Beyond the Secret Garden

by Ann Thwaite

  “But for Edmund Gosse I might never have heard of it.” At The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, he had greeted Frances—“Dear Mrs Burnett, do let me congratulate you on your enormous success in Paris.” Frances wrote to Vivian, “I can only hope fervently that this will end in money.” She had just paid one of her visits to St Monica’s, the nursing home for crippled children: “How I wish that I were a very rich woman that I might help it as I should like to! . . . It is so grievously needed.”

  Owen Lankester was one of the consultant doctors at St Monica’s. His sister Fay was involved in the National Health Society in Berners Street, and it happened this year that the Duchess of Albany, a daughter-in-law of the Queen, was attending a course of lectures there and regularly took tea in Miss Lankester’s sitting-room. “Last week she expressed a desire to meet me,” Frances wrote to Vivian, “so Fay invited me and I went and made my little curtsey to the dear woman and drank tea with her . . . I am always so sorry for Royalties. They are always stupid—poor dears—and as it is etiquette that one must wait until they speak—and as they can rarely think of anything to say and look as if they were frantically casting about in their minds for a lucid observation, they are frequently quite touching. H.R.H. is a nice plump German person with an amiable face and an accent. She has two children and is devoted to them. I could have made her talk quite fluently if I had not been aware that etiquette demanded that I should wait until she made some opening for agreeable conversation. I could have begun but she did not know how and so we were not absorbingly interesting.”

  If Frances, again like Mr Salteena, was not quite “the real thing”, she had by now been so well rubbed up in “Socierty ways” that one would hardly notice it. She could talk to a duchess without a tremor, although always aware that it would make a good story, that “high life” was something people liked to read about, though it was even more important in literature than in life to disguise any snobbish leanings one might have. People like to read about marquesses, but mainly to be assured that, under the delightful trappings of their rank, marquesses are but men.

  For the most part, however, Frances mixed, not with the aristocracy, but with writers and artists and theatre people. Some of them she met through her new friends Ella and Marion Hepworth Dixon, already mentioned as guests at the party for the Pinero first night. They were the daughters of William Hepworth Dixon, a Manchester-born editor of the Athenaeum, a well-known biographer and friend of many writers. Their mother was an ardent suffragette and admirer of Ibsen. Ella, who was to become one of Frances’ closest friends, had been educated in Germany and had herself published a novel the year before. It was called starkly The Story of a Modern Woman and created a considerable stir: T. P. O’Connor had devoted the whole front page of his Weekly News to it. Ella was herself the editor of a monthly magazine, the Englishwoman, and she moved with an independence Frances naturally admired. The admiration was mutual. After Frances’ death, Ella wrote of her modesty, humour and lack of egotism, of her generosity, loyalty and gentle manners, and her ability to tell a good story against herself, “a rare trait in a woman”. But she was still inclined to be impressed by the people she was meeting. She would never have talked of the “little dapper grocer, Gosse”, as Virginia Woolf did.

  “My tablet is full of engagements,” she wrote happily to Vivian. Here is a selection for a part of May 1895:

  May 8:

  Edward Burlingame and Zangwill at a dinner party in Portland Place.

  May 10:

  Dinner with the Edmund Gosses. Rider Haggard and the Crackanthorpes and Alma-Tademas among the guests.

  May 12:

  Lunch at the Boughtons at West House. Dinner at Lawrence Sterne’s bachelor apartment at Park Side.

  May 13:

  To the Alma-Tademas’ wonderful house. Heard music and saw pictures.

  May 14:

  Amateur theatricals and Beatrice Herford monologues at the Crackanthorpes.

  May 15:

  Elinor Calhoun, the actress, to lunch. At home in Portland Place.

  May 16:

  Dinner at Lady Lindsay’s.

  May 17:

  Ought to have gone to a tea at the Poulteney Bigelows but mistook the date.

  May 18:

  Calls.

  May 19:

  Lunch with the Countess of Kintire. She has been away from London for a few years, Lord Kintire having been something important and official either in India or Australia. I blush to say I cannot say which.

  May 20:

  Tea with Zangwill.

  Hubert Crackanthorpe, whose name appears twice in that fortnight’s engagements, is perhaps now familiar only from William Plomer’s lines about “The Widow of Bayswater”, who

  Talked scansion with Bridges and scandal with Wilde,

  To Drinkwater drank and at Crackanthorpe smiled.

  He was one of the Yellow Book writers. His Wreckage, a volume of short stories published in 1892, had established his reputation as the best prose-writer of the group. He was an attractive young man, gentle and chivalrous. When he drowned himself in the Seine in 1896, his friends were stunned. “He seemed the happiest of fortunate youth,” wrote Richard Le Gallienne. Frances had sent “the new Yellow Book” to Vivian in February, 1895. She thought it “affected and pretentious beyond description. The Squeaking Boys cry ‘damn’ louder than ever and there is a picture of Mr George Moore which looks like an extremely decayed lemon . . .” But “a little poem by Richard Le Gallienne touched me. Oh very much I know what it means and I have begun to cast about in my mind as to who shall help me to meet him.” She did not have to look very far for Le Gallienne had once been a sort of literary secretary to her old friend Wilson Barrett, the actor who had “done everything” for her when she was working on the Fauntleroy play. “Dear Princess,” he wrote to her from the Lyric, “will you come to see my play tonight? If so, I will save a box for you.” Introductions were easy. The names were all becoming faces. She met Aubrey Beardsley at Walter Besant’s.

  Vivian admired Beardsley. He thought him “superlatively grotesque”. He envied Frances her London life. Life at Harvard was not all roses. He was enjoying his music and he did quite well in his first exams but there was a girl from Vassar who had become rather a drag: “I gradually let her understand . . . that I could not attend to all her wishes, appease all her cross fits, keep cheering her up and still at the same time attend to my lessons here and do myself justice.” And the reporters were on to him: “I’m being persecuted again . . . On Sunday there appeared in the Journal a whole column on me . . . If that kind of thing happens often it will queer me for any of the societies.” Ernest Fahnestock, his cousin, was worrying him by being ill and ashamed of his shabby room. And the situation in Washington was even more worrying. He could “never feel anything but a stranger” when he went to the house on Massachusetts Avenue now his father had left.

  Frances wanted him to come to England for the summer—she was taking a house called Broomfields, not far from Hindhead—but her expenses were so heavy, and her income so uncertain, she was pleased to hear from Daisy Hall that return tickets on the American Hamburg fine were twenty per cent off, and she hoped Vivian would take advantage of the reduction. “If the Chicago thing [Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress] is successful and the French play brings in an income and Clorinda is well paid for, I shall be in splendid condition—but I know I am unduly timid where money is concerned and, until these things are settled, I am wretched. Archie and Stephen laugh at me.” She was “almost driven to a frenzy” by the American income tax. “I am a poor wretch panting under the effort merely to live—and they want to charge me two per cent for it.”

  However, there were others far worse off than she was. The poor Poulteney Bigelows had had to give notice to all their servants and let their lovely house on the Chelsea Embankment. She had dined there the very day they had heard they were “ruined”—with “Du Maurier’s daughter, just like his women in Punch” and F. Anstey, of Vice
Versa, who had once parodied “Editha’s Burglar” with devastating effect.

  Then there were poor Lady Anne Sherson and her inseparable companion. Frances invited them to Portland Place for Holy Week so they could enjoy “an orgy of church services” in London. She gave them “big charming rooms and easy chairs and books and nice dinners” and lent them her carriage to take them to their services. “I am afraid they will be spoiled for the cottage at Sutton and twopenny buses.”

  Worst of all, there was a mysterious character Frances called the Duke, in whom she had apparently invested no less than twenty-three thousand dollars. “I received the saddest possible letter from the Duke,” she confided to Vivian. “He has been dangerously ill from anxiety and suspense. He has lost everything—has had to give up his house, his business, all his property and has gone to live with his wife and daughters in three rooms. He cannot possibly pay the interest and God knows where the capital is. He says I shall be paid either during his life or at his death, but though I know he hopes it is true, I do not see any reason to believe that it is. It is terribly hard on me. I thought I could depend on that interest for your college expenses . . . It does seem a hideously cruel thing to lose twenty-three thousand dollars when one has worked so hard for it and needs it so terribly and yet I am so sorry for that man that it overwhelms me. Surely you must have heard something of his misfortunes . . .”

  There is a vivid picture of the summer at Broomfields in Stephen Townesend’s novel, A Thoroughbred Mongrel. Frances appears thinly disguised as Mrs Flufton Bennett, cooing over a tiny dog which has been sent to her. It is supposed to be a chihuahua from Mexico but turns out to be “an impudent fraud”, a mongrel from Seven Dials stunted by the consumption of gin. Vivian, Archie and Zangwill, Owen Lankester, Constance Fletcher and Elinor Calhoun all appear. Archie has a taste for practical joking. His inclination is to “drown the little beast and send her the corpse by parcel post; it would serve her right for fooling over the darned thing so much”. Zangwill, as Singwell, has some good lines, as he always had in real life: “On a dog, a flea feels he has a house of his own—on a man, he has only apartments—at any moment he may have notice to quit.” Stephen’s own personality comes over most strongly in a harsh, vivid description of a medical demonstration using a live rabbit. The mocking light tone of the rest of the book is transformed by his anger and it doesn’t need the footnote which tells us that the incident “is founded on a scene witnessed in the Physiological Class of Edinburgh University, 1882”.

  The summer at Broomfields was not entirely carefree, quite apart from any canine complications, though Zangwill wrote a warm letter after one of his visits: “You gave me a very good time at Broomfields and Miss Fletcher was an unexpected treat. But I mustn’t make invidious distinctions, for everybody was charming to me . . . May you all have fine weather and cigarettes and peppermints ad lib. May the play continue to evolve and the collaborators to be friends.”

  The play was The First Gentleman of Europe, which Frances was trying to write with Constance Fletcher; she was known as George Fleming and had recently had a success with her Mrs Lessingham, starring Mrs Patrick Campbell. The reference to cigarettes and peppermints was not a casual conjunction. Frances always interspersed puffs on her cigarette with bites on a peppermint Certainly there was no sign of her neuritis during the summer of 1895. “I want to tell you, Vivie, how curiously well I am. Suddenly it seems as if I had passed out of the heavy cloud of dreary tiredness which has closed about me for so long.”

  But she was not sanguine about the play. There were three good acts “but the construction of the fourth does not seem to me safe . . . Constance is not a person I can argue with when she is in one of her grandiloquently cocksure moods. It is really ‘not good enough’. I do not think I shall ever allow anyone to collaborate with me again . . . I have not had any quarrel but it is because I was determined there should be none and I am very good at not speaking.” The play was eventually produced by Daniel Frohman at the Lyceum in New York but did not run for long.

  Frances returned to Portland Place “to find scarcely anything in the bank—the rent due, the taxes sent in and divers innumerable small bills”. “I should have been in despair,” she wrote to Vivian, “if it had not been for Stephen. I did not know he could be so nice. The touch of real anxiety seemed to bring out a new creature in him. He has managed for me, arranged things and seen people and persistently cheered me up and insisted that we could get through the time of difficulty and that once through it should be easier than ever.”

  While the time was difficult, Frances made bold attempts at economy. “I have taken the housekeeping into my own hands,” she wrote to Vivian, “think of your Mammy going to the kitchen every morning ordering dinners and, what is more, going out and buying them her very self. I allow no bills. I buy everything myself and pay for it on the spot and the result is absolutely amazing. What I paid eleven or twelve pounds for before I paid five for last week.” She said she felt too poor to talk about Shakespeare, though Irving’s Romeo and Juliet was filling the Lyceum every night.

  But by December, as Stephen had predicted, things were easier than ever. There was a large cheque from Scribner’s—the advance for The Lady of Quality and her royalties on the books in print There was also a £500 advance on a 22½% royalty for the same book’s English publication by Warne. There was good money from the French Fauntleroy coming in and a telegram from Berlin to say that the Little Lord had opened there “amidst storms of universal public enthusiasm”. Stephen had arranged all this. He must certainly have a good part in the new play—“You know I really invented the play because it is of his favourite acting period”—but he did not care for either the Prince or Carteret. He chose Lord Carisbrooke. It would make matters easier to arrange with actor-managers who must have the best rôles for themselves.

  Frances had now taken up again the book she had first started in 1880—In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim. “It is very interesting to pick up a half-written book, not touched for nearly fifteen years, and find it absolutely worth finishing . . . It covers a larger canvas than anything else I have done.” She read the first chapter to Zangwill and he said: “You have touched that big man so clearly that even now I could go and write a book about him myself.” “I care for his opinion,” she said to Vivian. His was the only opinion she cared for, at least of the people she knew intimately. This was almost equal to saying she had no particular respect for Stephen’s opinion of her work. He was useful, a valuable business manager. He was friendly. He and Archie gave her violets and lilies of the valley on her birthday. But that he had been, or would be again, something much more there is no hint.

  To judge from her letters, she seems to have seen a great deal more of Israel Zangwill than of Stephen at this time. On 30th November 1895, Zangwill wrote to her, “I see that you are to be the guest of the Vagabonds on the 9th. I presume you will be making a speech. This is indeed the new woman. Kind regards from the old man.” It was nearly twenty years since the jokes about the “coming woman”. The phrase “the new woman” was on everyone’s lips in 1895. It was not always a compliment Punch filled in a spare inch with the lines:

  New men, new manners

  New women, no manners.

  It would still be unusual enough for a woman to be asked to speak as guest of honour at a dinner given by a men’s club.

  Frances was also invited to Mrs Humphry Ward’s on 9th December (“quite a small party. Mr and Mrs Du Maurier and a few other friends”) but the Vagabonds’ invitation was a challenge. It was in fact Frances’ first public speech. She had got away with murmuring a few words on earlier occasions, such as the Society of Authors’ Dinner and the opening of the Boys’ Club Reading Room. She had, she said, always hoped to be spared three things—hanging, drowning and being obliged to make a speech. ‘I am torn between two emotions—one is the hope that I shall be able to make you hear me; the other the fear that it might be better for me and for you, if I
could not.” After such pleasant nothings and some more solemn stuff, suitably modest about her work, Frances sat down to what the Queen called “prolonged cheering”. After years of refusing to speak in public, she had addressed four hundred people in the most difficult banqueting hall in London and had the success of her life. “To do a thing you can do—such as write a book—what is that? But to do a thing you can’t do, and find yourself called a brilliant thing, is really worthwhile.” Zangwill sat at her right: when she had finished speaking, he took her hands in both his and said, “It was perfect. It couldn’t have been better.” Everyone agreed. Jerome K. Jerome said, “I would give a great deal to be able to make such a speech as that.”

  A week later she set off for Yorkshire in high spirits. She was going to stay with the Earl of Crewe, whom she had first met the year before when he had been Lord Houghton, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He had spoken, as his father’s son, at the unveiling of the Keats memorial in Hampstead Parish Church. That had been an occasion. There had been lunch first at Walter Besant’s. Gosse was there and Du Maurier, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Sydney Colvin and Aubrey Beardsley. The Gosse children hung laurels on the bust when it was unveiled. Looking at it, Zangwill said: “The irony of it! Just as they did to him then they would do to another today, who had his genius.”