Evening Post, Volume LXXV, Issue 09, 11 January 1908, Page 12

"C.A.S." writes in the New York Evening Post : —

The Druce-Portland contestants have dragged their alleged mystery along until somebody has made the attempt to graft upon it the very real mystery in Charles Dickens's unfinished story of Edwin Drood.

Cue for this came the other day in a London police court, where a Miss Robinson, in the course of the trial of the perjury case of Druce against Druce, testified that Charles Dickens had told her that. Thomas Charles Druce, who employed her as a stenographer, and the fifth Duke of Portland had been one and the same man.

This alleged conversation between the novelist and the stenographer took place in Hyde Park in April, 1870, two months before Dickens died, and six years after the real or bogus funeral of Thomas Carlyle Druce, and nine years previous to the death of the fifth Duke of Portland. There was no corroboration of this testimony. Miss Robinson might have supported her oral statement by letters, and the entries in her diary, if, she explained, those documents had not been stolen.

Then, just as naturally as night follows day, came the suggestion that Dickens had not only known, of the Duke's double life, but that he had used it as material for fiction. That doesn't seem unreasonable. If the Duke were a duke only part of the time, and a dry-goods merchant the rest of the time, and had secret subterranean, passages between a town house and his dry-goods store, and Dickens knew about it, of course, he might make literary use of the material. There are three or four good Dickensian chapters in that subterranean passage alone, and as many more in the mere sudden appearance of the transformed duke behind the linen counter, and his conversation with the clerks. But it isn't reasonable to claim that those chapters were actually written, or that anything of the Druce case is to be found in any of Dickens's novels.

Thus "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" bobs up again. That incomplete story is not selected because it is incomplete, and so always a subject of speculation as to what outcome was really intended by the author. But the first two letters of Druce are D—r, and the first letters of Drood are D—r. Why should anybody want anything more conclusive than that? The only persons who can't accept that simple theory are those who, at one time or another, have read "Edwin Drood."

"It was his knowledge of the Druce case, no doubt," say the sceptics, "that induced Dickens to put something about the Druids in his 'Child's History of England.' Probably Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe knew of the Druce case. Otherwise how could she have written 'Dred'? There's the same tell-tale D—r. And it also suggests plain Drivel."

It may be an exaggeration to say that there is absolutely no similarity between the stories beyond that of the two D—R's. It is only fair to add that, as in the Druce case, both Caldwell and Miss Robinson have both testified that the Duke wore a false beard, so in Dickens's novel the character Datchery wears a wig.

NO DOUBLE LIFE IN EDWIN DROOD

In the story of Edwin Drood there is no double life, except the Jekyll- Hyde sort of existence, of John Jasper, choirmaster, opium fiend, and probable murderer. There are no subterranean passages. Both the Duke of Portland and Druce were "cranks" on the subject of total abstinence. Neither of them used tobacco or liquor. But Edwin Drood and Neville Landless, two of the principal characters of the story, are both intoxicated when, in Jaspers lodgings, they have that first hostile encounter, out of which so much of the story comes.

The story of Edwin Drood was written in 1870, about the time, that Miss Robinson says the author told her about the Druce case, but there is nothing about the stage setting of the story which had not been, familiar material to Dickens for many years, The only inn that figures in the story was the Furnival, not counting, of course, Billickin's excellent boarding-house with the leaky roof. And Dickens had lived in the Furnival himself thirty-five or more years before that. And Cloisterham, the cathedral town where Crisparkle and all the rest of them lived, was the same old Rochester with which Dickens had always been familiar.

WAS DROOD MURDERED

Of course, any reference to Edwin Drood suggests the old question that readers have been asking over since 1870 — "Was Drood really murdered?" If he wasn't murdered, his body placed beyond (he reach of all the searchers of Cloisterham, what was the significance of John Jasper's curious question about the heap of quicklime? And what the meaning of the reply of Durdles, the gravestone cutter, who said, "Ay, quick enough to eat your boots. With a little handy stirring quick enough to eat your bones."

And if Jasper had not killed his nephew, just as he had dreamed of doing many times when under the influence of opium, what did this fiendish reminiscence and dialogue with a scheming hag in a London opium den mean after the nephew had vanished from the face of the earth?

"What? I told you so. When it comes to be real at last, it is so short that it seems unreal for the first time. Hark!"

"Yes, deary. I'm listening."

"Time and place are both at hand."

He is on his feet, speaking in a whisper, as if in the dark.

"Time, place, and fellow-traveller," she suggests, adopting his tone, and holding him softly by the arm.

"How could the time be at hand unless the fellow-traveller was? Hush! The journey's made. It's over."

"So soon."

"That's what I said to you! So soon. Wait a little. This is a vision. I will sleep it off. It has been too short and easy. I must have a better vision than this; this is be poorest of all. No struggle, no consciousness of peril, no entreaty — and yet I never saw that before," with a start.

"Saw what, deary?"

"Look at it. Look what a poor, mean, miserable thing it is! That must be real. It's over."

But dead or alive there is nothing about Edwin Drood that could have been suggested by the Druce case.