by Dan Simmons
James’s depression had deepened during the long sleepless night, but with the increase of melancholy had come an increase in clarity; he’d decided sometime before the day began growing gray at his windows that as soon as Holmes left the Hays’ home that Saturday, he would talk to John Hay and make a full confession about his sin (and he fully considered it a sin, against friendship, against all discretion) of bringing this stranger in disguise into the embrace of one of his closest circles of friends. James could not imagine any way that the Hays and Henry Adams and Clarence King would ever forgive him, and the writer was prepared to skulk away at once, taking the mid-day train back to New York there to seek passage back to England. He knew that other fast friends of the Hays and Adamses—including James’s old friend William Dean Howells—would be as equally outraged at his unspeakable behavior. He would accept all their anger and disapprobation; the alternative was to continue this vile charade and James saw now that he could not do that.
He’d hoped to speak to John Hay alone just after breakfast, but business took Hay out of the house, “Jan Sigerson” had left for his walk, and Henry James found himself alone with Clara Hay all morning and into the afternoon. As pleasant as Clara had always been to Henry James, he could not bring himself to reveal the truth to her.
So they chatted about mutual friends, about the weather in England and on the Continent this time of year versus the early spring of Washington, about various artists they knew—including Daniel Chester French, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Singer Sargent—and then about writers again. After the luncheon dishes were removed, they discussed Turgenev’s work and Mr. Emerson’s essays (which James did not much admire) and others until Clara Hay finally laughed and said, “You’ve seen John’s library, of course, but you should really see my bookshelves of shameful pleasures, Harry.”
James raised an eyebrow. “Shameful pleasures?”
“Yes, you know . . . books I enjoy tremendously that John and Henry Adams and Howells and others simply think I should not stoop to read. But I enjoy them! Perhaps you can offer me some dispensation. Come along.”
She led him up the wide staircase and down the right hallway toward their master bedrooms. For a horrified instant, James thought that this woman with whom he was alone in the house (save for six or eight servants) was going to lead him into her bed-sitting-room, but she stopped in the hall outside. The bookcase there was of polished mahogany and was at least twelve-feet long.
“Yellow-backed books!” he exclaimed.
“Yes. I can’t resist picking them up at the railway stations when I’m traveling in England,” said Clara Hay and set the fingers of both hands against her reddening cheeks. “Have you ever succumbed to the temptation, Harry?”
He smiled with what he hoped looked like friendly benevolence. “Of course, my dear woman. The yellow-backed books are designed to while away a boring railway trip. I see you have Collins’s The Moonstone and The Woman in White there amongst your other sensationalist novels.”
Still blushing, Clara said, “Oh, yes. How I enjoy Wilkie Collins’s books. And how sorry I was when he passed away four years ago. I do read serious books as well, you know.”
“If I remember correctly, you were amongst the first of the Five of Hearts to discover my work,” said James, removing a few of the volumes from the bookcase of third- and second-rate H. Rider Haggard–style “adventure romances” and glancing at titles before setting them back. Not all of the books here—not even a majority—were actually yellow-backed British novels that invariably dealt with bigamy, illegitimacy, murder, blackmail, and the like, but all were “sensationalist novels”.
“Oh, long before Clover’s the Five of Hearts began meeting, Harry! John and I were each reading your work when we met.”
“What is this?” asked James removing a crisp new volume with a light tan binding. On the spine it read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and lower on the spine and below that, boxed, The Strand Library.
“I became addicted to Mr. Conan Doyle’s stories when John and I spent three months in London two years ago,” said Clara. “But they don’t sell The Strand Magazine here so when I heard that they were releasing that collection of the Strand’s Sherlock Holmes stories here last month—a dozen stories in all—I purchased it immediately.”
“Last month, you say,” murmured James, leafing through the indifferently bound book. There were illustrations. “It appeared in February?”
“Yes.”
“May I borrow this, Clara?” asked Henry James, slapping the book shut and lifting it. “My gout is acting up and I could use some amusing light reading to take my mind off it.”
“Of course!” said Clara Hay, blushing again. “Just do not tell John what kind of book I’ve lent to such an illustrious author. I would never hear the end of it.” The two stood in the hallway smiling at one another like two conspirators.
* * *
With his gout as an excuse—and it was acting up, causing his left foot to ache something terribly—James spent the rest of the afternoon in his room. A girl came in to build up the fire, and James sat close to it, his aching foot up on an overstuffed footstool, as a light rain began to tap and streak the windows.
Edmund Gosse and his other younger friends who enjoyed and recommended Henry Rider Haggard’s jungle adventures and the supposedly true Sherlock Holmes tales in The Strand, or the longer Holmes pieces in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, hadn’t told James much detail about the Conan Doyle tales—other than it was their perception that Doyle was the literary agent and editor, a sort of collaborator, for Dr. John H. Watson’s true tales of the reclusive (but evidently very busy) London detective.
James had attempted to read precisely one H. Rider Haggard romance, but when he came to a graphic scene whereby the white hunter blew his black native bearer’s brains out rather than allow his man to be tortured, James had set aside the book—and all thoughts of reading future Haggard—for good. Glimpses of life on the streets of London were difficult enough to reconcile with a graceful, dignified life; James wanted to encounter no more lovingly detailed descriptions of skulls exploding and brain matter flying free.
The Holmes stories he had never been even slightly curious about.
Thinking back now to Mrs. O’Connor’s and Lady Wolseley’s benefit garden party where he had been introduced to Sherlock Holmes four years earlier, James could remember that A. Conan Doyle had been on the guest list—several popular but not very highly thought of authors had been a part of the charity effort—but he couldn’t remember being introduced to Conan Doyle or talking with him. He had no memory of any Dr. John H. Watson being present at the affair.
Shifting his swollen and slippered foot so that it would be more comfortable, nodding his thanks to the footman who’d brought him his tea with lemon, James settled back and began reading the twelve stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
* * *
James recognized his traveling companion through Dr. Watson’s—or perhaps Conan Doyle’s—descriptions: the lean physique, oversized pale forehead, gaunt cheeks, hawklike nose, expressive eyebrows, and intense gray-eyed gaze—although the illustrator for The Strand stories, a certain Sidney Paget, showed a man much better looking and even more the gentleman than the real Holmes. Of course, James realized, he’d not yet fully seen the real Sherlock Holmes, dressed fully as himself and behaving fully like himself.
If there were a real Sherlock Holmes.
In the first story, “A Scandal in Bohemia”, James was shocked to encounter “the King of Bohemia”—whom Holmes had clearly identified as the Prince of Wales while the two were late-dining at Café de la Paix a mere twelve days earlier. James thought the quality of prose something less than merely serviceable and the plot ridiculous. Holmes’s machinations to retrieve the “incriminating photograph” for the Prince of Wales were contrived and absurd and—in the end—unsuccessful. A mere female adventuress had outsmarted him at every turn. If this tale were true, why
would Holmes—whose income seems to flow only through these private clients—ever allow Dr. Watson to work with Conan Doyle to publish the details of such a singular failure?
Even more interesting to Henry James was the sense, sometimes emerging from between the lines or a sardonic comment, that Holmes—at least the character of Holmes as shown in this odd tale—holds the “King of Bohemia”—England’s actual Prince of Wales—in something like cold contempt. At the end of the tale, Holmes seems to be glad that he had been beaten and that “Irene Adler” had retained the incriminating photograph. (James also noticed that Watson—or Conan Doyle—had referred to the adventuress as “the late Irene Adler.”)
“The Red-Headed League” was more amusing but Henry James found the detective’s “startling deductions” in the tale merely silly. Nowhere in either of these stories had the author, whoever he really was, attempted to get into the minds or motivations of any of the characters. Watson insisted on viewing his flatmate at 221 B Baker Street with awe no matter the level of idiocy Holmes was perpetuating.
Proofreading errors were rampant. The red-headed character named Wilson started work—simply sitting in a room for four hours a day and copying pages from the Encyclopaedia Britannica—on April 29, 1890. After 8 weeks’ work and 32 pounds paid for his labors, Wilson shows up promptly at the empty room (save for table and chair where he sits to copy) and finds a note pinned to the door—
THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE
IS
DISSOLVED
Oct. 9, 1890.
But—and James did this calculation in his head—the 8 weeks and 32 pounds would have brought Wilson (and the story) only to June 23, not October 9. And Wilson would have been owed an extra 58 pounds, 10 shillings, and 2 pence were it actually October 9.
The author also has “Wilson” mentioning that he was moving into the “B’s” in the encyclopedia at the time the Red-Headed League was dissolved and he lost his silly job. Holmes had noticed the recent 1889 Ninth Edition of the encyclopedia in a hallway bookcase, and Henry James rang for a manservant to fetch the first volume of the Britannica. After actually counting the words on an “average” page in the first section, James hobbled over to the room’s small writing desk, retrieved some foolscap and a pencil, and figured that the character of “Jabez Wilson” had copied some 6,419,616 words in eight weeks’ work . . . and that while copying for only four hours a day! With a little division on his foolscap, James averaged this to a rate of some 33,435 words per hour or a little over 557 words per minute. Extraordinary!
Ridiculous! The author, whether Watson or Conan Doyle, literally had not done his arithmetic.
On another page of the same story, the careless writer has Holmes, Watson, a constable, and others suffering a “long drive” through “an endless labyrinth of gas-lit streets”, even though their objective would have been only a short walk from where the party had started.
In another part of the story, Henry James could not stop himself from laughing out loud. Holmes has announced that the mystery facing him was a “three-pipe problem” and then drew his legs up into his chair and—using a disreputable black-clay pipe that James had seen the detective smoke while on their trip here—supposedly smoked three pipes of shag tobacco in fifty minutes. James knew that one shag of such rough tobacco in an hour would almost certainly ruin any man’s throat and nose membranes; three shags would probably kill a man.
In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”, the Holmes character is his usual arrogant, condescending self to Watson—a man older and certainly more experienced in life and war than the so-called “consulting detective”—but he also continues to prove that he has no right to act that way. At the first news of a murder in the mythical “Boscombe Valley” near the very-real city of Ross in Herefordshire, Holmes has Watson join him in a pall-mall earliest-train-possible rush to the city and crime scene. But once Holmes arrives in Ross, he inexplicably takes two days off in the hotel there before venturing out to the outdoor crime scene where a man had died by having his skull caved in. Holmes even emphasizes the absolute importance of inspecting that crime scene “before it rains and all evidence is washed away”, but then is satisfied that the weather shall remain “No wind and not a cloud in the sky” by consulting a barometer which reports the pressure at 29.
Now Henry James was no meteorologist and to the best of his recollection he had never used a barometer reading as a plot point in any of his stories or novels, but he had spent enough time with farmers—both back in New England and in England and France—and with sea captains during his various crossings of the Atlantic to know that a reading of “29” does not insure good weather; indeed, if, with that reading, a serious rainstorm had not arrived, it was certainly on the way.
After a day lost not viewing the crime scene, Holmes again refers to the barometer reading of 29 as “promising fine weather” and proceeds to waste another day that should have been close to typhoon weather.
Holmes then solves the mystery largely due to inferring that the murdered man’s seemingly incomprehensible last words to his (accused-of-murder) son—“A rat”—actually must mean “Ballarat” in Australia. Therefore the murderer had to be from Ballarat. But even granted the identity of the murderer as Australian and Henry James’s personal lack of knowledge of the continent, one flip open of the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica showed James that there were several other Australian towns and regions that ended with “arat”, including “Ararat”.
James’s dismay at the lack of proofreading—as well as the carelessness of the writing itself—was not diminished in the story called “The Man with the Twisted Lip” when Dr. John Watson’s wife, visited in the night by a distraught and veiled lady whom she soon sees to be a certain acquaintance known to her as “Kate Whitney”, says—“It was very sweet of you to come. Now, you must have some wine and water, and sit here comfortably and tell us all about it. Or should you rather that I sent James off to bed?”
James? thought Henry James in growing contempt. The gentleman in question, unless Mrs. Watson had a lover hiding under the table, had to be her husband, John Watson. Doesn’t this author even bother to proofread his work?
In the same story, Holmes reveals the true identity of a “filthy prisoner” by rubbing his face lightly with a large, wet sponge he’s been thoughtful enough to bring to the prison, thus removing—according to the author of the tale—layers of actor’s greasepaint. Henry James, who had spent much of the previous eighteen months traveling around England with an acting troupe putting on his first play, The American, knew from simple observation that Holmes’s “wet sponge” would have just mottled and muddled an actor’s disguise: all of the actors and actresses James had watched removing their make-up first had to carefully apply a layer of cold cream before beginning to remove theatrical make-up.
And so it went, story after story, idiocy after idiocy.
James set aside the collection only when a footman came up to announce that everyone was meeting in the parlor for tea or drinks before dinner. He did not have to feign his limp when going down, and at John Hay’s concerned questioning, James admitted that his gout—about which he’d written Hay the previous December—was indeed acting up.
The dinner, although so limited in number it was essentially diner en famille, was roast beef for which James had little appetite this particular evening. John Hay was expansive, happy and perfect as their host, Clara was kind and sure that everyone was involved in the conversation, “Jan Sigerson” described his pleasure at seeing the gleaming white Capitol and other such wonders—including what James considered the wedding-cake baroque-on-baroque monstrosity of the State Department just down the street, where Hay had worked for so many years—and James was quiet, save for nods of attention and various smiles of appreciation. The others must have put his quietness down to his gout, although it was more or less characteristic of Henry James at any table.
In truth, James was carefully observing this Sherlock Holmes
/Jan Sigerson person. Yes, it had been he—James—who had recognized Holmes in the almost absolute darkness along the Seine, for despite the actor’s putty on the nose, added hair, and other make-up (none of which would come off with a simple pass of a wet sponge), the hawk-look of that lean face remained. But James was beginning to have a different feeling about both Holmes and about his own plan to talk to John Hay privately after dinner and there—with endless apologies—expose the hoax and humbug he’d brought to the Hays’ household.
No . . . tomorrow would serve. James saw how it would be better to wait until the real explorer and mountain-climber Clarence King exposed Holmes for the fraud he was. Or, failing that, the certainty of the Norwegian emissary tripping up Holmes’s clumsy and shallow disguise. Then James could act as shocked and deceived as everyone else at the table. It would be embarrassing, yes, but it wouldn’t necessarily put Henry James beyond the pale with these old friends. Holmes would be banished, James would apologize to John and Clara for his own unforgivable naïveté in believing the man, he would leave almost immediately to sail to England, and that would be that.
Hay invited the men into his library for brandy and cigars, but after quickly finishing his drink there, James pled gout again and went back upstairs, leaving his host and “Sigerson” energetically discussing the European gold situation, the recent slaughter of thousands of Arabs by Congo cannibals, and the possible injustice of canal-builder de Lesseps’s imprisonment for fraud.
CHAPTER 14
James read into the night. The authorial and plot idiocies continued to accrue. But here and there, James did see elements of the Sherlock Holmes character which reminded him of the man he’d met thirteen days earlier and with whom he’d dined that night. And he began to understand, dimly, the attraction of these “adventures” to educated friends of his such as Edmund Gosse. The heart of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes lay not in the clumsy “adventures”—which never struck James as that adventurous—but rather in the friendship between Holmes and Watson, their breakfasts together, the foggy days shared indoors by the crackling fire, and Mrs. Hudson coming and going with her food trays and messages from the world. Holmes and Watson lived in a Boys’ Adventure universe and, like Peter Pan, and despite Watson’s rather confused mentions of being married, neither of them ever grew up.