Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

by Tim Symonds

  I lit my pipe and considered. Yes, I thought, selecting twelve would challenge The Strand’s readers whichever side of the Ocean. Holmes could hardly overlook one case which dealt with the only foe who ever really extended him, and which deceived the public (and me) into the erroneous inference of his death. Therefore I would expect The Adventure of the Final Problem.

  At Eastbourne I took a motor cab the two or three miles to Beachy Head and switched to a horse-drawn carriage for the remainder of the journey along the narrow country lanes and muddy tracks to Holmes’s farmstead. He was waiting for me on his verandah, tweed-suited, briar in hand, when the horse-drawn carriage from Beachy Head brought me to his isolated home. Though slightly stooped in the cooling air sweeping in from the Channel the tall, spare figure still reflected the time he was idolised by swordsmen everywhere as captain of the British épee and sabre teams, and the only foreign swordsman to be elected to France’s Académie des Armes.

  Holmes welcomed the driver with, ‘A nice little brougham, I see it was once the pride of the Earl of Arundel,’ pointing to a painted-over trace of the previous owner’s coat of arms on the carriage doors, ‘and (referring to the horses) a pair of beauties. You must leave me your card.’

  After such pleasantries he turned his attention to me.

  ‘I see you’ve put on seven and a half pounds since we last met,’ he chastised.

  ‘Seven at the most, Holmes!’ I retorted.

  Holmes bid me enter the house and waved me to an armchair, throwing across a case of cigars, and indicating a spirit case and the old gasogene in the corner. I glanced around. Except for an unfamiliar tidiness due, presumably, to a housekeeper, the old landmarks from 221B, Baker Street were all in their place. There was the chemical corner and there the acid-stained, deal-topped table. The diagrams, the pipe-rack, even the Persian slipper containing his tobacco, and finally the precious violin, a Stradivarius bought on Tottenham Court Road for fifty-five shillings, the four strings tuned in perfect fifths.

  Noting where my glance had stopped, Holmes remarked, ‘Do you know who was the fastest violinist ever?’

  ‘I don’t,’ I replied. ‘And to tell the truth I’m not...’

  ‘Paganini. He was recorded playing 12 notes per second.’

  Holmes lit a pipe and leant against the mantel, regarding me with his singularly introspective look. Smoke-rings chased each other up to the ceiling. I asked if he maintained contact with ‘old friends’ at Scotland Yard, those involved in many of our most famous cases, Inspectors Althelney Jones, and Gregson, the ferret-like Lestrade, or Algar from the Liverpool Force.

  ‘Hardly, my dear fellow,’ came the amused reply. ‘The best function Scotland Yard serves is to make the pseudoscience of astrology look respectable.’

  The gap of months melted away.

  The evening found us in a picturesque old room with sanded floors and high-backed settles at our favourite haunt, the Tiger Inn, situated half a mile inland from the chalk cliffs of the Seven Sisters. Holmes was determined to add to my knowledge of bees. I was equally determined to resist. I blamed their siren calls for my comrade’s premature retirement. Nevertheless, on the completion of a fine dessert the conversation went –

  ‘Watson, I’ve estimated how far a bee flies to gather the nectar needed to produce a quart of honey. How many miles would you say?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest, Holmes.’

  ‘48,000 miles. Isn’t that a fact worth noting?’

  ‘I can’t think to which sane person it would be,’ I replied.

  An hour or so later, with a fine bottle of Clos du Bourg inside us, we returned on foot to the farmhouse under an immense buttermilk sky, the full moon stepping from cloud to cloud. We settled into two arm-chairs, the tobacco jar on a table exactly equidistant between us.

  ‘Well, Watson,’ my old friend began, thumbing tobacco into his favourite blackened clay pipe, ‘as to the list you mention, I’ve given it considerable thought since your letter arrived. Among the grimmest of our cases is The Speckled Band. That, I’m sure, will be quite high on any list.’

  Holmes’s pipe stabbed at me like a sixth finger, just as it had at our old quarters at 221B, Baker Street. The deep-set grey eyes twinkled.

  ‘Then there are the cases in which you strive the difficult task of explaining away my alleged death and which introduce a villain as vile as Colonel Sebastian Moran. They deserve their place.’

  I wrote down The Final Problem, A Scandal In Bohemia, and The Empty House.

  He continued, ‘But as to my top choice - rather, choices - I have settled on three which I recall with the utmost satisfaction and enjoyment. In fact I would place them equal first.’

  ‘And they are?’ I asked pencil poised.

  ‘Silver Blaze. And, like you,’ he continued, guessing at my likely choice, ‘our time on those strange Devon moors in The Hound of the Baskervilles. We must include The Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter. Serbia was a strange land, almost beyond imagination.’

  The following day found me back at the Marylebone surgery. The waiting-room echoed with a medley of coughs and sneezes, the pitches in novel combinations perfectly suited to a Schönberg composition. The last of my patients in the memorandum-book was Lord P______ himself, a man immersed in large public questions and listed in Sherlock Holmes’s ‘general encyclopaedia of reference’. Unaware his wife was a patient, he confessed he was once more suffering from a disease prevalent among those who benefitted themselves of the multitudes of ‘ladies of the night’ filling the streets of the Capital. I administered an injection of mercury into the urethra.

  I had just told him to pull up his trousers when, after a single urgent knock, the receptionist threw open the door and beckoned me to follow her. Apologising to the heroically indiscreet nobleman I hurried out with the practioner’s immediate assumption something dramatic had occurred. Had someone - not for the first time - fallen in front of a train at nearby Paddington Station, scattering their limbs to the four corners? Orbeen knocked down by a speeding Wolseley-Siddeley van in the busy street outside my very premises, given the automobile had graduated from a noisy fad to a passion in all parts of the country?

  Worse, could Sherlock Holmes have suffered a grievous accident, isolated as he was on his bee-farm on the South Downs? He mentioned on the last occasion that over the years his usually mild Apis Mellifera had stung him precisely 7,860 times. My professional advice had been forthright. Avoid being stung again. An allergy could set in out of the blue, whether the first or the 7,861st sting. Within minutes it could trigger a potentially deadly anaphylactic reaction.

  I came into the reception room at a rush to be met by a smart salute from a chauffeur standing at attention. He politely asked me to step outside where I was asked to confirm my particulars (‘You are Dr. John H. Watson?’ ‘And the H stands for what, sir?’) before he reached into his jacket. He handed over a special telegram stamped Private and Secret.

  The telegram was from Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s new Foreign Secretary. Not yet enveloped in the international fame he was to gain, Sir Edward had two useful attributes - a good Parliamentary seat, and money. His grandfather left him a private income, a baronet’s hereditary title and an estate of about 2,000 acres.

  The message read, ‘Dear Dr. Watson, it would greatly honour War Minister Haldane and me if you could attend a private meeting tomorrow. If so, shall we say the India Office at 10am? It will be very good to see you again. Very sincerely yours, E. Grey.’

  Sir Edward was a countryman after my own heart. On the first occasion we met he told me, ‘I’d far rather catch a three-pound trout on the River Itchen than make a highly successful speech in the House’.

  His Parliamentary colleague Richard Burdon Haldane, already regarded as one of Britain’s greatest War Ministers, had been elected in 1885 as a Liberal of Imperialist bent.r />
  I scribbled a reply and handed it to the chauffeur, keeping my patients waiting long enough for him to answer questions about his vehicle. He explained the functioning of the water-cooled brake drums and told me he had graduated from the Daimler Company’s school of instruction for chauffeurs just off the Gray’s Inn Road.

  Driver and the magnificent 40 horsepower Napier roared off followed by my envious eye. I planned to take the plunge and equip myself with a motor-car. There was an interesting new automobile, the Aerocar, an air-cooled, four-cylinder luxury car delivered from America for about £700 which included cap, goggles and gauntlet gloves.

  I reread the telegram. There was a puzzling omission. It made no mention of Sherlock Holmes.

  Chapter III

  I am Invited to the Foreign Office to Meet an Oriental Potentate

  The newly-constructed Bakerloo Line on the Underground took me to Embankment followed by a short walk along the Thames to the Foreign Office & India Office. The Departments were housed in a vast Victorian Italianate building deliberately designed to impress, like the Royal Courts of Justice, providing a sumptuous setting for affairs of state and diplomatic functions.

  I was ushered into the Durbar Court. Doric columns on the ground floor and Ionic on the second were of polished red Peterhead granite, while the top floor Corinthian columns were of grey Aberdeen granite. The flooring was of Greek, Sicilian and Belgian marble. A man in livery greeted me. To my surprise he led me out of the building to a small side-entrance overlooking the Charles Steps and St. James’s Park. Almost furtively Sir Edward was waiting there. We shook hands, the Foreign Secretary greeting me with a polite ‘Good to see you again, Dr. Watson’. Throwing a cautionary glance at a fog-spectacles hawker on the opposite pavement, he said, ‘For the sake of privacy I’d like to hold our chat in St. James’s Park. At Duck Island Cottage on the lake. You’d be astonished at what our friends in the daily Press get up to, to winkle out a story.’

  He continued, ‘The War Minister will be there but it’s the other person you’re here to meet, a Chinese potentate, General Yuán Shì-kai. Yuán is the surname.’

  Duck Island Cottage was a small gingerbread building of vaguely Swiss inspiration, embowered with climbing plants and trimmed with ornamental barge-boards finials. It was the residence of the Park’s Bird Keeper, though manifestly it served a dual purpose as a Foreign Office place of assignation. As we strolled towards the cottage Sir Edward said, ‘On our one previous encounter you were very much the colleague of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. As the War Minister will make clear, this time you will be acting in your own right.’

  My chest puffed out.

  The visitor was short and burly, with a pickedevant beard and the stance of a boxer. From the popular Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera The Mikado, westerners easily jumble up Japanese and Chinese. We expect all Oriental men to be clad in a changpao and sporting a moustache drooping to the chin. They would wear woven bamboo hats covered with cream silk gauze, like a lampshade.

  The War Minister made the formal introduction. General Yuán and I saluted as befitted men of military backgrounds and stepped up close to each other to shake hands.

  The General’s eyes were alive with interest, fine and clear. They fixed me with keen penetration. In stature, facial expression, contour of features as well as in the manner of wearing his moustache (though not his modish Buffalo Bill Cody vandyke beard) he greatly resembled France’s new Prime Minister, Clemenceau.

  Far from being attired in saffron-coloured robes or clutching a bejewelled pipe, the man before me was dressed in an expensively tailored hacking jacket and checked cravat as though about to catch a day at the horse races. On the coat-rack behind him hung a more traditional Oriental piece of clothing, a long silk coat slit up the sides to allow horseback riding, embroidered front and back with a white crane, the prince of all feathered creatures on earth. I was to learn later the crane signified a personage of the first rank.

  Haldane invited our visitor to open the conversation. The General stepped up to a large map of China on the wall and began to speak.

  ‘Gentlemen, events of the past fifty years have shown the Army of the Great East must catch up with the Great West. The world has seen how the despised Japanese bandits defeated us. My country has been soundly sleeping on the top of a pile of kindling lying in the midst of a group of strong Powers with a box of matches in their hand. The Russians spy on us in the north, the French stare at us in the south, the Japanese are watching us like pygmy chameleons in the east, and you English are peeping at us from the west. I am not convinced our traditional ways of qi, meridians, and acupuncture points will serve us any better on the battlefields of the future.

  The world outside our borders watches like crows on a fence, intent on divvying up my country between them. In their eyes China is a hay cart. Everyone feels free to take from it what they want. Germany hankers after Shantung, France after Yunnan, Japan after Fuhkien, Belgium after Tianjin. The Italians eye the Bay of San Mun. Russia is the worst of all - their Viceroys dream of creating another Muscovite Empire on the shores of the Pacific, such as Rome created on the shores of the Bosphorus.’

  A shadow crossed his face.

  ‘Our people shake at the prospect of the ‘White Peril’ sweeping across our land. Our people fear the white race intends to do to us what you have done to the American Indians and African negroes - impose a humiliating colonial serfdom. Even annihilate us. If we just fold our arms and yield, I shall have no face to see our ancestors after death.’

  He paused.

  ‘This is where you, Dr. Watson, come in.’

  ‘How can I be of help?’ I asked, perplexed.

  General Yuán beckoned me to join him at the table where Sir Edward was pouring the tea. He dipped his finger in a cup and began to draw maps on the dusty table-top.

  ‘My aim is to build up a modern army. Divisions will be stationed here, here, and here - Manchuria and Shantung, Chihli and Nanyuán, Paoting and Peking - enough to hold all foreign armies at bay, including the Russian Bear. We must standardise the drilling, the equipment, the instruction and finance, and the organization of the Army –but even if I had half a million trained men under my command, their numbers would be meaningless unless they stay in good condition. Napoleon Bonaparte said an army marches on its stomach. I say an Army depends just as much on the health of its soldiery. I plan the establishment of half a dozen Imperial Army Medical companies. That’s where you come in. We need your advice and expertise.’

  He nodded at the two attentive politicians.

  ‘Our friends here brought to my attention your stint as a medical officer with the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers in Afghanistan back in 1880. Sir Edward tells me you are a man of impetuous courage. Come out to High Asia, Doctor. Help me form the first of those Medical companies, a prototype.’

  He ended poetically, ‘If you carry out this mission, China’s gratitude will endure until the T’ai Mountain shrinks to the size of a grindstone, and the Yellow River becomes a mere seasonal rivulet.’

  ‘This request is somewhat of a surprise,’ I stammered hesitantly, darting a look at Grey and Haldane. ‘Where would I...?’

  ‘...begin?’ the General broke in. ‘The Chinese philosopher Laozi points out a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It would be best to go to my country overland, by the least likely, therefore the most hazardous route. Once you touch the soil of France follow your nose east for 5,000 miles to Kashgar.’

  He nodded towards Grey and Haldane.

  ‘With the Ministers’ permission, I’ll have orders left for you at the British Mission there.’

  He added, ‘You will end the assignment at the Forbidden City. I’m sure you would like to meet our famous Regent of the Empire, the Divine Mother Empress Dowager Cixi, our ‘Good Queen Bess’, our She-Dragon.’

  The Gene
ral continued, ‘Our people say she has a secret army of women hidden in nearby forests. The troops are so numerous they are named ‘the Purple Cloud’. Each is clad in purple hue and carrying a bow and arrows of the same colour. They have bound feet yet move with preternatural speed. It is said they can leap great distances into the air, and rise under the bellies of galloping horses. Their leader is known as Jade Woman or ‘the divine-shouldered bowman’ because of the immense power of her bow and the distance and accuracy she shoots her arrows.’

  I needed no more to make my decision. I got to my feet and once again shook his hand, offering my services. Haldane brought him the long silk coat. As the General turned to leave I asked, ‘Where do you go from here?’

  ‘I’m already late for a chat with Mr. Marconi at The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company. I may have work for him in China. Tomorrow I shall do the rounds of your famous teaching universities, starting with the University of London. China needs teachers, professors. Astronomy, navigation, mechanics, geography, trigonometry, engineering and so on. I shall poach them.’

  He nodded towards the watchful Foreign Secretary and smiled.

  ‘Then Brighton. I have the offer of a tour of a famous palace there.’

  Grey intervened.

  ‘The Royal Pavilion. I want General Yuán to know we have buildings as fine as the ones we hear of in Peking.’

  The General resumed, ‘Afterwards I shall take in a performance of a play on the Palace Pier, by your famous Mr. Shakespeare - my first. Then I shall be driven to Sherborne. My three sons are in school there. The eldest is playing in the last cricket match of the season, against their great rivals Canford School. I plan to attend it.’

  His expression became serious.

  ‘Dr. Watson, you will have to arm yourself for the journey. My enemies are many. They will become your enemies too. Any trespasser in the mountain badlands is regarded as fair game by the local tribesmen. You will face physical hardship. The winters are cruel, the summers sweltering. You will need mules and ponies, cooks and coolies. You will cling dizzily to mountain ledges. There are sections where if you stray you will - when you are already past the point of no return - be informed of your drift by a continuous line of bones and bodies.