Part 4

We must also ask, How could Helena, fresh from Ceylon, know “the old tavern way of keeping scores? Illegible except to the scorer. The scorer not committed, the scored debited with what is against him,” as Datchery observes. An Eurasian girl of twenty, new to England, would not argue thus with herself: she would probably know nothing of English tavern scores. We do not hear that Helena ever opened a book: we do know that education had been denied to her. What acquaintance could she have with old English tavern customs?

If Drood is Datchery, then Dickens used a form of a very old and favourite ficelle of his: the watching of a villain by an improbable and unsuspected person, in this case thought to be dead. If Helena is Datchery, the “assumption” or personation is in the highest degree improbable, her whole bearing is quite out of her possibilities, and the personation is very absurd.

Here the story ends.

THEORIES OF THE MYSTERY

FORSTER’S EVIDENCE

WE have some external evidence as to Dickens’s solution of his own problem, from Forster. {48} On August 6, 1869, some weeks before he began to work at his tale, Dickens, in a letter, told Forster, “I have a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not communicable (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work.” Forster must have instantly asked that the incommunicable secret should be communicated to him, for he tells us that “immediately after I learnt”—the secret. But did he learn it? Dickens was ill, and his plot, whatever it may have been, would be irritatingly criticized by Forster before it was fully thought out. “Fules and bairns should not see half-done work,” and Dickens may well have felt that Forster should not see work not even begun, but merely simmering in the author’s own fancy.

Forster does not tell us that Dickens communicated the secret in a letter. He quotes none: he says “I was told,” orally, that is. When he writes, five years later (1874), “Landless was, I think, to have perished in assisting Tartar finally to unmask and seize the murderer,” he is clearly trusting, not to a letter of Dickens’s, but to a defective memory; and he knows it. He says that a nephew was to be murdered by an uncle. The criminal was to confess in the condemned cell. He was to find out that his crime had been needless, and to be convicted by means of the ring (Rosa’s mother’s ring) remaining in the quicklime that had destroyed the body of Edwin.

Nothing “new” in all this, as Forster must have seen. “The originality,” he explains, “was to consist in the review of the murderer’s career by himself at the close, when its temptations were to be dwelt upon as if, not he the culprit, but some other man, were the tempted.”

But all this is not “hard to work,” and is not “original.” As Mr. Proctor remarks, Dickens had used that trick twice already. (“Madman’s Manuscript,” Pickwick; “Clock Case Confession,” in Master Humphrey’s Clock.) The quicklime trick is also very old indeed. The disguise of a woman as a man is as ancient as the art of fiction: yet Helena may be Datchery, though nobody guessed it before Mr. Cuming Walters. She ought not to be Datchery; she is quite out of keeping in her speech and manner as Datchery, and is much more like Drood.

“A NEW IDEA”

There are no new ideas in plots. “All the stories have been told,” and all the merit lies in the manner of the telling. Dickens had used the unsuspected watcher, as Mr. Proctor shows, in almost all his novels. In Martin Chuzzlewit, when Jonas finds that Nadgett has been the watcher, Dickens writes, “The dead man might have come out of his grave and not confounded and appalled him so.” Now, to Jasper, Edwin was “the dead man,” and Edwin’s grave contained quicklime. Jasper was sure that he had done for Edwin: he had taken Edwin’s watch, chain, and scarf-pin; he believed that he had left him, drugged, in quicklime, in a locked vault. Consequently the reappearance of Edwin, quite well, in the vault where Jasper had buried him, would be a very new idea to Jasper; would “confound and appall him.” Jasper would have emotions, at that spectacle, and so would the reader! It is not every day, even in our age of sixpenny novels, that a murderer is compelled to visit, alone, at night, the vault which holds his victim’s “cold remains,” and therein finds the victim “come up, smiling.”

Yes, for business purposes, this idea was new enough! The idea was “difficult to work,” says Dickens, with obvious truth. How was he to get the quicklime into the vault, and Drood, alive, out of the vault? As to the reader, he would at first take Datchery for Drood, and then think, “No, that is impossible, and also is stale. Datchery cannot be Drood,” and thus the reader would remain in a pleasant state of puzzledom, as he does, unto this day.

If Edwin is dead, there is not much “Mystery” about him. We have as good as seen Jasper strangle him and take his pin, chain, and watch. Yet by adroitly managing the conduct of Mr. Grewgious, Dickens persuaded Mr. Proctor that certainly, Grewgious knew Edwin to be alive. As Grewgious knew, from Helena, all that was necessary to provoke his experiment on Jasper’s nerves, Mr. Proctor argued on false premises, but that was due to the craft of Dickens. Mr. Proctor rejected Forster’s report, from memory, of what he understood to be the “incommunicable secret” of Dickens’s plot, and I think that he was justified in the rejection. Forster does not seem to have cared about the thing—he refers lightly to “the reader curious in such matters”—when once he had received his explanation from Dickens. His memory, in the space of five years, may have been inaccurate: he probably neither knew nor cared who Datchery was; and he may readily have misunderstood what Dickens told him, orally, about the ring, as the instrument of detection. Moreover, Forster quite overlooked one source of evidence, as I shall show later.

MR. PROCTOR’S THEORY

Mr. Proctor’s theory of the story is that Jasper, after Edwin’s return at midnight on Christmas Eve, recommended a warm drink—mulled wine, drugged—and then proposed another stroll of inspection of the effects of the storm. He then strangled him, somewhere, and placed him in the quicklime in the Sapsea vault, locked him in, and went to bed. Next, according to Mr. Proctor, Durdles, then, “lying drunk in the precincts,” for some reason taps with his hammer on the wall of the Sapsea vault, detects the presence of a foreign body, opens the tomb, and finds Drood in the quicklime, “his face fortunately protected by the strong silk shawl with which Jasper has intended to throttle him.”

A MISTAKEN THEORY

This is “thin,” very “thin!” Dickens must have had some better scheme than Mr. Proctor’s. Why did Jasper not “mak sikker” like Kirkpatrick with the Red Comyn? Why did he leave his silk scarf? It might come to be asked for; to be sure the quicklime would destroy it, but why did Jasper leave it? Why did the intoxicated Durdles come out of the crypt, if he was there, enter the graveyard, and begin tapping at the wall of the vault? Why not open the door? he had the key.

Suppose, however, all this to have occurred, and suppose, with Mr. Proctor, that Durdles and Deputy carried Edwin to the Tramps’ lodgings, would Durdles fail to recognize Edwin? We are to guess that Grewgious was present, or disturbed at his inn, or somehow brought into touch with Edwin, and bribed Durdles to silence, “until a scheme for the punishment of Jasper had been devised.”

All this set of conjectures is crude to the last degree. We do not know how Dickens meant to get Edwin into and out of the vault. Granting that Edwin was drugged, Jasper might lead Edwin in, considering the licence extended to the effects of drugs in novels, and might strangle him there. Above all, how did Grewgious, if in Cloisterham, come to be at hand at midnight?

ANOTHER WAY

If I must make a guess, I conjecture that Jasper had one of his “filmy” seizures, was “in a frightful sort of dream,” and bungled the murder: made an incomplete job of it. Half-strangled men and women have often recovered. In Jasper’s opium vision and reminiscence there was no resistance, all was very soon over. Jasper might even bungle the locking of the door of the vault. He was apt to have a seizure after opium, in moments of excitement, and he had been at the opium den through the night of December 23, for the hag tracked him from her house in town to Cloisterham on December 24, the day of the crime. Grant that his accustomed fit came upon him during the excitement of the murder, as it does come after “a nicht wi’ opium,” in chapter ii., when Edwin excites him by contemptuous talk of the girl whom Jasper loves so furiously—and then anything may happen!

Jasper murders Edwin inefficiently; he has a fit; while he is unconscious the quicklime revives Edwin, by burning his hand, say, and, during Jasper’s swoon, Edwin, like another famous prisoner, “has a happy thought, he opens the door, and walks out.”

Being drugged, he is in a dreamy state; knows not clearly what has occurred, or who attacked him. Jasper revives, “look on’t again he dare not,”—on the body of his victim—and he walks out and goes home, where his red lamp has burned all the time—“thinking it all wery capital.”

“Another way,”—Jasper not only fails to strangle Drood, but fails to lock the door of the vault, and Drood walks out after Jasper has gone. Jasper has, before his fit, “removed from the body the most lasting, the best known, and most easily recognizable things upon it, the watch and scarf-pin.” So Dickens puts the popular view of the case against Neville Landless, and so we are to presume that Jasper acted. If he removed no more things from the body than these, he made a fatal oversight.

Meanwhile, how does Edwin, once out of the vault, make good a secret escape from Cloisterham? Mr. Proctor invokes the aid of Mr. Grewgious, but does not explain why Grewgious was on the spot. I venture to think it not inconceivable that Mr. Grewgious having come down to Cloisterham by a late train, on Christmas Eve, to keep his Christmas appointment with Rosa, paid a darkling visit to the tomb of his lost love, Rosa’s mother. Grewgious was very sentimental, but too secretive to pay such a visit by daylight. “A night of memories and sighs” he might “consecrate” to his lost lady love, as Landor did to Rose Aylmer. Grewgious was to have helped Bazzard to eat a turkey on Christmas Day. But he could get out of that engagement. He would wish to see Edwin and Rosa together, and Edwin was leaving Cloisterham. The date of Grewgious’s arrival at Cloisterham is studiously concealed. I offer at least a conceivable motive for Grewgious’s possible presence at the churchyard. Mrs. Bud, his lost love, we have been told, was buried hard by the Sapsea monument. If Grewgious visited her tomb, he was on the spot to help Edwin, supposing Edwin to escape. Unlikelier things occur in novels. I do not, in fact, call these probable occurrences in every-day life, but none of the story is probable. Jasper’s “weird seizures” are meant to lead up to something. They may have been meant to lead up to the failure of the murder and the escape of Edwin. Of course Dickens would not have treated these incidents, when he came to make Edwin explain,—nobody else could explain,—in my studiously simple style. The drugged Edwin himself would remember the circumstances but mistily: his evidence would be of no value against Jasper.

Mr. Proctor next supposes, we saw, that Drood got into touch with Grewgious, and I have added the circumstances which might take Grewgious to the churchyard. Next, when Edwin recovered health, he came down, perhaps, as Datchery, to spy on Jasper. I have elsewhere said, as Mr. Cuming Walters quotes me, that “fancy can suggest no reason why Edwin Drood, if he escaped from his wicked uncle, should go spying about instead of coming openly forward. No plausible unfantastic reason could be invented.” Later, I shall explain why Edwin, if he is Datchery, might go spying alone.

It is also urged that Edwin left Rosa in sorrow, and left blame on Neville Landless. Why do this? Mr. Proctor replies that Grewgious’s intense and watchful interest in Neville, otherwise unexplained, is due to his knowledge that Drood is alive, and that Neville must be cared for, while Grewgious has told Rosa that Edwin lives. He also told her of Edwin’s real love of her, hence Miss Bud says, “Poor, poor Eddy,” quite à propos de bottes, when she finds herself many fathoms deep in love with Lieutenant Tartar, R.N. “‘Poor, poor Eddy!’ thought Rosa, as they walked along,” Tartar and she. This is a plausible suggestion of Mr. Proctor. Edwin, though known to Rosa to be alive, has no chance! But, as to my own remark, “why should not Edwin come forward at once, instead of spying about?” Well, if he did, there would be no story. As for “an unfantastic reason” for his conduct, Dickens is not writing an “unfantastic” novel. Moreover, if things occurred as I have suggested, I do not see what evidence Drood had against Jasper. Edwin’s clothes were covered with lime, but, when he told his story, Jasper would reply that Drood never returned to his house on Christmas Eve, but stayed out, “doing what was correct by the season, in the way of giving it the welcome it had the right to expect,” like Durdles on another occasion. Drood’s evidence, if it was what I have suggested, would sound like the dream of an intoxicated man, and what other evidence could be adduced? Thus I had worked out Drood’s condition, if he really was not killed, in this way: I had supposed him to escape, in a very mixed frame of mind, when he would be encountered by Grewgious, who, of course, could make little out of him in his befogged state. Drood could not even prove that it was not Landless who attacked him. The result would be that Drood would lie low, and later, would have reason enough for disguising himself as Datchery, and playing the spy in Cloisterham.

At this point I was reinforced by an opinion which Mr. William Archer had expressed, unknown to me, in a newspaper article. I had described Edwin’s confused knowledge of his own experience, if he were thoroughly drugged, and then half strangled. Mr. Archer also took that point, and added that Edwin being a good-hearted fellow, and fond of his uncle Jasper, he would not bring, or let Grewgious bring, a terrible charge against Jasper, till he knew more certainly the whole state of the case. For that reason, he would come disguised to Cloisterham and make inquiries. By letting Jasper know about the ring, he would compel him to enter the vault, and then, Mr. Archer thinks, would induce him to “repent and begin life afresh.”