The Edwardian Englishman
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years been synonymous with all that is clever and astute in the art of detecting
crime” (7). Together, the Ralph-Jevons duo constitutes a composite of many of the
values and attributes of an idealized (not to say fantasized) re-formation of early
Edwardian English masculinity: education, Professional and social Status with the
right background and Connections, business acumen, comradeship, public spiritedness, scientific skill, intellectuality—and not to forget money. And yet, from
the outset, what is ostensibly a secure and stable bourgeois masculinity is more
unsettled and under pressure than would appear. Because, as Ralph puts it at the
beginning, he lives “in hourly dread of some catastrophe the nature of which I’m
utterly at a loss to determine” (6). Ralph is haunted by what he calls “a mysterious
feeling of insecurity” and an unaccountable “sense of impending evil” (10).
Ralph’s premonitions of looming disaster are soon bome out when he is
summoned to the house of one of Sir Bemard’s best patients, the very wealthy Henry
Courtenay, whom Ralph finds stabbed through the heart in his own bed. With no
clues as to the identity of the killer, everyone chooses a suspect. The police,
mistakenly but predictably, settle on the innocent butler, and Ralph (perversely and
ludicrously) half-convinces himself that it may have been his own sweetheart-cumfiancee, Ethelwynn, sister of the dead man’s wife. Ralph does so firstly on the
strength of some dark suspicions planted in his mind earlier by the woman-hating
Sir Bemard about some guilty secret that he Claims Ethelwynn is hiding and,
secondly, when he discovers what he takes for circumstantial evidence in a bloodstained fragment of chenille he finds by the victim’s bed—the same chenille as on
the fringe of one of Ethelwynn’s shawls. Ralph puts two and two together and gets
five. He pictures how the shred of fabric must have come away from the shawl “by
the sudden uplifting of the arm of the wearer” (38) as Ethelwynn had raised the
knife. “I saw how cleverly I had been duped,” Ralph says, “I recognized that this
woman, whom I thought an angel, was only a cunning assassin.” In fact, as will be
revealed, Ralph sees nothing at all. Not only does he condemn his beloved as a
vengeful murderess (he leams from a letter to the dead man written by Ethelwynn
that she had actually been secretly engaged to Courtenay herseif before he had
married her sister), but he also persuades himself that Sir Bemard’s waming about
Ethelwynn’s dark secret must have been based on fact. “He was at least an honest
upright man who...had my interests deeply at heart. In the progress I had made in my
profession I owed much to him, and even in my private affairs he had sought to
guide me, although I had, alas ! disregarded his repeated wamings” (49).
As the plot unravels, Ralph’s unquestioning acceptance of the medical
patriarch’s say-so and his unthinking faith in Sir Bemard’s reliability and moral
authority will seem grotesquely ironic as well as being potentially disastrous as it
could well send his betrothed to the gallows. Ralph may be intended by Le Queux
partly to personify the idealized early Edwardian bourgeois male, but his appalling
failure to distinguish honesty from corruption accurately is as reprehensible as his
callous and near-misogynistic rush to judgment against the completely innocent
Ethelwynn. Indeed, a little later, Ralph will reinforce his assumption of her guilt with
some rampant gender Stereotyping when he admits, “I could not bring myself to
believe that such a perfect face could conceal a heart blackened by the crime of
murder. But alas ! all men are weak where a pretty woman is concemed. After all, it