44 pages • 1 hour read
Arthur Conan DoyleThe Sign of the Four
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1890A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The End of the Islander”
Holmes, Watson, and Jones prepare to catch Small and his accomplice in the evening. Holmes recommends Watson bring his old service revolver. They take a police boat onto the river and hide near the wharf where Holmes knows the Aurora to be. He warns the police that the Aurora has a reputation for speed, and they will need to catch it quickly when it appears. While they wait, Holmes explains the logical suppositions he made to find the boat. He supposed that because Small had been in London watching the Sholtos for some time, he would need a day or two to prepare before he could make his final escape from the city. Therefore, Holmes concluded that he must have hidden the boat somewhere safe while he completed his business, and that the easiest place to hide a boat would be in a repair shipyard. So, in his disguise, he had visited every shipyard along the river until he found the right one.
Holmes shares another piece of his deductive reasoning process, explaining:
[W]hile the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant (102).
He suddenly stops speaking, however, when he sees the Aurora emerge at last. Holmes urges the police boat after it.
They chase the boat down the river until at last they begin to catch up. As they close in, they see a man with a wooden leg who must be Jonathan Small. Beside him, Watson sees a
little black man—the smallest I have ever seen—with a great, misshapen head and a shock of tangled, disheveled hair. [...] His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his thick lips were writhed back from his teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with half animal fury (105).
When the “dwarf” lifts a dart blower, Holmes and Watson both fire their weapons, killing the small man, who falls into the water.
They catch the boat, dragging Jonathan Small out. With him is a chest that must contain the Agra treasure. It is locked and there appears to be no key. As they return to land and the police arrest Small, Holmes points out to Watson a poison dart that hit the deck right where they had been standing. Holmes merely smiles and shrugs, but Watson is shaken by how close they came to death.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Great Agra Treasure”
As Small is arrested, he insists that he did not kill Bartholomew. That murder was committed by his accomplice, “that little hell-hound Tonga” (110), against his wishes. He then offers to tell his story, believing the truth to be his best defense. He adds that he wishes he had never laid eyes on the Agra treasure, which has been a curse on every man who owned it: “[T]o [Achmet] it brought murder, to Major Sholto it brought fear and guilt, to me it has meant slavery for life” (111).
While Holmes and Jones take Small back to Baker Street to hear his confession, Watson takes the Agra treasure to Mary, believing that she should be the first to open the chest and see its contents. However, Mary does not react with joy over the treasure’s recovery. Together, they break the lock, but find the chest empty.
Watson then admits that he is relieved the treasure is gone. As a wealthy heiress, Mary would have been beyond his reach. Now, he feels he can safely tell her that he loves her. Mary responds that she is also relieved and loves him as well.
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Strange Story of Jonathan Small”
Watson returns to tell Holmes and Jones that the treasure is gone. Triumphantly, Small says he threw the treasure into the river. He believes that this is justice, asking: “Whose loot is this, if it is not ours? Where is the justice that I should give it up to those who have not earned it?” (119). He concludes that he would rather be hanged 20 times than see any other man benefit from the wealth he believes should be his.
He then tells his entire story. Having joined the British Army, he is sent to India to work with the East India Company. During this time, he loses one leg to a crocodile while swimming in the Ganges River. Eventually, the “great mutiny” occurs, and the British colonialists find themselves under attack from the Indian population. Small is a guard at a British fort along with two Punjabi soldiers who remain loyal to the British. These two soldiers, Mahomet Singh and Abdullah Khan, turn on him one night, threatening to kill him unless he helps them with a heist they are planning.
Small agrees to join them. They explain that they, plus a third man named Dost Akbar, have a plan to steal a large fortune from a courier, sent by the Rajah of Agra, to bring his treasure to the safety of the British fort. The four men work together, killing the courier, Achmet, and hiding the treasure in a safe place to be retrieved later. However, all four are arrested for the murder and sent to the penal colony on the Andaman Islands. The Agra treasure, meanwhile, remains hidden.
On the penal colony, Small befriends Morstan and Sholto and offers them a deal. If they help the four thieves escape, they will tell them where to find the treasure and split the proceeds. But Sholto betrays them all, taking the treasure back to London alone. Shortly after that, Morstan also leaves. During this time, Small befriends an Andaman Island native, Tonga, who eventually helps him escape the island. Together they travel to London to exact revenge.Small finds Sholto, hoping he will reveal where he has hidden the treasure. Then Sholto dies. In a fury, Small breaks into the house to search for the treasure and leaves the sign of four note on Sholto’s body as a reminder. He then spends six years watching the house until he sees that Bartholomew has found the hidden Agra treasure. Tonga breaks in through the roof to let Small in through the window. However, Tonga kills Bartholomew without Small’s permission. They steal the treasure and rent the boat, planning to escape to a larger ship leaving for Brazil.
The story now complete, Jones takes Small to the police station. Watson tells Holmes that this may be the last adventure he shares with him because he proposed to Mary, and she has accepted. Holmes is disappointed. Though Mary is “one of the most charming young ladies” he has ever met (145), he believes that love and emotion are distractions from reason and logic, which he “places above all things” (145). Watson states that the division of rewards seems unfair: Though Holmes has done all the work, Watson has found a wife and Jones will receive all the credit, leaving Holmes with nothing. Holmes replies that he still has his cocaine and reaches for his syringe.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
The novel reaches its climax as Holmes, Watson, and Jones chase down the boat carrying Small and his accomplice. During this scene, Holmes reveals an intense drive to catch the culprits. He displays similar intensity in other cases, demonstrating both his sense of justice and his more personal need to finish any puzzle he puts his mind to solving. Watson’s narrative attempts to evoke the sense of tension and adrenaline they all feel during the chase scene. He also attempts to evoke a sense of horror in his description of Small’s accomplice, Tonga.
As in Chapter 8, this description relies on offensive and racist terms and descriptions. Watson’s description of the small man named Tonga is an exaggerated, animalistic, even monstrous caricature that reveals his own (and one might suppose Doyle’s) racist attitudes. The figure of Tonga is the focal point for the theme of Criminality, Monstrosity, and Fear of the Other. The other (white) characters’ reactions to him underline the extent to which they ascribe criminality to those outside the mainstream. This othering is later compounded when Small explains that it was the “hell-hound” Tonga who murdered Bartholomew. It does not seem to occur to Small that the murder only took place because he obsessively stalked the Sholto family; instead he places the blame on the man he views as monstrous.
One interesting aspect of Chapter 10 is Holmes’s use of statistics in understanding human behavior. His assertion that “Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant” is a large part of his deductive reasoning process (102), and many of his assumptions and conclusions result from applying probabilities. For instance, when he finally finds the Aurora, it is due to the probability that anyone attempting to hide a boat would most likely use a repair shipyard. These sorts of assumptions are common in Holmes’s cases.
The resolution of Watson and Mary’s story highlights The Consequences of Wealth and Greed. When Watson takes the retrieved Agra treasure to Mary, he assumes this will put an end to their growing attachment. However, Mary remains uninterested in the treasure. Even when they discover the treasure is gone, she is not upset, but relieved. In this way, she is a foil to the men who have owned the Agra treasure, especially Small, who cannot stand the idea that anyone else might possess it when he cannot. Small is afflicted with greed and suffers for it. Mary is not greedy and is rewarded.
The final chapter shares Small’s story from his own perspective. This story, filled with setbacks and frustrations, demonstrates his own feelings of entitlement and pettiness. He feels he has “earned” the wealth of the Agra treasure through murder and theft. His story of joining the British Army and going to India also ties the entire novel more closely to the theme of British Imperialism and Its Impact. Just as the Agra treasure represents, among other things, India and its “theft” by the British, so too does Small represent the enforcement of British imperialism.
Once Small completes his story, little time is given to wrapping up and closing the narrative. This is true of most Holmes stories; once the case has been solved to Holmes’s satisfaction, little more needs to be said. However, in this instance, Watson has news to share and announces his engagement to Mary. No one remarks on how quickly this has happened, though Watson and Mary have known each other for approximately five days. Holmes objects not to the rapidity of the engagement, but to love of any kind at all. Here and elsewhere, Holmes proclaims that emotions are meaningless, dangerous, and distracting. Instead, he places all his attention and confidence in pure logic and reason. This is true throughout many of the stories, leading Watson to comment on Holmes’s unfeeling and unsympathetic nature on more than one occasion.
The final moment of the novel circles back to the opening scene. Holmes once again takes up his cocaine addiction, implying that within minutes of the close of his case, he is already bored again and in need of artificial stimulation.
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By Arthur Conan Doyle
