«The Hound of the Baskervilles», Arthur Conan DoyleAlmost six chapters without Holmes. Yet Watson saw him

Where did Holmes go?

It starts the way it should: Baker Street, a walking stick left behind by last night’s visitor, Holmes at breakfast. Dr. Mortimer reads out an old manuscript about the curse of the Baskervilles, and in chapter 5 Sir Henry asks Holmes to come down to Devonshire himself. Holmes declines: in London a blackmailer is besmirching one of the most revered names in England, and “only I can stop a disastrous scandal”. He sends Watson instead.

In chapter 6 Holmes sees them off at the station. The train moves, Watson looks back and sees on the platform the tall, austere figure of Holmes, standing motionless and gazing after them. For the next 25,441 words in a row Holmes is not at Watson’s side. That is 43% of the book: chapters 7 to 10 whole, and nearly all of chapters 6 and 11.

He comes back in the very last paragraph of chapter 11. So, for how many chapters does Holmes go missing from his own book? Almost six out of fifteen. Except “missing” is the wrong word, and that is what this episode is about.

“My dear Holmes”

On the platform Holmes gives Watson his task: “I wish you simply to report facts in the fullest possible manner to me, and you can leave me to do the theorizing.” And from chapter 8 the book changes shape. Watson stops telling the story and copies out his letters to Holmes instead: two reports, dated October 13th and 15th, then extracts from his diary.

Watson tries hard. The reports are long: the neighbours, an escaped convict, a butler who stands at the window at night with a candle. Four times he writes “my dear Holmes”, and once he asks outright: “Congratulate me, my dear Holmes, and tell me that I have not disappointed you as an agent”.

Back comes next to nothing. In his diary Watson notes that the notes from Baker Street are “few and short”, with no comments on what he has sent, and decides that the blackmailing case must be absorbing all Holmes’s faculties. And he writes: “I wish that he were here.”

The man on the tor

Chapter 9, night. Watson and Sir Henry chase an escaped convict across the moor and lose him. Turning for home, Watson sees the moon low over a granite tor, and against it, outlined as black as an ebony statue, a man. Tall, thin, legs a little apart, arms folded, head bowed. Watson turns to grasp Sir Henry’s arm, and the man is gone.

In his report he insists: “Do not think that it was a delusion, Holmes.” The next day, in his diary, he goes through everyone he has met: this one was far taller than Stapleton and far thinner than Frankland. So a stranger, and perhaps the very one who dogged them in London. Watson resolves to catch him.

Now go back to the platform in chapter 6: “the tall, austere figure of Holmes standing motionless and gazing after us”. Tall, motionless, watching. Watson describes the same man twice, and the second time he doesn’t know him. That it was Holmes, Holmes admits himself later: that night he “was so imprudent as to allow the moon to rise behind” him.

“It is a lovely evening, my dear Watson”

Barrymore the butler tells him where to look: there is another man hiding on the moor, living in the old stone huts on the hillside, with a lad who brings him all he needs. Watson goes from hut to hut around that same tor, finds one that is lived in (blankets, a bucket of water, empty tins), and under a bundle with a loaf of bread a pencilled note: “Dr. Watson has gone to Coombe Tracey.” So it was Watson himself being watched.

Watson sits in a dark corner, cocks the pistol in his pocket and waits. He badly wants to catch the stranger himself: “It would indeed be a triumph for me if I could run him to earth where my master had failed.” Footsteps, a shadow across the opening, and a well-known voice: “It is a lovely evening, my dear Watson… I really think that you will be more comfortable outside than in.”

Watson’s first thought is his reports: “Then my reports have all been wasted!” Holmes takes a bundle of papers from his pocket. Watson thought he was writing to Baker Street, and Holmes had arranged things so that the letters reached the moor only a day late. To judge by the look of them, he read them more than once.

Why hide?

Watson is properly hurt: “Then you use me, and yet do not trust me!” Holmes explains: had he been at Baskerville Hall, his presence would have put their opponents on their guard; this way he remains an unknown factor. In the last chapter he says it plainly: “It was my game to watch Stapleton.” So he deceived everybody, Watson included, came down secretly, stayed mostly at Coombe Tracey and used the hut only when he had to be near.

Stapleton is the neighbour with the green butterfly-net whom Watson meets in chapter 7. Watson writes about him in his reports, as he does about every neighbour, never knowing his letters are being read on the same moor. And why wasn’t Watson told? Holmes explains that too, and to me it’s the best moment in the book: in his kindness Watson would have wished “to tell me something, or … brought me out some comfort or other”, and given him away.

Verdict

Read it. Not for the hound with fire in its mouth: it only comes bounding out of the fog in chapter 14. Read it for Watson. For almost six chapters Holmes leaves him on his own, and Watson manages: he finds out whom the butler signals to with a candle at night, goes to see Laura Lyons in Coombe Tracey, and tracks down the very hut where Holmes is hiding.

People remember it as a ghost story about a spectral dog. I think it’s a book about Watson tracking a stranger and finding his friend. And nobody says “Elementary, my dear Watson”: I checked, and the word “elementary” turns up twice, never next to Watson’s name. One point off for the last chapter, where Holmes sits by the fire explaining everything we’ve already worked out. I like explaining things too, just not after the ending.