by James Reese
“Mr. Bram Stoker,” came the standard greeting.
“Lady Wilde,” said I, bowing precipitously.
“Tell us,” said she, making free with the royal we, “how does Mrs. Stoker fare these days?”
“She is well, and sends her regrets.”
“Her regrets are well received, as ever they are.”59
I nodded. “And you, milady, are looking quite well.” Indeed, she was resplendent in a gown of purple silk set off by a matching headdress and golden earrings that depended to the level of her many brooches. The air around her was redolent of roses, as ever it is. Bangles could be heard upon her wrist as she withdrew her hand from my kiss.
“I am well, sir,” said she, “quite.” And, beckoning me closer, she spoke on:-
“Would that one could say the same of poor Miss Potter, there. Do, Bram, make yourself useful: Go tell the poor dear that to dress in tints of decomposed asparagus and cucumber flatters her face not at all. And she oughtn’t to speak so much. With such a face, she ought to be still, still and very grave.” She smiled, slyly. “Oh, but I am serious! If she doesn’t remove herself at once I shall be forced to rearrange my candles. See how she steals the light that belongs, by rights, to the baronet beside her?”
Speranza referred to votive candles set in alabaster vases ringed round with red fringe. Their light was pink, and wholly insufficient. This, it was whispered, was owing to the lady’s finding herself in reduced circumstances: as she could afford but one servant, and that the aforementioned bumbling Betty, she found it both easier and more economical to keep her rooms dark rather than clean. Of course, I was accustomed to meeting Speranza in shadow, and told those who spoke ill of her surrounds that Lady Wilde had long shunned natural light.60
Lamenting still the appearance of Miss Potter, Speranza said:-
“If only As-car were here, he’d somehow tell her—”
“Oscar is not here?” I asked. In truth, I was relieved to hear he was elsewhere.
“He is not. My As-car is absent, which so disappoints; but I read in Punch that he is making quite a stir on his American tour.” Whereupon she feigned shock to say, “Do you know, Bram, that there are those who come to my Saturdays only in the hopes of finding As-car here? I find I have become his mother, when formerly he was my son; but that is, of course, very much how it should be, and how I would have it.”61
Speranza then clutched at my arm. “Oh, Bram, I am in a bit of a quandary: I do so wish As-car would write more, even though that would leave him less time to speak, which he does so wondrously well! But you will speak to him on the point, will you not, Bram? As an older brother ought to? Our Willie is of no use in the matter.”
What was I to say to Oscar Wilde? It mattered not: he was, then as now, as impervious to persuasion as to public opinion. And so it may be said that I lied to the lady in replying:-
“I will speak to him, of course.” And then, seeking to set the conversation upon a different tack, I asked:-
“Have you heard the rumours about Rossetti?…He is at number sixteen, you know, just a few steps from our number twenty-seven.”
“Rumours?” Speranza drew herself up at the prospect.
I nodded. “Our Noel is sometimes woken by Rossetti’s peacocks parading in the common yard. They are in fine voice, I assure you. An outrage, really—that menagerie he keeps, and the neighbours are very much set against him at present, owing naturally, to the rumours.”
“Of…? Oh, do tell, Mr. Stoker. Rumours of what?”
“Of the elephant, of course.”
Speranza fell back, her hand upon her heart. In truth, her hand hovered some inches from said organ, separated from it by an ample bosom and that bib-like bit of brocade onto which her brooches were pinned. “Speak on, Mr. Stoker. Whatever can Rossetti be planning with a pachyderm?”
“It is said…” And here I paused, much to the lady’s anticipatory pleasure. “It is said that he means to keep one in the yard and train it to wash the windows of Tudor House.”
“Santo Cielo! You cannot—”
“Oh, but indeed I can be serious, and am.”
“An elephant? Here in the heart of Chelsea? Too rich, too rich by far!” Whereupon sympathy overtook her, or nearly so. “Oh, the poor man—poor only in spirit, mind, for they say he is rich as Croesus. Surely he has gone mad…. You know, I have it from a most unimpeachable source that Rossetti cried like a child at the loss of his wombat. But an elephant? The mind reels!62
“Help me up,” said Speranza, proffering her hand. “As gossip goes, I am very much indebted to that Countess in the corner, just there, and Rossetti’s elephant ought to square my account nicely.” And so she set off—audibly so: the jangle of jewelry, the swish of silks—saying:
“Do look in on Tuesday next, Mr. Stoker. We’ll take a late tea. There’s a matter I mean to discuss with you, a matter of books…. Quite sad, really. I shan’t sully my Saturday in speaking of it now.63
“But as regards Rossetti, I hear he has a new man—Crane or Banes or some such. No, no, it’s Caine. A Liverpudlian, they say, though Thursday last he appeared rather more like a Lilliputian; for as I coached past, I saw him dragging a trunk of but medium size up the stoop of Tudor House and succeeding none too easily. You will learn more, Mr. Stoker, and tell me all on Tuesday…. An elephant, you say? My word!” And, like a sawed tree, she timbered toward the unsuspecting Countess.
Caine…. I had heard the name before.
Ah, yes: Liverpool, hadn’t Speranza said? Didn’t Irving, as opening nights drew nigh, always direct me to ensure that a certain Caine be asked to come from Liverpool on behalf of its Town Crier? Indeed he did. And wasn’t it that same Caine who, when little more than a lad, had reviewed Irving’s Hamlet in terms so pleasing to the actor that he’d had Caine brought round to his rooms to meet him?64 It was, indeed. And now this Caine had finally come to London, and was resident with Rossetti in a house a half-block from my own. Most interesting, this.65
Rossetti had taken up tenancy in Tudor House in 1862, inconsolable after the loss of his beloved Lizzie.66 He leased the whole of the house, sub-leasing three of its many suites. On opposite sides of the first floor were the poets Geo. Meredith and Algernon Swinburne, the former mild in manner but the latter inclined to drink and, when drunk, further inclined to grease the banisters of Tudor House and take to them naked. A more sobering influence was provided by Rossetti’s brother, Michael.67
In time, Tudor House was emptied of all tenants save one: Rossetti wanted no company; but solitude soon devolved to seclusion, then delusion, whence he worsened unto addiction and, finally, insanity. As proof of the latter state, one need only reference Rossetti’s treatment of his Lizzie, long years after her decease.68
In the two decades prior to Caine’s coming, there had passed through Tudor House a procession of help. Coincidentally, when Caine first wrote to the erstwhile poet in 1881, soliciting a sonnet for a planned anthology, Rossetti had just hounded from his employ the latest of his secretaries. With Caine still in Liverpool yet longing to live the literary life in London, Rossetti sought his help with a commission in the former city, one that had grown complicated. This Caine saw to, successfully.69
As recompense he was invited to sup at Tudor House, where a grateful Rossetti—who’d turned from poetry to painting in the hope of greater profit—conferred upon Caine rights absolute to Swinburne’s former suite. The offer was accepted with alacrity.
(Is the foregoing fair enough, friend? I have distanced you here for ease of recollection; but you will of course correct these pages at will.)
It was not long after Speranza’s news that I met Hall Caine for the first time. To effect this took nothing more than a word to Henry Irving, who, quite happy to hear that young Caine had come to London, deputed me to invite him to the backstage dining room. Caine and I fast found ourselves the sharers of innumerable sympathies, interests, and much else besides, and we began to pass our (too few!) hours of leisu
re in each other’s company, whether fireside at my No. 27 or in Caine’s suite down the street at No. 16, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.70
I had been to No. 16 a half dozen times before finally meeting Rossetti. Typically, Caine and I had sat in the parlour, our talk attuned to the rhythm of Rossetti’s pacing in the studio above, and Rossetti had come to seem only slightly more real than the house’s infamous haunts.71
And when finally Rossetti did show himself, the presumed presence of such spectres was not dispelled: He seemed a ghost himself!
Here was a man old beyond his years, of medium height and inclined to corpulence, with a face more round than ovoid. His longish hair had thinned and was a shade less gray than his beard. And he was pale, eerily pale, with wide eyes that were black at their centers and ringed round, kohl-like, from want of sleep.
Indeed, Rossetti, fearful of his dreams, disdained sleep. He would paint as long as the light allowed. The idle hours of deepest night were a torture to him. He would roam the shadowed halls of Tudor House—always in those knee-length sack coats of his own design, paint-stained and buttoned tightly at the chin—along with its sorority of sprites, laying himself down at dawn with the last of his strength. I wondered if Rossetti’s delusion—and deluded he surely was—was owing more to his sleeplessness or to the means by which he battled it: namely, the chloral to which he’d long ago grown accustomed and to which he now was addicted.72
Caine had learned of the chloral shortly after coming to live at Tudor House. Rossetti himself confided in Caine that he regularly took sixty grains at nightfall, following that in four hours’ time with sixty more, and so on: enough chloral, in short, to send ten men to their dreams. Rossetti’s doctor assuaged Caine somewhat, saying his patient was not taking all the chloral he thought. The doctor, in collusion with the dispensing chemist, had arranged for the dilution of the doses. And happy the doctor was, surely, to now consign the phials to Caine, to hand him the key to the traveller’s cabinet in which they were kept, first directing Caine to give Rossetti one phial per day and no more, no matter how he pled.
Of course, Rossetti was ever after Caine for the key to the cabinet, for more chloral. And when Caine himself indulged in sleep—and an indulgence it must have come to seem—Rossetti would rifle through the house in search of the key, and, if fortune led him to find it, he would feast like a glutton come upon grub. Caine would wake to find his idol quite literally fallen. There Rossetti would be, bottles in hand, upon the floor of his studio, or the cold stone of the scullery, or once, most ignominiously, in the mud of the common yard amidst his peacocks.
If having to care for an addict slowed Caine’s literary ascendance, still he progressed. Readying his long-planned anthology, Caine was most pleased to find that no poet of renown ignored a request from Rossetti himself; and the older man was happy to write such requests, at once soliciting sonnets on Caine’s behalf and introducing him to literary London.
In time, Rossetti grew accustomed to my presence and suffered it well. Indeed, we three sometimes sat through the small hours of the night playing at poker or descanting, each in his turn, upon our chosen topics. Thusly was I present at No. 16 the night that the bill of Rossetti’s addiction came suddenly due.
In the weeks prior, Rossetti’s craving for chloral had grown. He verily stalked the halls of Tudor House searching for the key. When finally, and rightly, he supposed the sleeping Caine had it upon his person, he stole into the younger man’s suite. Caine woke with Rossetti’s cold hands upon him and started, terrified. Rossetti, debased, fell back from the bed, bowing his apology, the tears upon his face moon-silvered.
On the night in question, Rossetti was more restless than usual. Caine, reading aloud from Tennyson, kept one eye trained on his charge as Rossetti paced, ever more slowly, till finally he fell upon the studio sofa—crumpled, really, nearly missing its cushions—and announced, with a sigh, the loss of all feeling on his left side.
As Caine descended to summon a doctor, I carried Rossetti down to his bed.73 Rossetti, with his eyes shut, seemed a corpse; or worse, a revenant in repose. Life was yet quick within him, but I saw few signs of it. Indeed, Rossetti never rose from that bed in which I laid him down, and in it he dwindled undo death, achieving it—Requiescat in pace—on Easter Sunday, 9 April 1882.
LETTER, BRAM STOKER TO HALL CAINE74
8 May 1888
Dear Caine,
Enclosed please find my brief memoir. I thank you, friend, for suggesting that I write it. It did indeed distract me from to-day, from things as they stand. Still, you shall see that not all my memories are fond ones. Alas, I find I cannot outstrip sadness, Caine, try though I may. And I am wary, most wary of this return home.
We draw ever nearer Liverpool, & London, & the resumption of Routine. What it will be like, I cannot guess, but I hold tightly to Whitman’s admonition. I shall write a new life, a new letter that may someday merit a godly signature. Oh, but it shan’t be easy:
H.I. paces like a lion in its cage. Once he is loosed upon London…Alas, I fear that much of his busy-ness will fall to me, as ever it does. Have I told you he is determined to mount his Macbeth by year’s end? It shall be, says he; but first we have our Merchant to re-mount for those who have missed us.
Must now tidy my trunks but wanted this prefatory note ready for posting along with my memoir; for I suspect I shall not see you upon the slip in Liverpool. I understand your disinclination to show yourself on the mainland—owing, of course, to those most tenacious tax-men you reference—but still I say Come! Come you must, Caine, for we’ve much to discuss.
And I say again: Have your American friend come round to the Lyceum at his convenience.
Suddenly it seems I am in a mortal hurry! Land has lately hove into view, and the Co., to a one, revert to their needful selves, verily drumming upon my door. And so I close, Caine, thanking you for the respite I found in the enclosed pages, the writing of which has reminded me how truly I am
Yours,
Stoker
TELEGRAM, BRAM STOKER TO FLORENCE STOKER
8 May 1888.—Landed in L’pool. 2 pm finds me at your door. Pls. see that Noel nap accordingly.
Bram.
The Second Epoch
THE NIGHT
LETTER, BRAM STOKER TO HALL CAINE
14 May 1888, Monday
Dearest Caine,
It is more than a month now that I am returned to the resumption of routine, all routine, and I find myself with a question to pose:
Am I wrong to wish my wife illiterate?
Lest you think I jest, I forthwith list those volumes, acquired in my absence and arrayed before me now as I write upon my slope at the dining-room table, in which Florence finds countless things with which to worry both herself and me; viz:1
Ward & Lock’s Home Book: A Domestic Cyclopaedia. A Young Wife’s Perplexities, the title of which promises much more than it provides. And of course there is The Lady’s Every-Day Book, subtitled A Practical Guide to the Elegant Arts and Daily Difficulties of Domestic Life. Daily difficulties, indeed. And of course there is the venerable Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management.
Too, there are no few volumes on the general topic of Domestic Economy, though the pages of these are yet uncut. Were they cut, still my wife’s piled library would be testament enough to the fact that she has not read widely on the topic of Economy, Domestic or Otherwise.
I needn’t tell you, my most generous friend, that at present I find myself somewhat over-extended. Florence does not know of this, nor of your loan; this is how I would have it.2 In truth, she cannot be told, by which I mean that to share our situation with her would be as futile as casting seed upon stone. The truth of it would not take root. She cannot comprehend, cannot allow for realities other than her own. She is child-like in that regard, and inclined to fault reality for its failure to accede to her dreams.
And on the subject of children, I have before me now Florence’s Advice to Mothers on the Management of
Their Off-Spring. This, too, she cannot have read, unless it counsels coldness. Oh, Caine, am I too cruel? I fear I am. Of course, I would write such words as these to no-one but you; yet still, in re-reading these pages, I find I must resist the crumpling urge. And indeed, if once I loved Florence for being child-like, how can I now chide her for the same quality? How can I fault her ignorance of the Ways of the World when it is I who hide those ways from her? Can I at once gild her cage and complain that she does not fly from its opened door? I cannot. Oh, Tommy, doubtless your judgement is more sound than mine; and so I say, B-U-R-N T-H-I-S L-E-T-T-E-R! if you feel it the right and proper course, do.3
That said, it is true that I came back from the tour to find my son further distanced from his mother—and thus, by association, myself—owing to an excess of discipline. Not of the corporeal sort, of course; rather I refer to rules, more rules than a boy his age could ever abide.
Noel’s French, of course, continues unto fluency, but when I dared to suggest that our Mlle Dupont be sent back to Dieppe with letters of praise and a merci beaucoup for services rendered to our son, Florence cried, cried mightily. And, wily as women sometimes are, she fast alluded to my recent absence—no means atypical, it must be admitted—and her dart found its target; for even when we do not tour, still my London duties find me asleep when my son is awake, and vice versa. The odd afternoon when I am able to strip to shirtsleeves, lie upon the carpet, and invite the child to climb upon my mountainous self—Florence complaining all the while of the rising dust thus occasioned—can hardly be called fathering. And each time I leave for the theatre, it is to Noel’s cries of “Stay, Papa, won’t you please?” It both maddens and saddens me, Caine, to stand so justly accused.