The Sherlock Holmes Megapack: 25 Modern Tales by Masters: 25 Modern Tales by Masters

by Michael Kurland

  Entirely too much of this misdirected musing concerns me and my relationship with the self-anointed master detective. Amateur detection enthusiasts have wasted much time and energy in speculation as to how Sherlock Holmes and I first met, and just what caused the usually unflappable Holmes to describe me as “the Napoleon of crime” without supplying the slightest evidence to support this blatant canard.

  I propose to tell that story now, both to satisfy this misplaced curiosity and to put an end to the various speculations which have appeared in certain privately circulated monographs. To set the record straight: Holmes and I are not related; I have not had improper relations with any of his female relatives; I did not steal his childhood inamorata away from him. Neither did he, to the best of my knowledge, perform any of these services for me or anyone in my family.

  In any case, I assure you that I will no longer take such accusations lightly. Privately distributed though these monographs may be, their authors will have to answer for them in a court of law if this continues.

  Shortly before that ridiculous episode at the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes had the temerity to describe me to his befuddled amanuensis as “organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city.” (By which he meant London, of course). What crimes I had supposedly committed he was curiously silent about. Watson did not ask for specifics, and none were offered. The good doctor took Holmes’s unsupported word for this unsupportable insult. Had Holmes not chosen to disappear for three years after his foul accusation, I most assuredly would have had him in the dock for slander.

  And then, when Holmes returned from his extended vacation, during which time he did not have the kindness, the decency, to pass on one word that would let his dear companion know that he was not dead, he gave an account of our “struggle” at the falls that any child of nine would have recognized as a complete work of fiction—but it fooled Watson.

  The truth about the Reichenbach incident—but no, that is not for this narrative. Just permit me a brief pause, the merest aside in this chronicle before I go on, so that I may draw your attention to some of the details of that story that should have alerted the merest tyro to the fact that he was being diddled—but that Watson swallowed whole.

  * * * *

  In the narrative that he published under the name “The Final Problem,” Watson relates that Holmes appeared in his consulting room one day in April of 1891 and told him that he was being threatened by Professor Moriarty—myself—and that he had already been attacked twice that day by my agents and expected to be attacked again, probably by a man using an air-rifle. If that were so, was it not thoughtful of him to go to the residence of his close friend and thus place him, also, in deadly peril?

  At that meeting Holmes declares that, in three days, he will be able to place “the Professor, with all the principal members of his gang,” in the hands of the police. Why wait? Holmes gives no coherent reason. But until then, Holmes avers, he is in grave danger. Well now! If this were so, would not Scotland Yard gladly have given Holmes a room, nay a suite of rooms, in the hotel of his choosing—or in the Yard itself—to keep him safe for the next three days? But Holmes says that nothing will do but that he must flee the country, and once again Watson believes him. Is not unquestioning friendship a wonderful thing?

  Holmes then arranges for Watson to join him in this supposedly hasty flight. They meet at Victoria Station the next morning, where Watson has trouble recognizing Holmes, who has disguised himself as a “venerable Italian priest,” presumably to fool pursuers. This assumes that Holmes’s enemies can recognize the great detective, but have no idea what his good friend Dr Watson, who wears no disguise, who indeed is congenitally incapable of disguise, looks like.

  Again note that after a six-month absence, during which Holmes and I—but no, it is not my secret to tell—at any rate, six months after I was assumed to be dead I returned to my home on Russell Square and went about my business as usual, and Watson affected not to notice. After all, Holmes had killed me, and that was good enough for Watson.

  I could go on. Indeed, it is with remarkable restraint that I do not. To describe me as a master criminal is actionable; and then to compound matters by making me out to be such a bungler as to be fooled by Holmes’s juvenile antics is quite intolerable. It should be clear to all that the events leading up to that day at Reichenbach Falls, if they occurred as described, were designed by Holmes to fool his amiable companion, and not “the Napoleon of crime.”

  * * * *

  But I have digressed enough. In this brief paper I will describe how the relationship between Holmes and myself came to be, and perhaps supply some insight into how and why Holmes developed an entirely unwarranted antagonism toward me that has lasted these many years.

  I first met Sherlock Holmes in the early 1870s—I shall be no more precise than that. At the time I was a senior lecturer in mathematics at, I shall call it, “Queens College,” one of the six venerable colleges making up a small inland university which I shall call “Wexleigh” to preserve the anonymity of the events I am about to describe. I shall also alter the names of the persons who figure in this episode, save only those of Holmes and myself; as those who were involved surely have no desire to be reminded of the episode or pestered by the press for more details. You may, of course, apply to Holmes for the true names of these people, although I imagine that he will be no more forthcoming than I.

  Let me also point out that memories are not entirely reliable recorders of events. Over time they convolute, they conflate, they manufacture, and they discard, until what remains may bear only a passing resemblance to the original event. So if you happen to be one of the people whose lives crossed those of Holmes and myself at “Queens” at this time, and your memory of some of the details of these events differs from mine, I assure you that in all probability we are both wrong.

  Wexleigh University was of respectable antiquity, with respectable ecclesiastical underpinnings. Most of the dons at Queens were churchmen of one description or another. Latin and Greek were still considered the foundations upon which an education should be constructed. The “modern” side of the university had come into existence a mere decade before, and the Classics dons still looked with mixed amazement and scorn at the Science instructors and the courses offered, which they insisted on describing as “Stinks and Bangs.”

  Holmes was an underclassman at the time. His presence had provoked a certain amount of interest among the faculty, many of whom remembered his brother Mycroft, who had attended the university some six years previously.

  Mycroft had spent most of his three years at Queens in his room, coming out only for meals and to gather armsful of books from the library and retreat back to his room. When he did appear in the lecture hall it would often be to correct the instructor on some error of fact or pedagogy that had lain unnoticed, sometimes for years, in one of his lectures. Mycroft had departed the university without completing the requirements for a degree, stating with some justification that he had received all the institution had to offer, and he saw no point in remaining.

  Holmes had few friends among his fellow underclassmen and seemed to prefer it that way. His interests were varied but transient, as he dipped first into one field of study and then another, trying to find something that stimulated him sufficiently for him to make it his life’s work; something to which he could apply his powerful intellect and his capacity for close and accurate observation, which was even then apparent, if not fully developed.

  An odd sort of amity soon grew between myself and this intense young man. On looking back I would describe it as a cerebral bond, based mostly on the shared snobbery of the highly intelligent against those whom they deem as their intellectual inferiors. I confess to that weakness in my youth, and my only defence against a charge of hubris is that those whom we went out of our way to ignore were just as anxious to avoid us.

  The incident I am about to relate occurred in the Fall, shortly after Holmes
returned to begin his second year. A new don joined the college, occupying the newly-created chair of Moral Philosophy, a chair which had been endowed by a Midlands mill owner who made it a practice to employ as many children under twelve in his mills as his agents could sweep up off the streets. Thus, I suppose, his interest in Moral Philosophy.

  The new man’s name was—well, for the purposes of this tale let us call him Professor Charles Maples. He was, I would judge, in his mid forties; a stout, sharp-nosed, myopic, amiable man who strutted and bobbed slightly when he walked. His voice was high and intense, and his mannerisms were complex. His speech was accompanied by elaborate hand motions, as though he would mold the air into a semblance of what he was describing. When one saw him crossing the quad in the distance, with his grey master of arts gown flapping about him, waving the mahogany walking-stick with the brass duck’s-head handle that he was never without, and gesticulating to the empty air, he resembled nothing so much as a corpulent king pigeon.

  Moral Philosophy was a fit subject for Maples. No one could say exactly what it encompassed, and so he was free to speak on whatever caught his interest at the moment. And his interests seemed to be of the moment: he took intellectual nourishment from whatever flower of knowledge seemed brightest to him in the morning, and had tired of it ere night drew nigh. Excuse the vaguely poetic turn of phrase; speaking of Maples seems to bring that out in one.

  I do not mean to suggest the Maples was intellectually inferior; far from it. He had a piercing intellect, an incisive clarity of expression, and a sarcastic wit that occasionally broke through his mild facade. Maples spoke on the Greek and Roman concept of manliness, and made one regret that we lived in these decadent times. He lectured on the nineteenth century penchant for substituting a surface prudery for morality, and left his students with a vivid image of unnamed immorality seething and billowing not very far beneath the surface. He spoke on this and that and created in his students an abiding enthusiasm for this and an unremitting loathing for that.

  There was still an unspoken presumption about the college that celibacy was the proper model for the students, and so only the unmarried, and presumably celibate, dons were lodged in one or another of the various buildings within the college walls. Those few with wives found housing around town where they could, preferably at a respectable distance from the university.

  Maples was numbered among the domestic ones, and he and his wife Andrea had taken a house with fairly extensive grounds on Barleymore Road not far from the college, which they shared with Andrea’s sister Lucinda Moys and a physical education instructor named Crisboy, who, choosing to live away from the college for reasons of his own, rented a pair of rooms on the top floor. There was a small guest house at the far end of the property which was untenanted. The owner of the property, who had moved to Glasgow some years previously, kept it for his own used on his occasional visits to town. The Maples employed a cook and a maid, both of whom were day help, sleeping in their own homes at night.

  Andrea was a fine-looking woman who appeared to be fearlessly approaching thirty, with intelligent brown eyes set in a broad face and a head of thick, brown hair, which fell down her back to somewhere below her waist when she didn’t have it tied up in a sort of oversized bun circling her head. She was of a solid appearance and decisive character.

  Her sister, “Lucy” to all who knew her, was somewhat younger and more ethereal in nature. She was a slim, golden-haired creature of mercurial moods: usually bright and confident and more than capable of handling anything the mean old world could throw at her; but on occasion dark and sullen and angry at the rest of the world for not measuring up to her standards. When one of her moods overtook her, she retired to her room and refused to see anyone until it passed, which for some reason the young men of the college found intensely romantic. She had an intense manner of gazing at you while you conversed, as though your words were the only things of importance in the world at that instant, and she felt privileged to be listening. This caused several of the underclassmen to fall instantly in love with her, as she was perhaps the first person, certainly the first woman aside from their mothers, who had ever paid serious attention to anything they said.

  One of the underclassmen who was attracted by Miss Lucy’s obvious charms was Mr Sherlock Holmes. She gazed at him wide-eyed while he spoke earnestly, as young men speak, of things that I’m sure must have interested her not in the least. Was it perhaps Holmes himself who interested the pert young lady? I certainly hoped so, for his sake. Holmes had no sisters, and a man who grows up without sisters has few defences against those wiles, those innocent wiles of body, speech and motion, with which nature has provided young females in its blind desire to propagate the species.

  I was not a close observer of the amorous affairs of Lucy Moys, but as far as I could see she treated all her suitors the same—neither encouraging them nor discouraging them, but enjoying their company and keeping them at a great enough distance, both physically and emotionally, to satisfy the most demanding duenna. She seemed to me to find all her young gentlemen vaguely amusing, regarding them with the sort of detachment one finds in the heroines of Oscar Wilde’s plays, to use a modern simile.

  Professor Maples took the in loco parentis role of the teacher a bit further than most of the faculty, certainly further than I would have cared to, befriending his students, and for that matter any students who desired to be befriended, earnestly, sincerely and kindly. But then he seemed to truly care about the needs and welfare of the young men of Wexleigh.

  Personally I felt that attempting to educate most of them in class and at tutorials was quite enough. For the most part they cared for nothing but sports, except for those who cared for nothing but religion, and were content to allow the sciences and mathematics to remain dark mysteries.

  Maples and his wife had “at home” afternoon teas twice a month, the second and fourth Tuesdays, and quite soon these events became very popular with the students. His sister-in-law, who was invariably present, was certainly part of the reason, as was the supply of tea-cakes, scones, fruit tarts, and other assorted edibles.

  I attended several of these, and was soon struck by an indefinable feeling that something was not what it seemed. I say “indefinable” because I could not put my finger on just what it was that puzzled me about the events. I did not attach too much importance to it at the time. It was only later that it seemed significant. I will try to give you a word picture of the last of these events that I attended; the last one, as it happens, before the tragedy.

  It was Holmes who suggested that we attend Professor Maples’s tea that day. I had been trying to impress upon him a rudimentary understanding of the calculus, and he had demanded of me an example of some situation in which such knowledge might be of use. I outlined three problems, one from astronomy, involving the search for the planet Vulcan, said to lie inside the orbit of Mercury; one from physics, relating to determining magnetic lines of force when an electric current is applied; and one based on some thoughts of my own regarding Professor Malthus’s notions on population control.

  Holmes waved them all aside. “Yes, I am sure they are very interesting in their own way,” he said, “but, frankly, they do not concern me. It does not matter to me whether the Earth goes around the Sun or the Sun goes around the Earth, as long as whichever does whatever keeps on doing it reliably.”

  “You have no intellectual curiosity regarding the world around you?” I asked in some surprise.

  “On the contrary,” Holmes averred. “I have an immense curiosity, but I have no more interest in the Binomial Theorem than it has in me. I feel that I must confine my curiosity to those subjects that will be of some use to me in the future. There is so much to learn on the path I have chosen that I fear that I dare not venture very far along side roads.”

  “Ah!” I said. “I was not aware that you have started down your chosen road, or indeed that you have chosen a road down which to trod.”

  Holmes and
I were sitting in an otherwise unoccupied lecture hall, and at my words he rose and began pacing restlessly about the front of the room.

  “I wouldn’t say that I have chosen the road, exactly,” he said, “to continue with this, I suppose, inescapable metaphor. But I have an idea of the direction in which I wish to travel.” He made a point of his right forefinger and thrust it forcefully in front of him. “And I feel I must carefully limit my steps to paths that go in that direction.”

  “Is it that pile of erasers or the wastebasket at the end of the room at which you hope to arrive?” I asked, and then quickly raised a conciliatory hand. “No, no, I take it back. I’m glad you have formulated a goal in life, even if it doesn’t include the calculus. What is the direction of this city on a hill toward which you strive?”

  Holmes glowered at me for a moment and then looked thoughtful. “It’s still slightly vague,” he told me. “I can see it in outline only. A man,” he gathered his ideas, “A man should strive to do something larger than himself. To cure disease, or eradicate hunger or poverty or crime.”

  “Ah!” I said. “Noble thoughts.” I fancied that I could hear the lovely voice of Miss Lucy earnestly saying that, or something similar, to Holmes within the week. When a man is suddenly struck by noble ambitions it is usually a woman who does the striking. But I thought it would be wiser not to mention this deduction, which, at any rate, was rather tentative and not based on any hard evidence.

  “It’s Professor Maples’s afternoon tea day today,” Holmes commented, “and I had thought of going.”

  “Why so it is,” I said. “And so we should. And, in one last effort to interest you in the sort of detail for which you find no immediate utility, I call to your attention the shape of Lucinda Moys’ ear. Considered properly, it presents an interesting question. You should have an opportunity to observe it, perhaps even fairly closely, this afternoon.”