Kept (3 page)

FROM GEORGE ELIOT’S JOURNAL

22 March 1862

A bright day of radiant sunshine, not the least inclemency. George engrossed in literary tasks, articles for the
Cornhill,
writing to Mr. Martin anent his translations &c. I, having no other occupation, spent the afternoon in reverie, reading Mr. Hutton in the
Spectator
—at
least I supposed it were Mr. Hutton—on Arnold’s last words on translating Homer. Thence to dine with the Irelands at their house in Eccleston Square. This I was interested to see: a pleasant, commodious residence, the rooms all crammed with dull, old furniture, scarlet draperies. A profusion of mirrors, many portraits of old gentlemen in periwigs. A dozen of us sat down: a sucking barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, Mr. Masson who writes for the magazines and a silent wife, a literary man whom George recalled from some endeavour lost in time. With Mr. Ireland I was, of course, familiar. A conventional kind of a man, I should suppose: tall, ruddy-faced, soft-spoken, talking a little of his property in Suffolk (it is embarrassed, George says, and a source of shame to him) and equestrian pleasures, solicitous of his wife. I acknowledge freely that it was she to whom my eye turned the more often: a slight, sorrowful woman with exquisite (there is no other word) red hair—I would have run my hands through it, negotiated to buy it at six shillings the yard like some Russian huckster—in whom deep reservoirs of feeling contended with the topics of the day. In short, a decidedly unusual representative of the female species, and yet some deep unhappiness so manifest in her that it pained the heart to see. Thus, on my asking would she and her husband go away this season, she replied with great emphasis,
Go away? Why, I have been drifting rudderless for too long.
This seemed such a singular expression that I enquired, what did she mean by it? She replied with perfect politeness and yet, it seemed to me, great private misgivings that there were times when she
felt like a boat rowing on the ebb tide and could not for the life of her steer herself to safety.
Mr. Ireland, I saw, was watching her closely and here interjected, “My wife has peculiar fancies, Miss Evans.” Although there was suavity in the words, I fancy they were troublesome to pronounce.

Meanwhile the dinner was proceeding around us—soup, cutlets, a beefsteak, none of which was sufficient to distract the eye from the curious intelligence at my side. As the meal continued, Mrs. Ireland’s behaviour became more singular still. While the servants were clearing the savoury from the table I observed her carefully decant the contents of a saltcellar upon the tablecloth. This task accomplished, she availed herself of a half-empty glass that lay nearby and, with infinite care
and solicitude, began to drip claret wine upon the salt. All this with a look of such stealth—cunning, rapt introspection—as to suggest an animal bent on evading capture. Fascinated, and somehow liking her for this absorption, I enquired again, what was she doing?
To be sure,
she replied,
was it not well known that salt was a sovereign remedy for spilled wine? And would not the servants thank her for it in the morning?

I had hoped for further converse but, on retiring with the other ladies, I noticed that she was gone. Indeed we had not been a moment over our negus before Mr. Ireland appeared to announce that his wife was indisposed and had been conducted to bed by her maid &c. I will confess that I missed her presence in that little room—talk all of the Queen, the Duchess of A——’s ball—would have liked her there, if only to drip claret onto the tablecloth, and that the rest of the evening had no pleasure for me. Reflecting on these incidents, I felt that I had observed a rare and generous spirit, yet struggling to convey some great distress of which it was perhaps only partly aware: the effect disturbing to the mind, a life wreathed in shadow breaking out now and again in hard, bitter laughter. George, to whom I explained something of this,
unhappy,
said that Mrs. Ireland’s afflictions were well known, her husband near beside himself with anxiety. All this, I found, worked on me very curiously—the silent woman in her house of dull old furniture and serried mirrors—to the point where, the following day, I determined to call, neglected an article I had promised to Mr. Chapman and took an omnibus to the further end of the Buckingham Palace Road. Alas, it was a fool’s errand. The house seemed quiet, the blinds drawn down, with only a little servant girl in a creased mob cap to tell me that “Master and Missus” had gone away that morning to the country, although the number of coats, hats, etc., upon the hallway hooks suggested that, if this were the case, they had taken very little of their clothing with them. And so I took my leave and walked for a while in the Square’s gardens, past the nursery maids and their carriages and the small boys with their hoops, musing on the peculiar circumstances to which I had been witness, casting an occasional glance at the house, from whose upper window, I am tolerably certain at one point, a woman’s face stared balefully down.

 

J
AS.
D
IXEY,
E
SQ.

Easton Hall

Near Watton

Norfolk

My dear Dixey,

Although our acquaintance is not so very intimate, yet you are the man that my father always said that he respected most and have ever been a friend to me. Be assured, then, that I should not have cared to burden you with this letter were it not for the extremity in which I have been plunged. In truth I have been so sorely tested this last month and more that I have not known which way to turn. You will perhaps more fully comprehend the pain of these afflictions if I say at the outset that not one particle of what follows is exaggerated, coloured or in any way distorted in the telling.

You will have heard—who has not?—of our troubles. It was ever the case that when a man stands well before the world, the world is silent, yet, should adversity strike, the air is filled with clamorous voices. Thinking that sea and country air might be beneficial, I proposed a tour of the southern counties of Ireland. (We had property there once, in Roscommon, though, alas, the estate is fallen into ruin.) To this, in a lucid moment, Isabel heartily assented. Indeed, prior to our departure she seemed better, almost—less languid, more sensible of her condition,
sorrowful
even, that her state was so.

Alas, that the hopes I had entertained of her recovery should be so cruelly dashed! We had set out on our journey by carriage, stopping at London and Devizes, were a day out from Bristol in the packet, seated on deck in the morning sun, when Brodie our servant came to me from below in a state of much anxiety to say that her mistress could not be found. Needless to relate, I straightaway instituted a thorough search of the ship but could discover nothing. Our cabin was empty, the keepsake at which I
had left her reading discarded on the bed. Near out of my mind at what this might portend, I rushed hither and thither about the deck peering beneath the canvases of the rowboats, even turning up the very coils of rope in an effort to find some clue. On the instant a gentleman who had been amusing himself by looking out across the stern of the vessel came rushing up to declare that he had seen a large object floating in the waves, resembling, as he put it, a giant water beetle resting on its back. At my urgent solicitation the ship’s boat put out and in half an hour retrieved my darling from the sea. It appears now that she concealed herself in a water closet to the rear of the ship and by this means flung herself from its window, would have drowned had not the air become trapped in her skirts. When found, she was paddling in a feeble way and was pulled out quite demented…

Of the hours that followed—we were then two days’ journey from Cork—I can scarcely bring myself to speak. So fearful was I that she would once more seek to destroy herself that in the night I lay beside her chained at the waist by a piece of ribbon, so that I should know if she stirred. Happily, the ship’s cabinet contained a supply of laudanum and this, freely administered, was sufficient to pacify her until such time as we put into harbour. What was to be done? Knowing too well what would be the likely outcome, I could not immediately propose that we return to England. There was no one to whom I might apply. In the end I secured rooms for us in the city, representing my wife as excessively fatigued by the voyage, &c….

We were a fortnight at Cork. You cannot conceive the horror of it. The dull,
hopeless
look on her face, as if she knew full well the secret of her malady but could not bring herself to gainsay it. Of Irish doctors I think nothing. One prescribed brandy and milk, another walks by the shore—this when the poor creature could scarcely stir from her bed!—a third hot baths and chafing. Finally there came a little man—a Mr. Fitzpatrick—who did, I think, do her some good: ordered that she should not be disturbed, but her mind kept occupied, &c.
She remarked once that her head “ran away with her like a carriage that would not stop,” which both he and I thought significant. And yet even here, when given rest and occupation, it was clear that her intellect was forcing her back upon a particular course, viz., when read to out of one of Mr. Smith’s novels, in fact a humorous piece about a tipsy labourer and his family, she burst out in a passion, talking of the poor children, and how should they have clean shirts, and what could be done, as if these were real infants living in some shanty a furlong distant.

Come the end of the first week she was, if not recovered, then a dozen times better than she had been. Indeed she read to me, as we sat in our lodgings, a comical piece from
Punch
about a servant girl who mislaid her mistress’s things, and swore it was the cat, and was found drinking porter with the boots over a pair of pawn tickets, over which we both laughed much. I remember it above all, a Sunday morning with the bells ringing and the folk hurrying to service in the street below our window. (There is no Protestant church else we should have joined them.) She ate a good dinner, drank a glass of “clar’t” that Dr. Fitzgerald had prescribed for her—he is a Sligo man with the most uncouth brogue you ever heard—and seemed content, but for certain remarks that betrayed to me the febrile tenor of her mind. Thus, at one juncture, picking up a newspaper—this was after the
Punch
reading—she observed that the print
swam
before her, made it impossible for her to contemplate, that there were shapes she saw between the adjacent columns as clear as day to her tho’ perhaps not discernible to all…

Still, the afternoon waxing fine and there being no other occupation available to us, I determined to take her walking upon the sands. Indeed, she seemed to relish it, took off her stockings even—they are very free and easy here, the gentlemen march about the shore in their shirtsleeves—and paddled in the rock pools in such a droll way that I could not forbear to laugh. There was a little black-haired tinker girl playing nearby—I could see the family’s wagon drawn up on the shale and an old
father smoking a pipe on its seat—and Isabel befriended her, searched with her among the rocks for crabs, walked with her to the sea’s edge and looked for ships, &c. All this was very poignant to me, a circumstance that I would have prolonged to its utmost limit, were it not that suddenly there came a terrible shriek from the water. Looking up from this reverie, I saw to my horror—you will scarcely credit it, but it is true nonetheless—that she had picked the child up in both arms, as one might seize a bolster, and dashed her into the waves. What was to be done? In an instant a crowd had gathered around us—the old father hastened across the sands yelling “Murther!”—and it was all I could do, having ascertained that the child was unhurt, to spirit Isabel away. The people looked at us very strangely as I half pushed, half pulled her along the street. Yet once taken to our lodgings, she grew tractable, did as I bade her, but sat in a chair by the window wearing the most desolate expression I have ever seen on a human countenance and pray that I shall not see again. Dr. Fitzgerald, who presently arrived in answer to my summons, looked very grave and vowed that he could do nothing, in fact insisted on our immediate return…

Since that time it has gone very hard with us. There is no pattern to her madness, which manifests itself first as a fury of self-reproach, then as stark dolorousness, then again as a curious silent melancholy. On our return I of course consulted Mr. Procter, formerly Her Majesty’s Commissioner—you will perhaps know him by his other name, Cornwall. Procter’s opinion was that an institution might suit, and to this end he conducted me around what he termed his “favourite place.” This, I freely confess, I feel quite sick to think of even now—a great grim house out in the wilds of Herefordshire, with bars on every window and wild-eyed women roaming the gardens. Procter shook his head about other places…

Lately she has been at Camberwell with Mrs. Baxter, a most respectable person, with experience of these cases, &c. Here she is humoured, has a parlour to herself, is kept clean and seems well enough. And yet I am filled with the gravest foreboding.
Visiting her this Whit Monday past, thinking to take her to Peckham Fair or on some other jaunt, I found, to my disquiet, that she did not know me, merely stared up interestedly from beneath her bonnet, enquired of her keeper who was that man, why had he come, & so forth. On my asking her at one point if she would take a turn in the garden, she replied only, “Alas, sir, I had better not,” following this with some rigmarole about the Queen, the Houses of Parliament, like fragments of the morning’s
Times
, almost, picked up from the floor. The sadness is that in all other respects she is unchanged, the gracefulness of her form and gesture just as I remember. Half a dozen times indeed I found myself regarding her in the absolute confidence that her next utterance would make perfect sense, that the events of the past months had been no more than a ghastly nightmare. Alas, this was a delusion as grave as that which has afflicted her…

This has been an infernally long preface, my dear Dixey, to what is a simple request, but there was much that you should know and much to tell about our life since last you saw us. Rest assured that if you can find it in your heart to accommodate that which I now propose, I shall be eternally grateful, as indeed would Isabel, could she but grasp the nature of what I ask…