Burning boy, p.85
Burning Boy, page 85
The owner was Moreton Frewen (1853–1924), the scion of an old Sussex family endowed with enormous wealth, and his American wife, Clara, happened to be the sister of Brooklyn-born Jennie Jerome, who was the wife of another Englishman, Lord Randolph Churchill, and the mother of the twenty-four-year-old future prime minister, Winston Churchill. Frewen was something of a renegade among that august company, an adventurer who won and lost fortunes as other men win and lose at blackjack, and so incurable was his penchant for gambling on the longest of long shots that he earned the twin nicknames of “Mortal Ruin” and “the splendid pauper.” His latest enterprise had been a vast, sprawling ranch in Wyoming that had been built to cash in on the western cattle boom but had generated so little profit that the scheme had gone bust. Almost inevitably, he and Crane wound up becoming fast friends. In April 1900, not two months before he died, S.C. put the finishing touch on his collection of Cuban war stories by adding a dedication to his sweet-tempered, live-and-let-live landlord, who never bothered to collect the rent and actively tried to help the Cranes whenever they fell into difficulties: To / Moreton Frewen / this small token of things / well remembered by / his friend / Stephen Crane.
Brede Place had been in the family for more than three hundred years, and having bought it recently from one of his brothers, Frewen was now the sole owner of the house and the one-hundred-acre property that surrounded it. Sometime in May, Cora took the first step by engaging an architect to inspect the house and report on any necessary repairs, and on June fourth she wrote to Clara Frewen explaining that she would have been in touch earlier but had been waiting to hear from the architect about “how much it would cost to make the house habitable.” She had hoped, too, to have heard from Crane by then, but so far no word had come. Eager to keep the process moving, she decided to act on her own and made an offer to rent the place for forty pounds a year (a moot point, as it turned out, since the rent was rarely if ever paid). On the tenth, she followed up with a letter to Frewen telling him that Mr. Crane had sent her a cablegram from Jamaica and “that he is satisfied with my arrangements.” With the matter settled now, she went off on a four-day driving excursion with friends and saw her future home for the first time, a pleasant jolt that prompted another letter to Frewen on the sixteenth in which she assured him that Crane “will be delighted at the idea of camping in your old house.”
Brede Place, Sussex, in 1944. (COURTESY OF SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY)
“Old house” hardly does justice to the tumbledown decay of Brede, a monstrosity built in the fourteenth century that had been restored twice since then—back in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There was no electricity and no modern plumbing, and most of the many rooms in that immense stone hulk were in such disrepair they were not fit for anything but storing junk. On top of that, it had the further disadvantage of being a haunted house. A ghost prowled the halls at night, and there was no chance of ever getting rid of him. From The Crane Log:
Servants refused to spend the night in the house because of the legend that it was haunted by the spirit of its early sixteenth-century owner, Sir Goddard Oxenbridge, a warlock and an ogre who purportedly ate a child for dinner each night. According to the legend, he was executed by local children who sawed him in half with a wooden saw while he lay in an intoxicated stupor.
It made no difference to the Cranes. They both fell in love with the idea of living in their collapsed medieval ruin, and however impractical it was for them to be there, their enthusiasm for Brede Place never flagged—for the simple reason that they were not practical people. As Cora wrote to Reynolds that fall, “A man must have pure wholesome air if he wishes to succeed in art,” and then, a couple of sentences later, that Crane “has … a wonderful home awaiting him.” But it wasn’t a wonderful home, and the air in that place was far from wholesome. If they had wanted wholesome air, they could have moved to some craggy perch in the Arizona desert or, if America was not an option, to the mountains of Switzerland or France. A failing, fever-ridden body will not recover its strength by living in dank, chilly rooms, and two long winters at Brede exacted a harsh toll on Crane. The house itself was not directly responsible for his death, but there is no question that it played an important role in killing him.
Perhaps the calendar had something to do with it as well. Cora went there for the first time in June, the loveliest, most welcoming month of the year. One wonders what she would have thought if she had made the trip in January.
* * *
On August twelfth, the forty-two-year-old Frederic suffered a stroke, and for the next several months Cora had additional things to worry about besides money problems and Crane’s infrequent cablegrams. Her friends were in crisis, and as she stepped in to help them, the initial blow devolved into a melodrama that played out in four distinct acts, advancing from illness to death to manslaughter charges to a possible prison term for Kate Lyon. No one could have invented such a story. Only the real world is powerful enough to dream up something on this order of Weird.
Frederic was a big man who lived hard, and while not every man who drinks too much and smokes too much and maintains two separate families is a candidate for stroke—at least not when he is barely past forty—Frederic was one of the unlucky ones. And his was a bad stroke, so severe that his life was threatened. On learning the news, Cora rushed over to Homefield with Adoni Ptolemy and arranged for her servant to be lent out for as long as necessary to help with Frederic’s care. Then she gathered up the three small children (ages four, five, and six) and took them back to Ravensbrook to live with her so Kate would not have to divide her energies between child care and nursing a sick man.
Frederic had been paralyzed along the right side of his body and the left side of his face, but he continued to smoke and drink in his debilitated condition, had nothing but contempt for his doctors, refused to listen to their advice, and ultimately dismissed them on September twentieth. Cora was alarmed by this impetuous move, but Kate sympathized with her husband, not just out of loyalty but because of her own lack of faith in traditional medicine, and with Frederic’s wholehearted approval, they decided to handle his case by following the Christian Science precepts of nonintervention and prayer. A Christian Science healer named Mrs. Mills was called in to supervise his treatment (or nontreatment), and for a host of obvious reasons Frederic’s condition continued to decline. On October sixteenth, a frantic John Scott Stokes turned up at Cora’s house and explained that he had just been to Homefield and had found Frederic in miserable shape, perhaps on the point of death. He urged Cora to go there herself and try to talk Kate into summoning the doctors. Denying someone adequate medical care was a criminal offense, he told her, and he feared that Kate could be charged with manslaughter if Frederic died.
Cora went to Homefield the next morning, and after some strenuous resistance from her friend, she finally managed to persuade her to call in the doctors who had been cut loose in September. It was too little too late. In the middle of the following night, as October eighteenth was turning into the nineteenth, Frederic died when his heart gave out on him.
Two days later, an inquest concerning the cause of his death was opened by the district coroner, and in an ugly procedure that plodded on for several weeks and left Kate’s reputation in a shambles, a verdict was finally delivered by the jury on November eighth to charge both her and Mrs. Mills with manslaughter—just as Scott Stokes had predicted. Both women were arrested outside the courtroom, arraigned in the local police court, and then released after posting bail in the amount of fifty pounds each. Scott Stokes and other friends pooled their money to free Kate.
She and her children went back to Ravensbrook with Cora, and two weeks later the trial began at the Croydon County Police Court. The prosecutor was Horace Avory, the same man who had helped convict Oscar Wilde on charges of sodomy and gross indecency in 1895, and along with the two doctors, the Frederics’ housekeeper, Scott Stokes, and Adoni Ptolemy, Cora was one of the witnesses called on to testify. After court was adjourned for the day, a number of postponements followed, and then, in a surprising turn on December fifth, Avory asked for the charges against Kate Lyon to be dropped. Presumably, he wanted to focus his attention on Mrs. Mills, but in an even more surprising turn, the magistrates eventually dismissed the charges against both women. Still, there was one more barrier in front of them, and it wasn’t until December fourteenth—four months and two days after Frederic’s stroke—that the case concluded in London’s Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) when the charges were withdrawn against Kate and dismissed against Mrs. Mills. By then, Kate Lyon had been so thoroughly beaten up in the press that she no longer had a private life. She was public property now, a fallen woman who had destroyed the marriage of an honorable man and given birth to three bastard children. For those sins, she had lost the right to show her face in decent society and now qualified as a non-person, a human smudge.
By way of response, Cora and Scott Stokes established a fund to help raise money for the support of Kate’s children. Henry James and George Bernard Shaw kicked in small contributions, but Conrad, who had only eight pounds in the bank, was too strapped to offer anything. The two fundraisers forged on with mixed results, and when Cora received a letter from the wife of James Creelman (the head of the Journal office in London and the man who was actively not giving Cora the money Crane had hoped would be sent to her), the depth of the hostility toward Kate Lyon was exposed in the most naked terms. “I must say that my deep sympathy is enlisted for those little creatures brought face to face with calamity by the deliberate selfishness of their parents,” Alice Creelman wrote, “and if I was certain they would not be under the corrupting influence of their mother I should gladly contribute freely to their support. As it is I must tell you frankly that I have a great scorn for Kate Lyon and the evil influence she has exerted over a morally weak man and that the only atonement possible for the crime of bringing three bastard children into the world and of wrecking the life of another woman and the lawful children, is a continuous life of sacrifice and labor to support her children without charity from strangers.”
Cora’s response, fired off in anger the next day, is not only a defense of Kate Lyon and her children but a document that sets forth Cora’s views on Christian ethics, womanhood, female solidarity, and the pernicious harm that comes from judging others. The occasional spelling and diction errors show that it was written in the frenzy of the moment, straight off the top of her head and from deep within her gut, but it also shows who Cora was at her best—both passionate and compassionate, both tender and fierce, a woman who had thought long and hard about the big questions in life and had formed some solid, impressive answers. The letter is fairly long, but it is worth quoting more or less in full.
I thank you for your reply to my letter asking for private subscriptions for the support of the three youngest children of the late Harold Frederic. In justice to their mother, let me say, that she refused, absolutely, to join in a public appeal for help, thinking, as I do, such an appeal in shocking taste. Nor did she have any knowledge, until yesterday when I wrote informing her, of this fund for the children.
The people whom you have said “discuss this unfortunate scandal” are, naturally, not the people one would look to for help in this matter. The nasty taste that such discussion would leave in their mouths—would strike through to the organ which they use solely to pump blood—blood soured by lack of true charity—to the brain. One wonders if they think themselves christians? And how they dare set themselves up as models of virteous morality, when they have the example of Christs loving kindness to sinners, before them.
How can we judge another, we that are so full of sin and weakness? And how can any creature knowing itself mortal lose an orportunity to be charitable in the true sense? Judging not!
To me, the supreme egotism of women who never having been tempted, and so knowing nothing of the temptation of another’s soul, set themselves upon their pedestals of self-conceit and concious virtue, judging their unfortunate sisters guilty alike, is the hardest thing in life. If we women who are beloved and sheltered, would help those less fortunate of our sex to help themselves (and this is not done by using a club or turning our-selves into shrews under the cover of outraged innocence) the world would be a sweeter, purer place to live in and we ourselves would be more worthy of happiness.
… These moralists swollen and distorted with the knowledge of not having, themselves, sinned a particular sin, who rush to drag a dead man’s name through the mire, that they themselves, revel to hear about—to these poor souls scandal, and the throwing of mud—and stones—is meat and strong drink. They roll it on their tongues as a sweet morsel, and the wine of it is the highest exaltation they know! For those who have no charity I ask God’s mercy; they are so poor a lot!
You say your surprised that I should expect anyone to help Miss Lyon with the burden of her children—my surprise is, that people can visit the sins of the parents upon those innocent babies—If self respect can come to mankind by their proving their loathing of sin, (and how can we judge the laws of God—by laws of state or those of our theological brothers?) by not helping these children to bread and shelter—let them so get what comfort they can out of the satisfaction that come with the knowledge of their own loved one’s warm and fed—I have sheltered these children for five months in my own home and with my own name—and if all the world line themselves up to fight these babes, I will still shelter them & God will help me.
* * *
Meanwhile, running parallel to the gruesome saga of her friends, there was the deepening mystery of Crane’s silence. He had sent a cablegram on September sixteenth (four days after Frederic’s stroke) telling her that the Puerto Rican campaign was over and he had safely landed in Key West, and then, for the next several weeks, nothing more was heard from him. If in fact he wrote to her from his boardinghouse in Havana (a strong possibility), the Spanish-speaking person who was supposed to mail the letters for him threw them out instead. And without knowing where Crane was, Cora had no idea how to contact him.
A month went by without a single scrap of news. On September twenty-second, an article that had been published in the Florida Times-Union on September tenth reached Cora in England, and by the time she had absorbed the headline and taken in the first paragraph, she must have been in a full-blown panic.
STEPHEN CRANE MISSING
Stephen Crane, the novelist, also a member of the Journal staff, who entered Havana as a tobacco buyer about ten days ago, and was stopping quietly at the Hotel Pasaje, is missing, and fears for his safety are entertained by his friends. The police had been shadowing him several days before he disappeared.
It doesn’t matter that the article was wrong, that it was essentially a bogus piece of conjecture inspired by the fact that Crane had left the hotel where he had been staying and moved to a less expensive boardinghouse in another part of town. With no more battles to report, the Journal had ambushed him by terminating his contact as a member of the regular staff, and even though he continued to write for them in Havana, he had been turned into a freelancer, paid so much per article as he turned them in, and he no longer had an expense account to cover the costs of a pricey hotel. No doubt, some of the peripheral members of his circle were unaware of this, and now that Crane had apparently disappeared, they figured he must have been snatched away by the police.
Not true, but Cora couldn’t have known that, and consequently she was forced to conclude that Crane had gone missing. Desperate as she must have been, the newspaper report had given her a possible lead, and working on the assumption that Crane had been in Havana and was perhaps still there, she immediately got to work on trying to find him.
She began her search by going straight to the top, sending off a letter on September twenty-fourth to John Hay, the American secretary of state, who until recently had been the ambassador to Great Britain and was not only on friendly terms with Crane but an avid follower of his work. “Knowing you to be a personal friend of my husband, Stephen Crane,” Cora began, she went on to give a brief summary of the facts as she understood them and concluded: “I am almost distracted with grief and anxiety. I am sure you will personally ask the President to instruct the American commission to demand Mr. Crane from the Havana police.”
The next day, she contacted three more people, sending both a letter and a wire to the American secretary of war, Russell A. Alger, a letter to Crane’s agent, Reynolds, who knew of Cora’s existence by then, and a wire to William Crane, who didn’t. Cora had been going along with the ruse of hide-and-pretend for a year and a half at that point, but now that the man’s little brother was in danger, it was her duty to let him know about it. If he was shocked to learn that the same little brother also had a wife, that was his problem, not hers. There was a crisis to be dealt with, and it was too urgent to allow for any more hypocritical evasions. If the big brother was any kind of person, the shock of the marriage would wear off soon enough.
The communications with Alger turned out to be one of Cora’s most effective moves, for not only did she give him an outline of the general situation, she specifically asked that he contact the U.S. authorities in Havana to investigate the matter, and that put a slow, bureaucratic process in motion that wound up coming to the attention of Major General J. F. Wade, who was in charge of the evacuation of Americans from Cuba, and some weeks after Cora’s initial request, the general finally got to the bottom of the story. By then, Cora had already learned that her husband was alive and had not been rotting in some Spanish dungeon, but it was Wade’s intervention that induced Crane to break his long silence, and later on, toward the end of the year, the general served as the conduit through which the money was sent to bring Crane back to England.
