The Sherlock Holmes Megapack: 25 Modern Tales by Masters: 25 Modern Tales by Masters (19 page)

Old Tom smiled gently, “Think no more of it, lad.”

“Will I be going off to prison?” the boy asked nervously.

Old Tom laughed with gentle warmth, “Of course not, Danny.”

“So where’s the trophy now?” Holmes asked.

“Why, still at the bottom of the stream, where I left it,” Danny replied.

Holmes nodded, “Very well then. Now Danny, get yourself out of that bed and let us go and fetch it immediately.”

* * * *

It was early the next morning when Sherlock Holmes and I played our first round of golf. The problem of the day before had been solved satisfactorily; the trophy had been retrieved and then presented in time to the championship winner with nary a hitch. Young Danny had been suitably chastised by Old Tom but was allowed to keep his position as a caddy at the club. Once again, all was right and well at the R&A.

Still and all that next day offered us a lovely, brisk, Scottish morning, perfect for a round of golf at the Royal and Ancient Saint Andrews. Old Tom had made a gift of a favourable tee time to Holmes and I, in gratitude for our deed. So my companion reluctantly agreed to play a round.

We decided to play a singles match, just he and I, stroke play. Old Tom and Danny even volunteered to act as our caddies, each giving us much needed and helpful instruction and information before we began play.

The course at the R&A was sandy in nature, with small hills that played havoc with even the most well-struck drive, frequently knocking the ball devilishly off-line and into an insidiously placed pot bunker that only the most diabolically warped mind could have created. It was a challenging course to play.

The first hole, known as the “Burn” hole, was a par four. With a good deal of luck, Holmes and I both bogeyed it with five. We were lucky to shoot only one stroke over par. I did better on the second hole actually making par, while Holmes did better than I on the third.

By the fourth hole I began to realize that Holmes seemed to know a lot more about playing golf than he’d ever let on to me. We played a few more holes and we did well enough, mostly through the good advice of our caddies, both of us going over par of course, but not terribly so.

“Where did you learn to play so well?” I finally asked Holmes, astounded by his quality of play. I was no master of the game, nor was he, but I was surprised by the rapidity with which he had picked up the essentials.

Holmes only smiled, adjusted his deerstalker cap, and replied, “On the train to Saint Andrews, of course. While you slept the hours away, I studied up on the game reading the golfing books in your pack. I found Horace E. Hutchinson’s volume most useful, while
The Art of Golf
by Simpson was highly informative. Did you know it even includes photographic plates of our friend Old Tom demonstrating the value of the swing? His advice is priceless. You may be correct in stating that once you understand this game it opens up a true appreciation of it.”

“Posh, Holmes! Golf from books!” I snorted derisively, but I could not help but laud his improved attitude. “Well then, we’ll see where this leads, we’re off to the Tenth. So far we are even, so let’s see what you can do on the back nine.”

We moved on to the Tenth hole and played through. I went ahead by a stroke, but by the next hole Holmes had drawn even with me. He went ahead on the Thirteenth, but I caught up to him by the Fifteenth. At this point it was anyone’s game. Holmes played with grim determination, scowling at bad shots but seemingly elated when he made a good one—in that way he proved no different from any other golfer.

It was on the approach to the last hole that Old Tom announced, “Gentlemen, the Eighteenth Hole. It is a par 4, at 360 yards in length, and you both be even up to this point.”

“A close contest, Watson,“ Holmes said ruefully. “You are quite right, this pursuit can be most challenging. I think I shall win this hole, then put to bed once and for all your obsessive dreams concerning this game.”

“I shall give you a good fight, Holmes,” I warned.

Sherlock Holmes smiled, “I would expect nothing less, old man.“

It had taken us each two strokes to get onto the green of the Eighteenth. Holmes had a difficult 20-foot putt to make the hole. My putt was shorter, being almost 12 feet in distance. Being farthest from the hole, Holmes played first.

Holmes’s putt went straight and true right towards the hole. It looked like it just might go in. My face grew grim with the bitter taste of impending doom. Surely his ball was heading straight for the hole and would fall in right away. I looked over at my friend and he appeared elated.

Then I saw his ball suddenly stop dead, less than a foot from the cup. Holmes stared at the ball in utter shock and disbelief as if willing it to move on it’s own accord and go into the cup. But it did not.

Now it was my turn. A grim smile came to my face as I prepared for my putt. Danny, acting as my caddy took out one of his favourite hickory-shafted putting cleeks and handed it to me. “Here, Doctor, try this one. You have a level shot, play it straight and it should go true.”

I nodded, my face serious with the competitive spirit as I got into position and made my putt. It was a less forceful stroke than my opponent’s. I intended a simple and straight stroke, but my ball immediately veered off curving in a wide arc. I shook my head with dark trepidation and took a deep breath. I saw that Holmes held his breath also.

All four of us watched intently as my ball rolled in a wide arc, slowly moving closer and closer to the cup with what appeared to be the sureness of inevitability. I let out a tense breath. It looked like I just might make the hole. Then the ball suddenly encountered a rough patch on the green and by some devilish action hooked in front of Holmes’s ball and rolled to a dead stop. I tried to figure out what had just happened. My ball now lay between Holmes’s ball and the cup by barely over six inches—effectively blocking him from the cup.

“That’s the way, doctor!” Danny, shouted with glee.

Old Tom Morris just laughed with uproarious mirth, “Aye, well played, Doctor Watson, it appears you’ve stymied Mr Holmes quite nicely!”

“Stymied?” Holmes blurted. He was obviously not aware of this particular rule.

I was surprised myself by the turn of events but quickly realized it could be a potential game changer for me.

Old Tom explained, “Watson’s ball blocks your own from the cup, Mr Holmes. It’s an old and valued rule of golf, called the Stymie. In golf you must hit your ball true to the hole. Hence, when another ball blocks your own, you are stymied. It‘s your play, Mr Holmes.”

“How can it be played, if Watson‘s ball blocks mine?” Holmes asked.

“Indeed,” Old Tom said most sympathetically, “the balls be just over six inches apart—so Watson’s ball canna’ be lifted as per the rules. Your only option is to concede the hole, or negotiate the stymie. When a player be stymied he obviously can not putt straight for the hole, but if he strikes his ball so as to miss his opponent’s ball and yet go into the hole, he is said to negotiate the stymie. Well, Mr Holmes?”

The Great Detective carefully regarded his options. They were woefully limited. “You have placed me a quite the pickle, Watson. I shall not concede the hole to you, so you leave me no alternative but to attempt, as Old Tom says, to negotiate this…stymie.”

“Bravo, Mr Holmes!” Old Tom enthused warmly at my friend’s obvious pluck. “Here now, use this Jigger, it will give you the loft you need to play your ball.”

Holmes took the hickory-shafted Jigger and prepared to make his play. He took his time and hit the ball with a sudden and sharp lifting motion that lofted his ball into the air. I was shocked to see his ball ride over my own—a bare two inches in height and straight towards the hole. Then his ball kicked right
into
the hole—
and bounced right back out!

Holmes’s ball slowly rolled away to rest a few inches from the cup.

It was heartbreaking. Danny grimaced while Old Tom shook his head good-naturedly at the mystical vagaries of the game. I stood there amazed by what I had just seen.

Holmes for his part said not one word, his face had become a solid mask of stone. I decided it was not the right time for me to make any comment about what had happened.

It was my turn now. I took my time. With the utmost care I took my putt, lightly tapping my ball so it fell squarely into the cup with a soft plop. I sighed with relief and looked over at my friend.

Sherlock Holmes seemed to hardly believe what had happened. A moment later he mechanically tapped his ball into the hole, officially ending the game, and then he walked away in a rather sullen funk.

I had beat Holmes by one stroke but my victory was bittersweet.

I thought I could hear my friend murmuring to himself as he walked off the green, something about how he had been right all along, that golf was a stupid game, a horrendous waste of time, and based solely upon luck rather than any true skill.

“You know, Watson, some day that damnable stymie rule will have to go,” he commented to me sharply as the four of us walked off towards the clubhouse.

Old Tom Morris cut in before I could reply, “Never, Mr Holmes! Not while I live! Aye, golfing tradition, it surely be. One of the most sacred rules of the game.”

“Hah!” Holmes snorted derisively dismissing the entire affair. Then he looked at me and suddenly smiled with renewed good humour, “Well played, Watson. I must say, well played, indeed.”

“Why thank you, Holmes, that is very gracious of you. It was a close contest. I am sure you will do better on our next outing,” I said in an upbeat tone, trying to offer him some measure of support, but I knew the truth. I knew my friend. This was the first and
last
game of golf I or anyone else would ever play with Sherlock Holmes.

I shook my head in consternation as Holmes and I accompanied Old Tom towards his club-making shop off the 18th green. We had sent young Danny off, and now the three of us sat down enjoying a few pints, sharing stories about golf and life, and never once did we ever mention the stymie again.

HISTORICAL NOTE:

Much of the background of this story is based on historical facts that deal with the Royal and Ancient Golf Club at Saint Andrews, in Scotland; the British Open trophy, better know as the Claret Jug; and the lives of Young Tom and Old Tom Morris. I also want to thank the real Dan Roberts, as well as the Gerritsen Beach Golf Museum Library for their assistance. The Stymie rule was finally taken out of golf in 1952. Before then, players could not lift their ball, but after 1952 they would use a marker on the green and then lift their ball so as not to obstruct an opponent’s ball. There are many who wish the Stymie was still in effect.

YEARS AGO AND IN A DIFFERENT PLACE, by Michael Kurland

Professor James Moriarty, Ph.D., F.R.A.S.

“The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as—”

“My blushes, Watson,” Holmes murmured, in a depreciating voice.

“I was about to say ‘as he is unknown to the public.’”

“A touch—a distinct touch!” cried Holmes. “You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must learn to guard myself. But in calling Moriarty a criminal you are uttering libel in the eyes of the law—and there lies the glory and the wonder of it. The greatest schemer of all time, the organiser of every devilry, the controlling brain of the underworld, a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations—that’s the man. But so aloof is he from general suspicion, so immune from criticism, so admirable in his management and self-effacement, that for those very words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year’s pension as a solatium for his wounded character. Is he not the celebrated author of
The Dynamics of an Asteroid
, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticising it? Is this a man to traduce?”

—
The Valley of Fear

YEARS AGO AND IN A DIFFERENT PLACE

My name is Professor James Clovis Moriarty, Ph.D., F.R.A.S. You may have heard of me. I have been the author of a number of well-regarded scientific monographs and journal articles over the past few decades, including a treatise on the Binomial Theorem and a monograph titled “The Dynamics of an Asteroid,” which was well received in scientific circles both in Great Britain and on the continent. My recent paper in the
British Astronomical Journal
, “Observations on the July 1889 Eclipse of Mercury with Some Speculations Concerning the Effect of Gravity on Light Waves,” has occasioned some comment among those few who could understand its implications.

But I fear that if you know my name, it is, in all probability, not through any of my published scientific papers. Further, my current, shall I say, notoriety, was not of my own doing and most assuredly not by my choice. I am by nature a retiring, some would have it secretive, person.

Over the past few years narratives from the memoirs of a certain Dr John Watson concerning that jackanapes who calls himself a “consulting detective,” Mr Sherlock Holmes, have been appearing in the
Strand
magazine and elsewhere with increasing frequency, and have attained a—to my mind—most unwarranted popularity.

Students of the “higher criticism,” as those insufferable pedants who devote their lives to picking over minuscule details of Dr Watson’s stories call their ridiculous avocation, have analysed Watson’s rather pedestrian prose with the avid attention gourmands pay to mounds of goose-liver pâté. They extract hidden meanings from every word, and extrapolate facts not in evidence from every paragraph. Which leads them unfailingly to conclusions even more specious than those in which Holmes himself indulges.

Entirely too much of this misdirected musing concerns me and my relationship with the self-anointed master detective. Amateur detection enthusiasts have wasted much time and energy in speculation as to how Sherlock Holmes and I first met, and just what caused the usually unflappable Holmes to describe me as “the Napoleon of crime” without supplying the slightest evidence to support this blatant canard.

I propose to tell that story now, both to satisfy this misplaced curiosity and to put an end to the various speculations which have appeared in certain privately circulated monographs. To set the record straight: Holmes and I are
not
related; I have
not
had improper relations with any of his female relatives; I did
not
steal his childhood inamorata away from him. Neither did he, to the best of my knowledge, perform any of these services for me or anyone in my family.

In any case, I assure you that I will no longer take such accusations lightly. Privately distributed though these monographs may be, their authors will have to answer for them in a court of law if this continues.

Shortly before that ridiculous episode at the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes had the temerity to describe me to his befuddled amanuensis as “organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city.” (By which he meant London, of course). What crimes I had supposedly committed he was curiously silent about. Watson did not ask for specifics, and none were offered. The good doctor took Holmes’s unsupported word for this unsupportable insult. Had Holmes not chosen to disappear for three years after his foul accusation, I most assuredly would have had him in the dock for slander.

And then, when Holmes returned from his extended vacation, during which time he did not have the kindness, the decency, to pass on one word that would let his dear companion know that he was not dead, he gave an account of our “struggle” at the falls that any child of nine would have recognized as a complete work of fiction—but it fooled Watson.

The truth about the Reichenbach incident—but no, that is not for this narrative. Just permit me a brief pause, the merest aside in this chronicle before I go on, so that I may draw your attention to some of the details of that story that should have alerted the merest tyro to the fact that he was being diddled—but that Watson swallowed whole.

* * * *

In the narrative that he published under the name “The Final Problem,” Watson relates that Holmes appeared in his consulting room one day in April of 1891 and told him that he was being threatened by Professor Moriarty—myself—and that he had already been attacked twice that day by my agents and expected to be attacked again, probably by a man using an air-rifle. If that were so, was it not thoughtful of him to go to the residence of his close friend and thus place him, also, in deadly peril?

At that meeting Holmes declares that, in three days, he will be able to place “the Professor, with all the principal members of his gang,” in the hands of the police. Why wait? Holmes gives no coherent reason. But until then, Holmes avers, he is in grave danger. Well now! If this were so, would not Scotland Yard gladly have given Holmes a room, nay a suite of rooms, in the hotel of his choosing—or in the Yard itself—to keep him safe for the next three days? But Holmes says that nothing will do but that he must flee the country, and once again Watson believes him. Is not unquestioning friendship a wonderful thing?

Holmes then arranges for Watson to join him in this supposedly hasty flight. They meet at Victoria Station the next morning, where Watson has trouble recognizing Holmes, who has disguised himself as a “venerable Italian priest,” presumably to fool pursuers. This assumes that Holmes’s enemies can recognize the great detective, but have no idea what his good friend Dr Watson, who wears no disguise, who indeed is congenitally incapable of disguise, looks like.

Again note that after a six-month absence, during which Holmes and I—but no, it is not my secret to tell—at any rate, six months after I was assumed to be dead I returned to my home on Russell Square and went about my business as usual, and Watson affected not to notice. After all, Holmes had killed me, and that was good enough for Watson.

I could go on. Indeed, it is with remarkable restraint that I do not. To describe me as a master criminal is actionable; and then to compound matters by making me out to be such a bungler as to be fooled by Holmes’s juvenile antics is quite intolerable. It should be clear to all that the events leading up to that day at Reichenbach Falls, if they occurred as described, were designed by Holmes to fool his amiable companion, and not “the Napoleon of crime.”

* * * *

But I have digressed enough. In this brief paper I will describe how the relationship between Holmes and myself came to be, and perhaps supply some insight into how and why Holmes developed an entirely unwarranted antagonism toward me that has lasted these many years.

I first met Sherlock Holm
es in the early 1870s—I shall be no more precise than that. At the time I was a senior lecturer in mathematics at, I shall call it, “Queens College,” one of the six venerable colleges making up a small inland university which I shall call “Wexleigh” to preserve the anonymity of the events I am about to describe. I shall also alter the names of the persons who figure in this episode, save only those of Holmes and myself; as those who were involved surely have no desire to be reminded of the episode or pestered by the press for more details. You may, of course, apply to Holmes for the true names of these people, although I imagine that he will be no more forthcoming than I.

Let me also point out that memories are not entirely reliable recorders of events. Over time they convolute, they conflate, they manufacture, and they discard, until what remains may bear only a passing resemblance to the original event. So if you happen to be one of the people whose lives crossed those of Holmes and myself at “Queens” at this time, and your memory of some of the details of these events differs from mine, I assure you that in all probability we are both wrong.

Wexleigh University was of respectable antiquity, with respectable ecclesiastical underpinnings. Most of the dons at Queens were churchmen of one description or another. Latin and Greek were still considered the foundations upon which an education should be constructed. The “modern” side of the university had come into existence a mere decade before, and the Classics dons still looked with mixed amazement and scorn at the Science instructors and the courses offered, which they insisted on describing as “Stinks and Bangs.”

Holmes was an underclassman at the time. His presence had provoked a certain amount of interest among the faculty, many of whom remembered his brother Mycroft, who had attended the university some six years previously.

Mycroft had spent most of his three years at Queens in his room, coming out only for meals and to gather armsful of books from the library and retreat back to his room. When he did appear in the lecture hall it would often be to correct the instructor on some error of fact or pedagogy that had lain unnoticed, sometimes for years, in one of his lectures. Mycroft had departed the university without completing the requirements for a degree, stating with some justification that he had received all the institution had to offer, and he saw no point in remaining.

Holmes had few friends among his fellow underclassmen and seemed to prefer it that way. His interests were varied but transient, as he dipped first into one field of study and then another, trying to find something that stimulated him sufficiently for him to make it his life’s work; something to which he could apply his powerful intellect and his capacity for close and accurate observation, which was even then apparent, if not fully developed.

An odd sort of amity soon grew between myself and this intense young man. On looking back I would describe it as a cerebral bond, based mostly on the shared snobbery of the highly intelligent against those whom they deem as their intellectual inferiors. I confess to that weakness in my youth, and my only defence against a charge of hubris is that those whom we went out of our way to ignore were just as anxious to avoid us.

The incident I am about to relate occurred in the Fall, shortly after Holmes returned to begin his second year. A new don joined the college, occupying the newly-created chair of Moral Philosophy, a chair which had been endowed by a Midlands mill owner who made it a practice to employ as many children under twelve in his mills as his agents could sweep up off the streets. Thus, I suppose, his interest in Moral Philosophy.

The new man’s name was—well, for the purposes of this tale let us call him Professor Charles Maples. He was, I would judge, in his mid forties; a stout, sharp-nosed, myopic, amiable man who strutted and bobbed slightly when he walked. His voice was high and intense, and his mannerisms were complex. His speech was accompanied by elaborate hand motions, as though he would mold the air into a semblance of what he was describing. When one saw him crossing the quad in the distance, with his grey master of arts gown flapping about him, waving the mahogany walking-stick with the brass duck’s-head handle that he was never without, and gesticulating to the empty air, he resembled nothing so much as a corpulent king pigeon.

Moral Philosophy was a fit subject for Maples. No one could say exactly what it encompassed, and so he was free to speak on whatever caught his interest at the moment. And his interests seemed to be of the moment: he took intellectual nourishment from whatever flower of knowledge seemed brightest to him in the morning, and had tired of it ere night drew nigh. Excuse the vaguely poetic turn of phrase; speaking of Maples seems to bring that out in one.

I do not mean to suggest the Maples was intellectually inferior; far from it. He had a piercing intellect, an incisive clarity of expression, and a sarcastic wit that occasionally broke through his mild facade. Maples spoke on the Greek and Roman concept of manliness, and made one regret that we lived in these decadent times. He lectured on the nineteenth century penchant for substituting a surface prudery for morality, and left his students with a vivid image of unnamed immorality seething and billowing not very far beneath the surface. He spoke on this and that and created in his students an abiding enthusiasm for this and an unremitting loathing for that.

There was still an unspoken presumption about the college that celibacy was the proper model for the students, and so only the unmarried, and presumably celibate, dons were lodged in one or another of the various buildings within the college walls. Those few with wives found housing around town where they could, preferably at a respectable distance from the university.

Maples was numbered among the domestic ones, and he and his wife Andrea had taken a house with fairly extensive grounds on Barleymore Road not far from the college, which they shared with Andrea’s sister Lucinda Moys and a physical education instructor named Crisboy, who, choosing to live away from the college for reasons of his own, rented a pair of rooms on the top floor. There was a small guest house at the far end of the property which was untenanted. The owner of the property, who had moved to Glasgow some years previously, kept it for his own used on his occasional visits to town. The Maples employed a cook and a maid, both of whom were day help, sleeping in their own homes at night.