Dan Simmons - Drood

MONTHLY SALES OF THE SERIALISED Man and Wife were not as impressive as had been The Moonstone’ s. No long lines waited for the monthly release of instalments. Critical reaction was tepid, even hostile. The English reading public was, as I had anticipated, angered by my careful and accurate description of the abuses and self-abuses of the Muscular Christian athlete. Word from the Harper brothers in New York indicated that the American reading public had limited interest in and even less outrage over the unfairness of our English marriage laws, which allowed—even encouraged—entrapment of one member of the couple into an unwanted matrimony.

None of these facts bothered me in the least.

If you have not read my Man and Wife there in the future, Dear Reader (although I sincerely hope it is still in print a century and more hence), let me give you a taste of it here. In this scene from Chapter the Fifty-fourth (page 226 in the first edition), I have my poor Hester Dethridge come upon a terrifying (to me, at least) encounter:

The Thing stole out, dark and shadowy in the pleasant sunlight. At first I saw only the dim figure of a woman. After a little it began to get plainer, brightening from within outwards—brightening, brightening, brightening, till it set before me the vision of MY OWN SELF—repeated as if I was standing before a glass: the double of myself, looking at me with my own eyes.… And it said to me, with my own voice, “Kill him.”

Cassell’s Magazine had paid me an advance of £500 and a total payment of £750. I had made arrangements to publish Man and Wife in three volumes, with the initial release date being 27 January, with the firm F. S. Ellis. Despite the moderate sales in America, Harper’s was so delighted with the quality of the early instalments that they sent me a totally unexpected cheque for £500. Also, I had written the novel Man and Wife with both eyes firmly set on its stage adaptation—in some ways, it and my ensuing novels would be theatrical scripts in shorthand—and I looked forward to further income from that very quick translation to both the London and American stage.

Compare all this to Charles Dickens’s lack of literary production in the past year and more.

Thus it was all the more galling one day in May when I stepped into the Wellington Street offices of All the Year Round to discuss (demand) reversions of my copyrights with Wills or Charley Dickens—only to find both of them absent to lunch—and, wandering from office to office as was my old habit there, came across an open letter of accounting from Forster and Dolby.

It was a summary of earnings from Dickens’s readings, and looking at it made the scarab scuttle behind my right eye and brought a band of excruciating headache pain tightening around my forehead. It was through just such rising agony that I read the following in Dolby’s tight, ledger-columned script:

Charles Dickens’s paid readings over the past years had totalled 423, including 111 given while Arthur Smith was the Inimitable’s manager, 70 under Thomas Headland, and 242 under Dolby. It seemed that Dickens had never kept precise records of his profits under Smith and Headland, but this spring he estimated them at about £12,000. Under Dolby, those profits had reached almost £33,000. This gave a total of some £45,000—an average of more than £100 per reading—and, according to the note from Dickens appended, represented almost half of his entire current estate’s value, estimated at about £93,000.

Ninety-three thousand pounds. All last year and this, because of my personal investment in the theatrical production of Black and White, my excessive loans to Fechter, the constant upkeep on the grand house on Gloucester Place (and the attendant salaries for the two servants and frequent cook there), my generous payments to Martha R—, and especially the constant need to purchase large quantities of both opium and morphia for personal medicinal reasons, I had been struggling financially. As I had written to Frederick Lehmann the year before (when that good friend had offered to lend me money)— “I shall pay the Arts. Damn the Arts!”

BECAUSE IT WAS BAD WEATHER, I was taking a cab home from Wellington Street that afternoon when I saw Dickens’s daughter Mary walking along the Strand in the rain. I immediately had the driver stop the cab, ran to her side, and discovered that she was walking alone and unprotected in the rain (returning to the Milner Gibson house after a luncheon downtown) because she had been unable to hail a cab. Helping her into my coach, I rapped on the ceiling with my cane and called up to the driver, “Five Hyde Park Place, driver, across from the Marble Arch.”

As Mamie dripped onto the upholstery—I had offered two clean handkerchiefs for her to dry her face and hands at the very least—and as I saw her reddened eyes, I realised that she had been crying. We talked as the cab moved slowly north through traffic and while she mopped at herself. The rain on the roof of the cab had a particularly insistent sound that afternoon.

“You are so kind,” began the distraught young woman (although, at the advanced age of thirty-two, she was hardly still a young woman). “You have always been so kind to our family, Wilkie.”

“As I shall always be,” I muttered. “After having received unlimited kindness from the family over the years.” The driver above us in the rain was shouting and cracking his whip not at his own poor horse but at some dray waggon driver who had crossed in front of him.

Mamie did not seem to be listening to me. Handing back my now-sodden handkerchiefs, she sighed and said, “I went to the Queen’s Ball the other night, you know, and had ever so much fun! It was so gay! Father was to have been my escort, but at the last minute he was unable to go…”

“Not because of his health, I hope,” I said.

“Yes, sadly, yes. He says that his foot—and these are his words, so you must forgive me—is a mere bag of pain. He can barely hobble to his desk to write each day.”

“I am dismayed to hear that, Mamie.”

“Yes, yes, we all are. The day before the Queen’s Ball, Father had a visitor—a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over—and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, ‘But suppose you died before all the book was written?’ ”

“Outrageous,” I muttered.

“Yes, yes. Well, Father—you know sometimes in a conversation he smiles but how his gaze suddenly becomes focused on something very far away—he said, ‘Ah-h! That has occurred to me at times.’ And the girl became flustered.…”

“As well she should have been,” I said.

“Yes, yes… but when Father saw that he had embarrassed her, he spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, ‘One can only work on, you know—work while it is day.’ ”

“Very true,” I said. “All of us writers feel the same on this issue.”

Mamie began fussing with her bonnet, setting her wet hair and sagging curls to rights, and I had a moment to contemplate the rather sad future for both of Dickens’s daughters. Katey was married to a very sick young man and was currently a social outcast both because of her father’s separation from her mother and because of Kate’s own flirtations and behaviour. Her tongue had always been too sharp for either Society’s ear or that of most men who might have been marriage partners. Mamie was less intelligent than Kate, but her sometimes frenzied efforts towards social acceptance were always carried out at the fringes of society, usually within a maelstrom of malicious gossip, again because of her father’s political attitudes, her sister’s behaviour, and her own spinsterhood. Mamie’s last serious marriage possibility had been Percy Fitzgerald, but—as Katey had said last New Year’s Eve—Percy had settled on that “simpering charmer” and forgone his last opportunity of marrying into the Dickens fold.