Sherlock Holmes Edwardian Parodies and Pastiches II

by Bill Peschel

  “Down, Tiger!” shouted Holmes. To the man he said simply: “No wonder your mother is proud of you, Philip Wing!” And so saying, he whipped a length of cord out of his pocket, and tied the man’s hands behind him, and pushed me out of the gate, and followed with Tiger. As the door clanged behind us, I heard the woman’s cry: “Phil, Phil, what is it?” And still Kip made no sign.

  “Back to the hotel,” whispered Holmes; “I’m going to establish an alibi.”

  There were lights in several of the windows, as he stepped coolly round to the front door and opened it with his latch key. I learned from him afterwards that in the hall he met Mrs. Wing and Jane supporting Phillip to a chair. He was still bound, for Holmes’s knots were not easy to untie.

  “Dear, dear,” said Robert Baines. “What is wrong with your son, Mrs. Wing?”

  “He’s been half-killed,” said Mrs. Wing bitterly, “that’s what’s wrong. O, why wasn’t Mr. Sherlock Holmes here?”

  At length Philip recovered sufficiently from his dazed condition to deliver the explanation which he had been laboriously evolving with his eyes closed.

  “Went to smoke social—missed last train for Fremantle—thought I’d sleep here—came in by yard gate—not disturb anybody—”

  “Always thoughtful for others,” commented Mrs. Wing.

  “—Found two men entering Baines’s room by the window—”

  “Dear, dear,” said Baines again.

  “—let Kip loose—barked furiously—two men went for me—I shouted for help.”

  He glanced uneasily at Baines to see if the latter was going to dispute his circumstantial narrative. But the latter seemed too much astonished to make any other comment than “Dear, dear!”

  “I didn’t hear Kip bark,” said Mrs. Wing.

  “O, I did, distinctly,” protested Jane. And Baines offered no contradiction.

  “I don’t see where the Boy is to sleep,” began Mrs. Wing.

  “Pardon me,” said Baines. “I am going to stay the night at a hotel with a friend. If Mr. Philip would care to take my room.”

  “Much obliged,” said Philip, ungraciously.

  “Then I’ll just fetch my—what I’ll require for the night.” (Mrs. Wing’s ideas of propriety were strictly early Victorian.)

  Five minutes later a handful of sand was thrown against the window of the room which Baines had just vacated.

  “You may come in, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” muttered Philip. “I guess it’s you, and you’ve got me beaten.”

  Next day (Sunday) Sherlock Holmes, Harris, and myself called at 1,084 shortly before one o’clock—the Sabbatical dinner-hour.

  “I’ve brought two friends to dinner,” said Harris, who was by no means so confident as he tried to look.

  “Sunday visitors—against the rules of the house,” snapped Mrs. Wing.

  “Surely you remember me, Mrs. Wing,” said Holmes.

  Mrs. Wing remembered—with some difficulty. “Why should I give you dinner, when you wouldn’t undertake my case?”

  “Pardon me,” said Holmes, “I said that I could not carry out your wishes—that is to say I could not carry out the investigation in the way which you suggested.”

  “Then you have investigated?”

  “I have.”

  “And found out something?”

  “Yes—something.”

  “I haven’t room for three extra if the Boy and Mr. Robert come.”

  This was my cue. “Baines was at my hotel last night,” I explained, “and he asked me to tell you that he wouldn’t be here to dinner—he is giving up his room.”

  “A week’s notice is the rule of the house. Jane, put these gentleman at the side table.”

  At dinner Holmes had the pleasure of listening to various accounts of the mysterious happenings at Mrs. Wing’s house. Barker was too much absorbed in the serious business of deglutition to spare any time for conversation, but when the table was being cleared, he remarked, “You ought to have been here a week ago, Mr. Holmes,” quite unconscious that a similar remark had been made by every one of the boarders in turn.

  “Sorry to be too late for an interesting case,” said Holmes, “but it’s not too late for me to give you a tune on the violin, if you care for it. I saw a fiddle-case on the piano in the drawing-room.”

  “Empty is the cradle,” quoted Alderton. “That was the instrument that was stolen.”

  “I should like to look at the case,” said Holmes.

  “I’ll fetch it,” volunteered Harris.

  “Drawing-room’s the place for music,” said Barker. But nobody heeded him.

  “I don’t think the cradle is empty,” said Holmes, as he unfastened the case. “Here, you see, gentlemen, we have what looks like a viola.”

  “Why, it’s Hildersley’s,” said Harris, taking it out of the case. “I recognise it at once.”

  “Mr. Holmes,” said Mrs. Wing, “you are a conjurer!”

  “Here,” said Holmes, disregarding the various expressions of admiration, “we have little pockets for the reception of rosin, or spare strings, or what not.” He opened one of them. “Do you usually keep your purse in another man’s fiddle-case Mr. Harris?”

  “It looks like my purse,” said Harris, who had carefully rehearsed his part in this little scene, “and there are four sovereigns in it—like mine.”

  “Jane, that’s the second plate you’ve broken this week,” said Mrs. Wing. But for once Jane forgot her customary formula, “If I don’t suit Mrs. Wing, you’d better suit yourself.”

  The general chorus of congratulations was interrupted by a dissentient voice—Barker’s.

  “You haven’t caught those two men that tried to break in last night, Mr. Holmes?”

  “No,” said Holmes, humbly—“I fancy it will be rather difficult to overtake them.” And Jane understood.

  A few hours later Holmes, Harris, and I had the smoking-room at the Primal Hotel to ourselves.

  “The case,” said Holmes, “was absolutely commonplace and presented no striking feature of interest, but it was better than doing nothing. Of course, the first thing to be done was to test the truth of Jane’s statement about the mysterious footsteps which died away. I found that the yard had not been asphalted very recently—there was more sand than asphalt to be seen, and if a man wished his footsteps to be inaudible (as most burglars do) there was not the least difficulty about it. Therefore Jane’s story was a lie, and therefore she was either the thief, or was an accomplice in the theft. Mr. Philip Wing was kind enough to give me the clue, when he called the girl Selina. It wasn’t a joke, I felt pretty sure, but a slip, and the girl looked angry and flushed, but not surprised. I surmised that he had called her Selina more than once, and the surmise proved correct. I instituted certain enquiries as to Mr. Philip’s antecedents and heard no good of him anywhere.”

  “We all hated him,” assented Harris.

  “His mother, who is a Puritan of the Puritans, believes him to be a most estimable character, and he is mean enough to trade on this belief. The matter of the purse caused no trouble—there remained the matter of the viola and the extra bridge. Obviously, it was not safe to assume that the same person had stolen both the purse and the viola, or even that the viola had been stolen at all. There was no doubt that the bridge had been planted in Barker’s room to annoy him, but why should any person have taken the trouble to obtain a new bridge, if the original one was available? Was it available? If somebody had accidentally broken that bridge, and thrown it away, before evolving that little scheme for annoying Barker—well, if so, that somebody was extremely likely to be Jane.

  “I soon ascertained that no second-hand viola had been lately sold to any dealer in Perth, pawnbroker or otherwise. I determined to test the hypothesis that Jane had taken the viola not necessarily for the purpose of theft, and had hidden it in the house. Where could she have hidden it?—that was the question. Mrs. Wing is a born ‘manager,’ and a viola is not a thing to be stowed away in an old
envelope. Jane’s bedroom would not be safe, nor the washhouse, nor the dining-room, where there is only a small sideboard which Mrs. Wing opens a dozen times a day.

  “Then I thought of Mrs. Wing’s phrase ‘I have no time to read,’ and I remembered the bookcase in the drawing room with the books in regular rows, every one exactly flush with its neighbour, and not one looking as if it had ever been opened.”

  “Her husband’s books,” explained Harris. “Died nearly forty years ago—books never been opened since.”

  “I thought so. Well, sure enough, I noticed a slight outward bulge on the top shelf. Some volume of an encyclopaedia had at least been moved, if not opened. The viola was behind them. I found afterwards from Mr. Philip that Jane had accidentally stuck her elbow into the bridge, while examining the viola, just out of curiosity. She threw the broken bridge away, and bought another, but could not get it into position—she never thought of loosening the pegs. So she tucked the viola away behind the books, meaning at some time or other, to have a new bridge fitted to it—and then Hildersley turned up sooner than he had been expected, and it was assumed that the instrument had been stolen. So Philip said to her. ‘If they think it’s a theft, make it a theft—plant it on old Barker.’ And she did. I really think he almost deserved it.”

  “There are two other points which I might mention. I bought the dog, Tiger, with the idea of playing a little jest upon Mr. Philip by substituting my dog for Barker’s, which hadn’t been on the premises 24 hours before Philip had planned to steal it. He made Jane believe that it was only to be hidden away for a few days and then returned.

  “Yes, Kip was drugged last night.”

  “The other point is this. When I tied up Mr. Philip, I meant to hand him over to the police, but at the last moment, or fraction of a moment, I relented, for his mother’s sake. It is not the first time, Watson, that we have compounded a felony. By the way, you must not think of chronicling this case—I absolutely forbid it.”

  But I have ventured to disobey him.

  The Weirdly Thrilling Adventure of the Lost Bathing Suit

  Being a hair-raising experience of that planet-famous detective, HERLOCK SHOMES, as related by his comrade, DR. ROTSON

  L.C. Hopkins

  Illustrated by Robert J. Dean

  This exercise in misdetection appeared in November’s Uncle Remus’s Home Magazine. The publication was edited by Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908), the journalist who collected stories from African-Americans and published them as Uncle Remus stories. Linton Cooke Hopkins (1872-1943) was an Atlanta lawyer who wrote short stories on the side. A member of a prominent legal family, he spoke out in 1906 against a proposed revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the city in response to crimes against white women. (It should be mentioned that in the same issue of Uncle Remus the magazine also published a defense of the Klan by a former member!) Robert J. Dean was the magazine’s staff artist.

  Herlock Shomes was reclining in his great arm-chair. A cigar-box full of cocaine and morphine lay on the table at one side. At his elbow stood his tobacco-holder. He filled his pipe with Perique, and was soon blowing out such clouds of heavy smoke that I could discern through them but an indistinct outline of his figure. Ever and anon he lifted from the cocaine box a large lump of the drug and bit off an ounce or two. He was the picture of contentment.

  “Good morning, my dear Rotson,” said he, cheerily. “I see you have been eating fish for breakfast, and that you accidentally walked through Jones’s watermelon patch last night. That red-and-green-checked vest is certainly very becoming. Brother Simpkins lent it you for some gala occasion. Ah, I see! Your birthday. That explains your unusually dapper appearance. Let me congratulate you! Ha! I see you were out playing the guitar again, last night. Sly dog! Thought I wouldn’t find it out, did you? Was that before or after the watermelon patch? Before, I see. Well, Jones’s bulldog’ll outrun you some day. You’ve beat him out thus far, but you’d better be careful! He’s getting lots of sprinting practice this summer. Meanwhile, how would it do to give the hired girl a dime and let her darn those striped trousers where you snagged ’em on the barbed-wire? . . . What a picture that must have been! I’d have given fourteen dollars to see you jump that fence with your guitar under one arm and your watermelon under the other!”

  “Herlock,” I remarked, “you’re nothing short of a wonder! A double-back-action, triple-expansion, compound-condensing wonder! Each and every one of those ten-cent reductions of yours is correct. It is truly wonderful! Your method ought to be exposed. The world should no longer be kept in ignorance of those almost supernatural powers of productive reasoning which you possess. I think I shall chronicle one of your amazing adventures. It would do the people good and it would knock ’em cold! Incidentally, I might get enough dough for it to un-soak our overcoats.”

  “Might do,” answered Shomes, laconically. “How would the adventure of the lost bathing suit answer?”

  “It would fit the requirements skin-tight, or, in other words, it would suit exactly,” I answered with glee as I dodged the hunk of morphine he threw at me.

  I. Searching for Clues

  It was at the seashore that this most astounding adventure took place. The incident is so full of wonderful action, so thrilfully stuffed with awful unforeseen excitement, that I can only bring myself to set it on paper by suppressing the true names of the parties involved and eradicating all dates and localities whereby the actual perpetrators and principal actors in this most diabolical occurrence might be identified.

  The bathing suit belonged to a clear young blond thing of not more than thirty-five summers, and not more than a hundred pounds avoirdupois. Its disappearance was surrounded with such irreconcilable phenomena that my brain was in a whirl from the very first. But Shomes didn’t turn a hair.

  “There are nineteen clues to the thief, my dear Rotson,” he remarked, “but we must not make up our minds about anything until we have all the facts. We must trace that bathing suit from the time Miss Blank took it off that last fatal afternoon until it finally disappeared. We must go down to the beach and make a careful examination of the bath house, the shore and the surf.” With that, he slipped into his pocket a large magnifying glass and a shining revolver.

  I turned pale. “Do you think it necessary for me to go?” I asked anxiously. “I think I had just as well remain here. I am sure you will not need me on this occasion.”

  Herlock looked at me steadfastly. “I have the most serious grounds for the conviction,” he said slowly, “that we are opposed in this investigation by one of the most desperate criminals in America. Indeed, I feel altogether certain that on this occasion we shall have at last a foeman worthy of our steel. And I shall need all the help you can give me. We cannot afford to take any risks. We must prepare for anything!”

  I slipped my six-shooter into my pistol pocket, slid two or three razors into my coat, and picked up my repeating rifle.

  “Come on!” I muttered hoarsely. “I see the worst is yet to come!”

  We proceeded to the beach, and there, Herlock, instead of making an exhaustive examination of the bath house and other places in the vicinity, as I had, of course, expected he would do at once, put on his bath suit and suggested that I do the same.

  We lay down on the sand and Herlock was at once absorbed in thought. I knew the workings of that wonderful mind of his and let him take his own time about it.

  “Yes,” he said, after a long silence, “I think I have it. The science of deduction never fails. We must be very careful, however. In an investigation of such paramount importance as this, we must not neglect the slightest circumstance. For instance, I notice peculiar tracks in the sand over to your left. Let me see if you have learned anything from my various exhibitions. Tell me: What do you gather from those tracks?”

  I looked at them hard.

  “They are at least three feet across,” I remarked. “Too large for a sand-crab—they never grow over five inches. These are not deep enough for
a sea-cow or a hippopotamus. I gather, therefore, by what I believe is one of your rules, ‘eliminate the impossible and what remains, however improbable, is true,’ that it must have been a sea turtle.”

  “Capital, Rotty!” cried Shomes. “Capital! I could not have done better myself! What else do you deduce?”

  “On one side,” I went on, “I see five scratches on each track, on the other side there are only four scratches. I gather that the turtle must have lost one of his left toenails.”

  Shomes leaped to his feet and grasped my hand. “You are indeed an apt pupil!” he cried. “You will soon be where you can see me with a telescope! We could identify that turtle among ten thousand by that missing toenail. Yes, sir, if we can now connect the visit of that turtle with the loss of the bathing suit, the problem will be simplicity itself. All we’ll have to do will be to hire eight or nine hundred of my Quaker Street Arabs, let them catch all the turtles in the sea, and the one with a toenail missing from a left flipper will be the thief! The case will be complete! However, before we go to that trouble and expense, let us see if we can tell how old are the tracks. The bath suit, you know, was stolen yesterday. How old are the tracks?”

  I knew here I was out of my depth.

  “The tracks end three yards down,” he said, when I did not answer. “They have therefore been made before last high-water; all except three yards of them are washed out. The last heavy rain we had was on the tenth of last mouth and the twenty-sixth of this.”

  “Plain!” I commented.

  “The water last night reached only to that line of seaweed yonder, which is eight yards below the end of the tracks. There have been other and higher tides since the turtle was out. The highest tide of the month is on the full moon. The last full moon was the fifteenth of last month. The turtle was out between the tenth and fifteenth of last month, and therefore could not have had anything to do with the bathing suit. At that time, the sweet owner of that delicate article had not made her appearance at this resort.”