My Dear Watson (6 page)

But Holmes was never in danger of opiates, not the way he was built. He sat back with a languid smile, a proud cock always, but he did Watson the basic courtesy of explaining himself: “My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispose then with artificial stimulants.” Depressants like morphine would have exacerbated the problem, would have depressed him to the point of suicide. He was safe from morphine.

And yet: between the cocaine, the need that motivated his use of it, the self-important way he claimed to be wholly unique (the world’s first and only independent
consulting
detective, thank you very much), and of course the wretched way he treated his one and only friend… Sherlock Holmes was his own worst enemy. Whenever he finds himself in a hole, he starts digging. The same behavior that makes him a legendary detective makes him a wretched human being.

After six years together, even the torrid energy coming off of Holmes in his best instances was not enough to sustain a partner. In truth, they were both finding out that it was barely enough to sustain Holmes alone. Those victorious moments where he shines and the glow fills the room like the radiating warmth of a fire, those times are too few and far between. The reality of living with Holmes was so often dealing with his large and petulant ego, tolerating his ghastly habits, standing in as his punching bag. Holmes had a mean streak in him, especially when he was sunk into his own dark places, and especially when he has someone to take for granted. He was under the impression that Watson would never leave him, and that made him all the more thoughtless. Luckily, he was wrong.

The Sign of Four
marks the occasion of when Watson met his first wife. A student before he was a soldier before he was a wounded veteran, Watson had spent very little time in the company of women. Do not be fooled by his claim that he had “an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents”—I asked him when I read this, nearly convulsed with laughter, if I was merely one in a string of women he had experienced in his life, and he blushed and murmured that I was reading too far into his words.

Watson had
seen
beautiful women, of course, over many nations and three separate continents. He had come to appreciate those uniquely feminine qualities in the wives of his friends, in their daughters as the girls blossomed, in the remarkable change that takes place when a girl becomes a mother—his admiration of women was sentimental, even for the time. He saw women as goddesses—many of them toppled, underappreciated, wronged, but all of them possessed of a quality entirely lacking in men. There could be no family without women, no society, no empire. They were the reason to build as well as the rock to build upon. He put the female sex on an absolute pedestal.

A multitude of factors led Watson to abandon Holmes for the gentle company of a wife. The cocaine problem was just the peak of it all, the snow that caps the mountain. Not only was Holmes in top form needling Watson about his overly romantic portrayal of their first case together, which Watson had just published in 1887, but Holmes was also flaunting a young admirer in his face. Builds himself up with the bricks he tears down from another, that’s what Holmes does. And he had done it to Watson one too many times.

In the injured silence after Holmes had disparaged
A Study In Scarlet
as nearly unreadable because it didn’t glorify him properly, he decided to twist the knife by tossing Watson a letter from young Francois le Villard, a French detective studying the Holmesian method with all the ardor of a true devotee. Watson was forced to look at the thing: “I glanced my eyes down it, catching a profusion of notes of admiration, with stray
magnifiques
,
coup-de-maîtres
and
tours-de-force
, all testifying to the ardent admiration of the Frenchman.” It sickened him to read the letter, and to understand what Holmes was telling him: that while Watson’s words were insufficient, this man who didn’t even know Holmes could praise him perfectly, and in two languages no less.

Watson told Holmes sullenly, “He speaks as a pupil to his master.”

“Oh,” Holmes said without a hint of real modesty, “he rates my assistance too highly. He has considerable gifts himself.”

Watson was nearly wincing in pain while listening to this cruel talk, and he was eager to distract Holmes with any topic at hand. When Holmes started doing his blasted magic tricks, guessing at Watson’s morning errands and getting them all infuriatingly right, Watson handed him his pocket watch to decipher in the hopes that it would put a stop to the hurtful stream of comments coming from Holmes. It didn’t.

Noting right away that the watch must have belonged to Watson’s elder brother, Holmes launched right into a mechanical assessment of the man, completely overlooking that Watson might have cared for his brother: “He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died.”

Watson was bitterly stung by this; the fallout conversation is cleaned up a bit in the official narrative, and Watson did not give me a precise transcript of what really passed between them. It was not the sort of cooing excuses one imagines from what is written down, though Holmes did admit that because he was handed the watch as a puzzle, he completely disregarded Watson’s emotions. He did that with every puzzle. That was finally becoming clear.

Other than that, all I can say for certain was that Watson was reaching a breaking point with Holmes at the critical moment when Mary Morstan first came into their lives. Holmes was in a dystopic mind, relying more heavily than ever before on the crutch of cocaine, and he exuded gloom into the spaces around him just as easily as he could glow with light. When I read the story of this case, I’m filled with the same inexorable dread I get when attending a deathbed. I know that everything is ending, and I know how it is ending, and I am powerless to stop it.

Not for nothing, Holmes came to feel the same way when he realized just how much Mary Morstan would take from him. This is one of the few times I have ever found myself sympathizing with Holmes in all these long chronicles. The idea of losing Watson can only truly signify to those few of us who have ever possessed him. What a horror it must have been to realize that the seed of romance had been planted in Watson’s head, and knowing that for weeks he had done his level best to make Watson miserable. A sniping Holmes would not be hard to outshine if Watson decided to choose between the two of them, and it dawned on Holmes all too slowly that Watson was considering his options.

And so: in she came, my watermark, Miss Mary Morstan. Small, blonde, dainty, well-dressed but humble, very much unlike me, though in a way I prefer that. It reassures me that I am not merely a stand-in, that I stand on my own. Her face was brimming with emotion when she entered their rooms at Baker Street, and at that moment Watson craved someone with sensitivity, someone who would not hurt him on purpose, nor by thoughtless accident. He held them against each other: the sweetly rounded face of Mary against the “clear-cut, hawk-like features” of Holmes. Holmes started losing ground right away. Mary was orphaned and friendless and asking Watson for help as much as she was asking Holmes. She made him feel needed. She made him feel like a man.

The moment she left, the tables were turned. Holmes would spend all morning bragging about his French admirer, eh? Very well, then Watson would declare, “What a very attractive woman!” This game was built for two, after all, and Watson was finally getting engaged.

Holmes, observant to every other aspect of humanity, could say nothing as to a woman’s attractiveness. Like the movements of distant stars or the minute brushstrokes of art, it was not a subject that deserved his attention. But lighted with his own fire now, Watson called Holmes “an automaton—a calculating machine,” and noted (finally) that “there is something positively inhuman” about the world’s first independent consulting detective. Holmes smiled at what he unfortunately viewed as a compliment. It was the beginning of their end.

At first Watson despaired of having her, severely underestimating his own abilities and totting himself up using only his material attributes. He was in his mid-thirties and she only twenty-seven, he was damaged goods from the war and she in the bloom of perfect health, he was poor and until the end of this case, she expected to be wealthy. He did not count on his kindness, his stability, his patience. And more than all the circumstances he felt stacked against him, Holmes’s toxic mood had seeped into Watson’s heart, and he considered his future black and inescapable. The world was a place he didn’t belong to, and soon enough it would expel him from life, and he would have gained nothing. These were not his thoughts! But when Holmes is sick, he is contagious.

Watson spent this entire case measuring Holmes against Mary and vice versa. As with Hayter, and as with anyone else in the company of Sherlock Holmes, Watson bonded with Mary over their awe of Holmes’s ability. Further than that, while Holmes sat in silence, functioning on a level all his own, Watson and Mary chatted quietly, trying to distract themselves from the apprehension which did not touch Sherlock Holmes. Holmes knew their location by the turns of the cab, his mind was three moves ahead on the chess board; he was on a plane above everyone.

For once, however, Holmes’s incredible abilities were doing him a disservice. Every reminder of how extraordinary he was only served to highlight the distance between himself and mere mortals like Watson—how can you feel close to someone on such a high summit? It’s like trying to love an all-knowing but distant god, and Watson’s faith was starting to waver. What did they have in common, really? And what was it they shared? The muck and danger of pursuing criminals, that’s what held them together. Holmes only had one interest, and if you didn’t meet him there, you didn’t know him. Well, Watson was growing tired of awful things. Perhaps he would prefer a quiet life with hearth and wife and safety. A modest home with hand-knit blankets on the bed and a thoroughly uninteresting private medical practice. Hadn’t that been what he wanted before he met Holmes? How had he let this man lead him astray?

The case brought them to Thaddeus Sholto, and Sholto soon took them to his brother’s home, Pondicherry Lodge. Here the gulf growing in Watson’s heart stretched another league. They were about to be denied entrance to the house by the ex-prize-fighter standing guard at the gate, but luckily Holmes had gone three rounds with him four years previously, and even though this coincidence saved Mary from standing out on the public road, it counted against Holmes. After the episode with Colonel Hayter, Watson had learned to be suspicious of men from Holmes’s past, especially men of certain social classes. Holmes had once kept a relatively even pool of suitors, but as his career called upon him to wallow in the depths, more often that was where he found companionship. They were easier men to converse with anyway; they had fewer scruples about what others might be whispering about them.

The fighter’s warm welcome of Holmes started Watson’s imagination churning. The man, McMurdo, burst out with, “Not Mr. Sherlock Holmes! If instead of standin’ there so quiet you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours under the jaw, I’d ha’ known you without a question.” Watson’s mind was flooded with images of his friend shirtless and sweating, boxing with this tough who now clapped him on the shoulder in all familiarity. Had they changed while congratulating one another on a good game? Had someone, probably Holmes, suggested they go for a walk to cool down? Had he offered to buy his new friend a drink for being such an outstanding loser, and in a dim pub ask him if he had ever tried his hand at other sports? Had he ever wrestled, for instance? Had he ever wrestled in the Greek tradition, and if not, would he like to now? Oh, Watson could just see it all.

Glancing at Mary, he could not help but picture her as his faithful bride—pure and gentle and guileless—and the scale tipped further in her favor. By the time they got inside the spooky, ill-used house of Sholto’s brother, he and Mary were holding hands “like children,” taking solace in each other while the adults decided their fate.

After finding Sholto’s brother murdered and leaving Mary to comfort the dead man’s housekeeper, Holmes and Watson found themselves briefly alone. Here Holmes, probably suspicious in his own right of what was budding between Watson and Mary, gave a grand demonstration of his talents. He used his old tricks to try and win Watson back, plying the same charms that wooed him the first time. He went crawling all over the house and grounds, impressing Watson for sure, but not in the way he meant to.

Watson wrote: “So swift, silent, and furtive were his movements, like those of a trained bloodhound picking out a scent, that I could not but think what a terrible criminal he would have made had he turned his energy and sagacity against the law instead of exerting them in its defense.” It chilled Watson to stand there and grasp Holmes’s true potential, to know truly that he might be capable of anything. Watson could already say—easily!—that Mary was not capable of murder, but could he say the same of Holmes? Circumstances would have to be severely altered, but it was not outside the realm of possibility. And as Holmes himself has said on numerous occassions: “Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

He should have been a pugilist, should have been a thief. Was Holmes not extraordinary? And then police arrived, and with them the reminder of the first thing that brought Holmes and Watson together, the thing that caused Watson to become a scribe: the disrespect of the official police force for Holmes’s skill. Hadn’t that been the reason for penning
A Study In Scarlet
? To, in the spirit of fair play and sportsmanship, let the world know who really kept them safe?