How very convenient for the Inimitable.

It was another four days before Dickens made himself available for a welcoming from Wills, Frank Beard, and me. He took the train in from Peckham for an early dinner with Fechter and the rest of us, and then we all went to the Adelphi so that Dickens could finally see No Thoroughfare.

I had been more than prepared to express sympathetic concern and even shock at Dickens’s aged, exhausted state after the American tour, but Beard spoke for both of us at the station when the physician cried out, “Good Lord, Charles! Seven years younger!”

It was true. There was no sign of the limp and swollen foot we had heard so much about through letters. He had lost some weight in America, but it made him look younger and healthier. The eight-day spring sea voyage had obviously given him some real rest away from all duties, and long hours on deck had turned the always quick-tanning Dickens’s visage to bronze; somehow even his hair and beard seemed darker and fuller. Dickens’s eyes were bright. His smile was quick and his laughter and resonant tale-telling voice filled the restaurant where we dined and the carriage the five of us later took to the Adelphi.

“Good God, Wilkie,” Dickens said to me in private as we handed our hats, gloves, and sticks to the girl at the theatre, “I knew you’d been ill, but you look absolutely terrible, my dear boy. You’re shaking and pale and shuffling along like Thackeray near the end. What on earth has gotten into you?”

Gotten into me. How very clever. How very… droll. I gave Dickens a wan smile and said nothing.

Later, during the play, I had the most extraordinary experience.

Our little group was in the authors’ box—minus Fechter, of course, who had rushed backstage to put on his makeup and vomit in preparation for the show (even though everyone believed that this might be his last month of performing in England as the villain Obenreizer because of the actor’s increasing health problems). Despite my own illness, I had been there in that box many times in the preceding five months, but this was the first time Dickens had been present for the play on which he had collaborated in the early stages. Naturally, Dickens received a standing ovation from the full house even before the curtain opened. But I had expected that and it did not hurt my feelings.

No, it was the play itself that was the extraordinary experience for me. Counting rehearsals, I had seen my No Thoroughfare from start to finish at least thirty times. I could recite every line and every rewrite of every line. I had every entrance and exit timed to the fraction of a second.

But this night it was as if I were watching the play for the first time.

In truth, Dear Reader, it was as if one eye were watching the play for the first time. The headache that was always with me had settled, as was its wont, behind my right eye with such intensity that I expected the back of my eyeball to hiss the way a pitcher of good grog does when the boy thrusts in a white-hot rod to heat it. I could also feel the pressure of the scarab there. Sometimes I believed that it burrowed forward precisely so that it could peer out through one of my eyes.

So it was that as I sat there holding my temple first with my right hand and then my left, covertly covering first my left eye and then my right, as if I were watching the play I had written and seen so many times for the first time.

The scene at the orphanage with the foundling children being switched, I saw at once, was pure nonsense rather than real pathos, despite the obvious emotional response from the gullible audience. That Dickens had been most active in his collaboration in this pathetic setup business was little solace to me as the play ground on.

The death of our Walter Wilding (from both a broken heart and sheer guilt at the thought that he had accidentally inherited another man’s name and fortune) set the audience to boo-hooing as always, but it made me want to retch. Pure poppycock. Absolute drivel. How, I wondered, could any serious author have concocted such a scene?

And now Fechter was strutting to and fro in his guise as the villain Obenreizer. What an absurd character. What an absurd performance.

I remember showing one specific paragraph from the published story to Fechter, submitting it as the key to his character’s secret motivations and internal psyche. Now I recalled the words with rue—

But the great Obenreizer peculiarity was, that a certain nameless film would come over his eyes—apparently by the action of his own will—which would impenetrably veil, not only from those tellers of tales, but from his face at large, every expression save one of attention. It by no means followed that his attention should be wholly given to the person with whom he spoke, or even wholly bestowed on present sounds and objects. Rather, it was a comprehensive watchingfulness of everything he had in his own mind, and everything that he knew to be, or suspected to be, in the minds of other men.

I remembered writing that passage almost a year earlier and I also recalled having a distinct sense of satisfaction at my own abilities of expressing the complex mental and physical traits of a villain. I had thought, at the time, that I was conveying my own secret way of looking at a world that I knew was insincere and set on spoiling my own plans and ambitions.

But these words from the original Christmas tale—the so-called key to Obenreizer’s character—were flat, I realised now. Flat and silly and empty. And Fechter had used my words to endow his Obenreizer with a constantly skulking, furtive walk and look, combined with a manic stare—all too frequently aimed at nothing at all—that now impressed me as not the traits of a clever villain, but rather those of a village idiot after a serious concussion to his skull.

The audience loved it.

They also loved our new hero, George Vendale (who took the heroic palm from Walter Wilding when the latter died of his guiltless shame). Tonight I saw that George Vendale was a worse idiot than the skulking, smirking, brainlessly goggling Obenreizer. A child of three could have seen Obenreizer’s endless manipulations and falsehoods, yet Vendale—and several hundred people in that night’s audience—accepted our silly premise that the hero was simply a sweet, trusting soul.

If our race had produced only a few sweet, trusting souls like George Vendale, the species would have died out from sheer stupidity millennia ago.

Even the setting in the Swiss Alps, I realised while watching with the scarab’s clarity, was silly and unnecessary. The action leaping back and forth from London to Switzerland had no purpose except to bring in some of the spectacle that Dickens and I had seen in our journey across the Alps in 1853. The last scenes in the play, where Vendale’s beloved, Margaret Obenreizer (the villain’s beautiful and sinless niece), revealed that Vendale had not died from being hurled down the glacier a year earlier, but had been in her secret care all that time in a cosy little Swiss chalet presumably at the base of the aforementioned glacier, came close to making me bark with derisive laughter.

The scene where Obenreizer the Clever (who had lured Vendale all that way to that very ice-bridge above the abyss a year before) set forth across the treacherous slope for no other reason than the play’s ending demanded a sacrifice of him, not only stretched my newly awakened scepticism to the breaking point, but snapped it entirely. I wished to God that Fechter had been flinging himself into an actual bottomless abyss that night rather than merely dropping eight feet to a pile of mattresses hidden from the audience’s view behind a painted wooden spire of ice.

I had to close both eyes in the final scene where Obenreizer’s body was being borne into the little Swiss village celebrating Vendale’s and Margaret’s marriage (why wouldn’t they have married in London, for God’s sake?), with the happy couple exiting in exultance on stage right and with Obenreizer’s lifeless body being carried in a litter off stage left as the audience simultaneously hissed at the villain’s funeral and wept and cheered the wedding. The juxtaposition, seemingly so clever when Dickens and I outlined it on the page, was puerile and absurd in the clarity of my scarab-vision. But the audience hissed and cheered on as Fechter’s body was carried off stage left and our newly married couple rolled away in their marriage coach stage right.