The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures

eagerness in my voice. 'Mr Edison's Vitascope has gone one better than the magic-lantern: his invention can project images that actually move!'

' 'Invention', indeed!' Holmes remarked with an audible sniff. 'Edison has no more invented the Vitascope than I have invented the wheel. Watson, the first kinetographic camera and projector were devised by Louis Le Prince, a Frenchman who dwelt in Yorkshire. I myself attended a demonstration of his apparatus in Leeds in 1888. But come: since you are clearly so keen to witness this Vitascope, let us pay the admission and enter.'

The amusement hall's afternoon programme was well attended, but Holmes and I were able to secure two seats in the pit-stalls, conveniently adjoining the centre aisle. The stage of the amusement hall was bare, except for a large white

rectangular screen that seemed to afford no great promise of entertainment. The performance had not yet begun, and in the theatre seats all round us the audience were abuzz with a myriad of conversations. 'I am no longer homesick for my bees.' Holmes murmured to me, amid the general huzzbuzz. 'It appears that we may converse freely without breaching etiquette, since everyone else in this place is talking anyway. Watson, I can never sit through a moving-picture exhibition without thinking of the strange case of James Phillimore.'

For a moment the name meant nothing whatever to me, but then the penny dropped: 'Wasn't he the man who vanished from his own house in Warwickshire?'

'The same.' In the red plush seat beside me, Holmes sighed wearily. 'One of my earliest failures, Watson. Following his vanishment in 1875, neither I nor anyone else ever clapped eyes on Mr James Phillimore again.'

'Surely a man who vanished in 1875 could have nothing to do with moving-pictures,' I proposed, 'for they had not yet been invented.'

Sherlock Holmes nodded. 'Watson, I have told you that the kinetograph was invented in England by Louis Le Prince. In 1890, during a visit to his native France, Monsieur Le Prince consented to demonstrate his device at the Paris Opera House. In September of that year, he boarded a train at Dijon, taking his camera and projector into a first-class compartment. When the train reached Paris, Watson, that compartment was empty. Despite an exhaustive investigation, neither Le Prince nor his motion-picture apparatus were ever seen again.'

'Astonishing!' I remarked.

'I had read of the case at the time, and offered my services to the French authorities,' Holmes went on. 'The Surete declined my offer. Still, to this day I can never view a kinetograph without thinking of its inventor's curious fate, and when I think of Le Prince's vanishment I am naturally put in mind of James Phillimore.'

'Was Phillimore a friend of yours, Holmes?'

'I never met him,' said my companion. 'Phillimore's peculiar disappearance in 1875 aroused much attention at the time, and I journeyed to Leamington Spa to join the search for him. Among the furnishings in Phillimore's house in Tavistock Street was found a cabinet study of a man in his early thirties; his two banking colleagues identified this photograph as a likeness of James Phillimore. I obtained a copy of the portrait, and committed it to memory. Watson, for twenty years after his vanishment – even when my wanderings brought me to the gates of Lhassa and Khartoum – I never was able to pass through a crowd without searching amongst its constituents for the face of James Phillimore. But now, after thirty-one years, I am resigned that he has vanished forever.'

At that moment the house lights dimmed, and the theatre audience fell silent. A man stepped forth upon the stage, and introduced himself to us as Mr Edwin Stanton Porter of the Edison Film Company. He assured us that the Vitascope possessed a full palette of diversions – comedies, dramas, nature studies – and that all of these would be on offer at this afternoon's performance.

'I particularly wish to draw your attention to the closing item on the bill,' said Mr Porter to his wrapt audience. 'This very morning, a Vitascope photographer set up his apparatus in the streets of Manhattan. He has captured true-life scenes of New York City, taken in natural sunlight. Ladies and gentlemen, the photographic record of those events has already been developed and shipped to this theatre, barely four hours after they occurred.' An excited murmur went round the auditorium at this point. Mr Porter continued: 'It is hoped that, in future, the Edison Film Company will devise a means by which any newsworthy event anywhere on the globe can be captured by Mr Edison's wonderful Vitascope, and projected onto screens throughout the planet instantaneously.'

In his seat beside me, Sherlock Holmes muttered something. Now Mr Porter left the stage, and of a sudden we were plunged into utter darkness.

Without warning, a railway engine burst onto the stage, rushing headlong towards the audience. There was a general panic, followed by gasps and applause as the realization came that this oncoming juggernaut was a kinetographic image in one of Mr Edison's Vitascope films. I confess that I had risen halfway from my seat, in flight from the illusion, before Holmes's grip on my arm restrained me. 'Calm yourself, Doctor. It is only a toy.'

I regained my seat, and the programme resumed. The next Vitascope was a tableau vivant of several plump ladies striking poses in Grecian robes. This was followed by a display of ocean waves. Next came an extract from the opera Faust – an opera, that is, without music or voices, for I was disappointed to observe that these Vitascope life-studies were devoid of sound and colour. The actors were obliged to perform their roles in dumb-show. Still, they were remarkable – and their silence lent them an air of dignity that speaking actors often lack.

' Ton my word, Watson,' Holmes whispered beside me. 'This thing is no mere toy. It is marvellous! Long after the actors on that screen have died, their images will still walk and gesticulate for generations yet unborn!'

Now there commenced a low comedy titled Why Mrs Jones Got a Divorce, followed by an even lower melodrama called Ching Lin Foo Outdone. Beside me in the darkness, Holmes writhed in his seat.

'The greatest educational tool ever devised, and this man Edison squanders it on knockabout farces,' Holmes remarked in disgust.

Now the picture changed again, to a play titled The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend. On the screen before us, a man wearing a frock-coat was seated at a table, consuming his dinner ofWelsh rarebit. The picture faded momentarily, and at once this same man was in his bedroom, attired in a nightshirt and a peaked nightcap. The transformation was instantaneous, and I did not see how it was done. The nightshirted man clambered into his bed, drew up the counterpane, and went to sleep with remarkable alacrity.

Suddenly the bed rose from its moorings and flew out the window, with its occupant – now awake and terrified – clinging fast to the headboard. The bed flew over the rooftops towards the spire of a church that was surmounted by a weathervane which seemed rather larger than necessary. Here the animated bed ejected its passenger, and flew onwards without him. All about me in the dark of the music-hall, the audience roared with laughter whilst the poor fellow in the nightshirt dangled helplessly from the weathervane, kicking and bellowing. The last scene – with no intervening transition – showed him safe in his bedroom again, wakening from a nightmare. Solemnly raising his right hand and gazing heavenward, whilst moving his lips in dumb-show, the fellow vowed a silent oath: presumably against eating Welsh rarebit at bedtime.

'Watson, this is really quite enough,' Sherlock Holmes remarked beside me, amidst the raucous merriment of the audience surrounding us. 'Surely, in Manhattan's vasty deeps, we might find entertainment more refined than this. Let us elsewhere ourselves.'

The image on the screen had changed once more. Now it depicted an urban crossroads, quite unremarkable excepting that the trams, broughams, and other conveyances – in the American manner – were moving on the wrong side of the street. Upon the screen, men and women were proceeding in their usual fashions and varying gaits, entering at the one side and exeunting at the other. A newsboy hawked his gazettes between two hoardings underneath a street-lamp, and although this object was unlit – the tableau taking place in full daylight – I was surprised to observe that the street-lamp was outfitted for electrical current, not gaslight. Two signs depending from the lamp-post apprised us that this crossroads was the intersection of 'Broadway' and 'W. 58th Street'. In the background, a clock-dial set into the face of a distant tower gave the time as ten-seventeen. Evidently, this newest vitascope film was neither farce nor tragedy, but merely an impromptu vignette of Manhattanites in their native environs… and as such, no especial drama was about to unfold.

'You are right, Holmes,' I whispered to my friend. 'I have beheld my fill. Let us away to the Empire Theatre, and pay tribute to Miss Adams.'

During the while I said these words, the images, on the screen continued their silent processions. As I spoke, yet one more figure made his entrance within the background of the tableau before us. He was a man of above the middle height, thirtyish, with neatly trimmed moustaches. He was well-shod, in expensive cordovans, and clutching in his left hand a furled umbrella. But something about him was out of the