The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1

by Philip Hensher

  ‘That was the curious incident,’ remarked Sherlock Holmes.

  Four days later Holmes and I were again in the train, bound for Winchester to see the race for the Wessex Cup. Colonel Ross met us by appointment outside the station, and we drove in his drag to the course beyond the town. His face was grave, and his manner was cold in the extreme.

  ‘I have seen nothing of my horse,’ said he.

  ‘I suppose that you would know him when you saw him?’ asked Holmes.

  The colonel was very angry. ‘I have been on the turf for twenty years and never was asked such a question as that before,’ said he. ‘A child would know Silver Blaze with his white forehead and his mottled off-foreleg.’

  ‘How is the betting?’

  ‘Well, that is the curious part of it. You could have got fifteen to one yesterday, but the price has become shorter and shorter, until you can hardly get three to one now.’

  ‘Hum!’ said Holmes. ‘Somebody knows something, that is clear.’

  As the drag drew up in the enclosure near the grandstand I glanced at the card to see the entries.

  Wessex Plate [it ran] 50 sovs. each h ft with 1000 sovs. added, for four and five year olds. Second, £300. Third, £200. New course (one mile and five furlongs).

  1. Mr Heath Newton’s The Negro. Red cap. Cinnamon jacket.

  2. Colonel Wardlaw’s Pugilist. Pink cap. Blue and black jacket.

  3. Lord Backwater’s Desborough. Yellow cap and sleeves.

  4. Colonel Ross’s Silver Blaze. Black cap. Red jacket.

  5. Duke of Balmoral’s Iris. Yellow and black stripes.

  6. Lord Singleford’s Rasper. Purple cap. Black sleeves.

  ‘We scratched our other one and put all hopes on your word,’ said the colonel. ‘Why, what is that? Silver Blaze favourite?’

  ‘Five to four against Silver Blaze!’ roared the ring. ‘Five to four against Silver Blaze! Five to fifteen against Desborough! Five to four on the field!’

  ‘There are the numbers up,’ I cried. ‘They are all six there.’

  ‘All six there? Then my horse is running,’ cried the colonel in great agitation. ‘But I don’t see him. My colours have not passed.’

  ‘Only five have passed. This must be he.’

  As I spoke a powerful bay horse swept out from the weighing enclosure and cantered past us, bearing on its back the well-known black and red of the colonel.

  ‘That’s not my horse,’ cried the owner. ‘That beast has not a white hair upon its body. What is this that you have done, Mr Holmes?’

  ‘Well, well, let us see how he gets on,’ said my friend imperturbably. For a few minutes he gazed through my field-glass. ‘Capital! An excellent start!’ he cried suddenly. ‘There they are, coming round the curve!’

  From our drag we had a superb view as they came up the straight. The six horses were so close together that a carpet could have covered them, but halfway up the yellow of the Mapleton stable showed to the front. Before they reached us, however, Desborough’s bolt was shot, and the colonel’s horse, coming away with a rush, passed the post a good six lengths before its rival, the Duke of Balmoral’s Iris making a bad third.

  ‘It’s my race, anyhow,’ gasped the colonel, passing his hand over his eyes. ‘I confess that I can make neither head nor tail of it. Don’t you think that you have kept up your mystery long enough, Mr Holmes?’

  ‘Certainly, Colonel, you shall know everything. Let us all go round and have a look at the horse together. Here he is,’ he continued as we made our way into the weighing enclosure, where only owners and their friends find admittance. ‘You have only to wash his face and his leg in spirits of wine, and you will find that he is the same old Silver Blaze as ever.’

  ‘You take my breath away!’

  ‘I found him in the hands of a faker and took the liberty of running him just as he was sent over.’

  ‘My dear sir, you have done wonders. The horse looks very fit and well. It never went better in its life. I owe you a thousand apologies for having doubted your ability. You have done me a great service by recovering my horse. You would do me a greater still if you could lay your hands on the murderer of John Straker.’

  ‘I have done so,’ said Holmes quietly.

  The colonel and I stared at him in amazement. ‘You have got him! Where is he, then?’

  ‘He is here.’

  ‘Here! Where?’

  ‘In my company at the present moment.’

  The colonel flushed angrily. ‘I quite recognize that I am under obligations to you, Mr Holmes,’ said he, ‘but I must regard what you have just said as either a very bad joke or an insult.’

  Sherlock Holmes laughed. ‘I assure you that I have not associated you with the crime, Colonel,’ said he. ‘The real murderer is standing immediately behind you.’ He stepped past and laid his hand upon the glossy neck of the thoroughbred.

  ‘The horse!’ cried both the colonel and myself.

  ‘Yes, the horse. And it may lessen his guilt if I say that it was done in self-defence, and that John Straker was a man who was entirely unworthy of your confidence. But there goes the bell, and as I stand to win a little on this next race, I shall defer a lengthy explanation until a more fitting time.’

  We had the corner of a Pullman car to ourselves that evening as we whirled back to London, and I fancy that the journey was a short one to Colonel Ross as well as to myself as we listened to our companion’s narrative of the events which had occurred at the Dartmoor training-stables upon that Monday night, and the means by which he had unravelled them.

  ‘I confess,’ said he, ‘that any theories which I had formed from the newspaper reports were entirely erroneous. And yet there were indications there, had they not been overlaid by other details which concealed their true import. I went to Devonshire with the conviction that Fitzroy Simpson was the true culprit, although, of course, I saw that the evidence against him was by no means complete. It was while I was in the carriage, just as we reached the trainer’s house, that the immense significance of the curried mutton occurred to me. You may remember that I was distrait and remained sitting after you had all alighted. I was marvelling in my own mind how I could possibly have overlooked so obvious a clue.’

  ‘I confess,’ said the colonel, ‘that even now I cannot see how it helps us.’

  ‘It was the first link in my chain of reasoning. Powdered opium is by no means tasteless. The flavour is not disagreeable, but it is perceptible. Were it mixed with any ordinary dish the eater would undoubtedly detect it and would probably eat no more. A curry was exactly the medium which would disguise this taste. By no possible supposition could this stranger, Fitzroy Simpson, have caused curry to be served in the trainer’s family that night, and it is surely too monstrous a coincidence to suppose that he happened to come along with powdered opium upon the very night when a dish happened to be served which would disguise the flavour. That is unthinkable. Therefore Simpson becomes eliminated from the case, and our attention centres upon Straker and his wife, the only two people who could have chosen curried mutton for supper that night. The opium was added after the dish was set aside for the stable-boy, for the others had the same for supper with no ill effects. Which of them, then, had access to that dish without the maid seeing them?

  ‘Before deciding that question I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others. The Simpson incident had shown me that a dog was kept in the stables, and yet, though someone had been in and had fetched out a horse, he had not barked enough to arouse the two lads in the loft. Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.

  ‘I was already convinced, or almost convinced, that John Straker went down to the stables in the dead of the night and took out Silver Blaze. For what purpose? For a dishonest one, obviously, or why should he drug his own stable-boy? And yet I was at a loss to know why. There have been cases before now where trainers have made sure of great sums of mo
ney by laying against their own horses through agents and then preventing them from winning by fraud. Sometimes it is a pulling jockey. Sometimes it is some surer and subtler means. What was it here? I hoped that the contents of his pockets might help me to form a conclusion.

  ‘And they did so. You cannot have forgotten the singular knife which was found in the dead man’s hand, a knife which certainly no sane man would choose for a weapon. It was, as Dr Watson told us, a form of knife which is used for the most delicate operations known in surgery. And it was to be used for a delicate operation that night. You must know, with your wide experience of turf matters, Colonel Ross, that it is possible to make a slight nick upon the tendons of a horse’s ham, and to do it subcutaneously, so as to leave absolutely no trace. A horse so treated would develop a slight lameness, which would be put down to a strain in exercise or a touch of rheumatism, but never to foul play.’

  ‘Villain! Scoundrel!’ cried the colonel.

  ‘We have here the explanation of why John Straker wished to take the horse out on to the moor. So spirited a creature would have certainly roused the soundest of sleepers when it felt the prick of the knife. It was absolutely necessary to do it in the open air.’

  ‘I have been blind!’ cried the colonel. ‘Of course that was why he needed the candle and struck the match.’

  ‘Undoubtedly. But in examining his belongings I was fortunate enough to discover not only the method of the crime but even its motives. As a man of the world, Colonel, you know that men do not carry other people’s bills about in their pockets. We have most of us quite enough to do to settle our own. I at once concluded that Straker was leading a double life and keeping a second establishment. The nature of the bill showed that there was a lady in the case, and one who had expensive tastes. Liberal as you are with your servants, one can hardly expect that they can buy twenty-guinea walking dresses for their ladies. I questioned Mrs Straker as to the dress without her knowing it, and, having satisfied myself that it had never reached her, I made a note of the milliner’s address and felt that by calling there with Straker’s photograph I could easily dispose of the mythical Derbyshire.

  ‘From that time on all was plain. Straker had led out the horse to a hollow where his light would be invisible. Simpson in his flight had dropped his cravat, and Straker had picked it up – with some idea, perhaps, that he might use it in securing the horse’s leg. Once in the hollow, he had got behind the horse and had struck a light; but the creature, frightened at the sudden glare, and with the strange instinct of animals feeling that some mischief was intended, had lashed out, and the steel shoe had struck Straker full on the forehead. He had already, in spite of the rain, taken off his overcoat in order to do his delicate task, and so, as he fell, his knife gashed his thigh. Do I make it clear?’

  ‘Wonderful!’ cried the colonel. ‘Wonderful! You might have been there!’

  ‘My final shot was, I confess, a very long one. It struck me that so astute a man as Straker would not undertake this delicate tendon-nicking without a little practice. What could he practise on? My eyes fell upon the sheep, and I asked a question which, rather to my surprise, showed that my surmise was correct.

  ‘When I returned to London I called upon the milliner, who had recognized Straker as an excellent customer of the name of Derbyshire, who had a very dashing wife, with a strong partiality for expensive dresses. I have no doubt that this woman had plunged him over head and ears in debt, and so led him into this miserable plot.’

  ‘You have explained all but one thing,’ cried the colonel. ‘Where was the horse?’

  ‘Ah, it bolted, and was cared for by one of your neighbours. We must have an amnesty in that direction, I think. This is Clapham Junction, if I am not mistaken, and we shall be in Victoria in less than ten minutes. If you care to smoke a cigar in our rooms, Colonel, I shall be happy to give you any other details which might interest you.’

  Arthur Morrison

  Behind the Shade

  The street was the common East End street – two parallels of brick pierced with windows and doors. But at the end of one, where the builder had found a remnant of land too small for another six-roomer, there stood an odd box of a cottage, with three rooms and a wash-house. It had a green door with a well-blacked knocker round the corner; and in the lower window in front stood a ‘shade of fruit’ – a cone of waxen grapes and apples under a glass cover.

  Although the house was smaller than the others, and was built upon a remnant, it was always a house of some consideration. In a street like this mere independence of pattern gives distinction. And a house inhabited by one sole family makes a figure among houses inhabited by two or more, even though it be the smallest of all. And here the seal of respectability was set by the shade of fruit – a sign accepted in those parts. Now, when people keep a house to themselves, and keep it clean; when they neither stand at the doors nor gossip across back-fences; when, moreover, they have a well-dusted shade of fruit in the front window; and, especially, when they are two women who tell nobody their business: they are known at once for well-to-do, and are regarded with the admixture of spite and respect that is proper to the circumstances. They are also watched.

  Still, the neighbours knew the history of the Perkinses, mother and daughter, in its main features, with little disagreement: having told it to each other, filling in the details when occasion seemed to serve. Perkins, ere he died, had been a shipwright; and this was when the shipwrights were the aristocracy of the work-shops, and he that worked more than three or four days a week was counted a mean slave: it was long (in fact) before depression, strikes, iron plates, and collective blindness had driven shipbuilding to the Clyde. Perkins had laboured no harder than his fellows, had married a tradesman’s daughter, and had spent his money with freedom; and some while after his death his widow and daughter came to live in the small house, and kept a school for tradesmen’s little girls in a back room over the wash-house. But as the School Board waxed in power, and the tradesmen’s pride in regard thereunto waned, the attendance, never large, came down to twos and threes. Then Mrs Perkins met with her accident. A dweller in Stidder’s Rents overtook her one night, and, having vigorously punched her in the face and the breast, kicked her and jumped on her for five minutes as she lay on the pavement. (In the dark, it afterwards appeared, he had mistaken her for his mother.) The one distinct opinion the adventure bred in the street was Mrs Webster’s, the Little Bethelite, who considered it a judgment for sinful pride – for Mrs Perkins had been a Church-goer. But the neighbours never saw Mrs Perkins again. The doctor left his patient ‘as well as she ever would be,’ but bed-ridden and helpless. Her daughter was a scraggy, sharp-faced woman of thirty or so, whose black dress hung from her hips as from a wooden frame; and some people got into the way of calling her Mrs Perkins, seeing no other thus to honour. And meantime, the school had ceased, although Miss Perkins essayed a revival, and joined a Dissenting chapel to that end.

  Then, one day, a card appeared in the window, over the shade of fruit, with the legend ‘Pianoforte Lessons’. It was not approved by the street. It was a standing advertisement of the fact that the Perkinses had a piano, which others had not. It also revealed a grasping spirit on the part of people able to keep a house to themselves, with red curtains and a shade of fruit in the parlour window; who, moreover, had been able to give up keeping a school because of ill-health. The pianoforte lessons were eight-and-sixpence a quarter, two a week. Nobody was ever known to take them but the relieving officer’s daughter, and she paid sixpence a lesson, to see how she got on, and left off in three weeks. The card stayed in the window a fortnight longer, and none of the neighbours saw the cart that came in the night and took away the old cabinet piano with the channelled keys, that had been fourth-hand when Perkins bought it twenty years ago. Mrs Clark, the widow who sewed far into the night, may possibly have heard a noise and looked; but she said nothing if she did. There was no card in the window next morning, but the shade of fruit stoo
d primly respectable as ever. The curtains were drawn a little closer across, for some of the children playing in the street were used to flatten their faces against the lower panes, and to discuss the piano, the stuff-bottomed chairs, the antimacassars, the mantelpiece ornaments, and the loo table with the family Bible and the album on it.

  It was soon after this that the Perkinses altogether ceased from shopping – ceased, at any rate, in that neighbourhood. Trade with them had already been dwindling, and it was said that Miss Perkins was getting stingier than her mother – who had been stingy enough herself. Indeed, the Perkins demeanour began to change for the worse, to be significant of a miserly retirement and an offensive alienation from the rest of the street. One day the deacon called, as was his practice now and then; but, being invited no further than the doorstep, he went away in dudgeon, and did not return. Nor, indeed, was Miss Perkins seen again at chapel.

  Then there was a discovery. The spare figure of Miss Perkins was seldom seen in the streets, and then almost always at night; but on these occasions she was observed to carry parcels, of varying wrappings and shapes. Once, in broad daylight, with a package in newspaper, she made such haste past a shop-window where stood Mrs Webster and Mrs Jones, that she tripped on the broken sole of one shoe, and fell headlong. The newspaper broke away from its pins, and although the woman reached and recovered her parcel before she rose, it was plain to see that it was made up of cheap shirts, cut out ready for the stitching. The street had the news the same hour, and it was generally held that such a taking of the bread out of the mouths of them that wanted it by them that had plenty was a scandal and a shame, and ought to be put a stop to. And Mrs Webster, foremost in the setting right of things, undertook to find out whence the work came, and to say a few plain words in the right quarter.

  All this while nobody watched closely enough to note that the parcels brought in were fewer than the parcels taken out. Even a hand-truck, late one evening, went unremarked: the door being round the corner, and most people within. One morning, though, Miss Perkins, her best foot foremost, was venturing along a near street with an outgoing parcel – large and triangular and wrapped in white drugget – when the relieving officer turned the corner across the way.