“You must be…Lise…”
She nodded. “Can you sit up now?”
“I think so.”
“Then you must take a little bouillon.”
At the mention of food, I was instantly very hungry. Madame Pelletier helped me sit up, propped pillows at my back and began to feed me broth with a spoon. At first, I resisted this, but upon discovering that my trembling hand would not support the weight of the spoon, I surrendered to her ministrations.
Soon, I asked, “And where is Sébastien now?”
“At the Théâtre. A rehearsal of Oedipe.” With a faintly deprecatory inflection, she added, “Voltaire’s.”
I smiled at this, and said, “Your theatrical tastes are as pristine as Sébastien’s.”
She smiled in return. “It was not always so, perhaps. But when one knows a man like Sébastien, a man dedicated, noble, with impeccable taste and living a life beyond reproach…one climbs up to his level, or tries to.”
“You esteem him highly.”
“I love him, M’sieu’.”
I had not forgotten my revelation of the night before. True, it seemed less credible in daylight, but it continued to stick in my mind like a burr. I asked myself what I should do with my fantastic theory. Blurt it out to this charming lady and have her think me demented? Take it to the commissaire and have him think me the same? Try to place it again before Sébastien, in more orderly fashion, and solicit his aid? I decided on the last course, and informed my lovely nurse that I felt well enough to leave. She protested; I assured her my strength was restored; and at last she left the bedroom and allowed me to dress. I did so quickly, and left the Sellig rooms immediately thereafter.
By this time, they knew me at the Théâtre Français, and I was allowed to stand in the wings while the Voltaire tragedy was being rehearsed. When the scene was finished, I sought out Sellig, drew him aside, and spoke to him, phrasing my suspicions with more calm than I had before.
“My dear friend,” he said, “I flatter myself that my imagination is broad and ranging, that my mind is open, that I can give credence to many wonders at which other men might scoff. But this—”
“I know, I know,” I said hastily, “and I do not profess to believe it entirely myself—but it is a clue, if nothing more, to Laval’s character; a solution, perhaps, to a living puzzle…”
Sellig was a patient man. “Very well. I will have a bit of time after this rehearsal and before tonight’s performance. Come back later and we will…” His voice trailed off. “And we will talk, at least. I do not know what else we can do.”
I agreed to leave. I went directly to the Guignol, even though I knew that, being midafternoon, it would not be open. Arriving there, I found an elderly functionary, asked if Monsieur Laval was inside, perhaps rehearsing, and was told there was no one in the theatre. Then, after pressing a banknote into the old man’s hand, I persuaded him to give me Laval’s address. He did, and I immediately hailed a passing carriage.
As it carried me away from Montmartre, I tried to govern my thoughts. Why was I seeking out Laval? What would I say to him once I had found him? Would I point a finger at him and dramatically accuse him of being Gilles de Laval, Baron de Rais, a man of the Fifteenth Century? He would laugh at me, and have me committed as a madman. I still had not decided on a plan of attack when the carriage stopped, and the driver opened the door and said, “We are here, M’sieu’.”
I stepped out, paid him, and looked at the place to which I had been taken. Dumbfounded, I turned to the driver and said, “But this is not—”
“It is the address M’sieu’ gave me.” He was correct. It was. I thanked him and the carriage drove off. My mind churning, I entered the building.
It was the same one which contained Sellig’s rooms. Summoning the concierge, I asked the number of Laval’s apartments. He told me no such person lived there. I described Laval. He nodded and said, “Ah. The ugly one. Yes, he lives here, but his name is not Laval. It is De Retz.”
Rayx, Rays, Retz, Rais—according to the history book, they were different spellings of the same name. “And the number of his suite?” I asked, impatiently.
“Oh, he shares a suite,” he said. “He shares a suite with M’sieu’ Sellig…”
I masked my astonishment and ran up the stairs, growing more angry with each step. To think that Sébastien had concealed this from me! Why? For what reason? And yet Laval had not shared the apartment the night before…What did it mean?
Etiquette discarded, I did not knock but threw open the door and burst in. “Laval!” I shouted. “Laval, I know you are here! You cannot hide from me!”
There was no answer. I stalked furiously through the rooms. They were empty. “Madame?” I called. “Madame Pelletier?” And then, standing in Sellig’s bedroom, I saw that the place had been ransacked. Drawers of chiffoniers had been pulled out and relieved of their contents. It appeared very much as if the occupant had taken sudden flight.
Then I remembered the little room or closet I had seen Sellig leaving in the small hours. Going to it, I turned the knob and found it locked. Desperation and anger flooded my arms with strength, and yelling unseemly oaths, I broke into the room.
It was chaos.
The glass phials and demijohns had been smashed into shards, as if someone had flailed methodically among them with a cane. What purpose they had served was now a mystery. Perhaps a chemist could have analyzed certain residues among the debris, but I could not. Yet, somehow, these ruins did not seem, as I had first assumed, equipment for the development of photographic plates.
Again, supernatural awe turned me cold. Was this the dread laboratory of Bluebeard? Had these bottles and jars contained human blood and vital organs? In this Paris apartment, with Sellig as his conscripted assistant, had Laval distilled, out of death itself, the inmost secrets of life?
Quaking, I backed out of the little room, and in so doing, displaced a corner of one of the blue draperies. Odd things flicker through one’s mind in the direst of circumstances—for some reason, I remembered having once heard that blue is sometimes a mortuary color used in covering the coffins of young persons…and also that it is a symbol of eternity and human immortality…blue coffins…blue drapes…Bluebeard…
I looked down at the displaced drape and saw something that was to delay my return to London, to involve me with the police for many days until they would finally judge me innocent and release me. On the floor at my feet, only half hidden by the blue drapes, was the naked, butchered, dead body of Madame Pelletier.
I think I screamed. I know I must have dashed from those rooms like a possessed thing. I cannot remember my flight, nor the hailing of any carriage, but I do know I returned to the Théâtre Français, a babbling, incoherent maniac who demanded that the rehearsal be stopped, who insisted upon seeing Sébastien Sellig.
The manager finally succeeded in breaking through the wall of my hysteria. He said only one thing, but that one thing served as the cohesive substance that made everything fall into place in an instant.
“He is not here, M’sieu’,” he said. “It is very odd…he has never missed a rehearsal or a performance before today…he was here earlier, but now…an understudy has taken his place…I hope nothing has happened to him…but M’sieu’ Sellig, believe me, is not to be found.”
I stumbled out into the street, my brain a kaleidoscope. I thought of that little laboratory…and of those two utterly opposite men, the sublime Sellig and the depraved Laval, living in the same suite…I thought of Sagittarius, the Man-Beast…I thought of the phrase “The sins of the fathers,” and of a banal tune, “More to be Pitied than Censured.”…I realized now why Laval was absent from the Guignol on certain nights, the very nights Sellig appeared at the Théâtre Français…I heard my own voice, on that first night, inviting Sellig to accompany us to the Guignol: “Will you come? Or perhaps you have a performance?” And Sellig’s answer: “I do have a performance” (yes, but where?)…I heard Sellig’s voice in
other scraps: I have not watched a Guignol performance for several years; I have never seen Laval perform…
Of course not! How could he, when he and Laval…
I accosted a gendarme, seized his lapels, and roared into his astonished face: “Don’t you see? How is it possible I overlooked it? It is so absurdly simple! It is the crudest…the most childish…the most transparent of cryptograms!”
“What is, M’sieu’?” he demanded.
I laughed—or wept. “Sellig!” I cried. “One has only to spell it backward!”
VIII
Over the Precipice
The dining room of the Century Club was now almost deserted. Lord Terry was sipping a brandy with his coffee. He had refused dessert, but Hunt had not, and he was dispatching the last forkful of a particularly rich baba au rhum. His host produced from his pocket a massive, ornate case—of the same design as his pill box—and offered Hunt a cigar. It was deep brown, slender, fragrant, marvelously fresh. “The wizard has his wand,” said Lord Terry, “the priest his censer, the king his sceptre, the soldier his sword, the policeman his nightstick, the orchestra conductor his baton. I have these. I suppose your generation would speak of phallic symbolism.”
“We might,” Hunt answered, smiling; “but we would also accept a cigar.” He did, and a waiter appeared from nowhere to light them for the two men.
Through the first festoons of smoke, Hunt said, “You tell a grand story, sir.”
“Story,” the Earl repeated. “By that, you imply I have told a—whopper?”
“An extremely entertaining whopper.”
He shrugged. “Very well. Let it stand as that and nothing more.” He drew reflectively on his cigar.
“Come, Lord Terry,” Hunt said. “Laval and Sellig were one man? The son of Edward Hyde? Starring at the Guignol in his evil personality and then, after a drink of his father’s famous potion in that little laboratory, transforming himself into the blameless classicist of the Théâtre Français?”
“Exactly, my boy. And a murderer, besides, at least the Laval part of him; a murderer who felt I was drawing too close to the truth, and so fled Paris, never to be heard from again.”
“Fled where?”
“Who knows? To New York, perhaps, where he still lives the double life of a respectable man in constant fear of involuntarily becoming a monster in public (Jekyll came to that pass in the story), and who must periodically imbibe his father’s formula simply to remain a man…and who sometimes fails. Think of it! Even now, somewhere, in this very city, this very club, the inhuman Man-Beast, blood still steaming on his hands, may be drinking off the draught that will transform him into a gentleman of spotless reputation! A gentleman who, when dominant, loathes the dormant evil half of his personality—just as that evil half, when it is dominant, loathes the respectable gentleman! I am not insisting he is still alive, you understand, but that is precisely the way it was in Paris, back in the early Nineteen Hundreds.”
Hunt smiled. “You don’t expect me to believe you, sir, surely?”
“If I have given you a pleasant hour,” Lord Terry replied, “I am content. I do not ask you to accept my story as truth. But I do inquire of you: why not accept it? Why couldn’t it be the truth?”
“He is teasing me, of course,” Hunt told himself, “luring me on to another precipice of the plot, like any seasoned storyteller. And part of his art is the dead seriousness of his tone and face.”
“Why couldn’t it?” Lord Terry repeated.
Hunt was determined not to be led into pitfalls, so he did not trot out lengthy rebuttals and protestations about the fantastic and antinatural “facts” of the tale—he was sure the Earl had arguments woven of the best casuistry to meet and vanquish anything he might have said. So he simply conceded: “It could be true, I suppose.”
But a second later, not able to resist, he added, “The—story—does have one very large flaw.”
“Flaw? Rubbish. What flaw?”
“It seems to me you’ve tried to have the best of both worlds, sir, tried to tell two stories in one, and they don’t really meld. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I am prepared to accept as fact the notion that Gilles de Rais was not burned at the stake, that he not only escaped death but managed to live for centuries, thanks to his unholy experiments. All well and good. Let’s say that he was indeed the Guignol actor known as Laval. Still well, still good. But you’ve made him something else—something he could not possibly be. The son of Dr. Henry Jekyll, or rather, of Jekyll’s alter ego, Edward Hyde. In my trade, we would say your story ‘needs work.’ We would ask you to make up your mind—was Laval the son of Edward Hyde, or was he a person centuries older than his own father? He could not be both.”
Lord Terry nodded. “Oh, I see,” he said. “Yes, I should have made myself clearer. No, I do not doubt for a moment that Laval and Sellig were one and the same person and that person the natural son of Edward Hyde. I think the facts support that. The Bluebeard business is, as you say, quite impossible. It was a figment of my disturbed mind, nothing more. Sellig could not have been Gilles.”
“Then—”
“You or I might take a saint as our idol, might we not, or a great statesman—Churchill, Roosevelt—or possibly a literary or musical or scientific genius. At any rate, some lofty benefactor of immaculate prestige. But the son of Hyde? Would he not be drawn to and fascinated by history’s great figures of evil? Might he not liken himself to Bluebeard? Might he not assume his name? Might he not envelop himself in symbolic blue draperies? Might he not delight in portraying his idol upon the Guignol stage? Might it not please his fiendish irony to saddle even his ‘good’ self with a disguised form of Gilles’s name, and to exert such influence over that good self that even as the noble Sellig he could wallow in the personality of, say, a Nero? Of course he was not actually Bluebeard. It was adulation and aping, my dear sir, identification and a touch of madness. In short, it was hero worship, pure and simple.”
He had led Hunt to the precipice, after all, and the younger man had neatly tumbled over the edge.
“There is something else,” Lord Terry said presently. “Something I have been saving for the last. I did not wish to inundate you with too much all at once. You say I’ve tried to tell two stories. But it may be—it just possibly may be—that I have not two but three stories here.”
“Three?”
“Yes, in a way. It’s just supposition, of course, a theory, and I have no evidence at all, other than circumstantial evidence, a certain remarkable juxtaposition of time and events that is a bit too pat to be coincidence…”
He treated himself to an abnormally long draw on his cigar, letting Hunt and the syntax hang in the air; then he started a new sentence: “Laval’s father, Edward Hyde, may have left his mark on history in a manner much more real than the pages of a supposedly fictional work by Stevenson. Certain criminal deeds that are matters of police record may have been his doing. I think they were. Killings that took place between 1885 and 1891 in London, Paris, Moscow, Texas, New York, Nicaragua, and perhaps a few other places, by an unknown, unapprehended monster about whom speculation varies greatly but generally agrees on one point: the high probability that he was a medical man. Hyde, of course, was a medical man; or rather, Jekyll was; the same thing, really.
“What I’m suggesting, you see, is that Laval was—is?—not only the son of Hyde but the son of the fiend who has been supposed an Englishman, a Frenchman, an Algerian, a Polish Jew, a Russian, and an American; whose supposed true names include George Chapman, Severin Klosowski, Neill Cream, Sir William Gull, Aleksandr Pedachenko, Ameer Ben Ali, and even Queen Victoria’s grandson, Eddy, Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward. His sobriquets are also legion: Frenchy, El Destripador, L’Éventreur, The Whitechapel Butcher, and, most popularly—”
Hunt snatched the words from his mouth: “Jack the Ripper.”
IX
The Suspension of Disbelief
“Exactly,” said Lord Te
rry. “The Ripper’s killings, without exception, resembled the later Paris murders, and also the earlier massacres of Bluebeard’s, in that they were obsessively sexual and resulted in ‘wounds of a nature too shocking to be described,’ as the London Times put it. The Bluebeard comparison is not exclusive with me—a Chicago doctor named Kiernan arrived at it independently and put it forth at the time of the Whitechapel murders. And the current series of perverted butcheries here in New York are, of course, of that same stripe. Incidently, may I call your attention to the sound of Jekyll’s name? Trivial, of course, but it would have been characteristic of that scoundrel Hyde to tell one of his victims his name was Jekyll, which she might have taken as ‘jackal’ and later gasped out in her last fits, you know. We’ve placed Hyde’s ‘birth’ at 1886 for no better reason than because the Stevenson story was published in that year…but if the story is based in truth, then it is a telling of events that took place before the publication date, perhaps very shortly before. Yes, there is a distinct possibility that Jack the Ripper was Mr. Hyde.”
Hunt toyed with the dregs of his coffee. “Excuse me, Lord Terry,” he said, “but another flaw has opened up.”
“Truth cannot be flawed, my boy.”
“Truth cannot, no.” This time, it was Hunt who stalled. He signalled the waiter for hot coffee, elaborately added sugar and cream, stirred longly and thoughtfully. Then he said, “Jack the Ripper’s crimes were committed, you say, between the years 1885 and 1891?”
“According to the best authorities, yes.”
“But, sir,” Hunt said, smiling deferentially all the while, “in Stevenson’s story, published in 1886, Hyde died. He therefore could not have committed those crimes that took place after 1886.”
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 143