"An addict?" I echoed, putting a hand to my throat.
"Was I say, not is," Holmes hastened to reassure me. "He threw off the incubus long ago. Indeed, he has not willingly taken any kind of opiate for some years now, at no little cost."
"His leg?" I ventured.
He nodded. "Watson told you that his leg was wounded in Afghanistan. That is not so. He was shot here in London, not four months past. But I am getting ahead of myself." He composed himself again, hooding his too expressive eyes as he considered the past. "You must not think that I in any way thought less of Watson because of his recourse to morphine. He was frequently in pain, between his shoulder and the wretched weather, and I thought it only logical for him to seek such relief as he could find. I myself had discovered already that I could blunt my own fits of melancholy with a careful combination of the right chemicals. By temperament and heritage I am doomed to swing from high energy to utter lassitude not infrequently. I use both morphine and cocaine as a myopic man uses glasses, to supplement the weaknesses of my own body. But Watson... he is not made that way. His melancholy was a product of his experiences and it was exacerbated by his situation. The drug brought him sleep, but it did not ease his nightmares."
I nodded, but said nothing. Holmes' admission had only confirmed to me that he was himself not truly sober. I suspect it was with cocaine that he had bolstered his courage before coming, as morphine, in my experience, renders the user sleepy and unsociable. But the man before me was fully alert, and seemed almost compelled to speak. It would be my task to listen.
"We danced around each other for three weeks more, each on our best behavior as new acquaintances must be. In exchange for Watson's consideration over my use of our sitting room as a place of business I endeavored to play his favorite airs on my violin, and when chance threw us together over a meal we began in a small, desultory way to exchange our views. Quickly, I came to the realization that Watson, with his conversational gambits, was in his own way as curious about me as I had become curious about him." For the first time a genuine smile flickered across the long face, as Holmes seemed to see in the silver tea service a memory that amused him. "Unfortunately I was, at the time, enamored of a rather foolish theory concerning the capacity of the human memory, and so confounded my poor Watson almost as thoroughly as I was confounding myself."
"Watson had no callers, and no correspondence save a laggard bill sent round by an apothecary from his time at the hotel. If it had not been for his books and his meals I doubt he would have had reason to get up in the morning. It was a bitter winter, cold and grey, and he could not even walk to the lending library to refresh his stock of books unless the weather was exceptionally fine. His study of me remained inobtrusive, but what else had he to fill his hours? On an impulse, late in February, I invited him to accompany me to the gymnasium, pointing out that I must pay for the cab whether it held one or two, that we could both avail ourselves of a Turkish bath once I had done with my training, and that in any case the gym would be warmer than our sitting room with the wind set in that particular quarter. To my surprise he agreed, and once he had observed my skills at boxing and singlestick, made a tidy profit over my fencing match, on the strength of which he bought us both dinner at Claridge's." This time the smile which came to him remained in place. "I learned more about Watson at that dinner than I had in a month's time, and I laughed more than I had in three years. The ring lost a fine fighter to that bullet in his shoulder and I gained a bonny coach, for he had much to say about what he had observed and a host of stories about other fighters he had known. With a topic of mutual interest we talked for hours, until he grew quite fumble-tongued with wine and fatigue. In spite of overstraining his injury whilst trying to demonstrate a move to me, he slept that night for the first time without once crying out."
"Soon afterwards I found a way to introduce him to my plan to become the world's first consulting detective, and luckily enough that same day a problem presented itself which convinced him that the plan was feasible." Holmes' smile grew rueful. "Indeed after the ridicule I had withstood as I undertook my studies, Watson's encouragement and praise were a much needed balm to my vanity. In short order it became unthinkable to embark upon a case without asking Watson if he cared to join me, and as the weather improved he did so fairly often. His stamina improved markedly between fresh air and exercise, although his digestion remained delicate from the enteric fever and his appetite remained low. He had some hope of passing his medical review, however, and returning to his duties, and even spent some time with me in the dissecting rooms at Bart's trying to learn how to practice his trade one-handed. He was not entirely successful, no more than I was myself at attracting sufficient income with my new profession, and I will confess to being pleased when the Army refused to take him back come autumn. Being kept on half-pay was a blow, however, and as the weather turned for the worse Watson's dependence on morphine grew more pronounced. Just before Christmas I was summoned to the continent to solve a pretty puzzle, and although my client would have cheerfully allowed me a second fare, Watson begged off, saying he had business of a personal nature to attend to.
"I returned just after the New Year triumphant, to find Watson quite ill. He rallied within a day or two, however, and seemed his old self. I believe now that he had attempted to cease using the morphine in my absence, and resumed it upon my return so as to be able to continue our pleasant habit of visiting the gymnasium, where I availed myself of his skills as coach and he took such exercise as he could comfortably manage. In an attempt to supplement his income and keep his medical knowledge from atrophying he took to spending a few hours each week at the Fleet clinic, and offering his services as locum to established practitioners. The strain on him told however, and in his exhaustion one night he confused his words - much as he did the other night, with us - and the error nearly cost a woman's life."
"The shotgun and the tiger cub," I recalled.
"And the strychnine and the Castor oil," Holmes said. "I warned Sholto against accepting that advice. I put it down to the late hour, and God knows I hope that that is all that was the cause."
"What else could it be?" I asked.
"Watson blames these occasional confusions on the lasting effects of the morphine." Holmes flung himself across the room and began to pace, shaking his head. "But it cannot be. The pattern is all wrong. He stumbles when he is excessively tired, or has put a strain on his old wound, not when... " He stopped to pinch the bridge of his nose. "It hardly matters. Watson was convinced, and so was Sir Julian Emberley, who runs the Fleet clinic. He barred Watson from practicing there unsupervised until such time as Watson had made a choice between medicine and morphine after that incident, and so drove Watson into even worse state. He could not honestly act as locum when he had been told his skills would not even benefit the miserable wretches who go to the Fleet."
"What did you do?" I wondered.
"What could I do?" Holmes said. "The third night I found him sitting with his revolver in his hand before the sitting room fire at three in the morning he nearly put a bullet through me, so I had an excuse to lock it away, but by then he knew that my own house was glass -- he had seen me melancholy more than once indeed, and tolerated it in silence. My cure has always been work, and that had been denied him. And then, by chance, I received a narrative from America which greatly increased our understanding of the first case we had shared and Watson was reminded that he had promised to write the matter up. I told him that I meant to hold him to that promise, and had the boots fetch round a fresh notebook of the kind Watson favored and a store of ink and nibs."
"He had always kept a daily record, although in his despair even that practice had fallen aside -- but his journals are his most valued possessions, and the loss of his diaries on the Northern Frontier appears to have stung him harder than the loss of his health. He hoards them like jewels, going so far as to lock them away in his bank once they are filled, lest some catastrophe overtake him again. To write out the case seemed a natural outgrowth of what he had always done. But this was a new kind of writing for him, and he stumbled at it at first. Somehow the suggestion was made -- I do not remember quite how -- that he begin by writing down the sort of story he told so well, about people he had met or small incidents in his career. By the time that the notebook had been labelled "Reminiscences" and was a quarter full, he had pulled himself somewhat free of the slough of despond, and as my studies ended and my fame in police circles spread, he and I found ourselves increasingly occupied with my work."
"Reminiscences?" I murmured, and could not help but look toward the bookshelf, where a certain pamphlet was set crooked to its fellows.
Holmes followed my gaze and went to pluck it from the shelf. "A Study in Scarlet..." He made a small, disdainful sound and passed it to me. "It was barer of unnecessary romance in the original, I promise you," he said. "But Watson's literary agent thought it needed that ungainly American passage and so he inserted it in the reprint."
"But you have a copy of his 'Reminiscences'," I pressed, for I very much wanted to read anything I could find about John. I could feel my cheeks darken.
"I shall send it to you," Holmes promised, with a laugh. "Although I warn you, the paper is very fragile. The printer in Calcutta went to little expense."
"Calcutta?" I blinked.
He nodded. "I am getting ahead of myself again," he said. He sat and drank off the last of his neglected tea. "As I was saying, Watson accompanied me on several cases, and continued to coach me whenever I needed a fit of exercise, which often meant running alongside me. In many ways his health improved, but twice more when I returned from a solitary excursion I found that he had been ill in my absence. And then in early March of '83 he and I were caught in a late snow on the high fells of Yorkshire as we hunted a murderer. It was a blinding storm, and I slipped on a traverse and fell, breaking both bones just above my left wrist. Watson did what he could, and we stumbled on. No doubt we would have frozen to death if it weren't for a shepherd who found us and took us to his hut. It was a tiny, barren thing, but weathertight, and the shepherd was able to provide us with nearly everything we required." He studied his empty cup very carefully. "Everything but morphine."