The Start of a Beautiful Friendship
I LAUGHED at this cross-examination. “I keep a bull pup,”* I said, “and I object to rows because my nerves are shaken, and I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours, and I am extremely lazy. I have another set of vices when I’m well, but those are the principal ones at present.”
“Do you include violin-playing in your category of rows?” he asked, anxiously.*
“It depends on the player,” I answered. “A well-played violin is a treat for the gods – a badly-played one— ”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he cried, with a merry laugh. “I think we may consider the thing as settled.”
We left him working among his chemicals, and we walked together towards my hotel.
“By the way,” I asked suddenly, stopping and turning upon Stamford, “how the deuce did he know that I had come from Afghanistan?”
My companion smiled an enigmatical smile. “That’s just his little peculiarity,” he said. “A good many people have wanted to know how he finds things out.”
We never hear of this dog again. In ‘The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes’ however we do hear that in his college days, Sherlock was on his way to chapel when he was bitten on the ankle by a bull terrier. Possibly the memory still rankled.
Sherlock Holmes’s favourite violinist was the brilliant Wilhelmina Neruda (1839-1911), much admired by the great Joachim. Holmes waxes lyrical over her Chopin, but what would Holmes himself have made of that, spoken by any other man? For Chopin did not write any solo violin music, and there is no record of Neruda performing anything by Chopin in public. See the photo above for more.