Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  Mary’s explanation to Wilfrid is the clearest indication we have that her relationship with Balfour had not been consummated. That night she wrote to Arthur confessing that Wilfrid had ‘made a little love’: confessing and needling simultaneously. Arthur replied almost immediately from a fog-ridden London where he was battling ‘the important trifling of politics’ and influenza: ‘All the things I really want to say are unsayable so that if you wish to know them you must imagine them for yourself. Think of what you would like best to hear and have faith that that is what I should like to speak. I do not think you will be far wrong.’16

  It is as close as Arthur would ever come to a declaration, but hardly a satisfactory one. It was also too late. A few days before that letter arrived, Mary had sent the children and Miss J into Cairo, to see the museum, while she stayed in bed, recovering from a bad cold. In the late morning, as she dozed in her cool darkened room, she was woken by a soft knock on the door. It was Wilfrid who found, as he had hoped, Mary alone. One thing led to another. ‘My extremest hopes were achieved,’ Wilfrid wrote in his diary that evening, jubilant at having seduced the cousin he had been pursuing for so long.17 It was almost certainly the first time that Mary had had sex with anyone other than Hugo. Wilfrid did not think that she had ‘intended quite all that happened’,18 and Mary later agreed. ‘We might have been lifelong friends but you excluded it with yr eyes open,’ she said, explaining that she before ‘had only had to do with different men’ – the men of the Souls who flirted, cajoled and kissed, but never (at least not in Mary’s experience) crossed over into ‘the conjugal act’. Later still, when nostalgia had cast a rosy glow upon everything to do with her time in Egypt she would tease the ‘unscrupulous’ Wilfrid for having taken advantage of her.19

  In early February, the party set out on what Blunt called their ‘desert honeymoon’. As intended, Anne and Judith accompanied them only on their first day, after which they turned back, leaving Blunt and Mary, albeit ‘chaperoned’ by the children and Miss Jourdain and numerous servants, on their own. Each night, in the wadis where they pitched their camp, Mary secretly left the tents set up for the women and children and went to Blunt, under the canopy of his travelling carpet a little way away. The clandestine visits did not go unnoticed by all the members of the party. ‘I think the Arabs with us knew that we were lovers,’ confided Wilfrid to his diary: ‘indeed they must have known it, for there were Mary’s naked tell-tale footsteps each morning in the sand … Mary is now my true Bedouin wife.’20

  Far from being intimidated by the desolate, unforgiving landscape, Mary felt free for the first time since her Cumberland childhood. ‘I was made for the desert,’ she told Wilfrid proudly. ‘I knew how to live in a tent (have “blackened cooking pots!”) & to rise high on a camel with streamers flying in the … wind! It all came to me by instinct.’21 Years later, even a kettle’s singing in an Edinburgh convalescent home recalled to her the sound of Wilfrid’s servant, Mubarak, playing to the company on his flute, as they reclined under tents made of rugs set among the sandhills, and conjured up the memory of ‘lying in a tent in the hot clean sand & making foot prints in it’: the telltale signs left of the lovers’ nighttime wanderings.22

  On their return from the desert, the affair continued. Judith, who was in her early twenties, dropped by El Kheysheh one evening, to find ‘H.F. [‘Head of the Family’, Judith’s nickname for her father] sitting on Mary’s bed … They looked horribly confused but I suppose it means nothing,’ she recorded in her diary.23 Cynthia’s biographer believes that both the little girl and her governess had some idea of what was going on.24 It would seem impossible that Anne Blunt had not noticed as well. But Mary buried thoughts of Anne, of Arthur, of the fact that she had taken her mother’s lover as her own. ‘I am & always shall be sorry for wounding the feelings of anyone I care for but otherwise its difficult to wholly regret days of beauty & romance,’ she assured Wilfrid later.25 ‘I am quite happy living in the present,’ she told Evelyn innocently in early February, just after her return to Sheykh Obeyd.26

  The ramifications of the past and thoughts of the future could not be held at bay for ever. The next day – Valentine’s Day – Mary broke the news to Blunt that ‘it being the 36th day … she is certainly with child’. Blunt received the news with sheer delight – ‘For me it is a pure gift from heaven.’27 Throughout the affair, Mary had alluded with concern to possible ‘consequences’. Her period came like clockwork, and a rough and ready calculation with the dates suggests she fell pregnant almost the first time she slept with Wilfrid. Perhaps this knowledge informed her recklessness: since she was damned she might as well embrace it. Yet from Blunt’s bald report now that Mary was ‘a little troubled and anxious’ one can sense a world of apprehension and confusion for her. ‘She will not, if she can help it, give up her husband, or her children, or her friend,’ he told his diary.28 Nor can Mary have forgotten that six years before her doctor had warned her that another pregnancy would risk her life – the reason why she and Hugo had not had sex in all that time, and why she could not now hope to pass off the child as Hugo’s, even if she wanted to. Almost magically, a solution to the latter problem appeared to present itself: the next day, they received a letter from Hugo announcing his imminent arrival – and, hot on its heels, the author himself appeared, bowler hat plonked firmly on his head and Cymru, Hermione’s fluffy chow, on a chain.

  Hugo had made the decision to go to Egypt long before he notified his wife. Settled in Menton, the quieter town down the coast to which he and Hermione had moved from Monte Carlo, he had become uneasy. Insidious rumours about the state of the Elchos’ marriage had already begun to trickle back to London: the World had reported mischievously that it was Lady Elcho nursing the Duchess of Leinster in the south of France, and he was equally worried by rumours of Mary’s activities. ‘She is leading an odd sort of life & I fear people may be talking [about] them,’ he explained to Evelyn.29 ‘I think I ought to go … to let it be known I have been in Egypt. I know that she [Mary] is wildly happy … & not really wanting me. But this does not make any difference.’30 Hermione became agitated at the very thought of Hugo leaving her, and several times she had made pitiful attempts at suicide with an overdose of chloral pills, a crude sleeping aid. Now, despite her state, Hugo deemed it necessary for him to make a brief visit to Egypt, informing Mary of his imminent arrival only when he was already on his way.

  On Hugo’s arrival Wilfrid seethed silently at the sight of his rival enjoying himself in the Egyptian sunshine, with apparently no inkling of what was going on. He was anguished at the sight of Mary dressed once again in Western clothes, as the party, which now included Frederick Harrison, a hearty diplomatic acquaintance of Blunt’s, visited the Cairo museum. He cheered darkly when Hugo went out in a boat on the lake to shoot duck and capsized. But he was enraged when he found Hugo’s ‘Christian hat’ left in the Bedouin tent in the grounds: evidence that ‘she who was my Bedouin wife’ had brought a stranger into his tent. ‘When I get her once more into the desert I shall cut off her head,’ he vowed.31

  Wilfrid’s revenge was more subtle than that. An overnight expedition to Goshen was planned, to give Hugo and Harrison a brief taste of the desert, camping on the supposed site of the house of Potiphar, to whom Joseph of the fabled many-coloured coat was sold as a slave. The party were not all so accustomed to such expeditions: ‘d’you remember how funny F Harrison looked in his grey dittoes [sic] & white puggery [sic] & miss J on donkey with a Margate Sands straw hat!’ Mary reminded Wilfrid.32 Later, Harrison published in his memoirs letters to his family describing this desert expedition: the women of the party in ‘long flowing white burnouses [hooded capes] and Oriental head-dresses worn over embroidered satin, looking like Roxana and Fatima’, Blunt biblical in his white robes, his hawk-like face craggy and sunburnt. He wrote of being woken by a ‘thin moon like a scimitar’ shining through a cranny in his canvas tent, of watching, in the cool early morning, the sun ‘rise out of
Mount Sinai’, and dawn feasts of tea, coffee, fruit, dates, chicken, lamb and tongue. Only when Harrison, a keen mountaineer, begins to liken the sand on the dunes down which they slid to Alpine snow is one brought back to earth with a bump.33

  If the desert could inspire even the plump, prosaic Harrison to lyricism, then the expedition should have been an ideal time for a reconciliation that would enable Mary to pass off the child as Hugo’s. Blunt put paid to that. ‘I would not allow Mary to share her tent with Hugo as that would not have been proper. Suleyman and all the Arabs know that she is my Bedouin wife,’ Wilfrid told his diary primly. And so Mary and Judith slept in one tent, Hugo and Harrison in the other, with Blunt rolled up in his blue and white carpet set up under a bush ‘a little apart’ so that Mary could come to him ‘as in the night of our honeymoon’.34

  It seems unlikely that Mary was quite so reckless, but nor did she go to Hugo that night or any other. A few days later Hugo left. From the Grand Hotel Abbat in Alexandria, waiting for his passage back to France, he wrote Mary an awkward letter in which he could only sidle up to intimacy in the third person. He hoped that his ‘Wigs’ understood that he had not been able to say all he wanted. ‘Perhaps I made her feel how I loved her … have loved her all the time more than she knew & more than even perhaps I knew – perhaps it is not too late to shew her even now – though I don’t deserve that she should care for me … please take care of yourself little Wigs & let us be together again soon & stay together …’35

  Hugo was frozen, and Mary unable to make a move herself, too guilty to deceive him, or preferring, almost literally, to bury her head in the sand. With foolhardiness doubtless partly provoked by fear, she plunged back into the desert one final time. This time the expedition planned was lengthy and dangerous: just Mary, Wilfrid and Anne on a camelback pilgrimage to St Anthony’s monastery, lying in the heart of the Eastern Desert between the Kalala mountains and the Gulf of Suez, a place that no European woman had visited for 1,500 years.

  ‘I am wretchedly, I suppose stupidly anxious about Mary,’ Hugo confessed to Evelyn, having tried without success to dissuade Mary from going.36 The journey, as recorded by Wilfrid in his diary, is a jumble of images: of Mary carrying apples and biscuits in her pocket like a schoolboy; Mary in a white robe up to her waist in water in the Red Sea ‘like Andromeda clinging to the rocks’; Mary collecting shells near their camp, an oasis of palms a few yards from the sea hemmed in by high precipices of brown stone; Mary’s black hair tangled in the canvas after a fierce hot wind had blown down her tent in the night, a tent where Wilfrid had been only shortly before – for every night, despite the presence of Anne so close by, the footsteps in the sand made their way from Wilfrid to Mary.

  And then over time danger crept in, as Mary grew tired and provisions grew short; vultures ringed their camp at night, watching and waiting in the dark. When finally at the monastery, Blunt lit three candles to Sheykh Obeyd and left them burning as they made the long journey back. They returned exhausted, travel-weary but still high on the excitement of the desert. ‘There is no doubt now of her pregnancy, & she suffered not a little from the lack of substantial food,’ Wilfrid wrote in his diary upon their return. ‘Still no harm has been done & her courage has carried her through – only we are glad that she can rest. It has been a delicious time for it is not often given to lovers to lead thus a wholly married life for 15 days.’37 Mary herself never regretted a moment. ‘I was made for the desert & so I do not forget those few days of life spent there – the night by the sea & the dome palaces & many other things … we were sons & daughters of the desert & the desert loved us & we it,’ she wrote to Wilfrid a few years later.38 They returned to find ‘much changed’. The old Khedive had died and been buried in Egypt; George Curzon was engaged to the American heiress Mary Leiter. And it was not long before Mary received a telegram from Hugo that finally spelt an end to her time in Egypt.

  Hugo returned from Egypt to find Hermione with ‘death written on her face’. On an early-spring afternoon in March, in her bedroom at the Hôtel des Îles Britanniques, she slowly but inexorably slipped from life. When it was over, Hugo sat by her still, throughout the long afternoon, ‘and it seemed just as it often has when she has been tired & sleepy, only she smiled all the time,’ he told Evelyn. That night he dined, as always, in the adjacent sitting room with the connecting door ajar ‘as she liked to have it … & I have gone backwards & forwards – & it has been the same as other nights excepting that she has not coughed – nor sent for me when she woke up’.39 That night he telegraphed Mary. ‘Am unhappy. Shall go Grand Hotel Rome’, where Mary was to meet him.40 Hugo left Menton the next morning with Cymru the chow, too miserable to write or even speak.41

  Understanding immediately the meaning of this cryptic telegram, Mary went to bed early and wept – or so she said. ‘I cannot bear to think of it – I did love her … and if I feel it what must you feel?’ she asked Hugo in a lengthy letter she wrote a few days later. When Mary was truly overcome by emotion, she lost her tongue. Here, the words positively dripped off her pen: the letter is suffused with praise for Hugo’s loyalty, almost gushing as she writes of her own ‘love’ for Hermione. She promises to be a ‘help and comfort’ to Hugo, prays ‘that you will love me & that we may help each other to live our life as we ought to live it’. Doubtless Hermione’s sad death did touch Mary’s heart. But her overblown tone – more characteristic of Ettie than of herself – spoke only one thing. As Mary prepared to tell Hugo of her pregnancy she was doing everything in her power to remind him of their bond, to stress her generosity so that he might exercise his.42

  Mary and her party sailed from Alexandria on Tuesday 26 March. They met Hugo in Rome on Friday, took a train via Milan to Basle, then another overnight train to Calais, and crossed the Channel on Sunday. They were at Cadogan Square by 5 p.m. Arthur Balfour ‘turned up’ shortly afterwards to see Mary; Mary, tired out, went to bed before dinner.43 The next morning she rose early to see her lawyer Mr Jamieson, had tea with Evelyn de Vesci, dined with George and Sibell, and just two days later was at Stanway, where, she informed her mother, for the foreseeable future she intended to stay.

  Mary’s precipitate and uncharacteristic haste to leave London and the prying eyes of her friends was for a good reason. She was ‘bent on keeping … dark’ the ‘beautiful secret’ of her pregnancy44 for as long as she possibly could; ‘nobody need ever suspect anything’, she told Wilfrid, assuming that no one but a few curious Souls would ever trouble to compare dates.45 ‘All that society resents is a scandal and so long as Hugo is mute & shields her with his marital countenance, Mary’s woman friends will only think she has been quite right to enjoy herself, and that they wd have done precisely the same if they had had the opportunity,’ said Wilfrid.46

  SEVENTEEN

  The Florentine Drama

  On 14 February 1895, the day that Mary told Wilfrid Blunt of her pregnancy in Egypt, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest premiered at the St James’s Theatre in London. Critics hailed it as an almost perfect comedy, audiences loved it. But the opening-night atmosphere was uneasy for insiders. After Drummy’s death, his father had focused his vitriolic attentions upon the relationship of his youngest son, and Queensberry had made known his intention of throwing a bouquet of rotting vegetables on to the stage at Earnest’s opening night. Forced by police presence to abandon this plan, he left a note for Wilde at his club instead. Later much would turn upon whether the near-illegible scrawl, handed unsealed to a club servant, was addressed to ‘Oscar Wilde, ponce and somdomite [sic]’ or ‘Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite [sic]’. In any event the message, discreetly placed in an envelope by the embarrassed club porter, was a terrible insult. Urged on by Bosie, disregarding the warnings of the more worldly-wise, Wilde sued for libel. The trial opened on 3 April 1895.

  ‘How dreadful this libel suit is … poor darling Cousin Sib there seems no end to all she has to bear,’ Mananai wrote from Dresden where the Adeanes were e
njoying a season of German opera, and marvelling at the disproportionate pomp of the Saxon state’s miniature court.1 Cousin Sib was with Wommy and the Wyndhams in Florence waiting for the spring, which even there seemed slow to arrive after the worst winter that anyone could recall.

  The reports were dreadful. Queensberry’s ruthless counsel Edward Carson QC stopped at nothing to prove the truth of Queensberry’s statement: Wilde was either a sodomite or he had posed as one. He put rent boys on the stand. He all but destroyed Wilde under cross-examination. The flippancy that served the playwright so well in the theatre scandalized when uttered in the forbidding Royal Courts of Justice. As Wilde denied kissing a youth on the grounds that he was too ugly, and as detail after sordid detail was revealed, it became daily more apparent that Wilde could not hope to escape criminal prosecution for what were, after all, illegal acts.

  Wilde refused the advice of his friends to flee to the Continent. He lost his libel case. On 26 April he appeared in the dock charged with offences under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. The Wyndhams, like most of Society, thought that Wilde had brought this upon himself. Their concern was for Bosie. With Percy abroad, George took on the responsibility of paterfamilias. A truculent, defiant Bosie told him that nothing on earth would induce him to leave London or Wilde until the trial was over. ‘You may be sure that nothing will … he is quite insane on the subject,’ George told Percy. ‘Were “W.” to be released … Bosie would do anything he asked, & no entreaty from you or his mother could weigh with him.’ But Arthur Balfour, who had been ‘told the case’ and its most sensitive details by the prosecution, had reported to George in confidence that ‘W. is certain to be condemned.’ The evidence of the ‘systematic ruin of a number of young men’ that was to be put before the court was too serious not to require a scapegoat; the strength of ‘public feeling’ against Wilde was ‘fiercely hostile … among all classes’. George now secured from Bosie the promise that, if ‘W.’ were imprisoned, ‘he will do what I ask’.2