Thunderstruck

THE END OF THE WORLD

CRIPPEN BECAME CAUGHT UP in the social web of the Ladies’ Guild. He attended parties thrown by music hall artists, visited their clubs, and when Belle felt it necessary to have a companion, dined out with other guild members and their husbands.

One afternoon Seymour Hicks, the performer and memoirist, encountered Crippen at London’s Vaudeville Club. An acquaintance of Hicks’s introduced them, and they spent half an hour together, over cocktails. Hicks knew something of Crippen and of the dynamics of his marriage to Belle. It was hard to understand—so large and robust a woman, exuding energy from every pore, coupled with so mild and self-erasing a man as Crippen.

“The most noticeable thing about him was his eyes,” Hicks wrote. “They bulged considerably and appeared to be closely related to some kind of ophthalmic goiter. Added to this, as they were weak and watery he was obliged to wear spectacles with lenses of more than ordinary thickness, which so magnified his pupils that in looking at him I was by no means sure I was not talking to a bream or mullet or some other open-eyed and equally intelligent deep sea fish. He spoke with a slight American accent.”

On this occasion Hicks’s acquaintance complained of a toothache, and Crippen immediately handed him one of Munyon’s remedies, “assuring him that it would instantly relieve the acute toothache from which he was suffering.”

Hicks wrote, “There is no doubt that as the years rolled on, the home life of this little peddler of patent medicines must have been anything but a rest cure, and one for which even Dr. Munyon himself could not have found a remedy.”

Hicks felt sympathy for Crippen. Looking back from the darkling year 1939, knowing by then all that had come to pass, Hicks mused, “Miserably unhappy, he would not have been human if he had not sought consolation elsewhere.”

SO INTENSE WAS THE WORK and the fear of competitors—of Tesla, Lodge, Slaby, and now Maskelyne—that Marconi and his men seemed unaware of the passing of the nineteenth century, the age of Victoria. Out in the world beyond the windblown cliffs of Cornwall and the snug Christmas hearths of the Poldhu and Haven hotels, the first shadows of a long melancholy dusk had begun to gather.

In 1898, spurred by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and by widespread ill will among the German populace toward England, the German Reichstag passed the First Navy Law, which called for the production of seven new battleships. Two years later, in June 1900, much to the alarm of the British Admiralty, the Reichstag went further and passed its Second Navy Law, which doubled the number of battleships in the German navy and set in motion a cascade of events that over the next decade and a half would align the world for war.

There was wide agreement that some kind of war in Europe was inevitable, although no one could say when or between which nations; but there also was agreement that advances in science and in the power of weapons and ships would make the war mercifully short. The carnage would be too great, too vast, too sudden for the warring parties to endure. One voice dissented. In 1900 Ivan S. Bloch wrote, “At first there will be increased slaughter—increased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue.” At the onset of hostilities armies would try to fight under the old rules of warfare but quickly would find them no longer applicable. “The war, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate, in which neither army being able to get at the other, both armies will be maintained in opposition to each other, threatening each other, but never able to deliver a final and decisive attack.”

They would dig in and hold their ground. “It will be a great war of entrenchments. The spade will be as indispensable to a soldier as his rifle.”

In January 1901 something greater than fear of war settled over the nation. Twenty-three days into the new century, Queen Victoria died. Britain was cast into literal shadow as men and women donned black and thick black lines appeared along the edges of each page of The Times. A sense of dread shaded life. Henry James wrote, “I mourn the safe and motherly old middle-class queen, who held the nation warm under the fold of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl and whose duration had been so extraordinarily convenient and beneficent. I felt her death much more than I should have expected; she was a sustaining symbol—the wild waters are upon us now.”

Her son Edward, the Prince of Wales, would be king. James called him “Edward the Caresser” and feared his impending accession was “the worst omen for the dignity of things.” In marked contrast to the old queen, the king-to-be was affable, indulgent, even funny. As Victoria lay dying, someone asked, not intending an answer, “I wonder if she will be happy in heaven?”

To which Edward replied, “I don’t know. She will have to walk behind the angels—and she won’t like that.”

MARCONI AND HIS MEN mourned the queen but did not let her death interrupt their work. Kemp’s diary makes no reference to her passing. On January 23, 1901, the day after her death, Marconi achieved his greatest distance yet, registered when the new test station at the Lizard on its first day of operation received messages sent from the Isle of Wight, 186 miles away.

The transatlantic station at Poldhu was well into the first phase of construction, and now Marconi turned to the matter of where to build its twin. He examined a map of the United States and began planning his second voyage to America.