Holmes and Watson (14 page)

In September 1888
*
Watson became involved with Holmes in a case which was to have an important effect on his future happiness, for it was during the course of the investigation that he met the young lady who was to become his wife.

She was Mary Morstan, who possibly was born and was certainly partly brought up in India where her father,
Major Arthur Morstan, was serving in an Indian regiment. As her mother was dead and there were no relatives living in England, her father had sent her as a child to Edinburgh to be educated at a boarding-school. This may imply that she had at least one relation living in or near Edinburgh, perhaps an aunt with whom she may have spent the school holidays and whom she was later to visit on at least two occasions.

In the meantime, her father had been posted to the Andaman Islands, situated in the Bay of Bengal off the east coast of India, to assist Major John Sholto in guarding a convict settlement on Blair Island, one of the most southerly of the group.

In 1878, Major Morstan, having obtained twelve months’ leave, returned to England and sent a telegram to his daughter, asking her to meet him in London at the Langham Hotel. However, when Mary Morstan arrived there, she found her father had disappeared, leaving his luggage behind. Despite enquiries on her part, nothing more was heard of him and his whereabouts remained a mystery.

Six years later, Mary Morstan, who had taken up the post of governess to Mrs Cecil Forrester’s family in Lower Camberwell, saw an advertisement in
The Times
, asking for her address and stating that, if she came forward, it would be to her advantage. On Mrs Forrester’s advice, she published her address in the newspaper and received through the post a parcel containing a valuable pearl, the first of six which were to be sent to her anonymously over the next five years.

And then, quite unexpectedly in September 1888, she received a letter telling her she had been wronged and asking her to meet her unknown correspondent that evening at seven o’clock outside the Lyceum Theatre. If she were at all doubtful, she could bring two friends with her but the police were not to be informed. Mrs Forrester who, as we have seen in Chapter Two, had been one of Holmes’ clients while he was living in Montague Street, further advised her to consult Holmes which Mary Morstan did, calling on him at Baker Street and laying the facts before him.

It was an intriguing account and Holmes agreed to accompany her on the mysterious assignation, suggesting that Watson came as well, an invitation which he eagerly accepted. For far more fascinating to him than her story was Miss Morstan herself.

He describes her in detail. She was a small, dainty, blue-eyed blonde and, although she was not exactly beautiful, everything about her struck him as charming, from her simple, yet tasteful dress sense to her amiable and sympathetic expression which indicated a sensitive personality. Of a sympathetic nature himself, he was touched by her outward composure which hid an intense inner distress and by the fact that she was alone in the world. She was twenty-seven, a ‘sweet age’, as Watson describes it, when a woman has lost the self-consciousness of youth and has matured through experience.

He himself was thirty-five or thirty-six and to all outward appearances a confirmed bachelor, content with
his single life, spent almost entirely in Holmes’ company. During his eight years in Baker Street, the thought of marriage had not crossed his mind. Nor apparently had it occurred to him that he might resume his former medical career. As far as he was concerned, any such ambition had been cut short at the battle of Maiwand.

The meeting with Mary Morstan was to change all that. For him, it was a case of love at first sight, a
coup de foudre
, which altered his whole attitude and set him yearning for a very different future. But these were ‘dangerous thoughts’ which he dare not allow himself to contemplate. It is, however, highly significant that, as soon as Mary Morstan had left and he was alone, Watson went straight to his desk and ‘plunged furiously into the latest treatise on pathology’, the only record during those eight years of his reading any medical books.

Yet, despite this sudden interest in his former studies, it all seemed hopeless. Watson had enough common sense as well as honesty to realise that marriage to Mary Morstan was out of the question. Although the future without her seemed black indeed, it was far better to face reality like a man than deceive himself with ‘mere will o’ the wisps of the imagination’. As he himself realised, he was nothing more than a former army surgeon with, as he says, a weak leg and an even weaker bank balance. As for any hope of making a living as an author, this was so unlikely that Watson does not even mention it.

His chances seemed even more remote when, during the investigation, it was discovered that Mary Morstan’s
father was dead and that she stood to inherit his half share in the Agra treasure, a fabulous collection of jewels estimated to be worth the huge sum of half a million pounds.

A more mercenary man would have welcomed the news. To Watson, it was yet another barrier between them. For how could he, a man living on a pension and with no immediate prospects of earning any more, propose to a woman who might become the richest heiress in England? His own sense of decency and self-respect prevented him from even considering it, despite the signs that Mary Morstan’s feelings for him were as warm as his towards her.

There is a touching scene of them standing in the dark in the desolate garden of Pondicherry Lodge, where Holmes’ enquiries had led them, and of Mary Morstan’s hand reaching out to grasp Watson’s as if she were turning to him instinctively for comfort and protection.

To Watson’s enormous relief, and also to hers, the chest said to contain the Agra treasure was later found to be empty, its contents having been thrown into the Thames by Jonathan Small, who had stolen the jewels in the first place and whom Holmes and Watson were pursuing up the river in an attempt to retrieve them. Watson was now free to propose marriage to Mary Morstan, who accepted him without any hesitation.

His choice of her as a wife was excellent. Mary Morstan was a quiet, sensible woman with a warm personality which, as Watson says, drew people in trouble to her as
naturally as ‘birds to a lighthouse’. As a former governess, she was also used to living frugally and making the most of a little money, a necessary quality in the wife of a future GP who was to struggle to build up a neglected practice.

She was to create a happy and stable domestic background for Watson such as he had probably not experienced since his boyhood, so much of his adult life having been spent in student lodgings, army quarters or the bachelor apartment at Baker Street. Although he was content enough sharing digs with Holmes where he was well looked after by Mrs Hudson, it was not quite the same as having his own home and coming back to his own fireside.

Even Holmes remarked that Mary Morstan was one of the most charming young ladies he had ever met and added that, with her intelligence, she could have become a private consulting detective, a rare accolade indeed.

Knowing Holmes’ attitude to women and his strong aversion to marriage, Watson must have anticipated his old friend’s reaction when he told him of his engagement. Even so, he found Holmes’ response a little hurtful.

‘I really cannot congratulate you,’ Holmes remarked.

It was an honest reply if not exactly tactful, although Watson accepted it with good humour. He was wrong, however, in his assumption that the Sholto investigation would be the last in which he assisted Holmes.

The following month, October 1888,
*
he became
involved with Holmes on a complex case which was to take him away from London and Mary Morstan for several weeks.
*
This was the inquiry into the death of Sir Charles Baskerville the previous June in the grounds of Baskerville Hall on Dartmoor. It was apparently connected with the family legend of a spectral hound which was said to haunt the moor and which, it was feared, might threaten the life of the young Sir Henry Baskerville, Sir Charles’s nephew and heir, when he arrived in Devon to take up residence at the ancestral home.

Some commentators, ignoring the references to the dating of this case, have assigned it to the late 1890s, on the grounds that Watson shows no signs of his game leg which had troubled him during the Sholto affair. Nor is there any mention in his account of the Baskerville inquiry of Mary Morstan, to whom he had become engaged only the previous month.

As we have seen, Watson states specifically that the wound to his leg only troubled him when there was a change in the weather and even then it did not prevent him from walking.
Moreover, it seemed to affect him most when he was idle and he had time to think about the disability. When he was busy and his mind was occupied, he apparently forgot about it in much the same way as Holmes’ depression lifted when his energies were fully engaged. For example, during the Sign of Four case, Watson walked to Camberwell and back to visit Mary Morstan, a distance of some twelve or fourteen miles, without showing any apparent discomfort. This suggests that some of the symptoms may well have been psychosomatic.

As for his failure to mention Mary Morstan, this is perfectly understandable. It has already been pointed out that, as a narrator, Watson was far more concerned with chronicling Holmes’ exploits than in informing his readers of his own personal affairs. In addition, during much of the Baskerville case, Watson was left in charge of the enquiries, a responsibility he took very seriously. In his diary entry for 16th October, he notes that he must devote all his energies to discovering the identity of the stranger seen on the moors who might be behind the mysterious chain of events threatening Sir Henry’s life.

He was regularly in touch with Holmes by post. Presumably his correspondence also included letters to Mary Morstan in Camberwell. But the main thrust of his narrative is to convey to his readers the dangerous nature of the investigation, not to indulge in an expression of his own private and more romantic feelings.

With the successful outcome of the Baskerville inquiry, Holmes and Watson returned to London where Holmes
became involved in two further cases already referred to in Chapter Six, the scandal concerning Colonel Upwood and the Nonpareil Club and the defence of Mme Montpensier, accused of the apparent murder of her stepdaughter, Mlle Carère, who was found six months later alive in New York. It was also at about this time that Holmes successfully investigated the case of the Grosvenor Square furniture van, about which Watson gives no further details.

As he has left no written accounts of any of these, Watson may not have taken part in them. With typical modesty, he never assumed that Holmes would welcome his presence at every investigation and always waited to be invited to assist on a case. As we have seen in Chapter Six, he participated in about only a seventh of Holmes’ inquiries during this 1881–9 period. But he was certainly concerned with another scandal which at the time caused a great deal of gossip in high places.

The client was Lord St Simon, who called on Holmes under embarrassing circumstances. His American bride of a few hours had run away during the wedding reception and Lord St Simon wanted Holmes to discover her whereabouts as well as the reason for her sudden disappearance. Inspector Lestrade was also involved with the case and, much to Holmes’ amusement, ordered the Serpentine to be dragged after the bride’s wedding clothes were discovered floating in the water, wrongly assuming that Lady St Simon had been murdered by Flora Miller, a dancer and former mistress of his lordship.

The inquiry had particular significance for Watson, for it occurred only a few weeks before his own marriage, as he remarks in one of his typically laconic statements dropped almost casually into his account. It is useful for establishing an approximate date for his wedding to Mary Morstan but is infuriatingly imprecise on details. One has to assume that, in the weeks following Watson’s return from Devon, he and Mary Morstan were quietly making plans for their marriage, which included a search for a suitable property to serve as their home and as a base for Watson as a general medical practitioner.

Understandably, Watson did not discuss any of these plans with Holmes, not even his decision to return to medical practice. It was only when the two men met again after the marriage that Holmes was aware of this fact, which he deduced from Watson’s appearance.
*
Watson’s failure to confide in Holmes was not out of any desire for secrecy. He was by nature frank and, if Holmes had asked what his plans were, Watson would have told him. But
Holmes did not ask, an omission which Watson accepted without any resentment.

Theirs was an essentially male friendship in which the exchange of personal confidences was not expected and much was therefore left unsaid. Apparently, not even Watson’s departure from the Baker Street lodgings on the occasion of his marriage was discussed. At least, there is no record of any such conversation in the published canon. Both men must have realised it was inevitable but preferred not to speak of it, let alone openly express their feelings about such a parting or the immense changes it would bring to both their lives.

In the weeks leading up to Watson’s marriage there was not much opportunity anyway to discuss these personal matters even if they had wished to. Holmes was out of England for most of the latter part of 1888 and the beginning of 1889. Once again, Watson fails to give precise dates and the exact period can only be guessed at by implication.

Holmes was certainly still in England at the end of November 1888. Sir Henry Baskerville, accompanied by Dr Mortimer, his personal physician, called on him and Watson then at Baker Street before embarking on a recuperative voyage which was intended to restore Sir Henry’s shattered nerves after his terrifying experiences during the Hound of the Baskerville case.