The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (21 page)

S
EPTEMBER
26, 1880: My dear wife loved the pantomime so much that, last night in the carriage back to New Cross, she sang the reprise with which she and Dan used to close in the old days. As soon as she entered the house, she clasped the maid’s hand and recounted the business of the whole performance. “And then Dan did a little bit of back-walking with Bluebeard. ‘I’m going out and then I’m coming in again, just so you’ll know I’m here.’ Do you remember it, Aveline?” My wife even imitated the hoarse voice of Sister Anne. I went upstairs to my study in order to settle an argument I was having with myself; I seemed to remember an essay on the pantomime by Thomas De Quincey, but I could not recall its name. Was it something like “Laughter and Screaming,” or “The Trick of Screaming”? I had only remembered it as a very fine title indeed, but the precise wording now escaped me. So I went through the great writer’s works and, by curious coincidence, found it in the same volume as my other cherished piece, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” Its exact title was “Laugh, Scream and Speech” and I discovered that I had even marked a passage in the margin, where pantomime is described as “the short for fun, whim, trick and atrocity—that is, clown atrocity or crimes that delight us.” What a wonderful phrase that was—
crimes that delight us
—and of course it quite explained all the popular interest in my own little dramas on the streets of London. I could even see myself appearing before the next whore with a mallet in my hand, exclaiming
“Here we are again!” in the right tone of screaming excitement. I might even put on costume before I slit them. Oh what a life it is! And of course the audience loves every minute of it—was it not Edmund Burke, in his very suggestive essay on the Sublime and Beautiful who explained how the greatest aesthetic sensations come from the experience of terror and danger? Horror is the true sublime. The common people and even the middling classes profess to be sickened or alarmed by my great career but, secretly, they have loved and admired each stage of it. Every newspaper in the country has dwelled reverentially upon my great acts, and sometimes they have even exaggerated them in order to satisfy the public taste—in a sense they have become my understudies, who watch every move and practice every line. I once worked on the
Era
, and I know how absurdly gullible newspaper reporters can be; no doubt they now believed in the Limehouse Golem with the same fervor as everybody else, and willingly accepted that some supernatural creature was preying upon the living. Mythology of a kind has returned to London—if indeed it ever really left it. Interrogate an inhabitant of London very carefully, and you will find the remnants of some frightened medieval churl.

I hired a cab to Aldgate, and then took a stroll towards Ratcliffe Highway; there was a policeman outside the house of the beautifully slain, and a small crowd who stood in the street with no other purpose than to gape or to gossip. I joined them readily enough, and was pleased to hear the evidence of their great respect and admiration. “He did it without a sound,” said one. “He cut their throats before they even knew it.” That was not strictly true, since the wife and children had seen me on the stairs, but, still, it is the thought that counts. “ ’E must be invisible,” a woman was whispering to her neighbor. “Nobody saw ’im come or go.” I wanted to thank her for her flattering report
but, of course, I was compelled to be invisible among them again. “Tell me,” I asked an odd-looking fellow with a red scarf knotted around his head, “was there much blood?”

“Tubs of it. They were washing it down all day.”

“And what of the poor victims? What will happen to them?”

“The cemetery in Wellclose Square. The same grave for them all.” He opened his eyes very wide as he imparted this interesting information to me. “And I’ll tell you what will happen to the Golem when they find
him
.”

“If they find him.”

“They’ll bury
him
underneath the crossroads. With a stake through his heart.”

It sounded almost like a crucifixion, but I knew it to be the old penalty for extravagant crime: better that than to be left in chains by the riverside, while the tides washed over my body. Infinite London would always minister to me in my affliction.

I went back to New Cross and listened to my wife playing a new tune by Charles Dibdin on the piano.

W
hen the police detectives came to interview Dan Leno on the subject of the Gerrard murders in the Ratcliffe Highway, only a few hours after John Cree had been consulting Thomas De Quincey’s essay on pantomime, they happened to discover a copy of that author’s “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” in the great comedian’s drawing room. But Leno had no interest in death of any kind (in fact he was thoroughly frightened of the topic), and the presence of this volume in his house had a much more unlikely explanation; it was a result of his passion for Joseph Grimaldi, the most famous clown of the eighteenth century.

The history of pantomime had been Leno’s study ever since he had made his name in the music hall; it was as if “The Funniest Man on Earth” wished to understand the conditions which had, in a sense, created him. He collected old playbills as well as such items of memorabilia as the Harlequin’s costume from
The Triumph of Mirth
and the wand from
The Magic Circle
. Of course he knew of Grimaldi from the beginning—forty years after his death, he was still the most famous clown of all—and one of the first theatrical souvenirs he purchased was a color print of “Mr. Grimaldi as Clown in the Popular New Pantomime of Mother Goose.” He had been “the most wonderful creature of his day,” according to one contemporary, because “there was such
mind
in everything he did.” The phrase had appealed to Leno when he first read it, because it seemed to summarize his own performance; for him, too, it was a question of “thinking through” (as
he used to put it) an entire character. It was not enough to dress as Sister Anne or Mother Goose; it was necessary to become them. He also relished the famous story of Grimaldi’s visit to a doctor while he was performing in Manchester; he was already in the grip of that nervous exhaustion which would eventually destroy him, and the doctor took one look at the poor man’s face and gave his verdict: “There is only one thing for you,” he said. “You must go and see Grimaldi the Clown.”

But Dan Leno knew very little else about his great predecessor until a few weeks before when, on the advice of Statisticon, “The Memory Man,” he visited the library of the British Museum. Here, in the catalogues beneath the vast dome, he discovered
The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi
, edited by “Boz.” Leno was a literate, if not an educated, man—he always said that his school had been a traveling trunk—and he knew well enough that “Boz” was the late Charles Dickens. This afforded him greater pleasure still, because he had always admired Dickens’s portrayal of theatrical folk in
Nicholas Nickleby
and in
Hard Times
; he had once even met the great novelist, when he was playing at the Tivoli in Wellington Street and Dickens had come around afterwards to congratulate him on his performance. Dickens himself was always an admirer of the halls, and divined in Leno some bright image of his own desperate childhood.

Of course Leno immediately ordered the edited memoirs, and spent the rest of the day reading the narrative of Grimaldi’s adventures. He had come naked and piping into the world on December the 18th, just two days before the date of Leno’s own birth—whether they had both emerged under a lucky or unlucky star was, as yet, uncertain. He discovered that Grimaldi was born in Stanhope Street, Clare Market, in 1779 and had first appeared upon the stage three years later; Clare Market was not very far from Leno’s own birthplace and he, too, had started work at the age of three. Here, then, was a kindred spirit. With
increasing enthusiasm and excitement he noted down the details of Grimaldi’s characteristic costume of white silk with variously colored patches and spangles; Grimaldi, generally being mute upon the stage, would point to the color which symbolized his mood. Leno wrote down the details of an entire scene between Guzzle the Drinking Clown and Gobble the Eating Clown; then he transcribed the words of Grimaldi’s most famous and popular song, “Hot Codlins,” and even went so far as to memorize certain sentences from the clown’s last speech to the theater-goers of London: “It is four years since I jumped my last jump, filched my last oyster and ate my last sausage. I am not so rich a man as I was then for, as some of you may remember, I used to have a fowl in one pocket and sauce for it in the other. Eight and forty years have passed over my head, and I am sinking fast. I now stand worse on my legs than I used to do on my head. So tonight has seen me assume the motley for the last time—it seemed to cling to my skin as I took it off a few moments ago, and the old cap and bells rang mournfully as I quitted them forever. I have overleaped myself at last, ladies and gentlemen, and I must hasten to bid you farewell. Farewell! Farewell!” At this point, as Dickens records in a footnote, he was assisted from the stage. Dan Leno thought it the most wonderful speech he had ever encountered and, under the dome of the Reading Room, he recited it again and again until he had got it by heart. And as he whispered it to himself he thought of all the poor lost people who haunted the streets of the city, the children without a bed and the families without a home; for some reason Grimaldi, in his last days, seemed to represent them and console them. He remembered the speech, too, when he himself lay sick and dying; then Dan Leno spoke it aloud, word for word, while those around his deathbed believed that he was delirious.

During the course of that spring day in 1880, however, he still saw only the light and glory of Grimaldi’s genius. He paid
particular attention to Dickens’s suggestion that “his Clown was an embodied conception of his own,” since he believed that the novelist had hit upon a characteristic which he himself also possessed; and when Dickens went on to describe “the genuine droll, the grimacing, filching, irresistible, flinching Clown,” he knew, without any arrogance or presumption, that he had truly inherited Grimaldi’s spirit. Whether it was the strange coincidence of birth dates, or the very atmosphere of London from which they both came and within which they both dwelled, there could be no doubt that Grimaldi and Leno were extraordinarily alike in their comedy and in the quality of their stage presence. Of course Grimaldi was often a Harlequin and Leno often a Dame (although Grimaldi had sometimes dressed up as a female, most notably as Baroness Pompsini in
Harlequin and Cinderella
), but their characters and dispositions were much the same. They sprang from the same soil, and as Leno left the British Museum on that warm London evening he decided to walk down to Clare Market where Grimaldi had been born.

It was the same squalid, reckless, haunting confusion of shops, alleys, tenements and public houses which it had always been (swept away twenty years later, however, by the “improvements” and the building of Kingsway); in the year of Grimaldi’s death, Dickens had described the area in
The Pickwick Papers
as one of “ill lighted and worse ventilated rooms” with vapors “like those of a fungus-pit.” Leno entered Stanhope Street, and tried to imagine in which house Grimaldi had been born; but these were all poor lodgings and the great Clown could have emerged from any of them. “Oh, Mr. Leno, sir, good evening to you.”

“Good evening.” He turned to find a shabby-looking young man peering out from one of the porches.

“I don’t believe you remember me, sir.”

“No. Forgive me, but I can’t say that I do.”

The man, who could have been no more than twenty-two
or twenty-three, had a wild and earnest look which alarmed Leno: he knew well enough the effects of heavy drinking upon the mind. “I thought not, sir. I was one of the crowd in
Mother Goose
at the Lane three years ago, sir. I was the one who used to give you the hat and muff.”

“You gave them very well, as I recall.” Leno peered around into the gloom of this narrow court.

“Many of us theatrical folk live here, Mr. Leno. You see how close it is to the Lane and to the smaller halls.” He stepped out from the porch. “I was never a second late with that muff all the run, sir, if you remember.”

“Indeed I do. The muff was always on cue.”

“But I’ve had a lot of trouble since then, sir. Our profession can be a hard one.”

“Ah, yes, true enough.” The young man’s jacket and shirt were threadbare, and he looked as if he had not eaten for a day or two.

“Yes, sir, I was touring with
Babes in the Wood
when I got badly bitten in Margate.”

“You must be wary of the landladies. Some of them are very careless with their teeth.”

“Oh no, sir. It was a real dog. It bit me through the wrist and ankle.”

Suddenly he felt such pity and sympathy for the young man that he could have embraced him here, in the very court where Grimaldi had once lived. “Wrist and ankle? What were you doing at the time? Scratching your leg?”

“Separating two dogs which were in the way of fighting. I was laid up three weeks in a hospital ward and, when I came out, my place was taken. I’ve been out of a shop ever since.”

Dan Leno took a sovereign from his pocket and gave it to the man. “This is for the time lost on
Babes
. Think of it as coming from the profession.” The man seemed about to weep
and so he added, very quickly, “Did you know that the great Grimaldi was born around here?”

“Oh yes, sir. He came from the very lodgings I have now. I was about to tell you, because I guessed that was why you had come.”

“Could I intrude? Just for a moment?”

“You can come up and be welcome, sir. To have had Grimaldi and Leno under the same roof …” He followed the young man up two flights of cramped and dirty stairs. “We live in no comfort, so you must excuse our circumstances.”