Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

Chapter II I Go Down to Sussex to See Holmes

Holmes accepted my self-invitation to visit him. I parcelled up a supply of books to freshen my old comrade’s shelves, including an advance copy of The Turnpike Sailor - Or Rhymes on the Road by Clark Russell, H. G. Wells’s A Short History Of The World, a new story by Rudyard Kipling titled A Washout, set in South Africa, and A.E.W. Mason’s The Four Feathers, and the latest Philip’s Atlas of London.

My visit had a purpose over and above renewing our friendship and restocking book-shelves. The editors of The Strand planned a competition to choose the top twelve Sherlock Holmes cases. The readers would be faced with some forty to be weighed against each other. I was to obtain from Holmes a listing of his cases in the order he himself judged them. Where a reader’s entry precisely matched his, the former would receive a year’s free subscription to the magazine.

Aboard the train, the fine Sussex landscape unfolded at sixty miles per hour. I hazarded a guess Holmes would rate The Adventure of the Speckled Band with its deadly Indian swamp adder top of his list, or at the very least second. And for its involvement in a world of diplomacy and intrigue, The Adventure of the Second Stain. There was A Scandal In Bohemia, with more female interest than any other of our manifestos. Would the large American readership produce results similar to Britain’s?

I lit my pipe and considered. Yes, I thought, selecting twelve would challenge The Strand’s readers whichever side of the Ocean. Holmes could hardly overlook one case which dealt with the only foe who ever really extended him, and which deceived the public (and me) into the erroneous inference of his death. Therefore I would expect The Adventure of the Final Problem.

At Eastbourne I took a motor cab the two or three miles to Beachy Head and switched to a horse-drawn carriage for the remainder of the journey along the narrow country lanes and muddy tracks to Holmes’s farmstead. He was waiting for me on his verandah, tweed-suited, briar in hand, when the horse-drawn carriage from Beachy Head brought me to his isolated home. Though slightly stooped in the cooling air sweeping in from the Channel the tall, spare figure still reflected the time he was idolised by swordsmen everywhere as captain of the British épee and sabre teams, and the only foreign swordsman to be elected to France’s Académie des Armes.

Holmes welcomed the driver with, ‘A nice little brougham, I see it was once the pride of the Earl of Arundel,’ pointing to a painted-over trace of the previous owner’s coat of arms on the carriage doors, ‘and (referring to the horses) a pair of beauties. You must leave me your card.’

After such pleasantries he turned his attention to me.

‘I see you’ve put on seven and a half pounds since we last met,’ he chastised.

‘Seven at the most, Holmes!’ I retorted.

Holmes bid me enter the house and waved me to an armchair, throwing across a case of cigars, and indicating a spirit case and the old gasogene in the corner. I glanced around. Except for an unfamiliar tidiness due, presumably, to a housekeeper, the old landmarks from 221B, Baker Street were all in their place. There was the chemical corner and there the acid-stained, deal-topped table. The diagrams, the pipe-rack, even the Persian slipper containing his tobacco, and finally the precious violin, a Stradivarius bought on Tottenham Court Road for fifty-five shillings, the four strings tuned in perfect fifths.

Noting where my glance had stopped, Holmes remarked, ‘Do you know who was the fastest violinist ever?’

‘I don’t,’ I replied. ‘And to tell the truth I’m not...’

‘Paganini. He was recorded playing 12 notes per second.’

Holmes lit a pipe and leant against the mantel, regarding me with his singularly introspective look. Smoke-rings chased each other up to the ceiling. I asked if he maintained contact with ‘old friends’ at Scotland Yard, those involved in many of our most famous cases, Inspectors Althelney Jones, and Gregson, the ferret-like Lestrade, or Algar from the Liverpool Force.

‘Hardly, my dear fellow,’ came the amused reply. ‘The best function Scotland Yard serves is to make the pseudoscience of astrology look respectable.’

The gap of months melted away.

The evening found us in a picturesque old room with sanded floors and high-backed settles at our favourite haunt, the Tiger Inn, situated half a mile inland from the chalk cliffs of the Seven Sisters. Holmes was determined to add to my knowledge of bees. I was equally determined to resist. I blamed their siren calls for my comrade’s premature retirement. Nevertheless, on the completion of a fine dessert the conversation went –

‘Watson, I’ve estimated how far a bee flies to gather the nectar needed to produce a quart of honey. How many miles would you say?’

‘I haven’t the faintest, Holmes.’

‘48,000 miles. Isn’t that a fact worth noting?’

‘I can’t think to which sane person it would be,’ I replied.

An hour or so later, with a fine bottle of Clos du Bourg inside us, we returned on foot to the farmhouse under an immense buttermilk sky, the full moon stepping from cloud to cloud. We settled into two arm-chairs, the tobacco jar on a table exactly equidistant between us.

‘Well, Watson,’ my old friend began, thumbing tobacco into his favourite blackened clay pipe, ‘as to the list you mention, I’ve given it considerable thought since your letter arrived. Among the grimmest of our cases is The Speckled Band. That, I’m sure, will be quite high on any list.’

Holmes’s pipe stabbed at me like a sixth finger, just as it had at our old quarters at 221B, Baker Street. The deep-set grey eyes twinkled.

‘Then there are the cases in which you strive the difficult task of explaining away my alleged death and which introduce a villain as vile as Colonel Sebastian Moran. They deserve their place.’

I wrote down The Final Problem, A Scandal In Bohemia, and The Empty House.

He continued, ‘But as to my top choice - rather, choices - I have settled on three which I recall with the utmost satisfaction and enjoyment. In fact I would place them equal first.’

‘And they are?’ I asked pencil poised.

‘Silver Blaze. And, like you,’ he continued, guessing at my likely choice, ‘our time on those strange Devon moors in The Hound of the Baskervilles. We must include The Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter. Serbia was a strange land, almost beyond imagination.’

The following day found me back at the Marylebone surgery. The waiting-room echoed with a medley of coughs and sneezes, the pitches in novel combinations perfectly suited to a Schönberg composition. The last of my patients in the memorandum-book was Lord P______ himself, a man immersed in large public questions and listed in Sherlock Holmes’s ‘general encyclopaedia of reference’. Unaware his wife was a patient, he confessed he was once more suffering from a disease prevalent among those who benefitted themselves of the multitudes of ‘ladies of the night’ filling the streets of the Capital. I administered an injection of mercury into the urethra.

I had just told him to pull up his trousers when, after a single urgent knock, the receptionist threw open the door and beckoned me to follow her. Apologising to the heroically indiscreet nobleman I hurried out with the practioner’s immediate assumption something dramatic had occurred. Had someone - not for the first time - fallen in front of a train at nearby Paddington Station, scattering their limbs to the four corners? Orbeen knocked down by a speeding Wolseley-Siddeley van in the busy street outside my very premises, given the automobile had graduated from a noisy fad to a passion in all parts of the country?

Worse, could Sherlock Holmes have suffered a grievous accident, isolated as he was on his bee-farm on the South Downs? He mentioned on the last occasion that over the years his usually mild Apis Mellifera had stung him precisely 7,860 times. My professional advice had been forthright. Avoid being stung again. An allergy could set in out of the blue, whether the first or the 7,861st sting. Within minutes it could trigger a potentially deadly anaphylactic reaction.

I came into the reception room at a rush to be met by a smart salute from a chauffeur standing at attention. He politely asked me to step outside where I was asked to confirm my particulars (‘You are Dr. John H. Watson?’ ‘And the H stands for what, sir?’) before he reached into his jacket. He handed over a special telegram stamped Private and Secret.

The telegram was from Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s new Foreign Secretary. Not yet enveloped in the international fame he was to gain, Sir Edward had two useful attributes - a good Parliamentary seat, and money. His grandfather left him a private income, a baronet’s hereditary title and an estate of about 2,000 acres.

The message read, ‘Dear Dr. Watson, it would greatly honour War Minister Haldane and me if you could attend a private meeting tomorrow. If so, shall we say the India Office at 10am? It will be very good to see you again. Very sincerely yours, E. Grey.’

Sir Edward was a countryman after my own heart. On the first occasion we met he told me, ‘I’d far rather catch a three-pound trout on the River Itchen than make a highly successful speech in the House’.

His Parliamentary colleague Richard Burdon Haldane, already regarded as one of Britain’s greatest War Ministers, had been elected in 1885 as a Liberal of Imperialist bent.

I scribbled a reply and handed it to the chauffeur, keeping my patients waiting long enough for him to answer questions about his vehicle. He explained the functioning of the water-cooled brake drums and told me he had graduated from the Daimler Company’s school of instruction for chauffeurs just off the Gray’s Inn Road.

Driver and the magnificent 40 horsepower Napier roared off followed by my envious eye. I planned to take the plunge and equip myself with a motor-car. There was an interesting new automobile, the Aerocar, an air-cooled, four-cylinder luxury car delivered from America for about £700 which included cap, goggles and gauntlet gloves.

I reread the telegram. There was a puzzling omission. It made no mention of Sherlock Holmes.