Drood

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The premiere of my play Black and White was on a Sunday, 29 March, 1869. I hovered backstage in an advanced stage of nerves, too agitated even to gauge the audience response by the sound or absence of laughter and applause. All I could hear was the beating of my heart and the pounding of my pulse in my aching temples. My stomach revolted frequently in the carefully calculated ninety-one minutes that the play ran (not so long as to bore the audience, not so brief as to make them feel short-changed, all according to the accursed, hovering Fechter’s calculations). Borrowing an idea from Fechter—who had called for the same boy earlier, before the curtain went up—I had the lad follow me around with a basin. I was forced to resort to it several times before the end of Act III.

Peeking out through the curtains, I could see my family and friends crowding the author’s box—Carrie looking especially lovely in a new gown given to her by the Ward family (for whom she still worked); my brother, Charley, and his wife, Katey; Frank Beard and his wife; Fred and Nina Lehmann; Holman Hunt (who had attended Mother’s funeral in my place); and others. In the lower omnibus-box closer to the stage was Charles Dickens and all of his family that was not scattered to Australia or India or to lonely exile (Catherine)—Georgina, his daughter Mamie, his son Charley and his wife, his son Henry, home for a break from Cambridge, and more.

I could not bear to watch their reaction. I went back to cowering backstage, the boy with the basin scrambling to stay close.

Finally the last curtain came down, the Adelphi Theatre exploded with wild applause, and Fechter and his leading lady, Carlotta Leclercq, went out to take their bows and then to summon out the rest of the cast. Everyone was smiling. The ovation continued unabated and I could hear the cries of “Author! Author!”

Fechter came back to lead me out, and I strode onto the stage with as much an appearance of modest aplomb as I could muster.

Dickens was standing and appeared to be leading the crowd’s wild applause. He was wearing his spectacles and was so close to the stage that the limelights reflected in them turnd his eye sockets into circles of blue fire.

We had a hit. Everyone said so. The newspapers the next day congratulated me on having—at last—found the perfect formula for theatrical success by mastering, as they said, “the essential business of neat, tight, dramatic construction.”

No Thoroughfare had run for six months. I fully expected Black and White to run (with a full house) for a year, perhaps eighteen months.

But after three weeks, empty seats began appearing like leprous lesions on a saint’s face. After six weeks, Fechter and his troupe were emoting to a half-empty house. The play closed after a mere sixty days, less than half the run of the far clumsier and collaborative No Thoroughfare.

I blamed the bovine stupidity of London playgoers. We had laid a pure pearl at their feet and they had wondered where the rancid oyster meat had gone. I also blamed those elements in Fechter’s original scenario for what I (and certain French newspapers) called the overly “Oncle Tommerie” aspects of the play. England in the early 1860s (just as America shortly before it) had gone ecstatically mad about Uncle Tom’s Cabin—everyone in England with a threadbare suit of evening clothes had seen the thing twice—but interest in slavery and its cruelties had faded since then, especially after the American Civil War.

And in the meantime, Fechter’s “Triumph” was coming close to driving me to Marshalsea debtors prison—although Marshalsea itself had been closed and partially torn down decades earlier. When he promised “copious backers” for Black and White, he essentially had me in mind. And I had complied—secretly pouring a fortune into expenses, actors’ salaries, artists’ fees for backdrops, musicians’ fees, et cetera.

I had also been lending more and more money to the always-insolvent (yet always-living-well) Charles Albert Fechter, and it did not console me in the least to know that Dickens had also been subsidising the actor’s extravagant style of living (to the combined tune, I knew now, of more than £20,000).

When Black and White closed after sixty days, Fechter shrugged and went off in search of new roles. I received the bills. When I finally cornered Fechter about what he owed me, he replied with his usual childish cunning—“My dear Wilkie, you know I love you. Do you think I should love you so if I were not firmly convinced you would do the same thing in my place?”

This response made me remember that I still owned poor Hatchery’s pistol with its four remaining bullets.

So, to pay the bills and to begin digging myself out of the debt that had so soon followed and replaced true financial security (with Mother’s inheritance and my earnings from The Moonstone and other projects now all but gone), I did what any writer would do in such an emergency: I drank more laudanum, took my nightly injections of morphine, drank much wine, bedded Martha more frequently, and began a new novel.

DICKENS MAY HAVE LEAPT to his feet applauding during the premiere of my Black and White, but a month later his reading tour had him flat on his back.

In Blackburn he was giddy and in Bolton he staggered and almost fell, although months later I overheard him telling his American friend James Fields, “… only Nelly observed that I had staggered and that my eye had failed and only she dared to tell me.”

Nelly was Ellen Ternan, also still referred to by Dickens as “the Patient” because of the slight injuries she had suffered at Staplehurst four years earlier. Now he was the patient. And she was still travelling with him from time to time. This was interesting news. What a terrible and final turning-point it is in any ageing man’s life when one’s young lover becomes one’s caretaker.

I knew from Frank Beard that Dickens had been compelled to write him describing these symptoms. Beard, in turn, had been sufficiently alarmed that he had departed by rail for Preston the very afternoon he received the letter.

Beard arrived, examined Dickens, and announced that there could be no more readings. The tour was over.

“Are you certain?” asked Dolby, who was in the room. “The house is sold out and it is too late to refund the tickets.”

“If you insist on Dickens taking the platform tonight,” said the physician, glowering at Dolby almost as fiercely as had Macready, “I will not guarantee but that he goes through life dragging a foot after him.”

Beard brought Dickens back to London that very night and the next morning had arranged a consultation with the famous physician Sir Thomas Watson. After a very thorough examination and interrogation of the Inimitable on his symptoms, Watson announced, “The state thus described shows plainly that C. D. has been on the brink of an attack of paralysis of his left side, and possibly of apoplexy.”

Dickens rejected these dire predictions, saying in the following months that he had been suffering only from over-fatigue. Still, he called a pause in his tour. Dickens had finished seventy-four of his planned one hundred readings (this was only two fewer than the number that had driven him to near-collapse in America).

And yet, after a few weeks of relative rest at Gad’s Hill Place and in London, the Inimitable began pressing Dr Watson to allow him to salvage his rescheduled tour. Sir Thomas shook his head, warned against the writer’s over-optimism, prescribed extreme caution, and said, “Preventative measures are always invidious, for when the most successful, need for them is the least apparent.”

Dickens won the argument, of course. He always won. But he agreed that his final readings—his true farewell readings—were to number no more than twelve, were to involve no railway travel whatsoever, and would necessarily have to be delayed until 1870, eight months away.

And so Dickens returned to London, living during the week— he was at Gad’s Hill most weekends—in his rooms above the offices of All the Year Round at Wellington Street, and threw himself full-tilt into the editing, refurbishing, writing, and planning of the magazine. When he had nothing else to do (I saw this myself during a visit to pick up a cheque), he went into Wills’s now frequently empty office and tidied and sorted and rearranged and dusted.

He also ordered his solicitor, Ouvry, to draw up and finalise his will, which was done quickly and signed and executed on 12 May.

But little of the melancholy he showed during the most exhausted days of his reading tour was visible during these late-spring and early-summer months. Dickens was anticipating the long visit by his old American friends James Fields and his wife, Annie, in that feverish way that only a boy eager to share his toys and games could evince.

And, with his will signed, his doctors predicting imminent apoplexy and death, and the warmest and most humid summer in memory settling over London like a Thames-stinking wet horse blanket, Dickens was beginning to think about another novel.

BY SUMMER I had already begun my new book and was researching and writing it with a will.

I had decided for certain the form and thrust of the book one weekend in late May, when I was visiting Martha R— (“Martha Dawson” to her landlady) in the persona of William Dawson, travelling Barrister at Law. It was one of those rare times when, in order to please Martha, I stayed two nights. I had brought my flask of laudanum, of course, but decided to leave the morphia with its attendant syringe at home. This led to two sleepless nights (not even extra laudanum allowed me to sleep more than a few anxious minutes). So it was on the second of these nights that I found myself sitting in a chair, watching Martha R— sleep. Because of the early-summer warmth I had opened a window and left the drapes wide, since this bedroom looked out only upon a private garden. Moonlight painted the floor, the bed, and Martha in a broad white stripe.

Now, some say that a woman with child becomes especially attractive. And it is true that there is—with all but the most sickly sort—a strange glow of joy and healthiness that tends to hover around a woman at least during part of her time in confinement. But many men, at least of my acquaintance, also subscribe to the odd theory that a woman with child is also erotically attractive (and I apologise for this candid and perhaps vulgar talk, Dear Reader of the Future—perhaps my time was a more direct and honest one), but I fail to see that.

In fact, Dear Reader, as I sat there in the deepest hours of the morning on that warm and sticky May night, turning the pillow over and over in my hands, I looked at Martha where she was sleeping and saw not the innocent young woman who had so enticed me just a few years earlier, but an ageing, ponderous, blue-veined, bosom-bloated, and bizarre figure that was, to my keen novelist’s eye, not quite human.

Caroline had never looked this way. Of course, Caroline had had the good manners—at least in my presence—never to be pregnant. But more than that, Caroline had always looked like the lady she purported to be and worked so hard to become. This snoring form painted by the wide stripe of moonlight looked… bovine.

I turned the pillow over in my hands and thought about all this with the clarity that only the proper dosage of laudanum can bring to a mind already sharpened by education and logic.

Mrs Wells, Martha’s landlady (not to be confused with the much cannier Mrs Wells who had been my mother’s final caretaker), had not seen me arrive. She had been, Martha told me, shut up in her tower room with the croup for more than a week. A neighbour boy brought her soup in the evening and toast and tea in the morning, but I hadn’t seen the boy when I’d arrived or during any of the time I was in Martha’s private rooms. Mrs Wells was a foolish old woman who read nothing, almost never went out, and knew nothing of the modern world. She knew me only as “Mr Dawson” and we had spoken only a few times in passing. She believed me to be a barrister. I was sure that she had never heard of the writer named Wilkie Collins.

I held the pillow tight, compressing it and then stretching it in my soft-looking but (I believe) powerful hands.

There was, of course, the land agent with whom I had arranged to rent these rooms from Mrs Wells years before. But he also had known me only as Mr Dawson, and I had given a false address for myself.

Martha almost never wrote her parents, and not just because of an estrangement arising from her association with me. Despite my patient lessons with Martha, neither she nor her mother was really literate—they could form letters and sign their names, but neither could read with any assurance and neither took the time to write letters. Her father could but never chose to. Occasionally Martha went home to visit—she had no real friends in her former home town or in nearby Yarmouth, only family—but she always assured me that she’d given no details of her life here: not her address, never her true situation, and especially not the fiction of her marriage to “Mr Dawson.” As far as her family knew, based on her last visit some time ago, Martha was single and working as a parlourmaid in some unspecified London hotel and living in a cheap tenement flat with three other good Christian working girls.

Could I trust that she had not told them the truth?

Yes, I was certain I could. Martha had never lied to me.

Had I ever seen anyone in the city—or, more important, had they seen us—when I went out in company with Martha R—?

I was all but certain that I had not. As small as London seems at times, as frequently as friends and acquaintances in the upper crust of society cross paths, I had never taken Martha anywhere—especially in the daylight—where those in my true circle might have stumbled across us. On those few occasions when Martha and I had strolled together, I had always taken her to odd corners of the city—distant parks, poorly lighted inns, or back-alley restaurants. I was sure that she had seen through my explanation of wanting to explore, of seeking out new parts of the city like a child playing hide-and-catch, but she had never complained.

No, no one knew—or if they had seen us, they had no idea who the young woman had been and would have thought little of it. Just another young actress on that rogue Wilkie Collins’s arm. I had spent time with so many. Just another young periwinkle. Even Caroline had known of the periwinkles.

I left my chair and went over to sit on the edge of the bed.

Martha stirred, half-rolled towards me, and ceased snoring for a moment, but she did not wake.

The pillow was still in my hands. Now the moonlight covered my long, sensitive fingers as if dabbing them with white paint. Each finger was whiter than the linen on the pillow and suddenly they all seemed to blend with that delicate linen, to sink into it, to melt and become one with the fabric. They became the hands of a corpse disappearing into chalk.

Or melting in a pit of lime.

I leaned forward and held the pillow over Martha’s sleeping face. The scarab behind my right eye scuttled forward for a better view.

Frank Beard!

Two months earlier, I had told the physician about a married but abandoned female friend of an acquaintance of mine—the woman being alone and with child at the moment and with little money. Could he recommend a midwife?

Beard had given me a partially amused, partially scolding look and said, “Do you know when this female friend of an acquaintance is due?”

“Late June, I think,” I said, feeling my ears burn. “Or perhaps early July.”

“Then I shall look in on her myself in her ninth month… and most probably attend the birth as well. Some midwives are wonderful. Many are murderesses. Give me the lady’s name and address.”

“I do not know such information offhand,” I’d replied. “But I shall ask my acquaintance and send her name and address to you in a letter.”

And so I had. And then forgotten about it.

But Frank Beard might not forget if he read a newspaper this week and…

“D— n!” I cried and threw the pillow across the room.

Martha was awake in an instant, levering herself upright in bed like some Leviathan rising from the surface of a sheeted sea. “Wilkie! What is it?”

“Nothing, my dear. Just the rheumatical gout and a terrible headache. I apologise for wakening you.”

The headache was real enough, as the scarab—furious for some reason—burrowed itself back into the deepest recesses of my brain.

“Oh, my darling boy,” cried Martha R— and hugged me to her bosom. Some time later, I fell asleep like that, with my head still on her swollen breast.

THE BOOK I WAS WRITING during this period was titled Man and Wife. The theme of it was how a man might be trapped into a terrible marriage.

I had recently read a report on marriage in our kingdom published the year before by the Royal Commission; astoundingly, the Commission sanctioned the Scottish law which legalised marriage by consent and then defended these marriages by pointing out that they were “wronged-women’s ways” of capturing men with dishonourable intentions towards them. I underlined and then wrote in the margins of the report—“That they act, on certain occasions, in the capacity of a trap to catch a profligate man!!!!”

The four exclamation marks may seem excessive to you, Dear Reader, but I assure you that they were a profound understatement of my emotion at this absurd and obscene twisting of the law to aid a man-hungry wench. The idea of being trapped into marriage—with the consent and help of the Crown! — was a Horror beyond imagining to me. It was a Horror beyond the Entity in the servants’ stairway at Number 90 Gloucester Place.

But I knew that I could never write the book from the point of view of a victimised man. The Reading Public in 1869—nay, the General Public—simply would never see the pathos and tragedy of such a trap inflicted on a man they hypocritically would call a “cad” (even while the majority of those male readers and that male public had a similar “profligate” history).

So I cleverly turned my victimised male into a frail but very high-class and highbred lady trapped—by a mere moment’s indiscretion—into a forced marriage to a brute.

I made the brute not only an Oxford man (oh, how I hated Oxford and everything it represented!!) but an Oxford athlete.

This last aspect of the brute’s character was a stroke of genius, if I do say so myself. You must understand, Dear Reader from the impossibly distant future, that at this time in England, the idiocy of exercise and the absurdity of sports had melded with the hypocrisies of religion to create a monstrosity called “Muscular Christianity.” The idea that good Christians should be “muscular” and throw themselves into any number of mindless, brutish sports was all the rage. More than the rage, Muscular Christianity was both an exercise in Mr Darwin’s insights and an explanation of why England’s Empire had the right to rule the world and all the weak little brown people in it. It was Superiority personified in barbells and track meets and fields of fools jumping and hopping and pushing themselves up and down. The proselytising for this Muscular Christianity belched out from the newspapers, the magazines, and the pulpits. And Oxford and Cambridge—those Grand Old English nurseries for pedantic dolts—embraced it with all their usual arrogant vigour.

So you see why I took such joy in tossing this fad right in the face of my unsuspecting readership. I might be the only one to know that my trapped and abused heroine was really the captured male, but my Oxford brute would create quite enough controversy.

Even in the early stages of writing Man and Wife, I made enemies through it. Frank Beard’s children and Fred Lehmann’s children—all of whom had loved me and whom I had entertained many a time by telling ripping yarns of classic prizefights and by describing the massive biceps of England’s champion, Tom Sayers—heard about my Oxford brute and were furious with me. It was a betrayal to them.

This made me laugh all the more as I pressed Frank Beard into taking me out to various pugilistic and team sport training camps where he served as attending physician from time to time. There I would press the trainers and others for stories of how unhealthy this muscular life truly was—how it turned the athletes into brutes as surely as a return to Darwin’s jungle would—and, through Beard, I hurled questions at the camp doctors about physical and mental breakdowns due to such training. Being out in the sunlight and taking such notes was difficult work for me, but I got through it by sipping from my laudanum flask at least hourly.

The secondary theme of Man and Wife (behind that of the injustice of marriage-by-capture) was that any morality is completely contingent upon a person’s capacity for remorse: a capacity totally lacking in any animal’s (or athlete’s) life.

Beard, a huge sports fan himself, said nothing about my theories as he took me with him to one unhealthy den of sweat after another. On 4 July, 1869, it was Frank who delivered a girl child to Martha at her lodgings on Bolsover Street. It was also Frank who handled the somewhat tricky formalities of registering in the parish records the mother’s name (Mrs Martha Dawson) and the infant’s name (Marian, after my most popular female character) and the father’s name (William Dawson, Esquire, travelling Barrister at Law).

Due to my heavy writing and research schedule, I was not present at the birth but looked in on the mother and squalling infant a week or two after the fact. As I had promised in January and on that October evening of my mistress’s wedding when I had proposed marriage to my dying brother’s wife, I now raised Martha R—’s monthly allowance from £20 to £25. The woman wept when she thanked me.

But I have galloped on too far in this tale and skipped a much more important detail, Dear Reader. For you to fully understand the ending of this story, you need to be with me on the night of Wednesday, 9 June, 1869—the fourth anniversary of Dickens’s accident at Staplehurst and of his first meeting with Drood. It was the last such anniversary that Charles Dickens would live to see.