The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens

by William J Palmer

  Charles seemed rather intimidated by the responsibility which had been so precipitously thrust upon him, but the child seemed rather amused by the whole affair, as if being passed around like a basket of muffins was a rather common occurrence in her young bohemian life.

  After long minutes of dandling the infant, shifting our feet on the tiles of the entrance foyer, and gazing at the many paintings which hung on the walls of the hallway leading to the steps up which that young woman had disappeared, she finally returned with a sheepish smile.

  “Oh, Mr. Dickens, in my hurry to tell Danny the news, I just, out of habit, handed Lolly to you. We tend to pass her around here like a beach ball. I am sorry. He and Lizzie are in the studio. You know, the late afternoon light and all. He said for you to come right up.”

  “Why thank you,” Dickens said, handing her back her pink bundle, and with that we followed her up.

  After ascending to the second storey of the house, she led us down a long corridor, our footfalls muffled in lush oriental rugs, our eyes feasting upon the glut of brilliant original paintings which covered every available space on the walls. When she opened a door at the end of that hallway for us and bid us go in, we realized what she had meant by the artist’s need to take advantage of that late-afternoon August light. That carpeted art gallery of a hallway was in no way dark or dim, but when that young woman opened the door to Rossetti’s studio, a rich golden light flooded out upon us. It was a brilliant light though textured and soft, and in no way a violent shock to our eyes. What we encountered, however, when we entered that studio, was, indeed, quite a shock and stopped us dead in our tracks just inside the door on a small landing two steps above the sunken room.

  It was a large high room of half-circular shape. From the entrance on that small landing where we stood staring, the walls, totally windowed, curved in a gentle arc out away from us. The room was all wide windows and skylights, and the late-afternoon sunlight streamed through and bathed everything in a golden glow. But it was neither the graceful arc of the room nor the mythic light which had so captured our attention.

  At the far end of the room, on a simple cream-colored divan set into the deepest curve of the windows, reclining in a pose of total abandonment, was an utterly naked woman. She did not move when we entered. She seemed blissfully, even innocently, unaware of our very presence in the room. I was transfixed by her beauty, and Dickens must have been as well, for we both stood there gaping down at her, utterly unaware of anyone else in the room. Lying there on her back bathed in that golden light with one arm and her head thrown back in total abandon, her eyes closed, she was a figure out of myth. Her other arm hung helplessly to the floor as if trailing in some limpid forest pool. She was Psyche; she was the Eternal Muse; she was the Lady of Shalott. The golden sunlight danced across her alabaster skin and caressed the gentle curve of her breasts. Her legs were open in beckoning submission, one dangling helplessly over the end of the divan, the other trailing heedlessly to the floor, and the golden light set afire the dark red triangle which adorned her mound of Venus. She was a nymph out of the Golden Age (certainly not of our age) waiting in languid expectation for the satyrs to return for their sport. It was Elizabeth Siddal, who by Dante Rossetti’s brush would become the icon of female sexuality for our age. Oh, Lizzie Siddal was an exotic beauty indeed. I could not take my eyes off of her.

  “Thank you, Sarah,” a somewhat bemused voice broke our enchantment. Turning my head too quickly in embarrassment, I realized that it was a tall thin man at an easel dismissing the woman with the baby who had been our guide into this enchanted world. Rossetti was tall and clean featured, with shiny black hair brushed back from his forehead and a thin Frenchified mustache adorning his upper lip. The woman with the baby shut the door as she left, and Dickens stepped forward to greet Rossetti.

  Standing at his easel, which held a large canvas upon which his study in golden flesh was in progress, with a large dirty palette in one hand and his brush in the other, Rossetti looked more like a banker on holiday than a famous painter or notorious bohemian. He was wearing a somber and buttoned black suit, with his white shirt open at the neck sans cravat. He just didn’t look like a painter. I guess I expected some sort of long flowing paint smock and an extravagant straw hat.

  “Charles, I am delighted to see you again. It was the benefit dinner for John Overs, that poor poet, that last brought us together, was it not? I attended with Carlyle, who lives just two houses down the Walk.”* Rossetti placed his brush and palette on a high work table beside his easel and greeted Dickens with an outstretched hand.

  “Dante”—Charles took his hand warmly—“I am so sorry to intrude. Please finish your work. We shall wait outside until you are done. I would never have broken in upon you unannounced like this if it were not urgent.”

  “Nonsense.” Rossetti smiled a gentle understanding smile. “We all work too hard at this mad thing we call art. No one works harder at this than you. We read each new number of Bleak House aloud, you know. Poor Jo has become all of our child. We mourned his death as though we had lost one of our own.”

  “But you are working. You shall lose your light, your model her mood.”

  “Not at all.” With a sweep of his arm Rossetti took in the whole room. “I welcome the interruption. In fact, I live for the interruptions. This art, this composing, is such hard work. The light will come again. And as for Lizzie,” he laughed, “she has been drinking most of the afternoon. She is in the land of the Lotus Eaters.”

  He delivered that speech in an almost lilting voice full of amusement and philosophical disdain. His allusion to Tennyson’s poem seemed altogether fitting. Miss Siddal did, indeed, look as if she were drugged. She reclined there in her pose of naked abandonment even as we spoke about her.

  Suddenly, however, I was startled by the model’s abrupt movement. Miss Siddal sat up and stared, rather blankly, at us. She made no attempt whatsoever to cover her nakedness. She just looked wonderingly up at us as if we were the curiosities, the rara avis in that room. I, of course, immediately averted my eyes.

  “Miss Woodruff said that you were accompanied by a second gentleman, Charles.” Rossetti’s laughing voice drew my attention away from that awakened nymph. “I don’t believe that I have had the pleasure,” he said, and moved toward me with his small hand extended.

  “Wilkie Collins.” Dickens made the perfunctory introduction, but I noticed that his gaze also had been arrested by the sudden movement into life of the naked Miss Siddal. “Wilkie is my colleague in Household Words.”

  “Mr. Collins, I am pleased to meet you.” Rossetti was all charm and ease. But that mood was stridently broken in an instant.

  “Are they here to paint me, too?” Miss Siddal demanded in a harsh voice clearly returned from Lotus Land. “Or have you just invited some of your gentleman friends in to watch you work”—and a mischievous grin stole across her face, giving her teasing away—“…and me pose.”

  “Actually we are here to see, uh”—Dickens paused, momentarily flustered at his own poor choice of words (for a word-man)—“to speak to you, Miss Siddal.”

  At that, the woman rose and reached for her wrap. I watched her every movement even as she covered herself in a flowing green silk robe. Having done so, she walked to a wide, flat worktable at the side of the room against the only unwindowed inner wall, and refilled a stemmed wineglass with an emerald green liquid which matched the color of her robe in the dying sunlight.

  “Would you like a glass of absinthe, gentlemen?” Rossetti took his cue from Miss Siddal. “It has a very pleasing effect upon one in the late afternoon.”*

  Dickens waved off that offer of seductive hospitality and I demurred as well, but I must say that I found the afternoon surprise, the différence as the French call it, of nude models and decadent drugs decidedly stimulating.

  Miss Siddal resumed her seat on the creamy divan and looked up at us expectantly while Rossetti pulled up two high, plain wooden stools, of th
e sort that clerks in countinghouses are chained to, for Dickens and me to perch upon. Her eyes were wide with the drug, or perhaps with curiosity at these two birds of prey who had descended upon her, but she seemed perfectly capable of conversing.

  “What is it you wish of me?” she asked.

  “We are involved with the investigation of the murder of Eliza Lynn Lane of the Women’s Emancipation Society.” Dickens got down to the business of the moment. I was always amazed how, even in moments susceptible to great distraction, he was able to maintain his concentration upon his task. “Could you tell us anything about her or about the night of the murder?”

  She thought on that for a moment as Rossetti looked on rather bemused, sipping from a glass of absinthe which had magically appeared in his hand.

  “Actually, not much,” she finally answered. “I was there at our meeting that night when she burst in and threw her cat fit.” She grinned happily at the memory. “But she just screamed a lot of silly things and ran out. Most of the women were shocked, though I thought it rather funny.”

  “How was it funny?” Dickens pressed her.

  “Well really,” she laughed, “imagine Eliza Lane accusing us of all those terrible things. It was like casting the first stone. And, anyway”—she became a bit more thoughtful—“those things she accused all of us of doing were the very things we often discussed in those meetings, things like the freedom to love and take your pleasure just as men do.”

  Dickens decided to move on with his interrogation. “So you didn’t see anything unusual or significant that night which might reveal why she was murdered and by whom?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Anything? Any small thing?”

  “No. No sir. She seemed especially angry at Miss Angela and at Nellie Ternan…”

  At that, Dickens perceptibly recoiled as if he had been struck in the face by a small stone.

  “…but why I certainly do not know. They are two of the sweetest, kindest women in that group. But now that I think on it, your name was mentioned along with Nellie’s.” At that, a light seemed to come on in her distracted mind. She grinned vacantly. “Oh, that is why you are doing this, isn’t it?”

  Again, Dickens was momentarily taken aback, but he hid his embarrassment and quickly recovered.

  “What about Miss Lane’s friends? Miss Beach and Marie de Brevecoeur.” Dickens struck off in a new direction. “Do you know them at all?”

  At this question, Elizabeth Siddal glanced quickly at Rossetti as if for permission, as if she was uncomfortable with the question and wanted him to help her to answer. He did nothing. He sipped from his fragile glass and smiled benignly at Dickens as they both waited for the answer.

  “I do not know Sydney Beach, except for talking to her at the meetings, but…” And again Miss Siddal paused and her eyes leapt to Rossetti in a plea for help.

  This time he answered her with a slight, almost imperceptible nod downward of his head. What he gave her permission to say proved the most shocking revelation of any of our interviews thus far. Little did we know that we were entering a world where the aesthetics of the body tangled themselves with the rough commercial perversions of the night streets.

  “Marie de Brevecoeur has been here,” Elizabeth turned back to us and almost triumphantly declared, “and we tried to make love right here on this divan.”

  “And I tried to paint them,” Rossetti added quite congenially, “but it did not work out. I got only a few preliminary sketches.”

  This revelation managed to break even Dickens’s concentration.

  “What do you mean? I, I, I don’t understand,” Dickens managed to sputter.

  “Shall we say that Marie de Brevecoeur expressed a, shall we say, intimate interest in Lizzie,” Rossetti, still quite amused, began to explain.

  “She asked me to sup with her after one of the Women’s Society meetings.” Elizabeth Siddal took up her own story as a woman quite used to speaking for herself. “But we never went into the coffeehouse. In the cab on the way, she talked of free love. She said that she and Sydney Beach were daughters of Lesbos. She asked me if I knew what that meant and I said yes, because I did, because Danny is always talking about it since his paintings are mostly of women. Then she started touching me.”

  She paused to drink, and I looked quickly at Dickens, who looked quizzically at Rossetti. Rossetti just nodded solemnly as if to say Be patient and she will tell you all.

  “I was somewhat surprised,” Elizabeth resumed her narrative, “but she was saying very nice things and she was very gentle, in no way threatening. But I was confused. I told her that I was Danny’s lover, that I had only been with men and I was very happy as his mistress and model. When the cab stopped outside of the eating place, I broke away from her and told her that I needed time to think about what she had been saying.”

  “What had she been saying?” Dickens miraculously seemed to have found his voice.

  “She told me that she had fallen in love with my body from Danny’s paintings, that they had inflamed her desire and that she would like to make love to me, but, even more than that, she would like Danny to paint us making love. I told her I would think about it and I had to leave. She was utterly accepting of my decision. She made me take the cab. I left her standing there in the street before the coffeehouse. I never had any sense that she was forcing herself upon me as men have so often in the past, before I met Danny.”

  Again she stopped, only this time not to drink. Rather, she waited, as if her part of the story was over and her partner in crime (though neither of them exhibited any guilt) was expected to take it up and bring it to conclusion.

  “Naturally, I was quite intrigued by this story and this woman’s proposition.” Rossetti took up the narrative without the slightest hesitation.

  “Naturally.” Dickens said it somewhat wryly, in a voice approaching sarcasm.

  “Yes, quite naturally actually,” Rossetti answered with that same heedlessness that was beginning to remind me of Tally Ho Thompson’s eternal knowing grin. “I told Lizzie that the whole idea spurred both my carnal curiosity and my aesthetic desire. I told her that I would enjoy both watching and painting her and this woman making love here in the studio. We discussed the whole project at length and Lizzie seemed quite as curious as I. The upshot is that she invited the woman to come, the woman came to the house in the late afternoon on a day much like this, but it just did not work.”

  “What do you mean ‘it did not work’?” Dickens could barely contain himself as Rossetti seemed, by stopping, to be signaling the end of his story.

  “I didn’t really like it. I felt uncomfortable,” Elizabeth Siddal resumed the narrative. “I thought it might be a lark, a new experience, the freest of free love. But when we were naked”—her voice slowed as she remembered—“and we were kissing”—she spoke as if she were in a trance, reliving a dream—“of a sudden I felt very frightened and confused. I was afraid and wanted to escape her caresses.”

  The telling of this intimate tale had completely broken Miss Siddal down. She struggled from her seat on the divan, tears streaming from her eyes, overturning what was left of her glass of absinthe in the process, and fled to Rossetti, burying her head in his chest. “Oh Danny, Danny, I’m sorry. It would have been such a picture.”

  “It upset her greatly, as it still does, as you can see.” Rossetti, quite composed, finished speaking for her. “She was not really able to do it, you see, to open herself to that other woman in the way that woman was demanding she do. She sought shelter in my arms just as she is doing now. I think it confused her mightily,” Rossetti finished in classic understatement.

  “And you were trying to paint them?” Dickens, who had recovered his composure, pressed for more of the tawdry details.

  “Yes. I tried.” Rossetti seemed to be getting bored with the subject. “But they weren’t at it long enough for me to get anything down, just a few scrawled sketches.” He stopped a moment to think. “But
the woman’s idea was a good one, and she has helped me to execute it. Actually, she was very nice about that whole affair.”

  “Oh she was wonderful, so understanding.” Lizzie Siddal, still in tears, raised her red face from Rossetti’s chest. “She didn’t mind that I couldn’t make love with her. She said that I probably wasn’t right for women, not all women are. She said she was sorry and she hoped she hadn’t frightened me. She said once more how beautiful I was, that I was”—and a desirous wistfulness seemed to float like a flower in a still pool into her voice—“the most beautiful woman of our age and that was why she so wanted to touch my beauty.”

  I was stunned at the simplicity and depth of her narcissism. I was moved by it, I think, not only because she so believed in it, but because the wistfulness in her voice gave off the scent of mortality. She knew how fleeting was that beauty upon which she had built her whole existence.

  “But I was caught up in the idea, you see, of painting two women making love.” Rossetti seemed to have rekindled his interest in our conversation. “And I asked Miss de Brevecoeur, before she left us that day, if I might paint her making love to another woman.”

  Rossetti clearly had none of the woman’s compunction about following his art for art’s sake philosophy wherever it might lead.

  “And what did she answer?” Dickens was utterly captured by the strangeness, the utter frankness of Rossetti’s distanced, purely aesthetic view of this act which our century and every other century condemned as unnatural.

  “She answered that yes, it was quite possible, but I would have to pay for the privilege and do my painting in a much different, less congenial light.”