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Extract: 56881-56940 WATSON PAPERS. The literary papers of Doctor John Watson; 1883-1932, n.d. Chiefly autograph. Partly French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Tamil, and Cantonese. The papers are listed, with other BL holdings relating to John Watson and Sherlock Holmes, in Location Register of Twentieth-Century English Literary Manuscripts and Letters (1988), i, pp. 218-224. For full descriptions of some of the items see Wallingford, Mod. Lit. MSS., no. 93 (1988). Subsequent to the receipt of further Watson papers in 1982, the whole collection was rearranged. The present numeration therefore does not always correspond to that in Wallingford. Some material listed by Wallingford is now among Add. 58210-58214, while some material acquired in 1982 is incorporated in the present collection. The material was donated to the library by the Estate of John Watson, except for selected items, as indicated, presented by Sir Geoffrey Frathington, 13 Dec. 1969. Paper. Fifty-nine volumes. British Library arrangement.
From Add. 56882, a file of miscellaneous correspondence dated 1883-1900. This note is written on the bottom of a receipt from Chas. Haworth, Chemist, Edgware Road, dated 17 April 1883, for the purchase of a four-ounce vial of cocaine solution, two syringes, and a bar of soap. Kenworth (1985), unlike most scholars, links it to the pair's ongoing and sometimes public disagreements about Holmes' drug abuse.
Recto: I think it of no concern. Do not trouble yourself further on my account, doctor.
Verso (different hand): In my (locked!) dresser drawer. Damn him.
From Add. 56913, this autograph fragment is written in pencil on a sheet apparently torn from a notebook. It was originally contained in an envelope marked "DB — Mary," now lost. Wallingford (1988) proposes a date of 1889, suggesting that this was written contemporaneously with Watson's Sign of the Four, although Simpkins (2004) suggests that it was composed after the 1893 death of Mary Morstan Watson.
I pulled myself from her arms. "Mary, there is aught that I must tell you, though it pains me to do so." We had, against my better judgment, been ardently entwined on Mrs. Cecil Forrester's settee for some moments, and my breath came quickly. She was, as ever, entirely composed, but for the delicate flush that stole across her cheeks.
She smiled. "Yes?"
I could not meet her eyes. "I cannot ask you not to speak of this, I know — it is quite shameful, and I have behaved terribly —"
And then she did what astonished me, indeed, astonishes me still, recalling it. She took my hand in hers, and said, quite simply, "Darling, I am entirely aware."
I was overwhelmed. The room swam before me and I leaned forward, clutching at the cushion on which I sat. "When did you learn of it?" I managed at last. "Just now?" I had not imagined that I had in any way tipped my hand, difficult though it had been to pull back when I most wanted to push forward.
She laughed. "Hardly. Your Mr. Holmes informed me."
"Holmes?" I asked, indignant. "Holmes took it upon himself —"
"I think he believed," Mary said mildly, "that it would convince me to reject your attentions."
"And has it not?"
"My dear doctor," she said, "a young lady does not attain the age of seven-and-twenty without being well-aware of her own predilections. And you are — " she leaned back, surveying my unbuttoned vest, my rumpled shirtwaist, and my tweed trousers, soiled about the cuffs with Thames muck; in short, all the physical evidences of both my unsuitability and my depravity, " — you are, Doctor Watson, the solution to a quandary which has troubled me for some years now."
"Some years?" I asked, confused.
"Oh, yes. I was raised at a boarding school, doctor. A girls' boarding school. Some things became clear to me at quite a young age. Need I say more?" My surprise must have been writ clear on my face, for she laughed again, a blessed, melodious sound, and drew me to her. "You do not imagine, my dear, that you are taking advantage of me, do you? I must assure you that nothing could be further from the case."
Fragment from Add 56885, a notebook also containing a draft version of the story eventually published as "The Adventure of the Empty House," an unpublished, incomplete short story titled, "The Adventure of the Argentine Gold," and notes from a series of lectures on surgical correction of deformities of the feet delivered by Dr. Giles Calder at the Royal College of Surgeons in October of 1893. Interleaved in the notebook are ephemera including shopping lists, receipts, and cancelled cheques, which, taken with the lecture notes, lead Wallingford (1984) to date the notebook's contents to the period 1892-94. This fragment is in pencil; there is a five-pointed star in ink on the upper right corner of the first page of the section, and below it the note "Unbelievable — you flatter yourself," which Simpkins includes as "Probably Attributable" in her index of Holmes' addenda to Watson's manuscripts (2002). A third hand, likely at a later date, has written, "File in dispatch box," underlined twice, in red ink on the notebook's frontispiece.
The estimable Mrs. Hudson had produced a fine eel pie, there was a bottle of wine to go with it, and in all, I thought, our celebration of Holmes' return to London was quite merry. Holmes had stories of Tibet, France, and points in between, a suitcase full of foreign books and newspaper clippings, and an elaborate silk hat which had, he insisted, been given to him by a lama. I wasn't entirely certain what a lama was when he was at home, but the hat would surely make an unusual addition to Holmes' trunk of disguises.
His manner was unusually upbeat, even exuberant, for Holmes two days off a case, and his appearance matched his mood — new and bright, not in the least travelworn. His suit, a fine blue worsted, was clearly Parisian, but he hardly looked Continental in it. No, there was still the unmistakable air of the Englishman about his athletic figure, though in his absence he'd developed deeper lines on his face and a touch of grey at his temples. Less than I had, still.
Holmes had, from the sound of it, been his incorrigible self during his travels — he let it slip, with a sly grin, that he would be subject to arrest were he to cross the Polish border — but I was quite confident he wasn't touching on anything but the high points. His stories were all adventure, chemistry, and derring-do. So be it. There were things I wasn't keen to discuss, either.
As I spooned up the last bit of gravy and piecrust, Holmes suggested that we retire to our chairs. "I brought home some very good brandy," he said. "A gift from Dr. Varnier, before I left."
"The optics expert?"
"None other," he said, opening the bottle with a flourish and a squeak of wet cork.
"Only a little for me, Holmes," I said. "Be judicious."
"When have I ever been judicious?" Holmes answered, but he splashed only a fingersbreadth of the deep red liquid into the wide-bottomed snifter before he brought it to me.
"Thank you," I said, settling back in the seat. It was familiar and strange, all at once, to be back at Baker Street, the dustcloths lifted, Holmes returned from the dead. To go from such a terrible pair of losses — Holmes' disappearance in the Alps, and then, barely six months ago, Mary, burned away by fever — to return to this room and this fireside, in this company, was entirely unexpected. I was still dazed by the change.
Holmes, half-hidden behind his glass but perceptive as always, murmured, "My dear, I am so sorry. I did not learn of her death until I met with Lestrade, Monday last."
There it was, that familiar tightness in my throat. "Thank you."
Holmes took a deep breath. "I am sorry to have deceived you for so very long, doctor. But had Moran, or any of my other enemies, discovered your sex, I shudder to think what the consequences would have been for you and the late Miss Morstan. Most men, Watson, are not as liberalminded as I am."
My hand tightened on the arm of the chair. Most men wouldn't leave their closest friend to publicly mourn their deaths in the press, either, while they explored the mystic secrets of ancient Tibet. Or whatever it was Holmes had truly been doing these last years. "Mrs. Watson," I muttered. "The late Mrs. Watson."
Holmes frowned, shifting in his chair.
"We were married, Holmes."
"I was there," Holmes said, and the distaste was clear in his voice.
"So you were," I said. He'd spent the entire time shifting from one foot to the other and, when it was time to sign in the witness' space, he had caught the pen nib against the paper, spraying ink across the page. At the time, I had laughed it off and reached for the blotting paper, Mary's hand fine and warm in mine.
There was a swallow of brandy left in my glass. It was warm and acidic at the back of my throat, and, added to the two glasses of burgundy I'd drunk with dinner, left me somewhat lightheaded. My tolerance was less than it had been: I had not drunk wine or spirits, these last months, because every time I took a glass, I found that I took another, and another. It had come to seem unhealthy.
"I had hoped," Holmes said, clearing his throat and interrupting my ruminations, "that you might consent to move back into your rooms here. I am in need of assistance, if I am to resume my career as the scourge of London's underworld."
I could not, I found, respond; indeed, I was surprised that he would ask. As if I would simply give up my practice in Kensington, the rooms where Mary and I had spent the short time we'd had together, the clients who depended on me. As if I would surrender all that, without a second thought, to return to his side. As if I'd never spent those days beside the waterfall, waiting for his corpse to float to the surface.
I shivered. The fire was dying down; I took up the poker, added another log, and began to prod it back to life.
"I would —" Holmes cleared his throat. "In light of the circumstances, and your understandable distress at my sudden departure in Switzerland, I would be willing to offer you a more legally binding arrangement than we have enjoyed in the past."
"Legally binding, Holmes?" I tipped a second log into the grate, levering it above the flames.
"If we were to marry, there would be certain financial benefits for you, were something to happen to me. Again."
I turned from the fire, poker dangling from one hand. "Dear God, Sherlock, you are proposing marriage? To me? As some sort of life insurance policy?" I was, I am afraid, half-laughing with disbelief.
"Well, yes. If that would convince you to return." Holmes' tone was deliberately neutral. "It is not as though I would expect you to live as a woman. Not on a regular basis. You could think of it as a disguise." He didn't meet my eyes.
"A disguise?" I said, incredulous.
"I have certainly dressed as a woman, from time to time, when my cases made it necessary to do so. It is not so difficult."
"I have no little experience with the practice, myself," I said. Half a lifetime in skirts and corsets and pinning up my hair. I had taught him much of what he knew about wearing women's clothes, whether or not he liked to admit it. "And I am not — I have no interest in marrying a man."
In truth, I hardly thought myself capable of doing so. The fire popped, loudly, sending a shower of sparks onto the hearthrug, and I turned to stamp them out before the wool scorched.
"I was proposing a legal arrangement, Watson, not a coital one," Holmes said, dryly. The cracked leather of the ottoman creaked as he propped his feet on it.
I hooked the poker up beside the hearth and pulled the firescreen back into place. He was, I reminded myself, as he had always been. Holmes understood that individuals reacted out of emotion — he would have made a poor detective, had he not — but he simply did not believe that he himself, nor those around him, should make decisions on such an irrational basis. He had never, so far as I knew, seriously considered engaging in coitus himself. The act would have necessitated a repugnant loss of control, and in company.
"I have missed you terribly, Holmes," I said at last, because it was true. "I will not marry you."
"But you will return to Baker Street," he said promptly.
"I would have to sell my practice," I prevaricated, not wanting to refuse outright when I had just declined what was, so far as I could tell, an entirely sincere proposal of matrimony.
Holmes smiled and, raising the brandy bottle, topped up his glass. "Excellent. I have already spoken with an agent; I will introduce you tomorrow. His name is Cadwallader; he keeps an office in Islington."
"I will have to check my calendar. I expect to be seeing patients well into the afternoon." The sitting room seemed very close, suddenly. Smoke from the fire, perhaps, not drafting properly. One could not expect all to be in perfect repair, after such a lengthy absence; I would have to make sure Mrs. Hudson brought someone in to sweep the chimney. "If you'll excuse me," I said, rising, "it's growing late."
"May I escort you?" he asked, with an unusual solicitousness.
"I don't think that's necessary, Holmes," I told him. I buttoned my coat and, taking up my cane, gestured in his direction. "Good evening."
"Good evening," he replied, not rising from his chair. "Ask Mrs. Hudson to bring up a pot of tea for me on your way out, would you, doctor?"
I assented, and ducked into the kitchen as I left to pass along Holmes' request. Mrs. Hudson, looking up from the vast woolen article she was knitting, said, surprised, "Oh, you're not staying, then, doctor? But I made up a bed for you. He said —"
"I've business in Kensington in the morning," I interrupted, frowning, and elected not to remark on the chimney.
I was unsurprised when, showing my last patients out the door a little after three o'clock the following afternoon, I found Holmes on the doorstep of my surgery, picking through my mail. I wished Mrs. Plimpton and her daughter good afternoon and ushered Holmes into the hallway.
"You've been buying some expensive suits, Watson," he said, by way of greeting.
I lifted the paper from his hand. "Mine is not an unsuccessful practice, you know." I glanced down at the haberdasher's invoice. "And he's billed me for three sets of trousers when I only took two. Macmillan's billing error does not constitute an extravagance on my part, Holmes."
Holmes, ignoring me, had already pushed past me and was standing behind my desk. His familiar, narrow hands lifted a jar, a sheaf of papers, my stethoscope, then pulled open the top drawer and rummaged through the things inside. A letter opener, a pen, a receipt-book, a framed picture of Mary — I knew full well what I kept in that drawer. Nothing, of course, which I would object to him seeing. He didn't, wouldn't, ask me how business was; instead he would assemble the clues himself and solve the mystery of it. I leaned against the doorframe and waited.
"I have some business, Watson, on which I would benefit from your company," he told me, rifling through a stack of receipts.
"Oh?" I asked, amused. I wondered what he was learning from eight months worth of chemists' bills. That I'd broken two bottles of chloroform one afternoon last August, perhaps, when I tripped coming up the stairs. Or that I'd resorted, at the extremity of Mary's illness, to dosing her with laudanum because it let her rest without coughing.
"It involves the former President of Argentina," he said, "a Señor Murillo, who has been much in the papers of late."
"The gentleman with the mine?" It had been quite a scandal, as I recalled, involving no small quantity of gold, the Belgian ambassador's daughter, and a shooting in a Buenos Aires opera house.
"Indeed," Holmes said, replacing the receipts. "You are well-informed, my dear doctor, it is good to know that you have maintained the habits I instilled in you. Murillo is, even now, waiting for us at the Midland Grand hotel. You know the place," he said, closing my drawer as he straightened.
"Will the great detective be inspecting my consultation room as well?" I asked, nodding toward the little room where I saw patients privately.
Holmes glanced at it, then back at me, raising an eyebrow. "I think not. No, not if we are going to meet with both Murillo and Cadwallader this afternoon."
"We shall be busy, with all that," I said.
"Oh, yes," he told me. "We shall be very busy indeed."
From Add. 56891, autograph in ink on pages torn from a notebook, originally paperclipped together and headed by a note, in pencil on foolscap, reading "from the beasts of the field, good Lord, deliver us." Wallingford (1984) points out the resemblances between these sheets and those in the notebooks numbered "1904B," "1904C," and "1904E," and suggests that they were extracted from either the missing A or D volumes of that series.
"Doctor! It is you! Are you all right?"
"I am very well," I answered him, laughing, peering up from under the grate. "Indeed, I have rarely, if ever, been better."
He leaned over, inspecting me. "You have almost always looked better, Watson. I am sure we shall have to find you a bath, ere the end of the evening, and I doubt that those trousers will prove redeemable." He levered up the manhole cover with a crowbar, produced, rather to my surprise, from under his coat. "It is dead, then?"
"As a doornail!" I exulted, pushing my head through the opening and drawing a good breath of fresh aboveground air. "Will you come and see?"
"I can do naught else, as you have so thoughtfully dispatched the creature," he said, setting his feet to the cast-iron rungs of the ladder. I stepped back into the darkness, raising my lantern to illuminate the tunnel.
Holmes' boots clanged on the ladder as he descended into the sewer. It was dark and foul; water trickled in from drains and gutters, and a thick sludge flowed through the bottom of the bore. Holmes never hesitated, plunging knee-deep into the mire and seizing the lantern I offered.
"It is this way?" he asked, casting about. "My word, the smell is terrible. It has been years since I suffered through the underpinnings of our fine city."
I gestured. "Toward the north, past the first junction. You will be unable to miss it."
"I have missed it before," he said, slogging forward. "Really, Watson, I question your forbearance. A simple 'I told you so,' would be quite justifiable, under the circumstances."
"I think," I said smugly, "that it is much more satisfactory to hear you say it."
He rounded on me, then, the lantern that hung from his hand turning his narrow face skeletal. "Very well, then, you told me so. Repeatedly." His brows were drawn low, and his voice frustrated — with whom, I was not sure.
"Hardly the first time, Holmes," I said, lightly.
"It is the first time I have failed quite this badly," he said. "You were nearly killed. And by such a thing."
I could not permit this. His disbelief had not been unreasonable; after all, I had been under the influence of Iskandar's sleeping draught when I first saw the creature. "It is nothing of the sort," I told him. "I am yet living, after all."
"You are too kind," he muttered, then took my shoulder and lifted the lantern higher, shining it upon my face and looking on me with a strange intensity. "I would not be able to live with myself, had anything more dire come to pass. Particularly after disregarding your warning."
"Holmes!" I exclaimed. "I have had a thrilling pursuit through the fouler parts of London. A little excitement! An opportunity to discharge my revolver, which, believe you me, was long overdue. Nothing more." I shook loose of his grasp and splashed onward. "I pray you, come praise my work."
He followed, and as we came to the junction, he inhaled sharply. "My word, Watson."
"It is exactly as I told you, is it not?" I asked.
He played the light over the splayed form of the giant rodent: its horrible gaping jaws, its patchy and irregular fur, its claws, the whiplike tail that drifted behind it in the water. "If anything, it is fouler," he said, dryly. "I will have to compose a very pointed telegram to the consul."
From Add. 56881, papers initially accessioned as part of the 1969 Frathington bequest which could not be definitively associated with other materials in the collection. Original is in pencil on ruled paper. Sir Geoffrey Frathington was the son of Mrs. Charlotte (MacIlvray) Frathington, who cohabitated with Watson from 1906 until the latter began service with the Foreign Office in the autumn of 1914. Simpkins (1998) argues that Frathington was responsible for the loss of several of Watson's notebooks from this period, suggesting that he destroyed them to conceal his mother's lesbianism — a charge vigorously contested by Augusta Frathington in a 1999 essay in the Times Literary Supplement, headlined "My father: protector of a great Victorian legacy."
He was seated on the red couch in the sitting room, picking at his nails with the tip of a penknife, and, so far as I could determine from the array of bottles and jars about him, had spent most of the afternoon consuming miscellaneous unhealthy substances.
"Have you seen my studs, Holmes?" I asked, holding my shirtfront together with one hand as I entered the room.
He hummed. "When we came in from the Travellers, Monday last, you put them…where did you put them? You were not precisely sober at the time, so —" Holmes rose to his feet, tottering slightly, and I gave him my arm. He leaned on me, then turned toward the sideboard. "The little china dish," he said, tapping it with the bowl of his pipe, making it ring, "is our culprit."
I reached for the lid, lifting it to reveal not only my good mother-of-pearl studs, but also the sterling silver cufflinks, engraved with my initials, which a grateful client had sent at the conclusion of one of our bloodier cases.
"I didn't know we were going out," Holmes said, watching me fasten my shirt.
"We are not, old boy. I am escorting a lady this evening." He stepped back, swaying, and I clutched at his elbow, arresting his collapse. "Come now, Holmes, it's the couch for you. Or perhaps bed?"
"A lady?" he asked. "What sort of lady? No, do not tell me." He sat heavily, draping one arm extravagantly across the back of the couch.
I fished the last of my studs from the dish. "I would not dream of it, my dear."
His eyes flicked up and down, taking in my best dress trousers, the fresh shirt, crisp from Mrs. Hudson's iron, the shining toe-caps of my shoes. I did up my right cuff with a flourish, turning my wrist to make sure I'd settled the cufflink so it lined up with the seam. That nimble mind would, I was certain, draw the right conclusion, try though its possessor might to drug it into quiescence.
Holmes exhaled and reached for a brown glass bottle, without taking his eyes from me; I nudged it away with one toe. "You've had enough," I told him, firmly.
"In your medical opinion." It wasn't a question, so I didn't answer, addressing my second cuff instead. There was a long pause until, at last, he said softly, "Your sort of lady."
"I believe so, yes," I told him. "I won't discuss it, not when you're in this state. I know very well your thoughts on the subject."
He spread his hands, turning to frown down at himself, and I smiled at him. "It's supper and a concert, Holmes, that is all. I will be back."
"I may not be here," he told me. "I had a telegram, today, from the Yard."
"Good," I said, firmly. "It's about time you went and found another case; you need some more salutory occupation than what you have, of late, found for yourself." I returned to my room to finish dressing, confident that, by the time I emerged again, he would have departed. I was not mistaken.
From Add. 56883, a file of miscellaneous correspondence dating from 1900-1920, a letter by Rowena Starling, a newspaper reporter and suffragette from New York who met Watson during the 1905 North American lecture tour. They maintained a regular correspondence for most of the next decade: there are thirty-four letters from Starling in the file, most discussing current events, books, and mutual acquaintances in Canada and the United States. This is the only one of her letters which mentions Holmes.
Schenectady, June 6, 1907
Dearest John,
Your letter and the pamphlets arrived yesterday; I have read the former over twice now and shared the latter out with Maisie and Beth, both of whom thank you for thinking of us. The commentaries on the petition were amusing.
We have been canning like mad, the cherry trees are covered with fruit this year and I hate to let any of it go to waste. Mr. Teller brought up the big kettle and the three of us have been out in the back kitchen for the last three days. With reasonable breaks for lemonade and novels, of course.
I have thought it over and as usual I will tell you what to do: don't go to the Downs. I can't imagine you being happy, all the way out there, and from what you say I'm not sure I can imagine it of Holmes, either. The whole thing sounds quite mad, unless of course by "beekeeping" you mean something entirely different. Which you may! Still, put with what he's said to Charlotte, and to you about Charlotte, of course — don't think I can't read between the lines, there, dear heart — I am sure you will be happier staying in London.
I have made arrangements to come over on the Cedric in September. Mr. Goldman says the accommodation is very nice. He and Mrs. Parker have been writing back and forth making the arrangements for the meetings. I will write again when schedules are clearer — I will know more after I go down to the city at the end of this month. I am eager as always to see you and meet your lovely lady, and am keeping that pleasant object in mind when the details of travel become overwhelming.
With warmest regards,
R.
Also from Add. 56882, a Post Office telegram form, undated, but of a type discontinued in 1909. The form, though it shows signs of multiple erasures and emendations, lacks a date stamp and was probably never sent.
NOT COMING THIS WEEK, SENDING NEW APICULTURAL BOOK AND RHEUMATISM PREPARATION BY POST. CHARLOTTE SENDS REGARDS. YOURS AS ALWAYS, WATSON.