The Magnificent Montez Part 31

But, while her manager looked glum when he examined the box-office figures, Lola was not upset, for she had suddenly developed another activity, and one to which she was giving all her attention. This was the occult. The "Voices" at whose bidding she had abandoned the stage a couple of years earlier were now insistent that she should drop the platform; and, casting in her lot with the "Spirits," get into touch with a mysterious region vaguely referred to as "the Beyond."

It was a time when spiritualism was flourishing like a green bay tree.

Mrs. Hayden ("the wife of a respectable journalist") and the Fox Sisters had been playing their pranks for years and collecting dollars from dupes all over the country; and their rivals, the Davenport Brothers, with Daniel Dunglas Home (Browning's "Sludge, the Medium") were humbugging Harvard professors, financial magnates, and Supreme Court judges; and, not to be behindhand, other experts were (for a cash consideration) calling up Columbus and Shakespeare and Napoleon, who talked to them at seances as readily as if they were at the end of a telephone, but with p.r.o.nounced American accents.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Countess of Landsfeld. A favourite portrait_

(_Harvard Theatre Collection_)]

Lola's first reaction was all that could be desired. There never was a more promising recruit or a more receptive one. Quite prepared to take the "Voices" on trust, and to contribute liberally to the "cause," she attended a number of psychic circles, arranged by Stephen Andrews and other charlatans; listened to mysterious rappings and tappings coming out of the darkness; felt inanimate objects being lifted across the room; heard tambourines rattled by invisible hands; and unquestionably swallowed all the traditional tomfoolery that appears to be part and parcel of such "phenomena."

This state of things might have continued indefinitely. By, however, an unfortunate mischance, a "medium," from whom much was expected, went, in his endeavour to give satisfaction, a little too far. Not keeping a vigilant eye on European happenings, he announced at one such gathering that the "spirit" addressing the a.s.sembly was that of Ludwig of Bavaria. As, however, Ludwig was still in the land of the living (where, by the way, he remained for several years to come) it was a bad slip. The result was, Lola felt her faith shaken, and, convinced that she was being exploited, shut up her purse, and withdrew from the promised "guidance."

II

Under stress of emotion, some women take to the bottle; others to the Bible. With Lola Montez, however, it was a case of from Bunk.u.m to Boanerges, from the circle to the conventicle. Spiritualism had been tried and found wanting. Casting about for something with which to fill the empty niche and adjust her equilibrium, she turned to religion for consolation. The brand she selected was that favoured by the Methodists. One would scarcely imagine that Little Bethel would have had much appeal to her. But perhaps its very drabness and remoteness from the world of the footlights proved a welcome relief.

Having "got religion," Lola fastened upon it with characteristic fervour. It occupied all her thoughts; and in the process she soon developed what would now be dubbed a marked inferiority-complex.

"Lord," she wrote at this period, "Thy mercies are great to me. Oh!

how little are they deserved, filthy worm that I am! Oh! that the Holy Spirit may fill my soul with prayer! Lord, have mercy on Thy weary wanderer, and grant me all I beseech of Thee! Oh! give me a meek and lowly heart. Amen."

A doctor, had she consulted one just then, would probably have prescribed a blue pill.

There is a theory that the "Light" had been vouchsafed as the result of a chance visit to Spurgeon's Tabernacle when she was last in England. Although Spurgeon himself never put forward any such claim, a diary that Lola kept at the time has a significant entry:

LONDON,

_September 10, 1859._

How many, many years of my life have been sacrificed to Satan and my own love of sin! What have I not been guilty of in thought or deed during these years of wretchedness! Oh! I dare not think of the past. What have I not been! I only lived for my own pa.s.sions; and what is there of good even in the best natural human being! What would I not give to have my terrible and fearful experience given as an awful warning to such natures as my own!

A week later, things not having improved during the interval, she took stock of her position in greater detail:

I am afraid sometimes that I think too well of myself. But let me only look back to the past. Oh! how I am humbled....

How manifold are my sins, and how long in years have I lived a life of evil pa.s.sions without a check!

To-morrow (the Lord's Day) is the day of peace and happiness. Once it seemed to me anything but a happy day.

But now all is wonderfully changed in my heart.... This week I have princ.i.p.ally sinned through hastiness of temper and uncharitableness of feeling towards my neighbour. Oh! that I could have only love for others and hatred of myself!

Another pa.s.sage ran:

To-morrow is Sunday, and I shall go into the poor little humble chapel, and there will I mingle my prayers with the fervent pastor, and with the good and true. There is no pomp or ceremony among these. All is simple. No fine dresses, no worldly display, but the honest Methodist breathes forth a sincere prayer, and I feel much unity of souls.

The "conversion" of Lola Montez was no flash in the pan, or the result of a sudden impulse. It was a real one, deep and sincere and lasting.

Her former triumphs on the stage and in the boudoir had become as dust and ashes. Compared with her new-found joy in religion, all else was vanity and emptiness.

"I can forget my French and German, and everything else I have valued," she is declared to have said to a pressman, who, scenting a "news story," followed hot-foot on her track, "but I cannot forget my Christ."

She had been "Montez the Magnificent." Now she was "Montez the Magdalen." The woman whose voluptuous beauty and unbridled pa.s.sion had upset thrones and fired the hearts of men was now concerned with the saving of souls. As such, she resolved to spread "the Word" among others less happily circ.u.mstanced. To this end, she preached in conventicles and visited hospitals, asylums, and prisons, offering a helping hand to all who would accept one, and especially to "unfortunates" of her own s.e.x. She had her disappointments. But neither snubs nor setbacks, nor sneers nor jeers could turn her from the path she had elected to tread.

"In the course of a long experience as a Christian minister," says a clergyman whom she encountered at this period, "I do not think I ever saw deeper penitence and humility, more real contrition of soul, and more bitter self-reproach than in this poor woman."

"With," he adds, in an oleaginous little tract on the subject, "a heart full of generous sympathy for the poor outcasts of her own s.e.x, she devoted the last few months of her life to visiting them at the Magdalen Asylum, near New York.... She strove to impress upon them not only the awful guilt of breaking the divine law, but the inevitable earthly sorrow which those who persisted with thoughtless desperation in sinful courses were a.s.suredly treasuring up for themselves."

But, except those who encountered her charity and self-sacrifice, there were few who had a good word for Lola Montez in her character as a Magdalen. People who had fawned upon her in the days of her success now jeered and sneered and affected to doubt the reality of her penitence. "Once a sinner, always a sinner," they declared; and "Lola in the pulpit is rich!" was another barbed shaft.

In thus abandoning the buskin for the Bible, Lola Montez was following one example and setting another. The example she followed was that of Mlle Gautier, of the Comedie Francaise, who, after flashing across the horizon of Maurice de Saxe (and several others), left the footlights and retired to a convent. "It is true," she says in her memoirs, "that I have encountered during my theatrical career a number of people whose morals have been as irreproachable as their talents, but I myself was not among them." This was putting it--well--mildly, for, according to Le d'Hoefer, "her stage career was marked by a freedom of manner pushed to the extremity of licence."

In the sisterhood that she joined the new name of Mlle Gautier was Sister Augustine. As such, she lived a Carmelite nun for thirty-two years. But time did not hang heavy on her hands, for, in addition to religious exercises and domestic tasks, she occupied herself with painting miniatures and composing verses. "I am so happy here," she wrote from her cell, "that I much regret having delayed too long entering this holy place. The real calm and peace I have now discovered have made me imagine all my previous life an evil dream."

The example that Lola Montez was setting was to be followed, fifty years later, by another member of her calling. This was Eve Lavalliere, who, after a distinctly hectic career, cut herself adrift from the footlights of Paris and entered the mission-field of North Africa. "Here at your feet," she says in one of her letters, "lies the vilest, lowest, and most contemptible object on earth, a worm from the dung-heap, the most infamous, the most soiled of all creatures. Lord, I am but a poor sheep in your flock!"

There is also something of a parallel between the career of Lola Montez and that of Theodora, who, once in the circus ring, and, at the start, a lady of decidedly easy virtue, afterwards became the consort of the Emperor Justinian and shared his throne. Like Lola, too, Theodora endeavoured to make amends for her early slips by voluntarily abandoning the pomp and power she had once enjoyed and giving herself up to the redemption of "fallen women."

III

Perhaps the "Spirits" resented being abandoned by her in summary fashion; perhaps she had overtaxed her energies addressing outdoor meetings in all weathers. At any rate, and whatever the cause, while she was travelling in the country during the winter of 1860, Lola Montez was suddenly stricken down by a mysterious illness. As it baffled the hospital doctors, she had to be taken back to New York.

There, instead of getting better, she gradually got worse, developing consumption, followed by partial paralysis.

"What a study for the thoughtless; what a sermon on the inevitable result of human vanity!" was the ghoulish comment of a scribbler.

Rufus Blake, an entrepreneur, under whose banner she had once starred, has some reminiscences of her at this period. "She lived," he says, "in strict retirement, reading religious books, and steadily, calmly, hopefully preparing for death, fully convinced that consumption had snapped the pillars of her life and that she was soon to make her final exit."

After an interval, word of Lola's collapse reached England by means of a cutting in a theatrical paper. There it appears to have touched a long slumbering maternal chord. "Mrs. Craigie," says a paragraphist, "suddenly arrived in America, anxious, as next of kin, to secure her daughter's property. On discovering, however, that none existed, she hurried back again, leaving behind her a sum of three pounds for medicine and other necessities."

Cast off by her fair-weather friends, bereft of her looks, poverty-stricken, and ravaged by an insidious illness, the situation of Lola Montez was, during that winter of 1860, one to excite pity among the most severe of judges. Under duress, even her new found trust in Providence began to falter. Was prayer, she wondered forlornly, to fail her like everything else? Suddenly, however, and when things were at their darkest, a helping hand was offered. One bitter evening, as she sat brooding in the miserable lodging where she had secured temporary shelter, she was visited by a Mrs. Buchanan, claiming her as a friend of the long distant past. The years fell back; and, with an effort, Lola recognised in the visitor a girl, now a mature matron, whom she had last met in Montrose.

The sympathy of Mrs. Buchanan, shared to the full by her husband, a prosperous merchant, was of a practical description. Although familiar with the many lapses in Lola's career, they counted for nothing beside the fact that she was in sore need. Bygones were bygones. Insisting that the stricken woman should leave her wretched surroundings, Mrs. Buchanan took her into her own well-appointed house, provided doctors and nurses, and did all that was possible to smooth her path. Deeply religious herself, she soon won back her faltering faith, and summoned a clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Hawks, to prepare her for the inevitable and rapidly approaching end.

A smug little booklet, _The Story of a Penitent: Lola Montez_, published under the auspices of the "Protestant Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge," was afterwards written by this shepherd. Since his name did not appear on the t.i.tle page, he was able to make several unctuous references to himself.

"Most acceptable," he says in one characteristic pa.s.sage, "were his ministrations. Refreshing, too, to his own spirit were his interviews with her."

"It was," he continues, "in the latter part of 1860 that I received a message from the unhappy woman so well known to the public under the name of Lola Montez, earnestly requesting me to visit her and minister to her spiritual wants. She had been stricken down by a paralysis of her left side. For some days she was unconscious, and her death seemed to be at hand. She had, however, rallied, and a most benevolent Christian female, who had been her schoolmate in Scotland in the days of her girlhood, and knew her well, had stepped forward and provided for the temporal comfort of the afflicted companion of her childhood.

The real name of Lola Montez was Eliza G., and she was of respectable family in Ireland, where she was born."

But neither the Rev. Mr. Hawks, with his oiliness and smug piety, nor Mrs. Buchanan, with her true womanly sympathy and understanding, could bring Lola Montez back to health, any more than--for all their pills and purges--could the doctors and nurses round her bed. She lay there, day after day, aware of their presence, but unable to move or speak.

Yet, able to think. Thoughts crowded upon her in a series of flashing pictures; a bewildering phantasmagoria, coming out of the shadows, and beckoning to her. Childhood's memories of India; hot suns, marching men, palanquins and elephants; Montrose and a dour Calvinism; Bath and Sir Jasper Nicolls; love's young dream; Lieutenant James and the runaway marriage in Dublin; another experience of India's coral strand; kind-hearted Captain Craigie and hard-hearted George Lennox; the Consistory Court proceedings; fiasco at Her Majesty's Theatre; Ranelagh and Lumley; _wanderjahre_ and odyssey; Paris and Dujarier; Ludwig and the steps of a throne; pa.s.sion and poetry; intrigues and liaisons; Cornet Heald and Patrick Hull; voyages from the old world to the new; mining camps and backwoods; palaces and conventicles; glittering triumphs and abject failures. And now, gasping and struggling for breath, the end.

The sands were running out. The days slipped away, and, with them, the last vitality of the woman who had once been so full of life and the joy of living.

The doctors did what they could. But it was very little, for Lola Montez was beyond their help. The end was fast at hand. It came with merciful swiftness. On January 17, 1861, she turned her face to the wall and drew a last shuddering breath.

"I am very tired," she whispered.

The funeral took place two days later. "Accompanied by some of our most respected citizens and their families," says an eye-witness, "the cortege left the house of Mrs. Buchanan for Green-Wood cemetery."