The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper (10 page)

I had walked, I suppose, over a mile before I began to think coherently; I say “walked” but my progress must have been more in the nature of a blind rush unconscious of direction. I had no thought but to get away from the vicinity of my uncle's house.

I have a dim recollection that the aching of my arm as a result of the bag I carried was the thing which ultimately dragged me back to reality. I know that I stayed my footsteps and leant against some railings. And then I gave way to uncontrollable laughter; I had suddenly seen the funny side of my adventure.

The remembrance of my uncle's face no longer struck me as pathetic, but as grotesque. He must have had the surprise of his life. And he was probably still lying in bed waiting for morning in a state of funk, watching the window and wondering whether my head would suddenly appear round it. (Unless, of course, he had heard the sounds of my departure.) And all the time he was lying there sweating, afraid to move, I was a mile or more away. I was still chuckling over this when I perceived in the distance a figure approaching and, picking up my bag, I resumed my journey. The figure was that of an early workman, and he gave me and my bag a curious glance as he passed.

I was now sufficiently controlled to observe my surroundings and to think sensibly. I saw I had been walking towards London, and as this seemed as good a place to make for as any other, I had no reason to alter my direction. But as I went I pondered my future movements, and it occurred to me to examine my financial resources. Placing my bag on the pavement I examined the pocket book which, luckily, I had left in my coat pocket over-night. I knew there was a five-pound note there, but I wanted to confirm this. My trouser-pockets yielded nothing, for it had been my habit to fold my trousers each night upon retiring and to hang them over a chair-back; and this necessitated emptying the pockets. But a waistcoat-pocket contained, I found, half a sovereign.

I was not dismayed by my shortage of ready cash, for I had a banking account at a Town branch of my uncle's bank—more convenient to me by reason of my days spent in Town than a suburban branch would have been—and I knew that over fifty pounds lay to my credit. I had left my cheque-book behind, but I could easily obtain a fresh one and there seemed no reason why I should be unable to draw against my account. I felt quite confident that my uncle would take no steps against me, and, after all, what had I done which could not be explained as a joke?

It then occurred to me that I might very well return home, but on thinking this over I perceived that such a course would be impossible. Primarily it would be difficult for my uncle and myself to live comfortably together in the future; he would almost certainly regard me with a feeling of suspicion. Such a feeling is unavoidable between two persons, one of whom has betrayed a desire to cut the throat of the other. And it was highly probable that my uncle would suspect an outbreak of insanity on my part and insist on having me “seen to” by doctors. But the factor which finally decided me against a return home was the realization that were I to do so I should, sooner or later, cut my uncle's throat. I knew instinctively that I could no longer live with that sleek, goitre-like throat. In this particular matter I could no longer rely upon my strength to withstand temptation.

And, on the whole, I was not sorry to enter upon a period of absolute freedom. I was tired of my medical studies, which had lost their first novelty, and although nothing more than a merely conventional restraint had ever been exercised over me by my uncle, I had not, in the past, experienced the sense of absolute freedom which I now did—the knowledge that I could do absolutely whatever I pleased without question from any person.

That afternoon I deposited my bag at a small London hotel, but I did not spend the night there. I slept in the bed of a young person I encountered in Shaftesbury Avenue.

—

Having definitely decided not to return to my uncle's house, or to my medical studies, I took two rooms in a street off Tottenham Court Road. The district was then a sordid one, but my particular street consisted largely of houses which had not long since been in the occupation of “gentlefolks” and had not yet fallen into actual degradation. Most of them were tenanted by women who let rooms to young men of the student class; my landlady's name was Mrs. Brooks and my two rooms were on the first floor of her house. Mrs. Brooks was a kindly and rather casual old soul with a tippling husband who was employed in some minor capacity at the Olympic Theatre in Wych Street.

Within a week of settling in these rooms, I received, through my bankers, a letter from my uncle. He begged me to return home and he wrote in terms of sorrow but with no word of reproach. “I found this,” he wrote, “with your poor father's papers. I was not going to let you see it, but as things are I think you had better know. I am afraid it is in your blood, my poor boy, but do come and talk things over.” He concluded with a vague hope as to the possibility of a doctor being able to “do something” and with a further pleading to me to come home.

“This” was a document in my father's handwriting in the form of a genealogical tree and I reproduce it here as it was set out.

This document astonished me, containing as it did information at which my father had never even hinted. I was also rather pleasantly excited to learn of my descent from such a famous—or should I say infamous?—family; but at the same time I experienced a vague uneasiness. I perceived the drift of my uncle's remarks; he supposed I had an hereditary taint. Ever since he had discovered the document he had doubtless suspected the possibility of such a taint and he must have regarded the homicidal outbreak of my father as tending to confirm his suspicion. Had the poor old chap been even waiting in dread for some similar manifestation of abnormality on my part? I felt pretty certain that he had. In a flash of imaginative insight, I experienced a real sympathy for my uncle.

In the light of this document I could fully understand what my uncle's point of view may have been, but I resisted the lurking suspicion that he was right. I tried to laugh it away as being too grotesque for serious consideration. Within limits I was prepared to admit that my reactions to certain phenomena, such as the shedding of blood, were peculiar; that there might be a connection between those peculiarities and the fact that I came of a long line of executioners and torturers I perceived as a possibility. But I was not prepared to subscribe to the doctrine of heredity beyond a certain point. Never, I told myself, would I believe that I, the master of my own actions, the author of my individual feelings and emotions, was a mere puppet manipulated by the dead hands of my ancestors. The idea, I rammed into myself, was preposterous. I refused to entertain it. Why, the alleged genealogical tree might even be a work of imagination on the part of my father.

I may say that in later years I made the half-hearted attempt to confirm that tree. Owing to the difficulty of conducting my researches, which involved reference to documents lodged in a foreign country, I did not get very far; but I must confess I was unable to discover any discrepancies in my father's document. Up to a point, at least, it seemed perfectly correct.

—

After some hesitation I replied to my uncle's letter, for it seemed callous to ignore it entirely. I was fully conscious of his past kindness to me, but I realized with absolute conviction the unwisdom of attempting to live again within the very circle of temptation. So my reply was evasive and concerned mainly with thanks to him for his care and kindness.

I never saw him again and he died two years later.

In the summer of the year 1888 I was living in rooms in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. I shall not mention the number of the house, but it is one on the right-hand side as one walks towards the Market. My landlady was an elderly widow, rather stout, very talkative, but a kindly and motherly soul. She kept my rooms spotlessly clean; mainly by her personal efforts, for although a young maid-of-all-work lurked somewhere in the lower recesses of the building, her contact with the “gentlemen” (i.e., I and my fellow lodger) was limited to the carrying of coals, water-jugs and heavy trays, and the cleaning and returning of boots. Mrs. D., my landlady, dusted, made my bed and carried in and arranged my meals.

Of her two lodgers I was, I think, regarded by Mrs. D. with the most consideration, for I was financially independent; and the moneyed drone is always, in this world, treated with more respect than the worker. In the popular view the possession of money would seem to postulate intrinsic merit in the possessor. I had inherited my uncle's savings in addition to my father's money, and the combined capital was, and is, sufficient to provide me with a comfortable income.

Technically I was, I suppose, a drone, but my time was fully occupied. I did not live the life of the “young man about town”; I was neither dissipated nor extravagant. Although a comparatively young man, I took little pleasure in the flippancies of youth; my disposition was that of the student, and reading and drawing were my principal interests.

I kept up my drawing. I have never had occasion to practise as a professional artist and am quite aware that such proficiency as I now possess is no more than that of the average industrious amateur. I am not even sure that the drawings I have made for this book reach the standard of merit expected by a publisher.

In pursuit of my hobby of drawing I explored many parts of London and particularly the East End. I was attracted by the grotesque and the macabre, but never by the “pretty-pretty.” I take more pleasure in drawing a leprous, tumble-down building enveloped in the sinister shadows of a London slum than I do in depicting a sun-lit haystack with cows in the foreground. Owing to the impracticality of setting up an easel in a crowded East End street I had to learn to rely upon my memory assisted by rapid, rough jottings made on the spot, and to work out my actual drawings at home.

I grew thoroughly familiar with the East End of London; the grimy, dilapidated houses packed with grotesque caricatures of humanity seemed to hold a message for me and yet I could not interpret that message. Fantastic stirrings of what seemed a remote memory moved me as I loafed about brooding over these mucoid and decaying tenements; they recalled a vague familiarity as though in a remote and nearly forgotten past I had lived and wandered among them. Yet I seemed to recall that the houses had once been taller, more angular; leaning outwards and precariously balanced one against the other; fantastically lit by sharp, angular patches of bluish moonlight and yellow splashes from drunken-looking lamps suspended from the walls. And as I stood in a street letting my imagination—or memory—range about the scene before me, there would come to my ears the sound of muttering, gnomish voices with snatches of guttural song. Not the cockney and Yiddish intonations with which the street really resounded, but something stranger and even more foreign than those mixed dialects. And in the course of time one voice slowly developed and separated itself from the muttered unintelligibility until I began to recognize it above the undertones of my imagination and even above the actual, existing chatter and uproar of the Whitechapel streets.

Am I unwise in mentioning these curious imaginings of mine, and especially the Voice? Am I perhaps giving another fillip to the popular assumption of my lunacy? That the hearing of imaginary voices as a symptom of insanity is pretty generally recognized I am fully aware. But was Joan of Ark [sic] insane? Were the other saints insane? Confidence in my own sanity is strong enough to permit me to ignore popular conceptions of insanity and its symptoms.

I heard the Voice. But was it an actual voice speaking to me from outside the borders of this earthly life, or was it a phenomenon of a too-active imagination? After all these years I cannot say, for the Voice has long been silent and memories fade.

My taste in reading was “morbid” by popular standards. I have always been interested in what is loosely called the occult, in which term I include witchcraft, sorcery, certain aspects of priestcraft, hypnotism and modern spiritualism. These things are usually regarded as trivially fantastic by the conventional stolid citizen, but as one who, in all modesty, can claim to be something of an authority I say that they are worthy of careful consideration if only as exemplifying that pitiful striving of humanity towards the favour of an assumed Power, which striving still goes on to-day in the unreasoning faith of dogmatic religionists.

—

During the period between my flight from the house of my uncle, and the time of which I now write, my strange obsession in the matter of knives had slumbered. Fitfully and uneasily, it is true; but still it had slumbered. By this I mean that although I was still conscious of an eager interest in knives, I had experienced no return of the over-whelming desire to demonstrate their properties; I began to regard the unfortunate affair which had terminated my connection with my uncle as an isolated manifestation of nervous instability following upon the shock and continued morbid brooding on the deaths of my parents. Nervous debility was not so well understood at that time as it is to-day, and in the popular view “nerves” was merely a synonym for hysterical cussedness. But my own medical knowledge and reading had shown me that nervous outbreaks may take strange forms. That I had been the victim of such an outburst I preferred to believe.

Yet there was no blinking the fact that knives were still to me something more than mere utensils for everyday use. They still fascinated me and occasional incidents would arise when I would become intensely aware of the fascination. On one morning, for example, I found two brand-new table-knives by my plate; my landlady had bought a new set to replace the old worn ones. I picked up those new knives and examined them critically; they were wretched-looking things, clean and bright, it is true, and with handles of ivory whiteness. But they were mere imitations beside the old friends to which I had become accustomed. The blades of the latter had been worn to thinness, with sharp, pointed tips and blades of razor-like keenness; what if the handles were yellow and stained, the blades gaping from the hafts and exposing parts of the tangs? I resented these new knives, and fumbled with my breakfast in a fit of irritation.

I did not care to complain to Mrs. D.—or to ask for my old favourites; but I surreptitiously sharpened the new table-knives on a bone which I kept in my bed-room, and in the course of a few weeks I had all the blades of the good lady's new set in a fair state of keenness. Whether she noticed it or not I do not know.

But in spite of this, and other incidents pointing to my interest in knives, I had not, since leaving my uncle's house, experienced an impulse towards throat-cutting; I had not experienced it, yet I am not justified in saying that I had not, deep down, a lurking suspicion that I might again experience it. I think I had such a suspicion or at least an uneasy feeling that under stress of excitement or shock my reactions might take an abnormal course. I can perceive now that, having that vague suspicion, I should never have allowed full play to my feelings for Julia Norcote; I should have known at least that in some respects my temperament was—shall I say—peculiar. But I look back at the affair with the dispassionate eyes of an old man, while at the time I was of an age when inclination is not readily controlled by reason.

—

I met Julia Norcote in the early part of the year 1888. She was the sister of an old fellow-student of my hospital days whom I re-encountered one night at a London music hall. This meeting, trivial as it seemed at the time, I place as a definite step towards that which I was ultimately to become; in the latter contemplation of these seemingly purposeless and yet significant steps on life's highway I am led into a sneaking sympathy with the conviction of the professed fatalist. “The fate of every man have we hung about his neck,” says the Koran; was my fate hung about my neck in earliest childhood or even, perchance, years before my conception—on the steps of the blood-stained scaffolding of the Place de la Revolution or in some gloomy vault beneath the Palais de Justice?

And if my course was mapped for me by “Fate,” who, or what, is that Fate? Can it be anything but a malevolent demon? And the Voice, to which I have already lightly alluded but of which I shall presently say more: was that the voice of an attendant devil, the Kah, maybe, of one of my blood-weary ancestors deputed to watch and guide me along my appointed path? I am not, as the reader may have already surmised, a religious man; I pay no service to a benevolent Deity because I can perceive nothing to justify a belief in the benevolent supervision of mankind. But I can perceive much which may be regarded as evidence of the existence of an inimical power. The question is one which must ever remain open, nor will I attempt to pursue it at the moment.

Let me return to my meeting with John Norcote. The music hall was, of course, of the type now extinct. It boasted a chairman whom it was considered an honour to ply with drink, and members of the audience sat at marble-topped tables moist and sometimes sloppy with spilt beer. Perspiring waiters threaded their ways with difficulty amongst the tables, balancing upon upraised hands trays precariously laden with glasses. The table at which I seated myself on this evening had one other occupant, and we recognized each other simultaneously.

Norcote told me, after our first exchange of reminiscences, that he had taken his degree and was then in partnership with his father. He wanted to know why I had so suddenly dropped my studies, and to satisfy his curiosity I told him of my accession to comfortable financial circumstances following the deaths of my father and my uncle. He was, of course, ignorant of the events which had led to my father's death, for of these I had never spoken to any of my associates; nor did I tell him anything of the circumstances now.

We left the music hall at an early hour, for Norcote, upon whom the dignity of his new profession seemed to weigh heavily, mentioned that he had only “looked in for half an hour.” In deference also to his professional standing, we refrained from celebrating our meeting except with one modest glass of beer each, and we parted at the door of the theatre after an invitation on his part for me to visit the Norcote household.

I availed myself of the invitation and so met old Dr. Norcote and Julia.

Of Dr. Norcote I need say little; he was a big, red-faced man with a nearly bald head, and a pompous manner which sometimes broke down into a rather irritating facetiousness. I carried away from that first visit only a vague picture of the doctor, for my attention had been too wholly taken up by his daughter.

Julia struck me as an extraordinarily beautiful girl; she was tall, well formed, and possessed a mass of golden hair. I was, I think, slightly embarrassed at first by this radiant vision, while she was reserved and shy with me, having the bashful unsophistication of the period; for there was then none of the frank camaraderie which prevails between the sexes to-day. Yet, disguise and muffle it as you will, sex has always been sex and always will be. In spite of our mutual awkwardness there flashed between us a hint of a telepathic message; she sensed my interest, I knew, and she did not resent it. It seemed almost that she reciprocated it; yet I was by no means an Adonis, for I was short, sallow-skinned and distinctly fattish of face. Nor could she have been attracted by any mental brilliance on my part for I was not in a state to adequately display such wits as I possessed.

When I left the Norcotes' house that evening I knew I had fallen in love.

To the average reader there will doubtless appear an element of horrid humour in the idea of “Jack the Ripper” being in love; for, as I have previously hinted, there is some difficulty, no doubt, in associating an unknown and rather fearful being such as J.R. with the common reactions of ordinary humanity. While admitting that J.R. was a man, the average person cannot perceive (or so I judge from reading and conversation) that the particular activity which brought him under public notice was a manifestation of but one unit in his mentality. Love! What can a man who could cut up women know of love!

Let me tell you, O reader, that as a younger man I was quite as capable of love as you are; and possibly more so. You may be, and probably are, one of those conventional and “respectable” individuals who, in the mass, comprise the back-bone of the nation. It is even possible that you are (pardon me if I am wrong) one of the rabbit class: one of those smug little clerks, creeping fussily to Town each morning; plodding through your boring and monotonous clerking, one eye on the clock and the other on your superior officer; oppressed by fear—fear of being late, fear of making mistakes, fear of offending the chief, your master; fear of losing your job. Scurrying home to your rabbit-hutch of a suburban house; pottering over your rotten little “garden.” A product of fears, anxieties and repressions. What can you know of love or, indeed, of any human passion? Again I ask your pardon if I have misjudged you.

But I have known life. Even before I became a man I had known life. And I have known real fear; not the fear of a testy employer; not the “fear of God” as you unctuously term it in your churches. But the fear of the intangible Unknown; the dreadful, hovering Something moulding my destiny, muttering at my elbow, malevolently distorting the trivial chances of my life. And I have known thrills such as you will never know.

—

My love affair progressed upon the lines which are usual, I presume, in most love affairs, and it is needless for me to tell of my courtship in detail even were I willing to do so; for it was only in its dreadful conclusion that it became remarkable.