The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 3.2
Featuring indicators of sarcasm, being ignored by waiters and Leo Tolstoy's writing tips
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Previously on my confabulannotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Dr Mortimer described an alley!
And now, the story continues…
“Now, tell me, Dr. Mortimer—and this is important—the marks which you saw were on the path and not on the grass?”
“No marks1 could show on the grass.”
“Were they on the same side of the path as the moor-gate?”
“Yes; they were on the edge of the path on the same side as the moor-gate.”
“You interest me exceedingly2. Another point. Was the wicket-gate closed?”
“Closed and padlocked.”
“How high was it?”
“About four feet high.”
“Then anyone could have got over it?”
“Yes.3”
“And what marks did you see by the wicket-gate?”
“None in particular4.”
“Good heaven! Did no one examine?”
“Yes, I examined, myself.”
“And found nothing?”
“It was all very confused5. Sir Charles had evidently stood there for five or ten minutes.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because the ash had twice dropped from his cigar6.”
“Excellent! This is a colleague, Watson, after our own heart. But the marks?”
“He had left his own marks all over that small patch of gravel. I could discern no others.”
Sherlock Holmes struck his hand against his knee with an impatient gesture7.
“If I had only been there!” he cried. “It is evidently a case of extraordinary interest8, and one which presented immense opportunities to the scientific expert. That gravel page upon which I might have read so much has been long ere this smudged by the rain9 and defaced by the clogs of curious peasants10. Oh, Dr. Mortimer, Dr. Mortimer, to think that you should not have called me in! You have indeed much to answer for.”
TO BE CONTINUED
A sly dig at Mark Twain, who Conan Doyle considered to be ‘a typical self-aggrandising American showman, addicted to claiming others’ witticisms, when he’s not prattling on about royalties or railroad expansion.’
In early drafts of this book, Conan Doyle toyed with various methods of emphasising the sarcasm in this particular sentence (including italics, the earliest known use of an ‘/s’ tag, and adding a blunt ‘Holmes said sarcastically’) before eventually, on the advice of Leo ‘The two most powerful warriors are patience and time’ Tolstoy, allowing the reader to infer the scorn.
Dr Mortimer’s unwillingness to even consider leprechauns is, of course, typical of the anti-Irish bigotry of the time.
Take that, Twain! You vacuous non-entity!
Conan Doyle successfully conveys this air of confusion, of course, by not providing any dialogue tags in this entire stretch of personalityless conversation. Can you keep track of who’s talking? If not, as the marketing material for this book made clear, you may be a Dr Mortimer, yourself.
Grandfather clocks powered by the release of cigar ash had a brief resurgence in 1890s London, before the tobacco-burning timepiece industry collapsed as a result of the infamous Albion Whistlers Club Lunchtime Fiasco.
Y’know, that one when a waiter still ignores you, despite the fact you’ve waved at them several times and would actually quite like to order another expensive bottle of Pinot, and you’d have thought that maybe they’d be interested in selling you that, because of, like, the nature of their business, which is an exchange of monetary compensation for the provision of foodstuffs and yet… nope… he’s still ignoring us in favour of those drunken dipshits over at Table 7.
Holmes said, sarcastically.
The use of ‘ere’ in this sentence is a telltale remnant of very early attempts to have this entire story function as a palindrome. This dream of ‘a wholly reversible novel’ was eventually abandoned, once again on the advice of Tolstoy, who had famously wasted years on his original draft of ‘Anna Karakanna’.
‘Clogs of Curious Peasants’ was also the working title of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.