Drood (110 page)

And I had no Dolby to organise my reading-tour life. The one manager I hired to oversee the production of one of my plays in New York and Boston—one of several theatrical premieres I had arranged for my tour there—tried to rob me blind.

In February of 1874, in Boston and in other urban pimples on that blank white canvas of a map they call New England, I spent time with the leading lights of American literature and intellectual life—Longfellow, Mark Twain, Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—and I have to say that if these men were the “leading lights,” then the glow of literature and intellectual life in the United States was very dim indeed. (Although I did enjoy a verse tribute that Holmes wrote and performed in public for me.)

I realised then and still believe now that the majority of Americans in those crowds who jostled to see me or who paid to hear me read, did so just because
I had been a friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens.
Dickens was the ghost that I could not leave behind. Dickens was the Marley-face on the knocker who greeted me every time I approached a new door.

I saw Dickens’s old friend James T. Fields and his wife in Boston—they took me out for a fine dinner and then to the opera—but I could tell that Annie Fields thought little of me, and I was not surprised when, sometime later, I read the following report she had made of me in private but which quickly found its way to public print—

A small man with an odd figure and forehead and shoulders much too large for the rest of him. His talk was rapid and pleasant but not at all inspiring.… A man who has been fêted and petted in London society, who has overeaten and overdrunk, has been ill, is gouty, and in short is no very wonderful specimen of a human being.

All in all, the only truly companionable and relaxed time I had during all those months in America was when I went down to stay with my old friend the French-English actor Fechter, he of Dickens’s Christmas-gift Swiss chalet, at Fechter’s farm near Quakertown, in the province of Pennsylvania.

Fechter had become a drunk and a raving paranoid. The once distinctive (if not overly handsome, since he specialised in villains) actor was now—all agreed—gross and bloated in both appearance and manner. Before leaving London forever, Fechter had quarrelled with his theatrical partners there—he owed them all money, of course—and then had quarrelled with and publicly insulted his leading lady, Carlotta Leclercq. When he went off to Pennsylvania in America to marry a girl named Lizzie Price—another actress but one with no discernible talent—no one even thought it pertinent to mention to Miss Price that Fechter already had a wife and two children in Europe.

Fechter died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1879 in a condition—one London obituary reported—of being “universally despised and isolated.” His passing was a special blow to me, since even during my last visit to him in Quakertown six years before his death, he had once again borrowed money from me and never paid it back.

Last year as I write this (with blobs), or perhaps it was the year before—1887—at any rate, sometime shortly after I had moved from Number 90 Gloucester Place to where I currently am living (and dying) at 82 Wimpole Street (Agnes was beginning to scream, you understand, and I do not believe that I was the only one who could hear her, since Mrs Webb and the other servants avoided being near the boarded-up staircase at all costs) and…

Where was I?

Oh, yes, last year or the year before, I was introduced to Hall Caine (I can only trust, Dear Reader, that you know who he is—was—as well as Rossetti, who introduced us), and Caine looked at me a long time and his impressions of me later found print:

His eyes were large and protuberant, and had the vague and dreamy look sometimes seen in the eyes of the blind, or those of a man to whom chloroform has just been administered.

But I was not so blind then that I did not notice his horrified appraisal. I said to Caine that day, “I see that you can’t keep your eyes off
my
eyes, and I ought to say that I’ve got gout in them, and that it is doing its best to blind me.”

Only by then, of course, and for many years before that, I used the word “gout” to mean “beetle”—to mean “scarab”—to mean “Drood’s insect burrowed into my brain behind my aching eyes.” And it
was
doing its best to blind me. It always had been.

A
LL RIGHT . . .
Reader. I know that you could not care less for my history or pains or even the fact that I am dying as I labour to write this for you. All you want to hear about is Dickens and Drood, Drood and Dickens.

I have been wise to you from the start… Reader. You never cared about
my
part of this memoir. It was always Dickens and Drood, or Drood and Dickens, which kept you reading.

I started this memoir years ago with the hopeful dream that you knew me and—much more importantly—that you knew my work, had read my books, had seen my plays. But no, Reader there in the indifferent future, I know now that you have never read
The Woman in White
or even
The Moonstone,
much less my
Man and Wife
or
Poor Miss Finch
or
The New Magdalen
or
The Law and the Lady
or
The Two Destinies
or
The Haunted Hotel
or
A Rogue’s Life
or
The Fallen Leaves
or
Jezebel’s Daughter
or
The Black Robe
or
Heart and Science
or
“I Say No”
or
The Evil Genius
or
The Legacy of Cain
—or the book I am working so hard on now, when I can write at all, and which is being serialised in the
Illustrated London News,
my
Blind Love.

You know none of these, do you… Reader?

And in your arrogant future, as you glide to the bookstore in your horseless carriage and come back to your underground home illuminated by garish electric lights, or perhaps even read in your carriage that may have electric lights
in it
(anything is possible) or glide to the theatre in the evening—I trust you still have theatre—I hardly think that you have read my novels or seen stage productions of my
The Frozen Deep
(it was never Dickens’s, which was performed first in Manchester) or
Black and White
(which opened at the Adelphi) or
The Woman in White
(which opened at the Olympic) or
Man and Wife
(which opened at the Prince of Wales) or
The New Magdalen
(which opened at the Olympic and also premiered in New York while I was there) or
Miss Gwilt
(which opened at the Globe) or
The Dead Secret
(which opened at the Lyceum Theatre) or—at long last—
The Moonstone
(which opened at the Olympic) or…

Just writing the above has exhausted me, stolen the last of my strength.

All those thousands upon thousands of days and nights of writing—writing through unspeakable pain and intolerable loneliness and in utter dread—and
you… Reader… have not read or been in the audience for any one of them.

To hell with it. To hell with you.

It is Drood and Dickens you want. Dickens and Drood. Very well, then—here, with my last drops of mortal energy—it is after 9 AM—I shall give you Drood. You can have Drood up your hairy arse, Reader. This page is more blobs than words, but I do not apologise. Nor do I apologise for the language. I am sick of apologising. My entire life has been one endless round of apologies after another for no reason.…

I once thought that I could see into the future—“precognition” is the term that those on the far edges of science use for this ability—but I was never certain whether my second-sight was real or not.

Now I am sure. I can see every detail of the rest of my life, and my ability to see clearly into the future—even as my own eyes are failing—is no less impressive for the fact that “the rest of my life” now consists of less than two hours. So please forgive the future tense. It shall be—as they say—short-lived. I shall write this now, while I still can, because I see forward until then, into later in this very morning, until the very end of my life, peering forward into those final moments when I shall no longer be able to write.

D
ROOD HAS BEEN WITH ME
, in one way or the other, every day of the nineteen years and three months since Charles Dickens died.

When I looked out into the rain on a cold autumn or winter night, I would see one of Drood’s minions—Barris or Dickenson or even the dead boy with the strange eyes, Gooseberry—across the street, staring at me.

When I walked the streets of London, trying to lose some of this weight that now will never leave me except by rotting away, I could hear the footsteps behind me of Drood’s men, Drood’s watchers. And always there were the dark shapes and bright eyes in the alleys.

Imagine, Reader, if you
can,
what it is like to be in the arse-end village of, say, Albany, New York, where there are more cuspidors than people, and doing a reading in some great draughty freezing dark hall while a blizzard rages outside—I was helpfully told that more than 900 people had attended Charles Dickens’s reading there sixteen years earlier—and I had perhaps twenty-five people. But among them, above them, sitting in the shaky old balcony that had been sealed off for that night’s performance, sat Drood, his lidless eyes never blinking, his sharp-toothed smile never wavering.

And the provincial Americans wondered why my readings were so muted and stilted and lifeless.

Drood and his minions and his scarab have drained the life out of me, Reader, day by day and night by night.

Every time I open my mouth for one of Frank Beard’s increasingly frequent examinations, I expect him to cry out—“Dear God! I see the black carapace of a huge beetle blocking your throat, Wilkie! Its pincers are eating you alive!”

Drood has been there at the premieres of my plays and at the failures of my novels.

Did you see the game of revelations I have been playing with my titles, Reader?

The Two Destinies.
I had such once. But Dickens and Drood chose the more terrible for me.

The Dead Secret.
This has been my heart. Towards the women who have shared my bed (but never my name) and the children who share my blood (but also never my name).

A Rogue’s Life.
I need not even comment.

Man and Wife.
The only trap I have succeeded in avoiding, even while being caged in all others.

“I Say No.”
My entire life.

The Evil Genius.
Drood, of course.

The Legacy of Cain
. But have I been Cain, or Abel? I once thought of Charles Dickens as my brother. My only regret about my attempt at killing him was that I did not succeed, that Drood took that pleasure from me.

Do you see… Reader? Do you see how vile and terrible Charles Dickens’s curse was upon me?

I did not and do not believe for a second that Drood was some mesmeric suggestion, made on a casual whim in June of 1865 and living on to curse every day of my life since then. But if Dickens
had
done that—if there were no Drood—what an abominable and vicious act that would have been. Dickens would have deserved to die and have his flesh burned away in the pit of quick-lime for that crime alone.

But if he had
not
suggested Drood to my unconscious and opium-laced writer’s mind in a bout of forgotten (by me) mesmerism in 1865, how much more cruel and calculating and unforgivably terrible the fact that he
said he did
—that he had the cure for Drood in a few minutes’ session with his swinging watch and the simple command “Unintelligible” to bring me out of the nightmare that has been my life.

Dickens deserved to die for that alone. Many times over.

And most of all… Reader… Dickens deserved to die and be damned because, despite all of his weaknesses and failings (both as a writer and as a man), Charles Dickens was the literary genius and I was not.

This curse—this constant knowledge, as painful and as irrevocable as Adam’s awful awakening after being seduced into eating from the apple from the Tree of Knowledge—has been worse even than Drood. And nothing is worse than Drood.

B
LIND LOVE.
That is the book I have been writing and of which I have finished a first draft. I will not, I know this moment, live long enough to polish it.

But Blind Love for whom?

Not for Caroline G—— or Martha R——. My love for them has been provisional, rational and rationed, grudging at the best of times, and always—always—governed by lust.

Not for the grown and growing children—Marian, Harriet, and William Charles. I am glad they are alive. I can say little more than that.

Not for my books or the labours it took to produce them. I loved none of them. They were, like my children, mere products.

But, God help me, I loved Charles Dickens. I loved his sudden, infectious laugh and his boyish absurdities and the stories he would tell and the sense—when one was with him—that every moment was important. I
hated
his genius—that genius which eclipsed me and my work when he was alive, and has eclipsed me more every year that he has been dead, and which—I am certain of this, Faithless Reader—shall eclipse me even more in your unobtainable future.

I
HAVE THOUGHT
often, in the past nineteen years, of Dickens’s last little story he told me. The one about him as a poor young man walking the streets of London while feeding cherries out of his bag to the big-headed boy riding on his father’s shoulders. The boy ate all the cherries. His father never knew.

I think that Dickens told the story backwards. I think he was
stealing
cherries out of the boy’s brown bag. And the father never knew. Nor did the world.

Or perhaps this has been
my
secret story. Or perhaps Dickens had been stealing the cherries from
me
as I rode on
his
shoulders.

An hour from now, I will have just sent Marian with the note for Frank Beard.
I am dying—come if you can.