Some, I should add, believe poor Long got it wrong. It developed that the aforementioned Constable Halse of City had shown up before the erasure and inscribed in his own notebook a slightly different version. Thus there was no stationary target, which is why the damned thing still floats in the ether so provocatively.
Halse said the words were “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing,” as opposed to Long’s “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.”
That damned “not”! It drifts hither and yon like a balloon, untethered, on the zephyrs of the interpreter’s bias.
“Double negative,” said Cavanagh, university man. “Technically, grammatically, by all the rules, the two negatives cancel each other out, so the true meaning, regardless of the placement of the ‘not,’ is that the Jews are indeed guilty. It is saying, ‘The Jews are the men who will be blamed for something.’ ”
“That does not impute guilt,” said another. “It is neutral, simply stating the Jews will be blamed, and as we all know and have observed, the Jews being this era’s prime bogeymen, indeed they will be blamed.”
“So he’s merely a social critic, like Dr. Arnold?”
There was some laughter at the idea of killer as essayist, but then the subject drifted elsewhere. On and on it went for almost an hour, as the boys tossed various ideas to and fro. Was our nasty chap really mad or only pretending? Did he have a program, or was he random? Was he intelligent, even a genius, or pure savage brute out of the dark forests of the east, full of primal blood lust for arcane religious purposes? Could he even be, after it all, someone similar to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, two separate personalities in one body? Perhaps, as in the Scot’s fiction, the one did not know of the other. It was all quite curious—pointless in the end, I suppose—but one remark stood out and colored my reactions to all that was to come.
“Well,” someone said, “one thing’s for certain, the only man who could solve this one is Sherlock Holmes.”
Laughter, but not from me. Now, that was a damned fine idea. I had read Mr. Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” the previous year in a magazine where it was published, though I understand it has since come out in book form. Sherlock was exactly what we needed: a calm, dispassionate intellect with a gift for deduction, who could master a complex set of clues and make appropriate inferences, and through the swamp of this and that track a steady course that led inevitably to but one culprit. It was to be done, moreover, stylishly, with dry wit, wry observation, and despite a sort of academic diffidence, a true grasp as to how the world actually worked.
Where could we find such a man? Where was our Sherlock Holmes? I was ready to be his Watson.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Diary
October 4, 1888
I have been named.
It had to happen. If I am the demon incarnate, sooner or later some fellow will pin a moniker on me, first, to simplify communication of my charisma, and second, in some way, to diminish me by cramming all my nuances, improvisations, heroic acts of sheer will, bravery, and long-term shrewdness into one banal package that at first holds those attributes in high regard but eventually erodes until the name—and I—become commonplace.
25 Sept. 1888
Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
Don’t mind me giving the trade name.
wasn’t good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now ha ha
However, I rather like it. Whoever coined it is not without a certain low genius. Jack the Ripper. I, Jack. I, Ripper. It’s both violent and short, it combines two commonalities in an unexpected way, it uses the verb “to rip” in an equally unexpected way, as very little of what I’ve done involves ripping. But Jack the Cutter would not work, because cutting is a term, though accurately employed here, that more usually finds its place in discussions of tailoring. So Jack the Ripper it shall be.
I suspect it’s the business of the ear that drove it home. Whichever pusillanimous journo coined “Jack the Ripper” had no way of knowing that in my frenzy in Mitre Square involving what was left of Mrs. Eddowes, I indeed loosed an ear from its mooring on the side of the skull. I had no memory of doing so; that was a period of blur, although rereading my last entry, I see I retained enough recollection to record it immediately postcoitus, if ever so swiftly it vanished under the tidal swell of sleep that overwhelmed me.
But that freak of circumstance gave Jack the Ripper’s missive, with its lurid silliness about using blood as ink, a certain kind of instant celebrity. You need a vivid detail to nail something hard and permanent into the public consciousness, and whosoever my benefactor was, he provided that. He should be writing adverts!
Meanwhile, the “double event,” as the papers are calling it, seems to be seen as evidence of a particularly malignant higher genius. How I wish it were so! Were I that genius, I might not have had to improvise so desperately and to depend on luck so totally. But nobody seems to have cottoned to the fact that the second event existed purely because the first was so unsatisfactory, just as no one has an inkling as to why JEWS is spelled JUWES in my graffito, or why that sentence seems to make no sense, grammatically or otherwise. I have to laugh at how incompetent are our supposedly great minds. It appears that nobody has the gift of putting these things into their proper pattern and inferring where this campaign is ultimately going. That pleases me no end.
In fact, I am at this time more happy than I have ever been in my life. Those who smote me so deeply and took from me that which I had created and loved, they will meet the knife—of one sort or another—soon. Those who criticized me, those who disdained my work, those who found me shallow and overambitious, I am in the process of proving them all wrong, in thunder. “Ha ha,” as Jack has written, and whoever he is, the anonymous scribe got exactly the joy I feel in confounding the world. Sir Charles, the boys of the press, all the mobs who cannot help themselves but for prattling and dreaming of Jack, all of them are miles from the truth, and the only crime is that if I succeed, as I surely feel I will, no one will be wise enough to put it all together.
I have a little left to do. I must be on with it.