The improvement in health, which had enabled her to face the strain of this tour, was not of long duration. Many letters in the winter complain of the “dragging pain” in the right leg, which prevents her from walking more than fifty yards without being “brought up sharp till the pain and stiffness have gone off again—which they do with resting.” By the following June (1893) she was as ill as ever she had been in the preceding summer. The London doctor adopted the theory of the “shifting kidney,” but encouraged her to allow herself to be carried up and downstairs at Stocks, so as to lie in the summer garden. “I am afraid this tendency may mean times of pain for me in the future,” she writes, “but it is not dangerous, and need not prevent my working just as usual. I am so enjoying the sight of the flowers again, and this afternoon I shall somehow get to the lime on the lawn. It had given me quite a pang at my heart to think the lime-blossom would go and I not see it! One has fewer years to waste now.”
She was hard at work on the writing of Marcella throughout this year, but the fact that she could not sit up at a table without bringing on a “wild fit of pain,” as she described it once, meant that she had to cultivate the art of writing in bed or in her garden chair, a proceeding which was very apt to produce attacks of writer’s cramp. Elaborate erections of writing-boards had to be built up around her, so as to enable as many as possible of Dr. Wolff’s precepts to be carried out, but it was a weary business, and often the hand would drop lame for a while, in spite of the author’s longing to be “at” her characters. This joy of creation was, however, her principal stay during these months of pain and weakness.
To Mr. George Murray Smith.
September 8, 1893.
“I, alas! cannot get well, though I am no doubt somewhat better than when you were here. The horrid ailment, whatever it is, will not go away, and work is rather a struggle. Still it is also my great stand-by and consolation,—by the help of it I manage to avoid the depression which otherwise this long malaise and weakness must have brought with it. A walk to the kitchen-garden and back yesterday gave me a bad night and fresh pain to-day, and I cannot travel with any comfort. But I can get along, and soon we shall be in London and I must try some fresh doctoring. Meanwhile I have written nearly a volume since we came down, which is not so bad.”
All through the autumn of this year she grew more and more absorbed in her story, while her health improved slightly, though walking was still an unattainable joy. The life of the little village of Aldbury, half a mile from the house, which she wove into so many scenes of Marcella, had an immense fascination for her. She would drive down in her pony-carriage, whenever she could find time, to spend an hour with old Mrs. Swabey or Mrs. Bradsell, or with Johnny Dolt, the postmaster, gleaning from their old-world gossip the elemental life-story of the country-side, or hearing the echoes of the bloody tragedy which had convulsed the village just before we came to it, in December, 1891. For while the old lady of Stocks (Mrs. Bright) lay dying, a murderous affray had occurred in the wood, not a mile from the house, between the gamekeeper and his lad on the one side, and a band of poachers on the other. The keeper was shot dead, and the lad, who fled for his life into the open, down towards a spreading beech in the hollow below, was followed and beaten to death with the butt-end of a gun. No wonder that Mrs. Ward took the tale and made it the dominating theme of her story, weaving into it new threads that the sordid tragedy itself did not possess—of the poacher Hurd, the dying child, the piteous little wife. The village itself was somewhat agape, we used to think, over the proceedings of the new mistress of Stocks, who would have “grand folks” down from London to spend their Sundays with her, but who had also taken a cottage on purpose for the reception of tired people from the back streets, and who was constantly having parties down from “some place in London” to enjoy the garden and the shady trees. The place in question was Marchmont Hall, for whose cricket team we children preserved a private but invincible contempt; but the elderly Associates became real friends, and soon learnt to know Stocks and its environs with more than a passing knowledge. Sometimes they would come down just for a day’s outing, but more often they, or the club-girls, or some ailing mother and baby would stay for a fortnight at the Convalescent Cottage under the care of the loquacious Mrs. Dell, whose memory must still be green in many London hearts. A natural philosopher, reared on the Bible and her own shrewd observation of life, Mrs. Dell was the ideal matron for the London folk who were sent down to her; she took them all in under her large embrace, though her opinion of their “draggled” faces when they arrived was anything but complimentary. She was wont to express herself, in fact, with considerable freedom about London life. Once one of her guests—a working-man—had gone back to town for the week-end, feeling bored in the country. “And pray what can ‘e do in London?” she asked with magnificent scorn. “Nothin’ but titter-totter on the paves!”
And besides the Convalescent Cottage, there stood on the same steep slope of hill, just under the hanging wood, with its mixture of beech, ash and wild cherry, another little house, known simply as Stocks Cottage, which Mr. Ward acquired to round off the miniature estate early in 1895. It became a source of unmixed joy to Mrs. Ward, for she could lend or let it to many different friends, from Graham Wallas and Bernard Shaw, who came to it during one of her absences abroad, and thence roamed the downs with the daughter she had left behind, preaching collectivism and Jaeger clothes—to the Neville Lytteltons, who spent seven consecutive summers in the little place, from 1895 to 1901. The Cottage, indeed, became a very intimate part of Mrs. Ward’s life at Stocks, and its mistress, Mrs. Lyttelton, one of her closest friends.
Marcella was finished, after a long struggle against sleeplessness, headache and a bad bout of writer’s cramp, on January 31, 1894. A characteristic passage occurred between the author and her publisher immediately afterwards. Mr. Smith had sent her, according to promise, a considerable sum in advance of royalty, setting forth at the same time, with his habitual candour, the exact sum which his firm expected to make from the same number of copies. Mrs. Ward thought it not enough, and wrote at once to propose a decrease of royalty on the first 2,000 copies. “I hardly know what to say,” replied Mr. Smith. “It is not often that a publisher receives such a letter from an author.” But after mutual bargainings—all of an inverted character—they arrived at a satisfactory agreement.
Mrs. Ward fled to Italy with husband and daughter to escape the appearance of the book, and saw herself flaunted on the posters of the English papers in the Piazza di Spagna early in April. It was indeed an exhilarating time for her, for there were few harsh voices among the reviewers on this occasion, while the many letters from her friends were as kind as ever. A typical opinion was that of Sir Francis Jeune: “I was charmed with sentence after sentence of perfect finish and point, such as no other writer of fiction in the present day ever attempts and certainly could not sustain. They are a delight in themselves, and the care bestowed on them is the highest compliment to a reader. May I add that I think the dramatic force of some scenes—I single out the morning of Hurd’s execution, and the death of Hallin, but there are several more—is greatly in advance of anything even you have done, and touches a very high point in comparison with any scenes in English fiction. I think George Eliot never surpassed them.” In her Recollections Mrs. Ward describes the coming out of Marcella as “perhaps the happiest date in my literary life,” for it not only gave her unalloyed joy in itself, but it coincided also with a comparative return to health—though always with ups and downs. Yet the immense publicity which the success of the book brought her was also a grievous burden, and she gives vent to this feeling in a letter to Mr. Gladstone, written in reply to his own words of thanks for the gift of the book:
25, Grosvenor Place.
May 6, 1894.