Following this, I went back and discovered the Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and after that the earliest novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four. I cannot recall how often I have re-read these books. Some lines are as familiar and precious to me as Shakespeare or Scripture passages. I know from Mother’s diary that Conan Doyle was sceptical and dismissive of the ‘fans’ Holmes had attracted. I know that my father regarded his hostility towards the Holmes character as more than a little mean-spirited, and I somewhat resented it as well. However, I was just glad, glad to be in the company once more of this great family that I had become detached from.
Though as a student and a scholar of Father’s writing and Holmes’s celebrated detective methods I admired various qualities in many different episodes, my favourite was always The Sign of Four. There was something so very romantic about it - even though Father showed considerable restraint in describing Mother - and having such a frank and candid account of their first meeting constantly reminded me of the love they held for each other. It was a love I was confident was still very present when Mother breathed her last. Whether it was Father’s relation or Conan Doyle’s presentation, the story’s concluding chapter was magically poignant for me. The personal connection it held, and the distance it showed between the two men, and the promise of the happy life Father then believed lay long ahead for himself and Mother - considering all that made me, for the first time, lose my composure and confront the sorrow that for so long lay numbing my heart.
Fresh from this strange self-discovery - and perhaps right in the crux of the confusing emotions that many girls feel in their thirteenth year - I reacted perhaps slightly badly to Mrs. Forrester’s confrontation with me over my choice of reading material. She tore The Sign of Four out of my hand and gripped it so tightly I thought she was going to snap its spine in two.
“John Watson!” she spat.
“Whatever is the matter, Mrs. Forrester?” I asked innocently.
“That man! Seeing his name fills me with such anger!” she roared.
Knowing Mrs. Forrester’s placid temperament, I was surprised at this anger. Her worst character trait until now had been a certain eagerness to judge, but this was an entirely new and unexpected facet. Additionally, it was confusing as only a few weeks earlier we were both guests at Father’s wedding, and she was perfectly cordial to him and his new wife - my stepmother, it seems odd to record.
It seemed as though the redder passions that I was in the throes of were mirrored and amplified by the elder woman’s.
“Mrs. Forrester, whatever has come over you?” I asked, slightly unsettled in truth by all this lack of composure. “What has Father done to deserve such hostility?”
“What has your father done indeed? Mary, I can’t believe you can ask that question! Seeing him go off with another woman as though he were … buying a new hat!”
“You disapprove of his new wife?”
“I disapprove, you silly child, of the whole union! Surely you must be emotional about it yourself? To think of your poor mother … taken so young! At least my Cecil had led a full life when … when!” She stopped talking and angrily waved her hand in my face. I could see from the beady squint she was giving me that the memories were extremely painful for her. “Perhaps you don’t understand.”
It seems bloodless of me, and not a little cruel, but at that moment I felt angry at her insensitivity to my sadness. With the passage of time, I can see she saw in me a lack of empathy for her own deep wells of sorrow, but I did not draw this connection. As a result, my response to her was high-handed and a little cold.
“Our grief takes different forms, Mrs. Forrester. For instance, it is through reading my father’s accounts of his early, happy days with Mother, that I for the first time properly considered her terrible absence from my life. I hope you can appreciate that.”
She nodded acquiescently, and uttered a slightly mumbled apology. “It just all seems such a waste. To think that there’s nothing that can be done anymore. To think how he’s let you down as a father.”
“But surely, he has seen to my education and my upbringing.”
“Financially, yes, he has. And very grateful I am for that, and I think it is sweet of you to accept it for what it is. But he has remained so absent, so distant. I don’t know how he can treat you that way.”
“I think it’s unfair of you to judge him by such … prosaic markers,” I said haughtily. “He is, after all, not merely concerned with his living and his family. He plays for so much larger stakes. It would be selfish of me to demand more commitment from him! Read his writing, Mrs. Forrester, recall your own part in it … then you will see why we are lucky to even have the fleeting contact we did with my father.”
Mrs. Forrester flipped through the book. I really hoped she would take it and read it, but she seemed to use it more as an aide-memoire for her recollections. At the time I thought her a little self-centred to do so, but as an adult I see why she did so.
“Things were so different then, but now … just a few years later, and we’re all so alone. Him, of course, by choice. But to cut off his own daughter like he’s done. At first I regarded him and Holmes as good people, their eccentricities endearing. To see Mary - your mother - at the time, well I had never seen her so happy.”
“I know, Mrs. Forrester. Father recalls it with the same happiness. You can read it all in here.”
With some trepidation, I slid the now discarded George Newnes hardback her way. She flipped through it cursorily - registering a tiny smirk at the illustrations that gave Holmes a beard or a moustache - but then she dropped the book on the table.
“You are very right, dear Mary. I cannot begrudge you this connection. But I cannot revisit it, there’s nothing but pain in there for me now. All that was happy and bright about those days is now withered and blighted.”
Not being able to talk my thoughts over with Mrs. Forrester, and having no one at school who remotely understood any of these complexities, I turned Mother’s life over in my mind, repeatedly. I cast my mind back to her last years of life so I could absorb their every detail. There seems to me now, writing this down, something of hero-worship about all this, as I was using the methods of Holmes to detach myself from my emotions and collect an ample and unabridged mental encyclopaedia of this turmoil. Perhaps then, I could understand it.
Whatever my reasoning, I pored over these details. I recalled how deeply Father had mourned her, and how empty his life seemed without her and Holmes. I intimately knew and felt his fragility, his need for support. In some ways, he was more vulnerable than Mother in that regard. A quiet stoicism had entered into her early, from her lifelong isolation and her travelling. Perhaps it concealed sadness and regret, but it gave the impression of a strong constitution in its own way. Father was never a solitary man, enjoying the company of fellow soldiers, of the gentlemen at his club and his old school friends, and lastly and most importantly, of Sherlock Holmes.
Anyhow, I tried to convey some of the impressions I now write down to Mrs. Forrester. My lack of consideration made them inevitably sound a trifle less formed, and I regret to say I lost my temper with my guardian on several occasions. In her capacity as a governess, she was used to the passions of her pupils, though, and bore my repeated frustrations with patience. I am glad that she did, for it would have caused me great sorrow to lose her wisdom early on owing to my callow lack of understanding.
It is surreal to recall my next encounter with my father was seeing him as a character in a stage melodrama. A friend of mine from school, Constance Quinn, invited me to see William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes. I knew that Mrs. Forrester would not approve, so I told her I was attending George Dance’s dreary musical, A Chinese Honeymoon, playing at the Royal Strand (which, by the way, entailed a side-trip down to Wych Street to pinch a discarded programme in order to complete the deception!).
It seemed a very surreal mix of fact and fiction that Sherlock Holmes was playing at the
Lyceum Theatre, where fifteen years earlier my mother had her rendezvous with Holmes and Watson and went to Thaddeus Sholto’s house.
Just as with The Hound of the Baskervilles, I was struck by the closeness and yet the distortion of my kin, as seen through the lens of William Gillette’s writing and performance. His Holmes was not the man I knew. And yet he was. That was the true strange power of the distortion, that it still reflected so much that was true in the man. For Holmes was no man of action, did not have women swooning over him, did not have the charisma William Gillette imbued him with. By heaven, Mr. Gillette even spoke in the swaggering tones of an American, not the cultivated and undemonstrative English diction that so soothed me as a younger girl. But behind that - well, ‘inaccuracy’, dare I say - all of these things were true about Holmes.
As I saw this foolish hero, leaping about the stage, escaping from Moriarty’s evil clutches, and making declamations of love in the arms of Alice Faulker, I wondered whether I had slightly fallen in love with Sherlock Holmes. I also wondered, comparing the heroic but false stage protagonist with his truer but more alien real-life counterpart, whether this was not sadder and more impossible than any of the improbable melodrama that Mr. Gillette’s scenario had inflicted upon theatre-goers.
Constance’s mother was principally interested in Mr. Gillette, and perhaps less for his fidelity to the man and myth of Holmes than for his aesthetic qualities. To such fickle but enthusiastic criticism, I know the play measured up most favourably, for both Mrs. Quinn and the audience at large. The large crowd laughed, cheered, and yelled in a manner most unlike the polite and staid London theatre-goers’ normal mien. And, when there was widespread laughter and applause at Gillette’s invented catch-phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson,”, I knew that the audience shared Mrs. Quinn’s fascination. I remember feeling somewhat - was it embarrassed? No, surely even that would be unfair of me - but I certainly felt distant when Mrs. Quinn ejaculated a loud sigh at the moment Holmes admitted his life for Alice.
It was this moment that I took issue with as the curtain fell.
“There is nothing in the stories that would suggest Holmes would ever fall in love so glibly. And his words were so out of character, so incredibly false. ‘I suppose - indeed I know - that I love you. I love you. But I know as well what I am - and what you are - I know that no such person as I should ever dream of being a part of your sweet life. It would be a crime for me to think of such a thing. There is every reason-’”
“My dear Mary,” Mrs. Quinn reproached me. “It is not what Mr. Holmes said, but what Alice did after that.”
“She did nothing,” I recalled. “In fact, she silenced Holmes before he could explain his reasons, reasons that we loyal fans and readers know he holds above all other things. What a betrayal of Holmes’s beliefs!”
“But she held him in her arms. It is not something you, as a girl, would know.” She emitted another sigh at this point. I had Holmes’s very words from The Sign of Four -ending with “I shall never marry myself, lest I bias my judgement” - ready to cite as evidence. However, I realized there was no point reasoning with Mrs. Quinn, gripped as she was by sentiment.
I ended the evening frustrated. I was frustrated that my knowledge of Sherlock Holmes could be neither revealed, nor given the respect it deserved. Instead I was treated like a misunderstanding juvenile. Secondly, there was a touch of - I can think of no other word to call it - a touch of jealousy in my marrow. This Holmes may have been an impostor, but he was still Holmes. I resented having to share him with so many people, I resented the notion that a flibbertigibbet like Alice Faulkner would be a fitting match for him, and I resented people who ill understood talking of him as they would of Lillie Langtry or Herbert Beerbohm Tree. How dare they!
When we talked of it another time, I told Constance what I had thought, no doubt in an inarticulate and silly-sounding way. She laughed and said, “To think, Mary, that I always find you such a serious person!”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Well, and here you are nursing some fancy for Sherlock Holmes of all people!”
Constance’s plain-talking assessment, paradoxically, cheered me immensely. Indeed, we would often laugh about it and any time I would express a similar sentiment, or she would discuss a boy admirer of hers, she would ruefully mention my fancy. “I know he’s no Sherlock Holmes,” she might add.
I gave no more serious thought, quite deliberately, of this impossible romantic delusion of mine, which I now deemed could have no bearing on my emotions anyway.
I came of age with many academic achievements to my name. Mrs. Forrester made no secret that she thought that I, like Mother, would make an excellent governess and she would take me on. By this stage, she had grown somewhat enfeebled and had retired, but was on good terms with the current proprietress.
At this time, though - and it somewhat makes me blush to record it - but I had aimed to become a detective myself. Frankly, I could think of no one more equipped to follow in Holmes’s footsteps than myself. By this time there was no need to conceal my knowledge of Holmes’s survival, as The Return of Sherlock Holmes had begun its Strand serialization, and begun with the Great Detective’s miraculous return from the dead in ‘The Empty House’. The stories that followed only strengthened my resolve to learn the science of deduction for myself.
I was now firmly in awe of Holmes, and it was he rather than Watson whom I identified myself with. After all, Holmes who was the master detective - Watson, for all his achievements, was no more than a friendly bystander, a faithful ally but one whose lack of ratiocination became more and more marked. Unlike Watson, who never ceased to be surprised at Holmes’s disguises and never attempted to work out his deductions for himself, I would be a protégé who could, one day, rival the mentor. And anyway, why should I aspire to be the conductor of light, not in itself luminous, when I could be the light itself?
It was shortly before my nineteenth birthday that, determined in my resolution but finding no one who could offer me help or advice for it, I decided to visit Holmes and ask him about it. Baker Street had lost none of its tourist allure, and that otherwise unremarkable end of it thronged as usual with passers-by who stopped by its door just long enough to mark out their fervour. It had been devotional enough in 1893, but the passing decades had made it a sort of Mecca for detective ‘fans’.
I marched past them and rang the doorbell. I felt like the prodigal son returning to a long-vacated manor seat. I had my argument all worked out, and felt sure I could state my case well enough even for a misogynist of Holmes’s standing to see that I was well equipped for the challenge.
I was somewhat knocked back when the door was answered not by the expected Mrs. Hudson, but by an imperious woman in her middle thirties. She took a disdainful survey at the other sightseers assembled outside the door, and no doubt thought my eager expression was simply an outgrowth of theirs. “I must ask you to keep the street clear, please,” she replied wearily.
“I’m not with these other people,” I explained, trying to set myself apart but also not to judge the poor unfortunates whose only crime was a passion for the character, a passion that I understood and shared. “I am here to ask for an interview with Mr. Holmes.”
“You really should have written ahead,” she returned. “Or telephoned.”
“I was informed by Scotland Yard that Mr. Holmes had his telephone removed.”
With a bitterly sardonic smile, she retorted, “That is why you should have telephoned.”
“I am certain Mr. Holmes will see me,” I quickly interjected, feeling the frosty lady was readying the door to slam into my face. “You see … I am Mary Watson, his friend and colleague’s daughter.”
“That is hardly original,” she sighed.
I had thought of this, and so pulled from my bag a treasured, but rather crumpled, family photograph taken in Switzerland. There I stood, as a little girl, standing proudly alongside my parents. “You can also make o
ut Arthur Conan Doyle in the corner of the picture.”
The woman looked up at me, squinting, before taking the point.
“I recognize the eyes.” She looked around at the citizens, who were now even more interested by this new development and drew nearer to the door to overhear. One person in particular - a drably attired man in his late twenties, whose inquisitive gaze told me he had ‘dressed down’ for the purposes of observing Baker Street without himself being observed - stayed in my mind.
“We cannot really talk out here,” the maid said frankly. “Why don’t you come inside?”
This was my first visit to Baker Street, and as with Gillette’s play, there was a sense of dislocation in seeing a life-like representation of something that formerly existed - but existed so vividly - in my mind. Perversely, I found the decay that spread across the whole environment added to its appeal: that distinctive furniture Father described so specifically was crumbling, the mantelpiece had a dent in it from years of correspondence fixed to it with a jack-knife. The far wall decorated with its ‘V.R.’ in bullet-holes had been repainted (which did not hide the blemishes), and the smell was a pungently fusty mixture of years of smoke and dust.
Yet it was not the dilapidation but the emptiness that most affected me. There was no jack-knife, a few letters lay neatly piled upon the table, the shelves were largely devoid of books, and the surfaces were polished. The sight of this cleanliness, clearly unnatural in this space, put me on edge.
The whole experience was simultaneously prosaic and unreal. I walked around the rooms in silence for longer than the maid, certainly, expected.
“Where is Mrs. Hudson?” I asked, still awed by my surroundings. “Will Mr. Holmes be out for long?”
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