The Honeymoon (28 page)

After supper, they had taken a moonlight cruise on the Thames to Twickenham, and all the while, Barbara, who was tall herself, never took her eyes off Eugène. It was clear that she had succumbed at last to “the Master Passion.”

Now, two years later, Barbara, off for her annual winter sojourn in Algiers, had come to Holly Lodge to say goodbye to Marian.

“This is an improvement over your old rooms in Richmond,” Barbara said. “You used to complain you could hear each other’s pens scratching when you worked.”

“But the houses are so close together,” Marian said, “and the windows are so big. I feel as if everyone can see into our lives here. They know everything about us.”

Barbara intuited what she meant. “What if George tried to obtain a divorce on the Continent?” she asked, no doubt in the excitement of her own marriage and wishing the same for Marian. “Perhaps it would be legal in England. Then the problem would be solved.”

Later, after Barbara had gone, Marian told George of Barbara’s suggestion. “I’ll get on it at once in the morning,” he said. “I’ll speak to the solicitor.”

But when he came in the next afternoon, his face was downcast. “I’m so sorry, my darling.”

“He said no!” she cried.

“Yes,” he said, taking her hands. “He says there is no such thing as an international treaty about divorce. Wherever we might get one on the Continent, it wouldn’t apply here.”

She turned away angrily. “What does it matter?” she said. “We’re more married than most people who were wed in a church.”

He caught her wrist and spun her around. “And nothing,” he said, fiercely and finally, “and no one, can ever rend us asunder.”

Another of their visitors at Holly Lodge was Herbert Spencer. George loved Spencer, that brilliant, eccentric fellow. And what did she care anyway about the hurt Spencer had inflicted on her, she who was so bathed now in George’s love? She had told George of the episode — she kept nothing from him. “If it hadn’t been for him bringing you to the Princess that night,” George said, “we wouldn’t be together. That was the first time we really spoke.” Spencer was such a sad, aggrieved person these days, he felt his genius was unrecognized. He was writing his autobiography, though he was a very young man still. She couldn’t stay angry at the odd soul who simply lacked the human capacity for love. They asked him to dinner and he was grateful, though apparently totally unaware of the pain he’d once caused her.

Ever since the publication of
Adam Bede
, the public’s curiosity to know the real George Eliot had intensified. Someone from Coventry said that Isaac had recognized their father in the character of Adam. And there was a madman
from Nuneaton, one Joseph Liggins, who was going around insisting that
he
was actually George Eliot, and the author of both
Scenes of Clerical Life
and
Adam Bede
.

It was impossible to keep the secret up any longer. They began to tell friends that George Eliot was none other than Marian Evans, a country girl from Warwickshire who had educated herself to become one of the most famous authors in the land, and soon the word spread. But they decided she would retain the pseudonym “George Eliot” on future books, as that was the name on her first great success.

It had been two years now since Isaac had cut her out of his life. Sometimes the hurt and anger faded, and then it arose again without warning. How could Isaac keep away from her this long? He had inherited their father’s terrible capacity for anger, the ability to separate himself from what he loved out of the principles ingrained in him by his little country world. And Chrissey was gone now. There was no one now whom she could call brother or sister, she had no real family.

She sat in the conservatory window at Holly Lodge in the bleak, winter silence, looking out, thinking about him. Before her was a wide view, it was almost countryside, not quite, all the way to Wimbledon. The leaves had gone from the trees, there was only the brown grass, the cold that she so hated. George was in his study, working on a series of essays he was calling
The Physiology of Common Life
. They were descriptions of the nervous, digestive, and respiratory systems of different species. He wanted it to be clearly written for the common reader, but also of interest to scientists.

As she sat there staring out the window of the conservatory, she began to imagine a woman such as herself sitting in a window, thinking about the past.

She turned to her little table, and wrote the words
“I have been pressing my elbows on the arms of my chair and dreaming that I was standing on the bridge in front of —”
She saw in her mind’s eye the little mill at Arbury, the turning wheel, jets of water spurting out of it.
“Dorlcote Mill,”
she’d call it. A girl was standing there.
“That little girl was watching too,”
she wrote. But it was no small stream, as it had been at Arbury, it was a mighty river, the River Floss, she’d call it.

The little girl was Maggie Tulliver. She has a brother, Tom, whom she adores. Like Isaac, Tom has “cheeks of cream and roses.” Tom is bossy and they squabble, as all brothers and sisters do. Maggie is keenly intelligent, but she can only go to school for a year because it’s her job to take care of their elderly father. Tom, however, gets a good education and succeeds in business.

As always the writing, the process of creating a story from the recesses of her mind, from her fragile memories, went slowly.

George came in with the post. “Something from Barbara,” he said. “I thought you’d want to see it.” She had told no one but George what she was writing, but Barbara knew she was struggling with a new book. Barbara had written a little note of encouragement to her, and enclosed a drawing of Parizade, the princess from
The Arabian Nights
, Parizade, who demanded to be educated like her brothers, to be allowed to hunt like them. Barbara had evoked their mutual love of
The Arabian Nights
to cheer her up.

Marian hung the drawing up above her desk for inspiration, and wrote to thank her.
“Parizade has a mysterious resemblance to the heroine of the book I am writing,”
she told her.

She went on with her work. There would be aunts in the novel, her mother’s sisters, the Pearsons. She made Aunt Mary into Aunt Glegg, a sarcastic old bat, whom the children hate; Aunt Elizabeth became the weepy, valetudinarian Aunt Pullet; and Aunt Ann, thin, sallow, and rich, was Aunt Deane. Sweet revenge.

Young Maggie is attracted to wealthy Stephen Guest. They spend the night on a boat on the River Floss — but they do nothing wrong. Tom learns about it and disowns her, just as Isaac had disowned Marian.

At the end of the book, the river floods, swelling into an immense tide, moaning in restless sorrow like an angry god. Brother and sister are reconciled, but they drown together, locked in an unbroken embrace.

On the morning of March 21, she finished. In her journal she wrote,
“Magnificat anima mea!” —
“My soul doth magnify the Lord,” from the Evening Prayer.

“George Eliot is as great as ever,”
wrote the
London Times
reviewer.
The Mill on the Floss
earned her twice as much as
Adam Bede
.

Three days after she finished the book, they set out for the Continent. “It’s time for you to know the boys,” George said. He had sent his sons to the Hofwyl School in Berne to get them away from the chaos in Agnes’s house. It was an idealistic place, with rich and poor pupils alike, in which they learned their lessons through farming, but George missed his boys sorely.

They were teenagers now, and he had explained the situation with Marian to them. He’d begun to mention Marian in his letters, and then gradually to refer to her as “Mother” — Agnes was always, respectfully, “Mama.” It was decided that Marian should begin to write to them herself. She sent them little gifts: for Charley, the eldest, who was sixteen, a watch, and for Thornie, the middle boy, who was fourteen, a copy of
Adam Bede
. To Bertie, the youngest, at eleven, she sent a pocketknife with a corkscrew. She suggested to George that she sign her letters to them
Mutter
. “Perfect,” George said. “It acknowledges that you are not quite their real mother, but you
are
a mother to them.”

They wrote back to thank her for their gifts, charmingly. Charley signed his letter
“Yours affectionately, Charles Lewes.”
Thornie began,
“For the first time do I seize the pen to begin a correspondence which is to be lasting which affords me much pleasure.”
Little Bertie wrote poignantly,
“I long to come back to England again, it is 3 yearys that I have not seen England.”
“Poor little fellow,” George had said. “He was very ill as a child and I’m afraid he’s a bit ‘slow.’ ”

“Thornie’s most like me,” George told her. “He’s a devil, very high-spirited, I’m afraid. I hope he won’t be too much for you.” And indeed, soon Thornie was revealing his true colors, entreating her in his letters to persuade his father,
“Schnurrbarttragende alte”
(whiskery old man), as he called him, to increase his allowance.

Now she was finally going to meet them. They traveled through Italy toward Switzerland. In Florence, George was reading the guidebook when he said, “You should write a novel about Savonarola.”

The idea caught her — here was a chance to confront the evil of absolute morality, the pain it caused, what it had done to her, as manifested in the cruel rigidities of the country life of her childhood, in Isaac’s pitiless judgment. “We’ll research it together,” he said.

The next morning they set out through the hot, narrow streets of Florence for the San Marco monastery, where Savonarola had lived. At the door, a monk, dressed in a cloak and hood, slightly bent over, stood guard. Seeing her, he addressed George, “I am sorry, Signor, but women are not allowed inside.”

“As if there’s anything going on under those skirts of his,” George whispered.

“Not to worry,” she told him. “I’ll wait here.” So she stayed in the outer cloister studying Fra Angelico’s
Crucifixion
while George went inside and made notes for her on what he saw.
“From the refectory a spiral staircase leads to (room) … Savonarola’s cell 5 paces long 4 broad …”
Then they went to the Magliabecchian Library, where they saw Savonarola’s manuscripts, written in his tiny handwriting. But they could remain in Florence only a few days because they had to go on to Switzerland to see the boys. As they left, she said to George, “I have all these facts, but what is my story?”