THE MENACING CONCLUSION of Chapter Seven has left us perplexed. Someone would appear to be threatened by that gleam of fire in Helena Landless’s eye, and this someone should ‘look well to it’. But who is this someone? Logic would suggest Jasper. Yet we have the feeling that it is the reader who should be careful, who should ‘look well to it’.
The author tells us that the person the gleam concerns (or rather: ‘most’ concerns) could be anyone, but there is a hint of mockery, of playfulness, in the way he says it, as if he doesn’t for one minute believe it himself.
‘But of course it’s Jasper,’ he seems to assure us, with the frank smile of one who plays fair. ‘Who else could it be?’
‘Drood,’ we reply, not trusting Dickens. But we might have said any other name.
While waiting for the conference to start up again, let us have another look at the cast of characters. Whom can we classify as above, and whom below, suspicion?
Half-way through No. 2, John Jasper is more than ever the prime suspect. The evidence against him was already weighty, but now it is overwhelming. His behaviour becomes more sinister with every turn of the page. Rev. Crisparkle, on the other hand, can be excluded – and not just because nobody has ever suspected him (Helena has never been suspected either, if it comes to that). He is, in contrast to the ‘philanthropist’ Honeythunder, the incarnation of the ideas of tolerance and neighbourliness that Dickens most cherished. Impossible for him to be a cold-blooded murderer! For the same reason, we feel no possible suspicion can fall on the lawyer Grewgious, another of Dickens’s marvellous creations, who is about to make his appearance. We exclude also (unless for solutions of a paradoxical or burlesque kind) such comic characters as Durdles, the Topes, Miss Twinkleton, or caricatures such as the Dean and Mr. Sapsea. Honeythunder himself, odious as he is, is too grotesque to be suspected of anything other than fraud and embezzlement against those in his charge. Which means that apart from Rosa (whom we leave to the study of Superintendent Battle), only the two Landlesses remain as rival candidates to Jasper for potential murder.
But while the evidence against Jasper is consistent and detailed, the few facts that might cast suspicion on the twins will not stand up to serious scrutiny. What weight can be given to such heavy-handed, clumsy ‘evidence’ as their Oriental origins, their possible ‘mixed blood’, their ‘wildness’, or Neville’s sudden infatuation with Rosa?
And yet, can we rule out the possibility that this is real evidence deliberately presented in such a way as to appear false? Dickens did not know Agatha Christie, of course, but he did know Wilkie Collins and his Moonstone, which was praised by T. S. Eliot as ‘the first, the longest, and the best of English detective novels’.
So in the MED, too, we must be careful not to brush aside clues that are ‘too obvious’; and equally careful not to miss such clues as the author might have slipped in between the lines or hidden in digressions and simple colourful descriptions that would seem to bear no relation to the crime.
As for digressions, here is one on hypnotism and telepathy.
Dickens did not believe in spiritualism, and in his ghoststories he never ceased to make fun of it. But he was extremely interested in paranormal psychology. He himself practised ‘mesmerism’, as we know; and though he never succeeded in hypnotising his daughter Kate, not even from close-to, he was convinced that mesmeric powers could be exerted even from a distance, by telepathy. That is why Rosa, who is highly sensitive, fears that Jasper, with his magnetic powers, can reach her, even ‘passing in through the wall’. And that is why Helena says that she does not fear him: being magnetic and telepathic herself, not only has she recognised Jasper as a ‘colleague’ (note how she looks at him in the Crisparkles’ house while he secretly hypnotises Rosa), but probably she also judges herself to be stronger than he. Her eyes, remember, are described as intensely dark, and she had a ‘gipsy-face’. And she comes from Ceylon.
Furthermore, telepathic communication seems to be habitual between the twins. They can understand each other without needing to exchange a word, as Crisparkle has already noted. Later, while teaching Neville, the Reverend will have the impression that ‘in teaching one, he was teaching two’.
Returning to the end of Chapter Seven, then, we ask: Where is Neville during this scene between Helena and Rosa? And who is he with? The title of Chapter Eight suggests that he is already at daggers drawn, and a rapid glance through it confirms this surmise: the hot-blooded young man, mortally offended by his rival, is actually about to kill him in the presence of Jasper. But not only of Jasper. His sister is present too, if the telepathic link between them is operating. In this case, against whom could the ‘gleam of fire’ in her eyes be directed, if not Drood?
Our hypothesis was not so wide of the mark, after all. And our advice to Drood, could we give him any, would be to beware, above all, of Helena.
We are now in the Dickens Room, where the session is at last about to begin. The technical difficulties, truly technical, have been solved: the sponsors, to save precious time, and tired of waiting for the famous announcer, have had a new relaying system put in, which is not only simultaneous but also subliminal. White-coated technicians have just completed the installation.
Loredana explains that everyone must now put on the headphones and listen attentively to a three- or four-second buzz (made up, in fact, of billions of subliminal bytes) which will imprint the entire second number of the MED on the brain. Attention.
‘Zzz, zzz,’ and that’s Chapters Six and Seven (which we already know). ‘Zzz, zzz,’ and that’s Eight and Nine.