“A toast to our success,” Irene said, lifting her wine glass.
“At what?” I wondered.
“At whatever we elect to do,” Godfrey said.
I should have known better than to expect logic from them.
I hoisted my Vichy water as Casanova began cawing, “Cut the cackle” by the window. Lucifer turned his head and tumbled soundlessly to the floor. Then a low black shadow was sidling along the carpet toward the cage.
Irene paused for attention, looking as pleased as Lucifer.
“And,” she said, theatrically lifting her voice as well as her wineglass, “I do believe we owe the past one last bow. A toast, my dears: Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes—wherever you are.”
NEXT . . .
CODA
The foregoing collation integrates the diaries of Penelope Huxleigh, recently (and ironically) found in an abandoned safe-deposit box at a Shropshire bank, with fragments of previously unknown writings attributed to John H. Watson, M.D.
Alert readers will notice discrepancies between this work and the story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” first published in the July 1891 issue of the Strand magazine of London. That purported “fiction” was written by the same Dr. Watson who chronicled other exploits of Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective.
These Holmes tales—a century after their creation— stand as sacred cows to many, who regard them as not only literal truth but unbiased reportage. To such enthusiasts, any objective re-evaluation of such sanctified bovine conventions raises a red flag: it is viewed as an attack on the “Canon.”
True Holmes fanatics occupy two equally ridiculous camps: one holds that the tales as written by a historical Dr. Watson comprise authentic Victoriana and therefore cannot be challenged as to full candor or veracity; the other, even more extreme camp avers that a Scottish medical man of Irish antecedents, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, authored these pieces as pure fiction. This is patently ludicrous.
More sensible students conducting post mortems on the Sherlock Holmes literary corpus agree that Doyle merely acted as literary agent for the actual, retiring—if not completely anonymous—Dr. Watson.
Now new evidence offers an opportunity to put the Holmes As Literary Invention theory on its ear, where it rightfully belongs. The Huxleigh diaries prove that Irene Adler, at least, was no fiction and thus lend credence to the actual existence of Holmes, Watson et al. The foregoing collation also supports a new and startling revelation: that, whatever its origin, some authentic Holmes material was suppressed.
These new-found fragments, integrated with the Huxleigh accounts, make superior chronological and narrative sense of many discrepancies in the so-called Canon, the very inconsistencies that fuel the arguments of those who would debunk Holmes, his cases and his contemporaries as mere fictional creations.
Literary suppression—particularly of memoirs—was all too common in nineteenth-century England. Consider Richard Burton (the other one, an explorer and translator of “The Arabian Nights”), whose unpublished writings were burned on his death by his prudish (Victorians would have said prudent) widow.
Similarly, witness the long loss to history of the Huxleigh account with its frank and surprising depiction of a liberated American woman in Victorian England. It differs significantly from the then-dominant male view, evident even in the Holmes stories, in which women swooned with “brain fever” at the first sign of crisis.
As Dr. Watson observes in a rediscovered Holmes text, “Irene Adler did not swoon.” Exactly! And exactly why her unexpurgated adventures were suppressed—certainly through the modesty of her chronicler and later by other “judges” of their suitability for publication.
We will never know the diaries’ full history; the principals are long since dead, though Holmes fanatics persist in granting their hero immortality, as if actuality were not enough. No such claque avers the same for Irene Adler, another symptom of surviving male chauvinism in the worlds of history and letters, if not fiction.
Understandably, Irene Adler’s strong sense of personal liberty would have been scandalous in her day—the men’s “walking clothes” and cigarettes, her theatrical profession and excursions into problem solving if not crime solving— but the Huxleigh diaries contradict Watson’s assertion in “A Scandal in Bohemia” that Adler was sexually promiscuous (an “adventuress... of dubious and questionable memory”).
The Huxleigh accounts testify that Irene Adler was not one of the socially ambitious, sexually pragmatic women then labeled adventuresses. Though Penelope Huxleigh remains reticent on the issue of Adler’s past, the opera singer—during her years with the parson’s daughter, through her liaison with the King of Bohemia and up to her marriage to Godfrey Norton—avoided compromise in fact if not in appearance.
Cynics might argue that Irene Adler was unchaperoned in Bohemia, but Adler herself tells Penelope that the King has been “patient.” Indeed, his fury at her defection smacks more of a forever-frustrated suitor than of a man losing a mistress.
Another discrepancy exists: the Huxleigh account shows Holmes visiting Godfrey Norton’s chambers twice, yet the detective appears to know nothing of Norton (and the Zone of Diamonds) in “A Scandal in Bohemia.”
Two possibilities occur: Holmes kept his fruitless pursuit of the Zone from Watson, not wishing to appear fallible in his chronicler’s eyes, or... Watson himself suppressed the Master’s significant failure in that regard, especially since Holmes failed to acquire the photograph that was his immediate object in the story as it stands.
Losing two elusive objects would have been more than even Holmes’s reputation could have survived.
The new material only clouds the matter of Watson’s marriage—to whom, how many times and when. Here he clearly was wed by March of 1888. Citations in the Doyle/Watson material confirm this, although they also have Watson not meeting Mary Morstan until July of that year. This leads some foolish apologists to assign Watson two wives during his association with Holmes. The truth remains elusive, as does much involving this controversial figure and his biographer.
Another minor inconsistency persists, even in the face of the Huxleigh revelations.
In “A Scandal in Bohemia” the King claims that he met Irene Adler in Warsaw five years earlier. The Huxleigh papers show Adler meeting the King in 1886 and fleeing Bohemia in 1887, only a year prior to March 1888, when Watson dates “A Scandal in Bohemia” as occurring.
Two possibilities explain the time discrepancy. Could not the Doyle/Watson stories, though true, have been partially “fictionalized” to protect famous persons of the day? Thus dates may have been manipulated. Before the discovery of the Huxleigh diaries, some so-called Holmes scholars insisted that “Irene Adler” was a fictionalized version of the day’s notorious mistress/actress, Lillie Langtry, known as the “Jersey Lily” for her birth on the Channel island of Jersey. (Hence, these deluded analysts would have it, Adler’s American birth in “New Jersey.”)
These self-appointed “experts” even question the King of Bohemia’s identity, suggesting that the elderly Franz Josef, then ruler of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire of which Bohemia was a province, was officially “King of Bohemia.” They fail to mention that he never used the title.
No. The King of Bohemia was Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein.
The notion that he was anyone other—a notion aided and abetted by the chaotic dissolution of these Slavic-Germanic ruling families in the upheavals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that eventually occasioned World War I—only demonstrates how overeager Holmes addicts can stretch skimpy evidence into full-blown assertion.
Yet the chronological question remains: When did Irene Adler meet the King? Facts favor the Huxleigh timetable’s biographical consistency and meticulous revelation of character.
For Irene Adler to have loved and lost the King of Bohemia some five years before his forthcoming marriage, to have kept the incriminating photograph for so long and then th
reatened to produce it to ruin his nuptials (and an innocent woman’s happiness) doesn’t fit the admirable woman depicted in both “Scandal” and the Huxleigh diaries. (In the diaries she never threatens to release the photograph; the King’s own guilt causes his insecurity.)
Why should Irene Adler have waited until the royal marriage loomed when she could have damaged the King’s marriageability earlier—when their association and her indignation was fresher? And why fear his acting against her unless their liaison had ended recently enough for the King to attempt to regain her—or the photograph?
“It won’t wash, Watson!” Holmes would have said, and so says logic.
The most reasonable conclusion is that the King of Bohemia misrepresented to Holmes the date of his first meeting Adler, in order to excuse his behavior as a youthful indiscretion and to represent his “cruelly wronged” opponent as vengeful and thus win Holmes’s sympathy. (Otherwise his Majesty would have looked like a disgruntled suitor and a bully toward women, as he certainly appears to unflattering effect in the Huxleigh account.)
Given Adler’s parallel activities to the Great Detective and her own documented puzzle-solving proclivities, a greater question teases all Holmes adherents, whether they subscribe to the silly “fiction” notion or accept the historicity of these individuals. Did Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes ever meet again?
This question stands apart from the obvious fantasies indulged in by such noted Holmes experts of times past as William S. Baring-Gould, who fabricated not only a future meeting between Adler and Holmes, but a love affair resulting in a son! To accomplish this miracle of self-delusion, Baring-Gould had to defame Godfrey Norton as a worthless wife-beater, a characterization that the Huxleigh diaries hardly support nor does it do Irene Adler justice.
Yet it is not impossible that these two inventive individuals’ paths should have crossed again. Further volumes of the parson’s daughter’s diaries remain to be collated with the Holmes Canon and its lost fragments—and presented, if research confirms their veracity, to a waiting world.
Fiona Witherspoon, Ph. D., A. I. A.*
November 5,1989
*Advocates of Irene Adler
Below is Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes short story introducing Irene Adler. British spellings are used.
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA
by
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. He was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and occupied his immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation in following out those clues, and clearing up those mysteries which had been abandoned as hopeless by the official police. From time to time I heard some vague account of his doings: of his summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder, of his clearing up of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee, and finally of the mission which he had accomplished so delicately and successfully for the reigning family of Holland. Beyond these signs of his activity, however, which I merely shared with all the readers of the daily press, I knew little of my former friend and companion.
One night—it was on the twentieth of March, 1888—I was returning from a journey to a patient ( for I had now returned to civil practice ), when my way led me through Baker Street. As I passed the well-remembered door, which must always be associated in my mind with my wooing, and with the dark incidents of the Study in Scarlet, I was seized with a keen desire to see Holmes again, and to know how he was employing his extraordinary powers. His rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw his tall, spare figure pass twice in a dark silhouette against the blind. He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped behind him. To me, who knew his every mood and habit, his attitude and manner told their own story. He was at work again. He had risen out of his drug-created dreams and was hot upon the scent of some new problem. I rang the bell and was shown up to the chamber which had formerly been in part my own.
His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to see me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved me to an armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a gasogene in the corner. Then he stood before the fire and looked me over in his singular introspective fashion.
“Wedlock suits you,” he remarked. I think, Watson, that you have put on seven and a half pounds since I saw you.”
“Seven!” I answered.
“Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more, I fancy, Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not tell me that you intended to go into harness.”
“Then, how do you know?”
“I see it, I deduce it. How do I know that you have been getting yourself very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless servant girl?”
“My dear Holmes,” said I, “this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true that I had a country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I have changed my clothes I can’t imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice, but there, again, I fail to see how you work it out.”
He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together.
“It is simplicity itself,” said he; “my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession.”
I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction. “When I hear you give your reasons,” I remarked, “the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours.”
“Quite so,” he answered, lighting a cigarette, and t
hrowing himself down into an armchair. “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room.”
“Frequently.”
“How often?
“Well, some hundreds of times.”
“Then how many are there?”
“How many? I don’t know.”
“Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed. By the way, since you are interested in these little problems, and since you are good enough to chronicle one or two of my trifling experiences, you may be interested in this.” He threw over a sheet of thick, pink-tinted note-paper which had been lying open upon the table. “It came by the last post,” said he. “Read it aloud.”
The note was undated, and without either signature or address.
“There will call upon you to-night, at a quarter to eight o’clock [it said], a gentleman who desires to consult you upon a matter of the very deepest moment. Your recent services to one of the royal houses of Europe have shown that you are one who may safely be trusted with matters which are of an importance which can hardly be exaggerated. This account of you we have from all quarters received. Be in your chamber then at that hour, and do not take it amiss if your visitor wear a mask.”
“This is indeed a mystery,” I remarked. “What do you imagine that it means?”
“I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. But the note itself. What do you deduce from it?”
I carefully examined the writing, and the paper upon which it was written.
Good Night, Mr. Holmes (A Novel of Suspense featuring Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes) Page 36
