Panic seeped through my brain like fungus through dead wood. Even as Holmes’ heated words fled from the carriage, a most remarkable thing took place. Both of us watched in the greatest astonishment. Like a ouija board in motion, summoning up the spirits, a hand was rising of its own accord before our eyes. It proceeded upwards whilst we stared, mesmerised, then arched backward over our heads and rapped against the carriage wall like a spirit from the other side. A commanding voice which, like the hand, turned out to be mine, though I did not recognise either, so feverish had I grown from trepidation, yelled ‘Cabman, halt the horses - at once!’
With a sharp pull of the reins and a musical jangling sound, the greys halted, their heads turning back like pointers on the leash, looking upward at the driver. The cabman leant forward, his face half upside-down, and stared in at us expectantly.
‘Holmes,’ I said, dropping my voice to an urgent whisper, my words coming in sharp, jerky outbursts, ‘If this carriage contained a bell-pull to a psychiatric unit I would use it to summon six strong men in white apparel. In our time together we have had the good fortune to bring peace to many troubled souls. Now I beg you to bring some to mine. Let the cabman await a while. You have issued a farrago of unconnected facts guised as proof. We must talk in confidence - and now!’
Holmes sat in startled silence, staring at me with amazement.
A Rabbit’s Tail
Taken aback by such vehemence from a usually diffident companion, Holmes waved the cabman to a triangle of grass at the intersection of two lanes some thirty yards ahead. The coach moved forward and we came to a halt by a stream. Head whirling, the setting sun a blur, I sprang out and walked to the bridge. In the twilight of the early-summer evening, the Sussex landscape glowed golden and wonderful in the slanting rays of the setting sun. The shadow of a white signpost moved across an open field, one finger pointed southward to Wood’s Corner on a ridge three miles beyond, another westward to Crick’s End, less than a quarter-mile down the lane.
I threw a backward glance at Holmes. He bore the angry, aspersive look of a disturbed cock-pheasant. Like a quarry cornered, I turned to confront his glowering countenance. ‘My dear and singular friend,’ I began, keen to pre-empt his wrath, ‘I speak with the deepest trepidation. You know it is my greatest joy and privilege to serve you. I am look-out, decoy, accomplice, messenger and whetstone for your mind and willingly accept my drummer-boy status. It has always been my habit to go along with you, clinging on if only to your little finger or large toe while you leap the yawning crevice. It is my custom to take up distant ground, to be disposed to avoid all pretext for collision. I realise full well I am at my highest value in the role of an interested student observing a surgeon at work or seated quietly in a corner while you think aloud. Even to hardened members of Scotland Yard or the Paris Sûreté the sight of Sherlock Holmes in majestic action has an especially vivid appeal, like the trill of a pipe to a cobra.’ I paused. With as much emphasis as I could muster, I added, ‘but in this instance I feel the stakes are much too high.’
At this unfamiliar show of defiance, my comrade opened his mouth to start his response. I held up a peremptory finger. ‘Holmes, I will not offer subjection to your commands, however righteous. Do you not recall on our way to the Brixton Road during A Study In Scarlet you convinced me it is a capital mistake to theorise before all the evidence is in, because it biases the judgment? I have a vivid recollection of that instance. Bitterly hard as I find it, I must therefore alter my long-held habit of withholding my opinion for fear of needless interruption of your thought. Here, and now, I say there is such a need.’
I ceased speaking and waited with extreme disquiet for his reply. In the stillness I heard little but the thumping of my heart.
My companion cocked a puckered eye at me from a near distance with great curiosity, as though in need of a monocle. It was clear my words had failed to assuage him. When he took his turn to speak, he showed every sign of acute impatience. Umbrage permeated every word.
‘Watson, it has been your custom to express incredulity with your eyebrows - now I see you have switched to your tongue! This is a brilliant departure! Am I to understand you have deserted my faction and crossed to the enemy line?’ His voice sharpened. ‘Are you the Sorcerer’s Apprentice - having memorised what to do and say, you wish to do your own witching? Do we have the elements of a Promethean tale the equal of Mary Shelley’s? Or like the Pankhursts, are you going to march behind me with a banner demanding the right to vote?’
He stopped. His face more purple than I had ever noted. In a visible effort to regain my cooperation he asked, ‘Which part of my reasoning strikes you as faulty? I tell you, Watson, and I beg you to listen, this is no pretty puzzle of the police-court. Large issues will prove to be at stake, I am certain of it. I fear it is a serious international complication, a diplomatic coup d’état.’
His thin fingers twitched. He continued, ‘My dear friend, if in the detail you reject my supposition, do you not consider the cumulative effects of what I say to be considerable? Do you not recall my words in The Book of Life - from an observation of a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of a Niagara or the Pacific Ocean? I speculate this may not merely be the murder of a Boer but - and I repeat - the promise of an international incident or worse.’
At this my companion ceased speaking, awaiting my reaction to his words, a singular expression of interest on his hawkish features. I felt unwilling to respond. At my silence, he resumed his old manner and demanded sardonically. ‘Or is it possible that without my knowing, you are in hot pursuit of the real assassin, a hirsute man wearing Russian Army boots, both left-footed? Someone whose presence in our shadow I have completely failed to spot?’
The sneer in his voice obliged me to retort. ‘Holmes, I am not in hot pursuit of a hirsute man wearing two left-footed Russian Army boots. I realise you regard me simply as a minor confederate, one to whom each development comes as a perpetual surprise, but in this instance if you believe I follow you willingly back to their portico, you labour under a grave misapprehension. As to a logician inferring the Niagara Falls from a single drop of water, may I refer you to the tale of the six blind men clustered around an elephant, each asked to guess the whole beast from touching just a single part - trunk, ear, side, tusk, leg, tail. I say we are two of those blind men. I repeat, despite your every effort to brow-beat me into submission, from the insubstantial wares you have laid out at our table you have not for a moment convinced me there is a case of murder to be made, and certainly no case to prove the members of the Kipling League perpetrated a hideous crime.’
‘Confound it, Holmes,’ I hastened on. ‘Surely the game is hardly worth the candle? My trust in your intuition has gone as far as it will. Leave well alone. Nothing about the description of the body seems alarming. It might well be just a drowning and a corpse like any other, except for being seared by a sun fiercer than one we are accustomed to in an English spring. Do you not see that we are plunging at a furious pace to professional extinction? I have long feared that at some point a horrible misfortune would come suddenly to blast your career. Has that time come, I ask? You put forward an unsubstantiated hypothesis, you speak of wagon ponds and moats, spiny lizards, Tropical hats - and Randlords and Gold Bugs howling out like wolves of war. Until now I have been quite unacquainted with your gift for improvisation, other than when you play the Stradivarius. I swear you totter on the very edge of self-deception.’