I was afraid that in spite of my efforts Mr Holmes was not very comme il faut, socially speaking. One would have thought that after all the difficulties and dangers he had undergone he would at least relax a bit and enjoy himself with the other holidaying Europeans at the hill-station. But he did nothing of the kind. He did not call on the Viceroy or sign the guest list at Government House, or even drop cards at the residences of important officers and personalities – in fact he did not even have cards printed. As a result he was not invited to the great balls and banquets, or even asked out to dinner; a situation which he maintained just suited him 'down to the ground'. The tournaments of the Simla Toxophilite Society, and even the polo matches and horse races at Annandale left him cold.
I was really at my wits end trying to make him enjoy himself. But at the same time one had to be quite wary about attempting to persuade Mr Holmes to do anything he did not so desire. There was that in his cold, nonchalant air which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching a liberty. Knowing his liking for music, I thought it would not be improper to suggest a visit to the Gaiety Theatre, where at the time a comic operetta by Messrs Gilbert and Sullivan was being performed. It was only much later I learned that his musical interests leaned towards violin concerts, symphonies, and the grand opera.
'An operetta. A comic operetta?' exclaimed Sherlock Holmes, a tinge of horror colouring his voice.
'Yes, Mr Holmes,' said I, a trifle defensively, 'and a jolly entertaining performance it is too – from what I've heard. The whole of Simla is talking about it. Why, His Excellency the Viceroy has seen it twice already.'
'Which is, no doubt, why it should recommend itself to me also. No, no. Let His Excellency do what he will. As for me, odi profanum vulgus et arceo. Horace's sentiments may not be exacdy democratic, but at least they reflect mine at the moment.' He handed me a long list. 'Now, Huree, if you really want to make yourself useful, you could go down to the chemists, and get these reagents for me.'
This was another thing that I found rather difficult about Mr Holmes. As the reader will have realised by now, I am a scientific man, but I do draw the line at performing malodorous experiments in the living room. But not Mr Holmes. On the very first day that he set up house at Runnymeade Cottage, he made me get him a whole collection of beakers, retorts, test-tubes, pipettes, bunsenlamps, and chemicals, (some of which were not immediately available in Simla) which he happily set up on a few shelves in the corner of the living room, spilling acids and what not on a beautiful Georgian table which he used as a work bench.
I shuddered to think of the day when I would have to return the cottage and its furnishings to that hard-faced Oswal Jain, who was the housing agent, for it was not only the table which would have to be accounted for but also the deep gash on the teak mantiepiece where Mr Holmes had transfixed all his unanswered correspondence with a Thibetan ghost dagger he had purchased from a curio dealer at the bazaar. The mantiepiece itself was always a mess, with a litter of pipes, tobacco-pouches, syringes, penknives, revolver cartridges, and other debris scattered over it.
But all this was nothing. One day the simple pahari manservant I had got for Mr Holmes came running into my apartment, yelling that there had been shooting and murder up at the cottage. With my heart beating furiously, I rushed up to the cottage, only to discover Mr Holmes hale and hearty, lounging in an armchair in a room filled with cordite-smoke. By his side was his hair-trigger and a box of cartridges, and the wall opposite him, to my horror, was adorned with a mystical OM, done in bullet holes.
But one thing I could not really object to was Mr Holmes's compulsive bibliophilism since I was thus inclined myself, although I never did have the means to indulge in it to the happy extent as he did. He bought books not by the niggardly volume, but in large piles and generous bundles, which were scattered higgledy- piggledy all over the cottage, much to the distress of the pahari servant. Indeed Mr Holmes and I never went for a walk around the Mall without finally ending up browsing at Wheeler's, or Higginbotham's Book Depot.
But Sherlock Holmes's favourite was the Antiquarian Bookshop belonging to Mr Lurgan. Stacks of strange and rare books, documents, maps and prints, covered with layers of grey dust, rested between all manner of strange merchandise. Turquoise necklaces, jade ornaments, trumpets of human thigh-bone and silver prayer wheels from Thibet, gilt figures of Buddhas and Boddhisattvas, devil masks and suits of Japanese armour, scores of lances, khanda and kuttar swords, Persian water jugs and dull copper incense burners, tarnished silver belts that knotted like raw-hide, hairpins of ivory and plasma, and a thousand other oddment were cased, piled or merely lying about the room, leaving a clear space only round the rickety deal table, where Lurgan worked.
He was an employee of our Department, of course, and extremely efficient at training chain-men and preparing them for great excursions into the unknown. He was very knowledgeable and an able linguist, speaking English, Hindustani, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, French and Russianfluently. We shared similar interests in strange religions, and native customs, though I must admit to not being altogether comfortable in his company. He had the disconcerting ability of being able to dilate the pupils of his eyes and closing them to a pin-prick, as if at will. He had strange mesmeric powers too, that I had on more than one occasion seen him use on people; and he was reputed to have dabbled in jadoo, magic! Lurgan was surely the most mysterious character ever employed by the Survey of India. He was very vague about his antecedents, claiming to be partly Hungarian, partly French and partly Persian, changing one or the other every now and then to suit his queer humours. Only Colonel Creighton knew Lurgan's real story; and the Colonel being the insufferably close-mouthed gentleman that he was, would probably carry that information with him to his grave.
Lurgan enjoyed Mr Holmes's company – though I had not told him who the Norwegian explorer really was – and between long bouts of speculation on nature, metaphysics, and the vagaries of the book-trade in Simla, served us small nutty biscuits and green china tea in exquisite egg-shell cups.
One evening when returning to Runnymeade Cottage from Lurgan's shop, Sherlock Holmes turned to me. 'Lurgan says you speak Thibetan.'
'I have some modest abilities in that direction.'
'Modest?' said Mr Holmes dryly. 'You are the author of a definitive work on Thibetan grammar, and the compiler of the first Thibetan-English dictionary.'
'Not really the first, Mr Holmes. Oh no. My late guru, the great Hungarian orientalist, Alexander Csoma de Koros, not only produced the first Thibetan-English dictionary, but pioneered the whole modern study of the Thibetan language and civilisation.'
'How were your interests first directed towards this field?'
'Well, Sir. It is a long story, but I will be brief. I finished my M.A. from Calcutta University in 1862, when I was a young man of twenty-four. Being favourably known to Sir Alfred Croft, the director of Public Instruction of Bengal, who has always been my good friend and mentor, I was appointed to the post of headmaster of the Bhutia Boarding School in Darjeeling. At that pleasant hill station on the border of Sikkhim. I met Csoma de Koros.
'He was an extraordinary man and a great scholar, truly one of the greatest. He had left Hungary as a young man and come to this Himalayan town to learn everything he could about Thibet. He believed that the Hungarian people, the Magyars, had, many centuries ago migrated to Hungary from Thibet; and everything about that strange country fascinated him. He was a very old man when I met him, and it is my great regret that I was not able to fully imbibe from this fount of wisdom, for he passed away a year later. But none the less, he fired in me a great inspiration to learn about Thibet.