The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

by Arthur Conan Doyle

  “Are you the parties who come with Miss Morstan?” he asked.

  “I am Miss Morstan, and these two gentlemen are my friends,” said she.

  He bent a pair of wonderfully penetrating and questioning eyes upon us.

  “You will excuse me, miss,” he said, with a certain dogged manner, “but I was to ask you to give me your word that neither of your companions is a police-officer.”

  “After the Play—Under the Lyceum Portico.”

  Graphic (1881)

  “A small, brisk man in the dress of a coachman accosted us.” Frederic Dorr Steele, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. I, 1950. The illustration indicates that it was “re-drawn by Mr. Steele for this edition.” Andrew Malec, in a fine bit of detection, identifies the picture as first appearing as an illustration to Richard Harding Davis’s The Adventures of the Scarlet Car, in Collier’s Weekly for December 15, 1906 (although difficult to see, note the ’06 next to the artist’s signature). Note the flashlights and motoring garb, certainly anachronistic for 1888; also, one of the figures mentioned in the text is missing.

  “I give you my word on that,” she answered.

  He gave a shrill whistle, on which a street Arab led across a four-wheeler and opened the door. The man who had addressed us mounted to the box, while we took our places inside. We had hardly done so before the driver59 whipped up his horse, and we plunged away at a furious pace through the foggy streets.

  The situation was a curious one. We were driving to an unknown place, on an unknown errand. Yet our invitation was either a complete hoax—which was an inconceivable hypothesis—or else we had good reason to think that important issues might hang upon our journey. Miss Morstan’s demeanour was as resolute and collected as ever. I endeavoured to cheer and amuse her by reminiscences of my adventures in Afghanistan; but, to tell the truth, I was myself so excited at our situation, and so curious as to our destination, that my stories were slightly involved. To this day she declares that I told her one moving anecdote as to how a musket looked into my tent at the dead of night, and how I fired a double-barrelled tiger cub60 at it. At first I had some idea as to the direction in which we were driving; but soon, what with our pace, the fog, and my own limited knowledge of London,61 I lost my bearings and knew nothing save that we seemed to be going a very long way. Sherlock Holmes was never at fault, however,62 and he muttered the names as the cab rattled through squares and in and out by tortuous by-streets.63

  “Rochester Row,”64 said he. “Now Vincent Square.65 Now we come out on the Vauxhall Bridge Road.66 We are making for the Surrey side67 apparently. Yes, I thought so. Now we are on the bridge.68 You can catch glimpses of the river.”

  We did indeed get a fleeting view of a stretch of the Thames, with the lamps shining upon the broad, silent water; but our cab dashed on and was soon involved in a labyrinth of streets upon the other side.

  “. . . a small, dark, brisk man in the dress of a coachman . . .”

  Richard Gutschmidt, Das Zeichen der Vier (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1902)

  “Wandsworth Road,”69 said my companion. “Priory Road.70 Larkhall Lane.71 Stockwell Place.72 Robert Street.73 Coldharbour Lane.74 Our quest does not appear to take us to very fashionable regions.”

  We had indeed reached a questionable and forbidding neighbourhood. Long lines of dull brick houses were only relieved by the coarse glare and tawdry brilliancy of public-houses at the corner. Then came rows of two-storeyed villas, each with a fronting of miniature garden, and then again interminable lines of new, staring brick buildings—the monster tentacles which the giant city was throwing out into the country. At last the cab drew up at the third house in a new terrace.75 None of the other houses were inhabited, and that at which we stopped was as dark as its neighbours, save for a single glimmer in the kitchen-window. On our knocking, however, the door was instantly thrown open by a Hindoo servant, clad in a yellow turban, white loose-fitting clothes, and a yellow sash. There was something strangely incongruous in this Oriental figure framed in the commonplace doorway of a third-rate suburban dwelling-house.

  “The sahib76 awaits you,” said he, and even as he spoke, there came a high, piping voice from some inner room.

  “Show them in to me, khitmutgar,”77 it said. “Show them straight in to me.”

  55 Bernard Davies notes, in “Doctor Watson’s Deuteronomy,” that Captain Morstan left his pocket-book with the document safe at his hotel, rather than carrying it on his person. “The ‘pocket-book’ was popularised in Continental countries where the carrying of identity papers was mandatory. This no free-born Englishman could abide, and the habit of carrying pocket-books did not become widespread in Britain until banknotes came into general use after 1914.” In popular culture, one of the more memorable uses of a man’s pocket-book is in the 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan. (Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 classic The 39 Steps, while based on the novel, deviates from it in almost every important aspect.) The protagonist of the book is Richard Hannay, a Scot living in London. Hannay receives a visit from a stranger, Franklin P. Scudder, who reveals a political plot to Hannay and is then murdered, leaving behind a pocket-book containing a substitution cipher and various notes. Hannay, in disguise and carrying the dead man’s pocket-book, goes into hiding, cracks the substitution cipher, and eventually helps safeguard Britain’s military secrets as World War I looms.

  56 This is a pocket-sized version of the “dark lantern” mentioned in a number of the stories (for example, “The Red-Headed League”). See A Study in Scarlet, note 137. Of course, the heat of the flame would deter keeping a lit pocket lantern in one’s pocket.

  57 A number of American editions and the Crowborough edition have the curious misprint “crows.” According to the Annotated “Annotated,” “Peter Blau and Cameron Hollyer determined that the ‘crows’ appeared first in the Crowborough edition [of the Canon]. The Doubleday Memorial Edition in two volumes [the standard American text] was printed from the Crowborough plates. When new plates were made for the 1936 single-volume Doubleday edition the error was copied. These plates were used for the 1953 two-volume edition.”

  58 The Lyceum Theatre had a long association (1878–1903) with eminent actors Henry Irving (1838–1905) and Ellen Terry (1848–1928) and was managed by civil servant and drama critic Abraham “Bram” Stoker, the author of Dracula (1897). According to Christopher Morley, “They were probably playing Shakespeare at the time of this rendezvous, which would account for the crowd of devotees, though seven o’clock is surely too early for the carriage trade to be arriving.” Morley also notes the “happy coincidence” that William Gillette’s play Sherlock Holmes was performed at the Lyceum in 1901.

  59 Kelvin I. Jones, in The Carfax Syndrome, observes that the physical characteristics of the driver match those of Bram Stoker and concludes that the meeting-place of the Lyceum was not randomly selected and that Holmes was involved in the affairs described in Stoker’s Dracula. However, Barbara Belford, in Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula, describes Stoker as an undergraduate as six foot two inches in height and weighing 175 pounds—hardly “small.”

  60 “The celebrated ‘double-barrelled’ tiger cub must, I think, have been a snow leopard,” T. S. Blakeney writes, in “Thoughts on The Sign of the Four,” pointing out that tigers do not inhabit either the Kandahar/Maiwand region or the Peshawar region, where Watson would have found one. The double-barrelled gun was invented in Italy in 1653 by Giuliano Bossi and was widely used in warfare. Napoleon commissioned a beautiful double-barrelled musket for his personal use.

  61 This seems to be self-effacing nonsense; Watson had certainly lived in the great metropolis for at least seven years by the time of The Sign of Four.

  62 “It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London,” Holmes says in “The Red-Headed League,” and in “The Empty House,” Watson writes: “Holmes’s knowledge of the byways of London was extraordinary.”

  63 In “Was Holmes a London
er?” Bernard Davies concludes that, in light of Holmes’s use of obsolete street names (see, e.g., notes 72 and 73, below), “Holmes’s knowledge of this part of London, while of an extremely detailed kind, had not been brought up to date… . It was a knowledge born of an intimate acquaintance many years before, certainly long before he appears in his London rooms in The Gloria Scott.”

  64 Rochester Row, leading to Horseferry Road, is about halfway along the Vauxhall Bridge Road on the east side. Nearby is Tothill Fields Prison, built in 1836, and the police court for this district, opened in 1846, is in the Row.

  65 According to Augustus J. C. Hare, in his Walks in London, “The large open space called Vincent Square is used as a playground by the Westminster Scholars.”

  66 The Vauxhall Bridge Road connects Hyde Park Corner, Grosvenor Place, and the south of London and was originally conceived as part of a thoroughfare from Hyde Park Corner to Greenwich.

  67 The Surrey Side, as the area south of the Thames was commonly known, housed over 750,000 people in 1896. Baedeker describes it as “a scene of great business life and bustle from Lambeth to Bermondsey, but its sights, institutions, and public buildings are few.”

  68 The Vauxhall Bridge, originally a nine-span structure called (at least during the initial phases of construction) Regent’s Bridge, was completed in 1816 and substantially rebuilt from 1904 to 1906. Featuring sculpted bronze female figures by Frederick Pomeroy and Alfred Drury that apostrophise Agriculture, Engineering, and other arts and sciences, it was the first cast-iron bridge across the Thames, and the first to convey trams. Though not as spectacular as, for example, the 1817 Waterloo Bridge (“a colossal monument worthy of Sesostris and the Caesars”—M. Dupin), its history is venerable.

  69 American editions of the Canon refer to “Wordsworth Road.” Wandsworth Road is a major artery in South Lambeth. If one consults a map, it is evident that the party should not have turned on Wandsworth Road but instead travelled south on Lambeth Road. However, the reference to Priory Road (which changes its name before reaching Lambeth Road) makes it clear that, for whatever reason (traffic, perhaps), the driver proceeded slightly out of the way by driving south on Wandsworth Road and then “cut over” on Priory/Lansdowne Road.

  70 Priory Road runs perpendicular to Wandsworth—east, until it becomes Lansdowne Road, connecting Wandsworth Road to Clapham Road.

  71 Larkhall Lane is parallel to Wandsworth Road, off Lansdowne Road.

  72 Stockwell Place is not a road but rather an address, a row of some dozen houses in Clapham Road, Stockwell, abolished in 1869 when the road was renumbered. Watson’s faithful listing of the names Holmes rattled off, consisting, as it does, not only of streets but of this building, may confuse the casual reader into searching for a non-existent road. Or perhaps Holmes actually said “Stockwell Park Road,” the continuation of Lansdowne Road after it crosses the Clapham Road. This entire area is called Stockwell. While this is a logical route to Cold Harbour Lane, it is not necessarily the shortest. However, only on this street would the party have passed Robert Street. A shorter route would have been to turn off Lansdowne Road onto Binfield Road, continuing on Stockwell Road, which, with its continuation named Canterbury Road, runs directly to Cold Harbour Lane. Again, the dictates of traffic may have suggested the alternate route.

  73 Stockwell Park Road continues to Robsart Street, a left turn from the Park Road. William S. Baring-Gould notes that Robsart Street was the renamed version of the combination of Park and Robert Streets, effected in April 1880.

  74 Cold Harbour Lane is an east-west road beginning at approximately the intersection of the Brixton Road and Effra Road, where it is the continuation of Clapham Park Street and Acre Lane. A quick glance at a map will show that the party would not have turned on the Robsart Road, only driven past it. It is the last cross-street along Stockwell Park Road before coming to the Brixton Road and only a few blocks from the sharp left turn off the Brixton Road into Cold Harbour Lane. This is the vicinity of Brixton Station, and the neighbourhood, abutting Angell Town, is known, of course, as Brixton.

  75 There is little to go on here to identify Thaddeus Sholto’s “oasis,” but several try: Robert R. Pattrick, in “ ‘The Oasis in the Howling Desert,’ ” nominates a location on Dorchester Drive. Humphrey Morton, in his entry in a photographic competition of the Sherlock Holmes Journal, selects No. 3, Milkwood Road. Percy Metcalfe (“Reflections on the Sign of Four or Oreamnosis Once Removed”) proposes Dalberg Road, while Bernard Davies (“Dr. Watson’s Deuteronomy”) presents the two connected double houses on Gubyon Avenue just south of Woodquest Avenue. David L. Hammer, in The Worth of the Game, casts his vote for Davies’s candidate.

  76 According to the Anglo-Indian Dictionary, the word means “[a] lord, a master. The word is often affixed to titles expressive of rank, as Rájá Sáheb, Collector Sáheb. It is similarly affixed to proper names. It is also used by itself as a respectful appellation. Again, the word is often used as the peculiar designation of an English gentleman.”

  77 Hindustani: A servant or personal attendant.

  CHAPTER

  IV

  THE STORY OF THE BALD-HEADED MAN

  WE FOLLOWED THE Indian down a sordid and common passage, ill-lit and worse furnished, until he came to a door upon the right, which he threw open. A blaze of yellow light streamed out upon us, and in the centre of the glare there stood a small man with a very high head, a bristle of red hair all round the fringe of it, and a bald, shining scalp which shot out from among it like a mountain-peak from fir-trees. He writhed78 his hands together as he stood, and his features were in a perpetual jerk—now smiling, now scowling, but never for an instant in repose. Nature had given him a pendulous lip, and a too visible line of yellow and irregular teeth, which he strove feebly to conceal by constantly passing his hand over the lower part of his face. In spite of his obtrusive baldness, he gave the impression of youth. In point of fact, he had just turned his thirtieth year.

  “Your servant, Miss Morstan,” he kept repeating, in a thin, high voice. “Your servant, gentlemen. Pray step into my little sanctum. A small place, miss, but furnished to my own liking. An oasis of art in the howling desert of South London.”

  We were all astonished by the appearance of the apartment into which he invited us. In that sorry house it looked as out of place as a diamond of the first water in a setting of brass. The richest and glossiest of curtains and tapestries draped the walls, looped back here and there to expose some richly-mounted painting or Oriental vase. The carpet was of amber and black, so soft and so thick that the foot sank pleasantly into it, as into a bed of moss. Two great tiger-skins thrown athwart it increased the suggestion of Eastern luxury, as did a huge hookah which stood upon a mat in the corner. A lamp in the fashion of a silver dove was hung from an almost invisible golden wire in the centre of the room. As it burned it filled the air with a subtle and aromatic odour.79

  Dustjacket, The Sign of Four. Sixpenny Series (London: George Newnes, Ltd., ca. 1920)

  “Mr. Thaddeus Sholto,”80 said the little man, still jerking and smiling. “That is my name. You are Miss Morstan, of course. And these gentlemen—”

  “This is Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and this Dr. Watson.”

  “A doctor, eh?” cried he, much excited. “Have you your stethoscope?81 Might I ask you—would you have the kindness? I have grave doubts as to my mitral valve, if you would be so very good. The aortic I may rely upon, but I should value your opinion upon the mitral.”82

  I listened to his heart, as requested, but was unable to find anything amiss, save, indeed, that he was in an ecstasy of fear, for he shivered from head to foot.

  “It appears to be normal,” I said. “You have no cause for uneasiness.”83

  “You will excuse my anxiety, Miss Morstan,” he remarked airily. “I am a great sufferer, and I have long had suspicions as to that valve. I am delighted to hear that they are unwarranted. Had your father, Miss Morstan, refrained from throwing a strain upon his
heart, he might have been alive now.”

  I could have struck the man across the face, so hot was I at this callous and offhand reference to so delicate a matter. Miss Morstan sat down, and her face grew white to the lips.

  “I knew in my heart that he was dead,” said she.

  “I can give you every information,” said he; “and, what is more, I can do you justice; and I will, too, whatever Brother Bartholomew84 may say. I am so glad to have your friends here not only as an escort to you but also as witnesses to what I am about to do and say. The three of us can show a bold front to Brother Bartholomew. But let us have no outsiders—no police or officials. We can settle everything satisfactorily among ourselves without any interference. Nothing would annoy Brother Bartholomew more than any publicity.”

  He sat down upon a low settee and blinked at us inquiringly with his weak, watery blue eyes.

  “For my part,” said Holmes, “whatever you may choose to say will go no further.”

  I nodded to show my agreement.

  “That is well! That is well!” said he. “May I offer you a glass of Chianti, Miss Morstan? Or of Tokay?85 I keep no other wines.86 Shall I open a flask? No? Well, then, I trust that you have no objection to tobacco-smoke, to the balsamic odour of the Eastern tobacco. I am a little nervous, and I find my hookah an invaluable sedative.”

  He applied a taper to the great bowl, and the smoke bubbled merrily through the rose-water. We sat all three in a semicircle, with our heads advanced and our chins upon our hands, while the strange, jerky little fellow, with his high, shining head, puffed uneasily in the centre.