She was a small Scottish West Highland terrier, dead white to proclaim virtue and justice, proving that symbolism of times appears in reality just as readily as it does in fiction, poetry, or art. Her bark was not alarming, but it was insistent; truly heroic, she pulled hard to assault me, plunge her fangs into my flesh, and bring me down.
“Maddy, my goodness, you must stop at once, oh, bad lady, bad bad girl,” yelped her embarrassed master, a grandmotherly type under a straw bonnet with more than a few ribbons, posies, and bows, another murder gawker embarrassed to be stirred into human contact by her doggie’s misbehavior.
But Maddy knew and would not relent. She screamed aloud, “It’s he, it’s Jack, it’s the knifer, the ripper, the killer, oh, you foolish people, if you would but look into this blackguard’s soul, you would see his evil and smell the blood he spilled not thirty feet away!” Unfortunately, since she spoke only terrier, the doltish humans about her paid no attention whatsoever and went about their nervous murder-site gawking.
The mistress bent and scooped up Maddy and hugged the squirming thing to her bosom, but Maddy kept trying to alert civilization to the threat it faced, although to no effect.
“Sir, I am so sorry, I cannot fathom what has got into her today, she is usually so polite.”
“Madam,” I said, “do not be concerned. Dogs, children, and women universally loathe me, but on the other hand, gentlemen do not much care for me, either.”
“Well, sir, at least you’re not a Mason!” said the lady, a rather game riposte, I thought, and it brought our conversation to a pleasing close, as we had chatted in the enjoyable language of high irony. I bent, bowed, removed my bowler in a sweeping, overmagnanimous gesture to signify theatrical-sized graciousness, and turned smartly to abandon the square.
I walked to the church passage, and it was much narrower by day than I recalled by night, with the brick walls pressing in fiercely but a meter or so apart. As I meant to make egress, I turned and saw that the lady had gone back to her ruminating on the events of the square, but Maddy, ever vigilant, had me fixed in a baleful glare.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jeb’s Memoir
Was he our Sherlock Holmes? Could the long-hoped-for genius intellect at last be entering the fray? Lord, I did so hope. I also, ambitious wretch, did so hope that I’d be the one to take it all down.
Two days hence I met him at the Reform Club, at Pall Mall next to the Traveler’s Club, in the high club land of central London. His tweeds were magnificent, flowing like the land forms of the heather itself, and again he seemed utterly unimpressed by the figure he cut with his wavy blond hair, his aquiline nose, his round specs, and his general air of Porthos amid the corpses of freshly skewered Richelieu swordsmen.
“Do sit down,” he said, “and pay no attention to the various Irish revolutionaries about you, as they are not apt to plant a bomb in the only place in London where you can have a good dish of lamb stew.”
“As I speak with a wee but insistent Dublin brogue,” I said, “I suspect they would not explode until I left the premises, for fear—misplaced, of course—of blasting one of their own.”
I knew there were no revolutionaries about, not even many radicals, rather that wan and forlorn tribe of misbegotten and guilt-bearing mere liberals, who wanted change at only a slightly increased pace over the progress of a turtle across the Sahara.
We sat in a corner nook of the great cigar- and pipe-smoked room, amid lustrous mahogany walls lined with books and portraits of various liberals from Anne Boleyn on down, and he offered me a cheroot and a drink, the first of which I took, the second of which I turned down.
“Probably a wise decision,” he said. “I have too many times awakened after a night with friend Jack Barley in the arms of a whore whom I promised to marry and thereby render licit. And bourgeois. Believe me, it takes more than phonetics to get out of that one with phiz intact.”
I laughed, loving again a wit based on shock, which I had not encountered in so pure a form. Perhaps Wilde had it in him, for his was also a sharpness of the knife as applied to moral convention (and how, as it turned out, poor man!). I wondered then, as I do now, if Wilde knew Dare and borrowed from him. I knew I would borrow from Dare. And I certainly have!
“So,” he said, “the Irish journalist who’s really a music critic wants a solution to the mystery of J-U-W-E, does he?”
“I’ve read and heard so many, I yearn for a thing I can believe in.”
“Not for you, then, satanic or Masonic ritual, ancient cockney slang, the ravings of a ill-educated lout who cannot spell a three-letter word and would, if challenged, produce C-A-E-T for cat? Are there others?”
“Some seem to think it Chinese. Or rather the pronunciation of a Chinese pictogram. Others place its derivation in the steppes, where Russia runs out and tribal Cossack elements begin. Language, most agree, is at the heart of it.”
“I do, too. Indeed, it is language.”
He reached into a briefcase I had not noticed and pulled out a volume, not a book but more than a newspaper, a kind of heavily bound journal of the sort I would later learn was a part of medical and scientific worlds.
“Here is your answer,” he said, “and congratulations on being the second man in London to behold it.”
I took it eagerly.
“Pages 132 through 139,” he said helpfully.
Alas, they were in German, as was the whole damned thing.
“Sir, I have no German.”
“Why, you have been advertised to me as a sort of genius.”
“I have taught myself Pitman shorthand and am able to read French, which I taught myself as well. I am known as a wit and have some potential as a writer. But that is where it stops, alas.”
“All right, then. The journal you have before you is Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Augenheilkunde. Which playfully translates into the ‘Journal of Comparative Ophthamology.’ On the pages specified, a brilliant German opthamalogist—that is, eye doctor—named Rudolf Berlin has published a study entitled Eine besondere Art der Worthblindheit (Dyslexie). Does that clear things up a bit for you?”
He was playing with me as a cat plays with a mouse. But he wasn’t meaning to eat me—rather, to enlighten me. To do so, he had to destroy me. Thus is education built.
“You know it hasn’t, sir,” I said.
“I think rather too much of myself, don’t I? I find myself so amusing. Always had that problem. All right, then, Herr Doktor Berlin’s title translates as ‘A Special Kind of Word Blindness,’ and in parentheses he has coined a term for a condition relevant to our inquiry here.”
“And that is—”
“This condition posits an interference between what the eye records and what the brain receives. He called it dyslexie, or in our more felicitous tongue, dyslexia.”
“You’re saying—” I was struggling with the concept.
“I am saying Jack has a condition known not as stupidity or insanity or immorality or even cannibalism, but while he may indeed have all those, his condition is scientifically called dyslexia. He is dyslexic.”
I nodded, even if my eyes were occluded with confusion.
“Put simply: He looks at the letters J-E-W-S and that is what he sees, but as his eyes send that information brainward, they become, by tangled paths not yet understood, J-U-W-E-S. To him, J-U-W-E-S is objective reality. He has no idea he’s ‘misspelling,’ though assuming that he’s mature, he’s presumably aware that he has certain spelling and reading problems, but as no diagnosis for his condition existed until last year, he has spent his life quietly devising strategies to get around it. His friends, his family, his society, none of them has any idea he has this condition because he has gotten so damned good at hiding it. But it tells us certain things. For example, he is certain not to have a job in any firm or institution that demands carefully written reports, which lets out most forms of science, medicine being one. There goes the mad-surgeon theory. His infirmity would hold him back, even make him a laughingstock. He must therefore be in some action- or behavior-intensive line of work, such as policeman or soldier, perhaps a surveyor, or an architect. His form of the condition may not at all affect his acuity with numbers or images, so he could be an engineer, a retailer, a manufacturer, what have you. He might be very gifted in verbal expression, and thus a barrister, a sales representative, a stockbroker, a carnival barker.