by June Thomson
As a doctor, Watson was also concerned by the occasions when Holmes’ energy seemed to desert him and he would lie for days on end on the sofa, hardly speaking or moving, a vacant expression in his eyes. Under any other circumstances, Watson would have suspected Holmes of taking narcotic drugs, had not his temperate habits ruled this out of the question. It was only later that Watson discovered how wrong he had been in this assumption. Presumably, Holmes injected himself in the privacy of his bedroom and took care to keep the evidence of his drug addiction concealed from Watson and Mrs Hudson.
Watson was naturally curious about his fellow-lodger. With no friends to visit and little to occupy either his time or his mind, he had the leisure to watch his co-tenant closely and to speculate about him. The wound to his leg, which he had received at the battle of Maiwand and which had seemed a minor injury, was painful, especially in cold or damp conditions, and prevented him from going out except when the weather was mild. During those winter months of early 1881, he must have been confined to the house for days at a stretch. As he makes no reference to the wound in his shoulder, this must have healed satisfactorily and gave him no further trouble.
In particular, it was Holmes’ occupation which mystified Watson. He was evidently not a medical student. Stamford had made this clear and Holmes had confirmed this fact when Watson questioned him directly. But his studies, however eccentric and haphazard, seemed to suggest he was preparing himself for some profession. But which? It was all very confusing.
Watson has left no record of their conversations during these first few weeks at Baker Street but, given Watson’s curiosity and the contents of the list he was soon to draw up enumerating Holmes’ limitations, it is obvious that whenever he had the opportunity, he quizzed him in some detail, and probably not very subtly, about his interests, hobbies and attitudes.
At the same time, Holmes was quietly studying Watson and his observations led him to conclude that his fellow-lodger was rather a dull dog, although Watson, to give him his due, was far from being at his best. His low state of health, both physical and mental, cannot have made him a very stimulating companion. To Holmes, he must have seemed worthy enough but stolid, literal-minded and, frankly, something of a bore. He was therefore ripe for teasing. Watson was later to comment on Holmes’ sense of humour as being ‘peculiar and at times offensive’.
Faced with Watson’s ill-disguised curiosity, Holmes amused himself by giving tongue-in-cheek answers to his questions, designed to shock the good doctor by his apparent ignorance of, for example, Thomas Carlyle and even the Copernican theory. The irony was lost on Watson, who took it all much too seriously to the extent of explaining to Holmes that the world went round the sun and not the other way round. His earnestness must have afforded Holmes a great deal of quiet entertainment.
Holmes’ explanation for his apparent ignorance was reasonable. The human brain, he declared, was like an empty attic which each individual stocked according to choice. It was a wise man who threw away the lumber and retained only that knowledge which was useful. As we have seen in Chapter One, Holmes had the capacity for storing information which he could recall when he needed it.
It was after this conversation that Watson drew up his list in an attempt to get to grips with the puzzling anomalies in Holmes’ education and to come to some conclusion on what, if anything, he did for a living.
It read as follows:
SHERLOCK HOLMES – HIS LIMITS
1. Knowledge of Literature. – Nil.
2. “ ” Philosophy. – Nil.
3. “ ” Astronomy. – Nil.
4. “ ” Politics. – Feeble.
5. “ ” Botany. – Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.
6. “ ” Geology. – Practical, but limited. Tells at glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistency in what part of London he had received them.
7. “ ” Chemistry. – Profound.
8. “ ” Anatomy. – Accurate, but unsystematic.
9. “ ” Sensational Literature. – Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.
10. Plays the violin well.
11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer and swordsman.
12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.
Knowing the full extent of, for example, Holmes’ knowledge of literature and astronomy, we can see how far Watson was deceived, and even he realised the list was worthless, for he tore it up and threw it into the fire. The exact nature of Holmes’ profession, if indeed he had one, continued to mystify him and Holmes was careful to keep him in the dark.
For the first few weeks, Holmes had no visitors and one suspects that he had deliberately told no one of his change of address in order to give himself time to settle into his new lodgings. Once he was established and felt that his relationships with Watson and, in particular, with Mrs Hudson were on a firm footing, he let his new address be known and visitors began to arrive in a steady stream, among them a certain short, sallow-faced man with dark eyes and rat-like features who called four times in one week and whom Holmes was careful to introduce to Watson as plain Mr Lestrade, omitting his professional title of Inspector. Other visitors included a fashionably-dressed young woman, an excitable Jewish pedlar and a railway porter. Holmes explained that these visitors were clients and politely asked for the exclusive use of the shared sitting-room for business purposes.
Clients? Business?
But Holmes offered no further explanation and Watson retired to his bedroom, agog with curiosity but too well mannered to question Holmes point-blank.
And then, on the morning of 4th March, the mystery was finally solved.
For the first time since his arrival in the Baker Street lodgings, Watson was up in time to join Holmes at breakfast. While he waited a little impatiently for Mrs Hudson to lay his place and bring fresh coffee, Watson picked up a magazine from the table and began to read an article in it, entitled, rather ambitiously he thought, ‘The Book of Life’, which was marked by a pencil. One suspects that Holmes, on hearing Watson coming down the stairs, had hurriedly fetched the magazine from the bookcase and had deliberately marked that particular article in order to draw the doctor’s attention to it, intending to use it as an excuse to take Watson into his confidence at last. After all, the game-playing and the mystification, amusing though it had been, could not continue indefinitely.
Watson was unimpressed by the anonymous author’s assertion that a careful observer, by following even the most elementary precepts of what he called the ‘Science of Deduction and Analysis’, could correctly deduce the history as well as the trade or profession of any man on first acquaintance.
‘By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs – by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.’
While admitting that the reasoning in the article was close and intense, Watson was exasperated by its conclusions, which struck him as far-fetched and exaggerated. Slapping the magazine down on the table, he roundly denounced it as ‘ineffable twaddle’, adding that he had never read such rubbish in his life. As a betting man, he continued, he was willing to lay a thousand to one that, should the author be ‘clapped down’, as he expressed it, in a third-class carriage in the underground, he would be unable to name the trades of his fellow-travellers.
Holmes may well have been taken aback by the unexpected vehemence of this criticism, coming from a man whom he had dismissed as a fool and a bore. Certainly, there is a defensive ring to his choice of words when, having acknowledged his authorship of the article, he went on to explain that he was by ‘trade’ a private consulting detective and that he depended on those theories of observation and deduction for his ‘bread and cheese’ as if, having created the m
ystery surrounding himself, he was anxious, in the face of Watson’s scorn over the contents of the article, to play down the situation.
Lestrade, he continued, was a well-known detective whom he, Holmes, was helping over a forgery case and his visitors were clients seeking his professional assistance. It was by employing his powers of observation at their first meeting at Bart’s, Holmes added, that he had been able to deduce Watson’s recent career as an army doctor serving in Afghanistan.
Despite some scepticism, Watson was impressed enough to compare Holmes to two of his favourite fictional detectives, Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin and Emile Gaboriau’s Lecoq, and was considerably annoyed when Holmes dismissed them contemptuously. Holmes, Watson concluded, and not without some justification, was bumptious.
He was further exasperated when, in order to change the subject, he drew Holmes’ attention to a man walking along the other side of Baker Street, carrying a large blue envelope in his hand and looking anxiously at the numbers of the houses. Joining Watson at the window, Holmes immediately pronounced him to be a sergeant of Marines, an assertion which Watson silently dismissed as mere ‘brag and bounce’.
When, a few minutes later, the man arrived in their sitting-room to deliver the letter to Holmes, Watson, with a touch of excusable malice, seized on the opportunity to take Holmes down a peg or two by asking the man what his trade was. To his discomfiture, he discovered that Holmes was correct and that the man, though now a commissionaire, had indeed once served as a sergeant in the Royal Marine Light Infantry. Although Watson was impressed, a lurking suspicion remained that the episode had been pre-arranged in order to ‘dazzle’ him, a doubt which was not expelled until Holmes explained step by step the method by which he had arrived at his conclusions regarding the man. Watson was totally won over and from that moment on was to remain a loyal admirer and exponent of Holmes’ unique skills as a private consulting detective, an attitude which was to form the bedrock of their friendship.
The events of that morning of 4th March were also significant for Holmes, for they showed him that Watson, far from being the gullible fool he had at first imagined, possessed not only a good deal of intelligence and healthy scepticism but was prepared to stand up for himself and express his opinions in a forthright manner. At the same time, he was gratified by the doctor’s genuine admiration for his deductive skills. As Watson was later to discover, Holmes was as susceptible to flattery of his professional abilities as any young woman of her beauty.
Watson might be worth cultivating after all, and Holmes was tempted to prove to Watson just how far those skills extended by inviting him to join him as an observer on the Study in Scarlet murder inquiry, for which Inspector Gregson had requested Holmes’ assistance in the letter delivered by the former sergeant of Marines. It would also be entertaining to have Watson as a witness to the inevitable discomfiture of the official police when Holmes eventually proved them wrong, as he had every confidence of doing.
At the same time, Holmes could not resist squeezing the last few drops of humour out of the situation by pretending indifference to the case, knowing only too well that Watson, with his newly-acquired enthusiasm, would be further astonished and would urge him to accept. It was a subtle game, the artfulness of which Watson did not entirely appreciate, although, once they had arrived at number 3 Lauriston Gardens, Brixton, where Drebber’s body had been discovered, he was not completely taken in by the little act which Holmes put on for his benefit. It occurred to Watson that Holmes’ show of nonchalance, the lounging manner in which he sauntered up and down the pavement or gazed vacantly about him, bordered on affectation, a conclusion which was not far from the truth. For although Holmes’ methods on this occasion were similar to those he often employed on other investigations, he undoubtedly exaggerated the unhurried nature of his preliminary examination of the scene-of-crime in order to impress his companion.
Once the inquiry was under way and the second murder, that of Joseph Stangerson, had been committed, he abandoned these prima-donnaish pretensions and threw himself into solving the case with his usual enthusiastic energy, applying those precepts of scientific analysis and deduction to such dazzling effect that any vestige of Watson’s earlier scepticism was finally swept away. Indeed, the doctor was so impressed by Holmes’ professional expertise that, once the case was completed and the murderer of Drebber and Stangerson was arrested and had made a full confession, Watson was determined that Holmes’ merits as a consulting detective should be made public, especially as an account in the evening newspaper, The Echo, gave all the credit for the successful conclusion of the case to the two Scotland Yard inspectors Lestrade and Gregson, just as Holmes had predicted.
It was this sense of justice and fair play as well as his admiration that persuaded Watson to declare that, if Holmes would not publish an account of the case, then he himself would do so on Holmes’ behalf. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision which Watson was not to regret over the years he acted as self-appointed chronicler of Holmes’ many exploits.
In this role, he has come in for much criticism from commentators. However, it should be remembered that Watson had no formal training either as a secretary or as a recorder of events, although his experience both at Bart’s and at Netley as a student would have accustomed him to taking lecture notes and he was therefore used to scribbling down the more important facts, relying on his memory when he came to expanding those notes into a more coherent and detailed form.
And despite his notorious carelessness over dates and other facts and figures, he was on the whole blessed with a good memory, particularly for conversations and for the details of his physical surroundings as well as the people he was to encounter, especially women. His accounts are full of vivid descriptions of interiors and landscapes, whether of London streets or of the countryside as, for example, this picture of Dartmoor in autumn, ‘the slanting rays of the sun turning the streams to threads of gold and glowing on the red earth new turned by the plough and the broad tangle of woodlands.’
He uses this same talent to describe people as diverse as Miss Violet Hunter with ‘her bright, quick face, freckled like a plover’s egg’, or Charles Augustus Milverton with ‘his large, intellectual head’ and ‘perpetual frozen smile.’*
Holmes, too, is captured again and again in his many moods, sitting cross-legged, for example, on a pile of cushions, ‘his old briar pipe between his lips’ as, ‘in the dim light of the lamp’, he ponders the problem of the disappearance of Neville St Clair in The Man with the Twisted Lip, or smashing the plaster bust of Napoleon with his hunting crop and, ‘with a shout of triumph’, retrieving the black Borgia pearl from among its fragments in The Adventure of the Six Napoleons.
Watson records conversations with the same lively immediacy and has a keen ear for differentiating between, for example, the Cockney speech of Mr Sherman, the taxidermist from Pinchen Lane, the Scots accent of Inspector MacDonald, and the pompous language of Lord St Simon.
Watson also possesses great skills as a narrator. His accounts never flag but are driven forward with enormous energy and gusto, especially in those passages where the action is all important, as in this passage from The Sign of Four, which with its short, staccato sentences captures the speed and excitement of the night-time pursuit up the Thames by a police boat of the steam launch Aurora.
‘We flashed past barges, steamers, merchant-vessels, in and out, behind this one and round the other. Voices hailed us out of the darkness, but still the Aurora thundered on, and still we thundered close upon her track.’
He is also adept at using other narrative devices to forward the action or to convey information: quotations from newspaper accounts, for example, or direct conversation, either in brief exchanges or in longer passages in which Holmes’ clients explain their problems or Holmes himself expounds his theories. On occasions, Watson uses his role as narrator to address the reader personally or, in order to heighten the mystery and tension, expresses his thoughts and feelings i
n such an open and disarming manner that the reader easily identifies with him.
His methods of recording his material are made clear in A Study in Scarlet. Presumably he made use of much the same system in subsequent cases. He kept a journal. He also read newspaper accounts of the case as it progressed, using them as sources of additional information before cutting them out and pasting them into a scrap book, a form of reference which he may have copied from Holmes, who was in the habit of keeping similar records. In addition, he had access to Inspector Lestrade’s notes on the murderer’s confession, probably not in their original shorthand version but in the extended longhand reports which Lestrade would have had to submit to his superior officers at Scotland Yard.
Apart from these written or printed records, Watson was in daily contact with Holmes, with whom he discussed the cases and from whom he could draw any additional material or information should it be needed.
In the Drebber-Stangerson murder inquiry, he was also given permission to hold a lengthy interview with Jefferson Hope, his notes of which Watson was later to expand and transcribe into five retrospective chapters which form the larger section of Part Two of A Study in Scarlet.
His limitations are seen in his negligence over some of the facts of the cases, especially in the matter of dates, over which at times he was infuriatingly imprecise. Watson clearly belonged to that group of people, often but not exclusively male, who are congenially incapable of remembering dates, even their children’s and spouse’s birthdays or their own wedding anniversary.
However, it should be pointed out in Watson’s defence that it was not the chronological aspect of Holmes’ career which particularly interested him. He was not a historian; he was not even a biographer in the accepted sense of the term, even though he claimed to be both in ‘The Adventure of the Resident Patient’. He was a chronicler of events in which he himself participated and his point of view was therefore subjective. He was, moreover, far more concerned with conveying to his readers an awareness and appreciation of Holmes’ skill as a consulting detective and the exciting as well as the baffling aspects of the cases he investigated than in recording the precise dates on which they occurred.