by Anita Janda
I remind the reader that I never wanted to be a travel writer.
Dieppe. A brief argument with Holmes on the quay, which sick as I was, I yet won. The sun was going down, tomorrow was Sunday, and we should present a very odd appearance if we were to arrive at our hotel with one small clerical bag between us. What about shaving tackle? Toothpowder? Travel guides? Braving the local shops, I managed to outfit a couple of carpetbags against our simple needs. When I saw the quantity of maps Holmes judged essential to our progress, I knew I had done well. Besides, I had a great need at that point to spend half an hour with the ground steady beneath my feet.
Our flight to the Continent came to an abrupt halt a little later, in Brussels, where I watched us register in the obvious hotel under our own names and drew my own conclusions. He has courage, my friend Holmes. Or a fine sense of his own immortality. He certainly stands by his deductions in a way that interferes with my sleep.
I suppose it is up to the Yard now. All our hopes are for Monday—that is, tomorrow. Monday is the day fixed for the arrest of Professor Moriarty and his gang. The first thing Holmes did after watching Moriarty’s special steam past the station in Canterbury was to send word to Inspector Patterson at the Yard: Moriarty was gone to Paris in pursuit of our luggage, which was ticketed for the Hôtel du Louvre. Holmes was (for Holmes) positively jubilant. Let them only arrest Moriarty and his minions on Monday and he would engage to connect the Professor to a range of criminal activity that would have all London howling for his blood. It will be the apotheosis of his career.
I don’t know. Speaking only for myself and only in this diary, I must admit I feel both too young and too old for this particular adventure—too old to revel in the excitement of the chase, and too young to wish for anything remotely resembling an apotheosis. What do you do with yourself after you’ve had an apotheosis?
Holmes hasn’t said anything to me, but my guess is that we will remain in Brussels tonight and reassess the situation tomorrow. All of our activity since our arrival has been cerebral, and most of that was Holmes’s. Knowing that no good comes of interrupting him at these times, I left him smoking and thinking in our room and took myself off to the hotel lobby, where I have been amusing myself (as Holmes would put it) with my journal. For once the verb is reasonably accurate. What I should be doing, I know, is writing a letter to my wife, who is going to be very upset when she returns home to find my note. Considering that I wrote it in a state of siege and had to take into account the possibility that it might fall into the hands of Moriarty’s men, I think I did very well, but I can’t expect Mary to see it that way.
2 a.m. Saturday, 25 April, 1891
Dear Mary,
I am called away on an emergency—one whose nature makes it absolutely impossible that I should give you my direction even if I knew it, which I assure you I don’t. Do please try not to worry.
Dr Jackson takes my rounds.
Leave the shutters up! I will explain when I see you.
John
P.S. I took the housekeeping money.
Mary is not, thank God, of a nervous disposition, but when I add to this very connubial communication a newspaper report, however garbled, of a mysterious fire at 221B Baker Street on that same night, I can’t help feeling I owe her something more in the way of explanation.
I wish I hadn’t told her to leave the shutters up.
* * *
I know what this reminds me of—it reminds me of my last holiday, the one I spent on Dartmoor, alternately hunched over the Baskerville family stationery and my diary, waiting for the Hound to appear. I have just been writing to Mary, advising her from my heart never to be caught in Brussels on a Sunday. Will this day never end?
Moriarty. It is easy enough to hold myself absolved from having to struggle with the intellectual problem of Moriarty, given the distinctly marginal quality of the information at my disposal. The difficulty comes in accepting this absolution. Try as I may, I cannot keep my thoughts from straying in his direction. Moriarty has assumed epic proportions in my mind. He is an elemental figure, an archetype of evil, an atavistic force. He draws my thoughts as a magnet draws iron filings and it is useless to remind myself that he could hardly fail to disappoint in the flesh. Professor James Moriarty—his very name has the taste of evil in my mouth.
I have a much clearer picture of Inspector Patterson. “Inspector Patterson? In a word, ambitious, Watson. A man with an instinctive understanding of hierarchy. He knows who it is he has to please at the Yard, make no mistake about that. He finds me—useful. And so have I found him.”
I have known many men like Ivor Patterson in my day, but none like Professor James Moriarty.
* * *
“So, Watson, how are you enjoying Brussels?”
Holmes materialized at my elbow in good time for dinner, apparently none the worse for his long vigil.
“Very much indeed.” The platitude was out before I had time to think; I hastened to retrieve my position. “I rarely get the opportunity to spend this much time in a hotel lobby at home. If you just wait long enough, the entire population of the city will pass by your window. I have not seen Moriarty yet, but perhaps tomorrow…”
His response was more of a grimace than a grin, but it told me what I wanted to know. He believed Moriarty would discover us if we stayed. We were no longer safe in Brussels. By unspoken agreement, further conversation was postponed until we should have had something to eat. The situation was grave, but not yet so grave that Holmes should have to end his forty-eight hour fast by missing dinner. We repaired to the salle à manger and made a very good meal of oxtail soup and a kind of beef ragout (Note: I must tell Mary about truffles), of which Holmes, normally the most moderate of men, rashly had two portions. He has no regard for his digestive system and no respect for mine. He actually asked me whether I was quite recovered from the crossing—did I feel able to go on? I told him tartly that as far as I knew, one usually travelled from Brussels to Geneva by land, not by sea.
* * *
Two mortal days in Brussels, but it is Monday at last and it promises to be a day of activity. Holmes has wired Inspector Patterson at the Yard for the arrest particulars, providing addresses in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Strasbourg, and Lyons for the confusion of the Professor, should he still be at large. I think we are going to Strasbourg, but nothing is certain. Holmes asked me whether I wanted to send Mary a wire (“It may be some days before we can risk another communication, Watson—you understand”), but if I understand anything about the situation in which I find myself, it is that a telegram from Brussels saying ARRIVED SAFELY LEAVING SHORTLY would do little to allay her anxiety. Mary may not know where I am now, but at least she imagines me lost in my own country. The note I left said nothing about the Continent. That’s why I spent yesterday writing that letter. Mary is going to want to know who proposed we go to the Continent, why I agreed to go, how we evaded Moriarty, why Holmes can’t go to the police, what we’re eating, how I’m sleeping, and a thousand other things I couldn’t possibly cover in a telegram.
I told Holmes that I would prefer to post the letter which I had written. I assured him that it was a simple catalogue of the events of the past few days, that it made no mention of [whispered] Switzerland—I even offered to let him read it. It was an offer I knew he’d decline.
“What, all that?” he said. “We only left London on Saturday, Watson. What will you have written in a week or so?”
If he thinks my letter is long, he should take a look at my diary.
Chapter 28
In the past five days we have been to Canterbury, Newhaven, Dieppe, Brussels, Strasbourg, Geneva, and half a dozen points northwest too small to mention. No part of this expedition has unfolded as I anticipated it would. At every point I have been taken by surprise, lately as much by Holmes’s attitude as by external events. Something is wrong, something more than he has told me, which is bad enough, God knows: Moriarty free, presumably furious, bent on vengeance, and a
s Holmes thinks, stalking us.
It feels like years since Holmes burst into my study with his talk of air-guns and erupted over my garden wall, years since I even thought I understood the situation. We alternate between bouts of frantic haste—first in our mad escape from England and now in our scramble southward along the Rhone—and brief periods of inexplicable idleness. We were two days in Brussels, where we kept to our hotel, and I understand that we will be some days in Meiringen next week, assuming the Reichenbach Fall lives up to its reputation.
I don’t understand it. We take no precautions, don no disguises, use no false names. Holmes remains in a state of excitement bordering on elation. He is preternaturally alert, every nerve on the stretch. Every conversation we have takes place against a background of Holmes looking for Moriarty, Holmes listening for Moriarty, Holmes waiting for Moriarty. A week of this and I will be in a state of nervous collapse myself. It is as if our only defense against this, this mathematics tutor is to stay one step ahead of him, to keep moving all the time.
Holmes’s conversational code is a simple one: if he wants you to know, he will tell you. Nine times out of ten, he will then explain why you did not need him to tell you that—you should have deduced it from the hat he wore on the 14th inst., from the uneven distribution of the blacking on his boots, from the unusual ink stain decorating the second phalanx of the index finger of his left hand. I have sometimes thought that it is only the mounting pressure of these mute witnesses, these tiny clues that only he can read, that finally induces him to confide in me. However that may be, it is clear to me that our friendship has endured these ten years partly because I will permit him to dole out his revelations in this way, little by little, in his own good time, while I myself am an open book, a primer if you will. Under ordinary conditions I am content that it should be so—he takes nothing from me that he does not take from everyone else, after all, and he does make some return, in time—but current conditions are not ordinary. Something has gone wrong, badly wrong, and I have no conversational right to broach the subject with my friend. I am condemned instead to play detective, a role in which I have little interest and less aptitude, to sift each hour of the past few days, to try and wrest from their inconsequent doings a larger pattern of cause and effect. I have no alternative. Holmes can not or will not let me help him.
I wish Holmes had more faith in me.
* * *
The truth is, Holmes on holiday is even more unnerving than Holmes at work.
If anyone had told me that I would find Holmes’s Continental dress disturbing, I would have laughed in his face. Holmes in mufti, Holmes in a burnoose, Holmes banging the drum for the Salvation Army, Holmes in a dhoti, these I could support with equanimity. Holmes in Hessians, Holmes in sandals, Holmes in snowshoes even. The demands of disguise can be brutal, as I know to my cost. However, for reasons which I cannot begin to imagine, we are not in fact travelling in disguise and in consequence, I find the sight of Holmes taking his ease in lederhosen and short pants, waving an Alpine-stock at each new discovery, difficult to take in my stride. He has gone native in Switzerland, just two days after crossing the border.
I suppose I must be grateful that he is still speaking English to me. He insists on speaking German to everyone else.
Always before, when I have managed to tear him away from London (on medical grounds, needless to say), he has been just as restive as the impaired state of his health would permit him to be, scarcely able to endure the fresh air and rural pursuits long enough for them to have their promised effect. No matter how brief a stay I have agreed to, always we have had to cut it short. Now that we are stranded on foreign soil with an evil genius intent on tracking us down, Holmes is disposed to be pleased by everything, happily discovering an appetite for natural science. At least half of his conversation is given over to rhapsodies about Nature’s palette, the pine forests that make our own British woodlands seem tame, the glory of the heights, the reliability of the sunshine, and the charming variety of songbirds on the Continent. We travel miles to see a curious waterfall or an unusual geological formation. It is unnatural.
Today he suddenly became convinced that there is some mystery attached to the foraging behaviour of the honey-bee relative to the solar azimuth and spent three interminable hours moving a dish of scented sugar-water across a meadow on his knees, counting the visitors at each station along the way. I must confess, I find all of this distinctly trying. When he said he thought we had time for a little experiment this afternoon, this is not at all what I thought he meant. From now on, my journal accompanies me everywhere.
When I think how I have tried to persuade him to take some interest in life beyond the confines of his work! I can hardly blame myself for never having presented him with a bowl of sugar-water, but the irony is complete. Horses, dogs, fishing, racing, hiking, rowing, shooting, and what I should have suggested was bee-farming.
The day ended on a particularly contentious note when Holmes tried to persuade me to abandon him and return to England, on the puerile grounds that from here on, our journey would become increasingly dangerous. This is not the first time he has insulted me in this way, languidly pointing out the danger in what is palpably, patently, unmistakably a dangerous situation. I defy anyone to read ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ without recognizing Dr Grimesby Roylott as a dangerous character well in advance of Holmes’s congenial warning to me on the outskirts of Stoke Moran. Why, the man caught up a steel poker, bent it into a horseshoe, and waved it in our faces within minutes of introducing himself to us in our own home. In my own phlegmatic way, I am prepared to recognize the threat in that.
It would doubtless come as a surprise to Mr Holmes to learn that a physician routinely exposes himself to death and disease. I have seen typhus, I have seen diphtheria, I have seen smallpox. In my military days, I saw diseases I had no name for. At least in my casework with Sherlock Holmes, I know that I won’t be bringing the risk home to Mary with me on my return. My wife is safe from Moriarty, if out of my reach, and I am a free agent. I told Holmes that I had not come all the way to Interleuken merely to buy him a change of linen and a supply of shag in Dieppe.
I may not have his degree of courage, few men have, but neither am I made of the kind of stuff that would abandon an old friend to his fate in desperate circumstances. He should know me better than that by now. How often do we have to have the same conversation?
Chapter 29
So this is what it’s like to be in shock.
I seem to be doing everything that is required, but very slowly and deliberately, as if from a great distance. I watch my hand move across the page and I recognize the handwriting, but that is my only connection to this activity. I am writing this because that is what I do, but I no longer remember very clearly why I do it.
It felt so strange to have the gendarme ask me about Holmes and write my answers down. That’s what I do, I wanted to say. I ask the questions, I write down the answers.
This tea is cold and the cup has a slight crack near the lip on the side with the handle on it. Why have I never noticed before how fragile everything is? It never occurred to me that Holmes might die in the course of this adventure. All the while Holmes was telling me how willing he was to trade his life for Professor Moriarty’s, he must have been serious. I thought he was planning to put some great plan into effect. I have become so used to watching him pull a rabbit out of his hat that it never occurred to me that he might not have a plan this time. I kept waiting for him to let me in on the secret. How could I know that there was no secret? God forgive me, I was impatient with him. I could not understand why were spending our time collecting “views” and listening to birdsong. How could I have been so blind? I am glad Holmes had this week, glad we climbed the Gemmi Pass, glad he found his honey-bees. No man goes to his grave regretting the time he spent marvelling at the beauty of this world. I thank God he had this week.
They tell me the telegraph office is closed now until mor
ning. One of the little disadvantages, Holmes would say, of life in the country. I don’t mind. I find that some telegrams are much harder to write than others.
To Inspector Patterson at Scotland Yard: HOLMES MORIARTY BOTH DEAD SECURE ADDITIONAL EVIDENCE BLUE ENVELOPE PIGEONHOLE M BAKER STREET DESK INVESTIGATION CONTINUES—DOCTOR WATSON. It was his last request of me, that I should tell Inspector Patterson about the blue envelope marked “Moriarty.” Holmes never did have much respect for the ingenuity of the Yard.
To my bank, for funds. I should have liked to have wired my bank earlier, but Holmes wouldn’t hear of it. “It doesn’t matter, Watson,” he said. “You can pay for the accommodations on our return journey.” There will be no return journey, for Holmes.
To my wife, Mary. I hate sending Mary a wire like this, but there simply isn’t anyone else I can call upon in this instance. Holmes was far too jealous of his privacy to admit many people into his circle. He had clients and he had colleagues (of a sort), but he did not have friends. Stamford would do it if I asked him to, but it would take so much explanation! He hasn’t seen Holmes in years, not since Holmes failed to attend his wedding. Mary has at least heard of Mycroft, which puts her one step ahead of everyone else, as far as I know. If my letter has arrived from Brussels, she will even have heard of Professor Moriarty. What is more to the point is that Mycroft will have heard of Mary or if not, will immediately deduce the connection from her name. Dr Stamford’s sudden appearance could only introduce an additional note of confusion at this most confusing time. And Mary will say all that is kind, as much for Holmes’s sake as for mine. I can’t help it that she is a woman. She is still infinitely more suitable than Lestrade, for example. If the Holmes boys wanted to avoid women, then they should have peopled their lives with men.