The Honeymoon (30 page)

George, sitting opposite her with his Scotch, could only laugh. “There
are
no gods, my darling.”

They began holding regular “at-homes” in the new house, every Sunday afternoon from two to six. She’d sit in the low chair by the fire, wearing her black satin gown — he still couldn’t break her habit of black entirely — the green-shaded lamp shedding a soft light on her face, a wall of books stacked on the table as if to protect her. George would lead the guests up to her, one by one. They’d sit on the footstool at her feet. From across the room he’d keep an eye on them, and when someone was taking up too much of her time, he’d hurry over and whisk him away. Some people, she knew, thought she was haughty. But it was caution, fear.

Still, mostly men came to the house, rarely women because of their unmarried state. There were lots of bachelors, seeking her wisdom as if she were a priestess, young men struggling with ideas, eager to learn from her, drawn by the famous intellect. She was in her forties now. Perhaps she was like a mother to them. She encouraged them, listened to them, held them captive with their worship of her.
All these young men, they could never hurt her. She could experience the world of men without heartbreak.

One July Sunday, a dapper little man with a beguiling smile and yellow gloves was brought out of the dimness to meet her. His name was Emanuel Deutsch.

“Your article was glorious,” she told him. She had asked to see him. He was a Silesian Jew, a lowly assistant in the British Museum who had just published an article in the
Quarterly Review
on the Talmud and its similarities to the Christian Bible. In the Talmud, he wrote, could be found the foundations of all Christianity, the notions of a Messiah, of redemption, regeneration, and turning away from sin. He wrote about the rise of Jewish nationalism at the time of the Babylonian captivity and the Jewish longing for a homeland. Until Deutsch’s article, for the most part, non-Jews had been ignorant of the Talmud, but Deutsch had revealed it to them. Although Marian had long given up on formal religion, the question of religion and faith still preoccupied her, especially the universality of belief. Deutsch was speaking to her own notions.

He smiled his sweet smile. “Praise from George Eliot means as much as anything in the world to me,” he said in his German accent.

“You must speak many languages to be able to write this,” she said.

“I can read Chaldaic,” he said. “Sanskrit, Amharic, and the Phoenician language.”

“I very much want to learn better Hebrew,” she told him.

“I would be honored to be your tutor,” he replied.

He began coming once a week to give her Hebrew lessons. Meanwhile, his article had become a best seller, of all
things. The
Quarterly Review
had gone into no less than seven reprints. People were attacking him because they said he was belittling the Bible. The London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Among Jews called the essay
“blasphemy.”

When Deutsch next appeared at the Priory, he was near tears. “I beseech you,” Marian said, “try not to think of it. Make the effort. You’ve done the world an enormous service.”

As they grew closer, she came to love him like a son. He told her that the greatest longing of his life was to see Jerusalem. He managed to get a commission from his employer, the British Museum, to go to Palestine to decipher some inscriptions that had been discovered there on ancient stone.

From Palestine, he wrote to her:
“The East … All my wild yearnings fulfilled at last.”

When he returned and came to the Priory, he described to her how he’d prayed at the Western Wall of the Temple along with other Jews. As he was telling her, he broke into tears and couldn’t go on. “I understand,” she said, touching his shoulder. “I understand and I envy you the gift of faith.”

After
Romola
, which had seemed to drain all her blood from her, she tried writing a play. It would be easier, she thought, than a novel. The characters would simply move across the stage and speak, and she wouldn’t have to fill in the story with details. She called it
The Spanish Gypsy
. It was set during the Spanish Inquisition, about a Gypsy girl. She did her usual research, studied Spanish, but foundered
in a swamp of misery. “Maybe I’m destined never to write anything good ever again,” she told George.

All he could do was sigh and kiss her — he was used to her litany of worries and sorrow.

When she let him read it, he held the pages to his chest and said nothing.

“Tell me the truth, please,” she said. “I’d rather hear it from you than others.”

He sighed. “The problem is it lacks drama,” he said. “I can’t stand to see you suffer. I think this isn’t the thing for you.”

Never before had he said this, and she knew he must be right.

As she’d been struggling with it, an idea for an English story had kept intruding on her thoughts, about the events surrounding the Reform Act which had so marked her childhood. She had never forgotten riding with her father in the gig that election day when they went into Nuneaton to market and witnessed the laborers rioting.

She conceived of an idealistic young radical, Felix Holt, and an estate owner with radical ideas, Harold Transome. They fall in love with the same woman, Esther Lyon, and the story of
Felix Holt, the Radical
, went on from there.

After she finished it, she returned to her play about the Spanish Gypsy. She decided to write the whole thing in verse — poetry might free her imagination. Not so. Like everything she wrote, progress was slow and painful. It didn’t sell as well as the novels, though the
Spectator
praised it as
“much the greatest poem of any wide scope and on a plan of any magnitude, which was ever proceeded from a woman.”

She’d also begun to conceive of a novel about medicine. It would be set in the provinces in a town named
Middlemarch, a fitting name for a place that was in the middle of the road. She sketched out the character of an idealistic doctor, based on Chrissey’s husband, poor, wretched Edward Clarke. “Tertius Lydgate” wants to use the latest scientific research in his work, but is trapped in a marriage to pretty, grasping Rosamond Vincy. As always, she thoroughly researched the background and the setting. She ordered books on medicine, studied the details about provincial hospitals — she must have read two hundred books for that novel. She even observed an Oxford professor, Dr. George Rolleston, dissect a human brain.

Writing the new novel was, as usual, a torment, but as George reminded her, “You’ve felt this way about everything you’ve ever written. And it’s always succeeded.”

“Rosamond’s so hard,” she said. “She’s all surfaces.”

“Perhaps because she’s so unlike you,” he said.

Increasing numbers of people were coming to the “at homes” now — naughty George started referring to them as “Sunday Services for the People” and took to calling her “Madonna.” Charles Darwin came. George had been one of the first to praise his
On the Origin of Species
in the
Cornhill Magazine
, and Darwin was grateful to him. He was a tall, stooped man, with red hair fading to gray, a seemingly deferential figure, yet filled with a kind of tension, a guilt and defensiveness, she thought, about his radical ideas. She and George had read
On the Origin of Species
together. She’d found the ideas interesting indeed, but Darwin wasn’t a very good writer, and the book was quite disorganized.

They held an evening so Tennyson could read his poem “The Northern Farmer.” “Wheer ’asta beän sawlong and meä liggin’ ’ere aloän?” it went. Impossible to understand with that Lincolnshire dialect of his. After he finished, he read “Maud” and became so totally swept up in enthusiasm for his own words that he went on until they were all practically falling asleep, and his son, Hallam, tugged at his arm and cried, “Papa, it’s after midnight!”

She was recognized now even when they were abroad. In Rome, they were getting money from a bank and the cashier looked up and said, “Aren’t you the author George Eliot?”

“Oh dear,” George said, “would you mind not telling any other English people that Mrs. Lewes is here? We’re trying to have a peaceful holiday.”

It was fortunate they didn’t keep everyone away.

They were wandering through the maze in the Pamphili Gardens, following the serpentine green hedges trying to find the opening to the end, when they ran into a young woman, Zibbie Cross, on her honeymoon with her husband, Henry Bullock. George had met the Cross family two years before while he was on a walking tour in Surrey with Spencer.

The next night in Rome, Zibbie’s mother, Anna, called on them at the Hotel Minerva, bringing two of her other grown children with her, her daughter Mary and her son Johnnie.

They sat in the faded lobby of the hotel with its wood-beamed ceilings and worn frescoes, a statue of Minerva in a niche, and George ordered tea for everyone. Anna Cross was a widow who’d born ten children. She was small and plump, Mary and Johnnie Cross were both very tall. (Father Cross must have been tall.)

Mary was thin, austere, and quiet. At once, Marian noticed Johnnie Cross’s good looks, his dark red curly hair, his elegant beard, his tall, strong, athletic body, his good cheer, his youthful health and radiance. He was twenty-nine.

As they sat and chatted, Johnnie told her he’d gone to Rugby. Then, at seventeen, he’d been sent to New York to work at a branch of the family banking business, Dennistoun & Cross. “I’ve been living with my brother, Richard,” he said, “on a place called Washington Square.” He had a faint Scottish-American accent, she noticed: soft, round
r
’s and long vowels.

She noticed that he was kind and deferential to his mother, pouring her tea and carefully handing it to her. “Johnnie, dear, can you fetch me my purse with my handkerchief?” And he sprung up at once to get it.

“He’s a saint,” Anna said in front of him, “my perfect one. He was so sickly as a child. He had rheumatic fever and I spent months nursing him and praying over him. I thought I’d lose him. I think because of that he’s my special boy.” As she spoke, Johnnie smiled sweetly at his adoring mother and didn’t seem the least bit discomfited at the mention of being nursed by her. A bit under his mama’s thumb, Marian thought.

“I read your novel,
Romola
,” he told her. “I was quite dumfounded by the learning in it. I don’t know how you could have made it all so real.”

“Thank you,” she replied. “You couldn’t have said anything better.” What a sweet boy he was.