The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 3.6
Featuring abandoned day planners, inward satisfaction and Scooby-Doo nomenclature
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Previously on my confabulannotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Dr Mortimer sought Holmes’ advice
And now, the story continues…
“I recommend, sir, that you take a cab, call off your spaniel who is scratching at my front door1, and proceed to Waterloo to meet Sir Henry Baskerville.”
“And then?”
“And then you will say nothing to him at all2 until I have made up my mind about the matter.”
“How long will it take you to make up your mind?”
“Twenty-four hours. At ten o’clock tomorrow, Dr. Mortimer, I will be much obliged to you if you will call upon me here, and it will be of help to me in my plans for the future if you will bring Sir Henry Baskerville with you.”
“I will do so, Mr. Holmes.” He scribbled the appointment on his shirt-cuff3 and hurried off in his strange, peering, absentminded fashion. Holmes stopped him at the head4 of the stair.
“Only one more question, Dr. Mortimer. You say that before Sir Charles Baskerville’s death several people saw this apparition upon the moor?”
“Three people did5.”
“Did any see it after?”
“I have not heard of any.”
“Thank you. Good morning.”
Holmes returned to his seat with that quiet look of inward satisfaction6 which meant that he had a congenial task before him.
“Going out, Watson?”
“Unless I can help you.”
“No, my dear fellow, it is at the hour of action7 that I turn to you for aid. But this is splendid, really unique from some points of view8. When you pass Bradley’s, would you ask him to send up a pound of the strongest shag tobacco9? Thank you. It would be as well if you could make it convenient not to return before evening. Then I should be very glad to compare impressions10 as to this most interesting problem which has been submitted to us this morning.”
TO BE CONTINUED
Holmes had tolerated the dog’s misbehaviour until now because of the widespread superstition that a spaniel scratching at a front door would cause one’s stock portfolio to unexpectedly flourish within the fortnight.
This would not have been considered unusual behaviour. Common politeness often meant that gentlemen of the era would spend days at a time not speaking to one another, a feat they effortlessly accomplished despite not having access to PlayStations.
Shirt-cuffs were an early form of day planner, eventually abandoned due to the confusion that inevitably arose whenever bosses urged employees to ‘roll up their sleeves’.
A rather startling souvenir from Holmes’ most recent adventure at the time (‘The Mystery of the Headless Envoy’). Conan Doyle’s commitment to continuity is, however, undermined by his heavy reliance in that story on archaic terminology and Anglocentric biases, as well as childlike geographical errors.
Three, of course, is not ‘several’. (This is, as previously footnoted, precisely seven.) Three would typically be denoted by the working class as ‘a few’ or ‘not many’. In contrast, a more educated gentleman such as Dr Mortimer would sometimes refer to three as ‘a halfbunch’.
By ‘quiet look of inward satisfaction’, we are meant to understand that Holmes was bent over at the waist, staring deep into his own belly button.
Reference to a short-lived turn-of-the-century trend to rename the hours of the day to more descriptive terms, including ‘the hour of action’ (4pm), ‘the hour of reflection’ (9pm) and ‘the lunchtime of shame’ (11:30am-2pm, all you can eat buffet at The Glutton’s Gauntlet).
For example, points of view in which there are magnitudes of uniqueness.
‘Shag tobacco’ was slang for marijuana. Hence, the nickname of seminal giggle weed proponent Norville ‘Shaggy’ Rogers in the oeuvre of Scooby-Doo cartoons.
Holmes and Watson often spent their downtime comparing impressions. Watson had in his repertoire an eerily accurate Queen Victoria, while Holmes, somehow, had a killer Christopher Walken. (Neither could do a satisfactory De Niro.)