by Bill Peschel
“La Savoie! La Savoie!” they shouted. “Greatest of Paris detectives, join us in the merry cup! Or the bucket or the barrel, if you like!”
M. La Savoie shrank backwards, nervously.
“I see Lepine!” he said, turning to me. “I notice M. Herlock Soames! I also behold Animal and Dr. Watts! This is a family party, evidently!”
“Incomplete without you, Monsieur!”
“But my reputation?”
“No one shall know! My waiters are too foolish to recognize you!”
“If I had not been burnt up with the fever in foreign parts, I would drink with the best of them! I will even now try! But who is paying the bill?”
If I had been transfixed by an electric shock, I could not have felt more aghast. The bill? It had never entered my mind! The bill? Who would pay it?
“They knew you were coming, Monsieur, and they said you would pay it!”
“But how did they know I was coming? I have only just left the ship, a German steamer.”
“It was the wireless telegraph, no doubt!”
“I had not thought of that. But they are calling for more wine! Take it to them, for I know what it is to be thirsty when one is in that happy state. Not to quench the thirst promptly is to set up a contretemps! I do not like to see them drink alone, parbleu, either! Bring me a chair and bring more wine—we will see what I can do, waiter!”
“Bien, Monsieur!”
M. La Savoie glanced at my clients with an air of toleration.
“You fellows will have to reckon with me now!”
“You do not want to put me in prison tonight?” shrieked Lepine, laughing loudly. “Have mercy, my dear La Savoie!”
“Tut! Tut! I mean you will have to reckon with me as a consumer of good wine! M. Animal, I am glad to see you! M. Soames, this is an honor indeed. Dr. Watts, the pleasure is mine!”
“Nonsense, it is mine!” smiled the Army surgeon. “But you’re a good chap! We’re all good chaps, aren’t we? Hurrah! Hurrah for La Savoie and myself! Don’t look at me like that, Soames! If you could only see yourself, you wouldn’t do it! Pass me the bottle, Arsene! It is much nicer to have it on the table without any beastly eavesdropping waiters hanging about listening to the words of greatness which fall from our renowned lips! Agree with me, Animal, or I shall throw something at you! Quickly! Is it agreed?”
“Certainement! . . . Do you sing, M. La Savoie?”
M. Soames looked gravely at them all for a few seconds, then he got up and climbed on to the table.
“Gentlemen, since my young days at the ’varsity I have not felt as free from care and as happy as I feel tonight. My dear old friend Watts can bear witness. I have not any cocaine with me to emphasize the sensations 0f joy through which I am passing, but I can tell you so in this glass. No, hand me the bottle, Lepine! I can better express myself with a bottle! It is half full, as you can see! I will place the end in my mouth, thus! . . . There! That was a big gulp, wasn’t it? Now we will sing again! I am going to conduct that portion of the ditty which most resembles a solo! Are you ready? Yes! Now! For he’s a jolly good fellow—I refer, of course, to our friend La Savoie! See! The tint of the yellow fever is leaving his face! It is a pleasure to watch the chameleonic effect of good company! Again! For he’s a jolly good fellow—oh, Watts, your voice is cracked! You jumble the beautiful meaning of the words! Hang it all!” he cried, jumping down, “it’s no good! I can’t manage it! You chaps wouldn’t do in a village choir!”
La Savoie seized a glass and filled it three times in quick succession.
“I propose the health of M. Herlock Soames, the most famous personage of the day! There is not a duke or a plowboy who is not familiar with him, with his most intimate doings and sayings! Thanks—thanks to Dr. Watts!”
“And what about Arsene Lepine?” asked Animal, not to be kept from his pet topic 0f conversation. “I say M. Lepine is on a par with M. Soames! He divides the honors!”
“And so say all of us!” sang Dr. Watts, falling into the chorus of M. Soames’ song.
While the entertainment was still at its height, there was a noisy trample of feet, and a company of uniformed policemen entered the restaurant with their batons raised.
“Prepare to charge!” called out their superintendent.
They were policemen of enormous stature, men of the Broadway squad. I felt like getting out of the line of route! I did not want to be jellied for a second time in one night! Ma foi, no!
M. Soames quickly took command of the table contingent.
“Lepine,” he shouted, “get your automatic pistol ready! No silly fears about bloodshed and that sort of rot! Fire when I give the word! Watts, out with the old Army revolver, and await orders! Animal, wave a serviette as a flag of truce! You, M. La Savoie, be ready to shoot. Aim at the heart, if they advance!”
Animal, with a revolver in one hand and a napkin in the other, advanced to meet the enemy.
“Messieurs les Ennemis!” he started. He could get no further. “Messieurs,” he repeated, “you may notice we are heavily armed, and it is for a good purpose! If you attempt to advance upon us, you will be shot! Already you, Superintendent, are covered by the weapon of M. Herlock Soames, and I only have to drop this towel—this serviette, I mean—for him to open fire! On the other hand, if you choose to occupy the restaurant as friends, not foes, you shall drink of the best!”
The men lowered their clubs and commenced talking volubly with a strong Irish brogue. Their superintendent must have seen that it would be senseless to ask them to charge while there was any alcohol to be had for nothing, so he retreated a step and exchanged some words with a sergeant and an inspector, or a captain 0f police. His arguments had no apparent effect on these officers, for they pointed to the men and shook their heads.
With quick decision, the superintendent wheeled round and came towards M. Animal.
“We will drink,” he said, simply.
There were great thuds as the gigantic feet of the Broadway squad penetrated the soft thick surface of the splendid carpet. They distributed themselves awkwardly at the finely appointed tables of my restaurant, and my heart shrank within me at the prospect of serving such savages.
“What is it to be?” I asked in no very inviting way.
“They will have all the champagne in the building, and when that is gone,” added the superintendent, who acted as spokesman, “you can bring up the Burgundy and the Bordeaux and the Italian wines!”
“Wouldn’t they prefer beer or whiskey?”
“That will come later!” snapped the superintendent.
What a terrible orgy to remember! I grew thin during the service. My poor waiters panted like tired dogs as they ran with the bottles! They could not be brought up quickly enough! I refer to the bottles! Oh, it was a nightmare, an experience unprecedented. I did not dare think of the bill! Hundreds of dollars, a thousand dollars before they left! Still, I could always explain to the proprietors that they had sent for the police to disperse the Soames-Lepine party, and the attack on the cellars was due to this gross act of indiscretion. I therefore felt safe. Mon Dieu! It was like a corner of hell, but worse! I did not dare remonstrate with anyone in my displeasure! I feared for the carpet! I trembled for the magnificent walls! I wanted to rush from the establishment.
About five o’clock in the morning, M. Soames led a song called “The Wearing of the Green.” There was such an immense uproar that I feared that the regular hotel visitors would be driven from their beds! I wondered whether I should see frenzied ladies rushing out in their night attire if I went to the central hall. On the whole, I had better confess that as I grew accustomed to the police music, “The Wearing of the Green,” I enjoyed their enthusiasm as much as they did! M. Arsene Lepine announced his identity amid a storm of applause. Then Dr. Watts said a few words about M. La Savoie and M. Animal. In the end, M. La Savoie witnessed the signatures of MM. Animal, Soames, Lepine, and Watts, who swore as The Troupe of Four to be friends for evermore!
In the wild excitement of the moment, M. Lepine pulled a diamond necklace from his pocket and tried to split it up into souvenirs. It was the wonderful ornament of Mrs. Vanhattan Cuyler. However, I said nothing, and towards seven o’clock, the police withdrew from the hotel and the others went to bed! I had not had such a night since I had left the headwaitership at Trouville Casino. For the Hotel Chesterfield, New York, it was a record of an epoch-making kind!
1913
Despite the reassurance Conan Doyle felt about Germany during the Prince Henry Tour the previous year, he could not ignore a more ominous sign in the form of a book from one of the Kaiser’s top officers.
Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849-1930) was a Prussian general with a distinguished record. His service during the Franco-Prussian war was rewarded by being the first German to ride under the Arc de Triomphe when the Germans occupied Paris. He was also a military historian and intimate with the thinking inside Berlin.
In Germany and the Next War, Bernhardi argued that war was inevitable, the natural result of a Darwinian struggle for existence. He saw the process with the rigidity and inhumanity of a math formula: a nation’s growing population inevitably outstripped its resources; new land must be found. “Since almost every part of the globe is inhabited, new territory must, as a rule, be obtained at the cost of its possessors—that is to say, by conquest, which thus becomes a law of necessity.”
With the argument for “give war a chance” won, Bernhardi got down to describing how Germany should defeat its enemies, England included, in the next war. And there will be a next war, Bernhardi declared, even if Europe reaches a peace deal: “We may at most use them to delay the necessary and inevitable war until we may fairly imagine we have some prospect of success.”
Germany and the Next War spurred Conan Doyle into furious thinking. He wrote England and the Next War to counter Bernhardi’s assumptions about Britain. He pointed out that Britain could not attack Germany by itself without public support and its army was too small to do so anyway. Conan Doyle also dismissed Bernhardi’s assumptions that Britain and the U.S. were potential warring rivals, and that the Colonies would abandon Britain were she attacked.
Conan Doyle also drew public attention to two newly developed inventions and their effect on future conflicts: the submarine and the airship, specifically dirigibles. The latter would prove useful for spying from above, but the submarine, he saw, could upset the balance of power. “No blockade, so far as I can see, can hold these vessels in harbour, and no skill or bravery can counteract their attack when once they are within striking distance. One could imagine a state of things when it might be found impossible for the greater ships on either side to keep the seas on account of these poisonous craft.”
Faced with the prospect of German subs dominating the seas, Conan Doyle had an answer: build a tunnel to France under the English Channel, a project that had been proposed in fits and starts since 1802.
The article spurred much discussion in the press but no political or military progress. The only personal effect came with an invitation to meet Gen. Henry Wilson, who as director of military operations for the War Office was in charge of contingency planning for the next war. Wilson, a combative ambitious Irishman, had been pushing plans to send the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to France in the event of a German invasion. After lunch, Conan Doyle wrote, Wilson “machine-gunned me with questions for about an hour. He was fierce and explosive in his manner, and looked upon me, no doubt, as one of those pestilential laymen who insist upon talking of things they don’t understand.” They wrangled over the effectiveness of the channel tunnel and whether it would be better to train the Territorial Army (as Conan Doyle wanted) to support the BEF against conscripting civilians favored by Wilson.
As World War I proved, Conan Doyle was correct: submarines were devastatingly effective against shipping. He was also in the vanguard in publicly discussing them, for all the good it did Britain. Still, as he reflected in England and the Next War, “better to be a voice, however small, than an echo.”
On a happier note, that same month Conan Doyle participated in the Amateur Billiard Championship, where he reached the third round before losing to the eventual champion.
March also saw the serialization in The Strand of the sequel to The Lost World. Instead of another adventure story, The Poison Belt was about the end of the world. Warned that a comet with a tail of poison gas was passing by the earth, Professor Challenger summons the gang to his Sussex home. With the windows sealed and armed with oxygen canisters, he proposes staying in place for as long as the air holds out. When they come out from hiding, they believe themselves to be the sole survivors, only to find that the gas put the world to sleep instead. But the devastation caused by the panic and the unattended machinery shocked the world into reforming itself.
In April, during a campaign of vandalism to force Parliament to extend the franchise to women, suffragettes attacked the pavilion of the Nevill Cricket Ground at Tunbridge Wells. The club was notorious for not allowing women to enter the pavilion, especially after an unnamed official was reported to have said “It is not true that women are banned from the pavilion. Who do you think makes the teas?” The suffragettes’ response was to burn the place down. The pavilion was set on fire, destroying the stands, offices, and the club’s archives. Nearby, firemen found suffragette literature and a picture of Emmeline Pankhurst, a leading advocate for women’s equality.
As the club launched a fundraising drive to rebuild the pavilion, Conan Doyle spoke in Tunbridge Wells before the National League for Opposing Women Suffrage. He called the arsonists “female hooligans” and compared the attack to “blowing up a blind man and his dog.” In response, the next month, while the Conan Doyles cruised the Mediterranean, someone poured a bottle of vitriol into the letter box outside Windlesham.
While Conan Doyle remained consistent in opposing universal suffrage, he also campaigned to reform divorce law and believed in extending the vote to women who paid their taxes. “He had seen,” his biographer Daniel Stashower wrote, “by the example of his own mother that a woman could hold her own in a man’s world, and he saw no reason why women should not enter professional life.”
The rest of the year proceeded more calmly. Conan Doyle finished another Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Dying Detective.” He and Jean attended a private showing of The House of Temperley, a silent movie based on his play. He attended a fundraiser for the Olympic team and watched French boxer Georges Carpentier, the European heavyweight, knock out Bombardier Wells in the first round at Covent Garden.
In December, Conan Doyle joined other literary luminaries at the Savoy in London at a dinner to honor the French writer Anatole France, who would win the Nobel Prize in 1921. Attending were his friends James Barrie and Rudyard Kipling, and his former neighbor and Titanic critic George Bernard Shaw. Whether they exchanged words was not recorded.
Publications: Holmes: “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” (November in Colliers, December in The Strand); Other: “Great Britain and the Next War” (Feb.); The Poison Belt (Aug.).
The Adventure of the Lost Baby
Carolyn Wells
Illustrations by H.C. Townsend
It is a measure of our appreciation of Carolyn Wells that we’ve included six of her stories in the series. This is another tale from her International Society of Infallible Detectives, a supergroup of literature’s greatest sleuths that anticipated by several decades superhero groups such as the Avengers and the Justice League. The complete list of its members can be found in “The Adventure of the Mona Lisa” in the 1912 chapter. This story was found in the Washington Evening Star Sunday Magazine of Feb. 21. Nothing is known of artist H.C. Townsend.
The members of the International Society of Infallible Detectives were assembled in their rooms on Faker street. It was a very rainy day, and they were hoping against hope that a case worthy of their individual and concerted intellects might be brought to them. At last, as a last resor
t, Arsène Lupin said in despair to the president:
“Do look out of the window, Holmes! Most always when you look out you see a case approaching.”
With his somewhat hackneyed, bored shrug, Sherlock Holmes removed his pipe from his finely chiseled countenance and placed it carefully in an embroidered pipe rack given him by a grateful client, who was light complected and an Episcopalian, and whose missing pearls he had once found. Sauntering to the window, he looked saturninely out into a landscape of perpendicular wetness.
“It’s all right,” Holmes said. “She’s coming.”
“It’s all right,” he said drearily. “She’s coming. A middle-aged lady, not poor, but somewhat parsimonious, an ant suffragist, and a reader of The Ladies’ Own Ledger. She has lost an article of great value.”
But Holmes spoke slowly, and Watson had time only to breathe the first syllable of his trite and classical response, when the lady was ushered into the room.
“Good afternoon, Gentlemen,” she said, sinking into a chair offered her by the blithe Watson.
President Holmes gazed at her, as if reading and translating her secret soul.
Lupin, Dupin, Lecoq, and Vidocq, who had risen, made right-angular French bows, hands at hearts. The Thinking Machine kept his seat and gazed at her from his querulous blue eyes, his chin resting on his folded hands, which in turn rested on his knobbed walking stick, which in turn rested, of course, on the floor.
Luther Trant fidgeted a little, and Raffles smiled like the handsome dog that he was.
“I deduce it is raining,” said Holmes, looking sternly at his visitor.
“You knew that before,” observed Lupin, with a Gallic leer.