by Bolt, Rodney
Edward persisted in his onslaught. He hinted darkly to Mrs Sidgwick at the temptations that beset him, and at what the consequences might be if he could not express his love for Minnie. The matter-of-fact widow was unmoved. She had been a headmaster’s wife and had raised three boys single-handedly. She had, she wrote, an idea, albeit ‘undefined’, of ‘those severe temptations which peculiarly affect boys when they are removed from the sheltering care of home’. She sympathized with the ‘anticipation of coming evil’ which weighed him down so, and though she advised ‘earnest prayer’, she knew from experience that there was ‘no better antidote than regular and active employment’. As she had with her own boys, Mrs Sidgwick offered Edward a mother’s love, the thought of which she hoped would ‘present itself in the moment of temptation and sometimes be victorious’.
In his face-to-face encounters with Mrs Sidgwick, Edward did not appear troubled by any misplaced filial respect. He was at various times scathing, hurtful, humiliating her. He had a way of turning on her that devastated her, generally contriving to leave her feeling that she was somehow at fault. Mrs Sidgwick’s efforts to protect her child became tempered by an anxiety not to incur Edward’s wrath or lose his affection. Her letters grew peppered with apologies, cravings for forgiveness, assurances that he would never lose her love or goodwill. Mrs Sidgwick’s resistance was crumbling, and the change in atmosphere was tangible.
A visitor to the house, who had never met Edward, but heard much about him, said: ‘I don’t know how it is, but if Minnie were a little older, I should be disposed to form quite a romantic idea of her and Mr Benson!’ Aunt Etty again began to fish for confirmation of her suspicions, saying that when Edward did marry, she hoped it would be to a very nice woman, adding: ‘Well I don’t think he will be likely to meet with anyone when he comes to see us, who will be at all likely to attract him.’ When that elicited no response from Mrs Sidgwick, she mentioned the ‘peculiar suitableness’ of Minnie’s and Edward’s characters, and attempted: ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if in seven or eight years’ time they become engaged.’ When that still did not loosen Mrs Sidgwick’s tongue, Henrietta fired broadside-on with: ‘I am sure he thinks of her as his future wife and that he has told you so, has he not?’ Mrs Sidgwick had to acknowledge that yes, he had, and went on to admit to Edward that Henrietta was ‘really much pleased with the thought’. There was something magnetic about Edward; something that pulled all around him, particularly women, into his thrall. Edward knew what he wanted, and he always got his way. It had been just a matter of months. After a long conversation alone with him, Mrs Sidgwick relented.
Talk, even in large houses, has a habit of seeping out from the most private tête-à-têtes. Aunt Etty had not been alone in sensing something in the air. ‘Mama, it would be curious for me to be engaged now,’ said Minnie suddenly one afternoon. ‘I should not like it because I would not be able to think properly about it.’
Barely a year after Minnie had read to her cousin from The Princess, Edward sat in an armchair in a secluded corner of the Sidgwicks’ home and, as he usually did, took the ‘little fair girl of twelve with her earnest look’ upon his knee. He told her that he wanted to speak to her of something serious, and then ‘got quietly to the thing’ and asked her if she had ever thought it might come to pass that they should be married.
Minnie was silent. A rush of tears fell down her cheeks.
For just a moment Edward hesitated, then he went on. He told Minnie that she was often in his thoughts, and that he believed he should never love anyone so much as her – provided that she grew up in the manner that it seemed likely she would.
Minnie remained silent.
Edward continued. He said that he thought her too young to make any promise as yet, but that he wished to say this much to her, and if she felt the same she might promise a few years hence.
Still, Minnie said nothing. The tears streamed down her cheeks.
Then, without speaking, she took Edward’s handkerchief and – like the heroine of a novel, or a maiden in a poem – she tied a lover’s knot in it, and pressed it into his hand.
Edward was ‘affected very much’. The gesture was an encouragement. A positive response, indeed.
And thus ‘the thing’ was settled.
For the time being, the matter was kept private. Minnie’s elder brother William was told, her uncles had been consulted, and of course Mama and Aunt Etty knew, but no official announcement was yet made. Minnie did confide in her comforting nurse, Beth. It was decided that Minnie should sit next to Edward at table, and that he should take a portrait of her to hang on his chimney-piece at Trinity. In the days that followed, Minnie leafed once more through The Princess. Edward asked her if the thought of marrying him had ever struck her, when she read to him from the poem. ‘Never,’ she said. Backward and forward Minnie turned the pages, exclaiming again and again: ‘I wonder I never thought of it!’ and ‘I never understood this passage till today!’ Most gratifyingly to her cousin, now fiancé, and no doubt to her mama as well, she recited the line: ‘Love, children, happiness’, adding: ‘Two of those are mine now!’
CHAPTER FOUR
Edward had returned to Cambridge, following his First and Senior Medal in Classics, to read German. His rooms in Trinity New Court offered a view over the Backs, with a window so close to the library that he could almost climb across. One morning, towards the end of the academic year and shortly after he had proposed to Minnie, he leaned out. Striding down an avenue of limes by the river was a man he knew by sight as Dr Goulburn, headmaster of Rugby School. Dr Goulburn had succeeded Archibald Tait, who had taken over from the great pedagogue Dr Arnold himself. A moment later there was a knock at Edward’s door. The headmaster was standing at the threshold with the surprising announcement that he had come in person to invite Edward to join his staff at Rugby. Edward asked him in. Clearly, someone had been putting in a very good word on his behalf. The terms of Dr Goulburn’s offer could hardly have been more favourable.
Edward was to assist the headmaster with the Sixth Form, but would teach for just one hour a day. He would be assigned some boys as private pupils, to supplement his income, but would have the afternoons free to read for a Trinity fellowship. Rugby held an added allure for Edward. As Minnie’s brothers were to go to the school, Mrs Sidgwick and Minnie, together with all the company from Bristol, had just moved there, into a suburban villa called the Blue House. Edward himself had persuaded Mrs Sidgwick to disregard her late husband’s determination not to send his sons to one of the public schools for fear of the poor moral tone that pervaded them (the product of a dissolute aristocracy, in his view). Edward argued that a moral transformation had taken place in public schools since Mr Sidgwick’s time. Dr Arnold had led this change at Rugby, imbuing his pupils with a strong work ethic and sound Christian virtues of truthfulness, purity and manliness, combined with healthy exercise – the foundations of what was becoming known as Muscular Christianity. Edward was a firm adherent. He accepted Dr Goulburn’s offer.
The Blue House, named for its curiously coloured bricks, was surrounded by a large garden ‘agreeably planted with elms’. The household consisted primarily of women – Mama and Minnie, Beth and Aunt Etty, and of course little Ada, nearly Minnie’s age and much braver than before, even a touch wilful. Eleanor was now married, brother William was off at Oxford, and Henry and Arthur were at school most of the day. The Blue House swished with silk and tinkled politely with teacups. Piano scales faltered across the morning air, occasionally to be joined by Aunty Etty’s booming baritone and whooping laugh, or by the whack of cricket bats if the boys were home. With her slightly bewildered look and melancholy voice, armed with her edifying phrases and belief in ‘talking people round’, Mrs Sidgwick drifted through the Blue House keeping the entire vessel afloat.
For the twelve-year-old Minnie, life at the Blue House was lonely. Mrs Sidgwick did not wish her to have friends; in her view, lessons and the family were enough. Minnie wal
ked often in the large garden, and she soon chose a favourite tree. Woods and open fields lay just a few minutes away, and she now had a pony. She also, very soon, had Edward. Shortly after taking up his new position, following a brief stay in lodgings in Rugby, Edward went to live at the Blue House.
Edward went riding with Minnie, and for walks in the garden. She showed him her special tree, and allowed him a kiss under it – something that plagued her conscience, and about which she could not tell Mama. The walks and the rides, and Edward’s demands, multiplied. Minnie drew in on herself. Her sulks and tearful silences became more frequent. She was often idle and listless. At times she cried herself to sleep, and she still sought comfort with her nurse, Beth. What was said to Beth, stayed with Beth. She was a fount of warmth and homely maxims; solid, shrewd, and sympathetic. ‘Now don’t you get to thinking about it,’ she might say, ‘or you’ll not go to sleep.’
Mrs Sidgwick was concerned about Minnie’s behaviour. The time for what she might have referred to as Minnie’s ‘turns’ or ‘monthlies’ was approaching. Doctors warned that this was an age of ‘miniature insanity’, when even the most well-behaved girls waxed ‘snappish, fretful. . . full of deceit and mischief’, and that especially the young ‘pet of the family’ could become inexplicably ‘irreligious, selfish, slanderous, false, malicious, devoid of affection. . . self-willed and quarrelsome’. Minnie and her mother had many a long talk, but Minnie had developed ‘a fatal want of confidence’ in her mother, though she still hated to see her upset. Minnie did not mention difficulties with Edward. She simply hoped that ‘complications’ would go away.
Misery was most easily banished by not thinking of what Cousin Edward had said, of those dark pools of the past, nor of the turbulent waters of the future, but by splashing happily in the shallows of the present. Minnie’s natural cheerfulness was not easily dispelled; the volatility that Mrs Sidgwick had remarked upon proved irrepressible. Minnie clung on to her sunny, spirited, childlike nature as a means of survival. She skated over the surface of difficulties and revelled in the pleasures of the moment, in the butterflies in the garden and the hills growing gold in the autumn. She learned to distil clear nectar from the bleakest situation and to keep her sorrows to herself – and she never forgot how to do this. ‘I have long observed in Minnie that she has much difficulty in the expression of her deepest feelings,’ noted Mrs Sidgwick, ‘remarkably so for a child of her light-heartedness – and yet that she does feel strongly and warmly, I am sure.’ A house like the Blue House always has secrets to hold, as those who sit at its tables and slumber in its beds speak, yet say just so much, know and do not know; where so much that really matters remains deep and unsaid.
Swept along by all that was happening to her, Minnie (to her mother and Edward, at least) showed a girlish delight in the secret of her engagement. And she did believe Edward was splendid. For as long as she could remember she had revered her older cousin, adored him – and that was love, was it not?
JOTTINGS FROM MRS BENSON’S RETROSPECTIVE DIARY,
in which she casts a more penetrating adult eye on those childhood sorrows she kept to herself
. . . that terrible, difficult, amazing, Rugby time. . .
A terrible time. Dreary, helpless. . . He had been allowed to tell me but was not allowed to speak but he did – and more – hand-embrace – etc. all weights on my conscience. . . Oh the 1000 difficulties and complications! I lacked courage to bear his dark looks – gloom – but I see now I did not love him – Yet he loved me.
Walks. More freedom with Ed. – at last the great complication – Mama wanted me to tell her all that he said, without his knowing of my promise – I made a stand, and, I think, rightly – the 2 walks with Ed to Tree.
I had to strain the truth in order to satisfy Ed. by expressions of love and after was not true to Mama I was influenced too strongly by him, without really loving.
E’s disclosure – tears and emotion – why? No real thought about it after. Really I think it made me younger. I would not allow any responsibility. . . ride with Edward – I wasn’t true. . . Here I began to be cowardly – pleasure loving and living in the present.
. . . every interval was to me a kind of holiday in which I drew breath and played, and so it came to pass that I did not grow up – not in deep growth, in maturity.
Minnie did fall in love at the Blue House, a few years after moving there, when she was sixteen. Mrs Sidgwick had by then relaxed her strictures on outside friends, and among the visitors Minnie discovered her ‘first friendship’, a girl who quite captured her heart: ‘I fell in love with her and spent a great deal of time with her – and loved her über alle Massen [beyond all measure].’ Minnie neglected both the others and her duties and this ‘vexed Mama’, but she kept her feelings to herself. No one else in the Blue House mentions a particular friend. No one, not even Minnie, gives a hint of the girl’s name.
Minnie’s curious habit of using German to express her innermost feelings was one she picked up from Edward. He had been giving her lessons. Edward’s trajectory was effortlessly upward. He had been elected to a fellowship at Trinity during his first term of teaching at Rugby, and was ordained in January 1854, despite being unable to answer a single question put to him by the Bishop of Manchester’s chaplain when he arrived for his examination as a candidate for holy orders. The chaplain reprimanded Edward for his ignorance, but when he learned his name (he had missed it at first) realized that he had before him a letter from the Bishop himself, mentioning Edward and including a sealed document which affirmed that Edward had passed ‘a most creditable examination’. The young man’s influential admirers were once again hard at work. The Bishop was Edward’s old headmaster from his schooldays in Birmingham, James Prince Lee.
Edward was clearly destined for high things, and required a fitting consort. In the six years that he lived at Rugby he set about shaping his infant inamorata into a model wife. Not just German, but a range of subjects formed her curriculum. ‘Lessons with Edward – so dreaded – architecture and physical geography,’ she wrote. There was more: arithmetic, poetic metre, liturgical doctrine. Even in the early days, back in Bristol, Edward and Mrs Sidgwick had embarked on a joint mission to mould and educate little Minnie. Edward made clear when he first spoke to Mrs Sidgwick that he wished to marry Minnie only ‘if she grew up as it seemed likely [i.e. in the manner he was expecting]’. Mrs Sidgwick was intent on her ultimately unsuccessful project to temper Minnie’s volatility. Edward sent the twelve-year-old girl reading material: books on Pompeii and the Reformation, Ovid’s Epistles. Minnie complained of too many troublesome words, but Mrs Sidgwick observed that ‘a little hard reading will do her good’. Edward corrected the style and grammar of the letters Minnie wrote to him (she had a tendency to use the same word more than once). Mrs Sidgwick encouraged his criticism, as what he said ‘always makes a deep impression’, and for her own part she impressed upon Minnie how good it was of Edward to show such concern, and the necessity that she do her duty.
When, on occasions during the Rugby years, Edward was away from home, he continued Minnie’s education by correspondence. On one trip to the Continent with his friends, he dispatched long, crushingly dull letters on the niceties of cathedral architecture, delivered in suffocating prose. Minnie, well-versed in the romantic poems and novels of which her mother rather disapproved, knew what was expected of her and was more flamboyant in reply. How she read and reread his letters, she told him. How she kissed them and devoured them till she knew them half by heart! How she took them up to bed with her and held them to her breast! ‘Oh I did indeed put my heart close to yours, and yours echoed back such loving thoughts and beat oh so true – my love, my love, my love!’ she wrote. Occasionally, Minnie got into trouble for ‘exaggerated affection’ in her letters. Mrs Sidgwick read them all.
Not only did the little head require close attention and careful direction, but the little heart, and the little soul, too. Mrs Sidgwick set to work on Minnie�
��s ‘characteristic failings’ of carelessness and a wandering attention in her lessons, shortcomings that were ‘not softened by reproof’. As Minnie grew older, the righteous Edward brought heavier guns to bear:
Believe me though, you will not be really nor permanently comfortable and happy till you know that you [?deserve] your own respect, and mine, and that of others, by a regular unsparing Crusade against the faults you speak of – like insolence is [sic] conquered and unselfishness is a clear ruling principle. . .
Edward noted that Minnie’s ‘besetting sin’ was thought lessness. In his magnanimity, he acknowledged that she was anxious to control herself, ‘and grow up a good and useful woman, a true woman’ – but if she did not attempt to cure herself of this weakness, she would ‘go on always perpetually giving pain, and perpetually causing trouble to those whom you most love and wish to please’. His masterstroke in provoking a self-regulating sense of guilt was to tell Minnie that if she did not attend to this fault, she would expose her love for others to perpetual suspicion. They would ask: ‘could she do so, if she really and constantly loved me, and thought how she might please me?’ Edward exhorted Minnie to read this letter several times.
