The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures (78 page)

And so our adventure began. We sailed from Southampton on 12 May bound for New York City aboard a steamship aptly christened the
New York.
During the voyage, Sherlock Holmes kept his remarkable brain occupied with the game of observing our fellow passengers and deducing their origins, vocations and personalities from the clues offered by their physical appearances and behaviours.

We arrived in New York City’s harbour on the morning of 19 May. There was still the wide continent of North America to be traversed, but Mayor Phelan had arranged for us to be granted passage on any of the US Army’s relief trains bringing provisions and medical aid from New York to the refugee camps outside San Francisco. After clearing the New York customs house, health station, and currency exchange, Holmes and I secured a four-wheeler and made haste with our luggage north and east through Manhattan to the Pennsylvania station – for Holmes was determined to begin the long transcontinental railway journey as soon as possible.

By noon we reached the New York Central terminus, where Holmes was much distrait to be told that the next relief train did not embark until tomorrow morning. “There’s nothing for it, Watson,” he said. “We are obliged to spend a night in this metropolis. Let us quarter ourselves in an hotel, and then we shall see what diversions the island of Manhattan can offer us.”

I took charge of the transfer of our bags to the Herald Square Hotel, on the south side of West Thirty-Fourth Street, whilst Holmes sent a telegram to Continental Insurance’s main office. “I have cabled Mr Evans with the news that I shall be aboard tomorrow’s train,” Holmes informed me after I had dealt with the hotel’s guest-register, “and I have told him that I am bringing with me the greatest field surgeon of my acquaintance.”

“You flatter me, Holmes.”

“I think not. Come, Watson! For this afternoon and evening, at least, let us seek such pleasure as this city affords, knowing that tomorrow morning our unpleasant task begins. In the telegraph office I overheard that Maude Adams is appearing in
Peter Pan
at the Empire Theatre in West Forty-Sixth Street. Let us spend tonight in Neverland, and give no thoughts to pain or San Francisco.”

Sherlock Holmes and I proceeded northwards, up the wide Manhattan thoroughfare known as Broadway. Just south of West Thirty-Seventh Street, at Number 1367, Broadway, my attention was arrested by a brown stone building papered with gaudy posters. This proved to be the Edisonia Amusement Hall, and the posters outside advised us that, for five cents’ admission, we might view an exhibition of Thomas Edison’s miraculous invention, the Vitascope.

“I have heard of this machine, but never seen it in operation,” I remarked to Holmes, with more than a hint of eagerness in my voice. “Mr Edison’s Vitascope has gone one better than the magic-lantern: his invention can project images that actually
move!
“

“ ‘Invention’, indeed!” Holmes remarked with an audible sniff. “Edison has no more invented the Vitascope than I have invented the wheel. Watson, the first kinetographic camera and projector were devised by Louis Le Prince, a Frenchman who dwelt in Yorkshire. I myself attended a demonstration of his apparatus in Leeds in 1888. But come: since you are clearly so keen to witness this Vitascope, let us pay the admission and enter.”

The amusement hall’s afternoon programme was well attended, but Holmes and I were able to secure two seats in the pit-stalls, conveniently adjoining the centre aisle. The stage of the amusement hall was bare, except for a large white rectangular screen that seemed to afford no great promise of entertainment. The performance had not yet begun, and in the theatre seats all round us the audience were abuzz with a myriad of conversations. “I am no longer homesick for my bees.” Holmes murmured to me, amid the general huzzbuzz. “It appears that we may converse freely without breaching etiquette, since everyone else in this place is talking anyway. Watson, I can never sit through a moving-picture exhibition without thinking of the strange case of James Phillimore.”

For a moment the name meant nothing whatever to me, but then the penny dropped: “Wasn’t he the man who vanished from his own house in Warwickshire?”

“The same.” In the red plush seat beside me, Holmes sighed wearily. “One of my earliest failures, Watson. Following his vanishment in 1875, neither I nor anyone else ever clapped eyes on Mr James Phillimore again.”

“Surely a man who vanished in 1875 could have nothing to do with moving-pictures,” I proposed, “for they had not yet been invented.”

Sherlock Holmes nodded. “Watson, I have told you that the kinetograph was invented in England by Louis Le Prince. In 1890, during a visit to his native France, Monsieur Le Prince consented to demonstrate his device at the Paris Opera House. In September of that year, he boarded a train at Dijon, taking his camera and projector into a first-class compartment. When the train reached Paris, Watson, that compartment was empty. Despite an exhaustive investigation, neither Le Prince nor his motion-picture apparatus were ever seen again.”

“Astonishing!” I remarked.

“I had read of the case at the time, and offered my services to the French authorities,” Holmes went on. “The Sûreté declined my offer. Still, to this day I can never view a kinetograph without thinking of its inventor’s curious fate, and when I think of Le Prince’s vanishment I am naturally put in mind of James Phillimore.”

“Was Phillimore a friend of yours, Holmes?”

“I never met him,” said my companion. “Phillimore’s peculiar disappearance in 1875 aroused much attention at the time, and I journeyed to Leamington Spa to join the search for him. Among the furnishings in Phillimore’s house in Tavistock Street was found a cabinet study of a man in his early thirties; his two banking colleagues identified this photograph as a likeness of James Phillimore. I obtained a copy of the portrait, and committed it to memory. Watson, for twenty years after his vanishment – even when my wanderings brought me to the gates of Lhassa and Khartoum – I never was able to pass through a crowd without searching amongst its constituents for the face of James Phillimore. But now, after thirty-one years, I am resigned that he has vanished forever.”

At that moment the house lights dimmed, and the theatre audience fell silent. A man stepped forth upon the stage, and introduced himself to us as Mr Edwin Stanton Porter of the Edison Film Company. He assured us that the Vitascope possessed a full palette of diversions – comedies, dramas, nature studies – and that all of these would be on offer at this afternoon’s performance.

“I particularly wish to draw your attention to the closing item on the bill,” said Mr Porter to his wrapt audience. “This very morning, a Vitascope photographer set up his apparatus in the streets of Manhattan. He has captured true-life scenes of New York City, taken in natural sunlight. Ladies and gentlemen, the photographic record of those events has already been developed and shipped to this theatre, barely four hours after they occurred.” An excited murmur went round the auditorium at this point. Mr Porter continued: “It is hoped that, in future, the Edison Film Company will devise a means by which any newsworthy event anywhere on the globe can be captured by Mr Edison’s wonderful Vitascope, and projected onto screens throughout the planet instantaneously.”

In his seat beside me, Sherlock Holmes muttered something. Now Mr Porter left the stage, and of a sudden we were plunged into utter darkness.

Without warning,
a railway engine
burst onto the stage, rushing headlong towards the audience. There was a general panic, followed by gasps and applause as the realization came that this oncoming juggernaut was a kinetographic image in one of Mr Edison’s Vitascope films. I confess that I had risen halfway from my seat, in flight from the illusion, before Holmes’s grip on my arm restrained me. “Calm yourself, Doctor. It is only a toy.”

I regained my seat, and the programme resumed. The next Vitascope was a
tableau vivant
of several plump ladies striking poses in Grecian robes. This was followed by a display of ocean waves. Next came an extract from the opera
Faust
– an opera, that is, without music or voices, for I was disappointed to observe that these Vitascope life-studies were devoid of sound and colour. The actors were obliged to perform their roles in dumb-show. Still, they were remarkable – and their silence lent them an air of dignity that speaking actors often lack.

“ ‘Pon my word, Watson,” Holmes whispered beside me. “This thing is no mere toy. It is marvellous! Long after the actors on that screen have died, their images will still walk and gesticulate for generations yet unborn!”

Now there commenced a low comedy titled
Why Mrs Jones Got a Divorce
, followed by an even lower melodrama called
Ching Lin Foo Outdone
. Beside me in the darkness, Holmes writhed in his seat.

“The greatest educational tool ever devised, and this man Edison squanders it on knockabout farces,” Holmes remarked in disgust.

Now the picture changed again, to a play titled
The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend
. On the screen before us, a man wearing a frock-coat was seated at a table, consuming his dinner of Welsh rarebit. The picture faded momentarily, and at once this same man was in his bedroom, attired in a nightshirt and a peaked nightcap. The transformation was instantaneous, and I did not see how it was done. The nightshirted man clambered into his bed, drew up the counterpane, and went to sleep with remarkable alacrity.

Suddenly the bed rose from its moorings and flew out the window, with its occupant – now awake and terrified – clinging fast to the headboard. The bed flew over the rooftops towards the spire of a church that was surmounted by a weathervane which seemed rather larger than necessary. Here the animated bed ejected its passenger, and flew onwards without him. All about me in the dark of the music-hall, the audience roared with laughter whilst the poor fellow in the nightshirt dangled helplessly from the weathervane, kicking and bellowing. The last scene – with no intervening transition – showed him safe in his bedroom again, wakening from a nightmare. Solemnly raising his right hand and gazing heavenward, whilst moving his lips in dumb-show, the fellow vowed a silent oath: presumably against eating Welsh rarebit at bedtime.

“Watson, this is really quite enough,” Sherlock Holmes remarked beside me, amidst the raucous merriment of the audience surrounding us. “Surely, in Manhattan’s vasty deeps, we might find entertainment more refined than this. Let us elsewhere ourselves.”

The image on the screen had changed once more. Now it depicted an urban crossroads, quite unremarkable excepting that the trams, broughams, and other conveyances – in the American manner – were moving on the wrong side of the street. Upon the screen, men and women were proceeding in their usual fashions and varying gaits, entering at the one side and exeunting at the other. A newsboy hawked his gazettes between two hoardings underneath a street-lamp, and although this object was unlit – the
tableau
taking place in full daylight – I was surprised to observe that the street-lamp was outfitted for electrical current, not gaslight. Two signs depending from the lamp-post apprised us that this crossroads was the intersection of “Broadway“ and “W. 58th Street“. In the background, a clock-dial set into the face of a distant tower gave the time as ten-seventeen. Evidently, this newest vitascope film was neither farce nor tragedy, but merely an impromptu vignette of Manhattanites in their native environs … and as such, no especial drama was about to unfold.

“You are right, Holmes,” I whispered to my friend. “I have beheld my fill. Let us away to the Empire Theatre, and pay tribute to Miss Adams.”

During the while I said these words, the images, on the screen continued their silent processions. As I spoke, yet one more figure made his entrance within the background of the
tableau
before us. He was a man of above the middle height, thirtyish, with neatly trimmed moustaches. He was well-shod, in expensive cordovans, and clutching in his left hand a furled umbrella. But something about him was out of the common: his pin-striped suit was of a cut which had passed out of fashion some thirty years ago, and he sported side-whiskers in the style called dundrearies, which have long been out of vogue. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my wrist: the finger-tips of Sherlock Holmes were pressing into my flesh, as Holmes’s body went rigid.

“Watson!
” he shouted, so loudly that every person in the theatre might have heard him. “That man on the screen!
He is James Phillimore!
“

From the dark rows behind us, someone shouted for Holmes to keep still.

I felt a chill run up my spine as I beheld the flickering Vitascope image. James Phillmore had vanished thirty-one years ago, yet the newcomer on the kinetographic screen looked barely thirty years of age. “You must be mistaken, Holmes,” I whispered, so as not to disturb the audience. “If Phillimore is still alive, he is in his sixties now.”

“I tell you, Watson,
he is the very man!
“ Holmes stood erect, and pointed his long arm towards the screen. “That man is James Phillimore to the life, and
he has not aged a single day since he vanished!
“

I think that every head in the audience must have turned towards us at that moment, and every tongue – in harsh American accents – shouted at us to be quiet. Therefore I was certain that no one save Holmes and myself observed what happened next upon the Vitascope’s screen.

As if responding to Sherlock Holmes’s voice, the man on the screen abruptly turned and looked
directly toward us.
His eyes widened in delight, and his mouth split into a broad grin. His lips moved silently, in unheard speech.

Holmes leaped forth from his seat. “Down in front!” bellowed some person behind us.

I have said that the man in the picture stood within its background. No longer. Looking directly at Sherlock Holmes, the silent image of James Phillimore strode boldly to the foreground of the image. With a brief sidelong glance before resuming his gaze in Holmes’s direction, he traversed West Fifty-Eighth Street, stepped onto the kerb of the near side, and placed his well-shod feet firmly atop the pavement whilst he raised his umbrella, and pointed it squarely at Holmes. Now I too leaped out of my chair.