“I wish I had my memory intact,” he said. “Then I could tell you the name of that great beauty…a certain girl I knew when I was young, who is recalled to me when I behold your youth and grace.”
“Oh, sir.” What with one thing and another, he had her upset now, enough so that she gave up trying to conceal it. Dismayed, angered, delighted all at once. She must have been aware with one part of her mind that he was telling her some wild tales, but she was greatly taken with them all the same.
The violinist’s fingers warmed and flew. If his old brain had not been quite so traumatized, he could have found the precise words, the exactly right expression. The girl and victory should have been his, in full, before the muddy dawn came round. But as true history went, he had some fuddled moments, in which he lost his best line of attack. Unable to put off wondering who he was, he said to her: “Has none of them ever spoken my name in front of you?”
“No sir. I doubt they knows your name.” Then she feared that she had said more than was prudent.
“Sally. If this unjust, cruel imprisonment must end in my death—if it must, then let it be my heart’s last wish, that my eyes may behold your beauty near me, as they close.” Oh yes, I know. But really it was not the words he said so much as the way he said them; nor even the way the old man said them, so much as the hunger of the girl who listened. And at the time and place of which I write, real men and women really entreated one another in these and similar terms. People were moved by words like these to weep real tears—as Sally wept that night, before the dawn. In the late twenty-first century we all—all of us who are still quick above the ground—shall marvel at the styles of speech and writing that we admired back in the twentieth.
“Sally, the keys.”
“Oh, sir, I ’aven’t got them, on my soul.”
“But you know where they are.”
“Oh, sir, I daren’t even think of that. God, no!”
His head hurt, hurt, hurt. The storm blew past, the short hours of the summer night dragged with it. In inner thought, beneath his saintly victim’s mask, he raged at the poor bedeviled girl who could not quite make up her mind.
Time was running out on that old man. “They mean to kill me, girl.” It was a statement bald and true.
Books and all else forgotten, she alternately huddled in the chair and paced the floor. “I don’t know that, sir. I do know wot they’ll do t’ me should I do aught to cross ’em. Lord!”
The little strength and wit that he had left were failing. Dawn was near, time running, running out. He heard the four-wheeler coming along the otherwise deserted street. He heard it long before Sally did, yet there was nothing more that he could do.
CHAPTER TWO
(This and succeeding alternate chapters are from a manuscript in the handwriting of the late John H. Watson, M.D.)
It is with emotions doubly strange that I at last take up my pen to write the story involving the creature I have elsewhere referred to as the Giant Rat of Sumatra-a story, I may add, that until quite recently I had thought likely would remain forever unrecorded.
My feelings are strange because, in the first place, this was surely the most bizarre case in all the long and illustrious career of my friend Sherlock Holmes. God knows the creature I have called the Rat was peculiar enough in itself; but the case also involved a truly monumental crime. And it was made unique by the glimpse it offered into an incredible world, whose existence I had never before suspected, a world of horror seemingly more than mortal, but coexisting with the staid, humdrum life of Victorian London. I must admit here in passing, that in this terrible year of 1916 in which I write, that apparently stable pre-war world is almost as difficult to believe in as the world which the adventure of the Rat discovered. That 19th-century London, and that Europe, have long since died upon the battlefields of France.
In the second place, besides the grotesque and terrible nature of the adventure itself, there is the strange fact that what I write is not, in this case, to be placed immediately before the public. It is even probable that both Holmes and I will have been for some years beyond the reach of all this world’s concerns, before these lines are allowed to see the light of day.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Watson…” Holmes mused, recently, as I was visiting him at his retirement home in Sussex. “Yes, I think you must write about the Rat, for the benefit of others who will come after us. But what you write must not be read this year, or probably for some years to come; and you must change the names of those involved, wherever prudence suggests such alteration.”
“As to altering names, Holmes, I have done as much in detailing some of your other cases. But if it is not to be published in the near future, then when? And who is to decide?”
“Well, there is one man, I believe, whom we can trust to see to it that the story is placed before the public when the time is ripe, and not before.”
“Holmes—” I began a protest.
“Yes, Watson, I know your views.” He looked at me severely for a moment. Then his gaze softened. “I shall handle the necessary arrangements. Believe me, old fellow, it will be for the best. Therefore you must go home and write.”
And so it is that I am now seated at my desk. When complete, this account will not be entrusted to my own depository of confidential papers, Cox’s bank at Charing Cross, where lie the unfleshed bones of many another remarkable tale. Rather, by Holmes’ own instructions, it must go with some few private papers of his own, into the deepest vaults of the Oxford Street branch of the Capital and Counties bank. There it is to remain for years or decades, for centuries if need be, until a most singular password shall be presented for its removal.
The adventure began for me upon a sunny morning in early June of 1897. London was in a bustle of preparation for the Jubilee, and thronged with important visitors from every quarter of the Empire. The early months of that year had been an extremely busy time for Holmes as well, so arduous in fact that in March he had been ordered to rest, and I had accompanied him to Cornwall, where occurred those remarkable events I have recorded elsewhere as the Adventure of the Devil’s Foot.
On this morning I found Holmes at breakfast, turning over in his hands a small blue envelope. “I have not mentioned this to you yet, have I, Watson?” he exclaimed by way of greeting. “If not, it is only because in the press of recent events I have not found time, either to discuss it or to give it the full attention it perhaps deserves.”
“An appeal from a lady, no doubt,” I commented, taking my chair.
“Really, Watson, you outdo yourself. Yes, the feminine handwriting of the address zwill admit of no other interpretation. It is in fact a rather distraught young American lady, a Miss Sarah Tarlton, and this is the third communication I have received from her. The first was a cable from New York, and the second a packet of letters and a note sent yesterday afternoon, just after she arrived in London. She is coming here in person in half an hour, and I will be pleased if you would remain.”
“Certainly, Holmes, if there is anything I can do.”
“You can listen, old fellow. You are an invaluable listener. While we wait, I may perhaps outline for you her problem, as her successive written messages have presented it to me.”
“I am all ears.”
Holmes had finished his own breakfast, and while I attacked mine he pushed back his chair and lighted his first pipe of the day. “Miss Tarlton,” he began, “comes from a good family in New York. Her father is an eminent member of the medical profession there, and I suppose it is quite natural that she should have bestowed her heart upon another physician, Dr. John Scott. A very brilliant young man, by his fiancée’s account at least, and evidently determined to prove himself.”
“Young Scott’s talents lie—or lay; it is uncertain whether he is still alive—chiefly in research aimed at discovering the chemical and biological agents of disease. His studies in the laboratory were praised, but could not be conclusive in finding the cure he sought
. Having some means of his own, and acquiring financial aid from other sources, he outfitted an expedition to the East Indies, where pestilential death is likely to be found at home to any caller.
“His departure took place just two years ago, in June of 1895. It was the agreement that upon his return to New York, having, as he expected, achieved success in his dangerous researches, he and Miss Tarlton should marry.
“For more than a year he wrote her faithfully, and she of course responded. The irregularity of the post sometimes brought her several letters from him at once, and twice months passed without a word. Therefore her alarm was not instantaneous when the young man disappeared.”
“You mean—?”
“I mean he ceased to write, or at any rate his letters ceased to arrive in America. After five months had passed with no word, Miss Tarlton began to find more and more ominous certain hints of danger appearing in his last letters. Her attempts to communicate with the American embassies and consulates nearest to his last known whereabouts in Sumatra produced no helpful information. More months passed and the young lady grew increasingly worried. She and her father were on the point of organizing a search expedition, when something happened that turned her attention halfway across the world. Her young man, or so there is some reason to believe, has recently been seen alive and well in London.”
“London! But why on earth should he have come here?”
“There is no apparent reason. And from all that I have yet learned of his character, Watson, it rings false that he should act in a deliberately callous way to his betrothed.”
“What was the nature of his research?” I moved my plate away, and began filling my own pipe.
“Well, word had reached him in America that the disease for which he sought a cure was endemic in certain remote parts of the interior of Sumatra. His letters from that island to Miss Tarlton describe its strange pattern of infection in those regions. Village after village was ravaged, in a slow geographical progression suggesting the movement through the jungle of a single causative agent, perhaps a Living creature of some kind.
“Such reports as he had from the natives insisted that this agent was in fact a large animal—some claimed it to be an orangutan, the great ape of the region; others spoke of a large rodent, a kind of monstrous rat.”
“Good heavens, Holmes!”
“Young Scott’s letters—I have them here, and you can read them later—detail his pursuit of this animal under conditions of extreme difficulty and hardship. The sole companion who had set out with him from America, another young scientist, fell ill with fever early in the game and had to return home. But Scott persevered, using native assistants. He of course faced danger from tropic diseases, from the natural obstacles of the uncharted wilderness, from beasts, and from some of the island’s more savage inhabitants. And in his last letter there is a hint of still another kind of trouble—he mentions the presence, within a few miles of his own camp, of some European expedition.”
“I should have thought he’d find the presence of other civilized men very welcome.”
“So he did, evidently. And yet…well, it would be a waste of time to theorize on those far-off events with no more data than are yet on hand. And here, unless I am mistaken, is Miss Tarlton herself, and you will be able to hear the details from her own lips.”
A moment later the lady was shown in. Few visitors more lovely can ever have crossed our threshold. She was richly but very modestly dressed. Her blue eyes at first glance searched me with hope, almost with pleading, as if I might represent some answer to her prayers. But when we were introduced, the hope in her gaze quickly faded, to be reborn an instant later as she turned to my companion. “Mr. Holmes. I am told that if any living person can solve my problem, you are that man.”
“Pray sit down, Miss Tarlton. I am eager to hear in some greater detail the facts as you have outlined them in your letters. In particular, exactly when, and under what circumstances, was your fiancé identified in London? What makes you so sure that it was he?”
Greatly agitated, the lady leaned forward in the chair she had just taken. “Mr. Holmes, I can’t be sure.” She drew a deep breath. “It happened this way. A mutual friend of John’s and mine, Mr. Peter Moore, happened to be on business in this city last month, when he received a call from the London firm of Morrison, Morrison, and Dodd, who I understand are specialists in assessing machinery. The ship Matilda Briggs, bound for Portsmouth from the South Seas, had run aground upon the Eddystone Rocks. The salvors brought much of the cargo on to London. In it, some peculiar items had turned up, evidently of American manufacture; Mr. Moore was known to be the owner of an American firm that builds medical and laboratory equipment, and by good fortune he was in London; would he be kind enough to give an opinion on the goods?
“He agreed. Then he was naturally very surprised when he arrived at the warehouse and found the very equipment, most of it still intact, that John had purchased from him for the Sumatran expedition.
“Peter’s first impulse was to cable me. But he didn’t know that John had been so long unreported, and he was afraid of frightening me. He decided to try to learn, first, who the things now belong to, and why they had been aboard the Matilda Briggs. Was John in England, too? The people at the warehouse could be of no more help than to say that the material did seem to belong to a Dr. John Scott of New York. Nor could Morrison, Morrison, and Dodd provide any more information.
“His own business kept Peter occupied for a day or two. Then he went back to the warehouse, intending to complete his inspection of the equipment and write out a report for the assessors. He was greatly surprised to find that every bit of the material in question had been claimed, signed for and paid for, and already removed, apparently by John himself.”
“One moment, Miss Tarlton,” Holmes interposed. “Has Dr. Scott actually been seen in London by Peter Moore? Or by anyone who knows him well?”
“He has not. But the superintendent of the warehouse describes the man who claimed the equipment as blond, tall—John is tall, about the same height as you are, Mr. Holmes—with a narrow face and a thick mustache. All this fits very well. Here is the photograph I promised to bring. It shows John just a few days before leaving for Sumatra.”
The small picture showed an eager, manly face, smiling and squinting a trifle in bright sunshine.
“This is a good likeness?” Holmes asked.
“Yes, very good, so I believe.”
He put it into his pocket. “Now, the man who came to the warehouse of course presented identification? And he must have left there at least one copy of his signature.”
“He did. The men at the warehouse insist that he presented them with letters of credit bearing John’s name, with—oh, with a mass of documents, evidently. And he described the equipment he was claiming in such detail, even to the crates that it was packed in, that those in charge were fully satisfied of his identity.” Miss Tarlton sighed, and the weariness behind her energy showed through. “There was also the matter of—I think they called it salvage money—and of storage charges, and I don’t know what other fees. This came to almost five hundred pounds, which sum I understand was paid all at once, in cash. As to the man’s signature, they would not give me a counterfoil, but I was permitted to see it.” Here our lovely visitor hesitated.
“Yes?” Holmes prompted.
“It was John’s name, of course, and the writing was quite similar to his. But I do not believe that it was written by his hand.”
“Have you been to the police?” I asked. “I have, Dr. Watson. We—Peter Moore and I—went to Scotland Yard yesterday, as soon as I had checked into a hotel. The gentlemen there were sympathetic, and they assured me that some inquiries will be made. But I did not get the impression that they are going to push an investigation with the urgency that is required. There is, as they told me so soothingly, no real evidence of any crime. No doubt they have a thousand other urgent problems demanding their attention…no doubt you,
too, Mr. Holmes, are a very busy man. And yet I dare to—to demand your help. I am prepared to pay handsomely for it. I feel that you are my only hope!”
This last sentence was delivered in tones so brave and yet so piteous that I had little doubt of what Holmes’ answer must be. Nor was I disappointed.
“I will undertake to look into your problem, Miss Tarlton,” my friend replied. “The man who signed the goods out of the warehouse must have given some London address?”
“Yes, Mr. Holmes; the Northumberland Hotel. I was there inquiring, with Peter, just this morning. No John Scott was presently registered. I pursued my inquiries no further, but instead waited till I could see you.”
“In that you acted wisely.” Holmes rose casually, went to the window, and stood there for a few seconds almost as if daydreaming. Then he gave his head a little shake. Miss Tarlton I suppose read little or nothing into these actions, but I knew from long experience that he had just surveyed Baker Street for anyone who might be watching our house, and had observed nothing suspicious.
My friend came back to us. “I must warn you, Miss Tarlton, that I foresee no great probability of a happy outcome in this case.”
Her chin lifted. “I am determined to find out the truth.”
“And there is something I must ask you at the outset: Had you written angrily to your fiancé? Or had there been any suggestion, on either side, of breaking the engagement?”
The girl stood up, color flushing her cheeks. Her blue eyes flashed. “No, Mr. Holmes, to both questions. I have given you copies of all John’s letters, which I believe spoke his true feelings. On my part—I would rather have died than cease to love him. If you mean to imply that John has willingly abandoned me, without a word, without a letter of explanation, I simply refuse to believe it. He may be dead, in shipwreck or by some other means. He may have suffered some terrible loss of memory…”
The Holmes-Dracula File Page 3