upon Jasper and getting up some case against him; at any rate, if
he has not this purpose in the story he has no other earthly purpose in
it. He is an old gentleman of juvenile energy, with a habit of carrying
his hat in his hand even in the open air; which some have interpreted as
meaning that he feels the unaccustomed weight of a wig. Now there are
one or two people in the story who this person might possibly be.
Notably there is one person in the story who seems as if he were meant
to be something, but who hitherto has certainly been nothing; I mean
Bazzard, Mr. Grewgious's clerk, a sulky fellow interested in
theatricals, of whom an unnecessary fuss is made. There is also Mr.
Grewgious himself, and there is also another suggestion, so much more
startling that I shall have to deal with it later.

For the moment, however, the point is this: That ingenious writer, Mr.
Proctor, started the highly plausible theory that this Datchery was
Drood himself, who had not really been killed. He adduced a most complex
and complete scheme covering nearly all the details; but the strongest
argument he had was rather one of general artistic effect. This argument
has been quite perfectly summed up by Mr. Andrew Lang in one sentence:
"If Edwin Drood is dead, there is not much mystery about him." This is
quite true; Dickens, when writing in so deliberate, nay, dark and
conspiratorial a manner, would surely have kept the death of Drood and
the guilt of Jasper hidden a little longer if the only real mystery had
been the guilt of Jasper and the death of Drood. It certainly seems
artistically more likely that there was a further mystery of Edwin
Drood; not the mystery that he was murdered, but the mystery that he was
not murdered. It is true indeed that Mr. Cumming Walters has a theory of
Datchery (to which I have already darkly alluded) a theory which is wild
enough to be the centre not only of any novel but of any harlequinade.
But the point is that even Mr. Cumming Walters's theory, though it makes
the mystery more extraordinary, does not make it any more of a mystery
of Edwin Drood. It should not have been called _The Mystery of Drood_,
but _The Mystery of Datchery_. This is the strongest case for Proctor;
if the story tells of Drood coming back as Datchery, the story does at
any rate fulfil the title upon its title-page.

The principal objection to Proctor's theory is that there seems no
adequate reason why Jasper should not have murder