by Bill Peschel
Holmes laughed outright at my statement. “Will you forgive my laughing at your particular hobby, my dear Watson?” he said. “At times I believe you have regretted the inability to expend some of the literary skill, used in glorifying my little adventures, upon the unknown incidents of Professor Moriarty’s startling career. There was a genius in his organisation, and a fascinating horror in the accomplishment of his various masterpieces of crime, that would strongly appeal to your readers.”
I have often been puzzled by the unexpected in my friend’s conversation, and his insight into my thoughts, but never more startled than at present.
“What has made you recur to Professor Moriarty?” I exclaimed.
“My dear Watson,” said Holmes, slowly turning in his chair and languidly regarding the grotesque match-box among the smoking impedimenta at his elbow, “although I have retired from the active practice of deduction as applied to criminal investigation, I occasionally take an academic interest in the various problems of crime as presented by the daily papers. And I think that you will admit that such have been plentiful of late. There is the affair of Gluckstein, the copper magnate, the tunnel mystery at Eversham, and the recent forgery on Webb’s Bank, to mention a few. These have been conducted with a completeness of detail and a success worthy of our old friend Moriarty at his prime.
“There is a second reason which will probably more than startle you. I have been looking at the reflection of those somewhat heavy curtains over the window in my rear. If it would not inconvenience Prof. Moriarty to cease concealing himself, he could doubtless explain his interesting absence from the depths of the Reichenbach Fall.”
As I started to my feet in utter stupefaction the curtains shook fiercely and were tempestuously parted.
The only view I had previously had of Professor Moriarty was a fleeting glimpse of his tall figure elbowing through the crowd at Victoria Station on the morning of our futile flight to the Continent. Yet from Holmes’ description I immediately recognised the gaunt apparition in the window recess. Dressed in a close-fitting black frock suit, he stood with his tall thin form and rounded shoulders bent slightly forward. The deep cavernous glittering eyes hidden below the bulging dome of white forehead, the lean sinuous neck with its odd trick of swaying from side to side, the thin lips set in a wrinkled smile round his yellow fang-like teeth, and the pallor of his emaciated features all combined to add to the horror I felt at this ghostly reappearance.
For a second or two he glared silently at us, and then took a long nervous stride into the room. His whole form seemed to quiver with suppressed rage. His voice sounded with a sharp, icy, metallic distinctness when he at last spoke.
“Your mental acuteness has not decreased, Mr. Holmes, since our last discussion; as your deductive powers have already announced me, my appearance will hardly cause you any surprise.”
“It has been almost as sudden as your last departure, and but for your continued idiosyncrasy in the choice of your toilet soap and your adherence to a particularly aromatic variety, I have no doubt it would have been as startling as you probably desired.”
Holmes still lay carelessly back in his chair languidly regarding Moriarty through his half-shut eyes. He spoke with easy indifference as he explained the trifling accident which had made him suspect the faint movements of the curtains to be due to Moriarty, and not to the November wind.
Moriarty’s lips flicked sharply over his teeth, and then creased viciously back to a snarling smile.
“The unconsidered detail again, Mr. Holmes. I am ashamed of my carelessness. Your reasoning has always been an intellectual treat to a man of my experience. May I express my grief at our being on opposite sides?”
“If you have merely come to exchange compliments, I must remind you that you intrude. Dr. Watson will kindly convey you to the door, if you have not any partiality to the window.”
“At our previous two interviews, Mr. Holmes, I have tried to display as much courtesy as was possible to the nature of our discussion. I demand a certain return that we may come to an understanding.”
“An understanding between us is impossible, unless you have changed your views.”
“If I have not?”
“I should then regret to have to abandon the quiet life and those experiments which are congenial to me.”
“You have not interfered without danger in the past, Mr. Holmes.”
“You yourself did not escape all discomfort during our last difference.”
“Due to a trifling omission from my knowledge of self-defence, which is now remedied. But you cannot have yet fully recognised the strength of the organisation in whose path you have stood. You have inconvenienced a section of us, let me advise you to hesitate before you again irritate a force stronger than yourself.”
Holmes rose slowly to his feet and faced Moriarty. The affected carelessness of his air was gone; the keen incisive features were firmly set. He returned Moriarty’s look with steady eyes.
“I have more than fully recognised all that you can possibly threaten me with,” he said. Then raising his right hand he made a peculiar rapid gesture, which ended in a quick, jerking motion of the wrist and fingers. Moriarty suddenly drew himself up, his air of angry impatience fell from him. He was at once the suave, courteous man of science. He regarded Holmes with an almost friendly look of admiration. His voice was smooth and cultured. To a stranger he would have appeared an inoffensive elderly gentleman slightly antique in his ceremonies.
“Your powers of investigation seem boundless, Mr. Holmes. You are, moreover, courageous; it is to me a personal regret that you cannot join that organisation whose existence and secrets you have partially penetrated. You must be aware of the influences it controls, and you defy it.”
“Mr. Moriarty,” said Holmes, “I was forced by the extent and ingenuity of your crimes to risk my life in the detection and punishment of you and your numerous accomplices. Those concerned with you in certain actions of the past have met their just reward. You yourself have not escaped without an experience which cannot but have made a deep impression upon you. I have no desire to further expose that part of your career which has to general belief ended in the Reichenbach abyss. If you return to the misuse of your vast intellectual powers, and the abuse of the confidence of the society to which you belong, it is a different matter. I shall then be compelled to take up the struggle, which will end in your exposure and final punishment.”
“So that at present you regard me as a somewhat intrusive individual without a past, but with a probable future.”
“I have no other desire. Return to the investigation of the correct sciences, and I wish you many more brilliant discoveries. But if you are again an expert in crime I will not leave you unchallenged.”
Moriarty bowed in a deprecatory fashion, “I am happy, Mr. Holmes, in the receipt of your good intentions. It will be a continual pleasure to observe your interest in the development of my future career. But before I leave, may I remonstrate against one indignity to which I have been subjected?”
“And that is?”
“I have been represented as not possessing mathematical ability above the exposition of the Binomial Theorem by your friend and biographer Dr. Watson—the same gentleman, I presume, as I have now the pleasure of meeting. It is mortifying, Dr. Watson, to have my abilities rated by a small effort of my undergraduate days. May I recommend you to refresh your knowledge of the mathematical sciences? I have felt deeply, moreover, my portrayal upon the stage as a clumsy and melodramatic criminal. Your portraits are anything but flattering to their originals.”
The sudden change from the strained atmosphere of Moriarty’s appearance and the sharp interchange of words had completely dumbfoundered me. Instead of a vicious criminal in a maniacal rage for revenge, I was face to face with a blandly smiling, elderly mathematician, who mildly reproved me for libelling his attainments and pursuits. Holmes, too, had responded with a similar change of manner.
“My dear
Moriarty,” he said genially, “you will have to pardon our friend Watson’s little extravagances. I myself have not escaped the results of his pen, though I confess he has been in the habit of representing me in a somewhat too favourable light. May I say that it would give us both pleasure if you were to relate your exhilarating experience after our last parting; it might encourage Watson to a renewed and more favourable impression of your versatile genius. There is a chair which I can recommend, and perhaps Watson can mix a little whisky and soda in a way not altogether displeasing to your palate.”
Moriarty quietly assented, and our strangely assorted trio sat down in apparent good fellowship. The soothing influences of a good fire and filled glasses never surely were so diversely shared before. The reptilian motion of Moriarty’s head was stayed by the supporting back of his chair; he seemed the picture of virtuous grey hairs and refined tastes. Holmes sank languidly back into his chair after replenishing his pipe from the slipper. I passed the cigar box from the coal scuttle to Moriarty, he selected one carefully. For a few minutes we smoked in silence.
Those who have been sufficiently interested to follow my slight sketches of Sherlock Holmes’ career, will have seen that I am not unaccustomed to startling surprises and the solution of apparently inextricable problems. Constant association with Holmes had given me an insight into his peculiar methods of deduction, and attention to what appeared mere inconsequent details. Yet I could not but feel an extraordinary mixture of bewilderment and curiosity at the sudden development of this new drama. How had Holmes so accurately timed his conversation to the dramatic moment for unveiling Moriarty? How had Moriarty concealed himself, and what were his real motives? One moment he seemed to be on the point of a murderous attack on Holmes, now he was posing as a welcome guest by a friend’s fireside. How had he escaped from the deadly embrace of the long coil of dark waters that swept unceasingly into the deep cup of frothing tumult far below the Reichenbach ledge? How had he baffled Holmes’ ingenious efforts to put him off the track of our flight? In that strange interview, when the prince of detection was face to face with the master worker of crime on the precipitous ledge, Moriarty had given Holmes some particulars of his evasion of the police and subsequent following our traces, yet many points were obscure. I lost my horror of the man in my eager curiosity for his story, and sat intently forward to hear his explanations and to question him on a thousand details.
Moriarty noted my eagerness with a somewhat cynical smile. “I have a perception that my narrative will cause a recurrence of your old trouble in the middle digit of your right hand, Dr. Watson.”
“How do you know that I have suffered from it previously?” I exclaimed.
“It is really unpardonable in me, but I have ventured to study your friend’s methods, not without some slight success. The writer, who presses his pen strongly between the pad of his thumb and the side of his middle finger, invariably suffers from his awkwardness. And if, as in your case, he has written much, the middle finger is always curved more than ordinarily towards the little finger in its distal joints.”
Holmes laughed slightly. “My dear Moriarty, you have attained the highest form of flattery. I presume the means by which you followed our somewhat unique route to the Continent were another imitation of my little hobby. It will probably help you to fill up the blanks for our enthusiastic scribe Watson, if I recall some of the incidents from our point of view.”
Leaning forward he began checking off the facts of our flight with his long flexible forefinger upon the palm of his left hand.
“You will doubtless remember, Watson, the 21st of April 1891, when I came to your consulting room and told you of my first interview with Professor Moriarty on that morning. He and I had a slight difficulty in adapting the same view of our respective ambitions, and the Professor subsequently took a rather keen interest in my welfare during the day. At mid-day I was almost run over by a furiously driven van at the Welbeck Crossing. Half an hour later a brick from an empty house almost scattered my brains over the pavement of Vere Street. As I came round to your house a rough attempted my quietus with a bludgeon. I was obliged to leave your premises by the inconspicuous if undignified method of scaling your back garden wall. Next morning, with the assistance of my brother Mycroft, you arrived circuitously, and as we hoped unfollowed, at the Victoria Station to catch the Continental express. Owing, however, to the belated appearance of Professor Moriarty on the platform, we left the train at its sole stopping-place at Canterbury. I deduced that he would follow in a special to catch us on the boat. Subsequently, we saw a special dash through Canterbury on the heels of the express. Confident that the Professor had not followed our little move, we took the first train to Newhaven and arrived at Brussels that night apparently undetected.”
Moriarty listened with an expression of contented indifference to this recapitulation, nodding his head at intervals as he assented to each item.
“I wonder if you have ever played chess, Mr. Holmes,” he said at the conclusion. “It is essentially a game of deductions. Not only do you deduce your opponents’ moves and try to anticipate them, but not infrequently he follows your analysis from the same point of view, and alters his piece accordingly. If you will pardon a simile, your journey was a series of movements with the knight, one square ahead and then a square to the right or left. In my own case I have a partiality for ecclesiastical guidance, and, where possible, I choose the more direct diagonal route of the bishop. You have misunderstood me, Mr. Holmes, if you thought I should be satisfied with such clumsy methods of despatch as alarmed you that day. It was necessary for me to invent a series of apparently genuine narrow escapes, in order to manoeuvre you out of range of our excellent police organisation. In this way I hoped for a personal settlement of those mutual obligations which had arisen between us. After the accident in Vere Street you may remember purchasing a railway guide before you took a cab to your brother’s rooms in Pall Mall. During the drive you read the guide somewhat intently, and pressed down a particular page to mark your place.”
Holmes’ face was crossed by a shadow of annoyance for a second: “You are an apt pupil, Prof. Moriarty; I have been guilty of what you term the unconsidered detail.”
“And you, Dr. Watson,” said Moriarty, turning to me, “may remember a small boy being brought to your surgery late that night by a policeman. He had been knocked down and badly bruised by a cab in your street. You were unwilling to admit any patient that night, but was reassured by the presence of a policeman.
“And that policeman had the gratification of seeing a railway guide lying open on your desk with a page turned down at the London, Brighton and South-Coast tables. And your travelling bag was lying in a half-packed condition upon the floor. Even a humble mathematician may be excused from attempting a deduction. My little plan had worked excellently. You were about to fly in company. Victoria Station was the solution. I confess I had intended to share your carriage, but the unfortunate breakdown of my hansom caused me to arrive merely in time to see your faces at a carriage window in the vanishing express.
“Even to my slight powers of perception it was evident that you had taken unusual pains to catch the Continental express in an unobtrusive manner. You had failed in the preliminary move, would you not try some other means of rendering your retreat intricate? My only apparent means of catching up with you was to charter a special and arrive at the boat close upon you, and in an undesirably public manner. While I waited for the special to be got ready I glanced at the time table, and saw you had a single stop at Canterbury. Knowing I was determined on our meeting, you would naturally foresee a special as the only means of being overtaken. Here, however, was an opportunity for doubling in your traces. I did not doubt that you would skilfully contrive to complicate your route at Canterbury. To make sure, my friend Moran departed in the waiting special, which would confirm your probable deductions at Canterbury; and I retired to placidly contemplate the really excellent sherry procurable at the Victoria bu
ffet, while considering your next probable destination.
“That you would give up your design of reaching the Continent after such an elaborate anxiety about your journey was improbable. The perusal of possible routes from Canterbury convinced me that you would take the cross-country run to Newhaven and thence over to Dieppe. In brief, my friend Moran had an enjoyable run over to Paris with your abandoned luggage, and amused himself by keeping his eye upon it as you had kindly designed that I should do. It was extremely grateful to me to listen to Dr. Watson’s technical observations on the bronchial condition of a certain closely muffled old gentleman on the Dieppe boat. It was even more gratifying to be commiserated by Mr. Holmes for my presumable disappointment in Paris, when I found that the presence of your luggage meant the absence of its owners.”
During this account of the anticipation and defeat of our carefully planned evasion of Moriarty, I could not keep from glancing frequently at Holmes to see how he was affected by this attack on his pet habits of observation and inference. He had always regarded his cases from the aspect of a connoisseur in the bizarre, and had employed his deductive skill to their elucidation with the fondness of an artist. He had undertaken the most difficult problems not to gain fame or pecuniary reward, but for the congenial delight of following up their slender clues and exposing their mystery. The ordinary recreations of his fellows had little attraction for him; he loved to feel himself in the centre of the crowded hive of London, with his delicate antennae of thought stretching out and running through the devious channels of city life, responsive to every touch of unsolved crime.
His following out of Moriarty’s mysterious existence had been the finest test of his deductive powers, the climax of his professional career. Beginning with a suspicion of a unique organising power that stood concealed behind the actual malefactor, he had carefully observed the most daringly original of the many undetected crimes that figure so numerously in the criminal statistics of London. Again and again in varying cases, murders executed with deadly yet secret accuracy, forgeries of unequalled skill and effrontery, burglaries of audacious magnitude and success, he had seen the shadow of a powerful hand, the working of a mind sublime in its genius for contriving evil. Again and again he was about to deliver the criminal to the law, but the hidden force came between. Alibis, complete in every detail, established the innocence of the suspect. Important witnesses silently and permanently disappeared. The needful paper was ingeniously abstracted, and the heaviest bail could be procured. As a result, he deduced the existence of a great central power, surrounded by a sure and efficient machinery of criminals.
