The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (89 page)

Even as he spoke a prodigious peal came from the door-bell, followed by a succession of piercing screams. “And adventure meets me on the threshold,” said Holmes. “That is a good omen for our future work.”

He hastily refilled his pipe, his eyelids half closed, and the room grew dense with tobacco smoke.

“My landlady is out,” I shouted to make myself heard above the screaming, “and no one will answer the bell. In the meantime somebody is being murdered on the doorstep.”

Holmes sighed wearily.

“You will never distinguish the essential from the incidental, Watson,” he said. “Those screams—I think I recognise the
timbre
of the Queen of Bohemia—are not those of pain but of passion. We will wait till they are quieted. Then you shall bring her Majesty in.”

“Have you seen much of them lately?” I asked.

“Yes; I have been able to be of some small service to the King,” said Holmes, “whereby I saved a European war. It was a very simple little problem. He rewarded my services in a manner quite beyond their deserts by presenting me with the remarkably fine diamond that perhaps you noticed I was wearing.”

The door-bell had long since had its wire broken, but our fair visitor continued to hammer
on the door. The screams had died down, and at a sign from Holmes I took off my bowler-hat, and went to let her Majesty in.

A woman of transcendent loveliness was standing on the threshold. She was tall and commanding in figure, but her face was distorted with passion.

“Take me to Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” she said.

I preceded her upstairs and threw open the door. The room was quite empty, but a sound of furniture being pushed as a barricade against the bedroom door from the inside told me that my friend was exercising his usual caution in dealing with this problem.

“He is in there!” she cried. “Come out, Mr. Holmes! I will not hurt you! I only want my diamond! Otherwise, I shall shoot this man, whom I recognise as Watson, barricade the bedroom door from this side, and set fire to the house. You know my hasty temper.”

Some unusually strong emotion must have been excited in Sherlock Holmes at this speech, for he trembled so much in the adjoining room that the whole house shook.

“Does your Majesty swear not to make an attack on my person?” he asked.

“I would not touch you with a barge-pole,” she replied. “Come out!”

We heard the barricade slowly moved away, and in another moment Sherlock Holmes emerged, and with an impressive sweep of his right arm deposited the diamond in the Queen's hand.

“I restore the stone to your Majesty with pleasure,” he said. “it is false, and worth about £10.”

She looked at it a moment curiously.

“Very stupid of the King,” she said; “he telegraphed to me in London that you had stolen the Blue Gem and left for England. But I see you only got hold of the imitation one, which I wear on second-rate occasions. One does not leave valuable gems about, Mr. Holmes, when people of shady character are at the Palace. Goodbye! Next time you leave Bohemia you will leave it sitting on a donkey's back, face to the tail.”

She swept from the room, and for a few moments there was silence. Then the dreamy look that I know so well came into my friend's face.

“There are a few little
lacunae
to be supplied,” he said, “in what, after all, is a very commonplace affair. You see, the theft could not have been found out till I had left Bohemia, which, as you know, has no extradition treaty with any other country. Therefore I was safe in that respect. But a superficial examination of the stone by a jeweller in Paris convinced me it was false. Therefore I had not stolen the real gem. I did not tell you it was false, my dear Watson, because the announcements made by you that I have been engaged in investigations for crowned heads help my prestige very much, and to let you know that my reward has been only a £10 paste diamond would not lead you to believe I have been of any great service to them. And now that you do know all, I am sure my secret is safe with you, for otherwise you would spoil the market for both of us. The Queen is a woman of great force.”

He reached out for his violin.

“Let me play you a little thing of my own which I have not published,” he said. “Tomorrow we will begin writing some more adventures.”

ARTHUR CHAPMAN
(1873–1935) is most widely known as a writer of cowboy poetry—verse that depicts the people and the land of the Midwest frontier in early twentieth-century America, most famously “Out Where the West Begins,” which, a decade after its creation in 1910, was hailed as the “best-known bit of verse in America.”

Frequently reprinted, quoted, and parodied, it was published in book form in 1916.
Out Where the West Begins, and Other Small Songs of a Big Country
was a modest fifteen-page volume issued by Carson-Harper in Denver but was such a huge success that Houghton Mifflin quickly published a larger collection with fifty-eight poems,
Out Where the West Begins, and Other Western Verses
, in 1917. In addition, the poem was put to music composed by Estelle Philleo in the same year.

Chapman also had a long career in the newspaper business, working for the
Chicago Daily News
as a reporter,
The Denver Republican
as a literary editor and columnist, and
The Denver Times
as managing editor. In 1919 he left the frontier for New York City, where he became a staff writer for the Sunday edition of the
New York Tribune
(later the
New York Herald Tribune
). He was a writer of fiction and nonfiction throughout his life, and published four books over the span of a dozen years:
Mystery Ranch
(1921), a western adventure and murder mystery;
The Story of Colorado, Out Where the West Begins
(1924), a history of the state;
John Crews
(1926), a western combining adventure and romance; and
The Pony Express: The Record of a Romantic Adventure in Business
(1932), a nonfiction account.

“The Unmasking of Sherlock Holmes” was originally published in the February 1905 issue of
The Critic and Literary World
.

IN ALL MY
career as Boswell to the Johnson of Sherlock Holmes, I have seen the great detective agitated only once. We had been quietly smoking and talking over the theory of thumbprints, when the landlady brought in a little square of pasteboard at which Holmes glanced casually and then let drop on the floor. I picked up the card, and as I did so I saw that Holmes was trembling, evidently too agitated either to tell the landlady to show the visitor in or to send him away. On the card I read the name:

Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin
,

Paris
.

While I was wondering what there could be in that name to strike terror to the heart of Sherlock Holmes, M. Dupin himself entered the room. He was a young man, slight of build and unmistakably French of feature. He bowed as he stood in the doorway, but I observed that Sherlock Holmes was too amazed or too frightened to return the bow. My idol stood in the middle of the room, looking at the little Frenchman on the threshold as if M. Dupin had been a ghost. Finally, pulling himself together with an effort, Sherlock Holmes motioned the visitor to a seat, and, as M. Dupin sunk into the chair, my friend tumbled into another and wiped his brow feverishly.

“Pardon my unceremonious entrance, Mr. Holmes,” said the visitor, drawing out a meerschaum pipe, filling it, and then smoking in long, deliberate puffs. “I was afraid, however, that you would not care to see me, so I came in before you had an opportunity of telling your landlady to send me away.”

To my surprise Sherlock Holmes did not annihilate the man with one of those keen, searching glances for which he has become famous in literature and the drama. Instead he continued to mop his brow and finally mumbled, weakly:

“But—but—I thought y-y-you were dead, M. Dupin.”

“And people thought you were dead, too, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said the visitor, in his high, deliberate voice. “But if you can be brought to life after being hurled from a cliff in the Alps, why can't I come out of a respectable grave just to have a chat with you? You know my originator, Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, was very fond of bringing people out of their graves.”

“Yes, yes, I'll admit that I have read that fellow, Poe,” said Sherlock Holmes testily. “Clever writer in some things. Some of his detective stories about you are not half bad, either.”

“No, not half bad,” said M. Dupin, rather sarcastically, I thought. “Do you remember that little story of ‘The Purloined Letter,' for instance? What a little gem of a story that is! When I get to reading it over I forget all about you and your feeble imitations. There is nothing forced there. Everything is as sure as fate itself—not a false note—not a thing dragged in by the heels. And the solution of it all is so simple that it makes most of your artifices seem clumsy in comparison.”

“But if Poe had such a good thing in you, M. Dupin, why didn't he make more of you?” snapped Sherlock Holmes.

“Ah, that's where Mr. Poe proved himself a real literary artist,” said M. Dupin, puffing away at his eternal meerschaum. “When he had a good thing he knew enough not to ruin his reputation by running it into the ground. Suppose, after writing ‘The Murders of the Rue Morgue' around me as the central character, he had written two or three books of short stories in which I figured. Then suppose he had let them dramatize me and further parade me before the public. Likewise suppose, after he had decently killed me off and had announced that he would write no more detective stories, he had yielded to the blandishments of his publishers and had brought out another interminable lot of tales about me? Why, naturally, most of the stuff would have been worse than mediocre, and people would have forgotten all about that masterpiece, ‘The Murders of the Rue Morgue,' and also about ‘The Purloined Letter,' so covered would those gems be in a mass of trash.”

“Oh, I'll admit that my string has been overplayed,” sighed Sherlock Holmes moodily, reaching for the hypodermic syringe, which I slid out of his reach. “But maybe Poe would have overplayed you if he could have drawn down a dollar a word for all he could write about you.”

“Poor Edgar—poor misunderstood Edgar!—maybe he would,” said Dupin, thoughtfully. “Few enough dollars he had in his stormy life. But at the same time, no matter what his rewards, I think he was versatile genius enough to have found something new at the right time. At any rate he would not have filched the product of another's brain and palmed it off as his own.”

“But great Scott, man!” cried Sherlock Holmes. “You don't mean to say that no one else but Poe has a right to utilize the theory of analysis in a detective story, do you?”

“No, but see how closely you follow me in all other particulars. I am out of sorts with fortune and so are you. I am always smoking when thinking out my plans of attack, and so are you. I have an admiring friend to set down everything I say and do, and so have you. I am always dazzling the chief of police with much better theories than he can ever work out, and so are you.”

“I know, I know,” said Sherlock Holmes, beginning to mop his forehead again. “It looks like a bad case against me. I've drawn pretty freely upon you, M. Dupin, and the quotation marks haven't always been used as they should have been where credit was due. But after all I am not the most slavish imitation my author has produced. Have you ever read his book, ‘The White Company' and compared it with ‘The Cloister and the Hearth'? No? Well do so, if you want to get what might be termed ‘transplanted atmosphere.' ”

“Well, it seems to be a great age for the piratical appropriating of other men's ideas,” said M. Dupin, resignedly. “As for myself, I don't care a rap about your stealing of my thunder, Sherlock Holmes. In fact, you're a pretty decent sort of a chap, even though you are trying my patience with your continual refusal to retire; and besides you only make me shine the brighter in comparison. I don't even hold that ‘Dancing Men' story against you, in which you made use of a cryptogram that instantly brought up thoughts of ‘The Gold-Bug.' ”

“But you did not figure in ‘The Gold-Bug,' ” said Sherlock Holmes with the air of one who had won a point.

“No, and that merely emphasizes what I have been telling you—that people admire Poe as a literary artist owing to the fact that he did not overwork any of his creations. Bear that in mind, my boy, and remember, when you make your next farewell, to see that it is not one of the Patti kind, with a string to it. The patience of even the American reading public is not exhaustless, and you cannot always be among the ‘six best-selling books of the day.' ”

And with these words, M. Dupin, pipe and all, vanished in the tobacco-laden atmosphere of the room, leaving the great detective, Sherlock Holmes, looking at me as shamefacedly as a schoolboy who had been caught with stolen apples in his possession.

AS A PUBLISHING
venture, a slim volume of parodies by a virtually unknown author seems a risky business, but that did not prevent Frank Harvey of 21 & 22 Broad Street, a small house in Oxford, from committing to the publication of
Misfits: A Book of Parodies
by George Forrest (as his name appears on the front cover, or G. F. Forrest, as he is identified on the title page); it was released in 1905.

As with all story collections, some are inevitably better than others; in the case of parodies, some are funnier than others, and this volume is no exception. It contains burlesques of such disparate authors as Rudyard Kipling, Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, and the very popular adventure writer H. Rider Haggard, as well as several poets. “The Deathless Queen,” narrated by a cowardly Allan Quarterslain, is set in the heart of Africa and features an idolized queen known as “She-Who-Must-Be-Decayed.” For his spoof of Arthur Conan Doyle, Forrest subtitled the story “Dedicated as a study in grotesque criminology.”

In addition to a regular trade edition in paper covers,
Misfits
was also issued in a handsome large paper hardcover edition, limited to one hundred fifty copies. Limited editions, then as now, are generally reserved for the great names in literature, so it appears that the publisher had oddly high hopes for a book by the little-known Forrest or, as seems more likely, that the author himself may have had a hand in the publication. Subsidy publishing, also known as vanity publishing, was not unknown in Edwardian times.