The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 34 Only Those Things the Heart Believes Are True

January 12, 2010

The 9:15 train from King’s Cross to Cambridge was a five-car express. In the first-class cabin, Harold and Sarah sat beside each other in warm silence. Harold had become, over the past week, a connoisseur of silences. He was an expert at differentiating their particulars; was this a Tranquil Silence, marked by slow sighs and peaceful smiles? Or was it a Tired Silence, marked by ornery chair shifting? Or a Tense Silence, full of tight breaths and cautious glances? He and Sarah had experienced them all, and yet this one was different. It felt conclusive. If Harold were a sommelier of unspoken moods, then this would be his recommended digestif. This was an After-Dinner Silence, where both parties could digest the meal they’d had and contemplate the approaching end of their evening.

When she spoke, Harold was surprised but not startled. There was something gentle in her voice.

“You’re not reading,” she said.

“No,” Harold replied, “I don’t have anything left to read. All the books I brought with me are stuck in that first hotel room. But it’s nice, staring out the window.”

“What do you see?” she asked.

He felt like he was a child and she was playing a game to pass the time on a long drive. Harold looked out the window.

“Mmmm… Some wet, gray trees. Some wet, gray train tracks. A few wet, gray trains passing us on the opposite track. A few towns in the distance, and even though they’re just specks on the horizon, I’m pretty sure they’re wet and gray, too.”

Sarah smiled. “In other words, Britain.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “I’m so much more familiar with Britain a hundred years ago than Britain today.”

“Yeah? I’d imagine that’s true of all Sherlockians.”

“There’s a poem by Vincent Starrett. He was one of the first Sherlockians. What is it? ‘Here dwell together two men of note / Who never lived and so can never die / How very near they seem, yet how remote / That age before the world went all awry. / But still the game’s afoot for those with ears / Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo; / England is England yet, for all our fears- / Only those things the heart believes are true…’ The ending is great, it always gets me. ‘And here, though the world explode, these two survive, / And it is always eighteen ninety-five.’ ”

Harold paused. “Isn’t that beautiful?” he added.

“Yes,” she said. “It is. But it’s odd, when I hear you say that… There’s something really conservative about you Sherlockians, isn’t there? I don’t mean in a political sense, but in an aesthetic one. Always wishing to return to this rose-tinted vision of the world as it existed a hundred years ago. ‘England is England yet…’ Well, this is England, too, right? Only now women can vote and racial discrimination is at least on the retreat. As a woman, I’ll tell you flat out, I wouldn’t want to live in 1895.”

“I understand,” said Harold. “There’s something… incomplete about our vision of Holmes’s time. I know it’s not real. I know that in the real 1895 there were two hundred thousand prostitutes in the city of London. Syphilis was rampant. Feces littered most major streets. Indian immigrants were locked up in Newgate on the barest suspicion that they had committed a crime. So-called homosexual acts were crimes, and they were punishable by years in prison. It was a racist culture, and a sexist one, too.”

Harold took a breath while he thought of how to proceed. “Look, I get it. I’m a white, heterosexual man. It’s really easy for me to say, ‘Oh, wow, wasn’t the nineteenth century terrific?’ But try this. Imagine the scene: It’s pouring rain against a thick window. Outside, on Baker Street, the light from the gas lamps is so weak that it barely reaches the pavement. A fog swirls in the air, and the gas gives it a pale yellow glow. Mystery brews in every darkened corner, in every darkened room. And a man steps out into that dim, foggy world, and he can tell you the story of your life by the cut of your shirtsleeves. He can shine a light into the dimness, with only his intellect and his tobacco smoke to help him. Now. Tell me that’s not awfully romantic?”

Sarah laughed. “Sure,” she said. “That definitely sounds romantic.” She looked out the window at the gray countryside sweeping by. “But maybe this is romantic, too.”

Harold looked at the passing trees, noticing how they were stooped over with water from a recent rain. He saw an expanse of grass, a damp heath pocked with yellow bursts of dandelion. He turned from the window to face Sarah, and as he did so, his elbow touched hers on the armrest between their seats.

“I see your point,” he said.

“Is that why you love the stories so much? For the romance?”

Harold considered this. He realized that he’d never before had to put into words his reasons for loving the Holmes stories. Did this sort of obsession even have reasons? If she had asked Harold why he loved his mother, there wouldn’t be any answer he could give. How could he then explain his love for Holmes?

“I think I love the idea that problems have solutions. I think that’s the appeal of mystery stories, whether they’re Holmes or someone else. In those stories we live in an understandable world. We live in a place where every problem has a solution, and if we were only smart enough, we could figure them out.”

“As opposed to…?”

“As opposed to a world that’s random. Where violence and death are happenstance-unpreventable and unstoppable. Of all the conventions of mystery stories, the one that’s impossible to break is the solution at the end. Conan Doyle has writings in his journals about it. And plenty of novelists since have tried. Can you write a mystery story that ends with uncertainty? Where you never know who really did it? You can, but it’s unsatisfying. It’s unpleasant for the reader. There needs to be something at the end, some sort of resolution. It’s not that the killer even needs to be caught or locked up. It’s that the reader needs to know. Not knowing is the worst outcome for any mystery story, because we need to believe that everything in the world is knowable. Justice is optional, but answers, at least, are mandatory. And that’s what I love about Holmes. That the answers are so elegant and the world he lives in so ordered and rational. It’s beautiful.”

“The romance of a rational world,” Sarah said. “Do you still think there are answers at the end of all of this?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Satisfying ones?”

Harold watched the rain. He wasn’t sure how to answer that question, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to.