Sherlock Holmes (20 page)

The Isis and the Cherwell became sluggish, capped with a layer of floating slush; likewise the canal. Parks, meadows and playing fields were white all day long with frost. Trees were ivory skeletons, their new buds glazed with ice. Everyone – students, dons, citizens, myself – moved with a hunched-over, shuffling gait, as though uniformly stiff and ancient. Faces were pinched, cheeks chapped.

And Holmes?

Holmes succumbed to torpor, like some hibernating animal. He refused to leave the cosy confines of the Randolph. Many a time I invited him to come for a stroll, only to be rebuffed. He was busy, he said. He was reflecting, he said. But it didn’t look that way to me. All I could see was lassitude, enervation and an air of incipient hopelessness. Nothing I could say or do would shift his mood.

By the fourth day of this, I had become seriously concerned, not least when I espied a bottle of Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne on the dressing table in Holmes’s room. It was half empty, and the pallor of my friend’s cheeks and the pinkened glassiness of his eyes put it beyond question that he had partaken of a heavy dose of the patent medicine. A liquid suspension of laudanum, chloroform and tincture of cannabis, Chlorodyne was in my view dreadful stuff, dangerously addictive, and I regret to say I rather lost my temper.

“What is this?” I thundered. “Cocaine I can understand. Tobacco too. But an opiate? Holmes, you hate opiates. You refuse to have anything to do with them. The only time I have seen you even come close was in that den on Upper Swandam Lane, and that was only in order to entrap the Lascar who ran it!”

My friend barely raised his gaze to mine. “What can I say, Watson? I crave not stimulation now but release. This damnable business. This deadly agent provocateur who plays people like musical instruments and discards them mercilessly when his tune is finished. This city with its frigid air and mean beauty. What have I to show for my time here? Nothing. Nothing but disappointment and failure. If Dr Collis Browne’s concoction can offer an antidote to that, why should I not take advantage of it?”

“Come now, you are not some housewife with the hysterics or some dreamy poet who finds the world altogether too sharp and cruel for his aesthete’s soul. You are Sherlock Holmes, damn it. Sherlock Holmes!”

“For all the good
that
has done. Ask Aubrey Bancroft and Hugh Llewellyn how beneficial it has been to them to have known Sherlock Holmes.”

“I will not have this!” I snatched up the Chlorodyne, threw open the window sash, and emptied the bottle into the street below.

Briefly Holmes’s eyes flashed with indignation. Then either the opiate or his depression regained the upper hand, and he shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, saying, “So what? I can always buy more. The chemist on Broad Street is open ’til five.”

“Holmes. Please. Don’t do this to yourself. Shake off your brown study. Apply yourself anew to the problem at hand. Use that incomparable brain of yours.”

Holmes turned away. “You know what, Watson? I am tired of detection. It yields so little bounty beyond the pecuniary. Perhaps I am finished with it, or it is finished with me. I have talked before of retiring to the country. Sussex beckons. The landscape down there is congenial, especially by the coast. I have accumulated a sizeable nest egg. I could live comfortably, if a little more frugally than I am accustomed.”

“You cannot retire. You have only just returned from a three-year sabbatical, if I may call it that. There is still work to be done, work only you can do. You are barely forty. Who retires at that age?”

“The exhausted. The weary. The depleted.”

I apprehended that my friend had reached a point of crisis. His threat of retirement was not an idle one. I could foresee him abandoning his investigation in Oxford as a lost cause, relinquishing all his detecting duties, and slipping away into obscurity somewhere in the wilds of the Home Counties. Perhaps his three years of supposed death, the period Tomlinson had described as a “hiatus”, had given him a taste for solitude. Although he had wandered the world and mingled with the masses, he had done it under various aliases such as a Norwegian explorer named Sigerson, and not as Sherlock Holmes. He had been free of the onus of his renown and had had to meet no one’s expectations or play any role other than that of roving traveller and tourist. He had been able to indulge himself in scientific researches and obtain audiences with grandees – lamas in Tibet, sultans in Khartoum and the like. He had been a peregrine falcon, beholden only to his own whims and the vagaries of the winds. It must, I realised, have been a time of pure bliss.

When I thought of this and of how self-assured he had been at the start of the month, and now saw how low his sojourn at Oxford had brought him, it fair broke my heart.

I moved squarely into his line of vision. I bent before him, head bowed, hands out, almost in supplication.

“Old friend, I beg of you, snap out of this… this despondency. It is simply a trough. Troughs are followed by peaks. Such is the way of it. You must ride out the swells like a ship at sea. You must rise again.”

“What an adorable turn of phrase you have, Watson. Ever thought of becoming a writer?”

“For pity’s sake, I am trying to help you. I am your friend, possibly your only friend. Don’t spurn me. Without me, you’ll have nobody else to turn to.”

“Mycroft.”

“Your brother? Pah! Mycroft only sees you when it suits him, when he has a use for you. He calls, you come running. That is not brotherhood. It is certainly not friendship.”

“Watson, I am—”

“Holmes.” I put my face right up to his, so close that I could smell the peppermint-oil flavouring of the Chlorodyne on his breath. “I am telling you to accept help. You will not find answers in a surfeit of some spurious cure for neuralgia. You will find at best a temporary respite from your woes. Let me do something for you. Let me get you out into the daylight, away from that unmade bed and these meal trays which the chambermaid hasn’t been allowed to clear for days, I’ll be bound. Let us go eat at a riverside inn, or amble amongst the bookcases of the Bodleian, or maybe – here’s a thought – revisit some crime scenes and see if we cannot turn up any fresh clues. How about that? Does that strike you as a good idea?”

I seemed to be getting through to him. His gaze regained some of its focus and potency. His mouth lost its slackness, becoming tighter. A phantom smile flitted across his lips.

He rose, slowly, falteringly, like a man recovering his balance after a dizzy spell. I experienced a burst of relief. I had succeeded. I had galvanised him back into action.

“You are right, Watson,” said he.

“Of course I am,” I chuckled.

“I should accept help.”

“And who better to provide it than me?”

He collected his hat, his coat, his gloves, his scarf. “And there is one source of help which I have, through pride alone, been unwilling to exploit. You have persuaded me to think otherwise.”

“I’m sorry, what?” I was thoroughly confused.

“I should not have been so pusillanimous. I am, as you said, better than that. It feels as though I am stooping, but I am not. When in a trough, one has no alternative but to reach up to those above. It is an invidious position to be in, but one must acknowledge it as one’s lot.”

“Holmes, I don’t follow.”

“I am going,” Holmes said, “to consult an intellect which I must perforce recognise as surpassing mine.”

“You don’t mean Mycroft? Granted, you have claimed that he specialises in omniscience and that he is your superior in observation and deduction. All the same…”

“No, not Mycroft. Honestly, Watson. Why would I consult him? I am referring, obviously, to the Thinking Engine. What else?”

It crossed my mind, as Holmes and I once more traversed Beaumont Street to the University Galleries, that my friend had taken complete leave of his senses. The Thinking Engine?
He
was seeking aid from
it
? He must be at an extraordinarily low ebb if he reckoned that Quantock’s machine could unearth a solution where he could not. Evidently the Chlorodyne was impairing his judgement. His brain had become fogged, so that what seemed logical to him was, by any objective estimate, the opposite.

Then I wondered whether this was all just some artful ploy. The Chlorodyne, his intoxication, his impulsive decision to consult the Engine – it was one of Holmes’s subterfuges, an illusion he had concocted, like a conjuring trick, in order to generate some outcome that I could not as yet guess. He was only purporting to have imbibed such a large quantity of the medicine, just as he had only purported to be an opium addict in order to infiltrate the Lascar’s lair (in the adventure I have recorded as “The Man With The Twisted Lip”). It was all a performance, a bluff, and at some stage he would turn to me and the old familiar Holmes would reassert himself, glint in his eye, mind on fire, and I would know that I had been hoodwinked and so had the intended victim or victims of his scheme, and all would be well.

I clung to this hope, flimsy though it was, as we entered the underground chamber where the Thinking Engine was ensconced. Holmes was implementing some ingenious stratagem that would crack the case. He had to be. The alternative was too distressing to contemplate: the case had cracked him.

Professor Quantock was on site. It appeared he seldom left his Engine’s side. He was engaged in some complicated piece of repair or modification, in his hands a wax phonographic cylinder which he was delicately installing into the interstices of a teak cabinet stationed in the front of the Engine. The cabinet had not been present the last time we visited. It was large, the size of a double wardrobe, and I spied dozens of similar cylinders arrayed on racks within, connected to one another by wires.

So absorbed was Quantock in what he was doing that our arrival startled him and he nearly dropped the fragile cylinder.

“Oh! You’re early. N-no, wait. You are not who I was exp-expecting. Mr H-Holmes. Dr Watson. I did not know y-you would be joining us too. I was not t-told. I d-did not know you were even in Oxford st-still.”

“Still here. Still soldiering on,” said Holmes. “What are you up to?”

“Th-this?” Quantock glanced down at the cylinder. “An improvement to the Engine. The next step. You c-could say I’m enhancing its per-performance.”

“In what way?”

“Tickertape is not the m-most efficient form of communication. Slow and time-consuming. I have construed a faster and more d-direct method. I am just p-putting the finishing touches to it, and am due to d-demonstrate it shortly. To, as it happens, a roster of v-very important personages.”

“Really? I thought Lord Knaresfield had returned up north.”

“Not h-him. Others.”

“Ah. And this improvement to the Engine – it involves phonographic recordings somehow?”

“On each cylinder is etched a s-selection of syllables, carefully chosen and arranged according to frequency of use, the commoner ones more readily accessible than the less common. I d-dictated these myself – some three thousand of them in all, the building blocks of our mother tongue – via speaking tube assembly and cutting st-stylus. No mean feat, in light of my sp-speech imp-impediment, but I rose to the occ-occasion. The cylinders sit on their r-respective mandrels, and the Engine has been programmed to know the precise l-location of every syllable on every one of them. Instead of im-imprinting its answers onto t-tickertape, it sorts through these syllabaries algorithmically to find and play the individual sounds it needs. Putting them together one after another, it thus cr-creates words and ultimately sentences, somewhat in the manner of syllable-based languages such as Chinese and Japanese. The sounds c-come out here.”

He patted an amplification horn mounted on the side of the cabinet.

“In sh-short,” he concluded, “I have given the Th-Thinking Engine a voice.”

I could not suppress a low whistle. “You mean it talks now?”

“It will do, once the f-final few cylinders are in pl-place. If you’ll excuse me…”

He completed installation of the cylinder, holding it by the ends so as not to besmirch the playing surface with his fingerprints. Three further cylinders were removed from their tins and slotted onto the remaining vacant mandrels. I noted a small brass plate beside each mandrel with a numeral on it. There were corresponding numerals on the tins. Quantock then lowered a series of playing needles mounted on notched armatures, one for each cylinder.

Holmes watched the operation with a bleary concentration, as though he was interested but it took an effort to be so. I noticed that he was swaying slightly where he stood, and once or twice he had to stifle a yawn. If he was acting the part of an opiate-addled wastrel, he was doing it very well indeed. By which I mean – though it pains me to relate this – he was not acting at all.

Quantock fussed with a web of cables at the back of the unit which linked it to the Engine proper, made some meticulous calibrations to its interior, then pronounced himself satisfied and closed the glass doors that fronted it.

“The voice cabinet is r-ready,” he said. “Perhaps a dr-dry run before our g-guests arrive would be in order.”

The motor was started up, and the Engine embarked on its preliminary cycle of clicks, whirrs and chirrups, like a field of crickets responding to the first warming touch of sunrise.

“This is rather fortuitous,” Holmes remarked, “since we have come to solicit your machine’s advice.”

The mathematician’s hands expressed his surprise by flapping in opposite directions like a pair of birds parting company. “You…? My m-machine…? Well, that’s a turn-up for the b-books, I’ll say. From being its ant-antagonist, all at once you n-now wish to become its petitioner?”

“Such antagonism as there was, was largely Lord Knaresfield’s doing. He was the one who put the Engine and me on a collision course with his extravagant wager. Circumstances have since changed, and in the quandary in which I find myself, it would be foolish not to exhaust every possibility before finally conceding defeat.”