On Tuesday 15th June they went back to the Accademia, but Mr. Cross felt unwell in the afternoon and so they did not go out. Next morning, on Wednesday 16th June, Sophie departed for a day at the Lido with another German family they had befriended in the hotel. Max decided to send up his card to the Sibyl with a little message, wishing Mr. Cross a speedy recovery, and then to beat a retreat. He arranged to have himself rowed to the wharf before the Hôtel de l’Europe, but there was Karl, just outside the Danieli’s rotating doors, bristling with fresh information.
‘Herr Cross is seriously indisposed, sir. The lady has summoned Dr. Richetti for an urgent consultation.’
The clatter of bells and the mass of morning traffic bringing deliveries of fish and fresh vegetables to the market on the wharf blurred Karl’s urgent report. Max hauled him into the gondola and yelled at him to say it all again. So, the young man had fallen in the battle to keep pace with the Sibyl.
Even in the midst of his embarrassed dismay at the church of Santa Maria Assunta, beneath the ironic indifference of the gigantic Madonna, Max registered the fact that Mrs. Lewes, now a decidedly old lady, had blossomed beneath her appalling mantilla, and marched off down the nave with a bounce in her stride. Her young cavaliere, red and sweating, tramped beside her. And it was the handsome athletic red-beard who lay toppled upstairs, not the old frail dame.
A breathless rush through a damp German forest surged across Max’s memory of the woman, who still, obscurely, haunted his imagination. He heard Lewes’s voice urging him to take Polly out for a canter, and remembered his own chagrin upon discovering that the racehorse rarely proceeded at anything less than a gallop.
‘Oh well, that’s probably for the best. I won’t have to persist with visits. We’ll deliver our deepest respects and sincere concern for Mr. Cross’s health, wish him a rapid recovery and retreat at once to the Lido.’
Max imagined Sophie’s glowing face emerging from her bathing machine as he approached, like the wicked stepmother in ‘Snow White’, carrying a basket of fresh fruit and a melting bowl of ice cream.
They rocked slowly up to the jetty where a drenched red carpet led directly into the Grand Foyer. A gaggle of English visitors wobbled into their gondolas, exclaiming and fanning themselves. The hotel foyer steamed gently with foliage, a tropical palm court, designed to host Sunday-afternoon concerts. Max stepped aside on to the wooden planks, paused to light a cigarette and give himself time to compose a suitable sentence or two that he could slither into the envelope along with his visiting card. But he had no time to compose more than a single phrase. A great shout went up from the gondolas. He sprang back against the cold stone of the hotel wall in time to see a black figure tracing a giant curved arc in the air, the feet whirling like chariot wheels. The man leaped from the balcony above him, cleared all four gondolas and landed with a gigantic splash directly in the middle of the Grand Canal. Karl, stationed in the outermost gondola, immediately hurled himself into the water. So did one of the gondoliers, who later turned out to be one Corradini, the man employed by Mr. and Mrs. Cross to squire them around on their Venetian visits. Corradini had recognised his employer, flying through the air. For the man struggling to sink beneath the green water, resisting all attempts at rescue, was none other than Mr. John Walter Cross.
Max rushed to help the hotel staff, who hoisted the limp and sodden man out of the water. His shirt ripped open, revealing a hairy, virile, barrel chest, beneath the dripping beard. The sad fellow gave up the fight and lay groaning on the jetty, helpless and dishevelled. He wore no shoes. Max clasped his naked ankles and raised them up to stop them dragging on the marble squares as they transported him into the foyer. Five men, all shouting at once in desperate Italian, carried him rapidly up the stairs. The affair shuddered through the public rooms in a slow motion of whispers and stares. Someone’s fallen in. He didn’t fall. He leaped. Who is it? Who is it? The banker married to the much older lady. I didn’t catch the name.
On the wide landing decorated with worm-white copies of classical statues Max confronted a vision of the Sibyl, gaunt and terrified, visibly aged before his very eyes, as if the magic potion of her energy had been drained away. She uttered a low cry and staggered against Dr. Richetti who clutched his watch chain, as if he too needed support. They rushed the dripping body into the marital bedroom and laid him out upon the rumpled sheets and tossed pillows. Max relinquished the collapsed ankles and found the Sibyl attached to his arm like a dying clam.
‘Max, help me,’ she whispered.
The San Marco police station classified the incident as a ‘suicide attempt’ and reported the event in the following manner:
J.W. Cross, an Englishman of forty years, had been lodged for two weeks at the Hôtel de l’Europe with his wife, a woman over sixty. For some days he had been looking sad and melancholy, prompting his wife to call in a doctor. While they were talking, the husband, in the next room, made the aforementioned attempt on his life.
Max spent the rest of the day composing telegrams and organising their rapid expedition to William Cross, the unfortunate banker’s brother, begging him to come at once. Cross himself, doused with chloral, passed out. Max insisted on a little brandy for the shaking, distraught Sibyl. Karl was dispatched to the Lido, where he found Sophie, who had been waiting for hours, expecting Max at any moment, livid with fury, ready to eat the tablecloth, and once she had heard the story, prepared to drown the Sibyl herself.
What happened in those days leading up to The Great Leap? Well, the Sibyl’s real identity remained concealed. No hint that the elderly lady married to the mad banker was in fact the famous novelist, known under many other names, ever leaked out in Venice. But Rumour, that fleet-footed creature, raced across the mountains. London society rippled with malicious speculation. Even the police reports noticed the age difference between husband and wife. Had the lascivious demands of the elderly widow simply exhausted the young man? Had the very suggestion that he should enjoy the body of a woman old enough to be his mother rushed him to the edge of the balcony? Did he prefer boys? I’m told Venice is the right place for that. Was there madness in the family? The Sibyl said so. That’s what she told the doctor; but genetic insanity lets her off the hook, doesn’t it? Had Johnny Cross previously suffered from some kind of personality disorder, and the sudden onset of suicidal melancholy? An earlier incident is recorded, but nothing so serious as the Venetian defenestration. Who knows the truth, especially when it is disagreeable and embarrassing for all concerned?
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 Engla
nd 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!
Sophie and the Sibyl Page 28