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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 |
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