The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (31 page)

So it was, upon my friend’s impulse, that we had left the comforts of our quarters in Baker Street for an indefinite spell of indifferent cooking and the sound of breakers on shingle carrying to our ears at the Royal Albion Hotel. Within two hours of leaving London, we had moved into our suite, a spacious sitting-room with our bedrooms to either side. Its windows enjoyed a view across the busy esplanade to a broad expanse of waves that stretched between us and the coast of France sixty miles way. At this time of year, the edge of the sea was a promenade for mothers in full skirts, blouses, and straw boaters, fathers in their best suits and hats. Children gathered excitedly before the puppet booth of the Punch and Judy show on the beach when its little trumpet announced each performance.

We soon accustomed ourselves to the daily round. Each morning, several ponies drew the wheeled cabins of the ladies’ bathing machines down to the water’s edge and pulled them back up at sunset. The regimental band of the Coldstream Guards played briskly every afternoon at two
P
.
M
. on the far end of the old Chain Pier, while bearded fishermen mended their nets on the lower esplanade. Fishing boats and yachts lay drawn up on the shingle, except for a few jolly little craft like the
Honeymoon
and the
Dolly Varden
, which bobbed and twisted in the swell with their apprehensive passengers.

Within an hour of our arrival, we were sitting down to an early ‘theatre’ dinner provided by these seaside hotels for patrons who have booked seats at some theatrical performance. Holmes, in one of those infuriating moods which took him from time to time, would say nothing beyond remarking, ‘There is not a moment to be lost.’ On the contrary, I thought, we seemed to have all the time in the world. He withdrew behind the
Evening Globe
while the waiter attempted to serve us
turbot a la mayonnaise
. The Royal Albion was a large, solid building, now past its best, which qualities were reflected in its menu. Holmes ate rapidly but in silence, evidently turning over possibilities in his mind. Even before the coffee was served, he pushed back his chair and stood up.

‘Come, Watson. I think it is time we were on our way.’

As we came out into the evening sunlight of the esplanade, I was about to ask him what our way might be. Before I could do so, he very pointedly drew a deep breath, swelled out his chest, tapped his cane sharply on the paving of the esplanade and said, ‘How good it is to breathe sea air again after a winter of London fogs. What was it that they called this town in the days of the good King George III? They nicknamed it Doctor Brighton, I recall. And not without reason.’

‘I daresay I should breathe a lot more clearly if I knew where the blazes we were going.’

He looked at me in astonishment. ‘But you must have known, my dear friend. You heard the tale told this morning, of second sight and phantasms of the living. Where should we go for entertainment on our very first evening in Brighton but to the lecture-room of the Aquarium, apparently disapproved of by Mr. Gurney, for a display of Professor Chamberlain’s magical accomplishments with the talented Miss Elvira. Their names are on the bill over there.’

So that was it. Why such vulgar entertainment should be of the least use to our defence of Effie Deans was quite beyond me.

If you have ever visited Brighton, you will know that the Aquarium has less to do with sea creatures than with popular entertainment. It stands under its famous clock tower just at the landward end of the Chain Pier with its strings of colored lanterns. We paid our sixpences and passed through the turnstiles to a land of fairy lights and fireworks. Among the shows and exhibitions advertised, its theatre offered Madame Alice Barth’s Operetta Company in the Garden Scene from
Faust
and ‘Dr. Miracle,’ a one-act piece never performed before. Holmes led the way to the plainer fare offered by the lecture theater which was placarded by ‘Professor Chamberlain’s Experiments in Mesmerism and Thought-Reading.’

At the door, a newspaper review was displayed under glass. It was a cutting from the
Brighton Herald
, praising the excitement of last Saturday’s performance, when ‘Dr. Mesmer’ had hypnotised a youth and a girl. The youth was subjected to kickings and prickings, the girl to abuse and mockery. When brought back to consciousness, each of the dupes smilingly acknowledged the applause and confessed to having no memory of the ordeal. A heckler in the front row who had denounced the display loudly as a ‘put-up job’ was thrown out of the hall by several members of the large and excited audience. I cannot pretend that this was the entertainment I should have chosen for my first night in Brighton.

Across a bill advertising the show was a more recent banner still damp with paste. It announced that Professor Chamberlain and his medium, Madame Elvira, had been retained by other managements to provide ‘select high-class seances for the popularizing of phenomenal science.’ In consequence, this week must be the last of their present season in Brighton. It seemed that they had been in residence at the Aquarium during most of the summer so far.

We paid a further shilling and were ushered to seats near the front of what was not so much a lecture hall as a music hall or a palace of varieties. It seemed less crowded than on a Saturday night, but the buzz of excitement was still unmistakable. Professor Chamberlain, playing the role of Dr. Mesmer with an electrical magnet, first invited several victims onto his platform and made some magic passes over them. They then submitted to a few blows without apparent resentment. Among roars of approval from the onlookers, they also performed as though they believed themselves to be dogs or cockerels, infants at feeding time, or soldiers at drill. They finally woke up at the snap of their master’s fingers, remembering nothing. For half an hour we endured this sort of thing. Nothing would have been easier to counterfeit.

Chamberlain was a broad-shouldered young man with a flop of pale gold hair aslant his forehead and penetrating blue eyes. He was, I suppose, the type who might be handsome to a shopgirl or a maidservant, perhaps because there was a common look to him that brought him within every female’s grasp. Yet the more one looked at him, the more his youthfulness came into question. He was like a modern French painting, best seen from a distance, since cracks and crevices appear on closer inspection. As I studied him during his performance, I thought that after all he was not so much a young man as the ideal of what an indulgent old woman might think a young man should be. In this, at least, I was to be proved right. Quite probably he would never see forty again and must have spent some time each day concealing the fact. Perhaps his appearance alone would not have mattered quite so much had it not been for his voice, or rather its confident twang. It was not so much an accent as a distortion of his speech, which might equally well have been acquired in the stockyards of Chicago or the dock-side of Liverpool. It seemed to me that he had no real voice at all, merely a self-confident nasal bray.

Presently the audience fell silent, as if it knew that we had come to the serious business of the evening. Whatever flippancy had been evident in Chamberlain until now, he became as solemn and as insinuating as the Reverend Mr. Milner could ever have been in the pulpit of his Wesleyan Railway Mission.

We were introduced to Madame Elvira, a shrewish little person with ginger hair. She was wearing a dress of electric blue with white ruffs. It seems that she was blessed with gifts of many kinds, including ‘second sight,’ which may have been the least of her accomplishments, if Professor Chamberlain were to be believed.

‘Madame Elvira was born in the Middle West, where her ancestry included Indian blood from the tribes who fought at Fort Duquesne a century and more ago. She lived many years of her childhood as a friend of those tribes with the most happy results. By long practice and sympathetic attention she has attuned her spirit to those of the dead warriors and chiefs by whom messages from the beyond are so often brought to us.’

‘Which is to say,’ remarked Holmes softly, ‘that Madame Elvira has very probably never been further west than the terminus of the Hammersmith railway.’

The professor explained that a man whom Madame Elvira had never seen nor heard of might write his name upon a card. The card would then be handed to the professor, who would stare at it long enough and hard enough to fix the image of the signature in his mind. Twenty feet or more away from him, Madame Elvira would sit at a typewriter with her back to him. She would be blindfolded by volunteers from the audience. The image in the mind of the professor would then be transmitted to that of his protegée, before our eyes. She would type it correctly on a sheet of paper without removing her blindfold. Rarely in the past had she been mistaken and even then only in a syllable or so.

The professor called for several more volunteers to do the blindfolding and see fair play. He was down among the audience now, handing out several dozen blank cards to those of us in the front rows. On these we were to write our names and individual seat numbers. When the cards had been gathered in, he invited a woman in the first row to stand upon the stage and shuffle them like playing cards so that there could be no question of any prearranged order. Then he sprang back behind the footlights. Madame Elvira sat patiently at her table before the typewriter. Her back was toward Professor Chamberlain and the audience as she clenched and stretched her fingers, no doubt in preparation for her task. Two other women were still blindfolding her to their satisfaction.

The professor in his swallowtail evening coat addressed his public in his confident twang.

‘Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. In a moment we shall come to the highlight of our evening and our seance will begin, as soon as the two good ladies who have volunteered to ensure that my partner cannot by any means see me or any clue I might give her have completed their task. We have all heard of cheats in the thoughtreading profession who signal to one another, haven’t we? Eyes right for hearts, left for diamonds, up for clubs, and down for spades. One wink for an ace, two for a court card. We know all about that, don’t we? Of course we do! And we aren’t having it here, are we? Of course we aren’t! What you see before you now is genuine second sight, authentic mindreading. It may succeed, it may fail. One thing you may depend upon, ladies and gentlemen, is that it is entirely genuine.’

He had all the panache of a man who sends you a dishonored bill with a note to say that payment is guaranteed.

‘I have here fifty cards, ladies and gentlemen, each with the number of a seat and the name of a customer. I shall look at each in turn because, you understand, in order that second sight may operate it is necessary that another person should first see them and transmit them. But I shall do more than that. It is when thoughts are transferred in this way that the mind is most open to messages from the spirit world. For that reason, I shall also repeat to you whatever messages come to my mind as I hold the card before me. I cannot promise you there will be such messages, of course. I am in the hands of those beyond the veil who transmit them. What vulgar people call ghosts. However, whatever messages I have for those who have written these cards shall be relayed to them.’

Beside me I heard Holmes emit a despairing sigh. Professor Chamberlain had not finished.

‘Blindfolded though she be, Madame Elvira has a magic touch with a typewriter. On that machine she will print out the name from each card as it appears in her mind. A copy shall be given to the lady or gentleman whose name and seat number appears upon it, thus putting her performance beyond any suspicion of trickery.’

He was staring at the first card, as if to fix it in his mind. He closed his eyes.

‘I address the gentleman who wrote this card—for it is a gentleman in this case. Now, sir, while Madame Elvira sees in her own mind the very image that has just left mine, my thoughts are wandering, open to whatever message may be waiting for you in the world of the spirits. That world is infinite and we, in our finiteness, may not easily interpret its signals. … I have something. I do not say I understand it, but the letters of the message begin to form in my mind. I see the word ‘Death.’ What follows? Now it comes to me.
Death is but some means of reawakening
. … Wait, there is more!
Think nothing joyful unless innocent
. …’

‘Intolerable rubbish!’ said Holmes
sotto voce
.

Chamberlain opened his eyes. It was possible to hear the brief rattle of the typewriter keys, the ting of its bell, and the whiz of the paper being drawn clear. A volunteer from the audience who had helped to blindfold the girl brought the writing to him. Chamberlain came forward to the footlights.

‘The number of the seat is twenty-four and the gentleman sitting in it is Mr. Charles Smith. The messages from another world are also typewritten upon the card.’

There was a murmur of expectation. Chamberlain stabbed a finger dramatically through the limelight, towards seat twenty-four.

‘Am I right, sir?’

I could just catch a murmur and a nod.

‘Have I ever met you before, air? Are we known to one another?’ Another murmur and a shaking of the head.

‘Do you understand how the message applies to you?’

A briefer, less certain nod. An assistant or runner carried the piece of typed paper to the man who had been named, as if it were a prize. This seaside entertainment began to intrigue me. Holmes affected boredom. We went through a dozen names, each embellished by strange ‘messages’ from the hereafter that combined the impenetrably obscure and the blindingly self-evident. If it was a trick, I could not make out how the devil it was done. The girl could see nothing and yet she was never wrong.

The minutes passed and now he had taken another card at which he was staring. I heard him say, ‘A message is coming clearly to me but from very far off. I beg you will keep silence, ladies and gentlemen. … Perhaps it is directed to a professional gentleman, a man of learning. It is in two parts … or even three. … I hear the first one.
Knowledge protects its opposite
. … And then,
Experience brings understanding
. … Wait, there is one more!
Time precedes oblivion
. … Ladies and gentlemen, the meaning of much of this is hidden from me, but I have faith that it will be clear in some way to the recipient.’