The Stark Munro Letters I - Home. 30th March, 1881

Greg Giordano (0:01)

CHAPTER I OF THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS 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 Greg Giordano. The Stark Munro Letters. By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

CHAPTER I.

The Stark Munro Letters by J. Stark Munro Being a series of twelve letters written by J. Stark Munro, MB., to his friend and former fellow student Herbert Swanborough of Lowell, Massachusetts, during the years 1881 to 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 decisions 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, Massachusetts THE STARK MUNRO LETTERS 1 HOME, 30th MARCH, 1881 I have missed you very much since your return to America, my dear birdie, 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, 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 am 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 scraggly and rough-hewn, his nose aggressive and red-shot, his eyes small and near set, light blue in color, and capable of assuming a very genial and also an exceedingly vindictive expression. A slight wiry mustache 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 color and texture of the bark of a Scottish fur, 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. Carlisle's definition always seemed to me to be a very crisp and clear statement of what it is not. Far from its being an infinitive 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 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 own 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 civilized 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.