Dared and Done

by Julia Markus

  Aunt Hedley broke into the silent dialogue, “And Ba bowed her head as if she meant to signify to me that I was not to come in—”

  It was Henrietta’s turn to save the situation. She, the sister next in age to Ba, had her own lover, and unlike her younger sister, the pious Arabel, was not unused to playing lawyer with the truth. “Oh! that must have been a mistake of yours. Perhaps she meant just the contrary.”

  Moulton Barrett appeared to have recovered his equilibrium. “You should have gone in and seen the poet.”

  Earlier that very same day, the kindhearted Stormie told his aunt, “Oh Mr Browning is a great friend of Ba’s! He comes here twice a week—is it twice a week or once, Arabel?”

  And if these two scenes weren’t enough, as Elizabeth wrote them down for Robert, who interrupted her letter but Aunt Hedley, leading in Papa and her future son-in-law, James Johnston Bevan: “I was nervous . . oh, so nervous! & the six feet, & something more, of Mr Bevan seemed to me as if they never would end, so tall the man is.”

  Aunt Hedley, being charming once more, informed her future son-in-law, “You are to understand this to be a great honour—for she never lets anybody come here except Mr Kenyon, . . & a few other gentlemen.” And then she laughed.

  To which Papa replied, “Only ONE other gentleman, indeed. Only Mr Browning, the poet—the man of the pomegranates.”

  The well-meaning Hedleys were also concerned about Elizabeth’s spending another winter in London. No one, it would appear, expected spring to strike two winters in a row. Her aunt and uncle would have her go back to France with them. Anna Jameson, who would be traveling with her niece Gerardine, earnestly desired to take her to Italy. The mild-mannered Mr. Kenyon spoke with Elizabeth’s sisters about how he had answered Mrs. Jameson’s offer. He had told the art historian, Elizabeth wrote, that “only a relative would be a fit companion for me, & that no person out of my family could be justified in accepting such a responsibility.” And he informed Jameson of what had happened between father and children the previous year when Pisa was discussed for Elizabeth’s health, adding “that if I offended by an act of disobedience, I might be ‘cast off’ as for a crime. Oh—poor Papa was not spared at all—not to Mrs. Jameson, not to my sisters.”

  Mr. Kenyon was not the cautious bystander Elizabeth had considered him when it came to saving her life. “It is painful to you perhaps to hear me talk so, but it is a sore subject with me, & I cannot restrain my opinions,” he told Henrietta and Arabel. He had “told Mrs. Jameson everything—it was due her to have a full knowledge, he thought . . & had tried to set before her the impossibility” of her doing any good. He asked the sisters if Ba ever spoke of Italy since her father had disallowed it. Did she dwell on the idea?

  Both sisters answered in unison here, “Yes.” In their opinion she had made up her mind to go.

  “But how?” John Kenyon asked. “What is the practical side of the question? She can’t go alone—& which of you will go with her? You know, last year, she properly rejected the means which involved you in danger.”

  To this the daring Henrietta answered, “Ba must do everything for herself—Her friends cannot help her. She must help herself.”

  Again, Kenyon was perplexed, “But she must not go to Italy by herself. Then how?”

  “She has determination of character,” Henrietta told him. “She will surprise everybody some day.”

  “But HOW?” Kenyon repeated, looking quite uneasy.

  Silence.

  Elizabeth was angry—at Henrietta. She believed her sister had let the cat out of the bag. How could she have told Mr. Kenyon that she would do everything for herself! Henrietta had given it away.

  Browning tried to lead her from the details to the picture itself. What she should be facing was “how the ground is crumbling from beneath our feet.” They had to act quickly. He assumed Kenyon must know the truth now. If this intrigue kept up, Robert wouldn’t be surprised if Kenyon himself next applied to Browning to take Elizabeth to Italy! And what if her father had walked into the middle of Kenyon’s conversation with the sisters? “I dare say we should have been married to-day.”

  In her next letter Elizabeth’s nerves were frayed. Her lover had once again asked her to decide on the time of their marriage. Hadn’t she asked him to decide? All right, if she must: “Let it be September, if you do not decide otherwise.” This on July 29. She seemed annoyed a month later as well: “I told you in so many words in July that, if you really wished to go in August rather than in September, I would make no difficulty—to which you answered, remember, that October or November would do as well.” At the end of July they wondered if they should both travel with Mrs. Jameson and her niece, and decided against it.

  On the first of August, Browning visited Elizabeth in the midst of the greatest storm to hit London since 1809. So much for the luck of good weather. And good timing! Moulton Barrett had returned home during a lull in the storm and was fully aware of Browning’s being in his daughter’s room—hour after hour. She was so aware of her father’s being downstairs that during the visit “I was looking at Papa’s face as I saw it through the floor.” Her fear of his displeasure was such that she allowed her lover out into the raging storm.

  Not an hour had passed before her father came up to her room. She had changed into a white dressing gown. “Has this been your costume since the morning, pray?” he asked his daughter.

  “Oh no, only just now, because of the heat.”

  “Well, it appears, Ba, that that man has spent the whole day with you.” His daughter had a fear of lightning and might have become ill of it. Ill with “only Mr. Browning in the room!!”

  This indiscretion “was not to be permitted.”

  It was “a terrible day, when the lightning of it made the least terror.” Enter Mr. Kenyon as she wrote this. Those awful spectacles that magnified his questioning eyes were broken, and he carried them in his hand. “On which I caught at the opportunity & told him that they were the most unbecoming things in the world, & that fervently (& sincerely) I hoped never to see them mended.”

  “Did you see Browning yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so, I intended to come myself, but I thought it probable that he would be here, and so I stayed away.”

  For the first time she wondered if Robert were right and John Kenyon did know. Then he shocked her further.

  “Is there an attachment between your sister Henrietta & Capt. Cook?”

  The poet’s heart leapt up as “Wordsworth’s to the rainbow in the sky.” “Why Mr. Kenyon!” she answered, “what extraordinary questions, opening into unspeakable secrets, you do ask.”

  “But I did not know that it was a secret. How was I to know?—I have seen him here very often, & it is a natural enquiry which I might have put to anybody in the house.… I thought the affair might be an arranged one by anybody’s consent.”

  “But you ought to know that such things are never permitted in this house. So much for the consent. As for the matter itself you are right in your supposition—but it is a great secret,—& I entreat you not to put questions about it to anybody in or out of the house.”

  Robert took this scene as final proof of Kenyon’s knowledge. Yet Elizabeth’s uncanny intuition, her novelistic sense of human character, carried the day. For in late August the Hedleys spoke to her in similar terms: “Ah Ba, you have arranged your plans more than you would have us believe. But you are right not to tell us—Indeed I would rather not hear. Only don’t be rash—That is my only advice to you.” Had they guessed? No. She realized that the Hedleys thought Henrietta and Surtees Cook were going to get married and then were going to take Elizabeth with them to Italy. That was what Kenyon pieced together as well. The obvious pair of lovers in the Barrett household was Henrietta and Surtees Cook. They were the storm that was brewing, the rebellion in this household of middle-aged celibacy.

  Elizabeth Barrett’s marriage to Robert Browning actually would take everyon
e by surprise. As the Hedleys discussed their version of the secret plans with Elizabeth, supporting her and advising her against rashness, something that Browning had predicted happened. Papa walked in.

  Aunt Hedley applied a pressure point. “How well she is looking.”

  “Do you think so?” her brother-in-law replied.

  “Why, . . do not you think so? Do you pretend to say that you see no surprising difference in her?”

  “Oh, I dont know. She is mumpish I think.”

  Mumpish?

  “She doesn’t talk.”

  “Perhaps she is nervous.”

  “I said not one word,” Elizabeth wrote. “When birds have their eyes out, they are apt to be mumpish.” These words were crossed over in nervous agitation. “Mumpish!—The expression proved a displeasure—Yet I am sure that I have shown as little sullenness as was possible—To be very talkative & vivacious under such circumstances as these of mine, would argue insensibility, & was certainly beyond my power.”

  Elizabeth seemed to be destined to a life of extremes. She had a father and was to have a husband who were diametrically opposed. Her sister Henrietta, too, had found a man who did not want to dominate her life. If no Robert Browning, Captain Surtees Cook was a devoted and steadfast lover who had the patience to wait … and wait. Arabel found a nurturing man as well, not in a lover but in a clergyman. In an age of paternal domination it is good to remember that there was a Robert Browning, a William Surtees Cook, and also a Reverend James Stratten of Paddington Chapel.

  Elizabeth attempted to attend chapel once she was able to walk about. At first the music from the service was too much for her to overcome. It stirred up deep memories of Bro. But on August 30, less than three weeks before her marriage, she went to Paddington Chapel with Arabel. When the singing started the sisters left and stood outside the door—“& the next time I shall care less.” If it had been possible, Elizabeth would have liked to be both advised and married by Mr. Stratten. He might mumble his sermons and not appreciate Shakespeare, but he had a “heart of miraculous breadth & depth,—loving further than he can see.”

  Stratten’s children had “reverence” in their love for him, “yet no fear.” He had encouraged them all to speak out in front of him on religion and other subjects, freely and from their own individual consciences. The eldest daughter of Moulton Barrett described how Mr. Stratten turned “to his little daughter seriously ‘to hear what she thinks.’ ”

  And the other day Mr. Stratten’s eldest son, who he had hoped would succeed him at the dissenter’s chapel in Paddington, decided to enter the Church of England. His wife became ill with grief, and for him, too, it must have been an enormous trial. How did the preacher react? “With the utmost gentleness & tenderness however, he desired him [the son] to take time for thought & act according to his conscience,—I believe for my part that there never was a holier man.”

  But if Elizabeth turned to this man for the wedding, it would mean, after the fact, that her sister Arabel would never be allowed to attend Paddington Chapel again. So such a choice would be wrong.

  By the end of August Robert saw clearly that “a new leaf is turned over in our journal, an old part of our adventure done with, and a new one entered upon, altogether distinct from the other.” The end of September was the latest they could wait, before the weather changed. These were days of plans and anxiety. They might have escaped the formal trappings of the Arabella Hedley wedding, but leaving England without anyone’s knowing and getting safely to Italy, particularly with a woman who for years had never left her room—well, the arrangements were staggering. Neither poet, to pay some homage to Anna Jameson’s point of view, had had much experience in such practical matters. Finally, circumstances pushed them toward immediate action; but in the middle of all their planning, as if to underline a shift in luck and timing, Flush was stolen!

  Flush, the golden spaniel, has not yet taken center stage, though he was central to the life of Ba after Bro’s drowning. He truly was venerable and has had his own kind of Alice B. Toklas fame. Virginia Woolf wrote Flush: A Biography, the Brownings seen through the eyes of the dog. The Bloomsbury circle, with their own lives too close to Victorian roots for comfort, had a fascination with the period that was best expressed ironically, if not outright satirically. Still, it took a lot of interest to write a book about a spaniel who traveled to Italy. And under wit, there were similarities: threatening men—Woolf’s stepbrother terrorized her—and loss—a beloved brother—though it was Woolf herself who would drown. Also, Woolf learned from Barrett Browning. In her novel-length poem Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth would tell the world for the first time that what a woman artist needed was enough money for a room of her own.

  Flush had been a gift to Elizabeth from Mary Russell Mitford. It had been Mr. Kenyon—who else?—who convinced his cousin when she was thirty to go for a carriage ride with him and Miss Mitford, assuring her of the older writer’s kindness and admiration. Why would the author of the acclaimed drama Rienzi and the wonderful scenes from country life want to meet Elizabeth? As shy as she was, Elizabeth acquiesced, a fortunate decision that made her a friend for life. When she stepped into the carriage the rapport between the women began. They corresponded voluminously thereafter.

  Mary Russell Mitford’s father was an invalid, by the 1840s an octogenarian, who was as demanding on the author’s time as Moulton Barrett was on Elizabeth’s obedience. Both wrote about their fathers to each other in the highest terms. It would be hard to discern from the letters that Dr. Mitford’s extravagances had led to his daughter’s becoming his financial support. According to Meredith Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan, he was “a spendthrift doctor.” He preferred playing cards and raising greyhounds to practicing medicine. He ran through his wife’s fortune quickly. Gambling must have seemed natural to the young Mary Mitford, because the doctor also ran through her own early lottery winnings of twenty thousand pounds. After her mother’s death, Mitford became her father’s sole support in every way, and he often cautioned his daughter against walking in the woods that she loved so. He assumed that was what tired her out.

  Mary Mitford, as we’ve already seen, was not an admirer of Browning, yet it was she who might have opened up the possibility of entertaining him, long before the meeting. On October 21, 1842, Elizabeth referred to Mr. Kenyon’s asking “once, not long before” if he could bring Mr. Browning to see her. At the same time she was in correspondence with Richard Henry Horne, whom Miss Mitford considered an eccentric literary man. Imagine how astonished her father would be “if I had Mr. Horne & Mr. Browning upstairs in my bedroom!! He wd. certainly open his eyes & set me down among the inclined-to-be-‘good-for-nothing poetesses.’ ” She herself, however, agreed with Miss Mitford’s opinion “that it wd. be not only innocent, but what is quite another thing, proper.” Still, even if she were fifty her father would demur, though Miss Mitford thought her “old enough to have twenty gentlemen in my bedroom if I please, according to the order of the garter! Agreed! but then, but then . . this Papa of mine …”

  After Bro drowned Elizabeth didn’t write to anyone for months, but finally to Mary Mitford she was able to express some of her grief. She was so beside herself, had become so reclusive, that Mary Mitford sent her Flush, the offspring of her own champion spaniel, also named Flush, to give her new companionship and an outlet for her affections. Flush seized on his new mistress greedily, and just as hungrily Elizabeth seized on her Flush. Taking care of Flush was very good for Elizabeth, the bathing him, the spoiling him, not to mention the fact that Flush sprang into her life, offering her, just as so many humans would, a rather exclusive adoration. Flush, along with poetry and letters, helped to keep her alive. “His ears which you were inclined to criticise are improved—grown thicker & longer, and fall beautifully in golden light over the darker brown of his head & body. He is much admired for beauty—particularly for that white breastplate which marks him even among dogs of his colour—Flush, the silvershielded!” She wro
te about Flush with all the verve she would later bring to writing about her son. It made sense. As she told Mary Mitford early on, she loved dogs and children.

  And on the first of September, even before Elizabeth and Robert knew they would marry within two weeks, Flush was kidnapped by the London dog-stealers, an organized band of banditti of whom the infamous Taylor was captain. Robert had in fact warned Elizabeth of the possibility. He was a prophet! She and Arabel and Flush had gone in a cab to Vere Street, and Flush followed them as usual into a shop and out again—was in fact at Elizabeth’s heels when she stepped up to the carriage. “Flush!”

  Flush? He was gone. “He had been caught up in that moment, from under the wheels, do you understand?” Well, “When we shall be at Pisa, dearest, we shall be away from the London dog-stealers.” Then she turned her attention to wedding plans and travel routes.

  She would rather marry after she left Wimpole Street forever. Robert insisted they marry before. “If I accede to your ‘idée fixe’ about the marriage,” well then “let us go away as soon as possible afterwards, at least.” She was afraid “of breaking down under quite a different set of causes, in nervous excitement & exhaustion. I belong to that pitiful order of weak women who cannot command their bodies with their souls at every moment, & who sink down in hysterical disorder when they ought to act & resist.”

  She planned to ransom Flush back—as she had done twice before. Browning, perhaps picking up on her light tone, could joke. Flush had bitten him when he first came to visit Elizabeth. He had responded by offering the dog biscuits, but it took many visits to get Flush to stop growling and attacking his competition. “Poor fellow—was he no better than the rest of us, and did all that barking and fanciful valour spend itself on such enemies as Mr. Kenyon and myself, leaving only blandness and waggings of the tail for the man with the bag?” He then used Flush’s predicament as an analogy, telling her not to allow their happiness “to be caught up from us, after poor Flush’s fashion—there may be no redemption from that peril.” With a slip of the pen (or the psyche) he talked of Flush in the past tense.