19 Watson, anxious to emphasise his rôle, added himself; the manuscript reads, “one old hound like myself.”
20 Watson modestly suppresses his own observations, to heighten the drama of Holmes’s later detection: “I remember that it crossed my mind as I looked at him that it was impossible to imagine anyone more unlike the man of affairs whom one would expect to find as the agent of such a man as the Duke, a powerful nobleman.” Perhaps he realised that his observations were the result of hindsight.
21 Another excision made by Watson to conceal the location: The manuscript reads, “the main road between Manchester and Buxton.”
22 Surely, as D. Martin Dakin comments, this constable’s job was a peculiar (if not pointless) one. “[W]hat was the idea of having a policeman on duty all night on a lonely road in the heart of the country,” marvels Dakin, “where apparently no one was likely to pass? It seems an extraordinary waste of the poor man’s time and energy. What was he supposed to be doing? He wasn’t even patrolling the roads, just standing still in an isolated spot for six hours at night!”
23 Watson has deleted an uncharacteristic remark of concern expressed by Holmes; the manuscript continues here: “That unfortunate Dr. Huxtable will be seriously ill, I fear. Do you hear him pacing up and down the passage?”
24 Described in the manuscript as “to the Black Gill Hills.”
25 “Twelve miles” in the manuscript.
26 Omitted from the manuscript is “Here eight miles north is a simple house, Lower Gill House, now untenanted.”
27 Watson has deleted from the manuscript an artistic allusion, “the artist whose pigments are set out, and who has only to blend them into the expression of his own soul.”
28 Rosemary Michaud, in an article entitled “Who Dung It? A Trifling Manure-graph,” suggests that “sheep-marks” was Watson’s polite way of referring to sheep dung. Holmes, the scion of country squires, Michaud argues, surely could distinguish horse droppings from cow manure. When Holmes later called himself a “blind beetle,” he was referring to his overlooking the obvious lack of cow manure where there were “cattle-tracks”—and perhaps the presence of horse droppings?
29 Not surprisingly, there were dozens of tyre manufacturers producing a variety of tyres at the time of “The Priory School.” Holmes obviously limited his knowledge to the most popular brands and models.
30 Although the first patent for a pneumatic (air-filled) tyre was taken out by Robert William Thomson in England in 1845, it was not until Scottish veterinarian John Boyd Dunlop sought to improve the performance of his son’s tricycle—patenting the first pneumatic bicycle tyre in 1888—that air-filled tyres began to supersede solid rubber tyres in practicality and popularity. In 1889 Dunlop began manufacturing and marketing his invention, registering his company as Byrne Brothers India Rubber Company, Ltd., in 1896, and the Dunlop Rubber Company, Ltd., in 1900. He began manufacturing automobile tyres in 1906.
31 The first pneumatic tyres had no treads. As tyres become fully moulded, plain circumferential ribs were added to prevent lateral skidding. The Palmer tyre had such a tread.
Dunlop historian Eric Tompkins reports that by 1891, marketing departments had seen a prime opportunity presenting itself on the surface of the tyre, and they began adding the maker’s name as a central feature of the tread. The logo was typically surrounded by the ribs. Therefore, “the cyclist had the joy of leaving a trail of DUNLOP DUNLOP DUNLOP along the road, in the soft mud on wet days and in the dust on dry ones. . . . And so,” Tompkins remarks, “an era of fancy tread patterns started.” Could it be that Holmes differentiated the two types of tyres not by their treads, but by their logos? No wonder that he was “familiar with forty-two different impressions”!
32 For a discussion of the problem of the tyre-tracks, see “Which Way Did the Bicycle Travel?” page 973.
33 Curiously, Watson records himself smoking cigarettes only in one other adventure, namely, The Hound of the Baskervilles, generally dated in the twentieth century along with “The Priory School” (see Chronological Table). Was cigarette smoking a late-acquired and short-lived vice for Watson? Or was the doctor instead unable to embrace the rebellious image that cigarettes conveyed? (Holmes, ever the bohemian, smoked cigars, cigarettes, and various pipes.) According to Iain Gately’s Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization, those who smoked cigarettes once fared poorly when compared with those who favoured pipes and cigars; as Gately puts it, “cigarette smokers were naturally inferior specimens and best shunned.” Oscar Wilde, who smoked cigarettes in order to shock people, played upon this image of perversity in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), drawling, “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves me satisfied. What more can one want?” See also “The Golden Pince-Nez,” note 15, for a discussion of the history of cigarette smoking in Victorian England.
34 Watson cuts Holmes’s refreshingly naive statement that follows in the manuscript: “If it were with someone then it was probably with someone whom he knew and trusted. A lad of that age does not willingly set out alone in the dark with a stranger.”
35 A dealer in corn, wheat, and other grains.
36 In “The Hoof-Marks in ‘The Priory School’ ” S. Tupper Bigelow contends that the walk of a horse is more correctly depicted in dots as:
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
the canter as
. . . .
. . . .
and the gallop more or less as above.
37 Curiously, the manuscript reads, “Two men in the dogcart, so far as I could see. Wilder and Hayes—a curious couple to run together.” Is this evidence of Holmes’s failing vision? He obviously corrected himself when he turned and saw Wilder behind him.
38 Watson apparently concluded that a struck match was more dramatic, for the manuscript reads, “The lamp still gleamed from the bicycle. Holmes slipped it off, and turned it towards the machine. I heard him chuckle in the darkness as the narrow tunnel of vivid light fell upon the patch of a Dunlop tyre.”
39 Holmes meant that the duke should write the name of his banking company across the face of the cheque between two lines provided for that purpose, thereby limiting deposit to the particular bank (similar to a limiting endorsement).
40 This was also the bank of Neville St. Clair (“The Man with the Twisted Lip”) and Arthur Cadogan West (“The Bruce-Partington Plans”), as well as that of Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1918 it merged into Lloyds Bank, now Lloyds TSB Bank.
41 Why £12,000 and not the previously mentioned £6,000? T. S. Blakeney suggests that the duke might have felt Watson deserved a reward as well, whereas most other commentators regard this view as naive and argue that the duke intended to bribe Holmes into silence.
42 Most American statutes and, until 1957, British law proscribed “felony murder,” a killing committed while a felony or “serious crime of violence” is being perpetrated. Because Wilder was clearly an accessory to the felony, he would be guilty of the murder as well.
43 Earlier, in a remark eventually cut by Watson from the manuscript, the duke remarks, “The estates are all entailed and he was aware that even if I wished I could not divert them from the direct succession.”
44 A restricted course of descent or inheritance—for example, a restriction that property could only be left to the eldest child.
45 To “tax,” in this sense, meaning to call to account or take to task, to accuse.
46 One may wonder how “voluntary” a confession may be said to be when one is “taxed . . . with the deed” by one’s father.
47 One might argue that, no matter how persuasive the duke was, Reuben Hayes would believe it in his best interest not to keep quiet. As T. S. Blakeney observes, a man facing the gallows would be inclined to bring others down with him; in particular, the duke, whom Hayes disliked extremely, would certainly not escape unscathed. “We presume,” writes Blakeney, “that the Crown so presented thei
r case as to leave out all possible mention of the Duke, though one hardly sees how they could avoid bringing in Mr. Wilder’s complicity in the abduction of Lord Saltire.”
48 In the “Curiosities” section of the Strand Magazine in May 1903, accompanying a photograph, appeared: “These false horseshoes were found in the moat at Birtsmorton Court, near Tewkesbury. It is supposed that they were used in the time of the Civil Wars, so as to deceive any person tracking the marks. The one on the left is supposed to leave the mark of a cow’s hoof, the one on the right that of a child’s foot.”
49 D. Martin Dakin expresses the view that Holmes’s statement here is made sarcastically—“in contrast with the enormous wealth of the duke”—because “The Adventure of the Priory School” occurs near the end of Holmes’s career, by which time the detective had prospered financially.
THE ADVENTURE OF BLACK PETER1
It is hard to decide whether the criminal in “Black Peter” is worse than his victim. This tale of mistaken identity and murder begins with Holmes returning from the butcher’s, where he has been busy mysteriously harpooning pigs. We follow Holmes to one of the few undisguised locations in the Canon, the Brambletye Hotel in Forest Row, which now sports a Black Peter Bar. There Holmes saves his client by clearing up a twelve-year-old mystery. Dr. Watson’s account also includes tantalising references to two more unpublished cases, the “death of Cardinal Tosca” (explored by J. Regis O’Connor in The Sacred Seal, 1998), and “the notorious canary-trainer,” revealed in The Canary Trainer by Nicholas Meyer (author of the highly successful Seven-Per-Cent Solution, 1974) to be a story of Holmes and the Phantom of the Opera.
I HAVE NEVER known my friend to be in better form, both mental and physical, than in the year ’95.2 His increasing fame had brought with it an immense practice, and I should be guilty of an indiscretion if I were even to hint at the identity of some of the illustrious clients who crossed our humble threshold in Baker Street. Holmes, however, like all great artists, lived for his art’s sake, and, save in the case of the Duke of Holdernesse,3 I have seldom known him claim any large reward for his inestimable services. So unworldly was he—or so capricious—that he frequently refused his help to the powerful and wealthy where the problem made no appeal to his sympathies, while he would devote weeks of most intense application to the affairs of some humble client whose case presented those strange and dramatic qualities which appealed to his imagination and challenged his ingenuity.
In this memorable year ’95, a curious and incongruous succession of cases had engaged his attention, ranging from his famous investigation of the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca4—an inquiry which was carried out by him at the express desire of his Holiness the Pope5—down to his arrest of Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer,6 which removed a plague-spot from the East End of London. Close on the heels of these two famous cases came the tragedy of Woodman’s Lee,7 and the very obscure circumstances which surrounded the death of Captain Peter Carey. No record of the doings of Mr. Sherlock Holmes would be complete which did not include some account of this very unusual affair.
Frederick Dorr Steele, Collier’s, 1904
During the first week of July my friend had been absent so often and so long from our lodgings that I knew he had something on hand. The fact that several rough-looking men called during that time and inquired for Captain Basil made me understand that Holmes was working somewhere under one of the numerous disguises and names with which he concealed his own formidable identity.8 He had at least five small refuges9 in different parts of London in which he was able to change his personality. He said nothing of his business to me, and it was not my habit to force a confidence. The first positive sign which he gave me of the direction which his investigation was taking was an extraordinary one. He had gone out before breakfast,10 and I had sat down to mine, when he strode into the room, his hat upon his head and a huge, barbed-headed spear tucked like an umbrella under his arm.
“Good gracious, Holmes!” I cried. “You don’t mean to say that you have been walking about London with that thing?”
“I drove to the butcher’s and back.”
“The butcher’s?”
“And I return with an excellent appetite. There can be no question, my dear Watson, of the value of exercise before breakfast. But I am prepared to bet that you will not guess the form that my exercise has taken.”
“‘Good gracious, Holmes!’ I cried. ‘You don’t mean to say that you have been walking about London with that thing?’”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1904
“I will not attempt it.”
He chuckled as he poured out the coffee.
“If you could have looked into Allardyce’s back shop you would have seen a dead pig swung from a hook in the ceiling, and a gentleman in his shirt-sleeves furiously stabbing at it with this weapon. I was that energetic person, and I have satisfied myself that by no exertion of my strength can I transfix the pig with a single blow. Perhaps you would care to try?”
“Not for worlds. But why were you doing this?”
“Because it seemed to me to have an indirect bearing upon the mystery of Woodman’s Lee. Ah, Hopkins, I got your wire last night, and I have been expecting you. Come and join us.”
Our visitor was an exceedingly alert man, thirty years of age, dressed in a quiet tweed suit, but retaining the erect bearing of one who was accustomed to official uniform. I recognised him at once as Stanley Hopkins, a young police inspector, for whose future Holmes had high hopes, while he in turn professed the admiration and respect of a pupil for the scientific methods of the famous amateur. Hopkins’s brow was clouded and he sat down with an air of deep dejection.
“No, thank you, sir. I breakfasted before I came round. I spent the night in town, for I came up yesterday to report.”
“And what had you to report?”
“Failure, sir—absolute failure.”
“You have made no progress?”
“None.”
“Dear me! I must have a look at the matter.”
“I wish to heavens that you would, Mr. Holmes. It’s my first big chance, and I am at my wit’s end. For goodness’ sake, come down and lend me a hand.”
“Well, well, it just happens that I have already read all the available evidence, including the report of the inquest, with some care. By the way, what do you make of that tobacco-pouch, found on the scene of the crime? Is there no clue there?”
Hopkins looked surprised.
“It was the man’s own pouch, sir. His initials were inside it. And it was of sealskin—and he an old sealer.”
“But he had no pipe.”
“No, sir, we could find no pipe; indeed, he smoked very little, and yet he might have kept some tobacco for his friends.”
“No doubt. I only mention it because if I had been handling the case I should have been inclined to make that the starting-point of my investigation. However, my friend, Dr. Watson, knows nothing of this matter, and I should be none the worse for hearing the sequence of events once more. Just give us some short sketch of the essentials.”
Stanley Hopkins drew a slip of paper from his pocket.
“I have a few dates here which will give you the career of the dead man, Captain Peter Carey. He was born in ’45—fifty years of age. He was a most daring and successful seal and whale fisher. In 1883 he commanded the steam sealer Sea Unicorn, of Dundee. He had then had several successful voyages in succession, and in the following year, 1884, he retired. After that he travelled for some years, and finally he bought a small place called Woodman’s Lee, near Forest Row, in Sussex. There he has lived for six years, and there he died just a week ago to-day.
“There were some most singular points about the man. In ordinary life he was a strict Puritan—a silent, gloomy fellow. His household consisted of his wife, his daughter, aged twenty, and two female servants. These last were continually changing, for it was never a very cheery situation, and sometimes it became past all bearing. The man
was an intermittent drunkard, and when he had the fit on him he was a perfect fiend. He has been known to drive his wife and daughter out of doors in the middle of the night and flog them through the park until the whole village outside the gates was aroused by their screams.
“He was summoned once for a savage assault upon the old vicar, who had called upon him to remonstrate with him upon his conduct. In short, Mr. Holmes, you would go far before you found a more dangerous man than Peter Carey, and I have heard that he bore the same character when he commanded his ship. He was known in the trade as Black Peter, and the name was given him, not only on account of his swarthy features and the colour of his huge beard, but for the humours which were the terror of all around him. I need not say that he was loathed and avoided by every one of his neighbours, and that I have not heard one single word of sorrow about his terrible end.
“You must have read in the account of the inquest about the man’s cabin, Mr. Holmes, but perhaps your friend here has not heard of it. He had built himself a wooden outhouse—he always called it ‘the cabin’—a few hundred yards from his house, and it was here that he slept every night. It was a little, single-roomed hut, sixteen feet by ten. He kept the key in his pocket, made his own bed, cleaned it himself, and allowed no other foot to cross the threshold. There are small windows on each side, which were covered by curtains, and never opened. One of these windows was turned towards the high-road, and when the light burned in it at night the folk used to point it out to each other, and wonder what Black Peter was doing in there. That’s the window, Mr. Holmes, which gave us one of the few bits of positive evidence that came out at the inquest.
“You remember that a stonemason, named Slater, walking from Forest Row about one o’clock in the morning—two days before the murder—stopped as he passed the grounds and looked at the square of light still shining among the trees. He swears that the shadow of a man’s head turned sideways was clearly visible on the blind, and that this shadow was certainly not that of Peter Carey, whom he knew well. It was that of a bearded man, but the beard was short and bristled forward in a way very different from that of the captain. So he says, but he had been two hours in the public-house, and it is some distance from the road to the window. Besides, this refers to the Monday, and the crime was done upon the Wednesday.
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 23