There was no boat, but even so … The sobbing rose louder and fell again. It broke as infant tears, then into a laugh. It was someone playing a joke! Who? And how? Another laugh, chuckling, derisive. In that case, reason required that children were playing a trick as Miles and Flora had played one with Miss Temple. That was all. But Miles and Flora had been alive—and now they were certainly dead.
All I had to do was to walk steadily along the remainder of the lakeside path. There was nothing to impede me, and every step brought me closer to the company of Holmes and the others. But to welcome safety in this way was to give in to the thing again. As I walked, the sobbing or chuckling, which had fallen behind, now seemed to keep pace. I hope I am no coward in such matters. Twice I swung round—and saw only motionless water-lilies and the high white clouds still as a stage-set against the blue summer sky.
The lawn was in front of me now and the gate to the courtyard. The Tudor garden tower with its ruined staircase rose warm and still at my side. This was where the whole thing had started and it proved to be no more than an easy cheat by James Mordaunt. No apparition could linger here now. I paused and listened. The calls and cries, whatever they were, had gone. How could they be more than country children sounding closer than they were—the effect of the wind carrying sound through branches and over quiet water? But now there was no wind, it was still again. The birds and the sheep were silent once more, for all the world as if they were listening to the silence.
I was level with the brick tower and I kept a dignified pace as I passed towards the courtyard gate. I was not to be hurried. I could look where I liked and hold my own. But I did not feel the need to look up at those battlements. Whether it was because I disdained to do so or because I preferred not to, I must leave to the reader to judge.
3
Sherlock Holmes
the Actor
A FRAGMENT OF BIOGRAPHY
Anumber of my readers will be familiar with the fragments of biography which I have recalled in illustrating the cases of my friend Mr Sherlock Holmes. As we enter the world of the London theatre—“gaslight and greasepaint,” as he used to call it—I must say something of his youthful stage career. It was very brief, beginning in 1879 and ending in the early spring of 1881, shortly before we first met.
I only once saw the tall, spare figure of Sherlock Holmes upon a stage. The audience had left the auditorium of the Royal Herculaneum more than an hour before. The curtains had been drawn open again to reveal the set. The lights had gone up and, by the battlements of Prince Hamlet’s Elsinore, stood Holmes, tall, hawk-like and angular. In the white tie and tails of his evening clothes, he was in conversation with the stage manager, Mr Roland Gwyn. Beyond earshot were two stage-hands, one or two actors with minor parts, and two officers from the Metropolitan Police. Inspector Hopkins of Scotland Yard was in plain clothes. Superintendent Bradstreet of the nearby Bow Street police station wore the frogged jacket of the uniformed branch. A few yards away, one of the greatest actors in England—in the world, indeed—lay dead in his dressing-room.
Let us leave that great tragedian lying there a moment longer, while I explain our involvement in what I have called “The Case of the Matinee Idol.”
If ever a man was a born actor, it was Sherlock Holmes. Early in our friendship, he employed masterly disguises as a cabman and as an elderly nonconformist clergyman, in our case of “A Scandal in Bohemia.” I remarked to him at the time that the stage had lost a great actor when he turned his back upon it in order to become a specialist in crime. To my surprise, he took the comment seriously and at once began to compare himself favourably with the great performers of the day. Holmes never suffered from false modesty. He thought he would have encountered little competition on the London stage—except perhaps from Irving and possibly from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. But that was all.
This will sound absurdly boastful to those who know little of his life before our meeting in 1881. Indeed, few of his clients or acquaintances at Scotland Yard, let alone his enemies, ever had any idea that he once lived and worked in the company of such theatrical giants as Sir Henry Caradoc Price or popular character actors like “Captain” Carnaby Jenks. On half-a-dozen occasions, as an understudy, he even played opposite the great Sir Henry Irving himself.
My companion’s longest theatrical acquaintance was with “Caradoc,” as the mercurial Welshman was universally known. By 1890, Caradoc Price’s Royal Herculaneum Theatre in the Strand was a by-word for the boldest and the best. In his own estimation, at least, this flamboyant actor-manager was the greatest Shakespearean of his day.
A few weeks ago, having decided to give this story to the world, I made my way once again up the steep stairs of the Baker Street attic. Among dust and cobwebs in that lumber room stand such souvenirs as the fine silhouette profile of the Great Detective, designed and fashioned by the renowned theatrical artist of Grenoble, Monsieur Oscar Meunier. When it was set against the curtain of our sitting-room after dark, those looking up from the street were convinced that it moved as the angle of the light changed. It was first used to bring to justice the notorious Colonel Sebastian Moran, and several times persuaded Holmes’s enemies that he was at home when in truth he was many miles away.
At the far end of the loft was the cumbersome tin trunk, which had belonged to my friend since he left home in his teens. Its hinge moved a little stiffly and the black lacquer was somewhat chipped. Yet the documents and legal parchments it contained were as crisp and alluring as ever. Each represented some tour de force of his analytical reasoning.
Here and there I noticed packets of letters, tied with tape and pencilled “Miss Ethel Le Neve in re H. H. Crippen for murder,” or “Society for Insuring against Losses on the Turf,” or “The City of Paris Loan Frauds.” Elsewhere, barristers’ briefs, black-letter legal parchments, had been marked by Holmes’s scribble. He had written on Rex v. Dougal, “The Case of the Naked Bicyclists,” and on Regina v. Temple, “The Bly House Murder.” The notorious Siege of Sidney Street by Russian anarchists, which brought gunfire and insurrection to the London streets, was annotated rather whimsically as “The Mystery of the Yellow Canary.” News of a missing canary was indeed the first clue to the conspiracy.
Holmes had been too busy until the last day of his life to find time for putting such a mass of papers into order. Fortunately, I knew what I was after and soon came to a stiff white envelope, about eight inches by ten. From this I shook out several theatrical programmes. The first was for McVicker’s Theater, Madison Street, Chicago. This ornamental structure had been rebuilt after the great fire of 1871 in that city. The cover of its programme for November 1880 announced “The Sassanoff Shakespeare Touring Company of London.” The drama to be played was Romeo and Juliet. Romeo was performed by Henry Caradoc Price and Juliet by Anna Weld. Among the supporting cast, the character of Mercutio was acted by “William Sherlock Scott Holmes.” At the Broad Street Theatre, Philadelphia, the programme for the Sassanoff company advertised Othello. The hero was once again personified by Caradoc Price and Desdemona by Miss Weld. The part of the hapless dupe Roderigo was taken by a young supernumerary, Carnaby Jenks, and the villainous Iago by “W. S. Holmes.”