by James Carnac
—
For five weeks I pursued a quiet and uneventful life with my books and my drawing. I eschewed newspapers and offered no encouragement to my landlady’s chatter. I knew that my craving had led me into recklessness, and in that direction lay detection. I managed, by concentrating upon other things, to still my craving. For five weeks.
Chapter 24
The streets again, long rows of monotonous houses grimy and glistening with an unhealthy sweat where the recent rain had swept them; the windows patched with boards, newspapers and scraps of ragged clothing. Here and there through an aperture a subdued light could be seen, and on screens of ragged fabric moved figures in grotesquely elongated silhouette, their pathetic attempts at privacy betrayed by the light behind them.
Occasional street lamps, naphtha flares on barrows and the illuminated windows of shops cast patches of light upon the pavements and walls, intersecting in triangles of varying brightness, while the bluish moonlight played upon the shiny roofs, forming patterns with the black shadows of the chimney-stacks.
And a ceaseless mutter and the shuffle, shuffle of innumerable feet upon the greasy pavements.
I stood on a kerb before a fried-fish shop, curiously regarding its steady flow of customers. The shop was brightly lit by several gas-jets and, from my position, I could see the counter behind which a sweating man in shirt-sleeves and cloth cap strove to serve fairly in turn each of his clamouring customers. Men and women elbowed each other in efforts to reach the counter before the supply of fish gave out; for within a short time the shop would close for the night. The fortunate ones broke with difficulty from the crowd around the counter and emerged from the shop clutching their purchases. Some paused outside to open their newspaper-wrapped packets and then proceeded slowly, their faces bent over their repasts, their fingers picking. Others shuffled quickly away bearing home their suppers.
From the shop came a buzz of chatter, and a penetrating odour of fried fish.
Outside the shop a man stood, monotonously rocking backwards and forwards a home-made perambulator in which a baby slept. Presently a young woman pushed her way from the shop holding a packet of fish; she took her husband’s arm and they went off, pushing the perambulator before them.
A rough-looking man came out holding some fish on a slip of newspaper upon his upraised palm; he picked at the fish, his jaws working, while he stood by the window of the shop. He wore a large cap which shadowed his bent face. He remained there eating, and I saw his eyes upon my motionless figure by the kerb, running up and down my person. I wore a very old suit and a pair of broken, muddy boots, and my attitude and appearance must have suggested a person fascinated by the sight and smell of the fish-shop yet without the means to buy. The man suddenly advanced and thrust his paper of fish in front of me. “’Ave a bit, mate?” he invited.
I was startled and declined with some mumbled words of thanks. Then I turned on my heel and went off down the street.
I wandered on through streets and alleys, crossed Whitechapel High Street still rumbling with traffic and plunged into another network of slums. It was a raw night in early November with a suggestion of mistiness in the air, and I mended my pace for I was feeling chilly. As I went I examined furtively the people I passed. Some were hurrying, intent upon reaching their homes; others were loitering, while some were even lounging in doorways or the shadowed recesses between walls. Some of the latter I guessed to be police officers in plain clothes, for the newspapers had informed me how closely the streets had been watched since my double exploit.
Many women of the “unfortunate” class were about, but few were walking singly.
I walked about the streets until what must have been, I think, the early hours of the morning, and then I came suddenly upon an elderly drab crouching in a doorway. As I paused and looked down at her she grinned into my face and greeted me with the grotesque endearments with which I was now familiar. I turned my head and looked around; the slum was deserted. Then I went closer to the woman.
Did my action in scanning the street arouse suspicion in the woman, or did an expression on my face warn her? I do not know. But in a moment her leering smile vanished, giving place to a look of surprise and horror. She leaned there against the door, her hands stiffly outstretched, the palms resting against the blistered paintwork. For an appreciable interval neither of us moved. Then she ducked, slipped by me and set off down the street at a shambling run. At the corner she turned and looked back at my still motionless figure. Then she disappeared.
Chuckling I resumed my walk. The sense of power aroused by this creature’s tribute to my personality offset my slight disappointment. And, very soon, I saw another female figure in front of me; it seemed to be that of a younger woman and, from the uncertainty of her walk, I thought that she was probably drunk. I followed her into a narrow court where she mounted a step and pushed open a door; as she did so she looked back over her shoulder and perceived me.
I advanced from the shadowed entrance to the court and she regarded my approach with a grin. She was no elderly drab, I saw, but a woman of, perhaps, thirty years, her face heavily powdered and her clothing flashily smart. She was not so bad-looking and as she stood there smirking I experienced a wave of excitement. Here was a “subject” differing greatly from the others: a certain novelty was promised. She winked and jerked her head towards the open door and then, seeing me step forward again in response, entered.
In the darkness within the entrance I felt her hand upon my arm, and she turned from the passage and drew me into a ground-floor room in the front of the house. I could see nothing but the grey oblong of the window draped with a thin muslin curtain.
I heard movements in the darkness and the scraping of a match; a rush of feeble yellow light as the woman lit an oil lamp revealed the interior of the room.
In an earlier chapter I have referred to that curious habit my memory has of recalling outstanding incidents in purely visual form. I can picture now that scene in the room in Millers Court, but I cannot re-capture the first conversation and can do no more than assume its purport. Nothing of what was said with the exception of the few sentences at the last comes back to me.
The room was a small square one, its walls covered with faded wall-paper which, here and there, hung in torn fragments where it had peeled away, revealing beneath another grimy paper of different pattern. Near the floor, and up to a height of a couple of feet, strips of the paper had been torn vertically; it seemed as if a child or a mischievous puppy had been at work.
Of furniture there was little. A large iron bed-stead with one remaining brass knob and frowsty-looking bed-clothes occupied much of the space. A small wash-hand stand of thin deal bearing remnants of brownish paint stood against one wall beneath a lithographed “supplement” from a Christmas annual; near it was a chair with a broken back and a padded seat oozing grey flock. The oil lamp which the woman had lit stood on a flimsy little table near the bed.
I think the young woman and I must have talked for some time but I cannot, as I have said, recall our early conversation. I sat on the broken chair and I can picture her perched on the edge of the bed, or moving about the room. I remember that soon after our entry to the room she screened the window by pinning up a piece of tattered rep curtain, and that I was grateful to her for this precautionary act. And, in the course of our talk, she, in a very leisurely way, completely undressed.
I had not noticed it at first but now perceived on the wall beside the bed a square of mirror suspended in a narrow wooden frame. Some movement of my own must have attracted my attention, for I caught a reflection of my own face. For some extraordinary reason I can remember clearly what was said from that point onwards.
“What’s your name, dearie?” the woman said. She was not drunk but, on the other hand, she was not sober. She sat there immediately beneath the square of mirror so that, to my fancy, my face hung above her own. In that moment
a thrill of nervous excitement shot through me and I felt my hands wet and clammy; I slowly rubbed the palms on my knees. I did not immediately reply to the woman’s question; I was absorbed in my sensation of excitement and anticipation. I remained silent, staring at her and mechanically rubbing my palms backwards and forwards.
“What’s your name, dearie?” she repeated.
I found that my lips had gone stiff and dry; I passed my tongue over them and replied, slowly: “What do you want to know for?”
She gave her head a toss. “Oh, I don’t want to know particular.” She grinned at me. “I don’t care what yer name is. So long as it ain’t Jack.”
I rose slowly to my feet and as I did so caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror. I can visualize the expression now. I thrust my face forward towards the woman, and as I did so I felt, rather than saw, my image blur and expand. Ghost-like suggestions of other faces peered, distorted, around my head; mouthed over my shoulder. And then I spoke, clearly and distinctly.
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “my name is Jack.”
She gave a single cry of “Murder!” as I reached out and clutched her throat. That cry, I afterward learned, was heard by an inmate of the house who did not, fortunately for me, trouble to investigate. I stood rigid for a few seconds, grasping her throat with both hands and listening intently. Not a sound broke the silence without; I was conscious only of the blood drumming in my ears and a low gasping and wheezing from the woman as she squirmed and struggled under my grasp.
I was able to work quietly and at leisure.
—
I had no premonition as I set out for a walk on the following day of that which was awaiting me. I could not foresee that on that day Jack the Ripper would practically cease to be. I went briskly along the pavement, picking my way between the pedestrians and not observant, to any extent, of my surroundings. I was “licking the chops of memory” to quote one of Stevenson’s expressive phrases; pondering the events of the night. But in a crowded thoroughfare the cry of a newsboy attracted my attention. The raucous and familiar cry: “The Ripper Again!” drew me out of the past to the immediate present.
I fumbled for a copper and stepped unthinkingly into the road towards the lad on the other side. “’Orrible discovery in Whitechapel!” was the last thing I heard before there came a jangle of bells, a shout and a jarring crash; and with that consciousness abruptly left me.
I cannot fix any definite time at which I returned to a perception of life; its dawning was too gradual. I was dimly aware of unfamiliar bare walls and rows of beds with ghost-like figures flitting amongst them long before I was able to correlate these impressions into the realization that I was in a hospital.
When a measure of intelligence returned to me I discovered that my head was swathed in bandages; and I was conscious of a dull throbbing in my right leg.
They told me I had been knocked down by a hansom and that the wheel of a dray had passed over my leg. My right leg. That throbbing was deceptive; I had no longer a right leg to throb.
Part 3
Chapter 25
When I commenced this record, some months ago, it was my intention to conclude it by the description of my Millers Court exploit and the subsequent loss of my limb. This seemed to me a natural conclusion because the woman of Millers Court was my final “subject” and the accident put an end to my active life, while the many years which have since elapsed have brought to me no more than the trivial incidents of a hum-drum existence—certainly nothing worthy of inclusion in this unconventional autobiography. Forty years of hum-drum existence, mark you, gentle reader; it hardly seems right, does it? You, who can look back upon a blameless life entirely free from bloodshed except, perhaps (if you are a man), a few years of purely patriotic bloodshed, may quite justifiably feel a certain resentment at the dilatory behavior of Nemesis; in my case, at least, the daughter of Erebus is hardly what our American friends would call a fast worker. In fact if I die peacefully in bed, as I hope to do, that melancholy event will hardly seem to square with your ideas regarding the prevalence of right and justice. I know that I should have, according to your lights, an extremely unpleasant end.
Yet perhaps I am being unduly cynical in assuming in you an entire lack of understanding—I will not say sympathy—which I can hardly expect. For I have tried, in the course of this record, to convey my sense of being a mere plaything of Destiny; an instrument in some scheme of Fate. Yet what, may well be asked, can that scheme have been?
We touch here upon one of the most elusive problems of the universe. A baby is born; he is carefully tended and cherished, nursed through illnesses, educated and fed to the end that he may become a useful member of society. He gradually develops under the loving and marvelling eyes of his parents to that miraculous and efficient organism, a man. And then at the age of twenty he is killed in a futile war. Why?
A city is painfully and laboriously built; for many years, centuries perhaps, princes, architects, artists and slaves lavish upon it their wealth and toil until at last it stands completed, a monument to man’s energy and efficiency. And an earthquake destroys it in a day. Again why?
Ask our philosophers the purpose of such cruel and wanton events; they will tell you they do not know. Ask our parsons; they will tell you that God moves in mysterious ways; or, in other words, that they do not know. But I, who am less competent to judge than the philosophers, though more competent, I think, than the parsons, will make bold to suggest that the catastrophes visited upon suffering humanity, as individuals or in the aggregate, are simply the caprices of a malevolent and irresponsible Power. This is admittedly a depressing doctrine, but what other can a reasoning and unprejudiced man hold?
The theory I advance is, at least, not one to be readily upset by the test of human experience. In the light of it we may cease to wonder at the tribulations of mankind. And certain “laws of nature” would seem to lend support to my belief, since most of these clearly tend to the discomfort, rather than to the comfort, of humanity. Take, for example, the “laws” of heredity.
A man is the product of heredity and environment. If he is born in a slum of thievish parents, descendants of rogues and doxies, the chances that he will grow up to be other than a dishonest scoundrel, a nuisance to himself and others, are so trivial as to be negligible. But he is merely the sport of demons; he is perfectly helpless. His fate has indeed been hung about his neck.
Are we to blame that wretched product of heredity? We may imprison or even hang him, since he is a nuisance to other citizens whose parents happened to be respectable; but we ought to do it kindly and sympathetically because, you know, he would have chosen respectable parents himself had he been allowed the chance. And I would respectfully remind you, reader, that it is due to the caprice of chance and not to any merit of yours that you were not similarly handicapped at birth.
“Ah!” you may say, yawning behind your hand, “I can see what this fellow is driving at. He is trying to make out that he couldn’t help being a filthy assassin because he was born like that.”
Well, after all, I was “born like that,” O reader. Do you really suppose that if your ancestors had engaged, through generations, in the daily avocation of cutting, ripping and rending their fellow humans; investigating, and inventing perhaps, ingenious dodges for killing with the maximum amount of discomfort to their victims; blood and torn flesh the ordinary accompaniments of their everyday life; do you really suppose that with such forebears you would have been the nice person you are? Like the baby mentioned in “Punch,” you have always “kept yourself respectable,” but do not take too much credit to yourself.
So much for my theory of Providence, which you may accept or reject according to your circumstances and your capacity for thought. Paradoxical as it may seem, my own latter years have been rendered more comfortable by the belief in malevolent Destiny to which I have referred; it has freed me so thoroughly
from responsibility. I have been actuated not by a deliberately cultivated wish to do evil in the sight of others; I have been driven, willy-nilly, along a course mapped out for me. The fate of every man, etc.
And as my latter years have been comfortable I might have ended this record on a note of smugness; a tame ending and very disappointing to a reader accustomed to a proper climax in his literature. But you are not to be disappointed after all; you shall have your final burst of excitement. For it has been brought home to me, quite recently, that even at this eleventh hour I may make the acquaintance of the hang-man in his business capacity unless I bestir myself very thoroughly.
—
You find me then, after a hiatus of forty-two years, living in rooms in a street not far from Russell Square. It is a tall Georgian house with window-boxes, a green door and a highly polished brass knocker; a house respectable in every sense of the word. My living-room is on the first floor; my bed-room at the back of the third.
The latter arrangement is my own choice, and this choice was not dictated by reasons of economy; for although my means have been depreciated by the war and subsequent taxation, I am sufficiently comfortable, financially, to be able to avoid pinching. The room immediately below my bed-room was occupied when I first came to the house; I could have had a room in the front, but I preferred that at the back for the reason that one of its windows communicates with a fire-escape. And I happen to have a morbid horror of fire.
My landlady’s name is Hamlett. My mention of her name would appear to be inconsistent with my earlier declaration that I proposed to avoid mentioning the name of any person at present living; I hope, however, that the conclusion of this record will show that there is no such inconsistency.
Mrs. Hamlett is, so far as I know, an excellent woman, and her efforts for the comfort of myself and my fellow-boarder have been unceasing. She is tall and thin and although well past her prime has been sufficiently infected by the virus of modernity to bob her hair, which hangs beside her face and occasionally over her eyes in a series of rat-tails. She is lugubrious in manner but is fortunately free from the garrulous propensities of her tribe—a great advantage in my eyes. She is assisted by a maid-of-all-work named Minnie—a typical post-war product complete with indifferently shingled hair and artificial silk hose. She is chatty, but her chattiness may be stemmed by hints. I have rather taken to Minnie; she is a fair example of a decent English board-school girl whose education has been completed by the American “talkies,” and although she shows a tendency to lapse, occasionally, into the diction of the Bowery I believe that she has a streak of shrewd and kindly common-sense. I have a feeling that, in emergency, Minnie would show up well.