Chapter VIII: On Board the "Gehenna"

The Pursuit of the House-Boat

by John Kendrick Bangs

When the Gehenna had passed down the Styx and out through the
beautiful Cimmerian Harbor into the broad waters of the ocean, and
everything was comparatively safe for a while at least, Sherlock
Holmes came down from the bridge, where he had taken his place as the
commander of the expedition at the moment of departure. His brow was
furrowed with anxiety, and through his massive forehead his brain
could be seen to be throbbing violently, and the corrugations of his
gray matter were not pleasant to witness as he tried vainly to
squeeze an idea out of them.

"What is the matter?" asked Demosthenes, anxiously. "We are not
in any danger, are we?"

"No," replied Holmes. "But I am somewhat puzzled at the bubbles
on the surface of the ocean, and the ripples which we passed over an
hour or two ago, barely perceptible through the most powerful
microscope, indicate to my mind that for some reason at present
unknown to me the House-boat has changed her course. Take that
bubble floating by. It is the last expiring bit of aerial agitation
of the House-boat's wake. Observe whence it comes. Not from the
Azores quarter, but as if instead of steering a straight course
thither the House-boat had taken a sharp turn to the north-east, and
was making for Havre; or, in other words, Paris instead of London
seems to have become their destination."

Demosthenes looked at Holmes with blank amazement, and, to keep
from stammering out the exclamation of wonder that rose to his lips,
he opened his bonbonniere and swallowed a pebble.

"You don't happen to have a cocaine tablet in your box, do you?"
queried Holmes.

"No," returned the Greek. "Cocaine makes me flighty and
nervous, but these pebbles sort of ballast me and hold me down. How
on earth do you know that that bubble comes from the wake of the
House-boat?"

"By my chemical knowledge, merely," replied Holmes. "A merely
worldly vessel leaves a phosphorescent bubble in its wake. That one
we have just discovered is not so, but sulphurescent, if I may coin a
word which it seems to me the English language is very much in need
of. It proves, then, that the bubble is a portion of the wake of a
Stygian craft, and the only Stygian craft that has cleared the
Cimmerian Harbor for years is the House-boat--Q. E. D."

"We can go back until we find the ripple again, and follow that,
I presume," sneered Le Coq, who did not take much stock in the
theories of his great rival, largely because he was a detective by
intuition rather than by study of the science.

"You can if you want to, but it is better not to," rejoined
Holmes, simply, as though not observing the sneer, "because the
ripple represents the outer lines of the angle of disturbance in the
water; and as any one of the sides to an angle is greater than the
perpendicular from the hypothenuse to the apex, you'd merely be going
the long way. This is especially important when you consider the
formation of the bow of the House-boat, which is rounded like the
stern of most vessels, and comes near to making a pair of ripples at
an angle of ninety degrees."

"Then," observed Sir Walter, with a sigh of disappointment, "we
must change our course and sail for Paris?"

"I am afraid so," said Holmes; "but of course it's by no means
certain as yet. I think if Columbus would go up into the mizzentop
and look about him, he might discover something either in
confirmation or refutation of the theory."

"He couldn't discover anything," put in Pinzon. "He never
did."

"Well, I like that!" retorted Columbus. "I'd like to know who
discovered America."

"So should I," observed Leif Ericson, with a wink at
Vespucci.

"Tut!" retorted Columbus. "I did it, and the world knows it,
whether you claim it or not."

"Yes, just as Noah discovered Ararat," replied Pinzon. "You sat
upon the deck until we ran plumb into an island, after floating about
for three months, and then you couldn't tell it from a continent,
even when you had it right before your eyes. Noah might just as well
have told his family that he discovered a roof garden as for you to
go back to Spain telling 'em all that San Salvador was the United
States."

"Well, I don't care," said Columbus, with a short laugh. "I'm
the one they celebrate, so what's the odds? I'd rather stay down
here in the smoking-room enjoying a small game, anyhow, than climb up
that mast and strain my eyes for ten or a dozen hours looking for
evidence to prove or disprove the correctness of another man's
theory. I wouldn't know evidence when I saw it, anyhow. Send Judge
Blackstone."

"I draw the line at the mizzentop," observed Blackstone. "The
dignity of the bench must and shall be preserved, and I'll never
consent to climb up that rigging, getting pitch and paint on my
ermine, no matter who asks me to go."

"Whomsoever I tell to go, shall go," put in Holmes, firmly. "I
am commander of this ship. It will pay you to remember that, Judge
Blackstone."

"And I am the Court of Appeals," retorted Blackstone, hotly.
"Bear that in mind, captain, when you try to send me up. I'll issue
a writ of habeas corpus on my own body, and commit you for
contempt."

"There's no use of sending the Judge, anyhow," said Raleigh,
fearing by the glitter that came into the eye of the commander that
trouble might ensue unless pacificatory measures were resorted to.
"He's accustomed to weighing everything carefully, and cannot be
rushed into a decision. If he saw any evidence, he'd have to sit on
it a week before reaching a conclusion. What we need here more than
anything else is an expert seaman, a lookout, and I nominate Shem. He
has sailed under his father, and I have it on good authority that he
is a nautical expert."

Holmes hesitated for an instant. He was considering the
necessity of disciplining the recalcitrant Blackstone, but he finally
yielded.

"Very well," he said. "Shem be it. Bo'sun, pipe Shem on deck,
and tell him that general order number one requires him to report at
the mizzentop right away, and that immediately he sees anything he
shall come below and make it known to me. As for the rest of us,
having a very considerable appetite, I do now decree that it is
dinner-time. Shall we go below?"

"I don't think I care for any, thank you," said Raleigh. "Fact
is-- ah--I dined last week, and am not hungry."

Noah laughed. "Oh, come below and watch us eat, then," he said.
"It'll do you good."

But there was no reply. Raleigh had plunged head first into his
state-room, which fortunately happened to be on the upper deck. The
rest of the spirits repaired below to the saloon, where they were
soon engaged in an animated discussion of such viands as the larder
provided.

"This," said Dr. Johnson, from the head of the table, "is what I
call comfort. I don't know that I am so anxious to recover the
House- boat, after all."

"Nor I," said Socrates, "with a ship like this to go off
cruising on, and with such a larder. Look at the thickness of that
puree, Doctor- -"

"Excuse me," said Boswell, faintly, "but I--I've left my
note--bub-- book upstairs, Doctor, and I'd like to go up and get
it."

"Certainly," said Dr. Johnson. "I judge from your color, which
is highly suggestive of a modern magazine poster, that it might be
well too if you stayed on deck for a little while and made a few
entries in your commonplace book."

"Thank you," said Boswell, gratefully. "Shall you say anything
clever during dinner, sir? If so, I might be putting it down while
I'm up--"

"Get out!" roared the Doctor. "Get up as high as you can--get
up with Shem on the mizzentop--"

"Very good, sir," replied Boswell, and he was off.

"You ought to be more lenient with him, Doctor," said Bonaparte;
"he means well."

"I know it," observed Johnson; "but he's so very previous. Last
winter, at Chaucer's dinner to Burns, I made a speech, which Boswell
printed a week before it was delivered, with the words 'laughter' and
'uproarious applause' interspersed through it. It placed me in a
false position."

"How did he know what you were going to say?" queried
Demosthenes.

"Don't know," replied Johnson. "Kind of mind-reader, I fancy,"
he added, blushing a trifle. "But, Captain Holmes, what do you
deduce from your observation of the wake of the House-boat? If she's
going to Paris, why the change?"

"I have two theories," replied the detective.

"Which is always safe," said Le Coq.

"Always; it doubles your chances of success," acquiesced Holmes.
"Anyhow, it gives you a choice, which makes it more interesting. The
change of her course from Londonward to Parisward proves to me either
that Kidd is not satisfied with the extent of the revenge he has
already taken, and wishes to ruin you gentlemen financially by
turning your wives, daughters, and sisters loose on the Parisian
shops, or that the pirates have themselves been overthrown by the
ladies, who have decided to prolong their cruise and get some fun out
of their misfortune."

"And where else than to Paris would any one in search of
pleasure go?" asked Bonaparte.

"I had more fun a few miles outside of Brussels," said
Wellington, with a sly wink at Washington.

"Oh, let up on that!" retorted Bonaparte. "It wasn't you beat
me at Waterloo. You couldn't have beaten me at a plain ordinary game
of old-maid with a stacked pack of cards, much less in the game of
war, if you hadn't had the elements with you."

"Tut!" snapped Wellington. "It was clear science laid you out,
Boney."

"Taisey-voo!" shouted the irate Corsican. "Clear science be
hanged! Wet science was what did it. If it hadn't been for the rain,
my little Duke, I should have been in London within a week, my
grenadiers would have been camping in your Rue Peekadeely, and the
Old Guard all over everywhere else."

"You must have had a gay army, then," laughed Caesar. "What
are French soldiers made of, that they can't stand the wet--unshrunk
linen or flannel?"

"Bah!" observed Napoleon, shrugging his shoulders and walking a
few paces away. "You do not understand the French. The Frenchman is
not a pell-mell soldier like you Romans; he is the poet of arms; he
does not go in for glory at the expense of his dignity; style, form,
is dearer to him than honor, and he has no use for fighting in the
wet and coming out of the fight conspicuous as a victor with the curl
out of his feathers and his epaulets rusted with the damp. There is
no glory in water. But if we had had umbrellas and mackintoshes, as
every Englishman who comes to the Continent always has, and a bath-
tub for everybody, then would your Waterloo have been different
again, and the great democracy of Europe with a Bonaparte for emperor
would have been founded for what the Americans call the keeps; and as
for your little Great Britain, ha! she would have become the
Blackwell's Island of the Greater France."

"You're almost as funny as Punch isn't," drawled Wellington,
with an angry gesture at Bonaparte. "You weren't within telephoning
distance of victory all day. We simply played with you, my boy. It
was a regular game of golf for us. We let you keep up pretty close
and win a few holes, but on the home drive we had you beaten in one
stroke. Go to, my dear Bonaparte, and stop talking about the
flood."

"It's a lucky thing for us that Noah wasn't a Frenchman, eh?"
said Frederick the Great. "How that rain would have fazed him if he
had been! The human race would have been wiped out."

"Oh, pshaw!" ejaculated Noah, deprecating the unseemliness of
the quarrel, and putting his arm affectionately about Bonaparte's
shoulder. "When you come down to that, I was French--as French as
one could be in those days--and these Gallic subjects of my friend
here were, every one of 'em, my lineal descendants, and their hatred
of rain was inherited directly from me, their ancestor."

"Are not we English as much your descendants?" queried
Wellington, arching his eyebrows.

"You are," said Noah, "but you take after Mrs. Noah more than
after me. Water never fazes a woman, and your delight in tubs is an
essentially feminine trait. The first thing Mrs. Noah carried aboard
was a laundry outfit, and then she went back for rugs and coats and
all sorts of hand-baggage. Gad, it makes me laugh to this day when I
think of it! She looked for all the world like an Englishman
travelling on the Continent as she walked up the gang-plank behind
the elephants, each elephant with a Gladstone bag in his trunk and a
hat-box tied to his tail." Here the venerable old weather-prophet
winked at Munchausen, and the little quarrel which had been imminent
passed off in a general laugh.

"Where's Boswell? He ought to get that anecdote," said
Johnson.

"I've locked him up in the library," said Holmes. "He's in
charge of the log, and as I have a pretty good general idea as to
what is about to happen, I have mapped out a skeleton of the plot and
set him to work writing it up." Here the detective gave a sudden
start, placed his hand to his ear, listened intently for an instant,
and, taking out his watch and glancing at it, added, quietly, "In
three minutes Shem will be in here to announce a discovery, and one
of great importance, I judge, from the squeak."

The assemblage gazed earnestly at Holmes for a moment.

"The squeak?" queried Raleigh.

"Precisely," said Holmes. "The squeak is what I said, and as I
always say what I mean, it follows logically that I meant what I
said."

"I heard no squeak," observed Dr. Johnson; "and, furthermore, I
fail to see how a squeak, if I had heard it, would have portended a
discovery of importance."

"It would not--to you," said Holmes; "but with me it is
different. My hearing is unusually acute. I can hear the dropping of
a pin through a stone wall ten feet thick; any sound within a mile of
my eardrum vibrates thereon with an intensity which would surprise
you, and it is by the use of cocaine that I have acquired this
wonderfully acute sense. A property which dulls the senses of most
people renders mine doubly apprehensive; therefore, gentlemen, while
to you there was no auricular disturbance, to me there was. I heard
Shem sliding down the mast a minute since. The fact that he slid
down the mast instead of climbing down the rigging showed that he was
in great haste, therefore he must have something to communicate of
great importance."

"Why isn't he here already, then? It wouldn't take him two
minutes to get from the deck here," asked the ever-auspicious Le
Coq.

"It is simple," returned Holmes, calmly. "If you will go
yourself and slide down that mast you will see. Shem has stopped for
a little witch-hazel to soothe his burns. It is no cool matter
sliding down a mast two hundred feet in height."

As Sherlock Holmes spoke the door burst open and Shem rushed
in.

"A signal of distress, captain!" he cried.

"From what quarter--to larboard?" asked Holmes.

"No," returned Shem, breathless.

"Then it must be dead ahead," said Holmes.

"Why not to starboard?" asked Le Coq, dryly.

"Because," answered Holmes, confidently, "it never happens so.
If you had ever read a truly exciting sea-tale, my dear Le Coq, you
would have known that interesting things, and particularly signals of
distress, are never seen except to larboard or dead ahead."

A murmur of applause greeted this retort, and Le Coq
subsided.

"The nature of the signal?" demanded Holmes.

"A black flag, skull and cross-bones down, at half-mast!" cried
Shem, "and on a rock-bound coast!"

"They're marooned, by heavens!" shouted Holmes, springing to his
feet and rushing to the deck, where he was joined immediately by Sir
Walter, Dr. Johnson, Bonaparte, and the others.

"Isn't he a daisy?" whispered Demosthenes to Diogenes as they
climbed the stairs.

"He is more than that; he's a blooming orchid," said Diogenes,
with intense enthusiasm. "I think I'll get my X-ray lantern and see
if he's honest."