Money was not the immediate issue, though it may have seemed so to her mother. Georgina had lost Tavistock House forever. Her personal effects, including her musical scores and the chronofile she was building of her life, along with some furniture that was hers and not Harry’s, had gone into storage at Shoolbred’s in Tottenham Court Road. The house itself was bolted and barred—she learned it was being put on the market at £1,700. This had grave implications for the future of the orphanage, though just where everyone was was difficult to establish from Angele’s wobbly narrative of what had happened after she left France.
For the present, Georgina had more notoriety than ever before and just after her release made a triumphant appearance at the Central Hall, Bishopsgate, dressed in her prison uniform. But the audience for this sort of thing was narrow and generally confined to what were called “progressive” elements of society. Mr. Salsbury of the vegetarian restaurant, who pleaded with her to let him help, was a self-styled utopian. She was falling among strangers here. Louisa Lowe was the model social reformer from the progressive ranks—cautious, diligent, and possessed of a patience Georgina soon found grating. It was not her job and in no way her style to campaign for others. The only instance of social injustice she recognized was her own. It might irritate the Lunacy Law Reform Society and The People’s Cross to realize this, but she was being honest with them. It had been her head in the lion’s mouth and not theirs.
Everyone interested in social reform found out sooner or later in their dealings with Georgina that she made an impassioned and reckless captain but a very bad foot soldier. Those who ate at Salsbury’s restaurant did so under this banner:
The Novelty of the Nineteenth Century!
The ALPHA, First London Food Reform Restaurant &
Vegetarian Dining Rooms—No Fish! No Flesh! No Fowl!
No Intoxicants! No Tobacco!
As diners practiced their virtue, there were to hand pamphlets on almost every aspect of “rational being.” They might, for example, browse the writings of a Mr. Nicholls and his wife, who between them had written a hundred works on “sanitary and social science,” all published from the same address as where they sat. Some of the women patrons were members of the Rational Dress Society and wore simple straight skirts and plain blouses. Their figures were uncorseted, leading them to be mocked in the street but respected in the Alpha as harbingers of a new and more right-thinking age. Others, though they were not spiritualists, could find much to commend in the systematic investigations of the psychic world by such men as Sir William Crookes, the distinguished chemist, or F. W. H. Myers, an eminently respectable school inspector. Vegetarians ate Salsbury’s lettuce and raw cabbage but also pored anxiously over statistics that seemed to show a correlation between industrial output and diet. In comparisons made between the French and British economies, it was often asserted that the latter’s superiority had much to do with the boiled beef and carrots of the British workingman, as well as his penchant for beer over wine. These claims needed refuting. For many freethinkers, the comfort of being in the right when so many were in the wrong was greatly enhanced by the steady tone of the arguments set forth. The appeal was to the mind.
The defense counsel in the Tichborne Claimant case, Maurice Edward Kenealy, was a habitué of the Alpha restaurant. He was fond of quoting the toast of a country gentleman: “May every lawyer shoot a parson and be hanged for it.” It was not exactly the antiestablishment sentiment with which Georgina herself entered the fray. Nor did she have any of the practical philanthropy of a man like Dr. Edmunds, who had so promptly given her a clean bill of mental health after the visit of the mad doctors. She liked to describe Edmunds, a neighbor of hers in Bloomsbury, as an atheist and thus a free spirit, without apparently knowing that he helped found the Ladies Medical Society, to enable women to qualify as midwives. Just as Georgina had never met the criminal mind before the Meniers came into her life, so now she was among strangers with the freethinking allies who rallied to her cause.
Her mother’s repeated advice was to give up fighting altogether. Georgina demurred. To do that, her life would be forever afterward the story of a woman who had defied her husband and lost. She knew very well that Harry did not want her back, yet was all that had happened to her really just the story of a bad marriage? Did her failure have something to do with being a misunderstood artiste, or was it the awful commonplace of being an inadequate wife? Her mother thought the latter and so did the insufferably priggish Dal. She did not know what Harry himself thought—he made no attempt to contact her except through the unfortunate Neal—but she believed (and she may have been right) that he was, if pushed, likely to be more generous about her than many of her critics. He had married exactly the wrong woman. Nevertheless, he had supported her ambitions for as long as he could and longer than most men of his generation would have attempted. He did not love her now, but where was the story in that? Many men did not love their wives. She supposed he must like her a little and even admire her. She had put him in the box he was in, but it could not be his intention to see her snuffed out altogether. Deep down, she knew Harry as well as he knew her. Although she was forty-three and heavy with prison food, tired and in poor voice, she was not ready to give up. Nor, much as Angele would like it, was she the kind of woman to live in semiretirement at some foreign hotel, eking out her days with whist and idle conversation. She had seen all that as a child in Florence.
She took rooms in Burton Crescent, which overlooked Tavistock House. Her two cats were still to be seen through the railings. She conceived a plan to exhume the bones of the dogs buried under the mulberry tree. Even the kindly officers of Hunter Street might jib at her breaking and entering a property with the intention of digging up two dead dogs. The problem at all points was the law. She owed the solicitor who acted for her in the Rivière case £280, which she knew he had not a hope of recovering. Neal controlled Schoolbred’s, where all her letters and diaries were cached. On the sole occasion she had been permitted to inspect the depository, she found a crucifix given to her in Florence. One of Christ’s arms had broken off. This struck her as a special omen, but there were a hundred other small daily irritations. Her mother called at 54 Burton Crescent and finding her not at home, wandered away again: Georgina explained in rage that she lived at number 45. Louisa returned and left a cake and some chocolates on the doorstep. Her reason for not knocking was that she did not have a card she could send up. (Another of Louisa’s more endearing habits was to send letters she forgot to stamp, which drove Georgina into paroxysms.) Harry could not be found anywhere, and Neal refused to answer for his whereabouts.
This was a situation that could not endure. Georgina engaged a new solicitor, named Leaver, and instructed him to serve an order on Harry demanding restitution of conjugal rights. In September she quit London abruptly for Gisors, taking Angele and Bichette with her.
The nuns had done the best they could with the remnants of the orphanage. The unlucky Dagobert never reached Gisors, but many of the others did and were fostered with local families. Rosie Strube received instruction and was accepted into the Catholic Church. Beryl took her place as the nun’s blue-eyed girl. One of the boys, Georgina does not say which, received a prize, she does not say for what. M. Robine, the lay administrator, greeted her like a long-lost friend and persuaded her to relax and, if not forget her troubles, at least enjoy the peace and tranquillity of an autumnal Gisors. She played cards with him in the evenings and tried to explain the conundrum of the Tichborne Claimant. In practical terms, the problem of the orphans was being gently prized from her hands. M. Robine and his staff did not see them as the advance guard of a new system of music education, but as children. They were gradually assimilated into the community, a process already started when Georgina rejoined them.
Robine sensed she would not stay long, one indication of which was the flurry of unstamped letters that arrived from England. In November Dal wrote, an unexpected and alarming event. He had bad news. H
arry had wriggled for three months before the order for restitution of conjugal rights was successfully served on him. He refused it. The refusal was a legal ploy, and the situation was now quite straightforward. Harry had used his only defense. A husband could refuse restitution of conjugal rights on one ground only, adultery on the part of his wife. Georgina was genuinely horrified to hear that her husband intended to cite Sir Henry Thompson of Wimpole Street for adultery.
At first she denied everything. Her brother wanted her to come to London and meet him. This she refused to do. Nor would she give up the name of her solicitor. Dal persisted. He had seen a letter written to the Moth in her handwriting on which learned counsel engaged by Harry had given an opinion. Though no more than a few sheets of paper already sixteen years old, the letter provided sufficient evidence for Harry to have a good chance of winning his action. In citing the distinguished surgeon for divorce, he would disgrace and humiliate one of the most gifted and interesting men in London. The only possible way out of the impasse was for Georgina to withdraw the order and accept whatever terms for a legal separation Harry imposed. It was blackmail. “I seize the opportunity to abuse you of an idea you seem to have,” Dal wrote,
that I am afraid to appear in public and that consequently I want to hush up the whole affair. I have no such fear. I have worked and I am working entirely in what I believe to be your own interest and the best for you in all circumstances. You seem to think I am in the habit of seeing Weldon. I have only seen him once when he came in company with Mr. Jevons to make known his intentions (having been advised to do so by his counsel) I being head of the family . . . I ended the conversation by saying to them what I tell you, that I consider the Restitution of Conjugal Rights, after all that has taken place, absurd, unless he were a consenting party: but that I have felt, and I feel now that you have the right to claim a judicial separation with an allowance sufficient for the present and in the future.
Harry’s response was to offer her, through Dal, an allowance of £500 during his lifetime, and it brought forth a blistering reply from Georgina:
Your common sense should have led you to show Weldon and Jevons the door as soon as they spoke with such insolence, demonstrating they took you for an innocent, making you swallow such rubbish . . . after the infamies M.W. has shown himself capable of towards a wife who has always been so devoted to him, something he himself has told you . . . I have no more patience with your lack of discernment or sense of dignity, nor am I happy at the conduct of Mr. Leaver, to whom I shall make my own observations. Nor more interventions for the love of God, except those that I myself suggest! I really do have reason to say that “the family is the enemy of what nature you are given when you come into the world.”
3
Poor Mama! I do not think she has ever had bad intentions towards me, but, egged on by others, no one has done me more harm than her. There are instances where she has utterly failed in her duty towards me. She should have come to live with me at Tavistock after the mad doctors affair, as I begged her to do. Others were far too interested in keeping her with them for her to be able to respond to my appeal: I have been treated unworthily by you all. As for my exhibitions at police courts: give me the pleasure of citing a single instance where I have been wrong or out of order. I’m not asking you to furnish a list—it would not need more than one example. It should be possible to do that, surely, without you having to write or me to read a book . . . Of what great statesman does this letter make you think? None less than Gladstone. I sincerely hope that’s so.
Georgina wrote these words to her brother just before Christmas of 1880 as the conclusion to an enormously long letter in which all the old accusations of bad faith are gone over again and again. The truth was she by no means had Gladstone’s talent for marshaling an argument. What she had to say to Dal was more or less repeated in a pamphlet printed for her by Salsbury addressed to the new owners of Tavistock House. It was entitled An Urgent Appeal to the Israelite Men and Women, Patrons and Patronesses of a School for Jews. Nothing in the pamphlet was of the slightest practical value to them, nor did it have any interest to the public at large, unless it was to confirm their worst suspicions: she was becoming a one-note author, and exile in Gisors was making her worse.
It was a sad thing, but everything that was going to happen to her in life had already happened. She knew that. Nothing and no one new would ever come along as exciting as Gounod or as dangerous as the mad doctors incident. Gisors was fine, but it was the kind of calm retired folk are thrust into. Doing nothing when nothing is happening is no relaxation. She insisted on rising at six and, after a cold bath, made at least the pretense of washing the convent floors as a small act of religious obedience. She fed the chickens and tended the rabbits. She filled her day with small duties, went to bed early—and found she could not sleep. The same old tune was going round and round in her head. She wished to justify herself, but the means she chose—defamation of others and the most obscure projections of conspiracy (for example, that Sir Thomas Chambers, who had heard the Menier trial, was also M.P. for Marylebone, in which constituency many of her worst detractors also resided)—did her case nothing but harm. The good sisters needed her money and acted toward her with unfailing common sense but were completely unable to assuage her grief. The comic singer Arthur Blunt thought it worth his while to come to Gisors in hope of debauching her under the guise of cheering her up. He was sent packing.
Angele was even more restless. If this was to be the end—stalemate in the courts and a life eked out in Gisors watching the children grow up, take communion, and a year or so later marry some unwary farmhand—then where was the pleasure in that? It was not much different from the dreary life she had led in Clermont Ferrand and from which she had fled only to ruin herself. Her husband had vanished, vowing never to speak to her again (he was actually locked up in the Bicetre prison in Paris for an unrelated fraud, along with his equally scheming and devious brother Eugène). The nuns bored her, and she had heard the fine detail of the last two years of Georgina’s tribulations until she was ready to scream. Georgina might have the constitution of a horse, but she also had an elephant’s memory. Angele was far more easily downhearted than Georgina: failure made her ill. Seldom a week passed without the interment of some ancient old Gisorard, and the bells seemed to be tolling for her. Her youth, her looks, her years of promise, were as spent as Georgina’s, and what had she to look forward to in the future? Nothing but arguments. She was no more capable of settling down to the life of une bonne femme than her lover. There was no cottage with roses over the door, no puttering exile in some forsaken village or other, there or anywhere else in Europe.
To the dismay of the sisters, she persuaded Georgina to let her take five of the children out of the convent and move back to London. The means existed—Salsbury’s house at Brixton was at their disposal, and he was anxious to resume contact with his fellow utopian. In every other respect it was a crazy idea.
I should have been ashamed to confess to anyone that I was weak enough to take a house for her and five children when all that was managed so well at Gisors. I have a weird character. It’s true! When a matter of principle is at stake, I’m steel! Adamantine! Otherwise I have a deplorable feebleness of character. People have told me about her “if she isn’t happy, she sets about making life miserable for others. Fancy you needing to mess with such a woman!” They are telling the truth. My little friend Salsbury told me the same thing but . . . she didn’t want to let me go! There’s the truth of it and to get some peace and not have her on my back any longer, I pleaded the case so well that my friend did as I did. He gave in.
Angele left for England with the remaining five orphan girls in May 1881, leaving Georgina to celebrate her forty-fourth birthday alone in Gisors. Salsbury gave her the keys to the Brixton house and inquired anxiously after Georgina. Angele was curt and ungracious. She hired a maid and someone to teach the children, a young Frenchwoman named Eugénie Morand. Then, to Sa
lsbury’s dismay, she left for Clermont Ferrand, on the pretext that her father was ill. Though she undoubtedly loved Georgina, she could not help abusing her simplicity. It was not Angele who was the darling of the Alpha restaurant, nor had anyone there ever heaped sympathy on her head for a disastrous marriage and the general cruelty of men. In the confusion of the last three years Bichette had been left in Paris—as it turned out, for good. Angele’s interest in her had evaporated. Nor did she act now out of love for any of the other children. Georgina was right about her motive: she brought the last of the orphans back to England as a demonstration of her power over her lover and left for Clermont Ferrand for the same reason.
It would have taken a novelist to unravel the exact relationship between these two women. There was no doubting they were intimate in a way that far exceeded that of mistress and servant, or a lady and her companion, although they generally preserved the outward forms of such arrangements. Whatever was or had been sexual in their behavior was never apparent, though it was obvious to people who knew them at all well that these were two women in thrall to each other. They squabbled, they sobbed bitter tears of reproach, they kissed and made up: in appearance, two short and dumpy women with volcanic tempers who dressed almost identically and had the same fine disregard for conventional morality. Like man and wife, they shared a secret history which they guarded with smiles and frowns, hand-holding and kisses, as well as dark moods and spectacular fits of sulking. It was not in Georgina to flaunt her deepest emotional desires any more than it was Angele’s way to reveal her own crippled dependency on money as the substitute for love. Georgina wanted fame; Angele craved for the sheer ordinariness of a bourgeois existence. Nevertheless they were—and were seen to be—a couple. They were together because they could not bear to be apart.
The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon Page 28
