Holmes was seated in his familiar chair, looking very pale and exhausted. Apart from his injuries, even his iron nerves had been shocked by the events of the evening, and he listened with horror to my account of the Baron’s transformation.
“The wages of sin, Watson—the wages of sin!” said he.51 “Sooner or later it will always come. God knows, there was sin enough,” he added, taking up a brown volume from the table. “Here is the book the woman talked of. If this will not break off the marriage, nothing ever could. But it will, Watson. It must. No self-respecting woman could stand it.”
“It is his love diary?”
“Or his lust diary. Call it what you will. The moment the woman told us of it I realized what a tremendous weapon was there if we could but lay our hands on it. I said nothing at the time to indicate my thoughts, for this woman might have given it away. But I brooded over it. Then this assault upon me gave me the chance of letting the Baron think that no precautions need be taken against me. That was all to the good, I would have waited a little longer, but his visit to America forced my hand. He would never have left so compromising a document behind him. Therefore we had to act at once. Burglary at night is impossible. He takes precautions. But there was a chance in the evening if I could only be sure that his attention was engaged. That was where you and your blue saucer came in. But I had to be sure of the position of the book, and I knew I had only a few minutes in which to act, for my time was limited by your knowledge of Chinese pottery.52 Therefore I gathered the girl up at the last moment. How could I guess what the little packet was that she carried so carefully under her cloak?53 I thought she had come altogether on my business, but it seems she had some of her own.”
“He guessed I came from you.”
“I feared he would. But you held him in play just long enough for me to get the book, though not long enough for an unobserved escape. Ah, Sir James, I am very glad you have come!”
Our courtly friend had appeared in answer to a previous summons. He listened with the deepest attention to Holmes’s account of what had occurred.
“You have done wonders—wonders!” he cried, when he had heard the narrative. “But if these injuries are as terrible as Dr. Watson describes, then surely our purpose of thwarting the marriage is sufficiently gained without the use of this horrible book.”
Holmes shook his head.
“Women of the De Merville type do not act like that. She would love him the more as a disfigured martyr. No, no. It is his mental side, not his physical, which we have to destroy. That book will bring her back to earth—and I know nothing else that could. It is in his own writing. She cannot get past it.”
Sir James carried away both it and the precious saucer. As I was myself overdue, I went down with him into the street. A brougham was waiting for him. He sprang in, gave a hurried order to the cockaded coachman, and drove swiftly away. He flung his overcoat half out of the window to cover the armorial bearings upon the panel, but I had seen them in the glare of our fanlight none the less. I gasped with surprise. Then I turned back and ascended the stair to Holmes’s room.
“I have found out who our client is,” I cried, bursting with my great news. “why, Holmes, it is—”
“It is a loyal friend and a chivalrous gentleman,”54 said Holmes, holding up a restraining hand. “Let that now and forever be enough for us.”
I do not know how the incriminating book was used. Sir James may have managed it. Or it is more probable that so delicate a task was entrusted to the young lady’s father. The effect, at any rate, was all that could be desired. Three days later appeared a paragraph in the Morning Post to say that the marriage between Baron Adelbert Gruner and Miss Violet de Merville would not take place. The same paper had the first police-court hearing of the proceedings against Miss Kitty Winter on the grave charge of vitriol-throwing. Such extenuating circumstances came out in the trial that the sentence, as will be remembered, was the lowest that was possible for such an offence. Sherlock Holmes was threatened with a prosecution for burglary, but when an object is good and a client is sufficiently illustrious, even the rigid British law becomes human and elastic. My friend has not yet stood in the dock.
1 “The Illustrious Client” was published in two parts in the Strand Magazine in February and March 1925, and its first American appearance was in Collier’s Weekly Magazine on November 8, 1924.
2 In a Victorian Turkish bath, the bather would visit a series of hot, dry rooms of increasing temperature, cooling down with the occasional cold shower or bath. Afterward would follow a washing-down, a massage, and finally a lengthy relaxation period in a room outfitted with couches. Turkish baths were introduced to Victorian society by David Urquhart, a diplomat who served in the British embassy in Turkey from 1831 to 1837; he returned home to become a member of Parliament and a passionate advocate of all things Turkish. His house was decorated in the Turkish style, luxuriously outfitted with Iznik tiles and a working Turkish bath. In 1856, inspired by Urquhart’s book The Pillars of Hercules (1850), which described the Turkish hammam, a physician named Richard Barter built—with Urquhart’s help—a bath at St. Ann’s Hill in Blarney, Ireland, to be used for therapeutic purposes. The following year, Urquhart assisted in building England’s first public Turkish bath, on Broughton Lane in Manchester. Hundreds of similar establishments proliferated thereafter, including the fashionable Urquhart’s London & Provincial Turkish Bath Company (opened in 1862) and Nevill’s Turkish Baths, a chain of nine baths located throughout London. Nevill’s had a pair of establishments on Northumberland Avenue, one designated for men and one for women. Watson’s use of the baths was apparently a symptom of middle age; his first recorded visit was in “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax” (text accompanying note 3), set by most chronologists after 1900. Holmes is not recorded as a visitor in any other story.
3 Baedeker reports that the Conservative Carlton Club, located at 94 Pall Mall, boasted 1,800 members in 1896. In “The Greek Interpreter,” Dr. Watson places Mycroft Holmes’s Diogenes Club “some little distance” from the Carlton Club (see “The Greek Interpreter,” note 12).
4 According to O. F. Grazebrook, the first record of a telephone at the Carlton Club is in the directory dated October 31, 1883, issued by the United Telephone Company.
5 Sir George Lewis (1833–1911), of the firm of Lewis and Lewis, was the most famous solicitor in England, the confidant of the Prince of Wales and countless others.
6 Queen Anne Street was located in the Cavendish Square neighbourhood of medical establishments (see “The Resident Patient” and “The Devil’s Foot”), a short walk from Baker Street. Watson’s relocation to quarters in this area of respected professionals indicates a step up socially from the days of his Paddington practice, where, writes Vernon Pennell, “early patients were drawn from the porters and their like of the Great Western Railway, via Kensington. . . .” D. Martin Dakin rejects some scholars’ contentions that the move to Queen Anne Street was connected with a second marriage; rather, he contends, it was made out of necessity, “for financial reasons possibly connected with his unfortunate losses at gambling touched on in Shoscombe Old Place.” The location is not mentioned in any other story.
7 Bliss Austin uses this piece of dialogue as evidence of Holmes’s “subtle wit,” expressed here with the intent of belittling the dandily attired Colonel Damery. As the exchange ensues, Austin explains, it becomes clear that Damery has not yet removed his gloves (“Colonel Damery threw up his kid-gloved hands with a laugh”), indicating either that the colonel felt Holmes’s apartments were unclean, or, in a worse display of manners, that he had not yet shaken Holmes’s hand. Holmes’s question of “Don’t you smoke?” was a pointed means of “baiting” Damery, writes Austin, who continues, “The trap was not obvious but it was there. Unless the Colonel refused altogether, he must either remove his gloves or treat Holmes to the delicious sight of a man in lavender spats smoking with kid gloves on. But refuse he did, so Holmes continued: ‘T
hen you will excuse me if I light my pipe.’ And one can be certain that he smiled as he said it.”
8 Holmes also refers to Moran in “His Last Bow” (that is, in 1914) in a manner implying that he was still alive. How Moran may have escaped the gallows for the killing of the Honourable Ronald Adair is explored in the notes to “The Empty House.”
9 A pass on the boundary between Switzerland and Italy.
10 Michael Kaser questions the logic of the trial’s taking place in Prague for a murder that occurred at the Swiss Splügen Pass. Even an appeal of the verdict reached by the provincial court would have been heard in Vienna. Bliss Austin explains the incongruity by suggesting, “Perhaps the Baron’s reputation in Vienna was so bad that he requested, and because of his high position was granted, a change of venue.”
11 The battle of the Khyber Pass occurred in the second Afghan war (1878–1879), one of three wars in which Britain—threatened by Russia’s interest in Afghanistan—attempted to seize control of the territory for itself. Under terms of the 1879 Treaty of Gandamak, Yakub Khan, the emir of Afghanistan, ceded Khyber Pass to the British; and by the end of the year, following the murder of a British envoy, British forces had occupied Kabul. Watson carried out his military service in this second Afghan campaign.
12 This would have been an early type of passenger cruise, predating the transatlantic voyages of the great ocean liners like the Lusitania and the Titanic. According to O. F. Grazebrook, the first cruise operated by the Orient Line took place aboard the Garonne on February 20, 1889, and carried passengers to Algiers, Genoa, Lisbon, Malaga, and Naples en route to Gibraltar and back. Thereafter, the Orient Line conducted cruises annually from 1889 to 1900.
13 The Hurlingham Club in Fulham was considered the headquarters of polo in England. Originating in Persia sometime between the sixth century B.C. and the first century A.D., the equestrian sport eventually made its way to Arabia, Tibet, China, Japan, and India, where it was picked up by British officers stationed there. Polo—from the Balti, or Tibeto-Burman, word for ball—was introduced to England in 1869, and its popularity spread rapidly throughout the country. Soon after hosting its first polo match in 1874, Hurlingham was attracting thousands of spectators and hosting competitions such as the Champion Cup (which debuted in 1876) and the annual Oxford vs. Cambridge match (starting in 1878). In 1875, the Hurlingham Polo Committee took on responsibility for drawing up a set of polo rules, which were adopted for use throughout England.
14 Irving Fenton describes Charles Peace (1832–1879) as a “burglar, murderer, liar, wife-beater, braggart, actor, inventor, [and] violin virtuoso.” A native of Sheffield, Peace started his criminal career as a teenager, spending several stints in jail for burglarising people’s houses. Between prison terms, he taught himself to play a violin with one string, billing himself as “the modern Paganini” at fairs and other venues. Fenton credits Peace with inventing the burglar’s kit, improving the machinery at Dartmoor’s prison, and fashioning a “smoke helmet” for firemen, among other innovations. His downfall was the 1876 murder of Arthur Dyson, the husband of Peace’s purported mistress. Eluding capture by living as “Mr. Thompson” in London for two years, he was finally caught committing burglary in Blackheath. Peace was recognised and quickly sentenced to death—the jury was out for only ten minutes—and, writes Fenton, “on February 25, 1879, the law ended his terrestrial friendship, at least, with Sherlock Holmes.” His collection of violins and banjos, one of the best in England, was auctioned off after his death. One wonders whether Holmes purchased one of Peace’s violins as a souvenir.
Like Holmes, Peace was a master of disguise, capable of altering his appearance merely by jutting out his lower jaw or wearing a pair of goggles. For a time he posed as a one-armed man, hiding his real limb underneath his clothes. An 1894 Strand article entitled “Burglars and Burgling” notes that Peace used this effect to conceal the telltale fact that he was missing the forefinger of his left hand. “After he left Sheffield on 29th November, 1876,” the article recounts, “his description was posted at every police station in the country. So he made himself [a false arm] which he placed in his sleeve, hanging his violin on the hook when engaged in walking about and taking stock of ‘crackable’ residences, and screwing in a fork in the place of the hook for use at meals. For something like two years, the irrepressible Peace walked this earth short of a hand, while the police were looking for a man short of a finger.”
15 This might have been Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794–1852), a painter, art critic for London Magazine (writing essays under the pen names Egomet Bonmot and Janus Weathercock), and suspected murderer. Attempting to evade suspicion for the deaths of his uncle, his mother-in-law, and his sister-in-law, he lived in France for six years but, upon returning to England, was convicted on an old forgery charge and exiled to Tasmania for the remainder of his life. Or, Holmes might be referring to Henry Wainwright (?–1875), a brush manufacturer who killed his mistress and was caught attempting to dispose of her dismembered body parts. The artistic abilities of Wainwright, who maintained his innocence but confessed just before being hanged, are unknown.
16 Parkhurst, on the Isle of Wight, is a maximum-security prison, established in 1838.
17 A common lodging-house; a flop-house.
18 Some of which information Holmes may have passed on to Langdale Pike, with whom he regularly shared “knowledge” about the depths of London life (see “The Three Gables”).
19 At least the Baron Gruner has a punning sense of humour.
20 A king, queen, or jack in a deck of playing cards, and presumably, since the most popular card game in England in 1902 was whist, in which aces outranked kings, an ace as well.
21 Hypnosis was well known in the late nineteenth century. It was first used for scientific purposes by Friedrich (or Franz) Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), a Viennese physician who treated his patients with what he thought of as “animal magnetism”: an occult force that flowed from the hypnotist to the hypnotised, stimulating an invisible fluid in the body. The treatment became known as mesmerism, and although Mesmer was eventually discredited by the medical community—he was driven out of both Vienna and Paris—his methods did pave the way for the future exploration of the trance state in therapy. The “passes” scoffed at by Gruner refer to the early technique used by Mesmer of passing the hypnotist’s hands slowly and regularly over the subject’s face, with or without contact.
The term “hypnotism” was coined by British surgeon James Braid (1795–1860) in his book Neurypnology (1843). Braid debunked Mesmer’s theories of the occult and proposed instead that hypnotism was a form of sleep, brought on by the fatigue that intense concentration on a fixed object could induce. With this technique he claimed to have “cured” patients of rheumatism and paralysis. As the end of the nineteenth century drew near, more physicians, among them Sigmund Freud, began utilising hypnosis to treat psychological disorders such as hysteria.
Notwithstanding popular myths of “glamour” and “hypnotic personalities,” a post-hypnotic suggestion requires knowledge of the techniques of hypnotism. Where or when Gruner learned hypnotism remains unknown.
22 Holmes here refers to French criminals and not American Indians.
23 Formerly a town, Montmartre (French for “hill of the martyrs”) was annexed by Paris in 1860. The famed church of Sacré Coeur rests atop the hill—the highest point in Paris—and the area has long been favoured by the city’s bohemians. They gathered at nightclubs such as the Moulin Rouge, which opened in 1889 and was immortalised by the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
24 That is, affected by scurvy, a disease caused by a lack of fresh vegetables and, consequently, of vitamin C. Scurvy primarily used to affect sailors, who did not have access to perishable foods. In 1747, Scottish naval surgeon James Lind treated afflicted sailors with oranges and lemons, achieving dramatic results, and in 1795 the British navy began distributing lime juice on long sea voyages. Characterised by a weakening of the
capillaries, scurvy induces bleeding gums, loosened teeth, and haemorrhaging. Here, Watson likely uses “scorbutic” as another means of describing Johnson as “red-faced,” since there is no other indication that he might actually be suffering from the disease.
25 A torch—in this case, a metaphor for a passionate woman (continuing with the description of Kitty Winter as “flame-like” and, later, “fiery”).
26 Leprosy—caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, identified by Norwegian physician G. Armauer Hansen in 1874—inflicts affected persons with skin lesions. In the benign form of the disease, tuberculoid leprosy, these lesions are reddish or purplish; in the more severe lepromatous leprosy, they are yellow and brown in colour, protruding from the ears, nose, and throat. See “The Blanched Soldier,” note 24, for a discussion of the spread of the disease and social attitudes towards leprosy and lepers. Here, however, Watson is likely speaking metaphorically (as with “scorbutic—see note 24) and uses the term in the sense of moral decay.
27 Whether she was related to James Winter, a k a “Killer” Evans of “The Three Garridebs,” is unknown.
28 There is a confusion of names here. If the fellow’s real name is “Shinwell Johnson,” and “Porky” is his nickname, then why not “Porky Johnson”? Or is this used in the sense of “Fat Albert” or “Fast Eddie”? The “Porky” epithet undoubtedly refers to his physical grossness (a “huge . . . man”).
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 81