In Love with George Eliot

by Kathy O'Shaughnessy

  ‘What are you doing?’ said sharp-eyed Zibby, smiling up at him, her cheeks too rosy, breath coming fast.

  3

  The Cross family lived in Weybridge, in an expansive pretty house in docile rolling grounds that were equipped with a tennis court. The family was extensive. Anna Cross was the widowed mother of boys Johnny, Willie and James (who lived in America), and girls Emily, Eleanor, Florence, Mary, Anna and Zibbie. A month after leaving Rome, Johnny was due to accompany his mother to call on the Leweses at the Priory to drop by a German translation of Adam Bede they had stumbled on, with engravings that were, both son and mother agreed, exquisite. They would be calling because on Sunday the Leweses were known to receive visitors. That Sunday morning, Johnny had entered his mother’s bedroom to take his usual seat in the armchair beside her bed, where he would take his coffee. (His father, when alive, had done the same.) When Johnny entered this morning the breakfast tray was untouched, his mother was lying with a flannel covering the eyes. She had a headache, it turned out. Johnny said they would go the following Sunday. At this, Mrs Cross took the flannel off her face, and slowly rose to a sitting position. Her smile was tender.

  ‘My dear Johnny — they were so hospitable to us in Rome, I would not want us to be slow in this instance.’

  ‘But Mother. I would rather go when you are better.’

  Anna’s expression did not falter. An arm emerged from her shawl and she put a hand on his hand. ‘My dear,’ she said earnestly, with that same pained smile, ‘you will not fail me.’

  Johnny was silent before saying, in rather a blurting tone, that sounded even to his ears a jarring note in the Sunday morning sunny silence, ‘Mama, I will feel hopelessly presumptuous. I would rather we went the following Sunday.’

  Mother prevailed.

  Early afternoon Johnny Cross arrived. He stared at the gate, tall, pillars on either side. Two bells. He pulled the one on the right. It rang with surprising volume. Then there was silence, only wind whispering in those high trees. A curiously situated house, he thought. In London, yet not in London. He seemed to see country beyond the house, immediately so, to right and left. Big space between this house and the next.

  He was ushered into a room, the sitting room. He expected to encounter a social scene, a crowd, perhaps, of people standing and sitting and talking, but instead the room was silent and scantily occupied. The first person he saw was Mrs Lewes, sitting with her eyes unnaturally wide, staring, it seemed to him. There were only three other people — guests, he worked out immediately — stationary on chairs: two women, and a youngish man with a rather formidable jaw and heavy-lidded eyes. But Johnny started when he registered the object of everyone’s gaze — the body on the floor. The body was evidently a very young man: face strangely both whitish and dark in different places, moving or squirming as if with pain, still, and then twitching, the knees curling in the direction of the chest. Johnny averted his eyes. He regretted having come.

  He greeted Mrs Lewes and her face showed no expression at all.

  ‘Mr Cross. We met in Rome. My mother, Mrs William Cross, sends her greetings.’

  The features dissolved and warmed. She took his hand between her two hands, of course she remembered him.

  A second later she was again la pietà.

  The boy on the floor moved, then lay still, eyelids fluttering, sweat shining on nose and cheeks, then came a gasp, then silence, eyes fluttering shut.

  The four visitors sat awkwardly, before introductions were made.

  The woman who was called Mrs Norton rose. ‘My dear Mrs Lewes, we are intruding. We must leave you. Unless I could do something to help?’

  Silence. The atmosphere tinged, as with a dubious perfume, with uncertainty. Mrs Lewes said a faint thank you, but nothing else.

  ‘I, too, would like to assist if I could,’ said the man with the heavy-lidded eyes, Mr James. His voice was mellifluous: Johnny couldn’t elucidate further, but he felt that the voice emerged as if it had come through tunnels of thought. It emerged — wrought. ‘I would be deeply gratified, if it were not too much trouble, if you could — ah — explain these most piteous sounds.’

  In her low, musical tone Mrs Lewes explained that Thornie was Mr Lewes’ second son, who had just returned from Africa. He was in terrible pain, they didn’t yet understand it. He needed help, but today was Sunday. Mr Lewes had gone out to try to find morphine. They had also sent a note to Dr James Paget.

  ‘But my dear Mr Cross, I am pleased that you have brought yourself to the Priory,’ she said, automatically, turning to Johnny.

  He couldn’t help smiling, in spite of the dreadful situation — he had a sensation he had been singled out.

  ‘I thought,’ she added gently, ‘that we might not see you again after our lucky meeting in Rome.’

  She did remember him.

  Before Johnny could speak, Mr James cleared his throat, shifted in his seat, and said, ‘You have been in Rome? I would find it most — ah — edifying, if you could render your impressions to us, in the meanest shape or form, as it occurs to you. I am, Madam, I must say at once, your most ardent admirer. Felix Holt has a place near to my heart. I study it. But perhaps I have spoken precipitately.’

  ‘You study it?’ asked Mrs Lewes, eying this guest, with what looked like genuine curiosity.

  ‘I — too — write,’ said Mr James, with a modest air, inclining his head. ‘I am your apprentice. Your dramatic structures, ma’am, your deep understanding —’

  He seemed lost for words.

  ‘May I be allowed to know,’ said Mrs Lewes, with infinite graciousness, and she was la pietà no longer, ‘what it is you have written?’

  (Thankfully the boy on the floor was now motionless, eyes shut. Perhaps he was sleeping.)

  Mr James raised his eyes to look at Mrs Lewes. Johnny was interested in his eyes. He was looking at Mrs Lewes, yet his eyes were veiled. He coughed. ‘Nothing, uh, that would be likely to have attracted your attention, not least because your attention is, I imagine, filled so richly in the first instance. I cannot conceive that my small offerings could have entered those precincts, as it were,’ he added with a modest, yet hovering, inscrutable half smile. ‘I have written as yet only short stories, and what I would call — ah — journalism.’

  The man was American, like the women, but his voice was tinged unusually with an English accent simultaneously, which shaped and changed the vowels.

  ‘I am sorry to say I have not read your stories. I am sure it is my loss,’ said Mrs Lewes politely, and she inclined her head, with an incipient sympathy, which, noted Johnny, stopped short of being presumptuously too much.

  ‘Mrs Lewes,’ said the man called Mr Henry James. ‘Although I have enumerated my — ah — novice works to you, I cannot fail to register that there is a crisis on hand. Would you not let me go in search of this Dr Paget whom you mentioned? I am full of compassion for your situation. I could endeavour to find him.’

  Mrs Lewes accepted gratefully. The ladies rose to leave. In an inspired moment, Johnny resolved his sensation of awkwardness by offering to aid Mr James in his search. The offer was accepted. As he was leaving, Johnny remembered. He reached into his briefcase, pressed the copy of Adam Bede in its German translation into Mrs Lewes’ hand, saying that his mother, and he, hoped she would enjoy the engraved illustrations. Of the translation, he had no such expectation. She was, as everyone knew, expert in the German language, and would doubtless find many infelicities.

  Johnny Cross and Henry James walked across Regent’s Park together, Johnny regulating his naturally athletic stride to keep time with the more measured step of Mr James. They found a hansom in Park Crescent. They were on their way. It was a breezy, sunny May day; there was an odour in the hansom — stale pipe tobacco; the motion was jerky. Johnny sat in one corner; Henry James in the other. Henry James did not speak. He had hardly spoken when they were w
alking: he had worn a look of the most intense preoccupation.

  However, now that they were in the cab together, Johnny broke the silence by saying to him that he had heard of his writings in relation to, possibly, American journals.

  ‘Very kind of you to say so,’ said Henry James, hardly looking up. Then he seemed to wake up, and spoke with sudden affability: ‘I find myself absorbed, my dear Mr Cross, by the lady whom I have for the first time in my life encountered in the flesh: Mrs Lewes, to be exact. I do not exaggerate when I say that I have worn, metaphorically speaking, Felix Holt here,’ — he dabbed with his hand emphatically at the left part of his chest, his heart — ‘since I first read it, when it penetrated into the depths, the very depths. She goes in, if you follow me,’ he said, turning his eyes onto Johnny. His eyes with their heavy lids, and inscrutable gaze.

  ‘I think I follow you,’ said Johnny, trying his best.

  ‘Her art, is what I mean: the broad, wide-ranging, deep picture of us.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Having read her, I find it indescribably moving to meet the person in life.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Johnny.

  ‘I do,’ murmured Mr James, almost to himself; so that briefly Johnny felt Mr James had forgotten his existence.

  ‘A moving incident … a stirring incident … to see her deal with the most extreme yet ordinary crisis, the younger relative in pain, the white-faced boy. Just as it is moving,’ he went on, without a pause, ‘to see her ugliness. Her magnificent ugliness.’

  Johnny did not immediately speak. He had a sensation that some sort of blasphemy had been uttered.

  He stared at the imperturbable face on the other side of the hansom, swaying lightly to and fro with the cab’s movement, the eyes half shut, the slight smile. He felt it incumbent on him, strangely, to protest.

  ‘Really —!’

  At once Mr James’ eyes were on him, with an ironic and sceptical smile. It was as if Mr James sensed his own light sensation of shock, and was now enjoying himself as he proceeded.

  ‘That delicious hideousness!’ went on Mr James, with enthusiasm, looking amusedly, yet compellingly, at Johnny. ‘That low forehead! The dull grey eyes. The vast pendulous nose. The huge mouth. The chin! On and on, as to infinity. Those ill-shaped teeth; the rather small body — she is a feat of ugliness.’

  ‘Oh I say!’

  ‘You do not find her so?’ enquired his new friend, politely.

  ‘Not, ah … as you describe,’ said Johnny, with equal politeness, but he did not look at Mr James.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Mr James, but it seemed to Johnny that he discerned a smile behind the other man’s beard.

  ‘And yet, and yet,’ said Henry James, proceeding thoughtfully, ‘she has a beauty also.’

  For the second time Johnny was lost for words.

  ‘A … beauty,’ he echoed, half frowning. He was mistily attempting to follow James’ thought. ‘You — you — think that also?’

  ‘I do,’ said Mr James, firmly. ‘There is a deep charm in that soft, rich voice. The sense, too, that one is approaching a hinterland behind that soft voice. A vast hinterland, rich with thought and experience, and the golden thread of erudition. She is able to name, if you follow me. She has a multitude of examples, you might say, of those facets of experience — and where it has not been named,’ he finished, ‘she will still go. Stop me if I go on too long.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Johnny Cross, politely.

  The hansom cab did a violent turn round Trafalgar Square, and for a moment the two men were rocked, each flung into the respective corners; then the cab achieved a steady rhythm once more, Johnny coughed as he smoothed his jacket, centring himself once more on the seat.

  Now Mr James turned to Johnny with a smile. ‘Yes, behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking! The understanding —’ Mr James sighed. ‘The understanding, that surpasses the average person’s, as an ocean eclipses a pond: today I glimpsed it. And a vast tenderness, too. No, a beautiful tenderness.’

  ‘Right-oh!’ said Johnny.

  Johnny looked out of the window after that. His companion was indeed strange, he thought. Yet he couldn’t resist glancing at the stocky man on the other side of the carriage, who produced words and ideas so effortlessly. Still, Johnny had a faint sensation of relief when they finally knocked on Dr Paget’s door, and as soon as the maid heard the name Mrs Lewes, they were shown in — but Dr Paget was not at home, it was only Mrs Paget who greeted them and heard their story, and said she would notify the doctor as soon as he was home. Henry James and Johnny said their goodbyes. Johnny made his way to the station.

  Waiting for the train to Weybridge, Johnny sat on the platform, in the sunny smoky air. What a strange morning. That poor boy. Mrs Lewes, and then Henry James, the heavy eyelids, the veiled look, the faintly prim-looking mouth that seemed to harbour a possible smile in that well-trimmed dark beard. What was it he said? Magnificently ugly. Deliciously hideous.

  Johnny went back to the moment in Rome when he had beheld Mrs Lewes for the first time, sitting in the shadowed part of the room. He had had to control his features which had dropped at the sight of her. The idea that the smallish woman on the far side of the room, with the strangely large head and — and — his thoughts tailed off.

  But no, he could not instantly put her together with Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. The beauty of feeling he had found there.

  ‘Behold me literally in love …’ Mr James had said.

  ***

  At Weybridge station the florist was open, and he bought an especially large bunch of peonies, pink and white, for his mother.

  The next moment he frowned. The word ‘hideous’ had swum back into his mind. It was … a kind of blasphemy! He had a sore, affronted sensation.

  Had Mr James been laughing at him?

  4

  Marian sat regarding Thornie as he slept. He was at least peaceful now — had been dosed with morphia, and was surely exhausted, too. Sometimes she could see George in his face.

  Only two weeks ago they had been in Rome. She could remember all the preparations for the journey home, but it seemed a very long time ago. Then there was the travel itself. For some reason she kept remembering the Munich station in the cool half-light of the breaking dawn, silent and deserted, a little disturbing. There, they had taken the train to Strasbourg; after which, roaring through the night-time countryside, they had travelled to Paris.

  Lewes had rested his head on her shoulder, the gas light burning only faintly, bathing the room in a queer sallow colour, the train carriage smelling of heated metal. Sometimes he rocked forward, but Marian would steady him.

  Hurtling through northern France in the darkness, with Lewes asleep, knowing she was nearly home, Marian had at last had her mind to herself.

  She had a low, simmering instinct that she hadn’t yet used her powers as a writer fully — had hopes of returning to the strengths displayed in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, yet on a larger canvas, everything deeper, broader. Lifting the blind in the carriage window, she could see blackness, occasionally shapes in the distance, what looked like the far line of the horizon under the night sky. Some minutes later, she could make out a hilltown in the night. Just visible! This was how the new novel was, she thought: projecting dimly, fantastically in her mind.

  Within twenty-four hours, the hansom cab reached Regents Park, The Priory, and servants Amelia and Grace were letting them in. They were home. The house looked swept and tidy: two piles of post visible, a new cloth of maroon velvet on the hallway table. With dazed, tired eyes, warmth beginning to seep through her, Marian couldn’t see enough of the familiar hallway and stairs. Ben the bull terrier was jumping up in a frenzy of joy. In the dining room, they had leek soup, Welsh rarebit, and a refreshing glass of red wine. ‘Eh, Ma’am, you’ve had a journey, you have!’ Amelia kept saying, then returning to a
sk if there was anything else they wanted: it was pleasant to see Amelia’s wide, pale, pudgy face again, with the monk-like fringe, unable to stop smiling as she collected the plates. Afterwards they sat, just George and herself, in the drawing room. There was a fire burning. Even Marian’s chilled feet began to be warm. It was good to see the long room again, she had forgotten how pretty the flower-tracing wallpaper patterned in gold and green was; how comfortable the wingback chairs, with the low table linking them. Just perceptible, along with the smell of the burning wood, was the medicinal, reassuring smell of beeswax. Amelia or her sister Grace had polished the furniture for their return. The sense of relief deprived her of speech for some minutes. They were back.

  The next morning she woke early — she could see cracks of light either side of the heavy curtains, spilling gold. Downstairs, one of the servants was up already: the sound of running water, low bang of the pots. She found Amelia on her knees, sweeping the kitchen stove with a brush.

  Amelia said Marian had looked ‘done in’ when she arrived last night.

  ‘I am fine,’ said Marian, smiling, suppressing a sensation of impatience. ‘I wanted to ask if you would be so kind as to bring up coffee to my study.’

  ‘Done in,’ Marian repeated under her breath, making a face, as she climbed the stairs. Reaching her study door, she paused. In the early morning, the house was silent, except for the steady ticking of the tall clock downstairs. And, distantly, birds.

  She turned the door handle, stepped in, seated herself — her breathing steadied. Here she was, the familiar garden below, at her desk. She drew from her travelling bag her notebook. Some minutes later, Amelia brought a tray with steaming black coffee and warm milk in a jug.

  Marian sipped her coffee, savoured the silence, solitude, waited for her mind to settle.

  But her mind did not settle. The public. She was thinking of the public.