Then, early that summer, the news arrived.
“JAMES!” FIELDS HAD rushed into Osgood's office breathlessly. “We received it over the cable wires! God grant it as some mistake!”
Osgood panicked before he knew what to panic about. It was so rare that Fields would address his young partner informally, or that he'd exhibit such a show of emotion in proximity to the female bookkeepers-who all looked up from their copying and probably blotted a dozen words in one instant-or that he would be running at all. Then Osgood noticed one of their employees crying into her bare hands before she could find a handkerchief. And Rebecca was looking over at Osgood as though she had a thousand words waiting on her lips. He had the sickening feeling of everyone else knowing something terrible had transpired.
The sympathetic look of her green eyes made Osgood want to take Rebecca's counsel-to have the news, whatever it was and however bad- delivered by her.
But Fields had already flown through his office door, gesticulating wildly as he pushed it shut. “Charles Dickens… dead!” he finally managed to blurt out.
The Boston newspapers had received the obituaries from that morning's London papers and had sent a wire on to their office. Fields read from it aloud, emphasizing the details as though the subject might still be saved by quick thinking: “The pupil of the right eye was much dilated, that of the left contracted, the breathing stertorous, the limbs flaccid until half an hour before death, when some convulsion occurred…”
Further details included that Dickens had spent his final day working on The Mystery of Edwin Drood when, pen in hand, he had begun to feel sick. He had just finished the final words of the sixth installment of the story-the halfway mark through the book, which was to be composed of twelve serialized parts. Soon after, he fell down and never recovered.
“Dickens dead!” Fields exclaimed, shaking bodily. “How is it…! I cannot believe it! A world without Dickens!”
Men and women wept or sat bewildered and silent in the offices as word spread. “Charles Dickens is dead,” was repeated by all who heard it, to whomever they saw next. Nearly everyone in the publishing house had met Mr. Dickens when he had come for his tour two years before. Though it was difficult to feel Charles Dickens to be your friend, it was instantaneous to feel oneself his. How much life was in him-not just his own but each of his characters whose lives he had performed in front of so many thrilled audiences during his visit! No one who had ever met Dickens could imagine him gone. A man who had-Osgood remembered someone saying-a man who had exclamation points for eyes. How could such a man die?
“Charles… Dickens… Forty miles…” Fields was mumbling still in a crestfallen fog after they had sat in silence almost an hour. “I must remain on watch at the wires in case it was a mistake.” Dickens had only been a few years older than Fields-whose own sick headaches and hand aches had grown worse. Fields turned back to Osgood on his way out, “Forty miles, you said so!”
“I did indeed,” Osgood replied with a patient kindness.
It had been March 1868, near the end of Dickens's visit to Boston, at dinner at the Fieldses on Charles Street. The talk had somehow turned, in the way such things happened at the Fields dinner table, to calculating how far all of Charles Dickens's manuscripts would extend in a single line if the pages were laid end to end.
“Forty miles,” Osgood had said after careful mental calculation of the number of novels and stories and a quick census of their average length.
“No, Osgood,” Fields had called out. “A hundred thousand miles!”
“Thank you, my dear Fields,” Charles Dickens had said, as though conferring knighthood on him, then turned to Osgood with a stern countenance, his large blue-gray eyes seeming to burrow deep into the young publisher's soul, and his eyebrows darting far up. “Mr. Fields, I am inclined to be down on your young associate here until he rather changes his calculation of how many words I have surrendered in my day. More than forty miles, surely!”
There were Fields and Osgood in a nutshelclass="underline" the younger man sought the correct answer, the older gave the answer one wanted to hear.
“Does it not give you a weird sensation, Mr. Dickens?” said beautiful Annie Fields, laughing at her husband and his partner. “How could words with so much value cover so light a portion of the earth?”
The writer put up his large hands in an expressive gesture that pulled all attention to him. He had an ever-changing face that could not really be seen properly unless he was caught sleeping. “Mrs. Fields, you do understand my odd lot. Once I publish, my words are mangled, pounded, and robbed on both sides of the ocean. I have many readers and booksellers in league with me: and yet I stand alone. I suppose I am fated to be a Quixote without a Sancho. That is how my fellow authors fall as this life fight of ours progresses. There is nothing to do but close up the ranks, march on, and fight it out.”
Osgood felt a confusion and diminishment come over him at the memory now as he followed Fields into the corridor and his office. The senior officer sat and slumped over on his manuscript-filled window seat, pressing his forehead against the cool glass of the window until it fogged over from his breath.
Osgood felt if he could make a strategy for business instead of sinking into depression, Fields would be grateful. He would earn the faith placed in him with this partnership. He could hear Major Harper's voice in his ear from three months earlier speaking of junior partner, yes, and then Drood. I cannot wait to see for myself.
“Mr. Fields,” Osgood said, “I am concerned now more than ever about the Harpers.”
“Yes, yes,” Fields replied languidly. He was lost to grief. “What? I cannot understand it, Osgood. How could you think of Harper?”
“When the Major hears the new novel was only half finished-and Dickens dead-well, Mr. Fields, Harper will claim no trade courtesy even applies for anything unfinished. He will try to rush out and publish Drood right under our noses without hindrance or disguise.”
Fields snapped to attention. “Harpy Brothers, Lord! A deadly stab. Osgood, our house cannot survive it!” He moaned in a voice of surrender and rolled himself across the room in his desk chair. “No man can see the end of this. The business world now is depressed and wavering. Major Harper was right about what he told you of New York, you know. It will be over for us.”
“Do not say that, my friend,” said Osgood.
Fields's energy had seemed to expire as he sat with his limbs hanging flaccidly from the chair. “New England has been a brilliant school of literature. But it has the feature of a single generation, not destined to be succeeded by another. Edinburgh gave away its publishing over to London, and so we will be bought and swallowed by New York. Dash it all! We might as well just hawk books of quotations and law textbooks, like poor Little and Brown, God rest their souls. Why undergo the pain of literature?” Fields's mind suddenly wandered. “Say, you have a taste for salt at the moment, as I do, Osgood? I would run a mile for it. I want you to go to the stand on the corner and get a quart of peanuts. Yes, something salty.”
Osgood sighed, feeling suddenly like a junior clerk again-and feeling the solid forms around him were ready to disappear. Then he tossed his hat on the chair and turned back to his senior partner. “We must not sit by,” Osgood said. “Perhaps nothing can be done, but we must try. We will publish it and publish it well. Before Major Harper does. Half a Dickens novel is half more than any other novel on the shelves!”
“Bah! What good is a mystery novel without the ending? We become invested in the story of young Edwin Drood and then… nothing!” Fields cried out. But he started to pace up and down the room, with a reassuring clarity kindling in his eye. He blew out a long sigh as if expelling the old despair. Suddenly he was Osgood's Fields again, the invincible businessman. “You are in part right, Osgood. Half right, I should say. Yet we mustn't be content with half of the thing at all, Osgood!”