Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the PASSIONAL secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the most corrupt feelings, so long as they are CONVENTIONALLY ‘pure’. Then the novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels. Mrs Bolton’s gossip was always on the side of the angels. ‘And he was such a BAD fellow, and she was such a NICE woman.’ Whereas, as Connie could see even from Mrs Bolton’s gossip, the woman had been merely a mealy–mouthed sort, and the man angrily honest. But angry honesty made a ‘bad man’ of him, and mealy–mouthedness made a ‘nice woman’ of her, in the vicious, conventional channelling of sympathy by Mrs Bolton.

For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason, most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public responds now only to an appeal to its vices.

Nevertheless, one got a new vision of Tevershall village from Mrs Bolton’s talk. A terrible, seething welter of ugly life it seemed: not at all the flat drabness it looked from outside. Clifford of course knew by sight most of the people mentioned, Connie knew only one or or two. But it sounded really more like a Central African jungle than an English village.

‘I suppose you heard as Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would you ever! Miss Allsopp, old James’ daughter, the boot–and–shoe Allsopp. You know they built a house up at Pye Croft. The old man died last year from a fall; eighty–three, he was, an’ nimble as a lad. An’ then he slipped on Bestwood Hill, on a slide as the lads ‘ad made last winter, an’ broke his thigh, and that finished him, poor old man, it did seem a shame. Well, he left all his money to Tattie: didn’t leave the boys a penny. An’ Tattie, I know, is five years—yes, she’s fifty–three last autumn. And you know they were such Chapel people, my word! She taught Sunday school for thirty years, till her father died. And then she started carrying on with a fellow from Kinbrook, I don’t know if you know him, an oldish fellow with a red nose, rather dandified, Willcock, as works in Harrison’s woodyard. Well he’s sixty–five, if he’s a day, yet you’d have thought they were a pair of young turtle–doves, to see them, arm in arm, and kissing at the gate: yes, an’ she sitting on his knee right in the bay window on Pye Croft Road, for anybody to see. And he’s got sons over forty: only lost his wife two years ago. If old James Allsopp hasn’t risen from his grave, it’s because there is no rising: for he kept her that strict! Now they’re married and gone to live down at Kinbrook, and they say she goes round in a dressing–gown from morning to night, a veritable sight. I’m sure it’s awful, the way the old ones go on! Why they’re a lot worse than the young, and a sight more disgusting. I lay it down to the pictures, myself. But you can’t keep them away. I was always saying: go to a good instructive film, but do for goodness sake keep away from these melodramas and love films. Anyhow keep the children away! But there you are, grown–ups are worse than the children: and the old ones beat the band. Talk about morality! Nobody cares a thing. Folks does as they like, and much better off they are for it, I must say. But they’re having to draw their horns in nowadays, now th’ pits are working so bad, and they haven’t got the money. And the grumbling they do, it’s awful, especially the women. The men are so good and patient! What can they do, poor chaps! But the women, oh, they do carry on! They go and show off, giving contributions for a wedding present for Princess Mary, and then when they see all the grand things that’s been given, they simply rave: who’s she, any better than anybody else! Why doesn’t Swan & Edgar give me ONE fur coat, instead of giving her six. I wish I’d kept my ten shillings! What’s she going to give me, I should like to know? Here I can’t get a new spring coat, my dad’s working that bad, and she gets van–loads. It’s time as poor folks had some money to spend, rich ones ‘as ‘ad it long enough. I want a new spring coat, I do, an’ wheer am I going to get it? I say to them, be thankful you’re well fed and well clothed, without all the new finery you want! And they fly back at me: ‘‘Why isn’t Princess Mary thankful to go about in her old rags, then, an’ have nothing! Folks like HER get van–loads, an’ I can’t have a new spring coat. It’s a damned shame. Princess! Bloomin’ rot about Princess! It’s munney as matters, an’ cos she’s got lots, they give her more! Nobody’s givin’ me any, an’ I’ve as much right as anybody else. Don’t talk to me about education. It’s munney as matters. I want a new spring coat, I do, an’ I shan’t get it, cos there’s no munney...’’ That’s all they care about, clothes. They think nothing of giving seven or eight guineas for a winter coat—colliers’ daughters, mind you—and two guineas for a child’s summer hat. And then they go to the Primitive Chapel in their two–guinea hat, girls as would have been proud of a three–and–sixpenny one in my day. I heard that at the Primitive Methodist anniversary this year, when they have a built–up platform for the Sunday School children, like a grandstand going almost up to th’ ceiling, I heard Miss Thompson, who has the first class of girls in the Sunday School, say there’d be over a thousand pounds in new Sunday clothes sitting on that platform! And times are what they are! But you can’t stop them. They’re mad for clothes. And boys the same. The lads spend every penny on themselves, clothes, smoking, drinking in the Miners’ Welfare, jaunting off to Sheffield two or three times a week. Why, it’s another world. And they fear nothing, and they respect nothing, the young don’t. The older men are that patient and good, really, they let the women take everything. And this is what it leads to. The women are positive demons. But the lads aren’t like their dads. They’re sacrificing nothing, they aren’t: they’re all for self. If you tell them they ought to be putting a bit by, for a home, they say: That’ll keep, that will, I’m goin’ t’ enjoy myself while I can. Owt else’ll keep! Oh, they’re rough an’ selfish, if you like. Everything falls on the older men, an’ it’s a bad outlook all round.’

“Well, Mr. Gregson,” said the American, looking across at the official, “I don’t know what your British point of view may be, but I guess that in New York this lady’s husband will receive a pretty general vote of thanks.”

“She will have to come with me and see the chief,” Gregson answered. “If what she says is corroborated, I do not think she or her husband has much to fear. But what I can’t make head or tail of, Mr. Holmes, is how on earth you got yourself mixed up in the matter.”

“Education, Gregson, education. Still seeking knowledge at the old university. Well, Watson, you have one more specimen of the tragic and grotesque to add to your collection. By the way, it is not eight o’clock, and a Wagner night at Covent Garden! If we hurry, we might be in time for the second act.”

In choosing a few typical cases which illustrate the remarkable mental qualities of my friend, Sherlock Holmes, I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to select those which presented the minimum of sensationalism, while offering a fair field for his talents. It is, however, unfortunately impossible entirely to separate the sensational from the criminal, and a chronicler is left in the dilemma that he must either sacrifice details which are essential to his statement and so give a false impression of the problem, or he must use matter which chance, and not choice, has provided him with. With this short preface I shall turn to my notes of what proved to be a strange, though a peculiarly terrible, chain of events.

It was a blazing hot day in August. Baker Street was like an oven, and the glare of the sunlight upon the yellow brickwork of the house across the road was painful to the eye. It was hard to believe that these were the same walls which loomed so gloomily through the fogs of winter. Our blinds were half-drawn, and Holmes lay curled upon the sofa, reading and re-reading a letter which he had received by the morning post. For myself, my term of service in India had trained me to stand heat better than cold, and a thermometer at ninety was no hardship. But the morning paper was uninteresting. Parliament had risen. Everybody was out of town, and I yearned for the glades of the New Forest or the shingle of Southsea. A depleted bank account had caused me to postpone my holiday, and as to my companion, neither the country nor the sea presented the slightest attraction to him. He loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumour or suspicion of unsolved crime. Appreciation of nature found no place among his many gifts, and his only change was when he turned his mind from the evil-doer of the town to track down his brother of the country.

Finding that Holmes was too absorbed for conversation I had tossed aside the barren paper, and leaning back in my chair I fell into a brown study. Suddenly my companion’s voice broke in upon my thoughts: