23A portable reed-organ, equipped with a keyboard and sounded by air propelled by foot-pedal–operated bellows past reeds rather than pipes. The harmonium, patented by Alexandre Debain in 1848, was used in chapels, small churches, and homes.
24An obsession of the mind by one idea or interest (from the French: monomanie). Monomania was recognised as early as 1838, in Jean Étienne Dominique Esquirol’s Des Maladies Mentales (Paris, 1838); in W. A. Guy’s Principles of Forensic Medicine (New York: Harper & Bros., 1845), it is called “partial moral mania.” However, this was merely a classification, and Victorian medicine offered no definite idea as to the pathological character or cause of the disease.
25A beard gathered into tufts, resembling the fur of the animal. While the origin of the phrase is unknown, this limerick has achieved popularity:
When they catch a chinchilla in Chile,
They cut off its beard, willy-nilly,
With a small razor blade,
Just to say that they’ve made
A Chilean chinchilla’s chin chilly.
26Between 1860 and 1900, writes Karl Beckson, in London in the 1890s: A Cultural History, Londoners generally regarded Germany as both a potentially malevolent power and a formidable economic competitor in empire building. When William II (Kaiser Wilhelm) took the throne of Germany in 1888, strong anti-British feelings were widespread in Berlin, and it was supposed that the party from which it proceeded had the patronage of the emperor. However, the kaiser visited England annually, commencing in 1889, as the guest of the queen, and there was hope of an entente cordiale. The incident of the Jameson Raid in 1895, four years after publication of “The Engineer’s Thumb,” an abortive English-led invasion of the Transvaal, sparked a sympathetic telegram by the kaiser to the president of the Transvaal and caused a long alienation from England.
27Based on his own experiments, W. T. Rabe concludes that the room was probably no larger than two-and-a-half feet square. Without explaining these experiments, Rabe further concludes that Hatherley was 3.5 feet tall, calling into question Rabe’s original researches.
28While Hatherley’s nighttime journey successfully eluded detection, the presence of a “gigantic” hydraulic press in this secretive location is somewhat harder to explain. Benjamin Clark asks, “[H]ow in the world, without alerting the entire neighbourhood, do you surreptitiously install a gigantic hydraulic press into the second storey of an old country house?”
29Natural rubber.
30The curious existence of a sliding panel that leads out of the hydraulic press and into a passage is addressed by D. Martin Dakin, who considers, “It could not be the same door that Hatherley entered by, as . . . the colonel must have been still outside that door, waiting to remove the remains.” He surmises that the room containing the hydraulic press, which would of necessity have had to be quite large, was fashioned from two or three of the house’s original rooms, one underneath the other. Fortunately for Hatherley, one of those rooms conveniently contained a secret panel (many houses at the time had one), which Colonel Stark either did not know about or failed to consider. Secret rooms, panels, or passages appear in other Canonical houses, notably, Hurlstone Manor, a manor house (“The Musgrave Ritual”), Yoxley Old Place, a “country house” (“The Golden Pince-Nez”), where Holmes describes the hidden recess as “common in old libraries,” and the “ancient Manor House of Birlstone” (The Valley of Fear).
31Was Elise also of German descent? And what was her relationship to the colonel? She called him “Fritz,” but was she his wife, his mistress, his sister? Or just another crook?
32The text here follows the English edition of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In the Strand Magazine, the text appears as “was hanging by the hands to the sill.” This latter text also appears in American editions. Using that version as a basis, Jay Finley Christ argues, in “Thumbs Up Thumbs Down,” that a man hanging as Hatherley describes would actually have had his thumbs positioned “some two or three inches below the edge on the outside of the sill” [emphasis added]. Thus Colonel Stark’s cleaver would probably not have even touched Hatherley’s thumb, let alone cut it off, unless Stark had reached out well past the sill’s edge with his blow. Even then, Christ adds, severing a thumb would have been well nigh impossible, with nothing underneath to serve as a chopping block.
Stanley MacKenzie, in “The Engineer’s Thumb,” points out that this criticism is based on the Strand Magazine or American text. Referring to the English book text, MacKenzie writes, “Iwith whom the police have imagine the ‘slot’ to have been a recess, flush with the sill into which the bottom of the window dropped. If the sill was, say, 5” or more wide, and one’s fingers were in the slot, the palm of the hand and thumb would be flat on top of the sill. The thumb would, quite naturally, stick out sideways and be in a convenient position for amputation.”
Yet another conclusion is drawn by Bill Rabe, who envisions Hatherley clinging to a very broad sill, his torso “hanging outside the house, the forearms across the top of the sill, fingers curled around the inner sill, and the thumbs spread-eagled, as it were, on the chopping block of the sill.”
33Despite Hatherley’s bedraggled appearance here, he miraculously managed to turn up at Watson’s office “quietly dressed in a suit of heather tweed.”
34The Board of Ordnance—Britain’s defence ministry—began surveying southern Britain in 1791, in part to prepare for impending war with France. Its first map, a one-inch-to-one-mile map of Kent, was published in 1801. By the Victorian era, the Ordnance Survey was producing detailed maps of varying scales for Ireland as well as the whole of Great Britain.
35To name the 32 points of the compass, originally a nautical term.
36Coining (or the manufacture of forged coins) was a large criminal industry in Victorian England. “The up-to-date counterfeit-money coiner is one of the most difficult individuals with whom the police have to deal,” writes the Strand Magazine in “Crimes and Criminals: No. III—Coiners and Coining,” appearing in the April 1894 issue, two years after “The Engineer’s Thumb.” The article discusses at some length the use of melted pewter—usually derived from pewter-pots obtained from the local pub!—and the process of electroplating with silver but makes no mention of hydraulic presses. Apparently, the colonel was even more “up-to-date” than the author of the Strand article!
37Any alloy of mercury and some other metal.
38If the fire started when Hatherley dropped his lamp, that marks the genesis at sometime around 1:30 or 2:00 A.M. Hatherley arrived at the Eyford station after 11:00 P.M. and drove with the colonel for “at least an hour.” This places Hatherley at the house no earlier than 12:15 A.M. Allowing at least an hour for his wait in the darkened house, his “very thorough” examination of the press, and his confrontation with the colonel, the hour of Hatherley’s departure must have been around 1:30 or 2:00 A.M. When Hatherley came to himself he found that “the moon had sunk and a bright morning was breaking,” which would be no earlier than 4:00 A.M. in that latitude in summer. This is confirmed by Hatherley’s arrival at Paddington Station a little after 6:00 A.M. By the time Holmes and his crew arrived at midday, the fire was fully ablaze. Yet despite the efforts of firemen and three fire engines, the house continued to burn until around 8:00 P.M. (sunset)—in other words, a full twenty hours, incredibly, after the fire had begun.
39Given that Hatherley awoke very near the house perhaps two and a half hours after he dropped the lamp, it is surprising that he smelled no smoke or saw any other evidence of a fire.
40Jay Finley Christ suggests that Hatherley was in reality Mr. Jeremiah Hayling, the engineer who had disappeared a year earlier. He caught his hand in the press while operating it for the coiners. Hayling seized upon the fire (started in a manner unknown) as his best chance to escape. After attaining his freedom, he concocted the tale about the cleaver to avoid potentially embarrassing questions about his participation in the criminal enterprise.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE N
OBLE BACHELOR1
In “The Noble Bachelor,” Holmes meets society in the form of Lord Robert St. Simon. St. Simon is something of a fop, and middle-class British readers must have delighted in Holmes’s “putdown” of the young lord. English women complained of an American “invasion” of young (rich) women in search of husbands from among the poorer members of England’s upper crust. Here, Holmes is asked to trace a vanishing American bride. Correctly reading the signs, he finds her—and another man! Although some scholars insist that the beautiful heroine was a criminal, Holmes is forgiving; but his diplomacy fails when he tries to bring together the Old and New Worlds over breakfast. Holmes’s cheery, democratic attitude and his expression of faith in the future of the English-speaking peoples was copied in the utterly non-Canonical “Sherlock Holmes” films of Universal Pictures starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.
THE LORD ST. SIMON marriage, and its curious termination, have long ceased to be a subject of interest in those exalted circles in which the unfortunate bridegroom moves. Fresh scandals have eclipsed it, and their more piquant details have drawn the gossips away from this four-year-old drama. As I have reason to believe, however, that the full facts have never been revealed to the general public, and as my friend Sherlock Holmes had a considerable share in clearing the matter up, I feel that no memoir of him would be complete without some little sketch of this remarkable episode.
It was a few weeks before my own marriage, during the days when I was still sharing rooms with Holmes in Baker Street, that he came home from an afternoon stroll to find a letter on the table waiting for him. I had remained indoors all day, for the weather had taken a sudden turn to rain, with high autumnal winds, and the Jezail bullet which I had brought back in one of my limbs2 as a relic of my Afghan campaign, throbbed with dull persistence. With my body in one easy chair and my legs upon another, I had surrounded myself with a cloud of newspapers, until at last, saturated with the news of the day, I tossed them all aside and lay listless, watching the huge crest and monogram upon the envelope upon the table, and wondering lazily who my friend’s noble correspondent could be.
“Here is a very fashionable epistle,” I remarked as he entered. “Your morning letters, if I remember right, were from a fishmonger and a tide waiter.”3
“Yes, my correspondence has certainly the charm of variety,” he answered, smiling, “and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.”
He broke the seal, and glanced over the contents. “Oh, come, it may prove to be something of interest after all.”
“Not social, then?”
“No, distinctly professional.”
“And from a noble client?”
“One of the highest in England.”
“My dear fellow, I congratulate you.”
“I assure you, Watson, without affectation, that the status of my client is a matter of less moment to me than the interest of his case. It is just possible, however, that that also may not be wanting in this new investigation. You have been reading the papers diligently of late, have you not?”
“He broke the seal and glanced over the contents.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1892
“It looks like it,” said I ruefully, pointing to a huge bundle in the corner. “I have had nothing else to do.”
“It is fortunate, for you will perhaps be able to post me up. I read nothing except the criminal news and the agony column. The latter is always instructive. But if you have followed recent events so closely you must have read about Lord St. Simon4 and his wedding?”
“Oh, yes, with the deepest interest.”
“That is well. The letter which I hold in my hand is from Lord St. Simon. I will read it to you, and in return you must turn over these papers and let me have whatever bears upon the matter. This is what he says:
My dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes,
Lord Backwater5 tells me that I may place implicit reliance upon your judgment and discretion. I have determined, therefore, to call upon you, and to consult you in reference to the very painful event which has occurred in connection with my wedding. Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, is acting already in the matter, but he assures me that he sees no objection to your co-operation, and that he even thinks that it might be of some assistance. I will call at four o’clock in the afternoon, and, should you have any other engagement at that time, I hope that you will postpone it, as this matter is of paramount importance.
Yours faithfully,
Robert St. Simon.6
“It is dated from Grosvenor Mansions,7 written with a quill pen, and the noble lord has had the misfortune to get a smear of ink upon the outer side of his right little finger,” remarked Holmes, as he folded up the epistle.
“He says four o’clock. It is three now. He will be here in an hour.”
“Then I have just time, with your assistance, to get clear upon the subject. Turn over those papers, and arrange the extracts in their order of time, while I take a glance as to who our client is.” He picked a red-covered volume8 from a line of books of reference beside the mantelpiece. “Here he is,” said he, sitting down and flattening it out upon his knee. “ ‘Lord Robert Walsingham de Vere St. Simon, second son of the Duke of Balmoral—Hum! Arms: Azure, three caltrops9 in chief over a fess sable.10 Born in 1846.’ He’s forty-one years of age, which is mature for marriage. Was Under-Secretary for the Colonies in a late Administration. The Duke, his father, was at one time Secretary for Foreign Affairs. They inherit Plantagenet11 blood by direct descent, and Tudor12 on the distaff side. Ha! Well there is nothing very instructive in all this. I think that I must turn to you, Watson, for something more solid.”
“I have very little difficulty in finding what I want,” said I, “for the facts are quite recent, and the matter struck me as remarkable. I feared to refer them to you, however, as I knew that you had an inquiry on hand and that you disliked the intrusion of other matters.”
“Oh, you mean the little problem of the Grosvenor Square13 furniture van. That is quite cleared up now—though, indeed, it was obvious from the first. Pray give me the results of your newspaper selections.”
“Here is the first notice which I can find. It is in the personal column of The Morning Post,14 and dates, as you see, some weeks back.
A marriage has been arranged [it says] and will, if rumour is correct, very shortly take place, between Lord Robert St. Simon, second son of the Duke of Balmoral, and Miss Hatty Doran, the only daughter of Aloysius Doran, Esq., of San Francisco, Cal., U.S.A.
That is all.”
“Terse and to the point,” remarked Holmes, stretching his long, thin legs towards the fire.
“There was a paragraph amplifying this in one of the society papers of the same week. Ah, here it is.”
There will soon be a call for protection in the marriage market, for the present free-trade principle appears to tell heavily against our home product. One by one the management of the noble houses of Great Britain is passing into the hands of our fair cousins from across the Atlantic. An important addition has been made during the last week to the list of the prizes which have been borne away by these charming invaders. Lord St. Simon, who has shown himself for over twenty years proof against the little god’s arrows, has now definitely announced his approaching marriage with Miss Hatty Doran, the fascinating daughter of a California millionaire. Miss Doran, whose graceful figure and striking face attracted much attention at the Westbury House15 festivities, is an only child, and it is currently reported that her dowry will run to considerably over the six figures, with expectancies for the future. As it is an open secret that the Duke of Balmoral has been compelled to sell his pictures within the last few years, and as Lord St. Simon has no property of his own, save the small estate of Birchmoor, it is obvious that the Californian heiress is not the only gainer by an alliance which will enable her to make the easy and common transition from a Repu
blican lady to a British title.16
“Anything else?” asked Holmes, yawning.
“Oh, yes; plenty. Then there is another note in The Morning Post to say that the marriage would be an absolutely quiet one, that it would be at St. George’s, Hanover Square,17 that only half a dozen intimate friends would be invited, and that the party would return to the furnished house at Lancaster Gate18 which has been taken by Mr. Aloysius Doran. Two days later—that is, on Wednesday last—there is a curt announcement that the wedding had taken place, and that the honeymoon would be passed at Lord Backwater’s place, near Petersfield. Those are all the notices which appeared before the disappearance of the bride.”
“Before the what?” asked Holmes, with a start.
“The vanishing of the lady.”
“When did she vanish, then?”
“At the wedding breakfast.”19
“Indeed. This is more interesting than it promised to be; quite dramatic, in fact.”
“Yes; it struck me as being a little out of the common.”
“They often vanish before the ceremony, and occasionally during the honeymoon; but I cannot call to mind anything quite so prompt as this. Pray let me have the details.”
“I warn you that they are very incomplete.”
“Perhaps we may make them less so.”
“Such as they are, they are set forth in a single article of a morning paper of yesterday, which I will read to you. It is headed, ‘Singular Occurrence at a Fashionable Wedding’:
The family of Lord Robert St. Simon has been thrown into the greatest consternation by the strange and painful episodes which have taken place in connection with his wedding. The ceremony, as shortly announced in the papers of yesterday, occurred on the previous morning; but it is only now that it has been possible to confirm the strange rumours which have been so persistently floating about. In spite of the attempts of the friends to hush the matter up, so much public attention has now been drawn to it that no good purpose can be served by affecting to disregard what is a common subject for conversation.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 43
