“Good night gentlemen both,” said Jonathan Small.
“You first, Small,” remarked the wary Jones as they left the room. “I’ll take particular care that you don’t club me with your wooden leg, whatever you may have done to the gentleman at the Andaman Isles.”275
“Well, and there is the end of our little drama,” I remarked, after we had sat some time smoking in silence. “I fear that it may be the last investigation in which I shall have the chance of studying your methods. Miss Morstan has done me the honour to accept me as a husband in prospective.”276
He gave a most dismal groan.
“I feared as much,” said he. “I really cannot congratulate you.”277
I was a little hurt.
“Have you any reason to be dissatisfied with my choice?” I asked.
“Not at all. I think she is one of the most charming young ladies I ever met and might have been most useful in such work as we have been doing. She had a decided genius that way; witness the way in which she preserved that Agra plan from all the other papers of her father. But love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true, cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment.”278
“ ‘I am much obliged to you both for your assistance.’”
Richard Gutschmidt, Das Zeichen der Vier (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1902)
“ ‘I shall never marry myself, lest I bias my judgement.’ ”
Frederic Dorr Steele, Collier’s, 1903 (recaptioned and reused with slight alteration in Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. I [New York: Limited Editions Club, 1950]). The astute reader will readily recognize this as the cover drawn by Steele for “The Norwood Builder,” Collier’s, 1903, sans hand-print (see The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volume II, page 830).
“I trust,” said I, laughing, “that my judgment may survive the ordeal. But you look weary.”
“Yes, the reaction is already upon me. I shall be as limp as a rag for a week.”
“Strange,” said I, “how terms of what in another man I should call laziness alternate with your fits of splendid energy and vigour.”
“Yes,” he answered, “there are in me the makings of a very fine loafer, and also of a pretty spry sort of a fellow. I often think of those lines of old Goethe: ‘Schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf, Denn zum würdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff.’279 By the way, apropos of this Norwood business, you see that they had, as I surmised, a confederate in the house, who could be none other than Lal Rao, the butler: so Jones actually has the undivided honour of having caught one fish in his great haul.”
“The division seems rather unfair,” I remarked. “You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit; pray what remains for you?”
“For me,” said Sherlock Holmes, “there still remains the cocaine-bottle.” And he stretched his long, white hand up for it.280
225 And yet the Morstan family seems to have stood by Small, according to Small’s account.
226 Denise Rogers suggests that it is more likely that Sholto (a) broke up the treasure into small packets and hid them, (b) deposited them retrievably in the Thames (in a “safe place”), or (c) only got a part of the treasure (the rest was hidden by Bartholomew Sholto). She also considers the possibility that Watson himself disposed of the treasure. S. E. Dahlinger, in “In Search of the Agra Treasure,” has no doubt that Holmes, Watson, and Athelney Jones conspired to keep the treasure for themselves.
227 The coins struck by the British government of East India from 1860 until independence.
228 A town in the midland county of Worcestershire, England. As farmers, Small’s family would have participated in the chief occupation of the region; Pershore is the epicentre of a large agricultural area that still produces quantities of fruit and vegetables today.
229 A shilling was formerly given to a soldier on enlistment. The expression, then, means enlisting in the armed forces.
230 “This is a real and very famous regiment,” Mrs. Crighton Sellars records (above, note 46), “officially known as the Buffs (East Kent Regiment) consisting of the Third Foot. It is one of the oldest in the British Army, having its origin at the time of Queen Elizabeth [I].” Sellars questions whether Small belonged to this regiment, which was in the Crimea until after the Indian Mutiny ended. “The Buffs’ previous service in India was under General Grey at Punniar against the Mahrattas in 1843, and I doubt if Small went there with them at that date, particularly as they had not been in England before that, but went to India from New South Wales.”
231 T. S. Blakeney suggests that Holder was a younger brother of Alexander Holder, the banker in “The Beryl Coronet.”
232 A day-labourer. The word derives from the Tamil kuli.
233 The English text has “knee,” but this seems consistent with Small’s statement that his leg was severed “just above the knee.”
234 The Indian Mutiny of 1857–1858, also known as the Sepoy Rebellion (“sepoy” being the term for native soldiers), was the shocking, ultimately unsuccessful uprising that grew out of increasing Indian resentment toward British westernisation. Violence was sparked in early 1857 when sepoys in the Bengal army were issued the new Enfield rifles, whose cartridges, which could only be loaded by biting off one end, were rumoured to be greased with beef tallow and pork fat. Such a situation would have posed a grave religious insult to the army’s Hindus and Muslims, and many began to suspect the government of trying to convert them to Christianity.
It was only the latest in a list of grievances against a British government that, under the leadership of governor-general Lord Dalhousie, had reduced troop salaries, taken over property from Indian landowners, and spoken of upending the caste system by recruiting “cheaper,” lower-caste soldiers to replace the Brahmins and Rajputs then in service. By the time the governing East India Company ordered the cartridges greased with a more benign substance, it was too late for appeasement. On May 9, 1857, eighty-five sepoys at Meerut refused to use the rifles and were subsequently stripped of their uniforms, shackled, and marched off to prison to serve ten-year sentences. The next day, sepoys from three different units stormed the jail to release the imprisoned soldiers. In the ensuing melee, some fifty British men, women, and children were killed.
From there, the mutineers rode to Delhi. Simon Schama, in the third volume of his magisterial History of Britain, describes how in the moments before the violence, Harriet Tytler, the wife of the captain of the 38th Native Infantry, “could see there was something very wrong. Servants running about in a wild way, guns tearing down the main street… . What could it all mean?” Her French maid, Marie, responded, “Madame, this is a revolution.” Many European women and children who escaped Delhi were able to do so with the help of sympathetic sepoys, but others were less fortunate. More officers and their families were massacred, seemingly indiscriminately.
Terrible atrocities were committed on both sides. At Kanpur, a local ruler named Nana Sahib—perhaps seeking revenge over rent income that had been taken away from him—promised safe passage down the Ganges to a large group of European women and children. Once on board, the majority were shot, and several of the forty boats were set on fire; two hundred survivors were taken back to a former officer’s residence at Kanpur, where they were killed as well. The British desire for vengeance against those they referred to as “niggers” grew to a frenzy. As A. N. Wilson writes, “From the very first, the British decided to meet cruelty with redoubled cruelty, terror with terror, blood with blood.” There were reports, recounts Wilson, of Muslims smeared with pork fat before they were killed; Indians lashed to mouths of cannons and blown to pieces by grapeshot; women and children raped and then burnt alive; a bayoneted sepoy being roasted over a fire. Hundreds of Indians were executed by being shot from cannons.
In the end, after a lengthy siege of Lucknow, British troops were able to retake the city and finally
bring the hostilities to an end. Peace was declared on July 8, 1858. One immediate result of the mutiny was the elimination of the East India Company, as well as an understanding that governing India effectively would require some consultation with Indians. For the next ninety years, India served under direct British rule, a period of time known as “the Raj.”
Less than three decades after the violence, the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1875–1889) contemplated the motives for rebellion by musing, “The truth seems to be that native opinion throughout India was in a ferment, predisposing men to believe the wildest stories, and to act precipitately upon their fears… . Repeated annexations, the spread of education, the appearance of the steam engine and the telegraph wire, all alike revealed a consistent determination to substitute an English for an Indian civilization. The Bengal sepoys, especially, thought that they could see into the future farther than the rest of their countrymen… . They had everything to gain, and nothing to lose, by a revolution.”
235 Twenty-five to thirty miles above Agra, this was the administrative headquarters of the district of Muttra in the North-West Provinces of India and is a Hindu holy city, the birthplace of Krishna.
236 In 1853, this province (one of eight) was separated from Bengal, of which it till then formed the north-west portion. In 1876 it was combined with the demesne known as Oudh, a region that had been annexed as a British province in 1856—an event that helped bring about the Indian Mutiny. According to the Anglo-Indian Dictionary (1885), “The united province contains an area of over a million square miles, and a population of forty-four million, or nearly equal to that of Germany.”
237 A whisky or brandy with soda. Christopher Morley explains that the origin of the name is the witticism that “each drink is a peg in your coffin.”
238 A ravine running down to a river.
239 Native Indian soldiers then under British control. In “The Indian Elements in the Holmes Tales: Jewels and Tigers,” Paul Beam describes this passage recounting Dawson’s death as “a good microcosm of all the English feared: a man dead in a far land, defending his family from overwhelming numbers of inhuman beasts—futilely, as it transpires, for his wife is cruelly murdered and left for dog-meat.”
240 “By which,” Mrs. Crighton Sellars writes, “[Small] probably means (or else Watson deliberately misquotes him) the Third Bengal Infantry—the famous Guttrieka-pultran—which stood firm and loyal [to the British Empire] during the Mutiny.”
241 Sikhism is a monotheistic religion that was founded in Punjab in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century by Guru Nanak. It has elements of Hinduism and Islam but is significantly different from both of the dominant Indian faiths. Sikhs oppose the caste system and believe in karma and rebirth. Adherence to the notion of nobility of sacrifice, particularly in wartime, was adopted early on by the culture, when Govind Singh (born in 1666), the tenth and last leader of the Sikhs, made every man a soldier, calling them not Sikhs (“disciples”) but Singhs (“lions”). Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) consolidated his followers into a kingdom, but the Sikhs lost considerable ground during the Anglo-Sikh wars of 1845–1849, which resulted in the annexation of Punjab to the British dominion of India. The most emblematic and oft-cited Sikh battle in history occurred at Saragarhi, on September 12, 1897. Twenty-one members of the 36th Sikh Regiment of the Bengal Infantry were attacked and killed by 10,000 to 12,000 members of a Pashtun (Pathan) tribe, the Afridi. The battle became an immediate and unqualified symbol of collective bravery and willingness to fight to the death for a cause, in this case the protection of key Sikh forts.
242 The battle of Shahganj, a western suburb of Agra, took place on July 5, 1857.
243 Hartley R. Nathan, in “The Sign of the Four: A Potpourri of Devil Worshippers, Sikh Troopers and More,” offers an explanation of the religious festivals of mid-Victorian India and concludes that in terming the faithful “devil-worshippers,” it is likely that “Small, an uneducated army grunt, misinterpreted the local religious practices he observed.”
244 William S. Baring-Gould notes that Small evidently used—and Watson accepted—”Punjaubee” (Punjabi) and “Sikh” as interchangeable terms, which of course they are not.
245 In a battle fought in the village of Chillian Wallah on January 13, 1849, the British won a crucial tactical victory over the Sikhs. It was the penultimate battle of the Anglo-Sikh wars.
246 According to the Anglo-Indian Dictionary, “bhang” was a drink prepared from the leaves of the cannabis sativa plant, better known as marijuana.
247 A muzzle-loading rifle.
248 Several commentators note that, with the exception of “Singh,” none of these are Sikh names. Dr. Andrew Boyd, who observes that “[n]o educated man with years of service in the Indian Army could possibly have recorded them, even if he was recording another man’s garbled narrative, without comment,” concludes that Watson’s Indian Army record is fraudulent and that he had a dark and sinister past, as well as a criminal career. D. Martin Dakin expresses more kindly that either the Indians were in fact Muslims, and Small incorrectly assumed they were Sikhs from their fighting qualities and British sympathies, or else they were Sikhs and Small, not really knowing their names, got them muddled up or even invented them.
Rising to the defence of Dr. Watson, Lt. Col. T. F. Foss points out that in the Medical Department, Watson would not have had significant contact with Sikhs and therefore may not have recognised Small’s mistake/falsehood. In a similarly forgiving vein, Otis Hearn proposes that Watson unconsciously substituted Afghan names for the real names, at least for the first two.
249 A term applied to any European.
250 With the conquest of India, England actively fostered the cultivation and sale of opium through the British East India Company (familiarly known as John Company), which had a government-controlled monopoly on its Indian trade. So important did opium become to the British economy that efforts by China (which had outlawed the drug in 1799) to halt its import led the British to instigate and claim victory in two “Opium Wars,” in 1839–1842 (which also resulted in the cession of Hong Kong to England) and 1856–1860, and British importation of opium from India to China increased annually, from 52,925 piculs (of 1331/3 lbs.) in 1850 to 96,839 piculs in 1880. The company did not survive the Indian Mutiny, after which the British government took direct control of Indian matters.
251 A. Carson Simpson reports that the moeda d’ouro (coin of gold, anglica moidore) was first issued in Portugal during the reign of Pedro II (1683–1706) but ceased to be minted in 1732. It is unlikely, he concludes, that Jonathan Small encountered any Portuguese moidores. However, Simpson notes, Brazil minted moidores until the early 1830s, and it was undoubtedly these with which Small became familiar in India.
252 An immense tract of country in India, consisting of twenty states.
253 The phrase “gem of the first Water”—referring to the highest clarity and color in a diamond, and to the excellence of such attributes as pellucidity and limpidity—was coined by the famous seventeenth-century merchant Jean Baptiste Tavernier in his book Travels in India (1676; trans. V. Ball and William Crooke).
254 The Great Mogul, discovered by an Indian slave in 1701 and now lost, weighed between 787 and 793 carats in the rough and only about 280 cut; the story goes that the lapidary charged with cutting it botched the job and, rather than receiving payment for his work, was forced to pay a fine to the gem’s owner, Sháh Jahán (see note 96, above). However, Nicholas Utechin believes that the reference here is to the Agra Diamond, which belonged to the Duke of Brunswick at the time of the Mutiny. (An 1860 catalogue of the Duke’s jewel collection indicates he purchased it on November 22, 1844, probably from George Blogg, a London diamond merchant.) “What happened is clear,” writes Nicholas Utechin, in “The Treasure,” “[T]he valet stole it, along with other stones and somehow sold it off to our Indian rajah, who added it to his own collection and gave it all the name of the ‘Agra treasure.’ ” Utech
in suggests that Morstan and Sholto sold it back to the Duke, who kept the transaction a secret in order to save face.
255 Certainly not by handling them (Small was in the company of the treasure for only a few days), but rather in his mind—one imagines Small studying pictures of the jewels he briefly saw in the iron box so many years before.
256 Sir Archdale Wilson (1803–1874), commander of the force that retook Delhi.
257 Sir Colin Campbell (1792–1863), later Lord Clyde. When, in 1857, he was offered the command of the army in India after successful service in the Crimea (1854), his first action was to break the siege of Lucknow.
258 Probably Sir Edward Harris Greathed (1812–1881), who commanded the column that relieved Agra.
259 On March 19, 1857, on a parade ground at Barrackpore, near Calcutta, Mangal Pande, of the 34th Bengal Regiment, urged his regimental mates not to load their rifle cartridges (loading required biting off one end), said to have been smeared with beef tallow and pork fat (see note 234, above). Confrontations with an adjutant and a commanding general ensued, in response to which Pande shot himself in the chest. He survived the suicide attempt but was summarily hanged by the British for his act of defiance, which presaged the Indian Mutiny. Thereafter, Indians who fought in the uprising against British rule were called “pandies.”
260 The Corps of Guides was a crack Indian regiment raised in 1846 by Lieutenant (later Sir) Harry Lumsden. Said to have been made up variously of electrical and mechanical engineers and Pashtuns, the Guides offered a higher rate of pay than some other regiments, tended to attract a higher calibre of recruit, and quickly established a reputation as an elite corps. Their uniforms also differed from other regiments’: Wishing to introduce clothing that was more practical than the traditional heavy red wool of the British army, Lumsden was said to have soaked cotton in muddy water, a process that created the fabric known by the Hindi word “khaki” (meaning “dust-coloured”). In other versions of the story, the fabric existed but Lumsden received credit for outfitting the Guides in it. “Guides” is properly capitalised, although it is not in any known edition of The Sign of Four.
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