Heatherstone, for ever. But the allusion to Tamerlane Timor of the mountain of skulls is not only present to hint of the longevity of the murdered mystic: it symbolises that the English (or Anglified Scots?) conqueror is worse than Tamerlane, killing what that mass-slaughterer had spared.
We must now return to the question of the General's punishment. Because Conan Doyle ultimately became a convinced and practising Spiritualist it is often vaguely assumed that any work of his with a supernatural theme involves a tacit acceptance forming part of his ultimate full conversion. We should remember his consistent repudiation of Sherlock Holmes's sentiments on Poe and Gaboriau:
- Have you not learned, my esteemed commentator,
- That the created in not the creator?...
- So please grasp this fact with your cerebral tentacle,
- The doll and its maker are never identical.
In terms of belief asserted in the various stories, the most that can usually be said is that the convictions asserted are matters interesting the author and possibly receiving what may be temporary acceptance in one part of his highly self-argumentative mind. In the present instance, what happened was that Conan Doyle devoured a set of beliefs primarily as a creative artist in search of material, and that he personally gave them only a temporary acceptance insofar as he did so at all; moreover, what mattered was getting his story written, and if to do so he needed to sympathise with the creed of which he spoke, he did so, and in this instance he quickly dropped it when his work was done. Here is his recollection in Memories and Adventures written forty years after the events in question:
- I was deeply interested and attracted for a year or two by Theosophy, because while Spiritualism seemed at that time to be chaos so far as philosophy went, Theosophy presented a very well-thought-out and reasonable scheme, parts of which, notably reincarnation and Kharma, seemed to offer an explanation for some of the anomalies of life. I read Sinnett's Occult World and afterwards with even greater admiration I read his fine exposition of Theosophy in Esoteric Buddhism, a most notable book. I also met him, for he was an old friend of General Drayson's, and I was impressed by his conversation. Shortly afterwards, however, there appeared Dr Hodgson's report upon his investigation into Madame Blavatsky's proceedings at Adyar, which shook my confidence very much. It is true that Mrs Besant has since then published a powerful defence which tends to show that Hodgson may have been deceived, but the subsequent book, A Priestess of Isis, which contains many of her own letters, leaves an unpleasant impression, and Sinnett's posthumous work seems to show that he also had lost confidence. ... Theosophy will be in a stronger position when it shakes off Madame Blavatsky altogether. In any case it could never have met my needs, for I ask for severe proof, and if I have to go back to unquestioning faith I should find myself in the fold from which I wandered.
ACD gives 1886 as the date of his trying table turning with 'the family of a General whom I attended professionally', and his resultant experiments were duly recorded in his letter published in Light on 2 July 1887, respecting a successful test at a spiritualistic seance. But as the Bibliography and Commander Stavert have both noted, Conan Doyle must first have encountered Major-General Alfred Wilks Drayson, F.R.A.S. (1827-1901) in 1883, if he had not met him on or before 5 December 1882, the first recorded report of the presence of Conan Doyle at the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society. Conan Doyle is not reported as present at the meeting of 13 February 1883, when the General gave the main address, on an astronomical topic, but in Memories and Adventures he states 'I had known Drayson first as an astronomer'. At what date the Draysons added their undoubtedly welcome presence to young Dr Conan Doyle's list of patients may be unknown. The character of General Heatherstone has only a few touches of Drayson (whose publications reflect considerable liking for non-whites in Africa as well as India), but the unwanted tutorial in occultism for Dr Easterling quoted at the beginning above, would be consistent with what is clear of Drayson's interests and his testiness. (In his Intellectual Whist (1899), Drayson quotes with evident satisfaction a conversation he thrust on a card-player he had been observing from the sidelines, including as one of his opening remarks 'Is your knowledge of arithmetic sufficient to enable you to count up to thirteen?') Conan Doyle may have been recollecting a sudden barrage of bibliography from his patient, in decided reversal of the principles of doctor's omniscience and patient's deference laid down in his own training by Dr Joseph Bell at Edinburgh. The name of Gregory is particularly suggestive, as that of the Edinburgh Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh (1844-58) William Gregory (1803-1858), who edited Baron von Reichenbach's Researches on Magnetism, and was in his day the major British advocate of Mesmerism and its proponents. Drayson, whether in medical colloquy at his bedside or in post-Society informal discussion, might be expected to produce this distinguished Edinburgh luminary in response to mention of Conan Doyle's Edinburgh training, and to be duly scornful of a subsequent Edinburgh student insufficiently familiar with the work of the great man.
Arthur Conan Doyle seems to have naturally attracted the interest and sponsorship of formidable and assertive men (Joe Bell, Bryan Charles Waller, George Turnavine Budd) but initially this must have been a somewhat dismaying acquaintance. The first published 'prentice work of Conan Doyle, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley, had airily announced itself in 1879 a true story in its would-be authoritative statements about African diamonds, to whose pursuit and discovery Drayson had devoted himself inter alia and on which he would publish a novel, The Diamond Hunters of South Africa, in 1889: small wonder that Conan Doyle was so furious at the unauthorised republication and dissemination of that infantile first-born of his in a collection under his own name. But Conan Doyle wanted to learn, and if he was already at work on The Mystery of Cloomber, Drayson, who had served in India (Simla) in 1876 and 1877, would have been a Godsend. In any event, Drayson may be given credit for some authentic Indian touches in the finished product. Discussions of astronomy with Drayson were likely to lead rapidly to spiritualism; in answer to a query from St George Stock, enquiring apropos of a speech of Drayson's whether he could give an example of knowledge being sent from the spirit world, Drayson wrote in Light (29 November 1884) that in 1859 the spirit of astronomer William Herschel had obligingly informed him of the existence of Mars's two moons, which were discovered in 1877, to say nothing of having cleared up the question of the direction of orbit of the satellites of Uranus, as subsequently confirmed by astronomers. Drayson had been too justly apprehensive of ridicule to communicate these discoveries to professional astronomers in advance of the findings ultimately reached, but he had discussed them with Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840-1921), subsequently a disciple of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavacka (née Hahn) better known as Blavatsky (1831-1891), and as such author of The Occult World (1881) whose 1883 edition is quoted in the addendum to The Mystery of Cloomber. Sinnett returned to England in April 1883, and presumably called on Drayson at Southsea shortly thereafter: this would seem to have been when Conan Doyle met him.
Madame Blavatsky, and indeed Sinnett, communicated with an oriental whom they called an 'adept', and who was known as Koot Hoomi. He may never have existed out of the spirit world or in it, one conjecture being that the name derived from two of Blavatsky's associates, H.S. Olcott and A.O. Hume. In an earlier form, Koot Hoomi seems to have been called Gulab Lal Singh although this could be another adept, or possibly spirit. Blavatsky and her friends seem to have fully believed in the terrestrial existence of Koot Hoomi (one of her followers died in an attempt to find him in Tibet), but asserted his capacity for projecting his astral presence far from his corporeal. These qualities are ascribed to the older mystics in The Mystery of Cloomber, and one of their names is very suggestive: Lal Hoomi. Heatherstone's victim was Ghoolab Shah. The young mystic is Ram Singh. Madame Blavatsky was at this time famous for an astral bell, which sounded when no bell was apparently present. In The Mystery of Cloomber the bell-sound, exactly as described by its witnesses in the Blavatsky circle, rings twice a day as punishment for General Heatherstone. Sceptics were later to allege that Blavatsky, by now very fat and much begirt, enabled it to happen by the concealment of a music-box in her clothing, but this, as Watson might say, is a side-issue.
Conan Doyle did not have to believe in Madame Blavatsky to write The Mystery of Cloomber, but it is clear that he was impressed by Sinnett, who did. It is difficult to see the story getting written with such obvious dependence on Blavatsky if his scepticism had been alerted. Sinnett continued to believe in Koot Hoomi, but he was gradually becoming disillusioned by Blavatsky, partly in response to her own somewhat paranoid temperament and quick transitions from friendship to hostility, by the later 1880s as he recorded in his posthumously published The Early Days of Theosophy in Europe (1922). Sinnett did loyally defend Blavatsky against the hostile report of the investigator for the Psychical Research Society (which Conan Doyle would join later): the enquiry was in 1884-1885, but suspicion of fraud on Blavatsky's part was circulating in the Autumn of 1883, fuelled from the U.S.A. in the initial instance and thoroughly ventilated in Britain. Drayson seems to have become suspicious around this time. A letter published in Light on 19 January 1884, dated 25 December 1883, signed 'Semper Fidelis', addresses Koot Hoomi politely enough but refuses to accept 'what some of your chelas have fastened on you, viz. 'That in matters spiritual you cannot err' for in your wisdom you cannot ignore that infallibility, though claimed by the Roman Pontiffs, is even denied to the gods'. This is precisely the point the ex-Catholic Conan Doyle made in Memories and Adventures as his reason for finding Theosophy inevitably unacceptable, and some of the logic of 'Semper Fidelis' is in keeping with a lecture of Drayson's published in Light on 25 October 1884. But by that time there was less reason to assert much confidence in Koot Hoomi, and Drayson was now openly very critical of adepts. It is singular that in his story The Recollections of Captain Wilkie Conan Doyle has a pickpocket describe his professional condition as that of 'an adept'. (John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green in Uncollected Stories opine 'that it was written between 1880 and 1886, but it may have been earlier', basing themselves on external evidence; on internal evidence, given its sheer technical skill, it seems almost certainly 1884-1886.)
If Conan Doyle was allowing the winds of credulity to blow very freely on his imagination in relation to Theosophy in The Mystery of Cloomber, it was in a spirit of scepticism, indeed ribaldry, that his creative talent set to work in the latter part of 1883 when he produced Selecting a Ghost, published in London Society in late November (it is also found as The Ghosts of Goresthorpe Grange, its sub-title, and in an American piracy, as The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange, the form which I employed, regrettably, in my The Quest for Sherlock Holmes.) The story ridicules a forest of targets: his mother's heraldic-genealogic- chivalric obsessions, the nouveaux-riches buying themselves into landed society, his own pursuit of different literary impulses, spiritualism, ghost-hunting, and above all frauds enriching themselves by the judicious use of the supernatural at the expense of credulous enthusiasts. Shortly afterwards, in John Barrington Cowles, he uses something like an astral body as a device, certainly, but as a means whereby a wicked and dangerous woman destroys an innocent and betrayed man with an olive, Velasquez-like face, and dark tender eyes' (which seems a more constructive citation of Velasquez than is ladled out on Mordaunt Heatherstone). Whether as inspiration for fraud, or an inspiration for destructive force, this seems to put Madame Blavatsky to uses born of disillusion with her, of the kind Conan Doyle indicates in his memoirs. She would also seem an influence on the sinister Miss Penelosa, in The Parasite, written a few years later.
This still leaves a question hanging over the addendum. One the one hand, it is emphatically in the spirit of enthusiasm for Madame Blavatsky and all her works. It acts, indeed, as a kind of scholarly apparatus. On the other, its style differs from that of the text, and the signatory supplied, Mordaunt Heatherstone, is wholly inconsistent with his homicidal attitude to the oriental avengers, however mystical, as expressed in the story; nor does the addendum's promiscuous display of learning, supposedly born of his knowledge of his father's fate, show consistency with the limits of Mordaunt's knowledge as supplied in the text. (Mordaunt's name, incidentally, is a further Cromwellian symbol; in Dumas's Twenty Years After Mordaunt is Cromwell's closest associate, and the actual executioner of Charles I. The name of Gabriel, his sister, on the other hand, as that of the Archangel of the Annunciation, symbolises redemption and forgiveness.) I am led to question whether the addendum was Conan Doyle's work; in draft form it may be that of another hand, perhaps Drayson's, before he turned against the adepts (or, as they were more formally known, Mahatmas). Such a device is present in Uncle Jeremy's Household where the final letter, exuding learning on thuggism, and signed B.C. Haller' is almost certainly based on information somewhat egregiously thrust on the author by Bryan Charles Waller and may at least in part consist of direct quotation from him. If Drayson's hand is present, he may also have been an influence in advising Conan Doyle to lay the story aside as doubts began to swirl around Blavatsky. But Drayson may also have urged Light to notice the serialisation in Pall Mall, to which it responded cheerily enough on 6 October 1888: 'If anybody wants a sensation, read Dr Conan Doyle's The Mystery of Cloomber. There are to be found mystery, magic and Mahatmas, and the reader may rely upon being mixed.' The substitution of Mordaunt's name for one more identifiable with Drayson with consequent minor interpolations may date from 1888.
The Mystery of Cloomber is distinguished by the attractive portraits of the mystical avengers: it is a remarkable and courageous attempt to stem the tide of vainglorious imperialist literature. Its message of respect to other cultures is far more than the mere hint of future sympathy for spiritualism which has been read into it. It shows some of the anger of the just man at crimes committed in the name of vaunted western Christian civilisation; and the linkage between Cromwellian massacre in Ireland and its votaries in India is important and, for that time and audience, unusual. It fails in its activity on so many fronts. But this gives it a particular value for the student of Conan Doyle. It contains a forest of saplings which when matured make individual noble trees around which Conan Doyle would construct later fictions. If Israel Stakes is, sadly, a very promising but ultimately stunted growth, and the conclusion of his narrative as to his availability for future consultation a trick of Conan Doyle's earliest and most jejune work (such as his first published story The Mystery of Sasassa Valley of 1879), how much else points to the productive future!
There is the ugly, deformed, grumbling old soldier who proves Heatherstone's former gunner and co-murderer of the holy man Ghoolab Shah. In Cloomber his possibilities are wasted apart from his very sinister advent, notably as recorded by Stakes but chilling enough even in West's account. Conan Doyle recognised that the idea had far more chance of maturity if the former confederate came in quest of blackmail rather than as destined fellow-victim, and the result would be old McCarthy in The Boscombe Valley Mystery and, far more disturbing in his impact on the reader, Hudson in The Gloria Scott.
Heatherstone's contemptuous note on his late adversaries ('Got their banner, a green wisp of a thing with a sentence of the Koran engraved upon it') is reworked to culminate in a really touching tribute from victorious native rebels to their annihilated Irish foes in The Green Flag. The want of magnanimity in the British General becomes reversed by conquering Islam, although the story turns on Irish troops suddenly identifying with the cause of the hated British against the Muslim rebels. The artistry with which the possibilities of human sympathy are worked from so unpromising an antecedent is a most valuable proof of the command of emotional chemistry Conan Doyle came to possess. I can never read it unmoved:
- '... In token of our victory I send you by this messenger a flag which we have taken. By the colour it might well seem to have belonged to those of the true faith, but the Kaffirs gave their blood freely to save it, and so we think that, though small, it is very dear to them.'
The theme of danger threatening a guilty and successful soldier from the East is frequent, with mingling of dangerous former comrade-in arms and avenging former victim combined in The Crooked Man. It is singular that both there and in The Green Flag the Irish theme present only in Heatherstone's self-justification in Cloomber, is brought into full play, both times to express the ambiguities resulting on Irish recruitment in the service of their own conquerors.
The idea of a threat against British domestic security from a non-white source, essentially justified, is given a beautiful and reconciliatory resolution in The Yellow Face.
The terror of pursuit from a ship from the East is reasserted, slightly curiously (given its American preoccupation) in The Five Orange Pips. So is a Scottish landfall. And so is the storm, this time simply as atmospheric agent of doom. It is as though Conan Doyle had learned how to put fear into these things, and reworked them accordingly. The Five Orange Pips is outstanding in its construction of fear on such little tangible evidence. In Cloomber it is hard to feel afraid; Conan Doyle faced that failure, and answered it. He also retained the touch of the avengers' unscathed return to the sea, although now being evil themselves and agents of evil the element transporting them to murder and enabling their escape finally destroys them.
The idea of the haunted man persecuted by an injured oriental shade is ironically integrated with medical experiment in The Brown Hand, indicating Conan Doyle's realisation of the comic possibilities of Heatherstone's fate. Sir Dominick Holden is a guiltless object of sympathy, yet when his impecunious nephew (whose ill-success as a general practitioner is so pleasingly asserted in his name of Hardacre) attempts to better his fortunes by finding another hand for the ghostly visitant pursuing Holden with demands for its own, it is a charming if dismaying contretemps when the proposed substitute proves the left when it should have been the right.
Commander Geoffrey Stavert in A Study in Southsea (1987) p.126, points to the direct connection between the mystics' spatial travel described by Ram Singh and The Disintegration Machine, the last Professor Challenger story (January, 1929), a line of descent apparently forty-five years long!
And we may note that the young mystic Ram Singh with his powers of casual prophecy looks forward to quite an improbable but nonetheless exalted heir:
- '... Indeed, I think you must be wrong in considering this to be a barbarous locality. I am much mistaken if this young gentleman's father is not Mr James Hunter West, whose name is known and honoured by the pundits of India.'
- 'My father is, indeed, a well-known Sanscrit scholar,' I answered in astonishment.
- '... You may tell him, however, from me that he is mistaken in the analogy which he has traced between the Samoyede and Tamulic word roots.'
- '... and you, too, good-bye - you will command a ship of your own before the year is out...'
- '... I shall not see you again, Mr Hunter West, and I therefore bid you farewell. Your old age will be a happy one, as it deserves to be, and your Eastern studies will have a lasting effect upon the knowledge and literature of your own country. Farewell! ...'
- 'He is a leaned man', Ram Singh remarked, after we had left him behind, but, like many another, he is intolerant towards opinions which differ from his own. He will know better some day.'
Mr Sherlock Holmes, whether in his interest in Cornish word roots, in his tolerant amusement at foolish dismissal of his deductions, in his conjuring- trick enjoyment of new acquaintances by discussion of their identity, in his confrontation of opponents with news as to their own future, in his prediction of good fortunes for persons of goodwill, shows himself here in a very early and decidedly unexpected form. The combination of suavity and infallibility again possesses features in common with his use of it. In the story itself Ram Singh, while delightful, is yet additionally injurious to a doom-laden atmosphere; a suave and infallible villain is one thing, but Conan Doyle both liked and enjoyed this creation too much to attune him to tragedy; his effect is to make the occult seem so superbly reasonable that the story has become a slightly satirical deflation of melodrama, as though Aladdin's genie were conducting an operation in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary: Conan Doyle learned this too: Holmes was kept away from the supernatural.
The pursuit of Heatherstone, the gunner, and the mystics, to the boghole at Cree is recalled in the pursuit of Stapleton in The Hound of the Baskervilles to the Grimpen Mire, with some violation of the realities of Dartmoor terrain. Both pursuits end with the realisation of the guilty having been devoured alive by the bog.
The main story to reflect The Mystery of Cloomber, however, is The Sign of Four, and if, as we now see, it was written long after its predecessor's creation, it came quickly after its publication. The Four themselves show uneasiness in the proximity. Ram Singh, and his much more exalted colleagues Lal Hoomi and Mowdar Khan, play a critical and ultimately catastrophic part in their story, where Mahomet Singh, Abdullah Khan and Dost Akbar feature only in the narrative of their colleague Jonathan Small. In a sense, Conan Doyle had written the avenging Indians out of his system, and the result, ironically, is as though Small's friends are condemned to a perpetual materialisation in the Andaman Convict settlement while being spiritually present with Small at the point of vengeance. In Cloomber, Lal Hoomi and Mowdar Khan are actually in two places at once; in the Sign, the removal of the occult prevents any such thing, but Conan Doyle is really thinking of them as spiritually present, which does nothing for a reader unaware of the antecedent. It would matter less were it not for the occult appearance of the book's title and the significance of its implication.
But Conan Doyle definitely brought one vital factor from Cloomber: the idea of sympathy with Indian victims of villainous whites. Small and his friends are thieves, even murderers, but as against Major Sholto they are wronged victims. Small's hatred of Sholto on behalf of his friends goes far beyond the lust for wealth, as does his insistence that Sholto's and Morstan's kin must not share the treasure. He has become possesed of Indian identity to be vindicated against the marauding whites: he is heir to the quest of Ram Singh and his associates. It is this which gives an oddly sacred quality to his quest and guardianship of its fruits as sacrosanct. Yet the murder of the merchant Achmet, and it is a nasty murder, is morally as indefensible as Heatherstone's murder of the holy man: the excuse is the same, that the holy man and the Rajah's emissary are standing in the way of profit by their murderers, and that failure to be resolute would endanger British lives or lives under British protection. So the ambiguity of Small is a twin legacy of Cloomber; if Major Sholto is the debased reincarnation of General Heatherstone, the profit motive is now isolated into much greater and more pernicious evidence. Small is also representative both of Heatherstone and of his slayers.
The Mystery of Cloomber enables us to speak with confidence on one problem of The Sign of Four. What is Conan Doyle's attitude to the Four, granted that he condemns their murder of the supposed merchant? Does he accept the view of Sherlock Holmes, Athelney Jones, John H. Watson, Bartholemew Sholto, Thaddeus Sholto, Mary Morstan and Mrs Cecil Forrester, that the treasure, if recovered, rightfully belongs to Mary and the Sholtos? Cloomber's sense of justice to the Indians makes it clear he does not admit that white consensus in itself negates an Indian argument. This does not mean that he grants the rights to the Four to the treasure, morally flawed as is also their claim. If the Indian people cannot have it, nobody should have it. Small is his creator's agent of justice in consigning it to the Thames, and Watson and Mary Morstan therefore find happiness because of this justice.
In one respect Conan Doyle's education had not advanced. If he remained a fine critic of imperialist contempt and ill-treatment for Indians, he was no better acquainted with the religious implications of their nomenclature. Indians among the Four are absurdly named for Sikhs, and Lal Hoomi and Mowdar Khan and Ram Singh are similarly Blavatsky-Sikh-Moslem-Hindu mixum- gatherum. Indeed the two sets of names show more an influence of Indian cuisine than of Indian religion when one includes Major Sholto's body servant Lal Chowdar, who suggests the real origin of Mowdar Khan. It seems appropriate that the creator of Greyfriars, Frank Richards, shows signs of tutelage from The Mystery of Cloomber in the naming of his delightful Indian schoolboy (rather more intelligent than his British friends) Hurree Jamset Ram Singh.
We may also use Cloomber to dismiss the thesis of the Sign as excessively reliant on The Moonstone. The earlier book owes it far too much, notably in the quest of the three mystics in each book; the elimination of the Indian three from the English sequences in the Sign and the removal of all formal mystic preoccupation makes it a completely different story, simply reflecting some lights and shades from the initial imitative work. If any British writer merits a footnote in the Sign, it is Robert Louis Stevenson, simply for his use of a watery destination for a disputed Indian treasure in the Prince Florizel adventure The Rajah's Diamond, from the New Arabian Nights. Small's debt to Cloomber is irrelevant to The Moonstone, though to the points already noted we as add Cloomber's crippled gunner a further precursor of the wooden-legged ex-soldier, ex-overseer and escaped convict. Here, as with McCarthy, Hudson and Corporal Henry Wood, it is the vengeful pursuer who is realised in place of the fellow-victim.
The Sign of Four stands in relation to Cloomber somewhat as Shaw would see Ibsen standing to fashionable drama; the business of vengeance on the guilty, occupying the entire text of the youthful novel, is disposed of in flashbacks in the Sign. It is attitude that is the Sign's greatest debt: just as Cloomber shows the case for the General's persecutors however greatly loathed by his family, little Tonga is a figure of horror to Holmes and Watson, but of affection to Jonathan Small, expressed in a form which unconsciously rebukes the earlier homicidal reprobation. The Sign of Four shows its great advance on its predecessor by its ambiguities of attitude but the clear, crude presentation of loyalties in Cloomber enables us to realise how complex Conan Doyle wished to make the imperial and racial questions the Sign asserts. Conan Doyle had sloughed off much of the crudity and dependence on wooden characterisation of The Mystery of Cloomber, but his humane and generous nature and his profoundly moral sense he had splendidly retained.
A version of this paper was delivered by me to the inaugural meeting of the Conan Doyle Society at Stonyhurst College, on 30 September 1991, and I am deeply grateful to Mr Gerald Roberts, eminent scholar of Gerard Manley Hopkins and founder of the Society, to the Headmaster, staff and schoolboys, for the honour thus accorded me. I must also express my gratitude to the Rev. Frederick Turner, S.J., archivist of Stonyhurst, for his unfailing courtesy and assistance to me then as ever. The paper was substantially written during my visit to the University of St Michael's College, Toronto, and I most warmly thank the Very Rev. Donald Finlay, C.S.B., Ms Louise Girard, and the Rev. George Smith, C.S.B., for their warm support and hospitality during my visit. The onlie begetter' of this work is Christopher Roden, who confronted me with the dismaying information that, contrary to my supposition, I nowhere mentioned The Mystery of Cloomber in my biographical study of Arthur Conan Doyle, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, and demanded that I give him my views on it. I had of course read the book before writing my own, but I have little recollection of my views apart from having enjoyed it; and the discoveries and deductions are entirely subsequent to 22 September 1991. It seems only fair to be pedantically exact about the dating.
I am most grateful to Mr Richard Lancelyn Green for checking the Novel Magazine and the Newnes Sixpenny Copyright Novels texts, to confirm their identity with the Hodder and Stoughton Sevenpenny Library texts.
Owen Dudley Edwards needs no introduction to members of this Society. Born in Dublin in 1938, he is a Reader in Commonwealth and American History at the University of Edinburgh, where he has been on the teaching staff since 1968. He is the author of many highly acclaimed books, including biographical studies of P.G. Wodehouse, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle. He has recently contributed an Afterword to the Society's joint facsimile production of The Adventure of The Dying Detective, and has edited and introduced a new edition of The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, published by Canongate. His latest book, City of a Thousand Worlds: Edinburgh in Festival was published by Mainstream in September. He is an Honorary Member of the Society and a welcome and regular contributor to our publications.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
