My Sherlock Holmes Page 43

  Holmes tapped the side of his nose suggestively. “That will bear looking into,” he said.

  “I am looking into it, Mr. Holmes,” I told him. “Indeed, just before you arrived—”

  “Notice the lack of blood under the body, Lestrade,” Holmes interrupted in that ingratiating way he had.

  “It’s the very first thing I noticed, Mr. Holmes,” I told him.

  “The man was not killed here,” Holmes said.

  “That much is evident, Mr. Holmes.”

  “The body was moved.”

  “Do tell, Mr. Holmes.”

  “The sword through the neck is the mark of the Thuggee, a secret society of pernicious evildoers having its origins in the East.”

  I took out my notebook and pencil, and wrote down “Thuggee.”

  “But I believe this to be the work of someone imitating that awful rite,” Holmes continued. “The real, genuine Thuggee invariably uses a scimitar.”

  “Very interesting, Holmes,” I told him. “Why do you suppose—”

  “I call your attention, Lestrade, to the tantalus on the sideboard,” he interrupted, pointing a dramatic finger at the aforementioned object.

  “I’ve already noticed it, Mr. Holmes,” I replied politely. “It is a tantalus. It is on the sideboard, where it has always reposed, according to the maid.”

  “Exactly!” he responded. And then he smiled that infuriating smile, and stalked off to peer at the boot marks in the hallway.

  Well now, I ask you, how was I to know whether he was serious or he was just blowing smoke?

  About ten minutes later, as I was in the kitchen preparing to arrest the cook, Dr. Sempleman called me back into the parlor. “I’m done here,” he told me, shrugging into his overcoat. “Wadlington-Skitherbiggins died of a sudden and massive heart attack. I’ll write it up back at the office.”

  My mouth must have fallen open like a codfish. “Excuse me, Doctor?” I said.

  “Certainly,” he replied.

  “I mean—a heart attack?”

  “That’s right. Look at all the weight the poor man was carrying around. If people will carry an extra six stone of body fat around, and will not exercise, they stand little chance of reaching their allotted three score and ten years.”

  “But—the sword through his neck—

  “Oh, that!” He laughed. “It’s a conjuring trick.” He reached down and pulled the sword out, and then unfastened the small wooden stock. “See? Not a mark on his neck. The sword goes around the stock in some fashion. The lack of blood should have told you that. I would say, judging by his attire, that Wadlington-Skitherbiggins was practicing a conjuring act, perhaps to entertain children, when he fell over.”

  “But Holmes, that is we thought he’d been moved.”

  “Look at him,” Dr. Sempleman said with a gesture. “Would you like the task of moving him any great distance?”

  “Not I,” I agreed. “Holmes, do you—” I looked down the hall just in time to see the front door closing behind the consulting detective.

  I turned back to the doctor. “I don’t suppose the tantalus had anything to do with Wadlington Skitherbiggins’s death?” I inquired.

  “The tantalus? Perhaps in the larger sense that drinking contributed to his weight problem. But aside from that, I don’t see how.”

  I shook my head. “Smoke,” I said. “I knew it was smoke.”

  “Perhaps,” Dr. Sempleman agreed. “Those cheroot cigars are a terrible strain on the heart.”

  Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein

  Grand Duke of Casset-Futstein and Hereditary King of Bohemia

  In his own words.

  Sherlock Holmes? Sherlock Holmes? I cannot say as I have of this gentleman ever heard. Have you of him ever heard, my dear? No, I’m sorry, my wife has of this Sherlock Holmes never heard either. Some sort of British tradesman, is he?

  Bevis Stamford, M.D., F.R.C.P.

  Resident Physician, Little Sisters of Mercy Hospital

  New Providence, Bahamas Islands

  In his own words:

  Yes, it’s true. I’m the “Young Stamford” who first introduced James Watson and Sherlock Holmes. Watson told the story in his screed A Study in Starlet, and he told it well; but he did not get all of the details right. Some facts he altered in the interest of better storytelling, for he did not realize their importance, and some he was not aware of. I will now tell it as it happened, not in the interest of amplifying my own small part in the narrative, but in the service of History. For as Kierkegaard once said—I think it was Kierkegaard—“What is, is, and what was, was, and they are the harbingers of what shall be.”1

  I worked as a dresser at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, known by all who labor in its precincts as “Barts,” when Watson was a young intern there and I was even younger than he. A “dresser” was one who treated and bandaged wounds and surgical incisions, functions that have largely been taken over by nurses, since these competent women have been allowed to take up the occupation of helping the sick and wounded. Thanks to a small bequest from a great-uncle I was subsequently enabled to get my medical degree, and I moved out to the islands to practice medicine someplace where my skills would be more in demand.

  On the day in question, when I introduced Mr. Sherlock Holmes to the man who was to become his Boswell, I had seen Holmes off and on around the hospital for some six months or so. I had formed the opinion that he was a quite intelligent but unusually cold-blooded individual. He had a total disregard for all human frailty, whether in others or in himself. I had seen him beating corpses in the dissecting room with a stick to see how the human body would bruise after death. Once I noticed that he was sporting quite a shiner: a badly blackened eye, and a puffy and severely lacerated cheek. I chided him about it, commenting that, with his prowess in boxing and single-stick fighting, if he looked like that, the other fellow must be lying comatose in one of our wards.

  He laughed and assured me that it was self-inflicted. “I’m keeping a journal,” he told me, “recording the healing process. I sketch myself in the mirror every morning and night. I’m no Paget, but I fancy the drawings will do for my purposes.”

  “And just what are your purposes?” I asked him.

  He laughed again. “The advancement of human knowledge, Mr. Stamford,” he said. “Just that; the advancement of human knowledge.”

  The strangest man I ever met? No, I wouldn’t say so. That honor belongs to a thin, nervous gentleman named Pilchard who always wore a bowler, indoors and out, and collected fish. Dead fish. He used to carry around a suitcase full of used third-class railway tickets, which he would accumulate from the dustbins outside of government buildings and railway stations. He had some odd habits, but I guess this isn’t the place to discuss them.

  On the day that I ran into my old friend Watson at the Criterion Bar and we got into the discussion about lodgings, I had left the chemical laboratory at Barts a short time before, and recollected that while there I had a similar discussion with Mr. Sherlock Holmes. He, apparently, had found a suitable suite of rooms in Baker Street, but needed someone to go in with him on the rent. I mentioned this to Watson, and he was eager to meet Holmes and see if they coud come to some understanding. I warned him, as best I could, about Holmes’s peculiarities, but he was adamant. And besides, I really didn’t know anything against Holmes, I just felt that he might be a hard man to live with.

  We went in the side entrance to Barts, and I left Watson on the staircase landing while I went in to alert Holmes that I had brought someone to speak with him.

  “He might be just the man to share lodgings with,” I told Holmes.

  “Really?” Holmes sounded interested. “What sort of chap is he?”

  “He’s a medical doctor, served as an army surgeon in Afghanistan. Was wounded by a Jezail bullet at the battle of Maiwand. Seems pretty well recovered. Pleasant companion. No bad habits that I can remember.”

  Holmes laughed. “That’s good enoug
h for me,” he said. “Bring him in and I’ll give him a chance to discover my bad habits. Who knows, perhaps we’ll like each other.”

  I went to retrieve Watson and brought him back to the laboratory. “Dr. Watson,” I said, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  Holmes turned and looked Watson over, then grabbed his hand and shook it. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” he said.

  “How on earth did you know that?” Watson asked in astonishment.

  It was my turn to laugh. But before I could say, “He’s pulling your leg; I told him myself,” Holmes had gone into a discussion of this supposedly infallible test for hemoglobin that he had just developed. Well, by the time I could get a word in, the moment had passed and it would have been rude of me to play the spoiler.

  Sometime later I asked Holmes why he had done it, risking the chance that I would blurt out the damning fact that there was no clever deduction involved. “I don’t really know,” Holmes told me. “Watson just looked so stolid, so self-assured, so English, that I wanted to see whether I could astonish him. I was counting on you to keep mum, and so you did. And so I did.”

  I have kept the secret for a quarter of a century now, and am only revealing it because it can certainly no longer do any damage. The opinions that these two old companions have for each other have been tempered by decades of experience—and such experiences they have been! Who can not read the reminiscences of Dr. John Watson without feeling a bit of envy for all those years he shared the lodging at 221B Baker Street?

  And yet I wonder whether it would have been different had I not hesitated for those few seconds. If I had said, “Don’t believe him, Watson, he’s pulling your leg!” might Watson not have responded: “How dare you have me on in such a manner! Good day, Mr. Holmes!” And, perhaps, stalked out of the laboratory never to return?

  And thus by the going astray of that one jest, might not the world be a poorer place? On the whole, I’m glad I kept mum.

  Arthur Conan Doyle, M.D.

  Physician, Writer, Agent

  Yes, I came to know Sherlock Holmes fairly well over the years I spent as literary agent for his companion and amanuensis, Dr. John Watson. I liked him well enough, but in truth I must admit that there were times when I wished I’d never met him.

  Watson could see nothing but good in Holmes, and professed to be constantly amazed when he pulled this or that deductive rabbit out of his well-known deerstalker. But, if you want my opinion, I always thought that Watson put it on a bit for effect, and to keep Holmes happy. I noted many times how pleased Holmes looked—although he did his best not to show it—when Watson would look at him after a particularly telling deduction and murmur, “Astounding, Holmes, I don’t know how you do it!”

  But I rather think that Watson did know, at least to a large extent, how Holmes did it. Watson was, after all, a medical man, and from what I could see a particuarly competent one. And medical men are, of necessity, trained and practiced in deduction. Perhaps they cannot deduce the existence of a Niagara Falls or the Atlantic Ocean from a drop of water, but I’ve often seen my old professor, Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh University, deduce the history of a patient as well as his illness from his preliminary examination. I remember the following exchange with a patient Bell presented before our medical class:

  “Well, my man, you’ve served in the Army?” asked Bell.

  “Aye, sir,” said the patient.

  “Not long discharged?”

  “No, sir?”

  “A highland regiment?”

  “Aye, sir”

  “A noncommissioned officer”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Stationed at Barbados?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Dr. Bell explained his deductions thus: “The man was a respectful man, but he did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority, and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian not British, and the Scottish regiments are at present in that particular island.”

  If this has a certain resemblance to one of Holmes’s little displays, as related by Watson, well I cannot account for it; you will have to ask Watson for an explanation.

  It has always been my opinion that the popularity of Holmes was based just as much on artist Sidney Paget’s heroic portrayal of him as well as on Watson’s tales about him. Holmes in person, I must say, was not nearly as pretty as Paget makes him out in his drawings in the Strand magazine. He was thinner, gaunter, and his clothing was perpetually in disarray, as he had no time for thinking about his dress except perhaps when he was going in disguise.

  I’m sorry, but that’s all the time I can spare you right now. I’m working on an historical novel that I’m rather proud of. Yes, I think that if the world remembers me for anything, it will be for my historical novels.

  James Mortimer, M.R.C.S.

  Medical Officer for Grimpen, Thursley, and High Barrow

  Grimpen, Dartmoor, Devonshire

  Sherlock Holmes interested me from the first moment I met him, during the strange occurrences that my colleague Dr. Watson chronicled under the name The Hound of the Baskervilles. As I told Holmes at the time, I was impressed with the pronounced dolichocephalic shape of his skull which, along with his well-marked supra-orbital development, indicated something rare, if not unique, in the evolutionary line of Homo sapiens sapiens. Although whether a throwback or a step ahead, I am not prepared to say. I still covet a cast of his skull and, should he predecease me, the skull itself would be a welcome addition to my small collection.

  Since my involvement with the incidents which took place at Baskerville Hall, and Holmes’s brilliant resolution of the problem they presented, I have followed his career as related in the writings of Dr. Watson with considerable interest. I have also, when the occasion arose, availed myself of his hospitality in the city, and sat over the occasional glass of wine in his study at 221B Baker Street, discussing the latest advances of science or some new criminal outrage.

  I have recently begun an intensive study of the works of the Viennese alienists Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler, particularly Freud’s Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality), which have, I believe, given me a deep insight into human behavior. But, while their theories are a good beginning at unraveling this complex subject, and while they may hold true for Vienna, they are but a beginning, and their truths are not universal. England is not Vienna, and the British yeoman is not the Austrian burger.

  I will use this space to briefly discuss some of my own insights into human—or more particularly British—behavior, as exemplified by the conduct of Mr. Holmes, and his relationship with Dr. Watson. While Mr. Holmes is by no means typical, his aberrations lie at one end of a spectrum of behavior that I believe can be seen as particularly British.

  (As is the custom in these, as Dr. Freud calls them “psychiatric” analysis, I shall for the remainder of this monograph call Holmes “H” and Watson “W.”So remember, when I speak of “H” I mean Sherlock Holmes, and “W” represents Dr. John H. Watson.)

  There can be no doubt that the adult behavior of H was heavily influenced by his childhood, and his relationship with his parents. Freud would have it that H’s insistence on order—law and order—and his habit of crawling about on his hands and knees looking for “clews” in the dirt and grime of the floor were the result of overly strict toilet training and his mother’s withholding of love if he soiled his diapers. When he crawls about on the floor he is metaphorically seeking for the turd that will recapture his mother’s love. Freudian psychoanalysis would have it that H never passed out of the Anal Phase of development into the more mature or Genital Phase—which is also shown by his lack of interest in women.

  But, as I’m sure you will agree, this is a bit much. To describe H as a coprophilic personality at the same time over-simplifies and misunder stands his behavio
r. Let us take a deeper look.

  Perhaps the answer is to be found in the opinions H has of women, and his relationships with them. What does H say about women? W quotes him: “Love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true, cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment,” H says in The Sign of Four. And: “Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting,” H says in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” And again: “The motives of women are so inscrutable,” H complains in “The Adventure of the Second Stain.”

  Does he not protest too much? Do we not have hear the complaints of a man who is in Jove—deeply in love—with a woman who is unobtainable; who is perhaps too far above his own station for him to hope of wooing her, or perhaps who is already married, or perhaps both? Are there any hints as to whom this lady might be? There are perhaps two: first, H’s description of Irene Adler as “The woman,” not a phrase indicative of desire, but of great admiration. And what had she done that was so admirable? She had rejected the king of Bohemia to marry a commoner. And second, H’s using a revolver to shoot into the wall—surely the sign of great emotion—the initials VR, for his queen, Victoria. And what is the queen, but the strongest mother-figure that can be imagined? And what British boy does not love his mother? I shall say no more.

  Also by Michael Kurland

  THE PROFESSOR MORIARTY NOVELS

  The Infernal Device

  Death by Gaslight

  The Great Game

  THE ALEXANDER BRASS NOVELS

  Too Soon Dead

  The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes