Soames’s choice of a passage from Thucydides for students to translate strikes some as a bit of poor judgement. Lord Donegall, in Baker Street and Beyond, presumes that any student hoping to qualify for such a prestigious scholarship would surely have studied Thucydides rigourously and would therefore know his work “as well as an Honours Student in English Literature knows his Hamlet.” Any excerpt Soames used would then not qualify as “a large passage of Greek translation which the candidate has not seen.” However, Tony Bird suggests that Soames could have used portions of the less-studied speeches, not the narratives, because the speeches generally contain few contextual clues (personal names, places) and thus are harder to recognise. Bird also points out that the scholarship was likely to be an award given to a student early on in his career, before an undergraduate would have completed his reading of Thucydides, required only in the second part of Oxford’s Classics course.
10 The manuscript originally read “grammatically,” which is nonsense in the context of a Greek passage.
11 Ronald A. Knox is the first to comment on this extraordinary statement: “Is it likely . . . that [only] half a chapter should take the examiner an hour and a half to correct for the press?”
12 A coarse woollen cloth used for curtains, door covers, and table covers.
13 Numerous commentators, beginning with Andrew Lang, point out that not even a whole chapter of Thucydides is as long as three long slips of printers’ proofs.
14 Copying the entire thing may have been unnecessary, observes Andrew Lang, who guesses that a more expedient culprit could have gotten all the information he would need merely by jotting down one sentence from the beginning, one from the end, and a note on the subject matter. This should have been enough to allow the student to look the passage up at his leisure, in his own rooms.
15 The first of several insulting remarks Holmes aims at Watson in the course of “The Three Students,” evidence, as Watson says, that “his temper had not improved” by leaving Baker Street.
16 Johann Lothar von Faber (1817–1896) and John Eberhard Faber (1822–1879), were German brothers who took the family pencil business of their great-grandfather, Kaspar Faber, and turned it into a worldwide enterprise. After assuming control of Kaspar’s operations near Nuremberg, Lothar expanded into the rest of Europe and the United States, in 1856 contracting exclusive rights to all the graphite being mined in eastern Siberia. Meanwhile, his brother had gone to New York, establishing America’s first significant pencil factory in 1861. Eventually, the German portion of the Faber brothers’ business was sold (in 1903), but the U.S.-based Eberhard Faber Pencil Company remained under the family’s control and was incorporated in 1898. Most likely, the chip that Holmes is examining originated in Germany, where the company was known as “Johann Faber.”
The earliest “pencils” were nothing more than lumps of chalk or lead styluses, the latter used by ancient Egyptians and medieval monks. It was the 1564 discovery of graphite in Borrowdale, England, that led to the invention of the pencil as we know it today. (The word “graphite” comes from the Greek graphein, “to write.”) Because graphite was more pliable than lead, it required a “holder,” or encasing, to stabilise it. String wrapped around the graphite sticks first served this purpose, and later the graphite came to be inserted into hollowed-out wooden tubes. Nuremberg became the new centre for pencil manufacturing, but its pencils—which utilised a composite of graphite and sulfur—were inferior to those made with high-quality graphite in England, until French chemist Jacques Conté developed an advanced new technique in 1795. The process, which involved mixing powdered graphite and clay (the amount of clay used varied depending upon the hardness desired) and firing them in a furnace, was gradually adopted by the German factories, and presumably capitalised upon by the Faber brothers. The Conté technique remains the basis of pencil manufacture today.
17 Ronald A. Knox astutely observes that a pencil marked with the words JOHANN FABER would not leave the letters “NN” near the stump, but rather “ER.” But Bruce Holmes (no relation) suggests in a letter to the Baker Street Journal that the initials were not on the stump but instead on a small chip evidently cut off the pencil when sharpened.
18 For an athlete (at either Oxford or Cambridge) to “get his Blue” is the equivalent of earning a “letter” in American high school or college sports. It derives from the colour of the team caps, dark blue for Oxford and light blue for Cambridge.
According to W. S. Bristowe, Oxford’s long-jump team was led by C. B. Fry from 1892 to 1895, meaning that Gilchrist was either Fry’s “second string” at Oxford or his rival at Cambridge. Harold Abrahams, the famed long-jumper and runner (immortalised in the film Chariots of Fire), wrote Bristowe a letter providing further detail in which he said, “We are told that Gilchrist was a Blue for the long jump and hurdles. There was no Blue at Cambridge for those two events in 1895, but it is not without interest to note that C. B. Fry’s second string, W. J. Oakley, was a Blue for both these events in 1895 and in fact got his Blue for them in 1894.”
19 The word “many” is “fifteen” in the original manuscript.
20 Holmes here misquotes Shakespeare frivolously—see Henry V, Act 2, Scene 3, where hostess Mistress Quickly speaks of Falstaff “babbl[ing] of green fields” on his deathbed.
21 The pot calling the kettle black!
22 The scene resembles the “trial” of Captain Croker in “The Abbey Grange,” in which Holmes acts as prosecutor and Watson as jury.
23 W. S. Bristowe finds the presence of this black clay conclusive evidence that the locale of “The Three Students” is Cambridge. The same C. B. Fry who led the Oxford long-jump team wrote a 1902 Strand article in which he recalled that a groundsman at Fenners (a cricket lawn at Cambridge) had invented a type of clay that was duplicated by the Queen’s Club in London (the site of numerous Oxford vs. Cambridge athletic events, although, confusingly enough, not affiliated with either Queen’s College (Oxford) or Queens’ College (Cambridge)). The club began using the clay in its long-jump pit in 1902, thereby introducing the substance to the world outside Cambridge. After writing a letter to Fry, Bristowe received a reply on December 21, 1955, in which the long-jumping captain confirmed that Oxford jumpers landed in sand, not clay. “I saw no damped semi-clay soil in the Long Jump pit till at Queens in 1903,” wrote Fry. “Here, I submit,” writes Bristowe triumphantly, “we have positive proof from this distinguished contemporary of Gilchrist that the mud which led to his detection was invented by the Cambridge groundsman and was unique to Cambridge in 1895 [the date commonly accepted for ‘The Three Students’—see Chronological Table].”
This remarkable piece of evidence is independently corroborated in the diary of James Agate, quoting a letter from his friend George Lyttelton dated October 29, 1946. Lyttelton, a member of the Cambridge Union Athletic Club in 1895, verifies that the special clay was found only at Cambridge and not at Oxford.
24 Oak bark or other material used for tanning.
25 The state of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, was founded via the impetus of Cecil Rhodes, future prime minister of South Africa’s Cape Colony (see “The Solitary Cyclist,” note 28). In 1889, Rhodes was granted a charter for his new British South Africa Company, which he had formed with the purpose of exploring commercial, colonial, transportation, and mining interests in the area northeast of South Africa. His company sent settlers deep into the region in 1890, establishing Fort Salisbury at the site of the future Rhodesian capital and quickly encountering resistance from the native Ndebele. Rhodes’s troops, controlled by him in his capacity as the Parliament-appointed high commissioner, engaged in months of fighting but emerged victorious. The British South Africa Company took over administration of the territory, officially naming it Rhodesia in 1895. The military force Gilchrist intended to join (technically, the British South African Police) had more action ahead, however, as the Nbedele and the Shona tribes rose in resistance in 1896 and 1897. The police remained Rhodesia’s
internal security force until 1980, when the country became an independent member of the Commonwealth.
26 And what was that purpose? Soames describes Gilchrist as “a fine scholar . . . hard-working and industrious. He will do well.” John Hall, in Sidelights on Holmes, suggests, “[P]erhaps Gilchrist had been devoting so much of his time to rugby, cricket, hurdles and the long jump that he had rather neglected his more academic interests?”
27 In July 1904, a mere month following publication of “The Three Students,” famed editor and critic Andrew Lang analysed the case in his monthly column “At the Sign of the Ship” in Longman’s Magazine. Lang contends that Holmes and Watson were, in this case, made the victims of an elaborate hoax—prepared and brilliantly acted by Hilton Soames, with the aid and connivance of Gilchrist, if not of Bannister. Playing on Holmes’s complete ignorance of Greek literature, “Soames of St. Luke’s came to [Holmes] with a cock-and-bull story, which would not have taken in a Fifth Form boy.”
In The London Nights of Belsize, published in 1917, Vernon Rendall suggests that Watson, Gilchrist, Soames, and Bannister were in league together, their purpose being to give Holmes something to do. “Watson feared his relapse into the drug-habit . . . , and Watson got up this pretty little case for him.” T. S. Blakeney disagrees with this scenario, arguing that Watson was never a good enough actor to pull off such a stunt. “We have no special reason to think Watson was a good deceiver,” Blakeney explains, recalling various examples from the Canon in which Watson demonstrates a chronic facility for giving himself away: in “The Cardboard Box,” Holmes easily guesses Watson’s thoughts on General Gordon and Henry Ward Beecher merely by the expression on Watson’s face; in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Watson’s cigarette betrays him to Holmes; in “The Crooked Man,” it is the doctor’s habit of carrying his handkerchief in his sleeve that identifies him as a former soldier; and in “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” Watson’s method of tying his bootlaces catches him out. Blakeney concedes that “Watson was not averse to ‘taking a rise’ out of Holmes if he had the chance [The Valley of Fear], [but] his straightforward character and complete honesty do not fit him for any high degree of deception.” In any case, Blakeney concludes that Holmes was in no need of diversion, given the “striking” results he had evidently obtained in his study of English charters.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE GOLDEN PINCE-NEZ1
The period following Holmes’s return in the year 1894 was apparently a busy one for Holmes and Watson, because in “The Golden Pince-Nez,” Watson notes no fewer than five unpublished cases, and at least three other published cases occur in that year. We learn that Holmes earned the French Order of the Legion of Honour for his capture of “the Boulevard assassin,” leading to speculation about Holmes’s French connections. The case is also noteworthy for its Russian background: Although Russia and its recent violent history was much on the public’s mind in 1904 (the Russo-Japanese War broke out in February 1904, and in 1903, a general strike in Russia was widely reported), this is the only Canonical reference to nihilism and the terrors of the czarist police state.
WHEN I LOOK at the three massive manuscript volumes which contain our work for the year 1894, I confess that it is very difficult for me, out of such a wealth of material, to select the cases which are most interesting in themselves and at the same time most conducive to a display of those peculiar powers for which my friend was famous. As I turn over the pages, I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech2 and the terrible death of Crosby the banker. Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow. The famous Smith-Mortimer3 succession case comes also within this period, and so does the tracking and arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin4—an exploit which won for Holmes an autograph letter of thanks from the French President and the Order of the Legion of Honour. Each of these would furnish a narrative, but on the whole I am of opinion that none of them unites so many singular points of interest as the episode of Yoxley Old Place, which includes not only the lamentable death of young Willoughby Smith, but also those subsequent developments which threw so curious a light upon the causes of the crime.
Frederick Dorr Steele, Collier’s, 1904
It was a wild, tempestuous night, towards the close of November. Holmes and I sat together in silence all the evening, he engaged with a powerful lens deciphering the remains of the original inscription upon a palimpsest,5 I deep in a recent treatise upon surgery.6 Outside the wind howled down Baker Street, while the rain beat fiercely against the windows. It was strange there, in the very depths of the town, with ten miles of man’s handiwork on every side of us, to feel the iron grip of Nature, and to be conscious that to the huge elemental forces all London was no more than the molehills that dot the fields. I walked to the window and looked out on the deserted street. The occasional lamps gleamed on the expanse of muddy road and shining pavement. A single cab was splashing its way from the Oxford Street end.
“Well, Watson, it’s as well we have not to turn out to-night,” said Holmes, laying aside his lens and rolling up the palimpsest. “I’ve done enough for one sitting. It is trying work for the eyes. So far as I can make out, it is nothing more exciting than an Abbey’s accounts dating from the second half of the fifteenth century. Halloa! halloa! halloa! What’s this?”
Amid the droning of the wind there had come the stamping of a horse’s hoofs and the long grind of a wheel as it rasped against the kerb. The cab which I had seen had pulled up at our door.
“What can he want?” I ejaculated, as a man stepped out of it.
“Want! He wants us. And we, my poor Watson, want overcoats and cravats and goloshes, and every aid that man ever invented to fight the weather. Wait a bit, though! There’s the cab off again! There’s hope yet. He’d have kept it if he had wanted us to come. Run down, my dear fellow, and open the door, for all virtuous folk have been long in bed.”
When the light of the hall lamp fell upon our midnight visitor, I had no difficulty in recognizing him. It was young Stanley Hopkins, a promising detective, in whose career Holmes had several times shown a very practical interest.
“Is he in?” he asked, eagerly.
“Come up, my dear sir,” said Holmes’s voice from above. “I hope you have no designs upon us such a night as this.”
The detective mounted the stairs, and our lamp gleamed upon his shining waterproof. I helped him out of it, while Holmes knocked a blaze out of the logs in the grate.
“Now, my dear Hopkins, draw up and warm your toes,” said he. “Here’s a cigar, and the doctor has a prescription containing hot water and a lemon which is good medicine on a night like this. It must be something important which has brought you out in such a gale.”
“It is indeed, Mr. Holmes. I’ve had a bustling afternoon, I promise you. Did you see anything of the Yoxley case in the latest editions?”
“I’ve seen nothing later than the fifteenth century to-day.”
“Well, it was only a paragraph, and all wrong at that, so you have not missed anything. I haven’t let the grass grow under my feet. It’s down in Kent, seven miles from Chatham and three from the railway line. I was wired for at three-fifteen, reached Yoxley Old Place at five, conducted my investigation, was back at Charing Cross by the last train, and straight to you by cab.”
“It was young Stanley Hopkins, a promising detective.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1904
“Which means, I suppose, that you are not quite clear about your case?”
“It means that I can make neither head nor tail of it. So far as I can see, it is just as tangled a business as ever I handled, and yet at first it seemed so simple that one couldn’t go wrong. There’s no motive, Mr. Holmes. That’s what bothers me—I can’t put my hand on a motive. Here’s a man dead—there’s no denying that—but, so far as I can see, no reason on earth why anyone should wish him harm.”
Holmes lit his cigar and leaned back in his
chair.
“Let us hear about it,” said he.
“Now, my dear Hopkins, draw up and warm your toes.”
Frederick Dorr Steele, Collier’s, 1904
“I’ve got my facts pretty clear,” said Stanley Hopkins. “All I want now is to know what they all mean. The story, so far as I can make it out, is like this. Some years ago this country house, Yoxley Old Place, was taken by an elderly man, who gave the name of Professor Coram. He was an invalid, keeping his bed half the time, and the other half hobbling round the house with a stick or being pushed about the grounds by the gardener in a Bath chair.7 He was well liked by the few neighbours who called upon him, and he has the reputation down there of being a very learned man. His household used to consist of an elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Marker, and of a maid, Susan Tarlton. These have both been with him since his arrival, and they seem to be women of excellent character. The professor is writing a learned book, and he found it necessary about a year ago to engage a secretary. The first two that he tried were not successes, but the third, Mr. Willoughby Smith, a very young man straight from the university, seems to have been just what his employer wanted. His work consisted in writing all the morning to the professor’s dictation, and he usually spent the evening in hunting up references and passages which bore upon the next day’s work. This Willoughby Smith has nothing against him, either as a boy at Uppingham8 or as a young man at Cambridge. I have seen his testimonials, and from the first he was a decent, quiet, hard-working fellow, with no weak spot in him at all. And yet this is the lad who has met his death this morning in the professor’s study under circumstances which can point only to murder.”
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 36