114.

"A professor from Harvard, interested in what they call metaphysics, came to our help. We got the thing under some sort of control, after the summer visitors cleared out, and Mrs. Hiram took in a group from Boston, over Christmas. I need not tell you that we would, as I said, have worked together in secret, if it were possible. But it was no longer possible. The table helped us, you might almost say gran's table saved us. Miss Mary and Miss Cathy gave good-will messages from the table, to the Christmas people, the folks from Boston said, they would see that the two were sheltered. Miss Mary and Miss Cathy agreed to spend the summer visiting in Vermont and Massachusetts. That was last summer. There was a distinguished set in Boston, abolitionists and writers. It was your speaking of this French poet and my remembering Mr. Hawthorne, that confirmed me. I did not want to go on with the work. But I will try to do what I can in Europe; there are others already arranged for, to go on with the Academy, here in London. I would rather go home to Connecticut. I am a simple man, a doctor."

"You are not a simple man, Dr. Ely." Gabriel remembered Gus speaking of simple-Simon health-cures. "Do you do health-treatments?"

115.

"I talk to people. Doctors always talk to people."

"But the table - why do you say it saved you?"

"We could talk about the table. We had to cover rumours."

And there had always been talk of mystery at the Hollow. It was old tales from the past, we could say honestly. But the table started other tables. There was a mushroom growth of talking-tables, right across the country and they say the same of Europe. All this sprang up because of Miss Mary and Miss Cathy and myself. I feel responsible. And I think of how we sat together, winter evenings, and I think of the clear water of the spring from the Hollows, and I fear as I said earlier, that clear rivulet being lost in these dark waters."

And why had Dr. Ely told him all this? Gabriel knew the answer. It was the message he had had the second time, the last time, war and inheritors.

There had always been war, Ely had said earlier, but we could leave the door open.

"We cannot stop war," Dr. Ely had said, "We can not stop inheritance," said Gabriel.

Dr. Ely reached forward to adjust the lamp.

"I will finish my letter," he said, "I will tell Miss Cathy that I will go on."

116.

IV

What is happening to Lizzie in Paris, they asked in London. She wrote to Ruskin, deprecating her talent but Ruskin brushed aside her objections and said this year, at any rate, was settled. "I can not have you going to Paris or near Ida," Ruskin writes Gabriel, ordering him to finish certain drawings, commissioned for one of his art patrons in the North. But seeing a fresh picture of Gabriel's, at Chatham place, Ruskin buys it on the spot for thirty-five pounds, and Gabriel is off to Paris.

Lizzie had already been six weeks in Paris.

She looked stronger, better; Gabriel perceived a certain poise and elegance. "What have you done to yourself, Lizzie?" She rose gracefully, from the faded brocade tabouret where she was sitting, and in the small salon of the modest hotel where she and Mrs. Kincaid were staying, she swayed to the door and stood before the curtain. She might have been Miss Louise Herbert, in the green-room.

"Well, I asked you, what have you done to yourself, Lizzie?" Gabriel repeated. It was perhaps perversity on her part that she stood so still, that she turned her head, so that the chin and throat took the line, "your chin, your

117.

chin - you've spoilt that line, dem yon." It seemed that
she would tilt her head back, and laugh. She did laugh.
It was not however, the green-room laughter of Miss Herbert.
It was too tense, "her flighty giggle," William had called her
laughter, and "she is flighty," William Rossetti had said
(it was reported to her) on more than one occasion. Gabriel's
outlandish pranks and ridiculous and not always funny parodies,
were acclaimed as expression (even the most trivial) of genius
should be. It was never put on record that William Rossetti
called his brother flighty.

"What is the matter with you, Liz?"

"What is the matter with you, Gabriel? I hardly ever
remember, except for the first few times I sat for the Damozel,
your asking me to talk."

"You've been here six weeks, Lizzie, something's happened
to you."

"Something's happened to you, Gabriel."

"Tu quoque was always forbidden in our family."

"Ah - your family." (Ah - Miss Herbert!)

"Something stiffish about you, Lizzie."

"That's what you said of Spenser and Wykeham Deverell."

"My God - what a memory you have."

"That's what you said, when I remembered after three

118.

months (at Red Lion Square) that you hadn't thanked me for
the *Damozel*.

"But I think I said, it wasn't finished."

"And you said, why should you thank me, 'it's you', you
said, 'who should thank me, for making you immortal.'"

She swayed over to the window. Outside, was a walled
garden. She looked down on the wall; above it, there was
placed for her exact requirement, a roof slanting at a probable
angle to meet gables, and above and beyond, uneven planes,
roofs set at impossible angles, broken now and again, by dormer-
windows. Beyond them, was the pinnacle of the lesser *Saint Germain*. There were bells, no sweeter but more personal somehow, than the chimes of Bridewell.

"I thought Scotus would come over with Monro, but only
Monro turned up."

"You have already seen him?"

"We crossed together."

"What are you planning to do first?" From an immense
height, from an immeasurable distance, Elizabeth Siddall, for
the first time in the erratic, surcharged years, spoke with
gentle patronage to Gabriel Rossetti.

"Do? Well, we'll barge into the Louvre, I suppose first."

119.

"You won't like the way they've been cleaning up the
Claudes. There is too much of Rubens but you'll like the
Marriage."

"Marriage?"

"Veronese's Marriage in Cana."

It had been reported in London that the Sid was getting
out of hand. Scotus had remarked to one of them, William,
Boyce or Stevens, that she actually thought herself a genius,
with her "small, quaint, quasi-poetical imitations of his
works." It was Scott who had looked in at Chatham Place last
summer, to retrieve some books he had lent Gabriel and found
the Sid in charge, there, "sleeping there - well - in
Gabriel's absence." William Bell Scott had also run across
her, at the Hermitage. It was during the time that the girl
was sleeping in Gabriel's studio. Where wasn't she? True,
Gabriel was staying at the Queen's Head to be near Brown and
to finish the Bridge. I was trying to find Gabriel. That
caretaker told me he was out at Highgate, but I just pushed
upstairs. Imagine my feelings, I was damn hot. I
would go out the next evening, to Brown's. No, Emma said,
he wasn't there. No help from Emma. He might be sitting
with them, in the Hermitage garden. No, the maid informed me,

121.

perfect moment. She wanted to prolong it. She wanted to be alone afterwards, to think about it. She wanted to reassemble her impressions; herself, it seemed for the first time in her life, needed no assembling. She wanted to savour this moment and recalled the moment, less than a half-hour ago, when Madame Bonnard had announced Gabriel. She wanted to remember Gabriel's voice, behind the curtain, the voice of a new Gabriel, his French voice. It did not abash and shut her out, as his Italian did, when he and William got excited about something (usually some criticism of their father's Dante) and "disappeared" in a mysterious manner; strangers. They were fluent, vituperative in a new way, not that they weren't talkative and dramatic enough in English. But the French Gabriel was different.

"Funny, your not knowing what an *épergne* was," said Lizzie. "I heard you talking real French with Madame Bonnard in the hall, before you came in." 🕥 "That *épergne*, as you described it, wasn't real anything. And why a damned Exhibition?" 🕥 "It's cheap," said Lizzie, "cheaper than the Crystal Palace and easy to get to. I mean, we can't walk around the shops all day, looking, though we did buy, in the beginning." She had turned from the window. Now again, she swayed forward and

122.

seated herself, this time, on the gilded settee. The room was growing darker. Her hands seemed to be resting at her sides, but she was fingering the folds of her skirt, then as if at a sudden "damn you, your hands, Lizzie," she drew them forward and they rested on her lap. Still, her fingers felt within them, the sheen of the deep-rose taffeta, she had chosen that first week, with such care and so extravagantly, with Mrs. Kincaid. She had worn the dress to get the "feel" of it, so that she wouldn't be shy in it, when Gabriel saw her. It (or something) had gone to her head.

It was taffetas de soie but it wasn't silk exactly. It had the lustre of shot-silk but it wasn't stiff like taffeta.

"It was the stuffs; they have rooms and show-cases and costumes made up, and you couldn't buy anything, not outright, at the Exhibition, even if you wanted. So you look arouhd, without embarrassment, at what they call the dentelles, lace, every kind of stitch-work, Flemish, Spanish and of course, French embroideries - and tapestries." "Old tapestries?" I - I don't know."

"You mean you wasted six weeks, pottering about the Exhibition?"

"O - no, Gabriel."

123.

"You think the time wasn't wasted? Why the protestation?"

"I wasn't protesting. It was a way of - forgetting."

"Forgetting what, Lizzie?"

Gabriel, strangely contrite, thought of bleak London periods, his neglect, her illness. He wished he had not asked her what she had forgotten.

He saw the face, a shadowed cameo. There was the throat and the hands, in the darkness.

"It was a story I made up while you were out at Highgate, out of what you called the Lasinio book, peeled off from the walls at Pisa."

"It was a story as real as if I'd lived it."

"It was those coffins on the ground and the Kings, meant to be portrayed horrible, in the coffins."

"I knew it was a picture (you all talked about it) of a painting from a wall in a grave-yard, what you called the campo santo."

"It was going to Chartres. That's why I wouldn't leave Paris."

The face, the throat, the hands - the rest had faded away.

"Lizzy - "

124.

"What's the matter, Gabriel?"

"O, I suppose the crossing. I felt funny."

"There's matches, Gabriel, always in the saucer."

"Well - damn - where's the saucer?"

He did not believe, even now, that there was more to her
than a face, a throat, and two hands, folded upon darkness.

"It was Mrs. Browning saying it was that way with her -
or it had been - not knowing whether a book or a picture
was more real that the un-real world she lived in."

He did not even know she had met the Brownings. He
heard the rustle of her skirt as she rose from the settee.
It was silk of some kind. She was not clothed in impalpable
darkness. He saw through his eyelids and through his hands,
clasped over the flaming bar of Angelo, that there was light.
She had found the matches.

He did not open his eyes.

"Sitting there in the Cathedral, it was as if one
of the Queens had stepped off from the wall and was lying in
a coffin. The Queen it seemed, belonged to one of the Kings
in the picture - but this was just the opposite of that
grave-yard painting. It was mixed up with my being afraid
of cholera."

125.

"You never spoke of cholera."

"One fear joins to another fear - one fear reminds one of another. But in that Cathedral picture - or - dream - it was as if the queen might have come out of a Missal, like the ones Mr. Ruskin showed us at Denmark Hill. And I thought of other Cathedrals - or rather it seemed this might be the very place where Heloise and Abelard might most fittingly have worshipped. It seems from what Mrs. Browning told me, there was mystery about them. I had read about Abelard in one of those pamphlets sent to your father, that William used to bring in. It was Forerunners of Dante by a Professor in America, mostly about Abelard."

He opened his eyes. He saw Lizzie standing by the curtain.

"It was connecting terror of that far past, the wrong they did Abelard (and actually in a French cathedral) that reminded me of others, and Harry lunging at me with a knife and Walter Deverell dying at Mr. Greenacre."

The story had horrified Gabriel, but he should have made Lizzie talk more about Mr. Greenacre.

"Then, I was afraid, remembering the guillotine in Paris."

"How could you remember, Lizzy?"

126.

"I mean (maybe, I didn't tell you) Mr. Tozer (whose name was Toussier) told me how his father's master had been killed and I was afraid of Paris."

"I thought you wanted to come to Paris."

"I was afraid. But Mrs. Kincaid took me to the shops and sights, and Madame Bonnard said we must go to Chartres."

"I went alone sometimes. I even spent the night there with a cousin of Madame Bonnard's." Now Elizabeth Siddall remembered the story, herself and the embroidered falcon on the saddle-cloth, the chord twisted in the reins... She fell from the awkward saddle, as if into the abyss ... the gentlemen in the forest, led by her own companion. His sleeves were caught in the wrist and at first she had wondered why that should be, as apparently he was one of their hawking party. But he turned off into the forest and the gentlemen, for the most part, followed him. Her companion in the picture was not Gabriel. But she had worked that out; her own fever of anxiety lest he and Fanny were together ... had projected this other for her. She could not then think of Gabriel without some compensating hope for herself; but here in Paris, Gabriel was different."

"It was suddenly knowing that the story had its real

127.

side and wasn't what you just now called dotty, that made
everything seem different. It was her telling me she got
'lost' sometimes like that. That is she got 'lost', as she
called it, alone there in her father's house, before she was
married, and she experienced the same terrors, things thought
being true, and the washstand and the dressing-table and
everything on it being - 'hallucination' was her word.
She was happier when she had Flush."

"Who's Flush, Lizzie? And who is this who had hallucinations?" He did not know his own voice, but he recognised unfamiliar smothered sobbing in it. He had never cried, not even when ~~Gabriele~~ left him.

"Flush was the little dog she had, when he first came
to see her."

"Lizzie dear, who came to see who, and whose was the
little dog called Flush?"

Was Lizzy really going dotty?

"Why ~~he~~ came to see ~~her~~, Gabriel."

His hands dropped to his sides. He wanted something to eat - a drink, badly. But he couldn't leave her in this mood. "Get on your mantle and come out, Lizzie."

"You see, it doesn't matter, but it was always that way,
when I started talking. You always said, 'come out, Lizzy.'"

128.

"It does matter, Lizzy."

"She went to the circles sometimes, but I never saw her. He called it 'slumming', and she loved him so she stopped going. But she wanted to hear about the circles. There was a doctor who had helped her, talking to her; he didn't call it 'healing'.

"She said Robert didn't understand. She was so happy."

"Damn it - Browning is a rich man."

"I asked her if she still had the fancies, she said, yes, but now everything is different. She is so happy about us, Gabriel."

"What did you tell her about us?"

"Only that we are happy."

"We aren't happy, Lizzie, not as we could be. We could cut everything and get out, go to Florence -"

Florence? Even old Gabriele had never been to Florence,

"She talked about Florence and Venice."

Venice? "I suppose that's Ruskin."

"Why Ruskin, Gabriel?"

"Who ever heard of Venice, before Ruskin went there?"

He was only marking time. He was thinking of Veronese. He was thinking of Carpaccio. He was thinking of Titian and

29.

of Tintoretto.

"Do you remember that first time you saw me, Gabriel? If I think of Venice, I think of that first time at Walter's studio in the garden at Kew."

Kew? It was bog and fog and water sucking under the wharves, and the gnawing of rats in the old partitions. The Bridge.

"There's a bridge there; she called it the Bridge of Sighs." Lizzie was taking the very thoughts out of his mind.

"Well, Byron really started it," he said, "why did I drag in Ruskin?"

"Yes, Byron and Shelley and Keats and Mr. Landor - all of them, she told me, went away, went out of England."

"You mean, we'll get married at once and never go back to England?"

She moved over to the settee. She spread her skirts about her. "Yes, it was England. It was that Mr. Greenacre, and Lyddy having the same fancies. Lyddy and I knew that if Harry was really touched, it was a family failing. But then, I put it all together, Mr. Greenacre cutting her up and her head caught in the weir (which had a gate that pulled up, like Mr. Toussier described the guillotine) and then Abélard and the wrong they did him, that I read about in the folder

130.

that William had left. I even remembered how I had looked
over the folders and was about to put them back, as they were
mostly Italian and German, and then I found that one in English
and I read it. There was the story of Abélard and Héloïse,
for the first time, and the studio and everything in it, less
clear than the stones of that Cathedral in France, and her
being put away as a nun, till I looked up and saw what was
equally real with Abélard, your picture, unfinished on the
easel.

"They're always unfinished, Lizzy."

"You wrote, you finished one for Mr. Ruskin."

"I wanted to come to Paris. I could finish things -
and anyway, Ruskin more or less, offered to see us through -
that was in the beginning, if we wanted to get married. I
have only to write Ruskin."

"They're so much older than we are. We can wait,
Gabriel."

She thought of Aunt Polidori and the family and the
times the rent was not paid, and her own feelings about taking
Ruskin's money. But nothing, somehow, could spoil her rapture
over her first extravagance.

"Then at Chartres, I fancied the Queen in the coffin

132.

"It's what I'm trying to tell you, she likes the new
frame. We discussed all the latest fashions."

Now he saw her.

"I see, I'm hardly fine enough to escort you, Lizzie."

"We'll go out to-morrow, I have the old mantle to go
over it. I kept this till you came, though I wore it in the
house a few times, to get the sway of it. It's like walking
on air - being a sort of cloud - but fashionable."

"O - fashionable -"

"It's the way they walk. It's their seeing me somehow,
different. No-one ever seemed to think I was a scarecrow,
even in the beginning."

"Whoever thought you were a scarecrow?"

"The girls at Mrs. Tozer's - not Ellen and Jenny, but
the others - and, Gabriel, lots of London people."

"We'll never go back to London. We can talk about that
later - why Lizzie, you look like an empress."

"It's what it's called - the bell-flower."

"Bell-flower?" asked Gabriel.

"Bell-flower Imperatrice," said Lizzy.

133.

V

"If we hadn't had that champagne, you could have stayed a day longer." Lizzie had been horrified, reckoning the francs back into shillings. It was almost a week at Mrs. Tozer's. Why did Gabriel run his eye down the list and pick the most expensive? They had had champagne at Madame Bonnard's, now and again. Mrs. Kincaid said it was expected, the day the Emperor opened the new Boulevard, and then, Mrs. Kincaid had her husband's solicitor friend in, and they discussed the prices, and Mr. Barrington knew what he called the "vintage" years and seasons.

Mrs. Kincaid said, the first time, "We won't take the cheapest, it looks mean, but the next." It was the other way round with Gabriel, only he didn't take the "next", he took the most expensive.

Was it necessary?

"No heel-taps, Lizzie."

"But I haven't finished this glass."

"You don't finish, it just keeps on re-filling, like the Holy Grail."

"But that's the old name for the Communion."

"This is the new name," and he read out the French, the date, the place, Château something, from the label on the bottle.

134.

"We better have another."

"O - Gabriel - "

"It simply evaporates; it's like you, there's no body to it."

He called the waiter and though Lizzy could not follow what Gabriel was saying, she understood enough to know that he was scolding the waiter. Gabriel waved his hand toward her and the waiter bowed, "parfaitement."

"What did you say, Gabriel?"

"I said that while I was looking at the lady, half a hottle had evaporated and it was up to the house to bring me a new one."

"I don't understand, Gabriel."

"I said, unless he hurried, the lady might likewise vanish. She was wearing, I told him, under the table, a cloud Imperatrice that would, in a minute, waft her away to heaven."

But "Gad," Gabriel said, "quelle politesse."

A gentleman had risen from the next table and was making his way to the door. There was music playing somewhere.

"Ancien régime," said Gabriel, "wears his broadcloth like brocade, a little like Allingham."

135.

Gabriel had turned round in his chair. Lizzy said,
"Why did you say _quelle politesse_, Gabriel?"

"He didn't look at you, Lizzie."

"Is that politeness?"

"The essence. You were in his line of vision. Of
course, he wouldn't turn round, but he never saw you."

"He must have seen me, Gabriel, he was sitting just
opposite."

"So you've been looking at him?"

"Not to notice, not till you said he looked like Mr.
Allingham, and he does, a little."

"He's faithful - but he didn't stare at you. That's
why I'm suspicious. He treated you exactly as he would her,
not a _souvenir_ of recognition."

The waiter had placed a fresh bottle on the table;
Gabriel hadn't even noticed his drawing the cork and re-filling
the glasses.

But Gabriel lifted his glass, not looking at Lizzie.
"Madame, la Princesse."

A lady followed by a gentleman, was standing in the door-
way. As if by accident, their former neighbour paused for
the two to enter; surprised, he lifted the lady's hand to his
lips, bowed stiffly to the gentleman and passed out.

136.

"Good timing," said Gabriel, "that's the husband."

"Well, you're not, according to what you just said, being polite, Gabriel."

"Lizzie, you share her with me."

That was quite true.

Her skirt was not too full to be awkward, Lizzie noticed that, first thing. Her own bell-flower was moderate by the latest standards, but Lizzie had noticed that the most extravagant creations were not seen in public. The lady's creation belonged to eternity. It was what Gabriel was saying, "she's walked out of a Velasquez."

"You shouldn't stare, Gabriel."

"They are curiously tolerant in Paris, to what are known as artists. The lady - and even her husband - would know if they saw me staring, that I am no common pleb, nor even your excellent Mr. Barrington, run across on business. My clothes aren't right but your cavalier <u>opposite</u>, (her <u>inammorate</u>) would recognize a fellow-spirit. And if not for myself, he, she, or even the husband, would know me for what I am, because of you, Lizzie. In spite of insular opinion to the contrary, the French have far more respect for women than they have in England."

137.

"It's what I felt, Gabriel."

"I have a faint suspicion," said Gabriel, "that your cavalier has not consummated the liaison."

"I thought a liaison was lovers being together."

"There can be liaisons without lovers being together."

This did not sound like Gabriel.

The gentleman was arguing with the head-waiter.

"It's all been a mistake, on purpose," said Gabriel, "commedia dell'arte. There never was a table à part, upstairs in the balcony. They'll go on somewhere else."

"And pass him in the lobby again?"

"No, it will be something different - but mon mari is indignant. Ah, the manager, in person."

But Gabriel talking, was still looking at the lady.

"Now, who was Madame la Princesse, before she married Fontenelle?" de Villiers said Gabriel.

The manager was motioning to a waiter to find a table, but the gentleman stepped back and the lady brushed past him. Not acknowledging the head-waiter's profuse apology, the gentleman swept out.

"God save the king," said Gabriel.

"Why do you say that?" said Lizzie.

138.

"His high-and-mightiness may be only a dearest brother, but
it does not, for all of Baron Haussmann, accept our new Paris.
The other fellow is more of a gentleman."

"What do you mean, Gabriel?"

"It's just *je ne sais quoi*. They both belong to the old world, but there's that difference in them. This fellow, *mon mari*, would have had a good look at you, if he had been sitting where your cavalier was."

"The other was waiting, you said so, for your Princess.
He just didn't see me."

"Ma foi, Lizzie."

"And in any case, Gabriel, you saw the lady."

"I saw, I have seen ... the lady."

"You know her? You knew her name"

"I like to think that I might have heard her name in
London."

Lizzie remembered discussions of gatherings, before Mr. Rossetti died, and Mrs. Kincaid had talked too, but Mr. Kincaid did not go to the soirees, as she called them. They were mixed, they were foreign, Mrs. Rossetti was a cousin of her mother's, Mrs. Kincaid had explained carefully. Her mother had been a Miss Pierce.

"Do you think we ought to go, Gabriel? It's very crowded and there seem to be people waiting for our table."

139.

3

"Let them wait. What did I order this champagne for?
Which reminds me - " the re-filled his glass.

"Places like this, that's what they're for, to keep
people waiting. Who's waiting? O those, they'll find places
in a minute. It's Velasquez and della Guardia. Let me en-
treat you, Madame, the gondola is waiting. You never were a
girl to grudge a fellow exaltation - and you exult, too.
It is better to talk about her and to have you talk about him,
than for us to dilute our sacred raptures - no, not dilute,
Lizzie. What is the word for what I mean?"

"What do you mean, Gabriel?"

"I mean - should fill your - your glass, shouldn't I?"

"I don't think you can, Gabriel."

"No, Lizzie, it's not that makes me tremble; it's the
Elixir of Life, the Transmutation of Base Metal. Ever hear
of Caliostro?"

"Who's Caliostro?"

"He was a chap in Venice ... in Paris ... or perhaps
it was Versailles. It was all the rage of the Trianon. She
was one of them. But French, unlike her royal mistress who
came, didn't she, from Austria?"

"Who came from Austria, Gabriel?"

140.

"This one had more distinction, much more je ne sais quoi than that one. If she carried a crook, she did not tie ribbons round it, nor even primroses - do they have primroses in France, Lizzie?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, Gabriel."

"I don't know myself, Lizzie. I can't see her pretending to make hay, but she had to do what Marie did, I suppose, hoblesse oblige."

"Marie?"

"Antoinette - but it doesn't ring true, somehow. No more than he does. I mean, no more than he would, tricked up like a royal lackey to follow the Grand Soleil. But it isn't my world. Perhaps you were there, Lizzie."

She did not know what Gabriel was talking about, but
"Mr. Allingham would never look like a lackey," she said.

"All right, all right; you were always partial to
that cad, Allingham. But he knew his Paris - this one,
He didn't show his breeding. He didn't look at you, Lizzy.
It's a fancy of mine - what you would call a fancy - that
Fontenelle
Madame de Villiers and her inamorato were no more at home
in Versailles than I myself would have been, had I been
there. But I wasn't."

141.

"All right, all right Gabriel; but how do you know she
Fontenelle
is Madame de Villiers?"

Fontenelle
"I don't know that she is Madame de Villiers, I just
like to think she might be, because I heard a chap in London
Fontenelle
talk about Madame de Villiers. He didn't like Caliostro."

"Caliostro?"

"Well, imagine it yourself, Lizzie; it was a harmless
little outing. And easy to arrange things. We were discuss-
ing the fiesta, always a crowd in the Piazza, and easy to get
lost, and in a dark mantle like she wore —"

"She didn't have a mantle —"

"She left it in the foyer. That's how I knew that de
Fontenelle
Villiers had ordered a table à part."

"It's so mixed, Gabriel."

"It was mixed, certainly, imagine it for yourself. You
know Longhi?"

Lizzie had never heard of Longhi.

"But Caliostro —" Now she remembered. She had heard
of Caliostro.

"Not a bad chap, really; he was making a living by it,
but the gold rubbed off the brass. It would last, however, for
the time it took him to get out of Paris. He had other irons

142.

in the fire, I mean alchemy, retorts - *retorts* - 'I have
affairs in Venice with the Grand Master.' Ah, Venice! They
would all go to Venice. So they all went to Venice."

It seemed an anti-climax; the story was evaporating
like the champagne.

Lizzie saw mirrors on mirrors and candles reflected in
them.

They had found tables for the group that had seemed
pressing down upon her, obstructing her vision.

"Music - not, Lizzie, unlike this music."

"It's the new waltz."

"Lizzie, you know everything."

It was at Kew that she had heard of Caliostro; it was
Mr. Allingham talking about Dante.

"Did you ever read Zanoni?"

"Who ever has?"

"Mrs. Deverell said something once about it, at Kew,
There was someone in the book, a Count it was, the same sort
of thing as Caliostro, I should imagine."

St. Germain ?

"Gobelin? - Did William review Zanoni, I wonder? I must
have heard the story - that's it, this is the same story."

"I don't think so, Gabriel."

143.

"Well, the French Revolution came in, and counter-plots were going on, in the name of talking-spirits - and conjurations - "

"Did she - get back to Paris?"

"How do you know they tried to keep her there in Venice?"

"You said something about Mr. Allingham going to her rescue, from Vienna."

"I said nothing of the kind, Lizzie." But to her, everything was quite clear. There were mirrors that reflected double candles and then reflected them again, going backward and going forward. "They say the new waltz is from Vienna."

"Allingham knows Vienna?"

"You said so."

She had stepped from the marble pavement (it was mosaic pattern) onto the polished dance-floor. Her heels were lifting her, like a ladder, to God, and someone whispered, "ah - Mozart."

"Was it Mozart invented the waltz?"

"You're thinking of the minuet, Lizzie."

"Did we dance in Venice?"

Everything was so clear. You could see where the wall began or the wall ended, and count rows and rows of candles, reflecting each other in the double mirrors.

144.

"This is what you mean, Gabriel when you said, that first time, 'those circles, you know. I never did pretend I understood them, though I have explained them to you often enough in my lucid Bacchic moments.' You were talking to Walter Deverell."

So she swayed to the ground. It was a white rose, this time. But she was not broken. The violins lifted her to her feet and she crossed hands to another partner.

"What do you mean - Allingham?"

"Ere she was born
That vow was sworn;
And we must lose into the ground
Her face we knew."

"Is that Allingham?"

"Well - from a private letter."

"To you, Lizzie?"

"No, Gabriel."

"But Allingham - you know all this about him?"

"It was you started it, you said he didn't show his breeding. What a funny thing to say, Gabriel, but I knew what you meant."

"O - that follow."

145.

"My shroud of white, stuck all with yew
O prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it!"

"O - that Swan - "

"You said you didn't like the Elizabethans, Gabriel."

"I always say things like that, Lizzie."

"Yes, it was like that. Pretending. She didn't know
anything about them."

"Who didn't know anything, about who?"

"Versailles. It went on in three circles. When you
came to Hastings and told Mary, 'I am not engaged to Lizzy',
were
there/was still two circles left me, Mum and our family was one,
and Scalands was another and Mary Howitt who wouldn't speak
to you. I was not annoyed. I thought I would see clearly,
two circles and that would be enough for my whole life. They
would be clear circles; I would help Mrs. Howitt with her girls'
foundation, patterned on the Working Men's College in Bloomsbury.
But I had committed myself to Mum and Lyddy, half pretending,
so I said to Mary, 'I will marry Gabriel.'"

"So you married Gabriel?"

"No, I was already promised."

The circles did not interfere with one another. But it

146.

was not a three-ringed circus. They spiralled upward, it
was the violins. One violin repeated what another violin
had whispered, "Ah - Mozart."

"But who is Longhi?"

"He is Venice, the crowd in the Piazzetta, the cloaks,
the tricorns, the sword and dagger."

"But they're dancing."

"That's what I mean, Lizzy. It did not affect them.
They just went on dancing."

"What did not affect them, Gabriel?"

"O, the usual things ... Venetians! They were a
plague on God's earth, they were more effete, more decadent
even than Paris. What does decadent mean, Lizzy?"

"I don't know. What does it?"

"It's a thing that's come from Paris, they've begun to
talk about in London, or it would come if we weren't such manly
fellows with Sebastopol and all that."

"First time he kissed me he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write.
But I don't think she writes," said Lizzie.

adding
"She writes letters," said Gabriel, "and signs them, but/
~~her estimable but comparatively bourgeois~~ nee -
but let us be discreet. Suffice, she might have been a
princess if she hadn't married a Valois- only the
princess was Napoleonic pinchbec."

147.

"You mean, she isn't a real one?"

"I mean, she is more real than a real one."

"And ever since something grows more bright ... I wish I could remember it."

"Is it bouts rimes?"

And even since the candles throw some light.

Will that do, Lizzie? Well, it's your turn now."

"But I'm not making it up; I'm trying to remember it."

"What is it, Lizzy, that you're trying to remember?"

"One of the Sonnets from the Portuguese."

"Translations?"

"But you've surely read them?"

"I don't remember; what is it all about?"

"I wish I could tell you, I wish I could tell you."
He kissed her and it was God and she walked."

"That's scriptural, took up her bed and —"

"No, no, this happened and in London. But it was no laughing matter not knowing where the wall began and the sonnet left off. But I saw just now, where the wall ended and the candles began, I mean, the candles (do you see them?) in the mirror that reflect the candles in the mirror — and reflect the candles in the mirror. And each set of candles lights a

148.

separate room, and you can't prove it but you can see it. We
are in separate rooms, dancing. A minuet you say, one was?

"I couldn't say; it was catch-as-catch-can, after mid-
night on the Piazzetta."

"But the wall doesn't end now, the doors are all open,
Velasquez, Versailles, Venice. The sun through the glass
throws different colours on the pavement, like it might be
violets, but it was the same pavement."

"You're drunk, Lizzie," said Gabriel.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you. You said
to Walter Deverell, that first time at Kew, that you didn't
understand Mr. Rossetti's Dante's circle, but you could ex-
plain them, in 'lucid Bacchic moments.' This is a lucid
Bacchic moment and I'm trying to explain things."

"There's only one cure," said Gabriel, "a hair of the
dog."

"A hair - of the dog?"

"A hair of the dog that bit you; I mean, another bottle."
He snapped his fingers, but the waiters were all busy.

"No, no Gabriel. Please, Gabriel. I only want to
explain the Dante circles, then we'll go."

"They stay open all night."

"But I only wanted to ask you, why did he cut her up,
Gabriel?"

149.

"They're doing it all the time, that was only an isolated instance. **Addition garcon.** We'll go immediately. There's a chap splashed blood, I mean paint, all over the walls of **Les Invalides**. But he didn't paint the pieces. He left all that out, in his glory-of-battle pictures. They always do leave all that out - a beastly little frontier question."

"What are you talking about, Gabriel?"

"I was saying to a chap in London, or he was saying to me, that you couldn't stop war. They'll start soon in America."

"America - about what?"

"About - about the **Moor of Venice**. Don't let's talk about it, Lizzy."

"That's what you said, 'Madame,' you said, 'it was a night on the Rialto - but it wasn't Shakespeare.'"

"No, it wasn't Shakespeare," said Gabriel.

150.

VI.

Of course, she knew she couldn't stay in Paris. Mrs. Kincaid had it all mapped out. Gabriel wondered why Mrs. K wanted to go to Nice. Probably Mrs. Barrington or one of that set, suggested it. There had been talk of Mentone. They were going by slow stages. Well, they were off. He and Monro tucked their travelling-rugs about them in their first-class carriage and waited till the train pulled out. The next day, they were back in London.

What would Lizzie do? Sit about and play cards with solicitors' wives and army widows? He didn't see her in Nice. Nor did Ruskin. "If she would only get out of Nice," Ruskin grumbled to Gabriel. Well, after Christmas, they left the **Hotel des Princes**, that was something. But the new address conveyed nothing to either Gabriel or Ruskin. "It's lodgings anyway," said Gabriel, "and she says they're outside the town, on a slope above some olive-orchards." He remembered how Lizzie had spoken of orange-trees and snow, only on the high mountains.

"They had trouble with their passports," Gabriel told Ruskin. He read part of the letter to him. "Well, at least she's out of England," said Ruskin, "with this new epidemic about."

151.

Ruskin was actually sitting on the edge of the table,
with his great-coat wrapped about him. "I'll tell Miss
Heaton then, that you'll do a replica of <u>Paolo and Francesca</u>,
in place of <u>Beatrice</u>." Gabriel said, "You were always ragging
me about copying my own pictures and selling them twice over."
"Well," said Ruskin, "you needn't copy it; do a variation
of the same subject." "But she ordered <u>Beatrice</u>," said
Gabriel, "why not copy the <u>Beatrice</u>?"

"Because I do not want you to copy the <u>Beatrice</u>," said Ruskin.

All right. Gabriel wasn't quarrelling with his bread
and butter. He was wilful and usually shouted down Ruskin's
pronouncements, "take out the green there. I don't like your
shadows. You must have some line somewhere." Gabriel was
looking through stained-glass. It didn't really matter what
Ruskin said.

"You roughed out some arched windows, one day at Denmark
Hill. Did you do anything about them?"

"I was sketching." A comment on my <u>Lamps</u>, was it?
I don't remember."

"We were talking in Paris. Lizzie got me thinking of
stained-glass. She went moping alone around Chartres, having
fancies."

152.

"What sort of fancies?"

"O, queens in coffins, and Abelard."

"Why don't you do an Abelard?"

"I've got no model for him. Anyway, I've started Gus as Hamlet."

"Gus?"

"The fellow I sent out to see you. Manuel. Is he a fake?"

"He knew something about Turner."

"His father was a copyist, he told me, and there are two more chaps who say they want to meet you. You may have heard of their *Oxford and Cambridge* venture. Inspired by our *Germ*, they told me. They've already mapped out their rag for a whole year - but then, Morris has money. Jones and Morris, they're called. They almost made me feel that England mattered. I was for cutting it all. Lizzie talked about the Brownings - no -"

Gabriel felt that Ruskin was about to suggest putting his life on a secure foundation again, so that he could go away.

"It would be nothing to me, Gabriel. You owe it to your art, to all of us, to Ida." He looked round the room. "But it's - inspiring. What shall I say, Gabriel? Not all the fellows could carry off this affected carelessness -"

153.

"It's not affected," said Gabriel. "The Birrells turned the place out, as they called it, in my absence - never again - "

"I was thinking of Cellini, you are like those chaps, Gabriel. You are a great Italian living in the Inferno of England. Must you stay here?"

What did he know of England? He had money. Then Gabriel remembered Effie.

"But about those fellows," said Gabriel. "It was, Morris said, your *Nature of Gothic* and seeing a Cathedral in Beauvais (I think it was) on a summer holiday, that made him chuck up Oxford. Well, he's still there, but in an architect's office, at the moment. But Gad, they were both intended for the cloth. Fancy two budding parsons, hearing High Mass at Beauvais (they were on a walking-tour) and swearing, before they left Havre, that they would dedicate themselves to art - in place of, or because of God. But why come to me about it?" asked Gabriel and with no affectation.

"Who else would they go to, Gabriel?"

"You started them. It was the *Nature of Gothic* and your description of the Guilds, artist and craftsman all sub-merged in the Cathedral - so this Morris told me. I never read *The Stones of Venice* and I never thanked you for the

9

154

copy that you sent me."

"My _Venice_ can teach you nothing."

Gabriel did not know himself. He had always on principle,
quarrelled with "that sneak, Ruskin."

"This Morris thinks if he can get in with the architects,
he might in time, stop some of these restorations."

"Venice," said John Ruskin.

"What about Venice?" asked Gabriel.

"They're talking about taking up the old mosaic and
laying a new floor in St. Mark's Cathedral."

"What can we do about it?"

"I'm starting a petition. Gladstone might help," said Ruskin.

"Well, Gladstone's some use then. I should have thought
he was too busy with the Powers - France, Austria, Prussia;
But Austria and Prussia got out of the alliance, didn't they?
I don't know. What's it all about, anyway? And Louis
Napoleon got out of it, too. That meant only us - only
England was left. But I suppose Louis has come back or
there wouldn't be talk of a Conference in Paris."

"Is there talk of a Conference in Paris?"

"Well, I heard something - probably confidential -
Gus.
from Manuel. He has a finger in every pie. Looks like a

155.

Spanish grandee sometimes, like an organ-grinder with a monkey, others. Which reminds me, did you ever hear of Sonnets from the Portuguese? Lizzy was a bit foggy over dinner, the first night she wore her bell-flower, and quoted something that she called a sonnet, saying she didn't know where the wall left off and the sonnet began."

"Ida - foggy?"

"Your Ida was illuminated and dead-drunk."

Ruskin got off the table. "You're lunching with me, Gabriel."

"I'd like to. But I want first to talk of Lizzy. If you would sit down - I throw those things on the floor. This isn't equal to Ruskin something-or-other Domecq, and it isn't sherry, but Monro smuggled it back from Paris, under his Inverness. I didn't even know he had it, till he left it on the table. I swore to myself, I wouldn't have a drop without Lizzy - without Lizzy being in it, somehow." Gabriel placed the bottle on the table. "The glasses are clean, too."

"I see you've opened it. You had a drop then?"

"When I came back, trying to remember. I think the damned stuff's Russian."

Ruskin studied the label on the bottle, "curious - maybe

Turkish."

156.

He lifted his glass, "the bouquet is Greek."

"Damn you, John Ruskin, how did you know that? You are a curious fellow. Someone called you a spiteful saint, I don't know who. Gus said you were the best mannered fellow he ever met, and one of the best dressed. I forgive you everything."

"What have you to forgive me, Gabriel?"

"Your damned professorial attitude, your pseudo-superiority, your way of drawing leaves under a microscope; your way of teaching the fellows at the College to draw, 'line is everything, colour will come afterwards.' Was there any line in the firmament when heaven and earth, created He them? There was colour first. Let them have their fun with colour."

"Line's fun, too," said John Ruskin.

"You see everything reflected and you see it all so damn clearly that he makes me sick"

Ruskin went on savouring the bouquet.

"Don't you like it? O, I see, the perfect manners that Gus spoke of. Or are you suspicious? You are waiting for your host to prove the stuff isn't poison. Ah, Lizzie —" Gabriel raised his glass.

"And when I say Lizzie, John Ruskin, I mean another

157.

Lizzy than your frousty Ida. I mean Lizzy in a bell-flower
and Lizzy talking about Chartres and Lizzy in a room, stuck
round with mirrors and candles reflected backward and forward
(as she said) in them, and Lizzy with a waltz playing - anyway,
she said it was a waltz and from Vienna."

"And the bell-flower?"

"That's what I mean - why don't you marry Lizzy?"

"Is this what you meant, when you said you wanted to talk
first of Lizzy?" Ruskin placed his glass back on the table.

"Yes, you've never seen her."

Ruskin did not say, "I have seen Beatrice."

"You've run across her, here in these digs - she needs
a setting. She was happy there in Paris. She talked about
the Brownings - damn, of course, Elizabeth Barrett must have
written that sonnet, I mean the Portuguese, Lizzy quoted,

First time he kissed me, he but only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write,

Lizzy said she couldn't remember the rest, she wanted to
remember because 'he kissed her and it was God and she walked.'
I wanted to ask someone what it was all about."

"Why didn't you ask Ida?"

"There are things that go through one like knives. I
have - well, Lizzy and I have been about together but we're

158.

not lovers. I have kissed Lizzy, but it was not the kiss she
wanted. I knew she wanted something else or someone else when
she said 'he kissed her and it was God and she walked'. We
were making up a story too, over the champagne and the music.
The hero wasn't Gabriel, she was promised to another."

Gabriel refilled the glasses.

"She liked Allingham - you know old Allingham? But
somehow, it wasn't Allingham. It was something rugged, though
polished if you will. It was something with eyes from which
there is no escaping. It was something less suave than
Allingham - I say nothing against his - his charm. It's
just something Lizzy wanted. Does Lizzy love you, Ruskin?"

"No, Gabriel," said John Ruskin.

"You're hypnotic, Ruskin. You could make her love you."

"Women don't love line. They want colour."

"What she wants - she as good as said so - is a rock."

"What is a mere mountain when you have the firmament?
I always told you Gabriel, when I didn't like your pictures."

"Why do you buy the damn things, then - to keep Lizzy?"

"I buy them, as I buy Turner for the colour. I don't
like the mediaeval."

"What of your _beastly_ Gothic? Your glass windows, your
seven lamps, your Byzantine mosaic, your Carpaccio? Lizzie

159.

looks Byzantine; you said yourself at Denmark Hill, she was
like those elongated figures in your Missals - yes, you
did see her once, in a proper setting. She liked your room,
your mother showed her your room - horrible, no curtains,
those beastly windows. But Lizzy liked it. She liked the
shells you showed her and the rose-quartz or whatever it was
in chunks, blasted out of your beastly mountain. You can't
say she doesn't like you."

"I didn't say she didn't like me. You're volcanic,
like the fire in the mountain."

"But she likes snow," said Gabriel.

---

He saw him now. Gabriel had been trying to "see" John
Ruskin. He was the father-superior of some learned order,
who had served inheritance.

"They even discussed seriously, they told me, at one
time, a plan for a monastic foundation. They are good chaps,
really. Jones is the more sensitive and the less gifted.
I mean, the other fellow whom Jones calls Top, has the verve
or the nerve. And there's another blighter I haven't seen
yet, a sort of golden goblin or dwarf Sebastian, I gather

160.

from their description. Top writes too, but he says the
other fellow writes better."

"Who is the other fellow?" asked Ruskin.

"They call him Algernon. They promised to bring him
along one day, and later, I'll shepherd them all out to Denmark
Hill for your inspection. That's what you're for. Top went
on about your guilds and the subservience in the Cathedral,
of all to one objective - the loss of self. They're self-
less fellows. I think I said, a moment ago, that you said
(Top said) the artist in the middle-ages was submerged in the
Cathedral - drowned in it. It was a word used by another,
a religious fellow, I ran across with Gus. More of a mystic,
less of a fanatic, this other, but he was afraid his work would
be submerged, as he put it, in a tide-wave of dark waters.
He himself was following, he said, a clear rivulet from a
hollow - a hollow-dip, he called it. Fact, he's an American.
Hollow-dip. This place where he had his illumination was near
what he called a spring-house, an old farm called Hollows.
There's no connection."

Gabriel said, "that was before they saw the real thing
at Chartres, I mean Beauvais. They couldn't do anything after
that, about the Church in England; they had, Jones said,
'looked behind the veil'. Well, now their dedication is

161.

toward saving an old foundation, rather than establishing a
new one. That's where you come in. Superior, yes, I have
said I hated your damned didacticism. But it's your inheri-
tance. This chap I spoke of (of the Hollows' illumination)
was afraid his clear rivulet would be lost in the dark waters -
or these dark waters, as he put it. Here in England, he meant
and on the Continent. Not that he had any illusions about
America and a war that he said was coming. But the idea came
to me just now. They'll never be a foundation, not in the
old sense. It's one here, one there. But somehow, they find
their way through the dark waters."

162.

VII

Gabriel sent Lizzy a story, she said she hadn't read it. It had been printed in the *Germ*, their early Pre-Raphaelite paper. He sent it to her, as the setting was Pisa and she had spoken of the Lasinio reproductions, and told him about the story that she had lived or "seen" last summer. They were sitting on one of the benches in the Louvre. She had been frightened in London, she had told him, by the story of the vision. Probably, she said, when he mentioned his own tale of Pisa, she had heard them discussing it. Anyhow, engrossed in the *campo santo* reproductions, it was natural that they should both choose Pisa. She told him about the falcon and the embroidered saddle-cloth and he laughed and said, "one of the rival families in the Pisa story, bore the falcon." Then, I really must have heard you talk about it," she said. She was reconciled to his going back to London. She had so much to think about, to work out, she said.

She said she had lived her story. Well, he had lived his, too; what was imagination but a heightened perception of life?

Gabriel called his story *Hand and Soul*.

"What do you call your story, Lizzy?" he asked.

She hadn't a name for her story, she said. The girl got her bird's chord tangled, she told him; she was carrying

163.

a falcon on her wrist. She was alone. Her companion in the story, had taken most of the gentlemen into the forest for venison. Her party had cantered on ahead down the sea-road. "It was Barbara asking me to ride at Scalands, made me remember the saddle. It was worry about the cholera in London, made me think of those dead bodies."

"I speak too, of cholera or of leprosy," he said, "in Hand and Soul. And there are plenty of dead bodies."

Lizzie read *Hand and Soul*, and she remembered how Gabriel had asked her what she called her story. She did not know why she could not tell him that she called it *The Golden Chord*. But then, it was really not about Gabriel, though Gabriel might have painted or helped paint the frescoes. He was a painter. In her thought, she made no apology. In her thought, she knew that Gabriel would never have headed the company nor have led the gentlemen into the forest to hunt *deer*. In her thought, she no longer contrived to deceive herself, she had loved walking with Annie and Mum and Dad sometime; swinging along - and Gabriel at Scalands had slept late, even in the country. He had accompanied her to the woods, but he was not caught in it, like she was, like being at Chartres in the dim light and violets showing like those rainbow-blue and green splashes on the floor of the Cathedral. She was glad

164.

that she had been alone at Chartres, almost she had resented
Gabriel in the forest. It wouldn't be like that with her
outrider, in the feather-cap. He would see everything, not
just because he was a hunter. Gabriel had proposed to her
actually, in Scalands forest, and he wrote a poem about it,
but he did not see the curl-over of a fern, he did not notice
the speckled leaves with the new leaves growing on the same
stem of the groundsel, nor feel that certain feeling that a
beech
birch tree gives you, whose leaves seem always spring leaves
till they turn in autumn and even so, when they are turning,
they take colour, as of fresh-opening leaves. Gabriel would
stack pot-plants back of her to make a forest of it, for a
picture, but it was an indoor forest. He was indoors, in the
forest. He would throw himself down on the old sofa in the
studio, so he threw himself down there at her feet under the
beech trees.

But it was important that she loved Gabriel. Or that
she had loved Gabriel. It came to her after he proposed, and
Barbara's Aunt Julia was so kind about it,

I can not give to thee the love
I gave so long ago -
The love that turned and struck me down
Amid the blinding snow.

It came to her, that is, that the Gabriel she had first known

165.

had denied her, saying he was not engaged, at Hastings. And
he might deny her again. He would deny her again. But
she had stepped into the circle that almost seemed already
a broken circle, of Gabriel's inspiration. Without Gabriel,
she would have remained unrecognized - or would she? There
were the others, there was Mr. Allingham; Walter Deverell had
drawn away, only after Gabriel came into the studio. But
the outrider in the feather-cap wasn't Mr. Allingham. Perhaps
she remembered too clearly, when she thought of the figure by
the lamp-post, that curious feeling of loyalty to Ellen and
Jeannet; she was one of them, that "girl from the bonnet-
shop." She was just a girl from a shop until Gabriel began
to paint her, for she was still compromising, still delaying
her decision while she was with Walter Deverell; he himself
had agreed to her working part-time. There was no part-time
with Gabriel, he would never have let/go back to the shop and
yet he kept her sitting to him, with the windows closed and
his cigar-smoke, and he took her late to little upstairs
restaurants where it was crowded and hot, so that she couldn't
eat anything and only wanted to get away. She only wanted
to get away; she wanted so frightfully to gallop across
the fields with Barbara that she refused even to consider the
offer of Aunt Julia's habit. She wanted it so terribly,

166.

She wanted to be a sort of younger sister of Aunt Julia, she wanted all the things the people had at Sealand. She didn't want to quarrel with or about painters. Chiaro dell'Erma was a painter and no matter how often she read the story of his leaving Arezzo and his princely habitation to come and be a poor painter with a famous master, she couldn't associate herself (the girl that is, with the falcon on her wrist) with the painter, shut up in his room, with his dreams, by the Church of San Rocco. In the story, she was riding out toward the forest, and the leader of the cavalcade that met hers, at the turning below the outer fortress, wore her hawk-plume in his cap. And this was like Verona, Romeo and the rival faction, but the gentleman was more like Mercutio than Romeo, Gabriel said the rival faction had the hawk for heraldry. She was one of the falcons and he was the rival faction, and when they fought outside the church, along the arcades that were lined with Gabriel's - with Chiaro's painting, the blood splashed the pictures and they were pictures depicting peace, so it said in this Hand and Soul of Gabriel's.

She cared for peace, as much as Gabriel, though she didn't like his calling her the dove; no, she was not the dove. Perhaps a hawk does not belong to peace, nor a falcon.

He wore her falcon-feather stuck in his cap and he met her, as by accident below the outer turrets.

167.

He must have been killed.

But why did she blame Gabriel? He was not in the story really, her story, *The Golden Chord*.

Those Lasinio frescoes were fourteenth-century and she had wondered if Dante were the same time. She wrote Gabriel about it. He said, yes, Dante was thirteenth and fourteenth century. The dates did not matter of course, but she was, Gabriel said "fussy" about numbers; perhaps she got that from Dad having praised her for keeping the accounts right. You had to be fussy about numbers and she had done a good deal of explaining to tradespeople that Mr. Rossetti was busy on a painting and couldn't be troubled but she would work out the overdue bills, check up on the last months and promise to get things in order. Yes, Mr. Rossetti was paid considerable sums for his pictures, sometimes. Money just melted away with Gabriel.

Gabriel gave an exact date in *Hand and Soul* to the painting, 1239. Perhaps the modern artist who really tells the story, did see a picture with that date, in Florence.

But Chiaro quoted Dante, or something that sounded like the translation of the Dante, Gabriel read her, and Dante must have been later if he went on into the fourteenth century.

168.

It was things like this that made her tiresome, she knew that.

It was her worry about the bills and wanting to see that Gabriel wasn't cheated when he did hand her over a sum to settle things with, that annoyed him. Well, she couldn't help it.

She had to laugh to herself, sitting by her table in the pension, in the half-dark, thinking out how the outrider in the feather-cap would know just how many arrows there were in his own quiver and knowing just how many more arrows, in the company could be relied on, knowing just how many and which were likely to fall short and how many, if any were likely to snap off or how many if any, were independable, provided there were a row.

Now she had come back to Hastings and her wonder about who would and would not stand by her. She did not actually count her friends or number her adversaries, but again she thought, "It's like what Gabriel called Mr. Rossetti's Dante's three-ringed circus."

In the third ring or the middle-ring, there was Gabriel. And because he had already betrayed her and because he would, she knew, betray her again, she conjured up an en-chanted forest, an outrider who wore dangerously, her falcon-feather in his cap, a face that was more rugged than Gabriel's,

169.

with hard bones showing, hands perhaps not so beautiful nor
so eloquent in gesture, but reining a horse, notching an arrow,
drawing a bow, had a peculiar meaning for her, at the moment,
when she laid down *Hand and Soul*, because the light was going
and she wanted to think about the arrows. No, she did not
(any more than Gabriel) believe in all that ... murder. But
the isolated instance, as Gabriel had called Mr. Greenacre, as
compared with the dead and wounded at Sebastopol, was countered
or was checked or was check-mated by another isolated instance.
Gabriel was not isolated. He drew her into the whirlpool of
his enthusiasms and the plots and counter-plots of Pre-Raphaelite
quarrels and intrigue. She was, Mrs. Gabriele Rossetti was
right about that, "Gabriel's model."

And Gabriel's model might gain immortality as *Beatrice* or
as the more personal presentation of Beatrice, the *Damozel*, but
there is something, thought Elizabeth Siddall, that must not
be washed into the inner sea (she did not call it the Sargosso
sea) of Gabriel's circle. It was all right, there was fire
there and she had been stiff and frozen, that is inwardly
(she thought) frozen and stiff, sitting those hours and staying
those extra hours at Mrs. Tozer's. She did not realize her
state of spiritual and almost at times physical paralysis, until
she got out of Mrs. Tozer's. And sitting there at Kew was

170.

pleasant, and what did an hour mean, in pleasant company and
no-one to jeer at you, but the strange opposite, being thought
beautiful.

She went back to Gabriel's story. The story had really
given back the early Gabriel to her. Yes, he was a painter,
he was the painter in the *Band and Soul* who dedicates himself
"in the ecstacy of prayer to his mystical lady now barely in
her ninth year." But that was numbers, Dante's numbers, the
mystical nine that Gabriel had explained to her. But why did
Gabriel make Chiaro say, "the lady he had won on earth had been
dead an hundred years?" No doubt, it was symbolical like
Dante, as Gabriel explained his father's system to her, but
you had to hold on to something. She was ashamed almost, as
she remembered how she had borrowed Mrs. Kincaid's travel-book
and searched through it for some dates. She had found in
fine print at the back, a list of painters and writers and
famous people, and she found Dante: Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321.
Then the picture in 1239 was painted before Dante was born.
Then the mystical lady and the "band of whom he was one ...
permitted to gather round the blessed maiden, and to worship
with her through all ages", was all before Dante, yet it was
out of Dante. She wondered if Dante came into her story. She

171.

wanted to weave in the Chord, to follow on after Gabriel's
*Hand and Soul*, but she would have to think up some way of get-
ting round those dates. Might she say it was Abelard and
another, or the same lady? Was Beatrice, Héloïse really?
Was it the same story? Would Gabriel's "the lady he had won
on earth had been dead an hundred years", refer back to a former
lady? Would a hundred years from the time the picture was
painted, bring the story back to the time of Abelard and Héloïse?
She believed, roughly it would. She had remembered noting
that *the date of Abelard's death* was born 1066, but she didn't recall the
exact date. This was important to her. It was important
in this sense, she did not believe that Gabriel himself was
aware of what he meant there. It was something taking hold
of Gabriel like it did sometimes, that made him another person,
or that made him you might say, the flame burning *without the*
coal and soot and smoke that *seemed sometimes around him*.
Or as it happened sometimes that something he said was like
light shining through ruby glass.

*Hand and Soul* was published in January, 1850.

Then Gabriel must have written it before that, say in
1849.

It was just about then, that she met Gabriel.

172.

It seemed to have been written for her, to give her back her faith, so that she could go on.

In the basket-chair in Chatham Place, her thoughts had been a fever. She had suspected Gabriel of making love to Fanny, his *Bridge* model for the girl who had gone on the town. Elizabeth had been almost as unhappy before that, about Annie Miller. But Fanny Hughes and Annie Miller and her agony about unpaid bills and the rent overdue, no longer mattered.

She would write her story, *The Golden Chord* or *The Chord*.

Moreover, she would go into Nice, the first thing in the morning and find some drawing-paper suitable for illuminated lettering. She would get out her paints and brushes.

She would sketch in the *small consecrated image of St. Mary Virgin* that Chiaro dell'Erma had in his room, before which stood always in summer-time, a glass containing a lily and a rose.

PART II

I

173.

VIII

Gabriel did not trouble to shout "come in". They had the run of the place, he had told them, when they came up, week-ends. Jones usually turned up Saturday. This was Saturday. He had said, last time, he would be busy in the afternoon. It was Denmark Hill and the matter of those drawings, but he had expected the fellow to walk in, long before this. They would be getting out of Oxford, Jones said last time, as soon as they could manage. They wanted rooms of their own, somewhere in this neighbourhood or not too far off. Furnished rooms were expensive for what you got out of them. Gabriel wondered if Deverell's old studio at Red Lion Square was vacant. He had never been there since -

Well, let them stay away, then. He realized suddenly, his disappointment. It might be Freddy Stevens or old Boyce, but then he remembered that he had told Boyce and Stevens he was busy - not that that would have made any difference, in the old days. He knew the fellows thought him surly, since he got back from Paris. He had said he was staying with Brown.

"It is a cold winter," Mrs. Birrell told him. "We are still at war," he heard frequently.

174.

He didn't pretend to be a gentleman. Zf Mrs.Birrell were - was there with coals, remarking, "it is a cold winter - and the rats are gnawing something fearful in the basement", he knew he would not be responsible for ungentlemanly expletive. But coals? "Well, now you speak of it, Mrs.Birrell, the place is a bit draughty." Gabriel pushed aside his easel.

"Now you speak of it, Mrs. Birrell -" Gabriel opened the door.

"Hell - I expected Mrs.B -"

"I'm sorry. I'll push off."

"Gad - no. I thought I told you fellows not to knock but to come straight in. I told the other fellows I was out at Highgate."

"But - ah - Mrs. B -"

"Mrs. B is the lady wot does for me. She lives in the basement. We want coals, or don't we? Come in."

"But you're busy."

"I can go on painting, and anyway, what's that got to do with it?"

Gabriel realized that this was the first time he had seen this fellow without the other fellow.

"Where's the other fellow?"

175.

"He went round to the College. He said you had suggested he go round the next evening he was in town."

"I? When did I ever suggest to anybody, teaching the Working Man anything?"

"It was there Ted said he met you. He said the chaps like what you teach."

"What the Hell do I teach? I go round there to take the taste of Ruskin out of their mouths. 'Line, line, line,' says Professor Ruskin. I say, 'don't you chaps like colour?' 'The Professor hid the paints, after your first lecture,' they said."

Gabriel said, "You've got to bang the door shut or it will blow open." The door was banged shut. "I didn't tell you to knock the house down," said Gabriel. "You better take off your coat - unless it's too cold. I can't tell your length from your breadth. It's got snowed on? I didn't know it was snowing outside."

"It is a cold winter," said William Morris.

"I think I've heard that remark before somewhere," said Gabriel, "but you say it differently. Where have you hailed from? Just down from the bridge?"

"The bridge?" said William Morris.

176.

"Isn't that what they call the thing, the captain hails from? You look like a sea-rover. Hate the elements myself, but there's no accounting for taste. There was a peg on the door, before you banged it," said Gabriel, "hang up your coat, if the peg's still standing."

William Morris found the peg on the door.

"And stop walking round, you make me nervous. There was a chair once. This isn't the bridge and anyway, it's three or six or eight bells sounded, sometime since. It's not the black-watch, or is it? Those hooters on the river - is it the snow? And what is the black-watch, anyway? But don't tell me. You're a literal sort of a fellow and you'll say, 'we are still at war,' next."

"The war is over."

"How do you know that? Did Gus tell you, in confidence?"

"Who's Gus?" said William Morris.

"Gus? He's sitting there, on my easel. I was touching up his cuff. Is it the hand of Hamlet? I don't think so. Why did I paint Gus as Hamlet? And Hamlet wouldn't have that sort of cuff, would he? Anyway, I'm painting it out. I have my moments, but I don't pretend to be Velasquez. He might have done Gus. Gus is a cheat and a forger but Ruskin

177.

liked him. I don't mean Gus cheats at cards. Why do I call
him a forger? He makes an honest living, or tries to, making
copies of old pictures - well, so do I, but I copy my own
pictures. Difficult getting models, men - and I knew I
could sell Hamlet. Whoever would want to do your mug, and
what as?"

The owner of the mug met the blazing eyes of Gabriel Rossetti. His own eyes stared back. "If you want a model, you might do me as - as a sea-captain, as you suggested."

"Heaven forbid. I don't want you as a model," said Gabriel, "I don't like Vikings. But what I was thinking, just before you came in, was that there might be empty rooms for you later, at Red Lion Square, where I once had a studio with Deverell."

"Where is Red Lion Square?" said William Morris.

"Holborn way, past Lincoln's Inn, set back in its own garden. You might find rooms or put your names down for the next vacancy. It's cheap, too. There was a north light. It's worth looking into and it's worth waiting for."

William Morris said he would tell Ted about it.

"Ask for number 147," said Gabriel.

Gabriel was looking at the portrait.

178.

"Could Hamlet wear a lace cuff? Come, look at this damn thing. Where are you off to, now?"

"I was wondering," said Morris, "about the river —"

"Damn-blast, don't touch that curtain. If you must look at the river, go into the other room. There's this room, the next we call the long-room, then the corridor with the books (there are candles somewhere, if you want to explore the place) and the bed-room if you want to sleep here."

"I just thought I'd take a look at the river."

"Nor'-nor'-west?" asked Gabriel. "Have it your own way. To tell you the truth, I took the place myself because of the river, because of the bridge, rather. But I found a better wall for my *Bridge*, cut at Highgate. You've opened that door."

"How could I get into the long-room, as you call it, without opening the door?"

"Must you watch the weather? You remind me of Lizzie. She always hung out of the window or plastered her mug against the window-pane, if there was a beastly snow-flake in the offing."

What was Morris doing?

There was something in the offing.

179.

Gabriel did not turn round, he leaned forward as if to
scrutinize the canvas, in case Morris was looking at the back
of the head.

The fellow had whiskers - those cat-whiskers or dog-
hackles, but he didn't show it.

He was more like a great St.Bernard than a cat, though -
heavy but soft in his tread like a young lion.

Was he still standing there?

Had he sneaked into the next room without a candle?

"What I mean is, that cuff is a bit van Dyk - still,
van Dyk might have painted Hamlet, in his own way. But it's
not my idea. To paint or not to paint, that is the question.
Deverell wanted to be an actor. Could act, too. Family
stiffish, about the stage. Took up painting to please his
father and painted to please the Academy - that's not paint-
ing. You paint because you have to, and for no other reason -
unless you're a cheat and a forger and are making a sort of
living by it, like this Hamlet. To paint or not to paint - "

Was the fellow listening?

"Called me Ressetti, did Professor Ruskin, said I was
chaotic. Dell'Guardia is my name really. Rossetti, Hamlet
told me, was he'd wager, from me 'scutcheon, a rose.
Deverell was Romeo, troubadourship. That's what we all

180.

thought. We drew lots for the parts, then we let Deverell
cast us. We did out whole plays, <u>casa Rossetti</u> killed Walter
Deverell, they said. Excitement, fever, inspiration, a mixed
lot, Italians, shady kings and princes, revolutionaries, piano-
tuners - no place for Walter. But we loved him. We would
have pushed him on the stage somehow, but <u>casa Rossetti</u> killed
him, they said. I say it was Kew and Bloomsbury killed
Walter Deverell.

"It's being in two minds kills people," Gabriel went on.
"I kept away; they didn't like me. If he'd made up his mind,
after his father's death, to look after his mother and his
sisters, it would be too painful for him to see outside people.
What they called outside people. / Margaretta was at a dance
the night before he died; his mother hadn't been dead long,
either. Of course, I might have done something. But Lizzie
saw him, walking across Blackfriars Bridge in the snow, the
exact moment (we ascertained afterwards) that he died. Do you
believe in <u>revenants</u>? Lizzie saw him. She said he was coming
here to say good-bye. It was February, in the morning.
Don't look out of the window, you might see something."

Gabriel turned round. The fellow was still there.

"Did you see something?"

"No, I was only listening."

181.

"Did you hear something?"

"The hooters on the river."

"I mean - "

"No. I don't see things."

The fellow was a liar.

"What I mean is, Lizzie is not consumptive. Ruskin sent her to Doctor Ackland at Oxford. Ackland said (a profound diagnosis) her ill health was caused by mental power long pent up and lately overtaxed. That's what I do, overtax people. But Lizzie is out of London."

"Where is - "

"Siddall her name is, Sudal really, came in with the Conqueror like Deverell, D'Evrolles."

"I'm plain Morris."

"I can see that. I'm not worried about you. But the other chap might get exalte. It's what they said of Deverell, that casa Rossetti was a bad influence. Well, this isn't like the Old Antique days - Antique is the mater. She gave up the casa gatherings after the death of Gabriele, my father."

"What could you do to Ted but inspire him?"

"That's just what I mean, inspiration, they say, takes it out of one."

182.

"They say?"

"I'm told so."

"Then you - ah - know nothing first-hand of
inspiration?"

"It's just routine - inspiration was our daily bread,
while old Gabriele was living. But you damn English are so
suspicious of inspiration."

"I don't know," said William Morris, "there's Browning."

"I'm glad you didn't say Tennyson. And I don't mean you."

What was it Lizzie had said? There would be snow only on
the high mountains. Was there snow in the Hollow Land?

"You have your feet on the ground."

"Well, Ted's practical."

"Who got religion, first of you two?"

"Religion?"

"You know what I mean, exultation, ecstacy."

"I should say Ted."

"Gad - it's worse when you stand still, than when you
walk round. But you're not as broad as you look. How's
architecture? You can't stay forever in that Oxford office,
you know. What are you thinking of -

Ships sail through the Heaven
With red banners dress'd?

I like your poetry. It's heraldic."

183.

"You know that I like yours."

"Tu quoque was always forbidden in our family, as I had occasion to remark to Miss Siddall in Paris. I ran over with Monro, one of the fellows, to see her off to the South. What's an *opergne*? But don't tell me. Lizzie said a chap I knew designed one for the Exhibition.

All day long and every day,
From Christmas-Eve to Whit-Sunday,
Within that Chapel-aisle I lay,
And no man came anear.

Of course, I don't really know you fellows, but I think Jones
is a sort of streamer on a lance or banner-pole. He might
get ripped off in a fight."

Gabriel did not add, but nothing could break the banner-pole.

"Naked to the waist was I,
And deep within my breast did lie,
Though no man any blood could spy,
The trumcheon of a spear.

So you saw yourself? Lizzie had something of the same experience. A queen stepped down from the wall, and lay in a coffin, clasping a book. That was at Chartres. Lizzie was happy about it, because Mrs. Browning said it was a poem. Lizzie does little jingles herself.

Many a time I tried to shout;
But as in dream or battle-rout,
My frozen speech would not well out;
I could not even weep.

184.

But sit down in the Professor's chair - here's where he sat
the last time - and tell me how, by the sweat of your brow,
you came to write poetry?"

"If that's poetry, it's easy to write."

"So you don't get into a fever, inspiration doesn't
burn you out?"

"Not if that's inspiration."

"All in the day's work - eh?"

"If you call it work - I suppose so."

"Can't you sit comfortably? I told you you were
hearing things."

"I'm not hearing things, I was thinking."

"Well, even Professor Ruskin lounged with almost under-
graduate abandon, in that chair, the last time he was here,
but perhaps, he wasn't thinking."

"I've left Oxford, I mean the College."

"You mean Ruskin hasn't? Perhaps you're right. And
what, if I am not intruding, are you thinking?"

"I was thinking about *The Hollow Land*."

"That thing of yours?"

"I was thinking, it wasn't mine."

"Whose was it?"

185.

"I got the idea of going back in time, half in a dream,
from your *Hand and Soul*."

"It's hardly my idea."

"I got the idea from you, anyway, and the *Oxford and Cambridge* too, from the *Germ*. You don't know what we owe you."

“God bless my soul.”

"I had an idea that *Hand and Soul* should be copied out in
Canterbury Missal script - or I suppose you'd choose Venetian."

"Are you *en rapport* with Lizzie? Or are you mind-
reading? I had a letter from Lizzie only to-day, saying she
had bought drawing-paper and was making illuminated letters
for some of the Chiaro story."

"Perhaps I am *en rapport* with Miss Siddall. Only, I
don't know her ... *like one just come out of a dusk, hollow
country, bewildered with echoes, where he has lost himself.*"

"I don't remember your *Hollow Land*, not to that extent.
I remember the 'Ships sail through the Heaven'and
'Christ keep the Hollow Land
Through the sweet spring-tide'"

"It's not my *Hollow Land*, I'm quoting, it's your
*Hand and Soul*."

Gabriel's nonchalance abandoned him. He did not know
why. He remembered how he had seen Lizzie's face, that first

186.

evening, like a cameo rising from the shadows and her hands
resting upon darkness.

"Come, come, my dear fellow —" what would he say,
what would he say next?

Jones was bad enough but you could cope with Jones'
charming affectations. This fellow wasn't affected. He meant
everything he said. Jones had been in, frequently. He had
brought Morris once or twice. Gabriel had considered Morris
awkward and shy.

But William Morris was not shy.

"Tumpty-ti-tum — might have some grog or something.
Rather go to the pub on the corner, or stay in?"

"I'd rather stay in."

"Well, I've only the Elixir of Life to offer you."

"I don't need a drink."

"I'll just scrape out this cuff, while you go on thinking."

"There was snow," said William Morris, "and a walled city.
That is why I wanted to look out of the window. I did
<u>The Hollow Land</u> in what I called Fyttes. I mean, there were
three Fyttes, after I died. I called myself Florian, ours
was the House of Lilies, so I was Florian de Liliis. There
was a feud between the Lilies and Red Harald. That was when
they went out into the snow."

187.

"A good fight," said Gabriel, "I remember - crash, bang, lashing with swords; picturesque but realistic, soldiers and monks fighting together on your side, battle-axes, trumpets, long spears - "

"Her hair was not light yellow, but dusky golden, when he saw her."

"Eh - what? Reciting poetry?"

"It's a line from _The Hollow Land._"

If only he could explain things to Gabriel Rossetti, but how could he?

"Ted said, it was a bit confusing, going on with the story after Florian was dead. Perhaps you remember that Fytte the First, Second and Third were Florian's experience in _The Hollow Land_. He meets Margaret and loses her and finds her again."

William Morris had seen the face of Margaret from _The Hollow Land_.

He was standing behind Rossetti.

Rossetti said, "damn-blast, don't touch that curtain."

But William Morris had seen the picture before he dropped the curtain.

It was an unfinished picture, in a wooden frame, set against the wall under the window.

188.

There were other canvases.

Should he ask Rossetti if he could have a look round,
at his pictures?

He sank back in the chair. Rossetti was right, "did
you see something?" he had said.

He had seen something.

Christ keep the Hollow Land.

It was Margaret as she would have been, if he had seen
her before he left the world.

"O brave heart," she had said.

She should have been Margaret de Liliis. She bore the
sign of their house, three fleur-de-lis, a single blade of
iris with three flowers.

She had three lixes in her hand. William Morris re-
membered the Blessed Damozel of Gabriel Rossetti.

II

189.

—IX—

She had three lilies in her hand
And the stars in her hair were seven.

They had borrowed robes from the Abbot, the monk's
habit slipped easily over armour. The prior had supplied
them with ladders and Florian and his men scaled the walls
and opened the gates to the others.

"It was nearly three o'clock," he remembered he had
written, "and the moon began to clear."

The moon began to clear. A pale disc showed above
Thames' tide-way.

William Morris had walked over the bridge to Whitefriars.

Florian de Liliis came slowly back. The snow had blown
off the parapet and drifted against the stone ledge of the
pavement. The tide was rising, washing against the triangular
buttresses of the bridge foundation.

Their party had been supplied with white garments, priest-
ly vestments from the priory.

So they stood together on the inner wall, invisible against
the snow, about to pass the castle guard-house and descend
to open the gate.

There had been a voice singing, from one of the inner

190.

turrets.

Ships sail through the Heaven
With red banners dress'd;
Carrying the planets seven
To see the white breast

Mariae Virginis.

Whitefriars, Blackfriars, St. Bride's Well.

He had longed to be out of the place, to battle with
the wind, to plough through drifts, to shout, to exult openly.

But he had wanted to stay.

Rossetti had placed two glasses on the table. "Here
is the Elixir of Life," he had said. It was a quaint, squat
bottle with a label that Rossetti said, "the Professor calls
Greek. I think it's a magic-brew of some sort. There's
only this left, but I'm getting Gus to bring me some more,
if he can find it again in Paris. Monro dug this out of some
pub or other - curious. I called the abracadabra Russian -
or Turk. What do you think?"

"I wouldn't know. I'd say Coptic."

"Well, Ruskin is in sherry, you know Ruskin and Domecq.
He said the bouquet was Greek. How did he know that?"

"Maybe, a touch of resin, that pine-stuff they sometimes
put in."

"Do you notice any resin?"

191.

"I couldn't say so."

"What do you notice?"

"Taste - smell - or see?"

"All together - does it taste of Malaga?"

"Shouldn't say so."

"Colour - port-ish?"

"A stain of rose - lighter than port."

"Not attar of rose - that's Persian."

"You were speaking of the colour."

"Well - what the Professor calls the bouquet, then?
Inland or island?"

"I should say island."

"Lily on lily that o'er lace the sea - eh? Which
island?"

"Not Cos."

"Why not Cos?"

"I should say there's was a white wine."

"Can't you have both?"

"Not hoth - if you're speaking of the Elixir of Life."

"It is the Elixir of Life, then?"

"Certainly."

"I spoke of Lizzie's champagne - as the Holy Grail,
in Paris. It didn't seem to shock her."

193.

"Yes, Ted."

"What made you think that Ted was qualified to sample
the Elixir?"

"What made you think that I was?"

"Sea-dogs like grog."

It was the way he said it, tenderness mixed with mockery.
William Morris had never heard a voice so beautiful.

"It's all very simple," said William Morris. He stopped
above the water-steps to stare at the river.

He drew the fragile image closer to him and tucked the
frail hand into his great-coat pocket.

"But you are Margaret de Liliis," he said, "you like
snow."

"You ask me to explain it to you? Let's stay a moment,
looking at the river. But your hands are ice, put on your
gloves." He laughed at her and stooped to pick up the heavy
leather glove she dropped in the snow.

"I don't know what to do about it," he said, "you left
your gloves upstairs? Shall I run back and get them?"

She said he mustn't leave her.

"Shall we go back together?"

194.

She said, no, she liked to be out of doors, and he
might want to finish the picture.

"But he's working on Gus."

That was, she said, only because she had been away.

"But he wouldn't have you sitting in a cold room, and
so late?"

She said, he never noticed the cold, that is, not when
he was painting and that he never knew what time it was.

But she said, he was kind about her hair and said he
would convince people in time, that she was beautiful.

"Well, really darling, aren't you a little morbid?"

She said, she wasn't any more morbid than he was, he
was always thinking about chapel-aisles and tombs.

"But he said, _tu quoque_ was forbidden, you remember,
in his family."

She said that this was not his family.

"You're a little stubborn, and stop staring at the river."

She said, it was he who suggested that they wait above
the water-steps and look at the river.

"Darling, must we be always quarrelling?"

They walked almost as far as the law courts. "St.Bride's

195.

should be here somewhere," he said.

She reminded him that, apart from being late, the city churches didn't stay open like the churches in France.

But there was a gleam of light from a window, and in a side street where he dragged her, blinded with snow, there was a church door.

"I thought it had stopped snowing," he said.

She said, it was the wind that was blowing the dry snow in their faces.

"I suppose we can wait here, in the porch, out of the wind," said Florian.

"But the door's locked," said Florian.

She said that she had already told him that the city churches were always locked.

"There was a light in the window."

She said it was moonlight reflected.

She wondered what he had expected. This is only Fytte the First, she reminded him. It was not until the end, when he had lost her and found her again that she said, come now and look for it, love, a hollow city in the Hollow Land.

196.

William Morris, huddled in his great-coat, sat down on the stone step. "I'll call it St. Bride's," he said to himself, "it might be. As long as I'm broad, am I? O Margaret for the brotherhood of the golden dwellings."

The wind swirled the snow, a transparent mist, the veil before the altar. "Fancy her having that idea of illuminated lettering," mused William Morris.

"Can't take her into a pub to get warm, can I? I suppose that was some <u>Avenue de l'Opera</u> place they went to. Was she really happy or was she just pretending? He seemed to want to talk about her. There was some gossip at one time, that he was indifferent to her, but Ted ran across that fellow Monro, the chap who was in Paris, and Ted said, Monro said that Rossetti was mad about her. I told him didn't I, that you can't have two Elixirs?

"A stain of rose, I said, did I, for colour when he asked me? Rossetti - roses.

"And he called her Liz; I suppose it's/<u>quatro cento</u> way of pronouncing Lis.

"Lizzie - Lily.

"He knew I'd seen something.

"So she see things?

"What will she be doing with <u>Hand and Soul</u>?

197.

"She wrote (he read out that part of the letter) that she started an illumination of St. Mary Virgin with Chiaro's lily and rose in a glass. And she was worried about a date; Rossetti himself was a bit dim about it; he quoted something that she said sounded like his Dante. Had he confused the date on purpose, she had asked him. And who was Chiaro quoting if not Dante? Was it Abelard?" He did not think Elizabeth Siddall was superior, nor even eleven; she just wanted to know the date, for some point in her own story, which she said (did Gabriel like the title?) she was calling the Golden Chord.

"What was this chord that bound them?

"I don't mean you," William Morris spoke now to St. Bride beside him. "I understand perfectly how she feels about him. I am a hearty person, as long as I'm broad, he told me. He doesn't like Vikings. I was talking to Algernon about a Nordic Saga. Algernon wants to work this Saga into a play, he calls The Albigenses. The Albigenses - I suppose you know about them - had a Church once, in France. I told Algernon, it seemed a long way from the fiords of Iceland to the orchards of Provence. Lizzie is happy, he told me, in Provence, by some stone steps, above the olive orchards.

198.

There are blossoms on the south wall, while we sit here in
the snow. I should say this; St.Bride is that Virgin of the
illuminati of The Albigenses, as Algernon calls his play.

"It's a big subject but perhaps little Algernon can do it." William Morris struggled to his feet; he shook the snow from his great-coat. "But I can't keep you any longer ..." He pressed his flaming forehead against the pillar of the doorway, "good-night, St. Bride."

William Morris turned down the Strand.

III

199.

He pushed aside the drawing-board. He was working in G.E.Street's Oxford office, making tracings of the designs for the restoration of St.Albans.

There was nothing to be done about it; they had begun work there and who was he to stop it? He was an apprentice, a clerk in Street's office, learning his trade. But he could not go on with this trade of desecration.

He would stick it here till Ted finished at Exeter, then they would leave Oxford together.

There had been the traditional scenes and inoriminations, when he had announced to his mother on their return from France last summer, that he could not go into the Church, and must leave Exeter. He had compromised however; he had agreed to stay at the college, until arrangements could be made for some alternative profession.

He knew better than to mention art, outright. He had studied manuscript and missals, old reproductions, modern photographs at the Bodleian, as well as in the Marlborough College library, before he went to Oxford. His mother knew from his letters how he spent his half-holidays, exploring ruins and old churches. "Fitting for a lad, destined for

200.

the Church", was her inevitable comment to the boy's grandmother, after reading out his last letter to the Water House, at Walthamstow, where they had moved from Woodford Hall, soon after the death of William Morris, his father.

But William Morris, the son, was not destined for the Church, not in the sense implied in the words of Mrs. William Morris his mother, to Mrs. William Morris, his grandmother.

"I am plain Morris," he had said to Gabriel Rossetti, now more than a month ago, that night in London.

He had already had a preliminary tussle with his mother, about leaving Street's office. "But you have only just taken up architecture. After our disappointment about the Church - what will you want next? I need not point out to you that we have always been reliable business people, professional people, law and the Church. Your father had implicit faith in you."

William Morris had left his son William, a not inconsiderable fortune.

He did not mention his own writing to his mother, or their plans for a magazine, when he stayed with them. He would be busy in Oxford, he assured her, and then to ease the tension and appease his own law-abiding sense of fairness, he said, that if Mr. Street could find a place for him in his

201.

London office, he would go on working there, after he and
Ted left Oxford.

For how long?

He had realized when Fulford, Ted, Dixon, Crom and
the rest of them first broached the matter of the magazine,
that they could not meet preliminary expenses and the risk
of failure. But it was to be a gesture, a sort of continua-
tion of those already rare copies of the _Germ_, they swore by.
William Morris was glad enough to take financial responsibility.

Ted must have lent or given Rossetti one of the proof
copies of _The Hollow Land_.

Or he may have asked Fulford to enclose it with the
January copy of the _Oxford and Cambridge_. Fortunately,
Fulford was now settled in London and saw to the printing and
distribution of the paper.

Ted had told him that Rossetti had asked about that
"new poet fellow, Morris," at their first meeting and quoted
poems of his. William Morris hadn't then published anything.
He had copied out poems (everyone did that) and even sent
originals in letters. Who had received what? And to whom
had it gone next? The rumour of a new poem or picture spread
like wild-fire in that set. Had Ruskin passed on the poem or
poems to Rossetti? And who, if anyone, had sent the poems to

202.

Ruskin? They were a mad lot.

Gabriel Rossetti had read poems of his before he had published anything, so Ted had told him. Deliberately, William Morris returned to his drawing-board.

He had been over the ground before, but never with such dreary discipline.

He was as his mother had pointed out, trustworthy, reliable, honest, honourable - or he should be. There was no streak or freak of discernible madness in her family. How well he knew that: "I shall be master of a useful trade," he had written her. His mother's father was a certain Joseph Shelton of Worcester. But he could no longer be implicated in the generations; his mother had reminded him of her two brothers, both canons, but Worcester Cathedral and Westminster Abbey had another message for him now. Bishop, canon and dean, they were all rapacious, smug as earth-worms - and now these restorations. But he must be honest - it was hardly the fault of the many good church folk that he knew, that a fortune was being squandered on a disgraceful restoration of St.Albans, while Thames-side stank like Babylon to heaven.

Line upon line. He lifted the tracing paper. Hackwork, any journeyman apprentice could do this and do it better.

203.

No, not do it better. There was grim irony in the thought
that he had done this vile copy as well as the least of them.

Well, at the worst, if he were a copy, it was a copy of
a good original; a faithful copy? It was possible. After
all, there were the tradesmen. His mother called them pro-
fessional people but law, business and the Church were hardly
to be distinguished now, from one another. It was his mother's
harping on the Church and law side of her family, that had
led him to pry deeper. What is a mercer but a merchant?
There, he was happy in the discovery of one Henry Shelton, a
mercer of Birmingham, in the reign of Henry VII. It was as
far as he went, as far as he wanted to go.

"I am plain Morris," he had said to Gabriel Rossetti.

He carefully spread a new sheet of transparent paper
over the arch and vault of the next in the series of the neo-
Gothic restorations.

Sudal, D'Evrolles - did the fellow say his name was
della Guardia?

It was affection.

"I am plain Morris," he must hold on to something, till
he got out of this job.

The mercer would do.

204.

They could have their Conquest.

An English fellow, Henry Shelton.

Rossetti called his mother, Old Antique, more suitable for a grand-mother. Well, he had a grand-mother as well as a mother, both Mrs. William Morris.

"I am plain Morris."

His grand-mother's father had been a navy man from Nottingham. That would account for the Dane or the Viking in him.

This was the Church temporal; he went on outlining a false trefoil pattern around the base of a capitol. The Church Spiritual must wait.

The other chaps had already got the March number of the magazine into some sort of shape. There was his *Dream* in that. They had intended to open with his *Hollow Land* but after the proofs were set up, Crom found it would have to be spread over two numbers and he had taken *The Story of the Unknown Church* instead. But he must not think about his writing.

It was the spirit of the thing. Even if this trefoil were introduced at or about the time of St. Albans, anyone could see that it wasn't in the spirit of St. Albans.

205.

If this artificial scroll were beautiful, it would not
matter that it was historically incorrect. It was neither
beautiful nor correct. This was clay. There would never
be light reflected from these surfaces. It was Walter in
*The Unknown Church* who carved the marble "all about with many
flowers and histories." His sister was Margaret; Amyot his
friend loved Margaret; his face was "the most beautiful among
all the faces of men and women I have ever seen." Amyot
was wounded in the wars, and Margaret, on his return, died with
him.

"Margaret and Amyot did go, and left me very lonely, and
sad."

That was the January number, so Rossetti must have read
*The Unknown Church* as well as *The Hollow Land*. I must ask
Ted if he sent Rossetti, *The Hollow Land*.

But William Morris knew that he would not ask Ted anything about Gabriel Rossetti.

Rossetti - rose.

And of course, there were two of them.

Who was the second Margaret? Perhaps a cousin of
Florian's, not a sister.

He had Margaret. He would always have Margaret, but he

206.

had never had her in his heart and his head, at one and the
same time, until he saw the picture.

Granted that the picture had been painted by Rossetti,
granted that the girl in the picture was Rossetti's rose -
that did not alter the fact that she was Florian's lily,
de Liliis, Lis.

It was as he had told her on Blackfriars Bridge, all
very simple.

But Gabriel Rossetti's Elixir of Life was a potent sol-
vent; it would dissolve William Morris before he had really
come to man's estate and claimed his inheritance.

He must establish, fortify himself before he gave way.

This alternative career or profession, as his mother
called it, was outrageous cheating. But he was determined
to give it a chance.

Were all professions the cheat that this was?

Walter lived as a monk in the Abbey for twenty years,
in order to construct the tomb and carve the figures of Amyot
and Margaret, "lying with clasped hands like husband and wife."
Walter lived till he had finished "the last lily of the tomb."

William Morris followed the involutions of what he called
the copy-book trefoil, with cynical detachment. "You damn
English are so suspicious of inspiration," Gabriel Rossetti

207.

had said. One had even reason to be suspicious. "But I gave him my swashing blow," thought William Morris, "I said, there's Browning."

If he thought of Robert Browning, he was drawn inward (still tracing neo-Gothic) to the vast chaotic depth of weathered masonry. It was dark, no exotic incense, no flare of candles. The Cathedral was empty but it had been thronged, and processions would pass again, orderly, Benedictine, Dominican, stout fellows with tradition and learning, good living and sensible political affiliations. There was no stuff or tattered pennants hanging on these walls. Ordered, dim outline of religious story was copied in good Bruges or Brussels or Chipping Campden wool-thread. It was a warm interior. "Like the belly of a whale," thought William Morris.

"One can get one's swashing blow at these neo-Gothic fellows inside their own sham fortress," thought William Morris.

"This is clay. It will crumble, flake off, peel away. It won't last forever. Why worry, then, about it? Learn their technique, their tactic before you leave their crumbling citadel."

It was one thing to splash on colour. You must have line, too; Ruskin was right there. Not this rule-of-thumb

208.

deadening and uninspired traditional reconstruction - but
other reconstructions. He thought of Hans Membling and the
van Eycks and visualised ordered water-ways. The oast houses
of Kent and Sussex always suggested Dutch landscape to him.
There were streams in London, water-ways that had been paved
over; they ran underground; once silver rivulets wandering
through fields of buttercups in Kensington and Chelsea, had
been clamped under iron gratings to mingle with the filth
of the sewers. The whole of Thames bank, both sides
of the river, could be reconverted. His right hand continued
in grim irony, to trace imitation Gothic oak-leaf. He re-
membered his great moment. He had discovered Gerard's Herbal,
just before he was sent away to his first school.

That was his first great moment. Every leaf, every
hedge-rose, every bluebell stalk took form. A cluster of
blossom detached itself from the maze of the thorn and became
stylized, a theme for decoration. There were stone flowers
in some of their northern Cathedrals, not yet "discovered".
He wondered if Ruskin knew about the fern, the dandelion.
They'd be sure to call the latter, romanesque acanthus. He
felt sure that this particular trefoil was a later innovation.
The stone flowered of itself, if you let it alone.

209.

That is, the living stone.

The living stone had gone from most of their Cathedrals,
and what was left, was being smothered, killed ... but he must
not go on rebelling. He knew that beads of sweat were forming
on his forehead, "but if I stop now, even to mop my fevered
brow," he thought, "I will give up hope forever. I must just
go on here, till this job is finished." He was thinking how
a group of them went down (in spite of college prohibition) to
the slums of Marylebone that first year, to help with the
cholera carts.

Gabriel Rossetti's least remark was a flare in the dark-
ness. But you need not follow every flare, even if you are
lost. Rossetti's remark about Ted for instance - did it
ring true? But he knocked me breathless by reciting
<u>All day long and every day</u> and then he went on before I had time
to defend Ted, with

Naked to the waist was I,
And deep within my breast did lie,
Though no man any blood could spy,
The truncheon of a spear.

And then on and on, talking about Lizzie and Chartres, of all
places.

It was the first time he went to France that he saw
Chartres. He had wanted to take Ted back there. The miracle

210.

really happened the second time, last summer with Ted and
Fulford; it had happened at Beauvais, not Chartres.

So Ted was a sort of streamer on a lance that might get
ripped off?

Hardly.

Even if he were a streamer on a lance, they were none
of them alone, flaunting solitary pennants. There was Harry
Macdonald, Ted's oldest friend, the brother of little Georgie
whom Ted hoped to marry. The King Edward School, Birmingham,
had sent up most of their set. Dixon and Crom were both
King Edward's, as well as Harry and Ted.

He must fortify himself, get his bearings. To
think of them, re-established him, set him back again on his
own orbit. The voice of Rossetti pulled him side-ways. He
must toe the line, at least till he got this job done.

He summoned his retainers, Ted, Dixon, Harry and Crom
from King Edward's. The Exeter crowd had proved utterly un-
inspiring. Pembroke was their headquarters. Godfrey
Lushington joined them from Balliol. There were eight of
them at Oxford, though Fulford, a little older, had just left
for London. They met chiefly in Faulkner's rooms in Pembroke.
Then there was the outpost, Trinity College, Cambridge with
Wilfred Heely and Vernon Lushington.

211.

That was their Brotherhood.

The Pre-Raphaelite chaps were older, established in the world or already disestablished. Gabriel Rossetti was the core and fire of a Catherine-wheel that seemed momentarily to have burnt out. That is, burnt out (from what they told him) as a whole, a Brotherhood. They had more or less dropped Millais, out of loyalty to Ruskin. Holy Hunt, as Rossetti called him, was off on various expeditions, painting religious subjects in the Near East, set pictures, Rossetti called them, ordered by Rabbis or City Corporations. No, they had not quarrelled, Rossetti had insisted, none of them had quarrelled; they had merely separated, lost touch, for the most part, with one another.

Rossetti had insisted that he and Ted had brought back life and renewed his faith in the work.

There was Madox Brown of course, but Ruskin didn't like him. There were lesser members of the original group, Stevens, Boyce and a fellow they called Scotus, writers or painters. William Rossetti was now well established as a critic and there was William Allingham whom they had invited to contribute to the magazine. The only outstanding writer and painter was Gabriel Rossetti; could one do both?

There were of course, Rossetti's sisters and Ruskin said Miss Siddall had talent.

212.

What did Christina Rossetti make of Elizabeth Siddall,
he wondered?

Algernon will be joining us soon.

They have lost Walter Deverell.

But they had not really lost Walter Deverell. Perhaps
he was their greatest asset. His own Walter in _The Unknown_
_Church_ became identified with this other Walter. There were
three of them in _The Unknown Church_, Walter, Margaret and
Amyot. There were three of them that night he had seen the
picture, Walter, Margaret and Gabriel. Was he (William Morris)
another Walter, a _revenant_ on Blackfriars' Bridge? Rossetti
was talking of Walter Deverell, just before he spoke of Ted;
"who got religion first of you two?" he had asked.

Those hours alone with Rossetti had gone so quickly,
though compressed with endless thought, measureless emotion.
They were a distillation, an essence, like that attar of rose,
he spoke of. Like his own knight,

Fast to the stone,
The grim walls,
he had doled out to himself, grain by grain or drop by drop,

213.

the precious essence of the memory of that evening. A drug,
an elixir, if you will, that might with care, last a life-
time, this life-time in Street's office, waiting for Ted to
get on to his finals at Exeter.

IV

214.

xi

It was not disloyalty to the others that had led him of late, to seek out Godfrey Lushington at Balliol. Their intimacy had really come about because of Faulkner and the table. After one of their hectic evening discussions at Pembroke, last winter, Faulkner had asked for volunteers for his new experiments. There was a good deal of it going around, but Faulkner was taking the matter of the new _tables parlants_ seriously. If it had been anyone else but Faulkner, he himself would have been inclined to consider the whole business trivial or a bit sensational - a new fashion or after-dinner pastime.

Faulkner was admittedly, the most brainy of the whole lot, and outwardly the most athletic. He was a great oarsman and there was already talk of keeping him on at Oxford; he was one of those freak mathematical geniuses. Faulkner talked in terms of planes and parallels, which none of them could follow. There were, he said, serious experiments being done at the Sorbonne, and Dixon remembered having heard that the Brownings were interested.

William Morris didn't know what it was that had put off Ted and Dixon. Last winter, they were the most enthusiastic

215.

of the whole lot. There had not been any remarkable messages, but Faulkner was taking the thing seriously and was interested in checking up on what he called thought-transference. He didn't want a crowd. Usually Ted and Dixon stayed on after the others left, and he and Lushington took it easy in the arm-chairs smoking. There were the three of them at the table. Ted and Dixon said they didn't know any Vernon, nor did Faulkner, but V-e-r-n-o-n kept coming back. Lushington let it go on, for two evenings. The third time he said that Vernon was his brother.

They didn't know that Godfrey had a brother at Trinity, Cambridge.

You could not actually say that the table had suggested their enlarging their group, but Vernon and his friend Heeley, eventually became the Cambridge of *The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine*.

He and Godfrey laughed of course - what else was there for them to do? They agreed with Ted and Dixon that they had gone far enough with the table. "Don't tell old Faulkner." Of course, they wouldn't tell him. But the next time Faulkner called for volunteers, Godfrey tactfully said he thought it would be more convincing and more interesting, if some other chaps took over the table, for a change. Didn't one perhaps,

216.

get into a sort of groove? It was all right with Faulkner. Ted and Dixon had already dismissed the whole thing (in confidence to Godfrey and himself) as boring; they were glad to get out of it. Godfrey Lushington (William Morris was certain) was himself deeply interested. But they had dropped the table altogether, after Ted and Dixon told them that they themselves, to live things up, had pushed Faulkner's table about and made it spell the words they wanted - not all of them, they admitted. "It was slow and more than a little futile," Ted said. They had been interested enough in the beginning.

Perhaps it was the latest report about Browning that had put off Ted and Dixon. It was now said that Browning was trying to get Mrs Browning to give up communication. Had the same thing happened to Robert Browning that had happened to Ted and Dixon? They had followed so far, then for no perceptible reason, had made a joke of the whole business. He'd warrant Mrs Browning hadn't turned back when her circle or her messages became "futile", as Ted put it. It was a way of saying that they couldn't or wouldn't follow the clue, that they hadn't the patience to seek out the Grail.

There were halts, deserts, moors, swamps, impenetrable wastes and unsurpassable mountains in every Malory story.