by Anita Janda
If Mycroft thinks he can postpone his grief, he is no better than a fool. A grief deferred doesn’t withdraw politely from the room. It sits in your favourite chair, helps itself to your pipe and slippers, and clamours for a bigger fire and something to read. You are cut off from all your comforts and still, in spite of that, it is always at your elbow, tugging at your sleeve: “Now? Now?” Give way to anger and your anger will give way to grief. Your only hope is to look past your grief and practice being far-sighted, all the while keeping yourself very busy with something very near at hand—a diary, for instance.
No one could have worked harder than I did to preserve what little evidence there was, but to what end? The Swiss are satisfied that Holmes could have been saved by a handrail, Mycroft won’t leave London, and I can’t describe the missing witness any better than I have done. I’m not suddenly going to remember a scar on his cheek or a gold tooth in his head. He was young. He looked happy. He spoke German, we were in Switzerland, I assume he was Swiss. Someone should probably be investigating whether Professor Moriarty coached any Swiss students this year, but again, to what end? Nothing brings back the dead and nothing less than that will satisfy me.
I don’t know why I decided it was more important to play detective than to mourn my friend, but I know that I have paid a heavy price for my decision. All week long, I have felt the inexorable pressure of my determination driving a wedge between me and my world. Colours were less distinct. Sounds were duller. Furniture was harder to avoid. My shins are a mass of bruises, none of which has had time to turn yellow in the middle. If someone had pointed out to me (but no one did) a charming Alpine scene or a tasty local dish, I could have labelled its ingredients with my usual efficiency, but now nothing was piquant enough to warrant that attention on its own. I needed someone else to say, “Look at that!” and, as I say, no one did. If this is how life was for Sherlock Holmes, all flat and tasteless, it is small wonder that he experimented with cocaine. The life of the mind is vastly overrated.
And what do I have to show for all my efforts? Practically speaking, nothing at all. My statement and the two letters have returned from Geneva, where Swiss graphology experts have no doubt confirmed that my statement of the events in question was written by me, Holmes’s farewell letter by Holmes, and Moriarty’s lying decoy by Moriarty—or failing that, that these three writing samples were written by three different men. The authorities here insist on keeping the originals but with their permission, I have made a copy of the letter Holmes wrote to me. Mycroft has his sources, as he told Mary. If he wants to read Moriarty’s missive, let him seek his sources out once more. My days as a detective are done. I do not want to see that letter, much less copy it out in my own hand.
It’s funny—Mary tells me that when she read my telegram, she understood my “BEST COME SOONEST” line as a plea to Mycroft Holmes, as indeed it was. But that wasn’t Mycroft’s understanding. He was impervious to my plea, did not even recognize it for what it was. “When do you go?” he asked politely, handing it back to her. It was as if his brother’s death had nothing to do with him: he parts company with us here, there’s nothing he can do about this situation.
The one completely reliable characteristic of the brothers Holmes has been their ability to confuse the Watsons in their inmost hearts. When he added that to the best of his knowledge, I was merely helping the police with their inquiries and had not been taken in charge, Mary’s confusion was complete. She told me that by the end of her conversation with Mycroft Holmes, she was so worried about me that she had completely lost sight of the fact that Holmes was dead and she was supposed to be comforting his brother.
Mycroft may be fixed in London, but he had a clearer picture of my overall situation than I did. If Peter Steiler hadn’t sent his grandson running for that gendarme, if he hadn’t accompanied me back up the mountain, I might have found myself seriously suspected of murdering my friend Holmes. Why not? Two foreigners (how odd it is to have to think of oneself as a foreigner!) go up to the Reichenbach Fall and one comes back. Comes back, moreover, with a strange tale about a murderous mathematics tutor (who is also foreign) and a Swiss messenger lad he can’t describe and no one else has seen. The sun is setting and it is now too late to visit the scene of the crime. By morning, I’m in a Swiss gaol and the footmarks have disappeared in the mist. Then they discover that I am a writer—of detective fiction. I am too much the realist to suppose that the testimony of a couple of graphologists in Geneva would have precipitated my release under those conditions. No, once incarcerated, I would have had to produce more than a couple of letters to win my freedom.
When I look at the situation from a purely selfish point of view, I suppose I would have to say that I have been remarkably lucky. I actually arrived on the scene behind the police. Between my bad leg and Mr Steiler’s age (he wears it well but they don’t call him Peter Steiler the elder for nothing), we were easy to overtake and the gendarme caught us up before we were in shouting distance of the top. He saw for himself how heartsick I was, how glad I was to see a member of the local constabulary, how badly I was limping. I felt like a horse that has been ridden too far too fast. I was trembling with muscle fatigue. He saw the footmarks, he measured their stride. I didn’t have to tell him I hadn’t made those impressions any more than I had to tell him I had to rest before I could begin the descent. He could see that for himself. Thanks to Peter Steiler, who is as fluent in French as he is in English, there was no language problem, no frantic fumblings for the translation for “murderous” or “decoy” or “forgery.” The words they teach you in school are never the words you need in an emergency. I owe Peter Steiler far more than a copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
I am so tired. How odd to think that within the space of a few days, I shall have no reason to pick up my pen. Fitsch is going to have to take ‘The Cardboard Box’, after all, adultery or no adultery. I won’t be writing any more adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I have brought my second contract to a successful conclusion, which is something to be proud of and grateful for in this uncertain world. I won’t be signing a third. How could it be otherwise? Without Holmes, I will have no subject.
Finally, I have nothing to say.
1893
Chapter 31
We’ll call him John Sherlock Watson—in memory of our friend. And he will give shape to our dreams, fullness to our days, and immediacy to all our fears. Our future will have his face. We will become our parents and he will be our child and those we have lost will be found again, in the curve of his cheek and the sound of his sigh. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I was writing this under the influence.
What stories we have saved for him! All of the Morstan family stories, all of the Watson family stories (we are, we were, the last of our lines), and all of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes I never had the heart to tell the world. He alone will thrill to the slavering Hound of the Baskervilles. He alone will feel the spray from the Reichenbach Fall as a chill in his bones and shrink from the touch of Professor Moriarty.
When Mary and I were first married, I often pictured her with a baby in her arms and a child at her knee—I think I was trying to accustom myself to this unnerving idea in advance, by degrees. Then as the years went by and the Stamford family took on dynastic dimensions and Mary’s friend Celia delivered twin girls, I suppose I must have stopped picturing this. I know that when we sold the practice on Mortimer Street and moved to Kensington, I was secretly rather pleased that the late Dr Adams had been a bachelor—no nursery, you see. Mary was airing cupboards and disposing of motheaten relics for months, but at least there was no box-room painted a sensible green, with a broken hobby-horse in the corner and a cache of childish drawings tucked away in one of the window-seats, the way there was in our last house. We were able to put every room in the house to good use and just look how well it’s turned out! I should have bought a house with no nursery years ago—we might have had an absolute houseful of children underfoot by n
ow.
How I shall enjoy painting the spare bedroom a sensible green!
* * *
I hope Mary is carrying a boy because otherwise this child is going to have to go through life as Wanda Wilhelmina Watson, which strikes my ear as a wanton abuse of parental authority. I know I shouldn’t let this hideous thought dampen my enthusiasm for the child in any way, but “Wanda Wilhelmina”? That’s a bit thick, isn’t it?
I didn’t know Mary’s middle name was Martha or that her Aunt Mae was originally Maida Margaret Morstan. It seems a fairly pointless custom to me in view of the fact that Mary became Mary Martha Watson when we married, but a family tradition is a family tradition and this one is obviously very important to Mary, who describes it as a way of welcoming a daughter into the family, affirming that she will always be our little girl. So I told her: “Mary,” I said, “‘Wanda Wilhelmina’ it is.” And I hope the child appreciates what we’ve done for her.
The best way to handle this, I think, is to suppress the child’s middle name as too grand for everyday use. Mary should be amenable to this, I think—after all, I didn’t know her middle name was Martha until last night. She even signed our marriage lines as Mary Morstan. If my wife Mary can be happy without a middle name in daily use, it seems to me our daughter Wanda can, too.
“Wanda Watson”—I can get used to that. It’s Wanda’s little sisters Wallis Whitney and Wilona Winter, I feel sorry for.
“Wallis Whitney Watson” is terribly reminiscent of Wee Willie Winkie.
* * *
Ever since Mary told me she was expecting, I have been walking around smiling at nothing. They say that expectant mothers glow like brides, but I think that’s because they don’t want them to feel jealous of the expectant fathers, their husbands. I feel like I have been unexpectedly released from prison and led blinking into the light of a perfect summer day, without a cloud in the sky.
We are going to have a baby.
Life is full of possibilities again, as has not been the case for years. I am enjoying the writing. I haven’t forgotten why I stopped—it had become a fruitless exercise, an excuse for wallowing in pointless self-recriminations—but now that the future finally means more to me again than an empty extension of the past through the tedious medium of the present, I can see how much I’ve missed this. As usual, what I needed was a story to tell. I am left wondering whether the difference between those who recover from a loss and those who remain bowed down with grief is less a matter of temperament than it is of circumstance.
A great grief may require the corrective of a great joy—or such a preponderance of little joys as can be equally difficult to arrange. When it comes, the shift is unmistakable—like finding yourself on level ground again after a long, arduous climb up a treacherous incline covered with scree.
I will admit to a slight feeling of disorientation now that I don’t have to worry about my emotional footing. It seems like such a long time since I had leisure to observe the scenery! The most ordinary sights and sounds catch me by the throat and gladden my heart. As I write these words, the smoothness of the paper beneath the heel of my hand is a poignant source of physical pleasure, as is the rhythmic regularity of the words that flow from my pen.
I was teasing Mary this afternoon, thinking about that Morstan family tradition. She must have been madly in love with me, to have been able to overlook the handicap of a name like Watson.
* * *
It may be five years since Jack the Ripper claimed his first victim, but he’s still current enough to sell newspapers. Today’s lead story: a “retrospective” of the crimes which shocked the nation, raising the question of how the police can have acted so expeditiously in ridding the metropolis of the Moriarty gang and yet have failed even to have identified the madman who once roamed the streets of Whitechapel, slaying at will. I could answer that question for them in one word: Sherlock Holmes. All right, two words—it’s still the right answer.
Holmes was excluded from the Ripper investigation, but the Moriarty case was all his. It was Holmes who accumulated the evidence against the Professor, Holmes who orchestrated the mass arrest that Monday, to the everlasting credit of Scotland Yard’s own Inspector Patterson. And it was Holmes who bore the brunt of the Professor’s wrath and paid for the success of that investigation with his life.
In a way it’s a pity that I was never able to bring myself to tell the Moriarty story. It doesn’t seem right that the investigative success of our time should remain permanently associated with Inspector Patterson’s name. Or that the last time Holmes’s name ever appeared in print, it should have been misspelled in a garbled account of his “accident” along the path to the Reichenbach Fall. For want of a handrail, the great detective was lost—it’s insulting, that’s what it is.
I’m not the only one who has had difficulty accepting Holmes’s death. I know for a fact that his brother Mycroft is still paying the rent at 221B Baker Street two years later and that Mrs Hudson is still giving the old rooms a good turn-out once a week. She told Mary the other day that it wouldn’t be “respectful” to let the dust take hold.
Anyone would think that Holmes had been a house-proud man.
* * *
Letters in all the most popular newspapers, from a Colonel James Moriarty (Retired), objecting to the use of the term “the Moriarty gang,” which he understands to be an outgrowth of the vicious persecution(!) visited upon his innocent brother, the late Professor James Moriarty, who was blameless in all things, by that “infernal hothead” (The Standard), that “curst encroaching busybody” (Daily Chronicle), that “officious humbug” (Daily Telegraph), that “self-appointed avenger of the downtrodden” (The Times), Sherlock Holmes. God knows what new forms of invective will have occurred to him in time for the evening papers. Colonel Moriarty must have been stationed abroad when the story first hit the newspapers, two years ago. Every paper in town carried a running account of the arrest and conviction of the Moriarty gang.
I notice that Colonel Moriarty doesn’t say that any of the men who were arrested as part of the Moriarty gang were unfairly tried or unjustly convicted. I guess that “curst encroaching busybody,” Sherlock Holmes, accumulated enough evidence against the individual members of the gang to satisfy Colonel Moriarty’s exacting judicial standards—it is only the identification of the gang with the name of its leader, his brother, which offends his sense of propriety.
Family pride is a laudable quality when not taken to extremes. This is an extreme. Colonel Moriarty has blinded himself to the truth and that is his privilege, but when it comes to besmirching the reputation of my friend Holmes, he has overstepped his bounds.
* * *
Mary is right. I can try to cover the evidence linking Professor James Moriarty to the death of Sherlock Holmes in one hopelessly detailed paragraph that will be too long for anyone to publish, or I can send each and every Editor on Colonel Moriarty’s list a brief but dignified note to the effect that a full, unvarnished account of the facts surrounding the final, fatal encounter between Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes will be found in a forthcoming issue of the Strand Magazine under the title ‘The Final Problem’, and say that I would be obliged if Colonel Moriarty would refrain from further outbursts of misguided loyalty until he is in possession of those facts.
Whether or not they publish my letter, I know what I have to do. And I know that it won’t be easy. For two years and more, I have spent every waking minute trying not to think about the events of that time. They may trouble my dreams, I told myself, but they will not absorb my waking hours. But that’s of no consequence now.
I owe this to Holmes. That’s all that should concern me.
I owe this to Holmes.
1894
Chapter 32
First the child and then the mother. How shall I bear it? I am forty-three years old and everyone I have ever loved is dead.
Celia and I chose the dress together: her dark blue. I haven’t seen Mary in that dress
since she told me about the baby. My son, John Sherlock. He was mine for such a little breath of time. A week, what’s a week? And now they are laying out his mother. They say trouble always comes in threes, but that doesn’t frighten me today. What is there left for me to lose, now that I’ve lost my Mary? No lilies—I must remember to tell Celia, no lilies. Mary doesn’t like lilies.
They’re calling me.
* * *
The things people say, to try and ease a grief! You have to wonder, really, whether they can hear themselves at all or have simply learned deafness in order to preserve their good opinion of themselves. “What do I think Mary would want me to do with myself now that she’s gone?”
I think Mary would want me to mourn her as she would have mourned me had our roles been reversed. And I think that Mary would want me eventually to cease my mourning, to grow past my grief over my loss and into a fuller consciousness of the sweetness of life for however many years remain to me.
But how I am to do that, she herself could not have told me. We could neither of us long endure the imagining of that long loneliness. And now it is become a dream from which I will not wake.
Chapter 33
If I ever wondered how I would know when my diary had run its course, my curiosity has now been satisfied: Holmes has conquered death and whatever I may decide to do about his miraculous return, I shall have no need for this journal after this afternoon.