be sure, therefore a sergeant. It is a matter of simple deduction. Nothing more.”
“And I daresay a matter of luck.”
He smiled gently.
“My dear Watson! Lady Luck can play the deuce with us all!”
He gave his attention to the blue envelope, slitting it with a paper-knife and drawing out a single sheet of foolscap. It was a letter from Inspector Tobias Gregson, “the smartest of the Scotland Yarders,” as Holmes described him. It solicited an opinion in the case of the Brixton Road murder. In the view of my new friend, Gregson and Lestrade were the pick of a bad lot at the Yard. Even so, he had been obliged to extricate Inspector Lestrade, when the inspector had got himself into a fog over the Bank of England forgery case some years before. After that, he was visited by this tenacious officer several times a week, bringing the latest news of London crime for his views upon it.
If I had doubted the purpose of his “consulting rooms,” I did so no longer. They were the apartment of a private detective, who made himself available for hire as surely as a barrister or a hansom cab. Until a few days earlier, I would have told you that such people exist only in stories sold on station book-stalls. Now it seemed I breathed the excitement of crime and detection as surely as the air of Sherlock Holmes’s shag tobacco in our sitting-room.
The new rooms in Baker Street received our first clients. My Army medical board discharged me with a pension which would not support me on its own. My only other qualification lay in medical practice. But a practice means a partnership, and such a partnership requires purchase money. I caught myself thinking that if I could somehow work with Holmes for the time being, a modest income from detection would combine with my little pension to keep me alive. After a while, I might save enough to establish myself as a physician again. Perhaps I could buy myself a place, if only as a junior in a country town. There were the cousins in Devonshire. I had not seen them in a good many years, but I daresay they might help me to establish myself as a small-town doctor.
Alas, how greatly I underestimated the fascination of detection! Holmes and I were in partnership from the very first days of the Brixton Road murder mystery. There were certain understandings between us, of course. We almost always turned away marital disputes and divorce actions, which are the lot of so many “inquiry agents.” It also took me a considerable time to get used to Holmes’s insufferable air of superiority in the act of discovery. There was still a little too much “brag and bounce” in his demeanour, as it seemed to me. But the longer we knew one another, the better we got on.
I resigned myself to his bohemian ways, his unexplained absences and his habits of working at all hours of the day and night. All day he gathered information, and much of the night he passed in restless calculation. How often did the night walker or the policeman on his beat in Baker Street glance up and see the familiar silhouette of Holmes in profile against the drawn blind of our first-floor room! It was the shadow of a man pacing rapidly to and fro, his hands clasped behind his back, his head bowed by a weight of thought.
Those who caught sight of this familiar outline invariably imagined the subtle detective brain forming a pattern of clues to foil a new challenge by the underworld. Yet Holmes was human and, in his way, fallible. Like many successful men, from time to time he liked to sigh and confess that his true ambitions lay elsewhere. If he had his time over again, it would be a life of beekeeping in a fold of the quiet Sussex Downs. His cottage would be within sight of the glimmering sea and with the sound of its waves carried to him on a temperate breeze. For the time being, nothing pleased him more than to see his initials at the foot of a page in Notes and Queries or The Classical Quarterly, a few paragraphs on some obscure but learned topic, probably of interest to not more than fifty people in the entire world.
Yet while we were putting our detective partnership on a secure footing, in such cases as the decipherment of the Musgrave Ritual or the