Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 593
It was characteristic also of Dickens’s condition that he was anxious to touch up, to intensify the tenor of his readings. There must be no falling off in his success, no danger of monotony. Not even the success of the past could reassure his foreboding mind. He must have something new, — more dramatic, more melodramatic than before. He must have crime, — murder. So he worked up the murder scene of the book Oliver Twist, the killing of Nancy by Bill Sikes and the murderer haunted by his crime, an unparalleled presentation of horror. He himself was absorbed and fascinated with the sheer terror of it. ‘I have no doubt,’ he wrote, ‘that I could perfectly petrify an audience by carrying out the notion I have of the way of rendering it. But whether the impression would not be so horrible as to keep them away another time is what I cannot satisfy myself upon.’
He wanted murder. But he didn’t want to kill the box office.
So the tour began, — with the long railway journeys, the crowded halls, the roars of laughter and the thrills of terror, the crowning tumults of applause, — with which Dickens’s public was ushering him off the stage of the world.
There was no doubt of its success, — and, above all, of the fascinating horror of Dickens’s murder scene. We cannot tell now how Dickens acted it. There is no record to call to our eyes what those people saw. But some terrible and uncanny power must have gone from Dickens, — as Sikes the murderer, — to clutch his audience by the throat. At one place, — it was at Clifton, though the room was not hot, for it was winter, — twenty of the women of the audience fainted and were carried out rigid and unconscious. Dickens himself tells in a letter of a man who, — as he finished the murder scene, — sat on the platform motionless, with every vestige of colour gone from his face, his eyes staring in front of him in the wildest way.
But the price that Dickens was paying for this artistic success was his own life. He was exhausted. He was sleepless. He lay for hours upon sofas waiting for strength. His sight failed. At times on the street he could see only the half of the letters on the shops, — the top, not the bottom. Words slipped from him. Gaps opened in his memory. His hands groped wrongly in the air for things elsewhere. If he wished to lay his left hand on the table he must look first where it was to go. At times he could not raise his hand up to his head. His left foot was a dead weight. This was paralysis, — cerebral haemorrhage, — approaching, imminent. As Dickens stood upon the lecture platform there was a shrouded figure standing behind him waiting to strike. . . . And the blow was coming. . . .
For the moment it was deferred. An authoritative medical man of the real sort, — it was Sir Thomas Watson, — dragged him off the platform with a signed certificate that for the time saved Dickens’s life. This was in April of 1869.
The tour as planned was never completed. But with medical permission Dickens gave twelve more readings, in London, without the fatigue of travel, in the opening months of 1870. A doctor sat at his side. A great crowd filled St. James’s Hall for every occasion. Then at last on a March evening in 1870 Dickens reached his final reading. This time he left aside the murder. He read from the Christmas Carol and then from Pickwick. Where he had begun he ended.
As he finished he closed the volume of Pickwick and spoke a moment, as himself, a farewell to his last audience. ‘From these garish lights,’ he said in conclusion, ‘I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectable, affectionate farewell.’
‘When he ceased to speak,’ so writes his son Harry (Sir Henry Fielding Dickens, looking back over sixty years to his recollection of the scene), ‘a kind of sigh seemed to come from the audience, followed almost at once by such a storm of cheering as I have never seen equalled in my life. He was deeply touched that night, but infinitely sad and broken.’
So Dickens took himself back to Gad’s Hill to resume the proper work of his life, the writing of books. It was a relatively empty place compared to its first days. Dickens’s sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, was there, and the eldest daughter Mamie. But of the other children the soldier son Walter was dead. The eldest son and Kate, the second daughter, were married. The little wistful midshipman Sydney, affectionately called the Little Admiral and the ocean spectre, was at sea. Harry was at Cambridge with a Trinity scholarship. And the baby of the family, Edward Bulwer Lytton, ‘little Ploom’, had recently, 1868, sailed for Australia, — a heartbreak for his father, — to join his brother Alfred.
There at Gad’s Hill he worked out the rest of his time with an occasional public dinner in London to attend. It cheered him that the first monthly number of Edwin Drood ran straight to fifty thousand copies. There was no failing there.
Just in this closing evening of Dickens’s life a little touch of royal recognition came his way. Dickens had not seen Queen Victoria for the thirteen years that had elapsed since his presence in the royal box at his amateur theatricals. For her, as for him, the world had changed. Her marriage, too, had ended in a separation that left her widowed and secluded for ever. She found a gracious pretext for sending for Charles Dickens, who waited upon her at Buckingham Palace. She gave him, humbly enough, a signed copy of her own little book on her Life in the Highlands, a work whose origin disarms criticism; told him how the Fenians in New York had insulted her travelling son Prince Arthur; was delighted to learn from Mr. Dickens that not all New Yorkers were Fenians; and so dismissed him with an invitation for himself to the next levee and for his daughter to the next drawing-room.
A little later, at a royal request, Dickens dined in company with the Prince of Wales and the King of the Belgians. But these little sunset gleams of favour passed without further consequences. After Dickens was gone, it was stated in the Press that ‘The Queen was ready to confer any distinction which Mr. Dickens’s known views and tastes would permit him to accept,’ and that ‘more than one title of honour had been declined.’ The item was repeated and enlarged in various ways, but John Forster, who must have known, says that it is absurd.
When Dickens first planned his Edwin Drood, it was to centre round the idea of a ‘boy and a girl pledged to be married and going apart’. But to this he had added, as he told John Forster in a letter, ‘a very curious and new idea’, which, however, he explained was not a ‘communicable one’. But he was now undertaking to communicate it. The long days of early summer found him in his little châlet bent over his writing table. The pen hurried across the page. He had much to do. It was later than he thought.
And beside him, as he wrote, stood the shrouded figure that never left him, peering over his shoulder at the manuscript, — waiting to beckon him away.
The summons came.
It was on the afternoon of June 8, 1870. Dickens had spent a long day working in his châlet on his new book, with a brief interval, — cheerful enough, — for a light lunch. At about five o’clock he rose from his work. In front of him was the unfinished twenty-third chapter of Edwin Drood with its closing words,— ‘and then falls to with an appetite’. What happened after that may be told in the words of his daughter Mamie.
When he came again to the house, about an hour before the time fixed for an early dinner, he was tired, silent and abstracted, but as this was a mood very usual to him after a day of engrossing work, it caused no alarm nor surprise to my aunt, who happened to be the only member of the family at home. While awaiting dinner he wrote some letters in the library and arranged some trifling business matters, with a view to his departure for London the following morning.
It was not until they were seated at the dinner-table that a striking change in the colour and expression of his face startled my aunt. Upon her asking him if he were ill, he answered, ‘Yes, very ill; I have been very ill for the last hour.’ But when she said that she would send for a physician he stopped her, saying that he would go on with dinner, and afterward to London.
He made an earnest effort to struggle against the seizure which was fast coming over him, and continued to talk, but incoherently and very indistinctly. It being now evident that he was in a serious condition, my aunt begged him to go to his room before she sent for medical aid. ‘Come and lie down,’ she entreated. ‘Yes, on the ground,’ he answered indistinctly. These were the last words that he uttered. As he spoke, he fell to the floor. A couch was brought into the dining-room, on which he was laid, a messenger was dispatched for the local physician, telegrams were sent to all of us and to Mr. Beard. This was at a few minutes after six o’clock. I was dining at a house some little distance from my sister’s home. Dinner was half over when I received a message that she wished to speak to me. I found her in the hall with a change of dress for me and a cab in waiting. Quickly I changed my gown, and we began the short journey which brought us to our so sadly-altered home. Our dear aunt was waiting for us at the open door, and when I saw her face I think the last faint hope died within me.
All through the night we watched him — my sister on one side of the couch, my aunt on the other, and I keeping hot bricks to the feet which nothing could warm, hoping and praying that he might open his eyes and look at us, and know us once again. But he never moved, never opened his eyes, never showed a sign of consciousness through all the long night. On the afternoon of the ninth the celebrated London physician, Dr. Russell Reynolds, (recently deceased), was summoned to a consultation by the two medical men in attendance, but he could only confirm their hopeless verdict. Later, in the evening of this day, at ten minutes past six, we saw a shudder pass over our dear father, he heaved a deep sigh, a large tear rolled down his face and at that instant his spirit left us. As we saw the dark shadow pass from his face, leaving it so calm and beautiful in the peace and majesty of death, I think there was not one of us who would have wished, could we have had the power, to recall his spirit to earth.
CHAPTER XIII. THE MYSTERY OF MORE THAN EDWIN DROOD
THE SHOCK OCCASIONED by Dickens’s death and the sense of loss which it brought were so great that minor considerations connected with it were for the time forgotten. The fact that Dickens had left behind him an unfinished book was of no consequence as beside his unfinished life. Presently it became known that Dickens’s current serial story, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was not only unfinished, but that it never could be finished. When attention was turned to the matter, it was found that beyond the last words written in his little châlet at Gad’s Hill on June 8, 1870, there was scarcely a note, scarcely a scrap of real evidence, to indicate how the story was intended to move onward to its close. There was little or nothing, and there remains little or nothing, beyond internal and subjective evidence. With the lapse of years the Mystery of Edwin Drood has but become more mysterious still. Two generations of readers have pondered, with increasing interest, as to whether Edwin Drood is alive or dead. Quite a literature of books and articles has arisen around the problem. On the occasion of Dickens’s centenary in 1912 it was made the subject of a mock trial of the supposed murderer. Two opposing schools of thought have arisen between which no compromise is possible. The greater weight of authority, perhaps, inclines to the theory that Edwin is dead. But one may also, — with an optimism proper to the memory of Dickens, — insist on holding that Edwin Drood is still alive. The verb is in the present tense. For unless Charles Dickens killed Edwin Drood in 1870, he is alive to-day. He is just as much alive as Mr. Pickwick, still living quite unchanged in his little villa, — if only one could find it, — or Mr. Micawber on his sheep range, absolutely unaltered, somewhere in the wilds of Australia.
The only question is whether or not Edwin Drood was done to death by his creator.
At the time of Dickens’s death, as already said, the story was appearing, after the fashion of the time, in serial parts. Judging by the length of the other books, similarly published, and by the unfolding of the plot itself, the story was about half completed. The fortunes of Edwin Drood and his mysterious disappearance, surrounded with every circumstance of tragedy, even of horror, had been followed by tens of thousands of interested readers. The unravelling of the mystery was a subject of eager expectation. But as time passed, and the papers and notes of Dickens were collected and examined, the strange truth was revealed that the mystery of Edwin Drood was destined to remain a mystery for ever.
Of written testimony as to the dénouement of the story, but little remained; there were a few scraps of dialogue, apparently for minor characters in a later connection; a scribbled page of possible titles that Dickens had prepared, after his custom, and from which he had finally settled upon the title as it stands; these and a cover design that had appeared on the serial numbers, with little pictures to illustrate the plot, — themselves destined to be mysteries, — were all that was ever found.
It is, of course, impossible here to recite at length the outline of the unfinished story. But even those who know it best will not object to be reminded for a moment of its salient features.
With true artistic instinct for contrast, Dickens had laid the scene of the mystery, and of the horror that attends it, in the drowsy cathedral town of Cloisterham (Rochester), and centred it in the gloomy and resonant cathedral and in the dark, ancient crypt that lay beneath its floor. Here moves the strange figure of Durdles, the drunken stonemason, who prowls in the great crypt at night, tapping with his little hammer to find where the hollow sound of the ancient walls marks the resting-places of the dead. In the gloom of the cathedral and in the darkness of the crypt we feel that the stage is being set for the completion, or at least the attempt, of a crime. There is the crypt itself. There is the winding stairway that leads upwards from the crypt to the dizzy heights of the great tower where the wind at night howls through the yawning openings of the stone. Around the cathedral is the graveyard, shadowed by ancient trees with the monuments of the dead, and beside one of them a great heap of quicklime that, as Durdles is made to tell us, will in a few hours burn a dead body, once laid in it, into nothingness.
Even a child, in reading the story, feels that the introduction of this heap of lime is ominous with meaning.
And who are to be the actors in the scene? Of this, too, there is no doubt. Here is Edwin Drood, gay and high-spirited, on the threshold of life, a bright future before him, a favoured child of fortune, over-favoured, it seems, for his plighted engagement to his sweet fiancée Rosa — a thing arranged from their childhood — fails to please him. Here, also, is the obvious villain of the piece, Jasper, uncle of Drood, though not much older than he, by profession organist of the cathedral, dark, saturnine, repellent; a man of a double life and of dark vice, who makes mysterious visits to London, where he lies in the squalor of an opium den, stupefied and murmuring of the crime he means to commit. In his hideous fashion Jasper is in love with Rosa, to whom he teaches music and in whom, in a mesmeric way, he seems to inspire a species of terror. As the time for the pre-arranged marriage between Drood and Rosa approaches, Jasper plans to do away with Drood, to kill him in some strange and awful way, evidently connected with the cathedral and the crypt, most probably by enticing him to the tower in the dead of night and hurling him over the railing of the stairs, to be dashed to pieces on the floor below. From there, it seems, he means to carry Drood’s body to a vault in the churchyard of which he has stolen a key, and to shovel in upon his lifeless body the lime that lay heaped beside the vault.
All this, except only the conjectured details of the crime, is plain and evident to every reader. No one doubts that Jasper is the villain. No one doubts that he means to kill Drood. No one doubts his motive for meaning to kill him. And no one doubts that the Cathedral of Cloisterham is to be the scene of the crime. The only question is, Did Jasper succeed in his fell purpose?
This essential background already exists before the secondary characters of the story enter into the lives of the three described. Their introduction prevents the plot from being too simple and direct, and supplies a means, in the narrative, of turning suspicion toward some one else than Jasper, when Drood disappears. For this purpose we have the introduction of a brother and sister, — Neville and Helena Landless, — who come to reside in Cloisterham. The sister is to enter the ‘finishing school’ at which Rosa, who is an orphan, still has her home. The brother is to be taken in as a resident pupil by the Rev. Mr. Crisparkle, a canon of the cathedral, a central figure of the story, — the friend and confidant of everybody. Neville and his sister are a strange pair, — twins, — united by an intense and almost occult sympathy, reared (in the East) in adversity and ill-treatment, and with an almost Oriental tendency to passionate love and hatred. Helena is at once captivated with the gentle and shrinking Rosa. Neville, too, quite evidently falls in love with her, and is then led to conceive an intense dislike for Edwin Drood, whose offhand treatment of his little fiancée arouses Neville’s contempt. Jasper foments the quarrel. At his rooms one night he drugs the wine of the young men. There is a violent scene, in which they come to blows. Next day it is whispered in the town that young Landless has tried to kill Edwin Drood. Jasper lays plans. He invites Drood and Landless to dine with him, by way of reconciliation, on Christmas Eve. The night is wild with rain and storm. ‘No such power of wind has blown for many a winter night. Chimneys topple in the street, and people hold to posts and corners and to one another to keep themselves upon their feet. The violent rushes abate not, but increase in frequency and fury until at midnight, when the streets are empty, the storm goes thundering along them, rattling at all the latches and tearing at all the shutters.’
Such a night, indeed, as Dickens loved to depict, fit time for crime and mystery.
On the night of the storm, Drood disappears. The morning after it, Jasper, dishevelled and wild with excitement, comes to Mr. Crisparkle’s house to say that his nephew can nowhere be found. He had left Jasper at midnight alone with young Landless. He is, as far as the story reaches, never seen again. The problem is, what happened to him?
