“Frankland clapped his eye to it and gave a cry of satisfaction.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1902
As I approached the hut, walking as warily as Stapleton would do when with poised net he drew near the settled butterfly, I satisfied myself that the place had indeed been used as a habitation. A vague pathway among the boulders led to the dilapidated opening which served as a door. All was silent within. The unknown might be lurking there, or he might be prowling on the moor. My nerves tingled with the sense of adventure. Throwing aside my cigarette, I closed my hand upon the butt of my revolver, and, walking swiftly up to the door, I looked in. The place was empty.
But there were ample signs that I had not come upon a false scent. This was certainly where the man lived. Some blankets rolled in a waterproof lay upon that very stone slab upon which neolithic man had once slumbered. The ashes of a fire were heaped in a rude grate. Beside it lay some cooking utensils and a bucket half-full of water. A litter of empty tins showed that the place had been occupied for some time, and I saw, as my eyes became accustomed to the chequered light, a pannikin169 and a half-full170 bottle of spirits standing in the corner. In the middle of the hut a flat stone served the purpose of a table, and upon this stood a small cloth bundle—the same, no doubt, which I had seen through the telescope upon the shoulder of the boy. It contained a loaf of bread, a tinned tongue, and two tins of preserved peaches. As I set it down again, after having examined it, my heart leaped to see that beneath it there lay a sheet of paper with writing upon it. I raised it, and this was what I read, roughly scrawled in pencil:
Dr. Watson has gone to Coombe Tracey.
For a minute I stood there with the paper in my hands thinking out the meaning of this curt message. It was I, then, and not Sir Henry, who was being dogged by this secret man. He had not followed me himself, but he had set an agent—the boy, perhaps—upon my track, and this was his report. Possibly I had taken no step since I had been upon the moor which had not been observed and repeated. Always there was this feeling of an unseen force, a fine net drawn round us with infinite skill and delicacy, holding us so lightly that it was only at some supreme moment that one realized that one was indeed entangled in its meshes.
Plan of Grimspound hut, perhaps the very hut in which Holmes stayed.
Sabine Baring-Gould, A Book of Dartmoor (London: Methuen and Co., 1900)
If there was one report there might be others, so I looked round the hut in search of them. There was no trace, however, of anything of the kind, nor could I discover any sign which might indicate the character or intentions of the man who lived in this singular place, save that he must be of Spartan habits, and cared little for the comforts of life. When I thought of the heavy rains and looked at the gaping roof I understood how strong and immutable must be the purpose which had kept him in that inhospitable abode. Was he our malignant enemy, or was he by chance our guardian angel? I swore that I would not leave the hut until I knew.
Outside the sun was sinking low and the west was blazing with scarlet and gold. Its reflection was shot back in ruddy patches by the distant pools which lay amid the great Grimpen Mire. There were there the two towers of Baskerville Hall, and there a distant blur of smoke which marked the village of Grimpen. Between the two, behind the hill, was the house of the Stapletons. All was sweet and mellow and peaceful in the golden evening light, and yet as I looked at them my soul shared none of the peace of Nature, but quivered at the vagueness and the terror of that interview which every instant was bringing nearer.171 With tingling nerves, but a fixed purpose, I sat in the dark recess of the hut and waited with sombre patience for the coming of its tenant.
And then at last I heard him. Far away came the sharp clink of a boot striking upon a stone. Then another and yet another, coming nearer and nearer. I shrank back into the darkest corner, and cocked the pistol in my pocket, determined not to discover myself until I had an opportunity of seeing something of the stranger. There was a long pause, which showed that he had stopped. Then once more the footsteps approached and a shadow fell across the opening of the hut.
“It is a lovely evening, my dear Watson,” said a well-known voice. “I really think that you will be more comfortable outside than in.”
“With tingling nerves, but a fixed purpose, I sat in the dark recess of the hut.”
Richard Gutschmidt, Der Hund von Baskerville (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1903)
The shadow of Sherlock Holmes.
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1902
152 The manuscript of Chapter XI, which resides in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library and is the only known portion of the manuscript extant (other than single pages), was published in facsimile by the Baker Street Irregulars in 2001.
153 “Newton Abbot” in numerous places in the manuscript, and one assumes that the balance of the original manuscript must have been consistent. It has been changed to Coombe Tracey in the handwriting of Arthur Conan Doyle. This is an important clue as to location, for Newton Abbot was and remains a real town in Dartmoor. See notes 86 and 143, above. Philip Weller notes, in a private communication to this editor, that “it is located some six miles as the bittern booms from the nearest part of Dartmoor, and it is therefore not on the Moor.”
154 E. Remington & Sons, the gun-makers of Ilion, New York, was the first company to put a typewriter on the production line, but, although the Remington name is indelibly associated with the machines, the family’s involvement with them was relatively brief. The firearms manufacturing company was founded by Eliphalet Remington, a blacksmith who, as a young man, made his own pocket revolver by fashioning a barrel on his father’s forge; he bought the firing mechanism from a dealer. He formed the Remington Typewriter Company as a separate entity in 1873, and worked in cooperation with Christopher Latham Sholes, a Milwaukee newspaperman-printer, poet, and inventor who held the patent on the first usable, efficient typewriter, which Sholes licensed to Remington. Within five years Sholes had arrived at the consummate design—the Remington 2 model, with its famed qwerty keyboard, featuring the shift key, which physically moved the carriage to produce capitals letters. The marketing firm of Wyckoff, Seamans, and Benedict acquired sole distribution rights in 1883 and, in 1886, sole manufacturing rights, buying the typewriter portion of the business from Remington. The Remington brand name remained in place. In the summer of 1894, the Remington Company, as it continued to be called, placed Model No. 6 on the market—by far its most serviceable and popular design—with the slogan “to save time is to lengthen life.” All of these early models were of an upstrike, or “blind,” design: When the typist hit a key, the type swung up against the platen and made its impression on the paper; the typist (or “type-writer,” then the more common term for the individual using the machine) had to lift the carriage in order to determine if the correct key had been struck. A frontstrike (“visible”) model was not marketed until 1908. Apart from typewriters, Remington also made sewing machines, and many of the first typewriters, which sold for a hefty $100 and were in fact manufactured by the sewing machine department of the Remington arms company, resembled the beautiful, early machines prized by seamstresses, with their decorative flower panels, mother-of-pearl inlay, and, in some cases, bronze finishes.
Remington typewriter, Standard Model No. 2 of 1878.
155 “[A] somewhat strange reaction to someone who might have been bringing new business,” remarks Dorothyanne Evans, in “Laura Lyons.”
156 Rosa Hemisphaerica, also known as the sulphur rose, is native to Southwest Asia. The bushes grow 5 to 6 feet tall and 4 feet wide and have abundant greyish leaves; the double blooms are a striking yellow, and the scent is musky. Along with the species Rosa Ecae and Rosa Foetida (the latter found in Persia), Rosa Hemisphaerica was imported to Europe, possibly as early as 1625, because there was no yellow rose stock. The three became the progenitors of modern yellow hybrids.
157 This odd usage for “keys” is not to be found in t
he Oxford English Dictionary (2nd Ed.) or in descriptions of contemporary type-writing machines. It may refer to the tab stops, clip-like devices used to set tabs manually, and although this seems to be an odd part of the machine over which to “play” one’s fingers, the Paget illustration of the scene bears out this interpretation. Because Paget was clearly not present, we must take it that he, too, understood Watson’s phrase to mean that the lady was manipulating the tab stops. One could actually create tab stops on a typewriter; but this was a technique that was difficult to master—the province of professional typists such as Laura Lyons.
158 One who distributes another’s charity.
159 This and the two preceding sentences are an insert to the manuscript, evidently a point recalled later by Watson.
160 Compare the considerably different statement of Dr. Mortimer: “[Lyons] proved to be a blackguard and deserted her.” Is Mortimer’s version merely the story Laura Lyons put out to spare her own reputation? Victorian society had little regard for divorced (or separated) women.
The laws of England gave Laura Lyons little likelihood of divorce but a reasonable prospect of separation. According to Judge Albert M. Rosenblatt, now a justice of the New York Court of Appeals, “Under the [laws of England], a judicial separation could be obtained by either the husband or the wife on the ground of adultery, cruelty, or desertion.” Under the Divorce Act of 1858, while a husband could seek dissolution of the marriage on the grounds of his wife’s adultery, the wife could only seek dissolution on the grounds of incestuous adultery; bigamy with adultery; rape; sodomy; bestiality; adultery coupled with sufficient cruelty to serve as grounds for divorce in the ecclesiastical courts; or adultery coupled with desertion without reasonable excuse for two years or more. The Encyclopædia Britannica (9th Ed.) concludes, “The reason why the adultery of the husband is considered a less serious offence than the adultery of the wife will be obvious to every one.”
By 1895, Parliament had made some reforms to the divorce laws, extending the grounds for a wife seeking divorce to include aggravated assault upon the wife within the Offences Against the Person Act; conviction for an assault on her resulting in a fine of more than £5 or imprisonment for more than two months; desertion; or persistent cruelty to her or wilful neglect to maintain her or her infant children, if by such cruelty or neglect the wife was “caused” to leave and live apart from him. In such circumstances, the wife could apply for an order containing any or all of the following provisions—(1) that the applicant be not forced to cohabit with her husband, (2) that the applicant have custody of any children under sixteen years of age, or (3) that the husband pay to her an allowance not exceeding £2 a week.
The harshness of Victorian divorce laws is a theme forming the backdrop for the drama of “The Abbey Grange.” Arthur Conan Doyle was a staunch advocate of reform of the laws and served as president of the national Divorce Law Reform Union in 1909.
161 In the manuscript, the phrase is “if a certain sum of money could be found for his expenses my husband was willing to leave the country.”
162 “This was quick work,” notes William S. Baring-Gould, “as Sir Charles was not discovered until midnight.” Peter Calamai dissents. Laura Lyons’s account is credible, he asserts in a private communication to this editor, if she is referring to the Devon County Chronicle, a morning newspaper, which Calamai indicates would have been in the hands of news agents by 6:00 A.M. Given the importance of Sir Charles to the local community, it is no wonder that someone immediately tipped off the newspaper.
163 In the manuscript, Watson suggests instead that he check Laura Lyons’s story by “obtaining the last English address of the husband, and discussing whether he had indeed left England at the date she named.”
164 The manuscript contains the following additional observations, which Watson struck subsequently in later versions. “Either she was an accomplished actor and a deep conspirator, or Barrymore had misread the letter, or the letter was a forgery—unless indeed there could by some extraordinary coincidence be a second lady writing from Newton Abbott whose initials were L.L. For the time my clue had come to nothing and I could only turn back to that other one which lay among the stone huts upon the Moor.” These are interesting speculations, but with hindsight, perhaps Watson felt that they cast him (and the lady) in a poorer light than either deserved.
165 The manuscript refers instead to “the Mayor of Plymouth.” Although Sir John Morland remains unidentified, obviously Watson later recognised that he had failed to cover up the real name of the party.
166 The manuscript originally added the remark, “Without my telescope it would of course have been impossible.” Watson must have realised later that this was mere talk, for two sentences later, Frankland spots the boy with his unaided eyes.
167 That is, strips of lead used as roofing.
168 Sabine Baring-Gould’s Devon (1907) describes Vixen Tor as a “castellated Mass” in the Walkham Valley, between Ward Bridge and Merrivale Bridge. There is no mention of Belliver in the book, and again Watson seems to have gained from an unknown source a detailed knowledge of the local names applied to landmarks on the moor.
169 Slang for a small pan.
170 Oddly, originally referred to as “half-empty” in the manuscript. Does this change —which many may regard as reflecting Watson’s innate optimism—suggest anything about Watson’s propensity to imbibe spirits?
171 Watson’s original comment in the manuscript was, “and yet here was I waiting for some crisis, waiting with my nerves in a quiver, knowing that …”
CHAPTER
XII
DEATH ON THE MOOR
FOR A MOMENT or two I sat breathless, hardly able to believe my ears. Then my senses and my voice came back to me, while a crushing weight of responsibility seemed in an instant to be lifted from my soul. That cold, incisive, ironical voice could belong to but one man in all the world.
“Holmes!” I cried—“Holmes!”
“Come out,” said he, “and please be careful with the revolver.”
I stooped under the rude lintel, and there he sat upon a stone outside, his grey eyes dancing with amusement as they fell upon my astonished features. He was thin and worn, but clear and alert, his keen face bronzed by the sun and roughened by the wind. In his tweed suit and cloth cap172 he looked like any other tourist upon the moor, and he had contrived, with that cat-like love of personal cleanliness which was one of his characteristics, that his chin should be as smooth and his linen as perfect as if he were in Baker Street.173
“I never was more glad to see anyone in my life,” said I, as I wrung him by the hand.
“Or more astonished, eh?”
Scene from The Hound of the Baskervilles (Great Britain: Stoll Picture Productions, Ltd., 1921), starring Eille Norwood as Sherlock Holmes and Hubert Willis as Dr. Watson.
“Well, I must confess to it.”
“The surprise was not all on one side, I assure you. I had no idea that you had found my occasional retreat, still less that you were inside it, until I was within twenty paces of the door.”
“My footprint, I presume?”
“No, Watson; I fear that I could not undertake to recognize your footprint amid all the footprints of the world. If you seriously desire to deceive me you must change your tobacconist; for when I see the stub of a cigarette marked Bradley, Oxford Street,174 I know that my friend Watson is in the neighbourhood. You will see it there beside the path. You threw it down, no doubt, at that supreme moment when you charged into the empty hut.”
“Exactly.”
“I thought as much—and knowing your admirable tenacity, I was convinced that you were sitting in ambush, a weapon within reach, waiting for the tenant to return. So you actually thought that I was the criminal?”
“I did not know who you were, but I was determined to find out.”
“Excellent, Watson! And how did you localize me? You saw me perhaps,175 on the night of the convict hunt, when I was
so imprudent as to allow the moon to rise behind me?”
“There he sat upon a stone.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1902
“Yes, I saw you then.”
“And have, no doubt, searched all the huts until you came to this one?”
“No, your boy had been observed, and that gave me a guide where to look.”
“The old gentleman with the telescope, no doubt. I could not make it out when first I saw the light flashing upon the lens.” He rose and peeped into the hut, “Ha, I see that Cartwright has brought up some supplies. What’s this paper? So you have been to Coombe Tracey, have you?”
“Yes.”
“To see Mrs. Laura Lyons?”
Scene from The Hound of the Baskervilles (Great Britain: Stoll Picture Productions, Ltd., 1921), starring Eille Norwood as Sherlock Holmes.
“Exactly.”
“Well done! Our researches have evidently been running on parallel lines, and when we unite our results I expect we shall have a fairly full knowledge of the case.”
“Well, I am glad from my heart that you are here, for indeed the responsibility and the mystery were both becoming too much for my nerves. But how in the name of wonder did you come here, and what have you been doing? I thought you were in Baker Street working out that case of blackmailing.”
“That was what I wished you to think.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Page 65
