“But what do you intend to do?”
“I have no doubt, sir, that we shall succeed in establishing ourselves in some business. Sir Charles’s generosity has given us the means to do so. And now, sir, perhaps I had best show you to your rooms.”
A square balustraded gallery ran round the top of the old hall, approached by a double stair. From this central point two long corridors extended the whole length of the building, from which all the bedrooms opened. My own was in the same wing as Baskerville’s and almost next door to it. These rooms appeared to be much more modern than the central part of the house, and the bright paper and numerous candles did something to remove the sombre impression which our arrival had left upon my mind.
But the dining-room which opened out of the hall was a place of shadow and gloom. It was a long chamber with a step separating the daïs where the family sat from the lower portion reserved for their dependents. At one end a minstrels’ gallery overlooked it. Black beams shot across above our heads, with a smoke-darkened ceiling beyond them. With rows of flaring torches to light it up, and the colour and rude hilarity of an old-time banquet, it might have softened; but now, when two black-clothed gentlemen sat in the little circle of light thrown by a shaded lamp, one’s voice became hushed and one’s spirit subdued. A dim line of ancestors, in every variety of dress, from the Elizabethan knight to the buck of the Regency,111 stared down upon us and daunted us by their silent company. We talked little, and I for one was glad when the meal was over and we were able to retire into the modern billiard-room and smoke a cigarette.
“My word, it isn’t a very cheerful place,” said Sir Henry. “I suppose one can tone down to it, but I feel a bit out of the picture at present. I don’t wonder that my uncle got a little jumpy if he lived all alone in such a house as this. However, if it suits you, we will retire early tonight, and perhaps things may seem more cheerful in the morning.”
I drew aside my curtains before I went to bed and looked out from my window. It opened upon the grassy space which lay in front of the hall door. Beyond, two copses of trees moaned and swung in a rising wind. A half moon broke through the rifts of racing clouds. In its cold light I saw beyond the trees a broken fringe of rocks and the long, low curve of the melancholy moor. I closed the curtain, feeling that my last impression was in keeping with the rest.
“The dining-room was a place of shadow and gloom.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1901
And yet it was not quite the last. I found myself weary and yet wakeful, tossing restlessly from side to side, seeking for the sleep which would not come. Far away a chiming clock struck out the quarters of the hours, but otherwise a deathly silence lay upon the old house. And than suddenly, in the very dead of night, there came a sound to my ears, clear, resonant, and unmistakable. It was the sob of a woman, the muffled, strangling gasp of one who is torn by an uncontrollable sorrow. I sat up in bed and listened intently. The noise could not have been far away, and was certainly in the house. For half an hour I waited with every nerve on the alert, but there came no other sound save the chiming clock and the rustle of the ivy on the wall.
97 The Museum was the creation of John Hunter, F.R.S. (1728–1793), surgeon, anatomist, and the founder of experimental pathology, whose extraordinary private collection of over 14,000 preparations of human, animal, and plant material was purchased by the British government in 1799 and given over to the care of the Company (later the Royal College) of Surgeons. Hunter, a mechanically minded boy who grew up on a farm near Glasgow and left school at thirteen to roam the fields and teach himself animal economy, first officially took up the scalpel under the guidance of his brother, William Hunter, a London obstetrician and teacher of anatomy and dissection. He displayed an instant talent for the work, and William arranged for him to have surgical training at St. George’s, St. Bartholomew’s, and Chelsea Hospitals in London, also publishing his younger brother’s first paper, “The State of the Testis in the Foetus and on the Hernia Congenita,” in Medical Commentaries (1762). The perfectly preserved results of the experiments and dissections John Hunter carried out over the ensuing decades—most performed in a succession of homes that were part cadaver storage-place, part menagerie, with live jackals roaming the sitting-rooms and fossils displayed on the shelves of the dens—eventually formed the nucleus of one of the world’s greatest museums of comparative anatomy, pathology, osteology, and natural history. Hunter performed many famous, and some infamous, experiments, working on problems as diverse as syphilis and popliteal aneurysm, and never threw anything away. By 1941, when the College of Surgeons suffered extensive bomb damage, the Hunterian Museum held nearly 65,000 specimens. Much of the surviving material, including 3,500 of John Hunter’s original eighteenth-century specimens and some spectacular paintings of wild animals by George Stubbs (1724–1806), commissioned by Hunter, is still on display in four museums within the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
Jane Weller offers an overview of the Hunterian Museum in “A Place of Pure Amusement?: The Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.”
98 Presumably Hyde Park, which Dickens’s Dictionary of London calls “the great fashionable promenade of London.” Peter Calamai suggests an alternate interpretation: “[A] drawing from The Graphic of Sept. 7, 1887, show[s] St. James’s Park dotted with the wrapped bodies of homeless, poor people at mid-day. Such scenes were common in all the public parks for several years toward the end of the 1880s as a depression gripped the country, and many artisans were thrown out of work. It would have been quite a sight for a visitor from Canada.”
99 A corrupt form of “Hibernian,” the Latin term referring to the inhabitants of Ireland.
100 In “Always on Sunday, Watson!,” William H. Gill suggests that the station was either Brent or Ivybridge, south of the moor. William S. Baring-Gould proposes that Watson and his party continued along the line to Coryton Station. Philip Weller points out that the latter station is “on the wrong side of the Moor for the setting sun to have been seen over the Moor.” He considers three other stations as well, Ashburton, Bovey Tracey, and Buckfastleigh, but discards them all as failing in one respect or another to match Watson’s description.
101 A four-wheeled carriage, open, or made with a removable cover, with inward-facing benches in addition to the customary front seats or benches.
A wagonette.
102 Short-legged, strong horses, usually used for heavy carriage work.
103 A variety of fern with long, fleshy fronds.
104 Notting Hill, also known as Kensington Park and, much earlier, as Notting Dale, is characterised by Harold P. Clunn in The Face of London as “a handsome quarter of the Royal Borough of Kensington.” Although many of the neo-classical homes commissioned by the Ladbroke family and built by high-society architects were impressive in the mid-Victorian era, the area was notorious for its pig-keepers, brickfields, and attendant public-health nuisances, with rubbish and effluent standing in holes where the clay for brickmaking had been dug. Charles Dickens wrote of the neighbourhood’s being simultaneously “studded thickly with elegant villas and mansions” and “a plague-spot, scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London” (Household Words, 1850).
105 Its Gaelic predecessor, the term carn, meant a “heap of stones.”
106 Joseph Swan demonstrated a carbon filament lightbulb in Newcastle at least ten months prior to Thomas Alva Edison’s announcement of his invention. Swan received a British patent in 1878 for the same bulb that Edison patented in the United States in 1879. Swan filed suit for patent infringement, and as part of the settlement, Edison was forced to take Swan in as a partner in his British electric works. The company was called the Edison and Swan United Electric Company. The company marketed lightbulbs under the trade name “Ediswan.” Eventually, however, Edison acquired all of Swan’s interest in the company. William S. Baring-Gould inappropriately corrects Watson’s reporting here, claiming that since Edison and Swan marketed two differ
ent lightbulbs, Sir Henry must have said “Swan or Edison.”
Ediswan Electric Lamps.
Victorian Advertisments
Light bulb by Thomas Edison (ca. 1885).
107 A term describing a building topped with battlements, embrasures, or loopholes (the last being openings through which small arms may be fired or which permit observation).
108 The panes of a mullioned window are divided by a vertical bar. They are found especially in Gothic architecture. Hurlstone, the ancestral home of the Musgraves (“The Musgrave Ritual”), also has mullioned windows.
109 Beams or rafters.
110 Also known as a “cat,” a “dog” is a double tripod set before an open fireplace and used as a toasting-stand.
111 The period 1811–1820, during which the Prince of Wales was given the powers of regent because of the insanity of George III. While the intellectual life of England flourished, the moral atmosphere of the era was dissolute, and the life of the Regency “buck” was filled with gambling, sport, drink, and flirtation. Conan Doyle captures its flavour in Rodney Stone (1896). In the following incident, Stone’s uncle explains to the prince why he has given up duelling:
“A painful incident happened the last time that I was out, and it sickened me of it.”
“You killed your man—?”
“No, no, sir, it was worse than that. I had a coat that Weston has never equalled. To say that it fitted me is not to express it. It was me—like the hide on a horse. I’ve had sixty from him since, but he could never approach it. The sit of the collar brought tears into my eyes, sir, when first I saw it; and as to the waist—”
“But the duel, Tregellis!” cried the Prince.
“Well, sir, I wore it at the duel, like the thoughtless fool that I was. It was Major Hunter, of the Guards, with whom I had had a little tracasserie, because I hinted that he should not come into Brookes’s smelling of the stables. I fired first, and missed. He fired, and I shrieked in despair. ‘He’s hit! A surgeon! A surgeon!’ they cried. ‘A tailor! A tailor!’ said I, for there was a double hole through the tails of my masterpiece. No, it was past all repair. You may laugh, sir, but I’ll never see the like of it again.”
CHAPTER
VII
THE STAPLETONS OF MERRIPIT HOUSE
THE FRESH BEAUTY of the following morning did something to efface from our minds the grim and grey impression which had been left upon both of us by our first experience of Baskerville Hall. As Sir Henry and I sat at breakfast the sunlight flooded in through the high mullioned windows, throwing watery patches of colour from the coats-of-arms which covered them. The dark panelling glowed like bronze in the golden rays, and it was hard to realize that this was indeed the chamber which had struck such a gloom into our souls upon the evening before.
“I guess it is ourselves and not the house that we have to blame!” said the baronet. “We were tired with our journey and chilled by our drive, so we took a grey view of the place. Now we are fresh and well, so it is all cheerful once more.”
“And yet it was not entirely a question of imagination,” I answered. “Did you, for example, happen to hear someone, a woman I think, sobbing in the night?”
“That is curious, for I did when I was half asleep fancy that I heard something of the sort. I waited quite a time, but there was no more of it, so I concluded that it was all a dream.”
“I heard it distinctly, and I am sure that it was really the sob of a woman.”
“We must ask about this right away.”
He rang the bell and asked Barrymore whether he could account for our experience. It seemed to me that the pallid features of the butler turned a shade paler still as he listened to his master’s question.
“There are only two women in the house, Sir Henry,” he answered. “One is the scullery-maid, who sleeps in the other wing. The other is my wife, and I can answer for it that the sound could not have come from her.”
And yet he lied as he said it, for it chanced that after breakfast I met Mrs. Barrymore in the long corridor with the sun full upon her face. She was a large, impassive, heavy-featured woman with a stern, set expression of mouth. But her tell-tale eyes were red and glanced at me from between swollen lids. It was she, then, who wept in the night, and if she did so her husband must know it. Yet he had taken the obvious risk of discovery in declaring that it was not so. Why had he done this? And why did she weep so bitterly? Already round this pale-faced, handsome, black-bearded man there was gathering an atmosphere of mystery and of gloom. It was he who had been the first to discover the body of Sir Charles, and we had only his word for all the circumstances which led up to the old man’s death. Was it possible that it was Barrymore, after all, whom we had seen in the cab in Regent Street? The beard might well have been the same. The cabman had described a somewhat shorter man, but such an impression might easily have been erroneous. How could I settle the point for ever? Obviously the first thing to do was to see the Grimpen postmaster, and find whether the test telegram had really been placed in Barrymore’s own hands. Be the answer what it might, I should at least have something to report to Sherlock Holmes.
Sir Henry had numerous papers to examine after breakfast, so that the time was propitious for my excursion. It was a pleasant walk of four miles along the edge of the moor, leading me at last to a small grey hamlet, in which two larger buildings, which proved to be the inn and the house of Dr. Mortimer, stood high above the rest. The postmaster, who was also the village grocer, had a clear recollection of the telegram.
“Certainly, sir,” said he, “I had the telegram delivered to Mr. Barrymore exactly as directed.”
“Who delivered it?”
“My boy here. James, you delivered that telegram to Mr. Barrymore at the Hall last week, did you not?”
“Yes, father, I delivered it.”
“Into his own hands?” I asked.
“Well, he was up in the loft at the time, so that I could not put it into his own hands, but I gave it into Mrs. Barrymore’s hands, and she promised to deliver it at once.”
“Did you see Mr. Barrymore?”
“No, sir; I tell you he was in the loft.”
“If you didn’t see him, how do you know he was in the loft?”
“Well, surely his own wife ought to know where he is,” said the postmaster, testily. “Didn’t he get the telegram? If there is any mistake it is for Mr. Barrymore himself to complain.”
It seemed hopeless to pursue the inquiry any farther, but it was clear that in spite of Holmes’s ruse we had no proof that Barrymore had not been in London all the time. Suppose that it were so—suppose that the same man had been the last who had seen Sir Charles alive, and the first to dog the new heir when he returned to England. What then? Was he the agent of others, or had he some sinister design of his own? What interest could he have in persecuting the Baskerville family? I thought of the strange warning clipped out of the leading article of The Times. Was that his work, or was it possibly the doing of someone who was bent upon counteracting his schemes? The only conceivable motive was that which had been suggested by Sir Henry, that if the family could be scared away a comfortable and permanent home would be secured for the Barrymores. But surely such an explanation as that would be quite inadequate to account for the deep and subtle scheming which seemed to be weaving an invisible net round the young baronet. Holmes himself had said that no more complex case had come to him in all the long series of his sensational investigations. I prayed, as I walked back along the grey, lonely road, that my friend might soon be freed from his preoccupations and able to come down to take this heavy burden of responsibility from my shoulders.
Suddenly my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of running feet behind me and by a voice which called me by name. I turned, expecting to see Dr. Mortimer, but to my surprise it was a stranger who was pursuing me. He was a small, slim, clean-shaven, prim-faced man, flaxen-haired and lean-jawed, between thirty and forty years of age, dressed in a grey suit and wea
ring a straw hat. A tin box for botanical specimens hung over his shoulder, and he carried a green butterfly-net in one of his hands.
“I turned, expecting to see Dr. Mortimer, but to my surprise it was a stranger who was pursuing me.”
Richard Gutschmidt, Der Hund von Baskerville (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1903)
“You will, I am sure, excuse my presumption, Dr. Watson,” said he, as he came panting up to where I stood. “Here on the moor we are a homely folk, and do not wait for formal introductions. You may possibly have heard my name from our mutual friend, Mortimer. I am Stapleton, of Merripit House.”112
“Your net and box would have told me as much,” said I, “for I knew that Mr. Stapleton was a naturalist. But how did you know me?”
“I have been calling on Mortimer, and he pointed you out to me from the window of his surgery as you passed. As our road lay the same way, I thought that I would overtake you and introduce myself. I trust that Sir Henry is none the worse for his journey?”
“It was a stranger pursuing me.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1901
“He is very well, thank you.”
“We were all rather afraid that after the sad death of Sir Charles the new baronet might refuse to live here. It is asking much of a wealthy man to come down and bury himself in a place of this kind, but I need not tell you that it means a very great deal to the countryside. Sir Henry has, I suppose, no superstitious fears in the matter?”
“I do not think that it is likely.”
“Of course you know the legend of the fiend dog which haunts the family?”
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