Things Will Never Be the Same Page 24

There were oohs and more applause, the ones who guessed before nodding in satisfaction to themselves and their neighbors.

  The houselights dimmed until only Dickens, the desk, and the central magenta panel were illuminated.

  He opened the book in his hand, and without looking at it said, “The Christmas Garland. Holly Sprig the First. ‘No doubt about it, Marley was dead as a doorknob . . .’”

  Dickens barely glanced at the prompt book in his hand as he read. It was the regular edition of The Christmas Garland, the pages cut out and pasted in the center of larger bound octavo leaves. There were deletions and underlinings in red, blue, and yellow inks, notes to himself, directions for changes of voice, alternate wordings for lines. The whole had been shortened by more than a third, to fit into an hour and a half for these paid readings. When he had begun his charity readings more than ten years ago, the edition as printed had gone on more than two hours-and-a half. Through deletions and transpositions, he reduced it to its present length without losing effect or sense.

  He moved continually as he read, now using the letter as Eben’s quill, then the block of wood—3 heavy blows with his left hand—as a door knocker. He moved his fingers together, the book between them, to simulate Cratchitt’s attempts to warm himself at a single glowing coal. His voice was slow, cold and drawn as Eben Mizer, solemnly cheerful as the gentleman from the charity; merry and bright as Mizer’s nephew. The audience laughed or drew inward on itself as he read the opening scenes.

  “For I am that Spirit of Christmas Past,” said the visitant “I am to show you things that Were. Take my hand.”

  Eben Mizer did so, and they were out the window casing and over the night city in a slow movement. They flew slowly into the darkness to the north.

  And then they were outside a house and shop, looking through the window at a large man in old-fashioned waistcoat and knee-breeks, with his spectacles pushed back on his forehead.

  “Why, old Mr. Fezziwigg, to whom I was ’prenticed!” said Eben Mizer.

  “Ho!” said Fezziwigg. “Seven o’clock! Away with your quills! Roll back the carpets! Move those desks against the walls! It’s Christmas Eve and no one works! . . .”

  As Dickens acted out preparations for the party, his eyes going to the prompt book only twice, he remembered the writing of this, his most famous story It had been late October of the year 1843. He was halfway through the writing of Martin Sweezlebugg, had just, in fact, sent the young hero to America—the place he himself had returned from late in 1842, the place that had become the source of one long squeal of protest when he had published Notes on the Americans early in the year. He had gone from triumph to disdain in less than six months. For the first time in his life, the monthly numbers had been a chore for him—he was having troubles with Sweezlebugg, and the sales were disappointing. As they, had been for Gabriel Vardon: The Locksmith of London of two years before. The Americans who were outraged with his travel book were the same who had named a species of Far Western trout after Gabriel Vardon’s daughter. Between finishing the November number of Sweezlebugg on October 18, and having to start the next on November 3, he had taken one of the steam trains to the opening of the Manchester Institute of that city. Sitting on the platform. waiting his turn to speak, the idea for The Christmas Garland had come to him unbidden. He could hardly contain himself, waiting until after the speeches and the banquet to return to the quiet of his hotel to think it through.

  And since he had a larger and larger family each year to support, more indigent brothers and sisters, in-laws and his importunate mother and father, he conceived the story as a separate book, to be sold at Christmas as were many of the holiday annuals, keepsakes, and books of remembrance. Illustrated, of course, with cuts by John Leech. The whole plan was a fire in his mind that night and all the way back to London the next day. He went straight to Chapman and Hall and presented the notion to them. They agreed with alacrity, and began ordering up stock and writing advertisements.

  He had had no wild success since the two books that had made his reputation, Tales of the Nimrod Club and Oliver Twist, parts of them written simultaneously, in overlapping monthly numbers, six years before. He had envisioned for The Christmas Garland sales that would earn him £3,000 or more.

  “Show me no more, no more!” said Eben Mizer. “These are things long past; the alternate miseries and joys of my youth. Those times are all gone. We can no more change them than stop the tides!”

  “These are things as they were,” said the Spirit of Christmases Past. “These things are unchangeable. They have happened.”

  “I had forgotten both pleasure and heartache,” said Mizer. “I had forgotten the firewood, the smoke, the horses.”

  “In another night, as Marley said, you shall be visited by another, who will show you things as they are now. Prepare,” said the Spirit. As with the final guttering of a candle, it was gone. Eben Mizer was back in his bed, in his cold bedchamber, in the dark. He dropped his head to the horsehair pillow, and slept.

  Twenty-two years had gone by since Dickens wrote the words he read. He remembered his disappointment with the sales of The Christmas Garland—“Disappointment?! Disappointment!” yelled his friend Macready, the actor, when he had complained. “Disappointment at selling twenty thousand copies in six days! Disappointment, Charlie?” It was not that it had not sold phenomenally, but that it was such a well made book—red cover, gilt-edged pages, four hand-tinted cuts, the best type and paper, and because of Dickens’s insistence that everyone have one, priced far too low—that his half-copyright earnings through January 1844 only came to £347 6s 2p when he had counted on thousands. That had been the disappointment.

  Dickens spoke on. This was the ninety-fourth public reading of The Christmas Garland, his most popular, next to the trial scene from The Nimrod Club, and the death of little Dombey. At home these days he worked on an abridgement of the scenes, including that of the great sea storm, from The Copperfield Record of the World As It Rolled, which he thought would make a capital dramatic reading, perhaps to be followed by a short comic scene, such as his reading of Mrs. Gamp, the hit of the otherwise disappointing Martin Sweezlebugg.

  What a winter that had been . . . the hostile American press, doing the monthly numbers of Sweezlebugg, writing and seeing to the publication of The Christmas Garland in less than six weeks, preparing his growing family—his wife, an ever increasing number of children, his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, the servants and dogs—for the coming sojourn to Italy, severing his ties with Bentley’s Miscellany, thinking of starting a daily newspaper of a liberal slant, walking each night through London streets five, ten, fifteen miles because his brain was hot with plans and he could not sleep or rest. He was never to know such energies again.

  There was his foot now, for instance. He believed its present pain was a nervous condition brought on by walking twelve miles one night years ago through the snow. The doctors who had diagnosed it as gout were dismissed; a third was brought in who diagnosed it as a nervous condition brought on by walking through the snow. Before each of his readings, his servant John had to put upon the bare foot a fomentation of the poppy, which allowed him to put on a sock and shoe, and make it the two hours standing up.

  He still had a wife, though he had not seen her in six years; they had separated after twenty-three years of marriage and nine children. Some of the living children and Georgina had remained with Dickens, taking his side against the mother and sister. One boy was in the navy, another in Australia, two others in school. Only one child, Mamie—“young Tinderbox,” as Dickens called her—visited freely between the two households, taking neither side.

  The separation had of course caused scandal, and Dickens’s break with Anthony Trollope. They belonged to the same clubs. Trollope had walked into one; several scandalized members were saying that Dickens had taken his sister-in-law as mistress. “No such
thing,” said Trollope. “It’s a young actress.”

  So it was: Trollope said he was averting a larger outrageous lie with the truth; Dickens had not seen it that way.

  Her name was Ellen Ternan. She and Dickens had performed in charity theatricals together, The Frozen Deep and Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour. She was of a stage family—her mother and two sisters were actresses. Her sister Fanny had married Anthony Trollope’s brother Tom in Florence, Italy, where she had gone to be his children’s tutor after the death of Tom’s wife Theodosia.

  The world had been a much more settled place when the young fire-eating Boz had published his first works, and had remained so for some time afterward. But look at it now.

  The Americans had just finished blowing the heads off first themselves, and then their President; had thrown the world in turmoil—which side should we take?—for four years, destroying a large part of their manpower and manufacturing capabilities. What irked Dickens was not their violent war—they had it coming—but that he would not be able to arrange a reading tour there for at least another year. An American had shown up two weeks ago at his publisher’s office with an offer of £10,000, cash on the barrelhead, if Dickens would agree to a three-month tour of seventy-five readings. Both his friend Forster and the old actor Macready advised him against it for reasons of his health. Besides his foot, there had been some tightening in his chest for the last year or so, and his bowels had been in straitened circumstances long before that.

  Ah, but what a trouper. He found even with his mind wandering he had not lost his place, or missed a change of voice or character; not given the slightest hint that his whole being was not in the reading being communicated to his forward leaning, intent auditors.

  Eben Mizer opened his eyes. How long had he slept? Was the Spirit of Christmases Past that bit of undigested potato, that dollop of mustard? he thought.

  There came to his bedchamber a slight crackling sound; the air was suffused with a faint blue glow. Mizer reached into the watch catch above his bed and took down his timepiece. It was 12:00, he saw by the glow, which slowly brightened about his bed. Twelve! Surely at noon! And not the midnight before, when the Spirit of Christmases Past had come. Had he slept the clock round, all through the sham-bug Christmas Day? He grasped the bedclothes to haul himself out onto the cold bare floor. The overall bright glow coalesced in the corner nearest the chair.

  The popping became louder, like faraway fireworks over the Thames on Coronation Day, or the ice slowly breaking on a March day. There was a smell of hot metal in the air; the sharp odor before a thunderstorm, but without heat or dampness. And then it was there, in the room behind the chair!

  It was a looming figure, far above normal height, shrouded in a gown of copper and mica, and above its head, at its top, glowing green and jagged with purple, was one of Faraday’s Needles. . . .

  * * *

  The listeners jerked back, as always. There was a rustle of crinoline and starch as they hunkered back down. Most knew the story as they knew their own hearts, but the effect on them was always the same.

  Dickens knew why; for when he had written those words more than two decades before, his own hair had stood on end as if he were in the very presence of the Motility Factor itself.

  It was from that moment on in the writing of The Christmas Garland that he had never wavered, never slowed down; it was that moment when, overcome by tiredness at his desk he had flung himself and his hat and cane out into the (in those days) dark London night, and had walked till dawn, out to Holborn, up Duckett Lane, across to Seven Sisters, and back up and down Vauxhall Bridge Road, to come in again just as the household was rising, and throw himself fully clothed across his bed, to sleep for an hour, and then, rising, go back to his ink bottle and quills.

  The crackling sound grew louder as the Spirit shook his raiments, and a spark danced between the Needle and the ceiling, leaving a bright blue spot there to slowly fade as Eben Mizer watched, fascinated as a bird before a snake.

  “Know that I am the Spirit of Christmases Current, Eben Mizer. Know that I am in the form that the men who hire your accountancy worship, as you worship the money that flows, like the Motive Force itself, from them to you.”

  “What do you wish of me?” asked Eben.

  The Spirit laughed, and a large gust of blue washed over the room, as if day had come and gone in an instant.

  “Wish? Nothing. I am only to show you what takes place this Christmas.”

  “You mean this past day?”

  “Past? Oh, very well, as you will!” The Spirit laughed again. “Take my hand.”

  “I will be volcanized in an instant!” said Mizer.

  “No, you shall not.” It held out an empty sleeve. Mizer felt invisible fingers take his. “Come,” said the Spirit. “Hold on to me.”

  There was a feeling of lightness in Mizer’s head; he became a point of light, as the flash of a meteor across the heavens, or the dot of a lightning-bug against an American night, and they were outside his nephew’s house in the daylight.

  “As before, you are neither seen nor heard,” said the Spirit of Christmases Current. “Walk through this wall with me.” They did, but Mizer had the sensation that instead of walking directly through they had, in a twinkling, gone up the windowpane, across the roof tiles, down the heated air of the chimney, across the ceiling, and into the room just inside the window, too fast to apprehend. The effect was the same, from outside to inside, but Eben Mizer had the memory of doing it the long way. . . .

  Dickens’s voice became high, thin, and merry as he took on the younger tones of Mizer’s nephew, his nephew’s wife, their in-laws and guests at the party where they were settling in for a game of charades before the Christmas meal.

  Actors on the stage of the time said that Dickens was the greatest actor of his age; others thought it beneath his dignity to do the readings—authors should be paid to publish books, not read them for money. Some of his readings he had dropped after they did not have the desired effect—comic or pathetic or terrific—on the audience. Others he had prepared but never given, because they had proved unsatisfying to him. By the time any reading had joined his repertoire, he had rehearsed it twenty-five times before its debut.

  He knew that he was a good actor—if he had not gone into journalism, covering the courts and the Parliament when a youth, he would have gone on the stage—but he knew he was not great. He knew it was the words and the acting that had made his readings such a success. No matter how many times they had read and heard them, audiences still responded to them as if they had come newly dry from his pen that very morning.

  Dickens paused for another drink from the glass, mopped his brow with the handkerchief that a moment before had been Mizer’s nightcap. The audience waited patiently, the slight hum of the fans in the ceiling purring to let the accumulated warmth of 1,500 bodies escape into the cold night. The glow from the selenium lights against the magenta screen added nothing to the heat.

  He put the glass down, eyes twinkling, and went back to his reading.

  “If only my uncle were here,” said his nephew.

  “Oh, why bother?” asked his pretty young wife. “He’s probably at his office counting out more profits from the Greater Cumberland and Smythe-Jones Motility Factory, or the United Batchford Motive-Force Delivery Service. And no doubt got poor Bob Cratchitt there with him, chained to his stool. . . .”

  “Hush, please,” asked the nephew.

  “Well, it’s true. A man like Eben Mizer. He does sums for seventeen different power brokers, yet his office is still lit with candles! He lets poor Cratchitt freeze in the outer office. And poor Bob with the troubles he has at home. Your uncle should be ashamed of what he pays him, of how he himself lives. . . .”

  “But, after all,” said her father the greengrocer, “it is a free market, and he
pays what the trade will bear.”

  “That’s wrong too,” said the young wife, hands on hips. “How the workingmen are to better themselves if their wages are so low they have to put their children working at such early ages is beyond me. How are they to make ends meet? How are they to advance themselves if there are no better wages in the future, perhaps even lower ones, and they can’t live decently now?”

  “The Tories won’t be happy if women such as yourself get the suffrage,” said her father with a laugh. “Neither would anyone on the board of directors of a motive-power company!”

  “If I did not love you as a father,” said the young wife, “I should be very cross with you.”

  “Come, come,” said her husband the nephew. “It’s Christmas Day. Where’s your charity?”

  “Where’s your uncle’s?”

  “He does as the world wills,” said the nephew.

  “Only more so,” said another guest, and they all laughed, the young wife included.

  “Well, I invited him,” said Mizer’s nephew. “It’s up to him to come or no. I should welcome him with all the gladness of the season.”

  “As would I,” said his wife. “Only you might as well wish for Christian charity to be carried on every day, in every way, throughout the year, in every nation on Earth!”

  “Why show me this?” asked Eben Mizer of the Spirit. “No love is lost betwixt my nephew’s wife and myself. My nephew means very well, but he does not grasp the full principles of business to his bosom. He has done well enough; he could do much better.”

  “Come,” said the Spirit of Christmases Current, grabbing Mizer’s hand in its unseen own. There was another crackle of blue lightning, and they were away, up a nail, across the roof, down the gutter pipe, and off into the day.