Sherlock Holmes: The American Years

by Michael Kurland

  “Sorry,” a voice said, as I was jostled and felt a hand briefly grip my shoulder. I looked up and saw the Englishman I’d glimpsed outside the gate; he must have accommodated the hawker. Squeezing in on my right side, he looked no more cheerful than I about the tight circumstances. “Yours?” With a bony finger he indicated the umbrella, perched at the bench’s rear edge. I thanked him and moved it to safety.

  Staring idly at urchins trying to scale the weathered boards bordering the grounds, I felt an idea stirring. The whitewashing scene wherein Tom is enslaved for the day by his Aunt Polly lacked ginger; infernally tame it was, and its repair had eluded me. In exchange for entry to only a single match, couldn’t those street-boys be employed to paint the fence in a matter of hours? The lads would gladly pour out their labor; any wretch missing out would expire of mortification! The answer came: Aunt Polly’s fence=30 yards long and 9 feet high. Day’s end=three bright coats. With a chortle I pulled a stub pencil from my pocket and scribbled on the back of a scorecard the capper line that popped into mind: If he hadn’t run out of whitewash, he would have bankrupted every boy in the village. Delighted, I tucked the scorecard in my vest pocket and told myself to come to the ball grounds more often. Here, by glory, useful work could actually get done.

  As I’d made my notes, I grew aware of the young Englishman’s curious scrutiny. Now I took a moment to study him. I put him at perhaps fifteen years my junior, in his early to mid-twenties. His clothes were of current European mode, but somewhat ill-pressed. Up close he was even thinner than he’d first appeared. The pallor of his sharp features—sufficiently hatchet-edged to rival my own hawkish visage—suggested that he spent his days indoors. His slate-gray eyes seemed to hold a languid alertness, hinting at a keen brain but perhaps one not easily aroused.

  I was fixing to introduce myself when the crowd commenced to holler, “Play BALL!”

  “Is there some cause for delay?” asked the gaunt Englishman.

  Cheers broke out when the first Dark Blue batter swatted the ball over second base, but died out when a Boston infielder raced back to make a prize catch.

  Ashcroft opined gloomily that if the Bostons were to field like that, our gooses were halfway in the oven.

  “Your batsman spooned it up,” the Englishman countered crisply. “He’d do better with a horizontal stroke.”

  “Goose-egged in the first inning!” groaned Ashcroft after the next two Dark Blues went out.

  “Innings,” said the Englishman.

  During the visitors’ ups, daisy-cutters between basemen, a mis-played sky-ball, and a carnival of base running gave Boston a three-run lead.

  “Pool-sellers favor them at 100 to 70,” Ashcroft said with ponderous condescension, as if financiers alone appreciated such knotty matters. “At this rate—”

  “Am I to understand,” the Englishman interjected, “that wagering is openly conducted?”

  Color spread over Ashcroft’s neck and jowls. “Do you find fault with it, sir?”

  “To the extent that it encourages the criminal classes,” the Englishman replied, “I do indeed.”

  “Here?” Ashcroft said. “What criminal classes?”

  “Pray look for yourself.” The Englishman pointed to boys scurrying from the Pavilion to the bullpen. Casting furtive sideways glances, they performed some nature of exchange with one of the men there, all done very quickly, then moved back toward the Pavilion. “It requires small shrewdness to theorize that they are pickpockets fencing ill-gotten gains.” His tone said that only a simpleton would dispute it. “Gambling can do naught but increase such misdeeds.”

  Ashcroft had no ready answer. He and his wife had been rendered tight-faced and straight-backed by the stranger’s impertinence. I watched the boys for a minute; it was impossible to say they were guilty—or innocent, either. They did cast wary glances all about them, but in their place I would too if I lacked an entry ticket. Not wishing matters to grow hotter between my seatmates, I stuck out my hand. “Clemens is the name.”

  “Holmes.” He clasped my hand briefly, then gave me a start by asking for a sample of ash from my cigar. “For my collection,” he explained. “This will make 102 separate varieties of tobacco ash.” With that he produced a vial and scraped in the desired amount, leaving me to ruminate: Ash collection? I was fond of boasting I’d run afoul of every human type during my piloting days, but this Holmes might be a new one for my collection.

  A dismal succession of Dark Blues went down in order, leaving Ashcroft in a humor to tear his hair, and prompting Holmes to say, “If they attempted cover-drives instead of deep midwickets, they could exploit those gaps.” He pointed to right field. “Incidentally,” he added, “is it a sixer if the ball flies over the fence?”

  While I pondered these mysteries Ashcroft muttered something about sending foreigners home. I confess that I too was growing a bit irked. It rankled to have my boyhood game called up for judgment and found lacking.

  “Terrible luck!” Ashcroft moaned when yet another Boston hit safely.

  “Tut,” countered Holmes. “Luck is a product of strategy. Your club shows extremely little of it, attacking or defending.”

  Before Ashcroft could summon an answer, our attention was caught by voices rising from the field.

  “What is it?” asked Holmes.

  “A rhubarb,” I said, as if any saphead would know that, and was pleased at his puzzlement.

  “This certainly isn’t cricket,” said Holmes at length.

  That was too much for Ashcroft, who launched a salvo of elevated rhetoric I wouldn’t have thought was in him. “You are correct, young man!” he snapped. “Base ball is not cricket. It is rough and contentious, a democratic pastime. It requires team play, yes, but individual pluck as well. It is rambunctious in its vitality. It is not weighed down with ornament and tradition, like your cricket, but alive and vital! It is our game! A true portrait, sir, of our national character!”

  Well, I considered it first-rank argumentation, and was generally inclined to agree. But Ashcroft was mistaken if he thought he’d scored a home shot. Holmes took his time in sizing up his opponent with those gray eyes of his, and said, “Your ‘true portrait’ would be a good deal more absorbing with elements of success, not mere energy.” He added a sir, not outrightly mocking but in the neighborhood. “And your national game”—he gestured toward the diamond, where the dispute continued—“would be improved by more perfect agreement on its rules.”

  The crowd’s agitation exploded into hisses, groans, and boos.

  Holmes made a palms-up gesture. See?

  The Dark Blue captain had produced a rule book. “Read it out loud!” some wag yelled; another added, “Pass it around and let us all read!” A swell with waxed mustachios and a collapsible top hat turned and pointed at me. “Let Mark read it! Don’t HE know somethin’ about words?” It stirred a laugh, and heads turned my way.

  “You are well known.” Holmes’s leaden eyes regarded me.

  “I’m a bit of a scribbler,” I admitted modestly.

  “That man indicated as much,” he said dryly. “The stains on your fingers and cuff previously suggested it to me as well.”

  I looked down. Sure enough, faded black smudges were visible on my right cuff, and my fingers bore traces of ink from notebook entries that morning.

  “I might also surmise that you began as a compositor,” said Holmes.

  I have to admit that it rattled me. How’d he know of my years setting type?

  “A trifling observation,” he said, noting my puzzlement. “Those calluses on your left thumb—old, strongly ridged—could result from nothing else but gripping heavy composition boxes.”

  I nodded, thinking his feat clever but not so remarkable. On the other hand, nobody else had ever done it.

  “Incidentally,” he went on, “what are your accents? I can distinguish forty-two London dialects, but I confess that many here in America are as yet beyond me—and yours, Mr. Clemens, is unique.”<
br />
  I told him it was Missouri at base, Pike County with some Negro dialects tossed in, and overlayered with a sight of traveling. “And yours, Holmes?” I considered myself no slouch either when it came to sounding out a man’s pedigree. “I reckon you’ve spent some years in rural territory yourself—more so than in London.” I waited while he smiled with an attitude of not bad, then I sprang my capper on him. “Reared in Lincolnshire, were you? Among the squire set?”

  “Why, close by!” he exclaimed. “Near the Yorkshire Wolds, actually, not far distant from Lincolnshire. Splendid work, Clemens!” He couldn’t have looked more surprised if I was a monkey busting out with gospel hymns. He confessed that he’d spent his growing-up years in the countryside before attending university, which he’d recently left. Before returning to settle in London, he’d taken it on himself to see parts of the world. “You enjoyed your time in England, you said?”

  The crowd’s rumble became anticipatory as the players took up their positions again.

  “I had the bulliest stays.” I held back from saying I was hailed in London as “the greatest satirist since Swift and Voltaire” but I did recount how I’d come by my fine umbrella: namely, when a London reporter asked why I carried a cheap cotton model, I said it was the only kind Englishmen wouldn’t steal—and it was reprinted to nationwide laughter. At a banquet soon after, I was presented the one I carried today.

  “My brother sent me a clipping at university about it,” Holmes said. “I imagine it’s in my files, under Americans.”

  It didn’t sound wholly complimentary but I let it pass, and presented the umbrella for his inspection. After a short look he handed it back.

  “Well, what do you think of it?”

  “Perfectly satisfactory.”

  Hurrying boys pushed through the cramped space behind us. Knots of them had sped here and there throughout the afternoon, taking new routes to evade pursuing cops. I realized that I’d had a feeling of being watched again, and made sure my billfold was safe. Holmes stared after the boys in apparent fascination.

  “Satisfactory?” I said with some spirit. “Not a champion model?”

  Seeing that he’d ruffled my feathers, he extended a bony hand for the umbrella and gave it closer inspection. “Manufactured by James Smith & Sons. Very good. They are top-drawer in the field. I’m familiar with their New Oxford Street establishment—indeed, I made a study there.” He hefted the umbrella. “Fine silk canopy. Not the alpaca or oiled canvas used by lesser makers.” His hand slid along the shank and extended the spreaders. “But note here, Clemens, how these steel ribs are of recent Hanway design. Not handcrafted whalebone.” He touched a fingernail to one of the amber tips with a dismissive click, closed the spreaders, and extended the handle to me. “Pistol grip design, most common now, this one plain bone. No carved ivory or ebony figure as on Smith & Son’s finest models.”

  I boiled with resentment. The nerve of him branding my trophy second-class!

  “Sorry,” he said, “but you did ask.” Then, as if to divert me, he brought up the topic of the new typing machines and inquired if I knew of them. My spirits lifting a notch, I told him I owned one, and that with regular practice on two fingers, I’d boosted myself up to beating out “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck” at eighteen words per minute. Why was he interested?

  His thick brows drew together. “I perceive possibilities in their use for crime.”

  I looked at him; his face was perfectly sober and intent. Was the man gripped by a lunatic vision of wrongdoers everywhere? “You said you ‘made a study’ at Smith & Sons,” I reminded him. “Toward what enterprise? Do you plan to enter the umbrella trade?”

  That brought a short laugh. “Not quite.”

  “What, then?”

  “Consulting detective.”

  I chewed on it for some moments, letting it hang there in the air between us, thinking how he’d wanted to know my home dialect, been eager to get my cigar’s ashes. “You scout out clues?” I said. “In advance of crimes?” I’d read Poe, of course, even enjoyed some of him, and extracted an inkling of how the deductive mind could work. Not that I had one. Nor, as far as I could fathom, did the tin-plated heroes in illustrated magazines packed with farfetched feats of city detectives, railway detectives, prairie detectives—maybe even squirrel detectives. Seeing how rich a vein it was, I’d done some prospecting on a detective yarn of my own, calling back my old jumping-frog character and titling the yarn Simon Wheeler, Amateur Detective. Tried it as a story and a play, and in each it was a thundering failure, which did not render my heart fonder of the detective species.

  “How can one recognize and evaluate clues without systematic knowledge?” Holmes was saying. “And so, yes, a crucial element might be discovered in the intricacies of umbrella manufacture.” He waggled a forefinger like a schoolmaster. “And in subjects more arcane.”

  A Boston hitter rocketed a ball into center field, and the 4 vanished from Boston’s peg on the green telegraphic board beyond the left-field foul flag, and was replaced by a 5. Beneath it, Hartford’s 0 hung sadly.

  “Do you truly believe,” I said, “that crimes can be solved mainly by applying brainpower?”

  “I know it,” he said with exasperating smugness. “When all other possibilities are eliminated through a process of keenly applied deduction, the one remaining must be the truth, however improbable.” It came rattling out of him like a Sunday-school verse.

  “Could be the truth,” I amended. “Could be pure bunkum, too. Look, if this was as simple as you claim, Holmes, every sneak thief and back-alley mugger would be snared in no time—the big crooks, too. Didn’t the Pinkertons take a stab at the James gang just this past winter?” I jabbed a finger of my own, sure I had him in a corner. “The papers told how they tossed a bomb into his mother’s house and blew off her hand—but they didn’t get Jesse.”

  “I would venture to remind you that it all depends on who is employing the deduction,” he said. “Police may see but as a general rule they fail to observe. And deduction in criminal cases is rarely simple—in fact, it is complex and demanding, but ultimately it is reliable.” He’d gotten excited—at least for him—his nostrils flaring slightly the way I’d once seen an Arabian gelding’s. “As Flaubert said, ‘L’homme c’est rien—l’oeuvre c’est tout.’ The man is nothing, the work is everything.”

  “Yes, he wrote that to George Sand.” I felt considerable glee at Holmes’s look of startlement. Now I set myself to trump him to flinders, having taken to memory some of Flaubert’s phrases reprinted in London papers. “I believe it goes, ‘L’homme N’EST rien, l’oeuvre tout.”

  His frown at my drawling French deepened into a scowl as he perceived my accuracy. Again I’d astonished him, and this time he was not charmed. It didn’t take a gallery of scholars to see that he wasn’t used to being corrected—and that it suited him about like a case of hives.

  “But despite you being a mere man,” I added for spice, “I gather you claim this singular capacity to observe and deduce?”

  “Now you fault me for immodesty,” he retorted. “I do not count modesty as a virtue. To the logician things should be seen exactly as they are. To underestimate oneself is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s powers.”

  “In my line of wares,” I told him, “truth is often a laughing matter, and things rarely form up in anything like a straight logical chain. Won’t you agree that life doesn’t operate according to—”

  Fittingly, my logic was lost in an explosion of yells as the Hartfords finally began to show their mettle. A Dark Blue hitter smacked a long ball that sent two runners home. Rattled, the Boston pitcher called time-out.

  “See?” I pointed to the diamond and proceeded to float new arguments. Who’d have predicted—putting cash on logical deduction alone—this shift in fortune? Wasn’t the human lot precisely like that? At the mercy of unforeseen, chaotic bursts of providence? How could uncovering “clues” restore order when there
wasn’t any particular order to start with?

  He gave me a withering look, as if my propositions were too ignorant to consider. Undaunted, I piled on more. Detective stories had tidy resolutions, I pointed out, everything tucked in and pat by the end. But this sporting contest testified as much as anything to the folly of taking such an approach seriously. How could “logic” be applied in order to produce “truth” here, when most of base ball defied rationality?

  Holmes nodded absently, and I judged he was showing the white flag. His eyes had an introspective, faraway look. He seemed intent not on me nor on the players but on the movements of itinerant boys. Was his single-rut mind fixated on child outlaws?

  Several batters later, a Hartford sailed the ball into an apple tree just inside the fence, knotting the score, 5–5. How we loved it! “Hurrah!” I yelled, subordinating my rebel-yell instincts to local custom. “HooRAW!” Ashcroft whooped and pounded my shoulder with beefy fists. I couldn’t recollect such giddy spirits at a ball game since that long-distant day when Tom Blankenship, my model for Huck Finn, clubbed a ball through Widow Holliday’s kitchen window and smashed a bottle of painkiller on her sill. The widow’s old yellow cat, Last Judgment, sampled the stuff and lit out to settle grudges with every dog in the township.

  It was when we settled again after the last out and I checked for the umbrella that I found it was gone. I bounced up again as if visited by angry hornets and stared at the plank bench.

  “Something amiss?” said Ashcroft.

  “Could you get up?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  I tried to peer around his outsized hips. “Obliged if you’d elevate yourself.”

  When he grudgingly accommodated me, I concluded with sinking heart that the umbrella had not lodged beneath him but must be somewhere in the gloom below the Pavilion benches. How to descend? I surveyed the slope below me: jammed so tight that no hint of aisles existed. Getting to the bottom would be pure hell—and perish all thought of returning.