The Trial of Elizabeth Cree

by Peter Ackroyd

  “Lizzie, you know I don’t like to do it off the stage.”

  “Just the one?”

  “It was opened on the 11th November, 1823, having previously seen service as a chapel for the Sisters of Mercy. The original foundations were dug up on the 5th October, 1820, when they were found to date from the sixteenth century. Happy now?”

  Victor had come back with the needful, and was already exchanging a few silent gestures with his friends—a wink and a nod go a long way with hall folk. “Give us the use of that memory, Harry. Who’s the old file over there?” Victor was looking towards an elderly party sitting very close to a lady comique, and looking altogether snug. “Look at that ring,” he said. “He must be putrid with money. Rolling in loot.”

  “The oldest man in the country,” Harry said, “was Thomas Parr who died in 1653 at the age of one hundred and fifty-three. You can’t put a good man down.”

  “I know where you can put a good man up,” Victor whispered to me. I took his hand gently, and then pushed his finger so far back that you could hear him screaming all over the Canteen. I only relented when the others stopped and looked at us; Victor explained that I had trod on one of his corns.

  “Will that learn you?” I whispered fiercely to him.

  “For a woman, Lizzie, you’ve got a lot of strength.” He paused to examine his bruised fingers. “Do accept my most profound apologies. Do you think I put myself forward too much?”

  “Don’t you ever forget that I am an innocent.”

  “You must be over fifteen, Lizzie.”

  “No, I mustn’t. Now go and order me a baked potato before I damage you again.”

  Victor was one of those “have-another-with-me” boys. I knew he did the low halls and was paid with what we called “wet money”; he told me so himself, and he was proud of the fact that he could drink as much as any reasonably sized man—“putting a quart into a pint pot” was his way of expressing it. That night he did himself proud; he was pitching and tossing all over the place and, when he slipped under the table, I allowed him to look up me for a few moments. But when he felt my ankle I gave him such a savage kick that he came out on the other side. I was about to get up and kick him again, when a young man came hurrying over to the table. “Do you require any assistance?” he asked me. I recognized him at once: it was John Cree, the reporter from the Era who had come up to Doris when we were performing at the Washington.

  “Please help me, sir,” I said. “I should never have been led into this dreadful place.”

  He escorted me up the stairs and took me out into the little alley by the side of the theater. “Are you perfectly well?” He waited while I composed myself. “You look pale.”

  “I have been very ill used,” I replied. “But I think I must have some guardian angel who saves me from evil.”

  “Can I escort you anywhere? The streets, in such a place as this …”

  “No, sir. I can find my own way. I am accustomed to the night.” And so he left me, while I purged the tobacco smoke with lungfulls of London air. What a strange night it had become, and it was as yet far from over. For, just a few hours after I had met John Cree, at first light, the body of Little Victor Farrell was found in a basement area two streets away: his neck had been broken, no doubt because of some drunken fall. He had left the Canteen “highly schmozzled,” as one of his fellow inebriates had said, and it was believed that he had wandered through the night and somehow tripped down the stairs which led to the basement. “The Midshipmite” was no more.

  We had a matinée the following day, and Uncle was acting the inconsolable. “He was a real mammoth comique,” he said to me, with a handkerchief poised in his hand, “even though he was just a little one. I thought he could hold his drink but, alas, as Shakespeare used to say, I was very much mistaken.” At that moment drink was holding Uncle, since he had already been given “just the one” out of sympathy by most of the artistes. “He started as a busker, Lizzie. He was busking and pitching by the time he was two feet and a half.” He raised his handkerchief, but only to blow his fat nose. “I remember when he first came on at the old Apollo in Marylebone. He was billed as ‘The Shrimp with Feeling.’ Did he ever sing you ‘The Lodging House Cat’?”

  “Never you mind, Uncle.” I gave him a little kiss upon his damp forehead. “He was a great sparkler, and now he’s moved on to the great stage in the sky.”

  “I doubt if there will be variety there, dear.” He gave a little snort, halfway between a laugh and a sigh. “Ah well, all flesh is grass.”

  I sensed that my opportunity had come. “I was wondering, Uncle. You know that Victor was like a second father to me—”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “—and I was hoping to pay a little tribute to him?”

  “Go on, dear.”

  “I was wondering if you would let me take on his act this evening. I know all his songs by heart.” He looked earnestly at me for a moment, and so I carried on talking more quickly. “There is a gap in the bill, I know, and as I wanted to give him a proper send-off …”

  “But you’re a good few inches taller, Lizzie. Would it be right?”

  “That would be the joke of it, you see. Wouldn’t Victor laugh?”

  “I don’t know about that, dear. But I suppose you can show me.”

  In fact I had studied Little Victor very carefully indeed, so I knew both the patter and the business. Even though I was not in costume I sang “If Ever There Was a Damned Scamp” in front of Uncle, and jumped up and down in the approved “Midshipmite” manner.

  “You’ve got the right bounce,” he said.

  “Victor was training me. He said I had such a funny dial it was a pity to waste it.”

  “And you certainly manage a warble.”

  “Thank you, Uncle. Do you think Victor would have wanted me to have the chance to show it?”

  He was silent for a minute, and I could tell that he was speculating on the novelty of it: what if he could make a funny female or a legmania dancer out of me? “Do you think,” he said, “we could pretend that you were Little Victor’s daughter? Out of tiny acorns, you know …”

  “I did always think of him as a second father. He was so good to me.”

  “I know he was, my dear. He was very paternal.”

  So, after a few tears were shed, it was agreed that I should go on that night with Little Victor’s routine. I think Dan disapproved of the scheme but, when he saw the enthusiasm shining from my face, he could not bring himself to forbid it; I had been banking on that. You can imagine my nervousness as I dressed up for the first time: Little Victor’s clothes were too small for me, naturally, but that was the joke of it. As I said to Doris while we were changing, it’s a funny thing how seawater can shrink a midshipmite’s duds. We were in the green room with some of the other girls and boys, all milling about and laughing with the kind of gaiety that comes after a death. No one had loved, or even really liked, Little Victor—in any case hall folk mourn another’s passing by trying to be that little bit brighter.

  “Quart-’ervn-’our.” It was the callboy.

  Doris opened the door and shouted after him, “What’s the house, Sid?”

  “All pudding. Easy as you like.”

  I was going on between the ballet dancers and the Ethiopian serenaders; the property man saw me shaking in the corner, so he came over and put his arm around me. “You know what they say, Lizzie, don’t you? A bit of chaff sets you up. If they give you the bird, you whistle back at them.” It was not the most reassuring speech, but no doubt he meant well.

  When I was announced as Little Victor’s daughter, the house went wild. Everyone knew about his accident—it was that kind of neighborhood—and when I came on in his old clothes singing “All for the Sake of Dear Father” I knew that I had got them. I milked the death a little, but then I put in some patter I had memorized from Victor’s act, as well as some old comic business on the subject of lost handkerchiefs. But I also had a trick of my ow
n. I knew how strange my hands were still, so large and so scarred, so I had put on a pair of white gloves which served to emphasize their size. I held my hands out in front of me and sighed, “Look at them rotten cotton gloves!” They loved it, since it was one of those phrases which somehow strike a chord, and then I followed it up with that ditty which causes such a furor, “It’s Sunday All Over Again.” I suppose that I could have gone on forever, but I saw Uncle beckoning to me from the wings. I hurried over to him while they were still whistling and banging their feet.

  “Give them one more refrain,” he said, “and then come off when they ask for more.” So I skipped back onto the stage and sang the second verse.

  No duck must lay, no cat must kitten,

  No hen must leave her nest though sittin’,

  Though painful is her situation

  She must not think of incubation,

  For no business must be done on Sunday,

  They’ll have to put it off till Monday.

  I sang it especially well because I remembered my mother, and the way she used to drag me off to the little tin-roof chapel and turn my own Sunday into a time of misery. And, as I danced upon the stage, I had the most pleasurable sensation that I was stamping upon her grave. How I exulted! They loved me for it. There was a shower of coppers and, despite Uncle’s request, I “obliged again” with a chorus of “Up Goes the Price of Meat.” Then there was so much whistling and stamping that I could hardly hear myself thank them. I was in such a blaze of glory I might have died and gone to heaven. Of course, in a manner of speaking, I had died. My old self was dead and the new Lizzie, Little Victor’s daughter with the rotten cotton gloves, had been born at last.

  I believe that Dan was still annoyed with me for taking over Little Victor’s act, but he realized that I had acquitted myself very well. I was still a pigeon in the world of the halls but, over the next few weeks and months, I steadily crept up the bills. I made one song my very own, “The Hole in the Shutter, or I’m a Little Too Young to Know,” but I soon realized that I had much more talent in the comic line than as an ordinary dancer or singer. I was a good spoofer, and very soon I had my own catch phrase printed after my name—“Funny Without Being Vulgar.” I can still remember all my scenes perfectly well. I pretended to be a bathing machine, and sang “Why Can’t We Have the Sea in London?” and then I used to kill them with “I Don’t Suppose He’ll Do It Again for Months and Months and Months.” I never saw the dirt in it, not me, and I delivered it as a harmless little song about a wife whose husband took her once a year on a steamboat outing to Gravesend. It must have been the way I pronounced “do,” but they used to scream.

  I never knew where the comedy came from. I was not a particularly funny female off the stage, and I suppose that in some ways I was even prone to misery. It was as if I had some other personality which walked out from my body every time I stood in the glare of the gas, and sometimes she even surprised me with her slangster rhymes and cockney stuff. She had her own clothes by now—a battered bonnet, long skirt and big boots suited her best—and, as I slowly put them on, she began to appear. Sometimes she was uncontrollable, though, and one night at the Palace in Smithfield she began to perform a burlesque medley of the Bible with the most wicked patter about David and Goliath. There was a large Hebrew element in that particular hall, and they loved it, but the next day a deputation from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel complained to the manager. What they were doing there in the first place I do not know, but Little Victor’s daughter had to drop that particular item. Of course I had my admirers: ask any artiste and she will tell you how pestered we all are with stage-door Johnnies. They came on strong, but most of them were no more than twopenny bus conductors or City clerks. Fortunately Doris and I were still sharing a crib off the New Cut, so we just used to march straight past them. “I’m no Blondin,” she said once, “but I can walk in a straight line when I have to.” She was still the goddess of wire-walking, at least to her admirers, but Little Victor’s Daughter was soon spoken of as quite “the thing” in variety circles. We were still the best of pals, though, and liked nothing better, after the show, than to retire to our room and share a nice plate of bacon and greens. I was always overwrought after my performance—and, to judge by Doris’s concern, sometimes a trifle hysterical—but after a while Little Victor’s Daughter would fade away and Lizzie would come back. I had to be careful not to contradict the orphan story I had sold her when I first arrived in lodgings, but that was the easy part: I had invented a whole history which made me much more interesting to myself, and I really had no difficulty in sustaining it.

  Sometimes Austin would join us with some bottles of stout, and he would reminisce about the old days when he was a boy soprano in the Caves of Harmony and the Shrines of Song. “I had a lovely voice,” he told us confidentially one night, “and when I appeared in the tea gardens I was like an angel from heaven. I could have been legit, ducks, I could have been another Betty. But professional jealousy held me back. I was kept off the boards out of fear, you know. I was denied Drury Lane. Ah well, dears, shall I be Mother?” He poured us another stout, while he and Doris began to share the gossip of the day—how the ventriloquist was courting a young “burnt cork” dancer from Basildon, and how Clarence Lloyd had been found in his dame’s dress outside a seamen’s mission dead drunk. Poor Clarence had been taken into custody for importuning, or so Austin said, and had been led to the station singing “In My First Husband’s Time.” But somehow our conversation always came around to Dan, or “Mr. Leno” as Austin insisted on calling him when he was drunk. Dan always remained something of a mystery to us, although his mystery was really his artistry which was obvious even to the lowest class of audience. “They talk of Tennyson and Browning,” Austin used to say, “and I am the last person to deny the genius of those two gentlemen, but believe me, girls, Mr. Leno is it.”

  It was true: Dan was only fifteen then, but he played so many parts that he hardly had time to be himself. And yet, somehow, he was always himself. He was the Indian squaw, the waiter, the milkmaid, or the train driver, but it was always Dan conjuring people out of thin air. When he played the little shopkeeper, he made you see the customers who argued with him and the street arabs who plagued him. When he murmured, in an aside, “I’ll just go and unchain that Gorgonzola” you could smell the cheese and, when he pretended to shoot it and put it out of its misery, you could see the rifle and hear the shot. How they all roared when he first appeared on the stage; he would run down to the footlights, give a drumroll with his feet, and raise his right leg before bringing it down with a great thump upon the boards. Then suddenly he was the sour-faced spinster on the lookout for a man.

  “He is endless,” Uncle said to me one night as we were leaving the Desiderata in Hoxton. “Completely endless.” He was holding my arm rather too tightly but, since he had been so good to me in the past, I disengaged myself very gently. He did not seem to notice. “What would you say, Lizzie dear, to a nice parcel of fish and chips? Put something hot inside you, do.” I was about to plead tiredness, when who should we see coming out of the shadow of Leonard’s Rents but the young man who had saved me from Little Victor’s attentions so many months before. I had glimpsed him on other occasions since then, and had been expecting him to interview me for the Era. Unfortunately, he was always very respectful and kept his distance. He raised his hat to me when we passed and, perhaps thinking that Uncle was becoming a little too close and friendly, he asked me how I was. Uncle gave him a “heavy swell” look and was about to pass on, but I stopped for a moment. “It is good of you to ask, Mr.…”

  “John Cree of the Era.”

  “I am very well, Mr. Cree. My manager is just escorting me to my brougham.” I was very dignified indeed, and even Uncle was impressed. But, from that time forward, I often thought of Mr. John Cree.

  TWENTY-ONE

  On the morning Karl Marx was interviewed by the police detectives, George Gissing was sitting
in his customary place beneath the dome of the British Museum Reading Room. There were two long tables reserved for ladies, and Gissing always sat as far away from them as possible. This was not because he was in any sense a misogynist—far from it—but he was still young enough to maintain the illusion that the pursuit of knowledge must be a cloistered and self-denying activity, in which the mind itself must suffuse or overpower the body. In any case he came to the Reading Room partly to escape what he termed, in homage to Nietzsche whom he had just been reading, “the presence of the Female Will.” This was not some theoretical interest on his part, since in fact he believed that his entire life had been destroyed by the presence of one particular woman.

  He had been eighteen years old at the time; he had been an eager and promising student at Owens College in Manchester, and was preparing for his entrance examinations to the University of London when he met Nell Harrison. She was seventeen, but was already an alcoholic who earned her drink by prostitution. Gissing became infatuated with her after a chance meeting in a Manchester public house; he was an idealist who believed that, in the best theatrical tradition, he could “rescue” Nell. Literature was everything to him then, and in the shape of this young woman he invested all of his instincts for narrative and for pathetic drama. It is also possible that her name evoked childhood memories of Little Nell’s doomed wanderings in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, but it is more likely that the romantically inclined literary young man became obsessed with her because of her drunken prostitution—here was a modern outcast, who might have come from the pages of Émile Zola. In that sense he was wrong to blame her for all of his misfortunes, because they were in part the result of his own delusions.

  The tragedy of his life happened soon after their meeting. He used his scholarship funds to feed and clothe her; he even bought her a sewing machine (then a relatively new invention) so that she could earn a proper living as a seamstress. But she drank away the shillings he found for her and, as a result of her constant demand for money, he began to steal from his contemporaries at Owens College. In the spring of 1876 he was caught by the college authorities, arrested, and sentenced to a month’s hard labor in Manchester Prison. He had been the most gifted and learned student of his generation but, at a stroke, all hope of academic and social advancement seemed to have gone forever. He traveled to America after his release, but found it impossible to survive. And so he returned to England or rather, more pertinently, to Nell. He could not escape her (perhaps he did not wish to escape her) and together they came to London; they moved from cheap lodging to cheap lodging, always moving on when Nell’s trade was discovered. Yet still he clung to her. This sounds like a mere melodrama from the London stage, something which might be performed on the boards of a “theater of sensation” like the Cosmotheka in Bell Street, but it is a true story—the truest story George Gissing ever completed. He was an avid scholar, an accomplished classicist and linguist who in other circumstances would already have been a member of one of the ancient universities or a lecturer at the new University College in London; but instead he was attached to a vulgar prostitute, a drunkard and a slattern who had destroyed all hopes he might have harbored for conventional advancement. This was how Gissing viewed his whole life and yet, in the spring of 1880, he married Nell. Now, as he sat in the warmth of the Reading Room, he realized that not even this formal union had been able to divert her from her customary ways.