I sat down in a basket chair, whose ancient arm buckled from my pressure, and the maid - who introduced herself as Martha - stood by the fire. This resulted in her awkwardly looming over me throughout our interview. She was clearly uncomfortable at the posture yet too self-conscious to take a seat herself.
“I am afraid I won’t be able to help you, and that you won’t be able to see Mr. Holmes. I’m very sorry.”
“I could return another time.”
“No, you don’t understand. Mr. Holmes retired last year.”
“I see. I appreciate that he would not want to be disturbed, but I only came hear to ask for his endorsement in a professional matter.”
“And you say you are Dr. Watson’s daughter?”
“I don’t need to say it. You saw the photograph.”
This brought out some softness in Martha’s hard-lined features. But it was only for a moment, and then her placidly stony expression resumed. “I do not know where he could be found. He needs some disconnection from the outside world. The strain of his work got to him in the end, you understand.”
“I see,” I replied. “In that case, I will say good day to you. I can’t see the point of staying if Mr. Holmes is unwilling-”
“Unable, surely,” Martha corrected me.
“The result is the same. I can’t count on his help,” I concluded, pushing past her and leaving the house.
Dejected by this turn of events, I ultimately relied on Father’s machinations to gain me admission to St. Hilda’s, Oxford (then the newest women’s college). I had long been sceptical about the disadvantages a woman faced studying there. However, the year before I began my studies, the university buzzed with the furore over the ‘Steamboat Ladies’ [14]. Their example emboldened me to the possibilities of women’s education and like them, I was able to receive an ad eundem degree also.
I definitively adopted the surname of Forrester at this time, as my family connection was a particularly delicate matter here. For it was in these dreaming spires that the study of Sherlock Holmes became a formal, but no less fanatical, discipline. A student a year older than me, one Ronald Knox, was studying Classics, and his hobby and enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes was well-known. As I am sure most Holmes experts will know, he published the first serious piece of scholarship, ‘Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes’, in 1911. He even gained the attention of Arthur Conan Doyle.
I did not move in the same fashionable circles as Monsignor Knox. I had more or less concluded my period at Oxford when his paper was delivered as an address to the Gryphon Club. And as I had when I saw the Gillette play six years earlier, I was somewhat chagrined to find my own interest given over to public posterity. Personally I was somewhat aggrieved to read of his idea that Watson fabricated the post-Reichenbach Falls Holmes cases to supplement his spendthrift income, but obviously Knox was writing with tongue-in-cheek wit. Sadly, many of his later adherents took the rule of this game all too literally, and treated it with a pompous seriousness akin to Holy Writ.
I passed some clear Gryphon Club acolytes one day, pontificating at length in the quadrangle. It was a fine summer’s day and they were poring over that familiar-looking Newnes paperback of The Return of Sherlock Holmes. “Quite clear that Watson had to fake the later ones. Or worse, that bungler Conan Doyle.”
“Well, you know Doyle couldn’t get a detective story right. After all, where was that Jezail bullet again, Arthur? Was it in Watson’s shoulder or his leg?”
The others laughed at this badinage, but I could take no more of it. I stepped forward to confront them.
“You silly people!” I declared. “To take such sport with something that was meant for nothing but enjoyment - it is so heartless! And rather witless as well, I should add!”
As one might expect, these men were quite withering to me. Their sneers were expressed in the usual Oxford way - a disdainful and dry dismissal.
“This is exactly why women scholars will never amount to anything in Oxford,” one of them said. “A classic example, one might say.”
“Quite,” the other, even more chinless fellow, asserted. “Here we are having a cogent and empirical scholarly debate, and she comes charging in, all full of sentiment and tears.”
I had taken the time in this immature discourse to collect myself. My reply was thus a cooler and more considered one than my introduction. “What a shame you are as short-sighted about progress as you are about your Holmes facts. I know for a fact that Watson did not fabricate the post-Reichenbach Holmes stories.”
As the words tumbled from my mouth, I regretted them. For I was now stuck between either having to explain my real identity - something that, for this exact kind of exchange, I had not wanted to get around the university - or shuffle off and seem as silly as these nitwits wanted me to be.
As it was, an irate tutor of about ninety came outside and castigated the ringleader of the odious gang. “You were supposed to report to my digs twenty minutes ago!” he fumed. “No wonder your Greek is so appalling with that dozy attitude. Talking about your Holmes fairy stories again, I shouldn’t wonder!”
The ringleader reverted still farther to his childhood, sulkily declaring, “They’re not fairy stories. Haven’t you heard Monsignor Knox-”
“I’m fed up to high heaven with Monsignor Knox,” the tutor sighed. “We study serious subjects here at Oxford, not penny-dreadful modern drivel. Now come alone, you young oik!” He then seized the man - by the ear, for an added touch of deserved infantile humiliation - and dragged him through the quadrangle.
“Best of luck with your Classics!” I called to him as he receded into the distance.
For all the chauvinistic frustration I felt at the time, I came to regard that day as a nostalgic, glowing window into that time. For, I sometimes chill to think, many or all of those callow and feckless young boys - who had nothing more important than to argue over Holmes and play truant - would be charging through mud in France, plummeted from that gleaming and rarefied Edwardian utopia into the most sordid Hell the twentieth century could conceive for them.
***
By 1915, when I was twenty-and-six (the same age Mother had been when Father first came into her life), the fourth Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, was serialized in the Strand Magazine. Time had now made my constitution bitterer. The Great War was in its full and terrible throes, and I had taken some limited medical training, so as to lend assistance to the throngs of soldiers so massively and senselessly maimed and killed in that endless and fruitless conflict. It was touching to see Arthur Conan Doyle’s vocal patriotism had not lessened over the years, although his words were hopelessly naïve and ill-informed in light of this barbarous mayhem. With that as a background, re-acquainting myself with the Victorian nostalgia of Holmes’s world was at first, as I am sure it was to many millions of readers, a welcome and pleasantly nostalgic diversion. Its first chapter, certainly, struck me as noticeably better than the rather listless Holmes war story, ‘His Last Bow’ (even though I was amused to note that Holmes had adopted the same alias, Altamont, he took the last time I had seen him).
However, as the months passed and the chapters regularly appeared in the Strand, this initial enthusiasm sharply deteriorated. Especially in light of reading in Mother’s diaries how it had become something of a fascination for her, I found The Valley of Fear all the more curiously stodgy and un-involving reading. Holmes and Watson barely put in an appearance, and the second part with its Irish secret society seemed somehow like an inferior version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s grand guignol Mormon prequel in the second part of A Study in Scarlet. And the story seemed to end just as it was getting going, with Professor Moriarty’s part connecting the two sections of the story unresolved.
I wondered, too, how Holmes scholars would resolve the presence of the Professor with Father’s claim not to know of him in ‘The Final Problem’. It was a decision clearly made when he expected that earlier tale to be the last published Holmes adventu
re, but made the whole narrative seem tenuous and arbitrary. I had become a very demanding reader, I see now - but I believe these demands were the ones that Watson and Conan Doyle themselves created with their obsession over details, laying the gauntlet down for future readers to pick apart and draw their own conclusions. The Valley of Fear, by such a reading, was a decent enough thriller, I concluded, and it was only because of the (impossibly?) high standards to which I had elevated Father’s work that I found it wanting.
My nursing experiences were not on the whole notable - I was only doing what I could, and I believed the bravery of the men who were admitted far outstripped my own part in their recovery. The most notable soldier whom I nursed to health came in nearly at the end of the war. He had sustained a quite awful shrapnel injury a few months earlier, and was admitted to us in a state of shell-shock from the recent battle. After a painful and lengthy operation, a piece of embedded shrapnel from his earlier wound was extracted. All through his treatment, he kept looking up at me, pressing his bloodied hand to my face and desperately declaring, “I know you! I remember you!”
Of course, similar professions - and even more delirious admissions - were common amid the horrible experiences the men faced in battle and in operations. I was accustomed to hearing them and nodding with sympathy, though obviously I took with a grain of salt their declarations that I was the kindest and most beautiful woman they had ever seen, that I had cured their wounds and made their pain go away with my warmth, and - the most embarrassing - the fellow who said he would leave his wife for me!
With this young, sandy-haired shrapnel victim, though, I found out he was actually correct. I only got a clear look at him with his face cleaned up, as he was discharged from the hospital. He was that drably-dressed man lingering around Baker Street when I had my unsatisfying interview with Martha! I had only caught his first name, though, and soon the infirmary was filled up with fresh victims of Lord Kitchener’s savage idiocy. I thought of him often as the war went on.
At this same time, possibly inspired by the uncertainty of war that loomed so large over us all, Father’s distant relations grew unexpectedly closer. Until that point, he had sent monthly stipends to Mrs. Forrester, and the occasional added gift around my birthday. He had also, as I mentioned, put forward on my behalf an application to study at Oxford. I was extremely grateful for this consideration, but I did hope that just once, he might have come into contact with me for more social purposes.
Anyway, when I turned twenty, the pattern of these welcome but somewhat cold obligations was surprisingly broken. I began to receive long and regular letters from him. In this correspondence, he expressed regret at his conduct with me, and quite how much time had elapsed. He had returned to practice to support his new young family, and I observed (deduced, as Holmes would say, even though ‘induced’ is probably the more correct term) that he was hoping to assume a more responsible patina as he approached his seventh decade.
I read these letters, I occasionally responded to them - but I was now much changed from the girl who had followed his writings with such youthful enthusiasm. Mrs. Forrester and I did not talk often about Father - as she grew older she preferred to tell me more of Mother and the friendship they had cultivated in those years before 1888. She particularly impressed on me that she admired Mother’s independence.
“So many women of that time would do anything to take a husband. They’d marry some worthless sot just so they weren’t ‘left on the shelf’. None of that concerned Mary. She was always her own person, never needing or wanting anything but herself. Even though those pearls she was getting were her rightful part of an inheritance, she never felt she was owed anything by anyone. That’s why I was so convinced that … well, when she got married, she had made the right choice.”
Through these observations, I began to take Mrs. Forrester’s larger point, and became more and more convinced that I needed to carve out a life for myself, wholly independent of the past. In a way, Mother had inspired me - and though he was still alive, my father had no more closeness or bearing on my life than the absent, then dead, Captain Morstan.
We met again at Mrs. Forrester’s funeral - which took place at St. Giles, the very cathedral where my parents married in that long-distant summer of 1888. It was by this point a few months after Armistice Day, in 1919. I was desperately bereft at the time. Her departure from my life was as soul-wrenching as Mother’s, but I was now at an age for the full heart-ache to sink in. In a strange way, all the emotions I had not fully acknowledged at Mother’s death came to the surface newly augmented by this fresh sadness. I now truly felt orphaned, and Father’s presence was in this context, rather like greeting an impostor.
“You must have nearly finished your studies,” he mentioned. “I know as a woman you won’t be able to take your degree, but the study is the important thing.”
I explained that, thanks to Trinity’s ad eundem degree, I had joined the ranks of the ‘Steamboat Women’. He was very pleased to hear of my accomplishment.
“I am grateful indeed to have the opportunity to thank you in person, Father.”
Though I made some excuse, he insisted on making an arrangement to take me to dinner on an evening later in the week. “I cannot make my proper amends at a funeral.”
“Amends, Father? You should not feel-”
“Oh, yes, I should feel that I must make amends. And I ask you most humbly that you at least give me the opportunity to try.”
Therefore, we met again later that week in the Strand. I told him a little about my medical experience in the war. I tried to leave my feelings and anxieties out of the conversation.
“What are your plans for the future?”
“I had hoped Mr. Holmes might endorse my wish to become … to become a detective.” Strange as it may seem, Father was the first person to whom I had admitted this ambition aloud. I had become yet more solitary in my maturity, and save for Constance, kept no particular friends from school or Oxford.
I was very heartened when he did not mock this dream, which in the cold and dreary days that followed that awful occasion, seemed so very childish and impractical. “I think you would make a fine detective. Holmes always thought your mother would have, and now the tide is turning. I do believe one day women will be able to do anything and everything men can. And not before time.”
“I have also begun to consider … travelling abroad. Perhaps to Canada or America.”
“Again, a wise choice. Those more modern countries have more opportunities for young ladies than are available in England. Although … no, I wish you the best.”
“What is it Father?”
“Well … I do so deeply regret my actions, regarding you. I’ve come to feel that I abandoned you rather. Almost as bad, and despite my wishes and efforts, I ultimately abandoned Holmes as well. The agenda of a younger woman can be hard to refuse - harder even than Holmes leading me to an opium den.”
I laughed. Somehow he had managed to relax my guard. “If you would rather I stayed-”
“Not at all. It was merely a foolish hope of mine that it could be belatedly corrected, but … I should under no circumstances stand in the way of your future now. I wish you every success.”
Mrs. Forrester had also left me Mother’s diary. For some reason this had mistakenly been sent to her nephew, who had only realized the error and sent it to me some ten years later. I somewhat resented her concealing the document from me for so many years, especially given the closeness to her I came to crave so dearly. It was only as I read it that I understood her perspective on it. I know from the lady that she would have left Mother’s confidences to her daughter and never read the diary - but she must also have been somewhat conflicted about the potential emotions Mother might have expressed in her writings that were not intended for anyone else to know.
After Mrs. Forrester’s death, I departed for Canada, and it was travelling through the New World that I began to work in the theatre. This was partly aided b
y the charming gentleman that I met on my passage across the Atlantic - Roger Longacre. His entrance into my life has a somewhat miraculous feeling about it. For, in the most remarkable coincidence in my life, and the kind of happenstance that Sherlock Holmes always gained such gratification from - he was that drab-suited ‘fan’ who was standing outside Baker Street when I called on Martha for Holmes’s endorsement, and whom I treated in the hospital during the War. The injury had not gone away, and he now walked with a limp and a cane.
“I was then a young and penniless writer,” he told me, “and I was hoping that I could get Holmes or Watson to allow me to write a new play or a film script of their stories. But of course, I was too late. Seeing and overhearing your visit that day, I thought my luck might change if I introduced myself to you.”
“And yet you did not until now?”
“Well …” he blushed. “I must admit I was utterly speechless at your beauty, and I could not bring myself to make the introduction.”
I laughed at his self-effacement.
“As you can imagine, I kicked myself repeatedly for my reticence as the years passed. And then, when fate brought us together again, I was wracked with pain and hallucinating madly, with a shell sticking out of my leg! I’m sure you must have thought me a complete madman. I had only regained my senses after my discharge, and hadn’t the wit to ask your name.”
“I think, given the shell in your leg, I can understand.”
“But to get to meet you a third time … it is more good fortune than I deserve.”
I indicated the cane. “I’m not sure you did have such good fortune. You should understand though, that despite the training, being a nurse was not my real occupation. I really wanted to be a detective.”
Meeting Roger, for the first time I saw my Holmesian resolve to remain unmarried could not be sustained. I do not consider it a weakness on my part, for I have been a stronger and more self-possessed person in Roger’s company.
Best and Wisest Man Page 17