The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon

by Brian Thompson

  Experience swiftly taught her she was no playwright, and the entertainment she gave at the North London Colosseum or Shoreditch Music Hall was offered in defiant ignorance of what was popular in the halls. As a novelty act she had a short career, if an uproarious one. Working-class audiences soon enough gave her the bird. She had a few engagements to sing elsewhere, but the Rivière case had slammed the door forever on music as a profession. No impresario of any note would touch her, and in any case she was fifty. The wave she rode after her release from Holloway curled, broke, and was dissipated. Little by little, week by week, the frenzy of interest ebbed away. Now the headlines in bold—What is Mrs. Weldon up to?—become ironic. She had peaked. When everything is interesting, nothing gets done. She wanted fame more than anything else in the world, and when for a few short seasons she had it, she let it fall from her hands.

  The orphanage had shrunk to the two youngest children, of whom Sapho-Katie was the last to leave. Angele was tired of living in Brixton and persuaded Georgina to give the house in Loughborough Road back to Salsbury and take up the lease on a more imposing property at 58 Gower Street. She represented the move as being a more economical way of using the allowance that Harry was required by law to pay Georgina. At the last minute, Angele suggested that the lease be in her name, the better to protect it against distraint if things went wrong in the courts. Georgina agreed to this with only half her mind on the subject. She was busy preparing to tour her play when the move from Brixton was made, and she was staggered to find on her return that neither Sapho-Katie nor Pauline, the other orphanage veteran, had survived it. Pauline had been packed off to an aunt and Sapho-Katie sent to Canada “to be the companion of another little girl of the same age.” In their place, Angele had adopted the two girls of her brother-in-law, Jean Helluy. “One thing after another,” Georgina complained. “I don’t know how my brains could endure so many sorrows [chagrins], so many deceptions and disappointments.” With this single absentminded farewell, Sapho-Katie, the girl who had always been her favorite among the orphans, the child “who could converse in three languages” when she was two, was dismissed from the story.

  In Gower Street Angele maintained a household more than sufficient for the task and lived better than she had ever dreamed possible. With the children gone, the need for Eugénie Morand would seem to have ended also. She stayed on. In addition, Angele kept up three servants. What was ineradicable in her was the kind of avarice that sometimes besets the poor. Hunger becomes greed, greed becomes theft. She simply could not let the opportunity pass of taking what was there to take. Once, in the beginning, the two women had quarreled over the price of a pair of gloves. Now Angele bought furniture, amassed her bibelots, dressed in the height of fashion, abused the financial trust Georgina had placed in her. Left alone for days and weeks on end while Georgina deviled in Red Lion Court or rushed from hearing to hearing, what was there for her to do except to be the householder, the long-suffering wife? From the point of view of the greengrocer, the coalman, and all the rest of the tradesmen, she was the fixed point and Georgina the occasional visitor.

  There was a homemaker at the heart of Angele, a gift Georgina discounted too readily and of which she might have made much better use. It was true the Frenchwoman drank too much, flew into hysterical rages too often, pretended to romance a solicitor’s clerk she met (using the same wiles on him as Georgina always found successful, the helpless wight who turns out to be a witch). The psychological balance shifted, and the emotional dependency on her lover that Angele started out with finally came to an end. Ten years with Georgina had robbed them both of their youth and in Angele’s case her dreams and illusions. She, who so loved Georgina, despite the chasm of difference between them, of language as well as class and life experience, was drawn insensibly into becoming the last great enemy.

  2

  Georgina’s old friend Edward Maitland and Mrs. Anna Kingsford had come home from France, she to work in a medical practice in Kensington, he to write and study. They joined the Theosophical Society together and, disenchanted with that, founded in 1885 the Hermetic Society, more mystical than spiritualist and based on the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus. Georgina was never capable of such sustained abstract intellectual effort. Though she was vice-president of the Magna-Chartists, a reforming social movement founded by Kenealy, her interest in it was strictly limited to the publicizing of her own legal history. She was not a woman of ideas, as so many around her were becoming. She could not draw together all the threads of social reform, nor did she have the inclination. If she went out at night to address some meeting, it was always about herself, never about the broader issues. She read very little and was easily flummoxed by art—she got her information on that from back copies of the Athenaeum which her mother sent up from Hampshire whenever she could remember. She did chase money, but not in order to use it purposefully. For example, having learned that her mother had made a will, she tried to persuade Louisa to make her an early gift of her portion. (If Louisa was ambivalent about this, it was because she had no intention of giving Georgina more than the merest token.)

  What Georgina wanted out of any social transaction was what she considered her moral due, and this she was not always able to identify with any precision. Nor was she prepared to get along with other people in what might be called a good-natured way, winning some, losing some. To lose was not to have your worth recognized. The law was a ready-to-hand substitute for real life, for the disobliging and unsatisfactory nature of day-to-day existence. With it she had won great battles, but even then she was not always vindicated as she wished. The most titanically absurd of her legal wrangles was beginning against her own lawyer in the Menier trial, St. John Wontner. She pursued him and his firm through the courts all the way down to 1901, when the evidence being disputed was a quarter century old. Her friends (like the faithful Salsbury) waited for her to move on, find new challenges. She never did. She was nobody’s lieutenant and followed no flag but her own.

  In most lives, people live in a settled place. They give and receive hospitality and in this way build up a network of friends and confidants. They take pleasure in small things, like food and drink, or the best choice of curtain material, the progress of a particular shrub in the garden. They read. They follow the doings of the famous. The seasons of the year announce themselves by sunlight falling across a lawn or flooding a room that is otherwise dark. The passage of time is marked by the growth of children—their own or others. In other words, they are overwhelmed (or comforted) by sheer ordinariness. This never happened to Georgina. There is no evidence that—with one exception—she ever met her nephews and nieces. Hers is a story without Christmases. For nearly fifteen years she had not taken a vacation. All these benefits were enjoyed by the rest of the Trehernes, who might have been dull but were secure in the world of little things.

  Her fiftieth birthday could not go on being celebrated forever. Angele was away from home, Georgina could not be completely certain where. She wrote the Frenchwoman an enormously long letter outlining all her faults, ending with an ultimatum. She should come home to Gower Street or be forever banished. It was imperious but it was the last of her mistakes. Angele did come home nine days later. She pointed out, with the sort of cold savagery that Georgina herself employed in the courts when the occasion demanded, that the house was in her name and that if her lover, now her former lover, did not leave it at once, she would go to solicitors, seek an order, and have her evicted.

  Perhaps it came as a relief. Once, Mrs. Weldon would have rushed to the law herself and whatever the cost, however rocky the road ahead, found some way to drag Mme Menier through the courts. She had done it for everyone else who crossed her or betrayed her: why not Angele? It is an indication of what Angele meant to her that she did not. She accepted that it was over between them with a kind of exhausted grace. She conferred wearily with Harcourt (who offered to go to Bloomsbury and shoot the lady), wound up in the office in Red Lion Court, and a
rranged for her goods and chattels to go temporarily into storage. She wrote in her diary: “It quite breaks my heart to leave my garden, my window boxes, my little green room and everything. I hope I can keep the dogs and I must try to keep my darling monkeys. My little birds, too. How sad to leave them. I must take a few.”

  There were more than two dozen budgerigars that could not make the journey with her. Her papers and correspondence filled twenty-seven tea chests, which were removed to storage as though her life had been lived in nothing but an office. It was a dramatically dry-eyed parting and, as always happened with her, once a thing had been decided, swift. She never saw Angele again.

  On September 23, 1888, she went to Charing Cross and assembled on the platform her two pugs, the monkey Tittileelee, and several cages of birds. Her own luggage was modest by comparison. As she waited to board the train, she reflected it was the twenty-eighth anniversary of her miscarriage. It was also the death by exhaustion of the personality she had raised and nurtured in the baby’s place. Of that Georgina Weldon, there was nothing more to say. She wrote:

  I’d given myself until my fiftieth year to get together the sum I would need to raise and educate 50 children; and as late as 1885 I thought every incident, every adventure would end for me in triumphant success. When 1887 and my fiftieth birthday arrived, something broke inside me. Since then, my powers have noticeably declined. I had never been robust. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with me, but I felt exhausted.

  The whistle blew, the last door slammed, and like Gounod, with tears streaming down her face, she said good-bye to her past. A day later she presented herself at Gisors and was given a room on the second floor. She engaged a maid, calmed herself, put on the work uniform that the sisters wore (to their undying shock), inspected the garden; and then slowly, laboriously, began to compose the judicial memoirs on which this book is based.

  3

  Harry survived Georgina’s onslaught. He rose inexorably in the College of Arms and as Norroy supervised the ceremonies surrounding the interment of Gladstone in Westminster Abbey in 1898. He was acting Garter king of arms for the funeral of Victoria and the accession of Edward VII. In time he brought Annie Lowe ashore from the houseboat at Windsor to a cottage at Shiplake in Oxfordshire. They lived in separate houses—hers was called Hope Cottage. In 1915, as soon as he decently could after Georgina’s death, he married Mrs. Lowe. Soon after, he was given his Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. He died in 1923.

  Angele left England four or five years after Georgina and settled in Levallois-Perret, a suburb of Paris. There she set up as a piano teacher and a small-town fabulist, much in the manner of her former lover, claiming, among other things, an intimate friendship with the director of the Paris Opéra. He wrote to tell her to stop the nonsense. One afternoon a young girl serving in a post office in another banlieue of the city was startled to be addressed by a portly and elderly customer, her eyes streaming with tears. “Don’t you recognise me?” the woman sobbed. “It’s me—Auntie!” Bichette backed away in terror, calling for the postmaster to summon the police.

  Angele died in November 1898, leaving a generous amount of furniture to her nephews and nieces (but not Bichette). In the will she left five hundred francs for the poor, to be distributed by the newspaper L’Aurore. Someone in the reporter’s room confused her with the widow of the chocolate manufacturer Menier and composed a fulsome paragraph of thanks to a distinguished citizen of France noted for her many charitable acts.

  Angele survived her husband by six years. Anarcharsis Menier died in January 1892. He had come from a village outside Bordeaux and as a young man was anxious to make his fortune on the grand scale. After two terms of imprisonment, one in London, one in Paris, and the utter failure to dream up an investment swindle worthy of their talents, he and his brothers (ever on the lookout for the coming thing) started selling steam baths and respirators at Bois-Colombes, twelve kilometers from Paris. The various Appareils Menier that came from their “laboratories” won a bronze medal at a hygiene exhibition in Dijon, the town where Georgina’s Mémoires were eventually published.

  Louisa Treherne died in 1894. The woman who had been taken to Florence for her health and whose letters seldom omit mention of her various ailments, lived to be eighty-three. Late in life her will had been altered, and save for an unimportant minor legacy, Georgina did not benefit from it. It led, of course, to an acrimonious contest in the courts.

  Dal had astonished everyone by meeting and marrying a merry widow in 1883, at the very bottom of his fortunes. A brasserie in which he had invested in Muhlberg went bust, and by chance and a generous helping of luck of the sort not often vouchsafed to a Treherne, he managed to find his consolation prize in life. The lady was the young and beautiful widow Countess Waldstein, possessed of huge and lawyer-infested estates in Bohemia. His stepson Hugo inherited what was left of the great Dux estates in 1894, including the house in which Casanova had been the librarian. The countess gave Dal a son of his own, Phillip, who wrote the first biography of his aunt in 1923.

  Of the orphans who survived Georgina’s experiments in music education, nothing is known. In Paris, Gisors, Rouen, London, and somewhere in Canada, their descendants are walking about today in complete ignorance of what splendor and misery there was in being one of “Grannie’s” children. If Freddie was buried under the mulberry tree in Tavistock Square, as Georgina hinted but could never bring herself fully to admit, his grave is marked today by the headquarters of the British Medical Association, which occupies the site. Mireille’s tiny bones are lost or scattered in Argeuil. In the whole orphanage, only the peripheral figures of the Rawlings brothers made even the tiniest mark in history. Two of them became small-time music-hall impresarios.

  George Werranrath, whom Harry suspected of adultery, went to New York in 1876 and became the principal tenor of the Brooklyn Cathedral Choir. He married and in August 1883 his wife gave him a son, Reinhart. The father taught the son to sing, and in time Reinhart Werranrath appeared with Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera House, playing Silvio in Pagliacci and the part of Valentin in Gounod’s Faust. He died in 1953, not before leaving a permanent record of his baritone voice on discs cut with the Victor Opera Quartet.

  As for Georgina, once in Gisors, she quickly recovered her composure and admitted to herself that the time she had on her hands was never really going to be spent in reflection and contemplation. The greatest part of her possessions on earth was her vast collection of legal papers. When they followed her across the Channel (after the inconvenience of a London dock strike), she at once set to work indexing them. Slowly but surely, they fell into place, and the deed boxes in which she stored them lined the walls of her room. In the sifting process new injustices were revealed and new lines of inquiry opened up. No detail was too small to be overlooked. The Mémoires are stuffed full of tales of the hunt for missing documents, dismay at willfully destroyed letters or joy when others were miraculously recovered. Her whole daily routine was dictated by this obsessive exactitude. Never a day passed when she did not study and annotate, combing through ten years of turbulent history.

  It soon occurred to her that her labors merited a book. But what kind of a book should it be? Over the years, she had written half a dozen small pamphlets published at her own expense, and it was these that seemed to her to be the model for the work she contemplated. Sitting at her desk in the hospice, looking down the short road that led to the market, she slowly came to see the theme as an exposé of the English system of justice, nominally addressed to the French (who were going about their business buying potatoes in sublime ignorance of its value to them). The post office was at the end of the road. Unless it was in response to a letter of hers, there was seldom any news from England. No one visited from London, and her journeys to Paris were few and far between. As she pondered what to write, the loneliness of her life overcame her. Without a real friend in whom to confide and constantly playing the mysterious milady with the hospic
e staff, she chose exactly the wrong book to write. She compounded the error by deciding to write it in French. This required the translation of hundreds of thousands of words and drove her even further within herself. Once, she thought she would be lost without Tavistock House to keep her dream alive. Now it was her room in the hospice, smelling of moldering paper and cigarettes, that drew her back out of the sunlight and the vegetable gardens which she had more or less taken as her own.

  When the Mémoires came to be printed, they were furnished in the French fashion with a table des matières for each volume. The synopsis of the first eight pages of volume III gives an indication of the way the book was assembled:

  2. La Menier “accomplishes the sacrifice” of leaving Bichette with Marie Helluy. Her return, 28 June 1877. Mme Paul Julien. Loans and advances. French system of pawnbroking. 3. La Menier jealous. Watch sold to M. Landrec. 4. La Menier throws suspicion on Rosie of stealing it. 5. The big wardrobes from The Minories. Extracts from my journal. Menier an egg seller and Director of the Liberté Coloniale, 27 June 1877. 6. Scenes from La Menier. The mattress. Marie Helluy arrives with Bichette, 30 July 1877. 7. La Menier proposes placing the children at Argeuil. Endless uproar. 8. Terrible row with La Menier 10 August. Version of this same row with Marie Helluy . . .