“There’s one thing,” said I, as we walked down to the station; “if the husband’s name was James, and the other was Henry, what was this talk about David?”
“That one word, my dear Watson, should have told me the whole story had I been the ideal reasoner which you are so fond of depicting. It was evidently a term of reproach.”
“Of reproach?”
“Yes, David strayed a little occasionally, you know, and on one occasion in the same direction as Sergeant James Barclay. You remember the small affair of Uriah and Bathsheba? My Biblical knowledge is a trifle rusty, I fear, but you will find the story in the first or second of Samuel.”26
“It was quite a simple case after all.”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1893
THE INDIAN MUTINY
THE Indian mutiny of 1857–1858, also known as the Sepoy Rebellion (“sepoy” being the term for native soldiers), was the ultimately unsuccessful uprising that grew out of increasing Indian resentment toward British westernization. Violence was sparked in early 1857 when sepoys in the Bengal army were issued the new Enfield rifles, whose cartridges, which could only be loaded by biting off one end, were rumoured to be greased with beef tallow and pork fat. Such a situation would have posed a grave religious insult to the army’s Hindus and Muslims, and many began to suspect the government of trying to convert them to Christianity.
It was only the latest in a list of grievances against a British government that, under the leadership of Governor General Lord Dalhousie, had reduced troop salaries, taken over property from Indian landowners, and spoken of upending the caste system by recruiting “cheaper,” lower-caste soldiers to replace the Brahmins and Rajputs then in service. By the time the governing East India Company ordered the cartridges greased with a more benign substance, it was too late for appeasement. On May 9, 1857, eighty-five sepoys at Meerut refused to use the rifles and were subsequently stripped of their uniforms, shackled, and marched off to prison to serve ten-year sentences. The next day, sepoys from three different units stormed the jail to release the imprisoned soldiers. In the ensuing melee, some fifty British men, women, and children were killed.
From there, the mutineers rode to Delhi. Simon Schama, in the third volume of his magisterial History of Britain, describes how in the moments before the violence, Harriet Tytler, the wife of the captain of the 38th Native Infantry, “could see there was something very wrong. Servants running about in a wild way, guns tearing down the main street. . . . What could it all mean?” Her French maid, Marie, responded, “Madame, this is a revolution.” Many European women and children who escaped Delhi were able to do so with the help of sympathetic sepoys, but others were less fortunate. More officers and their families were massacred, seemingly indiscriminately.
Terrible atrocities were committed on both sides. At Kanpur, a local ruler named Nana Sahib—perhaps seeking revenge over rent income that had been taken away from him—promised safe passage down the Ganges to a large group of European women and children. Once on board, the majority were shot, and several of the forty boats were set on fire; two hundred survivors were taken back to a former officer’s residence at Kanpur, where they were killed as well. The British desire for vengeance against those they referred to as “niggers” grew to a frenzy. As A. N. Wilson writes, “From the very first, the British decided to meet cruelty with redoubled cruelty, terror with terror, blood with blood.” There were reports, recounts Wilson, of Muslims smeared with pork fat before they were killed; Indians lashed to mouths of cannons and blown to pieces by grapeshot; women and children raped and then burnt alive; a bayoneted sepoy being roasted over a fire. Hundreds of Indians were executed by being shot from cannons.
In the end, after a lengthy siege of Lucknow, British troops were able to retake the city and finally bring the hostilities to an end. Peace was declared on July 8, 1858. One immediate result of the mutiny was the elimination of the East India Company, as well as an understanding that governing India effectively would require some consultation with Indians. For the next ninety years, India served under direct British rule, a period of time known as “the Raj.”
Less than three decades after the violence, the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1875–1889) contemplated the motives for rebellion by musing, “The truth seems to be that native opinion throughout India was in a ferment, predisposing men to believe the wildest stories, and to act precipitately upon their fears. . . . Repeated annexations, the spread of education, the appearance of the steam engine and the telegraph wire, all alike revealed a consistent determination to substitute an English for an Indian civilisation. The Bengal sepoys, especially, thought that they could see into the future farther than the rest of their countrymen. . . . They had everything to gain, and nothing to lose, by a revolution.”
1“The Crooked Man” was published in the Strand Magazine in July 1893, in Harper’s Weekly (New York) on July 8, 1893, and in the Strand Magazine (New York) in August 1893.
2The case is generally dated in 1888 or 1889 by chronologists (see Chronological Table), based on Watson’s few phrases here about his marriage to Mary Morstan, which occurred shortly after The Sign of Four, generally dated in 1888.
3Holmes implies that Watson by this time had readers, indicating that the case took place after the publication of A Study in Scarlet in December, 1887.
4The accommodating neighbour-doctor is named Anstruther in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” and is nameless in “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk” and “The Final Problem.”
5In American editions the Royal Munsters.
6See “The Indian Mutiny,” page 605, for a brief history.
7The American editors, who resisted the word “squire” in “The Reigate Squires,” here add “and queenly” to the description of Nancy Barclay.
8A metal guard placed before an open fire.
9“The Crooked Man” presents all of the classical elements of a “locked room” or “impossible crime” mystery, a locked room containing a murder victim with no apparent means of entry for the murderer. Edgar Allan Poe was the first modern writer to use this mystery form, in “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841). In 1852, Wilkie Collins utilised the device with great success in “A Terribly Strange Bed.” The first novel-length use was in Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery (1892).
The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing credits “The Speckled Band” (1891) as the only encounter of Holmes with a death occurring in a locked room, but in fact Holmes several times dealt with such cases. In The Sign of Four (1889), the body of Bartholomew Sholto is found in a locked room, but the mystery of entry of the murderer is quickly solved when, upon forcing the door, a gaping hole in the ceiling is discovered. In “The Empty House,” Holmes must solve the murder of Ronald Adair, found behind a locked door.
The “locked room” genre retained its popularity through many changes in detective fiction. Gaston Leroux, G. K. Chesterton, Melville Davisson Post, and S. S. Van Dine all employed the plot device in one or more stories. In the 1930s, John Dickson Carr (later a biographer of Arthur Conan Doyle) made the form his own, and in his 1935 novel The Hollow Man (U. S. title The Three Coffins), the detective Dr. Gideon Fell stops the action of the book to give a chapter-length lecture on the varieties of “locked room” mysteries.
10An official who assists in making up lists of eligible voters.
11A bar at a military post or camp.
12Notwithstanding their near-mythic status, the “Baker Street boys” or “Baker Street Irregulars” are mentioned only in A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and “The Crooked Man.” (Cartwright, who assisted Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, had actual, gainful employment as a district messenger.) Those who are named are Wiggins (A Study in Scarlet) and Simpson (“The Crooked Man”). It is tempting to identify the latter with Baldy Simpson, who is mentioned in “The Blanched Soldier” as having died in battle in South Africa sometime around 1900, alongside Godfrey Emsworth.
13Brewer’s Dicti
onary of Phrase and Fable defines them: “The houseless poor; street children. So called because, like the Arabs, they are nomads or wanderers with no settled home.”
14Usually, temporary quarters for troops; however, in India, the term refers to a permanent military station.
15Ian McQueen identifies Bhurtee as Allahabad, which was relieved by then-Colonel Neill in June 1857, on his advance to Kanpur (see note 20, below). However, Evan M. Wilson, in “Sherlock Holmes and the Indian Mutiny: Or, Where and What Was Bhurtee?—An Identification,” argues that “Bhurtee” is evidently Agra (the focus of The Sign of Four), based on the similar points of a fort under siege and a dried-up water obstacle. Agra was indeed a haven for Europeans during the Mutiny, but Neill did not “relieve” Agra except by his presence in the neighbourhood, and it would have been a long distance from Agra to the route of Neill’s column, either on its way to Benares (his first mission) or to Allahabad.
16A sergeant responsible for the duty (and honour) of attending regimental colours in the field.
17That is, destined to become a commissioned officer.
18Typically eight guns and their personnel.
19The Indian religion of Sikhism, combining elements of Islamic Sufism and Bhakti Hinduism, was founded in the late fifteenth century by the guru Nanak, who, after experiencing a vision of God, emerged from seclusion to pronounce, “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” To his followers he preached monotheism and meditation while rejecting idolatry, organized priesthood, and the caste system. Many of the stricter Sikh traditions—turbans, uncut hair and beards, the carrying of daggers—date back to the dominant order of Khalsa, originally a military fraternity founded in 1699 by Sikhism’s tenth (and last) guru.
A Sikh kingdom in the Punjab (in northwestern India) was established by Maharaja Rajit Singh in the early 1800s, but the violent military unrest that followed his death precipitated the Sikh Wars against the British, who succeeded in annexing the Punjab in 1849. Civility returned to the region under British administration, and Sikh soldiers subsequently made up a substantial portion of the British army in the Indian Mutiny (as they would in World War I). They were rewarded for their participation with lucrative land grants.
20General James George Neill (1810–1857) commanded the British army’s right wing in the advance from Kanpur to Lucknow. A. N. Wilson singles him out as an example of the British officer whose religious conviction manifested itself in vicious behaviour toward his Indian adversaries, largely in retribution for the gruesome massacre of British women and children at Kanpur. Not only did Neill carry out mass executions of Indians suspected of conspiring with rebels, but he also, according to Wilson, forced his captives at Kanpur to lick blood from the floor while they were whipped by soldiers. One of Neill’s majors wrote of stuffing pork and beef down a prisoner’s throat to “break his caste” before he was hung. Neill went on to lead a furious assault on Lucknow, where he was shot and killed as his men entered the city. He was honoured after his death with a knighthood and various memorials.
21Barclay’s betrayal seems exceedingly poorly thought-out, considering that Wood was endeavouring to bring desperately needed aid to a group that included Barclay himself and, presumably, Nancy Devoy. Perhaps jealousy clouded Barclay’s better judgement, as D. Martin Dakin observes: “Much good it would have done him to have got rid of his rival, if he and Nancy had both been killed by the mutineers.”
22Many of the mutineers and rebels, including the infamous Nana Sahib (who directed the massacre at Kanpur—see page 606), fled north after the fighting to take refuge in forests and swamps of the Nepalese Terai. An independent kingdom, Nepal nonetheless was only able to maintain civil relations with Britain through certain concessions, which included accepting a British envoy at Kathmandu and sending Gurkha troops to aid British forces in the mutiny. It was not until the end of 1859 that the refugees were finally swept out of the country and over the frontier into Tibet by a joint force of British troops led by Sir Colin Campbell (later Lord Clyde) and a numerous army of Gurkhas headed by Sir Jang Bahádur of Nepal.
23The town of Darjeeling had been purchased in 1835 from the kingdom of Sikkim, after an officer in the British East India Company happened upon the deserted town nestled at 7,000 feet up in the Sikkim Himalayas. Strategically well-located (close to the borders of Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan) and far more temperate than the sweltering plains below, it was developed as a hill station or sanitarium for British troops. Five years after the acquisition, Darjeeling’s first superintendent began experimenting with Chinese and Assam tea seeds in his backyard, leading eventually to the cultivation of the tea for which the region would become famous. If Wood had been hauled from India to Nepal to Tibet, it is not unlikely that he would find himself in the area just north of Darjeeling.
24“How is it possible,” asks Bruce Harris, “that Colonel Barclay’s coachman did not see Henry Wood?”
25Bruce Harris contends that Nancy killed her husband with his own club, passing out after striking him. Henry Wood, still in love with Nancy, would have gladly covered up her crime. But Holmes was not deceived, Harris believes. “Holmes’s stated interest was in seeing that justice was done. Colonel Barclay received his comeuppance.”
26In 2 Samuel, 11–13, David, the king of Israel, catches a glimpse of Uriah’s beautiful wife Bathsheba and sends for her while her husband is away fighting a war. Bathsheba becomes pregnant with David’s child, and the king calls Uriah home, plies him with food and wine, and encourages him to spend the night with his wife, hoping to shift responsibility for the child onto him. Yet when the loyal Uriah refuses to leave his king’s side, David sends him off to war again with secret instructions reading, “Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.” Uriah does, indeed, die in battle, and Bathsheba becomes David’s wife. Barclay, however, was not as willing as David to leave the matter to chance and so arranged for Woods’s capture.
In the Bible, unlike Mrs. Barclay, Bathsheba is never shown reacting to her new husband’s rôle in her first husband’s demise—indeed, nowhere is it stated that she ever learns the truth at all. One is tempted to wonder whether Holmes or Watson embroidered the tale of Barclay and Wood by inserting the references to “David,” thereby not only adding dimension to the character of the woman caught between two competing men, but also painting their story of jealousy and betrayal on a grander, more mythic scale. While King David was an immensely popular subject in Victorian times (indeed, the “Star of David” was not an official symbol relating to Judaism until adopted by the Zionist movement in 1897), it does not seem likely that the tale of Uriah would come so quickly to the lips of Nancy Barclay in the heat of learning of her husband’s perfidy.
THE RESIDENT PATIENT1
The text of “The Resident Patient” was badly mangled when the editors of the Memoirs deleted “The Cardboard Box” and moved its opening scene to Watson’s account of this case. Here it is restored to its original version from the Strand Magazine. When Holmes is called in by young Dr. Percy Trevelyan to uncover the mystery of his “resident patient” (that is, a patient who shares living quarters with the doctor, a practice in which Conan Doyle himself once engaged), Holmes discovers waters far deeper than those imagined by Trevelyan. Holmes does little “deducing” in the case, relying instead on his immense knowledge of the sensational literature of the era and his docket-like recollection of unsolved crimes. Because the case also reflects the trials of a young doctor building a practice—a subject sure to elicit the sympathies of Drs. John Watson and Arthur Conan Doyle—we may understand why the case was included in the Memoirs.
IN GLANCING OVER the somewhat incoherent series of memoirs with which I have endeavoured to illustrate a few of the mental peculiarities of my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have been struck by the difficulty which I have experienced in picking out examples which shall in every way answer my purpose. For in those cases in which Holmes has performed
some tour de force of analytical reasoning, and has demonstrated the value of his peculiar methods of investigation, the facts themselves have often been so slight or so commonplace that I could not feel justified in laying them before the public. On the other hand, it has frequently happened that he has been concerned in some research where the facts have been of the most remarkable and dramatic character, but where the share which he has himself taken in determining their causes has been less pronounced than I, as his biographer, could wish. The small matter which I have chronicled under the heading of A Study in Scarlet,2 and that other later one connected with the loss of the Gloria Scott, may serve as examples of this Scylla and Charybdis3 which are for ever threatening his historian. It may be that, in the business of which I am now about to write, the part which my friend played is not sufficiently accentuated; and yet the whole train of circumstances is so remarkable that I cannot bring myself to omit it entirely from this series.4
I cannot be sure of the exact date, for some of my memoranda upon the matter have been mislaid, but it must have been towards the end of the first year during which Holmes and I shared chambers in Baker Street. It was boisterous October weather, and we had both remained indoors all day, I because I feared with my shaken health to face the keen autumn wind, while he was deep in some of those abstruse chemical investigations which absorbed him utterly as long as he was engaged upon them. Towards evening, however, the breaking of a test-tube brought his research to a premature ending, and he sprang up from his chair with an exclamation of impatience and a clouded brow.
“A day’s work ruined, Watson,” said he, striding across to the window. “Ha! The stars are out and the wind has fallen. What do you say to a ramble through London?”
I was weary of our little sitting-room, and gladly acquiesced, muffling myself nose-high against the keen night air. For three hours we strolled about together, watching the ever-changing kaleidoscope of life as it ebbs and flows through Fleet Street and the Strand. Holmes had shaken off his temporary ill-humour, and his characteristic talk, with its keen observance of detail and subtle power of inference, held me amused and enthralled. It was ten o’clock before we reached Baker Street again. A brougham was waiting at our door.
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 80
