About three weeks after I received this queer communication, I was sitting up late one evening in my consulting-room. My wife was staying with her aunt. I was poring over the latest issues of the medical press when suddenly the door swung open and on the threshold there appeared a gaunt apparition that I recognised, after a few moments, as Sherlock Holmes. I was still staring dumbly in shock when he dropped to his hands and knees and scuttled at great speed across the floor to the window. Reaching up, he pulled the shutters together and bolted them.
‘Holmes!’ I cried. ‘What has happened? You look terrible!’
In truth I had never before seen my old friend so pale and haggard. His features were drawn and lined, so that he appeared prematurely aged, while the trembling of his limbs spoke eloquently of his exhaustion. He edged around my desk, inspecting the room warily. At last he dropped into a chair, shading his eyes from my lamp.
‘What is it, Holmes? Are you afraid of something?’
‘Of someone.’
‘But of whom?’
He squinted blearily at me.
‘Did you not get my letter? Was it intercepted, then?’
I stared at him fixedly.
‘Your letter?’
‘From Nîmes.’
‘Certainly I got it. But I fear I have no recollection of any of the persons you named. Is it they who are pursuing you?’
Holmes sighed. He drew a cigarette from his case, studied it for a moment, and then glanced up at me.
‘I see. No doubt I expected too much. Might I trouble you for a match? I must apologise for calling so late. A few pence will see the pantry window mended, and then I should have it barred before one of the light-fingered gentry avails himself of the same facility. Is Mrs Watson in?’
‘My wife is away on a visit.’
‘Indeed? You are alone, then? Yes, of course – the hatstand. You must forgive my obtusity. I have not slept more than a few minutes these fourteen days. I cannot rest. He will gain the upper hand if I rest. But I grow slow, Watson, and that too may be fatal.’
‘Look, Holmes, I don’t know what you are talking about, but I know a case of utter exhaustion when I see one. You cannot continue to expend your strength without allowing the organism to recuperate. Your will may carry you further than other men, but you are still human. You must sleep here tonight. We shall be alone, and I will stay up to see that no harm befalls you.’
Holmes shook his head sadly.
‘Your offer is most generous, Watson, but I must refuse. If you knew the nature of the threat I represent, you would not be so free with your hospitality. I am cursed, Watson! The house in which I lay my head is visited by evil in the night. But if you would help me tomorrow – would you be willing to accompany me to the Continent for a few days?’
‘To the Continent? But where are you going?’ He waved vaguely.
‘Going? I am not going anywhere. I am fleeing, Watson – fleeing for my life! We must go where he will not find us. Ha! He will find us wherever we go!’
I strained forward.
‘But of whom are you speaking, Holmes?’
He started.
‘Eh? Why, Professor Moriarty, of course!’
‘What? But Moriarty is dead!’
‘Dead, is he?’ screamed Holmes in a fit of fury. ‘Oh, very well! Whatever you like! Of course, it may prove necessary to redefine what you mean by dead, if the term is to be applied to people who can fire air-guns, wield knives, murder unfortunates, and drive the foremost criminal agent in Europe to the brink of nervous exhaustion!’
I was by now confused beyond measure.
‘But Holmes, you told me he was dead, did you not?’
‘I told you that I had been mistaken, that he had survived and was once more at large.’
‘You told me that? But when? Where?’
‘In my letter, man! In a cipher so elementary I thought even you might be able to fathom it. The Gloria Scott case, Watson! Every third word! Oh, no matter. The fact is that Moriarty has returned from the dead and is loose in the streets of London. It was he who killed that woman Coles, and he would have had more since then had I not prevented him. Again and again he strove to break away, but as often I headed him off. I tell you, my friend, that if a detailed account of these eight weeks past could be written, it would count as the most brilliant piece of thrust-and-parry work in the history of detection. It has left both of us desperate and exhausted men. There is no holding back now, no sense of fair play. There is only the instinct to destroy meeting its implacable opposite, and the first of us to give an inch is a dead man. It is him or me, Watson, by fair means or foul!’
For a long moment he was silent, his head resting wearily in his cupped hands. Then he roused himself once more, and looked up at me imploringly.
‘That is why I am here. God knows I have no wish to bring danger to your house, but I am left with no alternative. I need your help, Watson, and I need it desperately! Moriarty and I are so finely matched that it is an impasse between us. Your help, perhaps, will swing the matter in my favour. A week, Watson! No more than a week. Will you come? It will be like old times. Say you will come!’
There were tears in my eyes, and in my breast an indescribable conflict of emotions, as I fervently replied:
‘Old fellow, can you doubt it?’
He smiled, and lay back in the chair. A few minutes later his eyes were closed, the cigarette had dropped cold from his fingers, and he was asleep. I went to my dispensary and made up a mildly soporific solution, which I injected into Holmes’s forearm. My first thought was to ensure that his rest was unbroken. With the assistance of my cook – a muscular Irishwoman – I moved the unconscious Holmes upstairs, and laid him down on a bed in the spare room. Having seen that he was comfortable, I locked the door on the outside and returned downstairs. I then poured myself a large whisky, and tried to think what the devil I was to do.
I was under no illusions as to the gravity of the situation. The cipher in Holmes’s letter might have got by me, but his conversational code I could now read with ease. I knew whom he meant in naming Moriarty, and I understood perfectly the nature of the struggle taking place between himself and the Professor. If Holmes was mad, it was, as one might have expected, a methodical madness. His great mind was in ruins, but in those ruins life went on. Did he know what he had done? In some remaining enclave of sanity, was he aware of what he had become? So it seemed, and finding the madness too powerful to master, he had grappled with it in the darkness of his soul and thrown it out, and called it Moriarty. Everything he did and said had to be not merely observed but interpreted, as one interprets a charade. His words, which seemed a wild nightmare if literally understood, made only too clear a sense once one grasped that everything of which he spoke was taking place within the confines of his own brain.
No doubt in my heart I had always known that this moment must arrive. How else could I have found myself so clear-headed, so unamazed – so relieved almost – now that the storm had finally broken? It had been a close and sultry interlude, full of wishful thinking and cowardly self-deception. I had known all the time what had to be done. All my doubts and my evasions were only attempts to deny that grim knowledge. I had known that such things as I had witnessed in Miller’s Court do not heal themselves with fresh air and exercise. They have to be destroyed. I had known that since the 9th of November 1888, but how I had hoped it might not prove necessary. How I had hoped I might be spared! And now another woman lay murdered, and her blood was on my head as surely as if I had struck her down myself. I found my conduct thus far utterly contemptible, and I turned from it in disgust. I could not mend it, but I could at least put an end to my vacillation and act the man for once.
I trust that the reader, having patiently followed me so far, will not now give me up for lost when I confess that even at this eleventh hour I could not wholly convince myself of Holmes’s guilt. If I were one of our psychological novelists I could perhaps hope to convey the subtle
shadings of reservation and misgiving which mottled the almost solid certainty of my mind. As it is, I can only say that, for all I had, I needed yet one more piece of evidence; some final spark to ignite the mass of material I had laboriously gathered. For a time was coming when I must confront Holmes, look him in the eyes and tell him what I knew. Such was the man’s mastery over me of old, I was terribly afraid that at the last I might funk it. If I were to free myself for ever of his influence, I needed some final irrefutable proof of what he had become, so that I could go forth with furious dispassion and do what had to be done.
I fetched my coat and hat, looked in on Holmes, who remained in a deep sleep, and then left the house. In the High Street I found a cab, which set me down some fifteen minutes later outside 221 Baker Street. I had removed Holmes’s keychain before leaving, and a minute later I was standing in the familiar front room. Nothing seemed to have changed, except that the disorder was even more marked than I remembered it. The floor was virtually impassable for mounds of newspaper. Drawers hung open and overflowing, and every horizontal surface supported an assortment of objects in fantastic juxtaposition. I stood for a full five minutes, gazing at this scene with a sinking heart, and then I took off my coat and set to work. It took me almost four hours to complete my search, but by then I had turned out and sifted through every article in those rooms, and I had found nothing one might not reasonably expect to find in the chambers of a gentleman of eccentric tastes. I certainly had not found that final damning proof I longed for – and dreaded. I collapsed despondently in Holmes’s velvet-lined chair and lit a cigarette. It was four o’clock in the morning. In a few hours Holmes would wake. Then what? Could I let him go, knowing what I did? Could I do otherwise, knowing no more? Unconsciously I had risen from my chair and started to pace the floor, as Holmes would when his mind was working on a problem. At length, tiring of picking a path through the piles of newsprint, I stopped in front of the tall windows and stared out at the bleak canyon of Baker Street, and up at the dark sky where all too soon the first shimmer of dawn would appear.
The truth struck me all at once. One moment I stood gazing aimlessly out of the window, the next I was rummaging furiously through the contents of Holmes’s desk. I soon found the small leather case I was looking for. With it concealed under my coat I quietly left the house, walked up to the corner, and turned into Blandford Street. I looked around to ensure that I was not observed before slipping into the mews. I passed the first house and stopped by the wooden gate giving into the yard of the second. It was unlocked. I passed through. The windows of the property were dark and curtainless. The back door was locked. I got out the case, which contained Holmes’s house-breaking tools. I had studied my friend’s methods on several occasions when he had deemed it necessary to enter a building without the consent of the owner, and although the finer points of the art were lost on me I could force a door as well as any man. In a minute I was standing in a bare passage, whose peeling paper and damp odour told of a long period of disuse and neglect. I lit the dark lantern which was another feature of the burglary kit, and began my search.
The house was in every respect the opposite of Number 221, which it faced across Baker Street. This even extended to the condition of the rooms, which – save one – were all bare and empty. The sole exception was the first-floor bedroom, at the rear of the premises. This was fully but simply furnished: a bed, a wardrobe, a wash-stand, a chest of drawers. Like Holmes’s room at 221B, to which it corresponded, it also contained a tin chest filled with papers and mementoes. The papers were of two sorts. First, there were cuttings from the press reports of the Whitechapel murders. These were stuffed into cardboard boxes. The texts were heavily underscored in parts, and sprinkled with marginal comments and exclamation marks. There were also several bundles of handwritten papers in the chest, tied up neatly with red tape. At first sight these looked exactly like the records of past cases which Holmes kept in the chest in his room. But these were records of a very different kind: exhaustive, graphic, gloating accounts of each of the Whitechapel murders, written by the murderer. I burned the papers later, for they were not fit to be read, but I kept back one sheet which will serve to give the flavour of the collection. It was a sort of index, written in the bold coarse hand whose letters had popularised the name of Jack the Ripper, and it ran as follows:
Curriculum Mortis
Hors d’oeuvre – Martha Tabram. A saucy little stabbing in the George Yard Buildings dont go away it gets better 7 August 88
1 Mary Ann Nicholls – the first work to show the power of the masters hand SLASHING CLEAN THREW HER BLOOMIN THROTE now Jack’s work is done the pubs lost its pun*
August 31st
2 Annie Chapman (she told me Sivvey) – a highly polished performance polished her off ha ha! Sliced her very nicely from her hot spot to her dugs 8th of September 1888 R.I.P. ha ha
A double treat!
3 Elizabeth Stride. Just had the big bitch pinned when the Philistine Jew has to come by and ruin all the beauty of it ah but
4 Catherine Eddowes – soaring free above the foul unfettered finding killing and utterly gutting the pigbag motherscum RIPRIPRIPRIPRIPRIPRIPRIPRIPRIPRIPRIP
And that’s the long and the short of it say old Boss did you ever think it Mitre been them Masons? The thirtieth of September in this fear of our bawds 1888
5 Mary Jane Kelly
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
9 November lady marys day
op. post. Frances Coles.
Old mother Coles
Was the first of the souls
To be chived since he rose from the dead
Her throat’s cut so fine
You can tickle her spine
And play skittle-ball with her head
13 February 1891 unlucky for some
At the bottom of the chest, when I had removed all the papers, I found a small wooden box and three glass vessels. The box contained a quantity of cheap jewellery, several locks of hair, a scrap of cloth, part of a broken mirror, a candle stub, two farthings, some matches, and a human tooth. The glass vessels were of the kind used in hospitals to retain organs for examination. They were filled with a colourless fluid, and wax-sealed. The first two I looked at held various abdominal organs. Amongst the contents I recognised part of a liver, a section of duodenum, a kidney, and a short length of urethra. The last jar –
(I broke off here, hoping I might omit this final obscene detail. But I am persuaded that without it my subsequent behaviour may not be fully understood.)
The last jar contained portions of a uterus, together with a foetus of some twelve or fourteen weeks’ growth. A paper label bearing six lines of writing was pasted to the glass.
Once in royal Victoria’s city
stood a lowly courtyard shed
Where a Mother took a stranger
He took her, and now she’s dead:
Kelly was that Mother wild
In this jar her little child.
It would be no undue exaggeration to say that those six lines sealed Holmes’s fate. I had asked for some proof so gross and blatant that our friendship would be dissolved as if in acid, leaving me free to destroy a stranger and a murderer. Here was my proof, and its effect was everything I had asked for – and more. Strictly speaking I could have washed my hands of the business there and then. I had only to call Lestrade and show him what I had found, and then to take him to my house and give Holmes over into his keeping. But it was too late for such half-measures. If I had discovered just the papers and the jars, without that jeering verse, I might have been content to play Judas. But I was personally involved now. The abomination Holmes had become threatened everything I hold dear and by which I have lived my life. The last thing I wished was to see such filth besmirch for ever the image of a man whom others besides myself had come to regard as among the best and the wisest England had produced. It would have been a terrible and damaging blow to the moral fibre of the entire nation if She
rlock Holmes had been identified in open court as the author of those lines. My legal duty gave way before a sense of obligation to my country and to the great ideal of enlightened rationalism which Holmes himself personified. If the events of the next ten days revealed a Watson whose existence no one – least of all myself – had previously suspected, the cause may be traced directly to that scrap of demonic doggerel.
I let myself out of that house, which Holmes had pointed out to me long before as Moriarty’s lair, shortly before five o’clock. I felt strangely calm and deliberate, but also elated. The morning air seemed to have been wafted straight from some mountain peak. I inhaled it gratefully as the cab jingled me home through the awakening city. How singular, I thought, that dull stolid uninspiring John Watson should have been selected as the instrument of fate!
My first task on returning home was to replace Holmes’s keys. He was still sleeping, and I took the opportunity to search his clothes for weapons and drugs. I found neither. His only possessions, besides the keychain, were a little money, his cigarettes, a ham sandwich wrapped in paper, and a small horn snuffbox. Having satisfied myself on this point, I relocked the bedroom door and made my way downstairs, where I wrote two letters. The first was a short personal note to my wife, containing as much of the truth as I thought she should know. The other was a detailed communication addressed to Inspector Lestrade. Although I was determined to settle the account with Holmes myself, I was not foolhardy enough to assume I would necessarily be successful. My own life I was prepared to hazard, but I could not permit Holmes to go free if I failed. I therefore told Lestrade what had happened, and what I had found, and what I was attempting, and hinted broadly that if I were to die as the result of an accident in the next few weeks, the circumstances might well bear looking into. This letter I sealed in an envelope addressed to my bank manager, instructing him to forward the contents on the 8th of May. When the maid appeared to lay the fire, I gave her the letter with instructions to put it in the post that morning without fail. I then sent her off to pack some necessities in a small case.
The Last Sherlock Holmes Story Page 16
