Memories and Adventures

by Arthur Conan Doyle

“From under the archway has darted the second runner, Hayes, Stars and Stripes on his breast, going gallantly, well within his strength. There is only twenty yards to do if the Italian can do it. He staggered up, no trace of intelligence upon his set face, and again the red legs broke into their strange automatic amble.

“Will he fall again? No, he sways, he balances, and then he is through the tape and into a score of friendly arms. He has gone to the extreme of human endurance. No Roman of the prime ever bore himself better than Dorando of the Olympic of 1908. The great breed is not yet extinct.”

Of course the prize went to the American, as his rival had been helped, but the sympathy of the crowd, and I am sure of every sporting American present, went out to the little Italian. I not only wrote Dorando up, but I started a subscription for him in the “Daily Mail,” which realized over £300—a fortune in his Italian village—so that he was able to start a baker’s shop, which he could not have done on an Olympic medal. My wife made the presentation in English, which he could not understand; he answered in Italian, which we could not understand; but I think we really did understand each other all the same.

There is no denying that the American team were very unpopular in London, though the unpopularity was not national, for the stadium was thick with American flags. Everyone admitted that they were a splendid lot of athletes, but they were not wisely handled and I saw with my own eyes that they did things which would not have been tolerated if done by an English team in New York. However, there may well have been some want of tact on both sides, and causes at work of which the public knew nothing. When I consider the Dunraven Yacht race, and then these Olympic Games, I am by no means assured that sport has that international effect for good which some people have claimed for it. I wonder whether any of the old Grecian wars had their real origin in the awards at Olympia. I may add that we had a dozen or so of the American boys down to “Windlesham,” where we had a very pleasant day together. I found them all excellent fellows. I put up a billiard Olympic prize, and one of them bore it off with him. The whole incident was very pleasant.

My work for a few years after my marriage ran largely in the direction of drama, and if it was not lucrative it at least provided us with a good deal of amusement and excitement. In the case of one venture this excitement became a little too poignant, though all ended well in the end. I had dramatized “Rodney Stone” under the name of “The House of Temperley,” with all the ring scenes and prize fights included, and treated in the most realistic fashion. We had an excellent boxing instructor who took one of the smaller parts and who not only fought himself but trained the others to a remarkable degree of skill. So realistic was it that when on the first night the bully, Berks, after a long encounter, went down with a crash from a fine raking uppercut, there was an involuntary groan from the whole house, which meant as clearly as could be, “There now, you have killed a man for our amusement.” It was really incredibly well done and I could never have believed that such scenes could be so cleverly faked, though it was not always done with impunity, for Rex Davies, who played Gloucester Dick, assured me that he lost a tooth and broke both a finger and a rib during his engagement. The play itself was unequal, but was so very novel and sensational in its best scenes that it should have been a considerable success. I found no manager who would take the risk, and I had myself to take the Adelphi Theatre for a six months’ lease, at a rent which with the Company worked out at about £600 a week. As on the top of this the production cost about £2,000, it will be seen that I was plunging rather deep.

And luck did not favour us. The furore for boxing had not yet set in. Ladies were afraid to come, and imagined it would be a brutal spectacle. Those who did come were exhilarated beyond measure, but the prejudice still weighed heavily against us. Then there came one of those theatrical slumps when everything goes wrong, and finally King Edward died and that killed it outright. It was a very serious situation. I still had the theatre upon my hands. I might sublet it, or I might not. If I did not, the expense was simply ruinous.

It was under these circumstances that, as I have already said, I wrote and rehearsed “The Speckled Band” in record time, and so saved the situation. The real fault of this play was that in trying to give Holmes a worthy antagonist I overdid it and produced a more interesting personality in the villain. The terrible ending was also against it. However, it was a considerable success and saved a difficult—almost a desperate—situation.

Yet another theatrical venture was my “Fires of Fate,” some of which is certainly the best dramatic work that I have ever done. It was unlucky, as it was produced in a very hot summer. I carried it at my own expense through the two impossible holiday months, but when Lewis Waller, who played the hero, returned from a provincial tour to London, he was keen on some new play and my “Fires” were never really burned out. I fancy sometimes that they might even now flame up again if given a chance. I stage managed most of this play myself, and with curious results. There are certain dramatic conventionalities which can only be broken through by one who is not himself an actor. There was a scene where a number of helpless tourists, men and women, were brutally ill-treated by Arabs. The brutality in rehearsal was conventional. I made the Arabs get imitation whips and cudgels and really savage the poor travellers. The effect was novel and appalling. There was a young Welsh officer in the front of the stalls who was a friend of my brother’s. He held both the V.C. and the D.S.O. So stirred was he by the sight that he could hardly be restrained from clambering on to the stage in order to help the unhappy tourists. The end of that act, when the drove of bleeding captives are led away and you hear the monotonous song of the Arabs as they march, and you see Lewis Waller, who has been left for dead, struggle up on his elbow and signal across the Nile for assistance, was one which brought the whole house to its feet. Such moments to a dramatist give a thrill of personal satisfaction such as the most successful novelist never can feel. There is no more subtle pleasure if you are really satisfied with your work than to sit in the shadow of a box and watch not the play but the audience.

I had one other dramatic venture, “Brigadier Gerard,” which also was mildly successful. In fact, I have never known failure on the stage save in the case of the unfortunate “Jane Annie.” Lewis Waller played the Brigadier and a splendid dashing Hussar he made. It was a glorious performance. I remember that in this play also I ran up against the conventionalities of the stage. I had a group of Hussar officers, the remnants of the regiment which had gone through Napoleon’s last campaign. When it came to the dress rehearsal, I found them, to my horror, dressed up in brand new uniforms of chestnut and silver. “Good heavens!” I cried. “This is not a comic opera!” “What do you want done?” asked Waller. “Why,” said I, “these men are warriors, not ballet dancers. They have been out in all weathers day and night for months. Every scrap of truth goes out of the play if they appear like that.” The uniforms had cost over a hundred pounds, but I covered them with mud and dust and tore holes in them. The result was that, with begrimed faces, I got a band of real Napoleonic soldiers. Waller himself insisted on retaining his grease paint and his nice new clothes, but I am sure every man in the audience, if not every woman, would have liked him better as I had made the others. Poor Lewis Waller! There was some strange and wonderful blood in his veins. He was a glorious fellow, and his premature death a great blow to our stage. What virility! What a face and figure! They called him the “Flappers’ idol,” and it reflects credit on the flapper, for where could she find a less sickly and more manly type. He caught his fatal illness in serving the soldiers. One of his greatest possessions was his voice. He came down to “Windlesham” once, and as he was reciting in the music-room that wonderful resonant voice chanced to catch the exact note which corresponded to the curve of all the glass lampshades on the walls. They all started thrilling as a wine-glass does when it is touched. I could quite believe after that, that matter could be disintegrated by sound if the sound were strong enough. I am not clear what blood ran in Waller’s veins, Hebrew or Basque or both. I only know that it went to make a very wonderful man. His intense feeling about everything that he did was one of his characteristics and no doubt a cause of his success. It did not carry him far in golf, however. I remember hearing him as he approached the last tee mutter, “God, give me one good drive.” I fear, however, that the betting was against it.

In 1910 a fresh task opened up before me. It arose from my being deeply moved by reading some of the evidence concerning the evil rule, not of Belgium, but of the King of the Belgians in the Congo. I examined this evidence carefully before I accepted it, and I assured myself that it was supported by five British Consuls and by Lord Cromer, as well as by travellers of many races, Belgian, French, American, Swedish and others. An attempt has been made since to minimize the facts and to pretend that Roger Casement had been at the back of the agitation for sinister purposes of his own. This contention is quite untenable and the evidence for the atrocities is overwhelming and from very many sources, the Belgians themselves being among the best witnesses. I put in some two years working with Mr. Morel and occasionally lecturing in the country upon this question, and it was certainly the efforts of the Congo Association which we represented, that eventually brought the question to the notice of that noble man King Albert which meant setting it right so that the colony is now, so far as I know, very well managed. Casement, whom I shall always regard as a fine man afflicted with mania, has met his tragic end, and Morel’s views upon the war have destroyed the feelings which I had for him, but I shall always maintain that they both did noble work in championing the wrongs of those unhappy and helpless negroes. My own book “The Crime of the Congo,” which was translated into all European languages, had also, I hope, some influence towards that end.