Having finished Steve Benen’s Ministry of Truth (about the efforts of Trump and his followers to gaslight recent history), I’m now reading The Collected Short Stories of Mark Twain. I love me some Twain, and there are several here I haven’t read.
On audio, I picked up an audiobook from my collection and have been listening to it in my car. It’s The Ring of Thoth and other stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I picked this up years ago cheap at a Used Book Superstore, and was sure I’d read it before. Eviddently I haven’t – the stories are all new to me.
This isn’t necessarily a good thing. This isn’t the Doyle of Sherlock Holmes and The Lost World and Professor Challenger and The White Company. This is the Doyle of The Coming of the Fairies and The Maracot Deep. Some of the stories are interesting enough, but he drags them out to intolerable length. And the tory I just finished deserves special comment.
“John Huxford’s Hiatus” starts out with Doyle reflecting upon how something happening in the world can cause unexpected results elsewhere. A Spanish investor setting up a cotk-cutting factory undercuts the price of British-made corks, this causing several factories to close, including the employing John Huxford, who was planning on getting married. Fortunately, his employer knows of a business situation in Canada. Huxford, after consulting his fiancee, takes him up on this. He goes to Canada, and sends a message that he arrived safely. After this, everything goes tohell. He is attacked by robbers, who fracture his skull, take everything that he has, and they leave him for dead. He is taken by the Watch to the hospital, where he is extraordinarily lucky to recover. But he has lost his memory. He gets employment in Canada under a different name.
There are several ways the story can proceed, especially if you want a happy ending. Doyle chose the most mawkish, overly-sentimental, overblown way for a story, even one from the height of the Victorian era (it was published in 1890), to proceed.
Huxford hears some words that strike a chord, and he recovers his memory. Unfortunately, this happens fifty years after he was set upon. He is in the throes of powerful emotion – does his fiancee remember him? Is she even still alive? What must she think of him. He wraps up his affairs and takes the fastest steamship back to Britain, rushing to his old home town. As with Rip van Winkle, everything has changed with the passage of time. How will he even locate his fiancee, if she lives?
It turns out to be absurdly easy. She’s still living in the same cottage she had been living in, keeping it up so it looks exactly the same. If something broke, she bought an exact replacement. Huxford learns from a passer-by that she has refused all offers to sell her cottage, or even to have it moved elsewhere, because she’s convinced her suitor will one day return. Even after 50 years.
But there’s more. She’s dying – wasting away. Huxford meets her doctor at her front door and learns that she will die shortly unless something turns her mood. He encounters a priest coming to visit her. It turns out that she’s now blind and bedridden. Huxford follows the priest into the house and waits outside the bedroom door, where he can hear everything.
His fiancee, convinced she is about to die, tells the clergyman that she is leaving money for her fiancee, if he should return, so that he will not be destitute.
By this point I’m starting to believe that Doyle didn’t write this as an honest exercise in storytelling, but as an experiment to see how far overboard he could go with mawkish sentimentality before the editor rejected it, or marked it all up with his blue pencil and edemanded changes. But it turned out that, in Victorian England, there was no bottom to the sump of sentimentality. They published the damned thing anyway.
JOhn, hearing all this twaddle, rushes into the room. Even before he says anything or makes a sound, and even though his fiancee is blind, she instantly knows it is him (“Maybe she could smell him,” suggested my wife, cynically.)
Predictably, there is a tearful and happy reunion. Fiancee doesn’t demand a recounting of Where The Hell John’s been all these years. She makes a miraculous recovery (although at least she doesn’t regain her eyesight), and they post the banns and are married, and move to Canada, and live for many years “until they fell asleep, within hours of each other.”
At which point Tonstant Weader fwowed up.