by Jason Rouby
Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms." Who would be so foolhardy as to gainsay this truism, made even more true for having been said by the Master? Alas, art in the blood of the Master took such a strange form even he did not begin to glimpse a glimmer of a gleam of the truth! And in blinding themselves to Holmes' own blindness of his one congenital shortcoming, men have taken tortuous trails to explain this failing.
Who has not heard of the blue carbuncle? Who has not dreamed of caressing it, of gazing into its pristine depths to find the very secrets of all Life?
But who of us has had the temerity to confuse the blue carbuncle, glorified by Sherlock himself, with the mundane Hope Diamond? Yes, I tell you, the blue carbuncle has been identified--if that is the proper word, and it certainly is not-- with that bauble, that play toy, that gimcrack! (See "The True Blue," by Philip Kasson, BSJ [NS] 11:200-202, [December] 1961.)
Why? To try to hide, to conceal, to cover up the Master's one physical handicap. We shall discuss, in clinical terms, that handicap. For now, let us dispose of the Hope Diamond canard.
First, the blue carbuncle was never called a diamond (nor was it identified as any other gem stone). It was called, always, a stone--twice by Dr. Watson, twice by Peterson the commissionaire, eight times by Holmes, twice by James Ryder, and once by the nameless reporter of the nameless newspaper in which the theft of the carbuncle was chronicled. In fact, Peterson asked, "A diamond, sir?" and Holmes ignored the question. Diamonds are common enough to be called diamonds, not stones, at least once in eighteen times, and certainly in newspaper accounts. Any city editor will agree that "diamonds," not "stones," sell newspapers.
Second, Holmes said the carbuncle came from southern China. The great diamond fields are in Africa, India, Brazil and Arkansas, just outside Murfreesboro, down the road a piece from Hot Springs.
Third, the blue carbuncle weighed 40 grains; we have this from the lips of Holmes. Watson described it as "rather smaller than a bean in size." At 3.086 grains to the carat, the carbuncle was a jewel of 12.96 carats.
The Hope Diamond is a monstrous gem of 44.5 carats. This is hardly a stone "rather smaller than a bean in size," unless, perchance, it may be one of the magic beans Jack planted to climb--but that is another story. No, the blue carbuncle was not the Hope Diamond, nor was it any other diamond. What was it?
Webster says a carbuncle is a deep red gem, especially a smooth convex garnet. Garnets are deep red, brown, black, yellow and green, but not blue. They are found chiefly in South Africa and southwestern United States, but not in southern China or in any part of southeastern Asia. The blue carbuncle is not a garnet.
Is it an emerald? Admittedly, emeralds are green, but the word "carbuncle" is often used in the Old Testament to denote "a bright or shining gem of any kind," and in Exodus 28:17 and Ezekiel 28:13 it is taken to mean an emerald:
And thou shall set it in settings of stones, even four rows of stones: the first row shall be a sardius, a topaz and a carbuncle: this shall be the first row.
--Exodus 28:17
Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering; the sardius, topaz and the diamond, the beryl, onyx and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou was created. --Ezekial 28:13
In The Satyricon, Petronius, too, refers to the emerald as a carbuncle:
What's a priceless pearl, India's fruit to you?
That your wife all jewelled with sea-treasures
Wildly goes down on the stranger's bed?
What use the green emerald, that precious glass,
Or gleam thrown by the stones of Carthage,
Unless honesty shines from these carbuncles?
But there is no hint of blue in Petronius. His emeralds are green, purely and simply green. Let us look further.
Hamlet welcomed the travelling players to Elsinore, and he recalled to them one of his favourite plays in the troupe's repertoire, especially the blood-and- thunder scene.
Roasted in wrath and fire,
And thus o'er-sized with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks.
Now we get from another Master, William Shakespeare, the thought that carbuncles are red! (Aside: Did the Hound of the Baskervilles have "eyes like carbuncles"? Was the hellish Hound perhaps named Pyrrhus?)
What stone is red? The ruby, of course! Where is it found? Burma, Ceylon, Thailand--southeast Asia, in other words; not too far from the banks of the Amoy River where the blue carbuncle was found.
Yes, you say, but rubies are red and the carbuncle was blue. Explain that! For the answer, we turn to the World Book, which states that ruby stone is a corundum which is colourless when pure, but when tainted by chromium oxide, assumes a red colour ranging from light red or rose to the most highly valued deep bluish red, called pigeon blood!
The blue carbuncle was a pigeon-blood ruby! No wonder Holmes ignored Peterson's bourgeois query about "a diamond"; no wonder Holmes sat up in amazement as he stared at the scintillating "stone" in the center of Peterson's palm! (Remark where it lay when Holmes first saw it.)
Holmes knew the value of g em stones, and he called the blue carbuncle "absolutely unique". The reward of 1,000 for its return, he said, was "certainly not within a twentieth part of the market price". Competent gemmologists know that a perfect pigeon-blood ruby is more valuable than a diamond of the same size. But why did Holmes refer to the carbuncle as "blue" when it was really "bluish red"? It must be admitted: Holmes was a congenital dichromatic deuteranope! In plain words, Holmes was colour-blind. Not totally colour-blind; after all, he did identify areas of London by the colour of clays indigenous to each area, but sufficiently colour-blind to miss the red cast in the carbuncle, or ruby, as we now know it to be. To a dichromatic deuteranope, the short-wave end of the spectrum appears blue. Hence, the bluishness of the carbuncle was intensified. Briefly, the red tended to fade away or to be ignored; the blue was emphasized. The pigeon-blood ruby became, to Holmes, a blue carbuncle.
From whom did Holmes inherit this trait? Not from the English gentry and Norwegian stock on his paternal side. These no-nonsense, hard-working people would give short shrift to such a ridiculous aberration. It is obvious the trait came, ironically, from Holmes' maternal family, his grandmother being a sister of Vernet, the French artist. The grand-uncle in question, Emile Jean Horace Vernet (1789-1863), was a scion of the House of Vernet, founded by Papa Antoine (1689- 1753), who earned his affectionate nickname by siring 22 children and painting one study, "Flowers and Birds". By the time the Vernet "art in the blood" had reached Emile Jean Horace, four generations later, it had become so diluted that it took the "strangest form", colour-blindness, unwittingly transmitted by the talented artist to his daughter, and by her through her daughter (the incidence of deuteranopia is 1.1 percent in males and only 0.1 percent in females, women being notoriously more the carriers than the victims of colour-blindness in all forms), who conceived and gave birth to a colour-blind son, Sherlock Holmes.
Epilogue
It was the morning of the second day after Christmas when Peterson burst into the rooms at 221B
Baker Street, clutching the carbuncle in his hand. It was a cold day; Watson recalled that "a sharp frost had set in, and the windows were thick with ice crystals". Is it not elementary, then, to deduce that Peterson's hands, especially the one which had a convulsive grasp on the carbuncle, nestled in the center of his palm, reflected the hue of Peterson's hand and thus looked even bluer than it was?