IT IS NINE A.M., READER. The participants are all making their way towards the Dickens Room. But let us step back in time, to see how yesterday’s sightseeing concluded. The tour was supposed to end with a visit to St Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel, with its magnificent Japanese-sponsored restorations.
They had almost reached the Basilica, when the driver suffered a sudden attack of revulsion. The hostesses called him to task: Did he doubt the magnificent results of the restorations?
It wasn’t that, he said. He just couldn’t take Michelangelo’s frescoes, especially the ones on the rear wall. They turned his stomach.
‘You mean the Last Judgement? Do you find it too . . . too overcharged?’ the two women asked him.
He didn’t know, because he’d never seen it; none the less he abhorred it – he explained in a strange voice – ‘as a typical example of pre-Baroque, heralding the intolerable abortions that Bernini and his friends left all over Rome’. And with this, he made a dangerous U-turn, to join the Trastevere road and drive back to the U&O.
Antonia and Loredana were prepared to argue with him, but Dr Wilmot in a low voice advised them not to. Wilmot did not return to the subject until that evening, after dinner in the hotel, when the atmosphere was more relaxed.
‘It was another paranormal event,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if anyone noticed, but . . .’
‘Yes.’ Porfiry Petrovich nodded. ‘I couldn’t say whether it was by extrasensory perception or what, but when the driver flew into that anti-Michelangelo, anti-Baroque tirade, he was merely repeating Dickens’s own thoughts on the subject. In the Pictures . . .’
‘And not only in the Pictures,’ the editor of The Dickensian said. ‘The same opinion (a rather misguided one, to tell the truth, like all his opinions on the figurative arts) is to be found in a letter from Rome to his friend and biographer, Forster.’
At these words, Holmes struck the table and declared that there could no longer be any doubt: It was Dickens’s own spirit that was producing these manifestations, to warn them to leave the Drood case alone.
‘Which means we’re getting near the truth,’ the Carabinieri colonel observed shrewdly.
But Gideon Fell, an expert in cases of spirits that turned out to be something other than spirits, put forward a different hypothesis: The driver, in the pay of industrial rivals of the sponsors, could have simulated his trance in order to throw the inquiry into confusion.
‘Yes, but what about the other manifestations?’ asked Maigret, who didn’t believe in spirits either, but didn’t see how the suppositious rivals of the sponsors were able to transform Marlowe and Archer into learned archaeologists, or to summon up dogs, jugs, and false vagabonds in order to throw the members of the group of the scent.
Father Brown offered a more plausible explanation, pointing out first of all that the Church (and Dickens, too) has always disapproved of spiritualism and the practices connected with it.
‘However,’ he went on, ‘that should not prevent us from acknowledging that the human mind possesses natural faculties that we know little about as yet, such as the so-called powers of telepathy. In yesterday’s session, we ourselves became involved in a complex albeit confused psychic interchange, in which fragments of one person’s thoughts were transmitted to another’s. The same thing may have happened again this afternoon.’
TOAD: But the driver . . .
F. BROWN: The driver, I quite agree, could hardly have known Dickens’s rash opinion of the Baroque and Michelangelo’s late work. But Dr Wilmot and Magistrate Petrovich did know it! There was thus no need to disturb the spirit of Dickens in order to . . .
P. PETROVICH: But I wasn’t thinking of any such thing just then.
WILMOT: Nor was I. I had put Dickens’s views on the subject completely out of my mind, given their relative, um, irrelevance.
F. BROWN: Which makes this even more probable. In certain circumstances, it’s what the person has forgotten or considers to be unimportant that becomes the object of unconscious transmission.
COLONEL: Yes.
F. BROWN: Let’s take the case of those . . . public facilities, as I might call them, which attracted our colleagues, though little more than a heap of stones. Am I wrong in assuming that someone among us, perhaps our friend the Latinist, knew exactly what those buildings had been used for? And thus it was he who unconsciously informed . . .
LATINIST, heatedly, under Antonia’s raised eyebrows: Quite unconsciously! Apart from the graffiti that are sometimes discovered in them, I take no interest in such . . .
F.BROWN: No doubt. But let’s turn to the dogs, the jug and the false vagabond. These, too, may derive from unconscious telepathy. But with a few differences. First of all, they appear to be connected with the MED, despite the fact that they are not mentioned there. In the second place, they were repeated. Finally, we don’t know where they come from – that is who transmitted them, although the prime suspect here is, of course, Dr Wilmot.
WILMOT, finding everyone looking at him suspiciously: But I . . .
F. BROWN: I know what you’re going to say. You didn’t take part in the telepathic exchange yesterday, since you weren’t imprinted. But someone else in the room may have picked up those fragments of your thoughts and transmitted them.
COLONEL: I have information to the effect that a lady wearing no identification badge was seen leaving the room in a hurry. I could arrange for her to be found and brought to the station for questioning. We could also have her confront the accused . . . Dr Wilmot, I mean.
F. BROWN: I would say that Dr Wilmot should first probe his memory. Perhaps the author was planning to use those dogs, that jug, etc., in the final solution. And there might be evidence – indirect – or some allusion of Dickens’s that Dr Wilmot felt unimportant and thus put out of his mind.
P. PETROVICH: They could also be elements that some Droodist used in his own solution, with no basis in the text, such as the hired assassin proposed by Aylmer, or the umbrella that the American, Kerr,fn1 introduced in his famous burlesque solution.
It was on this umbrella, reader, that last night’s discussion concluded. In his confusion, Dr Wilmot would have probably liked to begin searching his memory at once, but we saw Loredana tugging him away by the sleeve, while Antonia did the same with the Latinist, who was telling Hastings the plot of The Haunted Hotel, a late novel by Wilkie Collins.fn2 Apart from the few who stayed up chatting, everybody went to bed.
With regard to this morning’s session, the reader must be prepared for a disappointment. No light was thrown on the enigma of the telepathy. Although Dr Wilmot continued his self-examination into the small hours (as his rather drained appearance testifies), he failed to recall anything that connected the paranormal events with the MED, or with any of the literature on the MED. He therefore doubts that he was the agent of the phenomenon. ‘I might have forgotten dogs or jugs,’ he says, ‘but a false vagabond, well, I think I’d remember him.’
Whatever the answer, he adds, now that we have finished examining all six instalments, it would be best to pass on to the secondary documents. The most important being:
‘It goes without saying,’ states Wilmot, ‘that all serious Droodists have carefully combed this material in the hope of finding corroboration for their various hypotheses. But, in my opinion, so far not one has come up with any clue worth the name.’
Methodical Popeau still would like the material to be transmitted forthwith. But everyone else is happy to take the chairman’s word for it and pass on to further matters.
‘Especially since time is running out!’ shouts Toad.fn3
‘The rest of the documentary evidence,’ Dr Wilmot continues therefore, ‘consists of the various “confidential revelations” that Dickens is supposed to have made to his relatives and closest friends. There is, for example, the reference already cited of “suspense to the end”. There is Fildes’s statement about setting the last scene in the condemned cell. There is Wills’sfn4 statement on the “serious difficulties” the author said he was having with the plot while working on the sixth number: difficulties that Wills believed aggravated his condition of exhaustion and perhaps helped to hasten his end. And there is the much-discussed testimony of Forster, on which all the “Jekyllian” reconstructions are based; according to which Dickens confided to his friend and biographer that: I) the culprit was Jasper, and 2) the surprise ending would consist in Jasper’s description of his nephew’s murder in close detail, but as if he had no idea that he was the murderer.’
TOAD: Forster was a charlatan, a pompous, meddling fool! He claimed to be on such close terms with the novelist that Dickens told him everything. So when Forster didn’t know, he guessed, or just brazenly invented things. Dickens even threw him out of the house for this once. I move that his testimony be struck from the record.
WILMOT: And various other people claimed to have received ‘confidences’ with regard to Drood’s death or the true identity of Bazzard. The only conclusion one can really draw is that Dickens, pestered by inquisitive people on all sides and trusting nobody, chose to ‘reveal’ to each one the first thing that entered his head.
POIROT: Even to the Queen?
Poirot’s question takes everyone by surprise, including ourselves. What does the Belgian investigator know of the relations between Dickens and Queen Victoria? The smile on the face of Magistrate P. Petrovich, the only Dickens expert in the room apart from the editor of The Dickensian, helps us guess the truth. Our step back in time at the beginning of this chapter was not sufficient. Last night, after everyone went to bed, we reported that a few people stayed up chatting. But, sleepy ourselves, we passed up the chance to listen in, feeling it could not be relevant to the Drood case. But it is clear now that Poirot (perhaps judging that Wilmot, so engrossed in Loredana, is no longer to be relied on, or perhaps merely wanting to speed things up) subjected Porfiry Petrovich to a quick cross-examination.
It is too late to find out just what he asked him. But Petrovich, among other things, must have related the picturesque little anecdote that Wilmot now recounts.
WILMOT: In March 1870, when the first number of the MED was already eagerly awaited by everybody, Queen Victoria received the author at Buckingham Palace. Dickens supposedly promised her, as a joke, that she would have each number ‘much earlier than the common mortals’. But there was also a rumour (which might well have been spread deliberately, to increase sales) that he had promised to let her know the solution of the mystery in advance.fn5 It is a fact that the author dedicated a bound edition of his works to her on that occasion; and that at the beginning of June, while he was finishing the sixth number, Her Majesty wrote to him from Balmoral to tell him of the ‘beautiful effect’ that the volumes made on a shelf in her living-room. Perhaps a way of reminding him of his promise?
LOREDANA, to Wilmot, beside herself in her veneration for the English Royal Family: Her Majesty! This is wonderful! Why didn’t you tell us before?
ANTONIA,fn6 to the scholar from Juan-les-Pins, whose republican sentiments she has now adopted: I don’t see the difference between her and common mortals, do you?
The editor of The Dickensian ignores the interruption. He signals to an attendant in a black apron, then turns to the screen that has taken the place of the blackboard at the front of the room.
‘But the letter from Balmoral Castle,’ he continues, ‘did not reach Gadshill until June 10, the day after . . . Figure 1, please.’
The lights go out, and on the screen appears ‘The Empty Chair’, the famous drawing by Luke Fildes, engraved by F. G. Kitton, which adorns the dining- or living-rooms of so many old English boarding-houses.
A respectful hush falls on the darkened room. Dr Wilmot’s voice rings out as clear and professorial as ever, but there is a waver of emotion in it as he tells of the last days of Dickens.
‘During the month of May, which he had spent in London, the circulatory problems from which he suffered worsened. He had got behind in writing the sixth number, which was to be delivered to the printer on June 10. But in the peace of Gadshill his health improved. Every morning he went to work in the little chalet of the “Wilderness”, the wood he owned on the other side of Dover Road, and he would not return until the afternoon, when he had filled a good many pages.
‘Possibly he had resolved the difficulties he had mentioned to Wills a few days earlier. At any rate his prodigious inventive powers, the “opulence and great, careless prodigality” that Kafka particularly admired in him, showed no signs of flagging. One need only consider, in these very last pages, the unsurpassable ebullience of the scene between Deputy and Datchery near the ancient tombs. It was only through blindness, through total incomprehension, that Shaw could have called this novel the work of a man “already three-quarters dead”. And as for Wilkie Collins, it was certainly personal rancour that lay behind his venomous description of the MED as “Dickens’ last laboured effort, the melancholy work of a worn-out brain”.
‘On June 7, only about fifteen pages were needed to complete the sixth number. The writer gave himself half a day’s rest. He took Mamie and Georginafn7 for a walk, drove in the carriage to Rochester to post a few letters, and came back with some Chinese lanterns which, despite his lameness (he also suffered from oedema of the left foot and hand), he hung up in the garden himself.
‘The next day, he was at work in the chalet again, where he wrote and corrected another half-dozen pages. “Tomorrow I’ll have finished,” he said to his sister-in-law when he returned. As usual, he then sat in his study, at the desk we now see before us, to go through his correspondence. It was five p.m. Towards half-past six he went into the dining-room. His sister-in-law (Mamie wasn’t there; she had gone to see her sister in London) saw him stagger as he entered, his face contracted in a grimace of pain. He had been feeling bad for at least an hour, he told her, as he sank into a chair. Then he began to make random, disconnected remarks. He stood up, saying that he must go at once to London; but, overcome by dizziness again, he fell senseless.
‘Despite prompt assistance from the local physician, Dr Steele, and the aid of two eminent specialists who were sent for from London, Dickens did not regain consciousness. The diagnosis was a brain haemorrhage. He died on the afternoon of June 9. In this drawing by his friend and illustrator, Luke Fildes, we can see his study exactly as he had left it the day before: with the unposted letters and the “empty chair” moved away from the desk . . . Lights, please.’
fn1 O. C. Kerr (pseudonym of R. H. Newell), The Cloven Foot, New York, 1870. According to Kerr, Jasper not only lost his memory of the murder but also his umbrella. So when he finds it again . . .
fn2 The Haunted Hotel, or A Mystery of Modern Venice, London, 1878.
fn3 Tomorrow, reader, is already the fifth and final day of the work-sessions, since Saturday will be devoted to parties and celebrations, and on Sunday everyone goes home.
fn4 The sub-editor of the magazine All the Year Round, which took over from Household Words in 1859.
fn5 This could be important. It meant that if someone did not want the secret of the MED to be revealed, he could not wait until the last moment to stop it.
fn6 It goes without saying that Antonia, after her involvement in the manifestations yesterday, was authorised by the sponsors to join the Drood work-group permanently.
fn7 His elder daughter and sister-in-law, respectively, with whom the writer lived since his separation from his wife. His other daughter, Kate, was married to Wilkie Collins’s brother and lived in London.