The Honeymoon

by Dinitia Smith

  As he sat down with his coffee, in an effort to occupy him, to rouse him, to pretend that everything was normal, she suggested that they make the trip to Murano and Torcello, obligatory on any visit to Venice. He nodded assent, still stupefied with the aftereffects of the laudanum, but thankfully, calm now.

  Outside, the sun had risen higher, a burning disk just visible behind the haze, spinning malevolently.

  The gondolier, Corradini, rowed them out to Murano, past the cemetery island and the Church of San Michele. It was peaceful and quiet on the lagoon, the splashing of the water on the side of the boat rhythmic and restful. The gondolier, standing on the afterdeck, plowing the water with his oar, kept his pale eyes ahead, aloof, as if wary of annoying Johnnie again as he had the night of the Malibran. Though the man lacked all manners, she thought, he had an animal sense of how far he could go without losing his employment. Johnnie seemed hardly to notice him.

  She noticed again the sinew of the gondolier’s forearms, the strength of the muscles. As she sank back into the shade of the tendalin, she felt a kind of fear at the man’s quiet, his seemingly inhuman indifference to them. He had them in his power. She had a sudden sense of being rowed to her doom, of the gondolier, like Charon, unclean, with hollow eyes, rowing them across the river to the land of the dead. She felt a headache coming on from the heat and the jagged reflection of the sunlight on the water.

  At Murano, as she stood up to disembark, the boat rocked under her feet and she was afraid she’d fall in the water. Corradini reached out his hand and grasped her arm to steady her. His hand was rough, like sandpaper. “Thank you,” she said. He didn’t acknowledge her, even to nod his head.

  They set out on foot, leaving him behind, smoking his cigarette on the dock, looking away from them out at the water.

  They toured the Church of San Donato and visited Salviati’s, the glassworks, where she bought gifts for his sisters. “Look, won’t Mary love this?” she said, holding up a vase of turquoise glass, hoping to excite him. It had a rim of gold acanthus leaves and gold handles in the shape of dolphins. “I want to take Mary home something nice.”

  He smiled painfully, with effort, and nodded. “Very nice.”

  “Good, we’ll take it,” she told the lady shopkeeper.

  When they’d finished, Corradini rowed them onward to Torcello, which was bleak and windswept even in June. It was largely deserted of tourists, with a few fishermen’s huts, muddy flats, the canal lined with ruined brickwork. They walked to the crumbling old Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta. A boy brought them the key and they went inside. It smelled of death and mold.

  “See,” she said to Johnnie, “that’s the bishop’s throne.” She was the one with the enthusiasm and energy now. Johnnie was subdued, dazed from his long sleep, saying little as she pointed out the sights, eager to cheer him. “Those mosaics are from the eleventh century. See the Virgin, all the gold on the apse there?” She hoped to wear him out so that he’d sleep again, to give him the exercise he said he needed and had been so deprived of because of his old wife.

  That evening after supper, he refused to take any more of the laudanum. “I can’t bear the way it makes me feel in the morning. It makes me feel sluggish. I’ll be all right,” he insisted. “I promise.”

  Chapter 16

  The heat oppressed, the sky was thick, hazy, the atmosphere weighing down upon the city. There was no air in the appartement, and her face was covered with sweat. She tasted the salt on her skin. It was the sirocco coming, the great, humid wind all the way from the Sahara, bringing with it storms and high water.

  In the afternoon, they made their way to the workers’ quarters in San Biagio to see John Bunney.

  Number 2413 was a factory building with rough wooden doors. They rang the bell, and after a minute the doors flung open. “Welcome!” said Bunney. “Welcome to my humble abode.”

  He led them up the stairs to the second floor, to a large, light-filled space with plank floors and big windows that looked out over the water. Waiting there in the background was a wan woman with protruding eyes, Mrs. Bunney.

  The room had little furniture, and was strewn with canvases and easels. There was an iron bedstead, a long table and chairs, a wardrobe with its door hanging off, a woodstove, canvases leaning against the walls.

  “Lizzie asks that you please pardon her,” Mr. Bunney said, “but she’s having one of her attacks of neuralgia today.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Bunney said, drawing her hand across her brow. “I’m rendered just incapacitated by these things.”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” Marian told her. “I have them myself. We won’t stay long.”

  “But some tea …”

  “Please, don’t bother,” Marian told her.

  “Mr. Ruskin said that I was to show you some of my work,” Bunney said.

  In the middle of the room was a long carpenter’s table with paints and jars of murky liquid and brushes and stacks of drawings on it. Bunney began sorting through it. “This is for Mr. Ruskin’s project on Saint Ursula,” he said, holding up a watercolor of an hourglass, and another of a chair. “He’s in the process of copying Carpaccio’s Dream of Saint Ursula in the Accademia, and he’s asked me to work at his side. I’m just doing the secondary objects, the hourglass, the bookcase, the chair, and so on, and Mr. Ruskin’s doing the main figure, of course. But,” he said sadly, “Mr. Ruskin hasn’t been back in Venice for three years now. He’s been ill, I’m afraid.” Tactfully, he didn’t say what Ruskin’s illness was, but it was generally known that he’d gone insane.

  “He says the saint reminds him of Miss La Touche, the young lady he loved so much and who died.” Rose La Touche had been Ruskin’s fourteen-year-old pupil when he became infatuated with her. Eventually, the girl had starved herself to death. It was said she was insane herself. Her death had apparently precipitated Ruskin’s own illness.

  Mr. Bunney continued separating out his sketches for them. “Mr. Ruskin likes everything precisely as it really is, every line, every pediment, every shadow. He made me redo the bookcase and the table. Ay, he’s a rough taskmaster. But he took me out of the Working Men’s College and gave me work. I’ve got Lizzie and the children to feed.”

  Mrs. Bunney, in the background, spoke up sharply. “Mr. Ruskin is a harsh man. He drives him too hard. He looks so old,” she said. “Mr. Ruskin has aged him.”

  “No, Lizzie,” Mr. Bunney said, “he is a perfectionist, that’s all.”

  Mrs. Bunney said bitterly, “I can’t forgive him for not letting you come to Florence when little Frank died.”

  Mr. Bunney sighed. “Yes, that was cruel. I was in Verona and Lizzie and the children were in Florence. She wrote that our —” Here he stopped, sat down on a stool, and shook his head, unable to go on. Then he took a breath and continued. “Our darling boy had … passed away. But Mr. Ruskin wouldn’t let me go to them. He said there was too much work to do.”

  He collected himself. “Oh,” he said, “I almost forgot! These are Mr. Ruskin’s pamphlets. He says it’s very important that you see the things he’s written about, so you understand his whole campaign against the restoration, how precious these old things are.”

  Johnnie took the pile of pamphlets. He smiled eagerly. He seemed suddenly to come alive. “Thank you. This is wonderful!”

  When they were out on the fondamenta, he said brightly, “Let’s make a project of seeing every single thing Ruskin describes in his pamphlets. Shall we do that?”

  “But Johnnie, there are hundreds and hundreds of things he mentions.”

  “We can do it! In honor of the place.”

  “I don’t think I have the strength in this heat.”

  “I’m determined,” he said. “You can stay behind if you must. I’ll go without you.” He began paging through the pamphlets. “Off we go! Every single one! Santa Maria Formosa, that’s right near here.”

  “We’ve already been there,” she said dully.

  “
Yes, but we haven’t seen it through his eyes.”

  He started walking northward, to the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, and she followed. He came to a stop in front of the church and read from one of the pamphlets. “The third period of the Renaissance …” Looking up at the building, he exclaimed, “He hates it!” He looked down again. “The architecture raised at Venice during this period is among the worst and basest ever built by the hands of men …”

  “This is apparently the only church in Venice with two facades,” he said. “This façade whose architect is unknown, consists of a pediment, sustained on four Corinthian pilasters …”

  He stared down at the page. “He’s talking about a hideous face. Where’s that?”

  “Above the bell tower.”

  “Look at it!” he cried, pointing to the bell tower. Above the door was the head of a gargoyle carved in stone. It had only one eye, its mouth was grotesquely distorted, its tongue bulging. “Huge, inhuman and monstrous, leering in bestial degradation …,” Johnnie read eagerly.

  And so it went. Across the bridge to the Salute to see Tintoretto’s Marriage at Cana — “The most perfect example which human art has produced …”

  “I’ve got to sit down, Johnnie,” she said. “I feel weak.”

  A look of irritation crossed his face. “Of course,” he said.

  She sat down on a ledge, in a tiny bit of shade, while he paced impatiently, sorting through the pamphlets. He was almost spectral now in his thinness. After a few moments, he cried, “On to the Carmine.”

  “But that’s all the way across the Dorsoduro.”

  On they walked, into the heat. Her feet began to hurt. The air weighed down on her. She straggled behind him as he made long strides. A ridge on the inside of her boot was cutting into her ankle.

  “My feet are swollen,” she said. “There’s something hurting my foot.”

  In the past, he would’ve stopped immediately and tended to her, but not now. “We’ll soon be there!” he said.

  At last, in the hard light of the midday sun, they were at the Carmine, a small, stark church, red brick and marble. Inside, he stood before Tintoretto’s painting The Circumcision, the baby resting on the table, his head propped in the priest’s hands, his infant neck slack, his peasant mother watching, calm and accepting. “A picture of the moral power of gold and colour,” he read. And read.

  Across the Dorsoduro to San Polo, to San Cassiano. Not even Tintoretto’s Crucifixion, “among the finest in Europe,” could move her now. She could hardly see it. His voice was going to make her scream.

  “Johnnie, I can’t go another step. I’m going to faint.”

  Furiously, he hailed a gondola, and she sank gratefully into the seat, her feet throbbing.

  At the hotel, she hobbled up the stairs behind him to the appartement, he still reading as they went. “The horizon is so low, that the spectator —”

  “Please,” she begged. “Could you stop!”

  He lowered his voice ostentatiously: “the spectator must fancy himself lying at full length on the grass …”

  She sat on the other side of the room staring at him, part of her fascinated now to see how long he could keep it up. It was as if he were a great distance from her, small, an insect. His voice was like someone droning the rosary, repeating over and over again, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is …,” the words onrushing, a river of words, engulfing one another, unrelenting.

  “Johnnie, I’m going to go mad.” She stood up and tried to snatch the pamphlet away from him, but he was bigger than she was, and he held it tightly against his chest. “This picture unites color as rich as Titian’s with light and shade as forcible as Rembrandt’s …”

  The air in the room was close and awful, but he still wore his jacket, oblivious to the heat.

  Quickly, she slipped out of the appartement — he didn’t notice her leave. She went down into the lobby. Behind the reception desk was a clerk. “I want to send a telegram,” she told him.

  She wrote out her message: “To Mr. William Cross. From Mrs. Cross, Hotel de l’Europe, Calle del Ridotto, No. 1207. Johnnie ill. Come at once. Hurry.”

  Chapter 17

  Back in the appartement, she fled to her own room, leaving him in the sala, still reading aloud to his invisible audience, the candle sputtering. She closed the doors behind her. What if he … she could hardly form the thought — if he were to hurt her? She hesitated, then drew the bolt across the doors.

  The room was stifling, no oxygen here. She threw open the windows to the balcony to let in what little air there was. Outside, the canal was still and silent in the heat.

  He was there on the other side, behind the wall, and she was alone. He had become someone else, apart from her. She was no longer exhausted, sleep was impossible, she was afraid to leave the bedroom.

  Her skin prickled with fear. She was an old woman, sixty years old, weak, too thin, she’d lost weight along with him. Her eyes stung with tiredness, but she had to stay awake. Be vigilant. All around her, the folds of the room, the curtains on the four-poster, the thick red velvet drapes suddenly seemed to conceal dangers.

  But these double doors were thick. No one could get in at her. She was barricaded here. She was afraid to get into bed, so she sat down on the fauteuil, exhausted, emptied out.

  Despite all her efforts to stay awake, to remain alert to him, now that the doors were shut against him, the need to sleep, to escape into oblivion, came over her. Her eyelids began to dip. Her thoughts were a mad jumble. “An industrious bunny … oh, he is an industrious bunny.” His voice swam through her head: “color as rich as Titian’s … light and shade as forcible as Rembrandt …”

  Where was George now, when she needed him?

  PART V

  The City of Sorrow

  Chapter 18

  He must have already been ill when they bought the Heights. But he was so busy taking care of her that he hardly took care of himself. He was always tired that summer, he had terrible stomach cramps and he was losing weight, though when he wasn’t in pain, he was always laughing and joking in an attempt to keep her spirits up.

  All the while he was suffering he was trying to write the third volume of Problems of Life and Mind. He was such a determined little man.

  After she finished Daniel Deronda, she’d been thinking about a new book, perhaps a novel set during the Napoleonic Wars — that would provide the broad canvas she liked for her tales. She began jotting down notes in one of her “quarries,” and ordered some books to do research.

  But George was increasingly ill. Sir James Paget came and spent hours with him. It was most likely a thickening of the mucous membrane, he said, and prescribed castor oil. To no avail.

  She was too exhausted from nursing him to write another novel. She started writing some essays. There were pieces about writing itself — on plagiarism, originality, and literary controversy. And an essay on consciousness. It was “a futile cargo screeching irrelevantly, an idle parasite in the grand scheme of things.” There was a passionate piece on the necessity of a Jewish homeland. She named it “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” after the brutal cry of the Crusaders as they chased down the Jews to slaughter them. Perhaps she could collect them all into a book — make them into the reminiscences of an eccentric clergyman, she thought. She’d call her clergyman Theophrastus, after Aristotle’s pupil, who was a terrible writer and deservedly obscure, and she’d model him on Spencer — though he was so self-centered he’d never get the joke. (And she was making fun of herself too, uttering all these pronouncements.) “The person I love best has never loved me,” she wrote, as Theophrastus, “or known that I love her.” A reversal of the truth during those sad days of her youth. She’d call the book The Impressions of Theophrastus Such.

  All that summer, George kept up his good cheer, but in the night, the demons came. At dawn, he, who had always been so careful of her sleep, would awaken her. “Darling, I’m so sorry, but would you walk with me? It’s the only thi
ng that relieves the pain.” They would get dressed and she would walk with him, holding his arm, through the early morning world of the garden, along the paths, the servants still sleeping, in the perfect quiet, the only sound the gradual awakening of the birds beginning their dawn song.

  He always tried to cheer her. One evening, when Johnnie Cross came to dinner, he lay on the divan and sang through the entire tenor part of The Barber of Seville while she accompanied him on the piano. “Se il mio nome saper voi bramate,” he brayed, a little out of tune, singing it to her. “Dal mio labbro il mio nome ascoltate, Io son Lindoro …” He made everyone laugh and forget that he was ill.

  They stayed at the Heights through the early autumn. He was able to find the strength to make the journey to Cambridgeshire to a dinner for Turgenev, who was in England for the partridge shooting. At the dinner, Turgenev gave a wonderful toast to her in fluent English. “I must say that I think of myself as a writer only second or third to your own great English writers,” he said, nodding toward Marian, “after George Eliot.” The toast made George so happy because he knew now that with Turgenev’s praise, whatever happened to him, her reputation was secure.

  As winter came on, his pain grew so intense that it became nearly impossible for him to work on his Problems. He would lie on the divan with his pen and notebook and try to write, and then a spasm of pain would overcome him. “If I can’t finish it,” he said, “will you?”

  “Please, darling, don’t even say that,” she pleaded. “You’ll get better. You’ll finish it, you’ll see.”

  “But,” he insisted, with rare seriousness, “if I can’t, do you promise?”

  “Of course, I promise. But this is so unnecessary.”

  He sank back on the divan and closed his eyes, reassured.

  He began to stay mostly in bed, a shrunken figure amidst the pillows. Barbara Bodichon, with a rush of energy and kindness, came to replace her for a few hours, and read aloud to him from Victor Hugo. “I’m so sorry,” he said, “but I’m too tired to listen.”