The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper (19 page)

When a man reaches the age of sixty his internal machinery usually begins to show signs of wear; and so it is with me. During the past year or so my heart has developed a slight weakness; normally it does not trouble me, but on rare occasions I have had attacks of syncope. Quite recently such an attack occurred to me in a cinema, causing some inconvenience to my neighbours in the audience and to the management; I was brought back to consciousness, in fact, in the manager's office.

But I have never been finicky over my health and, like many other people, I obstinately ignored the possibility of really serious trouble developing. True, I consulted a doctor and listened blandly to his advice on “taking things quietly”; but my occasional fainting-fits seemed to me so trivial that I left them out of my calculations when reviewing my position in the house of Mrs. Hamlett.

This negligence on my part afforded an opportunity which Fate eagerly embraced. I had an attack one evening in my sitting-room. In the ordinary way this would have been unimportant, but it occurred while I was revising this manuscript.

I regained consciousness to find myself in my bed-room, whither I had been carried. I was lying on my bed fully clothed but with my collar and waistcoat loosened, and my doctor stood by the bed-side with the rubber tubes of a stethoscope hanging from his ears. Mrs. Hamlett was near him, looking anxious, and the girl Minnie hovered in the doorway.

I was hazy, with that slight feeling of nausea and “emptiness” which oppresses me after these attacks, and I did not immediately realize what had happened. In fact, quite an appreciable interval elapsed before I recollected the circumstances of my seizure; when I did I was hard put to it to conceal my apprehension. For I knew that this manuscript lay open upon my sitting-room table.

My doctor's professional attitude is of the genial and chatty variety, and on some occasions I have found him not unamusing; but now I wished him to the devil. All I wanted was to be left alone in order that I might descend to the sitting-room and lock away my manuscript. I assured him that I felt all right, and so great is the influence of mind over body that I actually believed it; but he did not believe it, and he showed no signs of departure. His conscientious attentions irritated me, and when I had again told him I was feeling quite well, and suggested that I might be keeping him from more necessitous patients, he insisted upon remaining to help me undress, while Mrs. Hamlett and Minnie left the room to make me a “nice cup of tea.” Finally, after what seemed hours of fussing, the doctor left with a promise to call on the following morning; I had consumed the tea, and Mrs. Hamlett had withdrawn, leaving me alone for the night.

For some time I curbed my impatience and lay there listening intently. After the sound of my landlady's descent into the lower regions of the house I heard nothing; and at last I decided to make an attempt to reach the sitting-room. Mrs. Hamlett had turned out my light, but I levered myself up in bed and, feeling for the switch beside me, turned it on again. The slight movement made me feel faint and giddy, but after sitting on the edge of the bed for a few minutes my head cleared, and I looked round for my crutch. It was not there, and I cursed softly; evidently it had been left behind when I had been brought up to bed.

I should explain that I do not wear an artificial leg, but I can make shift to move about without my crutch if solid objects are to hand which I can hold to; and I was sure I could manage to get down the two flights of stairs with the aid of the banisters. But I was feeling far from fit, and I wanted to make no noise. I stood up on my one leg and held to the head of the bed; immediately the room began to swim round and I nearly fell. But I mastered my weakness and, with a sort of hopping pirouette, reached the foot of the bed and, by aid of a chair, the door. There I took down my dressing-gown, struggled into it and, leaving it flapping open, cautiously unlatched the door.

The lights were burning on the landing outside and also, apparently, upon the landing below, and this surprised me for it was unusual after the household had retired. But I assumed that Mrs. Hamlett had forgotten to turn out the lights in the excitement caused by my performance of the evening. I began my descent by clinging to the balustrade and hopping from step to step; but I could not avoid a slight noise, so I sat on the stairs and, getting the necessary leverage with my arms, slid myself down, one stair at a time. I had to rest occasionally on account of my giddiness. Looking back to that night it strikes me that the affair must have been a horridly grotesque one, such as would have appealed to a German film-producer. A one-legged elderly gentleman, lightly clad and with an expression of apprehension on his face, bumping himself down from tread to tread of an ill-lit stairway on his posterior in order to conceal that which might send him to the gallows.

I finally reached the threshold of my sitting-room where I found that the door was open and the room lit. Without pausing to reflect that the room might not be unoccupied, I struggled upright and, clinging to the door-frame, hopped inside. There I paused aghast. Mrs. Hamlett was standing by the table reading my manuscript.

Some slight sound on my part must have attracted her attention, for she looked up in the act of turning a page. No doubt the figure she saw must have startled her; clinging to the side of the door, its dressing-gown hanging open and its light-coloured pyjamas with one empty leg fluttering. She gasped, but she did not move, simply stood there holding the page and staring fixedly at me.

For what seemed an eternity we stood without movement gazing into each other's eyes. The table was illuminated by a shaded stand-lamp; the shade itself cut a broad bar of shadow, but the manuscript and Mrs. Hamlett's hands were brilliantly lit, and the upper part of her face was bright from the upper opening of the shade, so that she seemed to be wearing a luminous mask. From this patch of light her two pale eyes gazed unblinkingly into mine, and in that moment I perceived that Mrs. Hamlett knew.

Concurrently with this perception there flashed into my mind a visual recollection of that other dramatic scene with my uncle so many years ago. Then two eyes had stared into mine in the relatively dim light of a candle, while I waited above him, a poised scalpel in my hand. The vision dimmed and the room before me swam; I felt faint again, doubtless the shock of this present revelation acting upon my weak state. I must have tottered, for my landlady left the manuscript and darted forward, grasping me by the arm. I drew back my head abruptly and stared again into her eyes, now at close quarters, for I wanted to confirm what I felt was a certainty. Yes; she did know.

But she addressed me in what seemed almost her usual tone; or was it her usual tone? Was it not rather a carefully controlled tone?

“Come, Mr. Carnac, this won't do,” she said. “You ought to be in bed, you know. What have you come down for?”

I did not reply immediately; I continued to stare. Then I wrenched my eyes from her face and pointed to the table.

“I left some important papers out,” I replied; and found that my voice was dry and hoarse. Twitching her hand away I swung myself, by aid of a chair, to the table, seized the manuscript and hopped with it to the safe. I thrust it in and slammed the door; and then remembered that the key was in the pocket of my trousers upstairs.

“Would you mind fetching my keys, Mrs. Hamlett?” I said.

She hesitated, still standing by the door; then, without a word, left the room. In a few minutes she returned with my bunch of keys. I locked the safe and, without again looking her in the face, suffered myself to be helped upstairs to bed.

—

Strange that I should have slept that night, but I did; or, at least, I passed the night in some form of coma approximating sleep. But when I awoke, early next morning, I felt reasonably well again, and my brain leapt instantly at the problem confronting it.

I had no doubt that my landlady knew that I, her respectable lodger, was none other than Jack the Ripper, whom it was her dearest wish to meet. And the fact that she did not really wish to meet Jack the Ripper, but a plagiarist, had no bearing upon the situation. I say that I had no doubt; I knew, but I cannot explain how I knew, beyond putting forward the unsatisfactory statement that I had read it in the woman's eyes.

The human eye is an extraordinary thing. It is limited in movement and its actual form is immutable with the exception of the variation in size possible to the iris. We talk of the eye “flashing” but, in reality, the eye never does flash; that is a mere novelists' cliché. Neither does it dim, nor grow soft. Yet, in spite of its limitations, the human eye is the most expressive and revealing part of the body; it can convey a meaning only secondary to that conveyed by speech. It can betray the fraud and the liar—I do not mean that it always does, but that it can to the discerning; it can betray the slightest traces of fear, anger and other emotions. And those eyes of Mrs. Hamlett seen in the bright illumination of a stand-lamp had betrayed to me the possession of certain undesirable knowledge.

And now what was I to do? For Mrs. Hamlett to know, and for Mrs. Hamlett to prove were two entirely different things; and though a ray of comfort might exist for me in this it was offset by the unfortunate fact that my doings during the vital period concerned would not bear suspicious investigation—or so I thought. My safety in the past had been due largely to an entire absence of suspicion on the part of anyone. And now I had been fool enough to set down in black and white my private thoughts and actions for all the world to read; and the most undesirable person possible had promptly read. Yes; I was a blind, egotistical fool. I recognized that now. And a bigger fool still not to have destroyed my effusion under the recent prompting of sanity.

However, self-recriminations would not help me; this was a case for calm, self-controlled thinking if ever there was one. I settled myself more comfortably in bed, while I gazed at the blank whiteness of the ceiling and reviewed the problem.

What would Mrs. Hamlett do? She was not of the thoughtlessly excitable type and would not, therefore, dash poste-haste to Scotland Yard. She had no evidence to offer beyond her allegation that she had read a confession which could very well be explained as an essay in fiction. She would be laughed at or shown the nearest way out, and she must know that quite well. And, after all, she does not know all because of her reading of my manuscript, but because that reading set her mind working in the right direction and because she correctly interpreted my look when I found her in the act of discovery. It was almost as though she had said last night: “I have been reading this confession of yours; can it possibly be real?” and I had replied: “I was afraid of this, Mrs. Hamlett; that's why I came down. Yes, it is true.” This is how Mrs. Hamlett came to know; by a species of telepathy functioning in particularly favourable circumstances.

Of course in a legal sense she does not know; she possesses no provable knowledge, but she entertains strong suspicions.

And, again, what would Mrs. Hamlett do? As I estimate her character she is of the slow and sure type. She will bide her time, nosing into my affairs until something else comes to light sufficiently definite to justify her taking legal assistance. And, knowing as I did the uncanny capacity of the female of the species for rooting up tit-bits of hidden scandal, I was not inclined to underrate the potentialities of Mrs. Hamlett. I did not know which part of my manuscript she had read nor, therefore, what incident in my life had been revealed to her as a starting-point for investigation.

Of course all this will doubtless seem very vague as a basis of anxiety to a reader who may have no more than a few trivial peccadillos to conceal, but my position was such as to force me to take even trivialities seriously. Yes, even after forty years of exemplary living. “Conscience makes cowards of us all” you will quote, dear reader; but it was not conscience in my case. You “get me wrong” (as Minnie would say) if you think that. I have never been troubled by conscience in the sense you mean; but I was now seriously troubled by the fear of being found out. Which is quite a different matter.

I pursued my thoughts, as I lay in bed, though as confusedly as I have, I fear, presented them here. I tried to envisage Mrs. Hamlett's point of view and to estimate her line of action, and was still so occupied when the good lady entered the room bearing my breakfast-tray. I looked at her carefully; I felt I was looking furtively, but hope that was not the case. She glanced swiftly at me and then turned her eyes away as she bid me “Good morning” and enquired after my condition.

I told her I was perfectly well again, and apologized for the trouble I had caused her. She began a formal chatting as she arranged the breakfast-tray upon my knee, and while she was doing this I was thinking: “She has not apologized for prying into my manuscript. She is ignoring the manuscript. That shows that I am right. She does know, and that is why it is impossible for her to refer to the manuscript.”

As I interpreted her manner it said: “All right, I know who you are now. I can't prove it, but I shall soon be able to do so. Just wait. In the meantime I must not let you know I know. I am going to carry on as usual as the considerate landlady. But it will be a bit of a strain.”

The door closed behind Mrs. Hamlett and, over a poached egg, I applied myself again to the problem. My own side of the question this time.

What could I do? I could sit still, do nothing and hope for the best. This I instantly dismissed. The best would probably be weeks of suspense terminating in the appearance in my sitting-room of two (or more) large gentlemen in navy blue and bowler hats, accompanied by a triumphant Mrs. Hamlett.

As an alternative I could flee, as many other potential clients of the hang-man have fled. But this did not appeal to me at all. It would confirm Mrs. Hamlett in her conviction and, moreover, it is extremely difficult to flee successfully, particularly when one is plainly labelled by a noticeable physical disability, which renders identification easy. And was I, an elderly gentleman of settled habits, to pass his declining years in hopping about the planet on one leg, looking for a non-extraditional country and expecting at any time the feel of a policeman's hand on my shoulder? This scheme was obviously out of the question.