Marx himself had been confined to his house since the evening John Cree had seen him in the Reading Room of the British Museum; he had contracted a severe cold, which had no doubt been exacerbated by his evening with Solomon Weil and his long walk homeward. He had seen no newspapers and so was quite unaware of the death of his friend—until, that is, Chief Inspector Kildare and Detective Paul Bryden visited his house in Maitland Park Road on the morning of September the 18th. They were shown into his study on the first floor by one of Marx’s daughters, Eleanor, who at the time was also looking after her mother: Jenny Marx had been ill for some weeks, and would soon be diagnosed as suffering from cancer of the liver. The room which they entered was filled with books, scattered around as if the spirit had been drained from them and they had sunk exhausted to the floor; the atmosphere was heavy with the scent of cigar smoke and, for a moment, Bryden was reminded of the song cellars and Caves of Harmony which he had inspected when he first joined the Metropolitan Police Force. Karl Marx was sitting at a small desk in the middle of his study; he was wearing a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles which he removed as the two policemen entered. He was not particularly perturbed by their visit; he had been used to official attention for the last thirty years, and he greeted them with his customary mixture of gravity and self-assurance. But he was, perhaps, a little puzzled: in recent years the Home Office had seemed to lose interest in him. He was, after all, now an elderly revolutionary.
He invited both men to sit on a leather sofa beneath the window and, walking up and down on the small avenue of carpet left between his books, he politely asked them their business. Kildare wondered where he had been on the evening of the 16th, and he replied that he had stayed in bed with a chest cold from which he was now recovering. His wife and two daughters would confirm his presence in the house that night but, excuse me, had there been some kind of event? When they informed him of the death of Solomon Weil he stared at them for a moment, put his hand up to his beard, and muttered something in German.
“So you knew him, sir?”
“Yes. I knew him. He was a great scholar.” He took his hand from his beard, and looked at them gravely. “It is an attack upon the Jew,” he said. “It is not an attack upon Solomon Weil.” It was obvious that the police officers did not wholly understand him. “If only you knew,” he continued, “how in this world men can become the symbols of ideas.” Then he remembered his manners, and asked them if they would care for tea; Eleanor was summoned once again and, after she had left the room, the policemen questioned Marx more closely about his association with Weil. “I am a Jew also, although perhaps you would not know it.” Kildare made no reply but he noticed that, although Marx was old, there was a defiance and even anger within him which he barely managed to keep in check. “We spoke together of the old stories and legends. We discussed theology. We both lived in our books, you see.”
“But you have also been seen alone, sir, in the streets of Limehouse.”
“I love to walk. Yes, even at my age. When I walk, I can think. And there is something about those streets which excites contemplation. Shall I tell you a secret?” Still Kildare said nothing. “I am writing a poem. In my earlier years I did nothing but compose poetry and now, in a place such as Limehouse, I can recall all the anger and sorrow of my youth. That is why I walk there.” He hardly noticed Eleanor when she brought in the tea, and she left the room as quietly as she had entered. “But do you suspect me of being a murderer, as well? Do you think I have red hands?” The allusion was not lost upon them, since they had already examined the files on “Carl Marx” in the Metropolitan Police Office—they had particularly noticed Detective Officer Williamson’s Special Report, numbered 36228, written six years before, in which it was recommended that Mr. Marx should be denied naturalization on the grounds that he was “the notorious German agitator, the head of the International Society, and the advocate of Communistic principles.” He had also been investigated at the time when Irish revolutionaries had attacked Clerkenwell Prison and the Home Secretary, Lord Aberdare, had placed him under surveillance after the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871.
“All I see upon your hands,” Kildare replied, “is the ink that you use.”
“That is good. That is how it should be. Sometimes I believe that I am made of ink and paper. Tell me now, how was Solomon killed?” Kildare looked across at the door of the study, which Eleanor had left open, and Marx closed it very quietly. “Is there something …”
“The details are unpleasant, sir.”
“Tell me everything, if you would be so kind.” Marx listened intently as Kildare explained how the skull of Solomon Weil had been crushed with a blunt instrument, probably a mallet, and how the body had then been mutilated. He also described how various organs had been draped around the room, and how the penis had been found on the open page of Hartlib’s Knowledge of Sacred Things across the entry for “golem.” That would be the name he would read in the newspapers. “So now they call this murderer a golem, do they?” Marx was very angry, and for a few moments he allowed the full force of his nature to be revealed to the two detectives. “So they absolve themselves of their responsibilities, and declare that the Jew is killed by a Jewish monster! Make no mistake about it, gentlemen. It is the Jew who has been killed and mutilated, not Solomon Weil. It is the Jew who has been violated, and now they wash their own hands clean!”
“But a prostitute has also been foully mutilated, sir. She was not a Hebrew.”
“But do you see how this murderer strikes at the very symbols of the city? The Jew and the whore are the scapegoats in the desert of London, and they must be ritually butchered to appease some terrible god. Do you understand that?”
“So you think it is some kind of conspiracy, or secret society?”
Karl Marx waved away the question with his hand. “Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretier.”
“Sir?”
“I cannot interpret it for you in that sense, gentlemen. I am talking only of the real forces which have created these deaths. Murder is part of history, you see. It is not outside history. It is the symptom, not the cause, of a great disease. You know, in the prisons of England, more convicts die at the hands of their fellows than by the judicial process.”
“I don’t follow you there.”
“I mean that the streets of this city are a prison for those who walk in them.”
At that moment there was a gentle tap upon the door and Eleanor, staying outside, asked if the gentlemen would care for more tea. No, they were refreshed and required no more; so she came in to remove the tray. She had something of her mother’s poise and once indomitable energy but she had also inherited her father’s innate theatricality—to such an extent, in fact, that, like her sister, Jenny, she was intent upon a career on the stage. She had already taken lessons from Madame Clairmont in Berners Street, but, although she had always enjoyed the low comedy of the halls, in such a respectable family as her own a career as comique or danseuse was quite out of the question. So she had begun to pursue a more serious course and in fact, earlier that week, had been promised her first part in Vera, or The Nihilist by Oscar Wilde. Her role was to be that of Vera Sabouroff, the daughter of an innkeeper, and she was mentally rehearsing one of her lines—“They are hungry and wretched. Let me go to them”—when she came into her father’s study to remove the tray.
Her father was accustomed to her presence, and simply continued with his conversation. “The dramatists treat the streets as theater, but it is a theater of oppression and cruelty.”
“They are hungry and wretched. Let me go to them.”
“What was that, Lena?”
She had spoken out her line, without realizing she had done so. “Nothing, Father. I was thinking aloud,” she whispered as she left the room.
The two detectives were not disposed to stay much longer in the old man’s company; but they listened to him politely enough, as he strode up and down the avenue of carpet. “D
o you know French, by any chance?” he asked them. “Do you know what I mean when I say that la mort saisit le vif?”
“Has it something to do with death, sir?”
“It could be so. It can be translated in any number of ways.” He went over to the window; from here, he could see a small park where children came to play. “It also has something to do with history, and the past.” He stared down at a small boy carrying a hoop. “And I suppose that Solomon Weil was the last of his line.” He turned to face the police detectives. “What will happen to his books? They cannot be dispersed. They must be secured.” They looked at him in surprise for asking such a question and now, at last, they rose to leave without answering him. They did not believe that they had found their murderer, although Marx’s alibi would have to be thoroughly investigated and, for the next few days, he would be followed whenever he left the house in Maitland Park Road.
He remained in his study after they had gone, and tried to recall the details of his last conversation with Solomon Weil. He took up a sheet of paper and, still standing, made brief notes on all that he could remember. There had been one incidental exchange which still remained with him. They had been discussing the beliefs of a sect of Jewish Gnostics who flourished in Cracow in the mid-eighteenth century; their central article of faith concerned a form of perpetual reincarnation in the lower world, through which the inhabitants of the earth were continually reborn in other places and in other circumstances. The malevolent spirits of the lower air could sometimes divide a departing soul into two or three “flames” or “flashes,” so that the elements of the same person might be distributed into more than one body of the newly born. The demons had one other power, granted to them by Jehovah who is the evil god of this world: certain remarkable men would be restored to earth in the full knowledge of their previous life and identity but, on pain of everlasting torture, they could never reveal that knowledge. If they managed to sustain another natural cycle of generation upon this earth, then their spirit would finally be released. “Do you know that you are Isaiah,” Solomon Weil had asked Marx that night, “or perhaps you are Ezekiel?”
He went over to the window once more, and looked down at the children. Was his old friend even now waking up to another life on earth? Was he one of the chosen, who would know that he had once been Solomon Weil? Or had his soul already been released? But it was all nonsense.
He walked to his shelves, and took down Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy by Thomas De Quincey.
TWENTY
I believe that in a past life I must have been a great actress. As soon as I walked upon the stage with Doris, even before the gas had been lit, I felt quite at my ease. Of course in those early days I was merely the prompter and play-copier, no higher in station than the general utility man or the callboy—I never thought to sing or dance, any more than the limelight man would dream of becoming a comic patterer. But, as I said, the stage was my element.
My first days were spent watching Dan Leno in rehearsal with Charlie “They Call Me Dizzy” Boyd, and my employment was to write down all the “trimmings” and “chaff” which occurred to them as they went through the script. I would hear Dan say, “That wouldn’t make a bad line, would it?” or, “Can you see your way to adding this little bit of business?” and I knew that I would have to write furiously in order to keep up with what he called his “spontaneizing.” He was still very young but he could already draw upon an infinite fund of pathos and comic sorrow: I often wondered where it came from, not finding it in myself, but I presume that there was some little piece of darkness in his past. He was always laughing, he was never still, and he had a way of saying the most ordinary things so that you never forgot them. We were passing the Tower of London one day, on our way back from the Effingham in Whitechapel, and he leaned out of the window to look at it. He kept on staring until we turned down the next street, and then he settled back in the carriage with a sigh. “Now that’s a building,” he said, “that satisfies a long-felt want.” It was the way he said it, too, not like a cockney slangster but, as he used to put it, in a melodious melancholy manner of mirth.
So I loved those early days, as I watched and listened to them gagging on the stage. “Tell me, officer,” Charlie was saying, “are you flying by the seat of your pantaloons or sitting on the fly of your pantaloons?”
“That’s too strong.” Dan always came down hard on that type of humor. “I’ll bring you round to your song, don’t you think? And then I’ll come down to the pit and start my monologue.” That song was Charlie’s speciality—“Yesterday She Gave Me Twins, Just to Show There’s No Hard Feelings”—and Dan took on the role of Charlie’s much put-upon, much harassed wife. “Yes, he took me to the hospital. Such a lovely place it was. Full of beds. The nurse comes up to me and says, ‘Are you here because of him?’ ‘Well, dear,’ I said, ‘he paid the bus fare.’ Didn’t we all laugh? Then I said to her, ‘If you’ll just relieve me of this little burden, I’ll be on my way.’ ‘When are you due?’ she says. ‘Not the baby, dear. Him.’ Oh, we laughed.” Dan stopped then, and looked over at me. “It hasn’t got that certain spark, has it?”
I shook my head. “It’s not quite motherly enough.”
Dan turned to Charlie, who was silently performing his favorite trick of walking backwards in perfect tempo. (I had once seen him on the stage of the Savoy Variety, trying to fool a constable on guard outside a grand party by walking backwards and pretending to leave rather than enter. It was memorable.) “What do you think, Charlie? Was I motherly?”
“Don’t ask me, dear.” He had become motherly himself, in sympathy. “I’ve had so many kids that I think Noah must have got to me. Something very old and hard, anyway.”
Of course there were often jokes and remarks which I pretended not to hear: it’s natural for hall folk to bring out the blue bag, as they say, but I wanted to convince Dan that I was as innocent as any Columbine in the panto. I wanted to save myself for the stage. Doris, the goddess of wire-walking, was always very good to me. She had listened to my orphan’s story, and had decided to “keep an eye out” for me. We slept together on cold nights, and I would press up against her nightdress to get the beauty of her hot. And we used to talk as we snuggled—we used to dream of having the Prince of Wales out front, and how he would come round to shake hands with us after the performance, or of how some rich admirer would send us five carnations a day until we agreed to marry him. Our mutual friend Tottie Golightly, a warbler and funny female, sometimes joined us for a little bit of mash and sausage in our room. She was the most fashionably dressed creature, with high button boots that shone like diamonds in the gas lamp, but on stage she wore a battered yellow hat, a topcoat three sizes too big for her and a pair of ancient shoes. She always came on brandishing an old green umbrella like a gigantic lettuce leaf. “Now what about this?” she used to say, waving it about. “Stupendous, ain’t it? Magnificent, ain’t it? You could go into the Channel with this, and never get wet. Am I right, or is any other woman?” That was her catch phrase, and she could never begin it without the house shouting out the rest with her. Her famous song was “I’m a Woman of Very Few Words”; after she had finished it she would leave the stage for a few seconds, and then return in gleaming frock coat, trousers and monocle to warble “I Saw Her Once at the Window.” I noticed everything, you see, and remembered everything; I think that, even then, I was waiting impatiently for the day when I could put on makeup and costume as well.
Little Victor Farrell was another artist who, unfortunately, took a shine to me. He was no more than four feet in height, but he made a great impression on the public with his character of “The Midshipmite.” He used to follow me about everywhere, but when I told him to blow away he would give one of his sarcastic little smiles and pretend to wipe his eyes on a handkerchief which was almost as big as he was. “Let’s go down to the Canteen for a chop,” he said one night after we had been playing at the Old Mo. “Do you feel like a bit of meat,
Lizzie?” I had just finished cleaning out the green room, and I was too tired to give him the elbow; in any case, I was famished. So we went downstairs below the stage: it was like a refreshment cellar, but it was patronized only by artists and their friends. These “friends” were the usual stage-door Johnnies and swells who went after any female in the business—but they never came after me, not when they had taken one look at me and realized that I would no more lift my skirts for them than I would for the devil.
There were no fancy frescoes or flowers in the Canteen, just a few plain tables and chairs with a big cracked mirror against one wall where they could all reflect upon their bleary faces. It smelled of tobacco and mutton chops, with a bit of spilled gin and beer to add savor. I hated the place, to tell you the truth, but, as I said, I was hungry. Little Victor Farrell would not let go of my arm, just as if he wanted to put me on show like the stuffed parrot he used in his “Midshipmite” routine, and he steered me to a table where Harry Turner was brooding over a glass of stout. Harry rose from his chair when I came over—he always was a gentleman—and Victor asked if he would have another, to which he graciously assented. Harry was Statisticon, the Memory Man, and there was never a date or a fact which he couldn’t recall on the stage. He told me his story once—how he was almost crushed to death as a child in a street accident, by one of those old-fashioned postilions, and had to spend three months in bed. He decided to read everything he could and found himself memorizing history dates, just for the pleasure of it; he never looked back. He still had a limp from where the wheel of the carriage went over his leg, but he had a sounder mind than anyone else I ever met. “Tell me, Harry,” I said, just to pass the time while Victor went over to the bar. “What was the date when the Old Mo was built?”
The Trial of Elizabeth Cree Page 8