The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (47 page)

IT WAS ON
a chill January afternoon in 1889 that I sat before the fire in my Paddington home, thoroughly exhausted from some hours of such strenuous activity as I had not known since our pursuit of the Andaman Islander on the Thames. I did not stir when I heard the bell, not recalling until its fifth clang that among the other vexations of this day was the fact that it was the maid's afternoon out. Charging my pipe load of Arcadia mixture to revive my flagging spirits, I reluctantly answered the summons.

It was with a mixture of joy and apprehension that I beheld upon the step the familiar figure of my friend Sherlock Holmes. Pleased though I was to see him, I nevertheless feared that he might find me, in my present condition, regrettably slow in responding to the challenge of whatever game might be afoot. But Holmes seemed as inactively disposed as I, inclined to do nothing, after our exchange of greetings, but follow me back to the fire, sink into the chair on the opposite side, and companionably stoke up his villainous black clay.

“London has grown dull,” Holmes complained as I performed the expected rites with the tantalus and gasogene which had been his wedding present to us. “And dullness, my dear Watson, is the only insufferable malady. It is over two months since my pretended illness, which so deeply concerned you, enabled Inspector Morton to arrest that devil, Mr. Culverton Smith; and in all that time not a single problem of interest has come my way. Oh, the newspapers devoted some space, of course, to that wretched affair of the Taliaferro opals; but a four-year old child could have seen that the thief must be an albino Lascar.” He broke off and regarded me with some concern. “My dear fellow, you aren't ill, are you?”

“The January chill,” I hastened to explain. “Here; this will take the edge off it for both of us.”

“Ennui
…
”
Holmes murmured. “The French, Watson, have certain invaluable words. Consider, too, their use of our own word,
spleen
…One needs my grandmother's language to describe my state at the moment. The concretely expressed gratitude of the reigning family of Holland would in itself be sufficient to maintain my modest needs for years to come; but my mind needs a case. I must sharpen my teeth, Watson, on whatever bone I can find.

“This afternoon,” he continued after a pause and a sip, “I called by at the Diogenes Club, but Mycroft was engaged on a mission of such secrecy that its nature might not be hinted even to me. I needed a mere five minutes to determine, from the ash beside Mycroft's habitual chair and the smudge of violet ink on the clerk's left forefinger, that his errand concerned a certain highly placed young gallant whose activities it would be wiser for me to ignore. Then I came to you, my old friend, in the hope that your practice—ever growing, I trust?—might have produced some little problem of a teasing, if petty, sort.”

“No problem,” I said wearily, and added, “from my practice.”

“If I cannot find stimulating distraction somewhere…” His normally incisive voice
trailed off, and the thumb of his right hand made the significant gesture of depressing a hypodermic syringe.

“In God's name, Holmes!” I cried. “You would not return to that?”

He sat in silence for a moment, smoking and smiling. Then he asked casually, “Polar or grizzly?”

“Polar,” I responded automatically, and then leapt to my feet. “Holmes,” I exclaimed, “this is too much! That you should want some stimulating distraction, as you call it, I can understand; but that you should invade the privacy of your friends, spying on them in their domestic moments like the pettiest enquiry agent—”

His welcome laugh and a gesture of his long thin hand interrupted my indignation. “Watson, Watson,” he lamented, shaking his head. “Will you never learn that I practice neither black magic nor sneaking skulduggery? When I find a healthy young man in a state of complete exhaustion, dust on his hands and on the knees of his trousers, his rug awry and the furniture misplaced, and when moreover he winces at my causual allusion to a four-year old child, it is obvious that he has been spending the afternoon entertaining an infant, and at least in part by imitating animals on all fours. To one who knows your character as I do, Watson, it is equally obvious that the child would find you most acceptable in the role of a bear. It remained only to ask, ‘Polar or grizzly?'—though in view of your predilection for tales of arctic adventure, that answer, too, should have been obvious. I regret that I seem to be losing my touch.”

“Now—” I began.

“I know,” he interrupted me with some acerbity. “Now it is all perfectly simple—once I have explained it. To see the answer it is explained—that, I might point out, is the desideratum. However, I might go on to deduce that the child belongs to a friend of your wife's (since I recall no couples with children in your own acquaintance), and that your wife and the child's mother have gone out together. Probably, in view of the day and the hour, to a matinee. Quite possibly, in view of the season, to a pantomime—which might perhaps indicate an older child in the family, taken to the theatre while this one, too young for public appearance, is left with the friend's obliging husband.”

“Holmes,” I exclaimed, “King James the First should have known you before he wrote his studies on witchcraft.”

“Tush, Watson,” my friend protested. “That was the merest guesswork. But there is no guesswork in concluding from the faint cries which I detect from the upper story that the young man in question has awakened from his nap and demands attention.”

“This,” I announced to Holmes when I had done my clumsy best to freshen the child after his nap, “is Master Elias Whitney.”

“Ah? A namesake, no doubt, of the late Principal of the Theological College of St. George's?”

“His nephew,” I replied, marveling as always at this man who had at his fingertips every fact of English life. “His mother, Kate, is a dear friend of Mary's. His father…” But professional reticence caused me to say no more of his poor father, little dreaming how the perverse proclivity which at that time caused me so much concern as a medical man was later to lead me into the adventure which I have chronicled elsewhere as the Man with the Twisted Lip.

“Ah there, young feller,” Holmes said genially.

Young Elias gravely contemplated the piercing eyes, the hawklike features, the firmly sensitive lips of my friend, and delivered his verdict. “Funny man,” he said.

I could not repress a smile, nor a lively sense of anticipation as I watched to see what species of animal Holmes would be obliged to portray for the young gentleman's entertainment. But I was disappointed in my expectations as young Elias disregarded the temptations of the rug which had been the Arctic Circle, settled himself on the hassock by the fire, and demanded, “Tell story.”

Holmes's eyes twinkled. “He's found your
weak spot, Watson, my lad—a confirmed story teller, in and out of school. Well, if he must have animals, tell him of our experiences at Baskerville Hall.”

I was about to protest as to the suitability for young ears of that gruesome narrative when the boy himself said, “No. Tell story about boglebear.”

“He's come to the right shop,” Holmes observed. “Your Scottish ancestry, my dear fellow, must team with stories of bogles.”

“He means,” I explained patiently, “a polar bear, such as I had the honor of portraying. No, Elias, I'm sorry, but I don't know any stories about polar bears. But I can recall that in my own childhood I was always partial to stories about wolves. Would one of those interest you?”

“Bogle-wolf?” Elias suggested.

“I am not positive on the subject, but I strongly doubt that there is such a beast as a polar wolf. This wolf is simply an ordinary wolf, such as one may encounter, at least in fairy tales, upon any corner. It lived in a deep dark forest—”

“Corners in forest?” Elias asked with interest.

Holmes had refilled his glass from the tantalus and settled back in the chair. “Pray continue, Watson,” he urged. “I find fairy tales particularly suitable for you, in view of the romantic touches in your narratives of my own adventures. I am eager to see you at work.”

“No,” I answered Elias. “There were no corners in the forest, only a long winding pathway which led from one cottage to another. Now in the first cottage there lived a little girl called Red Riding Hood—”

“Know bout Riding Good,” Elias said.

I felt somewhat rebuffed. “Would you prefer another story, then?”

“No. Like Riding Good. Tell bout Riding Good.”

“The public,” Holmes observed, “always prefers a story which it already knows.”

I told about “Riding Good.” Since the story may perhaps be familiar to the reader from his own nursery days, I shall here omit the details of the narrative, which I told in full as it was often related to us by our old Nannie in those happy sunlit days when Harry and I were children. I told of the first meeting with the wolf, of the wolf's nefarious practices upon grandmother, of Red Riding Hood's horrible interview with the disguised wolf, of her gradual realization of her great peril, and of the final intrusion of the gallant woodcutter (whom I described, I confess, with certain of the more outstanding physical traits of my friend) and his destruction of the wolf and restoration of grandmother—a detail, I am given to understand, frequently omitted from modern versions.

I was flattered by the rapt attention of young Elias, and I was not only flattered but puzzled by the equally rapt attention of Sherlock Holmes. As I progressed with my narrative, his eyes lit up, he followed my every word, and soon, after an automatic reach for the absent Persian slipper, extracted his pouch, loaded the clay, and surrounded himself with those poisonous clouds which I had come to associate with the final stages of a problem.

When I had concluded, he sprang to his feet and took several eager paces about the room. “That's done it, Watson!” he exclaimed, and there was the old life in his voice. “Elias!” He pointed a long forefinger at the child, who visibly quailed before it. “Do you want to know the
truth
about Red Riding Hood?”

“Know troof bout Riding Good?” the child repeated numbly.

“What dolts men can be!” Holmes ejaculated to himself. “To repeat that story for generations and never to perceive its meaning! And yet in the very words of this child there was a hint of the truth.
Bogle-wolf…
Surely you must see it, Watson?”

“See what?” I stammered.

“There are two essential points. Fix your mind on them, Watson. First, Red Riding Hood noticed the wolfishness of ‘grandmother' only gradually—almost feature by feature. Second, after the wolf was killed, there was grandmother.”

“But my dear Holmes—”

“You still do not understand? Then listen.” His eyes sparkled. “It was, indeed, a bogle-wolf: it was a
werewolf
, a wolf which is only the lupine shape of a malevolent and anthropophagous human being. And that human being was…
Grandmother
!

“It is perfectly clear. Red Riding Hood did not look up at once and see that the form in bed was a wolf. No; little by little, she noticed the appearance of wolfish characteristics. It is obvious that she was watching the werewolf change from human being to wolf.

“And when the wolf was killed, there was grandmother. Not springing alive from the stomach—that is palpably a later rationalization, impossible even by the standards of the fairy tale. But there was grandmother, lying on the floor, stretched out by the blow of the woodman's axe—for the werewolf, when slain, always resumes its human form.”

“Holmes,” I gasped, “you are right. That must be the truth. So simple and yet so startling. And after all these centuries, you alone—”

With a lightning motion of his lithe body, Holmes whirled on young Elias. “Now, young feller, you know. Tell your mother that while she was attending the pantomime, you, my lad, have been the first boy in the world to learn the truth about Red Riding Hood!”

The boy sat silent for a moment, gazing at the man before him. Then his mouth parted and his eyes screwed up. He was still silent for what seemed like minutes, but at last an anguished wail came from that horribly distorted countenance. In all the adventures which I have shared with my friend Sherlock Holmes, I have never heard a scream of such pure and undiluted rage, agony and frustration.

So loud was the scream that we did not hear the key in the front door. Our first warning of the ladies' return was the whirlwind entrance of Kate Whitney, who dashed to the hassock, seized her agonized offspring in her arms, and vainly tried to still his screams.

My wife, entering with the still panto-rapt young Isa, turned on me furiously. “James!” she cried, loudly enough to be heard even over those wails. “What
have
you been doing to that child?”

“James,” Sherlock Holmes observed. “A pet name, no doubt? And to think that I should have known you for so long, my dear fellow, without troubling to discover that your middle initial must stand for Hamish.”

Mary turned to face him. “Mr. Holmes,” she said, with ominous politeness. Her eyes took in the disordered rug, the rearranged furniture, the lowered level of the tantalus.

Kate Whitney's voice kept repeating, “What did the mans do to ums?” At last Master Elias controlled his hysteria sufficiently to point a damning finger at Sherlock Holmes.

“Bad man!” he said accusingly. “Bad man spoil Riding Good. Spoil it all up!” And he resumed his vociferous vocalizations.

I spoke as loudly and as calmly as I could. I said, “About that little matter of the Vatican Vaccination Scandal, old man. Don't you think we could talk it over in the consulting room?”