Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (53 page)

If Poe is acknowledged to be the father of the
mystery-detective story, Dickens’s contribution places him chief among the mid
wives. His final book, the uncompleted
Mystery of Edwin Drood
,
is itself one of the great mysteries of literature. Dickens set up a
fascinating story, then became physically incapacitated, leaving no clue to the
solution. Subsequent Dickensian have tried their hands at it, but no version
has been accepted as definitive.

Dickens actually wrote
several works about murder and investigation, including
Barnaby
Rudge
,
Hunted Down
and
Bleak House
,
which features Inspector Bucket, the first important detective in English
literature.

Dickens also served as
the editor of several periodicals in which his works were serialized.
Dr. Marigold
,
the work at hand, first appeared in one such publication,
All Year
Round
,
and is the story of a cheap jack (panhandler) and his daughter, little Sophy.
Some of the chapters were written by Wilkie Collins, the author of
The Moonstone
and
The
Woman
in White.
The sixth chapter “To Be
Taken With A Grain of Salt,” is a self-contained story entirely by Dickens’
hand.

By way of a prologue,
bits from other chapters have been excerpted to give a picture of Dr. Marigold
at Christmas. As he sits by the fire, a visitor appears with a story, a
Christmas story, as Dickens himself called it, when he collected
Dr. Marigold
into book form. Some liberties have been taken with the text, but the words that
follow are all those of Charles Dickens. Only the omissions are mine.

I am a Cheap Jack, and my
own father’s name was William Marigold. It was in his lifetime supposed by some
that his name was William, but my own father always consistently said No, it
was Willum. As to looking at the argument through the medium of the Register,
William Marigold came into the world before Registers came up much—and went out
of it too. They wouldn’t have been greatly in his line neither, if they had
chanced to come up before him!

I was born on the Queen’s
highway, but it was the King’s at that time. A doctor was fetched to my mother
by my own father, when it took place on a common; and in consequence of his
being a very kind gentlemen, and accepting no fee but a tea-tray, I was named
Doctor, out of gratitude and compliment to him. There you have me. Doctor
Marigold.

The doctor having
accepted a tea-tray, you’ll guess that my father was a Cheap Jack before me.
You are right, he was.

My father had been a
lovely one in his time at the Cheap Jack work... But I top him. I don’t say it
because it’s myself but because it has been universally acknowledged by all
that has had the means of comparison.

I had had a first-rate
autumn of it, and on the twenty-third of December, one thousand eight hundred
and sixty-four, I found myself at Axbridge, Middlesex, clean sold out. So I
jogged up to London with the old horse, light and easy, to have my Christmas
Eve and Christmas Day alone by the fire..., and then to buy a regular new stock
of goods all round, to sell’s again and get the money.

I am a neat hand at
cookery, and I’ll tell you what I knocked up for my Christmas Eve dinner... I
knocked up a beefsteak pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and
a couple of mushrooms thrown in. It’s a pudding to put a man in a good humor
with everything, except the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat. Having
relished that pudding and cleared away, I turned the lamp low, and sat down by
the light of the fire, watching it as it shone upon the backs of... books,...,
before I dropped off dozing....

I was on the road, off
the road, in all sorts of places, north and south and west and east, winds
liked best and winds liked least, here and there and gone astray, over the
hills and far away... when I awoke with a start....

I had started at a real
sound... That tread... I believed I was a-going to see a... ghost.

The touch... was laid
upon the outer handle of the door, the handle turned, and the door opened a
little....

Looking full at me... was
a languid young man, which I attribute the distance between his extremities. He
had a little head... weak eyes and weak knees, and altogether you couldn’t look
at him without feeling that there was greatly too much of him for his
joints....

“I am very glad to see
you,” says the Gentleman. “Yet I have my doubts, Sir,” says I, “if you can be
half as glad to see me as I am to see you.”

The creature took off...
a straw hat, and a quantity of dark curls fell about.

I might have been too
high to fall into conversation with him, had it not been for my lonely
feelings.

“Sir,... you are
affected...”

This made our footing...
easier.

“Come... Doctor Marigold
must prescribe... the Best of Drinks.”

He was amiable, though
tired,... and such a languid young man, that I don’t know how long it didn’t
take him to get this story out but it passed through his defective circulation
to his top extremity in course of time.

TO
BE TAKEN WITH A GRAIN OF SALT

I have always noticed a
prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and
culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have
been of a strange sort. Almost all men are afraid that what they could relate
in such wise would find no parallel or response in a listener’s internal life,
and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller, who should have
seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would have
no fear of mentioning it; but the same traveller, having had some singular
presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so called), dream, or other
remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own
to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such
subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of
these subjective things as we do our experiences of objective creation. The
consequence is, that the general stock of experience in this regard appears
exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect.

In what I am going to
relate, I have no intention of setting up, opposing, or supporting, any theory
whatever. I know the history of the Bookseller of Berlin, I have studied the
case of the wife of a late Astronomer Royal as related by Sir David Brewster,
and I have followed the minutest details of a much more remarkable case of
Spectral Illusion occurring within my private circle of friends. It may be
necessary to state as to this last, that the sufferer (a lady) was in no
degree, however distant, related to me. A mistaken assumption on that head
might suggest an explanation of a part of my own case, —but only a part, —which
would be wholly without foundation. It cannot be referred to my inheritance of
any developed peculiarity, nor had I ever before any at all similar experience,
nor have I ever had any at all similar experience since.

It does not signify how
many years ago, or how few, a certain murder was committed in England, which
attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of murderers as they rise
in succession to their atrocious eminence, and I would bury the memory of this
particular brute, if I could, as his body was buried, in Newgate Jail. I
purposely abstain from giving any direct clew to the criminal’s individuality.

When the murder was first
discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too
precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicion fell—on
the man who was afterwards brought to trial. As no reference was at that time
made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description
of him can at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that
this fact be remembered.

Unfolding at breakfast my
morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be
deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not
three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down
the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it, —no
word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive, —in which I seemed to see that
bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running
river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so
clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief, observed the absence of
the dead body from the bed.

It was in no romantic
place that I had this curious sensation, but in chambers in Piccadilly, very
near to the corner of St. James’s-street. It was entirely new to me. I was in
my easy-chair at the moment, and the sensation was accompanied with a peculiar
shiver which started the chair from its position. (But it is to be noted that
the chair ran easily on castors. ) I went to one of the windows (there are two
in the room, and the room is on the second floor) to refresh my eyes with the
moving objects down in Piccadilly. It was a bright autumn morning, and the
street was sparkling and cheerful. The wind was high. As I looked out, it
brought down from the Park a quantity of fallen leaves, which a gust took, and
whirled into a spiral pillar. As the pillar fell and the leaves dispersed, I
saw two men on the opposite side of the way, going from West to East. They were
one behind the other. The foremost man often looked back over his shoulder. The
second man followed him, at a distance of some thirty paces, with his right
hand menacingly raised. First, the singularity and steadiness of this
threatening gesture in so public a throughfare attracted my attention; and
next, the more remarkable circumstance that nobody heeded it. Both men threaded
their way among the other passengers with a smoothness hardly consistent even
with the action of walking on a pavement; and no single creature, that I could
see, gave them place, touched them, or looked after them. In passing before my
windows, they both stared up at me. I saw their two faces very distinctly, and
I knew that I could recognise them anywhere. Not that I had consciously noticed
anything very remarkable in either face, except that the man who went first had
an unusually lowering appearance, and that the face of the man who followed him
was of the colour of impure wax.

I am a bachelor, and my
valet and his wife constitute my whole establishment. My occupation is in a
certain Branch Bank, and I wish that my duties as head of a Department were as
light as they are popularly supposed to be. They kept me in town that autumn,
when I stood in need of change. I was not ill, but I was not well. My reader is
to make the most that can be reasonably made of my feeling jaded, having a
depressing sense upon me of a monotonous life, and being “slightly dyspeptic.” I
am assured by my renowned doctor that my real state of health at that time
justifies no stronger description, and I quote his own from his written answer
to my request for it.