My Dear Watson (14 page)

Even Watson knew something curious was happening, something unprecedented: “He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods.” Holmes knew as much to realize that Watson felt taken advantage of and ignored. He tried his best to shape up, but he was simply terrible at it:

“I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.”

Holmes blew smoke rings while lecturing Watson on this stranger which neither had met, and when at last he rose to the window to see this forgetful man approach his door, followed by a curly-haired spaniel, he insisted that Watson stay. He put a hand on Watson’s arm and said, “Don’t move, I beg you, Watson. He is a professional brother of yours, and your presence may be of assistance to me.” As if it mattered that they were both doctors! But Holmes did want him to stay. He’d been trying to get him to stay for over a year.

Dr. James Mortimer was an odd creature, and in earlier days, Watson might have had cause for concern. When first he walked in, the doctor complimented Holmes’s bone structure, particularly his skull, and asked if he might touch it for anthropological purposes. Flattery will get you everywhere with Sherlock Holmes, and Watson watched him for signs of warmth.

It was a loaded introduction, and Watson noted it: “Holmes was silent, but his little darting glances showed me the interest which he took in our curious companion.”

The man managed to slight Holmes a moment later, but even that did not make him less interesting. The problem he presented redeemed him immediately. After the initial legend of the hound, which Holmes found dull in its fantastic elements, Dr. Mortimer described the death of his friend and patient, Sir Charles Baskerville.

The scene, as described by Mortimer who had been there himself, presented some tantalizing details. Most inexplicable were the footprints of a large hound, not any mere hunting or herding dog, some twenty yards off from the body. But more than this observation, which Dr. Mortimer had wisely kept to himself, were his other minor deductions, such as the fact that Sir Charles had stood waiting for something or someone, which Mortimer knew by the presence of fallen cigar ash.

“Excellent!” Holmes cried. “This is a colleague, Watson, after our own heart.”

Watson smiled and nodded his head, but he felt injured. It felt like Colonel Hayter all over again. Watson could sense Holmes’s excitement: “His eyes had the hard, dry glitter which shot from them when he was keenly interested.” Naturally it was the case that had his blood up, but he was enjoying Dr. Mortimer quite a bit too. Watson guarded himself and waited to see how it would play out. He could always go home to his wife, after all.

Holmes and Mortimer were rams at odds over the presence of supernatural happenings, but even as they parted, it was clear that the doctor’s visit had stirred Holmes. He asked if Watson was going out.

“Unless I can help you,” Watson responded, though he had not really intended to go out. He was only fishing for validation.

“No, my dear fellow, it is at the hour of action that I turn to you for aid.” In other words, Watson gathered, it was his body and not his mind that Holmes found useful. And then Holmes was insensitive enough to ask Watson to send up some tobacco on his way out, and to stay away until evening. He had a problem to solve.

What a heartbreak it must be to love Holmes all the time, what an unending trial! He moved through the world so obliviously, like a storm; his reasons unknown, his destination unpredictable, but his indifference felt all too palpably in the destruction being wrought. And yet Watson always found it difficult to blame Holmes, for of course the man didn’t know his own strength, nor what damage he did by merely being himself. Watson managed to pity him most of the time, though I can’t imagine why; it’s more sensible to envy those who know not what they do.

Watson whiled away the day lingering at his club and returned back to a room later in the night that was as smoky as a blocked flue. Holmes immediately blurted out that Watson had been at his club all day, a fact he deduced because he knows Watson has no intimate friends with which he could have passed the time indoors. And this was Holmes trying his damnedest to be kind! This was his greatest effort.

But the time of action was upon them soon enough, and once they are both fully engaged in a case they syncopate beautifully. The next day, after they met Sir Henry Baskerville and heard that he had received a note cut from the previous day’s newspaper, Holmes sent Sir Henry and Dr. Mortimer away, promising that they would meet for lunch. The second they were out the door, Holmes leapt to activity.

“Your hat and boots, Watson, quick!” Watson wondered if he shouldn’t run off after their clients, but Holmes was done with them. “Not for the world, my dear Watson. I am perfectly satisfied with your company if you will tolerate mine.”

Watson smiled as they took off behind their clients, and was so pleased with Holmes’s sentiment that he did not see a bit of what Holmes saw until the detective took off after the cab of a bearded man who was also following Sir Henry. Suspicious happenings started to stack up after that very rapidly; Sir Henry had two boots go missing, one from a new pair, and then one from an old, and then the mysterious return of the first. It bothered Holmes so much that he volunteered Watson to go down to Baskerville Hall and keep an eye on Sir Henry, which Watson could not help but accept. Watson is not immune to flattery any more than his masterful friend.

It was all still a laugh for Sherlock Holmes until he found the cab that had driven their suspect around. The man had given his name to the cabman as Sherlock Holmes, and though Watson was still laughing after it a bit, wondering just who could be so cheeky, it began to chill Holmes. That is, after all, something that Holmes might have done, and as I’ve said before, Holmes knew enough to be wary of himself. Whoever they were hunting might prove himself equal to Holmes, and that was a fearful thought indeed.

“I’m not easy in my mind about it,” Holmes told Watson, “about sending you. Yes, my dear fellow, you may laugh, but I give you my word that I shall be very glad to have you back safe and sound in Baker Street once more.”

Watson grasped Holmes by the shoulder and asked, “But what could possibly happen to me?”

Holmes just gave him a dark look and went straight to bed. He did bring himself to worry about Watson in times of real danger, and at those times I do soften towards Holmes. He may have been too much of an automaton to realize when Watson’s emotions were being abused, but he was always acutely aware of bodily harm. Any threat of violence against Watson could turn Holmes human for a time, like a fairytale elixir. He was not, in the end, totally invincible.

That Saturday Holmes saw everyone off at the station, and Watson was immediately impressed upon arriving at Baskerville Hall by the gloomy atmosphere. He even went to bed to the sound of a woman sobbing, a noise he found more disturbing than most others. The moors surrounded him, a foreboding moonscape, and his trip only got stranger the longer it progressed. The creepy locals and the noises of the moor soon began to rattle him. He felt like Jonathan Harker during the first days in Count Dracula’s crumbling castle. He had a presentiment of something dreadful.

He even had the local villagers trying to warn him away, and unlike the unfortunate and thumbless Hatherley from a few months back, Watson does not ignore women who beseech him earnestly, especially when they are beautiful. When the neighboring Miss Stapleton hurried to him and, assuming he was Sir Henry, warned him to return to London, Watson paid very close attention. He started to monitor the Stapletons very closely, though not closely enough to realize that they were husband and wife, and not brother and sister as they posed. Holmes would be the one to decipher that.

A couple of Dear Holmes letters follow in the narrative, detailing the way Sir Henry became infatuated with Miss Stapleton, the curious actions of the assumed Brother Stapleton, and of the Barrymores who ran the Baskerville household. Watson was, unbeknownst to himself, investigating the considerably less interesting case of an escaped convict on the moor: “Congratulate me, my dear Holmes,” he wrote, “and tell me that I have not disappointed you as an agent—that you do not regret the confidence you showed in me when you sent me down.” He and Sir Henry followed Barrymore one night (after having fallen asleep the first night, bless them), and Watson desired to be praised for his discovery that Mrs. Barrymore was kin to the convict and helping him live out on the moor.

Little did poor Watson suspect that Holmes himself was on the moor, and not only knew all about the convict, but received Watson’s letters mere yards from him, upon the Tor. Watson had even spotted the figure of Holmes while they were out hunting the convict, and did not know him, though perhaps he should have. After all, Watson had felt “the thrill which his strange presence and his commanding attitude had given,” even from so great a distance. And he certainly recognized the silhouette of Holmes later, when the detective’s shadow fell across the doorway of one of the moor’s ancient dwellings, in which Holmes had been camped all the time.

Watson braved both the moor and a man he thought controlled some devilish hound when he entered the room while Holmes was out. It was of Holmes he thought while he did so too, hoping to succeed (he said) where his “master” had failed.

It was a tense wait inside the hut, Watson holding his revolver all the time, and afraid, once he’d found evidence that whoever inhabited this dwelling had been spying on him. The stress was trying him terribly as he heard boots approach the door, stop for a moment, and then advance again. However, as soon as the figure spoke, “a crushing weight of responsibility seemed in an instant to be lifted.” That cold, incisive, ironical voice could belong to but one man in all the world:

“It’s a lovely evening, my dear Watson. I really think that you will be more comfortable outside than in.”

Watson’s happiness at discovering Holmes on the moor was overwhelming, and Holmes too was repressing his emotion at meeting his friend so unexpectedly. They had grown accustomed to seeing one another every day since Watson had moved back to Baker Street. They didn’t realize how much their separation during this investigation had bothered them until they were joyfully reunited again. The transcript we have is so sweet it’s nearly sickening, like a child who’s gotten into the sugar and doesn’t know when to stop. It is too much, certainly, for me, and it was almost too much for them.

Watson is a visual creature, as is evidenced by the way he feasts on the image of women he meets. The same applies here, to Holmes.

When Watson stepped out of the hut, his eyes roved over Holmes, picking out the details, deducing less than Holmes might have, but learning things about Holmes’s stay out on the moors all the same. Holmes was roughed up a bit by this ascetic living, a little brown and wind-worn, but still with the “cat-like love of personal cleanliness which was one of his characteristics.” His face was neatly shaven, his clothes well cared for. You could take the dandy out of the city, but you simply could not take the dandy out of Holmes.

“I never was more glad to see anyone in my life,” Watson wrote of the moment. He went straight up to Holmes and grasped him by the hand.

The pleasure was mutual. Holmes’s gray eyes “danced with amusement.” He swore to Watson that he had no idea someone had found him, let alone who, until he was within twenty paces of the door. Watson guessed it was his footprint that gave him away, but Holmes assured him that, dear as the doctor was to him, he couldn’t pick his foot out of all the prints in the world. But he could identify his cigarette, and he could guess Watson’s behavior with such accuracy that he predicted Watson was armed within the hut. A man of action such as himself would not wait with his hands folded in his lap.

And yet, love as raw and open as this reunion occasioned is easily injured. When Watson discovered that Holmes had been using him and manipulating his ignorance, he was hurt, and even more so when he thought back to the careful letters he had written for his friend supposedly back in London: “My reports have all been wasted!”

Holmes was aghast at Watson’s emotion. Imagine someone who dislikes being lied to and tricked! For some reason Holmes can know Watson’s actions in advance, but not his feelings. It is Holmes’s most significant blind spot, not just in relation to Watson, but in his work as a detective as well. The question of motive that the officers of Scotland Yard rely on so heavily is not altogether useless—an intuitive understanding of human nature serves them nearly as well as Holmes’s deductions.

Holmes worked to rectify his mistake quickly. He produced Watson’s reports from a pocket over his heart. He
had
been reading them, and they were helpful! Secrecy seemed necessary to Holmes, because not only could he keep an eye on the principle players without them feeling his scrutiny, he could also guard over Watson’s safety, and not vex him with the worry which someone of his kindness would naturally feel if their friend was sleeping outdoors on the inclement moors. Couldn’t Watson see that it was only consideration for him that made Holmes appear so inconsiderate?

Holmes’s beseeching softened Watson towards him, and the relief Holmes felt at winning him back after such a sudden breech pushed him to a place of boldness. Watson’s forgiveness showed on his face (every one of his emotions may be read plainly there), and for the first time in over a year and a half, Holmes hooked Watson by the collar, and gave him a kiss.

“That’s better,” said Sherlock Holmes. And it was. At the time, it certainly was. Holmes had broken first, and my eyebrows shot up when I realized it, because I thought for sure Watson would have been the one. Holmes was a fisher of men, very catch and release. I thought Watson would grow desperate first, seeing as Holmes was his only source of masculine converse, but apparently there is no replacing Watson.