My Dear Watson by L.A. Fields Read Free Book Online Page B

recognize when things had gone too far, and it was time to distance himself from a habit that made him so unpredictable. This renunciation would not last long at all, but the flame of admiration it rekindled in Watson would go on protecting Holmes from his true opinion, although that too would reemerge soon enough.
     

1887: The Sign of Four
     
    I said Holmes’s sobriety didn’t last long; specifically it was about three weeks until he took up with the substance again. This was a boredom problem, and Sherlock Holmes had a cocaine solution. Watson couldn’t believe it, and he didn’t dare to speak against it lest Holmes seek out another of Watson’s army buddies and seduce him out of spite. But at long last it became too much. Sherlock rejoined the drug in May, and by September of 1887, Watson could endure the behavior no more.
    “What is it to-day,” he asked, his voice thick with a thousand other pointed questions he had tried to swallow down, “morphine or cocaine?” Implying, as he had less directly on other occasions, that it was only a matter of time before cocaine led to morphine, morphine to opium, and opium to destruction. He had seen it on too many occasions, the scions of wealthy houses fallen to ruin, his fellow soldiers returned from the Orient completely disoriented, addicted to that powerful smoke. Watson dreaded the day he would find Sherlock Holmes sprawled on a bunk in some opium den.
    But Holmes was never in danger of opiates, not the way he was built. He sat back with a languid smile, a proud cock always, but he did Watson the basic courtesy of explaining himself: “My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispose then with artificial stimulants.” Depressants like morphine would have exacerbated the problem, would have depressed him to the point of suicide. He was safe from morphine.
    And yet: between the cocaine, the need that motivated his use of it, the self-important way he claimed to be wholly unique (the world’s first and only independent consulting detective, thank you very much), and of course the wretched way he treated his one and only friend… Sherlock Holmes was his own worst enemy. Whenever he finds himself in a hole, he starts digging. The same behavior that makes him a legendary detective makes him a wretched human being.
    After six years together, even the torrid energy coming off of Holmes in his best instances was not enough to sustain a partner. In truth, they were both finding out that it was barely enough to sustain Holmes alone. Those victorious moments where he shines and the glow fills the room like the radiating warmth of a fire, those times are too few and far between. The reality of living with Holmes was so often dealing with his large and petulant ego, tolerating his ghastly habits, standing in as his punching bag. Holmes had a mean streak in him, especially when he was sunk into his own dark places, and especially when he has someone to take for granted. He was under the impression that Watson would never leave him, and that made him all the more thoughtless. Luckily, he was wrong.
    The Sign of Four marks the occasion of when Watson met his first wife. A student before he was a soldier before he was a wounded veteran, Watson had spent very little time in the company of women. Do not be fooled by his claim that he had “an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents”—I asked him when I read this, nearly convulsed with laughter, if I was merely one in a string of women he had experienced in his life, and he blushed and murmured that I was reading too far into his words.
    Watson had seen beautiful women, of course, over many nations and three separate continents. He had come to appreciate those uniquely feminine qualities in the wives of his friends, in their daughters as the girls