7  

Gounod was too selfish, Harry too indifferent, to channel all her wild energy into a plan, a scheme, a campaign. Some of the lesser lights of Tavistock House could not take it and left. Georgina had been training up a young soprano, Nita Gaetano, who used her time at Tavistock House to trap a certain Captain Moncrieffe. Shortly after, she forsook the world of music for marriage without a backward glance. In time George Werranrath left too, taking himself off to America. Among those that remained, there were shocking and unsubstantiated rumors that some of the orphans died and were buried in the garden, alongside (when old age at last claimed him) Dan the pug. The worst of these accusations suggested that bowls of poison had been left out for the children to eat like rats. None of this bothered her. She had an enviable capacity for remaining deaf to what she considered petty and unimportant criticisms. Unlike Gounod, she could not be depressed. Unlike Harry, she could not play the waiting game. She had no understanding of music as an organized profession and no inclination to acquire it. Like many people without a sense of humor, she compensated for the lack of one by a joshing clumsiness. We get the clear sense that she was driven, but only in the way a boisterous and stubborn child might said to be driven by an obsession with some small aspect of life—a collection, say, or a desire to visit the zoo. Like a child’s, her world existed outside of time. She was a woman without a real perspective of where she wanted to go.

Her unquenchable and scattergun wildness made her infuriating to deal with but did not necessarily indicate that she was mad. One of the niceties of nineteenth-century thought was that only God was held to be of sound mind. What was unsound about Georgina had lost her all her society friends—those that she genuinely had, as, for example, the good-natured Catherine Gladstone—and made her a laughingstock in the narrow world of London choirs. But what was that? There was a sliding scale of mental instability that certainly led in one direction to the private asylum, but included along the way every kind of quirk and oddity. The men who decided what was lunatic behavior were not doctors, but husbands. The laws of property and inheritance dictated terms. On the medical side it was commonly held that women were prone to lunacy through some connection between hysteria and the womb. What took the place of counseling and therapy in the case of many disturbed unmarried women was the speculum. A male doctor opened the cervix with a crude piece of stainless steel and looked for answers in the shadows of the womb. Among married women the husband was the judge.

All in all, Georgina was no more disturbed than Gounod. The difference between them was nothing to do with sanity, but talent. He could go away into a room—even a room without a piano—and externalize his feelings on a few pages of music paper. He was a maker where she was not. The whole house, the whole circus, was her arena, and in it no one thing was better than another. Else how could she be running an orphanage, organizing a choir, seeking individual pupils, and talking of a scheme to found a national training school? Ideas were drawn from a well that never emptied. One bucket was as pure and wholesome as the next. It all depended on how you felt when you woke up. Nothing was impossible. In her life, what was spilled or wasted could be refreshed without loss. She shared with Gounod an exasperation with other people and a deep sense of being unjustly persecuted. It had dragged them through the courts and led to explosive relationships with publishers and agents. However, in his case, vain though he was, he could admit at least sometimes that the fault lay with him. Such self-reproach was foreign to Georgina. It never entered her mind.