by Bill Peschel
As she seated herself she raised her eyes and looked keenly at Merton, who, disillusioned Oxonian as he was, felt like a school-boy at fault before this splendid vision of sea-blue originality.
“Mr. Merton, I presume?” she said in tones of gentle authority.
Straight there fell madness from the gods on Merton, and he found himself answering, “No, madam, I am Mr. Logan.”
“Don’t tell me!” said the lady, smiling into his face like a mother. “Mr. Logan is a Scot and you are not, for there was some joke between you two gentlemen as I came in, and I never yet met a Scot who could get the brake on his laughter when once he had seen the joke and it had taken charge. No, you are the other gentleman of the firm, from the way you brought your coach up at the moment. I don’t belong to my family for nothing!” she added proudly.
Logan, the Scot, had by this time come out of his fit.
“In what way can we be of use to you, madam?” he inquired in the thin frayed voice he kept for the traducers of his nation.
“All in good time,” said the strange old lady. “Furnished by Andrew Lang, evidently,” she said to herself, looking round. “You smoke Melachrino No. 4 cigarettes, Mr. Logan,” shaking a playful finger at him, “and Mr. Merton, Borneo cigars. Mr. Logan lunched at the British Museum to-day and forgot his umbrella.”
“Bless me,” said Logan, “are you a witch?”
“Not yet; we know what we are, but know not what we may be,” said this mysterious and elderly Ophelia, nodding her head. Then, with a sudden change to a business tone, “I understand this firm undertakes the solving of genealogical difficulties, heraldic tangles as well as matrimonial. They referred me to you at the British Museum.”
Merton bowed in a bewildered way.
“I am a professional research agent,” she went on, “and I would like to offer you my services, for I have only a small weekly insurance in a somewhat unstable company as my means of living.”
Merton took a long breath and glanced at Logan, who was staring moodily at a cracked crystal ball. “We make it a rule,” he said gently, “to know our staff personally, or else to have them recommended by our friends. Have you any testimonials, and will you be good enough to supply us with a few personal details?”
“Yes,” said the old lady, “but I think you have probably heard of my immediate family, whose talents did not lie in the money-making line, or else—But it’s no good, Marion,” she went on, giving herself a shake.
Logan was wide awake now. “Thank God!” thought Merton, “he’s finished saying that ballad.”
“My maiden name,” said the old lady, “was Marion Holmes. My brothers were Mycroft and Sherlock, and I am now dependent on a Hardy Coffee Insurance for my only means of support—10s. a week, or rather 8s. 10d., for I have to continue to buy my half-pound a week.”
“God bless my soul!” nearly shouted Logan. “In Heaven’s name don’t tell me you’re a widow and your name is Mrs. Florizel Grant?”
“And why should it not be, I’d like to know?” said Mrs. Grant in amazement.
Now was a racing and chasing on Cannoble Lee, that is, Logan was pirouetting on one leg in the middle of the room crying, “I say, Merton, who’s the kangaroo fool now? Mrs. Perdita Grant!”
Merton had sprung to his feet in horror at his partner’s sudden seizure, and stood like a rock half in sunshine, half in shadow, smiling reassuringly on the old lady, who had risen with an affronted air, and frowning on Logan, who was spluttering to a close.
“Pray, pray forgive my friend’s conduct!” he exclaimed in a distressed tone. “He is a Celt, and those hielan’ loons are not bred to conceal their emotions. It’s only joy at seeing you, for you happen to be a necessary factor in the case we were discussing when you were announced.”
The old lady reseated herself, and in so doing revealed the fact that the stout and ancient umbrella she had been clutching firmly for possible self-defence concealed a sword. The handle had worked loose, and at that moment parted from the stock and fell to the floor, leaving her with the naked blade in her hand. The extraordinary appearance presented by Mrs. Grant seated thus with her waterproof cloak thrown back over her right shoulder, had a homeopathic effect on Logan, and reduced him to sobriety, while Merton, his brain being now only capable of reflex action, stooped, and with a polite air returned the unusual sheath to its owner.
“Thank you,” she said simply, as she slipped back the blade. “Perhaps Mr. Logan will explain now,” she added severely.
“I apologise,” said he penitently. “Please forgive me Mrs. Grant, if you can. I have been horribly rude. You see we had been wishing you would appear, as necessary clues do in magazine stories, and in you walked.”
“But,” asked the old lady in a bewildered way, “what is this affair in which I seem to be mixed up? Am I wanted for anything, Mr. Merton?” She appealed to him as the more normal of the two partners.
“The case is Mr. Logan’s,” returned he, “and I think he will now be able to give you what particulars he has collected.”
Logan had already taken out his note-book, and hurriedly scanned several pages of stray notes. “Perhaps,” he said nervously, “if you will be so good as to answer some questions, I may afterwards be able to describe the case with greater coherence. Do you know anything of a gentleman called Mr. Rupert Grant?”
“Mr. Rupert Grant?” repeated the old lady. “No, I don’t know any gentleman of that name, but thirty years ago it was the name of my infant son.”
“This Rupert Grant has an elder brother called Basil,” went on Logan with an effort to preserve his conventionality of demeanour. He felt a little more would make him stand on his head (as he would already have done had he not feared Mr. Lang). “And Mr. Rupert Grant has just told me that his father’s name was Florizel Grant, and that his mother’s name was unknown to him. She left his father when he was a mere baby, and her name had evidently never passed Mr. Grant’s lips from that day.”
“Then,” said Mrs. Grant with no undue excitement, “I suppose I must be their mother. But I trust to your honour, young gentlemen, to keep my secret. You can easily produce official proof without mentioning that you have seen me. I’ve lived a free woman, and such I shall die, hampered by no sons. Before Nora was, I was.”
“Nora! Who’s she?” exclaimed Logan.
“Nora Helmer, who lived in a bijou residence called The Doll’s House,” said she grimly.
The Disentanglers were horrified to see the smile of a fanatic creep about her lips, and the bright keenness of independent womanhood light up her splendid blue eyes.
“Why couldn’t Logan have let her alone—the fool! She’s as bad as his ballads,” thought Merton desperately.
The enthusiast went on in a kind of chant. “I lived for facts, ignoring their foundation, dreams. One day my feet touched the bed-rock of life, and I saw the great cosmic vision, which is—that facts obscure the truth. I whispered this to my first-born, Basil; I sang it to him as he lay in the cradle. I meant to make it the foundation of his moral and intellectual life. And I did. He became an impossible member of the Bench and of society. Where he is now I know not, but that is an obscure detail. The routine of female life had become abhorrent to me. I stifled in the foetid atmosphere of domestic economy. My husband, Florizel Grant, an incurable Romantic, could not understand the mysticism stirring within me. Romance cloaks facts; mysticism strips them bare and turns them out of creation. Life became unbearable—one long misunderstanding in a London flat. One day I just went away—quietly, no fuss, kissed Florizel and left him, it being understood that he was to make no effort to reclaim me. The children were his; that was the law—”
Here Merton and Logan, who had listened gravely to the confessions of the old lady, simultaneously took advantage of a natural breathless pause in her monologue to inquire: “What was the name of your husband’s father?”
“Weir Grant of Hermiston,” said the enthusiast mechanically, adding hurriedly, as she m
ounted and set off again at a canter. “It was Nature I wanted, not human nature. How does a larch grow to straight and strong maturity? It shoulders others down. I wanted to shoulder, to trample on, if necessary to destroy others that my life might be perfect. I have shouldered, but now, alas, I am shouldered.”
Her voice fell, and there was no sound in the office, Logan’s pen worked noiselessly. Merton sat with the expression of a man who has his head bent against a sharp shower of hail. Mrs. Grant was absorbed in her thoughts, and he was afraid to move for fear of setting her off again.
“Who is Mr. Kay of Chesterton?” suddenly said Logan.
“A friend of Mr. Grant’s. He brought up Basil. My husband as a Romantic found two boys too great a burden and handed over Basil to Mr. Kay.”
“Up has he ta’en that bonny boy,
Given him to nurses nine;
Three to sleep and three to wake,
And three to go between,”
hummed Logan, who was quite himself again.
“Mr. Weir Grant of Hermiston was as remarkable on the Bench as Basil has been,” volunteered Mrs. Grant, still mechanically. “He married Arabia Knight, daughter of Mr. Stevenson of Edinburgh, of the lighthouse family.”
“Thank you,” said Logan gravely, and he wrote in a name on what seemed a genealogical table. This he passed to Merton. Mrs. Grant’s mind, with the disordered impetuosity of old age, was still absorbed in some other problem, and this gave the firm a chance of consultation. This was what Merton read:
“Good,” he said. “Now, if we dared, we need only submit it to Mrs. Grant for verification.”
“Chuck it here,” said Logan; “I’ll do it.”
“For heaven’s sake don’t let on that you’re related to the Grants,” said Merton anxiously.
“Mrs. Grant,” began Logan loudly, “may I trouble you to look at this?”
The old lady recovered her original businesslike attitude with a suddenness that startled Logan. “What is it worth?” she asked shrewdly.
Logan was still further taken aback, but, when he saw the drift of her question, burst out laughing. “Oh, that’ll be all right. We’ll give you five per cent. on our client’s fees and the next genealogical case we have.”
“Done!” said the strange old woman. “Give it to me. Yes, it’s quite correct. Now I shall leave you my address, and you can send me the percentage in a postal-order. Good day, young gentlemen.”
“One moment, Mrs. Grant!” said Merton, jumping up, too late to open the door for her. “Who is Mr. Gully Swinburne?
“His mother was a Boswell of Auchinleck. I thought every one knew that,” came faintly through the closing door.
Logan, exhausted but satisfied, was stretching himself in the middle of the room. “By the help o’ the Lord we hae loupit ower a stane dyke,” he observed with reverence; adding hastily, “Let’s pour libations!”
The Adventure of the Society Dame
Nathan M. Adams
Scandalous gossip and blackmail about New York’s social and business elite: That wasn’t the plot of a best-selling book, but the working model behind Town Topics magazine. Using a network of spies, especially servants in wealthy households, owner Col. William d’Alton Mann (1839-1920) would threaten to print scandalous items in his magazine unless the victim “bought” a subscription or an advertisement. With a particularly juicy piece of gossip, he would print a copy of the magazine with the item inside and send it to the victim for “editing.” Mann would then dine with the victim at Delmonico’s and negotiate the price. Payments ranged between $1,500 to $7,000, but some moguls paid more. To suppress a story still secret today, William K. Vanderbilt paid $25,000, the equivalent of $600,000.
Mann’s reign of terror over New York’s Four Hundred ended in 1906. In Collier’s Weekly, editor Norman Hapgood accused Mann of blackmail, and Mann sued for libel. Testimony backed Hapgood’s accusations, and the jury quickly found him innocent. Mann beat a subsequent indictment for perjury, but his power over the wealthy was broken.
In this article from the Aug. 9 issue of Puck, Smart Set Topics is a not-so-coded reference to Town Topics and Mann’s other magazine, The Smart Set. The latter magazine, after Mann sold it, would be revitalized under H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan into a showcase for rising authors such as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, and Dashiell Hammett.
Nothing is known of Nathan M. Adams.
“It is certainly a curious case, Watson,” remarked Sherlock Holmes, when the lady in black left our apartments. “The woman states that the allusions to her past, printed in Smart Set Topics, are known only to herself, since the gentleman in the case is dead; that in no possible way could a third be cognizant of the facts. Of this she is absolutely certain.”
“Then who is the contributor—an inhabitant of the spirit world?” I asked.
“It would seem so,” said Holmes. “And yet no gentleman, in the flesh or in the spirit, would be capable of such infamy.”
According to his wont, Sherlock Holmes donned a disguise and disappeared. He returned the evening following, a smile of satisfaction on his thin face. “The mystery is solved, Watson,” he declared triumphantly.
A few moments later, the veiled lady appeared as per agreement.
“Madame,” said Holmes, when I had provided her with a chair, “want of space makes it necessary for me to eliminate padding of every kind and state the result of my investigations briefly:
“In the first place, the contributions to Smart Set Topics, as you may or may not know, are all made by jealous and vengeful members of the smart set, and are merely rewritten by office hirelings.”
The woman in black nodded nervously. “I have understood so,” she replied in an agitated voice.
“Very good,” said Holmes. “Yesterday, I obtained access (by what means I need not stop to explain) to the private list of contributors to Topics, and I found that by all odds the most industrious of these contributors was—yourself.”
“Merciful heavens!” murmured the lady, with a premonition of the denouement. Holmes went on relentlessly:
“Since then no third person, on your own affirmation, could be cognizant of the facts in the scandal; since the gentleman in the case is dead, and since I have the sworn statement of the owner of Topics that no spirits or trance mediums are on his payroll, I have no hesitation in saving that in a moment of temporary aberration—YOU WROTE THE SCURRILOUS PARAGRAPH YOURSELF!”
The Succored Beauty
William B. Kahn
Here we have a mystery. William Bonn Kahn (1882-1971) was a businessman. Over the course of his career, he was described in newspaper stories as a silk magnate, a patent broker, and a wealthy banker. The latter descriptor appeared in a 1922 story describing a burglary of his apartments in which the thieves got away with jewels, furs, cigars, and—during Prohibition’s early years—200 bottles of champagne.
On the surface, Kahn seemed like your typical bourgeois businessman out of Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street. But he was an opera aficionado who fell in love with Frieda Hempel, a German singer who appeared regularly with the Metropolitan Opera. Their marriage in 1918 was announced on the front pages of newspapers across the country, with Frieda identified as an “enemy alien”—this was during World War I after all. The marriage did not last, however, and they were divorced in 1926.
Kahn also wrote The Avoidance of War, a Suggestion (1914), but when war came he served on the Export Embargo Board in Washington. And, of course, he wrote “The Succored Beauty.” It was apparently his sole piece of fiction, yet it’s one of the most popular Sherlock pastiches. It was republished as a limited edition in 1964, again in Marvin Kaye’s excellent The Game is Afoot anthology, and recently in Otto Penzler’s The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories. It was even singled out in LeRoy Lad Panek’s The Origins of the American Detective Story as one of the first to recognize how many Holmes stories involved marital problems. Clearly, there was more to Mr. Kahn than met the eye.
One night, as I was returning from a case of acute indigestion—it was immediately after my divorce and I was obliged to return to the practice of my profession in order to support myself—it chanced that my way homeward lay through Fakir street. As I reached the house where Combs and I had spent so many hours together, where I had composed so many of his adventures, an irresistible longing seized me to go once more upstairs and grasp my friend by the hand, for, if the truth must be told, Combs and I had had a tiff. I really did not like the way in which he had procured evidence for my wife when she sought the separation, and I took the liberty of telling Combs so, but he had said to me: “My dear fellow, it is my business, is it not?” and though I knew he was not acting properly I was forced to be placated. However, the incident left a little breach between us which I determined on this night to bridge.
As I entered the room I saw Combs nervously drinking a glass of soda water. Since I succeeded in breaking him of the morphine habit he had been slyly looking about for some other stimulant and at last he had found it. I sighed to see him thus employed.
