Watson's Last Case
Page 17
Several years later one of those double-edged things came to pass. It was 1897, Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. I had a hankering to see London again, but no means of achieving my goal. Sign on as a ship’s surgeon perhaps, but I had lost confidence in my ability with the knife in my addiction. Fate was to hold my hand. I went to an American Club in Shanghai (I was banned from the English ones) and read the newspapers. For some reason a copy of the Manchester Guardian was there. Naturally I chose to read that in preference to the San Diego Charger or the Seattle Sounder. In the personal columns was an advertisement asking for the whereabouts of a ‘Surgeon Stamford’ late of ‘Keralu’. The name given was Mrs Eileen Foggarty — my wife’s mother.
A month later I was at the club again with a ticket to England in my pocket. Old Foggarty had died and his wife had wished to trace me with a view to bringing what remained of the family together again.
1897 was a great year for me. I saw the Jubilee, was reunited with my family both of blood and in-law, and felt that a new start beckoned. I had not reckoned with my addiction. No matter what I tried it still haunted me. I thought of seeing Holmes or Watson again but somehow felt out of place. I returned to Liverpool to continue my studies of tropical diseases and help to look after the cotton mill of my in-laws.
I tried to become a respectable man of local affairs but always I felt that I would betray myself by an involuntary gesture or flush or stutter of speech or any one of a thousand ways in which the drug addict reveals himself. Slowly I weaned myself from the most serious addiction — mainly through reading Watson’s accounts of Holmes’s adventures and his recovery from his dependence. Often I too wished for a Cyril Overton to appear to dash temptation from me when the mood was on me. I was not always so lucky!
When the Great War started in 1914 I felt that my last chance had come to make amends for my indiscretions. To be exiled to the freezing North Atlantic was what I needed. I lied about my age — not that I really needed to — and was taken on.
As the war entered its final phase I was tired of being shot at by U-boats, I wanted to fight back. I was really too old for the Senior Service as such so I joined the Q-ships. I joined up with the Ready, a brigantine square rigger in the North Sea, and met someone I had first come across many years before in Singapore. He was a Pole by birth but was now called Conrad. We had to laugh — he was far older than I was and had been ashore for longer than I had. He saw no action on his tour. He had not changed much I thought as I saw his back receding down the gangplank for the last time — as taciturn as ever. Perhaps all great thinkers have to be like that, and it was not long before Holmes was on my mind again.
My last tour saw action. Our decoy tactics worked and we enticed not one but two U-boats to the surface expecting easy pickings. We threw off our disguise and sank one of them. That was my swansong at sea as it were.
The bar of the Criterion was a welcome and safe harbour.
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[1] Either Watson did not have a good history teacher or he was not an attentive pupil: the phrase was coined by Nicholas I of Russia.
[2] *Leader of Holmes’s ‘Baker Street Irregulars.’
[3] D. Martin Dakin was a bible scholar, who with others voiced suspicion concerning the authorship of the Casebook, although even he did not solve the problem completely.
[4] I suggest St Crispin’s Day, 25th October, because of his love of Henry V’s ‘the game’s afoot’.
[5] I was travelling under an assumed name at the time for reasons which will become clear later.
[6] The Naval Treaty
[7] Black Peter.
[8] The Norwood Builder.
[9] The Sign of Four.
[10] In The Sign of Four Watson clearly recalls Ballarat from his youth.
[11] Watson fainted only once in his life — The Empty House.
[12] Shoscombe Old Place.