In July, Jasper revisits the London opium den, and talks under opium,
watched by the old hag. He speaks of a thing which he often does in
visions: “a hazardous and perilous journey, over abysses where a slip
would be destruction. Look down, look down! You see what lies at the
bottom there?” He enacts the vision and says, “There was a fellow
traveller.” He “speaks in a whisper, and as if in the dark.” The vision
is, in this case, “a poor vision: no struggle, no consciousness of peril,
no entreaty.” Edwin, in the reminiscent vision, dies very easily and
rapidly. “When it comes to be real at last, it is so short that it seems
unreal for the first time.” “And yet I never saw _that_ before. Look
what a poor miserable mean thing it is. _That_ must be real. It’s
over.”
What can all this mean? We have been told that, shortly before Christmas
Eve, Jasper took to wearing a thick black-silk handkerchief for his
throat. He hung it over his arm, “his face knitted and stern,” as he
entered his house for his Christmas Eve dinner. If he strangled Edwin
with the scarf, as we are to suppose, he did not lead him, drugged, to
the tower top, and pitch him off. Is part of Jasper’s vision
reminiscent—the brief, unresisting death—while another part is a separate
vision, is _prospective_, “premonitory”? Does he see himself pitching
Neville Landless off the tower top, or see him fallen from the Cathedral
roof? Is Neville’s body “_that_”—“I never saw _that_ before. Look what
a poor miserable mean thing it is! _That_ must be real.” Jasper “never
saw _that_”—the dead body below the height—before. _This_ vision, I
think, is of the future, not of the past, and is meant to bewilder the
reader who thinks that the whole represents the slaying of Drood. The
tale is rich in “warnings” and telepathy.