Sherlock Holmes Victorian Parodies and Pastiches
Page 16
“St! you fool!” replied the detective angrily; “don’t you see there’s a man hiding behind that figure? It’s Edward Clay, the Manchester murderer.”
“Edward Clay! Hi! policeman, policeman! Hi! ’urry up!” shouted the attendant, wild with excitement. A policeman emerged with much deliberation from the next room; nothing would induce him to ‘’urry up.’
“Confound the fellow!” muttered the detective, “he’s spoiled my plans, but at all events the bird’s safe. Look here, policeman,” he continued, turning to the phlegmatic minister of the law, “you know me, I dare say?”
The policeman scrutinised him closely, “Yessir,” he replied deferentially.
“Well, that fellow skulking behind there is Edward Clay, the London Road murderer. You know the Treasury yesterday decided to offer £200 for his capture. I make you a free gift of him.”
The policeman’s eyes gleamed; he lost no time in getting behind the noble lord, and, two seconds later, he was holding aloft, in stupor and amazement, the rigid waxen effigy of the notorious Edward Clay.
“Death and damnation!” shouted the great detective, quoting Shakespeare. He gave a glance at the vacant spot on the opposite side of the room, and ground his teeth in fury.
“Come along!” he said sharply to his friend, “there’s not a moment to lose.”
“‘Ere, stop a bit!” cried the excited attendant, who hadn’t taken in the situation. “I want to know ’oo’s bin a-movin’ them figgers, that’s wot I want to know. Oh, no, ye don’t!” he continued, as the detective and his friend began to move off. “‘Ere, awficer, run ’em in, I say!”
“It’s all right,” observed the policeman imperturbably; “that’s Mr.———, the great detective, but ’e’s met his match this time.”
* * * *
Clay had judged it better to get out at Marlborough road Station. So far the detective traced him, but there he lost every vestige of him. Clay’s commonplace appearance was his great safeguard. He made a long leisurely detour by Grovend road and Lisson grove, and quietly regained his Temperance Hotel in time for seven o’clock dinner. It was not till two years after this that the police succeeded in tracking him and running him down. And then his wonderful waxen model was moved with due solemnity to its proper place, across the threshold of the Chamber of Horror.
Advertisement for Madame Tussaud’s collection of figures
Impressions of Sherlock Holmes
He Says that Man Has Not the Capability Not to Invent Cults
Anonymous
This appeared in The New York Times of Oct. 28. The “cults” subhead appeared below the headline.
Sherlock Holmes could have communicated wisdom to the reporter if the latter had been young enough to receive it, for he admitted him into the intimacy of his home life, which, in accordance with the dictates of a very moral, though gently cynical, philosopher, one should ardently love.
Although the reporter lacked tact in inducing him to make a show of his talents, the first time that he met Sherlock Holmes the latter dazzled him with his aptness in penetrating all sorts of mysteries. His mind, disentangled from all commonplace things, permitted no incidental proposition to embarrass it, and went in a direct line to events which had not yet occurred. An example of this faculty is often given by his friend, Hyams, the well-known golf champion of Lenox, who received him one day at the threshold of his cottage, on the stairs of which men hurried up and down, carrying sofas, divans, seats covered with silk and lace, bookcases of rosewood, and other futile and unnecessary pieces of furniture. Hyams, to explain, said:
“Estelle, my poor late wife’s friend, whose house is all topsy-turvy for repairs, asked me to take care of her furniture for two or three weeks. It’s a great bother, but I had no reason to refuse.”
“There could be no valid reason,” said Sherlock Holmes, “but when you marry think of your son.”
“What a notion!” exclaimed Hyams, in unaffected surprise. “I am not thinking of marriage. At all events, you know that my son is the dearest being on earth to me.”
The two friends talked for several hours without making the least allusion to this incident, but, when they parted, Sherlock said, in a firm, tenderly imperious voice:
“Think of your son!”
Of course, a few weeks later, Hyams married Estelle, for a woman’s furniture hooks itself to wherever it happens to be, with hooks of steel, more securely than ivy, with its thousand claws; but blind as was the old lover, he had enough clearness of perception to realize that the future Mrs. Hyams illy concealed her hatred for his son. He had not force of character enough to postpone the projected marriage, but he gave to his son a notable portion of his fortune, for Sherlock’s warning flashed through his mind at the right moment.
Facts like these are trifles in Sherlock’s experience. His ideas in their abstract liberty, disengaged from all anecdotic dross, are much more striking, but to express them, a translator is inevitably a traitor. The reporter found at Sherlock’s home one day a young stranger, whose rapid thoughts summarized, in concise phrases, universal history.
“He is,” said Sherlock, “a priest of talent, who has every possible chance to become a Bishop.”
“What!” exclaimed the reporter, with an irreverence that his astonishment excused, “a priest with a slate-blue waistcoat and a long beard! He is not a Roman Catholic priest, I am sure.”
“No,” replied Sherlock, very seriously, “he is a member of the atheistic cult; only he belongs to a dissenting sect.”
The reporter has the habit and the good taste never to be astonished, but he could not repress a slight movement which was vaguely like surprise.
“Don’t affect to ignore the most elementary things,” Sherlock said, in a tone which was affable, yet severe. “Certain philosophers refuse to designate by the word God original causes or lack of original causes; but as they have to name them when they have to speak of them, the new word which they adopt is equivalent to the ancient one, and expresses the same idea in as precise a manner. It is thus that, to use a vulgar but excessively clear comparison, prudishness of the language has been replaced by other syllables, syllables which people refused to pronounce. What has happened? That the new word, ‘unmentionables,’ for example, designates drawers as clearly as the word ‘drawers’.”
“Yes, but you were talking of cults.”
“Certainly,” he said impulsively, “for man has not the ability not to invent cults. As individuals are not entirely different from one another, several individuals in a group necessarily have ideas in common. These ideas, by virtue of an imperious need of the human mind, they clothe in symbols. That is a religion. Friends attend a funeral and adopt an insignia by which they may recognize one another. They have created a rite. Those who, not being Christians, and wishing nevertheless to do honor to the memory of a Christian, stay at the door of the church, cannot stay there if the rain falls in torrents. They seek for shelter in the corner wineroom. They have thus consecrated another church. As they cannot all talk at once, one of them, the most eloquent or the most talkative, expresses the thought of all, in verse or in prose. His words are a hymn or a prayer. Finally, his faculties are so great for the task that it is habitually intrusted to him. The suffrage of his friends has delegated to him a sacerdotal function.”
“Aren’t you exaggerating a little?” said the reporter.
“On the contrary, I am attenuating,” said Sherlock, “for man constructs always after he has destroyed. Can’t you see that the atheists will write the history of those among them who, persecuted by Governments or by very ordinary Philistines, will have suffered for atheism? These histories, wherein shall necessarily be mingled allegories and legends, what will they be? Will they not be gospels?”
Round the Pink Pill-Box
A Study in Pathological Romance
“Castor Oyle”
Holmes was not the only creation of Conan Doyle’s to feel the lampooners’ sting. The publication of
Round the Red Lamp inspired this parody of two of the stories: “The Third Generation” and “My First Operation.” It appeared in the Dec. 1 issue of Lika Joko. The short-lived magazine was edited by former Punch illustrator Harry Furniss (1854-1925), who went on to become a pioneering animator for Thomas Edison.
It was raining heavily. The water came down like a douche bath, and stung the few passers-by like a carbolic spray.
Dr. Hardas Stone sat in his dining-room in Harley Street, sipping his wine after dinner, and admiring its rich ruby tints, like those of a carminative mixture, as he held his glass to the light.
A hansom splashed and rattled furiously along the unlovely street. “Ha!” said the doctor, with that marvellous diagnosis which marked him out above the rest of the College of Surgeons; “ha! a patient!”
In a moment the bishop-like butler ushered in a gentleman of distinguished appearance, but pale and haggard-looking. “I have no time to attend to you,” said Dr. Hardas Stone; “at this moment I am the trusted medical adviser of half the crowned heads, and all the peerage.”
“I am the fourth baronet of my family,” gasped the intruder.
“In that case,” said the doctor, “I can give you five minutes. Sit down and tell me your symptoms.”
The patient introduced himself as Sir Fancy Symptoms, and began to tell his ailments in a round-about and discursive fashion, but the doctor did not listen to him. Through the thin party-wall came the groans of a piano and the shrill screams of a fiddle as the neighbouring surgeon’s daughters vivisected the intermezzo of an Italian composer.
“Time’s up!” said Dr. Hardas Stone, snapping his watch with a peculiar click. Then this man, who had done things that no other man in the profession had dared to do, put up his spectroscope and his datura tatula into his hat, and, cramming his pockets with bistouries, scissors, lint, forceps, and hypodermic syringes, hurried his visitor into the pair-horse barouche in which he drove to see his illustrious patients.
They tore furiously through the dank, dark streets in dead silence. Only once the doctor moved uneasily.
“Is my case so utterly hopeless, then?” muttered Sir Fancy.
“Your case? Pooh!” said Dr. Hardas Stone, in his deep bass voice; “the instrument-maker’s case. I have been sitting on the bistouries.”
In another moment they were passing through double rows of students, each one with his stethoscope in his hat-band, and his note-book and a roll of lint under his arm, on the way to the operating theatre. They entered. Round them and above them rose serried rows of faces, the elder hard and callous, the younger pale and sick with anticipation; for Hardas Stone was famous for plunging the medulla oblongata, marvellous instrument of his own invention, nearer the source of life than any other man.
In a moment the doctor had laid Sir Fancy on the dissecting table, and turning with his best society smile to the house-surgeon, remarked, “Lovely girl dancing at the Frillery. I go every night. Will probably develop ossification of the patella.” Then the doctor placed his large, white muscular hands, with their long tapering fingers, on Sir Fancy’s face, and with his thumbs on each side of his nose moved it backwards and forwards.
“Gentlemen,” he said, half-turning to the breathless and awe-struck theatre, “gentlemen, a most interesting case. It is planipetalous, and adherent in one spot.”
“I knew it,” groaned the patient, casting his arms up to heaven.
“How long have you known it?” said Dr. Hardas Stone, turning his stern steel grey eyes on him.
“Since this morning, when I blew my nose,” whimpered Sir Fancy.
“It is impossible,” said the doctor, “to diagnose the case unless you have full confidence in your medical man, and be careful that no false modesty prevents you from speaking out. Do not think,” he continued, in his Big Ben voice, “that I do not want your secrets, because we are men in a book, and all these people are listening.”
“I have told all,” wailed the patient. “I have concealed nothing. I drink nothing but aerated water, but my grandfather was a three-bottle man.”
Dr. Hardas Stone put his tongue in his cheek and made a strange clicking noise. Then he turned again to his audience. “It is also pachydermatous,” he continued.
Tears came into Sir Fancy’s eyes, and a young student in the front row turned a ghastly white.
“And primogeniture,” continued the doctor, his deep bass voice ringing through the theatre.
The patient rose to a sitting position, clasped his face in his hands, and screamed out—“Oh, heavens! What have I done to suffer like this? I never touched my grandfather’s three-bottle nose! And I was to have been married on Tuesday!”
“Impossible with a nose like this,” said the doctor, taking the organ between his finger and thumb, and forcing Sir Fancy back into a recumbent position.
But the patient had fallen back on the table in a dead faint.
* * * *
When he came to himself he was lying in the theatre, which was in darkness but for the light of a solitary candle. He sat up and felt his nose.
“It is not off,” he groaned, “and the doctor said it was polyphloisboiothalassical. How long have I to live?”
A student laughed. “By fainting like that you missed one of Hardas Stone’s most brilliant lectures. For two hours he entertained us with his most racy stories.”
“And was there no operation, then?”
“Not a bit of it. Why, you have not even a cold in the head! But you can’t have too much local colour in a short story.”
The Old Age of Holmes
An Unauthorized Extract from the Diary of Dr. Watson.
“Howard Fielding” (Charles Witherle Hook)
Howard Fielding is the pseudonym of Charles Witherle Hooke (1861-1929), who graduated from Harvard in 1883 and wrote humorous pieces while working for newspapers in Boston and New York. Heavily influenced by Conan Doyle, he turned to the mystery genre, writing novels and stories—two of which were turned into silent movies—as well as 33 Nick Carter stories. This piece appeared in the Dec. 2 edition of the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle and other newspapers. The artist is unknown, as is why he chose to portray Holmes as Uncle Sam!
The fact that my friend, Sherlock Holmes, was killed before reaching middle life did not, as the experienced reader will understand, prevent him from attaining a ripe old age. In order to be in line with the most popular detective fiction, I should, in fact, have killed him several times in the courses of each of the adventures which it has been my privilege to chronicle. On the contrary, it has been my aim to distinguish these records from fiction, and to convince the reader that they are as near the actual truth as anything founded on a married man’s diary can be. Therefore, while making a slight concession to the general prejudice by injecting fatal doses of cocaine into Holmes on every possible occasion, I have permitted him to die only once.
My gifted friend is an old man now. His lofty forehead extends all the way around to his shirt collar behind; his few remaining teeth are tied in with string; but his eye is as bright as ever, and, with the aid of a little extra cocaine, he can still see things which are not present. With this brief introduction, I will proceed to relate a series of incidents not intended to form a connected narrative, but simply to throw light upon my remarkable friend’s character, as it has developed in these later years.
Referring to my diary I find that it was in the fall of 1913. Holmes, by the continued exercise of his rare intellectual faculties, had remained a bachelor. He had the old rooms in Baker street, where the landlord, being quite deaf, did not object to Holmes’ performances on the violin. It was late in the evening, and I was dozing before my stove, when a ring at the bell called me to the door. Holmes entered.
“Ah, my dear Watson,” he said, “can I intrude upon your leisure for a few minutes?”
I assured him with an Englishman’s politeness that his company was better than none at all.
“So you’ve bee
n smoking, have you?” he said, as he treated himself in my office.
“My dear fellow,” I cried, “how is it possible for you to know that?”
“It is perfectly simple,” he replied; “there is a strong odor of tobacco in the air. Now, as I happen to know that you and Mrs. Watson are the only persons in the house, what follows? It is true that your stove smokes, but it does not smoke tobacco. So you see that, though seemingly complex, the problem is easy.”
“To be sure it is,” I rejoined, quite vexed at my own stupidity.
“Ah, my boy,” he said, “I fear that I make a mistake in giving explanations. They destroy the magic of the thing. But they fill space, and, at a guinea a word, that is worth considering. And now to the point. Can you go to New York with me?”
‘Why, certainly,” I hastened to say. “My neighbor, the doctor, is as accommodating as ever. He will take my practice for a few months, and my patients will not be much worse off than they are now. When shall we sail? And what is the case?”
“We shall sail at once,” he said, “and as for the case, it concerns the Society for the Discouragement of Thieves.”
“I never heard of it.”
“Perhaps not. I am its president, and, in fact, its only member at present. I have been unable to find anybody else who could be admitted without decreasing by one the number of persons whom the society is organized to discourage. That, of course, would not be desirable.”
“And you intend to admit me?”
“My dear Watson, when you give up the regular practice of your profession we will consider that question. Will you come with me to New York? There I expect to find thieves who really need to be discouraged. They have been having things all their own way for three hundred years, since the island of Manhattan was stolen from the Indians.”