Thunderstruck (29 page)

W
ITH EACH DAY
that Belle did not return, Ethel Le Neve found her confidence growing. She began wearing the jewelry Crippen had given her and allowed herself to be seen with him on the street, at the theater, and at restaurants. Her landlady, Mrs. Jackson, noticed that Ethel seemed to be in fine spirits almost all the time, noticed too that she had begun wearing new clothes and jewelry, including a brooch with a central diamond and radiating beams of pearls, and a trio of bracelets, though one of the bracelets, set with amethyst stones, seemed far too big for Ethel’s tiny wrist. Ethel also showed off two new gold watches. One evening, beaming, she showed Mrs. Jackson a diamond solitaire ring and called it her “proper engagement ring.” A few nights later Ethel displayed yet another ring. She flashed the diamond in the light. “Do you know what this cost?” she exclaimed.

“I have no idea,” Jackson said.

“Twenty pounds.”
More than $2,000 today.

One night, playfully, Mrs. Jackson asked Ethel if someone had died and left her a lot of money.

No, Ethel replied with delight. “Somebody has gone to America.”

E
THEL BEGAN SPENDING NIGHTS
away from Mrs. Jackson’s house. In the first week of February she was gone only one or two nights, but soon she was spending nearly every night away. She told Mrs. Jackson she was staying with friends and was helping Crippen search the house for certain papers and belongings of Belle’s, and she mentioned too that he had been teaching her how to shoot a revolver, a small nickel-plated weapon that he kept in a wardrobe in his bedroom.

Soon Ethel began giving gifts of clothing to her friends and to Mrs. Jackson. A widow with two daughters roomed at Constantine Road, and Ethel now gave the children an imitation pearl necklace, a piece of white lace, an imitation diamond tiara, two spray scent bottles, a pink waistband, two pairs of shoes with stockings to match, and four pairs of stockings—white, pink, and black—all of which became the daughters’ most-loved possessions. To her sister Nina she gave a black silk petticoat, a dress of gold Shantung silk, a black coat, “a very big cream coloured curly cape with long stole ends,” a white ostrich neck-wrapper, and two hats, one of gold silk, the other saxe blue with two pink roses.

At the time Nina said, “Fancy anyone going away and leaving such lovely clothes behind.”

Yes, Ethel agreed, “that Mrs. Crippen must have been wonderfully extravagant.”

But it was Mrs. Jackson who received the greatest windfall. She later had occasion to make a precise list:

1 outfit of mole skin trimmed in black

1 long coat, brown

1 long coat, black

1 coat and skirt, dark gray, striped

1 fur coat

1 coat, cream-colored

1 voile blouse and skirt, black

2 blouses, black (old)

2 blouses, one blue silk and lace, the other cream lace (new)

1 pair slippers

11 pairs stockings, brown, black, blue, white, pink, and black-and-white-striped

1 felt hat, brown, trimmed

1 lace hat, brown, trimmed with flowers

1 mole hat, pink, covered in sateen

1 imitation diamond 1 lizard-shaped diamond

1 harp-shaped brooch

2 hair stones, paste

3 night dresses, white (new)

1 skirt, yellow

1 outfit, heliotrope (new)

Ethel and Crippen grew more and more bold about declaring their romance to the world. Ethel wore Belle’s furs on the street and to work at Albion House, despite the proximity of the ladies of the guild, to whom Belle’s clothing was nearly as familiar and recognizable as their own. Crippen bought two tickets to one of the most important social events of the variety world, the annual banquet of the Music Hall Artists Benevolent Fund, set to take place on Sunday, February 20, at the much-loved Criterion Restaurant in Piccadilly.

“Neither of us was very anxious to go,” Ethel wrote. “The doctor had bought a couple of tickets, and naturally he wanted to use them. He asked me if I would go with him. I said that I was not very keen, as I had not danced for some years, and I had not a suitable dress.” Ethel ordered a new one, in pale pink, from Swan and Edgar, a prominent draper.

This decision to attend the ball was the couple’s most daring declaration yet and, as it happened, most unwise.

B
UILT IN
1873, the Criterion combined glamour and raffishness, especially its Long Bar, for men only, where a Scotland Yard inspector might find himself in amiable conversation with a former convict. In its dining rooms painters, writers, judges, and barristers gathered for lunch and dinner. Later, after the theaters of the Strand and Shaftesbury Avenue closed for the night, the city’s population of actors, comedians, and magicians thronged the “Cri” and its bar and its Grand Hall and its East Room and West.

Crippen wore an evening coat, Ethel wore her new dress, and as a further touch, she pinned to her bodice the rising sun brooch that Belle had left behind. Men watched her and admired the way her dress set off her slender figure. The ladies of the guild watched too, but what most caught their attention was the brooch. They knew it well—it had been a favorite of Belle’s. Louise Smythson saw it. Clara Martinetti saw it, and later noted that the typist “wore it without any attempt at concealment.” Annie Stratton saw it, as did her husband, Eugene, who sang in blackface with Pony Moore’s minstrels. Lil Hawthorne, attending with her husband and manager John Nash, sat opposite Crippen and the typist, and they too noticed the brooch. John Nash said, “it impressed me.” Maud Burroughs saw it: “I know [Belle] was very particular whenever she went away to have all her jewelry, except what she took with her, placed in a safe deposit, and this is why it struck me as so strange that the typist was seen wearing a brooch of hers.”

The atmosphere shimmered with hostility. Crippen sat between Clara Martinetti and Ethel. The two women did not speak, but at one point their eyes met. Mrs. Martinetti nodded. She recalled that Ethel seemed “very quiet.” John Nash said, “I noticed that Crippen and the girl were drinking very freely of wine.”

Mrs. Louise Smythson approached Crippen and asked for Belle’s address in America and said how strange it was that Belle had not yet written, to anyone.

“She is away up the mountains in the wilds of California,” he said.

“Has she no settled address?”

“No,” Crippen said, but then offered to forward anything that Smythson wanted to send.

For the moment, Mrs. Smythson let the matter drop.

“A
FTER THIS
,” E
THEL WROTE,
“I noticed that the members of the Music Hall Ladies Guild were showing marked curiosity in my movements.” Her sense of being spied upon and gossiped about became acute. She could not help but run into the ladies of the guild when she entered and left the building and walked the hall to Crippen’s office. Nothing was said directly, but much was communicated by glance and rigid cordiality, deadly for its iciness. “Often when I went along the street with Dr. Crippen,” she wrote, “I remarked people staring at me in a curious way.”

It made her uncomfortable. She wished the ladies could just accept the fact of her relationship with Crippen and be done with it.

But she had made the mistake of allowing the affair to become public: This was the England of Edward VII, but it was also the England that served as the setting for
Howards End,
to be published later that year, in which E. M. Forster plunged one of his heroines, Helen Schlegel, into an illicit pregnancy. He wrote, “The pack was turning on Helen, to deny her human rights.”

On March 12 Crippen took a cab to Mrs. Jackson’s house on Constantine Road and thanked her for all she had done for his “little girl,” but now, he said, he was taking her away. They loaded all her things into a cab, then went to a nearby public house to celebrate. Even Mrs. Jackson’s husband came along, though he did not approve of Crippen and did not consider Le Neve’s recent behavior at all ladylike. Crippen bought champagne. They all drank.

Then Crippen took Ethel home.

“I D
ON’T
B
ELIEVE
I
T
”

M
ARCONI HAD EXPECTED SOME SKEPTICISM
about his Newfoundland success, but he was dismayed to find himself now confronting a barrage of incredulous commentary.

“I doubt this story,” Thomas Edison told the Associated Press. “I don’t believe it.” He said, “That letter ‘S’ with the three dots is a very simple one, but I have been fooled myself. Until the published reports are verified I shall doubt the accuracy of the account.”

In London that same day the
Daily Telegraph
reported, “Skepticism prevailed in the city…. The view generally held was that electric straysand not rays were responsible for activating the delicate instruments recording the ‘S’s’ supposed to have been transmitted from near the Lizard to Newfoundland on Thursday or Friday.” The paper cited one widely held theory making the rounds that the signals had come from a “Cunarder fitted with the Marconi apparatus, which was, or should have been, within 200 miles of the receiving station at St. John’s on the day of the experiment.” It also quoted William Preece as stating that “the letters S and R are just the letters most frequently signaled as the result of disturbance in the earth or atmosphere.”

Two days later
The Electrical Review
called Marconi’s claim “so sensational that we are inclined for the present to think that his enthusiasm has got the better of his scientific caution.” The
Review
proposed that the signals most likely came from a station in America. “A practical joker who had learned when the signals were expected, might easily have fulfilled the expectations of the watchers at the Newfoundland station.”

The Times
of London published a letter from Oliver Lodge that was a model of artful damnation. “It is rash to express an opinion either way as to the probability of the correctness of Mr. Marconi’s evidently genuine impression that he has obtained evidence on the other side of the Atlantic of electrical disturbances purposely made on this side, but I sincerely trust he is not deceived.” Acknowledging that he had been critical of Marconi in the past, Lodge wrote, “I should not like to be behindhand in welcoming, even prematurely, the possibility of so immense and barely expected an increase of range as now appears to be foreshadowed. Proof, of course, is still absent, but by making the announcement in an incautious and enthusiastic manner Mr. Marconi has awakened sympathy and a hope that his energy and enterprise may not turn out to have been deceived by the unwonted electrical dryness of the atmosphere on that wintry shore.”

But at least one longtime skeptic took Marconi at his word, and saw in his achievement a glimmer of threat.

O
N THE EVENING OF
M
ONDAY
, December 16, 1901, as he dined at his hotel in St. John’s, Marconi was approached by a young man bearing a letter addressed to him. Marconi’s dinner companion was a Canadian postal official named William Smith, who was staying at the same hotel and had a room just off the dining room. As the young man crossed the room toward the table, Marconi was telling Smith that he now planned to build a permanent station on Newfoundland, most likely at Cape Spear, a spit of land that jutted into the sea four miles southeast of Signal Hill.

Smith watched as Marconi opened the letter. As Marconi read, he became distraught. When Smith expressed concern, Marconi passed him the letter.

Smith too found it appalling. The letter was from a law firm representing the Anglo-American Telegraph Co., the big undersea cable company that provided telegraph service between Britain and Newfoundland.

The letter was brief, a single long paragraph that charged Marconi with violating Anglo-American’s legal monopoly over telegraphic communication between Britain and Newfoundland. “Unless we receive an intimation from you during the day that you will not proceed any further with the work you are engaged in and remove the appliances erected for the purpose of telegraph communication legal proceedings will be instituted to restrain you from the further prosecution of your work and for any damages which our clients may sustain or have sustained; and we further give you notice that our clients will hold you responsible for any loss or damage sustained by reason of [your] trespass on their rights.”

Marconi was furious, but he took Anglo-American’s threat seriously. He knew his own company could not withstand litigation with so powerful a foe, and he recognized too that harm had indeed been done to Anglo-American, because of the decline in the price of its stock.

Smith asked him into his room, calmed him, and on impulse invited him—“begged him,” Smith recalled—to bring his experiments to Canada. (At this point Newfoundland was a colony of Britain; it did not join Canada until 1949.) Over the next few days Smith arranged a formal invitation from the Canadian government. Marconi relented and set off for Nova Scotia, part of Canada since 1867, to scout a new location.

A party of dignitaries met him at the wharf in North Sydney, at the eastern tip of Nova Scotia, and whisked him into a train for a brief trip south to Glace Bay to show him a spot called Table Head. Aptly named, it was a flat plateau of ice and blown snow atop cliffs striated with bands of blue-gray and rust that fell a hundred feet straight down to the sea. “The site,” Smith said, “delighted Marconi.”

He set off for Ottawa to negotiate a formal agreement with the government.

O
N
C
HRISTMAS
D
AY
two operators with Anglo-American Cable exchanged salvos of doggerel. One in Nova Scotia tapped out,

Best Christmas greetings from North Sydney,

Hope you are sound in heart and kidney.

Next year will find us quite unable

To exchange over the cable.

Marconi will our finish see,

The Cable Co’s have ceased to be.

No further need of automatics

Retards, resistances and statics.

I’ll then across the ether sea

Waft Christmas greetings unto thee.

His counterpart in Liverpool responded,

Don’t be alarmed, the Cable Co’s

Will not be dead as you suppose.

Marconi may have been deceived,

In what he firmly has believed.

But be it so, or be it not,

The cable routes won’t be forgot.

His speed will never equal ours,

Where we take minutes, he’ll want hours.

Besides, his poor weak undulations

Must be confined to their own stations.

This is for him to overcome,

Before we’re sent to our long home.

Don’t be alarmed, my worthy friend.

Full many a year precedes our end.

North Sydney ended the exchange:

Thanks old man, for the soothing balm,

Which makes me resolute and calm.

I do not feel the least alarm,

The signal S can do no harm.

It might mean sell to anxious sellers,

It may mean sold to other fellers.

Whether it is sold or simply sell,

Marconi’s S may go to—well!

I
N
N
EW
Y
ORK
J
OSEPHINE
Holman spent Christmas without her fiancé. She was coming to see that being pledged to a man so obsessed with work brought with it certain disadvantages, one of them being loneliness.