Sherlock Holmes (16 page)

The Thinking Engine steered him towards America and William Kissam Vanderbilt, the railroad millionaire whose wife had aspirations for their only daughter, Consuelo, to marry into the British nobility. The resultant betrothal rescued the duke from bankruptcy and his property from its remorseless slide into dilapidation, although it was not, by all accounts, a match made in heaven. Seldom can wedding vows have seemed more like the clauses of a business contract.

The
Coventry Gleaner
of Wednesday 13th March contains a story of almost tragicomic proportions about the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, one of Oxford’s most famous denizens, better known to his many, many readers around the world by his pen name Lewis Carroll. The venerable author of delightful nonsense, then nearing the final chapter of his life, paid a call on the Thinking Engine in his role as a semi-retired lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church College. He was in the throes of writing a new treatise on linear and algebraic equations, and sought the Engine’s aid in constructing a method of evaluating determinants in square matrices, a theorem he was working on. This action he undertook in a light-hearted, jocular manner, little thinking it would yield a result.

What happened next is not exactly clear. The Engine, after nearly half an hour of calculation and computation, churned out several dozen yards of tickertape, which Dodgson spent a further half an hour poring over. He then left the Galleries in a state of some flusterment with the coils of tickertape bunched up under his arm.

The story was picked up by two further Knaresfield newspapers, the
Northampton Argus
and the
Birmingham Echo
, the following day. In both, Dodgson is said by eyewitnesses to have “blanched” when he read the Thinking Engine’s answer and to have been “close to fainting”. The
Echo
article concludes,

Was this a Snark that Mr Dodgson discovered, or a Boojum? Did the Thinking Engine send him down a rabbit hole from which he may never return? Has it imparted some profound piece of wisdom to him with an enigmatic Cheshire Cat smile? What is certain is that Mr Dodgson departed from the University Galleries in high dudgeon, with anything but a “carol” in his heart.

I can imagine whoever wrote the piece was especially pleased with that closing sentence.

It has been said that his encounter with the Thinking Engine hastened Dodgson’s demise. He had been sickly since childhood, suffering from a weak chest, persistent migraines and epilepsy, but some have argued that the rapidity and facility with which the Engine solved the mathematical problem he put to it broke his spirit and was a blow from which he never recovered. A mere metal machine had cracked a riddle that had been confounding him for months, perhaps even years. He was an Anglican deacon and a staunch Christian, too, so the Engine’s triumph may have wounded him on a religious as well as an intellectual level: something unliving, not blessed by God with a soul, was able to outshine the supposed pinnacle of Creation,
Homo sapiens
. What is undeniable is that the Reverend Dodgson’s already precarious health deteriorated sharply thereafter, until pneumonia took him in 1898 just a fortnight shy of his sixty-sixth birthday.

Finally, I shall quote from the
Nottingham Mercury
of Saturday 16th March, in which it was reported that a delegation of students from St Edmund Hall had quizzed the Engine about one of Oxford’s queerest little oddities, namely a tombstone in the churchyard of St Peter-in-the-East on Queen’s Lane, adjacent to their college. Marking the last resting place of one Sarah Hounslow, the tombstone proclaims that the lady shuffled off her mortal coil on “31.2.1835”. This impossible date has been ascribed to a simple slip of the stonemason’s chisel. There is nothing in the parish records giving the correct date of death.

The Thinking Engine proposed that the error occurred because the stonemason commenced his work on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, which fell on 4th March that year. Sarah Hounslow must have died the day before, three days after the end of February. The stonemason, the machine suggested, may have overindulged himself on that same day, Shrove Tuesday. If he was of French or Eastern European origin, this would have meant drinking heavily in addition to gorging on pancakes and other rich foodstuffs. That, or he had been a guest of Brasenose College, where the consumption of a yard of spiced ale is traditional on the eve of Lent. In other words, the man was reeling from a titanic hangover as he hammered out the tombstone inscription and forgot that February customarily has only twenty-eight days, twenty-nine at most. “The Thinking Engine,” the
Mercury
article said,

prefixed its reply with the phrase “A polite speculation only”, suggesting that there are some conundrums that are beyond even its dazzling computational capacity to unravel. Yet there is a playfulness about the offered solution which suggests hitherto unplumbed depths. Is it possible, is it even conceivable that Professor Quantock’s machine possesses a latent humorous streak?

The perfidious Archie Slater of course made hay. The
Illustrated London News
of that same Saturday sees him describe the Engine’s escalating popularity in Oxford: “People approach in a spirit of scepticism and leave with the beatific smiles of the converted.” He is then provoked to muse, “What need have we of detectives when the Engine has all the answers? What becomes of Sherlock Holmes and his ilk now?”

The last was more than just a jeering taunt. It was something I was beginning to ask myself, and I asked it all the more intently on my next trip up to Oxford, as Holmes and I tackled “The Mystery of the Missing Stroke”.

Mist. Mist hung over Oxford. Mist draped itself across the rooftops, masking the city’s towers and spires and muffling the peals of its multiplicity of church bells. Mist slid along the cobbles and mud of the streets. Mist flowed around the dome of the Radcliffe Camera and shrouded the cupola of the Sheldonian Theatre, Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece with its palisade of sagely stone heads. Mist rippled and writhed through the air, turning the sun to a pale silver disc.

“Makes one quite nostalgic for home,” Holmes remarked as we headed along the towpath on the east bank of the Isis, past Christ Church Meadow.

“A London fog is yellower and more mephitic,” I said. “It leaves a foul taste in the back of the throat.”

“An Oxford mist runs it a close second. This is in many ways a dismal place, Watson, dank and damp. Built on marshland, which tells you a lot. Floodplains all around. Cambridge University is no better, perched amid the Fens. What is it that compelled the founders of our two supreme seats of learning to choose such low-lying, uncongenial sites for both?”

“No education worth having can be achieved without discomfort?” I suggested.

I was speaking in jest, of course, but Holmes took the comment at face value. “Perhaps so. The late Cardinal Newman, at any rate, was far from fond of Oxford. He said something along the lines of ‘Its air does not suit me. I feel it directly I return to it.’ This from a man all but synonymous with the city. No wonder he threw himself so enthusiastically into ecclesiastical reform, seeking refuge from unpleasant physical conditions in the embrace of doctrinal debate. Might the name the Oxford Movement have been a latent expression of the desire to be somewhere else? Then there’s Thomas Hardy, who has described Oxford’s air as ‘extinct’ and ‘accentuated by the rottenness of the stone’.”

I too had read
Jude the Obscure
the previous year in serial form in
Harper’s
, but could not quote from it as accurately as Holmes did, or indeed at all. His mind was an incredible repository of retained facts. I wonder if he forgot anything.

“I am experiencing that for myself,” he went on, “now that I have been here nearly three weeks. There is something deadening and enervating in the local atmosphere. It creeps up on one like catarrh. I am not at ease. I am not at home.”

His face took on a haunted, lugubrious cast. I had seen the look before, but normally it manifested when Holmes was bored, in a lull between cases, under-stimulated. I was surprised by its presence now. Weren’t we in the middle of an investigation? Weren’t we on our way to interview a group of people who had been present during an inexplicable abscondment? At a time when, in the normal course of events, he ought to have been at his most excitable and energetic, Holmes seemed to be lapsing into one of his episodic depressions. That worried me. I feared a resumption of the needle and the seven-per-cent solution of cocaine, whose effects were so detrimental to the health. The pupils of his eyes were not dilated, nor was he speaking with the agitated prolixity which use of the drug commonly engenders. He was not under its influence at that precise moment. But how long before he resorted to it once more?

On the river, a sleek clinker-built eight emerged from the mist, its crewmen pulling heavily through the iron-grey water. The cox exhorted them with shouts which matched the rhythmic splash of the blades and the grunts of the rowers. The boat passed us by in a flash and was swallowed by the mist again, the sounds of its progress swiftly dwindling into silence.

“If being here is getting you down,” I said, “why not remove yourself back to Baker Street? A change of scene might do you the world of good. It might restore some perspective.”

“Not while
he
is still out there.” Holmes swept an arm around him vaguely. “Not while he continues to evade me.”

“Is it the agent provocateur who is vexing you so, or is it the Thinking Engine?”

“Why would you say that? There is no comparison. One is an evil, the other merely an annoyance.”

“It cannot help your mental equilibrium, though, to be waging a war on two fronts. Ahead of you is an opponent, entrenched, lurking out of sight, while behind is another opponent nipping at your heels. You are stretched thin, your resources divided.”

“Watson, sometimes you really do talk utter rot,” Holmes snapped. “I have operated under far greater strain than this previously. My powers are up to the task. Tut! I make a few passing remarks about the inclemency of the weather, and all at once you’re inferring some sort of debility.”

He snorted in irritation and picked up the pace. So long and rapid did his strides become that I had to all but run to keep up.

We crossed a footbridge over a spur of the Cherwell and arrived at a row of boathouses. Our destination was the sixth one along. Outside, waiting for us in the mist, was a handful of hale and hearty young men of assorted shapes and sizes. They were dressed in boating caps, short-sleeved cotton shirts and neckerchiefs patterned with blue and white stripes. A couple of them wore blazers with navy blue piping and cuff rings and an emblem of three feathers embroidered on the breast pocket. All looked sheepish and a touch sullen. Their smiles, as they greeted us, were forced.

“These, Watson, unless I am very much mistaken, are the crew of the Oriel College 1st VIII,” Holmes said. “Gentlemen, you are kind to have agreed to convene here. You need not have come in your rowing outfits, but it is appropriate to have you looking the part, I suppose.”

“We have not got changed since this morning,” the tallest of them said. “We have, as you can imagine, been in a state of perturbation. For Trenchard to do as he did…” He shook his head. “It beggars belief.”

“You are…?”

“Stevens.”

“Ah yes. You row at number five.”

“How did you…?” Stevens turned to an older man present, who was clad not in rowing wear but in plain flannels. “Of course. You have told Mr Holmes about us, Mr Gill.”

The man called Gill gave a curt nod. “I gave him all the information he asked for, Stevens. Your names, your positions in the boat, whatever details he deemed pertinent.”

“You also insisted he try to discover what prompted Trenchard’s strange behaviour. I suppose it was inevitable.”

“If it helps us find Trenchard, where is the harm?” said Gill. “As your coach, your welfare is my responsibility. Trenchard is gone, God alone knows where. Torpids starts tomorrow, and if we cannot locate our stroke and captain of boats, then we are in trouble.”

“Torpids?” I said.

“It is one of the university’s two annual rowing races,” Holmes explained, “and is held over four days of Hilary Term. Every college fields a crew, often more than one, and the boats set off from staggered starting positions. Each boat attempts to hit the boat immediately in front. When this happens, it is known as a ‘bump’, and the crew which does the bumping ascends one place in the rankings while the crew that is bumped descends one place. The outcome of each day’s racing sets the starting positions for the next. At the end of the four days, whichever boat is at the top of the rankings is crowned Head of the River and holds that post until the following year.”

“Sounds inordinately complicated. Why not race side by side and have elimination rounds, as at an ordinary regatta?”

“The Isis is too narrow and winding for that,” said Gill. “We make do with what we’ve got.”

“But isn’t it hazardous, one boat trying to hit another? Surely there must be sinkings.”

“On very rare occasions. It is considered a bump, however, if the chasing boat’s bow merely overlaps the stern of the boat ahead. Actual contact need not be made.”

“Brasenose College has been Head for the past nine years,” said Holmes. “Oriel is favourite to catch them this year.”

“But not without Trenchard,” said Gill sourly. “He is a titan amongst oarsmen, a one-man engine room, and the best stroke I have ever coached. It’s a wonder he isn’t in the Blue Boat.”

“They don’t want him,” said one of the crew members, the smallest in stature. “They know what he’s like, how he rubs people up the wrong way. That’s why
we’re
stuck with him.”

“You are the cox,” said Holmes. “Preston, isn’t it? A cox needs to be light and slender, and you fit the bill.” He held out his hand, and Preston shook it. Puzzlement registered on his face, since Holmes had not shaken Stevens’s hand earlier in much the same circumstances; the act seemed gratuitous. The cox then shrugged, clearly thinking no more of it.