Holmes and Watson (30 page)

The subject of Watson’s writing and publishing activities
between September 1903 and December 1904 gives rise to several other notable factors. Firstly, in none of these accounts, and not even in those which were to be published towards the end of Watson’s life, is there any reference to his second wife, an omission which has been commented on earlier. One suspects that, as the years passed, this was not so much out of a need to suppress the old scandal surrounding his wife’s past nor fear of Neil Gibson’s revenge, both of which would have faded with time, but from a continuing anxiety on Watson’s part about Holmes’ reaction should any reference to this second marriage remind Holmes of his, Watson’s, so-called desertion and perhaps cause him to extend his ban on publication even further. One assumes the marriage was happy. There is no evidence in the canon to suggest otherwise.

With regard to Holmes’ objections to publicity, Watson must have discussed the whole matter with him either on his weekend visits to Sussex or by letter, a fact which is made evident by those comments already quoted from ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ and ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’.

Thirdly, and more importantly, although Holmes now lived in Sussex he was still exercising a degree of control over Watson’s life even from a distance, a state of affairs which Watson apparently accepted without protest. At least, he voices none. From this, we may reasonably assume that when the two men met, if only infrequently, their relationship almost certainly continued on much the same footing as before, Holmes acting as the dominant
partner in the friendship, Watson deferring to his wishes.

One final fact emerges concerning Watson’s life during this period from September 1903 to December 1904: the punishing work schedule he had set himself. Despite the calls made on him as a practising GP, he nevertheless managed to find the time to write on average one account a month, a total of about 100,000 words over fifteen months, an output which many professional full-time writers would find taxing and one which Watson himself had not surpassed since the time of the Great Hiatus, when he also produced over 100,000 words.

It should also be noted that, during both these exceptionally productive periods in Watson’s career as an author, Holmes was absent. During the first, he was travelling abroad; during the second, he had retired to Sussex. It is a sad but significant reflection on their friendship that, when Holmes was present, such were the demands he made on Watson’s time that the latter’s writing activities were considerably curtailed. As an author, Watson found himself in a classic double-bind situation. Without Holmes, he had no material on which to base his accounts. But when Holmes was there, he had scant opportunity to record it.

Very little is known about Holmes’ and Watson’s lives over the next seven years. In consequence, some commentators, unable to tolerate the silence, in much the same way as Nature is said to abhor a vacuum, have put forward their own theories in an attempt to fill this gap. Holmes, they suggest, was acting as a spy for the British authorities throughout this period. They even claim that, in this capacity, he was responsible in 1917 for handing over to the United States government the Zimmerman note which
proposed an anti-American alliance between Germany, Mexico and Japan should America remain neutral. It was the discovery of this note which led to America’s declaration of war against Germany shortly afterwards.

My own theory seems prosaic by comparison. I suggest he remained quietly in Sussex, tending his bees and enjoying all those other activities such as reading, swimming and walking over the Downs which had given him so much pleasure in the first four years of his retirement. The fact that he was reluctant to leave Sussex to undertake an important mission on behalf of his country and was only persuaded to do so by the personal intervention of no less a person than the prime minister tends to support this conclusion.

But he was not idle, for it was probably during this period that he wrote and published his book,
Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations on the Segregation of the Queen,
already referred to in the previous chapter.

Presumably he also kept up his friendship with Harold Stackhurst and other members of the staff at The Gables. But he and Watson seem to have drifted apart for, when they finally met in August 1914, it is quite clear that they have not seen each other for some considerable time. Watson’s comment that he has ‘heard’ of Holmes ‘living the life of a hermit’ among his bees and his books on a small Sussex farm is, of course, like his apparent ignorance of Professor Moriarty’s existence when Holmes came to visit him in Kensington at the beginning of the Final
Problem, merely a literary device intended to inform his readers of Holmes’ activities during his retirement. The account in which he makes this comment,
His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes
, was first published in
The Strand
in September 1917, while ‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane’, which Holmes himself wrote and in which he set out details of his life in Sussex up to July 1907, was not published until November 1926, nine years later. Watson was therefore obliged to fill in some background information about Holmes when he came to write his own account. His remark also tends to support the theory that Holmes remained in Sussex during those intervening years.

Like ‘The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone’, ‘His Last Bow’ was written in the third person, a choice of narrative form which was largely dictated by the material. As we have already seen, Watson was aware when he published ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’ that some cases in which he was either not present or had played too small a part ‘could only be told as by a third person’. This is certainly true of ‘His Last Bow’, which opens with a long discussion between Von Bork and Von Herling, witnessed by neither Holmes nor Watson. One can only assume either that Watson learnt the details of this conversation from Von Bork himself after he was arrested and taken to Scotland Yard for questioning, or that he was later given access to the report of the interview by one of the police officers. Watson’s choice of the third person may also reflect that loss of contact between himself and Holmes,
already referred to, which he may have thought was better indicated by the use of a less personal narrator.

This is not to suggest there was any serious rift in the relationship between Holmes and Watson between 1907 and 1914. When they finally meet, they greet one another with obvious pleasure. Their lack of contact is due more to a slow drifting apart, brought about by the physical distance between them, rather than through any specific alienation. Both were busy men, absorbed in their own very different lives and, as can happen in even the closest friendships, they found they had less and less in common as the years passed and there were fewer opportunities to meet.

Despite his work as a GP, Watson still found time for writing, although to a lesser extent than before. Once again, Holmes lifted his veto on publication in September 1908 when Watson was allowed to publish ‘Wisteria Lodge’, which appeared in print in
The Strand
in two parts during September and October of that year. It was the first of only six accounts which he published in the seven years between 1907 and 1914, the last being ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’, which first appeared in
Collier’s Weekly
in November 1914 and in
The Strand Magazine
the following month. Readers are referred to the chronology in Chapter Fourteen for the titles and publication dates of the other four accounts.

This diminution in literary output may have been partly caused by the demands made on Watson’s time by his professional duties, although difficulties in gaining
Holmes’ permission to publish were largely to blame. As Watson makes clear in ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’, it was because of Holmes’ ‘aversion to publicity’ and not through any lack of interesting material that has caused him ‘of late years to lay very few of my records before the public’. In fact, he wrote his account of the case only after receiving a telegram from Holmes containing the message: ‘Why not tell of the Cornish Horror – the strangest case I have ever handled.’ Watson himself had no idea what had prompted Holmes to make this suggestion, but he immediately set to work to look out his notes on the case and to begin writing them up before Holmes could change his mind and send another telegram cancelling the arrangement. It would seem that, in withholding and granting permission, Holmes was acting largely on whim. Although there are no signs that he continued to suffer from those periods of manic depression which he had experienced as a younger man, he remained mercurial by nature. As an author, Watson must have found this behaviour frustrating. However, Watson was evidently given permission to write an account of the Birlstone tragedy which had occurred in the late 1880s and in which Professor Moriarty and his gang had played such a significant role. As well as the six short accounts already referred to, Watson must have also written this novel-length narrative,
The Valley of Fear
, during this same period, for it was published as a serial in
The Strand
between September 1914 and May 1915. It was issued in volume form in the latter year.

One detail of Watson’s private life is, however, recorded for this period. He learnt to drive, a useful accomplishment for a busy GP. In the past, he had either walked or taken a cab when visiting his patients. But he was now in his fifties, no longer a young man, and the convenience of driving himself round his practice, especially in bad weather, must have made life a great deal easier for him. It is also a tribute to Watson’s adaptability and continuing sense of adventure that he was willing to learn this new skill at a relatively late age. The car he owned was a modest Ford and he evidently became a capable driver, for during the Von Bork inquiry it was only his expertise which prevented a collision with Von Herling’s larger and more powerful limousine. Apparently, Holmes never learnt to drive but with his simple Sussex life-style he would have had less need of transport.

But at some time in 1912, Holmes’ quiet way of life was to be disrupted as the international situation worsened and he was called out of retirement to serve his country for the last time.

The strained relations between Germany and Great Britain have already been commented on (pp. 291-92 and 395-98) in relation to the Second Stain case in which, as we have seen, Great Britain, alarmed by the growing power of the Triple Alliance, formed by Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, patched up its old differences with France and signed the Entente in 1904. This was followed three years later by the Anglo-Russian agreement, thus forming the Triple Entente to counterbalance the Triple Alliance.

Great Britain also reorganised and rearmed its fleet, the supremacy of which had been challenged by Germany’s expansion of its own navy in the late 1890s under Bismarck. In 1907 the first of the new ‘Dreadnought’ class of battleships was launched, followed by eighteen more between 1909 and 1911. Weighing 17,900 tons and capable of 21 knots, these Dreadnought battleships, armed with ten 12-inch guns, were the largest and best equipped in the world. The British army was also reorganised, a Territorial Force set up and Officer Training Corps (OTCs) established in all public and secondary schools in order to prepare a young officer class should relations with Germany worsen and war break out.

It was because of this heightening of tension that in 1910 Germany decided to send one of its most experienced spies, Von Bork, to England in order to gather information and to assess Great Britain’s state of war-readiness. Von Bork was an ideal choice for the task. A young and wealthy aristocrat who spoke excellent English, he was also a sportsman. His prowess on the polo and hunting fields and skill at yachting and driving a four-in-hand
*
guaranteed him entry to English upper-class society, from which were drawn top-grade officials in the diplomatic corps and Foreign Office as well as higher-ranking army and naval personnel. He even boxed with some of the younger officers. These social contacts would have provided him
with the opportunity to listen to conversations between these members of the Establishment. Such conversations could be ‘amazingly indiscreet’, as Baron Von Herling, Chief Secretary to the German Legation in London, with whom Von Bork was working in close liaison, discovered for himself during a weekend spent at a cabinet minister’s country house where Von Bork had also been a guest.

Through his own contacts, Von Herling was able to assure Von Bork that, as far as he could ascertain, Great Britain was quite unprepared for war. It was a situation similar to that of 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War when, compared to Germany’s state of military rearmament under Hitler, Great Britain was ill-equipped to take part in a major conflict.

Von Bork owned his own country residence, a large mansion in Essex overlooking Harwich harbour where he played the part of the country squire. He also adopted another personality, that of the ‘hard-drinking, night-club, knock-about-town, devil-may-care young fellow’ which would have endeared him to the raffish circle of friends with which the pleasure-loving Edward VII surrounded himself. So good was his cover that Von Bork was confident that no one suspected him of espionage.

‘They are not hard to deceive, these Englanders,’ he was to tell Von Herling. ‘A more simple, docile folk could not be imagined.’

In coming to this conclusion, Von Bork had seriously misread the signals, assuming Great Britain would be unwilling to declare war, a mistake Hitler was to make
when in 1933 the Oxford Union, the university debating society, passed the motion: ‘That this country refuses in any circumstances to fight for King and Country’ by 275 votes to 153. Six years later some of those young men would be fighting in France.

In his information gathering, Von Bork paid special attention to naval installations, harbours and the movement of shipping, particularly after 1912 when the British navy was transferred from the Mediterranean to patrol the North Sea, the Atlantic and the English Channel as a precaution against possible German aggression. During his time in England, Von Bork also built up a highly successful spy-ring which, by 1914, consisted of at least five active agents, including Steiner and Hollis and an American citizen, Jack James.

By 1912 fighting had already broken out in Eastern Europe in an area which today is still politically unstable. In 1908 Austria-Hungary, encouraged by the disintegration of the Turkish empire, had taken the opportunity to seize Bosnia and Herzogovenia, former Turkish possessions. This had led to the first Balkan war of 1912 in which the inhabitants of other parts of the area, in particular the Serbs, rose against the Turks, whom they defeated. The following year, they rebelled again in an attempt to free Bosnia from Austrian domination. An event which occurred in Bosnia on 28th June 1914, as we shall see later in the chapter, was to trigger the outbreak of the First World War.

Holmes must have been aware of the tense international
situation which preceded this event. Although it is not known if he possessed a wireless set, he had always been an avid reader of newspapers and, while he may not have scanned them quite so eagerly as in the past for reports on crime, he cannot have failed to notice at least the headlines as the crisis deepened.

In 1912 the British Government decided to ask for his help when it was realised by those same men with whom Von Bork had gone drinking, hunting and sailing that a spy-ring was operating virtually under their noses, although they apparently were not yet aware of the identity of the man who was controlling it. Holmes had already served his country on at least three occasions in the past: the inquiry into the missing Naval Treaty in 1889 which was not connected with international espionage and, more importantly, with two further investigations in the 1890s, the Bruce-Partington Plans affair and the Second Stain investigation. Both of these had involved foreign agents: the first Hugo Oberstein, almost certainly German, and the second Eduardo Lucas, probably of Italian origin. In both cases, Holmes had been specifically asked to undertake the investigations either by Mycroft Holmes, acting on behalf of the British Government in the Bruce-Partington affair, or, more directly in the Second Stain inquiry, by the Prime Minister and the Secretary for Foreign Affairs. As we have seen, Holmes was offered a place, which he refused, in the honours list for the part he played in the Bruce-Partington case. He had also been offered a knighthood which he had again refused. Readers
are referred back to Chapter Fourteen and to Appendix One for more detailed accounts of these two inquiries and the part Holmes played in their successful conclusion.