We are immeasurably indebted to the late Violet Hunt, for her reconstruction of the period, and we have profited by her recording the names of many of the minor characters in this narrative, though we differ in our attitude and approach to *The Wife of Rossetti*.

It will be remembered that manuscripts were freely circulated among the writers of the fifties of the last century, *therefore* though we have in several instances, referred to books, prior to the date of publication.

The character of Godfrey Lushington, as outlined in this romance, is presented in a purely symbolic manner, for the sake of completing the old pattern and inspiring a new cycle of the original *Brotherhood of Sir Galahad*, founded at Oxford by William Morris.

Lausanne
Lugano

1948

## PART I

### I

If only he would stop talking.

She had heard it all before but mostly from Mum and Annie. He read to them evenings and with his black scarf, his thin face and long hands, sitting with his book under the lamp, he might have been that other (the only picture in the small room), blackened, almost defaced, whose very name they had forgotten - Christopher, Mum said they said in Sheffield, but it was at best, an indifferent likeness, perhaps only a copy and a bad copy at that, so it hadn't been sold up, along with the effects at Hope Hall. It was Dad's auctioneer cousin who said it would bring nothing. Let Charles Siddall have Christopher Siddall - leaving out that one 1; his grandfather had added it, after the failure of the flax and bankruptcy.

It was Anna Grant de Hope who married Jacobus Sidall - and again in her thoughts, she spelt it differently, though Gabriel said she was Sidal really - de Grant de Hope.

Sudel or Suddel was carved on some of the oldest tombstones. Gabriel said he would take her to Hope Dale to see the carvings on the church front and "inside, there is sure

2.

to be," he said, "Per Bend Vert and Gules: an Eagle displayed,
somewhere."

That was the Greaves quartering.

Who would expect Dad to talk about his family? He had
cut her short once when she was a little girl. She had never
forgotten. She had not asked him again.

It was about the later coat that he was talking,
<u>Three Birds</u> and the word Honour.

It was after Harry began to call her the ginger-cat,
that she had chosen the Eagle. They were the <u>Three Birds</u>,
it was Annie's idea really. Annie, Lizzie and Lyddie
(Clara didn't count then) were <u>Three Birds</u>, Anna, Elizabeth
and Lydia. There were seven of them altogether, that is
counting Charlie. Annie and Charlie were both born in
Sheffield; Charlie died there. She, Lyddie, Clara and the
two boys were born in the old house, number 5, which Dad had
taken over for his business. "This is number 8, Kent Place,"
she said to herself. It was necessary to remind herself of
the <u>Three Birds</u>, having remembered Gabriel's joy in his dis-
covery of <u>Gules</u> and <u>Eagle displayed</u>. That is what she had
wanted to ask Dad - what are <u>Gules</u>?

She had not asked Dad, neither had she asked Gabriel.

3.

Nor had she told Gabriel that she had chosen the Eagle.
She had told no one. Moreover, to be on the safe side, she
had kept the *Three Birds*, that is her share in them. " I am
Elizabeth Siddall," she said to herself and that in the begin-
ning, was the bird in the middle.

She had left her room and come across the river, dressed
up (for to dress as she used to, was "dressing up" now) in the
very dress she had worn at Mrs. Tozer's. She kept it carefully
for these occasions. It was as if Dad were an actor or a
clergyman, talking out of a book and talking about honour.
She did not say, "I am engaged to marry Mr. Rossetti," for that
wouldn't have made any difference. She had come to say some-
thing else, at last secure. But she might have been a prospec-
tive governess being interviewed, whose credentials are not
satisfactory. This would not be the drawing-room itself, but
a small ante-room of a big house. There would be a garden
outside. The new sheds and houses had encroached on their old
play-ground and you could hardly see the masts now, at Wapping.
She was playing her old game again, she must not let them know
(not even Gabriel) that she was an Eagle displayed.

She could almost bless Harry now. It was like that.
It was even like that afterwards, with "the very knife he did
it with." Mum said it couldn't have been, but that didn't make

4.

any difference. It was the way Harry lunged out at her,
pretending to be Mr. Greenacre. She was to have married him.

Then, when she thought of the bride (as she always did
before going to sleep), that night for the first time, she
could count the pieces. She went on counting them, severed
arms, legs, the head caught in the weir. She counted them
carefully and then something happened. She was no longer afraid.

She could go on with her work in the parlour under the
lamp, and not say anything, and wait for Annie or even Lyddie
to shout, "now, stop it, Harry, that's long past." Later,
they all agreed that Harry wasn't quite right and James, a grown
lad now, in the shop with Dad, made it his own concern that
Harry stopped plaguing his three sisters, for it was three
still; though Annie had got married, Clara had joined the
ranks of the *Three Birds*.

That is why she blessed Harry and if only Dad would stop
talking, she would ask him if that new school had agreed to
keep on Harry. It was Harry hissing and spitting "gin-gin-ginger
cat" that had driven her to take refuge in the fancy that her
hair was like the feathers of a golden eagle. But she had
to remember that she was also one of the *Three Birds* and the
first now and "an example to the others"; she heard her father

5.

saying, "You are an example to the others and - my favourite daughter."

If only Lyddy would come in. Could she interrupt him to ask him about Lyddy? Lyddy had had the room to herself, and that was another reason for moving across the river. It wasn't only Gabriel, though it was all Gabriel. Lyddy could never sleep lying down.

"I wanted Mum and Lyddy and you, all together - to tell you the news." But he thought it was something else.

"Your mother went with James to fetch Lydia from your Aunt Day's."

Lyddy was in Aunt Lucy Day's shop now; she slept there, working-days.

No one had ever crossed the river to Cranbourne Street, not that she remembered, to fetch her home from Mrs. Tozer's.

"Do they always call for Lyddy on Saturday?"

"When I can spare James."

"Why?" asked Elizabeth Siddall. At least he had stopped talking about honour or perhaps that is what he was still saying, but saying it differently and saying it about Lyddy. It wasn't the crowds and anyway, she liked walking alone. What

6.

had happened that they had gone to Aunt Day's shop to fetch Lyddie? She could not really believe that they went often. She had been so happy when Mum's friend, out of her Euston Road days, had said she could work in the shop. She had been in there with Mum when she was a child, and admired Mum's old friend who wasn't married then. But she married Mr. Tozer. He was a little old gentleman and it seemed funny, a man in a bonnet-shop. But his father was, he said, French and he spelt his name differently. It was something about war that brought them to England, and he called her mademoiselle and said, would she like to help them.

He gave her some scraps and she made a pin-cushion for Mum's Christmas. She never forgot Mr. Tozer.

He had even helped her with Dad's present. Annie was hemming the handkerchiefs and Mum always gave Dad the black scarf. Mr. Tozer said, what did Dad do? Gentlemen had their preferences. He would like something for polishing the cutlery and such-like perhaps? But he had the soft pieces sent from Sheffield, she told him, from the same place where her grandfather got the chamois. And Mr. Tozer said, that would anyway, be in the way of business and the shop, he understood, was now separate. Christmas was for personal-like reminders. His

7.

own Dad was easy enough to plan for. It was always the same
from that nice place in Haymarket - it was old too, and they
remembered their clients from year to year and preferences.
Times are different, they always remarked friendly, and the
old gentleman (he was dead now) was the last, as he remembered,
to say, "Mr. Toussier - your father's usual mixture?" But
Dad, she had to tell him, didn't take snuff.

She didn't know why but she couldn't tell even Mr. Tozer
that Dad played the violin.

She thought of the times she had hemmed the black square
of that special soft cotton and of how she had scolded Clara,
more than once, for polishing the table with it. "But I
always know where to find Dad's duster," Clara told her.

The violin-case was standing in the corner.

The leather folder with the music was lying on the table.

She realised that she was sitting "tight in her chair",
the way she had so often sat, lifting her head from her sewing,
about to take a deep breath, as Annie flung down her scissors,
and (firm as Mum and grown-up now and going to be married)
ragged out, "Harry, no more fooling." It was for Mum's sake
they stood it. Mum said he was growing too fast and all lads
were a bit wild at that age.

8.

It was Mr. Tozer's idea really.

He even cut three rounds of velvet for her, but he let her measure and cut the inside circles of ordinary cloth to wipe the pens on.

The black velvet pen-wiper was still on his table in the office.

On the black velvet, she had embroidered the eagle that was stamped on the music folder. It was not, Annie said, their Eagle. Annie said she thought it was a church Eagle from the Cathedral where Dad's father had sung in Sheffield. There were other animals (Annie remembered the Cathedral) carved on the choir-stalls, a Lion, a Bull and there was an Angel that went with them.

She had asked a question, it seemed a long time ago, but it couldn't have been, for Dad had gone on talking and when he said, "its these roughs about, at war-time", she remembered that the question had been about Lyddy and why did James and Mum call for her. She asked again, "do they always call for Lyddy?" and he answered "not always - only lately, crowds get out of hand, excitable, almost like the last war." She made an effort, "I am Elizabeth Siddall," she said to herself, "and I can't remember the last war," and then she remembered

9.

how Mr.Tozer had explained or tried to explain it to her, how
they were looked after by the friend of Mr.Tozer's former master,
who had been - who had been ... it was the flash of the
knife in the lamp-light that she hadn't even seen then, for then
there was no Mr.Greenacre and the snow that fell and fell, but
there was a word that Mr.Tozer said that flashed broader than
the Greenacres that had been their play-ground and brighter
than Dad's polished silver and sharper than any steel in Shef-
field. It was a Doctor Guillotine who had invented it, but
her head caught in the weir.

"War," she said, trying not to ask a question. She was
only prompting him. Now she wanted him to go on talking, even
if it was about war. Mr.Tozer had talked about war, how kind
they were; they had been friends, his father's master and the
English gentleman, and then everything changed and it was
Frenchie, Frenchie and throwing stones at him and barking and
howling, "come on Tozer." He laughed, Mr. Toussier, when he
told her.

Of course, it had all started with her going to work in the
shop. She had wanted to help them, surely Dad knew that. And Mrs.
Tozer was a friend of Mum's, and Mum and she both remembered Mr.
Tozer. And Dad knew (or perhaps he didn't) how his teaching her to/
keep

10.

the books for him and checking up on the accounts, had really
given her her place there; Dad said she was good at numbers.
She was happy when Mrs.Tozer called her out of the shop, into
the little office and said, "Lizzie, just see what's wrong
here," and she could sit there, after she got the sum right,
nursing Tabby and warming her toes at the tiny fender. She
remembered when it happened.

Mrs.Tozer said, "thanks Lizzie, and now will you give
a hand to Jenny and Ellen, that buyer had all the bonnets down."
She was reaching up, she was taller than the others, putting
the boxes back on the upper shelf, when she felt something.
She turned with her arms still lifted. It wasn't a face re-
flected in the window. It was a face in the window.

It was two faces.

They were looking at her, that was the strange thing
about it.

But she mustn't think of the faces in the window, until
she found out what Dad meant about war. Yet somehow the faces
in the window and Mr.Allingham by the street-lamp on the corner,
bowing to Ellen and Jeannet did not encroach nor confuse. It
was going on there, and it was going on here, at the same time.

11.

It was that Mr. Allingham who was looking in the window.

"I am twenty-two," thought Elizabeth Siddall, "I was seventeen then."

They said they were alone, Ellen and Jeannet that even-
ing; would she walk with them? They knew she didn't like
meeting strangers.

"It's Miss Sid," said Jeannet. She would drop them as soon as she could. It was a gentleman from Ireland, Ellen had explained afterwards, substantial. They had met him looking round the shops and had asked him if they could help him. He said, "yes, girls know best what girls like," he was taking them presents back to Killarney. He had the pleasantest way of speaking. He was official. It was something to do with ships, but by way of customs or controlling. They hadn't really expected to see him again but in return for his confidence, they had told him where they worked. O, he knew Leicester Square and all that neighbourhood. He spent all his time in London, at the play. He did say he was going back, so Jeannet really was surprised to see him. He turned to "Miss Sid" but he didn't embarrass her by saying anything. She felt, he felt she wanted to get away.

But she didn't get away.

12.

" ... the Crimea," Dad was saying. "But that's far off."

"War is never far off - it doesn't depend on where you send your soldiers. It's the same." "It can't be, Dad, that was different, that was only across the channel, that was - "

"One remote country, in no way racially related to England, or even you might say to Europe, may be the cause of final and complete disaster." He was thinking, she felt, about how he missed going out that time, with the Midland Division, he had set his heart on. He was only fifteen, then the war was over. He used to talk to James about it. James was older now than Dad was for Waterloo. Nobody talked about war in Chatham Place. It only came to her notice really, last summer when she stayed with Gabriel at Scalands. It was Barbara Leigh-Smith saying she wished she could go out there and Gabriel saying, "they won't take you, Barbara, even in your riding-breeches." And Barbara saying, "but they're taking Florence."

"And who is Florence?" Gabriel asked her.

"My cousin Florence, Florence Nightingale," said Barbara.

" ... until things are readjusted." What did Dad mean by that? It wasn't like that war (his war) and it was far away and it would soon be over. They couldn't possibly want James. She said, "it was twenty-four pounds a year that Mrs.Tozer gave

13.

me. It was out of Shakespeare. It was Viola he wanted.

The Academy had already hung a picture and it was an honour
for so young a man, though they said his father being head of
Somerset House and the School of Design, helped give him his
advantage. Mum told you all about it. Mum and me talked it
over. She was not condescending, Mum said, Mrs.Deverell when
she came to call and Mum said even the greatest ladies could
spoil a visit by something you'd hardly notice, what Mum
called condescension. Not that we need apologize." Elizabeth
Siddall looked round the room.

"Mrs.Deverell didn't really want a bonnet. Mum said
that was real proof of her son's intentions, his bringing his
mother in to choose a bonnet, before even he spoke to me.
It was, in fact, his mother asked me. 'But I must speak to
your mother first,' she said. I remember how she said it.
Mrs.Deverell asked me if I liked reading, she didn't ask me
if I read Shakespeare, she just went on with it, did I not
think Viola somehow, was reminiscent of Rosalind? I said, no,
Viola was the sea and Rosalind was the forest. 'O, I mean, '
she said, 'their doublet and hose. Would you mind wearing a
page-costume, the jerkin comes almost to the knees, with pointy
shoes and a Rosalind-sortof cap to hide away the aureole.'

14.

She meant my hair. It was my hair they wanted for their
pictures.

"There was another Shakespeare, Mr. Millais' Ophelia.
Mr. Hunt did Silvia and another Viola. Mr. Deverell didn't
finish The Marriage of Rosalind and Orlando but Mr. Rossetti
said he would finish it. Mr. Deverell had what he called
The Flight of an Egyptian Ibis in mind but he didn't even
begin. He wanted me to do Ophelia again. Mr. Deverell
died a year ago last winter."

She waited for her father to say something.

"Mrs. Deverell came out through the garden and sat in
the studio. She read aloud sometimes. Mr. Deverell had to
work at odd hours because of his classes at the School of
Design. Mr. Deverell was not strong and after his father's
death, he overworked, looking after his mother and his sisters."

She was talking about Walter Deverell because she knew
that Dad knew she was thinking about Gabriel.

She took the plunge suddenly. "Mr. Rossetti is concerned
too, about his family, though Miss Maria and Miss Christina
are very clever and teach at languages and Mr. William Rossetti
is on the Board of Trade. They are still grieving for their
father, who died a year ago last April. Miss Maria and Miss

15.

Christina took turns reading and translating. Mrs. Rossetti never left him. Mr. Rossetti was elderly and his work was Dante. Mr. Rossetti was going blind. It was for that reason that I did not wish to intrude. I found Miss Maria very pleasant but they are intellectual superior ladies. Miss Christina writes poetry."

The clock was ticking. If she started counting, beating out a rhythm, she would put words to it. Gabriel said her poetry was not good, she was trying to override his admiration for Christina. But this was not true. She had scribbled in the stitched-together leaves of her wrapping-paper note-book, long before she heard of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Soon I must leave thee
This sweet summer tide.
That other is waiting
To claim his pale bride.

But that was after Walter Deverell walked across Blackfriars Bridge, that February morning. Stephens was leaning out of the window with her, so it wasn't just another of her fancies; "I thought Dev was too ill to be out," he said. It is true that it was snowing. He was too ill to be out but it was Deverell. He had died, they ascertained afterwards, at the exact moment that they saw him.

"Mr. Gabriele Rossetti was an authority on Dante;

16.

Mr. Gabriel Rossetti his son, has now been entrusted with
the rendering of the *Vita Nuova.*"

Still the clock was ticking.

"Mr. Gabriele Rossetti was for some time before his
marriage, a close friend of - of -" she had forgotten
the name of the gentleman in Malta.

"It was the Bourbons," she struck out wildly, she was
beyond her depth now, "and the fight for freedom and him, Mr.
Gabriele Rossetti being hidden in a cellar along with cholera
victims and getting recalled at the last to life, because of
some poems he had written. It was Lady Moore inquiring for
the poet, Gabriele Rossetti that led to their finding him.
It was that same family - "

What family?

Dad did not ask, "what family?"

"It was Spain, it was Napoleon, It was Lady Moore finding
him and Sir Graham Moore bringing him to Malta with the fleet
and Gabriele Rossetti teaching Italian and learning English and
writing the book about Dante and Divine Philosophy and circles
and circles - you could not begin to understand it, even if
you knew Italian - but Mr. Frere - I remember his name was
Frere, the gentleman in Malta - and him, between them had

17.

mapped out what they called a system that spelt a different
story, begun (Mr. Frere maintained) by the Knights themselves
in Malta, and beyond them, the Crusaders."

It was indeed difficult to explain. Was painting more
important than poetry? Gabriel said yes, in her case. She
had begun the sketches, partly because she wanted something to
do; he didn't like to see her sewing. She never scribbled in
a note-book when there were people around, as he did. He said
he liked her drawings. They were not good.

That was the reason for her withdrawing or holding back
the simple statement, the thing she had come to tell them.
And now it seemed fabulous and impossible, after Dad giving her
to understand that he would take her back in the shop and for
more than Mrs. Tozer had given her, she having had that additional
experience. It was no good, it was too difficult to explain,
it spelt a different story.

"Mr. Stevens, one of the gentlemen," she said, "lived in
the Tower."

Why did she say that?

"The Tower?" Dad had asked a question at last.

"His father was official," she said.

18.

"Mr. Allingham - " what should she say about Mr. Allingham?

"Mr. Allingham himself had a post at Customs - in Ireland.
He came back and forth to London."

It did not explain Jeannet and Ellen and the elegant line
of the dark blue broadcloth and the gentleman standing by the
lamp-post. But how explain anything?

How could he believe that Mr. Ruskin had offered her one
hundred and fifty pounds a year? That is, for the out-put of
all the painting she might do in that year. She did not be-
lieve it herself.

"Miss Christina herself sat for her brother, in
<u>The Girlhood of the Virgin.</u>"

She had come to make a simple statement, to tell them
about Mr. Ruskin and his offer. But she knew what her father
thought about wastrels, spendthrifts, idlers with no set in-
come, artists, painters and the harlots that sat for them.
"Miss Christina was the Virgin," she had come back to Christina,
the last person she would have thought to be appealed to, in
this, her defence.

"They call <u>The Carpenter Shop</u> of Mr. Millais, the family
party. That is, it was his own father stood for Joseph, and
the little boy was -" She realized that her father did not
know what she was talking about. "It is a study - Nazareth.

19.

You see outside, through the door left open. His mother kneels
on the floor and He has been trying to help his father, and His
mother holds open His hand, where the nail caught it. They are
concerned with the little boy, cutting himself like that and
one of them brings a bowl with water for Mary to tie up His
hand.

"They are not all religious. Mr.Hunt does historical
pieces and things out of books and Mr.Brown, too." She re-
membered helping Emma Brown cut out the fleur-de-lis to sew
on the king's coat. But she had not seen the finished picture
and she did not remember the name of the king. She remembered
how she had seen his likeness before she met Gabriel. That
is, Mr.Deverell had used him for the Fool in Twelfth Night.
Mr.Allingham had stipulated, before he brought Walter Deverell
to look in the shop-window, that the lady, "Miss Sid", as he
went on calling her, was (if she was what Walter wanted for
his Viola) to sit only for him. That was in the beginning.
Walter wanted to finish the picture; he expected the Academy
would hang it, if he finished it in time. He wanted someone
tall for the page, it wasn't her hair that time. Walter
Deverell had painted himself for the Duke Orsino and it looked
like him and the costume suited him. The other, he explained

20.

when he first showed the picture to her, was done from a friend who also, was a painter. No, the Royal Academy hadn't yet hung any of his pictures. He did not mention his friend's name. "You remember the occasion," he said.

She did not fit in the grouping and the rough indication (already sketched in) of Viola, with any special scene in *Twelfth Night*.

But there was another occasion.

It was late and they were alone, for Mrs. Deverell was ailing. There was a knock on the door but the door opened before Walter had time to lay down his brush.

"O," he said, "it's you, Gab," and he went on painting.

Gabriel flung down his cape. He brushed his hair from his forehead, combing the fingers of his left hand through it. His hair looked untidy, longer than Walter's, but it was the way he flung back his head. When he spoke, you knew that it was *Festive*, you knew it was the Fool, you knew that it was *Twelfth Night*. He was not as tall as Mr. Allingham. There was no elegant line of broadcloth, his coat did not match his trousers and his coat was a dark plum-colour. "You better come back with me to my digs," he said, "it's cold here," but he did not

21.

turn and put on his cape again, as she expected. He made
as if he were plucking a lute, but making a joke of it:
"Come away, come away, death, that is one of the best things
I ever wrote," he said, "And in dark cypress let me be laid."

But she knew the Fool's song in Twelfth Night. Why did
he say he wrote it?

Come away, come away, death,
And in dark cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew
O prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.

"O, Dev," he said, "did you know or do you think that
cypress, in that instance, means not cypress, wreath, tree,
funereal you know - but just the colour or even the stuff -
but he calls the shroud white, so it couldn't be the stuff,
could it? Cypress means just black sometimes, not tree,
wreath or anything. Why the devil must I go on like this?
Probably those paraphrases of old Gab - Dante, you know -
no, not Dante Gabriel Rossetti but Gabriele, the old gentleman.
He's been working too hard. Old Antique knows more Italian
than Maria and Christina put together, but dear mamma must
have a rest sometimes. I can't say I helped much this evening,

22.

but the old blighter worries lest <u>come away, come away,<br>death</u> should interfere with the final, pluperfect version,
interpretation, illumination of his three-ringed circus.
Those circles, you know, can't say I understand them, though
I've explained them to you often enough, in my lucid Bacchic
moments. Eh, what?"

He was looking at the picture.

"Your girl's a bit scrawny even for Viola," he said.

Deverell went on painting.

"I like myself though as Festus - but then, I always
like myself, anyway.

"But then, there's this too. Does he mean by cypress,
the cypress-wood box or coffin? I don't like the Elizabethans,
do you, really? Of course, if you're like some people and
have a pull with the committee and your Guv'nor runs a school
for teaching imbeciles how not to paint and you do hack-work
yourself, in your odd moments, and call it <u>Fête Champêtre</u> or
<u>The Ball</u> or whatever it was you called the last one - Dev,
I positively blush to think I know you. But that was a
rotten picture, the Academy hung last year; couldn't you have
left it at that? But nothing succeeds like success and it's
a pity - I will find myself on the line, after all the trouble

23.

I've taken to keep off it and to damn their stinking old
Academy. And with that, too - O, so there's your model."

It was the first time Elizabeth Siddall had heard herself
referred to as a model.

Deverell said, "I'm through painting. Get your things,
Gab, we'll go immediately."

Automatically, as Walter Deverell stuck his paint-brush
in the jar, she pulled off her cap.

"So that's who you are," said Gabriel Rossetti.

She was only wearing the jerkin over her dress, that
evening.

She went on unlacing the strings.

She slipped her arms out of the sleeves.

She folded the jacket, as she always did, and laid it
on the chair below the estrade. She laid the cloth cap on it.
She did not look at Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Her hair was not really coming down.

She found her outdoor coat, hanging on the peg behind
the door, where she had left it.

Walter Deverell would understand her not saying good-
night. He was putting away the easel.

He always left it standing. He was putting it away,
so as to give her time to slip out.

24.

"I don't think I caught your name, Miss, did I?" said Gabriel Rossetti. "Mine's Punchinello, yours to favour. I mean, Madame, yours to command. It was a night on the Rialto - no, not Shakespeare - this is another story; do you remember the moon? Come, don't say you have forgotten me?

"Madame, it was I, not Titian who invented your hair.

"I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave. Do you really like Browning? I don't. Taken all in all, he and the would-be laureate, I mean Tennyson, are provincial. And likewise, Mrs. Browning, O great god Pan by the river. It is Madame, exactly what I mean. They never got out of Pimlico. Do you like poppies? You see the black coal in the centre. But Lor', Madame, we are not in Manchester - or is it Newcastle, they bring coals to?"

She was shivering, though it was not late and it was still mid-summer.

"I can't wait for Mum and James and Lyddy, will you tell them?" she said.

She was standing. She glanced down at the music-folder, with what Annie had told her was a Church Eagle, stamped or embossed upon it.

"It's by way of a commission," she said, "you'll tell the others. But for that -

25.

"I mean, it's an undertaking and already paid for.
It's for a year's work. I couldn't forfeit the promise I've
made. I'll come back when I can stay and tell them properly.
It's for - design and drawing. Mr. Ruskin wants a whole
portfolio."

Her father said, "and who is Mr. Ruskin?"

27.

and he finds her crouching by the bridge, this very Blackfriars
Bridge corner, but then Gabriel said he couldn't paint it there
and stayed in Kew to be near a wall that he had found that
would do better.

The cholera rumours had started last summer, but she had
stayed at her own room in Weymouth Street. It was not far
off, so that she could be in and out, sitting for Gabriel.
But she couldn't stay in Weymouth Street, now that he was so
far away as Highgate, and while he was away, it was something
to stay in his rooms.

When they were married, he said, he would have a door
cut through, back of the books in the hall. The hall joined
the bed-room to the two front rooms. Gabriel said that would
make the place twice as large as it was now. His study or
his studio was the first room, but she was sitting in the long-
room as he called it, where Maria and Christina had come in to
take tea that day.

It was all right about Christina. She had told Dad,
this afternoon, that Miss Christina was superior. So she was
and she had a right to it. It was nice about the drawings.
She just wasn't interested. She knew that what she wrote was
what she wanted to write, when she said:

28.

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.

And she had written that after their engagement. It took
place formally, at Scalands Gate when she went down from
Hastings, last summer. Gabriel was proud of her. Barbara's
Aunt Julia was most gracious, the only real lady who had gone
out of her way to be nice, since Mrs. Deverell. Not that Maria
and Christina hadn't been nice, that is - well, you felt they
had gone out of their way, as against their will and judgment.
And she was at it again, judging Christina for judging her,
and Christina's **Goblin Market** with Gabriel's title-piece, had
just come out, and Maria was helping with the **Vita Nuova**, and
they were all being written up, now that Mr. Hunt had had his
big success with **The Light**, and that modern picture that Gabriel
said, Holman Hunt had stolen the idea for - from him. They
were quite different ideas but they were both about a girl who
had gone wrong.

Mr. Hunt's girl was Annie Miller in **The Awakened Conscience**. It was Mary Howitt who protested that Annie Miller was getting herself talked about with Gabriel. Mr. Hunt had stipulated, as Mr. Allingham had done with her, before he

29.

brought Walter Deverell to look in the Cranbourne Street shop-
window, that Annie was to sit for no one else, only he excepted
Mr.Boyce. It was while Annie was sitting for Mr.Boyce that
Gabriel got to know her, though they had all met her before.
Mr.Hunt was having her educated with the intent to marry. It
was Mary Howitt who thought with Barbara, it was a pity, Annie
Miller throwing away her chances. And with Gabriel, it was
only (he told Mr. Allingham) for a joke, "Hunt stole my
picture," he said, "so I'm stealing his model."

Mr. Hunt's picture was a success, it and The Light of the
World, last May at the Academy. Not that she liked Annie
Miller. She didn't pretend to like her. She knew that Mary
Howitt and Bessie Parkes, who Barbara always kept rooms for,
at Scalands Gate, were working for her good. That is, Annie
Miller's good, but it involved something that she had no care
then, to be discussed openly - about herself and Gabriel.
As an engaged man, did Gabriel have the right to carry on openly,
that way and with the model too, that one of his best friends
was going to marry? At least, that is, Mary Howitt explained,
what she had asked Mr. Allingham. Mr. Allingham was living
in London now, writing; he was one of the contributors to
Mr. Howitt's paper that had first printed Gabriel's Sister Helen.
Mary Howitt would never take her eyes off her, wherever she was.

30.

When she was thinking about ladies, she wasn't really remembering everybody. There was Mary's mother. The Howitts had the house at Highgate, the Hermitage, not so far from the Browns'. They would walk out there or go part way by bus. It was with Mary, almost idolatry, the way she looked at her. Mrs.Howitt said, "you understand the Spirits," naturally, like Mrs.Deverell talking about Shakespeare. It was there they had what Mrs.Howitt called their home-circle. Mr.Howitt was away on a long voyage and Mrs.Howitt asked if she and Gabriel would help them with their contact.

It was there at Highgate, that she got to know Barbara Leigh-Smith and Bessie Parkes and Mary. The Howitts had been Quakers but now they followed the new faith. You could say, yes, Bessie Parkes and Barbara were ladies, but they were fashionable young ladies, and Barbara always wore her breeches in the country and dragged back her hair. It was funny her taking the words out of Mum's mouth, about ladies and condescension. Mrs.Howitt wasn't so much of a lady as a sort of a little saint.

Quakers or Friends, as she called them, were like that, communing in the silence. It was different at the Howitts. All the same, there was comfort sometimes to be had at the

31.

 séances at the Academy in Sloane Street. She might go there
 again.

But there was no use going and asking, how does cholera
take people? You picked up your own worry out of the air,
and an answer came back to you that might mean almost anything.
With that simplicity of Mrs. Howitt, just loving her husband
and wanting word, for there had been no letters - he had
sailed for the Gold Fields - the Spirits gave consolation
and spoke simple words and spoke them very clearly. That is,
it was what Mrs. Howitt called "Rapping Spirits", they could
say yes and no, with one rap or with two raps, and letters like
N for north and H for hope - Mrs. Howitt had a list of words
they used - that was life-giving and inspirational. And
Gabriel was gentle with Mrs. Howitt and with Mary, but he said
at the end, it was too slow and he went to the Academy for
Spiritual Research, in Sloane Street.

She went there too, after the death of Walter Deverell.
They put ideas into your head and gave you comfort that
way. It was a way that might keep you alive, if you lost hope.
Not that she had lost hope, not that she didn't love Gabriel.
But when she first began to realize that he was angry with her

32.

"("your chin, your chin, you've spoiled that line
it was as if her heart were torn from her very insides,
she must have someone, something and there was no one to go to,
for she couldn't complain to the others about Gabriel.)"

She was happy at first - perhaps Mrs. Howitt could have told her it was spiritual pride, but Mrs. Howitt would never have said that. It wasn't just that Gabriel liked her. But did he like her?

He never said thank you, after a long hour's sitting.

It was how she came to think of Walter Deverell, he kept books by the *estraude* for her to read between times.

With Gabriel, there were no between times.

If she fell into a chair, just hanging on exhausted,
till she put on her coat, Gabriel would say, "don't move" and
she would wait there.

It was how she came to think of Walter Deverell.

And thinking of him, maybe got it into the air somehow.
"It's a French name," the lady-medium said. There were four
others in the circle, "it's for one of you five ladies."
Nobody seemed to know any French "on the other side", as the
lady-medium called it, and then she remembered Mr. Toussier.
Maybe just thinking of Mr. Toussier, gave the lady-medium the
idea that it was for her. She said, "it's a gentleman and

33.

it's something about Christmas."

She did not think of Twelfth Night.

"It's for this lady - no, it doesn't begin with T,
the name of the Helper who is calling. He says (indicating
I'm right) it's for you. It's that way, Miss, many times,
but you're sure to remember when you get home."

She did remember. She remembered before she got home.
Gabriel had told her that Walter Deverell was descended from
the D'Evrolles who had come in with the Conqueror.

"Being what you are, how can anyone expect you to be
other?" There were times when she remembered Gabriel's non-
sense, like remembering something in a book, a play-book, some-
thing you've heard over and over, as if you were another actor,
and yet heard it always for the first time.

"Strictly between ourselves,

Lizzy, Lizzy,
You make me dizzy,

and all my energy, my perfect and precise detachment, is re-
quired to get your chin right. If you painted, Lizzy, you
would understand this, or even if you wrote poetry. No one
could expect you to be clever, endowed with the ambrosial locks

34.

and the dim, disenchanted eyes of Circe. But Circe in good time, and Medea.

"I do not care what you think of Tennyson. I say, he never got out of Brixton. Or perhaps for reason of alliteration or assonance or mere crude rhyme or rhythm, which I can not expect you to follow, he remains and will remain to me always, the perfect translator of Catullus; my favourite phrase of his correct and polished rendering is,

O silver-shining Pimlico, like a boot-black, polishing the boots of the perfect prince and his lady, looking like Mrs. Tibbs o' Sundays. But you didn't know Mrs. Tibbs, did you, O Queen Hermione? But it must be Guinevere, next time.

"You say I did not thank you for the *Damozel*. It was three months ago that I stopped working on the *Damozel*. What a memory you have. But the *Damozel* isn't finished, and why should I thank you, anyway; it is you who should thank me, for making you immortal."

"As to the *Bones of Venice* — "

But she stopped him.

She was, he said, dictating to him and he couldn't have that.

But he agreed with her afterwards about Mr. Ruskin,

35.

"the old sneak behaved like a gentleman."

She had never met Effie.

There was only one person who knew all about it, Emma said, and that was Mr. Ruskin's valet, Mr. John Hobbes.

But then Emma didn't like Effie, or the idea that Mr. Millais counted more with Mr. Ruskin than her own Madox Brown. Mr. Ruskin was not fair to Madox, Emma maintained. Emma said that Madox had run across Mr. Hobbes at the Working Men's College, where they took turns lecturing and giving lessons. Mr. Hobbes had gone in to explain that Mr. Ruskin must discontinue his teaching for a short space, for health reasons. He was going to the Continent.

"Mr. Hobbes' language was something terrible," said Emma. "Not that I don't suppose Madox told me everything." It was a delicate subject. "Him," said Mr. Hobbes, 'and her, after all he's done for both of them. And now people calling Mr. Ruskin a name you don't meet nowhere but in the Bible. Mr. Brown, if it's the last thing I do, I declare to you - but then with my all-but oath to Mr. Ruskin, you don't know anything, no more than I. What I could say '-"

But Emma said, "he grit his teeth in a manner that spoke everything and he was even at that minute, catching his train" and that was all that anyone heard official, if you could say

36.

what Madox Brown said was hinted at, by Mr. Hobbes, the valet,
was official.

"It was a scandal such as had not been heard in England,
nor would probably not be heard again," so Emma said, and a man
like him, so Madox said, with a mind like those crystal chande-
liers he had all over the house (though Emma had never been
there), reflecting like crystal-glass, so Emma said Brown said,
and yet with a drawing-back as it might be, like those sea-
medusas, like you get at Hastings (Emma had seen them too, at
Brighton), all feeling and nerves yet cold as crystal-glass;
it was a contradiction, but that was genius, so Emma said that
Madox Brown had told her.

Gray

The decree was granted to Euphemia Chalmers/(falsely
known as Ruskin) on grounds of mullicity.

Elizabeth Siddall had always liked John Millais.

"The cold is due to the house-foundation being under water
at high tide," Elizabeth Siddall said to herself. At least,
she could stay hunched in the basket-chair that Gabriel
wanted to get rid of. Or she could get up if she wanted; it
worried her that one window in the studio was closed, even
though it was summer. The window had been nailed secure be-
cause of the rattling and the draught last winter, but now it
should be attended to, only Gabriel said he liked the light

37.

blocked out from that side and she hadn't the strength to drag a ladder all the way up the stairs, even if Mrs.Birrell had one.
Gabriel had forbidden Mrs.Birrell to touch anything; Elizabeth was sure there was an accumulation of dust behind the long single curtain that was actually tacked into the wall below the ceiling. It was beautiful cloth, some old piece Gabriel had picked up but it should have been cleaned and hemmed before he hung it. The curtain was hung when Mrs.Birrell sent the man up to nail shut the window. Anyway, Gabriel did not like to see her sewing, and she had so little time to herself, that she liked to rest and dream, then. He would stop her, even in pulling out a table or folding up a length of drapery, in order to do a drawing. If it was a matter of long bastings for a surcoat or pinning loose sleeves over tight ones, for Saint Cecelia or Francesca, he didn't call it sewing - nor did she for the matter of all that, it was too exciting and it was designing.

He had told her she was proud and put on airs, that her reserve was a sort of self-chastisement. He did not realize the self-control she practised, not to straighten a chair set at an impossible angle or a rug crooked on the floor. It was only natural to pick up a piece of drawing-paper that the draught was fluttering in the corner. As to pins -

38.

perhaps she had been too long at Mrs.Tozer's, but it was the
same, anyway, at home. What would Mum think of her now?
Idle - and the room looking like this.

True, the late mid-summer twilight softened the contours
of the outlandish objects. Perhaps some of them were valuable.
But she preferred the slim silhouettes of their few best pieces.
They were bits that Mum had cherished and almost worn away with
polishing. They were Sheffield. They were not rightly heir-
looms, but at Mum's place, the lady took a fancy to her and
when she was going to be married, gave her some old pieces out
of the attic. "I shouldn't wonder," Mum said, she said, "if
these old spindle-legs aren't Chippendale. The cabinet I
know," she said, "is Flemish." It was the sort of feeling you
got at Mr.Ruskin's in his own study that his mother showed her.
Gabriel didn't like the house at Denmark Hill or anything
about it. Downstairs, it was more crowded with heavy pieces,
but she liked the stones and the shells he showed her. Yes,
there were glass-crystals over the dining-room table and in the
drawing-room. It was the way Mr.Ruskin said, "I was born to
mourn over what I can not save," that frightened and embarrassed
her, as if he was quoting Scripture. She did not think he
meant Effie, though there was a space above the writing-desk
where Gabriel said a portrait of Effie had hung. She did not

39.

ask Gabriel if Millais had done the picture. John Everett Millais was Mr. Ruskin's best friend.

Walter Deverell had not wanted her to sit for other people. His mother had made the arrangement and explained things to her. It was a shilling an hour for special work, five shillings for a full morning, seven and six for the whole day, and there were other things to consider, bus fares and so on. Elizabeth Siddall said she did not need the money, her work at Mrs. Tozer's was well paid for and she liked coming to the studio. Mrs. Deverell insisted on her having the usual School of Design fee for what she called the work, although Elizabeth insisted on the pleasure that it gave her to come there to Kew. She hadn't thought of giving up Mrs. Tozer's, until Mr. Hunt came in, one Sunday afternoon. Mrs. Deverell came over to the studio to ask first if she would mind; a friend of Walter's, she said, was planning to do another scene from Shakespeare and he didn't want to begin until he had seen Walter's picture, in case it might appear that he was taking Walter's subject. In fact, they were much alike, Mr. Hunt was doing Silvia in *Two Gentlemen of Verona*.

40.

Mrs. Deverell presented Mr. Hunt and excused herself as there were other guests in the drawing-room.

Mr. Hunt said, not knowing anything about her, would she sit for him?

Walter Deverell said that Miss Siddall was not a model.

Walter Deverell tried to dissuade her from sitting to other people. She did not read now but they talked together, in the "rest". He told her that he had wanted to be an actor but the family were against it and he was glad now that he had stayed on at the School. The stage offered, at best, only a precarious living. He was interested in her writing but he said that that too, would never earn a living.

She said, "I've been thinking it out, since Mr. Hunt came in last Sunday." She explained to him that twenty-four divided by twelve is two; that is, counting twelve months to the year, she had two pounds a month. The weeks were uneven, but counting four weeks to a month, she had ten shillings a week - but a little less. Counting five shillings a morning for two mornings in the studio, she had ten shillings, as it were, for the whole day. She had left out Sundays but then, there were those extra days at the end of every one of the twelve months. She would have free time to read, to write, even to do some dress-patterns for Mrs. Tozer. Even as a little girl, Mr.

41.

Toussier - that is, it was originally a French name - had
helped her in some simple stitch-work embroidery. Mrs.Tozer
was really very good to her and did not insist on her staying
on late, but for the sake of Mr.Toussier who was dead, she
liked to see orders filled in time, in the rush season. Mrs.
Tozer didn't officially take in orders from the makers, but
sometimes the buyers who had known Mr.Toussier in the old days,
would rush in, for a special favour, with a last-minute ball-
gown. They had really, though not officially, done some lovely
costumes; the lace and drapes, Mrs.Tozer left to her discretion.
Mrs.Tozer was better on the bonnets. Perhaps if she spent her
time, working on design, one of the big costumiers would take
her for outside patterns. Mrs.Tozer, she knew, would sympathize
with her ambition, but she must see out the season.

She remembered, Walter Deverell was standing by the
window. "But I promised Allingham," he said.

She said, "Mr.Allingham was very pleasant, the few times
I saw him, but he wasn't particularly my friend."

He said, "Allingham may have had other - ideas for you.
He might have - he might have thought he could help you with
your writing."

"How could Mr.Allingham know that I did any writing?"

42.

"Well - you might have told him."

"I only saw him those few times, and never alone."

She remembered, Walter Deverell came back and began scraping his palette. "It's this way," he said, "I understand how you feel about your job. I feel the same way about mine. I resented it at first, now I don't think I could be without it. It sets a shape to the day, and all the time I'm teaching, I'm thinking how happy I'll be to get back to my work. Well - why do I call this work? This is my life and the other - the classes, family, interruption even, set a sort of fence about a pasture. I might get slack and lazy or indifferent, if I could get to my painting any time of the day. Do you see what I mean?"

She thought she saw what he meant.

"I'm independent now and my mother says that it might be better if I had a place of my own to work in. It's cold here and the light's none too good, so we saw no reason for rebuilding this old shed. I've been looking for something, ever since we moved here. I'd save time and energy if my studio was nearer the School. I don't think you should give up your job entirely. But if your Mrs.Tozer agrees to take you part-time, I would be grateful if you would continue sitting

43.

for me. I have the *Ibis* in mind, there's *Rosalind* and then
*Ophelia*. I personally see no reason why you should not help
Hunt with his Silvia. It's only that I gave my promise."

She said she would be glad to sit for him, when he found
his studio, if Mrs. Tozer would agree to part-time work.

Walter Deverell said he actually had a place in mind,
but he had to wait till next quarter to move in.

The studio he told her, was set back in a garden. It
was number 17, Red Lion Square.

But he did not tell her what William Allingham had told him.

Mary Howitt helped Mrs. Howitt edit *The People's Journal* and *Household Words*, while Mr. Howitt was away.

Mrs. Howitt was working separately as well, writing a
book on the new faith.

Mary should not have shown her the letter, but Mary
didn't know Mr. Allingham then, and Mary didn't know that she
had met Mr. Allingham. Gabriel took him out to the Hermitage,
after they had printed *Sister Helen*; Mr. Allingham wrote poetry.
But Mrs. Howitt made no reference to the letter when Gabriel
presented Mr. Allingham to her and Mary in the garden.

44.

Elizabeth wondered if Mary remembered the letter and the
poem that Mr. Allingham had enclosed with it.

She wondered if Mary connected the name of the writer
of the poem with this Mr. Allingham.

She didn't think that Mary did somehow, but she felt that
Mrs. Howitt went out of her way to bring up the subject of the
new faith, so that Mr. Allingham could say, "I'm afraid that
I'm not interested."

It was as if somehow, *something* was understood between them.
that he would say that...

It was a long letter and while she was reading the first
page, Mary said, "but I thought this was a poem for *Words* or
for the *Journal*. But I see it's confidential; I'll put it
back with mother's private papers."

The address was written at the top of the page but Mary
didn't then know Mr. Allingham or that he lived in Ireland.
Perhaps she hadn't even seen the signature.

It was about an experience.

Would Mrs. Howitt send him word, he knew of her communica-
tions. He would be grateful for some sort of guidance.

A friend of his was doing a portrait of a lady. He had
seen the lady in London and walking home with his friend, he was

45.

overwhelmed with a strange foreboding. Why should this be?
He had stayed awake all night; he was returning the next day
to Ireland. The poem enclosed could better explain his feel-
ings. The poem, of course, Mrs. Howitt understood, was not
for publication. It was called *The Cold Wedding*. He felt
he was looking at the lady through a snow-storm. Why should
he feel that his friend's portrait should bring disaster? Hid
friend was a person of distinction, of high spiritual attainment.

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

Elizabeth Siddall could not have read the four lines more
than twice, but she remembered them.

She had seen Mr. Allingham only three times and 'never
alone', as she had told Walter, but actually she had only spoken
to him once; how could she have told him about her writing?

Mrs. Deverell had asked her to Kew to look at the studio
before the sittings began. "We've already arranged the lamps,"
she said, "but it's hardly a place to work in. I'm afraid
you'll get cold here. We think we can have a small stove

46.

fitted in the corner later, and I'm having some old curtain-
stuff fastened up over the door and windows. By day of course,
Walter will need the windows but he can only work by day-light,
on Sunday - has he explained it to you? Walter says the light
won't be too difficult, not for your sittings, as he has al-
ready finished himself (I'm glad you like it, he makes a good
Orsino) and the Jester. Maria and Margaretta have promised
to help Miss Black put up the curtains this evening. Ah,
forgive me, my dear - I thought we were to be alone. Tell
him to come in, Ann."

When Mr. Allingham bowed to her, when Mrs. Deverell said,
"Miss Siddall," she wondered if she could claim to have met
him before.

"Miss Sid," they had said, laughing by the lamp-post.
He had not actually addressed her and she slipped off.

The second time was only a face in the window, and another
face.

This was the third time.

She stood and instinctively dropped a little curtsey,
the way Mum had showed them they did, at her lady's house in
Sheffield.

"Walter even as a child, was always absorbed in Shake-
speare," Mrs. Deverell said, after Ann had left the tea-things.

47.

"But except for a Mr. Garrick or a Miss Siddons, there's hardly a career in acting, is there? He was always casting everyone he knew for a part - now Miss Siddall - "

Mr. Allingham put down his cup and looked at her, as if he had never seen her before.

Elizabeth Siddall held her cup steady, and her hand did not tremble.

"Miss Siddall has agreed - she also is fond of Shakespeare - as a special favour, to sit for Walter in his Twelfth Night."

Mr. Allingham said, "I trust Walter does a faithful likeness of Miss Siddall."

"He has done his own portrait excellently. There is something about Walter. He was hardly fitted for a solicitor's office - he may have told you how concerned we were about it. We couldn't have him go on the stage, but we agreed to his leaving his uncle Travel's office, if he would give up acting. Mr. Dyce and Mr. Herbert at the Academy, recommended his painting highly, so his father had no competition about giving him an under-mastership at the Schools. But tell me about yourself, Mr. Allingham."

Mr. Allingham said, "I am off again to Ireland."

48.

Mrs.Deverell said, "you prefer Ireland?"

"O no," said Mr. Allingham, "it's my work there. I find London attracts me more every time I come here. Besides my official work, I am doing reviews for a Dublin journal, news of things and people here, books and art. Mr. William Rossetti has also placed a few things of mine. William Rossetti, as you no doubt know, is now on the staff of the *Spectator*. I hope in time, to make a livelihood of writing. Then I will stay in London."

Elizabeth Siddall felt that he was speaking to her, though he addressed himself to Mrs.Deverell.

"You enjoy the life in London?"

"Exceptionally."

"We are so busy at the Schools, that I don't get about now, as I used to. But I hear much talk of books and people from my son. It is odd that I do not miss Wykeham and Spenser more. You will think I am, what a mother should not be, partial. I have heard Walter referred to as the handsomest fellow in London. He is singularly immune to flattery. It is not only his appearance; for all his indifference to society, I have heard from Mrs.Dyce that at the Academy, he was known for his exquisite manners. His nature is affectionate."

49.

"Yes," said Mr. Allingham, "William Rossetti calls him
troubadourish."

"You have been to their gatherings? My son tells me
there are (at what he calls _casa Rosetti_) much come and go of
famous characters, Mr. Mazini, Paganini - but they invite the
piano-tuner and the dancing-master, as well as Father Gavazzi
and the Maestro."

Mr. Allingham said, he had not attended their formal
gatherings but had spent pleasant evenings, reading and dis-
cussing poetry with the two brothers.

"The sisters are likewise gifted. And I hear that Mrs.
Rossetti is not only a brilliant linguist but a good cook. She
is partly English; though her maiden name, Polidori sounds
Italian, my son tells me that he has heard it may be Greek.
I sometimes worry foolishly, but Walter is not really strong
and after coming back from the Rossettis, he seems sometimes
to be burning with a fever and enthusiasm which I fear his
body is too frail to withstand."

Mr. Allingham said, "their inferences are not always
sound but their enthusiasms are contagious."

"Their father's book has been printed, Walter tells me,
but not circulated. How can that be?"

50.

"The volume is perhaps a little too erudite for general circulation. No doubt, it will find its place in time, in the universities and on the Continent. But I can express no opinion. The book is written in Italian with, I believe, certain explanatory notes in Latin."

"The book is political?"

"I should not say so. Only in so far as Mr. Rossetti's system, as I believe he calls it, would unravel or untangle certain ancient evils. But I am all at sea, here. I have heard of Machiavelli but for the life of me, I don't know why I think of him now. Except that he too, came from Florence. Something to do with an ideal king or ruler. Virgil led Dante through circles in the Inferno and apparently with penetrating acumen and a brilliant sense of historical parallels, Mr. Rossetti would untangle the threads, solve the riddle or enigma and apply Dante's criticism, say of the Roman tyrants, to the pope's of his own day. There is no doubt, a fanatical ring about Mr. Rossetti's code or re-arrangement of letters, names and places, so that they spell in some instances (Gabriel tells me) other names and other places. But Italian spelt upside down, backwards or anagramatically, can convey little to the uninitiate and nothing to one who has no Italian and whose Latin is at best, fragmentary and uhreliable."

51.

"But Mr. Allingham - it savours of - what shall I say? It makes me think of Mr. Bulwer Lytton's book, _Zanoni_."

"Magic? I see, Mrs. Deverell, but I think I can assure you that the Conte de St. Germain and Caliostro would get scant welcome from Mr. Gabriele Rossetti. He is a devout man. He began his researches with an older brother, a priest, I believe in the Abruzzi."

"But you say he applied what he calls his system, to denouncing the evils of Rome?"

"He applied his system to show how Dante, guided by the poet Virgil, denounced or rather formulated the circles or the easy steps to Avernus. I do not say that Gabriele Rossetti goes so far as to apply his system to the evils of to-day."

It was not only Gabriel. She could remember what other people said, like listening to a play, watching from the basket-chair, herself acting.

She could hear the words best when she was shivering or when she was frozen, too cold to shiver.

Not that she was actually shivering.

The tide-water lapped round the house-foundation.

52.

There was only Mrs.Birrell in the basement. She was the caretaker, and Katy ran errands. There was Mrs.Birrell and Katy in the basement, in the corner-house at the bridge-head. The rest of the rooms in the entire row, were given over to solicitors, insurance, colonial societies, immigration and various welfare offices; the whole street was empty but for Elizabeth Siddall in a basket-chair, on the second from the top floor of 14 Chatham Place (the room in the middle) and Katy and Mrs.Birrell in the basement. It seemed the city was deserted. True, it was August. True, there had been recent arguments, questions, debates and appeals in the House, about the river and about cholera.

Mrs.Birrell said it was the rats, but Gabriel said the rats didn't matter, if you called them wombats.

Madox Brown said there should be more emigration. He had done that picture, *The Last of England*, with Emma in a bonnet and shawl. He had taken no end of trouble with the bonnet-strings and the pattern on the shawl.

Mr.Howitt felt the same about it but the friend who went with him to the Gold Fields, dissuaded him from staying; it would be too hard for a lady like Mrs.Howitt and for Mary.

She wouldn't want to leave England herself.

53.

It started in Red Lion Square. It was easy getting there and Walter could work at lunch-time. "What, ho —" said Gabriel. He had come in without knocking. "Bill's in a stew." Walter Deverell laid down his brush. "Let's have some lunch, Gab." "I'll tell you about it first, Dev. I dropped my satchel and my easel in the hall here." He came back immediately. "And while we're about it, why disturb the lady?" He unrolled his drawing-paper. "I can work and talk at the same time, if you can't. Don't move, Madame. Emma said she couldn't have me, she's always saying that just as I begin to settle down to the *Bridge*. I can sleep at home but I want a place to work in. The sneaks stole my books and furniture at Newman Street, while I was at Brown's. That is to say, it was Bill's books mostly, that paid the back rent. You're at the Schools all day. I can make do with this place and I can use your model. What an excellent arrangement this is. I got your address from the porter's wife, you know, Fanny."

Fanny?

Elizabeth Siddall did not want to think of Fanny.

Fanny called her the civet-cat.

But Fanny did not really matter, not that first year at Red Lion Square.

54.

She could not now recall the exact sequence, there were preliminary sketches, then Gabriel would toss aside a sheet of drawing-paper and say, "we'll finish Saint George later. I must find a proper brocade first, for the Princess Sabra. I've a half-offer for a Triptych but I must do Dante. There's the *Salutation* and I must finish the *Dream*."

The first drawing was a sketch for the *Salutation*.

She did not move when Walter said, "my hour's up."

Gabriel said, "mine isn't."

Walter said, "the lady is not a model. I promised a - a friend, when she consented to sit for Viola, that she was not to be approached by any other artist."

"But I am not an artist," said Gabriel Rossetti, "the Academy don't like me."

Gabriel leaned back, he tossed the stringy lock out of his eyes.

"And moreover," said Gabriel, "I made no promise to nobody, about this or about any other lady."

Walter Deverell motioned to Elizabeth Siddall to go.

"St-tt -" hissed Gabriel, "one moment."

Walter Deverell went over to the easel.

"Now - almost enough for this, anyway - preliminary - my *Salutation*."

55.

Gabriel Rossetti laughed, a mirthless, high-pitched
cackle.

She felt he was clowning, like he did with the lute,
that first time she saw him.

He was not really laughing.

"St-tt -" he hissed again, but he sank back, though he
still held the pencil.

Walter Deverell stood behind the easel.

"I'm sorry," he said, "Gabriel, but I can't kick you out."

"Not that I don't like Raphael, it's them that followed
after. And them that followed them that followed after. A
fashionable set-piece painter. Block in your pyramid formation,
regard your colour and proportion it discreetly. Let light
shine from this direction or from that direction, but never
from any other. Mechanical rules laid down by Reynolds; there
is no God but Raphael and Reynolds is his prophet. But you
know all this, Dev."

- - - - -

And another day (she and Gabriel were alone in the
studio):

56.

"The blessed Damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of heaven,
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand
And the stars in her hair were seven.

I wrote that when I was nineteen and now I've found you, would
you mind telling me if your lilies were the usual, or could
they be white iris? But why white, you ask me, though you
don't say anything. I see, old Dew told you, discretion is
the better part of valour. Did he ever do any talking?
And you must have said something, sometime. He told you to
keep quiet?"

She said (that was in the beginning, at Red Lion Square),
"he told me to rest sometimes."

"He amused you, talking?"

"He talked sometimes about Shakespeare."

"Ha - a horse, a horse - Did he do Petruchio for you?
Miss Clementina Black as Bianca. Did you see Clementina out
there? Margaretta was Katherine. Do you think her as pretty
as Maria? Stiffish, Spenser and dear Wykeham, the few times
I saw them. Why d'you suppose he wouldn't tell me your name,
that first time I saw you? Or would mamma not meet you?"

"It was Mrs. Deverell who first arranged my sittings for
Viola."

57.

"Ha - 'I promised a friend,' says Dev, speaking for the first time in his life like Wykeham, 'the lady is not a model; I assure you, my dear Rossetti, on my honour, I promised a friend that the lady was not to be approached by any profli-gate, thief, beggar or brother-artist.' He should have con-fided simply that you were Clementina's cousin from the country and he had promised mamma to keep an eye on you. It may be that Walter's doting mamma had a look at you, before she al-lowed you to take up headquarters at Kew. But Dev wouldn't have gone all pompous, 'my word as a gentleman - a friend', if it had only been a promise to his mother. Who was the friend?"

She did not ask his permission, she trailed down from the _estradè_. He had folded a length of worn blue stuff about her shoulders. The stuff, he told her had been rifled from the Polidori attic, "only curtain," he said, "but I promised Aunt Charlotte not to cut it." She lifted the trailing blue and stood behind the easel.

"White rose - for service meekly worn - yellow like ripe corn - st-tt, we must get a little more gold in, for a' that and a' that - red-gold, not yellow. I blocked them in anyway, the iris, and I think you are right; blue is better for fleur-de-lis."

58.

It was Aunt Charlotte who paid the rent last time.

How could they manage the double rent, when "we are,"
as he said, "married."

And what more would marriage bring her than she had now -
or what less?

She didn't think she would die, giving birth to his child,
but marriage had something to do with death.

If she married him, she would die.

She didn't really want to marry him, though she knew that
Mary Howitt, Barbara and Bessie Parkes blamed Gabriel.

He was angry with Allingham; she remembered how he had
stormed at her when he came down to Hastings, last summer.
Mary had actually written to Gabriel, but how did Mary know
(he asked her) that he - well - he and Allingham had taken
Annie Miller to Madame Tussaud's. A harmless little outing.
Can't these sneaks leave me alone? What else did Allingham
tell Mary? What the dickens does Allingham think he's doing?

"So you went to Madame Tussaud's?" She remembered the
words in her mouth, the taste and sting of them and the strength
she got from saying them. "Mr. Allingham told Mary nothing -
and in any case, whatever got about, no one mentioned Madame
Tussaud."

59.

"Lizzie," he stopped storming, "I almost suspect sometimes, you have a sense of humour. Or aren't you trying to be funny?"

"I can be funny without trying," she said.

"Mary wrote me you were dying."

"Well - what of it?"

"I tell you, Lizzie - and I went out to the Hermitage to tell Mrs. Howitt - "

"How was Mrs. Howitt?"

"Damn - I went out with Allingham, your precious Allingham who started all the mischief, to clear away - misapprehension. These misunderstandings - "

"Mary Howitt's waiting downstairs. Don't shout."

But he went out to the corridor and screamed down Mrs. Elphick's narrow staircase, "come up here, Mary."

Elizabeth Siddall did not know why, but the scene was somehow familiar. It might almost have been one of the old houses across the bridge, beyond the tan-yards, or it might even have been Kent Place or Aunt Day's rooms above the shop in Pentonville.

Elizabeth Siddall was at home here, Mrs. Elphick might have been Aunt Day. It was Gabriel who had come from outside.

60.

But there was more to it than just that. Say there was
a row - not Mum and Dad - but like there was sometimes on
that built-in court, the short-cut to the river, people hanging
out of windows and shouting across that it was 'im or that it
was 'er, and arguments about whatever it was that had caused
all the commotion. Yes, she had had one of her attacks.
What of it?

Elizabeth Siddall followed Gabriel and stood with him on
the boxed-in wooden platform that was like an estrade, at the
head of the stairs.

Dad said she was good at numbers. She did not actually
count her friends or number her adversaries, but she thought,
"it's like what Gabriel calls Mr. Rossetti's Dante's three-
ringed circus. I have Mrs. Elphick and most of High Street,
Hastings; he has his brother to stand up for him and editors
and journals - perhaps even Mrs. Howitt. But I have Mary
Howitt."

Mary Howitt was standing at the foot of the stairs.

"This isn't the Battle of Hastings," said Elizabeth
Siddall, "it isn't all that important. But why tell the town
about it, Gabriel? Come back in the bed-room. Mary -"
she heard herself speaking; even William Rossetti had admitted

61.

(Mary told her), "I never heard her speak other than correctly." There was patronage about it. She knew when she was speaking like Dad, almost out of a book, old-fashioned. Mr. William Rossetti was hardly one to comment on her way of speaking. As to Mum's friendly way of talking, that was equal and more than equal to Miss Maria's and Miss Christina's English - "governessy", Barbara called them. Mum got a sing-song in her voice too, sometimes, that was pretty. Mum was Welsh really, a Miss Evans.

But she must not think how her voice sounded, as she did when she pretended she was acting. "It's about Scalands, Mary," she said, "and my going out there." That would please Mrs.Elphick if she were listening.

When she closed the door, Gabriel said, "I want this gossip cleared up, Mary. I went out to see your mother. Can't they leave a fellow alone?"

Mary was looking out of the window.

"I want to show you a new cove, I found," she said, "Lizzie. It was the turn of the tide when I went out there, and I couldn't get those brittle-star and feather-star, I told you about. Properly, you can only see them under water and my colour-box holds no vermilion or dye-purple that contents me. You can help me decide what blue edges the ordinary

62.

star-fish. You wouldn't think they could ever be blue, when
you see them dried out. I can sketch in the background of
sea-weeds with my pencil, and colour afterwards. You can
paint the flat shells or a dog-whelk at home - "

Gabriel interrupted, "let there be no more gossip. I
am not engaged to marry Lizzie."

Mary turned from the window. Elizabeth Siddall re-
membered - so long ago - when she had said to Mrs. Deverell,
"Viola is the sea." Perhaps it was Mary speaking of dye-purple.

Mary said, "I forgot to tell you, Lizzie. I heard from
my mother yesterday. She especially sends her love."

"Did you hear what I said, Mary?"

"She remarked about other things that have nothing to
do with you, Lizzie, saying letters other than business or
editorial, shouldn't be shown. People showing strictly pri-
vate letters to other people, is a breach of confidence or
worse. It isn't honourable. I couldn't tell you what was
in the letter that she spoke of, nor did she tell me. In
fact, she would not read the letter that was handed to her.
She handed it back to Mr. Gabriel Rossetti. It was his letter
and it was written to him by me. Besides that, taking a
daughter's letter back to show her mother - I don't know.
Perhaps it's because mama gets so many private letters,

63.

considering them as sacred, that we feel as we do. A letter
is more sacred even than the word spoken."

One or the other of them must go. Elizabeth Siddall
laughed. "I am the *Bridge* between them," she thought.

Or the circle in the middle, at this moment of their
three-ringed circus.

Yes, Mary belonged with gallant Barbara, though she had
an added grace and dignity, and there was Mrs. Howitt

There was Mrs. Deverell in that circle and of course,
Walter, and Mrs. Howitt herself. She had forgotten Mrs. Howitt's
book on the new faith, when she had connected her with editors
and journals. She was thinking only of *Sister Helen* and people
calling Gabriel a genius.

There was Mr. Allingham in their circle, and separate
yet in no way inferior and never condescended to, by those in
Mary Howitt's circle, there was her own circle, Mum and Dad,
Lyddy, Aunt Day and other people; if it came to a row, there
was, she had just realized, Mrs. Elphick and most of High Street,
Hastings.

"Why are you laughing, Lizzie?"

"Won't you sit down, Gabriel?"

"Not while Mary's standing."

64.

He had, people remarked, easy, charming manners. He had always been exceptionally gentle with Mrs. Howitt and with Mary.

"I am sorry that I showed your letter, Mary."

But there was something else that had offended Mary.

She did not look at Gabriel.

"It is odd sometimes, Lizzy, about honourable people - I mean, O, spiritually honourable, you know, something that shows or glows in the way they ask a question; it may be just 'Miss Mary, how are you this evening?' And something shines out like the colour of the brittle-star or the feather-star. They look like other people, though perhaps there is something special in the way their Inverness cape seems different, ordinary but princely, at the same time. They look like other people, all dried star-fish above the tide-line, and then something's somehow different - quite, quite different. Perhaps it is as mama says, the Spirit is like water, the Sea - and suddenly, such a one, in the way he sweeps up his gloves from the console table in the hall, seems to reveal himself, or in any other gesture, like flinging his cape with his right hand, over his left shoulder. I mean, you see him with blue, edged round him, like the under-water living star-fish. Then

65.

he is alive and he makes you alive with wonder. I am speaking
without reserve, for so mama taught me as a child, as her mother
taught her. That is, to speak or write without fear and with
no embarrassment, when the Spirit moves you."

Gabriel said, "Mary, almost thou persuadest me - "

"That Gabriel Rossetti should have taken a letter,
wrung from me by my love of you, Lizzie, when you were so ill,
out to the Hermitage to show my mother, is no matter. We
sometimes think the same thoughts at the same time, mama might
even have written the letter for me. It is that the discre-
tion and courtesy of Mr. Allingham should have been challenged
and by Gabriel Rossetti."

"You look so pretty when you hold forth, Mary," said
Gabriel.

---

It was in no way her fault, she told Mary afterwards.
Lyddy naturally was curious and they were all uneasy when she
gave up Mrs.Tozer altogether, and sat for Mr.Hunt for Silvia.
That was the first outside person - she did not count
Gabriel. But she gave up Mrs.Tozer because Gabriel wanted
to rush through a picture for the Academy, though he said he

66.

would put the matter into the hands of his solicitor, if anyone
suggested hanging it. The Academicians that Stevens brought
in (no doubt prompted by Gabriel) didn't like it. Gabriel
pretended he had never contemplated the Academy. "That sneak,
Freddy Stevens got Redgrave or Hornsley into the studio, to
give an opinion." There were other pictures; if she gave
up Mrs.Tozer, she must make up, and Mr.Millais and Mr.Hunt
both wanted her. She had to explain to Gabriel that she
could not sit to him for ever. And Walter Deverell was not
working so regularly. He was not well.

She had taken Gabriel's extravagant statements, at their
face value, from the beginning; he had given her the clue
the first time she saw him, with "Come away, come away, death -
that is one of the best things I've ever written."

It was as if she were painting the pictures herself,
burning with his fire.

She could be quieter within, with Mr.Hunt and Mr.Millais.
That was just a job that she was being paid for.

But Mum and Dad had to be told something, when she first
had her own room across the river.

"It's confidential, Lyddy," she told Mary she had told
her sister, "I'm working at design too, to put in time before -"

67.

"Liz," Lyddy hugged her, "then you're going to be married?"

A little later she told Lyd that the design now was taking up more time, and she was working in Mr. Rossetti's studio as his pupil. It meant being odd hours in the studio, as she was sitting as well, for Mr. Millais, and Gabriel had work out and commissions. Would Lyd tell no one.

Elizabeth Siddall knew that Lydia would tell her mother.

By this time, Deverell had moved out altogether and Gabriel had found another place to work in.

They were not insistent, but she went out of her way to show Lyddy the house she lived in.

It was a nice room and the people at Weymouth Street were very pleasant, and as Gabriel was out of town that Sunday, she suggested to Lyddy that she might just like to stroll across and see the studio.

She explained to Lyddy that the bridge was Blackfriars, Whitefriars was across the river. This was Bridewell.

The street seemed empty, she told Lyddy, because it was all offices. Mrs. Birrell who was housekeeper in number 14, where the studio was, said it had at one time been residential.

Lyddy thought it all great fun, climbing the stairs past

68.

the polished name-plates of Mr. Keates, Consulting Chemist and
that of Mr. Benthall. Lyddy looked out on the river and said
the ships reminded her of Wapping.

The things, Elizabeth explained to Lydia, were some of
them borrowed. His aunt lent him brocades and satins for
his pictures, and sometimes, furniture. She had tidied up
the place in Gabriel's absence, but she was seeing it through
the eyes of Lydia and her mother. "It looks like a curiosity-
shop, I do admit it. I confess, I don't like that chiffonier
there, but I clear a space on the table; it's difficult working
in the Weymouth Street bed-room."

"Does he sleep here?" said Lyddy.

"There's a little bed-room; if he's late working, he
stays sometimes. He has his home to go to."

Elizabeth was glad that Lydia (prompted perhaps by
delicacy) did not ask to see the bed-room.

Her mother seemed happier when Mr. Wheeler discovered
Lydia. "Liz and Lyd - I always said you had an influence
on Lyddy, didn't I, Liz?"

"What's Lyddy done now?"

"The same as you and in somewhat the same manner. Your
Aunt Day told me sometime back, she was suspicious how often

69.

a certain gentleman stopped in for matches. You know your Aunt Day. Nothing too good for her girls, as she always calls you and Lyddy. Well, this Mr. Wheeler, she found out, was working on a paper in the City, working steady, a journalist with what Aunt Day called a column. I haven't yet met Mr. Joseph Wheeler - but it's funny how things happen, like Mrs. Deverell chancing by to look at bonnets, and having her son with her."

Elizabeth had told them she had first seen Mr. Rossetti when Mr. Deverell was working on the picture, at Kew.

But Dad wouldn't be talking about honour, when he was telling her, this afternoon, about Lyddy. It was Lizzie, he was talking about. She would have asked him, if there had been time, why Mr. Wheeler didn't see Lyddy home, if Lyddy had to be seen home. She had noticed no more crowds than usual, rather less if anything, but this was another part of London. And Mr. Wheeler might have work too, on that column, as Aunt Day called it, keeping him overtime or taking him out of London, now that Dad brought it to her notice about war.

She had intended to settle in and maybe stay to supper, not frightened about what they might find out about Gabriel, any longer, for she was formally engaged now, though Dad had not given his consent.

70.

Gabriel had taken her to see his mother. Elizabeth
Siddall was well aware that Mrs. Rossetti didn't want her in
the family, any more than Dad wanted him, but Gabriel was her
idol; it was idolatry and Mrs. Rossetti didn't want to lose
Gabriel. You could see her hope was that Gabriel would change
his mind.

She didn't like the way Mrs. Rossetti tried to find out
things from Madox Brown. "But she didn't get anything from
your old watch-dog," said Emma. Emma told her that Madox
said, "I agree, they shouldn't marry. The lady should be
better cared for. Gabriel hasn't enough to keep a wife on."
Elizabeth didn't want Emma to go on. She did not want to know
what Mrs. Rossetti thought about Gabriel's "model", as she
called her or "that girl from the bonnet-shop." Mrs. Rossetti
could hardly say with her second son, "I never heard her speak
other than correctly," for as far as she could recollect, she
had said nothing.

Gabriel did all the talking.

He was good on these occasions and he was shrewd and
business-like when his mind was on it, when he was getting
the better of someone, like luring Annie Miller from Mr. Hunt,
because he was annoyed that Hunt stole, as he said, his
picture.

71.

Gabriel could be patient and his easy negligence could hide a predatory something - what she meant was a cat stalk-ing a bird. Harry had called her gin-gin-ginger and now there was that Fanny, the wife of Hughes who used to be the porter at Somerset House, calling her a cat too, a civet-cat, whatever kind of a cat that was. Fanny came to sit here sometimes, in the studio, but now she was engaged to Gabriel, she could stop that, simply by setting up her easel. Fanny didn't like sitting while she was around; Elizabeth knew that. It was Fanny, he had found at last suitable, for the girl in the *Bridge* picture.

"There is money in the *Bridge*," Gabriel told her, "that's why I want to finish it, so as to cut that door through, and make some alterations and improvements in the place here." He had already sold *Found*, but he was selling it again. "I have only to dash off another copy, but I must finish this first; I've sold *Found*. I've as good as sold *Lost*. This is the *Bridge*." It was the same picture.

She did not want to have another scene, not just now. It was all so confusing. How could he sell a picture that wasn't finished, and then sell it again? He had only changed the title. She did ask him, "what became of *The Drover*?" But

72.

that time, perhaps it was just as well, he didn't sense the
taste and sting in the words and the strength she got from
saying them. Fortunately, he didn't realize that she was
being funny.

She was the Dove now.

What had she not been?

She was Ruskin's Princess Ida.

They had called her the Sid; they got that from Mr.
Allingham still calling her "Miss Sid".

Who was Gabriel walking? She was not taken in, by his
new attitude, always seeing her home and leaving the door open,
so that people passing on the landing outside her room at
Weymouth Street, could see her, could see him, whatever they
were doing.

He was engaged to be married, in other words, to all
intents and purposes, he was married, and he was free now, as
the way was on the Continent, to have a mistress.

But it wasn't as simple as all that - and what did
she know of the Continent and mistresses? It was things
that concerned them in the plays, Gabriel took her to, in
which Miss Herbert acted. Elizabeth would like to have been
an actress. And it was not likely that Miss Louise Herbert,

73.

Mrs. Crabbe as she was, would look at Gabriel.

It was something else, and Dove though she might be,
in the grey shot-silk she had made up in her own fashion,
without hoops, to please him, she could sense things no Dove
could be aware of.

It took her back to this afternoon again and <u>Three Birds</u>
<u>and the word Honour.</u> She was, she had remembered, one of
the <u>Three Birds</u>, at home. But she remembered also, that she
was the Eagle, and the way she came to find herself the Eagle,
was Harry spitting and making cat-calls at her.

This wasn't like home, but Gabriel was making outwardly,
the same distinctions. It was Fanny calling her the civet-cat
that made her wonder. She was not afraid of Fanny.

She remembered how she was not afraid of Harry.

She was not afraid of Gabriel.

She was afraid of something that was stalking her.

And she recalled the ease and assurance of Gabriel's
manner, she remembered how he had flung his challenge even to
Christina, that day he took her formally to see his mother.

"O," he said, "Ruskin - I'll arrange, Christina, for Lizzie
to take you out there." It was his knowing how Christina,
for all his admiration of her poetry, must wilt and wither

74.

inside, at the suggestion that she Lizzie, "Gabriel's model"
was socially (as far at least as Denmark Hill was concerned)
her superior. For all of _Goblin Market_, Christina had not
yet managed to meet Mr. Ruskin.

It was the way, smiling, you felt him feel Christina
wither.

And then, that sudden turn-about at Scalands, last summer.
"Of course, I won't marry you, Gabriel."

There was Mum, there was Lyddy. She was one of the
<u>Three Birds</u>.

There was Aunt Julia and Barbara and Bessie Parkes and
Mary.

There was Barbara, "you're too good for Gabriel."

There was Bessie, "Gabriel says you've consented, at last."

There was Mary.

Elizabeth did not want to remember what Mary had said.

She thought of the letter that Mary wrote to Gabriel
when she was so ill there at Hastings, and that other letter:

"Yes," she said, "Mary, I am going to marry Gabriel."

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
late, 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 17," 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 (the 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*, out 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 painting. 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. Ressetti, 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, _casa Rossetti_ 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 _casa Rossetti_ 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 _revenants_? 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 *épergné*? 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 truncheon 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.

<u>Christ keep the Hollow Land.</u>

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.

<u>She had three lives in her hand.</u> William Morris remembered the <u>Blessed Damozel</u> 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?"

192.

"I should say this is the Elixir of Life, rather than the Holy Grail."

William Morris was nearly back in Blackfriars. He looked up at the river-window of number 14, Chatham Place, There was a faint gleam of muffled light above the first window, where Rossetti was probably still sitting at his easel.

Snow had transformed the walls. The Victorian bay with the balcony that opened out from what Morris supposed was Rossetti's bed-room, looked like a mediaeval turret.

The ugly house and the hideous surroundings were transformed by winter-magic.

Magic?

The fellow was a magician.

"I'll pretend it's the Holy Grail," Rossetti had said, "at that, very few are fit to sample this Elixir. I'll get Gus to bring over those bottles, if he can find them, and pretend it's all out of the fabulous original."

"What did Ted make of it?"

"Ted?"

William Morris remembered the way the shadow fell on the forehead and how the wide-spaced grey eyes were black with their dilated pupils.

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 my 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 clever; 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 you feel 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/x/x of
the door-way, "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 incriminations, 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 grand-mother, 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 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 affectation.

"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/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 and odour 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 remembered 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 blossoon 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
All day long and every day and then he went on before I had time
to defend Ted, with

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 ~~own~~ 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 a new 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.

XII

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 these 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 confi-
dence 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 liven things up, had pushed Faulkner's table about and made
it spell the words they wanted - not all of them, they ad-
mitted. "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 per-
ceivable 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.

217.

Faulkner had plenty of friends for his experiments and it had seemed wiser to avoid speaking of the table, after Ted and Dixon backed out. He himself and Lushington, he knew, had followed Faulkner and would have gone on with the work. But he rarely saw Faulkner alone and then talk was as a rule, along the usual philosophic, sociological, college gossip and literary lines.

"I like coming here," said William Morris. "It's all very well but Dixon with his church-warden's pipe, doesn't really understand my feeling about St. Albans."

Godfrey was a fellow who could go on and on about nothing, in an easy conversational manner. He could turn a slightly serious accent into pleasing laughter, the moment he saw the seriousness was not acceptable. He was witty in a subtle way, he lacked, Ted said, humanitarian virtues. He didn't seem to care what became of the Church and State, he had no sociological bee in his bonnet, he might never have heard of Keble or Newman, he listened politely when Harry Macdonald held forth on social reform. He occasionally proffered a noncommittal comment when the names of Kingsley, Carlyle or Ruskin came into the conversation. He liked *The Stones of Venice*. He liked Tennyson. He could not say that Browning was the greater poet. He liked Browning.

218.

He preferred however, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He preferred Shelley to Keats. He agreed that Pope's influence was regrettable, but that Pope and Dryden were the inevitable reaction, after the extravagances of the later Elizabethans. He liked sitting up till all hours talking. He liked being alone.

Godfrey didn't think that Ted and Dixon had really pushed the table, not seriously, a little ragging at the end, perhaps. They wanted to get out of it and that was the way of saying so. "Why couldn't they come out with it? We discuss everything," said Morris. "They might have thought it ungracious to old Faulkner." "Dixon can shout down anyone in an argument, he doesn't mind what he says." "Perhaps Dixon was afraid to shout about it and so retreated to the Englishman's final refuge, the practical joke." "Can't say it's funny, there's a sort of - sort of spiritual discourtesy about it." William Morris was speaking in what they called his husky whisper; his usual terse brusque utterances seemed to be shouted from a battlefield, but in moments of emotion, his husky whisper carried echoes through dim corridors.

Godfrey Lushington realized that Morris was disappointed in his friend Jones.

218.ª

"Jones is a sensitive chap," said Godfrey, "the tappings may have taken it out of him. He wouldn't like to say so."

"There were three of them at the table."

"Jones being more sensitive than the others, may have got more of his share of what I believe they call the power."

"Don't think so. I think he and Dix talked it over in the vestry."

"I thought Jones was getting out of the Church."

"Well, we wanted to get _in_ to a church, we vowed to be positive whatever happened. We couldn't go back to Rome, though we even talked of that, too. We found the Anglo-Catholic ritual lacked the guts of Amiens and Beauvais. We wanted colour and direction, we didn't just want to mark time with _Pater Nosters_ done in English. We wanted the _rose_ of Rome, the _rose_ of England, not a plaster rosette."

"Well, there's the old circle."

"Circle?"

"They called it the Rose, didn't they?"

"You mean the Round Table?"

"In general - but didn't those old Rounds always have an inner circle and so on and so on, till you got to the inmost?"

219.

"Can't say I know much about it."

"I thought it was you started them all on Malory."

"Can't say I remember Malory going on about the Round Table as - what you call a circle."

"I may be wrong. I always thought it was what it was all about."

"A circle in the sense of - "

"Well, not always talking-tables but meetings; that Chapel Perilous was the last, I gathered, test before the Rose."

"Interesting - ah - theory - "

"Jones and Dixon and perhaps old Browning (don't you think) couldn't keep vigil all night."

"All night?"

"The night of doubt, depression, of hope lost."

"Who is Lushington? William Morris had heard the question asked on a number of occasions. The answer was always the same, that's the frightfully good-looking fellow from Balliol with the pleasant manner. He looked at Godfrey stretched out in his chair. Godfrey looked like a greyhound. Yes, he was handsome enough, in that sort of devil-may-care aristocratic manner. But he did care. But who could imagine Godfrey Lushington knowing anything of hope lost? He would win every

220.

battle. He was the not important actor who appears in the last scene, like Richmond in Richard III. "Can you unite the red rose and the white?" asked William Morris. He knocked out his pipe on Godfrey's fender. The wood had burnt out but there was still a glow in the embers. Are white roses, red roses burnt out? But what would Godfrey know of these things?

"The white rose is red," said Godfrey.

"Ah," said William Morris, he went on tapping his pipebowl on the fender, "you mean those York-and-Lancasters. We had them in the rose-garden at home." But he was not thinking of the Water House at Walthamstow. He returned to Woodford Hall, for his roses. They had left Woodford Hall, before he came back from Marlborough, on his first holiday. He was only fourteen but he felt that they should have consulted him, about giving up the Hall. He must take his father's place, they had insisted, there were the younger children. Relatives were deferential, they kept repeating that he looked more than his age. There were, to be sure, the two older sisters, but he was the first son and there was the battalion of youngsters after him, four brothers and two little sisters, nine of them altogether. He had taken his father's place, and they had not consulted him.

"Youngsters have funny notions," William Morris remarked

221.

solemnly, standing before the fireplace.

"Such as?"

"Dashing around with wooden swords and rescuing the fair from dragons."

"You mean Malory?"

"Yes and - children. Ghost stories and roasted chestmuts, dressing up for charades, guessing games, split proverbs, anagram letters spilled out on the table, card-houses - playing cards. I was thinking, there was always a rickety round-table in every nursery and they drag out card-tables from the hall or under the stairs when there's company after dinner. This sitting around a table suggests sociability and games. I don't say the thing is futile, as Ted does, but isn't it - well, childish?"

William Morris did not want to know why Godfrey Lushing-ton said, "the white rose is red."

But Godfrey said, almost as if he hadn't heard him, "there was always the tradition."

Godfrey said, "I ran through a lot of stuff at the Bibliothèque National when I was last in Paris - some loose pages, difficult to follow in the old script. A chap I know is collecting Chretien de Troyes; dates are difficult but he said they had pretty well cleared and catalogued Marie de France."

222.

William Morris had never heard of Chrétien de Troyes nor Marie de France.

Morris said, "ah, yes - about the Wolfgang von Eschenbach Minnesinger period."

"Troubadours - Minnesingers - I suppose it's the same thing?"

Godfrey Lushington seemed to take an immense time, getting to his feet. He couldn't lose a battle. He would stroll in when all hope was over; the Saracens in full panoply, had already announced victory. William Morris saw them caught in a noose and the rope drawn tighter. But it wasn't a miracle. There was something almost apologetic in Godfrey's manner, as the host turned. But any chap could have done this, he seemed to say, I came in at the last minute. He was as polished as his blade and as unbreakable. Godfrey said, "they're afraid of the unspoken question."

Godfrey Lushington placed the decanter and the glasses on the table.

"I haven't a crusader in my family," said William Morris, "only a fellow in wool, in the north of England. But what question?"

"The question they daren't ask," said Godfrey as he filled the glasses.

223.

"To the question," said Godfrey, as he raised his
glass, "I don't mean just the spoken question."

"Are you talking of those planes and waves and thought
transferences that Faulkner was trying to check up on?"

Godfrey said, "Vernon and I started it with this chap
from Paris. His sister or his *belle-soeur* rather, had a
group there. As you say, there are always tables, usually
the one you want is in the servants' hall, but we found one
in the attic. Vernon suddenly discovered that he wanted to
do some sketching and got out his easel; he set it up in
the summer-house; they would have chucked the table out of
the library or carted it off to be varnished, if we had had
it in one of our rooms. Funny how you start with intrigue;
the whole story starts with how and where you find the table,
and how you can disguise it. Vernon became suddenly tempera-
mental - you know - a fellow has to be alone sometimes.
Poetry? they asked him and he said, no, his brother was the
poet. They talked about Byron at the house, one had the
answers."

So his brother was the poet.

"Mind if I take your chair," said William Morris. "Um -
what sort of poetry?"

"I was trying my hand at translation - the old French
things - with Roland."

224.

"Any ready for - "

"I must see my way first, thanks all the same. I like your *Unknown Church*. It's like that; a sort of screen of secrecy is thrown around a situation that brings it into the realm of intrigue. You have all the trappings of a situation - Byronic, if you will - and you are planning all day, your way to the *rendez-vous* and all night, thinking about it. It's true, we overdid it. But Rolando had to get back to Paris."

"Um - rather difficult -"

"Of course, there are always difficulties, that's part of it."

"I mean, I shouldn't think a summer-house was quite the place for that sort of secrecy."

"It's one of those octagonal tower-rooms, really, with a door and seven windows. We called it the summer-house."

"Up and away through the drifting rain!
Let us ride to the Little Tower again,"
said William Morris.

"You note in any of the early stories, the lady is inevitably likened to a rose."

"Traditional."

"That's what I was saying, there was always the tradition about the meeting, the love affair. The troubadour or the

225.

poet meets with thorny hedges. The rendez-vous is secret.
There is always danger. There is always a husband, another
lover or some false friend at hand to betray their meetings -
also traditional. Those are the world, the church, the mis-
understandings and inevitable falling off of old friends - who
won't or who can't follow. The rose is the lady - "

"Though our arms are wet with the slanting rain,
There is joy to ride to my love again,"
said William Morris.

"Faulkner's table was all right," said Godfrey Lushington,
"I was asking it questions, myself."

"But you didn't do any talking."

"You don't have to ask the question out loud - just so
the question is clear in your own mind - "

"Um - "

"Don't you like this port?"

William Morris raised his glass. It was all there, the
light through the ruby glass at Chartres.

"I like looking at it."

William Morris was no greyhound, he was (Rossetti was
right) a great St. Bernard or a young lion.

He must pad carefully through the jungle.

"Funny fellow, Ruskin - did you know his people were in
sherry?"

226.

"Hadn't heard so."

"Good stuff, I believe, Ruskin and Domecq. Um - it
was Rossetti told me."

He had said Rossetti.

"That painter fellow?"

"Um - "

"What I mean is, the whole of the Roman de la Rose
tales are symbolic. The Rose is the table."

"Weren't they - curious, at the house?"

"Suspicious, you mean? Naturally. It was all the
young French gentleman of course, leading our young gentlemen
into God knows what lecherous company - none of the young
ladies/MK the Hall, mind you."

"This - Rolando's a good fellow."

"It didn't matter what they said about him, he said; he
was going back to Paris, but we all agreed it might be diploma-
tic if occasionally, Vernon and I spent an evening out of his
company, so we rode off to Quarles, but we made a *détour* and
met Roland at the Tower (Rolando called it the Tower). It
only came out afterwards, that we'd never been to Quarles.
But by that time, Roland had gone and it didn't matter.
Nothing really mattered."

The lion had made a *détour*, he padded into the open.

227.

"Ah - what sort of questions did you ask Faulkner's table?"

"Faulkner had put a question, rather vague, I don't remember - I cut across it. The answer to Faulkner's question or to mine rather, was Vernon."

"I remember."

"It might have been one of those - well, thought transferences. I asked the same question the next evening."

"They didn't know any Vernon."

"I asked it a third time."

"And the question?"

"I asked if the fellow, sitting there beside me, was in on this."

"Yes, thank you," said William Morris, "the port is excellent."

"They spelt Vernon a third time."

"And the fellow?"

"Enjoys his port?"

William Morris put down his glass.

How mark time?

"No furlong farther for us to-night,
The Little Tower draweth in sight."

There are a lot of things I must ask you."

228.

"Not always disembodied, from what Rpland said, and did it matter if it were a form of dual-personality?"

"I don't quite follow."

"The question that you ask the table - the Lady answers - or as with the *belle-soeur*, the Knight or the preux chevalier."

"And - ah - Vernon?"

"My brother," said Godfrey Lubhington.

V

229.

"I seem to have been gone a long time," said William Morris, "but I wanted to think things over."

"You haven't been gone at all," said Godfrey, "that outside time is non-existent - well, I don't know. I've been busy myself."

"With other things?"

"Plenty of other things."

It didn't do to ask a chap like Godfrey, what his people expected him to do when he left Oxford; diplomatic, William Morris presumed.

Godfrey said, "it was like that, I mean, the shock of losing Roland after Vernon went off to Scotland. I thought, I was clamped back in time, forever. I thought, I had lost the table."

"I finished my *Little Tower*," said William Morris. "I tried to put rhyming away, until I got out of Street's office. Then after I last saw you, I found that I could do their beastly copy, and rhyme at the same time. She doesn't get burnt as a witch."

"The grim king fumes at the council-board; Three more days, and then the sword - "

"Go on shouting."

230.

"No. I only wanted to say that I know those seven
windows. They look out on lake, forest, field, sky, each
different. Don't tell me there is no lake there. But even
if you did, I wouldn't believe you. I go there."

Godfrey was sitting on the window-seat. He turned
and drew the curtain.

"I hear the wind. I know all your trees, Godfrey
sans peur et sans reproche."

Godfrey was lighting the candles.

"Wearily, wearily,
Half the day long,
Flap the great banners
High over the stone,

but that was when I was in prison. You got me out."

"Rolando got you out. Or Rolando got you in, rather."

"In - "

"In the summer-house, the tower-room, the Tower."

"There were curtains?"

"Curtains?"

"The way you drew the curtains, put me back there. No,
don't say there are no curtains or that there are, or that the
place was once neatly shuttered but now some of the shutters
sag and here and there, there is a row of slats missing.

231.

Don't tell me you unbarred or unlatched only one shutter and
opened only one window - the one that brought the sandy
shelf of the lake (to the left) in focus. Don't tell me of
your precautions to keep the right side or the right sides
free from prying cottagers, your own gardeners or a stray poach-
er. Don't tell me that storm came up and you didn't get
back till morning. Don't tell me -"

"How the second gardener came in and said the table
would do nicely for the potting-shed?"

"That's an invention - but - what happened to the
table?"

"I should have thought it amiable on your part to ask
what happened to me."

"Well, you survived. the - test, or whatever you call
it, you're here to tell the tale."

"I can see that you're wondering about the spiders."

"I hadn't given the spiders a thought."

"You should have thought about the spiders."

"It's too clear-cut for spiders. I'll wager spiders
don't like octagons."

"I wouldn't be too sure of that. What of their spinning?"

"You're ah observant fellow. There were blackberry
bushes?"

232.

"A few."

"The webs always seem to come clearer on a thorn-bush, the dew of course, brings out the pattern."

"You're an early bird."

"You saw the silver threads, strung with brilliants, when you came forth, staggering into the dawn - you saw them, then, for the first time."

"Yes."

"I don't mean that you hadn't seen them before. I mean, you saw them - "

"Differently."

"I don't know what charm or enchantment you used."

"It was very simple. Vernon went first. Roland remembered what he called his manners, at the end - he seemed contrite, the *châtelaine*, my beautiful mother, what had she thought of him? It was all right, I assured him, she approved of my polishing off my French and working on old French in the summer-house, all useful - well, you never know, you have to show an intelligent interest, in my job. Roland was worried, he said, he wanted to make the separation easier. 'It's so painful breaking away suddenly,' he said, '*mon Godefroy*, what it was to find you and Vernon.' He entreated me, 'don't make

233.

it too hard - it will be easier for us both to give up the
table, if we don't go to the Tower, the last days. And if
the two of us were alone, it might prove disappointing. How
much better to leave it,' he argued, 'rather than be disappoint-
ed.' He must himself have experienced some bitter disappoint-
ment. 'Of course, we won't go back,' I said, 'I've never really
shown you to our neighbours. We must ride over to Quarles.'

"They brought Vernon's horse for Roland. 'I see,' he
said, "this is a compliment. I am then, not so out of favour.
Your people consider me, after all, one of the family.' I
had not thought he realized that the servants had been talking.
He was wary and sensitive. 'But my mother loves you,' I said,
'my
'and says you have improved/xx manners,' 'Your manners,' he
flung at me, 'mon Godefroy.' We turned off toward the Ayton
valley and followed the bridle-path. 'We'll cut across by
Barnfield and Bolton,' I said, 'and I'll show you the old
Carew Place before we reach Quarles.' But we didn't reach
Quarles."

"Where are we?" said William Morris.

"I have told you, on the bridle-path, along Ayton."

"You haven't told me what you saw and what you talked
about."

"I'm coming to what we talked about."

234.

"But I want to know everything."

"Well - then you tell the story."

William Morris said, "there is or there was a charming sister in the nursery. Roland loves her, he will wait till she grows up."

"You are wrong there - and if there had been, Roland was, as I told you, sensitive. Well, they were de Fontenelle, they had lost everything."

"There is the pretty cousin, rather distant, at Quarles."

No doubt, Morris thought, Godfrey like Ted, is thinking of getting married.

"Lavinia and Olive are both lovely creatures. They are not my cousins."

So Godfrey check-mated him.

"You thought the other one would do for Roland?"

Godfrey did not answer.

"Or does the other one belong to Vernon?"

"What an incorrigible match-maker you are. You want everyone to be happy - like yourself, eh?"

"I am not in that sense happy, but Ted is and I like to think that others may be."

"(So he was wary, the other chap, Rolando," thought William Morris, "and what of this one?")

235.

William Morris said, "I am happy, but in another sense."

"So was Roland happy."

"You just said he knew bitter disappointment."

"Well, to continue - or will you tell the story?"

With some vague feeling of insecurity, William Morris thought of Quarles and Carew - and of Roland. These crusader fellows!

"I don't know the story."

"Mon ami, I think you do."

"You were on the bridle-path along Ayton?"

"We were. Roland seemed thoughtful. I ambled ahead through the ford. I thought I had found a rhyme that had eluded me for some days. I reached in my pocket for my notebook. When I looked up, I saw we had turned below Barnfield, but Roland wouldn't notice. This was where Vernon and I broke into a gallop. Sure enough, Vernon's horse was following after. The last time I had followed Ayton, I had been with Vernon, and the four or five times before that. The horses were cantering back, but to the King's Wood. We called it the King's Wood, there was the usual legend. Henry VIII had hunted there, stayed at the Hall and so on."

"And so on?"

"I said the usual legend - you are a romantic fellow, work that out for yourself. You did not ask what Vernon and

236.

I did with our mounts, when we rode over to the Tower. Didn't
you wonder where we stabled them?"

"I did wonder. I did not see them grazing."

"There were no spiders, the Tower was or had been by
way of a hunting-lodge. The forester kept it. The door
was merely bolted from outside. We had no poachers. There
was a row of bridle-rings in the old wall of what was once the
outriders' stables. Part of it was still roofed over, in old
tile. I see you did not look out of all the windows. We
had tethered our ponies there as children."

Children? How many had there been, Morris wondered, and
he thought of his own first pony.

"My sister was killed in the King's Wood," said Godfrey
Lushington.

William Morris cursed himself for the clumsy, tactless
fellow that they said he was.

"She would go her own way. We would meet in the Tower.
They blamed us, afterwards. She wasn't in the summer-house;
'she must be playing the Bold Baron', said Vernon. That meant,
according to the old ritual, that we must collect our retinue
and seek out the Baron. It is a deer-park, really."

"You hunted there -" Morris couldn't think of anything
to say. He presumed the girl had been thrown. He must say

237.

something, "you - you found her?"

Godfrey said, "Vernon really was annoyed about it. Vernon said, 'we better light the candles,' but we hadn't yet drawn the curtains and 'it's still light enough to see by,' I said. Vernon said, 'we better light up anyway, you remember our old signal - just to show her that we give up and that she's won. Do you remember,' Vernon said, 'the time she almost got drowned on the lake and we thought she was cheating when she shouted!' I remembered. 'Maybe, she's lost now,' I said. But they had already found her. It was Giles - the forester."

It was something woven, it was tapestry. It was not true to life; it had no perspective; it was flat. The pony followed after, like the dead King's charger.

It was as if the wind fluttered the green and brown, the stitched blue of the lake, the carefully embroidered stone and sedge. The figures were not really moving.

"I - I'm sorry, Godfrey. I don't know how to say it. This - has shocked me profoundly."

"It didn't shock me at the time. It just hadn't happened. There was work to do, then the next holidays, work again and so on. Fortunately, the holidays were work, too, languages ... It was a narrow path. It took all one's surplus thought and energy, just to keep one's feet from slipping. One could

238.

manage to keep on, provided one didn't stop and look over
the edge. There was the night of doubt, of depression, of
hope lost."

This was Godfrey Lushington, the charming rather super-
ficial fellow from Balliol.

"It - it came back - the memory?" asked Morris.

Godfrey said, "it was Roland brought it, talking about
his *belle-soeur*. He had told us of her group or circle
in Fontainbleau, when he first explained the table to us,
but he didn't talk about the *belle-soeur* personally, when
the three of us were together. He said Henri, his brother,
was worried; he didn't actually forbid the circle, *tables
parlants* were the rage of fashionable Paris, and as Faulkner
explained to Ted and Dixon, the Sorbonne and various scient-
ists were taking the matter seriously. It was coming through
the King's Wood, that I explained to Roland, that it was
absent-mindedness on my part; I had been thinking of one of
those translations, crossing the ford. I hadn't been any-
where for the past fortnight, except with Vernon when we had
made off, as for Quarles and turned back after the crossing.
Roland said he was glad to see the King's Wood, it was like
Fontainbleau where there was the rustic summer-house, a cottage
really in the Petit Trianon style, above the river. A cousin

239.

of Valerie's had it and they met there, for boating-parties
and for picnics. It was there they had their circle. Roland
said, 'Henri knew all about it, but he didn't know that I loved
Valerie.'"

Godfrey went on, "Roland said, Valerie said that he had
betrayed them. Roland could not explain to her. 'How could
I betray my belle-soeur?' Roland had asked. And when he said
belle-soeur, by the first oak-coppice, I knew that it had
happened."

What had happened? William Morris tried to keep his
hands still. He remembered the hammocks he had woven at school.
His mind would be clearer if his hands were busy. No wonder
women seemed indifferent to controversy and to policy. Their
hands did the thinking for them.

Something had happened by the first oak-coppice. Was
it there that Giles found her? What wonderful names they had,
Vernon, Vivien and now Valerie. Everything was commonplace
about him - William. But Godfrey's name was sociable and
familiar, it went with Geoffrey, old Chaucer. He William, did
not go back to their crusaders, but as far as home was concerned,
he felt he went back further than they did. Giles might go
with him. They were not out of the King's Wood but the
wilderness.

240.

It was a wilderness. Fontainbleau and the King's Wood
had their keepers, their Little Trianon cottages and their
hunting-lodges. William Morris said, "It was by the first
oak-coppice that Giles found her?"

"It was there that I found her," said Godfrey.

Godfrey said, "it was the way he said belle-soeur.
I said, 'if you don't mind, we'll dismount and walk part way
through the forest.'" But I sat down on an oak-log where
Vivien and I had often talked together. Roland stood with
the bridle over his arm. He seemed restless. 'We must
not do the table alone,' Roland said again. I seemed to
feel what he was thinking. He said, 'Valerie said she would
work alone, if I broke up their circle. It was not that she
did not love Henri, but she was getting exalté, more intense
each time we had the table. There were only three of us, at
the end. Valerie thought that I was getting fond of her
cousin, Aurelie. 'Henri thinks we are meeting here, because
of you and Aurelie,' Valerie said. Then she turned on me,
'Aurelie is almost as good a parti as I was.' The marriage
had been arranged, as is usual with us in France. It is
true that Valerie's dot would help re-establish de Fontenelle,
if the rest of us agreed to give everything to Henri. 'All
Henri thinks of, is a son,' said Valerie. I said, 'Henri

241.

loves you.' 'He loves de Fontenelle.' 'But you are one of us, 'I said, 'Valerie.' I was thinking of her mother. Valerie was indeed one of us, frail as moonlight.'"

Godfrey said, "Roland was afraid Valerie would call him back to the table in Fontainbleau. She had not come to the table when the three of us were together. Roland said, 'if Valerie comes to the table, it means that she is dead or will soon die. It was not only Henri's son that the table was taking from us, it was Valerie. She was burning out like a white candle. "You can not work alone," I said. Aurelie had told me that the two of them together had had no answers."

Godfrey said, "I asked Roland 'why do you fear the summer-house now we have agreed about the table?' Roland said, 'it is surcharged with memories.'"

Godfrey repeated, "it was surcharged with memories. But we went back."

Now William Morris left the oak-coppice; oak was drus - Druid, wasn't it? The forest had taken its sacrifice.

There was Valerie like a white candle or a camellia with its petals folded round it. There was Vivien in green.

Godfrey said, "Roland and I sat talking in the tower-room, till dusk. He had managed to break the circle before Valerie burnt out. But Valerie turned on him, he was not a

242.

gentleman. He had used Aurelie badly. Even Henri blamed
him. He could not tell Henri that he was fighting, not
only for him but for Valerie and his son. Valerie was ill,
she said it was all his fault. Aurelie with an older sister,
went on with the boating-parties. Roland did not think that
Aurelie continued with the table. Aurelie was, he said,
oeillet, fragrant and - worldly. He had not disturbed her
equanimity. She would find a new circle in the fauburg, if
she wanted to go on with the work. Tables parlants were all
the fashion. If it had been just fashionable - but Valerie
was different. Roland said he had left home, under a cloud.
The table curiously (though the woods and the tower-room re-
minded him of Fontainbleau) had freed him. 'When we three
were together,' Roland said, 'it was cool, it was comforting;
it was England.'"

Godfrey said, "I asked him, 'can we two not be England,
in the tower-room?' 'We have talked too much,' said Roland,
'mon ami, that moonlight and the fleur-de-lis might claim you.'
It was then," Godfrey said, "that I lighted the candles for
the first time - remembering. I said to Roland, 'England
has already claimed me.'"

Godfrey went on, "you know how unselfishness takes some
people? Roland changed utterly, 'ah, mon ami, but you never
told me.' 'How could I tell you what I have only just found

243.

out for myself,' I answered."

Godfrey had found out that the white rose was red.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Was sacrifice always necessary?

William Morris knew that it was.

The white rose was stained with the blood of the
XXXXXXX heart.

But the heart drained of blood, renewed its heart-beat, and that throbbing was almost unbearable. So no doubt, Roland had found it, after his sacrifice. But Roland, William knew, embraced his thorns, he would not be without them. The thorns, it had been long established, were part of the Rose.

William Morris said, "did Valerie - finally - "

"Love Henri? I don't know but the quarrel with Roland led to their coming together on at least one issue - Roland had behaved badly. It was Valerie's distress, Henri told him, that had been responsible for her illness. Valerie had thought of Aurelie as a sister, really a sister. Roland did not of course, allude to it, but we may presume that Aurelie would have strengthened the material position of the family. Roland had given up everything to Henri on his marriage, but he would not give up - "

"His thorns," said William Morris.

244.

"The final family verdict was that Roland's action toward Aurelie had been unpardonable. This verdict had shielded Valerie. Her reputation was irreproachable."

Godfrey went on, "now having spoken (and he said for the first time) about Valerie, Roland became distant. We blew out the candles and bolted the door. We rode back. 'What shall I tell them about Quarles?' said Roland, on the way home.

It no longer mattered. 'Say that we turned round - say anything - it doesn't matter.' I knew that I spoke abruptly. I had been killed recently by the oak-coppice. I lived it. My forehead struck the stone. I was dead instantly. Then I was whispering to Godfrey, my beloved brother, 'I am here. It's Ven, Frey.' I heard, Frey-Ven, Ven-Frey - then, Venfrey. We were the same person."

What was there to say?

Godfrey said it, "I haven't a brain like - Faulkner. But I have a superficial way with people. It's chaps like me they want for ticklish situations. If I shouldn't come back -"

"Come back?"

"From the East, you'll know where I've gone. You're the only one who knows this."

It came from somewhere. The husky whisper found words for what could never be said.

245.

"The Little Tower will stand well here
Many a year when we are dead,
And over it our green and red,
Barred with the Lady's golden head;
From mere old age when we are dead.
But you're not going yet, Godfrey?"

"I'm not going till I've told you the whole story,"
said Godfrey Lushington.

VI

246.

He would come to no conclusion until he had heard more
from Godfrey. He kept away for a week. He ran across
Godfrey in the library but avoided strolling around with him
afterwards, as he usually did, if they met casually. He
drew in his horns and retired to his shell or rather, he
curled up on his bed of leaves and hibernated, when he could
get away from the mere routine of living. Dreaming was no
sharp sword, his withdrawal from life was as automatic and as
necessary as sleep. He had found that his hands could actually
continue the Gothic tracing and leave his mind free. He
would rather have done something useful, as he put it; nets
for hammocks or fish. Perhaps this was old Shelton in him,
perhaps Henry Shelton was a weaver; Paul was a tent maker.
Yes, they could have their conquest, he had concluded, that
day in Street's office, when he had first (painfully awake in
daylight) gone over the Rossetti visit. Those hours, he had
considered, were a distillation, an essence, a drug to be doled
out carefully. But William Morris had found a new distilla-
tion, a new essence.

This white rose, stained red, was not like the others.
Lis was a snow-flower, In memory, he was again whirled with

247.

the stinging snow-dust round a corner into a little court-
yard. He tried the church door. It was fastened. But
the creature beside him was tangible, though a mist of fine
drifting snow veiled her occasionally. She was a white rose,
certainly.

But he had already found her, before he walked across
Blackfriars Bridge with her in the snow. She was Margaret,
Walter's sister in the Unknown Church. And she was Margaret
again, a cousin perhaps, the lover who had waited for him in
The Hollow Land.

His heaven characterisitically, was no infinite vault;
it was the lap of earth, the bed of leaves, the beech-wood by
the stream, into which I let myself down carefully, by the
jutting rocks and bushes and strange trailing flowers, and
there lay down and fell asleep.

But the strange flowers were really his familiars, he
knew the foam of meadow-sweet, the flat pads of the elder-
berry, the briar-blossom, the various low-growing pulse and the
blue bergamot, as the bee knows them. From these, there was
the sustenance of no heady dream. Rossetti had asked him,
by what sweat of the brow he wrote poetry. If this is poetry,
he had explained to the fellows from the beginning, it has no

248.

affiliation with the midnight oil or Shelley's *Skylark*.
There were no whirling spirals lifting him to heaven. If
this is poetry, it is easy to write, he had told Rossetti,
and Rossetti had said, "you don't get into a fever, inspiration
you out ?"
doesn't burn you?" But inspiration of some sort was burning
out Godfrey; he was like the bell-soeur Roland loved, he was
another white candle.

They were all of them in the same *impasse*. William
Morris had re-read Rossetti's *Hand and Soul*. Himself, the
modern Rossetti (the artist narrator of the story) had fallen
in love with the picture which by inference, he had painted
in a former life, in Pisa. The Image in the picture was his
own soul. So he, William, had fallen in love with a picture
but he knew the frail image to be a living woman. But as his
way was, he abstracted her from the frame, even as he called to
companion William the Englishman, Margaret or the Lady Alys
from his own romances.

He had told Rossetti that he got the idea of going back
in time, half in a dream, from *Hand and Soul*, but he had always
lived in the dream. *Hand and Soul* had merely fortified his
resolution not to let the dream go. There were others in
that world. But to William the Englishman and to Gabriel

249.

Rossetti the Italian, there was no real danger. He had
kept away from Godfrey. There was danger in Godfrey saying,
"I was dead instantly. I had been killed recently by the
oak-coppice." It is true that Florian watched his own death
in _The Hollow Land_ and that he, William the Englishman had
stood and looked down on himself within the chapel aisles,
where

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

But something threatened Godfrey.

Roland had seen the same threat in the case of the
*belle-soeur* - but how could clumsy William deal with the so
subtle and lovely wraith that might endanger Godfrey's reason?

*La Belle Dame sans Merci.*

But Godfrey forestalled him, "how's single stick?"

"O, we hang round as usual, at Maclaren's."

"A pity he turned me out."

"Well, it was pleasant having you drop in occasionally,
but old Archibald said it would give no good name to his
gymnasium, if he allowed the best fencer from the school, to

250.

be bashed about by his chaps. I've been thinking a lot since
I was here last. It's about a lady - I've - seen."

William the Englishman, fearful as he had been lest he
should find Godfrey ecstatic and eager to go on with his story,
was now in a panic lest Godfrey withhold the story. No doubt,
Godfrey wondered why he hadn't come sooner. He'd better tell
his own story, as much of it as he could assemble.

"That - that *belle-soeur*. I was working round the
situation from de Fontenelle's point of view. I don't know
that this lady that I speak of, goes in for tables or anything
of that sort. (I call her Lis from the Margaret de Liliis of
my *Hollow Land*.) But she sees things."

He would have thought that Godfrey looked as usual, if
he hadn't now the clue to Godfrey's appearance and behaviour.
He was the same polished blade - but was the blade unbreakable?
Certainly, nothing in this world could break it. "This girl
is like the Valerie of Roland's story. Well, the fact is they
say she's not consumptive, but why say that if the question
had never come up? And thinking of this, I was reminded of
Robert Browning. He's a curious fellow. Lis knows Mrs.
Browning. I can't say that Mrs. Browning actually encouraged
her in her - her trances - I don't know actually how the

251.

dream takes her. But she saw herself, a queen in a coffin,
with a book in her hand, at Chartres. Is it possible that
old Robertus made a remunciation like de Fontenelle, to keep
Elizabeth Barrett out of it? Another candle, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, don't you think so? You were saying, I remember,
that old Browning couldn't keep vigil all night."

"I remember mentioning Browning, in connection with Ted
and Dixon."

"I think Ted and Dix are on a different level. Ted is
going to be married, and Dix has minor canon writ large already
on his bland, inexpressive countenance. Not that marriage
in itself -" but William Morris did not know what to say
of marriage.

"You mean, that you yourself want to keep out of - well,
the night of vigil - because of this lady and that you, like
Robert Browning with Elizabeth, want to save Lis?"

"I want to save Lis." Godfrey had unwittingly expressed
what he William, had only half-admitted. Lis was in danger.

"Well," Godfrey said, easy and affable, the Godfrey who
had looked in those few evenings, at Maclaren's, "then all you
have to do is to set about and save her. You're a substantial
fellow like old Browning, just whisk her off to Italy or the
South."

252.

"She is in the South."

Godfrey turned as if looking for something, "ah - you
have your matches."

But William had not yet taken his pipe out of his pocket.

"Look, Godfrey - you've got this all wrong. The
lady - "

It was not like Godfrey to let a pause lie, painful and
patent for all to see, between them.

"Dash it, Godfrey - the lady's to be married to the
man I love best in the whole world - except - "

Tell Godfrey that you loved him?

Said William the Englishman, "with the single exception
of Godfrey - "

"Sans peur but not sans reproche, you're thinking."

"Godfrey sans peur et sans reproche is perhaps as I am,
in danger."

Godfrey said, "there is only one danger."

"Perhaps ultimately. You mean death?"

"I mean separation."

"From the Lady?"

"From the self."

"Well, if you look on it that way, It's what in a way,
I've been thinking, why (heroically) I stayed away, just as I've
stayed away from London."

253.

"You said, the lady was not in London."

"Dash it, Godfrey, have you no imagination? I could talk about her with - with -"

"This other fellow? Can't you talk about her with me?"

"You don't know her, Godfrey."

"Then, you can explain her to me."

It was William the Englishman who had come, confident and comparatively cool, to minister to Godfrey. But this was a new Godfrey, detached as William never could be, in-different almost.

"We walked across Blackfriars Bridge in the snow together. Her hands were cold. I offered her my gloves. She slipped one on. Of course, it wouldn't stay on. It fell in the snow. I picked it up. I put her hand in my great-coat pocket. We got across the Bridge. She would stand staring. It might have been St. Bride's, a small church off a turning. The wind blew us down there. She is Margaret de Liliis. Rossetti called her Liz, or a mispronunciation or his *quatrocento* for Lis. He read part of her letter to me. She was doing some manuscript illumination for his *Hand and Soul*. I read and re-read *Hand and Soul* when I got back to Oxford. Rossetti said, he burnt out people; what he said was 'I over-tax people.' That was after he told me that Ruskin sent

254.

her to Doctor Ackland, Oxford's Ackland. I didn't even
know she'd been to Oxford. I know nothing at all about her.
I have never met her. I saw a picture, unfinished, in a
plain wood frame, set up on the floor. I was lifting the
curtain to look out at the snow. The face was the face of
Margaret de Liliis and of the Lady Alys, out of *My Golden
Wings*. I did not - "

William the Englishman paused to draw breath.

He said, "I stayed away because I thought you would
burn out. Ackland said her ill-health was caused by mental
power long pent-up and lately overtaxed. I am that plain,
blunt man - is he out of Shakespeare? But I am nearer
Chaucer. I am clumsy. I never saw this lady, only a
picture of her. We never walked across Blackfriars Bridge
in the snow together."

"Here, values are reversed, or the situation. I thought
it all out. But I am no good with a set speech. This is
not what I meant to say. *Alone and palely loitering*, I said
to myself, but I was thinking of you. *And no birds sing*,
but how do I know what is singing in your reverie?"

"And her eyes were wild, so I saw Vivien, *La Belle Dame sans Merci*."

Godfrey said, "she is all *merci*, merciful, pitiful."

255.

"Then, the sedge isn't withered from the lake and the
birds do sing? I felt that you, like Lis, had been pent up.
You did not tell me exactly when - it happened?"

Godfrey said, "it happened three years ago, that is, last summer that but it was only last summer, before I realized that it had happened."

William said, "she saw a revenant, an artist, Rossetti told me, who should have been an actor. She saw him in the snow, he said. This Deverell was walking across Blackfriars Bridge in the snow, and she saw him at the exact moment of his death. Rossetti said, she said, this Walter Deverell had come to say good-bye. My name is Walter in The Unknown Church. So she became my sister, Walter's sister. But it was Walter who died and she saw him - did you see your sister?"

"I imagined I saw my sister, but I really heard her talking."

"Outside? You mean a voice outside?"

"Inside myself. It was in the summer-house while Roland was telling me about Valerie, and Aurelie and the others."

"They must have found water-lilies in some of the reedy inlets. Or doesn't the Seine have inlets? I seem to imagine a sort of sandy island in wide shallow water, and some reedy islets or eyots, I believe they are called. But that is

256.

de Fontenelle's story. I thought of de Fontenelle because I was trying to think of you. How do you mean, that you heard your sister talking?

"We went back to the tower-room or the Tower, as Rolando called it. We didn't talk about Valerie. I did not tell him about Vivien. We were working on translations. After he left, I used the Tower for my study. We had spread out our books and papers, on the centre table. But I did not go back to the centre table. I did not unfasten all the shutters. I left the door open. Half-sheltered or screened behind the door, I made a nook for myself. The round-table had been there the whole time. It is easy enough according to Faraday, to explain the table by unconscious or half-conscious muscular reactions. Of course, she spelt Veh. It is what I would have spelt if I had been in her place. Perhaps, I was in her place, perhaps she was a projection of myself; they say we have some sort of double. Well, so be it, I said. It wasn't alarming but I confess I was astonished. If it was myself tapping out the letters, then I was drawing on forgotten memories, and if I could make myself remember other memories, the shock of the most recent memory would be modified. Do I speak clearly?"

257

258.

Godfrey went on, "how do we know what Bacon or Newton,
for the matter of all that, were up to in their tower-rooms?"

"Do you think Roger Bacon or Isaac Newton had a - a
try at it?"

"A try at what?" said Godfrey.

"O - to turn the tide - the black wave of so-called
civilization? I gather with the exception of old Shakers,
that things were pretty dreadful, in spite of the growing
empire, in the days of good Bess."

"I'm sure they had a try at something."

"And failed? As probably we'll fail. I have a feeling
that Rossetti is, as you said of me, ≈on this. He didn't
say anything to make me think/ - it's a feeling, rather.
In fact, I thought he took Miss Siddall's overtaxed and long
pent up state of nerves too casually. But there is Rossetti.
There is Rossetti the Italian, William the Englishman and
Godfrey the Crusader. But that's nonsense about your going
out East. You must stay here."

"And turn the tide?"

"If we can turn it. Probably, we can't. Then someone
will come along in a hundred years, pent up - like we are.
By that time, if things go on at this rate, civilization will

259.

be smashed entirely. Not that we're not civilized at Oxford."
Oporto? "

"Are you thinking of *the porto*?"

"It's not a bad idea," said William Morris.

"What I thought, when Rossetti asked me the colour
of that wine or brew he offered me, was - it's Rossetti-
colour. He had asked 'colour - port-ish?' I said there was
a stain of rose, lighter than port. He is the red flame in
the spectrum, the ruby glass in the window. I am almost
colourless. I have the quality of a snow-cloud. He said
I was a Viking. I don't mean drifted white snow, but snow
blown about - or I'm the froth of elderberry or of hawthorn.
I am that sort of cotton-wadding in the chestnut-buds or the
chestnut-flowers. I know what I am.

"Some say my poetry is nursery-jingle. I don't draw
people up to heaven or force them off the earth. I get people
back to earth, or I try to, if they're in danger of sliding
off it. I want to get you back. I don't know that I can do
anything about Miss Siddall, How could I cut in and marry
her? Anyway, who would look at William after Gabriel? It
isn't that he's so striking to look at. It's his voice, his
manner. His eyes are fine, he has a high forehead, his walk

260.

is careless, slouching; he doesn't, he says, care for fresh
air. He hates the snow. She loves it. I feel that he has
drawn a magic circle round her. I felt it about to enclose
me. That's why I stayed away from London. But I will go
back. I expect she will come back sometime - how could
she keep away from Gabriel Rossetti?

"Poor moth - she has seen the flame."

"Have you noticed? You can't really rescue a moth."

"I wonder," said Godfrey, "if there's only a - a sort
of pane of glass between us and them. When you leave the
window open and the light burning, do _they_ singe their wings?"

"Coming in from outside? O, I see, you mean - Vivien."

"In a way - Vivien."

"You could blow out the candle."

"You can't, once it starts burning."

"Have you tried it?"

"Have you ever tried to stop breathing? You can't stop
it for long. She is such a comfort to me, _Merci, la Belle
Dame._"

"Now you make me see it. It isn't my illumination - I
mean, illuminations. I mean both, really. Mine are Canterbury,
yours are Persian. I don't know how you got there."

261.

I was trying to find a colour for you and all I could think of was crystal. Mine is, I told you, clouded or cloud. You can't see through my window; you turn back indoors to the loom or you fling yourself right out, harvest or winter, into the fields. I see the East in you, not just the Paladin who gets there from England or from France, but I see the cypress avenue, the flat painted plum-tree in flower. It is Merci, the Goddess of Mercy, you mean - perhaps she was Tibetan. I am out of my depth, really.

"But perhaps I think of Persia, because when I said his cordial - the Elixir of Life, he called it - was a stain of rose, he said, 'not attar of rose, that's Persian.' Every word he spoke, is there to draw on. I called it an attar or essence, rather, and doled myself out drops or grainer."

"Can you use up memory?"

"You can overdo it, intoxicate yourself, drug yourself."

"You're a strange fellow - what do you know about it?"

"I only know a magic circle when I see one. I stepped free of the <u>piege</u> in the case of Gabriel. I walked around it. He didn't put the picture there to trap me. He didn't know I saw it. Perhaps I shouldn't have dodged the entrance to his Aladdin's cave, if I hadn't seen the picture. I wanted to get

262.

her out. Yours is another sort of circle. I've been walking
round it. Do you think it was easy to deny myself your story?
But you're not going out East. I had to see that first and
say it honestly, before I heard your story."

"But they want me to go to India."

"Who - these diplomatic fellows?"

"Yes, and I judge - the others."

William lifted his glass with assumed bonhomie, "well - to
the others." He had padded round the circle. It was no cave
entrance this time, but a sheet of crystal water that enticed
and warned him. Godfrey's story was about to take shape above
the mirror of the lake, but William Morris was no crystal-gazer.
He must meet the other, head on, bash at his gleam and glitter
with his single-stick. He must entice the crusader from the
Sepulchre, or lure him into his own wilderness.

He said, "I like shaggy things, block Canterbury missal-
script, ragged-robins or corn-flowers, flat common daisies,
untidy, uncleared forests. You and de Fontenelle go plunging
in such perfect form, to - death."

"You're thinking of the Brigade?"

"Who is not? But they'll soon forget the Brigade."

"That's what I want to prevent. I knew some of the
fellows, they took disproportionate toll from the Ayton hunting

263.

families. I fenced with the last Ayton Carew, at St. James's."

I see, I see, mused William Morris, better leave that
port, for the moment. Better do something, say something.
"What became of those matches you were looking for?" This is
tactless, clumsy William, always put my foot in it. Well,
what of it? "Lancers?" "The Light." It would be.

William the Englishman had taken the charge of the Light,
as all England took it. But distinction, chivalry had no
chance in modern warfare. Why go blind or dazzled? "Wouldn't
it have been better if one of the chaps had mutinied? I don't
know the word for it - "

"There is no word for it," said Godfrey.

Steady William, don't lose your head, "there should be,"
said William Morris, "after all, isn't that why the new Victoria
Cross has been introduced - for independent thinking? Why
couldn't your Carew have shouted to the fellows that it was
all damned nonsense?"

"You didn't know Carew."

"I've seen certain of his sort, changing guard before
the palace. Don't think I wasn't dazzled."

"There's plenty of romantic fighting in your tales."

"That was before the Czar moved up his cannon. The
Brigade wrote _finis_."

264.

"That's what they tell me."

So they told him things? Go easy, William.

"Vivien was really too young to come out. But she had her first season. It wasn't merely that it was suitable, the two together - "

"I can see them. I can see them dancing." Don't listen to the music, William, it puts you off, and you don't like dancing, you're too clumsy. Music makes you dizzy, stick to plain-song. "But I don't like music," said William, "it distracts me."

So - candles - glitter - *distracted* romance. Don't get dragged into their hypnotic circling, the new waltz, better a romp on the green round the maypole. Vivien should never have gone to London. "Did she meet him in the King's Wood?"

"Vernon and I would never have asked her."

More damned nonsense. "She rode with the groom usually?"

"Always."

So it went to her head, Vivien in a green habit, she was lost, she was *exalTED*.

"You say it wasn't dark when she came back?"

"It was getting dark, but light enough to see by."

"Did she ride in the evening?"

"Never."

265.

She was blinded, dazzled. They never should have left her
"I know," said Godfrey, "I know that I killed Vivien."
"What nonsense - "

"It's what you're thinking. That's why you stayed away.
I said, I was Godfrey <u>sans peur</u> but not <u>sans reproche</u>, you
remember."

"But you may remember that I contradicted you."

"You said I was in danger, I was, until Vivien brought Carew."

Carew, some damned Elizabethan or Lovelace fellow.
William claimed only superficial knowledge of the counties but
he wondered if this Ayton Carew was descended from the poet.
Better go easy - cup-bearer to King Charles, damned Royalist.

Circles upon circles of enchantment. I go back to
Chaucer.

"It was Byronic nonsense. We've got to be realistic.
We've got to face it."

"That's what I'm trying to do," said Godfrey.

Said Morris, "we've got to go back to Chaucer. There's
about two hundred years between him and Shakespeare."

"What exactly," said Godfrey, "has that got to do with it?"

"For two hundred years, the country was wasted by -
Roses."

"The wars?"

266.

"The wars of the Roses."

"Historically, you're a bit out."

"I'm not speaking altogether historically. All wars are wars of Roses."

"My dear fellow - "

"For two hundred years, we had no poets. Then one William Shakespeare dug his roots in, dragged up the sap and stemma of the field, the orchard, the garden into his Tree of Life. He completed England forever. We've got to circle round his Prospero, go back to older magic, the magic of the Saxon sea, the Saxon wilderness. Into the breach, my friends but not -" go easy William, he loved Carew.

"It's got to stop, it's got to stop," said William Morris. "I didn't know your Carew, nor one of them. I'm thinking of the horses."

Was he being brutal? "Forgive me, Godfrey."

"There's nothing to forgive, really," the words sounded automatic, conventional, and William sensed through the sudden weariness of his friend's voice, Godfrey's solution. He had renounced pain and pleasure. He no longer felt the shock; "I was dead instantly," he had said, but he no longer remembered his death. He was removed like Prospero, apart on a magic island, shut up in his own crystal. William knew now that

267.

he dared not smash the crystal.

"Don't think that I don't feel it," said William Morris, "the beauty of their sacrifice. But there's two hundred years missing, the wars broke the continuity. You may say that Shakespeare more than made up, that he filled the gap with his Historical Plays, so he did, really, and then, late in life, he went back to early Britain and the Rome that made our civilization. But I tell you there are gaps somewhere, we're uneven, unbalanced. We haven't caught up to Shakespeare."

What was Godfrey thinking?

"You're thinking I'm an oaf, Godfrey. I glory in it. If I have a part in your play, I'm Giles the forester."

"My play?"

"Your story then. You said you wouldn't go East till you told me the whole story - so I would delay the telling and keep you here forever."

"It's not my story, really, it's Carew's."

William said, "I'm very angry about Carew and the others. My rage, the last years, threatened my sanity. My sanity was only saved by my dreams - my stories. They are the anodine that saved me. I might hope that they'll save others - I mean, if I go on writing. But it's too easy. I simply talk."

268.

I simply tell a story - it's all improvised. I don't myself
know what will happen. I go on writing to see what will happen.
They don't shout at me, they crop up. You pass a field one
day, it's brown, the next, pale green, green, then gold. So
you know the seasons. It's that way with my stories. I won-
der why Shakespeare didn't have Chaucer walk into one of his
plays? Do you know why? Chaucer didn't."

"Chaucer didn't?"

"Don't you notice? I listen and wait for Chaucer.
The Tempest is an artificial storm, a device, an invention to
get Naples to Bermuda (was it Bermuda?) There is wind on the
moors, the heath, Lear and Macbeth. There is only one forest,
Arden. Don't you see, Godfrey, having Shakespeare makes us
too important. They didn't know, perhaps not one of them had
read through a whole play, but wish not a man from England was
the reason for it."

"But it wasn't Agincourt, and they'll go on making
Agincourt of it till the world's ruined."

"Do you think it was easy for me to keep away from that
flame? I don't know how I did it. But I'll tell you. I
faced England."

"I faced the glory with a single-stick."

"My eyes were not dazzled."

269.

"I remembered that first year, before you came up, how we dodged authority here in Oxford. We've got to dodge authority."

Godfrey said, "I don't remember."

"It was before you came up. We managed to get to London."

"But they let us go to London."

"Not to help with the cholera carts," said William Morris.

When Godfrey finished speaking, William said, "I knew you'd cut down all my arguments. But I will go on arguing. Your table and your voices are to you, what my romances are to me. I am afraid to name Florence Nightingale - that is, I have no power against my overwhelming feelings. If I were a devout Catholic, I would cross myself and be done with it. As to the others - I died with them. I met my death before the massed spears of The Hollow Land. That is why I say, all wars are wars of Roses. But perhaps I evaded the end. Red Harald did not get me with his axe. I was holding on to a tuft of yellow broom. The long spears had crowded me off the cliff edge. I had sheathed my sword and I heard their laughter. The broom gave before Red Harald's axe reached me. I fell down into The Hollow Land."

VII

270.

XIV.

He hadn't been altogether honest. the last time, or he
had been too honest, he didn't know which. He had tried to
suggest that there was danger and had dragged in the Brownings,
to bolster up his argument. But would Robert Browning make
a renunciation if his curiosity were thoroughly roused?
William Morris didn't really think so. He wondered if
Browning had been clumsy, cruel, thoughtless in regard to
Elizabeth (her own name, Lis). He knew that now he himself
had kept faith with Godfrey. Godfrey had had the answer,
whether it was dictated by his dead sister or his unconscious
self, his "double" as he called it, didn't really matter.
The "double" might be the soul or conscience.

That is what Gabriel Rossetti had formulated in *Hand and Soul* - call the "double" the muse or inspiration, in his case. Gabriel Rossetti was apparently in sympathy with Elizabeth Siddall's dream or vision, though William so far had taken the line that there was danger of Rossetti overtaxing her. Rossetti confessed it himself when he said, "that's what I do, overtax people."

But Robert Browning had really rescued Elizabeth Barrett
from semi-obscurity and possibly death. Was it the same with
Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddall? You could hardly

271.

compare the two men, though he admired them both unconditionally. But the two women seemed to have much in common.

In his own mind, that is - for what did he know of either?

He believed that Gabriel Rossetti was self-centred, indifferent to his surroundings. Browning was like a well-fed abbot or friar. "Materially, I am like Robert Browning," thought Morris, "though the dream is different." Browning might be unaware of the need for spiritual comfort, communion or "communication", as Godfrey called it. Rossetti was aware of the need, though he hadn't said so.

Godfrey had understood his reservations, William had gone back to Godfrey the evening after the talk about Shakespeare and the Roses.

It wasn't on the whole, much different from the work they had done with Faulkner, that is, the technique was the same, only Godfrey was working alone. William had asked Godfrey if de Fontenelle had worked alone, been disappointed or overdone the thing, and so tried to put him off. Godfrey didn't think so. He believed the inspiration or the impulse came when the time was ready; to force an issue was to court disappointment, but Godfrey was sure that Roland had not rushed in heedlessly; the time and place were ready. "Place is as

272.

important as time," Godfrey had said. "But once having established your time and place, can you work afterwards - anywhere?" William asked him. Godfrey didn't know. He believed these things were timed and to continue aimlessly, after the impact of the original contact was over, he thought was also to court trouble - as Roland had himself foreseen in the case of Valerie. Godfrey believed that his own contact was almost at an end, that is why he wanted to talk about it and to someone who might be to him, what he and Vernon had been to Roland. "Is it the same table?" William asked him. Yes, Godfrey had specified certain old pieces that he wanted sent on to him, he had said to furnish his man's room, though he only had the house valet; he wanted to be alone. They had sent the chairs and the table he had asked for. They had varnished and waxed the table. "I keep it in my bed-room," Godfrey told him.

William did not ask him what messages he and Vernon had had, when de Fontenelle was with them. He supposed they were routine, experimental as the work they had done with Faulkner. Godfrey believed if you held back the message, it died somehow. It reached out like a plant growing. You could lop off the awkward growth, but something in you would die with it. Not die entirely but perhaps wait for another hundred years or so, to put out a new shoot. William thought of the vine, its root

273.

and branches. Toward him, almost visibly, as from Godfrey,
the frail tendrils reached out; would they strangle him or
parasitically endanger his own strength? The vine and the
branches. Odd that the revelation should come from Godfrey
and in his comfortable arm-chair, not sweating with ecstacy
(as he phrased it to Ted and Fulford) kneeling on the stones
at Beauvais. Coming too, with no under-tone of tidal music,
incense and flaming banners. But there were candles on
Godfrey's table, and the decanter and the glasses. But the
table and the curtained room had, William knew, fulfilled his
need for communion more fully and more precisely, than High
Mass at Chartres or Beauvais. It was the literal revelation,
in time.

The frail tendril from Godfrey's Tree of Life reached
out to him, but the grapes had already been garnered, gathered
into the wine-press and the wine fulfilled him. Oxford had
been a hot bed of religious altercation, Christian Socialists,
humanitarians, Keble, Newman, Pusey and the rest of them.
But the fire of the combat was no longer heartening, by the
time he and Ted had settled at Exeter. They had their own
plan for a monastic foundation, the Order or Brotherhood of
Sir Galahad. They had talked endlessly, round the subject
but somehow, it had come to nothing. It was however, his
discovery of Malory that had first inspired them. William

274.

had humbly chosen for himself, Sir Palomydes, the Knight
unloved.

Godfrey had said, in their first serious talk together,
after Ted and Dixon gave up Faulkner's table, that there was
always the tradition. Godfrey said he needed no proof of
this, but his own thoughts outran him. He could ask Vivien
or Carew questions. The answers were prompt, authoritative.

"Is this part of the Arthurian legend?" Yes.

"Did Bacon experiment?" Yes.

"Did Newton?" Yes-no.

"How did they say yes-no?" William asked him. "There
was one tap," said Godfrey, "a distinct pause, then two taps.
We used the one-tap, two-tap signal with Roland, as we did
with Faulkner. There were some questions that I didn't care
to ask them, and occasionally, Carew wouldn't answer."

"Perhaps he couldn't," said William, but he did not
like to ask what questions were unanswered.

"It was mercy they were after; you were right about
Merci. And you were right about the East. Carew kept coming
back to it, e-a-s-t."

"Is that why you thought they wanted you to go there?"

"Yes."

"It doesn't follow. I went over some of the older

275.

Arthurian texts. There was one with Latin annotations. For once, I found my Latin useful. Didn't those paladin fellows pick up some mystery? There was a suggestion that when the fighting died down, they got together somehow, The Cross and Crescent."

"Do you think it likely?" Godfrey asked him. "I'm asking you to ask Carew," said William and when he said that, he knew that he had entered Godfrey's circle.

"We'll ask now," said Godfrey.

Godfrey brought out the table and said in a matter-of-fact way, "would you like to share it with me?" But William said, if the table talked alone to Godfrey, it was better if he sat back and let Godfrey do the asking. "But you can ask it mental questions," Godfrey told him, "if you want to."

"I would rather ask out loud," said William. Godfrey laid his hands on the table. "Well, ask then," he said.

William laid down his pipe. "This is all very friendly," he said. "I confess, I was afraid of some transcendental business. It's warm here. I thought, I'd feel cold shivers. They're friendly people."

Said William Morris, "did the Cross and Crescent get together?"

"Yes," said the table.

276.

"All these mad new inventions," said William Morris,
"I suppose something will come of it, in time?"

"Yes," said the table.

Godfrey said, "they call it the _telégraph de Dieu._"
He took his hands off the table.

"I'll wait for your next question," said Godfrey.

William said, "thank you. I'll think this over." When
would these wars stop? He must formulate his question. But
why waste time, talking about war? He had already found the
answer in _The Hollow Land_. Harald was his enemy that time,
they met again after they were dead. That was after he met
Margaret, in Fytte the First. This would be Fytte the First,
for Vivien and Carew. But was it Carew answering? Better
leave that question, for the moment, thought William. In
Fytte the Second, Florian loses Margaret and finds desolation -
and his enemy. He could not go on to Fytte the Third and last,
until he (or until Florian) was reconciled with Harald. They
renew their quarrel, hand and fist as serfs do, then with
barbaric weapons, till Wulf kills Swerker; Florian and Red
Harald had lost their names with their identities, at least,
they had lost the names that they had died with. It was when
Wulf (or Florian) remembers and calls "Harald", that they regain
identity. Florian finds armour for himself and then for Harald,

379
70.

of birth, of re-birth, regeneration. The goldwings was the
inspiration that went with it. It was inspiration and the
same on the haft of the dagger, gold wings chased on that steel.
I looked at his dagger, like a cross. I unclasped my wings and
laid the chain about his shoulders. I said, 'let me keep
the dagger till he comes back.' I said, 'he said, the in-
cantation and the litany would bring him.' Florence was
troubadour or poet. We would work together."

"Gold wings across the sea!
Grey light from tree to tree,
Gold hair beside my knee,
I pray thee come to me,
Gold wings!"

She said, "I said to Florence that Gregor might be
coming - but there was already, acrid fumes even at that
height. They must have got brushwood and poured oil on it.
It wasn't the smell of wood - it was - "

William Morris saw the golden head sway forward. She
would fall from her chair. He should not have let her go on
with the story.

William Morris knelt at her feet. He took the pale face
in his hands. "Margaret," he said.

She opened her eyes. She smiled her wan smile. "You
are always thinking of Lis."

380
-71.

He said, "yes. You must not tell me any more of the
story."

"There's only one thing," she said, "they called those
songs **villanelles**, in honour of the goat-boys who showed them
the way down."

V

5.

"But it will be easier to tell the story," she said.

He had with difficulty unlatched the lower window.

The air was fragrant with the un-trimmed climbing roses. He was seated on the window-ledge, his arms about her waist, his head bowed forward. He felt her heart under his burning forehead. It was the first time that he had touched her. He remembered how he had first talked to her on Blackfriars Bridge in the snow. He remembered how he had first heard of this same _Gold Chord_ from the letter Gabriel read him, that first time he saw him alone. He remembered that he had talked to her outside St.Bride's, about the Church of Provence, and of a play, _The Albigenses_ that Algernon was writing. "St.Bride," he had said, "is that Virgin of the illuminati." It was not the last time he had talked to Lis in the snow.

She was a snow-flower, he had concluded, and she is a white-rose.

"Actually, it was Richmond in Richard III who said, 'we will unite the red/rose and the/white,'" said William Morris. With an effort he lifted his head.

"That Richmond - "

"He might have built this place or started building it.

I don't know. I can't remember a thing about Henry VII, except the poet Skelton. But Richmond, I remember. Perhaps because romantically, I associate him with Godfrey. One can't associate Henry VIII with Romance though he was a handsome fellow and may have hunted in the King's Wood, while his brother was still living. In any case, Henry VII or Richmond would be the first king to unite the roses. And - "

She had taken her hands from his shoulders and placed them on his head. "Now, looking like that," she said, "you look like the sketch that Gabriel did of you for Launcelot. Only in the sketch, you're looking down in the boat at Ellaine the lily-maid - "

He said, "I am looking up at -" he dared not say it. She would not see him again - or would she? In any case, the story would be lost.

"You must not stand there," he said, "it's cold for midsummer." He had only, this moment, felt an icy finger.

"In any case," he became brusque, though he could not raise his voice above the husky whisper, "they'll be looking the place soon. We better clear out."

"It's not late," she said, "it's the rain makes it dark in here. So you called Godfrey, Richmond?"

He said, "yes. I thought I told you. It seemed odd, our both having a Richmond in the story."

383
74.

"But my Richmond isn't Walter Deverell," she said, "like you thought. And anyway, only just now, sitting in that chair, I found he was Don Gregor."

"I thought you had worked all that out, before you came here."

"No," she said, "only the goat—path and the rock—hall came true. I wrote down other things, but only that came true. My first story was part true, but I didn't have a name for my out-rider in the forest, nor did I know where it was. It was asking you if you knew geography from flowers made me realise somehow, that it wasn't Pisa." He fastened the window back into its warped frame. He wondered if he dared listen to what she was about to tell him.

She said, "finding I was Flor, helped me more than you can imagine."

He did not dare imagine.

"Well, they got off?" He tried to make it sound like a holiday excursion on the river. She was too tense, altogether. "It's a beautiful story," he said casually. It was all imagination. It was her story, even if he was in it. She didn't know Godfrey. Godfrey was standing before the altar. "This - this Gregor," he said, "reminds me a bit of Godfrey."

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75.

"You must think of him then, as Godfrey," she said.

"We better look at those pictures," he said, but she was seated again in the old-brocade chair. She said, "there's time for the pictures."

"And time for the story - "

"Yes. You think it's tired me but I get more tired when I get stuck somewhere."

"You mean when you can't find a name for one of your characters? I know that feeling."

"Yes, and just now I said halberd Halbert to myself. I think you have it in your poems - or in any case, you mention many times, yourself being killed - just now you mentioned it."

"Then one thrust me through the breast with a spear."

"Yes, almost as if it was - how shall I say? Almost as if the act of being killed with a spear was part of you, like Lyddy and me with Mr. Greenacre and that knife."

"But - but -" It was a long way in time, in space to the Knights Credentes and Godfrey before the altar, and Kent Place off Elephant and Castle in the year of - the year of - "It is August," he said, "it is 1856. It is England. It is Hampton Court. We are sitting in the upper gallery. Don't think of what happened in - whenever it was -"

"You mean Mr. Greenacre. It's part of me. But for the 'very knife he did it with' (poor Harry rushing at me), I

385

76.

might never have picked up, off the stone-floor, the Toledo
dagger with the wings, gold on the steel."

"It's what Aristotle said of Greek Tragedy."

She did not pretend to follow him.

"He used the same word, *katharsis*, for the cleansing of
the soul; pity and terror, were induced by watching the
tragedies. Or living them. Watching a play, reading a book
or hearing an old mystery-story is living it, if one has the
artist's passion. I'm living your story with you."

"You are in the story. That's what I meant by halberd -
but would it be different in French?"

"It is a French word," said William Morris, "if I am not
mistaken, it's the same word, *hallebarde*. It's a lance or
spear." But was it? He thought of single-stick. "I think
of a wooden shaft with the metal-point fixed on it. I'm not
sure. The point snaps off sometimes, in a fight. But - it's
so familiar. - "

"It should be," she said, "Halberd - it's your name."

"Hallebarde?"

"It was he held the rock to give light on those first
dangerous steps. To fall, would be it seemed, to drop down
to endless darkness. That's what I meant when I said it tired
me more when I got stuck somewhere. It seemed it would crush

me across the shoulders - that stone. But why, I wondered,
couldn't they have held it from above and lowered it, after he
got through?

"This is pure symbolism, all this."

"But it happened."

"Things are more real in a story than in history."

"But you said it was history, out of a book about Roma - "

"Roma? The Kathars were the opposite of Rome (the
Inquisition), they were the heretics."

"They burnt them, down there." Her voice was colourless,
toneless as if it no longer mattered. "It was history, some-
thing that happened out of a book, like we read of - " she
looked round the room - "well, that first girl - "

"Katherine of Aragon was the first girl," he said.

"I think of her older - wasn't she older and already
married? It's confusing, but it doesn't matter. It's just
history."

"It is confusing," he said. "I remember that first time
I met you, speaking of the Infanta of Castile. But that happened
here too, Spain, the Inquisition, Roma."

"It happened here too," she said.

"It was Rome, Roma," he said, "that really set us against
this makeshift Anglo-Catholicism. After hearing High Mass at

387
78.

Beauvais, Ted and I really talked serious for a time, of going
over to Rome. But we couldn't do that. But the other, the
Oxford High Church offered (I remember saying to Godfrey)
only a plaster rosette after the Rose. We wanted the Rose of
Rome (I remember saying), the Rose of England, not a plaster-
rosette."

"But that's what I'm telling you. He would be after us
anywhere, that - "

"Simon de Montfort," said William Morris.

"So it was decided between Donna Anna and Father Magnus,
to disguise the worship. We didn't want to fight Rome. It
was they who would exterminate us - heretics. I think it
was Donna Anna speaking Spanish. Many of our words were
similar and there was the scholar's Latin. It was Donna Anna,
I like to think, discovered Roma. Magnus called her Ma Donna.
He would without betrayal, blend with Manfred's Circle.
But Sicily was far off."

So they got to Sicily.

"I'm not sure about Manfred," he said.

She answered, "nor I - the name came to me, maybe
remembering Byron. To save time, sometimes, I take a name,
any name that just comes. It was you who held open the door,
after Gregor told you he wasn't coming. You would have stayed

388
79.

with them but it meant, the secret might die out, Gregor
said, and the sacrifice of the Credentes be in vain. It was
to save the Credentes that you consented to follow Magnus.
He had chosen you as disciple."

"But I thought we were all disciples."

"Not in the same sense, not in the sense of Magister or
Magnus."

"Master - of what?"

"I wouldn't know, I wouldn't know," she raised her hands
in a helpless gesture. "They were so mixed down there."

It was what he had told Godfrey, "Saracens", he said,
"beside the Greek foundation and the later Romans - and any
number of lesser colonies from - well, the Phoenicians to
begin with."

"I don't know. I don't know the words - but it was
romantic - "

"Romance - the Rose."

"Donna Anna said, 'you have only to spell it backwards.'"

He looked at her with the unspoken question.

"Roma, I mean," she said, "Amor - Love to reverse
politics, hate and ambition, the thing the power of Rome had
come to stand for. It was not Christ, surely? To reverse
ambition but to be more sly than they were, more cautious, more
diplomatic. It meant letting the Church go, in its outward

semblance. Magnus said we must never be gathered together,
all of us together, in one place for public worship. The
Credentes had been sacrificed for our illumination. Now, our
illumination must save them for eternity. They would be in
all tales of chivalry, now in our day, and always."

William Morris walked over to the window. "Gold wings
across the sea," he said under his breath, "Grey light from
tree to tree," so the mist clung about the box-trees, set out
in the W M, William and Mary pattern. "Gold hair beside my
knee." He had only to draw her down, down from the dais.so he
thought of the old-brocade chair where she sat above him).
"I pray thee come to me." He would bend over like Launcelot
in the sketch that Gabriel had done of him. Her white hands
were almost pleading, a mermaid. He had called her Undine.
She said she was dreamy, wayy was her word, out of the herald
manual. "Gold wings."

He drummed on the window-pane to discourage her from
talking. She had told him too much.

<u>Gold wings across the sea.</u> He beat out the measure on
the flawed glass. There was a stain along the window-ledge
where rain-water had dripped through. "But this is a good job,
this restoration," he thought to himself. "I must ask Street
or Philip Webb at the office, who has done it."

390
81.

He had noted the floor-boards last time. He turned round. "It's a pity this inlay is so warped," he said. He had said that before. She answered as she had done the last time, "but you're not interested."

He crossed the room again and stood before her. He said, "I don't understand, you're bewitched and you've bewitched me. It's like one of those new translations, - you've read them? The Grimm Brothers. It's that story of Briar-rose in the Sleeping Palace." He remembered that the Prince had wakened her with a kiss. He turned again, restless, "prowling" as Ted called it. He looked into the other room. "This is only a continuation," he said, "the whole length is one room. I suppose they slung curtains across - just about here, there would be curtains." He seemed to be shouting at her to drown the husky whisper of his thoughts, speaking names out of old chronicles and nearer at hand, here in this very room, Katherine, Jane, Anne, Catherine again, and Anne of Cleaves, Catherine - Elizabeth.

He was like the rest of them. He was railing at Rossetti. Bocca Baciata? Foolishly, he had asked Ted about it. While the place at Red Lion Square was being done up, Gabriel had asked if he could "make free of the garden." Did she know about it? Ted said it was one of Gabriel's best pictures, so far.

39/82.

A gold head against gold - marigolds. If only Gabriel would re-name the portrait, before she heard about it. Or had she heard about it? A strand of the ragged rose was tapping at the window. Or did he dream it? He would not awake her - NO, not Gabriel.

He was indeed Halberd, halbadier, or a young lion as others, as well as Gabriel had called him. You can not call a picture Bocca Baciata, the kissed youth.

It was one of those occasions that they teased him about at Oxford. He exaggerated to amuse the fellows. When there was no answer to an argument, he would bang his head against the wall and astonish them with simple circus feats like letting Maclaren's youngest hang on to his hair, while he slowly lifted his great head with the child clinging to what Ted called his lion-locks. Unlike Sampson, he had the locks shorn frequently. He thought it yesterday or the day before that he had been "sheared" as Ted called it. But as he pressed his hands against his forehead, he felt the thick curls heavy on his head. The pelt grew over-night. He would have flung it from him. Now was the moment to bang out his thoughts - but he couldn't do that here. "It's pressing down on my head."

She said, "it's that stone. I was wrong to talk about it. But we got out, following the winding corridors. We got out."

What had she done to him? He was staring at her with those
eyes that Gabriel had first written her, were hooded like an
eagle. They were slightly un-even, one eye was drooped lower
than the other and that gave him, what Gabriel called, his
"veiled look". His look as she stared at her now, was not
veiled.

"When do you marry Gabriel?"

She had heard that question before.

She had heard it frequently. She had been officially
engaged for - for - actually, Gabriel had asked her formally,
courteously and - romantically to marry him, soon after the
death of his father. Two years was not so long for an engagement.

"I promised to wait five years." Who had she promised?
Answers to this question came automatically, she had given the
answer in various ways and to so many people, Mr. Wheeler, Aunt
Day (to say nothing of the family), William Rossetti, even trades-
people and Mr. Keates, the chemist on the stairway. She knew
that Mrs. Birrell would explain that the lady who stayed in
Mr. Rossetti's rooms in his absence, was the one he was to marry.

"But you have known Gabriel for almost seven years."

"We have been engaged for two years." She knew this was
no answer. "My father does not approve of the engagement."

How fend him off? She had heard that he was given to
sudden bouts of anger. Mr. Jones said sometimes, he smashed

furniture, to amuse the fellows. It would be awkward if he
started on this place - museum-pieces like the chair she sat
in. He did it to amuse them, Mr. Jones said. Yes, she had
wanted to be an actress. Maybe, he was acting. She was thinking
of those queens, here in this very bed and two of them - her
head caught in the weir. It was perfectly true, she believed
in it explicitly, her theory that terror drove her through the
darkness. But the first talk about Godfrey and the ones that
followed, had given her a fresh clue. Godfrey was a fencer.
She had not made that up. And she judged he was a soldier,
though only associated with the Light, as William Morris called
the Brigade. Mr. Wheeler had told her, they were keeping the
news back.

She said, "I must confide in you, for your confidence to
me, about Lis."

He said, "Lis? I tell you, there is no magic needed."

What was he going to tell her?

She had decided to step graciously forward, to stand a
moment, surveying the royal bed-room, to remark that the rain
was over, to suggest his finding her mantle for her, she had
flung it on the work-bench by the far door. They would trail
through the orangery, past the sunken-gardens, remarking on the
flowers in their seasons. She had marked time by the flowers.

394
85.

Flor? Had she made it all up?

She could not get out of her chair.

William Morris said, "_Guenevere and The Defence_ - what
is that? A poem I wrote, hearing a lady maligned by vicious
gossip. Did you read _The Defence of Guenevere_, I sent you?"

She did not answer.

"You usually - you always thank me for the poems I
send you."

"The knight who came was Launcelot at good need," she
said, "but I don't need anybody."

"You - no - you have a host of friends, people who
admire you, who admire -"

"Mr. Ruskin wanted to help me because of Gabriel. It's
Gabriel who charmed him."

"There's Allingham and the people you told me of at Mrs.
Howitt's, Garth Wilkinson, and the others at Oxford, the
Acklands -"

"There are plenty of people, now you bring them to my
notice. There is also, Barbara Leigh-Smith and Bessie parkes,
besides, I know the Brownings."

The colour had come back to her face.

"That's what I mean, the Brownings." He remembered
Godfrey, "you're a substantial fellow like old Browning, just
whisk her off to Italy or the South."

"Anyway," she flared back at him, "I was trying to work out that poem. It was confusing."

"It's very clearly stated."

"I don't call that clear."

"Nevertheless you, O Sir Gauwain, lie - "

"I don't mean that part. I mean those pennants. - "

"One of these cloths is heaven, and one hell,  
Now choose one cloth forever."

There were spots of flaming colour in her cheeks now.

"She had no choice," said Elizabeth Siddall.

"There is choice between - Flor and magic."

"Do you mean between Halbert and - "

"You said he set you in a magic circle, that he burnt out everything outside the circle."

"I said, I was Ophelia, Viola, Sylvia inside the circle. It wasn't only Gabriel. There was Mr. Hunt and Mr. Millais."

"I just said that you had a host of friends."

"I said, outside the circle, I was the scarecrow. I told you, that first time at Chatham Place, that I was the freak at Mrs. Tozer's - "

"I do not have to believe everything you tell me. You see things in a distorting mirror, like the flawed glass in the room downstairs, where we talked the last time - "

396
87.

"Ghosts, you said ghosts were in the palace. Why don't
you take me out, then?"

"It is what I am saying to you. I said, there was no magic
needed. The red-rose is red-and-white in the hedges. You don't
need those artificial York-and-Lancasters. The bramble-rose is
the red and white united, the faint colour of the berry-stain.
The briar-rose that runs wild in our English lanes, is more - "

"Heraldic - yes. That rose we spoke of, in what you
called the differences - "

"The seventh son."

" - is a single wild-rose. Must we go on about it? I
told you it was a fairy-tale. You said, that wild-rose was barbed,
meaning with small leaves. I said, it was thorns, didn't I?"

"He said, 'yes.'"

"Why are we waiting, if you want to leave here?"

"You told me you had something to tell me in confidence,
in return for my - Lis."

"I have been trying to tell you. It's that story. It
was being in love -

So she was in love.

He walked slowly down the long room. He picked up her
mantle and came slowly back. She was standing now, dismissing
an audience or waiting for the executioner.

397
88.

VI.

He said, "don't talk about it."

She said, "it's no matter, only I can't lie about it,
not to convince myself, that is, and if you can't convince
yourself, you can't convince others. It was part of our
religion. There was love and - illumination. It was after
I found I loved him, that the story really came true. I could
imagine Mr. Allingham in the forest, I could imagine you in
the forest, but it wasn't you or Mr. Allingham. I could imagine
Dr.
Garth Wilkinson ( even though he was married) but it wasn't
Garth Wilkinson, though he was so kind when the Howitts took
me to him and he was, as Mr. Howitt first described him, tall
and upright as a spear.

"You can see him for yourself - Gregor. Could I be in
love with a person I had never seen? I fell in love with him
and the terror that Dr. Wilkinson wanted to talk of, dropped
from me. I talked to Dr. Wilkinson about - but I won't ever
speak of it again - just the knife, because I can say, when
I fell in love with Gregor, the knife that threatened me, turned
to the sword that saved me.

"I have tired you out with talking. I'm not tired.
I could go on and on talking. To talk about him, makes me
forget the other. I wasn't made for a King's mistress nor

was I made for a Saint, like Mary Howitt. I like simple things
and nice curtains, as much as you do."

He had not lost her. In a way, she was nearer to him
than ever.

"Here's a funny thing," he said, "I felt an icy-finger
and a rose-spray tapped on the window. I was foolish enough
to think it was tapping me a message. You will forgive me?
I was thinking of Briar-rose, the Sleeping Princess and I wanted
the Prince to wake her. How charming those tales are. Here,
it's warm and the clock is ticking and we're just as we always
have been, for weeks now, with the tea-cups and the muffins.
And it's not an anti-climax. It's a sort of reward."

She was crying, crouched low in her chair, her wide
sleeves fallen back from her white arms, while she tried to
smother her sobs in the handkerchief that her hands clutched.

He had never seen her cry, nor dreamed of sobs so pitiful.

"You think I made it all up," she said.

"No, but there's a new idea - there are stories waiting.
The *Little Mermaid* was simply waiting for one of the Grimm
brothers - "

"It's Hans Anderson," she said. He had tapped her neatly.

"There always were these stories. They're in the saga
of the north, as well as in the Greek tales of Nereids - or

are mermaids Syrens? They're the same stories. I said your
story was symbolic. They're all symbolic."

"The worst of it is," she said, "I couldn't say what I
did make up. I must have read some of it from one of the Dante
books that Gabriel has, or maybe it was a pamphlet that William
Rossetti brought in; books and papers kept coming to Mr.
Rossetti after his death. There was one called _Forerunners of
Dante_. It was in that, I first read of Abelard. There might
have been more of the story in that. It was about the group
around Dante and how they developed from the Provence poets.
Maybe, even Gabriel has a note on it, in the _Vita Nuova_."

Had he really wounded her when he said, "I do not have
to believe everything you tell me?" Or had he delivered a more
vital blow when he spoke of having heard a lady maligned by
vicious gossip? Was she trying to conceal that injury by
reference to the story?

"I was not speaking of the story," he said, "when I said
that I did not have to believe everything you told me. Faulkner
remembered having heard of you in Oxford from one of the fellows
who had been to Miss Cardwell's readings. He said they asked
you to read the _Blessed Damozel_ but that you refused. He said
they were wild about you."

"Gabriel made many sketches for the _Blessed Damozel_.

of me

He did finish a small picture/sometimes, because Mr.Ruskin bought them. It was symbolic, I thought, his not finishing that picture that you wanted. He did finish a Saint George and The Princess Sabra. Gregor is a sort of Saint George."

"And you are the Princess Flora in that story."

"I could make out I was a Princess."

She had stopped crying.

"Your tea's cold," he said. He reached over and emptied the cup into the china basin. "These forget-me-nots are funny, aren't they? I am almost certain that we had this very tea-set in our nursery."

"You were a happy family."

"It did not prevent my looking for the Princess in the wild-wood and the hornbeam forest."

"And I suppose I was looking for the Prince too, always watching the ships at Wapping. It was pretty, before they built it over."

That terrible weeping! He knew the desolation, only he took it out in anger.

So she watched the ships at Wapping.

And Gregor was Saint George.

He said, "Godfrey was a bit overwhelming, at times.

But I thought of him as Richmond, turning the battle. I didn't go as far back as Saint George."

401
qq.

"Well, I don't mean - Gregor wasn't in that sense, a saintly person. Not a Saint, really. I mean, you could not help but wonder at him, But that's what it does to you, if you are in love with someone. But - "

He was afraid she would start crying again.

"It makes me sad to think how happy I was with Gabriel in Paris. That sounds funny. We made up a story in a place where we sat late, with mirrors and music playing. There was a lady with a gentleman and another sitting near me, who left when he saw them coming. Gabriel even had names for them. He called the lady - she was frail looking and in white - a Velasquez. He called her a Princess - and then he spoke her name, Madame de Fontenelle."

"De Fontenelle?"

"The gentleman was sitting near me. He got up as if to leave, and kissed her hand as he passed through the door-way. Gabriel admired his manners. It is odd how Gabriel sees things. He thought the gentleman who he called the lover, was a little like Mr. Allingham. I remember how Gabriel said, 'he wears his broadcloth like brocade'. Gabriel can make you see things."

"You love Gabriel?"

"It's like I said. There is love, but being in love is different. They were lovers, those two."

"Did Gabriel know them?"

"He said he had heard mention of a Princess - but I couldn't follow. He went on talking about Venice. But - "

William Morris pushed back his chair, jolting the table with his sudden movement.

He said, "it was Roland and Henri and the belle-soeur that you saw in Paris."

"What is the matter?" she said.

He was staring at her as he had done in the Palace.

"That rose-spray tapping on the window."

"It was windy," she said.

"There was no wind. I thought it was a message."

"Messages can come," she said. "Mrs. Howitt had tapping messages when Mr. Howitt was on that voyage to the Gold Coast."

So Godfrey was dead.

(She thought, "Dr. Wilkinson said, one shock begets another, one fear is sometimes displaced on another. Godfrey's sister was Lis. The shock of Lis being thrown in the forest would come back. He said he was looking for a Princess in the forest.")

She said, "I haven't sat with the Howitts for some time. There was quite a group and there was talk too, of what they called comparative religions." She tried to re-assemble herself, as she was wont to call it. She had been stricken in the King's bed-chamber. William Morris said, "you see things in a dis-

94.

torting mirror," but what was worse, he had said, "<u>The Defence</u> -
a poem I wrote, hearing a lady maligned by vicious gossip." That
started with Mr. Scott finding her at night, in the arbour, with
Gabriel, while the Howitts were away. It was better to say any-
thing, rather than have him think of Godfrey in India.

She said, "you were upset in the Palace, thinking of that
lady that you spoke of being maligned by gossip. She would
be glad, I think, to know your defence of her. But there is
hardly any use taking an attitude, once people begin talking.
It upset Mary Howitt - some gossip about me and Gabriel, being
found after dark in their summer-house, while they were away.
It would be worse, I told Mary, to try to explain things. I got
careless, sitting at odd times for Gabriel. He would want to
finish something and I'd stay on, in the studio." She was
speaking almost indifferently.

William Morris said, "don't try to minimise my brutality.
I was heartless in the same way with Godfrey."

What was it Godfrey had said? It was Godfrey who had first
expressed what he William had only half admitted, Lis was in
danger. Was Godfrey saying it again with the rose-spray on the
window? And was his own response to chivalry, the challenge,

One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,
Now choose one cloth for ever.

95.

"People call me clumsy," he said, There was only one thing he could do now.

He did it, as only he could do it.

"That sort of thing does happen," he said. "Drink up your tea, that's right. But you pour, this time."

"There's an old superstition that only one pours," she said. He re-filled her cup and managed the milk and sugar.

"It's one of Mum's sayings."

"I'm partly Welsh too," he said.

"Yes," said Elizabeth Siddall, "it's like you said, sitting here is a sort of reward. I can't think of anything I'd like better, if I had a wish-ring. I might wish to finish my story, properly that is, with in-sets of verses."

"Like Aucassan and Nicolette," he said. "It's the same story, the forest and the bower - or summer-house."

"I thought I would die, remembering," she said, "till you remarked in that summer-house (the time before the island) on elderberry-flower and honeysuckle fragrance blended."

"Godfrey heard the same story from Roland."

"You think then, that was Roland that I saw in Paris?"

"I know that it was Roland."

"I don't think Gabriel knew his name."

405

96

"But his name is de Fontenelle."

"I don't follow."

"It was his *belle-soeur*, his sister-in-law. She was married to his brother, Henri. They were all de Fontenelles."

"I can't get over Gabriel knowing of them. I don't think he knew them."

"There was a summer-house or boat-house on the river, and I even remember thinking there might be a sandy island, an eyot, when Godfrey told the story to me. They met there, Roland and Valerie, his *belle-soeur*, and a friend of hers, Aurelie, whom she wanted Roland to marry."

"Just those three?"

"There had been others. It was a sort of circle. Rather like our Brotherhood. But like our Brotherhood, the original group had dwindled down or concentrated out (like the jewel in the matrix) to just three. There were eight of us, in the beginning, well - the fellows are all there but Godfrey and I renewed the Brotherhood or re-created it, or crystallized out. Though I didn't know Roland and Valerie, they were a part of it."

"And the other - the girl you speak of?"

"Godfrey didn't say so and obviously, Roland wouldn't. But Valerie must have been desperate. She wanted Roland to marry

406
97.

Aurelie, so that they could all go about together. Godfrey said
that Roland said, Valerie was burning out like a white candle.
Obviously, Valerie was in love with Roland."

"Is in love with him, from what I could see from that
glimpse of her - burnt out but lighted inside. But what be-
came of Aurelia?"

"Godfrey said that Roland said, she had friends in the
Faubourg - the - the fashionable quarter and that tables
parlants were all the rage in Paris. She would find another
Circle. She was, Roland had told Godfrey, oeillet, carnation,
fragrant and worldly."

"And did he have a flower for Valerie?"

"He said she was a white camellia." William Morris had
forgotten that it was he himself who said it.

"It's like her. But their being in that summer-house is
hardly the same as me and Gabriel in the Hermitage arbour-room
at night, with the family away."

"Well, I don't know how often or when they went there - "

"You mean there was gossip?"

"Roland only - well, one had to get the story from the
things he didn't tell me - or tell Godfrey rather. And Godfrey
may not have told me the whole story."

"I see."

98.

"It's this way," said William Morris, "these circles go on, dimming at the edges, dispersing or growing fainter - "

"Like a pebble in a pond."

" - and the centre crystallizes like the pebble - only it's a jewel."

Mercifully, he had only to get out his pipe now. The worst was over.

"Do you think these people noticed, who just left?" she said.

"It wouldn't matter," he said, "but they didn't notice."

"You had your back to them. You wouldn't see them."

"And they wouldn't see you, crouched in the corner."

She was afraid - she was afraid of people.

"But nothing matters," he said, "because - "

"Being in love makes people careless."

"No," he said, "when love crystallizes out or contracts - how shall I say it? - to its single flame, one is no longer careless. But there are other dangers. As you said, Valerie was burnt out but lighted inside. Godfrey was a flame in crystal. One could not get him away, without smashing the crystal."

"Get him away?"

"He had messages from a table. It was Roland introduced him

99/100.

to what he called the telegraph de Dieu or talking table."

"Your - your Galahad Order had the talking table?"

"Only for experiment in old Faulkner's rooms at Pembroke.
Ted and Dix - one of the fellows, Dixon - began ragging, so
we stopped it. But Godfrey and I continued alone. Godfrey and
his brother Vernon had apparently taken the matter seriously
when Roland introduced them to the table."

"Then, there was Vernon, as well as you and Godfrey?"

was

"No. Vernon is at Cambridge. He/is helping with the
magazine. But anyway, Roland only confided in Godfrey after
the
Vernon had left. It was/last summer when I was with Ted at
Beauvais. Roland was staying with them at Ayton - "

"That was the King's Wood?"

William Morris said, "yes." He remembered how Godfrey had
said the message would die somehow, unless you shared it.

But Roland was convinced that Valerie would die if she went
on alone. And Roland had tried to dissuade Godfrey.

He said, "in the old chronicles, they say that Martyrdom
is a Sacrament."

"Why do you say that?"

The cloud was lifting, the heavy weight on his head - that
symbolic stone before the altar.

409

101.

"I was thinking of your story. You needn't make a Saint
George of your Gregor. He is the hero in the legend; the
Greeks worshipped heroes. But there is no need of worship.
It's a Sacrament that should be remembered."

410
192.

VII.

He wouldn't hear, not yet, she had told him. But he
thought he knew as much as Mr. Joseph Wheeler, and maybe a little
more about communications with the East India Company. Godfrey
had a way of disappearing in mid-term, William had thought nothing
of it. Godfrey might have been gone six months. There was no
date on the letter, forwarded by Vernon Lushington from Cambridge.
There was no indication of where the letter had been written.
The original letter to Vernon, enclosing his own note, might even
have come from Marseilles. At that, Vernon might have been asked
to hold it over. And even if there was any chance of it leak through,
in any case, if it were bad news. India! He
almost envied Godfrey. He thought of rugs, the shawl his mother
cherished, one of the early imported Paisleys. He remembered
his silk-worms.

Why think of India in terms of disaster? And hadn't
Godfrey said of the messages or the senders of them, "not always
disembodied, from what Roland said." That was the first talk
in Godfrey's room. There was no use asking at Balliol, what has
become of Lushington? If Godfrey had covered his tracks, there
must be a reason for it. In any case, he William had his story.
It was her story.

102

He doubted if she were, as she said, "in love." That is,
he doubted if her love or inspiration or illumination burnt her
out like Valerie, like Godfrey. Well, there was still Roland,
balanced and logical (he saw him), impetuous, romantic, devoted,
devout, loyal. He was, if you will, a survivor of a vanished
France. France, however you look at it, had been destroyed by
Revolution and by Conquest. But there were a few left.

Roland - wasn't the other chap, Oliver?

William had called himself Oliver, sometimes Olivier.
But he felt now, it might have been an unconscious association.
He must have known from the beginning, that Godfrey would leave
him.

Was it Charlemagne? There was a narrow defile or valley -
Ronceveau, Roncevalle? - the name eluded him. Did it matter?
There was a trumpet sounding. But his story had Sicily for its
setting and Count Robert for its champion.

Why Robert? She had said Manfred.

It was an island-story, and however he might try, he could
not get away from Shakespeare. There was a Duke of Sicily or
Count, in one of the plays, wasn't there? He couldn't remember.
But he saw Algernon and Lis, or Florence and Flor in the old
Twelfth Night character. They were of a size, they were of an

104

age; she would crop off her over-abundant length of mermaid tresses. She had (her own story) taken his dagger and flung her chain, in the traditional Rosalind gesture, round his neck, "wear this for me." If Shakespeare hadn't written her story, who had? It was, as he had said, one of those stories, waiting to be written. Viola was her first part or character, and Deverell who chose it for her, had wanted to be an actor. It was natural to see the thing, in retrospect, in the form of a play.

She couldn't write it. She hadn't the detachment, the drive. Her dream might take her deeper, further, as a mermaid might dive down. But he was the helmsman, the mariner aware of danger. She would slide off or around jagged reefs that would rip open his keel. She was not aware of the treasure that she gathered from the depth. Viola - it was a flower really, one of her many Flor names.

Or he was a fisherman, wading deeper, deeper with the thick or fine mesh, woven by his own hands.

The Fisher King - that was another of the Grail stories, with threats of devastation, war and famine.

They called this the Peace Year, and however he might try to steel himself against these vagrant rumours, he could not help remembering half-whispered confidences in their drawing-room after dinner. He had a "safe place" with a book, on the sofa in the

4/3
105.

corner. His father and Mr. Worthington or Mr. Ellis from the
city, would inevitably move over from the fire-place, with their
coffee-cups and cigars, and talk of "India and the Company."

It was part of adventure, Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh. William
Morris had derided what he called the out-moded Byronic gesture
of Carew and his fellows. He was no good. He didn't know what
intrigue was on foot, what danger to the East India Company.
But there had always been whispered danger.

He had muttered to himself, while Godfrey in the candle-
light, lifted the decanter to re-fill their glasses, "Carew, some
damned Elizabethan or Lovelace fellow." So was Godfrey! You
couldn't break their Brotherhood, "cup-bearer to King Charles,
damned Royalist."

But there was another Brotherhood and Godfrey was of it,
with his lyric translations of de Fontenelle's findings at the
Bibliothèque. You might say that every cavalier, every King's
gentleman was a rhymster, as he was a swordsman by profession.
There was one gentleman - hardly of their company - whose game
was only one remove from single-stick. He was an archer, like every stable-boy on the common.

He was a vagrant, a gypsy, a strolling-player.

106.

William Morris never talked of William Shakespeare except to challenge him, as he had challenged Godfrey.

You would die of worship if you let yourself go.

You would never write another line.

He had said to Godfrey, if he was anybody, he was Giles the forester, in his play.

He had said that Shakespeare had mapped out all enchantment.

But there was a gap, those years between. Chaucer belonged to the middle-ages; there was a tradition that Chaucer had met Petrarch at Padua. Dante - Petrarch - Chaucer. Before Dante, the troubadours.

Yes, they went to Sicily.

It was, he told himself, a walled city. She had not spoken of the bay-blossom but the crushed fragrance of the bay-leaf. It was winter. Algernon had spoken of Nordic runes for his Provence play. It had seemed a contradiction. But the Vikings were sea-rovers. Ruskin had spoken of a stone lion in Venice, scratched with the names of Sea-kings.

He had thought of Vikings and the singers of Provence as widely separated in time and in space.

But were they? What did he know of either? And nearer home, the Normans were Norsemen. Duke Robert was a Norman.

415

107

You could get (in Algernon's play) a migrant Norse Chief
meeting his counterpart in Robert of Sicily. But this was not
Algernon's play, though Algernon had first inspired him with his
talk of Vikings influencing or being influenced by the singers
of Provence.

There were both Southern French and Northern French in
Sicily - Franks.

There were the earlier settlements of Greeks and Romans.

Was Sicily Italian?

It was conquered by Duke Robert. Who conquered England?

The story was later than Duke William. He had told her
(Flor) that Simon de Montfort was a contemporary of the Platagenet
Henry III. Henry II was the father of Richard Lion-heart. They
were still sea-rovers.

But Eleanor, Richard's mother, if he was not mistaken, was
of the province (Provence). They met even here in England, the
Viking and the troubadour. One did not have to go to Sicily to
find the School of Love challenged by the Conqueror.

But it was the School that challenged the Conqueror, Robert
in Sicily.

He himself was Hallebarde. Even in Provence, you may have
a Viking forebear. He was Hal; he was of the Knights Credentes,
Halberd or Hallebarde.

HIL
107.

He was of the School, as they had already come to call the
Church in England. He was Hal the Bard, with the _illuminati_.

Had they ever forgotten? He did not think so. He had said
to Godfrey (almost his last words to him), "it's all there, all
this, everything - The Templars, Shakespeare, Raleigh."

It was in answer to Godfrey's question, "The School of
Night?"

They went by contradiction, _renversé_, It must have been
the School of Light.

Its law was preserved in the set metres of _lai_ and _chanson_.
No doubt, to the initiate, there were still further inner readings
in the _vers_ or _verset_.

Runic - divinatory.

But we need not spoil the texture of the _verset_ to understand the message, any more than it is necessary to pull a rose to pieces to get at its secret.

Flor - adore - before - door - floret - verset.

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

Mariae Virginis.

His were nursery-rhymes. He had been the first to say so.
But sometimes,

Two red roses across the moon,

417
108.

he could equally say that the words were an invocation.

Bay strengthens our bastion
The bay-branch in leaf,
Bearing the seed to leaven
Sorrow and all grief,
Flor Amoris.

The rock-way is open
Through rock-cleft and cave,
The dark stone is broken
That covered the grave,
Flor Amoris.

She had said, "you make it sad, that Yoland, The graves stand grey in a row." And when they were speaking of the messages, that last time in Godfrey's room, Godfrey had said he imagined their Latin carved on old stones. "Tomb-stones?" was William's inevitable rejoinder but Godfrey had said, "milestones." Their few abbreviated words might almost have been clock-numbers or a motto on a sun-dial,

TEMP. LUM. IN. TEMP. OMN. UN.

Well, there was the School of Night, of Light, Lumen.

He believed the old Temple, near the Law Courts was originally octagonal, like Godfrey's tower-room. The Templars were dispersed and disbanded by the Inquisition. He had spoken of them and the Knights of Malta with Godfrey. The Knights of Malta were the Knights Credentes.

Godfrey had communicated with his friend Carew. No doubt,

413
102.

the Knights had established some form of communication. William believed that was their secret and their Brotherhood.

It was again, a far cry from the Knights Credentes in Malta and Provence, to the new vulgar elegance of Paris. But oddly, it was from Paris that the *table parlant* had come to Godfrey. There were three grades, degrees or divisions. There were the merely mondaine, carrying social intercourse into a vague, unreliable dream-world. There were the new investigators, Faraday and other serious technical experimentors in the higher vibrations, telepathy and so on. There was a final group, if group it could be called, so far, he had found only two - individuals of outstanding distinction, de Fontenelle and Godfrey.

The *lai*, the *vivanelle* and *roundel* had something to do with it. She had said, names make a difference. How well he knew that! There was an inevitability about rhyme and assonance that he sometimes felt could not be wholly accidental. It was inevitable that seven should rhyme with heaven. *This is the tune of the Seven Towers*, he had written and *Therefore, said fair Yoland of the flowers*. Flowers, towers, bowers. He was glad he had remembered Aucassan and Nicolette and the wattled flower-arbour in the woods. It was Aucassan and Nicolette? He had been surprised when he got back to his rooms, after their last meeting, to find he had been mistaken about *Amis and Amile*. There were two stories of

419

-110-

the period. Florence was in *The Tale of King Florus and the Fair Jehane*. He had referred to himself as Florian, when she first spoke of Flor.

Florence was the son of King Floris and Floria was his daughter.

There was Jehane too. Perhaps it was because of Jehane that he had confused the stories. He wanted a different ending for his *Golden Wings*.

> I cannot stay here all alone,
> Or meet their happy faces here,
> And wretchedly I have no fear;
> A little while, and I am gone.

But she had fear. She was still wretchedly obsessed.

*Why has she a broken sword?*
*Mary! She is slain outright* -
that was the end of *Tall Jehane du Castel-beau*.

He had called her Jehane in *Golden Wings*.

But Jehane was someone else now. He did not know who.

Jehane was the friend or companion of Hallebarde in the story. In the original tale, she was the wife of the King. In this story, she might be the sister of Florus.

She was not Margaret, not de Liliis, not Alys.

It was through no lack of understanding her nightmare. He understood only too well. He could not lure her out of her magic-circle, he must not be dragged into it. He had been warned

420
iii.

by a rose-spray tapping on the window of a notoriously haunted
Palace, in its very Bluebeard chamber. It was her way of telling
fortunes.

He had flung wide his nets. If only she were a mermaid.
Her humanity was at war with the fiction woven round her. Perhaps,
he had helped weave this fiction but he had at the same time
(ruthlessly if you will), offered the sword that would have
severed the fatal Gordian knot.

He would have saved her. He had said, "when do you marry
Gabriel?"

He had written poems to her and although the stories were
for the most part, written before he met her, she was in the
stories.

But "one thrust me through the breast with a spear," in
*Golden Wings*, and though "before them lay a great space of
flowers" in *The Hollow Land*, it was after his death, her death.
He would find "a great space of flowers" for the Fair Jehane and
Hallebarde, before death.

In *Svend*, he had written of ghastly wounds and streets red
with blood. There was *Gertha* in the field of battle, "something
very horrible to gaze at, to pass over." Olaf the King finds
her when she enters the circle of trees, but Olaf is a ghost

421

422

112

and after embracing Olaf, Gertha dies. "The blue speedwell kissed her white cheek." Hallebarde and the Fair Jehane must meet, this side of the grave.

A Dream ends with "the moon shining on the tomb, throwing
fair colours on it from the painted glass", and Walter in the
Unknown Church, dies, having dedicated twenty years of his life,
to chiselling the stone-lilies on the tomb of Margaret and Amyot.

Lis. He might have saved her.

They were mile-stones, not tomb-stones, Godfrey had said.

423.

PART IV.

I

"I see you have succumbed at last," said Gabriel.

"A fellow must rest sometimes."

"I don't mean that."

"You mean my blue shirt?"

"Partly. I was thinking of your brushes."

"Brushes?"

"You've found a use at last, for your white ties."

"That was Ted's idea."

"I doubt it. Ted is not eccentric nor does he encourage eccentricity in others. He works like a vernisseur. He'd never hang his brushes in the window on a white tie. It's not done. He's not a rebel. There's no rebellion in him. He's a disciple, a follower, an imitator - "

"I thought you liked Ted's work."

"So I do. But he would never order a cupboard or a sideboard or a settle or whatever you call this thing, until he'd taken the measurements of the door it was to come in by. This will never be forgotten."

424.

"No," said William Morris.

"It will always be held against you, this - "

"It was my first essay at designing furniture."

"It's not furniture, it's a luggage van. It's like you. It's as long as it's broad. It's clumsy. It's unusual. I ask myself, is it a barn? Is it an Ark? What made you think of it, anyway?"

"We had to have furniture. You admired the table."

"That's sheer refectory. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps it's all monastic. But I prefer the stuffiness of the Bishop's palace, heavy velvets, brocades - Bill calls me a brocanteur - candelebra - "

"Why do you waste your good paint then, on those doors?"

"They're not my paints, they're Ted's."

"I've heard you called an indolent fellow. Do you never stop work?"

"My salutation," said Gabriel Rossetti.

Gabriel had chosen to paint the *Salutation of Beatrice*, outside one of the doors of the already famous settle that had had to be dismantled before it could enter the door of No. 17, Red Lion Square. It had three shutters over the seat. Gabriel Rossetti remembered Walter Deverell. He might even

425.

now be standing behind his shoulder. "I'm sorry Gabriel, but
I can't kick you out." Deverell might be speaking to him.
He might be speaking to Deverell. The pale wraith was stand-
ing on the estrade, the wedgewood-blue, discarded from Aunt
Charlotte's drawing-room, did not quite match her eyes. She
stood behind him. But that was another picture. It was the
Blessed Damozel that she said he hadn't thanked her for. He
had never thanked Lizzie.

"Speaking of salutation," said Gabriel, still kneeling
on the broad seat of the settle, "don't you like Lizzie?"

William Morris did not answer.

Gabriel Rossetti turned, "I asked you a question," he said.

William Morris said, "I heard you." The blue shirt and
the rough beard did not alter his manner; on the other hand,
they seemed to emphasize an Oxford insolence that Gabriel had
not noticed while Morris was at Oxford. William Morris was
more assured, he seemed much older though it was less than a
year ago that he and Edward Burne-Jones had moved into Red
Lion Square. Said Rossetti, "the first sketch I did of Lizzie
was in this studio. It was Deverell's place though I elbowed
my way in."

"So Ted told me, but he didn't put it that way."

426.

"Ted tells you everything?"

"No doubt, Ted told you why Lizzie swept out and went to live in Hampstead. Did you see Lizzie in Spring Cottage? You might have popped in after a judicious, professional visit to Keat's House - only two minutes walk around the corner. You are interested, I believe, in restoration - or should I say preservation?" Gabriel stepped back as if to view the blocked-in blue and crimson on the wooden panel. William Morris remained stretched in what Gabriel had called (at their first talk in Chatham Place) undergraduate abandon. Morris had an air of independence which he had lacked while he was in Street's office. He had given up the office and spent his nights and days at life-classes and pouring over old manuscripts and records. Gabriel did not spoil his gesture, his stage-business, by too prolonged a survey of the panel. "Fra Pace," he said, "was done in X - a sort of chess-board idea, I was working on. I built the *Return of Tibullus to Delia* on single arches. It was a later development, experimental really. *Hamlet and Ophelia* and *Cassandra* (the first ones) were pure chess-board. Would water-colour technique take better on this board? Do you

427.

remember Galahad at the Shrine, The Blue Closet, The Tune of
the Seven Towers, The Marriage of Saint George - all water-
colours. Will a wooden panel go with my first Dante's Dream?
To whom belongs the pahel? It's your Ark. If I paint my
sublime masterpiece on its front door, is the Ark mine?"
Rossetti turned round. "But I asked you some time back, another
question."

"I remember The Tune of the Seven Towers," said William
Morris.

"Your poem was my inspiration - perhaps it is only
fair, that my inspiration should be your poem."

"You have many inspirations," said William Morris.

"Man does not live by bread alone," said Gabriel," and
contrariwise - well, inspiration, as I had occasion once
to tell you, does not wear me out. It wears out other people.
Do you remember my speaking of inspiration, the first time I
saw you?"

"I remember everything you said, if you mean the first
time I saw you alone."

"Which being the case, why should you assiduously avoid the
opportunity of seeing me alone, since?"

"Since when?"

428.

"Since the beginning."

"There were too many people about."

"You mean Gus?"

"I can't say that I have anything against him."

"I have. But all that in time. By what miracle, are we alone here?"

"Ted had those commissions. Didn't you ask him to go to Oxford?"

"Where's Red Lion Mary?"

"I told Mary she could have the day off."

"Expecting - anybody?"

"But to return to the question," said Gabriel, "what came between you and Lizzie?"

Was this fencing? Was this single-stick? William Morris heaved out of the low chair.

"Don't prowl," said Rossetti, "you make me nervous. I was painting and you were prowling that first time I saw you alone. 'Let by-gones be', says Mrs. Birrell when she smashes my blue bowl - a collector's item, you can't replace. # Canton? Ming? No, that's *aubergine*, a wonderful word - there's no English for it. I have heard it translated mad-apple. You

429.

couldn't call aubergine, egg-plant. Melon-gourd perhaps,
suggests it better? You're not interested in china?

Rossetti poised his brush like a toreador about to fling
the dart. Why wouldn't the fellow answer? It's true, Morris
could if he had wished, turn at any moment and trample his
tormentor. Rossetti studied his palette. He examined his
brush, turned to the table and carefully chose another. Then
he laid down the palette. "I can ask you," he said, "what I
asked Ruskin, after I came back from Paris. Lizzie and I
were in Paris. She was happy. No doubt, she told you we had
been to Paris."

"Yes," said Morris.

"I advise you to sit down," said Rossetti. "I wish to
do the prowling. I hold forth to a vast assembly. My father
wrote libretoes for Rossini. My father was at one time,
curator of marbles and bronzes at the Naples museum. There
were the Carbonari. There was proscription. Gabriele
Rossetti the poet, was hidden in the slums of the Naples.
An English gentlewoman, one Lady Moore, inquired diligently
for the poet. Why? He might have died there. He was brought
to Malta. The London Foreign Office wouldn't have suspects
stationed on the still seething island. Why must Gabriele

430.

leave Malta? He could live in England. Did Gabriele Rossetti
patriot, poet, art-expert and musical collaborator want to
live in England? Well, he could live, anyway. Sir Graham
Moore brought him to Spithead in 1824. Rossetti (Gabriele)
was then almost forty. He had left his heart's dream in Malta.
He and one John Hookham Frere had uncovered between them, the
clue to Dante's entire system. Don't ask me what the clue
was. They never met after. They corresponded for twenty
years in a sort of code that neither Bill nor I can make head
or tail of."

"This is all very interesting," said William Morris
dryly.

"You are not interested. Do you care for Dante? But
that is not what I want to ask you. I want to ask you what I
asked Ruskin when I returned from Paris. That was last
November. Was it? Or November before last? It was the
winter you blew in, out of the snow. But that was January.
It was, it turned out, the *peace-year*. Can you work that out?"

"No," said Morris. He bit off the monosyllable.

"Don't growl at me," said Rossetti. "Where are your
beastly matches? Since you won't sit down, I'll lean against
the table. Oh, thank you - the settle -"

431.

He went on, "have you ever had small-pox?"

William Morris was looking out of the window. He did not turn round. "I remember every word of that first talk," said Rossetti. "Must it be the last talk?" Still, Morris did not answer. "I asked if anyone had painted your mug and what as. I've done it since, as Lancelot before you grew your beard. There was a chance then, for chatting, only Ted interrupted - or was it Lizzie? She was in and out, then. She wasn't so unhappy. What unhinged her was Ted talking about an old plan you'd once had. It wasn't exactly my idea, but she blamed me. We would all get together, on the lines of some scheme you'd mapped out at Oxford."

"Thelma," Morris condescended to growl. "Abbey of Thelma."

"A sort of monastic order - yes - but with wives. Ted's Lady Greensleeves was already in love with a place she'd found in Kensington - I think it was - somewhere. Cedar Lodge or Cedar Villa - we'd call it Cedar Abbey. I had been over the ground so many times with Lizzie. The last time was in Paris. I concluded that it bored her - the idea of getting married. I was for chucking it all here and taking her to - "

William Morris turned round. Rossetti wanted to tell him something. He couldn't say it. Morris knew the feeling.

432.

"Where did you want to take her?"

"Florence," said Gabriel Rossetti.

"Why didn't you go to Florence?"

"Why? Why? Why? Why did I come back to England?
Why did I let Lizzie come back?"

"I am glad you came back," said William Morris. The
words caught in his throat but he had to say them. He produced
a box of matches. He laid it on the table. Gabriel did not
see it. "When I close my eyes, I see things in my head, here,"
said Gabriel. He beat at his forehead with the inner wrist-
bones. His hands were clenched, showing the taut tendons as
Morris stood above him. He wanted to lay his hand on the
bowed head. "I never had small-pox," said William Morris.

"The Polidoris were very kind," said Gabriel. He was
seated in the unpainted corner of the settle. He leaned his
head back, against the bare wood. His eyes were still closed.
"Aunt Charlotte got her doctor to say it was chicken-pox.
Aunt Charlotte is a saint, really. Gabriel must be moved before
the other children caught it. But when the fight came, it
was Tibbie who won the battle. She wasn't Tibbie, then. I
can't even remember her name. She married Tibbs afterwards.
She was a country-girl. She would have the young gentleman in

433.

her own bed-room, apart from the rest of the house. It wasn't right with people in and out like, and Madame with her church work. But I didn't mean to say this. We were talking about Ruskin."

"We were talking about the Abbey scheme."

"It came back to Hunt and Annie Miller. How could anyone suggest, Lizzie said, that she could live with Annie Miller? God - Annie Miller! She knew it wasn't Annie Miller - but how tell her? How tell her that I raved in the night and a country-girl with braids like ripe corn lay down beside me ... would anyone believe me?"

"No one," said William Morris. "No one knows what children go through."

"The brat in me cries in the night - and there's -
But I couldn't tell Lizzie. She might get small-pox. That's
how my mind works."

Rossetti opened his eyes. They were wide, staring,
the grey iris blotted out with the black pupil. "That's
Lilith, that's Adam's first wife. You know all about it,"
said Gabriel Rossetti.

William Morris was still standing by the table. The
black pupils seemed to grow larger; in a moment, unless he
broke the tension, he felt the pupils would be superimposed

434.

on one another and he would be staring into a single circle.
He would be hypnotized, caught in a luminous black crystal.
The curious lids over his own eyes quivered. He shut his
eyes upon ordinary darkness. Out of the crystal, the voice
was speaking.

"Lizzie. Do you know her name, really? She is
Blanchelys out of my Staff and Script. Do you remember?
The other is Lilith from Eden Bower. You've read my poetry?"

Morris turned, as if looking toward the window. He
propped himself against the table, his eyes still closed.
"I remember," he said. "I have read your poetry. I had
occasion one day, to speak of Algernon. I said Algernon's
poetry was only to be compared with Shelley. I meant, he had
no living rival. I meant it or thought I meant it. But
Algernon - how shall I say? There is hope for Algernon."

"There is no hope for Rossetti?"

"None. Not an atom. And there is no hope for those
who give in to Rossetti."

"Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

"There was something about her. I had seen her some-
where. I had written about her in my first poems and romances.
She answers the description. You invent her - or imagine

435.

her - she appears. It's startling. You didn't want the picture. It was an unfinished sketch in <u>pervanche</u> blue - "

"I called it wedgewood," said Rossetti.

"It was propped on the floor behind the curtain, that first time I came in, out of the snow. It was January, the <u>Peace Year</u>, as you say. I was looking for something and I found it. You asked if I was seeing things. I was seeing the picture. You didn't want it. Later, it came to life again, unexpectedly, and you say, 'I wondered where that frame had got to.' You only wanted the frame, you didn't want the picture."

"But she would not give me the picture. She was saving it. I thought she was saving it for you. But she said she was in love with someone - someone else - not Gabriel - "

"She told me the same in Paris."

"I didn't want to intrude. I thought that I could save her. I called her Lis, she never knew it - she thought Lis was the sister of - of a friend. He's in India. He may be dead, too."

"Dead - <u>too?</u>"

"His sister was killed in an accident. He thought he was responsible. He communicated with his sister - for a

436.

time, that is. He was concerned - how shall I say it?

He was in a way, connected with the Light Brigade. He lost -
well, many friends, and a certain friend who was to have
married his sister. He lost his - well, you might say,
his generation. He said the Light took heavy toll of the -
Ayton, it was - hunting-families. He communicated with
this Carew who was to have married his sister."

And why was he telling this to Gabriel Rossetti?

He opened his eyes to the room and the room outline.
It was a high studio-room. There was the precious north-
light that Gabriel had spoken of, in the beginning. There
were the other windows. There were the three rooms, a bed-
room and another. Framed in squares, like separate painted
pictures, or set there in stained-glass, was the light,
luminous on the tangle of the garden - thorn-bushes, mari-
golds and lilies.

"That you should call her Blanchelys and that I should
call her Lis, is no accident," said William Morris.

"There is no accident," said Gabriel. "That's what
I was working out or trying to work out, with my chess-pieces.
But you can only see the pattern after the game is over.
I was born in England. You have heard of Little Italy?

437.

Soho, I mean. There was the delicious smell of onions; garlic was a passion of my father. Does garlic go with Dante? What would you do, if it went round, whispered from Lavinia (my mother) to Maria (my elder sister), from Maria to Gaby, from Gab to Bill, from Bill to little Christie? What would you do, I mean, if Father Gavazzi and Guiseppe Mazzini both turned up together? You could sit on the floor with your crayons. We had the answer. It was Maria's idea. 'Say, yes we have had our supper and whisper under your breath (when Father Gavazzi asks you), yesterday.' It wasn't a lie, then. Perhaps Rolandi who dealt in old books, or the coal-man Faro, might drop in at the same time. 'We've had our supper', was a code-word - pass friend. Faro and Rolandi would sit with us by the fire-place. We were always hungry. So were Faro and Rolandi.'

"There had been the grand tour before Napoleon but Gabriele Rossetti came in too late for aristocratic coaching. But there was a new flutter and sympathy for Italians in England, due to the attempted revolution and the prison stories. Gabriele had gout. Gabriele took snuff. It was suggested if he called himself *cavaliere*, he might ask ten bob for a lesson. He taught during the day and worked all night at Dante.

438.

"I was going to ask you a question, the same question I asked Ruskin when I first came back from Paris. But that question can wait. I have another question."

"Why did Gabriele Rossetti leave Malta? Why was I born in England? Why did I shriek in the night, 'they don't understand, they don't understand'? I had forgotten my English. In my delirium, I thought I was lost. I was lost. I cried to an English country-girl in Italian, but she understood me. I am speaking a strange language to you who do not know Italian, but you understand me."

"I have found the clue to something that is more important than I or you or - Lizzie. Yet, it is I and you and Lizzie. It is others but I can't collect them - or recollect them. What did you say your friend's name was?"

"I didn't say," said William Morris, "but his name is Lushington, Godfrey Lushington." He added, "there was another chap, Rolando."

"What I mean," said Gabriel, "art is being hungry. When you're starved, you can paint a picture. The two go together. Deverell wasn't starved, not in that sense. But they say I killed him."

"That is impossible."

439.

"It was his studio. Lizzie was his model. Lizzie wouldn't come here. She said the place was haunted. She went off to Matlock, after she left Hampstead. I won't ask her to come back. Lizzie is at heart, conservative. She winds the clock."

William Morris saw them sitting in a row, watching the clock. Their eyes widen and grow anxious as the bell rings. "It's only the newspaper boy," says Maria. "It's maybe, the man with the monkey -" "St-st," says Gabriel, "you mustn't speak of the man with the monkey, Willum. He left a message last time." It was Lavinia, "come children, say good-evening to Father -" what did Gabriel say his name was?

"I see it all so clearly," said William Morris, "ah - er - that is - Father - what did you say his name was?"

"You mean Gavazzi? I was talking about Lizzie."

"I understood she went to Matlock. I don't know the country. I gather, it's cliffs and downs, rather rough and rugged - north Derbyshire?"

Gabriel said, "I read some of her letters to Ted - parts of them - before you left Street's office. In fact, as you know, my spending so much of my time here with - Ted, was actually what sent her off to Hampstead."

440.

"I may have sent her off to Hampstead. We had a sort of - sort of - well, explosion on my part in Hampton Court, last summer. It was my fault. I led her on to tell a story. It upset her. It was a story she started, she said, before she went to France. I first heard of it from the letter that you read to me that first evening I blew in. I was curious about the story. I saw Miss - ah, Lis, as I called her, perhaps a dozen times altogether, counting the times I met her at Chatham Place. I didn't see her again after - I wrote a number of times with suggestions for the story, but she ignored my last letters. I heard from Ted that she seemed better (from your account) and was planning visiting Sheffield and seeing some of the old places in the neighbourhood. I couldn't go on with the story. It was her story. It was troubadours before Dante. Algernon started it really - at least, as far as I was concerned, with some books he lent me, old French and a play he wanted to write. He doesn't seem to have gone on with it. It seems to evade everybody. But it's the same story."

"Do you mean <u>Chastelard?</u> or Algernon's Queen Yseult?"

"He called it <u>The Albagenses.</u>"

"Do you mean to tell me that little Algernon has blundered into the Albigensians?"

441.

"Why blundered?"

"It's an *impasse*. No one gets any further."

"Any further than - what?"

"Why the idea, the title, the beginning - the what
do you call it - the prologue."

you remember,

"She called her story, in the end, The Gold Chord."

"She would somehow," drawled Gabriel Rossetti.

He went over to the window. The light was fading on
the lilies, and the marigolds were turned in on themselves
like marsh-buds lost in their thick leaves. Gabriel did not
want to talk about the Albigensians, the troubadours, the
Kathars. It was all in Dante. How talk about it to a fellow
who didn't know Italian? He would have to explain from the
beginning. It was madness. And it was - it was - it
was his father's Dante.

"You think me impertinent," said William Morris, "to
come crashing in on - on - "

Gabriel did not answer. Then (but turned toward the
window and half whispered), "l'amor che move il sole e l'altre
stelle."

"What -" said William Morris.

It was very still in the room.

Gabriel thought, "Oh God, what would I not give to have

442.

the answer." There might be hope yet, though he and William Rossetti had gone over the papers, over and over, and studied the cramped notes and entrances in their father's earliest edition and the later printings of the Commedia. This was his country. Lizzie might have picked up a few crumbs, hearing him and Bill shouting at one another. Gabriel forgot that when he and his brother argued about Dante, they shouted in Italian.

"It was the names," said William Morris. He could let it go now. He had offended Gabriel. He could let this go now, but he couldn't ... not now. He had committed himself to the story, to Lis and the Gold Chord that bound them, that bound them all together. Gabriel was whispering Italian.

"What are you saying, Gabriel?"

"L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle," said Gabriel.

443.

II

"I don't have to borrow money," said Rossetti,
"commissions are rolling in, but I've lost my model. Can
you work that out?"

"No," said William Morris. But he was lost now.

"I think I've heard of - er - Lushington. I must
have met him."

"I don't think so."

"I'm sure I've met him somewhere. He was around with
Ted. He was working on the paper, the *Oxford and Cambridge*."

"You might have met his brother. He was back and forth
from Cambridge. Godfrey was at Balliol." But now, William
didn't want to talk of Godfrey. He did not want to talk of
Vivien and the King's Wood. It seemed far away, thin, tenuous,
colourless, embroidered as he had first visualised the scene
in faded blue, grey and dull brown. The crimson and sea-
purple of Gabriel Rossetti's least expression, his intimate,
trivial or even base experience, burnt out the fawn and sepia
like a fire sweeping through a forest. He had felt Godfrey's

*My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains*
*My sense,*

444.

but in retrospect, Godfrey's experience was a dream, a cold delirium. How could Godfrey turn the simple warning of Carew and Vivien into a battle-cry, another plunge in perfect form, to death?

He said, "do you happen to know if - if Ted has seen or heard from Vernon recently?"

"Vernon?"

"Godfrey's brother, Vernon Lushington."

He had said to Godfrey that they were out of Shakespeare, enchantment, Belmont from *The Merchant*. Had he himself opened the wrong casket, choosing Godfrey, neglecting Ted and the other chaps of the old Galahad circle? Had he himself plunged ahead, dazzled by Godfrey, as Godfrey had followed Carew? He had moreover, made it part of his story, he had gone over it in his imagination and jotted down impressions, lest he should forget the sequence of their talks together, lest in leaving London, Lis should have *herself* broken the thread that bound them. "I may have appeared sullen," said William Morris, "I have kept out of your way, you say you wondered. Yes, I was angry about - about - Ted said it was one of the best pictures you had done. It was your calling it -"

"Bocca baciata," said Rossetti.

445.

"It was that that sent me raving in the Palace - the
royal room at Hampton Court. It was the last time I saw her
alone."

Even now, though the sun had sunk behind the plane-
trees, to his left (he oriented himself as he stood there),
across and behind Kensington and the river at Kew, he felt
the flame - or heard it almost -

"The marigold that goes to bed with the sun," said Gabriel
Rossetti.

"Couldn't you have called it _The Marigold_?" said
William Morris. The voice came from far off, yet it was his
voice speaking. It was his voice speaking, "couldn't you
have called it _The Marigold_?" It wasn't Shakespeare, it
wasn't Dante speaking.

The voice matched the long wooden trestle-table, the
blocked-in outline of the enormous cupboard-settle. It was
the same voice that had said to Elizabeth Siddall, now almost
a year ago, "these forget-me-nots are funny, aren't they?
I am almost certain that we had this very tea-set in our
nursery."

"You said there was another chap, as well."

"Rolando."

"English?"

446.

"Roland was - is French. I never met him. He tried to keep Godfrey away from communication."

"What put Lushington into communication in the first place?"

William Morris did not want to talk about it, not now. Yet the communication had led to Lis, led to his intimate talks with her, those times at the Tudor Rose. He had gone over them, assembling, re-assembling the scenes, repeating their talks together and continuing unfinished conversations. In his reverie, he had talked by the hour in the galleries of the palace, although he had said and affirmed that Hal, as she called him, Halberd or Hallebarde, had another companion in the story. He could never dismiss Gabriel from her background, and as well, she had said, "it was being in love."

But most poignant, most tragic was the voice that stammered, "I like simple things and nice curtains, as much as you do."

"You've put a new idea into my head," said William Morris. "Or the Ark has. I want to do designs in stuffs, flower patterns, but simple meadow flowers, I would like to do a strawberry-flower, a periwinkle, daisies flung down as if a child had spilt a basket on the grass - all leaves."

447.

"I have that job for you at Oxford before you get onto
your leaves," said Gabriel Rossetti.

"I don't paint well enough to help in your Union venture,"
said Morris. "Ted is wild about it."

"You paint as well as some of the chaps. Faulkner is
putting his mathematical mind to work, on some line patterns.
You can begin painting your flower-patterns on the ceiling or
fill up the bays."

"Sun-flowers," said William Morris. He thought of
hollyhocks, cream, rose, pale-rose, black-purple. "I could
do a mallow pattern."

"Better stick to sun-flowers. What did you say her
name was?"

"Her name? I don't remember - "

"The girl, the sister he thought he had killed. You
were saying it was the names."

"I was thinking of the names in the <u>Gold Chord</u>. At least -"

"What were the names in the <u>Gold Chord</u>?

"She called herself Fleur, then Flor. Florence came in.
I had called myself Florian in the <u>Hollow Land</u."

"Who was Florence?"

"A page, a - a troubadour. It - it was a name out of
King <u>Florus</u>, an old French story that Algernon had lent me."

448/ 449.

"How did Godfrey come in?"

"I didn't say he came in. She had to have a hero. She called him Gregor. He was a sort of St. George, really. She must have been thinking of your picture, *The Marriage of St. George*. I said she could be the Princess Flora."

"Has Flora inspired the flower-patterns?"

"It was you really, saying that I could paint."

"Well, you can come along to Oxford as soon as Ted makes the arrangement for our rooms in the High. I tell you, you can have the whole ceiling for your sun-flowers."

"What are you doing, Gabriel?"

"We have the run of the place. I think Woodward must have been mad when he said we could do the Union in tempora. I know nothing of it. I intend to do a Guenevere, as usual. Brown says he won't come, he's too busy. I'd like the whole ten bays given to *Morte d'Arthur*. Princeps, Stanhope, Pollen and Hughes are all waiting for their orders. Ted took for granted that you were working with us. There's costume, as well, to think of. I'll take a box of old drapes and properties from Chatham. They're paying for the paints - would they pay for some new armour? You fellows have all got to serve as models. What we'll do without Liz, I don't know."

450.

The light was going in the studio.

He supposed he would go to Oxford and help them mix paints. He thought of the suit of armour, real armour, he had had as a child. He said, "I suppose there's a tin-smith or an ironmonger around Oxford, or a blacksmith who could beat out some metal for us. I can see about the armour." He wanted to get out now. It was evening on the river.

"There's so much to be seen to. I should like some lapis-lazuli," said Gabriel. "Do you know anything about grinding lapis?"

"No," said William Morris. He was holding out against something. He was holding on to something. Gabriel must not have everything.

"All right," said Gabriel, "but it was you who started the talk about communication."

William Morris said, "it was a conversation that was never finished. I suppose it never will be." He had seen himself stretched in Godfrey's arm-chair. He had seen Godfrey light the candles. He said, "I have some of my old stuff I brought down from Oxford. I keep it for occasions." He saw himself stoop to the wall-shelf for the decanter and the glasses. He saw himself reach in his pocket for the matches, but they were on the table. "Shall I light up?" He could not move, even

451.

to the match-box on the table.

He had pulled out the stool from under the table when Gabriel had moved over from the window. He jerked to his feet. "I'll light up." There was a row of candles on the wall-shelf. "Something autocratic about sticking a candle in a saucer. But Mary doesn't approve." He placed the unmatched saucers on the table.

He struck a match. He felt the eyes of Gabriel Rossetti, though he knew that Gabriel was not watching him. Gabriel would know. Gabriel did know. He had said to Godfrey, "Rossetti is, to use your own expression, in on this." Gabriel was the whole story, though Lis, out of a sense of self-preservation, had kept him out of the story.

"You were the whole story though you were not in the story. Algernon knows Italian. Algernon ought to finish his play. Amor - I know that much, from your quotation. She said she had read it somewhere. You spell it backward and it's Roma, or you spell Roma backwards and it's Amor."

"It's other things as well," said Gabriel. "It's Ramo, a branch or bough, the Golden Bough, you remember."

"I don't remember."

"Virgil is Dante's guide. You have a guide. I suppose

452.

you might say that fellow - did you say Carew? - was
your friend's guide. A bough, a branch of wood. It opens
doors. You can make Mora of it, Moira, the Greek Fate. You
can say Orma, that's Italian for trace or track or foot-
print. Mora might be a Moor, an Arab, the - the Astrology
and all that came in from the South of France, Spain, or was
brought over by the crusaders, the Templars."

"It's what the table told us."

"The table? Then it was a table. I stay awake, literally all night, sometimes, going over the words. Of course, if it's a secret, you can't give away the secret. That is, if you're one of them. Occasionally, some old bloke gets daring in a foot-note to a foot-note. Generations of commentators ... I found a French fellow who gave a clue, apropos of Dante in the Vita, quoting from the first book of the AEneid. I didn't confirm the Virgil. You just knew the old fellow would bust if he didn't hint to someone, in a foot-note to a foot-note that he had found a fresh clue."

"What was the foot-note - to the foot-note?"

"Le trèpied de Phoebus. It's in what for convenience, we call section XXV of the Vita. I have so far, run my translation along without breaks. There's no use giving

453.

these hints in English. There's Romeo in Paradise VI, a
Pilgrim from Provence. You remember Romeo? There's the Sacred
Wood. What is that but the communicating table?"

William Morris had said the story belonged to Gabriel
Rossetti.

"There is Alfa ed O, as he writes it, the alphabet."

"Alpha and Omega."

"Perhaps."

William Morris poured the red wine carefully. "The
first time I saw you, we talked of the colour of the - Elixir
of Life, you called it." He had talked to Godfrey of Gabriel,
before he had the messages. "It was the fellow from Paris
who introduced Godfrey and Vernon to the table. But Vernon
left - King's Wood was the name of the place. Then Roland
went back to Paris. Godfrey went on alone."

"He must have loved this fellow or there would have
been no connection."

"He loved him and he felt that he had killed his sister.
She came first."

"You Galahads had the table?"

"Only for experiment in Faulkner's room. Godfrey had
asked (across another question) if we should go on with it.

454.

Well - it wasn't altogether satisfactory. Ted and Dixon
were both bored, in the end. Talking over the matter after-
wards, alone with Godfrey - "

It was after all, very friendly.

Gabriel had moved over to the low chair. Where were
they? It was a work-shop, the table or the carpenter's bench
was like the one in the King's apartment where he had last
talked alone with Lis, at Hampton Court. It was a stage-scene,
he had said. The candles drew blocked shadows, but they were
still twilight shadows. It was back-stage or in the wings,
as he had said to Lis, the last time in the palace. "Funny,
I remember everything she said, that last time. She spoke
of Othello."

"The Moor of Venice, Mora, Amor indeed. There is
Guenevere, Ginevra and Lancillotto. He reported them in the
Inferno, but in Paradiso, there is mention of Ginevra. They
slide in and out, they change character or costume. But it's
simple things I'm after, words rather than people. The arcano,
the Revelation comes through the alphabet. It means so much
to me, that I haven't been near Sloane Street since - "

"Sloane Street?"

"Lizzie and I went there to lectures, at one time.

455.

They had circles, psychic-investigation. But it is, as you say Ted and Dixon found it, boring in the end. Besides, before I went to Paris, I had the - the revelation. A simple chap there. He was leaving. He gave me a message of a certain sort. I couldn't go beyond it."

So it was confidence for confidence. But Gabriel was always generous.

"There's Homer, too. He mentions him once in the *Vita*. The Italian *Omero* is *Romeo*, Amor again. Someone's got to do a new translation of Virgil and of Homer."

Rossetti went on, "Dante makes much of Mantua in the greeting."

"I don't follow."

"Virgil, the Mantuan. Romeo was banished to Mantua. Don't you suppose it was Virgil started the Roma-Amor? I have never tried to trace it."

Gabriel Rossetti said, "*Mora* is feminine, really, but we needn't be too pedantic."

William Morris thought, "The School of Night. But this is going too far, too quickly."

He flung out at random. "I spoke to Godfrey of the Minnesingers. He was working at translations, Marie de France and - someone else. De Fontenelle was studying the originals - "

456.

"De Fontenelle?"

"Roland, Rolando. He was working at the Bibliothèque in Paris."

Had he interrupted Gabriel? Had he interfered with his train of association?

Gabriel was gazing at the red wine in the goblet.

He had not tasted the wine.

It was true, the candle-flame might be marking ruby on the table.

"These are not properly speaking, wine-glasses," said William Morris.

Still, Gabriel did not answer.

"Ruskin was talking of stained-glass. Why shouldn't we experiment with thick-glass - the colour of the wine - for goblets?"

"Did you say Roland de Fontenelle?"

"He was the chap who introduced Godfrey to the table. It was in the country, Ayton. Roland was staying with them. Godfrey was a dark horse. I thought he was diplomatic, he fenced with Carew at St. James's. He must have been on the fringe of the Brigade, or a - what would it be? - reserve, We talked of the Brigade. I offended him. I said it was Byronic nonsense."

457.

"It was damned Byronic nonsense," said Rossetti.

"He may even have been swatting up on Hindu dialects.
I knew nothing of him. He was my best friend."

Rossetti said, "I was saying to this fellow I just spoke of, at Sloane Street - that you couldn't stop war. Or he was saying it to me. That was the first black mark I gave Gus. What I mean is, Gus wormed his way into the Society as a sort of private secretary to the then principal or director, an astute, honourable American, named Ely. He was a doctor by profession. He got caught up in some chivalrous notion that a lady he knew - clairvoyante - was being imposed on. But messages had come through her and her sister that determined him to go on with the work. The 'movement' as he called it, was getting into bad hands. He wasn't afraid of persecution from without. It was a swamp. There were talking-tables, he said, right across the country, that is, America - and now they had spread to Europe. He blamed himself, in some way. He was trying to check up here, on the 'submergence' as he called it.

"I had run across Gus first at one of their lectures. I had had two private sittings with Dr. Ely. Gus tried to cut across, or he blackmailed me, rather. If I introduced him to people, he would get me a third private sitting. Well, it

458.

wasn't as simple as all that. Yet, it was even simpler."

Apparently, this was something that Gabriel felt intensely. "You better sample that wine," said Morris. Gabriel lifted the glass. He set it back on the table. He said, "this is going to be difficult to say. I'd better say it. Bill and I were brought up on codes, secret signs and pass-words. I'm not official. Bill, in a sense, is. The Board of Trade has other irons in the fire. I didn't want to report Gus. I don't officially report people. I gossip to my brother. I did not want to gossip to my brother about Ely. Ely asked me to confirm a letter that Gus had written in French. Ely knew no French. It was exactly as Ely expressed it; there was, Ely said, 'a boudoir-air' about the letter that he didn't like. Later, I went over other letters for Ely. Ely needed no hint, no prompting from me. I didn't even tell him. It was that old worn-out derelict idea, they were after - Louis the Seventeenth."

"Louis the Seventeenth?" said William Morris.

"It goes too far. I don't even know that Louis wanted to be King. Louis Naundorf in the old days, used to turn up sometimes, at the casa Rossetti gatherings."

It was casa Rossetti, as he said it, that caused William Morris to blurt out abruptly, "if there's anything I can do - "

459.

The words were commonplace, but what could he say? Something
had stricken Gabriel. It was — William Morris realized
that he himself had been guilty of maligning Gabriel — in
his thought, anyway. All the fellows had criticised Gabriel,
in one way or another.

"Just run me down, to Ruskin. I must watch Gas,"
said Gabriel Rossetti.

"Why - why Ruskin?"

"I sent Gas around to Ruskin. Gas knows something about
Turner."

Gabriel added, "I said to myself, 'honour among thieves'.
His father was a copyist at the Frado. But I didn't like
Gas coexisting in, on psychic investigation. It was easy enough
to see what he was up to. The game was well worth the candle.
My game - my candle. I'm thinking of the others."

460.

III

"But names," said Gabriel, "before we go any further -
de Fontenell?"

"I didn't mean to blurt out Roland's full name. I - er -
Lis told me you had mentioned a de Fontenelle in Paris, at a
restaurant. She didn't think you knew them. The name slipped
out. I meant to stick to Roland."

"Why so cautious - or conventional? You remind me
of Dev. Always doing the right thing. I didn't know he was
de Fontenelle. For the matter of all that, I only guessed
that she was. But I don't quite follow. Is this another
sister?"

"Sister-in-law, <u>belle-soeur</u>, the other fellow was his
brother."

"I come into this, if I do come into this, because of a
letter. Ely at Sloane Street, asked me to confirm or criticise
a letter, written by Gus to a Madame de Fontenelle. Gus was
putting Ely's dictated English into French. I thought the
letter a little - well, familiar. 'Dear Princess' - Gus
began it. Ely was put off at the start by the 'Dear Princess.'

461.

He could read that. It had to be explained that the Lady's
maiden-name was - well, never mind the *née*, after her own
signature. She had been a Princess, as I explained to Lizzie,
on the occasion that we saw or didn't see her - but the
Princess was Napoleonic pinchbeck."

"Lis said, you said she was Velasquez. Lis said
(I remember how she said it), 'it is odd how Gabriel sees
things.' She was telling me how happy you had been in Paris.
She told you about the Palace?"

"Palace?"

"Hampton Court and how we went there."

"She told me nothing of the Palace."

"I had a sort of *crise* - a crisis. The thing the
fellows laughed at, when I pretended to smash furniture -
and did sometimes - at Oxford. I felt - I *felt* a rose-
spray tapping on the window. Afterwards, in the tea-room,
when she was talking of your trip to Paris, she mentioned
de Fontenelle. It seemed too - too apposite to be accidental.
De Fontenelle (Roland) had introduced Godfrey and Vernon to
the table. When Vernon left and Roland went back to Paris,
Godfrey went on with the table - but I told you. That is
what I told you. I don't want to go on repeating. Mary must

462.

have left that half-chicken and some cheese and cress-sandwiches
somewhere. I better light the hurricane-lamp. I bought it in -"

"Don't say Portobello Road or Brixton - I couldn't stand
it."

"It was - "

"Don't tell me - "

"I don't mean the hurricane-lamp. I mean Valerie.
Her name was - is Valerie, your *belle-dame*."

"What has this got to do with the - tapping?"

"I left all that after Godfrey went. I mean, any idea of
going on. I was waiting unconsciously, for Godfrey to turn up.
It's a sort of - sort of - well, troth. I mean, with the
table. I had plighted my troth to Godfrey's table. I couldn't
go to another, it would be the last discourtesy."

(The table? The lady? The *Vita*? The fellow didn't know
about it. That's what made it so important. He must not guess
how important. It might break the spell. He knows all about
it. He doesn't know a word of Dante. He doesn't know Italian.)
Said Gabriel, "your - ah - brew is excellent."

"Forgive me. I was talking too hard. It was the rose-
spray tapping in a sort of - a sort of ghost-hush. A sort
of icy moment in mid-August. I was afraid to count the taps.

463.

It was saying something. 'Are you saying something?' I had to ask that. 'Yes', ever so tenderly. Then I thought, 'I'm a fool - it can't be true - it's the wind.' There was no wind."

"Wind, wind thou art sad, art thou kind - " said Gabriel.

"There was no wind, I tell you. 'It's the wind,' I had to think it. Well, you know, you ask a question, without speaking out loud - "

"Wind, wind, unhappy! thou art blind - "

"That's what I said. I was deluded. 'Is it the wind?' The rose-spray tapped, but firmly, no-no. I suppose everyone has these yes and no-no signals. O, no-no, it seemed to say. 'But the damned place is haunted,' I thought and I turned on Lis. I was trying to make it right afterwards, in the tea-room. It was then that she began talking about your trip to Paris. It was then that she spoke of de Fontenelle."

"Yet still thou wanderest the lily-seed to find."

"It was as if her mentioning de Fontenelle at that moment, and for no apparent reason, was a sort of - sort of confirmation of my first - "

"Things do tap," said Gabriel, "rain-water drips."

"It's true, it had been raining, that's why we took shelter in the Palace. It might have been the rain. You think

464.

it was the rain?"

"My dear fellow - "

"I said to myself, 'it's Godfrey come to tell me.' Then afterwards, I argued round it. I went over my poems, my stories. There's death and ghosts in so many of them. Something she said, Lis said, made me feel worse - then better. She was telling the story, _Gold Chord_. They were trapped. He was after them. They would delay the army of the Inquisitor by taking a last stand by the altar, so the rest of us could escape. Well, she might have read it. She said, she might have read it. We were burrowing through a tunnel. It was rock-wall, carved rock. It was hard rock. It was the suffocating feeling, made me say burrowing. Perhaps the chambers or tunnels, having been closed for so long, had - had - it happens in mines. I mean, perhaps some kind of gas had accumulated and just that crack of light - of air when I lifted the stone, might have set up some chemical change. What is air, anyway?"

"Who took a last stand by the altar?"

"Gregor, she called the fellow - obviously, she meant George, don't you think so?"

"I don't know the - "

"It was the fellows. I told Godfrey that Carew or one of

465.

the other officers, should have ordered them back."

"Did Gregor order them back?"

"That was different - that was just the difference. The Knights Credentes were - how shall I say it? I told Godfrey I admired the fellows. But don't you see the difference? You do, Gabriel."

"Whose story is this?"

"Well, I don't know. Algernon started it, I told you, as far as I was concerned. Then there was Godfrey and our few sessions with the table. I don't think Godfrey altogether agreed when I said they were the Templars."

"Who were the Templars? These fellows by the altar?"

"Yes, the Knights Credentes, the Knights of Malta, the Crusaders. I felt that Carew (when he came to Godfrey) wanted to start something new. A new approach to the old things, anyway. I didn't feel that Carew wanted the thing to go on any longer - as it was. Of course, I had only been - been introduced to the table, when Godfrey vanished. I wasn't particularly concerned at the time. Godfrey often disappeared for weeks, during term. Then I got a letter, sent on by his brother. There was no indication where Godfrey had gone,

466.

where he had written from - my letter had been enclosed in
one to Vernon. It might have been sent from Portsmouth or
Marseilles. Only he had gone - to India."

"In-dia," said Gabriel Rossetti.

"India, I said," said Morris, " did you say India?"

"I said _In-dia_, it is one of the clue words of Dante.
I'm sorry I interrupted."

"How - clue?"

"It's just one of his countless rubrics, anagrams,
enigmas. _In-dia_, used as a verb, can possibly be translated
in-spirits, in and Deus, in-God."

"That's what I was trying to tell Godfrey, that my one
message - or two (actually all I had), were - well, he
said Roland called it _télégraph de Dieu_. My words were
abbreviated. They were Latin. Godfrey said he had had no Latin."

William Morris knew that Gabriel Rossetti would not ask
him what the words were. He searched his pocket for a pencil
and ripped open an old envelope. The candle drew the ruby on
his own page, now.

"TEMP. LUM. IN. TEMP. OMN. UN," he printed.

"It's nothing," he handed the paper over. "But it's all

467.

I had. It's all I have to go on. It's enough. It's everything ... but after... "

He rose abruptly. "Do you want the lantern? The candles are burnt down."

"Haven't you any more candles?" said Gabriel. He was looking at the paper. "Why don't you gulp that wine down?" said Gabriel.

"I was looking at the - the ruby on the table."

"Qual fin balascio in che la sol percuota," said Gabriel Rossetti."

"And that's a funny thing," said Gabriel, while Morris found and fitted candles in the saucers, "Dante speaks of the ruby, _rubino_ or _balascio_, as he calls it in this instance, in connection with an alleged leader of the so-called crusade against the Albigensians. He says Folquet is like a fine ruby, or a fine-cut or fine-turned _rubis balais_, on which the sun strikes or through which the sun shines. He puts him in the Paradise, in the third heaven, the heaven of Venus."

"Then Dante - "

"No. The whole _Commedia_ is a sort of Bible or Book of Hours of the so-called heretical church."

"But this - "

468.

"Folquet de Marseille was a troubadour. Dante followed his pattern in some of the early canzoni and the *Vita*. It was Folquet, the later Bishop, who is said to have inflamed Rome against the Albigensians. But Dante put the somewhat disreputable Cunizza, mistress of Sordello, in the same heaven, and Rahab the harlot. Their utterances are all ambiguous."

But Gabriel Rossetti was marking time. It was easier to explain or try to explain the sybilline obscurity of Folquet de Marseille than to make a simple statement. "Guido Guinizelli and Arnaut both personified Amor. They began it," said Gabriel. But he'd have to say it. "Swallow that wine and sit down," said Gabriel, "till I work this thing out." He spoke as if he might be trying to find the answer to a nursery-riddle or comundrum. "Why don't you just write TEMPLUM?" he said. "Why do you cut TEMPLUM?"

"I don't follow."

"You've got templum, for the first word."

"It's not templum," said William Morris, "it's abbreviated, it's two words, it's TEMP. LUM., as I've written it."

"Why did you write it that way?"

"It was words spelt by the table. It stopped when it finished a word. Godfrey would ask, 'is that all?' to be

469.

certain of the pauses. It would say yes or no-no, as happened,
and go on with the word or part of the word. I called it tomb-
stone Latin - if you can call it Latin. Godfrey called it
mile-stone."

"I told you about the chap at Sloane Street," said
Gabriel. "He was in trance or half-trance. But he was talking
to me in - that is, he gave me messages from an older brother
of my father's, a priest in the Abruzzi. The last messages were
in Latin, Church Latin," said Gabriel.

The words as Gabriel spoke them were matter-of-fact, al-
most common-place. "But of course, that was a different method,"
Gabriel went on, "the fellow was in trance or half-trance. He
didn't know Italian or French. He might have known a little
Latin. In any case, these experiments are interesting."

"I would hardly call - call Godfrey's and my <u>experience</u>
an experiment."

"Well, except for some pleasant, dull evenings at the
Howitts in Hampstead, and one or two trivial essays with a
mixed group at Sloane Street, I have had no experience with this
table-tapping - "

So Gabriel was dismissing it - <u>table-tapping?</u> Morris
cut across, "you don't mind my saying so, Gabriel, but this is

470.

different." Why had he told Gabriel about Godfrey?

"Different from what?"

"Why it's the thing the - the chaps and I had decided
in the beginning, to work for - "

"In the beginning?"

"Our - our circle - "

"But why did you come to me with this?" said Gabriel
Rossetti, "I'm no Galahad."

He had said it. He had said the worst thing he could
think of. It was possible to drive Tops raving. He had watched
others at the game, though theirs were for the most part, the
stings and arrows of unconscious stupidity. If Tops raved,
what would he say? He might blurt out more about the table.
He might give the clue he was waiting for, that would clear
up his own - that would give the answer to his own - "what
was it who said what to?" said Gabriel. "I mean, the fellow
who asked a riddle that had been the death of countless intrepid
idiots? You know what I mean. Or was it the thing that asked
him the riddle? The Sphinx. When he got the answer, it was
ludicrous. Didn't you always feel that the answer to the
Sphinx-riddle was an anti-climax? But who gave the answer?
Was the Sphinx answered? A play by one of those Greek fellows.

471.

This is what I ask you. How is it that Ely, Norton Ely, at
the Sloane Street psychic hang-out, gave me something of the
same message that's been given you here?"

He had said it, at last. It would only have delayed
the issue, to have sent Tops raving. Was he raving?

"The thing - the thing shattered me more than anything
that has happened since - since Gabriele - "

William Morris had thought from the beginning, that he
had never heard a voice so beautiful. He said, "I was upset
about - "

"That fellow Lushington? Well, I missed Ely, when he
left London. The worst of it was, I couldn't go back to anyone
after Ely - for - for confirmation or for comfort. But
worse even than that, I had to take a specious outside interest
and turn up at some of their so-called circles, to keep an eye
on Gus. Madame de Fontenelle had brought a fortune with her.
I was able to check up on the family through old Ida de St. Elme.
Ida was a Russian really. She had been a friend of one of
Napoleon's marshals. The de Fontenelles had lost everything.
Well, so for the matter of all that, had - what did you say
her name was? But her loss was irreparable. That sort of
woman will go anywhere for consolation. She would have been a

472.

gold-mine for old Gus. Ida described her/hother to me, Ida
half-Spanish
knew of course, nothing of the - the story. If it wasn't -
did you say Valerie? - then it was someone so like her as
to belong to - to the-story. Ivpry-white, did you say?"

"Ivory-white? I didn't say anything. I never saw -
Valerie."

"But Godfrey described her to you?"

"Godfrey had not seen her."

"Well, hang it all, somewhere there was comparison."

"Lis said she was a candle, or Godfrey said it. I don't
remember. Lis said, you said she was Velasquez. Someone said,
Godfrey maybe said that Roland said - but no, I may have said
it, that she was a white camellia. I got that impression, any-
way. Ivory."

"As I say, she would have been a gold-mine for old Gus,
if he could have got in with her. But I managed properly, to
put a spoke in his wheel, through a little judicious post-
script work on later letters. I didn't have to warn Ely but
I had to warn her."

"This was the Lady that you saw, then?"

"Qui lo so? Yes, it was the Lady."

473.

"It's all rather difficult to reassemble. Godfrey was
telling me the story as Roland told it to him. But I do remember
some reference to her mother. Valerie was one of them, I
gathered, through her mother."

"One of them - you mean _ancien régime_? But through
emigrés, returned from the West Indies. Ida knows everything."

Gabriel said, "there's nothing so white as a white tropic-
flower." He was thinking of Gabriele and the orange-groves in
Malta. Gabriel had never seen an orange-tree in blossom.

William Morris had called Lis a snow-flower. In some in-
explicable manner, the white tropic-flower and the snow-flower
merged in a new dimension, as Gabriel finished speaking.

Gabriel went on, "I come back to your poem, _The Wind_.
I was thinking of orange-blossoms, really.

I shrieked and leapt from my chair, and the orange
The faint yellow juice oozed out like blood from a
And then in march'd the ghosts of those that had gone
to the war."

"That's what I meant," said William Morris, "when I said
that I went over my poems and romances, after I had parted with
Lis. I saw ghosts everywhere. It was how my mind had been
working, I argued, and she had put a spell on me on the throne-

474.

room. I mean, in the upper gallery, the King's apartment.
There were those queens, I argued, and everyone knows that
Hampton Court is haunted. She said it was *The Wind*, too. I
mean, she talked about that poem, the first time we got caught
in the rain. There were two times in the rain, when we sheltered
in the Palace. Once, we went on the river to an island. I
could imagine the river as it ran past their shelter. I imagined
them caught in the rain, there. Godfrey had said (always re-
member Godfrey in quoting Roland) they had boating-parties on
the river. I imagine that Godfrey told me the story pretty
well, as he knew it. Roland would not tell everything."

"They had - parties?"

"That's how the thing started. Her cousin had a cottage,
a boat-house, a sort of summer-house - I don't know. Imagine
it for yourself. They met there, a group. They had formed a
circle. It dwindled down and some of them dropped out. It
always happens. But I told you all this?"

"When would you have told me?"

"Well, just now. I seem to be repeating myself. I
have told myself the story so often, in the past year. It was
luminous when Godfrey told it, like pictures seen in crystal.
I felt Godfrey was shut up in crystal. But you make it seem
real."

475.

"It's real enough," said Gabriel. "They could have been
had up for conspiracy."

"Conspiracy?"

"Yes - believe it or not. The girl was so desperate
that she wrote Dr. Ely of their meetings, their circle on the
river. Ely had saved her letters. He had smelt a rat in that
Dear Princess. Would you say the girl was a fool?"

"Why - Gabriel - "

"The circle had dwindled down to three of them. Trust
me - Gus had found out who they were."

"What harm was there in that?"

"Harm? An empty cottage - "

"Perhaps not quite a cottage, a cottage in the _Petit Trinon_ tradition was Godfrey's phrase, as I remember."

"_Tant pis._ So very much the worse. A girl of the
_noblesse_ (I don't mean the new nobility) meets her lover - "

"There was Aurelie, her cousin."

"Hardly a duenna, I should imagine."

"But surely Roland - "

"_L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle_," said Gabriel.

"But conspiracy?"

"It already has a name," said Gabriel, "Orsini. But

476.

forget it. It's known already as the Orsini Plot. Ida knows
everything. They plan to do away with the third Napoleon.
Gus had her - or would have had her - both ways. Her
father's people were ennobled by the first Napoleon. The
*emigrées* were - well, about as near as you can get to the
last Louis - Sixteenth. I imagine her mother had left
her with no illusions about thrones and princes. It was her
mother's father who had escaped the guillotine."

It sounded like a dream of fantasy as Gabriel told it.
William Morris remembered an ironical phrase that Gabriel
had used that first eventful evening, "Casa Rossetti", he
had said, 'no place for Walter - revolutionaries, shady
kings and princes.'" Was Gabriel thinking of Casa Rossetti
or of Valerie de Fontenelle? It was a question of fine-thinking,
*ancien régime* (to use his own expression) and honour. Had
Gabriel seen Valerie again? Had he warned Roland? It was an
impossible juxtaposition of coincidences, his talks with
Godfrey, his last talk with Lis.

"You - you - "

"Well, you might as well hear the end of it. Where are
those sandwiches you spoke of? I shadowed Roland."

IV.

478.

"Yes," said Gabriel, "we can live in our affinities.
Or as Lizzie said on that august occasion, we can watch our-
selves reflected in mirrors. Eighteenth century? I can't
say that I see you there, nor Lizzie - except in a reflection
of a reflection, seen through double rows of candles. We
made up a story about Versailles. Lizzie played herself into
it - or a new waltz (from Vienna, she said) played her
into it. She kept talking about the candles in the mirrors,
'and each set of candles lights a separate room, and you can't
prove it but you can see it. We are in separate rooms,' she
said. 'It's too damned prismatic."

"That's a little of what I felt of Godfrey. Roland's
story seemed to have been seen through crystal."

"Fontenelle wouldn't tell Godfrey the whole story.
And even if he had, as you say, Godfrey would have reflected or
refracted it - a frigid fellow?"

"I - I hadn't thought of Godfrey as - "

"A little like Blanchelys - what? I mean Liz, Lizzie.
We must get someone to match up with Lizzie - not you, brave
champion Launcelot, Lancillotto del Lago - what about Sir
Godfrey de - de - what sort of place d'you say it was?

479.

That octagonal look-out is a good invention. The Lady Lis
and the Seigneur of - For myself, I don't for one minute think
the fellow's dead yet. He wormed his way into the East India
Company, disguised as an honest down-at-heels accountant.
What these fellows won't do. You should hear Bill on the
subject. Our spies are all right. I don't mean to imply that
the Seigneur de la Tour would stoop to add up numbers. I wouldn't.
Not that that's anything against Lizzie, knowing the day of
the month, the price of a postage-stamp and winding the clock.
It's how their minds work. Octagonal."

"What's that - eight? One over the - why eight?
Neglecting my duties. You can sleep in Ted's room."

"I'm not going to sleep yet. You've only changed the
candles five times. I counted. One over the - you said
eight. Yes, thank you. Have you got two by two more candles
to go in those wax-sockets, eight less five times? Ha-ha.
I caught you."

"Nothing of the sort," said William Morris, "we changed
the candles when you spoke of the ruby on the table. Rubis
balais you called it. Out of Dante. Well that was the second
set. But we started talking in the day-light."

"It was you who saw the ruby on the table."

480.

"It wasn't there really, it was like Godfrey telling me of Roland, reflected from the crystal wine-glass. We'll make some red glass. I knew that you were lying when you said you shadowed Roland. You could never be a shadow. What - what's light in ruby?"

"Watcher mean? Light in ruby?"

"What you said, when I changed the candles for the first time."

"Qual fin balascio in che la sol percuota wasn't Richmond. Did you call him Richmond? She called him Gregor. Ain't they the same person? I don't care for history myself. I called Gus, Calliostro. I had to talk about him, there in Paris, or bust, so I called him Calliostro. Couldn't see myself at Trianon. So I set the scene in Venice. I had to follow her around, in my imagination. An island-story? Sicily? It works out. Count Robert was a Frank. You'll find him and Manfred too, in Dante. D'you see what I mean? A foot-note to a foot-note or bust. I mean le trépied de Phoebus. It's very simple. Who were you anyway in the circle?"

"I - I was Pal - Pal - "

"Pal - that you are! You can't say Palomydes. You ain't him, anyway. Wasn't he the chap that was after Iseult?

481.

The chap, I mean, that got left? You won't get left. You're
too good a trencherman. Have we eaten all the sandwiches?
In vino, what I always say, is veritas," said Gabriel Rossetti.

"As I was saying," said Gabriel as Morris refilled his
glass, "our spies have no end of fun. He's probably dressed up
as a Rajah and riding a dromedary in the desert. Who invented
Godfrey, anyway? That tower is an invention, out of your poem - "

"Up - up and away - through the - the - "

" - drifting rain. I know your poetry better than you
do. Let us ride to the Little Tower again," said Gabriel.

"It doesn't rain in the desert. He'll get sick of the sand-dunes, you mark my words."

"It's not - it's not sand-dunes, it's Holy Mountains
and tea-planting. What they call Paisley. I had silk-worms.
Must start some spinning - spinning - always wove hammocks
at school. We'll start spinning - "

"Rota, a wheel, don't go on about Dante - got his ideas
from the heathen, si come rota ch'ignalmente e mossa. Well,
Fate, Life, Rota, Amor, don't spell it backwards. Mora, a Moor,
she came I tell you, from the West Indies, In-dia."

"I don't - don't see con - con - what you called
it - told me not to remember - "