Sherlock Holmes (29 page)

‘Then a queer thought came into my head and showed me where I could lay my hand on a weapon. I sat down in the darkness and unstrapped my wooden leg. With three long hops I was on him. He put his carbine to his shoulder, but I struck him full, and knocked the whole front of his skull in. You can see the split in the wood now where I hit him. We both went down together, for I could not keep my balance; but when I got up I found him still lying quiet enough. I made for the boat, and in an hour we were well out at sea. Tonga had brought all his earthly possessions with him, his arms and his gods. Among other things, he had a long bamboo spear, and some Andaman cocoanut matting, with which I made a sort of a sail. For ten days we were beating about, trusting to luck, and on the eleventh we were picked up by a trader which was going from Singapore to Jiddah with a cargo of Malay pilgrims. They were a rum crowd, and Tonga and I soon managed to settle down among them. They had one very good quality: they let you alone and asked no questions.

‘Well, if I were to tell you all the adventures that my little chum and I went through, you would not thank me, for I would have you here until the sun was shining. Here and there we drifted about the world, something always turning up to keep us from London. All the time, however, I never lost sight of my purpose. I would dream of Sholto at night. A hundred times I have killed him in my sleep. At last, however, some three or four years ago, we found ourselves in England. I had no great difficulty in finding where Sholto lived, and I set to work to discover whether he had realized on the treasure, or if he still had it. I made friends with someone who could help me – I name no names, for I don't want to get anyone else in a hole – and I soon found that he still had the jewels. Then I tried to get at him in many ways; but he was pretty sly and had always two prize-fighters, besides his sons and his
khitmutgar
, on guard over him.

‘One day, however, I got word that he was dying. I hurried at once to the garden, mad that he should slip out of my clutches like that, and, looking through the window, I saw him lying in his bed, with his sons on each side of him. I'd have come through and taken
my chance with the three of them, only even as I looked at him his jaw dropped, and I knew that he was gone. I got into his room that same night, though, and I searched his papers to see if there was any record of where he had hidden our jewels. There was not a line, however, so I came away, bitter and savage as a man could be. Before I left I bethought me that if I ever met my Sikh friends again it would be a satisfaction to know that I had left some mark of our hatred; so I scrawled down the sign of the four of us, as it had been on the chart, and I pinned it on his bosom. It was too much that he should be taken to the grave without some token from the men whom he had robbed and befooled.

‘We earned a living at this time by my exhibiting poor Tonga at fairs and other such places as the black cannibal. He would eat raw meat and dance his war-dance: so we always had a hatful of pennies after a day's work. I still heard all the news from Pondicherry Lodge, and for some years there was no news to hear, except that they were hunting for the treasure. At last, however, came what we had waited for so long. The treasure had been found. It was up at the top of the house in Mr Bartholomew Sholto's chemical laboratory. I came at once and had a look at the place, but I could not see how, with my wooden leg, I was to make my way up to it. I learned, however, about a trapdoor in the roof, and also about Mr Sholto's supper-hour. It seemed to me that I could manage the thing easily through Tonga. I brought him out with me with a long rope wound round his waist. He could climb like a cat, and he soon made his way through the roof, but, as ill-luck would have it, Bartholomew Sholto was still in the room, to his cost. Tonga thought he had done something very clever in killing him, for when I came up by the rope I found him strutting about as proud as a peacock. Very much surprised was he when I made at him with the rope's end and cursed him for a little bloodthirsty imp. I took the treasure-box and let it down, and then slid down myself, having first left the sign of the four upon the table to show that the jewels had come back at last to those who had most right to them. Tonga then pulled up the rope, closed the window, and made off the way that he had come.

‘I don't know that I have anything else to tell you. I had heard a waterman speak of the speed of Smith's launch, the
Aurora
, so I thought she would be a handy craft for our escape. I engaged with
old Smith, and was to give him a big sum if he got us safe to our ship. He knew, no doubt, that there was some screw loose, but he was not in our secrets. All this is the truth, and if I tell it to you, gentlemen, it is not to amuse you – for you have not done me a very good turn – but it is because I believe the best defence I can make is just to hold back nothing, but let all the world know how badly I have myself been served by Major Sholto, and how innocent I am of the death of his son.'

‘A very remarkable account,' said Sherlock Holmes. ‘A fitting wind-up to an extremely interesting case. There is nothing at all new to me in the latter part of your narrative except that you brought your own rope. That I did not know. By the way, I had hoped that Tonga had lost all his darts; yet he managed to shoot one at us in the boat.'

‘He had lost them all, sir, except the one which was in his blow-pipe at the time.'

‘Ah, of course,' said Holmes. ‘I had not thought of that.'

‘Is there any other point which you would like to ask about?' asked the convict affably.

‘I think not, thank you,' my companion answered.

‘Well, Holmes,' said Athelney Jones, ‘you are a man to be humoured, and we all know that you are a connoisseur of crime; but duty is duty, and I have gone rather far in doing what you and your friend asked me. I shall feel more at ease when we have our story-teller here safe under lock and key. The cab still waits, and there are two inspectors downstairs. I am much obliged to you both for your assistance. Of course you will be wanted at the trial. Good-night to you.'

‘Good-night, gentlemen both,' said Jonathan Small.

‘You first, Small,' remarked the wary Jones as they left the room. ‘I'll take particular care that you don't club me with your wooden leg, whatever you may have done to the gentleman at the Andaman Isles.'

‘Well, and there is the end of our little drama,' I remarked, after we had sat some time smoking in silence. ‘I fear that it may be the last investigation in which I shall have the chance of studying your methods. Miss Morstan has done me the honour to accept me as a husband in prospective.'

He gave a most dismal groan.

‘I feared as much,' said he. ‘I really cannot congratulate you.'

I was a little hurt.

‘Have you any reason to be dissatisfied with my choice?' I asked.

‘Not at all. I think she is one of the most charming young ladies I ever met and might have been most useful in such work as we have been doing. She had a decided genius that way; witness the way in which she preserved that Agra plan from all the other papers of her father. But love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment.'

‘I trust,' said I, laughing, ‘that my judgment may survive the ordeal. But you look weary.'

‘Yes, the reaction is already upon me. I shall be as limp as a rag for a week.'

‘Strange,' said I, ‘how terms of what in another man I should call laziness alternate with your fits of splendid energy and vigour.'

‘Yes,' he answered, ‘there are in me the makings of a very fine loafer, and also of a pretty spry sort of fellow. I often think of those lines of old Goethe:

Schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf, Denn zum würdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff.

‘By the way, apropos of this Norwood business, you see that they had, as I surmised, a confederate in the house, who could be none other than Lal Rao, the butler: so Jones actually has the undivided honour of having caught one fish in his great haul.'

‘The division seems rather unfair,' I remarked. ‘You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?'

‘For me,' said Sherlock Holmes, ‘there still remains the cocaine-bottle.' And he stretched his long white hand up for
it.

Epigraph

1 Mr Sherlock Holmes

2 The Curse of the Baskervilles

3 The Problem

4 Sir Henry Baskerville

5 Three Broken Threads

6 Baskerville Hall

7 The Stapletons of Merripit House

8 First Report of Dr Watson

9 The Light upon the Moor

10 Extract from the Diary of Dr Watson

11 The Man on the Tor

12 Death on the Moor

13 Fixing the Nets

14 The Hound of the Baskervilles

15 A Retrospection

This story owes its inception to my friend, Mr Fletcher Robinson, who has helped me both in the general plot and in the local details.

A.C.D.

Mr Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearthrug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before. It was a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a ‘Penang lawyer'. Just under the head was a broad silver band, nearly an inch across. ‘To James Mortimer, MRCS, from his friends of the CCH', was engraved upon it, with the date ‘1884'. It was just a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry – dignified, solid, and reassuring.

‘Well, Watson, what do you make of it?'

Holmes was sitting with his back to me, and I had given him no sign of my occupation.

‘How did you know what I was doing? I believe you have eyes in the back of your head.'

‘I have, at least, a well-polished, silver-plated coffee-pot in front of me,' said he. ‘But, tell me, Watson, what do you make of our visitor's stick? Since we have been so unfortunate as to miss him and have no notion of his errand, this accidental souvenir becomes of importance. Let me hear you reconstruct the man by an examination of it.'

‘I think,' said I, following so far as I could the methods of my companion, ‘that Dr Mortimer is a successful elderly medical man, well-esteemed, since those who know him give him this mark of their appreciation.'

‘Good!' said Holmes. ‘Excellent!'

‘I think also that the probability is in favour of his being a country practitioner who does a great deal of his visiting on foot.'

‘Why so?'

‘Because this stick, though originally a very handsome one, has been so knocked about that I can hardly imagine a town practitioner carrying it. The thick iron ferrule is worn down, so it is evident that he has done a great amount of walking with it.'

‘Perfectly sound!' said Holmes.

‘And then again, there is the “friends of the CCH”. I should guess that to be the Something Hunt, the local hunt to whose members he has possibly given some surgical assistance, and which has made him a small presentation in return.'

‘Really, Watson, you excel yourself,' said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. ‘I am bound to say that in all accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.'

He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I have often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval. He now took the stick from my hands and examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes. Then, with an expression of interest, he laid down his cigarette, and, carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.

‘Interesting, though elementary,' said he, as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. ‘There are certainly one or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions.'

‘Has anything escaped me?' I asked, with some self-importance. ‘I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have over-looked?'

‘I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance. The man is certainly a country practitioner. And he walks a good deal.'

‘Then I was right.'

‘To that extent.'

‘But that was all.'

‘No, no, my dear Watson, not all – by no means all. I would suggest, for example, that a presentation to a doctor is more likely to come from a hospital than from a hunt, and that when the initials “CC” are placed before that hospital the words “Charing Cross” very naturally suggest themselves.'

‘You may be right.'

‘The probability lies in that direction. And if we take this as a working hypothesis we have a fresh basis from which to start our construction of this unknown visitor.'

‘Well, then, supposing that “CCH” does stand for “Charing Cross Hospital”, what further inferences may we draw?'

‘Do none suggest themselves? You know my methods. Apply them!'

‘I can only think of the obvious conclusion that the man has practised in town before going to the country.'

‘I think that we might venture a little farther than this. Look at it in this light. On what occasion would it be most probable that such a presentation would be made? When would his friends unite to give him a pledge of their good will? Obviously at the moment when Dr Mortimer withdrew from the service of the hospital in order to start in practice for himself. We know there has been a presentation. We believe there has been a change from a town hospital to a country practice. Is it, then, stretching our inference too far to say that the presentation was on the occasion of the change?'

‘It certainly seems probable.'

‘Now, you will observe that he could not have been on the
staff
of the hospital, since only a man well established in a London practice could hold such a position, and such a one would not drift into the country. What was he, then? If he was in the hospital and yet not on the staff, he could only have been a house-surgeon or a house-physician – little more than a senior student. And he left five years ago – the date is on the stick. So your grave, middle-aged family practitioner vanishes into thin air, my dear Watson, and there emerges a young fellow under thirty, amiable, unambitious, absentminded, and the possessor of a favourite dog, which I should describe roughly as being larger than a terrier and smaller than a mastiff.'

I laughed incredulously as Sherlock Holmes leaned back in his settee and blew little wavering rings of smoke up to the ceiling.

‘As to the latter part, I have no means of checking you,' said I, ‘but at least it is not difficult to find out a few particulars about the man's age and professional career.'

From my small medical shelf I took down the Medical Directory and turned up the name. There were several Mortimers, but only one who could be our visitor. I read his record aloud.

Mortimer, James, MRCS, 1882, Grimpen, Dartmoor, Devon. House-surgeon, from 1882 to 1884, at Charing Cross Hospital. Winner of the Jackson Prize for Comparative Pathology, with essay entitled ‘Is Disease a Reversion?' Corresponding member of the Swedish Pathological Society. Author of ‘Some Freaks of Atavism' (
Lancet
, 1882), ‘Do We Progress?' (
Journal of Psychology
, March, 1883). Medical Officer for the parishes of Grimpen, Thorsley, and High Barrow.

‘No mention of that local hunt, Watson,' said Holmes, with a mischievous smile, ‘but a country doctor, as you very astutely observed. I think that I am fairly justified in my inferences. As to the adjectives, I said, if I remember right, amiable, unambitious, and absentminded. It is my experience that it is only an amiable man in this world who receives testimonials, only an unambitious one who abandons a London career for the country, and only an absentminded one who leaves his stick and not his visiting-card after waiting an hour in your room.'

‘And the dog?'

‘Has been in the habit of carrying this stick behind his master. Being a heavy stick the dog has held it tightly by the middle, and the marks of his teeth are very plainly visible. The dog's jaw, as shown in the space between these marks, is too broad in my opinion for a terrier and not broad enough for a mastiff. It may have been – yes, by Jove it
is
a curly-haired spaniel.'

He had risen and paced the room as he spoke. Now he halted in the recess of the window. There was such a ring of conviction in his voice that I glanced up in surprise.

‘My dear fellow, how can you possibly be so sure of that?'

‘For the very simple reason that I see the dog himself on our very
doorstep, and there is the ring of its owner. Don't move, I beg you, Watson. He is a professional brother of yours, and your presence may be of assistance to me. Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill. What does Dr James Mortimer, the man of science, ask of Sherlock Holmes, the specialist in crime? Come in!'

The appearance of our visitor was a surprise to me since I had expected a typical country practitioner. He was a very tall, thin man, with a long nose like a beak, which shot out between two keen, grey eyes, set closely together and sparkling brightly from behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He was clad in a professional but rather slovenly fashion, for his frock-coat was dingy and his trousers frayed. Though young, his long back was already bowed, and he walked with a forward thrust of his head and a general air of peering benevolence. As he entered his eyes fell upon the stick in Holmes's hand, and he ran towards it with an exclamation of joy.

‘I am so very glad,' said he. ‘I was not sure whether I had left it here or in the Shipping Office. I would not lose that stick for the world.'

‘A presentation, I see,' said Holmes.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘From Charing Cross Hospital?'

‘From one or two friends there on the occasion of my marriage.'

‘Dear, dear, that's bad!' said Holmes, shaking his head.

Dr Mortimer blinked through his glasses in mild astonishment.

‘Why was it bad?'

‘Only that you have disarranged our little deductions. Your marriage, you say?'

‘Yes, sir. I married, and so left the hospital, and with it all hopes of a consulting practice. It was necessary to make a home of my own.'

‘Come, come, we are not so far wrong after all,' said Holmes. ‘And now, Dr James Mortimer –'

‘Mister, sir, Mister – a humble MRCS.'

‘And a man of precise mind, evidently.'

‘A dabbler in science, Mr Holmes, a picker-up of shells on the shores of the great unknown ocean. I presume that it is Mr Sherlock Holmes whom I am addressing and not –'

‘No, this is my friend Dr Watson.'

‘Glad to meet you, sir. I have heard your name mentioned in connection with that of your friend. You interest me very much, Mr Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.'

Sherlock Holmes waved our strange visitor into a chair.

‘You are an enthusiast in your line of thought, I perceive, sir, as I am in mine,' said he. ‘I observe from your forefinger that you make your own cigarettes. Have no hesitation in lighting one.'

The man drew out paper and tobacco and twirled the one up in the other with surprising dexterity. He had long, quivering fingers as agile and restless as the antennae of an insect.

Holmes was silent, but his little darting glances showed me the interest which he took in our curious companion.

‘I presume, sir,' said he at last, ‘that it was not merely for the purpose of examining my skull that you have done me the honour to call here last night and again today?'

‘No, sir, no; though I am happy to have had the opportunity of doing that as well, I came to you, Mr Holmes, because I recognize that I am myself an unpractical man, and because I am suddenly confronted with a most serious and extraordinary problem. Recognizing, as I do, that you are the second highest expert in Europe –'

‘Indeed, sir! May I inquire who has the honour to be the first?' asked Holmes, with some asperity.

‘To the man of precisely scientific mind the work of Monsieur Bertillon must always appeal strongly.'

‘Then had you not better consult him?'

‘I said, sir, to the precisely scientific mind. But as a practical man of affairs it is acknowledged that you stand alone. I trust, sir, that I have not inadvertently –'

‘Just a little,' said Holmes. ‘I think, Dr Mortimer, you would do wisely if without more ado you would kindly tell me plainly what the exact nature of the problem is in which you demand my assistance.'