by Bill Peschel
“But who was the culprit?”
“The culprit? Oh,—a diminutive white goat.”
How Sherlock Holmes Caught Raffles
Maurice Smiley
Conan Doyle resisted repeated suggestions that he send Holmes against his brother-in-law E.W. Horung’s creation, so it was left to others to do it for him. Maurice Smiley used clever wordplay and twisted logic in his shaggy-dog story that appeared in the July issue of The Bohemian. Little is known of Smiley. He grew up in the Chicago area and during the opening decades of the century he wrote mostly poems as well as a few short stories and articles that appeared in newspapers and general-interest magazines.
It did not require the expert perception of a physician to see that my friend was rapidly approaching an alarming, not to say dangerous, state of mind. Nothing had happened for weeks to engage those wonderful powers of whose workings I have from time to time given illustrations which I hope have not proved to be entirely without interest.
But the terrible lassitude of inaction was literally killing him by inches. It was eating him up. He was living off the principal of his tremendous intellectual capital instead of being thriftily and normally sustained by the interest of employment. Employment was not merely the lubricant which kept the mechanism of his mind running smoothly; to change the figure, it was the coal and steam, the motive power which, when withdrawn, resulted in the wear and tear of friction that was making him go to pieces.
As I watched him out of the tail of my eye, lying there on the sofa in an attitude not only of hopeless apathy, but of actual physical suffering, my heart literally ached for him. The pain roused me to my duty both as a friend and as a medical adviser.
“My dear friend,” I said at last, “this will never do in the world! Your health, your reason, your very life, demand that you rouse yourself. You must do something. Intricate problems will not present themselves automatically or as fast as you run out of something to do. Busy yourself, if only for amusement, with some of these less difficult puzzles which are constantly arising in the more humdrum domains of police work. You will at least keep yourself going until something worth while turns up. In the meantime, let me make you a rarebit. You know my skill.”
“What do you want me to do?” he asked pettishly, without looking at me. “Do you expect me to turn constable and run down shoplifters or trail street gamins who snatch apples from corner stands?”
At another time I might have been offended at his sarcasm, but now I made allowances, contenting myself with answering, though perhaps a bit testily:
“Nothing of the sort. Only the more complicated the problem you solve, the higher you set your standard. There is a logical end to it all. By and bye you will reach a psychological ne plus ultra. Have you ever speculated on the old but abstractly interesting conundrum as to what would happen if a resistless force was applied to an immovable object? In the higher domain of abstruse reasoning it might appeal more forcibly to you if put this way: What would be the conclusion if an axiomatic premise were predicted upon an irrefutable negation?”
The discussion appeared at least to amuse him for the moment, for he raised himself on an elbow and a flickering gleam of interest shone in his eye. It was like throwing a few chips on a fire that had almost gone out.
“Translated into medical terms,” he remarked, “I suppose the problem would address itself to the pathological effect of the application of an infallible remedy to an incurable disease.”
“Just so,” I replied, “and translated into terms which concern themselves more intimately with your own line of thought, have you ever speculated as to what would happen—which would win—if an uncatchable criminal were pursued by an inescapable detective? That is the catastrophe toward which you are tending and that is the catastrophe which I wish to avert.”
“Pshaw!” he exclaimed impatiently. “It will be long after your day and mine when any uncatchable criminal rises up to plague the police. There are criminals who have never been caught, but they have escaped through the blind mistakes of the police. The criminal never operated who did not leave some trace behind him, and the situation never existed which would not have yielded to the proper logical treatment, to borrow an analogy from your profession. But I’ll promise you, Watson, to look up Lestrade tomorrow and see if he can give me a job as second ‘shadow’ until something better turns up.”
Then he lay back on the sofa and I was highly gratified when he dropped off into a much-needed sleep. I turned to my desk and busied myself with a treatise on which I was working. It was not very exciting, I fear, and I believe I took forty winks myself.
I was awakened by a furious rapping on the door, and the next moment Lestrade literally dashed into the room. Holmes and I both sprang up in amazement at the man’s uncontrollable agitation.
“For God’s sake, Mr. Holmes,” he cried, mopping his brow and pulling himself together a bit, “excuse me for bursting into your rooms like this. But I couldn’t help it. Besides, it concerns you as much as any one else. You have been robbed, sir!”
“Robbed!” exclaimed Holmes, sharply. “By whom? Of what?”
Then recollecting that it was a bit silly to ask Lestrade such questions, he smiled and remarked composedly:
“Let me have all the facts in your possession, Lestrade.”
“I don’t know who has robbed you, of course, sir,” said the head constable, “but it has been going on for a long time. The only point on which I could, but may not, enlighten you is as to what has been taken from you. But the loss is irreparable, unless you recover it. In addition to your own private interest in the case, you will aid the cause of justice, help the whole business world, save the honor of the British nation, by solving this mystery of the lottery of the jaybirds.”
Both Holmes and myself burst out laughing. We had been keyed up to a degree of interest in connection with this appalling catastrophe which Lestrade believed threatened the terrestrial section of the universe. The rocket went up, and now the stick came down in the shape of a lottery of jaybirds!
“It is no laughing matter, I assure you,” said Lestrade with an injured air.
“Pray excuse me,” said Holmes quickly. “If I can help you in any way I shall be happy. I don’t mind telling you that I need a little work to keep from getting rusty.”
“You won’t be very rusty if you crack this nut,” said Lestrade grimly. “In fact you will be uncommonly bright. You will lay the smoothest criminal in England by the heels, and to crown all you will recoup your own loss and prevent the looting of the Bank of England!”
I positively gasped, though Holmes only looked mightily interested.
“Why, man,” I cried, “the Bank of England is safer than Gibraltar!”
“Nevertheless,” remarked Holmes, quietly, “within the last six months the bank has been entered, impressions of half the locks taken and only the impenetrability of the steel walls prevented possibly enormous losses.”
“I was not aware you knew of it,” said Lestrade in confusion. “We made a great mistake in not consulting you, but we thought we were on the trail of the fellow, whom we believe to be the same who has turned a dozen of the cleverest tricks ever known in England.”
“A mere clever thief,” said Holmes, a bit contemptuously. “I haven’t heard of his doing anything that he might not have been caught for by the authorities. This is the nearest approach to genius I have known. I think I know what has been stolen from me and I shall be glad to look into the matter. But the bank people only laugh. If they lost a few millions, it would serve them rightly. The matter goes back to the little problem we were discussing, Watson,” he concluded, turning to me.
“The matter is very serious, sir,” said Lestrade nervously. “The looting of the bank would be a national calamity. We have every reason to believe that this master of thievery has discovered, and for all we know has perfected, a compound which will make the strongest steel only so much limestone!”
“Is that so
?” exclaimed Holmes, startled out of his usual calm. “I had not heard of that.”
“This man,” continued the constable, “already has impressions of half the locks. He has effected an entrance once. We can’t surround the bank with platoons of police night and day. The worst of it is the bank officials only laugh at us.”
“But what has all this to do with the jaybird lottery?” asked Holmes impatiently.
“I was coming to that, sir. About a month ago a lady named Leeper, who has been separated from her husband and who takes lodgers at her home on the edge of Epping forest, took in as a roomer a tall, rather slender man who dressed much like a professor of sciences. He wore a brown beard and goggles, claiming that his eyes were weak from laboratory work. He was of course disguised. He had one passion which he could not entirely control, and that was his passion for taming crickets.”
To the amazement of both Lestrade and myself, Holmes uttered a sharp exclamation which was to us absolutely irrelevant. Then he abruptly signed Lestrade to proceed, confused at having been betrayed into a display of any emotion.
“The professor was visited at times by a younger man whom he was heard to address as ‘Bunny’ and who brought him parcels like those one gets at a chemist’s. He was very secretive and spent the greater part of his time in his room, which was fitted up as a crude laboratory. Mrs. Leeper supposed him to be a professor on his holidays, experimenting for pastime. We believe those experiments were directed toward perfecting this compound of which I have spoken. After he left, which was rather suddenly, we found charred drawings and sketches which have been identified as plans of the interior of the bank.”
“But the jaybird lottery!” snapped Holmes.
“I was just coming to that,” Lestrade hastened to say. “It seems that Epping forest abounds in these birds, and Mrs. Leeper had several as pets. The professor had a fancy to have one in his room. He never went out except in the evening, to catch a few crickets, and Mrs. Leeper got the impression that he was anxious to avoid the police. At any rate, when Head Constable Brigham arrived at Mrs. Leeper’s place on business entirely disconnected from the professor, the latter unceremoniously decamped. A maid saw him fasten what appeared to be a small strip of paper about the neck of the tame jaybird. In the hurry of departure the cage door was left open and the bird escaped into the forest.
Now comes the strangest part of the whole affair. For the past three days every rural paper in a radius of fifty miles of London has had this advertisement. Lestrade took a cutting from his pocketbook and, passed it to Holmes, who read aloud:
“Lottery extraordinary! All persons are hereby notified that the undersigned desires to secure as many jaybirds as possible for ornithological experiments. The names of all parties bringing birds to the subscribed address will be placed in a box on a date to be announced. Ten names will be drawn by a disinterested person and the owner of the tenth name will be given the capital prize of £50. Other smaller prizes will be awarded every tenth name up to 500. One shilling will be paid for each bird in good condition.
“(Signed) Prof. Watson.”
The address was our house in Baker Street!
Again that sharp exclamation, but this time it was of triumph. My friend sprang to his feet, his pale face flushed, his eyes blazing. What was to Lestrade and myself the utterest nonsense was to that wonderful mind the logical rivet that clinched the whole matter. What was to us absurd was to him the very thing for which he had been searching. What was to us the dropping of the fog about us was to him the burst of sunlight that drove away the mists.
Lestrade and I could only stare.
“I confess I can’t make head or tail out of it,” said Lestrade helplessly. “I’d give five napoleons to figure it out.”
Resuming his normal manner, Holmes said: “All men are fallible. I may be at fault, as I have been before. But I think I can assure you that by morning I shall be able to tell you whether my reasoning is correct or not and settle the whole matter.”
Lestrade took his leave and Holmes sat motionless for a long time. I was consumed with curiosity, but I knew better than to interrupt him.
Suddenly he said to me:
“Watson, did you ever dabble in the cotton market?”
I had taken a few “fliers,” but for certain private reasons I had not taken Holmes into my confidence. I was, however, forced to admit the soft impeachment.
“You wear a wig, I believe?”
That was a matter of common knowledge among my friends, but I failed to see the relevancy of the observation.
“Then that brings us back to the matter of the rarebit,” he said, quietly. “I think I have solved the little mystery and now we’ll have a bit of your famous confection.”
He rose and took down a cricket compendium as though the entire matter was dismissed from his mind. I was nettled at the cavalier way in which he flippantly “dashed off” puzzles which hopelessly befuddled me.
“You don’t get any of my rarebits,” I said sourly, “until you let me into some of this absurd mystery.”
“Well, Watson,” he replied, good-humoredly, as one would appease a child, “it is all very simple. I didn’t realize until an hour or so ago that I had been robbed. As long as the fellow confined himself to stealing diamonds, robbing jewelers and despoiling the British Museum of jubilee cups, it was merely a matter for the police. But when it came to this Bank of England affair and the jaybird lottery he invaded my own domain. That was the first evidence of genius I noted. It was then that he robbed me of—my reputation! As long as such a man was unchecked, my reputation was gone. The man himself is A. J. Raffles!”
“The famous cricketer?” I cried.
“The same,” replied Holmes, confidently. “This professor is inordinately fond of crickets. That was the first clue. A. J. Raffles is one of the best cricketers in England. A bird is very desperately wanted. I will stake my reputation on the statement that the professor had not completed his experiments with this dangerous compound. He probably confided the formula to paper; possibly it was very complicated.
“When he was scared away he fastened this paper to the neck of his pet jaybird, intending either to take it with him or return later. The bird escaped. To recover it would be worth many thousands of pounds. So A. J. raffles off all the jaybirds that can be caught, hoping to get his lost pet among them. It is not nearly so visionary as you might imagine. Very few wild birds will be caught. The missing bird, you will remember, was half-tamed and would be more easily secured than one wholly wild. It might even come back of its own accord. To call attention to it particularly would be fatal. The man who advertises raffles to get A. J. back, must be A. J. Raffles. That is perfectly clear, isn’t it?”
“But this absurd advertisement gives Prof. Watson’s address as this place. I am not a professor.”
“Just so,” said Holmes coolly. “That only shows that my reasoning is correct. You must adjust your mind, my dear Watson, to the idea that persons count as nothing in a chain of logical reasoning. If the reasoning is faultless, we cannot stop at such trivial obstacles as personalities. You live here, don’t you?”
“Of course,” I answered impatiently. “What has that to do with it?”
“You will remember that the professor’s occasional visitor was called ‘Bunny’?” asked Holmes with exasperating patronage. “That was the first clue along that line of reasoning. Don’t you see”—he seemed annoyed at my dullness—“the professor gave the address of his confederate? His confederate was named Bunny. You can cut off a leg as neatly as any one of my acquaintance, my dear Watson. But doctors make mistakes. Mathematics is infallible. Logic is inerrant. The professor gave your address because—you are Bunny!”
I could only blink groggily at this astounding declaration which Holmes made so coolly.
“Remember what I said about the inconsequentiality of persons,” he said. “‘Bunny’ is another name for rabbit. That was my first clue along that line. I knew how expert you
are in making Welsh ‘rabbit.’ Then you are interested in cotton market reports. They are cotton tales—an American species. As a third and absolutely irrefutable link in the chain, you wear a wig. The best wigs in the world are made in Belgium, welding indissolubly Welsh ‘rabbits,’ American cotton tails and Belgian hairs into a chain that fastens the Bunny identity upon you. Perhaps, however,” he said with a touch of sneer, “you can point out some weakness in my reasoning.” He waited with angry impatience for my presumption.
But suddenly a thought struck me, the tremendous thought that followed the last statement Holmes had made. It brought the perspiration to my brow and I sprang to my feet.
“If I am Bunny,” I cried, trembling with excitement, “then—you—are Raffles!”
“The conclusion is inescapable,” said Holmes coldly. “My reasoning being faultless, the mere question of personalities is nothing.”
I sat down weak and helpless—so weak in fact that I toppled off the chair to the floor.
That was what really brought my forty winks to an abrupt end. A chair never does make a good bedroom. I glanced sheepishly at Holmes. He was still sleeping, but stirring uneasily.