My Dear Watson (9 page)

When at last Watson had combed every hair, had every button done up, with his tie synched and his watch chain gleaming, he turned to Holmes to say goodbye.

“Well, that’ll be all then, won’t it?” He looked around at their rooms and wondered when they got so clean. Had Holmes been straightening up?

Holmes rose from his chemistry set where he had been pretending this day was no different than any other. Watson was nearly bouncing with the significance of it all, rocking back and forth on his toes, feeling as if he were at a precipice, feeling momentous. Holmes grasped Watson’s arms to hold him still.

“It’s terrible to see you grow up, my friend,” Holmes said to him. Watson opened his mouth to respond with some comfort, but he was stopped by what was assumed by both of them to be their final kiss.

It was passionate, but it built up slowly like a stoking fire, like a swelling wave. Holmes’s hands wrapped around Watson’s face, his long fingers disordering Watson’s hair. At the pinnacle of this, Holmes broke away, turned his back in an instant to hide…what? Finally a flash of emotion across that stony face? Did it crack in agony only to be patched over immediately? Watson would not know, because Holmes did not turn around again. He merely resumed his “work” with extra clinking and shuffling, as though Watson had distracted him quite enough already, and was really making himself a burdensome guest—for that is what he became with his marriage: merely a visitor in
221B
.

Watson smoothed his hair back down, rubbed his hand over his mouth and mustache, his fingers trembling. It felt as if Holmes has loosed something in him, something that burned. He let his mind flash before him an alternative: what if he left Mary at the alter? She’d be disappointed but able to carry on, letting no man’s action tarnish her heart. She’d find someone who could give her his whole heart, not just the beaten pulp of one that had been given too freely in his youth. He could spin Holmes around and tell him that he just can’t leave, that they’ve ruined each other for anyone else in the world; they would never truly be free of one another, but maybe there was a comfort in that?

But the moment passed. It was irrational, illogical, and Holmes would have been proud of Watson for forcing it away. If grand pronouncements of love or moments of sentiment were common with Holmes, Watson would not be leaving in the first place. Stupid of him to go so lightheaded over this last dying flare. It’s only train station syndrome—that last surge of affection before you say goodbye.

Watson checked his appearance in the mirror one last time, squeezed Holmes fraternally on the shoulder, and walked out. He wouldn’t see Baker Street again for some weeks.

1888: A Scandal In Bohemia

I find it somewhat difficult to read the introduction here, to see how quickly Watson tired of the settled life. He had more in common with Holmes than I would like to admit; of course Watson liked his new wife, his new life, but it was strangely unfulfilling. What was it about Holmes—razor-tongued, ego-choked, hard-hearted Holmes—that made living with him so much more worth it? What was it about the tension and drama of Baker Street that was so irresistible?

Watson threw himself into his new role as husband, his new job as a practicing physician, but it was impossible to stay away. The vague murmurings of Holmes in the papers filled Watson with a sort of jealousy, an acute, paranoid intuition that he had missed out on all the fun. Did Holmes feel the absence of his friend as sharply, or were they Dr. Watson and Mr. Hyde? Watson at last had time to read Stevenson’s morbid narrative after he married and no longer found himself dashing from the house every other night with a loaded revolver—he felt that he could read himself in its pages, and Holmes in its so-called villain. What was wrong with Hyde that Holmes could not understand, being just as selfish and willful and odd? And Watson knew the agony of Henry Jekyll all too well; yes, he was the normal one with the respectable life, but he was also the one who yearned for what he did not have. Neither Holmes nor Hyde felt any envy.

Watson’s way home on that evening in March hardly a month after his wedding did not lead him through Baker Street—I’ve consulted several maps, and there is no accidental way to do it. Watson took that direction on purpose, as he had done many times before without stopping, just wanting to see if the windows were lighted, if Holmes was at home. After weeks of spotting him at inactivity, vacillating “between cocaine and ambition,” Watson finally happened by while Holmes was deep in a case. He could tell by the way Holmes paced, the way his head was held, he could tell by his silhouette. Watson said that as he passed the door, he could not help but associate with it his wooing. However, he mentions “the dark incidents of the Study in Scarlet” in connection with that wooing, which was long before he ever met Mary Morstan. Indeed,
that
wooing had occurred here also, though that was not the one he was thinking about when he rang the bell.

On being let in, Holmes does not make a fuss over Watson, though the good doctor dares to believe that Holmes was glad to see him. Holmes made Watson comfortable, chided him for getting fat, and started in with his usual witchcraft, causing Watson to remark, “You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago.” Pity.

But Holmes was reaching out a true hand of friendship, asking Watson to consult on the case, stopping him from trying to leave with a restraining touch, and informing the King of Bohemia that, “It is both, or none.” Naturally he could not tell Watson how much he missed him, but the sentiment was heard all the same. When Holmes said goodnight, he scheduled Watson to come see him the next day. Holmes was reeling him in again, but Watson was not a fish on a line; he could not have been pulled back against his will.

Watson passed the night on a cloud, buoyed by his inclusion in the fast world of detection once again, thinking that his marriage bed would not seem so monotonous if he came back to it every now and again after a daring night out with Holmes. Watson arrived right on time the next morning, and he waited an hour for Holmes, all the while tapping and bouncing, as nervous as the man he was waiting for.

Holmes returned presently all done up in costume. He changed and told Watson about his investigations. He reported that the horsey men all found the King’s blackmailer, Irene Adler, to be “the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet.” He didn’t care, and certainly could not speak to her beauty himself. In fact, he was much more observant of her gentleman caller, Mr. Godfrey Norton, whom he described as “a remarkably handsome man, dark, aquiline, and moustached,” like Watson.

Holmes acknowledged her beauty in a practical fashion, saying that she had “a face that a man might die for,” though not a man such as Holmes. He witnessed for her marriage to Norton quite by happy accident, and returned home to Baker Street to engage Watson further. He knew why Watson had come round again, why he had waited so long in his old rooms:

“You don’t mind breaking the law?” Holmes asked him.

“Not in the least,” answered Watson.

“Nor running a chance of arrest?”

“Not in a good cause.”

“Oh, the cause is excellent!”

“Then I am your man.”

As ever! And poor Mary Morstan Watson left at home by herself, not half as exciting as all this, and not yet suspecting what it would mean for her, or for her marriage. This is one of the most uncomfortable stories in the whole canon for me—I can’t help but feel for another member of the sisterhood.

Holmes made another costume change, but not just that, according to Watson. He could change his whole demeanor, his movements, “his soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed.” Watson once more informs his audience that Holmes would have made a fine actor, as well as an acute reasoner, had he not specifically gone into crime. He seems completely oblivious to the unsettling implications of loving such a chameleon. How could he ever know that he was sitting with Sherlock Holmes and not a projection? Perhaps he felt, as Oscar Wilde once said, that a man is least himself when he talks in his own person. “Give him a mask and he’ll tell you the truth,” the quote goes. Watson was as near to the real man as anyone would ever get.

What a strange thing to read Watson’s thoughts as he watched Holmes trick his way into Irene Adler’s house by taking advantage of her kind nature. Watson was utterly split; his sympathy for a gentle woman who would take in an injured priest (for that indeed was Holmes’s character for the evening) welled up, and he wanted to abandon his task. “And yet it would be the blackest treachery to Holmes to draw back now from the part which he had entrusted to me. I hardened my heart.” Quite unlike the last time Holmes was held up against a woman; this time Watson chose his friend. Watson had learned his true preference for the moment. Already the shine had come off being chivalrous, but who could really be surprised? He was Holmes’s man through and through.

After the trick on Irene went off supposedly without a hitch, Holmes rejoined Watson at the top of the street, linked their arms and led Watson back home in cozy silence. He was being sweet because he knew, in the long game he played for Watson’s devotion, that he was the true winner. Holmes’s hand would stroke Watson’s arm between the streetlamps, and Watson allowed the petting to continue as Holmes spoke of the night’s events, explaining to Watson those aspects of the case that were still unclear to him. They were very easy with one another, both just so relieved that they would not be strangers forever, that they would continue on connected.

Irene Adler, a woman after my own heart, was following in male dress. Holmes was not the only one with tricks, and she was actively aware that she had been forced to reveal her secret—and so she made it her business to see if the man she had taken into her house had any secrets of his own. Who knows what all she saw or how much she understood of it, but I imagine that a woman of the theater had known men like Holmes before, and was smiling as she wished him good night. He would have made an exceptional actor, after all.

Watson stayed the night at Baker Street. I was stunned that he wrote it down in the public record, but his naïveté is part of his charm that I wouldn’t change. And I can’t imagine what he told Mary coming home the next day! The truth would have been outrageous, but if he hadn’t given any explanation at all, then what would Mary have been imagining? Would her husband really disappear at a moment’s notice, whenever Sherlock Holmes snapped his slender fingers? A day after seeing Holmes once again and his vows were dust. He didn’t even bother to be discreet.

I don’t know, maybe hearing that he had spent the night with Sherlock Holmes filled Mary with relief. She might have been feeling just as disillusioned as Watson himself. Maybe she didn’t know what these men were to each other, maybe she did and couldn’t bring herself to care. Irene Adler certainly knew enough to take full advantage of their distraction; she swapped photos on Holmes and made her escape. I rather like Holmes for holding onto the photo of Irene in evening dress, though Watson was not amused, and
is not
still, since Holmes continues to posses it. He went out of his way at the beginning of this narrative to clarify that Holmes was not a lover, and certainly not a lover of Irene Adler:

“All emotions, and that one [love] particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen; but as a lover, he would have placed himself in a false position.”

It must have stung Watson to be so honest. Holmes was perfect, but not for him. A man like Watson needs more affection than an engine like Holmes can churn out, and yet he couldn’t stay away; a metallic creature can’t help but shine, after all.

1888: The Stockbroker’s Clerk

And yet, it wasn’t Watson alone who couldn’t stay away. A few months after he was married and moved and busy with his new life, who should turn up at his doorstep but Mr. Sherlock Holmes, come to reclaim him for another adventure.

It was the first time in the nearly four months Watson had been gone that Holmes came to seek him out, and he informed Watson of his good deal in buying the practice that he did, for the one next door had hardly-worn steps, and was clearly doing poorer business. The conversation was painfully light for two such intimate friends, concentrating on niceties like health (who really gives an earthly damn?) while Holmes coyly sounded out Watson’s enthusiasm for a case.

Watson was champing at the bit for some excitement, and Holmes was revoltingly pleased to learn it. Just think: Holmes could show up without even a message to herald him, and Watson would cheerfully drop his patients, drop his wife, and follow Holmes anywhere before he’s even told what direction they’re headed. What an unbelievable rush that kind of power must have given him, what pleasure. He was probably having more fun stealing Watson away from Mary than he ever had when he owned Watson outright.

It was a good day all around for Holmes. He had succeeded in luring Watson away from Mary (the poor woman—Watson only ran upstairs to tell her he was leaving and then ran right back down into Holmes’s waiting arms), and he had a fun case. His client was the dupe in a robbery scheme that gave Holmes a few moments of mental pleasure; the way light exercise does for a body, this puzzle renewed his mind.

It was a quick solve for him. After explaining the curious circumstances to the police and releasing their client back to his oblivious existence, Holmes and Watson took a long walk back to his practice. Holmes continued his flirtation.

“You and Mrs. Watson are happy, then?” he asked Watson. “Loving? Companionate?”

“I should think so,” skirted Watson. “We are still newlyweds after all.”

“Of course,” said Holmes with a smile.

Mary had been waiting at the window for her husband to return. If my blithe Watson felt something amiss in their relationship, then surely she did too. Sherlock Holmes stepped inside to greet her and in the same breath bid her farewell. He put a subtle emphasis on calling her missus and, with a friendly squeeze of Watson’s arm, was gone.