Holmes and Watson (17 page)

Nevertheless, despite the calls on his time by his professional duties, Watson could not resist the opportunity to become involved in some of Holmes’ cases. It was as thrilling and as irresistible as the sirens’ song, appealing to that urge for adventure which ran deep in his veins and to that need to maintain the unique male friendship with Holmes which had been built up over the past eight years, when they had shared not only their lives together at the Baker Street lodgings but also so many exciting and dangerous exploits. And once back in Baker Street, it was so very easy to pick up the threads of the old, familiar companionship, as Watson found in the Red-Headed League inquiry in which he accompanies Holmes to St James’s Hall to hear Sarasate, the celebrated Spanish violinist, give a concert, or to sit up with Holmes until the early hours of the morning over a whisky and soda, discussing the case.

Mary Watson understood this need in her husband. An intelligent, warm-hearted and generous woman, she perceived, perhaps more clearly than Watson himself, the strength of the bond between the two men and went out of her way to encourage it. A meaner-spirited woman might have tried to break it, with possible damaging effects on her own relationship with her husband. In the Boscombe
Valley case, it is she who urges her husband to accompany Holmes when Watson hesitates to accept the invitation.

Even Watson himself seems more aware of the nature of the relationship between himself and Holmes as if, having moved away from Baker Street and distanced himself physically as well as psychologically from his day-to-day contact with Holmes, he was able to assess his own attitude more objectively.

‘It was difficult to refuse any of Holmes’ requests, for they were always so exceedingly definite, and put forward with such an air of mastery,’ Watson confesses in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, acknowledging for the first time in quite so frank a manner the force of Holmes’ dominant personality. His response to it was based partly on his genuine admiration for Holmes’ superior intellectual powers.

‘I have so deep a respect for the extraordinary qualities of Holmes that I have always deferred to his wishes, even when I least understood them,’ he was later to admit in ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’.

Nowhere in his accounts of the adventures he shared with Holmes during this 1889–91 period is there any reference to the exasperation he had felt at Holmes’ egotism or cold-bloodedness which is found in his earlier accounts. Once he had left 221B Baker Street and was no longer subjected to the inevitable tensions of living in such close proximity with him, he was less affected by the more infuriating aspects of Holmes’ personality.

Holmes himself was perfectly well aware of the
influence he had over Watson and there are signs that he used it deliberately on occasions to manipulate his old friend to his own advantage.

‘I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life,’ he remarks in ‘The Red-Headed League’, making it clear he understands the deep need in Watson for adventure, a need which Watson himself openly acknowledges in ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’, in which he describes himself as ‘tingling with that half-sporting, half-intellectual pleasure which I invariably experienced when I was associated with him [Holmes] in his investigations.’

Indeed, Holmes’ reference to the ‘humdrum routine of everyday life’ could be taken as much as a comment on Watson’s daily round as a married man and a GP, which to Holmes must have seemed rather dull and conventional, as on his own circumstances when no investigation was on hand to relieve his boredom. At times, his attitude to Watson’s responsibilities as a doctor could be cavalier, even selfish, as seen in this exchange quoted by Watson in ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’.

‘My practice—’ I began.

‘Oh, if you find your own cases more interesting than mine—’ said Holmes, with some asperity.

Watson’s reply – ‘I was going to say that my practice could get along very well without me for a day or two, since it is the slackest time of the year’ – has a defensive, almost apologetic ring to it. Holmes is quite clearly putting
pressure on Watson to give priority to his, Holmes’, needs rather than to those of his patients.

Watson wasn’t the only person to feel the force of Holmes’ personality. Mrs Hudson was also subjected to it. In ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’, she excuses her failure to call in a doctor when Holmes, who was apparently gravely ill, had forbidden her to do so by confessing to Watson, ‘You know how masterful he is. I didn’t dare disobey him.’

The case of the Dying Detective also illustrates that callous, cold-blooded side to Holmes’ character which has already been mentioned in an earlier chapter and which will be demonstrated in an even more extreme form in the series of events which were to occur later in 1891.

In the Dying Detective case, Holmes deceives both Mrs Hudson and Watson into believing he is mortally ill with a rare coolie disease, contracted during an investigation in the dockland area of Rotherhithe. Holmes even goes to the extent of using rouge and vaseline as well as encrusting his lips with beeswax to give the impression he is suffering from a high fever, another example of his use of disguise and his love of the dramatic.
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He appears, however, to have given no thought to the effect all of this would have on Mrs Hudson and Watson, two people who genuinely cared about his welfare. Mrs Hudson is reduced
to tears while Watson, horrified at his old friend’s pitiable condition, is plunged into a state bordering on despair. He is also ‘bitterly hurt’ by Holmes’ refusal to accept medical treatment from him.

‘After all,’ Holmes tells Watson, ‘you are only a general practitioner with very limited experience and mediocre qualifications.’

It should be pointed out in Holmes’ defence that the purpose of this elaborate deception is to lure Culverton Smith, who has murdered his nephew, Victor Savage, and made an attempt on Holmes’ life, to Baker Street where Inspector Morton will arrest him. Nevertheless, Holmes’ explanation for his behaviour rings a little hollow.

‘You will realise,’ he tells Watson, ‘that among your many talents dissimulation finds no place, and if you had shared my secret you would never have been able to impress Smith with the urgent necessity of his presence, which was the vital point of the whole scheme.’

This may well be true. Watson was too honest by nature to lie convincingly. But this is hardly an acceptable excuse, even if Holmes followed it up, after apologising profusely, by assuring Watson of his respect for his medical competence and by taking him out to dinner that night at Simpson’s, especially as the treat was as much for his own benefit as Watson’s. Holmes had been starving himself for three days in order to give himself a suitably gaunt appearance. Nor was the apology adequate compensation for the emotional trauma to which Watson, and Mrs Hudson, had been subjected, quite apart from
the inconvenience to Watson, who had abandoned his practice to hurry to Holmes’ bedside.

In fact, Holmes is far more concerned with the success of his deception than with its effects on his old friend and his landlady. He has carried out the pretence, he declares in a little burst of self-congratulation, ‘with the thoroughness of the true artist’. As a further insult, Holmes, in his excitement over the arrest of Smith, forgets that Watson, who is acting as unwitting witness to Smith’s confession, has hidden himself behind the headboard of the bed.

‘To think that I should have overlooked you!’ he exclaims as Watson emerges from his hiding-place.

To think, indeed!

Watson makes no comment on either Holmes’ attitude or actions, merely expressing relief that his old friend is not, after all, at death’s door, a reaction which is another indication of the strength of his regard for Holmes as well as his own good nature. A less tolerant or forgiving man might have left the house in a huff.

But Holmes needed Watson’s friendship as much as Watson needed his, a fact Watson was aware of even if Holmes only rarely gave expression to such feelings. Apart from Watson, he had no friends who called on him socially, as he admits in ‘The Five Orange Pips’. ‘I do not encourage visitors,’ he adds, although he must have been in close contact with his brother Mycroft, at least towards the end of this period, as later events were to prove.

He quite clearly missed Watson’s companionship, in particular his ability to listen to him without interruption.
He was also the only person to whom he could freely express his thoughts. ‘You have a grand gift of silence,’ he tells Watson in ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’. ‘It makes you invaluable as a companion. Upon my word, it is a great thing to have someone to talk to, for my own thoughts are not over-pleasant.’

And he still valued Watson’s advice on occasions, as well as the more practical help he was able to bring to an investigation. In both the Crooked Man and the Dying Detective inquiries, Holmes wanted Watson to act as a witness to the events, while in the Naval Treaty case Watson is pressed into service as a companion as well as a medical supervisor to Percy Phelps when Holmes sent him back to London with Watson to stay overnight at Baker Street. Watson’s medical knowledge also came in useful in the case of the Stockbroker’s Clerk, in which he was able to save the life of Beddington, the notorious forger and safe-breaker, after his suicide attempt.

Nevertheless, there are indications during 1889 that Holmes was making too many demands on his relationship with Watson, a situation which could have become overexacting or even psychologically damaging to Watson, whose self-esteem shows signs of suffering during this period when he compares his own intelligence with Holmes’.

‘I trust I am not more dense than my neighbours, but I was always oppressed by my own stupidity in my dealings with Sherlock Holmes,’ he confesses in ‘The Red-Headed League’.

It was saved from becoming so by two factors:
Watson’s removal to Kensington and Holmes’ involvement in a case of such immense importance and confidentiality that not even Watson could be informed of it.

At some time between 27th December 1889, the suggested date of the Blue Carbuncle case, and October 1890, the date generally accepted for the Red-Headed League inquiry, Watson sold his Paddington practice and moved to Kensington, although it is not known exactly when this took place. Watson himself only mentions this change of address in a passing remark in ‘The Red-Headed League’, when he refers in a typically laconic manner to driving home to his house in Kensington. It was near Church Street for, in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’, Holmes, disguised as an elderly bookseller, refers to himself as Watson’s neighbour as his shop is on the corner of Church Street. Apart from this and the fact that Watson had an ‘accommodating neighbour’ called Anstruther, very little else is known about it. Even its exact address is disguised. In ‘The Adventure of the Final Problem’, a case which will be examined in more detail in the next chapter, Watson describes Holmes scrambling over the garden wall into Mortimer Street where he hailed a hansom. However, as there is and never has been a Mortimer Street in the Kensington area, one must assume that Watson deliberately falsified the address so that it could not be identified, in much the same way as he disguised other facts, such as personal names and the exact location of 221B Baker Street.

During the year 1890 only three cases occurred of which, as Watson states, he kept any records. Although critics
disagree which these three inquiries were, according to the suggested chronology given earlier in the chapter they were most probably the Boscombe Valley mystery, the Red-Headed League inquiry and the case of the Dying Detective, the last two taking place after Watson’s move to Kensington.
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This decrease in the number of cases with which Watson was associated with Holmes may have been partly caused by this change of address. Kensington was about two miles from Baker Street, twice the distance Paddington was, and it was not so easy for Watson to call in casually at his former lodgings as he had done in the previous year, 1889. Although his new practice was smaller than his old one in Paddington, he was still kept busy. In ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, Watson speaks of a ‘fairly long list of patients’.

Holmes, too, as we shall see in the next chapter, was fully occupied with one particular investigation, which
was to absorb much of his time and attention during the latter part of this period.

Evidently, Holmes paid no call on the Watsons during 1890 and of the three cases in which Watson became involved, he was summoned to two of them by Holmes, once by telegram (‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’) and on the other occasion by Mrs Hudson, who took it upon herself to call on Watson when Holmes was apparently ill (‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’). However, it is clear from her remarks that the request for Watson’s presence had come from Holmes himself. Although at first refusing any medical attention, Holmes had at last reluctantly agreed to see a doctor, adding, ‘Let it be Watson, then.’

The only case with which Watson became associated through his own initiative was the Red-Headed League inquiry, when he called at Baker Street, the only recorded instance of his doing so during 1890. Business was apparently slack at the time for Watson tells Holmes, ‘I have nothing to do today.’ His added comment, ‘My practice is never very absorbing,’ should not, I believe, be taken too literally. Watson was probably salving his professional conscience by making the remark, although he may have been expressing a temporary boredom with his daily routine. He was, after all, thirty-seven or thirty-eight and the first flush of enthusiasm at returning to the medical profession was probably waning a little. And so, feeling in need of some excitement and finding himself with time on his hands, he called on Holmes.

Before the Boscombe Valley mystery, he was evidently
so busy that he was in two minds whether or not to accept Holmes’ invitation to travel to Herefordshire with him to investigate the case. It was only on his wife’s urging that Watson agreed to go.