His Last Bow by Arthur Conan Doyle (well read books .TXT) 📕

for a long time to come if you keep the terms,’ he said. ‘If not, I’ll have no more to do with you.’

“What were the terms?”

“Well, sir, they were that he was to have a key of the house. That was all right. Lodgers often have them. Also, that he was to be left entirely to himself and never, upon any excuse, to be disturbed.”

“Nothing wonderful in that, surely?”

“Not in reason, sir. But this is out of all reason. He has been there for ten days, and neither Mr. Warren, nor I, nor the girl has once set eyes upon him. We can hear that quick step of his pacing up and down, up and down, night, morning, and noon; but except on that first night he had never once gone out of the house.”

“Oh, he went out the first night, did he?”

“Yes, sir, and returned very late⁠—after we were all in bed. He told me after he had taken the rooms that he would do so and asked me not to bar the door. I heard him come up the stair after midnight.”

“But his meals?”

“It was his particular direction that we should always, when he rang, leave his meal upon a chair, outside his door. Then he rings again when he has finished, and we take it down from the same chair. If he wants anything else he prints it on a slip of paper and leaves it.”

“Prints it?”

“Yes, sir; prints it in pencil. Just the word, nothing more. Here’s the one I brought to show you⁠—‘soap.’ Here’s another⁠—‘match.’ This is one he left the first morning⁠—‘daily gazette.’ I leave that paper with his breakfast every morning.”

“Dear me, Watson,” said Holmes, staring with great curiosity at the slips of foolscap which the landlady had handed to him, “this is certainly a little unusual. Seclusion I can understand; but why print? Printing is a clumsy process. Why not write? What would it suggest, Watson?”

“That he desired to conceal his handwriting.”

“But why? What can it matter to him that his landlady should have a word of his writing? Still, it may be as you say. Then, again, why such laconic messages?”

“I cannot imagine.”

“It opens a pleasing field for intelligent speculation. The words are written with a broad-pointed, violet-tinted pencil of a not unusual pattern. You will observe that the paper is torn away at the side here after the printing was done, so that the ‘s’ of ‘soap’ is partly gone. Suggestive, Watson, is it not?”

“Of caution?”

“Exactly. There was evidently some mark, some thumbprint, something which might give a clue to the person’s identity. Now, Mrs. Warren, you say that the man was of middle size, dark, and bearded. What age would he be?”

“Youngish, sir⁠—not over thirty.”

“Well, can you give me no further indications?”

“He spoke good English, sir, and yet I thought he was a foreigner by his accent.”

“And he was well dressed?”

“Very smartly dressed, sir⁠—quite the gentleman. Dark clothes⁠—nothing you would note.”

“He gave no name?”

“No, sir.”

“And has had no letters or callers?”

“None.”

“But surely you or the girl enter his room of a morning?”

“No, sir; he looks after himself entirely.”

“Dear me! that is certainly remarkable. What about his luggage?”

“He had one big brown bag with him⁠—nothing else.”

“Well, we don’t seem to have much material to help us. Do you say nothing has come out of that room⁠—absolutely nothing?”

The landlady drew an envelope from her bag; from it she shook out two burnt matches and a cigarette-end upon the table.

“They were on his tray this morning. I brought them because I had heard that you can read great things out of small ones.”

Holmes shrugged his shoulders.

“There is nothing here,” said he. “The matches have, of course, been used to light cigarettes. That is obvious from the shortness of the burnt end. Half the match is consumed in lighting a pipe or cigar. But, dear me! this cigarette stub is certainly remarkable. The gentleman was bearded and moustached, you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I don’t understand that. I should say that only a clean-shaven man could have smoked this. Why, Watson, even your modest moustache would have been singed.”

“A holder?” I suggested.

“No, no; the end is matted. I suppose there could not be two people in your rooms, Mrs. Warren?”

“No, sir. He eats so little that I often wonder it can keep life in one.”

“Well, I think we must wait for a little more material. After all, you have nothing to complain of. You have received your rent, and he is not a troublesome lodger, though he is certainly an unusual one. He pays you well, and if he chooses to lie concealed it is no direct business of yours. We have no excuse for an intrusion upon his privacy until we have some reason to think that there is a guilty reason for it. I’ve taken up the matter, and I won’t lose sight of it. Report to me if anything fresh occurs, and rely upon my assistance if it should be needed.

“There are certainly some points of interest in this case, Watson,” he remarked when the landlady had left us. “It may, of course, be trivial⁠—individual eccentricity; or it may be very much deeper than appears on the surface. The first thing that strikes one is the obvious possibility that the person now in the rooms may be entirely different from the one who engaged them.”

“Why should you think so?”

“Well, apart from this cigarette-end, was it not suggestive that the only time the lodger went out was immediately after his taking the rooms? He came back⁠—or someone came back⁠—when all witnesses were out of the way. We have no proof that the person who came back was the person who went out. Then, again, the man who took the rooms spoke English well. This other, however, prints ‘match’ when it should have been ‘matches.’ I can imagine that the word was taken out of a dictionary, which would give the noun but not the plural. The laconic style may be to conceal the absence of knowledge of