Sunstroke (part 2)

The conclusion to a short story by this Russian author.  You can read the original here.

The bazaar was already dispersing.  For some reason he walked along the fresh manure between the carts, between the carts with cucumbers, among the new tureens and pots, and the old women seated on the ground beckoned to him, constantly interrupting one another, picked up the pots with their hands and knocked and rang them with their fingers to indicate their fine quality, while the men deafened him, screaming: "First-rate cucumbers, my lord, absolutely first-rate!"  All of this was so dumb and so senseless that he made haste from the bazaar. 

He went into the cathedral where loud, merry and powerful singing could be heard – as if the singers were conscious of having fulfilled a duty – and then walked on for a while, turning around the small, hot and neglected little garden on the edge of the hill above the bright steely expanse of the river.  The shoulder straps and buttons of his tunic got so hot that he could no longer touch them.  His hatband was wet inside with sweat and his face felt like it was aflame.   Returning to the hotel he entered the large, empty and cool dining room on the lower floor with great relish.  And with equal relish he removed his hat and sat down at the table beside the open window through which the heat passed.  Nevertheless the air was still blowing and he ordered a bowl of botvinya with ice.  Everything was good, in everything one could find unlimited happiness and great joy.  Even in this oppressive heat and amidst all the smells of the bazaar, in this unknown little town and in this old district hotel she was there, this joy, and his heart simply broke into pieces.

He drank a few shots of vodka, nibbled on some undersalted cucumbers and dill and, without much reflection, felt that tomorrow he would perish if by some miracle it were possible to bring her back and spend with her one more day, today.  And he would spend it with her only because he had something to tell her, something to prove to her, to convince her how his love for her was both torture and ecstasy.  Prove what?  Convince her of what?  He did not know why, but this was more necessary than life itself. 

"My nerves are completely shot!" he said, pouring himself a fifth shot of vodka.

He pushed the botvinya away from himself, ordered a cup of black coffee and began to smoke while his thoughts grew more tense.  What was he supposed to do now?  How could he rid himself of this sudden and unexpected love?  But ridding himself of it – and this he felt far too powerfully – was impossible.  And then he suddenly got up again, took up his hat and riding crop and, having asked where the post office was, scurried off in that direction with a telegram all planned out in his head: "Henceforth will all my life – forever, to the grave – be yours, and in your power."  Once he reached the old building and its high walls that housed both the post office and the telegraph, however, he stopped in horror.  He knew the town she lived in; he knew that he had a husband and a three-year-old daughter; but he did not know her name, neither first nor last!  Several times yesterday he had asked her about it, at lunch and in the hotel, and every time she had laughed and said:    

"And why do you need to know who I am or what my name is?"

On the corner beside the post office there was a window to a photo shop.  He stood and gazed for a long while at a large portrait of a soldier in thick epaulettes, with bulging eyes, a low forehead, suspiciously magnificent sideburns and a barrel chest simply littered with medals.  How absurd and frightening is the everyday and the habitual once the heart is struck – yes, struck, now he understood it – by this "sunstroke," by this love too powerful, by this happiness too great!  He looked at a pair of newlyweds – a young man in a long frock coat and white necktie, his hair almost spiked like a hedgehog's, standing out to the front arm-in-arm with a young woman in wedding dress silk – then shifted his eyes to the portrait of a pretty, sprightly girl in a student's cap cocked to the side.  Tired of the torturous envy of all these unsuffering strangers, he began to look tensely along the road.

"Where should I go?  What should I do?"

The street was completely empty.  All the buildings were the same – white, two floors, commercial, with large gardens – and it seemed not a soul lived there; the thick white dust lay upon the bridge road, and all of this blinded him, all of this was filled with the hot, flaming and joyful sun, a sun that here, however, seemed aimless.  In the distance the street rose, bent and leaned with its own reflection against the cloudless, greyish firmament.  In this there was something southern that reminded him of Sevastopol, Kerch ... Anapa.  This was especially unbearable.  And the lieutenant, his head lowered, squinting from the light, concentrating on where his feet were going, staggering, stumbling, clicking one spur against another, then began to walk back.     

He returned to the hotel as fatigued as if he had made a great trek somewhere in Turkistan or in the Sahara.  Gathering his last bit of energy, he entered his large, empty room.  The room had already been made and was now deprived of the final traces of her; only a single hairpin which she had forgotten lay upon the night stand!  He removed his tunic and looked at himself in the mirror: his face – that ordinary officer face, grey from the heat with his white moustache burnt by the sun and the somewhat light blue whiteness of his eyes which now in the heat looked even whiter – all of this assumed some crazed, excited expression, and in his thin white shirt with the starched standing collar there was something youthful and profoundly unhappy.     

He lay on his back on the bed and threw his dusty boots in a heap.  The windows were open, and the curtains puffed outwards as a light breeze blew through them from time to time, introducing into the room the heat of the warmed iron roofs and of this whole luminous and now completely abandoned and silent Volga realm.  He lay there, his hands crossed behind his head, and stared straight ahead.  Then he gritted his teeth, shut his eyelids with the sensation that tears were rolling down his cheek, and finally fell asleep.  When he opened his eyes again, a yellow evening sun was already turning red behind the curtains.  The wind had died down.  It was stuffy and dry in the room like an oven.  And now he remembered the day before and this morning as if they had happened ten years ago.   

He got up slowly, washed himself slowly, opened the curtains, called and asked for a samovar and the bill, and for a long time sat there drinking tea and lemon.  Then he called for the coachman and his things to be taken, and sitting on the coach again, on its rusty, burnt seat, he gave the footman a whole five rubles.  

"My lord, I believe I had the honor of bringing you here last night!" said the coachman gleefully as he took up the reins.

When they got to the pier a blue summer night was already settling on the Volga, and lights of a variety of colors were scattered in the river, and the lights hung from the masts of an approaching steamer.

"Delivered just in time!" said the coachman ingratiatingly.

The lieutenant gave him five rubles as well, took his ticket and walked out onto the pier.  Just like yesterday there was a soft thud against the pier's berth and his head spun mildly as he steadied himself.  Then there came the end flight, the roiling, running sound before the water beneath the wheels of a retreating steamer.   And all this seemed extraordinarily inviting, the fact that the steamer was crowded with people, with lights everywhere and scents wafting from its kitchen.

A minute later they had gone further and higher to the place where she had been taken that very morning. 

A dark summer's twilight faded before him in the distance, a dusky, sleepy and multicolored vision reflected in the river, and somewhere shined a trembling ripple below the horizon, below this twilight, and the lights continued to shine, dissipating in the surrounding darkness.

And the lieutenant sat below the awning on the deck feeling as if he had aged ten years.

Sunstroke (part 1)

The first part to a short story by this Russian author.  You can read the original here.

After lunch they left the hot and brightly lit cafeteria on the deck then lingered by the railing.  She closed her eyes and pressed a hand to her cheek, her palm facing out, laughed that simple, lovely laugh of hers – everything about this young lady was lovely – and said:

"I seem to be drunk ... Where did you come from?  Three hours ago I didn't even suspect you existed.  I don't even know where you got aboard.  In Samara?  But it doesn't matter ... Is my head spinning or are we turning around somewhere?"

Before them lay darkness and harbor lights.  From the darkness a strong, soft wind caressed their faces, the lights slipped somewhat to the side, and the steamer traced with Volga foppishness a wide arc as it approached the small wharf.  

The lieutenant took her hand and raised it to his lips.  The hand, small and forceful, smelled like suntanned skin, and so blissfully and horribly did his heart sink at the thought of how strong and swarthy she was beneath her lightweight dress after an entire month lying under the southern sun on the hot sea sand (she said she was coming from Anapa).  The lieutenant mumbled:

"Let's go ..."

"Where?" she asked, surprised.

"Onto the pier."

"Why?"

He fell silent.  She again placed the back of her hand to her hot cheek. 

"It's madness..."

"Let's go," he repeated bluntly.  "I beg you."

"Oh do whatever you like," she said, turning around.

The steamer continued its steady approach until it hit the dimly lit pier with a light thud and they almost fell on top of one another.  Above their heads flew the end of the cable, then they were thrown backwards as the gangplanks thundered and the water began to roil.  The lieutenant scurried about for their things.

A minute later they had walked past the sleepy office, emerged onto sand as deep as the hub of a wheel, and then sat down silently behind a driver in a dusty open carriage.  Upon that road soft with dust and sporadically lit by crooked street lamps, the gentle climb uphill seemed endless.  Once they had reached the top they began their rumble across the bridge – here was some square or other, there some local government buildings, a watch tower, the warmth and scents of a regional town in summer ... The coachman stopped at an illuminated entryway behind whose closed doors rose an old, wooden spiral staircase.  An old, unshaven footman in a pink garibaldi and frock coat took their things and lurched forward on his haggard legs.  They entered a large if horribly stuffy room which the day's sunlight had left quite hot.  Puffy white curtains guarded the windows and atop a pier table stood two unlit candles, and as soon as they had gone in and the footman had shut the door, the lieutenant impetuously threw himself upon her.  And the couple began kissing each other in such a gasping frenzy that they would remember this minute for many years: in both their lives neither one of them had ever experienced anything like this.

At ten o'clock on a sunny, hot, happy morning filled with church bells, with the bazaar on the square in front of the hotel, with the smell of hay and tar and anew with everything that was complicated and redolent in a Russian regional town, she, this slight, nameless woman, this woman who had not revealed her name but jokingly referred to herself as the beautiful stranger, departed.  She had slept little; but that morning, coming out from behind the partition near the bed, she washed and dressed in five minutes and was as fresh as she had been at seventeen years of age.  Was she embarrassed?  No, only very slightly.  She was back to how she had been before: simple, merry and reasonable.  

"No, no, darling," she said in answer to his desire to keep traveling together.  "No, you'll have to stay until the next steamer comes.  If we go together everything will be ruined.  That would be so unpleasant for me.   I give you my word that I am not at all what you might think I am.  Nothing like this has ever happened to me in my entire life – and it won't happen again.  It's as if I fell under an eclipse ... Or, better, as if we both got something like sunstroke."   

Somehow the lieutenant found himself easily agreeing with her.  In the light and happy air he took her to the pier just as the rose-colored "Plane" was casting off.  He kissed her on the deck in front of everyone, and hardly had he managed to jump off the gangplank when the boat began moving away.   

And just as easily and insouciantly did he return to the hotel.  Something, however, had already changed.  The room without her seemed utterly different than when she had been there.  It was still full of her – and yet empty all the same.  It was so strange!  Her fine English perfume still haunted the room, and on the tray sat her unfinished cup, but she was no longer there.  And the lieutenant's heart was suddenly seized by such tenderness that he scampered off to smoke and paced around the room several times. 

"A strange adventure!"  he said out loud, laughing and feeling that tears were welling up in his eyes.  "'I give you my word that I am not at all what you might think I am,' and now she's gone."

The partition was moved aside; the bed was still unmade; and now he felt that he simply didn't have the strength to look at that bed.   He blocked it off with the partition and shut the windows so as not to hear the bazaar chatter and screech of wheels, and having drawn the puffy white curtains over the windows, he sat down on the couch.  So this was the end to a "road adventure!"  She's gone and now already very far away.  Most likely, she's sitting in the white glass lounge or on the deck admiring the enormous, brilliant river beneath the sun, the approaching rafts, the yellow shoals, the shimmering blue distance of the water and sky, the entire expanse of the Volga.  And so it will be forever and ever ...  For now where could they see other again.  "I can't," he thought, "I just can't go to that town no matter what the reason, that town where her husband and three-year-old daughter live, where all her family lives and where she has her daily life!"  And this town seemed special, off-limits, secluded; and the mere thought that she would go back and live out her lonely life in this town often, perhaps, remembering him, remembering their casual and so fleeting encounter and he would never see her again, this thought amazed and stunned him.  No, no, this simply could not be!  It would be too wild, too unnatural, too improbable!  And he felt such pain and such uselessness in living out the rest of his days without her that he was seized by horror and despair.        

"What the hell!" he thought, getting up and again pacing about the room trying not to look at the bed behind the partition.  "What is it with me?  What is it about her in particular?  And what really happened?  It really was some kind of sunstroke!  More importantly, how I am going to spend the whole day without her in this out-of-the-way place?" 

He still remembered all of her and all her most minute traits and particularities; he remembered the smell of her suntanned skin and her light dress, her strong body, the lively, plain and merry sound of her voice.  In him the feeling of just having experienced all her female loveliness was still extraordinarily alive; but now it was superseded by a second, completely new feeling, a strange, unclear feeling which didn't exist when they were together, a feeling which he couldn't assume even existed within him.  Starting yesterday it was all, he believed, an amusing acquaintance, and yet now he couldn't tell her a thing!  "Even more important," he thought, "is the fact that I'll never be able to tell her!  What do I do?  How can I survive this endless day with these memories, with this unshakable torture, in this godforsaken little town on the banks of the shimmering Volga on which that rose-colored steamer carried her away!"

He had to save himself, occupy himself with something, distract himself, go somewhere.  He decided to put on a peaked cap, grabbed a riding crop and walked through the empty hallway clicking his spurs and running down the narrow staircase to the landing.  Fine, but where should he go now?  At the entryway  a young coachman in a fitted coat was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.  The lieutenant looked at him in confused astonishment: how can he sit there so calmly in his coach smoking and how can he be so indifferent, so simple and so uncaring?  "I'm probably the only horribly unhappy person in this whole town," he thought as he made his way to the bazaar.

The Wendigo

Presumably we all have nightmares (we cannot believe those who claim never to recall in waking what took place in sleep), but what those nightmares entail will depend much on the mind in their thrall.  Attempts to find commonalities among the legions of the reposed should be dismissed as swiftly as the long day's platitudes.  Nightmares may be universal, but riveting nightmares tend to be as exceptional as riveting biographies (with, it should be said, little coincidence of the two).  One of my most recurrent midnight scenes involves a fairground.  Perhaps the modern concept of an amusement park provides a better description.  I am alone and with friends; the park is both full of customers and gleefully empty; what I can say for certain is that it is night or evening, which necessitates a definite amount of artificial light, and a large store of current to engineer the rides swooping and sliding behind me.  What is occurring in my vicinity I never solve; but the motion and sounds of the machines indicate that on these grounds something baleful has taken root.  Sometimes I have a rucksack on; sometimes a companion is also outfitted with this appurtenance.  Most often I have awoken just as the tumult seems to be teetering on the brink of riot, and yet the source of this chaos is never revealed.  A different landscape but similar conundrum besets the characters in this famous story.

Our place is the wilds of Canada, and our cast is an unlikely quartet: Cathcart, a Scotsman and materialist scientist; his nephew Simpson; Hank Davis, a guide; and Simpson's guide, the French Canadian Joseph Défago.  A fifth man, the Native American Punk, has little function outside of his cooking, but he will steal more than one scene.  The aim of this small hunting party is the moose that roam the northern wilderness as hegemons among the mighty trees; they are practically unstoppable, although they are not what one would normally deem apex predators.  Like all good fictional prey, the moose never rear their comely antlers but are only rumored to be lurking a kilometer away or perhaps less, a relatively simple kill for a trained shot even if the animals can easily detect footsteps in their direction.   It is then from Simpson's perspective that we gain an affective picture of the surroundings:

It was one thing, he realized, to hear about primeval forests, but quite another to see them. While to dwell in them and seek acquaintance with their wild life was, again, an initiation that no intelligent man could undergo without a certain shifting of personal values hitherto held for permanent and sacred .... The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the only sounds audible.  The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast world of branches nothing stirred.  Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees.  In front, through doorways pillared by huge straight stems, lay the stretch of Fifty Island Water, a crescent-shaped lake some fifteen miles from tip to tip, and perhaps five miles across where they were camped.  A sky of rose and saffron, more clear than any atmosphere Simpson had ever known, still dropped its pale streaming fires across the waves, where the islands – a hundred, surely, rather than fifty – floated like the fairy barques of some enchanted fleet.  Fringed with pines, whose crests fingered most delicately the sky, they almost seemed to move upwards as the light faded – about to weigh anchor and navigate the pathways of the heavens instead of the currents of their native and desolate lake.

If you have read much of Blackwood, you will understand that it is precisely in such detail that he excels.  To paraphrase this author, Blackwood allows nature to speak for itself; he does not armor it in unwieldy description.  For that very reason do his psychological tales tend to drift into diffuse abstraction, distant echoes of a greater image now long forlorn.  But with one of the territories least explored by man as his backdrop, there seems little to encumber the magic labyrinths of his intellect.

What fate befalls our men?  The hunters and their guides split in pairs, and our text chooses to follow Simpson and Défago, a wise move as Cathcart later proves himself to be an insufferable skeptic.  The young men hike vigorously for a day or two and still come very shallow into the endless woods where their alleged bounty awaits.  Since hunting holds about as much appeal to me as chewing glass shards, I cannot possibly evaluate their methods nor the terrain on which they dare to practice them.  Suffice it to say that about a third of the story passes before the title is uttered, and it is given but casual mention.  One fateful night, Simpson is assailed by something ineluctable and cannot sleep without torment:

As, sometimes, in a nightmare events crowd upon each other's heels with a conviction of dreadfulest reality, yet some inconsistent detail accuses the whole display of incompleteness and disguise, so the events that now followed, though they actually happened, persuaded the mind somehow that the detail which could explain them had been overlooked in the confusion, and that therefore they were but partly true, the rest delusion.  At the back of the sleeper's mind something remains awake, ready to let slip the judgment.  'All this is not quite real; when you wake up you'll understand.'

I am loath to betray what the young Scot finds and does not find the next morning, because those details are perfectly presaged yet more than a bit surprising.  The best moments still involve Punk, especially what he is rumored to have done at the end of the narrative, as well as his furtive glances and stealthy evenings spent listening to or smelling God knows what.  And you may also discover how useful it is in a story like this to have a character by the name of Défago.  

Presumably we all have nightmares (we cannot believe those who claim never to recall in waking what took place in sleep), but what those nightmares entail will depend much on the mind in their thrall.  Attempts to find commonalities among the legions of the reposed should be dismissed as swiftly as the long day's platitudes.  Nightmares may be universal, but riveting nightmares tend to be as exceptional as riveting biographies (with, it should be said, little coincidence of the two).  One of my most recurrent midnight scenes involves a fair.  Perhaps the modern concept of an amusement park provides a better description.  I am alone and with friends; the park is both full of customers and gladfully empty; what I can say for certain is that it is night or evening, which necessitates a definite amount of artificial light, and a large store of current to engineer the rides swooping and sliding behind me.  What is occurring in my vicinity I never solve; but the motion and sounds of the machines indicate that on these grounds something baleful has taken root.   Sometimes  I have a rucksack on; sometimes a companion is also outfitted with this appurtenance.  Most often  I have awoken just as the tumult seems to be teetering on the brink of riot, and yet the source of this chaos is never revealed.  A different landscape but similar conundrum besets the characters in this famous story.

Our place is the wilds of Canada, and our cast is an unlikely quartet: Cathcart, a Scotsman and materialist scientist; his nephew Simpson; Hank Davis, a guide; and Simpson's guide, the French Canadian Joseph Défago.  A fifth man, the native American Punk, has little function outside of his cooking, but he will steal more than one scene.  The aim of this small hunting party is the moose that roam the northern wildnerness as hegemons among the mighty trees; they are practically unstoppable, although they are not what one would normally deem apex predators.  Like all good fictional prey, the moose never rear their antlers but are only rumored to be lurking a kilometer away or perhaps less, a relatively simple kill for a trained shot even if the animals can easily detect footsteps in their direction.   It is then from Simpson's perspective that we gain an affective picture of the surroundings:

It was one thing, he realized, to hear about primeval forests, but quite another to see them. While to dwell in them and seek acquaintance with their wild life was, again, an initiation that no intelligent man could undergo without a certain shifting of personal values hitherto held for permanent and sacred .... The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the only sounds audible.  The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast world of branches nothing stirred.  Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees. In front, through doorways pillared by huge straight stems, lay the stretch of Fifty Island Water, a crescent-shaped lake some fifteen miles from tip to tip, and perhaps five miles across where they were camped.  A sky of rose and saffron, more clear than any atmosphere Simpson had ever known, still dropped its pale streaming fires across the waves, where the islands—a hundred, surely, rather than fifty—floated like the fairy barques of some enchanted fleet.  Fringed with pines, whose crests fingered most delicately the sky, they almost seemed to move upwards as the light faded—about to weigh anchor and navigate the pathways of the heavens instead of the currents of their native and desolate lake.

If you have read much of Blackwood, you will understand that it is precisely in such detail that he excels.  To paraphrase this author, Blackwood allows nature to speak for itself; he does not armor it in unwieldy description.  For that very reason do his psychological tales tend to drift into diffuse abstraction, distant echoes of a greater image now long forlorn.  But with one of the territories least explored by man as his backdrop, there seems little to  

Black Peter

It is hardly happenstance that the greatest novel ever composed takes place at sea: once upon a time most of us had some relationship to what comprises the majority of the earth's surface – but these times are gone.  The sea has been replaced with an even more mysterious place, the sky.  While our oceans at their deepest stretch to about five miles our heavens go well past our knowledge of space and time.  It is then with some nostalgia that we review old stories of sailors, squalls, and krakens in their various guises, and most conclude that this was a stage of human development best left unbelabored now that we have metallic birds roaring above us.  Beautiful at moments, loud at others, they are not nearly as enchanting as the vessels on which Melville, Poe, and Stevenson moored our imaginings.  For that reason alone is it worth casting our minds back to this fantastic tale.

The year is 1895 and the Peter in question is fifty-year-old Captain Peter Carey, "a most daring and successful seal and whale fisher."  Carey left the endless cascading foam of the white waves, the brittle patches of life beneath the surface indifferent to his hulking presence, and retired with his wife and daughter to a small place near Forest Row, in Sussex.  Here Carey found little time for anything except drink and terrorizing his family.  Inspector Hopkins, a local official, would describe Carey as such:

He has been known to drive his wife and daughter out of doors in the middle of the night and flog them through the park until the whole village outside the gates was aroused by their screams.  He was summoned once for a savage assault upon the old vicar, who had called upon him to remonstrate with him upon his conduct.  In short ... you would go far before you found a more dangerous man than Peter Carey, and I have heard that he bore the same character when he commanded his ship.  He was known in the trade as Black Peter, and the name was given him, not only on account of his swarthy features and the colour of his huge beard, but for the humours which were the terror of all around him.  I need not say that he was loathed and avoided by every one of his neighbours.

Fiends like these do not last long, at not least in fiction.  And sure enough, not four pages into the narrative, we find our captain on the wall of his small, reclusive cabin at the end of his estate, "pinned like a beetle on a card."  What kind of weapon could make this barbarian into a mere insect?  That which has slain countless other oceanic predators: the brutal thrust of an iron harpoon.  As much as his wife and daughter would have liked to provide his end – his daughter even prides herself on not mourning her father's death – there is no way on earth or beyond that they could have possibly made use of the murder weapon in the manner described.  Are we looking for a man of gargantuan strength or is the puny fellow that Holmes, Watson, and Hopkins see breaking in Carey's cabin the real perpetrator?  Our clues include a tobacco bag, a tin containing some rather eccentric documents, a drab-covered notebook with the initials J. H. N., a bottle of rum and two dirty glasses, and a filthy wealth of coincidence that all lead the investigators to employ some most unusual methods.

Holmes has a hunch that requires research only mentioned towards the end of the story, which is a typical conceit.  But the hunch is more than facile intuition or, as in some of the less endearing Holmes outings, so abstruse as to seem grounded in processes and patterns of data collection that would baffle even more devoted readers.  As good as the story is and as satisfyingly as Holmes's deductions are maintained, the premise was clearly nourished working backwards.  That is to say, Conan Doyle had an image – the same image that "gets between" the murderer and his sleep – of Black Peter impaled upon the symbol of his exploitative trade and devised a scenario of which such a murder could be a plausible result.  Perhaps if you've read Black Peter as many times as I have, you begin seeing the cracks, retracing the story's development, and contemplating the details that are ostensibly far less important than the underlying moral fabric.  Holmes himself has been on a streak of unusual cases, and his motives have been as noble as the weirdness in his work:

So unworldly was he – or so capricious – that he frequently refused his help to the powerful and wealthy where the problem made no appeal to his sympathies, while he would devote weeks of most intense application to the affairs of some humble client whose case presented those strange and dramatic qualities which appealed to his imagination and challenged his ingenuity.

As is often pointed out by Holmesians, our detective never really accepts any monetary compensation for his work (with the exception of one story previously reviewed on these pages, which for the time being shall remain nameless), so his militant hatred for the whining of the rich and privileged is hardly surprising.  Thankfully, Holmes is neither uppity nor squeamish enough to help with the most macabre of investigations and expect nothing more than sustained praise of his genius.  Too bad Black Peter simply liked to get paid.

Heine, "Schöne Wiege meiner Leiden"

A work ("O lovely cradle of my pain")  by this German poet.  You can read the original here.

O lovely cradle of my pain,                   
O lovely tombstone of my rest,            
O lovely town, our paths must twain:    
So fare thee well; we gave our best.    

So fare thee well, O hallow bound!      
Where you shall stray, there holds my Grace;               
So fare thee well, O hallow ground!
Where first I saw Her soft steps pace.

Yet had I not beheld Her once,           
O sweetest Queen of my poor heart!     
So never would it have been thus,      
That misery and I shan't part.            

Nor did I wish to touch your core,             
No love would I have gouged to flow;                    
A quiet life I'd lead, no more,                     
Wherever your warm breath might blow.

And yet 'tis you who bids me hence,         
Your mouth befouled with bitter word;    
And madness churns my every sense,
And my poor heart falls sick and hurt. 

Yet I lurch forth on walking stick,  
My dull limbs droop and bend the way;
Until my tired head will crick
So distant in a cooling grave.