Miss Fuller (10 page)

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. Assuredly, 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 assured 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 coarse, 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 sturdy walking shoes, with a thick sole & brass 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, scraping 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 à 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 amusements 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 brass-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 God, & 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 embassy 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 attitude 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.