CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Jeb’s Memoir
After the turmoil of the night, I didn’t think I’d ever sleep again. But I did, dreamless and dark, if anything with the feeling of simple gliding through the night sky. Still, my mind was so provoked, it awoke me within a few hours, so I took a bath, gobbled something of breakfast, happily ignored Mother who happily ignored me, and took a hansom by ten A.M. for the professor’s.
We had said nothing on the way back from the station, as if the ordeal had drained us of all cogency. At that point, I felt too worn down to attempt to make sense of plans or consider ramifications. I considered the same of the professor. He himself answered his door and led me to his study, where he’d been having morning coffee. He offered me the same, but I was too agitated to settle down to civilized ritual. My poor mind was aflutter with doubt. “I turn to you for insight. It would help me so much in the construction of the story. What was driving him? How did his mind work, that it could be so heroic in the one quarter and so malevolent in the other? What was his motive?”
“I have puzzled myself. It was something Beneath, I think. Remember how I believe that there’s always a Beneath to a written piece? Clearly such a phenomenon springs from the fact that the mind itself has a Beneath, which we may not feel, acknowledge, understand, but which guides us.”
The colonel, the professor said, never really left Afghanistan. He was forever in the war. “Give the man credit. He understood that he was damaged, he understood that he was dangerous, and perhaps more heroic than the action that earned him his VC was his struggle against the demons that had infiltrated his Beneath. He tried to adjust, he tried to discipline himself from his impulses by concentrating on his Pashto dictionary, or if his dreams, anguish, memories, physical pain got really bad, by smoking the opium. But it was no use. He lost in the end.”
I was astonished how empathetic Professor Dare was in regard to a man who had within the past twelve hours come within a hair of murdering him. But such, I felt, was the greatness of the man. Under his sarcastic exterior, his own Beneath was compassionate and humane.
“He was haunted by the screams of young soldiers gutted in the night by Afghan women in the retreat from Maiwand, and he had to bring surcease to it. He had to make the screaming stop. Vengeance, even symbolic, was his final recourse. He could not deny it. So he went out on his own missions and did to them what they had done to his men. It was a narcotic. It took more and more violence to satisfy him. We cannot really blame him; he is, after all, us. He is the consequence of empire.”
“Yes,” I said, “that I understand.”
“Thus, motive is not a meaningful term here: impulse, undeniable desire, total and compelling need, those terms are more realistic.”
“He was, then, Jekyll and Hyde?”
“I think Louis Stevenson simplified by making each unaware of the other’s presence. No, no, it’s a matter of integration, merger, that somehow the Beneath takes over and manipulates the sentient. The Beneath, I believe, is like the iceberg, the seven tenths that lurks beneath the water. It is therefore the more powerful, the more masterful, the more brilliant.”
“I suppose I see,” I said. “I hope I can make the world see.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“Then I’m off to the Sholes machine, and I will—”
“Now hold for a second,” he said. “I do have, since you have convinced me that this is the course you mean to pursue, a suggestion.”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“This is a precipitous time for your enterprise, and I wonder if you are aware of that fact.”
“I am aware that the public is desperate for an end to the menace and terror of Jack,” I said.
“Not exactly. As of December of last year and more so since June of this year, a great many members of the public, particularly people of our sort, who matter and determine the course of our nation’s mental drift, have come to believe in the moral and intellectual authority of the amateur detective. As a figure, he is enlarging in the public imagination, even while that of the professional police detective has diminished. You yourself, to judge by your comments, are in his thrall. The horror of Jack and the utter failure of Warren’s coppers to halt or solve it has perhaps multiplied this condition. The people want a heroic detective to solve it. In their bosom, they yearn for a man to emerge who has insights, understandings, analytical and deductive powers, forensic attributes, a knowledge of darkness and its methods, and the will and righteous energy to project such on the malefactor while protecting the public. The public yearns for Sherlock Holmes.”
“Of course,” I said. “I had admired the creation. I see him and Watson in us, I must admit.”
“I have at last read A Study in Scarlet, in the Ward Lock edition. It seems to have entered that zone of private but vast awareness. Because Conan Doyle, an opthalmalogist, as I understand it, created the ideal detective. Sherlock Holmes: a man of science, a man of deduction paramount and refined, a man of calm, overall a man of complete rationality who sees what others have missed and is able to put facts in their proper order and context.”
“Exactly,” I said, quite pleased that the living Sherlock Holmes had validated my insight.
“The structure is also interesting. He himself does not narrate. He is, rather, observed by a junior partner, a fellow of keen observation as well as astute literary powers. This would be Watson, an MD actually, recently retired from military service. Holmes solves the case, Watson tells the tale.”
“You are suggesting—”
“What I am suggesting is that before you write your story, you reread Conan Doyle’s. In that way you will learn how someone has done it masterfully, the rhythms between the narrator and the hero, the careful placement of clues, the cycle of interpretation and revelation, all reported in oak-solid, dead-lucid English prose. That is, read A Study in Scarlet again and then write your story in the penumbra of its influence. Thus will you prosper. Thus will you do justice not only to Dare and Jeb but to Polly, Annie, Long Liz, Kate, and poor Mary Jane, and in a way, even to poor Colonel Woodruff, God rest his tormented soul.”
“Excellent advice,” I said. “I shall forthwith. We must publish the day after the funeral, even if they have not found the body. It is imperative that we name the colonel, so that the police may open his rooms and there, no doubt, find Annie’s rings, perhaps a knife, perhaps some pickled bits of Judy, some bloody rags, all signs of his perfidy, making our case air-tight.”
I stopped at Mudie’s on New Oxford and bought the Ward Lock & Company edition of A Study in Scarlet.
And so it was that afternoon that I reintroduced Mr. Holmes and his amanuensis, Dr. Watson, to my life. It was a cracking good read. Conan Doyle wrote clearly and directly, without affectation or ruse. Moreover, he had a gift for vigorous narrative that perhaps approached Louis Stevenson’s or Dickens’s even at this early stage of his career. I roared through the thing a second time, transfigured and pleased to be in the company of two such interesting gentlemen. While I saw a lot of Holmes in Dare, however, I saw very little of Watson in myself, except by structure of the story. Where Watson was wise and well salted, I was impetuous, ambitious, perhaps too brilliant to do anybody any good as an assistant, having a need for my own way and the prime spotlight. Knowing that, I told myself, would be very fine guidance for the long article I was about to write, for I would be able to control my love of self enough to let the true hero, Professor Dare, have center stage. It would benefit not only him but me as well.