Two of my assailants leaped at him. The brown-suited stranger broke the wrist and ribs of the first thug with two quick swings and then cracked the second one over the head with a sound such as I had never heard before. The burliest of my attackers—the whiskered and deadly-eyed man who had, only a second before, been holding the knife to my throat—extended the blade with his thumb atop it and feinted and whirled and lunged and swung at my rescuer from a poised, catlike crouch, all dance-like motions which, I am sure, had been honed in a thousand back-alley knife fights.
The brown-suited man jumped back as his attacker’s blade swung first right and then back left in vicious arcs that would have disemboweled him if not for his agility. Then—much more quickly than one could ever imagine judging from his stolid appearance—my saviour leaped in, broke our mutual assailant’s right forearm with a downward swing of his small cudgel, broke the thug’s jaw with the backhand return of the same swing, and—as the big man fell—struck him a third time in the groin with such violence that I winced and cried out myself, and then hit him a final time in the back of the head as the thug went first to his knees and then to his face in the mud.
Only the first assailant, the one with the broken ribs and wrist, remained conscious. He was staggering towards the darkness deeper in the alley.
The brown-suited man ran him down, spun him, struck him twice in the face with the short but deadly weapon, kicked his legs out from under him, and then struck him a final savage blow to the head as he lay there moaning. Then there were no more moans.
The compact man in brown turned towards me.
I admit that I backed away with my hands up, palms open imploringly towards the short, deadly figure that approached. I had come very, very close to soiling my linen. Only the incredible—I would say impossible—speed of the violence I had just witnessed had prevented my full and total reaction of fear.
I had written about violent altercations many times, but the physical events were all recorded as if choreographed and carried out in slow, deliberate motions. All of the real violence I had just witnessed—certainly the worst I had ever witnessed, and the most savage—had happened in seven or eight seconds. There was, I realised, a very real chance that I might vomit if the brown-suited terror did not kill me first. I held my hands up and tried to speak.
“It’s all right, Mr Collins,” said the man, tucking his cudgel into his jacket pocket and firmly taking me by the arm and leading me back the way I had come, out into the thoroughfare light. Broughams and cabs passed as if nothing extraordinary had just happened.
“Who… who… are you?” I managed. His grip was as relentless as one imagines a smithy vice’s steel grip might be.
“Mr Barris, sir. At your service. We need to get you back to the hotel, sir.”
“Barris?” I was ashamed to hear the quaver and stammer in my voice. I have always prided myself on being cool in difficult situations, at sea or on the land (although in recent months and years, I admit, that equanimity had been in small part due to the laudanum).
“Yes, sir. Reginald Barris. Detective Reginald Barris. Reggie to my friends, Mr Collins.”
“You’re Birmingham police?” I said as we turned east and began walking quickly, his hand still on my arm.
Barris laughed. “Oh, no, sir. I work for Inspector Field. Came up from London by way of Bristol, just as you did, sir.”
One uses the word “wobbly” in relation to “legs” often enough in fiction; it is a cliché. To actually feel legs so unsteady and wobbly that it is difficult to walk is an absurd situation, especially to someone like me, who loves to sail and who has not the slightest problem peramubulating on a pitching deck in the high seas of the Channel.
I managed to say, “Should we not go back? Those three men might be injured.”
Barris, if that was his true name, chuckled. “Oh, I guarantee that they are injured, Mr Collins. One is dead, I believe. But we are not going back. Leave them lie.”
“Dead?” I repeated stupidly. I could not believe that. I would not believe that. “We must inform the police.”
“The police?” said Barris. “Oh, no, sir. I think not. Inspector Field would sack me if I got my name and our Private Enquiries firm’s name in the Birmingham and London papers. And you might be delayed here for days, Mr Collins. And called back to testify in an endless series of inquests and hearings. And all for three street thugs who were ready to cut your throat to steal your purse? Please, sir, put such thoughts out of your mind.”
“I don’t understand,” I said as we turned east on an even wider street. I recognised the way back to the hotel now. The lamps were being lit all along this busy boulevard. “Did Field send you to… watch over me? Protect me?”
“Yes, sir,” said Barris, releasing my arm at last. I could feel the blood rush in where he had cut off circulation. “That is, sir, there are two of us… ah… accompanying you and Mr Dickens on this tour. In case Mr Drood should make an appearance, sir. Or his agents.”
“Drood?” I said. “Agents? Do you believe that those three men were sent by Drood to kill me?” For some reason, this thought caused my bowels to go loose again. This Drood fantasy had all been a clever if somewhat tiring game up to this point.
“Them, sir? Oh, no, sir. I’m quite sure that those blackguards had nothing to do with this Drood the inspector is hunting for. Nothing at all, sir. You can be confident of that.”
“How?” I said as the hotel came into sight. “Why?”
Barris smiled thinly. “They were white, sir. Drood almost never uses white men in his service, although the occasional German or Irishman has been known. No, he would’ve sent Chinamen or Lascars or Hindoos or even some black just off a ship if he’d wanted you dead here or in Bristol, sir. Well, here is your and Mr Dickens’s hotel, Mr Collins. One of my colleagues is there and will look after your well-being once you’ve entered the lobby. I’ll stand here and watch until you reach the doors, sir.”
“Colleague?” I repeated. But Barris had stepped back into the shadows of an alley and now raised his hand to his forehead as if tipping an invisible bowler.
I turned and wobbled towards the lighted doorway of the hotel.
I HAD NO intention of attending Dickens’s performance after such a terrible experience, but after a warm bath and at least four cups of laudanum—I drained my flask and refilled it from the carefully wrapped bottle I’d brought in my luggage—I decided to dress approriately for the evening and go to the reading. This was, after all, the reason I had come to Birmingham.
I knew from Wills and Dolby that Dickens was all but unapproachable in the last hour or two before his nightly performance. He and his manager walked to the theatre and I took a cab over a bit later. I had no intention of walking alone, in the dark, on Birmingham streets again. (If Detective Barris or his colleagues were out there watching me, I did not see them as the hansom cab dropped me at the side door of the theatre.)
It was quarter to eight and the audience was just arriving. I stood at the back of the hall and watched as Dickens’s gas and lighting experts appeared, appraised the structure of dark pipes and unlit lamps from positions on both sides of the theatre, and then withdrew. A moment later the gas man appeared alone, made some adjustment to the overhead lamps hidden behind the maroon cloth–covered board, and withdrew again. Several minutes later the gas man appeared a third time and turned on the gas. The effect of the lighting against the dark background, dim at this point but clearly illuminating Dickens’s reading table, was quite striking. There were hundreds of people in their seats by this time, and all became quiet and strained to watch with a focused interest that was almost palpable.
George Dolby ambled onto the stage and peered up at the low lighting, down at the table, and out at the congregating audience with an air of self-importance. Dolby slightly repositioned the carafe of water on Dickens’s table, nodded as if satisfied by this important and essential adjustment, and slowly disappeared behind the high screen t
hat extended from the curtained side of the stage to the central reading area. As I walked up the side of the platform to go backstage myself, Dolby coming in just behind me, I thought of Shakespeare’s most famous of stage instructions, from A Winter’s Tale—“Exit, pursued by a bear.”
In his dressing room, Dickens was in formal evening clothes. I was glad that I had decided to wear mine, although everyone who knew me also knew how little I cared for formal clothing or the proper appearance. But this night the white tie and tails seemed appropriate… perhaps even necessary.
“Ah, my dear Wilkie,” said the Inimitable as I entered. “It is so kind of you to attend the proceedings this night.” He appeared completely calm, but it was as if he had forgotten that I had spent the day travelling to Birmingham with him.
There was a bouquet of scarlet geraniums on his dressing table, and he now cut one for his buttonhole, adjusted it, and then cut another and set it in my lapel.
“Come,” he said as he adjusted his gold watch-chain and made a final check of buttons and beard and oiled curls in the mirror. “We shall peek out at the natives in the hope that they are becoming restless.”
We went out onto the stage itself, behind the shielding screen where Dolby was still hovering. Dickens showed me a small chink in the screen where—once a flap of fabric had been moved aside—we could look out at the now completely assembled and mildly fidgeting audience. He allowed me a glimpse. I felt anxious at that moment and wondered, for all my theatrical experience as an actor, if I should ever be able to carry out a reading without succumbing to nervousness, but Dickens himself showed no anxiety whatsoever. The gas man came up to him, Dickens nodded, leaned closer to the hole in the screen, and—as the gas man calmly walked out onto the stage to make the final adjustment to the lamps—the Inimitable whispered to me, “This is my favourite part of the evening, Wilkie.”
I leaned so close that I could smell the pomade on the author’s side curls as we both watched through the chink. Suddenly the lights went up dramatically and some two thousand faces were illuminated in reflected light as an “Aaahhhhh…” of expectation rose from the audience.
“You’d best take your seat, my friend,” whispered Dickens. “I wait another minute or so to whet their anticipation, then we shall begin.”
I had started to leave when he waved me back. Putting his mouth close to my ear, he whispered, “Keep your eye out for Drood. He might be anywhere.”
I could not tell if he was serious, so I nodded and moved away in the dark and then out, finding my way to the side stairs, then up against the flow of late arrivers to the rear of the hall, and then down towards the stage again to my reserved seat along the aisle about two-thirds of the way back. I had asked Wills to set aside this seat for me so that I might slip out to join Dickens in the dressing room more easily at the break about ninety minutes into the two-hour reading. The maroon carpet on the stage, simple table, and even the carafe of water—illuminated as they were by the bright lights—seemed pregnant with potential in that last minute before Dickens appeared.
Suddenly there erupted an explosion of applause as Dickens’s slim figure walked to his reading desk. The applause rose and continued at a deafening level, but Dickens ignored it completely, pouring some water for himself from the carafe and waiting silently for the ovation to abate much as one might wait for carriages to pass before crossing a street. Then, when silence finally descended, Dickens… did nothing. He merely stood there looking out at the audience, occasionally turning his head slightly so as to see everyone. It was as if he were meeting the gaze of every single man and woman there that night… and there now must have been more than two thousand of us crowded into the hall.
A few stragglers were finding their seats near the rear of the theatre and Dickens waited with that total and somehow unsettling calm until they did so. Then he seemed to fix them for a few seconds with his cool, serious, intense, yet mildly questioning gaze.
Then he began.
Several years after this night in Birmingham, Dolby was to say to me—“Watching the Chief read during those last years was not like attending a performance; it was more like being part of a spectacle. It was not at all a matter of being entertained; it was a case of being haunted.”
Haunted. Yes, perhaps. Or possessed, as the spirit rappers so in vogue in my day, Dear Reader, were supposedly possessed by their spirit guides to the Other Side. But it was not only Charles Dickens who seemed possessed during these readings; the entire audience joined him. As you will see, it was hard not to join him.
It saddens me, Dear Reader, that no one in your future generation will have heard or seen Charles Dickens read. There are experiments in my time as I write this with recording voices on various cylinders almost as photographers capture images of a person on film plates. But all this has come after Charles Dickens’s death. No one in your day will ever hear his thin, slightly lisping voice or—since to my knowledge none of his talks were ever captured on daguerreotype or other photographic devices (and since such forms of photography available in Dickens’s day were too slow to record any person in even the slightest motion anyway, and Dickens was always in motion)—see the strange change that came over the Inimitable and his audiences during these performances. His readings were unique in our day and—I would venture the opinion—will never be equalled or adequately imitated in yours (if authors still write books at all in this future you inhabit).
Even in the glare of those brilliant gaslights, a strange, iridescent cloud seemed to hover around Charles Dickens as he read from his most recent Christmas tale. That cloud, I believe, was the ectoplasmic manifestation of the many characters whom Dickens had created and whom he now summoned—one at a time—to speak and act before us.
As these ghosts entered him, Dickens’s posture would change. He would jerk alert or slump in despondency or laziness as the character’s spirit dictated. The author’s face would change immediately and totally—some facial muscles used so frequently by Charles Dickens going lax, others coming into play. Smiles, leers, frowns, and conspiratorial glances never used by the man who lived at Gad’s Hill flitted across the face of this spirit-possessed receptacle in front of us. His voice changed from second to second, and even in rapid-fire exchanges of dialogue Dickens seemed to be inhabited by two or more possessing demons at once.
In other readings, I had heard his tone shift instantly from the hoarse, rasping, lisping, urgent, whispered croak of Fagin—“Aha! I like that thellow’th lookth. He’d be of use to uth; he knows how to train the girl already. Don’t make ath much noise as a mouthe, my dear, and let me hear ’em talk—let me hear ’em”—to the sombre tenor of Mr Dombey to the silly, mincing tones of Miss Squeers, and then to a Cockney so perfect that no actor then on the English stage could rival his accent.
But it was more than voice and language that drew us all in that night. Everything about Dickens would change in the instant when he slipped from one character to the next (or in that instant when one character departed his body and another entered). When he became the Jew Fagin, Dickens’s eternally upright, almost martial posture would melt into the rounded, hunched-shouldered stoop of that evil man. The author’s brow seemed to rise and elongate, his eyebrows grew bushier, as his eyes receded into two dark wells and seemed to gleam of their own accord in the bright gaslight. Dickens’s hands, so composed and assured when he was reading descriptive passages, would quiver, clutch one another, rub themselves fitfully, twitch with money hunger, and try to hide themselves in sleeves when they belonged to Fagin. While reading, Dickens would pace several steps to this side of his customised desk, then several steps the other way, and though the motion was smooth and confident when it was Dickens standing there, it became lithe, shifty, and almost snakelike when he was possessed by the spirit of Fagin.
“These characters and changes are as real for me as they are for the audience,” Dickens had told me before this particular reading tour began. “So real are my fictions to myself
that I do not recall them but see them done again before my very eyes, for it all happens before me. And the audience sees this reality.”
I certainly did that night. Whether it was because of the consumption of oxygen by the gas flames or because of the literally mesmeric quality of Dickens’s face and hands illuminated so starkly against the dark maroon background due to the unique lighting, I constantly felt the author’s eyes on me—even when those eyes belonged to one of his characters—and, with that audience, I entered into a kind of trance.
When he was Dickens again, reading narration and description rather than character-inhabited dialogue, I could hear the unfaltering certainty in his voice, sense the enjoyment revealed in the gleam of his eye, and perceive a real hint of aggression—masked as confidence to the majority of the crowd, I was sure—coming from his own knowledge that he could mesmerise so many for so long.
Then the Christmas tale and bit of Oliver Twist were finished, the longer, ninety-minute segment of the evening finished, the interval in the evening’s performance arrived at, and Dickens turned and left the platform, as seemingly oblivious of the crowd’s wild applause as he had been when first coming on stage.
I shook my head as if awakening from a dream and went backstage.
Dickens was sprawled on a couch and appeared to be too exhausted to rise or move. Dolby bustled in and out, supervising a waiter who was setting out a glass of iced champagne and a plate with a dozen oysters. Dickens stirred himself to sip the champagne and suck down the oysters.
“It’s the only thing the Chief can eat in the evening,” Dolby whispered to me.
Hearing the whisper, Dickens looked up and said, “My dear Wilkie… how splendid of you to pop in during the interval. Did you enjoy the first part of the evening’s fare?”
“I did,” I said. “It was… extraordinary… as always.”
“I believe I told you that we shall be replacing the ‘Doctor Marigold’ parts should I accept more such engagements in the autumn or winter,” said Dickens.