The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes Page 2
It was Jones, this time, who took the credit—Athelney Jones, you will recall, of Scotland Yard—and for Watson, at the end of the trail, there was a wife. For Holmes there remained the bottle of cocaine that stood upon his shelf, toward which, when all was over, his long white hand was slowly reaching up.
The book appeared in the autumn of 1890, over the imprint of Spencer Blackett, and was popular from the first. It, too, today is rare and difficult to find. But the money that it made for its author was insufficient for his needs, and Dr. Conan Doyle continued to practice medicine at Southsea. A second great historical novel, meanwhile, had been written—the doctor’s industry was incredible—and The White Company was all but ready to take its place beside the earlier Micah Clarke. That Sherlock Holmes would again appear between the covers of a book did not enter the author’s mind, save perhaps as a happy possibility—when and if some other publisher, greatly daring, should solicit Watson for another reminiscence.
Dr. Conan Doyle, for all his mounting reputation, was a modest man, and still a man of medicine who wrote novels when his profession did not pay. In the latter days of 1890, indeed, he was contemplating a happy union of his two vocations.
As a specialist, it occurred to him, he would have leisure for his writing and perhaps command a greater flow of patients; wherefore, he would to Vienna go and study to be a specialist! The die was cast, and as the year drew to its close, Dr. and Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle closed the doors of Bush Villa behind them, for the last time. There is, today, one reads, a tablet on the villa, and “Doyle House” is a place of tourist interest. As the birthplace, so to speak, of Sherlock Holmes, it should be marked, one thinks, by national decree.
With the spring, his work in Vienna completed, a new eye specialist tacked his plate over a door in Devonshire Place, not far from classical Harley Street, and the new chapter of adversity was begun. “Every morning,” wrote Dr. Conan Doyle, later on in life, “I walked from my lodgings in Montague Place, reached my consulting-room at ten, and sat there until three or four, with never a ring to disturb my serenity.”
It was a situation made to order for literary work. A number of popular monthlies had begun to make their appearance on the stands, among them the famous Strand. To the thoughtfully smoking doctor, it appeared that a serial might be an impediment in such a journal, but that a series of short tales, featuring a single individual who would appear throughout the series, might be the very ticket. And, happily, the individual was at hand. In the long hours of waiting, all unknowing whither it was to lead him, Dr. Conan Doyle, eye specialist, of No. 2, Devonshire Place, began to write his remarkable series of short detective tales, now famous the world over as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
This time Holmes was in the world to stay. That lean and sinewy figure was to become a symbol as familiar as the Nelson Monument and the Tower of London. A figure of incredible popularity, who exists in history more surely than the warriors and statesmen in whose time he lived and had his being. An illusion so real, as Father Ronald Knox has happily suggested,* that one might some day look about for him in Heaven, forgetting that he was only a character in a book.
* A. C. Doyle: Memories and Adventures.
* H. E Jones: The Original of Sherlock Holmes.
* H. E. Jones: The Original of Sherlock Holmes.
* Ibid.
* Joseph Bell: “Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”
* A. C. Doyle: Memories and Adventures.
* “Years ago,” Conan Doyle was once quoted in a newspaper, “I made thirty runs against a bowler by the name of Sherlock, and I always had a kindly feeling for that name.”
* So much so that Mr. H. W. Bell believes it influenced some of the early pages of The Sign of Four—notably in the description of Thaddeus Sholto’s house and conversation, and in similar detail.
* Ronald A. Knox: Essays in Satire.
THE METHODS OF MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES
TO THE EARNEST STUDENT OF THE HOLMES SAGA IT must be clear that the medical practice of Dr. Watson, after his marriage, was never at any time excessive. For a while it was substantial and satisfactory; but at no time, apparently, was it so heavy that, at a call from Sherlock Holmes, it could not be dropped for a day or two, or turned over to an accommodating neighbor. Watson himself, we may be sure, for all his felicity, thought often and with great happiness of his days at Baker Street, when he was a figure in events of tempestuous moment; and if he wavered in the face of duty, there was always his wife to urge him to listen to the siren call of adventure. Anstruther, or another, she was always certain, would do his work for him. “You are so interested in Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s cases,” she used to say.
Precious little urging, one fancies, the good doctor ever needed. He could pack in half an hour, and there was always a convenient train from Paddington or some place.
Watson, at the close of the grim adventure called The Sign of Four, it will be remembered, had won the heart and hand of Mary Morstan, and the marriage must have followed almost immediately. There is, unfortunately, a confusion of dates at this point, which whimsical scholars have striven to correct, not with entire success. It is certain that at the time of the first of the recorded Adventures of Sherlock Holmes—the curious reminiscence known as A Scandal in Bohemia—Holmes and the doctor had not seen each other for some months. Yet the adventure is quite precisely dated in March of the year 1888: it was on the night of the 20th that Watson, returning from a professional visit, passed the rooms in Baker Street, saw the spare figure of his friend “pass twice in dark silhouette against the blind,” and was filled with an irresistible desire to look in upon him.
If Watson’s memory of this evening is correct, it is obvious that it was at fault when indirectly he gave date to the earlier adventure of The Sign of Four, which immediately preceded his marriage yet was dated in the month of September, 1888. And still other adventures, recorded later in the series, by their dating only increase the confusion. A plausible explanation of the difficulty must be found either in the suggestion that Watson himself was a bit confused about the date of his engagement and marriage, or in the perhaps more likely supposition that Dr. Conan Doyle was careless in the matter.
Possibly it is unimportant. The pleasing fact is that a certain Mr. Greenhough Smith was editor of the Strand Magazine, at just the proper moment, and welcomed the further reminiscences of Dr. Watson with flattering enthusiasm. It was in the seventh number of that journal, dated July, 1891, that the first of the series appeared, and by the time the last was published, in the Christmas issue of 1893, the name and fame of Sherlock Holmes was known around the world.
But on that night of March, in 1888, for Holmes and Watson the curtain was just ringing up. The gaunt detective was glad to see his friend again, after their separation, although “his manner was not effusive.” That he was at work upon a problem had been evident to Watson even from the street. The shadow on the blind had told its tale: “He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest, and his hands clasped behind him. He was at work again. He had risen from his drug-created dreams, and was hot upon the scent of some new problem.”
What that problem was, the world recalls. The surprising individual whose letter had preceded him, and who was to arrive at a quarter before eight, was punctual. His knock upon the door was loud and authoritative. His stature was not less than six feet, six inches. His dress was astounding in its barbaric opulence, and he must have been an astonishing figure, indeed, even in fin de siècle London. “Heavy bands of Astrakhan were slashed across the sleeves and fronts of his double-breasted coat, while the deep blue cloak which was thrown over his shoulders was lined with flame-coloured silk, and secured at the neck with a brooch which consisted of a single flaming beryl.” His boots, which extended halfway up his calves, were trimmed at the tops with rich brown fur; and to complete the Stevensonian melodrama of his appearance, he wore a black vizard mask across the upper part of his face, “extending down past the cheek-bones.
”
He had not spoken, however, before Holmes was aware that he was addressing Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein and hereditary King of Bohemia.
In the singular adventure that followed the appearance of this royal apparition—“the comedy of the King’s photograph,” it has been called—Holmes rose to heights of admirable ingenuity, even though in the end he failed. Defeated by a woman! It is the only defeat of its kind in the long history of the great detective’s career; and to Holmes, thereafter, Irene Norton (née Adler), of dubious memory, was always the woman. But the King was satisfied; and Watson was to record, in future, only a brilliant sequence of successes.
It is just conceivable that implicit in this first “short adventure,” that is to say, in this first of Watson’s reminiscences in the shorter form, we have all that is essentially important in the saga of Sherlock Holmes. Be that as it may—and one does not insist upon the notion—it is an excellent tale, with all the glamour of the others, plus an admirable sense of the rooms in Baker Street and a delightful glimpse of the two friends working in collaboration. Insofar as Watson himself, as narrator, is concerned, it contains much of what was later to become a favorite formula in the telling of these adventures. It is practically all on exhibition—the Baker Street prologue with mystifications by the detective; the references to other cases whose secrets may not at the moment be revealed; the statement of the problem about to present itself, and discussion of the insufficient evidence at hand; the arrival of the illustrious client, with further mystifications and an elaboration of the problem; the adventure itself, and finally the fascinating if slightly anti-climactic explanations of the detective, illustrating the ease with which it all had been accomplished.
Others among the reminiscences are perhaps more rigid examples of the formula, which—after all—was just beginning to shape itself in A Scandal in Bohemia, but few are better stories. For good measure, there are vivid, first-hand glimpses of Holmes’s “amazing powers in the use of disguises,” which in later tales are more often referred to than they are shown in operation. It may well be, indeed, that the narrative lacks only a corpse or two of being quite the best of all the adventures. But the great fathomer’s debt to Poe is very evident throughout. For all his earlier and perhaps ill-considered gibing at Dupin (in A Study in Scarlet), it is to be noted that in A Scandal in Bohemia Holmes was not above taking a leaf from the book of that “very inferior fellow.” The incident of Watson’s smoke-rocket, and the false alarm of fire at Briony Lodge, could only have been a happy memory of the duplicity of M. Dupin in the case of the celebrated Purloined Letter. There was always just a touch of professional jealousy in Holmes’s character—entirely natural, no doubt—that even Watson could not gloss away.
In the twenty-three further reminiscences contributed thereafter by Watson, through Conan Doyle, to the Strand, it is evident that a sort of intermittent partnership with Holmes had been resumed. The order of the adventures is not, however, chronological, and further doubts are possible as to Watson’s memory. The dating is almost irritatingly insufficient. While in the main the biographical narrative marches continuously, there are many backward glances, and it is obvious that a number of the problems are recollections of the days that preceded the doctor’s marriage, when he and Holmes were still fellow-lodgers in Baker Street. A chronological table of the adventures, accurately dated, is not possible, although the talents of a number of scholars have been directed toward the compilation of such a table—notably those of Mr. H. W. Bell, Mr. Thomas S. Blakeney, and Mr. S. C. Roberts, who are not always in agreement.
But what a record of achievement they reveal! What a picture they disclose of London at the century’s end! Is it too much to claim that social historians in the years to come are more likely to return to Watson than to the dull McCarthy and the sardonic Strachey? Of all the annalists of that curious time one must prefer the humble Watson, with his chronicle of crime and detection and his swift, kaleidoscopic record of bowler hats and “kerridges,” of bicycles and Turkish Baths, of green November fogs and baking August sunshines. No telephones had been installed to complicate the business of life; when Holmes made haste he sent a telegram. In every doorway lurked the minions of the Yard. The picture is unforgettable and unique. “Baker Street,” says Mr. Roberts, “remains for ever permeated with the Watsonian aura. The dim figures of the Baker Street irregulars scuttle through the November gloom; the ghostly hansom drives away, bearing Holmes and Watson on an errand of mystery.”*
Queer folk came to the rooms of Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street, and always they came when they were in trouble. It was a grim business that occupied the talents of the great detective. There was the dreadful case of Helen Stoner, recalled by Watson from an earlier year—the shocking adventure of The Speckled Band; and that gruesome business of The Engineer’s Thumb, which marked the summer of 1889. And the hideous adventure of The Copper Beeches that all but cost Miss Violet Hunter her life. One recalls the surprising episode of the managing director of the Franco-Midland Hardware Company, who knocked on his own door with his heels; and the alarming experience of The Greek Interpreter—a curious problem that was called to Holmes’s attention by his brother Mycroft. The singular adventure of The Red-Headed League, to be sure, was pure comedy to begin with, but it ended in the capture of the criminal upon whom Inspector Athelney Jones would rather have clapped bracelets than any man in London.
Throughout all, the remarkable methods of Mr. Sherlock Holmes are admirably in evidence; they are, of course, the raison d’être of Watson’s reminiscences. And they are, clearly enough, the principles and tenets of Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh, a bit stretched and dramatized, applied to specially selected cases of—for the most part—fantastic crime. In them, one hears again the dry inflections of the Scottish doctor, laying down his broad rules of diagnosis.…
“Try to learn the features of a disease or injury, gentlemen, as precisely as you know the features, the gait, the tricks of manner of your most intimate friend. Him, even in a crowd, you can recognize at once. It may be a crowd of men dressed all alike, and each having his full complement of eyes, nose, hair, and limbs. In every essential they resemble one another; only in trifles do they differ—and yet, by knowing these trifles well, you make your recognition or your diagnosis with ease. So it is with disease of mind or body or morals. Racial peculiarities, hereditary tricks of manner, accent, occupation or the want of it, education, environment of every kind, by their little trivial impressions gradually mould or carve the individual, and leave finger marks or chisel scores which the expert can detect. The great broad characteristics which at a glance can be recognized as indicative of heart disease or consumption, chronic drunkenness or long-continued loss of blood, are the common property of the veriest tyro in medicine, while to masters of their art there are myriads of signs eloquent and instructive, but which need the educated eye to discover. The … importance of the infinitely little is incalculable. Poison a well at Mecca with the cholera bacillus, and the holy water which the pilgrims carry off in bottles will infect a continent. The rags of the victims of a plague will terrify every seaport in Christendom.”*
These are the accents of Sherlock Holmes himself. It is amusing to recall, however, that Dr. Joseph Bell, pleased by the success of the detective for whom he sat as model, in later years suggested problems to Dr. Conan Doyle, which were not—the author admits in his autobiography—very practical. But Bell’s appreciation of the immortal Holmes was keen, and his own description of the detective is very adroit: “A shrewd, quick-sighted, inquisitive man, half doctor, half virtuoso, with plenty of spare time, a retentive memory, and perhaps with the best gift of all—the power of unloading the mind of all the burden of trying to remember unnecessary details.”
Holmes looked upon himself, it is to be recalled, as a machine. When he does not suggest it himself, the excellent Watson—like a Greek Chorus—does it for him. Thus at the outset of the Adventu
res, and not then for the first time, we are reminded that “all emotions … were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.” Deduction, of course, was his principal tool of office, and seldom was he at fault. Observation was a close and important second, but it was not always necessary for Holmes to see to understand. Pipe in mouth, his eyes half closed or shut entirely, he could listen to a client’s tale of puzzling horror and know the answer to the problem before the man had finished speaking. Whatever he might reveal to Watson, in advance of the ultimate revelation, reading the doctor’s account of a recital in Baker Street one is always certain that Holmes himself is hot upon the track. A particularly difficult case was sometimes a “three-pipe problem,” after the client had departed; but with Holmes of all people difficulty was a very relative word indeed.
The importance of tobacco in Holmes’s scheme of life and thought, incidentally, has been pointed out by all students of the detective’s methods. “He is,” as Father Knox cheerfully admits, “one of the world’s great smokers.”* But while occasionally he tossed a cigar case to Watson, he himself alternated between a pipe and cigarettes. The pipe was largely for his problems. In ordinary conversation, or when time was short, an occasional cigarette was sufficient. In practically all of the tales there is the odor of tobacco smoke. The rooms in Baker Street must always have been full of it.
The drugs—cocaine and morphine—with which, during the early days of his association with Watson, he used to “stimulate” and “clarify” his mind, were seldom necessary during the Adventures, one is glad to know—a reform for which Watson was, in large part, responsible.
The familiar Baker Street pose of lounging indifference, in tweeds or dressing gown, however, only masked the turnings of his restless mind. Bursts of almost daemonic enterprise followed quickly, as a rule. In pursuit, he had amazing energy. Holmes at his utmost must indeed have been a sight to strike the Scotland Yarders stiff with wonder and dismay. Sometimes on hands and knees he traced a culprit’s spoor across a sodden garden; and indoors, it is recorded, he often lay flat upon the boards, with glass or measuring line in hand, to verify his suspicions in the flagrant minutiae of a room’s disorder. An astonishing spectacle. But there is nothing self-conscious about a machine dedicated to vengeance and retribution. Enviable was the humble rôle of John H. Watson, whose privilege it was to watch; while Gregson and the others sneered.…