A story best known today for its progressive views on race. And it still feels progressive well over a hundred years later.
A man named Grant Munro comes to Holmes concerned about the strange behaviour of his wife, Effie. She’d been previously married to a man living in Atlanta, Georgia who she’d had a child with. Both this husband and child had reportedly died in a fire. Munro claims to have seen the death certificate. Or more specifically, he says he’s seen the husband’s death certificate. This is actually a clever bit of clue-dropping. Of course, when we hear that he’s seen the death certificate (actually not in use in Georgia for another twenty years) we immediately think it must be bogus. Because why else mention it? But what we might not register is that he only says he’s seen the husband’s death certificate.
As it turns out the child is alive. Holmes speculates that the wife is being blackmailed by her still-living first husband, who has moved into a nearby cottage. Meanwhile, what’s really happened is that a truculent Scottish governess is living there with Effie’s daughter, who has been seen looking out the second-floor window while wearing a yellow mask.
There are two twists. First, Effie isn’t being blackmailed by her first husband. Second: her daughter is “a little coal-black negress.” Effie had, you see, “cut herself off from my race to wed” a Black man. After overcoming a bit of shock, however, Grant scoops the child up and agrees to adopt her, claiming to be a better man than his wife has credited him with being.
I call the husband’s views progressive, but Wikipedia goes further in finding them “extraordinarily liberal for the 1890s.” Though interracial marriage wasn’t illegal in Britain at the time, I think the reveal here would still have been quite something. For comparison, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles had just come out in 1891. This story was published in 1893. So they’re almost exactly contemporary. In Tess, Angel is so appalled when he finds out Tess had been effectively raped as a sixteen-year-old and had a child who died, that he abandons her and flees to Brazil. Diff’rent strokes indeed.
Watson introduces the story as one of Holmes’s rare failures, even though everything turned out well in the end. He tries to excuse Holmes’s shortcomings by saying that it was “when he was at his wits’ ends that his energy and his versatility were most admirable,” but the fact is that his guess as to the inhabitant of the cottage was nothing but the wildest speculation. Which, in turn, quite undercuts all his boasting about not indulging in a lot of guesswork in the absence of facts. But as regular readers should have known by now, Holmes is actually quite a fantasist, and while most of his solutions turn out to be accurate they are just as often as not lucky shots.
A little point that caught my attention is that when Effie gets up in the middle of the night to visit the cottage, Munro checks the time by taking his watch “from under the pillow.” This triggered very old memories of sleeping with my watch under my pillow. Memories so old now I can’t be sure if this is something I actually ever did. But at least it wasn’t unheard of, back in the day.
Alex Good 