The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot [12]
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