Chapter Text
“John,” my wife said diffidently one evening in late summer, when we had been married about six months, “does Mr. Holmes have some reason to resent me?”
I had seen my friend Sherlock Holmes several times since my marriage, and assisted him on more than one case. But generally I had gone to him, or he had appeared on our doorstep without warning when Mary had already gone up to bed. Only twice had he consented to spend a social evening with the two of us.
His behavior on each occasion had been essentially irreproachable, but it was not without constraint, or a certain suppressed irritation of nerves—suppressed with energy and will, and a stranger might not have remarked it. But to me it was unmistakable, and in consequence my own manner probably lacked the natural ease and welcome I would have liked to offer my friend.
Indeed, I was aware that I could not have given a definite answer, as to which was the cause, and which the effect: my unease, or his constraint.
Be that as it may, he had just left us with a farewell whose geniality was a shade too marked, and we had gone upstairs to ready ourselves for bed.
I colored guiltily. “Resent you, Mary? What possible reason could he have?” Whatever Holmes may say, I am not an ill liar—not when it comes to strangers. But it goes against the grain with me to deceive the people I love.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly, as she sat brushing and plaiting her shining hair. “That’s why I asked you. If it is not me, then—then perhaps there has been some quarrel between the two of you?”
You and he only need more time to become better acquainted, was on the tip of my tongue. But I did not say it.
“You lived together a long time,” she said. “It is natural that he should be sorry to lose you. I would not be offended, or hold it against him, if you wished to confide in me.”
“It is nothing.”
I could see she knew I lied. It killed me, to see the disappointment come into her face. But what could I say, without involving another in my confession?
“John,” she said, more diffidently yet, “I—there is something I wish to ask you. I may ask you anything, may I not?”
“Of course, dear heart.”
“And you know that you may tell me anything, without fearing to lose one fraction, one atom of the love I bear you?”
My eyes stung. “I do.”
“Was there anything…please do not be offended. I would not distress you for the world. But you are troubled, and as your wife it is my place—I will not say right, for I would never force a confidence—and yet I should be so happy and proud to share your troubles, and to ease them if I can.”
I sat in terrible indecision, for I thought I knew what she would say. With her keen womanly intuition, she had divined the truth. The bitter irony was that my desire to tell her, could hardly be less than her desire to hear. Yet Holmes’s secrets were not mine to share. No, not even with her to whom I had pledged my whole soul.
“John, if there was anything in your friendship with Mr. Holmes, that perhaps the world would not understand—that perhaps might be dangerous to you, if it became generally known—I hope you know that I would never blame you for it—would never think there was anything to blame? That it would not alter my regard for you?”
Her agitation and timidity pierced my heart, and recalled to me my own inward struggle, before I spoke to Holmes of his dangerous dependence on cocaine. I had steeled myself for his scathing reply, or his cold silence, or his anger, and resolved to bear them for his sake.
I could not bear to make my wife regret her sweet courage.
“Mary,” I said in a low voice, “I will tell you something, and gladly—more than gladly—but I can never tell you all. For myself, I see that you have guessed that I have not always…”
I had to stop, and swallow, for it was not easy to say aloud. Her sincerity, I could not doubt—and yet she might believe it would not matter, and be mistaken. Insensibly, involuntarily, her view of me might change, even to her own dismay and self-reproach.
I had believed once that Holmes would always show me the same kindness and esteem as in the beginning. I would have sworn on any dear, pure, perfect thing in the world, that nothing could come between us, until depressed spirits and cocaine had actually done it.
Strange as it may seem, that very reflection decided me. I did not believe that anything essential in Holmes or myself had changed. No, the cause of our separation had been a gradual widening of the distance between us: the withdrawal of his confidence and sympathy, my fear of frankly confronting him with it, and his refusal to meet my frankness with his own.
I would not permit such a horror a second time. I would do anything, say anything, to keep the faith bright and living in Mary’s sweet face.
“You have guessed,” I said steadily, “that my inclinations are not entirely conventional. I have at times had passionate attachments to other men, of a kind English law does not sanction.”
She rose and swiftly came to me, taking my hand in both of hers, and sitting by me. “The law is unjust.” Her voice was firm, but I could feel the fine trembling of her fingers.
“I love you, Mary. You do not doubt that I love you? That I desire you?”
Her shoulders relaxed their tension. She had doubted. But she lifted my hand, and kissed it. “And I you, John. You are my husband. You are my world. I shall never love you any less.”
I caught her in my arms, and we clung to one another. “Thank you, Mary.”
At length, I continued more calmly. “In what concerns solely myself, I will always be glad to answer any questions you put to me. But as to who my companions have been, I must be silent forever. Mr. Holmes knows what I have just told you; but there has never been anything between us but friendship.” I hated the lie—hated it for all our sakes. But would not anything less have been a tacit acknowledgment, after what she had asked and I had answered?
“I understand. And all this—is there anything which is not entirely in the past?” She tried to speak lightly, but she could not hide from me that she was afraid of a negative, and gallantly pretending she would understand that too.
I took her face in my hands. “I cannot answer for whom I might admire at a safe distance, any more than you can. Did you think I didn’t notice you giving Dr. Anstruther the eye in his new brown suit yesterday?”
She blushed, but did not look entirely displeased that I knew her so well.
“But I promise you, Mary, that you may always be sure of my fidelity. I would never deceive you with anyone, man or woman.”
Her sensitive brow was yet a little furrowed, and her eyes a little troubled as she gazed upon me.
Would she have been easier in her mind, not knowing? Had I done wrong to take her at her word, and speak frankly? “Do you believe me?”
Her brow did not clear, but she answered readily, “Yes. Yes, John, I do.”
I smoothed my thumb across the delicate furrow between her brows. “Then what is it?”
“Nothing. I am only thinking.”
“Is there something else you wish to ask me? You must never be afraid to speak to me, Mary.” My heart clenched, half with grief for the past, and half with fear for the future. “Promise you will never be afraid to tell me what is it in your heart.”
She laughed. “I can’t promise not to be afraid. I shall promise to be brave, instead, when the situation requires it.”
“Thank you. Then was there something you wished to say?”
She leaned her head on my shoulder. “Not tonight.”
She felt very far away from me, just then. I thought again of Holmes, saw him reclining in his armchair only a few feet from me, rolling down his sleeve with a deep sigh of sensual satisfaction—a kind of sigh, and a kind of satisfaction, I had no longer been able to draw from him.
“Will you kiss me, Mary?” My heart pounded.
She pushed me back into the bed with an impish smile. “‘You are too timid in your inferences,’ John,” she rapped out in a rather neat imitation of Holmes’s style of speech. I wished it did not send such a shock through me—but that was over and gone in a flash, and there was only the bright flush upon her fair cheeks, the sweet curve of her mischievous mouth, and the warm affection in her eyes. “I will do much more than kiss you.”
Later, I fell asleep with her head tucked under my chin, happier than I had thought possible a couple of hours before.
It was perhaps a fortnight later that some work of Holmes’s (of too confidential and delicate a nature to mention here) took us out of town for a couple of days. I watched Mary’s face as I told her of it, afraid to find new signs of mistrust or jealousy.
She saw my fear, and stood on her tiptoes to kiss me. “Of course you must go,” she said, with half a warm smile. “Be safe, and give my regards to Mr. Holmes.”
I climbed into the waiting cab, conveying Mary’s greetings to Holmes as I did so. He nodded abruptly and answered only with “Charing Cross Station, driver! We must make the 11:15 train.”
But once ensconced in a first-class compartment, he talked easily enough, first about the case and then about crimes associated with the eighteenth-century French trade in grimoires, of which he was making a study.
Upon reaching our destination (which must also remain nameless, so closely associated was it in the public imagination with the scandal we were engaged in clearing up), we went at once to the local public house to engage our rooms for the night.
The town was already swarming with journalists, debt collectors, and all the scavengers who descend upon a tragedy in high places. “There’s a room,” the landlady allowed. “There wouldn't have been, if you’d come a quarter of an hour ago. But it’s only got one bed. Can you gentlemen make do?”
I hesitated—hesitated where I would never have hesitated before. Then I felt how swiftly Holmes would remark my hesitation and be wounded by it.
“Oh, I am an old campaigner, and have shared tighter quarters. That will suit us down to the ground, ma’am,” I said in much heartier tones than the thing required, and felt how Holmes would remark that. For a shameful moment I wished myself snug at home, with none of this dreadful awkwardness where everything had once been so easy.
Holmes handed her the requisite coin. “We shall return at supper-time. Kindly have the fire lit at seven o’clock. Do you expect any difficulty in our getting tea and a hot meal at a moment’s notice?”
I felt worse than ever, for I knew it was only for my benefit, and my old wound that ached in cold weather, that he devoted precious mental resources to such creature comforts.
“No, indeed, sir, not if you’re back before half ten. After that you’ll have to wait for the water to heat.”
“Thank you, Holmes,” I said quietly as we slipped out into the damp mist that hung over the square.
His baffled look told me he had already forgotten his kindness, and was impatient at my intrusion into his thoughts. In a moment he had waved the whole matter away with curious contortions of his wrist, and strode off. “Come along, Watson!”
My heart turned over at the sight of his tall, eager form straining to match itself to his will, which had already flown ahead to our destination.
He stopped short and glanced over his shoulder. “Watson?”
I hurried after him.
We were indeed damp and chilled when we returned late that evening—very near to half ten. I wondered if Holmes had taken care not to go past it; despite his capacity for total mental absorption, he was less likely to forget the time or be late for an appointment than I was.
But he had been silent all day, at first merely introspective, and now morose. So he remained, as I ordered our hot supper and tea and followed him up the stairs.
My spirits were equally low, for an increased ache in my leg always predisposes me to melancholy. Morbidly, I asked myself if I had only ever imagined Holmes’s unobtrusive solicitude for my health. Had I twisted my facts, to suit a theory which pleased and comforted me? He needed no ulterior motive to wish for hot tea on a cold night; he was not a machine, however much he liked to give the appearance of it.
Whatever his reasons, the fire had been lit according to Holmes’s instructions. Our room was warm and cozy, and soon we were falling upon tea and roast chicken with a hearty appetite.
“Any promising leads?” I asked, when he had finished his deliberate dissection of a baked potato and lit a cigarette.
He frowned into the fire. “A few. But the case will not come clear. There are threads which elude me. Go to sleep, Watson. We must make an early start tomorrow.”
I changed my clothes as nonchalantly as I could manage, aware of his tense profile in the corner of my eye. “You should get some rest, Holmes,” I said, climbing into bed. “Your brain will be the sharper for it.”
He shot me an amused, gleaming look. “One day, no doubt, I will learn to trust your medical opinion over my own private synthesis of the data.”
“No doubt.”
“I will come to bed in a few hours. I should like to think the problem over a little first.” He glanced at me again. “Would you rather I slept in the chair?”
I did feel some trepidation at the idea of sharing a bed again. It would unquestionably be awkward. My desire for him was undiminished, and I suspected that he knew it. Then, too, there had been one or two mildly unpleasant passages not long before Mary came into our lives, associated with his use of cocaine; on the last, he had left two livid fingerprints on my wrist, which took three days to fade from red to white again.
He had apologized, of course. His remorse had been sincere and deep; indeed, he took a graver view of the matter than I did, and his visits to my bed—already increasingly sporadic—had stopped altogether. I had objected, pleaded, represented to him that if he would only refrain from taking the drug before coming to me, there could be no danger—that there never had been any danger, for I could easily have shaken him off, if I had been willing to hurt him.
And yet for all that, my instinctual, animal sense of safety at his hands had been marred.
But we were friends and associates still. We had to get through this stiffness and constraint somehow. I could not take the chair myself if I wished my leg to be useful to either of us in the morning. And I would not leave him in the cold, nor make him feel that I shrank squeamishly from him, as though he were a leper.
“Of course not, Holmes. We are old friends, and need not stand upon ceremony.”
He eyed me thoughtfully, and turned back to the fire.
I awoke in the early morning, to find that he had indeed come to share the bed. I could sense his presence behind me—and not merely his warmth, his weight, his tug upon the blankets. I sensed his attention, his eyes on the back of my neck. He was awake.
I was very conscious that my nightshirt had risen above my waist in the night, and that my lower half was in that condition which is common to men in the morning. Worse, the weight of his gaze was doing nothing to cure it.
I was trying to cast off the cobwebs of sleep sufficiently to remove myself from the bed without drawing undue attention to my state, when with a sudden quick movement, he pressed a hot kiss to the back of my neck.
I sprang from the bed, pulse racing and flesh on fire, only daring to turn back when I had buttoned myself safely into my overcoat. Holmes’s eyes glittered in his still face.
We looked at each other for a moment, and then he rolled to face the ceiling with a sigh. “A thousand apologies, my dear fellow. It was quite unforgivable.”
“I am married, Holmes.”
“So are half the Uranians in London.”
“I never thought you would advance the frequency of a thing as an argument for its moral justification.”
He felt on the night-stand for his cigarettes, and lit one without sitting up.
I hated this distance between us—so absolute and unyielding that my conviction wavered, that we had ever been closer. Why did my affection for him not wane, even when living with him had become intolerable, and when I adored my wife?
For nearly a year now, I had hesitated to speak frankly to him. Maybe I had never confided entirely in him—the fact that in six years I had never spoken to him of my brother, was proof enough of that. But there was a difference between wishing to avoid a painful subject, and this dreadful constraint. Until this last year, I had thought of him as a man to whom one might safely disclose anything, and receive a broad-minded, kindly hearing.
What was the use in striving not to offend him, at my own expense? I might as well speak plainly, and take the consequences. “Holmes, I hope you will not be hurt by this, but I would like your permission to tell Mary about our history.”
“What part of our history?”
“That we were lovers.”
He finished his cigarette, and lit another, before he answered. “It’s a risk.” His tone made it a question.
“She asked me if I had carried forward any old attachments into the period of our marriage, and I told her no.”
“And so you have not.”
“Yes,” I said. “I have.”
He sat up in the bed, swathing himself in blankets like an old woman wrapped in shawls. “It is true that the Christ of Matthew was of the opinion that a man who looks upon a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. But I do not see that as a solid foundation for a system of justice. We distinguish between crimes which are committed in the imagination and those which are committed in the flesh. If we cease to do so, what is the purpose of free will, or of judgment?”
It was so like him. I could not catalog all the things I loved in it: the fair-mindedness; the pragmatism; the way he always said we as though he and I were a recognized principle of jurisprudence, almost a natural law—realer to him than the gravitational pull of planets and suns.
“I am not speaking of a crime, Holmes. I want Mary to know me. She is already aware that I have loved men, and she has been sympathetic.”
He plucked restlessly at his cocoon. “Women are never to be wholly trusted, Watson—not the best of them, though your wife is certainly that. A theoretical knowledge is quite different from a practical one. She knows that at some point in the past you loved some unknown man or men, well and good. Now you wish to tell her that you loved me, a person with whom she is acquainted and whom you still regularly see. She will very naturally be jealous. She will progress from thence to suspicion. You will annoy her in some secondary matter, and she will reach for the weapon you have placed in her hands.”
“I do understand your reluctance, Holmes. I will certainly not speak if you forbid it. But I trust Mary as I do you.”
He laughed, not very happily. “My dear Watson, that is a poor compliment to pay your wife.”
I wished I could give a more categorical denial. “I have never for a moment believed you capable of willingly injuring more than my feelings. But your will is not always entirely free, as I think you will admit.”
His bleak gaze dropped to my wrist, and he flung his cigarette into the grate. “The most likely result is that she will forbid you to have anything to do with me.”
“She has guessed already. I denied it, but if you could have heard how kindly she asked—how earnestly she assured me that it would never alter her regard for me—”
He threw back the bedclothes and strode jerkily to the wardrobe to retrieve yesterday’s suit. “How noble of her, to forgive such an indelible blot!” he spat out with indescribable bitterness. “The shame of being party to such a connection, even at secondhand, might have struck a lesser woman stone dead. Your wife is a paragon.”
“I’m sorry I’ve offended you,” I said quietly. “You know that our association has long been a source of the deepest pride and joy to me.” But I could not help reflecting that of late there had been less joy than heretofore, and the twist of his lips showed that he agreed with me. “It has pained me immeasurably, all these years, to pretend that you have been less to me than you really were, and are. That is partly why I should like Mary to know the truth. But Holmes, I must ask you to speak to me with common civility. I must ask you to speak of my wife with the respect which she has deserved from you, and which she should not need to deserve, to receive it from her husband’s most intimate friend.”
He ground his teeth together at the words—intimate friend—which had once meant so much more than they did at present.
“I would not allow her to abuse you either, Holmes, if she were to try it—which she has not.”
“Yes, yes, she is an angel. I have never disputed it.”
“Holmes.”
He passed a hand over his eyes. “You are right, Watson. I am sorry. My temper has not been often at its sweetest this past year, and less so lately. I cannot blame you for—well. For anything, in fact. You have acted honorably at every point, as everyone might have expected who knows you.” The tone was perhaps less generous than the words, but who is always master of his tone?
“Holmes. Whatever happens, I shall not cease to love you.”
He sighed. “Oh, no one can promise that, Watson. But thank you all the same.”
“You are very welcome.”
I would have been glad of some assurance of his own continued regard. But I understood why it would have been difficult for him to give it. Under the circumstances, he might feel it went without saying.
He concluded our case in the course of the morning with his usual electrifying brilliance, and by half past four was dismissing our cab and depositing me on my own doorstep.
I held out my hand, sorry to part with him on such uncertain terms, but very glad to be home.
He did not at once take it. Instead he glanced up at the windows, and said with passable courtesy, “Please convey my regards to Mrs. Watson.”
I smiled at him. “Thank you, Holmes. I—I am honored to still be permitted to take part in your work, and to call you my friend.”
He waved this away with the ghost of a smile. “Goodness, Watson, marriage is turning you mushy as pease-porridge.”
“Yes, that has been one of its good points, I think.”
The ghostly smile assumed a corporeal aspect. “Well, I suppose this newfound appetite for soul-baring must be satisfied. Please, my dear fellow, consider yourself at perfect liberty to divulge to your wife anything which you may wish her to know, with my blessing.”
“Do you mean that, Holmes?”
“Excluding our clients’ confidential business, of course.” He regarded me steadily for some moments. “It’s a risk,” he reminded me. “But I have asked you to take greater risks, and they have not all been good ones.”
“It has not only been for love,” I told him, for he spoke as though our work were merely a favor I had done him. “I trust your judgment, and I think I am right to do so. I think you have earned it.”
“Then I will trust yours,” he said simply, and held out his hand.
I wrung it, and he strode away.