V. Mr. Homes Shatters An Alibi

Welcome to the fifth installment of “The Adventures of Shylock Homes” by John Kendrick Bangs. (Read the first one here.) Bangs wrote 10 of these installments of Shylock’s adventures in the underworld for American newspapers in 1903. In this episode, he takes on Rip Van Winkle.

It was not many days after the amusing discomfiture of M. LeCoq that I have just narrated that, yielding to the solicitation of my friends I opened up a bureau of information in one of the conspicuous office buildings of Cimmeria. This I advertised in the news papers, stating that I was ready at any time to undertake the solution of any or all mysteries. For a little while there was no business of any importance on my books, but at last a case did come up which filled me, at least, with a great deal of interest. It was a gusty night in the latter part of March. I was just about to lock up my office and start for the club, when a sharp rap on the outer door struck viciously upon my ear.

“Come in,” I cried, turning the electric light so that its illumination concentrated itself upon the doorway, leaving me in comparative darkness.

The door opened with a jerk and there, peering into the room with a piercing eye that seemed to gather everything before it in at a glance, stood a gaunt, wiry woman, whose face had more of the qualities of the hatchet than of the olive branch.

“Shylock Homes in?” she demanded, in a rasping voice that would have driven a better man than myself to drink if he had had to listen to it for a lifetime.

“I am Shylock Homes, madam,” said I, rising and offering the lady a chair.

“Thanks, I’ve no time to set,” she answered. “It’s business I’m after, not civility. Are you all you’re said to be, or just a plain fraud, like all other men?”

“That is a leading question, madam,” I replied warily. “I can’t say that I’m all I’m said to be, because there are people who assert that I am a freak, the possibility of which you intimate. I judge, however, from the vivid whiteness of my conscience, which never troubles me in the slightest degree, that I am not a fakir. If you have come, however, to ask me to
solve the mystery of Self, I must decline the commission, since I have no wish to elucidate myself for the benefit of anybody.”

“Humph!” she retorted. “You have a certain amount of sagacity, after all. I
had an idea you might be one of those trance idiots who go off into a spasm and take money for telling people what they see in their dreams.”

“You do me wrong,” said I, with a short laugh, merely to show that, however unusual her method of approaching me, I did not intend to take offense. “Look!” I added, turning the electric light full upon my own face, “do I look like a fraud?”

“No, you don’t,” she answered shortly. “You’ve got a tolerably decent face. Rather sneaky eyes, perhaps, but on the whole you look smug enough to be a Sunday school superintendent. I think I can trust you.”

“Thank you,” said I. “And now, do sit down and tell me what I can do for you.”

With an ill grace the lady took the proffered chair this time, opened her reticule and took out a card.

“Mr. Shylock Homes ” said she, “I’m a bitterly deceived woman — or, at least, I’m beginning to think so, and I want you to find out the truth. Here is my card.”

I took the pasteboard, and glancing at it casually, was astounded to see who my visitor was. The card read as follows:—

MRS. RIP VAN WINKLE.

Thursdays in January.

Well!” I ejaculated. “This is an unexpected honor, Madame. I had hardly dared that I should ever —”

“Stick to business, Mr. Homes,” she snapped. “I didn’t come here under the impression that you were conducting a series of five o’clock teas. What I want to know is, will you look into the question of my husband’s whereabouts during that twenty years absence of his from home?”

“Why — ah —” I ventured, “his story has been told, Mrs. Van Winkle. He was asleep up in the Catskills. He wandered off to the top of — ah — one of the peaks of that noble range, and fell in with Hendrik Hudson and his men, and —”

“Oh, nonsense!” cried Mrs. Van Winkle impatiently. “They gave him knockout drops, I suppose? You don’t mean to say you believe that yarn, do you, Mr. Homes? If you do you are not the brilliant thing you think you are.”

“Well,” I demurred, “it does sound improbable, but I’ve always taken it on faith —”

“And I haven’t,” snapped the lady. “What’s more, I don’t intend to. I do intend to discover the truth, and if you want the business you can have it. If you don’t, say so, and I’ll worm the real story out of the old man in some other way.”

“The proposition attracts me,” said I, after a moment’s reflection. “I may be able to do you both a service. If I should restore your confidence in him —”

“Confidence?” she cried, shrilly. “Restore my confidence in Rip Van Winkle — Lord! I never had any!”

“Then why did you marry him?” I ventured.

“To get even with him,” she replied. “Rip Van Winkle was a born flirt, and he tried it once too often when he tackled me.”

“Have you any evidence that he was elsewhere?”

“Yes,” she answered; “convincing evidence to me.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“The fact that he told the yarn about the Catskill nap himself is enough for me. When Rip Van Winkle said he’d been to the taproom I knew he’d been to church, and vice versa. Reasoning on that line, his mere statement that he’d been asleep, out in the woods, proved to me that he’d been pretty wide awake somewhere else.”

The lady raved on for two or three minutes in this strain, and finally stopped from sheer lack of breath.

“Very well, madam,” said I, “I’ll take the case. Perhaps in a week I shall have something to report.”

Whereupon, after a few moments of commonplace conversation, she departed.

Later in the evening, at the club, while eating my dinner, I observed Hendrik Hudson taking his evening meal with Christopher Columbus and Noah, on the other side of the dining-room, and plunged into the business in hand at once.

“Hello, Hudson,” said I, as, after ordering my coffee served in the library, I rose to leave the room. “How is everything with you?”

“Serenely lovely,” he replied — he was in a genial mood, for the house committee had laid in a fine supply of ales, of which the great sailor had been absorbing pretty freely. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh, nothing much,” I answered. “Some day, when you’ve leisure, I wish you’d introduce me to Rip Van Winkle.”

“Rip Van Winkle?” he repeated, “Rip Van Winkle? Who the devil is Rip Van Winkle?”

“Why, don’t you know the chap you and your men got hold of that night up in the Catskills and —”

“Oh — that old tale,” laughed Hudson. “Seems to me I did hear of that, but there wasn’t any truth in it. What would I be doing giving away grog in the Catskill mountains, with good old New York not a hundred miles away? Never on your life, Shylock. That was a tale got up to injure me with the prohibitionists.”

It was quite evident that Mrs. Rip Van Winkle’s suspicions were quite correct. I was very sorry, too, for I have always rather like Rip himself, from what I had read of him, and it was unpleasant to discover that he was a base deceiver, after all.

“I was off on a cruise with old Columbus and Captain Kidd at that time,” Hudson continued, “down in the West Indies — so you see I can prove an alibi.”

“I can testify to that.” said Columbus. “Noah, you were along too — don’t you remember? Kidd was showing us where he’d cached his hidden treasure.”

“I’ll never forget it,” put in Noah. “I never was so sea sick in my life, before or after.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt your word, Hudson,” I said at this point. “I never more than half believed the story anyhow. I rather thought I’d like to meet Van Winkle — that’s all. He always seemed to me to have certain companionable qualities. Good night.”

And with this I walked on. The whole structure of Rip Van Winkle’s story had fallen to the ground at the very first touch — very much as his rifle was said to have done when, after his sleep of twenty years, he awoke and found the stock crumbling beneath his hand.

There were now two things to do — look up Rip Van Winkle and win his confidence — a course that I deplored — or seek out Diedrich Knickerbocker and ask him frankly the source of the information upon which he based his report of what really happened to Rip. I decided upon the latter plan, and after my coffee and cognac I left the club and sauntered up the street to call upon the distinguished historian.

Arriving at his house, I found the lights streaming from every window, and from within came shouts of laughter and other sounds of revelry. It was clear that some celebration was going on within. At the door was a caterer’s wagon, and sundry supplies for immediate use were being delivered under the supervision of a flunky clad in an old Dutch costume.

“What is going on here?” I asked the latter, as a case of schnapps was passed in through the basement door.

“There’s a meeting of the Sons of St. Nicholas,” he answered, with a laugh. “They’re having a gay time of it.”

“I’m glad I met you,” said I, slipping a gold piece in his hand. “I’m a reporter of the Gehenna Gazette, and I’ve been sent here to get an account of this affair. Can you tell me who is present?”

I took out a pad and pencil and made ready to write.

“Oh — er — Peter Stuyvesant, Mr. Anneke Jans, Wouter Van Twiller, Tryn Van Camp, Hendrick Kip, Jan Gerritsen, Nicholas Jansen, Rip Van Winkle, Anthony Van Corlear, Olaff de Peyster, and a dozen others — they’re in such a jumble I can’t make ’em out. But they’re in great form — especially that old rounder. Van Winkle.”

“Aha!” thought I. “Rip Van Winkle, eh?” It was strange that Rip should be celebrating the virtues of Manhattan, a man who had presumably never been there.

“What are they doing?” I asked aloud. “Making after-dinner speeches?”

“Not they,” replied the flunkey. It’s the informalist gathering I ever saw. They’re just swapping anecdotes, and I tell you, Mr. — er — ”

“Jones, of the Gehenna Gazette,” said I.

“Well, I tell you, Mr. Jones,” he continued, “that fellow Van Winkle is a ripper. He’ s drained seventeen bumpers of schnapps, and he’s out for reminiscences this night. He spent twenty years in New York once, and I’ve never in all my heard anything quite so racy as the tales he has to tell. Why, the mere manner of his getting to town was interesting enough for an historical novel. He came down from somewhere up the river as a stowaway on a lumber raft sometime before the American Revolution broke out, with nothing but a dog and a musket to his name. Landed in the city, he sold the dog a dozen times, and —”

“How many times did he sell the dog?” I demanded.

“A dozen,” said the flunkey. “He’d sell him, you see. and then walk off with the money, trusting to old Schneider to come back to him. On the money thus gained, he managed to live comfortably until he got a job on Bowling Green, setting up nine pins for the select people of the city, after which, in a year or two, having saved a little money, he started a tap room and chop house, which he kept for eighteen years, disappearing as suddenly as he came at the end of that time.”

“How very interesting,” said I. “I don’t suppose you could get me inside there were I can hear some of their marvelous tales.”

I emphasized my remark with another gold piece, and in a few minutes, arrayed as an assistant waiter, I found myself in the brilliant dining-room of Dr. Diedrick Knickerbocker, filling the glass of the now loquacious Rip Van Winkle over and over again. I was not long in discovering that the flunkey had not deceived me as to the nature of Rip Van Winkle’s reminiscences. They were what a literary friend of mine used to call “thrillers” and “shilling shockers,” and as he recounted over and over again the lively doings of himself and his companions in New York of ancient days, I must confess I found them pretty strong even for my taste, which has not been developed on a vichy and milk diet by any manner of means. A more abandoned old wretch than he could not be found in a month of Sundays in that modern Babylon they call New York, and as for the wit of his narrations, that was attested to by the shrieks of laughter that followed close upon his periods, which twice attracted the attention of the police patrolling without.

“It was a warm old town in those days,” Van Winkle cried, as he finished up a tale which I have not the courage to put upon paper. “The bottomless pit up the river is an ice box alongside of dear old New York when Deidrick and I were cronies.”

“You kept a famous tavern. Rip,” the doctor answered. “Such things to eat, such things to drink, and what a company! Do you remember the night when William Van Gheel and Teunis Fyn and you and I were landed in the old Sugar House jail for painting the nose of George III.’s statue red, white and blue? O, those days, those days! And —”

“Sunday afternoons on the Battery, eh, Deidrich, when little Peggy Tienhoven and her cousin, Margaret Carstessen, were in their prime?” Rip returned. “And the picnic out on Bedloe’s Island, when we stole and wore the uniforms of the two British officers who were sleeping off their night before at the taproom? Oh, what fun we had that day! I dream of it yet. I never flirted so in my life before.”

“It’s a good thing your wife never learned of those days, Rip,” said the doctor, solemnly. “There’d have been the deuce to pay.”

“I have to thank you for that, sir.” Rip answered. “If it hadn’t been for that wild tale of the Kaaterskills you got up for me to tell when I got home. I’m afraid there’d have been a peck of trouble for your Uncle Rip.”

And so it went on for hours. Long before the clock struck two I had enough evidence in hand, and from his own lips, to convict Rip Van Winkle, not only of desertion, but of a number of others of the most select crimes in the calendar. But it served my cause not at all, for it so happened that when the evening broke up the joviality of the party had reached such bounds that nothing would do but that the flunky and I should join in the revelry and, after absorbing a delicious julep, handed me by Rip himself, I found myself one of a circle of dancing roysterers, tripping hand in hand around the table, and singing. “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” in tones fit to raise the dead. Moreover, it fell also to my lot to carry Rip Van Winkle home, thrown limp and sleeping across my shoulder, for it was clear the moment we reached the street that he was in no condition to go home alone. His legs doubled up under him like so many blades of a jackknife, and in this condition I left him at his front door, running like a coward from the field of battle, after ringing the doorbell to summon whoever might have the privilege of letting him in.

Detective as I am, I have not the heart to betray a man I have drunk with and carried home after. Moreover, the evidence I had was not proper to submit to a lady even of Mrs. Rip Van Winkle’s advanced years.

Hence it was that next day I addressed a short note to my client, resigning my commission on the ground that upon investigation I did not think I could be of any possible service to her.