The Strand would pay all costs for a journey retracing our original route. Holmes and I would tread once more in the footsteps of Goethe, Tolstoy and Nietzsche along the charming Rhone Valley. Sir George wanted the photograph to show Holmes standing on the lip of the chasm down which Moriarty tumbled (rather, had been tumbled) to his end. The photograph was to capture the atmosphere of Jacques-Louis David’s ‘Napoleon At The Saint-Bernard Pass’ - as Bonaparte himself put it, ‘Calme sur un cheval fougueux’. In the picture my comrade-in-arms should stare down on the torrent, behind him crags piled one on the other. My publisher had looked at me quizzically. Did I think Holmes could be persuaded to strike a chord on his violin, staring down over the precipice as though viewing Moriarty’s body cannonading from rock to jutting rock? I replied that it was a ludicrous thought. The spray from the rushing torrent would badly upset a Stradivarius.
My publisher’s wish for an exclusive front-cover to boost sales was understandable. The publishing business was now highly competitive. The advent of the daily journey to work for large numbers of the population had triggered a demand for reading material from newspapers such as the Daily Mail and magazines with shorter articles and stories. Cheap titles like the Harmsworth Magazine or Pearson’s Magazine offered articles of scientific and historical interest, cartoons and celebrity gossip. The Strand looked over its shoulder at the rapid growth of a particularly vulgar halfpenny dreadfuller, the Penny Blood Union Jack magazine, popular with young men. The Union Jack’s circulation had been lifted by the adventures of the upstart detective Sexton Blake, the poor man’s Sherlock Holmes, and his scent hound Pedro. Another rival was Hornung’s disgraceful invention, A. J. Raffles, the ‘gentleman thief’, whose criminal exploits promoted the sales of Cassell’s Magazine.
In the early stages of the Great Hiatus I was approached only once by Lestrade, the ferret-like Scotland Yard Inspector. On this occasion, through my medical knowledge, I was instrumental in solving a crime, dubbed by the Evening Standard, ‘The Case of The Ghost of Grosvenor Square’, a sobriquet picked up and parodied by Punch.
After Holmes’s assumed death, I welcomed an invitation from his brother Mycroft to return to Baker Street to put my former comrade’s papers and possessions in an order. Tears had sprung to my eyes when I looked at a life-time’s souvenirs - the Yupik wolf mask sent from a shaman in Nunivak in 1890, a huge barbed-headed spear, a carving of the demi-god Maui, Lombardini’s Antonio Stradivari e la celebre scuola cremonese, the tennis rackets and cricket gear Holmes last employed in his short time at university.
I relocated the most precious of these household gods and books from the sitting room to his bedroom which became for me as great a shrine as the bedroom of the late admired Prince Albert in Queen Victoria’s eyes. I left three physical reminders of my friend’s still palpable presencecentre-stageon the deal-top breakfast table. The violin with its well-flamed maple, fine belly grain, and orangey brown varnish glowed where it lay in the morning sun, at its side the bow, like the bayonet of a fallen soldier. And his pipe-rack.
Upon Holmes’s miraculous reappearance, Mrs. Hudson and I had hauled the books back, together with the Betjemann Tantalus, the basket chair, the Persian slipper containing his tobacco (freshly restocked), the writing-desk, bear-skin rug, and a gasogene given to bursting. One wall remained bejewelled with fine fragments of glass shrapnel from such an explosion until we ordered an extensive refurbishment of the front room.
It was not long after his return that Holmes once again showed his talent for the unexpected. He announced his retirement. I was to read it on the front page of The Daily Express and beneath a dramatic headline on the third page of The Times. My old comrade expressed his long-standing desire - completely unsuspected by me - to give himself up entirely ‘to that soothing life of Nature’. I was as astonished as if I had opened the newspapers that day to find his obituary (‘The world mourns the passing of the great Consulting Detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes...’).
Holmes told reporters he wanted to enter upon a quiet and congenial existence with his Italian bees, Apis mellifera ligustica, a mild subspecies of the western honey bee. Holmes’s first effort with a particularly aggressive black bee with yellowish bands on the sides of the abdomen had brought a delegation of Sussex shepherds to his door, demanding their extinction or at least removal to the neighbouring county of Kent. A Punch caricaturist attempted an explanation for Sherlock Holmes’s retirement. Under the caption ‘The Old Horse has pulled a Heavy Load a Long Way’, Holmes was portrayed as a preternaturally elderly nag drawing a cart piled high with my chronicles (my head showing through).
The announcement of Holmes’s retirement hit me like the blast of a Fenian bomb. I was certain I was a south wind in Holmes’s life, like the old black clay pipe, or the Stradivarius, or the shag tobacco with its tendency to stain the inner surfaces of his teeth. The prospect of imminent separation deeply shocked me. It made no sense. My companion was at the very height of his powers. In the world of crime detection he was Facile princeps. He was hardly 49 years of age.
I had confronted my old friend. He confirmed his decision to turn his hand to beekeeping at his Sussex farmstead. This was not the man I knew. Just as the green anaconda finds the Brazilian jungle his natural home and slithers not a jot beyond, London was Holmes’s favoured haunt, not an old farmhouse tucked against a line of trees to withstand the full-frontal winter gales blasting in from the English Channel. The Sherlock Holmes I knew was addicted to the ever-changing kaleidoscope of life ebbing and flowing through Trafalgar Square or Pickle Herring Street with its line of small shipping offices. It was to the busy hum of men amid the sounds and sights of Hansom cabs, wing collars and flickering gas-light that Holmes went for recreation and inspiration. Whenever I waxed lyrical over the beauty of the English countryside (being a countryman by birth), Holmes had not been notably moved.
I have reported Holmes’s life-long attitude towards country life in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches:
All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and grey roofs of the farmsteadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage. ‘Are they not fresh and beautiful?’ I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.
Holmes shook his head gravely.
‘Do you know, Watson,’ said he, ‘that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed here’.
Now, suddenly, London - and I - found ourselves alone, without him.
Chapter II
Back Together in Baker Street
Sir George’s commission was an intriguing opportunity to rebuild my former warm relationship with Holmes. A return to the Reichenbach Falls would be like old times. I would seat myself opposite him aboard an ultra-quick locomotive à bec, service revolver in my coat pocket en cas où, the thrill of adventure in my heart. Once more we would cross the Gemmi Pass, our goal Interlaken or at least Daubensee for a good night’s rest in the fresh mountain air. Then, fifteen miles beyond, to the small village of Meiringen, a refuge in the wild and romantic landscape of the Rosenlaui valley, within close hiking distance of our goal. Sir George had made me an attractive and at six hundred guineas a remunerative offer but how was I to persuade Holmes to agree? Yuletide and the irregular week-end visit to Sussex to bring him up-to-date with the London gossip was the most I saw of him.