The Adventure of the Dying Detective(垂死侦探历险记)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 0 0 62.04KB 17 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Adventure of the Dying Detective

The Adventure of the

Dying Detective

By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Adventure of the Dying Detective

Mrs. Hudson, the landlady of Sherlock Holmes, was a long- suffering

woman. Not only was her first-floor flat invaded at all hours by throngs

of singular and often undesirable characters but her remarkable lodger

showed an eccentricity and irregularity in his life which must have sorely

tried her patience. His incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at

strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and

often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence

and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in

London. On the other hand, his payments were princely. I have no doubt

that the house might have been purchased at the price which Holmes paid

for his rooms during the years that I was with him.

The landlady stood in the deepest awe of him and never dared to

interfere with him, however outrageous his proceedings might seem. She

was fond of him, too, for he had a remarkable gentleness and courtesy in

his dealings with women. He disliked and distrusted the sex, but he was

always a chivalrous opponent. Knowing how genuine was her regard for

him, I listened earnestly to her story when she came to my rooms in the

second year of my married life and told me of the sad condition to which

my poor friend was reduced.

"He's dying, Dr. Watson," said she. "For three days he has been

sinking, and I doubt if he will last the day. He would not let me get a

doctor. This morning when I saw his bones sticking out of his face and

his great bright eyes looking at me I could stand no more of it. 'With

your leave or without it, Mr. Holmes, I am going for a doctor this very

hour,' said I. 'Let it be Watson, then,' said he. I wouldn't waste an hour

in coming to him, sir, or you may not see him alive."

I was horrified for I had heard nothing of his illness. I need not say

that I rushed for my coat and my hat. As we drove back I asked for the

details.

"There is little I can tell you, sir. He has been working at a case

down at Rotherhithe, in an alley near the river, and he has brought this

illness back with him. He took to his bed on Wednesday afternoon and

has never moved since. For these three days neither food nor drink has

The Adventure of the Dying Detective

passed his lips."

"Good God! Why did you not call in a doctor?"

"He wouldn't have it, sir. You know how masterful he is. I didn't

dare to disobey him. But he's not long for this world, as you'll see for

yourself the moment that you set eyes on him."

He was indeed a deplorable spectacle. In the dim light of a foggy

November day the sick room was a gloomy spot, but it was that gaunt,

wasted face staring at me from the bed which sent a chill to my heart.

His eyes had the brightness of fever, there was a hectic flush upon either

cheek, and dark crusts clung to his lips; the thin hands upon the coverlet

twitched incessantly, his voice was croaking and spasmodic. He lay

listlessly as I entered the room, but the sight of me brought a gleam of

recognition to his eyes.

"Well, Watson, we seem to have fallen upon evil days," said he in a

feeble voice, but with something of his old carelessness of manner.

"My dear fellow!" I cried, approaching him.

"Stand back! Stand right back!" said he with the sharp imperiousness

which I had associated only with moments of crisis. "If you approach me,

Watson, I shall order you out of the house."

"But why?"

"Because it is my desire. Is that not enough?"

Yes, Mrs. Hudson was right. He was more masterful than ever. It

was pitiful, however, to see his exhaustion.

"I only wished to help," I explained.

"Exactly! You will help best by doing what you are told."

"Certainly, Holmes."

He relaxed the austerity of his manner.

"You are not angry?" he asked, gasping for breath.

Poor devil, how could I be angry when I saw him lying in such a plight

before me?

"It's for your own sake, Watson," he croaked.

"For MY sake?"

"I know what is the matter with me. It is a coolie disease from

Sumatra--a thing that the Dutch know more about than we, though they

The Adventure of the Dying Detective

have made little of it up to date. One thing only is certain. It is

infallibly deadly, and it is horribly contagious."

He spoke now with a feverish energy, the long hands twitching and

jerking as he motioned me away.

"Contagious by touch, Watson--that's it, by touch. Keep your

distance and all is well."

"Good heavens, Holmes! Do you suppose that such a consideration

weighs with me of an instant? It would not affect me in the case of a

stranger. Do you imagine it would prevent me from doing my duty to so

old a friend?"

Again I advanced, but he repulsed me with a look of furious anger.

"If you will stand there I will talk. If you do not you must leave the

room."

I have so deep a respect for the extraordinary qualities of Holmes that I

have always deferred to his wishes, even when I least understood them.

But now all my professional instincts were aroused. Let him be my

master elsewhere, I at least was his in a sick room.

"Holmes," said I, "you are not yourself. A sick man is but a child,

and so I will treat you. Whether you like it or not, I will examine your

symptoms and treat you for them."

He looked at me with venomous eyes.

"If I am to have a doctor whether I will or not, let me at least have

someone in whom I have confidence," said he.

"Then you have none in me?"

"In your friendship, certainly. But facts are facts, Watson, and, after

all, you are only a general practitioner with very limited experience and

mediocre qualifications. It is painful to have to say these things, but you

leave me no choice."

I was bitterly hurt.

"Such a remark is unworthy of you, Holmes. It shows me very

clearly the state of your own nerves. But if you have no confidence in

me I would not intrude my services. Let me bring Sir Jasper Meek or

Penrose Fisher, or any of the best men in London. But someone you

MUST have, and that is final. If you think that I am going to stand here

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

TheAdventureoftheDyingDetective1TheAdventureoftheDyingDetectiveBySirArthurConanDoyleTheAdventureoftheDyingDetective2Mrs.Hudson,thelandladyofSherlockHolmes,wasalong-sufferingwoman.Notonlywasherfirst-floorflatinvadedatallhoursbythrongsofsingularandoftenundesirablecharactersbutherremarkablelodgershowed...

展开>> 收起<<

The Adventure of the Dying Detective(垂死侦探历险记).pdf

共17页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

The Adventure of the Dying Detective(垂死侦探历险记)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: