by Bill Peschel
“Aha,” he cried, betraying no little nervousness. “You are not taking up literary detection, I hope?”
“Yes, I am, Sir Francis,” I answered, “and my reputation is at stake. I wish to save it—”
“And cause me to lose mine by so doing!” he cried, impetuously, rising and pacing the room like a caged tiger.
“I don’t understand you, Sir Francis,” I said. “I certainly would not have you lose your reputation to save my own. Are you under suspicion in any literary controversy?” I added, innocently.
Bacon eyed me narrowly, and then sat down.
“Not that I am aware of,” he said, with a sigh of relief, “although—well, never mind. What is the mystery you wish to solve?”
The action had begun sooner than I had expected. It was clear that his lordship was much perturbed at the intrusion of myself into his affairs, and so, to throw him off the scent, instead of asking him frankly the question, “Did you, or did you not write Shakespeare’s plays,” as I had come to do, I answered, choosing my words by the merest chance, “That of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
If I had thrown a bomb into the middle of the library, the effect could not have been more dramatic. Bacon jumped up as if he had been shot, but I paid no attention, going on with my question calmly.
“Was that story romance or realism?”
“You have the subtlety of the serpent, Mr. Shylock Homes,” he answered, with difficulty regaining his composure. “Why do you ask me, of all men, that question?”
“Because,” said I, a great light dawning upon my mind, “I thought you, of all men, could tell me.”
“But why? Why? Why? Why?” he cried, the reiterated “whys” rising in inflection until they ended in a shriek.
Unconsciously, I had struck a vein of rich ore, and my future course revealed itself to me on the instant.
“Because,” I said, “because you, of all men, should know—having tried the same scheme yourself.”
The pallor that spread over his countenance was deadly, and he sank back limp in his chair, but, as with a sudden resolve, he straightened up again and became strong.
“Great Heavens, Homes, where have you heard this?” he implored.
“Oh, just a little coterie to which I belonged in London used to take that theory,” I lied, “and it found so general an acceptance among us that our friends and our friends’ friends that I had supposed that by this time it was all over.”
“You are retained by?” he queried.
“Sorosis,” said I.
“And your fee—I will double it, Mr. Shylock Homes, if you will call off.”
“I am incorruptible, Sir Francis,” said I, rising, with a mock show of anger, “and I bid you good evening.”
“Don’t leave me in anger, Mr. Homes,” he pleaded, holding out his hand, “I have long admired you and your work, and was frankly delighted when I received your card. My unfortunate suggestion as to your fee, I deeply regret. I, of course, know that you could not be corrupted, but I so deprecate the prolongation of the controversy as to my connection with—er—Shakespeare’s works, that I forgot myself.”
“Don’t mention it, Sir Francis,” I replied, accepting his proffered hand. “I understand. And to show you that I have no ill feelings, I wish you would take luncheon with me next Wednesday.”
He fell into the trap at once. “I shall be delighted,” he said.
“And to set forever at rest this absurd theory as to you and Shakespeare being another case of Jekyll and Hyde, I’ll ask him, too. If you are both there, you cannot, of course, be the same man, you see.”
Bacon tottered and almost fell as I spoke, but he soon recovered his equilibrium.
“I—I will see that he accepts,” he said huskily.
“Thank you,” said I, and took my departure.
Upon my return to my office, I dispatched a note to Shakespeare bidding him to the feast of Wednesday, and was somewhat taken aback, in view of my theory, to receive an immediate acceptance. When I left Lord Bacon, I was morally convinced that I had fallen upon the right solution of the mystery, but if this were so, how could both Shakespeare and Bacon be present at my luncheon simultaneously?
It perplexed me much, and, seeing no way out of the mystery, I dismissed the whole matter from my mind and sat down to await developments.
Wednesday came, and at the appointed hour both guests arrived, walking in arm in arm and chatting away as amiably as if there had never been a fierce battle raging between their followers for the greatest literary honors the world has to bestow. I was more than ever puzzled, when I shook them by the hand and made them welcome at my table, but it was none the less clear that there was some mystery to which they were both a party, for Bacon was excessively nervous all through the luncheon, and Shakespeare perspired as freely as though he were Damocles sitting beneath a suspended sword.
Moreover, Bacon was loath to let Shakespeare open his mouth, save to take in food and drink. He talked incessantly, and, at times, so vigorously that I wondered if he were in his right mind. Nor was there about Shakespeare any of the bonhomie that I had heard was so characteristic of the man, and, when the luncheon was over, instead of feeling that I had known him all my life, I really felt as if I knew him less well than when we had first sat down at table.
Still, there they were, both of them, and my theory must fall in the face of the fact, unless! Ah! That unless! It saved the day for Shylock Homes, for it bade me pursue the same line of inquiry even in the face of certain defeat.
Turning the conversation upon certain political schemers and their plans, I ventured the Shakespearean quotation:—
“Excellent! I smell a device!”
Bacon was about to respond, when Shakespeare growled forth.
“You don’t smell advice, do you, Mr. Homes? Your English language is so—”
Bacon upset his coffee in Shakespeare’s lap, to divert the bard, and set his tongue wagging on other lines, with which subterfuge I fell in most readily, but it was too late. Evidently there was something wrong with this Shakespeare who protested against his own periods and ventured the beginnings of an assault upon his own language. I did, indeed, smell a device but for the moment pursued it no further.
“I must lull them into a sense of security,” I thought, “and maybe then all will become clear.”
How well I did so is evidenced by the fact that when we parted it was with the distinct promise that Shakespeare and I were to spend the following Sunday at Noxmere with Bacon. I was glad, indeed, of the invitation, for my suspicions were becoming so great that all the powers of Hades could not now have diverted me from the mystery I had undertaken to solve. Entirely apart from the interest I was beginning to take in it, it would never do, even from a professional point of view, to give up now or to let Bacon deceive me as he appeared trying to do, and, as I looked back upon the luncheon and recalled several seemingly insignificant little details, I felt pretty certain that there was something very strange about Shakespeare. He preferred absinthe to ale, for one thing; he questioned the use of terms in one of his own phrases; had no good stories to tell, and was very far from being the roystering companion his friends had cracked him up to be. A day in the country might reveal the true inwardness of certain things that just now baffled me, and I accepted with alacrity. Not so Shakespeare, who betrayed considerable reluctance to be one of the party, but, partly by persuasion, and partly, I could see, by intimidation, he was won over.
The next day I called upon my friend, Henry Jekyll, with whom I had been on intimate relations in London the year he and I sprang almost simultaneously into our enviable notoriety. I told him frankly the position in which I was placed, and what I suspected, and adjured him, if he were my friend, to give me the prescription by which he transformed himself into Hyde, and then from Hyde back to Jekyll again.
At first, he refused me point-blank.
“You will use it on yourself, Homes, and if you do, it will ruin you,” he said.
“I swear to you that I will not, Jekyll,” I replied. “You know the value of my word.”
“But—” he persisted.
“Do you want me to be made the laughing stock of all Hades?” I cried. “As I surely shall be if I fail in this enterprise.”
“I know, Homes,” said he. “But—”
“It is the only favor I have ever asked of you, Henry Jekyll,” said I. “And I beg to recall to your mind that I knew the truth of your double existence in London when Hyde murdered Sir Danvers Carew. Did I betray you when your betrayal would have made my fortune?”
“It is yours,” he cried, as, seizing a prescription blank from the table, he wrote down the required formula.
I had the powder in my pocket the following Sunday upon my arrival at Noxmere. The day passed pleasantly, and Shakespeare proved a charming companion—rather too much given to reciting lines from his own works, perhaps, but full of geniality and quite like the man I had expected to find him. Indeed, had his manner at the luncheon been the same as that which he displayed at Noxmere, I should have pursued the Jekyll and Hyde theory no further. But now I refused to cast suspicion aside without the supremest test of trying Jekyll’s powders on Bacon.
All day long, I avoided allusion to my professional work, and by nightfall both Bacon and Shakespeare were so thoroughly convinced that they had thrown me off the scent that they became frankly and facetiously jocular. I bided my time until the nightcap hour came, and then, in order to put my plan into operation, suggested that I be allowed to mix a cocktail for the company.
“I learned the art from an American friend,” I said, “and I assure you, my Lord, and you, too, William Shakespeare, when you have swallowed your first Martini you will say that you’ve never had a drink before.”
“Wassail to the Martini,” cried Bacon joyously.
“All hail the queue de coq,” roared Shakespeare jovially—a remark which caused Bacon to frown and Shakespeare to turn pale. What had the “Bard of Avon” to do, indeed, with the French language? I said nothing, whatever, proceeding at once to the making of the mixture, and into Bacon’s glass I slipped the powder Henry Jekyll had given me. And we all drank, and then—
Do you remember Dr. Lanyon’s narrative in Stevenson’s stirring account of Jekyll’s fall, in which he describes what happened to Mr. Hyde when he had swallowed the potion? His words, as I remember them, ran as follows:—
“He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed. He reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth, and as I looked there came, I thought, a change—he seemed to swell, his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter, and the next moment I had sprung to my feet and leaped against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.
“‘Oh, God,’ I screamed, and ‘Oh, God,’ again and again, for there, before my eyes pale and shaken and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death, there stood Henry Jekyll!”
The same scene was enacted in the study of Francis Bacon. He, too, like Hyde, drained the contents of the glass at a gulp. He, too, reeled, staggered, and clutched and held on to the table, staring with injected eyes, and gasping with open mouth. And over him, also, came a change in which his face turned suddenly black, and the features melted and altered.
Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, faded in a mist of horror, and out of it emerged, pale, palsied and shattered for the moment, no less a person than William Shakespeare himself, while, seated opposite, gaping in horrified wonderment sat another Shakespeare, who gasped, and choked and gripped and groaned, staring the real in the eye and powerless for the instant to move. I stood back in the shadow of the mantel, watching both, when suddenly the spurious Shakespeare, with a shriek, sprang madly to his feet and plunged toward the door. By a quick move I intercepted him.
“We have solved the old mystery—now for the new!” I cried. “Who are you?”
“I beg of you,” he began, whereupon I seized him by the goatee, which, being false, came off in my hand, and with it the rest of the disguise, wig, mustache and all.
It was M. Lecoq.
“I—I paid him for this, Mr. Homes!” gasped Bacon, or, rather, Shakespeare, as he now was. “Do not blame M. Lecoq for this—”
“He may go,” said I, “I have only to deal with you.”
And Lecoq shrank from the room and disappeared into the night.
“Well, Lord Bacon,” said I, addressing the poor creature before me. “I have discovered the secret of the centuries. It is you who are the author of Shakespeare’s plays.”
“In a sense—as Shakespeare I—I—wrote them, yes.”
“So that I may report—”
“I do not know!” he moaned. “I am broken, Mr. Homes, absolutely broken, in spirit. To have this known—”
“It never will be, Lord Bacon,” said I. “At least not here. I shall publish my report only in the upper world, and the books of that sphere have no circulation in this.”
“And you will conclude?”
“There is but one conclusion, Lord Bacon. William Shakespeare wrote his own works. You backed him. I shall so report to Sorosis, and the ladies may take it as final or leave it.”
And so I left him. True to my promise, this story had not been circulated in Hades, and I rejoice to say, that, based upon my report to the committee, the Society of Sorosis of Cimmeria has voted by 369 to 1 that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
The negative vote was cast by Anne Hathaway, who observed that she did not wish to incriminate her husband until she had seen the stuff.
Sherlock Holmes Boards a Pirate Craft
Anonymous
This appeared in the April 11 issue of Snap-Shots, a humor magazine that reprinted articles from the American papers Puck, Life, and Judge. Its publisher was James Henderson, a Scotsman who moved from publishing newspapers in Glasgow to humorous newspapers in London, including Funny Folks, the first British comic book, and Scraps, which published “The Adventure of the Pink Pearl,” above.
Intent listeners detected a low moan.
“Hist!” said the pirate chief.
And every pirate hissed.
Far, far down in the hold was heard the tremendous moan of a captive damsel.
Things had come to such a pass as follows: The long, low, black, rakish-looking craft lay in the offing, manned by her swarthy pirate crew, and her scuppers ran with gore, in which the pirates washed their hands when they thought they needed it; for the notorious “Mary Ann” was not the romantic pirate craft of nursery fiction, but the pitiless and cruel sea marauder of uncompromising fact.
She flew the Jolly Roger at her mast-head, and she was armed to the teeth. Her captain—a dastardly Spaniard, whose long black hair had given rise to our expression “The Spanish Mane”—was also armed to the teeth, of which he had thirty-eight, each one loaded with the gold of captured galleons. (This unique fact has given rise to that other modern expression, “loaded to the muzzle”). His swarthy and desperate crew was never far behind him in this respect.
But now to the fair captive and her moan.
Far, far down in the hold (as we have said) she lay, smoking strong shag tobacco in her trusty briar, and tremulously moaning at intervals. Her features were temporarily obscured by a tilted stein, but a tell-tale hypodermic needle was sticking carelessly in her forearm, and the Hound of the Baskervilles lay phosphorescently at her feet and licked her hand whenever he thought it need—But enough!
You have doubtlessly already pierced the maid’s disguise and perceived that the villainous dastards on the upper deck will have to deal with the redoubtable Sherlock Holmes himself. Misguided men! They were about to raffle for her, little knowing that she had purposely contrived her capture for their destruction.
So now we are again at our starting point, for after the pirate chief had remarked “Hist!” on hearing th
e tremulous moan which we have already mentioned, he sent two of his cut-throat minions to bring the moaner on deck for raffling purposes.
She came, and there was something queenly in her regal gait. Even the hardened members of the Criminal Club, who composed that desperate crew, were awed to silence by the dazzling beauty of her girlish innocence.
In fact, Sherlock’s disguise was a triumph. At last, she raised her delicate white hand and spoke.
“Gentlemen,” she asked, in accents low and deceitful, “am I indeed to be raffled for?”
“Madame, you are,” replied the pirate captain, with courtly politeness, “and I trust that you will fall to my lot as a blushing bride.”
Sherlock sighed.
“Alas!” she said, with tears in her voice, “I am not worthy. I am poor and disguised—I mean despised—and can bring you no fit dowry save my youthful face. But stay! Hast heard of Captain Kidd?”
“We have,” said the cut-throats.
Sherlock drew a wrinkled chart from her bosom.
“Then look,” she said. “Here is the map of the whereabouts of his buried treasure. Upon yon tender island fringed with green lies hid a fortune for each man of you. That is my dowry.”
The marauders of the sea all cheered and urged her to read them the cipher of the chart. Lack of space prevents its unabridged reproduction in these columns, but we will quote enough to show that pirates are simple folk and were as children in the hands of guily, wily Sherlock and his machinations. Thus ran the chart:
Toe finde ye munney I hav burned, goe toe ye first tree u see & clime itt until u are verry tired. Then looke around u in ye leafey foliage, & if u doe not finde a needel itt is not y’r faulte, for itt is ye wronge tre. Butte doe not be discurridged. Keepe coole, & when ye seconde winde comes to u, clime ye right tre, finde ye needel, & holde itt in ye right hande, lookeing carefullie atte ye grounde through ye left eye of ye needel. Were y’r glance strykes is ye treasure. Digge twentie feete down for ye sake of ye exercise, then fill uppe ye excavation & digge sum more. U canne keepe wot u canne finde.—Y’re, with affexion,
