THE THIN MELANCHOLY MAN in black, who aroused our curiosity yesterday, today sits at the speakers’ table, together with Superintendent Battle and short, stolid Inspector Bucket, both from Scotland Yard.fn1 Who can it be? Either through absent-mindedness or because of his love of black (in strange contrast with his love of roses), he has pinned his plastic name-badge underneath his lapel, so we are unable to identify him for the reader.
But almost everyone is looking, instead, at the non-regulation beige tweed dress Loredana is wearing. The cameo-brooch and the arrangement of her hair in a bun behind her neck heighten the generally British – even Oxfordian – effect of the ensemble.
Dr Wilmot’s aplomb, meanwhile, is nonchalantly accentuated by a yellow cashmere scarf, and his bow-tie is a little less askew than usual.
He starts off the proceedings: ‘Halfway through the fourth number, the suspense begins, the suspense that the author had promised to maintain until the end, when the reader would learn not only by whom but, first of all, whether Rosa’s ex-fiancé had been murdered.’
MAN IN BLACK: Excuse me, but wasn’t the suspense supposed to begin from the fifth or sixth number?
WILMOT: No. In all probability, Dickens intended the real suspense to begin with the arrival of a new and mysterious character, a certain Datchery, who doesn’t appear until the August number. However, at this point, according to most critics, the author’s problem was not to speed things up but, rather, to slow them down. This is what he meant when he said that he was having trouble with the plot: miscalculating the distribution of events, he had overloaded the first six instalments, and now was finding it difficult to fill the remaining six.
MAN IN BLACK: Excuse me again, but this strikes me as absurd. For a writer like Dickens, who was naturally prolix and, if I might say so, supremely digressive, the problem could hardly be how to fill six more instalments. Which means, in my opinion, that . . . But what do you think, Superintendent?
BATTLE: I don’t know who this mysterious Datchery is, but I agree that the story must be far more complicated than it might appear from the first part.
MAN IN BLACK: Inspector Bucket?
BUCKET: I think so too. There’s the whole opium business; there’s the double, maybe triple personality of the presumed murderer; there’s a highly elaborate murder-method . . . But these are all things that have been explained if not over-explained, and we already know that the motive is jealousy. What’s the problem, then? If the murderer is Jasper, all you need is a reasonably bright policeman, and Jasper will confess in a twinkling: You got me bang to rights, officer, yes, I admit it all, your honour. And then – the rope.
MAN IN BLACK: Exactly. Which means that if the author says he’s having trouble with the plot as soon as the sixth number, we can deduce that Jasper isn’t the culprit.
TOAD: Hear hear!
MAN IN BLACK: Unless – and I wouldn’t exclude this possibility – unless Jasper is in some way working with the twins.
WILMOT, interrupting the audience’s comments and exclamations: This hypothesis has never been put forward. But as it comes from Richard Cuff, we must of course take it seriously. Thank you, Sergeant Cuff.
LOREDANA, with most un-Oxbridgean excitement: Sergeant Cuff! So it’s you, then!
Loredana is an expert on The Moonstone, having seen it twice on television, but even those less familiar with it know that the novel’s intriguing mystery is solved by the sergeant from Scotland Yard. It should be pointed out, here, that in Old Scotland Yard (before its transformation into Great Scotland Yard and its subsequent move under the name of New Scotland Yard to the Thames Embankment and then later to Victoria Street), a sergeant of the Detective Force was a high-ranking investigator. Wilmot has not chosen today’s panel haphazardly: for the fourth number (or the ‘mystery number,’ as the author himself called it), it can truly be said that Scotland Yard has descended in force on Cloisterham, to carry out a highly professional on-the-spot investigation. Let us therefore follow the three officers as they make their watchful, invisible way around the ancient town.
It is the afternoon of December 23. In Miss Twinkleton’s college, all the girls have left with the exception of Helena and Rosa. The latter, dressed to go out, is now alone in her ‘bower’, waiting for Drood. And here is Drood, who has just arrived from London and come to pick her up. Off they go for their customary walk towards the Cathedral. The scene of clarification between the two is more or less as expected and tells the investigators nothing they did not already know.
After Edwin’s reference to his uncle’s worrisome ‘paroxysms’, Rosa discovers that the uncle in question is spying on them from under the trees. The chapter concludes with their farewell at the gate. While Jasper continues to spy on them, Drood obtusely refuses to see anything more than affectionate concern in this. When Drood leaves her, Rosa follows him with a wondering look, which seems to say, ‘O! don’t you understand?’
‘Too stupid to last long,’ is Bucket’s cynical remark. In the course of the twenty instalments (two of which are double issues) of Bleak House, the man became hardened to the daily horrors of the struggle for existence in the slums of London.
Battle agrees. ‘Yes, he’s a classic case of the character who’s too good for his own good. He always turns up in suspense novels and films, and the readers just can’t wait for him to get the chop. Still, we have no proof that he’s wrong about Jasper’s following them. Jasper’s reasons for keeping Drood under such close watch may have nothing to do with jealousy.’
Cuff nods but continues to gaze up at the windows of the college, beyond the locked gate. ‘I wonder,’ he says, ‘why Rosa was alone while she waited for Drood. Where was Helena? All the other girls had gone; they were the only two left. Wouldn’t it have been natural for two friends like that to stick together, chatting and exchanging confidences? Instead . . . Which makes me think . . . I don’t know, but I have a feeling we won’t see them together again, from now on.’
‘Christmas Eve in Cloisterham. A few strange faces in the streets; a few other faces . . .’ Et cetera.
The hasty reader will find nothing other than a lively passage of local colour in this opening of Chapter Fourteen. But Bucket, who knows Dickens’s methods as well as anybody, realises at once that the reference to new faces is not a casual one. And indeed, looking around himself, he quickly spots an old acquaintance of his (and ours).
‘Lascar Sal’s here,’ he murmurs, pointing her out to his colleagues. ‘I’ll follow her. We’ll meet up again later.’
The other two detectives also split up, one to keep an eye on Neville and the other on Drood. (As for Jasper, whom they’ve already seen pass by in his new black silk scarf, they know he’ll be occupied in the Cathedral for the rest of the afternoon.)
But on his way to Minor Canon Corner, Cuff passes in front of the town’s theatre, and he stops for a moment to study the big coloured posters announcing a comic pantomime with Signor Jacksonini: HOW DO YOU DO TOMORROW? Yet another allusion – and a macabre one, hidden as it is in a clown’s wisecrack. Yorick’s skull is not too distant. Nor is Banquo’s ghost, if we can judge by the title of the chapter.
But then, in contrast with this subtlety, the scene in the canon’s house is so blatantly and clumsily suggestive as to act in Neville’s favour rather than against him. The vindictive (though converted) young man going off to meet his ex-rival and mortal offender, armed with a heavy stick! And Crisparkle, out of delicacy (has he gone soft in the head?), says nothing? And Neville, who has been busy this afternoon destroying ‘his stray papers’ (what papers? what have they got to do with all this?), tells him that he needs a change of air so he’ll be off very early the next day! Is any reader, even the most ingenuous one, likely to be fooled by ‘clues’ such as these?
Whistling ‘The Last Rose of Summer’,fn2 Sergeant Cuff notes down, without batting an eyelid: ‘Heavy iron-shod walking-stick. Destruction of papers except for studies. Wish to make self-untraceable next few days, perhaps to avoid immediate questioning, and see how dust settles.’
But let the reader not smile. He would do better to follow Cuff, who in turn is following the twins on their pre-evening walk; and listen again to their conversation. At first blush, it seemed ‘normal’ to us, too: no underlying currents, nothing to draw the attention of the clue-seeker. But when we watch and hear again in playback, there is in fact something very peculiar about the whole scene.
If Neville is really leaving the next day in order to keep away from Rosa, why should he hesitate to say this to his sister? Since she deplores this infatuation of his, she should be entirely in favour of that course of action. Why, then, does she have to think so hard about it? Neville appears relieved, even euphoric, when his enigmatic twin finally announces that if Crisparkle agrees to the plan, she does, too. After this, however, it takes only a comment on her part about the weight of the stick to cause a ‘revulsion’ in him, which makes him taciturn and depressed for the remainder of the walk. ‘I wish I were not going to this dinner, Helena,’ he says at last, when they are almost back at the gate of the Nuns’ House.
Now, as we know, the whole point of the dinner is to make peace with Drood. This is what everyone has been waiting for, the last two weeks. It was this that occasioned Helena’s big scene in front of Crisparkle, just the other day, with her exhortations to virtue and invocations of Heaven. So if there was one subject that the twins should touch on during their walk, it is this. But they don’t mention it until the end, and then for no more than half a minute, and in such terms that make one wonder what it is they are really talking about. Let’s hear it through again:
NEVILLE, depressed: I wish I were not going to this dinner, Helena.
HELENA, airily: Dear Neville, is it worth while to care much about it? Think how soon it will be over.
NEVILLE, gloomily: How soon it will be over. Yes. But I don’t like it.
HELENA, encouraging him: There may be a moment’s awkwardness, but it can only last a moment. You are quite sure of yourself.
NEVILLE, portentously: I wish I felt as sure of everything else, as I feel of myself.
HELENA, raising an eyebrow: How strangely you speak, dear! What do you mean?
NEVILLE, frowning: Helena, I don’t know. I only know that I don’t like it. What a strange dead weight there is in the air!
There is not a single word in this dialogue, Cuff notes, that can be applied to the reconciliation with Drood without some forcing, some twisting. But there is not a single word that does not apply easily to Drood’s murder, if that is what these ‘Anglo-Cingalese’ twins (or whatever they are) have come from Ceylon to commit. As an expert in criminal cases with a background of Oriental intrigue, Cuff knows that this is possible.fn3 But he also knows that in that case the murder would have to be a ritual one, which means either strangulation or suffocation, without the shedding of blood. The scene between the twins would therefore have to be interpreted as follows:
Neville will strangle the victim with his bare hands, or with a cord, in the manner of the thugs; they agreed on this some time ago. But at the last moment he fears he might not be up to it, and that is why he is taking the stick with him. His sister strongly disapproves, for ritual reasons. It is clear that she is the governing mind here and that it was not part of her plan (which may or may not include getting rid of the body in the calcium oxide) that Neville should leave Cloisterham immediately after the crime. But he feels he can’t cope, so she has no choice but to accept his decision. The fact that Crisparkle approves of his tour – indeed, even encourages it – will make it seem less suspicious. But the real problem is that Neville seems to have lost the unquestioning fanatical faith that still inspires Helena. It is not only Drood’s murder that he does not like, but ‘everything else’: who knows what further chain of vendettas or terrorist actions he has allowed himself to be dragged into? That is why his sister accuses him of ‘speaking strangely’; and that is what lies behind the long doubtful stare she directs at him when he leaves her.
‘Poor me, poor me!’
The woman from the Shadwell opium-den, known to the police under the nick-name of Lascar Sal or Sally the Opium Eater, was no different in life from the woman presented to us in the novel. When Dickens met her – trembling, emaciated, hoarse, and racked by a perpetual cough – her appearance was that of a woman of some sixty or seventy years. The poor creature was in fact twenty-six.fn4
‘My lungs is weakly; my lungs is dreffle bad,’ she whimpers amidst her hacking cough.
But it is not self-pity, or an attempt to win Drood’s sympathy (or the sympathy of the two invisible policemen in the background). It is, rather, a resigned self-assessment, a wretched but scrupulous account of herself that she keeps in her more lucid moments, in order to establish what stage she has reached in her downward path.
At the moment, for example, she needs three and sixpence for the drug, and if she can get it from this young man, so much the better. If not, so much the worse. In any case, she makes her own way; she is not one to go round bothering people, asking them for help. In London, as she makes quite clear, she has her own ‘business’, which supports her, although times are bad and business is slack.
‘It’s slack, it’s slack!’
Even Bucket has to pay tribute to this last vestige of dignity, of obstinate independence, as he watches her depart with her three and sixpence in the direction of that den of sinners, the Travellers’ Twopenny.
Meanwhile, Battle stays and watches Drood walk off (since it seems that no one can walk off, in Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen, without someone watching them).
‘Poor youth! Poor youth!’ he repeats with the author. ‘He’s really quite a nice chap, you know. A pity I can’t stay around here to save him.’
‘A pity we can’t stay and see who does him in,’ says Bucket cynically, addressing Cuff as well, since Cuff has arrived at that moment.
It’s time, in fact, for the three policemen to return to the Dickens Room, where everybody is awaiting the results of their investigation. In the meantime, the keener conference members, such as Toad, have already begun to discuss Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen. Which means, reader, we had better sit down and read them attentively ourselves.
fn1 The reader will remember that Bucket appears in Bleak House (1853), and is the first detective in English fiction. Dickens modelled him partly on his friend Inspector Charles F. Field, with whom he visited the opium-den we have already referred to. A typical trait of Bucket is the way he points at suspects with his forefinger, then places it at his ear as if to listen to their reply.
fn2 In Collins’s novel, the sergeant, in addition to his love of roses, is in the habit of whistling ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ in moments of great concentration.
fn3 The three Brahmins who kill Ablewhite in The Moonstone come directly from Seringapatam.
fn4 Several careless commentators, and even some translators, speak of the ‘old woman of the opium den’, since she is given no name. But Dickens never gives her age, and never uses the word ‘old’ to describe her.