The Barker Street Regulars

Holmes?”
    Every once in a while, of course, some dope asks me whether I like dogs.
     

Chapter Two
     
    D URING JANUARY AND EARLY February, as Rowdy and I continued to make our weekly visits to the Gateway, I began to read the Sherlock Holmes stories, some for the first time, others, like The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Red-headed League,” for the second, third, or fourth. Let me make this plain, however: Just as a vast, woofy gulf separates the real dog person from the person who really and merely enjoys dogs, so, too, a great gaslit chasm stretches between the true Sherlockian and the person like me who truly and merely enjoys Sherlock Holmes. I, for example, not only own two Alaskan malamutes, Rowdy and Kimi, but am a card-carrying member of the Dog Writers Association of America. Literally! I have a card. I carry it. It identifies me as a member of the press, a bit of an exaggeration, I always think— Dog’s Life magazine isn’t exactly The New York Times —but then again I own a D.W.A.A. baseball cap that I’m supposed to wear when I cover dog shows, and how many Times correspondents can boast the equivalent? More to the point, when other dog people talk about fiddle fronts, woollies, sunken croups, good crowns, three-point majors, and the leathers of P.B.G.V.’s, I know exactly what’s being said because everyone’s speaking my language.
    Feeling left out? If so, you know just how I felt on the Friday morning in mid-February when I led Rowdy into Althea’s room at the Gateway and overheard the animated conversation she was holding with Robert MacPherson and Hugh Searles. I caught English words and phrases, sometimes whole sentences, yet entirely failed to grasp either the gist or the particulars. I teeter-tottered on the non-Sherlockian side of the gaslit chasm. For the sake of anyone who might actually be able to understand what Althea, Hugh, and Robert were chuckling and exclaiming about, I wish I’d had a tape recorder along, but I didn’t. What I do remember made no sense to me. The word callosities stands out in my mind, as does a reference to a Crown Derby tea set, a mention of the supply of game for London, an evidently witty allusion to coals of fire, what sounded like an arch question from Althea about coins of Charles the First, and, from Robert, a riposte, I think, concerning, I swear, the extirpation of fish. At that point, everyone but me burst out laughing, and Hugh remarked that I must think they were discussing the fertility of oysters.
    “Fecundity!” snapped Robert. “Fecundity! Not fertility!”
    Callosities. Teapots. Oysters. I figured out what they were talking about only when the taller of the two men, Robert, I later learned, glanced over at Helen Mus-grave’s bulletin board and in a pleasant, even affectionate, tone made a passing remark about a ritual.
    Feeling like the slow kid in the class who has for once got the right answer, I exclaimed, “ ’The Musgrave Ritual’!” The Holmes story, which I’d just read, culminated in the discovery of a long-dead body and— oh, yes!—coins of Charles the First.
    Althea couldn’t see Rowdy unless he was right next to her, but she knew my voice. In a manner I now recognize as Watsonian, instead of telling Rowdy to go say hi, I said, “Althea, you have visitors. If we’re intruding—”
    “Intelligent company is never an intrusion,” Althea scolded.
    Naturally, I thought she meant my idea of intelligent company, namely, the unrivaled companionship of an Alaskan malamute. Rowdy knew better. He sank to the floor and peacefully rested his head on his big snow-shoe paws. With the lobby ladies, he was a performer. Gus needed a living link to the dogs he’d once loved; Rowdy was his animate time machine. Nancy’s need was raw and primitive: She suffered from the depletion of life itself. Rowdy was her donor, like a blood donor, really, but a transfuser of vitality that you could almost see and touch as it shot from him to her and restored, however briefly, her powers of speech and reason. Althea liked dogs. But what she really loved was intelligent human companionship, by which she meant, of course, a conversation with someone who would talk about Sherlock Holmes.
    “This is Rowdy,” I told Althea’s two guests. “I’m Holly. But meet Rowdy, and you’ve met me. A case of identity, so to speak.” That’s a title from the Canon: “A Case of Identity.” I can be a worse show-off than Rowdy.
    Althea