I, Ripper

If the colonel screamed as fate took him, I do not know; I heard nothing, so loud was the roar of the engine.

And that fast, it was over.

I stood, mind slow to calculate or react, rooted in abject paralysis, gibbering for air and words, finding neither, aware I had the trembles bad, and felt the sweat literally gushing from my body. When I returned to sentience, it was as if nothing had happened. I was standing next to the professor on the platform, the train was at full halt, bringing a sense of light and civilization to the emptiness, a few last passengers were ambling off, hurrying to get to bread, bed, or drink. No alarm had been raised, no crisis seemed to have been unleashed, no whistles, no Bobbies, no rush of witnesses, no panicked crowds.

“He’s gone,” the professor said.

I had no words.

“He went down too close to the engine for the engineer to see him, and it’s too much machine for a tremor to be felt. They’ll find him in the morning. Come on, now, let’s depart.”

“Should we—”

“No,” said the professor. “If it becomes known now, it’s out of our control, and then it’s anybody’s story. Besides, let the little bastard have his half-column in the Times, and everybody will read it as a suicide, and there’ll be a week of ‘Poor old Woodruff, VC and all.’ Then we can do the right proper job of telling the city the story of Jack and what we wrought and why no more gals will be sliced apart, and we will get what is coming to us.”

It made sense then. It makes sense even now. Holmes always gets his man.

“Let’s hence,” he said, bending to secure the butcher knife that lay afoot.

And we went out of the station into the cool December air.

CHAPTER FOURTY-FIVE Jeb’s Memoir

fter the turmoil of the night, I didn’t think I’d ever sleep again. But I did, dreamless and dark, if anything with the feeling of simple gliding through the night sky. Still, my mind was so provoked, it awoke me within a few hours, so I took a bath, gobbled something of breakfast, happily ignored Mother who happily ignored me, and took a hansom by ten A.M. for the professor’s.

We had said nothing on the way back from the station, as if the ordeal had drained us of all cogency. At that point, I felt too worn down to attempt to make sense of plans or consider ramifications. I considered the same of the professor. He himself answered his door and led me to his study, where he’d been having morning coffee. He offered me the same, but I was too agitated to settle down to civilized ritual. My poor mind was aflutter with doubt. “I turn to you for insight. It would help me so much in the construction of the story. What was driving him? How did his mind work, that it could be so heroic in the one quarter and so malevolent in the other? What was his motive?”

“I have puzzled myself. It was something Beneath, I think. Remember how I believe that there’s always a Beneath to a written piece? Clearly such a phenomenon springs from the fact that the mind itself has a Beneath, which we may not feel, acknowledge, understand, but which guides us.”

The colonel, the professor said, never really left Afghanistan. He was forever in the war. “Give the man credit. He understood that he was damaged, he understood that he was dangerous, and perhaps more heroic than the action that earned him his VC was his struggle against the demons that had infiltrated his Beneath. He tried to adjust, he tried to discipline himself from his impulses by concentrating on his Pashto dictionary, or if his dreams, anguish, memories, physical pain got really bad, by smoking the opium. But it was no use. He lost in the end.”

I was astonished how empathetic Professor Dare was in regard to a man who had within the past twelve hours come within a hair of murdering him. But such, I felt, was the greatness of the man. Under his sarcastic exterior, his own Beneath was compassionate and humane.

“He was haunted by the screams of young soldiers gutted in the night by Afghan women in the retreat from Maiwand, and he had to bring surcease to it. He had to make the screaming stop. Vengeance, even symbolic, was his final recourse. He could not deny it. So he went out on his own missions and did to them what they had done to his men. It was a narcotic. It took more and more violence to satisfy him. We cannot really blame him; he is, after all, us. He is the consequence of empire.”

“Yes,” I said, “that I understand.”

“Thus, motive is not a meaningful term here: impulse, undeniable desire, total and compelling need, those terms are more realistic.”

“He was, then, Jekyll and Hyde?”

“I think Louis Stevenson simplified by making each unaware of the other’s presence. No, no, it’s a matter of integration, merger, that somehow the Beneath takes over and manipulates the sentient. The Beneath, I believe, is like the iceberg, the seven tenths that lurks beneath the water. It is therefore the more powerful, the more masterful, the more brilliant.”