Drood

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Caroline played her trump card on Wednesday, the twenty-ninth of April, the day before the Russia, carrying Dickens and Dolby on the last leg of their long voyage, was scheduled to drop anchor in Queenstown Harbour.

Caroline knew that I was in a good mood, although she had no idea of all the reasons why. Those reasons were clear enough to me. When Charles Dickens had sailed for America the previous November, he had been the master and I the eager apprentice; now The Moonstone in serial form was the hit of the nation, crowds at the Wellington Street offices of All the Year Round were larger with each number released, and commoner and nobility both were hanging on each new instalment to see just who had stolen the diamond and how. And I was secure in the sure and certain knowledge that even the cleverest reader among them would never be able to guess.

When Charles Dickens had sailed for America the previous November, my play No Thoroughfare—and it was, indeed, my play, after all the rewrites, revisions, and fresh ideas I had poured into it since the previous autumn—had been just a dream in early rehearsal. Now it was a bona fide hit and had already run at the Adelphi Theatre for more than one hundred and thirty sold-out evening performances. There were eager negotiations under way for a Paris production.

Finally, Mother’s death, while saddening me (and horrifying me with its insectoid aspects and uncertainty of cause) had also liberated me. Now, at the age of forty-four, I had finally and fully become a man unto myself.

So Caroline sensed that despite the incident of the servants’ stairway (after two weeks I still would not go into the kitchen or any part of the upper hallways near the heavily nailed, boarded over, and fully sealed doors), and despite frequent relapses and the continuing pain that required larger doses of laudanum and morphine just to allow me to work a few hours each day, I was in the best mood I had enjoyed for years.

Dickens had left in November thinking of himself as the Master and me as protégé; he was returning (ill and disabled, from all accounts) to find me as the popular-selling novelist, successful playwright, and fully independent man I now was. We would meet this time as equals (at the very least).

And, I was increasingly convinced, we both carried Drood’s scarabs in our skulls. That fact alone brought a grim new equality to our relationship.

CAROLINE CAME TO ME that Wednesday morning while I was in the bath. Perhaps she thought this was when I would be at my most mellow… or at least at my most pliable.

“Wilkie, my dear, I have been thinking about our earlier conversation.”

“Which conversation is that?” I asked, even though I knew full well. My spectacles had steamed over and I reached for a nearby towel and squinted while I wiped the lenses clear. Caroline became a great white-and-pink lumpy blur.

“The one about Lizzie moving into society and about the future of our own relationship under this roof,” she said, sounding very nervous indeed.

I, on the other hand, was completely calm as I set the tiny spectacles back on my nose. “Yes?”

“I have decided, Wilkie, that for our Lizzie… Carrie… to have the proper advantages in life, her mother really must be married and she part of a stable family.”

“I could not agree more,” I said. The steam from my bath rose to the ceiling and curled to all sides. Caroline’s face was flushed red with it.

“You do?” she said. “You agree?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “Please hand me that towel, my dear.”

Speechless, she handed me the towel and I proceeded to pat my rather pleasing rotundity dry.

“I did not know… all this time… I was not sure…” spluttered Caroline.

“Nonsense,” I said. “Your well-being… and Carrie’s, of course… have always been my primary concern. And you are correct. It is time for a marriage.”

“Oh, Wilkie, I…” She could not go on. Tears ran down her steam-reddened cheeks.

“I presume you are still in touch with your plumber,” I said, tossing aside the towel and pulling on my velour robe. “Mr Clow. Joseph Charles Clow?”

Caroline froze. The flush seeped out of her cheeks. “Yes?”

“And I assume that Mr Clow has proposed marriage to you by now, my dear. In fact, I presume that you were going to mention that fact to me in this very conversation.”

“Yes, but, I did not… I have not…”

I patted her arm. “There is no need for further explanation between two such old friends,” I said merrily. “It is time for marriage—for Carrie’s sake, as well as your own—and our Mr Clow has proposed it. You must accept at once.”

Caroline was pale down to her fingertips now. She took two blind steps backwards and bumped into the washbasin.

“I shall have Besse pack your clothes at once,” I went on. “Your other belongings, books and so forth, we shall send along in due course. I shall have George go fetch a cab as soon as you’re packed.”

Caroline’s mouth moved twice before a word came out. “Lizzie…”

“Carrie, of course, shall stay with me,” I said. “This has already been arranged between Carrie and myself. It is her choice and it is final. However passionate and compliant your plumber… Mr Joseph Charles Clow… may be, and however well-regarded his distiller of a father might have been, your plumber’s actual, hopeful, but sometimes struggling bourgeois existence is not appropriate for Carrie at this point in her life. As you have pointed out, Caroline, she shall soon be entering society. She has chosen to do this from this fine home, from Number Ninety Gloucester Place, secure in the company of writers, artists, composers, and great men. She shall visit you frequently, of course, but this shall remain her home. I’ve discussed this not only with Carrie but with your current mother-in-law, and they both agree.”

Caroline had lowered both hands to the basin’s counter behind her and seemed to be holding herself upright only by the force of those straight, stiffened, and quaking arms.

I did not reach out to touch her as I brushed past to step into the hall, and it seemed that Caroline could not then have lifted an arm under any circumstances.

“I believe your decision is wise, my dear,” I said softly from the doorway. “You and I shall always be friends. Should you or Mr Joseph Charles Clow ever need assistance of any sort, I will endeavour to put both of you in touch with the kind of people who may be capable of helping, if they are inclined to do so.”

Caroline continued to stare at the space where I had been standing next to the tub.

“I’ll have Besse commence your packing,” I said. “And I will send George down to the thoroughfare for a cab sooner rather than later. I don’t mind paying the driver to wait a while if necessary. It’s best to begin a journey like this in the morning, when one is fresh.”

AS I MENTIONED EARLIER, Dickens’s and Dolby’s ship, the Russia, arrived in Queenstown Harbour on the last day in April, but none of the Inimitable’s friends rushed to Liverpool to welcome them. Telegrams from Dolby had made it clear that Dickens wished “a few days of solitary acclimatisation before resuming his duties and old habits.”

I translated this as meaning that the exhausted author would not be going straight to Gad’s Hill Place, nor would he stay in London (although he passed through there by train on May 2), but rather would continue on straight into the waiting arms of Ellen Ternan in Peckham. It turned out that I was perfectly correct in this assumption. I also knew through casual comments from Wills at the Wellington Street offices that the actress and her mother had returned from Italy only two days earlier.

How very convenient for the Inimitable.

It was another four days before Dickens made himself available for a welcoming from Wills, Frank Beard, and me. He took the train in from Peckham for an early dinner with Fechter and the rest of us, and then we all went to the Adelphi so that Dickens could finally see No Thoroughfare.

I had been more than prepared to express sympathetic concern and even shock at Dickens’s aged, exhausted state after the American tour, but Beard spoke for both of us at the station when the physician cried out, “Good Lord, Charles! Seven years younger!”

It was true. There was no sign of the limp and swollen foot we had heard so much about through letters. He had lost some weight in America, but it made him look younger and healthier. The eight-day spring sea voyage had obviously given him some real rest away from all duties, and long hours on deck had turned the always quick-tanning Dickens’s visage to bronze; somehow even his hair and beard seemed darker and fuller. Dickens’s eyes were bright. His smile was quick and his laughter and resonant tale-telling voice filled the restaurant where we dined and the carriage the five of us later took to the Adelphi.

“Good God, Wilkie,” Dickens said to me in private as we handed our hats, gloves, and sticks to the girl at the theatre, “I knew you’d been ill, but you look absolutely terrible, my dear boy. You’re shaking and pale and shuffling along like Thackeray near the end. What on earth has gotten into you?”

Gotten into me. How very clever. How very… droll. I gave Dickens a wan smile and said nothing.

Later, during the play, I had the most extraordinary experience.

Our little group was in the authors’ box—minus Fechter, of course, who had rushed backstage to put on his makeup and vomit in preparation for the show (even though everyone believed that this might be his last month of performing in England as the villain Obenreizer because of the actor’s increasing health problems). Despite my own illness, I had been there in that box many times in the preceding five months, but this was the first time Dickens had been present for the play on which he had collaborated in the early stages. Naturally, Dickens received a standing ovation from the full house even before the curtain opened. But I had expected that and it did not hurt my feelings.

No, it was the play itself that was the extraordinary experience for me. Counting rehearsals, I had seen my No Thoroughfare from start to finish at least thirty times. I could recite every line and every rewrite of every line. I had every entrance and exit timed to the fraction of a second.

But this night it was as if I were watching the play for the first time.

In truth, Dear Reader, it was as if one eye were watching the play for the first time. The headache that was always with me had settled, as was its wont, behind my right eye with such intensity that I expected the back of my eyeball to hiss the way a pitcher of good grog does when the boy thrusts in a white-hot rod to heat it. I could also feel the pressure of the scarab there. Sometimes I believed that it burrowed forward precisely so that it could peer out through one of my eyes.

So it was that as I sat there holding my temple first with my right hand and then my left, covertly covering first my left eye and then my right, as if I were watching the play I had written and seen so many times for the first time.

The scene at the orphanage with the foundling children being switched, I saw at once, was pure nonsense rather than real pathos, despite the obvious emotional response from the gullible audience. That Dickens had been most active in his collaboration in this pathetic setup business was little solace to me as the play ground on.

The death of our Walter Wilding (from both a broken heart and sheer guilt at the thought that he had accidentally inherited another man’s name and fortune) set the audience to boo-hooing as always, but it made me want to retch. Pure poppycock. Absolute drivel. How, I wondered, could any serious author have concocted such a scene?

And now Fechter was strutting to and fro in his guise as the villain Obenreizer. What an absurd character. What an absurd performance.

I remember showing one specific paragraph from the published story to Fechter, submitting it as the key to his character’s secret motivations and internal psyche. Now I recalled the words with rue—

But the great Obenreizer peculiarity was, that a certain nameless film would come over his eyes—apparently by the action of his own will—which would impenetrably veil, not only from those tellers of tales, but from his face at large, every expression save one of attention. It by no means followed that his attention should be wholly given to the person with whom he spoke, or even wholly bestowed on present sounds and objects. Rather, it was a comprehensive watchingfulness of everything he had in his own mind, and everything that he knew to be, or suspected to be, in the minds of other men.

I remembered writing that passage almost a year earlier and I also recalled having a distinct sense of satisfaction at my own abilities of expressing the complex mental and physical traits of a villain. I had thought, at the time, that I was conveying my own secret way of looking at a world that I knew was insincere and set on spoiling my own plans and ambitions.

But these words from the original Christmas tale—the so-called key to Obenreizer’s character—were flat, I realised now. Flat and silly and empty. And Fechter had used my words to endow his Obenreizer with a constantly skulking, furtive walk and look, combined with a manic stare—all too frequently aimed at nothing at all—that now impressed me as not the traits of a clever villain, but rather those of a village idiot after a serious concussion to his skull.

The audience loved it.

They also loved our new hero, George Vendale (who took the heroic palm from Walter Wilding when the latter died of his guiltless shame). Tonight I saw that George Vendale was a worse idiot than the skulking, smirking, brainlessly goggling Obenreizer. A child of three could have seen Obenreizer’s endless manipulations and falsehoods, yet Vendale—and several hundred people in that night’s audience—accepted our silly premise that the hero was simply a sweet, trusting soul.

If our race had produced only a few sweet, trusting souls like George Vendale, the species would have died out from sheer stupidity millennia ago.

Even the setting in the Swiss Alps, I realised while watching with the scarab’s clarity, was silly and unnecessary. The action leaping back and forth from London to Switzerland had no purpose except to bring in some of the spectacle that Dickens and I had seen in our journey across the Alps in 1853. The last scenes in the play, where Vendale’s beloved, Margaret Obenreizer (the villain’s beautiful and sinless niece), revealed that Vendale had not died from being hurled down the glacier a year earlier, but had been in her secret care all that time in a cosy little Swiss chalet presumably at the base of the aforementioned glacier, came close to making me bark with derisive laughter.

The scene where Obenreizer the Clever (who had lured Vendale all that way to that very ice-bridge above the abyss a year before) set forth across the treacherous slope for no other reason than the play’s ending demanded a sacrifice of him, not only stretched my newly awakened scepticism to the breaking point, but snapped it entirely. I wished to God that Fechter had been flinging himself into an actual bottomless abyss that night rather than merely dropping eight feet to a pile of mattresses hidden from the audience’s view behind a painted wooden spire of ice.

I had to close both eyes in the final scene where Obenreizer’s body was being borne into the little Swiss village celebrating Vendale’s and Margaret’s marriage (why wouldn’t they have married in London, for God’s sake?), with the happy couple exiting in exultance on stage right and with Obenreizer’s lifeless body being carried in a litter off stage left as the audience simultaneously hissed at the villain’s funeral and wept and cheered the wedding. The juxtaposition, seemingly so clever when Dickens and I outlined it on the page, was puerile and absurd in the clarity of my scarab-vision. But the audience hissed and cheered on as Fechter’s body was carried off stage left and our newly married couple rolled away in their marriage coach stage right.

The audience were idiots. The play was being performed by idiots. Its script was sheer melodrama idiocy penned by an idiot.

In the lobby after the play— and after five hundred people had pressed close to shake Dickens’s hand or tell him how wonderful his play had been (I was all but forgotten, it seemed, as the true playwright, which—on this night of revelation—I did not mind a bit)—Dickens said to me, “Well, my dear Wilkie, the play is a triumph. There is no doubt of it. But, to use your Moonstone language, it remains a diamond in the rough. There are excellent things in it… excellent things!.. but it still drags a tad.”

I stared at him. Had Dickens just seen the same play I had?

“There are too many pieces of stagecraft missed as it is now being produced,” continued Dickens. “Too many opportunities to heighten both the drama and Obenreizer’s villainy have been missed in this version.”

I had to use all my strength not to laugh in the Inimitable’s face. More stagecraft, more drama, and more villainy were the last things on earth this giant, steaming pile of overacted, melodramatic heap of horse apples needed. What it needed, I thought, was a shovel and a deep hole in a distant place in which to bury it.

“You know, of course, that while Fechter soon may have to leave this performance for reasons of health,” continued Dickens, “we fully intend to put on a new version of No Thoroughfare at the Café Vaudeville in Paris early next month with, one hopes, Fechter, sooner or later, reprising his success as Obenreizer.”

Reprising this public pratfall onto our collective arse was my only thought.

“I shall personally oversee the revisions and perhaps act as stage manager at Vaudeville Théâtre until the play is on its feet,” said Dickens. “I do hope you shall be coming along with us, Wilkie. It should be great fun.”

“I am afraid that will not be possible, Charles,” I said. “My health simply will not permit it.”

“Ahh,” said Dickens. “I am heartily sorry for that.” I could detect no actual regret in his voice and almost certainly could hear an undertone of relief. “Well,” he said, “Fechter will be too exhausted to go out with us afterwards, so I shall drop in on him backstage and convey our congratulations at the excellence of what may be his last performance as Obenreizer… in this version of the play at least!”

And with that, Dickens bustled away, still being congratulated by the last of the passing theatre-goers.

Beard, who was going out with us later, was chatting with others so I stepped out into the street. The air smelled of horse manure, as the air outside all theatres did after the carriages and cabs had taken away the well-dressed members of the night’s audience. The stink seemed appropriate.

As it turned out, Dickens kept Beard and me waiting for more than half an hour. I later learned that he had loaned the weeping Fechter £2,000… a fact that was especially galling, since I had loaned the foolish actor £1,000 that I could scarce afford only two weeks earlier.

While I waited alone in the barnyard miasma, I drank deeply from my silver flask of laudanum and realised that for all of Dickens’s talk of theatrical triumph in France, he would not be staying there past the first week of June.

Drood and the scarab would bring him back to London on or before 9 June. It would be the third anniversary of the Staplehurst accident. Charles Dickens had a date for that night, I was certain, and this year I vowed that I would spend it with him.

I swallowed the last of the laudanum and smiled a smile much colder and more villainous than anything Fechter as Obenreizer could ever have managed.