“It is as clear as daylight,” I answered. “I regret the injustice which I did you. I should have had more faith in your marvellous faculty. May I ask whether you have any professional inquiry on foot at present?”
“None. Hence the cocaine. I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, Doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them? Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth.”
I had opened my mouth to reply to this tirade, when, with a crisp knock, our landlady entered, bearing a card upon the brass salver.
“A young lady for you, sir,” she said, addressing my companion.36
“Miss Mary Morstan,” he read. “Hum! I have no recollection of the name. Ask the young lady to step up, Mrs. Hudson. Don’t go, Doctor. I should prefer that you remain.”
2 Note that the chapter has the same title as Chapter II of A Study in Scarlet. Watson apparently felt compelled to reintroduce Holmes, inasmuch as this was only the second tale published about him (publication of the series of short stories known as the Adventures did not commence until 1891).
3 Dr. Kohki Naganuma, a doctor of economics and not medicine, notes, in “Sherlock Holmes and Cocaine,” that Charles Gabriel Pravaz (1791–1853), a surgeon in Lyons, invented the hypodermic syringe in 1853 but that Carl Ludwig Schleich (1859–1922), of Berlin, was the first surgeon to use cocaine solution in hypodermic injection, and in sufficient dilution; this use occurred in 1891. Independently of Pravaz, the Scottish physician Alexander Wood (1817–1884) also developed a hypodermic syringe, which he used in 1855 to inject a patient with morphia. Naganuma finds the evidence inconclusive that Holmes actually injected cocaine. But Dr. Julian Wolff (a medical doctor) replies, in “A Narcotic Monograph,” that in fact the first use of cocaine by injection was in 1884, by the American Dr. William S. Halsted (1852–1922). This was “early enough so that it was no anachronism for Holmes to be taking cocaine injections when Watson said he was.”
Jack Tracy and Jim Berkey, in Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson, write that at the time of The Sign of Four, “the hypodermic injection of morphia had been commonplace, among both physicians and addicts, for thirty years and more.” However, Holmes was not injecting cocaine intravenously but, rather, subcutaneously (as physicians generally preferred) or intramuscularly (as most morphine users did). “There was a universal belief that intravenous injection put an undue strain on the system and was to be avoided …” However, in “Devilish Drugs, Part One,” F. A. Allen, M.P.S., finds the mention of puncture marks in Holmes’s wrist “sinister” and suggestive of intravenous injection.
4 Dr. Charles Goodman, in “The Dental Holmes,” contends that Holmes’s addiction stemmed from receiving cocaine for dental problems. In the 1880s, cocaine was a commonly used local anaesthetic. As late as 1897, Warner’s Pocket Medical Dictionary listed cocaine as a “nerve stimulant and local anaesthetic.”
5 Beaune is a French city, in the Burgundy region, about halfway between Dijon and Chalon-sur-Saône, which has given its name to the variety of local wine. A striking example of antiquity, Beaune is circular and has ramparts that date from the fifteenth century, and once it was a thriving textile centre—until, when the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685, the city’s Protestant artisans were driven out. Today, there is a wine school and research facilities, and among the city’s factories and businesses are those that produce winemaking equipment. “Beaune, like Pommard, used to be a convenient deception,” writes Matt Kramer, in Making Sense of Burgundy. “For centuries, it has been the centre from which wine shippers ruled viticultural Burgundy almost as peremptorily as the Burgundian dukes previously ruled political Burgundy… . So, as with Pommard, Nuits-Saint-Georges, and Chambertin, wines of a certain style were baptized ‘Beaune,’ never mind where they came from or even whether they were composed exclusively of Pinot Noir.”
Christopher Morley opines that Beaune is “[t]oo strong a drink for lunch, likely to cause either sleep or irritability.” In fact, it is no more “potent” than any other non-fortified wine, and this editor wishes it to be known that he is available for experimentation on the suitability of the wine for lunch. In “Dr. Watson’s Secret,” Morley expresses the further view that Watson was fortifying himself because, unknown to Holmes, he had married Mary Morstan some months before and knew that she would be calling on Holmes as a client that very afternoon. Some American editors of the Canon, apparently fearing the lack of oenophiles among their readers, substitute the word “claret” for “Beaune.”
6 William S. Baring-Gould, in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, points out that this is the only occasion in the Canon on which there is even the suggestion that Holmes took morphine.
7 Bernard Davies, in “Doctor Watson’s Deuteronomy: A Centenary Companion-piece,” writes that Watson, who would have noticed Holmes going back and forth between states of hyperactivity and morphine-induced torpor, seems confused by the morphine-cocaine dichotomy. He points out that, in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson reports Holmes “alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.” “Medical knowledge apart,” Davies notes, “his own experience should have told him that drowsiness was the precise opposite of the effect of cocaine.”
8 These were books printed in a typeface used by early printers; the term is probably meant here to suggest an antiquarian book. We see Holmes indulging in the same bibliophilia in “The Red-Headed League,” where his “black-letter editions” are also mentioned. Holmes’s book-collecting is discussed in more detail in A Study in Scarlet, note 147, above.
9 According to F. A. Allen, “The strength of injectio cocainae hypodermica became official in the [British Pharmacopoeia] in 1898 at ten per cent. May it not be presumed that, at least, Holmes was trying to ‘cut down’?” Allen suggests that when Holmes weaned himself from the drug, he may have begun using heroin, which had been introduced from Germany about this time as a cure for the morphia habit, and not condemned until a British Medical Journal editorial in 1906. Tracy and Berkey point out that “[b]lack market ‘street’ cocaine today generally contains 5% to 30% of the drug, though it should be kept in mind that the intravenous administration common now is many times as effective as Holmes’s subcutaneous method.” Based on the dosage and the method of taking the drug, they judge Holmes’s cocaine use to be “moderate and even therapeutic.”
Nicholas Meyer’s novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974), subsequently made into a very successful film starring Nicol Williamson as Holmes, Robert Duvall as Dr. Watson, and Alan Arkin as Sigmund Freud, records Holmes’s cure of his addiction with Freud’s aid. Freud helps Holmes understand that the villainous Moriarty was but a projection of Holmes’s mind, based on Holmes’s childhood discovery that his mother had committed adultery with his tutor Professor Moriarty (portrayed by Laurence Olivier in the film).
10 Michael Harrison points out, in In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, that Holmes’s purchases of cocaine were strictly legal at the time and that the drug was likely available at his neighbourhood chemist’s shop.
11 See A Study in Scarlet, Chapter 1, and especially notes 9 through 16 and accompanying text. Compare this comment, however, to Watson’s exertion in connection with the six-mile search for Tonga, in Chapter VI, below.
12 Cocaine, an alkaloid occurring to the extent of about 1 percent in the leaves of Erythroxylon coca, cultivated in the Andes and known as coca or cuca, was little understood in the Victorian era. The Encyclopædia Britannica (9th Ed.), a bellwether of common knowledge, has nothing to say about the injection of coca leaves, although chewing coca leaves, “when [they are] fresh and good, and used in moderate quan
tity, increases nervous energy, removes drowsiness, enlivens the spirits, and enables the [user] to bear cold, wet, great bodily exertion, and even want of food, to a surprising degree, with apparent ease and impunity.” By 1910, the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th Ed.) reported:
The injection of coca leaves has a very remarkable effect upon the higher tracts of the nervous system—an effect curiously contrary to that produced by their chief ingredient upon the peripheral parts of the nervous apparatus. The mental power is, at any rate subjectively, enhanced in marked degrees. In the absence of extended experiments in psychological laboratories, such as have been conducted with alcohol, it is not possible to say whether the apparent enhancement of the intellect is an objectively demonstrable fact. The physical power is unquestionably increased, such muscular exercises as are involved in ascending mountains being made much easier after the chewing of an ounce or so of these leaves. Excess in coca-chewing leads in many cases to great bodily wasting, mental failure, insomnia, weakness of the circulation and extreme dyspepsia.
Modern studies show that the effects of cocaine are short-lived, and that withdrawal from it produces a severe depressive reaction that the user often believes can be relieved only by further cocaine use.
13 That Holmes was a cocaine addict is questioned by W. H. Miller, in “The Habit of Sherlock Holmes.” Miller cites the lack of descriptions of behaviour consistent with cocaine usage and the lack of any evidence of withdrawal symptoms. Holmes’s remark he puts down to a joking rebuff of Watson’s shockingly “cheeky” question, and Miller concludes that Holmes must have been injecting atropine—an alkaloid that affects the nervous system and that is used today as pre-anaesthesia—in connection with experiments with “vegetable alkaloids” (see A Study in Scarlet, note 33, above). However, D. M. Grilly, in “A Reply to Miller’s ‘The Habit of Sherlock Holmes,’ ” contends that Miller’s conclusions are based on out-of-date research and that Watson’s report of Holmes’s symptoms “is accurate and consistent with what is presently known about cocaine.” In particular, he argues that recent evidence suggests that cocaine is not necessarily addictive—that many may experience the mood elevation Holmes evidently sought without becoming compulsive users.
14 The first example of Watsonian self-promotion, a practice he shamelessly pursued throughout his writing career.
John Hall, in Sidelights on Holmes, defends 1887 as the date of the events recorded in The Sign of Four and says that “by no stretch of the imagination could Holmes have glanced at anything other than a first draft of Watson’s first story—and, indeed, Watson could not have claimed to have published it, unless it were an edition we know absolutely nothing about, copies of which have never come to light.” If Hall is correct, then either Holmes did not make this statement (at least not at this time), or Watson’s account of Holmes’s remark is correct—in which case it would be necessary to move the events of The Sign of Four to 1888, with what Hall notes as that date’s attendant problems. H. B. Williams, in “The Unknown Watson,” backs 1887 as well, suggesting that it was the original publication of Watson’s reminiscences (see A Study in Scarlet, note 2) that Watson refers to here as “a small brochure” and “my pamphlet,” and that Watson was not referring to the second publication of A Study in Scarlet, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in late 1887.
However, most chronologists take this mention of a “small brochure” as a reference not to a draft or ur-Study but to the Beeton’s publication of A Study in Scarlet and therefore date the events of The Sign of Four after 1887—see Appendix. This view is buttressed by Holmes’s later remark that the criminal classes were coming to know him well, especially since Watson had taken to publishing “some” of his cases. Note, however (as Roger Johnson points out in private correspondence to this editor), that Watson does not claim to have published the tale, only to have embodied it “in a small brochure.”
In either event, Watson’s businesslike approach to his writing craft is first evidenced here. Although Watson had in desperation agreed in 1887 (at the apparent behest of Arthur Conan Doyle) to an outright sale of the British copyright to A Study in Scarlet, he presumably hoped to earn additional profits from the American market, and the first American publication of The Sign of Four (in Lippincott’s Magazine, in February 1890) was almost immediately followed by publication of an edition of A Study in Scarlet (J. B. Lippincott, March 1890). See Donald A. Redmond’s Sherlock Holmes Among the Pirates for a discussion of the numerous “pirated” American editions that followed as a result of the then-current American laws (which granted no copyright protection to a publication of a British author in the United States).
15 William S. Baring-Gould jokes, “It was probably the interlude with the Mormons that Holmes found tiresome.”
16 Euclid’s “fifth proposition” is: “If a straight line falling on two straight lines makes the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles.” “The Master here referred to the fifth proposition probably merely to illustrate his point,” Ernest Bloomfield Zeisler writes, in “A Chronological Study in Scarlet,” “for careful research has failed to reveal why any other proposition of Euclid would not have done as well.” But Raymond Holly, in “Dubious and Questionable,” points out that the fifth proposition is “the first proposition that refers to a naturally occurring pair—the base angles of an isosceles triangle” and implies that Holmes’s remark here was a reference to his attitude toward love, expressed in the text accompanying note 277, below.
17 The subject of Watson’s wounds is complex and intricate. A brief discussion may be found in A Study in Scarlet, note 14. See also note 146, below.
18 See A Study in Scarlet, note 15.
19 Madeline B. Stern, in Sherlock Holmes: Rare Book Collector, identifies him as the son of Francisque le Villard, who flourished about 1847 and wrote about the Paris theatre.
20 French: master strokes.
21 Holmes mentions his monograph on cigar ashes in A Study in Scarlet, but without disclosing its title. See A Study in Scarlet, note 127.
22 Poul Anderson (in “Art in the Blood”) asserts that the meticulous Holmes must have been a fine draftsman and painter: “Surely he would not have entrusted the preparation of these plates to anyone else.”
23 A strong Indian cigar that resembles a cheroot.
24 See A Study in Scarlet, note 118.
25 A special cut of tobacco, resembling in appearance a bird’s eye.
26 “There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps,” remarks Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, and numerous examples throughout the Canon demonstrate his expertise.
27 In “The Effects of Trades Upon Hands,” Archibald Hart accuses Gilbert Forbes (“a transparent alias”) of reprinting Holmes’s work under the title “Some Observations on Occupational Markings,” purportedly written by Forbes, in the Police Journal (London, October–November 1946; reprinted in the United States in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology [November–December 1947]). Remsen Ten Eyck Schenck notes a similar work, Occupational Marks, by Francesco Ronchese, M.D. (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1948).
In “A Case of Identity,” “The Red-Headed League,” “The Copper Beeches,” and “The Solitary Cyclist,” Holmes demonstrates his ability to observe the effects of various trades upon the hands. Dr. Joseph Bell (see Introduction, Volume I of this series, for a discussion of his relationship with Arthur Conan Doyle) preached the practical use of such knowledge in an introduction to a reprint of A Study in Scarlet in 1892. There, Bell expresses “how easy it is, if only you can observe, to find out a great deal as to the works and ways of your innocent and unconscious friends, and, by an extension of the same method, to baffle the criminal and lay bare the manner of his crime.” In “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” Holmes remarks, “Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the pu
blic, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction!”
28 Schenck notes, “The marks [of a slater—a roofer, in modern parlance] probably included the fingertips of the left hand worn smooth by handling the stone, as seen also in masons and bricklayers … , and calluses across the right palm from gripping the hammer. It is also reasonable that callosities of the knees would be prominent … , since roofing is done chiefly in a kneeling position.”
Nothing specific would distinguish a sailor’s hands from those of another person working hard outdoors. So reasons Schenck, who also points out that ship’s chores are more varied than repetitive, and furthermore that the right and left hands are used equally.
Cork-cutters, who have largely vanished with the advent of modern machinery, would, Schenck speculates, have “calluses [that] were produced on the thumb and first two fingers of the left hand by grasping the cork, and similarly on the thumb and across the inside of all four fingers of the right by the handle of the knife.” And, of the compositor, the “left thumb is often characterized by the formation of a callus on the tip, often with abrasion of the skin lower down, across the ‘ball’ of the digit,” Schenck writes. “In setting type, the ‘stick’ is held in the left hand and the type placed in it with the right. As each piece of type is dropped into the stick, the left thumb slides it into position against the last addition, and then holds the accumulated mass snugly in a corner.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Page 28
