Best and Wisest Man

by Hamish Crawford

  11 The Diogenes Club, as Holmes explained in ‘The Greek Interpreter’ (1893), was founded for “the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Strangers’ Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed.”

  1892

  It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished … It was my intention … to have said nothing of that event which has created a void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to fill.

  -‘The Final Problem’ (1894)

  19 April - Can there be an opening line in all literature that has such hidden complexity, and such truth to life, as Dickens’ immortal: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”?

  This is the first time I have dared to take up my pen since those momentous, dreadful events of nearly a year ago. Only now do I feel sufficiently fortified to sift through its wreckage and extract both the good and the bad from it.

  There is, regrettably, only one place to begin - that fateful day last May when James returned from Switzerland, alone. Moriarty had lured him away to Meiringen with word of a sick patient, and he and Holmes both plunged to their deaths in the Reichenbach Falls. When James returned, he said nothing about it for days, and indeed was very relaxed and light-hearted. He was quite his old self as he asked myself and little Mary about her week (she is talking quite a lot these days).

  Soon after, there was all the business of Holmes’s funeral, which was sombre and poorly attended. His brother Mycroft, Mrs. Hudson, and a handful of ne’er-do-wells from around London, who were touchingly gratified by the benefit Holmes had given to their lives and situations, paid their respects.

  Mycroft was an even more distant and alienating figure than his brother, and hovered on the fringes but talked to no one aside from James. James - who was welcomed at the event almost as a brother - remained cordial but taciturn throughout, and became even more so when the will was read and his modest bequest was acknowledged.

  Oddly, Mycroft has continued to rent the rooms in Baker Street from Mrs. Hudson. Perhaps they shall stand as a monument to his feats in detection, much as Dr. Samuel Johnson’s house in Gough Square has become a shrine to logomaniacs and lexicographers from far and wide.

  A few days after all this, with the dust settled, I saw fit to ask him about Holmes.

  “Yes, yes,” he said lightly. I was somewhat taken aback by his casualness, but then he added: “Don’t you see, Mary, it is all that Holmes wanted. As he said himself in his … his last note to me, that it was the most fitting way he could see of concluding his life’s work. In a way, I cannot begrudge him that wish … so painful though it was to me.”

  I thought back to that horrible day before they left. It made me glad - in a grim way that I did not enjoy feeling - that the man who had perpetrated all that misery was now finally perished, and that no more lives would be ruined by the poisonous shadow of Moriarty. And part of what made Holmes so very special was that he considered it worth the cost of his own life to eliminate that evil for all time.

  I wonder, however, how long this façade shall hold up. James is clearly wracked with emotional torment about all this. I had fully prepared to nurse him through this difficult recovery. I know that he is bottling up his true feelings with that famous stoical reserve that he has shown so many times. Usually, though, he has permitted me to see him with that guard down, but not in this case. I wonder, and worry, about why this could be.

  It cannot be helping James’s grief that, in another way, Holmes is very much alive. Shortly before he departed to Switzerland for Holmes’s ‘Final Problem’, James consulted with Herbert Greenhough Smith, editor of the Strand Magazine. Further to that meeting, since last July, James’s reminiscences have been running in that periodical, with Arthur Conan Doyle once again acting as editor, literary agent, and de facto co-author. So far nine Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as they will be called when published in book form this October, have been published - from ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ to ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’, taking in ‘The Red-Headed League’, ‘The Blue Carbuncle’, and ‘The Man With the Twisted Lip’ amongst others.

  I thought the popularity of The Sign of Four was quite inconceivable, but this! Herbert has been around several times to congratulate James on his excellent work. Though the exact figures have yet to be calculated, he is willing to estimate that Sherlock Holmes - or rather, as he indelicately put it, Conan Doyle’s name on the magazine’s cover - has added 100,000 copies to its circulation!

  I can well believe it. Whenever I am about town with either James or Arthur, they are stopped in the street by admirers. Though Arthur has scathingly said, “I don’t know how they recognize Dr. Watson here. Those illustrations are awful! I had wanted Walter Paget but ended up with his brother Sidney.”

  “I must say, Mr. Paget gives Sherlock Holmes a very handsome likeness,” I opined.

  “Aye, that’s where he goes wrong,” Arthur objected. “Still, all those women readers of the Strand seem - ridiculous though it is to say it - quite taken with that caricature they see every month.”

  “And what about my likeness?” James asked. “Do I look more handsome on the page than in person?”

  “Well, that would be quite impossible,” I dutifully riposted as I kissed him on the cheek. I dare say Arthur groaned at this.

  The good news does not stop there. Arthur has made additional money from the American publication (as well as a New York edition of the Strand, they have been syndicated in several American papers). We passed Baker Street one morning, and saw line-ups of people outside, staring up at those empty rooms of 221B.

  “They have a word for these people in America,” Conan Doyle muttered darkly. “They call them ‘fans’.”

  “Why ever would they name them for those folding devices to cool one’s skin?” I asked.

  “It is a shortening of the word ‘fanatic’.”

  25 May - An odd conversation with James today. He has become ever more distracted, and gives little attention to little Mary, myself, or even his patients. He has generally neglected me as a wife also, and I have taken to elaborately hinting that another child may settle this imbalance.

  We have never had any difficulty in communication before. And I know exactly why it is - but every time I bring up the subject of Holmes, James merely clamps shut and will talk of other matters like a man possessed.

  That made our discussion today all the more remarkable. Sadly, it was far from an amiable subject. “Do you know,” he began, “I feel quite better about Holmes. I know you have worried about me a bit these last few months my dear, but I am sure that I have solved it.”

  “I have indeed worried about you, but I know how hard it must be to put all those terrible events behind you.”

  “That is what I thought as well. But today I realized that I do not have to.”

  “Why is that?” I asked, trying to keep the concern from my voice.

  “Well, it occurs to me. I did not see Holmes go over the side of the Reichenbach Falls. I was called away and returned to find this note. What if Holmes had gotten rid of Moriarty, survived, but wanted the world to think he was dead? For the purposes of sorting out Moriarty’s gang and so forth.”

  “So you doubt whether Holmes is dead?”

  “Emphatically. In fact, I believe he is probably at large in London. I’m sure he is disguised somewhere and will come out of the woodwork when the time is right. But it makes it quite impossible, my dear, to consider having any more children with you.”

  My heart quite sank when I heard these words. “Why is that?” I asked as blandly as possible.

  “Well, little Mary - though I am charmed and blessed by her presence every minute of her life - is already quite a commitment on my part as a father, and indeed upon you as a mother. I must be ready, furthermore, at any time
to pick up Holmes’s gauntlet and resume our adventures. You yourself said that we should never leave each other’s side, and I hope you are as good as your word!”

  I have been to see Arthur about this, and though it is somewhat outside his expertise, he has given me some draughts to help James sleep. Some nights I hear him prowling and pacing downstairs, and once, I was certain I heard muffled sobbing.

  13 June -Little Mary continues her progress, and will begin this autumn in school. She has become a polite and charming young lady, and wherever possible I have been there to look after her. I remember my own isolated upbringing all too well.

  “You are very good to me Mummy,” she said with that delightful candour that children are so expert at.

  “And what about your father? Is he good as well?”

  “Oh yes. But we cannot expect too much of him, Mummy.”

  “Why is that?”

  “He does miss Mister Shylock so very much.” Understandably for a toddler, she finds Sherlock Holmes’s name difficult to say. “I don’t think he’ll be better until Mr. Shylock comes back.”

  “Do you think he will come back?”

  “Daddy thinks he will. And Daddy must be right about that, because he is one of the cleverest people I know. We are all very lucky, we Watsons. Probably you and I got it from Daddy being such good friends with Mr. Shylock.”

  24 June -With the last of the twelve Adventures of Sherlock Holmes published, James had another of these brainstorms. He has lately been obsessing over the publication schedule, and Arthur and Herbert have been so very accommodating to get him so involved. In truth, there is little he can contribute to these meetings, but both men know it is helping James along.

  I feel far better today than I have for some time. James and I had a long conversation about the state of affairs for the last little while.

  “I realized what a damn fool I have been acting,” he began. “I was out on a call by Aldersgate Street, and I saw past the usual peddlers and vendors this old bookseller. I was positive that it was Holmes. I walked past him a couple of times, and then I whispered in his ear. He talked back to me, and I congratulated him on his uncanny performance. One of his best disguises yet. I waffled on and on, and this bookseller started looking at me as though I was mad. It was like … it was like that time we went to Brighton …”

  The walls then finally broke down, and the tears he had been holding back so very long gushed forth like a tidal wave.

  “How desperately, desperately I wanted not to believe it, or to believe that it would not affect me!” he cried. “Oh, everything is so dreary, so totally and entirely dreary now. What do I do? Mary, for the love of God, what do I do?”

  I felt so wretched consoling him, for even then I was left with a twinge of wounded pride. I decided to treat him with equal candour, and say what I felt. “I feel responsible,” I admitted. “I feel I have let you down as a wife, letting you decline to this terrible state.”

  He wiped the tears from his eyes and seized me in his arms. “Mary, how can you possibly say that? You are the best and wisest woman I have ever known, but you still get things abominably wrong sometimes!” He laughed at this, the first and most genuine laugh he has had in a long while.

  “Tell me why,” I replied, smiling at his improved spirits.

  “I owe the shreds of sanity and self-worth that I still have to you, my truest love. I think of Holmes and all I can think is how I let him down, how my absence contributed to his death - no matter how much he intended it to be so, I should have known, I should have been sharper! But seeing you and Mary, and the joy and love that I continue to get from you daily … the world has for so long seemed such a grey and lacklustre place. That veil of evil that seemed to descend on the metropolis last January has lifted, but it is as though gauze still remains in place, making everything fuzzy and blurry, vague and distorted. Just a miasma of banality. Into that miasma, though, comes down these shafts of brilliant bright light. They remind me what it was all for. You remind me what it was all for. Now let me take you at once to bed, and I shall set about obliging your most recent nuptial request.”

  Entering into the spirit of this humour he was now in, I admitted, “You have neglected your obligations in that matter for rather a long while.”

  28 June -To echo James’s metaphor, it feels as though that veil has fully lifted! We went to Brighton, and never have those beaches and piers seemed so gloriously sunny in all my visits there!

  When James had gone to fetch us some ice cream, little Mary decided to broach the subject of her father’s improved humour.

  “He has come to terms with some difficult facts,” I said, trying to be as vague as I possibly could. I did not, after all, want to upset my daughter having just healed my husband.

  “It’s Mister Shylock, isn’t it?” little Mary asked. “He’s not coming back after all.”

  “No he is not,” I said simply. I looked at her as I would look upon a friend, desperate for some sympathy or words of wisdom. The clever little creature that she is, she recognized this entreaty at once.

  “Then we shall have to look after Daddy even more than before,” she concluded. “He only has us to depend on now.”

  I held her close to me, and laughed and cried. “Yes, I could not have said it better myself, Mary. That is exactly what we must do.”

  “I think I’ll be better at it than you,” she then remarked.

  15 December - We are flush with good news at the moment, with the book edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes continuing to sell well and the Strand publishing another twelve with the title of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. To think that, a few months ago, he was toying - quite indelicately, I must say - with the idea of adding Holmes’s death to the end of ‘The Copper Beeches’. His mother had dissuaded him from this. But now, more Holmes stories shall come - and what is the more remarkable in fact, Greenhough Smith was so desperate for Arthur to do another series that he has paid him £1,000! If ever there was proof of the craze for Sherlock Holmes, this is it! I cannot imagine the demand and the downright hysteria for these detective stories continuing past that, but who knows?

  With our share of this bounty, James has surprised me with a treat. Over Christmas, we shall go away to Switzerland with the Conan Doyles. Arthur has been telling him all about skiing and James is awfully keen to have a try at it.

  26 December - James is somewhat slower to adapt to skiing than Arthur, but I keep telling him that his war wound gives Arthur the advantage. The Conan Doyles’ daughter Mary Louise, is the same age as our little Mary, so the two have become great friends. Arthur’s wife Louise - ‘Tooie’, as he calls her - has been quite unwell. She attributes this to the strain placed upon her by travel, and so recently giving birth to their second child Kingsley. As a result, though, I have spent most days with her, and I think she has welcomed some company.

  One evening, when James and I were walking about in this magical Swiss village, the true spirit of Christmas all around us, he said to me, “Mary, I am truly sorry I have neglected you as a husband. I know you will deny it fervently but I mean to turn over a new leaf.”

  “You do not know I would deny it. Perhaps in parts I agree, but I understand why.”

  “You always have my dear. And I hope that our family can enter this new year with its demons behind it.”

  31 December -Emotions have run higher than might be expected for holidaying Britons. On Hogmanay, Arthur and James imbibed rather heavily, and became very verbose (as I know from experience James is apt to do, although it seldom happens).

  “My dear Louise, my dear Mary, do either of you know exactly what it was that brought old Watson here and myself together? What made friends of us?”

  We both confessed that we did not. James made an aggravated cough, that I knew to be his inarticulate attempt to abort this topic of conversation. Arthur merely raised his voice to talk over the noise.

  “Louise, I have of course told you of my dear father.
Mary, you are no doubt familiar with John’s brother Henry.”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “Now Arthur, there’s no need to go into all of that,” James protested.

  “Old Watson - old John here - well, that was it. In this world, when you have a weakness like the drink, it doesn’t matter what else you do. My father was a talented artist you know. I tried so hard to help him however I could.”

  James turned to me. “He got him to illustrate A Study in Scarlet you know. I never quite forgave him for giving Holmes that giant beard.”

  As we all laughed, Arthur added, “Father has a giant beard you know. Didn’t believe Sherlock Holmes was real, he thought I’d based the character on him!” Then he became serious once again. “But John here, he knew. It was the same with Henry.”

  “Yes indeed. And you were a great help to me during the worst of those years. I hope I was the same to you.”

  “Of course you were, man! That’s what has made you such a good doctor.”

  “You are both good doctors,” I added.

  “I don’t know how good a doctor I am,” Arthur remarked with a blush. “All that fame that Sherlock Holmes, and the good Doctor Watson here, have gathered is in some part due to my lack of success.”

  “Oh, don’t say that Arthur!” Louise remonstrated.

  “No, no, Tooie, it’s true. I came to London last year, determined that tuberculosis would be my area of speciality. I went to Viennese lectures, took as many notes as I could with my limited understanding of German. But I was convinced - convinced, I tell you - that this was where my future lay. So I packed up my practice in Southsea and started one up in Devonshire Place. Not a single patient came, not one! So I turned back to Herbert at the Strand with those two stories Watson had given me.”

  “Well then, your professional loss is the gain of the world of literature,” I said.

  “Damn it all though, I wouldn’t have done it without Watson here,” Arthur continued. James was now even more embarrassed at his friend’s over-affection, but I always find him somewhat adorable in this state so saw no problem in his friend continuing. “I never saw the potential of the Holmes stories, still can’t quite fathom how immensely successful they are. I owe that to you John.”