The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes
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261 Not so thorough, however, that the treasure—hidden in the very room in which the body lay covered by “loose bricks”—was found.
262 The southern area of the Indian peninsula.
263 Blair, or Port Blair, capital of the Andaman Islands, was settled in September 1789, largely through the efforts of Lieutenant Archibald Blair, R.N., acting under the direction of the Bengal government and army Captain Alexander Kyd. Blair, a surveyor and inventor, had undertaken his first voyage to the Andaman Islands in 1788. The port initially did not bear his name; he himself called the settlement Port Cornwallis, after Commodore William Cornwallis, the commander-in-chief of the British-Indian navy. After Blair returned to England in 1795, the settlement changed location at least once before taking hold at the spot he had selected. Of course, it was much later—more than forty years after his death in 1815—that the Andaman penal colony was established there (see note 45, above).
264 At 365 metres, it is the highest point in South Andaman.
265 According to the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th Ed.), “[The Andaman natives] were always very hostile to strangers, repulsing all approaches with treachery, or with violence and showers of arrows.” No wonder. The British who arrived in 1859 decimated the Andamanese not only with guns and artillery but by introducing bronchitis, syphilis, measles, and smallpox. A pre-1859 population of 3,000 to 3,500 was reduced, by 1895, to approximately 400.
266 Perhaps he wrote the letter to Major Sholto telling of Small’s escape (see note 145, above).
267 Slang for a blow or slap to the face; figuratively, a blow to one’s fortunes.
268 From the Hindi chauki, meaning a police station.
269 The “uncle” sounds like a convenient cover-up for the treasure, and Charles A. Meyer speculates that with the assistance of fellow officer Col. Sebastian Moran, Sholto was able to pawn some of it. However, Meyer disregards Small’s corroboration of Sholto’s declaration, that only the coronet with 12 pearls was missing from the treasure. Even if Small did not have opportunity for a truly detailed inventory of the treasure (notwithstanding his apparent grasp of its contents), one would expect that were a significant portion—reflecting a “considerable sum of money”—missing, he would have noticed. From what source, then, did Sholto accumulate his fortune? Could the “uncle” be real?
270 A Hindi term for Afghans. Perhaps the most useful colonial accounts of the Pashtuns are to be found in the writings of Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859) and Sir Robert Warburton (see A Study in Scarlet, note 15).
271 A town in what was to become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (which comprised several regions that unified in 1932). Jiddah, on the eastern coast of the Red Sea, was of importance mainly as the principal landing-place of pilgrims to Mecca.
272 “Queer strangers do not hire fast steam launches,” Robert R. Pattrick writes, in “Moriarty Was There,” “and have them stand in readiness for a day or two, on the basis of a promise. Something more tangible is required, and Small as yet had nothing to prove his story of ‘a big sum.’ ” Pattrick concludes that Professor Moriarty must have assisted Small with planning, advances of funds for expenses, and a hideout, all for a fee.
273 According to the Slang Dictionary, “[W]hen friends become cold and distant towards each other, it is said there is a SCREW LOOSE betwixt them; the same phrase is also used when anything goes wrong with a person’s credit or reputation”—or, more familiarly today, with a person’s mind.
274 Remarkable indeed, concludes John Linsenmeyer, in “Further Thoughts on The Sign of the Four.” Small’s account contains an “unacceptable proportion of unexplained mysteries.” First, why were two officers in the Bombay Army (Sholto and Morstan, who were with the ‘34th Bombay Infantry’) assigned to guard duty in the Andaman Islands, which was part of the Bengal Presidency? (But see note 46, above.) Second, Linsenmeyer notes the preposterous names of the co-conspirators (see note 248, above). Third, why would Sholto, if his history were as Small described it, name his house Pondicherry Lodge, Pondicherry being a French enclave on the eastern coast of India? Fourth, why are the descriptions of the Andamanese in general and Tonga in particular so different from the true nature of the Andamanese? Finally, why was one of Small’s guards a “Pathan,” a member of a group Linsenmeyer describes as “wild, undisciplined, and incredibly violent Moslem hillbillies”? In short, Linsenmeyer concludes that Holmes was “humbugged” by Small.
275 T. S. Blakeney finds some redeeming features in Small. First, he took his defeat by Holmes in sporting fashion. Second, there were extenuating circumstances in his story of Achmet’s murder. “In the predicament [Small] was in, it really boiled down to his own life, or Achmet’s (and the latter was an emissary of a rebel). Given war conditions, and particularly those obtaining in the Mutiny, where the British were terribly outnumbered and every man’s life among them was of value, Small would have been a pedant indeed, as well as a traitor to the interests of the Fort, if he preferred Achmet’s life to his own.” Blakeney considers him no worse than John Turner (“The Boscombe Valley Mystery”), reformed bushranger and later murderer of an old acquaintance. A similar view is expressed by David Galerstein, in “ ‘I Have the Right to Private Judgement,’ ” in which Galerstein considers the “innocence” of men such as Captain Croker (“The Abbey Grange”) and Jefferson Hope (A Study in Scarlet) compared to the “guilt” of Small. Galerstein questions the soundness of Holmes’s “private” judgement.
276 Watson’s marriage to Mary Morstan has created nightmares for those attempting to reconcile the date of the events recorded in this case (likely summer 1888—see Appendix) with the date of the events recorded in “The Five Orange Pips.” In the latter case, explicitly dated by Watson in September 1887, Watson states that “my wife was on a visit to her mother’s.” If “The Five Orange Pips” occurred before The Sign of Four, then the “wife” referred to there could not be Mary Morstan. To add further confusion, while the American edition’s version of “The Five Orange Pips” follows the Strand Magazine version in using the word “mother,” the first English book publication of “The Five Orange Pips” replaces the word “mother” with “aunt.” The latter was adopted as the “definitive text” by Edgar W. Smith for the Limited Editions Club publication of the Adventures in 1950 and has been widely copied.
Based in part on the reference to Watson’s “wife,” some chronologists reject dating “The Five Orange Pips” in September 1887 and date the case after The Sign of Four. However, this is a shaky foundation, for according to Mary Morstan (see Chapter II, above), her mother died before 1878, and she had no living relatives in England. (“My father was an officer in an Indian regiment, who sent me home when I was quite a child. My mother was dead, and I had no relative in England.”). Ian McQueen states: “Let us say here and now that we no more believe in the existence of Mary Watson’s aunt than we do in the orphan-girl’s mother. Both were figments of Conan Doyle’s imagination, erroneously inserted in the manuscript while he was editing Watson’s notes for publication.” McQueen suggests that Conan Doyle was misled by Watson’s notes into assuming that Watson was already married in September 1887 and invented the visit to Mary’s mother as the most plausible explanation for his absence from home.
It has been ingeniously suggested that Mary Morstan and Mrs. Cecil Forrester’s relationship was practically that of aunt and niece. Philip Weller, in “A Relative Question,” suggests that the “mother” is Mary Morstan’s stepmother. However, neither argument seems very convincing, and this editor believes that the aunt/wife reference in “The Five Orange Pips” must be to a wife who preceded Mary Morstan and died before 1888 and to whom Watson, out of delicacy for the feelings of his current wife, makes little or no reference.
277 J. N. Williamson fancifully excuses Holmes’s remark as an honest expression of worry, in light of Holmes’s knowledge of Watson’s “on-again-off-again relationship with Irene Adler, which resulted, after the death of Godfrey Norton, in th
e divorce of John and Mary and the marriage of John and Irene.” Ebbe Curtis Hoff, however, more reasonably suggests that “Holmes could not congratulate Watson because (1) he lost a potential colleague in Mary; (2) he lost his Boswell; and (3) he saw ahead a tragic bereavement for his friend.” The last, Hoff concludes, was based on Holmes’s early observations of Mary Morstan’s fatal illness. (Hoff suggests that this was likely clubbing of the fingertips, not mentioned in Watson’s narrative, obscured by Watson’s romantic visions of Mary.)
In “The Empty House,” Watson refers to Holmes consoling him for his “sad bereavement.” Most scholars accept the conventional view that this refers to the death of Mary Morstan. Others, seeing that Watson rarely discusses his wife in the Canon, take the view that his marriage was an unsuccessful one and that his “bereavement” does not refer to grief over his wife’s death. Wingate Bett, in “Watson’s Second Marriage,” advances the hypothesis that “bereavement” there means deprivation, either by estrangement or by mental derangement. C. Alan Bradley and William A. S. Sarjeant note that Watson does not even identify the name of the deceased person; “it could have been Watson’s mother, his father or his brother, for all that the chronicle tells us.”
278 Esther Longfellow, in “The Distaff Side of Baker Street,” argues that one only learns the effect of marriage by being married and concludes that Holmes must have wed. If this were so, however, one would have expected Holmes to say, “I should never marry again.” But Brad Keefauver, in Sherlock and the Ladies, reads more into Holmes’s unnecessary explanation: “[T]he detective is being both sincere and more emotional than he himself would ever admit. He’s disappointed, even a bit bitter over the whole thing.” Holmes and Watson both loved Mary Morstan, but “Watson was just the one to make the first move.”
279 Morris Rosenblum attributes the lines to the Xenien, a collection written by Goethe and Schiller in 1796. The phrase may be translated, “Nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material enough for a good man and a rogue.”
C. Alan Bradley and William A. S. Sarjeant offer a fresh interpretation: Holmes is not speaking of himself but instead “lamenting the fact that there were not two Watsons, one to marry Miss Morstan and the other to stay with him in Baker Street.”
280 Bradley and Sarjeant write that, though Watson’s announcement was a blow to Holmes, the latter’s reaching for the drug was less the response of a man in shock than “a gesture of defiance—defiance of the doctor who had been striving to wean his friend from cocaine, but who had now signified that his personal priorities had switched elsewhere.”
APPENDIX
The Dating of The Sign of Four
The dating of The Sign of Four is one of the most vexing problems of chronology, in part because there is a wealth of internal evidence and in part because of its pivotal role in fixing the dates of other Canonical events. The following table summarises the conclusions of the major chronologists, although there are numerous other works worthy of consultation:
Chronology
Date Assigned
Canon
July 7 or Sept. 1888
Bell, H. W. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: The Chronology of Their Adventures
Sept. 7, 1887, Wed.
Blakeney, T. S. Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction?
July 1888
Christ, Jay Finley. An Irregular Chronology of Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street
Sept. 25, 1888, Tues.
Brend, Gavin. My Dear Holmes
July 1887
Baring-Gould, William S., “New Chronology of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson”
Sept. 7, 1888, Fri.
Baring-Gould, William S. The Chronological Holmes. Mr. Baring-Gould uses the same dates in Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective and The Annotated Sherlock Holmes
Sept. 18, 1888, Tues.
Zeisler, Ernest Bloomfield. Baker Street Chronology: Commentaries on the Sacred Writings of Dr. John H. Watson
Apr. 16, 1888, Mon.
Folsom, Henry T. Through the Years at Baker Street: A Chronology of Sherlock Holmes
July 17, 1888, Tues.
Folsom, Henry T. Through the Years at Baker Street: A Chronology of Sherlock Holmes, Revised Edition
July 17, 1888, Tues.
Dakin, D. Martin. A Sherlock Holmes Commentary
Sept. 27, 1888, Thurs.
Cummings, Carey. The Biorhythmic Holmes: A Chronological Perspective
Sept. 27, 1888, Thurs.
Butters, Roger. First Person Singular: A Review of the Life and Work of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the World’s First Consulting Detective, and His Friend and Colleague, Dr. John H. Watson
July 1887
Bradley, C. Alan, and William A. S. Sarjeant. Ms. Holmes of Baker Street: The Truth about Sherlock
Sept. 18, 1888, Tues.
Hall, John. “I Remember the Date Very Well”: A Chronology of the Sherlock Holmes Stories of Arthur Conan Doyle
July 7 or Sept. 1888
Thomson, June. Holmes and Watson
July 7 or Sept. 1888
1 The Hound of the Baskervilles appeared in the Strand Magazine, in monthly parts, from August 1901 to April 1902 (vols. 22 and 23). The first book edition was published by George Newnes in 1902, before the final installment appeared in the Strand. The first American edition, published by McClure, Phillips & Co., also appeared in 1902. See Appendix 2 for a discussion of the various acknowledgements.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The immortal words “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” conjure fear as few others in the twentieth-century canon. Based on local legends of black dogs and vengeful ghosts, and called the greatest mystery ever penned, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), a tale of Gothic horror set in the fantastic moors of England, enthralled readers of the Strand Magazine (in which it was serialised) with its strange warnings and clues and clever host of suspects. Watson shines here, both as the narrator and as the principal investigator until Holmes sweeps down on the scene to ratchet up the drama one more notch. Widely acknowledged to be one of the century’s first bestsellers, the novel did little to quell the disappointment of readers who longed for a resolution of the question of whether Holmes—killed off in 1893’s “The Final Problem”—had somehow cheated death at the hands of the villainous Professor Moriarty. The novel, the faithful realised unhappily, recounted events which predated Holmes’s apparent death. The public had to wait until 1903, when “The Empty House” was published, for news that Holmes was firmly back in the land of the living.
Twentieth-Century Fox’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. San Francisco Chronicle, March 30, 1939
CHAPTER
I
MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES
MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night, was seated at the breakfast-table.2 I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before.3 It was a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a “Penang lawyer.”4 Just under the head was a broad silver band, nearly an inch across. “To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S.,5 from his friends of the C.C.H.,” was engraved upon it, with the date “1884.” It was just such a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry—dignified, solid, and reassuring.
“Well, Watson, what do you make of it?”
Holmes was sitting with his back to me, and I had given him no sign of my occupation.
“How did you know what I was doing? I believe you have eyes in the back of your head.”
“I have, at least, a well-polished, silver-plated coffee-pot in front of me,” said he. “But, tell me, Watson, what do you make of our visitor’s stick? Since we have been so unfortunate as to miss him and have no notion of his errand, this accidental souvenir becomes of importance. Let me hear you reconstruct the man by an examination of it.”
/> Dustjacket, The Hound of the Baskervilles.
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, ca. 1930)
“I think,” said I, following so far as I could the methods of my companion, “that Dr. Mortimer is a successful elderly medical man, well-esteemed, since those who know him give him this mark of their appreciation.”
“Good!” said Holmes. “Excellent!”
“I think also that the probability is in favour of his being a country practitioner who does a great deal of his visiting on foot.”
“Why so?”
“Because this stick, though originally a very handsome one, has been so knocked about that I can hardly imagine a town practitioner carrying it. The thick iron ferrule is worn down, so it is evident that he has done a great amount of walking with it.”
“Perfectly sound!” said Holmes.
“And then again, there is the ‘friends of the C.C.H.’ I should guess that to be the Something Hunt, the local hunt to whose members he has possibly given some surgical assistance, and which has made him a small presentation in return.”
“Really, Watson, you excel yourself,” said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. “I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.6 I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.”