Paula Cohen - What Alice Knew - A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper

Henry too had no time to register what had happened, only to realize suddenly he had a knife at his throat. He could feel it there; indeed, it was so sharp that it had already made a shallow incision, and a trickle of blood had run onto his collar. Mrs. Smith would have a job with that, he couldn’t help thinking, even as he felt the sting of the cut and a sense of dread rise in him. Perspiration gathered on his forehead, and his body began to shake. He looked across at his brother. Countless times on the playground of their youth, William had come to his rescue, pushing the offender aside or saying something in his sharp boy’s voice that had the same effect. But what could William do for him now?

Newsome pressed the knife harder against Henry’s throat, and there was another trickle of blood. How much of this could he take? Henry wondered desperately. Was the maniac going to hack him to death by degrees? He tried to remain still to avoid more pressure from the knife, though he was perspiring heavily and feared he would collapse, which might well cause the knife to slide down his throat, with God knew what result.

William, who had remained frozen, staring at the scene before him, roused himself from his stupor and addressed Newsome. He tried to keep his voice calm and authoritative, though he could feel the effort as a physical strain on the muscles of his body. “What good would it do for you to hurt him?” he asked softly. “I’m the one you want. I’m the one investigating the case.”

Henry murmured agreement. “Just tagging along,” he muttered faintly.

Newsome did not appear to hear. He continued to grimace. Henry, fearing that the knife would slip, tried to hold his breath.

“Haven’t you done enough?” William exhorted.

The question seemed to agitate the attacker further, who, for the first time, raised his voice. “How do you know?” he cried. “Did they tell you? Did they advertise it?”

William was confused. Hadn’t Newsome advertised his deeds himself with his letters to the newspapers and Scotland Yard? “You know that everyone knows what you did!” he exclaimed.

Newsome seemed to grow wilder with this statement. His eyes darted about, and he pressed the knife closer. Henry’s teeth began to chatter.

William recalled what had happened with Pizer during his visit to Broadmoor; he had somehow provoked the man to attack him. It was the same now, except it was not himself but his brother who was in danger. This fact made him feel sick with guilt and fear.

“You need to go where you’ll be cared for,” he pleaded with Newsome. “You need to be helped.”

“Helped?” The man’s voice had grown louder and more shrill. “Where they’ll know and stare? Like you and him and all the others!” He spit out the words wildly and pressed the knife with still more force against Henry’s throat. Henry’s eyes rolled up in his head.

William paused. What he was doing wasn’t working. Indeed, it was making things worse. He must reevaluate, rethink the context in which he was responding. This was how he came up with original ideas: reseeing a situation from another angle, one that had been ignored because of convention or habit. Except it was one thing to resee in the pleasant confines of his study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and another to do so in a dark basement where a deranged killer had a knife at his brother’s throat. But this was precisely what he had to do. What use were his powers of thought if they could not be employed now, when Henry’s life was in danger?

He willed himself to concentrate, to block out everything but the problem before him. What was inciting this man to such a frenzy? What was he afraid of? Suddenly he saw why Newsome was painting in a dimly lit basement alcove; why he painted with spasmodic, uncontrolled brushstrokes and responded with fear and then fury at being interrupted. He had not been following the pattern of the man’s increasingly enraged responses. Newsome’s mind was not on the women he had killed; they were only the by-products of the initial trauma of being discovered in the act of self-abuse.

Brand a man a deviant, and you are likely to make him one. Newsome could not recover from what had happened to him that day at the Slade. He replayed that traumatic episode every time he tried to paint a picture, and it was the failure to paint that must have driven him to kill. The murders were repetitions too—furtive and performed with the repetitive stabbings that he had seen in the bodies of Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. They too were a reenactment of that original trauma. At the root of it all was shame. That had been the root of Pizer’s rage. The lesson was clear: deprive a man of his humanity, and be prepared for the consequences: a human being capable of God knows what.

William addressed Newsome slowly and carefully, trying to incorporate his new understanding into his words. “I didn’t mean to disturb your privacy,” he said. “I was worried about Sally.”

Newsome continued to press the knife to Henry’s throat, blinking rapidly behind his spectacles.

William continued. “We are all of us prone to do things that are…unseemly. What you did was unfortunate, but in no way deviant or unnatural. It was wrong to shame you.” He spoke gently, no longer as an investigator or even as a conventional scientist, but as a psychologist and a human being who could not only explain but soothe the turbulence of a disordered mind.

Newsome blinked again and then spoke in a wavering voice. “I didn’t mean to do it. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known anyone was there. I thought they’d all left.”

“Of course you did.”

“They called me an animal.”

“We are all animals. But like us all, you are a human being as well. What you did then was hardly the worst thing a man can do.” He did not say that Newsome had gone on to do the worst.

Newsome gestured desperately toward the alcove, and his voice became a pitiful groan. “I can’t paint!”

William considered this; then he walked slowly to the easel and turned the painting over. “There,” he said. “Now no one can see.”

Newsome’s face relaxed.

“Please take the knife from my brother’s throat. I know you don’t want to harm him.”

Newsome loosened his grip, and Henry staggered over to William’s side. Released from the pressure of the knife, he felt a surge of well-being. There was something to be said for having your life threatened; you appreciated being alive afterward—if you got away.

The atmosphere in the room had become almost serene. The man’s spiritual being had been awakened, William thought. He had been deprived of his humanity, which had destroyed his vocation, an irrevocable loss, deeply connected to who he was. William could understand this. He had suffered his own crisis of vocation, and it had almost cost him his sanity. For Newsome, it had, and worse—it had driven him to kill.

William looked at the man before him again. How could this quivering mass of fear and insecurity have brutally killed those women? He felt again a momentary doubt. It was ridiculous to doubt, when Newsome had just threatened to kill Henry. He had seen the man’s capacity for violence with his own eyes. Besides, Newsome had a motive, a psychological profile that explained the Whitechapel murders with an admirable completeness. And still, the shifting tendency of his own mind, his incapacity to arrive definitely at any solid conclusion frustrated and unnerved him. Couldn’t he ever be sure? How was it that others seemed to settle on things and be done? Of course Newsome was Jack the Ripper. Everything pointed to it.

“What should I do?” Newsome asked simply. He still held the knife, but he seemed more like a child than a threatening killer.