Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  They left his father’s ground floor study, and John pointed to the wall near the stair. “Here, in the entrance hall, don’t you think?” he asked his father. “We shall all of us have enjoyment of it there, and as I come down every morning it will greet me, just as I will pass it each time I go up to my study to work.”

  “Some thoughts it will give you!” said his father with a laugh.

  Come February John invited Turner to his birthday dinner. He had met him the first time just after he had got ill and left Oxford, at a dinner given by Griffith, Turner’s sales agent, and since been given the signal honour of being allowed to call on Turner at home. Brushed up, dusted down, and swathed in a storm-blue greatcoat and moth-eaten top hat, the great man was happy and kind. He saw the prominent location given his ‘Slave Ship’ and leaned in on the canvas, his eye nearly touching the vivid surface.

  “I don’t like that fish,” he growled. He pulled back, and tapped the offending pale-lipped monster so smartly with the tip of his battered walking stick that John feared it would puncture. “I’ll come back and fix him.” I devoutly hope you will not, thought John, as he steered his guest into the dining room. Following dinner the honouree invited Turner to his study to see the favoured positions given the artist’s watercolour views of Richmond Bridge, Gosport, and Winchlesea. He did not reference the mass of manuscript papers overcovering his desk.

  His father had a further presentation to make the next day. “I’ve hired George Richmond to paint your portrait, as a birthday gift,” he told him. Richmond had been one of John’s drawing masters, one that John still had a high opinion of. Richmond asked him how he wanted to be shown.

  “Desk––outside too, if that makes sense––a pencil or crayon in my hand––or a pen––and in the background, Mont Blanc. Looking at my work––No, looking away.”

  “At what?” Richmond had asked.

  “Infinity,” he said.

  The painting hung in a Royal Academy show. He laughed when he saw the placard: “John Raskin, Age 24, 1843.” His father was furious and had the title corrected.

  Modern Painters: Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters, proved by examples of the True, the Beautiful, and the Intellectual, from the Works of Modern Artists, especially from those of J. M. W. Turner, Esq., R.A., by a Graduate of Oxford.

  Signing himself thus, and only thus, was John Ruskin’s half-ironic acknowledgement of the odd ‘Double Fourth’ Honours he had been granted at the conclusion of his interrupted education. And his father did not want him to risk his name until the reception to the work was gauged.

  Five hundred copies were printed, and appeared in bookstores in May. It was four hundred and fifty pages and he knew it was just Volume I. A mere one hundred fifty copies were sold, but to the nation’s most erudite and incisive intellects. It made its way into the hands of Wordsworth and Browning. Mrs. Gaskell read it with Charlotte Brontë. Tennyson, that model of thrift, borrowed a copy. They all puzzled over who the brilliant young Graduate could be. In private, George Eliot venerated the anonymous author as a prophet. Ruskin knew none of this.

  The Tory magazine Britannica, his father’s favoured journal, gave it a positive paragraph––but the reviewer was a family friend. John James scissored the piece out and contentedly pasted it in the scrap-book he had begun. The Athenaeum and Blackwood’s failed to mention Modern Painters. Turner simply ignored it.

  The silence did not matter. John Ruskin had not written it to flatter Turner, but to express the truth as he had discovered it.

  Chapter Four

  The Lamp of Life: 1848-1855

  Perth: January 1848

  Her hair was falling out by the brushful.

  Euphemia Chalmers Gray was nineteen years old, and this was meant to be the happiest time of her life; a very great and good man had implored her to wed him. She loved him back and had, despite the sudden coolness of his parents, consented. My Effie, my goddess, my enchantress, my own beloved, his letters now opened. John Ruskin was mad with passion for her, rapturous in his letters, and they thrilled her so she dare show them to no one, but read them over and again and pressed them to her heart when she was done.

  This morning Effie narrowed her eyes at her silver-headed brush, its boar hair bristles choking with her own auburn strands. What she had first noticed a fortnight past was now a daily occurrence––the quantity of hair on her pillow, after another night of bad sleep; the growing number of filaments which filled her comb, after even the most gentle run through.

  It was the strain, thought Effie Gray, the strain of it all. The backdrop to her engagement had been fraught with anxiety. Her father, a respected and normally prosperous Perth attorney, had unhappily invested the larger portion of his family’s funds in railway shares which now appeared worthless. As a result Effie’s brother George, a young gentlemen, was suddenly thrust into looking for work in trade––any work to relieve the pressure on the Gray family fortunes. Effie herself faced the financial embarrassment of heading into marriage with not a penny to her name, nothing to bring to her beloved John and the elder Ruskins but her pretty face and slender form and bright inquisitive mind. Mr. Gray and had been perfectly frank about his investment losses with Mr. Ruskin, with the result that the old man had himself provided Effie’s dowry. The Grays would keep no secrets about their sudden financial reversal; John had made it rather more than clear that he told his parents everything, and Effie had resolved she would be no less than candid in return.

  She set the brush down upon her bed. A brilliant life awaited her at London, a future far beyond any she could imagine here in Perth. John was twenty-eight, handsome and well-knit, serious even to gravity about buildings and paintings and trees, so good she felt a little in awe of his dutifulness to his parents, so devout a Christian as to be an exemplar, and a celebrated intellect and writer. His Modern Painters, volumes one and two, were known to all of intellectual Britain. And he was not without wit or charm, but the way in which he used them sparingly made the officers and engineers here trying to catch her eye look like strutting peacocks.

  My beloved Effie, you disrupt my work––I can scarce hold my pen––you are a complete man-trap––a siren on her rocks luring men to disaster––Mercy on me, to hear you ask once more “if I take sugar on my peaches?” ––don’t you recollect my being temporarily insane, for all the day afterwards, hearing you ask such a thing––I am utterly lost in longing for you––you are like a sweet forest glade into which a man might be tempted, searching for the heart of it, only to wander forever, enhemmed by thorns––you are like the soft swellings of an Alpine snow field––beautiful to the eye but hiding deep clefts that end in darkness where I might plummet and be gone, for-ever...

  She smiled at his extravagances, but they made her catch her breath too.

  The young persons’ fathers were friends––the Ruskins were Scottish at the bone, and had also lived at Perth. Effie had been born in Bowerswell, the rented Ruskin house where John’s mad grandfather had died––born in fact, in that very same room. Margaret and John James were long-engaged cousins, and the unmarried thirty-seven year old Margaret had lived with the Ruskin family. She’d been alone in the house when John James’ father, despairing of business losses and grieving the death of his wife, appeared spluttering in the drawing room doorway, his throat slashed through by his own straight razor. After the burial the cousins fled the house to wed, and set up at London. Not without reason Margaret Ruskin had been left with a holy horror of Perth, and of Bowerswell, especially.

  The old Bowerswell was sold to Effie’s newly-wed father, and after her birth her father had pulled it down, and the Grays lived in a new house on the same property and by the same name.

  Effie––or ‘Phemy’ as she had been known then––had met John when she was twelve. She’d come to London to stay with the Ruskins before going on to her school near Stratford-on-Avon; an English school pruden
tly chosen by her parents to dilute her Scot’s accent. John had been twenty, and had amused her by taking her to the zoological gardens and describing the lives and habitats of the animals there.

  The next summer she’d returned, sent away from Bowerswell where her three little sisters had just died from scarlet fever. She was sad and sorely in need of distraction. John, down from Oxford, wrote a faery tale for her, The King of the Golden River, the story of a neglected boy’s goodness rewarded.

  John and Phemy met again when she was fifteen, and returned to visit the Ruskins, this time at Denmark Hill. John had found her beautiful three years ago, and now noted that she no longer was. Phemy’s face had lost its childhood roundness early. Her nose was long and narrow and her cheekbones high in her heart-shaped face. But a few days after her arrival he thought her in fact a striking girl, with lively eyes and quick conversation, and without a trace of shyness.

  She was more than ordinarily skilled at the piano, devoted to practice, and John admired her dedication. She played each evening for the Ruskins, even playing Mrs. Ruskin to sleep; that old lady’s eyes seeming to close of themselves not long after eight. John’s parents were near to thirty years older than Phemy’s––they looked more like grandparents than parents to her––and she could not remember a time when they were not both white-haired. Early in that visit she had glanced up from her keyboard at the rasping of Margaret Ruskin’s snore, and she smiled at the slumped form in the wing chair before the fire. John was there and saw her smile, and smiled back at her; it formed a delicious first secret between the two.

  The next morning he was writing up in his study, comparing actual cloud formation to the way in which artists depicted storm-clouds on canvas. The section was long and both subtle and technical, and he stood after a while and paced the floor, stretching his arms behind him. From below his feet he heard the faint strains of music. He paused for a moment, then thought he might go downstairs and see what Phemy was up to.

  She was practicing Mendelssohn, alone. Her back was to him and he stood motionless on the crimson patterned rug as she played. He approached silently and obliquely. She saw him when she turned the page of her score, and then heard his voice, quite near.

  “It’s very cold in here, Phemy,” he said. John thought she played well, played strongly; didn’t plink away like most young ladies. He didn’t like to think of her fingers hurting from striking the cold keys. She turned her head to look at him. It was cold, and her fingerless gloves afforded no warmth. But she laughed.

  “No more than in Scotland, rather warmer, I should say,” she answered, without stopping in her piece.

  “Let me have a fire made up,” he offered.

  “A fire, for one person?” He watched her lift her eyes to the length of the drawing room. The purple draperies and ruby flocked wall-paper made the room no warmer.

  “Two then, if you grudge the coal. I shall be your audience.” He reached for a chair and drew it close to her instrument.

  She went on with her playing as he sat watching her. She did play beautifully, and he thought the Mendelssohn she had chosen maudlin, and unworthy of her ability. He enjoyed music very much, but had no facility himself to produce it. Several times at parties he had seen young men and women play four-handed pieces at the keyboard, and he wished of a sudden that he could do so with her. Her concentration on her task fascinated and somehow in that cold room warmed him, and he sat next her and watched her still profile and swift hands.

  “Phemy doesn’t suit,” John told her when she ended, rather than the customary compliment on her skill. Her name too was unworthy, maudlin and silly.

  She looked at him and laughed. “I have been Phemy all my life. What else can one do with ‘Euphemia’?”

  “I shall call you Effie,” he announced. “’Phemy’ sounds nearly like Feeny, which is a kitten’s name. Or a puppy’s. Effie you are,” he ended, to her continuing laughter. Then he left her, back to his work.

  She went on with more Mendelssohn after he’d gone. Effie, she said aloud. Effie. She repeated it silently as she went over a difficult left hand passage. She thought it did suit her. Effie. She liked it. John had named her.

  What naughty thoughts your last night’s letter gave me! You knocked all the philosopher straight out of me, and the art-man, and the man of letters too. That bit about your undressing––pray don’t be angry––but how could I help myself–thinking of you cold, and knowing that in just a few weeks––don’t be angry!––you might have my arms about you to keep you warm! And then I fancied us an old married couple, and out at the opera, and you sitting next me, and me just bending the crook of my finger into your hand, just so––where no one might see––and knowing all the men about were admiring you, and that I a King could think––Yes look all you like––but she is Mine All Mine!

  She and John had been good friends, and she just another of the many young people coming to stay at Denmark Hill when at London. Margaret Ruskin never went to the theatre or concerts, but the male Ruskins enjoyed both, and Effie was an admired addition to the gentlemen’s evenings out. Her vivacity contrasted pleasingly with the household’s essential sobriety, and Effie did not take the Ruskins seriously. She found old Mrs. Ruskin wry and quaint, and Mr. Ruskin’s brusque energy admirable. John himself was a study; grave and gay by rapid turns, always writing letters to newspapers or closeted with his cherished minerals.

  Effie returned to London in the spring she turned nineteen. Mrs. Ruskin made a great point of telling her that John was on the verge of a brilliant match––a girl no less literary royalty than Sir Walter Scott's granddaughter. She was glad for him, of course, although he never spoke of Miss Lockhart; oddly to her way of thinking, none of the Ruskins did. But an air of quiet assumption overtook Denmark Hill, with Mr. Ruskin composedly sanguine.

  Their guest had as good a time as ever. John’s cousin Mary had recently been wed and Denmark Hill seemed grateful for a young female presence. Following breakfast Effie practised at the keyboard while Mrs. Ruskin dusted her china figurines, an operation she refused to entrust to her parlour maid and which by Mrs. Ruskin’s strictures of tidiness must be performed daily. John, in self-imposed exile up in his study, whiled away his morning drawing and writing. Dinner was at one o’clock, and after that it was John’s habit to spend the afternoon alone walking, or driving into the country. By late afternoon Mr. Ruskin was home from his wine merchant’s firm on Billiter Street, and the family took tea together at seven. Afterwards Effie would resume her place at the piano and play all the evening.

  Effie and John were soon sharing long conversations about painting, and music, and architecture, and God––she realised there was nothing he couldn’t speak on. She liked dancing and parties and Haydn, and he favoured geology and paintings and Bellini; he didn’t like pink and it was her favourite colour. They chaffed and argued high-spiritedly. John began inviting Effie along for his afternoon walks and drives. He was as good as a married man in Effie’s eyes, a sort of young uncle to her, and she felt perfectly free in his presence to laugh and teaze like siblings.

  “I don’t believe a word of John’s entanglement with Miss Charlotte Lockhart,” she wrote her mother not long after. “He scarcely knows her and really doesn’t care to. He told me he’s seen her but six times in his life, and that always at parties...”

  Miss Lockhart’s diffident suitor had in fact just received what was to be his first and only letter from that young lady, a decidedly tepid and laconic response to a poem about river currents he had hazarded sending her. The elder Ruskins knew, to their excitement, that letters had been exchanged, but as this was the rare instance in which John did not share the contents with them they remained ignorant of the lady’s want of sympathy with their son’s genius.

  John began taking their young house guest down to tea each evening, knocking at Effie’s bedroom door so that they might go down arm in arm. Margaret Ruskin had seen her son straighten his jacket
in the hallway before knocking, and she had turned and hurried away. Soon after this Effie discerned the alteration in the elder Ruskins.

  “John,” announced Mrs. Ruskin at dinner. Mrs. Ruskin’s voice was naturally high pitched; she also enunciated very carefully to cover her early Scot’s accent. “I want you to read to me this afternoon; my eyes aren’t strong today.”

  Both Effie and John looked at his mother. It was their custom to spend the afternoon together, and outdoors; Mrs. Ruskin knew he had ordered the brougham for 2 o’clock for their drive.

  “It’s Scott’s The Pirate, so I know you’ll enjoy it,” Mrs. Ruskin finished.

  It would be Scott, Effie thought. All the family read and reread Walter Scott endlessly. They did not drive out that day.

  Over the next few days a growing reserve shadowed Miss Gray’s relations with John’s parents, and John too seem troubled, although he did not discuss it with her, and Effie was delicate enough not to ask. She had the creeping feeling that she was being discussed in the household, and it was a most uncomfortable sensation. She knew their fathers corresponded, but her family did not share the Ruskin habit of sharing letters from others for comment and opinion. Then one morning sitting at the piano, playing in an empty room, it struck her that perhaps John’s engagement to Miss Lockhart had indeed been a fancy, more a desired coinage of the brain than reality, for all the Ruskins; and that now that her father was in financial crisis, the elder Ruskins thought her angling for a rich husband.

  Effie was innocent, and she was angry. At one-o’clock dinner she took the reins.

  “I really must return to Perth tomorrow,” she announced to John and Mrs. Ruskin. The three of them had finished their soup and had started the fish. “Mama wrote me such a letter that made me know how much I’m missed. John, will you help with getting my rail ticket?”