Once more, however, my friend was destined to be disappointed. He came back at night weary and unsuccessful.
“I have had a blank day, Watson. Having got the doctor’s general direction, I spent the day in visiting all the villages upon that side of Cambridge, and comparing notes with publicans and other local news agencies. I have covered some ground. Chesterton, Histon, Waterbeach, and Oakington have each been explored, and have each proved disappointing. The daily appearance of a brougham and pair could hardly have been overlooked in such Sleepy Hollows. The doctor has scored once more. Is there a telegram for me?”
“Yes; I opened it. Here it is: ‘Ask for Pompey from Jeremy Dixon, Trinity College.’31 I don’t understand it.”
“Oh, it is clear enough. It is from our friend Overton, and is in answer to a question from me. I’ll just send round a note to Mr. Jeremy Dixon, and then I have no doubt that our luck will turn. By the way, is there any news of the match?”
“Yes, the local evening paper has an excellent account in its last edition. Oxford won by a goal and two tries.32 The last sentences of the description say:
The defeat of the Light Blues may be entirely attributed to the unfortunate absence of the crack International, Godfrey Staunton, whose want was felt at every instant of the game. The lack of combination in the three-quarter line and their weakness both in attack and defence more than neutralized the efforts of a heavy and hard-working pack.
“Then our friend Overton’s forebodings have been justified,” said Holmes. “Personally I am in agreement with Dr. Armstrong, and football does not come within my horizon. Early to bed to-night, Watson, for I foresee that to-morrow may be an eventful day.”
I was horrified by my first glimpse of Holmes next morning, for he sat by the fire holding his tiny hypodermic syringe. I associated that33 with the single weakness of his nature, and I feared the worst when I saw it glittering in his hand. He laughed at my expression of dismay and laid it upon the table.
“No, no, my dear fellow, there is no cause for alarm. It is not upon this occasion the instrument of evil, but it will rather prove to be the key which will unlock our mystery. On this syringe I base all my hopes. I have just returned from a small scouting expedition, and everything is favourable. Eat a good breakfast, Watson, for I propose to get upon Dr. Armstrong’s trail to-day, and once on it I will not stop for rest or food until I run him to his burrow.”
“In that case,” said I, “we had best carry our breakfast with us, for he is making an early start. His carriage is at the door.”
“Never mind. Let him go. He will be clever if he can drive where I cannot follow him. When you have finished, come downstairs with me, and I will introduce you to a detective who is a very eminent specialist in the work that lies before us.”
When we descended I followed Holmes into the stable yard, where he opened the door of a loose-box34 and led out a squat, lop-eared, white-and-tan dog, something between a beagle and a foxhound.
“Let me introduce you to Pompey,” said he. “Pompey is the pride of the local draghounds35—no very great flier, as his build will show, but a staunch hound on a scent. Well, Pompey, you may not be fast, but I expect you will be too fast for a couple of middle-aged London gentlemen, so I will take the liberty of fastening this leather leash to your collar. Now, boy, come along, and show what you can do.” He led him across to the doctor’s door. The dog sniffed round for an instant, and then with a shrill whine of excitement started off down the street, tugging at his leash in his efforts to go faster. In half an hour, we were clear of the town and hastening down a country road.
“What have you done, Holmes?” I asked.
“We were clear of the town and hastening down a country road.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1904
“A threadbare and venerable device, but useful upon occasion. I walked into the doctor’s yard this morning, and shot my syringe full of aniseed over the hind wheel. A draghound will follow aniseed from here to John o’ Groat’s,36 and our friend Armstrong would have to drive through the Cam37 before he would shake Pompey off his trail. Oh, the cunning rascal! This is how he gave me the slip the other night.”
The dog had suddenly turned out of the main road into a grass-grown lane. Half a mile farther this opened into another broad road, and the trail turned hard to the right in the direction of the town, which we had just quitted. The road took a sweep to the south of the town and continued in the opposite direction to that in which we started.
“This detour has been entirely for our benefit, then?” said Holmes. “No wonder that my inquiries among those villagers led to nothing. The doctor has certainly played the game for all it is worth, and one would like to know the reason for such elaborate deception.38 This should be the village of Trumpington to the right of us. And, by Jove! here is the brougham coming round the corner. Quick, Watson, quick, or we are done!”
He sprang through a gate into a field, dragging the reluctant Pompey after him. We had hardly got under the shelter of the hedge when the carriage rattled past. I caught a glimpse of Dr. Armstrong within, his shoulders bowed, his head sunk on his hands, the very image of distress. I could tell by my companion’s graver face that he also had seen.
“I fear there is some dark ending to our quest,” said he. “It cannot be long before we know it. Come, Pompey! Ah, it is the cottage in the field!”
There could be no doubt that we had reached the end of our journey. Pompey ran about and whined eagerly outside the gate, where the marks of the brougham’s wheels were still to be seen. A footpath led across to the lonely cottage. Holmes tied the dog to the hedge, and we hastened onwards. My friend knocked at the little rustic door, and knocked again without response. And yet the cottage was not deserted, for a low sound came to our ears—a kind of drone of misery and despair, which was indescribably melancholy. Holmes paused irresolute, and then he glanced back at the road which he had just traversed. A brougham was coming down it, and there could be no mistaking those grey horses.
“The carriage rattled past.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1904
“By Jove, the doctor is coming back!” cried Holmes. “That settles it. We are bound to see what it means before he comes.”
He opened the door, and we stepped into the hall. The droning sound swelled louder upon our ears until it became one long, deep wail of distress. It came from upstairs. Holmes darted up, and I followed him. He pushed open a half-closed door, and we both stood appalled at the sight before us.
A woman, young and beautiful, was lying dead upon the bed. Her calm, pale face, with dim, wide-opened blue eyes, looked upwards from amid a great tangle of golden hair. At the foot of the bed, half sitting, half kneeling, his face buried in the clothes, was a young man, whose frame was racked by his sobs. So absorbed was he by his bitter grief that he never looked up until Holmes’s hand was on his shoulder.
I caught a glimpse of Dr. Armstrong within.
Charles Raymond Macaulay, Return of Sherlock Holmes (McClure Phillips), 1905
“Are you Mr. Godfrey Staunton?”
“Yes, yes; I am—but you are too late. She is dead.”
The man was so dazed that he could not be made to understand that we were anything but doctors who had been sent to his assistance. Holmes was endeavouring to utter a few words of consolation and to explain the alarm which had been caused to his friends by his sudden disappearance when there was a step upon the stairs, and there was the heavy, stern, questioning face of Dr. Armstrong at the door.
“So, gentlemen,” said he, “you have attained your end and have certainly chosen a particularly delicate moment for your intrusion. I would not brawl in the presence of death, but I can assure you that if I were a younger man your monstrous conduct would not pass with impunity.”
“Excuse me, Dr. Armstrong, I think we are a little at cross purposes,” said my friend, with dignity. “If you could step downstairs with us, we may each be able to give some light t
o the other upon this miserable affair.”
A minute later the grim doctor and ourselves were in the sitting-room below.
“Well, sir?” said he.
“I wish you to understand, in the first place, that I am not employed by Lord Mount-James, and that my sympathies in this matter are entirely against that nobleman. When a man is lost it is my duty to ascertain his fate, but having done so the matter ends so far as I am concerned; and so long as there is nothing criminal, I am much more anxious to hush up private scandals than to give them publicity. If, as I imagine, there is no breach of the law in this matter, you can absolutely depend upon my discretion and my co-operation in keeping the facts out of the papers!”
“He never looked up until Holmes’s hand was on his shoulder.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1904
Dr. Armstrong took a quick step forward and wrung Holmes by the hand.
“You are a good fellow,” said he. “I had misjudged you. I thank heaven that my compunction at leaving poor Staunton all alone in this plight caused me to turn my carriage back; and so to make your acquaintance. Knowing as much as you do, the situation is very easily explained. A year ago Godfrey Staunton lodged in London for a time and became passionately attached to his landlady’s daughter, whom he married. She was as good as she was beautiful and as intelligent as she was good. No man need be ashamed of such a wife. But Godfrey was the heir to this crabbed old nobleman, and it was quite certain that the news of his marriage would have been the end of his inheritance. I knew the lad well, and I loved him for his many excellent qualities. I did all I could to help him to keep things straight. We did our very best to keep the thing from everyone, for, when once such a whisper gets about, it is not long before everyone has heard it. Thanks to this lonely cottage and his own discretion, Godfrey has up to now succeeded. Their secret was known to no one save to me and to one excellent servant who has at present gone for assistance to Trumpington. But at last there came a terrible blow in the shape of dangerous illness to his wife. It was consumption39 of the most virulent kind. The poor boy was half crazed with grief, and yet he had to go to London to play this match, for he could not get out of it without explanations which would expose the secret. I tried to cheer him up by a wire, and he sent me one in reply, imploring me to do all I could. This was the telegram which you appear in some inexplicable way to have seen. I did not tell him how urgent the danger was, for I knew that he could do no good here, but I sent the truth to the girl’s father, and he very injudiciously communicated it to Godfrey. The result was that he came straight away in a state bordering on frenzy, and has remained in the same state, kneeling at the end of her bed, until this morning death put an end to her sufferings. That is all, Mr. Holmes, and I am sure that I can rely upon your discretion and that of your friend.”
Holmes grasped the doctor’s hand.
“Come, Watson,” said he, and we passed from that house of grief into the pale sunlight of the winter day.40
THE RULES OF RUGBY
And then follows rush upon rush, and scrummage upon scrummage, the ball now driven through into the School-house quarters, and now into the School goal. . . . You say you don’t see much in it all—nothing but a struggling mass of boys, and a leather ball which seems to excite them all to great fury, as a red rag does a bull. My dear sir, a battle would look much the same to you, except that the boys would be men, and the balls iron; but a battle would be worth your looking at for all that, and so is a football match. You can’t be expected to appreciate the delicate strokes of play, the turns by which a game is lost and won—it takes an old player to do that; but the broad philosophy of football you can understand if you will. Come along with me a little nearer, and let us consider it.
—THOMAS HUGHES,
Tom Brown’s School Days (1857)
LEGEND has it that the game of rugby was “invented” in 1823 during a game of football (American soccer) when William Webb Ellis, a student at Rugby School in Warwickshire picked up the ball and began running downfield with it. The story, probably apocryphal, has elicited its share of controversy, and certainly there were other sporting events at which a ball was carried rather than kicked. Nonetheless, a plaque at Rugby School—where Tom Brown’s School Days is set—proudly commemorates the antics of the sixteen-year-old “who with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it.” Other schools and universities played variations of the game in the mid-nineteenth century, but a clear delineation between football and “rugby football” was not established until several rugby teams, rebuffed by the prohibitive rules of the newly formed Football Association, formed the Rugby Football Union in 1871 (see note 11, above).
Before too long, tensions within the new league arose, this time not over rules of play but over rules of payment. In order to ensure that they could field full teams, working-class clubs from the north began compensating players for “broken time,” or time that they lost at their mining or factory jobs while playing rugby. Clubs from the south—the domain, for the most part, of “gentlemen” players with less pressing financial considerations—failed to understand the need for such compensation, and they indignantly protested what they considered a violation of the purity of amateur sport. The Rugby Football Union agreed, insisting that all payments to players cease. After years in which the opposing factions could not reach a compromise, twenty-two clubs split off in 1895 to form the Northern Rugby Union, which later became known as Rugby League. This league became the home for professional rugby teams, and Rugby Football Union league, or “Rugby Union,” became that of amateur play. (In 1995, finally acknowledging the complications inherent in trying to maintain strict amateur standards, Rugby Union dropped its restrictions and permitted its players to be paid.) Even in the current era, the clubs in Rugby League—now co-owned by Australian tycoon Rupert Murdoch—are concentrated in the north of Britain and championed by the working class, whereas Rugby Union clubs retain a distinctly middle- and upper-class fan base.
As amateur clubs, Cambridge and Oxford would have been playing according to Rugby Union rules, which remain the most widely adopted in Britain. The game incorporates some elements of American football and soccer, being played with an oval ball on a rectangular field, or “pitch,” measuring 70 meters (229.7 feet) wide by 146 meters (160 yards) long. There are two opposing scoring zones and upright goalposts, rather like in American football, although the goalposts in rugby take more of a letter “H” shape, with the goalposts 5.6 metres (18.3 feet) apart and the crossbar 3 metres (10 feet) above the ground. Teams of fifteen players each (thirteen in Rugby League) play two halves, each forty minutes in length, with a ten-minute halftime in between. The team usually consists of eight forwards, who form the scrummage (discussed below); two half-backs, who are posted outside the scrummage; four three- quarter backs, who are arranged in a line across the field behind the scrummage; and the last line of defence, the fullback or “back.”
Play is continuous, resembling that of American soccer. A player moves the ball downfield by carrying the ball, kicking it, or passing it behind him or to the side; no forward passing is allowed. Neither is blocking allowed—the ball carrier’s teammates must stay behind him as play progresses down the field—but the abrupt tackling with which defensive players may stop ball carriers, not to mention the fact that rugby players may wear (voluntarily) only “scrumcap” headgear and a limited amount of shoulder protection, is largely what lends the sport its historically rough reputation. Some seventy deaths were reported in English rugby games from 1890 to 1893 alone, although numerous regulations enacted since then, including the prohibition of tripping and “hacking,” have greatly lessened the risk of serious injury.
Once a player is tackled and the ball touches the ground, he must immediately relinquish it, either passing the ball backward to a teammate or surrendering it to a member of the opposing team. More common is the loose maul, a sort of multiplayer se
mi-tackle in which the ball carrier’s progress is temporarily halted and offensive and defensive players swarm around him, fighting for possession. (When the ball touches the ground, the situation becomes known as a ruck.) In this position, the ball may change hands from the carrier to a teammate, and as long as the players remain on their feet and locked in a cohesive unit, they may drive the ball down the pitch in what is known as a rolling maul.
Should the ball carrier drop or pass the ball in any sort of forward motion, or should a team be called offside, then play is stopped, resulting in a scrum, or scrummage. Here, the forwards on each team lock arms and face off against each other, pushing forward to form a roiling mass into which the attacking team’s “scrum-half” rolls the ball. Both teams attempt to kick the ball backward out of the scrum, and play continues at the same chaotic pace as before. Members of the scrum must remain bound together and on their feet until the ball has been ejected.
A ball that strays out of bounds, or goes “into touch,” leads to another striking formation of Rugby Union (but not Rugby League): the visually spectacular lineout. The team that was not last to touch the ball is awarded the throw-in, and the forwards of each team arrange themselves in two straight lines, facing the sideline (“touchline”). At a coded signal, the player known as the hooker throws the ball toward a selected player (the “jumper”), who is hoisted straight upward by his teammates—his feet at the level of their shoulders—to receive the inbound pass. Players may not make use of the jumper’s clothing in lifting him up, but must physically lay hands on his person (thus cutting down on past injuries in which the unfortunate jumper was choked by his own jersey). Simultaneously, the other team elevates its own player, who attempts to intercept the inbound pass by whatever means necessary; and the two players duel for the ball, occupying their own midair playing field, in what can appear for all the world like some strange form of human puppetry.
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 42