“It’s getting dark,” said Bram suddenly.
Arthur had to admit that it was. Little remained of the sun’s light outside the windows. Bram stood and approached a small switch near the door. He flicked it upward, and the room exploded.
Or so it felt to Arthur, until his eyes adjusted to the searing glare. When the blinding whiteness had subsided and Arthur’s eyes began to perceive color again, he noticed that on the sconces of the walls beside him, and on the arms of the miniature chandelier above, were electric bulbs. The six-inch tubes of glass burned a light of such whiteness as Arthur had never before seen.
“Oh, have you not seen my lights yet?” said Bram. “I had these put in over the summer. You’ve seen the public ones they’re putting out on the streets, but these are smaller. For private use. Dreadfully expensive, I don’t mind telling you, but look at them! I feel like I’m blowing cigar smoke into the clouds of heaven itself!” To illustrate his point, Bram puffed a hearty cloud of smoke at one of the wall sconces. The smoke seemed to be incinerated by radiance.
Arthur blinked his eyes, trying to stamp out the red and orange spots he hallucinated before him. When he had done so and his vision was fully restored, he surveyed Bram’s drawing room again.
The colors were those of medieval pageantry. All red was pure red, and all blue was pure blue. The shadows of the chairs cut sharp black lines on the golden Persian rugs. All was clean, visible, and still. Arthur thought that the room used to look like a Michelangelo and now it more resembled a medieval panel work. The luscious and spooky graybrowns of gaslight chiaroscuro had been stripped clean off by the sharp razor of electricity.
“They are a marvel,” said Arthur. A twinge of hesitation remained in his throat.
“Quite,” said Bram. “And yet I hear it in your voice. Something bothers you about them.”
Arthur looked around and felt adrift in the nova glare of progress.
“I can’t explain it, precisely,” he said. “But they make me sad, somehow.”
“You feel it, too, then?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“It’s the end of an age,” said Bram. “And the beginning of a new one. The twentieth century. It sounds odd on the tongue, doesn’t it? The calendars have already changed. And now we’ve lost Oscar. Not even Victoria can last forever, though she’s certainly of a mind to try.”
“Hush! Don’t speak that way.”
“Oh, come now. Edward won’t be so bad. You wait and see.”
“Perhaps,” said Arthur, “what saddens me is not the passing of time but the curious sensation of being aware of it as it happens. We’re used to demarcating our histories in hindsight-we draw the lines afterward. It’s the scholars who separate one period from another. Did Constantine know that he was presiding over something more than the natural tumult of empire? Did Newton know that he’d arrived upon a wave of revolution, like Aphrodite on her clamshell? And moreover, did anyone else perceive the change in the air around them? Were they ‘self-aware,’ as we are?
“But you’re right, I think,” Arthur continued. “I don’t know how any man could feel his eyes burn in the electric light and not also feel the sudden palpability of history.”
Bram smiled. “The ‘palpability of history,’ ” he said, rolling it over his tongue. “I like that.” He paused, looking Arthur up and down curiously. “You’ve been writing again? At work on more stories?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, unsure of where Bram was headed with this line of inquiry.
“You always get a touch more poetic in conversation when you’ve just been writing. It’s something of which I’ve taken notice over the years. Quite charming, really.” Bram held his breath and scratched his beard. Arthur felt that Bram was preparing to broach a delicate subject. And when Bram next spoke, Arthur’s suspicions were confirmed.
“Holmes?”
“Oh, hell, not you, too!” said Arthur. “I get enough bullying about him from my publishers. No. I have not been writing about Sherlock Holmes.”
“As you say. I just had the thought…well, how shall I put this? There was no man who felt your ‘palpable history’ more than Sherlock Holmes.”
“I will not write more Holmes stories, do you understand? I would have thought I’d made that perfectly clear at this point.”
“I don’t care whether you do or not,” said Bram. “But you will, eventually. He’s yours, till death do you part. Did you really think he was dead and gone when you wrote ‘The Final Problem’? I don’t think you did. I think you always knew he’d be back. But whenever you take up your pen and continue, heed my advice. Don’t bring him here. Don’t bring Sherlock Holmes into the electric light. Leave him in the mysterious and romantic flicker of the gas lamp. He won’t stand next to this, do you see? The glare would melt him away. He was more the man of our time than Oscar was. Or than we were. Leave him where he belongs, in the last days of our bygone century. Because in a hundred years, no one will care about me. Or you. Or Oscar. We stopped caring about Oscar years ago, and we were his bloody friends. No, what they’ll remember are the stories. They’ll remember Holmes. And Watson. And Dorian Gray.”
“And your count? What was his name? From that little province…” Arthur trailed off. He searched his mind for the name of that backwater kingdom but couldn’t find it.
“Transylvania,” supplied Bram when it became clear that Arthur did not recall the name. “He was from Transylvania. No, they won’t remember him. He didn’t inspire the imagination of a people as did your Holmes. He was my great failure.” Bram laughed bitterly. “Count What’s-His-Name.”
“I’m sorry, Bram,” said Arthur. “I’m so very sorry. I know well how much of your own blood was in that novel. And I thought it was a grand thing, I truly did.” He paused. “Is that why Oscar’s death has you so battered up?”
“Yes, I suppose it is. We treated the man himself as scrap paper; to be used for a while and then discarded. But the stories we will treasure forever. At least Oscar will have his tales in posterity. What will I have?”
“ ‘The man is nothing. The work is everything.’ That’s what you’re getting at?”
“Yes.” Bram paused. “That’s Flaubert, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And we still remember.” Bram laughed bitterly again.
“My stories,” said Arthur. “The science of deduction. The reasoning detective. The solution delivered patly in a satisfying dénouement. They’re all horseshit.”
Bram smiled. “I know,” he said. “That’s why we need them.”
Arthur considered this. “I’ve moved on,” he offered after a long pause. “I’ve been working at realism. History.”
“Realism,” Bram repeated. “Realism, I think, is fleeting. It’s the romance that will live forever.”
“And what about me? Will my name live on?”
Bram’s face turned sour and grim. “I do not know, my friend. All I’ll say is this: The world does not need Arthur Conan Doyle. The world needs Sherlock Holmes.”
“No!” exclaimed Arthur quite suddenly. “No. I am better than he is, don’t you see? I will not be shamed by him. I will outlive him, and I will outshine him.”
“Arthur-”
“Wilde is dead and already forgotten, you say? We’re all bound for the grave and bitter obscurity? Damn it, no. I will not let Holmes win.”