What is there to be learned of the narrator – of Dr. John H. Watson? While Holmes was profiting by each exposure to the Bed­dington Plot, Watson was learning nothing at all. In spite of his participation in the Pycroft matter, the doctor's reaction to the Jabez Wilson affair was one of total bewilderment: "Here I had heard what he [Holmes] had heard, and I had seen what he had seen, and yet from his words it was evident that he saw clearly not only what had happened but what was about to happen, while to me the whole business was still confused and obscure…. I tried  to puzzle it out, but gave up in despair..." After arriving in Little Purlington with Mr. Amberley and discovering that the telegram which had precipitated the needless journey was a hoax, he wrote, "Our client and I looked at each other in amazement."

            When the Garrideb variation was presented to him, Watson remarked, "I can make neither heads nor tails of it." Finally, although he did not express his thoughts at being asked to sell Ming china to one of the world's top authorities on the subject, Watson at no time suggested that he had any idea why he was there.

            It is now clear why it was that the Beddington Plot cropped up again and again in Holmes 's career and why each such occasion was treated as if it were the first. The plot arose repeatedly because it was a highly useful one, and it continued to be repor­ted each time because the man writing the narrative never once recognized that he had encountered it before.

            Nigel Bruce has been criticized for sometimes representing Dr. Watson as more of a bumbling ass than he possibly could have been. Perhaps Bruce the actor was capable of more insight than he has been given credit for. The character whom Bruce portrayed might well have climbed his own stairs every day for three months without drawing any inference from the fact that they were worn down three itches (three inches?!) deeper than those of his neigh­bor (STOC), or have interpreted the inscription "From his friends of the C.C.H." on the walking stick of a fellow doctor as perhaps something to do with a local "hunt" (HOUN). In the exchange between Watson the ceramics expert and the evil Gruner, there is more than just a fleeting suggestion of dialogue one might have expected in a Universal movie script from the 1940s.

            It has been suggested often that in his desire to display the talents of his detective friend to the greatest advantage, Dr. Watson inadvertently made himself appear more lacking in intellectual attainments than he really was. Human nature, how­ever, makes one unconsciously tend to underplay one's own weaknesses rather than to overplay them, and there is no reason to believe that Watson was any less human than anyone else. One must ask then how Watson was regarded by his contemporaries.

            What did Sherlock Holmes think of Watson? When sent out on detective assignments, the good doctor earned such words of praise as "You have really done remarkably badly" (SOLI), "I can­not at the moment recall any possible blunder which you have omitted" (LADY), and ....you have missed everything of importance (RETI).⁴ In "The Blanched Soldier", Holmes wrote of his friend: "A confederate who foresees your conclusions and course of action is always dangerous, but one to whom each development comes as a perpetual surprise, and to whom the future is always a closed book, is indeed an ideal helpmate." Can anyone imagine a better description of a man who could encounter the Beddington Plot five times and never know it?

⁴Only in The Hound of the Baskervilles did Holmes fail to chide Watson after one of the latter's detective assignments. Holmes desired to mollify his irate companion who had just learned of the detective's covert presence in Dartmoor. Also, the Master's own record had not been all that shining. All he had acquired from an extended observation of Stapleton was the ability to recognize the naturalist from afar at night. He had made abso­lutely no headway in locating Stapleton's noisy 200-pound dog.