CHAPTER XXVIII

“ANY WIFE TO ANY HUSBAND”

Everything in life comes in series. One friend brings another. Mary and Percy, after suffering so much from loneliness, suddenly found themselves, without having sought it, the centre of a gay and pleasant circle.

Chance had worked the miracle. First of all Shelley had begun to suffer again from the pain in his side. The wind from the Apennines, so boisterous in Florence during the winter, tried him greatly, and the doctor recommended Pisa as more sheltered.

Tom Medwin, one of his cousins, came to join him there. Medwin had been in a dragoon regiment in India, from which he was now retired with the rank of Captain. He had literary aspirations, and on this account sought the society of the only literary member of the family. He was a good fellow, though a deadly bore, but he introduced to the Shelleys a charming couple, the Williamses.

Edward Williams, after three years in the Navy, had exchanged from that branch of the service into the 8th Dragoon Guards, then quartered in India, where he had made Medwin’s acquaintance. He had been obliged to sell out, he always explained, because of his health. Frank, fearless, quite without side, and interested in everything, the Shelleys liked him extremely, and they found his wife charming. She was a very pretty woman with much sweetness of manner, and an excellent musician. The two couples became great friends and at last the Shelleys knew the delights of informal visiting, of ungrudging admiration and praise, and of the perfect confidence which makes the joy of any real friendship.

The moment a social circle exists it attracts to its centre all the lonely souls drifting round its circumference. Thus, came Taaffe, the Irish count; Mavrocordato, the Greek prince; and an extraordinary Italian priest with the diabolic and piercing eye of a Venetian inquisitor. This was the reverend professor, Pacchiani, known as the Devil of Pisa, abbé without religion, professor without a chair, amateur of women and pictures, antiquary, pimp, dilettante, and go-between in general.

Always with some _palazzo_ or other to let, he would take his commission from the tenant as well as from the landlord; he would warmly recommend a teacher of Italian, and divide with him the price paid for the lessons; to the rich Englishman passing through Venice he would give, in strictest confidence, the address of a _marquese_ wishing to sell an Andrea del Sarto.

On familiar terms in every house the moment he had got his foot within the door, he called Mary and her friend Jane, “la belle Inglese,” and amused them by telling them tales of the great ladies of Pisa, to whom he was father confessor and tame cat.

* * *

One of Pacchiani’s stories made a deep impression on Shelley. Count Viviani, a great Florentine nobleman, had just married, for the second time, a woman much younger than himself. By his first wife he had two lovely daughters, and the new countess, jealous of their beauty, had persuaded her husband to send them to Pisa and shut them up each in a separate convent, until husbands were found who would take them without dowries. The professor, who had known the _contessine_ since their childhood, spoke with enthusiasm of their wit and beauty. The eldest in particular was almost a genius.

“Poverina!” said Pacchiani. “She pines like a bird in a cage. She sees her youth slipping away unused, and she is made for love. Yesterday she was watering some flowers in her cell—she has nothing else to love but her flowers—‘Yes,’ she told them, ‘you were born to vegetate, but we, thinking beings, we were created for action and not to wither away in one place. . . .’ A miserable place too is that convent of St. Anna; at this moment the poor inmates are shivering with cold, being allowed nothing to warm them but a few ashes which they carry about in an earthen vase. You would pity them.”

This story reawoke in Shelley all his instincts of knight-errantry, which the comforts of conjugal life had stilled during recent years. He asked dozens of questions, and showed such hot indignation with the Count, such interest in the fair victim, that Pacchiani could not resist the pleasure—always delicious to an old man of his sort—of bringing two young people together. He offered to take Shelley to the convent of St. Anna.

It was in all conscience a miserable place, a ruinous building situated in an unfrequented street in the suburbs. The visitors crossed a gloomy portal and the abbé went to find Emilia. Mephistopheles came back accompanied by Gretchen. He had not exaggerated her beauty. Her black hair was tied in a simple knot, after the manner of a Greek Muse. Her faultless contour seemed the work of Praxiteles: the marble-like pallor of her skin made more resplendent her large black eyes full of a sleepy voluptuousness, in which certain Italian women surpass even Orientals.

The moment she appeared in the sombre parlour, Shelley felt that he loved her, and love with him was no desire of the flesh, but a need for self-sacrifice to that which he adored. Ever at the back of his mind dwelt his ideal of perfect physical beauty united to perfect spiritual beauty, the myth of a lovely and persecuted woman whose knight he would become, some Andromeda to whom he would play Perseus, some Princess for whom he would be St. George; a myth which had always been the motive of his love adventures, which had led him to run away with Harriet to save her from her father, and to love Mary because she was unhappy. It was a sentiment made up in proportions unknown to himself, of desire and pity, which earthly perhaps in the beginning, had been so purified that it now merely raised to the highest point his creative power in poetry.

In Mary he had long believed this mystic love had been found. She fell indeed as little short of a goddess as any woman may be. For the first time, perhaps, the real woman coincided with the Shelleyan image of her. Nevertheless, daily life with her had shown him traits quite incompatible with divinity. Mary, mother of a family and housekeeper, was a drier, a more practical Mary, than the loving and courageous young girl of Skinner Street. What Shelley had been used to praise as her diamond-like purity now seemed to him to partake of the coldness of ice, while her jealousy had become inconceivably petty. Worst of all, he now knew her too intimately to be able any longer to find in her a quickening of his ideas.

In the beautiful and mysterious Emilia, on the contrary, he could incarnate his whole soul, because he knew nothing about her. At long last, he discovered in this Italian convent, the adorable and fleeting vision which he had pursued since boyhood, and which, every time that he had thought to seize it, had vanished away, leaving him in presence of a flesh-and-blood woman capable of wounding his sensitive soul.

On coming into the parlour, Emilia addressed herself to a caged bird in terms which appeared to Shelley the most poetic in the world:

“Poor little bird, you are dying of languor! How I pity you! How much you must suffer hearing the other birds calling to you, ere they depart for warmer climes! But you are doomed, like me, to finish in this prison your miserable life. . . . Ah, why can I not free you!”

She was fond of improvising thus in Italian fashion all sorts of spoken poems that did not fail in quality—nor in quantity either. But Shelley saw in her true genius. He begged leave to come and call upon her again, and to bring with him his wife and his sister-in-law. She graciously gave her permission.

When he described the visit to Mary, he made no secret of the sentiments with which it had inspired him. Both of them were great readers of Plato, and Mary was familiar with that love which is merely the contemplation of supreme beauty. She would, however, have been better pleased to see it awakened by a statue, or that Shelley, like Dante, had never had the chance of speaking to his Beatrice. However, when Shelley begged her to go with him to see the beautiful prisoner, she willingly went.

She admitted that Emilia was beautiful in a Greek statue style, and of surprising eloquence, but at the bottom of her heart she felt that she preferred the chaste reserve of the viaggetory Englishwoman to this too effusive Italian genius. She thought that Emilia’s voice was over-loud, that her gestures, if expressive, were wanting in grace, and that she was most agreeable when she held her tongue—which was seldom. However, Mary was careful not to let her real sentiments appear on the surface; on the contrary she expressed for Emilia the warmest friendship.

Claire, more impressionable than Mary, fell, like Shelley, an immediate victim to Emilia’s charms. While Mary took the prisoner little presents, books, a gold chain, Claire, who was poor, offered the only thing she could give, namely, lessons in English. Emilia accepted with joy. An endless correspondence began between the convent and Pisa, and it was nothing but “Dear Sister!” “Adored Mary!” “_Sensible_ Percy! . . . _Caro fratello!_” and even, in a mystic sense needless to say, “_Adorato sposo!_” Strangely enough, “dear sister Mary” sometimes showed a slight coldness. “But your husband tells me that this apparent coldness is only the ashes which cover an affectionate heart.”

The truth is, that Emilia was beginning to get on dear sister Mary’s nerves, for Shelley was busy in raising round her one of those aërial worlds into which he loved to escape. He was writing, in her honour, a magnificent love-poem, which he intended to make as mysterious as Dante’s _Vita Nuova_, or the _Sonnets_ of Shakespeare.

“I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise commend To cold oblivion, though it is in the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe The dreariest and the longest journey go. True love in this differs from gold and clay That to divide is not to take away. Love is like understanding that grows bright, Gazing on many truths; ’tis like thy light Imagination! . . . Narrow The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates . . . One object, and one form.”

He drew a picture of Emilia which was one long pæan to her beauty:

“Warm fragrance seems to fall from her light dress And her loose hair: and where some heavy tress The air of her own speed has disentwined, The sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind.”

“The brightness Of her divinest presence trembles through Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew Embodied in the windless heaven of June, Amid the splendour of winged stars, the Moon Burns inextinguishably beautiful.”

“Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate Whose course has been so starless! O too late Beloved! O too soon adored by me!” “Emily A ship is floating in the harbour now. . . .”

It was the most impassioned of invitations to set sail for some lovely and impossible Elysian isle. There

“We shall become the same, we shall be one Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two? . . . Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound, And our veins beat together. . . . One hope within two wills, one will beneath Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death, One heaven, one hell, one immortality, And one annihilation. Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of Love’s rare Universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire—— I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!”

Although Mary consoled herself by repeating that all these fine phrases were addressed to the divine essence of Emilia and not a very pretty girl with black eyes and black tresses, yet, at the same time, it was vexing to see Shelley writing with such enthusiasm. Happily, he was so engrossed by the ardour of composition that he had no time to go and see the poem’s heroine. And while her platonic lover multiplied his aërial metaphors, Emilia received from the Count, her father, a cynical message. He had found a husband who would take her without a penny, and he requested her to let him know whether she accepted. The gentleman in question, a certain Biondi, was not attractive, and he inhabited a distant castle, surrounded by swamps. Emilia had never seen him, nor was she to see him before the wedding-day. Such Turkish customs were supremely disgusting, yet what could she do? The Elfin king, married to a very real Mary, could not, evidently, free her from her dungeon. Were she to marry Biondi, this might be perhaps the beginning of a happier life. And if she didn’t like the man, she would meet others she might like, for _cavalieri sirventi_ are to be found even in the midst of a swamp.

Shelley had not finished his poem before he learnt that Emilia was married.

* * *

Six months later Mary wrote to a friend:

“Emilia has married Biondi; we hear that she leads him and his mother—to use a vulgarism—a devil of a life. The conclusion of our friendship, _à la Italiana_, puts me in mind of a nursery rhyme which runs thus:

‘As I was going down Cranbourne Lane, Cranbourne Lane was dirty, And there I met a pretty maid Who dropt to me a curtsy. I gave her cakes, I gave her wine, I gave her sugar-candy; But oh! the little naughty girl, She asked me for some brandy.’

“Now turn ‘Cranbourne Lane’ into Pisan acquaintances, which I am sure are dirty enough, and ‘brandy’ into the wherewithal to buy brandy, and you have the whole story of Shelley’s Italian Platonics.”

And Shelley added: “I cannot look at my poem! The person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno. . . . I think one is always in love with something or other; the error—and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it—consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.”