The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (12 page)

“Give them one more refrain,” he said, “and then come off when they ask for more.” So I skipped back onto the stage and sang the second verse.

I sang it especially well because I remembered my mother, and the way she used to drag me off to the little tin-roof chapel and turn my own Sunday into a time of misery. And, as I danced upon the stage, I had the most pleasurable sensation that I was stamping upon her grave. How I exulted! They loved me for it. There was a shower of coppers and, despite Uncle’s request, I “obliged again” with a chorus of “Up Goes the Price of Meat.” Then there was so much whistling and stamping that I could hardly hear myself thank them. I was in such a blaze of glory I might have died and gone to heaven. Of course, in a manner of speaking, I had died. My old self was dead and the new Lizzie, Little Victor’s daughter with the rotten cotton gloves, had been born at last.

I believe that Dan was still annoyed with me for taking over Little Victor’s act, but he realized that I had acquitted myself very well. I was still a pigeon in the world of the halls but, over the next few weeks and months, I steadily crept up the bills. I made one song my very own, “The Hole in the Shutter, or I’m a Little Too Young to Know,” but I soon realized that I had
much more talent in the comic line than as an ordinary dancer or singer. I was a good spoofer, and very soon I had my own catch phrase printed after my name—“Funny Without Being Vulgar.” I can still remember all my scenes perfectly well. I pretended to be a bathing machine, and sang “Why Can’t We Have the Sea in London?” and then I used to kill them with “I Don’t Suppose He’ll Do It Again for Months and Months and Months.” I never saw the dirt in it, not me, and I delivered it as a harmless little song about a wife whose husband took her once a year on a steamboat outing to Gravesend. It must have been the way I pronounced “do,” but they used to scream.

I never knew where the comedy came from. I was not a particularly funny female off the stage, and I suppose that in some ways I was even prone to misery. It was as if I had some other personality which walked out from my body every time I stood in the glare of the gas, and sometimes she even surprised me with her slangster rhymes and cockney stuff. She had her own clothes by now—a battered bonnet, long skirt and big boots suited her best—and, as I slowly put them on, she began to appear. Sometimes she was uncontrollable, though, and one night at the Palace in Smithfield she began to perform a burlesque medley of the Bible with the most wicked patter about David and Goliath. There was a large Hebrew element in that particular hall, and they loved it, but the next day a deputation from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel complained to the manager. What they were doing there in the first place I do not know, but Little Victor’s daughter had to drop that particular item. Of course I had my admirers: ask any artiste and she will tell you how pestered we all are with stage-door Johnnies. They came on strong, but most of them were no more than twopenny bus conductors or City clerks. Fortunately Doris and I were still sharing a crib off the New Cut, so we just used to march straight past them. “I’m no Blondin,” she said once, “but
I can walk in a straight line when I have to.” She was still the goddess of wire-walking, at least to her admirers, but Little Victor’s Daughter was soon spoken of as quite “the thing” in variety circles. We were still the best of pals, though, and liked nothing better, after the show, than to retire to our room and share a nice plate of bacon and greens. I was always overwrought after my performance—and, to judge by Doris’s concern, sometimes a trifle hysterical—but after a while Little Victor’s Daughter would fade away and Lizzie would come back. I had to be careful not to contradict the orphan story I had sold her when I first arrived in lodgings, but that was the easy part: I had invented a whole history which made me much more interesting to myself, and I really had no difficulty in sustaining it.

Sometimes Austin would join us with some bottles of stout, and he would reminisce about the old days when he was a boy soprano in the Caves of Harmony and the Shrines of Song. “I had a lovely voice,” he told us confidentially one night, “and when I appeared in the tea gardens I was like an angel from heaven. I could have been legit, ducks, I could have been another Betty. But professional jealousy held me back. I was kept off the boards out of fear, you know. I was denied Drury Lane. Ah well, dears, shall I be Mother?” He poured us another stout, while he and Doris began to share the gossip of the day—how the ventriloquist was courting a young “burnt cork” dancer from Basildon, and how Clarence Lloyd had been found in his dame’s dress outside a seamen’s mission dead drunk. Poor Clarence had been taken into custody for importuning, or so Austin said, and had been led to the station singing “In My First Husband’s Time.” But somehow our conversation always came around to Dan, or “Mr. Leno” as Austin insisted on calling him when he was drunk. Dan always remained something of a mystery to us, although his mystery was really his artistry which was obvious even to the lowest class of audience. “They talk of Tennyson
and Browning,” Austin used to say, “and I am the last person to deny the genius of those two gentlemen, but believe me, girls, Mr. Leno is
it
.”

It was true: Dan was only fifteen then, but he played so many parts that he hardly had time to be himself. And yet, somehow, he was always himself. He was the Indian squaw, the waiter, the milkmaid, or the train driver, but it was always Dan conjuring people out of thin air. When he played the little shopkeeper, he made you see the customers who argued with him and the street arabs who plagued him. When he murmured, in an aside, “I’ll just go and unchain that Gorgonzola” you could smell the cheese and, when he pretended to shoot it and put it out of its misery, you could see the rifle and hear the shot. How they all roared when he first appeared on the stage; he would run down to the footlights, give a drumroll with his feet, and raise his right leg before bringing it down with a great thump upon the boards. Then suddenly he was the sour-faced spinster on the lookout for a man.

“He is endless,” Uncle said to me one night as we were leaving the Desiderata in Hoxton. “Completely endless.” He was holding my arm rather too tightly but, since he had been so good to me in the past, I disengaged myself very gently. He did not seem to notice. “What would you say, Lizzie dear, to a nice parcel of fish and chips? Put something hot inside you, do.” I was about to plead tiredness, when who should we see coming out of the shadow of Leonard’s Rents but the young man who had saved me from Little Victor’s attentions so many months before. I had glimpsed him on other occasions since then, and had been expecting him to interview me for the
Era
. Unfortunately, he was always very respectful and kept his distance. He raised his hat to me when we passed and, perhaps thinking that Uncle was becoming a little too close and friendly, he asked me how I was. Uncle gave him a “heavy swell” look and was about
to pass on, but I stopped for a moment. “It is good of you to ask, Mr.…”

“John Cree of the
Era
.”

“I am very well, Mr. Cree. My manager is just escorting me to my brougham.” I was very dignified indeed, and even Uncle was impressed. But, from that time forward, I often thought of Mr. John Cree.

O
n the morning Karl Marx was interviewed by the police detectives, George Gissing was sitting in his customary place beneath the dome of the British Museum Reading Room. There were two long tables reserved for ladies, and Gissing always sat as far away from them as possible. This was not because he was in any sense a misogynist—far from it—but he was still young enough to maintain the illusion that the pursuit of knowledge must be a cloistered and self-denying activity, in which the mind itself must suffuse or overpower the body. In any case he came to the Reading Room partly to escape what he termed, in homage to Nietzsche whom he had just been reading, “the presence of the Female Will.” This was not some theoretical interest on his part, since in fact he believed that his entire life had been destroyed by the presence of one particular woman.

He had been eighteen years old at the time; he had been an eager and promising student at Owens College in Manchester, and was preparing for his entrance examinations to the University of London when he met Nell Harrison. She was seventeen, but was already an alcoholic who earned her drink by prostitution. Gissing became infatuated with her after a chance meeting in a Manchester public house; he was an idealist who believed that, in the best theatrical tradition, he could “rescue” Nell. Literature was everything to him then, and in the shape of this young woman he invested all of his instincts for narrative and for pathetic drama. It is also possible that her name evoked childhood memories of Little Nell’s doomed wanderings in Dickens’
The Old Curiosity Shop
, but it is more likely that the romantically inclined literary young man became obsessed with her because of her drunken prostitution—here was a modern outcast, who might have come from the pages of Émile Zola. In that sense he was wrong to blame her for all of his misfortunes, because they were in part the result of his own delusions.

The tragedy of his life happened soon after their meeting. He used his scholarship funds to feed and clothe her; he even bought her a sewing machine (then a relatively new invention) so that she could earn a proper living as a seamstress. But she drank away the shillings he found for her and, as a result of her constant demand for money, he began to steal from his contemporaries at Owens College. In the spring of 1876 he was caught by the college authorities, arrested, and sentenced to a month’s hard labor in Manchester Prison. He had been the most gifted and learned student of his generation but, at a stroke, all hope of academic and social advancement seemed to have gone forever. He traveled to America after his release, but found it impossible to survive. And so he returned to England or rather, more pertinently, to Nell. He could not escape her (perhaps he did not wish to escape her) and together they came to London; they moved from cheap lodging to cheap lodging, always moving on when Nell’s trade was discovered. Yet still he clung to her. This sounds like a mere melodrama from the London stage, something which might be performed on the boards of a “theater of sensation” like the Cosmotheka in Bell Street, but it is a true story—the truest story George Gissing ever completed. He was an avid scholar, an accomplished classicist and linguist who in other circumstances would already have been a member of one of the ancient universities or a lecturer at the new University College in London; but instead he was attached to a vulgar prostitute, a drunkard and a slattern who had destroyed all hopes he might have harbored for conventional advancement. This was
how Gissing viewed his whole life and yet, in the spring of 1880, he married Nell. Now, as he sat in the warmth of the Reading Room, he realized that not even this formal union had been able to divert her from her customary ways.

He had not altogether lost his own literary ambitions, however; he managed to earn a living as a tutor, but he was also hoping to write essays and reviews for the London periodicals. “Romanticism and Crime” had been judged a great success by the editor of the
Pall Mall Review
, for example, and Gissing was now ready to complete the first draft of his article on Charles Babbage. He had also, with the help of some small savings, managed to arrange the publication of his first novel in the spring of this year (just a few days after his marriage to Nell); it was entitled
Workers in the Dawn
and opened with a sentence which was later to have a peculiar resonance in his own life: “Walk with me, reader, into Whitecross Street.” By the autumn, however, it had sold only forty-nine copies, despite some modest praise in the
Academy
and the
Manchester Examiner
, and he realized that in the immediate future he would have to rely upon the more certain rewards of journalism. So now he labored over the remarkable inventions of Charles Babbage for the sake of an article.

But Gissing was not a scientist, and at this moment he was struggling to understand Babbage’s principles of numerical form in the context of Jeremy Bentham’s notion of “felicific calculus.” The connection may appear a fortuitous and even strange one but, in the intellectual culture of the period, science, philosophy and social theory were more readily joined. Gissing was even now attempting to relate the concept of the “greatest good” with recent experiments in social statistics, with special emphasis being placed on those formidable figures which had emerged from what Charles Babbage called his Analytical Engine. This was in many respects the forerunner of the modern computer since it was a machine, or engine, which combined
and dispersed numbers over a network of mechanically related parts. The particular motive for combining the research of Bentham and Babbage (as far as Gissing could understand the literature upon the subject) was to calculate the greatest amount of need or misery in any given place, and then to predict its possible spread. “To be exactly informed about the lot of humankind,” one Benthamite had written in a pamphlet entitled “The Elimination of Poverty in the Metropolitan Area,” “is to create the conditions in which it can be ameliorated. We must know before we can understand, and statistic evidence is the surest form of evidence currently in our possession.”

Of course Gissing himself was acquainted with poverty, and even degradation; he had lived among them ever since he had come to London with Nell. He was now only twenty-three but had already written, “Few men, I am sure, have led so bitter a life.” And yet he could hardly believe that, if men were “informed” of his condition, his lot would in any sense be improved; for him, to be a statistic or an object of inquiry would mean that he was degraded still further. He understood that this was no doubt an aspect of his already shrinking and sensitive temperament, when any reminder of his condition encroached upon him as a fresh agony, but he also had more general reservations. To be informed by statistical evidence was neither to know nor to understand; it was an intermediate stage, in which the inquirer remained at a distance from which the true reality could not properly be seen. To be informed merely—well, it meant having no sense of value or principle but only a shadow knowledge of forms and numbers. Gissing could easily imagine a future world in which the entire population was attuned to Bentham’s “felicific calculus” or to Babbage’s calculating machines—he even considered writing a novel upon the subject—but by then they would be no more than the dumb witnesses or passive
spectators of a reality which would wholly have escaped them. This was the reason for his difficulties with the article.