And yet, as Janet Byrne notes to this editor in private correspondence, “Isn’t it intriguing, and suggestive, that at the beginning of Chapter XII, Watson says, “A very patient man was that inspector in the cab, for it was a weary time before I rejoined him”?—especially inasmuch as Chapter XI ends with Watson “[drawing Mary Morstan] to his side”?
39 Donald A. Redmond, in Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources, identifies her as Mary Anne Forester, widow of David Ochterloney Dyce Sombré and daughter of Edward Jervis, 2nd Viscount St. Vincent, who married George Cecil Weld, 3rd Baron Forester of Willey Park, on November 8, 1862. Mrs. For[r]ester died in 1895.
40 Robert Keith Leavitt suggests (in “Who Was Cecil Forrester?”) that Mr. Cecil Forrester, Farintosh of “The Speckled Band,” Woodhouse of “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” and Colonel Upwood of The Hound of the Baskervilles, were all one and the same man—“former friend of Captain Morstan and probably of the none-too-scrupulous Major Sholto, sometime husband of Mary Morstan’s employer, party hanger-on, card-sharp and all-too-dubious hero of the strange adventure of the politician, the lighthouse and the trained cormorant” (the latter referred to in “The Veiled Lodger”).
And Ruth Douglass, in “The Camberwell Poisoner,” advances the speculation that the “little domestic complication” in Mrs. Forrester’s household was the Camberwell Poisoning mentioned in “The Five Orange Pips”; that the poisoner was Mrs. Forrester; that she escaped justice and used Mary first as bait (for Watson) and then as a tool (in order to obtain poison, through Mary, from Watson’s medical cabinet). She finally killed Mary.
41 Rosemary Michaud, in “Another Case of Identity,” proposes that the woman who came to see Holmes here was not Mary Morstan but rather the daughter of Mrs. Cecil Forrester. Holmes knew perfectly well who she was but, presented with a pearl, went along to find out what the case was about. Miss Morstan had died earlier, Michaud suggests, and the Forresters—swindlers by trade—decided to pursue the Times advertisement themselves. Holmes had no knowledge of how serious relations had become between “Miss Morstan” and Watson until too late and probably assumed that recovery of the treasure would put an end to “Miss Morstan’s” interest in Watson. This thesis also explains the reference in “The Five Orange Pips” to Mary visiting her “mother” (see note 276, below).
An alternate but equally startling suggestion is made by Charles A. Meyer, in “The Remarkable Forrester Case.” Meyer suggests that Mrs. Forrester and Holmes had an affair and that only after the passions had cooled for ten years was Mrs. Forrester comfortable in recommending that Mary Morstan consult Holmes. This explains, in Meyer’s view, the otherwise “dull” behaviour of Miss Morstan in accepting for so many years the twin mysteries of her father’s disappearance and the annual pearls.
42 Various chronologists point to this as an indication of a case early in the Partnership; compare, for example, “A Case of Identity” (pre-Return) or “The Norwood Builder” (post-Return), where Watson makes not the slightest move to excuse himself from the presence of either Mary Sutherland or John Hector McFarlane. “I cannot escape the impression,” writes D. Martin Dakin, “that Watson was trying to put back into this story the conditions of a much earlier period before his co-operation was taken for granted. It all adds up to the conclusion that in 1890 he did not anticipate the publication of any Holmes stories but these two.” Dakin proposes that this was the result of Holmes’s censorship of Watson’s publications. The censorship resulted in the postponement of publication of the cases collected as the Adventures and the Memoirs until Holmes’s disappearance in 1891. (The last of the Memoirs appeared in 1893, before Holmes’s return.) The cases that took place after Holmes’s return in 1894 were not published until after Holmes’s retirement in 1901 (the first appearing in 1903).
43 The dating of The Sign of Four is a vast and complex topic, with myriad implications for the dating of the remainder of the Canon. The conclusions of the major chronologists are summarised in the Appendix.
44 “This is rather excessive emotion to be exhibited by an Englishwoman of the upper classes when speaking of an event which occurred ten years before and of a person she has long believed dead,” T. B. Hunt and H. W. Starr observe, in “What Happened to Mary Morstan?” “She is subject to similar collapses whenever Captain Morstan’s death is mentioned. How else can this be explained save by the existence of a marked Oedipus complex?” Hunt and Starr conclude that Mary suffered mental illness and that Watson cared for her throughout her long decline into insanity and referred to this as his “sad bereavement” in “The Empty House.”
45 Infamous as the site of one of the world’s most sweeping colonial efforts to segregate rebels, the Andamans are a group of 204 islands in the Bay of Bengal, about 120 miles from Cape Negrais, Burma, and 340 miles from the northernmost point of Sumatra. The Encyclopædia Britannica (11th Ed.) comments, “The point of enduring interest as regards the Andamans is the penal system, the object of which is to turn the life-sentence and few long-sentence convicts, who alone are sent to the settlement, into honest, self-respecting men and women, by leading them along a continuous course of practice in self-help and self-restraint, and by offering them every inducement to take advantage of that practice.” Opened in 1858 and run primarily by James Patterson Walker, a Scotsman who served as surgeon-general of Great Britain, the settlement developed as a response to the mutiny and rebellion against the East India Company of the previous year and was almost entirely for political prisoners. These numbered, at the settlement’s opening, 773 Indian convicts, many of whom died shortly after arrival on the Andamans because they were forced to do manual labour in chains and fetters; additionally, 86 prisoners who escaped were hunted down, then hanged and buried in a mass grave, with their fetters still attached. By 1901, there were 11,947 convicts. The penal colony closed in 1947, the year of Indian independence.
46 “At the period of the Mutiny, when the events relating to Morstan and Sholto began, the regimental numbers of the Bombay Infantry of the Indian Army appear to have gone no higher than Thirty,” Mrs. Crighton Sellars writes, in “Dr. Watson and the British Army.” “Moreover, in the record of their achievements, a thick veil is drawn over the history of the Bombay Infantry during the Mutiny, a sure sign that they were not loyal.” She concludes that Watson created a fictional regiment to save the actual company from embarrassment and suggests that Morstan and Sholto were assigned to the Bengal 38th Infantry, known as “The Agra Regiment.”
47 Norwood is a large suburban district of London. In 1888, it was divided into Upper, Lower, and South Norwood, all consisting principally of villa residences and detached houses inhabited by the “better classes.” There were also a number of large public institutions, including the Lambeth Workhouse Industrial Schools, the Westmoreland Society School, and the Jews Hospital & Orphan Asylum, this last on Knights Hill Road (see note 91, below).
48 Robert J. Bousquet, in “Mary Morstan: Clothed in Euphemism,” makes the suggestion (humourously, one hopes) that Mary Morstan was employed as a “governess” in the sense of a dominatrix in the Forrester brothel.
49 William S. Baring-Gould argues for a date for the case of 1887, on the basis of the number of pearls (counting one for 1882 and five more for subsequent years). T. S. Blakeney suggests that there were seven pearls, but that Mary Morstan had the first pearl made up into a brooch or pendant, not expecting any more. Jay Finley Christ, in Irregular Chronology of Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, agrees with the seven-pearl theory and proposes that Mary may have sold the first one.
Ernest Bloomfield Zeisler is inclined (in his careful Baker Street Chronology) to take Mary Morstan at her word: “Miss Morstan’s account is detailed, precise and unhesitating. When she says ‘About six years ago—to be exact, upon the 4th of May, 1882’ she is precise. She has brought the six pearls she has received. She has brought the letter—in its envelope—received by her than morning. She has brought the ‘half a dozen pieces of paper’ with ‘
the pearl-box addresses.’ There is nowhere the slightest suggestion that her account is not entirely reliable. On the contrary, the Master relies on it, and there is no reason for us not to rely on it.” He therefore concludes that the case must be dated in 1887.
50 Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to J. M. Stoddart, editor of Lippincott’s Magazine, on March 6, 1890: “By the way there is one very obvious mistake which must be corrected in book form—in the second chapter the letter is headed July 7th, and on almost the same page I [sic] talk of its being a September evening.” (The letter is reproduced in Richard Lancelyn Green’s Uncollected Sherlock Holmes). Where Doyle obtained this information is unknown, and Watson made no correction in subsequent texts evidently supervised by him.
51 “Is it possible that a man so observant that he would even notice the depth to which parsley had sunk into the butter on a hot day could fail to notice that Mary Morstan was attractive?” Dr. Richard Asher asks, in “Holmes and the Fair Sex.” “No; Holmes was aware of her charms and on guard against them.” Holmes intentionally suppressed any emotional feelings for Miss Morstan, he concludes, partly because he recognised Watson’s growing feelings. See also the view of Daniel Moriarty, in note 36, above.
52 Asher suggests that this woman may have been Mrs. Morgan, “for a poisoner called Morgan occupied a place of honour in his index among other distinguished M’s (‘The Empty House’).” Donald A. Redmond proposes Mary Ann Cotton (1832–1873), the British serial killer who is said to have used arsenic to fatally poison fourteen to twenty-one people, though she was tried—at the Durham Assizes in March 1873—for the murder of only one, her seven-year-old stepson Charles. Cotton’s defence rested on the theory that Charles had ingested bits of his bedroom wallpaper, said to contain traces of arsenic. Pregnant with her seventh child when convicted, Cotton gave birth at Durham County Gaol. She was hanged in the jail yard by executioners Thomas Askern and William Calcraft.
53 The study of handwriting is an important plot device in several stories, most notably “The Reigate Squires,” where Holmes makes twenty-seven deductions from the handwriting on a letter.
54 William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) was a traveller, an indifferent novelist, and, briefly, during the portion of the Ashanti War that was fought chiefly in present-day Ghana (1873), a Times correspondent. Martyrdom of Man, a religious treatment of history that skewered accepted opinion because of its non-religious orientation, was published in London in 1872 and, despite a uniformly hostile public reception (it was not reviewed favourably until 1906), achieved both mass readership and wide popularity among intellectuals such as H. G. Wells. The work remains in print today. Among Reade’s other books were his African Sketch Book, a travelogue told in the form of a journal (addressed to “Dear Margaret”), and The Outcast, completed and published the year Reade died, in which the author—ill from the lingering effects of dysentery and fever contracted during the Ashanti campaign that culminated in the taking of Coomassie (now Kumasi), which he was the only civilian to witness—spoke in fictional form of the effects of persecution that comes from professing one’s lack of religious belief. Some view this novel as a confession of belief on the part of Reade. Perhaps one of the most oft-quoted sentences from Martyrdom of Man: “Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness.”
CHAPTER
III
IN QUEST OF A SOLUTION
IT WAS HALF-PAST five before Holmes returned. He was bright, eager, and in excellent spirits, a mood which in his case alternated with fits of the blackest depression.
“There is no great mystery in this matter,” he said, taking the cup of tea which I had poured out for him; “the facts appear to admit of only one explanation.”
“What! you have solved it already?”
“Well, that would be too much to say. I have discovered a suggestive fact, that is all. It is, however, very suggestive. The details are still to be added. I have just found, on consulting the back files of the Times, that Major Sholto, of Upper Norwood, late of the 34th Bombay Infantry, died upon the 28th of April, 1882.”
“I may be very obtuse, Holmes, but I fail to see what this suggests.”
“No? You surprise me. Look at it in this way, then. Captain Morstan disappears. The only person in London whom he could have visited is Major Sholto. Major Sholto denies having heard that he was in London. Four years later Sholto dies. Within a week of his death Captain Morstan’s daughter receives a valuable present, which is repeated from year to year and now culminates in a letter which describes her as a wronged woman. What wrong can it refer to except this deprivation of her father? And why should the presents begin immediately after Sholto’s death, unless it is that Sholto’s heir knows something of the mystery and desires to make compensation? Have you any alternative theory which will meet the facts?”
Dustjacket, The Sign of Four.
(London: George Newnes, Ltd., ca. 1920)
“But what a strange compensation! And how strangely made! Why, too, should he write a letter now, rather than six years ago? Again, the letter speaks of giving her justice. What justice can she have? It is too much to suppose that her father is still alive. There is no other injustice in her case that you know of.”
“There are difficulties; there are certainly difficulties,” said Sherlock Holmes pensively; “but our expedition of to-night will solve them all. Ah, here is a four-wheeler, and Miss Morstan is inside. Are you all ready? Then we had better go down, for it is a little past the hour.”
I picked up my hat and my heaviest stick, but I observed that Holmes took his revolver from his drawer and slipped it into his pocket. It was clear that he thought that our night’s work might be a serious one.
Miss Morstan was muffled in a dark cloak, and her sensitive face was composed but pale. She must have been more than woman if she did not feel some uneasiness at the strange enterprise upon which we were embarking, yet her self-control was perfect, and she readily answered the few additional questions which Sherlock Holmes put to her.
“Major Sholto was a very particular friend of Papa’s,” she said. “His letters were full of allusions to the major. He and Papa were in command of the troops at the Andaman Islands, so they were thrown a great deal together. By the way, a curious paper was found in Papa’s desk which no one could understand. I don’t suppose that it is of the slightest importance, but I thought you might care to see it, so I brought it with me. It is here.”
Holmes unfolded the paper carefully and smoothed it out upon his knee. He then very methodically examined it all over with his double lens.
“It is paper of native Indian manufacture,” he remarked. “It has at some time been pinned to a board. The diagram upon it appears to be a plan of part of a large building with numerous halls, corridors, and passages. At one point is a small cross done in red ink, and above it is ‘3.37 from left,’ in faded pencil-writing. In the left-hand corner is a curious hieroglyphic like four crosses in a line with their arms touching. Beside it is written, in very rough and coarse characters, ‘The sign of the four—Jonathan Small, Mahomet Singh, Abdullah Khan, Dost Akbar.’ No, I confess that I do not see how this bears upon the matter. Yet it is evidently a document of importance. It has been kept carefully in a pocket-book, for the one side is as clean as the other.”
“It was in his pocket-book that we found it.”55
“Preserve it carefully, then, Miss Morstan, for it may prove to be of use to us. I begin to suspect that this matter may turn out to be much deeper and more subtle than I at first supposed, I must reconsider my ideas.”
H. B. Eddy, “The Sign of the Four.”
San Francisco Call, October 10, 1907
He leaned back in the cab, and I could see by his drawn brow and his vacant eye that he was thinking intently. Miss Morstan and I chatted in an undertone about our present expedition and its possible outcome, but our companion maintained his impenetrable reserve until the end of our journey.
It was a September evening and not
yet seven o’clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light—sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all humankind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more. I am not subject to impressions, but the dull, heavy evening, with the strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me nervous and depressed. I could see from Miss Morstan’s manner that she was suffering from the same feeling. Holmes alone could rise superior to petty influences. He held his open notebook upon his knee, and from time to time he jotted down figures and memoranda in the light of his pocket-lantern.56
At the Lyceum Theatre the crowds57 were already thick at the side-entrances.58 In front a continuous stream of hansoms and four-wheelers were rattling up, discharging their cargoes of shirt-fronted men and be-shawled, be-diamonded women. We had hardly reached the third pillar, which was our rendezvous, before a small, dark, brisk man in the dress of a coachman accosted us.
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