It was my own room that we went to, in fact; it occurs to me now that he probably chose it because its window was somewhat more sequestered from the outside than that in his room; our curtains were rather sheer and only covered the lower part of the windows, so it was possibly important. I noticed at the time that he lit an oil lamp rather than use the gas-jet, and that he was careful to position it between the window and the bed, so that our shadows would not pass across the curtain.
I found his actions sobering, when I understood the reasons for them, and it was in somewhat cooler blood that I--albeit passively--faced the prospect of disrobing with another man with intentions both intimate and criminal. There is a world of difference between seeing a fellow more or less nude at the baths, or in a professional capacity, and seeing the same, usually very modest, man undressing with feverish urgency in one's own bed-chamber. An additional element of alarm is experienced when he turns his attentions from himself and begins, with ruthless efficiency, to undress you.
Alarm, yes, and a certain breathless feeling in the region of the epigastrium--but, to be honest, what I primarily felt was the thrill of adventure. I think I can say I have rarely proved a coward, and I felt at the time that a challenge to my manhood was being issued. That seems quite strange, now that I've set it down, but I think I have the right of it. I have often followed Holmes into situations of greater imminent danger--I would have followed him anywhere--but never into an adventure with the same admixture of joy and gravity, fear and expectation. I know we were both apprehensive.
This took longer to write than it did Holmes to bare us both to the waist, at which point, admittedly to my relief, he stepped back, and we stood regarding one another in the scant light for a few seconds. He had the elegant neck and shoulders of a ballet dancer, all strong, graceful lines, as handsome as his splendid eyes and fine artistic hands. His chest, however, was rather narrow and more or less gaunt, and though his long limbs were of perfect conformation, with musculature hard as oak to the touch, they were too thin for conventional standards of beauty. Yet he proved irresistible to women, especially of a certain intelligent and courageous sort, and easily dominated in his dealings with men. I think his finest attributes were his compelling manly grace and certainty of motion, and his commanding presence, which served him as well as--or rather better than--any ordinary comeliness.
I have been considered handsome: in fact upon occasion I have been called exceedingly handsome. Of course that is pleasant, though I have no opinion on the matter--vanity is not one of my several vices. Yet I do think it was astonishing that, at this moment, I saw in Holmes's eyes, which were locked on mine with the full intensity of their power, an emotion as much like reverence or adoration as has ever and by anyone been applied to me. I could not quite trust nor fathom it, that that brilliant man, to whom I had considered myself at most a tag-at-heel and more likely a mere nuisance, could look upon me in any way as an idol.
It was powerfully stimulating.
He took my hand and ran his thumb up my arm with a little frown, rather in the manner of a man considering the purchase of a two-year-old colt. His hands had gone from warm to cool, and though they no longer trembled there was a thrill or an electricity in his fingers that I felt acutely. Or else my skin was especially receptive to sensation, which might equally be true. He traced the cords of my neck with a light, precise motion like a lecturer demonstrating the origin and insertion of each fibre, framed the scar on my shoulder with a long thumb and forefinger, marked the apex of my heart for a few seconds with two fingers.
Even in my agitated state I was inclined to smile at his clinical touch, but why I should have thought that he, poor fellow, might feel any less strange and awkward than I did I cannot imagine. I have some reason to suspect that, at any rate, this was not his first such encounter--he was, in certain surprising and arcane ways, suspiciously adept--and yet the circumstances were extraordinary, and he, almost certainly, was as bewildered, and more shaken, than I.
During Holmes's tentative examination I had stood passive, but now I raised my hand to his face, and he closed his eyes and breathed through parted lips as I stroked along the strong line of his shoulder, then down the silky skin of his side. I felt him shiver faintly. He reached up to my arm and traced his own hand along it back to me before, very gently, he pulled me close to him, and bent his head to kiss my cheek, and then the sensitive spot below the ear. I felt the touch of his lips and tongue, the heat of his breath on my throat, with intense acuity. The resulting surge of warmth in my body was remarkable; I grew suddenly short of breath, and found I was spontaneously pressing myself against him in an amatory fashion, while he responded in kind, providing a pleasurable counter pressure.
Very strange, standing with a new lover a clear half head taller than myself, to feel a hard cheek with a day's growth of beard against my skin, and a hard bony breast against my own. Very, very strange to press close to this new lover and feel another, answering hardness... Singularly strange because I felt as if it had happened before, as if I had dreamed it--or as if I were dreaming it now, after it had already occurred.
I heard Holmes take in a sudden little breath. "Let me--" he whispered, and his hands ran forward around the waist of my trousers to open the flies. He glanced into my eyes for consent before he pushed them down, lowering himself slowly to kneel before me.
I felt a complicated pang when I realized his intention. "No," I gasped, reflexively. I spoke in a tone lower than the usual, but it still jolted my ear, waking me from a dream to find it was no dream after all. "Holmes, no--you can't. I shan't let you. It's--it's too degrading."
He looked up at me with the dreamy, distant look I associated with his moods of intense concentration, and it was only after a moment's pause that his gaze gradually became present. He wore another expression I had never seen upon his face before--he looked simply happy, almost childlike.
"Degrading!" he exclaimed. "Why, either it is all degrading, or none of it is. --Forgive me; I know I'm not making much sense--can't think." He chuckled and let his head fall forward against my abdomen, and I started at the contact. He paid no attention, but spoke deliberately, like a slightly drunken man who picks his words with care. "If the worship of Apollo is not degrading, then the worship of Priapus is no more so. To the former I have paid homage all my life--to the latter, my dear friend, I have yearned with such religious fervor in the months since I made your acquaintance, that to snatch the sacrament from my lips now would be an act of excommunication far beyond your capacity for cruelty. I am present at the altar; I must do worship, no matter what sacrifice is demanded...
"Besides," he added, looking down at my body and then up to my eye with a sly smile, "I believe that rambunctious and willful god has made his command quite plain, whatever your wishes. You are out voted, John Watson, degradation or no."
Though I vividly recall the events of that evening, I have little urge to write them all down in language which will hardly do them sympathetic justice. What matters more to me, and what more impressed me then, was the experience of a whole other man in Sherlock Holmes, as different from the cold, efficient sleuth as could be imagined. To see a grown man--and not just any man, but Sherlock Holmes--helpless in that paroxysm which is the penultimate triumph of Nature over mortal vanity, was a revelation to me. Its power over his brilliant rationality was as great as the sway death holds over life, or God over mankind.
That I was permitted to see him in that transcendent moment (not just once, but several times that night!), completely submerged in his animal self--arched and rapt and, for once, totally off his guard--was, strangely, a glimpse of the divine. The French perhaps have the right of it--seminal release is not so far removed from the release of the soul after all, but is a far kinder presentiment of that grim eventuality, and possibly one we from which we are meant to take a lesson.
(Well, that's a fine lot of nonsense. I shudder to think what Holmes would say if he looked over my shoulder while I wrote it, as was his irritating and much-missed habit of old.)
I think Holmes must have suffered sharply from the inevitable isolation that is human life, given his great awareness and his tendency to solitude. I could sense it--I was allowed to sense it--in a dozen ways. I had been given access to chambers of his being where none other was permitted, much less welcomed--where, I believe, he himself was reluctant to wander. He would have locked their doors forever, if he could; but he was, after all, a man--with a heart and a body whose needs could not entirely be neglected, and he had the strength and sense to abandon himself to those needs when their satisfaction became compulsory, if only then. Perhaps he was even aware that to deny the part of himself whence those needs sprang would be to lose a thing of inestimable value, no matter the pain and inconvenience their maintenance cost him.
I remember lying with him in the afterglow of that first night. The bed was small, and we lay very close, without speaking, which later proved typical. Holmes smoked a cigarette with the vague languidness of a sleepwalker, and eventually, when I was certain it would not be missed, I plucked it from his unresisting fingers and flicked it into the grate. Of course he was exhausted--it had been a strenuous night for mind and body, and he had been nearly sleepless for some days. It was something just to see him completely at his ease, without the bitter, ceaseless, nervous tension which marked his daily existence--sometimes acutely and sometimes subtly, but incessantly--which could be tiring to a companion, and which was, manifestly, occasionally unbearable to himself, since from it stemmed his use of narcotics.
The Bible uses the word "knowledge" for sexual congress, and it is certain at such times that one feels he has conned the depths of a companion--though of course, at that date we had not gone to the full extent of that act whose ugly name I will not mention. Holmes seemed utterly transparent to me then--he looked transparent, or at least translucent, slackened in catlike repose, the blue tracery of veins obvious under his fine, white skin. Even the pulsation of the heart beneath his fleshless ribs was as evident to the eye as its twin which flickered in his long throat, as if all his inner workings were displayed to me. He was hiding nothing from me, and I, foolishly enough, thought nothing hidden.
There are a great many things I ought to have asked him.