Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (2356 page)

On the fourth of February he wrote from Washington. “You may like to have a line to let you know that it is all right here, and that the croakers were simply ridiculous. I began last night. A charming audience, no dissatisfaction whatever at the raised prices, nothing missed or lost, cheers at the end of the
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, and rounds upon rounds of applause all through. All the foremost men and their families had taken tickets for the series of four. A small place to read in. £300 in it.” It will be no violation of the rule of avoiding private detail if the very interesting close of this letter is given. Its anecdote of President Lincoln was repeatedly told by Dickens after his return, and I am under no necessity to withhold from it the authority of Mr. Sumner’s name. “I am going to-morrow to see the President, who has sent to me twice. I dined with Charles Sumner last Sunday, against my rule; and as I had stipulated for no party, Mr. Secretary Stanton was the only other guest, besides his own secretary. Stanton is a man with a very remarkable memory, and extraordinarily familiar with my books. . . . He and Sumner having been the first two public men at the dying President’s bedside, and having remained with him until he breathed his last, we fell into a very interesting conversation after dinner, when, each of them giving his own narrative separately, the usual discrepancies about details of time were observable. Then Mr. Stanton told me a curious little story which will form the remainder of this short letter.

“On the afternoon of the day on which the President was shot, there was a cabinet council at which he presided. Mr. Stanton, being at the time commander-in-chief of the Northern troops that were concentrated about here, arrived rather late. Indeed they were waiting for him, and on his entering the room, the President broke off in something he was saying, and remarked: ‘Let us proceed to business, gentlemen.’ Mr. Stanton then noticed, with great surprise, that the President sat with an air of dignity in his chair instead of lolling about it in the most ungainly attitudes, as his invariable custom was; and that instead of telling irrelevant or questionable stories, he was grave and calm, and quite a different man. Mr. Stanton, on leaving the council with the Attorney-General, said to him, ‘That is the most satisfactory cabinet meeting I have attended for many a long day! What an extraordinary change in Mr. Lincoln!’ The Attorney-General replied, ‘We all saw it, before you came in. While we were waiting for you, he said, with his chin down on his breast, “Gentlemen, something very extraordinary is going to happen, and that very soon.”‘ To which the Attorney-General had observed, ‘Something good, sir, I hope?’ when the President answered very gravely: ‘I don’t know; I don’t know. But it will happen, and shortly too!’ As they were all impressed by his manner, the Attorney-General took him up again: ‘Have you received any information, sir, not yet disclosed to us?’ ‘No,’ answered the President: ‘but I have had a dream. And I have now had the same dream three times. Once, on the night preceding the Battle of Bull Run. Once, on the night preceding’ such another (naming a battle also not favourable to the North). His chin sank on his breast again, and he sat reflecting. ‘Might one ask the nature of this dream, sir?’ said the Attorney-General. ‘Well,’ replied the President, without lifting his head or changing his attitude, ‘I am on a great broad rolling river — and I am in a boat — and I drift — and I drift! — But this is not business — ’ suddenly raising his face and looking round the table as Mr. Stanton entered, ‘let us proceed to business, gentlemen.’ Mr. Stanton and the Attorney-General said, as they walked on together, it would be curious to notice whether anything ensued on this; and they agreed to notice. He was shot that night.”

On his birthday, the seventh of February, Dickens had his interview with President Andrew Johnson. “This scrambling scribblement is resumed this morning, because I have just seen the President: who had sent to me very courteously asking me to make my own appointment. He is a man with a remarkable face, indicating courage, watchfulness, and certainly strength of purpose. It is a face of the Webster type, but without the ‘bounce’ of Webster’s face. I would have picked him out anywhere as a character of mark. Figure, rather stoutish for an American; a trifle under the middle size; hands clasped in front of him; manner, suppressed, guarded, anxious. Each of us looked at the other very hard. . . . It was in his own cabinet that I saw him. As I came away, Thornton drove up in a sleigh — turned out for a state occasion — to deliver his credentials. There was to be a cabinet council at 12. The room was very like a London club’s ante-drawing room. On the walls, two engravings only: one, of his own portrait; one, of Lincoln’s. . . . In the outer room was sitting a certain sunburnt General Blair, with many evidences of the war upon him. He got up to shake hands with me, and then I found that he had been out on the Prairie with me five-and-twenty years ago. . . . The papers having referred to my birthday’s falling to-day, my room is filled with most exquisite flowers.
They came pouring in from all sorts of people at breakfast time. The audiences here are really very fine. So ready to laugh or cry, and doing both so freely, that you would suppose them to be Manchester shillings rather than Washington half-sovereigns. Alas! alas! my cold worse than ever.” So he had written too at the opening of his letter.

The first reading had been four days earlier, and was described to his daughter in a letter on the 4th, with a comical incident that occurred in the course of it. “The gas was very defective indeed last night, and I began with a small speech to the effect that I must trust to the brightness of their faces for the illumination of mine. This was taken greatly. In the
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a most ridiculous incident occurred. All of a sudden, I saw a dog leap out from among the seats in the centre aisle, and look very intently at me. The general attention being fixed on me, I don’t think anybody saw this dog; but I felt so sure of his turning up again and barking, that I kept my eye wandering about in search of him. He was a very comic dog, and it was well for me that I was reading a comic part of the book. But when he bounced out into the centre aisle again, in an entirely new place, and (still looking intently at me) tried the effect of a bark upon my proceedings, I was seized with such a paroxysm of laughter that it communicated itself to the audience, and we roared at one another, loud and long.” Three days later the sequel came, in a letter to his sister-in-law. “I mentioned the dog on the first night here? Next night, I thought I heard (in
Copperfield
) a suddenly-suppressed bark. It happened in this wise: — One of our people, standing just within the door, felt his leg touched, and looking down beheld the dog, staring intently at me, and evidently just about to bark. In a transport of presence of mind and fury, he instantly caught him up in both hands, and threw him over his own head, out into the entry, where the check-takers received him like a game at ball. Last night he came again,
with another dog;
but our people were so sharply on the look-out for him that he didn’t get in. He had evidently promised to pass the other dog, free.”

What is expressed in these letters, of a still active, hopeful, enjoying, energetic spirit, able to assert itself against illness of the body and in some sort to overmaster it, was also so strongly impressed upon those who were with him, that, seeing his sufferings as they did, they yet found it difficult to understand the extent of them. The sadness thus ever underlying his triumph makes it all very tragical. “That afternoon of my birthday,” he wrote from Baltimore on the 11th, “my catarrh was in such a state that Charles Sumner, coming in at five o’clock, and finding me covered with mustard poultice, and apparently voiceless, turned to Dolby and said: ‘Surely, Mr. Dolby, it is impossible that he can read to-night!’ Says Dolby: ‘Sir, I have told Mr. Dickens so, four times to-day, and I have been very anxious. But you have no idea how he will change, when he gets to the little table.’ After five minutes of the little table I was not (for the time) even hoarse. The frequent experience of this return of force when it is wanted, saves me a vast amount of anxiety; but I am not at times without the nervous dread that I may some day sink altogether.” To the same effect in another letter he adds: “Dolby and Osgood” (the latter represented the publishing firm of Mr. Fields and was one of the travelling staff), “who do the most ridiculous things to keep me in spirits
(I am often very heavy, and rarely sleep much), are determined to have a walking match at Boston on the last day of February to celebrate the arrival of the day when I can say ‘
next
month!’ for home.” The match ended in the Englishman’s defeat; which Dickens doubly commemorated, by a narrative of the American victory in sporting-newspaper style, and by a dinner in Boston to a party of dear friends there.

After Baltimore he was reading again at Philadelphia, from which he wrote to his sister-in-law on the 13th as to a characteristic trait observed in both places. “Nothing will induce the people to believe in the farewells. At Baltimore on Tuesday night (a very brilliant night indeed), they asked as they came out: ‘When will Mr. Dickens read here again?’ ‘Never.’ ‘Nonsense! Not come back, after such houses as these? Come. Say when he’ll read again.’ Just the same here. We could as soon persuade them that I am the President, as that to-morrow night I am going to read here for the last time. . . . There is a child in this house — a little girl — to whom I presented a black doll when I was here last; and as I have just seen her eye at the keyhole since I began writing this, I think she and the doll must be outside still. ‘When you sent it up to me by the coloured boy,’ she said after receiving it (coloured boy is the term for black waiter), ‘I gave such a cream that Ma come running in and creamed too, ‘cos she fort I’d hurt myself. But I creamed a cream of joy.’ She had a friend to play with her that day, and brought the friend with her — to my infinite confusion. A friend all stockings and much too tall, who sat on the sofa very far back with her stockings sticking stiffly out in front of her, and glared at me, and never spake a word. Dolby found us confronted in a sort of fascination, like serpent and bird.”

On the 15th he was again at New York, in the thick of more troubles with the speculators. They involved even charges of fraud in ticket-sales at Newhaven and Providence; indignation meetings having been held by the Mayors, and unavailing attempts made by his manager to turn the wrath aside. “I expect him back here presently half bereft of his senses, and I should be wholly bereft of mine if the situation were not comical as well as disagreeable. We can sell at our own box-office to any extent; but we cannot buy back of the speculators, because we have informed the public that all the tickets are gone; and even if we made the sacrifice of buying at their price and selling at ours, we should be accused of treating with them and of making money by it.” It ended in Providence by his going himself to the town and making a speech; and in Newhaven it ended by his sending back the money taken, with intimation that he would not read until there had been a new distribution of the tickets approved by all the town. Fresh disturbance broke out upon this; but he stuck to his determination to delay the reading until the heats had cooled down, and what should have been given in the middle of February he did not give until the close of March.

The Readings he had promised at the smaller outlying places by the Canadian frontier and Niagara district, including Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo, were appointed for that same March month which was to be the interval between the close of the ordinary readings and the farewells in the two leading cities. All that had been promised in New York were closed when he returned to Boston on the 23rd of February, ready for the increase he had promised there; but the check of a sudden political excitement came. It was the month when the vote was taken for impeachment of President Johnson. “It is well” (25th of February) “that the money has flowed in hitherto so fast, for I have a misgiving that the great excitement about the President’s impeachment will damage our receipts. . . . The vote was taken at 5 last night. At 7 the three large theatres here, all in a rush of good business, were stricken with paralysis. At 8 our long line of outsiders waiting for unoccupied places, was nowhere. To-day you hear all the people in the streets talking of only one thing. I shall suppress my next week’s promised readings (by good fortune, not yet announced), and watch the course of events. Nothing in this country, as I before said, lasts long; and I think it likely that the public may be heartily tired of the President’s name by the 9th of March, when I read at a considerable distance from here. So behold me with a whole week’s holiday in view!” Two days later he wrote pleasantly to his sister-in-law of his audiences. “They have come to regard the Readings and the Reader as their peculiar property; and you would be both amused and pleased if you could see the curious way in which they show this increased interest in both. Whenever they laugh or cry, they have taken to applauding as well; and the result is very inspiriting. I shall remain here until Saturday the 7th; but after to-morrow night shall not read here until the 1st of April, when I begin my farewells — six in number.” On the 28th he wrote: “To-morrow fortnight we purpose being at the Falls of Niagara, and then we shall come back and really begin to wind up. I have got to know the
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so well that I can’t remember it, and occasionally go dodging about in the wildest manner, to pick up lost pieces. They took it so tremendously last night that I was stopped every five minutes. One poor young girl in mourning burst into a passion of grief about Tiny Tim, and was taken out. We had a fine house, and, in the interval while I was out, they covered the little table with flowers. The cough has taken a fresh start as if it were a novelty, and is even worse than ever to-day. There is a lull in the excitement about the President: but the articles of impeachment are to be produced this afternoon, and then it may set in again. Osgood came into camp last night from selling in remote places, and reports that at Rochester and Buffalo (both places near the frontier), tickets were bought by Canada people, who had struggled across the frozen river and clambered over all sorts of obstructions to get them. Some of those distant halls turn out to be smaller than represented; but I have no doubt — to use an American expression — that we shall ‘get along.’ The second half of the receipts cannot reasonably be expected to come up to the first; political circumstances, and all other surroundings, considered.”