Sophie and the Sibyl (32 page)

We barge into other people’s lives, desperate to make ourselves heard, to have our feelings noticed, our rage and blame taken into account. Sophie had just done the same thing. She discounted the Sibyl’s point of view entirely. And had no idea whatsoever that she had unleashed a hornet’s nest of jealousy in the pounding breast of Edith Simcox. Sophie whirled through the front doors of her host’s mansion leaving Edith stranded in the street, hoping to snatch a word with the coachman, the housemaid or the delivery boy, anyone she could pump for information. What luck! Here comes a florist with a barrow, bearing red tulips.

The lady of the house? No, she’s already gone to the Museum for the ceremony. The lady who just went in? That’s the German Countess, married to the famous archaeologist who found the statue. I’ve brought these flowers for her. Ah! Edith had read all about the discovery in
The Times
. So that woman is the radiant Countess who dominated the photographs. She’s far more beautiful than I am. Younger, too, and much more fashionable. Edith charged back towards the Priory, that magnetic lodestone upon which all her thoughts were bent. She patrolled the far side of the street, studying the bedroom blinds, ignoring the oncoming rain.

Edith loved the Sibyl too well to reproach her, even in the privacy of her most secret thoughts, but the galling facts could neither be avoided nor denied. The Countess had walked straight in, when she, Edith, the devoted lover, with years of faithful service behind her, had been unkindly refused entrance. This cross must be borne, but it proved a heavy load to haul up and down the street as the chilly spring evening drew on, with all its lights and shadows.

We think of the Victorians facing death in a rustle of black plumes, many carriages trailing the wet streets in procession, black bows tied to the cab drivers’ whips, the blinds and curtains firmly closed. A murmur of gloomy prayers, black crêpe dresses, and weeping mourners dominate the domestic interiors of Victorian novels, pages littered with deathbed scenes and uplifting final moments. They are all there on my bookshelves, desperate to convince me that every single cliché is perfectly true. No one seems to die in a torrent of faeces or yellow vomit. And even if they do there’s a cleaned-up lying in state, usually in the dining room or the front parlour, the heavy scent of lilies cloaking the sweeter stench of putrefaction. Only the very rich bothered to have their dead embalmed.

Who faces death in the triumphant certainty that they are bound for better shores than these? No more did then than do now, I rather think. Frederick William Robertson, an Anglican priest, for whom Emma Darwin, beloved wife of Charles, had a good deal of time, preached the following sermon in 1852.

Talk as we will of immortality, there is an obstinate feeling we cannot master that we end in death; and that may be felt together with the firmest belief of a resurrection. Brethren, our faith tells us one thing, and our sensations tell us another. Everyone who knows what faith is knows too what is the desolation of doubt. We pray till we begin to ask, Is there one who hears, or am I whispering to myself? We hear the consolation administered to the bereaved, and we see the coffin lowered into the grave, and the thought comes, What if all this doctrine of a life to come be but the dream of man’s imaginative mind?

If men of faith were men of doubt, how did our agnostic intellectuals of the 1870s face their own deaths, believing, as the Sibyl did, that this was the Final Parting from all that was dearly beloved, from familiar faces and scenes, from the cat and the furniture, shelves of fingered volumes, an unfinished manuscript, a garden where we once gathered in the roses? Were they heroes, facing the void? Did no one blink or flinch as the agony approached? Or were they all stalwart, proud and as courageous with certainty as Marcus Curtius, gazing into the Roman abyss, before he dared the final bound?

Nineteenth-century symptoms of illness are tantalisingly, indeed infuriatingly, vague. G.H. Lewes is often described as ‘feeble’, ‘delicate’ and ‘ill’. Whereas the Sibyl suffered from dyspepsia, and disabling headaches: bad headache, ordinary headache, bilious headache, theatre headache and constant headache with added nausea. In addition, she came down with bodily malaise, feeling unwell, feebleness of body, constant dull pain, deep depression, feeling weak and generally ailing. In her Journal, on 1st January 1876, she records: ‘All blessedness except health.’ By 1877 the bulletins concerning health take a darker turn. 16th March: ‘Since I last wrote G. has had an illness of rheumatic gout and I have had a visitation of my renal disorder, from which I am not yet free.’ By June 1878 she reported that her Little Man was suffering from ‘suppressed gout and feeling his inward economy all wrong’. In fact, George Lewes was dying from bowel cancer.

Lewes suffered from piles, cramp and diarrhoea, presumably streaked with blood. His pains, intermittent but severe, didn’t stop him singing Rossini, with great spirit, but began to change his appearance. One of their visitors reported that Lewes looked as if he had been ‘gnawed by rats’. Cancer, like tuberculosis, haunted the deathbeds of all sorts and conditions of men, one of the many nineteenth-century diseases that dared not speak its name. Sir James Paget examined his wealthy patient and described his terminal ailment as ‘thickening of the mucous membrane’. The black cells cast their shadow through his body, and began to creep inside, then occupy all his vital organs. Astonishingly, his energy survived. On 21st November 1878, after an encouraging visit from Sir James, Lewes drove out to post parts of the manuscript of what was to be the Sibyl’s last book, to Blackwood in Edinburgh. But on the next day, 22nd November 1878, when Edith Simcox finally gained admittance to The Presence, the joyous pleasure she anticipated lay already dashed to pieces. ‘Monday came at last, but hardly the greeting I had dreamt of: the first thing I saw was Lewes stretched upon the sofa, and in concern for him I lost something of the sight of her.’ Edith realised at once that he was dying.

She laid siege to the housemaids. 26th November 1878: ‘On Monday the doctors were there and he was very ill. It seems that he must die – and then her life is one blank agony and – if that mattered – mine too.’ 28th November 1878: ‘This morning Sir James Paget thought him a shade better. I did not dare to go and ask and came to the house this morning with a deadly fear – perhaps he will recover? I dare not hope, I only know that if he dies the world will have nothing left for her.’ Lewes himself, who had not been told that he was dying, still hoped that his illness, which he described as ‘a fluctuating sickness with much malaise and headache’, would pass. But by nightfall on 29th November 1878 he had begun to sink away. At half past three in the afternoon of 30th November Edith Simcox roused the white-faced maid, who told her that there was no hope. Edith waited on the road, walking back and forth. The doctors gathered in their carriages and stood talking outside the gates. Edith approached them. ‘I asked was there no hope. A tall man – probably Sir James Paget – answered kindly, None: he is dying – dying quickly.’

Her next entry on 1st December reads as follows: ‘He died at a quarter to six – an hour and a half after I left the house. She sees no one, is in hysteric agonies. I can only think of her with dread.’ George Henry Lewes, the ape-like dancing master, the vibrant buoyant Little Man, cheated of the knowledge of his own death, and yet extravagantly mourned, was swept away to be buried in the Dissenters’ section of Highgate Cemetery. Mrs. Lewes did not attend the funeral, but Edith Simcox visited the grave on 5th December 1878, and found ‘the desolate new mound. Two white wreaths were on the grave and I laid mine of heather between them.’ Edith Simcox remained faithful, not just to the Sibyl, but to both of them.

Max arrived in London early in January 1879 to participate in the preparations for an International Archaeological Congress. He received stern orders from Wolfgang to pay his sorrowful respects to the grief-stricken author, and thus Max found himself standing at the Priory gates, mid-morning, in bright frost and sunlight, gazing up at the pointed gables and dark thorns of the barren roses. He rang the bell and stood for several minutes, shifting his weight from foot to foot. A tall man with a reddish beard, dressed in deep mourning, came striding towards him. Enter John Walter Cross, financial adviser to the Lewes household, and so intimately cherished that the Sibyl called him ‘Dearest Nephew’. Cross clearly counted as family to the older couple. The two men identified themselves, then shook hands. Nobody came to the door.

‘She sees no one,’ said Cross, looking up at the shuttered windows, ‘but I have called almost daily.’

‘My brother sent our condolences of course, as soon as we heard.’ Max did not want the financial adviser to think that the Sibyl’s German publishers had been remiss or in any way disrespectful to the sacred memory of the Beloved Husband. ‘But we did not even know that Mr. Lewes had passed away until we read it in the German papers. He is of course very famous in our country as the biographer of Goethe. Many of his works are translated. Mr. and Mrs. Lewes are both greatly honoured and respected in Berlin.’

Johnny Cross’s expression of set gravity mellowed a little, gratified. The maid appeared at last in a gust of steam, and reported that her mistress had been out that morning and taken a turn in the garden. She felt the better for it.

‘Give her our love,’ said Johnny Cross, and Max left his card, unable to think of anything suitable to write upon the back. In fact, he breathed again, mightily relieved that the Sibyl would admit no one. What could he say to her? He had not set eyes upon the lady since that fatal night in the autumn gardens at Stuttgart. Nor had he ever read that loving message of reconciliation and forgiveness which Sophie flung back in her face. He had prepared a formal speech of course, but now, delighted that it would not be delivered, he turned to his companion of the doorstep, with a face glowing in the cold. After a moment’s discussion the two men decided to take advantage of the bright day and walk across Regent’s Park together.

Something hectic and unsettled emerged from the strange huge man. His powerful physique, like a great cone of polished obsidian, seemed to shudder as he marched ahead, leading the way across the bridge. Two long lines of grief in his vigorous young cheeks gleamed stark and deep as he raised his face to the sun. He adapted his stride so that he and Max walked abreast and made it clear that he wanted to talk. Max knew how to listen, and his hesitant formal English transformed him, on this occasion, into a professional confessor. Thus, the sad torrent of misery that poured forth from the Sibyl’s financial adviser, a normally reticent man, fell upon sympathetic ears.

‘My dearest mother,’ murmured Johnny Cross. His voice broke and his stride faltered, Max supported him gently at the elbow. ‘My very dearest mother lay mortally ill just as Mr. Lewes sank close to death, and within a mere nine days she was gone. Forgive me, sir, the burden of my loss weighs hard upon me.’

He produced a handkerchief. Max concluded a rapid diagnosis of the case. Mr. John Walter Cross had lost both a father and a mother in the space of a fortnight, and was now clinging, desperate, to the wreckage of this last attachment. The Sibyl, he went on to explain, meant everything to him, he had counted upon her understanding love, and comfortable words, but the dark veil of mutual grief had descended between them.

‘Our lives are utterly changed. We have both lost our counsellors, our daily support. Even ordinary objects become double in our vision, sir. I cannot look upon cushions, teapots, an armchair, without missing the hand, the bent head and white hair beneath the cap, that should be there, and no longer is. Mrs. Lewes cannot bear to leave the rooms they once shared. How well I understand her.’

The pipes at the Priory froze and burst in the blizzards of that freezing winter. Cross narrated this disaster, that would once have shaken the Sibyl to the core, but now household matters shrank to trivialities, for her ‘everlasting winter has set in’. Marian Evans Lewes now confronted the starkest, most brutal trial of her entire life. The Final Parting that she had so dreaded, the rupture that wrenched her fragile happiness from her grasp, had come at last, leaving her naked of all philosophy. She reached the bleakest of all shores and gazed upon the endless ocean, until love and fame sank to nothingness.

‘She is very wise,’ Johnny Cross continued, ‘a wise woman indeed. But she is not herself. Our friends are all anxious at this absolute, enforced seclusion. Her nerves are shattered. And I fear that the servants are not discreet. I am told that howls and screams are heard from her apartments. She will not be consoled.’

Johnny Cross would not be consoled either. He paused, tottered, and passed a hand across his forehead.

‘Sir, you are not well.’ Max transferred his walking stick to the other hand and braced himself, should the giant begin to topple, right there amidst the barren trees and crusted mud upon the pathway. But Johnny Cross recovered himself.

‘You are very kind. I’m afraid that I have burdened you most disgracefully with my troubles. The sensation of bereaved disbelief is ever present. I sleep little. And my love for her is boundless. She is an exceptional woman.’

Max no longer knew if Cross was speaking of his dead mother or the living Sibyl.

‘Mrs. Lewes is admired by all who know her,’ said Max in lowered, cautious tones.

And then again, he saw before him the great forehead, the head inclined, the magnificent clear grey eyes, the godlike sensation of understanding and forgiveness, the certainty of unconditional love. She looks into all hearts, knows all desires before they are spoken. She traces the patterns of our very thoughts, before they take shape within our brains. This stranger to me loves her beyond measure. He is in thrall to the woman who is all pity and compassion, the woman who will have forgiven me for my indiscretion and my too hasty words before I slept that night. He loves her as I loved her. And then at last Max could be honest with himself. He loves her, and I still do.