Murder, My Dear Watson

  At last, the lights were dimmed and the film itself began. All thought of political issues and questions of historical accuracy were banished. The Birth of a Nation proved as extraordinary as had been promised. The period leading to the war was depicted in historical tableaux. A prosperous southern family, the Camerons, and their northern visitors, the Stonemans, were introduced. The ties of friendship and romance forged among the younger generation would soon be tested. The acting in these scenes, particularly by the young women of the two families, was remarkably subtle and natural, free of exaggerated gestures and excessive emotions.

  The attention of the audience was rapt throughout these early scenes. Then, about one hour into the film, came one of its few humorous moments. In a Northern hospital, the magnificent Lillian Gish, in the role of Elsie Stoneman, the daughter of Northern abolitionist Austin Stoneman, has been working as a nurse, serenading on the banjo the Southern hero, Benjamin Cameron, played by Henry B. Walthall. At one point, Miss Stoneman passes a Union sentry, leaning on his rifle, who sighs and looks longingly at this beautiful woman. It was a memorable human moment, but its effect was broken by a loud scream.

  Someone turned on the electric lights, and all the assembled guests turned to see Lady Miranda, on her feet with her fists to her cheeks, sobbing uncontrollably, a terror-stricken look in her eyes. Sir Eldridge reached out to support her. The projector stopped.

  “My dear, ah, my dear,” was all the baronet could say.

  “It’s him! It’s him! He’s the one! He’s the one, I tell you.”

  “Come, my dear,” Sir Eldridge said, and with the help of Holmes and Lady Veronica, he guided her out of the room. As the only medical man present, I followed to give what aid I could.

  “My wife is, ah, somewhat upset,” Sir Eldridge said. “Can you, ah, give her something to help her rest?”

  Before I could suggest a sedative, Holmes gently asked the stricken woman, “Whom did you see, Lady Miranda?”

  “He’s a murderer, I know it. The man on the screen. The man who looks at her in that terrible way.”

  “He’s an actor,” Lady Veronica said reasonably. “He’s admiring her beauty and daydreaming. It’s only a play.”

  Lady Miranda tried to take this in, her features troubled. “An actor? But I never played with him. Have you, Mr. Hope?”

  Holmes shook his head. “But he’s an American actor, Lady Miranda. One of Mr. Griffith’s company. Where had you seen him before?”

  “In the garden. Three nights ago. He appeared out of the shadows, looking at me, just as in the film. And then he was gone, as suddenly as he had come.” She turned to Sir Eldridge, imploring him. “I told you to look for him, dear.”

  “I did look, my dear,” said Sir Eldridge sadly and gently. “I looked, and all the servants looked. We looked everywhere. There was no one.”

  “Then last night. I saw him again. In my bedroom. He was there, and then he wasn’t. He might have murdered me. He might have murdered us all. I told you I saw him, dear. I told you. But you said there was no one.”

  “And there was no one, my dear.”

  “But there was. You thought I imagined him. I knew I had seen him, but I came to believe he was a ghost, one only I could see. Yet there he was on the screen tonight, so that proves he exists, doesn’t it? If I imagined him or if he was a ghost, he couldn’t appear in Mr. Griffith’s film, could he? He’s here to do some evil, I know it, I can feel it.”

  Sir Eldridge shook his head sadly. With a nod from Holmes, I carried out my professional duty and administered a sedative. Lady Miranda was delivered to the charge of her lady’s maid, and the rest of us returned to the small ballroom, where D. W. Griffith was again speaking to the other guests, noting that while his film had been controversial, audiences had usually found that particular scene more amusing than disturbing. When he saw the four of us return, he fell silent and looked enquiringly at our host. Sir Eldridge, with a halting reference to his wife’s delicate health, insisted the screening continue.

  As the film went on, even the genius of Griffith and the amazingly natural performances of his actors could not keep at bay the many thoughts that passed through my mind. Among them was the question of whether Holmes’s masquerade was in danger of exposure. Some of the guests had looked at him suspiciously, and I could imagine what they might be thinking. It was natural that Sir Eldridge, her husband, or Lady Veronica, another woman, or I, a doctor, should have attended to the stricken lady. But why this flamboyant actor?

  When the screening had finished and the assembled guests retired, Holmes and I visited the great cinematograph director in his bedroom. Immediately, Holmes dropped the “Sherrington Hope” masquerade and revealed to Griffith his true identity.

  “It is an honor, sir, to meet someone so preeminent in his chosen profession,” the director declaimed.

  “No more so than you are in yours,” Holmes replied handsomely, but somewhat impatiently, eager to move past the customary civilities. “Mr. Griffith, what was the name of the actor who played the mooning sentry that so frightened Lady Miranda?”

  “Many have asked me, but I have to confess I don’t know,” Griffith replied. “He was a day player, an extra. We employed hundreds of them on that picture. Quite often, I would pick one out of the crowd and give him a bit of business to do. That particular idea proved a great success, but of course, we didn’t know that at the time. At the end of the day, the fellow presumably picked up his wages and we never saw him again. Miss Gish might recall his name, I suppose, but I cannot.”

  “So,” I ventured, “this fellow was not among the actors who came with you here or went with you to France?”

  “Certainly not. I only brought a few of my most important players.”

  “Might he have sailed here on his own?”

  “I should think that very unlikely, Watson,” Holmes said, before Griffith could answer.

  “Quite so,” I said. “You are probably quite right to believe that Lady Miranda was imagining things. She is certainly in a perilous state of mental health and could be subject to hallucinations.”

  “No, in fact, I believe the mooning sentry that appeared to her was quite real and of sinister origin. But it need not have been the same man who portrayed the sentry in the film. All it would take was the blue cap and jacket, belt and sword of a Union Army sentry plus a long face, a mustache, a tilt of the head, and a comical expression of longing. In her emotional state, Lady Miranda would be unlikely to notice subtle differences in the face of the person on the screen.”

  “But why?” I demanded.

  “Mr. Griffith, did any of the costumes from your film accompany you to England?”

  “No,” the director answered. “Why would they, unless it were for a museum exhibit of some sort?”

  “Still, the sentry uniform would be easy enough to copy,” Holmes mused.

  “But why?” I asked again.

  Ignoring me, Holmes told the director, “We shall be outside your door throughout the night, Mr. Griffith. We are armed and prepared for any eventuality. If anything unusual occurs, call on us.”

  “Yes, certainly,” the puzzled American said.

  And so we remained. After two hours, at about the point I had decided our efforts were unnecessary, we heard sounds of a struggle in Griffith’s room. I drew my pistol as we burst through the door. Outlined in the moonlight from the window, we saw a figure in a Union sentry uniform, arms outstretched, hands encircling the throat of D. W. Griffith, who gripped his assailant’s wrists in desperate defense.

  “Raise your hands!” Holmes shouted.

  The attacker emitted a mad growl and continued his assault. I fired, striking the attacker in the shoulder. With a howl of pain, he released Griffith’s throat and surged toward the open window by which he had undoubtedly entered the room. For only an instant I saw his maddened, ravaged face, just long enough to recognize the American professor, Ernest Wheeler. As he climbed through the window, his wounded arm b
etrayed him, he lost his grip and fell with an anguished cry.

  “Quick, Watson!” Holmes cried. “He must not escape.” Holmes could still move quickly when the occasion demanded it. I followed my friend’s reckless descent of the stairs, barely conscious of doors opening, lights going on, and querulous voices.

  When I bent over the body of the man who had called himself Ernest Wheeler, lying where he fell under Griffith’s second story window, I quickly saw there was nothing I could do for him. The broken ivy clutched in his hand told the tale. He had been fatally injured, his neck broken in his fall.

  We heard Sir Eldridge’s voice imploring his guests not to leave the house. Then the baronet, in his dressing gown, rushed to join us under the window.

  “What has happened? My God, what has happened?” he demanded, looking down at the body. I quickly recounted the attack and its dramatic conclusion.

  “He must have climbed from his window to enter Griffith’s,” the baronet said, looking upward. “They aren’t far apart, and there are, ah, sufficient hand and footholds to give purchase. Still, it would have required considerable, ah, agility and indifference to danger.”

  “And a touch of madness, if you ask me,” I said.

  Sir Eldridge shook his head disbelievingly. “So that’s the end of it. And he can never tell his tale. But, ah, I would say it’s better this way.”

  “I daresay you would,” Holmes replied.

  “Well, that is to say, your brother’s information was that a German spy was among my guests, and, ah, there he is, isn’t he?”

  “There he is indeed. In his Union sentry’s uniform from the American Civil War. Not standard issue for German spies, I shouldn’t think.”

  “I believe he was a bit of a lunatic,” I offered. “He certainly appeared to have a genuine hostility toward Griffith, even when they were introduced in the ballroom. Perhaps that was why he was given the job, eh?”

  “But that leaves unexplained the ghostly appearances by which Wheeler terrorized your wife, Sir Eldridge.”

  “Oh, yes, I see,” the baronet nodded. “Now at last I see. She really did see someone in the garden and in her room, and I was convinced it was, ah, part of her illness. I never suspected Wheeler.”

  “I suspected him at once,” Holmes said. “Why do you suppose it became part of this assassin’s mission to drive your wife mad?”

  Sir Eldridge shook his head sadly. “I cannot think. She has, ah, suffered so much, my poor dear, and I have done her an injustice. Perhaps now things will become brighter for her.”

  “So they may if she gets away from here as quickly as possible,” Holmes said sharply.

  “Sir, ah, what are you suggesting?”

  “Why is it, Sir Eldridge, you haven’t even inquired how I came to suspect Ernest Wheeler, how I knew he was an impostor? I am accustomed to imprecations to explain my deductions. My vanity is wounded by your indifference.”

  The baronet essayed an unconvincing laugh. “Ah, Mr. Holmes, I do apologize for my failure. Tell us now, if you please.”

  “Wheeler claimed to be a professor of Etruscan literature. You know as well as I, Sir Eldridge, that there is no Etruscan literature to profess. Unlike the writings of the Greeks and Romans, whatever literature your Etruscans produced failed to survive their civilization. The average uninformed person might take Wheeler’s claim at face value. But he could never have fooled an Etruscan expert like you with that absurd story. Could he?”

  “And so I told the fool when he had already adopted it,” Sir Eldridge said softly. “Go on, then. What else do you have to say?”

  “The rest is surmise, but with a foundation of logic. The assassin stayed under your roof. You knew he was an impostor, so you must have been in league with him. You, sir, are the German agent my brother warned me about. Either your wife had begun to suspect your activities, or information she had been exposed to made you believe she might come to know the truth. You feared she might use this weekend event to expose you. You had for some time isolated her and essayed to ruin her health, physical and mental. The physical part of it, through what poisons I do not know, but the mental part consisted in ghostly appearances by Wheeler during the past week in his disguise as the mooning sentry. You hoped, as proved the case, that your wife would react hysterically to the sight of the mooning sentry on the screen, that whatever babbling she might do to me or to any other guest would be ignored in view of her obvious madness. Can you deny this, sir?”

  Sir Eldridge’s vague manner had disappeared. When he dropped the mask, his cultured accent was the same, but his clipped tones sounded subtly Germanic. I gripped my revolver warily.

  “You were right, Dr. Watson. Wheeler was quite mad. He is actually an American as he claimed, an assassin for hire to the highest bidder. He had an ancestor who performed such services for the Union Army, and he had an unbalanced hatred of the American South and, for whatever reason, of D. W. Griffith. When he appeared here with that ridiculous Union Army uniform and his litany of grievances against Griffith and the Confederacy, I could have cursed my superiors for their administrative failures, but instead I chose to use what they had provided me in as creative a manner as I could.” The baronet’s body tensed subtly, and a look in his eye suggested he was poised for action, but he went on speaking in the same even, clipped tones. “If you had not been here, Holmes, I might have succeeded. How many of my guests had any idea if the Etruscans had a literature or not?”

  With that he sprang at Holmes, a dagger clutched in his hand. Before my friend could test his joints with a defensive move, my pistol spoke for me. The wound to Sir Eldridge Masters was enough to stop him, but he would live to stand trial for treason.

  The next day, as Holmes and I shared a pony cart to the railway station, I remarked, “I ought to have known that Wheeler chap was up to no good when he suggested that dreadful title, 'The Adventure of the Murdered Professor.’ Deplorable taste. I wouldn’t dream of putting a tale before the public with an unpleasant word like murder or death in the title. My literary agent would never approve.”

  “I do recall you made one exception to that rule, Watson, or nearly. Wasn’t there a story called 'The Dying Detective’?”

  “Yes, yes, so there was. But you’ll never die, Holmes.”

  “You’ll never let me, my dear fellow.”

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE RARA AVIS

  Carolyn Wheat

  A CLUB WITHOUT a bow window is no club at all. This reflection absorbed me as I sat in the comfortable leather chair that constituted the premier place of honor in the Strangers’ Room at the Diogenes Club. Beyond the panes of the gently curving window stepped, or so it seemed, all of London, high born and low, gentlemen and pickpockets, men in frock coats and ladies in velvet cloaks, high-stepping horses and mangy curs.

  Carriages rattled past, some the crowded omnibuses of the great city, others bearing lozenge crests denoting rank and birth. Deliverymen shouted at coachmen, vendors cried their wares, and ladies whose cheeks showed perhaps a touch too much color smiled at passing gentlemen in a most unseemly manner.

  I fancied myself something of a student of humanity—or at least I did so before I made the acquaintance of my remarkable friend Sherlock Holmes and his even more remarkable brother Mycroft.

  “The man risked a fine just to speak to me,” Mycroft Holmes said, helping himself to a liberal bite of cucumber sandwich. “Indeed, we shall probably both be brought to the attention of the committee in a most embarrassing fashion.” It was the custom of the Diogenes, quite the most eccentric club in England, for members to address not a word to one another in the private rooms. Conversation was permitted in the Strangers’ Room alone (and, indeed, that sobriquet served notice upon those who in any other club would have been referred to as “guests” that, at the Diogenes, they were a sort of infection to be quarantined).

  “I can only conclude that his business is a matter of the utmost importance.”

  “Important to him, my dear Mycro
ft,” Sherlock Holmes replied. “Not necessarily important to me.” He contented himself with a sip of tea, ignoring the feast of sandwiches and scones brought by the ancient club waiter. “But tell me, what do you know of your fellow club member?”

  “He is but lately retired from the academic profession,” Mycroft replied. “Not a fellow of Oxford or Cambridge but of a lesser institution somewhere in the north. He is an archaeologist, not by profession but by passion.”

  “An amateur,” Holmes said with a brisk nod. “Which means he is either a genius or a dilettante. There is no in-between in such cases.”

  “His particular passion is early British pottery, and to that end he has participated in several ‘digs’ in various parts of the country.” Mycroft wiped his fleshy lips on a snow-white napkin. He reached into the pocket of his silk waistcoat and pulled out a neatly folded note, which he handed to his brother with an air of one conferring a great favor.