The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot Part 4

In the central lowest s.p.a.ce, a dark and whiskered man enters a dark chamber; his left hand is on the lock of the door; in his right he holds up a lantern. The light of the lantern reveals a young man in a soft hat of Tyrolese shape. His features are purely cla.s.sical, his nose is Grecian, his locks are long (at least, according to the taste of to-day); he wears a light paletot, b.u.t.toned to the throat; his right arm hangs by his side; his left hand is thrust into the breast of his coat. He calmly regards the dark man with the lantern. That man, of course, is Jasper.

The young man is EDWIN DROOD, of the Grecian nose, hyacinthine locks, and cla.s.sic features, as in Sir L. Fildes's third ill.u.s.tration.

Mr. Proctor correctly understood the unmistakable meaning of this last design, Jasper entering the vault-

"_To-day the dead are living_, _The lost is found to-day_."

Mr. c.u.ming Walters tells us that he did not examine these designs by Mr.

Collins till he had formed his theory, and finished his book. "On the conclusion of the whole work the pictures were referred to for the first time, and were then found to support in the most striking manner the opinions arrived at," namely, that Drood was killed, and that Helena is Datchery. Thus does theory blind us to facts!

Mr. c.u.ming Walters connects the figure of the whiskerless young man kneeling to a girl in a garden seat, with the whiskered Jasper's proposal to Rosa in a garden seat. But Jasper does not kneel to Rosa; he stands apart, leaning on a sundial; he only once vaguely "touches" her, which she resents; he does not kneel; he does not kiss her hand (Rosa "took the kiss sedately," like Maud in the poem); and-Jasper had l.u.s.trous thick black whiskers.

Again, the same whiskerless young man, bounding up the spiral staircase in daylight, and wildly pointing upwards, is taken by Mr. c.u.ming Walters to represent Jasper climbing the staircase to reconnoitre, at night, with a lantern, and, of course, with black whiskers. The two well-dressed men on the stairs (Grewgious, or Tartar, and Crisparkle) also, according to Mr. c.u.ming Walters, "relate to Jasper's unaccountable expedition with Durdles to the Cathedral." Neither of them is Jasper; neither of them is Durdles, "in a suit of coa.r.s.e flannel"-a disreputable jacket, as Sir L.

Fildes depicts him-"with horn b.u.t.tons," and a battered old tall hat.

These interpretations are quite demonstrably erroneous and even impossible. Mr. Archer interprets the designs exactly as I do.

As to the young man in the light of Jasper's lamp, Mr. c.u.ming Walters says, "the large hat and the tightly-b.u.t.toned surtout must be observed; they are the articles of clothing on which most stress is laid in the description of Datchery. But the face is young." The face of Datchery was elderly, and he had a huge shock of white hair, a wig. Datchery wore "a tightish blue surtout, with a buff waistcoat and grey trousers; he had something of a military air." The young man in the vault has anything but a military air; he shows no waistcoat, and he does not wear "a tightish blue surtout," or any surtout at all.

[Picture: Under the trees]

The surtout of the period is shown, worn by Jasper, in Sir L. Fildes's sixth and ninth ill.u.s.trations. It is a frock-coat; the collar descends far below the top of the waistcoat (buff or otherwise), displaying that garment; the coat is tightly b.u.t.toned beneath, revealing the figure; the tails of the coat do not reach the knees of the wearer. The young man in the vault, on the other hand, wears a loose paletot, b.u.t.toned to the throat (vaults are chilly places), and the coat falls so as to cover the knees; at least, partially. The young man is not, like Helena, "very dark, and fierce of look, . . . of almost the gipsy type." He is blonde, sedate, and of the cla.s.sic type, as Drood was. He is no more like Helena than Crisparkle is like Durdles. Mr. c.u.ming Walters says that Mr.

Proctor was "unable to allude to the prophetic picture by Collins." As a fact, this picture is fully described by Mr. Proctor, but Mr. Walters used the wrong edition of his book, unwittingly.

Mr. Proctor writes:-"Creeping down the crypt steps, oppressed by growing horror and by terror of coming judgment, sickening under fears engendered by the darkness of night and the charnel-house air he breathed, Jasper opens the door of the tomb and holds up his lantern, shuddering at the thought of what it may reveal to him.

"And what sees he? Is it the spirit of his victim that stands there, 'in his habit as he lived,' his hand clasped on his breast, where the ring had been when he was murdered? What else can Jasper deem it? There, clearly visible in the gloom at the back of the tomb, stands Edwin Drood, with stern look fixed on him-pale, silent, relentless!"

[Picture: Durdles Cautions Mr. Sapsea against Boasting]

Again, "On the t.i.tle-page are given two of the small pictures from the Love side of the cover, two from the Murder side, and the central picture below, which presents the central horror of the story-the end and aim of the 'Datchery a.s.sumption' and of Mr. Grewgious's plans-showing Jasper driven to seek for the proofs of his crime amid the dust to which, as he thought, the flesh and bones, and the very clothes of his victim, had been reduced."

There are only two possible choices; either Collins, under d.i.c.kens's oral instructions, depicted Jasper finding Drood alive in the vault, an incident which was to occur in the story; or d.i.c.kens bade Collins do this for the purpose of misleading his readers in an illegitimate manner; while the young man in the vault was really to be some person "made up"

to look like Drood, and so to frighten Jasper with a pseudo-ghost of that hero. The latter device, the misleading picture, would be childish, and the pseudo-ghost, exactly like Drood, could not be acted by the gipsy-like, fierce Helena, or by any other person in the romance.

MR. WALTERS'S THEORY CONTINUED

Mr. c.u.ming Walters guesses that Jasper was to aim a deadly blow (with his left hand, to judge from the picture) at Helena, and that Neville "was to give his life for hers." But, manifestly, Neville was to lead the hunt of Jasper up the spiral stair, as in Collins's design, and was to be dashed from the roof: his body beneath was to be "_that_, I never saw before. _That_ must be real. Look what a poor mean miserable thing it is!" as Jasper says in his vision.

Mr. c.u.ming Walters, pursuing his idea of Helena as both Datchery and also as the owner of "the _young_ face" of the youth in the vault (and also of the young hands, a young girl's hands could never pa.s.s for those of "an elderly buffer"), exclaims: "Imagine the intense power of the dramatic climax, when Datchery, the elderly man, is re-transformed into Helena Landless, the young and handsome woman; and when she reveals the seemingly impenetrable secret which had been closed up in one guilty man's mind."

The situations are startling, I admit, but how would Canon Crisparkle like them? He is, we know, to marry Helena, "the young person, my dear,"

Miss Twinkleton would say, "who for months lived alone, at inns, wearing a blue surtout, a buff waistcoat, and grey-" Here horror chokes the utterance of Miss Twinkleton. "Then she was in the vault in _another_ disguise, not more womanly, at that awful scene when poor Mr. Jasper was driven mad, so that he confessed all sorts of nonsense, for, my dear, all the Close believes that it _was_ nonsense, and that Mr. Jasper was reduced to insanity by persecution. And Mr. Crisparkle, with that elegant dainty mother of his-it has broken her heart-is marrying this half-caste gipsy _trollop_, with her blue surtout and grey-oh, it is a disgrace to Cloisterham!"

The climax, in fact, as devised by Mr. c.u.ming Walters, is rather too dramatic for the comfort of a minor canon. A humorist like d.i.c.kens ought to have seen the absurdity of the situation. Mr. Walters _may_ be right, Helena may be Datchery, but she ought not to be.

WHO WAS THE PRINCESS PUFFER?

Who was the opium hag, the Princess Puffer? Mr. c.u.ming Walters writes: "We make a guess, for d.i.c.kens gives us no solid facts. But when we remember that not a word is said throughout the volume of Jasper's antecedents, who he was, and where he came from; when we remember that but for his nephew he was a lonely man; when we see that he was both criminal and artist; when we observe his own wheedling propensity, his false and fulsome protestations of affection, his slyness, his subtlety, his heartlessness, his tenacity; and when, above all, we know that the opium vice is _hereditary_, and that a _young_ man would not be addicted to it unless born with the craving; {91} then, it is not too wild a conjecture that Jasper was the wayward progeny of this same opium-eating woman, all of whose characteristics he possessed, and, perchance, of a man of criminal instincts, but of a superior position. Jasper is a morbid and diseased being while still in the twenties, a mixture of genius and vice. He hates and he loves fiercely, as if there were wild gipsy blood in his veins. Though seemingly a model of decorum and devoted to his art, he complains of his "daily drudging round" and "the cramped monotony of his existence." He commits his crime with the ruthlessness of a beast, his own nature being wholly untamed. If we deduce that his father was an adventurer and a vagabond, we shall not be far wrong. If we deduce that his mother was the opium-eater, prematurely aged, who had transmitted her vicious propensity to her child, we shall almost certainly be right."

WHO WAS JASPER?

Who was Jasper? He was the brother-in-law of the late Mr. Drood, a respected engineer, and University man. We do not know whence came Mrs.

Drood, Jasper's sister, but is it likely that her mother "drank heaven's-hard"-so the hag says of herself-then took to keeping an opium den, and there entertained her son Jasper, already an accomplished vocalist, but in a lower station than that to which his musical genius later raised him, as lay Precentor? If the Princess Puffer be, as on Mr.

c.u.ming Walters's theory she is, Edwin's long-lost grandmother, her discovery would be unwelcome to Edwin. Probably she did not live much longer; "my lungs are like cabbage nets," she says. Mr. c.u.ming Walters goes on-

"Her purpose is left obscure. How easily, however, we see possibilities in a direction such as this. The father, perhaps a proud, handsome man, deserts the woman, and removes the child. The woman hates both for scorning her, but the father dies, or disappears, and is beyond her vengeance. Then the child, victim to the ills in his blood, creeps back to the opium den, not knowing his mother, but immediately recognized by her. She will make the child suffer for the sins of the father, who had destroyed her happiness. Such a theme was one which appealed to d.i.c.kens.

It must not, however, be urged; and the crucial question after all is concerned with the opium woman as one of the unconscious instruments of justice, aiding with her trifle of circ.u.mstantial evidence the Nemesis awaiting Jasper.

"Another hypothesis-following on the Carker theme in 'Dombey and Son'-is that Jasper, a dissolute and degenerate man, lascivious, and heartless, may have wronged a child of the woman's; but it is not likely that d.i.c.kens would repeat the Mrs. Brown story."

Jasper, _pere_, father of John Jasper and of Mrs. Drood, however handsome, ought not to have deserted Mrs. Jasper. Whether John Jasper, prematurely devoted to opium, became Edwin's guardian at about the age of fifteen, or whether, on attaining his majority, he succeeded to some other guardian, is not very obvious. In short, we cannot guess why the Princess Puffer hated Jasper, a paying client of long standing. We are only certain that Jasper was a bad fellow, and that the Princess Puffer said, "I know him, better than all the Reverend Parsons put together know him." On the other hand, Edwin "seems to know" the opium woman, when he meets her on Christmas Eve, which may be a point in favour of her being his long-lost grandmother.

Jasper was certainly tried and condemned; for d.i.c.kens intended "to take Mr. Fildes to a condemned cell in Maidstone, or some other gaol, in order to make a drawing." {96} Possibly Jasper managed to take his own life, in the cell; possibly he was duly hanged.

Jasper, after all, was a failure as a murderer, even if we suppose him to have strangled his nephew successfully. "It is obvious to the most excruciatingly feeble capacity" that, if he meant to get rid of proofs of the ident.i.ty of Drood's body by means of quicklime, it did not suffice to remove Drood's pin, watch, and chain. Drood would have coins of the realm in his pockets, gold, silver, bronze. Quicklime would not destroy these metallic objects, nor would it destroy keys, which would easily prove Drood's ident.i.ty. If Jasper knew his business, he would, of course, rifle _all_ of Edwin's pockets minutely, and would remove the metallic b.u.t.tons of his braces, which generally display the maker's name, or the tailor's. On research I find "H. Poole & Co., Savile Row" on my b.u.t.tons. In this inquiry of his, Jasper would have discovered the ring in Edwin's breast pocket, and would have taken it away. Perhaps d.i.c.kens never thought of that little fact: if he did think of it, no doubt he found some mode of accounting for Jasper's unworkmanlike negligence. The trouser-b.u.t.tons would have led any inquirer straight to Edwin's tailor; I incline to suspect that neither d.i.c.kens nor Jasper noticed that circ.u.mstance. The conscientious artist in crime cannot afford to neglect the humblest and most obvious details.

CONCLUSION

ACCORDING to my theory, which mainly rests on the unmistakable evidence of the cover drawn by Collins under d.i.c.kens's directions, all "ends well." Jasper comes to the grief he deserves: Helena, after her period of mourning for Neville, marries Crisparkle: Rosa weds her mariner.

Edwin, at twenty-one, is not heart-broken, but, a greatly improved character, takes, to quote his own words, "a sensible interest in works of engineering skill, especially when they are to change the whole condition of an undeveloped country"-Egypt.

These conclusions are inevitable unless we either suppose d.i.c.kens to have arranged a disappointment for his readers in the _tableau_ of Jasper and Drood, in the vault, on the cover, or can persuade ourselves that not Drood, but some other young man, is revealed by the light of Jasper's lantern. Now, the young man is very like Drood, and very unlike the dark fierce Helena Landless: disguised as Drood, this time, not as Datchery.

All the difficulty as to why Drood, if he escaped alive, did not at once openly denounce Jasper, is removed when we remember, as Mr. Archer and I have independently pointed out, that Drood, when attacked by Jasper, was (like Durdles in the "unaccountable expedition") stupefied by drugs, and so had no valid evidence against his uncle. Whether science is acquainted with the drugs necessary for such purposes is another question. They are always kept in stock by starving and venal apothecaries in fiction and the drama, and are a recognized convention of romance.

So ends our unfolding of the Mystery of Edwin Drood.

THE END