On an afternoon in early spring Holmes and Watson walk for two hours in the Park and come back to Baker Street.
A gentleman called while they were out, the page-boy says. He waited half an hour, walking and stamping about the room, then said he felt half choked and went out for air, promising to return.
A pipe is lying on the table. He has left it behind.
The Pipe He Left
Holmes picks it up.
It cost seven and sixpence to begin with and has been mended twice, once in the wooden stem and once in the amber. Both mends are banded with silver, so the repairs cost more than the pipe did.
The owner values it, then. And a man who leaves a thing he values that much behind him has been disturbed in his mind.
Holmes reads more. The owner is muscular and left-handed, has an excellent set of teeth, and has no need to practise economy.
The tobacco is eightpence an ounce when he could smoke well for half that. He has bitten through the amber. And the bowl is charred all down one side, which no match would do. He lights it at lamps, and the charring is on the right, which means the left hand holds it.
This chapter opens that way on purpose. It shows the method running well before anything else happens.
Three Years Without a Shadow
The visitor comes back. His name is Grant Munro and he looks about thirty.
You have not slept for a night or two, Holmes says easily. The man answers that he wants more than a detective. He wants to be told what he ought to do next.
His story runs like this.
He has been married three years and there has not been one difference between them in all that time. Effie loves him, he says, and he will not have that argued about.
And since last Monday there is a barrier between them.
His wife lived in Atlanta in America, lost her husband and her child to yellow fever, and came back to England. He has seen the death certificate himself. She had money of her own, and on their marriage she made all of it over to him.
About six weeks ago she asked him for a hundred pounds. What for, he asked. Some day, perhaps, she said, but not just at present.
It was the first secret there had ever been between them.
The Face at the Window
Across the field from their house stands a small cottage that had been empty eight months.
On Monday evening he walks that way and sees carpets and furniture lying on the grass beside the porch. Someone has taken it at last. And as he looks up, a face is watching him from an upper window.
He was too far off to make out the features. It was the colour that struck him. A livid chalky white, set and rigid in a way he calls unnatural.
When he moves closer the face is plucked away into the dark of the room.
He knocks. A tall, gaunt woman opens the door, says they will ask for help when they want it, and shuts it in his face.
That night he tells his wife only that the cottage is occupied. She makes no reply at all.
Three in the Morning
He is famously a sound sleeper. It is a standing joke in the family that nothing wakes him. That night he sleeps lightly.
Half awake, he sees his wife dressed and fastening her mantle. She is deadly pale and breathing fast, and she glances towards the bed to see whether she has disturbed him.
The front door creaks. He takes out his watch. It is three in the morning.
Twenty minutes later she comes back. When he asks where she has been, she starts violently and gives a kind of gasping cry.
She felt as if she were choking, she says, and stood at the door a few minutes for air. She never once looks in his direction while she says it.
He knows it is false. He turns his face to the wall and lies awake until morning.
Trust Me This Once
The next day, walking home, he passes the cottage.
The door opens and his wife comes out.
She has just been in to see whether she can be any help to the new neighbours, she says. He tells her she was here in the night. She says she has never been here before.
When he moves for the door she seizes his sleeve and pulls him back with all her strength.
She will tell him everything some day, she says, but nothing except misery can come of his going in. Their whole lives are at stake in this.
There is such despair in it that he stops. Then he sets one condition. She may keep her secret, but there must be no more night visits.
She agrees. They walk back together, and as he glances over his shoulder the yellow face is still watching from the upper window.
Three days later he comes home by an earlier train. The maid runs into the hall with a startled face and says her mistress has gone out for a walk.
From an upper window he watches that same maid running across the field towards the cottage.
He goes over and straight in. A kettle is singing and a black cat lies in a basket, and there is not one person in the house.
Only one room upstairs is comfortable and well furnished. On its mantelpiece stands a photograph of his wife, taken three months ago at his own request.
The Story That Covers Everything
After Munro leaves, Holmes tells Watson there is blackmail in this.
Then he builds it.
This woman married in America. Her husband developed something unbearable, and she fled, came back to England, changed her name and began again. She showed a death certificate belonging to some other man and believed herself safe.
Then her first husband found where she was. He wrote and threatened, and he came even after she sent a hundred pounds.
When her husband mentioned that the cottage was occupied she knew who had come. She ran down in the night to plead with them and failed. Next day she went again and was met coming out. Three days later she took the photograph they had demanded, and when the maid brought word she hurried them out of the back door.
Which is why he found the place empty.
It all fits. Watson says one thing. It is all surmise.
“But at least it covers all the facts. When new facts come to our knowledge which cannot be covered by it, it will be time enough to reconsider it.” (The Yellow Face)
What Was in the Room
A wire comes that evening. The cottage is tenanted and the face has been seen again.
The three of them walk down the dark lane. A bar of yellow light shows that the door is not quite shut, and one upper window is brightly lit. A dark blur moves across the blind.
A woman steps out of the shadow with her arms thrown out. She had a presentiment he would come tonight, she says. Trust me again, and you will never have cause to regret it.
I have trusted you too long, he answers, and puts her aside.
They go up the stairs and into the lighted room.
It is a cosy room with four candles burning. In the corner, stooping over a desk, sits a small girl in a red frock and long white gloves.
She turns round. Watson cries out. The face is of a strange livid colour and carries no expression at all.
Holmes laughs and passes his hand behind the child’s ear. The mask peels away.
Underneath it is a child, laughing at three astonished grown men with every tooth showing.
The Locket
The wife sweeps into the room with a proud, set face.
You have forced me against my own judgement to tell you, she says, and now we must both make the best of it. My husband died at Atlanta. My child survived.
She draws a silver locket from her dress and touches the spring. Inside is the portrait of a man.
That is John Hebron of Atlanta, she says, and a nobler man never walked the earth. He was a lawyer there, and she cut herself off from her own people to marry him.
The child took after her father. She was left in America because her health was weak, cared for by a Scottish woman who had once been their servant.
For three years she kept the child’s existence from her husband. She feared she would lose him, she says, and had not the courage. She had to choose between them, and in her weakness she turned away from her own little girl.
Then the longing to see the child grew past bearing. She sent a hundred pounds to the nurse, arranged the cottage so the woman could come as a neighbour, and told her to keep the child indoors by day with her face and hands covered.
Now you know it all, she says, and what is to become of us, my child and me? She clasps her hands and waits.
Ten Minutes
Munro says nothing for ten minutes.
Then he lifts the child and kisses her. Still carrying her, he holds his other hand out to his wife and turns towards the door.
We can talk it over more comfortably at home, he says. I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.
Holmes and Watson follow them down the lane.
We shall be of more use in London than in Norbury, Holmes says. And he says nothing more about the case until late that night, when he turns for his room with his candle lit.
At the door he calls to Watson.
“if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper ‘Norbury’ in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.” (The Yellow Face)
Today, On Everything Fitting
Here is what Holmes held in this chapter.
A hundred pounds. A walk at three in the morning. A rigid face at a window. A plea not to go in. A photograph on a mantelpiece. A house emptied before he could reach it.
The story he built covered all of it without a remainder.
And another story covered exactly the same facts. In that one the hundred pounds went to a nurse, the night walk was a mother going to her child, the rigid face was a mask, the plea was protection, and the photograph was a gift.
Neither story collides with anything known. Not colliding cannot tell the two apart.
Holmes took the one that came to him first. And what comes first is usually the story we have seen many times before.
A blackmailing first husband was a story he had handled often. A mother hiding a child was not.
Which is why the last line of this chapter is not about method. It is about himself. He hands Watson the job of telling him when he has become dangerous.
We stand in the same place. When an explanation covers everything neatly, the neatness itself produces the feeling of being right.
Have I ever gone looking for the other explanation that would cover the same facts?