There used to be a song which affirmed (how truly,
I do not know) that every nice girl loved a sailor.
I am prepared to state, though I do not propose to
make a song about it, that every nice man loves a
detective story. This week I have been reading
the last adventures of Sherlock Holmes—I
mean really the last adventures, ending with his triumph
over the German spy in 1914. Having saved the
Empire, Holmes returned to his farm on the Sussex
downs, and there, for all I mind, he may stay.
I have no great affection for the twentieth-century
Holmes. But I will give the warmest welcome to
as many adventures of the Baker Street Holmes as Watson
likes to reconstruct for us. There is no reason
why the supply of these should ever give out.
“It was, I remember, at the close of a winter’s
day in 1894”—when Watson begins like
this, then I am prepared to listen. Fortunately,
all the stories in this last book, with the exception
of the very indifferent spy story, are of the Baker
Street days, the days when Watson said, “Holmes,
this is marvellous!” Reading them now—with,
I suppose, a more critical mind than I exhibited twenty
years ago—I see that Holmes was not only
a great detective, but a very lucky one. There
is an occasion when he suddenly asks the doctor why
he had a Turkish bath. Utterly unnerved, Watson
asks how he knew, to which the great detective says
that it is as obvious as is the fact that the doctor
had shared a hansom with a friend that morning.
But when Holmes explains further, we see how lucky
he is. Watson, he says, has some mud on his left
trouser; therefore he sat on the left side of a hansom;
therefore he shared it with a friend, for otherwise
he would have sat in the middle. Watson’s
boots, he continues, had obviously been tied by a
stranger; therefore he has had them off in a Turkish
bath or a boot shop, and since the newness of the boots
makes it unlikely that he has been buying another
pair, therefore he must have been to a Turkish bath.
“Holmes,” says Watson, “this is
marvellous!”
Marvellously lucky, anyway. For, however new
his boots, poor old Watson might have been buying
a pair of pumps, or bedroom slippers, or tennis shoes
that morning, or even, if the practice allowed such
extravagance, a second pair of boots. And there
was, of course, no reason whatever why he should not
have sat at the side of his hansom, even if alone.
It is much more comfortable, and is, in fact, what
one always did in the hansom days, and still does
in a taxi. So if Holmes was right on this occasion,
he was right by luck and not by deduction.
