CHAPTER V—WAS EDWIN DROOD MURDERED?

I reply in the affirmative, and for the following reasons:

I.

1. The external testimonies as given in a previous chapter are all explicit as far as they go in their testimony that in the intention of Dickens Edwin Drood was murdered. There is first the testimony of John Forster. To him Dickens plainly declared that a nephew was to be murdered by his uncle. The murderer was to discover that his crime was useless for its purpose, but he was not to be convicted in the ordinary way. It was by means of a gold ring, which had resisted the corrosive effects of the lime into which the body had been cast, that the murderer and the person murdered were to be identified.

2. Madame Perugini corroborates Forster’s testimony, and points out that the only thing on which he is not positive is the ending of Neville Landless. He guards himself by saying, ‘I think,’ and this makes his testimony to the more important facts the more impressive. Madame Perugini, who thoroughly understood the relations between Forster and Dickens, finds it impossible to believe that Dickens should have altered his plan without communicating with Forster. Forster’s strong character, and the peculiar friendship that existed between him and Dickens, make it impossible to believe that Dickens should suddenly become ‘underhand,’ and we might say treacherous, by inventing a plot which he did not intend to carry into execution. Forster became a little jealous of Dickens’s confidence, and more than a little exacting in his demands on it. This Dickens knew, and smiled at occasionally. But he was very careful not to wound his friend’s very sensitive nature, and he so trusted Forster’s judgment as to be uneasy and unhappy if he did not obtain its sanction for his decisions and his actions. If there had been any change of plan Forster would certainly have been told. He never was told.

3. Again, we know that Charles Dickens the younger positively declared that he heard from his father’s lips that Edwin Drood was dead. I have been able to print part of a play written by Charles Dickens the younger and Joseph Hatton. This shows beyond contradiction that the authors believed Drood to be dead. Mr. Hatton says: ‘Consulting his son, Charles, to whom I offered my sketch, I found that his father had revealed to him sufficient of the plot to clearly indicate how the story was to end.’ How far this may apply to details we cannot be sure, but most certainly it certifies the death.

4. To this I may add that Madame Perugini’s own firm belief that Drood was dead is of no small importance, considering that she was the wife of Charles Allston Collins, who drew the much discussed wrapper. It did not occur either to Madame Perugini or her husband that there was any doubt as to the fate of Edwin Drood.

5. The weighty letter of Sir Luke Fildes printed on pages 54–5 confirms unmistakably and strongly the witness already adduced. Fildes was the sole illustrator of _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_, and he testifies that Collins did not in the least know the significance of the various groups on the wrapper. Further, when Sir Luke was puzzled by the statement that John Jasper was described as wearing a neckerchief that would go twice round his neck he drew Dickens’s attention to the circumstance that he had previously dressed Jasper as wearing a little black tie once round the neck, and asked why the alteration was made. Dickens, a little disconcerted, suddenly asked, ‘Can you keep a secret?’ He then said: ‘I must have the double necktie! It is necessary, for Jasper strangles Edwin Drood with it.’ Fildes was impressed by Dickens’s earnestness, and resented the suggestion often made that Dickens’s hints dropped to members of his family or friends may have been intentionally misleading. ‘It is a little startling,’ says Sir Luke, ‘after more than thirty-five years of profound belief in the nobility of character and sincerity of Charles Dickens, to be told now that he probably was more or less of a humbug on such occasions.’

I cannot but feel that the external testimony is too strong to be explained away, and it ought to be read and pondered in its entirety.

II. DICKENS’S OWN NOTE

In the Memoranda made by Dickens for chapter xii., and printed on page 63, we read that Jasper ‘lays the ground for the manner of the murder, to come out at last. Night picture of the Cathedral.’ Mr. Lang himself admits, ‘It seems almost undeniable that, when Dickens wrote this note, he meant Jasper to succeed in murdering Edwin.’ {113}

III. THE ADMITTED TESTIMONY OF THE BOOK

The proof that Edwin Drood was murdered is to my mind mainly to be found in the pages of the story. One would have to print a large part of it in order to convey the impressive and unmistakable force of the whole, but perhaps it is better to read it as Dickens wrote it. For he himself advances nothing to modify or mitigate the conclusion that, as the result of a carefully designed plot, Edwin Drood was foully murdered by his uncle. Happily it is not necessary to spend much space on this. I believe that Dr. Jackson is fully justified in his statement that all who have written on the subject acknowledge that Jasper tried to murder his nephew, and believed himself to have succeeded. We all see that Jasper had either strangled Edwin with a black scarf and committed his body to a heap of quicklime that lay about convenient, or thought that he had done so. ‘We all see that the crime is to be proved by a gold ring of rubies and diamonds which Edwin has concealed about his person, though Jasper does not know it.’ Mr. Proctor writes:

It is clear that Dickens has intended to convey the impression that Edwin Drood is murdered, his body and clothes consumed, Jasper having first taken his watch and chain and shirt-pin, which cannot have been thrown into the river till the night of Christmas Day, since the watch, wound up at twenty minutes past two on Christmas Eve, had run down when found in the river.

Having arrived at this point we may proceed.

Is it conceivable that Jasper, believing himself to have succeeded in murdering his nephew, could have failed? Jasper is meant by Dickens to be a man wholly without conscience and heart. Such characters are not numerous in Dickens’s books, but we have evidence that he knew them and had pondered over them. I may quote his words in _Hunted Down_:

There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a man who is a calculating criminal, is, in any phase of his guilt otherwise than true to himself, and perfectly consistent with his whole character. Such a man commits murder, and murder is the natural culmination of his course; such a man has to outface murder, and will do it with hardihood and effrontery. It is a sort of fashion to express surprise that any notorious criminal, having such crime upon his conscience, can so brave it out. Do you think that if he had it on his conscience at all, or had a conscience to have it upon, he would ever have committed the crime? Perfectly consistent with himself, as I believe all such monsters to be, this Slinkton recovered himself, and showed a defiance that was sufficiently cold and quiet. He was white, he was haggard, he was changed; but only as a sharper who had played for a great stake and had been outwitted and had lost the game.

In _Household Words_ for 14th June 1856, Dickens has an article on ‘The Demeanour of Murderers.’ He is referring to William Bousfield, ‘the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey dock.’ Bousfield’s demeanour was considered exceedingly remarkable because of his composure under trial. On this Dickens says:

Can any one, reflecting on the matter for five minutes, suppose it possible—we do not say probable, but possible—that in the breast of this poisoner there were surviving, in the days of his trial, any lingering traces of sensibility, or any wrecked fragment of the quality which we call sentiment. Can the profoundest or the simplest man alive believe that in such a heart there could have been left, by that time, any touch of pity?

The murder of Edwin Drood had been so long premeditated that Jasper had done it hundreds and thousands of times in the opium den. The motive was his fierce and wolfish passion for Rosa. He loathed his poor nephew as the chief obstacle to his wishes, and planned out in every detail a murder which would utterly remove him from the sight of men.

Jasper, then, was an unredeemed villain, but he was anything than a fool. He drugged Drood; he strangled him; he put his body in quicklime; he had time to rob the victim of his jewellery; he maintained a threatening and defiant attitude. He was not afraid that Drood would return to convict him of an attempt to murder. He had done his business. I think it worth while to point out that in Dickens’s view Jasper’s malevolence must have been raised to the highest point of fury on the night of the murder. For the murder was committed on a night of the wildest tempest. Trees were almost torn out of the earth, chimneys toppled into the streets, the hands of the cathedral clock were torn off, the lead from the roof was stripped away and blown into the close, and stones were displaced on the summit of the great tower. In _Barnaby Rudge_ (chapter ii.) Dickens says:

There are times when the elements being in unusual commotion, those who are bent on daring enterprises, or agitated by great thoughts, whether of good or evil, feel a mysterious sympathy with the tumult of nature, and are roused into corresponding violence. In the midst of thunder, lightning, and storm, many tremendous deeds have been committed; men, self-possessed before, have given a sudden loose to passions they could no longer control. The demons of wrath and despair have striven to emulate those who ride the whirlwind and direct the storm; and man, lashed into madness with the roaring winds and boiling waters, has become for the time as wild and merciless as the elements themselves.

IV. THE RING

As we have seen, Dickens’s method is to make every hint significant, and, as a rule, not too significant. The reader at the time may fail to perceive why a particular point is mentioned, but it is not mentioned carelessly or without design. The backward glance from the end is to interpret all. Besides this there are hints in the novels to which he calls special attention, and which he thereby binds himself to redeem. Conspicuous among these in _Edwin Drood_ is the sentence about the jewelled ring and betrothal over which Edwin Drood’s right hand closed as it rested in its little case. He would not let Rosa’s heart be grieved by those sorrowful jewels. He would restore them to the cabinet from which he had unwillingly taken them, and keep silence. He would let them be. He would let them lie unspoken of in his breast. But Dickens says: ‘Among the mighty store of wonderful chains that are for ever forging, day and night, in the vast ironworks of time and circumstance, there was one chain forged in the moment of that small conclusion, riveted to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted with invincible force to hold and drag.’ No answer to our question, no solution of the problem can be satisfactory which fails to assign its due weight to this sentence. In Proctor’s first attempt at the solution of _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ contained in _Leisure Readings_, we find the following amazingly inept words: ‘From the stress laid on this point, and the clear words in which its association with the mystery is spoken of, we may safely infer, I think, that it is intended partly to mislead the reader.’

Later on, Proctor, seeing the insufficiency of this, propounded another theory. This was that the attempt on Drood and his rescue were known almost immediately to Mr. Grewgious, who took possession of the ring; that when the fact that such a ring had been in Drood’s pocket came to Jasper’s knowledge he at once in a state of panic rushed to the vault to recover it from among the quicklime; that Drood, divining this intention, concealed himself in the vault and confronted Jasper the moment he opened the door. This theory is partly approved of by Mr. William Archer. {119} But Dickens’s point is plainly that the ring was the only jewellery possessed by Drood about which Jasper knew nothing. It is the finding of the ring in the tomb that is to bring the guilt of the murder home.

As for the numerous assumptions made by Proctor, it can only be said that they have no foundation in the facts. There is no reason to believe that the attempt on Drood and his rescue were known almost immediately to Mr. Grewgious. There is no evidence that Grewgious took possession of the ring. There is no evidence that Jasper came to know that such had been in Drood’s pocket. All these theories are not only without foundation, but, I think, also in plain contradiction to the whole tenor of the story.

If Drood was half dead how did he get away? According to Mr. Proctor’s ingenious theory he was rescued from the bed of quicklime by Durdles. He was rescued with the skin burnt off his face, and his eyebrows gone, so that he could afterwards disguise himself as Datchery. If this is so, the quicklime must have behaved itself in a singularly obliging and accommodating manner. But, as a matter of fact, there is no evidence whatever for the theory, and the whole drift of the story makes against it. The difficulties are admitted even by those who incline to support Proctor’s view and to maintain that Edwin is not dead.

Mr. Lang admits that Proctor’s theory of the murder is thin, and that ‘all this set of conjectures is crude to the last degree.’ I am content to leave it at that. Mr. Lang has conjectures of his own. He conjectures that Mr. Grewgious visited the tomb of his lost love, Rosa’s mother, and consecrated to her ‘a night of memories and sighs.’ He says: ‘Mrs. Bud, his lost love, we have been told, was buried hard by the Sapsea monument.’ This is not told by Dickens. It is better to stick by the narrative.

Supposing that Edwin was not dead, what was the meaning of the long silence? Why did he allow Neville to rest under a cloud of suspicion, and exposed to great peril? Why did he allow Jasper’s persecution of Rosa? Why did he allow Helena Landless, whom he had begun more or less to love, to suffer with the rest? Are we to suppose that he came back disguised to fix the guilt on his uncle? Can we believe that he did not know that his uncle had tried to murder him? If not, are we to believe that he suspected his uncle and was not sure, and came down to try to surprise his uncle’s secret and to punish him? He could only have punished him at most for an attempt at murder. Even that might have been hard to bring home, supposing he himself was not clear as to the facts. ‘Fancy can suggest no reason,’ writes Mr. Lang, ‘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.’

Dr. M. R. James, one of the few who still think that Edwin might not have been murdered, says in his last writing on the subject: ‘I freely confess that the view that Edwin is dead solves many difficulties. A wholly satisfactory theory of the manner of his escape has never been devised; his failure to clear Neville from suspicion is hard to explain.’ Mr. Lang, in what has unhappily proved his last article on the subject, in _Blackwood_ for May 1911, explains that while he believed in 1905 that Jasper failed in his attempt to murder, ‘now I have no theory as to how the novel would have been built up.’

V.

Those who more or less strongly still believe that Dickens meant to spare Edwin rest their case mainly on a subjective impression. Says Dr. James: ‘On the other hand, whether the result would be a piece of “bad art” or not, I do think it is more in Dickens’s manner to spare Edwin than to kill him. The subjective impression that he is not doomed is too strong for me to dismiss.’ {122} It is difficult to argue against a subjective impression. The fact remains that Edwin Drood becomes superfluous. He has effected no lodgment in any human heart. Mr. Walters says that Drood is little more than a name-label attached to a body, a man who never excites sympathy, and whose fate causes no emotion. Proctor, who believes that Edwin Drood survived, admits that he lived unpaired. ‘Rosa was to give her hand to Tartar, Helena Landless to Crisparkle, while Edwin and Mr. Grewgious were to look on approvingly, though Edwin a little sadly.’

Mr. Lang in the Gadshill edition of Dickens wrote: ‘Edwin and Neville are quarrelsome cubs, not come to discretion, and the fatuity of Edwin, though not exaggerated much, makes him extremely unsympathetic.’ But in his book on the subject Mr. Lang changes his view and writes: ‘On re-reading the novel I find that Dickens makes Drood as sympathetic as he can.’ Thus impressions alter. Gillan Vase, in her continuation of the story would make us believe that on Edwin’s reappearance Rosa transferred her heart from Tartar to her old lover! But taking the story as it stands, we see that the sorrow for his death is not deep, and that no heart is broken by his disappearance. Rosa is consoled, and more than consoled. Helena grieves for her brother, and flings a shield over Rosa. Neville and Edwin have never been good friends. Grewgious has cheerfully acquiesced in, if he has not instigated, the breaking of the engagement between Rosa and Edwin. The appropriate explanation is: ‘Poor youth! Poor youth!’ That is all.

It has been suggested that there is a parallel between _No Thoroughfare_ and _Edwin Drood_. According to Proctor it is suggested clearly in _No Thoroughfare_ that Vendale has been murdered beyond all seeming hope. Proctor’s real argument seems to be that Vendale is not marked for death, and does not die, and that Edwin Drood belongs to the same class. He says that Nell and Paul, Richard Carson and the other characters who die in Dickens’s stories are marked for death from the beginning, but that there is not one note of death in all that Edwin does or says. I believe that this is entirely contrary to the facts. There are some who like Edwin, but none who love him. He is hated by his uncle, and hated perhaps by Neville.

In _No Thoroughfare_, a story written by Wilkie Collins and Dickens in 1867 as a Christmas Number, we have the story of a man supposed dead coming to life again. It may be noted that the only portions of this story furnished exclusively by Dickens were the overture and the third act. Collins contributed to the first and fourth act, and wrote the whole of the second. Vendale, a wine-merchant, is in love with a Swiss girl, Marguerite. She returns his affection, but her guardian Obenreizer is bitterly opposed. He consents, however, to the marriage if Vendale can double his income and make it £3000 a year. Vendale discovers that a forgery has been committed, through which £500 are missing. He is asked by the Swiss firm with which he deals to send a trustworthy messenger to investigate the fraud and discover its perpetrator. Vendale resolves to go himself, and tells Obenreizer. Obenreizer is the culprit, though Vendale does not suspect it, and the two go to Switzerland together. Obenreizer keeps planning a murder, and contrives to give Vendale an opium draught. He drugs him again, and in the course of a perilous mountain journey Vendale is roused to the knowledge that Obenreizer had set upon him, and that they were struggling desperately in the snow. Vendale rolls himself over into a gulf. But help is near. Marguerite’s fears have been excited, and she has followed her lover on the journey. She engages a rescue expedition, and they find the lost man insensible. He is delirious and quite unconscious where he is. Then he seems to sink in the deadly cold, and his heart no longer beats. ‘She broke from them all, and sank over him on his litter with both her living hands upon the heart that stood still.’ But by and by, when the crisis of the exposure comes, ‘supported on Marguerite’s arm—his sunburnt colour gone, his right arm bandaged and slung over his breast—Vendale stood before the murderer a man risen from the dead.’ I cannot see that this is a great surprise. Vendale was not marked for death. I think the unsophisticated reader, knowing how he is loved and how he is waited for, and how unconsciousness may pass into consciousness, would fully expect him to live. When he comes to life, he is supported on Marguerite’s arm. There was no arm on which Edwin Drood could lean. Dickens can provide for his old bachelors like Newman Noggs, but he had no provision for Edwin.

THE ARGUMENTS FOR THE DISAPPEARANCE THEORY

_From the Wrapper_.—I am convinced after a careful perusal of nearly all that has been written on the subject that the real strength of the disappearance theory is to be found in the bottom picture of the wrapper. When Madame Perugini published the article from which I have quoted, Mr. Lang in a letter to the _Times_ {127} rested his whole case on the cover design. He said:

The chief difficulty in accepting the fact has always been that, in designs on the covers, by Mr. C. A. Collins, first husband of Mrs. Perugini, we see a young man, who is undeniably Edwin Drood, confronting Jasper in a dark vault, in the full light of a lantern held up by Jasper. Mrs. Perugini says that this figure may be regarded as ‘the ghost of Edwin as seen by Jasper in his half-dazed and drugged condition,’ or Helena Landless ‘dressed as Datchery.’ The figure is not dressed as Datchery, nor was Miss Landless fair like Drood, but very dark. As for the ghost, he is as substantial as Jasper, and it is most improbable that Dickens would have a mere hallucination designed in such a substantial fashion, ‘massive and concrete,’ as Pip said of Mr. Wopsle’s rendering of the part of Hamlet.

Mr. Lang in his final _Blackwood_ paper repeats the assertion with unhesitating confidence. He goes so far as to say:

Last, Dickens had instructed his son-in-law, Charles Collins (brother of Wilkie Collins), to design a pictorial cover of the numbers, in which Jasper, entering a dark vault with a lantern, finds a substantial shadow-casting Drood ‘in his habit as he lived,’—soft conical hat and all,—confronting him.

As to this we note:

1. That Collins received no such instructions.

2. That neither Collins nor Luke Fildes nor any of the Dickens family read the illustration in that sense. They all supposed Edwin to be dead.

3. We also note that, in spite of Mr. Lang’s confident assertions, there is no unanimity as to the meaning of the design. It may be Drood; it may be, as I think it is, Datchery; it may be Neville Landless, as Mr. Hugh Thomson has suggested. But no one is entitled to dogmatise on the subject.

4. As I have already pointed out, in the great majority of the wrappers the designs are vague and general, and cannot be verified in the narrative.

5. But to my mind the most conclusive proof that the wrapper is not to be rigidly and pedantically interpreted is that Dickens himself was the very last man in the world to give away his secrets on the cover. On this Madame Perugini has said all that needs to be said. I am glad to find that in his last review of the controversy Dr. M. R. James makes no mention of the wrapper evidence.

‘WHEN SHALL THESE THREE MEET AGAIN?’

It appears that certain readers have taken the heading of chapter xiv., ‘When shall these three meet again?’ as an argument for the theory that Drood reappears. If the use of the quotation has any special interest a very good interpretation has been supplied by Mr. Edwin Charles. Mr. Charles points out that the words are used in _Macbeth_ before the three witches meet again to plant in Macbeth’s mind the tragical lust of ambition. He slays Duncan, who is at once his guest, his kinsman, and his king. And Duncan’s sons, also guests of Macbeth, fly respectively to England and Ireland, and Macbeth uses the flight to spread suspicion against them. ‘We hear our bloody cousins are bestow’d in England and in Ireland: not confessing their cruel parricide.’ Jasper is Edwin Drood’s kinsman and guardian and host. Jasper slays his nephew, and contrives that the suspicion of his murder shall fall on his other guest, Neville Landless, who has to leave Cloisterham. Is this a chance parallel? Does the use of the words in the heading of the chapter prove that Dickens had the tragedy of _Macbeth_ in his mind? Mr. Charles not only thinks so, but he holds that the quotation positively destroys any shadow of doubt as to what was intended to be the fate of Edwin. Mr. Charles also notes that Dickens makes another reference to Macbeth in the story when he records the dinner which Grewgious gave to Edwin and Bazzard at Staple Inn. Speaking of the leg of the flying waiter Dickens says that ‘it always preceded him and the tray by some seconds, and always lingered after he disappeared,’ adding, ‘like Macbeth’s leg when accompanying him off the stage with reluctance to the assassination of Duncan.’

There is not much to reply to in the argument, but the reply is, to say the least, sufficient.

‘EDWIN DROOD IN HIDING’

Another argument has been drawn from the tentative titles written by Dickens here first printed in full. Two of them are ‘The Flight of Edwin Drood,’ and ‘Edwin Drood in Hiding.’ On this Mr. Lang writes in the _Morning Post_ {130} that, though the titles do not go with the idea that Edwin was to be slain early, Dickens may have intended the titles to mislead his readers, and may have rejected them because he felt them to be too misleading. This I believe to be the exact truth. Dickens was willing to have as much mystery as possible, but he soon perceived that it would not suit his purpose to raise the question whether Edwin was dead or alive.

THE MANNER OF THE MURDER

In Dr. Jackson’s book on the subject there is a very able discussion on the manner in which the murder was accomplished. Dr. Jackson inquires: (1) Where and how did Jasper murder Drood, or attempt to murder him? (2) Where and how did Jasper dispose of Drood’s body, or attempt to dispose of it? For myself, I believe that the manner of the murder is part of the mystery to be solved as the book proceeds. In this I am in general agreement with Proctor. It would be vain to guess what happened on that stormy night. To give the details definitely would have been to give them prematurely, for much of the interest of the novel is to depend on their unfolding. But certain suggestions may be offered. Dr. Jackson holds that significance is to be attached to Jasper’s babblings in the presence of the opium woman. He tells her that he has in his mind the tower of the cathedral, a perilous journey over abysses with an indispensable fellow-traveller. Also that when the journey was really made there was ‘no struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty,’ but that ‘a poor, mean, miserable thing,’ which was nevertheless real, lay ‘down below at the bottom.’ Dr. Jackson thinks that we have here Jasper’s confession of the place and the manner of the crime. ‘He had ascended the tower with Edwin, and he had seen Edwin’s body lying down below, presumably at the foot of the staircase by which they had ascended.’

Mr. Walters thinks that Drood was to be encountered near the cathedral, drugged and then strangled with the black silk scarf that Jasper wore round his own neck. Mr. Proctor and Mr. Lang suppose that Jasper partially strangled Drood near the cathedral, and then deposited his body in the Sapsea monument. They do not explain ‘the perilous journey over abysses.’ The babblings of the opium den become intelligible if Jasper flung or pushed Drood down the staircase of the tower. But if Drood was attacked outside the cathedral on level ground they are ‘unjustifiable mystifications.’

Dr. Jackson further argues that in chapter xii., ‘A Night with Durdles,’ is a rehearsal of the coming tragedy. He thinks that when Durdles sleeps Jasper makes a wax impression of a key with which Durdles had opened the outside door of the crypt and the door between the crypt and the cathedral. He finds quicklime in the crypt. Then he flings or pushes Drood, who is drugged, down the staircase, and deposits his body in the quicklime in the crypt. Else why did Jasper make a careful study of the tower with Durdles?

My friend and colleague, Miss Jane T. Stoddart, kindly sends me the following:

Some critics have failed to realise the extreme importance of the Sapsea monument in connection with the murder. It has been suggested by Professor Jackson that Jasper buried the body in a heap of lime in the crypt of the cathedral. But crypts are semi-public places, and if heaps of lime were about workmen would be coming and going. In no case could a corpse lie unnoticed on the open floor of a crypt for more than a few hours. All the evidence points rather to the Sapsea monument in the graveyard as the murderer’s chosen hiding-place. Observe how Dickens distinguishes between tombs and monuments, clearly meaning by the latter those massive vault-like erections of stone which are often seen in old churchyards, and which have the dimensions of small chambers with a corridor. Durdles says in chapter V.: ‘“Say that hammer of mine’s a wall—my work. Two; four; and two is six,” measuring on the pavement. “Six foot inside that wall is Mrs. Sapsea.”

‘“Not really Mrs. Sapsea?” asks Jasper.

‘“Say Mrs. Sapsea. Her wall’s thicker, but say Mrs. Sapsea. Durdles taps that wall represented by that hammer, and says, after good sounding: ‘Something betwixt us!’ Sure enough, some rubbish has been left in that same six-foot space by Durdles’s men!”’

There is therefore a ‘six-foot’ vacant space at least in the Sapsea monument, left, no doubt, for the reception at some far distant date of the Mayor’s body. Within this place Jasper decides to deposit the remains of his victim. I do not agree with the critics who fancy there was a Sapsea vault in the crypt. The monument is in the full light of day, for in chapter xii. the Mayor is walking near the churchyard ‘on the look-out for a blushing and retiring stranger.’ And in chapter xviii. he calls Datchery’s attention to this ‘small lion’ in the churchyard. Mrs. Sapsea, we are distinctly told, is buried within the monument, not in any subterranean vault in the crypt.

THE ‘NIGHT WITH DURDLES’

We come now to the night of the mysterious expedition of Jasper and Durdles, when they climb the Cathedral Tower in the moonlight, and when Durdles lies in a drugged sleep on the floor of the crypt. Jasper has been very active during this interval. How has his time been spent? His first business, after possessing himself of the key of the crypt, must have been to search in the bundle carried by Durdles for the key of the Sapsea monument. We have repeatedly been told of his interest in the bundle, into which (see chapter iv.) he had seen Durdles drop this particular key. The inscription had been placed on the monument, but we are to understand that the key had not yet been returned to the Mayor. Having secured this key, Jasper leaves the building, and by some means which can only be conjectured conveys quicklime to the monument, and places it in readiness in the empty space. He may have gone back to the yard-gate where Durdles had showed him the mound of lime, but this would have been a very risky proceeding, as the ‘hole in the city wall’ occupied by Durdles was beyond Minor Canon Corner, the Monks’ Vineyard, and the Travellers’ Twopenny. Even in the dead of night, sharp eyes in the lodging-house (Deputy’s, for instance) might have seen a man go by wheeling lime in a barrow or carrying it in a sack. It is far more probable that the lime was found nearer to the cathedral.

It has been suggested, further, that Jasper, while away from Durdles, took a wax model of the key of the crypt, which also opens the door at the top of the steps leading from the crypt to the cathedral. The Dean (it is presumed by Professor Jackson) has already entrusted him with another key, that of the iron gate which gives access to the Tower. We are told that Durdles ‘bears the close scrutiny of his companion in an insensible way, although it is prolonged while the latter fumbles among his pockets for a key confided to him that will open an iron gate, so to enable him to pass to the staircase of the great Tower.’

Visitors to cathedrals to-day usually find that the key of the tower staircase is in charge of the chief verger, and Jasper would have no difficulty in obtaining a loan of it from this functionary for one night, though hardly for a longer period, as visitors would be coming and going.

Dr. Jackson supposes that the Dean lent his key to the choirmaster, and assumes that, before the expedition with Durdles, Jasper has already taken a wax model of it. If he did so, it must have been in the interval between locking-up time, when we find him (see chapter xii.) conversing with the Dean and the verger, and the time of his changing his coat to go out on the expedition. But Dickens tells us that Mr. Jasper withdrew to his piano, and sat chanting choir music in a low and beautiful voice for two or three hours; ‘in short, until it has been for some time dark, and the moon is about to rise.’ I take it, then (1) that the iron key was lent to Jasper by the verger for use in this nocturnal expedition; (2) that no wax model of it has been made up to the time of starting; (3) that the verger will look for the return of the key next day.

It seems to me most unlikely that Jasper took a wax model of the crypt key or the key to the iron gate, either on the night of his wandering with Durdles, or at any other time. If he took any wax model, it was that of the key to the Sapsea monument. He used the crypt key merely to let himself out of the building and in again. May not the simplest explanation be that he unlocked the door of the monument, leaving it merely closed, so that a turn of the iron handle would admit him on the night of the murder? According to the picture at the foot of the cover the door seems to have a handle.

I find it difficult to believe that Jasper would order duplicates of two large and unusual-looking keys to be made from wax models by a locksmith in Cloisterham. Such an order would have excited curiosity and perhaps unfavourable surmises in a town where Jasper was so well known. I should expect a curious stare if I carried wax models of church keys even to a locksmith in a London suburb; and Jasper had no time during the week before Christmas to make a journey to London. He was not himself a worker in iron like Roland Graeme in _The Abbot_, who at the cost of much time and labour forged a bunch of keys almost exactly resembling those carried by the lady of Lochleven.

On the night of the murder—that wild and stormy Christmas Eve—Jasper brought Edwin into the churchyard on some pretext, after partially stupefying him with the ‘good stuff’ which affects the brain so speedily. He may have persuaded him to drink to the dawn of Christmas, as Faust proposed to quaff the cup of poison to the rising Easter dawn:

Der letzte Trunk sei nun, mit ganzer Seele, Als festlich hoher Gruss, dem Morgen zugebracht.

It is after midnight when the murderer and his victim are abroad together. At that hour the ‘streets are empty,’ and only the storm goes thundering along them. The precincts ‘are unusually dark to-night.’ No need, then, for Jasper to fear detection as he slips the great silk scarf over Edwin’s head and pulls it tightly round his throat. ‘No struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty—and yet I never saw that before.’

The maundering talk of Jasper in the opium woman’s den need not be taken literally. The difficult and dangerous journey ‘over abysses where a slip would be destruction’ may have no reference to the actual tower, but to the perils of the scheme and the risk of detection. Among other modes of killing, however, the idea of flinging Edwin from the tower may have occurred to Jasper, and been abandoned. Hence his outcry, ‘Look down! look down! You see what lies at the bottom there!’

Dr. Jackson thinks Jasper departed so far from his original plan that he chose the crypt instead of the Sapsea monument as a hiding-place. I think it far more likely that, if ever he intended to hurl Edwin from the tower, he set aside this plan when he found that it meant the making of two duplicate keys. Suppose that in the days following the crime, when the names of Edwin Drood and Jasper were in every mouth in Cloisterham, a small tradesman in some obscure lane were to ask his neighbours why the choirmaster needed these two large keys. The conjecture might be sufficient to destroy him.

I venture to think that Miss Stoddart is right in assigning the place of the body to the Sapsea monument, but I incline to agree with Dr. Jackson that, in order to do justice to the ‘Night with Durdles,’ and the confessions to the opium woman, we must give some place to the tower as connected with the murder. But I do not understand how Jasper should have seen Drood lying beneath him dead if he had merely pushed him down the tower stairs. Would it not have been more likely that Jasper should have pushed Drood from the galleries, and seen him fall into the space beneath? We cannot lay great stress on the topography of Cloisterham. The Sapsea monument is a pure invention, having no counterpart in Rochester, and Dickens manifestly used the utmost freedom in dealing with his materials. Mr. Lang, by the way, makes a strange mistake in saying, ‘As he walks with Durdles that worthy explains (in reply to a question by Jasper) that, by tapping a wall, even if over six feet thick, with his hammer, he can detect the nature of the contents of the vault.’ {139} The wall is not six feet thick. The words are: ‘six foot inside that wall is Mrs. Sapsea.’

It was for Dickens to explain in the remaining part of the novel how the murder was achieved, and no one has a right to say that he would have failed in doing so. His object is to leave upon us the impression of a murder which was in a singular degree premeditated, ferocious, and complete. If Dr. Jackson is right in supposing that Drood was thrown from the tower, in addition to his being drugged, strangled, and laid in quicklime, Dickens gives us a fresh thrill of horror.