After this refreshment which lasts an hour and a half, we have a football match, which is a terribly savage and wild affair, as everybody is in a state of excitement from the beer; it is the jolliest match of the whole year, in my opinion, for there are always four or five fellows lying on their backs, and shiners are given and taken with the greatest equanimity. After playing an hour we march back with music as before, and end our pleasant day.
I must bid you an abrupt goodbye, for I hear the voice of the Trigonometry summoning me, so goodbye! Love to papa and the children; remember me to Dr W—.
As the end of the school year approached, Conan Doyle’s mind turned to medical school, and the stringent academic requirements he faced to win a bursary to defray the formidable cost of that education.
to Mary Doyle FELDKIRCH, MAY 1876
I hope my last long letter will recompense you for this hasty note. I am studying away infinitely harder than I did for matriculation, and am quite astonishing myself. It was really very kind of Dr Waller to send me his own chemistry book, with such splendid notes too in his hand writing on the margin. Of course I wrote to thank him.
I have got an office here, namely that of doorkeeper in the study place, that is to say I have to answer all knocks, and carry messages about the house. It won’t interfere with study much, and then on the other hand one learns a lot of German by it, and it is a very satisfactory thing to get, as none but trustworthy boys are given it, and it shows one has earned a good name for himself if he gets such an office, especially the first year.
to Mary Doyle FELDKIRCH, MAY 30, 1876
I am sorry to say that I have had to be measured for a suit of clothes, especially as I suppose they can scarcely make very good ones here; I had no option in the matter though, and no doubt I wd need a suit to see uncle Conan and the London people in. I don’t think they are particularly dear here.
One of my English friends here sent for one of Cook’s tickets and got it from England. It is a wonderful saving. He is going a very roundabout way from here to Lucerne, then right up the Rhine to Cologne, then to Brussels, Ostende and London, and he got this ticket which is valid for a month for 120 francs or £4. 15 about. Don’t you think it would be at the same time a very satisfactory and economical arrangement if you went to his agent at Edinburgh, there is one at the Cockburn hotel, and bought me a ticket from here to London, and then sent it to me. Then I would need to get at most a pound here for hotels, etc, and thus we could manage the whole journey for £5! That would be a masterpiece of economy.
I think we could make a route to pass through Strasburgh. It is not much out of the way, and would indeed be interesting with its fortifications and cathedral clocks.
Tell Doctor Waller I have worked right through Roscoe, and at 11.45 A.M. today I finished the last example of the last chapter, having written out in full all the others. I did it in six weeks doing a chapter a day. I got on famously with organic chemistry, but I wish I could say as much for conic sections and bursary matter. I conquered the parabola but the ellipse is a terrible fellow. I won’t do any more chemistry now this month, but devote it to geometry and mathematics.
I could not wish for a more delightful companion from London than Lottie; it would be jolly to escort her home, and also to spend a day or two with her in London, which I have often described to her.
The vacations begin on the 27th tho’ I won’t start till Friday the 28th. We are having detestable weather, and, as I explain to the Germans, though they do call England ‘the land of mist and rain’, you see more of both commodities in a month here than in a year in England.
Pray do not let my coming spoil any little plans you had for visiting Dr W—’s mother. As long as I have my meals and conic sections, you know, I am provided for, and it would be quite a novelty to change the old order of things for once.
Conan Doyle was neither the first nor last young student to find his goals hindered by mathematics and geometry, and their infuriatingly defiant conic sections, but he may be the only one to turn the experience into one of literature’s notorious villains, the nemesis of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Professor James Moriarty.
to Mary Doyle FELDKIRCH, JUNE 1, 1876
I am longing to get a proper letter from you, though you must find it hard to find time even to write postcards. I am getting on very well with my work, to which the twelve labours of Hercules were child’s play, and am anxiously expecting the conic section book, which will be rather a tough fellow, I fear. I ought to attain one of my two objects, either to win the bursary, or distinguish myself at the chemistry examination, and either will give me a good start in my medical career, while both would be supreme felicity.
I get up very often at four in the morning now, as we are allowed to go and study by a dormitory window at that hour. I think that if you ever did happen to see a nice cheap little alarm clock—like Willie’s—it would save poor Baa a cold in the head, which she would certainly get if she had to come to knock me up at all sorts of unearthly hours in the morning,* for I never could succeed in waking myself, and no wonder when for seven years I have always been awakened by being battered with a policeman’s rattle, which treatment though generally effective is anything but soothing.
It is getting tremendously hot—such heat as we never experience in England. Two days ago we went up a mountain about a couple of thousand feet high; we got up in an hour and a quarter, and raced down in little more than ten minutes. It was like an oven the whole time. The whole place is infested with frogs which jump about in the ditches on each side of the road, like the grasshoppers in England. There was one I caught in a drinking trough on the top of the mountain, though how it managed to hop up there is rather incomprehensible. We have plenty of lizards too, and toads and bats and cockroaches and all sorts of nice little creatures.
I will, if I can get one, enclose a photograph of the band in this. You see me on the right hand with my little instrument. As you will perceive it is the largest instrument, and a fine deep bass. It is splendid work for the chest blowing at it.
Those who distinguished themselves by always gaining the first note in everything during May get a ‘card of honour’. I have got one and will send it next letter. Our names were read out with great pomp in the chapel yesterday.
Conan Doyle’s final letter from Feldkirch survives only as a fragment, but indicates that his school life was hardy physically as well as mentally—describing an astonishing trek in which he and his comrades ‘plodded manfully’ over many miles of rough terrain at the end of the school year.
to Mary Doyle (fragment) FELDKIRCH
and plodded on manfully. In the level country we formed ranks and marched singing German songs. As we all had our alpenstocks over our shoulders, and our tunes were somewhat lugubrious, I think we must have resembled a body of Cromwell’s pikemen, marching into action while singing the old hundredth,