First Catch Your Hare
Part One
There is something about Sunday that is ineffably depressing.
When one has company, an effort is demanded to provide amusement for all parties concerned. A stroll in the park usually proves welcome relief, followed by music or reading or the quiet contentment to be had in the companionable silence that comes when novelty in the marital state mellows to comfortable tolerance.
When one is alone, as I was on that Sunday in March of 1889, it seems hardly worth the effort to shift from one's chair, let alone find some diversion outside the house. As it was, the sky was awash with grey clouds and the rain danced on slick pavements. Cabs rattled by, the horse's coats shining with water and their breaths steaming in the chill air. Those who had dared to venture out did so with umbrellas unfurled and scarves tightly bundled around their necks.
Tomorrow, London would present a newly-washed face to the world and the sun would shine, as ever it did when the working week began again. Today, however, I, along with the five million other inhabitants who call this crowded, jostling city home, were confined indoors, watching the raindrops chase down the windowpane and wondering how to amuse oneself.
By noon, I had had my fill of newspapers, journals and endless cups of tea. In short, I was at a loose end. I wandered from room to room, noting various tasks that were on my list of things to do when I had either the time or the inclination. The former I had in plenty; the latter rather less so. When one is suffering the effects of lassitude, there are few more depressing sights than a jug with handle that needs repairing or a pile of papers that needs filing.
Such trivial concerns had begun to take on greater importance when I had acquired my own house and the responsibilities of a married man. There was a time when I had thought nothing of stepping over scattered newspapers or resting my coffee cup on a heap of commonplace books. Indeed, I had prided myself on managing to bring a degree of harmony to the disorder of our chambers, and on several memorable occasions had even persuaded Holmes to make our living space a little more comfortable when the clutter had started to drift down the stairs.
I had imagined, smugly, that Holmes would vanish beneath a mountain of paper following my departure. To my chagrin, however, on the few occasions I had paid him a visit at Baker Street, the place had been tidy, remarkably so.
I say tidy in the loosest possible sense, for one man's order is another man's chaos. The newspapers were still wont to be filed on the floor and his indexes were jumbled together on their shelves, irrespective of date or alphabetical order. What was lacking was the jumble of chemical and criminal relics that I remembered fondly from those halcyon days when Holmes's greatest concern was the impending arrival of the next client and mine was to prevent the worst of his occasional indiscretions.
As much as I hated to admit it, he appeared to be keeping abreast of affairs, even deigning to keep his mess under control to a greater degree than I was managing. Given the state of my consulting room on that dismal Sunday, I did start to wonder whether Holmes's new-found orderliness was less happy coincidence and final proof that I had been the untidier of Mrs Hudson's tenants.
Certainly I seemed to be suffering from a surfeit of paperwork, much of which could be placed just as comfortably in the wastepaper basket as in my files, and there was a regrettable accumulation of dust on my medical journals. Allowing for the fact that the maid was not the brightest girl in London, having chosen to trace her name in the grime on my bookcase rather than clean it, I could not excuse my own inattention to the state of my surroundings.
What I should have done on that grey Sunday was to take the opportunity to bring order to my little corner of the world. What I did was to grab my hat, coat and umbrella and head out into the rain. In my defence, I was on my own. Housework holds no joy without the encouragement and scrutiny of an observant wife.
In such situations, it has been my custom to seek out my old friend and talk of times past. I did not break with the proven formula, and so very shortly I found myself outside my former rooms, knocking on the door and hoping to be let in before my trouser legs became thoroughly soaked through.
I expected Mrs Hudson to answer. Instead, I heard the squeal of runners grinding against a window frame above my head, and soon after Holmes's head appeared through the aperture.
"Who is it?" he said crisply, his tone suggesting that the timing of my visit was somewhat inconvenient. I waved up at him, feeling somewhat awkward at having intruded. His expression softened when he recognised me and a smile brightened his face.
"Ah, Watson!" he called down. "You could not have come at a better time, my boy. Let yourself in and come up."
I just managed to catch the keys that he tossed down. Upstairs the room was infernally hot, with water running down the inside of the windows and the air near stifling. Sweat began to prickle at the back of my neck and my wet clothes began to steam. I shed what I could and left my coat in an unobtrusive place near the fire.
The reason for these intemperate conditions, apart from the roaring fire in the grate, was a rack of bubbling test tubes, from which curls of steam were rising. Holmes sat staring at them intently, occasionally glancing at his watch, but otherwise engrossed in his work.
The crumpled collar of his night shirt peeped from beneath his loosely-tied purple dressing gown, suggesting that he was not long from his bed. Since he had troubled to shave and groom his hair, however, I gathered that he had been up some little time, possibly interrupted in his dressing by a client. Applying his own methods, as he was fond of telling me, I deduced that this must surely be the case, and the reason for his preoccupation with his chemical paraphernalia to the exclusion of all other matters, including my own arrival. He would either confirm or scupper my theory when he was good and ready.
Until then, I took a seat quietly at the table and tried to fathom the nature of his activities. At first sight, it seemed a most unusual experiment. Five test tubes, lined up in the rack above a generous flame, each contained a half measure of boiling water and two green spherical balls, which on closer inspection proved to be peas. I could make nothing of this, and was about to question him as to the meaning of his work when he let out a sudden exclamation of triumph.
"There!" he cried. "Five-and-twenty minutes exactly. Now we shall see, now we shall see! My labours have finally borne fruit."
It is always something of a delight to see Holmes so absorbed by a case. His keen eyes gleam, his lips contract into a hard, thin line and his features are allowed a brief moment to express that suppressed exultation which his severe manner will not normally permit under other circumstances. At such times, his energy becomes infectious, so that one is quite carried along in the moment, as I was. I did not know what outcome he expected, but I gathered that the denouement was cause for celebration.
Finally, amidst the rubbing of hands and self-congratulatory noises, he registered my presence. "Well, Watson," said he, taking up a cigarette and striking a match. "Is it Sunday already?"
I stared at him. "You mean you don't know?"
"The observation was simply based on your being here in the middle of the day, something you never do during surgery hours during the week. Mrs Watson is away, I take it?"
"Yes. Visiting friends. They've had a baby."
"I understand there's a lot of it about," Holmes remarked vaguely.
"Babies?" I queried.
"Visiting friends. An absurd ritual!" Smoke curled from his lips as he marshalled his thoughts on the subject. "What some call sociable, I call intrusive. People turn up uninvited, expecting to be fed and watered, and then proceed to bore all and sundry half to death with tales of woe about Aunt Gladys and her gout. It's an appalling habit. I wouldn't give them house room."
"There's little danger of that," I said. "You've said before that you don't have any friends."
"Except yourself."
"Aren't I visiting?"
Holmes smiled. "No, my dear fellow, you are bored. An hour ago, you were rattling around your empty house and decided to settle for the lesser of two evils by coming round to your former rooms to see if I can offer any amusement."
I have long been used to his ability to divine my actions on the slimmest of evidence, although as usual I failed to see how he had arrived at such a conclusion, veracious as it was.
"It was very superficial, Watson, I assure you," said he in answer to my inquiry. "You have an iodoform stain just above your knee, which appears to be recent. Therefore, I believe I may state with certainty that those are the same trousers you were wearing yesterday."
"The day before, actually."
He waved this aside. "Either way, it is a sartorial error that Mrs Watson would never have allowed to pass muster were she home and in a position to take you to task over it. Then, when I see dust upon on your edges of your shirt cuffs, I can only conclude that you had toyed with the idea of tidying your domain, but felt unequal to the task and came round here to find more edifying entertain on an otherwise dreary Sunday."
"As usual, you have described my movements exactly."
"It is no great feat, Watson. I have the advantage of knowing you. The difficulty in such cases comes with the unknown quantity. Had you been a client, the dust on your cuffs might have hinted at more sinister events. The secret of an empty house, the locked room at the top of the stairs, hidden papers, a box buried beneath the floorboards – yes, in its own way dust offers many possibilities."
I could not help smiling as I listened to this fanciful outpouring. "And you claim that mine is the romantic imagination."
"What you call romantic, my dear fellow, I call the extension of those principles of logic which I have so often recommended to you in the past. Even something so trifling may be indicative of the worst of crimes."
"By your own argument," said I, gesturing to the rack of test tubes, "I suppose I am to draw some dark and sinister meaning from your experiment with these peas."
Holmes regarded me with wolfish amusement from behind a cloud of blue smoke. "What would be your conclusion?" he asked, almost idly.
I gave the matter some thought before replying. "You have a case that centres around the chemical composition of these peas." I hesitated. "They are peas, I take it? Not some exotic vegetable hitherto unknown to science?"
Holmes shook his head. "No, Watson, just peas, the common or garden Pisum sativum. Pray, continue."
"The fact you have been boiling them, and timing it, suggests that you intend to observe how long it takes for a certain reaction to take place. Judging from the state of the room – the amount of condensation on the windows in particular – I would say that these have been the subject of a good deal of experimentation. Now, you only expend such effort on a case of supreme importance." I regarded him with no small air of satisfaction in arriving at my conclusion. "Am I right in thinking that these are poisoned peas?"
"I do hope not," he drawled. "I was rather hoping to eat them."
"Eat them?"
He tipped the water from the furthermost test tube into a glass beaker, catching the peas in his hand as he did so. One he held out to me, while the other he retained.
I regarded his offering suspiciously. The space of eight years had not entirely dimmed the memory of Stamford's words of caution, that Holmes was cold-blooded enough to administer some toxic substance to an unwary friend out of curiosity to observe the effects. Despite our long years of association, I still regarded unsolicited items of food with a degree of misgiving, lest I find myself later subject to some intense scientific scrutiny.
"Is it safe?" I asked.
"It may be a trifle over-cooked. As my trusty epicure, I was hoping you could tell me."
"Holmes, do you really mean to say that you have been boiling these peas for no other reason than for your own consumption?"
"Indeed. I am endeavouring to establish the optimum cooking time."
I stared at him in bafflement. "My dear fellow, do you intend to add 'Upon the Correct Cooking of Peas' to your extensive list of monographs?"
I laughed as I said it, expecting a similar reaction from my friend. However, Holmes's countenance remained stony.
"There is a principle at stake," he stated. "Namely that one should strive for perfection in all things. In this particular instance, I do not expect to get it, for I have ever observed that cookery is an imperfect art. One man's broth may be another man's potage, after all. However, we can but try."
"Why not simply ask Mrs Hudson? I'm sure she will tell you."
"Do not mention that woman's name," said he tersely. "This intolerable situation is entirely her doing. I apparently, whilst being the most loyal and tenacious of her tenants, do not represent a worthy cause!"
He was somewhat roused in temper, the usual result of a hiccup in one's domestic arrangements. "I take it that you have fallen out," I remarked.
"Really, you astound me." His voice had taken on that edge of sarcasm that usually preceded one of his more biting and bumptious comments on my observational shortcomings. "A child could have deduced that much from the fact that you were compelled to admit yourself earlier!"
"Yes, I did wonder about that. Where has Mrs Hudson gone?"
"The Seaman's Mission." He shot me a sideways glance. "I hold you to blame for this turn of events. The last time you were here, I distinctly remember you dispensing advice about the benefits to be gained from outside interests."
I seemed to remember at the time Mrs Hudson had been complaining of headaches and an unsettling sense of depression that was making her feel quite out of sorts. She had asked me whether liver salts might be the answer to her problem; on the contrary, I suggested that a spell away from the daily stresses of life might remedy her condition more than any expensive medication. I gathered from Holmes's remarks that she had taken my advice to heart, much to his chagrin.
"The very next day, she took herself over to St Mary's and joined the Mothers' Union," Holmes went on, clearly much aggrieved. "She has thrown herself whole-heartedly into their charitable work, which includes visiting the sick."
"Hence her presence at the Seaman's Mission."
"Indeed. When I reminded her of her responsibilities here, she said that I should consider those less fortunate than myself. I told her that charity begins at home, whereupon she said, and I quote: 'If you are so clever, Mr Holmes, why don't you cook for yourself?'" He paused. "Well, the upshot of it is that if I wish to eat today, I must shift for myself."
"Oh, Holmes," I said adopting my most sympathetic tones, all the while struggling to contain my amusement at his predicament. "The answer is simple enough: why not dine at Simpsons or Marcini's?"
"Out of the question," said he dismissively. "Mrs Hudson has thrown down the gauntlet. To countenance defeat is unthinkable. No, my dear fellow, nothing less than roast chicken with all the trimmings will suffice. My only limitation is that I am prevented, on pain of eviction, from using her beloved stove. I do, however, have a secret weapon at my disposal."
He brandished a thick volume with a much worn and battered burgundy red cover. I glanced at the faded gold lettering of the title on the spine.
"Mrs Beeton's Household Management?" I read aloud. "Surely you are not serious?"
"Why ever not? This has been the valued companion of many a young wife, so I am told. See here, in the preface: 'I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways… a mistress must be thoroughly acquainted with the theory and practice of cookery, as well as all the other arts of making and keeping a comfortable home.' Just what we need in our situation, Waston, sound practical advice."
"Yes, I know. Mary has a copy."
"And you are fairly blooming on her efforts. Another three pounds, is it? Those buttons on your waistcoat are starting to look strained."
"Perhaps," I said, a trifle defensively. "But, Holmes, this is no easy undertaking which you propose. A full Sunday lunch? Isn't that a little ambitious?"
"Come, come, my dear fellow," he enthused. "Where is your sense of adventure?"
"I lost it in Afghanistan," I retorted.
He gave me a withering look and threw the book on the chair. "Yes, perhaps you are right," he conceded. "Having found myself bereft of interest, I thought it might be a welcome diversion. Well, well, I am sure I can find other distractions."
His eyes wandered to the mantelpiece and the small bottle that nestled amidst the jumble of letters, books and discarded pipes. Old habits die hard, and I was seized by concern at the direction of his thoughts. The situation seemed quite absurd, but since I had no viable alternatives, I saw that I would have to join him in this venture if only to keep his mind from other less edifying activities.
"Very well," I said with a sigh. "Where do we start?"
His eyes took on a gleam of delight. "Ah, Watson, my old and faithful campaigner, I knew you would not let me down," said he. "Now, to work! If we put our backs into it, we should be dining within the hour."
Hmm, I think not, Mr Holmes. However, we'll see how the boys get on in Part Two.
Here's an unusual pairing, I hear you say. Why Mrs Beeton, and why cookery? Well, doing research for something else turned up this interesting observation by one of the characters in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus': "Mrs Beeton must have been the finest housekeeper in the world." With such an endorsement, Holmes & Watson are in safe hands. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
