by Dan Simmons
Clemens and Howells were laughing at Holmes’s outburst, and James could not help it, he also chuckled.
“Well,” said Clemens as Holmes sat silent, leaning on his stick, “I only wish I had a trademark like your deerstalker hat, caped coat, and magnifying glass, Mr. Holmes. God knows I do love being known and recognized. Providence and Presbyterians please forgive me, I live for recognition and for my own insignificant little bit of fame. Life is short enough, is my belief, without passing through it unnoticed by the multitudes. If you hadn’t become known for your deerstalker cap, Mr. Holmes, perhaps I would be wearing one myself. I do so enjoy standing out in a crowd.”
“Go about a German or American city in a deerstalker,” said Howells, “and you will stand out in an asylum.”
James chuckled again. Sherlock Holmes said, “Wear white.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Clemens. He was preparing a new cigar.
“Wear a white suit . . . but with your regular black shoes,” said Holmes.
“I wear white suits from time to time every summer,” said Clemens, puffing the cigar to a glow. “A lovely, comfortable white-linen suit. And, yes, with my regular black shoes, which is a mortal sin and unspeakable faux pas at Newport and at several clubs to which I have been invited. But, alas, I am only one white suit amidst thousands as the temperatures soar and the season of white suits rolls round.”
“Wear them in the winter,” said Holmes. “Year-round.”
“Year-round?” repeated Clemens, looking to Howells who only smiled and shrugged. “They will put me in an asylum if I start doing that.”
“With your notoriety . . . fame I should say . . .” said Holmes, “and with your mane of white hair, it will be seen as an attractive eccentricity, a whim of a great and amusing man. You will stand out in every crowd, at least from September to May. The white suit shall become, one could say, your signature in society. Behold, Mark Twain cometh.”
Clemens laughed along with the rest of them, but there was a calculating look in his eye.
Henry James, allowing himself to get into the mood of the moment—which was very rare for him—said, “If anyone asks why you wear white linen suits all winter, Mr. Clemens, tell them that cleanliness is paramount for you and that you have become aware that men’s black suits merely hide the dirt and soot. How many weeks or months—or years—go between cleanings of those dark suits? No, sir . . . you will not be part of that suspiciously dark crowd. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, you can say, and Mark Twain is next to his white linen suit.”
This time Clemens threw his head back and roared with the others.
* * *
Howells stayed in Hartford with Clemens as the humorist made his afternoon round of visits and had dinner with old Connecticut friends who might just have money to invest or loan. James and Holmes took the afternoon train back to New York where they would catch the evening train to Washington.
“Henry Adams will be home in a very few days,” said James after they had made the connection in New York. “I’m a trifle curious how you will present yourself to him . . . the intrepid Norwegian explorer Jan Sigerson or the consulting London detective Sherlock Holmes. Of course, you and John Hay have three or four days to decide the better course.”
Holmes was reading a small guide to Chicago that he had picked up at a Grand Central Station kiosk, but now he looked up at James sitting across from him. “I’m afraid Hay and I have no more time to discuss such things. Mr. Adams is returning today—almost certainly before you and I arrive at Mr. Hay’s home.”
James blinked rapidly. “But John Hay said . . . the servants said . . . everyone said.” He calmed himself and leaned on his stick. “Are you sure of this, Mr. Holmes?”
“I am, Mr. James.”
“So will you be introduced to Adams as Sherlock Holmes or as Mr. Sigerson?” asked James.
“With luck, by tomorrow morning we’ll have shifted quarters to those nearby rooms to let about which Mr. Hay talked to you. You are certain they will be satisfactory?”
“They were in ’eighty-three when I was here last and Clover Adams arranged for me to stay there,” said James. “Light, clean rooms—and Hay says that we shall each have a corner bed-sitting-room of our own.”
Holmes nodded. “The privacy will help in my investigations.”
James looked out at the countryside passing by, the small white houses and red barns and newly plowed fields and small remaining bits of forest enriched by the warm light of the setting sun and the long shadows. When he turned back, he said, “I take it you would rather meet Henry Adams as yourself—as Holmes.”
“It would simplify much,” said Holmes and they rode in silence for half an hour or so.
“Mr. James,” said Holmes at last, “since we may not have the opportunity for a private conversation for some time to come, allow me to say Mr. Clemens’s reprise of your brother William’s theory of self—of ‘I’ and ‘Me’—was of the greatest interest to me.”
James nodded his appreciation and stifled a sigh. He’d been in his older brother’s shadow for fifty years now and, while he loved William dearly—part of James still wanted to follow William around and be in his presence constantly as he did when he was a small boy—he would, at age fifty, appreciate stepping into the sunshine of praise for his own work, his own achievements, his own life.
“I mention it,” continued Holmes, “because I see the same analysis of the polyphonicdialogic of multiple selves and most especially of the spiritual core, the ‘I’ caught up constantly in the flow of thoughts and events—what your brother so brilliantly labeled as ‘the stream of consciousness’—in your writing, sir. That is, in your stories and novels and characters. It is astounding to me that two brothers, usually separated by an ocean, could so masterfully come to the same impression and explanation of human consciousness—your brother from the scientific side and you, even more powerfully, from the literary.”
For the first time in years, Henry James found himself speechless. Finally he managed to say—“Thank you, sir. You have read my work?” He heard the odd tone in his own voice in that query.
“I’ve read and enjoyed your work for years,” said Sherlock Holmes. “For reasons that may be all too obvious, I found your The Princess Casamassima a wonderful examination of how the working classes in England and America turn to anarchy . . . and thus to terrorism.”
James again nodded modestly toward his interlocutor. The author had been inordinately fond of his The Princess Casamassima. For one thing, the novel was a far cry from Daisy Miller and his many stories about young American women encountering Europe, but the critical response to the book had been muted and mixed.
As if reading his mind again, Holmes said, “I happened to read one review in The Times that criticized the book—and you—for placing so much of the social interaction on Sundays.” Holmes shook his head and smiled. “That reviewer, and perhaps too many of our upper classes, simply don’t realize that for the foreign working class you were describing, Sunday afternoons are the only time they have for any sort of social activity.”
“Exactly,” said James, who had actually researched his novel about the foreign-born working classes more diligently than any other work he’d written. “Thank you for realizing that.”
“The prison so aptly described in your book was Millbank Prison,” said Holmes. “I saw you there—inside the prison—early on a December morning in eighteen eighty-four. You were being led by one of the surlier day wardens, he took you to the women’s wing probably conjecturing that it might seem less oppressive to a renowned author’s sensibilities, but the warden with a small lamp was so far ahead of you that you seemed alone, squeezing up the metal stairs from cell ward to cell ward with your shoulders brushing cold stone.”
“Yes!” cried James, amazed. “But I saw no other gentlemen during my visit. Not even Millbank’s warden with whom I had corresponded, through the kind offices of a friend in Whitehall, to receive permission
for the visit. There was only that surly, as you say, and infinitely uncommunicative guard. Where were you, sir? In the process, perhaps, of delivering some fiend you and Dr. Watson had just caught?”
“I was a prisoner,” said Holmes. “I saw you through the tiny Judas hole in my cell’s door—the guards were often too lazy to close it—before you climbed the steps to the women’s ward.”
“A prisoner?” gasped James. He knew his features were aghast, reflecting the shock he felt.
“I was there for a little more than two months in disguise—if a prison uniform, welts from beatings, and severe malnutrition from the slop Millbank served out can be called a disguise—and my plan was to get close to another inmate whom I was sure was a killer of young women, but I admit, Mr. James, that it crossed my mind more than once that if something were to happen to both Inspector Lestrade and the warden, I might be in Millbank to this day.”
“Who was the killer?” asked James in a soft voice.
“An Oxford-educated barrister named Montague Druitt,” said Holmes, his eyes veiled as he seemed to be looking backward in time. “Druitt was also a schoolmaster with a record of occasional insanities and was found one Sunday outside the school where he taught. He was covered in blood. Inside the school was the dead and vivisected body of a certain Mary O’Brian, one of his students. Druitt was found guilty by a lower court but was in Millbank Prison only a few more days than I was. He had friends in high places, especially among the Inns of Court, and a second trial declared him innocent—they accepted his explanation that he had dropped by the school on a Sunday to pick up his books so that he could prepare his Monday lessons, found Miss O’Brian dead there, and, in his distress, held her body in his arms—thus explaining the copious amounts of blood on him.
“No knife was found on Mr. Druitt’s person or in the vicinity of the crime, so the courts let him go. He was a gentleman, you see,” said Holmes. “But I saw Miss O’Brian’s body before it was moved. She had been dismembered, sir. Her body had been eviscerated and was in pieces—each piece slashed and stabbed until she was turned almost inside out. Even the most compassionate gentleman would not have cradled that dissectionist’s work.”
“So you think he was guilty?” asked James.
“After he was released, I found the knife where he dropped it down a nearby sewer,” said Holmes. “It actually had his initials inscribed on it. And I was in the same terrible cell with him for seven weeks. He never fully confessed to the crime, Watson . . . I’m terribly sorry, Mr. James . . . but, in the privacy of that dark, dank cell along the Thames, Druitt smirked enough to me about no one ever solving the crime that, in my professional opinion, he all but bragged of committing it.”
“Surely Scotland Yard must have arrested him again after you showed them the knife and told them of his demeanor?” said James.
“Scotland Yard misses much, Mr. James—including this knife in their searches just after the crime. Including the family history of Druitt’s bouts of madness. But Scotland Yard does not want to advertise the things and criminals they miss.”
“That’s terrible,” said James, looking at Holmes in a new and strange light. “What happened to Mr. Montague Druitt?”
“After his release from Millbank, he returned to an ever more successful career as a barrister,” said Holmes. “When the so-called Jack the Ripper murders in the East End captured the press’s attention in ’eighty-eight, I joined Mr. Anderson of the CID in looking at many suspects. There were other murders of women through that period, but I was certain that the Ripper’s victims were only five—the poor ladies Chapman, Stride, Nichols, Eddowes, and a certain Mary Kelly, who had known Miss O’Brian who had been murdered in eighteen eighty-three. The man whom I became convinced was behind all the so-called Jack the Ripper murders was Mr. Montague Druitt.”
“But Jack the Ripper was never caught!” said James.
“No, but the body of Montague Druitt was fished out of the Thames on December thirty-first of eighteen eighty-eight,” said Holmes. “The police ruled it a suicide.”
“Was it . . . a suicide?” asked Henry James.
“No,” said Holmes. His gray eyes now looked so cold to James that he would have described them as inhuman, reptilian. But a reptile that was both satisfied and deeply sad.
Suddenly Henry James felt his body grow cold and a strange and unpleasant prickling flowed down his arms, the back of his neck, and along his spine.
Eventually James said, “I thank you again for your comments about my Princess Casamassima. It pleases me that someone as thorough with detail as yourself approves of its research.”
Holmes smiled. “You remember the location of the Hotel Glenham where we met Mr. Clemens last night for dinner?”
“Of course,” said James. “Nine ninety-five Broadway.”
“Well, Mr. James,” said Holmes. “Within ten blocks of that hotel were more than thirty beer halls, union halls, lecture halls, and even churches where anarchists meet every week. For your American anarchists are primarily socialists, you see, and your American socialists are primarily German . . . moderately recent German immigrants, to be precise.”
“I would never have guessed that, sir,” said Henry James. “Of course, many of the workers in my Princess Casamassima were German, but that was due to the prevailing feeling . . . the stereotype in England, as it were . . .”
“The German neighborhoods in the Lower East Side of New York are the nexus for ninety-eight percent of anarchist sentiment and activity in America,” continued Holmes, as if James had not even spoken. “I found it located primarily in the Tenth, Eleventh, and Seventeenth Wards. Germans refer to this part of New York as Kleindeutschland—‘Little Germany’, as I am sure I don’t have to translate for you. This area is bounded by Fourteenth Street on the north, Third Avenue and the Bowery on the west, Division Street on the south, and the East River on the east. It has been Kleindeutschland since the Civil War.”
“Certainly, sir,” protested James, “you are not saying that all German immigrants in New York are anarchists.”
Holmes was still smiling. “Of course not,” he said softly. “But I am saying that a surprisingly large number of your German immigrants have brought socialism with them from Europe, and at the core of the most fanatical socialism lie the embers and sparks of today’s anarchism and terror.”
“I find this hard to believe,” said James.
“Between eighteen sixty-one and eighteen seventy,” continued Holmes, “some zero-point-three percent of your immigrants were from Austria and Hungary, fewer than eight thousand people. Between eighteen eighty-one and eighteen ninety, more than six-point-seven percent of your immigrants are Germans or Austrians, almost seven percent of your total. Some eighty-two thousand people, most of whom chose to reside in the most crowded sections of New York or Brooklyn and not move west. And the ratio is rising dramatically. Demographers working in my brother Mycroft’s department at Whitehall predict—rather confidently, I feel—that a full sixteen percent of your immigrant population will be German by the year nineteen hundred, almost six hundred thousand German men and women and children, and by nineteen ten, lower-class Germans should be almost twenty-five percent of your total immigration, numbering more than two million.”
“But certainly there are German immigrants who are hard working, God-fearing . . . I mean, you mention only a few German beer halls . . .” stammered James.
“There are more than two hundred German beer halls associated with the anarchist movement in New York City right now, just in eighteen ninety-three,” said Holmes. “Many of these are what they call Lokalfrage—secure places—where they can speak freely or hold socialist meetings where they can openly discuss anarchist plans.”
Holmes leaned forward, his weight on his walking stick.
“And yes, your German immigrants are very hard working, Mr. James—I can tell you that by working alongside them under the most inhuman of conditions in factories in New York. But the
majority of them resist learning the English language. And the literate among them—and literacy is high in the German community, as you doubtlessly know—have read and absorbed their European communist-anarchist philosophers such as Bakunin and recently have moved on to the more violent communist-anarchist leaders such as Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Élisée Reclus. Your German immigrants have brought with them not only their capacity for hard work six long days a week, but their hatred of the upper classes and their interest in anarchy and . . . for a minority, but still for too many of them . . . a willingness to turn to the bombings, uprisings, and the assassinations of all-out anarchy.”
Holmes patted his cane absently, as if his own recitation upset him.
“Socialists—and anarchists—also use these beer-house Lokalfrage as clubhouses for trade-union locals, singing societies, and German mutual-aid organizations. But the anarchists, including the most virulent kind, Mr. James, also meet there, store weapons there, make their plans for assassinations there. And we could have walked to a dozen of these Lokalfrage from the Glenham Hotel last night.”
James desperately needed to change the subject. Many of his characters in The Princess Casamassima had been German immigrant workers, but Henry James actually knew no such Germans, no industrial workers. The Germans he did know were teachers, professors, artists, and literary men in Germany itself. He said, “But the man you are seeking . . . this Lucan Adler . . . he is not German.”
“No,” said Holmes in a strange tone. “Lucan Adler is not German.”
Knowing he should stay silent and let this disturbing conversation die, he still spoke. “This search for the person behind Clover Adams’s death—the search for Lucan Adler, Mr. Sebastian Moran’s bastard son, is terribly personal to you, is it not, Mr. Holmes?”
Holmes stared at him with those cold gray eyes and nodded ever so slightly.
