Memories and Adventures Chapter 6 - My First Experiences in Practice

**Arthur Conan Doyle** (0:00)
Chapter 6 of Memories and Adventures This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. Recording by A Fine Voice Memories and Adventures by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Chapter 6 My First Experiences in Practice A strange character His honeymoon His Bristol practice Telegram from Plymouth Six amusing weeks A deep plot My South Sea venture Furnishing on the cheap The plot explodes I have now come to the temporary end of my voyages which were to be renewed in years to come, and I have reached the time when, under very curious circumstances, I endeavoured to establish myself in medical practice. In a book written some years afterwards called The Stark Monroe Letters, I drew in very close detail the events of the next few years, and there the curious reader will find them more clearly and fully set out than would be to scale in these pages. I would only remark, should any reader reconstruct me or my career from that book, that there are some few incidents there which are imaginary, and that especially the whole incident of the case of a lunatic and of Lord Sultyer in Chapter 4 occurred to a friend, otherwise the whole history of my association with the man whom I called Cullingworth, his extraordinary character, our parting, and the way in which I was left to what seemed certain ruin, were all as depicted. I will here simply give the essentials of the story and retain the fictitious name. In my last year of study at Annenborough, I formed a friendship with this remarkable student. He came of a famous medical family, his father having been a great authority upon zymotic disease.
He came also of a famous athletic stock and was a great rugby forward himself, though rather handicapped by the berserk fury with which he would play. He was up to international form, and his younger brother was reckoned by good judges to be about the best forward who ever donned the rose embroidered jersey of England. Collingworth was as strong mentally as physically. In person, he was about five foot nine inches, in height, perfectly built, with a bulldog jaw, bloodshot deep set eyes, overhanging brows, and yellowish hair as stiff as wire, which spurted up above his brows. He was a man born for trouble and adventure, unconventional in his designs, and formidable in his powers of execution. A man of action with a big, but incalculable brain guiding the action. He died in early middle age, and I understand that an autopsy reveals some cerebral abnormality, so that there was no doubt a pathological element in his strange explosive character. For some reason, he took a fancy to me, and appeared to attach an undue importance to my advice. When I met him first, he had just indulged in one of his wild escapades, which ended usually in a fight or in a transitory appearance in a police court, but on this occasion was more serious and permanent. He had run off with a charming young lady, and married her, she being a warden chancery and underage. However, the deed was done, and all the lawyers in the world could not undo it, though they might punish the culprit. He told me how he and the lady had gone over a Bradshaw with the intention that when they came on a station, of which neither of them had ever heard, they would make for that place, and spend their honeymoon there.
They came therefore upon some awful name, Clodpole in the Marsh, or something of the kind, and there they sojourned in the village inn.
Collingworth stained his yellow hair black, but the stain took in some places and not in others, so that he looked as if he had escaped from Barnum's show. What Clodpole in the Marsh could have thought of such an extraordinary couple, I cannot imagine, and it is probably the one occasion on which it ever buzzed. I cannot think of any surer way of getting publicity than that which Collingworth took to avoid detection. In London, they would have been perfectly unobserved. I remember that for years Collingworth's hair presented curious, iridescent tints, which were the remains of his disguise.
He brought his bride safely to Edinburgh, where they hired a flat, and lived in it without furnishing it, save for the absolutely needful. I have dined with them there on an apple dumpling, seated on a pile of thick volumes, as there was no chair. We introduced them to a few friends, did what we could for the lonely lady, and finally they drifted off, and for a time we heard no more.