The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  Granted the opportunity, gentlemen—one might cry, in paraphrase of Dr. Bell—of recovering a single day out of the irrecoverable past, how would you choose to spend that sorcerous gift? With Master Shakespeare in his tiring room? With Villon and his companions of the cockleshell? Riding with Rupert or barging it with Cleopatra up the Nile? Or would you choose to squander it on a chase with Sherlock Holmes, after a visit to the rooms in Baker Street? There can be only one possible answer, gentlemen, to the question.

  The notable taste of Mr. Sherlock Holmes for theatrical arrangement and dramatic effects has been a subject of frequent comment; and so, too, has been his flair for sardonic epigram. His theatricality is evident in all of the adventures. It is his most human failing—his appreciation of applause. It is the actor ranting to his audience when he cries: “Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the famous black pearl of the Borgias!” It is the admirable manipulator of third-act surprises who serves up the missing naval papers, under cover, as a breakfast dish. In the matter of epigram, he is at his best where a flavor of paradox is involved, and two examples—celebrated by Father Knox as specimens of the Sherlockismus—are famous. As both have been misquoted in that scholarly churchman’s study, it may be well to restate them from the Watsonian text. The first is a snatch of dialogue from Silver Blaze, the speakers being Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Gregory:

  “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

  “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

  “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

  “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

  The second, from The Devil’s Foot, a much later tale, is part of a conversation between the detective and a famous lion-hunter:

  “You came down here to ask me whom I suspected.… You then went to the vicarage, waited outside it for some time, and finally returned to your cottage.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I followed you.”

  “I saw no one.”

  “That is what you may expect to see when I follow you.”

  From this latter episode it is easy to see that Holmes was not above a bit of boasting, on occasion; but it was never empty braggadocio. He knew his powers very well, and such boasting as he indulged in was usually ironic, for all its truthfulness. There is a flavor of Dumas in his occasional rodomontade, a savor of D’Artagnan, who also made no brags that he was not able and willing to perform. And the always tacit contempt of the detective for Scotland Yard was similarly well-grounded. His tolerant scorn of the professional operatives is part of the very substance of the legend. Yet there is a certain apparent modesty that accompanies his transactions. “My trifling experiences,” he calls his greatest triumphs, when he speaks of them to Watson. False modesty perhaps? Yet not quite false, nor yet quite modest. It is again the artist speaking, half deprecating the applause he has so well deserved.… “The stage,” says Watson, “lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.”

  It is rather obvious, also, that business lost a remarkable organizer. The number of assistants in the detective’s employ—or ready to join his forces on a moment’s notice—is not at any time explicitly set forth; but it must have been a large one. The ease and promptness with which a fine acting company was assembled, to play their parts outside Miss Adler’s window, in A Scandal in Bohemia, points clearly to a highly perfected organization. And it is notorious that a veritable horde of gamins was at his call. Smart youngsters, too. “The Baker Street Division of the Detective Police Force,” Holmes whimsically calls the youthful gang, upon its first appearance, in A Study in Scarlet; and in The Sign of Four, its members are the “Baker Street Irregulars.” There are glimpses of them, here and there, in the Adventures, although their leader—a certain Wiggins—would seem to have been supplanted by a certain Simpson. It was Simpson, at any rate, who watched the rooms of Henry Wood, in Hudson Street, some months after Watson’s marriage.

  But Dr. Conan Doyle, in time, was weary of inventing plots. With mounting fame, the need for ready cash had passed. His program was ambitious; it even threatened the supremacy of Scott, whether or not the doctor realized it. Curiously anesthetic to the glamour of his great detective, with no faintest glimmer of a notion that he had created an immortal figure in literature and a living figure in the world, he determined that he and Holmes should part forever. The public clamor was still enormous; but Conan Doyle—the author resolutely told himself—had had enough. “I saw that I was in danger of having my hand forced, and of being entirely identified with what I regarded as a lower stratum of literary achievement.” Thus his explanation, years later, when he came to write his memories. “Therefore, as a sign of my resolution, I determined to end the life of my hero.”

  Incredible resolution! “Murder! Murder—most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange, and unnatural.”

  To Dr. Conan Doyle it was natural enough, however. It was, he felt, imperative. The idea, he confessed, was in his mind when, with his wife, he visited Switzerland and saw the falls of Reichenbach.…“A terrible place, and one that I thought would make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my banking account along with him. So there I laid him, fully determined that he should stay there.…”

  It is a dismaying chapter, come upon for the first time, that Adventure of the Final Problem. One suffers with poor Watson. “It is with a heavy heart,” he says, “that I take up my pen to write these last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished.” They had not seen each other in some time. The year was 1891, and Holmes presumably was in France—“engaged by the French Government upon a matter of supreme importance.” It was with surprise, therefore, that Watson saw his friend walk into his consulting-room, and with consternation that he noted the detective’s appearance. Sherlock Holmes was paler and more gaunt than Watson had ever seen him.

  Small wonder, for he had just foiled the third of three murderous attempts upon his life, all made within the single afternoon. He was at grips, at last, with Professor Robert Moriarty, the great genius of crime. It was inevitable that they should come together at the end; and that neither one should triumph. Moriarty! “He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city.… He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.”

  It was the evening of the 24th of April; that memory, at least, was burned in Watson’s brain.

  There was a chance, however, that Moriarty would be taken—that all would still be well. And Watson’s practice, fortunately, was quiet. He was able to accompany Holmes to the Continent, whither it was certain Moriarty, if he escaped the net, would be drawn in search of them. The falls of Reichenbach were waiting their arrival. “A fearful place.… The long sweep of green water roaring for ever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing for ever upwards,” turned Watson a bit giddy. “We stood near the edge,” he says, “peering down at the gleam of the water breaking far below us against the black rocks, and listening to the half-human shout which came booming up with the spray out of the abyss.” It was then the afternoon of May the 4th.

  And then the false and fatal message—calling the doctor back! And Moriarty walking swiftly along the curving path that led upward to the brink! And Holmes’s final letter written on torn pages from his notebook: “My dear Watson—I write these few lines through the courtesy of Mr. Moriarty, who awaits my convenience for the final discussion of those questions which lie between us.…”

  Ah me! So they were dead, then, both of them—the great criminal and the great crime savant—deep down in the boiling depths, among the jagged rocks of Reichenbach. And Dr. Conan Doyle was free to turn his agile mind to worthier matters.

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; He was amazed, he tells us, at the concern expressed by the public. “You brute,” began one vigorous, tearful letter of remonstrance from a woman; and from all sides were heard the sounds of lamentation. It was as if a god had been destroyed by treachery. So children mourn, perhaps, when Santa Claus is murdered by their elders.

  The first volume of the Adventures, dedicated to Dr. Joseph Bell, appeared in 1892, under the imprint of George Newnes. It contained the first dozen of the twenty-four episodes, beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia and closing with The Adventure of the Copper Beeches. The second group appeared in 1894, from the same publishing house, under a slightly different title, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and was found to be one short of the last dozen that had appeared in the Strand. The adventure known as The Cardboard Box was omitted, the reason for omission being—it has been asserted—the author’s chivalrous regret that he had allowed a woman’s reputation to be smirched, a literary practice which—even fictionally—he deplored. Whatever may have been the reason, the story was resurrected and given publication, years later, between the red covers of His Last Bow, where it occurs most unchronologically, to raise still further doubts concerning Watson’s memory.

  The two tall volumes known familiarly as the Adventures and the Memoirs are today of considerable rarity, and are—bibliographically speaking—of the utmost desirability. Their enormous popularity in their day is evidenced by the condition in which most of them turn up. In the final chapter of copies of the Memoirs it is not difficult to imagine the stain of tears among the thumbprints in the margins.

  Thus it was; and it was to be many years before the public knew that Sherlock Holmes was still among the living—that he was not dead, and never had been dead at all. Even Dr. Conan Doyle, himself, did not know the glorious truth. For three long years, even the devoted Watson did not know.

  Good old Watson!

  * S. C. Roberts: Doctor Watson.

  * Joseph Bell: “Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  * Ronald A. Knox: Essays in Satire.

  THE RETURN OF MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES

  THE LATE E. W. HORNUNG, CREATOR OF THE CELEBRATED Raffles, and brother-in-law, it is interesting to reflect, of Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, once made a very witty remark in the form of a very bad pun. “Though he might be more humble,” he observed, “there’s no police like Holmes.”

  The public thought so, too, and the uproar that followed the supposed death of the detective, in the steaming cauldron of Reichenbach, was considerable. This was no paper hero who had gone to his death in the pages of a novel, but one of England’s greatest living figures. The weeping was extensive and sincere. It is probable that the passing of no character in fiction since that of Little Nell, in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop, so wrought upon the heart of England and America. But if the death of Little Nell threw nations into mourning, it should in fairness be recorded that it also wrung the heart of her creator. Conan Doyle, it must be revealed, was made of sterner stuff.… “I fear I was utterly callous, myself,” he writes in his autobiography, “and only glad to have a chance of opening out into new fields of imagination, for the temptation of high prices made it difficult to get one’s thoughts away from Holmes.”

  Happily, it was not only difficult; it was impossible. In spite of the success of such books as Rodney Stone, Uncle Bernac, and The Tragedy of the Korosko—admirable tales, all of them—it was Sherlock Holmes for whom the public clamored. That the great detective was dead in Switzerland, according to unimpeachable authority, made no difference, since—as it was shrewdly pointed out—there were still hundreds of his cases upon which Watson had not yet reported. They had been mentioned, time and again, in the existing chronicles. There was, for instance, the “singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee,” about which the public mind had long been curious; and the “adventure of the Paradol chamber,” a suggestive hint of Watson’s that had not been lost upon the public imagination. More recently, there had been the “singular affair of the aluminium crutch,” the “adventure of Ricoletti of the clubfoot and his abominable wife,” the “question of the Netherland-Sumatra Company,” and other unrevealed problems in which Holmes presumably had triumphed hugely. The details of these and dozens of other cases were all in Watson’s notebooks, he had testified, and the public thought it had a right to them.

  When Dr. Conan Doyle at length relented, as in time he did, it was not, however, one of the problems already mentioned by Watson that he chose to present. It was the famous Hound of the Baskervilles, still perhaps the most celebrated of the many adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The immortal tale began its career in the pages of the Strand, during 1901, and was in covers under date of the following year. It was in this same year—1902—that Conan Doyle received his knighthood from a grateful Queen, and became Sir Arthur. Editorial gossip of the period had it that the honor was bestowed in recognition of his work in South Africa, and his history of the Boer War; but devotees of Sherlock Holmes knew better. It was a mark of royal gratitude for the return of Sherlock Holmes, one ventures, and positively nothing else.

  Our own gratitude must in part be given to Mr. B. Fletcher Robinson, the author’s friend, for reasons which are set forth in the dedication to the printed volume. “My dear Robinson,” the notice runs, “it was to your account of a West-country legend that this tale owes its inception. For this and for your help in the details all thanks.”

  All thanks indeed.

  The story is a reminiscence of the year ’89, it would appear, and again Watson’s memory is rather desperately at fault. In the year ’89, by his own earlier figures, he was a married man, only occasionally revisiting the glimpses. It is, of course, possible that his wife was away at the time of the adventure, and that she conveniently remained away the while it ran its course; but the theory will not hold much water. At no time does he mention Mrs. Watson (née Mary Morstan), whom traditionally he married some time in 1888. To the contrary, it is clear that he and Holmes were, at the time, fellow-lodgers in Baker Street, without thought of any change. From every indication, then, the problem of the Hound preceded Watson’s romantic marriage, and therefore preceded the adventure called The Sign of Four.

  In any case, it was one of Holmes’s finest problems, and Watson—good fellow—has given it to us in full. It is the longest of his many reminiscences.

  The story is too well known to need retelling. Who is there that has forgotten the dreadful death of Hugo Baskerville upon the moor, and the foul, unnatural thing that stood above him? “A great black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon.” And even as they looked upon the spectacle—the drunken roysterers who had followed—“the thing tore the throat out of Hugo Baskerville, on which, as it turned its blazing eyes and dripping jaws upon them, the three shrieked with fear and rode for dear life, still screaming, across the moor.”

  Two hundred years and more before, the thing had happened; and down the years the Baskervilles had perished, father and son, by means which had been at once “sudden, bloody, and mysterious.” Was it conceivable that in the nineteenth century such things were possible? Yet now Sir Charles was dead in circumstances equally mysterious and tragic.

  It was a sinister affair that Dr. James Mortimer laid before the great detective, that morning in Baker Street, and one that was to pit the fathomer against a foeman worthy of his steel. The public facts were simple. No indication of violence had been discovered upon Sir Charles’s person, unless it were an incredible distortion of the face. Before retiring, he had gone upon his evening walk, and never had returned alive. In the Yew Alley they had found his body, and there were evidences that he had paused beside a gate and looked out upon the moor. Organic heart disease was a sufficient explanation for the countryside. Such were the public facts. The private facts disclosed a singular circumstance which Barrymore, the butler, had neglected to relate upon the witness stand. He had said there were no traces on the ground, around the body.

  Bu
t Dr. Mortimer knew better … “some little distance off, but fresh and clear.”

  “Footprints?” asked Holmes.

  “Footprints.”

  “A man’s or a woman’s?”

  “Mr. Holmes,” the doctor whispered, “they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

  Thus the problem opened, and that Sir Henry Baskerville did not follow Sir Charles to his ancestral doom was entirely due to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Watson’s part in the adventure is not lightly to be dismissed as unimportant. He was Holmes’s surrogate at the beginning—on the scene before even the detective himself arrived; and there is Holmes’s own testimony that it was an ugly and dangerous business upon which his deputy had been sent. Is there, one wonders, in all of history or fiction, an incident more thrillingly courageous than Watson’s lone night charge into the empty hut upon the moor? For all he knew, the murderer was lurking just inside. And in all of the adventures there is no more taut, suspenseful moment than that which quickly follows—the moment when Watson, in a corner of the hut, hears the approaching footsteps of its occupant.

  The perfect Holmes adventure, no doubt, would be a shrewd amalgam of the best parts of them all; and such a tale would of necessity include many pages from The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  The book appeared in March of 1902, and became a classic almost overnight. The enormous popularity of Holmes, however, dictated a large first printing of the volume; in consequence of which, it is still possible, without great difficulty or expense, to obtain a copy of that first edition. Decidedly, gentlemen, it is a book to own.