“ ‘Most preposterous!’ I exclaimed, and then, suddenly realizing how he had echoed the inmost thought of my soul, I sat up in my chair and stared at him in blank amazement.
“ ‘What is this, Holmes? This is beyond anything which I could have imagined.’
“He laughed heartily at my perplexity.
“ ‘You remember,’ said he, ‘that some little time ago, when I read you the passage in one of Poe’s sketches, in which a close reasoner follows the unspoken thoughts of his companion, you were inclined to treat the matter as a mere tour de force of the author. On my remarking that I was constantly in the habit of doing the same thing you expressed incredulity.’
“ ‘Oh, no!’
“ ‘Perhaps not with your tongue, my dear Watson, but certainly with your eyebrows. So when I saw you throw down your paper and enter upon a train of thought, I was very happy to have the opportunity of reading it off, and eventually of breaking into it, as a proof that I had been in rapport with you.’
“But I was still far from satisfied. ‘In the example which you read to me,’ said I, ‘the reasoner drew his conclusions from the actions of the man whom he observed. If I remember right, he stumbled over a heap of stones, looked up at the stars, and so on. But I have been seated quietly in my chair, and what clues can I have given you?’
“ ‘You do yourself an injustice. The features are given to man as the means by which he shall express his emotions, and yours are faithful servants.’
“ ‘Do you mean to say that you read my train of thoughts from my features?’
“ ‘Your features, and especially your eyes. Perhaps you cannot yourself recall how your reverie commenced?’
“ ‘No, I cannot.’
“ ‘Then I will tell you. After throwing down your paper, which was the action which drew my attention to you, you sat for half a minute with a vacant expression. Then your eyes fixed themselves upon your newly framed picture of General Gordon, and I saw by the alteration in your face that a train of thought had been started. But it did not lead very far. Your eyes turned across to the unframed portrait of Henry Ward Beecher, which stands upon the top of your books. You then glanced up at the wall, and of course your meaning was obvious. You were thinking that if the portrait were framed it would just cover that bare space and correspond with Gordon’s picture over there.’
“ ‘You have followed me wonderfully!’ I exclaimed.
“ ‘So far I could hardly have gone astray. But now your thoughts went back to Beecher, and you looked hard across as if you were studying the character in his features. Then your eyes ceased to pucker, but you continued to look across, and your face was thoughtful. You were recalling the incidents of Beecher’s career. I was well aware that you could not do this without thinking of the mission which he undertook on behalf of the North at the time of the Civil War, for I remember you expressing your passionate indignation at the way in which he was received by the more turbulent of our people. You felt so strongly about it that I knew you could not think of Beecher without thinking of that also. When a moment later I saw your eyes wander away from the picture, I suspected that your mind had now turned to the Civil War, and when I observed that your lips set, your eyes sparkled, and your hands clinched, I was positive that you were indeed thinking of the gallantry which was shown by both sides in that desperate struggle. But then, again, your face grew sadder; you shook your head. You were dwelling upon the sadness and horror and useless waste of life. Your hand stole towards your own old wound, and a smile quivered on your lips, which showed me that the ridiculous side of this method of settling international questions had forced itself upon your mind. At this point I agreed with you that it was preposterous, and was glad to find that all my deductions had been correct.’
“ ‘Absolutely!’ said I. ‘And now that you have explained it I confess that I am as amazed as before.’
“ ‘It was very superficial, my dear Watson, I assure you. I should not have intruded it upon your attention had you not shown some incredulity the other day. But the evening has brought a breeze with it. What do you say to a ramble through London?’ ”
The astute reader will recognise the passages as lifted bodily from “The Cardboard Box.” Note the incongruities: It is a “close, rainy day in October.” “Parliament had risen.” “Everybody was out of town.” There was “a thermometer of 90.” It appears that the editor of the Newnes edition could not be bothered with a proper “paste job” when “The Cardboard Box” was suppressed. When “The Resident Patient” was reprinted in the 1928 John Murray edition of Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories, the passages from “The Cardboard Box” were omitted, and the two paragraphs were combined into the following:
“It had been a close, rainy day in October. ‘Unhealthy weather, Watson,’ said my friend. ‘But the evening has brought a breeze with it. What do you say to a ramble through London?’ ”
1“The Resident Patient” was published in the Strand Magazine in August 1893 and in Harper’s Weekly (New York) on August 12, 1893.
2Watson may here intend to point to A Study in Scarlet as a case in which, while “the facts have been of the most remarkable and dramatic character,” Holmes took little share. While it is true that Holmes made an immediate and brilliant identification of the murderer, the case was truly “solved” only by reason of Hope’s suicidal response to Holmes’s advertisement and subsequent full confession. Watson may have felt that he perhaps overstated Holmes’s credit in concluding that investigation.
3According to Greek mythology, Scylla and Charybdis (or Charibdis) were sea monsters who guarded the Strait of Messina. Once a beautiful maiden, Scylla was transformed (by either a jealous Circe or a jealous Amphritrite) into a sea monster with six heads, twelve feet, and loins made of baying dogs; she lived in a cave, snatching seamen from passing ships and devouring them. In Homer’s Odyssey, she ate six of Odysseus’s companions. Opposite Scylla dwelt Charybdis, a daughter of Poseidon who was turned into a whirlpool-like monster by Zeus for stealing Hercules’s cattle. To be caught between Scylla and Charybdis generally means to avoid one problem only to confront another, or, in more modern terms, to be caught “between a rock and a hard place.” Watson’s meaning here is a bit more benign, torn as he is between his impulses as a writer and his loyalties toward his friend.
4The second and third paragraphs of “The Resident Patient,” as they appear following, are the original text as it appeared in the Strand Magazine publication in 1893. See page 631 for a discussion of textual variations.
5Popular perception, encouraged in no small part by the acting of Nigel Bruce in numerous film depictions of Watson, is that the doctor himself has little or no powers of deductive reasoning and that he acts merely as a blank sounding board for Holmes. Here, Watson engages in a typical bit of self-deprecation, implying that he can do no more than attempt to mimic Holmes’s own superior skills. But this downplaying of Watson’s abilities is belied by many instances of acuity that occur throughout the Canon. Compare, for example, Watson’s fine deductions here with those in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” where Watson makes several deductions from the notepaper sent by “Count von Kramm” before Holmes voices his own; “The Five Orange Pips,” in which Watson quickly deduces the involvement of a seafaring man on the basis of the postmarks on the threats; The Sign of Four, where he is able to deduce, with only a little help from Holmes, that the killer entered through the roof; The Hound of the Baskervilles, where his conclusions about Dr. James Mortimer from his walking stick are close to Holmes’s own; “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” where he correctly assesses McCarthy’s fatal injuries; “Wisteria Lodge,” where Watson makes a series of accurate inferences about Scott Eccles. See especially The Hound of the Baskervilles, where Watson’s letters to Holmes are filled with keen observations and deductions, and where Holmes compliments Watson, saying “Our researches have evidently been running on parallel lines.”
6A “lesion” is an abnormal change in
structure of an organ or body part due to injury or disease. The subject of “nervous lesions”—that is, the relationship of nerves to disease—was little understood by Victorian medicine, and “obscure” in this context (and in Dr. Trevelyan’s article) presumably means “not readily understood.”
7Watson, too, attended the University of London, where he obtained his medical degree in 1878 (A Study in Scarlet).
8A person suffering from catalepsy would experience a sudden rigidity of muscles, such that his or her limbs would remain fixed in whatever position they were placed. Catalepsy tends to be a symptom of various clinical disorders such as epilepsy and schizophrenia.
Many authors writing in the nineteenth century used the striking effects of catalepsy in their fiction (perhaps, as suggested in a 2000 Journal of the History of the Neurosciences article, as a stand-in for epilepsy) to dramatic effect. In Alfred Tennyson’s 1847 poem “The Princess,” the narrator, diagnosed with catalepsy, confesses to having “weird seizures” in which “I seem’d to move among a world of ghosts, / And feel myself the shadow of a dream.” The cataleptic narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial” (1850) enters frequently into a state “without pain, without ability to stir, or, strictly speaking, to think, but with a dull lethargic consciousness of life.” Terrified that he will be buried alive during one of his attacks, Poe’s narrator alerts his friends not to bury him until he has begun to decompose; arranges for the family tomb to contain ample food, water, and a door that can opened from the inside; and designs for himself a “warmly and softly padded” coffin with a spring-loaded lid. For all that, the narrator, while away from home on a trip, is buried alive anyway, as is Poe’s similarly cataleptic Madeline in The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). And the friendless, bitter title character of George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861), standing at his doorway, loses an unspecified amount of time when he is struck “by the invisible wand of catalepsy, and stood like a graven image, with wide but sightless eyes, holding open his door, powerless to resist either the good or the evil that might enter there.”
9The area in and around Cavendish Square, notably Harley and Wimpole Streets, was known for housing the offices of some of London’s most exclusive medical practitioners. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Dr. Lanyon, a friend and colleague of Dr. Jekyll’s, lived and received patients on “Cavendish Square, that citadel of medicine.” Florence Nightingale served as superintendent of the Institute of Sick Governesses after its move to Harley Street in 1853; the Royal Society of Medicine has been headquartered at 1 Wimpole Street since 1912. Arthur Conan Doyle had offices at 2 Upper Wimpole Street from March to May 1891, while he attempted to establish a practice as an eye specialist.
10That would have been March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation; or the celebration of the angel Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that she would give birth to the son of God.
11Because a guinea is worth twenty-one shillings and there are twelve pence to a shilling, “five and threepence” is exactly one-quarter of a guinea.
12A comparison shared by the King of Bohemia in “A Scandal in Bohemia.”
13Dr. Trevelyan’s treatment of his cataleptic patient was certainly not the accepted approach, but neither was it completely unfounded. Amyl nitrite, a liquid generally inhaled in vapor form, actually has no reported effect on catalepsy but has been used mostly for the treatment of heart conditions.
In 1867, the Scottish physician Sir Thomas Lauder Brunton (1844–1916), who played a major rôle in establishing pharmacology as a science, discovered that amyl nitrite—by enlarging the blood vessels and increasing the heart rate—could relieve the pain of angina pectoris, or chest pain caused by lack of oxygen to the heart. It is this for which the drug has been traditionally prescribed. Yet an article entitled “On Catalepsy, with Cases. Treatment with High Temperature and Galvanism to Head,” published in July 1887 by Alex. Robertson, M.D., in the Journal of Mental Science, observed that constriction of the blood vessels was also a feature of catalepsy. Howard Brody argues that Dr. Trevelyan applied the amyl nitrite either as a result of reading that article or by reason of his own independent investigations. (Dr. Trevelyan’s contemporaries, reports the ninth edition of the Encyclopœdia Britannica, attempted to treat catalepsy not with medicine but by “obtain[ing] command of the patient’s will,” somehow preventing him or her through sheer force of mental persuasion not to enter the catalyptic state.)
Today, amyl nitrite—better known by its “street name” of poppers—tends to be used not for medical purposes but as a recreational drug favored by clubgoers who inhale it to induce a brief rush of energy. The drug is also thought to enhance sexual arousal. Amyl nitrite is currently banned in the United States, and it is allowable in the United Kingdom only when used by prescription.
14In “The Reigate Squires,” Holmes deceives the villains as well as Colonel Hayter with a simple “fit.” In “The Dying Detective,” Holmes displays his acting genius as he fakes “tapanuli fever” and near-death with elaborate symptoms.
15Inspector Lanner is never heard from again in the Canon.
16A part of a lock.
17The English Penal Act of 1877 allowed the term of sentence to be set by the judge. The sentence was subject to a remission of up to one-fourth of the sentence (exclusive of time spent in solitary confinement, usually the first nine months). This remission was earned by earnest labour, gauged by marks earned for each day’s work. For a five-year sentence, the maximum remission was one year and 23 days; in seven years, one year and 273 days; in fourteen years, three years and 181 days; in twenty years, four years and 86 days. “Lifers” could not claim any remission but their cases were reviewed at the end of twenty years.
“The Resident Patient” is generally thought to have occurred in 1887, although there is little agreement among the chronologists (see Chronological Table). If the gang members got fifteen-year sentences, it is not possible that the robbery occurred in 1875, as Holmes says, for the maximum remission permitted by law would be three years 271 days. This would place the sentencing of the gang in 1872 and the robbery in 1871. It is more likely that he was mistaken about the term of imprisonment rather than the date of the robbery, because the inspector does not contradict the date given. In 1875 Holmes was barely twenty-one, had not yet commenced his professional detective career, and may have been greatly impressed by the headlines given to the robbery.
THE GREEK INTERPRETER1
“The Greek Interpreter” is not one of Holmes’s most admirable performances, for he nearly loses his client and fails to prevent the murder of an innocent. However, as one of only two cases in which Holmes’s older brother Mycroft plays an active rôle (the other is “The Bruce-Partington Plans”), it is indispensable reading for a Sherlockian. Seven years Sherlock’s senior, Mycroft is the smarter, less active brother, who cannot be bothered to leave his armchair to deal with a problem. Described as “larger and stouter” than Sherlock, “corpulent,” with fat, flipper-like hands, Mycroft Holmes is said to be an auditor of some departments of the British government. In “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” however, when Sherlock Holmes has become more certain of Watson’s discretion, he reveals that Mycroft “occasionally . . . is the British government.” Some like to see Mycroft as a Victorian secret agent, the head of a British “Central Intelligence Agency.” Mycroft’s actions in this case, however, are not all logical, and some scholars speculate that he may have had his own nefarious “agenda” in the matter.
DURING MY LONG and intimate acquaintance with Mr. Sherlock Holmes I had never heard him refer to his relations, and hardly ever to his own early life. This reticence upon his part had increased the somewhat inhuman effect which he produced upon me, until sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was preeminent in intelligence. His aversion to women and his disinclination to form new friendships were both typical of h
is unemotional character, but not more so than his complete suppression of every reference to his own people. I had come to believe that he was an orphan with no relatives living; but one day, to my very great surprise, he began to talk to me about his brother.
It was after tea on a summer evening, and the conversation, which had roamed in a desultory, spasmodic fashion from golf clubs2 to the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic,3 came round at last to the question of atavism4 and hereditary aptitudes. The point under discussion was, how far any singular gift in an individual was due to his ancestry and how far to his own early training.
“In your own case,” said I, “from all that you have told me, it seems obvious that your faculty of observation and your peculiar facility for deduction are due to your own systematic training.”
“To some extent,” he answered thoughtfully. “My ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class.5 But, none the less, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet,6 the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”
Mycroft Holmes.
Sidney Paget, Strand Magazine, 1893
“But how do you know that it is hereditary?”
“Because my brother Mycroft possesses it in a larger degree than I do.”
This was news to me indeed.7 If there were another man with such singular powers in England, how was it that neither police nor public had heard of him? I put the question, with a hint that it was my companion’s modesty which made him acknowledge his brother as his superior. Holmes laughed at my suggestion.
“My dear Watson,” said he, “I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers. When I say, therefore, that Mycroft has better powers of observation than I, you may take it that I am speaking the exact and literal truth.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 1) (The Annotated Books) Page 83
