From mrspencil: a newfangled contraption causes frustration
Holmes' growl of frustration nearly filled the sitting room, and the door clicked shut behind me.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
He started, apparently not hearing me enter, and I moved to stand behind where he sat at his desk. "Is that a typewriter?"
He glanced up at me, hope sparking in his gaze. "Have you used one?"
I shook my head. "I have watched others use them, though. What are you trying to accomplish?"
He scowled at the machine. "I submitted a monograph to publish today, and they wanted to know if I could type future ones. They let me borrow a typewriter when I said I had never tried, but they were frustratingly vague on how it is used."
I studied what he had so far, comparing it to the memory of one I had seen on a professor's desk in medical school. The device he had was a typical downstroke typewriter, as the upstroke versions were still far too new, and a quick glance confirmed that he had everything set up correctly. I leaned against the desk as I looked back at him.
"Everything looks as it should," I told him. "What is the problem?"
"What do you mean 'it looks as it should?'" he burst out, gesturing angrily at the device. "How am I supposed to know what I am typing?"
I tried not to grin. "You don't," I answered. "The arms connected to each key strike the paper inside the box. This model spaces everything for you, but there is not yet a way to see what you type as you type it. You have to remove the paper when you are done."
He looked at me, then at the box-like typewriter sitting on the desk. "That is a horrible design!"
I laughed. "The upstroke ones only hit the market a few years ago and are still relatively expensive. Here."
I exchanged the nice paper he had loaded into the machine with a few scraps from my desk and slowly tapped out a few words. Pausing long enough to ensure I did not smear the ink, I removed the paper to reveal what I had typed.
"publ ishers are demanding," it read, and he quirked a grin.
I made no effort to hide a chuckle. "They are imperfect, as you can tell, and they require quite a bit of practice. I would recommend several hours with scraps before you feed your manuscript sheets into it."
His amusement at my attempt still twitching his mouth, he nodded and fed another, longer scrap into the machine, and I settled into my chair with a book as he began to type. I tried not to make it obvious that I paid more attention to him than I did the words on the page, but only his own distraction kept him from noticing me. He was worth watching. My friend was so accustomed to finding things easy that the few challenges he faced either fascinated or frustrated him, and this obviously fell into the latter category. He was too much of a perfectionist to feel otherwise. After spending several minutes tapping away on the keys and occasionally scowling at the device, he would pull the paper out and inevitably find one or more imperfections. The imperfections irritated him, and by the fourth try, he had taken to throwing the used scraps on the floor. I eventually had to rescue one when it landed too close to the fire, and minutes passed as more and more papers littered the floor behind him.
"No luck?" I asked two hours later, when he crumpled one particularly roughly.
He growled. "This confounded contraption refuses to work! I thought you said it spaced the words automatically?"
My grin widened a bit. "It does, but it will never be spaced the same way that a handwritten sentence will. The purpose of the typewriter is to make all the letters look alike across documents rather than having to decipher each individual's variation of script. Each successive model is better, but we are many years away from having a device that works perfectly."
He typed out another few words, only to throw that paper to the floor as well, growing more frustrated by the minute. Two more crumpled scraps later, he angrily pushed himself away from the desk and disappeared into his bedroom.
He reentered the sitting room a moment later, box in hand, and the typewriter quickly disappeared. He brushed out the door with a huff of frustration, obviously deciding to tell the publisher that they would have to make do with his handwriting, and I waited for the front door to slam behind him before I laughed. I could not blame them for trying, considering Holmes' handwriting varied from hurried to atrocious, but I also could not say I was surprised. Holmes did not have the patience to practice something that so irritated him—especially when the publisher had phrased it as a request instead of a requirement.
I set my book on a table and started gathering the papers he had scattered, intending to set them aside only long enough to make sure he did not want to keep them before we used them as fire starters, but a piece of text on one caught my eye. My curiosity got the better of me, and I opened it.
"bozwelk. wastin." I hesitated, staring at the familiar words. Even with the mistakes, I knew what he had been trying to type, and I opened another.
"tge qu icj brown fox ju mpe d ovet tge la zy rive r. mrz hisdon."
"watxin. londin."
"sher lick holms. th e qy ick broen fo xjunped ocerth e lazt river."
"bozwell. watsin."
"watson. mrz. hudson. sherlick holmes. mycroft."
My smile grew wider with each one. I knew he valued my friendship just as I did his, but he so deftly hid his thoughts that even I could rarely guess his true feelings. He had obviously been typing whatever came to mind, and that he had spent the last two hours alternating between a sentence that used the entire alphabet and those four names—of which mine was the most common by far—conveyed much more than I had ever thought to see.
"ba ker strret. 221"
"watson. sherlick holmes. lindon."
There had been a time when I believed he only kept me around for convenience, when I had thought that the regard I held for him was completely unreciprocated, and while more recent years had finally shown me that such an idea was probably inaccurate, I had never thought to see proof of the value he placed on our friendship. I considered him my brother and had for years, and the frequency with which my name appeared on those scraps showed I was much more than just a convenient flatmate and business partner. I opened paper after paper, finding different variations of the same message.
Cherished, they said with different letters and misspelled words. Important. Valued.
I slowly worked my way across the room, finding some scraps easier to read than others but all worth the time.
"the qiick brown fox jumped over the la zy river."
"watson. myc roft."
"mrs. hudsom."
"sherlick holmes."
"bozwell. watson."
Careful to recrumple each one after I read it, I finally reached the area where most of the last ones had landed, and the spelling improved as I went, though the contents hardly varied. Each one contained the same message, the same words time after time.
Except one.
"bos well. watson. brother."
The basket hit the ground as I stared at the scrap of paper, unable to believe what I was seeing. I would never have expected him to return such a sentiment. At best, I had hoped for what the other notes had conveyed—valued friend—and I read it again, then again, trying to decipher what it really said. There was no way that meant what I thought it did, what I hoped it did. I had long ago reconciled myself to the knowledge that the honorary title I had granted him long ago would never be returned.
The evidence stared at me no matter how many times I reread it, however. Brother.
The slamming of the door abruptly broke into my thoughts, and I jerked out of my stunned staring as he mounted the stairs, quickly clearing the rest of the notes and double checking that all in the basket had been recrumpled. By the time he reached the sitting room, the basket sat next to his desk chair, and I had returned to my book. He promptly dumped the crumpled scraps into the fire, but he never noticed that one scrap was missing.
I had shoved it into my journal as I took a seat. He did not need to know when I eventually moved that scrap to my wallet.
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