‘If they are, then it is you yourself you must blame, Holmes,’ I returned good-naturedly, ‘for you have been their Iron Duke.’ Laying down my copy of the Gazette, I rose from the settee and stepped over to the window to draw the curtains. It was an evening in early autumn, grey and overcast but not yet dark; save for an occasional scudding cloud-ball, the dimmed lustre of the heavens was even and neutral-tinted. At once attracting my eye, however, was a gentleman of somewhat cadaverous aspect who stood on the pavement opposite and who seemed quite overwhelmed by a heavy tweed overcoat which enveloped his thin frame like a bell-tent. In his left hand he held a small, unfolded piece of paper, and alternated between consulting it and peering up at the succession of house-numbers which confronted him. At last, having located the number he was searching for (as I surmised), he picked up the travelling-bag which had been sitting on the pavement beside him, crossed the street with a forthright stride and soon quit my view altogether.
‘Well, I fancy your Calvary is at an end,’ I remarked, ‘for, unless I am much mistaken, the bell will ring this very minute to announce a new client.’
Holmes growled churlishly from the depths of his armchair. ‘A client, is it? Most likely the distraught owner of a terrier gone missing from Kensington Gardens.’
‘We shall soon find out,’ I replied: ‘here he is now.’
In effect, the front doorbell had already chimed, two sets of footsteps were to be heard on the stairs, and an instant later Mrs. Hudson was ushering into our room the very gentleman I had spied in the street below.
At a first glance, the man who stood before us was somewhere in his fifties. The almost military erectness of his bearing was impaired by a slight but perceptible stoop in his shoulders. From each side of his head, which was totally bald at the middle, protruded a shapeless tuft of white, fleecy hair resembling the stuffing from a mattress. And, divested as he now was of his generously sized overcoat, he could be seen to be most amazingly lean and bony, with facial features so near-skeletal that, taken along with his keen, lively eyes and unexpectedly warm skin colouring, I thought of a death’s-head with a lighted candle posed inside it.
Since Holmes had not yet thrown off his fit of petulance, and appeared disinclined to do the honours, it was I who went forward, presented my companion and myself, and invited our visitor to take a chair.
‘My dear sirs,’ he murmured apologetically, ‘you must forgive me for intruding on your intimacy unannounced, and at this late hour, but I … I truly am at my wits’ end. If I had known where else I might turn, I assure you I would never have presumed to disturb you. Oh, but here I am so far forgetting myself that I have failed to offer you my card.’
‘And yet, even as you are, you are not entirely a stranger to us,’ said I. ‘Am I not right, Holmes?’
‘Why,’ said our visitor, perplexed, ‘what can you mean? To my recollection, we have not met before.’
‘I mean only,’ I answered, eager this once to exercise my own powers of deduction, ‘that you are obviously left-handed and a former Army officer, that you have a brother of far stockier physique than yourself and that, having lived in Devon for a good many years, you are naturally unfamiliar with our metropolis.’
‘But, bless my soul, sir, you astonish me!’ he cried. ‘I can hardly believe –’
‘Oh,’ I said lightly, ‘it was really very elementary, you know. Your left-handedness you gave away when –’
‘Dr. Watson,’ he interrupted me in no little degree of agitation, ‘if I say you astonish me, it is that I am in fact right-handed, I have never been a soldier, I was an only child, I have had to visit London four times this past fortnight and, far from living in Devon, I’ve not once set foot in the place!’
For a moment or two there was a disconcerting silence; then, to my relief, Holmes suavely intervened.
‘My friend Watson here,’ he said, ‘whom it has amused to chronicle a few of my trifling successes, has, as you may observe, his own rather underhand method of enquiry. To wit, by postulating the exact contrary of what he senses to be true, he hopes to elicit all the requisite information at once.’ He yawned. ‘It sometimes works.’
‘Most … most ingenious,’ responded our visitor, although, to judge by his prolonged scrutiny of me, his doubts as to my competence, and possibly even my sanity, were by no means allayed.
‘But to your problem,’ Holmes went on. ‘You are, I think, Dr. Eustace Gable, one of our most esteemed botanists. Oh, be assured,’ he drawled, seeing his interlocutor about to speak, ‘it is through no process of ratiocination that I have identified you. It happens that I recently attended an event at the Royal Botanical Society at which you read a most stimulating paper on the variety and luxuriance of South American fronds.’
‘Fronds are my passion, Mr. Holmes!’ Gable said fervently. ‘And, in a way, it is that passion that has brought me here tonight.’
‘Pray continue,’ said Holmes, placing the tips of his fingers together and pensively propping his chin upon them.
‘I should explain that I inhabit a large family estate called The Gables, by a curious coincidence, and situated halfway between Aylesbury and the village of Mentmore. The servants apart, the sole company I have in my rather lonely household are my sons James and Edward. They are not brothers, you understand, but half-brothers: my first wife died in childbirth, poor dear girl, and my second barely more than twelvemonth ago. Yet James and Edward have been as loving to one another as if they were indeed brothers, and their pranks have brightened many a winter evening for me.
‘Now it’s this way, Mr. Holmes. As I have said, I specialise, as a botanist, in those leaves characteristic of the palm or fern, and my enthusiasm has made of me a much-travelled man. There scarcely remains a corner of the globe to which I have not ventured in search of rare specimens, and I lately spent a fascinating two months in Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies. Well, exactly four weeks ago we docked at Southampton and the specimens I had had crated in Padang were forwarded to Aylesbury by the railway and then brought to the house by my man Jerrold in the dog-cart.
‘It was on that morning that was set in motion the inexplicable train of events which prompted me to seek outside assistance. We were in the kitchen – my two boys and I, along with one or two members of the staff – watching Jerrold screw open the crates with a crowbar. And it was when we were starting to lay the fronds out on the fine tissue paper which I purchase and store for just that purpose that, with a frightful scream, Jerrold suddenly withdrew his bare arm from within one of the crates. Gathering about him, we were all aghast to find him bleeding copiously from a profound and horribly corrugated gash in his wrist. Although he has always been of a robust constitution, I own I was quite afraid for him: he had in a trice turned white, there was terror in his eyes and my foremost anxiety was that he was about to faint. However, the thing appeared so abruptly I had no more time to think about him.’
‘The thing?’ echoed Holmes, rousing himself at last from the apathy into which he had sunk and fixing Gable with a penetrating eye. ‘What nature of thing?’
‘The rat!’ cried Gable.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Holmes, now bolt upright.
‘A rat, a giant rat!’ Gable went on breathlessly. ‘Oh, when I call it a giant, you must not infer from the term that there was anything supernatural about its size – I make this distinction now that you may better understand the import of what is to follow – but by the standard of our common-or-garden English rodents it certainly was disagreeably large. It darted from the crate, scurried across the kitchen floor and vanished out of the door leading to the main hallway.’