Miss Fuller Part 3

To put it plainly: Neither my wife nor I has any wish to receive, and most certainly will not read, the letter you describe. Do oblige me by disposing of it in the nearest stove. I can only wish you had not troubled to fish it out from the sea.

Do you think me harsh? No doubt you do not know the worst of what we know, of her irregular life, in Italy and before. In our days in Concord, she was merely a Transcendental heifer, and tho' we were fond of her as one of our own and endured her posturings as those of a sister, the wide world showed her for what she truly was. There was a Jew in New York who made her his mistress, on good authority. As for Italy, you all may trick up as a legitimate, even aristocratic, marriage and family this disgraceful business, of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d child fathered on her by an Italian rowdy with a fantastic name, but I shall not join you. She would have done better to have gone over to Rome entirely and entered a nunnery. Foolish Ophelia.

Thrice in recent months I have been obliged to intercept letters from that woman to my wife. With her permission - and her tender heart made her give it at first with difficulty - I have destroyed them unread.

When next I hear from you, I hope it will be on a topic more inclined to foster our mutual friendship. By all means visit our hovel in the hills, provided you come empty-handed.

N. Hawthorne "My goodness," Anne said. "This is a shocking thing." She handed the letter back to her brother. "I suppose he also means to be amusing. But I don't understand. Surely Miss Fuller was their friend?"

"I don't know," he said miserably. "She was their friend, once - I thought they were all quite taken with one another. I often don't understand these things. I thought she admired his writing, even to excess. Whatever could she have said, or done? I know that he is an anti-revolutionist, but I am surprised that he would let a difference of opinion affect an old friendship...."

"Mother says he is actually opposed to Abolition!"

"It's not so simple," Henry said. "Hawthorne despises slavery, just as he despises tyranny, but he also despairs. He thinks revolutions and Abolition are doomed enterprises - get rid of one form of slavery, and another will take its place - and so he mocks us all for hoping."

"What will you do with the letter?"

"What he says - get rid of it," said Henry.

"But it is addressed to her, and she does not say that."

"I suppose I could send it, and let him do what he likes -"

The Canary-bird's cage hung in the attic's east window. Anne poked a finger in, preened the bird's head, and let it gnaw the finger delicately.

"What he likes may not be what she likes," she said, "and in any case obviously he takes charge of their correspondence. I don't think you should do anything with it now. Maybe in a few years he will soften, or she will write herself and ask for it."

"I am uncomfortable having it around. It feels like a corpse, or like something stolen."

"These are her Last Words." She said it with the capitals.

"She wrote thousands and thousands of words, far too many words, one might say. I don't want to be burdened, like a ghostly postman. Margaret's ghost's postman, I mean."

"I read Woman in the Nineteenth Century. She does go on, but I thought parts of it were wonderful. 'Let them be sea-captains, if they will!' "

"Do you want to be a sea-captain?" said Henry.

"Certainly not. Ow!" The bird pecked too hard, and she pulled out her finger to suck it. "I want to paint and make botanical drawings and have seven children and when I go on a sea voyage, I hope the captain will be a good strong man who will keep me safe. But I still like that she wrote it. It's a grand dream." She wrinkled up her brow, almost comically, and then said, "But that's a terrible tragic irony, isn't it, that she was ship-wrecked? And that captain was a man."

"Women are never logical." Henry looked at Hawthorne's letter again, puzzling. "Perhaps she didn't praise his stories properly, to his way of thinking? He's thin-skinned, you know. And as he says, he may be be appalled morally by her life."

"Maybe he was, Mr. Nathan was, a Jew - we all heard of that, but that's not so bad. I am sure she was not his mistress. Mr. Greeley would never have asked her to write for his paper if she were actually a bad woman!"

Henry smiled at his sister. "I'll put it away for now. We won't mention it to anyone. Let's plan a walk tomorrow - I stored your trousers and hat and the rest of our gear in the shed at the old house. We can go to Fiddler's Swamp and look for pitcher-plants." Anne married Thomas Bratcher shortly before Christmas. Their cottage occupied the bottom-land of the Bratcher farm's big meadow. In hopes of escaping the damp, Anne set up her easel in the attic, but soon found she had little time for painting. The decorations she painted on the walls of the sitting-room clouded over, in a greenish black mould, during that first wet spring and summer - laughing, she and her husband scrubbed the walls down with lime. She was pregnant then, and laughing suited her. She laughed and sang, and even whistled when she was alone fighting the damp, repeatedly sifting the clotted flour, airing their clothes on the fence whenever the sun came through, and firing up the stove even in the worst heat, to keep the plaster from sagging and crumbling off the walls and ceilings.

She was herself as hot as a stove, an engine of heat, and she stayed strong until her final month, as it happened a very warm September. Thomas built a low seat for her by the spring, with a canvas awning, so she could sit in its shade with her feet in the fine sand of the gently bubbling cold water. There, during her final three weeks, she repaired to weep, gently, for the sorrows of the world. Dolly Allan was dying of summer fever on the lungs and Anne was not allowed to visit the sick-bed. Henry no longer talked to her in the old way or called her Annie. He did not ask her to draw and paint his plant and insect collections, and there was no more talk of Anne making ill.u.s.trations for Dr. Jaeger's insect encyclopedia. She would never travel anywhere, not to Paris, certainly not to Tahiti. She would be lucky if her life as a farmer's wife would permit her one trip a year to Boston. Her baby might be still-born, or blind; her husband would cease to love her; Sissy or Mother had said something unkind; a runaway slave had been seized in Boston and sent back to the Carolinas to be hanged; the red calf had sickened and died in the night.

She had two daughters in three years' time; and then they waited, anxiously, for a son, who arrived at last, as if the wait had been designed to make his arrival the more joyous, a few years later. By then they had moved into the main house, nicely set up on the hill, with Mother Bratcher, now a widow, and a bachelor uncle. Here the walls were elegantly papered. With her children Anne painted flowers and birds and fanciful landscapes on the furniture - except for the dining-room table and chairs, which Mother Bratcher insisted be left alone. In the nursery, she painted the life-cycle of the tadpole-to-frog around one window frame; around the other, that of the Monarch b.u.t.terfly, with leaves and eggs on the bottom, three of the gaudy waist-coated caterpillars climbing up the left side, their chrysalides, jade green with dots of gold, decorating the top, and the b.u.t.terflies taking flight along the right.

In these years, on the rare occasions when she and Henry were alone, Anne sometimes asked about the letter in the desk. Henry answered that it was still there, that no one had come for it or asked after it.

What Henry did not tell his sister was that on one occasion curiosity had successfully tempted him to look at the pages. His excuse was that he had been ill. It had been a cold spring, hardly a leaf in bud in April, and the rain was always mixed with snow. In a very heavy sleet, Henry had gone out to work. He liked the rain, he almost even liked it leaking into his boots, when he waded through pastures that had become ponds, and he loved it pouring off the brim of his hat.

A farmer whose fields ab.u.t.ted Emerson's land in Walden Woods was selling off an additional parcel to the railroad. It was foolish to attempt surveying work in the wet - the steel needles and plates corroded, the plumb lines stretched - but he did it anyway, even knowing he would have to do it again. Henry stood knee-deep in the meadows for two days and then came down with a cough. Teas and broths and bed were his punishment for more than a week, while he lay feverish and dreamy. Once he woke to find the tabby cat stretched out on her back purring beside him. She seemed not the slightest concerned about the Canary-bird, who was chirping so indignantly from her cage in the window that it sounded like yelling. Henry dragged himself over to the bird and threw a cloth over the cage, silencing her, then, faint with the effort, turned back to speak to the cat.

"Oh, Miss Kitty, I feel like the devil."

The tabby sat up and stared at him, c.o.c.king her head slightly. The dream he had just left came rushing back to him, so overwhelmingly that he felt dizzy, laid his head down, and muttered aloud, "Margaret!"

The cat bounced off the bed and went straight to the little lap-desk, where it sat pushed against the wall at one end of the big table. With one light jump, she landed on the narrow flat part of the top and, ever so slightly, lashed her tail.

Henry saw, again, Margaret's face - his dream of her talking, animated, at some gathering, then the water, water from the meadows, rising and rising, now a monstrous wave, over her face. He stared at the cat.

Slowly, he shuffled over to the lap-desk, weakly picked it up, and weakly shuffled it back to his bed. He re-made his nest in the quilts, this time sitting upright. He placed the desk on his knees. It smelled of salt and that medicinal tang of sea-weed.

Very gingerly, he tugged back the rickety hasp, lifted the lid, and touched the top page with his hand. Margaret was speaking to him, she wanted him to read this.

He bent over the desk, not taking the pages out, and began to read. He read the first page, then set it beside the pile. He began the second page.

A sense of cold dread filled him and recalled him to reality.

He dropped the page and shut the lid, replaced the hasp, and with more energy than before took the desk back and this time shoved it beneath the table and out of sight. Draped in his quilt, he paced the floor and said aloud, "I'm sorry, that was none of my business, I'm so sorry, please forgive me, it will never happen again."

Reading another person's letter. And from one woman to another. He was, as well as a sneak, a scoundrel. But Margaret would forgive him, and Mrs. Hawthorne would not know.

He never liked having the desk in his room, but felt no temptation to read the letter again. It might as well have been bound with hoops of steel, and guarded by an angel with a fiery sword. Or something like that, fiery swords rising, spinning like spokes of a wheel from the cold undertow of his dreams.

TWO.

IF FOUND, THIS LETTER IS FOR SOPHIA HAWTHORNE IN CONCORD, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS. M.F. OSSOLI.

On the 17th of May, 1850, hours out of Livorno, aboard the merchant ship Elizabeth bound for New York- My dearest Sophie, as always you are to me- How extraordinary to be on board & coming home -!

Here I must compose my thoughts. Perhaps I will not send this to you by post, perhaps one day soon I will sit beside you on a bench under a maple-tree - how I miss Concord's maples! - & be able to sit beside you as you read & tell all that needs to be told. The pages and pages of words I have offered you & the entire public in print for four years have been true enough, certainly, & many may have felt that my partisanship in the cause of the Italian Revolution, & all revolutions of the people, was not sufficiently measured or cautious. But if they, if you, only knew to what degree I was exercising the highest degree of caution, of discretion, by not telling my private story. Yet still I hesitate. Not from shame, but from something else - a fear of offending, a fear of disturbing the peace of so dear a friend.

- To whom did Jeanne d'Arc confide, when the angels & Mary told her to strap on her armor? & Did these friends weep, or laugh? Surely they tried to prevent her ... & yet my own reasons, altho' I cannot with that Catholic girl's pious confidence a.s.sert they come directly from G.o.d, but only more likely that they be the promptings of the Divine within - may seem equally mad, tho' not violent in intention.

What I want to tell you, & you alone my dear, comes from a full heart & an over-full, doubt it not, brain. But I trust that it will unfold, unfold as the pages of this letter unfold, best when you may be sitting quietly - & quite alone, my dear! - when the children have gone to bed & Nathaniel is sitting up in the parlor with his friends, the port & cigars in full fume, & you may scamper to a private attic corner to read.

You are a full-grown lady, by now; you will not scamper up those stairs but rather wend your way. I hope you did not find my earlier letters amiss; I spoke in riddles, perhaps, because I was too afraid to tell anyone the entire truth. (The Entire Truth! As if such a Universe could be told!) But it is all out now - or at least the public face of my life is unveil'd as I return home. Here I am, an old married woman, a Marchesa (such pomp as ill-becomes any democrat but my husband has held to the t.i.tle for practical reasons) in the bargain, with the best child in all the world & my dear husband beside me. That I did not receive return letters from you did not surprise or worry me unduly; perhaps half of the letters sent to me never arrived because of the war - & because, it must be said, of Italian ways in general. A saying there is: Nothing is urgent in all of Italia but the priest's brandy & the husband's dinner.

There! I am unfair, again, in my old jesting way. The n.o.blest of men, & women, inhabit Italy as well. As you know if you have read my dispatches. Mr Greeley a.s.sures me that indeed they were widely read & I believe that this was so. But, despite all my pleas for financial a.s.sistance from my countrymen to help the cause of the Italian people, so little was sent.

3 June, Gibraltar Alas, the journey has not begun well. Our Captain Hasty, a kindly & confident man who had all our trust, has died of the typhus. His good wife Mrs Hasty & I nursed him as he failed - it was a swift but agonized death, & the ship's linen in short supply - and oh! the odors of sickness, again they press on me! - Now we are quarantined at Gibraltar, barely a step away it seems from Livorno.... We must wait a few days for more supplies. We will not be able to put his body ash.o.r.e as he must be buried at sea as a precaution, & this is a great source of distress to Mrs Hasty. Two sailors show signs of typhoid symptoms as well. We are attempting to exercise the same measures of washing & airing that seemed efficacious in the field hospitals in Rome. Also isolating the sick. This is a bad business & I am especially fearful for my husband, my Giovanni, about whom I have yet to tell you in detail - but he was weakened in body & mind from the days of battle - I have begged him to confine himself to the cabin. He, dear fellow, wants to help & so we have agreed he may a.s.sist in the galley, making ox-tail broth for the sick. (The cook is also stricken but only slightly.) G.o.d willing there may be no more cases.

7 June We have received our supplies. The cook is well. We think he may not have had the fever at all, but some stray malady that departed quickly. One of the sailors, a hearty Malay fellow called Dark John, has survived. Alas poor redheaded Fredo has died & like the captain's, his body has been slipt, knotted in shrouds, into the sea. The water at Gibraltar is a pale green, with white foam making lace over the surface. It was lovely as well as terribly melancholy to see the white-sail-wrapt bodies fall through that almost celestial green, to be absorbed by that greater Element.

There are no more suspected cases - & as the captain & these two sailors had spent some days together before the voyage in Naples, on an errand for the merchant company - all aboard hope that it was confined to these three alone. Mrs Hasty has become the t.i.tular captain under law, but as she is no sailor (& if she were, 'twould make no difference!) the First Mate, Mr Bangs, is at the helm.

We are anch.o.r.ed one more day & then will be off with tomorrow's tide.

The melancholy of the last several days having subsided somewhat, I am p.r.i.c.ked with a greater urgency. I intend to tell the story of my heart since last you saw me. My companions on the voyage from New York to London, the Springs, tho' excellent companions, were unlikely chaperones for a grown woman. They were not better informed about England than I - less so in truth in all matters but where to stay & what to eat. Nonetheless they had many friends & ties to a.s.sist us in England & on the Continent.

Moreover Mr Greeley felt that the radical step of having his Foreign Correspondent be a woman would be softened if periodically I could refer in my dispatches to my respectable travelling companions. They were sedate enough, heaven knows. My head-aches were extreme in the crossing, & Rebecca Spring was almost too a.s.siduous with the application of balms & words of comfort. & From another good lady on that interminable voyage I learnt quite a lot about the social life to be had in the capital city of Albany should I ever have the misfortune to find myself visiting in that region. I also can recite from memory the receipt for a noxious-sounding comestible, a favorite of a garrulous Carolinian gentleman, called Brunswick Stew, that features squirrel-meat, maize & broad beans.

I thought of you on that crossing, little Sophie - how you were once upon a time the best ministering angel to my head-aches. How often to soothe me you would comb and braid my hair, and once I remember you wove apple-blossoms into my tresses. I had reason to think of you again, months later, when I was nursing the wounded in our hospital in Rome - I longed to have the magic of your touch in my own hands, to cure or at least to comfort the agonies of those who died in our care day after day....

But to return to the subject of London. We arrived in August of that year (1846) &, as I dutifully reported to the Tribune, were busy as honey-bees about our sight-seeing, theatre-going, gallery-visiting & high-toned calling on heads of State, both the real (the Lord Mayor! & a member of the Prime Minister's Cabinet who oversees American affairs!) & the soi-disant. The resident London genius, Mr Carlyle, is a stiff-necked man who would have done very well with the stiff-necks of Boston - & I cannot countenance his abiding admiration, nay hero-worship, of that monster Cromwell! No matter how polite I was in print, to you I can call him a Provincial, despite his fame.

His wife is of another breed entirely. She has a bold eye & a quiet step, like a Chippewa brave who would come up behind you with a hatchet in the night. I know she disapproved of me but I quite liked her & can imagine setting her loose on one of our Conversation parties in West Street to mightily great effect.

Mr E warned me months ago that rumors have circulated back home concerning my friendship with Mr Nathan in New York before I left - a lifetime ago now. Some have even said that he & I met up in England, or Munich, to continue our illicit liaison. This is absolutely Untrue.... I trust you believe no real ill of me, tho' how the truth gets tangled with the lies in rumor remains a source of wonder to me. I did most sincerely love Mr Nathan - James - with a friendship that exceeded friendship - & hoped, believed, I would marry him. Yet how his being of the Jewish race could so discompose Mr E & others, the very preachers of universal Religion & tolerance - I cannot rightly say. It is harder to live than to preach one's beliefs, I know to my own sorrow. Moreover Mr E has always believed I should remain a virgin vessel, pouring forth the female gospel of the spirit -!

But at the last James Nathan would not marry me & that is the story of it. He meant instead to make a profitable marriage for his business interests, & was at the same time courting me most formally engrossed in the courtship of a proper daughter of Jerusalem, German-born like himself, with a merchant inheritance. (Candor obliges me to add that there was still another young person, homeless & helpless, a girl of the streets whom he had taken under his protection some years earlier - I would have helped her as well, indeed I offered my help when I had learnt by accident of her existence - & I would have endeavored to live with the knowledge of men as they are, had James made it possible.) When I heard of his planned marriage I suffered the mortification of realising that his intentions towards me were base, that mixed into the gold of our extraordinary friendship there had ever been this dross. Mercifully I had not yielded myself to him utterly by the time he left New York with his dependent in the ship's steerage & his plans for a grand marriage in his coat pocket. a.s.suredly, I corresponded with him, but I was not following him to London. It is with a continual effort that I refuse to let my knowledge of his character & predilections color my apprehensions of the Semitic peoples as a whole. He would have made me his mistress, like a sultan with a hareem.

& Yet, can I explain, I exulted at the same time I was disgusted, that his esteem for me was as a woman, & that alone. (Sophie, you cannot know what this meant to me. You who were always a pretty little thing, a model of all graces, whose smile I believe was sought by every young man within a hundred miles of Boston, a princess who was finally won by your princely Mr H! ... To be admired, to be courted, as a woman! James a.s.sured me that men of Semitic, & also Mediterranean, blood, can appreciate the stately form & admire the candid face of a strong woman - & this, unlike so many of his other protestations, turned out to be true.) I recount this foolishness to you, knowing you will forgive me for my moments of vanity & weakness, which were minor. At most my garments were on one occasion disarranged. Thereafter I demanded a proposal, & received no word for several days; meanwhile an acquaintance, the wife of a clerk at the Tribune, told me about Mr Nathan's other marriage plans. How she knew, I know not; perhaps all the world knew, but I. When confronted, he admitted as much - & then had the audacity to suggest that this should not alter our own relations! What did the man imagine? That I would become a sort of Bohemian mistress, a false wife in the next street while he & his Rachel solemnly raised a family & lit the candles in a house that I, the outcast harlot, might sometimes see by leaning through the palings of a winter night, wishing to warm myself by the sight of their legitimated flames? I am no devotee of silly novels, to countenance myself a romantic heroine doomed to such a Fate as that!

I am angry again, now, to think of it, & at the time did blame myself much, for the freedom of my speech & friendship in the company of such a man that perhaps led him to think me capable of selling my love for a pittance.

No doubt such was the shame I felt, that when Mr Greeley stipulated that I be chaperoned by the worthy Springs, I complied without grumbling. Perhaps I do need chaperones, thought I ruefully. New York, my dear Sophie, is not so safe as Boston for a woman alone. Neither, I can say more happily, is Europe but I mean another kind of safety.

It almost amuses me to speak of this from the great, impossibly great, distance of a few years. So changed am I now; I still see Mr Nathan's behavior as coa.r.s.e, but I am no longer offended. He is what he is, & should he have ten dozen mistresses, in every Borough & bye-way of the cities of New York & London & Munich, that is no matter to me. I should have taken his measure myself at an earlier moment, ere I lost my heart. Well but I could not have lost it far, since I laid my hands on it again soon enough - a compensating gift of the sea-sickness: when I revived from that ailment of the body, so too did my heart seem restored to me. I was quite myself again by the time we reached England.

Same day, night The voyage is smooth now; my Nino sleeps. (He is nearly two years old!) At night my husband sits with the men in the rough parlor below decks & plays a kind of Italian patience called "Qui Sace" (Who Knows?), which the Brownings tell me is called in England "The Idle Year." Do you know it? I cannot take an interest in card games, but I see my Giovanni night after night, ever since the war, with his especial deck of cards - these are no ordinary cards but disks with the numerals or faces in the middle & the hearts or spades, the figures, arranged around the circle. These cards have soft tooled-leather backs, reddish, with a figure of a dragon on them. Like so many homely objects I have seen in Italy, they have a charm about them incommensurate with their monetary value, a happy charm of style. Most of them have been so handled that the dragon, black against the red, can scarcely be made out any more.

Giovanni sits for hours, laying out the cards, stacking them backwards into a single pile. He often "makes" the game - because, I believe, he does not truly shuffle the cards.

I run ahead of my tale, again, but I must say how my dear husband is no longer quite the man I married. He was never a man of letters, his English is halting & he cannot read a word of it, but he is withal a graceful & sensitive man with many gentle jests & niceties of manner, a true "swain," whose attentions astonished & gratified me, & with whom I have known a deep, sweetly domestic love. The sadness is that he has been damaged by an injury to his head he received during the last month of the fighting. For a time we feared he would be blind, but his vision has returned only slightly dimmed. His understanding & conversation have narrowed, but how he loves the boy! He can sit with him, playing at tops or cards & cat's-cradle, for hours.

To Tell of London But now I return to my chronicle & I do promise to be more direct, altho' as you know the shortest distance between two points has never been my particular forte. But back to London with my friends, in the autumn of 1846. Having met Mr Carlyle, & having at last persuaded the Springs to travel on their own to the beauty spots of Canterbury & the southern coast, I had my own time in London. Aside from the constant wish to do well by Mr Greeley's readers, & so to see & hear all that was worth seeing & hearing & knowing in the great Metropolis, I had a powerful desire to walk. & So I did. I found a boot-maker, most of whose customers are constables & messenger-clerks, who made me some very st.u.r.dy walking shoes, with a thick sole & bra.s.s toe-caps, scarcely different in form from the men's except that in concession to female fashion he added a delicate buckle above the instep. If anyone noticed, I am sure they laughed at me, but I did not care & they were mostly hid underneath the skirts which were, that season, sc.r.a.ping the ground & of course filthy. Never have I had such a comfortable pair of shoes & had I not walked them to pieces in London, Paris, & Rome I would be wearing them still.

Moreover I abandoned my deep-brim bonnets at last. There is a new fashion, "Continental" they call it & not really approved by society but which I have felt free to embrace in my new guise as that singular oddity, the American Woman Journalist - I wear a large squash-cap, something a la renaissance about it, with a flat brim, & a Lisle-veil for occasions when modesty is required.

Women are not allowed in the Houses of Parliament, not even as spectators, which was a sorrow - I had so hoped to catch a glimpse of such as my hero Mr Wilberforce! - tho' I was allowed to watch a trial in the Old Bailey. The pomp of the setting seemed especially sad as it made a contrast to the wretch in the dock who had evidently stabbed his landlord in a haze of drink but who spoke in his own defense by saying that he "loved him like a brother." The wounded man, sitting nearby, was friend & brother no longer & looked away in disgust.

The court wigs lend an antic air. We Colonials who have lived without that decoration for some years & only are acquainted with them from family portraits & newspaper drawings, find them not so much quaint as preposterous. I decided to pretend that I was observing a banquet of the Fi-Ji Islanders all dressed in their ceremonial feathers, instead of the court of law that is our own jurisprudential foundation, & commenced to smile. Human dress is one of my greatest amus.e.m.e.nts since visiting with the Indian tribes of the Great Lakes & now, since my travels on the Continent. Fashionable rules of dress & decorum, howsoever we act as if they were writ in stone, are so widely diverse & so quickly subject to change that indeed the day may come when you & I, Sophie, decide to follow Madame Sand's example & trot about in Turkish pantaloons. Trot is the wrong word for Mme Sand - she glides. But I am sure that I would at the very least canter in such gear, & flash my bra.s.s-toed boots for all to see!

The bridges of London were my great joy. It stirred my soul to walk back & forth across that great River, to see the commerce & the humanity that flowed over & under the bridges. My favorite was Waterloo when I felt I could spare the fee, but I also liked the Westminster Bridge that was Mr Wordsworth's stopping-place for inspiration. He preferred to see London before dawn, while its humanity still slept - "Ships, towers, domes, theatres, & temples lie / Open unto the fields & to the sky, / All bright & glittering in the smokeless air." But I most liked the city when it was awake, the greatest city in the world, with so much that is good & so much that is bad in it, & over all that cloud-strewn sky that glows grey then yellow & pink at sunset. The sky seemed forgiving, a forgiving sea-side sky, offering those "Everlasting Arms" to embrace us promised in the hymn. Somehow to rest in them we must reach upwards - the reaching is hard work, but the final repose is the greater.

Any day in which I felt that I had written accurately about a wrong that may be righted by public action; any day in which I fetched a meal for a beggar-woman & her child or offered my services to a committee that needed me to speak on behalf of a poor-hospital; any day in which I resolved, again, to enter the fray of these times by my pen or by more forceful means - that was a day in which, standing on a London bridge at sunset, I felt that I could view humanity with a full but calm heart, & stand erect to receive the solace of the Divine.

But oh my Sophie, this was not every day! How many days did I lie abed with a head-ache & weep about my failures, my losses, self-regard & self-pity clambering over me like vines upon a tombstone! Even in London I think that I lost one day in five to such defeats & there was one entire week after the Springs came back, that I was obliged by a bad cough to stay in & be nursed.

The day that I came back to health, if not to full strength, we had an invitation to a dinner - it was in November of 1846 - where we met Mazzini, the Italian revolutionary in exile. He was visiting throughout London, hoping to raise money & good will for the causa, for a free, united, & democratic Italy, & having heard of me he wanted me to tell his story for American readers. You can imagine, perhaps, the trepidation with which I approached that first meeting. Mazzini's personal power was said to be great, & like many, I suppose, I was suspicious of the person of a revolutionary, if not his goals. I was prepared to resist dazzlement. I was also, I confess, bracing myself against the smell of garlick & spirits & hair pomade & the insulting freedom of manner that prejudice had taught me to expect of Italians.

Imagine my gratification, to meet a gentleman - at first entirely reserved in manner & courteous - only becoming fiery-eyed when speaking to persuade, standing up from his seat at the table, then raising his eloquent voice - for altho' his English is limited, it has a music in its simple inflexions - gesturing to the small gathering, his voice growing louder as his hands waved more broadly, finally as if he were a very Caesar addressing his legions spread over a hill-side. "My friends in England, my friends from America - my friends who are democrats all! Only a united & free Italy can hope to bring her people into the nineteenth century, to sit at the table with the free men of Europe as I sit here with you tonight! We shall lead Europe again, from the darkness to the light! Too long has Austro-Hungary pressed the foreign boot upon our necks! We are the children of that great legacy of Rome, the model for democracy - an inspiration to our friends in the United States of America & throughout the world. We should claim our inheritance, be the owners of our fields & factories, & in unity bring our suffering, impoverished peoples into the light of progress & reform!"

He was more muted when speaking of the tyranny of the Church - even Italian anti-Papists are all nonetheless devout Catholics - "We have beseeched our Papa in the Vatican to show his support to the people of G.o.d, & to suffer the little children to come unto him - to let us turn to him in our struggle. The time may come when he will support our causa. Viva Italia!, & cetera."

It was wonderful drama especially in a London dining-room.

Before many days had past I was urging his cause on everyone I knew in London - some were cold but others made up for that with their enthusiasm. We raised nearly a hundred pounds in a week & a friend of the Springs at the French emba.s.sy began to make arrangements for Signor Mazzini to cross the Channel & so head south again secretly as he must through the Continent which did not after all belong to Austria tho' in her pocket. But that might be a year away & so meanwhile Mazzini entrusted me with papers & a letter to take to his mother in Genoa. We might be some time in travelling to Italy but I agreed, delighted to have a purpose animate my journey more urgent even than writing of the ferment of change to those back home. The Springs would accompany me to Paris & at least as far as Rome. I felt emboldened by the att.i.tude of my new European friends; tho' worried for my comfort, they did not otherwise find it unseemly for a woman to travel alone in their midst. If she were a gentlewoman & had enough money to travel as such, she would be reasonably safe.

Little did I know what would find me in Paris - what I most long & fear to tell -.

16 June, Leaving harbor of Tenerife, Canary Islands A week has pa.s.sed. My baby has survived. That is all I can write at present. He caught the fever, he was brave & we almost lost him but we did not. Today he is well enough to eat bread dipped in broth & to walk a few steps. His father never left our side. I am blessed by this love & thank the Divine.

17 June I write as if from another world. The near loss of my son has made me into a new person it seems. Celesta, the girl who accompanies us & minds Nino for the price of her pa.s.sage, was sick as well. I nursed her too & became truly fond of her - it is astonishing how waiting for another to breathe, listening for the air of life, enforces a kind of love upon us. I loved every soldier I nursed in the siege - all but one, who snarled at me like a mad cane until his eyes went flat.

The sailor Tomaso brought me a garland of "everlasting" amaranth flowers & the leaves of that plant, from a Tenerife garden, & they hang where I have tacked them on the upper bunk, just by my head where I sit to write. I have long dreamed of such flowers, since an English lady of my childhood, one whom I idolised, gave me a bouquet to remember her by. Hers were from Madeira, an island just north of us now, that I always longed to see - how close I have come to my childhood dream, by geography's terms! - & how far & how different the life I live from what I could have imagined.

"Madeira" once meant a magical island where I would be fully understood, a place to sail to in my dreams, where love & safety awaited me. Now I know something else - that it is my labor to understand others, & possibly even myself, that will be the accomplishment of my life - the accomplishment in the act of trying. Not to be understood, but to understand; not even, alas, to be loved, but to love.

Nino, whom I love by instinct & yet must still endeavor to love aright, nestles with Celesta now, both of them better but weak, sleeping in the other lower bunk across from my perch. We are so close-wedged that Nino can put his hand on my leg as I prop it across. I almost cannot force my mind to the past - & Yet, & yet - this near-death, this presence of Death as real as a hungry wolf in the forest, reminds me of how little time we have - and renews the pressure to tell, the imperative desire. I want to tell the truth, after years of decorous silence -. I repeat that I do not know if I will send this to you. I write to you as if to myself, but with the image of you, as I first saw you with your first child, you the cameo of Motherhood, all forgiveness. There has been much of my behavior that the world would not forgive; I know this. In response to the news of my marriage & child my own Mother has been all sweetness in her letter, but she hints that others will not feel so. Silence from my brothers, confused hauteur from the Greeleys, stern questions from Mr E, & a warm but worried response even from my old friend Caroline - all this has alerted me to the trouble that awaits me, the scornful words & suspicious interpretations. If this is how my friends greet my news, how will the harsher Wide World! It is "worse" than they imagine - & not worse at all as I know myself in this regard, at any rate, guiltless, standing on the axis of the Divinity as pure & true as the day I was born.

What is "worse"? I must write of Paris in the winter of 1846a47, & of the great man I met there, the Polish patriot & poet Adam Mickiewicz. I wrote about him in my columns & you no doubt have heard of him but that is not to know the dynamic, thrilling presence of the man, his humor & liveliness, his great soul. I am using the word great often it seems, but as it is one of the only words I can find to fit him it must be his great-coat.

We - the Springs & I - did not meet him until our third month in the city. We spent a full December & January in the heart of Paris life, staying as we were at the Hotel Rougemont, just off the happily named Boulevard des Italiennes. My French tutor was a necessity as I endeavored to catch the nuances of the political landscape in the cafes & on the street-corners & in the salons. Paris enlivened my pen as London had not & I wrote at least six dispatches in that brief time. At last through a letter of introduction to Madame Sand we were invited to meet that extraordinary lady. She had returned from her country home where hunger & rioting for bread had taken hold of the local peasants during a desperate winter - I learned that Mme Sand had given much money & had fed many with her own hands.

18 June Continuing: On our second visit to Mme Sand's elegant apartment (the color yellow predominated, a fashionable touch), I met the Poet. He is at most times accompanied by an entourage of his admirers & protectors. (I have seen these grown men kiss the Poet's right shoulder as the great man speaks, in homely homage to his sanct.i.ty.) I had heard that Mickiewicz no longer writes poems, saving all his inventive powers for the cause of liberty, in Poland & throughout Europe. He has been inspired by the doctrine of Messianism & dreams of the coming of a new golden age, ushered in by Giants who stand tall above the ordinary run of men & women - Poland is a natural breeding-ground for such giants - ah! It can easily sound foolish but as he spoke, it sounded as sincere & simple as a child's prayer, & every bit as truthful. You know that I have long harbored such hopes myself, but here from the Poet I felt as if my hopes had found their proper words at last. I told him of my own faith in the "resurgence," "Risorgimento," & we quickly agreed on the divine inspiration that has brought Mazzini to Italy's cause. It was as if our full apprehension of one another took place in a flash of light, as if no others in the room - including his good friends - were even present. We all spoke in English, out of courtesy to the Springs, but our conversations subsequent to that one were a mixture of French & some German, as well as English, & I learned a few words of Polish - a beautiful language, even when shouted, as there are those shhh & jhhhh sounds, so everything sounds like a whisper, a secret - I remember that in that first encounter he took my face between his hands - he is very tall, he stooped over the sopha where I sat, & his hands were so large I felt as if I had been taken into the paws of an enormous gentle Polish bear - a silver bear, as his mane is liberally streak'd with silver - & He said that I was the New Woman, a phrase I had heard before often enough in my travels (do not think me vain, it is how the Europeans tend to speak of American things & people) - But at this moment, I believed he meant also new to him - I was claimed, right there in the midst of the parlor & its inhabitants & its upholsteries - claimed as his "new woman," his enormous grey eyes, that look bigger than other eyes because his face is as broad & stern as a wind-swept sky, telling me - I feared I might convulse from the galvanic shock, I feared others might detect, yet I could not bring myself to remove his hands from my face, dear hands! - I faintly claimed a migraine, asked for the windows to be opened, & the Springs a.s.sisted me home to our hotel.

Rebecca was too careful of my head to provoke me with conversation about our remarkable tea-party, but she did look sideways at me when I said the next morning that I hoped to make another visit to the Poet & his friends. We met him at a private concert that evening - forgive me that, tho' it was M Chopin & he played his own compositions, I remember not a note! - as Mickiewicz gave me a letter, asking to meet me the following day at the home of a friend, in the afternoon. His letter also said what may shock you, Sophie - It said that I did not have the "right" to my virginity, that I needed to know love if I were to be the true New Woman. He had challenged me at first principles - You, who now know me well, know that I maintained the privilege of virginity both sincerely & also, in the depths of my soul, as a solace for my failures with such as Mr Nathan. The Poet destroyed my argument with his words, so bold, so clear - the language with which free men & women must speak to one another, as I believe - You must not be shocked at what transpired, my dear Sophie - He greeted me at the door, we were alone as I had hoped & perhaps feared. Our first words to one another, even as we embraced, were a solemn vow that we had met & been married in a previous life - we had the same happy notion - he said we had been peasants with a homely farm, I said no, he had been a Roman senator & I his wife - we knew that we had lived outside this time, in the past & in the future - that we were married already somewhere in the Universe -.

& What can be called "good" or "bad" after all? There is only the action that arises from one's true character.

20 June Cont: The next day I secured a small set of rooms in a side-street near the hotel, belonging to acquaintances who were away from town - & I told the Springs that I needed privacy to write, & nurse my head-aches, during the days. For two miraculous weeks, nearly every day he visited me in the afternoon, as early as he could get away. My rooms were on the second floor; I would slip down to the mews entrance & unlock the back door shortly before he was due - by avoiding the street door we hoped to escape detection - & he would come to me & stay until dusk. I often called him my "bear," because he was so like a silvery Polish bear, but I also took to calling him, in the style of American slang affection, "Mish." He laughed & exclaimed he had not known I spoke Polish - when I vowed I did not, he explained that the Polish word for "bear" is mis, p.r.o.nounced mish. & Then he told me that his word for me is ges, said with a honking noise, something like gensch, & that it means "goose."

One thing - & I hope this does not offend - we would, in the calm after the storm of love, set to make one another "spit-&-polish" fine - I in my shift, he in his shirt, would clean & trim one another's nails. I would comb his s.h.a.ggy mane, clean his ears & neck, snip his stray hairs. He could spend an hour combing my hair - he said it was the color of moonlight. He has terrible scars on his leg & on his head - from when he threw himself from a window years ago, in despair when he had first knew that his wife was incurably mad.

Altho' since he is a man, no doubt he had found ways - he hinted that for some years he kept one of his wife's nurses - what he had longed for were these wifely attentions, these groomings & pettings. I had not known that I longed for them too.

As a matter of fashion as well, he made another great change in my life: No more whale bones! He actually stomped on my corsets with his boots, in a rage that tho' feigned succeeded in "busting-up" the stays. He said it was a garment to which no free woman should submit & urged me to consult Madame Sand about alternatives.

Much to Rebecca's dismay, I did - & discovered that tho' Madame never wears any form of corset herself, she was happy to introduce me to a bandage-like wrapping, with b.u.t.tons, of softest linen, that resembles something I remember our grandmothers wearing. This old-new soft "corselette" necessitated a lengthy visit to the dressmaker to have all my clothes taken out - Rebecca was appalled - I cannot tell you, dear Sophie, the results! I felt free as a floating angel in my raiment! I cannot imagine that an inch or two more on the waist matters to any but the silliest young girls or the stiffest dowager. (& I will tell you, confidentially, that it matters not a whit to a real man.) Eventually, I had an Italian dressmaker show me how to fashion the loose robes that the women of intellectual & artistic circles in Europe favor, something between a reg'lar dress & a dressing gown, gathered at the bosom, & blessedly, utterly, without stays or hoops.

If Rebecca guessed at my afternoons, she said not a thing. I was so in love that nothing else seemed terribly serious, or fretsome, for a while - never before had I known that feeling of being outside of Time, that attends on two people wholly in love. & Then at last the calendar began to worry me - I received a letter from Mazzini, in which il magnifico urged me to see his mother in Genoa as soon as possible to deliver his letter - but not, he had decided, to try to bring or send anything back for himself, not even through a third party. He had been warned by his friends that, once I visited his mother, my movements would be watched & my correspondence would be read by the authorities. The protection & discretion he had once thought he could secure from my prominence & my role as a foreign, nearly official, visitor to Italy, he no longer trusted. Mish at first did not want me even to visit Mazzini's mother, but I reminded him that I was, as he had said himself so many times, "no ordinary woman," & that I did not fear to do what I knew to be right.

All I feared was leaving Mish. He had said, many times, that he must & would sever ties with his wife, but we neither of us, I speak sincerely, believed he should. No matter the terrible things she had done to him & to their children, she was not to blame - only her madness was to blame - & her frailty required his protection. The children lived safely now with an aunt, just outside Paris - how could he be sure to see them often? Moreover, he could not leave France without risking arrest - & If he travelled in disguise that would prevent him from doing his public work on behalf of the great cause.

Our Idyll was broken that day as we discussed Mazzini's letter, & it was made the more difficult because Mish decided to become jealous - I saw him decide, like a naughty boy calculating to throw a fit - of Mazzini, who is not married, & whose letter contained certain endearments addressed to myself. Why must I meet his mother? Why does he call me "his own dear lady" & "his cigno trombetta" (trumpeter swan)? Swan! Ha! I was a goose, but I was his goose, his farmyard goose, &c, &c.