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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot, by Andrew Lang
+(#5 in our series by Andrew Lang)
+
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+Title: The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot
+
+Author: Andrew Lang
+
+Release Date: December, 1996  [EBook #738]
+[This file was first posted on December 7, 1996]
+[Most recently updated: September 8, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, PUZZLE OF DICKENS'S LAST PLOT ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1905 Chapman and Hall edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+THE PUZZLE OF DICKENS'S LAST PLOT
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+
+Forster tells us that Dickens, in his later novels, from Bleak
+House onwards (1853), "assiduously cultivated" construction, "this
+essential of his art."  Some critics may think, that since so many
+of the best novels in the world "have no outline, or, if they have
+an outline, it is a demned outline," elaborate construction is not
+absolutely "essential."  Really essential are character,
+"atmosphere," humour.
+
+But as, in the natural changes of life, and under the strain of
+restless and unsatisfied activity, his old buoyancy and unequalled
+high spirits deserted Dickens, he certainly wrote no longer in what
+Scott, speaking of himself, calls the manner of "hab nab at a
+venture."  He constructed elaborate plots, rich in secrets and
+surprises.  He emulated the manner of Wilkie Collins, or even of
+Gaboriau, while he combined with some of the elements of the
+detective novel, or roman policier, careful study of character.
+Except Great Expectations, none of his later tales rivals in merit
+his early picaresque stories of the road, such as Pickwick and
+Nicholas Nickleby.  "Youth will be served;" no sedulous care could
+compensate for the exuberance of "the first sprightly runnings."
+In the early books the melodrama of the plot, the secrets of Ralph
+Nickleby, of Monk, of Jonas Chuzzlewit, were the least of the
+innumerable attractions.  But Dickens was more and more drawn
+towards the secret that excites curiosity, and to the game of hide
+and seek with the reader who tried to anticipate the solution of
+the secret.
+
+In April, 1869, Dickens, outworn by the strain of his American
+readings; of that labour achieved under painful conditions of
+ominously bad health--found himself, as Sir Thomas Watson reported,
+"on the brink of an attack of paralysis of his left side, and
+possibly of apoplexy."  He therefore abandoned a new series of
+Readings.  We think of Scott's earlier seizures of a similar kind,
+after which Peveril, he said, "smacked of the apoplexy."  But
+Dickens's new story of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, first
+contemplated in July, 1869, and altered in character by the
+emergence of "a very curious and new idea," early in August, does
+not "smack of the apoplexy."  We may think that the mannerisms of
+Mr. Honeythunder, the philanthropist, and of Miss Twinkleton, the
+schoolmistress, are not in the author's best vein of humour.  "The
+Billickin," on the other hand, the lodging-house keeper, is "in
+very gracious fooling:" her unlooked-for sallies in skirmishes with
+Miss Twinkleton are rich in mirthful surprises.  Mr. Grewgious may
+be caricatured too much, but not out of reason; and Dickens, always
+good at boys, presents a gamin, in Deputy, who is in not unpleasant
+contrast with the pathetic Jo of Bleak House.  Opinions may differ
+as to Edwin and Rosa, but the more closely one studies Edwin, the
+better one thinks of that character.  As far as we are allowed to
+see Helena Landless, the restraint which she puts on her "tigerish
+blood" is admirable:  she is very fresh and original.  The villain
+is all that melodrama can desire, but what we do miss, I think, is
+the "atmosphere" of a small cathedral town.  Here there is a lack
+of softness and delicacy of treatment:  on the other hand, the
+opium den is studied from the life.
+
+On the whole, Dickens himself was perhaps most interested in his
+plot, his secret, his surprises, his game of hide and seek with the
+reader.  He threw himself into the sport with zest:  he spoke to
+his sister-in-law, Miss Hogarth, about his fear that he had not
+sufficiently concealed his tracks in the latest numbers.  Yet, when
+he died in June, 1870, leaving three completed numbers still
+unpublished, he left his secret as a puzzle to the curious.  Many
+efforts have been made to decipher his purpose, especially his
+intentions as to the hero.  Was Edwin Drood killed, or did he
+escape?
+
+By a coincidence, in September, 1869, Dickens was working over the
+late Lord Lytton's tale for All The Year Round, "The Disappearance
+of John Ackland," for the purpose of mystifying the reader as to
+whether Ackland was alive or dead.  But he was conspicuously
+defunct!  (All the Year Round, September-October, 1869.)
+
+The most careful of the attempts at a reply about Edwin, a study
+based on deep knowledge of Dickens, is "Watched by the Dead," by
+the late ingenious Mr. R. A. Proctor (1887).  This book, to which I
+owe much aid, is now out of print.  In 1905, Mr. Cuming Walters
+revived "the auld mysterie," in his "Clues to Dickens's Edwin
+Drood" (Chapman & Hall and Heywood, Manchester).  From the solution
+of Mr. Walters I am obliged to dissent.  Of Mr. Proctor's theory I
+offer some necessary corrections, and I hope that I have unravelled
+some skeins which Mr. Proctor left in a state of tangle.  As one
+read and re-read the fragment, points very dark seemed, at least,
+to become suddenly clear:  especially one appeared to understand
+the meaning half-revealed and half-concealed by Jasper's babblings
+under the influence of opium.  He saw in his vision, "THAT, I never
+saw THAT before."  We may be sure that he was to see "THAT" in real
+life.  We must remember that, according to Forster, "such was
+Dickens's interest in things supernatural that, but for the strong
+restraining power of his common sense, he might have fallen into
+the follies of spiritualism."  His interest in such matters
+certainly peeps out in this novel--there are two specimens of the
+supernormal--and he may have gone to the limited extent which my
+hypothesis requires.  If I am right, Dickens went further, and
+fared worse, in the too material premonitions of "The Signalman" in
+Mugby Junction.
+
+With this brief preface, I proceed to the analysis of Dickens's
+last plot.  Mr. William Archer has kindly read the proof sheets and
+made valuable suggestions, but is responsible for none of my
+theories.
+
+ANDREW LANG.
+ST. ANDREWS,
+September 4, 1905.
+
+
+
+THE STORY--DRAMATIS PERSONAE
+
+
+
+For the discovery of Dickens's secret in Edwin Drood it is
+necessary to obtain a clear view of the characters in the tale, and
+of their relations to each other.
+
+About the middle of the nineteenth century there lived in
+Cloisterham, a cathedral city sketched from Rochester, a young
+University man, Mr. Bud, who had a friend Mr. Drood, one of a firm
+of engineers--somewhere.  They were "fast friends and old college
+companions."  Both married young.  Mr. Bud wedded a lady unnamed,
+by whom he was the father of one child, a daughter, Rosa Bud.  Mr.
+Drood, whose wife's maiden name was Jasper, had one son, Edwin
+Drood.  Mrs. Bud was drowned in a boating accident, when her
+daughter, Rosa, was a child.  Mr. Drood, already a widower, and the
+bereaved Mr. Bud "betrothed" the two children, Rosa and Edwin, and
+then expired, when the orphans were about seven and eleven years
+old.  The guardian of Rosa was a lawyer, Mr. Grewgious, who had
+been in love with her mother.  To Grewgious Mr. Bud entrusted his
+wife's engagement ring, rubies and diamonds, which Grewgious was to
+hand over to Edwin Drood, if, when he attained his majority, he and
+Rosa decided to marry.
+
+Grewgious was apparently legal agent for Edwin, while Edwin's
+maternal uncle, John Jasper (aged about sixteen when the male
+parents died), was Edwin's "trustee," as well as his uncle and
+devoted friend.  Rosa's little fortune was an annuity producing 250
+pounds a-year:  Edwin succeeded to his father's share in an
+engineering firm.
+
+When the story opens, Edwin is nearly twenty-one, and is about to
+proceed to Egypt, as an engineer.  Rosa, at school in Cloisterham,
+is about seventeen; John Jasper is twenty-six.  He is conductor of
+the Choir of the Cathedral, a "lay precentor;" he is very dark,
+with thick black whiskers, and, for a number of years, has been a
+victim to the habit of opium smoking.  He began very early.  He
+takes this drug both in his lodgings, over the gate of the
+Cathedral, and in a den in East London, kept by a woman nicknamed
+"The Princess Puffer."  This hag, we learn, has been a determined
+drunkard,--"I drank heaven's-hard,"--for sixteen years BEFORE she
+took to opium.  If she has been dealing in opium for ten years (the
+exact period is not stated), she has been very disreputable for
+twenty-six years, that is ever since John Jasper's birth.  Mr.
+Cuming Walters suggests that she is the mother of John Jasper, and,
+therefore, maternal grandmother of Edwin Drood.  She detests her
+client, Jasper, and plays the spy on his movements, for reasons
+unexplained.
+
+Jasper is secretly in love with Rosa, the fiancee of his nephew,
+and his own pupil in the musical art.  He makes her aware of his
+passion, silently, and she fears and detests him, but keeps these
+emotions private.  She is a saucy school-girl, and she and Edwin
+are on uncomfortable terms:  she does not love him, while he
+perhaps does love her, but is annoyed by her manner, and by the
+gossip about their betrothal.  "The bloom is off the plum" of their
+prearranged loves, he says to his friend, uncle, and confidant,
+Jasper, whose own concealed passion for Rosa is of a ferocious and
+homicidal character.  Rosa is aware of this fact; "a glaze comes
+over his eyes," sometimes, she says, "and he seems to wander away
+into a frightful sort of dream, in which he threatens most . . . "
+The man appears to have these frightful dreams even when he is not
+under opium.
+
+
+OPENING OF THE TALE
+
+
+The tale opens abruptly with an opium-bred vision of the tower of
+Cloisterham Cathedral, beheld by Jasper as he awakens in the den of
+the Princess Puffer, between a Chinaman, a Lascar, and the hag
+herself.  This Cathedral tower, thus early and emphatically
+introduced, is to play a great but more or less mysterious part in
+the romance:  that is certain.  Jasper, waking, makes experiments
+on the talk of the old woman, the Lascar and Chinaman in their
+sleep.  He pronounces it "unintelligible," which satisfies him that
+his own babble, when under opium, must be unintelligible also.  He
+is, presumably, acquainted with the languages of the eastern coast
+of India, and with Chinese, otherwise, how could he hope to
+understand the sleepers?  He is being watched by the hag, who hates
+him.
+
+Jasper returns to Cloisterham, where we are introduced to the Dean,
+a nonentity, and to Minor Canon Crisparkle, a muscular Christian in
+the pink of training, a classical scholar, and a good honest
+fellow.  Jasper gives Edwin a dinner, and gushes over "his bright
+boy," a lively lad, full of chaff, but also full of confiding
+affection and tenderness of heart.  Edwin admits that his betrothal
+is a bore:  Jasper admits that he loathes his life; and that the
+church singing "often sounds to me quite devilish,"--and no wonder.
+After this dinner, Jasper has a "weird seizure;" "a strange film
+comes over Jasper's eyes," he "looks frightfully ill," becomes
+rigid, and admits that he "has been taking opium for a pain, an
+agony that sometimes overcomes me."  This "agony," we learn, is the
+pain of hearing Edwin speak lightly of his love, whom Jasper so
+furiously desires.  "Take it as a warning," Jasper says, but Edwin,
+puzzled, and full of confiding tenderness, does not understand.
+
+In the next scene we meet the school-girl, Rosa, who takes a walk
+and has a tiff with Edwin.  Sir Luke Fildes's illustration shows
+Edwin as "a lad with the bloom of a lass," with a classic profile;
+and a gracious head of long, thick, fair hair, long, though we
+learn it has just been cut.  He wears a soft slouched hat, and the
+pea-coat of the period.
+
+
+SAPSEA AND DURDLES
+
+
+Next, Jasper and Sapsea, a pompous ass, auctioneer, and mayor, sit
+at their wine, expecting a third guest.  Mr. Sapsea reads his
+absurd epitaph for his late wife, who is buried in a "Monument," a
+vault of some sort in the Cathedral churchyard.  To them enter
+Durdles, a man never sober, yet trusted with the key of the crypt,
+"as contractor for rough repairs."  In the crypt "he habitually
+sleeps off the fumes of liquor."  Of course no Dean would entrust
+keys to this incredibly dissipated, dirty, and insolent creature,
+to whom Sapsea gives the key of his vault, for no reason at all, as
+the epitaph, of course, is to be engraved on the outside, by
+Durdles's men.  However, Durdles insists on getting the key of the
+vault:  he has two other large keys.  Jasper, trifling with them,
+keeps clinking them together, so as to know, even in the dark, by
+the sound, which is the key that opens Sapsea's vault, in the
+railed-off burial ground, beside the cloister arches.  He has met
+Durdles at Sapsea's for no other purpose than to obtain access at
+will to Mrs. Sapsea's monument.  Later in the evening Jasper finds
+Durdles more or less drunk, and being stoned by a gamin, "Deputy,"
+a retainer of a tramp's lodging-house.  Durdles fees Deputy, in
+fact, to drive him home every night after ten.  Jasper and Deputy
+fall into feud, and Jasper has thus a new, keen, and omnipresent
+enemy.  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, "solid in hollow, and inside solid, hollow
+again.  Old 'un crumbled away in stone coffin, in vault."  He can
+also discover the presence of "rubbish left in that same six foot
+space by Durdles's men."  Thus, if a foreign body were introduced
+into the Sapsea vault, Durdles could detect its presence by tapping
+the outside wall.  As Jasper's purpose clearly is to introduce a
+foreign body--that of Edwin who stands between him and Rosa--into
+Mrs. Sapsea's vault, this "gift" of Durdles is, for Jasper, an
+uncomfortable discovery.  He goes home, watches Edwin asleep, and
+smokes opium.
+
+
+THE LANDLESSES
+
+
+Two new characters are now introduced, Neville and Helena Landless,
+{1} twins, orphans, of Cingalese extraction, probably Eurasian;
+very dark, the girl "almost of the gipsy type;" both are "fierce of
+look."  The young man is to read with Canon Crisparkle and live
+with him; the girl goes to the same school as Rosa.  The education
+of both has been utterly neglected; instruction has been denied to
+them.  Neville explains the cause of their fierceness to
+Crisparkle.  In Ceylon they were bullied by a cruel stepfather and
+several times ran away:  the girl was the leader, always "dressed
+as a boy, and showing the daring of a man."  Edwin Drood's air of
+supercilious ownership of Rosa Bud (indicated as a fault of youth
+and circumstance, not of heart and character), irritates Neville
+Landless, who falls in love with Rosa at first sight.  As Rosa
+sings, at Crisparkle's, while Jasper plays the piano, Jasper's
+fixed stare produces an hysterical fit in the girl, who is soothed
+by Helena Landless.  Helena shows her aversion to Jasper, who, as
+even Edwin now sees, frightens Rosa.  "You would be afraid of him,
+under similar circumstances, wouldn't you, Miss Landless?" asks
+Edwin.  "Not under any circumstances," answers Helena, and Jasper
+"thanks Miss Landless for this vindication of his character."
+
+The girls go back to their school, where Rosa explains to Helena
+her horror of Jasper's silent love-making:  "I feel that I am never
+safe from him . . . a glaze comes over his eyes and he seems to
+wander away into a frightful sort of dream in which he threatens
+most," as already quoted.  Helena thus, and she alone, except Rosa,
+understands Jasper thoroughly.  She becomes Rosa's protectress.
+"Let whomsoever it most concerned look well to it."
+
+Thus Jasper has a new observer and enemy, in addition to the
+omnipresent street boy, Deputy, and the detective old hag of the
+opium den.
+
+Leaving the Canon's house, Neville and Edwin quarrel violently over
+Rosa, in the open air; they are followed by Jasper, and taken to
+his house to be reconciled over glasses of mulled wine.  Jasper
+drugs the wine, and thus provokes a violent scene; next day he
+tells Crisparkle that Neville is "murderous."  "There is something
+of the tiger in his dark blood."  He spreads the story of the
+fracas in the town.
+
+Grewgious, Rosa's guardian, now comes down on business; the girl
+fails to explain to him the unsatisfactory relations between her
+and Edwin:  Grewgious is to return to her "at Christmas," if she
+sends for him, and she does send.  Grewgious, "an angular man," all
+duty and sentiment (he had loved Rosa's mother), has an interview
+with Edwin's trustee, Jasper, for whom he has no enthusiasm, but
+whom he does not in any way suspect.  They part on good terms, to
+meet at Christmas.  Crisparkle, with whom Helena has fallen
+suddenly in love, arranges with Jasper that Edwin and Landless
+shall meet and be reconciled, as both are willing to be, at a
+dinner in Jasper's rooms, on Christmas Eve.  Jasper, when
+Crisparkle proposes this, denotes by his manner "some close
+internal calculation."  We see that he is reckoning how the dinner
+suits his plan of campaign, and "close calculation" may refer, as
+in Mr. Proctor's theory, to the period of the moon:  on Christmas
+Eve there will be no moonshine at midnight.  Jasper, having worked
+out this problem, accepts Crisparkle's proposal, and his assurances
+about Neville, and shows Crisparkle a diary in which he has entered
+his fears that Edwin's life is in danger from Neville.  Edwin (who
+is not in Cloisterham at this moment) accepts, by letter, the
+invitation to meet Neville at Jasper's on Christmas Eve.
+
+Meanwhile Edwin visits Grewgious in his London chambers; is
+lectured on his laggard and supercilious behaviour as a lover, and
+receives the engagement ring of the late Mrs. Bud, Rosa's mother,
+which is very dear to Grewgious--in the presence of Bazzard,
+Grewgious's clerk, a gloomy writer of an amateur unacted tragedy.
+Edwin is to return the ring to Grewgious, if he and Rosa decide not
+to marry.  The ring is in a case, and Edwin places it "in his
+breast."  We must understand, in the breast-pocket of his coat:  no
+other interpretation will pass muster.  "Her ring--will it come
+back to me?" reflects the mournful Grewgious.
+
+
+THE UNACCOUNTABLE EXPEDITION
+
+
+Jasper now tells Sapsea, and the Dean, that he is to make "a
+moonlight expedition with Durdles among the tombs, vaults, towers,
+and ruins to-night."  The impossible Durdles has the keys necessary
+for this, "surely an unaccountable expedition," Dickens keeps
+remarking.  The moon seems to rise on this night at about 7.30 p.m.
+Jasper takes a big case-bottle of liquor--drugged, of course and
+goes to the den of Durdles.  In the yard of this inspector of
+monuments he is bidden to beware of a mound of quicklime near the
+yard gate.  "With a little handy stirring, quick enough to eat your
+bones," says Durdles.  There is some considerable distance between
+this "mound" of quicklime and the crypt, of which Durdles has the
+key, but the intervening space is quite empty of human presence, as
+the citizens are unwilling to meet ghosts.
+
+In the crypt Durdles drinks a good deal of the drugged liquor.
+"They are to ascend the great Tower,"--and why they do that is part
+of the Mystery, though not an insoluble part.  Before they climb,
+Durdles tells Jasper that he was drunk and asleep in the crypt,
+last Christmas Eve, and was wakened by "the ghost of one terrific
+shriek, followed by the ghost of the howl of a dog, a long dismal,
+woeful howl, such as a dog gives when a person's dead."  Durdles
+has made inquiries and, as no one else heard the shriek and the
+howl, he calls these sounds "ghosts."
+
+They are obviously meant to be understood as supranormal
+premonitory sounds; of the nature of second sight, or rather of
+second hearing.  Forster gives examples of Dickens's tendency to
+believe in such premonitions:  Dickens had himself a curious
+premonitory dream.  He considerably overdid the premonitory
+business in his otherwise excellent story, The Signalman, or so it
+seems to a student of these things.  The shriek and howl heard by
+Durdles are to be repeated, we see, in real life, later, on a
+Christmas Eve.  The question is--when?  More probably NOT on the
+Christmas Eve just imminent, when Edwin is to vanish, but, on the
+Christmas Eve following, when Jasper is to be unmasked.
+
+All this while, and later, Jasper examines Durdles very closely,
+studying the effects on him of the drugged drink.  When they reach
+the top of the tower, Jasper closely contemplates "that stillest
+part of it" (the landscape) "which the Cathedral overshadows; but
+he contemplates Durdles quite as curiously."
+
+There is a motive for the scrutiny in either case.  Jasper examines
+the part of the precincts in the shadow of the Cathedral, because
+he wishes to assure himself that it is lonely enough for his later
+undescribed but easily guessed proceedings in this night of
+mystery.  He will have much to do that could not brook witnesses,
+after the drugged Durdles has fallen sound asleep.  We have already
+been assured that the whole area over which Jasper is to operate is
+"utterly deserted," even when it lies in full moonlight, about 8.30
+p.m.  "One might fancy that the tide of life was stemmed by Mr.
+Jasper's own gate-house."  The people of Cloisterham, we hear,
+would deny that they believe in ghosts; but they give this part of
+the precinct a wide berth (Chapter XII.).  If the region is
+"utterly deserted" at nine o'clock in the evening, when it lies in
+the ivory moonlight, much more will it be free from human presence
+when it lies in shadow, between one and two o'clock after midnight.
+Jasper, however, from the tower top closely scrutinizes the area of
+his future operations.  It is, probably, for this very purpose of
+discovering whether the coast be clear or not, that Jasper climbs
+the tower.
+
+He watches Durdles for the purpose of finding how the drug which he
+has administered works, with a view to future operations on Edwin.
+Durdles is now in such a state that "he deems the ground so far
+below on a level with the tower, and would as lief walk off the
+tower into the air as not."
+
+All this is apparently meant to suggest that Jasper, on Christmas
+Eve, will repeat his expedition, WITH EDWIN, whom he will have
+drugged, and that he will allow Edwin to "walk off the tower into
+the air."  There are later suggestions to the same effect, as we
+shall see, but they are deliberately misleading.  There are also
+strong suggestions to the very opposite effect:  it is broadly
+indicated that Jasper is to strangle Edwin with a thick black-silk
+scarf, which he has just taken to wearing for the good of his
+throat.
+
+The pair return to the crypt, Durdles falls asleep, dreams that
+Jasper leaves him, "and that something touches him and something
+falls from his hand.  Then something clinks and gropes about," and
+the lines of moonlight shift their direction, as Durdles finds that
+they have really done when he wakens, with Jasper beside him, while
+the Cathedral clock strikes two.  They have had many hours, not
+less than five, for their expedition.  The key of the crypt lies
+beside Durdles on the ground.  They go out, and as Deputy begins
+stone-throwing, Jasper half strangles him.
+
+
+PURPOSE OF THE EXPEDITION
+
+
+Jasper has had ample time to take models in wax of all Durdles's
+keys.  But he could have done that in a few minutes, while Durdles
+slept, if he had wax with him, without leaving the crypt.  He has
+also had time to convey several wheelbarrowfuls of quicklime from
+Durdles's yard to Mrs. Sapsea's sepulchre, of which monument he
+probably took the key from Durdles, and tried its identity by
+clinking.  But even in a Cathedral town, even after midnight,
+several successive expeditions of a lay precentor with a
+wheelbarrow full of quicklime would have been apt to attract the
+comment of some belated physician, some cleric coming from a sick
+bed, or some local roysterers.  Therefore it is that Dickens
+insists on the "utterly deserted" character of the area, and shows
+us that Jasper has made sure of that essential fact by observations
+from the tower top.  Still, his was a perilous expedition, with his
+wheelbarrow!  We should probably learn later, that Jasper was
+detected by the wakeful Deputy, who loathed him.  Moreover, next
+morning Durdles was apt to notice that some of his quicklime had
+been removed.  As far as is shown, Durdles noticed nothing of that
+kind, though he does observe peculiarities in Jasper's behaviour.
+
+The next point in the tale is that Edwin and Rosa meet, and have
+sense enough to break off their engagement.  But Edwin, represented
+as really good-hearted, now begins to repent his past behaviour,
+and, though he has a kind of fancy for Miss Landless, he pretty
+clearly falls deeper in love with his late fiancee, and weeps his
+loss in private:  so we are told.
+
+
+CHRISTMAS EVE
+
+
+Christmas Eve comes, the day of the dinner of three, Jasper,
+Landless, and Edwin.  The chapter describing this fateful day
+(xiv.) is headed, When shall these Three meet again? and Mr.
+Proctor argues that Dickens intends that THEY SHALL meet again.
+The intention, and the hint, are much in Dickens's manner.
+Landless means to start, next day, very early, on a solitary
+walking tour, and buys an exorbitantly heavy stick.  We casually
+hear that Jasper knows Edwin to possess no jewellery, except a
+watch and chain and a scarf-pin.  As Edwin moons about, he finds
+the old opium hag, come down from London, "seeking a needle in a
+bottle of hay," she says--that is, hunting vainly for Jasper.
+
+Please remark that Jasper has run up to town, on December 23, and
+has saturated his system with a debauch of opium on the very eve of
+the day when he clearly means to kill Edwin.  This was a most
+injudicious indulgence, in the circumstances.  A maiden murder
+needs nerve!  We know that "fiddlestrings was weakness to express
+the state of" Jasper's "nerves" on the day after the night of opium
+with which the story opens.  On December 24, Jasper returned home,
+the hag at his heels.  The old woman, when met by Edwin, has a
+curious film over her eyes; "he seems to know her."  "Great
+heaven," he thinks, next moment.  "Like Jack that night!"  This
+refers to a kind of fit of Jasper's, after dinner, on the first
+evening of the story.  Edwin has then seen Jack Jasper in one of
+his "filmy" seizures.  The woman prays Edwin for three shillings
+and sixpence, to buy opium.  He gives her the money; she asks his
+Christian name.  "Edwin."  Is "Eddy" a sweetheart's form of that?
+He says that he has no sweetheart.  He is told to be thankful that
+his name is not Ned.  Now, Jasper alone calls Edwin "Ned."  "'Ned'
+is a threatened name, a dangerous name," says the hag, who has
+heard Jasper threaten "Ned" in his opium dreams.
+
+Edwin determines to tell this adventure to Jasper, BUT NOT ON THIS
+NIGHT:  to-morrow will do.  Now, DID he tell the story to Jasper
+that night, in the presence of Landless, at dinner?  If so, Helena
+Landless might later learn the fact from Neville.  If she knew it,
+she would later tell Mr. Grewgious.
+
+The three men meet and dine.  There is a fearful storm.  "Stones
+are displaced upon the summit of the great tower."  Next morning,
+early, Jasper yells to Crisparkle, who is looking out of his window
+in Minor Canon Row, that Edwin has disappeared.  Neville has
+already set out on his walking tour.
+
+
+AFTER THE DISAPPEARANCE
+
+
+Men go forth and apprehend Neville, who shows fight with his heavy
+stick.  We learn that he and Drood left Jasper's house at midnight,
+went for ten minutes to look at the river under the wind, and
+parted at Crisparkle's door.  Neville now remains under suspicion:
+Jasper directs the search in the river, on December 25, 26, and 27.
+On the evening of December 27, Grewgious visits Jasper.  Now,
+Grewgious, as we know, was to be at Cloisterham at Christmas.
+True, he was engaged to dine on Christmas Day with Bazzard, his
+clerk; but, thoughtful as he was of the moody Bazzard, as Edwin was
+leaving Cloisterham he would excuse himself.  He would naturally
+take a great part in the search for Edwin, above all as Edwin had
+in his possession the ring so dear to the lawyer.  Edwin had not
+shown it to Rosa when they determined to part.  He "kept it in his
+breast," and the ring, we learn, was "gifted with invincible force
+to hold and drag," so Dickens warns us.
+
+The ring is obviously to be a piece de conviction.  But our point,
+at present, is that we do not know how Grewgious, to whom this ring
+was so dear, employed himself at Cloisterham--after Edwin's
+disappearance--between December 25 and December 27.  On the evening
+of the 27th, he came to Jasper, saying, "I have JUST LEFT MISS
+LANDLESS."  He then slowly and watchfully told Jasper that Edwin's
+engagement was broken off, while the precentor gasped, perspired,
+tore his hair, shrieked, and finally subsided into a heap of muddy
+clothes on the floor.  Meanwhile, Mr. Grewgious, calmly observing
+these phenomena, warmed his hands at the fire for some time before
+he called in Jasper's landlady.
+
+Grewgious now knows by Jasper's behaviour that he believes himself
+to have committed a superfluous crime, by murdering Edwin, who no
+longer stood between him and Rosa, as their engagement was already
+at an end.  Whether a Jasper, in real life, would excite himself so
+much, is another question.  We do not know, as Mr. Proctor insists,
+what Mr. Grewgious had been doing at Cloisterham between Christmas
+Day and December 27, the date of his experiment on Jasper's nerves.
+Mr. Proctor supposes him to have met the living Edwin, and obtained
+information from him, after his escape from a murderous attack by
+Jasper.  Mr. Proctor insists that this is the only explanation of
+Grewgious's conduct, any other "is absolutely impossible."  In that
+case the experiment of Grewgious was not made to gain information
+from Jasper's demeanour, but was the beginning of his punishment,
+and was intended by Grewgious to be so.
+
+But Dickens has been careful to suggest, with suspicious breadth of
+candour, another explanation of the source of Grewgious's
+knowledge.  If Edwin has really escaped, and met Grewgious, Dickens
+does not want us to be sure of that, as Mr. Proctor was sure.
+Dickens deliberately puts his readers on another trail, though
+neither Mr. Walters nor Mr. Proctor struck the scent.  As we have
+noted, Grewgious at once says to Jasper, "I HAVE JUST COME FROM
+MISS LANDLESS."  This tells Jasper nothing, but it tells a great
+deal to the watchful reader, who remembers that Miss Landless, and
+she only, is aware that Jasper loves, bullies, and insults Rosa,
+and that Rosa's life is embittered by Jasper's silent wooing, and
+his unspoken threats.  Helena may also know that "Ned is a
+threatened name," as we have seen, and that the menace comes from
+Jasper.  As Jasper is now known to be Edwin's rival in love, and as
+Edwin has vanished, the murderer, Mr. Grewgious reckons, is Jasper;
+and his experiment, with Jasper's consequent shriek and fit,
+confirms the hypothesis.  Thus Grewgious had information enough,
+from Miss Landless, to suggest his experiment--Dickens
+intentionally made that clear (though not clear enough for Mr.
+Proctor and Mr. Cuming Walters)--while his experiment gives him a
+moral certainty of Jasper's crime, but yields no legal evidence.
+
+But does Grewgious know no more than what Helena, and the fit and
+shriek of Jasper, have told him?  Is his knowledge limited to the
+evidence that Jasper has murdered Edwin?  Or does Grewgious know
+more, know that Edwin, in some way, has escaped from death?
+
+That is Dickens's secret.  But whereas Grewgious, if he believes
+Jasper to be an actual murderer, should take him seriously; in
+point of fact, he speaks of Jasper in so light a tone, as "our
+local friend," that we feel no certainty that he is not really
+aware of Edwin's escape from a murderous attack by Jasper, and of
+his continued existence.
+
+Presently Crisparkle, under some mysterious impression, apparently
+telepathic (the book is rich in such psychical phenomena), visits
+the weir on the river, at night, and next day finds Edwin's watch
+and chain in the timbers; his scarf-pin in the pool below.  The
+watch and chain must have been placed purposely where they were
+found, they could not float thither, and, if Neville had slain
+Edwin, he would not have stolen his property, of course, except as
+a blind, neutralised by the placing of the watch in a conspicuous
+spot.  However, the increased suspicions drive Neville away to read
+law in Staple Inn, where Grewgious also dwells, and incessantly
+watches Neville out of his window.
+
+About six months later, Helena Landless is to join Neville, who is
+watched at intervals by Jasper, who, again, is watched by Grewgious
+as the precentor lurks about Staple Inn.
+
+
+DICK DATCHERY
+
+
+About the time when Helena leaves Cloisterham for town, a new
+character appears in Cloisterham, "a white-headed personage with
+black eyebrows, BUTTONED UP IN A TIGHTISH BLUE SURTOUT, with a buff
+waistcoat, grey trowsers, and something of a military air."  His
+shock of white hair was unusually thick and ample.  This man, "a
+buffer living idly on his means," named Datchery, is either, as Mr.
+Proctor believed, Edwin Drood, or, as Mr. Walters thinks, Helena
+Landless.  By making Grewgious drop the remark that Bazzard, his
+clerk, a moping owl of an amateur tragedian, "is off duty here," at
+his chambers, Dickens hints that Bazzard is Datchery.  But that is
+a mere false scent, a ruse of the author, scattering paper in the
+wrong place, in this long paper hunt.
+
+As for Helena, Mr. Walters justly argues that Dickens has marked
+her for some important part in the ruin of Jasper.  "There was a
+slumbering gleam of fire in her intense dark eyes.  Let whomsoever
+it most concerned look well to it."  Again, we have been told that
+Helena had high courage.  She had told Jasper that she feared him
+"in no circumstances whatever."  Again, we have learned that in
+childhood she had dressed as a boy when she ran away from home; and
+she had the motives of protecting Rosa and her brother, Neville,
+from the machinations of Jasper, who needs watching, as he is
+trying to ruin Neville's already dilapidated character, and, by
+spying on him, to break down his nerve.  Really, of course, Neville
+is quite safe.  There is no corpus delicti, no carcase of the
+missing Edwin Drood.
+
+For the reasons given, Datchery might be Helena in disguise.
+
+If so, the idea is highly ludicrous, while nothing is proved either
+by the blackness of Datchery's eyebrows (Helena's were black), or
+by Datchery's habit of carrying his hat under his arm, not on his
+head.  A person who goes so far as to wear a conspicuous white wig,
+would not be afraid also to dye his eyebrows black, if he were
+Edwin; while either Edwin or Helena MUST have "made up" the face,
+by the use of paint and sham wrinkles.  Either Helena or Edwin
+would have been detected in real life, of course, but we allow for
+the accepted fictitious convention of successful disguise, and for
+the necessities of the novelist.  A tightly buttoned surtout would
+show Helena's feminine figure; but let that also pass.  As to the
+hat, Edwin's own hair was long and thick:  add a wig, and his hat
+would be a burden to him.
+
+What is most unlike the stern, fierce, sententious Helena, is
+Datchery's habit of "chaffing."  He fools the ass of a Mayor,
+Sapsea, by most exaggerated diference:  his tone is always that of
+indolent mockery, which one doubts whether the "intense" and
+concentrated Helena could assume.  He takes rooms in the same house
+as Jasper, to whom, as to Durdles and Deputy, he introduces himself
+on the night of his arrival at Cloisterham.  He afterwards
+addresses Deputy, the little gamin, by the name "Winks," which is
+given to him by the people at the Tramps' lodgings:  the name is a
+secret of Deputy's.
+
+
+JASPER, ROSA, AND TARTAR
+
+
+Meanwhile Jasper formally proposes to Rosa, in the school garden:
+standing apart and leaning against a sundial, as the garden is
+commanded by many windows.  He offers to resign his hopes of
+bringing Landless to the gallows (perhaps this bad man would
+provide a corpus delicti of his own making!) if Rosa will accept
+him:  he threatens to "pursue her to the death," if she will not;
+he frightens her so thoroughly that she rushes to Grewgious in his
+chambers in London.  She now suspects Jasper of Edwin's murder, but
+keeps her thoughts to herself.  She tells Grewgious, who is
+watching Neville,--"I have a fancy for keeping him under my eye,"--
+that Jasper has made love to her, and Grewgious replies in a parody
+of "God save the King"!
+
+
+"On Thee his hopes to fix
+Damn him again!"
+
+
+Would he fool thus, if he knew Jasper to have killed Edwin?  He is
+not certain whether Rosa should visit Helena next day, in
+Landless's rooms, opposite; and Mr. Walters suggests that he may be
+aware that Helena, dressed as Datchery, is really absent at
+Cloisterham.  However, next day, Helena is in her brother's rooms.
+Moreover, it is really a sufficient explanation of Grewgious's
+doubt that Jasper is lurking around, and that not till next day is
+a PRIVATE way of communication arranged between Neville and his
+friends.  In any case, next day, Helena is in her brother's rooms,
+and, by aid of a Mr. Tartar's rooms, she and Rosa can meet
+privately.  There is a good deal of conspiring to watch Jasper when
+he watches Neville, and in this new friend, Mr. Tartar, a lover is
+provided for Rosa.  Tartar is a miraculously agile climber over
+roofs and up walls, a retired Lieutenant of the navy, and a handy
+man, being such a climber, to chase Jasper about the roof of the
+Cathedral, when Jasper's day of doom arrives.
+
+
+JASPER'S OPIUM VISIONS
+
+
+In July, Jasper revisits the London opium den, and talks under
+opium, watched by the old hag.  He speaks of a thing which he often
+does in visions:  "a hazardous and perilous journey, over abysses
+where a slip would be destruction.  Look down, look down!  You see
+what lies at the bottom there?"  He enacts the vision and says,
+"There was a fellow traveller."  He "speaks in a whisper, and as if
+in the dark."  The vision is, in this case, "a poor vision:  no
+struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty."  Edwin, in the
+reminiscent vision, dies very easily and rapidly.  "When it comes
+to be real at last, it is so short that it seems unreal for the
+first time."  "And yet I never saw THAT before.  Look what a poor
+miserable mean thing it is.  THAT must be real.  It's over."
+
+What can all this mean?  We have been told that, shortly before
+Christmas Eve, Jasper took to wearing a thick black-silk
+handkerchief for his throat.  He hung it over his arm, "his face
+knitted and stern," as he entered his house for his Christmas Eve
+dinner.  If he strangled Edwin with the scarf, as we are to
+suppose, he did not lead him, drugged, to the tower top, and pitch
+him off.  Is part of Jasper's vision reminiscent--the brief,
+unresisting death--while another part is a separate vision, is
+PROSPECTIVE, "premonitory"?  Does he see himself pitching Neville
+Landless off the tower top, or see him fallen from the Cathedral
+roof?  Is Neville's body "THAT"--"I never saw THAT before.  Look
+what a poor miserable mean thing it is!  THAT must be real."
+Jasper "never saw THAT"--the dead body below the height--before.
+THIS vision, I think, is of the future, not of the past, and is
+meant to bewilder the reader who thinks that the whole represents
+the slaying of Drood.  The tale is rich in "warnings" and
+telepathy.
+
+
+DATCHERY AND THE OPIUM WOMAN
+
+
+The hag now tracks Jasper home to Cloisterham.  Here she meets
+Datchery, whom she asks how she can see Jasper?  If Datchery is
+Drood, he now learns, WHAT HE DID NOT KNOW BEFORE, THAT THERE IS
+SOME CONNECTION BETWEEN JASPER AND THE HAG.  He walks with her to
+the place where Edwin met the hag, on Christmas Eve, and gave her
+money; and he jingles his own money as he walks.  The place, or the
+sound of the money, makes the woman tell Datchery about Edwin's
+gift of three shillings and sixpence for opium.  Datchery, "with a
+sudden change of countenance, gives her a sudden look."  It does
+not follow that he is NOT Drood, for, though the hag's love of
+opium was known to Drood, Datchery is not to reveal his recognition
+of the woman.  He does what any stranger would do; he "gives a
+sudden look," as if surprised by the mention of opium.
+
+Mr. Walters says, "Drood would not have changed countenance on
+hearing a fact he had known six months previously."  But if Drood
+was playing at being somebody else, he would, of course, give a
+kind of start and stare, on hearing of the opium.  When he also
+hears from the hag that her former benefactor's name was Edwin, he
+asks her how she knew that--"a fatuously unnecessary question,"
+says Mr. Walters.  A needless question for Datchery's information,
+if he be Drood, but as useful a question as another if Drood be
+Datchery, and wishes to maintain the conversation.
+
+
+DATCHERY'S SCORE
+
+
+Datchery keeps a tavern score of his discoveries behind a door, in
+cryptic chalk strokes.  He does this, says Mr. Walters, because,
+being Helena, he would betray himself if he wrote in a female hand.
+But nobody would WRITE secrets on a door!  He adds "a moderate
+stroke," after meeting the hag, though, says Mr. Walters, "Edwin
+Drood would have learned nothing new whatever" from the hag.
+
+But Edwin would have learned something quite new, and very
+important--that the hag was hunting Jasper.  Next day Datchery sees
+the woman shake her fists at Jasper in church, and hears from her
+that she knows Jasper "better far than all the reverend parsons put
+together know him."  Datchery then adds a long thick line to his
+chalked score, yet, says Mr. Walters, Datchery has learned "nothing
+new to Edwin Drood, if alive."
+
+This is an obvious error.  It is absolutely new to Edwin Drood that
+the opium hag is intimately acquainted with his uncle, Jasper, and
+hates Jasper with a deadly hatred.  All this is not only new to
+Drood, if alive, but is rich in promise of further revelations.
+Drood, on Christmas Eve, had learned from the hag only that she
+took opium, and that she had come from town to Cloisterham, and had
+"hunted for a needle in a bottle of hay."  That was the sum of his
+information.  Now he learns that the woman knows, tracks, has
+found, and hates, his worthy uncle, Jasper.  He may well,
+therefore, add a heavy mark to his score.
+
+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. {2}  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 a 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."
+
+I scarcely think that Datchery's purpose was so truly honourable:
+he rather seems to be getting up a case against Jasper.  Still, the
+idea of Mr. Archer is very plausible, and, at least, given Drood's
+need of evidence, and the lack of evidence against Jasper, we see
+reason good, in a novel of this kind, for his playing the part of
+amateur detective.
+
+
+DICKENS'S UNUSED DRAFT OF A CHAPTER
+
+
+Forster found, and published, a very illegible sketch of a chapter
+of the tale:  "How Mr. Sapsea ceased to be a Member of the Eight
+Club, Told by Himself."  This was "a cramped, interlined, and
+blotted" draft, on paper of only half the size commonly used by
+Dickens.  Mr. Sapsea tells how his Club mocked him about a
+stranger, who had mistaken him for the Dean.  The jackass, Sapsea,
+left the Club, and met the stranger, A YOUNG MAN, who fooled him to
+the top of his bent, saying, "If I was to deny that I came to this
+town to see and hear you, Sir, what would it avail me?"  Apparently
+this paper was a rough draft of an idea for introducing a
+detective, as a YOUNG man, who mocks Sapsea just as Datchery does
+in the novel.  But to make the spy A YOUNG man, whether the spy was
+Drood or Helena Landless, was too difficult; and therefore Dickens
+makes Datchery "an elderly buffer" in a white wig.  If I am right,
+it was easier for Helena, a girl, to pose as a young man, than for
+Drood to reappear as a young man, not himself.  Helena MAY be
+Datchery, and yet Drood may be alive and biding his time; but I
+have disproved my old objection that there was no reason why Drood,
+if alive, should go spying about in disguise.  There were good
+Dickensian reasons.
+
+
+A QUESTION OF TASTE
+
+
+Mr. Cuming Walters argues that the story is very tame if Edwin is
+still alive, and left out of the marriages at the close.  Besides,
+"Drood is little more than a name-label, attached to a body, a man
+who never excites sympathy, whose fate causes no emotion, he is
+saved for no useful or sentimental purpose, and lags superfluous on
+the stage.  All of which is bad art, so bad that Dickens would
+never have been guilty of it."
+
+That is a question of taste.  On rereading the novel, I see that
+Dickens makes Drood as sympathetic as he can.  He is very young,
+and speaks of Rosa with bad taste, but he is really in love with
+her, much more so than she with him, and he is piqued by her
+ceaseless mockery, and by their false position.  To Jasper he is
+singularly tender, and remorseful when he thinks that he has shown
+want of tact.  There is nothing ominous about his gaiety:  as to
+his one fault, we leave him, on Christmas Eve, a converted
+character:  he has a kind word and look for every one whom he
+meets, young and old.  He accepts Mr. Grewgious's very stern
+lecture in the best manner possible.  In short, he is marked as
+faulty-- "I am young," so he excuses himself, in the very words of
+Darnley to Queen Mary! (if the Glasgow letter be genuine); but he
+is also marked as sympathetic.
+
+He was, I think, to have a lesson, and to become a good fellow.
+Mr. Proctor rightly argues (and Forster "thinks"), that Dickens
+meant to kill Neville Landless:  Mr. Cuming Walters agrees with
+him, but Mr. Proctor truly adds that Edwin has none of the signs of
+Dickens's doomed men, his Sidney Cartons, and the rest.  You can
+tell, as it were by the sound of the voice of Dickens, says Mr.
+Proctor, that Edwin is to live.  The impression is merely
+subjective, but I feel the impression.  The doom of Landless is
+conspicuously fixed, and why is Landless to be killed by Jasper?
+Merely to have a count on which to hang Jasper!  He cannot be
+hanged for killing Drood, if Drood is alive.
+
+
+MR. PROCTOR'S THEORY CONTINUED
+
+
+Mr. Proctor next supposes that Datchery and others, by aid of the
+opium hag, have found out a great deal of evidence against Jasper.
+They have discovered from the old woman that his crime was long
+premeditated:  he had threatened "Ned" in his opiated dreams:  and
+had clearly removed Edwin's trinkets and watch, because they would
+not be destroyed, with his body, by the quicklime.  This is all
+very well, but there is still, so far, no legal evidence, on my
+theory, that Jasper attempted to take Edwin's life.  Jasper's
+enemies, therefore, can only do their best to make his life a
+burden to him, and to give him a good fright, probably with the
+hope of terrifying him into avowals.
+
+Now the famous ring begins "to drag and hold" the murderer.  He is
+given to know, I presume, that, when Edwin disappeared, he had a
+gold ring in the pocket of his coat.  Jasper is thus compelled to
+revisit the vault, at night, and there, in the light of his
+lantern, he sees the long-lost Edwin, with his hand in the breast
+of his great coat.
+
+Horrified by this unexpected appearance, Jasper turns to fly.  But
+he is confronted by Neville Landless, Crisparkle, Tartar, and
+perhaps by Mr. Grewgious, who are all on the watch.  He rushes up
+through the only outlet, the winding staircase of the Cathedral
+tower, of which we know that he has had the key.  Neville, who
+leads his pursuers, "receives his death wound" (and, I think, is
+pitched off the top of the roof).  Then Jasper is collared by that
+agile climber, Tartar, and by Crisparkle, always in the pink of
+condition.  There is now something to hang Jasper for--the slaying
+of Landless (though, as far as I can see, THAT was done in self-
+defence).  Jasper confesses all; Tartar marries Rosa; Helena
+marries Crisparkle.  Edwin is only twenty-one, and may easily find
+a consoler of the fair sex:  indeed he is "ower young to marry
+yet."
+
+The capture of Jasper was fixed, of course, for Christmas Eve.  The
+phantom cry foreheard by Durdles, two years before, was that of
+Neville as he fell; and the dog that howled was Neville's dog, a
+character not yet introduced into the romance.
+
+
+MR. CUMING WALTERS'S THEORY
+
+
+Such is Mr. Proctor's theory of the story, in which I mainly agree.
+Mr. Proctor relies on a piece of evidence overlooked by Forster,
+and certainly misinterpreted, as I think I can prove to a
+certainty, by Mr. Cuming Walters, whose theory of the real conduct
+of the plot runs thus:  After watching the storm at midnight with
+Edwin, Neville left him, and went home:  "his way lay in an
+opposite direction.  Near to the Cathedral Jasper intercepted his
+nephew. . . . Edwin may have been already drugged."  How the murder
+was worked Mr. Cuming Walters does not say, but he introduces at
+this point, the two sounds foreheard by Durdles, without explaining
+"the howl of a dog."  Durdles would hear the cries, and Deputy "had
+seen what he could not understand," whatever it was that he saw.
+Jasper, not aware of Drood's possession of the ring, takes only his
+watch, chain, and pin, which he places on the timbers of the weir,
+and in the river, to be picked up by that persistent winter-bather,
+Crisparkle of the telescopic and microscopic eyesight.
+
+As to the ring, Mr. Cuming Walters erroneously declares that Mr.
+Proctor "ignores" the power of the ring "to hold and drag," and
+says that potent passage is "without meaning and must be
+disregarded."  Proctor, in fact, gives more than three pages to the
+meaning of the ring, which "drags" Jasper into the vault, when he
+hears of its existence. {3}  Next, Mr. Cuming Walters supposes
+Datchery to learn from Durdles, whom he is to visit, about the
+second hearing of the cry and the dog's howl.  Deputy may have seen
+Jasper "carrying his burden" (Edwin) "towards the Sapsea vault."
+In fact, Jasper probably saved trouble by making the drugged Edwin
+walk into that receptacle.  "Datchery would not think of the Sapsea
+vault unaided."  No--unless Datchery was Drood !  "Now Durdles is
+useful again.  Tapping with his hammer he would find a change . . .
+inquiry must be made."  Why should Durdles tap the Sapsea monument?
+As Durdles had the key, he would simply walk into the vault, and
+find the quicklime.  Now, Jasper also, we presume, had a key, made
+from a wax impression of the original.  If he had any sense, he
+would have removed the quicklime as easily as he inserted it, for
+Mr. Sapsea was mortal:  he might die any day, and be buried, and
+then the quicklime, lying where it ought not, would give rise to
+awkward inquiries.
+
+Inquiry being made, in consequence of Durdles's tappings, the ring
+would be found, as Mr. Cuming Walters says.  But even then, unless
+Deputy actually saw Jasper carry a man into the vault, nobody could
+prove Jasper's connection with the presence of the ring in the
+vault.  Moreover, Deputy hated Jasper, and if he saw Jasper
+carrying the body of a man, on the night when a man disappeared, he
+was clever enough to lead Durdles to examine the vault, AT ONCE.
+Deputy had a great dislike of the Law and its officers, but here
+was a chance for him to distinguish himself, and conciliate them.
+
+However these things may be, Mr. Cuming Walters supposes that
+Jasper, finding himself watched, re-enters the vault, perhaps, "to
+see that every trace of the crime had been removed."  In the vault
+he finds--Datchery, that is, Helena Landless!  Jasper certainly
+visited the vault and found somebody.
+
+
+EVIDENCE OF COLLINS'S DRAWINGS
+
+
+We now come to the evidence which Forster strangely overlooked,
+which Mr. Proctor and Mr. Archer correctly deciphered, and which
+Mr. Cuming Walters misinterprets.  On December 22, 1869, Dickens
+wrote to Forster that two numbers of his romance were "now in type.
+Charles Collins has designed an excellent cover."  Mr. C. A.
+Collins had married a daughter of Dickens. {4}  He was an artist, a
+great friend of Dickens, and author of that charming book, "A
+Cruise on Wheels."  His design of the paper cover of the story (it
+appeared in monthly numbers) contained, as usual, sketches which
+give an inkling of the events in the tale.  Mr. Collins was to have
+illustrated the book; but, finally, Mr. (now Sir) Luke Fildes
+undertook the task.  Mr. Collins died in 1873.  It appears that
+Forster never asked him the meaning of his designs--a singular
+oversight.
+
+The cover lies before the reader.  In the left-hand top corner
+appears an allegorical female figure of joy, with flowers.  The
+central top space contains the front of Cloisterham Cathedral, or
+rather, the nave.  To the left walks Edwin, with hyacinthine locks,
+and a thoroughly classical type of face, and Grecian nose.  LIKE
+DATCHERY, HE DOES NOT WEAR, BUT CARRIES HIS HAT; this means
+nothing, if they are in the nave.  He seems bored.  On his arm is
+Rosa; SHE seems bored; she trails her parasol, and looks away from
+Edwin, looks down, to her right.  On the spectator's right march
+the surpliced men and boys of the Choir.  Behind them is Jasper,
+black whiskers and all; he stares after Edwin and Rosa; his right
+hand hides his mouth.  In the corner above him is an allegorical
+female, clasping a stiletto.
+
+Beneath Edwin and Rosa is, first, an allegorical female figure,
+looking at a placard, headed "LOST," on a door.  Under that, again,
+is a girl in a garden-chair; a young man, whiskerless, with wavy
+hair, kneels and kisses her hand.  She looks rather unimpassioned.
+I conceive the man to be Landless, taking leave of Rosa after
+urging his hopeless suit, for which Helena, we learn, "seems to
+compassionate him."  He has avowed his passion, early in the story,
+to Crisparkle.  Below, the opium hag is smoking.  On the other
+side, under the figures of Jasper and the Choir, the young man who
+kneels to the girl is seen bounding up a spiral staircase.  His
+left hand is on the iron railing; he stoops over it, looking down
+at others who follow him.  His right hand, the index finger
+protruded, points upward, and, by chance or design, points straight
+at Jasper in the vignette above.  Beneath this man (clearly
+Landless) follows a tall man in a "bowler" hat, a "cut-away" coat,
+and trousers which show an inch of white stocking above the low
+shoes.  His profile is hid by the wall of the spiral staircase:  he
+might be Grewgious of the shoes, white stockings, and short
+trousers, but he may be Tartar:  he takes two steps at a stride.
+Beneath him a youngish man, in a low, soft, clerical hat and a
+black pea-coat, ascends, looking downwards and backwards.  This is
+clearly Crisparkle.  A Chinaman is smoking opium beneath.
+
+In the central lowest space, 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
+classical, his nose is Grecian, his locks are long (at least,
+according to the taste of to-day); he wears a light paletot,
+buttoned 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 classic features, as in Sir L. Fildes's third illustration.
+
+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. Cuming 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. Cuming 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 lustrous thick black whiskers.
+
+Again, the same whiskerless young man, bounding up the spiral
+staircase in daylight, and wildly pointing upwards, is taken by Mr.
+Cuming 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. Cuming 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 coarse flannel"--a disreputable jacket, as Sir L.
+Fildes depicts him--"with horn buttons," 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. Cuming
+Walters says, "the large hat and the tightly-buttoned 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.
+
+The surtout of the period is shown, worn by Jasper, in Sir L.
+Fildes's sixth and ninth illustrations.  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 buttoned
+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, buttoned 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 classic type, as Drood was.  He is no more like
+Helena than Crisparkle is like Durdles.  Mr. Cuming 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!"
+
+Again, "On the title-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 assumption' 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
+Dickens's oral instructions, depicted Jasper finding Drood alive in
+the vault, an incident which was to occur in the story; or Dickens
+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. Cuming 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. Cuming 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 pass
+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. Cuming Walters, is rather
+too dramatic for the comfort of a minor canon.  A humorist like
+Dickens 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. Cuming Walters
+writes:  "We make a guess, for Dickens 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; {5} 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. Cuming 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. Cuming 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 Dickens.  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 circumstantial
+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 Dickens 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 Dickens intended "to
+take Mr. Fildes to a condemned cell in Maidstone, or some other
+gaol, in order to make a drawing." {6}  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 identity 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 identity.  If Jasper knew his business, he would, of
+course, rifle ALL of Edwin's pockets minutely, and would remove the
+metallic buttons 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 buttons.  In this inquiry of his, Jasper would have
+discovered the ring in Edwin's breast pocket, and would have taken
+it away.  Perhaps Dickens 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-buttons would have
+led any inquirer straight to Edwin's tailor; I incline to suspect
+that neither Dickens nor Jasper noticed that circumstance.  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 Dickens'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 Dickens
+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.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{1}  Landless is not "Lackland," but a form of de Laundeles, a
+Lothian name of the twelfth century, merged later in that of
+Ormistoun.
+
+{2}  Life of Dickens, vol. iii. pp. 425-439.
+
+{3}  J. Cuming Walters, p. 102; Proctor, pp. 131-135.  Mr. Cuming
+Walters used an edition of 1896, apparently a reprint of a paper by
+Proctor, written earlier than his final book of 1887.  Hence the
+error as to Mr. Proctor's last theory.
+
+{4}  Mrs. Perugini, the books say, but certainly a daughter.
+
+{5}  What would Weissmann say to all this?
+
+{6}  So Mr. Cuming Walters quotes Mr. Hughes, who quotes Sir L.
+Fildes.  HE believes that Jasper strangled Edwin with the black-
+silk scarf, and, no doubt, Jasper was for long of that opinion
+himself.
+
+
+
+
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