Of the many lessons that I have learned during my long association with Sherlock Holmes, perhaps the most pertinent, the one of ultimate importance, would be the following:
Do not, under the remotest of any circumstances, reveal your greatest vulnerability.
I regret to inform the reader that I failed to heed my own advice. For I revealed my vulnerability, and the amiable vulture, sensing its prey, dug in its talons.
I had been tidying my bookshelves that warm Tuesday morning at 221B Baker Street. Rather than leave the task to our landlady and running the risk of favoured volumes being moved elsewhere altogether or inserted out of place, I had set to the laborious endeavour. I set my medical journals by descending date and my novels alphabetically, and was about to begin replacing them along the rows of polished wood when my friend made his belated appearance from his slugabed.
"Watson!" said he, with a cavernous yawn, "whatever are you doing there, sprawled on the floor?"
"Not quite sprawled, Holmes," I replied, looking up from my trouser knees. "I am rearranging my books. They have become intolerably muddled."
"Oh, very good. I wonder, could you possibly see your way to also rearranging-"
"-No, Holmes..."
"Ah. But they are not so many and it would not take-"
"-No, Holmes. Arrange your own books."
He frowned.
I turned back to my volumes. I barely heard the soft step behind me, but most certainly felt the delivery of a sharp tweak to my ribs which sent me fairly two feet into the air. It was small comfort that Holmes himself also started back in surprise.
"What was that?" I demanded. "Holmes, I absolutely cannot stand to be tickled. Please don't do that again."
He stared.
"I poked at you," he said. "Since you were being so very unreasonable about my bookshelves."
"Well, you poked at my ticklish spot," I complained. "And I would really rather that you did not."
My friend continued to look at me askance, a look which I did my best to disregard.
"Just don't," I added, shivering involuntarily.
"It sent you into the air," said he with a note of amusement.
"Yes, Holmes, I know it did."
"It was funny."
"It most certainly was not."
He giggled. "If I poked both sides of your ribs, what would happen then?"
"I would render you with a concussion, Holmes."
He sat a little distance away and continued to chortle.
"Is it just your ribs that are prone, Watson?"
"No, also my-" I broke off sharply. "Yes, just my ribs," I said, firmly, but too late I fear, for my friend's eyes adopted the most impish glint.
"I see," said he.
He affected to busy himself with that morning's Times. Not another word did he say upon the matter. I very much hoped that to be the end of it as I settled down to my paperbacks. And for a while it appeared that it was. We spent an hour or two over lunch at the Holborn, and took a most pleasant parkland walk. We visited one of the Bond Street picture galleries and thereafter, culturally sated, returned home to 221B.
"I didn't like that big painting of the cabbage," said Holmes with a sniff.
"It was not a cabbage, Holmes. It was a spring flower in its bud. I felt it very beautiful."
"Well, it looked like a cabbage to me," said my friend. He hung at my side while I placed my hat upon its hook. I did not anticipate the jab and flutter to my waist, and therefore was entirely unable to avoid it.
"Holmes!" I said, squirming out of the way and towards the fireplace. "I do wish that you would stop that."
"Did it tickle?" he asked, eagerly.
"No, it did not," I replied, my eyes narrowed. "If you are intending to do this by a process of elimination then I swear, Holmes, that I shall -"
"Happily, I myself am not ticklish," said my friend. He looked sideways at me.
"I have no wish to find out either way," I said. I sat down in my chair and tucked my arms into my sides, managing to manoeuvre a stuffed pipe into my mouth without too much of an issue.
Holmes did likewise at his own chair across the unlit hearth.
"Watson," he began.
"If it is about cabbages or tickling then I am not interested in hearing any of it," I said, in my sternest voice.
His face fell. I declare that he must have somehow managed to form both topics into an artful sentence.
"Mycroft was the same as you," he said sadly, after a moment's pause. "No fun at all." He peeked at me from the corner of one eye. "Curmudgeonly," he added, stretching the syllables across the framework of four seconds.
"Infuriating," I countered over my own, exasperated one of five.
Holmes has often said to me that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.
I should rather say that it is an infinite capacity for being a pain.
After a thoughtful three quarters of an hour where the both of us stood our defences, I recovered my humour and decided, against all contradictory self-argument, that fighting fire with fire might settle this the sooner. Holmes was by now examining a test tube at his chemistry table. I feigned a show of interest while he tilted it this way and that, disturbing its sediment. Replaced onto its rack, he turned his head and raised an eyebrow. His eyes widened as I advanced, my hands extended before me, as if a ghost, my fingers wiggling.
"Watson," said he, with a faint trace of panic, "I am near my test tubes."
"But you are not holding any of them," I said.
He started to his feet, ducked around the chair and back towards the bay window.
"Stop this immediately," he said, his voice by now quite the tone or two higher.
"The boot is on the other foot," I said, moving the closer towards him. "But, Holmes, I understood you to confirm that you were not ticklish? Therefore this should not alarm you, surely."
"Yes. I mean, no! But!"
"Come here."
"Absolutely not, Watson. Go away."
We assumed a skirmish around the breakfast table.
"I shall throw sugarcubes," Holmes whined.
"You would surely then give Mrs. Hudson good reason for tickling you also," I replied. "Sugar crumbs are her bugbear." I lunged at his left side and dealt it a torment. He released a shrill squeal, folding halfway into himself.
"You told me an untruth," I said, hardly able to speak now from laughing. "You are just as ticklish as I, if not the more so."
"Fibbing is my defence mechanism. Watson, please, I beg you." He snatched a sugarcube from the bowl but then thought twice of it.
"Do you hereby solemnly promise to desist from all further assaults upon my person, Holmes?"
We held a temporary stand-off while my friend smoothed down his twisted waistcoat. He straightened up and grimaced.
"I was conducting an experiment," said he, "and you are interfering with its outcome."
"Please do not tell me that you were planning to write a monograph upon the subject."
He shrugged.
"I require your promise to refrain, Holmes."
Holmes sighed. "Oh, very well. I promise. Will you tell me, at least, where your other ticklish spot might be?"
I chuckled. "So that you are armed with future ammunition? I rather think not, my dear fellow."
Smiling shyly, my friend removed himself from the corner that he had backed into.
"Perhaps it is just as well," he said. "For the sakes of both our nerves and that we should not drive each other mad. For that would be superfluous – a candid observer would certainly declare that we were so already."
"I recall you saying that once before, Holmes," I said.
He smiled and nodded, and strode to call down to Mrs. Hudson for a pot of tea. For sugarcubes do have alternative uses, after all.