Along with the reminiscences came the readings, which included two passages from Sherlock Holmes-the classic section from The Sign of the Four in which Holmes examines Watson’s pocket watch and deduces more about Watson and his family than Watson was prepared to hear, and a brief section from “The Greek Interpreter” in which Holmes and his brother Mycroft match observations about people in the street below, from at the window of the Diogenes Club in Pall Mall. Then, just about at the end of his performance, Conan Doyle set Holmes aside to read an entire short story from his other work, which seems generally to have been one that had only just been published in The Strand Magazine in England and a number of American newspapers, The Lord of Chateau Noir. It would eventually form part of the collection The Green Flag and Other Stories, issued in 1900. The tale is fairly gruesome, in keeping with a theme of physical mutilation that surfaces repeatedly in Conan Doyle’s writing, especially his stories of crime, including The Cardboard Box and The Crooked Man, but also his general and historical fiction. After the lecture in Worcester, for example, the local newspaper, the Evening Gazette, complained that it had been a mistake for the visitor to read such a thing, calling it “painful,” “brutal,” and “unpleasant.”
What emerges from these sources is not just the story of one lecture tour, but a portrait of social and literary America in 1894. [2] He did not see the whole country, going no further south than Washington, D.C. and no further west than Milwaukee, but within that scope there was plenty for him to see, plenty of people to meet, and plenty more he might have enjoyed meeting if the pressure had not been so intense and continuous. After shaking those 175 hands at the reception in Worcester, he may have felt mixed enthusiasm for getting up the next day, traveling to Amherst, and giving the same talk all over again, this time for an audience of college men. But there were clearly good times as well. One of the best may have been his day in Indianapolis, where he stayed at a hotel that was also home to the local poet laureate, James Whitcomb Riley. They met with mutual enthusiasm, and apparently spent several hours talking in one or both of their rooms upstairs-and anyone who knows of Riley’s habits will suspect that while they talked, a bottle and a couple of glasses were not far away.
In Yonkers, New York, Conan Doyle had dinner with John Kendrick Bangs, the writer best known now for using Sherlock Holmes as a character in his comic novel The Pursuit of the House-Boat. A biography of Bangs tells how everyone went upstairs to change for dinner, and what happened after Conan Doyle came down and took a seat in Bangs’s library: “As Bangs crossed the hall to the wide doorway of the library, he saw the back of Doyle’s head above the plush comfort of a chair which had been drawn up before a blazing fire on the library hearth. At the same moment he was shocked to see his son move swiftly upon Doyle from the rear, and, with a Gollywog Doll poised on high, bring it down upon the crown of the distinguished creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle like a flash seized the boy and went to the floor in a wrestling match, easily bringing the attacking party to complete subjection. Looking up and smiling, Doyle eternally subjected Bangs also. ‘Oh, never mind, Mr. Bangs,’ he said. ‘This is only another example of the irrepressible conflict between Old England and Young America!’”
Newspaper reporters sometimes asked him about exactly that sensitive issue. Conan Doyle told an audience of American literary men at New York’s Lotos Club that Britons “exult in your success and in your prosperity,” but at a dinner in Detroit he took exception to some derogatory remarks about the British Empire made by an intoxicated speaker late in the evening. “You Americans,” he rose and said in reply, “have lived up to now within your own palings, and know nothing of the real world outside. But now your land is filled up, and you will be compelled to mix more with the other nations. When you do so you will find that there is only one which can at all understand your ways and your aspirations, or will have the least sympathy. That is the mother country which you are now so fond of insulting.”
Conan Doyle visited Brattleboro, Vermont, to have Thanksgiving dinner with an expatriate Briton, Rudyard Kipling, and his American wife and in-laws, and they astonished local residents by playing a game of that newfangled sport, golf, across a nearby cow-pasture. In Philadelphia, he had dinner at the home of publisher Craige Lippincott in Rittenhouse Square. In New York City, he met with a less affluent publisher, S. S. McClure, and gave him a check for a thousand pounds sterling by way of investment in his struggling magazine-an amount he afterwards said accounted for the entire net proceeds of his lecture tour, worth about $100,000 in today’s money.
And there were a number of literary luncheons at which he met the writers and would-be writers of the day. These tended to be events for gentlemen only, but there was one particularly festive lunch in Chicago, at the home of a distinguished banker, at which ladies were present as well as businessmen, a prominent clergyman, and two noted authors of the time, Eugene Field and Hamlin Garland. Field took the opportunity to tease Conan Doyle a little by asking him to sign a copy of one of his books-a cheap, badly printed, pirated edition of The Sign of the Four, at a time when copyright and literary piracy in America were continuing aggravations for British authors. This one took the joke welclass="underline" next to his signature in the book he drew a skull and crossbones, and wrote a doggerel verse about pirates. He also signed a copy of the printed menu for the event, and all the guests did likewise. That menu is still in existence, owned by a private collector.
Some souvenirs of the trip are preserved in institutions now. The public library in Niagara Falls, New York, has the autographbook maintained by the owner of the inn where Conan Doyle stayed overnight. The illustrated menu for the Lotos Club dinner, whose talk by Conan Doyle that night follows, is framed on the wall of the club’s grill-room. Among the most touching documents of all is the diary kept by Lydia Kendall, who saw him lecture at the City Hall in Northampton, Massachusetts, and wrote at length about the experience. “He is a finelooking man of thirty-five,” she wrote, “very tall and well-proportioned.” That firsthand evidence of the tour is now in the archives at Smith College, where Kendall was a student at the time.
Anyone who wishes to stand where Conan Doyle once stood, and imagine how Lydia Kendall saw him 115 years ago, can have that experience in Northampton, for the City Hall on Main Street still stands. So does Plymouth Church on East Hampshire Avenue in Milwaukee; so does the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Lafayette Avenue; so do many other halls in which audiences heard his “Readings and Reminiscences.” Similarly, today’s pilgrim can walk in the footsteps of the visiting author to Cooper’s Cave in Glens Falls (though it is no longer open to tourists as it was then), and even spend a night in Naulakha, Kipling’s house in Vermont where Conan Doyle spent the Thanksgiving holiday in 1894.