What Alice Knew
Page 15
Before he could say more, Clemens was at it again, regaling the company with his adventures as a steamboat captain on the Mississippi River. Sargent, diverted by the Clemens account, murmured that he looked forward to learning more about Alice’s intriguing theory and shifted his attention to the other end of the table.
Henry was disgusted. Here he was with news that a diabolical murderer might be loose in the Royal Academy, and Sargent was more interested in hearing stories about paddling down a muddy river. He made no effort to speak again.
The courses came and went. There were chicken cutlets that he thought were overcooked, a mutton chop he sampled and left on his plate, a poor selection of jellies, and a mediocre poached turbot. He drank copiously and filled himself up with potatoes. He was becoming very sullen and very intoxicated.
As the meal drew to a close, Wilde called for his honored guest to give a toast. They all rose.
“To the mother country,” declared Clemens, “from which my compatriots and I are still trying to free ourselves.”
Henry had lifted his glass but put it down. There was only so much of this sort of thing he could take.
“You will not drink to that, Henry?” asked Wilde, pleased at the prospect of a quarrel.
“No,” asserted Henry, “I do not share Mr. Clemens’s desire to sever my ties to England.”
Clemens lifted a bushy eyebrow. “It is my understanding that we fought a war of independence for that purpose,” he said.
“Political independence is one thing; cultural independence, another,” intoned Henry. “We have much to learn from our European brothers, and we would be remiss to deny it.”
“We will have a native literature only when we do,” said Clemens.
“Then we will have a bad literature,” asserted Henry. “I count on my European ties to lend weight to my writing.”
“And your writing sinks under it,” murmured Clemens.
“Your meaning, sir?” Henry took this up sharply.
“My meaning is that your prose could use more native air.”
Henry sputtered. “And yours, sir, could use more art!”
Clemens paused, as the company waited for his rejoinder. “There is such a thing as too much art,” he finally said. “I fear that Mr. James’s novels suffer from that defect. When I put them down, I find myself incapable of picking them up again.”
There was considerable laughter, and it fleetingly occurred to Henry that he and Clemens were making spectacles of themselves in front of the Europeans, which was just what vulgar Americans were expected to do. Still, he could not stop himself and countered stridently, “Sir, no person of breeding would find your writing more than a burlesque diversion.”
“Breeding?” Clemens scoffed, looking around him with mock wonder. “Who are these persons of breeding? Are they men…or horses?”
The laughter had grown very loud. Clemens’s wit—if one could call it that—was being well received.
“I…resent that!” Henry declared lamely. He had gotten very red.
“Shall we have a duel?” demanded Wilde. “Shall I get out the sabers or the pistols?”
“Dueling is an old-world custom.” Clemens laughed. “In my country we would have a boxing match. Does Mr. James box?”
Henry felt vaguely panic-stricken. Clemens was baiting him, impugning his manliness, using vulgarity to place him at a disadvantage. What should he do? He felt ill-used and humiliated, and the prospect of being punched did not seem entirely outside the sphere of possibility. He had always had a horror of physical violence.
He looked with dismay at the company; all seemed to be paying close attention and smirking. Even the French had been roused from their Gallic indifference, eager to see what would happen next.
“I don’t think our American guests should fight,” a clear voice intruded in the background. “They are both indispensable to our cultural life by showing us the world from different angles, the high and the low. Our literature would be poorer for the lack of either of them.”
Everyone turned to the speaker, a fair young man with a square jaw and hard, glittery blue eyes. Henry felt a welling of gratitude.
“That settles it, then.” Wilde laughed. “We must not allow you Americans to hurt each other. Now sit.” He pulled at Clemens’s sleeve. “We will drink some more wine. Our wine at least is better than yours, which is reason enough to settle here.”
Henry dropped into his chair. As the wine was poured and the ices served, he pondered the episode that had just transpired. Who was it who had intervened? He looked to the front of the room and saw that the young man who had saved him had moved off to the side and was combing through a bag of what looked like costume apparel. Henry felt suddenly light-headed. Was that the face he had seen and remembered at the beginning of the evening? For weeks he had been trying to recall something from the dinner party at Gosse’s (if it had been Gosse’s). He believed this young man had been there. Indeed, he was certain he was. A memorable face. How had he forgotten it?
Once the ices had been cleared and the Madeira served, Wilde stood up and raised his glass. “To art and song,” he said. “I promised on a recent occasion that we would perform some musical hall turns. We have rehearsed something for this evening.” He motioned to the young man, whom James had been watching in the corner, who stepped forward. He was holding a wig and a piece of drapery. He placed the wig on his head and wrapped the drape around his shoulders, curtsied, and smiled. Even in this makeshift ironic garb, he had managed a transformation. There was now a pretty young girl in place of a handsome young man. A natural gift for mimicry, thought Henry admiringly.
“We shall perform ‘Oh, False One, You Have Deceived Me’ from Pirates of Penzance, by our friends Messieurs Gilbert and Sullivan,” announced Wilde.
There followed a lively rendition of the song, a call and response of the conventional farcical variety. Wilde sang with requisite brio, and the young man, with a sweetly coquettish lilt. Light musical numbers were not to Henry’s taste, but he granted that Oscar and the young man performed well. Especially the young man.
At the end, Wilde bowed low, and his partner curtsied and pulled off his wig. There was enthusiastic applause by the guests—even the blasé Frenchmen seemed to have been entertained.
Henry joined vigorously in the applause. It seemed the young man was looking directly at him. Perhaps he wanted a sign of thanks for having intervened in the encounter with Clemens. He nodded an acknowledgment, but the young man did not blink. Perhaps he was not looking at him at all. Still, Henry could not avert his own gaze. He was transfixed by the young man’s eyes, which were glacially blue. He felt a shiver pass through himself.
“Who is he?” he whispered to Sargent.
“Walter Sickert. An apprentice to Whistler.”
An artist! “Is he any good?”
“Talented but macabre.”
“How’s that?” asked Henry sharply.
“Dark palette. Tawdry subjects.”
Wilde motioned graciously to the young man. “My friend here is even more gifted as a painter than as a music hall performer. You must all go see his work. Buy it or write about it, and make him more famous than Whistler. Do your imitation of Jimmy’s laugh again, Walter.”
“‘Ha ha!’” said the young man.
“That’s Jimmy!” cried Wilde. “‘Ha ha.’ You do it better.”
Henry caught his breath. It came back to him in a rush. They had talked of Jack the Ripper at that dinner party the night of his ordeal. This Sickert had been present at that occasion and had noted that the “ha ha” in the letters put him in mind of Whistler. He had imitated Whistler’s laugh, then!
Sickert. The name was suggestive. Dickensian, if Henry wanted the name for a murderer. Not that he did. Indeed, a feeling of warmth for the young man competed with a feeling of dread.
It had been an extremely stressful evening, one Henry would not want to repeat, but he had learned something of importance, thoug
h he did not know what it was. If his logical faculties were weak, his instincts were strong. He had found a germ. He would have to bring it to Alice and see what she could make of it.
Chapter 24
At the same time that Henry was preparing for his dinner at the Albemarle Club, William was in a hansom cab heading to Mansell Street in Whitechapel. He had in hand the address of Benjamin Cohen that Abberline had gotten for him. It was unclear whether it was Cohen’s business establishment or his home—possibly it was both. From what he had discerned of the area, distinctions of home and work were not pronounced in the East End.
When William descended from the cab, he soon found that the address coincided with one of the small bookshops that cluttered the area and that he had wanted so much to peruse during his first visit to Whitechapel. But while most of the other shops were still open or just closing for the night, this one was shuttered and padlocked. When William gazed through the shutters, he saw that the shelves were bare, the fixtures removed from the walls, and the place apparently abandoned.
His first response was a lurch of panic. Had Benjamin Cohen been guilty after all and escaped justice due to William’s interference? A sense of dread began to rise in him, and he pulled himself back to reason by force of will, summoning to mind what had caused him to act in Cohen’s defense: the man’s intelligent and rational demeanor, the obvious scapegoating by Anderson, his own instinct regarding guilt and innocence.
He had calmed himself somewhat with this line of thought and decided to inquire about Cohen’s whereabouts of a group of men standing on the opposite corner, speaking animatedly in the Jewish tongue. The men were dressed in the conventional prayer shawls and skullcaps of the sect, perhaps waiting for sundown when they would hold their evening service. In the course of his research into comparative religion, William had been present for some of these ceremonies, which he had found at once exotic and familiar. All religion, as he saw it, was propelled by the same impulse: a need to believe in something larger than oneself. He saw the impulse, regardless of its manifestation, as an ennobling element in human nature, and the longer he lived, the less the various trappings that distinguished one religion from another made a difference to him.
He was about to cross over to talk to this group, but before he could do so, he found a figure blocking his way. The person was dressed, like the men across the street, in a fringed shawl and skullcap, but he was more than six feet tall, and his chest was so large that it pulled the coat that covered his vestments to bursting.
“What do you want here?” asked the sentinel pugnaciously. “Usually your kind comes round when it’s dark.”
William hadn’t realized that someone in a shawl and skullcap could look threatening, but this person did. He surmised that the man was assigned to keep watch on the street, a practical precaution, considering the level of crime in the area, not to mention the recent Ripper murders.
William pointed to the shop and mentioned the name of Benjamin Cohen.
“And what’s your business with him?” The man seemed to scowl more deeply.
“I’m not the police, if that’s what you think,” William explained quickly. “I’m a friend. Or at least, I’m someone in sympathy with…” He paused, trying to determine exactly with what he was in sympathy with regard to Cohen. “I am in sympathy with his position,” he finally finished vaguely.
The man eyed him with new interest. Perhaps he was sizing up the possibility that William might, after all, be a Jew of the exotic American variety. Or an anarchist. There had been mention of Cohen’s incendiary political activity, and William’s hair and beard were unkempt enough for that.
“My name is William James,” William clarified further. “I’m a professor of philosophy visiting from America.”
The man’s face cleared at once. As if thinking on the subject, he commented lightly, “‘Replace religion with philosophy,’ Ben says, ‘and the world will be a better place.’ That’s rubbish if you ask me. But it’s his soul, and yours too, for that matter. You’ll find him at the pub round the corner at one of his meetings.”
William nodded, wondering why the man had changed in his manner so abruptly, and turned the corner. The pub was indeed just a few yards down, although he would not have known it was there without being told. The sign hanging from the door was so ingrained with dirt as to be unreadable, and the establishment itself was located not on the ground level, which was occupied by some sort of pitiful shop—most of the merchandise of which seemed to consist of torn clothes and broken crockery—but at the bottom of a rickety set of steps in an area that resembled a dank cave. As he entered, William saw that a group of young men were seated toward the back, and that as soon as they saw him, they rose quickly and ducked out the door directly behind them. It was obviously a political gathering, possibly an anarchist cell that was plotting an act of defiance, if not outright destructiveness with regard to their society. He was again struck by the possibility that Cohen could have political reasons for having committed the murders, as Henry had originally suggested with his talk of cabals and Masonic societies.
Cohen remained at the table after the others dispersed, though, and rose with an expression of excitement on his face. “Professor James,” he said, his eyes bright. William noted what he had not noted at the police station, that the man was extremely thin and looked malnourished.
“You know my name?” asked William in wonderment. He recalled that the vigilante had also responded with immediate deference to his name.
“I might have recognized you from the photograph in some of your books,” Cohen explained, “but I had the additional help of seeing you at police headquarters this afternoon.”
When William looked puzzled, he continued. “There are members of our faith even on the London police force, and so news of your defense of me following my arrest came through those channels. I’ve admired your work for years. To have you to thank for intervening on my behalf makes me almost believe in God.”
As he spoke, he had taken William’s arm in an appropriating gesture and led him, without commentary, out of the pub. A kind of nervous energy emanated from the man, which William found at once endearing and unnerving. With Cohen’s hand on his arm, the two men walked briskly around the corner until he came to the closed shop that he had surveyed earlier. Cohen took a key out of his pocket, unlocked the padlock, and motioned for William to follow him inside. The shop had indeed been stripped bare.
“You are leaving your business?” asked William.
“I have decided it is no longer worth trying to effect social change in this country,” said Cohen, waving a nervous hand at his ramshackle surroundings. “I am going east to abet the Revolution.”
There was a note of repressed hysteria in the man’s voice, and William wondered again if he were an unstable and possibly dangerous personality.
Cohen had by then opened a door at the back of the shop that led into a space hardly bigger than a closet. There were no windows; in the corner was a cracked washbasin and a small cot covered with a ragged blanket. The room would have been cramped and airless under any circumstances, but what made it more so was that every spare inch was piled with books. These were the remains of Cohen’s trade, books he had not been able to sell or with which he was not willing to part.
As the two men moved as best they could into the room, Cohen suddenly grabbed a volume at the top of one of the piles. “You must be familiar with the ideas of the German philosopher Marx,” he exclaimed, waving the book excitedly. “He exposes the oppression of church and family and calls for the transfer of economic control to the people.” He pressed the book into William’s hands. “Read his Capital, and you will be converted. You are a utopian, Professor James, though you may not know it.” He paused as if to scour his memory and then recited, “‘This universe will never be completely good as long as one being is unhappy, as long as one poor cockroach suffers the pangs of unrequited love.’ It’s from one of your essays.”
“But you haven’t given it enough thought,” Cohen interrupted impatiently. “As an American, you are removed from the kinds of misery that people like myself see on a regular basis.”
William nodded; there seemed to be no point arguing with Cohen. Passionate belief—whether religious or political—was a form of lunacy. One stayed sane by keeping passion in check and by refusing to feel too much about anything. He understood the trade-off; he had made it years earlier.
Cohen waited for William to put the copy of Capital into the breast pocket of his coat and then reached under his bed to retrieve another book, obviously placed there for safekeeping. “I was hoping you would come, not just so I could discuss philosophy with someone whose work I respect, but also to give you this.” He passed the book to William. “I believe it may be evidence in the case for which I was arrested, though what it means I have not been able to decipher.”
William looked at the cover, which was printed in embossed gold lettering, The Complete Writings of Thomas De Quincey, Volume Four. He glanced up inquiringly.
“It was from the pages of this book that the police extracted the photograph of the murdered woman in that unseemly pose,” Cohen explained. “They had already found enough Marx and Fourier to indict me as a syndicalist and revolutionary. The photograph was an added bonus. I would have assumed they planted it, had I not seen with my own eyes one of the officers find it in this volume. At first, they simply took it as evidence of my degeneracy, after they’d ogled it themselves, of course. I don’t think the connection to the Ripper victim would have been made at all if someone at headquarters hadn’t seen it. By then, no one remembered the book in which it was found.”
William opened the De Quincey volume.