Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1901
61 A British title of hereditary rank, not nobility, introduced in 1611 by James I to raise funds. According to Alfred Miles’s Household Oracle (1897), the title immediately follows barons’ younger sons and precedes Knights of the Thistle (but is below Knights of the Garter). Baronetcies are acceded to by the title holder’s eldest legitimate son.
62 Baedeker lists no Northumberland Hotel, and Michael Harrison, in The London of Sherlock Holmes and elsewhere, identifies this as the Northumberland Arms, a tavern/inn, which, in a pleasant twist of fate, is now the Sherlock Holmes tavern and restaurant, at No. 11, Northumberland Street. If Sir Henry sought anonymity, this was a sound choice; however, as the heir, he would have been expected to stay in more luxurious lodgings, and some scholars therefore question Harrison’s identification. Vernon Goslin, in “Did Baskerville Stay at the Northumberland Hotel?,” concludes that three large, well-known hotels—the Métropole, the Victoria, and the Grand, all in Northumberland Avenue (and all owned by the same company)—were far more likely places for Sir Henry to stay. A. Godfrey Hunt dismisses the Grand on the grounds that Stapleton would not take a cab in Trafalgar Square to drive to a hotel that is in fact on Trafalgar Square. Furthermore, Watson probably would not have chosen the Northumberland Hotel alias for a hotel on Trafalgar Square. Catherine Cooke, in “We Found Ourselves at the Northumberland Hotel,” points out that the Hotel Victoria was originally planned in the early 1880s as the Northumberland Hotel but ran into financial difficulties and, when opened in 1887, used the other name, presumably in honour of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee.
63 A district in central London, it is so named for the stone cross placed there in 1290 by Edward I, marking the final stop of twelve along the route of the funeral procession for his first wife, Eleanor of Castile. (The decaying cross was destroyed in 1643 and replaced with a copy in 1863.) “Charing” is thought by some to be a corruption of chère reine, or French for “beloved queen”; others think it a corruption of the village “Cheringe,” which stood there in the thirteenth century. It is frequently mentioned in the Canon, and Holmes and Watson regularly used the Charing Cross railway station. In “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” a trap for a foreign agent was set at the Charing Cross Hotel. Even a century earlier, Samuel Johnson had remarked, “I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross.”
Today Charing Cross Road, long the home of antiquarian booksellers, may be best remembered from the title of Helene Hanff’s 1970 84, Charing Cross Road (and the subsequent film), a charming record of a New Yorker’s tender, sometimes combative correspondence with a bookseller located there.
64 Charles M. Pickard contends that Mortimer himself sent the note, in disregard of Holmes’s instructions to remain silent about his suspicions of Stapleton.
65 The “leading articles” or “leaders” are equivalent to American editorials.
66 Gavin Brend, who dates The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1899, argues that although free trade would not then have been written about widely, “presumably somebody at Printing House Square was slightly in advance of his time. An article on Free Trade in 1886 or 1889 would surely be quite out of the question.” Nonetheless, the 9th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1875–1889) devotes eleven pages to the subject.
67 The curve of the upper jaw-bone.
68 Bourgeois (pronounced “ber-joyce” by printers and type founders) is an intermediate size of type, between brevier and long primer. It measures 1021/2 lines to the foot (pica, for comparison, is 711/2 lines to the foot, or about 6 lines to the inch) and approximates 9-point type. Leading is the space between lines of type. According to Peter Calamai, Victorian newspaper scholar, in private correspondence to this editor, the leading in the Times “would most likely have been one point, with the result called 9 on 10.” Note that bourgeois has no reference to the font used, only the size. Of course, different newspapers used different fonts as well, but Holmes does not mention them.
69 Madeleine B. Stern opines that “specimens of Granjon’s civilité, the Estienne, the Bodoni, Fournier Le Jeune, the great Enschedé type specimen book with its exotic fonts, had all … found their way to Holmes’s library.”
70 The Mercury was established in 1718, but not until its purchase in 1801 by Edward Baines (1744–1848) did it begin to exert influence over Liberal politics, becoming the organ of party opinion in Leeds. Before Baines’s tenure, the Mercury—like most provincial papers—had no significant effect on national politics; reporting was nonexistent or shoddy. Baines’s skills as a newspaperman were considerable, and he was passionate in his political beliefs. He pushed for representation of industrial Leeds (and other cities and towns like it) in Parliament and for ending the slave trade in England; on the other hand, he opposed factory legislation, the right of the working class to vote, and universal suffrage. The Mercury, which by the late 1800s was one of the most important and widely read papers outside those of the major cities, was published both in a daily and a weekly edition.
71 There were 1,163 provincial newspapers in England and Wales in 1881. In “A History of the Western Morning News,” Margaret Sutton notes that it was the first paper in England to publish a weather forecast and the first to have its own private wire in Fleet Street.
72 Polished.
73 There are many “pet stories” associated with families and locations throughout England and Wales. The tale of the “shadow hound” that haunted the Vaughans of Hergest Court, in Wales, was popularised in the novel Malvern Chase, by W. S. Symonds (1881). Theo Brown, in Devon Ghosts (1992), tells of receiving, in 1963, a tale of the Baskerville Mynors family of Herefordshire—after cruel treatment of a faithful hound by his master, the death of a head of the family was thereafter always announced by the baying of a hound. “Black Shuck” was another well-known local Norfolk legend, about a black, shaggy dog the size of a small calf, whose fiery gaze caused death. Arthur Conan Doyle may have heard the legend of Black Shuck from his friend Fletcher Robinson (discussed in Appendix 2) when they golfed together at Cromer (in Norfolk) in 1901 and passed it on to Dr. Watson, who was then writing up his account of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
74 The District Messenger Service Co. was a private concern with numerous branch offices, which competed with the Post Office. Messengers cost 3s. per half-mile, 6d. per mile, 8d. per hour, fares extra. Holmes also used a district messenger in “The Six Napoleons” and may have used one in “The Illustrious Client” and “The Bruce-Partington Plans” as well.
The district messenger boy was a popular figure in children’s literature. James Otis Kaler, author of over 150 children’s books published under the name James Otis, including the popular Toby Tyler (1880), published a short collection of three tales entitled A District Messenger Boy and a Necktie Party (1898), which told in the first story of a persevering lad who, after hard work as a messenger, is rewarded: “… and to-day the district messenger boy is in a fair way to become a successful merchant.” The Game of the District Messenger Boy, or Merit Rewarded was brought out by McLoughlin Brothers in New York in 1896. Each player pushes a metallic messenger-boy piece along, with punishments meted out for “untidiness,” “drowsiness,” “loitering,” and even “stupidity” and advances earned for “integrity” and “ambition.” The point of the board game is to become president of the Telegraph Company.
The Game of District Messenger Boy (1886).
75 Brad Keefauver suggests that this is “Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer” of “Black Peter.”
76 There were numerous hotel directories; the British Museum Reference Collection lists eight. Depending on the date assigned to The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes may have had at hand The Official Hotel Directory and the Official Hotel Tariffs, Etc. (London: J. P. Segg & Co., 1894, etc.) or The XYZ Through Route Railway Guide and Hotel Directory (London, 1884–1886), among others.
77 New Bond Street, diverging to the right (south) from Oxford Street, is continued by Ol
d Bond Street to Piccadilly, and it contained, according to Baedeker, “numerous attractive and fashionable shops … and several picture galleries.” Among those listed in the 1896 directory are the Grafton Gallery, Lemercier Gallery (later Doré Gallery), Agnew’s, Hanover Gallery, Fine Art Society, Dowdeswell Galleries, Continental Gallery, and (according to Augustus J. C. Hare’s Walks in London [1884]) Grosvenor Gallery.
CHAPTER
V
THREE BROKEN THREADS
SHERLOCK HOLMES HAD, in a very remarkable degree, the power of detaching his mind at will. For two hours the strange business in which we had been involved appeared to be forgotten, and he was entirely absorbed in the pictures of the modern Belgian masters.78 He would talk of nothing but art, of which he had the crudest ideas, from our leaving the gallery until we found ourselves at the Northumberland Hotel.
“Sir Henry Baskerville is upstairs expecting you,” said the clerk. “He asked me to show you up at once when you came.”
“Have you any objection to my looking at your register?” said Holmes.
“Not in the least.”
The book showed that two names had been added after that of Baskerville. One was Theophilus Johnson and family, of Newcastle; the other Mrs. Oldmore and maid, of High Lodge, Alton.79
“Surely that must be the same Johnson whom I used to know,” said Holmes, to the porter. “A lawyer, is he not, gray-headed, and walks with a limp?”
Poster for The Hound of the Baskervilles (United States: Twentieth-Century Fox, 1939), starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson.
“No, sir, this is Mr. Johnson the coal-owner, a very active gentleman, not older than yourself.”
“Surely you are mistaken about his trade?”
“No, sir; he has used this hotel for many years, and he is very well known to us.”
“Ah, that settles it. Mrs. Oldmore, too; I seem to remember the name. Excuse my curiosity, but often in calling upon one friend one finds another.”
“She is an invalid lady, sir. Her husband was once Mayor of Gloucester. She always comes to us when she is in town.”
“Thank you; I am afraid I cannot claim her acquaintance. We have established a most important fact by these questions, Watson,” he continued, in a low voice, as we went upstairs together. “We know now that the people who are so interested in our friend have not settled down in his own hotel. That means that while they are, as we have seen, very anxious to watch him, they are equally anxious that he should not see them. Now, this is a most suggestive fact.”
“What does it suggest?”
“It suggests—halloa, my dear fellow, what on earth is the matter?”
As we came round the top of the stairs we had run up against Sir Henry Baskerville himself. His face was flushed with anger, and he held an old and dusty boot in one of his hands. So furious was he that he was hardly articulate, and when he did speak it was in a much broader and more Western dialect than any which we had heard from him in the morning.
“He held an old and dusty boot in one of his hands.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1901
“He held an old and dusty boot in one of his hands.”
Richard Gutschmidt, Der Hund von Baskerville (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1903)
“Seems to me they are playing me for a sucker in this hotel,” he cried. “They’ll find they’ve started in to monkey with the wrong man unless they are careful. By thunder, if that chap can’t find my missing boot there will be trouble. I can take a joke with the best, Mr. Holmes, but they’ve got a bit over the mark this time.”
“Still looking for your boot?”
“Yes, sir, and mean to find it.”
“But surely, you said that it was a new brown boot?”
“So it was, sir. And now it’s an old black one.”
“What! you don’t mean to say—?”
“That’s just what I do mean to say. I only had three pairs in the world—the new brown, the old black, and the patent leathers, which I am wearing. Last night they took one of my brown ones, and today they have sneaked one of the black. Well, have you got it? Speak out, man, and don’t stand staring!”
An agitated German waiter had appeared upon the scene.
“No, sir; I have made inquiry all over the hotel, but I can hear no word of it.”
“Well, either that boot comes back before sundown, or I’ll see the manager and tell him that I go right straight out of this hotel.”
“It shall be found, sir—I promise you that if you will have a little patience it will be found.”
“Mind it is, for it’s the last thing of mine that I’ll lose in this den of thieves. Well, well, Mr. Holmes, you’ll excuse my troubling you about such a trifle—”
“I think it’s well worth troubling about.”
“Why, you look very serious over it.”
“How do you explain it?”
“I just don’t attempt to explain it. It seems the very maddest, queerest thing that ever happened to me.”
“The queerest, perhaps,” said Holmes, thoughtfully.
“What do you make of it yourself?”
“Well, I don’t profess to understand it yet. This case of yours is very complex, Sir Henry. When taken in conjunction with your uncle’s death I am not sure that of all the five hundred cases of capital importance which I have handled80 there is one which cuts so deep. But we hold several threads in our hands, and the odds are that one or other of them guides us to the truth. We may waste time in following the wrong one, but sooner or later, we must come upon the right.”
We had a pleasant luncheon in which little was said of the business which had brought us together. It was in the private sitting-room to which we afterwards repaired that Holmes asked Baskerville what were his intentions.
“To go to Baskerville Hall.”
“And when?”
“At the end of the week.”
“On the whole,” said Holmes, “I think that your decision is a wise one. I have ample evidence that you are being dogged in London,81 and amid the millions of this great city it is difficult to discover who these people are or what their object can be. If their intentions are evil they might do you a mischief, and we should be powerless to prevent it. You did not know, Dr. Mortimer, that you were followed this morning from my house?”
Dr. Mortimer started violently. “Followed! By whom?”
“That, unfortunately, is what I cannot tell you. Have you among your neighbours or acquaintances on Dartmoor any man with a black, full beard?”82
“No—or, let me see—why, yes. Barrymore, Sir Charles’s butler, is a man with a full, black beard.”
“Ha! Where is Barrymore?”
“He is in charge of the Hall.”
“We had best ascertain if he is really there, or if by any possibility he might be in London.”
“How can you do that?”
“Give me a telegraph form. ‘Is all ready for Sir Henry?’ That will do. Address to Mr. Barrymore, Baskerville Hall. Which is the nearest telegraph-office? Grimpen. Very good, we will send a second wire to the postmaster, Grimpen: ‘Telegram to Mr. Barrymore, to be delivered into his own hand. If absent, please return wire to Sir Henry Baskerville, Northumberland Hotel.’ That should let us know before evening whether Barrymore is at his post in Devonshire or not.”
“That’s so,” said Baskerville. “By the way, Dr. Mortimer, who is this Barrymore, anyhow?”
“He is the son of the old caretaker, who is dead. They have looked after the Hall for four generations now. So far as I know, he and his wife are as respectable a couple as any in the county.”
“At the same time,” said Baskerville, “it’s clear enough that so long as there are none of the family at the Hall these people have a mighty fine home and nothing to do.”
“That is true.”
“Did Barrymore profit at all by Sir Charles’s will?” asked Holmes.
“He and his wife had five hun
dred pounds each.”
“Ha! Did they know that they would receive this?”
“Yes; Sir Charles was very fond of talking about the provisions of his will.”
“That is very interesting.”
“I hope,” said Dr. Mortimer, “that you do not look with suspicious eyes upon everyone who received a legacy from Sir Charles, for I also had a thousand pounds left to me.”
“Indeed! And anyone else?”
“There were many insignificant sums to individuals and a large number of public charities. The residue all went to Sir Henry.”
“And how much was the residue?”
“Seven hundred and forty thousand pounds.”83
Holmes raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I had no idea that so gigantic a sum was involved,” said he.
“Sir Charles had the reputation of being rich, but we did not know how very rich he was until we came to examine his securities. The total value of the estate was close on to a million.”
“Dear me! It is a stake for which a man might well play a desperate game. And one more question, Dr. Mortimer. Supposing that anything happened to our young friend here—you will forgive the unpleasant hypothesis!—who would inherit the estate?”
“Since Rodger Baskerville, Sir Charles’s younger brother, died unmarried, the estate would descend to the Desmonds, who are distant cousins. James Desmond is an elderly clergyman in Westmorland.”
“Thank you. These details are all of great interest. Have you met Mr. James Desmond?”
“Yes; he once came down to visit Sir Charles. He is a man of venerable appearance and of saintly life. I remember that he refused to accept any settlement from Sir Charles, though he pressed it upon him.”
“And this man of simple tastes would be the heir to Sir Charles’s thousands?”
“He would be the heir to the estate, because that is entailed.84 He would also be the heir to the money unless it were willed otherwise by the present owner, who can, of course, do what he likes with it.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Page 54