Sherlock Holmes In America (6 page)

We were all ushered to the porch while the Eddys ascended to the upper room to prepare, and no doubt to see if there were any traces of meddling. Knowing Sherlock, I was certain there would not be. He had lit another cigarette and looked altogether too pleased with himself. I took him down into the yard to tell him what he could do the next time he thought of involving me in one of his silly adventures, but he disarmed me by saying, “Well done, Mycroft. I know how unpleasant you must have found that, yet you did splendidly,” and offered me a cigarette.

I took it.

We smoked for a few minutes. The stars were brilliant in the clear, cool night, and here in the mountains there seemed to be many more of them.

“Is it the window?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “The seals are in place, and the window frame is secure in the wall.”

“They might have made an impress of the signet and reproduced it.”

“I think it more likely that—”

But at this point we were summoned to the séance.

The upstairs chamber was a large one. Though distance was difficult to judge in the very poor light (as the colonel had said, there was but a single lantern, and that in a corner farthest from the cabinet and platform), I would hazard it was a good thirty feet from the rear wall to the edge of the platform, which itself appeared to be five or six feet deep. Sherlock whispered to me that there was roughly a yard between the door of the cabinet and the back wall of the house with its little window. “But I don't think they bothered with the window. The nailheads in the floor of the cabinet are much battered.”

I nodded. All had become clear.

The Eddy brothers mounted the platform. With their deep-set eyes and surly faces, they looked grim enough, if not particularly spiritual. William gave a short speech about spirits and their nature and the responsibility of the medium and so forth; then he and Horatio entered the chamber, where he bound Horatio to a chair with thick rope. The audience was invited to come up one by one to observe this and to test the final result, which took several minutes, as there were nearly thirty people present. The dress of these revealed most of them as visitors, but there were several who appeared to be residents of the town. The latter did not bother to check the binding, and neither did Sherlock and I: no doubt the trick would be done well. Colonel Olcott too kept his place, up near the front and to one side, expectant but relaxed.

Finally, everyone was seated again. A curtain was drawn across the cabinet door and William Eddy repeated most of his speech. He moved to the center of the platform and shut his eyes. He swayed slightly. The room was hushed. From the cabinet, all was quiet. Then, from within, a violin began to play.

Sherlock winced. Whoever the spirit was, the violin was not his or her first instrument. The rest of the audience did not seem to notice the quality of the music, but gasped and murmured. They were equally impressed by the rattling of an invisible tambourine. However, the spirits did not seem to be in the mood for physical contact tonight. I saw no one flinch or start at a ghostly touch. Indeed, the presentation felt rather paltry. I suspect that mistrust of Sherlock and me had something to do with this.

Suddenly, William Eddy moved to the far right of the platform. The violin and tambourine fell silent. A tense moment passed before the curtain moved aside. The doorway was dark. Then a figure appeared and stepped solemnly out.

I found myself, quite unexpectedly, embarrassed. Embarrassed for the figure on the platform, for the audience around me, and for Colonel Olcott. I heard Sherlock sigh softly and realized he had had a similar reaction. Morosely, I examined the “apparition.” It was a tall man clearly meant to be a red Indian, though a combination of wig and headdress so obscured his face that he might have been Chinese, or a woman. His hands were indeed, so far as it was possible to tell in the shadows, reddish, as if some rouge had been rubbed over a deep tan. And I suppose one could say that his face glowed if a couple of smudgy gleams from the half-hidden face could be called a glow. He began to chant nonsense syllables in a deep voice. William Eddy stood with his head respectfully bowed. My embarrassment faded to be replaced by boredom. If I could have left without notice, I would have.

But I was trapped for the evening.

And a long evening it was. “Spirits” trouped in and out of the cabinet, William Eddy pacing the platform and making some brief remarks between each appearance. There were more red Indians and a number of white people in clothing from a few generations past who, indeed, had slightly greyish skin where it wasn't streaked with phosphorous—some attempt to make them look misty, perhaps, though a more solid bunch I never saw. The audience had begun to recover from its dumb wonder, and a few bold souls ventured questions. Some of the “spirits” ignored them. Others nodded and then turned to William Eddy, apparently communicating with him through some thought process, for he was the one who answered. Still others answered, in a variety of voices, almost all of them bearing traces at the very least of the local accent.

The questions were what I suppose are the usual sort at these affairs. Will my crop yield be high or poor? Should I invest in this or that? The answers to these questions, I noted, were vague and “mystical,” sometimes in rhyme. The otherworldly visitors were more specific when someone asked about a deceased relative: the loved one was always happy and always wished the survivor well. A few people, not all of them female, wept at this information. I felt myself growing angry and rather hoped Sherlock would have one of his impulsive urges and dart forward to unmask the impostor, but he remained still, indeed almost rigid, his attention fixed on the proceedings.

Apparently to vary the mood, some of the apparitions performed a trick by agreeing to improvise in rhyme on any subject. A number of these efforts were surprisingly agile and amusing, but most were on the level of these few lines, which I regret to say have stuck in my head:

At one point, a child “spirit,” a little girl of seven or so with fluffy golden hair and dressed all in white, attempted to rhyme on the word “love” but, charmingly I must confess, collapsed in giggles and had to be led by William Eddy back inside the cabinet. Afterward, Colonel Olcott asked us whether we had not found her endearing: “I am always delighted by her.”

“She comes often, then?” said Sherlock politely.

“Indeed, yes. She is a playful little thing.”

We were on the porch again, with people hurrying to their horses or conveyances, as the Green Inn has only eleven rooms and most of the visitors were lodging with other residents of Chittenden who had a bed and a corner to spare. The night had grown chilly, and in the lantern light the colonel's face was flushed with cold as well as excitement. I did not know what to say to him, and I'm sure neither did Sherlock, but fortunately he was surrounded by people eager for his conversation. Soon, he was quietly but passionately addressing a small crowd, speaking of the “self-complacent disdain” of scientific men: “Last summer, at a meeting of this country's most prestigious scientific association, hours were devoted to a discussion of the habits and characteristics of the
tumble-bug.
A nice subject to be used as an excuse for neglecting to observe and analyze the unknown occult laws by which a spirit may clothe itself with a material form. These men bend in their laboratories to study wriggling insects and squirming reptiles, blind to the field of research that lies before them in the direction of the Inner World.”

10 October—Sherlock and I did not have much to say to each other as we retired last evening in a small stuffy room at the Green Inn. I wrote in this journal while he went immediately to bed. This morning, the Colonel stayed on at Chittenden and we returned to Manchester on our own, though surrounded by enthusiastic and wondering spectators from the night before. It was not until we were walking from the train station back to our inn in Manchester, that Sherlock spoke. I was by now frankly bored with the whole matter, but he appeared disturbed, or at least distant. As we talked, he exhibited none of his usual eagerness and kept his eyes uncharacteristically down, watching the yellow leaves we scuffed from our path.

“The whole village is in on it,” said he, “because the whole village benefits.”

I nodded. “The Eddys' inn isn't large enough to accommodate or feed all the visitors, and the other residents take them in—”

“—And charge them well for a hard bed and a plain meal. Some of the villagers sit in the audience and assist with the ‘ghostly' touches—”

“—Probably accomplished by nothing more complicated than an extending rod. Horatio Eddy escapes from his ropes with the ease of the practiced conjurer—”

“—And plays, after his fashion, the violin, as well as the tambourine. The spirits, in their costumes and phosphorus makeup, are the populace of Chittenden.”

“They don't use the window, you say.”

“Unnecessary. They come up through the floor in the cabinet.”

“A possibility the colonel thought he had eliminated when he discovered no trap doors.”

Sherlock snorted impatiently. “He looked for what he thought he ought to find and then didn't find it. It's a classic case of overcomplicating a situation. What need of trapdoors when you can merely lift the floorboards? The nailheads were worn, and the wood around them scarred, from repeatedly being hammered in again.”

“Doubtless the nails had been shortened so that the boards pulled up as easily as opening a box.”

“I am certain that was the case.”

“The ceilings of the butteries were open to the beams above that supported platform and cabinet, you know.”

He smiled at me. “Excellent, Mycroft. That answers the last of our questions. The ‘spirits' climbed up on the beams and out through the floor, after being smuggled into the kitchen while everyone was upstairs. William Eddy, with his pacing and speeches, made enough noise to cover any sounds from below.”

We walked on for a moment in silence.

“Well,” said I at last, “no great mystery there.”

“On the contrary,” said he soberly, “there is a very great mystery indeed.”

11 October—Much against my will, Sherlock inveigled me into accompanying him on a walk. I could tell he had something on his mind and was perfectly willing to hear him out, but I saw no reason we could not sit comfortably, possibly enjoying cigars, while he unburdened himself. He, however, was restless and tense and no sooner would he sit then he would be up and pacing, so I finally got up myself and we went through the village and south along the verge of the road.

Having got me to go with him, he perversely fell silent. I put up with this for a few minutes before coming to the point. “It's this Olcott business, isn't it?”

He nodded. “I cannot understand it.”

“But you've explained everything.”

“Not
that
,” he said irritably. “That sham and paste!”

“Then what?”

He looked at me seriously. “Surely you agree that Colonel Olcott is a highly educated and intelligent man.”

“Of course.”

“Nothing of the flighty about him.”

“Nothing at all. Except this strange belief in spiritualism.”

“Exactly! It hardly seems in character, does it?”

I acknowledged that it did not. “But most people are not rational, Sherlock.”

“This is worse than that,” he insisted. “Here we have a man who rose to the rank of colonel as an investigator of fraud, whose observational and analytical skills were so prized that he was chosen to serve on the committee that investigated a president's assassination. He clearly has a first-rate mind. And a mind is a machine. You cannot gum it up with shoddy ideas and expect it to keep functioning optimally. This is some morbid form of self-betrayal.”

The passage along the main road was not particularly pleasant, the verge being narrow and the traffic heavy and dusty, so when we came to a pair of gateposts surmounted with marble figures of a sorrowing angel and a mourning woman, we turned in immediately. “Dellwood Cemetery,” a sign read, and we found ourselves in a place more like a park than a graveyard, with winding lanes and handsome trees and example after example of memorial statuary: angels wept, families prayed, small children gazed down at stone lilies in their hands. Nothing further from the crowded church and city cemeteries of England could be conceived, and we wandered among the tombs in uneasy fascination. Somehow, I was not surprised when, in the distance, we saw Colonel Olcott.

He was standing in front of a pair of simple stones, and his attitude suggested contemplation rather than personal grief. I made to turn aside and leave him with his thoughts, but he saw us and waved in a comradely fashion. I glanced at Sherlock as we approached; his profile was hard and set. I sighed to myself. He had decided the colonel deserved the truth.

“Look at this, boys,” said Olcott as we approached. His voice and manner were subdued as he gestured to the twin gravestones. Both were of young men, siblings by their name, who had died in 1863. Someone had recently left purple wildflowers on each grave. Olcott gestured across the expanse of the cemetery. “Dozens of them. And yet, that is nothing. In the graveyards of Pennsylvania, of Maryland and Virginia . . . ” He trailed off for a moment. “I saw very little active duty, you know,” he finally continued. “I am not ashamed; I had my job to do. I'm not like so many in the North who bought their way out of service so that some poor Irishman could die in their stead. I have been shot at in my time. I'm not such a fool that I wish I had been shot at more.”