Datchery keeps a tavern score of his discoveries behind a door, in
cryptic chalk strokes. He does this, says Mr. Walters, because, being
Helena, he would betray himself if he wrote in a female hand. But nobody
would _write_ secrets on a door! He adds “a moderate stroke,” after
meeting the hag, though, says Mr. Walters, “Edwin Drood would have
learned nothing new whatever” from the hag.
But Edwin would have learned something quite new, and very important—that
the hag was hunting Jasper. Next day Datchery sees the woman shake her
fists at Jasper in church, and hears from her that she knows Jasper
“better far than all the reverend parsons put together know him.”
Datchery then adds a long thick line to his chalked score, yet, says Mr.
Walters, Datchery has learned “nothing new to Edwin Drood, if alive.”
This is an obvious error. It is absolutely new to Edwin Drood that the
opium hag is intimately acquainted with his uncle, Jasper, and hates
Jasper with a deadly hatred. All this is not only new to Drood, if
alive, but is rich in promise of further revelations. Drood, on
Christmas Eve, had learned from the hag only that she took opium, and
that she had come from town to Cloisterham, and had “hunted for a needle
in a bottle of hay.” That was the sum of his information. Now he learns
that the woman knows, tracks, has found, and hates, his worthy uncle,
Jasper. He may well, therefore, add a heavy mark to his score.
We must also ask, How could Helena, fresh from Ceylon, know “the old
tavern way of keeping scores? Illegible except to the scorer. The
scorer not committed, the scored debited with what is against him,” as
Datchery observes. An Eurasian girl of twenty, new to England, would not
argue thus with herself: she would probably know nothing of English
tavern scores. We do not hear that Helena ever opened a book: we do know
that education had been denied to her. What acquaintance could she have
with old English tavern customs?
If Drood is Datchery, then Dickens used a form of a very old and
favourite _ficelle_ of his: the watching of a villain by an improbable
and unsuspected person, in this case thought to be dead. If Helena is
Datchery, the “assumption” or personation is in the highest degree
improbable, her whole bearing is quite out of her possibilities, and the
personation is very absurd.
Here the story ends.