My Dear Watson (27 page)

“Don’t you want to be rid of the habit?” Watson asked finally.

Holmes stood up wearily and beckoned Watson closer, put an arm over his shoulders, led him into his bedroom. He sat Watson down on the bed and opened his safe. Several spent bottles of cocaine were lying next to quite a few more full ones. Holmes dragged his fingernails across the bottles, making a pretty tinkling sound. He pulled one empty and one full bottle out and brought them over to Watson.

“Can it really mean so much to you, Watson?” he asked, rolling the bottles gently in his hand.

“Is it really that much to you?” Watson countered. “You are not a man of moderation, Holmes, this will consume you entirely if you let it.”

Holmes handed Watson the empty bottle and said, “I don’t want to stop doing it here. Find another place, a hospital perhaps, but private. And don’t bother me about this,” he held up the full bottle, “until you’ve found it. Those are my conditions.”

“I know the very place,” Watson said immediately, for indeed he had been looking for a reason to take Holmes out to Colonel Hayter’s country estate since he had come back to life. He reached for the bottle in Holmes’s hand.

Holmes squeezed down on it and would not relinquish. “You can have them when we’re disembarking from the train,” he said, and then ushered Watson out of his room. He shut the door and locked it against his friend. Watson started to make the plans immediately, before Holmes could change his prodigious mind.

1896: The Veiled Lodger

This is the first of my husband’s stories I reference that has not yet been published. A great many of Holmes’s later stories (post-resurrection) were drafted before the war and will indeed be published very soon, but Watson is particular now that I have been catching his errors that there not be any more mistakes in the stories, and so they languish here in our house as he and I both pore over them. Not that most of what I know about Holmes’s movements in 1896 will ever be written. In fact, the Veiled Lodger incident is the only one I see during this year, and that is because Holmes was rather indisposed for the majority of it. Truly most of these documents are ready to go before the public, but the public is not desirous of them yet. It has been a long few years of hardship, and people need a break from the never-ending talk of horror and misery. People, that is, who are not Sherlock Holmes.

It was a joke between Watson and Colonel Hayter while they rehabilitated Holmes that one of them should go out and murder someone so their charge would have something to do. Not that they joked much, because Holmes was really a pitiable sight, petulant at first, but then dreadfully struck down by his own malfunctions. The first day he arrived, Colonel Hayter greeted both men with a bracing hug each. He was unique in his relation to the pair of them, and as a group all three men found a strangely easy way to coexist, until of course Holmes had to be quarantined. They put him on the second floor so that he could not easily escape, but also so that if he did fling himself from the window, he wouldn’t cause himself permanent injury. For all his experience as a doctor, Watson knew very little about weaning a man from cocaine. He treated Holmes as if he might go mad at any moment. He had seen the effects of opium, as had Colonel Hayter, who had pulled his own head out of that magical cloud of smoke after returning to England from war abroad, but opium was not cocaine.

Holmes tolerated their dramatics like a man with bigger concerns. He would quit again to keep Watson, and because he
had
noticed disturbing changes in himself. He overlooked things every now and then, only little details, but his whole career relied on little details and his ability to know them for what they were. It absolutely terrified Holmes to think of losing his one true talent. He did not want to ruin all of his careful construction, the monolith he had built of his mind. Watson was probably right about that at least—Holmes’s vanity, his artistic integrity, his commitment to himself—even if he was wrong about what withdrawal would do to him. Holmes had dragged himself out of this hole once before, he knew he could do it again. It was only tiresome having to do it in front of an audience.

It was his unique psychology that made Holmes so susceptible to cocaine; someone else might use it every day and give it up at a moment’s notice with only the barest discomfort. The hold it had over Holmes was more powerful than the way it made his heart race, or the way it made the world around him sharpen into focus; it let him touch the breathless hope that used to drive him, the feeling that he was searching for something beyond all the answers to his cases, and the expectation that he would one day find it. That sensation had gone away from Holmes, and he missed it dearly.

But he felt like he might be able to stand the yearning for a while again. Certainly losing Watson would not help him, and Watson wouldn’t tolerate the drug at all. Holmes had stopped his use once before, he was sure he could do it again, and he prepared for his stay at Colonel Hayter’s like it was a second tour of war. It isn’t a pretty fight, but he’d waged it before and come out alive. Of course, it was easy to be brave while the drug was still in his body.

Only one day after giving it up, Holmes felt uncomfortable in his skin. Nausea kept him from attempting to eat dinner, though he did sit at the table with Watson and Hayter, and every word they spoke to each other bit him like an insect. They were chatting about some kind of political move that Holmes was unaware of since it had absolutely no impact on the criminal class, and even though Watson and Hayter disagreed, they did so amiably. How irritating! Holmes was quite in the mood for a shouting match to break out, but he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t contain his aggravation; Holmes pressed the tines of his fork into his wrist to keep from flipping the table over on their pleasant little debate.

Food disgusted him, daylight exhausted him, and he took to his room after a few days to get away from the revolting, happy world. It disappointed him more and more as the drug left his system. It seemed to reject him as much as he rejected it. Holmes lay prostrate on his bed in an agony of nothingness. Pain would have been preferable to him then. Pain would at least have been something to reckon with.

Watson bent to his friend’s fluctuating moods as best he knew how. When Holmes was desultory, Watson tried to engage him; when Holmes was hateful, Watson was patient with him; when Holmes lay in the midst of a seizure of nihilism, Watson held his unfeeling hand. When Holmes smarted off, Watson reminded him of why it was important to quit this drug. When Holmes complained that his mind was putrefying around such non-academic company, Watson brought him a book.

Watson had read
The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
during his hard times, and thought Holmes might get as much from it as he did. Something about Jekyll’s responsibility for Hyde, the way the man gave into his desires to be someone who cared not for consequence, who cared not for society, nor for his own best interests—Holmes could surely relate to that, and understand that destruction was the only inevitability if he did not stop in time? Well, Holmes must have grasped the analogy, because when next Watson returned to the room, he found the book being thrown at him in contempt. Holmes never was one for literature.

“I’m supposed to learn my lesson from that?” Holmes asked from a bed he hadn’t left in days, damp with sweat and tangled in frustration.

“I thought it echoed your struggle, yes,” Watson told him enduringly. You had to be strong with Holmes; only unwavering consistency would have any effect on him at all.

“Idiot,” Holmes spat, and it was unclear ultimately whether he meant Dr. Watson or Dr. Jekyll. “Hyde is naturally the better choice—what is the use of position and wealth if you’re sick with longing for a life unlived?”

Watson retrieved his rather battered copy of the story and returned it to the bedside table. Holmes had written angrily in all the margins, the way he had done with his Bible, filling every free space with criticism, skepticism, and scorn. Watson leafed through the Stevenson book, and hoped that he would soon see a day when he could show it to Holmes and they would both laugh heartily at it. Remember our hardships! How distant they become.

“You aren’t sympathetic with the way Doctor Jekyll feels?” Watson asked as he flipped through the pages. “How about when he says, ‘To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper.’ That’s like you and your crimes, Holmes, you and your cocaine. ‘To cast in with Hyde, was to die a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and for ever, despised and friendless.’ Does that not do you justice?”

Watson had consistently held his breath at this point in the narrative, the moment when Jekyll acknowledged that the bargain was unequal—anyone should naturally choose to be the socially esteemed and wealthy doctor, to be kind and liked and healthy, except for one problem: Hyde never pined to be Doctor Jekyll, but Jekyll longed always to be the selfish, uncaring Hyde. Jekyll would “suffer smartingly” his loss, and Hyde would feel no loss at all. It made Watson shudder for the nature of man. It made him worry for Sherlock Holmes.

“Jekyll’s a coward,” Holmes told him. “A real man would be able to accept his nature, not work to split it in half. I don’t pass the years lying to myself, at the very least,” Holmes said with disgust.

“‘The fires of abstinence,’ ” Watson said. “That is what you feel now.”

“Shut up, Watson!” Holmes said as he snatched the book from Watson’s hands and threw it out the door once more. He was doing enough for Watson without having to hear all his ignorant thoughts about it, apparently. Watson left in an injured hurry, slamming the door behind him and kicking the book through the railings of the balustrade where it fell a full story and clattered onto the first floor.

Colonel Hayter was more than tolerant of these small scenes. He loved Watson, he desired Holmes, but he was a man of ascetic training, and he controlled himself all the while. As a host to Holmes’s rehabilitation, he managed to be a friend to both him and Watson, a thing perfectly impossible for most of mankind to accomplish. Hayter was not only a friend, but in some respects a mending wall; when Holmes complained that Watson was a small-minded simpleton, Hayter told him the stories behind his scars, and of how Watson had patiently saved him from injury, infection, and despair as his doctor in the field. Likewise when Watson grew dejected at Holmes’s wretched attitude, Hayter reminded him of Holmes’s brilliance, of his magnificence; could anyone be so great without paying a price for it? Well: here was the debt collector. If the State would be continually saved, someone would have to gather the fragments of Holmes and hold them together. Holmes and Watson both suffered for the greater good, so Colonel Hayter would do his part as well. For Queen and country and the love that is unspeakable. He was an honorable man.

At last it was possible to bring an ill-tempered Holmes back to Baker Street. Watson stayed in a hotel for a few weeks, thinking it best to let Holmes find his own independence in their rooms, and because they were pretty well sick of each other by then. Holmes called Watson in on the
Veiled Lodger
case because it was one they had found together, during the time of Watson’s first marriage when he was back in his bachelor rooms, waffling between wife and Life, between domesticity and danger.

They went together out to see a woman who mentioned Abbas Parva, the place where a man named Ronder had been killed rather suspiciously by a lion in 1889. The woman they met was his disgruntled wife, a woman whose face was mutilated in the same attack. She wanted to make a clean breast of the old incident, and she did, saying that she would die soon and wanted the truth to be known.

Sherlock Holmes was at this time on his own, staying clean of cocaine but wildly unhappy about it. He was not in a patient mood at all. When he suspected Mrs. Ronder of suicidal intentions, he snapped at her, “Your life is not your own. Keep your hands off it.”

Had Holmes not just been through months of distasteful withdrawal to make him realize that very thing? Had he not only himself just realized that his life was not merely his own, but that others relied on him as well? Mrs. Ronder defied him to name someone she was of use to, and even showed him her mutilated face, asking if Holmes would bear such a burden. Holmes did not flinch. He told her, “The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world.” He knew it well enough himself. He could admire her for continuing on, even though it pained her terribly. He was called to do the same thing, and it was comforting to meet a fellow sufferer.

When Mrs. Ronder sent Holmes her poison with a note saying she would take his advice and carry on, Watson decided to come back home. If Holmes could now inspire others with his temperance and control, then he must be in a place of remission and health. Holmes welcomed his one friend back with as much enthusiasm as he could find. He was dampened, it seemed, permanently. He was damaged by too much awareness, by the heights he’d reached with Moriarty, by the furthest extremities of life. He knew too much, but he tried to forget. For Watson, he did try.

Holmes would in the end suffer a great deal of monotony to have Watson back in his rooms, and he really did keep clean of his solution for a while, for the sake of someone else. But even his best efforts in this area were not sufficient. It would take some time for both he and Watson to discover that fact, and in the meantime there would be more cases, more adventures, and just enough happiness to sustain them fondly towards one another in their subsequent years apart.

1897: The Missing Three-Quarter

Holmes had stopped using the drug, but he had only just begun complaining about it. Should a few days go by without a case, and if Holmes was not unconscious due to one of his strange fits, he would make little nasty comments about how glad he was to be saved from the ravages of cocaine so that he could die from boredom instead. Even when he received a note promising some “terrible misfortune” that February morning, he still had something sneering to say about it: “Even the most insignificant problem would be welcome in these stagnant days.” Watson kept a close scrutiny on Holmes when work was scarce. It was hard to know when Holmes was only letting off his frustration and when he was teetering near a fateful decision. Perhaps he was always seriously contemplating going back to the drug. Perhaps he always would.