I picked up the envelope once again.
‘No, no, my dear fellow, not the envelope. I must suppose that you have long ago extracted all the information you are likely to get from that. I meant have you no comment to make upon my remarking on your perspicacity in pointing to the style of my correspondent’s hand.’
‘Why, no, Holmes. No, I think not. No, there is nothing more to be said about that. I think.’
‘Not even that undoubtedly the writer of the letter is a schoolboy?’
‘A schoolboy? But how . . .’
‘That educated hand, yet with many of the letters curiously unformed. Why, you have only to compare the capital H of Holmes with that of Hughes to observe the significant differences. No, undoubtedly my correspondent is still at school, and indeed not yet at any of our great public schools but a mere boy of no more than twelve. And, as you must know, the South Coast is greatly favoured by private scholastic establishments. Open the letter, Watson, and let us hear why a schoolboy wishes to consult Sherlock Holmes.’
Obediently I took up a paperknife and slit open the envelope, hoping the while, I must confess, that just once Holmes’s confident deductions might prove false. But a single glance at the address on the letter within confirmed him exactly in his surmise. ‘St George’s School, Hove,’ it was headed.
‘Read it, Watson. Read it.’
‘Dear Mr Holmes,’ I read. ‘All of us boys at St George’s are jolly interested in your cases, except that Dr Smyllie, our headmaster, forbids us to read about you. But, Mr Holmes, a fearful injustice has been done. He has said that our holiday for St George’s Day, which has been our right ever since the beginning of the world, will be cancelled unless someone owns up. But, Mr Holmes, nobody did it. Every chap in the school is certain of that. No one did it at all, and still he says our holiday will be cancelled. Your obedient servant, Phillip Hughes. P.S. It was spilling ink on his precious book, and why should any fellow do that?’
I laid down Master Hughes’s letter with tears of laughter in my eyes.
‘Upon my soul, Holmes,’ I said. ‘Here’s a case that will try your methods to the utmost.’
‘Yes, indeed, Watson. There are features in it, are there not, of considerable interest. I think a trip to the Sussex coast might prove distinctly stimulating.’
My laughter was quenched.
‘Surely,’ I said, ‘you cannot be serious?’
Yet already I knew from the look of deep preoccupation on my friend’s countenance that he did indeed fully intend to go down to Hove and investigate our young correspondent’s indignant complaint.
‘My dear Watson,’ he answered with some asperity. ‘If a council of schoolboys declares upon oath in a purely private communication that a certain event did not occur among them, you can take it as pretty much of a fact that that event did not happen. They know altogether too much about each other. There is only one circumstance I can think of that might prove an exception.’
‘And that is?’
He gave me a quick frown.
‘Why, if the deed in question should have been perpetrated by the writer of the letter himself, of course. And we can make certain of that only by speaking to the young man face to face.’
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I answered. ‘But all the same, a visit to Hove will take us most of a day if not more, and you have the business of the Bank of England oyster dinner still in hand.’
‘My dear Watson, an injustice has been done. Or almost certainly so. I hope I am not the man to allow any mere pecuniary considerations to stand in my way under such circumstances. St George’s Day is but two days hence. Have the goodness to look up a train to Brighton. We will go down this morning.’
I went at once to Bradshaw in its familiar place upon our shelves.
But I was not yet to tell Holmes how soon we could be off on this extraordinary errand. Before I had had time to run my finger down the Brighton departures column there entered our page, Billy, with upon the salver that he carried a single large visiting card.
Holmes picked it up and read it aloud.
‘Dr A. Smyllie, M.A., Ph.D., St George’s School for the Preliminary Education of Young Gentlemen, Hove, near Brighton, Sussex. Why, Watson, here is the very dominie under whose stern edict our young friend is suffering. Bring him up, Billy. Bring him up.’
In a few moments Master Hughes’s headmaster stood before us. He was not the sort of man I would have imagined a headmaster to be, even the headmaster of an establishment for twelve-year-olds. Far from being an imposing figure able to exert authority with a glance, he was reedy and undulating to a degree. Correctly enough dressed in frock-coat and striped trousers, he yet wore a loosely knotted cravat at his throat. His face was very pale, and he seemed more than a little agitated.
‘Mr Sherlock Holmes?’ he asked in a high-pitched, almost sqeaky, voice, turning not to Holmes but to myself.
I corrected his mistake, which seemed unduly to disconcert him, and introduced my friend.
Dr Smyllie extended a somewhat limp hand at the end of an extraordinarily long arm, and winced a little when Holmes took it in his firm grasp.
‘And what can I have the honour of doing for the poet of childhood?’ Holmes asked.
Upon Dr Smyllie’s pallid countenance there appeared a faint flush of pleasure.
‘You know my work, Mr Holmes? I had hardly dared to hope that a person of your—of your—of your direction in life would be aware of my few, humble efforts.’
‘You do yourself an injustice, Dr Smyllie,’ Holmes replied. ‘Who does not know those lines of yours that conclude so touchingly “Take up the spangled web of words ’
“‘Then lay it gently on my grave,”’ I completed the poem, surprised only that Holmes, so contemptous of the softer things of life, should be able to quote those verses ‘For My Infant Son’, often though they have been reprinted.
Now I understood why Holmes had addressed Dr Smyllie as ‘the poet of childhood’. For such Algernon Smyllie had been dubbed some thirty years earlier when his very successful volume of verse had first appeared, poems concerned with every tender aspect of a child’s life, of which the verses ‘To My Infant Son’ were the crown.
But now, it seemed, the young poet had become the mature schoolmaster. Algernon Smyllie had become Dr A. Smyllie, M.A., Ph. D. Yet he still looked, I thought to myself, more the sensitive poet than the awe-inspiring headmaster.
Indeed, faced with telling Holmes the reason for his visit, he positively hung his head and scraped at our Turkey carpet with the inside of his right foot, upon which, I saw, the boot buttons were mismatched at the top.
‘Now, sir,’ Holmes said encouragingly.
Dr Smyllie blushed again.
‘It is a trifling matter, Mr Holmes,’ he said.
Holmes’s lips flickered in the merest hint of a smile.
‘But trifling matters, as I have more than once explained to my friend, Dr Watson, can on occasion be of the utmost significance,’ he said.
Dr Smyllie stepped back a pace, and even glanced at the door as if he were contemplating immediate flight. But he succeeded in standing his ground at last.
‘No, no, Mr Holmes,’ he said, the words tumbling out of him. ‘No, indeed. I assure you, my dear sir, quite the contrary. Altogether the other way about. I would not have disturbed you at all, my dear sir, only that I happened to be passing this way and I thought—I thought . . .’
Holmes stayed silent, sucking at an empty pipe which he had picked up from the mantelpiece.
Dr Smyllie gave an immense swallow, the Adam’s apple in his long throat above that loosely tied cravat rising and falling.
‘No, my dear sir,’ he resumed, ‘I would have dismissed the matter by writing a mere note, perhaps not even by that, only it so happened that my business takes me past—er—your door and it—er—occurred to me to call and settle it with a few words.’
‘And the matter is?’ Holmes asked, with a certain sharpness.
&
nbsp; ‘Oh, nothing, sir. A mere trif—Nothing, sir, of any importance.’
‘But, nevertheless, since you have called upon us, it would be as well to unburden yourself of its substance.’
The willowy poet-headmaster blushed again at Holmes’s rebuke. But he did now contrive to bring out what it was that had brought him to call.
‘Mr Holmes,’ he said, ‘I have reason to believe that one of my pupils—I assure you, sir, that they are not generally so disgracefully behaved—that one of my pupils may have had the temerity to address a letter to your good self. A letter concerning a trifling—that is, the merest matter of necessary discipline. And happening, as I say, to be passing, I—er—thought I would merely call in to—to assure you, sir, that you need do nothing in the matter. Nothing at all, sir. I merely wished to offer you an apology, as it were. An apology on behalf of—er—St George’s School.’
Holmes replaced his pipe upon the mantelpiece and gave our visitor a cool nod.
‘If you will excuse me one moment, Dr Smyllie,’ he said. ‘I have a small domestic matter to attend to. A word with our landlady about my arrangements for the day. She needs to know in good time in order to do her marketing.’ He left the room, quietly closing the door behind him, and Dr Smyllie and I stood facing each other in a somewhat awkward silence. I felt myself a little annoyed with my friend. He did not usually leave me with a client in this manner, and nor was it often his custom to consult so much Mrs Hudson’s convenience. However, he returned before I had had time to do more than offer our visitor some few comments on the prevailing weather, and he at once resumed the consultation.
‘I take it then, sir,’ he said to Dr Smyllie, ‘that this extempore visit was with the intention simply of reassuring me that I need take no particular notice of any communication I might receive from any of your pupils?’
‘Exactly so, sir. Exactly so.’
Holmes regarded the schoolmaster-poet with an expression of the utmost seriousness.
‘Then, sir, you may take it that the object of your visit has been thoroughly achieved,’ he said.
Dr Smyllie bowed and thanked Holmes with, I thought, perhaps more effusiveness than was necessary, and in a few minutes he had left us.
‘Well, Watson,’ Holmes said, as our visitor’s tread could be heard descending the stairs, ‘have you any observations to make?’
I pondered.
‘I hardly think so,’ I replied. ‘Except perhaps that Dr Smyllie need hardly have put himself out even to the extent of halting his cab outside our door to tell us that young Hughes’s letter is, after all, a very trifling—that is, not a matter of great importance.’
‘You think so? But, tell me, did you notice anything more about our poet of childhood?’
‘Why, no. No. Unless perhaps that his right boot was mis-buttoned.’
‘Good, Watson. I knew I could rely upon you to seize on the significant detail.’
‘Significant, Holmes?’
‘Why, surely so. When a person comes to our rooms here all the way from the Sussex coast while we are at breakfast, and, though correctly dressed, appears with a mis-buttoned boot and with a small shaving cut upon his right cheek, something which I fear you failed to notice, then there is only one conclusion to be drawn.’
‘And that is?’
‘That he left home in a very great hurry precisely in order to see myself as soon as he possibly could.’
‘But, no, Holmes,’ I could not help expostulating. ‘He told us that he had an appointment in town elsewhere. No doubt it was for an early hour and he is already on his way there again.’
‘You think so? Well, perhaps we shall soon see.’
At that moment Billy came back into the room, a look of sharp triumph on his always eager face.
‘Victoria Station, Mr Holmes, sir,’ he announced without preliminary.
‘There you are, Watson.’
‘But I don’t quite understand. What about Victoria Station?’
‘That it was to there that Dr Smyllie directed his cab,’ Holmes replied. ‘I made an opportunity to leave the room and instruct Billy to wait out on the steps and overhear any directions our visitor might give. You surely did not think I was so concerned about our dinner tonight that I went out for that purpose?’
‘No, no. Of course not. So Dr Smyllie is returning directly to Hove. What do you see as the significance of that?’
‘Simply that he is unduly concerned that I should take no action as the result of that letter. Now, if what might seem to be a mere trifle caused him to go to so much trouble, I think we should make all haste to follow in his footsteps. You were consulting Bradshaw, I believe.’
Although Sherlock Holmes is a master of disguise, and I have frequently seen him so transformed that it has taken me no little time to recognize him even at close quarters, it has been seldom in the course of our adventures that he has called upon me to assume an appearance other than my own. At Hove, however, once we had found St George’s School and examined the neighbourhood round about, he did require me to adopt a disguise. So it was that I found myself on the afternoon of that day waiting in the road where the school stood, clad in a not altogether sweetsmelling coat belonging to the owner of a four-wheeler whom Holmes had persuaded for a consideration to lend us both vehicle and garment. From where I sat high up on the driving seat I could see in the garden of the house next to St George’s, a residence that had luckily chanced to be unoccupied, the stooping figure of a gardener methodically digging in a flower-bed close to the fence dividing the two premises. Had I not known for a fact that this man was Holmes himself I would not, even at the comparatively short distance that separated us, have recognized him.
I had not been in position long before I heard the clangour of a bell from within the school and saw a few moments later some score of youngsters come pouring out into the grounds to play. None of them, I think, paid any heed to the old gardener at work on the other side of the fence. But when, after a little, one of the boys happened to go near, Holmes called out something in a quiet voice, and before long I was able to see another of the happy youngsters running and playing there, a handsome redheaded lad, go over and lean against the fence just where the gardener was at work. But no one who was not within a yard or two of the boy could have seen that he was engaged in converse with the man on the far side. It was a conversation that lasted a full quarter of an hour, and at its end the gardener carefully scraped clean his spade and made his way off, trudging along as if well tired after a good day’s labour.
I jerked the reins in my lap and the four-wheeler’s old horse set off at a sedate walk. Round the next corner I saw waiting for me a tall, upright and sprightly figure resembling not at all the ancient gardener in the empty garden, for all that his clothes were not unlike.
In a moment Holmes was seated in the cab behind me and telling me the result of his unconventional consultation with master Phillip Hughes.
‘It is much as I thought, Watson. It seems that in the entrance hall of the school there is kept in a place of honour, in a locked glass case, a copy of Algernon Smyllie’s book Poems of Childhood, together with a letter to the poet from Her Majesty herself. It is the custom for the chief boy of the school, the Dux as they call him, to turn one page of the book each day. Now, just a week ago our friend, young Hughes, who had omitted to learn the evening before a prescribed passage from Horace, came downstairs very early to, as he said, “mug up the beastly stuff’. Glancing at the display case to see which in particular of (again I use his own words) “the vicious verses” was on show, since if he failed to present his passage of Horace correctly it would be his punishment by tradition to learn that poem, he saw, not entirely to his dismay, that someone had poured ink with conspicuous liberality all over the page, which happened indeed to be that on which appear the quatrains you yourself so much admire, the ones entitled “For My Infant Son”.’
‘Ah, yes. “Take up the spangled web of words, Then lay it gently on my gra
ve.” ’
‘Exactly. Though I fear young Hughes does not share your enthusiasm. However, that is not the end of his account. Scarcely had he, he told me, absorbed the fact of the desecration than he heard behind him the voice of his headmaster which a moment later, when he too had perceived what had happened, was raised in the most terrible ire. An anger that persisted, when no culprit would come forward, and soon resulted in the cancellation of the long-honoured St George’s Day holiday.’
‘And are you satisfied, Holmes, that young Hughes did not himself commit the very act he summonued you to investigate?’
‘Yes, I flatter myself that no young man of twelve years of age could long deceive me. And, besides, there is no possible advantage to him in committing the crime.’
‘I suppose not. Yet, pray, consider. Youngsters are notoriously mettlesome. They revel in all sorts of pranks. Why, I remember from my own schooldays—’
‘I dare say, Watson. And I am very aware of the nature of schoolboys. It would not have been inconceivable that one of these youngsters had crept down in the middle of the night and played this trick were it not for two circumstances.’
‘Yes?’
‘First, as I explained to you at the outset of the affair, the act would be certain to have become known to at least one of his fellow pupils, aware of each other’s habits and inclinations as schoolboys invariably are. And, secondly, the case in which the book is kept is always locked, and there are only two keys to it, one held by Dr Smyllie himself and the other by his son, Arthur, a young man of twenty-two or twenty-three who assists in the running of the establishment.’
‘Then it seems to me that we must find some way of speaking to young Arthur Smyllie, if you are indeed satisfied that the cabinet can be opened in no other way than by its keys.’
‘Watson, I could not yet be satisfied of that myself. But Phillip Hughes and his fellow pupils most certainly are so, and I am well disposed to take their word for it, as interested parties.’
Holmes had ascertained from young Hughes that Mr Arthur Smyllie was in the habit of taking an evening stroll. ‘The young shaver intimated, Watson, that the Lion Hotel might be his destination, a suggestion that I felt bound to scout.’ But it was outside the Lion Hotel that we waited that evening in the expectation of accosting the son of the headmaster of St George’s School. I was myself a little apprehensive over what reception we might be given when we disclosed the reason for our seeking his company. But I need not have worried. The moment Holmes greeted the young fellow, a fine upstanding ruddy-faced specimen of British manhood, and pronounced his own name, his face lip up in an expression of profound delight.
The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes II Page 19
