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 39
“‘I am in your hands, Anna,’ said he.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1904
“You were always a noble woman, Anna,” said the old man, puffing at his cigarette.
She had risen, but she fell back again with a little cry of pain.
“I must finish,” she said. “When my term was over I set myself to get the diary and letters which, if sent to the Russian Government, would procure my friend’s release. I knew that my husband had come to England. After months of searching I discovered where he was. I knew that he still had the diary, for when I was in Siberia I had a letter from him once, reproaching me and quoting some passages from its pages. Yet I was sure that with his revengeful nature he would never give it to me of his own free will. I must get it for myself. With this object I engaged an agent from a private detective firm, who entered my husband’s house as secretary—it was your second secretary, Sergius, the one who left you so hurriedly. He found that papers were kept in the cupboard, and he got an impression of the key. He would not go farther. He furnished me with a plan of the house, and he told me that in the forenoon the study was always empty, as the secretary was employed up here. So at last I took my courage in both hands, and I came down to get the papers for myself. I succeeded, but at what a cost!
“I had just taken the papers and was locking the cupboard, when the young man seized me. I had seen him already that morning. He had met me on the road and I had asked him to tell me where Professor Coram lived, not knowing that he was in his employ.”
“Exactly! Exactly!” said Holmes. “The secretary came back and told his employer of the woman he had met. Then, in his last breath, he tried to send a message that it was she—the she whom he had just discussed with him.”
“You must let me speak,” said the woman, in an imperative voice, and her face contracted as if in pain. “When he had fallen I rushed from the room, chose the wrong door, and found myself in my husband’s room. He spoke of giving me up, I showed him that if he did so, his life was in my hands. If he gave me to the law, I could give him to the Brotherhood. It was not that I wished to live for my own sake, but it was that I desired to accomplish my purpose. He knew that I would do what I said—that his own fate was involved in mine. For that reason, and for no other, he shielded me. He thrust me into that dark hiding-place—a relic of old days, known only to himself. He took his meals in his own room, and so was able to give me part of his food. It was agreed that when the police left the house I should slip away by night and come back no more. But in some way you have read our plans.” She tore from the bosom of her dress a small packet. “These are my last words,” said she; “here is the packet which will save Alexis. I confide it to your honour and to your love of justice. Take it! You will deliver it at the Russian Embassy. Now, I have done my duty, and—”
“Stop her!” cried Holmes. He had bounded across the room and had wrenched a small phial from her hand.
“Too late!” she said, sinking back on the bed. “Too late! I took the poison before I left my hiding-place. My head swims! I am going! I charge you, sir, to remember the packet.”20
“A simple case, and yet, in some ways, an instructive one,” Holmes remarked, as we travelled back to town. “It hinged from the outset upon the pince-nez. But for the fortunate chance of the dying man having seized these, I am not sure that we could ever have reached our solution. It was clear to me from the strength of the glasses that the wearer must have been very blind and helpless when deprived of them. When you asked me to believe that she walked along a narrow strip of grass without once making a false step, I remarked, as you may remember, that it was a noteworthy performance. In my mind, I set it down as an impossible performance, save in the unlikely case that she had a second pair of glasses. I was forced, therefore, to consider seriously the hypothesis that she had remained within the house. On perceiving the similarity of the two corridors, it became clear that she might very easily have made such a mistake, and, in that case, it was evident that she must have entered the professor’s room. I was keenly on the alert, therefore, for whatever would bear out this supposition, and I examined the room narrowly for anything in the shape of a hiding-place. The carpet seemed continuous and firmly nailed, so I dismissed the idea of a trap-door. There might well be a recess behind the books. As you are aware, such devices are common in old libraries. I observed that books were piled on the floor at all other points, but that one bookcase was left clear. This, then, might be the door. I could see no marks to guide me, but the carpet was of a dun colour, which lends itself very well to examination. I therefore smoked a great number of those excellent cigarettes, and I dropped the ash all over the space in front of the suspected bookcase. It was a simple trick, but exceedingly effective. I then went downstairs, and I ascertained, in your presence, Watson, without your perceiving the drift of my remarks, that Professor Coram’s consumption of food had increased—as one would expect when he is supplying a second person. We then ascended to the room again, when, by upsetting the cigarette-box, I obtained a very excellent view of the floor, and was able to see quite clearly, from the traces upon the cigarette ash, that the prisoner had in our absence come out from her retreat.21 Well, Hopkins, here we are at Charing Cross, and I congratulate you on having brought your case to a successful conclusion. You are going to headquarters, no doubt. I think, Watson, you and I will drive together to the Russian Embassy.”
“Holmes had bounded across the room and had wrenched a small phial from her hand.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1904
1 “The Golden Pince-Nez” was published in the Strand Magazine in July 1904 and in Collier’s Weekly on October 29, 1904.
2 It is the rare leech that is red in colour. Most such parasites, as Lord Gore-Booth comments in “The Journeys of Sherlock Holmes: A Topographical Monograph,” are olive-green or brown. A. Carson Simpson gathers that Watson might have been using the word’s more archaic meaning and making a derogatory reference to a physician, perhaps one who had red hair (taking a name such as “Eric the Red”), wore predominantly red clothing (Count Amedeo VII of Savoy was known as “il Conte Rosso”), favoured blood-letting as a treatment, or had Communist sympathies.
3 Presumably there is no connection to Willoughby Smith or Mortimer, the secretary and gardener who feature prominently in this case.
4 “The Golden Pince-Nez” is generally thought to have occurred in the late autumn of 1894 (see Chronological Table). M. Jean-Paul-Pierre Casimir-Périer (1847–1907) was the President of France from June 24, 1894 to January 15, 1895, succeeding Marie-François Sadi-Carnot, who was assassinated by the Italian anarchist Sante or Santos Caserio.
William E. Fleischauer considers which president of France would have been the target of the “Boulevard assassin” and which wrote the letter of thanks. He concludes that Sadi-Carnot was the target but rejects the identification of Huret with Caserio, for although the assassination took place in a boulevard (old fortification) in Paris, there was no “tracking” involved—Caserio was arrested on the spot. Sadi-Carnot, Fleischauer suggests, was the intended victim of another, earlier assassin, supplied by the Moriarty organisation. Holmes was able to stop that assassin (and thus won the gratitude of Sadi-Carnot) but failed to prevent the subsequent successful attempt. Watson, anxious to mention Holmes’s medal but embarrassed to lay out the facts in light of the eventual assassination of Sadi-Carnot, obfuscated.
Michael Harrison, in The World of Sherlock Holmes, reaches a contrary conclusion. He asserts that Holmes tracked Huret, and that in December, using then-President Casimir-Périer as the “bait,” Holmes lured the would-be assassin to Montpellier. Montpellier was of course well known to Holmes, for he had just finished his researches into coal-tar derivatives there before returning to London in April 1894 (“The Final Problem”). Huret hid himself in the old fortifications in Montpellier, but Holmes quickly flushed and captured him, leading Casimir-Périer to express his gratitude.
5 A ter
m applied to any material from which writing has been removed to make room for another text, and which has thus been prepared or scraped a second time. It is most commonly applied to ancient manuscripts that have undergone this treatment. Figuratively, a palimpsest can also be a metaphor for a text or situation with several layers of meaning—as in the title of Gore Vidal’s 1995 memoir, Palimpsest, or the line from M. E. W. Sherwood’s Epistle to Posterity (1897): “They linger, each of these dinners, in our palimpsest memories, each recorded clearly, so that it does not blot out the others.”
6 Watson’s medical reading in “The Golden Pince-Nez” is not an isolated example, as evidently he is conscientious about keeping up with the latest trends. In The Sign of Four, he peruses the latest textbook on pathology; in “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk” he reads the British Medical Journal; in “The Resident Patient” he professes familiarity with Percy Trevelyan’s monograph Obscure Nervous Lesions.
7 Invented by James Heath of Bath circa 1750, the Bath chair was used to transport Victorian ladies and invalids, frequently at seaside resorts. It had three wheels: two underneath the seat and one small, pivoting wheel that supported the footrest and could be steered (via a connecting rod) by the occupant.
8 Smith may have been a classmate of E. W. Hornung, who was the brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle and attended the prestigious Uppingham School from 1880 to 1883. Hornung was the author of the popular “Raffles” series, tales of witty gentleman thief A. J. Raffles and his sidekick, “Bunny” Manders—“a kind of inverse Holmes and Watson,” according to Conan Doyle’s biographer, Daniel Stashower.
9 The word is “old” in the Strand Magazine and American texts.
10 “The conclusion that a woman who wears gold pince-nez must be well-dressed is unconvincing,” Vernon Rendall complains. A good salesperson, after all, can persuade a customer that she needs an expensive, fashionable pair of spectacles—trimmed with gold, even—before price is ever discussed. Eyeglasses, while dating back to ancient China, were once not as ubiquitous as they are today, and thus it stands to reason that a woman might be willing to spend extra money on an accessory that must be worn so prominently and so often. Perhaps the glasses were bought during a temporary prosperity (compare Henry Baker’s hat in “The Blue Carbuncle”) and kept as a no longer affordable luxury.
11 “Convex” in the manuscript and Collier’s Weekly, noted in a letter to The Bookman in July 1904.
12 That is, the police-boat pursuit of the blowgun-wielding pygmy Tonga, the companion of Jonathan Small, down the Thames —events recorded in The Sign of Four and especially memorable to Watson for the connection to his wooing of Mary Morstan.
13 Curiously, the English edition has the word “scarcely,” which is plainly wrong.
14 A patent lock with tumblers, named from its inventor, and believed at the time to be pick-proof.
15 The cigarette manufacturer Ionides & Co. was located at 3 Swallow Street, off Regent Street, in London. The “Alexandria” reference may be to the blend of tobacco, which might have been sweetened with molasses, as it is smoked in Egyptian hookahs. (Or perhaps the professor did have a source in Alexandria, and the Ionides name is merely a coincidence.) Cigarettes, as opposed to pipes, cigars, or snuff, were a relatively new phenomenon in the West, having been introduced in England only within the previous thirty years. In his book The Victorians, historian A. N. Wilson traces England’s cigarette craze to the Crimean War, during which Scotsman Robert Peacock Gloag—whose exact involvement in the war is unknown—witnessed Turks and Russians smoking cigarettes. He brought the curiosity back to London with him, selling rolled, strawberry-coloured paper filled with Latakia tobacco. Others caught on, and by the early 1860s there were a number of shops in London hawking “Turkish cigarettes.” Meanwhile, Gloag was experiencing considerable entrepreneurial success, having expanded operations to six houses and founded a factory in Walworth.
Although the health effects of tobacco were not as well known in the nineteenth century as they are today, many physicians did recognise that there were risks associated with smoking. Cigarettes, lacking the drawing-room sophistication of pipes and cigars, came in for particular scorn, and the habit tended to be condemned as unsavoury and low. Surgeon Arthur E. J. Longhurst blamed cigarettes for having brought down the Ottoman Empire, saying, “We may also take warning from the history of another nation, who some few centuries ago . . . were the terror of Christendom, but who since then having become more addicted to tobacco-smoking than any of the European nations, are now the lazy and lethargic Turks, held in contempt by all civilized communities.”
But once Gloag had gotten the wheels rolling, there was no stopping the momentum: England was hooked on this inexpensive new addiction. The cigarette’s biggest breakthrough came in 1883, when tobacconists W. D. and H. O. Wills bought their first Bonsack machine, an American invention that could manufacture two hundred cigarettes per minute. “Between 1860 and 1900,” Wilson writes, “Britain became a smoking nation.” Smoking, once banned from clubs and railway cars, became ubiquitous. Cigarettes were far more affordable than pipes or cigars, particularly after the introduction of “penny cigarettes” in the 1880s; and thus the vice of the Russians and Turks became the vice of the British working class. (See “The Priory School,” note 33, for more on the social perception of cigarettes.)
Holmes himself was of course an inveterate smoker of tobacco in all forms. Although Holmes is most often associated with pipes in his public image and his storage of his cigars in the coal scuttle is well-known (“The Musgrave Ritual”), there are ample records of the variety of his smoking habit. Jay Finley Christ, in “Keeping Score on Sherlock Holmes,” from his Flashes by Fanlight, notes twenty-nine tales in which Holmes smokes only pipes, five only cigarettes, and three only cigars; three tales mention pipe and cigars, two pipe and cigarettes, and two others cigars and cigarettes. In The Hound of the Baskervilles he indulges in all three! Only in twelve tales does he refrain from smoking.
16 Copts are Egyptian Christians whose cultural roots predate the seventh-century Arab conquest of Egypt. While much of the rest of Egypt was converting to Islam, the Copts remained devoted to the “Egyptian Church” (now the Coptic Orthodox Church), which was founded in the fifth century and adhered to the doctrine Monophysitism—that is, the notion that Christ’s nature was singularly divine, but not human. The Coptic language, an early form of Egyptian, died out in the twelfth century, and in most ways Copts seem no different from most Egyptian Muslims. Yet through the centuries they have remained a tight-knit community, and the Coptic Orthodox Church continues to play a vital administrative role in educational and theological matters. The Copts’ isolationist tendencies may have once led some to look askance at this peculiar minority. The Encyclopædia Britannica (9th Ed.) disparaged the Copts as “exceedingly bigoted, prone to be converted to Islamism, sullen, as Ammianus Marcellinus describes the Egyptians, false, faithless, and deceitful, but extremely useful as secretaries and accountants and skilful workmen.” Holmes was engaged in the “case of the two Coptic Patriarchs” at the beginning of “The Retired Colourman,” but that case is generally placed in 1898, and Holmes had no reason to study the Copts beforehand.
17 A gage is an item offered as a token or a pledge. More specifically, it used to refer to the glove offered (or thrown down) as challenge to a duel. Here, the word is used in its secondary sense, a “love-gage” being a sign of the affection one lover pledges to another.
18 Oops—so much for not revealing his name! Anna evidently thought that the matter would become public (was she a reader of Watson’s works?) but believed that using only Coram’s real first name would leave him untraceable.
19 Although the term “nihilism” had been floating around since the Middle Ages—encompassing definitions ranging from scepticism to a rejection of morality (the word comes from the Latin nihil, or “nothing”)—it was Ivan Turgenev’s 1862 novel Fathers and Sons that brought the concept into the popular imagin
ation. In the novel, Turgenev’s protagonist, Bazarov, embodies the radicalism of a new generation by scorning the traditional aristocracy. Nihilists were dedicated to the rejection of aestheticism and the destruction of the existing social order; they loathed ignorance and trusted only the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Even the bonds of family were considered suspect and undesirable. And while violence was not an officially sanctioned aspect of nihilism, it was not discouraged either, leaving more extremist individuals and terrorist organisations to embark upon campaigns that imprinted the movement with the permanent stamp of violence. The assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 was one such act, with hundreds of nihilists being exiled or hanged in its aftermath. One wonders whether this period was the “time of trouble” Anna mentions.
20 Would Holmes have let Anna go free if she survived? After all, the slaying of the secretary was accidental. Brad Keefauver, in Sherlock and the Ladies, is not convinced that Anna actually killed herself. He finds it “a little too convenient” that Anna is the only witness to her self-poisoning and, in a melodramatic scene, collapses “only after she’s had time to tell her story in its entirety,” complete with amateurish exclamations of “My head swims. I am going!” It is possible, Keefauver surmises, that a sympathetic Holmes—who had only just that year come back from the dead himself—knowingly allowed Anna to fake her own demise and escape with her life. “If Anna Coram did put on a death scene that could fool both an experienced policeman and a doctor, I think we can rest assured that Sherlock Holmes was not taken it by it.”