The Adventures of Shylock Homes IX: “IX. Mr. Homes Shatters A Tradition”

After a long delay, we return to “The Adventures of Shylock Homes,” written in 10 parts by John Kendrick Bangs during 1903. Episodes one through five were published a few years ago. Number 6 — “Mr. Homes Solves a Question of Authorship” — was published in the first volume of Edwardian-era pastiches. Number 7 was published two weeks ago and Number 8 last week.

An astonishing development at the last dinner of the Izaak Walton Club of Hades so aroused my suspicions of a well-known figure in history, that I set myself to work about a week since to show him up in his true colors. Now that I have discovered the actual truth as to the real George Washington, I almost hesitate to set it upon paper, but, even though I may be charged with a wicked and useless iconoclasm, my conception of my duty requires that I should reveal all that has come to me through my investigations of the last seven days.

The Izaak Walton Club, as your readers may not be aware, is an organization composed of the most distinguished fishermen of the realms of Apollyon. Noah is its president, Jonah its secretary, Baron Munchausen its treasurer, and many other great names, are enrolled upon its membership list. The chief function of the club is to hold a dinner once a year, at which each member is expected to be ready with a reminiscence connected with the piscatorial art. Upon the occasion of the most recent banquet, I had the honor to be present as a guest, and I listened with avidity to the marvelous tales that were told by old Walton himself, by Munchausen, Jonah, Bonaparte, and Noah’s promising son, Shem. They were good stories, and they were indubitably fish stories in the full acceptance of the term, and I was delighted and highly edified until George Washington arose to give his recollection of an early fishing episode, which shocked me beyond endurance, as I am sure you will agree was but natural when you hear the story that he told.

“I do not recall any special fishing episode in my career, gentlemen,” said General Washington, after he had been presented by the chairman, “which had in it any elements of an unusual nature. In my extreme youth I used to take my buckskin knee breeches occasionally and immerse them, tied up at the knees, so as to form a sort of bifurcated bag, at a narrow point of a trout stream near my home, and then beat the surface of the water for a hundred or more yards above the point of immersion with a hickory rod until the startled fish, in a blind endeavor to escape, had crowded to the number of half a thousand into the maw of my waiting garment, when I would gather them in with perfect ease.”

“Most unsportsmanlike!” cried Walton.

“No doubt,” said Washington “but that was in a day, sir, when the canons of fish-craft were not making the welkin ring with their thunderous roar. I knew no better until my good father one day surprised, me in the act, and applied such corrective measures as convinced me that buckskin breeches had better uses than those to which I had put mine. As I grew older, I adopted other methods. I remember one occasion, on the Rappahannock, when sitting idly in my boat, having neither bait, pole nor line, I suspended a bit of paper tied to a small piece of thread from one end of my projecting oar in such a fashion that the shadow it cast upon the water resembled a worm so strongly that the fish flocked to the surface in shoals to snap at it, to be met there with rap between the eyes from a small club carried in my right hand.

“The rap stunned between the eyes stunned them so effectively that I had no difficulty in catching them with my hands, and not infrequently have I in this manner landed between three and four hundred two-pounders in the course of an afternoon’s sport.”

Naturally very little applause greeted this statement, and, indeed, it was with great difficulty that Baron Munchausen was prevented from moving the expulsion of General Washington from the club for unsportsmanlike conduct. As for myself, I was amazed, but what was to follow capped the climax and was the cause of my resolve to expose, if possible, the true inwardness of this man’s chief reputation, as based upon the cherry tree episode.

“Probably the most interesting fishing experience I ever had, however,” continued Washington, blandly, “was during the famous New Jersey campaign against the British and their Hessian allies. After much difficulty with our friends the enemy, I had reached the banks of the Delaware, in the dead of winter, and was encamped on the shores about opposite to Trenton. Many stories had reached me of the sufferings of our followers in this famous New Jersey village, and I had in fact, received word that at least three of my personal friends in the Hessian-ridden town were on the verge of starvation. How to relieve them was a problem. I did not dare send them food by messenger, for I had little enough of my own, and no messenger to spare, when all of a sudden a great idea came to me.

“The Delaware, you know, gentlemen, is renowned for its shad, and shad is one of the most esculent birds that fly the depths. The river was frozen solid. What more natural, I thought, than that millions of these fish are embedded in the ice. It was, indeed, a happy thought, for investigation proved the accuracy of my surmise. We cut three tons of ice the next morning, and out of this we extracted nine hundred and twenty-three pounds of the finest roe-shad man ever tasted. But how to get them to our friends in Trenton? Again a happy idea came to me. I had one hundred and twenty of the fish frozen into ice balls of the precise caliber of my cannon, and, will you believe it, the next morning, a few hours before I set out on my famous journey across the river, I bombarded Trenton with these, and with such accuracy of aim that the necessities of my starving friends under the thrall of the Hessian forces were immediately relieved.”

The silence that followed this announcement was deadly, but Washington seemed not to observe it.

“There was but one mishap in the incident,” he continued. “One of the ice balls hit an American sympathizer squarely in the middle, and, inasmuch as the shad concealed within it happened to strike him tall foremost, he was frightfully lacerated by the bones. Which left a wound similar to that of the very reprehensible dum-dum bullet of modern times.”

“I move we adjourn!” cried Baron Munchausen, as General Washington sat down. “There is no chance for anybody else after a story like that.”

The motion was defeated merely out of courtesy to Washington, but it was obvious that a gloom had been cast upon the occasion by his story that nothing could dispel, and about an hour later the meeting broke up with a dulling sense in the mind of everybody that the dinner had been a failure. As Munchausen said to me, on his way home, “A fish story is a fish story, but a tale like that of Washington’s — well, it’s enough to make Apollo’s lyre blush with shame. Somebody ought to look up that cherry tree story and see just what this man Washington’s pretensions amounted to. You’re the man for the job, Homes. Why don’t you do it?”

“I wish he would,” said Diogenes, “It means a good deal to me, for you know I spent my life looking for an honest man, and when I met Washington I quit. Thought I had him at last — but that shad story of his upsets all my calculations. I may have to go back into business again.”

Others brought their powers of persuasion to bear upon me, but, shocked as I had been by the reckless statements of the General, I was at first loath to undertake the work. The role of the iconoclast is not a popular one, and I had no wish to risk my gratifying hold upon the affections of the American people by ruthlessly shattering one of their idols.

Their heroes do not last long, as a rule, and it seemed a pity to take one of the very few that had endured through more than a hundred years and shatter him. Yet, as Ananias argued, truth should ever prevail, and, however unpleasant the consequences, should be told. Hence it was that I took up the cherry tree episode.

My first step was to call upon the General at his home, an easy venture, since he had repeatedly invited me to do so. He was cordial to a degree, and as I sat and enjoyed his hospitality it vexed me much to think that I was deceiving him, and devoted, for the moment, to his betrayal. I think I should have given over my project had it not been for his response to my complimentary allusion to his speech.

“That was a charming tale of yours at the Walton Club, General,” said I, hoping that he would be honest with me and confess his obvious mendacity.

“Thank you,” said he, simply, “I’m glad you liked it. For myself, I have feared it was a failure. You see, Homes, these fishermen don’t like a story that bears the earmarks of truth. To please them you’ve simply got to lie, and it seemed to me, the other night, because I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, as the case may be, my tale was not liked.”

“By Jove!” thought I. “He’s trying to brazen it out!” Then I added aloud, “That campaign yarn was a stiff one, I must confess.”

“Yes,” said Washington. “But it was a stiff campaign, Homes.”

“But the shad whose bones ripped the American sympathizer like a dumdum bullet, General — that’s a hard story.”

“It was, indeed,” said Washington, handing me a cigar, “but — well, did you ever see a man who’d been shot through by a frozen shad whose bones at the moment of impact offered the greatest resistance?”

“No,” said I. “I never saw anybody who’d been shot by a shad under any circumstances.”

“Well, wait until you do,” said Washington. “It’s a terrible sight, any way you look at it. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

The calm assumption of righteousness on the General’s part made me merciless.

“General,” said I, in pursuance of the plan I had laid down, “I have been entertained a good deal down here, and I’ve decided to return some of my entertainment in kind. I’m going to give a turtle dinner down the river next Saturday. Will you come?”

“Delighted!” he said, with charming alacrity.

“We’ll have some sports before the dinner, I think. Running races, and tugs of war, and things of that sort,” I suggested.

“Splendid,” said he. “It’ll give us all an appetite for the turtle.”

“I suppose you’ll enter some of the events —” I began.

“Of course,” he replied. “I’m not much on running, or tug of warring, but you can put me down just for the fun of it.’

“Why — you can participate in the tree-felling contest,” I observed innocently, fully expecting him to turn pale and try to worm out of his predicament.

“As you please,” said he, calmly, and without turning a hair. “I used to be quite a dab at that sort of thing.”

“You prefer a cherry tree?” I put in, sarcastically.

“Yes — if you’ve got one,” said he. “In fact I’ll give you a full dress rehearsal of that famous episode in my career, out of which has grown my reputation for veracity.”

I was nonplussed. Instead of quailing before my insidious suggestion, he had met me openly and accepted the challenge in a way I had not expected.

“Better bring the original hatchet,” I said, with a grim chuckle, as I left him.

“I will,” said he, cheerily — and he did.

The following Saturday we were all on hand at the Turtle Club picnic grounds, and the sports went off with great success. Washington and his father were there, and with them was Rastus, the General’s aged negro body servant, the last named grinning as broadly as only a darky of the old school can, and hugging closely to his breast no less a thing than the hatchet of history.

“He’s going to bluff it out!” whispered Munchausen.

“It looks that way,” said Ananias. “What nerve!”

And then began a scene which I must confess started me and all Hades as well. When I announced that General Washington would give a faithful reproduction of the cherry tree episode, the three actors in the comedy — Augustine, George and Rastus — walked over to the tree. Augustine turned his back upon the other two and George seated himself on a fence rail near at hand, while Rastus, with a few lusty whacks with the hatchet, soon had the doomed tree lying prostrate upon the sward.

“Ah!” cried Augustine Washington, turning as the tree fell. “Who chopped down that cherry tree?”

“I did, father,” said the General, with a wink at Rastus. “I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” said the old gentleman, “because I’m going to larrup the life out of whoever did it, and I’d hate to kill Rastus, because he’s worth $29 in good money at the present market for lusty Africans.”

Whereupon the three famous personages bowed to the audience and, amid the cheers of the multitude, disappeared into the commodious House of the Turtle Club, where the cherries of the fallen tree were shortly served up in an amber-colored liquid of considerable alcoholic strength.

Later, as our party was on the way back to Gehenna, Ananias approached Washington and held out his hand.

“You’re a wonder, General!” said he. “How the deuce a man can get a reputation for veracity on a plain up and down lie beats me.”

“It’s simple enough.” said Washington, genially. “The exception proves the rule. That lie was the only one I ever told.”

“Humph!” ejaculated Munchausen, contemptuously. “And that remark?”

“Is the second,” said Washington with a courteous bow.

“You can be truthful, I see,” sneered Munchausen.

“Yes,” said Washington. “And it’s so easy, Munchausen, I wonder you never tried it.”

A sally which pleased the Walton Club so much that Washington was immediately reinstated in its good graces, and the story of the shad bombardment of Trenton was ordered spread upon the minutes of the association.