“I wrote it to bring you here.”
“You wrote it? There was no one on earth outside the Joint who knew the secret of the dancing men. How came you to write it?”
“What one man can invent another can discover,” said Holmes. “There is a cab coming to convey you to Norwich, Mr. Slaney. But, meanwhile, you have time to make some small reparation for the injury you have wrought. Are you aware that Mrs. Hilton Cubitt has herself lain under grave suspicion of the murder of her husband, and that it was only my presence here and the knowledge which I happened to possess, which has saved her from the accusation? The least that you owe her is to make it clear to the whole world that she was in no way directly or indirectly responsible for his tragic end.”
“I ask nothing better,” said the American. “I guess the very best case I can make for myself is the absolute naked truth.”
“It is my duty to warn you that it will be used against you,” cried the Inspector, with the magnificent fair-play of the British criminal law.22
Slaney shrugged his shoulders.
The composure of despair.
Frederic Dorr Steele, Collier’s, 1903
“I’ll chance that,” said he. “First of all, I want you gentlemen to understand that I have known this lady since she was a child. There were seven of us in a gang in Chicago, and Elsie’s father was the boss of the Joint.23 He was a clever man, was old Patrick. It was he who invented that writing,24 which would pass as a child’s scrawl unless you just happened to have the key to it. Well, Elsie learned some of our ways; but she couldn’t stand the business, and she had a bit of honest money of her own, so she gave us all the slip and got away to London. She had been engaged to me, and she would have married me, I believe, if I had taken over another profession; but she would have nothing to do with anything on the cross. It was only after her marriage to this Englishman that I was able to find out where she was. I wrote to her, but got no answer. After that I came over, and, as letters were no use, I put my messages where she could read them.
“Well, I have been here a month now. I lived in that farm, where I had a room down below, and could get in and out every night, and no one the wiser. I tried all I could to coax Elsie away. I knew that she read the messages, for once she wrote an answer under one of them. Then my temper got the better of me, and I began to threaten her. She sent me a letter then, imploring me to go away, and saying that it would break her heart if any scandal should come upon her husband. She said that she would come down when her husband was asleep at three in the morning, and speak with me through the end window, if I would go away afterwards and leave her in peace. She came down and brought money with her, trying to bribe me to go.25 This made me mad, and I caught her arm and tried to pull her through the window. At that moment in rushed the husband with his revolver in his hand. Elsie had sunk down upon the floor, and we were face to face. I was heeled26 also, and I held up my gun to scare him off and let me get away. He fired and missed me. I pulled off almost at the same instant, and down he dropped. I made away across the garden, and as I went I heard the window shut behind me.27 That’s God’s truth, gentlemen, every word of it, and I heard no more about it until that lad came riding up with a note which made me walk in here, like a jay,28 and give myself into your hands.”
A cab had driven up whilst the American had been talking. Two uniformed policemen sat inside. Inspector Martin rose and touched his prisoner on the shoulder.
“It is time for us to go.”
“Can I see her first?”
“No, she is not conscious. Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I only hope that if ever again I have an important case I shall have the good fortune to have you by my side.”
We stood at the window and watched the cab drive away. As I turned back my eye caught the pellet of paper which the prisoner had tossed upon the table. It was the note with which Holmes had decoyed him. “See if you can read it, Watson,” said he, with a smile.
It contained no word, but this little line of dancing men:
“If you use the code which I have explained,” said Holmes, “you will find that it simply means ‘Come here at once.’29 I was convinced that it was an invitation which he would not refuse, since he could never imagine that it could come from anyone but the lady. And so, my dear Watson, we have ended by turning the dancing men to good when they have so often been the agents of evil, and I think that I have fulfilled my promise of giving you something unusual for your notebook. Three-forty is our train, and I fancy we should be back in Baker Street for dinner.”
Only one word of epilogue. The American, Abe Slaney, was condemned to death at the winter assizes at Norwich; but his penalty was changed to penal servitude in consideration of mitigating circumstances,30 and the certainty that Hilton Cubitt had fired the first shot. Of Mrs. Hilton Cubitt I only know that I have heard she recovered entirely, and that she still remains a widow, devoting her whole life to the care of the poor and to the administration of her husband’s estate.
THE DANCING MEN ALPHABET
“THE FACT that a code of such transparent simplicity baffled the Master for such a time has long been a matter of wonder,” Ed. S. Woodhead notes in “In Defense of Dr. Watson.” Woodhead’s explanation? That the “dancing men” cipher was in fact far more complex than the one presented by Watson, and that Watson, in writing up the story, vastly simplified the code, substituting it with one that was just difficult enough to stump the reader but not too difficult to explain.
Fletcher Pratt agrees with this view, calling the dancing men cipher “far too simple for practical use, with its single unvarying character for each letter, [and] it is also far too complex for a simple substitution cipher.” In fact, in the figures of the dancing men themselves—and the ways in which they might be positioned—he sees myriad cryptic opportunities that are never utilised or discussed. Looking more closely at the code shown in Slaney’s various messages, Pratt considers the “various leg possibilities” and the “various arm possibilities” and comes up with 784 versions of dancing men that might have been used as components of the cipher. In addition, he observes, “D, G and T show the little figures standing on their heads, and T is simply an E in reverse. Obviously the meaning of any one of the 784 characters can be changed by turning it upside down, which doubles the total, giving 1,568 characters.”
By stunning coincidence, writes Pratt, the seventeenth-century cryptographers Antoine and Bonaventure Rossignol created for Louis XIV a “Great Cipher” which, after the Rossignols’ deaths, remained unsolved until Étienne Bazeries cracked it in the 1890s. (Pratt suggests that Holmes may have given Bazeries assistance on one of his trips to France.) The “Great Cipher,” was a “homophonic substitution cipher,” in which substitutions of strings of numbers were made for syllables, not letters. When all the permutations of the Great Cipher’s characters were added up, according to Pratt, the total was precisely 1,568.
Certainly the two codes must have been related in some way, if not in every way. “We have good reason to believe,” writes Pratt, “that it [the similarity of combinations] was not accidental; that with the connivance of Holmes, Watson deliberately eliminated from the record the cipher used by Abe Slaney . . . and inserted in its place this other.”
The completion of the alphabet of the “dancing men” has been attempted by numerous cryptologists and enthusiasts. The definitive work, however, is likely that of Michael J. Sare, who brilliantly devised a simple method for constructing and memorising a “dancing men” grid to encode and decode messages. Sare argues that if the code was to be used by a rough bunch of criminals, it needed to be easily constructed on principles readily memorised, requiring no codebooks or “cribs.” Sare’s “grid” follows:
1 “The Dancing Men” was published in the Strand Magazine in December 1903 and in Collier’s Weekly on December 5, 1903.
2 The 1886 discovery of a phenomenally rich, forty-mile vein of gold in the Transvaal’s Witwatersrand (or the Rand, the area of land between th
e Vaal and Olifants Rivers) brought to South Africa a rapidly expanding economy and hundreds of thousands of foreign white settlers, known as Uitlanders (outlanders). By 1898, according to A. N. Wilson, a staggering £15 million worth of gold was being taken from the mines every year. In the previous few decades, Britain had annexed much of South Africa, including the Transvaal in 1877, though in 1881 the province’s independence had been restored. Still, British Uitlanders made up a large portion of the Rand’s population, earning higher wages and garnering greater power than did the unskilled African migrant workers. British speculators, eager to cash in on the boom, traded enthusiastically in South African securities; the British government, meanwhile, was keen to claim the Transvaal for its own. Continued tension between Great Britain and the resistant Transvaal government—which, despite collecting enormous amounts of taxes from the Uitlanders, began depriving them of the vote, public education, and other political rights—led to the onset of the Boer War in 1899, one year after this conversation between Watson and Holmes is thought to have occurred. Britain would claim victory in the Boer War in 1902. See “The Blanched Soldier” for further discussion of the conflict.
3 The placement of the chalk mark is consistent with Watson’s right-handedness (see “The Yellow Face”). However, it is remarkable that a man who holds his left arm in a “stiff, unnatural manner” (A Study in Scarlet) has sufficient flexibility to manipulate a billiard cue.
4 It is tempting to consider this to be Watson’s club, for Watson was an eminently “clubbable” man, and to identify it as the United Service Club, founded in May 1831 as the general military club for naval and military officers. Ralph Nevill, in his London Clubs: Their History and Treasures, observes that the club had the nickname of “Cripplegate”—“from the prevailing advanced years and infirmity of its members . . . The United Service contains many interesting pictures, [including a portrait of] Major-General Charles G. Gordon, by Dickinson, from a photograph. . . . In the upper billiard-room is a picture of the Battle of Trafalgar, the frame of which is wood from the timbers of the Victory.” The United Service Club faces Pall Mall, and Watson must have joined it after the events of “The Greek Interpreter,” for he would surely otherwise have mentioned the proximity of “his” club to that of Mycroft. Was Thurston also a military man? Or was the “club” Thurston’s?
5 Ralph Hodgson, in a long letter to Christopher Morley, reprinted in the Baker Street Journal, reports that John Thurston of 78 Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, started making “superior” billiard tables sometime prior to 1814. A few years later he moved to 14 Catherine Street, The Strand. In 1869, Messrs. Thurston & Coy, still on Catherine Street, were one of the chief table-makers in England.
6 That Watson was, apparently, not to be trusted with his own money may have been rooted in his family’s profligate tendencies, according to S. C. Roberts’s Doctor Watson. Watson himself tells Holmes in “Shoscombe Old Place” that he spends half of his army pension betting on racing. In addition, writes Roberts, “Watson père had gambled on his luck as an Australian prospector—and won; his elder son gambled on life—and lost. . . . It is evident, however, that Holmes kept the watchful eye of an elder brother upon Watson’s gambling propensities.” Roberts’s familial observations can hardly be accepted as fact, however, for all that is definitely known of the brother is that he died of drink, and all that is known of the father is that he left a gold watch as a legacy (The Sign of Four). Indeed, rejecting the image of Watson as a man reckless with his funds, D. Martin Dakin suggests instead that the doctor may have temporarily broken the lock or mislaid his own desk key, or that his desk simply wasn’t the kind that locked.
7 In searching out the geographical locations mentioned in the case, numerous writers identify various residences belonging to various members of the Cubitt family in Norfolk, where the last name is prevalent. Philip Weller, however, points out in “The Norfolk Dance Hall and Other Locations: The Geography of ‘The Dancing Men,’ ” that it is illogical to accept (as almost all scholars do) that while Watson routinely changed the names of Holmes’s clients, Watson did not do so here. “It is more logical to accept that Watson, or his agent, used the name of Cubitt as a means of disguise precisely because it was, and still is, so common in Norfolk.”
8 Riding Thorpe in the first mention in the Strand Magazine; in other texts, Ridling Thorp or plain Ridling. It appears from the English book edition that the text given is the correct one.
9 Victoria asssumed the throne in 1837, celebrating her Golden Jubilee in 1887 and her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Most chronologists accept Cubitt’s reference as being to the latter event (see Chronological Table). Not just a commemoration of Victoria’s reign, the Diamond Jubilee was a final, grand tribute to the dominance of the British Empire, which at that time spanned over a fifth of the globe and seemed nearly invincible. Of the festivities themselves, Simon Schama writes that 50,000 troops—Gurkhas, Canadians, Jamaicans—paraded through London in tribute to the queen: “The tabloid imperialist press (above all, the Daily Mail) had been ecstatic; the crowds drunk with top-nation elation. Up and down the country, on 22 June schoolchildren were given the day off, herded into parks and, courtesy of the queen, given two buns and an orange. . . . The queen, now very lame, conceded just enough to the delirium to decorate her black satin with Cape ostrich feathers.”
10 The name “Hilton” is replaced with “John” in Collier’s Weekly. Shades of the “James/John” slip of “The Man with the Twisted Lip”!
11 “Holmes and Watson do not seem to have appreciated the urgency involved,” chides Philip Weller in The Company Canon: The Adventure of the Dancing Men. Weller suggests that a mail train could have taken them to Norwich, depositing them there at 2:00 in the morning, after which they might have ridden a carriage to the manor.
12 Despite Holmes’s evident dismay at having been too late to save his client, scholars such as Ian McQueen say that Holmes has no one but himself to blame. McQueen calls Holmes’s demeanour the previous evening “lackadaisacal,” especially considering that the detective claimed to have “expected” the alarming contents of Cubitt’s message (and later, upon arrival at the manor, admits to having “anticipated” the unfortunate turn of events). “If Holmes had been honest with himself . . . ,” McQueen sternly declares, “he might have confessed with some justification that he had suffered the greatest blow to have befallen him in his career. It was unquestionably a blow for which, owing to his gross negligence, he was personally responsible.” “The Five Orange Pips” is a similar case in which Holmes failed to warn his client adequately, to the client’s fatal detriment.
13 Although the word is “blank” in all other published texts, the word “black” seems more likely to be correct.
14 This historical region, encompassing the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and parts of Essex, has deep Anglo-Saxon roots; it was settled in the late fifth century by immigrants from northern Germany and Scandinavia. The wealth and power of the East Anglian kings was demonstrated with the 1939 discovery at Sutton Hoo (in Suffolk) of a seventh-century burial ship, intended to carry its “owner” to the afterlife. Laden with treasures including forty-one pieces of solid gold, the ship is thought to have been meant for the East Anglian king Raedwald, who died in 624.
15 The German Ocean, before the First World War, was an alternative name for the North Sea, and on maps of this period “The North Sea or German Ocean” was generally given.
16 A portico is an archway supported by columns.
17 That is, a lawn devoted to the play of lawn tennis, so-called to distinguish it from “real tennis,” a twelfth-century, racquetball-type game of French origin that was played indoors. Lawn tennis, a product of the Victorian age, gained rapidly in popularity among the fashionable set after Major Walter Winfield created an outdoor version of real tennis in 1874, utilising a new rubber ball that could bounce on grass. He introduced his new game at a lawn party in Wales and dubbed it “sphairistike” (from sp
aira, the Greek word for ball), but, as no one could remember—let alone pronounce!—such a name, the alternative of “lawn tennis” was suggested, and it stuck. The All England Croquet Club at Wimbledon held its first lawn tennis championship, restricted to men only, in 1877. (Women got their first Wimbledon tournament in 1884). Its inaugural champion was Spencer Gore, a surveyor, cricket aficionado, and skilled athlete, who, despite his newly won laurels, described tennis as “a monotonous game compared with others.” The Lawn Tennis Association was founded in 1888.
18 Encyclopædia Britannica (9th Ed.) provides additional assistance to budding cryptographers: “All the single letters must be a, I, or O. Letters occurring together are ee, oo, ff, ll, ss, &c [which stands for “etc.”]. The commonest words of two letters are (roughly arranged in the order of their frequency) of, to, in, it, is, be, he, by, or, as, at, an, so, &c. The commonest words of three letters are the and and (in great excess), for, are, but, all, not, &c.” For a further tutorial, Britannica points readers to Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 story “The Gold-Bug,” in which William Legrand, after deconstructing a complicated cipher, is able to unearth a fortune in buried treasure.
19 “This dictum implies that the five-letter word must be one of these alternatives,” Colin Prestige writes in “Agents of Evil.” “Never! A simple mental exercise reveals more than 30 alternatives, some possible and some improbable.” For example, such disparate words as “seven,” “repel,” “renew,” “jewel,” “sewer,” and “deter” all fit the requirements.
20 Richard Warshauer identifies “Hargreave” as Thomas Byrnes, superintendent of the New York Police Department in 1892, who, from 1882 to 1892, was the renowned (and first) chief of the brand-new Detective Bureau of the NYPD. In 1898, Byrnes retired from the police department amidst charges of corruption (though none against Byrnes himself) and went to work for an insurance company. “There can be little doubt that in 1898 he was still as knowledgeable about the world of crime as he was in 1886 when he wrote [the classic Professional Criminals of America]. What could be more natural than for Holmes to have consulted a man so well acquainted with ‘the annals of crime’?” During the height of the Whitechapel murders that terrorized London in 1888, Byrnes was quoted in the British paper, The Star, on the “commonsense way” in which he would pursue Jack the Ripper, criticising the work of Scotland Yard. He concluded with the brag that if he had conducted the investigation, “[t]he murderer would have been caught long ago.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 2) (The Annotated Books) Page 14