The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars

by Anthony Boucher

  “Give this to Worth!” he commanded in a clear, unaccented voice. He gave a perfunctory tug at the felt brim, turned, and walked off, limping slightly.

  She looked at the card. On one side was the name:

  TALIPES RICOLETTI

  On the other was drawn a string of little men, of the sort that have matchstick bodies and limbs and featureless dots for heads, dancing and cavorting in every imaginable manner. Some even stood on their heads, and others waved flags.

  Maureen shook her head and went to place the card beside the white envelope. This she regarded curiously for a moment. It was of such thin paper that the note inside should have been dimly visible; but it was not. She held the envelope up to the light from the window. There was no paper inside it, but there was something else—something dry that rattled as she moved the envelope about.

  She was saved the temptation of prying further by another ring of the doorbell. She hardly dared hope that this time it would be the missing Mrs. Hudson.

  “If you want Stephen Worth,” she was ready to say, “you can wait in hell. He’ll be sure to show up.”

  But she fell back a little as she looked up at the gaunt frame of Professor Drew Furness.

  He seemed not to notice her dismay. Instead he smiled with unexpected warmth and said, “Miss O’Breen! This is a delightful surprise.”

  “Isn’t it!” she murmured.

  He picked up a small suitcase and carried it into the hall. “I don’t suppose you would know which is my room?”

  “I don’t suppose,” she echoed, “that you’d know you weren’t supposed to show up here until six at the earliest? There are, by actual count, seven hundred and sixty-three last-minute things left to do around here, and mostly just me to do them. And half the lunatic fringe of this town seems to think I’m hiding Stephen Worth under my skirts like Amy Robsart or whoever it is I mean—”

  “Flora MacDonald,” Mr. Furness interposed.

  “Thank you. No, I don’t thank you. This is a fine time to be accurate about things. The only thing I’d thank you for is if you were still wherever you ought to be, Professor, instead of—”

  “Please,” he protested gently. “Not ‘Professor.’ The academic man who uses his title in private life always seems something of a pretentious charlatan. Even the use of ‘Doctor’ is suspect. And besides, I am merely an assistant professor. So simply Mr. Furness, if you please, unless I dare—”

  The phone rang.

  “No!” Maureen snapped. “Leave it alone. Don’t try to be helpful, for any sake.” She took up the phone, leaving Mr. Furness looking very empty-handed and forlorn. “Yes, F. X. … No, she hasn’t showed up yet. … All right, give them to me.” She stood silent, jotting down notes of instructions for the still-absent Mrs. Hudson. “All right. Fine. See you at seven, F. X., if I don’t wind up in the Withers Rest Home before then. Now I’ve got the Professor on my hands. … What Professor? Don’t you remember our pal? Canvasback Furness, the boys used to call him. … All right. Good-by, F. X.” She turned back to Furness. “Now please,” she began, “any minute Mrs. Hudson will be here and I’ll have to start explaining—”

  “Mrs. Hudson?” He smiled. “Surely 221B is not to be so realistic as all that?”

  “Isn’t it just?” For an instant she answered his smile. “Can’t you see her? The old landlady in person—half admiring and half pitying the helpless males who need her—her—”

  “Diurnal ministrations,” Drew Furness suggested.

  “There you go! I was just beginning to feel friendly again. Almost. But if you start pulling that stuff, out you go. Now—”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Now this, if the gods are good, will be Mrs. Hudson.”

  This was a tall, angular young woman, with rimless spectacles, black hair drawn back into a tight knot, and a dress which seemed to have been designed with far more of an eye to function than to form.

  “Miss O’Breen?” she demanded.

  “Look,” said Maureen, “if you want Stephen Worth—which I admit seems damned unlikely—”

  “My dear Miss O’Breen,” the young woman announced, “I am Mrs. Hudson.”

  Maureen goggled. “Are you—God save the mark!—a housekeeper?”

  Mrs. Hudson deigned to smile at the archaic word. “I am a bachelor of science in domestic economics. Is this the household which I am to manage?”

  “If Casting could get a load of this! …” Maureen muttered.

  “Please!” the bachelor of science snapped. “Am I to stand here in the doorway all day? This is the right address, is it not?”

  “Oh yes. Oh my, yes. Come on in, and God help you. Did they give you courses on the care and feeding of the press? But then that’s up to the caterer. All you have to do is make five intellectual gentlemen comfortable and contented. And there’s a sample for you.”

  Mrs. Hudson gave Drew Furness something the same glance he might have given a football star who wondered why he wasn’t doing so good in Chaucer. “Hmm!” she remarked. “A special diet, I suppose?”

  “Why, no. Not that I know of,” he faltered absurdly, feeling as abashed under her gaze as he had always hoped (and vainly) that the football player might feel under his.

  “Probably should have. Allergic type. Rash in the summertime?”

  “Professor Furness,” Maureen interposed, “is never rash.”

  “Miss O’Breen!”

  “You asked for worse than that, barging in here. Now if you’ll come with me, Mrs. Hudson …”

  Drew Furness was left alone in the hallway—as alone, that is, as one can well be on a major thoroughfare. He spent the next ten minutes dodging the decorators’ ladders, explaining to the caterer that he had no idea whether Mr. Weinberg wanted French or Italian in the Martinis, and letting the studio cameramen discover that there was no angle from which he could provide a presentable picture.

  The phone put an end to his posing ordeal. There was still no sign of Miss O’Breen or Mrs. Hudson. After the fifth ring he picked up the handset himself.

  “Is this the home of the Baker Street Irregulars?” a thick and somehow familiar voice wanted to know.

  “It is.”

  “And who’s this speaking?

  “Drew Furness.”

  “My pal!” The voice boomed so loudly in the receiver that Furness was forced to hold the instrument away from his ear. “Remember me, sister?”

  Furness’ voice grew dangerously cold. “Indeed I do, Mr. Worth.”

  “I’m glad I got you. Those other bastards don’t know me so—let’s say intimately, huh? They mightn’t appreciate my friendly greetings.”

  “Is there anything in particular you wished to say?” Furness asked with frigid politeness.

  “No. Nothing special. Just to tell you girls that I’ll see you tonight. Your little reunion wouldn’t be complete without me, would it now? You know you’re just dying to see me, aren’t you, ducky?”

  “Mr. Worth, I warn you that if I see you again I shall—”

  “I’ll tell you what you’ll do, Hyacinth,” Worth cut in. And he proceeded to describe, in fantastic and unprintable terms, his notions of what Drew Furness could do to him—notions which entailed an incredible physical versatility.

  Drew Furness thrust the receiver down on this farrago of obscenity with the gesture of one pushing the cork back on a jinni. His face was white when Maureen re-entered the hallway.

  “Miss O’Breen,” he began, “I—”

  “Are you still here? Look. I thought I told you to scram till six. Just because you’re a local boy in this galley is no reason you should have any special privileges. Bottomley and Ridgly and O’Dab are sitting pretty in their hotels and Federhut’s still on the train, I suppose. They’ve got more sense than to come cluttering—”

  “Miss O’Breen,” he interrupted, “please be quiet for a minute.” There was something close to authority in his tone, and not quite the authority of the classroom. “I did not com
e out here to clutter. My surprise at seeing you was, I confess, feigned. I learned from the studio that you were here, and because, ever since that mad day at Metropolis I have …”

  He hesitated a little, and Maureen snapped him up, her blue eyes flashing. “Go on, Professor. ‘Ever since that mad day!’ ‘Strike up the band, Kapellmeister, my regiment leaves at dawn!’ Romance and stuff! Look. Do you have any quaint idea that I was doing anything but trying to get Polly out of a damage suit? Out with it. What’s on your learned mind?”

  The silence of offended dignity emanated from Drew Furness. Wordlessly he picked up his bag and started for the door. A sudden shadow of disappointment crossed Maureen’s face. She started to speak, uncertain herself of what she would say.

  The doorbell rang.

  Maureen pushed past Mr. Furness, swung open the door with a bang, and said, “Yes!” with several extra s’s.

  “Package for O’Breen.”

  “I must beg your pardon, Miss O’Breen,” Furness was saying as she signed for the package and started to unwrap it. “I realized that it was presumptious of me to … That is, I … After all, my life, I fear, is a poor and cloistered thing, hardly fitting me to … My word!” he broke off. “What on earth is that?”

  Maureen wondered too for a moment. It took her a little while to realize that what looked like an exceedingly modernistic kitchen gadget was actually a chromium-plated parody of a brassière, in an unflatteringly small size, and remembered her gag threat before Worth to bill the studio for damages incurred in the line of duty.

  She read the card:

  Not that you’ll need it among the deductionists.

  Love,

  WORTH

  “No,” she observed to no one in particular, “I’m afraid I won’t.”

  Chapter 4

  The working press—a strange expression, that; it calls up a picture of a horde of other pressmen lolling about Hollywood on sumptuous divans, smothered by bevies of attendant odalisques, and thinking scornfully of their colleagues of the working press—the working press took kindly to the reception for the Baker Street Irregulars. The working press, in fact, always takes kindly to any function sponsored by F. X. Weinberg, who is noted, double takes and all, as the best host in the film colony. He never indulges in fancifully quaint invitations (there are members of the press who will never recall without a shudder the morning they received their bids to the première of Robin Hood) nor in coyly conceived souvenirs; but he sets a magnificent table, furnishes a resplendent bar, and generally provides guests who are newsworthy for much more than mere cinematographic importance.

  Maureen suffered, in fact, from a certain professional worry as she circulated among the party. No one was paying much attention to The Speckled Band. Each correspondent (or columnist or whatever name he bore to distinguish himself from a common, or garden, reporter) was sounding out his victim along the lines of that individual’s personal fame, and doing very nicely without a thought for Metropolis Pictures.

  “Socialized medicine,” Dr. Rufus Bottomley was declaiming with wags of his lively imperial, “is at once a golden goal and an abyss of horror. The medical profession cannot survive much longer without it, and yet may well be destroyed by it. The point is that reform, imperative though it is, must come from within the profession and not be totalitarianly imposed from without by an arbitrarily constituted bureaucratic authority. Mrmfk. I hear that an experiment along these lines is being made now in California. Could you tell me how close to success it has come?”

  “I’m afraid,” his columnist admitted, “I haven’t heard about that.”

  “Hell and death!” Dr. Bottomley exclaimed, with three rhythmic thumps on the arm of his chair. “Does a man have to come from Waterloo, Iowa, via New York to tell you Californians that an experiment of vital importance to our whole social structure is going on in your very midst? Is this the vaunted omniscience of the press? Why, man—”

  Maureen wandered to the table near the bar, where Harrison Ridgly III sat with a bottle of scotch and an interviewer, obviously considered in that order of importance.

  “A campaign for clean literature?” he was saying. “Why, well and good. But why should that affect me?”

  “I’ve heard, Mr. Ridgly, that they’re trying to ban Sirrah from all the stands in this country.

  Ridgly laughed. “To the pure, my dear man, all things are impure. I have a rankling suspicion that that paraphrase has been made often before, which might seem to invalidate its claim to truth; but I assure you that I believe it implicitly. Sirrah is modern. Sirrah is honest. Worst of all, Sirrah is amusing and popular. Therefore Sirrah must be a hot breath of corruption sweeping over the fair face of the land. Which inspires me with a rather pleasing slogan; Sirrah—Hotter than the Sirocco.”

  “But they say,” the interviewer persisted, “that your stories, and especially your drawings, have an erotic effect on the minds of degenerates. Do you have any statement to make on that?”

  “Of course they have an erotic effect. Why do you think I pay Denny such outrageous sums for his drawings? But the normal man, however he may delight in the erotic, controls his impulses for fear of society, and the degenerate’s uncontrolled impulses scarcely need my aid to arouse them. Look here.” He calmly reached out a lithe hand and seized Maureen by the wrist as indifferently as though she were an article of furniture. “Here is a damned attractive wench. Look well upon her. Now: Do you want to ravish her? Of course you do. So do I. So would any normal man. But we don’t. Whereas a degenerate would pounce upon her with logical unrestraint, whether he had ever seen a Denny drawing or not.”

  Maureen shook her hand free. “Mr. Ridgly,” she said, “the fear of society keeps us from a lot of things. Right now it’s keeping me from landing a good sound kick right in your masculine modernity.”

  The interviewer took another drink and settled back. This looked as thought it might be good.

  “Tush,” said Harrison Ridgly III. “Please don’t play the insulted heroine. You simply came up appositely to serve as an illustration, and surely you must realize that you are a damned attractive wench.”

  “I’ve heard that before when I liked it better.”

  “I have no doubt. The chivalric approach is generally far more effective, I admit. But I no longer find it easy to assume my Galahad rags. You see, I once respected a woman deeply. Only he who has done that can know you for what you are. I might,” he smiled, “tell you a little story. There was once a sheperdess, named Phillida, who lived—it might not be inappropriate to say dwelt—in a vine-covered bower with her brother, the poet Corrodon. One day—the Fates had smirkingly ordained that it should be in the merriest of months—”

  Maureen tossed her black hair impatiently. “Modernity, hell, Mr. Ridgly. You’re pulling a line that nobody’s got away with since Oscar. And strictly confidentially, it creaks.”

  She left Mr. Ridgly staring at the fifth of scotch with a strange grin of morbid contentment.

  “I’m sorry,” Drew Furness was explaining, “but I really haven’t any idea.”

  Maureen smiled in passing. The columnist who had chosen the English professor was a onetime sports reporter, who was now anxious to learn how many of U.C.L.A.’s 1938 first-string men had showed up for spring football practice.

  “Then tell me, Professor,” he went on undaunted, “what do you think are the odds that Kenny Washington’ll rate All-American recognition this fall?”

  Furness cast an appealing look at Maureen, begging for deliverance from this inquisition; but she feigned not to see him, and passed on to where Otto Federhut was holding forth to the more politically aware of the correspondents.

  “Battle is not the word,” the Austrian was saying. “Nor yet is it struggle. Fight perhaps—and no, not that either. One thing must we say for our paper-hanging madman—he has given into your language one of our noblest words: Kampf. ‘Mein Kampf,’ he has said in his blind arrogance. But we take his word, and to you we g
ive it. This is unser Kampf, unser aller Kampf. It is of all of us the Kampf, even of you, too.”

  His heavy resonant voice sank a little. “When Austria was Austria, I knew it and loved it for its gaiety and charm. But I was not of those who made its charm. I was not the Austrian you see in your minds—the dashing young Leutnant who drank wine at the Heuriger and whirled the süsse Mädels to the waltzes of Strauss, while on his wine-moistened lips lingered a jest from Nestroy. No, I was not gay; but I gave to Austria that without which there is no gaiety under the sun; I gave to her justice. I used to call my justice the justice of Mozart; for as in him classical purity was tempered by beauty and the warmth of human melody, so in me my scholarship, my logic, was softened by mercy and human understanding. But now is no longer the time for mercy, my friends. They know no mercy, nor can we now afford to know it. It is justice only that we seek, and justice that we shall obtain.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said a voice beside Maureen.

  It was such a very small voice—almost like that of the Gnat which sighed in Alice’s ear in the railway carriage—that Maureen instinctively looked down, though the elderly man was nearly as tall as she was.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said.

  “I suppose,” said Jonadab Evans, “that a vernacular translation of that would be, ‘Just who the devil are you?’”

  Maureen smiled. “It’s true that I can’t quite place you …”

  “We have met, though. At the station with Ridgly and Dr. Bottomley—you remember? I imagine I was rather lost; I usually am.”

  “Oh. Then you’re—”

  “John O’Dab. Yes. Creator of that stalwart and spectacular adventurer, the Honorable Derring Drew. At that,” he went on, “I sometimes think that spirit writing is the safest of all—you know, like Revelations by Shakespeare’s Spirit. Then no one can ever meet the author in the flesh and be disappointed. After all, one should be logical enough to realize that if a man were a splendid and romantic hero, he’d hardly waste his time writing about splendid and romantic heroes.”