The Honeymoon

by Dinitia Smith

  Still, mostly men came to the house, rarely women because of their unmarried state. There were lots of bachelors, seeking her wisdom as if she were a priestess, young men struggling with ideas, eager to learn from her, drawn by the famous intellect. She was in her forties now. Perhaps she was like a mother to them. She encouraged them, listened to them, held them captive with their worship of her. All these young men, they could never hurt her. She could experience the world of men without heartbreak.

  One July Sunday, a dapper little man with a beguiling smile and yellow gloves was brought out of the dimness to meet her. His name was Emanuel Deutsch.

  “Your article was glorious,” she told him. She had asked to see him. He was a Silesian Jew, a lowly assistant in the British Museum who had just published an article in the Quarterly Review on the Talmud and its similarities to the Christian Bible. In the Talmud, he wrote, could be found the foundations of all Christianity, the notions of a Messiah, of redemption, regeneration, and turning away from sin. He wrote about the rise of Jewish nationalism at the time of the Babylonian captivity and the Jewish longing for a homeland. Until Deutsch’s article, for the most part, non-Jews had been ignorant of the Talmud, but Deutsch had revealed it to them. Although Marian had long given up on formal religion, the question of religion and faith still preoccupied her, especially the universality of belief. Deutsch was speaking to her own notions.

  He smiled his sweet smile. “Praise from George Eliot means as much as anything in the world to me,” he said in his German accent.

  “You must speak many languages to be able to write this,” she said.

  “I can read Chaldaic,” he said. “Sanskrit, Amharic, and the Phoenician language.”

  “I very much want to learn better Hebrew,” she told him.

  “I would be honored to be your tutor,” he replied.

  He began coming once a week to give her Hebrew lessons. Meanwhile, his article had become a best seller, of all things. The Quarterly Review had gone into no less than seven reprints. People were attacking him because they said he was belittling the Bible. The London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Among Jews called the essay “blasphemy.”

  When Deutsch next appeared at the Priory, he was near tears. “I beseech you,” Marian said, “try not to think of it. Make the effort. You’ve done the world an enormous service.”

  As they grew closer, she came to love him like a son. He told her that the greatest longing of his life was to see Jerusalem. He managed to get a commission from his employer, the British Museum, to go to Palestine to decipher some inscriptions that had been discovered there on ancient stone.

  From Palestine, he wrote to her: “The East … All my wild yearnings fulfilled at last.”

  When he returned and came to the Priory, he described to her how he’d prayed at the Western Wall of the Temple along with other Jews. As he was telling her, he broke into tears and couldn’t go on. “I understand,” she said, touching his shoulder. “I understand and I envy you the gift of faith.”

  After Romola, which had seemed to drain all her blood from her, she tried writing a play. It would be easier, she thought, than a novel. The characters would simply move across the stage and speak, and she wouldn’t have to fill in the story with details. She called it The Spanish Gypsy. It was set during the Spanish Inquisition, about a Gypsy girl. She did her usual research, studied Spanish, but foundered in a swamp of misery. “Maybe I’m destined never to write anything good ever again,” she told George.

  All he could do was sigh and kiss her — he was used to her litany of worries and sorrow.

  When she let him read it, he held the pages to his chest and said nothing.

  “Tell me the truth, please,” she said. “I’d rather hear it from you than others.”

  He sighed. “The problem is it lacks drama,” he said. “I can’t stand to see you suffer. I think this isn’t the thing for you.”

  Never before had he said this, and she knew he must be right.

  As she’d been struggling with it, an idea for an English story had kept intruding on her thoughts, about the events surrounding the Reform Act which had so marked her childhood. She had never forgotten riding with her father in the gig that election day when they went into Nuneaton to market and witnessed the laborers rioting.

  She conceived of an idealistic young radical, Felix Holt, and an estate owner with radical ideas, Harold Transome. They fall in love with the same woman, Esther Lyon, and the story of Felix Holt, the Radical, went on from there.

  After she finished it, she returned to her play about the Spanish Gypsy. She decided to write the whole thing in verse — poetry might free her imagination. Not so. Like everything she wrote, progress was slow and painful. It didn’t sell as well as the novels, though the Spectator praised it as “much the greatest poem of any wide scope and on a plan of any magnitude, which was ever proceeded from a woman.”

  She’d also begun to conceive of a novel about medicine. It would be set in the provinces in a town named Middlemarch, a fitting name for a place that was in the middle of the road. She sketched out the character of an idealistic doctor, based on Chrissey’s husband, poor, wretched Edward Clarke. “Tertius Lydgate” wants to use the latest scientific research in his work, but is trapped in a marriage to pretty, grasping Rosamond Vincy. As always, she thoroughly researched the background and the setting. She ordered books on medicine, studied the details about provincial hospitals — she must have read two hundred books for that novel. She even observed an Oxford professor, Dr. George Rolleston, dissect a human brain.

  Writing the new novel was, as usual, a torment, but as George reminded her, “You’ve felt this way about everything you’ve ever written. And it’s always succeeded.”

  “Rosamond’s so hard,” she said. “She’s all surfaces.”

  “Perhaps because she’s so unlike you,” he said.

  Increasing numbers of people were coming to the “at homes” now — naughty George started referring to them as “Sunday Services for the People” and took to calling her “Madonna.” Charles Darwin came. George had been one of the first to praise his On the Origin of Species in the Cornhill Magazine, and Darwin was grateful to him. He was a tall, stooped man, with red hair fading to gray, a seemingly deferential figure, yet filled with a kind of tension, a guilt and defensiveness, she thought, about his radical ideas. She and George had read On the Origin of Species together. She’d found the ideas interesting indeed, but Darwin wasn’t a very good writer, and the book was quite disorganized.

  They held an evening so Tennyson could read his poem “The Northern Farmer.” “Wheer ’asta beän sawlong and meä liggin’ ’ere aloän?” it went. Impossible to understand with that Lincolnshire dialect of his. After he finished, he read “Maud” and became so totally swept up in enthusiasm for his own words that he went on until they were all practically falling asleep, and his son, Hallam, tugged at his arm and cried, “Papa, it’s after midnight!”

  She was recognized now even when they were abroad. In Rome, they were getting money from a bank and the cashier looked up and said, “Aren’t you the author George Eliot?”

  “Oh dear,” George said, “would you mind not telling any other English people that Mrs. Lewes is here? We’re trying to have a peaceful holiday.”

  It was fortunate they didn’t keep everyone away.

  They were wandering through the maze in the Pamphili Gardens, following the serpentine green hedges trying to find the opening to the end, when they ran into a young woman, Zibbie Cross, on her honeymoon with her husband, Henry Bullock. George had met the Cross family two years before while he was on a walking tour in Surrey with Spencer.

  The next night in Rome, Zibbie’s mother, Anna, called on them at the Hotel Minerva, bringing two of her other grown children with her, her daughter Mary and her son Johnnie.

  They sat in the faded lobby of the hotel with its wood-beamed ceilings and worn frescoes, a statue of Minerva in a niche, and Georg
e ordered tea for everyone. Anna Cross was a widow who’d born ten children. She was small and plump, Mary and Johnnie Cross were both very tall. (Father Cross must have been tall.)

  Mary was thin, austere, and quiet. At once, Marian noticed Johnnie Cross’s good looks, his dark red curly hair, his elegant beard, his tall, strong, athletic body, his good cheer, his youthful health and radiance. He was twenty-nine.

  As they sat and chatted, Johnnie told her he’d gone to Rugby. Then, at seventeen, he’d been sent to New York to work at a branch of the family banking business, Dennistoun & Cross. “I’ve been living with my brother, Richard,” he said, “on a place called Washington Square.” He had a faint Scottish-American accent, she noticed: soft, round r’s and long vowels.

  She noticed that he was kind and deferential to his mother, pouring her tea and carefully handing it to her. “Johnnie, dear, can you fetch me my purse with my handkerchief?” And he sprung up at once to get it.

  “He’s a saint,” Anna said in front of him, “my perfect one. He was so sickly as a child. He had rheumatic fever and I spent months nursing him and praying over him. I thought I’d lose him. I think because of that he’s my special boy.” As she spoke, Johnnie smiled sweetly at his adoring mother and didn’t seem the least bit discomfited at the mention of being nursed by her. A bit under his mama’s thumb, Marian thought.

  “I read your novel, Romola,” he told her. “I was quite dumfounded by the learning in it. I don’t know how you could have made it all so real.”

  “Thank you,” she replied. “You couldn’t have said anything better.” What a sweet boy he was.

  Arriving back in London from Rome, they walked in the door of the Priory and saw a figure sitting in the darkness of the parlor. On hearing the door opening, the person struggled up from his chair and stood before them. “Thornie!” George cried.

  He was recognizable, he looked like a skeleton. George went to him, and he sank back down immediately into the chair. “I’m in some pain,” he said.

  Thornie had written from Natal saying that he was suffering from back pain because he’d been in a wrestling match. He was losing weight, he wrote. George had urged him to come back to England to get medical attention.

  At once, George sent for Sir James Paget — he was the queen’s own doctor. They tried to carry Thornie up to a bedroom, but he couldn’t bear to be moved. Instead, he lay on the floor writhing in agony. When Sir James arrived, he examined him, and then shook his head. “I really don’t know what it is, but I will give him morphia.”

  For a few hours it helped, and he slept. But then the pain returned. Sir James called in a surgeon, Henry Roberts. Roberts told them, out of earshot, “I suspect it’s tuberculosis of the glands.”

  “Is there a cure?” she begged.

  “I’m afraid not,” he said. “We can continue with the morphia. And pray for a miracle.”

  They made him a bed on the couch. Sometimes, when the pain faded, the old Thornie would return, and he’d sing Zulu songs to amuse them and try and make them laugh.

  She put aside her work on Middlemarch to take care of him. At night, George dozed in a chair beside him, ready to give him more morphia when he awoke. She played the piano to try to soothe him, Beethoven and Schubert sonatas.

  Barbara Bodichon bustled in one day, bringing fresh chicken and fruit from her estate in Hastings. “Please,” she said, “let me sit with him and you go out for the day and rest.”

  She and George took the train down to Weybridge to have lunch with their new friends, the Crosses, who had a large house at the foot of St. George’s Hill. It was full of family and youth. There were two tall brothers in residence, Johnnie and his older brother, Willie, both of them bachelors and living with their mother. Willie was not as handsome as Johnnie, he was dark-haired like his mother, Anna, with small, narrow eyes, somewhat quiet and withdrawn. Johnnie Cross was the outgoing one, always trying to please everyone and thinking up games. Some of the unmarried sisters were there, Mary, Eleanor, who was round and plump like her mother, and Emily, a pretty, demure girl. Zibbie was visiting with her husband, Henry Bullock. Zibbie was big with pregnancy, and Anna Cross was fussing over her, for she was bearing the first grandchild.

  “I have something I’d like you to hear,” Zibbie told Marian. She sat down at the piano. “Oh dear,” she said, “I hope I can still reach the keys.”

  She stretched her arms across her swollen belly and began to play and sing: “Oh through the pines! The pillared woods, where silence breathes sweet breath …”

  “The Spanish Gypsy,” Marian cried.

  “I made a song of it,” Zibbie said. “The music’s mine.”

  Marian got up and hugged her as best she could, gently, across Zibbie’s big stomach.

  Thornie became paralyzed from the waist down. As Marian sat by his bed hour after hour, all she could do was write poetry: “Death was now Lord of Life,” she wrote, “And at his word / Time, vague as air before / new terror stirred.”

  The end was near. They sent for Agnes, his mother, and Marian absented herself from the house so Agnes could sit alone with her son.

  In October he died, only twenty-five years old. Marian was forty-nine now, George was fifty-two. She felt as if Thornie’s death was the beginning of their own. A few nights after Thornie died, George was standing by the bed when suddenly he dropped to the floor. She ran to his side. He soon recovered consciousness. Was George himself ill as well? He’d been complaining of terrible headaches and a constant ringing in his ears.

  They went away to Surrey and rented Park Farm, a supremely quiet place, and they mourned. They saw almost no one, though one day they rode over to Weybridge to visit the Crosses, to grieve together with them, for they’d suffered their own tragedy. Zibbie Cross had died giving birth to a baby boy, who survived her, and Johnnie Cross announced that he was retiring from Dennistoun & Cross and moving back to England to be with his mother.

  It was not until the following spring that she and George had the strength once more to take up their work. George had embarked on a new project he was calling Problems of Life and Mind. “I’ve spent my career popularizing other people’s ideas,” he said. “Now I want to make my own contribution.” The book would be an attempt to reconcile his belief in science with metaphysics.

  Again she took up her novel about the idealistic country doctor. To boost her spirits, she changed the color of her ink, from dark brown to purple — at least purple was a slightly more cheerful color.

  She invented a new character, Dorothea, who wants to devote herself to a higher cause, and thinks she must do it through a man — just as Marian herself had done, she thought, through Charles Bray, and awful Dr. Brabant, and Chapman. Only she made Dorothea beautiful, “high-colored but with a bloom like a Chiny rose,” and a gemlike brightness to her hair.

  Dorothea makes a terrible marriage with Edward Casaubon, whom she believes is engaged in a great intellectual work, “The Key to All Mythologies,” he calls it. But she discovers he’s unable to finish it and all he does is rewrite his few paltry pages. (Silly George, taking his break from laboring over his Problems, took to calling his own manuscript “The Key to all Psychologies.”)

  For Casaubon, she summoned up her memories of Brabant and his unfinished manuscript. She gave him the little white moles Brabant had on his face — with hairs sticking out of them, and made him slurp his soup.

  As she wrote, she laughed out loud to herself. When Middlemarch was published and people asked her who the real Casaubon was, she’d reply primly, “I fear that the Casaubon-tints are not quite foreign to my own mental complexion.”

  She made Dorothea fall in love with Casaubon’s nephew, Ladislaw, and then she killed Casaubon off. She had two main stories going at once now, one about the idealistic young doctor, Lydgate, and his wife, pretty, vain Rosamond Vincy, and the other about Dorothea and Ladislaw.

  But she had to bring them together. “Why not have Dorothea suddenly come upon Rosamond
and Ladislaw and think that they’re lovers?” George suggested.

  And she did just that. Of course Dorothea is completely wrong. Rosamond and Ladislaw are certainly not having an affair and Dorothea and Ladislaw marry and live happily ever after.

  She wrote the last pages of the book in Germany, in Homburg. Afterward they traveled to Hamburg to take the waters and heal their various illnesses — headaches and general biliousness (both of them), and decaying teeth (hers).

  They went to the Kursaal to watch the gamblers (as theater only). The gamblers were mostly old women with gaunt faces and wigs and crablike hands, and vaguely louche foreigners. The room was hot, the lights bright, the air filled with the desperate chink and rattle of the croupier’s wheel, the exclamations of the losers.

  One person among them seemed out of place, a young woman, purer-seeming than the rest, a sylphlike beauty in a sea-green dress, bent over the table intently. An older woman was teaching her how to gamble. Someone next to them whispered, “That’s Lord Byron’s grandniece, Lady Geraldine Leigh.”

  At first the young woman was winning. Then she began to lose. She still had a pile of louis in front of her. The old woman, her teacher, tried to get her to come away, but she ignored her.

  “Faites vos jeux,” the croupier commanded. The sylph pushed her last louis forward, watching the wheel, biting her lower lip.

  “Jeu zéro!” the croupier cried. She’d lost again. The girl turned to her companion, the old woman, terror on her face.

  “Poor thing,” Marian said to George. “What could her story be?”

  She couldn’t get the image of the young girl out of her head.

  When Middlemarch was published, her celebrity lifted her like the crest of a wave. They called it her “masterpiece.” She was “a great teacher,” they said. Barbara Bodichon, her dear friend, so incapable of telling her anything but the truth, wrote to her that it was her best book ever.