The Adventure of the Copper Beeches; was it all a charade?
Confusion abounds
Once again Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has packed a lot of excitement, Gothic drama and strange characters into 10,000 words, but he’s also packed a lot of conundrums, red herrings and innuendos into those same words. Let me summarize a few of those puzzling aspects, including those heretofore identified by Sherlockians and those which I have identified (although considering the long history of Sherlockian scholarship, I’m probably not the first).
- Holmes’ ill-temper at the beginning of the story
- Violet Hunter’s flirtation
- The thought of Jephro Rucastle on a ladder
- The imbecility of leaving Alice Rucastle’s hair in Miss Hunter’s bedroom
- The uselessness of cutting Violet Hunter’s hair
- The fact, already mentioned, that Holmes and Watson accomplish nothing in this story
- The outlandish suggestion (by me) that the entire story is a put-up job.
We’ll go through these items in order. 1. Holmes’ ill-temper at the beginning of the story. At first, Holmes seems to be complimenting Watson by noting that the good doctor has chosen to publish “those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province.” Almost in the next breath, however, he says Watson has failed to pay adequate notice of Holmes’ “severe reasoning” that solved the cases to which he earlier alluded.
After Watson understandably objects to this accusation, Holmes them tells Watson “… but in avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the trivial.” Holmes seems unusually contrary, even by his standards and I am left to wonder why. We know during The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, of which Copper Beeches is the twelfth and last, that Watson is married to the former Mary Morstan, and I believe it to have been a happy marriage. What more natural then, for a newly wed man, than to hope that his best friend might also find happiness. Is it possible that some friction has arisen between Holmes and Watson because of the latter’s attempts to introduce Holmes to a suitable mate?
2. Then there is the matter of Miss Hunter’s flirtation. She calls attention to her hair (admittedly she could hardly do otherwise because it is the point d’appui of the story, as Bertie Wooster would say): “As you may observe, Mr. Holmes, my hair is somewhat luxuriant, and of a rather peculiar tint of chestnut. It has been considered artistic.” She also calls attention to mental powers: “I am naturally observant, as you may have remarked, Mr. Holmes, and I soon had a pretty good plan of the whole house in my head.” And she calls attention to her sense of justice:
Well, Mr. Holmes, from the moment that I understood that there was something about that suite of rooms which I was not to know, I was all on fire to go over them. It was not mere curiosity, though I have my share of that. It was more a feeling of duty—a feeling that some good might come from my penetrating to this place. They talk of woman’s instinct; perhaps it was woman’s instinct which gave me that feeling.
I am definitely not the first to notice Miss Hunter’s flirtatiousness, although upon my first and second reading of this story, preparatory to the discussion of the story at our May meeting of Doctor Watson’s Neglected Patients, I dismissed the thought, when I still took the story on face value. But after watching the Jeremy Brett version of the story—which went to some pains to correct some of the confusions in the story, most notably:
3. The thought of Jephro Rucastle on a ladder. Miss Hunter describes Rucastle this way: “A prodigiously stout man with a very smiling face and a great heavy chin which rolled down in fold upon fold over his throat.” Later, Watson describes him as “a very fat and burly man.”
And yet Holmes suggests that this very fat man carried Alice Rucastle from her upper-story room down a light ladder. Remember the passage quoted before: ““Through the skylight. We shall soon see how he managed it.’ He swung himself up onto the roof. ‘Ah, yes,’ he cried, ‘here’s the end of a long light ladder against the eaves. That is how he did it.’”
(Go to 40:54 to see Fowler on the ladder)
The Granada version, however, shows Mr. Fowler, the agile seaman, climbing the ladder and smashing the window of Miss Rucastle’s room with an ax. Not only did this provide some much needed action in the story, it also gave us our only glimpse of the characters who are never directly seen by the narrator Watson in the actual story. And most importantly, it removed the ridiculous notion of Rucastle on a ladder.2
And yet Holmes surmises that this is precisely what happened. Are we to believe that Holmes finely tuned but highly strung mind has snapped? Or was Holmes speaking sarcastically? Had Holmes already determined the real purpose of this adventure. In short, had he already questioned 4. The imbecility of leaving Alice Rucastle’s hair in Miss Hunter bedroom and 5. The uselessness of cutting Violet Hunter’s hair.
It’s undoubtedly a genius touch of Gothic horror for Miss Hunter to find Alice Rucastle’s hair in the locked drawer of her bedroom chest (I cannot help, however, but think of Catherine Morland’s discovery of an old laundry list in Northanger Abbey.) But one has to wonder why the Rucastles would have left it in the very room of the person they hoped would unknowingly impersonate their daughter. Add to this the improbability Miss Hunter should be able to open the drawer so easily: “I took out my bunch of keys and tried to open it. The very first key fitted to perfection, and I drew the drawer open.”
We have to assume that either Miss Hunter was given the keys by the Rucastles or that she had upon her person a key that would fit the lock. The first assumption seems absurd, of course, but so does the idea of leaving the hair in the drawer in the first place. The more likely explanation is that a drawer lock is usually a pretty simple device and it’s possible she did have a key that fit from a previous residence.
We can also explain away the reason the hair was in the room. We learn from Mrs. Toller that Alice Rucastle suffered from brain fever after her parents prevented her from seeing her fiancé. It’s possible that Miss Hunter occupies Miss Rucastle’s room, before that unfortunate woman was locked away in the unused rooms. Of course a governess’ room is usually in another part of the house and one would think that the observant Miss Hunter might have mentioned how nice was her room.
However, if we accept that this was Miss Rucastle’s room, perhaps it’s understandable her shorn hair was kept in the locked drawer and that the ruthless but inept Rucastles forgot to remove it before placing Miss Hunter in that same room. Yeah, right.
More baffling than the presence of the hair, however, is the need for Violet Hunter to cut her hair at all. Consider this, Holmes surmises: “The man in the road was undoubtedly some friend of hers—possibly her fiancé—and no doubt, as you wore the girl’s dress and were so like her, he was convinced from your laughter, whenever he saw you, and afterwards from your gesture, that Miss Rucastle was perfectly happy, and that she no longer desired his attentions. The dog is let loose at night to prevent him from endeavouring to communicate with her.”
If we are to understand that Miss Rucastle has been kept from Fowler, why should he know that her hair had been removed. Of course Mrs. Toller says:
“When she [Miss Rucastle] wouldn’t do it [sign the paper as her father insisted], he kept on worrying her until she got brain-fever, and for six weeks was at death’s door. Then she got better at last, all worn to a shadow, and with her beautiful hair cut off; but that didn’t make no change in her young man, and he stuck to her as true as man could be.”
If we accept this, then he knew her hair had been cut, but he’d also know that because of love for him, she’d been at death’s door, and it seems unlikely that he’d be put off by Miss Hunter, unknowingly pretending to be Miss Rucastle, waving him away, and, if we accept this story, he would not be put off by any imposture. I’m sorry, my reasoning sounds circular, but so much of this story is circular.
6. The fact that Holmes and Watson accomplish nothing in this story It’s no very unusual thing that Holmes and Watson serve no useful purpose in an adventure. Five Orange Pips is a classic example of this, although had Holmes protected his client in that case, he might have prevented a murder. In this story, however, their actual presence makes things worse. When they arrive, Miss Rucastle is already gone, either spirited away by her fiancé or by the surprisingly nimble Rucastle. All their presence does is force Rucastle to let loose the hound (Watson distinctly says the baying of a hound) and Watson is forced to shoot Carlo, the mastiff.