Holmes and Watson (16 page)

The bad feeling was not only on the part of the English royal family either. The young Kaiser, Wilhelm II, deeply resented his uncle Bertie’s treatment of him as a mere nephew, which he felt was not in accordance with the dignity of his imperial status.

There were other long-standing political disagreements between Great Britain and Germany, one of which was the Schleswig-Holstein question, which was so complicated that Lord Palmerston said only three people had ever understood it: the Prince Consort, who was dead; a German professor, who had gone mad; and himself, and he had since forgotten what it was all about. The Schleswig-Holstein situation was one of the reasons for the coolness in the relationship between the two countries, which Count Herbert von Bismarck was hoping to improve during his visit to London. It is in this diplomatic area that the Scandinavian connection can be seen. Although not part of Danish territory, the duchies
of Schleswig and Holstein were ruled over by the King of Denmark until 1863 when Austria and Prussia combined to force the Danish king to relinquish them.

Britain largely supported the Danes and the dispute took on a more personal nature when the Prince of Wales married the Danish princess, Alexandra, in March of that same year. In fact, Princess Alexandra so hated the Germans that for eleven years she refused to visit Berlin and was reluctant even to travel to Germany for the funeral of her late brother-in-law, Kaiser Frederick III. It was only on Queen Victoria’s special pleading that she finally agreed to attend.

To make matters worse, in January 1889, two months before Count Herbert’s arrival in London, an old scandal involving Sir Robert Morier, the British Ambassador to St Petersburg, had been stirred up again in the
Cologne Gazette,
largely, it was suspected, at the instigation of the Bismarcks, father and son. This concerned the allegation that in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war,
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Sir Robert had passed on military information to the French marshal, Bazaire, about troop movements of the German army, a charge vigorously denied by Sir Robert. In an attempt to clear his name, Sir Robert had appealed personally to Count Herbert to publish an official denial of the
allegation, a request which the Count had refused in a ‘curt and crude reply’.

Diplomatically, the timing of this renewed attack on Sir Robert could not have been more ill-judged, for it helped neither Anglo-German relations nor Count Herbert’s reputation in England. In a leading article for 4th January 1889
The Times
took a strong line, accusing the Bismarcks of inflaming anti-British feeling in Germany and warning them that ‘their barrack-room manners’ were not conducive to a good understanding between the two countries.

‘We must beg the German Chancellor,’ the article continued, ‘and those who take their tone from him to treat English public men as English gentlemen.’

As a further complication, the British Government, anxious to preserve its isolationist policy, regarded with some suspicion Germany’s attempts to form alliances with other European nations, particularly with Great Britain’s traditional enemies, France and Russia, a situation which added to Count Herbert’s problems. In the event, Lord Salisbury, the prime minister, refused to sign the Anglo-German alliance and the count returned home empty-handed.

In treating his client with such brusqueness, Holmes may have been expressing this official mistrust, or his coldness might have arisen from a more personal antipathy. Count Herbert was a conceited, overbearing man, a heavy drinker with a tendency towards violence when drunk, and with an unfortunate habit for someone in his position
as German Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, of issuing orders to his opposite numbers rather than sitting down round the international table to discuss matters diplomatically. Holmes’ attitude towards him may reflect the private opinion of Mycroft and his colleagues in the British Foreign Office, who could well have experienced the Count’s highhanded manner during the negotiations over the Anglo-German alliance.

With so much depending on a successful mission to London, it is understandable that Count Herbert was anxious that no scandal concerning himself and the former opera singer, Irene Adler, should be made public, especially as a similar liaison between a prince and another professional singer had caused so much gossip only a short time before.

But who were this prince and his opera singer whose relationship so closely matched that of Count Herbert’s and Irene Adler’s?

He was the handsome Prince Alexander (Sandro) of Battenburg, second son of Prince Alexander of Hesse. Because of the latter’s morganatic marriage to a commoner, a former lady-in-waiting to his sister, the Empress of Russia, Sandro’s father had been obliged to give up the right to the Hessian title for his three sons.

Capable and intelligent, as well as exceedingly good-looking, Sandro had been elected in 1879 to rule Bulgaria, a newly-created state formed from the eastern part of Armenia after the Russians had defeated the Turks and driven them out of the territory. By supporting
Sandro’s nomination to the Bulgarian throne, the Russians assumed he would rule as a puppet prince, willing to carry out the Tsar’s policies.

Sandro’s charm and dark, good looks so enchanted Queen Victoria that she compared him to her beloved Albert, the late Prince Consort. He also captivated the heart of the nineteen-year-old Princess Victoria (Moretta), daughter of Vicky, the former German empress, and the same princess whom Count Herbert later hoped to marry. But some of the stuffier and more conservative members of the Hohenzollern family, supported by Bismarck, considered the match between Sandro and Moretta unsuitable because of the morganatic marriage of Sandro’s parents. Consequently, the young Prince of Bulgaria was ordered to give up all claim to Moretta’s hand.

Matters came to a head in 1886 when Sandro, who had angered the Tsar by his independent attitude, was kidnapped by Russian agents and forced to abdicate at gunpoint, much to Bismarck’s delight and to the distress of Queen Victoria, who had set her heart on a wedding between the charming prince and her granddaughter, Moretta.

In spite of these setbacks and the disapproval of some members of her family, Moretta still clung to the hope that one day she would be permitted to marry her handsome Sandro. It was at this time that the rumours began to circulate of Count Herbert von Bismarck’s interest in Moretta. The match was approved of by his father, the German chancellor, who could see the advantages of a
marriage between his son and the Hohenzollern princess, which would have made Count Herbert a member of the imperial family and strengthened his own ties with the young Kaiser.

But Sandro proved less constant in love than the faithful Moretta. In the interval, he transferred his affections to Joanna Loisinger, an opera singer, whom he secretly married in February 1889, a mere month before Count Herbert’s arrival in London. Because of this liaison, Sandro forfeited his title of Prince and, taking the name of Count Hartenau, retired from public life. His fate must have served as a warning light to Count Herbert of the likely consequences should his own entanglement with an opera singer become common knowledge.

What happened to them all afterwards?

Sandro died of peritonitis at the tragically early age of thirty-six and was buried in Sofia, the capital of what had once been his Bulgarian princedom. The year following his death, all hope finally abandoned, Moretta became engaged to Prince Adolf zu Schaumburg-Lippe, whom she later married. Ten years after his death, at the age of sixty-one, she married Alexander Zubkov, a Russian half her age who, after squandering her fortune, deserted her, leaving her penniless. She died two years later in 1929, disowned by her family.

Irene Adler also died tragically young, although the date and cause of death are not known. Writing an account of the events of March 1889, published just over two years later in July 1891 under the title ‘A Scandal in
Bohemia’, Watson refers to her as ‘the late Irene Adler’ but gives no further details. Perhaps the full facts were unknown to him.

Like Prince Alexander, Count Herbert von Bismarck also retired from public life, but not through any scandal involving an opera singer. On 10th March 1890, a mere year after his meeting with Sherlock Holmes, his father, Prince Otto von Bismarck, was forced to resign by the arrogant young German emperor, Wilhelm II, who had grown tired, as he himself expressed it, of being treated like a schoolboy by his elderly chancellor. Both he and his son went into retirement, Prince Otto dying in 1898, Count Herbert in 1904.

As for Wilhelm II, perhaps better known as Kaiser Bill, his fate closely mirrored that of his chancellor. After the defeat of the German armies by the Allies in 1918 at the end of the First World War, he was obliged to abdicate and went into exile in Holland, where he spent the next twenty-two years of his life, dying in 1941 at the age of eighty-two, in time to witness the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of the Second World War but not the fall of the Third Reich and the second defeat of Germany in twenty-seven years.

Once Watson had re-established contact with Holmes through the Scandal in Bohemia case, their relationship resumed on almost the same footing as before; almost, for there were, of course, significant changes. Watson was now a married man and a busy GP, living in Paddington, about a mile from his former lodgings in Baker Street. This renewal of their old association was a gradual process which took time to build up a momentum, reaching its climax in the summer of 1889 before tapering
off during the years 1890 and 1891, as may be seen from the suggested chronology for the period.

Readers are again referred to Appendix One for a detailed explanation of the dating of some of these cases and for an analysis of the crimes involved.

(Unrecorded cases for the year 1889: the Paradol Chamber; the Amateur Mendicant Society; the loss of the British barque,
Sophy Anderson
; the case of the Grice Pattersons on the island of Uffa;
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the Camberwell poisoning. As Watson ‘kept notes’ on these inquiries, he clearly took part in them.)

As the chronology shows, there was a gap of about a month between the Scandal in Bohemia case and the Mary Sutherland inquiry (‘A Case of Identity’). Holmes himself remarks that he had not seen Watson for several weeks, which would accord with this suggested dating scheme. In the meantime, Holmes had received two magnificent gifts from his former royal clients in token of his services: a gold snuff box with a huge amethyst on its lid from the flamboyant King of Bohemia, and a splendid ring containing a stone of remarkable brilliance, possibly a diamond, from the Dutch royal family.

At the time of the Case of Identity inquiry, Holmes had twelve other cases on hand, including an ‘intricate matter’ which had been referred to him from Marseilles as well as the Dundas separation case, the latter the only recorded instance of Holmes’ association in a matrimonial dispute. It was a squalid affair in which the wife complained of her husband’s habit of taking out his false teeth and hurling them at her at the end of every evening meal, perhaps in protest at her lack of culinary skills. As Holmes was engaged in clearing up only some small points in connection with it, he was presumably not deeply involved in the case. One hopes not.

As in the Scandal in Bohemia investigation, it was Watson who initiated the contact with Holmes in the Case of Identity inquiry, having called on him one evening at
Baker Street. It was during this visit that Mary Sutherland arrived with her extraordinary story of the disappearance of her husband-to-be on their wedding day, and once again Watson was drawn ineluctably but also very willingly into the affair. In fact, out of the nine recorded cases for 1889, it was Watson who made the initial approach to Holmes in five of them. In the case of the Engineer’s Thumb, Watson actually involved Holmes directly in the inquiry by rushing Mr Hatherley, one of his patients, round to Baker Street to tell his story. It was one of the two investigations which, Watson states, he was able to introduce to Holmes, the other being the inquiry into Colonel Warburton’s madness, an account of which Watson failed to publish. However, the Naval Treaty inquiry
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should also be included in this list, for it was through a letter sent to Watson by his old school chum Percy ‘Tadpole’ Phelps, appealing for help in finding the missing document, that Holmes became associated with the inquiry. In this case, too, Watson immediately hurried off to Baker Street to lay the facts before Holmes, a measure of his eagerness to maintain contact with his old friend.

In fact, at the time of the Five Orange Pips inquiry,
Watson had actually moved back temporarily into Baker Street while his wife was visiting her aunt, possibly the same relative who, as suggested in Chapter Eight, may have lived in Edinburgh and with whom Mary Morstan, as she then was, spent her school holidays. It should, however, be pointed out that, although based at Baker Street, Watson continued to run his practice, attending patients and presumably returning to his Paddington practice during the day. Watson’s association with the Blue Carbuncle case rose out of another call he made on Holmes on 27th December in order to wish him the compliments of the season.

It was not until June 1889 that Holmes paid his first visit to the Watsons, as is evident in ‘The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk’ in which Holmes, in asking after Mrs Watson’s health, makes it clear he has not seen her since the Sign of Four case in September 1888, over nine months earlier.

This bears out Watson’s own comment that, while he ‘continually visited’ Holmes, he only occasionally persuaded him to call on himself and his wife. Admittedly, Holmes was not in the habit of paying social visits on anyone, but one has the impression that Holmes hung back from such direct contact with Mrs Watson, preferring to confine his relationship exclusively to Watson, as it had been in the old Baker Street days. It is almost as if he wished to ignore the fact of Watson’s marriage and the very existence of his wife, an attitude which was to take an even more extreme form when, as will be seen later in
the book, Watson married for a second time. Nevertheless, after that first visit to the Watsons, Holmes relented to the extent of staying the night with them at the beginning of the Crooked Man inquiry.

Some commentators have criticised Watson for neglecting his practice and leaving his patients in the care of two colleagues, Jackson, who owned the practice next door to his in Paddington, and Anstruther, a Kensington neighbour,
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while he went gallivanting off with Holmes. Some have even questioned his medical competence, assuming that, as a doctor, he was lacking in responsibility and that therefore his patients suffered. The evidence, however, does not support such strictures. Watson states quite clearly that the arrangement with Jackson, and presumably also with Anstruther, was mutual and that he, in turn, reciprocated by looking after their patients when the need arose. After all, like anybody else, doctors are entitled to some leisure time.

And when the cases are analysed and the actual number of working days lost by Watson is calculated, the total is, in fact, quite small. Leaving aside, temporarily, the case of the Final Problem and taking only those recorded inquiries which took place between 20th March 1889 (‘A Scandal in Bohemia’) and November 1890 (‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’), a period of one year and eight months, Watson spent only eleven days away from his practice. Three of these investigations, the Case of Identity, the
Five Orange Pips and the Blue Carbuncle inquiries, took place in the evenings and therefore out of normal working hours, except in emergencies, when presumably Jackson would have acted as locum. Three more inquiries, the Stockbroker’s Clerk, the Man with the Twisted Lip and the Red-Headed League, occurred at weekends, when again one assumes that, although Watson’s consulting room was probably open on Saturdays, it was almost certainly closed on Sundays and he therefore lost only three working days. Moreover, in the Red-Headed League case, Watson states that, although the main events took place on Saturday, he had no patients to visit that day.

The Crooked Man, the Engineer’s Thumb and the Dying Detective cases each took up one whole day, Jackson taking care of Watson’s practice in the Crooked Man inquiry as he may have done with the other two investigations. Although Watson spent the night with Holmes in Kent during the Man with the Twisted Lip case, he was back in Baker Street by breakfast time and had presumably returned to Paddington before his first patient arrived.

Apart from the Final Problem, only two cases involved longer periods of absence, the Naval Treaty and the Boscombe Valley inquiries, both of which occupied two whole days. The Naval Treaty inquiry, however, occurred, as Watson states, at ‘the slackest time of the year’ while, although the Boscombe Valley mystery took place when he had a long list of patients, Watson made arrangements for Anstruther to take over his practice.

Watson has left no details of the five unrecorded cases of 1889 and it is therefore not known how many working days he lost over these. But, if Watson followed the same pattern set out above, he may well have so arranged matters that he forfeited the minimum time over these as well or asked either Jackson or Anstruther to look after his patients in his absence. There is no evidence in the canon of Watson taking any protracted time off, even for a holiday, during this period. Indeed, the fact that on two occasions Mary Watson went away alone on visits suggests that Watson was too occupied with his professional duties to accompany her. The case of the Final Problem, during which Watson was absent on the Continent with Holmes for about a fortnight, was exceptional and will be examined in more detail in the next chapter.

In addition to the inquiries in which he assisted Holmes, Watson was also spending at least some of his leisure time in the evenings writing up his notes on previous investigations. When Holmes calls on him at the beginning of the Stockbroker’s Clerk case, Watson remarks that, on the previous night ‘I was looking over my old notes and classifying our past investigations.’ However, he did not publish any accounts of these cases during this period, either because he was too busy or he may have felt that, with Holmes’ reputation now firmly established on both sides of the Channel, there was no need for him to promote his old friend’s professional expertise.

Rather than Watson’s practice suffering from these excursions with Holmes, the facts tend to show the
opposite is true. By the summer of 1889, the time of the Crooked Man inquiry and only a few months after his marriage and the purchase of the Paddington practice, Watson was evidently successful enough to afford extra live-in domestic help for, in his account of the case, he refers to the ‘servants’ as having gone to bed. One was certainly a maid who had presumably replaced the unsatisfactory Mary Jane who, as we have seen, was under notice in March of that year. The other may have been a cook-general. Moreover, before the time of the Red-Headed League inquiry, Watson’s finances had sufficiently improved for him to move to Kensington, a more fashionable and expensive area than Paddington, and a sure indication of his increasing success as a medical practitioner.

It is not surprising. While Watson might not have been a highly-qualified consulting surgeon, he was an able and caring GP. This is confirmed by the fact that he had cured a guard at Paddington station of a ‘painful and lingering disease’, presumably when other medical treatment had failed. In gratitude, the man extolled Watson’s virtues as a doctor and consequently more members of the railway staff joined his list of patients. This man may have been one of those whom Watson treated without charging a fee because he found their cases medically instructive, an aspect of Watson’s professional attitude which Holmes comments on in ‘The Adventure of the Red Circle’.

Watson was also prepared to turn out late at night to tend his patients. When Holmes calls unexpectedly at a
quarter to twelve one evening, Watson, who was on the point of going to bed, assumes the visitor has come on behalf of a patient and, although he makes a wry face, he is perfectly willing to comply, even though it might be an all-night sitting. Another late call occurred in the same summer of 1889 when Mrs Whitney arrived to ask for Watson’s help in tracing the whereabouts of her husband, one of Watson’s patients, who had been missing for two days and who she suspected was at an East End opium den. Despite the lateness of the hour, Watson set off immediately in a hansom. Although Mrs Whitney was a friend of Mrs Watson, one feels that he would have reacted similarly, whichever of his patients had asked for his help.

In fact, far from being neglectful of his patients, Watson was careful to put their needs first. In the Mary Sutherland inquiry (‘A Case of Identity’), Watson limits his involvement in the case to the evenings, spending the day at the bedside of a gravely ill patient, despite his eagerness to know the outcome of the case.

Part of Watson’s success as a GP was undoubtedly his sympathetic nature, which would have given him a good bedside manner. He cared about people, an attitude already seen in his concern over some of Holmes’ clients, particularly women. Holmes later remarks on this quality of Watson’s in ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’. ‘The fair sex is your department’, he tells him, while in ‘The Adventure of the Retired Colourman’, he speaks of Watson’s ‘natural advantages’ with the ladies. Quite
clearly, women found him attractive. This, too, would have contributed towards his success as a GP. It was often the lady of the house who selected the family doctor and Watson, steady, reliable, caring, would have been an excellent choice.