“Forget what?”
“Well, about Victor Savage’s death. You as good as admitted just now that you had done it. I’ll forget it.”
“You can forget it or remember it, just as you like. I don’t see you in the witness-box. Quite another shaped box, my good Holmes, I assure you. It matters nothing to me that you should know how my nephew died. It’s not him we are talking about. It’s you.”
“Yes, yes.”
“The fellow who came for me—I’ve forgotten his name—said that you contracted it down in the East End among the sailors.”
“I could only account for it so.”
“You are proud of your brains, Holmes, are you not? Think yourself smart, don’t you? You came across someone who was smarter this time. Now cast your mind back, Holmes. Can you think of no other way you could have got this thing?”
“I can’t think. My mind is gone. For heaven’s sake help me!”
“Yes, I will help you. I’ll help you to understand just where you are and how you got there. I’d like you to know before you die.”20
“Give me something to ease my pain.”
“Painful, is it? Yes, the coolies used to do some squealing towards the end. Takes you as cramp, I fancy.”
“Yes, yes; it is cramp.”
“Well, you can hear what I say, anyhow. Listen now! Can you remember any unusual incident in your life just about the time your symptoms began?”
“No, no; nothing.”
“Think again.”
“I’m too ill to think.”
“Well, then, I’ll help you. Did anything come by post?”
“By post?”
“A box by chance?”
“I’m fainting—I’m gone!”
“Listen, Holmes!” There was a sound as if he was shaking the dying man, and it was all that I could do to hold myself quiet in my hiding-place. “You must hear me. You shall hear me. Do you remember a box—an ivory box? It came on Wednesday. You opened it—do you remember?”
“Yes, yes, I opened it. There was a sharp spring inside it. Some joke—”
“It was no joke, as you will find to your cost. You fool, you would have it and you have got it. Who asked you to cross my path? If you had left me alone I would not have hurt you.”
“I remember,” Holmes gasped. “The spring! It drew blood. This box—this on the table.”
“The very one, by George! And it may as well leave the room in my pocket. There goes your last shred of evidence. But you have the truth now, Holmes, and you can die with the knowledge that I killed you. You knew too much of the fate of Victor Savage, so I have sent you to share it.21 You are very near your end, Holmes. I will sit here and I will watch you die.”
Holmes’s voice had sunk to an almost inaudible whisper.
“What is that?” said Smith. “Turn up the gas? Ah, the shadows begin to fall, do they? Yes, I will turn it up, that I may see you the better.” He crossed the room and the light suddenly brightened. “Is there any other little service that I can do you, my friend?”
“A match and a cigarette.”
I nearly called out in my joy and my amazement. He was speaking in his natural voice—a little weak, perhaps, but the very voice I knew. There was a long pause, and I felt that Culverton Smith was standing in silent amazement looking down at his companion.
“What’s the meaning of this?” I heard him say at last in a dry, rasping tone.
Lee Conrey, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 4, 1914
“The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it,” said Holmes. “I give you my word that for three days I have tasted neither food nor drink until you were good enough to pour me out that glass of water. But it is the tobacco which I find most irksome. Ah, here are some cigarettes.” I heard the striking of a match. “That is very much better. Halloa! halloa! Do I hear the step of a friend?”
There were footfalls outside, the door opened, and Inspector Morton appeared.
“All is in order and this is your man,” said Holmes.
The officer gave the usual cautions.
“I arrest you on the charge of the murder of one Victor Savage,” he concluded.
“And you might add of the attempted murder of one Sherlock Holmes,” remarked my friend with a chuckle. “To save an invalid trouble, Inspector, Mr. Culverton Smith was good enough to give our signal by turning up the gas. By the way, the prisoner has a small box in the right-hand pocket of his coat which it would be as well to remove. Thank you. I would handle it gingerly if I were you. Put it down here. It may play its part in the trial.”
There was a sudden rush and a scuffle, followed by the clash of iron and a cry of pain.
“You’ll only get yourself hurt,” said the inspector. “Stand still, will you?” There was the click of the closing handcuffs.
“A nice trap!” cried the high, snarling voice. “It will bring you into the dock, Holmes, not me. He asked me to come here to cure him. I was sorry for him and I came. Now he will pretend, no doubt, that I have said anything which he may invent which will corroborate his insane suspicions. You can lie as you like, Holmes. My word is always as good as yours.”
“You’ll only get yourself hurt,’ said the Inspector. ‘Stand still, will you?’”
Walter Paget, Strand Magazine, 1913
“Good heavens!” cried Holmes. “I had totally forgotten him. My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies. To think that I should have overlooked you! I need not introduce you to Mr. Culverton Smith, since I understand that you met somewhat earlier in the evening. Have you the cab below? I will follow you when I am dressed, for I may be of some use at the station.”
“I never needed it more,” said Holmes as he refreshed himself with a glass of claret and some biscuits in the intervals of his toilet. “However, as you know, my habits are irregular, and such a feat means less to me than to most men. It was very essential that I should impress Mrs. Hudson with the reality of my condition, since she was to convey it to you, and you in turn to him. You won’t be offended, Watson? You will realise that among your many talents dissimulation finds no place, and that if you had shared my secret you would never have been able to impress Smith with the urgent necessity of his presence, which was the vital point of the whole scheme.22 Knowing his vindictive nature, I was perfectly certain that he would come to look upon his handiwork.”
“But your appearance, Holmes—your ghastly face?”
“Three days of absolute fast does not improve one’s beauty, Watson. For the rest, there is nothing which a sponge may not cure. With vaseline upon one’s forehead, belladonna23 in one’s eyes, rouge over the cheek-bones, and crusts of beeswax24 round one’s lips, a very satisfying effect can be produced. Malingering is a subject upon which I have sometimes thought of writing a monograph.25 A little occasional talk about half-crowns, oysters, or any other extraneous subject produces a pleasing effect of delirium.”
“But why would you not let me near you, since there was in truth no infection?”
“Can you ask, my dear Watson? Do you imagine that I have no respect for your medical talents? Could I fancy that your astute judgment would pass a dying man who, however weak, had no rise of pulse or temperature? At four yards, I could deceive you. If I failed to do so, who would bring my Smith within my grasp? No, Watson, I would not touch that box. You can just see if you look at it sideways where the sharp spring like a viper’s tooth emerges as you open it.26 I dare say it was by some such device that poor Savage, who stood between this monster and a reversion,27 was done to death. My correspondence, however, is, as you know, a varied one, and I am somewhat upon my guard against any packages which reach me.28 It was clear to me, however, that by pretending that he had really succeeded in his design I might surprise a confession. That pretence I have carried out with the thoroughness of the true artist. Thank you, Watson, you must help me on with my coat. When we have finished at the police-station I think that something nutritious at Simpson’s29 would not b
e out of place.”
1 A facsimile of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s manuscript of “The Dying Detective” was published in 1991. There are minor textual differences between the manuscript dated July 27, 1913, and the version eventually published in the Strand Magazine in December 1913; significant differences are noted below.
2 What a change from Holmes’s situation in A Study in Scarlet! The cost of the rooms at Baker Street was, in 1878, “too much for [Holmes’s] purse,” and so he arranged to split the cost with Watson. Watson’s income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day led him to the same conclusion; therefore, it may be assumed that Holmes’s income had at that time approximated Watson’s. The amount of Watson’s current writing income is impossible to determine; Arthur Conan Doyle became wealthy from his involvement with Dr. Watson, but nothing is known about their financial arrangements.
3 Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, in their magnificent London: A Pilgrimage (1872), describe Rotherhithe, the neighborhood of the Thames dockyards, as “shabby, slatternly places” with “low and poor houses, amid shiftless riverside loungers,” and note “the intensity of the squalid recklessness” of the area. The residents of Rotherhithe had little use for “swells” or “West-enders,” and few Londoners ventured there unescorted at night.
4 What room is this? William S. Baring-Gould identifies it as Holmes’s bedroom, as does Watson, who explicitly refers to it as such by alluding to the “opening and closing of the bedroom door.” Julian Wolff, however, argues in “I Have My Eye on a Suite in Baker Street” that the room is the sitting-room made over into a sick-room.
5 A “hectic” fever is one that is fluctuating but persistently recurrent.
6 An unskilled labourer from Asia, generally from India or China (from the Hindi word Kuli, an aboriginal tribe; or Tamil kuli, meaning “wages”). In the 1840s, the abolition of slavery drove employers in the British colonies to rely increasingly upon the cheap labour provided by coolies. These workers functioned as indentured servants, signing contracts to work for a period of five years (although the amount of time varied) in exchange for minimal wages and the cost of passage. Conditions of passage for Chinese coolies in particular were horrendous: Thousands died in the crowded, miserable conditions on board the ships. Occasionally, coolies were kidnapped and forced into labour. British India largely prohibited the emigration of its unskilled workers in 1922; other countries, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, resented the influx of cheap labour and, toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, began passing laws specifically designed to prevent Chinese immigrants from entering the country.
7 The second-largest island in Indonesia, Sumatra was coveted, and battled over, by the British and the Dutch throughout the nineteenth century. The Dutch, having first arrived in 1596, had the greater claim, and by the early twentieth century had established administrative and economic authority over the island.
8 “Obstinate old Watson!” in the manuscript. The manuscript version of the remark seems inappropriate for the early date of this adventure, occurring at best eight or nine years after 1881 (see Chronological Table). However, when it is recalled that Dr. Watson wrote the narrative of this adventure over twenty-five years after it occurred, the remark may be viewed as a fond interpolation.
9 Many scholars have discounted these two diseases as fabrications, but William S. Baring-Gould, among others, declares that both are actually scrub typhus, also known as tsutsugamushi fever. Transmitted by mites carrying the parasite rickettsia (named after American pathologist Harold Taylor Ricketts, who identified the microorganism before dying of typhus in 1910), scrub typhus carries many of the symptoms purportedly exhibited by Holmes. A person suffering from scrub typhus will develop a black, encrusted lesion at the point of the bite, followed by headache, fever, chills, general aches and pains, and swollen lymph glands. After a week, a pinkish rash spreads across the torso and occasionally to the arms and legs. In the most extreme cases, delirium, apathy, heart and lung abnormalities, and circulatory failure may develop during the second symptomatic week.
Baring-Gould’s argument is advanced by Hugh L’Etang, who, in “Some Observations on the Black Formosa Corruption and Tapanuli Fever,” notes that the disease is found in the South Pacific, notably Formosa, Sumatra, Japan, New Guinea, northern Australia, and the Philippines. Whereas Formosa (Taiwan) is well known, “the name Tapanuli,” L’Etang admits, “sounds decidedly spurious.” Yet he points out that Tapanuli is in fact a mountainous region of 15,084 square miles located on Sumatra’s northwest coast.
Note that Holmes does not say that he has contracted either of these diseases, only that he knows of them and Watson does not.
10 The fact that Watson is unfamiliar with these diseases should not, according to Roger Butters, be added to the litany of Sherlockian criticism that Watson’s medical abilities are somewhat wanting. Butters dismisses these sorts of assessments as unfair, reasoning that, at least in this case, “there would presumably have been little call for treating [Tapanuli fever and black Formosa corruption] in Kensington. Anyway, Holmes very likely invented them.”
11 The manuscript adds the tantalisingly deleted phrase “which threatens to remove the last restraint [from/upon] one or two gentlemen whom I could mention.”
12 Despite Holmes’s prodigious smoking habit, this is the only instance in which Holmes is indicated to have used a traditional receptacle for his tobacco, in lieu of the oft-mentioned Persian slipper (“The Empty House,” “The Illustrious Client,” “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The Naval Treaty”) or coal-scuttle (“The Mazarin Stone”).
13 Presumably these were used to inject cocaine. In The Sign of Four, it is clear the Holmes takes cocaine subcutaneously.
14 Stephen Hayes suggests that the “giant rat of Sumatra”—the mystifying case that Holmes mentions in passing in “The Sussex Vampire”—may have been an experimental animal used by Culverton Smith in his study of bacteria. It was, Hayes continues, Holmes’s investigation of the plague-stricken ship Matilda Briggs (also mentioned in “The Sussex Vampire”) that carried the rat from Sumatra to London and led Holmes to uncover Smith’s misdeeds. Mary Ann Kluge identifies Smith himself as the giant rat of Sumatra.
15 This sentence is substituted (whether by Watson or another is unknown) for the following bizarre sentence in the manuscript: “You will find the gentleman, whose habits I have studied, seated at this present moment in a bamboo chair, his feet extended, a tumbler by his side, and a long manilla cigar between his curiously animal teeth.” If Watson accurately recorded Holmes’s statement in the manuscript, he may himself have changed the text to avoid embarrassing Holmes, for when Watson meets Smith, he is seated in a “reclining” chair (certainly not bamboo); there is no sign of a beverage or tobacco (save a “smoking-cap”) and no mention of noteworthy dentition.
16 This is the only mention by name of Holmes’s “old acquaintance.” He cannot be identified with Morton, the Oxford rugby player (“The Missing Three-Quarter”), Cyril Morton, the betrothed of Violet Smith (“The Solitary Cyclist”), or the Morton of Morton & Waylight, the firm for whom Mr. Warren was a timekeeper (“The Red Circle”), because all three of these cases unquestionably occurred long after the latest date assigned to “The Dying Detective” (see Chronological Table). Could he be one of the many unidentified constables or other policemen, now promoted? Or the partner of Inspector Brown in The Sign of Four? That he was an acquaintance of Holmes and not of Watson is implied by the “sir” at the end of his enquiry into Holmes’s health.
17 The manuscript indicates that the phrase replaces the phrase “I will follow after you.”
18 This is substituted for “almost as soon as yourself” in the manuscript and, together with the previous alteration, make much more sense than the deleted phrases, because Watson has just indicated that he will not return to Baker Street but has “another appointment.”
19 Smith positions himself here as a virtuous
but vengeful man following Saint Paul’s advice to the Romans, to “overcome evil with good”: “If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.” (Romans 12:21)
20 The device of inducing the villain to confess in front of a hidden witness is used again by Holmes in “The Mazarin Stone.” The latter story was evidently developed as a stage play before it became a short story, and the “staginess” of the similar scene there leads numerous critics to dispute the veracity of the tale. However, no scholar disputes the truthfulness of Watson’s report of “The Dying Detective.”
21 What was the mystery weapon that Culverton Smith used? George B. Koelle, in “Poisons of the Canon,” suggests that it was the plague bacillus, or the rod-shaped bacteria (named Pasterella pestis or Yersinia pestis, after Alexandre Yersin, the scientist who isolated it in 1894 and developed an antiserum) that is responsible for bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic plague. Of these, bubonic is the mildest form and represents three-quarters of all plague cases; pneumonic plague affects the lungs, and septicemic plague rapidly infects the bloodstream and may cause death within twenty-four hours. Left untreated, these two latter two types are almost always fatal.
Twenty-five million Europeans, or anywhere between one-fourth and one-third the total population of Europe, lost their lives to the so-called Black Death (comprising both pneumonic and bubonic plague) between 1347 and 1351; 70,000 people died in the 1664–1665 Great Plague of London; and 80,000 to 100,000 people died in an 1894 outbreak in Canton and Hong Kong. All three forms of the disease are transmitted by rat fleas, coincident with the theories connecting Smith to the giant rat of Sumatra (see note 14 above). Koelle does not name which type of plague might have struck Victor Savage, but N. Joel Ehrenkranz, in “A. Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, and Murder by Tropical Infection,” names septicemic plague as the murder weapon. Relatively little was known about the plague at the time of “The Dying Detective,” and Koelle recognises that the first published account of the bacillus did not appear until 1894. Thus Smith’s unpublished studies would surely have been groundbreaking had they reached a wider audience.
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 66