Murder by Candlelight (9 page)

Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again. . . .

The party in Probert's parlor has roughly the same significance, in the tragedy of Thurtell, that the knocking at the gate has in the tragedy of Macbeth. Having re-entered ordinary life, Macbeth seeks pleasure in a “great feast,” much as Thurtell and his henchmen seek it in a little one. “Come, love and health to all,” Macbeth cries:

Give me some wine; fill full.

I drink to th' general joy o' th' whole table.

Only Macbeth deviates from the familiar pattern in feeling scarcely, or not at all, the fleeting euphoria that Thurtell and his chums feel—the “Dionysian dowry,” the life-enhancing intoxication, which Nietzsche says is characteristic of the feast that follows the sacrifice and productive of that “horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty” which is the “real ‘witches' brew.'”

But the euphoria is temporary, and ultimately the “re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live,” De Quincey says, makes the evil-doers more “profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.” Macbeth, after killing Duncan, discovers that life has lost its savor; Thurtell, after killing Weare, is rapidly overtaken by despair. Macbeth no longer relishes an existence that has “fallen into the sere”—its autumnal decay; and Thurtell and his mates discover, after the first narcosis of pleasure has worn off, that grog has ceased to cheer and song to make merry. They, too, “have supp'd full with horrors,” and, like Macbeth, are

cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd, bound in

To saucy doubts and fears. . . .

*
Thurtell said that he had once been “upon terms of intimacy with a Quaker's family at Norwich,” and had privately paid his addresses to the daughter. The Quaker, however, was informed that his daughter's suitor “was a profligate bad character” and forbade him the house.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Devil's Grammar of Debauchery

the wakeful Bird
Sings darkling

—
Milton

A
t midnight, Mrs. Probert rose from the table; her husband, however, called for another bottle of rum.

“I suppose you will make a drunken bout of it,” she said to him. “I shan't disturb you.”

“Yes,” Thurtell said, “you may expect to see your Billy come up to bed drunk enough.”

Mrs. Probert went upstairs.

“We may as well look and see if there is any
chaunt
[marking] about the money,” Thurtell said. They examined Weare's five-pound notes and found no marks. Thurtell then took out Weare's note-case. It contained a shooting license and a few loose memoranda, but no money. Thurtell next produced Weare's silk purse.
In it were three sovereigns and some silver. They burned the purse upon the hearth together with the papers, and Thurtell divided the money.

“That's your share of the blunt,” he said as he gave his mates six pounds apiece. He kept eleven pounds for himself, justifying the larger sum as compensation for the expense to which he had gone in renting the gig and purchasing the pistols.

“This is a bad look out,” Probert said as he took his share. “This is hardly worth coming down for, Jack.”

“It cannot be helped,” Thurtell said. “I thought, Bill, we should have had a hundred or two at the least, but we must now make the best of it we can. This watch you must recollect, Bill, will fetch twenty or thirty pounds.”

“Very true,” Probert said, “and the gun, if it is good for any thing, will fetch ten pounds. Go, Hunt, and fetch the gun, and all the other things, and let's see what they are worth.”

Hunt went to the stable and brought back the gun, a small box, and a carpetbag.

Probert took up the gun. “This is one of Manton's make,” he said. “It will bring at least ten pounds.” He then laid hold of the box. “This is the backgammon board you were speaking of, Jack.”

“Yes,” Thurtell said. “That is the board to pick up a flat with.”

“Come, Jack, let's open the bag, there may be some money in that.”

Thurtell took a knife and cut open the bag. In it were the clothes and traveling things Weare had brought down with him, together with his shooting gear, his loaded dice, and his false cards.
^*

Perhaps no writer of his generation was more sensitive of the hellish breaches in existence than De Quincey, or more skilled in making their horror palpable to the reader. His account of his separation from the waif Ann, lost in the “mighty labyrinths of London,” or of the woman who upon reaching a remote city encountered the evil footman, of a pale and bloodless complexion, whom she had dreamt she would find there, are overlaid with a horror more affecting than anything in the overt terror-poetry of the age. His lamentation for his friend Charles Lloyd, the mad poet, is one of the minor masterpieces so often met with in his writings. Lloyd “told me that his situation internally was always this—it seemed to him as if on some distant road he heard a dull trampling sound, and that he knew it, by a misgiving, to be the sound of some man, or party of men, continually advancing slowly, continually threatening, or continually accusing him.” Once, when the fit was on him, he burst suddenly into tears on hearing the innocent voices of his own children laughing, and of one especially who was a favorite; and he “told me that sometimes, when this little child took his hand and led him passively about the garden, he had a feeling that prompted him (however weak and foolish it seemed) to call upon this child for protection; and that it seemed to him as if he might still escape, could he but surround himself only with children.”

De Quincey was a pensioner of Morpheus, but although the dark light of opium is on his highest inspirations, it was not the only source of his genius. As much as the other Romantic prophets, he believed that sympathetic insight is a more efficient instrument in the search for truth than reason and analytical intelligence; and he advised his reader “never to pay any attention to his understanding, when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind.” In his most perceptive moments, he was, it has been said, a psychological Champollion, whose feeling for the cross-weaving of beauty and horror in life enabled him to read more deeply (or, as he would have said, more “hieroglyphically”) than others in the
Rosetta-Stone mystery of our being, written first to last, he said, in “the great alphabet of Nature.”

The same sensitivity enabled De Quincey to fathom more deeply than any of his contemporaries the soul of the murderer, that type and figure of the diabolic in ordinary life. If we are to understand the murderer, he said, our “sympathy must be with
him
,” by which “of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand him,—not a sympathy of pity or approbation.” This faculty of sympathetic perception would eventually bear fruit in the most penetrating of his murder essays, in which he showed how certain killers, craving an intoxication they could experience in no other way, murdered over and over again precisely in order to intensify an existence which would otherwise have seemed to them insipid.

Mrs. Probert, unable to sleep, went to the top of the stairs and, leaning over the railing, heard a sound like that of papers being rustled on a table and burnt in a fire. The conversation was all in whispers. It seemed to her that the men were trying on clothes. “I think that would fit you very well,” she heard someone say in a low voice. Another said “We'll tell the boy there was a hare thrown on the cushion.”

After they divided the spoils, Thurtell said that they must go and fetch the body and put it in the pond near the cottage.

Probert objected. “You shall not put it in the pond,” he said. “It may ruin us.”

Thurtell said it would lie there only for a short time, until he could arrange to dispose of it more effectually. But he found the
corpse ponderous and returned to the cottage. “He is too heavy,” he said. “Will you go along with me, Probert? I'll put the bridle on my horse and fetch him.”

Mrs. Probert heard a door open and went to the window. It was, she remembered, a “very fine moonlight night.” Two shadowy forms were going toward the stable. A moment later, one of them led out a horse.

They brought the body back by way of the garden gate. Thurtell led the horse; Probert held the sack to keep it from falling off. Every murder re-enacts the eternal mystery of evil; and like the first transgression in paradise, the re-enactment gains in power if there is a woman in it, a garden, and a snake or two. Mrs. Probert “heard something dragged, as it seemed, very heavily.” She went to the window and saw them taking the sack through the garden to the pond. She lost sight of them; but after an interval she heard “a hollow noise, like a heap of stones being thrown into a pit.”+