Student Question
What is the mood when Holmes and Watson prepare to stay in Julia Stoner's death room?
Quick answer:
In the "Adventure of the Speckled Band" Dr. Grimesby Roylott, a retired Indian Army surgeon, has just moved from India to England and set up his home in an old mansion in Stoke Moran where he is living with his stepdaughters, Helen Stoner and her younger sister Julia. Dr. Roylott is described as an unpleasant character who keeps a variety of dangerous animals including a cheetah and a baboon and who ruthlessly killed one of his stepdaughters by strangling her with a snake. He fears that Helen Stoner has found out about his evil ways and has written to her sister Julia warning her not to come to England but Julia refuses to listen to her sister'
The mood is a mixture of fear, suspense, excitement, anticipation, extreme nervous tension, and curiosity. Dr. Watson describes it well when he tells how he and Holmes waited in silence in the pitch-dark bedroom as the hours slowly passed.
How shall I ever forget that dreadful vigil? I could not hear a sound, not even the drawing of a breath, and yet I knew that my companion sat open-eyed, within a few feet of me, in the same state of nervous tension in which I was myself. The shutters cut off the least ray of light, and we waited in absolute darkness.
Arthur Conan Doyle invariably combines ratiocination and adventure in his Sherlock Holmes tales. Holmes is depicted as an indolent type of man who can spend days doing nothing but lounging in his room, but who is also capable of bursts of action and even covering many miles by...
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train and horse-drawn conveyances in solving his cases. Unlike Watson, Holmes seems totally fearless. He is frequently getting into extremely dangerous situations and dragging the loyal Dr. Watson along with him.
The mood evoked by the long wait in the bedroom adjacent to that of the formidable Dr. Roylott is similar to that described by Watson in "The Red-Headed League" when Holmes, Watson, Merryweather, and Jones the Scotland Yard man are waiting in the darkness for the tunnelers to break through the floor of the basement strongroom where all the gold is stored.
What a time it seemed! From comparing notes afterwards it was but an hour and a quarter, yet it appeared to me that the night must have almost gone, and the dawn be breaking above us. My limbs were weary and stiff, for I feared to change my position; yet my nerves were worked up to the highest pitch of tension, and my hearing was so acute that I could not only hear the gentle breathing of my companions, but I could distinguish the deeper, heavier in-breath of the bulky Jones from the thin, sighing note of the bank director.
The purpose of such scenes, of course, is to evoke the same kinds of feelings in the reader that the characters are experiencing in the story. The reader, often called an "armchair detective," likes to escape from his mundane world into a world full of mystery and adventure. In a Sherlock Holmes story he is sure to meet strange characters like Dr. Grimesby Roylott, who keeps a baboon and a cheetah as pets, who consorts with a band of gypsies, and who lives in a huge, decaying mansion where he uses a snake to kill one of his stepdaughters and to attempt to kill the other.