"Philip Jose Farmer - A Feast Unknown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

Since the first eight volumes of his memoirs have not yet been published, Lord Grandrith has written a
special foreword which encapsulates the early part of Volume I. Without this, the reader would be puzzled
by some of the references in this volume.

•

I was conceived and born in 1888.
Jack the Ripper was my father.
I am certain of this, although I have no evidence that would stand up in court. I have only the diary of
my legal father. He was, in fact, my uncle, although he was married to my mother.
My legal father kept a diary almost up to the moment of his death. Shortly after he had locked it
inside a desk, he was killed. His last written words recorded his despair because his wife had just died and
I, only a year old, was wailing for milk. And there were no human beings within hundreds of miles, as far
as he knew.
I alone have read the entire diary. I have never permitted anyone else to read any of the diary
preceding the moment when my uncle and my mother sailed from England for Africa.
My “biographer” would have been too horrified by the truth to have written it if I had been unkind
enough to reveal it to him. He was a romanticist and, in many ways, a Victorian.
He would have made up a story of his own, ignoring the real story, as he did with so many of my
adventures. He was interested mainly in adventure for its own sake, although he did describe my
psychology, my Weltanschauung. However, he never really transmitted the half-infrahuman cast of my
mind.
Perhaps he could not understand that part of me, although I tried to communicate it as well as I
could. He tried to understand, but he was human, all-too-human, as my favorite poet says. He could never
grasp, with the human hands of his psyche, the nonhuman shape of mine.
That part of the diary which I had forbidden others to read describes how my mother happened to be
with her husband in Whitechapel on that fog-smothered night. She had insisted on going with him to look
for his brother, who had escaped from the cell in the castle in the Cumberland County. Private detectives
had quietly tracked John Cloamby to the Whitechapel district of London. His brother, James Cloamby,
Viscount Grandrith, had joined the hunt. My mother, Alexandra Applethwaite, related to the noble
family of Bedford, had insisted on accompanying him.
My uncle objected to bringing his wife along for several reasons. The strongest was that his brother
had attempted to rape her when he had broken out of his cell after bending several iron bars and
uprooting them from their stone sockets. Only her screams and the prompt appearance of two
manservants armed with pistols had saved her. Alexandra, however, persisted in her insane belief that she
alone could make him surrender voluntarily when he was found. Also, she said that she alone could locate
him exactly. There was, she claimed, a psychic bond between them, “vibrations” which enabled her to
point toward and track him as if she were a human lodestone.
I use the word “insane” in describing this belief because later developments (described by my
“biographer” and by me in Vol. I) revealed her mental instability.
She also said that if she were not allowed to go with her husband in the search, she would inform the
police and the newspapers of what had happened.


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 A Feast Unknown

My uncle gave in to her. He had a horror of publicity of any kind and especially of this kind. Also, he
might have been arrested for concealing evidence of murder. He was, in fact, an accessory after the fact of
murder, if, indeed, there was a fact.