Holmes and Watson (8 page)

Having inspected the rooms, Holmes and Watson decided then and there to take them, Watson moving his possessions in that very same evening, taking with him his tin despatch box but not apparently the bull pup, as there is no further reference to it. As Watson was a kindly soul, one assumes he found it a good home. As she herself owned an elderly and ailing terrier, Mrs Hudson may have put her foot down about allowing another dog into the house. With her permission, Holmes was later to put it out of its misery by giving it one of the pills containing
an alkaloid poison he had found in Joseph Stangerson’s room. It was a quick and merciful death.

Holmes arrived the following morning with several boxes and portmanteaus, including the large tin trunk containing papers and mementoes relating to those cases he had already undertaken during the five and a half years he had spent at Montague Street.

And so they took possession of the apartment which was to be Watson’s home for the next eight years, Holmes’ for the next twenty-two and which was eventually to become one of the most famous addresses in London.

For the first few weeks of their shared tenancy of 221B Baker Street, Holmes was on his best behaviour and proved to be a model companion and lodger. He was, Watson reports, quiet in his ways and regular in his habits. Usually in bed by ten o’clock at night, he was up early in the mornings and had breakfasted and left the house before Watson had come downstairs. As far as Watson could discover, his days were spent either at Bart’s in the chemistry laboratory or the dissecting
room, or in long solitary walks which took him to the seedier parts of London. On his return, Holmes, with his delight in deliberately mystifying others, at times quite unnecessarily, would show Watson the mud stains on his trousers and explain how, by their colour and consistency, it was possible to tell exactly where he had acquired them, although to what purpose he failed to make clear.

It was during these excursions that Holmes must have set about recruiting the six ragged little street urchins who were to form the Baker Street division of the detective police force, as Holmes at first called them, or the Baker Street Irregulars, their subsequent and best remembered title.

Led by Wiggins, they were to assist Holmes in at least two inquiries, the Study in Scarlet case in March of that year, and the Sign of Four affair seven years later in September 1888 when their number was increased to twelve. It is possible that the same Wiggins acted as leader on both occasions. If he were first recruited at the age of ten or eleven, he would have been only seventeen or eighteen at the time of the Sign of Four inquiry. Watson writes of him then as being ‘taller and older’ than the others while the adjective ‘little’ applied to him in the same passage may refer to his lack of inches compared to better-nourished youths of the same age. On the other hand, ‘Wiggins’ may be a generic name used by Holmes to apply to any of the lads appointed as group-lieutenant and spokesman. One of the ‘Baker Street boys’ was to mount
guard on Henry Wood’s lodgings in Aldershot during the Crooked Man inquiry in 1889.
*

There was no shortage of such urchins to choose from, as Dr Barnardo
†
had discovered through his work among them in the East End. London teemed with them. Some were orphans or had run away from violent homes, but many were turned out into the streets by parents too poor to feed them. They earned a few coppers as crossing sweepers or by running errands. When these legitimate methods failed, they survived by pilfering from coster-mongers’ barrows or living off the discarded fruit and vegetables they found in the gutters.

From among their number, Holmes was careful to pick the most intelligent and streetwise. As he was to point out to Watson, they were invaluable as assistants as they were able to go anywhere and hear everything, unlike a more official investigator to whom some people would hesitate to speak openly. All they needed was organisation. The sums of sixpence or a shilling each which Holmes paid a day for their services must have seemed a fortune.

Wiggins must have had a permanent address, for in the Sign of Four inquiry Holmes sent him a wire,
instructing him to report with his gang to him at Baker Street. Evidently none of them lived in the immediate area, for Holmes had to reimburse Wiggins the 3s 6d (approximately 17p) it had cost him in fares for the twelve of them to travel there for the appointment. Holmes may have employed a similar group of street urchins during his time in Montague Street, although there is no evidence in the canon to prove this.

He was also careful not to introduce them into 221B Baker Street until he had established himself in Mrs Hudson’s good books as a model lodger. Even so, the sight of six little ragamuffins invading her house
en masse
was too much for even that good lady’s tolerance, and her exclamations of disgust led Holmes to warn Wiggins that in future only he must report directly. The others were to wait outside on the pavement. These instructions evidently went unheeded, for in the Sign of Four case all twelve came rushing upstairs into the sitting-room and Holmes had to repeat the warning.

These first few weeks were a honeymoon period in Holmes’ and Watson’s relationship as fellow-lodgers, although there were some doubts and minor irritations on Watson’s part. While Watson enjoyed Holmes’ playing of Mendelssohn’s Lieder and other of his favourite pieces on his violin, he found his companion’s habit of laying the instrument across his knees and scraping out a succession of desultory chords, some melancholy, some cheerful, extremely trying at times. Aware of Watson’s impatience, Holmes was careful to round off these exasperating solos
with a performance of those musical items which Watson enjoyed.

As a doctor, Watson was also concerned by the occasions when Holmes’ energy seemed to desert him and he would lie for days on end on the sofa, hardly speaking or moving, a vacant expression in his eyes. Under any other circumstances, Watson would have suspected Holmes of taking narcotic drugs, had not his temperate habits ruled this out of the question. It was only later that Watson discovered how wrong he had been in this assumption. Presumably, Holmes injected himself in the privacy of his bedroom and took care to keep the evidence of his drug addiction concealed from Watson and Mrs Hudson.

Watson was naturally curious about his fellow-lodger. With no friends to visit and little to occupy either his time or his mind, he had the leisure to watch his co-tenant closely and to speculate about him. The wound to his leg, which he had received at the battle of Maiwand and which had seemed a minor injury, was painful, especially in cold or damp conditions, and prevented him from going out except when the weather was mild. During those winter months of early 1881, he must have been confined to the house for days at a stretch. As he makes no reference to the wound in his shoulder, this must have healed satisfactorily and gave him no further trouble.

In particular, it was Holmes’ occupation which mystified Watson. He was evidently not a medical student. Stamford had made this clear and Holmes had confirmed this fact when Watson questioned him directly. But his
studies, however eccentric and haphazard, seemed to suggest he was preparing himself for some profession. But which? It was all very confusing.

Watson has left no record of their conversations during these first few weeks at Baker Street but, given Watson’s curiosity and the contents of the list he was soon to draw up enumerating Holmes’ limitations, it is obvious that whenever he had the opportunity, he quizzed him in some detail, and probably not very subtly, about his interests, hobbies and attitudes.

At the same time, Holmes was quietly studying Watson and his observations led him to conclude that his fellow-lodger was rather a dull dog, although Watson, to give him his due, was far from being at his best. His low state of health, both physical and mental, cannot have made him a very stimulating companion. To Holmes, he must have seemed worthy enough but stolid, literal-minded and, frankly, something of a bore. He was therefore ripe for teasing. Watson was later to comment on Holmes’ sense of humour as being ‘peculiar and at times offensive’.

Faced with Watson’s ill-disguised curiosity, Holmes amused himself by giving tongue-in-cheek answers to his questions, designed to shock the good doctor by his apparent ignorance of, for example, Thomas Carlyle and even the Copernican theory. The irony was lost on Watson, who took it all much too seriously to the extent of explaining to Holmes that the world went round the sun and not the other way round. His earnestness must have afforded Holmes a great deal of quiet entertainment.

Holmes’ explanation for his apparent ignorance was reasonable. The human brain, he declared, was like an empty attic which each individual stocked according to choice. It was a wise man who threw away the lumber and retained only that knowledge which was useful. As we have seen in Chapter One, Holmes had the capacity for storing information which he could recall when he needed it.

It was after this conversation that Watson drew up his list in an attempt to get to grips with the puzzling anomalies in Holmes’ education and to come to some conclusion on what, if anything, he did for a living.

It read as follows:

SHERLOCK HOLMES – HIS LIMITS

Knowing the full extent of, for example, Holmes’ knowledge of literature and astronomy, we can see how far Watson was deceived, and even he realised the list was worthless, for he tore it up and threw it into the fire. The exact nature of Holmes’ profession, if indeed he had one, continued to mystify him and Holmes was careful to keep him in the dark.

For the first few weeks, Holmes had no visitors and one suspects that he had deliberately told no one of his change of address in order to give himself time to settle into his new lodgings. Once he was established and felt that his relationships with Watson and, in particular, with Mrs Hudson were on a firm footing, he let his new address be known and visitors began to arrive in a steady stream, among them a certain short, sallow-faced man with dark eyes and rat-like features who called four times in one week and whom Holmes was careful to introduce to Watson as plain Mr Lestrade, omitting his professional title of Inspector. Other visitors included a
fashionably-dressed young woman, an excitable Jewish pedlar and a railway porter. Holmes explained that these visitors were clients and politely asked for the exclusive use of the shared sitting-room for business purposes.

Clients? Business?

But Holmes offered no further explanation and Watson retired to his bedroom, agog with curiosity but too well mannered to question Holmes point-blank.

And then, on the morning of 4th March, the mystery was finally solved.

For the first time since his arrival in the Baker Street lodgings, Watson was up in time to join Holmes at breakfast. While he waited a little impatiently for Mrs Hudson to lay his place and bring fresh coffee, Watson picked up a magazine from the table and began to read an article in it, entitled, rather ambitiously he thought, ‘The Book of Life’, which was marked by a pencil. One suspects that Holmes, on hearing Watson coming down the stairs, had hurriedly fetched the magazine from the bookcase and had deliberately marked that particular article in order to draw the doctor’s attention to it, intending to use it as an excuse to take Watson into his confidence at last. After all, the game-playing and the mystification, amusing though it had been, could not continue indefinitely.

Watson was unimpressed by the anonymous author’s assertion that a careful observer, by following even the most elementary precepts of what he called the ‘Science of Deduction and Analysis’, could correctly deduce the
history as well as the trade or profession of any man on first acquaintance.

‘By a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs – by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.’

While admitting that the reasoning in the article was close and intense, Watson was exasperated by its conclusions, which struck him as far-fetched and exaggerated. Slapping the magazine down on the table, he roundly denounced it as ‘ineffable twaddle’, adding that he had never read such rubbish in his life. As a betting man, he continued, he was willing to lay a thousand to one that, should the author be ‘clapped down’, as he expressed it, in a third-class carriage in the underground, he would be unable to name the trades of his fellow-travellers.

Holmes may well have been taken aback by the unexpected vehemence of this criticism, coming from a man whom he had dismissed as a fool and a bore. Certainly, there is a defensive ring to his choice of words when, having acknowledged his authorship of the article, he went on to explain that he was by ‘trade’ a private consulting detective and that he depended on those theories of observation and deduction for his ‘bread and cheese’ as if, having created the mystery surrounding himself, he was anxious, in the face of Watson’s scorn over the contents of the article, to play down the situation.