The crackling fire might easily have been heating up his ire as well as the room.
“But it bloody well did happen here!” he cried. “There’s not much else to describe. It’s all too simple; you yourself said to dress up the ruddy action.”
Ignoring his crudities, I arched the fingers of my right hand on the foolscap. “Of course, you must engage your reader, my dear boy. But not at the expense of truth. Truth!” I waved my arms at the four walls around us as I spoke the holy word. “Truth! Where is the waiting room that you described in your story? And how did a door so magically appear beside the window alcove when in reality there is none?”
“I needed a way of getting Holmes and his effigy in and out of the bow,” he proclaimed, holding his head high.
“But in actuality there was no effigy.”
“There was in your bloody story, ‘The Empty House.’”
I winced at his language, but he stood his ground. No apologies here, I noted as he ran his fingers through his sleek black hair.
“Yes, Billy,” I said slowly, hoping to appease him. “There is indeed an effigy in that account. And I do appreciate your research - Dulwich is training you well. But there was an actual effigy in the true story. You cannot willy-nilly appropriate the material from one history and place it in another wherever you choose.”
“What about your silly snake in “The Speckled Band”? No real snake can climb a bell rope.”
“But it did, Billy. It really did. You must draw a distinction between what you merely imagine and what is real.”
Suddenly, as if he was found out, Billy’s shoulders sagged, and he lost his defiant pose. It was a reaction I’d seen many young writers exhibit at one point or another when confronted with realistic assessments of their so-called “art.”
From somewhere deep inside, however, Billy found the courage to ask, “Is there nothing of merit in my work?”
“Of course, Billy.” Fearing I might have been too harsh in my approach, I began anew. “I like your detail at the start - ‘the scientific charts on the wall, the acid-charred bench of chemicals, the violin case leaning in the corner... the baggy parasol.’ You’re good at noting the fine points; offer your readers more. And I especially like your use of the vernacular - words like ‘split’ and ‘peached.’ The more such slang you attribute to the persons who use it, the more convincing your writing shall be. Your dialogue rings true. You have a wonderful ear for accurately reproducing how people speak - the criminal class in particular. Really, lad, you write very well. Just remember to be credible, honest, real and baffling all at the same time.” I was overstating the case a trifle. “Relax,” I cautioned, “and it will come. You have talent, lad. I can tell.”
A faint smile began forming on Billy’s lips. “My classics master, Mr. Hose, will be pleased,” he said.
“But what I like most, young man,” I said, pointing to two distinct passages in his manuscript, “is the insight you’ve displayed regarding our common friend, Mr. Holmes. In the three months you’ve been here, you rightly profess - as you yourself put it - to know his ‘ways by now.’ And thanks to that understanding, you perceptively write that Billy the page has ‘helped a little to fill up the gaps of loneliness and isolation which surrounded Holmes.’ Indeed, one can only hope that you are correct.”
Obviously pleased with the complimentary aspects of the review, Billy took the papers from me and knocked on Holmes’ door to inform him that the writing seminar had ended. “Maybe someday I’ll compose a list of your rules,” Billy said to me before marching downstairs to fetch our tea. ‘Dr. Watson’s Notes on Writing the Mystery Story’ I could call it.”
“Billy’s a natural writer,” I told Sherlock Holmes upon his return to the sitting room. “He has an extraordinary ability to record people’s speech, a keen sense of detail, and excellent insight into human nature. I imagine that living with his mother has given him a greater sense of maturity than that of other schoolboys his age.”
“And you called me a psychologist,” Holmes said with a laugh.
Ignoring my friend’s mocking tone, I persisted. “The lad needs practice. He needs more experience in writing; he needs more experience in life. Eventually, he must discover who he is and what he wants to write about. It’s all up to Billy. He has to trust his natural abilities. One can only wonder where his compositional instincts will take him.”
“Good old Watson,” Holmes said, “a teacher till the end.”
Despite the gloom outside, I enjoyed my tea that afternoon before the dancing fire.
III
The only salvation for a writer is to write.
- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
The next few months were bittersweet for Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps it was my fault, my inattentiveness - some might call it my abandonment of the man - which cost the world the services of so astute a consulting detective. Perhaps it was Holmes’ desire for tranquillity. Whatever the precise cause, in the late summer of 1903, not long after the Mazarin Stone episode, he decided to give up his familiar rooms in Baker Street and retire. Regardless of how pleased his actions may have made the criminal elements, Holmes had been harbouring other plans for quite a while. As my readers have already come to learn, he moved to a small cottage in the South Downs where he hoped to realize his lifelong ambition: the maintenance, study, and documentation of a colony of bees with particular emphasis on the queen.
Holmes’ departure from London affected many of us. I, for one, found myself spending more time at home with my wife while Mrs. Hudson, who ultimately would become Holmes’ housekeeper in Sussex, had to seek new boarders at 221. Young Billy, upon discovering that his current school work required more attention than the previous year’s curriculum, realized that he could return to full-time studies at Dulwich with a clear conscience and a new sense of self-confidence.
I would like to believe that Billy’s writing experiences at Baker Street helped cultivate his commitment to the Classics. And yet, as I learned in an exchange of letters the following year, he had shifted - or, rather, had been forced to shift - his academic focus once more. Since his Uncle Ernest was footing the bill for the boy’s education, Uncle Ernest could insist that Billy confine his attention to the Modern Side, the course of study that would prepare him for the world of business, rather than to the Classics, whose study - at least, according to Uncle Ernest - simply immersed its devotees in the impractical world of belles-lettres. Worse, Uncle Ernest was pressuring his nephew into leaving school entirely in order to learn the major mercantile languages of the Continent. Such knowledge would enable the lad to take up a trade, an accomplishment Uncle Ernest hoped Billy would achieve as soon as possible so his nephew could begin supporting not only himself but also Billy’s mother.
Thus it came to pass in April of 1905 that the former page came round to Queen Anne Street to say good-bye. At the age of seventeen, he was abandoning Dulwich College and, with the blessings of his pragmatic uncle, going off to spend more than a year abroad, hoping to master the aspects of French and German that he would need in the commercial culture his uncle was forcing him to enter.
“I’ll miss our discussions on writing,” Billy said. His final words were, “Be sure to pass on my farewells to Mr. Holmes.”
Although Billy and I had no communication for the next two years, he did finally send me a letter that described his European venture and ultimate return to England. He had begun his stay in Paris at the Pension Marjollet at 27 Boulevard St. Michel, which, to be au courant, he insisted on calling ‘Boul’ Mich’. Not far from Notre Dame, his room was situated just above the Café Vachette, where Bohemians of all stripes would congregate. In a word, Billy’s pension placed him at the centre of the swirling artistic movements of Paris in the period people have come to call La Belle Époque. Although a traditionalist like me might be put off by the iconoclastic attit
udes of the modern French artists and authors of the time, I could at least recognize how a budding writer like Billy couldn’t ask for better stimulation than what he must have encountered on the Left Bank in the first decade of the twentieth century.
In Paris, Billy had taken classes to learn French. When he travelled to Germany, he studied with a tutor, an approach he much preferred. For a while, he lived in Munich and then near the Black Forest in picturesque Freiburg im Breisgau, and he further cultivated his German-language skills on side trips to Nuremberg and Vienna.
But inevitably the time for travel had to an end. In the spring of 1907, Billy, now almost twenty, returned to England, which he seemed finally ready to accept as his home. Apparently, the British side of his nature had triumphed. In May, the American-born lad passed the required interview with a detective from Scotland Yard, took the oath of allegiance to the Crown and became a naturalized British citizen. By June, having earned high marks during the six-days of civil service examinations he had sat for in English, foreign languages, and maths, he secured a position at the Admiralty. Boasting of his third-place finish in a field of six hundred, he seemed poised to start his life anew.
And yet not all had changed. Despite his official citizenship and his new occupation, he still found the way back to his ever-worrying mother. By this time, his grandmother, the so-called “tyrant,” had died; and Mrs. Chandler was living alone at 35 Mount Nod Road in Streatham some five miles south of central London. Billy decided to join his mother in her small, common house in a street full of small, common houses.
Even so, the winds of discontent were churning. Knowing Billy as Holmes and I did, we could have predicted that it wouldn’t take him long to grow restless. But just how restless was another question. After only a few months at the Admiralty, he was already regarding the daily train ride to Whitehall and the tedious and dreary routine of his work as intolerable. For half a year he held a job, which, despite his great success in his examinations, he regarded as a glorified clerkship. As Assistant Stores Officer in the Naval Stores Branch, he was charged with keeping account of the movement of naval supplies. Overseeing the relocation of military necessities like ammunition might seem exciting to some, but Billy hated his work. Worse, he hated having to tip his hat to so-called superiors and being ordered about by people he called “suburban nobodies.” He had his own life to live, his own career to shape; and neither included the British navy. Having inherited his mother’s defiant nature, he quit his position and moved on.
Strangely, Uncle Ernest seemed to accept Billy’s decision. Perhaps it was being coerced by his tyrannical mother into the role of solicitor that enabled Ernest to sympathize with his nephew. Whatever the reason, upon learning that Billy had severed ties with the Admiralty, Uncle Ernest remained true to his own practical nature. He recognized that with Billy out of work, he himself would need additional income, especially since he so enjoyed being a man of property. “A house in Forest Hill is a better investment than one in Streatham,” is how Billy says his uncle reacted to Billy’s news. Thus, Mrs. Chandler found herself in new digs, this time in a semi-detached house at 148 Devonshire Road in Forest Hill where Billy often joined her. The neighbourhood itself had a more village-like atmosphere than did working-class Streatham.
Perhaps young Billy had been a Bohemian from the start; perhaps his stay among the literati in Paris had struck a spark, or maybe the Siren song of writing was simply too great to withstand. Whatever the catalyst, Billy wound up finding himself a cheap room in a boarding house in Russell Square not far from the British Museum, the area of London called Bloomsbury that was only just then beginning to claim for itself the title of literary centre of the Empire.
At the same time, he wanted to share the news of his recent success. Hence, the letter he posted to me that, in addition to recounting his travels on the Continent and return to England, announced that he had secured a position as journalist with the Daily Express. It was thanks to my encouragement, Billy said, that he had hoped to become a writer, and here was the start. He even confessed to writing poetry. Admittedly composed in the bathroom, his first poem, entitled “The Unknown Love,” was published by Chambers’s Journal on 19 December 1908. To hear Billy tell it, most critics dismissed the piece. But in the long run, such criticism didn’t matter. Thanks to the appearance of the poem - along with his job at the Express - Billy’s literary career had officially begun.
* * *
Besides that last letter to me, as well as whatever of his publications I encountered in print, I heard nothing more of Billy the page until late one cold night in October of 1910.An intermittent rain had been washing the city. My wife and Mrs. Meeks, our housekeeper, had gone to bed, and I was reading the latest edition of a medical journal before a comforting fire when a loud rapping at our front door caused me to start. At first, I thought it was thunder, but the echoing rattle of the brass knocker convinced me that someone was actually pounding on the wooden door itself.
“Who’s there?” I demanded before drawing the bolt aside.
“Billy,” came the answer. “The page-boy from Baker Street, Dr. Watson.”
“Billy?” I questioned. I hadn’t laid eyes on him since he had left for the Continent some five years before. What could possibly bring him to my home so late at night?
Immediately, I threw open the door. Standing before me in what was now but a soft drizzle stood two men. Billy, with his wet black hair framing his face and his features leaner and older than I remembered, was literally holding up his slumping companion. Quite a picture they made, Billy in a buttoned dark mac; the other man, the one who needed the help to stand, sporting a red-plaid wool scarf and open black ulster over formal attire. But even more striking than the stranger’s shaky constitution was its vividness. He appeared a young man, yet his matted wet hair was snow white, and scars corrugated the left side of his face from just below his eye down to his chin. Whether his left eye remained partially closed due to the scarring or to his attenuated condition, it was difficult to tell. Standing in the rain as they were, the latter draped on Billy who was struggling to keep him upright, they presented a most dramatic tableau.
“Come in, come in,” I said, taking their coats and directing them into the sitting room with the fire crackling in the hearth.
“I’ll get some brandy,” I volunteered, but Billy shook me off.
“This is Terrence Leonard,” he said. “I just met him tonight, and I’m afraid he’s already had too much to drink. I found him lying in the street and didn’t know for certain what was wrong with him. I knew you lived nearby. So I took the liberty of bringing him here.”
A check of the stranger’s eyes and a whiff of his breath confirmed Billy’s diagnosis.
“You’re right,” I told Billy. “He’s simply drunk too much alcohol,”
“I thought that was the case, but one never knows. That’s why I wanted you to have a look at him, Doctor.”
“The women of the house are asleep,” I said. “I’ll make coffee. With plenty of sugar.”
I left to prepare the brew while Billy was arranging Terrence Leonard before the fire. Upon my return, Leonard’s white head was still drooping, but he would occasionally jerk it upright in an effort to stay alert.
Billy and I managed to get him to the dining room table, and soon we were all savouring the hot coffee and sampling the scones and jam I was able to find in the larder.
“How did you meet your inebriated friend?” I asked Billy.
“I was writing a story this evening for the Express,” he said. “At the Langham Hotel. Quite trivial, really - a social event - Lord Steynwood, the publisher, was celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday. My job was to note the important people who were there, describe what they were wearing, report any gossip I could overhear. I did my best though I’m not really interested in that sort of thing.”
I knew the type o
f piece he was referring to. Silly goings-on. And yet I must say that accounts of such events provided exactly the kind of seemingly insignificant information from which Holmes could often glean the most valuable facts.
“As I was leaving,” Billy continued, “a large motor-car - a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, actually - arrived to pick up two passengers, this gentleman here and his beautiful red-headed companion.”
Terrence Leonard opened his eyes. “My wife,” he intoned, then shut them again.
“With the chauffeur’s help, she entered the car, but Mr. Leonard stumbled as he climbed in, and the chauffeur couldn’t close the door because Mr. Leonard’s leg was hanging out. When the chauffeur opened the door wider, Mr. Leonard slipped off the seat cushion and fell to the pavement. Above the raised voices of nearby drivers and pedestrians, I clearly heard the woman, his wife, shout, ‘Take a cab!’Mrs. Leonard ordered the driver back into the car, and immediately thereafter, the Rolls drove off, leaving Mr. Leonard lying in the wet gutter.”
The poor man in question held up his cup, and I poured him more coffee.
“It was quite a scene, really,” Billy continued. “The rain had stopped, and the city was quite dark; but the empty roads were drenched enough to create reflecting images. Envision a black canvas full of shimmering lights and iridescent colours with Mr. Leonard here sprawled in the foreground.” Billy pondered this juxtaposition for a moment, then added, “Even the most beautiful of landscapes can in an instant devolve into the meanest of scenes.”
“My, my,” I observed. “A philosopher as well as a poet.”
“I had drunk too much, y’ see,” Leonard offered by way of explanation. He slurred many of his words and stammered as he spoke. “S-Sylvia - my wife - she wanted no more of me - I-I reckon I misspoke once too often at our dinner party - in the automobile I was drunk enough to have her throw me out.”
The Final Page of Baker Street Page 4
