This is part 2 of an ongoing series. Part 1, covering the first half of Chapter 1 of A Study in Scarlet, can be found here.
Where were we? Oh yeah, about to meet Sherlock Holmes. I suppose we might as well jump in.
It [the hospital] was familiar ground to me, and I needed no guiding as we ascended the bleak stone staircase and made our way down the long corridor with its vista of whitewashed wall and dun-coloured doors.
dun dun DUN
Near the farther end a low arched passage branched away from it and led to the chemical laboratory.
This was a lofty chamber, lined and littered with countless bottles. Broad, low tables were scattered about, which bristled with retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps, with their blue flickering flames. There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure: “I’ve found it! I’ve found it,” he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand.
Ok buddy, what have you found?
“I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by hæmoglobin, and by nothing else.” Had he discovered a gold mine, greater delight could not have shone upon his features.
To detect murders, I guess. The gold mine thing makes sense, though, if you think about it. If you were a detective, it’d probably be easier to squeeze out cash from this reagent, by detecting murders and stuff and then getting paid by clients, than a gold mine. You’d have to mine out gold ore and then extract the gold from the ore, if you even knew how to do that and had the proper equipment, and it would just end up being overall a huge pain.
“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.
“How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
“How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.
“Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himself. “The question now is about hæmoglobin.
This is where Holmes starts his long tradition of brilliant deductions. Every single one of these, without exception, are based on genius-tier logic that is never wrong. Ever.
Now that we’ve got that settled.
No doubt you see the significance of this discovery of mine?”
“It is interesting, chemically, no doubt,” I answered, “but practically—”
“Why, man, it is the most practical medico-legal discovery for years. Don’t you see that it gives us an infallible test for blood stains. Come over here now!”
This is where Watson starts a much shorter tradition of not figuring out Holmes’s profession, despite a lot of hints.
He seized me by the coat sleeve in his eagerness, and drew me over to the table at which he had been working. “Let us have some fresh blood,” he said, digging a long bodkin into his finger, and drawing off the resulting drop of blood in a chemical pipette. “Now, I add this small quantity of blood to a litre of water. You perceive that the resulting mixture has the appearance of pure water. The proportion of blood cannot be more than one in a million. I have no doubt, however, that we shall be able to obtain the characteristic reaction.” As he spoke, he threw into the vessel a few white crystals, and then added some drops of a transparent fluid. In an instant the contents assumed a dull mahogany colour, and a brownish dust was precipitated to the bottom of the glass jar.
A small note on bodkin: definitions include several sharp things, and in this context the most likely is probably a kind of blunt needle. But, and this is important to note, there is a small possibility that Conan Doyle intended Holmes to be stabbing himself with a large dagger and only producing a single drop of blood from it.
Basically what I’m saying is that we haven’t ruled out that Holmes might be Thanos in disguise.
“Ha! ha!” he cried, clapping his hands, and looking as delighted as a child with a new toy.
“What do you think of that?”
“It seems to be a very delicate test,” I remarked.
“Beautiful! beautiful! The old guaiacum test was very clumsy and uncertain. So is the microscopic examination for blood corpuscles. The latter is valueless if the stains are a few hours old. Now, this appears to act as well whether the blood is old or new. Had this test been invented, there are hundreds of men now walking the earth who would long ago have paid the penalty of their crimes.”
“Indeed!” I murmured.
If the prosecution’s entire case rests upon “wait, this is blood after all” then it may have a bad case. Just thinking out loud though.
“Criminal cases are continually hinging upon that one point. A man is suspected of a crime months perhaps after it has been committed. His linen or clothes are examined and brownish stains discovered upon them. Are they blood stains, or mud stains, or rust stains, or fruit stains, or what are they? That is a question which has puzzled many an expert, and why? Because there was no reliable test. Now we have the Sherlock Holmes’ test, and there will no longer be any difficulty.”
His eyes fairly glittered as he spoke, and he put his hand over his heart and bowed as if to some applauding crowd conjured up by his imagination.
“You are to be congratulated,” I remarked, considerably surprised at his enthusiasm.
“There was the case of Von Bischoff at Frankfort last year. He would certainly have been hung had this test been in existence. Then there was Mason of Bradford, and the notorious Muller, and Lefevre of Montpellier, and Samson of New Orleans. I could name a score of cases in which it would have been decisive.”
Frankfurt, Germany had Frankfort as an alternate spelling back then. It doesn’t refer to Kentucky’s capital, in case you were thinking that.
But again. If all that’s needed to convict on a murder charge is one bloodstain, someone is not doing their job correctly, depending on the size of the bloodstain.1If it’s a really big one, then it’s probably the murderer.
“You seem to be a walking calendar of crime,” said Stamford with a laugh. “You might start a paper on those lines. Call it the Police News of the Past.”
“Very interesting reading it might be made, too,” remarked Sherlock Holmes, sticking a small piece of plaster over the prick on his finger;
Holmes’d probably be right at home on Wikipedia…
“I have to be careful,” he continued, turning to me with a smile, “for I dabble with poisons a good deal.” He held out his hand as he spoke, and I noticed that it was all mottled over with similar pieces of plaster, and discoloured with strong acids.
A more sustainable solution might be gloves, but ok. They probably weren’t invented yet, and Wikipedia’s article on medical gloves is a bit sketchy, but I didn’t sign up to do research, I signed up to make bad puns, so I’m just going to trust it.
Moving on.
“We came here on business,” said Stamford, sitting down on a high three-legged stool, and pushing another one in my direction with his foot. “My friend here wants to take diggings; and as you were complaining that you could get no one to go halves with you, I thought that I had better bring you together.”
Sherlock Holmes seemed delighted at the idea of sharing his rooms with me. “I have my eye on a suite in Baker Street,” he said, “which would suit us down to the ground. You don’t mind the smell of strong tobacco, I hope?”
“I always smoke ‘ship’s’ myself,” I answered.2Surprisingly, there isn’t really a Wikipedia article on ship’s tobacco. This was about the closest I could get.
“That’s good enough: I generally have chemicals about, and occasionally do experiments. Would that annoy you?”
Dead people don’t tend to be annoyed, so:
“By no means.”
Ok glad we got that settled.
[Holmes:] “Let me see—what are my other shortcomings. I get in the dumps at times, and don’t open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I’ll soon be right. What have you to confess now? It’s just as well for two fellows to know the worst of one another before they begin to live together.”
I laughed at this cross-examination. “I keep a bull pup,” I said, “and I object to rows because my nerves are shaken, and I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours, and I am extremely lazy. I have another set of vices when I’m well, but those are the principal ones at present.”
Wait—laziness is a vice?
“Do you include violin playing in your category of rows?” he asked, anxiously.
“It depends on the player,” I answered. “A well-played violin is a treat for the gods—a badly-played one—”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he cried, with a merry laugh. “I think we may consider the thing as settled—that is, if the rooms are agreeable to you.”
That’s a healthy dose of arrogance, which is pride. Y’know what, I’ll just start a Seven Deadly Sins checklist.
“When shall we see them?”
“Call for me here at noon tomorrow, and we’ll go together and settle everything,” he answered.
“All right—noon exactly,” said I, shaking his hand.
We left him working among his chemicals, and we walked together towards my hotel.
Before the chapter ends, we have this exchange between Watson and Stamford, and then the latter completely ceases to exist, never to appear again in any of the novels or short stories.
“By the way,” I asked suddenly, stopping and turning upon Stamford, “how the deuce did he know that I had come from Afghanistan?”
My companion smiled an enigmatical smile. “That’s just his little peculiarity,” he said. ” A good many people have wanted to know how he finds things out.”
“Oh! a mystery is it?” I cried, rubbing my hands. “This is very piquant. I am much obliged to you for bringing us together. ‘The proper study of mankind is man,’ you know.”
“You must study him, then,” Stamford said, as he bade me good-bye. “You’ll find him a knotty problem, though. I’ll wager he learns more about you than you about him. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” I answered, and strolled on to my hotel, considerably interested in my new acquaintance.
Oh! a mystery is it? Yes Watson, the real mystery is not the friends we made along the way but the mystery of how long it’ll take for you to figure out that Holmes is a detective.
Also I’m not really sure if enigmatical is a real word, but this is the Victorian era, so we’re allowed to make up anything we want and nobody can stop us. BWAHAHAAAA
cue end credits, see you in Chapter 2 “The Science of Deduction” aka “Holmes Gets Insufferable.” Remember to smash that like button
the button doesn’t do anything but smash it anyway