The Stories and Real Life
“THERE WAS NO NEED TO BE QUITE SO BRUSQUE with the man,” I said to Holmes half an hour later at a hammam on Waterloo Road. My friend had insisted we take a Turkish bath in order to revive ourselves, and now we were perched in the hot-room, naked save for towels around our waists, our skin pinkened and perspiring freely. “You hurt McBride’s feelings, poor fellow. He was quite crestfallen as he escorted us out.”
My companion shrugged. “I have little patience with these people who expect me to perform for them. ‘What can you deduce about me from this fob watch, Mr Holmes?’ ‘Tell me everything you can about me from the condition of my walking stick, Mr Holmes.’ As though I am some trained bear, ever ready to rise up on my hind legs and dance about when they clap their hands.”
“It is harmless, surely.”
“It is trivial, and it is an imposition, and it wastes my talents, and I blame you for it, Watson. I blame you and your stories” – he buried the word stories in a contemptuous snort – “wherein you depict me as some sort of winking guru, dispensing gnomic pronouncements and shrewd insights with gay abandon.”
“I have been at pains to show you in a positive light in my fiction,” I retorted. “I never demean you. What you must not forget is that these stories you are so scornful of keep a roof over your head and clothes on your back.”
“I earn my own money.”
“I have clients.”
“A few, their problems trivial, the fees they pay insubstantial. I am your principal benefactor, I and my fiction. And if the price of my patronage is strangers occasionally asking you to act in a manner not dissimilar to the character I have created, well, it is hardly an exorbitant fee. They do it because they are fans.”
“Fans of a literary alter ego who is not me.”
“It is you, but a heightened version of you. For heaven’s sake, anyone else might be grateful for being turned into a celebrity. Not so Mr Sherlock Holmes. He finds it irksome. Why, it must be a relief that I have not published any tales for over two years.”
“Yes, you have ‘killed me off’, and now I exist in limbo, dead on the page, alive in real life. That has not deterred the curious, though, has it? If anything it makes them more demanding. They regard me with a mixture of incredulity and reverence, as though I am second in their estimation only to a certain Nazarene.”
“You go too far!” I ejaculated heatedly. “Besides, as I recall, it was at your behest that I laid down my pen, much though I would rather not have. Do you know how much Newnes at The Strand is offering me for new Sherlock Holmes adventures? Upward of a thousand pounds per tale!”
“A tidy sum.”
“I have all the materials to hand – notes, ideas, plot outlines – to provide us with a more than comfortable income, yet you insist I let them go to waste and preserve a literary silence. It is beyond vexing. It is all but unconscionable.”
We glared at each other for several seconds, narrow-eyed, tight-lipped. Then Holmes broke the impasse with a loud, hearty guffaw.
“Oh, Watson! How ever do you put up with me? I am possibly the most churlish, least appreciative friend a man could have.”
“You are not wrong there,” I said, laughing too.
“An apology is in order.”
“We are both fatigued. We both spoke out of turn. If there is an apology going begging, I would rather it went to McBride. Since he is not here, however, I am willing to accept one in his stead.”
“Rest assured that, through all the trials and ordeals we have faced and those we have yet to face, I would not care to have anyone else by my side but you.”
“That is good, since I doubt anyone else could bear to endure them with you.”
We moved from the hot-room to a cold pool into which we plunged ourselves up to the necks. The water was icy, eliciting a burning sensation that hovered on the border between pleasurable and painful. We shared the pool with perhaps a half-dozen fellow bathers, each of whom sat with head bowed, keeping his own counsel.
“So,” I said, after I had recovered from the shock of immersion, “what have you gleaned about our Bethlem-incarcerated Bostonian?”
“As I told McBride, I cannot yet say who he is, but I know what he is.”
“Go on.”
“He is a man of education and breeding, from a moneyed background.”
“His appearance suggests otherwise.”
“His superficial appearance, yes, but from closer examination of him the tell-tale signs are all there. He is no labourer, that much is for certain. His skin is soft and white all over, the parts usually exposed to the elements as pale as those that would be covered by clothing. He lacks muscle definition. Furthermore his one remaining hand lacks the extensive callusing of the man who earns a living by the sweat of his back. Rather, I would submit that the fellow earns a living by the sweat of his brow, for there is a single small callus upon the side of his middle finger, which betokens the frequent use of a pen. You yourself have one, Watson. Even though you are no longer an author, you nonetheless have to write copiously thanks to the reports and prescriptions that form an integral part of your profession.”
“Nothing so far intimates a moneyed background,” I said. “He could be a bank clerk or a legal secretary. A doctor, even.”
“Quite so,” said Holmes. “But we can at least safely aver that he has not led a life of significant hardship. Rather, he is an intellectual, or was, before the disruption of his mental faculties.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I have drawn your attention at least twice in the past to the equation between a sizeable head and a sizeable brain. It was true of Charles Augustus Milverton, and it was true of Mr Henry Baker, whom we met a few Christmases back.”
It was true also of Holmes himself, whose high forehead seemed sometimes to bulge with the strain of containing the grey matter within.
“Our man in Bethlem has substantial cranial capacity, and such a volume is wasted if it is not filled,” he continued. “Also of interest was his hand.”
“There was more there than just the callus?”
“There were a number of tiny patches of scar tissue adorning the fingers and wrist. The patterning of them is suggestive. I have a fair few myself.”
Holmes showed me his hand and wrist. Dots of shiny fibrous tissue stippled the skin here and there, like constellations of stars. I cannot recall having noticed these before, but then the cicatrices were so small as to be all but undetectable to the naked eye.
“From smoking?” I hazarded.
“Hardly! They are from working with chemicals, as I used to do extensively at university and after, until my practical researches took a turn for the arcane. Splashes of acid are an unavoidable by-product of chemical experimentation. However careful one is, accidents happen.”
“So our man is a scientist.”
“I would wager good money on it. There is one final detail, however, which is the most telling of all: his accent.”
“You have established that he is from Boston.”
“But he is not just any Bostonian. There are clear traces of Anglicisation in his speech. Did you notice how he said ‘here’? ‘I don’t belong heah’, with a distinct rising intonation at the end. That and the general refinement of his pronunciation mark him out as belonging to Boston’s upper class, those so-called Brahmins whose adherence to their English heritage is strong and who are renowned for their wealth and their attention to lineage and good schooling. The Brahmins are aristocracy in a nation that purports to have done away with heredity, and I tell you, Watson, the Bethlem inmate is one of them. He is gentry and no mistake.”
“If so, does it help us in identifying him?”
“Not as much as one might wish,” my friend allowed. “His status as a Boston Brahmin is insufficient to affix a name to our unknown, but that in tandem with his interest in chemistry does narrow down the scope of our search somewhat. There must be thousands of Americans at large on our shores, if not tens of thousands, but amongst those only a small percentage match our friend’s description: in his twenties, from Boston, well-born, well-read, a scientist.”
“Not to mention minus one hand and half a face.”
Holmes uttered a wry laugh. “Those surely are his most distinguishing characteristics, and you are right to make the point. How long ago did he receive the injuries, would you reckon? Two years? Three?”
“In my estimation, something like that.”
“Then if he has been in this country for any significant duration, he will surely have made an impression upon any who have met him. His identity should not be too hard to pin down, and I shall put out feelers forthwith. The more intriguing and challenging aspect of all this is, of course, how he came to be as he is.”
“There must be some connection between his state of mind and the R’lyehian he wrote on his cell walls.”
“Indubitably,” said Holmes. “Only too often do the two things go hand in hand: mental derangement and the mother tongue of the Elder Gods.”
“Unless you happen to be one of those gods yourself.”
“Even then. Are they mentally deranged or sane? How do we know? How can we mere mortals, with our limited faculties and circumscribed perceptions, measure those fathomless minds of theirs? How can we hope to divine the motivations, the emotions, of star-spawned beings from beyond? Everything about them is utterly alien. Perhaps they are all quite mad. Perhaps the eons spent in the gulfs of space and the depths of the earth have driven them over the brink of rationality and there is nothing within them now but howling chaos.”
“And evil.”
“Or something we only call evil because we cannot interpret it any other way. To them it might be necessity, or whim, or expedience.”
“The will to subjugate and eliminate the human race surely cannot be considered any of those things,” I said.
“Really? Imagine you are a wasp and I swat you with a rolled-up newspaper. Does that make me evil? I was only ridding myself of a nuisance. Or, let us say you are a sheep and I shear you for your wool then send you to the abattoir to become mutton. I am not a thief or a murderer. I am a farmer.”
“A fair point, I suppose.”
“What if, by believing the Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones hate us, we are exalting our own importance unduly? What if they harbour nothing for us but, at best, a mild disdain? So great is their power compared with ours that they have no real cause to fear us. It is, contrariwise, our fear of them that leads us to interpret their actions as evil. Why should Azathoth give a fig about me or you? Why should Shub-Niggurath? Yog-Sothoth? Yig? Cthulhu?”
I could not help but feel a prickle up my spine as Holmes intoned this roll call of names. Simply to speak them aloud was a transgressive act, akin to yelling obscenities during evensong. But to the average eavesdropper, Holmes would appear to be spouting just a stream of gibberish words, like something out of Lear or Carroll.
“If they pay human beings so little heed,” I said, “why do they wish to be worshipped?”
“Do they?” came the reply. “Do they care at all about obeisance and sacrifice? Such may be offered to them, but whether they court it, or even notice it, is debatable. If they respond, it might merely be the result of happenstance or inquisitiveness. The veneration in which some people hold the gods says more about those people than about the gods – their need for primordial gratification, their sense of their own insignificance and lack of worth. Cthulhu and his ilk hold up a black mirror to ourselves, and in it some see repugnant visions, something to shun, while others their own reflections, clear as day. I deem Professor Moriarty, for example, to belong in the latter category.”
I felt a prickle up my spine again. In many ways I loathed Moriarty’s name more than I did any of the gods’.
“Despicable man,” I said. “Fifteen years on, and I still find myself haunted by the memory of him. We have bested many villains since, yet somehow Moriarty stands out amongst them. Perhaps it is because he, along with the Chinaman Gong-Fen Shou, inaugurated us into the field of investigation we now pursue. He robbed us of our blissful innocence.”
“To put it another way, he opened our eyes to the truth,” said Holmes. “We owe him for that.”
“We owe him nothing but our everlasting enmity. He meant to feed us to Nyarlathotep. Do you not remember?”
“I remember all too well. I remember, also, that he himself ended up as Nyarlathotep’s victim, dragged down by that Crawling Chaos into the nether realms and consumed.”
“As you tell it, since you alone were witness to his demise, he allowed it to happen. He surrendered rather than resisted. I continue to wonder why.”
“So do I. I can only assume that, at the last, he loved death more than life and chose the one over the other. He had the mindset of a nihilist and pursued that philosophy to its inevitable bitter conclusion. I know he still obsesses you, Watson. Why else would you make him my opponent in ‘The Final Problem’?”
“I suppose I wanted to exorcise him from my mind. Hence I hurled him over a cliff into a maelstrom.”
“And me along with him,” said Holmes. “Was I in need of being exorcised too?”
“You asked for a conclusive ending to your fictional endeavours. Very little is more conclusive than being dead.”
Yet there was nonetheless a modicum of truth in Holmes’s observation. By having him perish alongside Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, I had to some degree been working out my less charitable feelings towards my friend. I could simply have had him emerge the victor from the struggle with Moriarty and thereafter retire. Instead, my decision to “kill” him could be regarded as an expression, albeit a subconscious one, of a wish to untether myself from a man whose companionship could often be burdensome and whose self-destructive tendencies posed a danger to me as well. I had imagined a world without Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps I was actually fantasising about a life without him.
“Well,” said he, “the fictional Holmes may be at rest but the flesh-and-blood one has work to do.” He rose from the pool. “Are you with me?”
“No time for a massage?”
“We have dallied enough, I feel.”
I was tired to the very marrow of my bones. The visit to the hammam had made precious little impact on the brittle shell of enervation that seemed to encase my brain. I wanted – craved – the rejuvenating oblivion of sleep.
All the same I said, “Very well.” What else could I, faithful Watson, do but follow in Sherlock Holmes’s wake? It was always that way in the stories, after all. How should real life be any different?
