The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures - Mike Ashley [272]
The image on the screen had changed once more. Now it depicted an urban crossroads, quite unremarkable excepting that the trams, broughams, and other conveyances – in the American manner – were moving on the wrong side of the street. Upon the screen, men and women were proceeding in their usual fashions and varying gaits, entering at the one side and exeunting at the other. A newsboy hawked his gazettes between two hoardings underneath a street-lamp, and although this object was unlit – the tableau taking place in full daylight – I was surprised to observe that the street-lamp was outfitted for electrical current, not gaslight. Two signs depending from the lamp-post apprised us that this crossroads was the intersection of “Broadway“ and “W. 58th Street“. In the background, a clock-dial set into the face of a distant tower gave the time as ten-seventeen. Evidently, this newest vitascope film was neither farce nor tragedy, but merely an impromptu vignette of Manhattanites in their native environs … and as such, no especial drama was about to unfold.
“You are right, Holmes,” I whispered to my friend. “I have beheld my fill. Let us away to the Empire Theatre, and pay tribute to Miss Adams.”
During the while I said these words, the images, on the screen continued their silent processions. As I spoke, yet one more figure made his entrance within the background of the tableau before us. He was a man of above the middle height, thirtyish, with neatly trimmed moustaches. He was well-shod, in expensive cordovans, and clutching in his left hand a furled umbrella. But something about him was out of the common: his pin-striped suit was of a cut which had passed out of fashion some thirty years ago, and he sported side-whiskers in the style called dundrearies, which have long been out of vogue. Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my wrist: the finger-tips of Sherlock Holmes were pressing into my flesh, as Holmes’s body went rigid.
“Watson!” he shouted, so loudly that every person in the theatre might have heard him. “That man on the screen! He is James Phillimore!“
From the dark rows behind us, someone shouted for Holmes to keep still.
I felt a chill run up my spine as I beheld the flickering Vitascope image. James Phillmore had vanished thirty-one years ago, yet the newcomer on the kinetographic screen looked barely thirty years of age. “You must be mistaken, Holmes,” I whispered, so as not to disturb the audience. “If Phillimore is still alive, he is in his sixties now.”
“I tell you, Watson, he is the very man!“ Holmes stood erect, and pointed his long arm towards the screen. “That man is James Phillimore to the life, and he has not aged a single day since he vanished!“
I think that every head in the audience must have turned towards us at that moment, and every tongue – in harsh American accents – shouted at us to be quiet. Therefore I was certain that no one save Holmes and myself observed what happened next upon the Vitascope’s screen.
As if responding to Sherlock Holmes’s voice, the man on the screen abruptly turned and looked directly toward us. His eyes widened in delight, and his mouth split into a broad grin. His lips moved silently, in unheard speech.
Holmes leaped forth from his seat. “Down in front!” bellowed some person behind us.
I have said that the man in the picture stood within its background. No longer. Looking directly at Sherlock Holmes, the silent image of James Phillimore strode boldly to the foreground of the image. With a brief sidelong glance before resuming his gaze in Holmes’s direction, he traversed West Fifty-Eighth Street, stepped onto the kerb of the near side, and placed his well-shod feet firmly atop the pavement whilst he raised his umbrella, and pointed it squarely at Holmes. Now I too leaped out of my chair.
The other simulacra within the Vitascope screen took no notice of James Phillimore,