PROLOGUE
Mr Sherlock Holmes
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set it free.” Michaelangelo.
His fleeting smile graced his lips. At once I was reminded that this was the only outward show of feeling this great man once permitted himself. If my friendship meant anything it was how Holmes allowed me in and also allowed some cracks in the marble he affected as the dark persona of Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes was in truth not as impenetrable as he seemed. He was as malleable as any human man in this time and place could be. And for some reason, he regarded our friendship as a chance to explore those areas he hitherto fore denied, disqualified, ignored, or buried in order to breathe into life the gentleman he was meant to be, the Great Detective, Sherlock Holmes. When I met him, he had not completely donned the mantle of his persona. I had access to that young man filled with hope and excitement for his discoveries. At one time, I alone knew the real Sherlock Holmes. The man who ran towards me, a stranger, in Bart’s Chemical Lab with a test tube in his hand, laughing and shouting, his eureka:
“I’ve found it! I’ve found it! I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by haemoglobin, and by nothing else!”
The gentleman I recently encountered in his Baker Street digs, was incapable of such feeling. It was as if the mask he wore as protection from the horrors of his chosen profession had taken possession of him. That fleeting smile was all that was left of my robust and happy friend. The only crack in his persona. He still had that sardonic and witty humorous view of life, but the joy had gone out of it and everything else. It was fifteen seasons from that first meeting, yet he seemed older than his forty-two years.
I entreated him to find a way to defeat this nervous prostration, to come away with me to the country and offered every available piece of our great islands to no avail. And as before I worried about his cocaine usage and how it could impart a permanent pathological and morbid weakness in him. I thought of Freud, who had once before helped Holmes recover from the ravages of cocaine. But because of our present political situation, Vienna was out of reach to Englishmen.
Madame Irene was away on her Continental concert tour and would not return home for at least a month. Miss Rachel had left us to complete her degrees at Vassar College. Meanwhile, Holmes was not even opening his mail. I asked permission to do so and he waved an assent. Halfway through the pile of admonishments and appreciations, there was a cable from New York which grabbed my attention. It was a dire message from Thomas Edison, beseeching Holmes to travel to New Jersey as soon as it was safe to cross the Atlantic. There had been a murder at his motion picture studio.
This was it! My answer. Edison possessed a mind as capable and brilliant as Holmes. Would he not be able to rouse my friend from this insatiable darkness? America was the place Holmes had healed after his horrible year battling Moriarty’s henchmen in Europe. The year he said he became like them, an assassin. His six weeks in Poughkeepsie, New York cured him, brought him back to himself, and even opened his heart to love.
“What is it, Watson? Revelation is written all over your face,” said Holmes.
“It is a message from Thomas Edison, requesting your presence at his New Jersey Laboratory. It seems a prominent danseuse was murdered in his film studio.”
“New Jersey? Irene’s birthplace?”
“Yes, Edison’s Lab and new film studio are in the town of West Orange, across the Hudson River from Manhattan Island.”
I picked up my copy of the steamship tables.
“The next Lucania voyage will be in April.”
“Watson, that leaves us a month.”
“You’re going, Holmes?”
“Of course!”
And here I witnessed that transformation I have spoken about before. He rose from his depression, and suddenly slipped on his cool persona, as carefully as he did his gloves. Before me stood the gentleman of action. I alone knew with what effort he had accomplished this and understood that for Holmes’ complete recovery, this trip to the States was an absolute necessity.
“We just have time for some little research, Watson. Now, where was that paper?”
Holmes collected the Pall Mall Gazette from the carpet and scanned the advertising notices.
