The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (47 page)

In the next few weeks, Mandor was captured despite the heavy defense by its mercenaries, the mines were closed, and the workers released. Captain Fantôme fled to South Africa, where she oversees the new diamond mines there.

“And what happened to the Frantzi, the rest of the population of the city of Mandor?” I asked.

“Many of them moved to other parts of India, and some, Watson, have, I gather, come to England, where they move silently within the upper circles of society. Their town is but a ruin, sitting now unproductively above the large, silent caverns below. Considering my role in its destruction, I doubt if I have heard the last of the Frantzi. Captain Fantôme is not the kind of person who forgets such injury.”

Holmes became silent, then said: “And of course, Watson, dear Giacomo Schaumberg was the young Swiss lad who gave you the false message at the Reichenbach Falls, changed by his experiences in the meantime, but recognisably the same.”

“Good Lord, Holmes, I should have realised this. When did you recognise him?”

“Immediately, Watson. That is why I decided to travel with them. But Giacomo did not recognise me until too late. Perhaps he was there at the falls for too short a time. He is now at large, having escaped from prison in Quetta, and I have no doubt that he will show up one of these days. Who knows when?”

AFTERWORD

T
he
READER WHO HAS TRAVELLED THIS FAR WILL
inevitably be tempted to speculate about the effects of the Orient on Mr. Sherlock Holmes and the course of his work subsequent to his return to London. It will come as no great surprise to those familiar with the chronicles of these exploits that my friend’s peculiar character has often eluded me. But since I remain close to him even now after these many years, my own observations on the matter may still prove to be of some interest.

It was, I remember, in that small cottage where we often stayed near Poldhu Bay at the further extremity of the Cornish peninsula that I first questioned him and put my thoughts on the subject in order. It was in the fall of 1894, a cool but bright October day. Holmes had begun to display his curious interest in the origin of the Cornish language and had expressed for the first time his notion that it was related to the Chaldean. He had just received a consignment of books upon philology but quickly abandoned them for the morning paper, which at our distant location arrived several days late.

I watched him carefully as he went about his business. To the casual observer, I thought, the Holmes who returned to London after a three-year absence was very much the same as before, a bit thinner perhaps, and somewhat older of course, but if anything more energetic and resourceful than ever. His near miraculous brain, with its almost magical ability to see beyond the appearance of things to their underlying causes, his uncanny power to deduce final solutions from the most trivial of details, and the tireless energy with which he pursued the most minute of clues, all of this was as before, if indeed not heightened by his many adventures abroad. He still disappeared on his nocturnal prowls about the city, the sleuth hound following the scent, and by day would sit in silent adumbration of the problem at hand. It was then, as he sat motionless in his easy chair, his eyes staring vacantly into space, that his brilliant reasoning power would rise to the level of intuition, forcing those unacquainted with his methods to look askance at him as at a man whose knowledge was not that of other mortals.

To my frequent consternation, he had added remarkable skills in disguise and illusion through his training in the Orient. This was indeed a new aspect to his art. Yet, he remained philosophically a direct descendant of Galileo and Francis Bacon, contemptuous of anything not grounded in experiment and the practical. All of that high metaphysic that flows from Plato and ancient India through the murky Germanic schools of the last hundred years was anathema to his sombre and cynical spirit. For him, it was all sophistry and illusion, to be cast into the flames, were it not for his great tolerance of opposing ideas and his strong belief that all arguments needed to be preserved as well as heard. And yet, I sensed at times a deeper questioning of larger problems, the answers to which he had previously taken for granted.

In his outward personal life, the same abstemious habits prevailed, and he maintained his habitual clutter in the same inventive ways. The violin was still there, played as beautifully as ever. Inwardly, however, I sensed a difference. I have remarked in describing his singular character on its dual nature. The swings of mood still took him from extreme languour to devouring energy, and his great exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which occasionally predominated in him. But, as the reader well knows, Holmes had been subject to severe bouts of melancholia from the time of our first meeting. Before his long sojourn abroad, he had relied on various cures, which he administered himself. One was abstract reasoning, which led him to abstruse mathematical and logical problems which often, on a more practical level, became problems of cryptography. Another was his incessant probe of the world of chemistry in search of more precise tests useful in his criminal investigations. A third, more treacherous treatment was, of course, cocaine, in which he indulged frequently before his stay in the Orient, to my great displeasure.

After his return, however, I knew him to use cocaine but once, and to my knowledge, he never went near it again. Nor was he any longer content with the abstract puzzles which had entertained him and pulled him back in the past from the brink of depression. Although his despair at times was, if anything, stronger upon his return, he used nothing external to himself to relieve the black moods that descended upon him. He came out of them himself, never falling completely under their sway.

When I queried him about the difference that day as we sat looking out at the bay, he broke his usual reticence about himself and noted in explanation that the death of Moriarty was a far more significant event in his life than he had previously thought and it was only in the narration of the tales presented here that he realised how significant indeed it was. Until Moriarty’s death, he said, he had seen crime very much as the creation of the individual gone wrong.

“You will remember, Watson, what I said so often in the past. There are some trees which grow up to a certain height, and then develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans as well. I had a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which came into the line of pedigree. The person becomes, as it were, the epitome of the history of his own family. In the evil professor, I believed I had found the supreme example of this: the genius gone amok, preying always upon the innocent. With Moriarty gone, I believed that some part of evil itself was also eliminated. It was a simple matter of subtraction: remove Moriarty and we have a net gain of good for humanity. But, as I fought the good fight in the Orient and elsewhere, I realised that Moriarty’s death meant nothing, that any number of criminal minds, some equally talented, his own brother for one, were available to take his place. Evil remained, therefore, as prevalent as ever: it was not a mere fact that could be changed, but something different. My theory of the evil genius explained nothing. I looked for a new explanation.”

“And did you find it?” I asked.

“Let us put it this way, Watson. I speak in all candor. As you know, I have never been attracted by the deliberations of the metaphysicians. In my youthful career, I believed simply that I could eradicate evil, or large portions of it, for it had simple if commonplace origins in the hearts of men. When I felt thwarted in this, I suffered immediately from melancholia and boredom, the signs of an underemployed brain. It was then that I took cocaine until a new problem obviated the need for the drug.”

He smiled broadly and continued. “But in Asia, Watson, I began to see things with a different eye, and it was in the very narration of these tales that I became most acutely aware of the profound effects of my Asiatic travels upon my thinking. Surely, so many of our countrymen who came to woe in these tales would have been far better off had they never left. Indeed, had Hodgson never left England, there would have been no Moriarty.”

“Come, Holmes,” said I, “surely you can’t mean that
we
are to blame. Has Sherlock Holmes as well become another
épateur
of the bourgeoisie in the end?”

“I cast no blame, Watson. You know me far better than that. Nor do I insist on my theory. But as disagreeable as it may sound to you, the Orient begins in London, and it was in Benares one day, while sitting on the banks of the Ganges, that I realised that my Oriental adventures had begun long before I ever left England. As I stared at the murky water and the thousands of naked worshippers bathing in it, one of the chief villains of our early adventures together, Jonathan Small, suddenly came to mind. Surely, you have not forgotten him.”

“No, indeed,” I said. “You mean the nasty little man from the Sign of Four.”

“Nasty indeed, but it was in the very holy waters that I then contemplated that he lost his leg to the bite of a crocodile, or so he thought, a loss which so embittered him that he had little mercy left in him for his fellow man. Small’s miserable story and his hateful image remained with me as I travelled.”

He paused briefly to light his pipe, and then said, “On my way to Java, the ship stopped for a few days in the Andamans.”

“Where Small was imprisoned for his part in the murder in the Red Fort in Agra. But you omitted your stop in the Andamans from the account you gave me,” I said.

“Ah, Watson, there is much that is omitted in my narration, otherwise our simple tales would rival those of dear Thackeray in length. Suffice it to say that I was allowed to disembark at Port Blair. I roamed the island at will, thinking often of Small and the other plotters in that godforsaken place. I climbed Mount Harriet and probably rested close to Small’s mud hut in Hopetown. I saw dozens of men like Tonga, the Andamaner who helped him to escape and do his evil deeds in London. Small called him the bloodthirsty little viper, did he not? The inhabitants I saw went about their business as calmly and methodically as any Londoner. I mingled with them, feeling no fear. Our observers have cast them as godless, numberless, primitive without fire, and savagely cruel, ready to kill any foreigner. And yet, during my stay, I felt no threat.

“As I left, I noticed that a whole group of them had been placed in a small shed near the shore in preparation for their transport as labourers to the Dutch Indies. I was told by our captain that there were one hundred ten men and women stuffed into the small shed, over one hundred “Tongas” to be taken from their island to unknown places. How many of them arrived at their destination alive?”

He stopped for a moment in thought.

“Later, on my way north from Ceylon,” he continued, “I stopped in Agra, reliving the horrible events that Small related to us, of the Mutiny, of his fellow conspirators, and the murder of the merchant Achmed. My interest in certain cases never leaves me, and in Jaisalmer I saw many of the same small brown Andamaners at work in the mines of the Frantzi, the slaves of Captain Fantôme and her ilk. It was here that I began to distinguish between the scent of the criminal and the stench of empire.”

He grinned as he tossed the morning paper in my direction. There on the front page was the report of the grisly murder of the Viceroy, Lord Elgin, on his visit to the Andamans. The shocking crime had been committed by a Punjabi imprisoned in the islands. He had acted so quickly and with such force that the Viceroy and his party were taken completely unaware. The Viceroy himself mumbled something about a slight pain in his back and fell forwards, dead in the water.

“What a ghastly affair, Holmes,” I said.

“Yes, Watson, another gruesome crime, pointless in itself, but one that will have various repercussions. I have no doubt that Government will, as it usually does, act in such a way as to make matters worse. You see, Watson, it is no longer a battle from which I hope to emerge victorious. I fight simply because I must, and it is in the knowledge that there is no final victory to be had that I find solace. Shall we say, dear doctor, that we are all entrapped in an iron cage, the exit from which is hidden from us? I sense an east wind and the coming of a dark polar night. But let us not despair, lest we do nothing at all.”

He said no more. He removed his shoes and went out to the beach, where I saw him striding rapidly in the surf, his trousers rolled up to his knees, his shirt hanging loosely about his waist. For the moment, I thought, he seemed free of all care, waiting only for the world to engage him once more.

J
OHN
W
ATSON,
M.D.

My interest in Sherlock Holmes was aided and abetted first by Merrily Weisbord, a gifted writer and a good friend; by Michael Haggiag, astute critic and writer of great imagination; by Bob Loomis, the great jewel in the crown of Random House; and by Peter Riva, whose polymathic prestidigitations still fill me with wonder.

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