The Loves of Leopold Singer (47 page)

The day before they were to see Coleridge, Geordie showed up at Asherinton. “Come out and help me, Wills.” He was all cheerfulness. “I want to buy a trinket for Miss Adams.”

“Do you realize it isn’t one o’clock?” Wills grumbled, but he got himself out of bed and rang for his man. After a quick meal, the brothers set off for 32 Ludgate Hill.

“She’d light up by these, I think.” Geordie indicated a pair of emerald earrings.

“Those would do a dowager duchess proud,” Wills said. At Geordie’s enquiring look, he said, “The things are too heavy. They’d give her a headache.”

“You're right. Good thing I have you with me.”

“You’ll find something perfect,” Wills said. “Just don’t jump on the first beauty that takes your fancy,” Wills said. “Wait for the best to rise like cream.”

“I'll decide after I’ve seen everything.”

Not likely
, Wills thought. After three shops nothing suited Wills, though Geordie saw many fine pieces. They stopped for a drink. Late in the afternoon, they came to a Chinese jeweler where Wills thought Geordie would find nothing too disastrous. Geordie charged into the shop to look about, but Wills stopped at a glass case near the door to examine a simple gold ring in the shape of a serpent, winding around a misshapen pearl. He knew immediately that it had been made for her.

“Say, that is something,” Geordie followed his gaze. He called the shopkeeper over. “Could we have a look at this ring?”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was pudgy, aging, and more than a little drunk. “Good prose comes from good words in good order. Poetry…” He paused for effect, and his dinner companions waited eagerly. “…is the best words in the best order!”

The amiable group laughed and applauded the famous poet and lecturer, even most had heard the line before on more than one occasion. Dr. Gillman motioned for the glasses to be replenished.

“Good lord,” Wills said.

“Our Lord is indeed good, Mr. Asher,” said Coleridge, a Christian, even if he tended to the mystical. “But what is the source of your astonishment?”

“I know what it’s about, now that I’ve heard it from your lips.”

“The
Kubla Khan
? Why I hardly know myself. But come, sir. Don’t deny us.”

Wills put on his most charming face and conspiratorial smile in order to mitigate the risqué nature of what he was about to say. “It is about…” Now
he
hesitated for effect “…sexual disappointment.”

“Oh!” The other women giggled and displayed mock outrage, but Sara was silent.

 
“Good lord, indeed,” said Gillman.

Coleridge smiled. “Perhaps it is, at that.”

“Oh, say it for us again, Coleridge!”

“Do!”

The evening was a success, the company all quite smug with themselves. They were drinking wine with Coleridge and discussing sex in mixed company. The poet was on fire, charming, intelligible, his brilliant best. Somehow his white hair had come undone in unruly wisps as if to illustrate his creation. His eyes glittered and his voice was commanding and sonorous.

“I shall recite—again—my fragment,
Kubla Khan
. And as I do, my brilliant associate, Mr. William Philo George Asher, will intersperse his gloss, so to speak, and so enlighten us all.”

Wills nodded, and Coleridge began.

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure dome decree.

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls & towers were girdled round.”

“There!” said Wills. “
Twice five miles of fertile ground
. There you have two human beings, fertile and, as Adam, made from the ground. And the walls and towers girdling round represent the marriage bond.”

“Very good,” said Gillman.

“And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And there were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.”

“The gardens are man-made, like the marriage bond. But the forests,” Wills’ tone grew ominous, “are made by Nature herself.”

The poet continued.

“But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!”

Wills said, “So our Poet warns us. Belying the domestic idyll promised by the marriage bond, there lurks a dark and unhomely danger. Our uncivilized, unbound natures will not be chained.” Wills looked for Sara’s response, but her gaze was fixed upon the half-filled goblet of claret she cradled. As the blush on her cheeks deepened, he felt satisfaction and desire all at once.

Coleridge continued.

“And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,”

“And the earth represents the bride,” Wills kept his gaze on Sara.

“With her fast, thick pants!” roared Mr. Abbot, another guest.

“A mighty fountain momently was forced”

“Oh, my!” said Mrs. Abbot, scandalized but a little too drunk to say more.

“Amid whose swift half-intermittent burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion”

“The bridegroom lazily—though urgently—explores the landscape of his bride.” Wills’s smile had just enough delighted wickedness to make the ladies warm to him further. Mrs. Chasen jumped as Mr. Chasen took her hand.

“Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean”

“Sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean,” Wills repeated, heavy with melancholy. Here, his eyes met those of Coleridge. In one instant, the sage saw his youth, and the young man his future. Each pitied himself.

“And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”

“Oh, the irony!” Wills said. “He’s been tricked! He thought she was a sunny pleasure dome, but discovers she is a cave of ice.”

“How sad.” Mrs. Chasen said.

Mr. Chasen said, “My dear, I’ve never found an icy crevice in your female depths.”

Coleridge concluded, soft and wistful,

“A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song

To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,

That with music loud and long.

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

For several minutes the only sound was of the crackling fire. Flames danced in Sara’s claret, like topaz mixed with garnet. Forgetting the audience, she said, “I don’t believe it’s a fragment at all, Mr. Coleridge.”

Coleridge sighed. “Perhaps not, Miss Sara. What a lovely name. Dear Sara.”

More poetry, more wine, more talk, more laughter. At one point Coleridge raised his empty glass to throw it against the stones of the fireplace.

“No! No!” cried Mrs. Gillman with mock severity. “Not again, Coleridge!”

Good-natured STC set his glass safely down. “For you, my dear. And because we have such a lovely Sara at table this night.”

-oOo-

“You were brave tonight, Sara,” Wills said.

It was over. She’d waited for this evening for so long, and now they were headed home.

“I congratulate you on speaking up. I know how difficult it must have been for you.”

He does understand me
. “I never dreamed I would meet Coleridge,” she said. “For the rest of my life when I read his poetry, I will hear his marvelous voice.” She was still full of the poet’s presence, proud of his acknowledgment of her comment. “Your brother will be sorry to have missed this night.”

The stars were magnificent, the crescent moon like a fierce exotic symbol. She thought of Coleridge’s Christabel:
A star has set. A star has risen
. Perhaps one didn’t need to go through trauma to be reborn, to realize a new version of one’s self. Maybe being in the presence of a mystic was itself transformative. Or maybe mystery was over-rated. Maybe transformation was a mundane thing: the page simply turns and the next chapter begins. Her life had changed in the course of common events. She had been one person, and now she was another.

Perhaps the nearer truth was that her outer life now better fit her interior nature. She had never been an active person like Eleanor. Sara was perfectly happy with her boring little life at The Branch. She would like to be her great aunt’s companion forever. But the baroness was old and would die. And then what? Would she be tossed back across the Atlantic Ocean?