Sophie and the Sibyl (19 page)

END OF CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

takes the Train to Stuttgart, which allows the Narrator a Closer Look at Max.

Sophie forgave Max. But she was not inclined to forgive the Sibyl. Nor did she enquire too closely into the Sibyl’s motives. She has betrayed me, and I will neither forget nor forgive. Thus determined, Sophie felt unchristian, but clean. She needed someone to blame for this emotional disaster, and to hate whoever that was, from the stomach upwards. When she blossomed again among the yellow leaves and muddy fields of Mark Brandenburg, flying along the rutted paths, leaving the groom well behind her, the poison tree of resentment and bitterness nevertheless grew strong in her heart. She never did read the end of
Middlemarch
, when the final episode, specially ordered by her mother, arrived at the great house in Wilhelmplatz. And so she never appreciated Dorothea’s revelation concerning the oneness of humanity, and universal human suffering, after her night of similarly disappointed tears, nor did she learn of that latter-day St Theresa’s championship of Lydgate when all the town turned against him. Sophie decided that the Sibyl’s advocacy of self-sacrifice and discriminating morals boiled down to a lot of tedious sententious waffle, and she was having none of it. Down with the Sibyl and her hypocritical morality! Who believes in a prophetess who doesn’t practise what she preaches, especially when it all comes seasoned with an atheistical gospel of scientific rationalism.

Sophie, however, being far more interested in horses than in Darwinism, or visions of the perfect Right that included all humanity, soon relegated her disillusion with the Sibyl to a far corner of her heart. She looked forward to seeing Max again, after a suitable lapse of time in which everyone recovered their tempers and their dignity. Sophie never doubted that Max would renew his proposals and fling himself at her feet. For this man, who had once hurtled after her vanishing plaits in the damp forest, risked his Sunday best in the fountains for her sake, strolled through her life, not as a guest or as a suitor, but as a permanent resident, part of her domestic landscape. Her interesting doubts, contained in the letter to the Sibyl, reflected the influence of her once beloved author’s work rather than her deepest feelings. Sophie could not imagine marrying a man who did not put her first or regard her desires as his commands. She loved Max unconditionally and without reflection, as if he were already an inmate of her stables, needing grooming, fodder and the whip.

But what of Max? I have noticed one thing he has clearly overlooked. The Sibyl may never have intended him to read that letter. And certainly never to reveal that she was the stranger who had delivered the necklace. For had she replied to Sophie’s eighteen-year-old torrent of adoration, her handwriting would have given her away. Did she, like Sophie, think that gentlemen do not read a young lady’s private letters? Was her conscious intention, when she handed over the unsealed missive, to throw these young people together? Or maybe she wasn’t even thinking clearly? Even genius suffers from its cloudy moments. Max was to answer the letter on her behalf. But how was he to do that if he hadn’t read the letter in the first place? Sophie declared that she was promised in marriage to Max; therefore they were an engaged couple, were they not? A few crisp words might have been exchanged, but serious matters, which involved money and familial consent, had surely already been settled? Did the Sibyl think that Sophie’s unguarded outburst and declaration of her deepest hopes would touch Max to the core, and move him not only to propose marriage but a life of camaraderie and adventure, discovering the world?

Who knows? But one thing is certain. Max had become, in the Sibyl’s vast expanding consciousness, an object of special interest. I have no conclusive evidence that the Sibyl cared for men more deeply than she did for women. She inspired a lifelong passion in the heart of Edith Simcox, and young persons of both sexes flung themselves at her feet, confessing all. But an ungenerous comment from Mrs. Jebb does rather stick in the mind.

‘She has always cared much more for men than for women, and has cultivated every art to make herself attractive, feeling bitterly all the time what a struggle it was, without beauty, whose influence she exaggerates as do all ugly people.’

Well, that Sophie, Countess von Hahn, possesses youth and beauty in abundance brooks no dispute. Is the Sibyl simply jealous, after all? I think not. For the Sibyl’s fame and wealth stood crowned by something magnificent and intangible – the sense of her own entitlement to judge others and yet still to be adored. Is she guilty of that fatal vanity which often overtakes celebrities, whatever their talent, who are sought after, lionised and flattered? Had she begun to believe, not what she thought of herself, but what others said of her?

Poor Blackwood, her devoted publisher, upon receiving
The Legend of Jubal, and Other Poems,
wrote in pitiful tones: ‘If you have any lighter pieces, written before the sense of what a great author should do for mankind came so strongly upon you, I should like much to look at them.’ Poetry isn’t her strongest suit, I’d agree. But her reputation was by then so colossal that the poems still sold, hand over fist.

The train bound for Stuttgart has not yet departed from Berlin. The conductor sees me coming and holds the door. The ladies’ compartment is full. No matter. I am looking for Max. Of course I have been watching him intently throughout these pages. I even dream of him. But we have never shared the same weather, breathed the same stale air, and certainly never sat opposite one another on a Continental train. If I can get a closer look at him I shall have a clearer idea of how to proceed.

He rises as soon as I enter his compartment and makes space for my small suitcase, hatbox and umbrella. He bows, and waits until I am conveniently seated. He closes the window to avoid the invasion of smuts. I am not used to being held up straight by what feels like a surgical corset, nor am I accustomed to wearing so many layers of clothes. I am hidden behind a thick muslin veil. He cannot see my eyes, but I continue to observe him, unobserved. He has two laughter lines at the corners of his eyes. And he looks older than he is. His moustache is beautifully trimmed, pencil-thin, like a gentleman pirate, and he has white hands, with clean, short fingernails. Is he handsome? Yes, ah yes, he is far more beautiful than Antinous. I am well known for my iron heart and cold head. I have worked with many authors who can provide excellent testimonials, praising my wintry self-control. I am never bewitched by men, but this man, troubled, romantic, arresting, has captured my attention. His rich, cropped dark curls tempt my fingers, damp in my crocheted white gloves. No wonder he annoys Wolfgang, who cannot hide that bald patch. I am forbidden to touch Max, for I am someone in some future time. But I long to do so. And now he senses the intensity of my gaze and shifts, uneasy, disconcerted, in his seat. No respectable woman scrutinises a man like that. He consults his watch. I inspect the buttons on his waistcoat. At the same moment we raise our faces to the window; the train blasts a long hoot and shudders forward with a ferocious lurch, before heaving itself away down the line. I search for his reflection in the glass, but see nothing, nothing but a wash of steam.

END OF CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

in which Max seizes his Opportunity and does Something Very Silly.

‘Sir, do I have the pleasure of addressing one of the Duncker brothers? Why yes, I believe I do. Your brother Wolfgang, sir, I have the honour to number among my close acquaintances. What brings you to Stuttgart?’

Max wheeled round, alarmed at being so easily recognised, and found himself confronted with a giant hairy paw and a large black beard. The voice, guttural and rumbling, completed the image of a Canadian bear in a tall top hat and black frock coat, with mud-splashes on his trousers.

‘I’m afraid I don’t recall . . .?’ Max wavered.

‘Carus, sir. Julius Victor Carus. We met once in Berlin at your firm’s offices in the Jägerstraße, when I was negotiating terms for a translation of Mr. Darwin’s famous work. Come now, you must remember.’ Carus set off again, with Max under his arm, as if he had effected an arrest and was herding the culprit towards his destined incarceration.

‘Yes, I have the honour of being Mr. Darwin’s German translator. His second translator, mind. Old Heinrich Bronn did the first edition, published here by Schweizerbart, and I was engaged to repair some of the old boy’s more fanciful additions. Couldn’t do it though until the good chap popped his clogs. Five or six years ago, it was, and I discussed every delicate point with the Great Man himself by correspondence. Sometimes two or three letters a day. Your brother shied off publication though. You see, he had enough controversy on his hands with all those pamphlets,
Darwinismus: For and Against
.’

The bear boomed onwards, leaving Max no opportunity to reply.

‘You were quite a young man then, just out of short trousers. Saw you since though – out in the park by the bandstand last summer with the von Hahns, on the arm of an uncommonly pretty young girl. That will be their eldest, eh?’

Carus marched Max across the cobbles and swivelled round, presenting his teeth in a slightly lecherous smile. Max winced, noting that he was observed on the arm of said pretty girl, rather than the other way round, and that, in this instance, the damsel was clearly leading the amorous dance.

‘Ah yes, that would have been Sophie, Countess von Hahn.’ Max tried to sound indifferent.

‘Blooming, blooming. Mind you, her mother outshone all the other girls in her first season. A handsome family, all of them. You’re engaged to her, I take it.’

Max suffered an internal seizure and turned white, then red. But Carus neither noticed nor paused.

‘I assume that we’re going to the same place. No other reason for you to be here in the Rote Gasse. And the lady is one of your big foreign authors, isn’t she? Alongside Walter Scott. Mind the muck.’ He steered Max round an oozing pile of horse shit.

The Leweses had chosen a rural corner of the town, close to one of the smaller hotels, where they took their meals. The streets were sufficiently bucolic to harbour a troop of geese and a multitude of farmyard odours. Carus thought this very suitable and declared himself a fan of the early rural novels. He fancied that Mrs. Lewes longed to return to the deep countryside lanes of her childhood.

‘You feel that on every page.
Adam Bede
, that’s the ticket. Written with love. You know, the one with that adorable kittenish little woman making butter in the dairy.’ Max could remember nothing whatever of Hetty Sorrel and Captain Donnithorne in Mrs. Poyser’s dairy. But he did remember a woman preacher delivering sermons in the open air.

‘I have the translation of her latest here,’ said Max, indicating a substantial package that bulged beneath his arm. ‘She wishes to read all the text that we have already completed. I am to take the Finale back to Berlin.’

‘Delicate business, translation,’ growled Carus. ‘Just as serious in the Sciences as in the Arts. Old Bronn had his own axe to grind when he set about translating poor Darwin. You see, the big question for Bronn was this: must every living being come into existence through the agency of another living being or could life emerge from disconnected organic materials? He was following the French. No shame in that. Many people did. And Bronn spotted at once that Darwin’s theory did away with any notion of a Creator God. Out go the six days and let there be light! Can living creatures be made out of inorganic matter? That’s the issue. The first origins of life! Where do we come from: God or Nature? Darwin’s very cautious, you know. Very circumspect. He doesn’t make any great statements. Wait a minute, we’ve gone straight past their door. Here it is. Do you know Lewes? First-rate botanist in his own right. That’s why he has such a convincing handle on Goethe.’

The front door swung open to reveal a dark stone passageway that traversed the house. Carus had clearly tramped through on other occasions.

‘Out the back!’ he roared, his huge bass echoing off the elderly woodwork. A young boy chasing a black-and-white dog charged past them yelling his excuses, and as the door at the far end blew open Max glimpsed the golden colours of an autumn garden, stirring in the sunny wind. The door banged shut and the garden vanished. Carus thundered through, holding his arm out to Max.

‘Mind the steps. Three down.’

The formal garden had once been laid out in geometric patterns, but now the tiny hedges, little lines of sportive wood run wild, poured out at peculiar angles. The ornamental hermitage, a rustic summer house coated in wisteria, yellowed at the edges, lay buried under seasonal colours, and the roses, sun-drenched in the washed light of these last warm days, fluttered in frail banks of red, orange, pink. Their petals showered down in the draught from the passage. The charm of this overgrown garden immediately convinced Max that it was the Sibyl who had chosen this last residence in Germany. No one, unless specifically invited, would ever find them out. Indeed, had he not met Carus, he would probably have patrolled the Rote Gasse for some time, searching for the secret passageway, the bundle of translated sheets growing ever heavier.

‘That’s their place. Little cottage at the back.’ Carus crunched across the weeds and gravel, then shook the bell until it shuddered on the chain. A trio of bobbing maids appeared; all three stared at Max, entranced.