But there is no fugitive, no one is accused. An ear in the hand, the prasarved Kidne upon his plate. Drops his fork; I see her face. She is whispering, I cannot tell what she is whispering to me. It is a name at least well known, a name that I cannot mention.
My wife is smiling. ‘Robert, the absurdity! You make yourself ridiculous. Following perfectly respectable gentlemen about the West End of London! Dodging among hansom cabs like a street-arab!’
Not Cavendish Square, Brook Street. The Juwes are The men that Will not be Blamed for nothing. Walls, doorways. A plaster rose in relief. You must listen to me, Inspector.
I have seen a woman turned inside out. A room decorated with her entrails. The room is scarlet; it is sweating. A woman’s voice singing. The smell of violets, left too long in water. They have the talisman. I cannot tell. Carried off or destroyed.
Robert Lees comes up from the Criterion; he had been dining with two Americans. Unconvinced voyant, the Inspector dogging his heels; he is barking like a Plains Indian, coyote throat, a time to believe nothing, to cultivate all the fictions. Stamping at the door, his back turned, not looking upon the slaughter, Millers Court, the final act. Demented Lees, responsible, implicated, some magnetic wave connecting him: he leads them, in a seizure – it will make a good story – not directly, circuitously, getting warmer, Boss.
Out from the hot room, the meat oven, to the cancelled spaces. Cooler, much cooler; cold. To Bucks Row, Hanbury, Matfellon, the White Mount, Berners, almost to the river. But it has already happened. He is foaming, white spittle; he is chewing leaves torn from the roadside. He is talking in tongues, prophesying what has already passed. He is seeing nothing. Robert Lees, quite blind, unravels the entrails of the maze. His brain is a stone of coral.
Further out, circling, deeper; it is almost morning. The party arrive at the house of a distinguished public man, at the gates, 74 Brook Street.
Impossible! This man has filled and still fills many of the most honourable offices of his profession, Baronet and Extraordinary Physician to the Queen; a philosopher and a man of strong will, yet of gentle presence, with soothing manners and a hawk’s eye; one of the most successful of those who have addressed themselves and given their lives to the relief of human suffering and the salvation of human life.
This cannot be, Mr Lees. The physician is not to be lightly disturbed, deflected from his duty; he belongs in the chronicle of society. He has served the highest in the land. Famed for the wise saws of which he is full. He plumes himself on his power of probing the secret hearts of his patients to the lowest depths by eagle glances and by pregnant and pithy pieces of professional sententiousness, enunciated in a melodramatic undertow. Nothing appears to proceed from the spontaneous emotion of the instant – everything is prearranged. He is a marvellous piece of human machinery.
No, sir. We must proceed with due caution. The doctor is not to be incontinently questioned: there has been a great mistake made. You are ill, Mr Lees. Not yourself, sir.
Persisting, Lees rushes out a description of the hallway: rough porter’s chair of black oak, stained glass beyond, a large mastiff at the foot of the stairs. I tell you, it is low-roofed, comfortable, and furnished with costly cabinets, also of oak.
We wait on the servants, until they stir. We are sweat-drenched, dusty, shrunken: unconvinced, on the second step. Ushered directly from door to dining-room. Blackmail House.
The room is long as a street; a girl folding back the shutters. Lady Gull receives them.
‘We have, Madame’ – Inspector Abberline feels that it is he who is being interviewed, and for the position of bootboy – ‘some questions to put to you. There are certain areas upon which you may be able to throw a light.’
The lady of the house, full-figured, easy, adjusts her gown at the throat, turning her face upon her inquisitor, whose back is to the window, red hair on fire.
‘Areas? You have ventured out at this inhuman hour to crave instruction – in geography?’
‘To relieve us, Madame, of particular difficulties. To furnish us with answers to the questions with which I am obliged, reluctantly, to confront you.’
Her gown, again, tightened. Abberline having an almost irresistible urge to check upon his own potential state of undress; feels that his choice of undershirt is being ruthlessly scrutinised.
‘Could we enquire if your husband, Sir William Withey Gull, was at home last evening, at midnight, and for the succeeding two or three hours?’
‘At home?’ Her voice was low, almost melodramatic.
‘Yes, Madame, at home. With you. Here.’
‘Do you seriously expect to establish, Inspector, whether at midnight my husband was honouring me with his company within his own house? Would you perhaps like to discover how precisely he was employed at that hour?’
Abberline finds it impossible to look directly at the woman. And though her hands are heavily ring’d, they are powerful; her face is powdered, her lips savage, her eyebrows quite alarming. He thinks of an owl: feathered immobile calm, razor claws hidden beneath a Japanese wrapper.
‘Perhaps, Inspector, it would soothe you to examine Sir William’s – bedroom? Are you searching for stolen silver, jewels, furs? You think this a likely crib? I could make arrangements for you to crawl beneath the bed. I will have cupboards emptied at your command.’
‘We are here in connection with a peculiarly savage murder. An unfortunate was mutilated last night in Whitechapel. Her womb torn out; her internal organs draped like bunting around the chamber.’
He had gone too far. It was unforgivable. His career was now over. The Lodge was closed to him.
Lady Gull did not shrink from the intrusion of horror. She toyed with a fork.
‘You come into my house and you bring with you unspeakable crimes. Crimes that you have now taken upon yourself to articulate, sparing none of the details that would shame a coroner’s court. You are quite mad, sir! This cannot go unremarked. I shall have occasion to speak with Sir Charles Warren. This is intolerable. An assault! Unwashed from the most barbarous slums in Europe, rubbing against vermin-infested walls, your arms scarlet with blood and filth – to be received in my husband’s house!’
A groan from Lees, head in hands. He is once more under the Royal Arch, nineteen years old, demonstrating clairvoyant tricks for the marble queen. Abberline, white to the temples, now doomed, and with a condemned man’s swagger.
‘If you would allow me, Madame, to examine Sir William’s wardrobe our work would be done.’
They climbed the stairs in silence. The Inspector nervously looking out the great mastiff, who was not to be seen.
The bedroom was immaculate. Fresh linen, bright rugs. An undistinguished watercolour, Thames barges. The boots in the wardrobe all shone accusingly. The long coats gleamed, a headless commission of enquiry. Shirts crisp as tissue paper. Forensic collars. Studs. Cuffs.
‘Would you care to take away for examination,’ said Lady Gull, who remained in the doorway, ‘Sir William’s underclothing?’
They left, were shown out, deposited in the sunshine. All against the tide of deliveries. Pitched out like dirty milkbottles. Parting, abruptly: the Inspector striding off, to no purpose, with his profession’s long experience of making that state look purposeful. On this ability his career had been built. To go by the book when the book said nothing.
Lees was deserted: his visions annulled. They could be transcribed as fiction. The myth, being freed from event, could gather far greater conviction. Released from himself, he hailed a cab; self-indulgent, and hungry, returned to the letter that he could now begin.
Lady Gull walked into her bathroom, sat in a wicker chair to unroll pink stockings, dainty slippers; to drape her patterned robe over a chairback, to face the mirror; full-chested, matted with body hair, right hand upon belly. Her hair was left upon a hook, a hollow cat. The pouting sardonic lips, a little too bright, parted to reveal strong square teeth. The powdered cheek clotted in the steam.
&n
bsp; Wiping the mirror with a firm forearm, looks at herself, thick but unaroused, a knotted rope-end. Flattened nipples painted around with star-shapes, mapped skin: Sir William Withey Gull.
23
To: Caroline Haddon
‘Waiting for a Train’, Berwick Station
May 1875
Dear Carrie,
Since our talk together I have wanted to write to you on one or two points. One thing is instructive to me, as to the way in which it happens that my processes of thought seem to me to excite a mistrust or feeling of inaccuracy or partialness, even (excuse me – I only say seem) in persons who so appreciate me, and enter into the results of my thinking as you do.
It is what I can scarcely now help calling my fluxion method of thinking; that is, the plan which I am quite conscious of when I look into the workings of my mind, of laying aside part of the visible elements of a case, in order better to see the others. What makes this process right is, that laying aside is remembered; and what makes it necessary is the complexity of facts, the presence in all of them, not only of many, but of counteracting or balancing elements, so that the results look simpler than they are, and the full extent of some of the things present can be perceived only by getting rid, in thought, of the mixed-up influences of the others.
I could refer to this process as the erasure of the inessential; but I could go further, leap beyond, it does come on me, that it is the obvious and the most apparent that is not to be stated. That which is present before our eyes needs no elaboration. It is the invisible that moves us. We arrive at the essence by describing that which surrounds it. To describe the invisible itself would be to erase its power over us. If I listed all the forces that were around me, the rights, passions, feelings, influences – I say, all – I would make my own presence wholly unnecessary. By ceasing to be I would however be more powerfully and truly present than I had ever been before. I would be disencumbered, no longer prey to the physical laws of the universe and the grinding tyranny of time. I should never again be before your eyes, a succession of negatives and qualifications, I should be within you, around you, beyond you. In erasing myself I should truly become.
So you see there is a compulsion on me, a necessity – the universal compulsion and necessity by which I believe all deeper seeing has come – to see human life differently, if I am to see it at all. That which is visible in it – is not it. I must see more if I am to feel I see it. I must see some hidden things that seem not there at all, but are there, though I will never see them.
Now, the fact that has arrested me in social life – perhaps it is emphatically in modern social life, though perhaps not – is the discord between people and what they do; how such people can do such things. This is the problem. What I am perhaps more conscious of than most, is the evil of this good life. And this is, I suppose, the happy fruit of my sojourn in Whitechapel in my youth.
I discovered then that there was a force that operates upon us, a force that our deeds can never describe; perhaps our deeds even deflect that force from its purpose. What is that purpose? It is not to be spoken of – other than by stating: it is that which we choose to leave out. We are now far beyond all notions of good and evil, all merely human morality. This new Heaven is not for greenhouses and carriages. There are no high walls around it. We have prepared ourselves for another ‘invisible life’ but that world has slipped away. When we have surrounded it – then it is gone. And we are the shape of that absence.
Dear Carrie, it is assuredly true that some men and some women will be alive and remain to the coming of the Lord; the very last epoch of human life will be witnessed by some eyes and hailed, or wailed (most likely at first) by some hearts incredulous and incapable of believing that they can be the witnesses of the last stage, the triumph. Then assuredly, too, the last stage before the last stage will be witnessed by some eyes, and trembled at, and mourned over, and disbelieved by some weak and troubled minds. Why should they not be yours and mine?
Your loving brother,
James
St Michael’s, The Azores
November 1875
A TRIBUTE
My dear Son,
Not Corvo, nor Flores.
Not Pico. It is at St Michael’s,
almost beyond the pull of
Europe, those tired bones, the
dust of its sad history, that I
have at last settled. Not at rest,
halted. The New World is a
rumour across the cold ocean.
I cannot hear the fall of those
bright feathers, the tooth of
the jaguar breaking upon
black stone.
I watch the sun die and feel
that it is my own brain
burning, liquefying, melting,
cooling to lead. Patches shine
like silver. But they do not
remain.
The fire in my skull is out. I
can watch most calmly as my
brain falls out of the heavens,
so abruptly, into the great
dead sea.
This is where I have come
We have heard recently, from
Ponta Delgada on the island of
St Michael’s in the Azores, of
the death of the philosopher
and surgeon, James Hinton.
Acute inflammation of the
brain declared itself, and after a
few days of intense suffering,
in which he knew no one, he
entered into his rest on the
16th December 1875.
It would be a pain to me that
any Memoir of James Hinton
should go forth without a word
of affectionate regard for his
memory from me. It is now
near twenty years ago that our
acquaintance began. Sympathies
in common on the nearest
subjects of human interest
brought us much together.
I recall vividly the earnest
manner with which he would
submit to me his new works,
chapter by chapter. Convinced
as he was that the only deadness
because this is nowhere. Dust.
The dust that man is,
blowing, blowing. On our
lips and in our fingers. The
orange groves! All those sad
lives; those candles, folded
into bulbs of wax. They hang.
But they are green, Howard.
There is no fire of truth in
them. I will not suck on that
green blood.
Our dwelling is a ruin,
nowhere better. The shutters
cannot hold out the dust. I
take it on my spoon.
A little girl of ten came to me
while I was sitting on the
harbour wall and said, ‘Do tell
me about the fluxions.’
I replied at once, ‘Multiply me
17 by 3. So you know 3 times 7
is 21, 1 and carry 2; 3 times 1 is
3 and 2 is 5 equals 51.’
‘Now,’ I said, ‘do you see
what you have done with that
2? You have put it down and
then rubbed it out; it was
necessary to have it, but not
to keep it. Now, a fluxion is
this; it is a thing we need to
have, but are not intended to
hold; a thing we rightly make,
but in order to unmake.’
in nature, the only negative
condition, was man’s selfishness,
his whole life and
thought was to excite a reaction
against it.
Death to him was a purely
human idea. All nature is living.
He was abreast of the best
physiology of the time, and
may be considered as having
done good service in combating
the narrow views that still
prevail, even in high quarters,
and which would raise a barrier
in nature between organic and
inorganic where none exists.
Hinton was not a man of
science, but a philosopher.
Science was to him the servant
of philosophy. He felt himself
to be an interpreter of nature;
not in the Baconian sense by
the collection and arrangement
of facts, the sequences of
causes and effects, but, like the
Hebrew seer of old, penetrating
through appearances to
their central cause.
I remember one occasion
when he came to me full of
emotion, with tears in his eyes,
at a glimpse he had caught of
the universal relation of things
The world is so beautiful I
don’t know what to do; the
condition of that joy is
consenting to bear pain; and
one scarcely dares to say one is
happy, because it makes the
pain confront one, and the
words have lost their meaning
ere they have passed one’s
lips.
I am happy and sorry; and just
now I cannot see a bit
whether that gladness I think
is coming on the earth is
coming or not.
I am not sure I shall be in a
great hurry to come back.
There is no reason to move
from where I am now. Not
even an eyelid, or tongue
over dried lips. Why should I
disturb the pain that is the
only truth?
It is so sad to me that I have
lost the power of helping
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Page 15
