Sherlock Holmes Great War Parodies and Pastiches II Page 6
In the meantime, he continued to work on his war history, interrupted only by more lectures. He was asked to consider standing for parliament for Edinburgh and St. Andrews Universities. He was willing, despite his distaste for campaigning, but was relieved when circumstances changed and he could decline graciously.
Besides, he had a greater mission in mind, one as noble and true as that which animated Sir Nigel. In November, Light magazine published “A New Revelation,” in which he proclaimed his conviction, after three decades of study and investigation, that the afterlife existed and its inhabitants are communicating with us. “We should now be at the close of the stage of investigation,” he wrote, “and beginning the period of religious construction.” His future course was set.
Publications: “A Visit to Three Fronts” (Aug.); The British Campaign in France and Flanders, Vol. 1 (Nov.); “A New Revelation” (Nov.).
The Puzzling Adventure of the Misunderstood Monkey Business
Maxwell Bukofzer
If Holmes played chess, we are not informed. He probably did not; he remarked in “The Retired Colourman” that he considered an interest in the sport the mark “of a scheming mind.” That didn’t stop chess aficionados from thinking otherwise.
Maxwell Bukofzer (1875-1958) of Long Island City, N.Y., was an expert composer of chess problems who wrote more than a dozen Holmes stories with a chess theme, such as this one which appeared in January’s American Chess Bulletin.
The type of puzzle in this story is a suimate, from the Latin for “self mate.” The goal is to force your opponent to checkmate you within a set number of moves. Spoiler alert: Working out the solution is impossible unless you know it uses a rule that allows you to promote a piece with that of the opposite color, something not allowed today.
“When you bear in mind, my dear Watson, that there are over a million chess players on this earth, thousands of whom are problemists, that each generation brings forth an additional crop of chessic highbrows, it becomes patent to thinkers that there can be but little in the realm of chess problems which has not been thought of and rendered to the public in some shape or other. I dare conclude naught is left to stagger a balanced mind such as you and I claim for ourselves. Hence you will not fail to understand why the humdrum stuff appearing day in, day out, in scores of chess publications is beginning to pall on me. By the skull of Philidor, there is indeed nothing new under the heavens. Not only is there a dearth of new ideas, but our present-day composers have even forgotten the pseudo art of dressing familiar puppets in new rags. Verily, I think, I shall have to renounce chess as I had to abandon other grazed-over fields and search the corners of our universe for a something that, if it cannot be new, at least has not lost every vestige of the unexplored, which alone seems worth while to a restless brain of the composition that nature, in a teasing mood, has planted in my head.”
I demurred. “Look here, Holmes,” I cried, irritated, “you are never so happy as when you imagine to have found an unassailable reason for unhappiness. Why this vehemence of wholly wasted feelings? You are pining for what you are wont to call a brain-twister once more and because there seems to be no avenue for the elimination of your stored-up energy you declare yourself ready to forsake the great science you toiled so unremittingly to develop and raise to its present high standard. Whatever your virtues, patience is not among their number.”
Holmes peered at me over his angular shoulder.
“Doctor,” he rejoined, speaking very deliberately, in a cutting tone of sarcasm, “only a fool is patient!”
He paused momentarily, then added:
“I admit, however, Doctor, that likewise many a patient is a fool, or the dubious craft of the medicos would not fare so well.”
Irately I plucked my hat from the hook.
“Accept my humble gratitude,” I snapped, “for the profoundly Christian sentiments your heart encompasses for me. I’ll go home now, the better to digest them.”
“Tut! Tut!” laughed Holmes, “what is ailing you, Colonel? How can a cheerful, crisp November morning find you so grouchy? Stay, I meant no harm. For goodness sake, is it a crime to utter a pun when one is almost rotting with stagnation?”
Without replying I snatched up my satchel and turned to the door.
Just as I grabbed the knob it was yanked out of my fingers from without. A well-dressed young fellow was standing outside, hat in hand, an embarrassed expression on his face.
“I crave your pardon, sir, if I’m intruding,” he stammered. “I knocked three times. Could I see Mr. Holmes?”
I stepped back. Wounded pride was wrestling with curiosity. Should I depart or remain?
“Sit down, gentlemen,” said Holmes. “I hate to see people standing around. What may I do for you, Mr. Winner? I know you are coming directly from Leeds to consult me. It’s about a chess matter, isn’t it?”
The young man whom Holmes had addressed as Mr. Winner stood like a pillar. He stared at Holmes in open-mouthed stupefaction.
“Pray be seated,” Holmes admonished again. “Yes, I know you, Mr. Winner, as I know most chess players of some note.”
“But how do you know I just arrived from Leeds?” cried the young chess player, still greatly disturbed.
“We peruse the newspapers occasionally in dreary old London,” Holmes smiled. “There is frequently nothing else to do. The reporters, somehow, learned of fair Eleanor Daw, the magnet that draws a certain local chess enthusiast to yonder busy town. Well, what a reporter ferrets out he does not generally treat as a secret.”
“How absurdly simple!” burst out the young fellow, suddenly right at home.
“I knew you would say that,” Holmes answered soberly. “But here, let me keep you no longer from broaching the object of your journey. This gentleman is Dr. Watson, my friend and collaborator, who shares all my secrets. Now let us have your story.”
“You have the reputation of being the foremost chess expert in the country,” Mr. Winner commenced his tale, “and to know everybody of any account in the world of chess. Of course, if even my name evokes a weak echo in your memory, you have heard of Mr. Daw, the famous problemist. Mr. Daw is a uniquely clever but rather eccentric gentleman, eccentric not only in chess, but hardly less in everyday life. He delights in doing things in a manner reversed from the usual. Nothing causes him more pleasure than to upset the matter-of-fact institutions, regulations and tenets of our days. A surpassing genius, like others of this rare species, he is angered by the hackneyed and stereotyped customs with which we lesser mortals—pardon me!—with which I am willing enough to acquiesce. As you learned, Mr. Daw has a daughter I adore. I am happy and proud to state that I was so fortunate as to win her affections. We looked forward to the gladsome day of imminent wedlock, threatened by no adversity, when, unheralded as a thunderclap in January, Mr. Daw’s veto suddenly came between us, converting anticipated bliss into bitter heartache. And why does he object? Not because of my character. That will bear the strictest investigation. Not because of my financial condition or social status. Both are promising and even enviable. No, he takes exception to my ‘intellectual inferiority.’ He is wrought up over my inability of solving his abstruse chess productions. I am not a novice at chess (here his handsome, boyish face spoke a language less modest than his lips), but, by the great Father Staunton, I confess I cannot keep step with him on the thorny, intricate bypath on which Mr. Daw’s supermind promenades with the utmost comfort. I spent the moderate allowance of wits I possess to the last atom in the fruitless endeavor to see through the bit of deviltry Mr. Daw incorporated in this little problem.”
Here Mr. Winner presented to Holmes a small piece of paper, on which was printed the following diagram:
Holmes glanced carelessly at the diagram. Then he sat up straight and looked squarely at it and gradually his brow became corrugated. I had had no glimpse of the problem, but Holmes’ behavior told me instantly: He had found the brain-twister for which he had been lamenting.
“Suppose you leave this in my care. Mr. Winner?” he murmured at last, without removing his eyes from the paper. “Hand your present address to Dr. Watson. I shall communicate with you as soon as I obtain results.”
Mr. Winner, a little vexed by Holmes’ impolite sudden absorption, wrote down his address. Then he bowed with punctilious precision to both the unseeing Holmes and me and withdrew.
For a half hour Holmes sat motionless, his forehead furrowed as the vest of a lean dyspeptic, the long, nervous fingers of his right hand running through his mane, never for a moment averting his gaze from the scrap of paper in his left.
“It appears to me you got a bigger contract than you were bidding for,” I said at length, I am afraid, not without irony.
Holmes raised his eyes, absent-mindedly.
“Have a little patience,” he growled, crustily.
“Only a fool is patient!” I retorted, viciously. With that I tramped out of the room noisily.
* * * * *
When I looked in on Holmes after two days, I was honestly shocked by his worn appearance.
“This will never do!” I scolded. “Why, I wager you have neither slept nor eaten a square meal, but smoked yourself to idiocy since you received that miserable problem.”
Holmes looked at me with that peculiar hunted expression in his eyes I had noticed there previously in the rare instances when he had found himself completely baffled.
“Doctor,” he replied, with a plaintive note in his voice, “were it not an undeniable fact that Daw is a recognized master composer, responsible in all of his work, I would, de facto, maintain that this problem of his is sheer lunacy. There is no suimate in two moves possible by the rules of chess. There is no means of compelling that unfettered Black Queen to perform the duty prescribed for her. Mr. Winner telephoned that he will call in to-day. I must make certain once more that this problem is correctly diagrammed. In the supplied form it is out of the range of possibility to comply with the author’s stipulation.”
“Never mind that confounded problem!” I commanded. “I am hungry. Let us have a bite, and then you go to bed.”
To my surprise, Holmes yielded. He ate a few mouthfuls, absent-mindedly enough, and, thereafter, stretched himself on the couch. He fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow.
But his rest was of short duration. Barely an hour elapsed before Mr. Winner, crestfallen, woebegone, broke in on us.
I frowned on him.
“The committee reports no progress at all,” I rasped out in a subdued but angry voice, “and your prospective father-in-law evidently requires the tightening of some of his loose screws.”
The lad sighed, without taking offense.
“The result is no worse than I feared,” he whispered, seeing Holmes was asleep. “When Mr. Daw breeds one of his ambiguous conglomerations the very prince of darkness himself despairs of solving it.”
“Then why bother good Christian people?” I was going to remonstrate, but Holmes, awaking, sat up and queried:
“Mr. Winner, are you positively certain this diagram is correct?”
The young fellow turned his sad face to Holmes.
“May I always be as certain,” he said, his voice quivering with earnestness, “of my darling’s love for me as I am of this baneful problem!”
“Then, are you equally certain you reported to me everything pertaining to this problem?”
“Everything, Mr. Holmes! Absolutely everything!” the lad exclaimed. “Ah, I knew it; nobody can solve it. Mr. Daw himself knew it. That is why he, as he handed it to me, said sneeringly: ‘Here is a bit of monkey business for your Christmas wedding.’ He knew we expected to marry on Christmas Day.”
Holmes sat bolt upright. Every trace of weariness had disappeared. His eyes sparkled like rubies in the sunlight.
“It is a pity,” he cried disgustedly, “people cannot make a complete report of a situation at one sitting. You might have saved us many anxious hours.” Mr. Winner and I stared at Holmes in stupid amazement.
“What in the cursed name of Beelzebub!” I let out. “Do you mean to insinuate that this nonsensical remark about a still more nonsensical ‘monkey business’ has aided you to penetrate the fog that beclouded your conception?”
“Ah me! How cleverly you deduce things, my dear Watson,” Holmes smiled. “You always get at the truth, ultimately.”
Turning to Mr. Winner, he continued:
“The old joker! In the language of the unsophisticated, Mr. Winner, Mr. Daw put one over on us and, by this time, is slyly laughing in his sleeve.”
Holmes walked up and down, muttering to himself: “The old rascal! The infernal old rascal!” Then he looked, in his peculiar manner, over his shoulder at Mr. Winner and said composedly:
“Come in to-morrow. I’ll have the solution written out for you. Better secure your license if you are still minded to become a benedict on Christmas Day. You have barely a month of freedom left.”
* * * * *
“Will you not condescend at last,” I said testily, “to explain to me how the dickens you suddenly arrived at the solution of this freakish problem?”
“There is little to tell,” Holmes replied, with great good humor. “When Mr. Winner, rather belated, informed us of Mr. Daw’s apparently trivial and rather unbecoming remark, ‘monkey business for Christmas,’ you probably took this for a vulgar expression and thought of chimpanzees, apes, gorillas and kindred types of the alleged ante-man. Mr. Daw, however, was neither vulgar nor did he house any Darwinian theories in his long head as those oracular words left ‘the gate of his teeth,’ as they used to say so poetically in old Hellas.
“In fact, Mr. Daw never said ‘monkey business,’ but ‘monk-key business.’ His allusion to Christmas, furthermore, made it instantly clear to me that the laws of chess were to be ‘observed’ with a generous addition of the proverbial grain of salt. In short, he wished to call Mr. Winner’s attention to the world-wide custom among chess problem composers to insert a bit of frolic into the sober curriculum of chess around Christmas time. So I deduced that the Queen was meant for a joker, that promotions were required, that, of course, Black pieces were to be made and that these Black pieces were to be monks, priests, in the idiom of chess, Bishops. Voila tout! Accordingly the solution is: I PxQ—Black Bishop, either B moves; 2 c8 or e8=Black, Kg7 mate!”
“As you behold, my dear Watson, the problem is so ridiculously simple that I am ashamed of my childlike stupidity and denseness that made me labor hopelessly at a task I wholly misunderstood and nearly drove me to distraction. It taught me a lesson that chess is, after all, not quite the barren pasture a torpid liver had pictured it to me.”
“By the way,” Holmes concluded his words, jestingly, “we are sure that Mr. Winner succeeded in winning the fair Eleanor. Hence, he is doubly a winner. I disclaim to forecast whether, by marrying Mr. Winner, Miss Daw is going to be a winner. But, anyhow, she will be a ‘Winner.’”
Herlock Shomes At It Again
Shot in the Culvert
Anonymous
The Belgium town of Ypres on the border with France was the scene of some of the worse fighting of the war. Five major battles were fought around it, and so many British soldiers died there that during peacetime it became a pilgrimage site for veterans and families.
In early 1916, soldiers from the 12th Battalion, Sherwood Forest, came across an abandoned printing press, and a sergeant with printing experience refurbished it. Thus was born The Wipers Times, a trench journal that underwent name changes as the Foresters moved from place to place, and grew so popular it ended as The B.E.F. Times. Like many publications, it was put together largely through improvisation and interrupted by battles.
Herlock Shomes At It Again ran in six chapters from Feb. 12 to May 1. There are numerous errors in punctuation and grammar, most of which were retained, and the use of chapter titles was inconsistent. We only removed the synopsis that appeared in the later chapters.
CHARACTERS:
Bill Banks—A Corpse.
Lizzie Jones—A Questionable Person Living at Hooge.
Harold Fitz Gibbons—Squire of White Chateau (in love with Honoria).
Intha Pink—A Pioneer (in love with himself).
Honoria Clarenceaux—The Heroine, (in love with Pink).
Herlock Shomes.
Dr. Hotsam, R.A.M.C.
Chapter 1
The wind was howling round the rugged spires of the Cloth Hall, and the moon shone down on the carriage bringing the elite of the old town to the festivities arranged to celebrate the 73rd term of office of Jacques Hallaert, the venerable mayor of Typers. Also the same moon shone down on the stalwart form of Intha Pink, the pioneer. He sighed as he passed the brilliantly lighted scene of festivity, thinking of days gone by and all that he had lost. As he plodded his way, clad in gum boots, thigh, pairs one, he soliloquised aloud thus:—“What I blooming gime! They gives me a blooming nail, they gives me a blooming ’ammer, and then they tells me to go and build a blooming dug-out.” At that moment Intha fell into a crump-hole, and then continued his soliloquies thus:
Chapter 2
Shomes and his Methods.
We now leave to the imagination of our gentle reader the nature of Intha’s soliloquies in the crump-hole, and turn to a series of tragic events which were occupying in the Denin Road. It being feast night in Typers, the road was surging with a merry crowd pushing and jostling their way, eager to taste the delights the town had to offer, but there were, amongst that motley throng, two people who were destined to play principal parts in the most profound and murky mystery that had ever baffled the aged and doddering constabulary of Typers—one was Honoria, the fair but anemic daughter of the shell-fish merchant of Hooge, and the other was—Shomes!—