by June Thomson
The struggle between the two men was to assume the epic proportions of the primeval contest between the forces of good and evil, Holmes on the side of the forces of light locked in mortal combat with Moriarty who ‘had all the powers of darkness at his back’.
None of this was apparent to the casual observer. Outwardly, Moriarty was harmless, a respectable Professor of Mathematics from a provincial university, known only as the learned author of two brilliant but abstruse publications which had caused quite a stir in academic circles. Inspector MacDonald, who called on him after hearing of him from Holmes, found nothing suspicious about him. Indeed, he thought Moriarty would have made ‘a grand meenister with his thin face and grey hair and solemn way of talking’. In the opinion of MacDonald and his colleagues in the CID, Holmes had a bit of a bee in his bonnet over the man.
Holmes’ description of Moriarty, when he finally came face to face with him, is much less flattering. He was extremely tall and thin, Holmes tells Watson, with a high, white, domed forehead, sunken eyes and rounded shoulders from his years of study. Clean-shaven, pale and ascetic-looking, he had something of the professor in his features, although his habit of pushing his head forward and swinging it slowly from side to side gave him a repulsive, reptilian air. Holmes found his style of speech, which was soft and precise, more threatening than an overtly bullying manner.
During his interview with Moriarty, MacDonald was also impressed when, the conversation having turned to the subject of eclipses, the Professor was able, with the aid of a reflector lantern and a globe, to make ‘it all clear in a minute’, proof of Moriarty’s undoubted skill as a teacher.
But what MacDonald failed to take sufficient note of was the painting which hung behind the Professor’s desk. It was a portrait of a young girl by the French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze. A similar painting, entitled La Jeune Fille à l’Agneau, had fetched FF1,200,000, more than £4,000, at the Portalis sale in 1865.* How could the Professor afford to buy such a painting on his salary of £700 a year?
The answer was simple. Like Jonathan Wild† before him, Moriarty sold his own criminal expertise and that of his organisation for a commission, either on a promise of part of the spoils or as a down-payment for organising the crime before it was committed. In the Birlstone case, he had been paid by the Scowrers, an American secret society intent on destroying the power of the railway and colliery owners in Vermissa Valley in the States, to hunt down and organise the murder of Birdy Edwards, a.k.a. John McMurdo, a Pinkerton detective who had infiltrated the Scowrers and brought about their downfall. Using the alias John Douglas, Edwards had fled to England, where Moriarty’s organisation had traced his whereabouts. But the attempt on his life failed when Douglas killed his would-be murderer, Ted Baldwin, a former Scowrer member, in self-defence.
This case, a full-length account of which Watson later published under the title The Valley of Fear, was the first direct contact Holmes had with both the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, set up in the States by Allan Pinkerton in 1850,* and, more importantly, with Moriarty and his gang.
Douglas later disappeared overboard from the Palmyra when on his way to South Africa with his wife, after being acquitted of Baldwin’s murder. Holmes attributed Douglas’s death to Moriarty, convinced he had stage-managed the apparent accident in order not to appear to have failed in his commission. As Holmes remarks, ‘You can tell an old Master by the sweep of his brush. I can tell a Moriarty when I see one.’
Holmes’ comparison of Moriarty with Wild was apt. So, too, was his comment that, ‘The old wheel turns and the same spoke comes up again.’ It had all been done before and would be done again.
Moriarty’s methods, such as the use of the paid professional ‘hit-man’, the investment in overseas banks of illegal money and the iron discipline exerted over gang members, are those still used by contemporary criminals. Even Moriarty’s ploy of deliberately seating a person he was interviewing so that either the light from the window or the desk lamp fell directly on his face while his own features remained in shadow, is a stratagem still used by secret police the world over.
Holmes himself was looking into the future when, at the end of the Valley of Fear inquiry, he assures Cecil Barker, Douglas’s close friend and associate, that Moriarty can be beaten.
‘But you must give me time – you must give me time.’
It was to take Holmes another three years before that promise was fulfilled.
* Although Watson’s account was hardly noticed by the critics at the time, the annual itself was such a success that the publishers issued A Study in Scarlet in a separate edition in 1888.
* The Diogenes Club has been variously identified as the Athenaeum or the Travellers’, which were also situated in Pall Mall. However, both were established too early for Mycroft Holmes to have been a founder-member.
* Holmes himself was a good mathematician. While travelling down to Devon on the Silver Blaze inquiry, he was able to calculate in his head the speed of the train from the time it took to pass the telegraph posts which were set sixty yards apart.
* Bengalore is spelt Bangalore in some American editions. There is no such regiment as the First Bengalore Pioneers. Because of Colonel Moran’s subsequent criminal career, Watson has clearly changed the name in order not to bring shame on Moran’s former regiment.
* Holmes was mistaken over the name Portalis. In fact, it was the Pourtalès Gallery of Art, a private collection owned by the Comte de Pourtalès-Gorgier, which was sold at auction in 1865. The painting referred to by Holmes, entitled Innocence, which was bought by an anonymous buyer, was later proved to be a copy of the original by Greuze. It is at present in the Wallace Collection in London.
† Jonathan Wild (c. 1682–1725) was a master criminal who organised a gang of London thieves, setting up their robberies and charging a fifteen per cent commission on the sale of the proceeds of their thefts. He betrayed anyone who refused to co-operate with him to the authorities. He was hanged at Tyburn in 1725.
* Allan Pinkerton (1819–1884) was born in Glasgow. After emigrating to the States in 1842, he was appointed deputy sheriff of Cook County. Eight years later he set up his own detective agency. One of his detectives, James McParlan, infiltrated the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania (1873–6) and secured evidence which led to the break-up of this organisation of coal-miners, allegedly engaged in terrorism. This closely parallels John Douglas’s infiltration of the Scowrers.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MEETING AND PARTING
September 1888–March 1889
‘Love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true, cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest it bias my judgement.’
Holmes: The Sign of Four
In September 1888* Watson became involved with Holmes in a case which was to have an important effect on his future happiness, for it was during the course of the investigation that he met the young lady who was to become his wife.
She was Mary Morstan, who possibly was born and was certainly partly brought up in India where her father, Major Arthur Morstan, was serving in an Indian regiment. As her mother was dead and there were no relatives living in England, her father had sent her as a child to Edinburgh to be educated at a boarding-school. This may imply that she had at least one relation living in or near Edinburgh, perhaps an aunt with whom she may have spent the school holidays and whom she was later to visit on at least two occasions.
In the meantime, her father had been posted to the Andaman Islands, situated in the Bay of Bengal off the east coast of India, to assist Major John Sholto in guarding a convict settlement on Blair Island, one of the most southerly of the group.
In 1878, Major Morstan, having obtained twelve months’ leave, returned to England and sent a telegram to his daughter, asking her to meet him in London at the Langham Hotel. However, when Mary Morstan arrived there, she found her father had disappeared, leaving his luggage behind. Despite enquiries
on her part, nothing more was heard of him and his whereabouts remained a mystery.
Six years later, Mary Morstan, who had taken up the post of governess to Mrs Cecil Forrester’s family in Lower Camberwell, saw an advertisement in The Times, asking for her address and stating that, if she came forward, it would be to her advantage. On Mrs Forrester’s advice, she published her address in the newspaper and received through the post a parcel containing a valuable pearl, the first of six which were to be sent to her anonymously over the next five years.
And then, quite unexpectedly in September 1888, she received a letter telling her she had been wronged and asking her to meet her unknown correspondent that evening at seven o’clock outside the Lyceum Theatre. If she were at all doubtful, she could bring two friends with her but the police were not to be informed. Mrs Forrester who, as we have seen in Chapter Two, had been one of Holmes’ clients while he was living in Montague Street, further advised her to consult Holmes which Mary Morstan did, calling on him at Baker Street and laying the facts before him.
It was an intriguing account and Holmes agreed to accompany her on the mysterious assignation, suggesting that Watson came as well, an invitation which he eagerly accepted. For far more fascinating to him than her story was Miss Morstan herself.
He describes her in detail. She was a small, dainty, blue-eyed blonde and, although she was not exactly beautiful, everything about her struck him as charming, from her simple, yet tasteful dress sense to her amiable and sympathetic expression which indicated a sensitive personality. Of a sympathetic nature himself, he was touched by her outward composure which hid an intense inner distress and by the fact that she was alone in the world. She was twenty-seven, a ‘sweet age’, as Watson describes it, when a woman has lost the self-consciousness of youth and has matured through experience.
He himself was thirty-five or thirty-six and to all outward appearances a confirmed bachelor, content with his single life, spent almost entirely in Holmes’ company. During his eight years in Baker Street, the thought of marriage had not crossed his mind. Nor apparently had it occurred to him that he might resume his former medical career. As far as he was concerned, any such ambition had been cut short at the battle of Maiwand.
The meeting with Mary Morstan was to change all that. For him, it was a case of love at first sight, a coup de foudre, which altered his whole attitude and set him yearning for a very different future. But these were ‘dangerous thoughts’ which he dare not allow himself to contemplate. It is, however, highly significant that, as soon as Mary Morstan had left and he was alone, Watson went straight to his desk and ‘plunged furiously into the latest treatise on pathology’, the only record during those eight years of his reading any medical books.
Yet, despite this sudden interest in his former studies, it all seemed hopeless. Watson had enough common sense as well as honesty to realise that marriage to Mary Morstan was out of the question. Although the future without her seemed black indeed, it was far better to face reality like a man than deceive himself with ‘mere will o’ the wisps of the imagination’. As he himself realised, he was nothing more than a former army surgeon with, as he says, a weak leg and an even weaker bank balance. As for any hope of making a living as an author, this was so unlikely that Watson does not even mention it.
His chances seemed even more remote when, during the investigation, it was discovered that Mary Morstan’s father was dead and that she stood to inherit his half share in the Agra treasure, a fabulous collection of jewels estimated to be worth the huge sum of half a million pounds.
A more mercenary man would have welcomed the news. To Watson, it was yet another barrier between them. For how could he, a man living on a pension and with no immediate prospects of earning any more, propose to a woman who might become the richest heiress in England? His own sense of decency and self-respect prevented him from even considering it, despite the signs that Mary Morstan’s feelings for him were as warm as his towards her.
There is a touching scene of them standing in the dark in the desolate garden of Pondicherry Lodge, where Holmes’ enquiries had led them, and of Mary Morstan’s hand reaching out to grasp Watson’s as if she were turning to him instinctively for comfort and protection.
To Watson’s enormous relief, and also to hers, the chest said to contain the Agra treasure was later found to be empty, its contents having been thrown into the Thames by Jonathan Small, who had stolen the jewels in the first place and whom Holmes and Watson were pursuing up the river in an attempt to retrieve them. Watson was now free to propose marriage to Mary Morstan, who accepted him without any hesitation.
His choice of her as a wife was excellent. Mary Morstan was a quiet, sensible woman with a warm personality which, as Watson says, drew people in trouble to her as naturally as ‘birds to a lighthouse’. As a former governess, she was also used to living frugally and making the most of a little money, a necessary quality in the wife of a future GP who was to struggle to build up a neglected practice.
She was to create a happy and stable domestic background for Watson such as he had probably not experienced since his boyhood, so much of his adult life having been spent in student lodgings, army quarters or the bachelor apartment at Baker Street. Although he was content enough sharing digs with Holmes where he was well looked after by Mrs Hudson, it was not quite the same as having his own home and coming back to his own fireside.
Even Holmes remarked that Mary Morstan was one of the most charming young ladies he had ever met and added that, with her intelligence, she could have become a private consulting detective, a rare accolade indeed.
Knowing Holmes’ attitude to women and his strong aversion to marriage, Watson must have anticipated his old friend’s reaction when he told him of his engagement. Even so, he found Holmes’ response a little hurtful.
‘I really cannot congratulate you,’ Holmes remarked.
It was an honest reply if not exactly tactful, although Watson accepted it with good humour. He was wrong, however, in his assumption that the Sholto investigation would be the last in which he assisted Holmes.
The following month, October 1888,* he became involved with Holmes on a complex case which was to take him away from London and Mary Morstan for several weeks.* This was the inquiry into the death of Sir Charles Baskerville the previous June in the grounds of Baskerville Hall on Dartmoor. It was apparently connected with the family legend of a spectral hound which was said to haunt the moor and which, it was feared, might threaten the life of the young Sir Henry Baskerville, Sir Charles’s nephew and heir, when he arrived in Devon to take up residence at the ancestral home.
Some commentators, ignoring the references to the dating of this case, have assigned it to the late 1890s, on the grounds that Watson shows no signs of his game leg which had troubled him during the Sholto affair. Nor is there any mention in his account of the Baskerville inquiry of Mary Morstan, to whom he had become engaged only the previous month.
As we have seen, Watson states specifically that the wound to his leg only troubled him when there was a change in the weather and even then it did not prevent him from walking. Moreover, it seemed to affect him most when he was idle and he had time to think about the disability. When he was busy and his mind was occupied, he apparently forgot about it in much the same way as Holmes’ depression lifted when his energies were fully engaged. For example, during the Sign of Four case, Watson walked to Camberwell and back to visit Mary Morstan, a distance of some twelve or fourteen miles, without showing any apparent discomfort. This suggests that some of the symptoms may well have been psychosomatic.
As for his failure to mention Mary Morstan, this is perfectly understandable. It has already been pointed out that, as a narrator, Watson was far more concerned with chronicling Holmes’ exploits than in informing his readers of his own personal affairs. In addition, during much of the Baskerville case, Watson was left in charge of the enquiries, a responsibility he took very seriously. In his diary entry for 16th
October, he notes that he must devote all his energies to discovering the identity of the stranger seen on the moors who might be behind the mysterious chain of events threatening Sir Henry’s life.
He was regularly in touch with Holmes by post. Presumably his correspondence also included letters to Mary Morstan in Camberwell. But the main thrust of his narrative is to convey to his readers the dangerous nature of the investigation, not to indulge in an expression of his own private and more romantic feelings.
With the successful outcome of the Baskerville inquiry, Holmes and Watson returned to London where Holmes became involved in two further cases already referred to in Chapter Six, the scandal concerning Colonel Upwood and the Nonpareil Club and the defence of Mme Montpensier, accused of the apparent murder of her stepdaughter, Mlle Carère, who was found six months later alive in New York. It was also at about this time that Holmes successfully investigated the case of the Grosvenor Square furniture van, about which Watson gives no further details.
As he has left no written accounts of any of these, Watson may not have taken part in them. With typical modesty, he never assumed that Holmes would welcome his presence at every investigation and always waited to be invited to assist on a case. As we have seen in Chapter Six, he participated in about only a seventh of Holmes’ inquiries during this 1881–9 period. But he was certainly concerned with another scandal which at the time caused a great deal of gossip in high places.
The client was Lord St Simon, who called on Holmes under embarrassing circumstances. His American bride of a few hours had run away during the wedding reception and Lord St Simon wanted Holmes to discover her whereabouts as well as the reason for her sudden disappearance. Inspector Lestrade was also involved with the case and, much to Holmes’ amusement, ordered the Serpentine to be dragged after the bride’s wedding clothes were discovered floating in the water, wrongly assuming that Lady St Simon had been murdered by Flora Miller, a dancer and former mistress of his lordship.
