Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Hay invited the men into his library for brandy and cigars, but after quickly finishing his drink there, James pled gout again and went back upstairs, leaving his host and “Sigerson” energetically discussing the European gold situation, the recent slaughter of thousands of Arabs by Congo cannibals, and the possible injustice of canal-builder de Lesseps’s imprisonment for fraud.

James read into the night. The authorial and plot idiocies continued to accrue. But here and there, James did see elements of the Sherlock Holmes character which reminded him of the man he’d met thirteen days earlier and with whom he’d dined that night. And he began to understand, dimly, the attraction of these “adventures” to educated friends of his such as Edmund Gosse. The heart of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes lay not in the clumsy “adventures”—which never struck James as that adventurous—but rather in the friendship between Holmes and Watson, their breakfasts together, the foggy days shared indoors by the crackling fire, and Mrs. Hudson coming and going with her food trays and messages from the world. Holmes and Watson lived in a Boys’ Adventure universe and, like Peter Pan, and despite Watson’s rather confused mentions of being married, neither of them ever grew up.

In “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor”—which, like so many of the other Holmesian “adventures”, was no adventure at all, but just a vulgar domestic misunderstanding in the flimsy guise of a mystery—a certain “Lord Robert St. Simon” of high-birth visits 221 B Baker Street to seek advice and Holmes is instantly rude to him. Besides botching the title and crying “Good-day, Lord St. Simon” rather than the proper “Lord Robert” or “Lord Robert St. Simon”, Holmes immediately insults his guest and client.

Henry James had to stop himself at the last minute from marking the following passage in Clara’s book with pencil or pen. Lord Robert, who has been left at the altar by an American bride, is speaking:

“ ‘A most painful matter to me, as you most readily imagine, Mr. Holmes. I have been cut to the quick. I understand that you already managed several delicate cases of this sort, sir, though I presume that they were hardly from the same class of society.’

“ ‘No, I am descending.’

“ ‘I beg pardon?’

“ ‘My last client of the sort was a king.’

“ ‘Oh, really! I had no idea. And which king?’

“ ‘The King of Scandinavia.’

“ ‘What! Had he lost his wife?’

“ ‘You can understand,’ said Holmes suavely, ‘that I extend to the affairs of my other clients the same secrecy which I promise to you in yours.’ ”

What utter bombast , thought James. Any gentleman with a shred of discretion might have mentioned similar details in another case, but would never be so indiscreet as to mention the name of another client—especially not a royal one.

It was all a reverse snobbery that James had heard from Holmes—or at least from the man downstairs who might be pretending to be Sherlock Holmes in the same penumbra of insanity that led him to pretend that he was Holmes pretending to be explorer Jan Sigerson—and it led, along with so many other clues both in these “adventures” and in James’s time with the detective, to one conclusion: Sherlock Holmes was no gentleman. He was simply someone gifted in disguises who had been play-acting for years at being a gentleman—cultivating the casual dress, bored air, and upper-class educated accents of a true gentleman, but never showing the soul of one.

The last story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes —read with the window open because of a growing warmth in the air and with moths batting at the lamp—made the usually staid Henry James stifle his laughter with his hand over his mouth. It would not do to have the Hays’ servants—or perhaps the other guest down the hall—hear gout-ridden Henry James laughing aloud after midnight.

The final story in the collection was “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” and it was a fitting finale, since it included all of the authorial sloppiness, logical idiocies, and Holmesian blunders that made the other stories all but unreadable. Here they were gathered into a primary mass of one sensationalist writer’s execrable laziness.

The story starts with an attractive but far-too-familiar young lady—a stranger to Holmes and Watson but one acting as if she were already an intimate of the detective—a certain Violet Hunter, appearing one morning and demanding the Great Detective’s advice on an earth-shattering matter: should she take a well-paying job as governess for the son of an immensely fat man named Jephro Rucastle.

Mr. Rucastle’s interview with her was “odd” because he declared himself and his wife as “faddy” and said her employment would require her to wear a certain dress “Or to sit here, or sit there, that would not be offensive to you?”

Miss Hunter declares herself shocked to hear of the idea of her wearing certain clothing—although all domestic servants and many governesses of the era were required to do so—and the warnings of orders “to sit here, or sit there” were foolish for Rucastle to mention if he had dark intentions; the lord and lady of households routinely ordered their domestics and governesses around.

Then Mr. Rucastle informed Violet Hunter that she would have to cut her lovely and luxuriant hair short. At this outrageous condition, Miss Hunter turned down the job offer but kept thinking about the high salary and after a few days came close to changing her mind. Then a letter arrived from Rucastle, still insisting on the cut-hair and wearing of certain clothes as a condition, but raising her proposed salary to thirty pounds a quarter: a fortune for a governess, especially one with the admittedly limited education and experience of Miss Violet Hunter.

“ ‘That is the letter which I have just received, Mr. Holmes, and my mind is made up that I will accept it.’ ”

“Then what in Hades are you doing wasting this detective’s time in asking for advice if you’ve already decided? ” softly hissed Henry James in the moth-circling night.

With the certainty of the machineries of plotting thudding and racketing along, drowning all logic and careful introspection, the telegram “which we eventually received came late one night” . . .

Please be at the “Black Swan” Hotel at Winchester at midnight

Tomorrow. Do come! I am at my wit’s end.

Hunter

This wasn’t a telegram; it was a royal summons. So naturally Holmes and Watson are thundering toward Winchester in a morning train. In this sequence, the interesting part, from what James’s brother William would have called “a psychological perspective”, was this rather amazing outburst from Holmes as he looks at the peaceful English countryside beyond London and comments upon the bucolic homes and cottages:

“ ‘ . . . I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.’

“ ‘Good Heavens!’ I cried. ‘Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?’

“ ‘They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’

“ ‘You horrify me!’

“ ‘But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it doing, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lovely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser . . . ’ ”