Poor Things

~ ~ ~

A letter from

Victoria McCandless M.D.

to her eldest surviving descendant

in 1974

correcting what she claims are errors

in

EPISODES FROM

the EARLY LIFE

of a

SCOTTISH PUBLIC

HEALTH OFFICER

by

her late husband

Archibald McCandless M.D.

b.1857 — d.1911

Dear Grand- or Great-Grandchild,

By 1974 my three strong, sprouting lads will be dead or senile, so all other surviving members of the McCandless dynasty will have two grandfathers or four great-grandfathers, and will easily laugh at the aberration of one. I cannot laugh at this book. I shudder at it and thank the Life Force that my late husband had just this single copy printed and bound. I have burned every scrap I could find of the original manuscript and would have burned this too, as he suggests in his verse on the fly-leaf; but alas! it is almost the only evidence left that the poor fool existed. He also paid a small fortune for it — enough to feed, clothe and educate twelve orphans for a year. The illustrations must have doubled the printing costs. The portrait of me is copied from one in an illustrated newspaper of 1896, and strikes me as a good likeness. If you ignore the Gainsborough hat and pretentious nickname it shows I am a plain, sensible woman, not the naïve Lucrezia Borgia and La Belle Dame Sans Merci described in the text. So I post the book to posterity. I do not care what posterity thinks of it, as long as nobody now living connects it with ME.

Having reread that first paragraph I notice it suggests my second husband was as repulsive as the first. Untrue. I married Archibald McCandless because he was convenient, and as the years slipped by I came to like and rely upon the man. He was not much use to anyone else. He calls his book “Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer”—he was a Glasgow municipal health officer for exactly eleven months, resigning from the job as soon as he became chairman of the Glasgow Civic Improvement Trust. Our investments, not his brilliant mind, got him that position. It required him to preside at certain meetings, but he had most of the week to himself. Not all this free time was wasted. He helped Mrs. Dinwiddie (my faithful housekeeper) with the early nurture of our children, taking them for walks, telling them stories, crawling about the floor with them, helping them build fantastical cities out of bricks and cardboard, and draw up fantastical maps and histories of invented continents. These tales and games gave them a rich variety of ideas and information. His scientific bent ensured that the queerest monsters had impeccable Darwinian-evolutionary pedigrees; the weirdest machines never contradicted the laws of thermo-dynamics. The education he gave them was very like the playful one I had been given by Godwin Baxter, and used many of the same toys, books and instruments. We still kept a small zoo in the back-garden, though the last of Godwin’s dogs died five years after he did.

There is an old Scots proverb: “The shoemaker’s bairns are aye the worst shod.” It is a fact that I, the fearless advocate of homely cuddling and playful teaching, was kept out of the house by my clinical work for most of the week, while other responsibilities took me out of Glasgow for part of every year. My husband practised what I preached. I sometimes feared he was making early childhood too attractive for the lads so that their adult lives (like those of my first husband, and Bismarck, and Napoleon, and more commonplace criminals) would become bad boyish day dreams made real. I need not have feared. When they joined the society of other boys in Glasgow High School (founded in the twelfth century) they grew ashamed of their idle, dreamy fantastical father and emulated their practical, busy-in-the-world mother. The eldest, Baxter McCandless, is our mathematician. He took an honours degree last year and now works in London for the Department of Imperial Statistics. Godwin, our engineer, moves so briskly between Gilmorehill and the Andersonian Institute that I never know where he is studying. He says steam and oil-fired engines are dangerous anachronisms, that we must prepare to draw energy electrically from the highland lochs and cataracts while gradually abandoning coal-mines and oil-wells whose wastes poison the air and soil the lungs. The youngest, Archibald, is in his last year at school and has two obsessions. One is painting garish water-colour landscapes, the other is commanding the Glasgow High School Army Cadet Corp. I hate military training, of course. The sight of young men marching in regular rows, each imitating the stiff movements of a clockwork doll while their movements are controlled by a single screaming sergeant — that sight sickens me even more than the sight of young women in a music-hall chorus-row, kicking up their heels in unison. However, I recognize that young Archie’s love of uniformed comrades balances his Bohemian individualism. When these sides of his nature at last harmonize he too may become a fine public servant — perhaps the best of them.

In writing about my boys I have forgotten their father: always an easy thing to do in his later years. He spent more and more time in his study, scribbling books printed at his own expense since no publisher would pay for them.³⁰ Every second year I would come down to breakfast and find another blue-black volume beside my plate, with a marker in the dedication page which always bore the message TO SHE WHO MAKES MY LIFE WORTH LIVING. As I leafed through it, trying to show interest I could not possibly feel, he would watch my face with a maddening expression of timid hope and humorous resignation: an expression which made the soul of me want to grip him and shake him into useful activity. He would have been a decent general practitioner had he not used Baxter’s money to buy the idleness he mistook for freedom. Having fulfilled his mother’s ambition by joining the middle class he had no wish to reform it from inside, no wish to help the labouring class reform us (and themselves) from outside. But example is the best reproof I know. I would lay the book down, walk round the table, kiss him kindly, thank him and go off to work at my clinic.

In 1908 we found he had disseminated sclerosis (he diagnosed it himself) so it became easy to be kind. He relaxed into the disease, shifting his bed into the study and ordering a special table which let him write without getting up. He could easily have lived longer had he exercised, but he knew that and I would not bully him. I kept the marriage sweet by having a game of draughts, a light supper and a chat with him most nights before retiring. Increasingly our talk recalled our earlier days with Godwin Baxter. I also saw he was engaged on another book.

“Do you want to know about it?” he asked one night, with a kind of mischievous vivacity which he clearly attributed to creative inspiration and I to a mild fever caused by disease.

“Tell me if you want to,” I said, smiling.

“Ah, but this time I want not to. I want you to read it with astonishment after I am gone. Promise to read it through at least once. Promise not to bury it in my coffin.”

I promised.

The bound volume at last arrived from the printers and gave him pleasure for many weeks. He slept with it under his pillow. He would lie on the sofa while the maid changed his sheets, turning pages forward or backward and chuckling over them. Later, as he weakened, a bitter impatience was what he mainly felt, and at the end he wanted nothing but the pressure of my hand on his brow, for he whimpered when I removed it. I stayed beside him though I could have done more good at other bed-sides. Never mind. I may want company during my own last days, so am glad I did not refuse it to him.

I read the book three years ago soon after the funeral and it made me unhappy for a fortnight. I am still unhappy when I remember it. To explain why I must tell my own life story as simply as possible.

The first home I remember was two small rooms and a kitchen where five of us lived, sometimes six when my father stayed with us. Our only water supply was a shared tap in a yard at the back. Father could have afforded a house with better sanitation. He was chief foreman (or works manager, as we call such nowadays) in a nearby Manchester foundry, and saving money was his major passion. He seldom gave my mother enough to buy proper food.

“I cannot give us a proper start in life before I control a good patent,” he told us, “and that needs all the money I can get.”

He treated his wife and children like he treated the workmen: as potential enemies who must be kept poor by violence or the threat of it. He thought any remark which did not obviously flatter him was rebellion. When five years old I once watched him stand before the looking-glass in our dank little kitchen, adjusting his dark-green cravat and waistcoat with green velvet facings, for he spent money on his appearance though not on ours, and in a coarse way was something of a dandy. Impressed by the contrast between the colour of the clothes and his dark-red face I said, “You are a poppy, Dad.”

I remember no more until I awoke in bed. He had clubbed me down with his fist, my head had struck the brick-cobbled floor, I had been bleeding and unconscious for several hours. I doubt if my mother had dared call a doctor. I still have an irregular three-inch-long scar above my left ear under the hair. It follows an abnormal widening of the squamosal suture, but apart from that period of unconsciousness it has never affected my memory. This is the crack my late husband describes as “mysteriously regular” and “ringing the entire skull under the hair line”.

Of my mother I have only this to say: she was unselfish and hard-working, and taught me how useless these virtues are when separated from courage and intelligence. She felt positively wicked when not washing or darning clothes, scrubbing floors, beating carpets or making a gallon of soup out of scraps a butcher could not sell for cat-food. I do not know if she was able to read, but if she ever saw me with a book it was snatched away because “Girls need no excuses for idleness.” I remember most clearly the misery of washing our bodies and clothes in cold water during the winter months, when we had no coal to heat it and hardly any soap. Life for Mother and me was mainly a struggle to keep the family and home clean, yet we never felt clean before my brothers died and Father (as if he had been waiting for that) shifted us into a three-storey house with a garden all round it, saying “I can afford this now.”

I think he had afforded it for at least a year.³¹ It was richly furnished, with ten or twelve servants who took their orders from a fine-looking lady with yellow hair and a brighter dress than worn by housekeepers I met in later years. She was kind to us.

“Here is your private parlour,” she said, showing us into a room with strongly patterned wallpaper and curtains, thickly carpeted floor, heavily upholstered furniture, the biggest fire I had ever seen and a bright brass scuttle of coal in the hearth.

“Here are biscuits, cake, sherry, port wine and spirits,” she said, opening the door of a huge sideboard, “also a soda-water gazogene which is recharged by the handy-man in an outhouse. If you ever want anything pull that bell-rope twice and a maid will call for orders. What would you like just now? Will I send up tea?”

“What does HE want?” whispered Mother, tilting her head toward Father who stood on the hearth-rug smoking a cigar.

“Blaydon, your wife wants to know if you want tea!” said the lady, and we realized she was not afraid of Father.

“Not now, Mabel,” he replied, yawning. “Give me a brandy. Give Mrs. Hattersley and young Vicky a sherry then go downstairs. I’ll see you in ten minutes. For God’s sake Mother sit down and stop twisting your hands together.”

Mother obeyed and when the housekeeper left sipped the sherry uneasily and asked him, “You got it, then?”

“Got what?”

“Got patent.”

“Got patent and heck of a lot more,”³² said Father, chuckling. “Got a lot from your brother.”

“My brother Elia?”

“Your brother Noah.”

“Shall I see him then?”

“No, nobody sees Noah now,” said Father, chuckling harder. “There is nothing much left of him to see. Take a word of advice, Mother. Don’t ask visitors here until you can act ladylike. Ask Mabel to teach you how to sit and dress and stand and walk. And how to speak, of course. She knows a heck of a lot. She’s taught ME a few new tricks. I’ll leave you now. You’ve had to wait a while for this but it’s solid. Depend on it.”

He finished the brandy and walked out.

I met him a fortnight later on the stairs and said, “Father, Mother gets drunk every day. She has nothing else to do.”

“Well, if she wants to kill herself by that particular road why should I object? As long as she does it quiet-like in her own parlour. What do you want from me?”

“I want to read books and learn about things.”

“Things Mabel cannot teach?”

“Yes.”

“All right then.”

A week later I was taken to a convent school in Lausanne.

I will not describe my foreign education in detail. Mother had taught me to be a working man’s domestic slave; the nuns taught me to be a rich man’s domestic toy. When they sent me back Mother was dead and I could speak French, dance, play the piano, move like a lady and discuss events as Conservative newspapers reported them, for the nuns thought husbands might prefer wives who knew some things about the world. General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington was indifferent to what I knew but waltzed beautifully in spite of his wounds. No doubt the uniform helped. I was tall but he taller and the other dancers stopped to gaze on us. I loved him for many reasons. Girls of my age were expected to have husbands, homes, babies. He was rich, famous and still handsome. Also I wanted to escape from my father, who had provided this escape route. I felt truly happy on my wedding-day. That night I discovered why “Thunderbolt” Blessington was called “The Arctic Pole” by his fellow officers, yet thought the fault was mine. Six months later I had my third hysterical pregnancy and was begging for a clitoridectomy. Dr. Prickett told me a skilful Scottish surgeon was in London and might “handle the job”. So one afternoon I was visited by the only man I have truly loved, Godwin Baxter.

Why did my second husband describe Godwin as a monster whose appearance made babies scream, nursemaids flee and horses shy? God was a big sad-looking man, but so careful and alert and unforcing in all his movements that animals, small people, hurt and lonely people, all women (I repeat and emphasize it) ALL WOMEN AT FIRST SIGHT felt safe and at peace with him. He asked why I wanted the operation Dr. Prickett was arranging. I explained. He questioned my explanation. I told him about my childhood, my schooling, my marriage. After a long pause he said gently, “My dear, you have been badly treated all your life by selfish, greedy, silly men. Yet they are not to blame. They too were horribly educated. Dr. Prickett really believes the operation the General wants for you will help you. It cannot. Have nothing to do with it. I will tell Prickett what I have just told you. He will not accept my opinion, but you have a right to know what it is.”

I wept with grief and gratitude, knowing what he said was true. I had always felt it was true, but could not know it until I heard it said. I cried out to him, “They will drive me mad if I stay here. Where can I go?”

“If you have no friend to shelter you, no money and no experience of earning it,” he said, “it will be suicide to leave your husband. I am sorry. I cannot help you.”

I was inspired — by his kindness. I rushed across to the chair where he sat, knelt between his legs and raised my clasped hands to the level of his face.

“If!” I demanded, “one night several weeks from now, or months or years from now, a homeless desperate friendless woman comes to your home in Scotland and begs for shelter — a woman you have once treated kindly — could you turn her away?”

“I could not,” he said, sighing and looking to the ceiling.

“That is all I need to know,” I said, standing up, “apart from your address which I suppose I can find in a British medical directory.”

“Yes,” he murmured, standing up also, “but leave me alone if possible, Lady Blessington.”

“Good-bye,” I said, shaking his hand and nodding.

Was ever surgeon in this manner wooed? Was ever surgeon in this manner won?

The last possible moment came two months later, and I was not pregnant, and had never considered leaping from a bridge when I arrived in Glasgow and took a cab to Park Circus and the house of the big dogs. I had just learned that the husband who would not give me a child was about to have one by a servant ten years my junior. Baxter received me without a single question. He led me to the room where Mrs. Dinwiddie sat (she must then have been forty-five years old, for he was thirty) and said, “Mother, this badly treated lady has come to us for a rest, and will stay here until she can afford a home of her own. Treat her as my sister.”

Yes, 18 Park Circus had one thing in common with 29 Porchester Terrace. A master there had got a son by a servant: a woman he did not marry. But Godwin loved and acknowledged his mother, though she had not his father’s name. The visitors Baxter most liked would be invited to drink tea with “my mother — Mrs. Dinwiddie”. Tea with her was no cosy formality. A keen-minded woman with a strong sense of humour, she could hold her end in a conversation with anyone.

“What are you inventing now, Sir William?” she would ask the scientist who had been knighted for making the Atlantic Cable work, “and will it undo the damage of your last big job?”—for she pretended to think wars and the weather had worsened since the development of the telegraph. My own mother had made me Mancunian. The nuns had made me French. The friendship and conversation of Mrs. Dinwiddie gave me the voice and manners of an unprejudiced, straightforward Scotswoman. Colleagues who knew nothing of my early years still amuse me sometimes by saying how SCOTTISH I am.

God could be honest about his unmarried mother because he was a bachelor with an unearned income. He could not be honest about sheltering the runaway wife of an English Baronet and Great British General. To save us from awkward questions he invented the South American married cousins, their death in a train crash and their amnesic daughter Bella Baxter, who was me. This was a good excuse for teaching me the important things I had never been taught, but he would not let me forget anything I had already learned.

“Forget nothing,” he said; “your worst experiences in Manchester and Lausanne and Porchester Terrace will enlarge your mind if you remember them with intelligent interest. They will stop you thinking clearly if you cannot.”

“I cannot!” I cried. “My fingers have ached scrubbing filthy clothes in a washtub of freezing water: they have ached playing Beethoven’s Für Elise nineteen times without stopping on the piano because the teacher made me start again whenever I hit a wrong note. My head has ached because my dad cracked my skull with his fist; it has ached because I had to memorize passages of Fénelon’s Télémaque, surely the dullest book ever. These things cannot be remembered intelligently — they belong to different worlds, God, and nothing connects them but pain I want to forget.”

“No, Bella. They seem in different worlds because you met them far apart, but see me open the hinged front of this big doll’s house and fold it back. Look into all the rooms. This is a type of house you will find by thousands in British cities, by hundreds in the towns, and tens in the villages. It could be Porchester Terrace or this house — my house. The servants live mostly in the basement and attics: the coldest and most crowded floors with the smallest rooms. Their body heat, while they sleep, keeps their employers in the central floors more snug. This little female doll in the kitchen is a scullery-maid who will also do rough laundry work, scrubbing and mangling the clothes. She will have plenty of hot water to use if her master or mistress is generous, and may not be overworked if the servants set over her are kind, but we live in an age when thrift and hard competition are proclaimed as the foundations of the state, so if she is meanly and cruelly used nobody will remark upon it. Now look into the parlour on the first floor. Here is a piano with another little female doll sitting at it. If her dress and hair-style were changed for the scullery-maid’s she might be the same girl, but that will not happen. She is probably trying to play Beethoven’s Für Elise without a wrong note — her parents want her one day to attract a rich husband who will use her as a social ornament and breeder of his children. Tell me, Bella, what the scullery-maid and the master’s daughter have in common, apart from their similar ages and bodies and this house.”

“Both are used by other people,” I said. “They are allowed to decide nothing for themselves.”

“You see?” cried Baxter delightedly. “You know that at once because you remember your early education. Never forget it, Bella. Most people in England, and Scotland too, are taught not to know it at all — are taught to be tools.”

Yes, Baxter taught freedom by surrounding me with toys I had never known as a child and by showing me how to work instruments (then called philosophical instruments) which his father had used to teach him. I cannot describe the heavenly feelings of power I enjoyed as I manipulated the terrestrial and celestial globes, the zoetrope, microscope, galvanic battery, camera obscura, regular solids and Napier’s bones. Fine manipulations came easily to me because of my mother’s needlework and the convent piano training. I also had botany, zoology, travel and history books with engraved and coloured pictures to brood over. Duncan Wedderburn, God’s legal friend, sometimes took me out to theatres because God could not do that — he had a horror of crowds. I loved the theatre — even the high-kicking pantomime chorus-row struck me as carefree and happy! But I loved Shakespeare most. So I started reading him at home, starting with Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, then the plays themselves. In the library (led on by the illustrations) I also discovered Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Alice in Wonderland and The Arabian Nights (this last in a French translation which included the erotic passages). For a while Baxter got a tutor for me, Miss MacTavish. She did not last. I wanted nobody but God to teach me. With him learning was a surprising meal; with her it was a discipline. Around this time I first met young Archie McCandless.

It was a warm fresh pleasant afternoon and I may have looked slightly childish, kneeling on the tiny kitchen-garden green and peering into a hutch where Mopsy and Flopsy were copulating. Baxter and an awkward, ill-dressed lad whose ears stuck out entered from the lane. Baxter introduced us, but the boy was too shy to say a word, and this made me equally awkward. We went upstairs to take a cup of tea, but not with Mrs. Dinwiddie, so I knew Baxter did not consider McCandless a close friend. While tea was prepared Baxter chatted pleasantly about university medical matters but McCandless was staring so hard at me that he said not a word in reply. Embarrassing! So I went to the piano and played one of the simpler songs of Burns. It may have been The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond,³³ but I did not use the treadles of the pianola roll. I played with my fingers, and the timing was perfect. Besides, I distinctly remember that we acquired the pianola in the year of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, 1897. I don’t think the instrument had been invented before then. When McCandless left he insisted on kissing my hand. In Sir Aubrey’s house this flowery continental gesture had never been practised even by our French and Italian guests. I was astonished, and probably stared at my fingertips afterward in a bemused way. Our visitor’s salivation was extreme, and I did not want to dry my hand or touch my dress with it till he was out of sight. I did not see him again for a very long time, and certainly did not want to!

There was only one source of misery in those happy, happy days. God would not let me seduce him.

“Please do not fall in love with me, Bella,” he said. “I am not a man, you see, I am a big intelligent dog who is shaped like a man. Apart from that I have only one undoggy trait. I want no master — and no mistress.”

This was true, but I could not face that truth. I loved him with all my heart and all my mind and all my soul so wanted to convert him to humanity. One night, unable to sleep because of this desire, I took a candle in my hand and went naked into his bedroom. The dogs on the floor snarled jealously but I knew they would not bite. Alas, dogs were heaped beside him on the bed too and over his feet. They growled throatily.

“Victoria, I have no room for you,” he murmured, opening his eyes.

“O please let me in for a little while God!” I begged him, weeping. “Give me just enough of you to make a child for us, a little child made from both of us who I can feed and love and cuddle forever.”

“They grow up,” he murmured, yawning, “and there is a medical reason why I must not father a child.”

“You are sick?”

“Incurably sick.”

“Then I will become a doctor and cure you! Doctors can do things surgeons cannot! I will be your doctor.”

He made a clicking noise with his tongue. The two dogs on the floor nipped the calves of my legs gently between their great jaws and tugged me toward the door. I had to go.

Next day over breakfast God explained things fully, for he never made unnecessary mysteries. From his father, the great surgeon, he had inherited a syphilitic illness which would eventually cause insanity and general paralysis.

“I do not know exactly when the blow will fall,” he said. “Perhaps in a few months; perhaps in a few years. But I am prepared for it. The only doctoring which can help me is painless poison, self-administered when the first symptoms appear. I always carry my medicine with me, so you need not become a doctor on my account.”

“Then I will become a doctor on the world’s account!” I declared between sobs. “I will save some people’s lives, if not yours. I will replace you! I will become you!”

“That is a good idea, Victoria,” he said gravely, “and if you hold to it your studies shall be directed that way. But I would first like to see you equipped with a useful husband: an efficient, unselfish one who will help you do what you want while satisfying your amorous instincts — they have been terribly starved.”

“Starvation shall be my husband if you will not!” I told him through clenched teeth. He smiled and shook his head. We had stopped thinking about my famous husband in England.

He took me on a world tour. The idea was mine — I wanted to get him away from his dogs. He did it (I now see) to extend my knowledge, but also to get rid of me. We visited hospitals or attended medical lectures in fourteen capital cities. A Viennese specialist taught me the most modern techniques of sexual hygiene and birth control, after which he kept pushing me into the company of other men whenever he could. But although the sensual appetite was strong in me I could not or would not split it off from the moral appetite to embrace the admirable, and who could I admire more than God? When we returned at last to Glasgow I had made him very miserable. My company deprived him of all freedom. I let him do nothing, go nowhere without me. I was more cheerful than he, because though unable to swallow him all up in a marriage I still had more of him than anybody else could get. And then, walking one day by the memorial fountain in the West End Park, we met McCandless again.

I have mentioned how animals, children and all small or awkward people felt safer when God was near them. McCandless had first met God in the university anatomy department where God gave demonstrations when the usual lecturer was off sick. Small, awkward McCandless fell as passionately in love with God as I had done. He loved me too, of course, but only because he saw me as God’s female part — the part he could embrace and enter. But God was the first great love of his life, and the love was not returned. Long before I came to Park Circus McCandless had spied out the routes by which God took his dogs for their Sunday walk, and kept joining him on these. God was unable to be unkind to anybody, but once, when McCandless not only accompanied him home but had the insolence to force his way inside, my poor darling DID manage to say he needed more privacy than McCandless was allowing him. McCandless left God alone after that, unless they met by accident and God invited him home. Since God was infinitely good this sometimes happened, and that was how I had first met McCandless.

When we met the second time God positively thrust me onto the poor wee man. He sat on a bench, said he needed a rest and begged McCandless to take me a walk round the park. I see now (looking backward) that he wanted nothing but peace from the hideously talkative demanding creature I had become; but as I set off arm-in-arm through the shrubberies with McCandless I had another notion of his motives. Might he think McCandless was the useful, unselfish husband who would help me do what I wanted while satisfying my amorous et cetera? I realized such a man would have to be (in the eyes of the world and perhaps my own) a weakling, because he MUST NOT separate me from God. In fact, he would have to live with God and me, wanting no establishment of his own. While I pondered these things the vain little homunculus clinging to my arm babbled to me about the poverty of his childhood, his successes as a medical student and his wonderful achievements as a house doctor in the Royal Infirmary. Could THIS be the man I needed? I paused to stare at him more closely. He responded by kissing me, shyly at first, then with ardour. I had never been kissed by a man before. My only amorous pleasures had been a Sapphic affair with my piano teacher in Lausanne. I would have loved her till the end of time, but alas, she loved too many others for my selfish taste, so I had turned against her. I was amazed by the enjoyment I got from McCandless. When we separated I gazed at him with an emotion verging on respect. When he proposed marriage I agreed and said, “Let us tell God at once.” There was no doubt in my mind that God would be overjoyed to get more privacy by sharing me with McCandless.

How astonishingly selfish I was in those days! I had no moral imagination, no intelligent sympathy for people. God wanted a good husband for me so that he might enjoy again the life I had interrupted; he had not expected my marriage to add ANOTHER person to his household! A person he did not greatly like! He nearly fainted when I told him the news. He begged us to consider the matter for at least a fortnight before making up our minds. We agreed, of course.

I hope the people of 1974 are less shocked by sexual facts than most of my late Victorian contemporaries. If not, this letter will be burned as soon as read.

In the following week the McCandless kiss filled my thoughts and daydreams. Was it because of McCandless, I wondered, or could any other man give me that feeling of exquisite power combined with exquisite helplessness? Perhaps (I even dared to think) ANOTHER MAN MIGHT DO IT BETTER! To find out I seduced Duncan Wedderburn, a man I had never considered before and who (to be fair to him) had never considered me! He was a conventional soul, so completely devoted to a selfish mother that the notion of marriage never occurred to him before he and I became lovers. However, it occurred to him immediately after. I did not realize that the elopement he proposed was to involve marriage. I thought of it as a delicious experiment, a voyage to discover how suitable McCandless was. I explained this to God who said forlornly, “Go your ways, Victoria, I cannot teach you about love. But be gentle with poor Wedderburn, he has not a strong head. McCandless, too, will suffer when he hears about it.”

“But you won’t shut me out when I come back?” I asked him brightly.

“No. But I may not be alive.”

“Yes you will,” I said, kissing him. I no longer believed he had syphilis. I found it easier to believe he had invented that to prevent women like me twisting him round their little fingers.

Well, I enjoyed my Wedderburn while he lasted and was gentle with him when he fell apart. I still visit him once a month in the lunatic asylum. He is bright and cheerful, and always greets me with a mischievous wink and knowing grin. I am sure his insanity began as a pretence to evade imprisonment for embezzling clients’ funds, but it is real enough now.

“How is your husband?” he asked me last week.

“Archie died in 1911,” I told him.

“No, I mean your OTHER husband — Leviathan Pit-Bottomless Baxter de Babylon, surgical king of the damned material universe.”

“Dead also Wedder,” I said with a heartfelt sigh.

“Teehee! That one will never die,” he giggled. How I wish he had never died.

When I returned to Park Circus he was dying already. I saw it in his shrunk figure and trembling hand.

“O God!” I cried, “O God!” and kneeling down I embraced his legs and pressed my weeping face into them. He was sitting in Mrs. Dinwiddie’s parlour, she on one side and McCandless standing behind. I was astonished to see my fiancé there, though of course I had kept in touch with him by letter. With the onset of the disease God had come to need medical help with some functions for which his mother’s strength was too little. The nearness of death had also driven out his dislike of McCandless.

“Victoria,” he murmured, “Bella-Victoria, you Beautiful Victory, my mind will soon be all gone, all gone, and you will no longer love me if our candle-maker friend does not give me a very strong medicine. But I am glad to see you before I drink it. Marry this candle, Bella-Victoria. All I own will be yours. Promise to look after my dogs for me, my poor poor lonely leaderless dogs. Poor dogs. Poor dogs.”

His head began to shake and his mouth dribble.

McCandless bared his arm and gave him an injection. He became sensible for a few more minutes.

“Yes, take the dogs for their Sunday walks, Archie and Victoria. Go along the canal bank to Bowling then go by Strowan’s Well to the Lang Crags above Dumbarton, cross the Stockiemuir to Carbeth, come back by way of Craigallion Loch, the Allander, Mugdock and Milngavie Waterworks. Or go up the Clyde to Rutherglen or Cambuslang, mount the Cathkin Braes by the Dechmont and stroll by way of Gargunnock and the Malletsheugh to Neilston Pad. There are glorious walks around Glasgow, all leading easily to high places where you can look out upon glorious tracts of the world: mountains, lochs, pastured hills, woodlands and the great Firth, all framing this Glasgow which we do not love enough, for we would make it better if we did. Enjoy these things for me: the stepping stones by Cadder Kirk, clear Bardowie Loch, The Auld Wives’ Lifts, The Devil’s Pulpit, Dumgoyach and Dungoyne. If you have sons, please name one after me. Mummy will help you with them. Mummy! Mummy! Treat the McCandless bairns like grandchildren. I am sorry I could give you none. And try to forgive my father, Sir Colin. What a damnably foul old scoundrel the man was. He started more than he could see the end of. But we all do that haha. Quick, McCandless! The medicine!”

Archie brought forward the draught but it was I who took it from him and, after pressing my lips to my beloved’s in the only kiss we ever shared, put my arm behind his head and helped him drink.

That is how Godwin Baxter died.

You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable. My second husband’s story positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries, the nineteenth. He has made a sufficiently strange story stranger still by stirring into it episodes and phrases to be found in Hogg’s Suicide’s Grave with additional ghouleries from the works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. What morbid Victorian fantasy has he NOT filched from? I find traces of The Coming Race, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Trilby, Rider Haggard’s She, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and, alas, Alice Through the Looking-Glass; a gloomier book than the sunlit Alice in Wonderland. He has even plagiarized work by two very dear friends: G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion and the scientific romances of Herbert George Wells. Ever since reading this infernal parody of my life-story I have been asking, WHY DID ARCHIE WRITE IT? I am now able to post this letter to posterity because I have at last found the answer.

As locomotive engines are driven by pressurized steam, so the mind of Archibald McCandless was driven by carefully hidden envy. His good fortune in later life never stopped him being at heart just “a poor bastard bairn”. The envy the poor and exploited feel toward the wealthy is a good thing if it works toward reforming this unfairly ordered nation. That is why we Fabians think the trade unions and Labour Party are as much our allies as any honest public servant (Liberal or Tory) who wants a decent minimum wage, a sanitary house, proper working conditions and the vote for every British adult. Unluckily my Archie envied the only two people he loved, the only two who could tolerate him. He envied God for having a famous father and tender, loving mother. He resented my wealthy father, convent education and famous first husband, resented my superior social graces. Most of all he envied the care and company God gave me and the strength of my love for God, and hated the fact that the most we felt for him was friendly goodwill tempered (on my side) with sensual indulgence. So in his last months he soothed himself by imagining a world where he and God and I existed in perfect equality. Having had a childhood which privileged people would have thought “no childhood” he wrote a book suggesting that God had none either — that God had always been as Archie knew him, because Sir Colin had manufactured God by the Frankenstein method. Then he deprived me of childhood and schooling by suggesting I was not mentally me when I first met him, but my baby daughter. Having invented this equality of deprivation for all of us he could then easily describe how I loved him at first sight, and how Godwin envied him! But of course, Archie was no lunatic. He knew his book was a cunning lie. When chuckling over it during his last few weeks what amused him was how cleverly his fiction outwitted the truth. Or so I believe.

Yet why did he not make it more convincing? In the twenty-second chapter, describing how my first husband shot me through the foot, he says “The bullet had luckily gone clean through into the carpet, PUNCTURING THE INTEGUMENT BETWEEN THE ULNA AND RADIUS OF THE SECOND AND THIRD METACARPALS without even chipping a bone.” The capitalized words might just convince someone who knows nothing of anatomy but they are blethers, havers, claptrap, gibberish, gobbledygook,³⁴ and since Archie cannot have forgotten his medical training to that extent he must have known it. He could easily have said “puncturing the tendon of the oblique head of adductor hallucis between the great and index proximal phalanges without chipping a bone”, because that was what happened. But I have no time to go through every page separating fact from fiction. If you ignore what contradicts common sense and this letter you will find that this book records some actual events during a dismal era. As I said before, to my nostrils the book stinks of Victorianism. It is as sham-gothic as the Scott Monument, Glasgow University, St. Pancras Station and the Houses of Parliament. I hate such structures. Their useless over-ornamentation was paid for out of needlessly high profits: profits squeezed from the stunted lives of children, women and men working more than twelve hours a day, six days a week in NEEDLESSLY filthy factories; for by the nineteenth century we had the knowledge to make things cleanly. We did not use it. The huge profits of the owning classes were too sacred to be questioned. To me this book stinks as the interior of a poor woman’s crinoline must have stunk after a cheap weekend railway excursion to the Crystal Palace. I realize I am taking it too seriously, but I am thankful to have survived into the twentieth century.³⁵

And so, dear grand- or great-grandchild, my thoughts turn to you because I cannot possibly imagine the world in which this message will be read — if it ever is read. Last month Herbert George Wells (that honey-smelling man!) published a book called The War in the Air. Set in the nineteen twenties or thirties it describes how a German air-fleet invades the U.S.A. and bombs New York. This draws the whole world into a conflict which destroys every major centre of civilized thought and skill. The survivors are left in a worse state than the Australian aborigines, for they lack the aboriginal skills of hunting and scavenging. H.G.’s book is a warning, of course, not a prediction. He and I and many others expect a better future because we are actively creating it. Glasgow is an exciting place for a dedicated Socialist. Even in its earlier Liberal phase it set the world an example through the municipal development of public resources. Our skilled labour force is now the best educated in Britain; the Co-operative movement is popular and expanding; the Glasgow telephone system is being adopted by the General Post Office for extension over the United Kingdom. I know that the money which pays for our confidence and achievement has a dangerous source — huge war-ships built along Clydeside by government contract, in response to equally big destroyers being built by the Germans. So H. G. Wells’ warnings should be heeded.

But the International Socialist Movement is as strong in Germany as in Britain. The labour and trade-union leaders in both countries have agreed that if their governments declare war they will immediately call a general strike. I almost hope our military and capitalistic leaders DO declare war! If the working classes immediately halt it by peaceful means then the moral and practical control of the great industrial nations will have passed from the owners to the makers of what we need, and the world YOU live in, dear child of the future, will be a saner and happier place. Bless you.

Victoria McCandless M.D.

18 Park Circus, Glasgow.

1st August, 1914.