My Dear Watson (3 page)

The day Watson finally discovered Holmes’s unique vocation, he was confronted as well with that enormous ego which dwells within the geometric frame of that man. Holmes declared himself unique in all the world, superior even to those detectives who might rival him in fiction, Dupin and Lecoq, meaning of course that he found the idea of someone who could rival him to be literally unimaginable. Holmes was an insufferable person, even and especially at his best, but Watson was already sunk. He was annoyed, but impressed, and it started to bind them together.

In the midst of a rant on how much better he was than his era might ever permit, Holmes revealed his true motivation, which he would deny in later years: “I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous.” Being the best was meaningless if the world did not know it as well. But as it turned out, Watson had what it would take to make him famous. They found in each other a perfect symbiosis; in Holmes there was a bottomless mystery to unravel and appreciate, and in Watson there was an ever-dazzled disciple recording each miracle with the proper amount of awe.

In those early days, it was a struggle for Holmes to feel superior. He was superior of course, most especially to the police detectives who came to him for help during
A Study In Scarlet
, Gregson and Lestrade. He could make all the slicing comments he wanted about the officers being a pair of jealous beauties, but it hurt to know that they were fighting each other for his glory, not their own, and that inevitably one of them would win it. It’s a problem of motivation with Sherlock Holmes, a problem of getting him to fire up that frightening machine he’s built out of his mind. Watson gave him motivation because Watson gave him his due credit, at long last. He would not even have left Baker Street to investigate this scarlet murder if Watson hadn’t wanted to see his talents in action.

And to give Holmes further credit (though it pains me), he did recognize and value in Watson all this worship which I have just described. Like a woman who knows in an instant she has found her husband, the man who will treat her like a queen all the days of her life, Holmes started courting Watson. Using the same coy tricks that my friends use, Holmes fished for compliments, lured Watson into saying what he wanted to hear:

“I’m not going to tell you much more of the case, Doctor. You know a conjurer gets no credit once he has explained his trick; and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.”

And Watson told him, “I shall never do that; you have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.”

Holmes blushed, and Watson noted that he was as susceptible to flattery over his skills “as any girl could be over her beauty.” What more must I really say? Watson had promised to always consider Holmes extraordinary (a promise he has kept, incidentally). How can it be that this is not obvious to everyone?

And yet they seemed a lop-sided pair to most, with Holmes so sterling and grand and Watson only following him everywhere. But there are weaknesses in Sherlock Holmes, profound weaknesses. He took quite a bit more from Watson than he was ever able to return. It’s why they no longer live with one another. It’s why Watson is my name as well.

Holmes’s little fun in titling this first case with Watson
A Study In Scarlet
hinted at those deficiencies oh so delicately. Watson never could bring himself to write the painful truths about his friend in any of his many accounts of their cases together, but he is not a liar, and the truth is there to be uncovered: “There’s a scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life,” Holmes said. What a thing to say, and what a thing to believe at only twenty-seven years old! Imagine that all of life for Sherlock Holmes is as dull as dish water, and the only fascination for him, the only captivating aspect, is murder and crime. That was his true sentiment, and as far as I know, he holds it to this day. He is worthy of pity, but too arrogant to accept it. Poor Watson got pushed and pulled for years.

A young man when Watson met him, Holmes was still sometimes unsure of himself. Deathly afraid, not that he was insufficient, but that others might be better than he granted them credit for, that he might have equals. And yet with all the care he put into besting and embarrassing the official representatives of Scotland Yard, it was not their praise he was seeking. Nor, though it may have sounded otherwise, did his desire for fame rest on the idea of being well-known among the citizenry. Holmes had little respect for the police, and even less for the dupes and victims he assisted, though he recognized their innocence as one would that of a child or an animal. His ideal audience needed to deeply appreciate the complexity of every knot he unraveled, and who else could be more suited than those who tie the knots in the first place?

Detectives Gregson and Lestrade were too jealous to really admire him, and Watson was too easily impressed by the simplest of feats to fully grasp his grander accomplishments—it’s showing a masterpiece of painting to someone who prefers caricatures, it’s handing a symphony to the rhyming crowd. But Holmes’s capture in this case, Mr. Jefferson Hope? His praise that Holmes should be chief of police, that his pursuit was thorough enough to rattle a man as solid and rough as himself,
that
was the sort of recognition Holmes wanted. He believes that competition is the only way for two people to be in perfect understanding—honesty in adversary.

Though not renowned for his artistic sensibilities or knowledge of literature, Sherlock Holmes has a natural intuition about the nature of art and life. Oscar Wilde is attributed with saying, “What is true in a man’s life is not what does, but the legend which grows up around him.” So too knew Holmes when he told Watson at the end of their first case, “What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done?” Obviously someone needed to tell his story, and with such pride as he had, Holmes would not do it himself. After days of pouting and sighing, he finally got Watson to volunteer to write the account as if it were his own sudden idea. My Watson still thinks he decided to scribe for Holmes all on his initiative, that the idea came to him organically. And yet, as there isn’t an ounce of guile in his whole body, he faithfully recorded all the proof to the contrary in his own report. He’s such an honest darling.

1881: The Resident Patient

It is a curious thing to flirt with someone who lives where you live. It was October in the year 1881, just a few months after Holmes and Watson first started living together, and the atmosphere was more than a little peculiar. They were stuck inside all day with each other owing to the whipping weather outside, and the tension was stacking. At last something broke: a test tube Sherlock Holmes had been experimenting with burst (supposedly by accident) while he was working, and he gave up his project in defeat.

“A day’s work ruined, Watson,” he said, striding across to the window. How he must have stood there, watching the ghost of his face in the glass, trying to get his tone perfectly right. Did he shake his head just the tiniest bit, knowing that Watson would never hear what he could hear in people’s voices, and that he was being overly careful for nothing? “Ha!” Holmes let out enthusiastically, as if it had only just realized. “The stars are out and the wind has fallen. What do you say to a ramble through London?” Just a sudden impulse! Or so he desired Watson to believe. People find spontaneity to be so charming, and Holmes knew he could fake it, if he just planned it carefully enough.

Holmes was on his best behavior in those early days, and a starlit walk through that magnificent city? I might have gone for him myself, though knowing what I do now as Watson’s wife, I’m glad I never met Sherlock Holmes when I was young and foolish, as my dear husband did.

Watson said in the story that he and Holmes just wandered, arm in arm, for three hours. Now, it was not unheard of for homosexual men of that time to try stamping out their desires, to go walking together until their longing for one another was exhausted through physical activity. It is a curiosity to note that in the beginning of Stevenson’s
Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde
, Mr. Utterson and his distant kinsman Mr. Enfield do the very same thing; walking, roaming together, doing anything they can to disperse that inexpressible desire in a world that does not understand. It was apparently not an uncommon practice.

That isn’t what Holmes was up to, however. The world didn’t understand him anyway, and he defied it at every turn.

Holmes and Watson did not
just
go for a lengthy stroll that night. The chilly air outside was invigorating, and Holmes shimmered to life beside Watson; his cheeks flushed and his eyes glittering, and Watson could feel that same buzzing energy that comes off of Holmes when he is hot on a case. It rained down on him like sparks from a fireworks display.

He and Holmes kept catching eyes under the street lamps, smiling and shy. They walked quite a ways around the city, building something subtle together as they went, like a charge will build in the air before lightening strikes. For Holmes and Watson, lightning struck on their way back towards Baker Street, when they passed a short and empty alley. Sherlock Holmes slowed down. He grasped Watson by the shoulder, looked around the street, and pulled him into the space between the buildings.

“Holmes?” Watson asked softly as his back was pressed against the wall of a pawn broker’s shop. Surely there wasn’t a case back here, so what was going on?

Holmes touched Watson’s face in response, standing close in the almost perfect darkness so that Watson could only tell his eyes by the faint glint from the stars. Watson started to get an inkling of what was happening. He could almost not dare to believe it; his breath came quick and thrilling, he put his hands up to grasp Holmes’s shoulders, pulling and pressing him at the same time. There was an extended moment of seizure, of clutch, and then Holmes kissed him, their chilly lips igniting on contact.

Watson lost his hat in the frenzy, but did not notice it tumbling down his side as Holmes roughed him against the brick wall. Holmes’s steel-bending grip on Watson’s clothes was nearly violent in its insistence, but his kiss was soft, full, and affectionate.

They had to break for air, and the moment calmed. Foreheads pressed together, breath intermingling, they recovered themselves. Holmes’s fingers slipped under Watson’s collar, sending chills down his spine. Holmes was smiling at him (this Watson could tell by the gleaming of his teeth), and Watson started to laugh with him, holding the both of them up against the wall as they disintegrated in quiet laughter.

Holmes finally thought to look around and picked up Watson’s hat, replacing it on his head. Arm-in-arm they left the alley and completed their walk back to Baker Street. They knew what they were returning to, and they were hurrying, but on arrival they saw a brougham outside the door.

“Hum!” exclaimed Sherlock Holmes, for once disappointed to see that he had a case on hand. Agreeing in a brief, communicative glance that they would have to deal with this late-night client before gaining any more privacy for themselves, Watson followed Holmes into what he called their “sanctum.”

The client was a fellow medical man with a peculiar client/patron who was being menaced by what appeared to be Russians, though they were not. Not Russians, and not even sick; they were in fact faking everything to revenge themselves against a paranoid old man. Holmes could see it all from the outset, knew he was being lied to, and dusted his hands of the whole matter, despite the fact that the man’s life was clearly at risk. Half of it was his annoyance at having his time wasted, and half of it was his annoyance at having his time with Watson wasted.

“Sorry to bring you out on such a fool’s errand, Watson.” Sorry for the both of them he was, but they were headed home at last, and there’s a tricky little turn in the story that lets you know what ultimately happened.

My Watson writes, “At half past seven next morning, in the first dim glimmer of daylight, I found Holmes standing by my bedside in his dressing-gown.” Imagine finding Holmes there! Not very strange when you understand that he spent the previous night in Watson’s room and henceforward always felt comfortable bursting in whenever he felt like it.

I don’t have a whole lot of details for what went on in the dark; I must confess I didn’t really delve when Watson told me this part of the story. I love him, I trust him, I know him to be excruciatingly faithful, and I don’t find myself to be jealous, but there are still some things I’d rather not know. Precisely the way Sherlock Holmes makes love is one of those things. May every man who knows the particulars of it take his secrets to the grave.

What I do know is that Holmes showed a curious lack of forethought in seducing Watson, almost as though he were a stranger to himself and his own inhuman patterns. Watson was inexperienced, but Holmes had been through a series of men (and preferred them that way, one right after another) which only began with his university friend Victor Trevor. From what Watson gleaned over the years (and from what I have in turn gleaned from Watson), it appears that Sherlock Holmes has a habit of swapping between high and low company.

There was a dry spell after Trevor and until Holmes had finished at university. Then he spent most of his time skulking around laboratories before meeting an advanced surgery student he got on with uproariously for a few weeks—a surgeon in training who was by all reports just as weird as Holmes himself. They used to stay up late in the dissecting room spilling gin into the runnels of the autopsy tables, doing things with one another that could get the both of them expelled, thrown into jail, and condemned to hell.

After that man took a job outside of the city, Holmes didn’t waste any time missing him. He next took up with a young ship’s hand he met while collecting algae samples from the local harbors. He slipped and scraped his arm badly on some barnacles, and this uncouth fellow stepped up to help him and to tease him for what looked like quite a foolish pursuit. That connection lasted until the man shipped out again.