📗The Adventures of SherlockH olmes.
Writer:- A. Conan Doyle.
Contents________________________
I. A Scandal in Bohemia
II. The Red-Headed League
III. A Case of Identity
IV. The Boscombe Valley Mystery
V. The Five Orange Pips
VI. The Man with the Twisted Lip
VII. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
VIII. The Adventure of the Speckled Band
IX. The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
X. The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
XI. The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
XII. The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.
✍️ This article collected from this book 📚)
A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA
I.
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him
mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the
whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler.
All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but
admirably balanced mind.
He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and
observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed
himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a
gibe and a sneer.
They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for
drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to
admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was
to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental
results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power
lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as
his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene
Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.
I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each
other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up
around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were
sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of
society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street,
buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine
and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen
nature.
He was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and occupied
his immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation in following out
those clues, and clearing up those mysteries which had been abandoned as
hopeless by the official police. From time to time I heard some vague account of
his doings: of his summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder, of his
clearing up of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee, and
finally of the mission which he had accomplished so delicately and successfully
for the reigning family of Holland. Beyond these signs of his activity, however,
which I merely shared with all the readers of the daily press, I knew little of my
former friend and companion.
One night—it was on the twentieth of March, 1888—I was returning from a
journey to a patient (for I had now returned to civil practice), when my way led
me through Baker Street. As I passed the well-remembered door, which must
always be associated in my mind with my wooing, and with the dark incidents of
the Study in Scarlet,
I was seized with a keen desire to see Holmes again, and to
know how he was employing his extraordinary powers. His rooms were
brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw his tall, spare figure pass twice in a
dark silhouette against the blind. He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with
his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped behind him. To me, who
knew his every mood and habit, his attitude and manner told their own story.
He
was at work again. He had risen out of his drug-created dreams and was hot
upon the scent of some new problem. I rang the bell and was shown up to the
chamber which had formerly been in part my own.
His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to see
me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved me to an
armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a
gasogene in the corner.
Then he stood before the fire and looked me over in his
singular introspective fashion.
“Wedlock suits you,” he remarked. “I think, Watson, that you have put on
seven and a half pounds since I saw you.”
“Seven!” I answered.
“Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more, I fancy,
Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not tell me that you intended
to go into harness.”
“Then, how do you know?”
“I see it, I deduce it. How do I know that you have been getting yourself very
wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless servant girl?”
“My dear Holmes,” said I, “this is too much. You would certainly have been
burned, had you lived a few centuries ago.
It is true that I had a country walk on
Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I have changed my clothes I
can’t imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary Jane, she is incorrigible, and my
wife has given her notice, but there, again, I fail to see how you work it out.”
He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together.