by Bill Peschel
I confessed that I saw no connection whatever between the theft and the failure of the M.C. to appear at the whist drive.
“Why it’s as plain as the nose on your face,” he retorted.
Now as my nose occupies more of my face than is quite pleasant, I resented his metaphor, and told him so, but my complaint was ignored.
“My dear fellow,” he resumed, “don’t you see that there is the most intimate connection between the bottle of stout and the whist drive? In the first place you can’t have a whist drive without a drink (if you do it’ll be flat), and in the second place you can’t have a whist drive without an M.C., hence I suppose it’s logically true that you can’t have an M.C. without a thirst. Now why didn’t the M.C. turn up as arranged? Of course, the answer to this question is not difficult—it’s impossible. Now tell me why it is impossible?”
I replied that I couldn’t.
He looked at me with clouded brow, and in scornful tones asked me did I understand anything, but before I could frame a suitable reply he went on with his jerky sentences.
“Why is it impossible? Why for the simple reason that the M.C. was here in time for the drive. Why didn’t he stay? Well, as you know, an M.C. without a thirst is a contradiction in terms, and, moreover, since necessity has no law, it becomes imperative that he should slake his thirst; but stout was not his drink, consequently his reason for removing one bottle was not personal indulgence. It’s evident he had no passion for stout. Then why did he take it?
“Perhaps you have observed that medical men have bizarre ideas upon the subject of art. Now this M.C. happens to be a medical man, and his forte is dramatic art, particularly drama, in which he takes a reluctant damsel from tragedy and places her at his own side—it’s mathematical art introduced by the old decadents under the name of Simple Subtraction. Now on his way through the corridor leading to the ward kitchen his artistic eye was shocked at the ungainly sight presented by twenty-three bottles. To think was to act, but in taking away the offending bottle he knocked his knuckles against a shelf. If you’ll only look there you’ll find a blood-stain.
“This we have subjected to severe bacteriological tests, with the result that we have discovered enteric bacilli along with traces of London petrol and several other elements which he has bribed us to keep secret. Of course, it was useless to take the matter further, as at a trial the enteric plea would have secured an acquittal. You see with enterics you never can tell what they’ll do—you merely watch them and feed them. Well, as no further action was necessary, the missing bottle was returned, and here it is. Good health and good luck to you.”
Bibliography
Bible references are from the King James Version found at Biblegateway.com.
Doyle, Georgina. Out of the Shadows: The Untold Story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s First Family. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Calabash Press, 2004.
Flora, Ian Ocampo. “Potential of Tobacco Industry in Central Luzon,” Papanga Sun-Star, Sept. 2, 2015, http://www.sunstar.com.ph/pampanga/local-news/2015/09/02/potential-tobacco-industry-central-luzon-428022, accessed Jan. 21, 2016.
Green, Jonathan, editor. Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang. London: Sterling Publishing Co., 2005.
Hepplewhite, Peter. True Stories from World War I. London: Pan Macmillan, 2014.
Jennings, Alan, “Hooge.” World War One Battlefields. http://www.ww1battlefields.co.uk/flanders/hooge.html, accessed Jan. 15, 2016.
Johnson, Karl. The Magician and the Cardsharp: The Search for America’s Greatest Slight-of-Hand Artist. New York: Macmillan, 2006.
Johnston, William. Roll of Commissioned Officers in the Medical Service of the British Army. Aberdeen: University Press, 1917.
Jung, Sandro. British Literature and Print Culture. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013.
Lellenberg, Jon, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. New York: Penguin Press, 2007.
Maltby, A.H. The New Englander, vol. 1. New Haven: B.L. Hamlen, 1843.
Marcosson, Isaac F., “The Millionaire Yield of Pittsburgh,” Munsey’s Magazine, March, 1912, p. 775.
Press, Charles, editor. A Bedside Book of Early Sherlockian Parodies and Pastiches. London: MX Publishing, 2014.
Pugh, Brian W. A Chronology of the Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. London: MX Publishing, Ltd., 2014.
“RegDwight”. “Origin of ‘on the QT’”. English Language & Usage, http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/12651/origin-of-on-the-qt, accessed Jan. 22, 2016.
Stashower, Daniel. Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999.
“The Citizen.” “Life and Times: How Gloucester soldiers created the first trench journal.” Gloucester Citizen. http://www.gloucestercitizen.co.uk/Life-Times-Gloucester-soldiers-created-trench/story-19857985-detail/story.html, accessed Jan. 29, 2016.
Waller, Philip. Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Williams, Michael. “The Last Call for the Dining Car,” Daily Mail, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1388536/The-dining-car-As-great-British-railway-eating-experience-dies-look-heights-civilised-travel.html, accessed Dec. 11, 2015.
Wikipedia
About the Editor
Bill Peschel is a recovering journalist who shares a Pulitzer Prize with the staff of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. He also is a mystery fan who has run the Wimsey Annotations at www.planetpeschel.com for nearly two decades. He is the author of Writers Gone Wild (Penguin). Through Peschel Press he publishes Sherlock parodies and pastiches in the 223B Casebook Series and annotated editions of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Whose Body? and Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Secret Adversary. An interest in Victorian crime led to the republication of three books on the William Palmer case. He lives with his family, dog and two cats in Hershey, where the air really does smell like chocolate.
Visit with Bill at Peschel Press or his personal website at Planet Peschel. He can be reached at [email protected].
Footnotes
[Back] Picquet duty: In the field, soldiers on picquet duty stand at the outer ring of a camp, marching between two points and acting as the first line of defense. In camp, their duties are combined with guard duty and they can be assigned to man a post. Picquet is a French word meaning “point.”
[Back] Booking office: The ticket office at a train station. Whether in the battle zone or in civilian areas, picquets would be posted to check the passes issued to soldiers and to question any man in civilian dress who might be a deserter.
[Back] Ought to be a soldier: From the beginning of the war, there was pressure on able-bodied men to serve. The Order of the White Feather was established to encourage women to present men who were not wearing a uniform a white feather, symbolizing their cowardice. This caused problems for men who were home on leave or recovering from wounds as well as government workers. In London, one feather was even awarded to a seaman, in civilian clothes, who was on his way to a reception honoring the Victoria Cross he won in the Gallipoli campaign.
[Back] Mufti: Plain civilian clothes. The word is Arabic and means Islamic scholar and was carried over to the clothes they tended to wear: dressing gown, slippers, and smoking cap.
[Back] Khaki: A dull-brown fabric used in military clothing.
[Back] Please copy: A request found at the bottom of an official body’s document, such as a government decree, instructing a newspaper to republish it. It was so commonly understood that it became a droll punch line in a newspaper or magazine column.
[Back] Barrel House wit: In Chicago, a barrelhouse or juke joint was a neighborhood corner bar that primarily catered to blacks. In the South, they were buildings outside of town (where blacks were not welcome, particularly in the bars) and the owner would operate it as a combination bar, grocery store, and nightclub where musicians would perform on a cramped stage.
[Back] Drummers: Travelling salesmen, nicknamed dr
ummers for their ability to “drum up” business.
[Back] Basket chair: A chair woven out of rattan.
[Back] ’Varsity letter: The word ’varsity is a shortened form of university, which explains the single quote mark at the beginning of the word (and subsequently dropped).
[Back] The Thinking Machine: Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, a.k.a. “The Thinking Machine” was an attempt to create an American Holmes by newspaper reporter Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912). A Futrelle-penned pastiche appears in the 1905-1909 edition.
[Back] Raffles: The gentleman thief-hero of fiction whose stories are entertaining to read today. Raffles’ creator, E.W. Hornung (1866-1921), married Conan Doyle’s sister. Despite repeated suggestions, they refused to collaborate on a book that would pit Sherlock Holmes against Raffles.
[Back] East Side: Gentrification and redevelopment has subdued the dodgy reputation of the southeast corner of Manhattan, but a century before, the Lower East Side was a haven for immigrants fresh from Ellis Island. They crowded into the hastily built, badly ventilated tenements, segregating themselves by nationality (German, Jewish, Irish, Slovaks, Russians, etc.) and their cultures were integrated into the American melting pot.
[Back] Arsene Lupin: The master thief created by Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941). Leblanc wrote several stories pitting Lupin against Holmes; an excerpt from one of them, “Holmlock Shears Opens Hostilities,” appears in the 1905-1909 edition.
[Back] Washing machine: “Blue Monday” was a painful day of the week for families. Husbands who got paid on Friday and drank during their time off were usually nursing a hangover, and wives who couldn’t send their family’s laundry out spent the day washing and wringing the clothes. By 1907, electric washers were being mass-produced, but it wouldn’t be until the 1920s, with the help of electrification and Prohibition, that Blue Mondays would begin to shed its reputation.
[Back] M. Dupin: C. Auguste Dupin was the hero of three classic short stories by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). Dupin shares many characteristics with Holmes, such as his deductive skills and his sidekick-narrator. Despite Holmes’ sneer at Dupin in A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle admitted freely borrowing from Poe.
[Back] M. Vidocq, while M. Lecoq: They’re speaking simultaneously because Eugène Francois Vidocq (1775-1857) was the thief-turned-detective used by Émile Gaboriau (1832-1873) to create Monsieur Lecoq.
[Back] Luther Trant: A detective created by Edwin Balmer (1883-1959), a longtime mystery and science-fiction writer. Trant relied on using science and psychology to solve his cases. Balmer was best-known for writing with Philip Wylie (1902-1971) When Worlds Collide (1933), which was made into a movie in 1951.
[Back] Scientific Sprague: Calvin Sprague was a scientific-detective created by Francis Lynde (1856-1930). Sprague was a railroad man who worked his cases among the engineers and rail-building crews of the Old West. The Coffin of Damocles was Sprague’s unsuccessful attempt to recall the sword of Damocles.
[Back] Mrs. Browning: Quoted from “How Do I Love Thee?” in Sonnets from the Portuguese: “I love thee to the level of every day’s / Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.”
[Back] Like Ophelia’s: Ophelia, the daughter of the merchant Polonius in Hamlet. She was to wed Hamlet, but after he kills her father, she goes mad and appears in public with her hair down, signaling her mental state to the audience.
[Back] Mr. Gryce: Detective Ebenezer Gryce of the New York Metropolitan Police Force was the hero in several novels by Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935). Her best-selling The Leavenworth Case (1878) was admired by Wilkie Collins and a particular influence on Agatha Christie.
[Back] New Thought: A philosophical movement that followed the teachings of Phineas Quimby (1802-1866), a watch and clockmaker who investigated the mind’s ability to affect the body using hypnotism. He taught that God was everywhere in the form of an “infinite intelligence,” and that the body can be healed through “right thinking.” Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), the founder of Christian Science, was one of Quimby’s patients.
[Back] Rouletabille: Joseph Rouletabille was a journalist and secret agent created by Gaston Leroux (1868-1927). He debuted in The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908), a notable locked-room mystery.
[Back] Avoirdupois: The system of weights used in the United States and most of the British Empire. It is from the Anglo-Norman French aveir de peis for “goods of weight.” It is also used to refer to a fat person, e.g., “He carries around a lot of excess avoirdupois.”
[Back] Eternal-feminine: The idea that women are defined by an essence that is uniquely theirs, usually tied into ideas of feminine values vs. masculine values, fertility, the purity of the virgin, and sanctity of the mother. Feminists such as Simone De Beauvoir argued that these values were creations of a male-dominated society and that everyone has the right to define their own existences.
[Back] Gotterdammerung: Translated as “Twilight of the Gods,” it is the last of four operas in the Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) cycle by Richard Wagner (1813-1883). It takes four nights and 15 hours to perform the Ring Cycle—Gotterdammerung takes five hours by itself, not counting intermissions—but when you’re in a prison camp, time is the one thing you have plenty of.
[Back] Captains’ Office: Each barrack had a captain in charge who wore a white armband bearing his title and barrack number. From their office, they were responsible for keeping records, maintaining discipline, and working with the commandant. They were considerably unpopular with the prisoners, in part because they refused to release information about the money, particularly from the inmates’ families, that passed through their hands.
[Back] Barrack eleven: The camp’s cells consisted of two horse stalls, each subdivided into two cells, and furnished with a wooden plank for a bed. Prisoners could be sent there for one to three days at any guard’s discretion for violating the camp’s rules, such as smoking in the barracks, burning naked candles, shirking the compulsory weekly bath, or insolence.
[Back] Bond Street: Wooden sidewalks were built to limit the mud and debris stirred up by the inmates, and they quickly acquired nicknames. Like its London counterpart, Bond Street was where many inmates set up small shops and businesses.
[Back] Otto-Sauer: A language-learning method created by Thomas Gaspey, Emil Otto, and Carl Marquard Sauer that emphasized using conversations to reinforce memorizing the words.
[Back] Millington: “Masterly inactivity” was coined by Sir James Mackintosh (1765-1832), a Scottish politician who observed that the House of Commons, which “faithful to their system, remained in a wise and masterly inactivity.” Millington was probably a civilian internee. The camp magazine mentions a D. Millington who was returned to England in March 1916.
[Back] Casino-schein holders: One enterprising inmate founded a combination casino and restaurant. Monthly tickets (“scheins”) were sold allowing the holder to spend up to two 1-hour shifts a day, and a sentry was posted at the door to control admission.
[Back] Coal-heaver: Someone who moves coal, such as with a shovel into a furnace, or into a homeowner’s basement coal bin.
[Back] Spoofia: Probably a reference to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria.
[Back] Ghammon: means nonsense or rubbish as a noun, and to gammon someone is to deceive them. The meaning is expressed forcefully in Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1861). In the commercial room at an inn, where traveling salesmen gather to dine and chat, Mr. Kantwise was demonstrating the strength of his tables by standing on them when Mr. Moulder, a representative of drinks purveyour Hubbles and Grease, wakes up.
At that moment Mr. Moulder awoke. “So you’ve got your iron traps out, have you?” said he. “What; you’re there, are you? Upon my word I’d sooner you than me.”
“I certainly should not like to see you up here, Mr. Moulder. I doubt whether even this table would bear five-and-twenty stone. Joe, lend me your shoulder, there’s a good fellow.” And then Mr. Kantwise, bearing very lightly on the chair, de
scended to the ground without accident.
“Now, that’s what I call gammon,” said Moulder.
“What is gammon, Mr. Moulder?” said the other, beginning to be angry.
“It’s all gammon. The chairs and tables is gammon, and so is the stools and the screens.”
“Mr. Moulder, I didn’t call your tea and coffee and brandy gammon.”
“You can’t; and you wouldn’t do any harm if you did. Hubbles and Grease are too well known in Yorkshire for you to hurt them. But as for all that show-off and gimcrack-work, I tell you fairly it ain’t what I call trade, and it ain’t fit for a commercial room. It’s gammon, gammon, gammon! James, give me a bedcandle.” And so Mr. Moulder took himself off to bed.
[Back] Shepherd’s Bush: An area of west London north of the Thames.
[Back] Hornsey Rise: A parish formed in 1865 in the Islington area of London.
[Back] The Monument: The nickname for the Monument to the Great Fire of London, a Doric column near the north end of London Bridge that commemorates the fire that destroyed most of London in 1666. A winding staircase of 311 steps takes visitors to the top of the 202-foot column.
[Back] Hill of Ludgate: One of the three ancient hills in central London. Now occupied by St. Paul’s Cathedral near the Ludgate, the westernmost gate in London Wall, the Roman defensive wall of which little remains.
