Мэтью Перл: The Dante Chamber

Ethel had been at Saint Mary’s nearly half of the two-year limit for residents. Like many of the girls, she was being trained to enter domestic service in a respectable home, and often helped the nuns in the kitchen. She looked younger than her years, which were twenty, her round face splashed with brown freckles and her eyes thoughtful and also brown. She was one of Christina’s favorites. The residents were forbidden to speak directly of their pasts to the nuns, but Christina was not quite as strict and would listen with open mind and heart. Ethel had told her how when her wages were lowered at a sewing factory, she turned to accepting men’s money in order to prevent her mother from being put into a workhouse.

“Need a hand, miss?” Ethel now asked with gentle concern. “By the by, I found one of your volumes of poems in the library, and don’t go telling the sisters I said so, but how it beat those dusty editions of sermons in there something terrific!”

Christina felt her olive cheeks color.

“I remember some of my favorite lines. Shall I say them?”

“Certainly not, Ethel.”

Ethel had already begun:

“We ought to finish serving, Ethel. Chapel begins soon.”

The charity home had a rotating list of ministers who would come and preach, so that there was at least one a day. Christina brought food to the chapel, where the guest on this day was readying himself at the pulpit by looking over some handwritten pages.

“Suffering... is... not... sin,” the preacher practiced, speaking slowly to himself as much to prepare his voice as to rehearse the language. This was Reverend Fallow, a stately man who paused to salute Christina as she silently left a plate for him to eat before his sermon.

As Christina continued her duties, she reviewed to herself all the reasons to ignore her ominous foreboding, the reasons circumstances did not justify her apprehension and that her own flawed imagination alone caused her worry. Sound reasons, every one. But she could fight her feelings for only so long. Her father had always urged her to trust her instincts the way her mother urged her to trust the Bible.

“Sister Christina,” came a whisper so natural it had to belong to a nun. “Miss Rossetti,” the voice tried again.

Christina had frozen in midmotion while carrying another large pot from the kitchen. She blinked herself back from her trance.

I wish I were a little bird.

“Are you feeling ill, dear?”

Christina assured her she was fine. “I’m only feeling as though...” She paused to think what it was.

As though he needs me now. When she composed poetry, the voice in her heart was hers and not hers. This was how she felt at this moment. She could doubt herself but she could not ignore the voice. He needs me now.

The pot slipped from her grasp and splattered her a deep red and brown. Her apron looked like it was covered in blood.

The nun suggested she go home to rest.

“Not until the women are fed, Sister.”

“We have made some progress with you, at least. Yours is the only apron that always remains white and pristine after helping serve fifty-five famished women. You’ve finally joined the rest of us mortals: not always as steady as we’d like to be. Care to talk about what’s weighing on you?”

Christina offered a hint of a grateful smile. Hers was a face so stoic and serious that an artist friend of her brother’s had once asked her to pose as Jesus Christ for a painting. She thought of speaking about her worries but didn’t. It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to seem egotistical speaking of her own problems, though it was true she didn’t. Christina would not trust even a nun with her feelings.

“Sister Christina,” said the woman in the dark habit. “Happy and unhappy Sister Christina. Come, we’ll bring the chowder in together.” The nun gripped one handle on the pot while Christina held on to the other. She had a mission to finish here, then one to begin.

By three o’clock on club days, the windowless room two flights up in the grand building in Cornhill filled with the greatest literary and artistic geniuses of England. It was said that by the time enough members of the Cosmopolitan drifted in between, say, four and six o’clock, a visitor could not think of a question too obscure that it could not be answered by one of the men in this room, putting aside whether the answer was correct.

One of many poets who belonged to the club, Robert Browning, at first bounded up the stairs on his way to the gathering but abruptly slowed down. Just moments before, he was eager to be going in. Then his brain betrayed him with the following train of thought, which began harmlessly enough:

This would be the first club meeting of January.

With January had come 1870.

With the New Year came another year without Her.

Another year without Her was another to wonder whether he could endure it.

He glanced down the dim stairwell. If anybody were coming behind him, he’d look lively — lock eyes, smile, shake hands. Empty, for now. He pulled off his lemon-colored gloves by the tips and caught his breath. Then he brightened with a better thought. Whenever the Cosmopolitan Club announced a gathering, members would come from across London and beyond — you never knew when the next meeting would come, and as a result, once one was scheduled, nobody wanted to miss it. This being the case, Browning expected he might encounter the one man in the club who truly understood his loss, whatever other differences existed between them. This comforting idea reanimated Browning, sending him the rest of the way up the steps into the smoke-filled chamber that vibrated with laughter and talk.

Cheers and toasts greeted him on all sides — the Irreplaceable Robert! the Glorious Browning! — along with New Year’s wishes and quotations from “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” or his recent epic, The Ring and the Book . The first people he asked had not seen the man he looked for. On a sofa in the corner of the room, with his feet up on a chair, he spied one of his fellow stars in London’s literary constellation. England’s poet laureate.

Alfred Tennyson peered over the top of his newspaper, as though just remembering he was at the club meeting.

After they exchanged greetings, Browning asked, “Has Rossetti come yet, by chance?” He asked as offhandedly as he could, though Browning never did succeed in offhandedness.

“You know better, Browning. I can’t see someone until they crash against me. Remember, I’m the second most shortsighted man in England.”

Tennyson would stay on the sofa so other members had to come to him. Which they did. Everyone paid tribute to the wordsmith with the long pointed beard, and for that reason Browning had hoped Tennyson, eyesight aside, would have already met the man he sought.

“Odd,” replied Browning, pulling a chair closer.

“Gabriel could forget about his own birthday, you know, Browning,” Tennyson said. “Today’s date slipped his mind, I’d wager.”

“I don’t mean just not coming to the club is odd,” Browning said. “I was just thinking of Rossetti on the way here because — well, something made me think of him, and I realized it’s been a while since the last time I’ve seen him at all.”

“How long?” Tennyson asked, suddenly interested.

Browning recalled running across Gabriel in Bond Street and talking about a mutual friend who had moved away from London after a mental collapse. Ah, how I still hope to be an outcast from humanity one of these days , Gabriel had said, one of the painter’s signature comments that could have been in jest or the beginning of a manifesto.