‘Dr. Watson,’ she cried in great agitation, waving the parasol, ‘a telegram from Lewes. I must assume it’s from Mr. Holmes. I know he never remembers your address. I hope he’s all right. Why would he send a telegram when the letter post is so much cheaper!’
Holding out my hand to her with a reassurance I did not feel, I cried, ‘Why, my dear Mrs. Hudson, I am sure there is nothing amiss. Holmes never writes when he can telegraph!’
She received my hand in hers, looking up at me with moist eyes. ‘I know you’ve had your differences of late but I wouldn’t waste an hour in going to see him, sir, or you may not see him alive.’
To judge by her words and her precipitate arrival, Mrs. Hudson feared (and at the thought my heart beat even harder) his tempestuous life might be coming to its end. A world without Holmes, even a disaffected Holmes? And two years my junior? No. Unthinkable.
For the past few years my former friend had spent much time at his isolated farm-house on the Sussex Downs, occupied with his hives and building a library. A mutual acquaintance came to tell me Holmes prowled about the purlieus of his farm like the Bengal tiger ‘Bert’ at the Regent’s Park Zoo, as restless, brilliant and dissatisfied as ever. This acquaintance took the chance to tell me that my name never came up.
I slit open the envelope. The message read, ‘Early today a cutting from the Rheinische Merkur was pushed under my door. Grave events afoot. Come, if convenient - if inconvenient come all the same. S.H.’
I read out the words to Mrs. Hudson. Without waiting for her encouragement (which was soon forthcoming), I resolved to obey my old comrade’s ringing command, though the request made it unlikely he was, as I had immediately feared, lying on his bed near death. Nor was there in this summons any hint of malice or retribution.
There was a post-script to the telegram. I should arrive by a circuitous route. This, I was instructed, would be by fast train to Hindhead, in Surrey, where he had arranged for the Station Master to put me on a char-à-banc or electric brougham to Lewes. At Lewes, given the state of the ground after a period of heavy rain, I would find a horse-drawn four-wheeler to take me on the final stage of my journey to the farm near King’s Standing. I was without fail to bring the latest Continental Gazetteer. The telegram ended, ‘The tsunami has struck,’ followed by a mysterious command, ‘Spend an hour in intensive study of the Kiel Canal.’
My heart sang at his customary presumption though I was alarmed by the phrase ‘The tsunami has struck’ and by the order to take a circuitous route. ‘What on Earth does all this mean?’ I said aloud, after I had twice read over the summons. Should I purchase a carpet-bag and fill it with a jemmy, a dark lantern and my best field-glasses? Or at the very least load two chambers of my Eley’s No. 2 with soft-nosed bullets and slip it in a hip-pocket? As to the Kiel Canal, I revolved in my head how to carry out so strange an order in such a short time and decided it was not possible.
I threw myself briskly into country-wear wondering why I should ‘without fail’ bring the Continental gazetteer. My practice could get along very well for a day or two without me since it was the slackest time in the year. I pinned a note to the patients’ entrance asking them to make do with the locum summoned from the St. Pancras Hospital. I promised Mrs. Hudson a supply of black hothouse grapes from Solomon’s in Piccadilly on my return and left helter-skelter for the railway station. Soon I was taking lunch on the train to Hindhead.
Shortly after five o’ clock that day, with a medical bag and the small portmanteau containing the Continental gazetteer, I was aboard the four-wheeler travelling through the mud and quiet of the Ashdown Forest. Just past Chelwood Vachery I glimpsed Holmes’ lonely, low-lying black-and-white building with its stone courtyard and crimson ramblers. From a nearby height Holmes could command a view of the English Channel, close enough as the seagull flies to blast his farm with winter gales. It was clear his respect for Nature had grown with age and familiarity. For many a year it took a little diplomacy to wrest him from London. On several occasions during our days at Baker Street I urged him to go to the countryside for a rest, not least because he could obtain a wondrous view of the heavens. He replied with some asperity, ‘Watson, the proper study for my species is my species, not blades of grass or insects and the stars! I shall sooth myself with Nature in my later days. For the moment, it is to the Quadrant of Regent Street and Charing Cross I turn to for recreation and inspiration, amid the sounds and sights of hansom-cabs, omnibuses and dog-carts, wing collars, and the flickering of gas-light, watching the ever-changing kaleidoscope of life as it ebbs and flows through Fleet Street and the Strand.’
As I journeyed closer to Holmes’ country retreat, my hearing grew attuned to the clip of the horses’ hoofs striking the road’s metalled surface. This switched to the crunching sound of the carriage-wheels turning from the highroad into the gravelled drive. The air wafting through the carriage window was suffused with the scent of dried grass. Heralding my arrival at this once-familiar place, we passed the small stand of Holm oaks and a fine 100-foot Lebanon cedar with a small engraved plate pinned to the bark stating ‘From a seed sourced in the Forest of the Cedars of God, planted to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon 1815’.
To my relief (given my still-bubbling worry for his health), as the horses pulled the carriage along the final stretch, I saw Holmes pacing up and down. He looked well enough for a man now into his sixties. I observed nothing formidable in his symptoms, except for an increase in lumbago in the lower spine, no doubt worsened by damp air seeping from the nearby woods. His demeanour reflected the tenor of the telegram. While I fumbled for money to pay the cabman, Holmes drummed his fingers on the carriage side. The payment made, with a touch of the driver’s whip the horses wheeled and turned away. I could give Holmes my fullest attention.
My host reached a hand across to my shoulder and in the tone of old said approvingly, ‘Well done, Watson, prompt as ever in answering a telegraphic summons. I see you have brought the Continental gazetteer.’
‘I have, yes,’ I responded, suffused with warmth, ‘but are you well?’
‘My ever-faithful friend, I am. You shall meet Mrs. Keppell once more, she is still with me. Her billeting and victualing are still carried out like army manoeuvres.’
Mrs. Keppell had remarried. Her new husband was the village wheel-wright and coffin-maker, though she kept to her former name when at Holmes’ farm. With her came Tallulah, a lively Norwich terrier. Refused entry in-doors by the master of the house, Tallulah spent the two hours as on daily duty, patrolling the courtyard, yapping with unabated excitement whenever Mrs. Keppell waved from an open window.
Now summer was almost upon us, petunias and snap-dragons set the farm ablaze with colour. Wall-flowers protruded from crevices, a favourite flower of mine from a nostalgic childhood holiday spent in Dorset with my mother, taking long walks around Thomas Hardy’s birthplace at Higher Bockhampton.
With the carriage gone and my introduction to Tallulah complete, Holmes raised a hand dramatically. Grasped between finger and thumb fluttered a piece of newsprint perhaps five inches square, displaying angular heavy characters. I heard his dry, crisp, emphatic utterance as, with a grim expression, he plunged into the matter without further preamble. ‘The tsunami, Watson, the proof of crime - and worse it is than we could ever have imagined.’