Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  Chamonix 5 July 1849

  My dear Mr. Gray

  Having heard the late correspondence between you and my father I think it well that you should know from myself my feelings respecting Effie’s illness...I have no fault to find with her...If she had not been seriously ill I should have had fault to find with her: but the state of her feelings I ascribe, now, simply to bodily weakness; that is to say––and this is a serious and distressing admission––to a nervous disease affecting the brain...it showed itself then, as it did now, in tears and depression: being probably a more acute manifestation, in consequence of fatigue and excitement, of disease under which she had long been labouring. I have my own opinion as to its principal cause––but it does not bear on the matter at hand...

  When she for the first time showed careless petulance towards my mother, I reproved her when we were alone...It disposed Effie to look with jealousy upon my mother’s influence over me...No further unpleasantness however took place between her and my mother and we got abroad at last.

  I had hoped this would put us all to rights; but whether I overfatigued her in seeing cathedrals––or whether we drank too much coffee at night––her illness continued to increase.

  So she returned worse than she went and I am still in entire ignorance that there was anything particularly the matter with her.

  The depression gained on her daily––and at last my mother, having done all she could to make her happy in vain, was, I suppose, partly piqued and partly like myself-disposed to try more serious reason with her. Finding her one day in tears when she ought to have been dressing for dinner, she gave her a scold––which had she not been ill she would have deserved. Poor Effie dressed and came down––looking very miserable. I had seen her look so too often to take notice of it––and besides thought my mother right. Unluckily Dr. Grant was with us––and seeing Effie looking ready to faint thought she must want his advice. Poor Effie like a good girl as she is––took––to please me––what Dr. Grant would have her––weakened herself more-sank under the influenza––and frightened me at last very sufficiently––and heaven only knows now when she will forgive my mother...

  If Effie had in sound mind been annoyed at the contemptible trifles which have annoyed her: if she had cast back from her the kindness and affection with which my parents received her and refused to do her duty to them under any circumstances whatever but those of an illness bordering in many of its features on incipient insanity, I should not now have written this letter to you...Restiveness I am accustomed to regard as unpromising character even in horses and asses...

  Mr. Gray did not share John’s letters to him with his daughter. The claim that Effie was suffering from incipient insanity struck him as too absurd for comment, although privately it did make him question the judgement and motive of the accuser. The comparison of Effie’s temperament to that of a horse or ass angered him. And what was meant when Ruskin wrote “I have my own opinion as to its principal cause––but it does not bear on the matter at hand”? If he had an opinion as to the principal cause of Effie’s distress, why would he not share it? Gray could not fathom what was actually wrong with the young marriage, and was grateful to have his eldest once again under his own roof where her comfort was assured. Between her mother’s and her old nurse’s care, and the hearty and familiar dishes produced by their cook, Effie had gained flesh and had stopped coughing. She took long walks outdoors to improve her wind, and frequent shower-baths, after which she rubbed her skin hard with a Turkish towel. After checking her pulse and listening to her descriptions of restlessness the family doctor recommended horseback riding. Her father scoured the local stables and procured for her use a dappled grey gelding.

  John wrote Effie of astonishingly rigorous climbs with his Alpine guide Couttet, scrambling over broken rock at high altitude, and of the new mineral specimens he was able to chip from exposed boulders. He sought an easy way into a valley and slid down a perpendicular snow-filled ravine on his back from a height of 2000 feet. Hearing of these exertions Effie wondered if his worrisome parents, snug back in the inn, ever knew of their son’s daily exploits. George Hobbs followed John almost everywhere, hauling his master’s heavy Daguerreotype apparatus on his back. John was continually working on mapping the Alps, calculating the movements of its glaciers, and cataloguing its vegetation. After considerable labour George and he succeeded in taking the first ever light-picture of the Matterhorn.

  I have your diary here, that you were keeping when we travelled together, and which when I called what you had written absurd, you let lapse––it was very foolish of me to think that then, and even more to say so––I will give you another book to write in when we come back, DV, and you will write in it steadily; but of this one I have taken possession––

  When she responded that she, and her parents, were sorry at their being parted his response was direct.

  ...the very simple truth that it was not I who had left you but you who had left me––...I wonder whether they think a husband is a kind of thing who is to be fastened to his wife’s waist with her pincushion and to be taken about with her wherever she chooses to go. However my love, never mind what they say and think: I shall always be glad when you can go with me...I must follow my present pursuits with the same zeal that I have hitherto followed them or go into the church...

  She began riding every day, sometimes with friends ambling along lanes, other times alone into the countryside surrounding Bowerswell. As she grew certain of the gelding her confidence increased. Frolic was beautiful and eager to respond to the slightest touch of her heel or crop. She had good hands and with her right leg hooked in her side-saddle felt light and free upon his back. She would ride at a canter and thinking of her husband, occupied without her far away, urge him into a gallop.

  Chapter Ten

  The Lamp of Life

  Venice: October 1849

  The curved prow of their gondola slid directly into the doorway on the canal, with a red-sashed porter always waiting to help them out upon the marble steps of the Hotel Danieli. Their suite of rooms––all high-ceilinged pale gilt and crackled grey woodwork, with shell-pink silk upon the walls––was up one floor on the piano nobile, and in crossing the marble threshold one stepped into a world of ancient and noble Venetian taste. The suite would serve admirably. From John’s dressing room he could see the golden-coloured brick of the campanile in the Piazza of St. Mark’s.

  After nine months apart they were again together, and to Effie’s eyes, in the most romantic city in the world. At her insistence John had come up to Perth to collect her after his return from the Alps; there was no other way to quell the rumours about the disintegration of their new marriage. He had scolded her bitterly for this expectation, ridiculing her childishness in a letter so severely that she would have felt shamed if in searching her conscience she found herself guilty of the least bit of coquetry, or base desire to display a long-absent husband for her own, instead of for the marriage’s, sake.

  He had at last acquiesced, despite his parents’ objections that the autumnal cold of Scotland might do him harm. They made a brief round of appearances at dinners and receptions together, were seen chatting happily by the doyens of Perth society. John had wished to make a study trip to Venice, and when she suggested that instead of settling back at London they leave for Italy, even old Mr. Ruskin gave his blessing. As John intended to be perpetually busy documenting the architecture and history of the fabled city, she must have a chaperone. Her friend Charlotte Ker from Perth was asked to join her as companion, and John must have George Hobbs along. John James Ruskin paid for all.

  Their party travelled in two carriages to accommodate the four of them and their bags, and at last Effie glimpsed John’s prized Alps. In Geneva they stopped at M. Bautte’s, jewellers, so that she might see where her birthday gift had come from. She wore the gold floral bracelet John had presented her, and M. Bautte, flattered, himself waited upon them. All
the necklaces, bracelets, and brooches were laid upon black velvet, and John paused before one. It was another bracelet, of green enamel work, and formed into the shape of a serpent. It was arresting, and the work exquisite. The head of the serpent was of opal, and it rested in a flower made of green enamel.

  Without looking up from it he spoke to Effie. “You might exchange the one I gave you, for this,” he offered. The quickening sinuousness of the serpent motif beckoned to him, and he took it in his hand. The bracelet of gold flowers was lifeless by comparison.

  Effie was surprised. The reptilian subject would not have been her first choice, but John’s enthusiasm was marked. He helped her place it on her wrist. “But opals––they’re unlucky for anyone not born in October,” she said.

  “Superstition,” he answered with a smile, and they left with the piece.

  After the elegance of Geneva, nothing prepared the two young women for the wretchedness of the folk they encountered in rural Switzerland. In narrow valley villages where the sun did not make an appearance until almost noon, she and Charlotte were shocked to see armless and otherwise mis-formed children. Idiots abounded. Toothless women with goitres the size of small melons wrapped rosaries around their deformities. The gnarled and weather-beaten men wheeled drunken on dirt paths. Chamonix was better than most and Effie saw at once why its clean sobriety was favoured by the Ruskins.

  They learnt cholera was raging in Venice in the aftermath of the siege and moved on to Milan via the Simplon, waiting for news of when the city might be safe. Milan was empty of all tourists and Austrian officers tipped their plumed cocked hats at them. The churches in which Austrian troops were now bivouacked and the food and fuel shortages suffered by the Milanese stirred Effie to sympathy with the Italian nationalists. The Austrian-run hotel at which they lodged produced fresh eggs, sweet butter, and cured meats for their meals, served by Milanese waiters whose eyes followed every dish with such undisguised hunger that she must stop herself from imagining the scene in the kitchen when their half-eaten plates were returned.

  “I feel almost an Italian here, and hate their oppression,” she said one afternoon when she and her husband had come in from the soldier-filled street and gained their rooms.

  She knew John could argue any position, and he did so now, countering that as flawed as the Austrians were, only a strong authoritarian hand could guide so indolent, irrational, and wayward a people as the Italians. But then he paused, and said in a quieter voice that he had noted their suffering.

  She smiled her challenge. “In France you were a great conservative, as you said everyone there is radical,” Effie told him. “Around Austrians you are a radical, as they are all so conservative. You change your position as nimbly as a fish.”

  “Like a fish I find it steadier going, swimming against the stream,” he answered.

  And in Venice the little party was aligned with the occupying Austrians from the first. John had despised the fact of the rail line which now meanly anchored Venice to the mainland. Much to his satisfaction the new rail terminus, built by the Austrians, had also been bombed by the Austrians during the siege. Their gondola landed them at a city deeply divided between the beaten italianissimi and the Italian austriacanti, those members of the Venetian nobility who had sided with the Austrians and acted as collaborators and informants. And there were, quite simply, almost no other English in the entire lagoon. They all had fled at the start of the five month Austrian bombardment and had not yet returned.

  Once at the Hotel Danieli John left to go out and walk the city. The building which was the greatest in the world, the Doge’s Palace, was almost next their hotel and unharmed by the recent action, though a row of Austrian cannon stood poised at it as threat. But they had heard fearful reports of destruction and he must revisit any number of palazzi and churches to assure himself.

  So Effie and Charlotte set out alone and by foot, John Murray’s guidebook to the sights in hand. Directly leaving the Danieli they heard a trumpet sound. Voices, indistinct but urgent, carried from the piazzetta in front of the Doge’s Palace, and they followed a small number of dark-cloaked Venetians. On the Ponte Paglia, the “straw bridge” they must cross to reach the Piazza, they paused to gaze down the side canal at the small, roofed-over Bridge of Sighs leading to the old ducal prison. In the Piazza itself, nearly empty a few hours earlier, a curious scene was being enacted in front of the great basilica of St. Mark’s. A large cauldron had been set in the centre of the pavement, in which a fire had been kindled. Austrian soldiers formed a semi-circle around it, as Venetians watched both nearby and from the sheltering shadows of the arcades. The soldiers passed wicker baskets of some sort of slips of paper down their line in almost ceremonial precision, and the final man emptied the contents of each basket into the cauldron, stirring it with a poker to ensure it burst into flame. The waving air above the cauldron was dark with ash, and each deposit elicited a cacophony of groans, shouts, and cheers from the crowd.

  What is it, Effie asked a nearby gentleman who turned to them. She knew only a few words of Italian and Charlotte, none. He was much moved by the action of the fire and his distress marked his face. “La moneta patriottica, signorina”... he told her, and touching his hat, moved away. It was Manin’s money, that printed by the short-lived republic. It was now worthless and its public burning an additional humiliation to the failed patriot cause. A few notes fluttered around them, driven by the heat of the blaze and the breeze sweeping though the piazza. She blinked against the particles of ash and bent and snatched at one that nearly hit her skirt. It was a two lire note. She stared at it as she grasped it between pale thumb and forefinger. Crisp and unfolded, the defunct note bore the slightest singeing along one blue edge. She looked helplessly at Charlotte for direction, and receiving none, tucked it away in her guidebook as memento.

  Ruskin applied himself at once measuring and drawing at the Doge’s Palace. Each of its hundreds of columns and capitals was unique, and he wished to draw every one. It was not whole buildings but the fragments of ancient architecture that most interested him, the stone window casings and doorways, arcaded passages, fonts and mosaics and wellheads. Much of this encrusted decoration had been carried off from the great and plundered cities of Byzantium to Venice during the Crusades, and been assembled and installed seemingly at random in the great edifices of Church and State. His goal was to record nothing less than the essential elements of each of the most important buildings of Venice, and to do so he had literally to scramble up and over roofs to reach chimney pots and spires. No alpine climbing proved as rigorous as his solo ascents up vertical walls and the ginger tracing of pathways across tiled spines or lead-spanned roof expanses to reach the delicate stone elements. Once gained he would rope himself to the object he sought––parapet or fretwork, pinnacle or frieze––and proceed to detail its contours in his sketchpad, annotating the drawing with careful measurements from his spooling pocket line. George Hobbs or Domenico, his recently engaged valet, waited below, ready with a whisk broom to brush off the soot and restore their master’s stressed clothing to respectability. He knew the Venetians thought him mad, sometimes saw them gesticulating far below him, though with a few Austrian zwanzigs he could speedily buy the blessing of a sexton or caretaker to gain the access he needed. In addition to the drawings he was making, he had George carry his Daguerreotype apparatus, which they set up wherever he felt a useful image might be struck.

  The act of drawing had always furthered his thinking, and it did so now. He saw within a few days of arrival that this new Venetian book would have to be far more than a study of prominent men and the buildings they erected. The Venice he walked was the ruin of the greatest mercantile force history had known, brought down by greed, hubris, and corrupted religious ideals. He recognised it as no less than a mirror, spotted and tarnished, but conveying glimmers of disquieting veracity. He knew it as a place that at its height was very like his own England today in its imperial pride.
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br />   With letters of introduction from London the young Ruskins were soon inserted into Austrian society. A sense of, if not normalcy, then of accommodating routine was being restored, and with it parties, balls, and operas performed at La Fenice. The local hostesses found that la signora Ruskin spoke German well enough to make her a sought-after and amusing guest. Venetian noblewomen presented Effie to marchesi, and Russian princes in employ of the Austrians vied to dance with her. Her scholarly husband chaffed at being taken away from his work in the evenings; this was the time he sat at his little painted desk in the Danieli and consolidated his cascading pages of notes. When pressed into accompanying the ladies to a concert Ruskin would continue to write or take a book to read. One night at the opera, while Effie was rapt with the stage action, she had to stifle her laughter when she glanced at him to find him oblivious in their box, preparing a chapter on Chamfered Edges.

  Soon Ruskin was urging his wife to accept invitations without him. He insisted he trusted her implicitly to protect her good name, and it would be a favour to him to be relieved of social obligations keeping him from his work. Miss Ker, he added, was a sensible and virtuous companion, and they each would have the best time of it by respecting the other’s inclinations.

  A succession of handsome and unfailingly polite Austrian officers presented themselves as escorts for the two young ladies. One, an artillery lieutenant, had designed and directed the awful balloon bombardment which had brought the city to its knees after the year-old siege. This talented young officer had made the acquaintance of the Ruskins at a party and respectfully requested permission to call upon them both. Although John Ruskin and his guest had only a few words of Italian in common––John spoke very little German, and Lt. Paulizza no English––the lieutenant was fascinated with the Englishman’s work and the beauty of his drawings. One afternoon the lieutenant proudly brought by his diagrams for the bombing of the same city his host was furiously documenting. John was utterly baffled, Effie quietly amused.