by Ann Thwaite
“We are only ten miles from the sea and the roads are perfect for bicycling.” It was less than ten miles from Rye, where Henry James was now installing himself at Lamb House. “We are neighbours and can borrow cabbages from each other,” Frances declared with a lack of practicality. James had taken to the bicycle in 1896 and it was one of the attractions of Rye that it was “somewhere I can, without disaster, bicycle”. Ellen Terry was only two or three miles away at Small Hythe, and Kipling could sometimes be encountered “trundling his bicycle up a difficult hill”. The rent for Maytham was half that for the Portland Place house and Frances decided that she could “work so much better in the country. It is under two hours from town so one can have Saturday to Monday house parties and can also run up to London for either business or pleasure when it is necessary.”
Bicyling was all the rage but there was little bicycling that summer. “Edith and I drive every afternoon in the Victoria . . . The bicycling is superb but . . . we are too tired in the afternoon after carrying the Rolvenden workmen about in our arms all morning . . . There are two or three people in the village who have always done the work for the Hall—there has been no competition so there is no need for them to learn how to move or think. And they are so sweet and so well-meaning and so simply amiably dawdling. One able-bodied young man stands on a step-ladder to put up a hook or a pole and an old man gravely holds the ladder. It takes two of them to do anything—and Edith and I believe that they go away and play marbles together. We lose them so often. It took two of them a whole day to put down a plain bedroom carpet.”
From an immediate practical point of view, this was frustrating, but Frances felt she was getting to know the real pace and atmosphere of “rustic English life”. “I believe I shall come upon hoards of ‘material’.” Like her own character Olivia Ferrol, she had long ago “fallen a victim to that dreadful habit of looking at everything in the light of material”. As material, Maytham was splendid. She could never—the Manchester-born half-American that she was—experience English country life as a real insider, but she was going to have a very good try. “There is a nice old square-towered church at Rolvenden with a Maytham pew for the gentry at the Hall and a Maytham pew for the servants. I am going to Church. I may teach in Sunday School (though I am not sure there is one) and I know I shall have school ‘treats’ in the Park. When I drive through the village, people touch their hats and I know almost everyone is related to me by baker-age or brewer-age or blacksmith-age. Just you give me time to make them adore me.”
Frances was aware of the temptations of the situation. She makes Sir Nigel in The Shuttle sneer, “I suppose it gratifies your vanity to play the Lady Bountiful.” Was it only her vanity that she was gratifying? Was it not more that desire she had always had to be needed, wanted, loved? Frances knew that love breeds love, that charity without love is useless. She had drawn a graphic picture more than ten years earlier in A Woman’s Will of loveless charity—Barbara Dysart distributing largesse, but making notes to take Forbes to task about his idleness, and to “read portions of Job to Mrs Feggs the next time she complains of her rheumatism”. “And yet Forbes gets drunk and Mrs Feggs will complain about rheumatism. And they hate her into the bargain. And I am sure there is no reason why they shouldn’t,” comments Térèse, “I should.” A Woman’s Will is really a sketch for The Shuttle, the book that was later to use so much of the Maytham material. It was Maytham that enabled Frances to expand and enrich the attractive sketch.
Frances enjoyed her first Christmas as Lady of the Manor. She was already really at home at Maytham. “When I enter its gates, I feel as if I had belonged here always!” She involved herself in everything. “I am a Clothing Club and a Mothers’ Union and several other most respectable things,” she wrote to Edith. She went visiting from cottage to cottage with “the little Vicaress”, Mrs Percival-Smith. “I took bundles of baby-clothes and little frocks and petticoats and found out names and all the rest. It was so nice.” She filled stockings with marbles and dolls for the village children and took part with enthusiasm in the annual dinner given by the “gentry” to the “old villagers” at the Bull Inn. “The great entertainment is to sing songs with choruses . . . Every year each man sings the same song. Old Johnny Hook with the nutcracker nose and chin and the white smock—he’s almost a hundred years old and each year he sings, “The Mistletoe Bough, Ah, the Mistletoe Bou-ou-ough . . .’ And then we all join in. You never saw your sister shine as she does when joining in choruses. I just sang and sang as loud as ever I could. It was a lovely party!”
Was this happiness? It seemed very much like it. The people of Rolvenden were apparently prepared to accept Frances as the Lady of the Manor, and her washerwoman, Mrs Burgess, admired the quantities of lace on her chemises. Little Lord Fauntleroy helped, of course. She was not regarded as a divorced novelist, an outsider, but as the author of a much-loved book. Everyone who could read had read Little Lord Fauntleroy and those who couldn’t took her at her face value, friendly, generous, sympathetic. Like Rosalie, in The Shuttle, “her sympathies were easily awakened and her purse was well filled and readily opened . . . Newly born infants or newly buried ones, old women with ‘bad legs’ and old men who needed comforts, equally touched her heart.”
In a letter to a close friend of this period, Rosamund Campbell, Frances wrote more than twenty years later: “It goes to my heart to be told that Rolvenden remembers me kindly. I loved the place so. Maytham was home to me.” In 1971, sixty-four years after Frances had left Rolvenden, I found it was still true. She was remembered and stories were told of her imaginative kindness in the village those long years before. Jenny Jenner remembered how she and her sister Hetty were given dolls dressed in velvet and how Frances would stop her carriage as she drove through the village (the two coachmen in top hats) and let the children ride the length of the village street. Alice Freeborn, the vicar’s daughter, also remembered toys at Christmas time (dolls in sailor suits) and a Christmas party in the school for all the village children. And old Mrs Judge, whose sister-in-law, Emily, worked at Maytham, remembered Frances visiting her when she was unable to earn money hop-picking because she had a newborn baby. She said she looked like Marie Lloyd in her large hat and feathers. Frances gave her port and left a gold sovereign in the baby’s fist. Mrs Judge’s situation had not eased a great deal in seventy years. She was still living with one cold tap and an earth closet down the garden, but, like Mrs Welden in The Shuttle, “she made no complaints”. The other person who remembered Frances was Harry Millum. His father worked at the Hall for many years as a gardener and Harry went there as a stable lad in 1898, just at the time Frances took over the house. He was twelve and earned half a crown a week. “The calm here is good for me,” she wrote to Vivian at the end of her first summer. “I hope to go back to first principles and merely live without thinking—heretofore I have thought without living.” An important part of the new life was the garden. Frances had always loved gardens but she had never, until now, been a gardener. She spent a great deal of the autumn deep in the study of Kelway’s Seed and Plant Catalogue. Everyone was enlisted in the cause of her new enthusiasm.
David Murray, A.R.A., fresh from a visit to Maytham, discussed her need of roses with Sir James Blyth. He had roses, grown out of doors in December, fit to decorate his table when he dined the Duke of Cambridge, and he and his brother were happy to despatch three hundred roses (of a French variety called Laurette Messimy) to be collected from Ashford station. The Blyth brothers were “delightfully reminiscent of the pleasure they had often derived from passages” in Frances’ books and were eager to thank her with roses.
The Rose Garden at Maytham became extremely important to Frances, for it served as an outdoor workroom. Whenever it was fine enough, she would go there in her white dress and large hat, and write. The gardeners knew not to disturb her. “It was as if she had something inside her she just had to get out,” Harry Millum said, looking back seventy-years. In the Rose Garden, F
rances wrote most of The Shuttle and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst, she turned Sara Crewe into A Little Princess and she finished The Dawn of a Tomorrow. And it was here in the Rose Garden that she felt the first ideas for The Secret Garden, as she made friends with a robin which would come to take crumbs from her hand “the instant I opened the little door in the leaf-covered garden wall”. Robins are “almost as friendly as dogs if you know how to get on with them”. Frances was thrilled to find that she did. When she arrived at Maytham, the Rose Garden was an old orchard reverted to wilderness, full of ancient apple-trees, with pears, peaches and plums clinging to the walls. “It was entered by a low, arched gateway in the wall, closed by a wooden door. The ground underneath the twisted, leaning old apple tree was cleared of all its weeds and thorns and sown with grass” (Frances watched the “thin-little green beard of grass” anxiously) “and then at every available place, roses were planted to climb up the ancient trunks and over the walls.” There Frances had her table and chair, her tuffet and rug, and a large Japanese umbrella, flowery with bamboo ribs, for shade if it were needed.
Harry Millum does not seem to think the gardeners at Maytham appreciated Frances’ actual gardening, but her letters record her transplanting seedlings and pruning; and The Secret Garden shows that her knowledge of gardening was practical and not merely a matter of waving her hand at her gardeners and saying “Let that be an Herbaceous Border!” Indeed in her last book of all, In the Garden, published after her death, she wrote:
I should always have preferred to have been at least two strong men in one and to have done all the work with my own hands. I love it all. I love to dig. I love to kneel down on the grass at the edge of a flower bed and pull out the weeds fiercely and throw them into a heap by my side. I love to fight with those who can spring up again almost in a night and taunt me. I tear them up by the roots again and again, and when at last after many days, perhaps, it seems as if I had beaten them for a time at least, I go away feeling like an army with banners.
Anyone who can so elevate and enjoy the tedious job of weeding is surely a true gardener. Her hatred of ragweed and pussley was intense (“I prefer not to speak of pussley”); and so was her love of old-fashioned flowers, such as petunias and zinnias and marigolds.
One of the happiest memories of her life, she wrote at the end of it was “of a softly rainy spring in Kent when I spent nearly three weeks kneeling on a small rubber mat on the grass edge of a heavenly old herbaceous border bed, which a big young gardener was trenching and remaking, while I followed him and tucked softly into the rich sweet damp mold the plants which were to bloom in loveliness for me in the summer. The rain was not constant. It only softly drizzled in a sort of mist on my red frieze garden cloak and hood . . . Day after day, I knelt on the grass edge and tucked my plants into the dark rich mellow English earth.”
But Frances did not, of course, spend all her time writing and gardening. The life of the world went on. There were many visitors. “The charmingest Americans shall all be invited to Maytham,” she told Vivian. Annie Russell was one who came. She had starred in that earlier, vastly more successful production of Esmeralda. Now she had been playing She and stayed at Maytham for a week before sailing home. But the American Frances wanted most was elusive. Dear Henry James at Rye was so near and yet so unattainable. His letters protest how much he regrets how little he sees her, but perhaps they protest too much. Was it that “mere twaddle of graciousness” again?
Just before leaving Portland Place, Frances had bought a set of James’ books and had sent them round to De Vere Gardens to be autographed. He returned them with this note:
34 De Vere Gardens, W.,
June 16, 1898
Dear Mrs Burnett
And yet I lingered—I never leave your presence and precinct on wings or by leaps—I was leaden-footed and most reluctant. And now I’m glad of anything—even anything so dreary as my own books—that may renew our communion.
I am divided between joy at the thought of so many copies sold—my publishers’ statement is usually one on alternate years—and anguish for your having added that thumping, pecuniary excrescence to the treasure you are lavishing at Maytham.
But I will charge you nothing for the signs-manual. There, don’t take them to Maytham (unless you are really otherwise homeless); they will require an extra van. However, if you do, I will speed over and scatter broadcast that I am
Yours most respectfully,
Henry James
But when they were both in Kent (that cabbage-borrowing distance apart) James did not do much speeding over. They did not see as much of each other as they had in London. There was a good deal of discussion on paper about meeting but very little actual contact. James was busy, weighed down by work or visitors or heavy colds. The following extravagantly phrased letter is undated:
Lamb House, Rye,
Wednesday.
Noblest of Neighbours and Most Heavenly of Women!—Your gorgeous, glorious gift shook Lamb House to its foundations an hour or two ago—but that agitated structure, with the light of purpose rapidly kindling in its eye, recuperates even as I write, with a sense of the futility, under the circumstances of a mere, economical swoon. We may swoon again—it is more than likely (if you can swoon from excess of—everything!)—but we avail ourselves of this lucid interval absolutely to fawn upon you with the force of our gratitude.
It’s too magnificent—we don’t deserve the quarter (another peach, please—yes it is the 7th—and one more fig—it is I can’t deny it—the 19th!) Well, I envy you the power to make a poor, decent body so happy—and, still more, so proud. The decent body has a pair of other decent bodies coming to him for the week’s end, from town, and—my eye! won’t he swagger over his intimate friend, the Princess of Maytham, for whom these trophies and treasures are as mere lumps of sugar or grains of salt.
For once in my life I shall be as I have always yearned and fondly dreamed: I shall say, “Tomkins, hand the fruits.” And Tomkins, who has a red nose and is universally hideous, will look for the occasion like the celebrated picture of Utica’s daughter, with the groaning, golden salver furnishing in the air.
It has its crushing side—but I shall have sufficiently rebounded, even from that week’s work, (under the grape cure) to ride over to you again and pour forth at your feet the unalterable sentiments of yours, dear Mrs Burnett, more and more gratefully and constantly,
Henry James
Did James really relish the gift so much? He was not usually short of fruit at Lamb House. In 1901 he wrote to Miss Muir Mackenzie that his figs were “unprecedently numerous”. If the letter was written that year, it would have been a case of coals to Newcastle. And, in any year, James rather resented a munificence which cast him in the rôle of comparatively unsuccessful writer. It was going to be hard when Edith Wharton bought a car with the proceeds of her last novel when, with the proceeds of his, he had merely been able to buy “a small go-kart or hand barrow on which my guests’ luggage is wheeled from the station” and with the proceeds of the next he might just about be able to paint it: “It needs a coat of paint.” James was very conscious of the grandeur of life at Maytham compared with that at Lamb House. She was the mountain, he the molehill, at least in terms of books sold. In 1899, preparing to buy Lamb House, he wrote to his brother William:
My whole being cries out aloud for something that I can call my own—and when I look round me at the splendour of so many of the “literary” fry, my confrères (M. Crawford’s, P. Bourget’s, Humphry Ward’s, Hodgson Burnett’s, W. D. Howellses etc.) and I feel that I may strike the world as still, at fifty-six with my long labour and my genius, reckless, presumptuous and unwarranted in curling up (for more assured peaceful production) in a poor little $10,000 shelter—once for all and for all time—then I do feel the bitterness of humiliation, the iron enters into my soul, and (I blush to confess it,) I weep! But enough, enough, enough!
He was desperately writing The Awkward Age (it was already
being serialized in Harper’s, before it was finished, in the way that some of Frances’ books were) when Alice Skinner, the parlour-maid, rebuffed Frances. She would always turn people away from the door when he was working for “when interrupted during his work, he would shout”. Frances wrote to give him the invitation she had tried to give verbally. This is his reply:
Lamb House, Rye.
November 11
Dear Illustrious and Gracious Neighbour:
Your letter has the fullest charm of kindness and wit, and I am in a poor frame to acknowledge it worthily, being half blind with a sickish cold—which is agreeably developing, however, so that if I wait for it to leave me clean and alert, I shall risk seeming to you a laggard in courtesy.
Take it from me then, in staggering accents and with profuse pocket-handkerchiefs, that I am touched greatly by your horribly frustrated little glimpse of my really amiable and almost interesting little old house. Yes—it has a meaning—but you couldn’t read out a word or two of that.
If I had only known you were coming I would have pulled myself so straight! I shall insist on knowing it very soon. I stay here till (toward) Xmas—perhaps even through it, on to Jan 1st, the latter, in fact, most probably, if I see my way on Jan 1st, as I desire to go abroad till April.
I am finishing, for dear life, a book—and the day after it is done shall wheel straight over to ask you for luncheon, when I will arrange and settle everything—anent, I mean, the other visit.
I will come with pleasure for some Sunday. I much desire a long, fraternizing talk with you, and as full a comparing of notes as a mole hill can compare with a mountain. I’ve the faintest recollection of your view, your woody gardens, garden produce or wild park scenery. I hope you are taking root half as firmly as I. I’ll pull up mine for a minute just to show you. But I require just at this moment more of a tucking-in treatment. I am yours in a passion of appreciation and sneezes.