Death on a Pale Horse

4





Holmes? Though I was not to meet him until my return from India, it is not strictly true to say that I had never heard of him before I left for home. Let me explain.So much for my days of soldiering. And what of

While I was convalescing at Peshawar our attendants used to wheel us out in our beds every morning on to the balconies of the wards. The clear air from the Khyber hills and the mild breezes from the fertile plains of the Punjab were supposed to invigorate our constitutions. There was little to do but lie propped on the pillows, talking or reading.

One morning my neighbour, a captain from the Somerset Light Infantry, was sitting on the edge of his bed in his dressing-gown and cap reading a copy of London Life. This was an illustrated periodical full of the gossip and humour of the day at home. Its features relied much on news or pictures of the West End stage and the London season. It was sent out monthly to the mess-rooms and clubs of the British Army in India, no doubt to boost our morale in what was now being called “The Second Afghan War.” Captain Coombes handed his copy to me, his finger indicating a small paragraph at the foot of the page.

I read what followed.

W. S. Scott Holmes is an English Shakespearean actor now entertaining the best society in New York. He sends us a puzzle. His grandfather, William Sigismund Holmes, lived a hundred years ago. It was a world before steam engines or telegraphs. In 1786 the good Sigismund bet one of his creditors a hundred guineas that he could send a letter fifty miles in an hour. At this time, a carriage horse would only cover six miles in an hour, while at twenty miles an hour the fastest racehorse would be exhausted in a few minutes. A ship under full sail in a strong wind would not even equal that. How did Sigismund Holmes do it? See the answer on page fifty-four.

I leafed my way through the magazine and came to the solution.

Sigismund employed the twenty-two young men who had represented the varsity teams of Oxford and Cambridge at their first game of cricket. They appeared dressed in white flannels and shirts, with caps and padded gloves, on the Old Steine at Brighton. Here they formed a line, twenty yards apart from one another, a quarter of a mile in all. All this was done under the eyes of the Prince Regent himself—a sportsman if ever there was one! The letter was enclosed in a cricket ball. It flew with great speed and accuracy from one expert fielder to the next, along the line and back, over and over. At the end of the hour the letter had travelled fifty-one and a half miles. The ingenious Sigismund Holmes was a hundred guineas less in debt. Any doubters may find this feat confirmed by the celebrated sporting writer C. J. Apperley, popularly known as “Nimrod.”

NB: For every curiosity of this kind printed, the proprietors of the London Life will be pleased to pay the correspondent two and a half guineas.

I was amused by Sigismund’s trick but gave not a second thought to his grandson. As his admirers will know, in those early days W. S. Scott Holmes was the stage name of William Sherlock Scott Holmes. He returned to the chemical laboratory of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and resumed his career as a criminal investigator after a year on the boards in America with the Sassanoff Shakespeare Touring Company. Thereafter, as a consulting detective, he chose to be known more simply as “Sherlock Holmes.”

Those who have read my narrative of the Brixton Road murder, given to the public under the somewhat sensational title of A Study in Scarlet, may recall something of the events which led to my first meeting with this future friend. When I had disembarked from the Orontes at Portsmouth, I was classified as a military invalid with little or no prospect of a further career in my chosen profession. Until their final decision was communicated, the Army medical board left me to lead a comfortless London existence at a private hotel in the Strand. The place was no better than a boarding-house for impoverished widows and widowers in their last years. My princely income was an allowance of four pounds and six pence a week.

During convalescence in hospital, I had managed to put aside most of my pay and my invalid supplement. There had been little opportunity to spend it. Even the comfort of a pipe and tobacco was forbidden me. Yet as the weeks of 1881 passed in London, this little stock of capital ran lower and lower. I had no family in England, except a few distant cousins down in Devonshire. I had no expectations of a legacy and no one to whom I could turn for immediate assistance.

A city with as many attractions as London is not an easy place in which to do nothing. Week after week, I seemed to spend more money than I had meant to. My state of mind may easily be imagined, as I contemplated the loss of both health and independence. As for marriage and a settled existence, what woman of any sense would have a man with my prospects?

In this frame of mind I walked down Piccadilly one January morning, wondering what I should do. That famous avenue was busy with people who all seemed to look far richer than I should ever be. Swans-neck pilentum carriages passed me, drawn by glossy bay geldings. A coach with armorial bearings upon its door rumbled by. Even the hansom cabs were almost beyond my means to hire.

At that moment, the course of my future life was decided by a single stroke of coincidence. As I returned from the trees and carriages of Hyde Park Corner, the clocks struck twelve. I resolved that my first economy must be to leave the private hotel for cheaper accommodation. What could be cheaper? Goodness knows whether I should find anything short of a common lodging-house. All the same, I would celebrate my decision to live more cheaply by allowing myself a final luxury. I pushed open the door of the old Criterion Bar in Coventry Street, off Piccadilly Circus.

The stroke of coincidence was a tap on my shoulder and the friendly voice of young Stamford, who had been a surgical dresser under me at Barts Hospital before my days in the Army.

We exchanged all the formalities of friends long parted and then began to talk. I described my military experiences in Afghanistan and the situation in which I now found myself. I knew him well enough to mention that I must move from my present hotel to another abode—I knew not where. At once he told me of his acquaintance, a certain Sherlock Holmes. Holmes had informed him that very morning that he was in search of lodgings. More to the point, he had found a very nice set of rooms, in Baker Street, but must have someone to go halves with him in the cost. Stamford rather thought that Holmes was inviting him to share the rooms; but Stamford was already suited, as they say.

I recall, as if it were only a week ago, my excitement at this chance of solving my own problem so easily. If I could chum with someone, it would halve the cost straight away.

“By Jove!” I said with a laugh. “If your friend really wants someone to share the rooms and the expense, I may be the very man for him. In any case, I should prefer going halves to living alone!”

That afternoon, in the chemical laboratory of Barts, I came face to face with a studious-looking individual, a little over six feet in height. He was so lean that it made him look, if anything, taller still. The eyes were sharp and penetrating, the nose thin and hawk-like. His features made him appear at once alert and decisive. His jaw was firmly set, as if resolute and determined. In the matter of his physical strength, the moment of our first handshake convinced me of that!

I was not in the least surprised that he later proved to be an expert swordsman, boxer, and singlestick player. As for the power of his hands, I shall never forget our visit from a bullying strongman, Dr. Grimesby Roylott. This bully emphasised his threats to us by taking the poker from our fireplace and bending it into a curve with his huge brown hands, his arteries swelling and face purpled. After his stormy departure, Holmes ruefully picked up the distorted metal from the grate and with a careful effort bent it straight again.

From the start, I knew that Holmes was a man who never admitted failure or defeat. I have sometimes been asked to describe his appearance and manner by those who had not known him. I have suggested that they should imagine the stance and manner of Sir Edward Carson, QC, that most vigorous and astute of cross-examiners, combined with the combative and self-assured manner of Lord Birkenhead, the former Mr. F. E. Smith. There was also a dash of the late Lord Curzon with his taste for what he called effortless superiority. But even all that does not do him sufficient credit for his nobler character. Holmes would put away ambition in order to work tirelessly and without reward on behalf of the poorest and humblest client. Indeed, it was “poor persons’ defences” which gave him the greatest satisfaction and which he undertook, without reward, for pure love of justice.

When Stamford introduced us that afternoon in the chemical laboratory, the great detective’s fingers were blotched with acid and stained a little by what looked like ink. Among broad low tables, shelves of bottles, retorts, test-tubes, and Bunsen burners with their blue flickering flames and odours of gas, he was in his element. After our brief introduction, he quite ignored me in his excitement at explaining to Stamford the success of some experiment on which he had been engaged. He confided to us that he had identified a reagent which was precipitated by haemoglobin and by nothing else. In plain terms, it would now be possible for the first time to identify blood stains long after the blood had dried.

It is not my intention to say more of this first meeting, for I have done that elsewhere. Let me just add, for the benefit of those who have not met him before, that Sherlock Holmes dwelt in alternating spasms of fierce intellectual excitement and moods of brooding contemplation. The problem is that life cannot always be lived at a pitch of fierce excitement. In the most active career, there are days or weeks of tedium. Other men might have turned to drink or sexual vice in these doldrums. Sherlock Holmes preferred the less complicated palliatives of music or cocaine. I deplored his use of the narcotic, but I came to see that the drug was not his true addiction. It was merely his substitute for a more powerful cerebral stimulation when he was engaged upon a case. Then he needed nothing stronger than his faithful pipe.

As to his mind, it was possessed of a profound knowledge of chemistry, an adequate acquaintance with anatomy, and a practical familiarity with the English criminal law. In morbid psychology or psychopathology, he had a firm grasp of mental alienation. He read Krafft-Ebing or Charcot in psychiatric medicine as other men read the morning newspaper. Nor did he ignore the analysis of human darkness in such literary imaginations as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, or Robert Browning.

Perhaps his most formidable gift was an ability to master any form of knowledge in a matter of days or hours. He who had known nothing of astrology or joint stock companies or the effect of amberite cartridges on gunshot wounds would be a master of the subject within a week.

Holmes exercised his brain as other men would have used a chest-expander or a set of dumb-bells. For example, he would set himself the great unsolved problems of mathematics. If he did not find solutions to age-old mathematical paradoxes like Fermat’s Last Theorem or the Goldbach Conjecture, I believe he understood the nature of those riddles better than any other man living.

The most astonishing thing about him, from the moment of our first meeting, was his clarity of insight combined with a power of logical deduction. I remember the first illustration of this vividly. Almost the first thing he said to me, when Stamford introduced us and we shook hands in the laboratory, was “Dear me, sir! I see you have just been in Afghanistan. You were lucky to come back from Maiwand alive, despite your injury.”

We were total strangers! Two minutes earlier, before Stamford and I walked into that laboratory, Holmes had not even known of my existence. How the devil could he tell me of Afghanistan, let alone that I had been at Maiwand? Even Stamford knew nothing of my part in that battle. I said as much to Holmes. He laughed but would not enlighten me just then. Stamford later remarked that Holmes was forever teasing his acquaintances with these curious displays of deductive power. It seemed he was seldom if ever wrong in his conclusions. I thought it was surely some trick that he had learnt. What else could it be? I was naturally determined to find out how that trick was done.

To return to our adventure, however. Holmes had found vacant rooms at 221b Baker Street, handy for the streets of central London and the Metropolitan Railway, as well as agreeably close to the open spaces of the Regent’s Park. The arrangement of the rooms was convenient for two tenants but, as he had discovered, too expensive for one. We went together to Evans’s Supper Rooms that evening and over our meal agreed to inspect the new premises next day.

He told me about himself as we ate. His first rooms—“consulting rooms,” as he grandly called them—had been in Lambeth Palace Road, just south of Westminster Bridge on the far side of the river. He had still been an apprentice then, but these lodgings were convenient for the chemical laboratory of St. Thomas’s Hospital. He was not a regular student but was allowed occasional access to this laboratory on the basis of grace-and-favour. This was by virtue of a legacy to the governors in a bequest made by one of his kinsmen. How or why he had transferred to Barts Hospital, he did not yet say.

For a couple of years, this young researcher would return every evening from St. Thomas’s to the terraces and tree-lined vistas of Lambeth Palace Road, a favourite abode of our young physicians. It was here that he scored his first forensic triumph in the case of Dr. William Smethurst, an avaricious and philandering medical man. Dr. Smethurst’s wealthy bride had died in suspicious circumstances. The autopsy revealed large quantities of arsenic, and Smethurst had been the only person to have access to her in her final days. He was tried, convicted, sentenced and waiting to be hanged in a few days’ time. Sherlock Holmes, the young consulting detective, was employed as a last resort. In a sensational conclusion to this first case, he was able to prove that William Smethurst, though a thoroughly repellent individual, was as innocent of murder as the babe new-born. The arsenic had come not from the body but from items of the apparatus used to carry out the post-mortem tests.*

From then on, he never looked back. Perhaps he lost his footing when St. Thomas’s Hospital grew anxious at the macabre nature of some of his experiments and drove him elsewhere. If so, this never impeded him. He confessed that shortly before our arrival at Barts on our first afternoon, he had been belabouring a cadaver with a truncheon to establish the extent to which bruising might be produced post-mortem!

So much for his past. Next morning, the two of us travelled to 221b Baker Street and viewed the first-floor rooms on offer. There were two comfortable bedrooms plus a large and airy sitting-room with use of an attic storeroom. We should be provided for by a quietly spoken but agreeable housekeeper of Scottish extraction, Mrs. Hudson.

Baker Street was less fashionable than the Strand, but I was pleased to find that I should be paying less than at my so-called “private hotel.” I was so taken with this new arrangement that I agreed to the terms at once and arranged for my things to be moved to these premises the same day. Sherlock Holmes followed on the next morning.

I took an early opportunity of asking my new friend what made him think that I had lately been in Afghanistan and—indeed—at Maiwand. On one of our first mornings, I suggested at breakfast that someone must have told him. He shook his head: “No, my dear fellow. Why should anyone have told me? for they could not have known we were destined to meet. To begin with, I merely deduced that you came from Afghanistan. Why? My reasoning was very simple. Here was a gentleman of a medical type but perhaps in low water. His clothes are not new, even his waistcoat has seen a good deal of student wear. The nap is worn just where a stethoscope might hang. But there is also the air of a military man, one who holds himself upright as though having learnt to drill and march. Clearly, then, the probability is that we have an army doctor of some kind. Where has he been lately? He has probably just come from the topics, for his face is dark and that is not the natural colour of his skin, for his wrists are fair.”

He made a vague gesture with his right hand as if the problem had been almost too easy for him. Then he resumed.

“Our medical man has also undergone hardship and sickness. Pardon me, but the sunken eyes and his haggard face say that clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner, but he can hardly have set out with it in that condition! Where in the tropics, in the present state of affairs, could an English army doctor have got his arm wounded? Most probably in Afghanistan. What battle has been fought there recently ending in a rout of our troops and injuries to many of them? You see? It could only be at Maiwand. The process is really very simple.”

“Very plausible, at any rate,” I said ironically. He demurred at once.

“Of course I could not be certain of all this, but where else would the path of reason lead me? If one follows it, one almost invariably reaches the correct conclusion. There is no trick to it, I assure you.”

Soon afterwards, I was able to put this theory to the test. Until then, I still thought there was a certain boast and bluster in his claims. Little by little, Sherlock Holmes’s associations with Scotland Yard and the extraordinary abilities of which he repeatedly gave evidence made me think again. On this second occasion, however, we were looking down from the sitting-room window one morning. A man in plain clothes, carrying a blue envelope, was evidently looking for a number on one of the house doors.

“I wonder who that fellow is after,” I said, thinking aloud.

“You mean the retired sergeant of Marines?”

How absurd! He could not possibly know that the Royal Marines had been the man’s career, unless he knew this visitor already. That seemed unlikely, for the man appeared to be having a little trouble in finding the right door. I saw my chance when this messenger crossed the road and there was a loud rap on our street door. Then came the sound of voices and footsteps on the stairs. A tap at our sitting-room door heralded the appearance of this wanderer. Determined not to be forestalled, I crossed the room and opened the door. There was our visitor with the blue envelope in one hand and his walking-cane in the other.

“For Mr. Sherlock Holmes, sir,” he said, handing over the envelope.

I had my chance now.

“One moment, if you please! What is your trade?”

“Commissionaire and messenger, sir. Uniform away for repairs just now.”

Good! I thought.

“Any previous occupation?” I inquired.

“Yes, sir! Sergeant, sir! Royal Marine Light Infantry, sir! No answer to the message? Right, sir! Much obliged, sir.”

He brought his heels together, raised his right hand in salute, and went back down the stairs.

The face of Sherlock Holmes was all innocence.

“Very clever,” I said. “But how could you know, unless you had met the fellow before?”

We were standing at the window again, watching the man as he walked slowly down the busy street towards the Metropolitan station.

“If you had observed more closely, Watson, you would have seen an anchor rather distinctly tattooed on the back of his left hand. Only a sailor, I think, would submit to wearing that. On the other hand he walks with a military step, does he not, rather than a seaman’s roll? He also sports army side-whiskers of regulation cut. Who would combine all these traits? Surely a Royal Marine. Clearly he is no longer in the service, therefore he has retired. Indeed, he is a commissionaire and messenger. Now watch him as he goes. That poise of his head and the swing of his cane give him a certain authority and command. Does not that suggest something more than a common ranker? Not an officer to be sure, therefore a sergeant. It is a matter of simple deduction. Nothing more.”

“And I daresay a matter of luck.”

He smiled gently.

“My dear Watson! Lady Luck can play the deuce with us all!”

He gave his attention to the blue envelope, slitting it with a paper-knife and drawing out a single sheet of foolscap. It was a letter from Inspector Tobias Gregson, “the smartest of the Scotland Yarders,” as Holmes described him. It solicited an opinion in the case of the Brixton Road murder. In the view of my new friend, Gregson and Lestrade were the pick of a bad lot at the Yard. Even so, he had been obliged to extricate Inspector Lestrade, when the inspector had got himself into a fog over the Bank of England forgery case some years before. After that, he was visited by this tenacious officer several times a week, bringing the latest news of London crime for his views upon it.

If I had doubted the purpose of his “consulting rooms,” I did so no longer. They were the apartment of a private detective, who made himself available for hire as surely as a barrister or a hansom cab. Until a few days earlier, I would have told you that such people exist only in stories sold on station book-stalls. Now it seemed I breathed the excitement of crime and detection as surely as the air of Sherlock Holmes’s shag tobacco in our sitting-room.

The new rooms in Baker Street received our first clients. My Army medical board discharged me with a pension which would not support me on its own. My only other qualification lay in medical practice. But a practice means a partnership, and such a partnership requires purchase money. I caught myself thinking that if I could somehow work with Holmes for the time being, a modest income from detection would combine with my little pension to keep me alive. After a while, I might save enough to establish myself as a physician again. Perhaps I could buy myself a place, if only as a junior in a country town. There were the cousins in Devonshire. I had not seen them in a good many years, but I daresay they might help me to establish myself as a small-town doctor.

Alas, how greatly I underestimated the fascination of detection! Holmes and I were in partnership from the very first days of the Brixton Road murder mystery. There were certain understandings between us, of course. We almost always turned away marital disputes and divorce actions, which are the lot of so many “inquiry agents.” It also took me a considerable time to get used to Holmes’s insufferable air of superiority in the act of discovery. There was still a little too much “brag and bounce” in his demeanour, as it seemed to me. But the longer we knew one another, the better we got on.

I resigned myself to his bohemian ways, his unexplained absences and his habits of working at all hours of the day and night. All day he gathered information, and much of the night he passed in restless calculation. How often did the night walker or the policeman on his beat in Baker Street glance up and see the familiar silhouette of Holmes in profile against the drawn blind of our first-floor room! It was the shadow of a man pacing rapidly to and fro, his hands clasped behind his back, his head bowed by a weight of thought.

Those who caught sight of this familiar outline invariably imagined the subtle detective brain forming a pattern of clues to foil a new challenge by the underworld. Yet Holmes was human and, in his way, fallible. Like many successful men, from time to time he liked to sigh and confess that his true ambitions lay elsewhere. If he had his time over again, it would be a life of beekeeping in a fold of the quiet Sussex Downs. His cottage would be within sight of the glimmering sea and with the sound of its waves carried to him on a temperate breeze. For the time being, nothing pleased him more than to see his initials at the foot of a page in Notes and Queries or The Classical Quarterly, a few paragraphs on some obscure but learned topic, probably of interest to not more than fifty people in the entire world.

Yet while we were putting our detective partnership on a secure footing, in such cases as the decipherment of the Musgrave Ritual or the retrieval of the Admiralty plans for the Bruce-Partington submarine, stolen from Woolwich Arsenal, the world outside our rooms was moving on. It was becoming a more dangerous place.

In particular, to one who had seen something of imperial warfare, all was not well with Britain and her empire in South Africa. The shadow of defeat which had lain over Isandhlwana soon extended elsewhere. This was all the more important because it coincided with the discovery and development of the new diamond fields and gold mines by the Dutch Boers of the Transvaal. Their territory had been annexed by Britain, but I arrived home from India to hear of the uprising against British rule and an invasion of our own South African province of Natal by the Boers themselves.

After a British column was ambushed and almost wiped out by Boer Commandos, a momentous battle followed at Laings Nek. British casualties were numbered in hundreds and those of the Boers scarcely in dozens. So complete was the rout that Her Majesty’s colours were never carried into battle again.

As I read of this in The Times or the Morning Post, I truly wondered whether there was not some purpose or pattern of events behind it all. Isandhlwana now appeared like a prelude to the loss of the whole of southern Africa. And what would follow in India and elsewhere? I said as much to Holmes several times, but he was not to be drawn into this discussion. He was less interested in British imperial policy than in the identification of bloodstains by haemoglobin.

In any event, before my question could be answered, there was a decisive encounter at Majuba Hill. British losses included the death of their commander General Sir George Colley. These losses once again ran into hundreds. Those of the Boer Commandos amounted to only half a dozen.

A returning medical colleague assured me that the enemy’s fire had been so accurate and lethal at Majuba that burial parties after the battle found five or six bullets in each skull of some fallen Highlanders. Red-coated infantry were no match for camouflaged guerillas. There could only be one outcome. Two months later, the vast territory was lost and the enemy was in Natal. Within three months, our surrender was signed. So much for the boast of General Sir Garnet Wolseley that “so long as the sun shines, the Transvaal will remain British territory.”

Even then, being settled into Baker Street, I assumed that I had heard the last of my own military career and everything to do with it. I had little enough to do with the dreadful events in Zululand or the Transvaal. Our detective practice continued to prosper. The case of the Brixton Road murder came and went, followed by a succession of lesser mysteries which wait to be written up. Before I could set my pen working on these, I received a letter which assured me that certain horrors of the past were anything but forgotten.

* “The Ghost in the Machine” in Donald Thomas, The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes.