The rain still fell. I thought of an old verse and appropriated it to my usage: “Western wind, when wilt thou blow, the small rain down can rain.” I thought, “Christ, that I were in my bed and my love in my arms again,” knowing bitterly that my love would never be in my arms again, and that the world would be—had been—made to pay for that folly.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Jeb’s Memoir
It was the usual muck-up, only worse. At least the rain had ceased to fall, though its moisture hung in the gray air, and it left puddles and sloughs of congealed mud everywhere it could, mischievous devil that it was. In this miasma, the crowds intensified on Commercial, and the hansom driver had to whip his horse to drive it among them down Dorset. Meanwhile, newsboys with placards and clumps of papers were already selling the news, EAST END FIEND SLAYS AGAIN, that sort of thing. You had to look carefully to see the day’s other big news, which is that by that insane coincidence which the God who does not exist seems to enjoy so heartily, just before Jack started hacking, Sir Charles Warren had resigned. So I supposed it could be said that on the night of November 8/9, 1888, Saucy Jacky sent off two, not just one. He was a busy lad, he was.
I pushed my way to the narrow passage by yelling, “Make way, Jeb of the Star,” and, though grudgingly, the Whitechapelians drawn to slaughter admitted my passage. Forcing my way through the narrow passage, I entered the court, which was jammed with coppers and plainclothesmen and the usual newsrag riffraff of the Jack beat who had been accorded a close-up perch to the little room that I presumed held the body, and would perhaps be allowed a quick and tasty glimpse of what Our Boy had wrought this time out. I saw Cavanagh of the Times and Renssalaer of the Daily Mail and several others, plus the motley assortment of penny-a-liners, as well as a boy from the Central News Agency, who looked a bit shaky. If this was his first Jack experience, the buzz in the crowd (“I ’eared ’e done ’er right good this time. Ain’t nothin’ left but guts ’n’ ’air!”) suggested he’d be losing his breakfast soon.
I didn’t deign to join them, and they hadn’t spotted me, so I peeled off and spied my friend Constable Ross standing quiet sentry to the left and edged to him. I didn’t want to confer in public, so as to embarrass him, so worked my way not to him but near him, and shielded in the crowd, whispered, “Ross, it’s me, Jeb. Don’t turn around, but get me up to date.”
He didn’t react, but I knew he’d hear and figure out a way to make the exchange easier. He turned, held out his broad arms, and began to chant, “’Ere now, back it up, then, people, let us do our work.” Nobody backed up, but it brought him to whisper distance.
“Hello, Mr. Jeb,” he said. “Oh, this one’s a dandy, it is.”
He gave me the rest. At ten-forty-five A.M. Thomas Bowyer, an agent from Mr. McCarthy, the owner of the court, knocked on Mary Jane’s door to make another attempt to get her to pay rent, which was several weeks in arrears. No answer. Knowing the property, he moved around the corner, where, owing to the odd angles of the court’s haphazard design, two windows permitted vision into her room. He reached in one with a broken pane, pushed the curtain aside, and saw her remains on the bed about ten feet away. Horrified, he ran back to his office, and he and McCarthy went to get the blue bottles, and the circus commenced. Now, nearly three hours later, all the stars were in accord: I noted Arnold, chief of H Division; Dr. Phillips, the examiner; and a chap who seemed to have stopped off on his way to his bank or brokerage. That had to be the famous Inspector Abberline from downtown. Abberline a hero in some accounts but not in this one, was of standoffish mien, his thinnish hair creamed over his pate, his mustaches drooping, his suit—not a frock-coat fellow, I’ll say that for him—immaculately pressed.
Any mysteries that the court may have contained were by now obliterated by the wanderings to and fro of coppers, reporters, citizens, the curious, maybe even, for all we knew, Jack himself. Yet for all the activity, there was no activity.
“Why is no one doing anything?” I asked Ross.
“They’re all waiting for Commissioner Warren to arrive. He will have bloodhounds with him, and that’s thought to be the latest in scientific detection.”
“Good Christ,” I said. These idiots didn’t know Warren was gone.
At that moment, Abberline’s frosty gaze struck me, and he came over. “Mr. Jeb, is it not? Here to find more avenues of criticism for our hardworking policemen, are you, and to make the apprehension of this brute more difficult?”
“Inspector, love me or not, allow me to give you some helpful information. I’m told you’re waiting on Sir Charles. I’ve just arrived and have not been sealed up here for two hours, so I know what you do not: That is, Sir Charles will never show up. At least not in official capacity, because he has no official capacity. He resigned late last night.”
If Abberline had a reaction, he kept it to himself, though I thought I saw a shade of gray pass across or beneath his otherwise grimly controlled face.
I watched as he went to Arnold, the two conferred, and an order was given. McCarthy was called up and, armed with an ax handle, began to pummel the door heroically. It yielded to his thunder, the door was sprung, and the official party entered. In seconds McCarthy emerged, went to his knees, and vomited.
“Oh, my,” I said.
Abberline came out, face blank as per normal, and signaled a fellow with some photographic equipment to enter. More science. For the first time the crime scene would be recorded by means other than memory. Then he came to me. “All right, Jeb,” he said, “you have helped, now I will help you. Constable, let the man pass, and we’ll show him what Jack has brought to London today.”
To the jeers and catcalls of the other press boys, I was led in. It soon became evident that this was no favor; Abberline meant to get me puking in the yard, too, so all the fellows could enjoy a good hard laugh at my destruction.
My first reaction was not horror so much as confusion. What I saw fit no pattern. “Dissonant” was a term that came to mind: It had no melody, structure, harmony, undertone, contrapuntal melody; it was just a random pile of notes, lines, and staffs. As my eyes adjusted to the darker palette of the room, I forgot musicality and moved next to the idea of a butcher shop in which the anarchists had detonated a small bomb, for heaps and piles of meat seemed to be laying about, and the walls had been spattered crimson.
I looked upon it—it was no she but only an it—as it lay at bed’s edge, and in a few seconds my mind was nimble enough to pick out the form that lay beneath the desecration.
“Holy Jesus,” I said.
“Not Jesus at all,” said the sanguine Abberline, “but Jack.”
Had she been a pretty girl? Had she a bonnie smile, a sparkle to the eye, a pert button nose, lips of cushion and comfort? I hope memory had the answer, because as of now, no one would ever know. It was not a face at all but a kind of mask of red death, after Poe’s helpful presentation of the apt phrase, all grisly and chopped, with chasms where features had been, all the more hideous for the fact that the more you looked at it, the less abstract it became, until it resolved itself into something precise and quite beyond metaphor, beyond literature, beyond even the great Poe. It took one’s breath and breakfast away, but fortunately, owing to Mother’s war on me, I had no breakfast to contribute to a festival of vomit; however, if nothing in my stomach raised itself up, I felt a shudder down to my knees and had a moment of wooze as I rocked back and forth. The cold of November, especially as admitted by the open window and now shattered door, kept well in control the odors that would have been choking, and that was a great aid in control of intestinal reactions, but I broke out in sweat and felt it roll down inside my suit.