Sophie and the Sibyl (38 page)

One thing is certain. By the time Sophie returned to their suite at the Danieli on that fatal day, Wednesday 16th June 1880, in the calm gold of evening, she had convinced herself that the Sibyl, not content with the attentions of one young man, whom she had driven insane and then almost bullied into a watery grave, had now sunk her jealous claws into Max, the second young man, and her next victim. Sophie paced the length of her terrace, four floors above the market down on the quays, ignoring the shouts far below her and the bells from San Giorgio Maggiore. Her loosened hair, still damp and salty from the sea, drying fast on the back of her white muslin housecoat, floated free. She strode like a Valkyrie, glamorous, armed. When Max clattered on to the balcony, without his hat, breathless and ready to face the music, she swung round upon him.

‘Well? Explain yourself!’

Sophie’s opening blast roared past the potted palms in their terracotta jars.

‘Sophie, my dearest, I was there by chance when it happened. I had to help her.’

‘She drove him to it.’

‘Hardly. I can’t believe that. He is seriously unwell. No one can be held responsible.’

The justice of this cut through Sophie’s rage, which was fuelled by the perception that she had taken second place to the mighty Sibyl, and been abandoned on the Lido.

‘You deserted your family to help this woman who has caused nothing but trouble between us.’

This accusation was true, but struck Max as utterly unjust. He bit his lip. Sophie raged on.

‘She has a new husband and another family. Let them help her. Why should she need you too?’

‘Sophie, stop. In common humanity I could not do otherwise. Her husband apparently tried to make away with himself. I have summoned his brother, who will be here in two days. Until then she is alone, and needs my help. We are her publishers. We owe her a great deal. Surely you must understand that.’

But Sophie refused to understand. Her uncanny intelligence sifted and judged, not just the facts, but also the emotional yearning behind them, and read the cards correctly. Max remained bound to this old woman, and a web of hidden connections, smuggled without acknowledgement into their married lives, sank like the taproot of an unkillable weed, into the past. Homburg. All this dates from Homburg. She could not identify the nature of the web, but knew that it hung between them, all three of them. Palpable, but unrevealed, the shimmering web vanished in the rising wind from the lagoon.

‘And I must go back to her this evening, Sophie.’ He stood still, waiting for his wife to capitulate.

‘Oh no, you won’t!’ She actually stood on the toes of his boots. ‘You shan’t go. I say, you shall not.’

Her gently freckled nose was one centimetre away from his own. Max simply gazed at the woman he loved, his decision steady in his eyes. For a moment he thought she intended to strike him. Instead, she screamed her jealous intransigence, not only at Max, but all of Venice.

‘You say she needs you. She’s already got a husband. Let him get out of bed and look after her. She married the wrong man, didn’t she? And so did I.’

END OF CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

END OF PART TWO

FINALE

for who can quit Young Lives after being long in Company with them, and not Desire to Know what befell them in After Years?

And had Sophie married the wrong man? Some marriages rock back and forth, like a creeper stretched between two trees, an unstable link that never breaks. Her marriage to Max, her childhood sweetheart, proved to be one such and rolled on, turbulent, joyous, explosive – and unbroken. Apart from his passion for the Sibyl, which never entirely dissolved, he neither coveted nor desired any other woman. And as he got older he even dropped the prostitutes. I believe him when he claims that he sought out no further Venetian adventures. Other marriages, like the free union between George Henry Lewes and Marian Evans, seem destined, upon strictly utilitarian lines, to secure the greatest happiness for all concerned; and to produce the conditions within which both parties live profitable and industrious lives. Many people found Lewes insufferably irritating. The Sibyl didn’t. And between them they gave birth to the writer herself: Marian Evans Lewes, better known as George Eliot. When Sophie accused her of marrying the wrong man she was not of course referring to her union with Lewes, but to that bizarre if legal marriage to Johnny Cross. Is it against nature to marry a man twenty years younger than yourself when he is a vigorous specimen and you have no teeth left? Well, look at it this way, he collapsed with nervous exhaustion, and she was the one still standing after weeks of gruelling tourism in draughty churches and damp trains.

Cross recovered from his peculiar attack of the melancholy horrors and carried on with the honeymoon. His brother, Willie Cross, arrived in Venice like the cavalry, took over from Max, offering his deepest gratitude and counting on ‘Your every discretion, sir’, so far as the public and indeed the press were concerned. Willie accompanied the newlyweds back to Austria. I note that Johnny Cross never suffered a relapse, never married again, and lived on until 1924. He remained her faithful banker, and, after her death, transformed himself from grieving widower into Keeper of the Sacred Flame. His
Life of George Eliot
, more or less in her own words, carefully edited, amounts to something more solid than a discreet muslin veil draped over an object of sexual scandal. True, he downplays Lewes’s role, and he certainly doesn’t point out, as more recent biographers have done, that George Eliot flung herself at more or less every man who took the slightest interest in her. She lured in the women too. Both Mrs. Congreve and Edith Simcox regarded themselves as women in love with another woman. They were given plenty of encouragement. George Eliot loved to be loved. We have had to wait a hundred years for all the lesbian attachments to be revealed, and even now I’ll be accused of tendentious anachronism for even mentioning that fatal word, and for suggesting that the great writer herself harboured Sapphic sentiments. No, Cross worshipped his dead wife and defended her against all comers. George Eliot married the right man. Twice.

And as for the writer’s famous charisma, well, even Sophie von Hahn recognised the drugged enchantment of the older woman’s power. She described her as the Queen of Fairies, or la belle dame sans merci, one New Year’s Eve, in her father’s drawing room. Max alone among the festive company understood that ballad, which is just as well, for Sophie aimed her song at him. He may have fallen under the witch’s spell, but Sophie decided, for reasons she has already given, to resist. George Eliot needed to be adored, but, even more deeply, she longed to be worshipped, revered. And until that incident of the letter, a petition addressed to her god, and for her eyes only, Sophie counted herself among the most ardent of acolytes.

Some readers are delighted to find themselves described in other people’s novels; readers of a different temperament immediately contact their lawyers. In the eighteenth century, if proceedings ensued, the publishers, or as they were known then, the booksellers, took the hit and saw their business closed down and their stock confiscated. Mrs. Gaskell had to print some embarrassing retractions, after being too free with her sexual accusations in her
Life of Charlotte Brontë
. Nowadays, if a character decides to issue writs, the writer has to face the music on her own. Sophie wasn’t the sort of woman who cowered behind writs; she settled her own scores. George Eliot’s last heroine, Gwendolen Harleth, with her dangerous egotism and arrogant stupidity, seemed manifestly so different from the bold and elegant Countess von Hahn, a girl born to inherited wealth and privilege, that no one else ever made the connection between the roulette table in Leubronn and the Casino in Homburg. After all, Sophie wasn’t the only young woman leaning over the green tables, her gaze fixed on the red and the black. The one thing those two young women shared was a love of horses. But Sophie felt, and justice in this case is clearly on her side, that the novelist had stolen something from her. For George Eliot certainly stole many things from Sophie on that autumn night in Homburg – her courage, her daring, her success. Sophie looked back, later in her life, and hissed in vindictive triumph:
I never lost, I won.

Writers often begin their works with a question. Sometimes they keep that question to themselves, or in George Eliot’s case they put it right there in the first line. Was she beautiful, or not beautiful? Is that the first question a man asks of a woman? George Eliot created, in Gwendolen Harleth, a spirited, exceptional creature, in order to punish her. Discipline and punish. That’s what so many nineteenth-century writers did – punish the women. So the questions are never open-ended, such as, what did she think? How did she feel? What did she do? The consequences relating to that first question, was she beautiful or not beautiful, determine all else in the writer’s mind. And sometimes in the reader’s mind too. Max doesn’t escape the clichés of judging women by appearance either, does he? He first saw George Eliot in September 1872, when she was in her fifties. The lady is old, the lady is ugly, the lady has wonderful eyes. George Eliot is still famous for being hideous.

But I must not jeer at the brilliant dead. Their fate will be ours. Beauty and ugliness alike fade, decay and drop to dust. This is a cruel truth perhaps, but then, as George Eliot brutally pointed out to Edith Simcox, ‘Why should truth be consoling?’ The writer survived her honeymoon, but she did not survive the year. At first the scene remained unclear – between the old woman and her young
cavalier servente
– which one was seriously ill and needing succour, and which one was bearing up well? Mr. and Mrs. Cross were already on their way back to England when Edith Simcox heard the rumours.

11th
July 1880

Yesterday I was startled by the question, ‘Is Mr. Cross any better?’ and then a rumour that he was ill – or like to die – of typhoid fever at Venice. It seemed too horrible to be true and yet I hardly dared to doubt it. It was bad enough at best to think of her alarm if he was ill at all.

Dear Edith! Her first thought was always for her darling, the woman she never ceased to love. As she wrote the next day, ‘I must love you unchangeably, my sweet.’

Over the next few months George Eliot settled into her usual pattern of letters, visits, piano playing and ferociously intellectual reading. Cross clearly recovered all his natural force. By 2nd November 1880 she records that he was cutting down trees in the afternoon. They began the process of moving house to 4 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. But she began no new work. Her writing life was over. The last words of George Eliot’s Journal were written on Saturday 4th December 1880.

J. to city in morning. Home to lunch. Went to our first Pop. Concert and heard Norman Neruda, Piatti etc. Miss Zimmermann playing the piano. After

And so it ends, the last sentence left unfinished. Edith saw her for the last time just before Christmas. The writer was suffering from a sore throat. Edith records her visit, and the dreadful event which followed, in her own Journal.

23rd
December 1880

She was alone when I arrived. I was too shy to ask for any special greeting – only kissed her again and again as she sat. Mr. Cross came in soon and I noticed his countenance was transfigured, a calm look of pure
beatitude
had succeeded the ordinary good nature. Poor fellow! She was complaining of a slight sore throat, when he came in and touched her hand, said she felt the reverse of better. I only stayed half an hour therefore; she said do not go, but I gave as a reason that she should not tire her throat and then she asked me to come in again and tell them the news. He came down to the door with me and I only asked after his health – she had spoken before of being quite well and I thought it was only a passing cold – she thought it was caught at the Agamemnon. I meant to call again tomorrow and take her some snowdrops. This morning I hear from Johnny – she died at 10 last night!

Her last whispered words to Johnny Cross were these: ‘Tell them I have great pain in the left side.’

Edith Simcox, her love unfaltering, followed her beloved to the grave. George Eliot lies buried in unconsecrated ground in Highgate Cemetery, and her tomb touches that of G.H. Lewes. Edith recorded that terrible day of loss and final separation.

29th
December 1880

This day stands alone. I am not afraid of forgetting, but as heretofore I record her teaching while the sound is still fresh in my soul’s ears. This morning at 10 when the wreath I had ordered – white flowers bordered with laurel leaves – came, I drove with it to Cheyne Walk, giving it silently to the silent cook. Then, instinct guiding, it seemed to guide one right all day – I went to Highgate – stopping on the way to get some violets – I was not sure for what purpose. In the cemetery I found that the new grave was in the place I had feebly coveted – nearer the path than his and one step further south. Then I laid my violets at the head of Mr. Lewes’s solitary grave and left the already gathering crowd to ask which way the entrance would be. Then I drifted towards the chapel – standing first for a while under the colonnade where a child asked me, ‘Was it the late George Eliot’s wife was going to be buried?’ I think I said yes – then I waited on the skirts of the group gathered in the porch between the church and chapel sanctuaries. Then someone claimed a passage through the thickening crowd and I followed in his wake and found myself without effort in a sort of vestibule past the door which kept back the crowd. Mrs. Lankester was next the chapel – I cannot forget that she offered me her place. I took it and presently everyone else was made to stand back, then the solemn procession passed me. The coffin bearers paused in the very doorway, I pressed a kiss upon the pall and trembled violently as I stood motionless else, in the still silence with nothing to mar the realisation of that intense moment’s awe. Then – it was hard to tell the invited mourners from the other waiting friends – men many of whose faces I knew – and so I passed among them into the chapel entering a forward pew. White wreaths lay thick upon the velvet pall – it was not painful to think of her last sleep so guarded. I saw her husband’s face, pale and still; he forced himself aloof from the unbearable world in sight. The service was so like our own I did not know it apart till afterwards when I could not trace the outlines that had seemed so almost entirely in harmony with her faith. Dr Sadler quoted – how could he help? – her words of aspiration, but what moved me most was the passage in the church service lesson – it moved me like the voice of God – of Her: ‘But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain – but God giveth it a body, as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.’ Awe thrilled me. As at the presence of God. In the memory of her life bare grain – oh God, my God. My love, what fruit should such seed bring forth in us – I will force myself to remember your crushing prophecy – that I was to do better work than you had – that cannot be, my Best! and all mine is always yours, but oh! Dearest! Dearest! It shall not be less unworthy of you than it must. As we left the chapel Miss Helps put her arm in mine, but I left her at the door, to make my way alone across the road to the other part where the grave was. I shook hands silently with Mrs. Anderson and waited at the corner where the hearse stopped and the coffin was brought up again. Again I followed near, on the skirts of the procession. A man – Champneys I thought – had a white wreath he wished to lay upon the coffin and as he pressed forward those behind bore me on, till I was standing between his grave and hers and heard the last words said: the grave was deep and narrow – the flowers filled all the level space. I turned away with the first – Charles Lewes pressed my hand as we gave the last look. Then I turned up the hill and walked through the rain by a road unknown before to Hampstead and a station. Then through the twilight I cried and moaned aloud.