A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA 5) I am Lost

"I think I had better go, Holmes."

"Not a bit, Doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell."

[A Scandal in Bohemia]

Mrs. Hudson found me sitting on Watson's bed with my head in my hands. To admit to all that I wanted was to undermine and betray all that I had. I couldn't survive on either and I saw no way to have both.

"It's a pity," she said.

Which struck me as a vast understatement.

I went back down to the living room and stood looking out the bow window. Through the closed door, I heard a man come for the chest and leave again. I went over to the mantle and picked up the card that sat there and without even reading it I threw it in the fire.

Then I thought about what I had just done and felt sick, ill to my soul.

Watson was right, I had been years without him in my travels and travails, but never without the *possibility* of him. I always knew that there was a Watson to return to, through wars, wives and royal espionage - his absence was as inconceivable as the disappearance of London overnight. Not the physical presence of his person, though I always found that comforting, but the presence of his regard, his ... love. Of that which was now gone. I had lost nothing that I had thought I needed, nothing that I had striven to protect, and all that gave my life meaning.

I had never wanted public acclaim, media attention, respect from my family, my peers or the police. Sometimes it pleased me to amaze them, simple pride. But what I wanted, was lost. To try and recover it I would have to betray my methods, possibly destroy the basis of my profession and perhaps my very sanity. Never a secure prospect, as I well knew. And even then, who was to say he would take me? Or whatever creature I became after betraying every tenant by which I lived and probably became incapable of the very achievements he admired in me.

I was lost.

I wandered into my bedroom and looked upon the mantle there. I looked to where the syringe sat upon its surface. The maid must have picked it up from the floor during the course of her sweeping and brought it back to its usual haunt. But there could not be sufficient solace in a sea of cocaine, in all the worlds' fields of poppies or any man-made balm. The thought of tobacco was merely laughable, the thought of cartridges less so.

I looked at that scattering of bullets. I picked up a single bullet, my hair-trigger pistol and went to sit before the glowering fire. I loaded the pistol. I sat. I sat in an echoing and almost timeless emptiness for a period that I can not now estimate the length of.

Then some simulacrum of reasoned return and I unloaded the pretty pistol.

I dressed in a suit of my sturdiest and most nondescript clothes. I put the bullets in one pocket and the little pistol in the other. I put every piece of cash money that I had in my shoes and I left. I knew that my bank would continue to pay my rent well into the next century without any further intervention from me. But to live there was as ludicrous an idea as to act out a play when no audience attended. I was sound and fury. I signified nothing. A strange realization to come to so late in life.

If I were to put my intentions at that time into words I would have to say I went to lose my physical self as thoroughly as I lost the man within. A characteristically melodramatic solution but one I came very close to achieving.