however, Holmes came to the conclusion that it really was no concern of his whether Moriarty had ceased to exist or not. “What is important to understand, Watson, is that the battle against evil is a constant one, a struggle against one of the great powers in the universe, not the fact of a man or his life of crime. Indeed, evil is not a fact; it is a condition of the universe. Were it a mere fact, we would have done away with it. Obviously, we cannot. We are part of an infinite struggle, timeless and without end.”
It is over a decade since the notes for the last of these cases were recorded. In their final composition, I have had to make a few editorial decisions that will please some and displease others. Thus, in a few places, I have quoted the speech of a character in the original language spoken, often of course in Italian, but sometimes in French or German. Some will revel in these passages, others will find them obstructive annoyances in the flow of the narrative. In my defense, I can say that Holmes has given his full support to my textual decisions. Indeed, at one point he suggested that he wished I might write these accounts entirely in French or Italian. They would thus serve him as mnemonic linguistic devices for his further language study. My knowledge of French and Italian are far too weak, however, for such a task.
In recent days, Holmes has announced that, upon the conclusion of his treatise on the motets of Orlando di Lasso, he intends to compose a treatise on crime and its relation to music. No one but he could conceive and execute such a work; no one could surpass it.
With the passage of time, Holmes has become less reticent and his intellect remains as sharp as ever. My memory has weakened, however, and I may have misstated a fact here and there. For these and other inevitable lapses, I beg the indulgence of the reader for one who is fast approaching old age. To paraphrase the great Latin poet:
JOHN H. WATSON, M.D.
AN AFFAIR IN RAVELLO
OF ALL THE ADVENTURES SHARED WITH ME BY MY FRIEND Sherlock Holmes, the one that follows is perhaps the most revelatory of certain elusive traits of character which, despite our deep and intimate friendship, remained well if not entirely hidden from view for as long as we knew each other. It contradicts most thoroughly the image that he assiduously cultivated of himself as a machine without emotions, a bodiless brain created solely to think. This cold facade which he put forward so convincingly, however, cracked on occasion despite his best efforts. The reader indeed may recall my observation, in the case of the three Garridebs, of the great affection that I saw move across his face when he feared that I had been fatally wounded. Despite these occasional breaks, Holmes persisted obstinately in his chosen portrayal of himself, for, even if untrue, the image frightened away fools and those who would waste his time on the trivial. In any case, let the reader know that Holmes has passed on the present manuscript with a benign smile and a laugh not devoid of irony.
I have remarked as well in past accounts that my friend’s personal habits, despite his well-known disorderliness, were of the most abstemious kind, even ascetic in their nature. In that portion of his life in which many of these cases fall, tobacco was his only habitual indulgence. As to food and drink, he ate only what was necessary to keep mind and body alive and drank even less, indulging from time to time in a single peg of whiskey or a glass of wine.
In Italy, despite the wider palette of temptation afforded there, I observed little change in his habits. He still ate sparingly and thought little about the food that was presented to him, though I noted that he had acquired a taste for the strong Roman coffee and the warm crusty loaf that the servant boy brought to our table every morning at dawn. As soon as Holmes finished with that simple breakfast, he would retire for a time to consult his books, perhaps the chief area in which his natural abstemiousness had failed him.
As in London, Holmes surrounded himself with old dusty volumes, and in Rome he had found a few bookstores that were greatly to his liking. Stacks of books appeared spontaneously everywhere like large toadstools, and I dreaded the inevitable moment when I would return home to find them invading my own room.
We had found new quarters on Via Crescenzio, in the spacious residence of la signora Manfredini, a rather outlandish woman, who regularly beat her husband, a croupier in Monte Carlo, with a large broom as soon as he arrived on his monthly visits. Seeing that il signore was never seriously harmed during these encounters, we took to disregarding the commotion to which they gave rise, though the beleaguered gentleman, hoping for a place to hide, sometimes raced through our rooms with his wife in hot pursuit shouting
Our lodgings consisted of three rooms on the top floor of a grey stone building recently refurbished. They were filled with light and looked out onto a verandah that ran around the entire residence. From there we could see the dome of the Church of the Val d’Aosta, and in the distance that of St. Peter’s. The rooms were spacious and plainly furnished: a bed, a table and chair, and large almirahs were what our eccentric landlady had provided. Holmes made us each more comfortable by purchasing lamps, shelves for books, and rather worn but comfortable easy chairs on his wanderings in the flea market at Porta Portese. His own shelves filled immediately with tome after tome and music as well. Most of the latter was rare pieces for the violin, but some of it consisted of operatic scores by the newly popular verismo composers Puccini, Leoncavallo, Giordano, and Mascagni, for he had acquired an interest in these works, not for their music, which he strongly deprecated, but for their illustrations of the criminal motives that lurked in the dark recesses of the Italian mind.
One day, in the late afternoon, I returned to our quarters after a long walk in the Villa Borghese. I found Holmes poring over his latest acquisitions.
“A most surprising set of finds, Watson. Look, dear doctor, a group of rare works on the Orient which, being of little if any interest to the Italians, I purchased for a small fraction of what they would have cost in London.”
I joined him on the floor in order to peruse the new purchases with him.
“Here, my dear fellow, is Maurice’s seven volumes on the antiquities of Hindustan, an exceedingly rare work, for just a few
I picked up the largest of the tomes on the floor, a copy, bound beautifully in blue leather, of Monier- Williams’s
“Holmes,” I said with some annoyance, “surely this purchase was unnecessary. There are two copies of this work in our quarters in London.”
“Ah, Watson, so there are indeed. Note, however, that this one is only half the bulk of the others, but has the same contents. It is a rare copy of the work printed on onionskin and thus useful for the traveler who must always pick his books carefully.”
I was about to remark wryly on the improbability of his working on Sanskrit texts while traveling, but I held my tongue. Instead, I said, somewhat pointedly, “Please explain to me how and why such works find their way to Italy.”
My friend looked at me with a broad smile. “You raise a most interesting question. The same query occurred to me, and I conceived of an explanation that was immediately corroborated by my book dealer. You see, Watson, many of our colonials, having spent their entire adult lives in India and elsewhere in the tropics, return after retirement to England to live their remaining years. But finding neither the dreary British climate nor the strictures of English life to their liking, they retreat to sunnier climes. Often the choice is Italy, and particularly, I gather from my learned bookseller, the coast south of Rome, in the hope that the sun and the exuberance of Italian life will bring to mind their younger days in the tropics. In this they are mistaken, of course, for it is not the sun that transmitted to them a sense of well-being, but the privilege of empire in which they participated. Nevertheless, in this mistaken hope, there has gathered, or so I am told, a small but growing number of Englishmen, who, having served in the Subcontinent and our African dominions, now live in and around the warm hills near Salerno. When the last of the family dies, the estate is disbanded, the goods sold off, the books winding up with the other family possessions in the junk shops of Rome and Naples, to my good fortune, of course.”
“Most interesting,” said I.
“Indeed,” said Holmes, “I gather that others, rather than move entirely to Italy, have taken to a more
