Had She But Known

by MacLeod, Charlotte;

  The Prince of Wales was in the British army. His younger brother the duke of York was in the Royal Navy; King George was touring the battlefields, boosting morale in the front-line trenches heedless of enemy shellfire and falling bombs. Back in England, the palace grounds had been opened to convalescent soldiers. The queen was gathering relief supplies on a grand scale, visiting hospitals, not letting her escorts get away with showing her only the less harrowing casualties in their deluded attempts to spare her feelings. When the German blockade of 1917 cut down on supplies of food to the British Isles, Queen Mary picked up a shovel and led the royal family in digging up a potato patch on the palace grounds as an example to her people.

  Had Mary Roberts Rinehart but known that she and the royal Mary were sisters under the skin, she might have felt more relaxed about the protocol she anticipated having to follow. As had happened with the Belgian king’s audience, she’d been given very little time to prepare for her English visit. She set off for Calais in such a rush that she forgot to obtain one all-important visa. Now here she was on the quay, her boat was preparing to sail. She mustn’t keep the queen waiting, but she couldn’t get aboard without the right papers. What was she to do?

  A respectable-looking Englishman was standing nearby, also waiting to board. Mary rushed up to him waving her passport, poured out her problem and asked if he could give her any advice. He listened in silence, then walked away. She turned to another, this man wouldn’t even stay to listen. She realized too late that both men probably had her pegged as a spy. Everybody had spies on the brain these days. Pretty women in fur coats, accosting perfect strangers at channel crossings with wild pleas to be saved from committing lèse-majesté, were particularly to be shunned by prudent males traveling alone.

  Mary should have known better, considering that all during her stay in France she was never once allowed to sign the too-Teutonic name Rinehart to any of her cables home. Her husband’s German ancestors had been among the earliest settlers in Pennsylvania, but Stanley Rinehart himself was of half-Scottish descent and American as apple pan dowdy. He must have been sadly puzzled by those overseas messages that told him only “Your wife is well and sends love” and were signed with assorted names that he’d never heard before.

  Anyway, Mary rose above her panic, hunted up a station attendant who owned a bicycle, waved a golden sovereign under his nose, gave him her passport, the queen’s cable, her Red Cross card, and a promise that he’d get the sovereign the second he came back to the quay with the missing document. He was off in a flash. She handed the man who was minding the gangplank another sovereign not to let the boat go until she was aboard, and stood dithering until the out-of-wind cyclist zoomed back down the quay with her papers all correct. He got his sovereign, she gasped out her thanks and rushed up the gangplank.

  By now it was dark, the night was calm and clear. Mary spent most of the crossing on deck, standing all by herself at the rail. Once a crew member appeared out of the shadows and pointed out to her a white streak in the water diagonally astern of where they were standing. “Torpedo,” he said, and returned to the shadows.

  Mary didn’t know whether or not the elusive seaman had told her the truth; but that one word of his was, for some reason, a balm to her tortured nerves. The enemy had tried and failed to blow them up, the danger was over, she might as well quit worrying. Not long after that calming incident, the searchlights of the port picked up the ferry and guided her in. Came the dawn, Mary was in London wondering how to get past those padlocked gates at Claridge’s Hotel.

  The gates opened, the red carpet began to roll out. Lord Cowdray, with whom Mary had had tea in Downing Street during her earlier visit, telephoned the hotel to let Her Majesty’s distinguished visitor know that, since his wife was not in London at this time, Mrs. Rinehart was welcome to use Lady Cowdray’s car. Mary had assumed that a chauffeur would come with the car, but she hadn’t reckoned on a footman as well. Her prearranged visit to one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting that afternoon went off with more pomp and circumstance than she’d bargained for.

  The lady-in-waiting was charming, as ladies-in-waiting are naturally expected to be. She poured tea for Mrs. Rinehart and chatted about the royal family, whose photographs were on display all over the room. The American Mary found the English woman’s obvious devotion to the great lady whom she served rather touching, and her tactful way of dealing with a gauche American’s faux pas an impressive lesson in diplomacy.

  Mary had made the gaffe of intimating that Her Majesty seemed to be a humorless sort of person. She could not have been more wrong. The reason for those poker faces at public functions, she learned, was that Queen Mary’s entourage knew from experience that, sometime during the event, something ludicrous was bound to happen. Whatever it was, the queen would notice, because she never missed a trick. If she happened to catch a sympathetic eye, she wouldn’t be able to keep from laughing. Rather than risk upsetting the royal aplomb, her loving ladies-in-waiting had learned to keep looking straight ahead and thinking, one assumes, of the empire.

  Now that she’d been briefed on the background, Mary got her orders. She would be received at Saint James’s Palace. She would arrive punctually at the stated time, the queen would appear fifteen minutes later. When greeted, Mrs. Rinehart would curtsy and the queen would extend her hand. It was usual for the person being received to kiss the hand, but Mrs. Rinehart didn’t have to if she would find the gesture awkward. Mary felt awkward just hearing about it, so they agreed on diplomatic grounds to scratch the kiss.

  Mary must have been ineffably relieved to get out of that bedraggled black taffeta dress and change into some of the elegant clothes she’d left waiting for her in London. Her diary records the toilette she put together for her visit to Saint James’s: a black velvet skirt, a white crepe blouse, a black brocaded coat trimmed with skunk fur, a black turban with black aigrettes, white-topped black boots, with all their buttons on, white ermine muff and stole, and the white gloves that she’d learned from her Belgian experience weren’t really mandatory when visiting royalty but she took them anyway.

  Mary’s choice of skunk to wear before the queen may sound absurd to modern readers, but this rich, glossy, long-haired fur was all the rage then and for some time to come. Why it went out of fashion is anybody’s guess. Those Lifebuoy soap ads sensitizing the public to the social consequences of BO may have been a factor, for skunk fur did tend to retain a certain faint but distinctive whiffiness that neither perfume nor mothballs could ever quite eradicate. But it was awfully pretty.

  The ladies-in-waiting told her how smart she looked. Mary probably said pleasant things to them in return but later on, in My Story, she would wax a bit catty about the queen. Perhaps she’d been disappointed that day when Her Majesty showed up wearing a plain green broadcloth suit, a black hat with feathers, fox furs, and what Mary dismissed a bit contemptuously as “some diamond and emerald jewelry.” She said the queen dressed badly, had too much hair, and wore her hats too high.

  It would have been kinder and truer to have said that Queen Mary did not conform to the mode of the moment. According to James Pope-Hennessy’s comprehensive biography as well as a multitude of portraits and photographs, both as princess of Wales and as queen, Her Majesty had always realized the importance of dressing as befitted a representative of the Crown. Her taste was excellent. She had the height, the figure, and the presence to carry off elaborate gowns and displays of court jewels that would have overwhelmed a lesser wearer.

  Before the war, when foreign travel was possible, her elegance had charmed great crowds both at home and abroad. As for whether some people now considered her style passé, Queen Mary could not have cared less. She dressed for one person alone, and that one was her “own darling Georgie dear,” that shy, gruff, inarticulate, often irascible ex-naval officer who hadn’t wanted to be king and could never bring himself to speak aloud the tender words of love, devotion, and gratitude that he poured out in letter after lett
er to his “sweet Angel May.” King George V was not a man to welcome change; he liked his wife the way she’d always been. Her job was not to look chic but to look regal, and she did.

  In those parlous times, the royal wardrobe was the least of Queen Mary’s concerns. Like Elisabeth of Belgium, she had rushed into the war effort almost before the first gun was fired, outlining plans to assist existing relief organizations in whatever ways were possible. Relief would have to be women’s work; the men would be needed for sterner tasks. But what could women do? At the beginning, it appeared that the only ways for them to serve would be by collecting clothes and money for the many who were already destitute or being thrown out of work as a result of the sudden upheaval, or by knitting khaki socks and stomach belts (shades of Amelia Peabody Emerson!) or performing the service that would inspire a popular song titled “Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers.”

  As to sewing, Her Royal Highness had an organization already in existence. Queen Mary’s Needlework Guild was quickly mobilized and greatly expanded, the enormous State Apartments at Saint James’s were given over as workrooms. This was where Mary Roberts Rinehart was shown upon her arrival; her visit turned out to be much less formal than she had anticipated. When she went in, she found the ladies of the guild hard at work. When the queen came along, they dropped the mandatory curtsy then talked shop with her in a manner more professional than courtly. It was business as usual until Her Majesty got to Mary Roberts Rinehart, who of course must be formally introduced.

  Mary bowed over the queen’s hand and waited for her to speak first. Her Majesty knew the protocol better than King Albert had, and she said kind things about the aid Americans were sending. She was even kinder about the Canadians, as well she ought to have been, considering how generously they had responded with both supplies and troops. She remarked that, while Londoners were by now taking the British troops as part of the scenery, they still burst into cheers when a Canadian regiment marched by.

  This could have been meant as an oblique hint for the Americans to get further involved, but Queen Mary was too good a diplomat to pursue the matter. She asked whether Mrs. Rinehart had visited any of the English hospitals during her stay in France, and whether they were getting all the supplies they needed. Mary managed to respond intelligently, even though she was having to revise some preconceived notions in a hurry.

  The queen must be the most unphotogenic woman alive, Mary thought, for even simply dressed for her work party with the wrong kind of hat and and with her hair dressed too high, she was very handsome. Her coloring was delicate, her complexion exquisite, her eyes a lovely blue. She was a bit stiff at first—Mary sensed that she was basically a shy person. Once the lady-in-waiting had prompted Mrs. Rinehart to tell the story of her sadly unorthodox audience with King Albert of Belgium, however, Queen Mary demonstrated most convincingly that she did indeed have a sense of humor.

  When the queen showed signs of moving on, Mary stepped back but was motioned to go with her. She was talking freely now, showing her guest from overseas some of the countless articles that the guild was collecting and dispensing. She picked up a baby’s sweater knitted in a hideous shade of yellow and expressed a tart opinion of anybody who would pick such a horrid color to put on a tiny baby. She waxed mildly prideful over a skillfully packed canvas roll, one of many thousands that had been sent to the army. Along with a towel, soap, toothbrush, nail brush, and tooth powder, the roll contained a change of flannels, extra socks, and abdominal belt, in case the men in the trenches ever found time to bathe, brush, and change their underwear.

  Having got all this stuff out, the queen despaired of getting it back in again. One of the ladies took over, and the queen passed on, but not without a final word. As Mary took her extended hand and curtsied, she asked, “Were you not frightened the night you were in the Belgian trenches?”

  “Not half so frightened as I was this afternoon, Your Majesty,” Mary responded. The queen smiled, the audience was over.

  Later, Mary Roberts Rinehart extolled the work of the Queen’s Needlework Guild. She did not mention—perhaps she never knew—that at one point the needlework guild nearly sabotaged the queen’s purpose by doing too good a job. Those mountains of socks and shirts that the volunteers turned out were threatening to take away the livelihood of other women who worked in garment factories or did piecework at home.

  As soon as the situation was made clear to her, Queen Mary steered the needleworkers into less fiscally disastrous channels and launched the Queen’s Work for Women Fund as a subsidiary of the National Relief Fund. This led to the Central Committee for Women’s Training and Employment, which had the queen’s patronage but not her personal involvement. Even a queen could do only so much, and there was always so much to do.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart’s London schedule was getting as tight as the queen’s. She had to go to Buckingham Palace the following day for the sole purpose of signing her name in the guest book. Queen Mary, the Grand Acquisitor, collected signatures as well as works of art and many other things. One thing Her Majesty hadn’t collected, Mary discovered, was a decent pen to sign with. After having debated with herself as to whether she was properly Mrs. Stanley or Mary Roberts in this instance and opted for the latter, Mary picked up the terrible pen and signed the book with a shaking hand. She made a poor job of it, but what could the Crown expect from a mere foreigner?

  Her main purpose achieved, Mary kept a few social engagements that had risen out of her royal visit and even managed to spend a little time in her own milieu. Sir Charles Wyndham and Mary Moore were producing a British version of Seven Days. Mary Rinehart attended a few rehearsals and got the disturbing impression of a major culture gap. As has been explained earlier in this book, the entire plot hung on the fact that the house was under quarantine. Over here, where an Englishman’s house was his castle, nobody was going to believe that a whole cast of characters would allow themselves to be held incommunicado by the health inspector just because a servant came down with smallpox. Mary tried to explain this to Miss Moore over a cup of tea. The coproducer seemed to understand what she was saying but failed to be convinced. The show went on, and soon came off. The playwright wasn’t around to watch the final curtain descend; Mary was back in the war zone.

  She had been startled to learn that, during her brief stay in London, civilian travel between England and the Continent had suddenly been made next to impossible. Visas were harder to get, travelers were being searched at railway stations and ports of embarkation. The Germans had announced that, as of February 18, all vessels leaving the coast of England would be sunk by their U-boats. Mary’s agenda called for her to be met in Calais on the nineteenth and given a tour of the French and British fronts, a special privilege that no journalist could afford to miss. Lord Northcliffe told her she’d better wait a few days and see what developed, but Mary didn’t want to wait. She’d been away too long. She was aching to finish what she’d come for and go home.

  So she packed her suitcase, picked up her umbrella, and took her chances. At the railroad station a matron searched her from the tip of her umbrella to the linings of her shoes. That was the easy part. Around ten at night, Mary was shivering under her open umbrella in a cold rain on the quay at Folkestone. She must have caught the Belgian general’s flu, she felt miserable. She’d had to go through an examining board, her papers had got passed from hand to hand, then back to her. There would be no boat carrying passengers to Calais tonight, she was told, only the boat to Boulogne.

  Boulogne was no good to her, so she walked up to the Calais boat and called out to a man on deck that she wanted to speak to the captain. Some officer or other came out, she handed him her papers, he looked them over, handed them back, escorted her off the boat, and disappeared. She was alone on the quay again, and she couldn’t see a soul on board. Mary took a firmer grip on her suitcase and umbrella and sneaked up the gangplank.

  Nobody stopped her, nobody even saw her. She found an empty cabi
n with the door ajar, felt her way in the dark to a wall settee, and sat down, terrified at the prospect of being put in irons or shot as a spy once she was discovered.

  She was not discovered. Mary stretched out on the settee and spread her fur coat over her. She was running a fever, having chills. She slept by fits and starts, troubled by nightmares. She woke to a gray, wet, silent dawn and peeked out from the cabin. The boat was tied up to the quay in Calais and nobody was on deck. Just across the way was the Hotel Terminus. She crossed the wharf, not daring to look behind her, and woke up the desk clerk.

  When she dared to venture from her room, Mary found security here even tighter. Calais had its own examining board. It took a solid twenty-four hours of explaining before they’d let her go on to Dunkirk. That they released her at all, Mary suspected, was due to their amusement over the way she’d tweaked the tail of the British lion. Once back at the Hotel des Arcades, she went to bed and nursed her flu.

  But this was not the time to be ailing. As soon as she’d got her legs back under her, Mary was off to Cassel to keep an appointment with General Foch. He was not at his headquarters, she found him by accident in a little Catholic church, kneeling at the altar, saying his prayers. She tiptoed away and went back to her cold, dank, inhospitable hotel room. At noon, a French officer appeared to escort her to lunch with the general and his staff. General Foch seated her himself, then took his own place and—quelle horreur!—realized that, counting the staff and Mrs. Rinehart, there would be thirteen at the table. With true military dispatch, a colonel was ordered to go and sit at a small table by himself. For the duration of Mary’s short visit, the poor colonel had to eat his meals alone.