The Adventures of Shylock Homes: VII. “Mr. Homes Tackles a Hard Case”

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.

These episodes recount Homes’ adventures in Hades, a region in the underworld. Each story was accompanied by an illustration or two. They’ve been somewhat cleaned up for publication. They were by Jesse “Vet” Anderson (1875-1966), an illustrator who became an animator for Fleischer Studios.

Mr. Homes Tackles a Hard Case

He was a long, lank specimen of humanity, who, but for the absence of wings, hour glass and scythe, might easily have passed for old Father Time. A moment before he entered my office, there was a terrific crash out in the hallway, and the building shook as though there had been an earthquake. I sprang to my feet and rushed to the doorway, thoroughly alarmed. Flinging the door wide open, the wizened old gentleman, covered with plaster from the ceiling, which had fallen upon him, plunged headlong into the room and sprawled upon the floor with his head in my wastebasket. The heaviness of his fall was such as to send my tall eight-day clock off its balance and it toppled over on the old gentleman, smashing its face on the way down on my ink bottle and spattering the contents of that vessel over about everything in the room including myself.

Nor was this the worst, for on top of all this ruin about six feet square of my own ceiling, like that of the hallway, was loosened, and fell with a crash over all. It was a wonderful transformation, and it happened in the twinkling of an eye. Where only thirty seconds before was the well ordered systematically arranged and scrupulously clean office of Shylock Homes the Ferret was now a scene of muddy desolation. My first thought, however, was for my visitor, who lay cursing, underneath the clock. I feared he might be seriously hurt, and hastened to his assistance, but fortunately, barring a bruised dignity and a ruffled temper, he was none the worse off for his precipitate entry.

“Wuh — Wait a minute, ’till I get my breath,” he panted, as I dusted him off, and scraped the ink from his nose with my eraser, “Uh — and I’ll tut — tell you huh — who I am.”

“There is no need,” said I, gazing about me upon the ruin his coming had wrought. “I perceive from the plaster on your neck and waste basket on your head and the demoralization that has overtaken my office since your arrival that you are none other than that prince of hoodoos George W. Jonah, Esq.. captain of the Whale and harbinger of ill luck. I thought at first you might be Job, but when I heard the language you used when the clock fell on you, which I assure you is not fit to print, I knew at once that you were not he, but yourself. What can I do for you?”

“May I sit down for a moment?” he asked.

“You can if you’ll pay for the chair,” said I, for I perceived very clearly what would happen if I yielded to his request. There is no known chair, bench, settee or divan made of iron, steel or solid oak that would be safe with him on it, nay, not even if its seat were of armor plate and its legs of the squad thickness of a grand piano’s.

“Perhaps we’d better go out in the park and talk,” he suggested. “Some place where nothing can fall on us. It might be safer.”

“No,” said I. “we’re better off here. We’ve already had all that can be coming to us in the way of trouble, unless, of course, the house falls. What can I do for you?”

“Have you seen this?” he asked, taking a newspaper clipping from the folds of his garment and handing it over. “It is a statement made by Baron Munchausen in his “Further Recollections,” now being published in the Gehenna Gazette, that I am an old fraud, and that he himself, in a previous state of existence, was Jonah. What is more, he foreshadows the ‘Autobiography of Jonah,’ a work upon which I am myself engaged, and hope to have finished in time for the next holiday season. He not only libels me by calling me an old fraud, but actually proposes to take the bread out of my mouth by writing a profitable work which no one but myself is entitled to write.”

I glanced over the article complained of, which read as follows:—

“Now as to Jonah. I really dislike very much to tread upon this worthy’s toes, and I should not do it had he not chosen to clap an injunction upon a volume of ‘Tales of the Whales,’ which I wrote for children last summer, claiming that I was infringing upon his copyright, and feeling that I, as a self-respecting man, would never claim the discredit of having myself been the person he claims to have been. I will candidly confess that I am not proud of my achievements as Jonah. I was a very oily person before I embarked upon the seas as Lord High Admiral of H.M.S. Leviathan. I was not a pleasant person to know. If I spent the night with a friend, his roof would fall in or his house would burn down. If I bet on a horse, he would lead up to the home stretch and fall down dead an inch from the finish. If I went into a stock speculation. I was invariably caught on a rising or falling market.

“In my youth I spoiled every yachting party I went on by attracting a gale. When I came out the moon went behind a cloud and people who began by indorsing my paper ended up in the poorhouse. Society gave me up; commerce wouldn’t have me; boards of trade everywhere repudiated me, and I gradually sank into that state of despair which finds no solace anywhere but on the sea or in politics, and, as politics was then unknown, I went to sea. The result is known to the world. I was cast overboard and engulfed by a whale, which, in his defense, let me be generous enough to say, swallowed me inadvertently, and with the usual result. I came back, and life went on. Finally I came here, and when it got to the ears of the authorities that I was in Hades, they sent me back for the fourth time on earth in the person of William Shakespeare.

“This is the whole of the Jonah story. It is a sad story, and I regret it; and I am sorry for the impostor now posing as Jonah when I reflect that the character he has assumed possesses attractions for him. His real life must have been a fearful thing if he is happy in his impersonation, and for his punishment let us leave him where he is. Having told the truth, I have done my duty. I cheerfully resign my claim to the personality he claims — I relinquish from this on all right, title and interest in the name, but if he ever dares to interfere with me again in the use of my personal recollections concerning the inside of whales I shall hale him before the authorities.

“Well,” said I, as I finished reading Munchausen’s strange narrative. “I don’t see what I have to do with, a case like this. I am not an attorney, but a detective. What you need is a lawyer.”

“There isn’t a lawyer in all Hades that will take my case.” said Jonah, “I went to Blackstone and besought him to see that I got justice, and, just because the moment I entered his office, a bookcase fell over on us both and knocked him senseless for a minute, he had me fired out.”

“Blackstone’s a clever man” said I, “but he isn’t the whole bar. Why don’t you go to Edmund Burke?”

“I did,” sighed Jonah, “and with the same result. At first he said he’d take the case, but just then some rotten beams in his office floor gave way, and we fell through three stories into the cellar — Burke, myself, his office and everybody in it. When we came to he said he had reconsidered and didn’t think that a libel suit for a plaintiff of my peculiar sort was quite in his line.”

It was with difficulty that I restrained my desire to laugh. The only thing that saved me from seeming to mock at the poor old chap’s misfortunes, I fear, was my own apprehension of what might happen to myself if I laughed as heartily as I should have done. I surely did not wish my own floor to give way, and I avoided any ebullition whatsoever that might bring further trouble upon us.

“Have you tried Catiline?” I asked, referring to the great Roman, who, in criminal practice is doing the most successful law business in Hades.

“Oh, Lord!” groaned Jonah. “When I think of Catiline it makes me weary. Of course, I tried him, and he actually took the case, and we got it started all right. But the moment I entered the court room, the scales on the statue of Justice, back of Lord Jeffreys’ chair, fell off and whacked his honor so vigorously on the pate that he didn’t come to for four hours, and the first thing he did on re gaining consciousness was to commit me for contempt of court.”

“What had you to do with it, besides being yourself?” I demanded.

“Nothing,” Jonah answered. “It was sheer negligence on the part of the court officials that caused it. They ought to have seen to it that the scales were securely fastened. But the Judge found me guilty of contributory negligence, and I had to stay in jail until His Honor’s head healed up.”

“You have luck to burn, haven’t you?” I suggested, sympathetically.

“Yes,” he sighed, “but it seems to be fire-proof. If it weren’t, you’d see a lot of it go up in smoke.”

“I still don’t see how I can help you. Mr. Jonah,” I put in, after a pause. “I have no influence with the courts, and am not in any sense a lawyer. What you really ought to do. it seems to me, is to have a trustee appointed for yourself, get a guardian, or possibly go into the hands of a receiver, and have this person institute a suit on your behalf.” For myself, you will pardon my saying it, you are a veritable hoodoo, and I can testify from personal experience” — here I waved my hand over the wreck of my once peaceful office — “that it is practically impossible for you in propria persona to leave a pleasant impression behind you, but if you make an assignment of your interests to a second party it may be that he can help you out.”

“I tried it.” said Jonah, mournfully. “But it wouldn’t work. I got Samson to look after my affairs — went into the hands of a receiver, as you have suggested, and — well, it was the same old story. On his way to court to qualify, he was run over by a trolley car, and the automobile ambulance that came to take him to the hospital blew up just after he’d been put aboard and smashed the few ribs he had left when the trolley car had gotten through with him. Then his partner, Demosthenes, took my case up, and while he was dictating the complaint, he swallowed one of the pebbles he keeps in his mouth to overcome his stammering. It lodged in his vermiform appendix, and he had to be operated on within three hours. He won’t be out again for six weeks, and meanwhile this beastly libel is going the rounds uncontradicted —”

“Why don’t some of your friends come to the front and set you straight? Hadn’t you any neighbors in Nineveh who can testify for you, and thus confound old Munchausen?” I asked, for I was torn by conflicting emotions. I was awfully sorry for the old gentleman, whose luck had been so hard as to be described by the adjective “adamantine,” but, on the other hand, I had myself to consider, and when I thought of the woes that had come upon Blackstone, Jeffreys, Samson and Demosthenes for having undertaken to champion Jonah’s cause, I was extremely loath to put my own neck in the same noose. I wanted to get free of him with the mere offer of advice, and I racked my brain to find some semblance of a reasonable scheme to send him forth tolerably content with my good will. But it was without avail. The suggestion merely elicited the fact of a more unhappy condition than I had surmised.

“They actually refuse to have anything to do with me,” he said sadly. “There isn’t one of them will consent to come within a mile of me if he can help it. You see they remember the old days when acquaintance with me was enough to send a man into bankruptcy. I don’t know why it is, Mr. Homes, but I’m the antipodes of that old jackass, Midas. He doesn’t know a blessed thing, but everything he touches turns to gold, whilst I — well, everything I touch turns into Attleboro jewelry in a minute. I frankly believe that if I had the Koh-i-noor diamond. in my possession for five minutes it would turn out to be nothing more than a poor quality of rhinestone before it left my possession. My neighbors of Nineveh? No indeed, Mr. Homes, there’s no relief there. As a matter of fact, Job himself, who is case-hardened when it comes to suffering, and who loves me like a brother, absolutely refuses to lift his finger to help me out”

My soul was fired by all this misery. I forgot the ruin of my office. I forgot the despoilment of my papers and the destruction of my clock, and sent him away with a promise of help.

It was the hardest task I had ever undertaken, for there seemed no way out of the situation. Silence on Jonah’s part in the public eye appeared to confirm the truth of Munchausen’s words, but how could he speak with the ordinary channels of redress barred? The lawyers were out of it, and after the Jeffreys accident even the courts were morally, if not physically, closed to him. His friends refused to speak, and without them the poor old fellow stood alone in the battle with one of the most ingenious and plausible liars of the age. Fortunately, however, a trip with Dr. Johnson and Sir Walter Raleigh down to Charybdis Rock, a sort of Cimmerian Coney Island, suggested a solution of Jonah’s troubles.

It so happened that there was a sword swallower there, who claimed to be the greatest in the business, because for two years his challenge to swallow swords against the world had gone untaken, wherefore he had dubbed himself the “Great and Only.” In an instant the solution of Jonah’s troubles flashed across my mind.

HE MUST CHALLENGE MUNCHAUSEN TO BE SWALLOWED BY A WHALE, BEST THREE IN FIVE, FOR THE TITLE THEY BOTH CLAIMED.

This surely would be the supreme test, for I reckoned that Baron Munchausen would either decline the challenge, and thus be placed hors de combat in the event of Jonah’s successfully surviving the ordeal, or accept, and granting the untruth, of his assertions, fail to do the trick with the ease and grace with which the more experienced Jonah would perform it.

Upon my return to Cimmeria, I telephoned my suggestion to Jonah, and was pleased at his ready acceptance.

“Splendid!” he cried. “I’ll be glad —”

Just here the telephone switchboard was struck by lightning and the connection cut off, but I had his approval of my plan, which was all I needed.

In due course the challenge was sent, and was published by myself in all the newspapers of Hades. It attracted immediate attention as a novel proposition, and Jonah’s position began to gather strength. Expectation rose to fever height. The match was the talk of all the clubs, and the betting ran up into the thousands, when, as I expected, Munchausen declined. He had a previous engagement, he said, although no date had been specified. His stock fell a hundred points in a night, but Jonah’s battle was only half won.

It needed clinching, so I announced publicly that, while we regretted our inability to make a match with Munchausen, rather than disappoint the public in the spectacle it had expected to witness, Jonah himself, on the following Saturday evening, at the Aquarium, would plunge into the leviathan tank and permit himself to be “ingulfed.” The evening came. The place was packed. My suffering client entered, stepped on the edge of the tank, dived head first into its lucent waters, and then, before ten thousand persons, swam grace fully into the open jaws of Jumbo, the Elephant of the Sea. as the leviathan was called, and disappeared from view.

The cheers that rent the air were such as to well nigh remove the top of the building, and all night long the streets were thronged by a cheering, howling mob, who hailed Jonah as the Conquering Hero Of the Hour, and fleered and jeered at Munchausen to such an extent that he was forced to leave the city and remain in hiding until the storm blew over.

But, alas! There was really no victor, for, in spite of his feat, poor Jonah never enjoyed the fruits of his nerve and courage, for some unaccountable reason, he has not returned from the interior, which has vexed me more than I like to say. I am not easily to be deceived, and I seldom make mistakes but Jonah’s failure to emerge from within the capacious person of the Elephant of the Sea indicates either that the man whose cause I championed was a spurious Jonah or that I selected the wrong kind of a whale for my experiment.

I am not enlarging upon this point, however, for either horn of my dilemma is an unpleasant one. All the satisfaction I get out of the episode is in the discomfiture of Baron Munchausen, whom I have long suspected to be a prevaricator of the first water.

Meanwhile, if Jonah has any heirs, I wish they would reveal themselves, for I have a bill against his estate for $672 for repairs to my office, $160 for my eight-day clock, $1 for a quart of ink, and $50 for one night’s rent of Jumbo, which I paid in advance, marked “Please remit.”