My Dear Watson (32 page)

“Well, surely there is some doubt. I mean, it could have been any man who’d passed through that prison with the unfortunate condemned man, this C.T.W.”

“Charles Thomas Wooldridge,” Holmes said. “Undoubtedly. He was a member of the Royal Horse Guards, and hanged two years ago today for the murder of his wife. I remember the crime and the execution.”

“But are you really so sure about the author of this work, Holmes?” Watson asked him. “You aren’t particularly well-versed in literature.”

“It isn’t a matter literature,” Holmes told him cryptically, and turned back to poring over the poem. The line that choruses started to echo in his mind: Each man kills the thing he loves. What did Sherlock Holmes love?

The question consumed him for the bulk of June, since he felt quite sure that it was true that every man murdered what he loved best, so it was only a matter of learning what that thing was. It seemed for him that it was a toss between two things: his own mind and his dear Watson. Would he not know which he loved most until one or the other was destroyed?

He invented experiments for himself—often working on one puzzle helps him solve another, as it trained his mind to function within a pattern of logical thought. The only problem was that one of his problems was not a logical one. He had to try and question his own heart.

It was during one of these projects in late June that he felt Watson idly staring at him, and decided to have a little fun with him. Holmes broke in on his thoughts about South African securities the same way someone might delight his sweetheart by contriving to pull a flower or a coin from behind her ear. Watson is always astonished when anyone can guess at his thoughts, apparently not realizing how expressive his face is, or how predictable his mind. It’s very fun when I manage to do it, and Holmes was no less amused than I.

“Now, Watson, confess yourself utterly taken aback,” he said.

He was of course, until Holmes explained his process, and then Holmes was annoyed with himself that he had told. Like summer lightning, the way his moods flashed so suddenly out of a clear blue sky. In one instance he was showing Watson a childish trick, and then in the next he was berating him for being childish in enjoying it. The hypocrisy of the man! How exhausting.

Before he could really hit his stride with complaining however, a case was brought to him with a tantalizing little cipher of dancing men who apparently belied something sinister. Holmes spent a cheerful few hours figuring it out and then got some lovely activity when he had to apprehend a murderer, and yet still he had a fog about him that he could not break through.

“The way of paradoxes is the way of truth,” Wilde knew. Life was undoubtedly always too short, but it was also too long to spend suffering. To be bored, for Sherlock Holmes, was to suffer. It used to be that his work was enough to sustain him, but since Moriarty made all his other cases pale in comparison, he had found a new way to give his life a little pep. Those small crimes he committed in uncovering bigger ones, they helped. But this ballad by Wilde…it was doing a serious turn on him. At the outset it reminded him how horrible prison must be, and just because Holmes had made friends with some few official inspectors did not mean there weren’t many more jealous rivals who would put him away at the slightest infraction if they could. But more than that was the plaintive tone of sorrowful ownership for a life lived all the way to the hilt. It was less cautionary perhaps, and more prophetic; not a message of “don’t do as I have done” but rather a reminder not to judge too harshly, for we will all want forgiveness in the end. A
memento mori
: as you are now, so once was I, etc.

Holmes felt, the longer he thought about it, a very contradictory impulse. He was not usually much taken with the notion of paradoxes. Things for Holmes either were or they weren’t. His whole career and often citizens’ lives depended on the truth being absolutely pure and relatively simple. And yet he felt a self-destructive urge to do with conviction what he knew could only end him, to follow his nature wheresoever it would it would lead.

But he was not a criminal, and he would henceforth cease to pose as one. Holmes would turn back to his one real vice and take it up again deliberately, because it was the only way to be true to himself.

Regrets were for the end of a life, not the thick of it. Now was the time for mistakes. “To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies. Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.” Holmes had been reading fiction again, but was any of it untrue?

It looked to Holmes as if he must love his own mind the best, for in the next few years he would all but pickle his brain in that seven percent solution. It was his cross to bear, and he was taking it up again, quietly; he knew he would be able to answer for it if he found himself in a spiritual dock someday, but for now it was his own private matter. This was the only life he’d been guaranteed, and if Watson could live without wanting to touch the outer edges of experience, well…so much the worse for him. Holmes would keep it a secret as long as he could, but…
quod scripsi, scripsi.
He washed his hands of it.

1919: Music

After dessert we move back into the sitting room where Watson has prepared a gift for Holmes, a recording of German music that they’d once heard together at St. James’s Hall. It’s a fascinating thing to sit and watch Holmes listen to music. Watson gives me a look asking me to be quiet, but he needn’t have bothered. As Holmes is enraptured by the music, so am I entranced by him. His eyes lose their usual sharp focus and a dreamy film comes over them. He leans back like he’s lost in an abstraction. I like music too, but it doesn’t seize me by the scruff quite like this.

Beside him Watson also seems distracted by watching Holmes, but his face does not have the happy reverie of the detective’s. His face is showing signs of strain and sadness, the same look from before the war when he would return from visits with Holmes, like he’d left something precious behind and didn’t know if he would ever see it again. The evening is drawing to a close, and he knows it. This music, which seemed like such a fun treat when he first planned it, is only reminding him of a past he hardly knows anymore, and misses very much.

The thing with music is that it may only be heard in the present; it must move to exist, and in moving it ends all too quickly. I can see Watson becoming maudlin, worrying about the inevitable moment when Holmes will have to leave. He was always under a burden of sadness when he came back from visiting Holmes before the war, as if he had drawn from a well of grief, and it would be days before the contents of his pail would evaporate away. It was hard enough departing from Holmes, how much harder will it be to let Holmes walk away from him?

When the record ends, Holmes snaps up to peruse the rest of our collection, pulling several that he would like to hear. Watson thinks he is glad to have their goodbye put off for that much longer, but he shouldn’t be. It only makes his anxious misery last a few hours longer.

1899: Thor Bridge

Watson might have seen it, if he’d been paying attention. By October when the narrative is next picked up, Sherlock Holmes had turned mysteriously chipper when he should not have been happy at all. On a whipping cold morning Watson said, “I descended to breakfast prepared to find my companion in depressed spirits, for, like all great artists, he was easily impressed by his surroundings.” His mood instead was “particularly bright and joyous,” which never happened with Holmes by accident, and Watson even called it a “somewhat sinister cheefulness.” I don’t know how he didn’t see what was really going on.

Holmes was better now at hiding his resumed habit than he had been before, when he had turned to it in desperation and frenzy. At last he was trying to use the substance as it was meant to be administered: as medication, as maintenance. He measured out a single dose a day as if it were a beneficial vitamin. It sustained him through September, which he called “a month of trivialities and stagnation,” and when at last a worthy case came to him he was ready to meet it.

A woman was dead, her children’s governess seemed the obvious culprit, but her husband was a hot-tempered fellow, and drew suspicion to himself as well. He even threatened Holmes, though he did it in so impotent a fashion that it only seemed quaint. “You’ve done yourself no good this morning, Mr. Holmes, for I have broken stronger men than you. No man ever crossed me and was the better for it.”

“So many have said so, and yet here I am,” said Holmes with a smile. Promises, promises, they’re all he ever heard!

In this case, Holmes demonstrated to Watson the art of bluffing. Less of a legal problem than lying (and he had become very careful about that sort of thing since June), but also a different sort of craft. Not pure theater; it was the difference between disguise and impersonation. One is pure creation, and the other adaptation; there must be a seed of truth in it.

If Holmes seems more moral and strident here, that is why; he was only bluffing. As if he cared more for this mistreated girl than any number of others he had helped or hampered based on his own selfish whims. “It is only for the young lady’s sake that I touch your case at all,” Holmes told his client. I sincerely doubt the truth of that; let the case be boring and see how chivalrous he stays.

The emphasis of the drug is apparent to me. Instead of a Holmes impatient for details that would make his life less of a misery, grasping at wisps and finding them horribly insufficient, his new subtle use of the substance and a greater understanding of himself allowed the cocaine to underscore his pleasure; it provided him the solid foundation for a very thrilling experience. Even people unfamiliar with his strange behavior could see the way he was “vibrating with nervous energy” as the events surrounding the dead woman started to bloom in his mind. It was always a golden period of grace when he first began his habit again; with all that he had learned the last few times, he knew how to extend this state to its absolute limits. It would be more than a year before the symptoms of the drug would finally catch up to him. In the past it had been his own intemperance that had done him in first.

It was a good time for Watson as well. Holmes was harboring a deep flame over what he suspected about the chipped stone on Thor Bridge, and in his sweet agitation over it, he was quite warm towards Watson. Watson reports that on the train ride from where the governess was being held back to the scene of the crime, Holmes was in a very sensitive condition of restlessness. “Suddenly, however, as we neared our destination he seated himself opposite to me—we had a first-class carriage to ourselves—and laying a hand upon each of my knees he looked into my eyes with the peculiarly mischievous gaze which was characteristic of his more imp-like moods.” He touched Watson firmly as if to discharge some of his excessive energy into his friend; Watson was always being used to ground him.

“Watson,” he said breathlessly. “I have some recollection that you go armed upon these excursions of ours.”

Watson innocently said that of course he must, since Holmes so rarely had regard for his own safety.

“Yes, yes, I am a little absent-minded in such matters,” Holmes answered quietly. “But have you your revolver on you?” he asked. His hands started to slide up Watson’s thighs, feeling for his weapon. Watson, still easily flustered by amorous attention no matter how old or experienced he’d become, stopped Holmes’s hands before they got too familiar. Private car or not, they were on the train! He pulled his gun out hurriedly and handed it to Holmes, who was able to think of many things at once, and spoke with a sly double meaning to Watson.

“It’s heavy—remarkably heavy,” he said. Watson agreed that it was so, not exactly sure what Holmes was implying. Holmes hefted it for a minute, dumped the cartridges into his hand, replaced all but one, and said, “Do you know, Watson, I believe your revolver is going to have a very intimate connection with the mystery which we are investigating.”

“My dear Holmes, you are joking,” Watson murmured suspiciously.

Holmes handed back the single remaining bullet to Watson; it was warm with body heat from rolling around in Holmes’s palm. Upon looking up, Watson could see Holmes stroking the gun with his fine, long fingers. He put my poor husband in a flush for the rest of the night.

Holmes got to do a pretty trick, standing in the place of the dead woman’s body, holding Watson’s gun to his head, and then letting it go with a weight attached. It struck the bridge making the same mark as the one already left by their conniving “victim” and sunk into the mere. It was a neat victory for Holmes, but it was obvious from his conversation with Watson afterwards that he was still in a contemplative place in regards to himself:

“I have been sluggish in mind and wanting in that mixture of imagination and reality which is the basis of my art,” he told Watson. Where was the Holmes of his twenties and thirties? Those young decades when all he needed was within his own reserves, and he was an exquisite machine which produced more than it took in? Now the conversion of energy was slowed, and he was not optimal. It was the way of all flesh, perhaps. He was doing his best to manage it.

In the end Holmes concluded that their client would probably join forces with his formerly accused governess and do quite well. They had “learned something in that schoolroom of sorrow where our earthly lessons are taught.” Of sorrow Holmes was too familiar; that exquisite, purifying emotion which reveals one’s true character.

Wilde had lost his freedom, Holmes had lost his fire, and I have lost my family, but: what does not kill us makes us stronger.

1900: The Six Napoleons

The only case recorded for this year, the year of Oscar Wilde’s death which would not occur until late November, was one of significance for Holmes. It was not so much the problem of someone cracking up Napoleon busts in order to find a rare stolen pearl that had been hidden in one of six. What made this case special was the credit he received. His fame, by 1900 was untouchable. For years its importance had been declining, until it finally mattered very little to Holmes what “everyone” thought of him. His circle of esteemed opinions was rather small indeed, including about the top one percent of criminals in all the world, and the few men he knew to be personally worthy, such as his handful of friendly inspectors, and of course, my dear Watson.