The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 3.4
Featuring mechanical type-writers, growing moose antlers and nursery rhyme inheritances
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Previously on my confabulannotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Dr Mortimer speculated about the supernatural!
And now, the story continues…
“I see that you have quite gone over to the supernaturalists. But now, Dr. Mortimer, tell me this. If you hold these views, why have you come to consult me at all? You tell me in the same breath1 that it is useless to investigate Sir Charles’s death, and that you desire me to do it.”
“I did not say that I desired you to do it.”
“Then, how can I assist you2?”
“By advising me as to what I should do with Sir Henry Baskerville, who arrives at Waterloo Station3”—Dr. Mortimer looked at his watch—“in exactly one hour and a quarter.”
“He being the heir?”
“Yes. On the death of Sir Charles we inquired for this young gentleman and found that he had been farming in Canada4. From the accounts which have reached us he is an excellent fellow in every way. I speak now not as a medical man5 but as a trustee and executor of Sir Charles’s will.”
“There is no other claimant, I presume?”
“None. The only other kinsman6 whom we have been able to trace was Rodger7 Baskerville, the youngest of three brothers of whom poor Sir Charles was the elder. The second brother, who died young, is the father of this lad Henry. The third, Rodger, was the black sheep8 of the family. He came of the old masterful Baskerville strain and was the very image, they tell me, of the family picture of old Hugo. He made England too hot to hold him, fled to Central America, and died there in 1876 of yellow fever9. Henry is the last of the Baskervilles. In one hour and five minutes10 I meet him at Waterloo Station. I have had a wire that he arrived at Southampton this morning. Now, Mr. Holmes, what would you advise me to do with him?”
It was considered a source of great pride to squeeze as many topics of conversation as possible into a single breath. In 1841, Lord Ashworth-Tramplemouse of Stourton famously lectured Parliament on eleven different debating topics ranging from the moral implications of left-handed scissors to whether pigeons were a form of bat, before passing out from oxygen deprivation, triggering an early luncheon.
An excellent question from Holmes, aware that the reader is, like, deep into this book by now.
Waterloo Station had yet to shake its understandable reputation as being fully submerged in toilet effluent.
In 1881, infamous London shyster The Dicky of Mayfair tried to convince gullible Britons that a fine living could be made harvesting moose antler crops in Ottawa. Sir Henry may well have fallen into this trap. (It remains unclear to this day how The Dicky of Mayfair profited from this con.)
We are to infer that Dr Mortimer had distinct voices for each of these personas - the medical man being warm and baritone, while the executor of the will was a little more prim and precise and interpreted through a puppet wearing a judge’s wig.
A ‘kinsman’ was a slang term for a ‘kind man’ who also habitually pressed the wrong keys on one of those maddening mechanical type-writers.
The number of ‘d’s in the name Roger had been steadily diminishing from the nine (9) when the name Rodddddddddger was first coined in the early 1400s to the more common zero (0) of today.
‘Black sheep’ status was assigned at birth, and awarded to any newborn whose inheritance was precisely equivalent to the market rate of three (3) full bags’ worth of wool.
A surprising number of nineteenth century ailments were colour-coded, including purplepox, indigorrhea and (confusingly) the crimson blues.
We can infer from this updated time that Dr Mortimer took ten minutes to get through his last two paragraphs of dialogue. Which means, by a rough extrapolation, the backstory of the previous chapter took approximately nineteen hours to retell. No wonder Holmes is losing patience.
Footnote 10 slayed me 🤣