Sherlock Holmes by Barbara Hambly Page A

an’ his gloves an’ his
coat, an’ bein’ so nice to buy me schnapps, eh? Oy, the headache I
got vhen I vake—” And indeed the woman’s haggard face was the hue
of ashes in the grimy glow of the gas jet and the fire. “Vhy he do
a t’ing so, eh?”
    “Maybe you were merely taken sick in the Fish
and Ring,” I suggested, “and stumbled in the alley and fell. The
streets around there aren’t terribly safe at this hour—” Which was
putting the matter mildly to say the least, the Fish and Ring being
in one of the least salubrious streets of a neighborhood renowned
for coshings, knifings, brawls, and hooliganism of all
descriptions. “Perhaps someone happened along and stole your
box?”
    “Oy,” she moaned, and pulled her shawl more
closely about her. “Vhy vhould goyische gentleman vant poison poor
voman like so, eh?”
    “I don’t know, Bubbe Wolff,” piped up
Rebecca, settling on the bench beside the woman and holding out her
chapped hands to the fire. “But Zoltan Berg, he told me how that
same thing happen to some woman his mama knows over Wapping.”
    “What?” I’d been turning over one of the
wicker dollies in my hands, fascinated by the delicate workmanship;
now I set it back in the basket and regarded the child in
startlement. “This happened to someone else?”
    “Zoltan’s mama said,” temporized Rebecca, an
accurate witness if ever there was one. “This man came up and
talked to her in the street, Mama Berg’s friend, and ask her to the
Blue Door Pub for mild and bitters, and next thing she know she
wakes up in the alley behind the pub all cold and in the rain. She
said he was a real nice gentleman, with a big brown beard and
spectacles like Mama Wolff said, and said he was lonely an’ she
remind him of someone he knew.”
    The girl shrugged, skinny little shoulders in
a hand-me-down pinafore and eyes too wise for a ten-year-old.
Unprepossessing, the local police call them, and pert, but the more
time I spend in the East End, the more I think that if ever I am
granted the miracle of bearing John a living child, I would like
her to have that kind of pluck and wit.
    “He didn’t rob her – anyway Mama Berg didn’t
say he did – and she got a drink out of it. And you know what
sometimes happens, around Wapping and here, it could have been lots
worse.”
    I shivered, and put a reassuring hand on the
little girl’s shoulder. The other reason I was the only one of my
friends who would work the Settlement Hall at night was, of course,
that the fiend whom the popular press had called Jack the Ripper
had operated within a few streets of where I sat, only last year.
Though nothing had been heard of that ghastly assassin for nearly
twelve months – and though I’ve always believed that if one takes
sensible precautions one can remain reasonable safe wherever one is
– I was, when it came time for me to return home, escorted through
the Settlement’s grim courtyard to my cab by at least six stalwart
local gentlemen, and left to meditate, all the long rattling way
back to Kensington, on the peculiarities of human conduct.
     
    *
     
    In John’s stories about Mr. Holmes’s cases,
events follow neatly one after another, without the intervening
persiflage of day-to-day existence. This, I suppose, is the
necessary difference between a painting and a photograph – the
simplification of the background, that the foreground may stand in
clearer relief. But in fact we live much more in photographs than
in paintings, and for the next several days the Adventure of the
Friendly Gentleman was crowded from my thoughts by the Adventure of
the Imbecilic Maidservant, the Adventure of the Talkative Neighbor,
the Adventure of the Blocked Stovepipe, and the Adventure of Mr.
Stamford’s Wedding Present. If I did not mention the matter to John
it was only because it had become my habit to speak of the more
harmless curiosities and occurrences at the Settlement House; and
that, I suppose, indicates that