“We have added one card to our hand, Watson, but it needs careful playing all the same. . . . We are getting some cards in our hands. . . . It’s not an easy one to play . . .” (“Shoscombe Old Place”).
“Now, Count, you are a card-player. When the other fellow has all the trumps, it saves time to throw down your hand. . . . That’s the hand I play from, I put it all upon the table. But one card is missing. It’s the king of diamonds” (“The Mazarin Stone”).
“I see the fall of the cards” (“The Bruce-Partington Plans”).
“We must see what further cards we have in our hands, and play them with decision” (The Hound of the Baskervilles).
However, notwithstanding a series of pastiches by bridge experts George Gooden and Frank Thomas (commencing with Sherlock Holmes, Bridge Detective) and Alfred Sheinwold in numerous bridge columns, this is the only Watsonian record of Holmes’s cardplaying.
65 In French, this means a “square party,” using the feminine adjective, meaning a party consisting of two men and two women. Holmes is being somewhat facetious here, for the party actually consisted of two male couples.
66 “Archie” was presumably the real name of “Duncan Ross.” Jerry Neal Williamson, in “The Sad Case of Young Stamford,” speculates that this Archie was the same Archie Stamford, the forger, later taken by Holmes and Watson near Farnham, on the borders of Surrey (“The Solitary Cyclist”) and also the young Stamford who introduced Watson to Holmes (in A Study in Scarlet).
67 Clay may have meant that he would swing back through the trapdoor, or he may have anticipated that he would be hanged for his crime. John Camden Hotten’s 1865 Slang Dictionary gives “to be hanged” as the contemporary meaning of “swing.” Hanging remained the principal method of British capital punishment until abolition of the death penalty in 1965. By 1861, however, reformers had limited the death penalty to persons convicted of murder, treason, arson in a royal dockyard, and piracy “with violence.” Is it possible that Clay had by this point murdered Jabez Wilson?
68 Slang: Handcuffs.
69 How the excavated earth was to be disposed of is not explained, points out Nathan L. Bengis, in “Sherlock Stays After School.” The large amount of dirt removed from the tunnel could not have been piled up in the cellar, for Wilson would surely have noticed it, nor could it have been deposited in the street without attracting considerable attention.
“Patience Moran” (who claims to have been the “girl of fourteen” employed by Wilson) states (in “Two Canonical Problems Solved”) that the earth was loaded into large empty cardboard boxes that were then taken away by a dray that delivered more cardboard boxes. Charles Scholefield speculates that the excavated earth might have been cast upon the neighbours’ lawns, but finds it unlikely that the neighbours would not mention Spaulding’s mound-building to his employer.
70 The notice to Wilson, which preceded the robbery, has occasioned much comment and speculation. Thomas L. Stix suggests that Clay may have terminated the league early to economize, but if he did so, then although Clay may have been the fourth smartest man in London, “he was doubtless the first most penurious.” Greg Darak, in “But Why Dissolve the League?,” suggests that Clay’s need to establish his superiority to the fatuous Wilson, not economy, caused Clay to publish the notice. It may be that Clay had so little regard for Wilson that he could not conceive that the sheeplike pawnbroker would complain to anyone of his loss.
71 It is unknown how the criminals hoped to remove the bullion, the weight of which must have been enormous. A. Carson Simpson estimates that each of the cases would weigh almost 60 pounds, and while removal of the boxes from the building, one at a time, would not have been difficult, the story does not disclose any means by which the criminals planned to transport over 900 pounds of loot.
Charles Scholefield suggests that the criminals intended to use carriages from McFarlane’s Depot, noted as nearby. The tunnel may have connected not only Wilson’s but also McFarlane’s with the bank, and the carriages could also have been used to carry earth and broken bricks and other spoil from the tunnel. David H. Galerstein, in “The Real Loot,” proposes a more radical solution: Clay and his confederate were not after the gold but rather currency and gems, with which the vaults were undoubtedly filled. These smaller, lighter items would pose neither transportation nor disposition problems.
72 In Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry Wotton remarks: “The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.” Holmes confessed in The Sign of Four, written almost simultaneously with Dorian Gray: “ ‘My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulation. But I abhor the dull routine of existence.’ ”
73 Correctly, “L’homme n’est rien, l’oeuvre tout.” “The man is nothing, the work is everything.”
A CASE OF IDENTITY1
As in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” no crime is actually committed in “A Case of Identity,” and scholars wonder why Watson chose to include it among the sixty published cases out of the more than 1,000 that Holmes handled. Could the villain be more wicked than the events reveal? While the near-comic Mary Sutherland, the whispering Hosmer Angel, and the strident James Windibank are only minor characters on Watson’s stage, we are reminded that a single woman of Holmes’s era can get along quite nicely on £60 per year. The “gasfitters’ ball,” a grand social event for the plumbing trade at which Mary meets her fate, has inspired many Sherlockian societies to hold similar galas. Here, too, we first see the masterful side of Holmes, as he hands out punishment and withholds information as he alone sees fit.
MY DEAR FELLOW,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.2 We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”3
“And yet I am not convinced of it,” I answered. “The cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.”
“A certain selection and discretion must be used in producing a realistic effect,” remarked Holmes. “This is wanting in the police report, where more stress is laid, perhaps, upon the platitudes of the magistrate than upon the details, which to an observer contain the vital essence of the whole matter. Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.”
I smiled and shook my head. “I can quite understand your thinking so,” I said. “Of course, in your position of unofficial adviser and helper to everybody who is absolutely puzzled, throughout three continents,4 you are brought in contact with all that is strange and bizarre. But here”—I picked up the morning paper from the ground—“let us put it to a practical test. Here is the first heading upon which I come. ‘A husband’s cruelty to his wife.’ There is half a column of print, but I know without reading it that it is all perfectly familiar to me. There is, of course, the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of writers could invent nothing more crude.”5
“Q.E.D.
‘What’s up wi’ Sal?’ ‘Aint yer ’erd? She’s married agin!’ ”
Phil May, Punch Magazine, September 1, 1894
“Indeed, your example is an unfortunate one for your argument,” said Holmes, taking the pap
er and glancing his eye down it. “This is the Dundas separation case, and, as it happens, I was engaged in clearing up some small points in connection with it. The husband was a teetotaler, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife,6 which, you will allow, is not an action likely to occur to the imagination of the average story-teller. Take a pinch of snuff,7 Doctor, and acknowledge that I have scored over you in your example.”
He held out his snuffbox of old gold, with a great amethyst in the centre of the lid. Its splendour was in such contrast to his homely ways and simple life that I could not help commenting upon it.
“Ah,” said he, “I forgot that I had not seen you for some weeks. It is a little souvenir8 from the King of Bohemia in return for my assistance in the case of the Irene Adler papers.”9
“And the ring?” I asked, glancing at a remarkable brilliant10 which sparkled upon his finger.
“It was from the reigning family of Holland, though the matter in which I served them was of such delicacy that I cannot confide it even to you, who have been good enough to chronicle one or two of my little problems.”
“And have you any on hand just now?” I asked with interest.
“Some ten or twelve, but none which presents any feature of interest.11 They are important, you understand, without being interesting. Indeed, I have found that it is usually in unimportant matters that there is a field for the observation, and for the quick analysis of cause and effect which gives the charm to an investigation. The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive. In these cases, save for one rather intricate matter which has been referred to me from Marseilles,12 there is nothing which presents any features of interest. It is possible, however, that I may have something better before very many minutes are over, for this is one of my clients, or I am much mistaken.”
He had risen from his chair, and was standing between the parted blinds, gazing down into the dull, neutral-tinted London street. Looking over his shoulder I saw that on the pavement opposite there stood a large woman with a heavy fur boa round her neck, and a large curling red feather in a broad-brimmed hat which was tilted in a coquettish Duchess-of-Devonshire13 fashion over her ear. From under this great panoply she peeped up in a nervous, hesitating fashion at our windows, while her body oscillated backwards and forwards, and her fingers fidgeted with her glove buttons. Suddenly, with a plunge, as of the swimmer who leaves the bank, she hurried across the road, and we heard the sharp clang of the bell.
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
Thomas Gainsborough, 1784
“I have seen those symptoms before,” said Holmes, throwing his cigarette into the fire. “Oscillation upon the pavement always means an affaire de coeur.14 She would like advice, but is not sure that the matter is not too delicate for communication. And yet even here we may discriminate. When a woman has been seriously wronged by a man she no longer oscillates, and the usual symptom is a broken bell wire. Here we may take it that there is a love matter, but that the maiden is not so much angry as perplexed, or grieved. But here she comes in person to resolve our doubts.”
As he spoke there was a tap at the door, and the boy in buttons15 entered to announce Miss Mary Sutherland, while the lady herself loomed behind his small black figure like a full-sailed merchant-man16 behind a tiny pilot boat. Sherlock Holmes welcomed her with the easy courtesy for which he was remarkable, and, having closed the door, and bowed her into an arm chair, he looked her over in the minute and yet abstracted fashion which was peculiar to him.
“Do you not find,” he said, “that with your short sight it is a little trying to do so much typewriting?”
“I did at first,” she answered, “but now I know where the letters are without looking.” Then, suddenly realizing the full purport of his words, she gave a violent start, and looked up with fear and astonishment upon her broad, good-humoured face. “You’ve heard about me, Mr. Holmes,” she cried, “else how could you know all that?”
“Sherlock Holmes welcomed her.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1891
“Never mind,” said Holmes, laughing; “it is my business to know things. Perhaps I have trained myself to see what others overlook. If not, why should you come to consult me?”
“I came to you, sir, because I heard of you from Mrs. Etherege, whose husband you found so easy when the police and every one had given him up for dead. Oh, Mr. Holmes, I wish you would do as much for me. I’m not rich, but still I have a hundred a year17 in my own right, besides the little that I make by the machine, and I would give it all to know what has become of Mr. Hosmer Angel.”
“Why did you come to consult me in such a hurry?”
Artist unknown, Chicago Inter-Ocean, September 5, 1891
“Why did you come away to consult me in such a hurry?” asked Sherlock Holmes, with his finger-tips together and his eyes to the ceiling.
Again a startled look came over the somewhat vacuous face of Miss Mary Sutherland. “Yes, I did bang out of the house,” she said, “for it made me angry to see the easy way in which Mr. Windibank—that is, my father—took it all. He would not go to the police, and he would not go to you, and so at last, as he would do nothing and kept on saying that there was no harm done, it made me mad, and I just on with my things and came right away to you.”
“Your father,” said Holmes, “your step-father, surely, since the name is different.”
“Yes, my step-father. I call him father, though it sounds funny, too, for he is only five years and two months older than myself.”
“And your mother is alive?”
“Oh, yes, mother is alive and well. I wasn’t best pleased, Mr. Holmes, when she married again so soon after father’s death, and a man who was nearly fifteen years younger than herself. Father was a plumber in the Tottenham Court Road, and he left a tidy business behind him, which mother carried on with Mr. Hardy,18 the foreman; but when Mr. Windibank came he made her sell the business, for he was very superior, being a traveller in wines. They got £4700 for the goodwill and interest, which wasn’t near as much as father could have got if he had been alive.”
I had expected to see Sherlock Holmes impatient under this rambling and inconsequential narrative, but, on the contrary, he had listened with the greatest concentration of attention.
“Your own little income,” he asked, “does it come out of the business?”
“Oh, no, sir. It is quite separate, and was left me by my uncle Ned in Auckland.19 It is in New Zealand20 Stock, paying 4½ per cent. Two thousand five hundred pounds was the amount, but I can only touch the interest.”
Tottenham Court Road.
Victorian and Edwardian London
“You interest me extremely,” said Holmes. “And since you draw so large a sum as a hundred a year, with what you earn into the bargain, you no doubt travel a little and indulge yourself in every way. I believe that a single lady can get on very nicely upon an income of about sixty pounds.21
“I could do with much less than that, Mr. Holmes, but you understand that as long as I live at home I don’t wish to be a burden to them, and so they have the use of the money just while I am staying with them. Of course that is only just for the time. Mr. Windibank draws my interest every quarter, and pays it over to mother, and I find that I can do pretty well with what I earn at typewriting. It brings me twopence a sheet, and I can often do from fifteen to twenty sheets in a day.22
“You have made your position very clear to me,” said Holmes. “This is my friend, Dr. Watson, before whom you can speak as freely as before myself. Kindly tell us now all about your connection with Mr. Hosmer Angel.”
Contemporary typewriter advertisement.
Victorian Advertisements
A flush stole over Miss Sutherland’s face, and she picked nervously at the fringe of her jacket. “I met him first a
t the gasfitters’23 ball,” she said. “They used to send father tickets when he was alive, and then afterwards they remembered us, and sent them to mother. Mr. Windibank did not wish us to go. He never did wish us to go anywhere. He would get quite mad if I wanted so much as to join a Sunday-school treat. But this time I was set on going, and I would go; for what right had he to prevent? He said the folk were not fit for us to know, when all father’s friends were to be there. And he said that I had nothing fit to wear, when I had my purple plush24 that I had never so much as taken out of the drawer. At last when nothing else would do he went off to France upon the business of the firm, but we went, mother and I, with Mr. Hardy, who used to be our foreman, and it was there I met Mr. Hosmer Angel.”
“At the Gasfitter’s Ball.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1891
“I suppose,” said Holmes, “that when Mr. Windibank came back from France, he was very annoyed at your having gone to the ball.”
“Oh, well, he was very good about it. He laughed, I remember, and shrugged his shoulders, and said there was no use denying anything to a woman, for she would have her way.”
“I see. Then at the gasfitters’ ball you met, as I understand, a gentleman called Mr. Hosmer Angel.”
“Yes, sir. I met him that night, and he called next day to ask if we had got home all safe, and after that we met him—that is to say, Mr. Holmes, I met him twice for walks, but after that father came back again, and Mr. Hosmer Angel could not come to the house any more.”
“No?”
“Well, you know, father didn’t like anything of the sort. He wouldn’t have any visitors if he could help it, and he used to say that a woman should be happy in her own family circle. But then, as I used to say to mother, a woman wants her own circle to begin with, and I had not got mine yet.”
“But how about Mr. Hosmer Angel? Did he make no attempt to see you?”
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