Childish Loves

by Benjamin Markovits

  He was born almost to the day two years before me, a fact which affords us some astonishment and much pleasure; but he might from the look of him be three or four years my junior.

  Bankes, as I say, quizzes me a great deal about him, and not only Bankes but Matthews, too. They talk of the Method and call me a very pious Methodist. But Edleston’s modesty is infectious and, for his sake, I feel everything I ought. He dislikes my connections with women, even of the theatre. Between Long and Edleston I keep to a very narrow path, but in London I am free to do as I please, and a great deal pleases me. Then when I am sick of self and love return to Cambridge. But my money has run out, and there is nothing for it but a summer in Southwell to replenish the supply. I am almost glad of it. Edleston alone ties me to Cambridge, and sometimes he strikes me as a very good reason for going.

  Several days I put off telling him, and then I could not put it off any longer. He had come to my room after chapel when I was still in bed. He sat at the head of it, as he sometimes did, and I said, ‘I am glad you have come today, for I mean to go to Southwell tomorrow, to see my mother.’ Adding, after a minute: ‘The truth is, I am rather dipped at the moment and hope to persuade her to raise a loan on my behalf. Come here; you needn’t take fright so.’

  But he had retreated to a chair, somewhat encumbered with old clothes.

  ‘I don’t see why you should mind me,’ he said.

  ‘You know very well why I do.’ I dislike this sort of talk, and being obliged to declare what everybody knows. Sitting in bed in this way made me feel foolish, so I began to dress in front of him.

  ‘You have made a great change in my life,’ he said. ‘I am grateful for it.’

  ‘I hope you are more than grateful, and less, too.’

  ‘But you don’t know what my life here is like without you. Since you don’t like to know, I don’t tell you.’

  ‘I know well enough; you tell me often enough.’

  But he can never keep angry at me long, and we parted for the morning on very good terms, only a little more tenderly and carefully than usual. In the afternoon, we rode out to Grantchester and bathed, diving for eggs, plates, shillings in the weir. There is at a corner in the Cam, about ten or twenty feet submerged, the root of an old tree, to which Long and I make a game of clinging; but as Edleston knew nothing of it, I dived down with a breast full of air and counted to a hundred, looking up all the time into the green sunshiny water to see if he would follow me. When I could breathe no longer I floated up. He was sitting at the edge of the river, with his legs under him and his arms crossed. When he saw me he gave a shout and turned away; and when I had got my own breath back, I joined him on the bank. We lay like that, drying and warming ourselves in the sunshine.

  In the morning Edleston met me very early at the door of my room. He could not be sure when I was leaving and had suffered from an anxious night at the thought of missing me. In his hand he held a little box and in the box, which he offered me at once (for he had a horror of farewells), was a little cornelian, attached to a ring, the stone itself no bigger than a suskin.

  ‘It is very small,’ he said. ‘I am only sorry it is so small.’

  ‘This matters to me not at all, except as I am more likely to lose it.’

  ‘I wanted to give you something in remembrance. I like to think that, poor as my company is, it has kept you out of worse.’

  ‘My dear child,’ I said, much moved, ‘you are only too good. You are everything I once was and am not. You keep me up to the mark. But this is all nonsense; it is only a month or two. I will see you very soon.’

  It is a three-day journey to Southwell, and I spent the first day in a sort of fever of feeling, which could only be relieved by composition.

  *

  I arrived about four o’clock of a July afternoon. Mrs Pigot was taking tea at Burgage Manor, which I was grateful for as it put Kitty on her good behaviour. She welcomed me with one of her smiles – she does not know herself how ugly they make her. I sat down to a fresh pot and buttered bread. These were brought to me in the drawing room, a pretty enough room when the sun is out (which it was), with a view of the Green – and of my carriage in the road, and the groom attending the horses, and my valet staggering under the weight of my box. Presently he was heard on the stairs; then he showed his head in the doorway, a little breathlessly, and asked where to dispose of it.

  ‘John is at home,’ Mrs Pigot said, when he was gone. ‘He is back from Edinburgh; I should think he will be very pleased to see you.’

  ‘What have you been talking about?’ I said. ‘You have an interrupted air.’

  ‘Our prodigal sons,’ Kitty said.

  But Mrs Pigot very slightly shook her head. She has grown still thinner since I saw her last; even Kitty looks well beside her, fat and well. Mrs Pigot for her part praised me for my slender and elegant appearance.

  ‘You are no longer a boy,’ she said. ‘John still looks like a boy.’

  ‘My clothes have been taken in twice since the new year. I dare say Elizabeth would pass me in the street, without stopping.’

  When I had finished the tea, I retired to my room to change; then walked out, looking for John and his sister. They live in a prosperous sort of house, with two columns, at the edge of the Green. Elizabeth herself answered my knock, then called out behind her into the house, ‘John, John! Guess who has come back when he said he wouldn’t.’

  We spent the afternoon in the garden, which overlooks on one side a series of fields, rising into the hills of Annesley. Another wall is shared with the Pigots’ neighbour, a public house. As the weather was fine, and it was a Sunday afternoon, their gardens were crowded; and the noise of people carrying over the wall gave us a pleasant sense of seclusion. John had just come back from studying medicine. He was very amusing on the subject and has become acquainted with almost every class of human misery. But we also exchanged Southwell gossip. Julia Leacroft has got engaged to the son of Lady Hathwell’s steward. It appears he has been boasting from Rainworth to Newark of having attracted the preference of Lord Byron’s established favourite, and broken his heart. But Mr Leacroft is disappointed and hopes to take up his cause with me. All of which meant nothing more than that Elizabeth had decided to tease me. I was sorry to find she had so little news of her own.

  Kitty, when I returned at last, was less sanguine than before. She had not known I was going out, she said. Mrs Pigot had left shortly after my arrival (this was not true), to allow her a decent period for the welcome of her own son. I could imagine her disappointment on finding me, etc. After supper, she began to inquire into my financial obligations, interrupting herself from time to time to exclaim, ‘I promised myself to keep quiet on this point, this evening. But I cannot, I will not.’ And beginning again. She discovered the coach and four stationed in the road and went out to inspect it with a lantern in her hand.

  ‘I wonder I did not note it at once,’ she cried.

  ‘It is a gift, for you,’ I said, following her out into the cool of the evening. ‘The mother of Lord Byron should not be seen in such a thing as the little two-in-hand you go about in.’

  ‘Go about! I like that, when I am confined to these four walls, unless Mrs Pigot invites me to what she calls a family supper, because she is ashamed of me, too.’

  But we bade our good-nights at last, and the house grew quiet.

  ***

  I have now been here six weeks. Most afternoons I spend at the Pigots’ house or riding with John or walking through town with Elizabeth. And in the evenings, when I am not engaged, I write. Ridge has agreed to print a collection of my verses for private distribution. The title gives me a great deal of trouble; Elizabeth and John and Mr Becher have all made suggestions. I gave them the poems in manuscript, after Elizabeth corrected and copied them in a fair hand. A few of the verses Mr Becher deems ‘in advance of provincial life’, and Elizabeth also expressed some fears of the interpretations that might be made on them. There is no one who has be
en more publicly associated with Lord Byron than herself; she still has some concern for her reputation. But this is only her teasing, and I do not mind it much.

  The stanzas objected to belong, most of them, to a series of poems addressed ‘To Mary’. Now this Mary is not one of your Southwell ladies. I met her in Newark at the printer’s, at Ridge’s office, which sits above the bank. There is a shop on the High Street as well, but he is mostly to be found beside his press, which he attends himself. Mary is one of his assistants, and took my hat when I came in – with chalky fingers – promised to clean it and forgot. She is a short shapely lively girl, not pretty but spirited, with a pock-marked face and small speckled eyes, like quails’ eggs. On taking my leave, I saw her chasing after the carriage, hat in hand, with a bright eager look of apology in her face – and before we had gone five hundred yards on the road to Southwell, the business of our apology was finished, and she had scrambled out again.

  I have sketched her as well as I can, but she refuses to sit long enough for a full study. Her father was a coachman who lost his leg under a horse; her mother is dead. For two or three years she has supplemented the small income of the printing-press with private clients. I believe she is sixteen or seventeen years old – she is sometimes vague. She remembers only the date of her mother’s death four years ago. Her father, whom I have not met, hardly leaves his room, where she also sleeps, but he introduces her where he can among his former associates. When the room is required, he sits on the steps and waits. I have made it a point of honour to rescue her from these surroundings, which he tolerates, as I am a lord, and he believes there might be some profit in it to himself.

  On the road from Newark to Southwell there is an old mill-house, which has fallen to ruin; but it has retained four walls and half a roof, which keeps one room dry (there are only two). It is used sometimes as a hunting-lodge. Mary sleeps there and I have gone to the expense of repairing the roof and two of the windows and providing a door. Once a day I ride out to her, unless it is wet; but then, she is only more eager the next day. Ridge, who knows nothing of these arrangements, complained to me of her disappearance, which has caused him some delay, as she was a very willing useful sort of girl, in this respect as well. But it is four miles on foot from the mill-house to Newark, and four miles to Southwell, which suits me perfectly and keeps her at home. Whenever I ride out to her, I tell Kitty I am going on printer’s business.

  But there are women enough in Southwell to occupy me. It appears that the rumour about Julia Leacroft’s engagement is untrue. I had this from her father’s own lips one evening, a propos of whatever you please, at a small dance given by Mr Buckleby. Mr Leacroft said to me, when I had taken a rest from dancing, ‘There is nothing I dislike more than what is sometimes affectionately called a little woman.’ (Julia is rather tall.) And then, ‘It is all nonsense, of course, the stories about Mr Tuttle. This is what comes of living in a small town.’ Now is such paternal solicitude, I asked myself, so very different from the consideration shown Mary by her own poor father? To be fair, Mr Leacroft expects a better price. I danced one dance with Miss Leacroft and afterwards we sat on a bench in the garden and ate an ice.

  Elizabeth protests that I have become so lively she hardly knows me; and the truth is, she knows nothing of my arrangements about the miller’s cottage, and I should be sorry if she did. I think she would be shocked, and she is not easily shocked. About a dozen times a day I consider the necessity of riding out to Newark. Mary has employed herself in my absence and swept the floors clean and pulled the rotten sodden remains of the mill-wheel out of the water, so that the stream flows past the cottage and does not flood it on rainy days. There are always picked flowers on the window ledge when I come and, if it is cold, a wet green smoking little fire in the grate – for she knows how I hate the cold. She calls me Lordy. Our bed is straw covered in sacking, and the stalks come through and tickle us until we scratch ourselves. We begin to stink of each other, and when the sun is out, before riding home, I bathe in the shallow water, stepping gingerly on stones and roots. Then dress with the clothes sticking to me. She stands cheerfully in the doorway as I ride away.

  In the evenings, I dine at the Pigots, and afterwards go out, with John and Elizabeth, to a party at the Leacrofts or the Muswells, etc. where we might encounter Lady Hathwell or Mrs Burgage-Mainwaring, who lets the house to my mother. Mr Becher is often ‘in attendance’. And I discuss with him the question of Reform and think of the brown hairs on Mary’s legs.

  *

  I have had a letter from Edleston, and Kitty has one from Hanson. I don’t know which gives me more pain. Edleston writes to say that his sister is to be married – to a clerk in a counting-house! And that among the inducements which persuaded her to accept his proposal (I would say this young man’s, but it appears he is not a young man) was his conviction that he could obtain a place for his wife’s brother, once she was his wife, at the same house. And this is what the world calls love. I have never met Miss Edleston but have seen a sketch of her, in pen and ink, done by her brother, who is very accomplished in this art; and if it is anything like, and if she is anything like him, she must be ‘beauty’s self’, with or without her robes. And yet Nature’s Coin has bought her nothing better than a middle-aged clerk in a mercantile house in the great city of London, who lives in two rooms off the Pentonville Road.

  Edleston is in despair, on his own account as well. The truth is, he cannot bear to part from me and revives an old plan we have sometimes discussed of living together, like Nisus and Euryalus, or Lady Butler and Miss Ponsonby, in retirement.

  Hanson writes about my debts – it is his great theme, and he returns to it as Cato to Carthage. Not only the four or five or seven thousands worth of debts contracted in London and due upon my majority, but the small accounts scattered about Cambridge, for which he himself is liable, as I tell Kitty, by deed of Crown. If the tradesmen go unpaid the shame is all his own. But Kitty seizes her opportunity and begins to lecture me about my father. Who was also a spendthrift, and a profligate, and a whoremonger, and what you please, though I tell her, we have nothing so much in common as a horror of you. She says that she does not believe me to be happy, that I was always a loving child, who defended her even from imaginary slights and would rather go without his dinner than suffer the least insult to his or his family’s honour. But that I had got in with a disreputable set at college. Augusta (who knows nothing of the matter) has said something to her about Bankes’s choristers, and Kitty has imagined the rest. The name of Byron is now a term of abuse, and fathers even in Southwell guard their daughters against me.

  I gave her several instances to the contrary. To which she responded, inconsequently enough, that if they knew the true state of my affairs – Newstead and Rochdale hopelessly entangled, myself in debt and under bond to several Jew-lenders, etc. – they would keep their daughters to themselves and not parade them about in this shameless way. But a Byron can never resist bidding for what is offered.

  She suspects me of the wildest improprieties and checks my room each night, standing in the light of the hall in her night-gown, to re-assure herself. Elizabeth tells me it is true, she has made such a spectacle of herself no one in Southwell will return her card, unless I am at home; and she has no visitors but Mrs Pigot, who makes it a point of duty to call on her twice a week. Kitty talks a great deal of Aberdeen, where her cousin still lives in a large house on the river; and where she was known, it seems, to two or three good families, whose visits she received. But the fact is, people grow tired of hearing her complaints, accusations and regrets.

  Mrs Crawley’s macaroons, for which she sends daily, have made her dyspeptic; and she doses herself afterwards with pink pills from Stambridge, the apothecary. He sells her a notorious diuretic, which I have tried myself to no very pleasant effect. I have spoken to him confidentially about her – about these pills, and other things. I think they do her no good and some harm. He took me aside into a small room at the
back, extended into the garden, with a sky-light, rather dusty, shedding a milky cloudy light over everything – phials liquids powders brass instruments books.

  ‘If Mrs Byron comes to you asking for – this or that,’ I said, ‘complaining of slugs in the garden or difficulty sleeping, take care what you give her.’ But he only smiled at me, and I felt a little foolish. ‘I should not like to answer for the use she intends to make of it,’ I said.

  Later I learned the reason for his impertinence. It appears my mother had approached him on similar business, concerning me. Mr Stambridge told John Pigot, who was visiting his shop (and who knows how many besides); and John told me. We were riding out one day towards Newstead, with a strong sunny breeze against us. John in his hesitant way delivered himself of the story, which he had been brooding on, like a hen laying its egg, and was much relieved to hear me laugh at it. We rode as far as Ravenshead, then south to Garden Lake, which took us the better part of the morning. Then rested our horses and let them drink. I could see the arch of the Abbey, and the trees blown this way and that behind it, through the ruins.

  John said, ‘Shall we go on? Is Lord Grey at home?’

  But I dislike seeing the place in another man’s possession, and Mrs Pigot anyway expected us to lunch. On our way back, I asked him (as a medical man), if he meant to kill himself, the method he should prefer. He could not resist this appeal to his professional opinion. Cyanide, he said, in solution, with a little magnesium – to mask its bitterness.

  Meanwhile, my poesies accumulate. Elizabeth wonders greatly at the extent of them, if nothing else, for she never sees me with a pen in hand, and she sees me every day. But I write when no one else writes, at two in the morning, or at six; at breakfast or dinner; on sofa or lawn or bed, and in every conceivable position. Even at the mill-cottage, I have fitted up a table and furnished it with quill, ink, paper. Such is our appetite for contrast – after one kind of exertion, we delight in another. And while Mary sleeps, I write.