watch. Yet by adroitly managing the conduct of Mr. Grewgious,
Dickens persuaded Mr. Proctor that certainly, Grewgious knew Edwin
to be alive. As Grewgious knew, from Helena, all that was
necessary to provoke his experiment on Jasper's nerves, Mr. Proctor
argued on false premises, but that was due to the craft of Dickens.
Mr. Proctor rejected Forster's report, from memory, of what he
understood to be the "incommunicable secret" of Dickens's plot, and
I think that he was justified in the rejection. Forster does not
seem to have cared about the thing--he refers lightly to "the
reader curious in such matters"--when once he had received his
explanation from Dickens. His memory, in the space of five years,
may have been inaccurate: he probably neither knew nor cared who
Datchery was; and he may readily have misunderstood what Dickens
told him, orally, about the ring, as the instrument of detection.
Moreover, Forster quite overlooked one source of evidence, as I
shall show later.


MR. PROCTOR'S THEORY


Mr. Proctor's theory of the story is that Jasper, after Edwin's
return at midnight on Christmas Eve, recommended a warm drink--
mulled wine, drugged--and then proposed another stroll of
inspection of the effects of the storm. He then strangled him,
somewhere, and placed him in the quicklime in the Sapsea vault,
locked him in, and went to bed. Next, according to Mr. Proctor,
Durdles, then, "lying drunk in the precincts," for some reason taps
with his hammer on the wall of the Sapsea vault, detects the
presence of a foreign body, opens the tomb, and finds Drood in the