The Detective and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  With a slight tug on my sleeve, Dickens pulled me behind the curtain where Field and Irish Meg had secreted themselves. Meg was leaning back against the brick wall, visibly shaken, as if she had, indeed, as Macbeth would later in the evening, seen a ghost. I considered taking her hand and saying something comforting.

  “He’s our man, the stage manager,” Field whispered excitedly to Dickens. “She pointed him out straight off.”

  Field didn’t hesitate in giving Dickens direction: “Leave us. Your presence is too conspicuous. Now we must identify the two others. When that is done we will leave by the way we came. Leave us.”

  The play was well underway. We stood in the wings and watched the light play through the smoke on the armor of sword-carrying men. The metallic thunder crashed.

  “Hallo Charles, Wilkie,” a gruff voice suddenly whispered beside us in the darkness of the wings. It was Macready, all bushy eyebrows and wide scowling mouth. “Can’t talk now. Have to palaver with the witches.”

  He turned to his dresser, a weaselly little man named Freddy Leavis, for a final check of his makeup and costume. Another actor joined Macready. The witches on stage chanted their devil’s litany. A drum sounded, and Macbeth and Banquo swept solemnly onstage.

  Macready was truly a commanding presence. When he stationed himself at center stage, every eye locked upon him. His voice shook the theatre, or seemed to. When he walked to the front of the stage, he controlled every eye and ear and imagination in the house.

  “If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me…” From beneath his deep brows Macready’s eyes burned down into the darkness.

  I glanced sideways at Dickens. He was not looking at the stage.

  “Time and the hour runs through the roughest day,” Macready solemnly intoned.

  Dickens’s back was turned to the stage. His whole attention was on the curtain behind which Field and Irish Meg were secreted. I watched as Field moved out from behind that curtain and circulated about the backstage area. He talked to no one, yet observed everything. After a complete circuit, he returned to his concealment. His presence went unnoticed. What had been unregulated chaos before the curtain rose had subsided into quiet order. Actors came and went with subdued concentration. Paroissien, the object of Field’s greatest interest, stood in the wings close to the stage with a sheaf of papers in one hand and a look of fierce concentration on his dark face. Every two or three minutes, as a scene was about to change or an entrance was to be made or some offstage effect was to be sounded, he gave sharp pointed signals, wordlessly, with his prepossessing forefinger.

  “I have no spur/To prick the sides of my intent, but only/Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself…” Macbeth paced the stage.

  Dickens, too, was restless. He kept glancing at the curtain behind which Field and Meg were secreted. I, too, was curious. However, my thoughts were upon the emotions of Irish Meg. I wanted to say something to her, I know not what, before she returned to the night streets, where I could never, honestly, pursue her.

  “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.”

  Dickens moved away from me. But, to my surprise, he did not approach the curtain where our co-conspirators stood concealed. Instead, he crossed the wings to a wooden stairway which led up to some enclosed dressing cubicles used by the female actors. At the foot of those stairs stood a young woman with her hand to her face. She seemed just an actress silently rehearsing her part. I followed after Dickens out of curiosity. I don’t think Dickens even realized that I was behind him. When we drew near to the young actress, it became clear that she was weeping, the hand to her face an unsuccessful attempt to hide her tears.

  When she took her hand away, the young lady proved quite young indeed. She could not have been older than fifteen years. It was strange to encounter one so young in such a distinguished theatre company. Her face was childlike, yet she was also a woman. Her full figure, even in the loose servant’s costume in which she was attired, betrayed her deceptive maturity. Her hair was a shiny shade of light brown, with dancing gold highlights becoming visible whenever the slightest ray of light reflected off of it. But the dominant, most compelling, aspect of her appearance was her eyes. They were large and round and brown and so innocent, that one wanted to protect her without her even being threatened. But when Dickens first looked into those eyes, they were brimming with tears, and she seemed very threatened indeed. No wonder, then, that he fell in love the first moment he saw her.

  “Look like th’ innocent flower,/But be the serpent under’t…” Lady Macbeth had taken the stage to converse with Macready.

  “Excuse me, Miss, but might I be of some assistance?” Dickens did not hesitate. A handkerchief had materialized out of his sleeve. She took it, and buried her face in it. Her shoulders shook with her sobs.

  “Please, young lady, nothing can be so frightening. Please tell me what is wrong. I would like very much to help.” I had never heard Dickens speak in a voice so gentle and concerned.

  The young actress’s sobs slowly subsided. She wiped the tears from her cheeks, and daintily blew her nose, then looked up at Dickens with those doe eyes. For Dickens, the mystery of Partlow’s murder and all else—me, Inspector Field, Macbeth—was forgotten.

  “Oh sir, I am so ashamed. Why would they force me to do this so suddenly?” Her voice still quaked as she spoke.

  Dickens reached out his hands toward her shoulders to calm her, but quickly drew them back as if thinking better of the idea.

  “Is this a dagger which I see before me,/The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee!” Macready’s great voice rent the charged air.

  “Who is forcing you to do what?” Dickens asked quietly.

  “Only tonight, after the play had begun, and my mother was already onstage, he brought me this new costume. He ordered me to play the whole scene with both hands at my sides, as if I was too dumbstruck by the appearance of Lady Macbeth to notice my own indecency.”

  “Indecency?” Dickens said it with a slight catch in his voice.

  My eyes followed Dickens’s eyes as they tried to solve the mystery of her costume, which she was holding bunched at the neck with that hand not occupied with Dickens’s handkerchief. With the silent eloquence that only a natural actress could accomplish, she let both of her hands fall to her sides. The coarse brown peasant’s smock fell open. Its neck hole had been slashed downward and the front was almost completely undone to her waist. She stood there helplessly, tears brimming in her eyes, her white shoulders and the tops of her breasts almost fully revealed.

  “Yes, I see,” Dickens delicately averted his eyes which, of course, caused me to avert my own. When I turned back, the young woman had turned her back to us, buried her head in the rising stairs, and recommenced her sobbing.

  “A dagger of the mind,” Macready’s soliloquy continued onstage, “a false creation,/Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”

  Dickens ascertained, after a brief questioning, that her role in the play was that of a wanton serving girl interrupted in the midst of a nocturnal assignation by Lady Macbeth, as that murderous worthy stalks the battlements, wringing her hands. The young actress’s role was to suddenly start up out of the darkness in the company of a half-dressed young man, and, having startled everyone, flee in disarray from the stage.

  “The manager, sir, he says no one knows what I’m doing there in the middle of that dark night unless I wear my blouse all undone, sir. It is indecent, sir, and I feel like a harlot. He says if I do not wear this new costume, and allow the light to fall on my open laces, that he will serve me notice, sir, and my mother also. Oh sir, I do not know what to do.”

  We found out later that the girl’s mother was a professional actress initiating her daughter into her profession by cadging a minor role in the plays in which she contracted to perform, and that, at the very moment, she was onstage in the part of none other than Lady Macbeth. This opportunity at Covent Garden was the daughter’s first maj
or theatre role.

  “Oh sir, this play has been running for four weeks. Why must he suddenly change my costume? It is such a small part.” She was an actress, but I do not feel that she was experienced enough or talented enough to feign the childlike innocence which she had fallen into before Dickens.

  “Mister Paroissien, the stage manager, made this change?” I could sense Dickens’s mind churning for the solution.

  ‘‘Yes sir, the manager,” she said, a small spark of hope flashing in her voice. “You know him, sir?”

  “Oh yes, I know him allright,” Dickens answered, grimly remembering why he had come to this theatre this night.

  “Sleep no more!/Macbeth does murder sleep!”

  The two stood looking at each other in silence. She was truly a vision of innocence and beauty in that scanty costume. I am not surprised that Charles was drawn to her. There was a magnetic intensity in her eyes. That look, as if words were no longer necessary, sealed my friend Charles’s doom. That look was the beginning and the end, and bound them forever like Paulo and Francesca.

  “I see what your part calls for and its reason,” Dickens said, breaking the silence of that mesmerizing look.

  The young woman’s face, full of expectancy, streaked with tears, fell.

  “But,” Dickens went on, and that writer’s gleam came into his eye, “I also think I know a way to suggest sexuality, without being at all indecent. You must trust me. I am an expert at such matters.”

  When his head swivelled in search of Paroissien, I knew that he was going to intercede for this child-woman, like that knight errant out of Eliduc.

  “O Banquo, Banquo,/Our royal master’s murder’d!”

  “Wilkie,” he ordered, as if I were his faithful squire, “stay with her. This will only take a moment.”

  To my great surprise, within short minutes he returned with Paroissien in tow. I could only imagine what Inspector Field, observing this conversation from behind his arras yet unable to overhear, must have been imagining. He told us later that, when he saw Dickens confronting Paroissien, he cursed himself for ever considering the cooperation of amateur detectives.

  “Poor girl is terrified of appearing indecent,” Dickens was saying as they came up. “I know the scene. I helped Macready compose it. There is a stylish and suggestive way to play her small part.”

  When the stage manager and the young actress faced each other, the girl lowered her eyes as if cowed in his presence.

  “Now, what is the problem?” Paroissien did not raise his voice and the inquiry was not made unkindly, yet the young woman’s eyes, when she raised her face to answer, were terror-stricken.

  “It is the blouse, sir. It is indecent. I cannot just stand there with my hands at my sides and let the whole audience stare at me.”

  “Let’s briefly put on manly readiness,” Macready’s voice seemed to taunt us from the stage.

  Paroissien’s lips compressed into a tight line.

  “If I might make a suggestion?” Dickens, who had been simply waiting for the appropriate moment to intrude, did so. “If the scene is altered ever so slightly, if she is but allowed to use her hands in an expressive way, the comic sexuality can be suggested, while at the same time avoiding the tasteless immodesty of such a sensational costume.” Dickens delivered his little speech in his most diplomatic and accommodating voice.

  There was something in Paroissien’s eyes, in the tension on the muscles of his neck, that gave me the sudden intuition that he was enraged. Yet, on the surface, he never lost his equanimity. “I am, of course,” he said, “open to suggestion, especially from such an eminent friend of the theatre, if that suggestion is reasonable.”

  “Oh, most reasonable, most reasonable.” Dickens, who, with his acute talent for reading people’s emotions, had, I’m certain, detected the rage smoldering beneath the stage manager’s facade of politeness, assured him.

  “What is it, then?” Pariossien could barely conceal his anger.

  “Why don’t you do it this way,” Dickens’s voice changed to one of command and intimidation. Beneath what seemed to be a straightforward narration of how the girl could play the scene was the clear threat that if this advice was not taken, further steps would be. “In seconds, your stage seamstress could sew some laces into that smock. When the serving girl pops up out of the darkness, her dress will indeed be all unlaced. The light will catch a brief glimpse of her white skin and the fact that she has been surprised in the midst of a sexual encounter will be immediately apparent. But then, she will guiltily begin to lace herself up as Lady Macbeth addresses her in distraction. Voila! The necessary hint of sexuality is present, and” he turned back to the girl, “your time on stage is spent in the protection of your modesty.”

  Paroissien did not say anything right off. Perhaps he was struggling to keep from strangling Dickens on the spot.

  “It wouldn’t be natural,” Dickens pressed him. “No woman, even the most debased, would just stand there with herself all unlaced, and make no attempt to cover up.”

  Paroissien buckled. “Yes, of course, I do see your point, more natural, yes, let us try it that way,” he said, nodding to the young actress. Without another word, he turned on his heel, and returned to his post in the front wings.

  “Oh, thank you, sir, thank you,” she said, beaming at Dickens before scurrying off to find the seamstress, for her scene was fast approaching.

  “Naught’s had, all’s spent./Where our desire is got without content…” Lady Macbeth commented from the stage as her daughter fled.

  Dickens led me back to our prior vantage point in the wings. Lady Macbeth, the young actress’s mother, was not known to Charles or myself by name, though Dickens expressed a vague memory of having seen her onstage before. When the famous sleepwalking scene commenced, Dickens focused his concentration fiercely upon the stage. When the girl jumped to her feet out of the black shadows into the white-hot moonlight, he was the only person in the whole theatre who was not startled. His eyes burned with excitement as she played her tiny role just as he had scripted it, and fled into the darkness at the far side of the stage.

  “Out, damned spot! out, I say!” Lady Macbeth delivered her lines.

  “Would it not be to our advantage if the blood were still on their hands?” a voice inquired, startling us from immediately behind. It was Field. I glanced around quickly to see if we were being observed. Paroissien was well in front of us at the edge of the stage.

  “Yes, that would certainly simplify things,” Dickens smiled.

  “Listen. I don’t have much time. Meg and I will slip out at the first opportunity. Our work is done.” (I am afraid that a man as perceptive as Inspector Field could not miss the disappointment in my face. Could he imagine that, in my secret mind, I had hoped for an opportunity to converse with Irish Meg?) “Banquo and Macduff are the other two. Even with the wigs and the powder, Meg is sure. Could you find out their names, perhaps engage them in conversation?” With that, he was gone, sliding like a piece of the scenery back behind his arras.

  “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”

  We never saw Field and his witness make their exit. Macready’s voice held every eye and heart and mind in that theatre in its thrall.

  “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

  And then is heard no more: it is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  Signifying nothing.”

  Field and Irish Meg must have slipped out of the stage door sometime during the emotion and confusion of the final scene. When I finally realized that they were gone, I felt as if I had lost her forever.

  Even as the “BRAVO’s” were growing to a crescendo, Dickens was dispatching old Spilka to the public house across the way for champagne. The effervescent bottles arrived before the numerous curtain calls and final bows of the principals were taken. Dickens arra
nged the bottles on a makeshift trestle just off the wings, while old Spilka gathered as many odd drinking receptacles as he could find, and when the players came off the stage, pulling off their wigs and false beards, loosening their stays, unstrapping their swords, elated at the enthusiasm of the audience still applauding in the stalls even though the gas was coming up, there stood Dickens with a champagne bottle in one hand and his cup upraised in a toast to the company. It was the kind of flourish which Dickens gloried in.

  “Never has a company of Macbeth fretted its hour upon the stage with more accomplished sound and fury. Fellow actors, I salute you,” he said, and he toasted them, one and all, with a sweep of his arm. “Please join me in a small impromptu toast to the finest acting company in London.” With that invitation, they descended upon the champagne with the same rabid appetite with which the inhabitants of Saint Antoine would descend upon that broken cask of wine eight years later in A Tale of Two Cities. Macready, still in full make-up, joined Dickens, pumping his hand. Macready raised his mailed arm, and every member of the company paused to listen.

  Macready proclaimed: “The Inimitable.” All of the members of the company in unison echoed Dickens’s favorite appellation. “An actor. One of us,” Macready intoned solemnly before drinking off his toast.

  As that crowd of actors raised their glasses, emptied them, then raised them once again, Dickens leaned close to me, and directed my attention to our friend Paroissien standing scowling in the wings, without a glass in his hand. “Seems we have a Methodistical presence to frown upon the proceedings,” Dickens quipped, as he moved away from me in the direction of Macduff and Banquo, who stood drinking from the same bottle, passing it back and forth with two of the three weird sisters. Dickens opened his remarks with compliments upon their executions of their roles, and soon was engaged in easy conversation with Field’s two unsuspecting suspects. Macduff was a fairly tall (about Dickens’s height) but spare man, who had padded his body for his warlike role, while Banquo was a man of much more ample girth and broad shoulders, who looked and carried himself like a soldier.