Drood, Page 26

  Our Mystery Guests were, of course, William Charles Macready, the Eminent Tragedian, and his new wife, Cecile.

  I hope and pray that I do not sense a silence on your distant end of this memoir through time, Dear Reader, for if your era has forgotten William Charles Macready, what hope do I have that the name or work of little Wilkie Collins has survived?

  William Charles Macready was the Eminent Tragedian of our age, inheriting Kean’s mantle and—according to many—surpassing that earlier giant of Shakespearean Theatre in both subtlety of interpretation and refinement of sensibility. Macready’s most memorable roles in his many decades of dominating the English stage were as Macbeth in that unnameable production and as King Lear. Born in 1793, if my arithmetic is correct, Macready was already a mature and recognised star of the stage and famous public man when young Dickens—the Inimitable Boz, as he was known in his first flush of success after The Pickwick Papers—was just a stagestruck lad. Macready’s unique mastery of pathos and remorse on stage, often at the expense of any sense of the nobility or greatness so often worn by Shakespearean actors, resonated strongly with the young writer’s own abilities in those areas.

  Macready also was, as was Dickens, a complex, sensitive, and paradoxical man. As outwardly certain of everything as the Inimitable himself, Macready was—according to those who knew him best—also privately in doubt much of the time. Proud of his profession in the same way that Dickens was of his, he also was insecure (just as Dickens sometimes was) that such a profession could allow him to be a true gentleman. But from the late 1830s on, the rising star Dickens and his friends Macready, Forster, Maclise, Ainsworth, Beard, and Mitton composed an inner circle of talent and ambition rarely equalled in our little island’s history.

  Of all these men, William Charles Macready was—until Dickens’s ultimate ascendency—by far the most famous.

  For many years (decades actually), the Inimitable Boz wrote admiring reviews from the sidelines, especially cheering on (along with his co-writer and editor John Forster) such theatrical innovations as Macready’s production of Lear—which restored Shakespeare’s true and tragic vision after more than a century and a half in which audiences had no choice but to suffer through Nahum Tate’s abysmal “happy ending” adaptation. Macready had also reintroduced the Fool to the cast of Lear, an act of inspired salvage to which Charles Dickens’s sensibilities had resonated as if he had been a bell struck by a hammer. I once looked up Dickens’s writing on this particular matter, and beyond Dickens’s referring to the renewed presence of the Fool as “singular and masterly relief” to the overwhelming presence of the Lear character, the ecstatic Boz had called Macready’s production “magnificent” and had elaborated—

  The heart, soul, and brain of the ruined piece of nature, in all the stages of its ruining, were laid bare before us.… The tenderness, the rage, the madness, the remorse, and sorrow, all come of one another, and are linked together in one chain.

  In 1849, the upstart American Shakespearean actor named Edwin Forrest—who had once been good friends with Macready and who had benefitted from his largesse—visited England and insulted Macready’s interpretation of Hamlet, going so far as to say that our great English Tragedian minced his way across the stage and delivered his lines like an effeminate fop. Forrest was not treated well by the entirety of English audiences during the remainder of his tour here. Englishmen laughed at his Macbeth delivering the Bard’s immortal lines in that atrocious American accent. Then, in May of that same year, Macready did his own tour of America—he had been there before and been welcomed warmly for the most part—and the gangs of Boston and New York, serious Shakespeare aficionados, theatre-goers, and vicious hooligans all, had pelted Macready, during his performances, with rotten eggs, chairs, dead cats, and even more disgusting items. Many American theatre-goers attempted to defend our Eminent Tragedian. More of the hooligan gang members organised to strike a blow against Macready and the English ascendancy and hegemony in all things Shakespearean. The result, on 10 May, 1849, had been one of the bloodiest riots in the history of New York City. Before it was over, fifteen thousand people had turned into either a pro- or anti-Macready mob near the theatre called Astor Place, the mayor and governor panicked and called out a militia which the Americans called the National Guard, the crowd was fired into, and somewhere between twenty and thirty citizens lay dead on the street.

  Through this all, Dickens had sent encouraging and congratulatory telegrams to Macready, as if he were the manager with the towel and smelling salts in a pugilist’s corner.

  Over the years, Dickens had quietly written and shyly submitted many short plays and theatre comedies to the great actor, but Macready had tactfully rejected all of them (although Dickens was involved in mounting such memorable performances for Macready as his 1838 presentation of Henry V). Somehow these rejections had not antagonised or alienated the Inimitable, who—in my experience—could tolerate no such rejection from anyone else, including the Queen.

  So their friendship had endured and matured for three decades now. But as friends in common had fallen by the wayside—either falling out of Dickens’s favour or dying—I had sensed from the Inimitable’s comments in recent years that his prominent reaction to Macready was now one of sadness.

  Life had not treated the Eminent Tragedian gently. The Astor Place riot had convinced the ageing actor to retire, but even as he hit the road for his farewell tour, his beloved oldest child, nineteen-year-old Nina, died. Macready, always a soul-searching man of faith, literally locked himself away to confront his newly powerful doubts about both the universe and himself. His wife, Catherine, was in confinement at the time with their tenth child. (The parallels between the Dickenses and the Macreadys were more than superficial—the couples were so close that when Charles Dickens took his own Catherine on his first American tour in the early 1840s, it was the Macreadys to whom he entrusted their own children at the time—but William Charles Macready never fell out of love with his Catherine.)

  Macready’s last performance was at Drury Lane on 26 February, 1851. Macbeth—the role he had been most identified with and the play he had been booed and attacked during in New York two years before—was, of course, his choice for his farewell. There was the inevitable grand banquet as a footnote to this farewell, this one so large that it had to be held in the echoing old Hall of Commerce. Bulwer-Lytton lisped his way through a sincere speech. John Forster read an abysmally bad verse written for the occasion by Tennyson. Thackeray, whose only task was to toast the health of the ladies in attendance, almost passed out from nerves. Dickens, of course, who had organised the entire night and who was wearing a bright blue coat with astounding brass buttons and shiny black satin waistcoat, gave a moving and sad and humourous and heartfelt speech that was truly memorable.

  Catherine Macready died in 1852. As had been the case with their daughter Nina, Macready’s wife succumbed after a long, terrible battle with tuberculosis. Dickens had told me about his last visit to her bedside and how he had written a friend shortly after that—“The tremendous sickle certainly does cut deep into the surrounding corn, when one’s own small blade has ripened.” The next year, both of Macready’s sons, Walter and Henry, also died, followed immediately after by their sister Lydia. None of his children had gotten out of their teens.

  After eight years of mourning in seclusion in his gloomy Sherbourne retreat, in 1860, at the age of sixty-seven, Macready had remarried—the twenty-three-year-old Cecile Louise Frederica Spencer became the second Mrs Macready—and moved to a handsome new home in Cheltenham, only four or five hours from London. Soon after that they had a son.

  Dickens was delighted. The Inimitable loathed, feared, and despised the idea of getting older (it was the reason that Mary Angela, his oldest grandchild, Charley and Bess’s daughter, this very evening was calling Dickens “Venerables,” as the writer had insisted—he would not allow the word “grandfather” to be used around him) and he did not wish to see or acknowl
edge signs of age or decay in those closest to him.

  But the William Charles Macready at our table this Christmas Day night of 1865, at age seventy-two, showed every possible sign of age and decay.

  The same features that so many had found interesting in an actor—the powerful chin, massive forehead, large nose, sunken eyes, pursed and budlike lips—now conveyed the sense of some once-proud bird of prey collapsed into itself.

  As an actor, Macready had developed a technique, still taught at theatrical schools, called “the Macready pause.” I had heard it on stage myself. Essentially it was nothing more than a hesitation, an odd pause or ellipsis put into a line of dialogue where no punctuation existed, and it’s true that it could add impact or emphasis to a line, to the point of changing the meaning of the words on either side of the pause. Macready had incorporated this pause into his regular speech decades ago and his dictatorial ways as a director of plays had been parodied by many—“Stand—er—er—still, damn your eyes!” or “Keep your—er—er—eye on me, sir!”

  But now the Macready pause had devoured most of the Macready meaning.

  “I can’t—er—er—can’t tell you—er—er—Dickens, how… What is that preposterous and—er—er—horrible hubbub from the other… Children? Your children, Charley? What cat is that? Do—do—do—a—a—a—a—damn it! Cecile! What was I about to say before… Collins! No, you, the other one—with the spectacles! I read your—er—er—saw your—you—you—you—cannot possibly have meant that she… Do, fair Georgina, pray unburden us all of this—er—er—relieve us of this—a—a—banging of pewter pots from the kitchen, no? Yes! By God! Someone should tell the stage manager that these children should… Oh, A Woman Is White is what I meant to—er—er—capital turkey, my dear! Capital!”

  THE TURKEY WAS good. Some people have written that no one in England had been more responsible in the past decades for turning English families gathering around their tables on Christmas away from the bony and greasy goose and towards the rich, plump turkey than had Charles Dickens. His ending to A Christmas Carol alone seems to have pushed thousands of our previously goosified countrymen over the poultry bodice brink onto the white breast of true turkey feasts.

  At any rate, the turkey was good this day, as were all the steaming side dishes. Even the white wine was better than that which Dickens usually served.

  This was a small Christmas gathering by Dickens’s standards, but the long table was still more crowded than any Caroline had ever hosted for a Christmas dinner. At the far end was Charles Dickens, of course, the carved carcass of the larger of the two depleted turkeys still in front of him like a trophy of war. To his immediate right was Macready, and across the table from the Eminent Tragedian was his young wife, Cecile. (I am sure that there is some ironclad social rule against seating spouses across from one another—almost as bad as next to each other, I would think—but Charles Dickens was never one to pay much attention to Society’s dictates. Mere Podsnappery, he would say.)

  Next to Macready was his god-daughter and namesake, Kate Macready Dickens Collins, but she did not look pleased to be seated next to her god-father—or pleased to be at the table with us, for that matter. After darting venomous glances at her father and wincing at Macready’s endlessly elliptical and indecipherable pronouncements, she would look down the table towards her sister Mamie and roll her eyes. Mamie—Mary—who was seated on my left (since, for some unknown reason, Dickens had bestowed upon me the honour of sitting at the opposite end of the table from him), had put on even more weight in the few weeks since I had last seen her and was looking more and more like her matronly mother.

  Across from Katey was my brother, Charles, who did indeed look ill this evening. As much as I hated to agree with Dickens on this particular matter, Charley’s pale countenance did look like a death’s head.

  To Katey Dickens’s right sat the Young Orphan, our very own Staplehurst survivor, Edmond Dickenson, who spent the evening grinning and gazing and beaming at everyone like the fool he was. Across from Dickenson was another young bachelor, twenty-six-year-old Percy Fitzgerald, who managed to be just as jovial and enthusiastic as Dickenson, sans the idiocy.

  Sitting between Dickenson and Mamie Dickens was Charley Dickens. The Inimitable’s oldest child seemed the happiest of any of us there that night, and the reason may have been sitting across the table from him. I confess that young Bessie Dickens, his wife, may have been the loveliest woman there that night—or at least a close second to Cecile Macready. Dickens had been furious at Charley for falling in love with Bessie Evans—her father, Frederick Evans, had been a long-time friend of the Inimitable’s, but Dickens had never forgiven Evans for representing Catherine during the ugly separation negotiations—nor for being her trustee afterwards—even though Dickens himself had asked Evans to take on those roles.

  Luckily for Charley Dickens’s happiness and future, he had ignored his father’s blusterings and ultimatums and married Bessie. She was quiet and contained this night—she rarely spoke in the presence of her father-in-law—but the candlelight on her lovely neck was statement enough. On Bessie’s left sat Georgina Hogarth, who did her best to preside over the table and cluck about each dish and entrée in the author’s wife’s very palpable absence.

  To Georgina’s left and to my immediate right sat young Henry Fielding Dickens. As far as I could recall, this was the first time that the sixteen-year-old had eaten at the grown-ups’ table on Christmas Day. The boy looked proud of that fact in his shiny new satin waistcoat with buttons far too visible. Less visible were the long side-whiskers the boy was attempting—none too successfully—to wish into existence along his downy cheeks. He kept touching, not consciously, I believe, his smooth cheeks and upper lip as if to see if the desired whiskers might have grown in during dinner.

  To my immediate left, sitting between Mamie Dickens and me, was the true (for me) “Surprise Guest” of the evening—a very tall, very thickset, very ruddy-complexioned, very bald man with the kind of luxurious moustache and side-whiskers that poor young Henry D. could only dream of. The man’s name was George Dolby and I had actually met him at the Household Words office once or twice, although my recollection was that his background was in theatrical or business management, not publishing. During the evening’s introductions before dinner, it became obvious that Dickens had known Dolby slightly, had some business to discuss with him, and—since Dolby was at loose ends this Christmas—had invited him to Gad’s Hill on the spur of the moment.

  Dolby was an energetic and skilful talker, despite a stammer that disappeared only when he was imitating other people (which he did frequently). His stories centred on theatrical gossip and, except for the slight stammer when he was speaking as himself, were told with almost perfect theatrical emphasis and timing—but he also knew how to listen. And to laugh. Several times this evening he had given forth with a noisy, jolly, reverberating, unselfconscious laugh that may have made Katey Dickens and Mamie roll their eyes but which, I noticed, always brought a smile to the Inimitable’s face. Dolby seemed especially amused by Macready’s nearly impenetrable tales and waited patiently through the “— er—er—er” for the “by God!” final lines before erupting in mirth.

  The communal part of the evening was almost over, the children and grandchildren had come in to wish “Venerables” and their parents good night, the conversation had reached a pause where even Dolby seemed thoughtful and a little sad, Katey and Mamie had quit rolling their eyes and looking displeased with us all, but obviously the women were ready to retire to wherever they retire when the men move to the library or billiards room for brandy and a cigar, when young Dickenson said, “Excuse me, Mr Dickens, but if I may be so forward, what are you writing now, sir? Have you embarked upon another novel?”

  Instead of frowning at the upstart, Dickens smiled as if he had been looking forward to this question all evening.

  “Actually,” he said, “I have put aside my writing for the time being. I don’t
know when I shall pick it up again.”

  “Father!” cried Mamie in mock alarm. “You not writing? You not in your study writing every day? Shall the next announcement be that the sun no longer shall rise in the east?”

  Dickens smiled again. “In truth, I have decided to embark upon a more rewarding endeavour over the coming months—perhaps years. A creative undertaking that shall be more rewarding to me in both artistic and financial terms.”

  Katey showed her own version of the Inimitable’s smile. “You’re becoming an artist, Father? An illustrator, perhaps?” She looked at her quiet husband, my brother, across the ruins of the turkey. “You had best watch out, Charles. You have yet another competitor.”

  “Nothing like that,” said Dickens. Kate often irritated her father, but his response to her taunt tonight was filled with equanimity. “I have decided to create a new art form altogether. Something the world has never experienced—has never imagined!—before this.”

  “Another—eh—eh—a new—eh—eh, that is to say—by God, Dickens!” offered Macready.

  The author leaned to his left and said softly to Cecile, “My dear, of all men at this table, your husband knows best the beauty and power of the new endeavour I shall be embarking upon in a very few weeks.”

  “You’re going to become a full-time actor, Father?” chirped up Henry, who had seen his father on the amateur stage his entire life and who had been tossed around by him on that same stage during the early performances of my The Frozen Deep.

  “Not at all, my boy,” said Dickens, still smiling. “I daresay that our friend Wilkie at the other end of the table here might have a glimmer of what I have in mind.”

  “I have no clue whatsoever,” I said truthfully.

  Dickens set both hands on the table and spread his arms in a way that reminded me of da Vinci’s The Last Supper. That thought had hardly entered my mind before another followed fast on its heels—If this is the Last Supper, which amongst us here is Judas?