The water rises very swiftly inside the cavern, fed by an underground river of some power, and by the confluence of the rainfall collected from the plateau of Vaucluse and the stony sides of the Mont Ventoux, Petrarch's Windy Mount, as Randolph put it in a letter. He must have been put in mind, at the sight of this majestic stream, of Coleridge's sacred river, and perhaps of the Fountain of the Muses, given the association with Petrarch, a poet to whom he was greatly attached and whose sonnets to Laura are thought to have influenced the poems to Embla. In front of the cavern, which is fringed with fig-trees and fantastic roots, several white rocks rise among the surface of the fast-flowing stream, which seeps away into a mat of flowing green weeds, which could have well been painted by Millais or Holman Hunt. Ellen remarked on the beauty of these "chiare, fresche e dolci acque." Randolph, in a charming gesture, lifted his new wife and carried her across the water, to perch her, like a presiding mermaid, or water-goddess, on a throne-like white stone, dividing the stream. We may imagine her sitting there, smiling demurely under her bonnet, holding her skirts away from the wet, whilst Randolph contemplated his possession, so unlike Petrarch's, of the lady he had worshipped from afar, through so many hindrances and difficulties, for almost as long as the earlier poet's sixteen-year sojourn of hopeless devotion in this very spot.
Ash always maintained, unlike many of his contemporaries, notably Professor Gabriele Rossetti, father of the poet, that Petrarch's Laura and Dante's Beatrice, along with Fiametta, Selvaggia, and other objects of Platonic courtly affection, were real live women, chaste but loved in the flesh, before their deaths, and not allegories of the politics of Italy, or the government of the Church, or even of their creators' souls. Petrarch saw Laure de Sade in Avignon in 1327 and fell immediately in love with her, and loved her steadily, despite her fidelity to Hugo de Sade. Ash wrote indignantly to Ruskin that it was a misunderstanding of the poetic imagination and of the nature of love to suppose that it could be so abstracted into allegory, could not in verity spring from "the human warmth of an individual embodied soul in all its purity and mortal vitality." His own poetry, he added, began and ended with "such incarnate truths, such unrepeated unique lives."
Given this sympathy with Petrarchan adoration, it is not surprising that he should have waited so devotedly on what may be called the Christian scruples or caprices of Ellen Best and her father. In the early days of their acquaintance Ellen was a high-minded devout young girl with a fragile and delicate beauty, if we are to believe her family and Ash himself. As I have shown, the Dean's anxieties about Ash's capacity to support a wife had some foundation, and were supported by Ellen's own very real religious anxieties about the doubtful tendencies of Ragnarôk. Such letters as have survived of their courtship-pitifully few, no doubt owing to the officious ministrations of Ellen's sister, Patience, after her death-suggest that she was not flirting with him, and that her affections were not, nevertheless, deeply engaged. But she was, by the time she accepted Randolph 's hand, in the difficult position of seeing her younger sisters, Patience and Faith, making advantageous and happy marriages whilst she remained a spinster.
All this raises the question of the feelings of the ardent poet-lover, now aged thirty, for his innocent bride, now no young girl, but a mature thirty-two-year-old aunt, devoted to her nephews and nieces. Was his innocence as great as hers? How had he endured, the twentieth-century mind suspiciously asks, the privations of his long wait? It is well known that many eminent Victorians turned in their doubleness for relief to the garish creatures of the Victorian underworld, the joking, painted temptresses who created so much noise and nuisance at Piccadilly Circus, the lost seamstresses, flowersellers and Fallen Women who died under the arches, begged from Mayhew or were rescued, if they were lucky, by Angela Burdett-Coutts and Charles Dickens. Ash's poetry, for Victorian poetry, is knowledgeable about sexual mores and indeed about sensuality. His Renaissance noblemen are convincingly fleshly, his Rubens a connoisseur of the solid human form, the speaker of the Embla poems a real as well as an ideal lover. Could such a man have remained happy with a purely Platonic desire? Did Ellen Best's prim delicacy, a little past its flowering, hide an unexpected ardour of response? Perhaps it did. There is no record of any early peccadillo on Randolph 's part, let alone any later one-he was always, as far as we can tell, thepreux chevalier. What did they see in each other, those two, alone and self-absorbed, as he put his hands round her comfortable waist and lifted her to her stony throne? Had they come from a night of bliss? Ellen wrote home that her husband was "exquisitely considerate in all things," which we can read how we choose.
There is another explanation, to which I personally incline. It depends on two powerful and equally, nowadays, unfashionable forces, the idealisation of the Poets of Courtesy, on which we have touched, and the theory of sublimation elaborated by Sigmund Freud. Quite simply, Randolph Henry Ash wrote, during the courtship years:
28,369 lines of verse, including one twelve-book epic, 35 dramatic monologues covering History from its dimmest origins to modern theological and geological controversy, 125 lyrics and three verse dramas, Cromwell, St Bartholomew's Eve and Cassandra, unsuccessfully performed at Drury Lane. He worked with dedication, far into the night. He was happy, for he saw his Ellen as a fount of purity, a vision of girlish grace, breathing an air infinitely more refined than the blood-soaked, plague-ridden scenes of his imagination, the tousled beds of the Borgias or "the sulphurous mud of the extinguished earth" in Ragnarôk. No sense visited him that he was less a man for this chaste waiting, this active solitude. He would work, and would win her, and so it happened indeed. If later poems, such as "The Fountain Sealed" or "A Painted Lady," with its image of beauty fixed forever on the canvas and fading in the face-if these later poems suggest that Randolph later came to count the cost of his long apprenticeship to love, this does not invalidate my case. Nor do these poems help us in our speculations about the feelings of the newly-wed couple on that sunny day outside the dark cave of the Fountain of Vaucluse.
Mortimer Cropper went up to his pleasant suite of rooms and re-read his photographed letters. He telephoned Beatrice Nest. Her voice had a thick woollen quality; she demurred, as she always did, putting up a flurry of slow half-objections, and then agreed, as she always did. He had learned that flattering Miss Nest produced no good results, but that making her feel guilty did.
"I have one or two very precise queries that only you can answer… I have saved this especially for you… any other time would be extremely inconvenient, though naturally I would change to oblige you… my dear Beatrice, if you cannot come, I must make other arrangements, I have no desire to inconvenience you in your busy life…" It took a long time. Since the conclusion was foregone, it ought not to have done.
He opened his locked case, putting away Randolph Ash's letters to his godchild, or anyway the stolen images, and drew out those other photographs of which he had a large and varied collection-as far as it was possible to vary, in flesh or tone or angle or close detail, so essentially simple an activity, a preoccupation. He had his own ways of sublimation.