The Patient's Eyes: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes

by Pirie, David

  All eyes turned on my friend. I could see him struggling to come up with something. ‘That he has a limp, perhaps a sprain of some kind?’

  ‘Not very much, in other words,’ said Bell curtly. ‘You see but you do not observe. Can no one observe? Mr Doyle! Using your eyes, your ears, your brain, your boundless perception, what do you see?’

  Perhaps I was unduly sensitive but the scorn in his voice seemed an uncanny echo of the superior tone of our arrogant medical lodger, Bryan Charles Waller. Was this not just the way Waller talked to my father as he subjected him to the nightly humiliation of the ‘examination’? I found myself hating the superciliousness of it all. Why did Bell need to chide us in such a way? We were supposed to be his collaborators, not little children. But, as I reflected on this, Bell was becoming impatient: ‘Come on, man, can you tell nothing from this man’s appearance here today?’

  My words slipped out before I could stop myself. ‘Of course. I can tell he is in need of medical attention. Why not ask him and see?’

  There was a gasp, then the hall erupted with laughter. They had never heard anyone challenge Bell’s notions in this way. I regretted it, fearing he would take the reply and the laughter badly. But to his credit Bell seemed to accept the bald logic of my answer.

  ‘I admit that he has few distinguishing features,’ he said with a smile. And he paused for effect. ‘All I can observe for sure from looking at him is that he comes from Liberton, that he drives two horses, one grey, one bay, and that he has recently been discharged from the army.’

  The audience’s applause was thunderous, and the patient himself looked astonished. ‘It’s true,’ he exclaimed. ‘But how in the world did you know that, sir?’

  Bell went over to him, smiling. ‘I am tempted to keep you all wondering. It is always so much more effective. But I will explain. There is Liberton clay on his toecaps. The colour is quite unmistakable. His boots are new and undoubtedly ammunition boots of the kind offered to any soldier on his discharge from the army. He has white equine hairs on one sleeve and bay on the other. Two horses.’

  There was more applause. I was intrigued by this list of facile clues but it merely served to reinforce my own scepticism. Bell went on about his ‘method’ as if it were something new. But when you actually analysed it, you could see at once it was merely a series of simple tricks, generally aided by bits of good luck like the clay and the horsehair. If this man’s jacket had been given a good brush and he had slipped off his boots before he entered, Bell would have been able to produce nothing at all.

  I started to outline my feelings about this to Stark, pointing out that a clean jacket would have stopped the Doctor in his tracks. ‘When you boil it all down,’ I said, ‘it is little more than a conjuring trick.’

  I was speaking loudly but I had forgotten Bell’s sheer command of his audience and did not see him raise his hand for silence so he could continue his diagnosis. The students obeyed instantly. As a result, my last sentence was audible to everyone in the hall.

  Bell stopped what he was doing and turned all his attention on me at once, his eyes gleaming, his profile slanted like some eagle about to descend on its prey. ‘Mr Doyle’ — his voice was lightly threatening — ‘you were saying?’

  There was no escape. I knew I was cornered, but I was still determined not to show fear to this amazing egotist. ‘I am sorry, Dr Bell. I did not mean to interrupt. But I was merely doubting the practical application of such tricks.’

  He stared at me a moment. ‘Oh, really, were you now?’ he said very quietly. ‘Well, such doubts may well have a practical application to your career at this university! I will see you afterwards.’

  My friends stared at me in horror. But their anxiety was nothing beside mine. My mother had made great sacrifices for me to come to the university. I had found it hard enough to tell her when I was considering giving up my studies voluntarily. Imagine returning home with news that I had been thrown out altogether for rudeness to one of its most eminent medical teachers.

  I recall nothing more of that afternoon until I stood waiting for Bell in the labyrinth of his book-lined room, staring into the stygian depths of his tank. I almost felt as if I would be better plunging into it and drowning. Then I heard him enter behind me. I turned.

  He stood there, looking at me. ‘So’ — he was very still — ‘you believe my method has no practical use?’

  In my misery I had toyed with the notion of an abject apology. But now, as he stared at me in that queer way of his, I felt sure that a recantation, especially if it were untruthful, would be the worst move of all. ‘I do not mean to give offence,’ I said, trying to choose my words very carefully, ‘but the truth is I have yet to see one.’

  He stood there for a moment, weighing this in the balance. ‘Come with me.’ His tone was not rude, exactly, but it hardly left room for dissent.

  I followed him round the shelves, wondering if he was going to escort me to some office and strike my name out of the student register there and then. But when we reached his desk I realised he merely wanted to put down the folder he was carrying and collect his things.

  He turned back to me. ‘You know that I could have you thrown out of this university for impertinence?’

  I said nothing for there was no denying it.

  ‘However’ — his tone changed — ‘when someone has so much to learn, it is better that he be taught a lesson.’

  This did not sound promising. I stood there looking down at the strange collection of objects on his desk. A funnel that seemed to be made of leather, I remember, a plastering trowel and a discoloured bronze ring. I had no conceivable notion of their purpose. The silence continued, then Dr Bell sighed and put on his hat. His next words were utterly unexpected.

  ‘I would like you to become my clerk.’

  THE IRRITATION OF THE CLERK

  To this day I am still not sure why he chose me to be clerk. It was an honorary position, paying no wage, but he had, after all, the pick of far better minds, all of whom were his slavish admirers. I can only suppose, looking back, that in some small way I represented a challenge. And, as I now know, the Doctor was never a man to turn a challenge down.

  My friends were amazed, and even a little jealous at my sudden elevation, for in that mass of dull and lazy teachers the Doctor was something of a hero. At home I naturally tried as hard as I could to inflate the importance of my new role. But Waller pointed out at once that most of my tasks would be little more than manual labour and he was quite right. Even my friends ceased to be jealous when they saw me with a bucket and mop, cleaning the floor after a messy dissection or sweeping the flagstones outside Bell’s study.

  In fact, I saw little enough of Bell himself in those early days. I was too busy preparing the lecture hall, helping to dress and escort the patients, sorting through his papers and mounting an endless series of specimens. My most glorious moments were the occasional afternoons when I assisted at operations. But even here I was allowed to do little more than wipe the perspiration from Bell’s face with a towel as he worked. At that time speed was the most vital attribute to a surgeon; it was the difference between success and abject failure, between getting your patient back to bed alive and having them die from shock in front of you on the table. My sole task in the operations was therefore to facilitate Bell’s speed.

  In this respect, and others, the Doctor was a taskmaster but he was a fair one. And yet, despite my promotion and these small privileges, I have to report that my harsh opinion of the man barely changed. I was now prepared to admit that Bell was dedicated and hard-working. He had made no attempt at all to charm or impress me, so the man could evidently leave vaudeville behind when he wanted to. But on his beloved ‘method’, the major issue at stake, I simply would not relent. My friends and I often debated the matter, and I was more cynical about it than ever. What meaning could it possibly have, I would declare, to the poor wretches who nearly died on our operating table? What did they care whether
Bell deduced one was a tea drinker from the stains on his jacket and the other rode a chestnut horse? All that mattered to them was that he got them off the table alive.

  And then, on a cold morning in early November, something happened.

  It was one of those rare occasions when Bell actually spent a few minutes with his humble clerk. He was planning a series of lectures that would involve several anatomical samples and he was anxious to make a selection from a department of anatomy outbuilding, which was then situated outside Surgeon’s Square in a quiet street of buildings, some of which were residential. He had asked me to accompany him so that in due course I could make the necessary arrangements for boxing and transporting the samples.

  We crossed the road amidst busy traffic and, not for the first time, I witnessed the Doctor’s extraordinary physical dexterity as he weaved through the vehicles with expert judgement. He carried his silver-topped cane as always and, having seen its accuracy with the woman patient, I feared for the fate of a cyclist who swerved rudely past him with some oath. An inch nearer and I am convinced the Doctor would have brought the cane down full on the man’s hands and probably broken them. As it was, Bell contented himself with a warning feint, which streaked past the cyclist’s handlebars and had the desired result. The man was forced to swerve away, and I saw him blanch at this near miss and pedal off furiously without looking back. Bell seemed utterly unperturbed by the dozen narrow brushes with horses and wheels during his crossing. He stepped on to the pavement as if he had just strode from one room to another, turned into a narrow street leading to his destination and stopped dead.

  I was a little behind, for the man walked at such a clip that it was often hard to keep pace with him. And now I assumed he was about to talk to someone. But the street was empty apart from a black carriage which stood at its far end. Two men were seated within it and, as they saw us, a white-gloved hand reached up and snapped the carriage blind down as if in some kind of signal.

  At this Bell’s whole manner changed. ‘Ah, it seems I will have to leave you now. We will undertake the samples another time. If you could proceed with the task of cataloguing the surgery papers?’ Then he walked on towards the carriage.

  I could hardly stand staring, so I turned back the way I had come. But later, as I was nearly at Surgeon’s Square I saw that same black vehicle on the main road, heading at speed into the centre of the city. And from what I could make out, there was now an additional passenger.

  Over the next few days I thought of every possible explanation for that carriage and could find none that seemed to fit. Then, a few days later as I was filing into a lecture, I looked out of a grimy window and saw it again, with Dr Bell emerging from it, looking extremely tired and worn. I was just resolving in my mind that I would find out what lay behind this when my thoughts were interrupted.

  ‘Ah, look, Doyle,’ Cullingworth was at my right shoulder and had followed my gaze. ‘There is your mysterious Dr Bell. What does it mean, do you think? Does the man have a mistress?’

  In fact, such a notion had already occurred to me but I had discarded it almost as soon as it did. Not only was it unlikely in itself, but what man attends his mistress in a black carriage with two officials?

  ‘Oh, no,’ Stark was saying as he came to join us. ‘But I think he is up to something. We should investigate.’

  ‘There is no point,’ I said almost too quickly. ‘It is just charitable work. I have known for weeks he takes an interest in such things.’

  Few people enjoy spying on the charity of others so my comments had the desired effect: my friends lost interest and fell to discussing the prospects for Saturday’s rugby match against the veterinary college. Nor was the lie entirely implausible for Bell did publicly contribute his time and money to three poor hospitals. But I was suddenly aware of how much I disliked the idea of anyone else involving themselves in what I now felt was my mystery. If there was some secret to Bell then, as his sternest critic, I wanted to be the one to discover what it was.

  The Doctor had recently engaged me to sort out his surgery papers, and the work meant that I was constantly in his laboratory and office, often at odd times. Perhaps because my curiosity was aroused, I began to realise that his comings and goings were a great deal odder than either I or my friends had ever appreciated. Moreover, it seemed to me they were intimately connected with the locked room that I had mistaken for an office when I first met him.

  Once, early in the morning, he made me jump as he came through that locked door wearing his coat and looking as if he had not slept a wink all night. On another occasion, quite late in the evening, he emerged from the same doorway dressed as if for an excursion. He saw me and made no remark, but gathered some things including his cane and went back through the door, locking it behind him as always. I stayed for another two hours but he did not re-emerge.

  From this it slowly became obvious to me there must be another exit from the room behind the locked door, yet not at all obvious in that labyrinth of corridors where such an exit could be. I had already drawn a map of the Doctor’s workroom itself without finding it very illuminating. Now I spent days working on a new map of the layout of rooms and corridors around it in the hope that it might throw light on the riddle of the inner room.

  Dr Bell’S Workroom

  There was certainly no sign of a door connecting that locked room to the main corridor or anywhere else, and a quick examination of the layout of corridors and rooms on that floor showed me at once that the locked room’s dimensions must be extraordinarily small. I used to have fantasies, as my map shows, of a tunnel leading from the Doctor’s locked room to the outside grounds, but even that seemed absurd. The university floors were of solid stone and I was sure there was no basement. In any case, I reasoned, if there was an exit, why did the Doctor keep his coat and stick and bag in the large study and laboratory where I worked? It is true, sometimes he would disappear through the locked door with them and I was sure he was going out. But also on occasions they would sit behind his desk, not far from where I was working, while he vanished through the same door for hours and hours. What could he possibly be doing in there? From its dimensions the room could hardly accommodate a chair, let alone a desk. The more I observed his routine at close quarters, the more puzzles seemed to multiply around the room and the man.

  In desperation I decided to apply the Doctor’s own principles to the problem. I still stuck to my view that most of his claims for his so-called ‘method’ were bogus, but here it might serve some small purpose. Thinking it over, I decided that if the Doctor had some hobby or activity that took him out and consumed so much of his free time, then certainly the nature of that hobby would be reflected in the extensive library which, as his clerk, I dusted every morning.

  And so, during one of the weeks when his absences were prolonged, I made as complete a study of the titles as I could. From wall to wall and ceiling to floor, I analysed the precise range of books and subjects, the exact number of books in each category, and the overall distribution and arrangement of each volume in a concerted attempt to examine the intellectual and personal slant of the whole collection. I pulled out the more obscure tomes to see what exactly they were and even (congratulating myself on my canniness) took special note of those titles, that appeared to be the most thumbed.

  After completing this work, however, I found to my fury that all I had done was add yet another mystery to all the others. For when you stepped back and analysed the titles, it emerged at once that, while the whole collection was strange and eccentric in the extreme, its overall purpose was quite baffling. It was not as if that strange assortment of books even properly mirrored the subject of medicine. Certainly there were treatises on surgery and anatomy, and they stood at the front of the nearest shelf, but only as if they were planted to deceive. For, upon close inspection, this subject range terminated relatively quickly. Indeed, I soon realised that the only medical subjects adequately and exhaustively covered in the entire collecti
on were pathology and chemistry.

  That was my first discovery, but the range of other subjects was just as peculiar. I had until this point been naively wondering whether Bell was engaged in some great debating society, a forum, perhaps, where the thinkers of the town, which had given the world David Hume and Adam Smith, were busily contemplating the leading subjects of our age. A study of the books showed at once that any such idea was quite ridiculous. You would have looked in vain throughout the entire library, for a single volume that told you anything at all about the great intellectual debates of our day. It contained no philosophy, no astronomy, no economic theory, no politics and virtually no history. The classics were thinly represented, as were languages, while the mathematics on display were mainly obscure treatises on numerical cryptography.

  And what, exactly, was included? Well, besides the pathology and the chemistry, geology was well represented and so was botany. There was typography, too. The subject of law was accorded so many books that I almost wondered if the Doctor had begun as a student and teacher on the subject, but I knew quite well he had studied medicine and at this very university. There was also a wellstocked shelf on the history of weaponry. All of these subjects appeared to be frequently consulted, as did some quite new volumes concerning abnormal psychology. Then, last of all on the furthest and lowest shelf, came a wholly weird surprise from which I could infer nothing whatsoever: namely an extensive collection of sensational popular literature.

  At first I was taken aback to see this collection of Penny Dreadfuls with their lurid covers, howling of horrors and bloodstained deeds. Then I decided it must be some aberration or indulgence. And so at last I set about compiling my list. Carefully I scribbled down the subjects to see if I could detect a pattern: