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.


DATCHERY AND THE OPIUM WOMAN


The hag now tracks Jasper home to Cloisterham. Here she meets
Datchery, whom she asks how she can see Jasper? If Datchery is
Drood, he now learns, WHAT HE DID NOT KNOW BEFORE, THAT THERE IS
SOME CONNECTION BETWEEN JASPER AND THE HAG. He walks with her to
the place where Edwin met the hag, on Christmas Eve, and gave her
money; and he jingles his own money as he walks. The place, or the
sound of the money, makes the woman tell Datchery about Edwin's