December l930
"Special delivery for Mr. John Watson!"
I have lived in the same house, and had the same post-man for nearly twenty-five years now. Perhaps it is a small point, but it would be most agreeable if the man could remember once, even once, that I am a Doctor of Medicine and as such should properly be addressed by the title Dr. Watson. Of course, I am no longer in active practice. My age is becoming somewhat advanced, by any measure, and it would not be to the benefit of the general population should I persist in diagnosing disease and prescribing medicine when I can barely see, even with my spectacles on. Taking these down from their perch atop my head I signed for the delivery, wondering what it could be, and to my surprise was handed a quite ordinary looking letter bearing the precise handwriting of my old friend Sherlock Holmes.
I had to adjust my eyeglasses twice before I could believe my eyes. It was not receiving the letter itself that was so startling. Holmes writes as often, and as delightfully, as he did the first year he retired to his solitary life of bee-keeping in the Sussex Downs. It has been slow in coming, but in those twenty-five years he has finally come to terms with the twentieth century, now that it is almost a third past. He has even learned to use a telephone, though he never answers the one installed in his cottage and uses it himself only to harangue the local police now that his legs are getting weak and he can no longer dash down to the police station or the telegraph office.
It would thus be too much to expect him to lift the receiver and ask the operator for my number in order to ask of my health and tell me about his bees. No, he prefers to write, and thus I would not have been surprised to see a letter from him in my post-box. However, he had never sent me anything special delivery before, and certainly I would not expect him to do so for an ordinary letter. It was not until I had read its contents twice that I realized that there was nothing ordinary about this letter. I reproduce it here for you in its entirety:
Dear Watson,
I was most pleased to learn of your recent commendation by the Royal Academy of Medicine for your voluntary work among the brave fallen men of the Great War. The fact that it took that bureaucratic behemoth so many years to realize the value of your service and commend you is a sad comment on the state of their administration, but you know my opinions regarding such large organizations. I never hesitated to share my estimation of Scotland Yard, that labyrinth of bureaucracy, with you or anyone else, as the readers of your tales can wearily attest.
You may have been startled to receive a letter from me by special messenger, not my usual means of delivery. However, the reason for this letter is not, as is my usual motive, simply to relax with my dear old friend Watson and relate the mundane news of the moment. I say mundane because as you know here in the country there is a lamentable lack of murders, abductions and other events to pique the interest of a retired detective. For such enjoyment I would have to return to London, that seething city of my youth. Yet I am content here to remember the past and, very occasionally, imagine what my life would have been had I made a different choice some forty years ago. I am certain you know the case of which I speak, for I have always forbidden you to write of it despite many earnest entreaties on your part.
Now I have changed my mind, a luxury allowed to women and to the elderly. You and I are no longer the young men we were, and I cannot go to my grave knowing that this case, perhaps the most important of my career, was not set down on paper by my Boswell. Perhaps history will not bear out my opinion, for no great political change was effected by the case as was in several of our others. But for me, as you well know although you have kept a gentlemanly silence all these years, there was no other problem brought to my attention that so profoundly affected me. At the time, my years of rigorous emphasis on the superiority of the intellect and fact triumphed, and you know the result.
I forbade you to write of it, my dear Watson, and now I have changed my mind. I realize this is a considerable undertaking on your part, and hope to further prevail upon our long friendship to ask you not to publish it immediately, but to do me the great favor of simply sending it to me. If at any time you need my assistance in refreshing your memory of events which took place so long ago, you may wire me, and I promise to lift that monstrous object, the telephone, to answer your questions. I look keenly forward to reading your account of the events forty years ago, and remain until then,
Yours sincerely,
Sherlock Holmes
There was no doubt in my mind as to which case he meant. Many of the cases which the great detective undertook in those days remained unchronicled, often because they involved state secrets, but sometimes simply because they lacked features of particular interest. And yet among our unchronicled cases, this is one which I have always felt to be the most noteworthy of all, for it presents an aspect of my friend not seen before or since. It is for that very reason, I believe, that Holmes has always forbidden me to write about it despite the fact that it displayed his talents of analytical reasoning in a unique fashion.
Why has he suddenly relented? Relented is perhaps the wrong word to use here, for indeed he had specifically requested that I write the story. And why does he not wish me to publish it, something I have done with all my other written accounts of our association? Perhaps he plans to allow it to be published after he is gone from this world. Who knows. I am no closer to understanding this cryptic gentleman than I was almost sixty years ago when we met, but I will do as he has bid me. As for wiring him to clarify any feature of the case, I doubt I should have to do that. The entire event lives in my memory, as I am certain it does in my friend's, as if it had occurred only last week. Oh, there are certain points I would wish to discuss with him, but they are just those I would term non-objective, those about which he would say nothing to anyone at the time or since. In truth, since it occurred he has maintained a stony silence about all aspects of the incident in question, even to me. However, Holmes has softened somewhat with the years, though he would doubtless snort with amusement to hear me say so, and perhaps he can finally look back upon that time without experiencing some of his darker emotions. In any event I can no more refuse my old friend this request than I could any other he has made in our acquaintance, so I will write the story from those notes still remaining to me, and do my best to be faithful to the truth.
The case about which Holmes has asked me to write began on a cold, rainy morning in April 1889. The spring that year had been a particularly pleasant one, without the endless chilly fog and mist one associates with London. Down in the southwest of the country the weather had not been so agreeable, however, and our landlady's daughter had caught a serious bout of pneumonia which had threatened to take her life. Now in her convalescence, she had summoned her mother, our landlady Mrs. Hudson, to join her at her home in Devon. In truth, she had been after her mother for years to come live with her and her husband, who was fairly well off. On their rare trips to London they would ply her with gifts and speak glowingly of country life on an estate. Mrs. Hudson, however, was adamant. She had lived in London all her life, she declared, and this building had been her husband's legacy to her. As long as she had strength in her two arms she would keep on doing just what she was doing, thank you very much.
However, she didn't mind a lengthy visit to the country now and again.
Thus as the rain streamed down the windows that morning, Mrs. Hudson was preparing to leave our lodgings in Baker Street. She had been packing for days, and everything she owned seemed to have been assembled in a large pile directly in front of the door. She had insisted our footman's carrying her suitcases into our sitting room as she readied them, so that she 'wouldn't forget to bring anything.' How could she, I wondered wryly, when she had seemingly emptied the entire flat into her bags. I kept urging her to sit down and rest before her long journey, yet she still hurried about the room finding additional things to tuck into her handbag. I almost stopped her when she lifted a Meissen porcelain fox from the mantle and absently sent it to join the jumble in her bag, but I decided silence was more prudent.
Although her train wasn't to leave for two hours, Mrs. Hudson suffered from what I would term nervous earliness and a hansom had already been called to bring her to the station. Soon, I thought, she would be gone, though not quite soon enough for me.
Holmes himself was in poor spirits. He had never come back to his usual form after completing the case of the Bohemian King several months earlier. This case, which I long ago chronicled, had as its most notable element the fact that Holmes had been put at a disadvantage by a woman for the only time in his career. This threw him into a lengthy funk, the kind of low point which often sends Holmes into an opiate haze. He had not yet succumbed to the needle this time, but I feared he needed a case into which he could sink his teeth, and soon.
Exacerbating Holmes' displeasure with the world around him today was his contemplation of the inconvenience Mrs. Hudson's absence would cause. When Holmes is on a case, he can easily abandon all creature comforts, even food, for days. But when he falls into one of his gloomy states, the one he was in now being the worst I'd seen, he becomes an absolute creature of habit in all small details relating to his routine at home. Our landlady's departure would disrupt this routine severely, for in addition to running the household as landlady, Mrs. Hudson cleaned our flat and usually did our marketing as well. Without Mrs. Hudson about, I could hear Holmes muttering as he lit his pipe for the third time, who would get the coffee up in the morning? Disrupted from his usual morning rituals by her scurrying and fluttering, he had not even touched his morning papers, usually a high point of his day. Between Mrs. Hudson's bustling and Holmes' grumbling, there was nothing for me to do but keep well out of the way, and that is just what I was doing.
"Tonight's dinner is already cooked for you," Mrs. Hudson said. "There's roasted beef and rice and . . ." The rest of her sentence was cut off by a ring at the door downstairs, followed by much commotion in the hall and stairwell as our footman Harry tried, apparently unsuccessfully, to precede a visitor up the stairs.
The door flew open and a young man burst through, panting from exertion. Two steps into the room he ran headlong into Mrs. Hudson's mountain of luggage and spilled forward in the direction of Holmes.
From that moment, though I am sure everything happened very fast, in my perception the action in the room seemed to somehow slow down. As the young man fell forward, he thrust a basket he had been carrying, filled with what appeared to be a small bundle of cloth, at Holmes. The basket seemed to hang suspended in the air for an instant, then Holmes, his reflexes honed from years of practice in the oriental arts of karate and baritsu, leaped forward and seized it before it fell. The young man crashed to the floor, scattering valises across the room. For a moment all was still, then he scrambled to his feet.
"Are you Mr. Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street?"
Holmes nodded. For once he seemed not to know what to say.
"Thank goodness I have reached you," cried the young man breathlessly. "It is crucial that she be in your care." He bent at the waist, trying to catch his breath.
Pipe still clamped in his teeth, Holmes rearranged his grip on the basket, which seemed to be quite heavy. Hands on his knees, our extraordinary visitor heaved a sigh of relief. As he straightened, there was a sudden splintering sound and the young man crumpled to the floor. For a moment I thought he had lost his footing again among the suitcases, then I realized that the sound had come from the window. I knelt immediately by his side as Holmes rushed to the window.
"I'm shot," the young man gasped. He added, barely audibly, "You must take care of Madeleine . . . until . . . " He fell silent.
"There, Watson," Holmes cried, motioning with his chin through the shattered window. I rose, crunching through the glass on the floor, and saw a cloaked figure emerging from the shadows of a doorway across the street. The person stopped for a moment and looked up at the window where we stood. A muffler shrouded the lower part of his face, making it impossible to discern his features before he turned and ran down the street. I noticed that my jacket was becoming soaked, and I stepped back from the rain.
"I had better take a closer look at this poor fellow," I said, hurrying back to the side of the wounded man.
"Mr. Holmes, shall I send for the police?" Mrs. Hudson asked in a rather shrill voice.
"No, we won't get them involved just yet." For the first time in weeks Holmes' eyes shone with excitement. It is one of the singular attributes of my friend that events which would shock and horrify others elicit a quite positive response from him. Now he stood in the middle of what by any standards would be termed a disaster. The floor of our sitting room was a veritable maze of shattered glass. Mrs. Hudson's heap of valises formed a lopsided pyramid in its center. At the foot of the pyramid, like some grotesque sphinx, lay a dead young man in a spreading pool of blood. Holmes stood tautly holding a basket in his hands, looking for all the world like a flower vendor. A soft mist of rain filtered through the broken window and slowly dampened everything in the room. In short, the game was afoot, and one could almost see Holmes' investigative powers springing from their dormant state into action. The detective Sherlock Holmes had returned.
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