My Dear Watson (16 page)

They waited for Sir Henry to emerge, and then for the hound to attack. At the moment of approach, Watson glanced at Holmes, and his face “was pale and exultant, his eyes shining brightly in the moonlight.” He was serene thinking he knew exactly what was waiting for him in the misty night, but he did not expect the hound to be breathing fire, or phosphorus, as it turned out to be.
That
rattled Holmes for the barest moment, and Sir Henry got the scare of his life in that slim second of hesitation. I suppose it is a blessing that Holmes is so vain he takes it as a personal failing to overlook anything; with the precarious way he plays with people, setting them up as if he is directing a play where the deaths are only temporary, he cannot afford to be wrong. People don’t get back up in real life unless they are saved in time, which is thankfully what happened here. With greater intellect comes greater responsibility—I would not thank my maker for giving me that sort of burden.

Sir Henry thanked Holmes for saving his life, even though Holmes admitted to him that he had endangered it in the first place. It is well of him to be honest in that, for I hate him least when he is honest.

The mystery was solved and Stapleton was lost upon the moor, presumed dead. Holmes almost drowned himself in the mire fetching back Sir Henry’s missing boot. Watson often compares him to a bloodhound, but even the massive beast who lived on the moor before it was gunned down never brought itself to run full-long into a sink hole like that, the rash child. Though his reason remains intact on a case, his sense of self-preservation absolutely vanishes.

But once the case was done, Watson and Holmes returned to Baker Street alive and renewed in one another. They exited from the crawling air of the moor and left the menacing mood of the place behind. On the long journey back to London the atmosphere transmuted, and the horrible dread of the Baskerville estate yielded to an emotion opposite but similar, the other hand of expectation: hope. It was an excited sort of charge shared between the two of them, the knowledge that something had changed, and that more alterations would follow suit. They were not going back to what they were before, they were moving on.

1890: The Yellow Face

The year is out before Watson’s narrative resumes. Was it a second giggling honeymoon that he was as reluctant to share as the first? Or was it a time too honest, too awkward, too tempestuous to reveal? These men would have needed to renegotiate their boundaries, their new terms for one another.

But they were so happy to be back together, regardless of what might be in their way now; they were young again, for a time. They got so sweet with one another that Holmes even admitted he was mistaken, a rare and precious occurrence more infrequent than blue moons. Watson writes gently of him in this case, explaining with a peculiar affection how Holmes’s supreme laziness is mixed with freakish bursts of energy, and even mentioning his use of cocaine passingly, saying that it was his one and only “occasional” vice, because that was how Watson chose to perceive it at the time. Holmes had put the drug away for a season, for the purpose of winning Watson back.

On the first warm day of spring, they went for a walk together, repeating the behavior of their initial courtship: “For two hours we rambled about together, in silence for the most part, as befits two men who know each other intimately.” I imagine they walked past the alley where they first kissed and smiled at one another. They knew more about each other than either one would ever speak aloud.

Holmes was being extra cautious here, trying to lure Watson back to him for good. Sure he was sleeping at Baker Street once again, but he still went to work every day, spoke to his wife, helped manage that household. Here was a creature with one foot in the ocean and one on dry land, and ultimately he would have to choose. Holmes wanted to have him permanently back, so much so that he managed to bite his tongue when he discovered their walk had caused a potential client to wait so long he finally left. Life without Watson was worse than life without puzzles. He had learned that the hard way.

The client returned soon after they got home anyway. Holmes said to him, “I can see that you have not slept for a night or two. That tries a man’s nerves more than work, and more even than pleasure.” He winked at Watson over the poor man’s head, and kept on with the cheeky double remarks, telling him not to worry, that “my friend and I have listened to many strange secrets in this room.”

They were soon distracted by the peculiar circumstances of the case, one in which Holmes assumed the blackmail of a former husband when it was instead the concealment of a mix-race child. The client mostly solved his own case, bursting into a neighboring house and embracing his wife’s daughter with a kind of acceptance that was rare in those days. Watson found it very touching, and Holmes capitalized on his tender mood. He tugged Watson away from the happy family, back to London, where he lit a candle and gestured Watson to follow him to his bedroom.

What I wouldn’t give to have been a fly on the wall as Holmes made his concession, telling Watson that, “if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers,” to knock him down a peg by reminding him of this case. And what I wouldn’t give after that to be a fly with the ability to buzz out an open window, because it was then that Sherlock Holmes asked Watson to come back to him. In his way.

“So how shall your wife be dealt with?” Holmes asked cheerfully, setting his candle down and beginning to change for sleep.

“Pardon?” asked Watson, frozen in the act of unbuttoning.

“Well, this arrangement seems less than ideal, you splitting your time between two households. Perhaps you might divorce,” he suggested breezily. “Have any proof of adultery?” Holmes joked.

But Watson did not think it was funny. He frowned at Holmes as he said, “There will be no divorce, Holmes. What an unthinkable thing! I made my vows to Mary, I promised her the rest of my life.”

Holmes had ceased his chuckling. “It’ll be a very long life if it’s an unhappy one, Watson. The same will be true for her as well. I’ve seen so many people torture themselves by staying together for outdated morals, for public approval, for nothing.”

“Who said we were unhappy?” Watson shrugged him off. “I never said that.”

It was a moment, I gather, even rarer than Holmes admitting a mistake: it was Holmes speechless. His lip quivered, his mouth opened, but nothing came out. What must have been going through his head… Should he scold Watson? If his vows were so meaningful to him, then why was he here in his friend’s room instead of at home with his wife? What about a threat? Leave your wife or I’ll give her reason enough to leave you? Perhaps he even thought about pleading with Watson, about exposing his own need?

But if he was about to reveal his true longing, he waited too long. Watson couldn’t tolerate the sight of his gaping face anymore and removed himself to his own former bedroom, where he slept for the first night since they’d returned from Baskerville Hall, like a guest in someone else’s house. They had run into their first snag on this second try.

I honestly wonder at Holmes’s reaction after Watson left the room. Did he sink to the bed limply, wondering helplessly what he had just done? Did he grit his teeth and get on with the business of undressing as if nothing was the matter? Or did he, as I speculate, overcome his stony nature for once and resolve to work harder at persuading Watson to his way of thinking. He would put forth his best effort in the early warm months of 1889, and it would be promising for a time, until the temperature turned on him.

1890: The Greek Interpreter

Watson reports this story as taking place in the summer, though it was just another warm day of spring. The cold would snap back in the next weeks, and by the time summer really arrived, their attempt at reconciling would be finished despite some of Holmes’s best efforts. It just wasn’t meant to be for another painful handful of years.

I’ll admit that sometimes I find Holmes fascinating too, much the way a hideous, newly-discovered life form is fascinating, or the way disasters are fascinating. Watson said, in beginning to tell this warm-weather case, “During my long and intimate acquaintance with Mr. Sherlock Holmes I had never heard him refer to his relations. This reticence upon his part had increased the somewhat inhuman effect which he produced upon me, until sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart.” That is how Holmes comes across, even to a most “intimate” friend like Watson. And though disinclined to form new friendships, Holmes did want to hold onto the one he had, a thing harder and harder to do ever since Watson married. Yes, they had renewed their physical relationship, but Holmes knew he had to do more than resume his old tactics if he wanted to maintain Watson now. The introduction of Watson to his brother Mycroft was a way of binding his friend closer to him, of investing himself ever so slightly, at last.

Holmes took Watson down to the Diogenes Club, where his brother sat all day amongst “the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town.” Imagine Sherlock Holmes without his bursts of energy, without his dogged persistence to prove himself right, and you are nearer to imagining his brother. Imagine Sherlock Holmes conceding another’s superiority and listening like a pupil, and that is Sherlock Holmes in the presence of Mycroft. It was the closest to humble that he had ever come in Watson’s presence, and it was a very charming move on the part of Holmes.

Knowing all that, it is no wonder to me why Holmes neglected to mention his brother for all those years previous. Watson gathered obliquely that the detective was an orphan, but for a long time he believed that Holmes had no living relatives at all. I feel safe in speculating that the Holmes boys lost their parents at a young age, though Mycroft was old enough to take charge of his younger brother. With seven years difference between them, I would guess that Mr. and Mrs. Holmes expired when Sherlock Holmes was around ten or eleven, and from thence forward Mycroft became somewhat of a father-figure to Sherlock. It explains why Holmes is so quick to assure Watson that Mycroft’s mental powers were greater than his own (he felt he had not yet surpassed his teacher), and it explains the rather endearing way he worked to impress Mycroft by guessing the history, task, and occupation of men who passed in the street below. I also deduce that Mycroft, as unenergetic as he appeared here, was a rather uninvolved guardian, which accounts for how Holmes would have developed his almost pathological independence.

Holmes is a more intriguing study than the majority of his cases, with his hidden history and his muted lawless streak. For example: when trying to gain access to a house in the pursuit of this Greek mystery, Holmes coerces a locked window open right in front of Inspector Gregson! The Inspector chose to let it slide with only this comment: “It is a mercy that you are on the side of the force, and not against it, Mr. Holmes.” How brazen he was, how unique, how hypnotizing. How lucky indeed that he is on our side.

I am less interested in the mystery here than in the personal details, and in what this trip to the Diogenes Club signaled for Holmes’s newfound but ultimately fruitless maturity. Holmes had done his best for Watson, making a genuine effort to share himself, and it did occur to Watson that
maybe
something pleasant would work out despite his inability to meet Holmes even halfway this time.

1890: Silver Blaze

The Adventure of Silver Blaze
begins with Holmes and Watson sharing breakfast in Baker Street. Watson, who had been waiting for this case to come to Holmes, or for Holmes to go to it, had got a fellow physician to cover his patients, knowing he would be headed out to the country to find a missing horse, and looking forward to it. I have a suspicion that Watson was being…not
unfair
to Holmes considering all that Holmes had done to him in the past, but perhaps he was taking advantage of being the one with all the power, the one who could stay or go at any moment, the one who was being solicited, at last. I think it might have gone to his head a bit. He let Holmes believe he would never change his mind about his sacred marriage vows.

Holmes was in rare form during this case, cerebral, much more controlled; he was getting into a veritable habit of civilized behavior. He sat quietly and in deep concentration as they rode out with the local inspector and the owner of the horse, and Watson had to rouse him when they stopped. How different from the wild excitement Watson was used to, and yet Holmes did not seem to be depressed—the case was exciting him, but it wasn’t crippling him with energy. At thirty-seven years of age, it was as if Holmes was finally growing up.

He was still his own self, however; as he and Watson strolled across the moor looking for where the horse might have fled to after its coach was killed, Watson noted: “The sun was beginning to sink behind the stables of Mapleton, and the long sloping plain in front of us was tinged with gold, deepening into rich, ruddy brown where the faded ferns and brambles caught the evening light. But the glories of the landscape were all wasted upon my companion.”

An artist but not a poet was Sherlock Holmes, not a romantic. In fact he left Watson to watch the glorious sunset on his own. Watson stood stranded outside a horse faker’s home and waited until “the reds had all faded to greys,” but he was in a forgiving mood towards his friend at this time. Being away from Holmes does make his heart grow fonder.

Holmes reemerged having thoroughly cowed the blustering man who lived there, and he was in cheerful spirits still. He had already solved the case and was now just shading in the picture. This was the artist in him, the need to render the whole case in loving detail. Once he realized that the horse’s coach had been intending to injure the creature, Holmes thought to ask if any of the sheep had gone lame; the man would have needed to practice, after all. He was so pleased at predicting this answer that he pinched Watson’s arm in excitement. After a whole careful day of muted discovery, a kind of innocent impishness overwhelmed him. He had even decided to protect the horse faker from Silver Blaze’s owner, a bit of retaliation on the man who had been too “cavalier” towards Holmes for his own taste.