Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [51]
But not always. A photographer captured Crippen at a formal banquet. In the photograph he is wearing evening attire: black dinner jacket and pants, white bow tie, and a gleaming white shirtfront. He wears a flower in his lapel. He is surrounded by women in white, as if he is about to disappear in a cloud of taffeta, silk, and lace. Belle and two other women are seated on risers behind him. Two pretty young women sit on his right and left, so close to him that their dresses drape over his legs and thighs, meaning also that their bodies and his must be in contact, albeit with layers of cloth in between. The scene is faintly erotic. One woman’s arm rests on his. The camera captures all five women in diverse expressions, odd for this era when one was never to move and above all not to smile. One woman stares into the middle distance, bored or sad or both. Another is smiling and glancing away. Belle, seated behind and above Crippen, has the pained expression of someone trying to get a room full of children to sit still. Only Crippen stares at the camera. His eyes, centered and magnified in the thick lenses of his glasses, are utterly without expression, as if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy, momentarily inert.
BELLE INSINUATED HERSELF into a group of talented variety players and their spouses, among them Marie Lloyd, Lil Hawthorne of the Hawthorne Sisters, Paul Martinetti, a well-known “pantomimist,” Eugene Stratton, a blackface singer, and others. At one gathering the women resolved to form a charity to provide for performers down on their luck and founded the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, a more subdued, women’s counterpart to the Grand Order of Water Rats, founded in 1889, which Seymour Hicks, a performer and memoirist, called “the most distinguished brotherhood of world-famous music-hall artists.” The Water Rats’ chairman was called the King Rat. The leader of the ladies’ guild was merely its president: Its first was Marie Lloyd, its most famous member. Belle became treasurer.
The post gave Belle the kind of recognition she never got on stage. Her peers liked her and her unquenchable good spirits. Meetings were held every Wednesday afternoon, and Belle attended every one. Close friendships blossomed—close enough, certainly, that her friends knew about and had seen, even touched, the scar on her abdomen. Belle was proud of it. That long dark line gave her an element of mystery. When her friend and fellow guild member Clara Martinetti saw it, she was appalled. She had never seen a scar that size before. “Oh Belle does it hurt you?” she exclaimed.
“Oh no,” Belle said, “it doesn’t hurt me,” and as she said it, she grabbed that portion of her abdomen and twisted.
“A GIGANTIC EXPERIMENT”
THE PLAN FLEW IN THE FACE of all that physicists believed about the optical character of electromagnetic waves. Like beams of light, waves traveled in a straight line. The earth was curved. Therefore, the physicists held, even if waves could travel thousands of miles—which they couldn’t—they would continue in a straight line far out into space. Sending waves across the ocean was no more possible than casting a beam of light from London to New York. There was another question: Why bother at all? How could wireless improve on the transoceanic telegraphy already in place via undersea cable? In 1898 fourteen submarine cables draped the sea floor. The dozen in daily use carried 25 to 30 million words annually, only half their potential capacity. Transmission was expensive but fast and efficient.
Now Marconi proposed to set up a wireless