The Blessings of Labor

On August 17, 1869, she and Emma and Sallie worriedly checked in at the Clarendon Hotel. Next morning, Sir James' verdict was clear: the operation would take place on August 26. To pass the difficult time, Charlotte invited to her rooms the many people who, years ago, had shown her kindness. Every night she forced herself to be the wit of the gathering in spite of the pain and Emma's melancholy looks. Then the night of August 25, suddenly tired, she let her guests go early. "Don't come here tomorrow," she said. "I do not think I shall be very well for a day or two."¹

Outside Simpson's operating theatre, Charlie waited with Emma and Sallie, pacing, while the surgeons removed Charlotte's left breast. When she could be moved back to her hotel, they rotated as nurses, though Sallie alone managed the dressings. Charlotte had taken the operation bravely. "With God's help, she will be lifted up again,"² Emma wrote the family at Malvern. Ned had gone on to America, but as soon as Charlotte could raise herself up a little, she wrote with a trembling pencil, "My dear boy. I shall pull through this dark valley, as I have through many others. God bless you. Your loving Auntie."³

Finding her pulse and color better one morning, Sir James assured her she was on the road to recovery. Weakly, Charlotte managed to ask, "Do you really think so, Sir James?" The dour Scotsman replied, "If I did na, I would na say so."⁴

Within a few days, she dictated longer letters for Emma Crow. "I resist all the opiates until suffering makes me fly to them for relief," but since all was in the hands of the good God, "We will trust in Him."⁵ Two weeks later, her pale face smiling, she could receive company. Sallie trundled her into the bright sitting room. After her long pain, seeing the sunlit squares on the carpet and the brilliant green of Calton Hill in the distance made her cry suddenly, but she greeted her guests calmly, admitting only that "I have not been very well, lately."⁶

A month later she left Edinburgh and headed for Rome, hungry for familiar surroundings, her books, her paintings, the family, in spite of Sir James' mutterings that she had lived "too long in the atmosphere of buried Caesars,"⁷ that her blood needed more bracing air. She had hardly arrived before she realized that political strife was changing Rome forever, that the timeless place Rome had been under old Pio Nono would soon be like any other capital, telling time by clocks instead of slow-moving shadows on its ruins.

Writing Seward in March, she confessed that Rome had already lost much of its charm. She would come home this summer to seek a more healthful climate. If she found herself better for the change, "I shall make up my mind where to pitch my tent" and so "end my days."⁸ She would pretend nothing with Seward. "Perhaps I have not many to look forward to, for I fear my evening! But I shall at least be among those who love me, and whom I love." She would come home, she wrote him in May, to pick up her staff and "go on to the end. Let it be sooner or later."⁹

She argued against Emma's wish to come with her: Emma's work was far from finished in Rome; her career had no reason to stop now. Yet Emma countered that reasons and needs were not all Charlotte's; the heart was a better guide. By late summer, their decision was clear. Charlotte would go home to work--for as long as time allowed her. Emma would follow.

Leaving 38 Via Gregoriana in May, Charlotte looked back at the doors that had opened to so many bright minds, so many famous faces. Its rooms had echoed to laughter, to her own songs, to incomparable conversation. In eleven years, its walls had become a gallery of the best paintings Rome's brushes could offer. Its corners and sills held Hattie's Puck, like the one that had so pleased the Prince of Wales, Emma's portrait bust like the one she had given Shepherd, Story's bronze Beethoven, and many others. Her carved antique cabinets held her weapons collection, including a sword made by the armorer of Charles II, dated 1692.* On a table lay the dagger the Duke of Devonshire had given her after Macbeth in London, the ebony box from the Prince of Wales. A glass case held all her promptbooks. She had wanted to have her Jarves collection of furniture shipped to the United States, but she had thought better of it when wiser heads had shaken in fear that the priceless pieces were too old to stand the jolts and jarring of travel.

* If the Spirit of the Times for July 14, 1838 is correct, her collection also included "the knife found with Cal. [James] Bowie's baggage in the Alamo."

Rounding the corner into the Via Sistina, Charlotte looked back through her carriage window to the waving hands and handkerchiefs in front of her house. Emma Crow and Ned stood waving, each with a child in arms, "sweet plagues and trying comforts" though they had been sometimes. It had been difficult to plan this departure. No one could say what uncertainties lay ahead.

By the time she and Emma left Paris, the canaries she had brought from Italy had nested. Something about the birds struck the hearts of both women as they clutched the arms of their chairs during the choppy crossing. To protect the birds from the noise and vibration, Charlotte wrapped a shawl around the cage, leaving only a small opening at the top. She clutched the cage close, at a sudden swell or the heartless bang of a porthole cover.

Leaving Rome, she had discovered new lumps under her arm. Sir James Paget's grave face, after his examination, told her what she already knew. A second operation must follow. To Charlotte's grief, Sir James Simpson had recently died in Edinburgh; the operation must be done in London.

Charlotte covered her feelings. If the first operation had failed, who could promise success with a second? But she said nothing to deepen the fear in Emma's eyes. On July 24, Sir James cauterized the new points of trouble, and Emma sent the report down to Rome: "There is nothing for it however but endurance, and I help her endure."¹⁰

Recovering, Charlotte found little courage in learning that William Macready was so crippled now that he could not hold a pen in his hand, that he spent his days dozing in senile sleep or staring at emptiness. Her gloom deepened when headlines carried the word that Charles Dickens and Thackeray had died suddenly. "How sad it is to think that the world is darker for us and for all humanity than it was last Thursday."¹¹

When she and Emma went down to Hastings for the sea air, Westland Marston came to see her one day and watched her face light up as Charlotte told him about seeing Tommaso Salvini as Othello a few days before she left Rome. "So infectious was her love for what is beautiful and great in art,"¹² wrote Marston, that her description of Salvini's acting made him almost come alive in the room.

The morning of October 22, 1870, Charlotte took her last look at Liverpool's grim harbor and the green hills of England beyond. Time had come full circle. Sitting weakly and heavy on deck of the Scotia, she looked back--knowing she would never again see England. Ned's family would follow in a few weeks and proceed straight to St. Louis, where Ned would work for Emma Crow's father. In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne had put his finger on the feeling that now rushed through her. She would never forget her excitement in Rome each time she had checked her horse at some overlook and gazed out over the sweep of history that lay frozen below in the stones. But like Hawthorne, she had discovered a truth that only lately she had been able to see. "The years, after all, have a kind of emptiness when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore." Prudent people never forgot their roots, the nourishment in their native air. "It is wise therefore to come back betimes, or never."¹³

Unquestionably, now was the time. On November 3, sighting New York rising tall now and freshly American, Charlotte knew something else. Illness had brought a new certainty. "Unless I would be eaten by my own corroding anxiety, I must do something which would so completely take me out of myself that I should forget all my own troubles." She would go back to the old profession "which I did wrong ever to leave."¹⁴ Long years of rest had brought only fatigue.

Charlotte felt her wisdom in coming home fully confirmed when the news flashed across the Atlantic by cable that the Italians had finally marched into Rome and held Pio Nono prisoner in the Vatican. In a plebiscite on October 2, only 1,500 people in all of Rome had voted against annexation. Hattie had joined the black-robed throng that had massed in St. Peter's to defend the Holy Father, and, as she wrote later, they had all sobbed at the sight of the doddering old Pontiff, weeping among his cardinals.

Charlotte would be slow about choosing a place to settle. Before she left England she had made one point clear to Emma Crow. Never again would she personally consider a house as any real home. She had outgrown the need for permanent headquarters; in the time she had left, wherever the children were happy would be home enough for her. Letters from Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Helen Hunt revived her interest in Newport. After Rome, any northern city would prove difficult in winter, though coming home and settling anywhere meant facing that obvious fact. She would have liked to talk it over with Seward, but in his new leisure he had left on a round-the-world cruise in August.

By January 1871, Boston was clamoring for her to return to the stage. One manager tossed aside her objections that she had brought no costumes with her by offering to supply whatever she needed and pay her seven hundred dollars a night. The offer made her smile a little. In the early days, when she had been full of energy and need, she had sometimes played in Boston for less than five dollars. Now when she had almost no energy and no money needs whatever, her cup ran over.

Charlotte and Emma spent the early weeks of 1871 at Newport proving, in spite of reports, that its winters could be as bitter as anywhere else. Yet having people like Helen Hunt and Julia Ward Howe and the Higginsons in town made it more cheerful, especially Higginson's booming enthusiasm for the place in any season. Newport was loveliest, he declared, when the north wind dappled the hills and drove the sailboats around Point Judith under heavy swirls of snow.¹⁵

At Helen Hunt's, Charlotte delighted the room with her talk about George Sand and her comments about why acting was often easier in England. English audiences applauded better; they came to the theatre to be amused.¹⁶ When someone asked what plans she had about acting again, she parried the question. Jamie Fields had recently stepped down from his editor's desk at the Atlantic Monthly, and that seemed right for Jamie. "I think the sense is in knowing when to retire!"¹⁷ she wrote Annie.

For herself, she had happy proof that she could undo her own bad timing. Three different cities were imploring her to act or read or lecture for twice the money she had ever been offered before. Now that the public had forgiven him for being John Wilkes' brother, Edwin Booth had his own theatre in New York and was begging her to act Queen Katharine for him in the fall--at better terms than anyone else could pay.

Did she dare risk all the excitement and fatigue? "I don't like to be tempted," she wrote Emma Crow. But writing it, Charlotte knew that the time had come to face both the fact of her illness and her need to get busy. The old pains in her arm were burning again. She must check soon with a doctor in New York who had invented a treatment using electricity. Whatever the new symptoms meant, she must get into costume.

In March, at William B. Ogden's Hudson River estate, Villa Boscobel, she was troubled about facing another operation. As President of the Union Pacific Railroad, Ogden had stood at Promontory Point in Utah in 1869 to see his rails join those moving eastward from San Francisco to complete the continent's first cross-country span. In Ogden's candor, she found her answer.

"It might help, but it might not, and I will simply not take the risk that its pain and trouble might not be justified."¹⁸ Looking at fact, she felt better "for having made up my mind to stand pat."¹⁹

By late April, Charlotte was clear about Newport. She would rent a house for the summer, persuade Emma Crow to bring the boys from St. Louis, and they would decide together about the place as a permanent home. When she visited the Fieldses in Boston, she had gotten back most of her old fighting strength. "Her full brain was brimming over," Annie wrote in her diary; "she does not overestimate herself, that woman, which is part of her greatness." Charlotte's fight with death had seemed, said Annie, to strengthen her affection for life. "She grows wiser and nobler."²⁰

By mid-July, she had made two decisions. Newport's humidity bothered her, but here was the place to settle for whatever time she had left. Seeing Emma Crow's delight in the flowers, the carriage rides along Bellevue Avenue and Ocean Drive, the little boys splashing at Bailey's Beach, she wrote a check for $9,000 to buy the corner at Rhode Island Avenue and Catherine Street. Richard Morris Hunt would design the house to be done by next summer. The gabled and turreted "cottage" Hunt envisioned was clear folly, but folly, somehow, was what she wanted now.

About acting sometime in the fall, her doctors had said "I may act," she wrote Edwin Booth, "and if I find it is too much for me, I must give up! But you know I have indomitable energy and I shall try to take care and not overdo myself."²¹ She would play a six-week run beginning in late September, and Booth must meet all her terms. It only sweetened her pleasure to hear that Edwin Forrest was "hanging by his eyelids" about beginning a New York run himself until Charlotte announced her plans.

She hoped Booth could get Couldock for Wolsey: he was "so better than any of these later comers over the water." And for Macbeth, E. L. Davenport would be splendid. She refused, she said, to play opposite inferior actors, for "neither Queen Katharine or Lady Macbeth can carry the play on their individual shoulders." She wrote Charlie in London to forward her costumes from storage, hopefully to arrive in time for Sallie to make any necessary alterations. Also, Booth needed her promptbooks for rehearsing the other actors.

If she got through this run at Booth's, the money from it plus earnings she hoped to make later in the season in other cities would bring her the $50,000 the Newport house would cost--though if necessary she could sell some of her stock. For her six weeks with Booth, she must have $18,000. "I am not ignorant of the value of my return to the stage as a finality."²²

"Finality," Charlotte realized, sounded a new note in her thinking. Earlier times, "farewell" and "retirement" had labeled whatever choice her greater happiness dictated. But with the choice apparently out of her hands, she would not lightly use them. When she learned that a Washington doctor had treated cancer with an extract of tropical bark, she wrote him for full particulars, in spite of the government report against it. After all, London scientists had once declared that no steamship unassisted by sails could get across the Atlantic. "If you can give me any help or hope, I pray you to do so."²³

The bargain Charlotte squeezed out of Booth underscored the real meaning she found in this return to the stage. If living demanded breathing, then it was no less true that life for her was acting. All else was mere exposition now, and she would waste no more time doubting it. When she met Booth and his new wife, Mary McVicker, she remembered again how much she had always disliked him, and now he had a wife who seemed utterly mad. "Oh, dear, oh, dear, what tinkering work acting must be nowadays," she wrote Emma Crow, "when such people as either of them can make money."²⁴

In response to the great wave of applause that welcomed her entrance on September 25, 1871, at Booth's Theatre, Charlotte felt all her pain and feebleness leave her. Tonight, as new energy surged through her, Charlotte knew how passionately she had always needed an audience. She could no more toss acting aside than she could squander the few precious days she had left.