MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, THE（ISBN=） 英文原版

　　The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a novel that is itself the
subject of one of literature’s most enduring mysteries. The story
recounts the troubled romance of Rosa Bud and the book’s eponymous
character, who later vanishes. Was Drood murdered, and if so by
whom? All clues point to John Jasper, Drood’s lugubrious uncle, who
coveted Rosa. Or did Drood orchestrate his own disappearance? As
Charles Dickens died before finishing the book, the ending is
intriguingly ambiguous. In his Introduction, Matthew Pearl
illuminates the 150-year-long quest to unravel” “The Mystery of
Edwin Drood and lends new insight into the novel, the literary
milieu of 1870s England, and the private life of Charles Dickens.
This Modern Library edition includes new endnotes and a full
tran* of “The Trial of John Jasper for the Murder of Edwin
Drood,” the 1914 mock court case presided over and argued by the
likes of G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. Now diehard
fans, new readers, and armchair detectives have another opportunity
to solve the mystery Dickens took to his grave.

　　Charles Dickens is the author of such timeless classics as
Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, and
Great Expectations.
　　Matthew Pearl is the New
York Times bestselling author of The Dante Club, The Poe
Shadow, and The Last Dickens. He is the editor of the
Modern Library editions of Dante’s Inferno (translated by
Henry Wordsworth Longfellow) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders
in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Tales.

　　Chapter One
　　The Dawn
　　An ancient English Cathedral Town? How can the ancient English
Cathedral town be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of
its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty
iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real
prospect. What IS the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up?
Maybe, it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a
horde of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash,
and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten
thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand
dancing- girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants
caparisoned in countless gorgeous colors, and infinite in number
and attendants. Still, the Cathedral Tower rises in the background,
where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim
spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on the
top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry? Some
vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the
consideration of this possibility.
　　Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness
has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises,
supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. He is
in the meanest and closest of small rooms. Through the ragged
window- curtain, the light of early day steals in from a miserable
court. He lies, dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a
bedstead that has indeed given way under the weight upon it. Lying,
also dressed and also across the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman,
a Lascar, and a haggard woman. The two first are in a sleep or
stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to kindle it. And as
she blows, and shading it with her lean hand, concentrates its red
spark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a lamp to show him
what he sees of her.
　　“Another?” says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper.
“Have another?”
　　He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead.
　　“Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,” the
woman goes on, as she chronically complains. “Poor me, poor me, my
head is so bad! Them two come in after ye. Ah, poor me, the
business is slack, is slack! Few Chinamen about the Docks, and
fewer Lascars, and no ships coming in, these say! Here’s another
ready for ye, dreary. Ye’ll remember like a good soul, won’t ye,
that the market price is
　　dreffle high just now? More than three shillings and sixpence for
a thimbleful! And ye’ll remember that nobody but me (and Jack
Chinaman t’other side the court; but he can’t do it as well as me)
has the true secret of mixing it? Ye’ll pay up according, dreary,
won’t ye?”
　　She blows at the pipe as she speaks, and, occasionally bubbling
at it, inhales much of its contents.
　　“O me, O me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad! It’s nearly ready
for ye, dreary. Ah poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes like to
drop off! I see ye coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, ‘I’ll have
another ready for him, and he’ll bear in mind the market price of
opium, and pay according.’ O my poor head! I makes my pipes of old
penny ink-bottles, ye see, dreary—this is one—and I fits in a
mouthpiece, this way, and I takes my mixter out of this thimble
with this little horn spoon; and so I fills, deary. Ah, my poor
nerves! I got Heavens-hard drunk for sixteen year afore I took to
this; but this don’t hurt me, not to speak of. And it takes away
the hunger as well as wittles, deary.”
　　She hands him the nearly-emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning
over on her face.
　　He rises unsteadily from the bed, lays the pipe upon the
hearthstone, draws back the ragged curtain, and looks with
repugnance at his three companions. He notices that the woman has
opium-smoked herself into a strange likeness of the Chinaman. His
form of cheek, eye, and temple, and his color, are repeated in her.
Said Chinaman convulsively wrestles with one of his many Gods, or
Devils, perhaps, and snarls horribly. The Lascar laughs and
dribbles at the mouth. The hostess is still.
　　“What visions can she have?” the waking man muses, as he turns
her face towards him, and stands looking down at it. “Visions of
many butchers’ shops, and public-houses, and much credit? Of an
increase of hideous customers, and this horrible bedstead set
upright again, and this horrible court swept clean? What can she
rise to, under any quantity of opium, higher than that!—Eh?”
　　He bends down his ear, to listen to her mutterings.
　　“Unintelligible!”
　　As he watches the spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of
her face and limbs, like fitful lightning out of a dark sky, some
contagion in them seizes upon him: insomuch that he has to withdraw
himself to a lean arm-chair by the hearth—placed there, perhaps,
for such emergencies—and to sit in it, holding tight, until he has
got the better of this unclean spirit of imitation.
　　Then he comes back, pounces on the Chinaman, and, seizing him
with both hands by the throat, turns him violently on the bed. The
Chinaman clutches the aggressive hands, resists, gasps, and
protests.
　　“What do you say?”
　　A watchful pause.
　　“Unintelligible!”
　　Slowly loosening his grasp as he listens to the incoherent jargon
with an attentive frown, he turns to the Lascar and fairly drags
him forth upon the floor. As he falls, the Lascar starts into a
half- risen attitude, glares with his eyes, lashes about him
fiercely with his arms, and draws a phantom knife. It then becomes
apparent that the woman has taken possession of his knife, for
safety’s sake; for, she too starting up, and restraining and
expostulating with him, the knife is visible in her dress, not in
his, when they drowsily drop back, side by side.
　　There has been chattering and clattering enough between them, but
to no purpose. When any distinct word has been flung into the air,
it has had no sense or sequence. Wherefore “unintelligible!” is
again the comment of the watcher, made with some reassured nodding
of his head, and a gloomy smile. He then lays certain silver money
on the table, finds his hat, gropes his way down the broken stairs,
gives a good morning to some rat-ridden doorkeeper, in bed in a
black hutch beneath the stairs, and passes out.
　　That same afternoon, the massive grey square tower of an old
Cathedral rises before the sight of a jaded traveller. The bells
are going for daily vesper service, and he must needs attend it,
one would say, from his haste to reach the open cathedral door. The
choir are getting on their sullied white robes, in a hurry, when he
arrives among them, gets on his own robe, and falls into the
procession filing in to service. Then, the Sacristan locks the
iron-barred gates that divide the sanctuary from the chancel, and
all of the procession having scuttled into their places, hide their
faces; and then the intoned words, “When the Wicked Man—” rise
among groins of arches and beams of roof, awakening muttered
thunder.
　　Chapter Two
　　
　　A Dean, and a Chapter Also
　　Whosoever has observed that sedate and clerical bird, the rook,
may perhaps have noticed that when he wings his way homeward
towards nightfall, in a sedate and clerical company, two rooks will
suddenly detach themselves from the rest, will retrace their flight
for some distance, and will there poise and linger; conveying to
mere men the fancy that it is of some occult importance to the body
politic, that this artful couple should pretend to have renounced
connection with it.
　　Similarly, service being over in the old cathedral with the
square tower, and the choir scuffling out again, and divers
venerable persons of rook-like aspect dispersing, two of these
latter retrace their steps, and walk together in the echoing
Close.
　　Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery
and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on
the cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on
the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry
shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked uneven
flagstones, and through the giant elm trees as they shed a gust of
tears. Their fallen leaves lie strewn thickly about. Some of these
leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary within the low arched
cathedral door; but two men coming out, resist them, and cast them
forth again with their feet; this done, one of the two locks the
door with a goodly key, and the other flits away with a folio music
book.
　　“Mr. Jasper was that, Tope?”
　　“Yes, Mr. Dean.”
　　“He has stayed late.”
　　“Yes, Mr. Dean. I have stayed for him, your Reverence. He has
been took a little poorly.”
　　“Say ‘taken,’ Tope—to the Dean,” the younger rook interposes in a
low tone with this touch of correction, as who should say: “You may
offer bad grammar to the laity, or the humbler clergy not to the
Dean.”
　　Mr. Tope, Chief Verger and Showman, and accustomed to be high
with excursion parties, declines with a silent loftiness to
perceive that any suggestion has been tendered to him.
　　“And when and how has Mr. Jasper been taken—for, as Mr.
Crisparkle has remarked, it is better to say taken—taken—” repeats
the Dean; “when and how has Mr. Jasper been Taken—”
　　“Taken, sir,” Tope deferentially murmurs.
　　“—Poorly, Tope?”
　　“Why, sir, Mr. Jasper was that breathed—”
　　“I wouldn’t say ‘That breathed,’ Tope,” Mr. Crisparkle
interposes, with the same touch as before. “Not English—to the
Dean.”
　　“Breathed to that extent,” the…