Chapter XXXI: A Notable Interlude

It was evident that things had come to a deadlock between the two detectives. They could not work together, and they would not work apart. Mr Shapter was summoned at length to arbitrate between them. He found Valombroso bristling, and Jannaway conscience-calm. The Italian opened on him.

“Signore, if I am to have an English colleague, it shall be other than this serene man. Yes, I will call him that for politeness.”

“What is the matter with him, detective?”

“The matter? Nothing is the matter. He enjoy the most perfect constitution in my experience. Nothing shall move or trouble him. I say to him ‘Suppose I think this Dalston somewheres in the neighbourhood?’ ‘Well, think it,’ he say. Again if I remark, ‘I believe of this letter that it is genuine,’ ‘You are quite welcome to your belief,’ he answer. Once more, ‘Suppose I decide it the good policy,’ I say, ‘to go and watch at the address which our man give for his wife in London?’ What is his reply? Why ‘Go along and watch yourself silly, if you like’--just that. But he will not come too; and so I shall refuse to go without him. He desire anything to put me wrong, so he may presently take to himself the credit when it arrive. We are baffled here at present, yes. We shall continue the same while this sort of thing shall last. But it shall not last. I say now at once, that, unless you give me the colleague I desire, I throw up the case. I cannot work at it any longer with a mule.”

“And who is this suggested colleague, Valombroso? Is it Mr Holmes?”

“Who else, signore? Am I not Valombroso?”

Mr Shapter shrugged his shoulders. But he had _carte blanche_ from Johnny to employ whom he pleased; and expense was no consideration.

“Well, have you any objection, Jannaway?” he asked resignedly.

“None whatever, sir,” answered the inspector. “It won’t be the first time me and Mr Holmes have met over a case. He’s got the makings of a respectable detective in him, or used to have; and if he _should_ come to fail here, like Mr Valombroso, why, there’s still me to fall back upon for a forlorn hope.”

What _did_ he mean? Had he or had he not something up his sleeve, which he was retaining merely for the greater discomfiture of his rival, should that gentleman once come to admit his own defeat? Nothing could be plausibly guessed but that he felt himself aggrieved over our moral assumption of the other’s supremacy, and was regarding with a mischievous enjoyment some _faux pas_ into which our mistaken faith was leading us. It seemed incredible that a man of his reputation could have _no_ ideas in the matter. We could so little believe it, in fact, that, through all this puzzling perversity of his mood, it never occurred to us for a moment, I think, to dispense with his services, negative as those were. At the very least, he might become, as he himself suggested, our ark of refuge.

Valombroso snorted fearfully over the assumption of his failure.

“_You_, to think you shall see to the end of my resource, Inspec-tar-r-r-r Jannaway!” he said, and ended with a furious ironic laugh.

Jannaway stood impassive.

“Very well, then,” said Mr Shapter hastily. “I will telegraph to Mr Holmes. I cannot, of course, answer for his being disengaged at the moment.”

But fortunately a favourable answer was received. Mr Holmes himself would follow by the midday train.

I confess I was extremely curious to see this extraordinary man, with whose eagle countenance, penetrating eyes and slender aristocratic figure report had made me familiar. Nor, when I had my opportunity, was it marked by that disillusionment which is often the penalty of over-expectation. It is true that there was a trifle more grey in the hair, a trifle more vagueness, or shall I say less brilliancy in the eye than I had looked for; but it must be remembered that at this period Mr Holmes was at least approaching that state of premature superannuation which his adventures, countless and diversified beyond the common human experience or endurance, had necessarily imposed upon him. Nevertheless he was still a striking-looking man, very pale in the face, and with a curious bump on his head, any mute and stealthy observation of which he was wont characteristically to detect, and to regard, it seemed, with suspicion or annoyance. He drove from Footover in a station fly, and of course his friend Dr Watson accompanied him. The two, it was well known, were inseparable.

Mr Shapter and I were waiting for him, as he alighted; but he took not the least notice of us for a moment, turning to his companion with the remark: “I believe you are perfectly right in what you are thinking, my dear Watson. The breach between the D.’s is eternal; they will never come together again.”

The doctor, long accustomed, it appeared, to the other’s method of deductive reasoning, showed no astonishment, but merely replied, “Yes, you have answered the thought in my mind exactly. No doubt it will interest these gentlemen to hear the processes by which you reached that conclusion.”

“Why, my dear Watson,” said Mr Holmes promptly, “do you not remember that little oath you uttered under your breath when our flyman jogged us over an offensively large stone? The ejaculation inevitably suggested a big letter to you--the bigness of the letter a certain popular operetta--the operetta, a pinafore--a pinafore, overcoats in general. At that moment you glanced up; the coat our coachman was wearing had obviously been made for a smaller man, and the seam had parted at the back never to rejoin. I saw you observe it. The association of ideas was complete. The D.’s and the breach between them rushed into your mind at the very instant that we came to the door of this capital hostelry, and into the presence, if I mistake not” (he turned with a charming bow and smile), “of our respected telegraphic correspondents.”

The formal greeting over, we conveyed our visitors into our private sitting-room, where the two detectives were awaiting us. Mr Holmes greeted the inspector with a “Ha, Jannaway!” and we promptly got to business.

The great amateur was severely interested in the tale unfolded to him, though his companion, I could not but think, appeared somewhat bored by it. He yawned a good deal, and kept looking at his watch. I was not mentally as familiar with his figure as with the other’s, and, beyond the fact of his face being a mutton-chop-whiskered one, had no more than an idea of his general appearance. Still, I had not seemed to associate quite so much bulk with it. Doctor Watson, I fear, had grown rather fat and inert, and, in suggestion, not unlike a prosperous impresario.

The story related and the letter examined, Mr Holmes sat in profound silence for a while.

“I take it, then,” he said presently, “that the point of contention is the present whereabouts of Mr Dalston?”

I was a little surprised, as that _was_ the point; and no other, in fact, had been raised.

“I believe,” said Mr Holmes after further reflection, “that Mr Dalston went abroad, and that he wrote that letter _from_ abroad. That is not necessarily to conclude, however, that he is abroad at this moment. The farm, by your showing, offers itself a very potential retreat to one desirous, shall we say, of evading his social obligations. At the same time it does not appear to be rich in the material necessities of existence. It is at least conceivable that this man, rendered desperate by an enforced abstinence, may be caught sneaking from his well-chosen burrow there at night, in order to satisfy those insatiable appetites which his position renders him unable to indulge by day. Your criminal is notoriously a sensuous animal, and one the least capable of resisting the calls of his nature. Have you, may I ask, ever thought of putting a watch upon the place at night?”

No, it appeared we had not. Our interlocutor smiled, shaking a long finger at Jannaway.

“Inspector, inspector!” he murmured--“the old fundamental insufficiency!”

Valombroso skipped with delight.

“Signore,” he began, “only show _me_ my man, and----”

Mr Holmes interrupted him, rising.

“I will do my best,” he said. “But this is very sad.”

He went out, and we did not see him again until dinner-time, when he turned up--rather late, to Dr Watson’s obvious annoyance--and luminous, so to speak, with preoccupation. He smoked a heavy pipe, filled with tobacco of a peculiarly pungent brand, throughout the meal, but ate very little--an abstinence which was fully compensated by his friend, who, not to misjudge him, appeared to think a good deal of his food, and eyed every dish interestedly as it was put on the table. The fare, proving exhilarating, moved the doctor, even, to some ill-timed levity; for when Mr Holmes at dessert slipped, apparently in a fit of abstraction, the nutcrackers into his pocket, he asked him banteringly if he hadn’t better send the dishful of nuts after them. Mr Holmes was very angry, and demanded to know how, after all these years of their acquaintance, he had learned no better than to question him openly as to the meaning of any action of his however seemingly uncalled for.

“For what do you exist, my dear Watson,” he said, with an infinite but perfectly gentlemanly irony, “but as a screen of vulgar commonplace between me and the public. You are not here to expose my methods, but to cover them.”

The doctor was completely, and rightly, set down; though it is only fair to him to admit that Mr Holmes afterwards confessed to us in private that the act had been an involuntary one on his part, due, no doubt, to some association of ideas between the implements, and his recognition of the fact that he had here a particularly hard nut to crack.

He left us again after dinner; and, seeing him well out of the room, the doctor, presumably in a spit of resentment, took the occasion to tap his own head significantly.

“He has never been,” he murmured, “quite the man he was since that fall.”

If this admission, or insinuation served to “give us pause,” our spirits were to be reassured in a few hours by the return of Mr Holmes in a great state of suppressed excitement.

“Give me a foot-rule,” he said. “I believe my theory was correct and that I am on his tracks.”

His enthusiasm communicated itself to us all.

“Great heavens, sir!” said Mr Shapter. “Do you mean to say you believe him to be really in hiding at the farm?”

“I lend myself to no positive assertion, my dear sir,” answered the other, with a smile. “I state, only, that I have come upon a number of footmarks about the house that were not there this afternoon. They may be his; they may not be. A great deal depends upon the postulate. But nothing can be lost, at least, by following them up; and that is my sole present intention. I shall be absent, probably, during the greater part of the night, and even, it may be, well into to-morrow morning. See that the door is left on the latch.”

You may be sure that none of us--save only Dr Watson, whose snores shook the partitions--slept much that night. We were all awake with daylight, and eager for news. It came, presently, with the astounding information that Mr Holmes, returning to the house in the early hours of the morning, had ordered incontinently a fly for the station, and had left in it before any of us were down. We stared at one another in mute consternation.

But Dr Watson, when he appeared, took the thunderbolt unruffled. This sudden disappearance was only, in his opinion, part of the plot. Likely enough the tracks had led his friend to Footover.

In the meantime he laid himself out to enjoy his respite in the consumption of much excellent fare and tobacco, to which latter indulgence he never resorted without first fitting on his head an embroidered black velvet smoking-cap with a large gold tassel pendent from its crown. His engagements, he said, left him free till Easter, when he was to take his usual little holiday at Clacton-on-Sea. No doubt there would be developments in a day or two.

But there were no developments, not that day nor the next, and we were beginning to foresee a difficulty in ridding ourselves of this self-complacent incubus, when there arrived a letter to him from Mr Holmes, which settled the business. He read it, and, in a fit, I cannot but think, of temporary aberration, threw it across to Mr Shapter. It ran as follows:--

“My Dear Watson,--I find this must be counted among my unsuccessful cases. I am under the necessity of admitting that the footmarks I have been following were my own. I traced them all the way to the “Black Dog,” and so up the stairs to my bedroom, where the boots themselves lay under a chair. _En passant_, why did you never remind me, my dear Watson, that they were a pair of yours which I had borrowed, and put off for some of my own when I went out for the second time? It was that misled me. Make my apologies to our friends. I enclose the half of your third-class return ticket, and am off to Siberia by the night mail. An important political prisoner has escaped from Kara Baigarama. I believe him to be hidden under an ice-floe in the Arctic Ocean. Tell this to nobody.”

Mr Shapter looked across at Dr Watson, who had sunk back in his chair, with a piece of bloater sticking out of his mouth. He gasped and swallowed it.

“I believe,” he said, “that that fall into the river gave him water on the brain.”