“There was no one in the street?”
“Not a livin’ soul, sir, nor as much as a dog. Then I pulled myself together and went back and pushed the door open. All was quiet inside, so I went into the room where the light was a-burnin’. There was a candle flickerin’ on the mantelpiece—a red wax one—and by its light I saw—”
“Yes, I know all that you saw. You walked round the room several times, and you knelt down by the body, and then you walked through and tried the kitchen door, and then—”
John Rance sprang to his feet with a frightened face and suspicion in his eyes. “Where was you hid to see all that?”138 he cried. “It seems to me that you knows a deal more than you should.”
Holmes laughed and threw his card across the table to the constable. “Don’t go arresting me for the murder,” he said. “I am one of the hounds and not the wolf; Mr. Gregson or Mr. Lestrade will answer for that. Go on, though. What did you do next?”
Bull’s-eye police lantern.
Rance resumed his seat, without, however, losing his mystified expression. “I went back to the gate and sounded my whistle. That brought Murcher and two more to the spot.”
“John Rance sprang to his feet with a frightened face.”
Geo. Hutchinson, A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward, Lock Bowden, and Co., 1891)
“Was the street empty then?”
“Well, it was, as far as anybody that could be of any good goes.”
“What do you mean?”
The constable’s features broadened into a grin. “I’ve seen many a drunk chap in my time,” he said, “but never anyone so cryin’ drunk as that cove. He was at the gate when I came out, a-leanin’ up agin the railings, and a-singin’ at the pitch o’ his lungs about Columbine’s New-fangled Banner,139 or some such stuff. He couldn’t stand, far less help.”
“What sort of a man was he?” asked Sherlock Holmes.
John Rance appeared to be somewhat irritated at this digression. “He was an uncommon drunk sort o’ man,” he said. “He’d ha’ found hisself in the station if we hadn’t been so took up.”
“His face—his dress—didn’t you notice them?” Holmes broke in impatiently.
“I should think I did notice them, seeing that I had to prop him up—me and Murcher between us. He was a long chap, with a red face, the lower part muffled round—”
“That will do,” cried Holmes. “What became of him?”
“We’d enough to do without lookin’ after him,” the policeman said, in an aggrieved voice. “I’ll wager he found his way home all right.”
“How was he dressed?”
“A brown overcoat”
“Had he a whip in his hand?”
“A whip—no.”
“He must have left it behind,” muttered my companion. “You didn’t happen to see or hear a cab after that?”
“No.”
“ ‘I’ve seen many a drunk chap in my time,’ he said, ‘but never anyone so cryin’ drunk as that cove.’ ”
Richard Gutschmidt, Späte Rache (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1902)
“There’s a half-sovereign for you,” my companion said, standing up and taking his hat. “I am afraid, Rance, that you will never rise in the force. That head of yours should be for use as well as ornament. You might have gained your sergeant’s stripes last night. The man whom you held in your hands is the man who holds the clue of this mystery, and whom we are seeking. There is no use of arguing about it now; I tell you that it is so. Come along, Doctor.”
“ ‘He was an uncommon drunk sort of man.’”
Geo. Hutchinson, A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward, Lock Bowden, and Co., 1891)
We started off for the cab together, leaving our informant incredulous, but obviously uncomfortable.
“The blundering fool,” Holmes said, bitterly, as we drove back to our lodgings. “Just to think of his having such an incomparable bit of good luck, and not taking advantage of it.”
“I am rather in the dark still. It is true that the description of this man tallies with your idea of the second party in this mystery. But why should he come back to the house after leaving it? That is not the way of criminals.”
“The ring, man, the ring: that was what he came back for. If we have no other way of catching him, we can always bait our line with the ring. I shall have him, Doctor—I’ll lay you two to one that I have him. I must thank you for it all. I might not have gone but for you, and so have missed the finest study I ever came across: a study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn’t we use a little art jargon.140 There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it. And now for lunch, and then for Norman-Neruda. Her attack and her bowing are splendid. What’s that little thing of Chopin’s she plays so magnificently: Tra-la-la-lira-lira-lay.”141
Leaning back in the cab, this amateur bloodhound carolled away like a lark while I meditated upon the many-sidedness of the human mind.
122 To support his identification of No. 318, Brixton Road, as “No. 3, Lauriston Gardens” (see note 100, above), H. W. Bell observes that as late as 1896, there was a post office—from which one could send telegrams—located some sixty yards up the road from No. 318.
123 In “The Devil’s Foot,” Watson said of Holmes: “[H]e was never known to write where a telegram would serve.” By the end of the nineteenth century—despite the invention of the telephone in 1876—sending telegrams was still an immensely popular way to communicate personal messages quickly. England’s first electromagnetic telegraph, which used a battery, copper wires, and a magnetic needle to tap out messages, had been patented in 1837 by physicists Sir William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. That year, the first practical telegraph was constructed in London with the purpose of enabling railway stations to relay simple emergency signals to each other. Meanwhile, in America, Samuel Morse had invented his own telegraph and alphabetic code (his first message, sent in 1844 on a wire between Washington and Baltimore, was “What hath God wrought!”). The Morse telegraph would eventually become the most commonly used in the world.
An important factor in the public’s acceptance of the telegram as a powerful means of communication was the sensational 1845 Tawell murder case. Tawell was hunted for the murder of a woman near Windsor. When he was spotted at the Slough railway station boarding a train to London’s Paddington Station, a telegram was dispatched to London officials with his description, and he was apprehended on his arrival. After his conviction and execution, the telegraph was dubbed “the wires that hanged Tawell” (described in Robert N. Brodie’s “ ‘Take a Wire, Like a Good Fellow’: The Telegraph in the Canon”). By 1869, 80,000 miles of telegraph wire had been erected throughout the United Kingdom. Designed along the low-cost lines of the postal system, an ordinary telegram from 1885 to 1915 cost 6d. for twelve words or less, plus 1/2d. for every excess word. As late as 1903, Holmes was sending his customary terse telegraphic messages to Watson: “Come at once if convenient—if inconvenient come all the same” (“The Creeping Man”).
124 This statement (“it’s always useful to obtain the facts, although I don’t really need them”) seems to fly in the face of Holmes’s own careful doctrine respecting theorising in advance of the evidence, expressed earlier. It appears to be Holmes trying to impress his newfound colleague on their first case together.
125 J. B. Mackenzie provided a quick and valid counterpoint to Holmes’s statement, arguing, in “Sherlock Holmes’s Plots and Strategy” (1902), “[I]s not the length of a man’s pace largely a matter of idiosyncrasy—something which is not, at any rate materially, dependent upon stature? Do not very many tall men take comparatively short steps, and a good number, of less inches, cover more ground with each? Have we not, besides, experience to testify that the upper and lower halves of the human body are often largely disproportioned?”
126 “Sere” is a term used to describe vegetation that has turned arid; “in the ser
e and yellow,” then, recalls a withered tree in the late autumn—in other words, one that is old. Shakespeare’s Macbeth calls upon the image when he mourns, “I have lived long enough. My way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf.” William S. Baring-Gould, in Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, proposes, on the basis of Holmes’s frequent quotation and paraphrasing of Shakespeare, that Holmes actually spent several post-University years on the stage, touring America with a Shakespeare company.
127 Holmes’s study of tobacco was written sometime before 1881, when the events of A Study in Scarlet occurred. According to Madeleine B. Stern, the monograph would almost certainly have influenced Gaetano Casoria’s 1882 book Sulla Combustibilitá alcune Varietá de Tobacchi, a detailed study of of the ash of various tobaccos. Watson did not give the exact name of Holmes’s monograph until 1889, in The Sign of Four, where it is revealed to be Upon the Distinction Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos: An Enumeration of 140 Forms of Cigar, Cigarette, and Pipe Tobacco, with Coloured Plates Illustrating the Difference in the Ash. During that case, Holmes remarks that French detective François le Villard was translating the work into his native tongue.
In “The Writings of Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” Walter Klinefelter notes that the monograph is the only one of Holmes’s writings that he mentions more than once in the Canon. (He refers to it again in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery.”) “Consequently,” Klinefelter writes, “it may be inferred that he took more than a little pride in its authorship, probably considering it his most important contribution to what may be termed the minutiæ of scientific detection.” This opinion was not shared by Arthur Conan Doyle, who found it “rather funny” when a Philadelphia tobacconist inquired of him where a copy could be obtained.
128 In 1951, the editors of Sherlock Holmes: Catalogue of an Exhibition Held at Abbey House, Baker Street, London, May–September 1951, stated that it was “not generally considered possible” to distinguish different types of tobacco ash. But Raymond J. McGowan, in “A Chemist’s Evaluation of Sherlock Holmes’s Monograph on Tobacco,” undertook to determine the feasibility of Holmes’s boast by performing a chemical analysis of the major types of tobacco, both for cigarettes and cigars. McGowan found that the source of tobacco ashes could indeed be determined from the concentration of manganese chloride and magnesium oxide present, and that as the concentration of the two chemicals increased, the colour of the resultant compound (magnesium permanganate) changed. Yet McGowan’s conclusion was that the colour change, from light blue to dark blue, is largely visible only under a microscope. While McGowan seems to have proven Holmes’s work, then (note that the monograph mentioned “coloured plates”) the detective appears to have exaggerated his abilities here and simplified the technique, perhaps to impress Dr. Watson.
129 “But let us note,” William S. Baring-Gould comments wryly, “that having said this, Watson immediately comes out with a string of seven quite apposite questions.”
130 Socialism, which arose out of the social and economic injustices suffered by factory workers during the Industrial Revolution (1750–1850, roughly), was far slower to take hold in Britain than it was in Germany. Historian A. N. Wilson describes socialism as “a minor issue” for Britain during the late 1800s, in part because the rise of the middle class made late Victorians feel as though they were capable of their own self-betterment; they didn’t need, as Wilson puts it, “ideas culled from foreigners with funny names.”
Despite this prevailing attitude, there were in fact a number of British socialist organisations that, inspired by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s seminal The Communist Manifesto (1848), dedicated themselves to speaking out against poor working conditions and capitalism in general. One of these was the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), founded in 1881 by Henry Hyndman, an eccentric figure who, according to Wilson, “never abandoned his silk hat, frock-coat and silver-topped cane,” and whose unsolicited visits to Marx were considered “a great bore.” Influential artist, designer, and poet William Morris joined SDF in 1883, only to split off in 1884 to found the Socialist League.
Morris was a key figure in what became known as Bloody Sunday, a socialist demonstration that took place on November 13, 1887. Demanding the release of Irish Nationalist MP William O’Brien, some ten thousand marchers—among them Morris and the renowned orator Annie Besant—marched from various locations to Trafalgar Square, where some two thousand police and four hundred soldiers had gathered. Wilson quotes The Times as reporting that “the police, mounted and on foot, charged in among the people, striking indiscriminately in all directions and causing complete disorder in the ranks of the processionists. I witnessed several cases of injury to men who had been struck on the head or the face by the police. The blood, in most instances, was flowing freely from the wound and the spectacle was indeed a sickening one.” Three people were killed and two hundred were injured.
The chaos of Bloody Sunday was hardly indicative of socialist activities as a whole, and in fact, the Christian Socialism movement, which leaned on the writings of Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Coleridge in linking the church to anti-capitalist ideals, experienced a spirited revival in the 1880s. But Bloody Sunday was no doubt instrumental in causing some to look negatively upon socialism and its adherents. Christopher Morley observes that “socialists were sometimes (and unfairly) associated in the public mind with other groups who believed in violent action as a protest against the inequalities of civilization.” Robert Louis Stevenson’s More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885) is a satirical series of tales framed by a story of an incompetent bomber involved with Irish independence and illustrates the public linkage of social causes and violence.
Socialism attracted many free-thinking individuals, and Dr. Watson’s colleague Arthur Conan Doyle, who was deeply involved in another great movement of free-thinkers, Spiritualism, crossed paths with many of them, including the founder of Owenite socialism, the philanthropist Robert Owen, and Theosophist Besant. Despite his reformist interests (for example, he presided over the Divorce Law Reform Union), Conan Doyle never appeared comfortable in one or another political party. Early in his Portsmouth years, he joined the Liberal-Unionist party; when he stood for Parliament in 1905, he ran as a Conservative-Unionist. He wrote to a newspaper during that campaign: “My attention has been called to a note in your issue of the 29th ult., in which surprise is expressed that a gentleman of Socialistic views, who is a Home Ruler, should address an audience on my behalf. I hope that the incident will emphasise the fact, which I have frequently asserted, that this election will, so far as I can make it so, not be a matter of Tory, Radical, or Socialist, but will be a contest between those who wish to improve the conditions of British trade and those who desire to leave them as they are. All other subjects are secondary to this, and all minor differences may be sunk in pursuit of the one main object.” In A Visit to Three Fronts (1916), recounting his travels during the Great War, Conan Doyle wrote, “Socialism has never had an attraction for me, but I should be a Socialist to-morrow if I thought that to ease a tax on wealth these men should ever suffer for the time or health that they gave to the public cause.”
131 Sir Charles Hallé (1819–1895) was a British pianist and conductor. Born in Germany, he studied in Darmstadt and in Paris, where he socialised with Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz. After the revolution forced him to flee Paris, he settled in Manchester with his family and began to give pianoforte concerts, first out of his home and then, starting in 1861, at St. James’s Hall in London. These Popular Concerts found great favor among the general public and were influential in promoting appreciation of Beethoven’s pianoforte sonatas. Hallé also founded, in 1858, the highly regarded Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, which today is Britain’s oldest professional symphony orchestra. In recognition of his many contributions to the popularising of fine music in England, Hallé was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1888.
132 Hallé’s wife, Czech violinist Wilhelmina (Wilma) Norman-Ner
uda (1839–1911), was the greatest female violinist of her time, so respected that she was referred to as “the female Paganini.” Her first marriage was to Ludwig Norman, a Swedish conductor and composer. (Her father was the organist Josef Neruda.) In 1888, three years after Norman’s death, she married Hallé, in whose Popular Concerts she had appeared for nearly twenty years. Queen Alexandra bestowed upon Norman-Neruda the honorary title of Violinist to the Queen in 1901.
Holmes may have had a particular interest in seeing Norman-Neruda play because, as Paul S. Clarkson points out, she—like Holmes—was the owner of a Stradivarius violin. Norman-Neruda’s Stradivarius, known as the Ernst Violin, was once owned by the virtuoso Heinrich Ernst. In 1874, after Ernst’s death, Queen Victoria’s son Alfred, then Duke of Edinburgh, presented it to Norman-Neruda as a token of his esteem.
Note that in the original Beeton’s text and many book texts, the name is not hyphenated.
133 H. W. Bell identifies the tavern as the Old White Horse, located across from the post-office on the Brixton Road. (See notes 100 and 122, above.) But Colin Prestige, writing in 1957, declared that there was an actual White Hart tavern in the district near Myatt’s Field (where he places Lauriston Gardens—see note 100, above), which lay at the corner of Lilford Road and Holland Road in Camberwell: “[A]lthough the present White Hart has only been in existence since 1938, it replaces an earlier ‘pub’ of the same name of considerable antiquity, which was on the same site until demolished for rebuilding in the 1930s.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Page 11