When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell–or I ought
rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was
nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicion fell–on the man who was
afterwards brought to trial. As no reference was at that time made
to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any
description of him can at that time have been given in the
newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered.
Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of
that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I
read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times.
The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the
paper, I was aware of a flash–rush–flow–I do not know what to
call it,–no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive,–in
which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a
picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost
instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that
I distinctly, and with a sense of relief, observed the absence of
the dead body from the bed.
It was in no romantic place that I had this curious sensation, but
in chambers in Piccadilly, very near to the corner of St. James’s
Street. It was entirely new to me. I was in my easy-chair at the
moment, and the sensation was accompanied with a peculiar shiver
which started the chair from its position. (But it is to be noted
that the chair ran easily on castors.) I went to one of the windows
(there are two in the room, and the room is on the second floor) to
refresh my eyes with the moving objects down in Piccadilly. It was
a bright autumn morning, and the street was sparkling and cheerful.
The wind was high. As I looked out, it brought down from the Park a
quantity of fallen leaves, which a gust took, and whirled into a
spiral pillar. As the pillar fell and the leaves dispersed, I saw
two men on the opposite side of the way, going from West to East.
They were one behind the other. The foremost man often looked back
over his shoulder. The second man followed him, at a distance of
some thirty paces, with his right hand menacingly raised. First,
the singularity and steadiness of this threatening gesture in so
public a thoroughfare attracted my attention; and next, the more
remarkable circumstance that nobody heeded it. Both men threaded
their way among the other passengers with a smoothness hardly
consistent even with the action of walking on a pavement; and no
single creature, that I could see, gave them place, touched them, or
looked after them. In passing before my windows, they both stared
up at me. I saw their two faces very distinctly, and I knew that I
could recognise them anywhere. Not that I had consciously noticed
anything very remarkable in either face, except that the man who
went first had an unusually lowering appearance, and that the face
of the man who followed him was of the colour of impure wax.
How curious the representation of the initial ‘haunting’ is? Indeed there is a strange lyricism, a pastoral lyricism to the Coleridge -like room floating before the narrator into his own private space. There is no antecedent to this sudden psychical manifestation, just a declared interest in a murder without initial suspect and a disclosure of repetition around the original report of the murder. So what is this awareness of a ‘flash-rush-flow’ ? It seems both creative and ungoverned by conscious deliberation. The hyphens emphasise the breakdown in the conventional systems of knowing and in the separation betwen this thought and another. Everything seems seamless and seeming. ( Hence my feelings reminding me of Kubla Khan with the appearance of the floating Pleasure dome! )
And the tension between the daily rituals of the domestic, of place;’ Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper..’ with this sudden manifestation of otherness. You cannot take away an appearance of something even and especiallly of course when its appearance is deemed ‘impossible’. The brilliance of Dickens’ perception centres too around the absence of a body on the bed. This is not mere Gothic horror. We have Romantic visitation which elevates the speaker to poet, to shaman. And then the body is not there. He has to look outside to see something seemingly ordinary and unrelated. And he does so on his special castor running chair. Once again a joke on Dickens’ part yet capturing the desire of the narrator to ground the extraordinary within and without the ordinary!
A whirl of leaves and perhaps a shape shifter’s presence and then we see, as he sees the unreal ‘smoothness’ of the two men passing along the thorough fare. The picture is marked for its singularity. One unusual sighting is followed by another, all ostensibly anchored to specific places at specific times. just as in The Signalman, geography seems signficant yet remains unresolved. A man looks down on others and ‘sees’ something that operates as a riddle for the rest of the story. Yet why the narrator should be gifted by such a visitation and why he ‘recognises’ bothe the killer and the victim remains uncertain. It just IS!!!
A fabulous wonderful tale. LITERALLY!