His last bow Some later reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes
he died! But my heart was flint, for he endured nothing which my
innocent darling had not felt before him. There is my story, Mr.
Holmes. Perhaps, if you loved a woman, you would have done as much
yourself. At any rate, I am in your hands. You can take what steps you
like. As I have already said, there is no man living who can fear death
less than I do.”
Holmes sat for some little time in silence.
“What were your plans?” he asked at last.
“I had intended to bury myself in central Africa. My work there is but
half finished.”
“Go and do the other half,” said Holmes. “I, at least, am not prepared
to prevent you.”
Dr. Sterndale raised his giant figure, bowed gravely, and walked from
the arbour. Holmes lit his pipe and handed me his pouch.
“Some fumes which are not poisonous would be a welcome change,” said
he. “I think you must agree, Watson, that it is not a case in which we
are called upon to interfere. Our investigation has been independent,
and our action shall be so also. You would not denounce the man?”
“Certainly not,” I answered.
“I have never loved, Watson, but if I did and if the woman I loved had
met such an end, I might act even as our lawless lion-hunter has done.
Who knows? Well, Watson, I will not offend your intelligence by
explaining what is obvious. The gravel upon the window-sill was, of
course, the starting-point of my research. It was unlike anything in
the vicarage garden. Only when my attention had been drawn to Dr.
Sterndale and his cottage did I find its counterpart. The lamp shining
in broad daylight and the remains of powder upon the shield were
successive links in a fairly obvious chain. And now, my dear Watson, I
think we may dismiss the matter from our mind and go back with a clear
conscience to the study of those Chaldean roots which are surely to be
traced in the Cornish branch of the great Celtic speech.”
The Adventure of the Red Circle
PART I
“Well, Mrs. Warren, I cannot see that you have any particular cause for
uneasiness, nor do I understand why I, whose time is of some value,
should interfere in the matter. I really have other things to engage
me.” So spoke Sherlock Holmes and turned back to the great scrapbook in
which he was arranging and indexing some of his recent material.
But the landlady had the pertinacity and also the cunning of her sex.
She held her ground firmly.
“You arranged an affair for a lodger of mine last year,” she said—“Mr.
Fairdale Hobbs.”
“Ah, yes—a simple matter.”
“But he would never cease talking of it—your kindness, sir, and the way
in which you brought light into the darkness. I remembered his words
when I was in doubt and darkness myself. I know you could if you only
would.”
Holmes was accessible upon the side of flattery, and also, to do him
justice, upon the side of kindliness. The two forces made him lay down
his gum-brush with a sigh of resignation and push back his chair.
“Well, well, Mrs. Warren, let us hear about it, then. You don’t object
to tobacco, I take it? Thank you, Watson—the matches! You are uneasy,
as I understand, because your new lodger remains in his rooms and you
cannot see him. Why, bless you, Mrs. Warren, if I were your lodger you
often would not see me for weeks on end.”
“No doubt, sir; but this is different. It frightens me, Mr. Holmes. I
can’t sleep for fright. To hear his quick step moving here and moving
there from early morning to late at night, and yet never to catch so
much as a glimpse of him—it’s more than I can stand. My husband is as
nervous over it as I am, but he is out at his work all day, while I get
no rest from it. What is he hiding for? What has he done? Except for
the girl, I am all alone in the house with him, and it’s more than my
nerves can stand.”
Holmes leaned forward and laid his long, thin fingers upon the woman’s
shoulder. He had an almost hypnotic power of soothing when he wished.
The scared look faded from her eyes, and her agitated features smoothed
into their usual commonplace. She sat down in the chair which he had
indicated.
“If I take it up I must understand every detail,” said he. “Take time
to consider. The smallest point may be the most essential. You say that
the man came ten days ago and paid you for a fortnight’s board and
lodging?”
“He asked my terms, sir. I said fifty shillings a week. There is a
small sitting-room and bedroom, and all complete, at the top of the
house.”
“Well?”
“He said, ‘I’ll pay you five pounds a week if I can have it on my own
terms.’ I’m a poor woman, sir, and Mr. Warren earns little, and the
money meant much to me. He took out a ten-pound note, and he held it
out to me then and there. ‘You can have the same every fortnight for a
long time to come if you keep the terms,’ he said. ‘If not, I’ll have
no more to do with you.’
“What were the terms?”
“Well, sir, they were that he was to have a key of the house. That was
all right. Lodgers often have them. Also, that he was to be left
entirely to himself and never, upon any excuse, to be disturbed.”
“Nothing wonderful in that, surely?”
“Not in reason, sir. But this is out of all reason. He has been there
for ten days, and neither Mr. Warren, nor I, nor the girl has once set
eyes upon him. We can hear that quick step of his pacing up and down,
up and down, night, morning, and noon; but except on that first night
he had never once gone out of the house.”
“Oh, he went out the first night, did he?”
“Yes, sir, and returned very late—after we were all in bed. He told me
after he had taken the rooms that he would do so and asked me not to
bar the door. I heard him come up the stair after midnight.”
“But his meals?”
“It was his particular direction that we should always, when he rang,
leave his meal upon a chair, outside his door. Then he rings again when
he has finished, and we take it down from the same chair. If he wants
anything else he prints it on a slip of paper and leaves it.”
“Prints it?”
“Yes, sir; prints it in pencil. Just the word, nothing more. Here’s the
one I brought to show you—SOAP. Here’s another—MATCH. This is one he
left the first morning—DAILY GAZETTE. I leave that paper with his
breakfast every morning.”
“Dear me, Watson,” said Homes, staring with great curiosity at the
slips of foolscap which the landlady had handed to him, “this is
certainly a little unusual. Seclusion I can understand; but why print?
Printing is a clumsy process. Why not write? What would it suggest,
Watson?”
“That he desired to conceal his handwriting.”
“But why? What can it matter to him that his landlady should have a
word of his writing? Still, it may be as you say. Then, again, why such
laconic messages?”
“I cannot imagine.”
“It opens a pleasing field for intelligent speculation. The words are
written with a broad-pointed, violet-tinted pencil of a not unusual
pattern. You will observe that the paper is torn away at the side here
after the printing was done, so that the ‘S’ of ‘SOAP’ is partly gone.
Suggestive, Watson, is it not?”
“Of caution?”
“Exactly. There was evidently some mark, some thumbprint, something
which might give a clue to the person’s identity. Now, Mrs. Warren, you
say that the man was of middle size, dark, and bearded. What age would
he be?”
“Youngish, sir—not over thirty.”
“Well, can you give me no further indications?”
“He spoke good English, sir, and yet I thought he was a foreigner by
his accent.”
“And he was well dressed?”
“Very smartly dressed, sir—quite the gentleman. Dark clothes—nothing
you would note.”
“He gave no name?”
“No, sir.”
“And has had no letters or callers?”
“None.”
“But surely you or the girl enter his room of a morning?”
“No, sir; he looks after himself entirely.”
“Dear me! that is certainly remarkable. What about his luggage?”
“He had one big brown bag with him—nothing else.”
“Well, we don’t seem to have much material to help us. Do you say
nothing has come out of that room—absolutely nothing?”
The landlady drew an envelope from her bag; from it she shook out two
burnt matches and a cigarette-end upon the table.
“They were on his tray this morning. I brought them because I had heard
that you can read great things out of small ones.”
Holmes shrugged his shoulders.
“There is nothing here,” said he. “The matches have, of course, been
used to light cigarettes. That is obvious from the shortness of the
burnt end. Half the match is consumed in lighting a pipe or cigar. But,
dear me! this cigarette stub is certainly remarkable. The gentleman was
bearded and moustached, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t understand that. I should say that only a clean-shaven man
could have smoked this. Why, Watson, even your modest moustache would
have been singed.”
“A holder?” I suggested.
“No, no; the end is matted. I suppose there could not be two people in
your rooms, Mrs. Warren?”
“No, sir. He eats so little that I often wonder it can keep life in
one.”
“Well, I think we must wait for a little more material. After all, you
have nothing to complain of. You have received your rent, and he is not
a troublesome lodger, though he is certainly an unusual one. He pays
you well, and if he chooses to lie concealed it is no direct business
of yours. We have no excuse for an intrusion upon his privacy until we
have some reason to think that there is a guilty reason for it. I’ve
taken up the matter, and I won’t lose sight of it. Report to me if
anything fresh occurs, and rely upon my assistance if it should be
needed.
“There are certainly some points of interest in this case, Watson,” he
remarked when the landlady had left us. “It may, of course, be
trivial—individual eccentricity; or it may be very much deeper than
appears on the surface. The first thing that strikes one is the obvious
possibility that the person now in the rooms may be entirely different
from the one who engaged them.”
“Why should you think so?”
“Well, apart from this cigarette-end, was it not suggestive that the
only time the lodger went out was immediately after his taking the
rooms? He came back—or someone came back—when all witnesses were out of
the way. We have no proof that the person who came back was the person
who went out. Then, again, the man who took the rooms spoke English
well. This other, however, prints ‘match’ when it should have been
‘matches.’ I can imagine that the word was taken out of a dictionary,
which would give the noun but not the plural. The laconic style may be
to conceal the absence of knowledge of English. Yes, Watson, there are
good reasons to suspect that there has been a substitution of lodgers.”
“But for what possible end?”
“Ah! there lies our problem. There is one rather obvious line of
investigation.” He took down the great book in which, day by day, he
filed the agony columns of the various London journals. “Dear me!” said
he, turning over the pages, “what a chorus of groans, cries, and
bleatings! What a rag-bag of singular happenings! But surely the most
valuable hunting-ground that ever was given to a student of the
unusual! This person is alone and cannot be approached by letter
without a breach of that absolute secrecy which is desired. How is any
news or any message to reach him from without? Obviously by
advertisement through a newspaper. There seems no other way, and
fortunately we need concern ourselves with the one paper only. Here are
the _Daily Gazette_ extracts of the last fortnight. ‘Lady with a black
boa at Prince’s Skating Club’—that we may pass. ‘Surely Jimmy will not
break his mother’s heart’—that appears to be irrelevant. ‘If the lady
who fainted on Brixton bus’—she does not interest me. ‘Every day my
heart longs—’ Bleat, Watson—unmitigated bleat! Ah, this is a little