Chapter 5 ― The Triumphant Return of Sherlock Holmes (Part 4)

The lobby of the theatre was carpeted in red velvet, and overhead glittering chandeliers threw resplendent light down upon us. On the right a grand staircase gracefully traced an arc upward to the balcony seating, while the high-ceilinged bar on the left was packed with revelers in evening dress. Peals of laughter pierced the veil of smoke which shrouded the room like a fog bank, as people raised their glasses in anticipation of Professor Moriarty’s Last Lecture.

I surveyed the crowd.

“Are all of these people employees of the professor?”

“That’s right. See, there is Madame Richborough,” she replied, pointing.

I glanced up to see the portly woman ascending the staircase, accompanied by a man wearing a top hat. When she finally reached the top of the stairs she rested against the banister, and looked back down at the crowd below. It was indeed Madame Richborough, and yet hers was not the demeanour of the kind landlady that I had known. Her haughty bearing was more befitting of a celebrated clairvoyant. When she noticed me standing there her fleshy, powdered face split into a triumphant grin. You see, dear Doctor? her expression seemed to say, You might have saved us all the trouble.

Her companion was a thin, fussy-looking man, about Holmes’s age. His upturned nose gave him an air of inveterate nobility, which made the pair seem all the more mismatched.

“That is Reginald Musgrave,” said a voice from behind me as I attempted to place the man, “Master of Hurlstone Manor in Sussex, and head of one of the most distinguished families in all England.”

I turned around to see Cartwright and Rachel standing there.

“What are you both doing here?” I cried.

“How could we not come?” beamed Cartwright.

“Tonight is a historic night,” chimed in Rachel, her smile matching his.

The pair was dressed up for the occasion, like two mannequins in a high street shop window. If they felt any remorse about their previous deception I was unable to detect it.

“That was quite a daring maneuvering, leaping out of your garret window,” said Cartwright with a wink. “I was on pins and needles, having forgotten that you are formerly of the service. But what was the need for all that, if you were going to come over to this side anyhow?”

“Dr. Watson has been perturbed,” said Rachel soothingly. “He was Holmes’s former partner, after all.”

“I suppose that is true,” nodded Cartwright. “In any case you have made the right choice. Holmes never did seem to comprehend the greatness of Professor Moriarty. They say that if it were not for his meddling, the Professor’s master plan would have been realized long ago. There’s no reason that you should chain your fate to his.”

“Don’t slander Holmes in that way in front of me, Cartwright,” I cried hotly. “I will never be one of your criminal fraternity!”

“Oh, come now!” said he in astonishment, “Surely it is too late for you to be saying such things! A crime is defined as an act against the old order of things. Now that Professor Moriarty has swept in with a new order, there’s not a one among us that you could call a criminal. Yesterday’s criminals are today’s heroes!”

“Once you hear the Professor’s Last Lecture you will understand,” said Rachel. “The Professor shall rule England, and England shall rule the world. It is all part of his beautiful mathematical equation for peace. And all of us here at the Black Gala―you included, Doctor―shall reign by his side.”

“That’s right. We are the chosen people,” Cartwright pronounced, smiling at Rachel.

In despair I looked on at the young couple. They had fallen for this megalomaniacal delusion of grandeur lock, stock, and barrel. So beyond reach did they seem that I was almost convinced that they were imposters wearing the originals’ skin. Where was that lovelorn, bright young artist who had dithered about whether to take up that post in Yorkshire? It had been only a few hours, and yet it felt as though that conversation had taken place an eternity ago.

“I suppose you will not be going to Yorkshire, then,” I said. Cartwright stared at me in surprise for a moment, and then burst into laughter.

“Ha, ha! You mean that tutor’s post! And why should I take myself all the way to Yorkshire and play professor for some country squire’s girls, when all I could ever wish for will soon be in my grasp? We who have gathered at this theatre will be the aristocracy of the coming age. But that’s enough of that; let me introduce you to our friends. They have all been waiting to meet you.”

Cartwright clapped me familiarly on the shoulder and steered me towards the bar. But as he did, I noticed that Irene Adler had vanished; she was nowhere to be seen in the lobby.

At the doorway to the bar, Cartwright stopped and loudly announced, “May I introduce: Dr. John Watson!”

The echoing conversations died away and were replaced by a warm round of applause. With Cartwright all but shoving me forward, I walked between the tables where I was warmly greeted by black-clad men and women with smiles, proffered handshakes, and hearty whistles; one or two of the gentlemen even came up to slap me on the back. The rolling wave of applause went on and on, not diminishing but rather growing louder every second. It was as if I was meeting a room full of old friends.

Among that buffeting crowd, I noticed a portly man with a head of flaming red hair. It was Mr. Jabez Wilson, Holmes’s one-time client in the case of the Red-headed League. Once I had seen him I realized that I was acquainted with many of those laughing, smiling faces. There was Colonel Ross, the owner of Silver Blaze, chuckling as he smoked a cigar, and at the same table Dr. Trevelyan, from the case of the Resident Patient. At a neighbouring table I spotted Miss Violet Smith, from the Adventures of the Solitary Cyclist, and Mr. and Mrs. St. Clair who had been at the epicenter of the Man with the Twisted Lip; elsewhere I saw Lord Bellinger, twice Premier of Britain, and Mr. and Mrs. Trelawny Hope of the Adventure of the Second Stain.

That sense of familiarity was, then, not without cause: it was like attending a reunion with all of Holmes’s old clients.

“I heard all about your little escapade, Dr. Watson!” said a gentleman to me. He was dressed ostentatiously to the verge of foppishness, with a snow-white waistcoat and shining patent-leather shoes. It was Lord St. Simon, and immediately my depiction of him in The Triumphant Return of Sherlock Holmes sprang to mind. At a distance his gaudy clothes made him look like a young man, but upon closer inspection I spotted strands of white mixed in his hair, and his complexion wore every one of his over two-score years.

“But don’t think I don’t know how you feel,” he continued smoothly. “One cannot help but sympathize with the plight of Sherlock Holmes.”

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During all of this Sherlock Holmes was of course never far from my mind.

Why had he vanished into the mist at Scotland Yard? Had the dissolution of the investigation and his realization that Professor Moriarty had beaten him sent him into flight? Or was he only biding his time in a safe place, looking for his chance to reverse his fortune?

But if the latter was the case, why had he not said anything to me? Right until we had opened that fateful door at Scotland Yard he had given no indication that he might do anything of the sort. His actions were utterly baffling, and I could not help but wonder whether the Holmes I had met tonight might actually have been a figment of my own imagination.

As my mind wandered, my feet brought me to the end of the bar counter. The man in the last seat was resting his chin on his palms, grinning at me in a repulsively intimate fashion. When I realized who it was I let out a little cry.

“Stamford!”

“You remember me at last, Watson,” said my old schoolmate, raising his glass. “How strange life can be. It was right here, at the Criterion bar, where I met you after your return from Afghanistan. You were so overjoyed when I tapped you on the shoulder that I can only imagine how lonely you must have been. And it was me who took you to the laboratories at Bart’s to make the acquaintance of Sherlock Holmes. It has been smooth sailing for you ever since, and yet since *A Study in Scarlet *not a mention of your old school chum who made it all possible has appeared in any of your writings!”

I sighed and took the seat beside him.

“So you were another of Moriarty’s followers all along.”

“It was not a straight path which brought me here,” said he. “An unlucky wager here, a little misappropriation there, and soon enough the hospital had turned me out. It was Professor Moriarty who picked me up when I was at my lowest. Nearly all of us here have the same story. Mr. Wilson there is an old hand at fencing stolen goods; Colonel Ross fixes horse races; Miss Smith is a professional swindler. We all went to work for the Professor. Sherlock Holmes’s snooping put fear into us, but I guess we have no reason to be afraid of him anymore.”

Leaned closer to me he whispered, “I hear that Professor Moriarty holds a particular interest in you.”

“Don’t talk nonsense!”

“Whatever do you mean? Isn’t that why you are here tonight?” he grinned. “What a wicked fellow you are, suckling greedily from Holmes’s teat only to turn on him at the eleventh hour. How you toadied up to the Professor I do not know, but what a performance it must have been!”

I slumped forward onto the counter and drained my glass in despair. Everything Stamford had said was nonsense, but I was too dispirited to rebuke him.

“Why the long face?” he laughed, slapping me heartily on the back. “You may have taken the long way round, but now you can make a fresh start. It’s Professor Moriarty’s time now. He’s an extraordinary man. I’m no believer in the supernatural, but he can do things which no mere mortal could. It’s as if the whole world is at his beck and call. And I’ll tell you something else: I have often suspected that our meeting that day at the Criterion, and your subsequent acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes at that chemical laboratory, were all somehow arranged by the Professor himself.”

“You make it sound as if he is God Himself.”

“I make no claim of the sort,” said Stamford, with another grin. “But if it were so I would not be surprised.”

I drained the rest of my glass and looked behind me at the black-clad crowd. Their attentions had dispersed from me; Cartwright and Rachel had struck up an animated conversation with flaming-headed Jabez Wilson. The drifting haze of tobacco smoke; the popping of champagne corks; the omnipresent babbling of the crowd: deeper and deeper I plunged into the nightmare.

What if Stamford was right? What if that chance meeting here at the Criterion bar had been more than mere chance? The thought nearly sent me reeling with fright―that this dolorous endgame had been preordained from the very start.

On the other side of that madding crowd, I suddenly spotted a face which I knew very well. She was wearing a simple black dress, sitting alone at a table in the dimly lit far corner of the room.

I got up from the counter and started walking.

“Where are you going?” called Stamford. I heeded him not, weaving between the tables and causing a small commotion as I brushed off well-wishers and curtly pushed away hands proffered for me to shake. But my eyes never left Mrs. Hudson, who looked up and met my gaze unflinchingly as I approached.

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How can I describe the despair of seeing the landlady of 221B Baker Street at the Black Gala? That place held a symbolic significance to me: the place where all of those adventures had begun, and also where they ended. To me it was the very center of the world. Without Mrs. Hudson’s constant presence there, the life and career of Sherlock Holmes would surely never have reached the heights which it did, and it was for this reason that I believed that she would be the last person in the world to betray him.

“What are you doing in this place?” I demanded to know. “Didn’t you tell me you would be waiting at Baker Street for Holmes’s return?”

“There’s no use in waiting,” she replied listlessly. “Mr. Holmes will never set foot on Baker Street again.”

Her expression was blank, as if she had utterly given up hope.

You, of all people! I almost blurted out, but I bit my tongue. While Holmes had been locked in his struggle with Professor Moriarty, I had done nothing. How could I remonstrate with her, when I myself had failed to live up to those words?

Feeling myself deflate, I lowered myself into the seat beside her. From that table I had an excellent view of the entire bar; Stamford was deep in conversation with Violet Smith, seemingly having forgotten all about me. Cartwright’s group was raising a glass with the neighbouring table: Pycroft, the stock-broker’s clerk; Holder, the bank president; Breickinridge, the goose salesman; Hatherly, the hydraulic engineer. All of them I knew from one of Holmes’s cases or another, and it would have seemed a glad affair had I not known them one and all to be followers of Professor Moriarty.

Mrs. Hudson did not seem much inclined to join in the festivities, secluded as she was here in the corner. She sat stiff and erect as a statue, and in her unmoving eyes I perceived a deep resignation. I could not imagine this gentle woman could ever be involved in crime. With what iniquity had she tainted her soul―with what crime had she had cast her lot in with Moriarty, and so earned her invitation to this Black Gala?

“He was always talking about you, you know,” said she. “He worried for you.”

“I know that, just as I know that I used him cruelly.”

“In the end, he needed as much help as the rest of us did,” she said, casting her gaze downward at the table. “He would never admit it, but I could tell. Without Watson, there is no Holmes. How I begged him over and over again to go see you. But he could not bring himself to do it. Mary’s death was a great shock to him as well; He’ll never forgive me, he would always sigh, I have never loved as he did, and so I do not know how to save him.”

The anguish in her voice made me recall Holmes’s tall, thin figure standing in the rain. Every detail of that day is imprinted deeply on my mind―the day that Mary was buried. The hazy mist which obscured the graveyard, the patter of the dirt as it fell upon the coffin, the solemn uttering of the homily, the somber procession of black umbrellas.

Yet I could never recall the expression which he had worn as we went our separate ways. Search my memory as I might, I could only ever picture that blurred silhouette standing alone in the rain. I could not bring myself to look him in the eye, such was my animosity toward him. All he had brought into my life, it seemed to me then, was death and decay, like the fallen leaves which clung to the gravestones.

But I realized too late how wrong I had been. It had not been Holmes I could not forgive, but myself, and my powerlessness to save Mary. I had sought to blame him for my own failings, and when we offered his hand in friendship I had cruelly slapped it away.

“Holmes came to see me, Mrs. Hudson,” I told her. I heard her breath catch, and she looked up at me.

“He was with me just before I was brought here. He helped me flee out my garret window, and told me that we would make a brand new start. I was wrong all along, and you were right. I should have come back to Baker Street long ago.”

“So you met Holmes, in the end,” she sighed. “I”m glad to hear it.”

“But he vanished into thin air,” I continued. “I don’t understand how it happened. Why did he vanish and leave me all alone?”

The clamour which surrounded us only grew louder by the minute. The conversations which echoed from the mosaicked ceiling rang discordantly like music from a far-off land; not one word could I discern. Every new pop of a champagne bottle was accompanied by screams of laughter. Each sound in this cacophony, this cloud of pestilent noise which surrounded me was like a shout of exultation for Professor Moriarty’s victory.

I reflected on Holmes’s solitariness. The partner who should have been at his side every step of the way had deserted him at the graveyard, and ever since he had fought alone against the world.

Mrs. Hudson placed a gentle hand on my arm.

“Dr. Watson,” she whispered softly but insistently, “Come what may, you must not forsake Holmes.”

I looked at her, startled. The resignation which had reigned over her features only a minute ago had been replaced by a penetrating stare. For a moment I was not in the Criterion Theatre, but 221B Baker Street again.

Seeing me nod, Mrs. Hudson began her tale.

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“As a simple landlady I knew little about the substance of Mr. Holmes’s work. But from the volume of his visitors and his positively Bohemian habits I knew it must be quite extraordinary. Far too many times I have seen the firemen pay us a visit on account of one of his strange experiments, and witnessed the fruits of his indoor pistol practice habit. So I thought little of it at first when he began to set out late at night without so much as a word to me. It did not seem much out of the way of his usual conduct.

“It was only when I noticed that he would always leave by the back door that I began to suspect something was amiss. Late at night I would be awoken by the sound of footsteps descending the stairs and proceeding down the hallway to the back of the house.

After many nights of this I determined one particular night to follow the footsteps out the back door. I arose from my bed and came out to the hallway just in time to see a black silhouette slipping out the door, and when I pursued it into the back garden I found an old man standing there beneath the moonlight.”

“An old man?”

“Yes, wearing a black overcoat.”

Mrs. Hudson glanced around furtively before continuing her tale.

“He turned around when I called out to him. I’ve never seen such a terrible face in my life! It bobbed in the air as it stared at me, as if it belonged to a venomous serpent. I was so frightened by that pale demonic visage that I fell on my backside. Without a word the old man turned on his heel, crossed the garden, scaled the wall and vanished.

“Even after he had gone I couldn’t move. That horrible face was burned into my mind. Who was that old man, and what was he doing in my house? I had to tell Mr. Holmes. But when I ran up to his room, I found his room empty and his bed untouched.”

I sucked in my breath; my mouth felt as dry as a bone. As Mrs. Hudson’s story drew closer to its horrible secret, the sounds of the triumphal bacchanalia which surrounded us faded away.

“When did this begin?” I asked.

“Last autumn, around the time that Mary passed away,” replied Mrs. Hudson. “At the beginning of the year, Mr. Holmes told me that he had taken on an important case. He seemed extremely busy, and often he would spend the night elsewhere. But whenever he did come home to 221B Baker Street, I would without fail hear those midnight footsteps creeping down the staircase and padding into the back garden, and afterward find his bed unslept in. Yet come morning, there he would be in his room. Mr. Holmes would never speak of the matter, and I could not summon the courage to ask. For whenever I thought of that ghoulish old man I had seen in the garden, I was convinced that he was part of a horrible secret which I must never disturb.”

So those unsettling events repeated themselves, culminating finally in the recent blast at Baker Street. When Inspector Lestrade came to examine the scene of the crime, he urged Mrs. Hudson to move elsewhere, but she steadfastly refused any suggestion of flight, for she regarded it as her sacred obligation to protect 221B. Yet an ominous portent continued to loom, and Sherlock Holmes never came home.

“It came to a head at last, after you visited me today,” she said.

After supper she had been reading a book in the sitting-room, when she was interrupted just past seven by the sound of the back door opening. She sat there petrified in the partial darkness, not daring to make a sound as she heard the floorboards squeaking in the hallway. The intruder slowly made his way up the stairs to Holmes’s room, and then there was silence. After a while she got up and took a lamp in hand. She glimpsed her reflection on a wall mirror; her face was white as death.

Raising her lamp up as if it were a protective talisman, she climbed the stairs to the second floor.

“Mr. Holmes?” she called, but there was only silence. Never in her life had 221B Baker Street felt so foreign to her. Even wrapped in her shawl she felt a shiver go through her.

The door to Holmes’s room was open. As she stood petrified outside it, someone called her name. It was the hoary voice of an old man.

“Come here. You needn’t be alarmed.”

“Who’s there?”

“My name is Professor James Moriarty. I am a friend of Holmes.”

Raising her lamp high, Mrs. Hudson entered the room.

It was as though she had stepped into a windswept wilderness. The cold night wind whistled through the shattered window, and moonlight fell onto the broken furniture. At the far end of the ruined chamber, an old man stood leaning against the mantel above the cold fireplace.

“I apologize for coming up without your permission. I wanted to see the place where Holmes has lived for myself.”

“There is not much to see. There was an explosion here.”

“I am aware of that,” he said with a dry laugh. “It was I who arranged it.”

Mrs. Hudson gasped.

“So it is you whom he is fighting against!”

“Fought. I believe the past tense is appropriate,” said he with a lurid smile. “The adventures of Sherlock Holmes are over. He has fought a valiant battle, and I assure you his methods have been most intellectually stimulating to observe. But the world holds mysteries which are beyond even his powers to solve.”

The old man picked up his cane and stepped forward into the moonlight, and at that moment Mrs. Hudson realized his horrible secret. A wave of despair swept over her, as cold and remote as the dark side of the moon.

Professor Moriarty was none other than Sherlock Holmes himself: the two men were one and the same. Holmes himself had never realized the fact that he was engaged in a battle with himself.

In a desperate state Mrs. Hudson rushed forward and grabbed him.

“Mr. Holmes!” she hissed desperately. “Wake up! You are not Moriarty, you are Mr. Sherlock Holmes!”

But Professor Moriarty only stared back at her uncomprehendingly, and when she saw the hollow look in his eyes she recoiled. It seemed to her that she was looking not into the eyes of a human being, but rather into the cold void of space.

“I thank you, Mrs. Hudson. You have my everlasting gratitude,” said Moriarty in a voice which seemed to come out of another dimension. “It is not God, or love, or material things which we can place our faith in. The only thing we can be sure of in this world is that everything must return one day to the infinite dark. That is the exquisite truth of the universe. And I have come to fulfill it.”