A Study in Sherlock

“President McKinley is an avid reader. I gather he’s read of your accomplishments in The Strand Magazine.”

I confess that when I heard those words, I found that my ears were hot and my collar suddenly seemed to have tightened around my neck. Vanity is a powerful drug, able to strengthen the heartbeat and circulation extraordinarily.

Holmes said, “I can answer for myself, because I only have to answer to myself. I shall be happy to meet with the president. When does the Deutschland weigh anchor?”

“High tide is tomorrow at nineteen hundred.”

Holmes turned to me. “And you, Watson?” It was not the first time when I thought I detected in Holmes a slight resentment of my relationship with the lovely creature who was, within the year, to become my second wife. It seemed to me a tease, almost a challenge, an implication that I was no longer my own man and able to have adventures.

I did not take the bait and say something foolish in an attempt to save face. “I must speak with a dear friend of mine before I give you my word. But I’m almost certain I will join you.”

Allen smiled and nodded. “I thank you both, gentlemen. I’ll leave the tickets with you. Once again, I must bring up the uncomfortable issue of secrecy. I must adjure you both to absolute silence about the nature of your voyage.”

“Of course,” I said, since the request was clearly addressed to me. Holmes could never have been prevailed upon to reveal anything he didn’t wish to. I, on the other hand, was about to go to Queen Anne Street to speak to a beautiful and loving woman, and get her to agree I should go to another continent without being able to tell her which one or why.

What was said during that night’s discussions, and what inducements were offered to break my oath of silence I leave to the reader’s own experience. I did present myself on the London docks at nineteen hundred the next evening with my steamer trunk packed. Holmes, upon seeing me arrive in a carriage, merely looked up and said, “Ah, Watson. Prompt as always.”

We sailed on the tide. The steamship Deutschland was a marvel of modern design, but also of modern impatience. The powerful engines in the stern below decks could be heard and felt without difficulty anywhere on board at any hour of the twenty-four, despite the fact that the bow was more than six hundred feet from them. I had been accustomed after several tours in India to long voyages under sail. The old, graceful, and soothing push of wind, where the only sound is the creaking of boards and ropes as they stand up to the sea is disappearing rapidly. Even HMT Orontes, which brought me back to Portsmouth after my last tour of duty, had its three masts of sails supplemented by steam power below deck. Some day, no doubt, travel by sail will be a pleasure reserved for the leisured rich, the only ones who will be able to afford the time for it.

Our enormous steamship pushed on at full tilt, regardless of the weather. Holmes and I walked the deck and speculated on the true nature of our enigmatic invitation. Rather, I speculated, but Holmes maintained the irritating silence into which he often retreated when a case began. It was something between a boxer’s silent meditation before a match—among Holmes’s several skills was a mastery of the pugilist’s art—and a scientist’s cogitation on a natural phenomenon. Long before the ship steamed its way into New York harbor, I was grateful that its soulless speed would deliver me of the need to be with a man who neither spoke nor listened.

It was late afternoon when the crew tied the bow and stern to cleats, and stevedores hauled our steamer trunks from our cabin. We were on the main deck prepared to step down the gangplank to the new world. Captain Allen joined us, and he engaged a closed carriage to take us to a different dock. “Have either of you been to the United States before?” Allen asked.

“I have,” Holmes said. “In 1879 I traveled here with a Shakespeare company as Hamlet. I hope to play a less tragic part on this visit.”

When we arrived at the new jetty, we found that all the sailors there were in military uniform. They rapidly loaded our trunks aboard a much smaller craft, a Coast Guard vessel of some fifty feet in length, with a steam engine. Once we were aboard, the vessel was pushed from the dock, oriented itself due north, and began to move across the harbor. The air was hot and humid that afternoon, and I was grateful when the vessel began to lay on some speed. I came to understand from one of the crew that the purpose of the vessel was to outrun the craft of smugglers and other miscreants and bring them to a halt, so its speed was considerable. Before long we were out of the congested waters of the harbor and heading up the majestic Hudson River.

Much of the land along the river was wooded, but here and there on the shore we could see charming villages, most of them apparently supported by a combination of agriculture and light manufacturing. I could see growing fields of maize and other vegetables on the distant hillsides, but nearer the water were smokestacks and railroad tracks.

As I explored the Coast Guard cutter, I happened upon Allen and Holmes at the bow. “Excellent means of travel,” Holmes said, and Allen replied, “It’s not the usual way, but it was determined that a government vessel would not be suspected to be smuggling two Englishmen to Buffalo.”

“Is the secrecy warranted?” Holmes asked.

Allen said, “If all goes well, we may never know.”

“Indeed.”

We disembarked at a city called Albany. I found all of the names of British places in America—York, Albany, Rochester—disturbing in some fundamental way. It was like emerging from a wilderness trail and hearing that I had arrived at Charing Cross. But I said nothing. At Albany we were transferred to a railroad train, and moved on at still greater speed. We followed roughly the course of a narrow, straight waterway called the Erie Canal, which had for the past seventy years or so brought the natural resources and products of the western parts—lumber, produce, and so on—back to the ports like New York. I found the vastness of the place a bit unnerving. By the time we reached Buffalo we had gone more than the distance between London and Edinburgh, and not left the state of New York, one of forty-five states, and by no means the largest.

The next day at four in the afternoon, we arrived at the train station in Buffalo. It was an imposing piece of architecture for such a distant and provincial place, with patterned marble floors and high stone galleries like a church. There I received my introduction to the peculiarity of the American mind. In the center of the large marble floor was a statue of an American bison covered in a layer of what I believe to be polished brass. Although this beast is commonly called a “buffalo,” it is nothing of the sort, not at all like either the Asian buffalo or the African. The Americans simply like to call it a buffalo, as they like to grant the name “robin” to a native migratory thrush that is not a near relative of a British robin. Further, although the bison posing as a buffalo is the informal mascot of the city, the city’s name has nothing to do with animals. It seems that Buffalo is a corruption of the seventeenth- century French name for the place, “Beau fleuve,” beautiful river, an accurate description of the Niagara, on whose banks the city is situated. The logic was all virtually incomprehensible, but even the dimmest visitor could see that the inhabitants of the place had built themselves what looked like a golden calf and placed it in the station. As I was soon to learn, this was a city that worshipped industry, technological progress, and prosperity as fervently as the biblical sinners worshipped their own false deities. Holmes and I were about to happen upon one of their greatest pagan celebrations: the Pan-American Exposition was a festival of electrical power.

We were rushed from the station to a carriage and taken to the Genesee Hotel at Main and Genesee Streets. The Genesee was one of several large and thriving hotels in the central part of the city, with more under construction. The hotel served to seal my impression of the city, which was full of people from elsewhere, there to sell or buy or negotiate or merely gawk, as a place that grew and changed so rapidly that one had better write down his address because the next time he saw the location it might look different.

Captain Allen waited while we checked in and let the bellmen take our trunks to our suite. Then he took his leave. “I shall call upon you gentlemen at ten this evening on the matter of which we spoke,” he said, turned on his heel, and went out the door. The carriage took him away.

Holmes and I went upstairs to our quarters. “We shall be here for at least a week,” he said. “We may as well do some unpacking.”

I took his advice, and watched out of the corner of my eye as he did the same. He had an array of unexpected items with him that I had not noticed during the six days at sea or the two days of travel into the