The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley [270]
“I have heard of this machine, but never seen it in operation,” I remarked to Holmes, with more than a hint of eagerness in my voice. “Mr Edison’s Vitascope has gone one better than the magic-lantern: his invention can project images that actually move!“
“ ‘Invention’, indeed!” Holmes remarked with an audible sniff. “Edison has no more invented the Vitascope than I have invented the wheel. Watson, the first kinetographic camera and projector were devised by Louis Le Prince, a Frenchman who dwelt in Yorkshire. I myself attended a demonstration of his apparatus in Leeds in 1888. But come: since you are clearly so keen to witness this Vitascope, let us pay the admission and enter.”
The amusement hall’s afternoon programme was well attended, but Holmes and I were able to secure two seats in the pit-stalls, conveniently adjoining the centre aisle. The stage of the amusement hall was bare, except for a large white rectangular screen that seemed to afford no great promise of entertainment. The performance had not yet begun, and in the theatre seats all round us the audience were abuzz with a myriad of conversations. “I am no longer homesick for my bees.” Holmes murmured to me, amid the general huzzbuzz. “It appears that we may converse freely without breaching etiquette, since everyone else in this place is talking anyway. Watson, I can never sit through a moving-picture exhibition without thinking of the strange case of James Phillimore.”
For a moment the name meant nothing whatever to me, but then the penny dropped: “Wasn’t he the man who vanished from his own house in Warwickshire?”
“The same.” In the red plush seat beside me, Holmes sighed wearily. “One of my earliest failures, Watson. Following his vanishment in 1875, neither I nor anyone else ever clapped eyes on Mr James Phillimore again.”
“Surely a man who vanished in 1875 could have nothing to do with moving-pictures,” I proposed, “for they had not yet been invented.”
Sherlock Holmes nodded. “Watson, I have told you that the kinetograph was invented in England by Louis Le Prince. In 1890, during a visit to his native France, Monsieur Le Prince consented to demonstrate his device at the Paris Opera House. In September of that year, he boarded a train at Dijon, taking his camera and projector into a first-class compartment. When the train reached Paris, Watson, that compartment was empty. Despite an exhaustive investigation, neither Le Prince nor his motion-picture apparatus were ever seen again.”
“Astonishing!” I remarked.
“I had read of the case at the time, and offered my services to the French authorities,” Holmes went on. “The Sûreté declined my offer. Still, to this day I can never view a kinetograph without thinking of its inventor’s curious fate, and when I think of Le Prince’s vanishment I am naturally put in mind of James Phillimore.”
“Was Phillimore a friend of yours, Holmes?”
“I never met him,” said my companion. “Phillimore’s peculiar disappearance in 1875 aroused much attention at the time, and I journeyed to Leamington Spa to join the search for him. Among the furnishings in Phillimore’s house in Tavistock Street was found a cabinet study of a man in his early thirties; his two banking colleagues identified this photograph as a likeness of James Phillimore. I obtained a copy of the portrait, and committed it to memory. Watson, for twenty years after his vanishment – even when my wanderings brought me to the gates of Lhassa and Khartoum – I never was able to pass through a crowd without searching amongst its constituents for the face of James Phillimore. But now, after thirty-one years, I am resigned that he has vanished forever.”
At that moment the house lights dimmed, and the theatre audience fell silent. A man stepped forth upon the stage,