The Last Dickens

“I'd wager they would happily use their influence to swat away this pest, don't you think? Take a trip back there.”

Dolby went back to Washington for a day as instructed. He dined with the chief commissioner of Internal Revenue of the federal government, who confirmed that Dickens's readings were considered occasional and, as such, exempt.

“We will always have rogue collectors, a rowdy element here and there in this bureau,” the commissioner said to Dolby apologetically when writing out a letter at the table. “Why, Congress had to even investigate the tendency of some of our men to make, well, ungentlemanly demands of some of the new women bookeepers in Treasury. Keep my letter with you, Mr. Dolby. It should stop the mischief. Many of the collectors in the eastern states, you see, are Irish, and suffer greatly from Anglophobia. We hope to enlighten them yet with visits like yours from our English cousins.”

Returning immediately to Boston, to a Saturday dinner planned for Dickens and Dolby at the Fieldses’, felt like being home again when compared with their recent itinerant lives.

They took a long walk around Boston before the meal. The amiable Mr. Osgood pointed out places of interest. So much was being built. The Sears Building, at the moment formless piles of stone and dust and scaffold, was said to be on its way to be a grand palace of offices and shops of seven stories. “There,” Osgood said, pointing to it, “shall be Boston's first steam elevator when this building is finished. You see, they say that is where it will go.” A space had been left in the middle of the construction on each floor, at the very bottom of which was an engine room with a steam pump connected to a series of pipes extending to the top of the building. There was an elaborately decorated elevator car, like a small parlor room, resting on its side by the building.

“Before long, they say,” Osgood commented, “nobody will use stairs at all and we shall save the lives of fifty persons a year who die by falling down stairwells. I only wonder whether things in Boston have begun to change too rapidly to comprehend them. We will all move up and down by steam power.”

“Any politician with that platform has my vote,” said Dolby, who was openly spiteful of walking as much as was required by Boston and Dickens.

Joining the dinner at the Fieldses that evening was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had come from Concord. Unlike most of the Cam-bridge literary delegates-Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes-Emerson seemed only half interested in Dickens as a man and even less in Dickens as a writer. Yet the Concord Sage could not help laughing at Dickens's singing an old Irish ballad (“Chrush ke lan ne chouskin!”) over punch that Dickens made for the group; Emerson's laughing, in spite of his best philosophies, looked as if it must hurt.

There were several other grim faces at dinner that, like some imperceptible force, spread a dark cloud over the levity. The faces belonged to high-level Massachusetts politicians who insisted that after President Johnson's rash dismissal of the secretary of war, impeachment had become all but certain. The leaders of Congress were in secret meetings through the night. Chaos was in the air.

Chapter 25

THE NATIONAL POLITICAL CRISIS PREDICTED AT THE DINNER came to pass that Monday-articles of impeachment against Andrew Johnson were issued for high crimes and misdemeanors for his defiance of Congress during reconstruction of the Union-and the public fell into a fervor. The lines at the ticket office that day were thinly populated-even most of the speculators were gone! Observing the public distraction and considering Dickens's health, Dolby canceled the next Boston reading series.

The staff did all they could to entertain Dickens during the quiet period. Dolby and Osgood raced each other in a walking match dreamed up by Dickens, which also gave Dickens an excuse to call for a grand dinner party. “That Osgood!” Dolby commented to Henry, who helped him prepare for the contest by fitting him with seamless socks. “Hardly ten stone and a half, my luck, I daresay he can move faster than me in any weather, much less in snow and ice. With his rheumatic smile all along. Mark my words, he is faster and stronger than he appears-in racing and otherwise. Confound that Johnson for being impeached.” Soon Dolby and Osgood were both leaving town to address the changes to the schedule. Tom and Henry Scott were left at the Parker House with Dickens. Compared with the rest of their time in America, these days at Parker's without any readings were absurdly slow. The weather and Dickens's health confined the novelist to his rooms for the most part. He was weakened by his sneezing and coughing and most of all by missing Gadshill.

When he was not at his desk writing, Dickens would talk with anyone who was nearby, waiter, staff or hotel guest. Tom was asked to bring the latest telegraphed reports to Dickens's rooms whenever they arrived from Dolby and Osgood. Another time, Dickens had received a letter from home that sent him into a melancholy mood. When Tom came to take mail for the last post of the day, Dickens was still staring at the letter.

“Surely not John Thompson!” Dickens exclaimed.

“Chief?”

“Thompson is one of my men at Gadshill. The police discovered he was stealing money from my office cash box. After all these years! Why, I trusted him with my babies-I mean my manuscripts, delivering them here and there. What I am to do with, or for, the miserable man, God knows!”

“I'm very sorry, Chief.”

“Tell me,” the Chief said, “my good Branagan, do you read my books?”

Tom paused with surprise. Usually Dickens talked near but not really to him. He also remembered Dolby's words about their mission to keep Dickens content.

Dickens laughed at his hesitation. “Oh, you may tell the truth, Mr. Branagan! One more blasted ‘Dickensite’ and I may tip over from the weight. Nothing terrifies a writer like meeting his reader for the first time.”

“I do not often read novels, sir.”

“Sir? I want only strangers calling me ‘sir,’ and in truth I'd prefer strangers not to call me anything at all. Do you know why I am called Chief?”

“No.”

“Dolby never felt comfortable calling me Charles or Dickens. Well, I had at least been able to convince him to call me Boz.” Dickens continued his story, saying that one afternoon during a reading tour of Chester, Dolby had come to find Dickens in front of a fire with a Turkish fez and a bright muffler around his neck because cold air was coming into the room at the Queen's Hotel.

How do you feel? Dolby had asked, concerned.

Dickens had grumbled to this: Like something good to eat being kept cool in a larder. How do I look?

Like an old chief, Dolby had answered, but without the pipe.

“That is where it comes from. I respect Dolby more than I can say, for he overcame the same defect of speech that my India boy-that is my third son, Frank, now in Bengal with the police-had suffered with as a child from his severe want of application. Now, no novels at all, you say?”

Tom had forgotten the earlier subject. “Novels and romances pretend,” he commented.

“They lie, you mean to say?”

“Yes,” Tom replied. “They pretend to be what they are not.”

“The books do pretend, Mr. Branagan. Surely. But that is not all. Novels are filled with lies, but squeezed in between is even more that is true-without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see? The writer of books always puts himself in, his real self, but you must be careful of not taking him for his next -door neighbor.”

“It is still only imagination. Isn't it?”

“Let me show you something. Suppose this wineglass on the table were a character.” Tom nodded at the demonstration. “Good. Now, fancy it a man, imbue it with certain qualities, and soon fine filmy webs of thoughts spin and weave around it until it assumes form and beauty and becomes instinct with life. From there, the writing comes of itself until those two words, sorrowfully penned at last, stare at me, in capitals: THE END. But if I don't