“Boats leave almost daily for England,” I observed, tossing aside the newspaper and settling comfortably in a chair near his.
Holmes nodded. “Yes, but I am committed to completing the tour with Sasanoff. We go directly to Baltimore. It will be some time before I see London again.”
“And some time before you leave it again?”
The detective smiled. “She is the queen of cities. There is so much work to do there. But what of Theodore Roosevelt?”
“I am off to the West. A long-awaited journey with my brother. When I return, I will take up the study of law and then...”
“Politics?”
I smiled. “I’m going to give it a try.”
“And not long from now, I will find myself listening to my brother Mycroft, who keeps track of political news for me, regaling me with tales of the successes of Mr Roosevelt until, I am certain, that news will originate from Washington, D.C.”
“It’s an established American promise – that any man may aspire to become President of the United States,” I boasted.
“Yes, Teddy! You have found precisely the word to sum up the greatness of your country. Promise! What promise there is in this land! Things happen in this country that could not happen anywhere else in the world. No, not even in my beloved England. There is an optimistic zest for tomorrow in every aspect of American life that is unlike that in any other country in the world. The new century that is so rapidly approaching is going to see the emergence of this rough, raw-boned, vital country into a colossus. The nineteenth has been the century of the English. The twentieth will belong to the United States of America. Men like you will see to it.”
“A bright future, indeed.”
“What have you planned for today?” he asked.
“Nothing important, really.”
“Excellent! Then you are free to accompany me across the Hudson River? There is a fellow in New Jersey whom I wish to visit. Like you, he has been a correspondent of mine over the past few years. He’s a fellow scientist. Perhaps you’ve heard of him? Thomas Edison?”
“The name sounds familiar.”
“An amazing chap,” said Holmes, slipping into his jacket crossing the room, and opening the door. “He is at work in his laboratory in a place called Menlo Park, and he is tinkering with inventions that will amaze you, utterly amaze you, the latest of which is an electric lamp. Three years ago he devised a phonograph, or speaking machine, and it is that device that I am going to Menlo Park to see demonstrated.”
“A speaking machine. Yes, I recall an item about its patenting.”
“Yes,” said Holmes as we hurried down the stairs toward the street. “I foresee innumerable uses for such a device in the fight against crime. Think of it, Roosevelt! A machine capable of recording the human voice and reproducing it at will. Think of the implications in terms of gathering evidence, of transcribing conversations covertly, of having the recorded words – in their actual voices – of conspirators and criminals. Think of the advantage to law enforcement!”
We were quickly onto the street and signaling for a cab to take us to the ferry landing. Thence, across the broad Hudson to New Jersey, and as we travelled, the subdued and homesick fellow I had found in Holmes’ rooms vanished. Beside me in the hansom was the quick, bright, animated Sherlock Holmes, who had deduced that a seemingly common street crime was part of a larger and more sinister conspiracy. His efforts had thwarted it, leaving nothing unanswered except for the identity of the elusive Charles, that furtive fellow who had escaped us.
While the excited Holmes, who was looking forward to meeting Mr Edison, sat beside me, he made no mention of any emotion he may have been experiencing – disappointment, surely, and frustration – at having failed to apprehend Charles. Nor did he evidence any outward sign that he would continue ruminating upon that one loose end in the puzzle.
His mind was to the future – to what he would learn in the laboratory of the amazing Mr Edison of Menlo Park.
Holmes was quiet until we were on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, but, as we settled into a railway coach for the trip to Menlo Park, he turned to me with a smile of pure excited anticipation to say, “I have been promised in my previous correspondence with Edison a personal demonstration of his phonograph. I have not decided whether I shall record a few lines from Twelfth Night or simply speak as myself. What do you suggest?”
“In the course of history there have been and will be many Malvolios, but Sherlock Holmes is, I deduce, one of a kind!”
___
Author's notes on this chapter
Afterword
There are few instances of a failure by Sherlock Holmes, although there are tantalising allusions to them in Watson’s writings.
Because Holmes thwarted a conspiracy to assassinate Rutherford B. Hayes it may seem unfair to say that Holmes failed in “The Adventure of the Stalwart Companions.” Yet he did. He failed to capture the central figure in the case, that enigmatic, wily, furtive fellow named Charles.
While I do not have any evidence to show that Holmes eventually discovered who Charles was, it seems likely he did, perhaps through a chance remark by Holmes’ brother Mycroft, on July 2, 1881 – one year after the murder of Nigel Tebbel at Gramercy Park. I imagine Holmes’ discovery regarding Charles as follows.
Mycroft Holmes, a man whose giant body seemed designed by nature to accommodate his giant intellect, came into his brother’s rooms without knocking, an irritating custom all his life. “Have you recovered the Duke’s missing letters?” he asked.
Sherlock Holmes registered a passing surprise, then smiled. “Of course! It had to be you who whispered my name in the Duke’s ear as the one person who could retrieve the compromising letters!”
“To be precise,” said Mycroft, settling heavily into a chair, “I whispered your name to the ‘other woman’ and she whispered your name to the Duke!”
“I shall have the letters in my possession at midnight.”
“The Duke will be relieved.”
“And grateful, I hope, for my bill will be reflective of the difficulty I have had in the case. And why are you going to the Foreign Office at this late hour?”
Mycroft smiled, recognising himself all the little clues about his appearance and deportment that had led his brother to deduce that he was, indeed, going to call upon the Foreign Minister. “I have been asked to give my assessment of the possible effects on the Empire of the assassination of the American President.”
“What?” gasped Sherlock Holmes, bolting away from his desk and striding to his brother’s chair. “President Garfield has been murdered?”
“He is mortally wounded. Confidentially, he will not survive very long. I thought you would have heard about this.”
“I have not left these rooms in two days’ time.”
“President Garfield was boarding a train at Washington’s Baltimore and Potomac railway station for a journey to attend the twenty-fifth reunion of his class at Williams College. A mentally deranged man came out of the crowd and shot the President pointblank, two shots. One hit Garfield in the arm. The other, the mortally wounding one, struck him in the back. A dastardly deed.”
“And the assassin?”
“As I said, a mentally deranged person.”
“Mycroft, I am disappointed. Mental derangement is not a satisfactory explanation for such an act.”
“Insane persons do insane things, Sherlock.”
“In view of what I told you about the plot against President Hayes a year ago, how can you accept the preposterous explanation that this assassin is merely a deranged man?”
“You see a connection between that matter in New York last year and this act?”
“The assassin! What of him? What do you know?”
“His name is Guiteau. He shouted as he shot the President, ‘I am a Stalwart! Arthur will be President!’”
Sherlock Holmes blanched and sank into a chair, his face buried in his hands. “What a tragedy! What a
tragedy that I let that man slip through my hands.”
Mycroft leaned forward, his great weight causing the big chair to creak in protest. “What do you mean, Sherlock?”
Holmes looked up at his brother. “Guiteau? His given name is Charles?”
Mycroft, whom Holmes had never known to be taken by surprise, jumped in shock. “Yes!”
“Charles Guiteau. The elusive Charles. The initials on that scrap of paper in Tebbel’s pocket! C. G.,” groaned Holmes.
Aware, now, of the importance of what his brother was saying, Mycroft whispered, “The fellow who escaped you on the Brooklyn Bridge was this same Charles Guiteau?”
With a forlorn shrug, Holmes replied, “Beyond question. And now he has succeeded with Garfield that which he and his dastardly bunch failed to do in the case of Hayes.”
“A failure to kill Hayes, I point out to you, Sherlock, which was due to your excellent work in that case.”
“But Charles escaped and see what he has done!”
Mycroft Holmes had no response.
President James A. Garfield lingered for more than two months, his physicians unable to locate the bullet fired by Guiteau. (It would be more than a dozen years until X rays.) Garfield died at his seaside cottage at Elberon, New Jersey, September 19, 1881, where he had been taken to escape the oppressive heat of Washington, D.C.
Succeeding to the Presidency, Chester A. Arthur took the oath of office in a tiny house on Lexington Avenue in New York City, only a few blocks from the spot where Nigel Tebbel had been slain on July 2, 1880. Never elected to public office in his own right (except the Vice-Presidency, which was automatic with the election of Garfield), Arthur was viewed as the epitome of all that is bad in the worst possible definition of the word ‘politician.’ Chester A. Arthur, ‘The Gentleman Boss’ of the New York Republican party and the darling of the Stalwarts, was the second Vice-President to attain that office as the result of an assassin’s bullet.
Assassin Charles J. Guiteau was hanged.
At his trial it was decided that Guiteau was not acting as part of a conspiracy by the Stalwarts.
As did Mycroft Holmes, the overwhelming majority of those who investigated the Garfield murder and who questioned Guiteau insisted that he had acted alone and was insane, driven by a distorted sense of his own mission in life and his own importance. It is casually stated in most histories that Guiteau was a “disgruntled office-seeker,” but he was a far more complexly motivated character than that. He admitted that he had stalked Garfield for at least six weeks prior to the attack upon him on July 2, 1881, with the intention of making ‘Stalwart’ Arthur the President by killing Garfield.
Although his statements after his arrest were regarded as lunatic ravings, Guiteau insisted that he acted on behalf of the Stalwarts. “I guess you have not talked with the Stalwarts,” he told a newspaper interviewer. “The Stalwarts will protect me.” He stated, “His death [Garfield’s] was a political necessity. I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts.”
The Times described Guiteau as a “half-crazed, pettifogging lawyer.”
Who was Guiteau?
Could he have been part of a conspiracy?
Could that conspiracy have existed as early as July 2, 1880, and been directed at that time against Rutherford B. Hayes?
Julius Charles Guiteau was born in Freeport, Illinois, on September 8, 1841, of French-Canadian stock. He later transposed his names and called himself Charles. He spent some time at the University of Michigan, was smitten by the ideas of the Oneida Community, and harboured a variety of unusual religious notions. He earned a law degree and was admitted to the Chicago bar, but he had a poor reputation as a counsellor and left behind wherever he went a trail of unpaid debts and bad cheques. He lived by his wits and roamed around the eastern United States during the 1870s, domiciled in Boston and New York, and practicing law in New York from offices in Liberty Street.
Guiteau attached himself devotedly to the Republican party and the Stalwarts. In the aftermath of the Garfield assassination, former President Grant recalled, “While I was at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, just after the close of the Hayes campaign, this man Guiteau stopped there, too.” Grant went on to remember Guiteau barging into his suite, although Grant had sent word that he wanted nothing to do with Guiteau. (Grant had been told Guiteau was a bother, some hanger-on by Grant’s son.) Other New York Republicans remembered running into Guiteau on numerous occasions.
If one is to share Holmes’ conviction that Guiteau was the elusive Charles of “The Adventure of the Stalwart Companions,” it must be shown that Guiteau was, in fact, in New York City at the time of the plot against Hayes, that is, July 2, 1880.
He was.
In its extensive coverage of the events surrounding the Garfield assassination, The New York Times reported an interview with Emory A. Storrs, an influential Republican of the period, who remembered Guiteau. “I have met him in New York occasionally when he was there haunting the hotels, and last summer [1880] I saw him at the National Committee, rooms.”
There is no better evidence than that of a reliable eyewitness, so this testimony by Storrs eliminates any doubt that Guiteau was at Republican National Committee meetings at the Fifth Avenue Hotel during the first days of July 1880 when the plot against Hayes was set in motion.
While it is assumed that Holmes eventually made the connection between Guiteau and the Charles who eluded capture on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1880, and while it may be assumed that the shrewd Hargreave would also discern a connection, there is no evidence that Roosevelt came to such a realisation, but if Holmes and Hargreave saw a connection, why did they not come forward to at least raise the question of whether Guiteau had been involved in a Stalwart plot against Hayes?
While aware of Holmes’ advice against coming to conclusions without supporting data. I believe that the detectives hesitated to suggest that President Arthur came to power as a result of a conspiracy when it seemed improbable that Arthur had a connection with the Stalwart conspirators or Guiteau. Both detectives were aware what a traumatic experience it would have been for a nation which had only begun to recover from the Civil War and the Lincoln assassination to have laid upon it allegations of political treachery in the murder of Garfield. In short, it is easy to see how Holmes at Baker Street would elect to spare ‘the noble democracy’ the agony that publicising the Hayes affair would mean, especially in view of the fact that – to the surprise of everyone – ‘Chet’ Arthur was turning into a good President with not even a hint of personal scandal. That Holmes and Hargreave held their tongues I therefore attribute to patriotism – Hargreave’s patriotic fervour for his native land, Holmes’ to a country that was also, in his heart, his.
Notes
In these notes, I have endeavoured to show by reference to Watson’s writings and through my own independent research the authenticity of the material which is included in the Roosevelt manuscript. My sources in my independent work include: The New York Times; Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1920; The Complete Sherlock Holmes, a single-volume compendium of the four novels and fifty-six adventures, published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York; Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective, William S. Baring-Gould, Bramhall House, New York, 1962; The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Vincent Starrett, the Macmillan Co., New York, 1933, revised and enlarged by the University of Chicago Press, 1960.
CHAPTER ONE
Much of the autobiographical material which Roosevelt included in the opening passage of this chapter is echoed in Roosevelt’s autobiography published in 1920 by Scribner’s, indicating that Roosevelt may have referred for its writing to his notes prepared for “The Adventure of the Stalwart Companions.” It is significant that Roosevelt, when preparing his autobiography, felt impelled to continue to observe Holmes’ admonition that no part of the Gramercy Park affair be published in their lifetimes.
A recent search of the Harva
rd library has failed to uncover any copy of Holmes’ tobacco monograph to which Roosevelt refers, indicating its loss through accident or oversight. Another possibility is that the monograph was purlointed by a student or teacher, a priceless addition to any collection of Sherlockiana, certainly.
Holmes’ statement that “from a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other” along with a lengthy dissertation upon the Art of Deduction appeared later in an article entitled “The Book of Life,” which Dr Watson, after reading it, dismissed as “ineffable twaddle” until Holmes announced, “As for the article, I wrote it myself.” (“A Study in Scarlet”) The existence of this article has long been an object of intense search. To date, it has not been found and we are left with only the quotations from it in “A Study in Scarlet” and, now, in this publication of Holmes’ theory voiced in conversation with Roosevelt, years before Watson quoted it.
The New York theatrical season in 1880 was, usually, November to May, indicating that the Sasanoff Company was such a respected ensemble that an off-season run could command full houses.
Roosevelt’s whimsical decision to bring together two detectives without telling either about the other is a rich insight into the sense of humour and good nature of Roosevelt, attested to by those who knew him all his life. For a question raised by this meeting between Holmes and Hargreave, see the Notes on Chapter 3.
Back to chapter one
CHAPTER TWO
President Rutherford B. Hayes paid a private visit to New York City after having been the commencement speaker at Yale, arriving in New York at noon on July 2. That Hargreave would have been nervous about a seemingly routine visit by the President may be attributed to the widely circulated rumour ten days earlier that Hayes had died, a rumor that became so widespread that it was noted as a news item in The New York Times of June 23, 1880, nine days before Hayes’ arrival in Hargreave’s territory. It may well have been confidential information concerning this death report that had put the New York police on guard, given Hayes’s unpopularity amount certain hotheaded political factions at the time. Yet Hargreave’s amazement at Holmes’ uncovering of the plot by the Stalwarts against Hayes indicates that Hargreave, at least, had no evidence that Hayes’ life was in danger at this time and that the security precautions were routine.
The Stalwart Companions Page 12