Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life Story 12 - Lot No. 249, Part 1

Arthur Conan Doyle (0:01)

Section 13 of Round the Red Lamp. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org.

Round the Red Lamp by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Section 13 Lot No. 249 Of the dealings of Edward Bellingham with William Monkhouse Lee, and of the cause of the great terror of Abercrombie Smith, it may be that no absolute and final judgment will ever be delivered.

It is true that we have the full and clear narrative of Smith himself, and such corroboration as he could look for from Thomas Styles, the servant, from the reverend Plumptree Peterson, fellow of Olds, and from other such people as chance to gain some passing glance at this or that incident in a singular chain of events.

Yet in the main, the story must rest upon Smith alone, and the most will think that it is more likely that one brain, however outwardly sane, has some subtle warp in its texture, some strange flaw in its workings, than that the path of nature has been overstepped in open day in so famed a centre of learning and light as the University of Oxford.

Yet when we think how narrow and how devious this path of nature is, how dimly we can trace it for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowy upwards, it is a bold and confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-paths into which the human spirit may wander.

In a certain wing of what we will call old college in Oxford, there is a corner of turret of an exceeding great age. The heavy arch which spans the open door has bent downwards in the centre, under the weight of its years, and the grey, litching blotch blocks of stone are bound and knitted together with writhes and strands of ivy, as though the old mother had herself to brace them up against the wind and weather. From the door a stoned staircase curves upwards spirally, passing two landings and terminating in a third one, its steps all shapeless and hollowed by the tread of so many generations of the seekers after knowledge.

Life has flowed like water down this winding stair, and water like has left those smooth-worn groves behind it. From the long-gown pedantic scholars of plantagenet days, down to the young bloods of a later age, how full and strong had been that tide of young English life! And what was left now of all those hopes, those strivings, those fiery energies, save here and there, in some old world churchyard, a few scratches upon a stone, and perchance a handful of dust in a mouldering coffin.

Yet here were the silent stair, and the grey old wall, with bend and saltire, and many other heraldic device still to be read upon its surface, like grotesque shadows, thrown back from the days that had passed.

In the month of May in the year 1884, three young men occupied the sets of rooms, which opened on to the separate landings of the old stair. Each set consisted simply of a sitting room, and of a bedroom, while two corresponding rooms upon the ground floor were used, the one as a coal-cellar, and the other as the living room of the servant, or chip, Thomas Stiles, whose duty it was to wait upon the three men above him. To right and to left was the line of lecture rooms and of offices, so that the dwellers in the old turret enjoyed a certain seclusion, which made the chambers popular among the more studious undergraduates. Such were the three who occupied them now—Abba Crombie Smith above, Edward Bellingham beneath him, and William Monkhouse Lee upon the lowest storey. It was ten o'clock on a bright spring night, and Abba Crombie Smith lay back in his armchair, his feet upon the fender, and his briar-root pipe between his lips. In a similar chair, and equally at his ease, there lounged on the other side of the fireplace his old-school friend, Geoffro Hasty.

Both men were in flannels, for they had spent their evening upon the river. But apart from their dress, no one could look at their hard-cut, alert faces, without seeing that they were open-air men, men whose minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly and robust. Hasty indeed was stroke of his college boat, and Smith was an even better oar. But a coming examination had already cast its shadow over him, and held him to his work, save for the few hours a week which health demanded. A litter of medical books upon the table, with scattered bones, models, and anatomical plates, pointed to the extent as well as the nature of his studies, while a couple of single sticks, and a set of boxing-gloves above the mantelpiece, hinted at the means by which, with Hasty's help, he might take his exercise in its most compressed and least distant form. They knew each other very well, so well that they could sit now in that soothing silence, which is the very highest development of companionship. Have some whisky, said Abercrombie Smith, at last between two cloud-bursts. Scotch in the jug and Irish in the bottle. No, thanks, I'm in for the skulls. I don't liquor when I'm training. How about you? I'm reading hard. I think it's best to leave it alone. Hasty nodded, and they relapsed into contented silence.