“How blind I have been!”48
“The facts of the case, as far as I have worked them out, are these: This Joseph Harrison entered the office through the Charles Street door, and knowing his way he walked straight into your room the instant after you left it. Finding no one there he promptly rang the bell, and at the instant that he did so his eyes caught the paper upon the table. A glance showed him that chance had put in his way a State document of immense value, and in an instant he had thrust it into his pocket and was gone. A few minutes elapsed, as you remember, before the sleepy commissionaire drew your attention to the bell, and those were just enough to give the thief time to make his escape.
“He made his way to Woking by the first train, and, having examined his booty and assured himself that it really was of immense value, he had concealed it in what he thought was a very safe place, with the intention of taking it out again in a day or two, and carrying it to the French embassy, or wherever he thought that a long price was to be had. Then came your sudden return. He, without a moment’s warning, was bundled out of his room, and from that time onward there were always at least two of you there to prevent him from regaining his treasure. The situation to him must have been a maddening one. But at last he thought he saw his chance. He tried to steal in, but was baffled by your wakefulness. You may remember that you did not take your usual draught that night.”
“I remember.”
“I fancy that he had taken steps to make that draught efficacious, and that he quite relied upon your being unconscious. Of course, I understood that he would repeat the attempt whenever it could be done with safety. Your leaving the room gave him the chance he wanted. I kept Miss Harrison in it all day so that he might not anticipate us. Then, having given him the idea that the coast was clear, I kept guard as I have described. I already knew that the papers were probably in the room, but I had no desire to rip up all the planking and skirting in search of them. I let him take them, therefore, from the hiding-place, and so saved myself an infinity of trouble. Is there any other point which I can make clear?”
“Why did he try the window on the first occasion,” I asked, “when he might have entered by the door?”
“In reaching the door he would have to pass seven bedrooms. On the other hand, he could get out on to the lawn with ease. Anything else?”
“You do not think,” asked Phelps, “that he had any murderous intention? The knife was only meant as a tool.”
“It may be so,” answered Holmes, shrugging his shoulders. “I can only say for certain that Mr. Joseph Harrison is a gentleman to whose mercy I should be extremely unwilling to trust.”
“Is there any other point which I can make clear?”
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1893
1“The Naval Treaty” was published in two parts in the Strand Magazine in October and November 1893 and in Harper’s Weekly (New York) on October 14 and 21, 1893.
2If the description of “specialist” means a private detective, von Waldbaum joins the elite company of only three other “competitors” mentioned by name in the Canon: Barker (“The Retired Colourman”), Le Brun (“The Illustrious Client”), and François Le Villard (Sign of the Four). These men are all, of course, inferior to Holmes: Barker (his “hated rival on the Surrey shore”) does “only what [Holmes] told him” in their joint case; all that is known of Le Brun is that the Baron Gruner (“The Illustrious Client”) utterly defeated him; and Villard is described as “deficient” but is worshipful of Holmes.
3A story entitled “The Adventure of the Second Stain” was recorded by Watson and published in the Strand Magazine (December 1904) and Collier’s Weekly (January 28, 1905). One may search the story in vain for any mention of Fritz von Waldbaum or Monsieur Dubuque or for the “implication” of “many” of the “first families of the kingdom” (beyond, that is, that of Trelawney Hope). To confuse matters further, in “The Yellow Face” (published in February 1893), Watson refers to an “affair of ‘the second stain.’ ”
Somewhat unconvincingly, Anatole Chujoy asserts that the published version of “The Second Stain” was edited by Holmes to eliminate the spy hunt that followed it. “Watson, of course, had not expected that Holmes would censor The Second Stain; he had never done so before. Hence the apparent discrepancy between the reference to the story in The Naval Treaty and the story itself.” Yet Chujoy fails to explain why the story that was published took place in autumn (not, as Watson states here, in July) and featured Watson living as a bachelor on Baker Street. William S. Baring-Gould further punctures Chujoy’s argument by noting that Watson has been uncharacteristically specific about the date of this “Adventure of the Second Stain,” an effort that seems superfluous were he attempting to obscure the real facts. Thus it appears that, unlikely as it sounds, Holmes handled two separate cases that involved the significance of a second stain.
4David R. McCallister makes a case for the “school” as the British Public School of St. Mary’s at Winchester, commonly known as Winchester College. One of the elite “Clarendon Schools,” Winchester best fits the Canonical clues for its location, its lack of rugby, and its utilization of the “Division” system (which permitted men of the same age to be separated in classes, as Phelps and Watson apparently were). McCallister amasses a wealth of evidence, including enrollment of several Phelpses and Watsons over the years, but surely the most interesting point is his suggestion that Holmes abstained from public involvement in the “Jack the Ripper” case out of allegiance to Watson: Scotland Yard’s leading candidate for the killer was Montague John Druitt, a Winchester graduate. William S. Baring-Gould, in Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, designates Wellington College, Hampshire, without analysis, while Ian McQueen concurs with Winchester.
5The Conservative party, at this time, reigned supreme over England’s political hierarchy, having evolved over a complicated history of ideologies, loyalties, even names. Britain’s first political parties, the Whigs and the Tories, developed in the late 1600s during the effort to exclude the Duke of York (later James II), a Roman Catholic, from the line of succession. The Presbyterian Whigs opposed the duke and later advocated a greater role for Parliament; the Tories supported James and believed in the right of divine monarchy. As the power of the monarchy diminished, the Whigs came to represent the interests of wealthy landowners and merchants; the Tories the landed gentry, the Church of England, and British isolationism.
The Tories transformed into the Conservative party after 1830, when John Wilson Croker described the faction with that term in the Quarterly Review. (Conservatives may still be referred to as Tories, but the Whigs were subsumed by the emerging Liberal party—which eventually disintegrated and gave way to the Labour party in the early twentieth century.) Out of favor in a time of anti-imperialism, Conservatives weathered a fallow period of three decades before being brought triumphantly back to prominence by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1868, 1874–1880), who saw the need for the party to reach out to a broader populace and encourage social reform. He did this in large part by leading passage of the surprising (for the elitist Tories) Reform Act of 1867, which more than doubled the electorate when previously only one out of every six adult males was able to vote. Disraeli’s courting of the middle and working classes was a master stroke, and it paid off handsomely; as A. N. Wilson reports, “Conservatism, of a sort, was the dominant political creed of the second half of Victoria’s reign.”
6O. F. Grazebrook, in his Studies in Sherlock Holmes, II: Politics and Premiers, identifies Lord Holdhurst with the Conservative Lord Salisbury, who was prime minister in 1888, when the events of “The Naval Treaty” occurred. (In all, Salisbury served three terms from 1885 to 1902, and was also foreign minister four times.) Grazebrook amasses pieces of circumstantial evidence to prove his case, including Salisbury’s notoriety for untidy boots! Most scholars conclude that the disguised “Lord Bellinger” of “The Second Stain” and “Lord Holdhurst” must be the same individual and opt for Salisbury for
both. However, Jon Lellenberg, quoting official government papers, conclusively identifies Lord Bellinger as William Ewart Gladstone, the four-time Liberal prime minister. It is difficult to square this identification with the description of Lord Holdhurst as a Conservative. F. E. Morgan also disagrees with the identification of Lord Salisbury, arguing that instead of the Foreign Office, the agency involved was really the Admiralty, and “Salisbury” was Lord George Hamilton, First Lord of the Admiralty.
7Little wonder, for the milieu of the elite English public school—that bastion of the upper class and of good breeding—was notorious for submitting its pupils to every sort of childhood torture, and more. Fighting and bullying were rampant, as was an atmosphere of authoritarianism that fostered hierarchical cruelties such as flogging, caning, and sexual molestation. In flogging their students, historian Peter Gay writes, some headmasters were perhaps “only gratifying their barely suppressed sexual needs in the guise of penalizing absentmindedness, poor study habits, a missed lesson, an insubordinate look—or reached for the rod for no discernible reason at all.” Headmasters whose sexual indiscretions caught up with them frequently were asked quietly to “retire”; and it often seemed that the public schools were concerned less with educating their students than with attempting to suppress their individuality. As A. N. Wilson marvels, “One of the mysteries of English life, from the 1820s to the present day, is why otherwise kind parents were prepared to entrust much-loved children to the rigours of boarding-school education.” Yet the schoolboy’s torment was literature’s gain. Wilson goes on to write that the “school story” (Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Jane Eyre, Nicholas Nickleby, and others) was a major contribution to Victorian letters, noting, “There are no Elizabethan or Jacobean tragedies about school.”
8Chase.
9Lord Donegall translates for “Trans-Atlantic” researchers: “What it means is that Watson and his Teddy-Boy friends chased young ‘Tadpole’ Phelps round the play-ground and bashed him about with cricket-stumps—which makes it the more peculiar that Percy should have come to John H. with his subsequent troubles!” (For those still confused, a wicket—in the game of cricket—consists of three wooden stumps, or stakes, each approximately two feet tall and one inch wide. Two shorter pieces of wood, called bails, are placed atop the stumps. The bowler throws the ball toward the wicket, attempting to hit the wicket such that the bails fall off; the batter defends the wicket by swinging his or her bat. Presumably, young Watson and his friends used not the entire wicket but, as Donegall guesses, merely the stumps, which, for a mischievous schoolboy, might seem custom-made to inflict damage.)
10A vessel or chamber in which substances are distilled or decomposed by heat.
11Named after Robert Bunsen, the German chemist who introduced (but did not invent) it in 1855, the Bunsen burner combines a hollow metal tube with a valve at the base that allows for regulation of the supply of air. Flammable gas and air together are forced upward through the tube and then lit to produce a hot flame. The principles behind the Bunsen burner paved the way for the invention of the gas-stove burner and the gas furnace.
12A soft slipper with a pointed toe, often embroidered and with a leather sole, emanating from Persia (now Iran) or Turkey. Although legendary, Holmes’s use of the Persian slipper as a receptacle for tobacco is mentioned only in “The Empty House,” “The Illustrious Client,” “The Musgrave Ritual,” and “The Naval Treaty.”
13Howard Brody suggests that this “commonplace little murder” is a poisoning by carbolic acid of Mary Sutherland, the hapless typist of “A Case of Identity,” whose story chronologists date to sometime just before the events in “The Naval Treaty.” Brody further pins the deed on Sutherland’s duplicitous stepfather James Windibank, fulfilling Holmes’s prophecy of his future (“That fellow will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallow”). If this theory is correct, however, Holmes surprisingly shows no sign of any remorse here for his failure to warn Ms. Sutherland about Windibank’s potential to cause her still more harm.
14Holmes called himself one in “The Reigate Squires.”
15During their visit to Woking, a residential suburb in Surrey, Holmes and Watson might not only have passed England’s first crematorium (officially opened in 1885) but also encountered construction of a mosque of future renown. It was erected in 1889 for an intended institute of Oriental culture; but when those plans fell through, the mosque was converted into a place of worship in 1913, drawing Muslims to Woking from all over Britain.
16Watson’s moustache is mentioned again in “Charles Augustus Milverton” and “The Red Circle.” Paget generally depicts the moustache as thick, with a slight taper toward the ends, a style adopted by both David Burke and Edward Hardwicke in the Granada Television productions of the Canon. Nigel Bruce, paired with Basil Rathbone in a long series of Fox and Universal Films in the 1930s and 1940s, wore much the same style.
17Fletcher Pratt observes that there was a secret treaty between England and Italy entered into in 1887.
18It is surprising that the British Foreign Office had no duplicating machines. While the photostatic process had not been invented, a variety of letter copying presses, roller copiers, and letter copying baths had proliferated since the patenting of a copying press by James Watt in 1780. In Bureaucracy (circa 1830), a story set in Paris in 1823, Balzac wrote of a government office worker who carried a handwritten memorandum “to an autographic printing house, where he obtained two pressed copies,” and of another office worker who was “considering whether these autographic presses could not be made to do the work of copying clerks.”
19In 1879, Germany and Austria-Hungary created a secret alliance as a defensive tactic against Russia. Italy joined the two in May 1882, out of anger at France over its invasion of Tunisia, and thus the Triple Alliance was born. In this delicate coalition (which eventually came to include Serbia and Romania), Italy was always something of an ambivalent outsider, given its rivalry with Austria-Hungary over the Balkans. Nonetheless, the treaty was periodically renewed until 1914 when Italy, contrary to the terms of the alliance, declared neutrality in World War I and ultimately joined the Allies to oppose its former conspirators.
20While French is the traditional language of diplomacy, it is curious that a treaty between Britain and Italy should be written in French.
21A charwoman was a cleaning woman. The word “char” has nothing to do with charcoal; rather, it derives from the Old English cierr, meaning turn (that is, a turn of work). After the term made its way across the Atlantic, it was modified into the uniquely American word “chore.”
22The word “clock” appears in the American editions of the Canon in lieu of the word “church.”
23There are two chiming clocks in the neighbourhood of Charles Street, explains Michael Harrison in In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes—the church clock at St. Margaret’s and the clock at Westminster Abbey. However, only a few yards from those clocks is Big Ben, whose chimes drown out its neighbours’. “It is extraordinary,” Harrison observes, “not only that Phelps should have mentioned the chiming of ‘a neighbouring church’ when Big Ben was practically overhead, but that Holmes should not have remarked upon this.”
24The stiff cuff common in Victorian times. It was not as if Holmes had no notebook (see The Sign of Four). Watson observes that Dr. Mortimer used his shirtcuff similarly in The Hound of the Baskervilles, but the context suggests that Watson thought it a sign of untidiness and absentmindedness.
25Be that as it may, the activities of the commissionaire’s wife, who has been hurrying about on the street, remain suspect. D. Martin Dakin puzzles over the matter and concludes that “[h]er movements are altogether wrapped in mystery. What was she doing between the time she came to Percy’s room and the time he left? Clearly not making the coffee.”
26“List” here means a strip of cloth.
27In modern slang, the “repo men.”
28This could not have been the
intended eleven o’clock train that Phelps had earlier hoped to catch. The theft occurred shortly before quarter to ten (Phelps notes the chimes), after which Phelps and the commissionaire searched the premises—a process that may have occupied fifteen minutes to a half-hour: “The alarm had reached Scotland Yard by this time.” After Detective Forbes’s appearance, Phelps and Forbes took a hansom to the Tangey residence, reaching it “in half an hour.” “About ten minutes later,” the charwoman appeared. The examination of her residence and the return to Scotland Yard might have taken forty-five minutes, all told, and the search of Mrs. Tangey herself, another ten minutes. Phelps was then escorted to Waterloo. Thus the earliest Phelps could have possibly caught a train would be one hour and fifty minutes after the chimes, or about half-past eleven.
29Surprisingly, no one has suggested any connection with the Ferriers of A Study in Scarlet.
30French Protestants, who suffered continued persecution throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A prime example is the massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, in which the attempted assassination of Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny (ordered by Catherine de’ Medici, the mother of Charles IX) led to a royal plot to kill all of the Huguenot leaders. The massacre spun out of control, and from August to October of 1572, more than 3,000 Protestants were killed in Paris alone. (Some estimates put the number of those killed throughout France at 70,000.) Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes in 1598 gave the Huguenots some degree of religious and political freedom, but when Louis XIV revoked the edict in 1685, more than 400,000 Huguenots abandoned France to settle in Britain, Prussia, the Netherlands, and the United States.
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 91
