Crime and Punishment

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I was just rereading HBP, “Lord Voldemort Request,” and the final interchange floored me when I finally paid it adequate attention. Twinkles said, and a great sadness filled his face, “The time is long gone when I could frighten you with a burning wardrobe and force you to make repayment for your crimes. But I wish I could, Tom…. I wish I could….”
Excuse me?



The Dumb One had forced Tom to make repayment for his crimes? When had that happened, precisely?

I can only presume that this is Albus’s interpretation of the scene in Tom’s orphanage when the wise visiting wizard cast a charm that made Tom’s private wardrobe first seem to be engulfed in flames, and then to “rattle” from the stolen trinkets hidden within. Finally Tom was forced to display his mean trophies. And then The White Wizard displayed his morality:


“You will return them to their owners with your apologies,” said Dumbledore calmly, putting his wand back into his jacket. “I shall know whether it has been done. And be warned: Thieving is not tolerated at Hogwarts.”

Tom did not look remotely abashed; he was still staring coldly and appraisingly at Dumbledore. At last he said in a colorless voice, “Yes, sir.

“At Hogwarts,” Dumbledore went on, “we teach you not only to use magic, but to control it. You have—inadvertently, I am sure—been using your powers in a way that is neither taught nor tolerated at our school. You are not the first, nor will you be the last, to allow your magic to run away with you. But you should know that Hogwarts can expel students, and the Ministry of Magic—yes, there is a Ministry—will punish lawbreakers still more severely. All new wizards must accept that, in entering our world, they abide by our laws.”

“Yes, sir,” said Riddle again.

Let’s assume for the moment that Tom did in fact return his sordid trophies to those still able to reclaim them, i.e. to those of Tom’s victims still alive, sane, ambulatory, and resident at the orphanage.

Now, suppose Tommy had caught me showing off my yo-yo skills to admiring fellow orphans, and used the yo-yo itself in various creative ways to torment me. Perhaps he first made it entangle my hands while my former admirers laughed at my ineptness, and then tripped my feet while they stopped laughing in fear, and then strangled me almost to death with my own toy…. Suppose he then confiscated the toy as a souvenir of the encounter. Had he done some such, I might not, in fact, want the yo-yo back. It would be a memento to me of the encounter, as much as to my tormentor.

Or perhaps the yo-yo was little Billy’s, and its string was what his pet rabbit had been hanged with…. Let’s not even think about what Tom could do with a girl’s thimble. (I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me….)

But leaving such considerations aside, Albus seriously believed that returning a few stolen trinkets would, to Tom’s orphanage fellows, constitute full repayment for his many crimes against them? For years of terror?

Um. You know. That’s a rather unique viewpoint. Really, it gets more unique, the more one imagines what it must have been like to live at little Tommy’s mercy. It gets to be quite a view without compare.

Well, Albus does believe he can’t be understood by the rest of us. In this matter, he's right.

*

What exactly were Riddle’s crimes by the time the Dumb One visited Tom in that beleaguered orphaniage? Mrs. Cole told Albus, “He scares the other children."

"You mean he is a bully?" asked Dumbledore.

"I think he must be," said Mrs. Cole, frowning slightly, "but it's very hard to catch him at it. There have been incidents…. Nasty things…..

"Billy Stubbs’ rabbit… well, Tom said he didn’t do it and I don’t see how he could have done, but even so, it didn’t hang itself from the rafters, did it?... All I know is he and Billy had argued the day before. And then on the summer outing…. well, Amy Benton and Dennis Bishop were never quite right afterwards, and all we ever got out of them was that they’d gone into a cave with Tom Riddle…. And, well, there have been a lot of things, funny things….”

This is as indefinite as it is sinister (and it’s an abrogation of responsibility that the Hogwarts representative chose not to explore more precisely how the child had been misusing his magic), but two definite crimes have been mentioned: killing a pet rabbit, and driving Amy Benton and Dennis Bishop insane.

(See my essay “Accessory after the Fact” for my parsing of the clues that Dennis and Amy had been sent to the lunatic asylum for their “not quite rightness”.)

But even if you don't accept my reading that they'd been transferred to the loony bin, we have Mrs. Cole's statement that they never recovered from whatever Tom did. Tom inflicted long-term, possibly permanent, mental damage on them.

Then there’s Tommy’s own confession to Albus: “I can make things move without touching them. I can make animals do what I want them to do, without training them. I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to.”

Tom says, “I can,” which is to say that he had already tested these powers. So he’s confessed to having coerced or possessed animals, used magic to harm people, and caused pain magically.

Further, he told Dumbledore “with ringing force” to “Tell the truth!” and it’s clear that he expected Dumbledore to obey unthinkingly. That was a homegrown version of the Imperius Tom deployed, and he’s clearly experienced at it; when Dumbledore doesn’t react properly, Tom was shocked, wary, and instantaneously demanded, “Who are you?”

Which establishes that Tom has must have used his spell repeatedly, enough at least to know that there has to be something special about Dumbledore if he can resist it.

Tom has thus confessed to or demonstrated homemade, wandless versions of two of the three Unforgivable Curses, folks, and he had already at least one death (of a pet) to his, ah, credit.

To summarize: in the orphanage Albus learned that young Tom had used magic deliberately and repeatedly to cause pain, fear, mental damage, and probably physical harm (“bad things happen”) to his fellow orphans; he had used magic to coerce both animals and humans; he had taken trophies, souvenirs of his most memorable successes in tormenting his fellows. This child had invented and perfected crude (wandless) versions of both the Cruciatus and the Imperius. He had, almost certainly, tortured other children into insanity. He had killed, if only a pet so far.

The other children were scared of him. Gee, why?

And Albus knew all this.

And the Dumb One’s response at the time was to lecture the budding psychopath, “Thieving is not tolerated at Hogwarts.”

Torture, possession, mind-control, telekinesis to hurt people, ARE? Just not theft?

Evidently.

*

But Albus’s attitude makes sense when we adjust for one additional variable.

Twinkles has many admirable intellectual attributes (just ask him, he’ll list them!), but there’s one we readers in this forum seldom grant him:

Empathy for those without his resources. For the weak.

*

And now it all falls into place.

From when Albus was a little boy, he was smarter and more powerful than most of his peers. And he internalized this, accepted this as normal, at a very young age.

And Albus now is emotionally divorced enough not to care much about public opinion—being regarded as mad, so long as he’s simultaneously granted to be brilliant is fine with him. “Nitwick. Blubber. Oddment. Tweak,” and donning a vulture hat at Yule.

If this attitude goes back a long ways, his peers couldn't even have ganged up on him and used humiliation effectively against him. (Compare young Severus's jealousy of his dignity.)

So Albus may have been nearly untouchable by anything others could do even as a child. He certainly is now, and has been for decades at least.

So now circle around to the point when above-it-all Albus met with that orphan. No one around Albus NOW—no one perhaps since Al’s first or second year as a student—perhaps no one EVER—can really bother Twinkles. No one can cause Dumbles serious physical or emotional pain. No one can coerce or possess him.

He fears no person, and perhaps never seriously has. (The one thing he says he fears is confronting his responsibility for killing Ariana.)

But Albus was the custodian of innumerable interesting secrets and trinkets. Whether or not anyone ever succeeded in penetrating his defenses, OF COURSE he expected people sometimes to try.

By the time Twinkles visited Tom’s orphanage, no sane person even tried to harm Albus. But optimistic sorts might still try to steal from him.

So, when he tries to understand that a miscreant might have offended against persons, theft is the only possibility that can actually register for Albus. It’s the only one Twinkles can relate to.

So yeah, Tom caused pain and terror to his fellow orphans, killed their pets, drove two of them insane…. Yawn.

But, horror of horrors, he also successfully stole from them!

Make restitution for that crime, sirrah, and know that some things are not to be tolerated!