Dear Illusion by Kingsley Amis

Author:Kingsley Amis
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781590178256
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2015-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

THE DARKWATER HALL MYSTERY

On consulting my notes, their paper grown yellow and their ink brown with the passage of almost forty years, I find it to have been in the closing days of July, 1885, that my friend Sherlock Holmes fell victim, more completely perhaps than at any other time, to the innate melancholy of his temperament. The circumstances were not propitious. London was stiflingly hot, without a drop of rain to lay the dust which, at intervals, a damp wind swept up Baker Street. The exertions caused Holmes by the affair of the Wallace-Bardwell portfolio, and the subsequent entrapment of the elusive Count Varga, had taken their toll of him. His grey eyes, always sharp and piercing, acquired a positively hectic brightness, and the thinness of his hawk-like nose seemed accentuated. He smoked incessantly, getting through an ounce or more of heavy shag tobacco in a single day.

As his depression became blacker, he would sit in his purple dressing-gown with his fiddle across his knee and draw from it strange harmonies, sometimes sonorous, sometimes puzzling, more often harsh and disagreeable. Strange too, and quite as disagreeable, were the odours given off by his chemical experiments; I did not inquire their purpose. When he brought out his hair-trigger pistol and proceeded to add elaborate serifs to the patriotic VR done in bullet-pocks in the wall opposite his armchair, my impatience and my concern together dictated action. Nothing short of a complete rest, in conditions of comfort and ease such as I could not possibly provide, would restore my friend to health. I moved swiftly; telegrams were exchanged; within little more than twelve hours Sherlock Holmes was on his way to Hurlstone in Sussex, the seat of that Reginald Musgrave whose family treasures he had so brilliantly rediscovered some five years earlier. Thus it was that events conspired to embroil me in what I must describe as a truly singular adventure.

It came about in the following fashion. That same afternoon, I had just returned from visiting a patient when the housekeeper announced the arrival of a Lady Fairfax. The name at once stirred something in my memory, but I had had no time to apprehend it before my visitor had crossed the threshold of the sitting-room. There entered a blonde young woman of the most unusual beauty and distinction of feature. I was at once aware in her of a discomposure obviously not at all derived from the sweltering weather, to which indeed her bearing proclaimed utter indifference. I encouraged this lovely but troubled creature to be seated and to divulge her purpose.

‘It was Mr Sherlock Holmes whom I came to see, but I understand he has gone away and is not expected back for a fortnight,’ she began.

‘That is so.’

‘Can he not be recalled?’

I shook my head. ‘Quite out of the question.’

‘But I come on a matter of the utmost urgency. A life is in danger.’

‘Lady Fairfax,’ said I, ‘Holmes has been overworking and must have rest and a change of air.

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