Holmes and Watson (26 page)

And despite Watson’s efforts to dissuade him, Holmes was still occasionally using cocaine. Although Watson had over the years ‘gradually weaned him from the drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career’, he had not been entirely successful as he himself suggests in ‘The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot’, in which he refers to those ‘occasional indiscretions’, which had helped to bring about Holmes’ breakdown in health. Boredom was largely responsible for his use of drugs.

Holmes was no better at dealing with tedium than he had been in the past. He himself refers to the ‘insufferable fatigues of idleness’ and compares his mind to ‘a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built.’

Nor had Holmes cured himself of another habit: that of overwork. He remained a workaholic, taking on too many cases and depriving himself of both food and sleep during some investigations. In the spring of 1897, the inevitable happened and he suffered another major breakdown in health, similar to the one he had already experienced in 1887. On the advice of his physician, Dr Moore Agar of Harley Street, who warned him that unless he rested he would never work again, Holmes, accompanied by Watson, travelled down to Cornwall where they rented a small cottage at Poldhu Bay. But even there, Holmes could not remain idle. Fascinated by the Cornish language, he had books on philology sent to him and, as happened during his earlier convalescence in Reigate, he became involved, despite Watson’s objections, in an investigation, the case of the Devil’s Foot, also known as ‘The Cornish Horror’, the outcome of which could have been fatal for them both had it not been for Watson’s quick thinking and presence of mind.

When Holmes was not occupied with his professional work, there were still his hobbies to keep him busy. He continued to play the violin and to conduct his chemical experiments, long established interests of his to which he added several more: the music of the Middle Ages, the
philology of the Cornish language, already referred to, and early English charters, research for which took both him and Watson to one of the university towns, almost certainly Oxford, his old Alma Mater,
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where he made use of the library, probably the Bodleian. It was during this period that he found time, in the middle of the inquiry into the missing Bruce-Partington plans, to write his monograph on the polyphonic motets of Lassus, already referred to in Chapter Two.

He also maintained his interest in nature which, as we have seen, marked a change of attitude in the late 1880s when he was investigating Moriarty’s criminal career. During the Black Peter case, he invites Watson to join him on a walk through the woods where they will ‘give a few hours to the birds and the flowers’. As we have also seen, this interest in the countryside and the beauty of nature was linked to a longing for a quiet, private life and this was still very much in Holmes’ thoughts. He was already making specific plans for his retirement, for he speaks of a ‘little farm of my dreams’ and of devoting his ‘declining years’ to writing a textbook on the art of detection. Unfortunately, for it would have been of great general interest as well as of immense value to Sherlockian students, he apparently never found the time to complete this project.

But there were breaks in this punishing schedule of
work. Holmes and Watson went on walks together round London, visited Covent Garden to hear a Wagner opera and also the Albert Hall for a concert given by Carina, dined out at an Italian restaurant, Goldini’s, and even went trout-fishing in Berkshire as part of their cover during the Shoscombe Old Place inquiry, the only instance of either of them showing any interest in this particular country sport. In 1895, at the end of the Black Peter inquiry, they both went to Norway for a holiday, a trip no doubt prompted by the Norwegian connections of the case, although, with the investigation over, their visit was purely for pleasure.

Watson must have benefited from these social outings as much as Holmes, for it cannot have been easy for him to share lodgings with someone of such exasperating habits and so volatile a temperament, especially as he had known the pleasures of owning his own home and following his own daily routine, however humdrum it may have seemed at times. Generally speaking, Watson tolerated it all with remarkable stoicism, although there were occasions when even his patience was sorely tried and he expressed a not unnatural exasperation. These instances, however, are less frequent than they were in the earlier period (1881–9) when they shared lodgings.

On the whole Watson expresses far more admiration than criticism of Holmes, that ‘extraordinary man’, as he once refers to him. It was an admiration amounting at times to reverence. One of the reasons Watson agrees not to publish any accounts during this period is his fear that he might, by overburdening his readers, damage
Holmes’ reputation, ‘a man whom above all others I revere’. Watson had always had a tendency towards hero-worship, seen in his admiration of General Gordon and Henry Ward Beecher and, as Holmes’ reputation increased internationally, so Watson’s regard for him grew proportionately. After the death of his wife, Watson also relied more and more on Holmes for that companionship for which he naturally craved. It was an attitude which left him vulnerable to criticism. However, although Holmes was still capable of hurting Watson’s feelings, as for example during the case of the Three Students when he remarks that, as the inquiry is more mental than physical, it is unlikely to interest him, Watson was more than compensated by those other occasions when Holmes allowed his defences to drop and openly expressed his real feelings. This happened at the end of the Three Garridebs case when, thinking Watson was seriously injured when Killer Evans fires at him, Holmes shows a genuine concern. ‘It was worth a wound – it was worth many wounds – to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask,’ Watson remarks, adding that it was the first time he caught a glimpse of ‘a great heart as well as a great brain’. Holmes shows a similar concern at the end of the Devil’s Foot inquiry when his experiment with the West African poisonous root almost had fatal consequences, a response which prompted Watson’s reply, quoted in the heading to this chapter.

This friendship and companionship, together with the opportunities for adventure and excitement which his
association with Holmes afforded him, helped Watson to recover gradually from his wife’s death. He had always been susceptible to female charm, and women in turn found him attractive. As we have seen, Holmes teased him sometimes on this subject, referring to the ‘fair sex’ as being his ‘department’. But although Watson continued to feel concern for Holmes’ female clients, going to the trouble, for example, of reporting that, after the conclusion of the Solitary Cyclist case, Miss Violet Smith inherited a large fortune and married Cyril Morton, her faithful suitor, it was not until the Abbey Grange inquiry in 1897 that Watson felt any real plucking at his heartstrings at the sight of a beautiful woman. She was Lady Brackenstall, blonde, golden-haired, blue-eyed; very similar in colouring, in fact, to his late wife Mary, who was also fair-haired.

But when, towards the end of this period, Watson finally lost his heart and fell in love for the second time, it was with a young woman of an entirely different complexion. It was also an
affaire de coeur
which very nearly brought about an end to his friendship with Sherlock Holmes. 

The identity of the woman with whom Watson fell in love and whom he later married is not recorded. Watson himself makes no reference to her at all and our knowledge of the existence of the second Mrs Watson depends entirely on one single, brief statement made by Holmes in ‘The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier’ in which he reports: ‘The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action which I can recall in our association.’ To drive home the point, he adds, with a
touch of self-dramatisation, ‘I was alone.’ He quite clearly feels hard done by and sorry for himself.

Because of Watson’s total silence about his second marriage, some commentators have doubted if it ever took place. Instead, they suggest that Watson’s ‘sad bereavement’ during the Great Hiatus of 1891–4 refers either to the death of a child or to a serious breakdown in Mrs Watson’s health, and they ascribe her disappearance from Watson’s accounts after 1894 and his return to Baker Street to her long-term illness. She was, they argue, in a sanatorium where Watson visited her regularly. On her recovery, Watson went back to live with her: hence Holmes’ reference to ‘a wife’.

Quite apart from the lack of evidence to support these theories and their failure to explain satisfactorily Watson’s silence over the matter, both Watson’s and Holmes’ choice of words alone would tend to refute them. If Mary Watson had been seriously ill, Watson would hardly have described this as a ‘sad bereavement’. Nor would Holmes have referred to her as ‘a wife’. If Watson had left him to return to Mary, whom Holmes knew quite well, it would be more natural to use the term ‘his wife’. Other evidence within the canon also points to the existence of a second Mrs Watson. But who was she? Where and when did Watson meet her? When were they married? And why was Watson so careful never to refer to her in his accounts?

One theory suggesting she was Watson’s housekeeper after he moved out of the Baker Street lodgings whom he married merely for practical reasons and was too ashamed
to mention is not, in my opinion, tenable. Watson was a romantic man who was much more likely to marry for love than for such mundane considerations. And why should he go to the trouble of marrying her? Or, come to that, why should he even move out of Baker Street, where his material needs were well looked after by Mrs Hudson?

However, before any attempt is made to name the second Mrs Watson, it is important to try to establish the date of the marriage, if only approximately, for her identification depends largely on this factor.

It is clear that at the time of the Three Garridebs inquiry, a case which Watson positively assigns to June 1902, he was still unmarried and living in Baker Street. But by 3rd September 1902, the date of the Illustrious Client inquiry, Watson had already moved out of the Baker Street lodgings and was not only living in his own rooms in Queen Anne Street but was again practising as a doctor, facts which most commentators agree are connected with his second marriage. It is therefore often assumed that the wedding must have taken place between June and September 1902. However, as we shall see later in the chapter, Watson’s marriage plans were probably more complex than this.

One fact at least emerges from the information set out above: Watson must have met the woman he was later to marry at some date before September 1902. This immediately rules out one candidate whom some commentators have put forward as the second Mrs Watson: Violet de Merville, who features in the Illustrious Client
case. Watson had already moved into Queen Anne Street and resumed his medical career before this investigation took place.

Other factors also mitigate against her. Violet de Merville was not the type of woman whom Watson would have found attractive. Young, rich and beautiful, she had fallen obsessively in love with Baron Gruner, a charming but highly undesirable suitor with a criminal past, whom Holmes suspected of murder and from whom her family was trying to separate her with Holmes’ assistance. She was also self-willed, spoilt and, despite her passion for the Baron, a hard-hearted woman whom Holmes himself accused of ‘supreme self-complaisance’. Watson preferred women of a softer and more agreeable nature. Neither would she, with her longings for a romantic lover like Baron Gruner, a wealthy man with an aristocratic and fascinatingly mysterious background, have been attracted to Watson, a middle-aged widower and a relatively dull and humble GP. The social conventions of the time would not have encouraged such a match either. Violet de Merville was the daughter of General de Merville, who had friends in high places, including Sir James Damery, who asks Holmes to take up the case and who was, as Holmes himself says, ‘a household name in society’. Sir James was acting on behalf of an even more illustrious client who, Watson hints, had ducal if not royal connections. It has even been suggested that he was none other than Edward VII. In short, Watson was not sufficiently wealthy nor of a high enough social rank to make such a marriage
likely. There is no evidence either that Watson ever met her. When Holmes goes to her house to interview her, he is accompanied only by Kitty Winter, the Baron’s former mistress. Watson is not present. Lastly, and I believe conclusively, Watson had, as stated earlier, already met the young woman whom he was later to marry. By the time of the Illustrious Client case, he had certainly moved out of Baker Street and was again in practice as a GP, two factors which, as we have seen, are generally accepted as related to his second marriage.

However, there is one young woman whom Watson had already met by June 1902 and who possessed many of the qualities he would have looked for in a prospective wife. Moreover, she was, like Mary Morstan, his first wife, a governess and therefore came from Watson’s own middle-class background. There are also other similarities between the two women and Watson’s feelings towards them which are too striking to be coincidental. This theory concerning her identity would also explain Watson’s unprecedented silence about her, a reticence which he had not shown over his first wife, about whom he has given his readers a great deal of information in
The Sign of Four
, including an account of her background as well as details of his courtship of her and their subsequent married life together. The young woman in question is Grace Dunbar.

Watson first met her during the Thor Bridge investigation into the death of Mrs Gibson, the wife of Neil Gibson, the American gold millionaire. At the time Holmes took up the case, Grace Dunbar, governess to the Gibson children,
had been arrested for the murder of Mrs Gibson, found shot dead on a bridge in the grounds of Thor Place, the Gibson family home, and was in Winchester prison awaiting trial. In fact, Watson was introduced to her in her cell. In a lengthy passage, as detailed as his account of his initial meeting with Mary Morstan thirteen years earlier, Watson describes her appearance and his reactions on seeing her for the first time. ‘I had expected from all we had heard to see a beautiful woman,’ he writes in ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge’, ‘but I can never forget the effect which Miss Dunbar produced upon me.’

It was not only her beauty which captivated him. As with Mary Morstan, he was impressed by the sensitivity of her features which expressed ‘a nobility of character’ and was touched, too, by ‘the appealing, helpless expression’ in her dark eyes.

Although physically the two women were very different, Grace Dunbar being a tall brunette with a commanding presence, whereas Mary Morstan had been a small, dainty blonde, there are many similarities in the two descriptions. As well as Watson’s immediate attraction towards them both, he also felt an urge to protect them combined with an admiration of their courage in facing life alone. Mary Morstan was an orphan who worked to support herself; Grace Dunbar had dependants who relied on her financially. In fact, Watson was so taken by Grace Dunbar that the short journey from Winchester to Thor Place seemed intolerably long to him in his impatience for Holmes to begin work on the case and prove her
innocence, which Holmes eventually succeeds in doing.

At the end of the Thor Bridge inquiry, Holmes comments that, now Grace Dunbar has been cleared of the murder charge, it seems ‘not unlikely’ that she and Neil Gibson will marry. It is a curiously negative statement as if Holmes himself was not convinced of its likelihood. If he were aware, as seems highly likely, of Watson’s feelings towards the young woman, the comment could be wishful thinking on Holmes’ part for, if she married Gibson, it would place her beyond Watson’s reach.

But a marriage between Gibson and Grace Dunbar is, I believe, out of the question. Gibson is a violent and cunning man, hated by his servants, one of whom, his estate manager, comes specially to Baker Street to warn Holmes about him. Gibson, the manager declares, is a brute and ‘an infernal villain’. On Gibson’s own admission, it is because of his ill-treatment of her that his wife, a passionate and neurotic Brazilian, was driven to commit suicide in such a way as to throw suspicion of murder on Grace Dunbar, to whom Gibson had transferred his attentions. Far from welcoming his advances, Grace Dunbar had threatened to leave Thor Place and was only persuaded to remain by Gibson’s assurances that he would stop pestering her. In addition, she had, as we have seen, dependants and, according to Gibson, she was convinced that, if she remained in her post as governess, she could influence him for the better.

None of this carries any weight in the argument that she later married him. At the time this happened, Mrs Gibson
was still alive and any question of marriage between Grace Dunbar and the Gold King would not have arisen. It seems highly unlikely that, after Mrs Gibson’s death and her own release from prison, Grace Dunbar, a woman of great strength and nobility of character, would have married a man whose brutal conduct had not only driven his first wife to commit suicide but had put her own life in jeopardy.

The date of the Thor Bridge inquiry is not known. Watson specifies the month only, which was October, but not the year. However, as the internal evidence makes it quite clear that Watson was still living in Baker Street, it must have occurred before September 1902 and Watson’s move to Queen Anne Street. D. Martin Dakin and Dr Zeisler, among others, suggest October 1901, a date with which I concur.

Although the rest of the theory is merely speculative, I also suggest that, after her release from prison, Grace Dunbar left Gibson’s household. As she would then have been out of work, nothing would have been more natural for her than to come to London in order to visit one of the employment agencies which specialised in finding posts for governesses. Violet Hunter had made use of such an agency, Westaways, at the beginning of the Copper Beeches inquiry. And while she was in London, it would also have been quite natural for Grace Dunbar to pay a call on Holmes in Baker Street to thank him personally for his help in saving her from the gallows, an opportunity she had not had during the final stages of the Thor Bridge
case. It was during this interview, I suggest, that Watson renewed his acquaintance with her, an occasion which led to further meetings and to their subsequent marriage.

This theory would also explain Watson’s secrecy about the identity and even the very existence of his second wife. He would not want the general public, and in particular his patients and his readers, to know he had married a woman who had been in prison on a murder charge. Social conventions of the time would have inhibited him from publishing these facts. But there was an even more pressing reason for his silence. Gibson was a violent and revengeful man who even went as far as to threaten Holmes when he was at first reluctant to take up the case. In Watson’s presence, he told Holmes, ‘You’ve done yourself no good this morning, Mr Holmes, for I have broken stronger men than you. No man ever crossed me and was the better for it.’ Had he known that Watson had married Grace Dunbar, the young woman whom he himself had hoped to marry, his desire for revenge would have been even stronger. He might have set about ruining Watson’s career or even have threatened his life. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that Watson omitted any reference to his second wife in the canon.

According to the evidence, Watson apparently failed to be totally frank with Holmes as well, although for entirely different motives. Knowing his old friend’s strong aversion to marriage, Watson must have anticipated Holmes’ reaction to the announcement that he intended marrying again. As it was, Holmes took the news badly, regarding
it as a ‘selfish action’ on Watson’s part, an attitude which reveals once more his strong urge to control other people’s lives, Watson’s in particular.

And from Holmes’ point of view, Watson’s decision to marry again was indeed selfish. At one stroke, Holmes was deprived of a friend, companion, assistant, amanuensis and all the other roles which Watson had filled over the years. It was no wonder he felt deserted and alone. Out of sheer necessity, he was forced to employ a man named Mercer, ‘my general utility man who looks up routine business’, as Holmes rather disparagingly refers to him in ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’. Mercer quite clearly carried out some of the duties Watson had once undertaken.
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Nor is it surprising that Holmes failed to consider Watson’s happiness or to appreciate that side of Watson which longed for domesticity and the love of a good woman. Watson was uxorious by nature; Holmes decidedly was not. Despite his own feelings for Irene Adler, Holmes had always scorned love as one of the softer emotions and, as he grew older, became, as many of us tend to do, less tolerant. In describing Watson’s action as selfish, he was quite unaware that he himself was
displaying a strong selfish disregard for Watson’s needs.

Watson’s second marriage was to have far-reaching repercussions. It led to a rift in his relationship with Holmes which lasted for about six months and which, even after their reconciliation, gave rise to a coolness between the two men for an even longer period. And it was to hasten Holmes’ decision to retire from his professional career as a private consulting detective.