by Dan Simmons
In “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor”—which, like so many of the other Holmesian “adventures”, was no adventure at all, but just a vulgar domestic misunderstanding in the flimsy guise of a mystery—a certain “Lord Robert St. Simon” of high-birth visits 221 B Baker Street to seek advice and Holmes is instantly rude to him. Besides botching the title and crying “Good-day, Lord St. Simon” rather than the proper “Lord Robert” or “Lord Robert St. Simon”, Holmes immediately insults his guest and client.
Henry James had to stop himself at the last minute from marking the following passage in Clara’s book with pencil or pen. Lord Robert, who has been left at the altar by an American bride, is speaking:
“ ‘A most painful matter to me, as you most readily imagine, Mr. Holmes. I have been cut to the quick. I understand that you already managed several delicate cases of this sort, sir, though I presume that they were hardly from the same class of society.’
“ ‘No, I am descending.’
“ ‘I beg pardon?’
“ ‘My last client of the sort was a king.’
“ ‘Oh, really! I had no idea. And which king?’
“ ‘The King of Scandinavia.’
“ ‘What! Had he lost his wife?’
“ ‘You can understand,’ said Holmes suavely, ‘that I extend to the affairs of my other clients the same secrecy which I promise to you in yours.’ ”
What utter bombast, thought James. Any gentleman with a shred of discretion might have mentioned similar details in another case, but would never be so indiscreet as to mention the name of another client—especially not a royal one.
It was all a reverse snobbery that James had heard from Holmes—or at least from the man downstairs who might be pretending to be Sherlock Holmes in the same penumbra of insanity that led him to pretend that he was Holmes pretending to be explorer Jan Sigerson—and it led, along with so many other clues both in these “adventures” and in James’s time with the detective, to one conclusion: Sherlock Holmes was no gentleman. He was simply someone gifted in disguises who had been play-acting for years at being a gentleman—cultivating the casual dress, bored air, and upper-class educated accents of a true gentleman, but never showing the soul of one.
* * *
The last story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes—read with the window open because of a growing warmth in the air and with moths batting at the lamp—made the usually staid Henry James stifle his laughter with his hand over his mouth. It would not do to have the Hays’ servants—or perhaps the other guest down the hall—hear gout-ridden Henry James laughing aloud after midnight.
The final story in the collection was “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” and it was a fitting finale, since it included all of the authorial sloppiness, logical idiocies, and Holmesian blunders that made the other stories all but unreadable. Here they were gathered into a primary mass of one sensationalist writer’s execrable laziness.
The story starts with an attractive but far-too-familiar young lady—a stranger to Holmes and Watson but one acting as if she were already an intimate of the detective—a certain Violet Hunter, appearing one morning and demanding the Great Detective’s advice on an earth-shattering matter: should she take a well-paying job as governess for the son of an immensely fat man named Jephro Rucastle.
Mr. Rucastle’s interview with her was “odd” because he declared himself and his wife as “faddy” and said her employment would require her to wear a certain dress “Or to sit here, or sit there, that would not be offensive to you?”
Miss Hunter declares herself shocked to hear of the idea of her wearing certain clothing—although all domestic servants and many governesses of the era were required to do so—and the warnings of orders “to sit here, or sit there” were foolish for Rucastle to mention if he had dark intentions; the lord and lady of households routinely ordered their domestics and governesses around.
Then Mr. Rucastle informed Violet Hunter that she would have to cut her lovely and luxuriant hair short. At this outrageous condition, Miss Hunter turned down the job offer but kept thinking about the high salary and after a few days came close to changing her mind. Then a letter arrived from Rucastle, still insisting on the cut-hair and wearing of certain clothes as a condition, but raising her proposed salary to thirty pounds a quarter: a fortune for a governess, especially one with the admittedly limited education and experience of Miss Violet Hunter.
“ ‘That is the letter which I have just received, Mr. Holmes, and my mind is made up that I will accept it.’ ”
“Then what in Hades are you doing wasting this detective’s time in asking for advice if you’ve already decided?” softly hissed Henry James in the moth-circling night.
With the certainty of the machineries of plotting thudding and racketing along, drowning all logic and careful introspection, the telegram “which we eventually received came late one night” . . .
Please be at the “Black Swan” Hotel at Winchester at midnight
Tomorrow. Do come! I am at my wit’s end.
Hunter
This wasn’t a telegram; it was a royal summons. So naturally Holmes and Watson are thundering toward Winchester in a morning train. In this sequence, the interesting part, from what James’s brother William would have called “a psychological perspective”, was this rather amazing outburst from Holmes as he looks at the peaceful English countryside beyond London and comments upon the bucolic homes and cottages:
“ ‘ . . . I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.’
“ ‘Good Heavens!’ I cried. ‘Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?’
“ ‘They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’
“ ‘You horrify me!’
“ ‘But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it doing, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lovely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser . . . ’ ”
Henry James had lived in England long enough to know that this was pure twaddle. There were certainly instances of crime and domestic brutality in any picturesque village or cottage, but none of the wanton crime, neglect, and lack of law that Holmes here states—absurdly—would be so quickly reported and corrected, with punishment invariably handed out, in the slums and tenements of London. Indeed, the cruelty of Henry James’s favorite city was known to all of its urban inhabitants.
What struck Henry James in this silly outburst of the literary Sherlock Holmes was twofold:
First, it was not an English attitude about the city versus country. In fact, it was decidedly “un-English”. French, perhaps, Russian, possibly, but never English.
Second, James could all but hear his brother William’s strong voice saying—“This is a sort of confession from the man’s own background, Harry. A psychological plea for help and understanding. Something very dark and painful happened to this man in the country sometime in his past—a countryside he was not used to, being a former city slum-dweller perhaps—and his subconscious now loathes and fears the very idea of bucolic quiet and those stretches of peaceful darkness between the country homes and cottages. It would be very interesting to explore the basis for this man’s deep fears.”
* * *
Henry James occasionally lectured
on great writers, but should he ever give a symposium on Ludicrous Writing, he would use as his text the rest of “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”:
Miss Hunter—her hair now cropped short in a way that reminded James, with a pang, of his teenaged cousin, now deceased, Minnie Temple posing as Hamlet for them after a serious illness had caused her hair to be roughly shorn—meets Holmes and Watson at the Black Swan Hotel (evidently she is a governess who has no problem leaving her young charge, the Rucastles’ only child—a son, Edward, described only as having “a huge and oversized head” and of being “evil”—at any time of the day or night).
Indeed, other than her ascertaining that the odd-looking boy is evil, there is no mention of Miss Hunter’s governess duties or interactions with the boy. The Rucastles have informed Violet Hunter that their daughter—who looked very much like Violet Hunter—had died of “brain fever” (which was the reason for the daughter’s shortened hair), and now Hunter informs a solicitous Holmes and Watson that she has been made to sit in front of a bow window (with her back to the window, of course) in the dead daughter’s dress and laugh aloud at Mr. Rucastle’s endless trove of amusing anecdotes. When Violet secreted a small mirror into her handkerchief to look out the window behind her, she saw a young man standing at the fence to the property, staring intently at her back. But the humorless Mrs. Rucastle noticed the mirror, exclaimed that there was an intruder on the property, and demanded that Violet wave him away before they immediately lowered the blinds. Miss Hunter then easily unlocks a “locked drawer” in a chest of drawers in her room and finds a coil of hair that has precisely the color and texture of her own when it had been long.
As established forever in such gothic tales as Jane Eyre, there was the inevitable locked room—in fact, an entire locked wing—which Miss Violet Hunter was told to avoid. Naturally, she soon finds a key (inevitably, conveniently) left in the lock there and explores the empty, dusty wing . . . empty save for one room which is also locked, with the iron headboard from a bed used as bars across it. She does not have time to go inside.
Mr. Rucastle almost immediately learns of her transgression and threatens to feed her to the large mastiff, called Carlo, that he orders the single manservant, named Toller, to loose from the kennel to prowl the grounds at night. Toller, it seems, has drunk himself into oblivion that very afternoon. Holmes immediately announces that she must lock Mrs. Toller in the cellar that evening and that he and Dr. Watson, carrying his trusty service revolver, will be at Copper Beeches at seven p.m.
Holmes has stated that it is obvious that Mr. Rucastle has imprisoned his still-living daughter—Judy—in the locked room for some nefarious reason, probably about an inheritance he wants to control, and the three adventurers have soon broken through the locks and bedstead grille and flung open the door, only to find . . .
“It was empty. There was no furniture save a little pallet bed, a small table, and a basketful of linen. The skylight above was open, and the prisoner gone.
“ ‘There has been some villainy here,’ said Holmes; ‘this beauty has guessed Miss Hunter’s intentions, and has carried his victim off.’
“ ‘But how?’
“ ‘Through the skylight. We shall soon see how he managed it.’ He swung himself up onto the roof. ‘Ah, yes,’ he cried, ‘Here’s the end of a long light ladder against the eaves. That is how he did it.’
“ ‘But it is impossible,’ said Miss Hunter. ‘The ladder was not there when the Rucastles went away.’
“ ‘He has come back and done it. I tell you that he is a clever and dangerous man . . . ’ ”
Here Henry James cannot resist the soft laughter that overcame him. “A clever and dangerous man . . .” who for some reason found it necessary to bring a tall ladder to his own home, cross the roof, and drop through a skylight to retrieve a young woman from a room to which he had the keys and could easily unlock and walk in—and take his daughter out the normal way should he need to—any time he chose. This was typical of Holmes’s “deductions” and—James thought—it was typically asinine.
The end of the story was almost apologetically pro forma: Rucastle appears: “You villain!” cries Holmes. “Where is your daughter?” Then Rucastle rushes out to free Carlo, the giant mastiff, who we know from Mr. Toller’s two days of reported drunkenness—has not been fed for two days. Our trio hears “the baying of a hound”—another authorial idiocy, James notes tiredly. Although Henry James prefers small dogs, lap dogs suitable for parlors, such as dachshunds, he’s been around all breeds of dogs enough at other people’s country homes to know that mastiffs—which are usually quite gentle around people—are incapable of “baying”. Growling, perhaps. Roaring from the chest when threatened, perhaps. But baying, never. That ability to “bay” belongs to the “hounds” group of canines—and a mastiff is not a hound.
At any rate, Carlo chews out Mr. Rucastle’s throat, Dr. Watson with his trusty service revolver “blew its brains out” (but too late, alas!), and a suddenly helpful Mrs. Toller explains the entire plot, the need for Rucastle to fake his daughter Judy’s death (for inheritance reasons!) and hide her away in the locked wing, and the whole pantomime of Violet Hunter being made to impersonate Judy so that the daughter’s persistent fiancé (a “Mr. Fowler” whom Violet Hunter glimpsed in her mirror) will give up, accept Judy’s death, and go away.
In one final paragraph all the loose ends are tied and tidied up—we never meet Judy or Mr. Fowler, but hear from the narrator that they were married and that the lucky groom is now “the holder of a Government appointment in the Island of Mauritius”, and that Miss Violet Hunter has gone on (perhaps with the help of Sherlock Holmes?) to be “the head of a private school at Walsatt”. (A rather good job for a young woman with no real references who admitted in the story that she had as skills “only a little music, a tiny bit of French and German”.)
Henry James, setting the finished book on his bedside table, again has to press his knuckles against his lips lest an audible laugh escape.
The writer—Dr. John H. “James” Watson? Arthur Conan Doyle? A bizarre blend of the two hacks?—has forgotten all about the son, Edward. The boy with the “oversized head” and reported penchant for evil. It’s obvious that all of the characters, including his former governess, Miss Hunter, had also forgotten that Edward was supposed to exist. With the happy ending of Mr. Rucastle having his throat torn out by a hungry and impossibly baying mastiff, Edward just seems to have vanished. Poof!
Lying in the warm darkness, James thinks of a future story about a governess that he’s contemplated writing from time to time: his story, should he ever write it, would be from the governess’s mentally clouded point-of-view and would deal with a palpable—although imagined—evil that seems to threaten the child or children in the remote country house. James sees it as a ghost story without any certain ghost and knows it will require the lightest and subtlest of touches to make the increasingly nervous reader begin to wonder if the governess is insane . . . or evil . . . or if it is the children who are evil. Or perhaps there is a ghost (or ghosts, James hasn’t decided), despite all the psychological suggestions to the contrary.
His brother William would almost certainly like such a “psychological” tale.
All James knows for certain is that the tale will require all of his hard-earned skills and the most delicate of authorial brushstrokes to help the reader slowly become aware of the multiple levels of honesty, lying, guilt, and innocence—not even to mention survival—even while keeping the story explicit enough to chill the reader to goosebumps. But everywhere and always he will have to leave the reader in deep doubt about what has “really” happened and which of the events are only in the increasingly unstable governess’s mind.
Smiling slightly from the pathetic absurdities of the “Copper Beeches” and thinking ever so gently of ghosts and of the human mind in murky conflict with itself, Henry James falls asleep in the warm Washington night.
CHAPTER 15
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br /> Sunday was quiet in the sprawling Hays household—at least until Henry James cornered Sherlock Holmes.
Clara Hay had gone to church after informing everyone that she would be doing some charity volunteer work for hours after the church service proper. John Hay had hosted his two guests at breakfast but then disappeared into his beautiful study for hours of his own sort of literary or historical devotion. The huge home was quiet except for the reassuring sound of horses’ hooves and buggy wheels on the street outside and the occasional nunlike hushed rustle of servants moving efficiently to and fro within the light-filled, mahogany-scented mansion.
It was late morning when Henry James knocked on “Jan Sigerson’s” guest room door. Holmes, smoking cheap shag tobacco in his disreputable black clay pipe, let the writer in and beckoned to an extra chair near the window where he’d been reading. James was carrying a book of his own but he carefully kept the cover and spine hidden while the two men took their seats.
“Clarence King will be here in a few hours,” said James.
“Yes,” said Holmes. “I’m very much looking forward to meeting him.”
“I think you should not.” Henry James’s soft voice could be firm to the point of hardness when he willed it to be. He willed it so now.
