The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes
Page 97
“Devilry, Watson!” he remarked, and sat long with a clouded brow.162
Late last night Mrs. Hudson, our landlady, brought up a message that a gentleman wished to see Holmes, and that the matter was of the utmost importance. Close at the heels of his messenger came Mr. Cecil Barker, our friend of the moated Manor House. His face was drawn and haggard.
“ ‘I’ve had bad news—terrible news, Mr. Holmes,’ said he.”
Frank Wiles, Strand Magazine, 1915
“I’ve had bad news—terrible news, Mr. Holmes,” said he.
“I feared as much,” said Holmes.
“You have not had a cable, have you?”
“I have had a note from some one who has.”
“It’s poor Douglas. They tell me his name is Edwards; but he will always be Jack Douglas of Benito Canyon to me. I told you that they started together for South Africa in the Palmyra163 three weeks ago.”
“Exactly.”
“The ship reached Cape Town last night. I received this cable from Mrs. Douglas this morning:
Jack has been lost overboard in gale off St. Helena.164 No one knows how accident occurred.
Ivy Douglas.165
“Ha! It came like that, did it?” said Holmes thoughtfully. “Well, I’ve no doubt it was well stage-managed.”166
“You mean that you think there was no accident?”
“None in the world.”
“He was murdered?”
“Surely!”
“So I think also. These infernal Scowrers, this cursed vindictive nest of criminals—”167
“No, no, my good sir,” said Holmes. “There is a master hand here. It is no case of sawed-off shot-guns and clumsy six-shooters. You can tell an old master by the sweep of his brush. I can tell a Moriarty when I see one. This crime is from London, not from America.”
“But for what motive?”
“Because it is done by a man who cannot afford to fail—one whose whole unique position depends upon the fact that all he does must succeed. A great brain and a huge organization have been turned to the extinction of one man. It is crushing the nut with the triphammer—an absurd extravagance of energy—but the nut is very effectually crushed all the same.”
“How came this man to have anything to do with it?”
“I can only say that the first word that ever came to us of the business was from one of his lieutenants.168 These Americans were well advised. Having an English job to do, they took into partnership, as any foreign criminal could do, this great consultant in crime. From that moment their man was doomed.169 At first he would content himself by using his machinery in order to find their victim. Then he would indicate how the matter might be treated. Finally, when he read in the reports of the failure of this agent, he would step in himself with a master touch. You heard me warn this man at Birlstone Manor House that the coming danger was greater than the past. Was I right?”170
Barker beat his head with his clenched fist in his impotent anger. “Do you tell me that we have to sit down under this? Do you say that no one can ever get level with this king-devil?”
“No, I don’t say that,” said Holmes, and his eyes seemed to be looking far into the future. “I don’t say that he can’t be beat. But you must give me time—you must give me time!”171
We all sat in silence for some minutes while those fateful eyes still strained to pierce the veil.
Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
Frederic Dorr Steele, Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vol. I, 1952. Plainly a reuse of the cover for “The Priory School,” Collier’s, 1904.
161 The English book text refers to the “police court” and the “Assizes.”
162 What did Holmes read into this “enigmatic note”? It’s possible, muses David Talbott Cox, that the text contained the Greek ´ Holmes observed in Porlock’s earlier messages, causing Holmes to realise that “Porlock” was Moriarty, bent on exacting retribution for Holmes’s interference. Contrarily, Christopher F. Baum reads the situation at its face value, dismissing Professor Moriarty as a candidate for Porlock precisely because Holmes did not (apparently) notice any Greek ´9s in the note.
163 Donald A. Redmond, in Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Sources, notes that “The Times for 28 May 1890 records a fire aboard the SS Palmyra lying at the Fresh Wharf, Thames-street, struck by a spark from a shovel and extinguished without much damage.” If the chronologists are correct (see Appendix 3), this would have occurred after the ship’s return from Africa. Was there evidence aboard the ship that Moriarty sought to destroy?
164 Saint Helena is a lonely island in the Atlantic, 1,200 miles off the west coast of Africa. It became a British colony in 1834 and remains so to this day. After his defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena in 1815, living at a farmhouse in Longwood, three miles from the capital of Jamestown, until his death in 1821. Brigadier Étienne Gerard, whose allegedly fictional adventures were also published by Arthur Conan Doyle, visited Saint Helena in an abortive effort to rescue his beloved emperor. “Here, then, was the island of my dreams!” he said, upon seeing its shores. “Here was the cage where our great Eagle of France was confined!”
165 Note that this is the only mention of Mrs. Douglas’s first name.
166 Indeed, suggests Theodore W. Gibson, perhaps the “stage management” was the doing of the inventive and resourceful Jack Douglas, who in impersonating Birdy Edwards had attempted earlier to vanish from view, only to be foiled by the inopportune interference of Holmes. See note 170, below.
167 Cornelius Helling, in a letter to the Sherlock Holmes Journal, wonders why Holmes, a “walking calendar of crime,” needed John Douglas’s explanation to recognise the “nest of criminals.” Upon observing the sawn shotgun from the Pennsylvania Small Arm Company, the brand on the dead man’s forearm, and, above all, the card with the initials V.V. and the number 341 rudely scrawled upon it, why did he not “instantly remember the momentous trial of the infamous Scowrers of Vermissa Valley only fifteen years ago and the remarkable rôle played by the Pinkerton man Birdy Edwards—and so [identify] John Douglas at once with Edwards? Or, perhaps had he his good reasons to keep silent?” (Of course, the initials would have been “M.M.” or perhaps “A.O.H.,” and it is the name “James McParlan” that Holmes should have recollected.)
168 Alan Olding observes that the following passage “encapsulates the whole tragic history of what was surely Holmes’s greatest failure. If we analyse these remarks, we can see at once the frustration of a man who realises that he has been out-manoeuvred from the start; that he has been cheated of his victory, and that, by his unquestioning acceptance at face value of the cipher message from his quondam ‘Secret Agent,’ he has been used himself, as an unsuspecting tool of the ‘controlling brain of the underworld.’ ”
169 ”Is this an admission, or a justification of his failure?” wonders Olding.
170 ”Oh, no, Mr. Holmes you were wrong!!” laments Olding, who points to numerous cases (“The Second Stain,” “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”) in which Holmes, by turning a blind eye, extended his forgiveness and aid toward otherwise worthy people who had confessed to having done wrong. “Why in heaven’s name could you not have done the same for this brave man, who had descended into Hell, in his selfless devotion to duty, and to the Law?” D. Martin Dakin raises similar questions: “If Douglas’s plan [to disappear] had been allowed to go forward, then indeed, as he said, it might have been assumed that Baldwin had got him, pursuit would have been thrown off and he and his wife could have ended their days in peace. We are driven to the melancholy conclusion that if Holmes had kept his mouth shut (as he did with Captain Croker [“The Abbey Grange”] and Dr. Sterndale [“The Devil’s Foot”]) or if he had never been called in at all, the ending would have been a much happier one. Or would the wily Moriarty have found out in any case?”
171 Why, ponders Michael Waxenberg, in “Organized Thoughts on Organized Labor, or Labour’s Libels Lost in The Valley of Fear,” did Holmes ne
ed time to beat Moriarty? This conversation probably occurred in early 1890 (see Appendix 3). Perhaps, Waxenberg argues, Moriarty’s gang had close ties to British organised labour, and Holmes did not want to cause unnecessary harm to the labour movement at that time. By 1891, however, certain court cases had given trade unions the right to threaten to strike and picket and the old relationships with organised criminals became obsolete; therefore, Holmes was then free to round up the Moriarty gang without injuring the trade union movement.
APPENDIX 1
“Who, Then, Is Porlock?”
Watson’s desire to “pierce the veil” of the identity of “Fred Porlock” is shared by many scholars.
Ronald A. Knox considers at length, in “The Mystery of Mycroft,” the position of Holmes’s enigmatic brother, Mycroft Holmes, who figures prominently in “The Greek Interpreter” and other stories. Mycroft, Knox argues, was a man of “nefarious associations” who often collaborated with Professor Moriarty and therefore was able to pass along inside information to Holmes. “It is easy to understand,” Knox reasons,
that some of [Holmes’s] “most interesting cases” came to him through Mycroft, and that Mycroft was able to supply his brother, perplexed over a difficult problem, with “an explanation which was afterwards proved to be the correct one [‘The Greek Interpreter’].” Although the thing cannot be proved, I am strongly of the opinion that Mycroft was in fact the “Fred Porlock” who acted as his brother’s informer in The Valley of Fear. Sherlock—Porlock; there is a subconscious reminiscence in the choice of an alias which suggests a family connection. And who more likely than Mycroft, with his tidy and orderly brain, his great capacity for storing facts, to use Whitaker’s Almanack as the basis of a cipher message?
But there are other views. David Talbott Cox theorises, in “Poor Sherlock,” that Professor Moriarty himself was Porlock, and as such sent Holmes intentionally misleading messages. In this case, he “called in” Holmes to put pressure on the Scowrers to pay his fee. Noah Andre Trudeau, in “Fred Porlock—Probing ‘A Link in the Chain,’ ” agrees with Cox’s conclusion but psychoanalyses that “Porlock” was the “good” personality of a schizophrenic Professor Moriarty.172 In “Porlock—Piercing the Nom de Plume,” Paul B. Smedegaard advocates for Colonel Sebastian Moran, Moriarty’s chief of staff and “the second most dangerous man in London” (“The Empty House”), who intended to supplant his master. Thomas Andrew, in “The Porlock Puzzle: An Abbreviated Solution,” proposes Mrs. Hudson as the agent, while Russell McDermott, in “Porlock, the Professor, and Colonel James,” suggests Colonel James Moriarty, who sought to take over his brother’s organisation. After considering the suggestions of Knox, Cox, Smedegaard, Dandrew, and McDermott, Christopher F. Baum, in “The Problem of Porlock,” also concludes that Porlock was Colonel James Moriarty. Colonel Moran, Baum argues, lacked the necessary intelligence for the role, as evidenced by his foolishly attempting to kill Holmes by using the same air-gun he had used on Ronald Adair (“The Empty House”).173
Still other candidates abound: In “A Case of Identity,” Paul Zens, pointing out that Porlock is a town in the northwest corner of the western county of Somerset, makes a case for the third Moriarty brother, “the station master in the west of England.” He traces a career for the young Moriarty, beginning as a station master and ending as “Deputy Chief of Transportation” in the Moriarty organization, eventually relocating to London. Alan Olding, in “The Spy Who Stayed in the Warm,” suggests Adolphe Verloc of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.
The most compelling summation of the issue is a letter by Donald Alan Webster to the Baker Street Journal, which (because it has received so little attention) is quoted here in full. “Ever since The Valley of Fear,” writes Webster,
many individuals have asked Watson’s question, “Who, then, is Porlock?” Eight contrivers of the Porlock letters have been suggested. These are Mrs. Cecil Forrester, Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes, Mrs. Hudson, Shinwell Johnson, Sebastian Moran, and all three Jameses Moriarty. Some of these can easily be eliminated. Porlock was “scared out of his senses.” Moran would not have been. Colonel James Moriarty’s letters to The Times indicate that he was no friend of Sherlock Holmes and was presumably not even aware of his brother’s criminal activities. The idea that Professor James Moriarty wrote the letters to mislead Holmes is possible but improbable. The professor would not be likely to take the unnecessary risk of accidentally giving Holmes an important clue. The notion that Holmes himself wrote the letters in order to conceal from Watson that his information on Moriarty came from opium-created visions does not deserve a refutation. I feel that important clues have been overlooked.
Clue No. 1—Porlock is close to Moriarty and knows of his criminal activities. Since Holmes emphasises how well-concealed Moriarty was, very few of his gang would know this. Only the well-paid (£6000 a year) inner circle would know (in his gang at least).
Clue No. 2—Porlock is not well paid. Porlock’s willingness to sell out to Holmes for a mere £10 reveals that Porlock is desperate and therefore not getting £6000 a year.
Clue No. 3—Porlock is living with Prof. Moriarty. Porlock writes, “He came to me quite unexpectedly after I had actually addressed this envelope with the intention of sending you the key to the cipher. I was able to cover it up.” This would not be possible if Porlock and the professor were living in different houses.
Clue No. 4—Porlock was not a member of Moriarty’s gang. Every one writing about Porlock till now has assumed that he was a gang member, but our first three clues point against that. The only gang members close to the professor were the highly paid inner circle (clue no. 1), but Porlock could not have been one of them since he was not highly paid (clue no. 2). Furthermore, in order to be well-concealed, the professor would hardly be living with a gang member (clue no. 3). Porlock, therefore, must be someone close to the professor who discovered the criminal connection by chance. Who could he be? Of the suggested Porlocks the only ones likely to be living with the professor were his brothers. We have already eliminated the colonel. The station-master is unlikely. Holmes’s image of a spider in the centre of its web indicates that Prof. Moriarty lived in London. A station-master in the west of England must live in the west of England. Moriarty is unmarried, so it is not his wife and not likely a son or daughter. Given the mores of the time, a mistress is not likely. She would not have been living with him.174 Who is left? Who is there who would always be around? From whom secrets could not be kept? Who would be notoriously underpaid? I think the answer to the question “Who, then, is Porlock?” lies downstairs, not upstairs.
In “Excellent, Watson! … An Almanac!,” P. H. Wood makes a detailed response to Webster’s arguments. Agreeing with his first “clue” but rejecting the rest, Wood deduces that Porlock (1) apparently has a strong motive to prevent the Birlstone murder, risking death; (2) cannot leave Moriarty’s employ, because of some hold over him; (3) has not long been with the gang (otherwise, there would have been more occasions of attempts to hinder Moriarty; (4) has a good education; (5) must have come in contact with Moriarty; and (6) must hold a fairly senior position with the gang. Wood concludes that Porlock is a university man with a mathematical background, was tutored or employed by Moriarty when Moriarty was a coach, and was induced into accepting a senior administrative post. His responsibilities would have been communication and security. He speculates that Porlock was the younger brother of Ivy Douglas.
Yet no identification is fully satisfactory, and the truth may remain undiscovered until further information comes to light.
172 See also Gordon R. Speck’s “Fred Porlock’s Identity,” which suggests that Moriarty used the nom de plume to hide his duplicity in ridding his organisation of assertive or incompetent members.
173 Baum’s rejection of the candidacy of Professor Moriarty is challenged by Donald K. Pollock, Jr., in a letter to the Baker Street Journal, in which he points out that Moriarty may well have disguised his handwriting in t
he Porlock notes. Baum responds in another letter that it is unlikely that one could disguise his hand in the same way three times. He admits, however, the weight of Pollock’s argument that Professor and Colonel Moriarty would have had similar handwriting and withdraws his definitive conclusion that Colonel Moriarty was Porlock. Who, then?
174 P. H. Wood scoffs at this statement as displaying “an amazing lack of acquaintance with the facts of Victorian life.” See Christopher Redmond’s In Bed with Sherlock Holmes, which considers at length Victorian sexual mores and their reflections in the Canon.
APPENDIX 2
People, Places, and Incidents in The Valley of Fear with Their Pennsylvania Counterparts
Description in
The Valley of Fear
Counterpart
The Valley of Fear
The Pennsylvania anthracite region in the 1870s
Vermissa Valley
Panther Valley, Schuylkill Valley, Mahanoy Valley, and Shenandoah Valley
Vermissa
Pottsville, Shenandoah, Tamaqua, and Girardville
Birdy Edwards (a k a Jack McMurdo
James McParlan (a k a James McKenna)
Boss McGinty
Jack Kehoe, Mike (Muff) Lawlor, and Pat Dormer
Union House
Hibernia House (Girardville) and others including Sheridan House (Pottsville)
Scowrers
Molly Maguires
Eminent Order of Freemen
Ancient Order of Hibernians
Captain Teddy Marvin
Captain Robert Linden