The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (137 page)

“With your staff?” Lord Rivington said with heavy irony.

“My valet, my chef, what should I do without them?” He bowed slightly and was gone. The Secretary for War muttered something among which I thought I heard the words “primping popinjay.”

Holmes looked after him with a puzzled air, then stood deep in thought. Lord Rivington said impatiently, “Mr. Holmes, this is no time for brooding.”

“I beg your pardon. I agree, Plan X must be returned to you at once.”

“You know where it is?” the Secretary for War said in astonishment.

“It was an elementary problem.”

Holmes asked a maid to take us to Mr. Hans's room. As we walked up the great stairs and down a long passage, Holmes murmured to me, “Nevertheless, Watson, there is something I do not understand.”

We found the son of the house on a sofa, one foot heavily bandaged. He was a good-looking young fellow with delicate, almost pretty features, but at this moment they were taut with anguish. A bowl of flowers stood on a window ledge beside him and Holmes picked it up.

“The autumn crocus,” he said musingly. “A charming but dangerous flower.”

The young man started, then said, “Before God, Mr. Holmes, I never intended——”

“I am prepared to believe you, but I am not your judge. Let me tell you what I think happened and you can say how nearly it approaches the truth.”

He turned to us. “Hans here is one of those unfortunate people with a strong feminine streak that leads them into dubious, even criminal associations. Such deviations have touched our own Royal family—you will recall the need to hush up the scandal of the noble visitors to the male brothel in Cleveland Street. The German Intelligence department became aware of Hans's propensities and they have been blackmailing him. He has abstracted documents from his stepfather's bureau, copied, and then returned them. When you, Lord Rivington, told Sir Charles what had happened, he knew who the culprit must be.”

The young man wrung his hands. “They threatened to expose me. I would have gone to prison. What else could I do?”

“You should have told your stepfather,” Holmes said sternly. “I come to the events of last night. Sir Charles called you to his room. I don't know what he said, perhaps that you must leave the country, but it made you desperate. You had sufficient medical knowledge to know that colchicum was in your stepfather's medicine, and that it is easily distilled from the autumn crocus. Perhaps you prepared it then, perhaps you had some already prepared for just such an emergency. You added it to the medicine.”

“It was to make sure he slept soundly. I swear I never meant him to die.”

“I don't suppose you did. A little medical knowledge may be not merely dangerous but fatal. Otherwise, your scheme worked well enough. You took the papers, I suppose meaning to copy and return them. Why did you not do so?”

“Because I was drugged. All you say is true, Mr. Holmes, but can you explain what happened to me? When I knew my stepfather would be asleep, I went to his dressing-room and took the plan and the memorandum—the bureau drawer was easy to open. I had done it before. I brought them in here to copy and return them, and then I was going to post the copy at once. But I was too sleepy, my fingers wouldn't move over the paper. I put the papers away and fell asleep, and when I was woken I felt so dizzy I could hardly stand. It was because of the dizziness that I fell and broke my ankle.” He gestured at the bandages. “Then Dr. Cardew gave me an opiate and I slept until ten o'clock this morning. Now I am told not to move.”

“The papers are still here?” Lord Rivington cried. “Then if you want a chance of saving your villainous skin, tell me where they are.”

“In that bookcase,” the young man said sullenly. “Behind the top row of books, on the right.”

Lord Rivington went to the bookcase, took out some books in the top row, put his hand in, took out more books, and turned with a furious face. “There is nothing here! What trick are you trying to play?”

“Nothing?” I have never seen a ghastlier look of fear and apprehension on a man's face. “Impossible.” He shrank back as Lord Rivington approached him threateningly.

“Wait,” Sherlock Holmes said in an imperative tone. “Something is wrong here, there is something I have not understood.” He paced up and down the room while the rest of us watched. “Did you write a card saying my presence here was unnecessary? I thought not, yet it came from within the house. Last night you all ate the same food at dinner?”

“Except M. Calamy. His food is specially prepared by his chef.”

“And afterwards?”

“My stepfather left us. Coffee was served, but my digestion is poor. I always have a cup of chocolate.”

“A cup of chocolate, yes. And M. Calamy was very pleased with himself. I have been stupid, Watson.”

“Holmes, I don't know what you're talking about.” I could see from Lord Rivington's expression that he was similarly bewildered.

“The card, Watson, the card. It was a Frenchman's English misspelling. But quick, there is not a moment to lose, he is leaving.”

“M. Calamy?”

“The man who drugged the cup of chocolate—his so-called chef.”

We found him in a servants' bedroom, under the eaves, packing his bag for departure. He did not seem surprised to see us.

“Ah, Monsieur Holmes. Here is what you look for.” A large envelope lay on the bed. “The excellent Plan X, and the other paper.”

“Which you have copied.”

“Precisely,
mon cher
. Now Britain and France have no secrets from each other, we can be entirely frank in discussion.”

“It was you who sent me the postcard.”

“My spelling, she is not of the best, but that is so.”

“You drugged the chocolate, and then took the documents.”

“On behalf of
la belle France
. I am called the good M. Calamy's chef, but he gets the indigestion from my cooking.” He chuckled. “I make my investigation, and soon understand that the young Hans is—like your Oscar Wilde, shall we say?—and is responsible for what has happened. And I see things are, as you say, coming to the head, so I arrange for the young Hans to have a little harmless sleep while I take possession of Plan X and the memorandum. No harm is done—except to our friend Sir Charles. That is a great tragedy.”

He was an odd-looking little fellow, very short, his head a perfect egg shape. His hair was very black and parted in the middle, his moustaches long and pointed. He wore patent-leather shoes. He looked like a perfect musical-comedy Frenchman.

“You are an agent of the French government,” Holmes said rather stiffly.

“At the moment that is so, but I am like yourself a private detective. It is truly an honour to meet the greatest detective in Britain.”

Holmes rarely smiled but he did so then, although his smile vanished at the little man's next words.

“I am myself the greatest detective in Europe. My name is——”

The narrative ends here, so that the pseudo-chef's identity remains uncertain. The scandal of Sir Charles's death was evidently hushed up. Hans Mulready had in later life a successful stage career as a female impersonator
.

A PROLIFIC NOVELIST
with more than fifty books to his credit, as well as the author of scores of short stories, Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating (1926–2011) also worked as a journalist until 1960, when he became a full-time fiction writer and literary critic, achieving success with
The Perfect Murder
(1964). Introducing his most famous character, Inspector Ganesh Ghote (pronounced GO-tay), of the Bombay CID, it won the (British) Crime Writers' Association (CWA) Gold Dagger for the best novel of the year; it also was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Regarded as one of the great writers of fair-play detective fiction, Keating served as president of the prestigious Detection Club (1985–2000) and was awarded a Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement by the CWA in 1996.

In addition to reviewing crime fiction for the London
Times
for fifteen years, he wrote many nonfiction books devoted to mysteries, including
Murder Must Appetize
(1975),
Great Crimes
(1982),
Writing Crime Fiction
(1986; revised 2nd ed. 1994),
Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books
(1987), and
The Bedside Companion to Crime
(1989). As a dedicated aficionado of Sherlock Holmes, he produced
Sherlock Holmes, the Man and His World
(1979) and several pastiches of the great detective.

“A Trifling Affair” was first published in
John Creasey's Crime Collection
, edited by Herbert Harris (London, Gollancz, 1980).

TRIFLES, SHERLOCK HOLMES
was wont to remark, may bear an importance altogether contrary to their apparent worth, and I venture to think that there cannot have been a case more trifling in all Holmes's adventures than that of the affair of the poet of childhood and the ink-blotted verse volume. Yet, unimportant though it was, it nevertheless had in it for me a lesson which I hope I shall not forget.

It was a day in the spring of 1898 when from among the early post Holmes selected a particular letter, still in its envelope, and tossed it to me across the breakfast table.

“Well, Watson,” he said, “tell me what you make of that. A somewhat unusual missive for a consulting detective to receive, I think.”

I took the envelope and turned it over once or twice in my hands. It appeared to be of no particular distinction. The paper was neither cheap nor very expensive. The postmark, I saw, was that of Brighton and Hove for the previous afternoon. The writing of the address, “Sherlock Holmes Esq., 221
B
Baker Street, London W.,” was plainly that of a gentleman, though the letters were not perhaps as confidently formed as they might have been. The sole peculiarity that I could observe was that the writer's name had been put upon the reverse of the envelope, “Phillip Hughes Esq.”

“Possibly an American who writes,” I ventured at last, when from the tapping of Holmes's lean fingers on the tablecloth I became aware of his impatience. “I believe that the custom of putting the writer's name on the outside of a letter is more practised on the far side of the Atlantic than here. And certainly the handwriting is not that of any contintental.”

“Good, Watson. Excellent. Clearly my correspondent does not come from the Continent of Europe. But is there no more you can tell from the plentiful signs that any person addressing an envelope is bound to leave behind?”

I looked at the letter once more, a little mortified that Holmes had added his disparaging rider to the praise for my first deduction.

“Perhaps the writer was in a state of some perturbation,” I suggested. “The formation of some of the letters is certainly rather ragged, although the hand in itself is by no means uneducated. It is just the sort I learnt painfully at school myself.”

Holmes clapped his hands in delight.

“Yes, indeed, Watson. You have gone to the heart of it with all your usual perspicacity.”

I busied myself in taking some marmalade. The truth of the matter was that I could not for the life of me see in what I had been so perspicacious, though I was not sorry to have earned Holmes's unstinted praise.

A silence fell. Darting a glance at my companion from my perhaps over-busy buttering of my hot toast, I found that he was leaning back in his chair, half-empty coffee cup neglected, regarding me with unremitting steadiness.

I was constrained to look back at him.

“You have no further comment to make?” he asked me at last.

I picked up the envelope once again.

“No, no, my dear fellow, not the envelope. I must suppose that you have long ago extracted
all the information you are likely to get from that. I meant have you no comment to make upon my remarking on your perspicacity in pointing to the style of my correspondent's hand.”

“Why, no, Holmes. No, I think not. No, there is nothing more to be said about that. I think.”

“Not even that undoubtedly the writer of the letter is a schoolboy?”

“A schoolboy? But how…”

“That educated hand, yet with many of the letters curiously unformed. Why, you have only to compare the capital H of Holmes with that of Hughes to observe the significant differences. No, undoubtedly my correspondent is still at school, and indeed not yet at any of our great public schools but a mere boy of no more than twelve. And, as you must know, the South Coast is greatly favoured by private scholastic establishments. Open the letter, Watson, and let us hear why a schoolboy wishes to consult Sherlock Holmes.”

Obediently I took up a paperknife and slit open the envelope, hoping the while, I must confess, that just once Holmes's confident deductions might prove false. But a single glance at the address on the letter within confirmed him exactly in his surmise. “St. George's School, Hove,” it was headed.

“Read it, Watson. Read it.”

“Dear Mr. Holmes,” I read. “All of us boys at St. George's are jolly interested in your cases, except that Dr. Smyllie, our headmaster, forbids us to read about you. But, Mr. Holmes, a fearful injustice has been done. He has said that our holiday for St. George's Day, which has been our right ever since the beginning of the world, will be cancelled unless someone owns up. But, Mr. Holmes, nobody did it. Every chap in the school is certain of that. No one did it at all, and still he says our holiday will be cancelled. Your obedient servant, Phillip Hughes. P.S. It was spilling ink on his precious book, and why should any fellow do that?”

I laid down Master Hughes's letter with tears of laughter in my eyes.

“Upon my soul, Holmes,” I said. “Here's a case that will try your methods to the utmost.”

“Yes, indeed, Watson. There are features in it, are there not, of considerable interest. I think a trip to the Sussex coast might prove distinctly stimulating.”

My laughter was quenched.

“Surely,” I said, “you cannot be serious?”

Yet already I knew from the look of deep preoccupation on my friend's countenance that he did indeed fully intend to go down to Hove and investigate our young correspondent's indignant complaint.

“My dear Watson,” he answered with some asperity. “If a council of schoolboys declares upon oath in a purely private communication that a certain event did not occur among them, you can take it as pretty much of a fact that that event did not happen. They know altogether too much about each other. There is only one circumstance I can think of that might prove an exception.”

“And that is?”

He gave me a quick frown.

“Why, if the deed in question should have been perpetrated by the writer of the letter himself, of course. And we can make certain of that only by speaking to the young man face to face.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” I answered. “But all the same, a visit to Hove will take us most of a day if not more, and you have the business of the Bank of England oyster dinner still in hand.”

“My dear Watson, an injustice has been done. Or almost certainly so. I hope I am not the man to allow any mere pecuniary considerations to stand in my way under such circumstances. St. George's Day is but two days hence. Have the goodness to look up a train to Brighton. We will go down this morning.”

I went at once to Bradshaw in its familiar place upon our shelves.

But I was not yet to tell Holmes how soon we could be off on this extraordinary errand. Before I had had time to run my finger down the Brighton departures column there entered our page, Billy, with upon the salver that he carried a single large visiting card.

Holmes picked it up and read it aloud.

“Dr. A. Smyllie, MA, PhD, St. George's School for the Preliminary Education of Young
Gentlemen, Hove, near Brighton, Sussex. Why, Watson, here is the very dominie under whose stern edict our young friend is suffering. Bring him up, Billy. Bring him up.”

In a few moments Master Hughes's headmaster stood before us. He was not the sort of man I would have imagined a headmaster to be, even the headmaster of an establishment for twelve-year-olds. Far from being an imposing figure able to exert authority with a glance, he was reedy and undulating to a degree. Correctly enough dressed in frock-coat and striped trousers, he yet wore a loosely knotted cravat at his throat. His face was very pale, and he seemed more than a little agitated.

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes?” he asked in a high-pitched, almost squeaky, voice, turning not to Holmes but to myself.

I corrected his mistake, which seemed unduly to disconcert him, and introduced my friend.

Dr. Smyllie extended a somewhat limp hand at the end of an extraordinarily long arm, and winced a little when Holmes took it in his firm grasp.

“And what can I have the honour of doing for the poet of childhood?” Holmes asked.

Upon Dr. Smyllie's pallid countenance there appeared a faint flush of pleasure.

“You know my work, Mr. Holmes? I had hardly dared to hope that a person of your—of your—of your direction in life would be aware of my few, humble efforts.”

“You do yourself an injustice, Dr. Smyllie,” Holmes replied. “Who does not know those lines of yours that conclude so touchingly ‘Take up the spangled web of words—' ”

“ ‘Then lay it gently on my grave,' ” I completed the poem, surprised only that Holmes, so contemptous of the softer things of life, should be able to quote those verses from “For My Infant Son,” often though they have been reprinted.

Now I understood why Holmes had addressed Dr. Smyllie as “the poet of childhood.” For such Algernon Smyllie had been dubbed some thirty years earlier when his very successful volume of verse had first appeared, poems concerned with every tender aspect of a child's life, of which the verses “For My Infant Son” were the crown.

But now, it seemed, the young poet had become the mature schoolmaster. Algernon Smyllie had become Dr. A. Smyllie, MA, PhD. Yet he still looked, I thought to myself, more the sensitive poet than the awe-inspiring headmaster.

Indeed, faced with telling Holmes the reason for his visit, he positively hung his head and scraped at our Turkey carpet with the inside of his right foot, upon which, I saw, the boot buttons were mismatched at the top.

“Now, sir,” Holmes said encouragingly.

Dr. Smyllie blushed again.

“It is a trifling matter, Mr. Holmes,” he said.

Holmes's lips flickered in the merest hint of a smile.

“But trifling matters, as I have more than once explained to my friend, Dr. Watson, can on occasion be of the utmost significance,” he said.

Dr. Smyllie stepped back a pace, and even glanced at the door as if he were contemplating immediate flight. But he succeeded in standing his ground at last.

“No, no, Mr. Holmes,” he said, the words tumbling out of him. “No, indeed. I assure you, my dear sir, quite the contrary. Altogether the other way about. I would not have disturbed you at all, my dear sir, only that I happened to be passing this way and I thought—I thought…”

Holmes stayed silent, sucking at an empty pipe which he had picked up from the mantelpiece.

Dr. Smyllie gave an immense swallow, the Adam's apple in his long throat above that loosely tied cravat rising and falling.

“No, my dear sir,” he resumed, “I would have dismissed the matter by writing a mere note, perhaps not even by that, only it so happened that my business takes me past—er—your door and it—er—occurred to me to call and settle it with a few words.”

“And the matter is?” Holmes asked, with a certain sharpness.

“Oh, nothing, sir. A mere trif— Nothing, sir, of any importance.”

“But, nevertheless, since you have called upon us, it would be as well to unburden yourself of its substance.”

The willowy poet-headmaster blushed again at Holmes's rebuke. But he did now contrive to bring out what it was that had brought him to call.

“Mr. Holmes,” he said, “I have reason to believe that one of my pupils—I assure you, sir, that they are not generally so disgracefully behaved—that one of my pupils may have had the temerity to address a letter to your good self. A letter concerning a trifling—that is, the merest matter of necessary discipline. And happening, as I say, to be passing, I—er—thought I would merely call in to—to assure you, sir, that you need do nothing in the matter. Nothing at all, sir. I merely wished to offer you an apology, as it were. An apology on behalf of—er—St. George's School.”

Holmes replaced his pipe upon the mantelpiece and gave our visitor a cool nod.

“If you will excuse me one moment, Dr. Smyllie,” he said. “I have a small domestic matter to attend to. A word with our landlady about my arrangements for the day. She needs to know in good time in order to do her marketing.”

He left the room, quietly closing the door behind him, and Dr. Smyllie and I stood facing each other in a somewhat awkward silence. I felt myself a little annoyed with my friend. He did not usually leave me with a client in this manner, nor was it often his custom to consult so much Mrs. Hudson's convenience. However, he returned before I had had time to do more than offer our visitor some few comments on the prevailing weather, and he at once resumed the consultation.

“I take it then, sir,” he said to Dr. Smyllie, “that this extempore visit was with the intention simply of reassuring me that I need take no particular notice of any communication I might receive from any of your pupils?”

“Exactly so, sir. Exactly so.”

Holmes regarded the schoolmaster-poet with an expression of the utmost seriousness.

“Then, sir, you may take it that the object of your visit has been thoroughly achieved,” he said.

Dr. Smyllie bowed and thanked Holmes with, I thought, perhaps more effusiveness than was necessary, and in a few minutes he had left us.

“Well, Watson,” Holmes said, as our visitor's tread could be heard descending the stairs, “have you any observations to make?”

I pondered.

“I hardly think so,” I replied. “Except perhaps that Dr. Smyllie need hardly have put himself out even to the extent of halting his cab outside our door to tell us that young Hughes's letter is, after all, a very trifling—that is, not a matter of great importance.”

“You think so? But, tell me, did you notice anything more about our poet of childhood?”

“Why, no. No. Unless perhaps that his right boot was mis-buttoned.”

“Good, Watson. I knew I could rely upon you to seize on the significant detail.”