I examine the data, as an expert, and pronounce a specialist’s opinion. When Gregson, or Lestrade, or Athelney Jones are out of their depths – which, by the way, is their normal state – the matter is laid before me. ‘I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection. ‘The only unofficial consulting detective,’ he answered. ‘The only unofficial detective?’ I said, raising my eyebrows. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.’
But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. ‘My mind,’ he said, ‘rebels at stagnation. On the contrary, he put his finger-tips together, and leaned his elbows on the arms of his chair, like one who has a relish for conversation. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.’ Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. ‘Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process which involves increased tissue-change and may at least leave a permanent weakness. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.’ ‘I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one.
‘Perhaps you are right, Watson,’ he said. I cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it.’ ‘My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. ‘It is cocaine,’ he said, ‘a seven-per-cent solution. He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. ‘Which is it to-day,’ I asked, ‘morphine or cocaine?’ Yet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune, which I had taken with my lunch or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.
His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him. Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty.
On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Three times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt cuff. Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.
0 kommentar(er)
