George Eliot (68 page)

Even telling Charlie Lewes was an ordeal. It looks as if Marian sent Cross over to Hampstead to break the news. As it turned out, she need not have worried. Charlie was as generous a man as his late father. He rushed over to the Priory for a long interview with his stepmother and pronounced himself delighted with the new arrangement. He had no doubt that his father would have wanted her to be happy and he was probably relieved at the prospect of being able to shift more of the responsibility for the old lady on to Cross. His own life was busier than ever, with a recent promotion at the Post Office, a growing sideline in journalism and a family of three to juggle. Even the most conscientious
of young men must have longed for more time of his own.

On the eve of the wedding Marian wrote to Cara, Barbara, Georgie and William Blackwood breaking the news. In all four letters she stressed many of the same points. First, that Lewes had known and loved Cross for years. Second, that Cross had money of his own and so, by implication, was no fortune-hunter. Third, that she would continue to support the Lewes clan. To Georgie Burne-Jones in particular Marian sounded like a wise Eliot narrator when she added, ‘Explanations for these crises, which seem sudden though they are slowly dimly prepared, are impossible. I can only ask you and your husband to imagine and interpret according to your deep experience and loving kindness.’
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There remains a puzzle about what happened to these difficult letters. From her honeymoon in Venice Marian writes to Charles about the ‘inexplicable failure of the letters I wrote to some of my friends, letters intended to reach them on the morning of my marriage’. She wonders if the coachman Burkin forgot them, but given that the letter to Barbara Bodichon turned up in a drawer at the Priory seven weeks later, it may be that Marian had unconsciously sabotaged the communication herself.
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On 6 May at 10.15, Marian Evans Lewes was led up the aisle by Charles Lewes to marry John Walter Cross in front of a tiny congregation made up of the groom’s family. There was still one more surprise for those who read about it later in the papers. The service was held not at the Leweses’ unofficial parish church of Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, but at the Anglican church of St George’s, Hanover Square, in the heart of the West End. Here was another blow for those who had always seen Marian Lewes as incapable of hypocrisy. For an agnostic to get married in church was, said Dr Richard Congreve as tactfully as he knew how, ‘rather a queer step’.
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If she could not subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, then how could she repeat words which she did not believe in front of witnesses?

By the time London got the chance to argue these points the new Mr and Mrs Cross were safely on their honeymoon journey through France and Italy. As the letters of congratulation poured into the Priory, Charles sifted, bundled and forwarded the most important ones to the appropriate Poste Restante. Cara, in con
trast to her angrily muted response of twenty-five years ago, was careful to write immediately and say that she was delighted: ‘it is a comfort to know that you have now one to protect and cherish you’.
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Charles Bray, whose differences with Lewes over phrenology had made friendship impossible, saw the chance to make a new beginning. At the end of the year he wrote asking Marian for details about her new husband’s skull, to which she was able to respond lightly, ‘I think you would be satisfied with his coronal arch which finishes a figure six feet high. If his head does not indicate fine moral qualities, it must be phrenology that is in fault.’
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Georgie Burne-Jones dashed off a letter the moment she received Marian’s, but did not send it for six weeks. Instead she ruminated, hoping, she explained subsequently, to find ‘more and brighter words’ to send.
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But those words did not come, buried under a blanket of resentment that Marian had not confided in her. So Georgie decided to send the original note, together with a plea to ‘Give me time – this was the one “change” I was unprepared for – but that is my own fault – I have no right to impute to my friends what they do not claim.’
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Barbara typically was not offended by the non-arrival of Marian’s news-bearing letter. She had in the meantime read about the marriage in the papers and dashed off a generous response:

Both Edith Simcox and Clementia Taylor took the news, broken by Charles in person, surprisingly well. Since both loved Marian unconditionally, they wanted whatever made her happy. Edith, in any case, had recently become ‘much mellowed’ as a result of finding a focus for her passionate energy on the London School
Board.
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She enclosed a thoughtful note for John Cross in her longer letter of congratulations to her Madonna.

It was, in the end, only Maria Congreve who found it hard to be happy. This may have been because she followed her husband in upholding the importance of ‘perpetual widowhood’, but also because of all Marian’s circle her devotion went back the furthest, to the Coventry where they had both been girls forty years before. On the eve of the marriage Marian had written to tell her that Charles Lewes would soon be calling with some remarkable news. Charles’s reluctance to report back to his stepmother suggests that the subsequent interview was emotional and difficult.
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Three weeks later Maria finally managed a ‘loving though brief letter, which was forwarded to an anxious Marian in Milan. On 10 June, by now writing from Venice, Marian attempted to explain to Maria why she had not confided the news sooner and in person. She said what she had said to other friends, that the marriage had only been decided a fortnight before it happened. This was technically true, although it had been a real possibility for well over six months. While to various people Marian had given the excuse that a bout of flu had stopped her spreading the news, to Maria she maintained that it was sensitivity to the fact that the Congreves’ niece Emily had recently been widowed that stopped her being fully frank.
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All the same, this was not the most important correspondence which Marian embarked upon now. She had received a letter, dated 17 May, from Griff House:

The letter was signed ‘Your affectionate brother Isaac P Evans’.
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Marian wrote back delightedly, ‘it was a great joy to me to have your kind words of sympathy, for our long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones’.
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In fact, Isaac’s letter was not unprompted. Marian, made optimistic by the brief note of condolence she had received on Lewes’s death from Isaac’s wife Sarah, had made a point of
asking Vincent Holbeche, the family solicitor, to let her brother know the news about her marriage. She could justify this to herself on the grounds that Isaac was still in charge of sending her income from their father’s estate and so needed to know her change of name and legal status. In practice, though, this was a way of making a cautious overture, while reminding Isaac that it was he who had first chosen to communicate by solicitor. She signed her letter ‘Always your affectionate Sister, Mary Ann Cross’.

Letters which the Crosses wrote as they travelled through Paris, Lyons, Grenoble, Milan and Verona suggest that the honeymoon was going well. Marian clearly enjoyed the novelty of having ‘Sisters’ to correspond with and felt no awkwardness in telling Charles about the good time she was having in places she had previously visited with his father. Being married, and being married to Cross, delighted her: ‘we seem to love each other better than we did when we set out,’ she told Florence Cross from Milan on 25 May.
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Back in October 1879, just as she was deciding to accept Cross as a lover, she had told Elma that after a year of celibacy she feared her heart was drying up, ‘so that one has to act by rule without the tide of love to carry one’. Now she was able to write to Maria Congreve touchingly, ‘I seem to have recovered the loving sympathy that I was in danger of losing.’
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The only sign that something might be wrong comes in a letter of 6 June when Marian mentions that Cross had lost so much weight that his clothes were hanging off him. While she liked his new appearance, she told his youngest brother ominously, ‘I hope it will not turn out to be disadvantageous in any other way.’
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Later Cross’s sisters revealed to Edith Simcox that Johnny had set out on the honeymoon utterly ‘worn and ill’. They put this down to the fact that Marian had badgered him into continuing his ordinary business until the very eve of the marriage, in order not to arouse suspicion.
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Several years later, rumours of Cross’s depressive nature began to trickle out. Some said that one of his brothers was mad and that it ran in the family. Barbara Bodichon told Edith Simcox that by the time Cross met Marian he had already had at least one breakdown. His sisters, talking also to the rapt Edith, hinted that Johnny had always had a tendency to get het up under
pressure.
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Whatever the exact strains which were playing on him now, the fact is that on 16 June John Cross jumped from the hotel bedroom which he and Marian were sharing on Venice’s Grand Canal. The gondoliers, who had spent the last two weeks ferrying the honeymoon couple around churches, palaces and art galleries, now rushed to fish the English signor out of the water.

Writing up the incident two years later in
George Eliot’s Life
, on a page defensively headed ‘Dangers of Venice’, Cross put his unspecified ‘illness’ – no mention of the desperate leap – down to an unlikely combination of bad drains, the heat and a lack of regular physical exercise, presumably lawn tennis.
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Marian’s contemporary diary, meanwhile, reflects the seriousness of the incident by falling into virtual silence. During the days following the 16th her entries become terse and businesslike, recording the arrival of doctors, the prescribing of chloral and the sending of a telegram to Willie Cross asking him to come at once.

The sniggering explanation, and the one that naturally endured in the Athenaeum and the Garrick, was that Cross was so overwhelmed by having to make physical love to an ugly old woman that he preferred death to intercourse. It was a line of reasoning which reprised all those old jokes from 1854 about Marian being a nymphomaniac whose incontinent lusts broke through every legal and social constraint. In the original 1854 rumour Lewes had been viewed as Marian’s partner in crime, a man whose urge to sexual misconduct was matched only by her own. In the 1880 version Cross was cast as the naive virgin, and perhaps even unacknowledged homosexual, chased around the bed by a hideous, lascivious woman demanding sex. There may have been a grain of truth in this. Marian’s marriage with Lewes had been fully sexual. Her writing demonstrates a deep understanding of the power of sex in relations between men and women. It was a subject which interested her. At the age of sixty and in fragile health, she was unlikely to have anticipated a huge amount of sexual activity with her new husband, but with the rigours of the honeymoon journey perhaps she assumed that a little gentle love-making might ensue.

Why was Cross so horrified at this prospect? Perhaps he had always taken it for granted that the marriage was to be celibate.
Or maybe he thought the exact opposite but found, when it came to it, that he could not bear to have sex with a woman whom he thought of as his aunt or his mother. Or perhaps it was the fact that he described his wife as ‘my ideal’, which made sex with her impossible.
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We shall never know the answers to these questions. Two days after the fateful leap Willie Cross arrived in Venice to try to calm his agitated brother. Five days on and John Cross was deemed well enough to travel. The honeymoon trio set off by gentle stages to Verona, Innsbruck, Munich and Wildbad. By now it was 8 July and Cross had rallied sufficiently in the brisk German climate for it to seem safe for Willie Cross to set out for home. The bride and groom spent a further two weeks on the Continent before travelling slowly back to Britain.

They went straight to Witley where they began a summer of gentle entertaining as if nothing had happened. Marian relished all the little rituals attached to being newly married. Having spent twenty years telling everyone how much she hated making social calls, she threw herself into visiting her husband’s three married sisters who lived at some distance. Sharp-eyed and sour-tongued observers noted that she was not always at ease on these occasions. According to Mrs (later Lady) Jebb, who met her at dinner at Six Mile Bottom: