Читать книгу The Snake-Oil Dickens Man - Ross Gilfillan - Страница 11

Chapter Four

I

I SHOULD BE at other work than this. In the lobby beyond my office door are probably a whole roomful of people, half of whom will be awaiting my pleasure only so they may press more money upon me. They would have me sponsor this or endorse that, or simply do nothing so that they may further their own schemes. I pray that my loyal secretary and guardian of my secrets, Miss Tummel, will protect me from such distractions a little while longer.

But even she can impede my progress. She has reminded me that there is a speech I am to prepare and must give to the greatest of our great land. Its acceptance will inevitably result in the filling of the coffers of my associates and of my own purse too. However, compared with the tonguey rhetoric which was once my stock-in-trade and which might have earned me fifty or a couple of hundred dollars, or a few months in jail, it will be a poor affair. You who have the priceless leisure to read books for your own diversion may take me for a robber at least but if I commit robberies now, they are done in your name.

While we talk of robberies, I have one for you now. Readers of popular fiction may consider this a paltry affair: the theft has already been committed and there has been no fancy-play with six-guns. I’m sorry for that – if you prefer something more racy, you must open a dime novel or a daily newspaper.

A discovery was made while I lay asleep in Elijah’s room. D’Orleans had closed up the ticket office pretty sharpish; no one knew why. Then a couple of rounders had galloped through town, hollering about Barnum’s caravan coming up the road from the east. Soon after, riders and folk in buggies and on foot were streaming out of town to meet him, no matter that a wild wind was all but blowing them back into town. The rest of the populace found shelter and waited for the zephyr to blow itself out. Sometime during this, D’Orleans and Wilkes took themselves and the money out of town, most likely on stolen horses.

And P.T. Barnum did come to Hayes, Missouri, though I doubt it’s well-documented. The whole procession of gaily-painted covered wagons, teams of thoroughbred horses, great swaying stages packed with men and women inside and on top; freaks of nature on horseback and astride camels, Indians in the boots of coaches, huge carts piled high with cages of outlandish animals and ropes and tackle, canvas and abundance of mysterious contrivance, came quickly upon us and as quickly passed right on through.

We watched them rush headlong past, drivers whipping on the beasts with cries of ‘Hi-yi!’ and ‘G’lang!’ through crowds who had turned out to see Barnum arrive and you can imagine the kind of feelings that were abroad when it was realised that not only had the townspeople been swindled of their money but P.T. Barnum wasn’t even going to stop in Hayes anyway. The Barnum circus, looking neither tuckered nor travel-stained, as the efficient machine had unloaded from hired freight cars just down the line, shoved for the next town, where they mounted a memorable show and those who could still afford to follow him and see it, said it was wondrous to behold.

I don’t know that Barnum already had intelligence of something amiss in our town but he sure seemed in an uncommon hurry to put some dirt between him and Hayes. At least, that was the verdict of the informal inquiry held in the lobby of the Particular Hotel, the next morning. A deputation of citizens had arrived, headed by Judge Eckert and Sheriff McCulloch.

‘Maybe we was swindled by Barnum,’ someone said. ‘And it was all like we thought. The smooth-talking feller was Barnum himself.’

‘Don’t be so foolish,’ said McCulloch, ‘Barnum ain’t the man to do nothing of that sort. Fact of the matter is, he never planned to stop in Hayes and was only makin’ for the next place. We was a passel o’ fools to get taken in like we did, but it wan’t Barnum’s fault.’

‘They must have been considerable smart fellers to get the drop on us,’ said Old Henry.

‘Smart?’ said a deputy. ‘I’ll say they were. Why, those two boys were probably the slickest, sharpest operators as ever palmed a silver dollar. Didn’t you hear they did the exact same as this in Syracuse? And they’re double-smart people, in Syracuse.’

Others nodded and murmured their agreement, consoled in part, that they had been some taken in by the best. As we had appeared closely connected with the swindlers, Merriweather and I were keenly questioned. I told my story a number of times, repeating and enlarging on details I had given before and was believed in the end, in a grudging sort of a way, but not before I had been accused, sniped at and generally made to feel like the biggest fool in a ship of the same. That I might have easily borne for I felt as much myself but what had unnerved me during the ordeal was the entrance of Mrs Bullock and her daughter, Cissy, who swept past me and took seats at the back of the crowd. When I had been interrogated, derided and sent about my work, the crowd listened to Merriweather as he protested his innocence and neatly attached any remaining blame and suspicion to my coat-tails.

I hung about the doorway, waiting for the crowd to disperse, that I might exchange a word with Cissy: her mother was a placid woman, generally amiable and not as decided in her opinions of me as was her husband. I had every hope of being able to wish her and Cissy a good day, a brief exchange which would have cheered me immensely and gone a long way towards compensating for the blight I had felt that morning.

They were last to leave the lobby and I followed them down the steps to their buggy. I walked over to the fly and opened the door and let down the step, intending to hand in first Dame Bullock and then Cissy herself. I longed for the soft touch of her hand in mine. But first I offered Mrs Bullock my hand and she astounded me by brushing it away with her parasol, snapping, ‘Unhand me, you ruffian,’ before boarding under her own steam. I looked to Cissy but she only glowered and avoided my gaze. When I asked what was up, she said, ‘You leave us be. Poppa was right. I was blind. You’re nothing but a low-down swamp-rat and I don’t want nothing to do with you, ever again!’

‘But, Cissy,’ I said, quite thunderstruck. ‘I just told the inquiry, I had nothing to do with the swindle. I’ll pay you back your money myself.’

‘I ain’t talking about the swindle,’ Cissy said. ‘I was referring to the shame your family brings to this town. I heard,’ she said, with a look of sour repugnance, ‘all about your mother, Billy.’

She cracked her whip and the buggy moved off, leaving me such a sorry individual that had I been a horse, or a dog, I would most likely have been shot.

II

Merriweather was looking for me but I couldn’t face his certain wrath. He had been made to look a bigger fool than he was and would be seeking to vent his ire upon me. In other circumstances, I might have gone to my mother but now that was out of the question: because of her, my Cissy had spurned me. I climbed the old tree I had spent whole days in as a kid and mused upon my relation, whom I occasionally glimpsed through a veil of yellow leaves as she took linen to and from the wash-house.

The memory of the night she had wafted past me in a fantasy of taffeta and scent made me nauseous. But it also set me thinking. I had seen my mother dressed up before but never so perfectly as that night. I had an imperfect memory that Merriweather had once bought her dresses and that at some time in the distant past there had been something between them and only now understood that he must have used her and discarded her. At the time, I only saw the dresses and noticed that for a while she didn’t live in the lean-to behind the wash-house. Then I brought to mind other occasions when she had dressed fine but I didn’t recall them well as these were nights on which I had generally been sent early to bed.

I was sickened by an abrupt realisation. Parts of a puzzle I should have completed years ago fell into place. Bullock’s estimation of the Particular and of its inmates suddenly made sense. I had taken the bad name of the hotel to have some reference to its boorish and drunken owner and perhaps to the edifice itself, which had once been quite grand but was now broken-roofed and in need of a multitude of repairs. In truth, the establishment was a sham: a worn-out suit with brand-new pockets and everyone knew it.

Now I perceived that we took in any ragtag and bobtail at cut rates; that Irving was whispered to be wanted in Wyoming; that mystery surrounded the blind schoolteacher Putnam. Our poor name might have been born out of any of these facts. But that the reason some folk drove out of Hayes to stay in the Particular at the failed hamlet of Rodericksburg was because of the particular services that Merriweather could arrange, at a price, might never have occurred to me had not a snub from Cissy Bullock awoken my slumbering senses. I thought at first that I must have been blind, or he too discreet, for me not to have seen what was going on. But I searched my mind, and later the diaries I had kept as a child, connecting dates, impressions and memories and arrived at a conclusion that was as inevitable as it was terrifying. Unless there was something I had overlooked, it was awfully clear that my mother had been not only the gewgaw of Merriweather but had most likely been pimped by him to a succession of our honoured guests.

I thought of Cissy and how she now appeared as impossibly remote. Did she know what I knew now? That seemed impossible. Her father would slander my name yet never tell her that. But recent events were being talked up all over town and the customers who had been in the saloon that night had not omitted to include in their accounts of the evening, that Mrs Talbot had finished the night with the Wilkes man. If Cissy didn’t know the extent of what was going on now, it couldn’t be long before some gossip poured it into her ear like so much mercury.

III

In the afternoon, I knocked upon Elijah’s door. I had nowhere else to go and longed for the blanket of routine.

‘You’re early,’ he remarked.

He said that Mr Merriweather had lately been with him and had acquainted him with the fact that my name was presently not good currency. ‘He said it smelt to high heaven, in fact,’ said Elijah. ‘Well, never mind that now; we shall work on my memoir and when it is dark we will take a walk. It will be safer to talk without these walls. I have that to relate to you that will make you think differently of yourself and perhaps you will then not give a hang about the opinion of these small-town prattlers.’

Though electrified with curiosity, I knew it was no good pushing him and resigned myself to the ledger and pen. Elijah settled himself in a rocking-chair and took up his story.

‘I had embarked upon the ocean crossing, had I not?’ he asked.

‘Not so far as that,’ I said, for I had dozed through the last part of the narrative and this had gone unrecorded in the ledger.

‘We won’t mind the details. It’s sufficient to say that I got myself to Liverpool in time to join the steamer Britannia, bound for Halifax and Boston.’

His pale blue eyes fixed me with their sightless gaze.

‘I was barely aboard before I had been told that among the eighty-six passengers I would be attending were Mr and Mrs Charles Dickens. What do you think of that, then?’

‘Dickens? You met him?’ I asked, astounded that the man whose life and works had formed such a disproportionately large part of our studies, might be personally known to my tutor himself.

‘Not so fast,’ said Elijah. ‘All in good time.’

‘I’m listening,’ I said.

‘Don’t just listen, boy, take it down. Now, I would hardly have taken my fellow stewards for bookish men but both they and the crew were much exercised by this news. Such was, and remains, the celebrity of Charles Dickens. I was surprised that not a few knew him from his works themselves but many more knew him as the popular figure. They had seen his name time and again in newspapers and the likenesses of him and his creations decorating all kinds of products and advertising. Why, if you had asked them whom they considered the most famous man on earth, I guess that some might have answered President Tyler and others Queen Victoria but I would place a hefty wager that many more would have promptly replied, “Charles Dickens.”

‘So you may imagine there was not a little competition among we stewards for the honour of attending on the great man and we were sorely disappointed when he elected to ensconce himself in the ladies’ saloon where he would be served by a Scottish stewardess.

‘I caught sight of him the first night out. He was taking the air on deck before turning in. Against the weather, he was wearing a great pea-coat and a pair of cork-soled boots. At about thirty years of age, he was not much older than myself but what a gulf separated us! There was Boz, sipping his brandy, long hair blowing in the sea breeze, apparently without a care in the world, cutting through black waters towards a country that already loved him as its own fortunate son. And there was I, risking the fury of the chief steward by standing out upon the companionway, the better to catch a glimpse of the man who had come from nothing and made himself what he was, with no better weapon than the tip of his nib.

‘I longed to drop down the ladder and strike up a conversation with the immortal who had given life to Pickwick and Sam Weller, Fagin and Sykes, Squeers and Quilp. For unlike my colleagues and, I suspected, most of the passengers, I had read these books and his sketches of London life attentively and had long been fascinated by their author. But he finished his drink and ducked back inside before I had summoned the resolution to ask if he would like a second and that was the last I saw of him for perhaps five days.

‘When my labours were over, I lay upon my bunk, my mind churning with possibilities. This Dickens was not only the talk and toast of London. In America too, his admirers were multitudinous and eagerly awaited the arrival of each new part of his latest work. These no sooner arrived than they were hurried to booksellers and to newspapers and printers and copied until there were sufficient to satisfy even the furthest flung territories. We loved him as one of our own. His democratic concern for every stratum of society, his advocacy of reform and stout refusal to pander to a single class of reader had us adjudge him an American in everything but birth.

‘And here he was, sleeping peacefully, perhaps only a few feet above my head. I was excited by his proximity and yet recognised that I had no better chance of conversing properly with him than had one of the stokers. This seemed terribly unfair: because of my close study of his books I felt that some strange bond existed between us that he would acknowledge warmly were I only to broach the subject.

‘I might mention here that I had not only read everything he had produced, but, coveting his colossal success almost as much as I admired his genius, had already begun something of my own, in emulation. I had perhaps four chapters written, with which I was immoderately pleased. They were about me now and I became consumed with the notion of encountering Dickens and showing him the leaves and giving him the satisfaction of knowing that it was he that had stirred my dormant talent. But the next day saw a livelier sea and anyone without his full complement of sea legs betook himself to his bed and stayed there, Mr and Mrs Charles Dickens among them.

‘My own crossing to England had been a smooth one and the experience had persuaded me that constitutionally, I was a good sailor. This delusion sustained me for the first days of the return voyage and I was irked that I had never a sighting of his inimitable person. I expected to see him scribbling at a saloon table, at any moment. Conditions worsened on the third day and no one had any thoughts of anything but their own well-being while we were tossed from one giant wave to the next, for the idle amusement of the elements.

‘The passengers kept to their cabins but we attendants worked on, our nausea made subservient to the terrifying temper of the chief steward, though few of our charges welcomed our attentions, preferring to keep to their cabins and survive on diets of brandy and water and hard biscuit. And yet there was sufficient opportunity for accident and catastrophe. A steward blinded a passenger with spilt lobster sauce and, descending a companionway, another, delivering to table a huge round of red beef (optimistically, in my opinion), fell hard and broke his foot. Following behind, I received a deep cut to my eye.

‘Inanimate objects achieved lives of their own in this floating revolution. Cups and saucers performed acrobatics. Crockery smashed with almost rhythmic regularity. Objects on one table were found a moment later on the next. A gross of porter bottles broke free and could be heard rolling about the deck like drunken revellers, needlessly providing another hazard for those foolhardy enough to attempt a promenade from stem to stern. Seeming to sense that normal bounds of propriety had been cast asunder or might be suspended without impropriety for the duration of this hellish crossing, humankind behaved with as much irregularity as anything else aboard this crazy vessel. Of the passengers, one perceived that his worldly wealth would be useless to him in the next and proceeded to lose everything at vingt-et-un. A supposedly poor clerk was of a similar opinion and kept us busy fetching bottles of champagne. Among the crew, the cook salvaged some sea-damaged whisky and was discovered drunk by the captain who ordered him hosed sober and sent upon the next four watches without his coat. Worse for me was that the pastry chef succumbed entirely and I, though protesting I was no better than he, was ordered by the captain to take his place in a tiny cabin on deck. Propped between two barrels I was made to roll out dough and prepare sweet fancies, the sight of every one of which magnified my anguish and caused my stomach to revolt in paroxysms of agony. As a result I cared not a jot then that I was unable to see Dickens who had found his feet and was reported entertaining fellow passengers with a borrowed accordion.

‘But worse was in store. On the tenth day out from Liverpool, we were caught in a terrific storm that threatened to blow down the smoke-stack and offer us a fiery alternative to the watery end we expected at any minute. When it subsided sufficiently to make a walk along deck less than a method of certain suicide, we found that a lifeboat had been smashed to fragments and that the wooden paddle-housings were likewise destroyed, so that now water was scooped up and thrown on the decks, or over anyone condemned by duty to brave the elements.

‘At last, when calm returned and I could face my cakes with an equanimity unimaginable the day before, my thoughts turned again to our illustrious passenger and I pondered the problem of how I might meet with Dickens. The initial excitement passed, it came to me that encountering him now might actually harm my cause. How seriously could he take the babblings of a steward about some unlikely book? I was cast low for a full day but was then inspired by what appeared as a brilliant idea: once arrived in America, this hero of the people would surely be in need of an aide, a secretary perhaps, for the duration of his stay. It was impossible that he should deal personally with the deluge of correspondence that would inevitably follow in the wake of such an august event. I decided upon approaching him on land, in the guise of a free citizen of the United States.

‘The difficulty would lie in securing an introduction to the great man. I turned over innumerable schemes that I thought might achieve this end but rejected them all and was in low spirits during our brief stop at Halifax. My optimism was fully restored when we finally berthed at the busy port of Boston. No sooner had the painter been tossed upon the quay and the planks let down than the ship was boarded by piratical members of the Eastern press, some local dignitaries and by a certain luminary whose face I was startled to recognise. This was the artist, Francis Alexander, in whose employ my brother George now was and whom I had espied as he left his house, the morning I had paid a visit to his pupil, before taking ship for England.

‘The commotion on the forward deck was immense. Reporters were swarming like so many bees, the crew were tying off gangplanks and crowds on the quay were cheering anyone who made use of them. In this confusion, I was able to approach quite close to the bearskin-coated young writer and hear him receive Alexander’s introductions and note that Dickens had agreed to sit for his portrait during his stay in Boston.

‘I hugged myself in joy. To further my design now, I had only to make my way to Alexander’s studio and confide my plans to George and then to take up my position as secretary to Charles Dickens. And then, when Dickens realised what a protégé he had, what a world might be mine!’

‘And did it work out?’ I asked, forgetting my role as secretary yet knowing something of Elijah’s more recent history I felt I could answer this myself.

Before he could form his answer, I heard a commotion upon the stairs and then the door flew open and Merriweather burst in, with Silas Amory on his heels.

‘Is that you, Merriweather?’ said Elijah, angered by the unprecedented interruption. ‘You had better have good reason for this.’

‘Damn right I have, you old fool,’ Merriweather cried. ‘We’ve been robbed. Somebody cleared out the safe!’

I looked at Merriweather, his face crimson with emotion, his small black eyes fixed on me like the sights of twin rifles. Amory regarded us both, coolly and dispassionately and then Merriweather too, with equal impartiality.

‘Does something go forth here, is something afoot, gentlemen?’ he breathed, with the sibilance of snakes. Elijah rocked in his chair and continued to stare at a vacancy somewhere between us all.