by Bill Peschel
The Stocky One changed his quid to the other side and said with some unction, “Say, but you’re a Peach. If anybody ever intimates that your Garret is Dusty, just refer them to me. Now I’ll speak my piece. My name is Jake Jagpole. You see, my Aunt Sarah Watkins dropped off rather sudden, and some of us got it into our nut that there was crooked work. After bothering over it for a spell, I happened to think maybe you could help us out.”
The Great Detective raised his hand.
“Wait. That is sufficient.” Then turning to a pigeon-hole in his desk he looked over some papers for a moment and said:
“Your Aunt Sarah Watkins was a widow and lived alone.”
“Yep.”
“She was near-sighted.”
“Yes; awful. Why, I’ve seen her set down to a carpenter’s work bench and try to milk it, thinking the darn thing was a cow.”
“Exactly. Set your mind at rest. There was no foul play. Your Aunt died from eating some Embalmed Beef that she chopped in the hash by mistake owing to the defect in her vision. Is that all you wish to know?”
The Stocky One arose and observed with some emotion: “Yes, that’s all. Much obliged. What’s the damage?”
“Oh, the service was so slight: Twenty dollars.”
The Stocky One handed over a twenty and turned to go; halted a moment, faced about, and remarked:
“Pardner, you’re the smoothest event that ever occurred. You’re a Ten Wheeler with 200 pounds of steam. I’m glad I came. I’m a V to the Good, besides a whole lot of valuable information. You see, on the run in yesterday I bet my head brakeman—by the way, I’m a freight conductor on the P.D.Q.&T.S. Never was on a farm in my life, and never had an Aunt Sarah Watkins, or any other kind of an Aunt. But that doesn’t alter the fact that you have given me the worth of my money. As I was saying, I bet the head brake man twenty-five dollars that you could ferret out anything whether it happened or not. As you see, I have won out. I started to tell you I was a farmer-looking chap, but you jumped in and took my run, and when I saw I was Swiped a trip I kept quiet. So Long. We’ll have a good time with the other five.”
MORAL
When you know the other fellow is bluffing it’s like money from home.
1908
The new year opened on a sad note with the death of Sidney Paget. Only 47, he left behind a rich legacy of illustrations, including 356 for the Sherlock stories which would make him immortal.
For Conan Doyle, the year was a period of quiet adjustment to life with his new wife. There was an investment in perfecting a sculpture-making machine that failed. He turned out two Holmes stories: “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge” and “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” the latter warning against the submarine’s threat to Britain, as well as a couple of stories and tinkering on several plays.
It was a busy life. In late June he explained to his mother that “we have not had four days on end to ourselves since we came back to England.” He continued his social rounds, and an example of his wide-ranging interests can be found in the list of groups he joined, the companies for which he became a director, and the causes which he supported. The major difference this time was that Jean was frequently at his side:
* Vice-president, the Beacon Brass Band, Crowborough
* Vice-president, the Research Defense Society
* Director, Cranston’s Hotels Co.
* Testified for a daylight saving time bill
* Appearance at the Tariff Commission dinner
* Director, Raphael Tuck & Sons (Ltd.)
* Patron, Wolseley-Siddeley Car Co.
* Attended dinner for Reader’s Pension Fund
* Attended dinner to honor Ranjitsinhji, the Jan [ruler] of the Indian state of Nawanaga who had played cricket for Cambridge and Sussex.
* Lectured on Edward Gibbon to the Crowborough Literary Society
* Speech and presentation of a gift to Dorando Pietri, who won the Olympic marathon that summer in London but was disqualified when the umpires helped him across the finish line.
* Chaired bazaar and concert for Tunbridge Wells Cripples’ Branch of Dr. Barnardo’s Homes
* Chaired students of Middlesex Hospital’s smoking concert to aid cancer wards
That was all in one year, mind, in addition to writing, participating in numerous cricket matches, adding a wing to Windlesham, and leaving the country in November for the south of France. It would be the last major trip for Jean for awhile; she was six months pregnant with their first child.
Publications: Holmes stories: “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge,” published in two parts as “The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles” (Sept.) and “The Tiger of San Pedro” (Oct.); “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” (Dec.). Other: Round the Fire Stories (Sept.).
Holmes questions Violet Westbury about her late fiancé in “The Bruce-Partington Plans.” Illustration by Frederic Dorr Steele.
A Pragmatic Enigma
“A. Conan Watson, M.D.” (John Kendrick Bangs)
Subtitled “Being a chapter from ‘The Failures of Sherlock Holmes,’” this contribution by the prolific Bangs appeared in the April 19 magazine section of The New York Herald. There is no doubt that Bangs, a successful lecturer, drew on his experiences riding the rails for this story. It was collected in Potted Fiction (1908), and republished in 1999 by Otto Penzler’s The Mysterious Bookshop.
It was a drizzly morning in November. Holmes and I had just arrived at Boston, where he was to lecture that night on “The Relation of Cigar Stumps to Crime” before the Browning Club of the Back Bay, and he was playfully indulging in some deductive pranks at my expense.
“You are a doctor by profession, with a slight leaning toward literature,” he observed, rolling up a small pill for his opium pipe and placing it in the bowl. “You have just come on a long journey over the ocean and have finished up with a five-hour trip on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. You were brushed off by a coloured porter and rewarded him with a sixpence taken from your right hand vest pocket before leaving the train. You came from the station in a cab, accompanied by a very handsome and famous Englishman; ate a lunch of baked beans and brown bread, opening with a Martini cocktail, and you are now wondering which one of the Boston newspapers pays the highest rates for press notices.”
“Marvellous! Marvellous!” I cried. “How on earth do you know all this?”—for it was every bit of it true.
“It is the thing that we see the most clearly that we perceive the more quickly, my dear Watson,” he replied, with a deprecatory gesture. “To begin with, I know you are a doctor because I have been a patient of yours for many years. That you have an inclination toward literature is shown by the fact that the nails on the fingers of your right hand are broken off short by persistent banging on the keys of a typewriting machine, which you carry with you wherever you go and with which you keep me awake every night, whether we are at a hotel or travelling on a sleeping car. If this were not enough to prove it I can clinch the fact by calling your attention to the other fact that I pay you a salary to write me up and can produce signed receipts on demand.”
“Wonderful,” said I; “but how did you know I had come on a long journey, partly by sea and partly by rail on a road which you specify?”
“It is simplicity itself,” returned Holmes wearily. “I crossed on the steamer with you. As for the railroad, the soot that still remains in your ears and mottles your nose is identical with that which decorates my own features. Having got mine on the New Haven and Hartford, I deduce that you got yours there also. As for the coloured porter, they have only coloured porters on those trains for the reason that they show the effects of dust and soot less than white porters would. That he brushed you off is shown by the streaks of gray on your white vest where his brush left its marks. Over your vest pocket is the mark of your thumb, showing that you reached into that pocket for the only bit of coin you possessed, a sixpence.”
“You are a marvel,” I mur
mured. “And the cab?”
“The top of your beaver hat is ruffed the wrong way where you rubbed it on the curtain roller as you entered the cab,” said Holmes. “The handsome and famous Englishman who accompanied you is obvious. I am he, and am therefore sure of my deduction.”
“But the lunch, Holmes, the lunch, with the beans and the cocktail,” I cried.
“Can you deny them?” he demanded.
“No, I cannot,” I replied, for to tell the truth his statement of the items was absolutely correct. “But how, how, my dear fellow, can you have deduced a bean? That’s what stumps me.”
Holmes laughed.
“You are not observant, my dear Watson,” he said. “How could I help knowing when I paid the bill?”
In proof he tossed me the luncheon cheque, and there it was, itemised in full.
“Aha!” I cried, “but how do you know that I am wondering which one of the Boston papers pays the best rates for press notices?”
“That,” said he, “is merely a guess, my dear Watson. I don’t know it, but I do know you.”
And this was the man they had said was losing his powers!
At this moment there came a timid knock on our door.
“A would-be client,” said Holmes. “The timidity of his knock shows that he is not a reporter. If it were the chambermaid, knowing that there were gentlemen in the room, she would have entered without knocking. He is a distinguished man, also, who does not wish it known that he is calling, for if it were otherwise he would have been announced on the telephone from the office—a Harvard professor, I take it, for no other kind of living creature in Boston would admit that there was anything he did not know, and therefore no other kind of a Bostonian would seek my assistance. Come in.”
The door opened and a rather distinguished-looking old gentleman carrying a suit case and an umbrella entered.
“Good morning, professor,” said Holmes, rising and holding out his right hand in a genial fashion and taking his visitor’s hat with his left. “How are things out at Cambridge this morning?”
“Marvellous! Marvellous!” ejaculated the visitor, infringing somewhat on my copyright, in fact taking the very words out of my mouth. “How did you know I was a professor at Harvard?”
“By the matriculation mark on your right forefinger,” said Holmes, “and also by the way in which you carry your umbrella, which you hold not as if it were a walking stick, but as if it were a pointer with which you were about to demonstrate something on a chart, for the benefit of a number of football players taking a four years’ course in Life, at an institution of learning. Moreover, your address is pasted in your hat, which I have just taken from you and placed on the table. You have come to me for assistance, and your entanglement is purely intellectual, not spiritual. You have not committed a crime nor are you the victim of one—I can tell that by looking at your eyes, which are red, not with weeping, but from reading and writing. The tear ducts have not been used for years. Hence, I judge that you have written a book, and after having published it, you suddenly discover that you don’t know what it means yourself, and inasmuch as the critics over the country are beginning to ask you to explain it you are in a most embarrassing position. You must either keep silent, which is a great trial to a college professor, especially a Harvard professor, or you must acknowledge that you cannot explain—a dreadful alternative. In that bag you have the original manuscript of the book, which you desire to leave with me, in order that I may read it and if possible detect the thought, tell you what it is, and thus rid you of your dilemma.”
“You are a wonderful man, Mr. Holmes,” began our visitor, “but if you will let me—”
“One moment, please,” said Holmes, eying the other closely. “Let us deduce next, if possible, just who you are. First let us admit that you are the author of a recently published book which nobody understands. Now, what is that book? It cannot be Six Months by Helinor Quinn, for you are a gentleman, and no gentleman would have written a book of that character. Moreover, everybody knows just what that book means. The book we are after is one that cannot be understood without the assistance of a master like myself. Who writes such books? You may safely assert that the only books that nobody can understand these days are written by one James—Henry James. So far so good. But you are not Henry James, for Henry James is now in London translating his earlier works into Esperanto. Now, a man cannot be in London and in Boston at one and the same time. What is the inevitable conclusion? You must be some other James!”
The hand of our visitor trembled slightly as the marvellous deductive powers of Holmes unfolded themselves.
“Murmarvellulous!” he stammered.
“Now, what James can you be if you are not Henry?” said Holmes, “and what book have you written that defies the interpretation of the ordinary mind hitherto fed on the classic output of Hall Caine, Laura Jean Libbey and Gertrude Atherton? A search of the Six Best Sellers fails to reveal the answer. Therefore the work is not fiction. I do not recall seeing it on the table of the reading room downstairs, and it is not likely, then, to be statistical. It was not handed me to read in the barber shop while having my hair cut and my chin manicured, from which I deduce that it is not humour. It is likely, then, that it is a volume either of history or philosophy.
Now, in this country to-day people are too busy taking care of the large consignments of history in the making that come every day from Washington in the form of newspaper dispatches to devote any time to the history that was made in the past, and it is therefore not at all probable that you would go to the expense of publishing a book dealing with it.
“What, then, must we conclude? To me it is clear that you are therefore a man named James who has written a book on philosophy which nobody understands but yourself, and even you—”
“Say no more!” cried our visitor, rising and walking excitedly about the room. “You are the most amazingly astonishing bit of stupefying dumfounderment that I have ever stared at!”
“In short,” continued Holmes, pointing his finger sternly at the other, “you are the man who wrote that airy trifle called Pragmatism!”
There was silence for a moment, and then the Professor spoke up.
“I do not understand it at all,” he said.
“What, pragmatism?” asked Holmes with a chuckle.
“No, you,” returned the Professor coldly.
“Oh, it’s all simple enough,” said Holmes. “You were pointed out to me in the dining-room at luncheon time by the head waiter, and, besides, your name is painted on the end of your suit case. How could your identity escape me?”
“Nevertheless,” said the Professor, with a puzzled look on his face, “granted that you could deduce all these things as to my name, vocation, and so on, what could have given you the idea that I do not myself know what I meant when I wrote my book? Can you explain that?”
“That, my dear Professor, is the simplest of my deductions,” said Holmes. “I have read the book.”
Here the great man threw himself back in his chair and closed his eyes, and I, realising that I was about to be a witness of a memorable adventure, retired to an escritoire over by the window to take down in shorthand what Holmes said. The Professor, on the other hand, was walking nervously up and down the room.
“Well,” said he, “even if you have read it, what does that prove?”
“I will tell you,” said Holmes, going into one of his trances. “I read it first as a man should read a book, from first page to last, and when I got through I could not for the life of me detect your drift. A second reading in the same way left me more mystified than before, so I decided to read it backward. Inverted, it was somewhat clarified but not convincing, so I tried to read it standing on my head, skipping alternate pages as I read forward, and taking in the omitted ones on the return trip. The only result of this was a nervous headache.
“But my blood was up. I vowed to detect your thought if it cost me my life. Removing the covers of the bo
ok, I cut the pages up into slips, each the size of a playing card, pasted these upon four packs of cards, shuffled them three times, cut them twice, dealt them to three imaginary friends seated about a circular table and played an equally imaginary game of muggins with them, at the end of which I placed the four packs one on top of the other, shuffled them twice again, and sat down to read the pages in the resulting sequence. Still the meaning of pragmatism eluded me.”
There was a prolonged pause, interrupted only by the heavy breathing of the Professor.
“Go on,” he said hoarsely.
“Well,” said Holmes, “as a last resort I sent the book to a young friend of mine who runs a printing shop and had him set the whole thing in type, which I afterward pied, sweeping up the remains in a barrel and then drawing them out letter by letter, arranging them in the order in which they came. Of the result I drew galley proofs, and would you believe it, Professor, when I again proceeded to read your words the thing meant even less than it did before. From all of which I deduce that you did not know what pragmatism was, for if you had known the chances are you would have told us. Eh?”
I awaited the answer, looking out of the window, for the demolition of another man is not a pleasant thing to witness, even though it involves a triumph for one of our most respected and profitable heroes. Strange to say the answer did not come, and on turning to see the reason why I observed to my astonishment that Holmes and I were alone, and, what was worse, our visitor had vanished with both our suit cases and my overcoat as well.
Holmes, opening his eyes at the same moment, took in the situation as soon as I did and sprang immediately to the ’phone, but even as he took down the receiver the instrument rang of itself.
