Chapter 19 Chapter Eighteen

Why are there tears?Although he never wailed, or mourned to the point of numbness, why would he find himself with his head in his hands, touching To bearded fingertips wet with tears?Somewhere—some small cemetery, he imagined, on the outskirts of London—Mrs. Munroe and her relatives were standing together, in sombre dresses, with dark clouds over sea and land.Is she crying too?Or did she shed all her tears on the way to London alone, and when she returned to the city, with the support of her family and the comfort of her friends, she could barely support herself? It doesn't matter, he told himself, she's somewhere else and I'm here, and there's nothing I can do for her.

He had tried hard to help her.Before she left, he sent Anderson's daughter to the cottage twice with an envelope more than enough to cover travel and funeral expenses.But both times the girl returned with a reserved and cheerful expression, telling him that she refused to accept the envelope. "She won't ask, sir, and won't talk to me." "It's okay, Ann." "Should I try again?" "No, I don't think there will be any results if I try again." Now, alone, he stood facing the apiary, with a blank and serious expression, as if he were among the mourning crowd at Roger's grave.Rows of beehives are like tombstones—rectangular white boxes without any decoration, erected in the grass.He hoped that the little cemetery where Roger was buried would be as simple and unassuming as the bee farm.Someone took care of it carefully, the grass was green and there were no weeds, and there were no tall buildings, traffic, or crowds nearby, and no one came to disturb the sleeping souls.A peaceful place to live in harmony with nature, a place where a boy can rest in peace and a place where his mother can finally say goodbye.

But why does he always cry for no reason, without any emotion, as if the tears fell by himself?Why can't he cover his face with his hands and cry out loud?He had suffered the death of other relatives and friends, and it was as painful then as it is now, but he never went to the funeral of a loved one, and never shed a tear, as if grief was something to be despised.Why? "Never mind," he murmured, "it doesn't make sense—" He's not going to look for answers (at least not today), and he'll never believe that those tears could be a concentrated outburst of everything he's seen, known, loved, lost, and repressed over the years—his youth. Fragments of life, the destruction of great cities and empires in history, the great wars that changed the geography of the world, and the gradual loss of beloved companions, the gradual decline of personal health, memory and life memories; all the unspeakable complexity of life, every day A profound and future-changing moment, all condensed into the salty liquid gushing out of his tired eyes.He didn't think about it any more, and let himself sit on the ground, like an inexplicable stone sculpture on the freshly mowed lawn.

He used to sit here before, this is the place, not far from the bee farm, surrounded by four stones he picked up from the beach eighteen years ago, and he placed them symmetrically at the four corners (black gray stones) polished by the tide and flattened to fit in the palm of the hand)—one in front of him, one behind, one to the left, one to the right, forming a private little clearing.In the past, he used to silently release his despair here.It is like a trick of the mind, a game, but it is beneficial.Within four stones, he can meditate and reminisce about warm pasts with loved ones who have passed away; and when he steps out of this area, all the sorrows he has had before will be left there, even if only briefly for a while. "Body and spirit are one," was his mantra, which he said once when he entered, and repeated when he left: "Everything goes round and round, and round and round, even the poet Juvenal would have to admit it."

The first time was in 1929, and the second time was in 1946. He used to come here often to communicate with the dead, and buried his grief in this bee farm.But the blow that was brought to him in 1929 was devastating, and he was immersed in incomparable pain, which he could not extricate himself for a long time: in that year, the already elderly Mrs. Hudson (since he lived in London, Hudson Mrs. Sen was his housekeeper and cook, and the only one who accompanied him to Sussex after he retired) fell in the kitchen, shattered a hip, smashed his jaw, knocked out his teeth, and fell into a coma (It was later discovered that her hip bone may have fractured long before the fatal fall, and her fragile bones could no longer support her overweight frame); in the hospital, she eventually died of acute pneumonia (Dr. In writing to Holmes announcing her death, it was a happy ending. Pneumonia, you know, is not a torment to the feeble old.)

After Dr. Watson's letters were filed and Mrs. Hudson's belongings were taken away by her nephew, who had just hired an inexperienced butler to help with housework, his long-time companion, the kind-hearted Watson, Dr. Sheng also passed away suddenly in the middle of the night (that night, he had dinner with his children and grandchildren who came to visit him, drank three glasses of red wine, and the jokes whispered in his ear by the grandson still made him laugh out loud Before ten o'clock, he said goodnight to everyone, and passed away before midnight).Dr. Watson's third wife telegraphed the heartbreaking news to Holmes, and the young housekeeper handed him the telegram disapprovingly (this was the first housekeeper he invited after Mrs. Hudson, She hustled through the farms, silently enduring her employer's tantrums, and was followed by numerous successors, who often resigned within a year.)

In the days that followed, Holmes loitered on the beach for hours on end, looking out at the sea or at the stones at his feet from dawn to dusk.He had not seen Dr. Watson or spoken to him directly since the summer of 1920.That summer, the doctor took his wife to spend a weekend with him, but he felt bad, or Holmes felt worse than the guests felt.He is not very friendly with the doctor's third wife (he finds her boring and overbearing), and he finds that he and Watson have little in common other than reliving past experiences.Evening chats inevitably fell into an embarrassing silence, and the only thing that broke the silence was the wife's silly gossip, either about her children or her love of French food. It seemed that silence was her worst enemy.

But in any case, Holmes has always regarded Watson as a person closer than his relatives. Therefore, his sudden death, coupled with the recent departure of Mrs. Hudson, made Holmes feel a door slammed shut in front of him. Locked inside everything that had shaped his life in the past.As he strolled along the beach, pausing now and then to look at the rolling waves, he realized how adrift he was: suddenly, during that month, neither of the two people who were most in touch with his past self remained, he remained. it's here.On the fourth day, he went for a walk on the beach again, and began to study the stones on the beach.He held them in front of him, kept the ones he liked, threw away the ones he didn't like, and finally, he found four favorites.In his view, even the smallest pebble hides the mysteries of the entire universe.He put them in his pocket and carried them to the top of the cliff. These four stones existed before he was born, and while he was conceived, born, educated, and aged, they did not change at all. This beach awaits.Four common stones, like others he had ever stepped on, combined the basic elements that make up man, every living thing, and everything imaginable; and they, no doubt, contained Dr. and Mrs. Hudson's initial traces, of course, and quite a few traces of himself.

So Holmes placed the stones in specific places, sat cross-legged in the middle, and cleared his troubled thoughts—the troubles caused by the eternal loss of the two people he cared about most.He believes that to feel the absence of someone is, in a way, to feel his presence.What he breathed in was the fresh autumn air from the apiary, and what he breathed out was his annoyance (he meditated in his heart, his mind was calm, his heart was calm, which was taught to him by Tibetan lamas).He felt that the farewell ceremony between himself and the undead was beginning, and they were slowly receding like a tide, leaving him with peace.Finally, he stood up and stepped forward, between those solemn stones, his sorrow was temporarily suppressed: "Body and spirit are one—"

In the second half of 1929, he came here six times, and the meditation time was shorter and shorter each time (three hours and eighteen minutes, one hour and two minutes, forty-seven minutes, twenty-three minutes, nine minutes, four minutes).By New Years, he no longer needs to sit among the rocks, he is here for the needs of the garden (pulling the weeds, mowing the lawn, and setting the stones deep into the dirt, like paving. like pebbles on a garden walk).It was almost two hundred and one months later, when he got the news of his brother Mycroft's death, that he returned and sat there for several hours--on a cold November afternoon, he exhaled The white air dissipated in front of his eyes, making him feel like a dream, half truth and half false.

But the figure that emerged in his mind still made him unable to let go.Four months earlier the man had welcomed him in the drawing-room of the Diogenes Club--the last time Holmes had seen his only surviving brother (the two had smoked cigars and drank brandy ).Mycroft seemed to be in good health, his eyes were clear, and his plump cheeks were still rosy. In fact, his physical condition was deteriorating at that time, and he showed signs of losing his mind. But that day, his mind was unbelievably sober. Not only did he recall his glorious stories during the war, but he also seemed very happy to be with his younger brother.Holmes had just started regularly sending jars of royal jelly to the Diogenes Club, so he believed it was the effects of royal jelly that made Mycroft better. "Even if you use your imagination, Sherlock," Mycroft's huge body seemed to burst into laughter at any time, "I don't think you can imagine me and my old friend Winston coming from the landing ship. Climbing ashore. 'I am Mr. Grayfinch,' said Winston—that was the code we had agreed upon beforehand—'I have come to see for myself how things are going in North Africa.'" However, Holmes still suspects that the two world wars had actually had a dire effect on his good brother (Mycroft served in the army long after he reached retirement age, though he rarely left the Diogenes club. armchair, but he made an indelible contribution to the government).He was an enigmatic figure at the very top of Britain's secret intelligence service, often working without sleep for weeks, fueled only by gobbling.He has single-handedly monitored a large number of domestic and foreign conspiracies.Not surprisingly, his health deteriorated rapidly after World War II ended.However, Holmes was not surprised to see that his brother regained some vitality after continuing to take royal jelly. "Mycroft, it's a pleasure to meet you." Holmes stood up and was about to leave. "You're in good spirits again." "Like a trolley on a country road?" Mycroft said with a smile. "That's about it. That's it." Holmes reached out and took his brother's hand. "I don't think we see each other very often. When will we see each other again?" "I'm afraid I'll never see you again." Holmes stooped and took his brother's soft, heavy hand.He should be smiling at this moment, but he saw that there was no smile in his brother's eyes—the indecisive eyes contained the humility of resignation to fate, and suddenly attracted his own eyes firmly.Those eyes seem to be trying their best to convey some information, they seem to say: Like you, I am also a person who has gone through two centuries, and my life long run is coming to an end. "Well, Mycroft," said Holmes, tapping his brother's calf lightly with a cane, "I bet you have misspoken that." But McCoff never missed it.Soon, the last link between Holmes and the past was completely severed with a letter from the Diogenes Club.The letter was unsigned and contained no words of consolation, simply stating that his brother had passed away on Tuesday, November 19th.In accordance with his last wishes, there will be no funeral and the body will be buried anonymously.This, he thought, was so in keeping with Mycroft's style.He folded the letter and put it among the files on the desk.Later, as he sat among the rocks and pondered, he felt that McCoff was doing the right thing.It was a cold night, and he sat there, completely unaware that Roger was standing on the garden path in the twilight watching him, and that Mrs. Monroe scolded him when she found the boy: "Son, don't you go Disturb him. He's in a strange mood today, God knows why—" Holmes, of course, did not tell anyone about Mycroft's death, nor did he publicly admit that he had received a second package from the Diogenes Club.The little package arrived a full week after the letter was received.He was about to go for a walk that morning when he spotted it on the front steps and almost stepped on it.Unwrapping the brown wrapper, he found an old copy of Wynwood Read's The Martyrdom of Man (he had been terribly ill as a child and spent several days lying in the attic bedroom of his parents' Yorkshire farmhouse). Months, withering day by day, the book was given to him by his father Sig at the time), and there was a note from McCaw in it.The content of this book is quite heavy, but it has brought a profound impact on the young Sherlock Holmes.After reading the note, he picked up the book again, and a memory that had been dusty for a long time came to his mind again-in 1867, he lent the book to his brother and insisted that he read it: "After you finish reading, You must tell me what you think, and I want to know what you think." Seventy-nine years later, Mycroft gave it a brief review: There are many interesting reflections in the book, but I think it is a bit too roundabout twists and turns.It took so many years to watch it. This is not the first time he has received messages from the deceased.Mrs. Hudson wrote a lot of notes when she was alive, but obviously she wanted to keep them for herself at the time. She scribbled the things she wanted to remind herself on the torn-off notes, and quickly read them. Stuffed—in kitchen drawers, in broom cupboards, in various corners of the housekeeper's cabin—after her death, the successors found these notes one after another, and each with the same bewildered expression, handed them over to Holmes.Holmes kept them for some time, studying each note as if putting them together would solve some meaningless mystery.But in the end, he could not find any definite meaning in the messages left by Mrs. Hudson. All the notes generally contained only two nouns: hatbox, slippers; barley, soapstone; whirlwind, almonds. Sugar; hounds, peddlers; church calendars, round spacers; carrots, home clothes; small fruits, samples; false catheters, plates; peppers, sweet muffins.Finally, he came to an objective conclusion: the fireplace in the study was the best destination for these notes (on a winter day, he lit the cipher-like words that Mrs. Letters to him from complete strangers). Before that, three of Dr. Watson's never-before-published diaries met the same fate.Of course, he burned them for very good reasons.From 1874 to 1929, Dr. Watson recorded every detail of his daily life, and the resulting countless diaries filled his bookshelf.Three of them, which he bequeathed to Holmes on his deathbed—from Thursday, May 16, 1901 to late October, 1903—are sensitive in content.In chronological order, he records hundreds of small cases and several famous adventures, as well as an interesting anecdote about the theft of a racehorse ("The Case of the Racehorse").But among these trivial and noteworthy records are mixed a dozen scandals with potentially serious consequences: various indiscretions by members of the royal family, a foreign high-ranking official's special penchant for black boys, and many A prostitution incident that could expose fourteen members of parliament. Therefore, Dr. Watson wisely gave him three diaries so as not to fall into the wrong hands.Holmes decided that they should all be destroyed, otherwise the records might become public after his own death.Either publish them as frivolous fictions, he thought, or destroy them for good, keeping the secrets of those who trusted him in the first place.So, he himself refrained from looking through those diaries, and without even looking at them, he threw them into the fireplace in the study. Thick smoke rose from the pages and covers, and orange and blue flames erupted in an instant. flame. Many years later, when traveling in Japan, Holmes remembered with regret the three diaries that had been destroyed.According to Mr. Mei Qi's account, he should have helped his father in 1903, which means that if Mei Qi's statement is true, then all the details about his father may be reduced to ashes in the fireplace up.While resting in the Xiaguan Hotel, he thought again of Dr. Watson's diary burning in the fireplace—the hot ashes recorded the past years, but fell apart in the fire, floating up the chimney like an ascended soul , floated into the air, never to be found again.The memory dulled his mind, and he stretched out on the futon, closed his eyes, and felt the emptiness and unexplainable loss in his heart.Months later, as he sat among the rocks one overcast and cloudy morning, that sharp helplessness came back to him. Holmes was not there when Roger was buried, but suddenly he couldn't feel or understand anything.For some reason, he felt as if he had been stripped naked, a lingering sense of suffocation (his weakened soul was now passing through the deserted area, bit by bit expelled from the places he knew, and then he felt a sense of suffocation). I can't find my way back to the world either).But a lonely tear brought him back to life. The tear slipped down his beard, flowed down to his chin, and hung on a beard on his chin. He stretched out his hand quickly. "Okay okay," he sighed, opening his red, swollen eyes, looking out at the apiary—he lifted his hand from the lawn and caught the tear before it fell.