All that was Possible: being the record of a summer in the life of Mrs. Sibyl Crofts, Comedian, extracted from her correspondence [or rather, written] by H. O. Sturgis

Letter I

Ebury Street, March 7th, 1S8-. Dear Milly, You are about the only person I can think of at the moment who cares enough about me to want to know what has become of me, and as I feel in a mood for writing to some one and for chattering about myself, there seems to be no escape for you. You needn't read my letter if you don't like, but I feel as though it would do me good to write it, and I like somehow to think it is to you, though I daresay I shall tear it up when it's finished. A You have probably seen in the Society papers the " approaching marriage in high life of the Earl of Medmenham to Lady Florence Marlowe," and perhaps have wondered what would become of me under those circumstances. Several other people I find have been wondering the same thing, including George himself. You would have been sorry for him (I was) if you had been present on the occasion of his breaking the news to me.

The poor fellow was so grateful to me for what he called " taking it so well " that I think he would have there and then settled any thing on me for life that I had chosen to ask. The fact is I am amazed myself to find how little I care. George had evi dently braced his nerves for a scene : his ideas are still painfully crude on many subjects : I was to have hysterics, or indulge in the lofty heroic style ; indeed I don't quite know what he expected me to do, but his apprehensions were evidently none the less awful for being vague. I almost wish I was more affected by this event : I am afraid I must have grown callous ; but (I am writing to you as to my other self) I confess the idea of a change of life is not unpleasant to me. Breathe it not in Gath, and had he so willed, I would have done my best to have prevented his finding it out, but I find it impossible to disguise from myself that George had begun to bore me.

What do people do, I wonder, who are married, when they make this discovery ? Does that awful half-hour in church make such a ddnoilment impossible ? I went to a wedding the other day (not as a guest, but in the gallery among the spectators) to see what it was George had got to go through, and I came to the conclusion that people were very courageous. However, as I say, if he hadn't found out he was tired first, and, with the accustomed selfishness of his sex, taken steps to remove the burthen, I doubt if I should ever have had the heart to inflict the pain on him, which he no doubt fully believed he was going to inflict on me. I hear a ring at the bell and must stop : perhaps I will go on later. Who do you think my visitor was ? Old Prossett, come to offer me untold gold ' o if I would return to the theatre ; I was to have leading parts, and every sort of advantage.

"Why, Mr. Prossett," I said, "you never thought so much of me in old days : and now I am out of practice. My voice would require all sorts of training to get back its timbre, and I have quite forgotten how to dance : besides I am five years older, and not near so good-looking." "Ah," said the old wretch, "but then you were nobody. Now you would be a celebrity." So you see female virtue is not at a premium. The long and short of it was that I told him I expected to be provided for ; that I always hated the stage, and had no desire to return to it. He couldn't take it in at all. " Provided for ! " he cried. " Yes : a pretty provision for a woman with your tastes. Why, if you come back to us you would be making three times as much, not to speak of the opportunities you would have of getting rich in other little ways."

I thanked him for the delicacy of the last allusion and turned him out. When he was gone I burnt lavender in the shovel, and opened the window. Certainly my sensibilities have become more acute in these five years of leisure, and reading. The man used not to set me on edge in the same way in old days, with his filthy hints, and his scent and rings, and the aspirates he flings about when he gets excited. Well, good bye for the present ; if you write that you would like to hear more of me and my prospects, I will inflict another letter on you, as long and as tedious as this one.

Letter II

March 16th. Before I say anything else, let me thank you from my heart, if I have one, for your letter. You are a true friend, and though ' o I am not given to gush, I assure you it is a possession I appreciate. I have not been spoilt by excess of that commodity in my life. But you say two things which I must answer. Dabord, you are unjust to George, who has not " behaved badly " at all. On the contrary, he has shown every consideration for me, and been ex tremely liberal in money matters, which we all know is the balm for wounded feel ings. As to sentiment, the day for that has gone by. The difficulty has been to prevent his being too generous. He wanted me, among other things, to keep the carriage, which of course was out of the question. By-the-way, I have asked him to keep Ridgeway as his coachman : the man is a nice man and a first-rate driver, and, moreover, devoted to George, who is always kind to his servants.

But I am wandering from the point ; the other thing in your letter at which I take exception is your remark that I can never really have been in love with George, or I couldn't take the thing as I do, and write about it all so calmly. I certainly was in love with him : at least I think so : or, at the very least, I did think so ; that much I may say for certain. He was just twenty-one when I first saw him, and I wasn't more than a year older myself. How handsome I thought him, and how beautifully he was dressed ! Good Lord ! what fools we both were. I blush now when I think of the twaddle we talked and wrote to one another in those days, only five years ago. Yes, I think I loved him. Anyway I gave him what is always sup posed to be the crowning proof of love, and quarrelled irremediably with my only surviving relative by doing so.

Yes, it was genuine passion : I think I can say quite truly I wasn't tempted by what he offered me. And I have been a good friend to him ; he says so himself. Lady Florence has me to thank that her future husband is in every way a pleasanter person to live with than he was before he knew me. I cured him of gambling : he only did it because he was bored ; and of drinking brandy and soda in the morning. I never could get him to read books, it is true. " Damn it all, Sibby," he used to say, " it is not in the bond ; I never en gaged you as a governess." But I did succeed in giving him a taste for music, and taught him to sing quite passably ; he has a very pretty voice, and an ear that only wanted cultivation. Jack Hilyard told me once he overheard George's mother at a party telling some other Dowager of the iniquities of her second son, who was living, I believe, at no end of a rate : " Now, dear Medmenham gives me no anxiety," the old woman whispered, confidentially : " of course I am not supposed to know, but a little bird tells me there is a liaison of some kind with quite a superior sort of girl ; and certainly he is not wild like poor Charlie : of course one ought to be shocked ; but it is everyway better that there should be something of the kind (and George is most discreet in keeping it in the background) than all this horrible scandal about married women, and divorce courts and all that."

I doubt if she would have been so entirely satisfied if she had known how anxious her " dear Medmenham " was to present me to her as a daughter-in-law about that time. But she was right in a way. I had a good influence over George. Nothing is settled yet about the future. I have advertised the house to let, and will sell the furniture to the incoming tenant ; I expect to move by the end of the month, and I shall go quite away, somewhere, for a time, but haven't made up my mind where. I will let you know as soon as I decide on anything.

Letter III

March 28th. You see I am still here ; and I have all sorts of things to tell you that have happened since I wrote last. The fact is, I had a sudden inspiration as to where to go. In turning over some old papers one day I came on a little slip on which was written the name of a Welsh house-agent, and after cudgelling my poor brains for about ten minutes, I remembered how it had come into my possession. In the early days, and indeed up to two years ago, George and I used sometimes, not very often, but whenever he could get away, to go off on wild little expeditions of ten days or a fortnight, and one year we stumbled on a lovely Welsh valley, where we spent nearly three weeks : it was our longest outing, and I think our last. How happy we were ! Well, one day there, in one of our walks we trespassed, as we thought, through the tangled garden of the queerest little house in the world.

Afterwards we heard it was empty, and we need not have been frightened, so we got an order from the local house-agent and went to look at it. I forget the history of the place, but I remember the look of the rooms, which were just as the last tenants had left them ; I shall never forget the chill of the cold daylight striking in on those deserted tokens of everyday life. The man thought we had an eye to taking the cottage, and offered it to us at an absurdly low rent. We took his address, and I never thought of it again from that day till three days ago, when the sight of the little slip of paper called up the whole place before me just as I saw it when I turned at the gate for a last look : the pink monthly roses round the porch, the one big stack of chimneys that seemed too heavy for the cottage to carry, the little wood, the grey rocks above with the sun lying warm on them, the tangle of garden shrubs and wild things growing almost up to the door : it all flashed upon me as clear and distinct as a picture, and I seemed to feel that it would be a pleasant place to be lost in, at least for the summer; beyond that I shall make no plans.

I sat down then and there, and wrote to the agent to know if it was still vacant, and am eagerly awaiting his reply. I feel the need of getting away from all the people I have seen in the last five years : I would not have believed they would have been so vulgarly curious to know " how I take it " and "what I am going to do." I can't stay in London to be used as a peepshow. I am sick and tired of everything. My Aunt will not see me any more. I had a passing thought of her, but I know it would be no use. And as to your generous invitation, I love you too well to saddle you with a guest in such an anoma lous position. The fact is, what is called my " position " is being brought home to me, and I am beginning to realise that it is not, and never can be, the same as before this episode in my life.

Who should come to see me the other day but the parson of a neighbouring church. It seems some garbled version of my story had got round to him, and he pictured the poor girl betrayed and forsaken by the heartless nobleman. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I think of the poor good man. He came so kindly and meaning to be so tender with me, and rejoice over the brand it was perhaps not too late to snatch from the burning ; and O ' he was so embarrassed at finding me so unlike what he had evidently expected. He called me his erring sister, and talked about Mary Magdalen, and finally offered to get me into a "home." I really hated myself for being amused : he was doing his duty so nobly. I assured him I was not in want of money, and required no assistance, and I could see that he felt himself that his little phrases de circon stance were not quite appropriate.

Next day he came again, and said, if I liked, his wife would get me a place as governess with some friends of hers going abroad, " without mentioning my antecedents." But this too I was forced to decline ; and, to say the truth, it struck me as a somewhat questionable direction for their philan thropy to take. Somehow when I have read in novels of the " erring sisters " as the clergyman called them, it has never occurred to me to think of myself in the same category. I can't tell why, but the description seemed as much outside of any experience of mine as though I were the clergyman's wife herself. So I suppose these two interviews left an unpleasant taste behind them, and perhaps had something to do with my desire to get away altogether for a little. All this time I have almost forgotten to tell you that I have seen Lady Florence.

She and her mamma came up to shop. They don't come to town till after Easter, so their carriages are in the country, and George lent them his brougham ; I was in a hansom and met them at a corner where there was a block, and of course knew at once who it must be. I wish you could have seen the deprecating glance my poor Ridgeway directed at me over his high collars from the box : it was a trying situation for him, I felt. Lady Florence is very pretty, prettier than I was at my best, and very young — she can't be more than nineteen or twenty — but she doesn't look amusing, and she dresses horribly, in the smart English style ; a little poultice E of a scarlet cloth cap on her head, a tight jacket, and a wretched little pinched in waist; that, thank Heaven, is a folly my father the doctor, and perhaps even more my French mother, early taught me to avoid.

Forgive all this. I have nothing to do all day but write, till I get the house-agent's answer, and after that I shall be too busy to write a line. Your affectionate SIBYL. P.S. — George is to be married at Easter down at the young lady's home in the country. I hear the mamma is very proud of having caught him, he being supposed to be impregnable.

Letter IV

Tanfrws, Cwm-y-Straeth, N.Wales, April 10th. Dearest Milly, I feel utterly and entirely wretched, and as you have accepted the office of confessor, I mean to relieve my feelings by pouring out my ill-humour to you. I begin to think I was a fool to come here, where I expect I shall mope to death, and yet where better could I go, or what better could I do ? I arrived at dusk yesterday evening, and was met at Abergaeslau, the nearest station, by the old gardener, with a ramshackle waggonette from the one inn in the place. My poor old Virginie shed tears during the entire journey, which did not tend to raise my spirits : you know she was my poor mother's dresser in the days when mamma was a star of the Parisian ballet, and she has stuck to me ever since, poor dear ! I sent away the other servants before I left London, but she, I am sure, will never leave me.

A drizzling rain, that seemed like steam, was falling when we emerged from the station ; it was stifling, and cold at the same time, and, as our conveyance was an open one, we got very wet during our five mile drive. Also it soon got quite dark, and we jolted over the stones without an idea where we were going, in a silence which was broken only by Virginie's muffled murmurs of horror and alarm, and invocations to the Virgin, and all the Saints of Heaven. When we came to the village here, we were stopped by a crowd of people ; the old gardener descended to inquire what was the matter, and returned with the intelligence that it was a poor quarryman, who had fallen down dead in a fit : they were carrying him home. Somehow it seemed like a bad omen ; Virginie, ot course, accepted it as such, and begged me to turn back and fly from this wilderness which the hand of Heaven warned me was uninhabitable in so clear a manner.

But by this time the crowd had passed, and the vehicle proceeded on its way. Never shall I forget the dreariness of my arrival at my new home : the house enveloped in this grey mist was very different from the picture I retained of it, under that warm August sunshine, as different, I thought a little bitterly, as my life now and then. After the comfort and neatness and warmth of the Ebury Street house, these empty forlorn rooms, with the damp mouldy smell of all places long unlived in, seemed melancholy as the tomb. The woman who has been got in from the village to help Virginie (and who has been selected principally on account of being one of the few who can speak English), had lighted fires, but they sputtered damply, and the chimneys nearly all smoked, as though they resented being called on to do duty again after so long a holiday.

I had sent down my piano and some books, and such prints and china, and so forth, as I was specially fond of. But nothing was unpacked, and the rows of packing cases looked in the dimly-lit hall like so many coffins for dead quarrymen. To-day it is raining as I never recollect to have seen it rain before, one continuous downpour of water in great sheets. The hills which I remember as surrounding the place, are so completely blotted out that one might be in Cam bridgeshire ; there are patches of damp on the walls and ceilings, and from a large leak in the skylight on the stairs I can hear the continuous dripping of the water into the footbath that Virginie has placed below it. She, good soul, refreshed by a night's rest, has gone to work tooth-and nail to clean up and get things in order. Tib, too, has accommodated himself to circumstances, and is snoring peacefully before the fire, which has at last consented to burn, in spite of the rain that drops with a hiss into it down the chimney.

Virginie is making out a list of all sorts of things that she wants and for which I have promised to send to London, and this has consoled her. As for me I haven't even the energy to unpack. I have been out, and looked sadly at the packing cases that contain my goods, and from which Mr. Mutter, the gardener, has removed the tops, but I feel incapable of doing anything but sit and grumble to you. Nothing seems worth while. What is the good, I ask myself, of bothering to make the place look nice when not a soul will see it but myself? The fact is a sense of the awful loneliness of my life is weigh ing on my soul. What have I to look forward to ? I am still a young woman, and yet everything seems to be over for me, and looking back is not much more agreeable than looking forward. Good God ! What a mess I've made of my life.

I seem to have given everything and got nothing in return. I am bitter and black this morning, and life seems inexpressibly dreary. I almost think it would be happier to go back to London and go to the dogs utterly. And yet I know I couldn't do it ; if I did I should be wretched, wretcheder even than I am. Shall I never enjoy anything any more, I wonder ? Look where I will I can see no road by which happiness can reach me. And yet I am only twenty-seven. And I do so want to be happy. That clergyman who came to see me, would say I was reaping the inevitable reward of sin. Sin ? Was it sin ? It never struck me in that light. My ideas of religion are of the vaguest. My dear father, who was the best of men, was a freethinker on all subjects, a great reader and quoter of the French eighteenth-century philosophers, a deist of the school of Voltaire; he used to talk about the " choix librement consenti " and all that kind of thing.

My poor mother was a devout Catholic, and very super stitious, but her ideas on certain subjects, though less the result of philosophic reasoning than of early habits of thought, were even easier than papa's. But all the same the thought is borne in upon me that there are grave disadvantages in my position in the world. The lawyer who was winding up my affairs and settling things in London, when he was going to write about this place for me, asked what he should say his client's name was. "Why, Crofts, of course," I said, sharply; "what else should it be?" "Oh, certainly," he answered, hastily; "certainly, of course;" and then added, with a horrid little downward drop of his eyelids, ' May I say Mrs. Crofts ? You see it will save tiresome inquiries ; you are rather young otherwise to live alone."

I hate having to do that kind of thing. Why should I call myself Mrs. ? Why must I lie, and tacitly own I'm ashamed of what I've done, when I'm not ? That's the kind of thing that galls my pride.

Letter V

(Undated.) How can you ask who "Tib" is ? Don't you remember my pug ? He is the darling of my heart. I am not by way of caring much for dogs as a rule, and when George, who looked on the possession of a dog as about as necessary as a house, or food, or a name to be called by, insisted on presenting this one to me, I was secretly rather horrified ; but he has somehow contrived to wind himself into the inmost recesses of my heart, so that I think I love him better than any one else in the world, which, after all, is not saying a great deal, for my powers of bestowing affection seem to have withered away for lack of exercise. Sometimes I think I have lost the power of feeling either pain or pleasure, anything but this intolerable sense of the flatness and dulness of life. I almost wish that the ending of my life in London had been more of a grief to me ; that I was suffering from a good old fashioned broken heart : I should some how be a more interesting object to my self.

It irritates me to remember that I have not even the luxury of being an ill-used woman. My inability to feel shocks me : I see that I have deterior ated, and hardened : I used, I am sure of it, whatever my faults were, and they were many, to have a warm heart. I loved my father with a love that was half worship, and my poor sweet pretty mother, with a love that was more than half protection : and I think I loved George — once. Yes, I'm sure I did. But I seem to have outlived all power of emotion. When I die my epitaph will be " bored to death." And it isn't as though it were only the life that I have chosen that is boring me. It must be something inherently wrong in me. Had George remained faithful to me, I should have been worse bored : had I taken old Prossett's offer and gone back to the stage, etc., I should have been worst bored of all.

And something tells me, that were such a thing possible for me as to have been a wife and mother, and led the life that you, and such as you lead, boredom would have been complicated with even worse things. I don't ask if boredom is the inevitable lot of humanity, or even of all women, because I know women who are never bored, but it does seem as if this curse was on me, and how to fly from it I don't know. However, I am getting used to it, as the eels to being skinned. I have un packed my possessions, including all the latest French novels. I read and sew, and play the piano, and try to fancy that it amuses me. Mr. Mutter, who pos sesses every trade and all arts, is slowly, with the intermittent help of a desultory Welshman, making the house compara tively watertight. I wonder if it ever stops raining in this country. Virginie thinks not.

Letter VI

Tanfrws, April 18th. Oh, my dear Milly, the beauty of this place ! I know I could never describe it to you, but I'm going to try. After the week of almost continuous rain, the weather has changed, and with it the whole face of Nature. Virginie burst into my room this morn ing, " Mamzelle Sibylle : enfin le soleil," and I leapt out of bed and ran to the window ; it was as though a fairy had been at work in the night. The whole place was transfigured. As soon as I was dressed I rushed out into the garden, and stood there snuffing in the spring. The cottage stands a little back from the high-road, and raised sufficiently above it to command a view of the open country and the estuary of the river, and just a narrow streak of sea, backed by the glorious hills of the further coast. These hills to-day are of every shade of purple and blue, and green and yellow, as the great cloud shadows go rolling across them ; and the sea forms a streak of flash ing silver between that enchanted region and the no less beautiful realities of the nearer landscape ; wide flat water meadows full of cattle lie all round the river ; beyond, in the middle distance, is a little double rise (hardly a hill) of waste land, ablaze with gorse, between the two knolls of which the river runs out to join the sea ; they form, as it were, the gates of the valley, a melting away of the great hills on either side into the plain.

And away on the right I can just catch a glimpse of the shipping in the harbour at Abergaeslau, and the smoke from its chimneys. On both sides of the cottage, and nestling close round the back of it, is a little wood, just touched with its first faint wash of green, in which the ground is carpeted so thick with primroses that you cannot walk there without treading on the plants. The whole of this small forest is alive with birds. I never heard so many anywhere before, and it seems as though they had all begun to sing together to-day with one consent, to cele brate the return of their god, the Sun. Above the wood, behind the house, the ground rises, almost precipitously, into a region of wild tumbled rocks, that to-day, with the sun on them, look perfectly sublime. Above them still, I am told, is a wide stretch of moorland, dotted with farms, which stretches back and up to c Moel-yr-Cwl, one of the highest hills in the country, but of these upper regions nothing of course is visible from below, and the rocks stand out against the blue sky as though some Michael Angelo among giants had hewn them and set them there for the special admiration and awe of the dwellers in the valley.