The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

by Arthur Conan Doyle

  It was nearly midnight, and the street was deserted save for one or two revellers upon their way home. The party crossed the road, and, pushing open the door of the newspaper office, Baldwin and his men rushed in and up the stair which faced them. McMurdo and another remained below. From the room above came a shout, a cry for help, and then the sound of trampling feet and of falling chairs. An instant later a gray-haired man rushed out on the landing.

  He was seized before he could get farther, and his spectacles came tinkling down to McMurdo’s feet. There was a thud and a groan. He was on his face, and half-a-dozen sticks were clattering together as they fell upon him. He writhed, and his long, thin limbs quivered under the blows. The others ceased at last; but Baldwin, his cruel face set in an infernal smile, was hacking at the man’s head, which be vainly endeavoured to defend with his arms. His white hair was dabbled with patches of blood. Baldwin was still stooping over his victim, putting in a short, vicious blow whenever he could see a part exposed, when McMurdo dashed up the stair and pushed him back.

  “You’ll kill the man,” said he. “Drop it!”

  Baldwin looked at him in amazement. “Curse you!” he cried. “Who are you to interfere—you that are new to the Lodge? Stand back!” He raised his stick, but McMurdo had whipped his pistol out of his hip pocket.

  “Stand back yourself!” he cried. “I’ll blow your face in if you lay a hand on me. As to the Lodge, wasn’t it the order of the Bodymaster that the man was not to be killed—and what are you doing but killing him?”

  “It’s truth he says,” remarked one of the men.

  “By Gar! you’d best hurry yourselves!” cried the man below. “The windows are all lighting up, and you’ll have the whole township here inside of five minutes.”

  There was indeed the sound of shouting in the street, and a little group of compositors and typesetters138 was forming in the hall below and nerving itself to action. Leaving the limp and motionless body of the editor at the head of the stair, the criminals rushed down and made their way swiftly along the street. Having reached the Union House, some of them mixed with the crowd in McGinty’s saloon, whispering across the bar to the Boss that the job had been well carried through. Others, and among them McMurdo, broke away into side streets, and so by devious paths to their own homes.139

  “ ‘Stand back yourself!’ he cried. ‘I’ll blow your face in if you lay a hand on me.’ ”

  Frank Wiles, Strand Magazine, 1915

  125 In the American editions, they have been disguised as the “mine police.” The Conways note, “Coal companies could hire as many policemen as they wished simply by filing an application with the state along with a fee of one dollar. No background checks were conducted. The Coal and Iron Police were the private police force of the Reading Railroad and the colliery owners.”

  126 Robert Linden, the likely historical counterpart of Marvin, was the assistant superintendent of the Chicago office of the Pinkertons until 1875, when he was moved by Pinkerton to Pottsville and formally inducted into Reading’s Coal and Iron Police as a captain. In Lament for the Molly Maguires, Arthur Lewis reports a similar historical incident in which Captain Linden raided Pat Dormer’s Sheridan House in Pottsville. Wayne Melander, in his “The Early American Holmes,” adopts the idea that Holmes was Captain Marvin at the close of his American years.

  127 Hatton’s Slang Dictionary (1865) defines this phrase as meaning “[t]o give a hint dishonestly to a confederate, thereby enabling him to win a game or bet, the profits being shared.”

  128 This is a sarcastic reference: A postulant is a candidate for admission to holy orders or to a religious community.

  129 This is probably a disguised version of the murder of John P. Jones, superintendent of the Lehigh and Wilkes Barre mine at Lansford, who was killed on September 3, 1875, while on his way to work. In the spring of 1876, Michael J. Doyle and Edward Kelly, members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians from Mount Laffee in Schuylkill County, were tried and convicted of first-degree murder in the case.

  130 The protocol of the Molly Maguires said if the bodymaster of one division undertook any action at the request of another, he (in this case, Windle) was entitled to have that “favor” returned at a future date. “The matter of the patrolman last fall” is probably a reference to the highly publicised shooting of police officer Benjamin Yost in Tamaqua on July 6, 1875. Cleveland Moffett reported that James “Powder Keg” Kerrigan, the man who ordered the murder, later claimed that the wrong man had been killed and that his actual target had been another officer who had switched beats with Yost. Kerrigan’s wife, Fanny Higgins Kerrigan, testified at the first Yost murder trial in May 1876 that Kerrigan was an informer and a terrible liar. However, a mistrial was declared after a juror died, and a second trial was held in July 1876. Fanny Kerrigan did not testify at that trial, and she moved to Virginia with her husband after charges against him were dropped. In the end, five men were convicted of Yost’s murder, four in the second trial and a fifth later; all five were hanged in Pottsville on June 21, 1877, the “Day of the Rope,” when five others were also hanged in Schuylkill and Carbon Counties for alleged Molly-related killings.

  131 “Eminent Bodymaster” in the American texts. “Worshipful Master” is a term applied to the head of Masonic lodges and was perhaps deemed too religious-sounding by the American editors.

  132 In choosing a disguise for a Vermissa company, Watson may have looked no farther than the newspapers. By 1912, the French comic actor Max Linder (1883–1925) was the highest paid film star in the world. Born Gabriel-Maximilien Leuviefle, he preceded Charlie Chaplin as a recognisable silent-film genius whose slapstick antics captivated audiences. Linder wrote, directed, and starred in all his own early films, which always featured the actor as an upper-class bachelor (“Max”) in pursuit of a pretty young woman. His service in the military in World War I was well publicised, as was his suffering from a gas attack and his subsequent breakdown. Commercial failures in the early 1920s may have contributed to his death in a suicide pact with his wife in 1925.

  133 Hotten’s Slang Dictionary (1865) supplies “one who takes a desponding view of everything; an alarmist.”

  134 Jack Tracy identifies this tune as properly “The Lament of the Irish Emigrant,” a ballad composed in 1843 by the Scottish musician William R. Dempster (1808–1871); the words were written by Helen Selina Blackwood, Lady Dufferin (1807–1867). The ballad begins with the line “I’m sitting on the stile, Mary,” and conveys the parting thoughts of a man who, in leaving Ireland, must also leave behind the wife he has buried in the nearby graveyard.

  135 “On the Banks of Allan Water” is indeed a folk song, believed to have been written by an Englishman, Matthew Lewis (1775–1818), who also wrote the gothic romance The Monk (1796). The song concerns a young woman, frequently seen by the river in central Scotland (“On the banks of Allan Water / When the sweet spring-time did fall / Was the miller’s lovely daughter / Fairest of them all”), whose heart is broken by a rascal soldier. Bathsheba Everdene sings the song at the harvest supper in Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).

  136 Irish dissatisfaction with English rule dated from the twelfth century, when Henry II traveled to Ireland and declared himself its sovereign. In the centuries that followed, the Irish rebelled constantly against a Protestant government that saw its largely Catholic territory as simultaneously a resource and a threat. Then, from 1845 to 1849, the Irish Potato Famine struck, driving an already struggling population, heavily dependent on potatoes for both sustenance and income, into desperate poverty. One million people died of starvation, typhoid fever, or other diseases related to the famine. Peasants could not pay their rents, and landlords ran out of funds as well, so the British government was relied upon to provide £8,000,000 in relief. But that support was only grudgingly given. Historian Simon Schama, in his masterly A History of Britain: Volume III: The Fate of Empire 1776–2000, writes that Sir Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary
of the treasury and the man responsible for relief operations, “believed, without malice yet without sentimentality, that the ordeal had been inflicted by Providence to bring Ireland through pain to a better way of life. His bleak conclusion was that it had all been ‘the judgement of God on an indolent and unself-reliant people, and as God had sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated: the selfish and indolent must learn their lesson so that a new and improved state of affairs must arise.’ ” Even as the famine raged, Irish farmers were forced to export grains and meats to Britain, since the Irish themselves could not afford to buy them.

  Between 1847 and 1854, 1.6 million Irish left their homeland for the United States, and the mass emigration continued for the next few decades. Those who survived the journey were often bitter toward the government they’d left behind. Schama cites John Mitchel, an Irish lawyer and journalist who had been sentenced to Tasmania for printing “seditious views” in the United Irishman. Escaping to come to America, Mitchel became “the most militant and wrathful of the memorialists of the Great Hunger,” and he charged that “The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine… . A million and a half of men, women and children were carefully, prudently and peacefully slain by the English government.” The “Irish problem” continued to be a major issue in British and Irish relations, with the fight for Home Rule figuring prominently in the political battles of the 1870s and 1880s.

  By “the alien who flies from the despotisms of Europe,” Stanger may have meant more than just the Irish who escaped the Potato Famine. In the same years, German immigrants fled to America to escape armed conflicts with Prussia, Austria, Italy, and the other continental powers, and the coal-mining regions of Pennsylvania had heavy influxes of German and Irish emigrants.

  137 While Morris speaks figuratively here, suggesting that the Scowerers risk lynching, there was an actual “Judge Lynch,” one Charles Lynch (1737–1796), who was an American Revolutionary soldier and a justice of the peace in Bedford County, Virginia. The terms “lynch law” and “lynching” originate with Lynch’s practice of circumventing the colonial justice system and trying Tory conspirators via an extralegal “court.”

  138 “Pressmen” (reporters) in the American texts.

  139 The confrontation with Stanger is likely based on an incident involving Thomas Foster, editor of the Shenandoah Herald, who was outspoken in his editorials in opposing the Molly Maguires. Arthur Lewis, in Lament for the Molly Maguires, reports an occasion on which Foster and reporter Thomas Fielders held off a Molly mob with firearms. Unfortunately, Fielders was extremely nearsighted, could not find his glasses, and was inexperienced with weapons, causing Foster to exclaim, “I’d be safer with the Mollies in here.” The Molly mob dispersed before anyone was hurt. Although there were several incidents in which the newspaper suffered property damage, the editor never suffered bodily injury.

  CHAPTER

  IV

  THE VALLEY OF FEAR

  WHEN MCMURDO AWOKE next morning he had good reason to remember his initiation into the Lodge. His head ached with the effect of the drink, and his arm, where he had been branded, was hot and swollen. Having his own peculiar source of income, he was irregular in his attendance at his work; so he had a late breakfast and remained at home for the morning writing a long letter to a friend. Afterwards he read the Daily Herald. In a special column put in at the last moment he read:

  OUTRAGE AT THE HERALD OFFICE—EDITOR SERIOUSLY INJURED.

  It was a short account of the facts with which he was himself more familiar than the writer could have been. It ended with the statement:

  The matter is now in the hands of the police, but it can hardly be hoped that their exertions will be attended by any better results than in the past.

  Some of the men were recognized, and there is hope that a conviction may be obtained. The source of the outrage was, it need hardly be said, that infamous society which has held this community in bondage for so long a period, and against which the Herald has taken so uncompromising a stand. Mr. Stanger’s many friends will rejoice to hear that though he has been cruelly and brutally beaten, and though he has sustained severe injuries about the head, there is no immediate danger to his life.

  Below it stated that a guard of Coal and Iron Police, armed with Winchester rifles,140 had been requisitioned for the defence of the office.

  McMurdo had laid down the paper, and was lighting his pipe with a hand which was shaky from the excesses of the previous evening, when there was a knock outside, and his landlady brought to him a note which had just been handed in by a lad. It was unsigned, and ran thus:

  I should wish to speak to you; but would rather not do so in your house. You will find me beside the flagstaff upon Miller Hill. If you will come there now, I have something which it is important for you to hear and for me to say.

  McMurdo read the note twice with the utmost surprise; for he could not imagine what it meant or who was the author of it. Had it been in a feminine hand, he might have imagined that it was the beginning of one of those adventures which had been familiar enough in his past life. But it was the writing of a man, and of a well-educated one, too. Finally, after some hesitation, he determined to see the matter through.

  Miller Hill is an ill-kept public park in the very centre of the town. In summer it is a favourite resort of the people; but in winter it is desolate enough. From the top of it one has a view not only of the whole grimy straggling town, but of the winding valley beneath, with its scattered mines and factories blackening the snow on each side of it, and of the wooded and white-capped ranges which flank it.141

  McMurdo strolled up the winding path hedged in with evergreens until he reached the deserted restaurant which forms the centre of summer gaiety. Beside it was a bare flagstaff, and underneath it a man, his hat drawn down and the collar of his overcoat raised up. When he turned his face McMurdo saw that it was Brother Morris, he who had incurred the anger of the Bodymaster the night before. The Lodge sign was given and exchanged as they met.

  “I wanted to have a word with you, Mr. McMurdo,” said the older man, speaking with a hesitation which showed that he was on delicate ground. “It was kind of you to come.”

  “Why did you not put your name to the note?”

  “One has to be cautious, mister. One never knows in times like these how a thing may come back to one. One never knows either who to trust or who not to trust.”

  “Surely one may trust brothers of the Lodge.”

  “No, no, not always,” cried Morris with vehemence. “Whatever we say, even what we think, seems to go back to that man McGinty.”

  “Look here,” said McMurdo sternly. “It was only last night, as you know well, that I swore good faith to our Bodymaster. Would you be asking me to break my oath?”

  “If that is the view you take,” said Morris sadly, “I can only say that I am sorry I gave you the trouble to come and meet me. Things have come to a bad pass when two free citizens cannot speak their thoughts to each other.”

  McMurdo, who had been watching his companion very narrowly, relaxed somewhat in his bearing. “Sure I spoke for myself only,” said he. “I am a newcomer, as you know, and I am strange to it all. It is not for me to open my mouth, Mr. Morris, and if you think well to say anything to me I am here to hear it.”

  “And to take it back to Boss McGinty!” said Morris bitterly.

  “Indeed, then, you do me injustice there,” cried McMurdo. “For myself I am loyal to the Lodge, and so I tell you straight; but I would be a poor creature if I were to repeat to any other what you might say to me in confidence. It will go no further than me; though I warn you that you may get neither help nor sympathy.”

  “I have given up looking for either the one or the other,” said Morris. “I may be putting my very life in your hands by what I say; but, bad as you are—and it seemed to me last night that you were shaping to be as bad as the worst—still you are n
ew to it, and your conscience cannot yet be as hardened as theirs. That was why I thought to speak with you.”

  “Well, what have you to say?”

  “If you give me away, may a curse be on you!”

  “Sure, I said I would not.”

  “I would ask you, then, when you joined the Freeman’s Society in Chicago and swore vows of charity and fidelity, did ever it cross your mind that you might find it would lead you to crime?”

  “If you call it crime,” McMurdo answered.

  “Call it crime!” cried Morris, his voice vibrating with passion. “You have seen little of it if you can call it anything else. Was it crime last night when a man old enough to be your father was beaten till the blood dripped from his white hairs? Was that crime—or what else would you call it?”

  “There are some would say it was war,” said McMurdo. “A war of two classes with all in, so that each struck as best it could.”

  “Well, did you think of such a thing when you joined the Freeman’s Society at Chicago?”

  “No, I’m bound to say I did not.”

  “Nor did I when I joined it at Philadelphia. It was just a benefit club142 and a meeting-place for one’s fellows. Then I heard of this place—curse the hour that the name first fell upon my ears!—and I came to better myself! My God, to better myself! My wife and three children came with me, I started a drygoods store on Market Square, and I prospered well. The word had gone round that I was a Freeman, and I was forced to join the local Lodge, same as you did last night. I’ve the badge of shame on my forearm and something worse branded on my heart. I found that I was under the orders of a black villain and caught in a meshwork of crime. What could I do? Every word I said to make things better was taken as treason, same as it was last night. I can’t get away; for all I have in the world is in my store. If I leave the society, I know well that it means murder to me, and God knows what to my wife and children. Oh, man, it is awful—awful!” He put his hands to his face, and his body shook with convulsive sobs.