Denis Smith - The Mammoth Book of the New Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes

‘How came you to appear in the room beneath the stage when you did?’ asked Holmes.

‘As I have described, I had suspected for some time that Trent was planning something, but had no idea what form his evil plans might take. Yesterday afternoon, however, a curious thing happened. It was raining very heavily when I arrived at the theatre, so I sat in my carriage for a few moments, waiting for it to let up. I was thinking about Isabel and her husband, when, to my very great surprise, Captain Trent himself appeared from round the side of the theatre. I leaned back in my seat so that he would not see me, and reflected on the matter. What, I wondered, had he been doing round there? I instructed my coachman to turn into the little street by the side of the theatre. There was only one place there from which Trent could possibly have come, the locked side-door of the old Palace Theatre. But what possible business could he have in there? And then it was as if the scales fell from my eyes! Trent had discovered the old tunnel between the two theatres which I remembered having read about two or three years ago. It was he that was responsible for all the nasty little tricks which had been played upon the company recently and on each occasion he had used the tunnel to make good his escape! I saw it all now and feared that some serious harm might be intended for Miss Ballantyne. I therefore resolved that I would keep guard in the basement corridor today, during the dress-rehearsal. It seems, however, that I would, nevertheless, have been too late. Somehow, that devil slipped by me and I heard nothing until the sounds of your struggle came to my ears. How fortunate it was for Miss Ballantyne that you were more alert than I and cleverer than that serpent, Trent, to foil his devilish plot!’

‘And how fortunate it was for Miss Ballantyne,’ I interjected, ‘that the wooden bar which held the trap-door had jammed and did not slide free!’

Holmes chuckled. ‘I am always ready to acknowledge the part played by chance in the affairs of men,’ said he; ‘but in this case, with regard to the trap-door, at least, I must insist that chance had very little to do with it. The wooden bar did not slide free because I had called in at the theatre in the morning, borrowed a hammer from one of the stage-hands and banged two large nails into the back edge of it, where they could not be seen by anyone looking up from the floor.’

‘What!’ I cried. ‘You might have told me, Holmes! I had no idea that you had been there earlier in the day!’

‘My dear fellow! You can hardly suppose that I would leave my client at risk of plummeting to her death. I had been pondering overnight how best to secure the trap-door without making it apparent to Trent that I had done so. In the end I decided that the simplest method was the best. I really could not leave it as we had found it, Watson. The risk was simply too great. Consider, for instance, the number of brewers’ drays in London on an average day! Any one of them might have run us down on our way to the theatre and thus prevented our reaching there in time to save Miss Ballantyne!’

‘And even though we were there in good time,’ I remarked, ‘Trent still succeeded in holding us all at bay until he had pulled on the rope.’

Again my friend chuckled. ‘I had a pistol of my own in my pocket,’ said he. ‘When Inspector Jones’s slip gave away our position, I could have whipped it out and had Trent at my mercy at once. But I wished him to think himself secure and thus proceed with his plan, so that his guilt could be proved beyond doubt before three reliable witnesses! I am sorry that I had to keep you in the dark about the trap-door, old man! But I was concerned that if you knew that I had secured it, you might inadvertently reveal the fact to Jones; and if Jones knew about it, he might inadvertently reveal it to Trent. I am sure that under the circumstances you will forgive my reticence on the point!’

‘I am more than familiar with your tendency to reticence,’ said I, laughing. ‘Frankly, I doubt that my granting or withholding forgiveness will make the slightest difference to it! But if you would value my forgiveness, I hereby grant it!’

‘For what you have done,’ said Count Laszlo in a serious tone, ‘I can never repay you and any gesture I might make would be but a trifle. Nevertheless, I should be greatly honoured if you would be my guests on Saturday evening. I have a private box for the opening of The Lavender Girl , and am entertaining the entire company afterwards in my rooms at the Langham Hotel.’

‘I am honoured by your invitation,’ replied Holmes, ‘but regret that I shall be otherwise engaged on Saturday evening.’

My face must have betrayed the disappointment I felt at this response; for after a glance in my direction, and a moment’s pause, my friend’s features broke into a smile and he chuckled.

‘But, perhaps, on this occasion, I could cancel my other engagements!’ said he with a merry laugh. ‘After all, both Dr Watson and I have certainly made a contribution, however indirect, to the eventual success of The Lavender Girl ; so it is perhaps no more than fitting if we are in attendance when she is at last presented to the world!’

It has been justly observed of medicine that it can never be wholly a science, but must also be at least partly an art. For unlike the other scientific subjects, its field of study is not that of inanimate substances and forces, but living and breathing human beings, who are not always amenable to being treated in a purely scientific manner, and who are, generally speaking, less interested in hearing one’s opinion of what is wrong with them than in achieving full health once more. This fact serves not only to distinguish medicine from the other sciences, but also to mark a division in the ranks of medical practitioners themselves. All medical men serve the same deity, but an individual’s temperament will determine the character of his service.

There are medicos of my acquaintance, for instance, to whom the presence of other human beings seems nothing but an irksome distraction, except when it is a downright nuisance, especially if the human beings in question should actually have the effrontery to be ill. Such men find their most useful employment in medical research. For others, the study of one particular aspect of the complex that is a man becomes so absorbing that it is only as specialists that they can achieve professional satisfaction. But for many – and among these I would number myself – the chief interest lies not in any one illness or condition to which a person may fall victim, but in that person as a whole, whatever may ail him. For such medical men, who derive their satisfaction from diagnosing and treating the quite unpredictable variety of complaints with which their patients present them, there is nothing so good as general practice.

The choice of general practice – the specialisation in generality, as it has been termed – has the added advantage, also, that in following it, one comes into contact to a quite singular degree with the multifarious panorama of life; for one’s patients have a habit of adulterating their descriptions of what ails them with large measures of personal history and local anecdote. The years I had shared chambers with Sherlock Holmes had sharpened my taste for all that was outré and out of the common, and I enjoyed hearing the unusual experiences of my patients. Only when it was apparent that some unusually garrulous patient regarded his physician as a captive audience for as long as he chose to hold forth have I been tempted on occasion to regret my choice of medical career.

When I took over the Paddington practice of old Dr Farquhar, shortly after my marriage, I was at once involved in a more strenuous round of work than I had known since my days in the Army Medical Department. No longer in his prime, Farquhar had had neither the energy nor the inclination to put any great amount of effort into the practice, with the inevitable result that a decline had set in, and many of his patients had transferred to the rival practice of the young and vigorous Dr Jackson. The temptation to effect such a change must indeed have been a great one, for the temptation most difficult to resist is that which calls for the least expenditure of effort; and in this respect the circumstances could scarcely have been more agreeable, the premises of the two doctors standing side by side in the same street. Still, the physical proximity of our consulting-rooms could just as well work to my advantage as to that of my rival, I reasoned, and I was confident that by dint of hard work I could more than recoup the losses that my predecessor had suffered.