Franny Moyle (11 page)

While in America, Oscar had renewed his ambitions to become a playwright. He had befriended one of America's leading theatrical impresarios, Steele Mackaye, and together they had hatched plans to stage not only
Vera
in the USA but also a new play that Oscar would write:
The Duchess of Padua
. By the time Oscar returned home Mackaye had already brought one of America's leading ladies, Marie Prescott, to the table to produce and take the lead in
Vera
. And for
The Duchess
he had put Oscar in touch with another actress, Mary Anderson. By February financial terms for
Vera
had been agreed and Oscar had benefited from a lump-sum down payment. Meanwhile he was due to complete the
Duchess
by the end of March. To this end, just a few weeks after returning home he left for Paris, where he intended to write. With what was left of his American earnings and £200 in his pocket from the down payment for
Vera
, Oscar was for the first time in his life quite comfortably off.

By May 1883 both Oscar and Constance had returned to London for the season, Oscar from France and Constance from a brief stay in Torquay with the Harveys. Oscar, whose new, short hairstyle was now curled, stayed with his family in Park Street. The capital was once again in the grip of its annual social whirlwind, and he became intoxicated. Unable to focus on work amid the festivities, where ‘the splendid whirl and swirl of life in London sweeps me from my Sphinx. I am hard at work being idle,' he explained to his friend Robert Sherard, ‘late midnights and famishing morrows follow one another … However society must be amazed and my Neronian coiffure has amazed it.'
²⁹

To Oscar's distress, amid all this gaiety he found himself once again impoverished. He had managed to spend his recent earnings and discovered that he was still pursued by bills that had remained unpaid from his college days.
³⁰
The disappointment of this financial position, in spite of a year's hard graft, prompted Speranza into action once again. She quickly reprised those visits in which marriageable young women were invited over for the benefit of her sons. On 16 May Constance and Otho found themselves in her tiny Mayfair rooms. And it seems that the relationship between Constance and Oscar took up where it had left off.

The very next day Constance and Otho returned to Tite Street to another of Lady Wilde's receptions. On 19 May Oscar was at Lancaster Gate. Constance was invited to visit Lady Wilde on 24 May. Unable to attend, she asked the Wildes to come to them on the 28th, when the Hope family were also expected.

Lady Wilde lost no time in responding. Sensing her son's renewed interest in Constance, she did not want to let the opportunity slip as it had done two years previously. ‘Dear Constance (I trust I might call you Constance), We were desolated not seeing you yesterday,' Speranza wrote on 25 May. ‘Oscar talked like Plato on Divinity … I shall go and see Miss Hope & Jenny, with great pleasure, on the 28th but hope meanwhile you will call on Saturday 26th. I like my rooms to be decorated.'
³¹

Even if Speranza imagined that Constance would provide some adornment in her living room in Park Street, it's likely that few people would have noticed. Lady Wilde's salons were notorious for being held in such low-lit conditions that attendees quite often disappeared into the shadows. Speranza kept the curtains drawn in Park Street and, with candles muted by shades, luminaries from the artistic and literary world would be spared a clear sight not only of their fellow guests but also of their hostess's increasingly meagre means. Speranza herself and her household were becoming unkempt and second-hand, often wearing clothes that clearly belonged in a long-gone past. With only a single Irish domestic to polish and scrub her furniture, the artistic lighting was pragmatic.

If attending Lady Wilde's salon provided some candle-lit old-world flavour to Constance's season, elsewhere the wonders of modern technology were to be marvelled at. One of the spectacles of the season of '83 was the ‘Great International Fisheries' exhibition held in South Kensington. With contributions from fishing nations from China to North America, it was a show designed to illustrate aspects of that industry all over the world. It quickly became the most popular haunt that summer. And thanks to the power of the new electric lighting, it was an event that could be visited at night as well as during the day.

One of the most popular attractions was the aquarium. Here live species of sea fish and crustaceans were on view in ten huge water tanks measuring fifteen feet long and over four feet deep. Some 70,000 gallons of seawater were kept in reserve to feed these tanks, with the water pumped through vulcanized India-rubber pipes. In addition there were a further nine tanks of freshwater fish! There was even a beautiful fishing pagoda and a waterfall in the Chinese court and an ‘unrivalled collection of Indian fish preserved in labelled bottles' in the Asian pavilion.

Despite all these diversions, when Otho and Constance joined Oscar in a visit to this extraordinary spectacle on 7 June, Oscar talked away throughout the whole adventure, barely noticing the fish. Perhaps this was why he found it necessary to return to the show at a later date, on which occasion he bumped into the Swinburne-Kings and raised a few eyebrows among their party by referring to Constance by her first name. Writing from another house party out of town, Constance related the event to Otho, revealing that she had had a ‘cheeky epistle two days ago from Mr King. I suppose you heard about their meeting OW at the Fisheries and his calling me Constance.'
³²

This style of address, which did away with traditional formalities, may have been as much an Aesthetic mannerism on Oscar's part as an indication of growing intimacy. But both implications were clearly welcomed by Constance, who in the same note revealed more of herself. She was continuing her habit of bringing up Oscar as a topic
of conversation wherever she could. Every glowing account of the man with whom she was now head over heels in love simply served to enhance her devotion to him.

‘There was a man dining here last night who was rather interesting,' she told Otho. ‘He is a vicar and I should imagine very unsuited for clerical work … he … got out a couch and flopped on to it with his legs up in the air … flopped out of it onto the floor and asked me if I called that acting. He abused Oscar Wilde but acknowledged that he was awfully clever, said that his poems were very clever and very wicked.'
³³

As June progressed, Constance and Oscar continued to see one another as much as possible. According to Otho, they attended a reception held as a piece of advocacy for the women's rights movement. And then, on 10 July, Constance and Otho went to hear Oscar lecture on his ‘Impressions of America' at Prince's Hall in Piccadilly. Shortly afterwards Oscar and his mother attended a large ‘at home' in Lancaster Gate, where, according to Otho, despite sixty-odd guests Oscar spoke to no one but Constance.

It was hard to interpret Oscar's behaviour as anything other than romantic infatuation, but Otho did his best. At some profound level Otho was against the blossoming romance. In spite of Oscar's attentions to Constance, Otho wrote to his own sweetheart, Nellie Hutchinson: ‘I don't believe that he means anything; that is his way with all girls whom he finds interesting.' Otho considered all this attention to Constance nothing more than another of Oscar's poses: ‘If the man were anyone else but Oscar Wilde one might conclude that he was in love.'
³⁴

But if Constance hoped that their socializing might lead to a proposal, America once more proved the obstacle to their romance. Rehearsals for
Vera
were due to start in New York in August, and so after a brief lecture tour that took Oscar to Margate, Ramsgate, Southampton, Brighton and Southport, on 2 August he boarded the
Britannia
in Liverpool, bound for America.

Constance headed to the Continent with her grandfather while Oscar was away. John Horatio was in the habit of making a European
excursion around August time. She returned to British shores towards the end of September and was at once keen to find out what Oscar had been up to in her absence. Writing to Otho from Folkestone, Constance noted:

I've just got a
Western Morning News …
with an account of Oscar Wilde's lecture on America, at Exeter. It is the same that we heard apparently … they give a description of him, he is a handsome well-built man above medium height and wore his hair cut rather short, … he has a musical voice and good elocution and … easy self-possessed manner … when the lecture had been … delivered and Oscar had quitted the stage and the curtain had been dropped, no one showed any disposition to leave the auditorium. Loud applause called out the Lecturer who gracefully bowing, thanked the audience for their attention and courtesy and again retired.
³⁵

Constance's feet barely touched London soil. When she and her grandfather returned to Lancaster Gate, John Horatio fell gravely ill. Constance saw Oscar briefly in mid-October at Lady Wilde's Saturday salon but was then dispatched to Dublin to stay with ‘Mama Mary', her maternal grandmother, where she arrived around 8 November. This time, however, distance did not get between Oscar and Constance. They wrote to each other avidly.

Before she left for Ireland, Oscar had given Constance a copy of
Vera
to read. The play had not gone well in America and had closed after just a week. Writing from her grandmother's house in Dublin's Ely Place on 11 November, Constance comforted Oscar as best she could over the play's lack of success. ‘I cannot understand why you should have been so unfortunate in its reception unless either the acting was very inferior or the audience was unsympathetic to the political opinion expressed in it,' she offered. ‘The world surely is unjust and bitter to most of us; I think we must either renounce our opinions & run with the general stream or else totally ignore the world and go on our own way regardless of all, there is not the slightest use in fighting against existing prejudices for we are only worsted in the struggle.'
³⁶

In the letter Constance continued an argument that she and Oscar had been having about the nature of art, one that set them distinctly apart: ‘I am afraid you & I disagree in our opinion on art, for I hold that there is no perfect art without perfect morality, whilst you say that they are distinct & separable things.' But Constance was quick to offer a means of resolving their differences into a workable arrangement: ‘I know that I should judge you rather by your aims than by your work.' And with this Constance wrapped up her letter with an invitation to Oscar to visit her in Dublin: ‘I told the Atkinsons that you would be here some time soon and they will be very pleased to see you. I shall be here.'

Oscar headed for Ireland on 21 November. Constance was ready and waiting. The Irish family were primed to meet her beau: her Hemphill cousins had a note awaiting him at his hotel, the Shelbourne, inviting him to join the family the moment he arrived. And so Oscar saw Constance the very first evening he was in town. According to Constance, Oscar was ‘extra affected'. She put this down to nerves.

The following day he was lecturing on ‘The House Beautiful' at the Gaiety Theatre, and Constance and her clan attended. They were so thrilled with the lecture that, even though Constance had already heard it, they all decided to go to his ‘Impressions of America' the next day.

Cenie and Stanhope & I went to the lecture yesterday afternoon and brought O. W. back to four o'clock tea … We three went again to the [American] lecture, which none of us thought as interesting as the former one. We also went to Oscar's box in the evening to see
The Merry Duchess
(stupid and somewhat vulgar thing!). He could not come himself as he was dining out. They all think him so improved in appearance, and he is certainly very pleasant. Mama Mary is so fond of him & he is quite at home here. We are having 40 or 50 people to tea this afternoon for
my
sake I believe, between ourselves rather a nuisance for I hate having to talk to dozens of people. Stanhope has started on a new tack and chaffs my life out of me about O. W., such stupid nonsense, & Cenie eggs him on … I have just read
Vera
through again, and I really think it very fine. Oscar says he wrote it in order to show that an abstract idea such as liberty could have quite as much power and be made quite as fine as the passion of love … Please destroy this letter for as you know our family is not over-honourable in such matters as reading other people's letters.

Ever your loving sister

Constance M. Lloyd

Oscar praised you so much both to Cenie and me.
³⁷

And now something quite strange happened in the story of Oscar and Constance's romance. Otho, who throughout the summer had chaperoned his sister during her outings with Oscar, suddenly wrote to his sister confessing his doubts about the suitability of his Oxford contemporary as her suitor. His letter, no longer extant, related a story about Oscar Wilde, sufficiently unsavoury for Otho to feel he must raise an immediate alarm.

Otho's letter arrived at Ely Place on 27 November. It crossed with one that Constance had sent her brother the day previously. The two siblings must have been horrified as they opened each other's correspondence. For while Constance read with dismay Otho's warnings, on reading his sister's letter Otho realized he had acted too late.

‘My dearest Otho,' his sister announced, ‘Prepare yourself for an astounding piece of news! I am engaged to Oscar Wilde and perfectly and insanely happy.'
³⁸

4

‘Bunthorne is to get his bride'

T
HE ENGAGEMENT RING
that Oscar Wilde presented to Constance Lloyd remains in the possession of the Wilde family's descendants today: a heart formed from diamonds enclosing two pearls, surmounted with another bow of diamonds. The design was apparently Oscar's own.