The Honeymoon (10 page)

Marian sat on the ottoman in the drawing room by the French window and Charles pulled a chair up next to her. He looked down at her intently.

“My sister, Elizabeth, says you are a most extraordinary young woman. She says you’ve read everything.”

“I don’t know about that,” Marian said.

“Well, have you read Emerson’s essays?”

“I have,” she said.

“Have you read
Sartor Resartus
?”

“Of course.”

“What about my brother-in-law Charles Hennell’s book,
An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity
?”

“He’s your brother-in-law?” she asked.

“Indeed, he’s Cara’s brother.”

“I am amazed to be sitting here,” she said with a smile. “The way he so carefully analyzed the Gospels, and was able to find the smallest discrepancies. He must be an extraordinary man.”

“He is,” Charles said. “But you, you don’t talk at all like a country girl.”

“Well, I am one,” she said. “But people say I’ve lost the dialect.”

His eyes seemed to burn into her. “And you’re hardly a typical woman in your reading.”

“I hardly know what a typical woman is. Do you?” she said, again smiling.

When she was leaving, he said, “You must come again. You must come all the time. We shall feast on you!”

She began to go regularly to see the Brays, often on her own, slipping out of the house so Elizabeth Pears wouldn’t see her go and disapprove of her growing friendship with her radical brother and sister-in-law.

It seemed as if that winter she and Cara and Charles discussed everything under the sun, philosophy, politics, and especially religion. A light had suddenly penetrated her existence, her mind engaged with ideas, with people who’d read the same books she had. She’d never known anyone like the Brays.

Charles told her that he and Cara had ceased going to church. They’d both come from Unitarian families. Now, partly because of Cara’s brother Charles Hennell’s book, they no longer believed that God’s will could even be divined through Scripture. “God is nature,” Charles said, “and nature is utmost perfection. Freedom and happiness consist in understanding the laws of nature and what drives us. Prayer is just a distraction from knowing what those laws are.” These were akin to the thoughts she’d long had
herself. Until now, there’d been no one with whom she could discuss them.

The winter deepened, and her long talks with Charles coalesced the doubts swirling about in her. God was indefinable, He emanated from within oneself and enveloped everything. It was His spirit which made one want to hug a child, to kiss a dear friend, to soothe her tears, to clothe the poor and feed the hungry laborers of the city. What mattered was to pay close attention to one’s inner instincts and not to be distracted by the old, empty words of Scripture and ritual.

At Christmas, Sarah and Isaac rode over from Griff for dinner, and Marian told them about her new friends.

“Best watch out for those types, Marian,” Isaac said. Isaac was a country squire now, a man of affairs in his new job as manager of the Arbury Estate, a Church of England man, a conservative now, just like her father. “You’ll never find yourself a husband with the likes of them. The whole reason Father’s taken on this lease is so you’ll meet the appropriate people. You’re going to be a burden on this family forever.”

“But … they’re so nice,” she said. “They’ve made me feel so welcome.”

“There’s plenty of other people around who would make you feel welcome too, if you just tried,” Isaac said.

She held her ground. She couldn’t ignore any longer the changes that had swept through her. She was transformed, for the first time she had an identity that was sure and certain. The world made sense. To ignore all this would be to lie.

On the next Sunday after Christmas, after breakfast, she stood by the front door watching as her father got ready for church. Outside, the snow was falling softly, steadily,
weighing down the branches of the firs. He took up his walking stick, then noticed that she still hadn’t put on her outdoor things.

“Best hurry up, Marian. The man’s awaitin’.”

“Papa, I’m afraid I’m not going to church today,” she said quietly. “I’ve decided that I’m not going to go to church — ever again.”

He stared at her. “What’s that? Hurry up now. The carriage is outside.”

She took a breath. “As I said, Papa, with utmost respect, I’m no longer going to church because I no longer believe in religion.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard from your lips! Get on with ya now.”

“But I mean it, Papa.”

“Is that what those Bray people’s taught you?”

“No. It’s entirely my decision.”

“Them’s Godless people! How dare they interfere with my daughter!”

“They’re not Godless, Papa,” she said. “And they’ve got nothing to do with this. I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time.”

“You don’t believe in God?” he said. “I never heard such a thing.”

“I believe profoundly in God. I believe He’s a bigger, more sacred presence than any we can ever know, but that He’s ultimately mysterious to us. Our task in life is to discover His teaching. The Bible is a set of fables, it doesn’t contain the real truth of God.”

“Poppycock!”

She could see through the window the carriage waiting outside, the snow deepening. The man was trudging down the path toward the front door.

“I’m not going, Papa,” she said. “For me to go to church is a lie.”

The man was at the door now. “Mr. Evans?” he said. “The carriage is here.”

Her father glared at her as if he couldn’t think of what to say. She tried to keep her eyes levelly on his.

Then he put on his hat and stormed out of the house without speaking another word. She watched from the window as the carriage drove away through the whirling white.

Thus began the “Holy War.” Two hours later, he came back from church, his face tight, lips sealed. He went immediately upstairs to his bedroom.

At five o’clock, the maid, Clare, rang the bell for supper. Marian went to his bedroom door and called out, “Papa, supper is ready.”

Clare had laid out the mutton and pies. When at last he entered the dining room, Marian rose and served him his food. Throughout supper, the only sound was his slurping and chewing in the furious silence. When Clare brought in the cabinet pudding and custard, his favorite dessert, he said nothing.

The following afternoon, Isaac appeared at Bird Grove. Her father had sent for him to intervene. “You’re just trying to call attention to yourself,” Isaac said. “As usual. Always the center of attention.”

Why did he say that? She always tried to be gray, to recede. Was it because she was cleverer than he?

“That’s not true. I don’t believe in the language and the rituals anymore. Only the God inside us.”

“You always think you know more than the rest of us.”

“No! It’s just what I know for myself.”

“Then why do you have to cause all this fuss? And make Papa angry? Just sit there and keep your mouth shut.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t.”

Next came her neighbor, Elizabeth Pears. “I’m responsible for this,” Elizabeth said. “Please don’t let them corrupt you with their thinking.”

“No,” Marian said. “You’ve got to understand, this is my own conclusion.”

Her father enlisted Rebecca Franklin from the Misses Franklin’s school to change her mind, and even a professor of theology, the Reverend Francis Watts of Spring College, a young man who distracted her with his attractive looks even as he tried to argue with her. But every book they cited to refute her arguments, she’d read and knew better than they did.

Then her father told Isaac, who informed her, that he intended to leave Bird Grove, as the lease was too expensive, and to move to Meriden to live with Chrissey and Edward Clarke.

But where would she go? How could she support herself? Perhaps she could be a governess or a teacher? She made inquiries at the Binswood Hall School in Leamington, but there were no openings. Word of her apostasy had spread. No one wanted an irreligious woman around children.

Her father’s cold rage, his silence, was unbearable. She loved him more than anything on earth, this great, strong man, she was beholden to him. When a smile of approval
escaped his lips, his barely perceptible smile, warmth flowed through her body. How she loved to stroke his face when he kissed her, and his smell, of male hair and skin. His care was the center of her life, the focus of everything. His rage terrified her. It was like a hell, as if he’d killed her and she didn’t exist for him anymore. She’d become invisible.

After four weeks of this, she sat down and wrote him a long, impassioned letter reiterating her position.
“My Dear father, All my efforts in conversation have hitherto failed,”
she wrote.
“I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus.”
But the teachings of the Scriptures themselves, she had come to believe, were
“histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction.”
To continue going to church would be a lie,
“dishonorable to God,”
she said. The truth of feeling was the only universal bond of union. She’d do anything, anything, to make him happy — short of attending church.

He was unmoved. He didn’t answer. He told Isaac again, who again told her, that he was determined to leave and go and live with Chrissey and Edward Clarke.

At the end of February, Isaac suggested that for the sake of peace, she move back to Griff with him and Sarah. Initially, she was comforted, surrounded once again by the familiar rooms of her childhood, the rooms she knew like her own skin, the landscape that had been so much a part of her. Sarah was pregnant for the first time, and anxious, and preparing the room that Marian was sleeping in for the new baby. Sarah tried to be kind, but Marian could tell that they didn’t want her there.

Then Sarah, obviously wanting Griff to herself, told her father and Isaac that they were going about things the
wrong way. It was no good telling Marian that she had to go to church just because people would disapprove. She was far too stubborn to accede to that. Tell her that her father needed her to care for him, and that he missed her. Say to Marian that out of respect for him, she should at least go to church with him, but that she didn’t have to renounce her beliefs. She should just keep them to herself.

An arrangement was made. In April she returned to the house. She went to Trinity Church with him and tried not to pay attention to the service. She stared up at the medieval painting of the Last Judgment above the tower arch, with its depiction of the poor souls being ushered by Christ to Paradise on the right or to Hell on the left; Hell’s mouth, a roaring furnace, gaped to receive the agonized figures consigned there. She no longer believed in that Hell, that crude superstition.

She waited out the service for the promise of the outdoors, the sweet spring air, freedom.

Peace was restored and she cared for her father obediently in every way. At first there were no welcoming arms, only a few grudging thank-yous when she served him his supper. He wanted to make it clear that he was hanging on to his disapproval. But slowly, his words grew in number, a few smiles here and there escaped from his lips, and gradually he seemed to forget his anger. And as she played his favorite songs for him on the piano — he particularly liked “When the Swallows Homeward Fly” — he sighed with satisfaction. “Ah, that’s a good gel,” he said.

When she was not caring for him, she continued her pilgrimages to the Brays. He no longer tried to stop her, he merely ignored these visits.

And she and Charles continued their perpetual conversation, walking arm in arm through the streets of Coventry in deep discussion.

As they strolled through the cobblestone streets, passing the timbered buildings and the shopfronts filled with displays of ribbons, he told her about his life. “I was a very spoiled little boy,” he said. “But then my mother died when I was nine and I was sent off to boarding school. I was very rebellious, always in hot water. The teachers tied my leg to a desk —”

“They tied your leg to a desk!”

“I managed to cut the cord. Then they tied my leg to a log and I just hefted the thing up onto my shoulders and walked around with it. I defied them and I was very proud. The schoolmaster was a Methodist minister, and that’s where I learned the meaning of injustice.”

“How horrible!” she said.

“And it was. They took me out of there when I was seventeen and I apprenticed at my father’s warehouse. I spent my nights reading, and that’s where I abandoned my faith. I realized that God is nature, and that nature is perfect, and our principal task in life is to understand the laws of nature, for they are inevitably just.”

“I wish I could believe that,” she said.

He continued, “I saw the misery of the workers. After my father died, I took on the management of the business, but business bores me to death. I’d discovered Robert Owen and I decided to adapt his ideas of cooperatives to help the employees of C. Bray & Co. Cara and I have started an Infants’ School, and we’ve given the workers allotments so they can grow their own food and earn some extra cash.
We set up a Workingmen’s Club where they can go instead of the pubs and getting drunk out of their minds.”