The Devil's Spectacles

If you think ... that a clergyman will come to a man who has got the Devil's Spectacles here, under his pillow, and who has only to put those Spectacles on to see through that clergyman's clothes, flesh and whatnot, and read everything that's written in his secret mind as plain as print, fetch him, Master Alfred, fetch him!

                                                                                                                         Septimus Notman

Readers of these pages know that I have a fondness – not a weakness, mind you – for the letters of Victorian England that cannot be explained away so easily. What does that glorious period offer the reader that he cannot obtain now? It stands to reason that there has been pulp cramming every bookstore as long as there have been books in that same establishment, and the worldwide literacy boom of the last hundred years has done nothing to better that situation. But something persists about that period, the twilight of the British Empire and its global achievements of culture and learning ironically coinciding with its highest opinion of itself, which unlocks endless labyrinths in the mind. It was the age of Holmes and Watson, Jekyll and Hyde, Drood, and Scrooge; it was also the heyday of this writer, whose fame while alive has obscured an appreciation of his talents. And few stories of his are more entertaining than this bizarre tale.

Our protagonist and narrator is a young and moneyed nobleman by the name of Alfred, who cannot be expected to be capable of anything beyond his class. Since he is a blooming bachelor and very eligible, his main concern is the acquisition of a wife. He announces this somewhat obvious preoccupation to us in passing because his initial interest, as our tale unfolds, is in a fellow called Septimus Notman, "a lodge-keeper at the second of our two park gates," and "the only survivor of our head gamekeeper's family of seven children" (hence, we suppose, his name). What Notman is and, well, is not, should be clear without much reflection:

Everybody disliked Septimus Notman. He was said to be mad; to be a liar, a hypocrite, a vicious wretch, and a disagreeable brute. There were some people who even reported that he had been a pirate during the time when we lost sight of him and who declared, when they were asked for their proof, that his crimes were written on his face.

When had Alfred's family lost sight of him? Oh, that was several years ago now; but his good father, for reasons that escape us at first then become more likely as our story progresses, could not turn Notman away after the latter's prolonged and wholly inexplicable absence. Now, of course, Notman straddles his deathbed – his response to Alfred's inquiry about summoning a priest begins this review – and we know that deathbeds have a certain effect on the mind besieged as life's light wanes by prior calamities and passions. Notman wishes to confess, not for the purposes of expiation, but simply to delay his inevitable descent into a fiery pit. More specifically, to confess the crime by which Notman was bestowed the mysterious article he now conceals beneath his pillow. And where did this crime take place? The same that concludes this much ballyhooed novel, when he and a "boatswain's mate" from an unsuccessful icebreaker take it upon themselves to find the North Pole even when their captain prohibits their disembarkation. Alfred is predictably intrigued, especially when informed that the confession "will take long and ... make your flesh creep" – and that quote may have given away too much as it is. In the end, Notman will die, but not before gifting those spectacles to his master, along with brief instructions on their use.   

Here I will permit myself an aside. Although folklore and the history of fictional narratives surely welcome extraneous prefaces so as to introduce an object or character that would otherwise prove difficult to integrate, the opening pages of The Devil's Spectacles outdo themselves (somehow I recur to a film that I cannot spoil, into which a serial killer is written merely to abet a minor plot point). Doubtless, the conceit of the spectacles could have been handled much more easily, viz. with Alfred's passing a pawnbroker's shop and espying them in the window, or some chance encounter with a stranger who abandons them in a train compartment (reminiscent of the uncut version of this film). If we elect to grant Collins full credit for this arrangement, then the handoff of these glasses – which apparently allow you to read people's thoughts by peering into their hearts – has greater significance than first imagined. Given the alleged origin of the appurtenance, one may reasonably expect that the thoughts which will be 'read' will not necessarily rank among that person's happiest or most flattering. Once Alfred has the glasses in his possession he returns to his mission: choosing between Cecilia, "handsome, well-born, and poor" and the "companion and reader" of Alfred's mother, and his mother's niece and his first cousin, Zilla, "the Angel of the school." Without unfurling the numerous intrigues that ensue, we may enjoy the following gems: "If her eye had not been on me at the moment, I believe that I should have taken my Spectacles out of my pocket"; "My Spectacles informed me that she deliberately declined to face that question, even in her thoughts"; "For the first week I never even got the chance of looking at her through the Devil's Spectacles." And as Alfred no longer bothers to try to ascertain a person's true intentions through normal methods – listening, observation, and what the Germans call Menschenkenntnis, and what we can only lamely render as "a knowledge of human nature" – he becomes increasingly distrustful of everyone from his mother, to his butler, to the two young women in invisible competition for a sumptuous estate. A very sumptuous estate, in fact, as he begins to realize.

Were the name of Alfred's beloved Cordelia, not Cecilia, we might be reminded more immediately of this masterpiece, also featuring a ratiocinating, affluent nobleman with an eye for pretty women. The difference between Kierkegaard's alter ego and Alfred is that the latter does not really consider the possibility that what he discerns may not be true at all, and nothing more than the projection of his own worries. Only towards the end of his narrative does he perceive the contradiction:

I made no further use of the Spectacles that morning; my purpose was to keep them in my pocket until the interview in the shrubbery was over. Shall I own the motive? It was simply fear – fear of making further discoveries, and of losing the masterly self-control on which the whole success of my project depended.

We will not mention the shrubbery; suffice it to say that a critical conversation takes place literally sub rosa. But what then of the implication that one may know too much about one's fellow man to take effective action? That matter is addressed in the very last section of the story when Alfred – actually, it may not be Alfred at all who is telling us all this. At least not he of the sumptuous estate.

Brother Grasshopper

Why do some only children slosh through their childhood and even a significant portion of their adult life longing for siblings? Loneliness, curiosity, having someone with whom to conspire and share the blame and memories and more practical tasks as age overcomes our elders – these are some of the most common reasons. Numerous movements, most of which are vulgar excuses for mass thought and uniform foolishness, have encouraged us to form brotherhoods and sisterhoods and generally hoodwink ourselves into believing we all have natural bonds. We may be human and equal in dignity; but the individual must triumph if he is to fulfill his potential, the goal, admitted or otherwise, of every living being. It is natural for us to love our parents and children, and it is also natural, in a somewhat different way, to love our spouse who is our counterpart, our witness, our shade. But our siblings? Do we not have friends who grant us almost all the benefits of sibship and far less of the grief? We do; but as those who have brothers and sisters may tell you, nothing can flow in your veins quite like blood. A soft introduction to the hard truths of a story in this collection.

The only child in question is Fred Emmet, a good egg who will have a torrential affair with a woman he will decide is not worth the price of bourgeois happiness. Even much later in life, we learn how much he regretted choosing children, familiar flesh, and peace over passion:

A decade later, he still missed the woman he had given up – dreamed of her in amazing, all-but-forgotten detail. He would never love anyone that much again. He had come to see that the heart, like a rubber ball, loses bounce, and eventually goes dead.

This doesn't sound terribly much like a family father of three who consecrates his precious days to the furtive accumulation of riches (Fred "was, like many only children, naturally meticulous and secretive, and it warmed him to think his growing personal wealth was cunningly hidden"). But adultery is a continent on Updike's earth, and adultery is nothing more than the power of suggestion. So while we may adduce a few wonderful things about Fred, about the new life he begins fresh out of Harvard with a nice, sweet girl called Betsy, about his real estate dealings and the satisfaction he derives from such games, we note that the most distinctive thing about Fred is his suggestibility, which means there is nothing distinct about Fred at all. He is the perfect sinner, the plain and Philistine mind who looks forward to forming better habits while secretly envying the possessions and values of others. And the main target of his envy is the brother he never had, a lanky and befuddled man by the name of Carlyle Saughterfield.

Some biographer may have found the original Carlyle Saughterfield, but you and I know that such a being could not possibly have existed. Fred meets the brother he never really wanted when the latter is finishing Harvard Business School, a dangerous place with dangerous friends if you are not, shall we say, of the right mindset. At that time Carlyle was "exotic and intimidating, a grown man with his own car, a green Studebaker convertible, and confident access to the skills and equipment of expensive sports like sailing, skiing, climbing, and hunting." Readers of these pages will know precisely what I think of "expensive sports" and their purveyors; but more fundamentally, one should ask why such people cannot read a book or watch a film for their adventure – and when you can answer that question with confidence, you will have solved one of life's greatest mysteries. Yet as we witness the slow demise of Carlyle – few have seeds within them that are so self-destructive – we note an inconsistency. At first blush, our praying mantis of a businessman does expensive things with expensive people (Updike's definition of business, "putting on a suit in the morning, working for other men, travelling in airplanes to meet with more men in suits," may never be topped). But as his life and faint grasp on reality both elude him, he engages in things that no sane man of affairs would ever contemplate, including, of course, investments of the high-risk, low-yield category that continue to attract the gullible and ignorant. Soon he bears an uncanny resemblance to the titular orthopteran:

Carlyle's weakness, perhaps, was his artistic side. His Harvard major had been not economics but fine arts; he took photographs and bought expensive art books so big no shelves could hold them .... He became a partner in an avant-garde furniture store in the Back Bay .... The store did well .... but Carlyle got bored, and became a partner in a Los Angeles firm that manufactured kinetic gadgets of Plexiglas and chemical fluids. This firm went bust, but not before Carlyle fell in fatal love with California – its spaghetti of flowing thruways, its pink and palmy sprawl, its endless sunshine and perilous sense of being on the edge .... As his children grew and his hair thinned, Carlyle himself seemed increasingly on the edge – on the edge of the stock market, on the edge of the movie industry, on the edge of some unspecified breakthrough.

We may recur to Fred's rather plebeian observation that "all these upper-class skills involved danger," or maybe we need not do so. Carlyle, who ends up marrying Betsy's sister Germaine, has mistaken the adventure of the body for that of the soul; but it is the soul of Carlyle that should test and imperil itself, not his physical person, wallet, or taste.

The years "in parallel" pass, two brothers-in-lie married to two very true sisters. Carlyle's promise, however, as an older sibling, as someone whose every gesture spelled "power and entitlement," as the embodiment of modern manhood, is never fulfilled because such a promise, in most, is a sham. Many facets of Carlyle, "a tall, bony New Englander with a careless, potent manner," lure Fred into contemplating such nonsense, even things that first seem like shortcomings:

His voice, husky and hard to hear, as if strained through something like baleen, was the one weak thing about him; but even this impressed Fred. Back in New Jersey, the big men, gangsters and police chiefs and Knights of Columbus, spoke softly, forcing others to listen.

But Fred does not listen. The calculating, somewhat venal part of him recognizes that Carlyle Saughterfield will die a failure, if only because the goals he establishes for himself are both vague and unreasonable. At some point in our story it becomes clear that Fred is determined not to be a failure, and his recipe for success is to be in every way his brother-in-law's foil. Indeed, once flush with funds from a series of inheritances, a Carlyle of waning affluence asks his brother-in-law for a loan in a roundabout way and gets just as indirect a refusal. And it is here that we ponder another power among siblings, that of the "brusque restoration to one's true measure," because "as an only child, Fred had never been made to confront his limits." No one possessed the threat of revealing, from the deepest part of his childhood, his most embarrassing moments, a tool siblings and enemies have in common. The same biographer might note that Updike was also an only child, also married right after Harvard, also had three children and then divorced his first wife, and also was a prolific producer in his chosen profession. But there remains no one on earth who can tell us about all the quirks, eccentricities, and fears of the young Updike. Perhaps because those will turn out to be the most common things about him. 

Lik

I suppose I do not quite understand those who are fascinated by comets and craters yet cannot believe in the immortality of the human soul. Now there are many, many shades of my ignorance, to be conquered by my future selves or to be left untouched in some dark corners of this universe; but my lack of understanding has more to do with aim than with substance. To wit, why do we bother? Why be kind to each other if kindness is but a façade for advantage? Why love when all love's labor will be lost? Why laugh or cry when all events and emotions are time, that cruelest of tyrants, simply spotting us treats? Some particularly smug proponents of the five senses' predominance have labeled those who think we are better than fossils and fuels "history deniers." These are the same megaphoning militants who tell us that we should not believe anything that cannot be verified – as if any of history can be "verified" – and we will leave them to their morons, oxy or otherwise. I do not deny history because I believe in moral justice; I, on the contrary, reinforce it. Of all things, natural selection is supposed to adhere so strictly to predetermined laws – laws announced to all, in other words – as to make the determinants of those laws likewise predetermined. (This chain goes back in time to something, one might guess, indeterminate; but the megaphoners claim that's when everything exploded into determinism; better to calm them down before in their red-faced rants they, too, explode.) Nevertheless, we should not limit natural selection to the chameleon or the slowly rising primate. Human souls also have a destiny plotted well in advance by their valor and fortitude, which brings us to a story in this collection.

Our Lik, an acronym for his Christian name Lavrentiy Ivanovich Kruzhevnitsyn, is a humble beast, but one relatively well-evolved. He is an actor by the sheer fact that this profession is the only one which brings him any form of intercourse with the world, much less any income. As we meet him, he is consigned to a minor role in an "ideally idiotic" French drama of the conventional family-conflict-honor mould. The drama is in French, and Lik speaks the language with exactly the suitable Russian swallowing of vowels and stress to imbue the play, appropriately called The Abyss, with the proper dash of foreign flavor. He also begins to understand the role as his sole reality, suggesting that he is not so much an actor as a person bereft of true identity:

It was hard to say, though, whether Lik (the word means "countenance" in Russian and Middle English) possessed genuine theatrical talent or was a man of many indistinct callings who had chosen one of them at random but could just as well have been a painter, jeweler, or ratcatcher. Such a person resembles a room with a number of different doors, among which there is perhaps one that does lead straight into some great garden, into the moonlit depths of a marvelous human night, where the soul discovers the treasure intended for it alone.

On the subject of choice, there are few passages in the English language of greater lucidity or beauty. Lik may not have an outward appearance of genius, but then again most persons who seem at first glance to fit that profile turn out to be blustering frauds. What Lik does possess, however, is the inscrutable sense of himself that accompanies a sensitive soul; he could be an artist of any caliber – an organ grinder, a balalaika player, a street mime – but how he views the world makes him a first-class aesthete. He is most afflicted by what has always tortured the artist – time and its undertow, and the vastness of eternity lapping its waves upon the minute skeleton half-buried on a sandy beach:

The proximity of the sea, whose presence he divined beyond the lemon grove, oppressed him, as if this ample viscously glistening space, with only a membrane of moonlight stretched tight across its surface, was akin to the equally taut vessel of his drumming heart, and, like it, was agonizingly bare, with nothing to separate it from the sky, from the shuffling of human feet and the unbearable pressure of the music playing in a nearby bar.

We also learn that Lik is terminally ill, a coincidence that befits a far lesser work of literature – but there are, as it were, no coincidences in the works of Nabokov. Lik will carry on down his lonely path until a palaver with a fellow lodger reveals an element of our actor's past that we might have suspected all along. And that element is Oleg Petrovich Koldunov.

Koldunov is both Lik's relative and nemesis, one thought long dead. We cannot say too much about Oleg Petrovich, who reenters his miserable cousin's life almost twenty years after he left it, because Koldunov bludgeons us with monologue after monologue, often, it seems, arguing with himself or a past version of Lik. In fact, Koldunov is as loquacious and irritating as Lik is quiet and non-offensive (Lik's "absence from friendly gatherings, instead of being attributed to a lack of sociability .... simply went unnoticed"). There are moments in the narrative's second half when we cannot believe in Oleg Petrovich. That is to say, we don't believe in him as a human being at any point ("it was perfectly obvious he was an idler, a drunk, and a boor"); but soon enough we don't even believe in him as a fictional character. He is so exaggerated and incensed that we get the distinct impression that he might simply be a figment of a very neurotic actor's mind. The few alleged facts we do gather may strangely apply to both him and his cousin:  

Why has life systematically baited me? Why have I been assigned the part of some kind of miserable scoundrel who is spat on by everybody, gypped, bullied, thrown into jail? Here's an example for you: When they were taking me away after a certain incident in Lyon .... you know what they did? They stuck a little hook right here in the live flesh of my neck .... and off the cop led me to the police station, and I floated along like a sleepwalker, because every additional motion made me black out with pain. Well, can you explain why they don't do this to other people and then, all of a sudden, do it to me? Why did my first wife run off with a Circassian? Why did seven people nearly beat me to death in Antwerp in '32 in a small room?

There are other hints strewn amidst the story's increasingly odd second part that allow one to think, if for but a few paragraphs, that we are dealing with a single human soul engaged in internal debate. I am happy to say, however, that this impression is thoroughly demolished by our final scene. Or is it? Do white shoes betoken more than summertime and posh eccentricity? Should we be concerned that since Lik "had accumulated no spiritual treasures, [he] was hardly an interesting prey" for the looming Scythe? Hardly interesting at all. 

The Minister's Black Veil

The topic, it might be supposed, was obvious enough. There was the black veil swathed round Mr. Hooper's forehead and concealing every feature above his placid mouth, on which, at times, they could perceive the glimmering of a melancholy smile. But that piece ... to their imagination, seemed to hang down before his heart, the symbol of a fearful secret between him and them. Were the veil but cast aside, they might speak freely of it, but not till then. Thus they sat a considerable time, speechless, confused and shrinking uneasily from Mr. Hooper's eye, which they felt to be fixed upon them with an invisible glance.

In a previous life – or twenty-two years ago, which was definitely another life of sorts – I was forcibly subjected to the dismal science and its web of incongruities, a maze with a monster in the middle but neither egress nor ingress. This was a dull time no shinier in retrospect. Readers of these pages are duly aware of my attitude towards the accumulation of riches while millions are never given the chance to live on subsistence, and twenty some years ago my opinions were but cygnets compared to the majestic bird who now swims unmolested on my autumn lake. Yet my opinions were already formed. Economics may not only involve the pursuit of money or wealth, but that is ultimately what gears its engine, just like the pursuit of physical satisfaction will always be captained by something that cannot be love. Few actually study economics to help the victims of inequality; most either want money or the authority to direct the policy of money (look no further than the pandemic fraud of Marxism-Leninism), which ends up corrupting them just as much as absolute power. No, most people who like to talk about money – even theoretically – will sooner or later love money itself and use it as a barometer to measure public happiness as well as their own. Some even say that the loss of something valuable can lead to economic stimulation, a horrific fallacy that was most famously coined in a work by a French theoretician. Behind the broken window, however, lies another human event, namely that some of us will catch ourselves smiling at the misfortune of others – not only because of the worst of human emotions, Schadenfreude, but also because in their failures we espy our opportunities. The services of some citizens may indeed gain in demand from rectifying the woes of others; but over time there lurks the possibility that they may begin to wish for misfortune so that they might profit. And to those who enjoy watching others struggle and fail, financial and emotional distress can be similarly beneficial, a point made in this fine parable.

An excessively candid title does not detract from the vitality of the introduction, whereby we become acquainted with a young, unmarried sexton by the name of Hooper. Hooper is well-liked in his small community both for his humor and his mildness, and seems to exemplify at least in his words what the Puritan methodology on the enjoyment of life and our destination upon corporeal extinction might entail. His ostensible piety mitigates his choice one day to don a veil, an act that confounds his parishioners:

On a nearer view [the veil] seemed to consist of two folds of crape, which entirely concealed his features, except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his sight, further than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things. With this gloomy shade before him, good Mr. Hooper walked onward, at a slow and quiet pace, stooping somewhat, and looking on the ground, as is customary with abstracted men, yet nodding kindly to those of his parishioners who still waited on the meeting-house steps.

It is this "darkened aspect" that hints at those deeds to which we cannot be privy. Hooper's appearance at the pulpit is taken as part of his guise as preacher, as the presence he must possess to sway his constituents into the good and the favor of the Almighty. Hooper talks and all are enthralled because he seems to have pierced their consciences, derived from their darkest caverns the toils of their compunction, and encased them all behind his veil as if the veil itself were a box of sins to be fastened for eternity – or maybe a bit less than that. Yet his own misery makes him the subject of idle chatter, and those whose minds might indeed be plagued by something or someone see in him a worse version of themselves. And despite the uncertainty of his intentions (Hooper never quite explains what is gnawing at him) and the wickedness around their world, they cannot help but smile.

This uncertainty is augmented by the story's finest scene, and one of the finest in nineteenth-century literature, the subsequent funeral of a young woman. Hooper is expected to appear to send the departed on her way. But his actions, unquestioned for the most part by the mourners, cannot be deemed ordinary:

The clergyman stepped into the room where the corpse was laid, and bent over the coffin, to take a last farewell of his deceased parishioner. As he stooped, the veil hung straight down from his forehead, so that, if her eyelids had not been closed forever, the dead maiden might have seen his face. Could Mr. Hooper be fearful of her glance, that he so hastily caught back the black veil? A person who watched the interview between the dead and living, scrupled not to affirm, that, at the instant when the clergyman's features were disclosed, the corpse had slightly shuddered, rustling the shroud and muslin cap, though the countenance retained the composure of death. A superstitious old woman was the only witness of this prodigy.

One would guess that it is important that the only witness is both old and beset by the tall tales of more simple souls. Yet the matter is elucidated shortly thereafter by a couple in the procession:

"Why do you look back?" said one in the procession to his partner.

"I had a fancy," replied she, "that the minister and the maiden's spirit were walking hand in hand."

"And so had I, at the same moment," said the other.

We are given only one more aspersion against the pastor's character, and it comes from yet another woman. Upon learning of the ineptitude of local representatives tasked with discovering the truth behind Hooper's apparent self-castigation, a woman named Elizabeth, called the sexton's "lover" yet for the time being just a candidate for marriage, approaches the man of the cloth with halfhearted curiosity. Elizabeth is not baffled by Hooper, yet neither is she without fear. Fear, one should add, of knowing enough of the truth to guess the rest as if at the threshold of an ancient manor an indefinite series of parallel doors opened to reveal, at their end, one's most hideous apprehension. There were, she intimates, "rumors already abroad in the village," but these rumors are expressed only in the "color [that] rose in her cheeks." Hooper does not confirm or deny any of her insinuations, preferring to lift his veil only in death. Elizabeth leaves and we understand that, although still young, he has forsaken his last chance for companionship in this world.

Hawthorne's works come in two forms: excellent and riveting, and excellent and bland.  The blander works may still find their way onto high school curricula and can invariably be praised for their locution and elegance; but his riveting works cannot be praised enough. For reasons not unrelated to this astounding work of genius, the plight of our veiled sexton has endured among Hawthorne's most read short stories and can be used on opposing sides of argumentation, especially given the delightful but not unsurprising dénouement. What argumentation, you might ask? Consider the sexton's first address to Elizabeth: "There is an hour to come when all of us shall cast aside our veils." And at that hour a dark box may or may not be unfastened for all to see, however thick our camouflage was on earth.

The Crooked Man

There was one thing in the case which had made the deepest impression both upon the servants and the police. This was the contortion of the colonel's face. It had set, according to their account, into the most dreadful expression of fear and horror which a human countenance is capable of assuming. More than one person fainted at the mere sight of him, so terrible was the effect. It was quite certain that he had foreseen his fate, and that it had caused him the utmost horror.

There is an old adage about forgiving betrayal because you cannot expect another person to love you more than he loves himself. That is only true, of course, in those cases where self-love is the catalyst; there is also the manifestation of malice. Malice as personal requital has been understood as both necessary and sadistic in the annals of literature, that chart and compass of the human soul, but I fear we all know such feelings quite well. The pinprick of the slightest treason strikes worst at the hearts of the very proud, of those who want to love and trust all and are confident in their ability, however overstated, to make their companions better by improving themselves. Revenge bubbles within such bodies as an extension of the spell of hatred that separates us from our good selves, from the ones who surely wish that life were not quite as meretricious. Yet perhaps the best revenge is still the gnawed conscience of the traitor that over a wicked life gains a voice and shadow. Which brings us to this story of crime.

The crime may not be a crime at all. Colonel James Barclay, late of a highly-decorated Irish regiment, is found dead in his library on a sultry September eve in the last years of Victorian England. And while his head incurred severe trauma, he may have already been dead by the time his body crashed into "a singular club of hard carved wood with a bone handle." Beside him lies his beloved wife, Nancy, a woman of exceptional beauty (in this regard, fiction makes exceptions seem the rule) in a dead faint; she will not revive by the story's end, nor will she need to do so, and Holmes and Watson proceed, mostly in flashback, to reconstruct what cannot be explained by conventional truths. Barclay and his wife have enjoyed "upwards of thirty years" of marriage, and despite the typical machismo expected of career military officers, it is he, to paraphrase this poet, who is the more loving one. He also boasts a few qualities uncommon in an erstwhile soldier:

Colonel Barclay himself seems to have had some singular traits in his character. He was a dashing, jovial old soldier in his usual mood, but there were occasions on which he seemed to show himself capable of considerable violence and vindictiveness. This side of his nature, however, appears never to have been turned towards his wife. Another fact which had struck Major Murphy and three out of five of the other officers with whom I conversed was the singular sort of depression which came upon him at times. As the major expressed it, the smile has often been struck from his mouth, as if by some invisible hand, when he has been joining in the gaieties and chaff of the mess-table. For days on end, when the mood was on him, he has been sunk in the deepest gloom. This and a certain tinge of superstition were the only unusual traits in his character which his brother officers had observed. The latter peculiarity took the form of a dislike to being left alone, especially after dark. This puerile feature in a nature which was conspicuously manly had often given rise to comment and conjecture.

"Comment and conjecture" have everything to do with the most vulnerable part of any man, his reputation. And as well they should: many soldiers are routinely visited by nightmares and obliged to forego any later interests in gunnery for fear of hearing the screams and explosions anew – but I digress. One need not be a soldier to comprehend the crimes on our colonel's conscience, and one need not have served a day in the armed forces to recognize a coward. A coward, as it were, still mindful of the indiscretions of the past.

If memory serves me rightly – and it usually is a galley slave – the BBC adaptation featuring this incomparable actor includes Holmes's ironic gratitude to Watson for the latter's quaint explanation of "military morality," Watson having been an old army doctor in Afghanistan back in his day. The line, which does not appear in the original text, has stuck with me and not only because of Holmes's cursory dismissal of Watson's suggestions. There lingers in the air of The Crooked Man the bitter scent of injustice that cannot be combated by ordinary legal avenues; one would almost dare to say that the impression of the British Armed Forces is one of indifference and cruelty. Internal rules and chain-of-command can stymie a group of unruly young men far more effectively than general philosophical tenets without any practical application. That may be why the destruction of individual thought processes has received such attention from critics of the military, even though the concept is hardly far removed from what is preached on fields, courts, and pitches all around the world in a variety of governments and political freedoms. I'm quite sure that our eponymous character, who shows up eventually, would love to "comment and conjecture" on that last point. And you might also want to brush up on your Book of Samuel.