The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper (6 page)

My first intimation of something unusual going on in our house—unusual, I mean, apart from the state of affairs I have outlined—came to me on one evening near my seventeenth birthday. My mother was absent at one of her church meetings and I was alone in the sitting-room. I had completed my home-work and was engrossed in my drawing when Mary entered the room with my light supper. I looked at the clock and saw that it was nine; it was hardly likely my mother would return before ten or ten-thirty and I usually retired to bed before that time. Mary set down her tray, and laid my meal on one end of the table at which I was working; as she finished I glanced up and caught a sly smile and a curious sidelong glance as she left the room. A few minutes later I heard the creaking of the stairs; apparently she had gone up to bed.

As I was eating my supper I heard my father's steps in the hall and then the loud slam of the street door. I was paying no particular attention, as I was eating and drawing at the same time; I merely registered the impression that my father had gone out and it was only later that I recalled I had not heard his steps continuing down the front garden path. At about nine-thirty, feeling tired, I went up to bed.

My parents occupied a front bed-room on the first floor. My room was immediately above this and next to that occupied by Mary. As I undressed I heard a sudden giggle from this adjoining room and, a few moments later, a few words spoken in a low tone. And, in the silence of the evening, the dividing wall was not thick enough to prevent the character of the voice filtering through. I knew instantly that it was not Mary's voice; it was that of a man and in the light of probability could be no other than my father's. I think I felt surprise more than any other emotion; I remember standing there with my collar in my hand, staring at the dividing wall and straining my ears for further sounds. It occurred to me then that on other occasions recently I had, as I thought, overheard Mary talking to herself at about this time. Pondering, I finished undressing and slipped into bed which creaked loudly, as usual, under my weight.

In a few minutes I heard the door of the next room softly opened and the sound of footsteps on the stairs; hardly footsteps, in fact, but simply one or two creaks. The sounds were almost imperceptible and I am sure I should never have heard them had I not been listening intently. Then came the rattling of a key in the lock of the street door, followed by an ostentatious scraping of feet on the door-mat and a loud slam. I was not deceived by these noises; I knew now with certainty that my father had never left the house. He had pretended to do so and was now pretending to return. I lay thinking hard for some twenty minutes, after which I heard the return to the house of my mother.

Now I could write pages on the subject of my thoughts and feelings following this nocturnal incident, but I shall not do so. Can I be expected to enter into a long self-analysis, or even remember with sufficient clearness the exact trend of my thoughts as a lad of seventeen? Such a procedure may be right and proper enough in the popular novelist; but I am not a novelist. I am an old man working more or less against time to set down a series of events, and already experiencing distaste for the physical labour involved in writing. I must concentrate on events—at least for the early part of this history.

Shortly after the revelation above alluded to (for it certainly was a revelation of my father's turpitude), the Providence which is said to shape our ends took on the aspect of a malicious demon—an aspect from which I have never been able to disassociate it in my mind. It arranged that my mother should be absent from the house for several relatively long periods. Religious piety had drawn her from the house on several evenings in each week and so allowed ample scope for the sowing of the seed. And now that the dreadful harvest was ripe, Sisterly Piety was the card played. In short her sister fell seriously ill and my mother was called away to nurse her. Had that illness not occurred exactly when it did, I believe that the thing that turned out a tragedy would have ended in no more than a vulgar scandal.

My mother's sister visited us only on rare occasions, for she had disgraced herself in my mother's eyes by marrying a bookmaker. This man, whose name was Evans, had called at our house in my aunt's company, and although he was received by my mother with cold politeness, I had taken to him at once; and I know that my father thought him excellent company. I shall have more to say later about this excellent man, and need not therefore enter into a description of him at this stage.

Now my aunt lay ill at her bookmaker-husband's house at Peckham and my mother felt it incumbent upon her to go there and take charge. I think she experienced some doubts as to the propriety of leaving my father and me alone in the house with a young female, for I overheard scraps of an argument in which the phrases “doesn't seem the thing,” “what may people think!” “silly convention,” “won't the boy be here” and so forth led me to gather that this subject of propriety was under discussion. Ultimately my mother presumably decided that I might be regarded as a sufficient chaperon for my father (or he for me) and she departed for Peckham.

Within a day of her departure things began to happen. I found myself on several occasions interrupting discussions between my father and Mary, discussions which almost bore the appearance of arguments and which dropped to whispers upon my approach. On one occasion Mary was weeping noisily and unrestrainedly while my father appeared to be bullying her. On another he took her boldly into the surgery and was closeted with her for half an hour. And always Mary went about her household duties white-faced, red-eyed and with a look of what I could only analyse as “funk.” And yet, despite the scraps of sexual knowledge I had garnered from the dirty hints of school-fellows and my catholic reading, I was not sufficiently experienced to realize at that time what was actually the matter.

After a fortnight's absence my mother returned suddenly to the house, gave a hasty account of her sister's illness (which account she had already conveyed in a series of letters) deposited in Mary's charge a bundle of soiled linen and, packing a fresh supply, set off again for Peckham. She was too distressed by her sister's condition (I learned that the illness was cancer) to exercise much discernment, and she appeared to miss anything unusual in the appearance of Mary or of my father.

On the day following this fleeting visit I returned from school to find my father looking rather more harassed than he had appeared even of late, and a strange and particularly offensive old woman in charge of the household. Mary was not to be seen, and my father told me abruptly that she was in bed seriously ill.

The next two days seemed to be a kind of blur. I could not gather what was going on, but it seemed that the old woman was acting as a nurse to Mary; both the old woman and my father appeared to be labouring under extreme excitement, and in my father's case, an additional emotion which I analysed as fear. Was he afraid that Mary might die? Such a theory hardly seemed to meet the case, for I knew that many of his previous patients had died and he had never before manifested any particular distress at the occurrences.

To this strange, sinister atmosphere I returned from school at mid-day and in the evening, to partake of a wretchedly cooked meal hastily served to me by the old woman, spending my evenings alone in the sitting-room in futile attempts to grapple with home-work while my ears were strained to catch the sounds occasionally filtering down from the upper floor. Sometimes I could hear muffled cries; once I was aware of a continuous gabbling. Was Mary in a fever? Then would come an outburst from my father muffled by the dividing walls but sounding to me like the declaiming of a tipsy man. And whispered colloquies between my father and the old woman outside the surgery door.

At last, on the evening of the second day, I returned from school to find a new-comer in the hall. I recognized him as another doctor, a Dr. Sims who practised in our district. He was standing with my father by the surgery door and the two seemed to be engaged in a furious argument. My father looked horribly pale and I thought, at the first glance, that he had been drinking. When he caught sight of me he drew Dr. Sims into the surgery and slammed the door; and the argument seemed to break out afresh. As I passed into the sitting-room I heard Dr. Sims say: “What do you expect me to do, eh? What can I do?” And a muttered reply from my father. Then something else from Dr. Sims which I could not catch, something about “professional reputation to consider.”

I left the sitting-room door ajar and sat down at the table, trying to catch some more. But in a few minutes the door was pushed open and the old woman came in carrying a tray; giving me a quick, furtive look, she hastily set out my meal and left the room, closing the door behind her. But as she passed out I heard the surgery door open and my father and Dr. Sims come into the hall. “—if she does,” I heard the latter say, “you'll be finished. And not only finished—” The rest of the sentence was cut off by the closing of the sitting-room door. A few moments later the hall door slammed and then, quite loudly, came my father's voice: “Oh my God! Oh my God!” The surgery door banged.

After gobbling down my tea I tried to fix my mind on my home-work, but I do not know how I managed to get through the evening. At about nine when I was beginning to wonder whether I had not better go up to bed, I heard the crunching of wheels outside the house: I went to the window and peered through the blinds. At that season of the year it was still light enough for me to make out a kind of van standing outside the house. The driver alighted and, coming up our path, knocked at the door while another man opened the back of the van and appeared to be pulling something out.

I heard the old woman open the door and the murmur of voices. Then my father's voice. The man who had knocked returned to the van and assisted the other in what he was doing. Then they both came up the garden path and I saw they were carrying a stretcher. Both men were wearing uniforms and peaked caps.

With a loud trampling, everyone passed upstairs and there was an interval of silence. Then I caught the sound of the men's return, more slowly this time. One of them said: “Mind the corner.” And then: “Your end a bit higher. Steady. Steady. That's it.” By this time I had the sitting-room door ajar and was peering into the hall. I saw the uniformed men walk along the hall bearing the stretcher on which was a muffled figure I knew was Mary. My father and the old woman brought up the rear. As my father passed me he caught my eye, and I hastily retreated and closed the door.

Some time after the van had moved off the old woman came into the room and began to clear away the remains of my meal which had lain upon the table all through the evening.

“Ain't it time you went up to bed?” she said, curtly.

“Have they taken Mary to the hospital?” I asked.

“Yes, she's been took away,” the old woman replied.

“What's the matter with her?” I persisted.

“Nothin' you'd understand,” she said. “You get up to bed.”

Although I was of an age to resent this old woman's orders I saw no point in remaining up. After a decent interval to show I was not to be ordered about, I went to bed. And in spite of the abnormal events of the evening and my general bewilderment I fell asleep very quickly.

On the following morning I had no sight of my father before leaving for school, and the only evidence of his presence in the house at mid-day when I came home for dinner was a low, continuous muttering proceeding from the surgery as though he were talking to himself. As I left the house to return to school I saw Dr. Sims coming down the road and evidently making for our house and, acting upon a sudden impulse, I stopped and raised my cap.

“If you please, how is Mary?” I asked him. “I'm Dr. Carnac's son,” I added in case he should not know me—though he evidently did.

He hesitated for a few moments, eyeing me curiously. “She's dead,” he said. And without another word continued on his way.

I was so taken aback by this intelligence—although I think I must have sub-consciously expected it—that I hesitated as to whether I should go to school or return home. Ultimately I continued to school, for obviously there was nothing I could do at home. I hardly think I felt shocked at learning of Mary's death; my feeling was more one of morbid excitement, for this was the first time death had come within my personal circle. And even that feeling was overlapped by puzzlement regarding my father's position in the affair. I had gathered enough during the past two days to realize that the matter meant trouble of some kind for him. His distress and the attitude of the other doctor were, alone, enough to convey that. But how could the death of a patient cause him trouble? Other of his patients had died and nothing had happened. Had he “violated professional etiquette,” a term which, in the past, I had heard him use and which I understood to mean taking insufficient care of patients? Or had he made some mistake in treating Mary? Given her poison by mistake, or something like that?

The latter theory seemed the only one to meet the case and, knowing my father as I did, it seemed not improbable. Supposing my father had been drunk when making up Mary's medicine, for example. And had mixed poison with it. In that case would he be “struck off the medical register” (another term I had heard used) or would even worse befall? Would he get sent to prison? What, exactly, did happen to doctors who poisoned their patients by mistake—or carelessness? (Incidentally, who would know if he had been drunk when he mixed the medicine?)

And then my thoughts reverted to that other matter which I had rather overlooked in the stress of more recent events. I was not sufficiently innocent to be unable to realize pretty clearly how matters had stood between Mary and my father. And I now perceived that I had been sub-consciously feeling some sinister connection between that presumed relationship and Mary's death. Did I then get some faint glimmer of what that connection might be? After all these years it is difficult to say.