The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (142 page)

“When we consider,” remarks Mr. Carr, “Conan Doyle's detective work in the case of George Edalji, we may ask ourselves a question to which the answer will be self-evident: Who
was
Sherlock Holmes?”

In Mr. Carr's book appears a photograph of Dr. Conan Doyle taken at approximately the period of the
Victory
crime, together with a photograph
of the handwriting and signature of Mr. James Watson, Secretary of the Portsmouth & Southsea Literary & Scientific Society.

H.M.S.
Victory
, now preserved in drydock, may still be visited in Portsmouth Harbor, and the uniform stained with the lifeblood of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson may be viewed today in the Royal Navy Museum at Greenwich.

Due, presumably, to the official sequestration of documents touching upon the
Victory
crime, no mention of it appears in Mr. Carr's book, but it may be of interest to note that the Thracian Marbles were quietly returned to Greece not long after the events described by Mr. Manders in his private writings about the career of his friend, A. J. Raffles.

“
I WONDER IF
by any chance, Mr. Raffles, you're one of those discriminating people who may be described, perhaps, as Sherlockians?”

The question was tossed suddenly at A. J. Raffles by Mr. Greenhough Smith, distinguished editor of England's leading monthly periodical,
The Strand Magazine
.

It was a morning in dubious springtime, and a fitful sun shone in through the windows of Mr. Smith's editorial sanctum in Southampton Street, just off London's busy Strand.

Mr. Smith had invited Raffles, England's best-known cricketer, to contribute an article on the game, and dropping in on Mr. Smith to discuss the matter, Raffles had brought me along with him.

Knowing what I knew about the least suspected side of Raffles's life, the criminal side, I felt uncomfortable when Mr. Smith, agreement having been reached with Raffles for the cricket article, asked his unexpected question.

“Why, yes, Mr. Smith,” Raffles replied, at ease in a saddlebag chair, his suit immaculate, a pearl in his cravat, his dark hair crisp, his keen face tanned. “I think Bunny Manders and I can claim to be—shall we say—amateur Sherlockians. Eh, Bunny?”

“Certainly, Raffles,” I murmured uneasily, taking my cue from him and accepting a Sullivan from his proffered cigarette-case.

“You may be interested, then,” said Mr. Greenhough Smith, “to note this big basketful of letters on my desk. They're just a small part of the mail that's been flooding in from readers of Dr. Conan Doyle's latest tale,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
. It's the twenty-sixth published adventure of Sherlock Holmes. Its first instalment appeared last year, in
The Strand Magazine
for August 1901. Its eighth and final instalment is in the current issue—practically vanished already from the bookstalls. You may have been reading the tale?”

“Bunny Manders and I consider it,” said Raffles, “the most enthralling Holmes adventure that's so far appeared.”

“An opinion, to judge from these letters,” said Mr. Smith, “concurred in by most readers—with one curious exception.”

The jingle of passing hansoms was faintly audible from Southampton Street as Mr. Smith, polishing his scholarly glasses, frowned at a letter that lay open before him on his blotting-pad.

“You know, Mr. Raffles,” he went on, “Dr. Doyle was asked recently if he'd based the character of Sherlock Holmes on any real-life original. He replied that he had had in mind a preceptor of his undergraduate days at Edinburgh University, a certain Dr. Joseph Bell. On being told of this, Dr. Bell smiled. He said that Dr. Doyle's kind remembrance of his old teacher had made much of very little and that the real-life Sherlock Holmes is, in fact, Dr. Conan Doyle himself.”

My palms moistened with embarrassment, for Raffles and I knew from personal experience that Dr. Joseph Bell's remark was only too true. Back at a time when Dr. Conan Doyle had been an obscure medical practitioner in the naval town of Portsmouth and had published, to
no great acclaim, only the first of his Sherlock Holmes tales,
A Study in Scarlet
, Raffles and I had had an encounter with Dr. Doyle and had nearly gone to prison as a result.

Now here in Mr. Greenhough Smith's editorial sanctum twenty-five Sherlock Holmes tales later, with the great detective and his creator known the world over, the conversation had taken a turn I found distinctly disquieting.

But Raffles merely tapped ash casually from his cigarette and said, “To amateur Sherlockians, Dr. Joseph Bell's remark provides food for thought, Mr. Smith.”

“Of late,” Mr. Smith said, “Dr. Doyle's own great investigative ability has been concentrated on a challenge of the times we live in. As you may know, on the success of the Holmes tales, he abandoned medicine for literature. However, when the recent regrettable war with the Boers broke out, he abandoned literature for medicine—in order to serve in South Africa with the Langman Field Hospital. That photograph of him was taken at the time.”

Among the framed drawings and signed photographs on the walls of Mr. Smith's Sanctum was the original, I saw now, of an illustration for
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, depicting Sherlock Holmes, in deerstalker cap and Inverness cape, firing his revolver at the apparition of a gigantic hound charging with lambent eyes and slavering jaws out of the fog of a Dartmoor night.

Beside this illustration of the fictional Holmes hung a photograph of his creator, the real-life Sherlock Holmes. Big, burly, bushy-moustached, wearing khaki fatigues and a sun-helmet and smoking a Boer curved pipe, he was shown standing, a stalwart, uncompromising figure, against a background of Red Cross bell-tents on the parched South African
veld
.

“You may have met Dr. Doyle out there?” Mr. Smith asked.

“As Yeomanry subalterns for the duration, Bunny Manders and I served in a different sector,” said Raffles, naturally making no mention of our Portsmouth encounter with Dr. Doyle, which had occurred years before the Boer War.

“Now that peace has been restored,” said Mr. Smith, “Dr. Doyle has felt it his duty to investigate foreign allegations, not made by the Boers themselves, that the British used dum-dum bullets and committed other transgressions. As a doctor who had a good many Boer prisoners, wounded and sick, pass through his hands, he saw no evidence to support the allegations. He considers them to emanate from tainted sources with a vested interest in maintaining discord among nations.”

“The traffickers in armaments,” said Raffles.

“Exactly! And our government,” said Mr. Smith, “apparently considering it beneath its dignity to heed such allegations, Dr. Doyle has undertaken the task of investigation himself, at great personal expense of time and money. He has, nowadays, a world-wide audience. He feels a duty to it and to the cause of Peace, for he knows that when he speaks it's with a voice known to the world—the voice of Sherlock Holmes.”

“Quite so,” said Raffles.

“Dr. Doyle has gathered his documented evidence in rebuttal,” said Mr. Smith, “in a book he calls
The South African War: Its Cause and Conduct
, written without fee and printed far below cost by a sympathetic publisher. With the object of financing the translation of the book into many languages and its printing and world-wide distribution, gratis, a Fund has been opened for the receipt of contributions—”

“A Fund?” said Raffles, his grey eyes alert.

“A ‘War Book Fund,' ” said Mr. Smith, “administered by Dr. Doyle's own bank—and also, you may recall, as Sherlockians, Holmes's bank—the Capital and Counties, Oxford Street branch. Of course, this great task which Dr. Doyle has taken upon his broad shoulders leaves him no time for fiction. In fact, he tells me he intends
The Hound of the Baskervilles
to be his last Holmes tale—which is bad news, of course, for the writers of all these letters. Strange as it may seem, I dare not bother him with them in his present mood—which is a pity, because there's one here in particular that—”

He broke off and called, “Come in!”

The door opened to admit a tall young man,
meticulously frock-coated, with a high collar and clean-cut, intellectual features.

“My Assistant Editor,” said Mr. Smith, introducing us and handing the newcomer a sheaf of page proofs. “You want these for Mr. W. W. Jacobs? Very well, they can go off to him now. We mustn't keep humorists waiting. By the way, I was thinking of getting Mr. Raffles's impression of that letter from Dartmoor.”

“It's a hoax, Mr. Smith,” said the Assistant Editor firmly. “It's another humorist at work—an unlicenced one. It's be a mistake to bother Dr. Doyle with it, especially at this time. An impudent hoax would not only annoy Dr. Doyle, it'd just about put the lid on his determination to write no more Holmes tales. Gentlemen, if you'll excuse me—”

With a brisk nod to Raffles and myself, the Assistant Editor, obviously busy, left us.

“He's probably right about this letter,” said Mr. Smith, as the door closed. “It came in this morning, in an envelope postmarked Bovey Tracey. That's a small town—the ‘Coombe Tracey' of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
—on the edge of Dartmoor. No harm in getting a fresh eye cast on this letter. As a man of the world, Mr. Raffles, what d'you make of this?”

I read the letter, amateurishly typewritten on a machine with a faded blue ribbon, over Raffles's shoulder:

Dartmoor
,

Devonshire
.

27th March 1902

The Editor
,

The Strand Magazine
,

London
.

Sir
,

As a resident in the Dartmoor area, scene of
The Hound of the Baskervilles,
now concluded in the current issue of your magazine, I have read the narrative with particular interest
.

Your author, A. Conan Doyle, has based his tale on the case, well known in this area since 1677, of Sir Richard Cabell, Lord of the Manor of Brooke in the parish of Buckfastleigh. This evil-living baronet, in the act of raping a virgin, had his throat torn out by an avenging hound, which then, according to legend, took on phantom form, to range evermore upon Dartmoor
.

Your author has adapted the legend to his own purpose, making the Phantom Hound “the curse of the Baskervilles” and skilfully using the topography and certain phenomena of Dartmoor to lend his tale verisimilitude. Among such phenomena mentioned by him are strange nocturnal howlings sometimes heard, as indeed of some huge hound baying the moon. Sceptics attribute these sounds to natural causes—the wind in the rocks of the moorland tors, or the slow upwelling and escape of vegetable gas from the depths of the treacherous Dartmoor mires, such as the Fox Tor morass which your author chooses to call “the great Grimpen Mire.”

These sounds, and other phenomena mentioned in his tale, have never in fact been satisfactorily explained. I had hoped that your author might advance some theory to account for them. I now find, however, that he is content to end his tale with Mr. Sherlock Holmes destroying the “phantom hound” with five shots from a revolver, proving the beast to be mortal and doctored with phosphorescent paste in order for an evildoer to secure an inheritance by chicanery
.

Sir, I must confess to a slight sense of disappointment, and I feel constrained to describe to you a recent experience of my own
.

As something of a folklorist, I have cultivated the acquaintance, for the sake of his unique knowledge of the moor, of a certain local deer-poacher, sheep-stealer, all-around ne'er-do-well. I am, frankly, ashamed of my furtive association with the man. However, he came stealing one night to my back door
not long ago. His poacher's sawed-off shotgun had been confiscated
.

He begged the loan of my twelve-bore and a handful of cartridges. For some time, I gathered, a lurcher-like bitch he owned, a rangy, grizzly-grey beast he called Skaur, had been wild on the moor. Trouble was now brewing over sheep wantonly hamstrung and other depredations. The police were on the look-out for the culprit
—
Skaur, my acquaintance was certain, though he had long ago given it out that the bitch was dead and buried. If the police now got her and proved his ownership, it would mean gaol for him, as he could not pay the fines and damages
.

He was in such a panic to down Skaur before the police did so that I lent him my gun. About a week later, he appeared again one night at my door, a deeply shaken man. He had sighted Skaur, shot her, and crippled her. Following her blood trail, he found her laired among the rocks. She lay panting, bloodstained, with three grizzly-grey whelps so savagely at her dugs that she was like to be eaten while yet alive
.

As he crouched, peering into the lair in the failing daylight and howling wind, some instinct made him look round. He swears that, stealing towards him, was a creature, big as a pony, shadowy—some species of enormous hound. He shot at it, wildly—and the apparition was gone
.

The fellow was in such a state when he came to me that it was all I could do to get him, the following day, to take me on the long, rough trudge across some of the worst parts of Dartmoor to the alleged lair
.

It exists. Skaur lay there dead, ripped and torn by her own whelps. Sir, I have never seen on canine pelts such curious markings as those on these savage creatures. I have penned them into the lair and, at considerable inconvenience, kept them alive. Curious as to their sire, I have maintained long vigils at the lair by day and night, but have caught no glimpse of the creature described by my ne'er-do-well acquaintance, though I have heard, on two occasions, a distant, grievous, hound-like howling—but no conclusion, of course, can be drawn from that nocturnal phenomenon
.

I can devote no further time to this matter. I intend to shoot the whelps. I have no desire, as you will appreciate, for my association with my unsavoury acquaintance to become known. I must guard my local good repute—and hence maintain my anonymity in this matter. However, I will make this much concession: If your author should wish to view the strange whelps, he should insert forthwith, in the Personal column of the daily
Devon & Cornwall Gazette,
an announcement to this effect: ‘Sirius
—
instructions awaited.'

There will then be mailed to your office a map of Dartmoor with, clearly marked upon it, the precise location of the lair of the strange whelps. What your author may then choose to do about them, should he look into the matter, will be his responsibility, not mine
.

In the event of no announcement appearing, as specified above, by 7th April, I shall carry out the intention I have expressed in this notification
.

Meantime, I have the honour to be, Sir, yours truly
,

Sirius