“He’s a lunatic!” declared Du Maurier (was George here? mused Henry; had they come together?) “You’ve read the letters he wrote to the newspaper. No sane man would write with such odd taunts and turns of phrase.”
“On the contrary.” Wilde took this up. “The letters suggest a literary side to the fellow. But then, all of us literary fellows are mad, aren’t we, Henry?”
Why must Wilde ask such questions? Henry thought with irritation. He waved away the asparagus that was being offered by the boy at his elbow, but allowed a small helping of the potato salad. “I’ll admit that we all have our peccadilloes,” he responded finally, “but some of us are more excessive in that way than others.” He cast a disapproving glance at Wilde’s foppish waistcoat.
“But excess is a matter of context,” protested Wilde. “You are, in certain contexts, as excessive as I am. The number of words you employ, for example. True, you are subtle, but there is lunacy in subtlety. Perhaps our murderer is being subtle too, if we only knew the context in which he is operating.”
“Now you’re being too subtle for me,” said Henry, finishing the potato salad and wishing he had taken more.
“The letters to the papers are certainly curious,” noted Du Maurier, returning to this point. “Whoever heard of a murderer naming himself Jack the Ripper? It’s almost comic, in a morbid sort of way.”
“Yes,” acknowledged Wilde, “the man has a dramatic flair.”
“And some of his locutions,” continued Du Maurier. “The ‘ha ha’ that he puts in the letters, for example, taunting in the most unambiguous terms. It makes one’s skin crawl.”
“It reminds me of Whistler’s laugh, you know,” said the young man next to Wilde, winking at the American woman. “He laughs like that: ‘ha ha.’”
“Quite true; that’s Whistler,” agreed Wilde. “You do it well.” He nodded approvingly at the young man. “Let me try. ‘Ha ha.’ You do it better. Do it again.”
“Ha ha,” repeated the young man.
Everyone laughed.
“Where is that great pretender?” asked Du Maurier. “I mark a distinct absence of preening in the room.”
“He’s on his honeymoon in Paris,” said the young man. “He married his architect’s widow, Beatrice Godwin.”
“Beautiful Beatrice, rich as Croesus,” intoned Wilde.
“Shaw is an ass!” asserted the elderly gentleman suddenly.
“We’re not speaking of Shaw, but of Whistler, Monty,” corrected Wilde.
“Whistler is an ass too,” put in Du Maurier. “Keep him away from me.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” proffered the young man next to Wilde. “After his honeymoon he intends to settle in Paris, where he feels he will be more appreciated. It’s a commendable plan, in my opinion. His art has swayed too far toward the Japanese, and he needs to be recalled to the French influence.”
Henry glanced at the young man for voicing such an informed opinion. He could not place him, but then, his mind was jumbled; a headache had set in. He had a meringue à la crème on his plate along with a chocolate crème and a maraschino jelly. Was he eating too much? Alice maintained that he was and was growing stout. “Corpulent” was the term he preferred. He motioned for the champagne, which he imagined might settle his stomach.
The cheeses had made their appearance, and the sardines. “No sardines, please; they disagree with me.” Why had he said that? It was more than a servant needed to know. He was always doing that—saying too much. He ought to be more reticent, especially with the servants.
Wilde had embarked on another subject. “We must have a dramatic evening next time,” he proposed, and with a nod to the young man beside him: “We can do our music hall turns.”
“But will there be more murders?” asked the American woman, who obviously had no interest in music and preferred the more macabre topic.
“Undoubtedly. If this Ripper fellow is caught and put out of commission, then someone else will have to take them up. Your response is indicative, madam. We have come to view the murders as entertainment. Of course, to keep us interested, they will have to become more gruesome.”
“Oh no!” exclaimed the pretty, impressionable woman.
“Sadly, yes,” said Wilde. “It is in our nature to enjoy atrocity so long as it continues to shock and remains comfortably removed from our own lives. It takes an exceptional sensibility to feel beyond the parameters of self. I know very few so constructed, and I am not one of them.”
Henry acknowledged to himself that he was not either, though his sister, Alice, was. “An apricot,” he instructed the boy who was holding the platter of fruit off to the side. It occurred to him, as the apricot was placed on his plate, how much the servants would enjoy the leftovers. So much food! Would they carry it off to their homes? Where did they live? In the East End, where the murders had happened? And what, he wondered, did this boy’s mother do—washing or sewing or something less reputable? He would not think about it. “A touch of the Madeira,” he instructed the boy.
The ices were being served, and he noted, with a leap of pleasure, that they had pineapple cream, his favorite.
“Will they catch him?” inquired the American woman. “Will he be brought to justice?”
“Justice,” Wilde sneered. “What is justice?”
“The gallows, I should think.”
“Perhaps they will find him if he is a crazed lunatic and bring him to the gallows—but is there justice in that? What would a lunatic care or know about being hanged? And if he’s not a lunatic, then no doubt they won’t catch him. It’s an unsatisfying set of alternatives.”
“You should write about it, Mr. James,” insisted the woman to his left.
“I don’t write about such things,” said Henry. “They are too—”
“Vulgar.” Wilde completed the thought.
Henry did not disagree. His work was a means of keeping the more unseemly aspects of life at bay. Each member of his family had found a way to do this: his older brother through theoretical constructions, his younger brothers through the anesthetic of alcohol and gambling, his sister by taking to her bed. Overall, he preferred his own method: the evasion of art.
He began to eat his ices and tried to make his mind focus on where he was, but he felt dizzy, and the rumblings in his stomach distracted him. He had had too much wine; the sweetbreads (unless it was the oysters) had disagreed with him. He wished he were in his rooms in De Vere Gardens, where Mr. and Mrs. Smith, his invaluable servants (with whom he must learn to be more reticent), would put him to bed. Tomorrow he would work. He had a new project in view—a story about a couple who existed in ghoulish symbiosis, one sapping energy and personality from the other. Marriages, as he had observed them, were brutal arrangements; he was glad he had no truck with them.
But—his mind darted beyond the complacent thought, as it so often did in its drive to complicate—who was exempt from brutality? His own imagination was brutal; no knives or hatchets, but brutal nonetheless. He knew it was so, thinking of what he did. In his own way, he knew all about hacking to pieces. Which was why the murders in the East End, horrible though they were, did not shock him. They had their source in the same kind of anger and fear and resentment that coursed through him. He had learned to control such things, to channel them by putting pen to paper. But that excess of words, that devotion to subtlety, wasn’t it, in its own way, mad? Yes, much as he hated to agree with Wilde, he knew that lunacy was a matter of context, and the line separating the novelist and the murderer was not as great as one might think.
Chapter 2
Henry opened his eyes with a start. He had dozed over his ices, and he now saw that the table had been cleared. A few disorderly souls were loitering in the corner of the room, but the other guests had already taken their leave and dispersed into the night.
He rose and made his way unsteadily to the side door. His stomach had begun to rumble loudly, making him eager to exit the premises as quickly as he could.