The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 3.7
Featuring dragon speculation, friendship and miasmic vapours
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Previously on my confabulannotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Holmes finally got rid of both Watson and Dr Mortimer
And now, the story continues…
I knew that seclusion and solitude1 were very necessary for my friend2 in those hours of intense mental concentration during which he weighed every particle of evidence3, constructed alternative theories, balanced one against the other, and made up his mind as to which points were essential and which immaterial. I therefore spent the day at my club and did not return to Baker Street until evening. It was nearly nine o’clock when I found myself in the sitting-room once more.
My first impression as I opened the door was that a fire had broken out, for the room was so filled with smoke4 that the light of the lamp upon the table was blurred by it. As I entered, however, my fears were set at rest, for it was the acrid fumes of strong coarse tobacco which took me by the throat and set me coughing. Through the haze I had a vague vision of Holmes in his dressing-gown coiled up in an armchair5 with his black clay pipe between his lips. Several rolls of paper lay around him.
“Caught cold, Watson?” said he.
“No, it’s this poisonous atmosphere.”
“I suppose it is pretty thick6, now that you mention it.”
“Thick! It is intolerable7.”
“Open the window, then! You have been at your club all day, I perceive.”
“My dear Holmes!”
“Am I right?”
“Certainly, but how?”
He laughed at my bewildered expression8. “There is a delightful freshness about you, Watson, which makes it a pleasure to exercise any small powers9 which I possess at your expense. A gentleman goes forth on a showery and miry day. He returns immaculate in the evening with the gloss still on his hat and his boots. He has been a fixture therefore all day. He is not a man with intimate friends10. Where, then, could he have been? Is it not obvious?”
TO BE CONTINUED
In later stories, Watson took to referring to Holmes’ famous 221B Baker Street residence as his ‘Fortress of Seclusion and Solitude’, an affectation he later dropped due to a) its wordiness and b) a general forgetfulness that he’d ever called it that.
It is, of course, wildly presumptuous of Watson to assume that Holmes is his friend.
Watson believed in the particle theory of evidence, whereas other leading detective sidekicks of the day convincingly argued instead that evidence was a waveform. It wasn’t until Encyclopaedia Brown’s partner and bodyguard Sally Kimball posited that evidence had aspects of both particles and waves that a quantum theory of evidence was fully developed. This led directly, of course, to Douglas Adams’ holistic detective, Dirk Gently (who was famously also both a noun and an adverb).
Fans at the time listening to the legendary London Holmes Readalong Sessions (‘Wherein the Keenest Observers of the Realm Convene to Decipher the Master’s Mysteries, One Gaslit Evening at a Time!’) were briefly convinced that Holmes had somehow transformed into a dragon! Word spread excitedly through the gathered crowd for a handful of paragraphs before their theories were quashed by Conan Doyle’s less fantastical text. (A young boy in that crowd? John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.)
A far smaller, but still statistically significant, portion of the Readalong crowd that evening instantly leapt instead to the theory that Holmes had transformed into a giant metal spring. A notoriously quick-to-speculate fanbase. (Another young boy in that crowd? John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s friend, Tommy. Sure, he didn’t have anything to do with springs. But he was still there.)
Much like the smoking pipe itself, the adjective ‘pretty thick’ was famously never far from Holmes’ lips when conversing with Watson.
At the time, this was read as a panicky overreaction from Watson, and readers would have sneered at the fool sidekick’s neurotic unwillingness to breathe in the lung-clearing secondhand pipe-smoke that was well known to dissolve melancholic humours and purge the blood of miasmic vapours.
An expression that was intended to mimic a wildebeest.
For example, super-ventriloquism, elasticity of limbs or the ability to fill a fortress of seclusion with smoke.
Told you so. Wonderfully cruel stuff from the master.
Now that I come to think, where COULD Watson have been? I'm assuming the pubs of the day would have been for the working class. A miry day rules out a day at Lord's. There's not indication that Watson was a trainspotter and therefore couldn't have spent the day at the station, like I'm capable of. A bit of a no-brainer for sure:)