A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [9]
The drive into town was slowed by the number of farm vehicles about on a summer afternoon, but I had allowed plenty of time, and we talked easily about books and the uncluttered and unrecoverable pleasures of life as an Oxford undergraduate. Then she abruptly changed the topic.
"I like your Mr Holmes. Very like Ned Lawrence, d'you know? Both of 'em positively quivering with passion, always under iron control, both stuffed full of ability and common sense and that backwards approach to a problem that marks a true genius, and at the same time this incongruous tendency to mystify, a compulsion almost to obfuscate and to conceal themselves behind an air of myth and mystery. Ned's extravagances," she added thoughtfully, "are almost certainly due to his small stature and the domination of his mother and will bring him to a sticky end. He'll never have the hands of your man, though."
I was quite floored by this tumble of insight and information so placidly given, and I could only pluck feebly at the last phrase.
"Hands?" Was this some idiosyncratic equine reference to Holmes' height?
"Um. He has the most striking hands I've ever seen on a man. The first thing I noticed about him, back in Palestine. Strong, but more than that. Elegant. Nervous. No, not nervous exactly; acutely sensitive. Aristocratic working-class hands." She grimaced and waved away this uncharacteristic search among the nuances of adjectives. "Remember the Chinese ball?"
"The Chinese— oh yes, the ivory puzzle." I did remember it, a carved ball of ivory so old, it was nearly yellow. It could only be opened by precise pressure at three different points simultaneously. She had handed the ball to Holmes, and he had held it lightly in the palm of his left hand, occasionally caressing it with the fingertips of the other. (Holmes, unlike myself, is right-handed.) The conversation had gone on; Holmes had talked with great animation about his travels in Tibet and the amazing feats of physical control he had witnessed amongst the lamas, and his tour through Mecca, while he occasionally reached down to touch the ball. The magician's apprentice knows to watch the hands, though, and I was gratified to witness the gentle arrangement of thumb and two fingers that loosed the lock and sent the ball's treasure, a lustrous black pearl, rolling gently into the palm of his hand.
"So clever, those hands. It took me six months to figure out that ball, and he did it in twenty minutes. Oh, are we here, then?" She sounded disappointed. "Thank you for the afternoon, and do enjoy Mariam. I'll be interested to know what you think of her. Did I give you my address in Jerusalem? No? Oh, dash it, here comes the train. Where are those cards— in here somewhere." She thrust at me two handfuls of motley papers— a couple of handbills, some typescript, letters, sweet wrappers, telegram flimsies, notes scribbled on the corners of newspapers— as well as three journals, a book, and two glasses cases (one empty), before she emerged with a bent white cardboard rectangle. I poured the papers back into her bag, took the card, and helped her up into the carriage.
"Good-bye, my dear Miss Russell. Come see me again in Palestine!" She seemed on the edge of saying something else, but the whistle blew, the moment passed, and she contented herself with leaning forward and kissing my cheek. I stepped down from the train, and she was gone.
On the way home, I was in time to be greeted by a neighbour's dairy herd being brought down the narrow lane for the night. I took the car out of gear to wait and looked down at my hands. Competent, practical hands, with large knuckles, square nails, rough cuticles, ink stains, and a dusting of freckles. The two outer fingers of the weaker right hand were slightly twisted, a thin white scar almost invisible at their base, near the palm, one remnant of the automobile accident that had taken the lives of my parents and my brother and had left me with a multitude of scars, visible