Sherlock Holmes In America Page 6

  Sherlockian lore is replete with tales of dusty manuscripts in musty vaults that, when found, shed surprising new light on the Great Detective. I myself have enjoyed reading many such “discoveries,” even while (no offense to the discoverers) finding their provenance highly suspect. If there really were so many heretofore unknown Holmes chronicles floating around, there could hardly be a cellar, attic, or cupboard in the world that wasn’t home to at least one, if not several.

  I am no longer skeptical, however. Here’s why.

  In June of this year, I received in the mail a most remarkable (and rather dusty and, yes, musty) manuscript that—really and truly!—sheds surprising new light on the Great Detective. It was being sent to me, a cover letter said, because of my own small successes in the world of Sherlockiana. Perhaps I could act as literary agent for the party who’d unearthed it (who wished, for reasons I can’t go into, to remain anonymous)?

  The timing was fortuitous—practically miraculous, really—as I’d just been queried about a possible submission to this very collection. And here one was! And one of incalculable value to historians, as well, for it backs up one of William S. Baring-Gould’s most interesting claims in his classic biography Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: that Holmes once trod the boards, and in America, no less.

  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, as you will see), space does not permit us to present the manuscript in its entirety here. Not by a long shot. The verbiage is lush, thick, and, at times, tangled, and I had to hack my way through it like Jungle Jim through darkest Africa.

  I think it was worth the slog, though. I hope you agree. If you don’t, I would suggest this: Take a look in the attic. There’s a good chance you’ll find something there you like better.

  —Stephen B. Hockensmith

  Alameda, California

  August 9, 2008

  From What a Piece of Work! My Life in the Limelight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  “Some Notable Shame”

  Oh, St. Louis, St. Louis—if only there were anything saintly about you. Anything heavenly, anything worthy of veneration. Anything not spackled with filth! But, no, alas. Praise for you I must limit to this: You are not Indianapolis.

  And this, too, I will add upon further reflection. Your odors may have assaulted me, your citizens may have insulted me, your “theatre” may have been an insult to the theatre, yet at no time whilst walking your dung-paved paths (I cannot grace them with the appellation “streets”) did I feel myself in danger of mortal harm . . . excepting, of course, that which I might inflict upon myself in order to escape you the quicker.

  No, for that honor—the privilege of experiencing a fright worthy of Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors—I have Leadville, Colorado, to thank.

  Leadville, of course, wasn’t on the original itinerary for Sasanoff’s tour of America. If it had been, I never would have signed on with the man’s company. One glance at a map and I’d have seen that he was leading us deep into that infamous “Wild West” from which tales of savagery and death routinely gush like geysers of blood. At the time, the martyr Custer was but three years in his shallow prairie grave, and I certainly would have had no desire to become his neighbor. St. Louis was both as west and as wild as I ever intended to experience.

  A few days before our engagement there was due to end, however, Sasanoff gathered the company to make an announcement. New Orleans would not be our next stop, as had been planned. There would be a “brief detour” to Colorado, where our Twelfth Night would help inaugurate “the grandest theatre west of the Mississippi.”

  Never mind that there was no such thing as a “brief detour” to Colorado from St. Louis, the journey from one to the other being nearly one thousand miles long. As for us opening “the grandest theatre west of the Mississippi,” this was rich indeed given that we had yet to see anything approaching grand east of it, the stages of St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis (Oh! How my hand trembles to write that accursed word!), Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Hartford, etc., etc., being no more grand than an East End public house water closet.

  The long delay in visiting New Orleans would be a bitter blow to the troupe, too. Most of us found American “culture” so woeful we were actually looking forward to the influence of (God help us) the French.

  But Sasanoff quashed any hint of mutiny quickly, reminding us that we had all signed contracts that explicitly gave him, the acting manager, authority to add and drop tour dates—and company members—as he saw fit. If we didn’t fancy a little jaunt westward, we could always remain behind . . . and make our way back to England alone.

  This was an unveiled threat to most of us, of course. But I had the feeling it was intended for one of us—He Who Shall Not Be Further Canonized by My Pen—as more of an invitation.

  [First introduced in Chapter Fifty-Six (“The ‘States’ of America—Filthy and Repulsive”), He Who Shall Not Be Further Canonized by My Pen is never definitively identified. Even the most casual Sherlockian scholar should recognize him, however. To facilitate ease of reading, he is henceforth referred to wherever possible by the author’s other nickname for him: “the Whelp.”—S.B.H.]

  Our leading man’s relations with the Whelp had continued their deterioration, and though the two rarely argued about the proper approach to acting any longer—a byproduct of not speaking to each other—Sasanoff had seen fit to demote the young dilettante. No longer was the Whelp our Malvolio. He was now Priest and Musician #1 and Sailor #2 and other assorted nonentities a step up from scenery.

  Yet the Whelp, with his usual arrogance, put up the pretense that he was thankful to be a mere spear carrier.

  “I’ve played Malvolio for months,” he said to me. “There was nothing more to learn from the part. Blending into the background in so many new guises, on the other hand—that’s a challenge I look forward to.”

  As if it requires skill to not be noticed! It took all my own considerable powers as a thespian not to laugh in his face.

  Unfortunately, much as it would have relieved us to be rid of him, the Whelp didn’t rise to Sasanoff’s bait, and our manager was still reluctant to sack him outright. When we set off for Colorado a week later, the company was intact.

  I’ve written much already about the peculiar torments of American rail travel, so I won’t dwell on them again except to say this: [Approximately three thousand words have been omitted here in the interest of (perhaps unattainable, given the source) brevity.—S.B.H]

  All that was but preamble to the real tortures ahead, however. Leadville, it turned out, was a mining “boom town” not even two years old. No rail line had yet reached it, and the last hundred miles up from Denver required us to transfer to a pair of privately engaged coaches.

  And when I write of traveling up, I do not mean we went north. Leadville actually lies to the southwest of Denver. It was further up into the snow-peaked mountains we had to go. And go and go and go. Mr. Verne and the other dreamers may assure us man will soon master fantastic flying machines, but if the like of Leadville is all we’ll find in the clouds, I say it’s not worth the bother.

  After enduring nerve-racking rides along gaping gorges on rocky, hole-pocked roads plagued (the cackling drivers delighted in telling us) by both bandit gangs and bloodthirsty bands of Native warriors, we finally arrived at our destination: Gomorrah in the Alps. Or so it struck me at first. I would revise my estimation—downward—the longer I was there.

  Surrounding the town on all sides were shoddily built shacks, tree stumps without number, and the yawning black mouths of the silver mines. Closer in was a fringe of tents—lodgings for newly arrived fortune hunters and the businesses (mostly “saloons” and drafty bagnios) that catered to them. And then at last we entered the city proper (if one could apply either word to Leadville) and found ourselves rolling down actual streets . . . broad ones comprised entirely of dirt and bracketed on both sides by only slightly sturdier variations on the canvas-topped groggeries and maisons de joie we’d just pas
sed.

  “To such a place as this we’ve brought the Bard,” Sasanoff said with an incredulous shake of the head.

  Only I was on hand to reply, Sasanoff having granted me the honor of sharing his private car while the rest of the company crammed themselves into the other coach like so much meat into an overstuffed sausage.

  “Indeed,” I said, and I reached out and gave little Master Sasanoff a hearty slap on one of his Lilliputian shoulders. “Dr. Livingstone himself couldn’t have claimed to do more for the spread of civilization!”

  Sasanoff’s expressive features curled into a smirk.

  “Nor could he have claimed to profit so handsomely by it,” he said.

  I chuckled through gritted teeth, for Sasanoff had favored me in another way, as well: by sharing an explanation for our presence in Leadville. The American silver magnate Horace Tabor had offered five thousand dollars for a week’s run in the town’s newly built opera house. Being under contract, of course, none of the players would see a penny’s extra profit. The windfall would be Sasanoff’s alone.

  Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, however, and Sasanoff’s wee little head was soon uneasy indeed. Construction of the Tabor Opera House (the tycoon, with the usual humility of his ilk, had named the theatre after himself) was behind schedule, and our premiere there delayed at least a week. It had been hard enough for Sasanoff to put off our engagement in New Orleans. If we tarried too long, our run there—and our subsequent appearances in Atlanta, Richmond, and Washington—might be cancelled. The second half of the tour could collapse like a row of dominoes.

  Predictably, the days that followed saw Sasanoff in the blackest of moods, and most of the company—terrorized by both their illtempered acting manager and the town he’d marooned them in—barricaded themselves in their hotel rooms. The Whelp, on the other hand, was rarely to be found in his: he quickly took to disappearing for hours at a time. In one of my few forays into Leadville’s mud-splattered fray, I entered a low tavern (drawn, of course, by simple curiosity) and spotted him standing alone at the bar, watching all around him as if it were some great drama unfolding upon the stage. He seemed to be invisible to the ruffians infesting the place, yet upon me their attention seized instantly with hungry-eyed insolence. My ample frame and lordly bearing always served me well on the boards, but here it put me at a distinct disadvantage.

  “Ho ho ho! Lookee who just walked in!” cried a miner so blackened with soot he looked like he bathed in cinders as the rest of us do water. He reached out a hand and took the obscene liberty of patting my stomach. “It’s Santa Claus a whole month early!”

  “If you please,” I said, brushing away the man’s grubby paw. But before I could utter another word in protest, the saloon erupted with more shouts.

  “Where’s yer sleigh, Santa?”

  “Why ain’t ya in yer red suit, Santa?”

  “What’d ya bring us, Santa?”

  Miners, “muleskinners,” layabouts, even the lewd women such rough-hewn rustics consort with—all were jeering and laughing at me.

  I turned to flee the raucous uproar. Before I could make my escape, however, I locked eyes, for just a second, on the Whelp. He was regarding me coolly, in that detached yet deeply probing way our fellow company members found so disquieting. And I could have sworn the young rascal was smiling.

  I immediately relayed the incident to Sasanoff, taking an actor’s license to give myself a more flattering exit line (“I would give you bounders lumps of coal, only I see it’s smeared all over your filthy faces already!”).

  “He’s the lowest utility player, consorting with rabble . . . yet he still thinks himself superior to us all,” Sasanoff mused darkly. “I should have sent him packing weeks ago.”

  “Yes,” I said. “You should have.”

  Sasanoff glowered at me—and a fine glower it was, too. The man may have been little taller than an overgrown squirrel, but he was undoubtedly one of the great Richard IIIs of his time.

  Of course, Richard would have shown an impudent knave like the Whelp considerably less mercy than Sasanoff had, and why our otherwise irascible manager tolerated the stripling’s cheek was a matter of much conjecture in the company. It had to do with an incident early in the tour, some whispered—a predicament the Whelp freed Sasanoff from with his sharp mind and even sharper tongue. Whatever the reason, even I, Sasanoff’s closest confidante in the troupe, had not been made privy to the truth.

  “Yes, well . . . you’d all better be on your guard,” Sasanoff snarled at me now. “I’m in a foul enough temper to dismiss the whole company—myself included!”

  I soothed his savage breast with the sweet music of gentle (feigned) laughter, then changed the subject to something more mutually amusing: the latest broadside in Catherine P_________ and Thomas B____________’s ongoing battle for the affections of Louis H_____________.

  [A short passage has been excised here by request of the B_____________ estate.—S.B.H.]

  My rendering of these inanities d’amour lightened Sasanoff’s spirits considerably. And just in time, too. Horace Tabor and his wife were hosting a reception for the company in the hotel’s paltry ballroom. It was time to kiss the backer’s backside.

  Tabor himself I found to be the epitome of the American ideal: a “selfmade man.” Alas, what he’d made of himself was vulgar in the extreme, and the making of him seemed to involve little more than a layer of dumb luck slapped over a foundation of slavering avarice. But, for all that, selfmade he was. God certainly would want none of the credit.

  The other town notables who turned out to greet us (and drink Tabor’s flat champagne) I have even less to say about, except that they were “notable” only for their wretched clothing and abominable manners.

  Still, let it never be said I couldn’t play to the groundlings, and I was, as always, the darling of all. Sasanoff, as was his way at soirees, stuck close to the hosts (and the money), and I swooped in from time to time when it looked as though the conversation could use a little enlivening. Which was frequently. Tabor was the sort of man who grew forlorn and bewildered if the talk strayed far from commerce, while his wife . . . well, she made such a faint impression I can’t, at this late date, recall her at all. In fact, I could barely remember she was present even when she was speaking to me.

  I was giving the Tabors a comical foretaste of my performance as Sir Toby Belch, alternately huzzahing and haranguing as only the great old reprobate can, when I noticed Sasanoff scowling at something behind me. I glanced back to find the Whelp sauntering in a full hour late.

  Usually, one might expect a sense of decorum—or, at the very least, self interest—to discourage public sniping between a leading man/ manager and his supporting players. Yet (as exhaustively chronicled in previous chapters), Sasanoff and the Whelp had clashed at one gathering after another, and always on the same tiresome subject.

  To wit, acting. That, so far as any of the troupe knew, the Whelp was a nobody from nowhere hadn’t stopped him from airing his foolish views on proper dramatics. Sometime after leaving London, it seemed, he’d been infected by that always-fatal (to good acting) disease known as “Naturalism,” and he’d increasingly insisted that Truth demanded the avoidance of “stylized bombast” (his phrase, not mine) and scrupulous attention to realistic detail. Sasanoff (and I, when sufficiently provoked) quite rightly countered that audiences don’t care two figs about Truth. They crave Big—big characters, big emotions, big laughs, big tears. Any actor who chooses to be Small is also choosing empty houses over full ones. To which the Whelp invariably replied that he hadn’t taken up the study of acting in order to enrich himself with money. Which was fine, it was always pointed out in return, because his approach to the craft would surely leave him penniless.

  Round and round it ever went, and I certainly had no desire to see the circuit run again. Yet Sasanoff, sadly, couldn’t resist a dig—the first, it turned out, in what would soon become a very deep hole indeed.

  “
Let me guess,” he said to the Whelp. “You were studying your lines and lost track of the time.”

  The Whelp replied with a tight smile and a “touché” nod.

  “I apologize for my late arrival,” he said, addressing Mr. and Mrs. Tabor. “But I did indeed lose track of the time—while exploring this most intriguing community of yours.”

  I only barely stifled a roll of the eyes, but the Tabors (apparently afflicted with the same baseless provincial pride I’d encountered everywhere in America) grinned and cooed and practically adopted the Whelp on the spot.

  “Think nothing of it!” Mr. Tabor said. “Why, there’s so much to see around here, so much to do, I can understand a man getting a little lost in it.”

  “To be honest, I was surprised any of you were on time,” his wife added with what I’m sure she imagined was coquettish levity. “Aren’t actors always supposed to make a dramatic entrance?”

  “Only the great ones,” I said with a censorious sniff.

  The Tabors just kept grinning idiotically, my point blunted by the impenetrable thickness of their plebeian skulls.

  Mr. Tabor turned to Sasanoff.

  “And what role will we see our young friend here playing come opening night?”

  Sasanoff begrudgingly provided proper introductions, dismissively presenting the Whelp as “one of our junior utility players.”

  “What Mr. Sasanoff means,” the Whelp said, “is that you will see me in a variety of roles. You won’t, however, do much hearing of me. The parts are very small.”

  “Oh, that seems like a shame,” Mrs. Tabor simpered. “You’re such a striking-looking young man, and your voice is so—”

  “It takes more than pleasing looks and stature to make an actor,” Sasanoff declared, puffing himself up to his full height . . . which almost brought him even with the Whelp’s chest. Of course, the woman hadn’t mentioned the Whelp’s height at all, but poor Sasanoff could never stop measuring himself against other actors—literally. I think that’s one of the reasons he tolerated me. I was five times the man he was side to side, but toe to top of head he was nearly my equal.