The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (39 page)

Few people ever knew how closely Holmes was involved in some of the most sensational cases of the day. He was triumphant again and again but success did not always come his way. He worked with Marshall Hall on the so-called ‘Yarmouth Beach Murder' of 1900, when Herbert Bennett was convicted and hanged for the murder of his wife, despite the solid evidence of an alibi witness. When I asked my friend, on his return from court, as to the outcome of the case, he said dryly, ‘I fear, Watson, that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give preference to my theories over Inspector Lestrade's evidence.'

How hard it was in some cases to distinguish success from failure! In the ordeal of Oscar Slater, who was first condemned to death and then reprieved to life imprisonment, Sherlock Holmes thought he had failed where, in truth, he succeeded. Upon the evidence he gathered, showing that Slater could not be the murderer of Miss Gilchrist in a shabby Glasgow tenement, a campaign was built which set the innocent man free after eighteen years in prison. It is much to be regretted that the intransigence of the authorities delayed this act of justice until it was too late for Holmes to savour the victory.

All the same, those cases in which he was unable to secure a verdict for his client were few indeed. More often than not, as in the tragedy of Dr Crippen, they were investigations where the client turned away from the advice that had been offered. There was never a more memorable and obdurate example of this than the late Mr Oscar Wilde, who visited our Baker Street rooms on a windy afternoon in February 1895.

It must be said that the self-admiring paradoxes and the egregious vanity of the playwright were anathema to Sherlock Holmes. They were two men, each accustomed to being the centre of attention, and therefore ill-suited to one another's company. I do not think, however, that the pathological inclinations of Mr Wilde much perturbed my friend. Holmes had been well-acquainted with the work of Professor Krafft-Ebing since its first appearance in German nine years earlier. Indeed, he was to contribute three cases to later studies by Dr Havelock Ellis, as well as making available to him findings based on his own privately published monograph, ‘The Mechanism of Emotional Deviation'. In the first weeks of 1895, Oscar Wilde was enjoying a theatrical fame that can scarcely have been equalled in modern times.
The Importance of Being Earnest
opened at the St James's Theatre to enthusiastic audiences and universal praise.
An Ideal Husband
was still running at the Haymarket Theatre a little distance away. I had, myself, been to the opening night of the earlier play and had returned full of its praises. Holmes was engaged in calculating the errant weights of base coinage at his ‘chemical table' in the corner of the room. He made no response until I said, in the hope of interesting him, that I had never experienced such a torrent of epigrams as in the first act of the
Ideal Husband
.

He did not look up from his nicely-balanced miniature scales, but said quietly, ‘A torrent of epigrams, indeed! I daresay you would do well to remember, Watson, that everything which shares the properties of a torrent necessarily has in common with it that it is shallow at the source and wide at the mouth.'

Argument, like discussion, was futile on such occasions. However, when the second play opened, the subject of Mr Wilde came up between us again. It was plain that Holmes's antipathy towards the author was as sharp as ever. In this case, the unfortunate truth was that both Holmes and a younger contemporary, the historian Sir George Young, recognized the origins of many of the witticisms and paradoxes in the famous plays. They were not Oscar Wilde's own, but had been purloined by him from the clever sayings of the author's fellow undergraduates at Oxford a decade before.

I was thunderstruck by this. However, everyone had heard that an entire act had been cut from
The Importance of Being Earnest
to match the more usual length of a West End theatrical performance. Holmes was informed by his brother Mycroft that this superfluous act was full of these stolen gems. Among them was a deathbed pleasantry by Dr Benjamin Jowett, the great Master of Balliol, who had been a controversial debater in theological wars of faith and doubt many years before. To a young female friend, who questioned him on his present belief, the old man replied with a kindly smile, ‘Ah! You must always believe in God, my dear. No matter
what
the clergy tell you!' When Mycroft Holmes and his fellow members of the Diogenes Club heard of this proposed larceny in the mouth of the stage-character of Dr Chasuble, they threatened to fill the first night of Mr Wilde's play and cry ‘Cheat!' every time a stolen paradox was uttered. For whatever reason, the superfluous act was cut from the performance and the immediate cause of offence removed.

The borrowing of other men's epigrams was not the worst scandal attending Mr Wilde. Among the glitter of theatrical success, only a few people had yet heard of a certain friendship contracted by the playwright with the Marquess of Queensberry's son, Lord Alfred Douglas, while the young man was an Oxford undergraduate. The father's resentment at this infatuation grew beyond all restraint. Mr Wilde's world of aesthetes and green carnations filled him with honest disgust and made him suspect something far worse.

Even I had heard nothing of this until Holmes himself was approached by the greatest criminal solicitor of the day, Sir George Lewis. Mr Wilde had gone to him, alleging defamation by Lord Queensberry, whom the world still knew best for his formulation of the Queensberry Rules in boxing. However, Sir George found himself in a fix, being both a friend of Mr Wilde's and yet already retained as legal adviser to the marquess. He resolved this conflict by withdrawing from the case completely but he could not act, in good faith, as an informal adviser to Mr Wilde. He urged the playwright, before taking any other course of action, to consult Sherlock Holmes.

Before Mr Wilde's visit, we had received from Sir George Lewis an outline of the events in the case. Lord Queensberry had left his misspelt and often misquoted card with the porter at the Albemarle Club, to which Mr Wilde belonged. He had written five words upon the back of it. ‘To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.' If Mr Wilde was to be believed, this was by no means the first insult of its kind he had received from Lord Queensberry but the public nature of it made it by far the most serious. Having been unable to retain Sir George Lewis, the author had gone to another and more pugnacious lawyer, Mr Charles Humphreys. Humphreys at once recommended prosecuting the marquess for a criminal libel.

As we awaited our client, Holmes showed little of his usual relish for the fight. It was not, I think, that he found the nature of the case distasteful, given his unconcealed fascination with human waywardness. It was rather the prospect of Mr Wilde's habitual self-appreciation that grated upon Sherlock Holmes.

When our visitor came through the sitting-room doorway, he gave the impression of a clumsy and ponderous man, with something of the gait of an agricultural labourer, despite his verbal adroitness. There was heaviness in his body, his head, and in the features of his face. Surprisingly, he exuded an air of weariness in his conversation. To meet the famous aesthete in the flesh, however, was still to catch something of the pose of the photographic studio. The whole world had seen photographs of Mr Wilde, at theatres and in booksellers' windows, taken in the years of his fame. He stood before us now with that familiar expression, jaded and unsmiling, indeed with the mouth pressed tighter than seemed natural.

He ignored the chair that Holmes had indicated and sat awkwardly in another, directly facing the great detective with the late winter sky at his back.

‘I throw myself upon your mercy, Mr Holmes,' he said with a half-wave of his hand, ‘Sir George Lewis is unable to take me on. To hear a lawyer turn away one's money undermines one's confidence in the entire natural order of the universe.'

Holmes accepted this pleasantry without a movement. His features might have been carved in ivory.

‘I am acquainted with the circumstances, sir,' he said coolly. ‘Pray continue.'

Mr Wilde was more than a little shaken by such unaccustomed abruptness. His face seemed a little more tired and flabby.

‘Very well, Mr Holmes. I must decide by tomorrow whether I am to bring an action against Lord Queensberry for a criminal libel. Mr Humphreys is for proceeding with it. Sir George Lewis, I think, would not.'

‘I daresay Sir George is the wiser,' Holmes said quietly. ‘Do go on.'

‘Eddie Carson …' the unfortunate author began, ‘I am told that Sir Edward Carson QC is to be briefed in any defence.'

‘A foeman worthy of your steel, Mr Wilde. I take it that you are prepared to face cross-examination by him over this matter?'

‘I am sure you know, Mr Holmes, that we were undergraduates together at Trinity College, Dublin. He will no doubt carry out his duty with all the added bitterness of an old friend who has since been neglected.'

Holmes received this witticism in arctic silence, then he said, ‘That was not precisely what I asked, sir. Play games like that with Sir Edward Carson and he will cut you in pieces.'

Mr Wilde was brought up short. He stumbled on—there is no other phrase for it. However, he still talked in his other-worldly terms.

‘Games? An artist, Mr Holmes, is one who plays sublime games with immortal words. I cannot deny that an artist in the eyes of artisans appears, therefore, as a figure of affectation. Lord Queens-berry's crime is to confuse the affectation of genius with a perversion of the soul's beauty.'

Holmes touched his fingertips together before his chin. His words, when they came, were so softly-spoken that I scarcely heard them but they struck with the speed and accuracy of a whiplash.

‘I beg, Mr Wilde, that you will make no such error! By the law of the land, Lord Queensberry's crime is either a criminal libel—or there is no crime. As to the rest, whether a man appears affected may be a question of opinion. Whether he is perverted in his actions is a matter of fact. In this, the burden of proof will lie upon you as the prosecutor. If that burden is too great …'

Our visitor had recovered himself sufficiently to interrupt.

‘My reputation, Mr Holmes, has been trampled in the gutter! That is indisputable. Does any other fact matter, beside the damage done publicly to my reputation by these foul accusations?'

‘For the purposes of this case, Mr Wilde, you may take it from me that it matters.'

‘Very well,' said our visitor sulkily, ‘let us suppose that the distinction between the affected and the perverse may be in issue. Yet the difference lies only in the eye of the beholder.'

‘You would do well to remember, sir,' said Holmes brutally, ‘that under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the difference between affectation and perversion is the thickness of a prison wall.'

I was never so uncomfortable in my life as during the next thirty minutes of these exchanges. At last Mr Wilde could bear it no longer.

‘Mr Holmes, I have listened to your sermonizing for the past half-hour and I have to say I am none the wiser.'

‘I daresay not,' Holmes muttered, ‘but much better informed, I trust.'

‘And that is all you can do for me?'

It was almost like a child's cry.

‘Not quite,' said Holmes. ‘You say you are an innocent man. Then I will give you my advice without charge. Take that absurd visiting card of Lord Queensberry's and tear it into fragments. Then, if you are an innocent man, continue to behave innocently and you will have nothing to fear. It is as simple as that, Mr Wilde. The action you propose to bring against Lord Queensberry will publish this libel across the world, whether you are innocent or not. Whatever the outcome, the wise world will think that there is no smoke without fire.'

‘This is abominable! I would stop at nothing to make my protest!'

‘Methinks …' said Holmes. And through all our minds ran the rest of that famous line from
Hamlet. The lady doth protest too much, methinks
. The colour rose from the base of Mr Wilde's soft neck until he blushed the colour of a beetroot.

‘I will take no more of your time.' In anger or embarrassment, he stumbled over the words again.

‘Tear up that card!' said Holmes, rising from his chair.

‘I shall be the judge, Mr Holmes, of what is to be done in this case!'

‘I doubt that you will,' Holmes said grimly, ‘I doubt that very much.'

On this note of mutual antipathy, they parted. Little as I sympathized with Oscar Wilde the man, I was shocked by my friend's dealing with him.

‘How could you, Holmes?' I said angrily when the street door had closed. ‘You gave the poor fellow no chance!'

He was standing at the window now, staring down into the street as he watched the waiting hansom drive away with a light rattle of harness.

‘Because I would save him from destruction, little as I care for him.'

‘He will be destroyed if the message on that card is the gossip of London and he takes no action!'

Holmes shook his head.

‘No. Gossip may merely harm him. He will be destroyed only if he goes into court.'

‘How?'

‘The evidence will destroy him.'

‘How can you say that? Neither of us has seen the evidence on either side!'

‘We have both seen the evidence in this case. I was the only one to realize it.'

This shook me, for I did not understand how it could be so.

‘You have seen it?'

‘And so have you, if you had cared to observe it! Did you not take note, Watson, how he ignored my invitation and sat in another chair?'

‘What the devil has sitting in a chair to do with it? Perhaps he was more comfortable.'

‘Did you not notice that he was careful to sit with his back to the light, so that we should not see his face so clearly?'