Stephen Hunter - I, Ripper

“I believe we’ve moved onward in our Christian crusade.”

“Well, wherever there are too many wogs, the darker the better, all fuzzy and wuzzy at once. Every good English boy should spend a few years Gatling-gunning nig-nogs for queen, country, and the interests of the Birmingham steel lords. And to keep the price of silk for Charlie’s pater’s department stores down.”

Speaking of Charlie, he suddenly bore down upon us, holding a champagne bottle in each hand. He’d been pouring his way through his guests.

“I see you two have found each other,” he said. “I knew you would, as you’ve much the same temperament and scabrous insight. Tom does phonetics at the University of London.”

Good God, I thought. The Professor Thomas Dare!

“I was telling our young friend here the sad truth of academics today,” said Professor Dare. He had round black spectacles, wavy blond hair, and one of those aquiline profiles that seemed to make him the grandson of the Iron Duke. But his irony had no Wellington in it. “At least my lackadaisical approach to duty leaves me with enough time for my experiments, which are the real thrust of my life. I can tell you, if you want, why a tribe in Africa called the Xhosa speaks with a peculiar popping sound, like a short, dry belch; they literally communicate by burps.”

I laughed. Amusing fellow.

“And then there are the Germans. Do you know, they form words by just sticking them together, so that their word for ‘Gatling gun’ literally translates into ‘mechanicaldeviceshootingwithoutcockingrifle?’ The words get longer still. No word is too long for a German because it’s quite impossible to bore a German. You cannot entertain a Norwegian, you cannot bore a German, and you cannot educate an American or a chimpanzee.”

I laughed again, then sought to turn him on another course. “What experiments have you done?”

“Too many by half,” he said.

I had read of him and thought I knew the background. Renegade intellectual, too bold for Oxford or Cambridge, too radical for any provincial place, always going off exploring, had theories of language as it related to society, and had invented – yes, that was it – a universal alphabet.

He wanted to do away with tribalism, nationalism, paternalism, capitalism, communism, militarism, vegetarianism, colonialism, ismism, anything that could take -ism as a tail end. Any thought, belief system, article of faith, uniqueness of dress, or size of boot heel. His methodology consisted of converting the world to one language that all would speak without accent, or indication of geography, class, or origin. Each man, each woman, each child would be a tabula rosa, so to speak, and come at the world without prejudice or hostility applied before he even got a chance to show what he or she could do.

Naturally, Dare was laughed off the front pages and hadn’t been heard from in some time. For one thing: Who would pay for it? For another: Who would teach it? For still another: Who would enforce it?

“I do remember your piece in the Times, Professor Dare,” I said. “A nice stir it caused, as I remember.”

“Dare’s Dare. What piffle. All gone, best forgotten. I was a fool, believed in the educability of the species and that humanity was capable of acting on its own behalf. But people are born with such deep ideas and grow so attached to them that it’s like trying to argue them out of a limb. If I said to you, ‘Say, your life would be better without that damned leg,’ what would you say?”

“Why, you’re a madman.”

“Indeed, and that is what they said to me. Anyhow, enough of this chitchat about my squalid past. I will leave you and mingle. I think there’s someone here who could help my reputation whom I haven’t yet insulted tonight. Possibly it will come to fisticuffs, which would be the ideal outcome.”

And he was swept away.

“Interesting fellow,” I said to Charlie.

“Tom’s a charmer. Brilliant but won’t back down. Perhaps a ruinous fault. You could call it a personality flaw, but you could also call it a heroic attribute. Socrates had it, too. So he gets destroyed and the mediocre continue to clump along to domination, producing universal stultification. Perhaps in a hundred years he will get his due. Champagne, my friend?”

I turned Charlie down, and he drifted away to fill more glasses. The party waxed and waned like a moon, and it seemed little eddies of energy were forever breaking out wherever I wasn’t, and when I turned to the laughter, I always saw Professor Dare at the center of it, and yet when they seemed to have him pinned down for serious conversation, he’d somehow peel off and take his magic elsewhere.

At last the party seemed to be breaking up, and by my pocket watch, I knew it was time to say thanks to Charlie and depart from this leafy street in Bloomsbury. I assumed finding a hansom wouldn’t be much of a problem. But a crowd had backed up around Charlie at the doorway, so I backed off and, seeking relief from the closeness of the room, stepped out on the terrace. Ah, the sweetness of the clean air, the drift of some sweet flower’s perfume, the clear night above. I drew it all in, enjoying, and then who should I find hunched against the balustrade but Professor Dare, enjoying a cheroot.

“Oh, hullo,” I said. “I enjoyed your company. You see the world much as I do myself.”

“I hope not. I detest it and everything in it. I once believed in everything, now I believe in nothing. You’re much too young for such cynicism. You have bruising and scarring left to do. You must earn the purity of your contempt, else it’s a pose meant to attract attention.”

“Well, you hide your disillusion brilliantly by the boldness of your wit.”

“Could always crack a line, I’ll say that for myself. But we do have something in common, I might add, now that I think of it.”

“And that would be?”

“Why, Jeb, we both detest Sir Charles Warren and understand that he is entirely too stupid in his thinking to catch this fellow you chaps call the Whitechapel Murderer.”

It was quite a moment. Not a word had been said about the murders the whole night, and I had presumed no one there had any idea I wrote under Jeb for the Star and had seen the wrecked and bleeding bodies steaming and leaking in the cool night air.

“I say,” I said, which is what people say when they have nothing to say, “I say, you have the advantage over me. I know not—”

“Oh, come now. I’ve particularly enjoyed the pieces on Warren’s folly. Your analysis of the broken system that underlies his Scotland Yard is spot-on, but even if they become more efficient and get more boots to the street faster, I don’t think the killer will fall to dragnet. If he were that careless, his luck would have run out, given his need to commit his deeds in heavily patrolled areas, just missing the blue bottles by a hair each time out.”

“Professor Dare, I shan’t lie, because I am indeed professionally Jeb, but how on earth, sir, did you know? Did some kind of spy—”

“No, no. Language. Phonetics. One of my many theories is that we speak two Englishes, a shallow English and a deep English. The second is the language of structure, organization; I call it the Beneath. It lurks, prehistoric and brutal, under the gibbets of grammar, words, punctuation, and neatness in penmanship. It is a reflection of the manner in which we solve problems, it expresses how we think, it expresses our true self. It is, in the end, our truth. I believe I’ve trained myself to read for the tracks of this Beneath, and when I read Jeb in the Star over the past few weeks, I saw those tracks. The music was extremely familiar. Some of the words, too, some of the effects – though now you’re drawn through the sieve of newspaper editing, with some dilution occurring. But I recognized it. You have much to write, much to learn, but if you give it your life, you might at one time accomplish something of note.”