The Perils of Sherlock Holmes (16 page)

“What, no eye of newt?” Holmes spoke round his pipestem.

“You shan’t shame me with laughter, sir. I have been jeered at by the most brilliant men of our day. The egg is significant. You will remember that I believe the center structure of Stonehenge to be egg-shaped. It is a symbol of birth, and of the fount from which life springs eternal. In that context we see it now at Easter, in children’s brightly painted
ova
, but it was so revered many centuries before Christ. The charm itself was either a stone whose shape recalled that object or an actual fossilised egg, ancient even in the time of the earliest Druids, affixed to a chain or a thong and worn round the neck. Nothing can withstand its power.”

“Twaddle,” I said, beneath my breath. I’d come round to Holmes’s point of view regarding our guest’s character.

Carlyle heard, and turned his bright eyes upon me. “If you accept the Crucifixion and Resurrection as historical events, you are halfway in my camp. Fifteen hundred years closer to our time, the European explorers believed it as well, or there would be no Florida. Ponce de Leon set sail in search of eternal youth.”

“He failed to find it,” I pointed out.

“Understand, I shared your opinion when I started out. No longer is this the case.

“I have spent the past fortnight tenting on the Salisbury Plain with my crew of labourers, excavating by day, examining, cataloguing, and recording my discoveries by night. Nothing I found dissuaded me from my conviction that Stonehenge is both Druidic and prehistoric. Such evidence is material. I cannot explain in scientific terms what happened three nights ago.

“I was studying a shard of pottery in the light of a spirit-lamp, utterly absorbed in the delicate painting, when I suddenly became aware that I no longer required illumination to make out the details. My tent was flooded with light from outside.

“At first I believed the hour to be later than I’d supposed, and that in my concentration I’d passed an entire night into the dawn without noticing the time slipping away. However, my watch informed me it was only half-past two. It was still ticking; it had not stopped, and I’d never known it to lose more than a few seconds per day. Yet the light from without was growing brighter, and at a pace faster than ordinary sunrise.

“Emerging from my tent, I was dazzled by the glare, which filled the sky and threw grotesque crawling shadows upon the ground, extending weirdly from the base of the great monoliths. The sky was aflame, Mr. Holmes, with a fire such as this island has not seen since the great blaze that destroyed London in the time of our great-grandfathers. And there, no farther from me than that bow-window yonder, stood a singular figure.”

“Man or woman?” Holmes enquired.

“The figure was hooded and its face was in shadow. However, as its height was nearer seven feet than six, my impression is that it was male.”

“A seven-foot man is no less preposterous than a seven-foot woman.” I’d dismissed the man as an inspired liar.

“Not so, Watson. I did a small service last year for a major who had brought back a Watutsi warrior from the Congo to serve as his batman. The fellow could scarcely have stood erect in this room.” Holmes spoke quickly, evidently impatient to hear the rest of Carlyle’s account.

“For the space of I know not how many minutes I watched that strange cloaked creature gyrating forth and back, swaying its arms and bobbing its head as though in the grip of some powerful drug. It was chanting in a high, ethereal voice, words which at length I recognised as an appeal in Old English to the dark gods who dwell in the wood and the water. His accent seemed otherworldly; but then those of us who study the language know it only as it was written. I cannot tell you the effect it had upon me, hearing a dead tongue come alive after nine hundred years.”

I confess that at this point in the narrative I was rapt, no longer questioning its veracity, but caught up, as in a theatrical performance so well rehearsed as to annihilate the last lingering portion of doubt. I saw that mysterious chanting shade as clearly as Carlyle claimed it had appeared to him that night.

Of Holmes’s reaction I had no hint. His pipe had gone dead, and with his hands folded now upon his breast and his eyes closed I would have thought he’d dozed off had I not known his habits and humours as well as I did.

The archaeologist seemed to have forgotten his audience. He went on speaking as if to himself, his myopic gaze fixed upon some point halfway between himself and his listeners.

“All at once the figure fell silent,” said he. “It raised one foot, and supporting itself upon the other, pivoted round in a complete circle, coming to rest facing face foremost with a skeletal finger jabbed directly at me.

“I am a man of science, gentlemen, and yet I am not ashamed to say that at that moment I felt my marrow freeze. The reaction upon my hired labourers was stronger yet. They had all left their tents and were standing round me, entranced by the spectacle of that dancing phantom. Some were locals, for whom the practice of Druidism is modern and real. When that finger pointed, the group shouted and scattered, fleeing that place and leaving behind all their possessions. From that day to this I have not heard from any of them; not even to collect the wages they were owed.”

“And the figure?” Holmes was visibly alert now, perched upon the edge of his chair like a man preparing to leap off a cliff. I had not observed him to move, though his physical attitude had changed completely.

The archaeologist moved his thin shoulders up and down. “Alas, I was distracted by the panic among the workmen. When I turned my attention back in that direction, the apparition was gone; vanished as if in a ball of smoke, for there was no place to hide in that flat depression in the earth.”

Presently (to sum up the conclusion of Carlyle’s account), the sky darkened, and soon the early morning was like any other in that desolate country, dreary and silent. He did not retire, but fetched his lamp and searched that place where the figure had stood. The ground was rock-hard. There was no physical trace of anyone having occupied it, then or later, when true daylight came. When hours later it became clear that his helpers had abandoned the site for good, he struck his tent and returned to London.

“You are the first, gentlemen, to hear my story,” he said. “Ridpath would not listen.”

Holmes sprang to his feet and rummaged through the stack of newspapers and other periodicals which upon inclement days filled the sitting-room and threatened to tumble onto the grate and catch fire. “Bah!” he exclaimed at last, and cast them aside.

“It has been raining heavily in Wiltshire for the past forty-eight hours, according to the
Times
,” said he peevishly. “You are doubtless my superior in tracing the activities of a thousand years ago, Doctor, but very few are my equal in deciphering those of the past week. Unfortunately, rainfall is my
bête noire
. Were I upon that spot this very moment, I could see little more than you did when the event was fresh.”

“My story is not yet complete.”

The detective shifted his aggrievement from the weather to the scholar. “Very well, then: complete it. This is not a serial story in
The Strand
.”

“I have not told you of the curse.”

Holmes yelped and smacked his hands together. “Curse, yes! What is a ghost story without a curse?”

“You mock, but I would swear on my mother’s grave what I have to say is true. I have told you that the magi dabbled in the black arts. Since the night that accusatory finger sought me out, I have had three near encounters with death. Yesterday morning, I stepped into Basil Street, a quiet thoroughfare, bent on visiting a colleague there, and was almost run down by a speeding four-wheeler. I was forced to dive for my life, and the wheels passed within inches of where I lay. Sir, the street was deserted when I stepped off the kerb.”

“Carelessness.”

“Late last night, a gas main exploded in front of the building where I live in Stepney. The blast tore a hole in the wall and destroyed my bed-chamber, which I had just left in order to fetch a drink of water.”

“Faulty pipe.”

“My fight with Ridpath is neither here nor there; he is quick to anger, but he would not kill a fly. The third incident took place as I approached Marylebone Lane this very afternoon. A pair of workers were raising a Louis XIV sideboard from the back of a wagon towards a first-floor window on Wigmore Street when the block-and-tackle failed. The massive piece of furniture plunged straight to the pavement, shattering into a hundred pieces not a handspan from where I was standing.”

“Loose knot.”

“Mr. Holmes, I am not accident prone. Surely so many life-threatening episodes in such a brief space of time is no coincidence.”

Holmes shook his head.

“You are a fatalist, Dr. Carlyle. A horse bolts, a line breaks, a cupboard falls, and you think yourself marked for death. Yet here you sit, alive and according to a reliable physician in sound health. If you look at the situation from another point of view, you would say that you are blessed with extraordinarily good fortune.”

“I fear the situation is quite the contrary. I consider myself a doomed man.”

These words, and the expression upon the unhappy man’s face, ended Holmes’s ebullience. He bent and knocked his pipe against the grate.

“I am not unsympathetic,” he said, straightening. “You will perhaps concur that half-past two on a dismal morning in a place like Stonehenge is scarcely a time for rational thought, particularly steeped as you were in the mystic rites of an ancient society. Absent the testimony of your hired help, who by your own admission are unavailable, you offer no evidence that what you think you saw actually took place. In fact, your unsuccessful quest for clues in the light of day knocks the foundation from under your claim.”

Our visitor smiled, but this time there was no mirth in the twist of his thin lips.

“I am a seeker after truth, Mr. Holmes. You are one also, and so I think you will understand the need for an occasional falsehood when you are not quite prepared to share everything you have experienced. There
was
something on that plain. I found it within minutes of the vision’s departure. I assure you I had been all over that ground over more than ten days and it was not there previously.”

He reached inside his street-soiled shirt, and with a sudden exertion tugged loose something which had been tied round his neck.

Holmes and I leaned forwards, peering at the object he was holding for our enlightenment. From a rude leather thong hung an iron socket containing a smooth speckled object which caught the light upon its smooth surface, and which I took to be a fossilised egg.

T
his essay originally appeared as the introduction to
Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories
, published in two volumes by Bantam Books in 1986. It reflects my personal sentiments about the importance of Dr. Watson to the Canon; and I’m pleased to report that the entertainment industry has come round to my way of thinking in the way he’s now portrayed on TV and in the movies. This version has been revised to address a twenty-first-century audience, with background on the original Holmes series excised as extraneous and new material added.

I submit for your inspection one John H. Watson: medical man, late British Army surgeon, raconteur, journalist, connoisseur of women, Knight of the Battered Tin Dispatch-Box, valiant and loyal friend.

He has suffered mightily at the hands of scholars and the public since the 1887 appearance of
A Study in Scarlet
in
Beeton’s Christmas Annual
, calumniated on the one hand as a tanglefooted incompetent and on the other as a boozy Bluebeard, to say nothing of sundry slanderous impostitures his admirers have been forced to endure, beginning in 1905, when Sherlock Holmes and his indispensable biographer made their silent-screen debut. (For the purposes of this essay, we will ignore the 1900 vignette
Sherlock Holmes Baffled
, in which Watson was ungraciously not invited to appear.) Chief among these poseurs was the otherwise distinguished character actor Nigel Bruce, whose corpulent and ineffectual bumbler in thirteen Universal features starring Basil Rathbone in the 1940s fixed Watson in the public mind for decades as a comic foil.

It was an ill-advised comedown from the first two features pairing Basil Rathbone’s Holmes with Bruce’s physician,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
and
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
, both released by Twentieth-Century Fox in 1939. Watson’s dunderheaded side was more subdued, and he was even of assistance in the cases’ successful resolution. They were also the first films to set the stories during the Victorian era. Prior to that, Holmes and Watson were presented as contemporaries with the producers and audiences—which in many cases they were, cast so recently after the turn of the twentieth century. The decision, when the series moved to Universal, to catapult the duo into a World War II setting, substituted a schleppy bucket hat for Holmes’s iconic deerstalker and addled Watson’s brain. The fore-and-aft cap would return in short order, but the faithful companion took decades to recover.

If a mop bucket appeared in a scene, Bruce’s foot would be inside it, and if by some sardonic twist of fate and the whim of director Roy William Neill (the bold auteur behind
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman
) he managed to stumble upon an important clue, he could be depended upon to blow his nose in it and throw it away. It’s most fortunate that this healthcare giver spent more time in a hansom cab racing toward some mysterious venue than treating patients in an examination room. I am convinced that this lampoon of Holmes’s trusty right bower has colored much of the psuedoscholarship undertaken during the past sixty years regarding the good doctor’s life and habits.

Moriarty was not involved in this deceit; it was made without malice. Directors simply don’t know what to do with Watson. His presence in fifty-six of the sixty published adventures (two are told by a third-person narrator, and Holmes himself relates “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane” and “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier”) is crucial, for he is both the storyteller and the buffer between the cold, blinding light of Holmes’s intellect and the reader. On stage and screen he is a fixture, and directors abhor characters who don’t appear to be doing anything. Since much of the action—and, despite the claims of some proponents of the American school of detective fiction, there is plenty of action in the Sherlock Holmes series—takes place in the final scenes, the simplest solution is to provide a number of banana skins for Watson to take a Brodie on until his brawn is required. Besides, it makes Holmes look that much smarter and pleases the groundlings.

Watson was the first to confess that his friend’s analytic mind worked on a plane he himself could scarcely conceive, and although in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
he pokes some good-natured fun at himself for fancying he has mastered the science of deduction in the matter of Dr. Mortimer’s stick, he never pretended to skills beyond his own considerable ones. Unlike most of his antecedents in the ape world of mystery fiction, he never prolonged or spoiled a case by bungling. Indeed, time and again, in such tight situations as the long-awaited encounter with the spectral hound on the Baskerville common and that magnificently suspenseful chase down the Thames in
The Sign of Four
, he quite saved the day for the often impetuous Holmes with his courage and propensity toward action at the precise moment it is needed. “I am lost without my Boswell,” declares Holmes in “A Scandal in Bohemia”; and it’s probable that, in his supreme egocentricity, he is not fully aware of the statement’s truth.

Holmes, of course, was the star, and disregarding Watson’s close physical and spiritual resemblance to the dashing Richard Harding Davis of Hearst’s
New York Journal
, Watson was not the sort of journalist who makes himself the hero in his dispatches. Yet, guileless chronicler and respecter of privacy that he was, we know rather more about him than we do about his companion.

In
Scarlet
, he refers modestly to his service with the Berkshires at Maiwand, touching almost apologetically upon the severe wound he received there that troubled him throughout his life—and not just physically, for we may infer from his inability in later years to recall whether the jezail bullet passed through his leg or his shoulder that his conscious mind attempted to wipe out all memory of the incident. Maiwand was a major British defeat, in which nearly half its force was slain, wounded, or reported missing after its clash with a hugely superior force of Afghans. We learn of Watson’s near-fatal bout with infection (“enteric fever”), his lack of family, and the alarming state of his finances, and all before he makes contact with Sherlock Holmes.

(On what became of the “bull pup” that he told Holmes he kept, we can only speculate, and various conjectures about colonial slang for “bad temper” and the existence somewhere of a bastard son seem both unsatisfying and actionable. It was refreshing, in 2009’s enormously successful film
Sherlock Holmes
, to find Jude Law’s Watson in possession of a full-grown English bulldog: The researchers did their homework.)

We become aware also, counter to the Oliver Hardy image projected by Hollywood, that at this time Watson is “as thin as a lath and as brown as a nut,” and although by the time of the morally unsettling “Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” he will be described as “a middle-aged, strongly built man—square jaw, thick neck, a moustache,” this early picture certainly challenges the common conception.

What emerges, then, be he lean and tan or broad and brawny, is a figure both distinctive and arresting, more Nick Carter than Sancho Panza, and strongly attracted to women, who in turn find him attractive. Holmes makes note in “The Resident Patient” of his friend’s “natural advantages” in that department, and in
The Sign of Four
Watson himself uncharacteristically boasts of “an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents”—driving subsequent scholars into frenzied debate over which was the third continent. He is often observed admiring a clean feminine profile or a trim ankle, and his memory for the details of a handsome female client’s dress rivals Holmes’s more practical one. But he is no callous swordsman and commits himself willingly to the chains of matrimony when the lovely Mary Morstan beckons in
Four
.

Which brings us to the other extreme: that brand of canard, born of supposition and sexual frustration masquerading as scholarship, concerning Watson’s marriage(s). We hear first of his bereavement in “The Adventure of the Empty House”; then, in “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” dated nine years later, Holmes alludes querulously to his friend’s desertion of him for a wife. The obvious conclusion is that he remarried; but this is not sufficient for some trash pickers who have published learned treatises in distinguished periodicals attesting to a third, fourth, and even a
fifth
marriage, including one before the seminal events described in
Scarlet
. I relegate all this into the same bin with the speculations regarding Watson’s drinking habits because he mixed up a few dates and references in a forty-year chronicle and wonder that the man who applauded his friend Sherlock Holmes for his intention to horsewhip a cad in “A Case of Identity” has not come out of seclusion before this to defend his name before a magistrate.

Considerable sanctimony has been employed as well in denigrating his skills as a doctor. This is based on the evidence of emergency first-aid procedures that were quite rightly presented in layman’s terms to avoid overloading the narrative with scientific jargon, and a reference in “The Red-Headed League” to a practice that was “never very absorbing.” To this we need only respond that he never lost a patient in our presence who was not already beyond the reach of medicine. “Do you imagine,” says Holmes, in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” “that I have no respect for your medical talents?” His ethics have been called into question for his readiness to abandon patients on the slightest notice and run off with Holmes on some new quest. Admittedly, the energetic veteran of the bloody Afghanistan campaign was too adventurous for the staid life of office hours and regular rounds. But Drs. Anstruther and Jackson were close by and ever eager to assume his practice while he was away.

Watson was a swashbuckler. There is no use denying it, even if denial were necessary. He braved poisoned darts in
The Sign of Four
, dispatched the devil-dog to save Sir Henry’s life in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, scaled a wall with the police hard on his heels in “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” and at the time of “His Last Bow,” when he was well past sixty, offered his surgical skills to his country on the eve of World War I. (That they were accepted should lay to rest once and for all any questions about their merit.) Notwithstanding his friend’s mastery of boxing and fencing, and sitting-room marksmanship that would quicken the heart of an Annie Oakley, when a pistol was necessary it was Watson who carried it, at Holmes’s request. A modern-day police officer could do far worse in a partner, and often does.

Mind, the man had faults. Along with the standard Victorian irritability and a tendency, displayed as early as
Scarlet
, to dismiss those things about which he knew nothing as “ineffable twaddle,” the most destructive of these seems to have been his gambling. He confesses ruefully to Holmes in “The Adventure of Schoscombe Old Place” that he has paid for his knowledge of racing with “about half my wound pension,” and in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” we learn that his checkbook is locked safely away in Holmes’s desk, a self-protective measure familiar to compulsive gamblers who recognize their weakness.

“Eureka!” exclaim supporters of the many-times-wedded theory; a clue at last to the cause of the dissolution of his marriages. Yet it should be noted that in that same adventure he has resisted the urge to invest in the “sure thing” of South African securities, and that by “His Last Bow” he has sufficiently conquered his problem to engage in the rich man’s sport, in 1914, of driving an automobile.

The daily double, perhaps. But at its worst, the lure of games of chance appears to be a placebo for his adventurous soul—a substitute in quieter times, like Holmes’s own darker habit, for the adrenaline rush of hansom-cab chases through Soho and midnight stakeouts in Dartmoor. The vice is less insidious than cocaine addiction; and let us not forget that if Holmes helped out Watson by withholding his funds, Watson succeeded single-handedly in weaning his friend away from the needle.

And Watson grew. While Holmes the rheumatic beekeeper on the South Downs is not significantly less idiosyncratic than Holmes the young criminologist at Bart’s, Watson is not the same person when we leave him as when we made his acquaintance. The roommate who scores verbally off a more than usually truculent Holmes at the beginning of
The Valley of Fear
could or would not have done so as recently as “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist,” when a withering evaluation of his research efforts near Surrey renders the detective piqued and quarrelsome. Although several of Watson’s conclusions regarding the identity and character of Dr. Mortimer based upon his stick in
Hound
are erroneous, as many are correct: The invalided surgeon in
Scarlet
who threw down “The Book of Life” because he found deduction based on analysis unacceptable would not have been capable of that.

Watson at the end of the Canon is a father confessor, tolerant of human frailty, and well aware of his limitations, while Holmes’s consistent refusal to acknowledge his own reduces him to an oddity, albeit a fascinating and brilliant one. Which man you will invite for dinner depends upon the personality and temperament of the other guests.

From the outset a man who walked with kings—the late Bohemian monarch springs to mind—yet never lost the common touch—yellow-backed novels and the sea stories of William Clark Russell remained among his reading pleasures—Watson was the ballast upon whose reassuring weight Holmes came to rely more and more as the gaslight era drew to a close. That was the basis of the partnership from March 1881 to August 1914, and those who suggest homosexuality, as they have of every other famous male team from Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday to Batman and Robin, either are ignorant of the largely masculine character of late nineteenth-century English society or are unable to accept Holmes’s notorious misogyny at face value.

The stories without Watson, or in which he plays a minor role, are arid and disappointing, lack humanity, and embarrass one with Holmes’s unchained narcissism. They are self-conscious and help to propagate the disturbing rumour that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson never existed, and that they were the creations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote about the Boer War and Professor Challenger, introduced the sport of skiing to Switzerland, and conducted seances with Houdini’s ghost. This is never the case when Holmes and Watson are in their proper places as detective and biographer, or even during Holmes’s absences, as when Watson gets his chance to play the bully hero in
chapters 6
through 11 of
Hound
.