Martin Greenberg - Sherlock Holmes In America

Early in the fourth quarter, Carlisle had an eight to four lead, much too close to satisfy Warner. He called Hauser and the star end Exendine to the sidelines and gave them some quick instructions, as Stagg watched suspiciously from our side of the field. The center snapped the ball to Hauser, but Exendine, instead of running toward his inevitable knockdown, ran off the field and behind the Carlisle bench. Hauser evaded the Chicago tacklers as long as he could, then delivered a long throw downfield. Exendine, having run some twenty-five yards behind the Carlisle bench, ran back onto the field of play, and caught the pass with no Chicago defender near him. The Carlisle Indians went on to win by a score of eighteen to four.

“An admirable piece of misdirection,” Holmes remarked in a low voice. “But is that stratagem within the rules?”

“I daresay it won’t be after the next rules committee meeting,” I said.

Amos Alonzo Stagg, who had come perilously close to violating his personal ban on profanity, had his own opinion. “That’s unethical, unprofessional, dishonest, and dishonorable! Pop Warner is a cheat!”

Note: Two books were useful in verifying details of Armitage’s account: Touchdown (Longmans, Green, 1927), by Amos Alonzo Stagg and Wesley Winans Stout; and Carlisle vs. Army (Random House, 2007), by Lars Anderson.

“Michéal Breathnach” lives in his ancestral home in the Burren at Carrowney Cleary, County Clare, just a few miles from the market town of Lisdoonvarna and the rollicking seaside village of Doolin where, between the jigs and the reels, he occasionally gets some work done. For Ghosts in Baker Street , he contributed “The Coole Park Problem,” co-written with his daughter, Clare, which was inspired by a long ramble in Yeats’s haunted wood on Lady Gregory’s old estate near Gort in County Galway. “The Song at Twilight” was suggested by the Canonical tale, “His Last Bow,” with its tantalizing references to Holmes’s time in Chicago and Buffalo. Michéal Breathnach is also the Irish nomde-plume of the American writer, Michael Walsh.

Chicago, July 1912

Mrs. Murphy’s chowder was, of course, inedible, but then I was not here for Mrs. Murphy’s chowder. I was here for Miss Maddie McParland.

Forgive me for being blunt. The finer points of literary style are Watson’s, as my feeble effort concerning the business of the Lion’s Mane so vividly illustrates. A few minutes’ consultation with the Britannica and the solution to that mystery would have readily presented itself. Still, we all of us are human, all too human, as Nietzsche said, and I am not as young as I used to be.

How I do miss my amanuensis, my Boswell. I am not a man given to personal reflection, nor do I possess that experience with women on several continents which distinguished my long-suffering but everamiable companion when it came to matters of the heart. But Watson has finally abandoned me, and so cannot help me now, whether literarily or in the realm of das ewig-Weibliche , and so I alone am left to tell thee. I trust my allusions are clear and in order.

The chowder, as I said, was execrable, an eldritch admixture of corn, water-no doubt cheap liquor had been added to it as well-and some sort of meat stock dredged up from the bowels of the nearby slaughterhouses, whose stench permeates the insalubrious atmosphere of this most wretched of American cities. All it wanted was a pair of overalls to make the concoction complete.

So also the accommodations and the weather. Chicago is a fearful place at the best of times, but most of the time it is either blistering hot, as it was now, or frightfully cold. The people of this benighted metropolis walk head down, shoulders hunched, alternately nearly naked or bundled up like Esquimaux, cloth caps tugged down tight, like Irish peasants, too-small bowlers squashed onto too-large heads, dandy fedoras attached by strings to their bearers’ lapels, so as not to go sailing away into inclement waters of Lake Michigan. The mere act of perambulation is one of the labors of Hercules.

For all of this, I blame my brother. Although it has been some years since one could truthfully say that Mycroft was the British Government, he nevertheless still wields enormous influence, especially since the accession of King George IV to the throne of England. Although nil nisi bonum and all that, my lack of regard for the former King, the late Edward, was well known, and I regularly rejected all honors and entreaties from His Majesty’s Government during the mercifully brief reign of a man Watson chose to cloak as the King of Bohemia during our one unhappy encounter.

Too, the long-ago memory of Miss Irene Adler has long remained with me, and so it was with some reluctance that I welcomed my brother to my humble cottage on the South Downs, where I was content to live out the remainder of my life in peace and solitude, with only Mrs. Hudson and my apiary for company as I scribbled away at my magnum opus .

As always, on those infrequent occasions when I see my brother, I marvel at the physical dissimilarity between us. If ever, in matters of appearance, two men were less likely to be siblings, then surely he and I were those men: I, hawk-featured, even gaunt as I approach my sixtieth birthday, and Mycroft tending toward the portly as he advanced in both age and wisdom. And yet, in certain qualities of mind and rigorousness of intellect, I dare say that there is some distinct familial resemblance.

He ambled past Mrs. Hudson with the air of a man on a palanquin. “Damn it, Sherlock,” he began without preamble, “if there is an excuse for your insufferable rudeness, I would very much like to hear it.”

Unaccustomed as he was to physical exertion, my brother plopped himself unbidden into a wing chair as I discreetly signaled Mrs. Hudson for tea.

“You have come straight from Whitehall, I perceive,” I said. After all these years, he was used to my little tricks of behavioural detection, but inevitably he rose to the bait.

“How on earth did you know that?”

“Elementary. Had you come from the Diogenes Club, you would have the tell-tale smudge of printer’s ink on your left thumb and right forefinger, as you habitually wet your index finger as you turn the pages of the Times .”

“Perhaps,” muttered my brother, “but what about my attire or manner suggests Whitehall?”

“Again, child’s play. Your right cuff is besmirched with sealingwax, which strongly suggests you have very recently sealed an important envelope and then rushed here without a chance to change your cuffs. That, together with the presence of a Daimler outside my humble doorway, strong suggests that you are here on matters of state. Hence, Whitehall.”

Mycroft looked at me for a moment, that look I knew so well from our childhood, and then moved straightaway to the business which had brought him here. “See here, Sherlock,” he said. “Your country needs you and that is the end of it.”

He then handed me the purpose of my mission: a sealed letter that I was not to open, but rather to deliver in person to a young woman in America of whom I had never heard. I glanced at the envelope, which contained only a single name: “Miss Maddie McParland.” No address was given.

“You are wondering why I cannot simply post this,” observed Mycroft, turning the tables ever so slightly, “but this is no task for the Royal Mail.” His mien was deadly serious. “Make no mistake, brother, this is a matter of the highest urgency. I have given His Majesty my solemn word that, upon the honor of the family name, you will carry out this mission, personally deliver this missive to its intended recipient, and await her reply.”