The Stark Munto Letters
Arthur Conan Doyle
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THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS
BEING A SERIES OF TWELVE LETTERS
WRITTEN BY J. STARK MUNRO, M.B.,
TO HIS FRIEND AND FORMER FELLOW-STUDENT,
HERBERT SWANBOROUGH,
OF LOWELL, MASSACHUSETTS,
DURING THE YEARS 1881-1884
EDITED AND ARRANGED BY
A. CONAN DOYLE
The letters of my friend Mr. Stark Munro appear to
me to form so connected a whole, and to give so plain an
account of some of the troubles which a young man may be
called upon to face right away at the outset of his
career, that I have handed them over to the gentleman who
is about to edit them. There are two of them, the fifth
and the ninth, from which some excisions are necessary;
but in the main I hope that they may be reproduced as
they stand. I am sure that there is no privilege which
my friend would value more highly than the thought that
some other young man, harassed by the needs of this world
and doubts of the next, should have gotten strength by
reading how a brother had passed down the valley of
shadow before him.
HERBERT SWANBOROUGH.
LOWELL, MASS.
THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS.
HOME. 30th March, 1881.
I have missed you very much since your return to
America, my dear Bertie, for you are the one man upon
this earth to whom I have ever been able to unreservedly
open my whole mind. I don't know why it is; for, now
that I come to think of it, I have never enjoyed very
much of your confidence in return. But that may be my
fault. Perhaps you don't find me sympathetic, even
though I have every wish to be. I can only say that I
find you intensely so, and perhaps I presume too much
upon the fact. But no, every instinct in my nature tells
me that I don't bore you by my confidences.
Can you remember Cullingworth at the University? You
never were in the athletic set, and so it is possible
that you don't. Anyway, I'll take it for granted
that you don't, and explain it all from the beginning.
I'm sure that you would know his photograph, however, for
the reason that he was the ugliest and queerest-looking
man of our year.
Physically he was a fine athlete--one of the fastest
and most determined Rugby forwards that I have ever
known, though he played so savage a game that he was
never given his international cap. He was well-grown,
five foot nine perhaps, with square shoulders, an arching
chest, and a quick jerky way of walking. He had a round
strong head, bristling with short wiry black hair. His
face was wonderfully ugly, but it was the ugliness of
character, which is as attractive as beauty. His jaw and
eyebrows were scraggy and rough-hewn, his nose aggressive
and red-shot, his eyes small and near set, light blue in
colour, and capable of assuming a very genial and also an
exceedingly vindictive expression. A slight wiry
moustache covered his upper lip, and his teeth were
yellow, strong, and overlapping. Add to this that he
seldom wore collar or necktie, that his throat was the
colour and texture of the bark of a Scotch fir, and that
he had a voice and especially a laugh like a bull's
bellow. Then you have some idea (if you can piece all
these items in your mind) of the outward James Cullingworth.
But the inner man, after all, was what was most worth
noting. I don't pretend to know what genius is.
Carlyle's definition always seemed to me to be a very
crisp and clear statement of what it is NOT. Far
from its being an infinite capacity for taking pains, its
leading characteristic, as far as I have ever been able
to observe it, has been that it allows the possessor of
it to attain results by a sort of instinct which other
men could only reach by hard work. In this sense
Cullingworth was the greatest genius that I have ever
known. He never seemed to work, and yet he took the
anatomy prize over the heads of all the ten-hour-a-day
men. That might not count for much, for he was quite
capable of idling ostentatiously all day and then reading
desperately all night; but start a subject of your own
for him, and then see his originality and strength. Talk
about torpedoes, and he would catch up a pencil, and on
the back of an old envelope from his pocket he would
sketch out some novel contrivance for piercing a ship's
netting and getting at her side, which might no doubt
involve some technical impossibility, but which would at
least be quite plausible and new. Then as he drew, his
bristling eyebrows would contract, his small eyes would
gleam with excitement, his lips would be pressed
together, and he would end by banging on the paper with
his open hand, and shouting in his exultation. You would
think that his one mission in life was to invent
torpedoes. But next instant, if you were to express
surprise as to how it was that the Egyptian workmen
elevated the stones to the top of the pyramids, out would
come the pencil and envelope, and he would propound a
scheme for doing that with equal energy and conviction.
This ingenuity was joined to an extremely sanguine
nature. As he paced up and down in his jerky quick-
stepping fashion after one of these flights of invention,
he would take out patents for it, receive you as his
partner in the enterprise, have it adopted in every
civilised country, see all conceivable applications of
it, count up his probable royalties, sketch out the novel
methods in which he would invest his gains, and finally
retire with the most gigantic fortune that has ever been
amassed. And you would be swept along by his words,
and would be carried every foot of the way with him, so
that it would come as quite a shock to you when you
suddenly fell back to earth again, and found yourself
trudging the city street a poor student, with Kirk's
Physiology under your arm, and hardly the price of
your luncheon in your pocket.
I read over what I have written, but I can see that
I give you no real insight into the demoniac cleverness
of Cullingworth. His views upon medicine were most
revolutionary, but I daresay that if things fulfil their
promise I may have a good deal to say about them in the
sequel. With his brilliant and unusual gifts, his fine
athletic record, his strange way of dressing (his hat on
the back of his head and his throat bare), his thundering
voice, and his ugly, powerful face, he had quite the most
marked individuality of any man that I have ever known.
Now, you will think me rather prolix about this man;
but, as it looks as if his life might become entwined
with mine, it is a subject of immediate interest to me,
and I am writing all this for the purpose of reviving my
own half-faded impressions, as well as in the hope of
amusing and interesting you. So I must just give you
one or two other points which may make his character more
clear to you.
He had a dash of the heroic in him. On one occasion
he was placed in such a position that he must choose
between compromising a lady, or springing out of a third-
floor window. Without a moment's hesitation he hurled
himself out of the window. As luck would have it, he
fell through a large laurel bush on to a garden plot,
which was soft with rain, and so escaped with a shaking
and a bruising. If I have to say anything that gives a
bad impression of the man, put that upon the other side.
He was fond of rough horse-play; but it was better to
avoid it with him, for you could never tell what it might
lead to. His temper was nothing less than infernal. I
have seen him in the dissecting-rooms begin to skylark
with a fellow, and then in an instant the fun would go
out of his face, his little eyes would gleam with fury,
and the two would be rolling, worrying each other like
dogs, below the table. He would be dragged off, panting
and speechless with fury, with his wiry hair bristling
straight up like a fighting terrier's.
This pugnacious side of his character would be
worthily used sometimes. I remember that an address
which was being given to us by an eminent London
specialist was much interrupted by a man in the front
row, who amused himself by interjecting remarks. The
lecturer appealed to his audience at last. "These
interruptions are insufferable, gentlemen," said he;
"will no one free me from this annoyance?" "Hold your
tongue--you, sir, on the front bench," cried
Cullingworth, in his bull's bellow. "Perhaps you'll make
me," said the fellow, turning a contemptuous face over
his shoulder. Cullingworth closed his note-book, and
began to walk down on the tops of the desks to the
delight of the three hundred spectators. It was fine to
see the deliberate way in which he picked his way among
the ink bottles. As he sprang down from the last bench
on to the floor, his opponent struck him a smashing blow
full in the face. Cullingworth got his bulldog grip on
him, however, and rushed him backwards out of the class-
room. What he did with him I don't know, but there was
a noise like the delivery of a ton of coals; and the
champion of law and order returned, with the sedate
air of a man who had done his work. One of his eyes
looked like an over-ripe damson, but we gave him three
cheers as he made his way back to his seat. Then we went
on with the dangers of Placenta Praevia.
He was not a man who drank hard, but a little drink
would have a very great effect upon him. Then it was
that the ideas would surge from his brain, each more
fantastic and ingenious than the last. And if ever he
did get beyond the borderland he would do the most
amazing things. Sometimes it was the fighting instinct
that would possess him, sometimes the preaching, and
sometimes the comic, or they might come in succession,
replacing each other so rapidly as to bewilder his
companions. Intoxication brought all kinds of queer
little peculiarities with it. One of them was that he
could walk or run perfectly straight, but that there
always came a time when he unconsciously returned upon
his tracks and retraced his steps again. This had a
strange effect sometimes, as in the instance which I am
about to tell you.
Very sober to outward seeming, but in a frenzy
within, he went down to the station one night, and,
stooping to the pigeon-hole, he asked the ticket-clerk,
in the suavest voice, whether he could tell him how far
it was to London. The official put forward his face to
reply when Cullingworth drove his fist through the little
hole with the force of a piston. The clerk flew
backwards off his stool, and his yell of pain and
indignation brought some police and railway men to his
assistance. They pursued Cullingworth; but he, as active
and as fit as a greyhound, outraced them all, and
vanished into the darkness, down the long, straight
street. The pursuers had stopped, and were gathered in
a knot talking the matter over, when, looking up, they
saw, to their amazement, the man whom they were after,
running at the top of his speed in their direction. His
little peculiarity had asserted itself, you see, and he
had unconsciously turned in his flight. They tripped him
up, flung themselves upon him, and after a long and
desperate struggle dragged him to the police station. He
was charged before the magistrate next morning, but made
such a brilliant speech from the dock in his own
defence that he carried the Court with him, and escaped
with a nominal fine. At his invitation, the witnesses
and the police trooped after him to the nearest hotel,
and the affair ended in universal whisky-and-sodas.
Well, now, if, after all these illustrations, I have
failed to give you some notion of the man, able,
magnetic, unscrupulous, interesting, many-sided, I must
despair of ever doing so. I'll suppose, however, that I
have not failed; and I will proceed to tell you, my most
patient of confidants, something of my personal relations
with Cullingworth.
When I first made a casual acquaintance with him he
was a bachelor. At the end of a long vacation, however,
he met me in the street, and told me, in his loud-voiced
volcanic shoulder-slapping way, that he had just been
married. At his invitation, I went up with him then and
there to see his wife; and as we walked he told me the
history of his wedding, which was as extraordinary as
everything else he did. I won't tell it to you here, my
dear Bertie, for I feel that I have dived down too many
side streets already; but it was a most bustling
business, in which the locking of a governess into her
room and the dyeing of Cullingworth's hair played
prominent parts. Apropos of the latter he was never
quite able to get rid of its traces; and from this time
forward there was added to his other peculiarities the
fact that when the sunlight struck upon his hair at
certain angles, it turned it all iridescent and
shimmering.
Well, I went up to his lodgings with him, and was
introduced to Mrs. Cullingworth. She was a timid,
little, sweet-faced, grey-eyed woman, quiet-voiced and
gentle-mannered. You had only to see the way in which
she looked at him to understand that she was absolutely
under his control, and that do what he might, or say what
he might, it would always be the best thing to her. She
could be obstinate, too, in a gentle, dove-like sort of
way; but her obstinacy lay always in the direction of
backing up his sayings and doings. This, however, I was
only to find out afterwards; and at that, my first visit,
she impressed me as being one of the sweetest little
women that I had ever known.
They were living in the most singular style, in
a suite of four small rooms, over a grocer's shop. There
was a kitchen, a bedroom, a sitting-room, and a fourth
room, which Cullingworth insisted upon regarding as a
most unhealthy apartment and a focus of disease, though
I am convinced that it was nothing more than the smell of
cheeses from below which had given him the idea. At any
rate, with his usual energy he had not only locked the
room up, but had gummed varnished paper over all the
cracks of the door, to prevent the imaginary contagion
from spreading. The furniture was the sparest possible.
There were, I remember, only two chairs in the sitting-
room; so that when a guest came (and I think I was the
only one) Cullingworth used to squat upon a pile of
yearly volumes of the British Medical Journal in the
corner. I can see him now levering himself up from his
lowly seat, and striding about the room roaring and
striking with his hands, while his little wife sat mum in
the corner, listening to him with love and admiration in
her eyes. What did we care, any one of the three of us,
where we sat or how we lived, when youth throbbed hot in
our veins, and our souls were all aflame with the
possibilities of life? I still look upon those Bohemian
evenings, in the bare room amid the smell of the cheese,
as being among the happiest that I have known.
I was a frequent visitor to the Cullingworths, for
the pleasure that I got was made the sweeter by the
pleasure which I hoped that I gave. They knew no one,
and desired to know no one; so that socially I seemed to
be the only link that bound them to the world. I even
ventured to interfere in the details of their little
menage. Cullingworth had a fad at the time, that all
the diseases of civilisation were due to the abandonment
of the open-air life of our ancestors, and as a corollary
he kept his windows open day and night. As his wife was
obviously fragile, and yet would have died before she
would have uttered a word of complaint, I took it upon
myself to point out to him that the cough from which she
suffered was hardly to be cured so long as she spent her
life in a draught. He scowled savagely at me for my
interference; and I thought we were on the verge of a
quarrel, but it blew over, and he became more considerate
in the matter of ventilation.
Our evening occupations just about that time were of
a most extraordinary character. You are aware that there
is a substance, called waxy matter, which is deposited in
the tissues of the body during the course of certain
diseases. What this may be and how it is formed has been
a cause for much bickering among pathologists.
Cullingworth had strong views upon the subject, holding
that the waxy matter was really the same thing as the
glycogen which is normally secreted by the liver. But it
is one thing to have an idea, and another to be able to
prove it. Above all, we wanted some waxy matter with
which to experiment. But fortune favoured us in the most
magical way. The Professor of Pathology had come into
possession of a magnificent specimen of the condition.
With pride he exhibited the organ to us in the class-room
before ordering his assistant to remove it to the ice-
chest, preparatory to its being used for microscopical
work in the practical class. Cullingworth saw his
chance, and acted on the instant. Slipping out of the
classroom, he threw open the ice-chest, rolled his ulster
round the dreadful glistening mass, closed the chest
again, and walked quietly away. I have no doubt that to
this day the disappearance of that waxy liver is one of
the most inexplicable mysteries in the career of our
Professor.
That evening, and for many evenings to come, we
worked upon our liver. For our experiments it was
necessary to subject it all to great heat in an endeavour
to separate the nitrogenous cellular substance from the
non-nitrogenous waxy matter. With our limited appliances
the only way we could think of was to cut it into fine
pieces and cook it in a frying pan. So night after night
the curious spectacle might have been seen of a beautiful
young woman and two very earnest young men busily engaged
in making these grim fricassees. Nothing came of all our
work; for though Cullingworth considered that he had
absolutely established his case, and wrote long screeds
to the medical papers upon the subject, he was never apt
at stating his views with his pen, and he left, I am
sure, a very confused idea on the minds of his readers as
to what it was that he was driving at. Again, as he was
a mere student without any letters after his name, he
got scant attention, and I never heard that he gained
over a single supporter.
At the end of the year we both passed our
examinations and became duly qualified medical men. The
Cullingworths vanished away, and I never heard any more
of them, for he was a man who prided himself upon never
writing a letter. His father had formerly a very large
and lucrative practice in the West of Scotland, but he
died some years ago. I had a vague idea, founded upon
some chance remark of his, that Cullingworth had gone to
see whether the family name might still stand him in good
stead there. As for me I began, as you will remember
that I explained in my last, by acting as assistant in my
father's practice. You know, however, that at its best
it is not worth more than L700 a year, with no room for
expansion. This is not large enough to keep two of us at
work. Then, again, there are times when I can see that
my religious opinions annoy the dear old man. On the
whole, and for every reason, I think that it would be
better if I were out of this. I applied for several
steamship lines, and for at least a dozen house
surgeonships; but there is as much competition for a
miserable post with a hundred a year as if it were the
Viceroyship of India. As a rule, I simply get my
testimonials returned without any comment, which is the
sort of thing that teaches a man humility. Of course, it
is very pleasant to live with the mater, and my little
brother Paul is a regular trump. I am teaching him
boxing; and you should see him put his tiny fists up, and
counter with his right. He got me under the jaw this
evening, and I had to ask for poached eggs for supper.
And all this brings me up to the present time and the
latest news. It is that I had a telegram from
Cullingworth this morning--after nine months' silence.
It was dated from Avonmouth, the town where I had
suspected that he had settled, and it said simply, "Come
at once. I have urgent need of you. "CULLINGWORTH." Of
course, I shall go by the first train to-morrow. It may
mean anything or nothing. In my heart of hearts I hope
and believe that old Cullingworth sees an opening for me
either as his partner or in some other way. I always
believed that he would turn up trumps, and make my
fortune as well as his own. He knows that if I am not
very quick or brilliant I am fairly steady and reliable.
So that's what I've been working up to all along, Bertie,
that to-morrow I go to join Cullingworth, and that it
looks as if there was to be an opening for me at last.
I gave you a sketch of him and his ways, so that you may
take an interest in the development of my fortune, which
you could not do if you did not know something of the man
who is holding out his hand to me.
Yesterday was my birthday, and I was two and twenty
years of age. For two and twenty years have I swung
around the sun. And in all seriousness, without a touch
of levity, and from the bottom of my soul, I assure you
that I have at the present moment the very vaguest idea
as to whence I have come from, whither I am going, or
what I am here for. It is not for want of inquiry, or
from indifference. I have mastered the principles of
several religions. They have all shocked me by the
violence which I should have to do to my reason to accept
the dogmas of any one of them. Their ethics are usually
excellent. So are the ethics of the common law of
England. But the scheme of creation upon which those
ethics are built! Well, it really is to me the most
astonishing thing that I have seen in my short earthly
pilgrimage, that so many able men, deep philosophers,
astute lawyers, and clear-headed men of the world should
accept such an explanation of the facts of life. In the
face of their apparent concurrence my own poor little
opinion would not dare to do more than lurk at the back
of my soul, were it not that I take courage when I
reflect that the equally eminent lawyers and philosophers
of Rome and Greece were all agreed that Jupiter had
numerous wives and was fond of a glass of good wine.
Mind, my dear Bertie, I do not wish to run down your
view or that of any other man. We who claim toleration
should be the first to extend it to others. I am only
indicating my own position, as I have often done before.
And I know your reply so well. Can't I hear your grave
voice saying "Have faith!" Your conscience allows you
to. Well, mine won't allow me. I see so clearly that
faith is not a virtue, but a vice. It is a goat which
has been herded with the sheep. If a man deliberately
shut his physical eyes and refused to use them, you
would be as quick as any one in seeing that it was
immoral and a treason to Nature. And yet you would
counsel a man to shut that far more precious gift, the
reason, and to refuse to use it in the most intimate
question of life.
"The reason cannot help in such a matter," you reply.
I answer that to say so is to give up a battle before it
is fought. My reason SHALL help me, and when it can
help no longer I shall do without help.
It's late, Bertie, and the fire's out, and I'm
shivering; and you, I'm very sure, are heartily weary of
my gossip and my heresies, so adieu until my next.
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