Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  Mary returned to Sewickley filled with noble resolutions to work less and play more, but there was no stemming the pressures. Early in the fall of that same year, she collapsed and went for some more surgery. The hospital seemed to be the only place she could get any rest, and even there she was not left in peace. Aunt Ella, Cornelia’s sister, came one day to visit. Ella still limped from that long-ago near-tragedy at the exposition when she and her young niece had crashed down from the collapsed balcony with an overload of pianos; on this day she sat down beside the bed and told Mary that she was dying of cancer.

  This was hardly the way to cheer up a hospital patient, but Mary comforted her aunt as best she could in the circumstances. Once out of bed, she added a new chore to her daily routine, getting off the train in Pittsburgh and climbing the hill to Ella’s small house, which was situated not far from where Tom Roberts’s office used to be. Mary would do what she could to make her aunt comfortable, then walk through familiar streets to her husband’s office, enter her black-walled cavern, and get back to writing.

  Mary offered to provide her aunt with a private nurse, but Ella wouldn’t have one. She remained in her little house, alone most of each day except for the partially helpless, very old woman who lived upstairs. This woman was the mother of Ella’s first husband, who had died of tuberculosis when his and Ella’s only son was still a baby. Mary remembered her late uncle well. She could picture him bundled into an overcoat even on hot summer days, walking to the slaughterhouse where, under the doctor’s orders, he would drink fresh blood still warm from the slain animals.

  As Grandmother Roberts and later Cornelia had done, the widowed Ella had taken in sewing to support herself and the boy. After a while she’d married again and had a baby girl. Her second husband, also tubercular, had died within two years of their marriage; she’d kept on sewing. When she developed cataracts and lost the sight in one eye, she used the other as best she could. Mary was wracked with anguish to watch this gallant woman in such a state, and she hated to leave Ella alone. It was all right, her aunt would reassure her, the children would be coming home soon. The only complaint Ella ever made was that the morphia made her mouth dry.

  On the day Aunt Ella died, Mary was back in the hospital, this time with diphtheria. She went into coma and almost made it a double funeral. For two weeks after her aunt’s death, once the lights had been put out, she could feel Ella’s presence in the room. Then one night, Ella was gone. Why had she come? Where did she go? What was life all about, anyway? Mary could find no answers; she thought perhaps it was better not to ask.

  Beatrice DeMille was still sending Mary plays to read, still asking her now and then to serve as a play doctor. That fall, Mary herself put on a farce called Cheer Up. Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldwyn were delighted to back a piece by the author of Seven Days. Walter Hampden played the lead, Cecil DeMille produced, his brother William assisted. But Cheer Up cheered nobody—the play was pulled off in short order and Mary went back to her regular job. She was finished (again) with the theater. She had no interest in writing for the movies; that would have meant moving her family to the West Coast, which was unthinkable.

  She organized some more. Mondays became mail days, and a secretary came in to help her get through the stacks of letters that arrived every week. Sometimes Mary dictated all day long, so at least her hand got a rest. As for the bookkeeping, that was just a matter of jotting down in a notebook what publisher had bought which piece, and how much she’d got paid for it. Often as not, she didn’t even bother to date her entries.

  Mary was making a determined effort to live a quiet, orderly life, to concentrate on her home, her family, and her religion. She’d never quite forgotten those Sabbath-day sermons about a God of wrath and vengeance, and she seems to have retained a nervous feeling that he might still be out to get her. But there were other ministers, she knew now, who preached of a merciful All-Father, slow to judge and chary of blame. She knelt to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church and arose with a new sense of peace. After a while, her husband and sons were confirmed also; at last Mary was able to believe that she and her loved ones were all of them safe.

  They had reason enough to feel safe during the winter of 1913–14. Mary drew a cozy picture of Sunday night supper laid before a blazing wood fire in the den, the family gathered around their festive board, the dogs giving them hopeful nudges, scraps being slipped furtively under the table, sled tracks in the snow outside the windows; then, at dawn on Monday, the faithful William showing up to shovel a path so that they could get to the train and begin another week’s work.

  The one question that mystery novelists hear above all others is “Where do you get your ideas?” That’s a hard one to answer. One modern-day writer always replies simply “Pittsburgh.” It was in fact Pittsburgh that gave Mary the idea for a novel called, even more simply, “K”. More specifically, this was one of those vivid pictures that can flash into one’s mind during the magical brief hiatus between sleep and awakening, and sometimes spark off the process of plot building.

  Mary’s flash was a memory of her husband as a young bachelor surgeon, throwing a fit because an incompetent nurse had miscounted the gauze sponges used to clean the open incision, almost causing him to sew up the patient with a sponge still inside. Such things had been known to happen during surgery. What might have been the result if Stanley hadn’t been such a stickler for correct procedure in the operating room?

  Mary began to develop her picture. She could see a quiet man neither old nor young, not well-dressed but not ill-kempt, walking alone down a quiet street lined with shabby dwellings and little shops. She envisioned two doctors, one middle-aged, the other younger, handsomer, more prosperous-looking. This was the street she’d grown up in. She moved a young girl into one of the houses, a girl just blossoming into womanhood, a good, helpful, hardworking girl who had begun to show the rare beauty of face and manner that too many men might covet. From here on, all Mary had to do was tag along after K and write his story as it came.

  Halfway through the first draft, her hand gave out. Hot-water soaks and massage no longer helped, the fingers and palm were stiff and swollen, the wrist ached, the arm hurt all the way up to the shoulder. What did it matter? Mary had lost faith in K; she liked her story too much, therefore it couldn’t possibly be any good. She foresaw that this would become another The Street of Seven Stars, perhaps not quite a flop but by no means a success. Still, now that she’d got this far, she might as well struggle along as best she could. Her tongue at least still worked. Mary called in her secretary and began to dictate.

  Just telling a story to somebody who knows shorthand seems an easy way to get a book written. For some authors it’s the perfect method; for others it offers a temptation to lose the thread of the plot, to ramble on about inconsequentialities, to become verbose and boring. Mary had 40,000 words on paper before she realized the book was a mess. Her hand was a little less painful by now, so she picked up her overworked fountain pen, went back to the beginning, and rewrote the entire text. She still couldn’t make herself believe that “K” would come to anything. She was on the point of throwing it out, but she begged her husband to look over what she’d done and give her an honest opinion.

  Stanley took her manuscript to read on the train. Mary stayed home and paced the floor. When his call came, she was in such a state that she could hardly pick up the phone. “Go ahead and finish it,” he told her. “This is far and away the best thing you’ve ever done.”

  So it was not, after all, a mental aberration to like what she was doing. Mary wrote the last chapters of “K” in July 1914 and sent the typescript to Houghton Mifflin in Boston, her publisher at that time. Her editors were delighted, everybody was delighted. “K” would turn out to be another success, and it was time to give the author a treat. Since fishing and family were Mary’s great delights, the Rineharts packed up their rods and reels and headed for French River, near the northern end of Georgian Bay in Ontario.
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br />   This would be Mary’s first real experience of camping. Stanley loved the out-of-doors, he delighted in living rough. So did his sons. So, to her surprise, did Mary. So did their dog Jock, until he lost a fight with a porcupine and Dr. Rinehart had to operate. They made portages to inland lakes, the two Stanleys carrying the canoe overland from one body of water to the next; Mary, Alan, and young Ted tagging along behind with the provisions, the frying pan, and the coffeepot. They met Indians coming along in canoes who tried to sell them meat that was allegedly veal but was in fact venison.

  Though Georgian Bay was already a favored vacationing area, amenities were primitive. Their bathtub was a sheltered cove. Mary got marooned there one day, until two strange men who had been casting their fishing lines across the mouth of the cove went away, little knowing that they’d kept a naked woman sitting up to her neck in chilly water with only a towel and a cake of soap for company.

  That was nothing compared to the time young Stanley and another boy he’d met at the campground went canoeing, not realizing what a treacherous body of water French River could be. At five in the afternoon a violent summer storm came up. It passed over, darkness fell, the boys still weren’t back. Dr. Rinehart rowed frantically over to Manitoulin Island to find help and a motorboat, Mary stood on a rocky point, fighting to keep from going crazy with terror. When the boys finally showed up, wet and tired but safe and sound, they couldn’t understand why Mrs. Rinehart took a screaming fit.

  A little steamboat plied Georgian Bay every day, bringing fresh provisions, boxes of fishing worms, and the Toronto newspapers, which told the vacationing Rineharts that Germany was at war. They were not at all surprised. They remembered far too well the smartly uniformed troops goose-stepping down the broad avenues of Berlin, their long waits in half-empty restaurants until the Offizieren had been seated, the dirty looks they’d got for speaking English among the patriotic Germans.

  Everybody was predicting that the fighting would soon be over. The newspapers were full of grudging admiration for the superefficient Teutons and Kaiser Wilhelm’s invincible war machine. As the United States shook its collective head and stayed neutral, the superefficient invaders blundered their way across Belgium, advancing in mass formation according to protocol and getting mowed down in rows, slaughtering innocent civilians in retaliation for their loss of face, mounting a campaign of terror among the overrun Belgians that would convert the West’s reluctant admiration to wholehearted loathing and wrest defeat out of what might have been a fairly easy victory.

  France and England immediately went in on the side of the Belgians. Canada, still a part of the British Empire, was consequently also at war with what would become the Axis. Canadian troops would enter the fray early in 1915 at Ypres in France, where some of them would get their first whiff of the foe’s terrible new weapon, mustard gas. When the exhausted French troops broke, it would be the rookie Canadians who plugged the gap and prevented Kaiser Bill’s alleged Invincibles from driving through to the channel ports and on to England.

  From then on, as Britain’s prime minister Lloyd George would avow, “whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line, they prepared for the worst.” At Vimy Ridge in the spring of 1917, at Hill 70, in the bloody inch-by-inch slog at Passchendaele; on the “Black Day of the German Army,” August 8, 1918, at Amiens, when it became apparent that the Allies were taking control of the war, it was the Canadians who spearheaded the attacks. Approximately 425,000 of them went overseas, and they would keep on fighting with great valor and often little credit until the war was won. By then their losses would have reached a staggering 60,661, roughly one-seventh of their entire strength.

  All the Rineharts got to see of this valiant band were a few bewildered-looking young chaps in high-necked khaki tunics and clumsily wrapped puttees left over from the Boer War, standing guard over Canadian bridges. For now, the trouble in Europe was too new, too far away. The fishing at French River was almost too good. Mary and the boys kept reeling them in, Stanley Senior wielded the scaling knife. By the time they left Canada, he’d have grown to hate the mere sight of a fin.

  While her menfolk slept in the pine-scented air and dreamed, perchance, of fish, Mary lay awake thinking about the war. Not about the horror, the brutality, the wanton destruction of property, the ghastly waste of human lives; those would impinge on her consciousness later. At the moment, she was focusing on how she could get overseas and what she’d find there to write about.

  For the time being, however, she had nowhere to go but home. Word had gone out that any war correspondent found near the Allied front would be immediately arrested and thrown into jail. Mary put off her hopes of an active role in the war and sublimated her thirst for adventure with the help of her dream woman, Tish.

  Here might be a reasonable place to draw a few parallels between Mary Roberts Rinehart and another writer of popular fiction who achieved international fame more or less by accident. Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story appeared in London in 1886, when Mary was ten years old. It did for him what The Circular Staircase would do for her a quarter of a century later.

  Both of them had been trained for careers in medicine, both had begun writing simply in the hope of making a little extra money, both were astounded to find themselves getting rich and famous through the trifles they tossed off at breakneck speed. Both got caught up in wartime activities, using their medical training to get a foot in the door. Doyle had volunteered as a British army doctor in the Boer War, Mary would perform a valuable service inspecting Allied field hospitals for the Red Cross. Both wrote vividly of their wartime experiences, both would later skirmish with politics, both wrote long-running plays and straight novels. Both are now remembered almost exclusively for their mysteries.

  And—perhaps not many of today’s readers know this—both relieved the strain of being public figures leading admirable lives by writing outrageous farces. Fiction writers can hardly avoid putting bits of themselves into their characters. One can’t help wondering just who ran rampant through their wilder tales, riding roughshod over everybody else, committing acts of pillage and vandalism with impunity, getting into impossible situations and, naturally, always coming out on top.

  Doyle’s rampageous alter ego was a bearded monster named Professor George Edward Challenger; Mary’s was Miss Letitia Carberry, a spinster of uncertain years and infallibly certain opinions. Her two faithful satellites were Lizzie, the narrator, and Aggie, the one with hay fever. As was mentioned many pages ago, Mary’s Aunt Tish (the one who made that disastrous marriage with the fickle floorwalker) liked to think that she was the model for the Tish who was to become for almost thirty years one of the brightest stars in the Saturday Evening Post’s galaxy, right up there with Tugboat Annie Brennan, Chief Engineer Colin Glencannon of the SS Inchliffe Castle, and Alexander Bott, hotshot salesman for the Earthworm Tractor Company. In fact, Mary’s muse had been nudged rather prosaically, sometime around 1910, by three nice ladies at a summer cottage who were trying by various ingenious but ineffectual methods to disencumber themselves of somebody else’s dog.

  At that time, Harper’s magazine had asked Mary for a short story. Pleased to be solicited by so august a publication, Mary had dashed off a tale based on the three ladies’ dilemma, titled it “Three Pirates of Penzance,” and shot it along. Harper’s had shot it right back with only a printed rejection slip enclosed. Once over the shock, she’d mailed her spurned brainchild off to the Saturday Evening Post. There Miss Letitia Carberry was greeted with delight; Mary vowed that Tish would be the Post’s for as long as they wanted her.

  To get back to Harper’s, though only in passing, once Tish had made her welcome debut in the Post, Mary got a plaintive letter from her erstwhile disdainers. They had not yet received the story she’d promised to send them. What Harper’s would most particularly like to get from her was exactly the sort of tale that had so recently appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. Too bad, but nothing cou
ld be done about it now.

  So Tish was a shelter in the time of storm, a way for Mary to work off her excess adrenaline during this holiday season of 1914. The Rineharts celebrated Christmas as usual, with William playing Santa Claus and presents all around. Underneath the gaiety, however, a new tension had arisen. The Saturday Evening Post’s Christmas gift to Mrs. Rinehart had been an agreement to finance her trip overseas.

  While America was still neutral and hoping to stay that way, the Allies were being assisted with medical supplies, among other things. The Red Cross would be greatly relieved to have a representative in the field, finding out firsthand how field hospitals were being run and where the needs were greatest. After a long, serious talk, Stanley had agreed that Mary should go. His consent may have been predicated on a tacit assumption that his wife, like so many other hopeful American journalists, would get no farther than London. Had he but known!

  CHAPTER 19

  A Painful Good-bye, A Dubious Welcome

  When Mary sent Tish to war, her heroine took along Lizzie, Aggie, and a bottle of blackberry cordial. Mary herself would be traveling alone, but no less encumbered. Not having any idea what, if anything, she’d be getting herself into, she prepared for all contingencies. Her outfit for the trenches included a tan coat and skirt of sturdy fabric, high-laced boots, a long, dark military cape, a man’s brown velour hat, a mackintosh, and an umbrella. She’d been told it rained a lot in the war zone. Along with her battle fatigues, Mary packed a few modish gowns, including one of white velvet, plus a set of ermine furs, a black velvet suit, and a tasteful assortment of jewelry. One never knew which foreign dignitary one might happen to meet; a member of the Sewickley Country Club in good standing could hardly go to visit a queen, much less a king, in high-laced boots and a mackintosh.