A Conversation with Captain Croker
The Baker Street Interviews Hosted by Herbert Greenhough Smith
SMITH: Welcome to the Baker Street Interviews, a new series inspired by The Strand Magazine's Sherlock Holmes Seminars which were held at the British Museum. My name is Herbert Greenhough Smith, and I have had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with the very men and women who lived the Sherlock Holmes adventures you have enjoyed. These are the voices behind the cases — the clients, the confidants, and the witnesses — each with a story to tell that Dr. Watson's faithful accounts only began to capture. It is my great pleasure to welcome Captain Croker, who played a pivotal role in the story entitled “The Adventure of the Abby Grange”. Captain Croker, I am grateful to you for agreeing to speak with us. I confess that when your letter arrived, I was not entirely certain you would keep the appointment.
CAPTAIN CROKER: I nearly didn’t. I have spent the better part of two years convincing myself that silence was the wiser course. Mr. Holmes made the same argument, and far more eloquently than I could manage. But there is something that sits uneasily in a man when a story has been told about him—and about people he loves—that is not quite true. I could not let someone else carry the whole weight of it forever, even if they are guilty of a dozen other things besides.
SMITH: Let us begin, then, at the beginning—or at least at the beginning as it concerns you personally. Will you tell our readers who Lady Mary Brackenstall is to you?
CAPTAIN CROKER: She is everything. She was everything before I ever knew what to call it. I met Mary Fraser—as she then was—when she sailed with her chaperone on a voyage to England from Adelaide, some years ago. I was first officer at the time. She was the most remarkable woman I had ever laid eyes upon, and I say that without a trace of sentiment clouding my judgment. She had intelligence, courage, and a quality of spirit that I can only describe as irreducible. The sea does not diminish a person. Mary Fraser was not diminished by anything.
SMITH: And yet she married Sir Eustace Brackenstall.
CAPTAIN CROKER: She did. I was at sea. She was a young woman of good family but without great fortune, newly arrived in England, surrounded by a society that places extraordinary pressure upon women to contract advantageous marriages before opportunity closes. Sir Eustace was wealthy. He was—by outward appearances—a man of position. I did not learn of the marriage until I returned to port. I will not pretend that the news did not strike me. It did. But what could I say? She had made her choice. I had made mine by going to sea.
SMITH: Did you maintain contact with her after the marriage?
CAPTAIN CROKER: Not in any improper sense. I was aware of her circumstances. Sailors hear things in ports—letters travel, word passes. I knew that Sir Eustace was not a temperate man. I knew that his conduct toward her was — it is difficult to frame this for a family publication. He was brutal. I will simply say that. He was a brute and a drunkard, and she bore it with a fortitude that I found both admirable and infuriating in equal measure. A woman should not require such fortitude at her own hearth.
SMITH: Will you describe the events of the night of the twenty-third of January?
CAPTAIN CROKER: I had put in at Gravesend. We were loading cargo for the Australia run. I had three days in England and I confess—I am not ashamed to confess it—that I intended to call upon her. Not to create any scene, you understand, not to make demands upon her. Simply to see with my own eyes that she was well. I had received a letter from Theresa Wright, Lady Mary’s maid—a formidable woman, that one; I rather think she would have made an excellent bosun—in which Theresa had made it sufficiently clear that things at Abbey Grange had taken a darker turn than I had fully appreciated. I could not simply leave for Australia without knowing.
SMITH: So you went to Abbey Grange.
CAPTAIN CROKER: I did. I arrived late. It was well past midnight. I came around through the grounds to avoid the lane, and I let myself be known to Theresa, who admitted me through the servants’ entrance. Lady Mary and I spoke. It had been so long—and yet not long enough to change what was between us. We were perhaps an hour in conversation when Sir Eustace—he must have heard voices, or perhaps he simply awoke in one of his rages; it scarcely mattered—came down into the room.
SMITH: What was his condition?
CAPTAIN CROKER: He had been drinking. Heavily. His face was a dark colour and his eyes—there is a particular look in the eyes of a violent man who has found a pretext. I have seen it before, in rough ports and rougher crews. Well, gentlemen, I was standing with her just inside the window, in all innocence, as Heaven is my judge, when he rushed like a madman into the room, called her the vilest name that a man could use to a woman, and welted her across the face with the stick he had in his hand. I had sprung for the poker, and it was a fair fight between us. See here on my arm where his first blow fell. Then it was my turn, and I went through him as if he had been a rotten pumpkin.
SMITH: You struck him once?
CAPTAIN CROKER: Once. It was sufficient. I did not strike him in cold blood, and I did not strike him twice. I am not a murderer, Mr. Smith, whatever the law might choose to call it. I struck a violent man who was in the act of attacking a woman with a fire iron. I will stand behind that, and I will stand behind it in any court in England if it comes to it.
SMITH: Did you believe, at the time, that he was dead?
CAPTAIN CROKER: I knew it almost immediately. There was no question. I am not a man who has been sheltered from death. He was gone before he reached the floor.
SMITH: What followed?
CAPTAIN CROKER: Theresa was magnificent. There are people who discover, in extremity, a quality of mind that surprise you. She had it. She had it in abundance. It was she who conceived the idea of the Randall gang—she knew of them, knew they had been working in the area. She had me tie Lady Mary to the settee, which I did, though it was perhaps the most terrible thing I have ever done—knowing that she would be found in that condition by the police. We poured three glasses of the wine from the cellar. We thought it would look like the intruders had helped themselves. We staged it as best we could, and then I went.
SMITH: And the detail of the wine glasses—three glasses filled, yet one never drunk from—that was the thread which Mr. Holmes pulled to unravel everything.
CAPTAIN CROKER: So I understand. Yes. One glass was filled and never touched. In our haste we had filled three, but there were only two of us who drank. Mr. Holmes, of course, noticed that one glass bore no lip-marks and that the beeswax on the rim was undisturbed. When I learned afterwards what evidence he had assembled—the bell-rope that was cut rather than rung, the manner of Lady Mary’s bonds, the nature of her bruise—I confess I felt a grudging admiration even as my blood ran cold. The man misses nothing. Nothing at all.
SMITH: Tell me of the moment Mr. Holmes confronted you. You had returned to England, I believe, in anticipation of being summoned.
CAPTAIN CROKER: He had sent word to the Bass Rock before she sailed. Simply a note—no threats, no theatrics—asking me to present myself at Baker Street. The address alone told me enough. I went, of course. What else was I to do? Run? I am not a man who runs. I sat in his rooms and I looked him in the eye, and I told him the truth. The complete truth, without trimming. There is no point in lying to Sherlock Holmes. It is like attempting to deceive the tide.
SMITH: How did he receive your account?
CAPTAIN CROKER: He listened without interruption. That in itself is a quality—most men who are not listening are at least composing their next remark. He was simply—present. When I had finished, he sat quiet for a moment. Then he turned to Dr. Watson and he said something that I shall carry with me to my grave. He said: “Watson, you are a British jury... I am the judge. Now, gentlemen of the jury, you have heard the evidence. Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?" Watson’s answer was “Not guilty.”
SMITH: What did you feel in that moment?
CAPTAIN CROKER: I felt—I am not naturally given to describing feelings, Mr. Smith, so I ask your patience. I felt that I was in the presence of something rarer than justice. Justice is a formal matter, a thing of wigs and arguments. What Holmes offered was—a reckoning. He had weighed it himself, honestly, and had found that the scales did not fall where the law would have them fall. He knew I had killed a man. He also knew why, and he knew what that man was. He chose to trust his own judgment rather than the statutes. I have spent a great deal of time trying to decide whether that was wisdom or audacity, and I have concluded it was both simultaneously.
SMITH: And Dr. Watson? What was his role in those proceedings?
CAPTAIN CROKER: He sat beside Holmes and listened. He asked no questions during my account. He is a good man, Watson—a plain, decent, honest man, which is rarer than cleverness. I have met clever men in every port from Southampton to Sydney. I have met far fewer honest ones. He looked at me with the eyes of a man who has seen the worst of human nature in conditions that would make a London drawing room seem like paradise, and he did not judge me harshly. I was grateful for that.
SMITH: Has the legal matter entirely closed?
CAPTAIN CROKER: I had heard that since the Randall gang was apprehended in New York, they could not have committed the murder of Sir Eustace Brackenstall. My understanding is that Inspector Hopkins—a young man, very capable, very earnest—was still looking for the criminals responsible for Sir Eustace' death.
SMITH: You are currently in England, Captain. Am I to understand that you and Lady Mary Brackenstall have reached an understanding?
CAPTAIN CROKER: Lady Mary Croker, as she will shortly be known, and I are to be married in the spring. Holmes extracted that promise from me as part of our arrangement: that I would go to sea, return in one year, and if she remained free, I would ask for her hand. She was good enough to say yes. She said it, I am told by Theresa Wright, before I had quite finished the question.
SMITH: A final question, Captain, and I think our readers will understand why I must ask it. Do you feel guilt over the death of Sir Eustace Brackenstall?
CAPTAIN CROKER: I have thought about this question every day for two years. I have thought about it on flat seas and in storms, in the middle watch and in the small hours of the morning when a man cannot escape his own company. Here is my honest answer: I feel guilt over the fact that a man is dead, and I am the instrument of that death. Any man who did not feel that is a man I would not trust. But do I believe I should have acted otherwise? No. I do not. He was going to kill her, Mr. Smith. Or, if not that night, then the next occasion, or the one after. Theresa Wright will tell you the same. He was that kind of man. I am sorry that he was that kind of man. I am sorry that any man is that kind of man. But I am not sorry that I was there, and I am not sorry that I stopped him. The law may not make room for such distinctions, but human conscience does.
SMITH: Mr. Holmes, I understand, made a somewhat similar observation.
CAPTAIN CROKER: He said—and I remember it precisely—that the law cannot in its wisdom take into account every factor which operates in a man’s favour. He said that occasionally it falls to the individual to act as the final court of appeal. He is right, of course. He is almost invariably right, which I imagine is both his greatest asset and his most considerable inconvenience.
SMITH'S THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THIS INTERVIEW
He stood to leave, shook my hand with a grip that recalled at once the sea and the certainty of the man, and declined the offer of a cab, saying he preferred to walk. Through the window I watched him stride off down the Strand in the November fog, a large and self-contained figure who carried his private drama as sailors carry ballast—below the waterline, where it cannot be seen, but where it keeps the whole vessel from capsizing.
I asked Mr. Sherlock Holmes, subsequent to conducting this interview, whether he felt that his decision in the matter of the Abbey Grange had been the correct one. He replied, without looking up from the chemical experiment that was consuming his attention: “Correct is a word that belongs to mathematics, Smith. What I attempted was just. There is a difference, and it is not a trivial one.”
I am inclined to agree with him. The reader who has followed these interviews will have encountered men and women who found themselves in extremity—who were brought by circumstance to the threshold of Mr. Holmes’s remarkable faculties—and who were changed, in ways large and small, by the encounter. Captain Croker was tested by that encounter more rigorously than any of them. He was measured, quite literally, by the only tribunal that mattered: the conscience of one honest man sitting in judgment of another.
CAPTAIN CROKER: I nearly didn’t. I have spent the better part of two years convincing myself that silence was the wiser course. Mr. Holmes made the same argument, and far more eloquently than I could manage. But there is something that sits uneasily in a man when a story has been told about him—and about people he loves—that is not quite true. I could not let someone else carry the whole weight of it forever, even if they are guilty of a dozen other things besides.
SMITH: Let us begin, then, at the beginning—or at least at the beginning as it concerns you personally. Will you tell our readers who Lady Mary Brackenstall is to you?
CAPTAIN CROKER: She is everything. She was everything before I ever knew what to call it. I met Mary Fraser—as she then was—when she sailed with her chaperone on a voyage to England from Adelaide, some years ago. I was first officer at the time. She was the most remarkable woman I had ever laid eyes upon, and I say that without a trace of sentiment clouding my judgment. She had intelligence, courage, and a quality of spirit that I can only describe as irreducible. The sea does not diminish a person. Mary Fraser was not diminished by anything.
SMITH: And yet she married Sir Eustace Brackenstall.
CAPTAIN CROKER: She did. I was at sea. She was a young woman of good family but without great fortune, newly arrived in England, surrounded by a society that places extraordinary pressure upon women to contract advantageous marriages before opportunity closes. Sir Eustace was wealthy. He was—by outward appearances—a man of position. I did not learn of the marriage until I returned to port. I will not pretend that the news did not strike me. It did. But what could I say? She had made her choice. I had made mine by going to sea.
SMITH: Did you maintain contact with her after the marriage?
CAPTAIN CROKER: Not in any improper sense. I was aware of her circumstances. Sailors hear things in ports—letters travel, word passes. I knew that Sir Eustace was not a temperate man. I knew that his conduct toward her was — it is difficult to frame this for a family publication. He was brutal. I will simply say that. He was a brute and a drunkard, and she bore it with a fortitude that I found both admirable and infuriating in equal measure. A woman should not require such fortitude at her own hearth.
SMITH: Will you describe the events of the night of the twenty-third of January?
CAPTAIN CROKER: I had put in at Gravesend. We were loading cargo for the Australia run. I had three days in England and I confess—I am not ashamed to confess it—that I intended to call upon her. Not to create any scene, you understand, not to make demands upon her. Simply to see with my own eyes that she was well. I had received a letter from Theresa Wright, Lady Mary’s maid—a formidable woman, that one; I rather think she would have made an excellent bosun—in which Theresa had made it sufficiently clear that things at Abbey Grange had taken a darker turn than I had fully appreciated. I could not simply leave for Australia without knowing.
SMITH: So you went to Abbey Grange.
CAPTAIN CROKER: I did. I arrived late. It was well past midnight. I came around through the grounds to avoid the lane, and I let myself be known to Theresa, who admitted me through the servants’ entrance. Lady Mary and I spoke. It had been so long—and yet not long enough to change what was between us. We were perhaps an hour in conversation when Sir Eustace—he must have heard voices, or perhaps he simply awoke in one of his rages; it scarcely mattered—came down into the room.
SMITH: What was his condition?
CAPTAIN CROKER: He had been drinking. Heavily. His face was a dark colour and his eyes—there is a particular look in the eyes of a violent man who has found a pretext. I have seen it before, in rough ports and rougher crews. Well, gentlemen, I was standing with her just inside the window, in all innocence, as Heaven is my judge, when he rushed like a madman into the room, called her the vilest name that a man could use to a woman, and welted her across the face with the stick he had in his hand. I had sprung for the poker, and it was a fair fight between us. See here on my arm where his first blow fell. Then it was my turn, and I went through him as if he had been a rotten pumpkin.
SMITH: You struck him once?
CAPTAIN CROKER: Once. It was sufficient. I did not strike him in cold blood, and I did not strike him twice. I am not a murderer, Mr. Smith, whatever the law might choose to call it. I struck a violent man who was in the act of attacking a woman with a fire iron. I will stand behind that, and I will stand behind it in any court in England if it comes to it.
SMITH: Did you believe, at the time, that he was dead?
CAPTAIN CROKER: I knew it almost immediately. There was no question. I am not a man who has been sheltered from death. He was gone before he reached the floor.
SMITH: What followed?
CAPTAIN CROKER: Theresa was magnificent. There are people who discover, in extremity, a quality of mind that surprise you. She had it. She had it in abundance. It was she who conceived the idea of the Randall gang—she knew of them, knew they had been working in the area. She had me tie Lady Mary to the settee, which I did, though it was perhaps the most terrible thing I have ever done—knowing that she would be found in that condition by the police. We poured three glasses of the wine from the cellar. We thought it would look like the intruders had helped themselves. We staged it as best we could, and then I went.
SMITH: And the detail of the wine glasses—three glasses filled, yet one never drunk from—that was the thread which Mr. Holmes pulled to unravel everything.
CAPTAIN CROKER: So I understand. Yes. One glass was filled and never touched. In our haste we had filled three, but there were only two of us who drank. Mr. Holmes, of course, noticed that one glass bore no lip-marks and that the beeswax on the rim was undisturbed. When I learned afterwards what evidence he had assembled—the bell-rope that was cut rather than rung, the manner of Lady Mary’s bonds, the nature of her bruise—I confess I felt a grudging admiration even as my blood ran cold. The man misses nothing. Nothing at all.
SMITH: Tell me of the moment Mr. Holmes confronted you. You had returned to England, I believe, in anticipation of being summoned.
CAPTAIN CROKER: He had sent word to the Bass Rock before she sailed. Simply a note—no threats, no theatrics—asking me to present myself at Baker Street. The address alone told me enough. I went, of course. What else was I to do? Run? I am not a man who runs. I sat in his rooms and I looked him in the eye, and I told him the truth. The complete truth, without trimming. There is no point in lying to Sherlock Holmes. It is like attempting to deceive the tide.
SMITH: How did he receive your account?
CAPTAIN CROKER: He listened without interruption. That in itself is a quality—most men who are not listening are at least composing their next remark. He was simply—present. When I had finished, he sat quiet for a moment. Then he turned to Dr. Watson and he said something that I shall carry with me to my grave. He said: “Watson, you are a British jury... I am the judge. Now, gentlemen of the jury, you have heard the evidence. Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?" Watson’s answer was “Not guilty.”
SMITH: What did you feel in that moment?
CAPTAIN CROKER: I felt—I am not naturally given to describing feelings, Mr. Smith, so I ask your patience. I felt that I was in the presence of something rarer than justice. Justice is a formal matter, a thing of wigs and arguments. What Holmes offered was—a reckoning. He had weighed it himself, honestly, and had found that the scales did not fall where the law would have them fall. He knew I had killed a man. He also knew why, and he knew what that man was. He chose to trust his own judgment rather than the statutes. I have spent a great deal of time trying to decide whether that was wisdom or audacity, and I have concluded it was both simultaneously.
SMITH: And Dr. Watson? What was his role in those proceedings?
CAPTAIN CROKER: He sat beside Holmes and listened. He asked no questions during my account. He is a good man, Watson—a plain, decent, honest man, which is rarer than cleverness. I have met clever men in every port from Southampton to Sydney. I have met far fewer honest ones. He looked at me with the eyes of a man who has seen the worst of human nature in conditions that would make a London drawing room seem like paradise, and he did not judge me harshly. I was grateful for that.
SMITH: Has the legal matter entirely closed?
CAPTAIN CROKER: I had heard that since the Randall gang was apprehended in New York, they could not have committed the murder of Sir Eustace Brackenstall. My understanding is that Inspector Hopkins—a young man, very capable, very earnest—was still looking for the criminals responsible for Sir Eustace' death.
SMITH: You are currently in England, Captain. Am I to understand that you and Lady Mary Brackenstall have reached an understanding?
CAPTAIN CROKER: Lady Mary Croker, as she will shortly be known, and I are to be married in the spring. Holmes extracted that promise from me as part of our arrangement: that I would go to sea, return in one year, and if she remained free, I would ask for her hand. She was good enough to say yes. She said it, I am told by Theresa Wright, before I had quite finished the question.
SMITH: A final question, Captain, and I think our readers will understand why I must ask it. Do you feel guilt over the death of Sir Eustace Brackenstall?
CAPTAIN CROKER: I have thought about this question every day for two years. I have thought about it on flat seas and in storms, in the middle watch and in the small hours of the morning when a man cannot escape his own company. Here is my honest answer: I feel guilt over the fact that a man is dead, and I am the instrument of that death. Any man who did not feel that is a man I would not trust. But do I believe I should have acted otherwise? No. I do not. He was going to kill her, Mr. Smith. Or, if not that night, then the next occasion, or the one after. Theresa Wright will tell you the same. He was that kind of man. I am sorry that he was that kind of man. I am sorry that any man is that kind of man. But I am not sorry that I was there, and I am not sorry that I stopped him. The law may not make room for such distinctions, but human conscience does.
SMITH: Mr. Holmes, I understand, made a somewhat similar observation.
CAPTAIN CROKER: He said—and I remember it precisely—that the law cannot in its wisdom take into account every factor which operates in a man’s favour. He said that occasionally it falls to the individual to act as the final court of appeal. He is right, of course. He is almost invariably right, which I imagine is both his greatest asset and his most considerable inconvenience.
SMITH'S THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THIS INTERVIEW
He stood to leave, shook my hand with a grip that recalled at once the sea and the certainty of the man, and declined the offer of a cab, saying he preferred to walk. Through the window I watched him stride off down the Strand in the November fog, a large and self-contained figure who carried his private drama as sailors carry ballast—below the waterline, where it cannot be seen, but where it keeps the whole vessel from capsizing.
I asked Mr. Sherlock Holmes, subsequent to conducting this interview, whether he felt that his decision in the matter of the Abbey Grange had been the correct one. He replied, without looking up from the chemical experiment that was consuming his attention: “Correct is a word that belongs to mathematics, Smith. What I attempted was just. There is a difference, and it is not a trivial one.”
I am inclined to agree with him. The reader who has followed these interviews will have encountered men and women who found themselves in extremity—who were brought by circumstance to the threshold of Mr. Holmes’s remarkable faculties—and who were changed, in ways large and small, by the encounter. Captain Croker was tested by that encounter more rigorously than any of them. He was measured, quite literally, by the only tribunal that mattered: the conscience of one honest man sitting in judgment of another.
