Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  “This––cannot be,” he whispered into the stillness of the vast room. He had worked late into the evening in the damp and mould-ridden subterranean environment assigned his task. His quiet words jolted him nearly as much as what he held in his hands.

  He knew Turner frequented brothels and of course had lived with a succession of “house-keepers,” widows all, who kept him spruce and did his laundry and cooking. The fact that these women had obviously exposed themselves in this way for him, that Turner––his Master––who painted Nature with God-given gifts unmatched by any man, had found delight in the very looking, let alone study, of this most intimate and frankly ugly aspect of female anatomy made him faint-headed. And delight was there; Ruskin when he could bear to look saw the attention Turner had lavished upon his subject. The results of these obscenities invoked a kind of gut-churning fear he had almost forgotten, and he was in a state of exhaustion when he deemed his work complete.

  Now the loveliness of Rose LaTouche, with a mouth like her name-sake flower bud, expunged those images. When he felt sickened, fatigued, or near despair, he thought of her and took heart, as a weary pilgrim when considering the holy relic at journey’s end. Within weeks of meeting her she was inhabiting his imagination, unwittingly offering in her childish way her pure beauty as a hand-hold to grasp at and save himself by.

  But nothing roused him to real work. He felt at times almost prostrate with fatigue, plagued with giddiness or watering eyes. His physical exhaustion manifested itself in endless coughs and colds, to his own alarm and to the far greater alarm of his parents. His aged mother’s worried chastisements were just as bad as her earlier nursing and hovering. His father’s puzzled and reproachful demeanour smote his own heart; he could not be the son his father deserved. John James still read in draught form everything Ruskin wrote, every draught of every essay, every letter to a newspaper, and censored with a heavy hand. What had once been grateful and useful editorial advice had become more and more open dissension as his father grew increasingly dismayed at his emerging political and economic views.

  His mother made of him an Idol and yet incessantly harped on the smallest domestic infractions. She despaired at his friendship with the great Carlyle, whom she feared was a freethinker, and his father, who had unwittingly thrown him together with immoral rakes at Oxford, complained that Ned Burne-Jones, the sweetest of his friends, was a bad influence. Together his parents made life at Denmark Hill almost unbearable. Yet he was without independent income, and bound in more ways than the merely monetary to stay on. For decades son and parents had lived and travelled together. Now that age and infirmity had made inroads upon them he was free to travel alone, grasping at any opportunity to bolt, and yet stricken with remorse by their distress at his leaving.

  He had been aware for years of his inability to escape what he slowly realised was parental domination, a capitulation to his parents’ desires and wishes. Here he was, forty-two years old, living with his elderly parents and their equally elderly servants in a pile of a house filled with massive mahogany furnishings. A house in which, at his mother’s insistence, all his paintings must be screened from view, from enjoyment, every Sabbath to preserve the day’s “sanctity.” Living alone.

  He wanted to flee London but the difficulty remained of leaving his parents at Denmark Hill. His own health was faltering; at night he coughed so that he worried of some recrudescence of his youthful problems with his lungs. He was seeing almost no friends. A devoted coterie of intellectually gifted women confidantes remained sympathetic to his sorrows, and he abhorred the thought of intruding even further in their own rich lives. The Brownings were away in Italy, and he realised that he couldn’t possibly praise his London artist friends enough to keep them happy, so he was spending fewer evenings with them as well. Rossetti was up to such absurdities on his canvases––Madonnas so dark they looked like mulattos––that he had thrown up his hands over him. His wife Lizzie no longer would accept the allowance he had been paying to keep her working at her own easel; Ruskin’s young painter friend Ned Burne-Jones had hinted that she might be in an interesting condition and so that was likely that. If he could ever entice her to paint again he would take many more pains with her than he had, but she––like every genius he had ever encountered––was almost as ungovernable as her husband.

  He liked the sculptor Alexander Monroe, but he lived in a studio kept so damp with tubs of water and wet clay that every time he visited he caught cold. Even Ned, whom he truly loved, tired him. He couldn’t look at Ned’s ethereal paintings properly without working himself up to a state of Dantesque Visionariness, and that requirement was at this point beyond his limited reserves of health and energy.

  His closest friend, Charles Eliot Norton, was back in Boston after having lived in London and the Continent for years, and Ruskin owed him a letter––he seemed to owe every blessed person on Earth a letter––and he ought to place a pen in his hand and write it. He had reopened Norton’s translation of Vita Nuova last night and been comforted anew by his rendering of Dante. It was his fury over the American war which made it so difficult to write; he was appalled at the assumption of moral superiority by the North, and could not make Norton understand that right here in Britain supposedly ‘free’ white people suffered in such extreme want that would make black slaves with reasonable masters tremble to be released from their care. Equality was impossible in this life, this Ruskin knew with every fibre in his body, and the hideousness of the wars being fought in the name of it sickened him.

  He could not write to Norton as he wished he might, yet it was from America that he had received the few shreds of comfort over his discovery at Turin. He had related his revelatory un-conversion, his ‘Queen of Sheba crash’ to his friend and had received letters of the tenderest counsel in return. Norton had, it seemed, started out nearly where he had ended up in his views of religion––revering Christ as a great teacher but valuing the ethics of Sophocles as highly, and––this was what was causing Ruskin’s greatest struggle––having no expectation for life after death. These were to him painful pieces of new light, so much so that at times he longed for the old shades he had once inhabited. He felt freer, but much less happy; less innocent––for his whole-hearted belief in his mother’s evangelical doctrines had been innocent––and less hopeful. The deception of his own spiritual superiority and a great deal of other foolishness had been forced upon him. Now that he saw himself a tiny leaf upon a tree he knew it as a less selfish view of his place in the world, but it felt a far less pleasant one.

  Making his apologies to his parents Ruskin excused himself from Denmark Hill and went alone to France. He found his way to Boulogne, with its dusky red-sailed fishing fleet. The first boat he saw in the harbour was La Rose Mysterieuse. Wandering the coast he stopped and sketched what turned out to be the Port d’Amour. Rose was following him, even here.

  Today I visited a field where the white wheat was growing high, full of promise, he wrote her. I stopped and pulled open a sheaf to satisfy my curious eye, but at once was sorry for spoiling it. Then across the way I saw a hedge of roses, which led me into reverie upon the symbolism, and destinies of Roses––but these thoughts could not be of the slightest interest to you, my Pet!...

  His spirits began to lift as he spent days walking the hard grey beaches. He spoke with the local fishermen often enough to be invited to join them mackerel-fishing; one even allowed him to take the helm of his sturdy lugger on an all-night netting expedition. The fisherfolk delighted him. Their honesty and natural elegance of manner worked as a tonic. The patter of wooden sabots ringing in the swept stone streets pleased his ear, and the village women in their chaste and flattering white coiffes seemed a throwback to a happier age. The faces of the old, seated in sling-chairs and quietly knitting under shade trees, exhibited that contented vieille sagesse seen in ancient prints. One fishing family bid him join them in their home, and Ruskin gladly forsook his inn for a snug room under th
eir low eaves. They had two charming daughters, a little older than Rose, whose smiles brightened his mornings. He wrote to her of them and was sent a tartly jealous letter in reply, which gave him such sharp pleasure that he laughed aloud. He returned each night from his rambles with sand in his shoes and the bottoms of trouser-legs damp through and felt himself revived.

  Then the summons arrived from Harristown––Rose’s Irish home––and he made haste for London. The LaTouches had returned from Italy. Having lately entertained the young Prince of Wales at their residence outside of Dublin––the fact of which cast Mrs. Ruskin into an awe of agitation, and jolted his father with this direct proof of the exalted social circles in which Rose’s parents travelled––they now, against all his expectations, invited him home to Ireland.

  He arrived late after a day of hard travelling, fearful the children would be abed. Lights blazed along the gravelled drive as the coach drew up; the sharp square outlines of the windows on the ground floor were brilliantly lit in welcome. Harristown House was a blocky Georgian manor of pale grey limestone, the smoothness of which emphasised the uncompromising hardness of the place. He was shown into an immense drawing room hung with paintings from the last century and warmly welcomed by Mrs. LaTouche.

  The children were in fact in their rooms, but after a few minutes they came bounding down the marble stair––Percy quite the young Irish squire despite his bare feet and grinning face, Emily demure in a gown and wrapper of butter yellow, and Rose, swathed in a tiny pink dressing gown which streamed out behind her as she ran to him. He was in the act of shaking hands with Percy when she came, and he made haste to free his hand so he could catch her up. Her slender arms were thrown about his neck. She kissed him full upon the lips. Nor did she pull away at once, but for a moment lay her softly rounded cheek against his side-whiskers. Maria LaTouche laughingly scolded, but as the children withdrew Ruskin found his own hand rising to touch his cheek, and knew when next his whiskers were scissored he would save the trimmings. He turned to come face to face with an unsmiling John LaTouche.

  Maria LaTouche finished fastening her pearl ear-bobs and rose from her dressing table. Emily was practicing Schubert in the music room downstairs, and Mrs. LaTouche paused and attended appreciatively for a moment to the rising music. Mr. LaTouche was behind the closed door leading to his bedroom; the hour before dinner was one of private prayer for him. Percy was––wherever the boy was.

  She moved to the window. The late summer sun dropping behind the row of beeches cast deep and reaching shadows across the mowed lawns, their green bleached to a striking yellow by the raking light. She turned her head and saw two figures walking side by side along the little copse of woods fringing the Liffey’s banks. Rose in her white muslin gown was walking hand in hand with Mr. Ruskin. He was looking down at her, and speaking, she could see. Their guest had been with them for a week, and would be tonight asked to stay another.

  Thank God for Ruskin! she thought. This Summer had been more trying than most, with disquieting financial difficulties of her husband’s at the bank, Rose’s growing truculence, and the trials of entertaining the Prince of Wales and his military retinue. After that exertion the remains of the season at Harristown threatened to revert to mind-numbing regularity. She was starved––starved for intelligent and sympathetic company in her endless and stultifying rounds of calls, dinner parties, and county balls. With Ruskin near she felt a hope that her life at thirty-five had not climaxed; nor was to be given wholly over to the care of her children, which of late was all she had felt left to her. With Ruskin she could converse on the most important topics of the day; nay eternal topics too, and feel his interest in her intellect and ideas. She could discuss books with him, Shakespeare’s dramas, the ethics of Scott’s romances or Tennyson’s poems; or listen enraptured while he spoke on the Ideal in Beauty. And he was delightfully playful as well, and touchingly told her he approved her pet-name ‘Lacerta’, after the lizard constellation, as an appropriate tribute to her serpent-like yet venom-less wisdom.

  Despite his greatness he was altogether like no other man she had ever known. Walking with him through the grounds was an especial joy. Together they stooped and identified tiny, and by-others-unnoticed wild flowers through his folding magnifying glass, always in his pocket. She was no match for him, not in any wise, the magnitude of his mind was too expansive for her even to glimpse its full magnificence; but with him she felt vital and alive and recognised as a thinking being. He looked at her when she spoke.

  She heard a dull sound and turned her head to the closed door of her husband’s dressing room. He must be rising from his knees. Married at nineteen, she thought she had made a love match. A mutual attraction to their persons there had been, but she soon realised that there was little else. John LaTouche, ten years her senior, was given over to the fox hunt and the race course, and being made Master of the Kildare Fox Hounds at an early age earned him the sobriquet “the Master” which had followed him long after the conclusion of his hunt days. He had scant interest in the sort of books she liked, none in botany, and was indifferent to the Canova marbles gracing the house, souvenirs of his grandfather’s more exalted tastes. He was not a brute––she had always been grateful for that; and he cared for the children as much as any father, she imagined; her own had died too young for her to remember. And by his extremes he was capable of surprising her.

  She recalled awakening early one November morning, the first year of the Great Hunger, to a fearful racket of men and hounds out upon the South lawn. Through her frosted window she saw her husband in the dawn gloom, surrounded with Harristown’s many gamesmen, mounted and turning to ride. But it was no hunt day, and her husband wore grouse-hunting garb. He returned at dusk as she sat writing invitations for an upcoming dinner party. He looked exhausted but exhilarated, and astonished her by his greeting.

  “We took 67 deer, every one we could flush or drive within five miles.”

  She could not imagine such slaughter, nor the practical requirements for the dressing-out of so many beasts. The gamesmen would have to work far into the night.

  “They’ll be going out to the poor of the parish.”

  He emptied his game parks to relieve the suffering of those starving for want of potatoes.

  Another time he provoked an outcry from local antiquarians by, without warning, pulling down the remains of the highly picturesque and quite ruined family castle, the stone to go as his donation to the building of a new village school. He shrugged off their protests in the name of Progress and a good cause, and she bit her lip to see the destruction of such a pretty place.

  But his abiding passion had been for the fox hunt, which by its waste secretly disgusted her, the expense of maintaining the packs of high-bred hounds, the indiscriminate tearing-up of crop land by the riders, the loss of good horses to bad falls. When his twin brother dropped dead in the racing stands, John LaTouche took it as a clarion call. He resigned from the hunt, sold his hounds, and never rode in sport again.

  At first she was delighted––why should she not be? After ten years of marriage, and with three young offspring, she felt they were beginning anew. But if he had once strayed from the straight and narrow by his dedication to race-course and fox hounds, she now witnessed an over-correction in her husband’s path. He spent hours reading the latest tracts published by Dissenter ministers. He attended a gentlemen’s Bible study group from which she was naturally excluded. He spent more time with the children, yes––but it was in expounding the new-found truths of Scripture. But she felt no real alarm until the morning he declined to accompany her to where they had always worshipped together, the charming Church of Ireland chapel by the family mausoleum. He would henceforth attend divine service at the local Baptist tabernacle. His quiet yet flat announcement pained her more than she hoped her face betrayed. Emily, Percy and Rose went with their mother and governess in the chaise to their Anglican service. They turned off the drive and she watched as he
rode alone, erect and impassive in his seat, to his new destination in town. A rift––the depths of which was yet unknowable––had opened at her very feet, one she must calmly straddle.

  Ruskin troubled her, in his own way, but he never drained her, though any conversation with him was like a game of shuttlecock––her brain on tip-toe running in the attempt to return a worthy comment to his remark. It was his sorrow that troubled her, some deep and as yet to her unexpressed sorrow that crossed his soul. And she knew now, without doubt––for this he had confided in her––that he had lost his belief. She was frightened by his declaration––she ardently believed in God’s love and presence in her decorous Anglican way––and yet strangely thrilled he had confided in her.

  Three days into his visit Ruskin had walked alone with Maria LaTouche while the children were at their lessons. Their conversation had turned to the Rev. Charles Spurgeon, the Baptist preacher whose fiery London sermons both Ruskin and his father had occasionally enjoyed; they were like good theatre to him now. Ruskin knew from both LaTouche’s own frequent citations of the preacher, and by his private conversation with Mrs. LaTouche, that John LaTouche was coming more and more under Spurgeon’s influence.

  “It’s not the vulgarity of Spurgeon’s Bible-thumping that disgusts me––his ‘Turn or Burn’ exhortations are no more than crude modernisations of certain of the Proverbs,” he said as he strolled the gardens with Mrs. LaTouche. She was very pleasant to walk with, a pleasure that gave a fine, contrasting edge to his indictment of the portentous Baptist. The violet scent she wore mixed agreeably with the sweetness of the new-mown grass, and he paused for just an instant to consider the relative positions of violet and green on the colour wheel. “His arrogant ignorance is what I object to. Spurgeon ought to be shut up with some good books, or even better sent out into the fields where he might learn something of benefit.” Ruskin lifted his hand to gesture at a few gardeners raking the gravel paths of the flower beds.