His last bow Some later reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes
seen and followed by young Cadogan West, who had probably some previous
reason to suspect you. He saw your theft, but could not give the alarm,
as it was just possible that you were taking the papers to your brother
in London. Leaving all his private concerns, like the good citizen that
he was, he followed you closely in the fog and kept at your heels until
you reached this very house. There he intervened, and then it was,
Colonel Walter, that to treason you added the more terrible crime of
murder.”
“I did not! I did not! Before God I swear that I did not!” cried our
wretched prisoner.
“Tell us, then, how Cadogan West met his end before you laid him upon
the roof of a railway carriage.”
“I will. I swear to you that I will. I did the rest. I confess it. It
was just as you say. A Stock Exchange debt had to be paid. I needed the
money badly. Oberstein offered me five thousand. It was to save myself
from ruin. But as to murder, I am as innocent as you.”
“What happened, then?”
“He had his suspicions before, and he followed me as you describe. I
never knew it until I was at the very door. It was thick fog, and one
could not see three yards. I had given two taps and Oberstein had come
to the door. The young man rushed up and demanded to know what we were
about to do with the papers. Oberstein had a short life-preserver. He
always carried it with him. As West forced his way after us into the
house Oberstein struck him on the head. The blow was a fatal one. He
was dead within five minutes. There he lay in the hall, and we were at
our wits’ end what to do. Then Oberstein had this idea about the trains
which halted under his back window. But first he examined the papers
which I had brought. He said that three of them were essential, and
that he must keep them. ‘You cannot keep them,’ said I. ‘There will be
a dreadful row at Woolwich if they are not returned.’ ‘I must keep
them,’ said he, ‘for they are so technical that it is impossible in the
time to make copies.’ ‘Then they must all go back together to-night,’
said I. He thought for a little, and then he cried out that he had it.
‘Three I will keep,’ said he. ‘The others we will stuff into the pocket
of this young man. When he is found the whole business will assuredly
be put to his account.’ I could see no other way out of it, so we did
as he suggested. We waited half an hour at the window before a train
stopped. It was so thick that nothing could be seen, and we had no
difficulty in lowering West’s body on to the train. That was the end of
the matter so far as I was concerned.”
“And your brother?”
“He said nothing, but he had caught me once with his keys, and I think
that he suspected. I read in his eyes that he suspected. As you know,
he never held up his head again.”
There was silence in the room. It was broken by Mycroft Holmes.
“Can you not make reparation? It would ease your conscience, and
possibly your punishment.”
“What reparation can I make?”
“Where is Oberstein with the papers?”
“I do not know.”
“Did he give you no address?”
“He said that letters to the Hôtel du Louvre, Paris, would eventually
reach him.”
“Then reparation is still within your power,” said Sherlock Holmes.
“I will do anything I can. I owe this fellow no particular good-will.
He has been my ruin and my downfall.”
“Here are paper and pen. Sit at this desk and write to my dictation.
Direct the envelope to the address given. That is right. Now the
letter:
“Dear Sir:
“With regard to our transaction, you will no doubt have observed by now
that one essential detail is missing. I have a tracing which will make
it complete. This has involved me in extra trouble, however, and I must
ask you for a further advance of five hundred pounds. I will not trust
it to the post, nor will I take anything but gold or notes. I would
come to you abroad, but it would excite remark if I left the country at
present. Therefore I shall expect to meet you in the smoking-room of
the Charing Cross Hotel at noon on Saturday. Remember that only English
notes, or gold, will be taken.
“That will do very well. I shall be very much surprised if it does not
fetch our man.”
And it did! It is a matter of history—that secret history of a nation
which is often so much more intimate and interesting than its public
chronicles—that Oberstein, eager to complete the coup of his lifetime,
came to the lure and was safely engulfed for fifteen years in a British
prison. In his trunk were found the invaluable Bruce-Partington plans,
which he had put up for auction in all the naval centres of Europe.
Colonel Walter died in prison towards the end of the second year of his
sentence. As to Holmes, he returned refreshed to his monograph upon the
Polyphonic Motets of Lassus, which has since been printed for private
circulation, and is said by experts to be the last word upon the
subject. Some weeks afterwards I learned incidentally that my friend
spent a day at Windsor, whence he returned with a remarkably fine
emerald tie-pin. When I asked him if he had bought it, he answered that
it was a present from a certain gracious lady in whose interests he had
once been fortunate enough to carry out a small commission. He said no
more; but I fancy that I could guess at that lady’s august name, and I
have little doubt that the emerald pin will forever recall to my
friend’s memory the adventure of the Bruce-Partington plans.
The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot
In recording from time to time some of the curious experiences and
interesting recollections which I associate with my long and intimate
friendship with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have continually been faced by
difficulties caused by his own aversion to publicity. To his sombre and
cynical spirit all popular applause was always abhorrent, and nothing
amused him more at the end of a successful case than to hand over the
actual exposure to some orthodox official, and to listen with a mocking
smile to the general chorus of misplaced congratulation. It was indeed
this attitude upon the part of my friend and certainly not any lack of
interesting material which has caused me of late years to lay very few
of my records before the public. My participation in some of his
adventures was always a privilege which entailed discretion and
reticence upon me.
It was, then, with considerable surprise that I received a telegram
from Holmes last Tuesday—he has never been known to write where a
telegram would serve—in the following terms: “Why not tell them of the
Cornish horror—strangest case I have handled.” I have no idea what
backward sweep of memory had brought the matter fresh to his mind, or
what freak had caused him to desire that I should recount it; but I
hasten, before another cancelling telegram may arrive, to hunt out the
notes which give me the exact details of the case and to lay the
narrative before my readers.
It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes’s iron
constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of constant
hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional
indiscretions of his own. In March of that year Dr. Moore Agar, of
Harley Street, whose dramatic introduction to Holmes I may some day
recount, gave positive injunctions that the famous private agent lay
aside all his cases and surrender himself to complete rest if he wished
to avert an absolute breakdown. The state of his health was not a
matter in which he himself took the faintest interest, for his mental
detachment was absolute, but he was induced at last, on the threat of
being permanently disqualified from work, to give himself a complete
change of scene and air. Thus it was that in the early spring of that
year we found ourselves together in a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, at
the further extremity of the Cornish peninsula.
It was a singular spot, and one peculiarly well suited to the grim
humour of my patient. From the windows of our little whitewashed house,
which stood high upon a grassy headland, we looked down upon the whole
sinister semi-circle of Mounts Bay, that old death trap of sailing
vessels, with its fringe of black cliffs and surge-swept reefs on which
innumerable seamen have met their end. With a northerly breeze it lies
placid and sheltered, inviting the storm-tossed craft to tack into it
for rest and protection.
Then come the sudden swirl round of the wind, the blistering gale from
the south-west, the dragging anchor, the lee shore, and the last battle
in the creaming breakers. The wise mariner stands far out from that
evil place.
On the land side our surroundings were as sombre as on the sea. It was
a country of rolling moors, lonely and dun-coloured, with an occasional
church tower to mark the site of some old-world village. In every
direction upon these moors there were traces of some vanished race
which had passed utterly away, and left as its sole record strange
monuments of stone, irregular mounds which contained the burned ashes
of the dead, and curious earthworks which hinted at prehistoric strife.
The glamour and mystery of the place, with its sinister atmosphere of
forgotten nations, appealed to the imagination of my friend, and he
spent much of his time in long walks and solitary meditations upon the
moor. The ancient Cornish language had also arrested his attention, and
he had, I remember, conceived the idea that it was akin to the
Chaldean, and had been largely derived from the Phœnician traders in
tin. He had received a consignment of books upon philology and was
settling down to develop this thesis when suddenly, to my sorrow and to
his unfeigned delight, we found ourselves, even in that land of dreams,
plunged into a problem at our very doors which was more intense, more
engrossing, and infinitely more mysterious than any of those which had
driven us from London. Our simple life and peaceful, healthy routine
were violently interrupted, and we were precipitated into the midst of
a series of events which caused the utmost excitement not only in
Cornwall but throughout the whole west of England. Many of my readers
may retain some recollection of what was called at the time “The
Cornish Horror,” though a most imperfect account of the matter reached
the London press. Now, after thirteen years, I will give the true
details of this inconceivable affair to the public.
I have said that scattered towers marked the villages which dotted this
part of Cornwall. The nearest of these was the hamlet of Tredannick
Wollas, where the cottages of a couple of hundred inhabitants clustered
round an ancient, moss-grown church. The vicar of the parish, Mr.
Roundhay, was something of an archæologist, and as such Holmes had made
his acquaintance. He was a middle-aged man, portly and affable, with a
considerable fund of local lore. At his invitation we had taken tea at
the vicarage and had come to know, also, Mr. Mortimer Tregennis, an
independent gentleman, who increased the clergyman’s scanty resources
by taking rooms in his large, straggling house. The vicar, being a
bachelor, was glad to come to such an arrangement, though he had little
in common with his lodger, who was a thin, dark, spectacled man, with a
stoop which gave the impression of actual, physical deformity. I
remember that during our short visit we found the vicar garrulous, but
his lodger strangely reticent, a sad-faced, introspective man, sitting
with averted eyes, brooding apparently upon his own affairs.
These were the two men who entered abruptly into our little
sitting-room on Tuesday, March the 16th, shortly after our breakfast
hour, as we were smoking together, preparatory to our daily excursion
upon the moors.
“Mr. Holmes,” said the vicar in an agitated voice, “the most