Old Writing: Jack - Part 3

            When Mrs. Nichols, Polly, approached me, I am ashamed to say that I at first thought the same as any of you would think and nearly shooed her away.  She was an older woman, almost matronly, who had undoubtedly been pretty before poverty and the life it had forced upon her had stripped it away, piece by piece.  She was also, I would come to learn, a very clever woman who, despite her lack of what we in the more refined classes would call true education, had learned enough quickly enough to survive.

            When she asked to speak with me, her voice strong and resigned but with no hint of solicitation, I agreed warily.  So we walked down the streets of London, she talking and I listening, and my eyes were slowly, tactfully, opened to the world as it truly is.  We have, as a ruling class, embraced complex illusions of propriety in order to, we claim, keep the world running as it is meant to run.  Deep down, however, the real reason for our reliance on this rigid social construction is simply to keep ourselves insulated from the cruel havoc we inflict upon others without a second’s contemplation, all in favor of our own comfort.

            Polly explained carefully the injustice that existed just outside our periphery, only acknowledged when we sought out our baser fancies, and only for the brief time it took to partake in them.  It was what she had done more of her life than I should rightly be so, out of necessity, and it was what, she said as we arrived at my home, was going to be the death of her in a very immediate sense.

            By the time we’d reached my doorstep, any hesitation about inviting her in had long since passed.  We had tea and talked long into the night, sometimes about her crusade, the crux of which she had yet to spring upon me, and other about her life, her family, her world.  I was ashamed of the life into which I had been born, something she insisted was foolish with a wave of her worn hand.  She reminded me of my own mother, God rest her soul.

            By the time it all came out, her plan to change the world, the fire was burning low and the first chill of the early morning was just reaching out from the shadows.  She was, she told me, going to die the following Friday.  I began to protest, insisting, as we are wont, that she not lose hope, that disease was unpredictable and medical science expanding rapidly its understanding of the body.  As I rambled on, she watched me serenely, waiting until I had finished to shake her head softly.

            “No,” she said, “You don’t understand.  I’ll die Friday cause you’re going to kill me.”

            She leaned back in the softness of the high-backed chair, into the darkness, as she laid out her plot in intricate detail.  Her words curled inside me like some malevolent serpent, twisting in my gut, in part because of the nature of the crime and in part because, as she continued, I realized with a horrifying certainty the wisdom of her words and that she was right; I was to become a murderer.