Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (7 page)

One could suggest that, after all, these stories were written at the end of Conan Doyle’s life, by which time his creative powers had begun to flag. He was also in ill health during these years. This might be a reasonable explanation, were it not that some of these last stories still show remarkable power. “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” and “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” for example, are superior to some of the stories in the first two volumes of Holmes’s exploits. Some of the other less successful stories also have passages of considerable power, making a judgment that parts were written by someone other than Conan Doyle extremely difficult to sustain.

Not everything in
The Case Book
is cartoon fiction, however. In “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger,” Holmes solves no crime, nor does he even clear up any sort of mystery. The lodger, a woman who had been horribly disfigured by a lion while trying to kill her husband, simply wants to confess her crime of years ago before taking her own life. Holmes, after listening to the confession, dissuades the lady from ending it all by telling her “your life is not your own.” Days later she sends him the bottle of poison she was planning to swallow to show him he has saved her from despair. We see in this story that Conan Doyle chose to make Holmes fulfill functions other than just avenging crimes. Here he takes on the role of priest, hearing a last confession before giving a secular absolution. By the time of this story, Conan Doyle was nearly seventy. Like most people, he grew sadder as he grew older. In addition to the usual woes that afflict us all, he suffered a few not everyone experiences. He lost his first wife in 1906 after a long illness, his son and his brother to World War I, and he saw the devastation that war wrought on a whole generation of young English men. He may well have come to think that gallivanting around the countryside peering at footprints and carriage tracks was ultimately a trivial pursuit for his fictional creature. If he were to continue to write stories about Holmes, Conan Doyle wanted him to serve some higher purpose than just putting away the odd criminal or two. Unfortunately, paragons of virtue rarely make good reading. While Holmes is out saving souls, he is not performing the feats most readers have come to expect of him, and many are left cold by this change of mission.

The Case Book
brings to an end the development of a forty-year relationship between two of the most oddly paired characters in fiction. Most of that time the personal relationship between Holmes and Watson was unstated. Victorian men weren’t accustomed to express emotion, especially about their male friends. Before his resurrection, Holmes scarcely noticed Watson, save to chide him for placing the wrong emphasis on his accounts, or for bungling a reconnaissance on which Holmes has sent him, or for completely misdeducing some obvious string of inferences. We’ve seen a couple of scenes where that pattern was broken by a show of feeling by Holmes, but the ultimate epiphany of Holmes’s emotion for Watson occurs in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” after Watson has been shot by Killer Evans. The passage bears repeating in full.

This is the closest Holmes ever comes to expressing love for another human being. It’s all the more touching because he has been so aloof from ordinary human passions for most of his life. When we imagine him in his retirement, in proud isolation on Sussex Downs, tending his bees, creatures who are the very emblem of passionless, mechanical activity, do we not feel, mixed with our admiration, a hint of sorrow that his life has been largely untouched by love, that his remarkable personality never found its soul mate? Of course looking at the imagined life of a fictional character this way is clearly out of bounds for ordinary literary criticism. There’s always been something special about Sherlock Holmes, however, that has inspired this sort of speculation into his unwritten life. Early on, admiring readers and critics adopted the convention that Holmes was a real person, who never died. Naturally this is tongue in cheek, as we know that Holmes never really lived, and if he had, he’d be 150 years old now, a bit long for even his iron constitution to hold out. But in another sense, those admirers are right: Sherlock Holmes is still alive, and always will be as long as human affairs have mysteries at their center, and readers feel the impulse to identify with heroes who are braver, bolder, and more clever than they are.

 

 

Kyle Freeman,
a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast for many years, earned two graduate degrees in English literature from Columbia University, where his major was twentieth-century British literature. He has seen almost all the Holmes movies of the last sixty years, as well as the television series with Jeremy Brett. Now working as a computer consultant, he constantly puts into practice Sherlock Holmes’s famous statement “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

During the course of their adventures, Holmes and Watson travel in a number of different vehicles. During the period of the stories, London had more than 8,000 horse-drawn carriages of many types. These are the ones that appear most often:

 

Landau:
This heavy, four-wheeled carriage accommodated four people, who sat on facing seats; the coachman drove four horses from a raised front seat. The top of the carriage was in two sections that could be folded down or removed, and the bottom was cut away at the ends so that the door was the lowest point on the body. The landau was popular in England starting in the eighteenth century.

 

Hansom: The driver sat above and behind the closed carriage of this light, two-wheeled vehicle and spoke through a trapdoor to passengers, who entered from the front through a folding door and perched on a seat for two positioned above the axle. The hansom was in wide use as a public cab.

 

Brougham:
This light four-wheeled carriage was usually drawn by one horse. The low, closed body appeared cut away in front, though there were many variations in the basic design. Inside was a two-passenger seat; a third passenger could ride up front with the driver.

 

Trap:
This two-wheeled carriage on springs was drawn by one horse.

 

Dog-cart:
Called a dog-cart because its back seat could be converted into a compartment for carrying a dog, this two-wheeled horse cart had two seats placed back to back.

 

The generic term
cab
can refer to any of the above, but it mainly describes two-wheelers. A four-wheeled, two-horse vehicle is more likely to be called a
coach.
Generally, four-wheeled carriages offered a smoother ride, with more privacy, while a dog-cart or trap offered the greatest speed. When the game was afoot, though, the first vehicle that presented itself often had to do.

To travel to places outside London, Holmes and Watson take the train. Waterloo, Charing Cross, Paddington, Victoria, London Bridge, Woolwich, Aldersgate, Gloucester Road, Blackheath, High Street, King’s Cross, Euston, and Metropolitan are all railway stations in London. Sometimes speakers drop the word “station”; when a character says she arrived at Waterloo or Victoria, she means the railway station. The names of railway stations outside London are generally the name of the town where the train stops.

I
t was in the spring of the year 1894 that all London was interested, and the fashionable world dismayed, by the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair under most unusual and inexplicable circumstances. The public has already learned those particulars of the crime which came out in the police investigation, but a good deal was suppressed upon that occasion, since the case for the prosecution was so overwhelmingly strong that it was not necessary to bring forward all the facts. Only now, at the end of nearly ten years, am I allowed to supply those missing links which make up the whole of that remarkable chain. The crime was of interest in itself, but that interest was as nothing to me compared to the inconceivable sequel, which afforded me the greatest shock and surprise of any event in my adventurous life. Even now, after this long interval, I find myself thrilling as I think of it, and feeling once more that sudden flood of joy, amazement, and incredulity which utterly submerged my mind. Let me say to that public, which has shown some interest in those glimpses which I have occasionally given them of the thoughts and actions of a very remarkable man, that they are not to blame me if I have not shared my knowledge with them, for I should have considered it my first duty to do so, had I not been barred by a positive prohibition from his own lips, which was only withdrawn upon the third of last month.

It can be imagined that my close intimacy with Sherlock Holmes had interested me deeply in crime, and that after his disappearance I never failed to read with care the various problems which came before the public. And I even attempted, more than once, for my own private satisfaction, to employ his methods in their solution, though with indifferent success. There was none, however, which appealed to me like this tragedy of Ronald Adair. As I read the evidence at the inquest, which led up to a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown, I realized more clearly than I had ever done the loss which the community had sustained by the death of Sherlock Holmes. There were points about this strange business which would, I was sure, have specially appealed to him, and the efforts of the police would have been supplemented, or more probably anticipated, by the trained observation and the alert mind of the first criminal agent in Europe. All day, as I drove upon my round, I turned over the case in my mind and found no explanation which appeared to me to be adequate. At the risk of telling a twice-told tale, I will recapitulate the facts as they were known to the public at the conclusion of the inquest.

The Honourable Ronald Adair was the second son of the Earl of Maynooth, at that time governor of one of the Australian colonies. Adair’s mother had returned from Australia to undergo the operation for cataract, and she, her son Ronald, and her daughter Hilda were living together at 427 Park Lane. The youth moved in the best society—had, so far as was known, no enemies and no particular vices. He had been engaged to Miss Edith Woodley, of Carstairs, but the engagement had been broken off by mutual consent some months before, and there was no sign that it had left any very profound feeling behind it. For the rest of the man’s life moved in a narrow and conventional circle, for his habits were quiet and his nature unemotional. Yet it was upon this easy-going young aristocrat that death came, in most strange and unexpected form, between the hours of ten and eleven-twenty on the night of March 30, 1894.

Ronald Adair was fond of cards—playing continually, but never for such stakes as would hurt him. He was a member of the Baldwin, the Cavendish, and the Bagatelle card clubs. It was shown that, after dinner on the day of his death, he had played a rubber of whist at the latter club. He had also played there in the afternoon. The evidence of those who had played with him—Mr. Murray, Sir John Hardy, and Colonel Moran—showed that the game was whist, and that there was a fairly equal fall of the cards. Adair might have lost five pounds, but not more. His fortune was a considerable one, and such a loss could not in any way affect him. He had played nearly every day at one club or other, but he was a cautious player, and usually rose a winner. It came out in evidence that, in partnership with Colonel Moran, he had actually won as much as four hundred and twenty pounds in a sitting, some weeks before, from Godfrey Milner and Lord Balmoral. So much for his recent history as it came out at the inquest.

On the evening of the crime, he returned from the club exactly at ten. His mother and sister were out spending the evening with a relation. The servant deposed that she heard him enter the front room on the second floor, generally used as his sitting-room. She had lit a fire there, and as it smoked she had opened the window. No sound was heard from the room until eleven-twenty, the hour of the return of Lady Maynooth and her daughter. Desiring to say good-night, she attempted to enter her son’s room. The door was locked on the inside, and no answer could be got to their cries and knocking. Help was obtained, and the door forced. The unfortunate young man was found lying near the table. His head had been horribly mutilated by an expanding revolver bullet, but no weapon of any sort was to be found in the room. On the table lay two banknotes for ten pounds each and seventeen pounds ten in silver and gold, the money arranged in little piles of varying amount. There were some figures also upon a sheet of paper, with the names of some club friends opposite to them, from which it was conjectured that before his death he was endeavouring to make out his losses or winnings at cards.

A minute examination of the circumstances served only to make the case more complex. In the first place, no reason could be given why the young man should have fastened the door upon the inside. There was the possibility that the murderer had done this, and had afterwards escaped by the window. The drop was at least twenty feet, however, and a bed of crocuses in full bloom lay beneath. Neither the flowers nor the earth showed any sign of having been disturbed, nor were there any marks upon the narrow strip of grass which separated the house from the road. Apparently, therefore, it was the young man himself who had fastened the door. But how did he come by his death? No one could have climbed up to the window without leaving traces. Suppose a man had fired through the window, he would indeed be a remarkable shot who could with a revolver inflict so deadly a wound. Again, Park Lane is a frequented thoroughfare; there is a cab stand within a hundred yards of the house. No one had heard a shot. And yet there was the dead man, and there the revolver bullet, which had mushroomed out, as soft-nosed bullets will, and so inflicted a wound which must have caused instantaneous death. Such were the circumstances of the Park Lane Mystery, which were further complicated by entire absence of motive, since, as I have said, young Adair was not known to have any enemy, and no attempt had been made to remove the money or valuables in the room.