Part 8 (1/2)
”You know how we have always hankered after an old place with old trees,” she wrote to her brother Willie, ”and when the Thursfields made us come down and see the place and declared we must and should take it we couldn't in the end resist! It has such an old walled garden, such a beautiful lime avenue, such delicious old hollies and oaks, such woods behind it and about it! The house is bigger in the way of bedrooms than Haslemere, but otherwise not more formidable, and though the inside has no particular features (the outside is charming) we shall manage I think to make it habitable and pretty. One great attraction to me is that it is so near Euston and therefore to the Hall and all its works. I don't mean to say that we are taking it on any but the most ordinary selfish principles!--but still, I like to think that I can make Marchmont Hall, and the people who congregate about it, free of it as I cannot do of Haslemere, and that there is a hungry demand in that part of London for the fruit and flowers with which the place must overflow in the summer. I believe also that the change will help me a good deal in my work, and that at Stocks I shall be able to see something of the genuine English country life which I never could at Haslemere. But we had got to love Haslemere all the same, and it is an up-rooting.”
The little house on Grayswood Hill was indeed loath to let her go. She went there alone at the end of February, when plain and hill lay steeped in a flood of spring suns.h.i.+ne. ”If only the place had not looked so lovely yesterday and to-day!” she wrote. ”We have been hung in infinite air over the most ethereal of plains.” But when Stocks finally received her, at midsummer, 1892, she knew in her heart that all was well; that ”something” deep down in her nature ”that stands more rubs than anything else in our equipment” was satisfied--satisfied with the quiet lines of the chalk hills, with the beechwoods that clothed their sides, and stretched away, she knew, for miles beyond the horizon; with the neighbourhood of that ancient life of the soil that surrounded her in village and scattered farm. She had found her home; she was to live in it and love it for eight-and-twenty years.
CHAPTER VI
THE STRUGGLE WITH ILL-HEALTH--_MARCELLA_ AND _SIR GEORGE TRESSADY_--THE BUILDING OF THE Pa.s.sMORE EDWARDS SETTLEMENT
1892-1897
The acquisition of Stocks in the summer of 1892 was a landmark in Mrs.
Ward's life for more reasons than one, for it coincided with the advent of a mysterious ailment, or disability, from which she was never to be wholly free for the rest of her life. She had hardly been in the new house a fortnight before she succ.u.mbed to a violent attack of internal pain, showing symptoms of gastric catarrh, but also affecting the nerves of the right leg. It crippled her for many weeks and exercised the minds of both the local and the London doctors. Some believed that the cause of it must be a ”floating kidney,” others that the pain was merely neuralgic, while Mrs. Ward herself, with that keen interest in the human organism and that instinct for self-doctoring which made her so embarra.s.sing a patient, watched the effect of each remedy and suggested others with pathetic ingenuity. She had her better days, when she was able to go down to the old walled kitchen-garden--about 300 yards from the house--in a bath-chair, but whenever she tried to walk, even a little, the pain returned in aggravated form. Only those who watched her through those two summer months knew what heroic efforts she made to master it and to throw herself into the writing of her new book, _Marcella_, or how her ”spirit grew” as the days of comparative relief were followed ever and again by days of collapse. While she was still in the thick of the struggle she received a visit from her American friend, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, whose impressions of the day were written immediately to Mrs. Whitman, in Boston, and give a vivid picture of Mrs. Ward as she appeared at that time to so shrewd and sympathetic an observer.[17] (Aug. 20, 1892).
”Yesterday we spent the day with Mrs. Humphry Ward, who has been ill for a while and is just getting better. Somehow, she seemed so much younger and more girlish than I expected. I long to have you know Mrs. Ward. She is very clear and s.h.i.+ning in her young mind, brilliant and full of charm, and with a lovely simplicity and sincerity of manner. I think of her with warmest affection, and a sacred expectation of what she is sure to do if she keeps strong, and sorrow does not break her eager young heart too soon. Her life burns with a very fierce flame, and she has not in the least done all that she can do, but just now it seems to me that her vigour is a good deal spent.”
The ”spent vigour” was only another word for bodily illness, but some weeks after Miss Jewett's visit the first signs of relief appeared. Her London doctor introduced her to a new drug, phenacetin, which worked wonders with the sore side and leg. Phenacetin and all its kindred ”tabloids” came into common use at Stocks from that time onwards, in spite of the mockery of her friends. Mrs. Ward developed an extraordinary skill in the use of these ”little drugs,” and would often baffle her doctors by her theories of their effects. At any rate, they bore a remarkable part in the complicated struggle between her work and her health, which was to occupy the next few years, and Mrs. Ward always staunchly believed in them.
The improvement continued steadily, so that she was able, that autumn, to undertake a speaking-tour in Lancas.h.i.+re and Yorks.h.i.+re on behalf of University Hall, finding wherever she went the most astonis.h.i.+ng welcome.
At Manchester she went, after her own meetings were over, to a great Unitarian gathering in the Free Trade Hall, stipulating that she was not to speak; but at the end she was entrapped, nevertheless. Her husband received the following account of it.
”Then at the very end, to my sorrow, the chairman announced that Mrs. Humphry Ward was present, and had been asked to speak, but was not well enough to do so! Whereupon there were such groans from the audience, and I felt it so absurd to be sitting there pleading illness that I could only move up to the desk, wondering whether I could possibly make myself heard in such a place. Then they all rose, and such applause as you never heard! It was a good thing that a certain number of people had left to catch early trains, or it would have been still more overwhelming to me. I just managed to say half a dozen words, and I think I said them with sufficient ease, but whether they carried to the back of the hall I don't know. It certainly must be very exciting to be able to speak easily to such a responsive mult.i.tude.”
At Leeds the same kind of experience awaited her, though on a smaller scale. ”I should not have been mortal if I had not been deeply touched by their feeling towards me and towards the books,” she wrote. ”And what a strong independent world of its own all this north-country Nonconformity is! I feel as though these experiences were invaluable to me as a novelist. One never dreamt of all this at Oxford.”
The improvement in health, which had enabled her to face the strain of this tour, was not of long duration. Many letters in the winter complain of the ”dragging pain” in the right leg, which prevents her from walking more than fifty yards without being ”brought up sharp till the pain and stiffness have gone off again--which they do with resting.” By the following June (1893) she was as ill as ever she had been in the preceding summer. The London doctor adopted the theory of the ”s.h.i.+fting kidney,” but encouraged her to allow herself to be carried up and downstairs at Stocks, so as to lie in the summer garden. ”I am afraid this tendency may mean times of pain for me in the future,” she writes, ”but it is not dangerous, and need not prevent my working just as usual.
I _am_ so enjoying the sight of the flowers again, and this afternoon I shall somehow get to the lime on the lawn. It had given me quite a pang at my heart to think the lime-blossom would go and I not see it! One has fewer years to waste now.”
She was hard at work on the writing of _Marcella_ throughout this year, but the fact that she could not sit up at a table without bringing on a ”wild fit of pain,” as she described it once, meant that she had to cultivate the art of writing in bed or in her garden chair, a proceeding which was very apt to produce attacks of writer's cramp. Elaborate erections of writing-boards had to be built up around her, so as to enable as many as possible of Dr. Wolff's precepts to be carried out, but it was a weary business, and often the hand would drop lame for a while, in spite of the author's longing to be ”at” her characters. This joy of creation was, however, her princ.i.p.al stay during these months of pain and weakness.
_To Mr. George Murray Smith_.
_September 8, 1893._
”I, alas! cannot get well, though I am no doubt somewhat better than when you were here. The horrid ailment, whatever it is, will not go away, and work is rather a struggle. Still it is also my great stand-by and consolation,--by the help of it I manage to avoid the depression which otherwise this long _malaise_ and weakness must have brought with it. A walk to the kitchen-garden and back yesterday gave me a bad night and fresh pain to-day, and I cannot travel with any comfort. But I can get along, and soon we shall be in London and I must try some fresh doctoring. Meanwhile I have written nearly a volume since we came down, which is not so bad.”
All through the autumn of this year she grew more and more absorbed in her story, while her health improved slightly, though walking was still an unattainable joy. The life of the little village of Aldbury, half a mile from the house, which she wove into so many scenes of _Marcella_, had an immense fascination for her. She would drive down in her pony-carriage, whenever she could find time, to spend an hour with old Mrs. Swabey or Mrs. Bradsell, or with Johnny Dolt, the postmaster, gleaning from their old-world gossip the elemental life-story of the country-side, or hearing the echoes of the b.l.o.o.d.y tragedy which had convulsed the village just before we came to it, in December, 1891. For while the old lady of Stocks (Mrs. Bright) lay dying, a murderous affray had occurred in the wood, not a mile from the house, between the gamekeeper and his lad on the one side, and a band of poachers on the other. The keeper was shot dead, and the lad, who fled for his life into the open, down towards a spreading beech in the hollow below, was followed and beaten to death with the b.u.t.t-end of a gun. No wonder that Mrs. Ward took the tale and made it the dominating theme of her story, weaving into it new threads that the sordid tragedy itself did not possess--of the poacher Hurd, the dying child, the piteous little wife.
The village itself was somewhat agape, we used to think, over the proceedings of the new mistress of Stocks, who would have ”grand folks”
down from London to spend their Sundays with her, but who had also taken a cottage on purpose for the reception of tired people from the back streets, and who was constantly having parties down from ”some place in London” to enjoy the garden and the shady trees. The place in question was Marchmont Hall, for whose cricket team we children preserved a private but invincible contempt; but the elderly a.s.sociates became real friends, and soon learnt to know Stocks and its environs with more than a pa.s.sing knowledge. Sometimes they would come down just for a day's outing, but more often they, or the club-girls, or some ailing mother and baby would stay for a fortnight at the Convalescent Cottage under the care of the loquacious Mrs. Dell, whose memory must still be green in many London hearts. A natural philosopher, reared on the Bible and her own shrewd observation of life, Mrs. Dell was the ideal matron for the London folk who were sent down to her; she took them all in under her large embrace, though her opinion of their ”draggled” faces when they arrived was anything but complimentary. She was wont to express herself, in fact, with considerable freedom about London life. Once one of her guests--a working-man--had gone back to town for the week-end, feeling bored in the country. ”And pray what can 'e do in London?” she asked with magnificent scorn. ”Nothin' but t.i.tter-totter on the paves!”
And besides the Convalescent Cottage, there stood on the same steep slope of hill, just under the hanging wood, with its mixture of beech, ash and wild cherry, another little house, known simply as Stocks Cottage, which Mr. Ward acquired to round off the miniature estate early in 1895. It became a source of unmixed joy to Mrs. Ward, for she could lend or let it to many different friends, from Graham Wallas and Bernard Shaw, who came to it during one of her absences abroad, and thence roamed the downs with the daughter she had left behind, preaching collectivism and Jaeger clothes--to the Neville Lytteltons, who spent seven consecutive summers in the little place, from 1895 to 1901. The Cottage, indeed, became a very intimate part of Mrs. Ward's life at Stocks, and its mistress, Mrs. Lyttelton, one of her closest friends.
_Marcella_ was finished, after a long struggle against sleeplessness, headache and a bad bout of writer's cramp, on January 31, 1894. A characteristic pa.s.sage occurred between the author and her publisher immediately afterwards. Mr. Smith had sent her, according to promise, a considerable sum in advance of royalty, setting forth at the same time, with his habitual candour, the exact sum which his firm expected to make from the same number of copies. Mrs. Ward thought it not enough, and wrote at once to propose a decrease of royalty on the first 2,000 copies. ”I hardly know what to say,” replied Mr. Smith. ”It is not often that a publisher receives such a letter from an author.” But after mutual bargainings--all of an inverted character--they arrived at a satisfactory agreement.
Mrs. Ward fled to Italy with husband and daughter to escape the appearance of the book, and saw herself flaunted on the posters of the English papers in the Piazza di Spagna early in April. It was indeed an exhilarating time for her, for there were few harsh voices among the reviewers on this occasion, while the many letters from her friends were as kind as ever. A typical opinion was that of Sir Francis Jeune: ”I was charmed with sentence after sentence of perfect finish and point, such as no other writer of fiction in the present day ever attempts and certainly could not sustain. They are a delight in themselves, and the care bestowed on them is the highest compliment to a reader. May I add that I think the dramatic force of some scenes--I single out the morning of Hurd's execution, and the death of Hallin, but there are several more--is greatly in advance of anything even you have done, and touches a very high point in comparison with any scenes in English fiction. I think George Eliot never surpa.s.sed them.” In her _Recollections_ Mrs.
Ward describes the coming out of _Marcella_ as ”perhaps the happiest date in my literary life,” for it not only gave her unalloyed joy in itself, but it coincided also with a comparative return to health--though always with ups and downs. Yet the immense publicity which the success of the book brought her was also a grievous burden, and she gives vent to this feeling in a letter to Mr. Gladstone, written in reply to his own words of thanks for the gift of the book:
25, GROSVENOR PLACE.