What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper

Chapter 35

After Sickert left, William burst out of the closet looking distraught. Henry had already seated himself at the little table and was pressing the handkerchief to his nose.

“There!” exclaimed William to Alice. “That finishes it! It’s clear we need to have Abberline arrest the man and formally begin interrogation.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Alice.

“He’s Jack the Ripper! He as good as confessed. You saw it! You almost fainted!”

“I had a moment of trepidation, I admit, but I was mistaken. Walter Sickert is as innocent as I am.”

William stared at her.

She continued. “The man is incapable of calculated brutality. He is a philanderer, to be sure—no doubt a source of misery to his wife—but he would never commit murder.”

“He has seduced you! Even as we watched, he exerted his animal magnetism and caused you to lose your reason.”

Alice laughed and protested that her reason was entirely intact. She had, she admitted, found Sickert appealing; for the first time in many years she understood the attraction that a man could hold for a woman. Indeed, though her condition made it impossible for her to act on her inclination, she could understand how other women might. She felt for Ellen Cobden, the long-suffering wife, but one ought to know what one was getting oneself into when marrying this sort of man. He belonged, one might say, to womankind.

William listened with mounting astonishment and disgust. He had never dreamed that his sister would espouse the notions of unfettered love or make excuses for an adulterer. But here he was, listening to her do so.

“Will you make her see reason, Henry?” he insisted, turning to his brother.

Henry, who had been pressing the handkerchief Sickert had given him to his nose (he had finally put it together and recalled the scene of his near death in the East End that night), looked up with surprise. “Oh,” he said dreamily, “Walter Sickert couldn’t possibly have killed those women in the East End. He’s a capital fellow. He saved my life.”

Sickert was not late the next day. He arrived at three p.m. as he had said he would. It was, Alice suspected, more than a matter of professional punctuality; he wished to see her again as much as she wished to see him. And why should this be surprising? Although she was not young or pretty, she was interesting. Why wouldn’t a man of exceptional sensibility enjoy her company? William could not be expected to understand it; his opinion of other men was too low to imagine that anyone might be as discriminating as he was.

Her conviction that Sickert was innocent of anything beyond excessive appreciation of the opposite sex had solidified, and in the face of her conviction, she had forbidden her brothers to spy on her. “If you want to come in to greet the artist and exchange a few words, you may,” she intoned regally, “but I will not permit you to stay.”

William knew that he was helpless to change her mind. From childhood on, there had been certain edicts that she would not allow to be breached; thus, when Sickert arrived for his next visit, William remained downstairs in the kitchen, fuming and pacing.

Henry, on the other hand, made a point of coming into the room to offer thanks to the man who had saved him from attack in the East End some weeks earlier. “I had no idea it was you,” he explained with a mixture of gratitude and embarrassment, “given my…confused…state of mind. But yesterday I recognized the scent of your handkerchief and then realized that was the event you were referring to when we spoke at dinner the other night.”

Sickert smiled affably and had the good grace to shift the focus of discussion from the victim to the attacker. “It was an unfortunate combination of circumstances,” he said. “You found yourself in the wrong place and collided with the wrong man. Such people are dangerous, because they want more than your money.”

“What do they want?” asked Henry.

“They want attention. They want to be heard. But they don’t know how to express themselves except by beating you senseless.”

“I see,” said Henry. “So you think my attacker was trying to express himself. And would you say the same for all criminals…for this Jack the Ripper, for example? Does he want to express himself by killing those women in Whitechapel?”

“Most assuredly,” said Sickert. “All that carving up of the bodies. It’s clear something is being expressed.”

“Something sexual, you mean,” said Alice, interested in hearing Sickert elaborate.

“No, I wouldn’t say that. The murders do not seem to me sexual in nature. Creative, but not sexual.”

“You call murder creative?” asked Alice, surprised to hear her own views echoed so succinctly. “What do you mean?”

“All human beings are creative. They may not express their creativity as your brother and I do, by painting or writing, but they find an outlet in some form.”

“It puts me in mind of that De Quincey essay, you know,” said Henry casually, shooting a glance at his sister.

“Oh yes,” said Sickert. “‘Murder Considered as a Fine Art.’”

“I’m fond of De Quincey,” murmured Henry, “though I haven’t read everything.”

“I have a complete edition, given to me by a friend,” noted Sickert. “I’d be glad to lend it to you.”

Henry said he was grateful and would consider the offer.

“And how does someone who is bedridden express her creativity?” asked Alice returning to the original topic.

“With her illness, certainly,” said Sickert. “It takes a certain amount of creative energy to be sick.”

Alice laughed. “Precisely what I’ve always believed. Henry has explored it in his fiction. Some of his most interesting characters are sick. But William does not approve. He sees the invalid as someone who hasn’t exerted his will sufficiently. It’s the American Puritan in him,” added Alice. “His touchstones are spirituality, exertion, and restraint. He doesn’t approve of Henry and me.”

“Then he certainly wouldn’t approve of me,” noted Sickert.