The Sunday Gentleman (67 page)

“I certainly shall. Good day.”

That evening, at the British-American Club, beneath the three framed portraits of the King and Queen of England, the President of the United States, and Francisco Franco, I sat over bourbon-and-sodas with several resident American correspondents. Although they knew everyone in the government, especially in the press department of the Foreign Office, not one of them had ever seen or even heard of the Marqués de Espinardo.

‘Tall? Mustache? Sandhurst?” said the correspondent who had come into Madrid shortly after Franco. “Can’t say I’ve ever heard of him. He’s a new one. Most likely secret police. Oh, they still do that. As for press credentials, look, old man, you’ll do better without them.”

He paused, reflected a moment. “Espinardo, eh? He sounds like an improvement. At least, he’s read Hemingway.”

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

The preceding story was one result of my first visit to Spain. I had taken a train from Paris to the Spanish frontier in January of 1947, stayed in the Basque capital of San Sebastian briefly, then continued on by train to Madrid. A month later, in February, my wife and I agreed to depart from Spain by automobile, sharing the ride and the burden of driving with a pretty, young brunette, and free-lance American correspondent, named Rita Hume. We drove from Madrid to Zaragoza, and then on to Barcelona, and later, went on to La Junquera, crossing out of Spain to visit Montpellier, Marseille, Cannes, Rapallo, and finally Rome.

The adventures on this ride eventually provided not me but my close friend, Zachary Gold, with the basis for a hilarious short story, his last before his untimely death in 1953. The innocent triangle of Rita, my wife Sylvia, and myself became Gold’s “A Lady in No Distress” in
Woman’s Home Companion
for September, 1952. However, there is a second sad postscript to the story: Rita Hume eventually married John Secondari, author of
Three Coins in the Fountain
and later, a television network commentator, but short years after their marriage, Rita was killed in a motorcar accident in Europe.

During the time I spent in Spain, I wrote three magazine articles. One was about the independent, eccentric, and fascinating Basques of Spain. Another recounted my adventures in a small Spanish village south of Madrid, an impoverished village inhabited by brave but angry men who were anti-Franco. I had been taken there by Charles Gordian Troeller, publisher of Luxembourg’s
L’Indépendent
, and his friend, a sweet, gentle, chubby Barcelona member of the anarchist underground who looked like Robert Benchley and was equally loved wherever he went. I published this story in
The Saturday Evening Post
. Partially as a result of my story, but mainly because of further clandestine activities on their part, Troeller was eventually ousted from Spain, and the sweet anarchist gentleman was caught and executed. I was banned from Spain. However, apparently the passage of eighteen years has had its mellowing effect on the Falangist authorities, for now all of my books, fiction and nonfiction, have been or will be published in Spain, and several of my novels have achieved widespread popularity there.

The third article I wrote in Spain was “The Man Who Hated Hemingway.” My journal reminds me that I met the Marqués de Espinardo on Friday, January 24, 1947, in Madrid. I was sufficiently impressed and irritated by the interview simply to sit down and write the preceding impression, although I had no periodical in mind.

Having always had affection for the story, I decided, to include it in this collection. In preparing to do so, I wondered what had happened in the many years since to the Marqués de Espinardo. I did not know where to inquire, and then I remembered one press-association friend—a Spaniard who had worked for an American newspaper syndicate in Madrid—and I wrote to him. Here is his reply verbatim:

Dear Irving,

Please excuse me for the delay in writing, but I was awaiting replies to my inquiries for particulars about the Marqués of Espinardo. For many days, I was trying to remember the family name of this Marqués, and I did not succeed. The only Espinardo I know is a little village in the Murcia Province. I contacted some friends for further information. They said the name was unknown down there. You know, the titles of nobility are common among Spanish officials these days, especially in the Foreign Ministry. But this one was a real mystery. One thing is certain: the Marqués was an official of the Spanish Foreign Ministry, since Olascoaga (who died several years ago) was not in the Ministry of Information and Tourism but in the Foreign Office itself.

It was difficult to identify the man, despite the very good description you give in your story. One thing is clear to me: the Marqués must have been, may still be, a Foreign Ministry intelligence official, because Olascoaga was Vice-Chief of the Oficina de Información Diplomática, and the Marqués was certainly a substitute for him. I don’t think that the Marqués was an obvious secret policeman, as the correspondent in the British-American Club told you. Secret policemen are quite different in Spain, and they usually do not speak the fluent English your Hemingway-hater spoke. The Marqués was probably more important and less known to outsiders. I think you will not find out more about him.

If the Marqués was still alive at the time, it is unlikely that he grieved at the news of Hemingway’s suicide in Idaho on that early July morning in 1961. But I suspect that today the Marqués enjoys little satisfaction from the disappearance of the corporeal Hemingway. For he must know that Hemingway, the artist, still lives.

Yes, Hemingway lives and will survive his mortal critics, be they a Spanish Marqués pr an American literary Brahmin. What I could not tell the Marqués de Espinardo in our conversation in 1947, is now known to the whole world.

As Hemingway wrote in
Death in the Afternoon
:

“The sun is very important…The Spanish say, ‘El sol es el mejor torero.’ The sun is the best bullfighter, and without the sun the best bullfighter is not there. He is like a man without a shadow.”

Today, more than ever, the sun shines on Ernest Hemingway, and as a consequence, his long shadow falls across, envelops, and obscures every Marqués on earth.

19

The Incredible

Dr. Bell

One evening, about the turn of the last century, after enjoying a weekend shoot in Scotland, a dozen guests sat around a dinner table discussing human monsters, famous murders, and unsolved crimes. One of the guests. Dr. Joseph Bell, the eminent Edinburgh surgeon and medical instructor, had the others wide-eyed with his deductive acrobatics.

“The trouble with most people,” he said, “is that they see, but do not observe. Any really good detective ought to be able to tell, before a stranger has fairly sat down, his occupation, habits, and past history through rapid observation and deduction. Glance at a man and you find his nationality written on his face, his means of livelihood on his hands, and the rest of his story in his gait, mannerisms, tattoo marks, watch chain ornaments, shoelaces and in the lint adhering to his clothes.”

The guests were skeptical. One challenged Dr. Bell to give an example of applied observation. Promptly, Dr. Bell obliged.

“A patient walked into the room where I was instructing the students, and his case seemed to be a very simple one. I was talking about what was wrong with him. ‘Of course, gentlemen,’ I happened to say, ‘he has been a soldier in a Highland regiment, and probably a bandsman.’ I pointed out the swagger in his walk, suggestive of the Highland piper; while his shortness told me that if he had been a soldier, it was probably as a bandsman. But the man insisted he was nothing but a shoemaker and had never been in the army in his life. This was rather a floorer, but being absolutely certain, I told two of the strongest clerks to remove the man to a side room and strip him.

“Under his left breast I instantly detected a little blue D branded on his skin. He was an army deserter. That was how they used to mark them in the Crimean days. You can understand his evasion. However, this proved my first observation correct. He confessed having played in the band of a Highland regiment in the war against the Russians. It was really elementary, gentlemen.”

Most of the guests were impressed. But one listener jocularly remarked, “Why, Dr. Bell might almost be Sherlock Holmes.”

To which Dr. Bell snapped, “My dear sir, I am Sherlock Holmes.”

Dr. Bell was not jesting. He was, indeed, the original Sherlock Holmes, the real-life inspiration for the immortal detective of fiction. “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes,” A. Conan Doyle wrote Dr. Bell in May, 1892. Thirty-two years later, still grateful to Dr. Bell, author Doyle publicly admitted, “I used and amplified his methods when I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on their own merits.”

Unlike the detective. Dr. Bell wore neither deerstalker cap nor ankle-length Inverness cape, and used neither magnifying glass nor cocaine. Where Sherlock Holmes was the eccentric bachelor in his cluttered rooms at No. 221B Baker Street, Dr. Bell was entirely the family man with a son, two daughters, and two sprawling multi-gabled homes of his own. Where Sherlock Holmes dwelt in a shadow world bounded by Moriarty and Watson, Dr. Bell was a surgeon whose courage won compliments from Queen Victoria, whose crusades for nurses earned the friendship of Florence Nightingale, whose classroom sorcery influenced five decades of Edinburgh University undergraduates ranging from A. Conan Doyle to Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir James Barrie.

However, the one unique thing which the detective and the doctor held in common overshadowed all their differences. Just as Sherlock Holmes was the foremost fictional practitioner of what he termed “the science of “deduction and analysis,” so his real-life model. Dr. Bell, was perhaps the most brilliant master of observation the world has seen in the last one hundred years.

Many of Dr. Bell’s views on the science of observation became household words, after the character Sherlock Holmes mouthed them through sixty classic stories. “Let the inquirer begin,” advised Sherlock Holmes, “by mastering more elementary problems. Let him , on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs…By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.”

In story after story, Sherlock Holmes reiterated his rules for deduction and analysis. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts…You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles…It is a curious thing that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting…I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children…I always put myself in the other man’s place, and, having first gauged his intelligence, I try to imagine how I should myself have proceeded under the same circumstances.”

These rules merely echoed the real-life gospel of Dr. Joseph Bell. “I always impressed over and over again upon all my scholars the vast importance of little distinctions, the endless significance of the trifles,” Dr. Bell once told a reporter. “The great majority of people, of incidents, and of cases resemble each other in the main and larger features. For instance, most men have apiece a head, two arms, a nose a mouth, and a certain number of teeth. It is the little differences, in themselves trifles, such as the droop of the eyelid or what not, which differentiate men.”

In an essay on crime, penned a half century ago. Dr. Bell wrote, “The importance of the infinitely little is incalculable. Poison a well at Mecca with the cholera bacillus, and the holy water which the pilgrims carry off in their bottles will infect a continent, and the rags of the victims of the plague will terrify every seaport in Christendom.”

What were some of these “infinitely little” factors Dr. Bell regarded as important in observation? “Nearly every handicraft writes its sign-manual on the hands,” contended Dr. Bell. “The scars of the miner differ from those of the quarryman. The carpenter’s callosities are not those of the mason…The soldier and sailor differ in gait. Accent helps you to district and, to an educated ear, almost to county…With a woman, especially, the observant doctor can often tell, by noticing her, exactly what part of her body she is going to talk about.”

While Dr. Bell felt that the development of observation was a necessity to doctors and detectives, he felt equally strongly that it was a thrilling sport for laymen. The vain Sherlock Holmes disagreed, holding little hope for the common man. “What do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell…a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction?” bemoaned Sherlock Holmes. But Dr. Bell felt the unobservant public might care a good deal, once let in on the game.

Every man, argued Dr. Bell, can transform his world from one of monotony and drabness into one of excitement and adventure by developing his faculty of observation. For this reason—though once he complained in exasperation, “I am haunted by my double, Sherlock Holmes!”—Dr. Bell heartily approved of A. Conan Doyle’s detective stories that popularized his ideas. “Doyle shows how easy it is, if only you can observe, to find out a great deal as to the works and ways of your innocent and unconscious friends, and, by an extension of the same method, to baffle the criminal and lay bare the manner of his crime…His stories make many a fellow who has before felt very little interest in his life and daily surroundings think that, after all, there may be much more in life if he keeps his eyes open.” Once aware of the entertainment and instruction to be had from careful observation, the average man will find his workaday world much the richer. Like Sherlock Holmes, he will be able to detect from a man’s hat that his wife does not love him, from a man’s cane that he fears being murdered, from a man’s pipe that he is muscular, left-handed, careless, and wealthy.