Franny Moyle Read Online Free PDF Page A

Swinburne Kinge
    Of him I love
    With a passion Wilde;
    Until the very welin singe
    And all the bare-armed trees above
    Do sigh as at an utter thinge
    Moved by the sorrows of thy weary childe
    Oh, could I be beguiled
    With Terra-Cotta tiled
    Or sunflowers gold
    Or a lily white
    The smell of verdant cabbage liked
    Or sight of peacock feathers bold
    And yet the thoughts of something wilde
    Sootheth my aching spirit always quite. 7
    A week after receiving her sonnet from Mr Swinburne-King, Constance and her mother were yet again at home with Lady Wilde. Willie Wilde had finally secured a staff job on the Daily Telegraph , and so he and Speranza had moved from Ovington Square to a house in Park Street in Mayfair. A better address for a salon, perhaps, but a more expensive one. Lady Wilde’s stretched finances could only accommodate the smallest house in the area, with the tiniest rooms, a fact not lost on Constance.
    â€˜We had such a joke yesterday,’ Constance told Otho.
    I went out with Mama to call on Lady Wilde having quite forgotten her address and in the pouring rain. I made Mama go down in a hansom to Number 70 … to find out then that it was shut up, so we went into all the shops on both sides of the way until at last at a bakers I reluctantly found the number and we went in and found Lady W all alone in her glory in such wee rooms that Mama and I puzzled internally how she’d got into them. No one had appeared though L.W. made us stay in to see Willie whom she was expecting. I heard all about Oscar. He is bringing out a drama which I see is advertised today in the Observer. Vera or The Nihilists , which is to be acted at the Adelphi on the afternoon of the 17th of December and Lady Wilde has said I must go because Oscar would expect me to go. I suppose she is trying to carouse audience. However I tried to make Mr King and Mama promise to go and Mama is quite willing. 8
    Vera, or The Nihilists was Oscar’s first foray into drama. It tells the tale of a Russian female assassin who falls in love with one of her fellow nihilists, Alexis, only to discover he is in fact the heir to the Russian throne. When Alexis does in fact become Tsar, Vera is sent to kill him. But she cannot kill the man she loves, a man who is determined to use his birthright to bring democratic change to Russia. With her fellow assassins ready to follow in her steps and assassinate Alexis themselves unless Vera throws a bloodied dagger out of a window as a sign of the success of her mission, Vera chooses to sacrifice herself and throw a knife covered in her own blood to her colleagues.
    The performance to which Constance was invited never took place. It was cancelled. A real-life Tsar had been assassinated in March and diplomatic pressures were afoot, possibly from the Russian Embassy. Meanwhile, preparations for Oscar’s American lecture tour suddenly became all-consuming. Oscar had engaged George Lewis to act as his solicitor and negotiate his contract for the tour, and had been writing to important figures who might provide letters of introduction to opinion-formers on the other side of the Atlantic. On Christmas Eve, Oscar boarded the Arizona and set off on his adventure.
    In Oscar’s absence Constance continued to embrace the attributes of Aestheticism. It has often been suggested that she was a person whose adoption of Aestheticism was purely part of her enthralment to Oscar. But Constance was quite her own person. Oscar’s appeal to her reflected her own predispositions.
    Although an invitation to lunch at the club most associated with London’s bohemian crowd, the particularly female-friendly Albemarle, felt like a step too far for Constance (‘Mademoiselle Arbau and I went to the Temple Church on Sunday and did not get home to lunch until 2.30. Mr Short took us into the Hall and into his rooms. He was most anxious to take us to the Albemarle Club to lunch, but we were afraid to go’ 9 ), nevertheless