Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,34
of our first handshake convinced me of that!
I was not in the least surprised that he later proved to be an expert swordsman, boxer, and singlestick player. As for the power of his hands, I shall never forget our visit from a bullying strongman, Dr. Grimesby Roylott. This bully emphasised his threats to us by taking the poker from our fireplace and bending it into a curve with his huge brown hands, his arteries swelling and face purpled. After his stormy departure, Holmes ruefully picked up the distorted metal from the grate and with a careful effort bent it straight again.
From the start, I knew that Holmes was a man who never admitted failure or defeat. I have sometimes been asked to describe his appearance and manner by those who had not known him. I have suggested that they should imagine the stance and manner of Sir Edward Carson, QC, that most vigorous and astute of cross-examiners, combined with the combative and self-assured manner of Lord Birkenhead, the former Mr. F. E. Smith. There was also a dash of the late Lord Curzon with his taste for what he called effortless superiority. But even all that does not do him sufficient credit for his nobler character. Holmes would put away ambition in order to work tirelessly and without reward on behalf of the poorest and humblest client. Indeed, it was “poor persons’ defences” which gave him the greatest satisfaction and which he undertook, without reward, for pure love of justice.
When Stamford introduced us that afternoon in the chemical laboratory, the great detective’s fingers were blotched with acid and stained a little by what looked like ink. Among broad low tables, shelves of bottles, retorts, test-tubes, and Bunsen burners with their blue flickering flames and odours of gas, he was in his element. After our brief introduction, he quite ignored me in his excitement at explaining to Stamford the success of some experiment on which he had been engaged. He confided to us that he had identified a reagent which was precipitated by haemoglobin and by nothing else. In plain terms, it would now be possible for the first time to identify blood stains long after the blood had dried.
It is not my intention to say more of this first meeting, for I have done that elsewhere. Let me just add, for the benefit of those who have not met him before, that Sherlock Holmes dwelt in alternating spasms of fierce intellectual excitement and moods of brooding contemplation. The problem is that life cannot always be lived at a pitch of fierce excitement. In the most active career, there are days or weeks of tedium. Other men might have turned to drink or sexual vice in these doldrums. Sherlock Holmes preferred the less complicated palliatives of music or cocaine. I deplored his use of the narcotic, but I came to see that the drug was not his true addiction. It was merely his substitute for a more powerful cerebral stimulation when he was engaged upon a case. Then he needed nothing stronger than his faithful pipe.
As to his mind, it was possessed of a profound knowledge of chemistry, an adequate acquaintance with anatomy, and a practical familiarity with the English criminal law. In morbid psychology or psychopathology, he had a firm grasp of mental alienation. He read Krafft-Ebing or Charcot in psychiatric medicine as other men read the morning newspaper. Nor did he ignore the analysis of human darkness in such literary imaginations as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, or Robert Browning.
Perhaps his most formidable gift was an ability to master any form of knowledge in a matter of days or hours. He who had known nothing of astrology or joint stock companies or the effect of amberite cartridges on gunshot wounds would be a master of the subject within a week.
Holmes exercised his brain as other men would have used a chest-expander or a set of dumb-bells. For example, he would set himself the great unsolved problems of mathematics. If he did not find solutions to age-old mathematical paradoxes like Fermat’s Last Theorem or the Goldbach Conjecture, I believe he understood the nature of those riddles better than any other man living.
The most astonishing thing about him, from the moment of our first meeting, was his clarity of insight combined with a power of logical deduction. I remember the first illustration of this vividly. Almost the first thing he said to me, when Stamford introduced us and we shook hands