Holmes and Watson (29 page)

But in one significant area of his life, Holmes underwent a fundamental change of heart which, like his increased forbearance and sociability, shows a more sympathetic response to other people. This was his attitude to women. Even before his retirement, he was already becoming less intolerant of them. In 1902, during the case of the Illustrious Client, he had expressed concern for Violet de Merville. Although exasperated by her pride and supreme self-complaisance, he was sufficiently moved by the thought of her fate, should she marry Baron Gruner, to remark: ‘I was sorry for her, Watson. I thought of her for the moment as I would have thought of a daughter of my own.’

He was even more affected by Maud Bellamy, whom he met during the Lion’s Mane inquiry. ‘Women have seldom been an attraction for me, for my brain has always governed my heart,’ Holmes writes, ‘but I could not look upon her perfect clear-cut face, with all the soft freshness of the Downlands in her delicate colouring, without realising that no young man would cross her path unscathed.’ Later, he adds, ‘Maud Bellamy will always remain in my memory as a most complete and remarkable woman.’

Not since his brief acquaintance with Irene Adler eighteen years earlier had Holmes’ emotions been so moved by a woman’s beauty and strength of personality. There is, too, in these remarks a note of uncharacteristic wistfulness, as if Holmes were regretting the daughter he had never had or were mourning his lost youth when he might have met and fallen in love with someone like
Maud Bellamy, if only his heart had not been ruled by his head. But it was too late.

Holmes was cared for by an elderly housekeeper whom he does not name. It has been suggested by some commentators that she was none other than Mrs Hudson, who had given up the Baker Street house to look after Holmes in his retirement. I consider this unlikely. Had the housekeeper been Mrs Hudson, Holmes would have referred to her by name. Nor was it in Mrs Hudson’s nature to indulge in gossip, as Holmes’ Sussex housekeeper obviously does, to the extent that he was obliged to discourage such conversations. Through her long relationship with Holmes, which had lasted for nineteen years,
*
Mrs Hudson knew better than to try to engage her gentleman lodger in idle chat. The impression one has of the anonymous Sussex housekeeper is of a garrulous local woman, possibly a widow, who had lived all her life in the area and whom Holmes employed after his retirement.

While on the subject of housekeepers, it is worth looking ahead to the events of August 1914, in which Martha, another elderly housekeeper, was to play a part. It is unlikely that Martha, whom Holmes introduced as his agent into the household of Von Bork, the German spy, was either Mrs Hudson or the Sussex housekeeper, although the description of her as ‘an old, ruddy-faced woman in a country cap’ with her knitting and her cat might better
fit the anonymous Sussex lady than Mrs Hudson with her London background. However, the Sussex housekeeper, with her predilection for gossip, hardly seems capable of acting as Holmes’ undercover agent, while Mrs Hudson, apart from the one occasion when she helped Holmes to bring about Colonel Moran’s arrest by turning the wax bust in the sitting-room window of 221B Baker Street, had never played any active role in assisting him in any of his other enquiries. In addition, Holmes arranges to meet Martha at Claridges Hotel in London for a debriefing after the case has been successfully concluded, an unnecessary rendezvous if she had been Mrs Hudson, for he could have interviewed her more conveniently at 221B Baker Street, or, if she were his Sussex housekeeper, waited until they had both returned home. I suggest, therefore, that the three women are quite separate individuals and that Holmes recruited Martha, possibly through an employment agency, to act as Von Bork’s housekeeper, having interviewed her personally and coached her in her role.

Less is known about Watson’s activities during this period. Presumably he was kept busy with his Queen Anne Street practice, although, as we have seen, he found time to spend an occasional weekend with Holmes in Sussex, where no doubt he accompanied Holmes on his walks across the Downs and may also have joined him in his early morning expeditions to the beach, although there is no evidence in the canon that Watson could swim. He was probably also introduced to Holmes’ new friends, in
particular Harold Stackhurst. Knowing Watson’s kind and generous nature, it is unlikely that he felt any resentment towards them but welcomed the fact that Holmes had found some like-minded companions.

Despite his busy professional life, Watson still found time for writing. In September 1903, the month of the Creeping Man inquiry, according to Watson one of the last cases which Holmes undertook before his retirement, Holmes lifted the ban on publication which he had imposed on his return to England in April 1894 after the Great Hiatus, although, as we have seen, it had been partially lifted in 1901 when Watson was permitted to publish
The Hound
of
the
Baskervilles
in serial form between August of that year and September 1902.

Watson made the most of this new authorial freedom. Between September 1903 and December 1904, he published both in this country and in America thirteen accounts of his earlier exploits with Holmes, beginning with ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’, in which he chronicled Holmes’ return to London in April 1894 and which was first published, not in
The Strand
but in the American magazine
Collier’s Weekly
. The series ended with ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’, which first appeared in
The Strand
in December 1904 and in
Collier’s
Weekly
in January 1905. Readers are referred to the chronology set out in Chapter Fourteen for the titles and publication dates of the other eleven accounts. All thirteen were published in 1905 in volume form under the general title of
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
.

The date of the first publication of ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ and the choice of
Collier’s
Weekly
rather than
The Strand
in which to launch it are, I believe, significant clues to the date of Holmes’ retirement. In his account of the case, Watson states that it was only ‘at the end of nearly ten years’ after the events that Holmes allowed him to publish it, that permission being granted on the ‘third of last month’, that is 3rd August 1903, the month before it appeared in
Collier’s Weekly
. This suggests that Holmes was making positive plans to retire and may already have found that ‘little farm’ of his dreams in Sussex by August of that year. Knowing his retirement was imminent, Holmes therefore lifted his veto and allowed Watson to publish his account of the Empty House case on the understanding that it appeared first in the States and that the English publication in
The Strand Magazine
was delayed until October, by which time Holmes had given up practising as a private consulting detective and had left Baker Street.

However, even when the embargo was lifted in September 1903, Watson’s problems were far from over. Holmes still continued to exercise editorial control over his publishing activities, as Watson makes clear in ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’. Because of Holmes’ objections to the publication of this latter account, Watson had intended to end the series with ‘The Adventure of the Abbey Grange’, which first appeared in print in September 1904. This decision was made, he explains, not through any shortage of material, for he has notes on many hundreds
of cases never alluded to, nor out of a lack of interest on the part of his readers, either in Holmes’ ‘singular personality’ or the ‘unique methods of this remarkable man’. But, on thinking the matter over, he decided that an account of the Second Stain inquiry would form a more appropriate climax to the sequence. He had, moreover, given his word that he would place this case before the public. The problem was persuading Holmes to allow its publication. To quote Watson’s own words, he states: ‘It was only upon my representing to him that I had given a promise that ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’ should be published when the time was right, and pointed out to him that this long series of episodes should culminate in the most important case which he has ever been called upon to handle that I at last succeeded in obtaining his consent that a carefully guarded account of the incident should at last be laid before the public.’

Watson does not specify to whom he gave this promise. It may have been his literary agent, if he had one, or possibly the proprietors of
The Strand
, who published his accounts and with whom he may have discussed projected subjectmatter. They would have had a keen interest in Watson’s literary output, as his chronicles of Holmes’ exploits were very popular with their readers. They may also have felt that, in view of the international situation in 1904, publication of ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’ was particularly apt. At that time, Great Britain was anxious, in the face of growing German expansionism and increased rearmament, to end its policy of ‘splendid
isolation’
*
which had marked Queen Victoria’s reign and the premiership of Lord Salisbury. With Victoria’s death in 1901 and Salisbury’s retirement in 1902, a new foreign policy was adopted and Britain began to cast around for European allies. In 1904 Edward VII made a state visit to Paris in order to patch up Britain’s relationship with its old enemy, France. Despite anti-British feeling, exacerbated by the Boer War (1899–1902),
†
Edward VII was able finally to win French support and an Entente was signed in 1904.

Although the Second Stain case dealt with events which had probably happened about eight years before,† nevertheless it was relevant to the political situation of 1904 in which Great Britain, aware of the growing threat posed by the Kaiser’s foreign policy, was attempting to hold the balance in Europe by signing the Entente with France, thereby preventing the scales of power falling too heavily in Germany’s favour, points which the prime minister at the time, Lord Bellinger, put to Holmes during the course of that inquiry. Indeed, the contents of the stolen letter, which Lord Bellinger had been so anxious to retrieve and which had criticised Great Britain’s colonial
policy, probably towards South Africa in 1895 before the outbreak of the Boer War, were also applicable to the 1904 situation after the Boer War, which had aroused strong anti-British feeling in Europe, particularly in Germany. Readers are reminded of the telegram sent by the Kaiser in 1896 congratulating the Boers and offering them friendship, an action seen by the British at the time as decidedly hostile.
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Publication of ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’ would therefore have been seen as an opportunity to put forward the British side of the situation and also to warn of the danger still posed by Germany.

These continuing difficulties in obtaining Holmes’ permission to publish certain accounts must have caused Watson considerable frustration as an author. It also placed him in an embarrassing situation with regard to his readers, to whom he felt he owed some explanation. But he could hardly blame Holmes outright for exercising this form of editorial control without placing his old friend in a poor light. In the end, Watson compromised by deliberately blurring the issue.

‘The real reason,’ he writes in ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’ in an attempt to explain the situation, ‘lay in the reluctance Mr Holmes has shown to the continued publication of his experiences. So long as he was in actual professional practice the records of his successes were of some practical value to him; but since he has definitely
retired from London and betaken himself to study and bee-farming on the Sussex Downs, notoriety has become hateful to him, and he has peremptorily requested that his wishes in this matter should be strictly observed.’

This sounds like an apologia for Holmes’ conduct. Readers will note that Watson makes no reference to the April 1894 ban which extended, with the exception of the publication of
The Hound of the Baskerville
s, until September 1903, a period of nearly nine and a half years when Holmes was, in fact, in active practice. Nor was the ban imposed, or rather re-imposed, immediately on Holmes’ retirement as Watson implies in his statement. Holmes was already living in Sussex when the majority of Watson’s thirteen accounts were published. Indeed, Holmes only decided that notoriety was ‘hateful’ to him fifteen months after his retirement when ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’ was first printed in
The Strand
in December 1904. Having belatedly made up his mind to avoid publicity, Holmes then re-imposed his veto on publication and Watson was silenced again until September 1908, a period of almost another four years. This aspect of Watson’s career as an author will be examined in more detail in the next chapter.

However, although Watson gives Holmes’ hatred of notoriety as the reason for his refusal to allow publication, there may have been a subconscious resentment on Holmes’ part towards Watson’s success as an author. Despite his own literary achievements, for example his monograph on the motets of Lassus and ‘The
Book of Life’, these were minor triumphs compared to Watson’s much greater output and widespread popularity. Holmes’ remark regarding the publication of his treatise on beekeeping – ‘Alone I did it.’ – could indicate such a resentment, while another comment made by him in ‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane’, which Holmes himself wrote, has all the hidden suggestiveness of a classic Freudian slip. In it, Holmes refers to ‘all my chronicles’ of past cases, as if claiming authorship of Watson’s accounts. If such an interpretation is correct, it might help to explain Holmes’ need to control not only Watson’s right to publish but other aspects of his life as well. By doing so, Holmes was asserting his authority over Watson who, in his eyes at least, was assuming authorial control of his own life by acting as his chronicler, a role which Holmes, with his dominant personality, found unacceptable on occasions.

Watson was under other publication restraints in addition to those imposed by Holmes. Because of the delicate nature of the case involving the blackmailer Charles Augustus Milverton, Watson had to wait until the ‘principal person’ in the inquiry, presumably the titled lady who shot Milverton, was herself dead before he could publish his account, and even then he deliberately withheld the date and other information in order that she should not be identified. As we have seen, he also had to be ‘guarded’ in his account of the Second Stain case, refraining from divulging all the facts because sensitive international issues were involved.