The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes Read online

  But the tale was frankly from the notebooks of Dr. Watson—those capacious memorandums! It was a reminiscence of an earlier day. Poor Holmes, for all of Conan Doyle, now happily Sir Arthur, was dead and done for at the hands of Moriarty. The resurrection was a year away.

  To bring the dead to life is an achievement. And Doyle had killed his hero, in The Final Problem, with a completeness that was appalling. Was he at all troubled in his mind about it? At the time of writing, not a whit. But it is impossible not to believe that, tardily, he knew regret. It is impossible not to feel certain that, in later years, after the murderous impulse of the moment had long passed, he wished it had been otherwise. At very least, one can imagine him as thinking, he might have left the death of Holmes in doubt. There was Arabia to which he might have sent him, instead of Switzerland. Men disappeared for years in the Arabian desert, then turned up safe and whole with manuscripts beneath their arms.

  Yet the truth, when he established it, was so simple! Holmes was not dead at all. He never had been dead. Sir Arthur, like all the rest of us, had been mistaken; deceived by Watson’s error at the brink—misled, no doubt, by Watson’s later silences.

  Watson himself had known since 1894, which was the year that “all London was interested, and the fashionable world dismayed, by the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair, under most unusual and inexplicable circumstances.” The crime was of considerable importance in itself, but it was its “inconceivable sequel” that lent it its later interest and importance to the doctor, who was by this time a widower, his wife having passed away some time during the years of Holmes’s absence.

  It was not to be supposed that, after the passing of his two associates, Watson would settle down with no further interest in crime; and we have his word for it that he did nothing of the sort. In point of fact, he never failed to read with care the various problems that came before the public; and more than once he even endeavored to employ the familiar methods of his mentor in their solution. For his personal satisfaction only, of course, and always—as he tells us—with indifferent success. The case of Ronald Adair, as it happened, had made a strong appeal to him; so much so that at six o’clock one evening he found himself one of a group of curious loafers staring up at a window in the dead man’s house. Turning to leave the scene, he collided with an elderly deformed man and knocked a number of volumes from his hands.

  There is no need to continue the account. The world has long since known the truth of that eventful meeting. The crippled bookman was Sherlock Holmes himself. And what more natural than his explanation, a little later, to the bewildered and delighted Watson? “My dear fellow … about that chasm. I had no serious difficulty in getting out of it, for the very simple reason that I was never in it.”

  Moriarty alone had fallen to his doom! “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” One is not quoting Watson literally; but it is all there between the lines—his joy, his affection, and his satisfaction. And once more Mr. Sherlock Holmes was free to devote his life to examining “those interesting little problems which the complex life of London so plentifully presents.”

  For sensible reasons he had sent even Watson no word of his survival. The trial of Moriarty’s sinister gang had left two of its most dangerous members at large—criminals who would leave no stone unturned to bring about the death of Holmes, once it became known that he had returned to London. Silence—a long vacation—had seemed the wisest course. For two years he had travelled in Tibet, and for a time conducted a laboratory at Montpelier, in France. Then the Park Lane Mystery had drawn him home—the murder of the Honorable Ronald Adair, which offered him peculiar personal opportunities. He was again in Baker Street, and all was as it ever had been and ever shall be.

  The Return of Sherlock Holmes, a series of thirteen reminiscences in Watson’s shorter manner, began to run in the Strand Magazine of October, 1903, and was concluded in the corresponding month of 1904. By February of 1905, the tales were in covers and another difficult volume had been added to lists of bibliophilic desiderata. The reason for the book’s rarity in its first edition form, in spite of a large printing, is obviously its tremendous popularity in its day. Less difficult to find than the earliest volumes of the series, it is much scarcer than The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was published three years before it. That is a phenomenon that can be explained only by the supposition that the short stories are, on the whole, even more popular than the novels.

  Some of the most famous of the adventures are between the covers of this book, and some of Holmes’s most skillful reasoning. Few better stories are to be found in the entire saga than those, in this sixth volume, known as The Dancing Men, The Six Napoleons, and The Golden Pince-nez. It is to be noted, however, how curiously many of Holmes’s problems, in essence, repeat themselves, from first to last. It is almost as if, returning after his reputed death in Switzerland, he began the cycle over again—so much in common have A Scandal in Bohemia and The Norwood Builder; The Blue Carbuncle and The Six Napoleons; The Greek Interpreter and The Solitary Cyclist; The Naval Treaty and The Second Stain. And one suspects that the dangerous adventure of The Dancing Men followed with singular fortuity the detective’s reading—or rereading—of Poe’s Gold Bug. Not that it really matters. And, no doubt, it is merely further evidence in support of Holmes’s own contention as to the way crimes duplicate each other. “There is nothing new under the sun,” he told Inspector Gregson, in A Study in Scarlet; adding significantly: “It has all been done before.”

  In spite of everything, London remained a fascinating place. One cannot agree with Holmes that the loss of Professor Moriarty left it a “singularly uninteresting city.” And, for that matter, there was all the rest of criminal England to furnish him with problems. “From the years 1894 to 1901 inclusive, Mr. Sherlock Holmes was a very busy man,” writes Watson authoritatively, at the beginning of The Solitary Cyclist. Not only was he consulted in all public cases of importance, but he was called upon to handle hundreds of private cases, “some of them of the most intricate and extraordinary character.” Among these, few perhaps were more sensational than that involving Charles Augustus Milverton, in which Holmes and Watson committed midnight burglary to serve the ends of justice; and certainly none was more highly colored with the hues of blood than that which saw the death of Captain Peter Carey—pinned to his cabin wall like a beetle on a card. The suggestion that Robert Moriarty had left no competent successors was surely one of Holmes’s most ironic jests. Throughout this period of prolific misdemeanor the old intimacy between the two friends prevailed, and No. 221-B Baker Street again contained them both. Many were the startling quests on which they ventured forth, in fog and sunshine, and all too few of them are here in print. The fact is, at the conclusion of the Return, Watson is again preparing to swear off writing—or furnishing materials to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  It had been his intention, the doctor tells us, to conclude his series with The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, an oddly twisted problem that came to the collaborators one frosty morning during the winter of ’97; but the circumstances of an earlier promise to relate the puzzling Adventure of the Second Stain obtained from Holmes a final dispensation, and for readers of 1904 a final story. Holmes, it appears, had been for some time reluctant to see the reminiscences continue. We learn the reason with somewhat of a shock. “So long as he was in actual professional practice the records of his successes were of some practical value to him; but since he has definitely retired from London and betaken himself to study and bee-farming on the Sussex Downs, notoriety has become hateful to him.” Our shock is occasioned by these sudden tidings of the detective’s retirement, just as we are congratulating ourselves on the fact that he is still hale and well, and back in Baker Street.

  The date of publication, at this point, becomes important, however, for it enables us to establish the time of Holmes’s retirement, without reference to Watson’s notoriously faulty memory. It is a matter that has been a trifle cloudy; and Mr. S. C. Ro
berts rather begs the issue when he loosely asserts that “by 1907 Holmes had definitely retired from professional work.” In point of fact, Holmes had retired by October, 1904. It was in the issue of the Strand Magazine of that month and year that Watson’s Second Stain reminiscence first appeared, with its clear-cut statement revealing that the detective was even then keeping his bees upon the Sussex Downs. Precisely how long before October Holmes had given over his practice it is only possible to guess; but one ventures to think that it must have been a number of months, at least, in view of Watson’s reference to his friend’s objections—obviously over a period of recent time—to the “continued publication” of his experiences.

  Nevertheless, three further volumes of reminiscences were to follow. Of the first, The Valley of Fear, published in 1914-15, it is sufficient to say that it was one of Holmes’s early cases, and that it shows up Watson’s memory again. Since Moriarty is the offstage villain of the piece, not yet precipitated into Reichenbach, it is clear that the adventure belongs to a time before the working out of The Final Problem. Yet whereas Watson in The Final Problem declares his utter ignorance of even Moriarty’s name, in The Valley of Fear he speaks of him with some familiarity. One often wonders that Holmes relied as much on Watson as he did. But the rarefied heights of Watson’s unreliability—in the matter of dates—are better viewed from the opening paragraph of Wisteria Lodge, the first adventure in the volume known as His Last Bow (1917).

  “I find it recorded in my notebook,” he begins, “that it was a bleak and windy day towards the end of March in the year 1892. Holmes had received a telegram whilst we sat at lunch, and he had scribbled a reply.… Suddenly he turned upon me with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.”

  But Holmes, my dear Watson, was dead beneath the falls of Reichenbach, on that bleak and windy day of March in 1892—at least, you thought he was! It was the 4th of May, in 1891, that you bent above the brink and called his name. It was not until the spring of 1894, the year of Ronald Adair’s inexplicable murder, that you met the crippled bookseller and found that he was Holmes.

  But the answer is ready to our hand—even to Watson’s hand. The reading is quite clear.…“I find it recorded in my notebook.” And we have seen before that not all that went into the doctor’s notebooks was beyond a suspicion of inaccuracy. No doubt the year was 1902. If the matter is of further interest, it might be verified by a letter to the minister in London for San Pedro.

  For the rest—save only for the last—the tales are apparently Watsonian reminiscences of earlier days. One, The Bruce-Partington Plans, is dated 1895, and is one of the finest in the saga. Written at various times between the years 1908 and 1917, they were collected from the pages of the Strand and issued in covers in the latter year, the year of Sherlock Holmes’s ultimate service to his country. In a preface, all too brief, we have from Watson’s pen the last word that has directly come to us from the Sussex Downs. “The friends of Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” he writes, “will be glad to learn that he is still alive and well, though somewhat crippled by occasional attacks of rheumatism”; and the detective’s secret retreat is recklessly identified. He lives, it appears, “on a small farm upon the Downs, five miles from Eastbourne, where his time is divided between philosophy and agriculture.”

  Of Holmes’s final service to his country, there is nothing now that need be said, save perhaps that—to American ears—his “Yankee” slang, throughout the adventure, is just a bit atrocious. It is as if he had just learned it all, and all at once, and was determined to omit no single word. And since, unhappily, the experience is narrated in the third person, by an unknown chronicler, no part of it may be specifically charged to Watson.

  In this connection, and at this time, however, it should be said that there are scholars in the world who hold that Watson is to be charged with much more than simple inaccuracies of dating. He is the actual inventor, they assert, of certain of the adventures, which they declare to be spurious on grounds that are frequently well-taken. There are even those who insist that the final volume of the series—a set of stories put forth as The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)—is so incredibly below the standard of a majority of the earlier tales as to make it highly suspect either as good Holmes or good Watson. It is a serious suggestion that they propound, and one that is involved with dangerous possibilities when it is recalled that two, at least, of the latest narratives are presumably from the pen of Holmes himself. It is an argument in which, at the moment, one prefers to take no part. Yet upon the canonicity of these dubious tales may hang no less a matter than the fact or false report of Watson’s second marriage. Mr. Roberts, on the whole a fundamentalist, has been at some pains to show that Watson married—in 1902 or 1903—Miss Violet de Merville, shortly after the conclusion of The Adventure of the Illustrious Client; and one would like to believe him right.* It is, however, a theory with which one cannot agree.

  And it is, of course, just possible, n’est ce pas, that the mind of Arthur Conan Doyle again grew weary. “I think, sir,” he was told by an old Cornish boatman, whom he met, “that when Sherlock Holmes fell over that cliff, he may not have killed himself, but all the same he was never quite the same man afterwards.”

  Sir Arthur disagreed; and—for the most part—the rest of us are with him. Good, bad, or indifferent, one wishes that there were stories yet to come. And why may not one hope? There is still—is there not?—that long row of year-books, which filled a shelf in Baker Street; and the dispatch-cases filled with documents: “a perfect quarry for the student, not only of crime,” says Watson, in The Veiled Lodger, but of the “social and official scandals of the late Victorian era.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to be sure, is dead, and Holmes has quite retired; but what of Watson?

  Let us at least agree to hope that there may be made yet another attempt to destroy these damning documents. For if the outrage is repeated, we have Holmes’s word to Watson, “the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant will be given to the public.”

  * S. C. Roberts: Doctor Watson.

  NO. 221-B BAKER STREET

  ONCE UPON A TIME—BUT THIS IS NOT A FAIRY TALE—a group of French schoolboys, for reasons having to do with scholarship or behavior, or something of the sort, reached the English capital on a sight-seeing tour. Asked by the erudite barker in command of their char-à-banc what they would like to see first in London, they replied unanimously, with a great shout, that they would like to see the lodgings of Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street. One hopes the erudite barker was equal to the occasion.

  A great many persons have felt that way about the city of London—that Baker Street should come before the Roman Wall and the Houses of Parliament. After all, there are shrines and shrines. And a great many persons, during his lifetime, asked Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to identify the house in Baker Street. “But that is a point which for excellent reasons,” he observes in his autobiography, “I will not decide.”

  Has he not done so, in spite of himself?

  Like the problem of what songs the sirens sang, and what name Achilles took when he hid himself among women, the question, although puzzling, has not been beyond all conjecture. There is, of course, the address, which is explicitly set forth in the first sentence of the second chapter of A Study in Scarlet; but it is unfortunately misleading, not to say deliberately inaccurate, as tourists have discovered to their regret. It would have been impossible, however, for Sir Arthur (or for Watson) so often to have described the famous rooms without betraying some clue to their precise location, and much speculation has been pleasurably wasted upon the mystery.

  “Sherlock Holmes lived on Baker Street, you will recall, hard by what is now Waterloo Station of the Underground, in that district of Georgian houses, with colorless brick fronts, little windows, iron handrails at the doors, and chimney-pots.” Thus Mr. Harry Hansen, in the New York World, on the occasion of Sir Arthur’s death. “And Baker Street,” he continues, “is not very far from Piccadilly,
the Strand, Trafalgar Square, and Whitehall, where the trade and politics of the seven seas were somehow unravelled and routed throughout the later nineteenth century. I myself have stood in Baker Street and surveyed a suppositious upper story, wondering whether Sherlock Holmes was standing beside the dark hangings of the windows, looking up and down for a hansom-cab with a suspicious driver. I have wondered just how Moriarty went about it to ‘make the place safe,’ as he called it, and pictured the streets bare of traffic and pedestrians, pervaded with a feeling of imminent danger.”

  But Mr. Hansen was content with the impression, as was the present writer when he roamed the length of Baker Street upon a day in drear November. There was, indeed, a house at 66 which satisfied one’s occult sense of rightness; but the notion that it was the very place has long since passed in the light of the surprising research of another quester. It required, quite plainly, the genius of another sleuth, gifted as Holmes himself was gifted, to run its eye along the many pages of the record, and find the hidden clue. All other searchers paused, then retired in confusion, when Dr. Briggs announced his solution.

  The clue is in that admirable adventure of The Empty House, first of the collection brought together as The Return of Sherlock Holmes. One recalls the circumstances of that adventure, growing out of the murder of the Honorable Ronald Adair—how, after a circuitous journey through silent, menacing streets, through networks of mews and stables whose very existence to Watson had been unknown, Holmes passed at length through a wooden gate into a deserted yard, and opened the back door of the “Empty House.” The description of the place is definite—almost exact. Dark as was the house within, Watson followed his companion down the long, straight hall until he dimly saw the murky fanlight over the door, in front. The window panes were thick with dust; the room was only faintly illumined by the lamplights of the street beyond. Then Holmes’s lips were at the doctor’s ear.