The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (53 page)

“Appearances are clever liars; much like friend Smith.”

I saw then that he was ready to return to the subject of our visit to Battersea.

“Is it your theory, then, that he is posing as a madman?”

“I have not made up my mind. Madmen lie better than most, for they manage to convince themselves as well as their listeners. If he is posing, we shall know once midnight has passed and he is still a guest of St. Poor's. A lunatic, once confronted with the evidence of his delusion, either becomes agitated or substitutes another for the one that has betrayed him. A liar attempts to explain it away. Conventional liars are invariably rational.”

“But what could be his motive?”

“That remains to be seen. He may be acting in concert with an accomplice, distracting me from some other crime committed somewhere far away from this place to which we've been decoyed: Your position on the staff, and your reputation as my companion, may have given them the idea.

“Yes,” he continued; “I think that scenario more likely than Smith enjoying making mischief and laying the guilt at Satan's door. Or such is my hope. In these times of temptation, any unscrupulous or lecherous man of the cloth is capable of the latter. I am no connoisseur of the ordinary.”

“What do you think he meant when he spoke of Africa and Germany and America?”

“If I were Beelzebub, or pretending to be, I couldn't think of better places for calamity.”

The publican announced that the establishment would be closing shortly. He was a narrow, rat-faced fellow, quite the opposite of the merry rubicund alesman of quaint English legend, and just the sort who would purchase provisions from a hospital orderly with no questions asked.

“What need for watches, when we have merchants?” Holmes enquired. “Shall we watch the
patient in Room Six unfold his leathery wings and fly to the sound of mortals in torment?”

There was a different orderly at the door, built along the lines of a prizefighter, who held his truncheon as if it were an extension of his right arm. His predecessor had told him of our expected return. He reported that all was quiet. After a brief visit to Dr. Menitor's consulting-room to confirm that he continued to sleep soundly beneath the blanket I had spread over him, I rejoined Holmes, who had retained the key to John Smith's cell. I gripped my revolver as he unlocked the door.

Smith looked as if he had not moved in our absence. He sat with his hands resting on his thighs and his mocking smile firmly in place.

“How was the service?” he asked.

Holmes was unshaken by this assumption of our recent whereabouts.

“You're inconsistent. If you indeed saw into our minds, you would know the answer to that question.”

“You confuse me with my former Master. I am not omniscient.”

“In that case, the service was indifferent, but the fare above the average—surprising, in view of the proprietor's
laissez-faire
attitude regarding the source of his stock. We would have brought you a sample, but it might slow your flight.”

Smith chuckled once more, in that way that chilled me to the bone.

“I shall miss you, Holmes. I am sorry my holiday can't be extended. I should have admired to snare your soul. I could build a new display with it in the centre.”

“And to think only a few hours ago you offered me a seat at the head table.”

“That offer has expired.”

“Still, you exalt me. Dr. Watson is the better catch. He has the fairest soul in all of England, and the noblest heart.”

Smith stroked his chin thoughtfully, as if he expected to find a spade-shaped beard there out of a children's illustrated guide to Holy Writ.

“I shall not be gone forever. If I return in a year, will you wager your friend's fair soul that I cannot vanquish you in a game of wits?”

“Twaddle!” I exclaimed; and looked to Holmes for support. But his reaction surprised and unnerved me. When he was amused, his own cold chuckle was nearly a match for Smith's. Instead, he appeared to grow a shade more pale, and raised a stubborn chin.

“You will forgive me if I decline the invitation,” said he simply.

Smith shrugged. “It is one minute to midnight.”

“You have no watch,” I said.

“I told the time before there were clocks and watches.”

I groped for the timepiece in my pocket, eager to prove him wrong, if only by seconds. Holmes stopped me with a nearly infinitesimal shake of his head. His eyes remained upon Smith. I clutched the revolver in my pocket, tightly enough to make my hand ache.

The first throb of Big Ben's iron bell penetrated the keep's thick wall.

“One minute, precisely,” Smith said. “I don't pretend to think you will accept my word on that.”

The bell bonged a second time; a third, fourth. We three remained absolutely motionless.

Upon the seventh stroke, the play of a cloud against the moon cast Smith's face in precise halves of light and dark, making of it a Harlequin mask. Still none of us stirred.

Eight.

Nine. The shadow passed; his visage was fully illuminated once again.

Ten.

Eleven. Another cloud, larger and denser than its predecessor, blotted out the light. The man seated on the cot was a figure drenched in black. I nearly squeezed the trigger in my confusion as to what he might be up to in the shadows. Only my old military training, and my long exposure to Holmes's own iron nerve, allowed me to hold my fire.

Came the final knell. It seemed to reverberate long after it had passed. Silence followed, as complete as the grave.

“Right.” Holmes stirred. “Wake up, Smith. St. Walpurgis has fled, and you are still with us.”

The moon now fell full upon the seated man. He raised his head. Relief swept through me. I relaxed my grip. Circulation returned tingling to my hand.

John Smith blinked, looked round.

“What is this place?” His gaze fell upon Holmes. “Who the devil are you?”

To this day, I cannot encompass the change that took place in the man in Room Six after Big Ben had finished his ageless report. He was still the same figure, fair and blue-eyed and inclining towards stout, but the mocking smile had vanished and his eyes had become expressive, as if whoever had decamped from them days before had returned. Most unsettling of all, his upper-class British accent was gone, replaced by the somewhat nasal tones of an American of English stock.

“Stop staring at me, you clods, and tell me where you've taken me. By God, you'll answer to Lord Penderbroke before this day is out. He's expecting me for dinner.”

The young man's story would not be shaken, even when Holmes admitted failure and sent for Inspector Lestrade, whose brutish technique for obtaining confessions made up to a great extent for his shortcomings as a practical investigator. It was eventually corroborated when Lord Penderbroke himself was summoned and confirmed the young man's identity as Jeffrey Vestle, son of the Boston industrialist Cornelius Vestle, who had dispatched him to London to request the hand of his lordship's daughter in marriage and merge their American fortune with noble blood. Young Vestle had failed to keep a dinner appointment three days before, and the police had been combing the regular hospitals and mortuaries to determine whether he'd come to misfortune; private hospitals and lunatic asylums were at the bottom of the list.

Lestrade, in conference with Holmes and me in Dr. Menitor's consulting-room, was shamefaced.

“I daresay you have the advantage of me this one time, Mr. Holmes. The constables who brought the fellow here didn't recognise him from the description.”

Holmes was grave.

“You won't hear it from me, Inspector. When the first stone is cast, you will hardly be the one it strikes.”

Lestrade thanked him, although it was clear he knew not what to make of the remark, or of the grim humour in which it was delivered.

The mystery of the Devil of St. Porphyry's Hospital is a first in the matter that I was the client of record; but it is a first also in that I have chosen to place it before the public without a solution.

Dr. Menitor was satisfied, for with the departure of “John Smith,” exited also the curse that seemed to have befallen his institution. He erased the mark from Nurse Brant's record and reinstated the temporarily larcenous orderly, assigning their lapses to strain connected with overwork, as he had dismissed his own emotional crisis, and thanked Holmes and me profusely for our intervention.

Holmes himself never refers to the case, except to hold it up as an example of
amnesia dysplacia
, a temporary loss of identity upon young Vestle's part, complicated by dementia, and brought on by stress, possibly related to his forthcoming nuptials.

“I might, in his place, have been stricken similarly,” he says. “I met Penderbroke's daughter.” But the humour rings hollow.

He considers his role in the affair that of a passive observer, and therefore not one of his successes. In this I am inclined to agree, but for a different reason.

I do not know that “John Smith” was the Devil, having left Jeffrey Vestle's body for a brief holiday from his busy schedule; I cannot say that Holmes's scientific explanation for the phenomenon—in which, I am bound to say, Dr.
Menitor concurred—is not the correct one. I fervently hope it is. However, it does not explain how Smith/Vestle knew of the Milverton business, cloaked in secrecy as it was by the only two people who could give evidence (and never would, as to do so would lay us open to a charge of complicity in murder). At the time of that incident, the young Bostonian was three thousand miles away in Massachusetts, and in no position to connect himself with either Milverton or his fate. I am at a loss to supply such a connection, and too sensitive of Holmes's avoidance of the issue to bring it up.

Lack of evidence is not evidence, and such evidence as I possess is at best circumstantial.

Within months of Smith's leaving Vestle's body, the Bloemfontein Conference in South Africa came to grief over the British Foreign Secretary's refusal to back away from his political position and an ultimatum from Paul Krueger, the Boer leader, precipitating our nation into a long and tragic armed conflict with the Boers.

Less than two years later, on September 6, 1901, William McKinley, the American President, was fatally shot by a lone assassin in Buffalo, New York.

All the world knows what happened in August 1914, when Kaiser Wilhelm II invaded France, violating Belgium's neutrality and bringing Germany to war with England, and eventually the world. That prediction of Smith's took longer to become reality, but its effects will be with us for another century at least.

Regardless of whether Sherlock Holmes sparred with the Devil, or of whether the Devil exists, I know there is evil in our world. I know, too, that there is a great good, and I found myself in the presence of both in Room Six at St. Poor's.

For one fleeting moment, my friend put aside his pragmatic convictions and refused, even in jest, to gamble with Satan over my soul. I say again that he was the best and the wisest man I have ever known; and I challenge you, the reader, to suggest one better and wiser.

IN THE WORLD
of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Sydney Castle Roberts (1887–1966) was the well-known author of such classic Holmesian volumes as
Doctor Watson: Prolegomena to the Study of a Biographical Problem
(1931), a chapbook that was the first study devoted entirely to Watson;
Christmas Eve
(1936), a one-act play parodying Holmes that Roberts had privately printed as a gift for his friends and acquaintances in the Sherlockian community; and
Holmes and Watson: A Miscellany
(1953), a collection of scholarly essays about the great detective and his amanuensis. His affection for Holmes and his devotion to studying and writing about him earned him the presidency of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London.

Roberts's accomplishments, however, went far beyond Holmes. He was recognized as a major figure in British publishing and education, serving as Secretary of Cambridge University Press from 1922 to 1948, Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, from 1948 to 1958, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 1949 to 1951, and Chairman of the British Film Institute from 1952 to 1956. He was given a knighthood in 1958. Three portraits of Roberts hang in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Among his many works are books about Cambridge, publishing, and such biographies as
The Story of Doctor Johnson: Being an Introduction to Boswell's Life
(1919),
Doctor Johnson in Cambridge: Essays in Boswellian Imitation
(1922),
Lord Macaulay: The Pre-eminent Victorian
(1927), and
Adventures with Authors
(1966).

“The Strange Case of the Megatherium Thefts” was first published as a privately printed chapbook in an edition of one hundred twenty-five copies (Cambridge, University Press, 1945); it was first commercially published in
Holmes and Watson: A Miscellany
(London, Oxford University Press, 1953).