Beyond the Secret Garden

by Ann Thwaite

  Stephen Townesend was to Frances in 1889 and to society at large “a charming fellow”. As they became closer, over the years, he was to become far worse than a bear. What he was really like, only God knows. Certainly as Frances observed (at times with sympathy, at others with exasperation), “I never saw a human being with such a self-tormenting, nervous temperament. It is dreadful. He never fails in anything he has to learn, but he always goes through the same process of distrust of himself and wretchedness.” It was true all his life.

  Stephen was twenty-nine that year. He had had one or two professional engagements but the success he had in the Bart’s Dramatic Club eluded him when he appeared in Miss Lytton’s Company. He was “embittered and broken by discouragement”, according to Frances. It was a very different matter to enter a profession at twenty-nine rather than nineteen. His parents had taken ten years away from him “They were not consciously bad or heartless people. They were only stupid and selfish.” Frances, enraptured by Stephen’s charm, determined to help him. She knew so many people in the theatre, surely she could get Stephen on the path to achieving his ambitions. As a start, she would, employ him as her business manager.

  She was so busy with her plans for Stephen and the delights of the season, that again one of her sons had cause to complain that she had not written. Lionel wrote from Washington: “I have not received a letter from you for about three weeks, but I suppose you have a great deal to do . . . Yesterday, Monday, July 8, 1889 was the day of the great prize fight between Sullivan and Kilrain for the championship of the world. Sullivan knocked Kilrain out in seventy-two rounds. I suppose you do not care for prize fights but you can tell Vivian about it.”

  Vivian was spending much of his time watching cricket at Lord’s, though he was occasionally prevailed upon to present a bouquet to a duchess, when accompanying Frances to a garden party. He was thirteen now and still worrying, as he had as a boy, about the state of the world. He came into Frances’ room in Lexham Gardens one day and announced “Dearest, I just wanted to tell you I am a Socialist.” He had been reading a book called Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. This book, a probing of the evils of capitalism, was high on the best seller lists of 1888 and one of the few books which disproved the general picture that the public wanted their reading sweet and light. It fired Vivian with enthusiasm for righting wrongs and injustices. Frances rather unkindly suggested that he could start being a good socialist by hanging up his hat, not leaving his cricket bat in the hall or his tennis racquet on the piano. “You see one of the points is that everyone is to do his own work and not leave any of it for the others to do.” But she also told him, “If you are a good socialist you must remember that gifts are only workman’s tools,” and that we should never feel superior to those who have fewer gifts than we have.

  For all Frances’ cracker-barrel wisdom, it was difficult for Vivian to hope for a just world when it was only too clear that, in their world, it was a case of to those that have shall be given. That summer the developers of a new estate called Bellagio, somewhere in Surrey—a collection of bungalows built in a carefully preserved woodland area on the shores of a lake—obviously thinking it would be good publicity for their enterprise, named one of the bungalows “Dorincourt”, after the castle in Fauntleroy, and presented it to Frances.

  Vivian returned to Washington with his father, who had called in briefly on his way home from an international medical congress in Berlin. Frances, Lisa Chiellini and Stephen Townesend moved, when the season was over, into the miniature Dorincourt. Frances invited Owen Lankester to stay—“We need you to make our circle complete”—but he couldn’t get away. She wrote to him describing their “horse-breaking” activities:

  I am sitting in the rather tremulous condition attendant upon Mr Townesend’s being out taking his ride on Gordon. Gordon is a lovely new horse I have bought, who is considered extremely dangerous by prejudiced persons at the stables. Mr Townesend takes him out mildly but firmly every morning and has always returned with his system underanged so far . . . Notwithstanding what the grooms say, he does not seem to have trouble with the darling brute when he is driving him, and we have been miles and miles.

  The gloomy predictions of the grooms were justified one day when Frances, with the chestnut cob harnessed to the red and black, high two-wheeled trap, set out to meet Stephen at the station on his return from a visit to London. Gordon bolted and threw Frances out of the trap and on to her head. Stephen, worried at not having been met, hired a station hack and came by just in time to see her apparently lifeless body being carried into a nearby house. She had “concussion of the brain and was quite stiff and unconscious from Saturday till Tuesday”. As she came round, she kept moaning, “Oh dear! Oh dear!” and thought it was because there was something the boys wanted “which their Dearest could not get for them”. It was many days before she was considered fit to be moved to Dorincourt from the house where she had been taken, but she was back in Lexham Gardens in September.

  Stephen was constantly beside her, and there were nurses from St Bartholomew’s as well. She was deeply depressed—terrified that the awful blow had stunned “the vivid, vital part of her brain that made the stories”. Long before she was really well, she tried to put it to the test by propping herself up and scribbling—a page or two at a time—the first act of a new play.

  Scribner’s London agent, Lemuel Bangs, went to see her about a volume of her St Nicholas stories, which they hoped to publish. Lemuel Bangs was a character. Every night at the Garrick Club he could be seen with a pint of champagne. Gerald Duckworth was one of those who called him the “Senator”. He had large moustaches and a tremendous wardrobe. On his death it was found to contain, among hundreds of other items, 188 ties, 26 lined fancy waistcoats and 14 overcoats. It was not, then, surprising that the first thing he noted on his visit to Frances was her clothes:

  She looked an exceedingly interesting invalid in a rich and harmonious loose costume, bolstered up with comfortable cushions etc. and was very cordial and pleasant during my long call (two hours or so) . . . Evidently she has had the benefit of careful attention and has made wonderful progress but is not yet well, by any means. She enjoyed telling me about her illness, her books, especially associations connected with the stories under consideration and it seemed almost cruel to bother her with business, however she appreciated the necessity of it.

  She was to receive a 12½% royalty and an advance of one thousand pounds on publication day. There was “no written agreement as she could not sign it, even if it had been necessary”. It was strange she could talk for two hours but not sign her name.

  The new book, to be called Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories, was to be uniform with Fauntleroy and Sara Crewe. “The title story is so good,” Scribner wrote to Bangs, “it deserves all the success of the others. Mrs Burnett is a very curious customer. She is always ‘on the make’ and you were very fortunate to come off so easily. It is necessary to burn much incense at her shrine in order to accomplish anything.”

  During Frances’ illness Stephen had become indispensable. He had certainly been prepared to burn a good deal of incense. How fortunate he was a doctor. For three months, as she put it, he had carried her “concussed brain in his pocket, day and night”. He had hardly left her side. By November, seeing no immediate prospects for him on the professional stage, with his patron temporarily unable to help him, he returned to his old stage at Bart’s. At the annual general meeting of the Dramatic Club, he was elected stage manager (their term for producer) and appeared in their next production as Shylock in the fourth act of The Merchant of Venice. (“Mr Townesend’s interpretation of Shylock was highly artistic.”) In January he played the part again and also appeared as Puff in the second act of The Critic.

  The winter was dark and drear. Bangs reported to Scribner in December that London was so foggy that gas light was necessary throughout the day. Frances, by now well enough to travel, left England. After a stay in the South of Fra
nce, she moved on to Rome. “I wanted to be quiet, so I went to a hotel which an English Roman told me afterwards was ‘the oldest, the most respectable and the dullest in Rome’. But that exactly pleased me and I could not be dull with three interesting people with me and all old Rome around me.”

  One of the interesting people was certainly Lisa Chiellini. She helped Frances deal with the mountains of letters and manuscripts which had piled up during her illness. There was a charge of plagiarism which had appeared in the St James’ Gazette a few days before her accident. A Miss Winthrop had accused her of copying her Wilfred. Now Frances replied that the only things Fauntleroy and Wilfred had in common was that they were both grandsons of earls, and as Miss Winthrop could see from Debrett there are any number of those. A man in Washington who had seen the item in the Gazette asked her to submit the two books to a critical expert for a disinterested judgment. If she were maligned, generous justice ought to be done to her. He enclosed credentials from the Governor of Massachusetts and other notables and said “You can determine what you will pay.” There were numerous children’s stories submitted for her opinion. To the authors of these she replied invariably, “Children might like it.” As she said, “One can say that much of any book intended for children. It is civil and not untruthful.” There was a facetious letter from Edmund Gosse, commenting on a photograph of her in a literary magazine which seemed to be directing a glance of “withering scorn” at a paragraph about Gosse: “If you feel like that, let us part . . . O don’t look at me like that, or else you will reduce me to some such scarcely human object as poor Stevenson appears below.” There were hundreds of letters.

  The most interesting were those from the boys, busy in Washington with electricity and printing. Lionel, now fifteen, wrote that he and Vivian were doing everything by electricity: “I light my gas by electricity. If you and Lisa want to get me anything, I want it electric. Anything that has to do with electricity . . . Will you get Lisa to get me some books on electricity and send them to me, because I like to do experiments. Papa gave me two books on electricity but I have nearly exhausted them . . .” Besides putting contraptions on the burners to light the gas by sparks, they had wired the Massachusetts Avenue house with burglar alarms so that after they had set the master-switch in their bedroom, a cat could hardly step on the doormat without waking the neighbourhood with the buzzing of bells.

  And they were still interested in printing. It was two years since Frances had given them an old press. Their activities the winter before had brought them a fair number of “paying costumers” in Vivian’s phrase. Now they wanted to expand their activities. Certainly they had not been brought up to believe that money grew on trees:

  1770 Massachusetts Avenue,

  February 26,1890

  Dear Mamma:

  I want to tell you about something Vivian and I have set our hearts on. Vivian and I have taken to printing a great deal. We have been printing, I think, since the first part of Jan. and have made quite a little money, besides the pleasure we got out of it. Of course, we did not have all the type and things we wanted, so we had to buy them. I saw an advertisement in a paper of a man who sold presses and things, and so I sent to him for a price list. In this price list there were some printing outfits. One of these I am going to tell you about. It costs quite a large sum, but Vivian and I think we can make enough money with it to pay for it. This is the outfit:

  O.K. Rotary Job Press

  $100.00

  Furniture

  2.00

  Hand Roller

  0.50

  Black and Colored inks

  2.00

  Twelve fonts of type

  24.45

  Eleven type cases and cabinet

  12.00

  Leads, bodkin and tweezers

  1.50

  Six gauge pins and Screw driver

  0.60

  Mallet, planer and oil can

  0.75

  Composing stick

  1.00

  Can of cleaning preparation

  0.30

  Lead cutter

  2.00

  Rules, dashes, borders

  2.90

  $150.00

  I know the price of it startles you, but I have a way to get over it. Vivian says that he will give up his bicycle that you said you were going to get us when we came over, and I am willing to do the same, and I think that will make the amount. I think Papa will pay the express for us, which will be quite a good deal, I think.

  If you will do it, will you cable yes, for we, of course, want it very much. We have talked with Papa about it and he said that he thought it was very good, but that it cost such a lot. He said he would get it for us if he could afford it.

  I send you a little book I printed on the press that was given me Christmas before last. I call it “Job Lots”, because it is composed of all kinds of poetry. I put in “There was an old man up a tree”, because I know you always laugh at it. I printed the book all by myself . . .

  Your loving son,

  L. BURNETT,

  Job Printer

  Needless to say, Frances cabled the money. Vivian and Lionel had produced the first few issues of a weekly paper when Lionel fell ill. In the beginning it was thought to be “la grippe”, the name given to an epidemic raging in Washington that winter of 1890.

  The news turned Frances pale. Lionel, as Vivian pointed out in his book, “was high strung, sensitive and emotional and not able to protect himself very well from the knocks and disappointments of the world”. He found his school work difficult—he was in the same grade this year as his bright young brother, Vivian, which could not have been very good for his morale. He was often ill. He needed his mother but she was never there. He had not seen her for a year. Frances was stirred by deep feelings of guilt and love. Of course, her accident had been to blame, she assured herself. If it had not been for her accident she would surely have returned home before this. She wrote from Rome, from the dull Hotel Minerva, reminding Lionel that Dearest thought all the time of her boys. “I shall send you a cable every now and then to show you I am near enough to talk to you.”

  Lionel was fifteen. She had never come to terms with the boys growing up. She wrote to him as if he were a child of Fauntleroy’s age—a seven-year-old—sending him photographs of the Carnival at Nice and the ruins of Pompeii, and boxes of construzione, to cheer him up.

  Lionel responded perfectly: “Don’t bother about me, darling Sweet. What I want you to do is to get well, and not to worry about me. I also want to see you very much, but don’t start until you feel well.” He thought he was getting better but he was not. Specialists were consulted. The verdict was “galloping consumption” with no hope of recovery.

  Frances sailed from Rome on Easter Day, 1890. Two days later the play which Frances and Stephen had been working on between drives with the chestnut Gordon the previous summer, had its first performance at Terry’s Theatre. It was called Nixie, and was an adaptation and elongation of the story “Editha’s Burglar”. It was “very patiently received” according to the Era “and at the end some applause brought Mr Townesend to the footlights to offer his acknowledgments and to promise to cable to Mrs Hodgson Burnett news of the favourable verdict”. But most of the success was due to “the remarkably clever performance of the little lady entrusted with the title-part”, Nixie, “the most precocious child ever brought into this wicked world . . . whose pretty prattle caused many a ripple of laughter”. Altogether, however, it was a “crude and unsatisfactory concoction” and did not run for long.

  But Frances could not worry about that. She arrived in Washington to find Lionel in bed waiting for her, his “cheeks and hands hot with fever”. He was dying; but she would not believe it. Her childhood reading had been full of children who died young and beautifully. In Haworth’s, she had made Janey say, when questioned about her Sunday reading, “It’s a nice book an’ theer’s lots more like it in th’ skoo’ library—all about Sunday skoo’ sch
olars as has consumption an’ th’loike an’ reads the bible to foak an’ dees.” Now Lionel was dying of consumption. He had never been a Sunday-school scholar. His reading had been a manual of electricity and a compositor’s handbook, not the Bible. Where, in those, would he find the strength to meet death gladly? Frances had no conviction that he, like the dying children in East Lynne, could be “brought to look with pleasure, rather than fear, upon the unknown journey”. She determined he should not know the truth. They would look for a cure. In the long, sad journeyings that followed, Lionel did not know that he would never return to the house in Washington. She wrapped him round in make-believe. She could not say, “Yes, you are very ill. You cannot use your cameras or your engines or your bicycle any more. You must lie still and take medicine and peptonoids all day and night. When you travel to different countries you will have a doctor and a trained nurse always with you and your medicine chest will be in the railway carriage. I shall spend a great deal of money for you but I don’t know when you will get well.” Instead she said, “We will pretend you are the Prince Imperial.”

  There were possibilities of treatment in America. They spent a few weeks in Atlantic City, a few more in Philadelphia. His condition did not improve. Frances was recommended to take the boy to a sanatorium in Göbersdorf in the pine forests of South Germany. Vivian and Lisa Chiellini travelled with Frances and Lionel. Stephen Townesend and a nurse from St Bartholomew’s joined them at Southampton. From Göbersdorf, early in August, Frances wrote to Scribner, “the condition of my poor boy is so hopeless and sad a one that I have no prospect of any near return to America if I can have the heart and courage to return at all. If my boy lives so long, we shall probably winter in Nice or Cannes.” But by 22nd August she was in Marienbad. Stephen wrote from there to Scribner acknowledging a royalty cheque for £1,575. Vivian returned from Marienbad to America ready for the new school term. The others took Lionel to Paris, to see yet another specialist, and because “it was too cold at Marienbad and too hot to go to the South of France”.