Holmes looked down at her, then back at the instrument in his hands. Its varnish gleamed in the gaslight. He plucked a string or two, wincing slightly at the sound. Tucking the violin beneath his chin, he jerked his neck up and down to accustom the thing to its proper place and set about tuning it. This done—as we watched with all the breathless anticipation of people at the circus witnessing a high-wire performance—he withdrew the bow and ran some rosin up and down it after tightening the horsehair.
“Hmm.”
He played tentatively at first, and not at all in his usual style as he assayed a few chords and phrases. Slowly, however, a smile spread across his features—the first genuinely happy expression I had beheld there in what seemed an eternity.
And then he began to play in earnest.
I have alluded elsewhere to my friend’s musical accomplishments, but never did he so excel himself and bewitch his listeners as he did that night. A miracle took place before our very eyes as the instrument restored life to its owner and he to it.
Seemingly without realising it, Holmes pushed back his chair and arose, still playing the violin and becoming more animated as he became increasingly absorbed. I forget what he began with—I am not musically knowledgeable myself, as some of my readers have observed before this—but I fancy it was some exercises and wistful compositions of his own.
I know what he played, next, however. Holmes had a flair for the dramatic and he knew, after all, where he was.
He played Strauss waltzes. Oh, how he played! Rich, languorous, sonorous, gay, propulsively rhythmic—I know they were propulsively rhythmic because Dr. Freud seized his wife round the waist and began to waltz her about the dining room and into the sitting room as Holmes, Anna, Paula, and myself followed. So enrapt was I in watching the spectacle and eyeing my friend, whose smile had not ceased to leave his face, that it was some moments before I became aware of a small hand tugging at my sleeve. I looked down and beheld Anna, who stretched forth her arms in my direction.
I was never accounted much of a dancer, and with my game leg I was perhaps still less of one than most unmusical men—but I danced. It wasn’t, I suspect, a very graceful performance, but it possessed infinite energy and good will.
‘Tales of the Vienna Woods’, ‘Wiener Blut’, The Blue Danube’, ‘Wine, Women and Song’—Holmes played them all as we four whirled around the room, shrieking with laughter and enjoyment! After a time I exchanged partners with Freud and danced with his wife, while the Doctor—whom I could perceive was little more accustomed to waltzing than I—gambolled about with his daughter. At one point, in my excitement, I even recall spinning Paula about, much to her amusement and over her protestations.
When at last it was over, we all of us fell into chairs, gasping for breath, our ridiculous smiles playing on, though the music that inspired them had stopped. Holmes removed the violin from beneath his chin and stared at it for a long time. Then he looked up and across the room at Freud.
“I have not ceased to be astounded by your talents,” Freud said to him.
“I am just beginning to be amazed by yours,” Holmes countered, looking him steadily in the eye—and there, I delighted to observe, was the familiar sparkle.
I retired that night marvelling at the power of music. I believe it is somewhere in Julius Caesar§ that the Bard speaks of music having the power to soothe the savage breast and calm the restless spirit, but I had never had the opportunity of witnessing a practical demonstration of that phenomenon.
It persisted after the rest of the house had gone to bed, as I had good reason to know, for through the thin partition that divided Holmes’s room from mine I could hear him quietly scraping on into the wee hours. Allowed to choose his own repertoire, he reverted to the melancholy, dreamy airs of his own invention. They were haunting and desperately sad, but they had the eventual effect of lulling me gently to sleep. I drifted off, vaguely wondering if, now that we had struck a spark in my friend’s chilly soul, that spark was destined to kindle itself into flame or rather the out again with the coming day. The episode with the violin proved that his soul was not gutted and charred beyond igniting, but whether music was sufficient in itself for the purpose, this I instinctively doubted. Somewhere, too, in my uneasy slumbers, I saw again that devil’s scheming face with its grotesque, dead white wound.
* * *
* Does this declaration suggest a reason why Watson never mentions his children, not even to state that he fathered any? N.M.
† Arm? This manuscript does not resolve our doubts concerning the famous Afghan wound. N.M.
‡ Watson’s memory surely plays him false here. A personal inspection of the Maumberg’s yet extant indoor courts reveals that no more than one hundred spectators could have watched this exciting though little-known episode in Freud’s life. Obviously Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, was not among them.
§ It isn’t. N.M.
CHAPTER X
A Study In Hysteria
SHERLOCK HOLMES was quiet the next morning at breakfast. He gave no clue as to whether or not the musical episode had well and truly set him on the road to recovery. Dr. Freud remained inscrutable in the face of his patient’s neutral behaviour. He asked, as usual, how Holmes had slept and if he would like a second cup of coffee.
What happened next for ever prevents my saying with certainty whether or not the violin alone recalled my companion to his former self. If the doorbell had not rung, the mad adventure into which we fell headlong would not have occurred. Yet, in spite of what followed, I am glad the messenger arrived with a note for Dr. Freud, for without it I fear Holmes might well have relapsed, fiddle or no.
He was a courier from the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, the teaching hospital to which Freud had once been attached. He bore a note from somebody on the staff, asking if Dr. Freud would care to come and look at a patient who had arrived the night before. The note had a familiar flavour as Freud read it aloud.
I would be pleased if you could spare the time to consult with me about a most peculiar case. The patient cannot or will not speak a word, and though she is frail, her health appears perfectly sound. Could you find a moment to stop by and conduct a brief examination? Your methods are a little off the beaten track but I have always respected them, myself.
It was signed ‘Schultz’.
“You see what a pariah I am,” Freud said, smiling, as he folded the note. “Would you care to accompany me, gentlemen, and see the recalcitrant woman?”
“I should be greatly interested,” Holmes responded with alacrity, and proceeded to fold his napkin. Prepared to go as well, I remarked humorously that I had not thought the Doctor’s patients could be of any interest to him. He certainly had not demonstrated curiosity about them before.
“Oh, I have no interest in the patient,” Holmes laughed, “but doesn’t this Dr. Schultz sound much like our old friend Lestrade?* I have decided to come and offer Doctor Freud my sympathy.”
It was no great distance to the hospital, and on arriving we were informed that Dr. Schultz was with his patient in the Psychiatric Wing. We found him in the outside court, accessible through a separate gate, beyond which the patients were permitted—under supervision—to sit or wander about in the sun. There were games also at their disposal and some half-dozen were playing croquet, though it was a mad game they played, with much shouting and noise and need for the attendants’ presence.
Dr. Schultz was a heavy-set and seemingly self-important individual, roughly fifty years of age, with a thin moustache and incongruously large side-whiskers. He greeted Freud with guarded formality and Holmes and myself in a perfunctory manner. As the hospital was devoted to teaching as well as the practice of medicine, he did not demur when Freud asked if we might accompany him. I believe he caught the fact that I was a physician and assumed that we had reasons of our own for wishing to view the patient.
“It’s really no concern of mine,” Schultz explained as we stepped briskly over the lawn, “but we must do
something about her, you see. She was observed attempting to throw herself into the canal from the Augarten Bridge. Bystanders tried to stop her, but she succeeded in breaking free and throwing herself in anyway. Malnutrition,” he added, as an after-thought, “but when the police brought her round she did eat a little. The question is: what now? If you can find out who she is or anything of the kind, I shall be for ever in your debt.”
He did not sound much interested in being for ever in Freud’s debt, and Freud smiled at me rather than responding directly. I was struck—as Holmes had been by Schultz’s message—with the similarity in tone between the proper physician and the proper Scotland Yard investigator when dealing with their respective iconoclasts. Whatever Freud’s theories, they resembled Holmes’s in the condescending scepticism they evoked in quarters of officialdom and sanctioned thought.
“There she is—all yours. I am due in surgery. Just leave word for me at my office, if you will be so kind. I will look in on her again tomorrow.”
He departed for his operation, leaving us to face a young woman who sat in a basket chair, looking out at the lawn with wide unblinking blue eyes that refused to squint in the bright sunlight. She was obviously undernourished and her skin had a delicate blue tint, especially beneath the eyes. It might have been a striking face but for the ravages of her condition. I should have said she was exhausted, had not the rigid quality of her posture proclaimed that she was under the highest tension.
Freud walked round her slowly as Holmes and I watched. He passed a hand before her face. There was no response. She did not resist as he gently held her wrist to gauge her pulse, but when he released his hold, the limb dropped back into her lap like a thing dead. Her face was thin, thinner even than it was supposed to be, judging from its bone structure. We were unable to estimate her weight since she was dressed in ample hospital clothing. Holmes appeared mildly interested in the woman and stood watching attentively as Freud went about his cursory examination.
“You see why they call for me,” Freud said quietly. “They don’t know what else to do. She cannot be sent to any of the normal facilities for the destitute in her present condition.”
“What made her hysterical?” I asked.
“That is not beyond surmise, surely. Poverty, despair, desertion. At the end of her tether, she decided to end her life, and, being deprived of that goal, she retreats into the state in which we find her.”
Freud was opening his black bag and rummaging about for something. He took out a syringe and a bottle.
“What will you do?” Holmes squatted down beside him on his haunches, not removing his eyes from the unfortunate wretch who sat before him.
“What I can,” Freud responded, rolling back the floppy sleeve of her white gown and sterilising a portion of her arm with cotton dipped in alcohol. “I will see if I can hypnotise her. In order to do that I must give her something to relax and enable me to get her attention.”
Holmes nodded and rose to his feet as Freud plunged the needle home.
He began swinging his watch chain back and forth and talking in that solicitous yet forceful voice of his—as I had occasion to witness so many times before. I cast a brief glance at Holmes, wondering what associations this procedure held for him, but his faculties were plainly absorbed by the woman’s reactions to the watch chain and Freud’s voice.
The Doctor motioned us with his free hand to stand back, out of the line of the patient’s vision, and went on quietly telling her to listen to what he had to say, to relax, that she was among friends, and so forth.
At first I was conscious of the croquet game, with its ludicrous shouts, going on somewhere to my left, but as Freud went on, the sounds receded into the distance. So persuasive was the Doctor’s insistent litany that we might have been shrouded in the familiar semi-darkness of his study at Bergasse 19.
Almost imperceptibly, the patient’s eyes began to blink and then to follow the movements of the fob, which they had hitherto ignored. Perceiving this, Freud changed his quiet injunctions to relax and commanded her, in the same soft tones, to sleep.
Hesitating at first, with another flicker of her lids, the girl did as she was bid, and closed her eyes.
“You can still hear me, can’t you?” Freud asked. “Nod your head if you can hear me.”
She nodded languidly, her shoulders slumping.
“Now you will be able to talk,” Freud told her, “and to answer some very simple questions. Are you ready? Nod again, please.”
She did.
“What is your name?”
There was a long pause. Her mouth moved slightly but no sound emerged.
“Please speak more clearly. I will ask you again and you will speak clearly. What is your name?”
“My name is Nancy.”
She spoke in English!
Freud frowned in surprise and exchanged a brief involuntary glance with me, then returned his attention to the girl. Coughing slightly, he addressed her now in English.
“Now then, Nancy. What is your full name?”
“I have two names.”
“Yes, and what are they?”
“Slater. Nancy Slater. Nancy Osborn Slater. Von Leinsdorf,” she added with a choking sound. Her mouth continued to work after she had done speaking.
“All right, Nancy. Relax. Relax. Yon are all right. Tell me: where are you from?”
“Providence.”
Freud looked up at us, clearly mystified, and I confess I was almost of the opinion we were the victims of some improbable practical joke—or was her fancy now wandering idly into the realm of metaphysics?
Holmes solved the dilemma. Standing directly behind the girl he spoke quietly so that only we might hear.
“Perhaps she refers to Providence, the capital of Rhode Island. It is, I believe, the smallest of the United States.”
Freud was nodding energetically before Holmes had concluded, and then, shrugging at the peculiarity of it, he knelt before the girl once more and repeated the question.
“Yes. Providence. Rhode Island.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I spent my honeymoon in an attic.”
Her mouth was chewing convulsively on itself again, and when she spoke some speech impediment distorted her replies, making it somewhat difficult to catch the words. Perplexed as I was by her condition and her inarticulate speech, my heart none the less went out to her, poor stricken creature!
“All right, now. Relax. Relax.”
Freud rose and faced us.
“It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Ask some more questions,” Holmes prompted quietly. His eyes were hooded like the head of the cobra beneath heavy lids, but I know he was as far from sleep as he ever got. Only the utmost satisfaction could provoke that dreamy appearance where the smoke rising from his pipe and the fact that he was standing were the only clues to his consciousness. “Ask her some more questions,” he repeated. “Where was she married?”
Freud repeated the question.
“In the meat house.” Her speech impediment made it difficult to understand her.
“A meat house?”‘
She nodded. Freud looked over her shoulder at us and shrugged once more. Holmes motioned him to go on.
“You say your name is Von Leinsdorf. Who is Von Leinsdorf? Your husband?”
“Yes.”
“Baron Karl Von Leinsdorf?” Freud was unable to suppress the challenging note in his voice.
“Yes.”
“The Baron is dead,” he began, when the woman who called herself Nancy suddenly rose with a fierce movement, her eyes still closed, but apparently struggling to open.
“No !”
“Sit down, Nancy. Sit down. That’s good. That’s very good. Now relax again. Relax.”
Once more he rose and faced us.
“This is most peculiar. Obviously her delusions persist under hypnosis—not often the case,” he informed us with a significant look.
�
�Delusions?” Holmes spoke, opening his eyes. “What leads you to infer they are delusions?”
“They make no sense.”
“That is not the same thing. Who is Baron Von Leinsdorf?”
“An elderly peer of the realm. A cousin to the Emperor, I believe. He died some weeks ago.”
“Was he married?”
“I have no idea. I confess I am at a loss. I have managed to communicate with her but what she has to say does not tell us what should be done with her.”
He cupped a fist in a palm and twisted it in his perplexity as we stared down at the strange patient, whose mouth was beginning to work again.
“May I pose a question or two?” Holmes nodded in her direction.
“You?” Freud sounded more surprised by the request than he probably intended.
“If you don’t mind. I may be able to shed some small light in the darkness that surrounds us.”
Freud considered the question again, looking keenly at Holmes, who waited for his response with every outward appearance of indifference. Yet I knew from a dozen tell-tale signs, that meant something to me alone, how dearly he wanted to receive the Doctor’s permission.
“It cannot do any harm,” I ventured, “and surely, as you confess yourself mystified, a little assistance might not be amiss. I have known my friend to make sense out of what was far less sensible,” I added.
Freud hesitated a moment longer. He was unwilling, I think, to admit defeat or acknowledge his need for help, but he needed help, and I also think he had some inkling of how much it meant to Holmes, who had shown so few signs of life himself, until recently.
“Very well. But be quick. The sedative is wearing off and we shall lose her shortly.”
Holmes’s eyes gleamed briefly with excitement, but hooded themselves almost at once as he followed Freud to the front of the basket chair.
“There is someone here who would like to talk to you, Nancy. You may speak as freely to him as you did to me. Are you ready?”
“Y-yes.”
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution Page 12
