The Detective and Mr. Dickens (10 page)

Upon arriving at the house in Devonshire Terrace, I found out what had happened. The words are hard to write even at a safe distance from the reality of the event. The child, Dickens’s youngest, was dead.

Great sadness had replaced violence in Forster’s face. His voice cracked. I never liked the man, but that night I realized what a true friend of Dickens he was. He grieved the death of Dickens’s child as if the child had been his own. He felt his closest friend’s pain as if he were suffering it himself.

It seems that all had thought little Dora Annie brilliantly recovered from a brain congestion and the chicken pox. When Dickens and Forster had left the house, she had been smiling and happy. No more than an hour later, the child’s illness mysteriously returned, convulsions set in, and, before the doctor could be summoned, she was dead.
*

We sat in uneasy silence in a small downstairs parlor for perhaps fifteen minutes before Dickens reappeared. His face was ashen, but he was steady on his feet. He summoned Forster from the room and they held private consultation. I learned later that Mrs. Dickens was the subject of their discussion. Dickens had designated Forster for the delicate assignment of bringing Kate Dickens back from the spa at Malvern. He wrote a letter to his wife which Forster was to hand-deliver. It did not reveal the terrible truth of the child’s death but, nevertheless, prepared the poor mother, herself in quite delicate health, for the receiving of the cold reality upon her arrival. Forster departed immediately in a new carriage with fresh horses which had been summoned by the servants. Dickens, Lemon and I met in the foyer to see Forster off. We started to follow him out to the carriage, but he quickly motioned us back.

“Stay inside,” he ordered through clenched teeth. “The sharks are beginning to gather.”

A small crowd of reporters were already milling in the street before the house and more were arriving in hansom cabs each minute. At least ten or twelve were loitering around the front gate looking expectantly up at the house as if getting ready to storm it. Dickens looked at these sensation mongers, but who they were and the reason for their presence did not seem to register in his rational thoughts.

“Charlie, Charlie, why don’t you get some sleep? Kate won’t be here until morning.” It was Lemon coaxing him as he stood in a paralyzed daze at the bottom of the stairway in the foyer.

“I must be with little Dora. I must stay with her. She is so alone on her journey. I must keep the vigil. She is so alone.” Dickens spoke the words in a slow, drugged voice as if he wasn’t really there.

“Yes, of course. We’ll stay with her, Charlie, that’s the thing,” Lemon consoled him.

Our eyes met. “I’ll take care of things down here,” I whispered, as Lemon, with his arm around Charles’s shoulder, led Dickens up the stairs.

When they had disappeared into the upper reaches of the house, I turned to my task. Half of Grub Street, it seemed, was clamoring at the gate. The unruly mob of reporters, knowing that Dickens had been called from the Chair of the General Theatrical Fund Dinner on some emergency, was understandably restless. They were beginning to raise a din which was disturbing the neighborhood, and which would disturb Dickens in his mourning if not dealt with quickly. I took a few moments to assemble my thoughts and steel myself to the task, then marched out to face them.

As I looked down from the front steps at the crowd of them, I remembered Inspector Field striding fearlessly into the midst of that mob of cutthroats in that Rats’ Castle. That image decided me against standing safely on the steps behind the closed gate to address them. Instead, I walked right down, opened the gate, closed it tight behind me, and strode into their very midst. It was the first time that the press had ever clamored for my opinion as they did for Dickens’s every time he appeared in public. I must admit I relished being the center of their attention even though they hadn’t the slightest idea who I was.

“I am Wilkie Collins,” the reporters, to my exhilaration, all bent to scribble my name, “a colleague of Mister Dickens.” I paused, trying to compose what I was next going to say.

“Well Guv, get on wi’ it. Wha’ ’as ’appened?” one of the more impatient of the Grub Street veterans badgered me.

“A family tragedy,” I blurted out. “Mister Dickens’s youngest child, Dora Annie, died this evening. She suffered a relapse of an ongoing sickness which resulted in convulsions and caused her death.”

I stopped for breath as the madding crowd closed in tight. Questions rained down. “Mister Dickens is himself a member of the press,” I pleaded, “all pertinent information will be made available to you.” The crowd of reporters had grown to some twenty or thirty. “You must not cause a disturbance here in the street,” I cautioned them. “All information will be made available to you,” I assured them as I made a temporary escape back into the house.

I made three different forays out to converse with those insensitive vultures camped in the street. New arrivals arrived, those who had been there from the beginning hung on, and hired messengers came and went with the frequency of foreign armies in Belgium. Indeed, as the sole answerer of all their questions, I felt quite the celebrity. The night raced by for me. It passed much more slowly, however, for Charles and Mark Lemon.

Twice I looked in on them, carrying a tray of hot coffee. The small dead body, dressed all in white, lay on its back on what I thought was a rather large bed for such a small child. The two men kept the vigil, one on each side of the bed. The first time that I entered, Dickens sat slumped in silence, his head resting against the velvet side of his high-backed chair, his empty eyes staring in disbelief at the motionless white corpse before him. Lemon sat warily across from him, tilted forward on the edge of his hard wooden seat. No longer did he resemble jolly Jack Falstaff. Now he watched Dickens carefully as if trying to anticipate his every movement, thought, need. They were a dejected Robinson Crusoe and his attentive man Friday cast totally adrift, trying to stay afloat. The second time I entered, Dickens was up and pacing. He was speaking rapidly in a low hoarse whisper. As I poured the coffee, I listened to his distraught ramblings. I don’t think he even realized that I was in the room.

“Nothing is more inexplicable than the sudden death of a small child. This is my punishment. For Nell. For Paul. For my treatment of my father. For my other Dora, David’s Dora. Oh yes, God surely has a wickedly ironic sense! He unleashes this hound of hell to plague me for my exploitation of children. Dora’s death is a judgement on me and my creations.”

As he constructed the plots of his novels, he was constructing the edifice of his own responsibility and guilt for the unfortunate child’s death. Lemon motioned me from the room. I left willingly. I prayed that Lemon would find the words to soothe our poor driven and tortured Dickens. For me, entering that room where those two shipwrecked souls kept their midnight vigil was like descending into some underground tomb.

I was nodding, barely awake, in a chair in the foyer, when Dickens and Lemon came down the steps at seven in the morning. The sun was up and it was a glorious new day, yet Dickens looked like some aged debauchee. His face was haggard and twisted by the tension of his grief. His rich brown hair was thoroughly disheveled and his eyes were dim and empty.

“Ah, Wilkie, my companion of my evening walks, I am glad that you are here.” His voice was sad but he seemed lucid and rational.

I led Dickens into the small parlor and we sat down. Lemon excused himself to freshen up. One of the servants entered and informed Dickens that the morticians, Peyrouten and Polhemus, had been summoned. We were left alone. I was terrified. I knew not what to say.

Dickens broke the awkward silence.

“Death seems to be closing in all around me, Wilkie. Horrible! Everywhere I look there are dead eyes, and I can identify them all.”

I thought for a moment that he was referring to the man that Field had fished out of the Thames two nights before, but he was referring to no particular corpse, no particular eyes. He was referring to all the ghosts who plagued his imagination.

“I wish there were some way I could lessen the burden of your grief,” I leaned to him and whispered lamely.

“It is better that you don’t start writing novels, Wilkie,” he stared wildly into my face. “Novels try to deal with reality and reality is a sick thing, a diseased bleak house where no one should be forced to live.”

There was a clamour out in the street, and it drew his attention.

“The reporters, Charles,” I prompted. “They’ve been out there all night.”

He looked at me bewildered: “Why?”

“Because you are news.”

Panic gripped his countenance: “Wilkie, you must drive them away before Kate arrives. They will unsettle her.”

I felt helpless in the face of his plea. For the briefest moment I considered getting my hands somehow on a gun and firing on those Grub Street vultures. Yet I knew that I had to tell him the truth.

“There is only one way that they will be persuaded to retire.”

His tired eyes looked at me uncomprehending.

“They must have a statement from you. You are the reason they are here. You are the only one who can satisfy them. If you ask them to leave, they will go. They have been out there all night, waiting.”

“For me?” he spoke the words as if he hadn’t slept in weeks.

“For you.”
The Inimitable
, that cruel sarcastic phrase crossed my mind.

Lemon returned. “What is it?” he asked me upon observing Dickens’s new agitation.

Dickens’s eyes darted back and forth between the two of us. “I feel like a ship that has hit a rock,” he finally said, “stove in and at the mercy of the storm.” He stopped and gazed at us for long seconds. “You surely are the best of friends,” he finally said. “I shall never forget how you have sat up with me this night.”

With that, he stepped into the foyer and moved to the door.

“We must get rid of them before Kate arrives,” he turned and reiterated. With Lemon on one side and myself on the other, he walked slowly out to meet his voracious public.

*
She probably died of what is now known as Reye’s Syndrome, a mysterious disease, possibly liver connected, which follows recovery from a virus or a chicken pox.

“It Takes a Gentleman to Catch a Gentleman”

April 31, 1851—late afternoon

Two weeks after his youngest child was buried in Highgate Cemetery, Dickens returned to London. He had resided during that too brief time of mourning at the spa at Great Malvern where Kate was recuperating. I dined with Forster and Wills at the Garrick Club on the twenty-sixth of April. Dickens was, of course, our sole topic of conversation. Wills, myself and Sala had held the fort at Wellington Street. Forster had relayed instructions from Dickens concerning business at the magazine. As we sat at the table over brandy and cigars following dinner, Forster was uncharacteristically expansive in his description of Dickens’s state of mind.

“He appears to be acting very inconsistently,” Forster harrumphed, “almost, I hesitate to say it, yet I know it will go no further, almost…unstable.”

“Unstable?” I said, encouraging him to continue.

“Yes, his moods fluctuate wildly. One moment he may be laughing and joking, yet a short time later he will suddenly become morose and distant. I spent the night in the guest quarters. All evening Charles was lively with the children, attentive to Kate, jocular with me. About ten I said goodnight and withdrew to my room on the second floor. Just prior to retiring, I looked out of my window at the moon and, to my surprise, observed Dickens setting out across the moors. His long striding gait is unmistakable. I inquired the next morning of the servants and found out that he walked out like that every night. ‘Long wild walks on the heath’ as one of the older serving people described it. Now doesn’t that seem unstable to you?”

I could barely keep from laughing aloud. The evidence for Forster’s great concern about Dickens’s mental instability was the single act which Dickens undertook more consistently than any other (except, of course, his writing). On the contrary, his fierce walks across the Malvern moors were nothing more nor less than a sign of his return to his normal exercise of both the legs and the imagination. The city streets, the Malvern moors, the Thames at midnight—they were all nothing more than the landscape of his imagination which he needed to visit regularly.

Forster did tell one story which alarmed me, because it echoed a guilty sentiment which Dickens had expressed during that long night of the child’s death watch. Forster described how Dickens came to him with a copy of a letter he had written in August of the previous year.

“He read me one line of the letter,” Forster recalled, “and, when he was done, he laughed insanely for a long moment. ‘And you scoff when I tell you that I am psychic!’ he said.”

“Well, what did the letter say?” I had to prod Forster.

“The letter read: ‘I have still to kill Dora—I mean the Copperfields’ Dora—’” Forster intoned.

“It was a novelist’s joke thrown off more than eight months ago.” I objected to Forster’s gravity. “Surely, he couldn’t believe that his own ill-considered words could have any meaning eight months later.”

“He brought the letter to me, and, in a very distraught state, read me that one line aloud,” Forster insisted.