Burning Boy, page 95
The last photograph of Crane, sitting with his dog Sponge at Brede Place. Taken by Cora, 1900. (COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA)
Meanwhile, their money woes continued, as dire and pressing as ever, which leads one to pause for a moment and begin to ask how two such intelligent people could have found themselves—again and again—in the same stupid fix. Most Crane biographers have tended to jump on Cora and hold her responsible, but the couple’s overspending was clearly a two-person operation, and Crane was no less guilty than she was. He couldn’t help himself. His improvidence was more than just a compulsion or an addiction or a mysterious character flaw, it sat at the very heart of his character and defined who he was. Crane was a gambler, which meant that he felt happiest and most fully alive only when taking risks. The same impulse that had driven him out into a snowstorm in a thin, threadbare jacket to find the story he was looking for, that had compelled him to rush off to wars and expose himself to enemy fire, that had made him the only man in the room willing to jump into a knife fight to stop one man from killing another was also what made it necessary for him to push himself into debt on the home front. Ordinary life, which he understood as well as any slippers-and-pipe office worker, was deeply boring to him, not only because he found it dull and complacent and hypocritical but because it made him feel dead. Overspending put him in danger of losing everything, and how much better it felt to be clinging to the edge of a cliff by his fingernails than to be sitting in a soft chair by a warm, cozy fire. As Otto Carmichael keenly noted after he had spent some time with Crane in Havana: “Danger was his dissipation.” And with Cora dangling beside him as they clung to that same perilous cliff, no amount of danger could ever be too much. It’s not that he always liked it, and it’s not that he didn’t suffer because of it, but he needed the cliff in the same way a poker player needs to bet his entire night’s winnings on a single turn of a card. And then, unexpectedly, he began coughing up blood.
Ernest B. Skinner, the country doctor who examined Crane on the night of the party, concluded that the damage to the lung had not been severe enough to cause undue alarm. He recommended a period of sustained rest, the standard method of treatment for supposedly mild cases of tuberculosis. Thomas J. Maclagen, the eminent specialist from London who was brought in to look at Crane three months later, recommended a similar course of action. What both of those men failed to understand was that Crane’s physical breakdown was being caused by more than just the damage to his lungs. The recurring bouts of Cuban fever were also undermining his strength, and when Crane developed an abscess in his rectum—an anal fistula too deeply embedded to be removed—he suffered greatly, which further undermined his strength. Sitting on a horse was too painful for him now, and the simple act of defecation must have been excruciating. Crane’s body was under assault on three fronts, each ailment weakening his resistance to fight the other two, but the doctors continued to focus their attention on his lungs. TB was the scourge of the era, and the immensity of that illness blinded them to Crane’s other problems. A leaking roof can cause considerable damage to a house, but if the walls are already buckling and the foundation is already sinking into the ground, it is only a matter of time before the house collapses.
On February second, a luncheon was given in Crane’s honor by a wealthy book collector from Hastings. Eleven days after S.C.’s death, a local reporter who had been at the gathering recalled the impression he had made on her that afternoon:
Already months ago … it was easy to see that Stephen Crane’s years, if not months, were numbered. In February last I met him at the house of a friend—bibliophile, ornithologist, and amateur artist—living in Hastings. Painful was the contrast between the young author of “The Red Badge of Courage” and the other guests, all of whom were in good health and spirits. Poor Stephen Crane had that white, worn-out, restless look betokening complete nervous exhaustion. He took no tea and did not join in general conversation, but moved about uneasily as if in search of something he could not find.
The next crisis occurred at the end of March. Helen was about to board a train from Lausanne to Paris, and with Crane too occupied with his work to leave his study at Brede, Cora set out on her own to meet the renegade dropout. Her plan was to linger in Paris for a few days and shop for clothes before returning to England. On the thirty-first, within hours of Cora’s departure, Crane sent Pinker the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth chapters of The O’Ruddy (the last ones he wrote) along with a request to wire Cora twenty pounds, fearing that “the poor things may be left high and dry in Paris.” Not long after finishing the letter, he suffered the first of two massive hemorrhages, both of them far stronger than the last one. Again, he didn’t want Cora to know what had happened, but defying the instructions she was given, Vernall eventually sent a telegram to Paris on April third. Cora came rushing back, and from then until the fifth of June the dimensions of their world grew smaller and smaller until that world was gone.
Maclagen was brought in at the suggestion of someone at the American embassy, who told Cora he was the best lung man in London, but after traveling to Brede and charging fifty pounds for the consultation, the doctor’s advice was to hold on and see how things developed. Cora took this as encouraging news, but after having written a check for funds she did not have, she then had to scramble with Pinker to get fifty pounds into her bank account before the check bounced. So it went throughout the month of April and the first part of May.
William to Cora on April seventh: “We are greatly alarmed and grieved over Stephen’s condition. We await further news with anxiety.” And then: “I fear I cannot help you with money at present. My bank account is very much depleted.”
Cora to Clara Frewen on April eleventh: “We moved my husband on Monday night downstairs in the oak room. He seems to get weaker every day and my anxiety is very great. There has been no return of hemorrhage but he suffers so greatly from the abscess, which is too deep-seated to open from the outside while he is in such a weak state. We are in hopes to get him out in the sunshine on warm days.”
Cora to Pinker on April eleventh: “He had a quiet day and night with no hemorrhage, and takes his nourishment well. His illness will be a long one and I shall be under great expense.… Now Mr. Pinker, It was a matter of life & death to have the Specialist down. I could not leave any stone unturned. You might have not gone to office on Saturday or Friday. I had to write to Lippincott at the same time I wrote to you. One cannot stand on ceremony at such a moment, and indeed I was almost distracted. Pray forgive any seeming lack of courtesy to yourself.”
William to his brother on April thirteenth: “There is in our morning paper every day a London dispatch, giving the latest news from you. We find this unsatisfactory, and are anxiously awaiting for letters.”
Cora to Wells on April fifteenth: “There has been no hemorrhage now since Monday last. The doctors say that if he pulls through until next Thursday—ten days—that he will be out of danger. Then the future plans will have to be made. I fear that we shall have to give up Brede Place & go to a more bracing place, on the sea.”
Cora to Wells on April twenty-fifth: “Stephen is not up to letter writing so I am answering your very cheerful letter to him. I am so anxious about him. The lung trouble seems over! The doctor today, after an examination, said that the right lung was entirely unaffected. The trouble is that this dreadful abscess which seems to open from time to time in the bowels—or rectum, makes him suffer the most awful agony. And it takes away his strength in an alarming fashion. The abscess seems to have upset the bowels too. So he is very weak. Then the fever (Cuban fever) comes for an hour or two each day. The chills seems to have stopped the past week. And he hopes within three or four weeks to go on a sea voyage. Write to him when you can. Sick people have fancies that their friends neglect them, and wonder at small number of letters, etc. Of course, I have up to date read all letters first and there are many which I think best he should not see—you understand.”
Maclagen to Cora on May second: “I am very sorry to have so bad a report of Mr. Crane. He has shown such good rallying powers in the past that one would not readily take a hopeless view of the case. Should you feel that you would like me to see him again you have only to telegraph and I will arrange to go.”
Cora to Pinker on May fifth: “The doctors say that for Mr. Crane to recover he must get out of England. The Black Forest first. Now this means, an expensive move within the week. Can you manage an advance in some way? Mr. Crane is no worse & the right lung holds out only, this change must be made without delay. We will go to some small Inn in the Black Forrest. & rent Brede Place as it stands. I shall have to take a nurse & the doctor will go with us. Its a very expensive Journey but its a matter of life or death and it must be done. Please advise me. Can you cable Stokes to advance or get Metheun to advance or How about Serial? Please reply at once. This climate seems simply death to lung Trouble.”
Alfred T. Plant (Moreton Frewen’s solicitor) to Cora on May seventh, explaining his client’s intention to cover all of the Cranes’ debts: “I am in receipt of your letter of the 5th inst. and can only say that it was at Mr. Frewen’s express wish that I asked for the list of debts as he was most anxious that this trouble should be, if possible, removed.… I believe he has written direct to Dr. Skinner & am certain he is doing all in his power to help you.”
William to Cora on May tenth: “I have received your telegram and also a letter from Dr. Skinner. We are grieving over the situation, but I really cannot send money, in any amount to make it worth while, at present. It has been years since I have been so hardly pressed as I am now.” Followed by: “It looks as if it might be best for Helen to come home.”
Conrad to Cora on May tenth:
Your letter distresses me beyond measure and confirms my fears as to your material situation. It has been the object of my anxiety and of many sad thoughts. You may imagine that had it been in my power to render you any sort of service I would not have waited for any sort of appeal. I’ve kept quiet because I feel myself powerless. I am a man without connections, without influence and without means. The daily subsistence is a matter of anxious thought for me. What can I do? I am already in debt to my two publishers, in arrears with my work, and know no one who could be of the slightest use. It is not even in my power to jeopardize my own future to serve you. If it had been, such is my affection for Stephen and my admiration for his genius, that I would so do without hesitation, to save him. But my future, such as it is, is already pawned. You can’t imagine how much I suffer in writing this to you. I have been almost distracted since I had your letter. Won’t Stephen’s relations come forward?
Pardon me for not saying more. I feel too unhappy.
* * *
It was a pointless, difficult journey, but the doctors had said it was Crane’s only chance, and even though Cora must have understood how remote that chance was, she scraped together every penny she could from every source available to her, most vitally from Moreton Frewen and Lady Randolph Churchill, who solicited funds on her behalf, and left Brede on May fifteenth with her dying husband, Dr. Skinner, two nurses, niece Helen, the servant Richard Heather, and the dog Sponge. Crane was carried on a stretcher to Rye, where he was put in an invalid carriage and conveyed to Dover with the rest of the party. Cora had booked rooms for them at the Lord Warden Hotel, overlooking the English Channel, but the waters were rough that week, too rough to hazard the crossing to Calais, and so they stayed on longer than expected, nine days in all, during which Cora often skipped meals to keep them within the boundaries of their narrow budget.
Conrad came on the sixteenth, Wells on the seventeenth, and Barr on the nineteenth. “There was a thin thread of hope that he might recover,” Barr recalled, “but to me he looked like a man already dead. When he spoke, or rather, whispered, there was all the accustomed humor in his sayings. I said to him that I would go over to the Schwarzwald in a few weeks, when he was getting better, and that we would take some convalescent rambles together. As his wife was listening he said faintly, ‘I’ll look forward to that,’ but he smiled at me, and winked slowly, as much as to say, ‘You damned humbug, you know I’ll take no more rambles in this world.’”
Wells wanted to see Crane again on the twenty-first, but that was the day the party was planning to leave for the continent, and Cora wrote to him on the twentieth that “Nurses think best for Stephen not to see anyone before starting. Best for him to be quite alone tomorrow, so I must ask you not to come & I am sorry.” The trip was delayed, however, and then delayed again, which allowed Conrad to come back for another visit on the twenty-third, the day before they finally left. A matter of pure happenstance, but it seems fitting that he should have been the last friend to see Crane alive.
Nineteen years later he wrote:
I saw Stephen Crane a few days after his arrival in London. I saw him for the last time on his last day in England. It was in Dover, in a big hotel, in a bedroom with a large window looking on to the sea. He had been very ill and Mrs. Crane was taking him to some place in Germany, but one glance at the wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most forlorn of all hopes. The last words he breathed out to me were: “I am tired. Give my love to your wife and child.” When I stopped at the door for another look I saw that he had turned his head on the pillow and was staring wistfully out the window at the sails of a cutter yacht that glided slowly across the frame, like a dim shadow against the grey sky.
Jessie Conrad provided a bit more about the events of that last day in her article from 1926:
Conrad told me afterward how he had sat talking to the sick man, who was able to answer only by signs and by a few panting words scarcely above a whisper. That parting glimpse of Stephen lying on the bed with his wonderful eyes fixed on the ships that showed through his open window, the feeble voice, and the stretcher on which he made this final journey, made a deep and lasting impression on my husband’s mind. I recall his words when he rejoined me in the hotel … “It is the end, Jess. He knows it is all useless. He goes only to please Cora, and would rather have died at home!”
* * *
The crossing to Calais on the twenty-fourth, a pause for two or three days at a hotel in Basel, and then on to Badenweiler at the edge of the Black Forest by the twenty-eighth, the last stop on their useless, exhausting, expensive journey to nowhere. They moved into a large house at Luisenstrasse 44, also known as the Villa Eberhardt because the man who owned it was named Eberhardt. The doctor in charge of the case was Albert Fraenkel. With nothing else to do until he died, Crane filled the empty hours by dictating random passages and fragmentary episodes of The O’Ruddy to Cora, who was steadily crumbling to pieces herself. Five days of nothing, and then more nothing until she wrote a pair of letters to Frewen on June third, a short one about looking for investors to back her canteen filter, and a long one that concludes: “It is dreadful to have to think or write that if God takes my husband from me I shall not know what to do. What shall I do! I can’t write more about it.”
The letter begins with the belated, agonizing recognition that God will indeed be taking her husband from her, and from then on it rambles haphazardly from the doctor’s irritation with the British diagnosis to finding someone to finish the unfinished novel to the cost of everything from lodging to food to medical care to the laundry, since “sometimes Mr. Crane’s bed is changed three times a day”: “I’ve only sad news to write you. There seems little hope of cure. The fever seems the thing that cannot be conquered. It is not due alone to the lung but is the remains of the yellow fever and the Cuban fever.” Later on she adds: “My husbands brain is never at rest. He lives over everything in dreams & talks aloud constantly. It is too awful to hear him try to change places in the ‘open boat’! I nearly went mad yesterday & the nurse gave me some drug which made me sleep for hours, so I’m fresh again for today. He worries so about his debts and about our not being able to live here. So I told him yesterday that I had £300—cash & since then he has been satisfied. I think it is really worry about my future. so I do everything possible to ease his poor tired mind.”
… if God takes my husband from me I shall not know what to do. What shall I do!
At some point on the fourth, Crane had his last lucid moment and whispered to Cora, “I leave here gentle, seeking to do good, firm, resolute, impregnable.” After she left the room, he dissolved into a twilight of pain and semiconscious delirium. The doctor injected him with morphine, and by three o’clock in the morning he was dead.
The story ends with these anguished, incoherent scribbles written by Cora sometime on the fifth:
Write to D’ Skinner about Morphine—
—“That’s what strayed him”—
“You can cut them she cant.”
