He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval. He now took the stick from my hands and examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes. Then, with an expression of interest, he laid down his cigarette, and, carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.
“Interesting, though elementary,” said he, as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. “There are certainly one or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions.”
“Has anything escaped me?” I asked, with some self-importance. “I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?”
“I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance. The man is certainly a country practitioner.”
“Then I was right.”
“He looked over it again with a convex lens.”
Richard Gutschmidt, Der Hund von Baskerville (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1903)
“To that extent.”
“But that was all.”
“No, no, my dear Watson, not all—by no means all. I would suggest, for example, that a presentation to a doctor is more likely to come from a hospital than from a hunt, and that when the initials ‘C.C.’ are placed before that hospital the words ‘Charing Cross’ very naturally suggest themselves.”
“You may be right.”
“The probability lies in that direction. And if we take this as a working hypothesis we have a fresh basis from which to start our construction of this unknown visitor.”
“Well, then, supposing that ‘C.C.H.’ does stand for ‘Charing Cross Hospital,’7 what further inferences may we draw?”
“Do none suggest themselves? You know my methods. Apply them!”
“I can only think of the obvious conclusion that the man has practised in town before going to the country.”
“I think that we might venture a little farther than this. Look at it in this light. On what occasion would it be most probable that such a presentation would be made? When would his friends unite to give him a pledge of their good will? Obviously at the moment when Dr. Mortimer withdrew from the service of the hospital in order to start in practice for himself. We know there has been a presentation. We believe there has been a change from a town hospital to a country practice. Is it, then, stretching our inference too far to say that the presentation was on the occasion of the change?”
“It certainly seems probable.”
“Now, you will observe that he could not have been on the staff of the hospital, since only a man well-established in a London practice could hold such a position, and such a one would not drift into the country. What was he, then? If he was in the hospital and yet not on the staff, he could only have been a house-surgeon or a house-physician—little more than a senior student. And he left five years ago—the date is on the stick. So your grave, middle-aged family practitioner vanishes into thin air, my dear Watson, and there emerges a young fellow under thirty, amiable, unambitious, absent-minded, and the possessor of a favourite dog, which I should describe roughly as being larger than a terrier and smaller than a mastiff.”
“He looked over it again with a convex lens.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1901
I laughed incredulously as Sherlock Holmes leaned back in his settee and blew little wavering rings of smoke up to the ceiling.
“As to the latter part, I have no means of checking you,” said I, “but at least it is not difficult to find out a few particulars about the man’s age8 and professional career.”
From my small medical shelf I took down the Medical Directory9 and turned up the name. There were several Mortimers, but only one who could be our visitor. I read his record aloud.
Mortimer, James, M.R.C.S., 1882, Grimpen, Dartmoor,10 Devon. House-surgeon, from 1882 to 1884, at Charing Cross Hospital. Winner of the Jackson Prize11 for Comparative Pathology, with essay entitled “Is Disease a Reversion?” Corresponding member of the Swedish Pathological Society. Author of “Some Freaks of Atavism”12 (Lancet, 1882), “Do We Progress?” (Journal of Psychology, March, 1883). Medical Officer13 for the parishes of Grimpen, Thorsley, and High Barrow.
“No mention of that local hunt, Watson,” said Holmes, with a mischievous smile, “but a country doctor, as you very astutely observed. I think that I am fairly justified in my inferences. As to the adjectives, I said, if I remember right, amiable, unambitious, and absent-minded. It is my experience that it is only an amiable man in this world who receives testimonials, only an unambitious one who abandons a London career for the country and only an absent-minded one who leaves his stick and not his visiting-card after waiting an hour in your room.”
“And the dog?”
“Has been in the habit of carrying this stick behind his master. Being a heavy stick the dog has held it tightly by the middle, and the marks of his teeth are very plainly visible. The dog’s jaw, as shown in the space between these marks, is too broad in my opinion for a terrier and not broad enough for a mastiff. It may have been—yes, by Jove, it is a curly-haired spaniel.”14
He had risen and paced the room as he spoke. Now he halted in the recess of the window. There was such a ring of conviction in his voice that I glanced up in surprise.
“My dear fellow, how can you possibly be so sure of that?”
“For the very simple reason that I see the dog himself on our very doorstep,15 and there is the ring of its owner. Don’t move, I beg you, Watson. He is a professional brother of yours, and your presence may be of assistance to me. Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill. What does Dr. James Mortimer, the man of science, ask of Sherlock Holmes, the specialist in crime? Come in!”
The appearance of our visitor was a surprise to me since I had expected a typical country practitioner. He was a very tall, thin man, with a long nose like a beak, which shot out between two keen, grey eyes,16 set closely together and sparkling brightly from behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He was clad in a professional but rather slovenly fashion, for his frock-coat was dingy and his trousers frayed. Though young, his long back was already bowed, and he walked with a forward thrust of his head and a general air of peering benevolence. As he entered his eyes fell upon the stick in Holmes’s hand, and he ran towards it with an exclamation of joy.
“I am so very glad,” said he. “I was not sure whether I had left it here or in the Shipping Office. I would not lose that stick for the world.”
“A presentation, I see,” said Holmes.
“Yes, sir.”
“From Charing Cross Hospital?”
“From one or two friends there on the occasion of my marriage.”17
“Dear, dear, that’s bad!” said Holmes, shaking his head.
Dr. Mortimer blinked through his glasses in mild astonishment.
“Why was it bad?”
“Only that you have disarranged our little deductions. Your marriage, you say?”
“Yes, sir. I married, and so left the hospital, and with it all hopes of a consulting practice. It was necessary to make a home of my own.”
“He was clad in a professional but rather slovenly fashion, for his frockcoat was dingy and his trousers frayed.”
Richard Gutschmidt, Der Hund von Baskerville (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1903)
“Come, come, we are not so far wrong after all,” said Holmes. “And now, Dr. James Mortimer—”
“Mister, sir, Mister—a humble M.R.C.S.”18
“And a man of precis
e mind, evidently.”
“A dabbler in science, Mr. Holmes, a picker-up of shells on the shores of the great unknown ocean.19 I presume that it is Mr. Sherlock Holmes whom I am addressing and not—”
“No, this is my friend Dr. Watson.”
“Glad to meet you, sir. I have heard your name mentioned in connection with that of your friend. You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic20 a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development.21 Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure?22 A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.”23
“His eyes fell upon the stick in Holmes’s hand.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1901
Sherlock Holmes waved our strange visitor into a chair.
“You are an enthusiast in your line of thought, I perceive, sir, as I am in mine,” said he. “I observe from your forefinger that you make your own cigarettes.24 Have no hesitation in lighting one.”
The man drew out paper and tobacco and twirled the one up in the other with surprising dexterity. He had long, quivering fingers as agile and restless as the antennæ of an insect.
Holmes was silent, but his little darting glances showed me the interest which he took in our curious companion.
“I presume, sir,” said he at last, “that it was not merely for the purpose of examining my skull that you have done me the honour to call here last night and again today?”
“No, sir, no; though I am happy to have had the opportunity of doing that as well. I came to you, Mr. Holmes, because I recognise that I am myself an unpractical man, and because I am suddenly confronted with a most serious and extraordinary problem. Recognising, as I do, that you are the second highest expert in Europe—”
“Indeed, sir! May I inquire who has the honour to be the first?” asked Holmes, with some asperity.
“To the man of precisely scientific mind the work of Monsieur Bertillon.”25
“Then had you not better consult him?”
“I said, sir, to the precisely scientific mind. But as a practical man of affairs it is acknowledged that you stand alone. I trust, sir, that I have not inadvertently—”
“Just a little,” said Holmes. “I think, Dr. Mortimer, you would do wisely if without more ado you would kindly tell me plainly what the exact nature of the problem is in which you demand my assistance.”
2 In “The Speckled Band,” Watson feels “surprise, and perhaps just a little resentment” when Holmes not only rises first but unceremoniously wakes him up, “for I was myself regular in my habits”—a lofty claim at odds with much of the rest of the Canon, where Holmes is almost always the first one up and out. Here, the implication is that Watson has for once bested his friend, is relaxing after his meal, “and in the warm glow of comfortable satiety he dares to venture some pregnant observations of his own,” as Vincent Starrett points out. In A Study in Scarlet (see note 53), Watson describes Holmes as having “invariably breakfasted and gone out” before he can even rouse himself from his bed; he refers to his own “late habits” and confesses that “I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours.” This was presumably before Watson commenced his practise in Paddington. In “The Engineer’s Thumb,” after being roused before seven o’clock, Watson expects to discover Holmes taking his breakfast. In “The Speckled Band,” however, Watson describes himself as “regular in my habits” and Holmes as a “late riser as a rule.”
3 Holmes’s clients make a habit of leaving their belongings behind (for example, in “The Yellow Face”). “The result was always highly satisfactory,” Gavin Brend writes, “for Holmes invariably made a reconstruction of the missing client from the missing article.” In The Sign of Four, when Watson challenges Holmes by presenting him with a watch whose provenance he is convinced Holmes can’t deduce, Holmes outdoes himself—and insults Watson—by declaring, correctly, that the watch once belonged to Watson’s dissolute brother. A little later, Holmes remarks that Dr. Mortimer had waited over an hour for them (a fact obviously imparted by Mrs. Hudson), but curiously, notes Brad Keefauver, in The Armchair Baskerville Tour, Holmes voices no criticism of Mrs. Hudson for allowing Mortimer to wait unobserved in their rooms.
4 A cane or walking-stick with a large, irregular head and imported from Penang, an island in Malaysia, off the northwest coast of Malaya. Its uses as a weapon were legion; Fitzroy Simpson of “Silver Blaze” owned one, “weighted with lead.”
5 Member of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1540, Henry VIII created the Company of Barber-Surgeons by joining the Worshipful Company of Barbers (incorporated in 1462) and the Guild of Surgeons. The surgeons broke away from the barbers in 1745 to form the Company of Surgeons. In 1800, the Company received a Royal Charter to become the Royal College of Surgeons in London; the title was changed in 1843, again by Royal Charter, to the Royal College of Surgeons of England. This diploma is now regarded as a specialist higher qualification in surgery, awarded to doctors who have already qualified in their profession and have elected to practise in the surgical branch of it, by examination at a middle stage of their junior careers. In Mortimer’s day, the M.R.C.S. was the surgical half of the standard qualification to practise, not an advanced degree, and surgeons in fact occupied a lower position in the medical hierarchy than physicians, who diagnosed patients and prescribed medication. Surgeons’ duties included the treatment of wounds and performance of then-standard surgical procedures, the range of which was smaller than it of course is today. Mortimer apparently did not possess the medical half of the qualification to practise medicine, usually a license from the Society of Apothecaries, which conferred the letters L.S.A. (originally for Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries; the title was changed in 1907 to L.M.S.S.A., indicating that the examination included surgery).
6 Although “double-edged testimony to Watson’s assistance is only too typical,” as T. S. Blakeney comments, the competition between the two men is perhaps more evident in this novel than elsewhere in the Canon. The foundation is laid in the opening pages, as we have seen, with the unspoken competition over which man breakfasted first, and the demonstrations of Holmes’s superiority extend to the final pages, when Holmes criticizes Watson’s investigative powers even more mortifyingly than usual, while simultaneously praising his friend’s skills as a detective. William Hyder, in “The Rise of the Underdog: Dr. Watson in The Hound of the Baskervilles” points out that embarrassingly, several of Holmes’s own deductions prove incorrect, while several of Watson’s are later verified. Still, “It was a securely-founded friendship,” Blakeney continues, “which survived this withering frankness of expression.”
7 Charing Cross Hospital was established in 1823 in Villiers Street, London, as a charitable institution known as the West London Infirmary, although it traces its origins to a meeting initiated by Dr. Benjamin Golding in 1818. The infirmary was small, treating twelve patients at a time. It acquired the name Charing Cross Hospital in 1827. Its function as a teaching hospital got fully under way in 1834, when a new building was opened in Agar Street that could accommodate twenty-two students. A separate medical school building was opened in Chandos Place in 1881, and in 1894 the venerable Charing Cross Theatre (which became Toole’s Theatre in 1878 and was the venue in 1892 for the first play of Arthur Conan Doyle’s good friend J. M. Barrie) was demolished to make way for the facility’s expansion and various improvements, which included the building of additional laboratories. The hospital continues today under the full name Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School, with the school being part of the Imperial College School of Medicine.
Surgeons perform an operation before medical students at Charing Cross Hospital (ca. 1890).
8 Actually, Mortimer’s age is not given in the Medical Directory.
9 The Medical Directory was created under the 1858 Medical Act, through which Parli
ament sought to regulate both the medical profession and medical education in the United Kingdom. In an age when disputes concerning qualifications were rampant among professionals in London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, and when anyone could hang out a shingle and collect fees from patients “provided he does not assume misleading titles” (Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th Ed.), the 1858 Act, considered draconian by some for its exclusion of Continental practitioners, also aimed to end quackery. A General Medical Council was established to assume oversight of practices and conduct. The directory listed practitioners with a degree in medicine or surgery from a British university; licentiates, members, or fellows of the Royal Colleges of Physicians or Surgeons in London, Dublin, or Edinburgh; licentiates or fellows of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow; and licentiates of the Apothecaries’ Halls of London and Dublin. Registering—which cost five pounds—conferred certain rights on practitioners, among them the ability to sue patients for nonpayment.
10 Notwithstanding the numerous references to Dartmoor and its locales, real and fictitious, several commentators contend that the events of The Hound of the Baskervilles actually take place in Herefordshire. Maurice Campbell, in “The Hound of the Baskervilles: Dartmoor or Herefordshire?,” reaches that result on the basis of identification of buildings and heraldic markings. Roger Robinson similarly makes a case for Herefordshire in “The Hound: Dartmoor or Oxfordshire?” Dartmoor, known for the beauty of its heaths and craggy hills, is in the county of Devon, in southwest England, between the Bristol and English Channels; less rugged Herefordshire borders Wales. However, those who reject Dartmoor as the locale are a distinct minority, and there appears little reason to doubt the majority view holding with the Dartmoor identification.
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