Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [162]
At this time Mattie consulted a lawyer in New York. He was a distant cousin, Gilbert Holland Montague, who had married Mattie’s old friend Amy Collier. It was decided that Mattie’s fortune had been drained to the point where she was forced to sell the Homestead in order to pay for ‘some’ of her husband’s ‘fraudulent business transactions’, as Montague put it. Though she divorced the fraudster in 1920, she remained ‘Madame Bianchi’.
Of all who suffered in the course of the trial and its aftermath, it was the one who lost the case who was to thrive. A month before the trial, in February 1898, Mabel and David Todd moved from The Dell to Observatory House, far grander with a pillared entrance above a wide flight of steps. Charles Wilder, cousin to Mabel’s mother, Mary Wilder Loomis, had willed $15,000 for this property adjacent to a prospective observatory. The house, reserved for the director of the observatory, put the Todds amongst the notables of Amherst. From 1903 to 1905 the observatory itself was rising at its side, the fulfilment of David’s dream. By this time Mabel had launched a new career. Women’s clubs were active everywhere, and she became their star turn, with fifty or so lectures each winter, including lectures for private schools and colleges across the country. On New Year’s Eve 1900 she reflected on her success: she had found it in her power to cast a ‘spell’ on listeners as she opened up ‘The Gateway to the Sahara’ (Tripoli) or the floating houses of Siam, places she had visited in the course of husband’s expeditions. When she stopped speaking she would hear a sigh, as though her audience woke up from a trance.
David told her, ‘you positively seem to take our minds with you, and actually spread out the places before our own eyes. I believe it is half hypnotic.’
It was as though she transported her audience into the unvisited places of the earth, revealing the customs of the hairy Ainu in Esashi on the island of Yezo in northern Japan, twelve hundred miles north of Yokohama, or the Negritos, dwarf aborigines in the Philippine archipelago. At a time when anthropology was a new field, Mabel Todd was often the first outside woman to penetrate the customs of these peoples. David, with his expertise in photography, created slides to illustrate the talks.
In the years after the trial her energies soared as a performer who wrote her own scripts for these one-woman shows. Mabel, who knew the difference between talent and genius, recognised that in lecturing alone she had the quality of genius. For sixteen years Mabel Todd gripped audiences, at the same time as Mrs Pankhurst and her daughters, on platforms across England, were demanding votes and openings for women’s efforts. Mabel Todd always supported the women’s movement, and no woman was more attuned to the rising agency of her sex. As she watched the days dawn and sink behind the hills she felt, she said, unseen forces ‘clasping me for a higher flight. Is not mine the inheritance of the ages? Am I not the heir of time, the participator in immortality?’
The talks made money. A newly affluent Mabel was able to fund her husband’s 1905 expedition to Tripoli. She continued also to promote her husband’s philandering. Mabel was expected to arrange visits of women ‘friends’ to their home. She balked, at last, when David took a fancy to a typist in 1911.
This sign of ‘low tastes’ was too much for Mabel, as she confided to her journal: David ‘gave himself away to a fearfully common person far below him’. It was ‘one thing I had always pleaded with him to spare me’. Then, with her usual caution, she tore out five pages and inked out some phrases. The following remains:
For thirty-three years I have absolutely refrained from putting