The Vicissitudes of an Idiom
by Lisa (A Mild Fit of Hysterics)
and Jessica (soothing if occasionally incomprehensible monologue)
The carriage rocked in a steady rhythm, causing my unwilling back to sway gently. It was quite warm in the compartment; the overweight electrician's wife sitting across from me was sweating profusely and tugging at her collar. No doubt her sister in town would make her comfortable. At least the heat covered the steady burn of my own cheeks. I hadn't had time to wait for a first-class compartment all to myself, and anyway, with my boots freshly muddy from my recent expedition and my clothes equally disreputable, I doubt they'd have given a first class to me, name or no name.
Name. Curse my bloody name! I thought, and then flushed even more unbearably as the accountant beside me glanced my way. Damn, I must have muttered that last thought out loud. I'd better get hold of myself, I thought.
It seemed to take forever for the train to arrive in town, and as soon as the carriage came to a recognizable stop I was upright and out onto the platform. Throwing all circumspection to perdition, I made a beeline, as the Americans say, for my brother's club.
To my relief he was in as usual. "Sherlock -- brother--" he said mildly, heaving himself up from the depths of his chair.
I felt my lips go thin in fresh mortification and impatience.
"You are just in time," Mycroft said, "to join me for lunch in my flat. I had meant to spend the afternoon perusing this lovely stack of gleanings from young Penny here."
"Will that be all, Mr. Holmes?" inquired the boyish (and boyishly-dressed) young woman at the side of his chair. It was a mark of my distraction that I hadn't even noticed her. Mycroft dismissed her with a paternal nod and finished rising from the chair. Young Penny bounced out the door.
Mycroft followed my glare. "Yes, sometimes just watching that child makes me tired."
"I thought women weren't allowed..."
"Penny is a very unconventional woman; Olympus itself would be no match for her tenacity-much less the Diogenes Club. Rather like your loving wife."
I snorted.
"By the way, my dear Sherlock, I do hope this is nothing very urgent to take you direct from the downs to my door. And you know I have no interest whatsoever in gardening."
"Damn it, Mycroft," I said tensely, "you know I don't either. I can't help my dirty boots -- and no, it isn't urgent." Mycroft eyed me sideways as we emerged into the London sunshine. He said nothing at all in a very significant manner all the way up the lift to his flat. I began to regret acutely my decision to come to him. I could see by the twitch in the corner of his mouth that he was not going to be very sympathetic. "I suppose," he said finally as lunch was being served, "that all is not marital bliss at the moment?"I was so wrapped up in my translation of a particularly difficult idiomatic passage that I did not look up to see Mrs. Hudson standing beside me, hands on her hips, until she cleared her throat rather loudly.
I nearly jumped out of my skin (as the expression goes).
"What is it, Mrs. H?" I grumbled.
"I wouldn't want to bother you, but would you like me to bring a tray for you?" Mrs. Hudson asked. "Seeing as it doesn't look like Mr. Holmes will be returning for supper this evening."
A muttered curse escaped my clenched teeth. "A tray would be fine, thank you," I snapped.
Mrs. Hudson's expression wavered between indignation and maternal concern. Concern won out. "I know it isn't my place to ask, dear," she began, "but if you would like to talk about what happened this afternoon between you and Mr. Holmes..."
"What did you see?" I asked suspiciously. I was embarrassed enough about the whole mess as it was, and the last thing I wanted was to find out that there had been a witness to it. Even if it was Mrs. Hudson, who would have been the first to agree that the man had gotten what he had asked for.
"Nothing at all," she answered. A little too quickly, I thought. "But it doesn't take a detective to figure it out, now does it?" She fluffed a pillow on the sofa across the room and sat down, patting the empty space beside her. "Now come over here and tell me exactly what happened... that's a good lass."
I sighed, walked over to the sofa, and plopped myself down beside her. I could see I was not going to get back to my work until I told her everything. At any rate, my eyes could use the break. And, I told myself, those were the only reasons I was going to tell her what had happened to put me in such a foul mood, and drive my husband to seek asylum at his brother's club.
"It isn't funny," I said, unable to help folding my arms tight against me.
But it was no use. Mycroft was shaking, still holding his dessert-spoon in a dithering hand, his face going purple, his belly quivering under his waistcoat.
I flushed again, helplessly. "I tell you, it isn't funny!"
At this, tears spilled down his red cheeks and he started to wheeze. For a long moment he couldn't breathe at all; then he managed to gasp, "Brandy--"
I was already pouring him one. I plunked it down in front of him. "Serve you right if you have a heart attack," I said with perhaps more malice than I meant. I sat down again, and waited for Mycroft to recover.
At length he ran his face over with his handkerchief and sipped delicately at the brandy.Finally, he coughed gently and turned to me. "Well," he said, "she must have been awfully perturbed to say -- that--" He dissolved into giggles and went red again.
"Obviously, this was the wrong place to come for sympathy," I said coldly.
"Oh do shut up. It is funny, and you know it." He tried to control his broad grin but couldn't.
"She had no cause to show me such disrespect," I said.
"Even if you were being officious and overbearing?"
"I hardly think that a simple explanation counts as officiousness."
"Well, since it was clearly unnecessary, she could be excused for thinking so."
"Well, how was I to know she had made any deductions about the Barkers at all?" I said, heating up again. "It's as much as I can do to get a word from her when she's like this."
"Doubtless," Mycroft said, lighting a placid cigar and pushing his brandy aside, "she will be more forthcoming now she's had her bit of good news."
"Hmph."
"But you're welcome to stay here until things cool down."
"Thanks," I muttered.
"Oh, my... no wonder Mr. Holmes was in such a hurry to get away." Mrs. Hudson laughed -- again -- and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
"I don't even know how... that came out," I said. I sounded like I was whining, even to myself, and moderated my tone. "I don't call him by his first name, so it's not as though it would come naturally to me. Granted, the phrase has taken on a degree of popularity, and it isn't the first time I've thought it, but to actually say it..."
"Now, now," Mrs. Hudson said soothingly. "Don't be so hard on yourself. You've both been downright gloomy these past weeks -- you with your paper, and Mr. Holmes with nothing to occupy him but the Barkers' renovations, and that trench they're digging--"
I rolled my eyes at her.
"Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned that," she said, and laughed again.
"It's not as though I literally did not know that the Barkers' trench was slowing the mail delivery," I fumed, "and if he's not detective enough to see that I was merely expressing my consternation at not getting Professor Lyman's reply to my question..." I choked, and, to my embarrassment, burst into tears of fury and remorse.
Mrs. Hudson, that kind woman, left the room and busied herself with putting together a tea tray for us. By the time she returned, I had composed myself. She sat beside me and poured the tea.
"I'll only say one thing more about it," Mrs. Hudson said. "Although it wasn't kind of you to say that to him, it is funny. And I can't help thinking that the man couldn't stand to be brought down a notch or two at times."
I smiled faintly as I blew on my tea. "Thank you, Mrs. Hudson. You've made me feel much better."
Three days into my visit with Mycroft, I had regained some of my calm. It helped that Mycroft had some things for me to do; young Penny's stack of "gleanings" had proved fruitful for several small London errands. It was after I'd come back from a particularly strenuous early morning at the docks that I found a telegram lying by my breakfast plate. It said:
This was a facer: if I were to get angry at this, she'd be (at least on the face of it) justified in her claim that I was "pouting" (dreadful Americanism -- how ridiculous). But if I buried my anger, I wasn't likely to get an apology. I decided to pout and be damned to it:
The next morning the reply was:
I shook this one under Mycroft's nose. "Damn the woman!" I cried. "She has no sense of delicacy at all. And stop laughing!"
I was forced to ply Mycroft with more brandy before he could speak.
"I'm afraid, my dear Sherlock," he said, "that you're going to have to give in."
I gave him a feral glare. "You're enjoying this, aren't you?"
He opened his mouth -- I held up a palm like a traffic cop-- "Ah!"
He grinned.
"That was a preemptive 'ah!'" I said.
He grinned even more broadly.
So he's going to stay in London and pout, then, I thought. I suppose I should not be surprised.
Actually, I had been glad of it these past few days. My answer from Professor Lyman had arrived within twenty-four hours of Holmes' hasty departure, and I was grateful that he was not around to rub in the fact that it had arrived in due time. Not to mention the work I was able to get done without having to attend to his comings and goings and the general nuisance of him trying to pull me away from my work for the odd (and, of late, frivolous) detectival interlude.
Though it's not, I mused, that I object to participating in Holmes' adventures on principle, although I had a suspicion that that was what he believed. Nor was it simply a case of the apprentice trying to distance herself from the mentor's shadow, although I assumed a touch of that might (still) exist.The issue was this: I was a young, female scholar, trying to make her way in a field that has always been dominated by the aged and male -- scholars who assume that I have nothing to say on a matter so ancient and profound as theology, and, if I do, I shouldn't be allowed to say it.
If I was going to get my fledgling career to take wing, I must have a consistent time and space in which to do it. And so far, life with Holmes had hardly been consistent.
I wasn't, I argued with myself, thinking that Holmes doesn't value what I do independently of him. Nor did I blame him for wanting me to be with him as he did his work. Mostly, when things such as this happened, I was angry at myself. Angry that I had yet again allowed myself to be distracted from my vocation, when I had yet to assure both my colleagues and myself of my place within it.
Actually, I thought ruefully, stirring my umpteenth cup of tea, I miss Holmes terribly. But I had gotten a lot of work done.
That night I lit my pipe in the privacy of Mycroft's guest bedroom and put my mind to the problem. Mycroft was certainly right in one respect: clearly Russell had been driven over the edge by my explanation of the mail delay. And, also clearly, she had been awaiting the letter from her colleague in such a high pitch of nervous enthusiasm that it was foolish of me not to anticipate a strained reaction to anything I said. However, I had not thought she would ever sink to such a level of -- of--
What on earth would have caused her to lash out at me in such a fashion? Surely she didn't believe I ever meant to belittle her intellectual talents. And I had been attempting to stay discreetly out of her way as she plowed through Hebrew psalmistry and rabbinical commentaries. I heaved a sigh and rubbed my day's growth of whiskers. Perhaps it was the old problem again. Or perhaps it was the echoes of the old problem, topped by a hot summer and a set of annoyances too mundane to notice until they got under our skins. Well... one could be magnanimous... one could even, maybe just a little -- laugh. I tried a small chuckle, taking the pipe from my lips.
It set loose in me a silent shaking as I replayed the scene, heard again the scathing words that had snapped me upright and sent me straight out the door and down the road to the train station. Blast her, it was funny -- but so unutterably at my own expense that I couldn't help wincing even as I laughed.
My pipe had gone out. I knocked the dottle out into the tray, shrugged out of Mycroft's large spare bed-jacket, and crawled into bed. All right, my wife, I thought as I drifted off, I am done pouting.
The next morning, I found on my breakfast plate a card announcing a guest lecture in Somerville College, Oxford. M. J. Russell, it said, would be speaking to the College courtesy of the current lecturer in Hebraic studies. Her subject of discussion would be the idioms of war and intimacy in the Song of Songs.
I laughed. "Mycroft," I said, "have you anything pressing for me to do today?"
Mycroft smiled at me over his grapefruit. "Not that I can think of."
"Because there's a lecture in Oxford I'd like to attend this evening." I folded the card neatly back into its envelope. "I do hope I'm not putting you out by leaving so precipitately."
"Considering your precipitate arrival, Sherlock, I should hardly be offended."
"Touché," I said.
And skipped breakfast to purchase a proper bath and shave.
"He has taken me to the banquet hall,
and his banner over me is love..."
I sat in the room adjoining the lecture hall, checking through my lecture notes in the last hour before my presentation. I had decided to separate the food idioms from the pageantry idioms, despite the fact that verses like this one, the one I had just read, revealed how enmeshed the two in fact were.
My thesis on female vulnerability, I thought, would just have to wait until the end.
"I slept but my heart was awake.
Listen! My lover is knocking... .
My lover thrust his hand through the latch-opening;
my heart began to pound for him... .
I opened for my lover; but my lover had left; he was gone.
My heart sank at his departure..."
"Dammit!"
"Swearing is unladylike, Russell," Holmes said, entering from the other room. He looked positively filthy.
I stopped in mid-pace and gaped at him. Then I said something even worse.
Holmes rolled his eyes, "Not that anyone would dare accuse you of being anything so weak as a 'lady.' What bee from Hades has found its way into your cap?"
I snorted. "You know very well that I'm trying to get this paper done, Holmes. And I can't proceed until I have word from Professor Lyman."
"I really think you should be more careful with that flyswatter, Russ. While I don't mind the occasional breakage of china, Mrs. Hudson will not be pleased to be missing yet another teacup."
"Holmes-- "
He continued on, as if I had not said a word.
"You may not be aware, Russell, but the Barkers have been doing extensive renovations. This has caused--"
"Holmes, I don't have time for this right now."
Instead of shutting up, he just raised his voice.
"This has caused them to feel that they have to dig a deeper cesspool."
I decided to ignore him, and resumed my pacing.
"And as a result, the road has been flooded this side of Eastbourne..."
I whacked the flyswatter against the wall, and returned to my fumings.
"Dammit! Dammit! Dammit! What on earth could be holding up the damned--"
"Mail. That's what I've been trying to tell you. The flooding has caused a mail delay to everyone on this side of the road. But I was talking with Patrick, and he said that it should be resolved by tomorrow afternoon. My dear Russell, kindly do not smear fly entrails against the wall. It is unnecessary for you to carry on in such a fashion, nor will it get your mail here any faster, as I have just explained..."
I rounded on him and roared, "NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!"
My eyes cleared upon the page, and I tried to steady my breathing and refocus upon the notes I'd made.
"'I slept, but my heart was awake. Listen! My lover is knocking'--" I repeated softly to myself, attempting to reclaim the flow of the presentation...
A soft knock sounded on the door. "Come in," I said without turning around.
I heard the door open and then shut softly. A supple, familiar hand laid a pomegranate upon my notes before me.
"Arise, my love, my fair one," Holmes said, "and come away with me. They are waiting for you in the lecture room."