by Bill Peschel
Vernon Rendall
Conan Doyle wrote his Holmes stories quickly and without much regard for accuracy. It’s telling that they still enchant readers despite the errors, such as Watson’s wound traveling between his leg and his shoulder, and his wife calling him James in one story and John the rest of the time. Even when it’s a factual error—snakes are deaf and cannot respond to a whistle as they do in “The Speckled Band”—most readers are too absorbed to mind.
But sometimes they do, such as when Belsize puts “The Adventure of the Three Students” under the magnifying glass with amusing results. This story comes from The London Nights of Belsize, a collection written in the vein of Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, about a young, wealthy man who walks the byways of London in search of adventure. Vernon Rendall (1869-1960) was a writer of miscellaneous pieces and an anthologist whose major claim to fame was the two decades he spent at the literary magazine Athenaeum, 16 of them as its editor. It wasn’t enough to rescue an undistinguished career. According to British Literature and Print Culture, Rendall was “an almost unknown entity because so little has been written about him. There was no one left to write about his merits after his death. Unless of course there were no merits to write about?”
Everybody at the Club agreed that it was a hopeless morning, and that the proper study of mankind was meals. Andrewes and his guest discussed an excellent lunch in both senses of the word, extended themselves on criticisms of vintages, and spent a good hour and a half over the proper and improper varieties of meat and drink. Was tripe really tolerable? Was old Jamaica rum above proof the most potent of fluids? Did wine preserved from the days of the Commonwealth really taste of anything but cobwebs?
These important matters with the legends appertaining thereto having been thoroughly exhausted, cigars were in full blow by the side of the smoking-room fire, and conversation flagged. The usual topics of the day had been distorted ad nauseam with the usual cynicism before lunch.
“Well,” said the guest, “we can’t go out; the weather’s disgraceful. I heard all about your recent cases, Andrewes, last week; otherwise I’m particularly interested in crime—the subtleties, I mean, of it, not the common murders, housebreakings, and violence of the meaner sort. Are there any really first-rate brains in crime? I doubt it.”
“There is one,” replied Andrewes, “but he’s not available at present.”
“Good heavens! Does the Club possess an artistic malefactor who has never been found out and pursues his nefarious trade at large?”
“No, not quite so bad—at least not so far as I am aware. I meant that the Club possesses a man who knows all about crime, and examines it with the skill of an expert.”
“Yourself.”
“Oh no; I have not descended to throwing bouquets at myself yet, though I have known that apparently impossible feat performed with considerable grace. The artist I mean is a friend of mine called Belsize, a queer fellow, quiet and deep. When he can be drawn out, the results are interesting. But he’s well educated, and that, as you know, shuts a man up. I think I might venture to see if he’s in the house anywhere.”
“Do; I am most curious.”
“And Belsize is most polite. I’ll send to the library a judicious word, and, if he is there, he’ll probably come down. He’s as obstinate as a pig when he wishes to be silent, but, if I can draw him as a commentator on crime, you may be interested.”
Ten minutes later Belsize appeared.
“Ah, Andrewes, you want to consult me about cigars.”
“Yes, I know your excellent taste.”
“Well, I can send you the details of the best I know to-morrow.”
“Are you busy now?”
“No, I have just finished a little investigation upstairs.”
“That would interest my guest—Mr. Milson—Mr. Belsize—for he has a leaning for crime.”
“Indeed?” Belsize replied politely. “I was employed on nothing so serious upstairs.”
“But you have studied criminals,” insisted Andrewes.
“Yes, in my small way, but not practically, as you have.”
“I’m not so sure about your being unpractical, though I take it you are a diligent commentator.”
“I make a few notes on cases that attract me, and which appear to offer some unusual feature, and I read detective stories.”
“That is what a great many people do,” said Milson.
“Of course,” interposed Andrewes. “But Belsize reads them more carefully than most people, and he has a memory like a vice. Now, Belsize, I had better be frank. I wanted your type of cigar, but I wanted your company too, when I sent for you. This rotten afternoon has given me the megrims. I feel as dull as a Blue-book. My guest has heard much of the Club and its resources. I am for the moment resourceless: I sent for you. I throw myself on your mercy.”
“What can I do?” asked Belsize.
Andrewes was a skilful improviser when he chose. “Well,” he said, “we were talking of my cases—I prate about them far too much; and there was one years ago which puzzled me, and which I’ve never been able to explain. Now, if by any chance you went into it at the time, I feel sure you know a vast deal more about it than I did.”
“It is quite likely that I never heard of it.”
“Hardly, I think. It was the sort of thing to interest you. I mean the capture of the Collins gang of burglars in Covent Garden. You remember it?”
“Yes, I fancy I do.”
“I got the gang the due reward of their merits all right; but what struck me was this: on a particularly easy job they were caught after evading the police for many months in more desperate ventures, and there was a blind man about that we could not positively connect with the case, though I felt sure at the time that he was mixed up with the gang. But he was blind; he had apparently a fit while the others were being caught, and his counsel dwelt so strongly on these points that he got clean off. Now, why did they fail at Covent Garden? Was there any special reason for that? And what had the blind man to do with it? Elsewhere the police never got near them; the gang seemed to discover them before they were anywhere within range.”
“Quite just: you have explained the whole thing. There is nothing more to say.”
“Excuse me, I am not in the least enlightened.”
“Come, you are pulling my leg.”
“Certainly not. I should never attempt such a process on you. Before I succeeded in pulling your leg you would have me mentally prostrate.”
“A strange attitude for a K.C.!” burst in Milson. “Really, Mr. Belsize, you must satisfy us. We are stupid just now. Andrewes has admitted it, and his tribute to you is remarkable from him. I know him well enough to say that he has a good conceit of himself.”
“Am I to expound, then?” asked Belsize doubtfully.
“You must, after this exposure of my own incompetence,” said Andrewes. “I can’t confess my inadequacy, and then be fobbed off with trivial nothings.”
Belsize bowed and turned to Andrewes.
“If you are not satisfied with my explanation, I’ll soothe the wound with a box of cigars. I see that I must lecture, but I have no objection to sleep among the audience.
“This case, Mr. Milson, interested me because it led to a line of investigation which at that time was fairly novel to me. When you first begin to observe things in London, you fix your attention on various buildings, those particularly which you use as landmarks more or less unconsciously. In a fog these indications of outline or other small marks in a building are valuable. You know the look of the place in detail, and a single small object, like the yellowish brick on the left of the entrance of this Club among the dull red ones, will enable you to be sure that you are at the door of the place you seek, though its outline in general is vague and is that also of the three other Clubs adjacent to it.
“Next, you proceed to notice faces and habits of mind and body. You observe that this man is a pessimist, though he is well off; t
hat that man has the springy walk of an athlete and reads the sporting page of the newspaper first; and that a third, a woman, always carries an umbrella and carefully avoids the slightest puddle, though she is not well dressed, and walks stiffly during the winter—she has had rheumatic fever and does not want a second dose.
“So far all is fairly obvious. But here is something more subtle and nothing like so simple. That is the sense and differentiation of smells. London to a dog must be a paradise of wildly whirling excitements, for he meets new smells at every yard—smells human, animal, vegetable, and mineral, and smells which are a compound of all the four. Watch a dog sniffing at a dustheap, and you will appreciate the fervour of his divided attention.
“When the case my friend has mentioned occurred, I was studying smells, and acquired a considerable practice in differentiating between them. I have it still.”
Belsize leant forward and sniffed. “Andrewes, you have had an excellent lunch. You deserved it, I dare say, for you may not have had much more for breakfast than a herring.”
“You are right,” replied Andrewes; “but what has that to do with my case?”
“Nothing, in so far as we do not know what the burglars had for breakfast, but in principle everything. I may tell you that to fortify my own theories I sought out that blind man. I was right, and you were right. He was one of the gang; he was, in his way, the most important man in it. He was born blind, and had in compensation an abnormal sense of smell. He smelt out the police before they were within range, just as a wild animal can smell a human body at an incredible distance. Once before, the police did not get this gang, but got within sight of them. Where? You have forgotten this, Andrewes. At the Zoo, where they were picking pockets, and where the smell of the animals was so strong as to subdue all others.
“Not profiting by this near escape, the silly duffers go to Covent Garden with their blind assistant—the place where there is one of the strongest smells in the world. They talk of putting a station some quarter of a mile away for an underground Tube. They will use a lift, and I am sure that that lift, even if it is well inside the station and is frequently a long way beneath the ground, will smell strongly, the odour being a mixture of greens, apples, oranges, rotting straw, and horses, of which there are a lot always about Covent Garden. I asked the blind man afterwards, when I had won his confidence, what he felt about Covent Garden. He said that it was maddening. He had so trained his wonderful sense of smell that he knew different sorts of human characters and trades a long way off. He was groping for the smell of the police, and he was quite prostrated with the vegetable smell I have mentioned. It came on him so strongly that he fell down in a fit, and was hardly recovered when the police came up. You, Andrewes, naturally supposed that the fit was a fraud. I found out that it was real. Relying on his own powers, he hoped to be able to smell the police through the vegetables, but he broke down, and was unable to warn his friends that his nose had failed.”
“Such abnormal powers,” remarked Milson, “must be uncommon.”
“Nothing like so uncommon as you suppose,” replied Belsize. “They exist where all the other senses are normal. Men of science would expect them. They are sports, attempts at evolution by the human body. But the possessors of these rare gifts are generally derided or discouraged in youth, and avoided in later years as dangerous freaks unless some money can be made out of them. You remember, Andrewes, my excellent oranges?”
“Certainly, they are superb, but I suppose you pay a fortune for them, unless Covent Garden is grateful to you; and, after all, you neither caught the burglars nor got them condemned.”
“Nevertheless, the oranges don’t cost me a penny. They are a gift from Covent Garden.”
“What did you do to earn it?” asked Milson.
“I did not see why the blind man should not make an honest living. When cases of oranges come over, it is very important to know if any of the fruit has rotted, as the rot spreads very quickly. It saves time and trouble to discover this without opening the cases and looking through all the oranges down to the bottom row. The blind man performs this duty easily. I could not at first persuade the orange-merchants that his sense of smell was equal to the business, so I bought twelve cases and had a demonstration on the spot. He was right every time, and he has never failed since. I knew something before about the powers of blind men, for my uncle, the silk millionaire, had one of them as his chief assistant. This man was the finest judge of silk in the world, and tested it with his fingers.”
Milson was all rapt attention, and whispered to Andrewes:
“Your friend is really remarkable. It would be interesting to have his views on Sherlock Holmes.”
“One of the annoying things for me,” remarked Belsize, “is that I hear what people say when they whisper. But I am not in the least remarkable, Mr. Milson, I can assure you, only an assiduous student. My province is what clever people don’t think it worth while to notice, and I make nothing by my labour, except a few friends and enemies. That will show you how trivial my small researches are.”
“But Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Belsize? Your views on such a man would be intensely interesting, and you told us that you read detective literature.”
“My uncle thought that all the best detective lore came from the East, and despised him as a rank modern imitator.”
“That was foolish.”
“Very; an absurd prejudice. I think him a very great man, and I admire his inventor immensely. I even have an admiration for Watson, that stupid practitioner.”
“Oh, come! He is a mere foil to Holmes.”
“Not always. There is one story which shows that he managed to deceive Holmes for his good.”
“Indeed?” burst from the guest; “I thought I knew my Sherlock Holmes pretty well, and I don’t remember it.”
“Belsize is inventing as he goes along,” said Andrewes, well knowing that Belsize never did anything of the kind. “Now, Belsize, you really must explain.”
“But I am not a master of monologue.”
“Nonsense; you know all about detective stories, and have traced them back further than Depken, the German critic.”
“But the company does not want another long explanation.”
“Milson does, and there are no signs of boredom in the other faces.”
“But perhaps they don’t know the story, I mean, well enough to appreciate the points.”
“In that case you can retell it, or summarize it.”
“I’ll get the volume from the library, and try, if you really want me to do so.”
A chorus of assent followed.
“The narrative of which I am thinking,” began Belsize five minutes later, “is Watson’s one and only masterpiece, though it is so ingeniously arranged that ordinary scrutiny, such as that of Andrewes at leisure, may find in it nothing more than one of Holmes’s usual triumphs.
“In The Return of Sherlock Holmes, a series of his cases now available at sixpence, the ninth story is called ‘The Adventure of the Three Students,’ and its scene is one of our great University towns. Holmes is staying there for the purpose of research in early English charters, with the invaluable Watson on hand, as usual.
Enters to them an acquaintance, Mr. Soames, a college tutor and lecturer, who explains that the proofs of a Greek unseen he has set for the Fortescue Scholarship were left by him lying open on his desk, and during his absence from the rooms were pulled about and copied. Three students, all on Soames’s staircase, are in for the examination, and one of them is almost certainly guilty of making the unseen seen. Holmes gets to work and discovers the culprit, chiefly by means of two small balls of black clay left in the room and a scratch on a leather-covered table. These clues point to the jumping spikes of Gilchrist, an athletic young man. Gilchrist was, further, tall enough to look in at the don’s open window and clever enough to guess what the proofs (rolled up, the don says) were, and was in league with the don’s servant, who, in trying to screen him, gave Holmes
another clue. There were also in the room signs of a pencil sharpened in a hurry.
“Thus briefly stated, the case sounds satisfactory enough, and worthy of Holmes’s acumen, but the satisfaction vanishes when one examines the details with the care characteristic of the great investigator, and a little of that expert knowledge which he applied in his own branches of cigar-ash, poisons, footsteps, etc.
“Holmes was on strange ground; he was not familiar with the details of the buildings, though they were a show part of the college. His knowledge of literature was nil; he had no interest in Greek or Latin, and would not acquire such an interest from Watson, who had not enjoyed (or endured) an academic training. Holmes leaves Watson in another story of this series to seek out the sights of Cambridge, which he calls ‘this venerable city.’ Cambridge is not a city. Holmes’s own studies, in fact, were purely chemical, and we know what such students make of dead languages.
“Mr. Soames, in an excessively nervous state, tells his story, and his nervousness may have been increased by the fact that he was bluffing the investigator with some pretty unlikely stuff. I will quote his actual words so as to be quite fair. Explaining that he is one of the examiners for the scholarship, he goes on:
“‘My subject is Greek, and the first of the papers consists of a large passage of Greek translation which the candidate has not seen. … To-day about three o’clock the proofs of this paper arrived from the printers. The exercise consisted of half a chapter of Thucydides. I had to read it over carefully, as the text must be absolutely correct. At four-thirty my task was not yet completed. I had, however, promised to take tea in a friend’s rooms, so I left the proof upon my desk.’
“Later it appears that ‘the proof was in three long slips.’
“This is astonishing; indeed, incredible. In the first place, there is no whole chapter in Thucydides which would occupy anything like as much as three slips of ordinary or special proof matter. Any one tolerably familiar both with Thucydides and printing could have told Mr. Holmes as much off-hand. In the second place, Soames could not possibly have spent as much as an hour and a half in reading the proofs through, and he did not even finish them in that time! Greek, being unlike Latin, widely divergent from English, is recognized by printers as a language requiring special care, and generally well set up. University printers at least would make few mistakes in such ‘copy,’ and it is ludicrous to suppose that an examiner for a University scholarship, well up in his Greek, would occupy more than half the supposed time in making corrections. What corrections? The text of Thucydides is usually sound, and an examiner would hardly set a corrupt passage. What was Soames doing for that hour and a half? Perhaps he was correcting an original composition of his own, which Holmes would easily take for Thucydides; it would certainly be Greek to Holmes. Perhaps he was asleep or smiling over a little plot.
