About the time when Helena leaves Cloisterham for town, a new character
appears in Cloisterham, “a white-headed personage with black eyebrows,
_buttoned up in a tightish blue surtout_, with a buff waistcoat, grey
trowsers, and something of a military air.” His shock of white hair was
unusually thick and ample. This man, “a buffer living idly on his
means,” named Datchery, is either, as Mr. Proctor believed, Edwin Drood,
or, as Mr. Walters thinks, Helena Landless. By making Grewgious drop the
remark that Bazzard, his clerk, a moping owl of an amateur tragedian, “is
off duty here,” at his chambers, Dickens hints that Bazzard is Datchery.
But that is a mere false scent, a ruse of the author, scattering paper in
the wrong place, in this long paper hunt.
As for Helena, Mr. Walters justly argues that Dickens has marked her for
some important part in the ruin of Jasper. “There was a slumbering gleam
of fire in her intense dark eyes. Let whomsoever it most concerned look
well to it.” Again, we have been told that Helena had high courage. She
had told Jasper that she feared him “in no circumstances whatever.”
Again, we have learned that in childhood she had dressed as a boy when
she ran away from home; and she had the motives of protecting Rosa and
her brother, Neville, from the machinations of Jasper, who needs
watching, as he is trying to ruin Neville’s already dilapidated
character, and, by spying on him, to break down his nerve. Really, of
course, Neville is quite safe. There is no _corpus delicti_, no carcase
of the missing Edwin Drood.
For the reasons given, Datchery might be Helena in disguise.
If so, the idea is highly ludicrous, while nothing is proved either by
the blackness of Datchery’s eyebrows (Helena’s were black), or by
Datchery’s habit of carrying his hat under his arm, not on his head. A
person who goes so far as to wear a conspicuous white wig, would not be
afraid also to dye his eyebrows black, if he were Edwin; while either
Edwin or Helena _must_ have “made up” the face, by the use of paint and
sham wrinkles. Either Helena or Edwin would have been detected in real
life, of course, but we allow for the accepted fictitious convention of
successful disguise, and for the necessities of the novelist. A tightly
buttoned surtout would show Helena’s feminine figure; but let that also
pass. As to the hat, Edwin’s own hair was long and thick: add a wig, and
his hat would be a burden to him.
What is most unlike the stern, fierce, sententious Helena, is Datchery’s
habit of “chaffing.” He fools the ass of a Mayor, Sapsea, by most
exaggerated diference: his tone is always that of indolent mockery, which
one doubts whether the “intense” and concentrated Helena could assume.
He takes rooms in the same house as Jasper, to whom, as to Durdles and
Deputy, he introduces himself on the night of his arrival at Cloisterham.
He afterwards addresses Deputy, the little _gamin_, by the name “Winks,”
which is given to him by the people at the Tramps’ lodgings: the name is
a secret of Deputy’s.