Sherlock Holmes: The American Years (7 page)

Why did Sherlock Holmes first go to America? Why else, Mr. Lupoff tells us, but to attend a wedding? But complications ensued . . .

by

DARRYL BROCK

London
18 May 1897

M
y home country’s so thick with sleuth-hounds nowadays that a body can scarcely open a door without some would-be Pinkerton chucklehead—the breed
must
be chuckleheaded to keep spawning like it does—tumbling out from a rigged-up hideaway.
This
budding sleuth was cut from his own design, though, and since I first encountered him, on this very day, twenty-two years ago, he’s become notorious, puffed everywhere like a dime-show marvel, a walking, snorting, detecting legend if you judge from what all the puffers claim, especially Dr. John H. Watson, that tireless puffing engine.

This balloon of a detective specimen—Holmes—was still an unknown article then, and as a result of our bumping together, an encounter I equate to a plague of aching molars, I somehow became one of his first paying customers. Not that I volunteered for this unlikely distinction, or paid him directly, or even
knew
about it till nearly the end of the dismal episode.

18 May 1875. . . .

My recollections of that day are nigh perfect. It was on a spring Tuesday with nature all tailored out in her new clothes that fortune threw us together at a base ball match in Hartford, where I’d moved my family the previous year. Dawn had delivered a coating of frost, and the morning papers prophesied rain showers—not that it was easy locating weather tables amongst the columns bristling with tawdry revelations from Grant’s latest corruptions—but my darling Livy managed the task, and she insisted I pack along my prize umbrella.

I had no worthy excuse for dodging work, except that the promise of today’s match was too potent. Our hometown nine, the Dark Blues, had shaken off last year’s bottom finish and somehow catapulted themselves to a 12-0 start in the National Association. Coming to face them were Boston’s champ Red Stockings, themselves with a gaudy record of 16-0. The matchup was a sockdologer—and I was burning to see it.

I set out along lanes canopied by cherry and peach blossoms. Golden shafts pierced the cloud-swollen sky, and I felt the air heating up. The day was built for pleasure, aburst with vital juices, redolent of sweet lost loves. Though my umbrella was superfluous, I twirled it to add dash to the figure I cut in my linen duster and
new green spectacles. I nodded to passersby who greeted me, most invoking my nom de plume, calling, “Top of the morning, Mark.”

Downtown was tarted up like a parlor-house madam, festooned with bunting and overhung with whip pennants and banners proclaiming the Dark Blues’ invincibility. I joined the crowds on Willys Avenue heading toward the ball grounds near Dutch Point. At several places I had a prickly sensation of being watched—more than usual, that is—and took the trouble to ensure that my billfold resided in its customary pocket. Once I spun around but found nothing to provoke suspicion beyond some noisy street-boys, whose numbers grew thick outside the grounds. I watched a squad of fly-cops try to keep young invaders from gaining entry over, under, or between the planks of the tall fence. They also labored to pacify those who had not purchased tickets ahead, and now found the sales office closed.

“But it’s a glorified game of rounders!” I heard a decidedly English voice protest, and turned to see a tall, thin young man in London-cut tweeds engaged in negotiations with a shady-looking hawker. “Why the deuce is your price so dear?”

He would prove to be Holmes.

Inside the gates I moved to the Pavilion, a new covered stand built for the occasion. Tickets for it, originally 75 cents, had been trading upwards of five dollars, and the dullest saphead could see that these seats had been criminally oversold. Now they were fairly bursting. With gyrations to make a snake blush, I worked my way to my allotted space near the top. From there I could see the 50-cent “bleaching boards” that flanked the Pavilion likewise packed with raw humanity, and beyond them, behind ropes stretching around the outfields, men standing shoulder to shoulder in the 25-cent
“bullpens.” With a seasoned eye I put the throng at ten thousand—surely the biggest ever for a New England sporting event.

Who was pocketing all the gate money?

As if galvanized by the thought, my lefthand neighbor, an overstuffed banker by the name of Ashcroft, introduced himself—or rather,
re
introduced himself, claiming we’d met the previous winter—and presented his prune-faced wife, seated on his other side. She gave me a sour stare through an ivory lorgnette, her general demeanor lifted from a chromo ad for galloping dyspepsia. Noting Ashcroft’s jowls quivering with each utterance, I
did
recall him: I’d been trapped with him in a club room and sorely regretted the experience. Politically, he regarded high tariffs as proofs of God’s workings. Personally, he was a raging dullard.

The red-legged Bostons trotted on to the field; then came the Hartfords, natty in their navy blues. I leaned back contentedly, ignited a cigar (only my fifth of the day; I was heeding Livy’s dictum to cut back), and inhaled an elixir of tobacco, pungent mustard, and the Pavilion’s fresh-planed pine. The grass of the outfield radiated emerald green. Vendors’ cries—
Soda water here! New York ginger snaps!
—sounded in my ears.

How perfect, I thought, tracking wrens in the rafters above me, how
dear
to be playing hooky like the rawest of schoolboys. Like my own Tom Sawyer, whose adventures I’d nearly finished writing—
should be at home working on it that very instant
—but instead of squeezing out Tom’s story up in my study, here I was free,
being
Tom. Work on the boy’s novel had thrust me deep into the territory of my own youth. Today’s sporting affair, though conducted by top-paid professionals, quickened memories of town-ball games in Hannibal played in drowsy summer afternoons during those
too-brief years before my pap died and I’d apprenticed as a typesetter, my boyhood effectively ended.

“Sorry,” a voice said, as I was jostled and felt a hand briefly grip my shoulder. I looked up and saw the Englishman I’d glimpsed outside the gate; he must have accommodated the hawker. Squeezing in on my right side, he looked no more cheerful than I about the tight circumstances. “Yours?” With a bony finger he indicated the umbrella, perched at the bench’s rear edge. I thanked him and moved it to safety.

Staring idly at urchins trying to scale the weathered boards bordering the grounds, I felt an idea stirring. The whitewashing scene wherein Tom is enslaved for the day by his Aunt Polly lacked ginger; infernally
tame
it was, and its repair had eluded me. In exchange for entry to only a single match, couldn’t those street-boys be employed to paint the fence in a matter of hours? The lads would gladly pour out their labor; any wretch missing out would expire of mortification! The answer came:
Aunt Polly’s fence=30 yards long and 9 feet high. Day’s end=three bright coats.
With a chortle I pulled a stub pencil from my pocket and scribbled on the back of a scorecard the capper line that popped into mind:
If he hadn’t run out of whitewash, he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.
Delighted, I tucked the scorecard in my vest pocket and told myself to come to the ball grounds more often. Here, by glory, useful work could actually get
done.

As I’d made my notes, I grew aware of the young Englishman’s curious scrutiny. Now I took a moment to study
him.
I put him at perhaps fifteen years my junior, in his early to mid-twenties. His clothes were of current European mode, but somewhat ill-pressed. Up close he was even thinner than he’d first appeared.
The pallor of his sharp features—sufficiently hatchet-edged to rival my own hawkish visage—suggested that he spent his days indoors. His slate-gray eyes seemed to hold a languid alertness, hinting at a keen brain but perhaps one not easily aroused.

I was fixing to introduce myself when the crowd commenced to holler, “Play BALL!”

“Is there some cause for delay?” asked the gaunt Englishman.

Cheers broke out when the first Dark Blue batter swatted the ball over second base, but died out when a Boston infielder raced back to make a prize catch.

Ashcroft opined gloomily that if the Bostons were to field like
that
, our gooses were halfway in the oven.

“Your batsman spooned it up,” the Englishman countered crisply. “He’d do better with a horizontal stroke.”

“Goose-egged in the first inning!” groaned Ashcroft after the next two Dark Blues went out.

“
Innings
,” said the Englishman.

During the visitors’ ups, daisy-cutters between basemen, a mis-played sky-ball, and a carnival of base running gave Boston a three-run lead.

“Pool-sellers favor them at 100 to 70,” Ashcroft said with ponderous condescension, as if financiers alone appreciated such knotty matters. “At this rate—”

“Am I to understand,” the Englishman interjected, “that wagering is openly conducted?”

Color spread over Ashcroft’s neck and jowls. “Do you find fault with it, sir?”

“To the extent that it encourages the criminal classes,” the Englishman replied, “I do indeed.”

“
Here
?” Ashcroft said. “What criminal classes?”

“Pray look for yourself.” The Englishman pointed to boys scurrying from the Pavilion to the bullpen. Casting furtive sideways glances, they performed some nature of exchange with one of the men there, all done very quickly, then moved back toward the Pavilion. “It requires small shrewdness to theorize that they are pickpockets fencing ill-gotten gains.” His tone said that only a simpleton would dispute it. “Gambling can do naught but increase such misdeeds.”

Ashcroft had no ready answer. He and his wife had been rendered tight-faced and straight-backed by the stranger’s impertinence. I watched the boys for a minute; it was impossible to say they were guilty—or innocent, either. They did cast wary glances all about them, but in their place I would too if I lacked an entry ticket. Not wishing matters to grow hotter between my seatmates, I stuck out my hand. “Clemens is the name.”

“Holmes.” He clasped my hand briefly, then gave me a start by asking for a sample of ash from my cigar. “For my collection,” he explained. “This will make 102 separate varieties of tobacco ash.” With that he produced a vial and scraped in the desired amount, leaving me to ruminate:
Ash collection?
I was fond of boasting I’d run afoul of every human type during my piloting days, but this Holmes might be a new one for
my
collection.

A dismal succession of Dark Blues went down in order, leaving Ashcroft in a humor to tear his hair, and prompting Holmes to say, “If they attempted cover-drives instead of deep midwickets, they could exploit those gaps.” He pointed to right field. “Incidentally,” he added, “is it a sixer if the ball flies over the fence?”

While I pondered these mysteries Ashcroft muttered something
about sending foreigners home. I confess that I too was growing a bit irked. It rankled to have my boyhood game called up for judgment and found lacking.

“Terrible luck!” Ashcroft moaned when yet another Boston hit safely.

“Tut,” countered Holmes. “Luck is a product of strategy. Your club shows extremely little of it, attacking or defending.”

Before Ashcroft could summon an answer, our attention was caught by voices rising from the field.

“What is it?” asked Holmes.

“A rhubarb,” I said, as if any saphead would know
that
, and was pleased at his puzzlement.

“This certainly isn’t cricket,” said Holmes at length.

That was too much for Ashcroft, who launched a salvo of elevated rhetoric I wouldn’t have thought was in him. “You are correct, young man!” he snapped. “Base ball is
not
cricket. It is rough and contentious, a
democratic
pastime. It requires team play, yes, but individual pluck as well. It is rambunctious in its vitality. It is not weighed down with ornament and tradition, like your cricket, but alive and vital! It is
our
game! A true portrait, sir, of our national character!”

Well, I considered it first-rank argumentation, and was generally inclined to agree. But Ashcroft was mistaken if he thought he’d scored a home shot. Holmes took his time in sizing up his opponent with those gray eyes of his, and said, “Your ‘true portrait’ would be a good deal more absorbing with elements of
success
, not mere energy.” He added a
sir
, not outrightly mocking but in the neighborhood. “And your national game”—he gestured toward the diamond, where the dispute continued—“would be improved by more perfect agreement on its rules.”

The crowd’s agitation exploded into hisses, groans, and boos.

Holmes made a palms-up gesture.
See?

The Dark Blue captain had produced a rule book. “Read it out loud!” some wag yelled; another added, “Pass it around and let us
all
read!” A swell with waxed mustachios and a collapsible top hat turned and pointed at me. “Let Mark read it! Don’t HE know somethin’ about words?” It stirred a laugh, and heads turned my way.

“You are well known.” Holmes’s leaden eyes regarded me.

“I’m a bit of a scribbler,” I admitted modestly.

“That man indicated as much,” he said dryly. “The stains on your fingers and cuff previously suggested it to me as well.”

I looked down. Sure enough, faded black smudges were visible on my right cuff, and my fingers bore traces of ink from notebook entries that morning.

“I might also surmise that you began as a compositor,” said Holmes.

I have to admit that it rattled me. How’d he know of my years setting type?

“A trifling observation,” he said, noting my puzzlement. “Those calluses on your left thumb—old, strongly ridged—could result from nothing else but gripping heavy composition boxes.”

I nodded, thinking his feat clever but not
so
remarkable. On the other hand, nobody else had ever done it.