Sherlock Holmes in New York

by D. R. Bensen

  Holmes shook his head.

  “I pretend to some expertise on the violin, Mr.—”

  “Mix. First name, Thomas. Though nobody uses it in full, much.”

  “—but having, many years ago, traveled in America and heard your country fiddlers, I know my limitations too well to try to compete with their spirited performance. I shall look forward to hearing your songs. Many such, I believe, contain the history of notable crimes of the past—which touches on my professional interest. You were, then, yourself a cowboy?”

  Mix shrugged.

  “Have been. Got to know horses that way. Served in Cuba in ‘ninety-eight, with the cavalry, then joined up with your army in South Africa.”

  “You were with Kitchener and Roberts?” said I, excited to meet a participant in that epic struggle, American though he might be.

  “The generals didn’t trickle down to my level much,” he observed. “But yes, I was there—at Ladysmith, for one.”

  It seemed an odd thing to me that this ingenuous youth should have been engaged in a battle which had made history for the Empire, and I said, “Even though a foreigner, you must have been thrilled at our victory.”

  He gave me a squinting look.

  “Well, Kruger’s army’s out of it now,” said he, “but the war’s not over. And the way it’s going on is one reason I left. ‘Mopping up’ is what the dispatches call it, but it’s fighting against the farmers on their farms, getting backshot from behind a koppie, burning people out of their homes, and herding old men, women, and children behind barbed wire so’s you can keep an eye on ‘em all in one place … What do the staff fellows call ‘em, now— Oh, yes, ‘concentration camps.’ It’s a pretty-sounding name, but it don’t look so pretty when you see it.”

  I was not well-pleased to hear this sort of pro-Boer sentiment from one who, though he had admittedly been on the scene, did not have the instinctive viewpoint from which to understand these matters. Holmes divined my irritation, and attempted to compose matters by saying: “Mr. Mix comes from a land which established itself little more than a century ago by just such a struggle. Whatever the deeper significance of the conflict, an American is bound to have a feeling for embattled farmers.”

  He turned to Mix and said, “I am always glad to meet an American, and, in spite of the business which brings me on this trip, happy to renew my acquaintance with your country. Your rebellion against the Crown was a sad loss to us, but I believe we have been the gainer by seeing the old English spirit of Liberty reborn in even stronger form. It would be a grand thing, would it not, if one day our two nations, in a time of greater understanding, might rejoin and truly form what your Constitution calls ‘a more perfect union.’”

  As always, when mounting one of his few abstractly philosophical hobby-horses, Holmes was close to being feverishly animated.

  “We have the age and experience of Empire,” he went on—almost declaiming—”you, the generosity and vigor of youth. Should Britain and America have been united two years ago, for instance, I doubt that this unhappiness in South Africa would ever have taken place—for who can imagine America exerting its might to force its will on a distant, poor nation of peasants, whatever the cause?”

  Mix bent on him the same quizzical look he had at first given me. “When you get to the States,” said he quietly, “you might look up old Geronimo. He and you could have a right interesting talk on that point. See you at the concert tonight, gentlemen.”

  ———«»——————«»——————«»———

  I had to admit, as I sat in the lounge that night, that Mix’s songs, delivered in a pleasant, slightly nasal baritone, were simple and affecting, dealing with star-crossed lovers, the work of cattle ranching, and duels on fine points of honor, set to tunes that mostly seemed English or Irish. My neighbor, a red-faced man in a rumpled dinner jacket, seemed much moved, and tears rolled down his cheeks.

  Because of a change in the original order, Holmes was next to appear; and, though I had become inured to his abstracted scraping on his instrument during those times when he was brooding on some case—or the lack of any case—I responded to the richer tones and more assured performance that he now gave with enthusiasm. He eschewed the severely classical, and played several warmly haunting tunes reminiscent of Austria (lilting waltzes and pyrotechnic Gypsy melodies), though finishing, for reasons which escaped me, with “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.”

  As the last strains of Holmes’ violin died away, the man next to me muttered, “Beau’f’l song. Swee’st song ever …”

  I looked at him sharply. His eyes were glassy and through his open mouth his breath came raspingly. He was clearly quite drunk or under the influence of some opiate, and I felt a professional obligation to see him in surroundings where he could avoid further injury to his system.

  “Why don’t I see you to your cabin, old fellow?” I said as heartily as I could.

  “Goo’ idea. Hot … here.”

  The man looked up at me as if through a pond-deep layer of water.

  “And where’s your cabin, eh? B Deck, or what?” It seemed to me that he muttered “flummery.”

  “What?”

  He made a greater effort for clarity. “‘Nn … frm’ry. Infirm’ry. ‘M doctor. Ship’s doctor.”

  I flushed with rage and shame for my profession. The one physician available for hundreds of souls on this ship, and the man was dead drunk! Brusquely, I helped him to his feet and ushered him from the lounge—aware, with little regret, that I was missing a large lady beginning an impassioned reading from her favorite poems of Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

  Once we were out of earshot of the crowd and I was hustling him down the corridors and stairways that led to the infirmary, where he was quartered, I could not refrain from remonstrating with him.

  “This is disgraceful, man! Think of those dependent on you—scores and scores of people who might at any moment suffer injury or sickness, and have only you to turn to! Why, there’s an old lady aboard practically on the point of death! Do you propose to minister to her, should she require it, fuddled with drink? Or are you even aware of her presence among your … practice?”

  “Rum ol’ lady,” he mumbled, his rubber-legged walk making him twist in my grasp. “Of course saw‘r. She’s sick. Tha’s what I do, see sick people. Ship’s doctor, y’know. Looked in on ‘r jus’ before concert, dam’ fellow there wouldn’t let m’ see ‘r. Gave me a cup of tea, chat ‘bout how she’s restin’ com’f’bly, sent me off with flea in ear. I know that kin’. Next thing, ‘ll want death stifk’t. No queshions ‘n’ a nice sea burial. Won’t get it, not f’m me …”

  During this drunken maundering, I managed to get the doctor to his quarters, place him on his bunk, and loosen his tie. Praying that there would be no calls until at least morning—preferably not until the end of the voyage—on his skills, I left him.

  Outside the infirmary, I stood uncertainly for a moment.

  The old lady I had seen carried on board was surely gravely ill, and the doctor who should have been responsible for her care was incapable of seeing to it. Ought I not make some effort to satisfy myself of her condition? If so, how? I had no idea of her name or her cabin, and I shrank from making inquiries of the ship’s staff, which would inevitably expose the doctor to a ruinous investigation; after all, this might be only a momentary aberration, and, in spite of my indignation, I had no wish to destroy the man’s career.

  My problem was partially solved by the sudden appearance of a man whom I recognized as he who had followed the old lady’s invalid-chair up the gangplank at Liverpool. He was emerging from a door down the corridor. He carried a book in one hand, and I surmised that he was going to the ship’s library to exchange it for another, doubtless his means for whiling away the hours of his vigil.

  “Sir!” I called after him.

  He stopped, and I explained that I was a physician and—stretching the truth somewhat—had been asked to give a consultant’s o
pinion on the old lady, about whom the ship’s doctor was concerned.

  “My aunt is well enough,” the man observed. “She is sturdier than she looks, Doctor, and may well bury many who are younger than she.” He seemed to find the thought amusing. “In any case; she has a passion for privacy, and flatly refuses to see any physician or other person whatever. You may tell your colleague that Miss Jacobs is as well as her age allows her, and that she does not stand in need of his services—or yours, sir. Good night.”

  I was affronted at the man’s curtness, but, I confess, relieved that there seemed to be no further action which duty required of me. I made my way to the lounge for the remainder of the concert.

  ———«»——————«»——————«»———

  It seemed both an age and no time at all until we were standing past the statue of Liberty Enlightening the World in New York Harbor and making our way up the North River. On our left, a jumble of docks and warehouses marked our landing place; on our right, the awe-inspiring towers of Manhattan rose from their rocky base and strained into the morning sky. The water was alive with craft of every kind, from ungainly ferries plying between New York and every shore facing it, through rusty steamers, square-rigged grain and cargo ships, pleasure ketches and yawls, to mighty ocean liners like the one which carried us steadily upriver.

  “I fancy not London itself offers such a show, Watson,” said Sherlock Holmes as he surveyed the scene. “Yet it is changing. Ten years ago, or twenty, sail would have dominated it. Now, that is giving way to steam, and soon the tall masts that reach to the clouds will be gone, all gone. It is strange to think that in fifty or seventy-five years’ time the inhabitants of New York will never see a sailing vessel from one year’s end to the next … Where have we got to now, I wonder?”

  With audible cries of command from the bridge and the clangor of the engine-room telegraph, the Pavonia, abetted by nudging tugboats, was slowly turning toward the western shore of the river.

  “If we’re docking, this must be Hoboken,” said I.

  Holmes looked at me sharply. “Your logic is both rigorous and unassailable, Watson, but you have an uncanny way of making it seem that logic is not always the answer. However, we’d best get to our packing.”

  ———«»——————«»——————«»———

  As we stood on the dock, surrounded by our trunks, waiting for the ferry which would convey us to the New York side of the river, I was pleased to see that the old lady in the invalid-chair did not seem to have taken any harm from her sea voyage. As she was borne down the gangplank, she looked no worse than when I had first seen her in Liverpool. And she was clearly getting special treatment, I saw.

  “My word, Holmes, Miss Jacobs has a private boat to take her to Manhattan. See there, they’re lowering her into that steam launch!”

  “Ah, the chair-bound old lady. How do you come to know her name, my dear fellow?”

  I recounted my bizarre experiences with the ship’s doctor and the old woman’s uncommunicative attendant.

  “You are sure of all that, Watson?” Holmes said in great excitement. “Word for word—what the doctor said and what the … nephew … said?”

  “I believe I am?”

  “Fool!”

  “Holmes!”

  Sherlock Holmes clapped me on the back reassuringly. “Not you, Watson, never you! I should have seen it, should have known it. A wrapped form, kept hidden from all view … the one doctor with a right to investigate fed a cup of tea and somehow made suddenly incapable … the quick exit via a private launch … and, to cap it all, Miss Jacobs!”

  I considered these elements, but could form no picture from them, and said so.

  “Jacob is the Latin form of James, Watson. I tell you, I am as certain as I am of tomorrow’s sunrise that Professor James Moriarty is even now in that launch, laughing at how he has crossed the ocean under our very noses!”

  Striving to live up to Holmes’ complimentary remark concerning my logical faculties, I felt obliged to demur.

  “I shouldn’t have thought Moriarty was that sporting, to give us a chance to catch on to him.”

  “He isn’t, Watson. He left just enough of a trail so that I would know he was here, and not enough for me to catch him. He means me to be aware of his presence. And that means that, whatever the significance of those torn-up theater tickets, they somehow point to Moriarty. His web is spread in the streets of this great city, Watson, and we venture into it. Let us hope that we prove to be wasps—to rend it and destroy the spider that sits at its center—and not flies that will leave their lifeless husks enmeshed in it. Either way, the game is afoot!”

  Not for the first time, I was struck by the thought that Holmes, for a supposedly passionless logician, had an unnerving poetic streak to him. I could have done without that vivid comment about the flies.

  Chapter Five

  Standing among our piled trunks and luggage on the pavement outside the ferry landing on the Manhattan side, I had a curious sense of double vision. From the very color of the sky to the pitch of the roof of the warehouses and dwellings and the costumes of the inhabitants, it was clear that I was in a foreign country. Yet the language about me, though couched in a variety of strange accents, was English, and the bustle of the debarking crowd, the huddle of hansoms and carriages awaiting passengers, and the general air of busyness were not so different from what might have been encountered in London. I suppose I had been expecting something as completely strange as the first sight of India and the Red Sea ports I had seen during my Army service had been to me, and said as much to Holmes.

  “The railways, the telegraph, the telephone, and the fast steamer have knit the world ever tighter, Watson,” said he. “If something is thought of on Tuesday in Paris, it is known in Berlin, London and New York on Wednesday, and a uniquely tailored suit which sees the light of day in Old Bond Street may well be observed in little more than a week adorning half a dozen saunterers on Broadway. In a few years’ time, any large city will be in all important respects indistinguishable from any other, I fear.”

  “Well, I suppose it is to our advantage that the cabs are much the same,” I remarked. “I’d best get ourselves and our trunks and bags into one.”

  I raised a hand and gestured. A hansom driver whipped up his steed and brought his vehicle up to us, one wheel on the sidewalk causing it to tilt alarmingly.

  “No, man, not you!” I called up to where he perched atop his cab. “Look at these trunks. There’s no room for them and two men in a hansom!”

  A well-dressed woman wearing an extravagantly wide-brimmed hat, and standing next to me on the pavement, said, “Handsome is as handsome does.”

  “I beg your pardon, madam?” said I. “I was referring to the cab—that two-wheeler there. Are they not called hansoms in this country?”

  “Oh, yes. But I wasn’t talking about the cab. You’re handsome enough yourself, you know.”

  I blush to admit that I was about to try to reply sensibly to this odd comment until I saw Holmes fairly doubled over with laughter, supporting himself against a lamp post. In my defense, I can merely say that it seemed to me only polite to expect to accommodate to variations in manners and modes of speech between England and America. And certainly, the woman did not have the look of the sordid drabs who offer themselves in far too many quarters of our capital.

  “Be off with you, miss,” I said sternly. “We’ve no time for that.”

  I was conscious that what I said might have been better phrased.

  Holmes, still chuckling, helped me superintend the loading of our effects into a four-wheeler which had come up to replace the hansom, and instructed the driver to take us to the Empire Theater.

  “I can’t imagine what she hoped for from a crowd of arriving passengers from the ferry,” said I, still somewhat in a huff. “It stands to reason that they would all have some sort of immediate business elsewhere.”

  “Well, well, Watson,
she is in a profession older than either of ours, and I suppose she knows her trade. And Americans have a reputation for get-up-and-go, of being born salesmen. I dare say many a businessman is persuaded to arrive ten minutes or so late to an appointment with some tale of a traffic block.”

  The high good humor which my discomfiture had occasioned lasted only a few moments, and a brooding, impatient look settled on Holmes’ face as we proceeded through the crowded streets. Now that I was fully immersed in New York, I began to see it as more truly foreign in spite of its many resemblances to London. The streets were all straight, giving a curiously disconnected and blocky appearance to the massed buildings, which were uniformly modern—none I saw could have been more than a century old, though some, in their architectural detail, aped every period of the past from Egyptian to Gothic. The trams which coursed the major streets and avenues, some drawn by horses and some propelled, as I later learned, by cable snaking beneath the street, dashed along at a pace which would have done credit to a fire engine or an ambulance in London. The people, too, moved along far more briskly than Londoners, in the aggregate flowing like a swift-moving stream past such obstacles as organ-grinders, chestnut-vendors, and persons hawking strange machines, the nature of which I could not make out from our carriage.

  In spite of our driver’s efforts, our speed slowed as the traffic thickened about us, with other hacks, drays, pleasure carriages—even a few automobiles, though far more than I would have expected to see on a London street—vying for the advantage of position.

  We were now heading eastward on a wide street lined with shop buildings, some of them many stories in height. I looked ahead, startled, and saw a curious construction much like an iron roadway, ahead of us, suspended some twelve or fifteen yards above the level of the street.