“There was a little coal-black Negress.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1893
“My God!” he cried. “What can be the meaning of this?”
“I will tell you the meaning of it,” cried the lady, sweeping into the room with a proud, set face. “You have forced me against my own judgment to tell you, and now we must both make the best of it. My husband died at Atlanta. My child survived.”
“Your child!”
She drew a large silver locket from her bosom. “You have never seen this open.”
“I understood that it did not open.”
She touched a spring, and the front hinged back. There was a portrait within of a man, strikingly handsome and intelligent, but bearing unmistakable signs upon his features of his African descent.
“That is John Hebron, of Atlanta,” said the lady, “and a nobler man never walked the earth.19 I cut myself off from my race in order to wed him;20 but never once while he lived did I for an instant regret it. It was our misfortune that our only child took after his people rather than mine.21 It is often so in such matches, and little Lucy is darker far than ever her father was. But, dark or fair, she is my own dear little girlie, and her mother’s pet.”22 The little creature ran across at the words and nestled up against the lady’s dress. “When I left her in America,” she continued, “it was only because her health was weak, and the change might have done her harm. She was given to the care of a faithful Scotch woman who had once been our servant. Never for an instant did I dream of disowning her as my child. But when chance threw you in my way, Jack, and I learned to love you, I feared to tell you about my child. God forgive me, I feared that I should lose you, and I had not the courage to tell you. I had to choose between you, and in my weakness I turned away from my own little girl.23 For three years I have kept her existence a secret from you, but I heard from the nurse, and I knew that all was well with her. At last, however, there came an overwhelming desire to see the child once more. I struggled against it, but in vain. Though I knew the danger, I determined to have the child over, if it were but for a few weeks. I sent a hundred pounds to the nurse, and I gave her instructions about this cottage, so that she might come as a neighbour without my appearing to be in any way connected with her. I pushed my precautions so far as to order her to keep the child in the house during the daytime, and to cover up her little face and hands, so that even those who might see her at the window should not gossip about there being a black child in the neighbourhood. If I had been less cautious I might have been more wise, but I was half crazy with fear lest you should learn the truth.
“It was you who told me first that the cottage was occupied. I should have waited for the morning, but I could not sleep for excitement, and so at last I slipped out, knowing how difficult it is to awaken you. But you saw me go, and that was the beginning of my troubles. Next day you had my secret at your mercy, but you nobly refrained from pursuing your advantage. Three days later, however, the nurse and child only just escaped from the back door as you rushed in at the front one. And now to-night you at last know all, and I ask you what is to become of us, my child and me?”24 She clasped her hands and waited for an answer.
It was a long two25 minutes before Grant Munro broke the silence, and when his answer came it was one of which I love to think. He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held his other hand out to his wife and turned towards the door.
“He lifted the little child.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1893
“We can talk it over more comfortably at home,” said he. “I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.”
Holmes and I followed them down to the lane, and my friend plucked at my sleeve as we came out.
“I think,” said he, “that we shall be of more use in London than in Norbury.”
Not another word did he say of the case until late that night when he was turning away, with his lighted candle, for his bedroom.
“Watson,” said he, “if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper ‘Norbury’ in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.”
1“The Yellow Face” was published in the Strand Magazine in Februrary 1893 and in Harper’s Weekly (New York) on February 11, 1893.
2In various American editions the references have been inexplicably changed to “us,” “listeners,” and “actors.”
3American editions refer here, not to “the affair of the second stain,” but to “the adventure of the Musgrave Ritual,” which seems a bit incongruous. Certainly Holmes would disagree with Watson’s regarding “The Musgrave Ritual” as a case in which Holmes erred. But see “The Musgrave Ritual,” note 41, for the views of others. In addition, this opening paragraph is often printed in brackets, for reasons unexplained.
The provenance of Watson’s casual mention of “the affair of the second stain” also remains somewhat unclear; the story entitled “The Second Stain” was not published in the Strand Magazine until December 1904, over a decade after “The Yellow Face” first appeared. Perhaps the mystery affair is related in some way to the “Adventure of the Second Stain” that Watson makes reference to in “The Naval Treaty”; in that instance, he hints at various details that appear nowhere else in the Canon. See “The Naval Treaty,” note 1.
4Edward J. Van Liere, in “Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Perennial Athletes,” calls this “[a] real compliment, for Watson was a keen sportsman, who probably had had occasion to attend many boxing matches.” Van Liere points out that Holmes’s rangy build, long reach, speed, and superior intelligence would have made him “a dangerous man in the ring.” In The Sign of Four, Holmes recalls to the professional boxer McMurdo how they went three rounds together, and McMurdo declares, “You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.”
Modern boxing actually originated in England with the publication of the Queensberry Rules in 1867. Written by John Graham Chambers under the patronage of John Sholto Douglas, the 8th Marquis of Queensberry (and the father of Oscar Wilde’s particular friend, Alfred Douglas), these rules called for the use of gloves, a specified number of three-minute rounds, and a ten-second count to signify a knockout, among other tenets familiar to today’s boxing fans. The sport prior to the adoption of the Queensberry Rules had been much more of a no-holds-barred affair, a bare-knuckle, often brutal pastime that in the eighteenth century had supplanted swordplay and gunplay as a way of defending one’s honour. From its working-class roots boxing grew to become popular among members of the aristocracy as well, leading to the formation of numerous clubs dedicated to the training of athletes and the staging of fights; given Watson’s description of Holmes’s skills, the detective was surely a member of one of these establishments. Arthur Conan Doyle was a great student of the history of boxing, and his novel Rodney Stone (1896) indelibly captures the boxing milieu of the Regency period.
5Regent’s Park was the nearest at hand. See “A Scandal in Bohemia,” note 66.
6As fossilised tree resin, amber often preserves the remains of insects, leaves, and flowers trapped in the substance millions of years ago—thus fake amber might be passed off as genuine if it were embedded with what looks to be a fossilised fly. In the American texts, the sentence is omitted. D. Martin Dakin comments, “I don’t know if the [American] editor was shocked that such reprehensible practices should go on among the dishonest English.”
7Holmes himself indulged in this means of pipe-lighting; see “Charles Augustus Milverton.”
8According to John Camden Hotten’s 1865 Slang Dictionary, a broad-brimmed felt hat—so called because it never had a nap, and never wants one.
9For much of the nineteenth century, yellow fever outbreaks struck south-eastern cities of the United States nearly every summer. One particularly deadly epidemic killed 9,000 people in New Orlea
ns in 1853. (As for Atlanta, Manly Wade Wellman has concluded that between 1860 and 1900 there were actually no epidemics of yellow fever in that city.) In 1900, some degree of control over the disease—which was devastating U.S. troops occupying Cuba after the Spanish-American War—was finally obtained when a commission of physicians, led by army surgeon Walter Reed, travelled to Havana and conducted a series of experiments proving that the virus was carried and transmitted by infected Aedes aegypti mosquitos. Subsequent mosquito-eradication efforts had dramatic results, paving the way for successful construction of the Panama Canal. The last U.S. outbreak of yellow fever occurred in New Orleans in 1905; a vaccine was developed in 1937.
10Stuart C. Rand points out that neither the State of Georgia nor the city of Atlanta issued death certificates until they were provided for by an Act of 1914.
11A sum equivalent to about £300,000 in modern purchasing power. But to have such a sum return “an average of 7 per cent” would be “an impossibility with any degree of safety,” R. M. McLaren points out in “Doctor Watson—Punter or Speculator?”
12The current purchasing power of £700 is about £45,000, or about $80,000 per year in current U.S. dollars. Readers may form their own conclusions about whether this sum would leave one “well off” in today’s economy.
13Who is “Jack”? Is this another symptom of the “John/James” syndrome exhibited in “Man with the Twisted Lip”? Or did Holmes misread Munro’s handwriting upon the lining of his hat, and Munro is subtly correcting Holmes? Note that no one actually calls Munro by the name “Grant,” and Watson, who consistently identifies him as “Grant Munro,” is only following Holmes’s lead. D. Martin Dakin suggests that “ ‘Grant’ sounds rather formal from a loving wife, and no doubt she adopted a pet name, which might well have been his second one.” Patrick Drazen points out that “Jack” is a familiar version of “John,” Effie’s first husband’s name.
14The American texts change the colour to “chalky white” instead of “dead yellow,” perhaps in some concession to the growing Asian population, although the title of the story makes the change absurd.
15North of England, Munro presumably means. It is curious that Grant Munro, likely of Scottish descent (for both Grant and Munro are common Scottish names), should not identify the accent of a woman whom Effie calls a “Scotch woman” as Scottish.
16The Crystal Palace was originally constructed in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, conceived of by Prince Albert to show off Britain’s industrial, military, and scientific achievements. Designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, landscape architect to the Duke of Devonshire, the mammoth structure required some 2,000 men to assemble its 2,300 cast-iron girders and 900,000 square feet of glass. The building’s incandescence inspired Punch magazine editor Douglas Jerrold to dub it “the Crystal Palace,” and William Thackeray to write in tribute, “As though ‘twere by a wizard’s rod / A blazing arch of lucid glass / Leaps like a fountain from the grass / To meet the sun!” (Historian A. N. Wilson, comparing the Crystal Palace to other buildings of the age, describes it as “a magnificent airy structure . . . modern, architecturally innovative and without the camp element of pastiche which characterizes almost all other great Victorian buildings.”) Six million visitors from all across Europe flocked to the Great Exhibition to see its vast array of exhibits, which ranged from cotton-spinning machines to microscopes and cameras to religious artifacts to stuffed elephants from India. After the exhibition, the structure was dismantled and rebuilt, reopening at Sydenham Hill—obviously the location to which Munro refers—in 1854. There, the building hosted concerts, auto shows, air shows, sporting events (the Crystal Palace Football Club was formed in 1861), and even a circus until 1936, when the building was destroyed by fire.
17Manly Wade Wellman’s research into that period of Atlanta history uncovers no “great fire” having taken place there since Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s infamous burning of the city in 1864.
18“Does it not seem unlikely that a blackmailer would give a place of honour in his home to the photograph of one of his victims?” asks Beverly Baer Potter, in “Thoughts on The Yellow Face.”
19His noble nature nowithstanding, Sherlockians have thrown certain details of John Hebron’s background into question. Earlier, Hebron is identified as a lawyer; yet in searching the City Directory for 1885, Stuart C. Rand could locate no black attorneys, and he contends that—given the inequities of the day—none who practised in later years could have amassed the £4,500 of capital to which Grant Munro has referred. Robert H. Schutz, using C. G. Woodson’s The Negro Professional Man and the Community, with Special Emphasis on the Physician and the Lawyer (1934) as his source, counters that as early as 1850 there were a number of black lawyers in New York City. The differences between New York City and Atlanta at that time were, of course, vast. But Schutz slyly suggests that Effie Munro could be alluding not to Atlanta, Georgia, but to Atlanta, New York, a small town near the New York–Pennsylvania state line. D. Martin Dakin takes a similar tack with his own reference to Atlanta, Michigan.
David R. McCallister, in “The Black Barrister Who Baffled Baker Street,” takes a less mundane view of John Hebron in identifying him as Aaron Alpeoria Bradley, a former slave from Boston who passed himself off as a lawyer and became involved in Reconstruction politics in Georgia. Bradley made his fortune by charging thousands of Savannah blacks one dollar each to petition Washington, ostensibly to secure their voting rights. Elected to the state senate in 1868 as one of Georgia’s first four black legislators, Bradley was ousted when compromising rumours of his past surfaced; he then went up North, where McCallister guesses he may have met Effie. Moving to St. Louis, Bradley became part of a movement to form a black separatist territory in the West. He died penniless on the streets of St. Louis in 1882.
20Georgia’s laws, H. W. Bell points out, prohibited such marriages. “[E]ven on the theory that [Mrs. Munro and John Hebron] were married in some State in which such unions were permitted, their marriage upon their return to Atlanta, would have come to an abrupt and sanguinary end.”
21Would Hebron have thought so?
22A “dear little girlie” she may well be, but Edward Quayle charges that Lucy’s “coal-black” complexion makes it impossible for her to be Effie Munro’s child. “Any anthropologist could have reminded him that the child of a mixed racial marriage has pigmentation approximately halfway between that of the parents.” Eileen Snyder, after examining the seminal work of Charles B. Davenport on miscegenation in the British West Indies (1913), similarly states that it would have been impossible for anyone other than two at-least-tan-skinned blacks to produce a “coal-black” offspring.
Patrick E. Drazen attempts to refute Snyder’s conclusions, pointing out that Davenport’s studies ignore dominant-recessive gene theory and that Snyder’s blanket statement fails to take into account that genetics is a science of probabilities, not certainties. While it is not likely that a “coal-black” descendant would result, it is not impossible. Further, Drazen suggests, Effie Munro may have been a mulatto herself.
23Snyder sympathetically suggests that Lucy was the child of Hebron and his first wife and the step-daughter of Effie Munro.
24H. W. Bell concludes that, because Effie’s story contains so many glaring inconsistencies, the child must have been fathered by someone other than Mr. Hebron (who, according to Bell, was white). After her husband’s death, Bell continues, Effie fled in order to start her life over. When confronted by Munro, she made up the entire story. “She was an actress of parts, and an accomplished liar,” marvels Bell, “but her greatest distinction is that she deceived Sherlock Holmes.”
25The American text has “ten” minutes. Christopher Roden suggests that this American emendation was made to suggest Munro’s great hesitancy and so soften the story’s acceptance of an inter-racial marriage.
THE STOCK-BROKER’S CLERK1
The world of money has changed little in 100 years, and “The Sto
ck-Broker’s Clerk” tells a thrilling tale of “identity theft” that might be drawn from today’s headlines. Here Holmes and Watson must tread unfamiliar turf, the “City,” the realm of banks, brokerage firms, and high finance, to foil a daring robbery. Watson reveals an ear for Cockney slang in recording young Hall Pycroft’s encounter with mystery. Strangely, the criminals of “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk” appear to have been familiar with Holmes’s cases, for the plot is certainly reminiscent of “The Red-Headed League.” Scholars date the case to 1888 or 1889, and therefore the plotters could not have read the published version of “The Red-Headed League.” However, if Professor Moriarty had a hand in both, the similarities are no coincidence. The case also provides uncharacteristic revelations of Watson’s personal life, providing details of his return to medical practice after his marriage.
SHORTLY AFTER MY marriage2 I had bought a connection3 in the Paddington district. Old Mr. Farquhar, from whom I purchased it, had at one time an excellent general practice, but his age, and an affliction of the nature of St. Vitus’s dance4 from which he suffered, had very much thinned it. The public not unnaturally goes on the principle that he who would heal others must himself be whole, and looks askance at the curative powers of the man whose own case is beyond the reach of his drugs. Thus, as my predecessor weakened his practice declined, until when I purchased it from him it had sunk from twelve hundred to little more than three hundred a year. I had confidence, however, in my own youth and energy,5 and was convinced that in a very few years the concern would be as flourishing as ever.
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 64
