Worse, could Sherlock Holmes have suffered a grievous accident, isolated as he was on his bee-farm on the South Downs? He mentioned on the last occasion that over the years his usually mild Apis Mellifera had stung him precisely 7,860 times. My professional advice had been forthright. Avoid being stung again. An allergy could set in out of the blue, whether the first or the 7,861st sting. Within minutes it could trigger a potentially deadly anaphylactic reaction.
I came into the reception room at a rush to be met by a smart salute from a chauffeur standing at attention. He politely asked me to step outside where I was asked to confirm my particulars (‘You are Dr. John H. Watson?’ ‘And the H stands for what, sir?’) before he reached into his jacket. He handed over a special telegram stamped Private and Secret.
The telegram was from Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s new Foreign Secretary. Not yet enveloped in the international fame he was to gain, Sir Edward had two useful attributes - a good Parliamentary seat, and money. His grandfather left him a private income, a baronet’s hereditary title and an estate of about 2,000 acres.
The message read, ‘Dear Dr. Watson, it would greatly honour War Minister Haldane and me if you could attend a private meeting tomorrow. If so, shall we say the India Office at 10am? It will be very good to see you again. Very sincerely yours, E. Grey.’
Sir Edward was a countryman after my own heart. On the first occasion we met he told me, ‘I’d far rather catch a three-pound trout on the River Itchen than make a highly successful speech in the House’.
His Parliamentary colleague Richard Burdon Haldane, already regarded as one of Britain’s greatest War Ministers, had been elected in 1885 as a Liberal of Imperialist bent.
I scribbled a reply and handed it to the chauffeur, keeping my patients waiting long enough for him to answer questions about his vehicle. He explained the functioning of the water-cooled brake drums and told me he had graduated from the Daimler Company’s school of instruction for chauffeurs just off the Gray’s Inn Road.
Driver and the magnificent 40 horsepower Napier roared off followed by my envious eye. I planned to take the plunge and equip myself with a motor-car. There was an interesting new automobile, the Aerocar, an air-cooled, four-cylinder luxury car delivered from America for about £700 which included cap, goggles and gauntlet gloves.
I reread the telegram. There was a puzzling omission. It made no mention of Sherlock Holmes.
Chapter III
I am Invited to the Foreign Office to Meet an Oriental Potentate
The newly-constructed Bakerloo Line on the Underground took me to Embankment followed by a short walk along the Thames to the Foreign Office & India Office. The Departments were housed in a vast Victorian Italianate building deliberately designed to impress, like the Royal Courts of Justice, providing a sumptuous setting for affairs of state and diplomatic functions.
I was ushered into the Durbar Court. Doric columns on the ground floor and Ionic on the second were of polished red Peterhead granite, while the top floor Corinthian columns were of grey Aberdeen granite. The flooring was of Greek, Sicilian and Belgian marble. A man in livery greeted me. To my surprise he led me out of the building to a small side-entrance overlooking the Charles Steps and St. James’s Park. Almost furtively Sir Edward was waiting there. We shook hands, the Foreign Secretary greeting me with a polite ‘Good to see you again, Dr. Watson’. Throwing a cautionary glance at a fog-spectacles hawker on the opposite pavement, he said, ‘For the sake of privacy I’d like to hold our chat in St. James’s Park. At Duck Island Cottage on the lake. You’d be astonished at what our friends in the daily Press get up to, to winkle out a story.’
He continued, ‘The War Minister will be there but it’s the other person you’re here to meet, a Chinese potentate, General Yuán Shì-kai. Yuán is the surname.’
Duck Island Cottage was a small gingerbread building of vaguely Swiss inspiration, embowered with climbing plants and trimmed with ornamental barge-boards finials. It was the residence of the Park’s Bird Keeper, though manifestly it served a dual purpose as a Foreign Office place of assignation. As we strolled towards the cottage Sir Edward said, ‘On our one previous encounter you were very much the colleague of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. As the War Minister will make clear, this time you will be acting in your own right.’
My chest puffed out.
The visitor was short and burly, with a pickedevant beard and the stance of a boxer. From the popular Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera The Mikado, westerners easily jumble up Japanese and Chinese. We expect all Oriental men to be clad in a changpao and sporting a moustache drooping to the chin. They would wear woven bamboo hats covered with cream silk gauze, like a lampshade.
The War Minister made the formal introduction. General Yuán and I saluted as befitted men of military backgrounds and stepped up close to each other to shake hands.
The General’s eyes were alive with interest, fine and clear. They fixed me with keen penetration. In stature, facial expression, contour of features as well as in the manner of wearing his moustache (though not his modish Buffalo Bill Cody vandyke beard) he greatly resembled France’s new Prime Minister, Clemenceau.
Far from being attired in saffron-coloured robes or clutching a bejewelled pipe, the man before me was dressed in an expensively tailored hacking jacket and checked cravat as though about to catch a day at the horse races. On the coat-rack behind him hung a more traditional Oriental piece of clothing, a long silk coat slit up the sides to allow horseback riding, embroidered front and back with a white crane, the prince of all feathered creatures on earth. I was to learn later the crane signified a personage of the first rank.
Haldane invited our visitor to open the conversation. The General stepped up to a large map of China on the wall and began to speak.
‘Gentlemen, events of the past fifty years have shown the Army of the Great East must catch up with the Great West. The world has seen how the despised Japanese bandits defeated us. My country has been soundly sleeping on the top of a pile of kindling lying in the midst of a group of strong Powers with a box of matches in their hand. The Russians spy on us in the north, the French stare at us in the south, the Japanese are watching us like pygmy chameleons in the east, and you English are peeping at us from the west. I am not convinced our traditional ways of qi, meridians, and acupuncture points will serve us any better on the battlefields of the future.
The world outside our borders watches like crows on a fence, intent on divvying up my country between them. In their eyes China is a hay cart. Everyone feels free to take from it what they want. Germany hankers after Shantung, France after Yunnan, Japan after Fuhkien, Belgium after Tianjin. The Italians eye the Bay of San Mun. Russia is the worst of all - their Viceroys dream of creating another Muscovite Empire on the shores of the Pacific, such as Rome created on the shores of the Bosphorus.’
A shadow crossed his face.
‘Our people shake at the prospect of the ‘White Peril’ sweeping across our land. Our people fear the white race intends to do to us what you have done to the American Indians and African negroes - impose a humiliating colonial serfdom. Even annihilate us. If we just fold our arms and yield, I shall have no face to see our ancestors after death.’