The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 2.13

Featuring Gary Gygax, scrambled eggs and freak show support bands

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Previously on my confabulannotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Mortimer revealed Sir Charles’s mental anguish

And now, the story continues…

BAD AI IMAGE OF: Holmes on the case

“I can well remember driving up to his house in the evening some three weeks before the fatal event. He chanced to be at his hall door¹. I had descended from my gig² and was standing in front of him, when I saw his eyes fix themselves over my shoulder and stare past me with an expression of the most dreadful horror³. I whisked⁴ round and had just time to catch a glimpse of something which I took to be a large black calf⁵ passing at the head of the drive. So excited and alarmed was he that I was compelled to go down to the spot where the animal had been and look around for it. It was gone, however⁶, and the incident appeared to make the worst impression upon his mind. I stayed with him all the evening, and it was on that occasion, to explain the emotion which he had shown, that he confided to my keeping that narrative which I read to you when first I came⁷. I mention this small episode because it assumes some importance in view of the tragedy which followed, but I was convinced at the time that the matter was entirely trivial and that his excitement had no justification⁸.

“It was at my advice that Sir Charles was about to go to London. His heart was, I knew, affected, and the constant anxiety in which he lived, however chimerical the cause⁹ of it might be, was evidently having a serious effect upon his health. I thought that a few months among the distractions of town¹⁰ would send him back a new man. Mr. Stapleton, a mutual friend who was much concerned at his state of health, was of the same opinion. At the last instant came this terrible catastrophe.

TO BE CONTINUED

1. Members of high society would often try to add extra intrigue to their otherwise empty days by randomising the mansion doors at which they would stand. Randomisers included, but were not limited to: playing cards, dice, tea leaves, and pulling hastily scrawled options from a gentleman’s hat. (Interestingly, role-playing game designer Gary Gygax later revived the idea of randomising who one might meet behind a door for Dungeons and Dragons, in the form of Wandering Monsters.)

2. Mortimer, to this point, has not mentioned that he regularly performed musical accompaniment for a local freak show revue. But this can be inferred.

3. Jaws: The Revenge

4. Mortimer has also failed to mention that he was making scrambled eggs at the time of this interaction. Again, this is to be inferred.

5. Look, he’s a doctor. He’s not a veterinarian.

6. Although, given Mortimer’s well-deserved reputation as an inferior observer of the animal kingdom, this testimony can hardly be relied upon.

7. It is now widely accepted that there’s no Santa Claus. But there are subordinate clauses, and Conan Doyle just inserted about fifteen of them into a single sentence.

8. It was a prevailing conviction among the scientific minds of the era that the universe operated with absolute determinism, and thus, every individual’s emotional condition must similarly flow from a set of initial empathetic principles. “Justify your excitement!” schoolmasters would cry to their charges, demanding airtight reasoning for every flicker of sentiment. Only the most gifted student logicians would therefore be able to offer a rigorous proof to account for their lingering gaze upon the school nurse’s distinguished décolletage.

9. A ‘chimerical’ cause is one that is half-numerical, and half-based on chimes (for example, being driven mad by a malfunctioning grandfather clock).

10. “Perhaps, Sir Charles, you might find the curiosities on display at the local freak show revue somewhat diverting? I hear whispers these uncommon human oddities are accompanied by musicianship most enlivening… Now, would you like some scrambled eggs?”