The Perfect Crime: The Big Bow Mystery. Israel Zangwill
of my profession. Had I not been impelled by this consideration I should certainly have brought in a verdict against Mrs Drabdump, as recommended by the reader who said that, judging by the illustration in the Star, she must be at least seven feet high, and, therefore, could easily have got on the roof and put her (proportionately) long arm down the chimney to effect the cut. I am not responsible for the artist’s conception of the character. When I last saw the good lady she was under six feet, but your artist may have had later information. The Star is always so frightfully up to date. I ought not to omit the humorous remark of a correspondent, who said: ‘Mortlake might have swung in some wild way from one window to another, at any rate in a story.’ I hope my fellow-writers thus satirically prodded will not demand his name, as I object to murders, ‘at any rate in real life’. Finally, a word with the legions who have taken me to task for allowing Mr Gladstone to write over 170 words on a postcard. It is all owing to you, sir, who announced my story as containing humorous elements. I tried to put in some, and this gentle dig at the grand old correspondent’s habits was intended to be one of them. However, if I am to be taken ‘at the foot of the letter’ (or rather of the postcard), I must say that only today I received a postcard containing about 250 words. But this was not from Mr Gladstone. At any rate, till Mr Gladstone himself repudiates this postcard, I shall consider myself justified in allowing it to stand in the book.
Again thanking your readers for their valuable assistance,
Yours, etc.
One would have imagined that nobody could take this seriously, for it is obvious that the mystery-story is just the one species of story that cannot be told impromptu or altered at the last moment, seeing that it demands the most careful piecing together and the most elaborate dovetailing. Nevertheless, if you cast your joke upon the waters, you shall find it no joke after many days. This is what I read in the Lyttelton Times, New Zealand: ‘The chain of circumstantial evidence seems fairly irrefragable. From all accounts, Mr Zangwill himself was puzzled, after carefully forging every link, how to break it. The method ultimately adopted I consider more ingenious than convincing.’ After that I made up my mind never to joke again, but this good intention now helps to pave the beaten path.
I. ZANGWILL
London, September 1895
THE Mystery which the author will always associate with this story is how he got through the task of writing it. It was written in a fortnight—day by day—to meet a sudden demand from the Star, which made ‘a new departure’ with it.
The said fortnight was further disturbed by an extraordinary combined attack of other troubles and tasks. This is no excuse for the shortcomings of the book, as it was always open to the writer to revise or suppress it. The latter function may safely be left to the public, while if the work stands—almost to a letter—as it appeared in the Star, it is because the author cannot tell a story more than once.
The introduction of Mr Gladstone into a fictitious scene is defended on the ground that he is largely mythical.
I. Z.
ON a memorable morning of early December London opened its eyes on a frigid grey mist. There are mornings when King Fog masses his molecules of carbon in serried squadrons in the city, while he scatters them tenuously in the suburbs; so that your morning train may bear you from twilight to darkness. But today the enemy’s manoeuvring was more monotonous. From Bow even unto Hammersmith there draggled a dull, wretched vapour, like the wraith of an impecunious suicide come into a fortune immediately after the fatal deed. The barometers and thermometers had sympathetically shared its depression, and their spirits (when they had any) were low. The cold cut like a many-bladed knife.
Mrs Drabdump, of 11 Glover Street, Bow, was one of the few persons in London whom fog did not depress. She went about her work quite as cheerlessly as usual. She had been among the earliest to be aware of the enemy’s advent, picking out the strands of fog from the coils of darkness the moment she rolled up her bedroom blind and unveiled the sombre picture of the winter morning. She knew that the fog had come to stay for the day at least, and that the gas bill for the quarter was going to beat the record in high-jumping. She also knew that this was because she had allowed her new gentleman lodger, Mr Arthur Constant, to pay a fixed sum of a shilling a week for gas, instead of charging him a proportion of the actual account for the whole house. The meteorologists might have saved the credit of their science if they had reckoned with Mrs Drabdump’s next gas bill when they predicted the weather and made ‘Snow’ the favourite, and said that ‘Fog’ would be nowhere. Fog was everywhere, yet Mrs Drabdump took no credit to herself for her prescience. Mrs Drabdump indeed took no credit for anything, paying her way along doggedly, and struggling through life like a wearied swimmer trying to touch the horizon. That things always went as badly as she had foreseen did not exhilarate her in the least.
Mrs Drabdump was a widow. Widows are not born but made, else you might have fancied Mrs Drabdump had always been a widow. Nature had given her that tall, spare form, and that pale, thin-lipped, elongated, hard-eyed visage, and that painfully precise hair, which are always associated with widowhood in low life. It is only in higher circles that women can lose their husbands and yet remain bewitching. The late Mr Drabdump had scratched the base of his thumb with a rusty nail, and Mrs Drabdump’s foreboding that he would die of lockjaw had not prevented her wrestling day and night with the shadow of Death, as she had wrestled with it vainly twice before, when Katie died of diphtheria and little Johnny of scarlet fever. Perhaps it is from overwork among the poor that Death has been reduced to a shadow.
Mrs Drabdump was lighting the kitchen fire. She did it very scientifically, as knowing the contrariety of coal and the anxiety of flaming sticks to end in smoke unless rigidly kept up to the mark. Science was a success as usual; and Mrs Drabdump rose from her knees content, like a Parsee priestess who had duly paid her morning devotions to her deity. Then she started violently, and nearly lost her balance. Her eye had caught the hands of the clock on the mantel. They pointed to fifteen minutes to seven. Mrs Drabdump’s devotion to the kitchen fire invariably terminated at fifteen minutes past six. What was the matter with the clock?
Mrs Drabdump had an immediate vision of Snoppet, the neighbouring horologist, keeping the clock in hand for weeks and then returning it only superficially repaired and secretly injured more vitally ‘for the good of the trade’. The evil vision vanished as quickly as it came, exorcised by the deep boom of St Dunstan’s bells chiming the three-quarters. In its place a great horror surged. Instinct had failed; Mrs Drabdump had risen at half-past six instead of six. Now she understood why she had been feeling so dazed and strange and sleepy. She had overslept herself.
Chagrined and puzzled, she hastily set the kettle over the crackling coal, discovering a second later that she had overslept herself because Mr Constant wished to be woke three-quarters of an hour earlier than usual, and to have his breakfast at seven, having to speak at an early meeting of discontented tram-men. She ran at once, candle in hand, to his bedroom. It was upstairs. All ‘upstairs’ was Arthur Constant’s domain, for it consisted of but two mutually independent rooms. Mrs Drabdump knocked viciously at the door of the one he used for a bedroom, crying, ‘Seven o’clock, sir. You’ll be late, sir. You must get up at once.’ The usual slumberous ‘All right’ was not forthcoming; but, as she herself had varied her morning salute, her ear was less expectant of the echo. She went downstairs, with no foreboding save that the kettle would come off second best in the race between its boiling and her lodger’s dressing.
For she knew there was no fear of Arthur Constant’s lying deaf to the call of duty—temporarily represented by Mrs Drabdump. He was a light sleeper, and the tram conductors’ bells were probably ringing in his ears, summoning him to the meeting. Why Arthur Constant, B.A.—white-handed and white-shirted, and gentleman to the very purse of him—should concern himself with tram-men, when fortune