A question for Sherlock Holmes aficionados - "Adventure of the Naval Treaty"

Cafe Society
1

A couple of active threads have mentioned Sherlock Holmes, who is my favorite fictional detective, and they brought to mind one of the most puzzling excerpts (to me, anyway) in the entire canon.

One of the better Holmes stories, in my opinion, is “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty.” Holmes is at his inscrutable best solving the crime, seeing clues where all is dark to others.

However, in the midst of this story, there’s a brief passage that seems wholly out of character for Holmes (I call it “The Moss Rose Part”), and, to my way of thinking, is a jarring note in the story itself. I’ve quoted it below.

In other stories, Holmes is shown as completely dedicated to the science of deduction and solving a crime. We’re told that in some instances he’s gone days without eating or sleeping while working on a case, and on more than one occasion he’s made himself ill by overtaxing his body. In this passage, though, he gives himself over to admiring a rose for several minutes while gathering information from the victim of the crime.

Some cursory searches over the years haven’t turned up any real explanations for The Moss Rose Part, although a few folks have noted its odd nature. And unlike Tolkien, I doubt we’ll find a long series of letters in which A.C. Doyle explains what it means.

So I’ll put it to the Straight Dope community: What purpose do you think this passage serves in an otherwise well-written and fairly straightforward whodunit story?

The excerpt begins with Holmes talking. With him are Watson, Percy Phelps, and Percy’s fiancée, Annie Harrison.

*"I have no doubt I can get details from Forbes. The authorities are excellent at amassing facts, though they do not always use them to advantage. What a lovely thing a rose is!”

He walked past the couch to the open window, and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.

“There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,” said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. “It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

Percy Phelps and his nurse looked at Holmes during this demonstration with surprise and a good deal of disappointment written upon their faces. He had fallen into a reverie, with the moss-rose between his fingers. It had lasted some minutes before the young lady broke in upon it.

“Do you see any prospect of solving this mystery, Mr. Holmes?” she asked, with a touch of asperity in her voice.

“Oh, the mystery!” he answered, coming back with a start to the realities of life.*

2

Maybe Holmes was high. Watson mentions he used morphine as well as cocaine. That would fit with Homes’ springing the recovery of the treaty on Phelps suddenly and making him faint as a callous practical joke.

Or maybe just a touch of character development, to show Holmes as more than an unfeeling rationalist. Similar to the implication that he has a thing for Irene Adler.

Or Doyle is putting his own thoughts into the mouth of his main character.

But the passage does kind of come out of nowhere.

Regards,
Shodan

3

I think it’s showing that Holmes is always thinking and analysing, and that he can go off on tangents. It helps deepen his character.

4

Maybe ACD was being paid per word. You know the old saying, “Writers are paid per word, per week, or perhaps.”

5

The passage is to Holmes’ character as the rose, as he claims, is to the rest of creation: it’s an extra, not governed by mere necessity (either of solving the mystery, or of existence). It forms a counter without which all the rest would ultimately lack a point.

6

It wasn’t unknown for Holmes to ramble on about something wholly unrelated to the Case at Hand. So he speculates on who William White was who owned the antique book he picked up (“James’ head was firmly on his shoulders when this volume was struck off,” he remarks, with dark humor.) Or his speculation about all the crimes possibly going on in the clean-looking suburbs as they ride out on a case, or his opinion of schools as the Lighthouses of the Future. Or his discussion of The Martyrdom of Man by Winwoode Reade. Or his speculation that Phoenician lay at the root of the Cornish Language. Or the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus.

Holmes talked about not carrying around extraneous material unhelpful to the case, so that it didn’t matter if he knew about the Copernican system, but he clearly did let his mind run on about topics utterly unrelated to cases. It might be why he was constantly berating himself as not a wholly analytic thinker. But if he were, I would think he would be unsocializable.

7

I like that—it’s very meta.

8

Holmes does and says several uncharacteristic things in this story as in this passage:

Doyle had moved considerably from the desiccated brain of “A Study in Scarlet” to a more human Holmes over the years. He had especial reason to make Holmes lighter and more optimistic, because that’s the way he was feeling. He knew he was going to kill Holmes off in the very next story and be out from under the burden of the character.

9

I have just reviewed the context around the passage in question. Holmes has just finished questioning Phelps obtaining, as he later says, seven clues. Immediately after the Moss Rose Passage, he accuses himself of jumping to conclusions, suggesting that he has already developed a theory of the case.

With the benefit of hindsight and analysis of the questions Holmes asked, we can infer elements of that theory. We know that:

  1. Holmes suspected the thief of arriving by cab or other conveyance due to the lack of damp footprints.
  2. Holmes took a particular interest in the ringing of the bell.
  3. Holmes made a note that the theft occurred at 10:45.
  4. Holmes knew that the late train for Woking departed at 11:00.
  5. Holmes knew that family and associates of Phelps were familiar with the office.
  6. Holmes knew that only Phelps and Holdhurst were aware that the treaty was in Phelps’ possession.
  7. Holmes knew that Joseph was expected to take the late train for Woking, because Phelps had hoped to go with him.

Additionally, Holmes already knew (8), which was that the treaty had been missing for more than two months.

Based on (6), Holmes suspected that the treaty was not actually the target of the crime, because a thief or spy looking for the treaty would have been expecting it to be in Holdhurst’s possession. Therefore, if the thief was not originally interested in the treaty, their interest must have been in Phelps himself, which suggested a prior association, and (5) told Holmes who would know where Phelps’s desk was located. (3) and (4) and (7) support this, providing a known associate in the area and an escape route. Hence, by the time Phelps finished his narrative, Holmes already suspected Joseph.

What remains is the element of motive. Why would a thief arrive openly in a cab (1)? Because Joseph was not intending to steal anything when he arrived and had a plausible, legal reason to be there. What, then, did he intend to accomplish? The fact that the treaty had not resurfaced (8) suggested a personal motive–say, to break up the impending marriage by discrediting Phelps. Thus, his strangest action of all, ringing the bell (2), was intended to bring witnesses running, so that Phelps would have no opportunity to cover up the theft of the treaty.

Obviously, not all of that matches the eventual denouement, but that’s why Holmes chided himself for jumping to conclusions. If this is what Holmes was thinking, why then the Moss Rose Passage?

Because it hadn’t worked. Annie was still loyal, sticking to Phelps despite his disgrace, and Holmes suspected Joseph would try another tactic. He went to the window and looked down; under the cover of looking down at the rose and monologuing, he was examining the ground outside the invalid’s room for signs that someone had been lurking–spying or waiting for an opportunity. Meanwhile, the monologue itself was a metaphorical reflection on love and Annie’s loyalty, which he hoped would protect Phelps until the matter was resolved; he was already forming contingency plans which would rely on her.

10

Everyone’s given good answers, but I agree with Balance. It gave him a chance to inspect the ground and maybe the room without arousing Joseph’s suspicions.

11

Remember that, in addition to his other skills, Holmes is a master at manipulating other people. He went on at length about the rose because he wanted the other people present to think that he was distracted, so that they would let down their guard and perhaps reveal some clue.

12

I’m surprised there’s debate about this. It almost seemed clear to me that Holmes was blathering about the rose in order to provide an excuse for his going to the window and looking at the ground outside. I don’t have access to my copy right now but I’m pretty sure he mentions seeing footprints out there later in the story. Watson’s reaction is typical of his reactions to similar ruses by Holmes in other stories, where he comments on some unusual behavior by Holmes and later it is revealed that Holmes had an ulterior motive that Watson failed to perceive.

13

This is an interesting thought; I’d never considered the timing of this story in the canon, although I knew Doyle had come to loathe the character and the stories. Thanks!

The only problem I have with that interpretation (which certainly sounds very plausible) is that Holmes always explained his little tricks and stratagems when he was wrapping up a case. He didn’t do that in this instance; in fact, when he returns to Woking the next day and learns of the attempt to break in through Percy’s window the night before, he goes outside to examine the ground underneath it, and doesn’t see anything he can use as a clue (“I don’t think any one could make much of this,” he says, which is noteworthy on its own; I can think of only one other time he couldn’t deduce something from smudges on the ground). He never mentions trying to examine the ground outside the window before that.

14

Holmes was doing it on purpose, because he was testing the woman. She was of course on his initial list of suspects, and he was trying to see how she would react if he went all spacey. Would she react with a kind of smug relief at his loopiness? Bingo - she’s suspect No. 1.

Instead, she got all huffy and demanded that he get on with solving the case. Well, that lets her off the hook. Now he can cross her off the list and concentrate his attention on her brother, the other suspect.

15

Detective story writers are smarter than you think they are. See Sam Spade’s “Flitcraft Parable” digression from The Maltese Falcon.

16

He explains the ones that contribute to the solution, but not necessarily the ones that led nowhere, I think, and this one did not result in obtaining any clues. He explained the negative result the next day because he was openly examining the ground after the burglary attempt.

17

It’s also a dreadful piece of reasoning, the Anthropic Fallacy at its worst.

18

Not only that, it’s not even true that a rose is “an extra…an embellishment of life, not a condition of it.” Roses, like all flowers, are reproductive organs. Their smell and color attract insects, thus allowing pollination to occur.

So for the plant, the rose is certainly “a condition of life.” Sloppy thinking all the way around, Holmes, old boy!

19

It strikes me as Holmes inadvertently :dubious: channeling Conan Doyle, who had an embarrassing mystic side.

20

Doyle was a smart guy, but he had huge blind spots, and he was not a rigorous thinker. Somewhere on my shelves there’s a collection of Edwardian essays including one by Doyle in which he visits New Zealand, where he’s struct by the sight of an old Maori woman smoking a pipe, decides that the similarity between her and old Irish women is too much to be a coincidence, notes that Maori sounds similar to Japanese, and concocts a theory whereby Maori are a lost tribe of Irish who walked though Asia and picked up a smattering of Japanese on the way. All of this from the sight of an old lady chilling on her doorstep.