My Sherlock Holmes Part 16

"Yes, Gregson, and much more!"

Holmes paused, then, as if addressing a fly on the ceiling: "Since we caught him," he said, "the Count-or the Witch, as you like to call him-has been declared a very dangerous lunatic by the doctors. Justice won't do anything against him, but he shall remain shut for the rest of his life in a padded cell at Bedlam. His daughter is cared upon by the best specialists and no doubt she will recover in the near future."

"But what about the ragmen's riches, Mr. Holmes?" asked Gregson.

"Lost!" was my master's brief reply. But in saying this, he gave me a wink, and I answered with a slight, surrept.i.tious smile. Le Villard, quick-witted as most Frenchmen, had no difficulty in understanding the trick, and he thought with an inward chuckle that the unclaimed loot might one day become the dowry of the Count's unfortunate daughter. To divert the inspector's possible suspicions, he stood up abruptly and said with a French accent, purposedly heavier than usual: "Bon sang! To get rid of Mr. Victor and all the ragmen at the same time is what you British may call, er ... 'killing two birds with one stone'!"

Gregson fell into the trap. He could not help cracking a joke, retorting with a big laugh: "With one flea, rather! ... With one flea, my friend!"

PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY, PH.D., F.R.A.S.

"The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as-"

"My blushes, Watson," Holmes murmured, in a depreciating voice.

"I was about to say 'as he is unknown to the public.'"

"A touch-a distinct touch!" cried Holmes. "You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humor, Watson, against which I must learn to guard myself. But in calling Moriarty a criminal you are uttering libel in the eyes of the law, and there lies the glory and the wonder of it. The greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every devilry, the controlling brain of the underworld-a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations. That's the man. But so aloof is he from criticism-so admirable in his management and self-effacement, that for those very words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year's pension as a lolatium for his wounded character. Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid-a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of mure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it? Is this a man to traduce?"

-The Valley of Fear.

by MICHAEL KURLAND.

Years Ago and in a Different Place.

My name is Professor James Clovis Moriarty, Ph.D., F.R.A.S. You may have heard of me. I have been the author of a number of well-regarded scientific monographs and journal articles over the past few decades, including a treatise on the Binomial Theorem, and a monograph t.i.tled "The Dynamics of an Asteroid," which was well received in scientific circles both in Great Britain and on the continent. My recent paper in the British Astronomical Journal, "Observations on the July 1889 Eclipse of Mercury with Some Speculations Concerning the Effect of Gravity on Light Waves," has occasioned some comment among those few who could understand its implications.

But I fear that if you know my name, it is, in all probability, not through any of my published scientific papers. Further, my current, shall I say, notoriety, was not of my own doing and most a.s.suredly not by my choice. I am by nature a retiring, some would have it secretive, person.

Over the past few years narratives from the memoirs of a certain Dr. John Watson concerning that jackanapes who calls himself a "consulting detective," Mr. Sherlock Holmes, have been appearing in the Strand magazine and elsewhere with increasing frequency, and have attained a, to my mind, most unwarranted popularity. Students of the "higher criticism," as those insufferable pedants who devote their lives to picking over minuscule details of Dr. Watson's stories call their ridiculous avocation, have a.n.a.lyzed Watson's rather pedestrian prose with the avid attention gourmands pay to mounds of goose-liver pate. They extract hidden meanings from every word, and extrapolate facts not in evidence from every paragraph. Which leads them unfailingly to conclusions even more specious than those in which Holmes himself indulges.

Entirely too much of this misdirected musing concerns me and my relationship with the self-anointed master detective. Amateur detection enthusiasts have wasted much time and energy in speculation as to how Sherlock Holmes and I first met, and just what caused the usually unflappable Holmes to describe me as "the Napoleon of crime" without supplying the slightest evidence to support this blatant canard.

I propose to tell that story now, both to satisfy this misplaced curiosity and to put an end to the various speculations which have appeared in certain privately circulated monographs. To set the record straight: Holmes and I are not related; I have not had improper relations with any of his female relatives; I did not steal his childhood inamorata away from him. Neither did he, to the best of my knowledge, perform any of these services for me or anyone in my family.

In any case, I a.s.sure you that I will no longer take such accusations lightly. Privately distributed though these monographs may be, their authors will have to answer for them in a court of law if this continues.

Shortly before that ridiculous episode at the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes had the temerity to describe me to his befuddled amanuensis as "organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected in this great city." (By which he meant London, of course.) What crimes I had supposedly committed he was curiously silent about. Watson did not ask for specifics, and none were offered. The good doctor took Holmes's unsupported word for this unsupportable insult. Had Holmes not chosen to disappear for three years after his foul accusation, I most a.s.suredly would have had him in the dock for slander.

And then, when Holmes returned from his extended vacation, during which time he did not have the kindness, the decency, to pa.s.s on one word that would let his dear companion know that he was not dead, he gave an account of our "struggle" at the falls that any child of nine would have recognized as a complete work of fiction-but it fooled Watson.

The truth about the Reichenbach incident-but no, that is not for this narrative. Just permit me a brief pause, the merest aside in this chronicle before I go on, so that I may draw your attention to some of the details of that story that should have alerted the merest tyro to the fact that he was being diddled-but that Watson swallowed whole.

In the narrative that he published under the name "The Final Problem," Watson relates that Holmes appeared in his consulting room one day in April of 1891 and told him that he was being threatened by Professor Moriarty-myself-and that he had already been attacked twice that day by my agents and expected to be attacked again, probably by a man using an air rifle. If that were so, was it not thoughtful of him to go to the residence of his close friend and thus place him, also, in deadly peril?

At that meeting Holmes declares that in three days he will be able to place "the Professor, with all the princ.i.p.al members of his gang," in the hands of the police. Why wait? Holmes gives no coherent reason. But until then, Holmes avers, he is in grave danger. Well now! If this were so, would not Scotland Yard gladly have given Holmes a room, nay a suite of rooms, in the hotel of his choosing-or in the Yard itself-to keep him safe for the next three days? But Holmes says that nothing will do but that he must flee the country, and once again Watson believes him. Is not unquestioning friendship a wonderful thing?

Holmes then arranges for Watson to join him in this supposedly hasty flight. They meet at Victoria Station the next morning, where Watson has trouble recognizing Holmes, who has disguised himself as a "venerable Italian priest," presumably to fool pursuers. This a.s.sumes that Holmes's enemies can recognize the great detective, but have no idea what his good friend Dr. Watson, who wears no disguise, who indeed is congenitally incapable of disguise, looks like.

Again note that after a six-month absence, during which Holmes and I-but no, it is not my secret to tell-at any rate, six months after I was a.s.sumed to be dead I returned to my home on Russell Square and went about my business as usual, and Watson affected not to notice. After all, Holmes had killed me, and that was good enough for Watson.

I could go on. Indeed, it is with remarkable restraint that I do not. To describe me as a master criminal is actionable; and then to compound matters by making me out to be such a bungler as to be fooled by Holmes's juvenile antics is quite intolerable. It should be clear to all that the events leading up to that day at Reichenbach Falls, if they occurred as described, were designed by Holmes to fool his amiable companion, and not "the Napoleon of crime."

But I have digressed enough. In this brief paper I will describe how the relationship between Holmes and myself came to be, and perhaps supply some insight into how and why Holmes developed an entirely unwarranted antagonism toward me that has lasted these many years.

I first met Sherlock Holmes in the early 1870s-I shall be no more precise than that. At the time I was a senior lecturer in mathematics at, I shall call it, "Queens College," one of the six venerable colleges making up a small inland university which I shall call "Wexleigh" to preserve the anonymity of the events I am about to describe. I shall also alter the names of the persons who figure in this episode, save only those of Holmes and myself, as those who were involved surely have no desire to be reminded of the episode or pestered by the press for more details. You may, of course, apply to Holmes for the true names of these people, although I imagine that he will be no more forthcoming than I.

Let me also point out that memories are not entirely reliable recorders of events. Over time they convolute, they conflate, they manufacture, and they discard, until what remains may bear only a pa.s.sing resemblance to the original event. So if you happen to be one of the people whose lives crossed those of Holmes and myself at "Queens" at this time, and your memory of some of the details of these events differs from mine, I a.s.sure you that in all probability we are both wrong.

Wexleigh University was of respectable antiquity, with respectable ecclesiastical underpinnings. Most of the dons at Queens were churchmen of one description or another. Latin and Greek were still considered the foundations upon which an education should be constructed. The "modern" side of the university had come into existence a mere decade before, and the Cla.s.sics dons still looked with mixed amazement and scorn at the Science instructors and the courses offered, which they insisted on describing as "Stinks and Bangs."

Holmes was an undercla.s.sman at the time. His presence had provoked a certain amount of interest among the faculty, many of whom remembered his brother Mycroft, who had attended the university some six years previously. Mycroft had spent most of his three years at Queens in his room, coming out only for meals and to gather armsful of books from the library and retreat back to his room. When he did appear in the lecture hall it would often be to correct the instructor on some error of fact or pedagogy that had lain unnoticed, sometimes for years, in one of his lectures. Mycroft had departed the university without completing the requirements for a degree, stating with some justification that he had received all the inst.i.tution had to offer, and he saw no point in remaining.

Holmes had few friends among his fellow undercla.s.smen and seemed to prefer it that way. His interests were varied but transient, as he dipped first into one field of study and then another, trying to find something that stimulated him sufficiently for him to make it his life's work; something to which he could apply his powerful intellect and his capacity for close and accurate observation, which was even then apparent, if not fully developed.

An odd sort of amity soon grew between myself and this intense young man. On looking back I would describe it as a cerebral bond, based mostly on the shared sn.o.bbery of the highly intelligent against those whom they deem as their intellectual inferiors. I confess to that weakness in my youth, and my only defense against a charge of hubris is that those whom we went out of our way to ignore were just as anxious to avoid us.

The incident I am about to relate occurred in the fall, shortly after Holmes returned to begin his second year. A new don joined the college, occupying the newly created chair of Moral Philosophy, a chair which had been endowed by a midlands mill owner who made it a practice to employ as many children under twelve in his mills as his agents could sweep up off the streets. Thus, I suppose, his interest in Moral Philosophy.

The new man's name was-well, for the purposes of this tale let us call him Professor Charles Maples. He was, I would judge, in his mid-forties; a stout, sharp-nosed, myopic, amiable man who strutted and bobbed slightly when he walked. His voice was high and intense, and his mannerisms were complex. His speech was accompanied by elaborate hand motions, as though he would mold the air into a semblance of what he was describing. When one saw him crossing the quad in the distance, with his gray master of arts gown flapping about him, waving the mahogany walking stick with the bra.s.s duck's-head handle that he was never without, and gesticulating to the empty air, he resembled nothing so much as a corpulent king pigeon.

Moral Philosophy was a fit subject for Maples. No one could say exactly what it encompa.s.sed, and so he was free to speak on whatever caught his interest at the moment. And his interests seemed to be of the moment: he took intellectual nourishment from whatever flower of knowledge seemed brightest to him in the morning, and had tired of it ere night drew nigh. Excuse the vaguely poetic turn of phrase; speaking of Maples seems to bring that out in one.

I do not mean to suggest the Maples was intellectually inferior; far from it. He had a piercing intellect, an incisive clarity of expression, and a sarcastic wit that occasionally broke through his mild facade. Maples spoke on the Greek and Roman concept of manliness, and made one regret that we lived in these decadent times. He lectured on the nineteenth-century pen chant for subst.i.tuting a surface prudery for morality, and left his students with a vivid image of unnamed immorality seething and billowing not very far beneath the surface. He spoke on this and that and created in his students with an abiding enthusiasm for this, and an unremitting loathing for that.

There was still an unspoken presumption about the college that celibacy was the proper model for the students, and so only the unmarried, and presumably celibate, dons were lodged in one or another of the various buildings within the college walls. Those few with wives found housing around town where they could, preferably a respectable distance from the university. Maples was numbered among the domestic ones, and he and his wife, Andrea, had taken a house with fairly extensive grounds on Barleymore Road not far from the college, which they shared with Andrea's sister, Lucinda Moys, and a physical education instructor named Crisboy, who, choosing to live away from the college for reasons of his own, rented a pair of rooms on the top floor. There was a small guest house at the far end of the property which was untenanted. The owner of the property, who had moved to Glasgow some years previously, kept it for his own use on his occasional visits to town. The Mapleses employed a cook and a maid, both of whom were day help, sleeping in their own homes at night.

Andrea was a fine-looking woman who appeared to be fearlessly approaching thirty, with intelligent brown eyes set in a broad face and a head of thick, brown hair, which fell down her back to somewhere below her waist when she didn't have it tied up in a sort of oversized bun circling her head. She was of a solid appearance and decisive character.

Her sister, "Lucy" to all who knew her, was somewhat younger and more ethereal in nature. She was a slim, golden haired creature of mercurial moods: usually bright and confident and more than capable of handling anything the mean old world could throw at her, but on occasion dark and sullen and angry at the rest of the world for not measuring up to her standards. When one of her moods overtook her, she retired to her room and refused to see anyone until it pa.s.sed, which for some reason the young men of the college found intensely romantic. She had a manner of gazing at you while you conversed, as though your words were the only things of importance in the world at that instant, and she felt privileged to be listening. This caused several of the undercla.s.smen to fall instantly in love with her, as she was perhaps the first person, certainly the first woman aside from their mothers, who had ever paid serious attention to anything they said.

One of the undercla.s.smen who was attracted by Miss Lucy's obvious charms was Mr. Sherlock Holmes. She gazed at him wide-eyed while he spoke earnestly, as young men speak, of things that I'm sure must have interested her not in the least. Was it perhaps Holmes himself who interested the pert young lady? I certainly hoped so, for his sake. Holmes had no sisters, and a man who grows up without sisters has few defenses against those wiles, those innocent wiles of body, speech, and motion, with which nature has provided young females in its blind desire to propagate the species.

I was not a close observer of the amorous affairs of Lucy Moys, but as far as I could see she treated all her suitors the same; neither encouraging them nor discouraging them, but enjoying their company and keeping them at a great enough distance, both physically and emotionally, to satisfy the most demanding duenna. She seemed to me to find all her young gentlemen vaguely amusing, regarding them with the sort of detachment one finds in the heroines of Oscar Wilde's plays, to use a modern simile.

Professor Maples took the in loco parentis role of the teacher a bit further than most of the faculty, and certainly further than I would have cared to, befriending his students, and for that matter any students who desired to be befriended, earnestly, sincerely, and kindly. But then he seemed to truly care about the needs and welfare of the young men of Wexleigh. Personally I felt that attempting to educate most of them in the lecture hall and at tutorials was quite enough. For the most part they cared for nothing but sports, except for those who cared for nothing but religion, and were content to allow the sciences and mathematics to remain dark mysteries.

Maples and his wife had "at home" afternoon teas twice a month, the second and fourth Tuesdays, and quite soon these events became very popular with the students. His sister-in-law, who was invariably present, was certainly part of the reason, as was the supply of tea cakes, scones, fruit tarts, and other a.s.sorted edibles. I attended several of these, and was soon struck by an indefinable feeling that something was not what it seemed. I say "indefinable" because I could not put my finger on just what it was that puzzled me about the events. I did not attach too much importance to it at the time. It was only later that it seemed significant. I will try to give you a word picture of the last of these events that I attended; the last one, as it happens, before the tragedy.

It was Holmes who suggested that we attend Professor Maples's tea that day. I had been trying to impress upon him a rudimentary understanding of the calculus, and he had demanded of me an example of some situation in which such knowledge might be of use. I outlined three problems, one from astronomy, involving the search for the planet Vulcan, said to lie inside the orbit of Mercury; one from physics, relating to determining magnetic lines of force when an electric current is applied; and one based on some thoughts of my own regarding Professor Malthus's notions on population control.

Holmes waved them all aside. "Yes, I am sure they are very interesting in their own way," he said, "but, frankly, they do not concern me. It does not matter to me whether the Earth goes around the Sun or the Sun goes around the Earth, as long as whichever does whatever keeps on doing it reliably."

"You have no intellectual curiosity regarding the world around you?" I asked in some surprise.

"On the contrary," Holmes averred. "I have an immense curiosity, but I have no more interest in the Binomial Theorem than it has in me. I feel that I must confine my curiosity to those subjects that will be of some use to me in the future. There is so much to learn on the path I have chosen that I fear that I dare not venture very far along side roads."

"Ah!" I said. "I was not aware that you have started down your chosen road, or indeed that you have chosen a road down which to trod."

Holmes and I were sitting in an otherwise unoccupied lecture hall, and at my words he rose and began pacing restlessly about the front of the room. "I wouldn't say that I have chosen the broad, exactly," he said, "to continue with this, I suppose, inescapable metaphor, But I have an idea of the direction in which I wish to travel"-he made a point of his right forefinger and thrust it forcefully in front of him-"and I feel I must carefully limit my steps to paths that go in that direction."

"Is it that pile of erasers or the wastebasket at the end of the room at which you hope to arrive?" I asked, and then quickly raised a conciliatory hand. "No, no, I take it back. I'm glad you have formulated a goal in life, even if it doesn't include the calculus. What is the direction of this city on a hill toward which you strive?"

Holmes glowered at me for a moment and then looked thoughtful. "It's still slightly vague," he told me. "I can see it in outline only. A man-" He gathered his ideas. "A man should strive to do something larger than himself. To cure disease, or eradicate hunger or poverty or crime."

"Ah!" I said. "n.o.ble thoughts." I fancied that I could hear the lovely voice of Miss Lucy earnestly saying that, or something similar, to Holmes within the week. When a man is suddenly struck by n.o.ble ambitions it is usually a woman who does the striking. But I decided it would be wiser not to mention this deduction, which, at any rate, was rather tentative and not based on any hard evidence.

"It's Professor Maples's afternoon tea day today," Holmes commented. "And I had thought of going."

"Why so it is," I said. "And so we should. And, in one last effort to interest you in the sort of detail for which you find no immediate utility, I call to your attention the shape of Lucinda Moys's ear. Considered properly, it presents an interesting question. You should have an opportunity to observe it, perhaps even fairly closely, this afternoon."

"Which ear?"

"Either will do."

"What's the matter with Miss Lucy's ear?" Holmes demanded.

"Why, nothing. It's a delightful ear. Well formed. Flat, rather oblate lobes. I've never seen another quite like it. Very attractive, if it comes to that."

"All right, then," Holmes said.

I closed the few books I had been using and put them in my book sack. "I hereby renounce any future attempt to teach you higher mathematics," I told him. "I propose we adjourn and head toward the professor's house and his tea cakes."

And so we did.

The Mapleses' event was from three in the afternoon until six in the evening, although some arrived a bit earlier, and some I believe stayed quite a bit later. The weather was surprisingly mild for mid-October, and Holmes and I arrived around half past three that day to find the professor and his household and their dozen or so guests scattered about the lawn behind the house in predictable dumps. The vice chancellor of the university was present, relaxing in a lawn chair with a cup of tea and a plate of scones. Cla.s.sical Greece was represented by Dean Herbert McCuthers, an elderly man of intense sobriety and respectability, who was at that moment rolling up his trouper legs preparatory to wading in the small artificial pond with Andrea Maples, who had removed her shoes and hoisted her skirts in a delicate balance between wet clothing and propriety.

Crisboy, the physical education instructor who roomed with the Mapleses, a large, muscular, and pugnacious looking man in his late twenties, was standing in one corner of the lawn with a games coach named Faulting, a young man with the build and general appearance of one of the lithe athletes depicted by ancient Greek statuary, if you can picture a young Greek athlete clad in baggy gray flannels. The comparison was one that Faulting was well aware of, judging by his practice of posing heroically whenever he thought anyone was looking at him.

The pair of them were standing near the house, swinging athletic clubs with muscular wild abandon, and discussing the finer details of last Sat.u.r.day's football match, surrounded by a bevy of admiring undercla.s.smen. There are those students at every university who are more interested in games than education. They spend years afterward talking about this or that cricket match against their mortal foes at the next school over, or some particularly eventful football game. It never seems to bother them, or perhaps even occur to them, that they are engaged in pursuits at which a suitably trained three-year-old chimpanzee or orang utan could best them. And, for some reason that eludes me, these men are allowed to vote and to breed. But, once again, I digress.

Maples was walking magisterially across the lawn, his gray master's gown billowing about his fundament, his hands clasped behind him holding his walking stick, which jutted out to his rear like a tail, followed by a gaggle of young gentlemen in their dark brown scholars' gowns, with their mortarboards tucked under their arms, most of them giving their professor the subtle homage of imitating his walk and his posture. "The ideal of the university," Maples was saying in a voice that would brook no dispute, obviously warming up to his theme, "is the Aristotelean stadium as filtered through the medieval monastic schools."

He nodded to me as he reached me, and then wheeled about and headed back whence he had come, embroidering on his theme. "Those students who hungered for something more than a religious education, who perhaps wanted to learn the law, or what there was of medicine, headed toward the larger cities, where savants fit to instruct them could be found. Paris, Bologna, York, London; here the students gathered, often traveling from city to city in search of just the right teacher. After a century or two the instruction became formalized, and the schools came into official existence, receiving charters from the local monarch, and perhaps from the pope."

Maples suddenly froze in midstep and wheeled around to face his entourage. "But make no mistake!" he enjoined them, waving his cane pointedly in front of him, its duck-faced head pointed first at one student and then another, "a university is not made up of its buildings, its colleges, its lecture halls, or its playing fields. No, not even its playing fields. A university is made up of the people-teachers and students-that come together in its name. Universitas scholarium, is how the charters read, providing for a, shall I say, guild of students. Or, as in the case of the University of Paris, a unaversitas magistrorum, a guild of teachers. So we are co-equal, you and I. Tuck your shirt more firmly into your trousers, Mr. Pomfrit; you are becoming all disa.s.sembled."

He turned and continued his journey across the greensward, his voice fading with distance. His students, no doubt impressed with their newfound equality, trotted along behind him.

Lucy Moys glided onto the lawn just then, coming through the French doors at the back of the house, bringing a fresh platter of pastries to the parasol-covered table. Behind her trotted the maid, bringing a pitcher full of steaming hot water to refill the teapot. Sherlock Holmes left my side and wandered casually across the lawn, contriving to arrive by Miss Lucy's side just in time to help her distribute the pastries about the table. Whether he took any special interest in her ear, I could not observe.

I acquired a cup of tea and a slice of tea cake and a.s.sumed my accustomed role as an observer of phenomena. This has been my natural inclination for years, and I have enhanced whatever ability I began with by a conscious effort to accurately take note of what I see. I had practiced this for long enough, even then, that it had become second nature to me. I could not sit opposite a man on a railway car without, for example, noticing by his watch fob that he was a Rosicrucian, let us say, and by the wear marks on his left cuff that he was a note cashier or an order clerk. A smudge of ink on his right thumb would favor the note cashier hypothesis, while the state of his boots might show that he had not been at work that day. The note case that he kept clutched to his body might indicate that he was transferring notes to a branch bank, or possibly that he was absconding with the bank's funds. And so on. I go into this only to show that my observations were not made in antic.i.p.ation of tragedy, but were merely the result of my fixed habit.

I walked about the lawn for the next hour or so, stopping here and there to nod h.e.l.lo to this student or that professor. I lingered at the edge of this group, and listened for a while to a spirited critique of Wilkie Collin's recent novel, The Moonstone, and how it represented an entirely new sort of fiction. I paused by that cl.u.s.ter to hear a young man earnestly explicating on the good works being done by Mr. William Booth and his Christian Revival a.s.sociation in the slums of our larger cities. I have always distrusted earnest, pious, loud young men. If they are sincere, they're insufferable. If they are not sincere, they're dangerous.

I observed Andrea Maples, who had dried her feet and lowered her skirts, take a platter of pastries and wander around the lawn, offering a cruller here and a tea cake there, whispering intimate comments to accompany the pastry. Mrs. Maples had a gift for instant intimacy, for creating the illusion that you and she shared wonderful, if unimportant, secrets. She sidled by Crisboy, who was now busy leading five or six of his athletic proteges in doing push-ups, and whispered something to young Faulting, the games coach, and he laughed. And then she was up on her tiptoes whispering some more. After perhaps a minute, which is a long time to be whispering, she danced a few steps back and paused, and Faulting blushed. Blushing has quite gone out of fashion now, but it was quite the thing for both men and women back in the seventies. Although how something that is believed to be an involuntary physiological reaction can be either in or out of fashion demands more study by Dr. Freud and his fellow psycho-a.n.a.lysts.

Crisboy gathered himself and leaped to his feet. "Stay on your own side of the street!" he yapped at Andrea Maples, which startled both her and the young gamesmen, two of whom rolled over and stared up at the scene, while the other three or four continued doing push-ups at a frantic pace, as though there were nothing remarkable happening above them. After a second Mrs. Maples laughed and thrust the plate of pastries out at him.

Professor Maples turned to stare at the little group some twenty feet away from him and his hands tightened around his walking stick. Although he strove to remain calm, he was clearly in the grip of some powerful emotion for a few seconds before he regained control. "Now, now, my dear," he called across the lawn. "Let us not incite the athletes."

Andrea skipped over to him and leaned over to whisper in his ear. As she was facing me this time, and I had practiced lip reading for some years, I could make out what she said: "Perhaps I'll do you a favor, poppa bear," she whispered. His reply was not visible to me.

A few minutes later my wanderings took me over to where Sherlock Holmes was sitting by himself on one of the canvas chairs near the French windows looking disconsolate. "Well," I said, looking around, "and where is Miss Lucy?"

"She suddenly discovered that she had a sick headache and needed to go lie down. Presumably she has gone to lie down," he told me.

"I see," I said. "Leaving you to suffer alone among the mult.i.tude."

"I'm afraid it must have been something I said," Holmes confided to me.

"Really? What did you say?"

"I'm not sure. I was speaking about-well ..." Holmes looked embarra.s.sed, a look I had never seen him encompa.s.s before, nor have I seen it since.

"Hopes and dreams," I suggested.

"Something of that nature," he agreed. "Why is it that words that sound so-important-when one is speaking to a young lady with whom one is on close terms, would sound ridiculous when spoken to the world at large? That is, you understand, Mr. Moriarty, a rhetorical question."

"I do understand," I told him. "Shall we return to the college?"

And so we did.

The next afternoon found me in the commons room sitting in my usual chair beneath the oil painting of Sir James Walsingham, the first chancellor of Queens College, receiving the keys to the college from Queen Elizabeth. I was dividing my attention between my cup of coffee and a letter from the reverend Charles Dodgson, a fellow mathematician who was then at Oxford, in which he put forth some of his ideas concerning what we might call the mathematical constraints of logical constructions. My solitude was interrupted by Dean McCuthers, who toddled over, cup of tea in hand, looking even older than usual, and dropped into the chair next to me. "Afternoon, Moriarty," he breathed. "Isn't it dreadful?"

I put the letter aside. "Isn't what dreadful?" I asked him. "The day? The war news? Huxley's Theory of Biogenesis? Perhaps you're referring to the coffee-it is pretty dreadful today."

McCuthers shook his head sadly. "Would that I could take the news so lightly," he said. "I am always so aware, so sadly aware, of John Donne's admonishment."

"I thought Donne had done with admonishing for these past two hundred years or so," I said.

But there was no stopping McCuthers. He was determined to quote Donne, and quote he did: "'Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind,'" he went on, ignoring my comment. "'And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.'"

I forbore from mentioning that the dean, a solitary man who spent most of his waking hours pondering over literature written over two thousand years before he was born, was probably less involved in mankind than any man I had ever known. "I see," I said. "The bell has tolled for someone?"

"And murder makes it so much worse," McCuthers continued. "As Lucretius puts it-"

"Who was murdered?" I asked firmly, cutting through his tour of the cla.s.sics.

"Eh? You mean you don't know? Oh, dear me. This will come as something of a shock, then. It's that Professor Maples-"

"Someone has murdered Maples?"

"No, no. My thought was unfinished. Professor Maples has been arrested. His wife-Andrea-Mrs. Maples-has been murdered."

I was, I will admit it, bemused. You may subst.i.tute a stronger term if you like. I tried to get some more details from McCuthers, but the dean's involvement with the facts had not gone beyond the murder and the arrest. I finished my coffee and went off in search of more information.

Murder is a sensational crime which evokes a formidable amount of interest, even among the staid and unworldly dons of Queens College. And a murder in mediis rebus, or perhaps better, in mediis universitatibus; one that actually occurs among said staid dons, will intrude on the contemplations of even the most unworldly. The story, which spread rapidly through the college, was this: A quartet of bicyclists, undercla.s.smen from St. Simon's College, set out together at dawn three days a week, rain or shine, to get an hour or two's cycling in before breakfast. This morning, undeterred by the chill drizzle that had begun during the night, they went out along Barleymore Road as usual. At about eight o'clock, or shortly after, they happened to stop at the front steps to the small cottage on Professor Maples's property. One of the bicycles had throw a shoe, or something of the sort, and they had paused to repair the damage. The chain-operated bicycle had been in existence for only a few years back then, and was p.r.o.ne to a variety of malfunctions. I understand that bicyclists, even today, find it useful to carry about a complete set of tools in order to be prepared for the inevitable mishap.