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I never did quite manage to determine whether the pain was truly worse at night, or if I simply had less to distract myself from it. Whatever the reason, I certainly felt it more strongly at night, and this was especially true of the first few months after my return. My injuries and my illness had conspired to make my body an unforgiving prison: minutes dragged into hours, which dragged into days, which dragged into weeks, and never was I given even a moment of respite from the constant ache.
It was somewhat easier to ignore it during the day, when I could read and smoke and write. This may not be apparent from the stories which I have published, but I had been writing long before I put the skill to use in chronicling Holmes’ cases – memories of my childhood, escapades at university, and even some of the more palatable recollections of my time abroad were memorialized in the cheap notebooks I could afford, and the process of putting thoughts to paper soothed my soul and stilled my too-often racing heart.
Having soon found that medical texts of any sort would send my mind back to the battlefield and clamp a cruel vice around my chest, I turned instead to fiction, the sorts of stories that Holmes would denounce as rubbish, but they never spoke of pain and fever and death, of terror and hunger and heat and exhaustion, and so they were safe for me when much of the world still seemed a terrible threat.
When I took up my rooms at Baker Street, I brought my textbooks with me but ignored them for months, and focused on the art of the narrative. I had never thought my life to be of much interest or much worth, but there in those silly, comforting books I saw how even the most mundane detail could be rendered beautiful, and found that such glimpses of beauty existed even in my own dreary days.
And so I spent those early days hunting down the perfect words to capture the particular crack of a log on the fire, or the comfort of settling a teacup perfectly into its saucer, and the thrum of a gentle rain against the windows. And then I would go upstairs and spend my nights awake, lying as still as I could and trying to relax against the ache, which swelled and pounded unpredictably. I tried to compose stories in my head, to call up pieces of music I enjoyed, to dwell on pleasant memories, but nothing could withstand the onslaught.
If I managed to sleep at all, it would be for a few unsatisfactory hours in the early morning, and I inevitably awoke feeling rotten in every conceivable way.
One morning after such a night, I woke with a pounding headache and an ache in my jaw; I hadn’t noticed it at the time, but I must have been clenching my teeth powerfully for some time. I rolled out of bed, stiff and exhausted and generally in a foul temper – at least, as foul a temper as I could muster in my state – and hobbled down the stairs. A cup of tea wouldn’t entirely repair my situation, but it could hardly make it worse.
Holmes was already at the table, in his dressing gown still but neat of hair and face, so he must have been up a while.
“Ah,” he said upon sighting me, “good morning, Watson. Mrs. Hudson has just brought up a fresh pot. Shall I pour you a cup?”
“Please,” I said, and eased myself into the chair as he cleared aside his papers and placed a steaming cup before me. I could feel his eyes upon me as I settled back with a poorly-concealed sigh and lifted the cup to my lips, but he said nothing until I had set it down again.
“Another sleepless night, I gather?” he asked, fairly off-hand, though not callous. “And a headache, too, it seems,” he added, lowering his voice somewhat when I couldn’t help but wince at the pitch of it. “Would you prefer silence?”
“No, please,” I said. “Don’t restrain yourself on my account.” It was a poor attempt at humour, but a slight smile touched his lips nonetheless.
“What shall I do on your account, then?” he asked. “Forgive me – I’ve tried to leave you your privacy, but it’s all too clear to me that you have been languishing, my dear fellow, positively languishing. I hope you don’t think so badly of me that you fear to admit to such a natural state as pain?”
“No,” I sighed, “it’s not that, not at all. But I’m quite sure there’s nothing that you can do, not even with your varied skills and many fine attributes. This is something that must resolve in its own course, or not at all. I do thank you for your concern, though,” I added hastily. “I just shouldn’t want you to waste any time or effort on such an unsolvable problem.”
A more cunning mind than my own – or perhaps my own mind on a more cunning day, less fogged with exhaustion – might have known that saying it thus would ensure precisely the opposite of what I intended: Holmes never could ignore a challenge, and he took my words for one and threw himself into proving me wrong.
Oh, he wasn’t garish about it, of course (for all his oddities, he has always been the perfect gentleman), but after that I began to notice shifts in our day-to-day affairs that I could only imagine had arisen through his scheming. The chair I preferred to sit and read in had been moved closer to the fire, swapped with the settee that had previously sat there, and a small footstool had appeared in front of it. Holmes began engaging me in long discussions after dinner, explaining abstruse theories or practices that he could have been inventing on the spot, for all I knew, but he was entertaining about it, and coaxed replies from me as expertly as I would eventually witness him coaxing information from witnesses and suspects in his cases. I found myself retiring to bed later and falling asleep more quickly when I did. I still frequently slept poorly, but the following day I would find my companion softer of speech and more lyrical of music than was his habit, and although he would enquire after my health, he would not pester me about it.
I think what struck me most of all, however, was what he did not offer me: never did he offer me his morphine, and it wasn’t until I was far more whole that I understood the degree to which he himself partook of it. I have never asked why he did not, but I assume he must have deduced my distaste for it, or else assumed that if I had had need of it I would have acquired my own. I do not think it had anything to do with greed, however. In fact, I am sure it did not. For if he were of an avaricious character (such a ridiculous notion that I cannot fathom how anyone could think it the faintest possibility), that would have been the simplest option.
How much more attention and effort he exerted in his own ways than would have been required had he simply handed me a syringe! How much more care he showed in accommodating the needs of which I was too ashamed to mention, and how much more respect for my character, than would have been demonstrated in such a simple, unconcerned exchange.
No, I am quite sure that if I had ever truly needed it, he would have offered it without hesitation and with no concern for the longevity of his supply. But I did not – not to the extent that I had no alternative – and so he did not make mention of it. Whether he feared to tempt me or feared to rouse my scorn I do not know, and don't much care. Far more important to me are the actions that he did take.
I harbor no insecurity in my skill as a physician, nor did I even then, when active practice was entirely beyond me, and I trust that my training was as thorough as the knowledge of the time allowed, but I will not hesitate to admit that I learned from Holmes a sort of care that I had never encountered anywhere else. For in it, he took the bulk of the labor upon himself and applied himself most thoroughly to anticipating my needs rather than simply reacting to them, and it was that most of all that I now believe helped set me back upon my path.
It did not dispel the pain in my body nor seal the cracks in my mind, and it did not cure me of the shadow in my soul, but it helped me to see that despite these things, I was still endowed with the basic human dignity and worth of all people, and it showed me quite plainly that there was still good and kindness to be found, even in a stranger.
And it was that, more than any physical healing, that coaxed me into once more rejoining the world.