“Madame Defarge . . . yes . . . well. Take this, Pip. She—”
“Morning, Mr. Dickens!”
I flung myself into the dining room chair. Mr. Dickens was already half through his stack of pancakes.
I took one bite and then saw the even greater stack of pages lying on the table between us.
“Mr. Dickens?” I said. “The Tale of Two Cities. It’s . . . finished?”
“Done.” Mr. Dickens ate, eyes down. “Got up at six. Been working steady. Done. Finished. Through.”
“Wow!” I said.
A train whistle blew. Charlie sat up, then rose suddenly, to leave the rest of his breakfast and hurry out in the hall. I heard the front door slam and tore out on the porch to see Mr. Dickens half down the walk, carrying his carpetbag.
He was walking so fast I had to run to circle round and round him as he headed for the rail depot.
“Mr. Dickens, the book’s finished, yeah, but not published yet!”
“You be my executor, Pip.”
He fled. I pursued, gasping.
“What about David Copperfield?! Little Dorrit?!”
“Friends of yours, Pip?”
“Yours, Mr. Dickens, Charlie, oh, gosh, if you don’t write them, they’ll never live.”
“They’ll get on somehow.” He vanished around a corner. I jumped after.
“Charlie, wait. I’ll give you—a new title! Pickwick Papers, sure, Pickwick Papers!”
The train was pulling into the station.
Charlie ran fast.
“And after that, Bleak House, Charlie, and Hard Times and Great—Mr. Dickens, listen—Expectations! Oh, my gosh!”
For he was far ahead now and I could only yell after him:
“Oh, blast, go on! get off! get away! You know what I’m going to do!? You don’t deserve reading! You don’t! So right now, and from here on, see if I even bother to finish reading Tale of Two Cities! Not me! Not this one! No!”
The bell was tolling in the station. The steam was rising. But, Mr. Dickens had slowed. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk. I came up to stare at his back.
“Pip,” he said softly. “You mean what you just said?”
“You!” I cried. “You’re nothing but—” I searched in my mind and seized a thought: “—a blot of mustard, some undigested bit of raw potato—!”
“‘Bah, Humbug, Pip?’”
“Humbug! I don’t give a blast what happens to Sidney Carton!”
“Why, it’s a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done, Pip. You must read it.”
“Why!?”
He turned to look at me with great sad eyes.
“Because I wrote it for you.”
It took all my strength to half-yell back: “So—?”
“So,” said Mr. Dickens, “I have just missed my train. Forty minutes till the next one—”
“Then you got time,” I said.
“Time for what?”
“To meet someone. Meet them, Charlie, and I promise I’ll finish reading your book. In there. In there, Charlie.”
He pulled back.
“That place? The library?!”
“Ten minutes, Mr. Dickens, give me ten minutes, just ten, Charlie. Please.”
“Ten?”
And at last, like a blind man, he let me lead him up the library steps and half-fearful, sidle in.
The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years.
Way off in that direction: silence.
Way off in that direction: hush.
It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were.
We waited, Mr. Dickens and I, on the edge of the silence.
Mr. Dickens trembled. And I suddenly remembered I had never seen him here all summer. He was afraid I might take him near the fiction shelves and see all his books, written, done, finished, printed, stamped, bound, borrowed, read, repaired, and shelved.
But I wouldn’t be that dumb. Even so, he took my elbow and whispered:
“Pip, what are we doing here? Let’s go. There’s . . .”
“Listen!” I hissed.
And a long way off in the stacks somewhere, there was a sound like a moth turning over in its sleep.
“Bless me,” Mr. Dickens’s eyes widened. “I know that sound.”
“Sure!”
“It’s the sound,” he said, holding his breath, then nodding, “of someone writing.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Writing with a pen. And . . . and writing . . .”
“What?”
“Poetry,” gasped Mr. Dickens. “That’s it. Someone off there in a room, how many fathoms deep, Pip, I swear, writing a poem. There! Eh? Flourish, flourish, scratch, flourish on, on, on, that’s not figures, Pip, not numerals, not dusty-dry facts, you feel it sweep, feel it scurry? A poem, by God, yes, sir, no doubt, a poem!”
“Ma’am,” I called.
The moth-sound ceased.
“Don’t stop her!” hissed Mr. Dickens. “Middle of inspiration. Let her go!”
The moth-scratch started again.
Flourish, flourish, scratch, on, on, stop. Flourish, flourish. I bobbed my head. I moved my lips, as did Mr. Dickens, both of us suspended, held, leaned forward on the cool marble air listening to the vaults and stacks and echoes in the subterrane.
Flourish, flourish, scratch, on, on.
Silence.
“There.” Mr. Dickens nudged me.
“Ma’am!” I called ever so urgently soft.
And something rustled in the corridors.
And there stood the librarian, a lady between years, not young, not old; between colors, not dark, not pale; between heights, not short, not tall, but rather frail, a woman you often heard talking to herself off in the dark dust-stacks with a whisper like turned pages, a woman who glided as if on hidden wheels.
She came carrying her soft lamp of face, lighting her way with her glance.
Her lips were moving, she was busy with words in the vast room behind her clouded gaze.
Charlie read her lips eagerly. He nodded. He waited for her to halt and bring us to focus, which she did, suddenly. She gasped and laughed at herself.
“Oh, Ralph, it’s you and—” A look of recognition warmed her face. “Why, you’re Ralph’s friend. Mr. Dickens, isn’t it?”
Charlie stared at her with a quiet and almost alarming devotion.
“Mr. Dickens,” I said. “I want you to meet—”
“‘Because I could not stop for Death—’” Charlie, eyes shut, quoted from memory.
The librarian blinked swiftly and her brow like a lamp turned high, took white color.
“Miss Emily,” he said.
“Her name is—” I said.
“Miss Emily.” He put out his hand to touch hers.
“Pleased,” she said. “But how did you—?”
“Know your name? Why, bless me, ma’am, I heard you scratching way off in there, runalong rush, only poets do that!”
“It’s nothing.”
“Head high, chin up,” he said, gently. “It’s something. ‘Because I could not stop for death’ is a fine A-1 first-class poem.”
“My own poems are so poor,” she said, nervously. “I copy hers out to learn.”
“Copy who?” I blurted.
“Excellent way to learn.”
“Is it, really?” She looked close at Charlie. “You’re not . . .?”
“Joking? No, not with Emily Dickinson, ma’am!”
“Emily Dickinson?” I said.
“That means much coming from you, Mr. Dickens,” she flushed. “I have read all your books.”
“All?” He backed off.
“All,” she added hastily, “that you have published so far, sir.”
“Just finished a new one.” I put in, “Sockdolager! A Tale of Two Cities.”
“And you, ma’am?” he asked, kindly.
She opened her small hands as if to let a bird go.
“Me? Why, I haven’t even sent a poem to our town newspaper.”
“You must!” he cried, with true passion and meaning. “Tomorrow. No, today!”
“But,” her voice faded. “I have no one to read them to, first.”
“Why,” said Charlie quietly. “You have Pip here, and, accept my card, C. Dickens, Esquire. Who will, if allowed, stop by on occasion, to see if all’s well in this Arcadian silo of books.”
She took his card. “I couldn’t—”
“Tut! You must. For I shall offer only warm sliced white bread. Your words must be the marmalade and summer honey jam. I shall read long and plain. You: short and rapturous of life and tempted by that odd delicious Death you often lean upon. Enough.” He pointed. “There. At the far end of the corridor, her lamp lit ready to guide your hand . . . the Muse awaits. Keep and feed her well. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye?” she asked. “Doesn’t that mean ‘God be with you’?”
“So I have heard, dear lady, so I have heard.”
And suddenly we were back out in the sunlight, Mr. Dickens almost stumbling over his carpetbag waiting there.
In the middle of the lawn, Mr. Dickens stood very still and said, “The sky is blue, boy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The grass is green.”
“Sure.” Then I stopped and really looked around. “I mean, heck, yeah!”
“And the wind . . . smell that sweet wind?”
We both smelled it. He said:
“And in this world are remarkable boys with vast imaginations who know the secrets of salvation . . .”
He patted my shoulder. Head down, I didn’t know what to do. And then I was saved by a whistle:
“Hey, the next train! Here it comes!”
We waited.
After a long while, Mr. Dickens said:
“There it goes . . . and let’s go home, boy.”
“Home!” I cried, joyfully, and then stopped. “But what about . . . Mr. Wyneski?”
“O, after all this, I have such confidence in you, Pip. Every afternoon while I’m having tea and resting my wits, you must trot down to the barbershop and—”
“Sweep hair!”
“Brave lad. It’s little enough. A loan of friendship from the Bank of England to the First National Bank of Green Town, Illinois. And now, Pip . . . pencil!”
I tried behind one ear, found gum; tried the other ear and found: “Pencil!”
“Paper?”
“Paper!”
We strode along under the soft green summer trees.
“Title, Pip—”
He reached up with his cane to write a mystery on the sky. I squinted at the invisible penmanship.
“The—”
He blocked out a second word on the air.
“Old,” I translated.
A third.
“C.U.” I spelled. “R.I. . . . Curiosity!”
“How’s that for a title, Pip?”
I hesitated. “It . . . doesn’t seem, well, quite finished, sir.”
“What a Christian you are. There!”
He flourished a final word on the sun.
“S.H.O. . . . Shop! The Old Curiosity Shop.”
“Take a novel, Pip!”
“Yes, sir,” I cried. “Chapter One!”
A blizzard of snow blew through
