“There is but one place where he can have fled,” she answered. “There is an old tin mine on an island in the heart of the Mire. It was there that he kept his hound, and there also he had made preparations so that he might have a refuge. That is where he would fly.”
“Mrs. Stapleton sank upon the floor.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1902
“ ‘The brute!’ cried Holmes. ‘Here, Lestrade, your brandy-bottle!’ ”
Frederic Dorr Steele, Later Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. II, 1952. Although captioned “drawn by Mr. Steele especially for this edition,” Andrew Malec shows that the work first illustrated Mary Robert Rinehart’s novel Sight Unseen, which appeared in Everybody’s Magazine, August 1916 (note the ’16 next to the artist’s signature).
The fog-bank lay like white wool against the window. Holmes held the lamp towards it.
“See,” said he. “No one could find his way into the Grimpen Mire tonight.”
She laughed and clapped her hands. Her eyes and teeth gleamed with fierce merriment.
“He may find his way in, but never out,” she cried. “How can he see the guiding wands tonight? We planted them together, he and I, to mark the pathway through the Mire. Oh, if I could only have plucked them out today! Then indeed you would have had him at your mercy.”
It was evident to us that all pursuit was in vain until the fog had lifted. Meanwhile we left Lestrade in possession of the house, while Holmes and I went back with the baronet to Baskerville Hall. The story of the Stapletons could no longer be withheld from him, but he took the blow bravely when he learned the truth about the woman whom he had loved. But the shock of the night’s adventures had shattered his nerves, and before morning he lay delirious in a high fever,208 under the care of Dr. Mortimer. The two of them were destined to travel together round the world before Sir Henry had become once more the hale, hearty man that he had been before he became master of the ill-omened estate.
And now I come rapidly to the conclusion of this singular narrative, in which I have tried to make the reader share those dark fears and vague surmises which clouded our lives so long, and ended in so tragic a manner. On the morning after the death of the hound the fog had lifted and we were guided by Mrs. Stapleton to the point where they had found a pathway through the bog. It helped us to realize the horror of this woman’s life when we saw the eagerness and joy with which she laid us on her husband’s track. We left her standing upon the thin peninsula of firm, peaty soil which tapered out into the widespread bog. From the end of it a small wand planted here and there showed where the path zigzagged from tuft to tuft of rushes among those green-scummed pits and foul quagmires which barred the way to the stranger. Rank reeds and lush, slimy water-plants sent an odour of decay and a heavy miasmatic vapour into our faces, while a false step plunged us more than once thigh-deep into the dark, quivering mire, which shook for yards in soft undulations around our feet. Its tenacious grip plucked at our heels as we walked, and when we sank into it it was as if some malignant hand was tugging us down into those obscene depths, so grim and purposeful was the clutch in which it held us. Once only we saw a trace that someone had passed that perilous way before us. From amid a tuft of cotton-grass which bore it up out of the slime some dark thing was projecting. Holmes sank to his waist as he stepped from the path to seize it, and had we not been there to drag him out he could never have set his foot upon firm land again. He held an old black boot in the air. “Meyers,209 Toronto,” was printed on the leather inside.
“It is worth a mud bath,” said he. “It is our friend Sir Henry’s missing boot.”
“Thrown there by Stapleton in his flight.”
“Exactly. He retained it in his hand after using it to set the hound upon his track. He fled when he knew the game was up, still clutching it. And he hurled it away at this point of his flight. We know at least that he came so far in safety.”
“He held an old black boot in the air.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1902
But more than that we were never destined to know, though there was much which we might surmise.210 There was no chance of finding footsteps in the mire, for the rising mud oozed swiftly in upon them, but as we at last reached firmer ground beyond the morass we all looked eagerly for them. But no slightest sign of them ever met our eyes. If the earth told a true story, then Stapleton never reached that island of refuge towards which he struggled through the fog upon that last night. Somewhere in the heart of the great Grimpen Mire, down in the foul slime of the huge morass which had sucked him in, this cold and cruel-hearted man is for ever buried.
Many traces we found of him in the bog-girt island where he had hid his savage ally. A huge driving-wheel and a shaft half-filled with rubbish showed the position of an abandoned mine. Beside it were the crumbling remains of the cottages of the miners, driven away, no doubt, by the foul reek of the surrounding swamp. In one of these a staple and chain, with a quantity of gnawed bones, showed where the animal had been confined. A skeleton with a tangle of brown hair adhering to it lay among the débris.
“A dog!” said Holmes. “By Jove, a curly-haired spaniel.211 Poor Mortimer will never see his pet again. Well, I do not know that this place contains any secret which we have not already fathomed. He could hide his hound, but he could not hush its voice, and hence came those cries which even in the daylight were not pleasant to hear. On an emergency he could keep the hound in the out-house at Merripit, but it was always a risk, and it was only on the supreme day, which he regarded as the end of all his efforts, that he dared do it. This paste in the tin is no doubt the luminous mixture with which the creature was daubed. It was suggested, of course, by the story of the family hell-hound, and by the desire to frighten old Sir Charles to death. No wonder the poor devil of a convict ran and screamed, even as our friend did, and as we ourselves might have done, when he saw such a creature bounding through the darkness of the moor upon his track. It was a cunning device, for, apart from the chance of driving your victim to his death, what peasant would venture to inquire too closely into such a creature should he get sight of it, as many have done, upon the moor! I said it in London, Watson, and I say it again now, that never yet have we helped to hunt down a more dangerous man than he who is lying yonder”—he swept his long arm towards the huge mottled expanse of green-splotched bog which stretched away until it merged into the russet slopes of the moor.212
“Where the animal had been confined.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1902
198 But he is apparently not armed, and when Holmes has killed the hound, Lestrade proffers a brandy flask, which must have been in his hip-pocket. See text accompanying note 204, below.
199 Elliot Kimball, in “Watson’s Neurosis,” praises Lestrade’s behaviour, maintaining that it is a sign of the intelligence of “the courageous little man” that he “succumbed, momentarily” to the unknown, and that any other response would have been “senseless.” The question is how this analysis reflects on Holmes and Watson, who did not flinch.
200 Stephen Farrell, in “It Can’t Be Quite a Dead Dog; There’s Still More Life to Be Wrung Out of It: A Discourse upon Marksmanship in The Hound,” wonders why Holmes did not fire again before the animal reached Sir Henry. His delay not only made killing the hound (who, atop Sir Henry, would have been thrashing about) problematic but also risked injuring or killing Sir Henry by mistake.
201 Edward J. Van Liere notes, in “Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Perennial Athletes,” that Watson, who “had doubtless seen first-class track men perform,” here elevates Holmes above all others in terms of speed and endurance.
202 Philip Weller, in a private communication with this editor, explains Watson’s description of “emptied barrels,” often criticised because of its implication of a multiple-barrelled weapon. When a bullet was fired, the casing remained in the weapon’s rotating cartridge chamber, while the projectile (bullet) was propelled out of the barrel. The chamber was
then rotated, and a fresh bullet lined up with the barrel.
The barrel would, however, have been filled with the expanding gases from each cartridge in turn as the revolver was fired, as those gases drove the bullet out of the barrel, and the barrel would thus have been emptied of both the bullet and the gases each time that the pistol was fired. Watson might more correctly have said that the barrel was emptied five times, rather than that five barrels were emptied, but the latter turn of phrase was a very commonly used colloquialism which requires no apology.
Of course, Watson is only speaking figuratively. Only the obsolete “pepperpot” pistol would have had five barrels—Watson means five chambers of a conventional pistol.
203 Robert Keith Leavitt, in “Annie Oakley in Baker Street,” notes that this was a poor choice of a target. Flank wounds would not necessarily be lethal and might well have been reflected; in this case, the bullet could have struck Sir Henry.
204 Did this come from Lestrade’s “hip-pocket”? See note 198, above. James Edward Holroyd, in Baker Street By-Ways, reports that his friend Bill McGowran, of the London Evening News, “has a theory that Lestrade was a tippler and that this explains the fact that while we first meet him as an inspector, he is still the same rank twenty years later.” There is no real Canonical evidence for this thesis. Only in “The Noble Bachelor” does Holmes offer Lestrade a drink, and even in circumstances where they share cigars (for example, “The Six Napoleons”), there is no mention of alcohol.
205 Michael L. Burton, in “On the Hound,” carefully reviews all of the evidence and concludes that Watson’s description of the breed mix is accurate. Others reach different conclusions:
“From its gigantic size I would hazard that there was more likely some Great Dane or Scottish Wolfhound mixture involved,” Stuart Palmer writes, in “Notes on Certain Evidences of Caniphobia in Mr. Sherlock Holmes and His Associates.” Owen Frisbie comments, in “On the Origin of the Hound of the Baskervilles,” that Watson’s contention that the hound is both bloodhound and mastiff cannot be accurate, and that it is instead staghound (“for size and drive”) and bloodhound (“for ability and will to take the line of a human”).
Shirley Purves argues for a combination of Doberman pinscher and Irish Wolfhound, in “Consider the Hound.” She also puts forward the possibility of a Cuban bloodhound cross-bred with a Tibetan mastiff. Don Wright, in “The Hound of Hell Is Alive and Well,” argues for a pit bull terrier. Philip Weller rises to the support of Watson, specifically rejecting some of the foregoing as well as others in “Barking Up the Wrong Yew Tree.”
206 But phosphorus can kill dog or man, comments Stuart Palmer, note 205, above. D. A. Redmond suggests, in “Some Chemical Problems in the Canon,” that the substance was not phosphorus but barium sulphide, while Walter Shepherd, in On the Scent with Sherlock Holmes (1986), proposes zinc sulphide or calcium sulphide. Frederick J. Jaeger and Rose M. Vogel, in Hound from Hell, contend for a bioluminous substance based on the studies of Raphael Dubois published in 1886. Michael Bedford and Bruce Dettman, in “ ‘A Cunning Preparation,’ ” sidestep the problem by positing that the substance was on a leather muzzle, not the dog’s muzzle.
207 Dean W. Dickensheet, in “Upon the Victorian Reticence of John H. Watson, M.D.,” points out that notwithstanding that she is swathed in sheets, Beryl’s weal is on her neck. The truth, he concludes, is that “[t]he diabolical Stapleton, having bound his recalcitrant wife to the beam, stripped her to the waist (at least) and savagely beat her upon the back and (probably) breasts, exhibiting the diablerie of a man attempting to disfigure those desirable charms which he believes he has lost to another.” Dickensheet’s more lurid scene is genteelly illustrated in the cover drawn by Bill Shoyer for a 1949 paperback reissue of The Hound of the Baskervilles. The inside cover reads, “He had tied her to an upright beam in the centre of the room, her perfect figure and elegant dress swathed in the sheets that dug into her flesh and secured her to the post. She was tall, dark, and slender, with a proud, finely cut face so regular it would have been impassive except for the sensitive mouth and the beautiful, dark, eager eyes. The eyes—full of fear and grief—stared out at her tormentor with a dreadful questioning.” Quelle difference!
208 Undoubtedly another example of the epidemic of brain fever in the Canon. Seven patients in the Canon are mentioned as having the disease “brain fever,” which, Alvin E. Rodin and Jack D. Key write in Medical Casebook of Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, “we can characterize … as one which follows quickly on a severe emotional shock, which exhibits weight loss, weakness, pallor, and high fever, and which has a protracted course. Most patients recover, but insanity or death is possible.” A vague affliction, to be sure, but Watson is in good company: Nineteenth-century fiction is rife with instances of the malady. Rodin and Key note other well-known victims, including Catherine Linton in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Emma Bovary in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), and Lucy Feverel in George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859). Such prevalence of brain fever in the literature of the day would seem to validate it as a medical diagnosis; Rodin and Key further cite an 1892 medical textbook that lists “fever” as a manifestation of an hysterical reaction, as well as a modern dictionary that equates brain fever with meningitis.
209 Watson got the name wrong; Joseph Meier was a boot and shoe manufacturer located on Queen Street West in Toronto, notes Donald A. Redmond.
210 In a daring work of speculation entitled “A Vindication of Stapleton,” Donald Yates reconstructs the missing page from Watson’s narrative (see note 125, above) and explains the mystery of Stapleton’s disappearance. Sir Henry, Yates concludes, knew of Stapleton’s plan to loose the hound and furthermore knew that Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade would be lying in wait to save him. Since Sir Henry could not tolerate Stapleton’s mistreatment of Beryl, he urged Beryl, Laura Lyons, and the manservant Antonio, whose sympathies lay with his mistress, to force Stapleton onto the moor in a panic. Antonio had removed the secret wands showing the path to safety, and Stapleton perished immediately. To save face, Holmes, when he became aware of this conspiracy and that his rôle was only that of an actor, removed a page from Watson’s correspondence that would have undermined his absolute authority.
211 “Sheer brilliance,” sniffs Stuart Palmer, “since the skeletal remains of a spaniel differ slightly if at all from [those of] any other small dog.” Benjamin S. Clark sees a more sinister significance in the presence of the bones. He reasons that the spaniel could not have strayed there by itself and finds it unlikely that Stapleton would have risked—unnecessarily, with other plentiful supplies of meat at hand—taking his neighbour’s dog (or permitting the hound itself to take the dog) for fodder. Clark reasons that the spaniel could not have “penetrated” the bog without Mortimer, and that the logical conclusion is that Mortimer was colluding with Stapleton, since “even if the doctor had come on the path to the island by chance he would, if he were an honest man, have immediately publicised his discovery of the hound.”
212 Ian McQueen concludes that it is premature to announce Stapleton’s death. “Holmes assumed from the lack of footprints on the ‘firmer ground beyond the morass’ that Stapleton had perished in the swamp, but this can be neither proved nor disproved.” McQueen asks why, if such ground showed footmarks, there were none of Stapleton’s from the afternoon before, proving he had left for Merripit House with his dog. Indeed, Emily O’Brien, in “Did Stapleton Escape to Samoa?,” finds evidence of Stapleton’s escape in The Beach of Falesa, a novella by Robert Louis Stevenson, written near the end of his life. The Stevenson novella, originally entitled “Uma,” is not to be confused with the narrative screenplay by Dylan Thomas entitled The Beach at Falesa (1964), which covers some of the same ground.
CHAPTER
XV
A RETROSPECTION
IT WAS THE end of November, and Holmes and I sat, upon a raw and foggy night, on either side of a blazing fire in our sitting-room in
Baker Street. Since the tragic upshot of our visit to Devonshire he had been engaged in two affairs of the utmost importance, in the first of which he had exposed the atrocious conduct of Colonel Upwood213 in connection with the famous card scandal of the Nonpareil Club,214 while in the second he had defended the unfortunate Mme. Montpensier from the charge of murder which hung over her in connection with the death of her step-daughter Mlle. Carère, the young lady who, as it will be remembered, was found six months later alive and married in New York.215 My friend was in excellent spirits over the success which had attended a succession of difficult and important cases, so that I was able to induce him to discuss the details of the Baskerville mystery. I had waited patiently for the opportunity, for I was aware that he would never permit cases to overlap, and that his clear and logical mind would not be drawn from its present work to dwell upon memories of the past. Sir Henry and Dr. Mortimer were, however, in London, on their way to that long voyage which had been recommended for the restoration of his shattered nerves. They had called upon us that very afternoon, so that it was natural that the subject should come up for discussion.
“A retrospection.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1902
“The whole course of events,” said Holmes, “from the point of view of the man who called himself Stapleton, was simple and direct, although to us, who had no means in the beginning of knowing the motives of his actions and could only learn part of the facts, it all appeared exceedingly complex. I have had the advantage of two conversations with Mrs. Stapleton, and the case has now been so entirely cleared up that I am not aware that there is anything which has remained a secret to us. You will find a few notes upon the matter under the heading B in my indexed list of cases.”
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