Holmes and Watson (28 page)

It should be pointed out that several commentators, among them D. Martin Dakin, have questioned the authenticity of some of these accounts. As readers may see from the chronology, all the dates of first publication belong to a much later period, 1921 to 1926, and for this reason I propose dealing with this contentious subject in the epilogue, which covers that stage in Holmes’ and Watson’s lives, although one aspect of it relating to ‘The Adventure of the Three Gables’ must be examined now, as it has a direct bearing on Holmes’ state of mind at this particular time.

This account has evoked much criticism largely because of the racist attitude Holmes shows towards Stevie Dixon,
the Negro boxer. Two of his remarks are especially offensive: ‘I shan’t ask you to sit down for I don’t like the smell of you’ and his retort, as he reaches into his pocket, that he is looking not for his gun but for his scent bottle. Holmes has not shown such overt racism before. In fact, in the Yellow Face inquiry, he treats Mrs Munro’s little half-caste daughter, the product of her marriage in America with John Hebron, a Negro, with sympathy and makes no disparaging comment either about the child or Mrs Munro’s first husband. Nor does he remark on Daulat Ras, the Indian undergraduate, in the Three Students inquiry. However, Holmes was a product of his age and it should be pointed out that the Victorians tended to regard uneducated people of non-white races as uncivilised.

It should also be pointed out that Stevie Dixon is a thoroughly unpleasant character, a ‘bruiser’ whom Holmes suspects of killing a young man called Perkins outside the Holborn Bar. In dealing with any violent or brutal men, as for example Neil Gibson in the Thor Bridge case or Dr Roylott in the Speckled Band inquiry, both of them white, Holmes shows no compunction in expressing his dislike of them. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that, until the Three Gables case, Holmes had never before shown his contempt for another human being in quite so blatant a manner. The remarks are unworthy of him.

If it is any defence, which I doubt, it should be added that Holmes had an ‘abnormally acute set of senses’, to quote his own words in ‘The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier’, and his sense of smell was quite clearly offended
by Dixon’s lack of personal freshness, although this does not excuse his sneering references to it.

Another reason for Holmes’ exceptional rudeness may be attributed to his mental health at this particular period. He was showing definite signs of stress, brought on by many years of over-work and almost certainly exacerbated by Watson’s departure from Baker Street and his second marriage. Watson himself describes the ‘gap of loneliness and isolation which surrounded the saturnine figure of the great detective’. In that loneliness, Holmes had reverted to using drugs again, as Watson reports in ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’, in which he refers obliquely to ‘less excusable habits’ in which his old friend was indulging. He was also not eating properly and had lost weight to such an extent that Billy, the page-boy, was anxious about his health. It is clear that Holmes was close to another breakdown.

There are signs, too, that he was becoming more eccentric in his behaviour. In the Mazarin Stone inquiry, having recovered the stolen gem, Holmes slips it into Lord Cantlemere’s pocket, much to that elderly peer’s bewilderment. Holmes tries to pass off this bizarre behaviour as an ‘impish’ example of his love of practical jokes. But Lord Cantlemere is much nearer the truth in describing it as ‘perverted’. He seldom laughed either, as Watson, or rather the anonymous narrator, remarks in his account of the same case, and his periods of abstraction were becoming more extreme. Having summoned Watson to Baker Street at the beginning of the Creeping Man
inquiry, Holmes sits huddled silently in his armchair for half an hour as he ponders over the problems of the case, quite oblivious of Watson’s presence in the room.

It is therefore not surprising, even if it is still inexcusable, that given the stress Holmes was under and these signs of growing eccentricity, those quirks of personality which had always been apparent, such as his outspokenness and his disregard for other people’s feelings, should be accentuated to such a degree that his behaviour became at times socially unacceptable.

His work was also suffering. In the Creeping Man inquiry, Holmes castigates himself for missing vital clues which would have led to an earlier solution of the case. In fact, only a few weeks
*
after this investigation, which occurred in September 1903 and which Watson reports was one of the last cases Holmes was to undertake, Holmes decided to retire. ‘It is surely time that I disappeared into the little farm of my dreams,’ he tells Watson.

Holmes, whose sense of the dramatic was one of the strongest features of his personality, knew when to quit the stage, although this was not to be his final curtain call.

Although the precise date of Holmes’ retirement from active practice is unknown, we have already established that it was not long after September 1903, the date of the Creeping Man case. I suggest it took place in early October, a theory which will be explained in detail later in the chapter when the publication dates of some of Watson’s accounts are more fully examined.

It is not known either why Holmes chose Sussex as the place to which to retire. One reason could have been his
familiarity with the area. He knew it well, having visited it during at least four investigations: the Musgrave Ritual, the Valley of Fear, the Sussex Vampire and the Black Peter inquiries. In fact, it was the location of the third case Holmes was called on to investigate, the Musgrave Ritual affair, during which he came to the decision to become a professional private consulting detective and, although sentiment played little part in Holmes’ personality, he may have remembered the area with particular affection. Certainly he was struck by the beauty of its countryside, for during the Black Peter case he took time off from his enquiries to walk with Watson in the ‘beautiful woods’ to admire the birds and the flowers.

From a practical point of view, Sussex was an ideal setting for retirement. It was not far from London and, had Holmes wished, he could have travelled easily by train to Victoria station and from there to the Albert Hall, Covent Garden or St James’s Hall to attend concerts and the opera, although there is no evidence in the canon of his having done so. But as he no doubt took his gramophone and records with him when he retired, as well as his violin, he could still enjoy the pleasure of listening to and making music.

Sussex is also a coastal county, with a long shoreline facing south towards the English Channel, where in the past fishing ports such as Hastings and, more recently, popular seaside resorts, for example Brighton and Eastbourne, have grown up. But, despite the development of some of these resorts and other urban areas in more
modern times, Sussex still remains an agricultural county given over largely to sheep and arable farming. In Holmes’ time, it was even more rural and parts of it, as can be seen from the isolated setting of, for example, Ferguson’s house in the Sussex Vampire case, which was situated at the end of a long, winding lane, remained unspoilt.

The house which Holmes bought for his retirement was in such an undeveloped part of the county. Although not far from Lewes, the county town of East Sussex, a picturesque place of historic buildings and steep, narrow streets, it was isolated from any near neighbours. Standing alone on the southern slope of the South Downs, a continuation of the broad chalk uplands which extend from the borders of Hampshire to Beachy Head, it had views over the cliffs to the sea beyond and was within walking distance of the beach, which was reached by a steep path. The setting was superb.

Although attempts have been made by some Sherlockian scholars to identify the house, its exact location will probably never be established. Holmes valued his privacy and, in the same way that Watson altered certain details so that 221B Baker Street could not be precisely located, Holmes deliberately included false information in his description of the setting of his house to throw potential sightseers off the scent. The names of the nearest village, Fulworth, and Fulworth Cove on which it was built, are inventions, for no such places exist. Little is known either of its physical appearance. It is variously described by both Holmes and Watson as a house, a villa and a farm,
but as the adjectives most often applied to it are ‘small’ or ‘little’ it is safe to assume that it was a modest building with some land attached to it and may have originally been what is usually referred to as a smallholding.

Holmes was happy there. As he himself expresses it, ‘I had given myself up entirely to that soothing love of Nature for which I had so often yearned during the long years spent amid the gloom of London.’ He describes with obvious pleasure the ‘thyme-scented Downs’ and the beauty of the coast with its long shingle beach, extending for several miles, broken only by Fulworth Cove and by the rock pools scattered along its length, which were filled by each new tide with sea-water as clear as crystal and which served as convenient bathing pools for Holmes and other residents in the area.

As we have already seen, this love of nature had begun to develop before the Great Hiatus when Holmes, tired of London and exhausted by the heavy demands made on him by his professional career, turned to a contemplation of nature for solace and relaxation. After his retirement, he benefited both psychologically and physically from the change in environment and lifestyle and, as the signs of stress which had marked his latter months in Baker Street gradually disappeared, he became more sociable and relaxed. His daily routine was simple and healthy. He went for walks, he swam regularly every morning, he read, and he tended his bees, a new interest, the relevance of which in connection with his childhood and his relationship with his mother has already been referred to in Chapter One,
although, as was pointed out there, Holmes himself may not have been aware of the symbolic significance of the queen bee.

He was, however, conscious of another parallel. The bee-hive with its ‘little working gangs’ reminded him of London’s criminal underworld, an unusual comparison which suggests the wide gulf which now existed between this new Holmes and his former self as a private consulting detective. No longer involved emotionally or professionally in the world of crime, he could now stand back and regard it with an aloof detachment.

Watson’s reference to bee-farming, quoted in the heading to this chapter, could imply that Holmes’ apicultural activities were not confined to keeping a few hives for his own use and he may have been running a small commercial enterprise, selling honey to local shopkeepers and residents. The thyme, growing wild on the Downs, would have given the honey a pleasantly distinctive flavour.

Writing still remained one of his interests. During his retirement, Holmes wrote and published his
Practical Handbook of Bee Culture
,
with some Observations upon the Segregation
of the Queen
, the ‘fruit of my leisured ease’, as Holmes himself describes it, and the
magnum
opus
of his latter years. He was obviously proud of this product of ‘pensive nights and laborious days’ for, when he finally had the opportunity to show it to Watson, he declares, ‘Alone I did it.’ No doubt he intended the remark to be a wry reminder that so much of his life had been
chronicled, not by himself, but by his old friend and former close companion. It was a small book, bound in blue with the title printed in gold across the cover. Unfortunately, no copies of it have survived. Nor apparently was he to find the time to produce the other volume he had intended writing, his textbook on the art of deduction, referred to in Chapter Fourteen. Perhaps, once he had retired, he no longer wished to be reminded of the life he had left behind.

There were other hobbies and interests to fill his time. He remained an ‘omnivorous reader’ as he himself states, and he took his books with him from Baker Street, which presumably included his encyclopaedias, his commonplace books of newspaper cuttings as well as all the other records of the hundreds of cases he had investigated during the twenty-three years he had been in active practice in London. There were so many volumes that some had to be stored in the attic of his house which, Holmes reports, was ‘stuffed with books’. Others, the ones he needed for more regular reference, were no doubt kept on shelves in the main rooms. He also mentions a bureau, almost certainly the desk fitted with pigeon-holes which used to stand in the sitting-room of 221B Baker Street and which he took with him when he moved. Other furniture was presumably bought especially for the Sussex house, as Mrs Hudson owned the contents of Holmes’ old lodgings. Knowing Holmes’ ascetic tastes, the house was probably furnished very simply with only the barest essentials.

Another new interest was photography. In the Lion’s
Mane inquiry, a case which occurred in July 1907, Holmes was evidently skilful enough at this particular hobby to produce an enlarged photograph of the injuries to Fitzroy McPherson’s back, the victim of a mysterious and apparently murderous attack. Holmes may very well have developed and enlarged the print himself. He had the necessary knowledge of chemistry to carry out the process and the equipment was available for amateurs. If so, he must have set up his own dark-room on the premises. Photography may have replaced his earlier interest in chemical experimentation, for there is no reference to any such research during his retirement.

Apart from these activities, there were social contacts as well. Although Holmes reports that ‘the good Watson had passed almost beyond my ken’, Watson travelled from London occasionally for weekend visits, presumably alone as there is no reference to his wife accompanying him on these trips. There were also other friends and acquaintances to visit and who paid calls on Holmes, in particular Harold Stackhurst, who owned a private school, The Gables, half a mile away, where about twenty young men were coached for entry into various professions by a staff of several teachers.

Holmes met Stackhurst soon after he retired to Sussex and struck up an immediate friendship with him on such good terms that the two men called on one another in the evenings without waiting to be invited, another indication of Holmes’ more relaxed attitude to life. When he was living in London, he would not have
encouraged such easy-going informality on so short an acquaintance and the calls he made even on Watson, a longstanding friend, were infrequent. To a certain extent, Stackhurst replaced Watson as Holmes’ companion. Like Watson, Stackhurst was a cheerful, athletic man, a former well-known rowing Blue, who shared Holmes’ pleasure in walking and swimming. A graduate of either Oxford or Cambridge University, Stackhurst was also an excellent all-round scholar, a distinction to which Watson, with his less academic education, could not hope to aspire. Holmes also had contact, although not so close, with some members of Stackhurst’s staff, including Fitzroy McPherson, the science master, with whom he would also have had common interests, and he became acquainted at least with the more unsociable Ian Murdoch, the mathematics coach, a taciturn man who made no friends.

Holmes was also on good terms with the local policeman, Anderson, whom he describes as a ‘big, ginger-moustached man of the slow, Sussex breed’, a breed which, Holmes hastens to add, ‘covers much good sense under a heavy, silent exterior.’ This tolerant attitude is a far cry from the exasperation he had shown towards Watson’s ‘methodical slowness’ of mentality in the months prior to his retirement.

Inevitably, despite his dislike of publicity, Holmes’ reputation as a private consulting detective had followed him to Sussex. Anderson was aware of it. So, too, was Inspector Bardle who, when called in to enquire into the death of Fitzroy McPherson, refers to Holmes’ ‘immense
experience’ in criminal investigation, while Stackhurst, in pleading with Holmes to use his powers when a similar attack is made on another of his staff, Ian Murdoch, speaks of his ‘world-wide reputation’.

But not every facet of Holmes’ personality was altered on his retirement, as is made evident during the Lion’s Mane inquiry. He was still prone to secrecy. When Inspector Bardle asks him if he has any idea what has caused the strange weals on McPherson’s back, Holmes replied enigmatically, ‘Perhaps I have. Perhaps I haven’t.’ He was also willing to take the law into his own hands when necessary, suggesting that Murdoch’s rooms should be secretly searched in his absence, a clandestine operation in which, incidentally, Stackhurst collaborates, in much the same way as Watson has assisted in the past with some of Holmes’ other illegal activities.

And Holmes was still subject to exaggeration on occasions. In the opening sentence of his account of the case ‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane’, he describes the mystery of McPherson’s death as being as ‘abstruse and unusual as any I have faced in my professional career’ and one which, as he states a little later, brought him to the limits of his powers. This is an overestimation of the importance and difficulty of the inquiry. Compared to such earlier cases as the Hound of the Baskervilles or the Second Stain, the Lion’s Mane inquiry is relatively straightforward, its unusualness depending solely on the means by which McPherson met his death.

In carrying out the investigation, Holmes shows a
distinct waning of his skills, perhaps through lack of use. It was almost four years since he had last undertaken a major inquiry. Or increasing age may have blunted his former mental agility; he was fifty-five. It took him over a week to realise the significance of McPherson’s dying words, ‘the lion’s mane’, and to relate them to a passage he had once read in the book
Out of Doors
by J. G. Wood, a copy of which was in his attic. A younger Holmes, with his capacity for storing information and recalling it at will, an ability referred to in Chapter One, would not have taken so long to remember the relevant passage with its detailed description of
Cyanea capillata
.
*

Holmes himself may have been aware of this diminution in his mental powers, for he compares his mind to ‘a crowded box-room with packets of all sorts stored therein – so many that I may well have but a vague perception of what was there.’ This is in sharp contrast to the description he had given to Watson before the Study in Scarlet inquiry twenty-six years earlier, in which he speaks of a man’s brain as being like ‘an empty attic’ which each individual has to stock as he or she chooses. It was the fool who kept the lumber. The wise man stored only that knowledge which was useful to him, discarding everything else.