ANOTHER MAN 115Wardour enters carrying the failing Aldersley in his arms, gives him back to
his betrothed, and then dies in noble self-sacrifice at Clara’s feet.
The play makes a clean division between male and female worlds. Act
One shows us only the anxious waiting women, while Act Two is set entirely
among the men of the party. When Wardour enters, his first words are that
he likes the Arctic “because there are no women here” (Brannon 126). The
most successful scene in the play involves a triangle of men that effectively
replaces the conventional love triangle. Wardour’s old and admiring friend
Crayford, to whom he had once confessed his disappointed and misogynist
feelings, now hears him say that he lives only for “the time when I and that
man shall meet, face to face... it is written on my heart now, that we two
shall meet, and know each other.” Twice more Wardour repeats his mantra:
that he lives “for the coming of one day—for the meeting with one man”
(Brannon 134). Crayford watches in growing horror as Frank’s identity is
revealed and Wardour schemes to leave with him. The three men scuffle;
violence threatens; Crayford tries to protect one man from the other. The
drama hangs on Crayford’s anxiety as the other two exit: can the man he has
idealized decline into a murderer? As the “third man,” Crayford plays a part
that interested Dickens: he witnesses the rivalry and attempts unsuccessfully
to intervene in its uncontrollable passions. Male pairs that turn into trios
may remind us of mediated situations among Dickens’s own friendships;
they also emphasize the split between actor and observer that was so central
in Dickens’s relation to himself.
Wardour-Dickens becomes a one-man Franklin expedition, whose test
lies before him. Dying, he explains that his murderous frozen deep was
melted by Frank’s childlike trust: “I set him his place to sleep in apart; but he
crept between the Devil and me, and nestled his head on my breast, and slept
here” (Brannon 159). As the play ends, the two men’s intimacy is rendered as
an interchange of qualities. Wardour calls on Clara to “love him, for helping
me!” while Frank cries, “He has given all his strength to my weakness; and
now, see how strong I am, and how weak he is!” The confrontational “face
to face” meeting turns out to be an exchange in which each man infuses
the other with the strength he had lacked. For Dickens, who could showcase
both a violent, long-brewing sense of injustice and its transmutation into
noble self-sacrifice, the play was a perfect vehicle. He played his part with
a realistic passion that stunned and frightened his audiences and led one
reviewer to rave that Dickens “has all the technical knowledge and resources
of a professed actor; but these, the dry bones of acting, are kindled by that
soul of vitality which can only be put into them by the man of genius and
the interpreter of the affections” (qtd. 8.254n.).