by June Thomson
In reprisal, Austria sent an ultimatum to the Serbian Government, which it accused of complicity in the assassination, making some of the demands so harsh that the Serbs refused to agree. Using this as an excuse, Austria, with Germany’s support, declared war on Serbia on 28th July. Determined to maintain its position in the Balkans and to protect the Serbs, Russia in turn began to mobilise its forces, refusing to comply when Germany demanded it should put a halt to these preparations. Consequently, on 1st August, Germany declared war on Russia, following two days later with a declaration of war against France, Russia’s ally. On the same day, 3rd August, on its way to attack Paris, the German army invaded Belgium, having been refused free passage through that country. The next day, 4th August, the British Parliament, which had guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality, declared war on Germany. The First World War, which was to last four years and cost ten million lives, had begun. As Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Minister, was to write: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’
On 2nd August, two days before Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, Von Bork was making hurried preparations to leave England. His wife and members of his household, with the exception of Martha, had already left for Flushing, taking some of his less important papers with them. He, too, was planning to leave as part of the personal suite of Baron Von Herling, the Chief Secretary to the German Legation in London. As such, both he and his baggage containing his more important documents would have had diplomatic immunity. In fact, Von Herling had driven down from London to Von Bork’s house in Harwich on the evening of the 2nd August to discuss with him the final arrangements for Von Bork’s arrival at the German legation the following morning. In a few hours, he would be immune from arrest.
Holmes’ plans, however, were in place. He himself had telegraphed Von Bork, arranging to meet him that same evening and to hand over to him the new naval codes. Martha had been instructed to signal the departure of Von Herling by extinguishing her lamp. Holmes had also wired Watson, asking him to meet him in Harwich with his car, an invitation which Watson eagerly accepted. He was now sixty-one or two, an ‘elderly man’ who had put on weight and whose hair had turned grey. But his devotion to Holmes and his love of adventure had not diminished. Indeed, some of that enduring spirit of youth prompted Holmes to comment that Watson was ‘the same blithe boy as ever’.
Apart from the ‘horrible goatee’, Watson found Holmes little changed physically, although it was several years since they had last met. He would also have recognised some of the quirks in Holmes’ character which had not changed either with the passage of time: his sense of humour, for example. Instead of handing over to Von Bork the expected naval codes, he gave him a copy of his own book, Practical Handbook on Bee Culture. He was also still prepared to act outside the law. Having chloroformed Von Bork and bound his arms and legs, Holmes removed the documents from his safe and then, with Watson’s help, bundled him into his old friend’s small car to drive him back to London to be questioned at Scotland Yard.*
Before setting off, the two friends lingered for a few minutes on the terrace, looking out over the moonlit sea. Holmes was in a thoughtful mood.
‘There’s an east wind coming, Watson,’ he remarked.
Watson, with characteristic obtuseness, failed to take the point.
‘I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.’
There is affectionate amusement in Holmes’ reply.
‘Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age.’
Holmes was right in his prediction. Within a month, the Germans had swept through Belgium and invaded France, where they met the French army and a small British expeditionary force at the battle of the Marne in September 1914. The lamps were indeed beginning to go out, extinguished by that cold east wind which would sweep across Europe from Germany, just as Holmes had foreseen when he and Watson stood side by side on that warm evening of 2nd August, gazing out towards the harbour lights of Harwich.
* A carriage drawn by four horses. Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, is an expert at driving a four-in-hand.
*The Prime Minister in 1912 was H. H. Asquith, who led a Liberal Government from 1908 to 1916 and whose cabinet included Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.
* Holmes assumed that Von Bork, after he was questioned at Scotland Yard, would be allowed to join Von Herling’s suite and leave England, although, in view of his espionage activities, this seems unlikely. His subsequent fate is unknown.
EPILOGUE
That occasion on 2nd August 1914 when Holmes and Watson stood in Von Bork’s garden gazing out towards the lights of Harwich, two days before Great Britain declared war on Germany, is the last glimpse we are afforded of the two old friends together. On that warm summer evening they both took their last public bows and the curtain finally descended.
But while they might have left the stage, their lives continued behind the scenes for at least another thirteen years. Some of their activities can even be traced, although the references are few and scattered.
Soon after returning to London after Von Bork’s arrest, Watson rejoined his old regiment, presumably the Berkshires with which he had served in Afghanistan in 1880. It is unlikely at his age, for he was sixty-one or sixty-two in 1914, that he was sent to France. More probably he was allocated a post at a home-based hospital, perhaps even at the Royal Victoria at Netley, where he had trained as an assistant surgeon thirty-four years before and where he himself had received treatment for the wounds he had received at Maiwand before being invalided out of the army with a pension. If he was sent to Netley, he would have seen the casualties from the battlefields of France arriving by boat at the specially constructed landing-stage. His own experience of active service as well as his skills as a surgeon and a general practitioner would have been useful wherever he was sent. It is not known what happened to his Queen Anne Street practice during his absence but he may well have found a locum willing to take care of it until peace was declared in 1918.
Holmes’ career during the war is not recorded. He may have returned to Sussex to resume his interrupted retirement, although, given his specialised knowledge of espionage and the activities of the Irish Republican movement,* it is possible he remained in London, acting as a Government adviser, or travelled to and from Sussex to attend ministerial meetings. He may even have made use of his old rooms at 221B Baker Street, if they remained vacant and if Mrs Hudson had not herself retired in the meantime.
Mycroft, too, may have come out of retirement to return to his former post as Government adviser and to contribute his own expertise towards the war effort. Although he was sixty-seven when the war began, it is hard to believe that his great intellectual powers were in any way diminished. Indeed, both brothers may even have served on the same Whitehall committee, an intriguing if speculative thought.
Despite his army service, Watson still managed to continue writing. Between September 1914, only a month after the outbreak of the war, and May 1915, he published The Valley of Fear, much of which, as has been suggested in Chapter Seventeen, was almost certainly written before 1914, while in 1917, possibly when he was still serving as an army doctor, His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes appeared in print.
There then followed a gap of four years when he published nothing. No doubt he spent these years after the war and his demobilisation building up his London practice once again. But in 1921 he resumed his writing career and ‘The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone’ which, like ‘His Last Bow’, is told in the third person, appeared in print in this country and America. However, compared with his earlier efforts, his literary output was low and he only succeeded in publishing one account a year over the next two years, ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’ in 1922 and ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ in 1923, drawing on his extensive notes, some of which he kept in his old tin despatch-box. At some time he had gone to the precaution of depositing this box in the safety of the vault of h
is bank, Cox and Co., at Charing Cross, perhaps during the war when the German zeppelins were making bombing raids on London. Or an event which happened not long before the publication in 1927 of ‘The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger’ may have prompted this decision. Watson is too discreet to reveal the full facts but, reading between the lines, it is apparent that an attempt was made ‘to get at and destroy’ certain of his more confidential papers, presumably in the course of a burglary at his rooms in Queen Anne Street. Watson knew the identity of the person involved and, with Holmes’ permission, issued a warning at the beginning of the Veiled Lodger account that ‘if these outrages’ continued, ‘the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse and the trained cormorant will be given to the public.’ He adds ominously, ‘There is at least one reader who will understand.’
It is an intriguing story and one wishes Watson had revealed more. In the absence of further details, one can only assume that the papers concerned some intrigue involving a member of His Majesty’s Government which, if revealed, would have caused scandal in high places, although what part the lighthouse and the trained cormorant played in the events can only be imagined.
‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’ dealt, of course, with his first meeting with Grace Dunbar who, if my theory is right, became his second wife. The publication of the account may mark an acceptance on Holmes’ part of Watson’s so-called desertion in 1902 or 1903, although Watson was still careful not to refer directly to his marriage and, as far as his readers were concerned, the identity of the second Mrs Watson remained unknown.
The year 1924 was more productive, with the publication of three more accounts of earlier cases: the Sussex Vampire, the Three Garridebs and the Illustrious Client inquiries. The last two first appeared in the American magazines Collier’s Weekly and Liberty and were not printed in The Strand until January and March of 1925.
Holmes was partly responsible for Watson’s low literary output, although his ban on publication during this period arose not so much out of his own aversion to publicity as from a concern to protect the right to privacy of some of his former clients, as Watson makes clear in the opening paragraph of ‘The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger’. In his many year books and despatch-cases filled with papers, Watson states, were notes and documents of cases undertaken by Holmes which concerned ‘the social and official scandals of the late Victorian era.’ Evidently Holmes had received many ‘agonised letters’ from relatives of those involved in these inquiries, begging him, for the sake of their family honour, not to reveal the details of these old scandals. Watson was able to reassure them.
‘The discretion and high sense of professional honour which has always distinguished my friend are still at work in the choice of these memoirs, and no confidence will be abused,’ he promises them a little sententiously.
It was this concern for the reputation of one of his former clients which prompted Holmes to ban publication of an account of the Illustrious Client case until 1925, although Watson had been pleading for permission since 1915. Publication of ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ was also postponed until 1923 when, over twenty years after the events, ‘certain obstacles’ were removed, almost certainly a discreet reference to the death of Professor Presbury, whose bizarre behaviour had featured so largely in the case. Even then, it was only a desire to dispel ‘the ugly rumours’ circulating round the university about the professor which finally persuaded Holmes to allow Watson to publish an account of the case. The use of the first person plural in Watson’s statement ‘Now we have at last obtained permission to ventilate the facts’, is almost certainly not a reference to himself and his wife but to himself and his publishers.
Watson published nothing in 1926. Instead, Holmes took up his own pen, writing and publishing two accounts of his own, ‘The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier’ and ‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane’. Watson had been pressing him for some time to turn author and to ‘write an experience’ of his own. During the composition of the Blanched Soldier account, Holmes, reminded of Watson’s second marriage which had taken place shortly before that particular investigation, allowed some of that old resentment at Watson’s ‘selfish action’ to resurface. It was perhaps not a wise choice of subject-matter, for it had opened up old wounds. But they soon healed, for in ‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane’, also published in 1926, Holmes was able to refer to his former companion affectionately as ‘the good Watson’. They may have still met for an occasional weekend together in Sussex, although, with the passage of time and their own advancing years, these meetings would have become more difficult and therefore less frequent.
Several critics, among them D. Martin Dakin, have questioned the authorship of some of the accounts published in this 1921–7 period. Their doubts include the two accounts written by Holmes, which they consider are unworthy of him and which they have attributed to Watson or even to the second Mrs Watson. Some of them go as far as to claim that she wrote the whole of these last twelve chronicles which were later published in volume form in 1927 under the general title, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. Others have attributed them to Dr Verner, who bought Watson’s Kensington practice, or to an anonymous author, possibly Watson’s literary agent, who managed to acquire the doctor’s notes on the cases.
Those chronicles which are considered the most doubtful are ‘The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone’, ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ and, in particular, ‘The Adventure of the Three Gables’, the last one largely because of the racism shown by Holmes in that account, an attitude which has already been examined in Chapter Fifteen.
To present a detailed review of the arguments for and against the case put forward by these critics who doubt the authorship of some at least of these chronicles would require another whole chapter. Those readers who are interested in following up the pros and cons of the dispute may do so on their own account. For my own part, I wish to add only two points to the discussion. The first concerns Holmes’ authorship of the two narratives relating to the Blanched Soldier and the Lion’s Mane inquiries which, critics argue, show none of that ‘severe reasoning from cause to effect’ which Holmes advocated and the lack of which he had so deplored in Watson’s own accounts. But, while it is easy to criticise, it is more difficult, when one turns author oneself, to put those precepts into practice. As we have already seen, Holmes himself found this out, as he ruefully admits in ‘The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier’. ‘Having taken my pen in my hand,’ he writes, ‘I do begin to realise that the matter [i.e. the material] must be presented in such a way as may interest the reader.’
The second point concerns the general reduction of literary standards shown in some of these later chronicles, whether written by Holmes or by Watson. It should, however, be remembered that both men were growing older and that, by the time these disputed accounts were published in the 1920s, they were in their seventies. The fall in quality could therefore be as easily attributed to their increasing age as to the assumed participation of some anonymous third author.
Readers are again referred to the chronologies in Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen for the publication dates of these last twelve accounts.
With the publication of ‘The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier’ and ‘The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane’ in 1926, Holmes finally passes from the records. He was seventy-two. Watson, however, remained active for another year, publishing three more accounts, ‘The Adventure of the Retired Colourman’, ‘The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger’ and ‘Shoscombe Old Place’ which appeared in The Strand between January and April 1927, when he was seventy-four or seventy-five.
After this, the rest, as Hamlet says, is silence.
The dates on which Holmes and Watson died are not known. No obituary was ever published on either of them, an extraordinary omission when one considers their reputations. For the twenty-three years he had been in active practice as a private consulting detective, Holmes had gained worldwide renown, numbering among his client
s kings and cardinals, millionaires and prime ministers, as well as many hundreds of ordinary men and women. As his chronicler, Watson had, over his long and successful career as an author, made their names household words.
One can only assume that, for their own different reasons, both men preferred their deaths to pass unnoticed, Holmes out of his hatred of publicity, Watson through his own natural modesty. While still alive, they must have left instructions that no one outside their immediate family and friends was to be notified. The funerals were therefore private and unreported.
Holmes is almost certainly laid to rest in the graveyard of Fulworth church, wherever that may be, in good Sussex soil and within sound of the sea, as he himself no doubt had wished. Watson may also have retired from London to spend his last years, like Holmes, in the quiet of the English countryside which he had loved and which he had described with such deep affection. He, too, may be buried in some peaceful village churchyard. If that is so, the location of his grave will remain unidentified.
In the absence of any known memorial to those two remarkable friends, one can do no better than to quote Holmes’ own words to Watson as their final tribute: ‘You have never failed to play the game. I am sure you will play it to the end.’
* See Appendix One.
APPENDIX ONE
VARIOUS THEORIES CONCERNING THE CANON
CHAPTER ONE
Holmes’ date of birth: Holmes’ date of birth has been assigned to various years between 1852 and 1858, one commentator dating it as late as 1867. However, as the statement that Holmes was a man of sixty in 1914 has no qualification attached to it, the year 1854 seems the most likely, as many commentators agree. The month of his birth is variously ascribed to January or June, with January 6th or 7th suggested as his actual birthday. Other commentators have claimed Yorkshire, Shropshire or Surrey as his place of birth. There is, however, no conclusive evidence in the canon to support any of these theories.