Miss Morstan (Chapters 1–4)

CHAPTER 1: THE SCIENCE OF DEDUCTION

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it.

"Which is it to-day," I asked, "morphine or cocaine?"

He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. "It is cocaine," he said, "a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?"

"No, indeed," I answered, brusquely. "My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. Count the cost! Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?"

"My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation."

He gave me a little demonstration. "Observation shows me that you have been to the Wigmore Street Post-Office this morning; but deduction lets me know that when there you dispatched a telegram. You have a little reddish mould adhering to your instep. Just opposite the Wigmore Street Office they have taken up the pavement and thrown up some earth, which lies in such a way that it is difficult to avoid treading in it. The earth is of this peculiar reddish tint which is found, as far as I know, nowhere else in the neighbourhood. That is observation. The rest is deduction. I knew that you had not written a letter, since I sat opposite to you all morning. I see also in your open desk that you have a sheet of stamps and a thick bundle of postcards. What could you go into the post-office for, then, but to send a wire? Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth."

I handed him a watch which had lately come into my possession, and asked him what he could tell of its former owner. He told me that it had belonged to my elder brother, who had inherited it from my father; that he was a man of untidy habits, very untidy and careless; that he was left with good prospects, but threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died. All this he read from the scratches about the keyhole, from the pawnbrokers' numbers inside the case. I was bitterly hurt, and accused him of having made inquiries; and he apologised, and assured me that he had never even known I had a brother.

At that moment our landlady entered, bearing a card upon the brass salver. "A young lady for you, sir," she said. "Miss Mary Morstan."

CHAPTER 2: THE STATEMENT OF THE CASE

Miss Morstan entered the room with a firm step and an outward composure of manner. She was a blonde young lady, small, dainty, well gloved, and dressed in the most perfect taste. Her face had neither regularity of feature nor beauty of complexion, but her expression was sweet and amiable, and her large blue eyes were singularly spiritual and sympathetic. In an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents, I have never looked upon a face which gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature.

She told her story. Her father, Captain Morstan, an officer in an Indian regiment, had sent her home when she was quite a child; her mother was dead. In 1878 he had obtained twelve months' leave and come home. He had telegraphed to her from London that he had arrived all safe, and directed her to come down at once, giving the Langham Hotel as his address. She came; he had gone out the night before, and never returned. Not a trace of him had ever been found. His only friend in London was a Major Sholto, of his own regiment, who denied even knowing that he was in England.

"Six years ago, exactly," she went on, "on the 4th of May, 1882, an advertisement appeared in the Times asking for the address of Miss Mary Morstan, and stating that it would be to her advantage to come forward. On the same day there arrived through the post a small card-board box addressed to me, which I found to contain a very large and lustrous pearl. Since then every year upon the same date there has always appeared a similar box, containing a similar pearl, without any clue as to the sender." And this morning she had received a letter: "Be at the third pillar from the left outside the Lyceum Theatre to-night at seven o'clock. If you are distrustful, bring two friends. You are a wronged woman, and shall have justice."

"Well, really," said Holmes, "this is a very pretty hitch. We shall most certainly go." When she had gone, I stood at the window watching her walking briskly down the street.

"What a very attractive woman!" I exclaimed.

He had lit his pipe again, and was leaning back with drooping eyelids. "Is she?" he said, languidly. "I did not observe."

"You really are an automaton, a calculating machine," I cried. "There is something positively inhuman in you at times."

He smiled gently. "It is of the first importance," he said, "not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities. A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money."

CHAPTER 3: IN QUEST OF A SOLUTION

By the evening Holmes had learned that Major Sholto had died in April 1882; within a week of his death, Miss Morstan had received her first pearl. Among her father's papers she had found a curious document: a plan of some large building, with corridors and passages, and in one corner, in coarse characters, "The sign of the four: Jonathan Small, Mahomet Singh, Abdullah Khan, Dost Akbar."

It was a September evening, and not yet seven o'clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. At the Lyceum, the crowds were already thick at the side-entrances. We had hardly reached the third pillar when a small, dark, brisk man in the dress of a coachman accosted us, asked whether these gentlemen were police officers, and, satisfied, put us into a four-wheeler. We drove through the fog, south over the river, into a labyrinth of streets, Holmes naming every one as we passed: "Rochester Row. Now Vincent Square. Wandsworth Road. Priory Road. Larkhall Lane. Stockwell Place."

CHAPTER 4: THE STORY OF THE BALD-HEADED MAN

The carriage stopped at the third house in a new terrace. A Hindoo servant, clad in a yellow turban, white loose-fitting clothes, and a yellow sash, opened the door, and showed us into a room which was as out of place in that dreary house as a diamond of the first water in a setting of brass. The richest and glossiest of curtains and tapestries draped the walls; two great tiger-skins were thrown athwart the floor; and a hookah stood on a mat in the corner. In the room stood a small man with a very high head, a bristle of red hair all round the fringe of it, and a bald, shining scalp. He was Thaddeus Sholto, the son of the Major, and he was a nervous hypochondriac, who asked me, as a doctor, to listen to his mitral valve.

He told us his father's story. Major Sholto had come home from India with a considerable sum of money and a collection of valuable curiosities, and lived at Pondicherry Lodge, in Upper Norwood. He had a horror of men with wooden legs. On his death-bed, he had called his twin sons, Thaddeus and Bartholomew, and confessed. He and Captain Morstan had come into possession of a great treasure in India. When Morstan came to London, he came to Sholto to claim his share. They quarrelled; Morstan, who had a weak heart, fell back in a fit and struck his head against the corner of the treasure-chest, and died. Sholto, afraid that he would be accused of murder, hid the body, and kept the treasure. Dying, he begged his sons to give Miss Morstan her share. "The treasure is hidden in..." At that instant a horrible change came over his expression; his eyes stared wildly, his jaw dropped, and he yelled, in a voice which I can never forget, "Keep him out! For Christ's sake keep him out!" We both stared round at the window behind us. A face was looking in at us out of the darkness, a bearded, hairy face, with wild cruel eyes and an expression of concentrated malevolence. When we rushed to the window the man was gone. And when we returned to our father his heart had ceased to beat.

The next morning his room was found broken into, his boxes rifled, and upon his chest was fixed a torn piece of paper, with the words "The sign of the four" scrawled across it.

Thaddeus, ashamed of his father, had sent Miss Morstan a pearl every year from a chaplet the Major had kept. And yesterday Bartholomew had at last found the treasure, hidden in a sealed room under the roof of Pondicherry Lodge. Thaddeus had written to Miss Morstan; and now we must all go to Norwood, to claim her share.

(End of Episode 1 — continued in Episode 2: Pondicherry Lodge)