Part four of this series opens here. And from here, five chapters are one case.
Until now one chapter has been one case. From here a single case runs across five.
On the breakfast table lies a walking stick.
The Stick He Left Behind
Last night’s visitor left it. A fine, thick piece of wood with a broad silver band just under the head.
The band is engraved with the name James Mortimer and the year 1884.
Watson picks it up and reads it out. An elderly country doctor, he suggests, well thought of, since people clubbed together to give it. A man who does much of his visiting on foot, because the iron ferrule is worn down.
Excellent, says Holmes.
And he adds something. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, he says, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.
Watson is pleased by it. Then Holmes takes the stick and turns the reading over.
Most of your conclusions were erroneous, he says. When I said you stimulated me, I meant that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.
The Same Object, a Different Man
What Holmes reads is this.
A presentation to a doctor is likelier to come from a hospital than a hunt. The two initials in front of it suggest Charing Cross.
A man established in a London practice does not drift into the country. So this was someone who had just finished his training.
The date is five years old, so he is under thirty. He chose a country practice, so he is unambitious. And after waiting an hour he left his stick instead of his card, so he is absent-minded.
And he has a dog. There are teeth marks in the middle of the stick, and the width between them is too broad for a terrier and not broad enough for a mastiff.
Watson takes down the Medical Directory. Mortimer qualified in 1882, was house-surgeon at Charing Cross for two years, and practises at Grimpen.
And then the man himself is at the door. The dog is with him.
The Manuscript of 1742
The visitor is tall and thin and young, with a nose like a beak and gold-rimmed glasses, and instead of a greeting he asks whether he may run a finger along Holmes’s skull.
From his pocket he draws an old paper.
Early eighteenth century, says Holmes, unless it is a forgery. The exact date is 1742, Mortimer answers.
The man who committed it to his care was Sir Charles Baskerville, dead suddenly three months ago. A strong-minded man, shrewd, practical and as unimaginative as Mortimer himself, who nonetheless took this document very seriously.
Mortimer reads it aloud.
A Night Two Centuries Ago
About the time of the Civil War the manor of Baskerville was held by a man named Hugo. He was wild and godless, and his name was a by-word through the West.
He came to want the daughter of a yeoman who farmed nearby, and the young woman avoided him. One night Hugo and five or six of his companions went down to the farm and carried her off, and shut her in an upper room of the Hall.
Below, the drinking began, and the singing and the oaths came up to her. She climbed down by the ivy on the south wall and ran home across the moor.
Finding the room empty, Hugo went out of his mind. He sprang onto the great table and cried before the whole company that he would give his body and soul to the Powers of Evil that very night if he might overtake her.
One of them shouted that they should put the hounds on her. Hugo gave the pack a kerchief of hers and rode out into the moonlight.
The remaining thirteen came to their senses and took horse after him.
They passed a night shepherd and asked what he had seen. He could scarcely speak for fear, but said he had seen the girl with the hounds on her track. And more than that, he said. Hugo Baskerville had passed him on his black mare, and behind him ran, without a sound, a hound of hell.
Between Two Stones
Soon the black mare came galloping back past them with an empty saddle and a trailing bridle.
They rode close together now. At the head of a deep dip they came upon the hounds, famed for their courage, whimpering in a cluster, some slinking away and some staring down the narrow valley with their hackles up.
Only three rode down. The place opened into a clearing where two great stones stood, set there by forgotten peoples.
In the moonlight the girl lay dead of fear and exhaustion, and Hugo Baskerville lay near her.
What raised the hair on the heads of those three was neither body. It was the thing standing over Hugo and plucking at his throat, a great black beast shaped like a hound and larger than any hound mortal eye has seen.
They rode for their lives, screaming. One died that very night of what he had seen, and the other two were broken men for the rest of their days.
The writer set down his reason at the end.
“If I have set it down it is because that which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed.” (The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 2)
For a Collector of Fairy Tales
Mortimer finishes, pushes his spectacles up on his forehead, and looks across at Holmes.
Well, says Holmes.
Do you not find it interesting?
“To a collector of fairy tales.” (The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 2)
Mortimer takes out a folded newspaper. Then he will give him something a little more recent.
It is the county paper of the fourteenth of May, with a short account of the facts elicited at the death of Sir Charles Baskerville.
What the Paper Said
Sir Charles had made a great fortune in South Africa and had lived at the Hall for two years. He was childless, and he had said openly that he wished the whole countryside to profit by his good fortune in his own lifetime.
There is no reason whatever to suspect foul play, the paper says.
The facts are these. Every night before bed he walked down the yew alley with a cigar. On the night of the fourth of May he went out as usual and never came back.
At twelve the butler found the hall door still open, lit a lantern and went to look. It had rained, so the footmarks were easy to follow.
Halfway down the alley is a gate onto the moor, and there were signs that Sir Charles had stood there for some little time. The body lay at the far end.
One fact was never explained. According to the butler, from the moor-gate onward his master’s footprints altered, and he appeared from then on to have been walking on his toes.
There were no injuries. The face was distorted so badly that Mortimer at first refused to believe it was his friend, though that was explained as a common symptom of death from cardiac exhaustion.
The post-mortem showed long-standing organic disease, and the jury returned a verdict in accordance with the medical evidence.
What He Kept Back
Those are the public facts, Mortimer says.
Then let me have the private ones, Holmes answers.
He has told nobody this, he says. A man of science shrinks from seeming to endorse a popular superstition, and the Hall would certainly stay untenanted if its reputation grew any grimmer.
Then he describes Sir Charles’s last months.
The old man had taken that manuscript deeply to heart. He would walk in his own grounds and nothing would induce him to go out on the moor at night.
He asked Mortimer more than once whether, on his night journeys, he had ever seen a strange creature or heard the baying of a hound.
Three weeks before his death he stood in his own doorway and his face set with horror at something past Mortimer’s shoulder. Turning, Mortimer caught a glimpse of what he took for a large black calf passing the head of the drive.
That evening Sir Charles put the manuscript into his keeping.
And on the night of the death there was something Mortimer saw.
The butler stated at the inquest that there were no traces on the ground around the body. He did not observe any.
Mortimer did. Some little distance off, but fresh and clear.
Footprints, Holmes asks. Footprints, he answers.
A man’s or a woman’s, Holmes asks.
Mortimer looks strangely at them for an instant, and his voice sinks to a whisper. They were the footprints of a gigantic hound.
Twenty Yards
What Holmes does now is the whole of this chapter.
He does not go towards the legend. He starts asking about places and distances and times.
Did you see this yourself? As clearly as I see you.
And you said nothing? What was the use?
How was it that nobody else saw it? The marks were some twenty yards from the body and no one gave them a thought, and Mortimer doubts he would have done so himself had he not known the legend.
Are there many sheep-dogs on the moor? No doubt, but this was no sheep-dog.
Had it approached the body? No.
What is the alley like, what lies between the hedges and the walk, was the wicket-gate closed, how high was it.
What marks did you see by the gate? None in particular. Sir Charles had evidently stood there five or ten minutes.
How do you know that? Because the ash had twice dropped from his cigar.
Excellent, says Holmes. This is a colleague after our own heart.
That He Was Not There
Then Holmes strikes his hand against his knee.
If I had only been there, he cries. That gravel page on which he might have read so much has long since been smudged by rain and defaced by the clogs of curious onlookers.
It is the only place in this chapter where he is angry. What he is angry at is not the legend. It is time.
Then he presses Mortimer.
Do you believe the thing supernatural? I do not know what to believe.
I have hitherto confined my investigations to this world, Holmes says. In a modest way he has combated evil, but taking on the Father of Evil himself might be too ambitious a task. Yet the footmark, he says, is material.
The original hound was material enough to tug a man’s throat out, Mortimer answers, and was diabolical as well.
Then why come to me at all, Holmes asks. You tell me in one breath that it is useless to investigate and that you want me to do it.
I did not say that I wanted you to do it, Mortimer answers.
In an Hour and a Quarter
Then how can I assist you, Holmes asks.
By advising him what to do about Sir Henry Baskerville, who reaches Waterloo in an hour and a quarter, Mortimer says, looking at his watch.
After Sir Charles’s death they traced the young man to a farm in Canada. Of three brothers, Sir Charles was the eldest, Henry is the son of the second, and the youngest fled to Central America and died there in 1876.
Henry is the last of the Baskervilles.
Why should he not go to the home of his fathers, Holmes asks.
Every Baskerville who goes there meets an evil fate, Mortimer says. And yet this whole poor, bleak countryside depends on his being there, and Mortimer fears being swayed by his own obvious interest, which is why he has brought the case here.
Holmes considers a little.
Then he puts it plainly. If a supernatural agency is at work, it could do the young man harm in London as easily as in Devonshire. A devil with merely local powers, like a parish vestry, would be too inconceivable a thing.
Take a cab and go to Waterloo and meet Sir Henry, he says. And say nothing to him until I have made up my mind.
How long will that take? Twenty-four hours.
Today, Which One to Take Hold Of
Mortimer goes, and Holmes gives the whole day to it. He asks Watson not to come back before evening.
Two cases are lying on that table.
One is two centuries old. There is moonlight and a hound and two standing stones, and of the three men who saw it one died that same night.
The other is three months old. It lay twenty yards off, it was freshly made, and one person saw it.
The legend supplies an explanation. It joins up why Sir Charles avoided the moor at night, why his face was so distorted, and why the men of that family keep dying strangely.
The print explains nothing at all. It was simply there.
So people take the legend. Mortimer leans that way, and so does the district.
What Holmes takes hold of is the one that explains nothing.
And for the first time in this series he regrets not having been on the ground. He is angry about what was written on that gravel and washed away by rain.
Stories survive time. Marks do not.
Which of the old stories I know explains nothing at all while looking as though it explains everything?