Shelley: The Pursuit (154 page)

At 8 o’clock on the morning of 16 June Mary’s illness did finally result in a bad miscarriage. She bled profusely and when Shelley sent for a doctor and for ice, nobody came to the remote house for seven hours. Mary thought she was going to die. ‘I lay nearly lifeless — kept from fainting by brandy, vinegar eau de Cologne &c — at length ice was brought to our solitude — it came before the doctor so Claire and Jane were afraid of using it . . . .’
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But Shelley was quite ruthless in the emergency: he had a tin hip bath filled up with the ice, and
plunged Mary into it and made her sit still till all the bleeding stopped. The rest of the household looked on in helpless horror, but his method worked. Two days later he wrote to John Gisborne: ‘I succeeded in checking the haemorrhage and fainting fits, so that when the physician arrived all danger was over, and he had nothing to do but applaud me for by boldness. [Mary] is now doing well, and the sea baths will soon restore her.’
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But she did not recover quickly, and at the beginning of July was only just able to ‘crawl from [her] bedroom to the terrace’.
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Claire was a great help to Mary at this time; but Jane Williams was more concerned with Shelley. It was she who went out with the men in the boat, sometimes taking the guitar Shelley had given her with its inlaid fretwork of flowers, so that the music floated across the water to the Casa Magni.

On 18 June Trelawny took the
Bolivar
out of Lerici harbour, and made south for Livorno. Captain Roberts and Williams began refitting the
Don Juan
, mounting the fore and aft sections, and preparing the new topmast rigging they had designed for both masts. It took up all their time for the next week. Shelley no longer had the release of sailing, except for the little shallop, and he stayed at the Casa Magni writing letters to Trelawny and John Gisborne, and working intermittently on his poem. His letter to Trelawny, whom he had only just waved off, was very strange. Most of it consisted of a long request for a lethal dose of ‘the Prussic Acid, or essential oil of bitter almonds’. He explained that he had no intention of suicide at present, ‘but I confess it would be a comfort to me to hold in my possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest’. The letter does not ring quite right, it is both morbid and artificial at the same time, and one has the feeling that Shelley was trying deliberately to impress Trelawny with his own uncertain state. One reason for Shelley’s guilt and depression appeared in the line of postscript: ‘PS. Mary is better, though still excessively weak.’
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He knew Trelawny was fond of Mary, and perhaps he felt that the Cornishman blamed his treatment of her.

To John Gisborne, he wrote more freely: ‘Italy is more and more delightful to me. . . . I only feel the want of those who can feel, and understand me. Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not. The necessity of concealing from her thoughts that would pain her, necessitates this, perhaps. It is the curse of Tantalus . . . .’ The Williamses on the other hand he found more and more pleasing, though as he aptly put it ‘words are not the instruments of our intercourse’. Claire was ‘vivacious and talkative, and though she teases me sometimes, I like her’. Though he was not writing — ‘Imagine Demosthenes reciting a Philippic to the waves of the Atlantic’ — he was feeling well, and outwardly contented. The bay of Lerici was dazzlingly fine in the changing lights, and the sailing magical. ‘[My boat] is swift and beautiful, and appears quite a vessel. Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful
bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, “Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful.”’
³⁶

Shelley composed little songs and poems for Jane, one of which ‘The Keen Stars are Twinkling . . .’ he left in her room with a note: ‘I commit [it] to your secrecy and your mercy, and will try to do better another time.’
³⁷
Other poems belonging to these few days were the dedication of her guitar, ‘Ariel to Miranda . . .’, ‘When the Lamp is Shattered’, and the ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’:

And the fisher with his lamp

And spear about the low rocks damp

Crept, and struck the fish which came

To worship the delusive flame. . . .
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He had cast his spell over Jane, and she once reported with terror that she had seen his figure walk twice along the terrace while he was actually aboard the boat.
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Shelley kept a small white vellum notebook
⁴⁰
in his pocket in which he jotted parts of these brief lyrics and
ariettes
, as he called them to Jane. He translated a few more lines of
Faust
, and sketched boats, sailing rigs and a chariot with a rider whipping on his horse who turns to look balefully back at him.
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He also put odd Biblical fragments in the notebook. In the middle of one page is: ‘Thou shalt be hidden from the scourge of the angel — Thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field.’ And at the bottom: ‘Thou makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth’; and ‘The mind’s invisible tyranny’.
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On the front inside cover he wrote in large, black ink: ‘The Spring rebels not against winter but it succeeds it — the dawn rebels not against night but it disperses it.’

Definite news had now reached Lerici of Hunt, who had arrived at long last in Genoa and was about to sail to Livorno. Captain Roberts and Williams hurried to finish the refitting so they could sail to meet him, and the
Don Juan
was relaunched on the 22nd. She now had two complete new sets of topmast rigging, and could fly three spinnakers and a storm jib. She looked ‘like a vessel of 50 tons’ Williams wrote with pride. But despite all the new woodwork and rigging, she floated three inches higher on her revised ballast load.
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Shelley told Mary that they intended to sail on the 24th, but she begged him not to go, as she felt helpless without him and worried about the health of the child Percy Florence.

On the night before the planned departure, Williams wrote in his journal that
‘Shelley
sees spirits
and alarms the whole house’.
⁴⁴
Mary’s account, later written to Maria Gisborne, is genuinely horrifying.

… The fright my illness gave him caused a return of nervous sensations & visions as bad as in his worst times. I think it was the Saturday after my illness while yet unable to walk I was confined to my bed — in the middle of the night I was awoken by hearing him scream & come rushing into my room; I was sure he was asleep & tried to waken him by calling on him, but he continued to scream which inspired me with such a panic that I jumped out of bed & ran across the hall to Mrs Williams’s room where I fell through weakness, though I was so frightened that I got up again immediately — she let me in & Williams went to Shelley who had been wakened by my getting out of bed — he said that he had not been asleep & that it was a vision that he saw that had frightened him —
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Under questioning, Shelley explained that he had seen two visions: one was of the lacerated figures of Edward and Jane covered with blood who staggered into his room supporting each other and shouted, ‘Get up Shelley the sea is flooding the house & it is all coming down.’ The other vision was when he rushed into Mary’s room to waken her: he saw his own figure bending over the bed strangling her. Shelley did not sail for Genoa the next day, for Mary had a relapse as a result of these visitations.
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He talked to her calmly in the morning about the many other visions that he had been seeing lately. The only one Mary records was another meeting with himself.’. . . He had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace & said to him — “How long do you mean to be content?” ’
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It was of course his Zoroastrian double; he had at last succeeded in thoroughly terrifying Mary.

The trip to meet Hunt was now postponed until 1 July, when Hunt should have arrived at Livorno. The heat was again oppressive, and in San Terenzo and Lerici church prayers were offered for rain. At night the Fiesta of St John was celebrated on the shore, and the local people danced and sang wildly in the surf.
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Two days before sailing, Shelley wrote a long letter to Horace Smith in Versailles, largely about politics. ‘It seems to me that things have now arrived at such a crisis as requires every man plainly to utter his sentiments on the inefficacy of the existing religions no less than political systems for restraining & guiding mankind. Let us see the truth whatever that may be — ’ Having finished the letter, he turned it round and wrote crosswise on top of his previous writing: ‘I still inhabit this divine bay, reading Spanish dramas & sailing & listening to the most enchanting music.’
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Shelley seems to have had some discussion with Williams on public affairs too, and on the last day of the month, Williams sat on the deck of the
Don Juan
as the topmast rigging was being reset for the final time and
read Shelley’s copy of
Queen Mab
under the baking sun. ‘An astonishing work.’
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On 1 July Shelley, Williams, Captain Roberts and the boat boy Charles Vivian sailed for Livorno, covering the distance of fifty miles in seven hours. They docked at half past nine in the evening, and spent the night sleeping on deck on cushions thrown down from the
Bolivar.
The next morning the quarantine officers cleared them to come ashore. Byron, the Gambas, Hunt and his family were all at Livorno, and there was an emotional reunion between Hunt and Shelley. Hunt recalled how Shelley rushed forward to embrace him, repeating over and over with delight ‘how
inexpressibly
glad’ he was to see him. Shelley was in the highest spirits, and when some joke was made, he leaned against a doorway for support, laughing wildly till the tears came into his eyes.

The next day, leaving Williams at the harbour to buy provisions, Shelley and the Hunts and Byron made their way to Pisa. The Pisa plan for the
Liberal
, which was after all the real reason for their being together, did not now look promising. The Gambas were about to be permanently exiled from Tuscany, and Byron had declared that he would abandon both the Lanfranchi, and his new summer residence at Monte Nero to follow them. Trelawny was already scheming to get the
Bolivar
by land to the Lake of Geneva. Hunt was sixty crowns in debt, and his wife Marianne was dangerously ill: at Pisa Vaccà told Hunt she would probably die. Byron was appalled and irritated by the sight of Hunt’s numerous offspring, and groaned inwardly and outwardly at the responsibility he had taken on at the ground floor of his palace. On top of all this, a private letter from Mary to Hunt which Shelley delivered announced that it would be ‘madness’ for the Hunts to come to Lerici: ‘I wish I could break my chains and leave this dungeon.’
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‘Everybody is in despair,’ Shelley wrote, ‘& everything in confusion.’
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Shelley made great efforts during the next five days to mediate between all the parties, and succeeded to some degree. He pointed out to Hunt that the offer Byron had made of assigning the copyright of his ‘Vision of Judgement’ for the first number of the
Liberal
would almost certainly guarantee the journal’s success. This offer he firmly secured from Byron ‘in spite of delicacy’. When it appeared in the autumn, the
Liberal
did in fact carry Byron’s poem.

Shelley’s presence at Pisa, looking sun-burnt and healthy, gradually had the effect of cheering everyone, and both Byron and Hunt were anxious that he should stay. But Williams was still waiting at Livorno with the
Don Juan
, and he was impatient to return to Jane at Lerici: the wind blew constantly northwards for Spezia. ‘What can I do,’ he wrote in a note to Jane. ‘Poor Shelley desires that I should return to you, but I know secretly wishes me not to leave him in the lurch.’
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Besides, there was Mary still waiting on her sofa in the terrace windows,
worrying about Percy Florence. Shelley wrote to her from Pisa: ‘How are you my best Mary? Write especially how is your health & how your spirits are, & whether you are not more reconciled to staying at Lerici at least during the summer. . . . Ever dearest Mary, Yours affectionately S. — PS. I have found the translation of the Symposium.’
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He also sent a brief love-note to Jane. ‘I fear you are solitary & melancholy at Villa Magni. . . . How soon those hours past, & how slowly they return to pass so soon again, & perhaps for ever, in which we have lived together so intimately so happily! . . .’
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He looked in to greet the Masons at Casa Silva before leaving Pisa on 7 July.