The Honeymoon (34 page)

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.”

B
ack 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?

H
e 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 thing 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.