Brontës (123 page)

They have died comparatively young – but their short lives were spotless – their brief career was honourable – their untimely death befel amidst all associations that can hallow, and not one that can desecrate.

The searing sorrows of the last nine months, which had deprived her of a brother and two sisters, had left her emotionally drained and, without the religious faith which had sustained her, would just as surely have destroyed her too.

A year ago – had a prophet warned me how I should stand in June 1849 – how stripped and bereaved – had he foretold the autumn – the winter, the spring of sickness and suffering to be gone through – I should have thought – this can never be endured. It is over. Branwell – Emily – Anne are gone like dreams – gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm – and closed their glazed eyes – I have seen them buried one by one – and – thus far – God has upheld me. from my heart I thank Him.
¹⁰⁰

Charlotte would have preferred to stay at Filey but Ellen, perhaps finding the strain of coping alone with her grieving friend too much, insisted that they should move on to Bridlington and spend a week with the Hudsons at Easton Farm. The move was not a happy one and even though Charlotte deferred her return home for a day to fit in with the carrier's arrangements, they did not spend a full week there.
¹⁰¹

The return to Haworth Parsonage had to be faced and on 20 June Charlotte and Ellen packed their bags and set out for home. ‘I got home a little before eight o'clock', Charlotte later told her friend.

All was clean and bright waiting for me – Papa and the servants were well – and all received me with an affection which should have consoled. The dogs seemed in strange ecstasy. I am certain they regarded me as the harbinger of others – the dumb creatures thought that as I was returned – those who had been so long absent were not far behind.

I left Papa soon and went into the dining room – I shut the door – I tried to be glad that I was come home – I have always been glad before – except once – even then I was cheered, but this time joy was not to be the sensation. I felt that the house was all silent – the rooms were all empty – I remembered where the three were laid – in what narrow dark dwellings – never were they to
reappear on earth. So the sense of desolation and bitterness took possession of me – the agony that
was to be undergone
– and
was not
to be avoided came on – I underwent it & passed a dreary evening and night and a mournful morrow – to-day I am better.
¹⁰²

On the ‘mournful morrow' Charlotte attempted to find some relief for her overcharged feelings in writing a poem on her sister's death. The unfinished lines were eloquent testimony to her later comment on Tennyson's
In Memoriam:
‘bitter sorrow, while recent, does not flow out in verse'.
¹⁰³

The daily routine of the house went on as usual, despite the fact that three of its inhabitants were now dead. ‘The great trial', as Charlotte confessed to Ellen, ‘is when evening closes and night approaches – At that hour we used to assemble in the dining-room – we used to talk – Now I sit by myself – necessarily I am silent.'
¹⁰⁴
Perhaps surprisingly, she was not afflicted by the same suffocating oppression of the spirits she had suffered after her return from Brussels. Now that she had a real and terrible grief to bear, it was a sense of Jane Eyre-ish rage at the injustice of her threefold loss which attacked her at these moments. This she preferred to confide in the less shockable ear of Williams.

In the day-time effort and occupation aid me – but when evening darkens something in my heart revolts against the burden of solitude – the sense of loss and want grows almost too much for me. I am not good or amiable in such moments – I am rebellious – and it is only the thought of my dear Father in the next room, or of the kind servants in the kitchen – or some caress from the poor dogs which restores me to softer sentiments and more rational views. As to the night – could I do without bed – I would never seek it – waking – I think – sleeping – I dream of them – and I cannot recall them as they were in health – still they appear to me in sickness and suffering –
¹⁰⁵

That anger against her fate which had, in the past, pricked on her ambition to succeed as a writer was now to be her saving grace, preventing her relapsing into morbidity. Even so, it was to be a continual fight. The sound of the clock ticking loud through the still house was a constant reminder of what had been. The sight of Keeper making his daily visit to Emily's bedroom or Flossy looking wistfully round for Anne would wring her heart. The pleasure of receiving another parcel of books from Cornhill was to be poisoned by the memory that Emily was just beginning to be ill when the first such
parcel had arrived, that Charlotte had read one of Emerson's essays to her the night before she died, reading on until she found that her sister was not listening. ‘I thought to recommence next day—', Charlotte told Williams, adding, with her peculiar gift for reinventing the past where her sisters were concerned, ‘Next day, the first glance at her face told me what would happen before night-fall.'
¹⁰⁶

‘My life is what I expected it to be –', Charlotte confessed to Ellen,

sometimes when I wake in the morning – and know that Solitude, Remembrance and Longing are to be almost my sole companions all day through – that at night I shall go to bed with them, that they will long keep me sleepless – that next morning I shall wake to them again – Sometimes – Nell – I have a heavy heart of it.

But crushed I am not – yet: nor robbed of elasticity nor of hope nor quite of endeavour – Still I have some strength to fight the battle of life. I am aware and can acknowledge I have many comforts – many mercies – still I can
get
on
.
¹⁰⁷

Among those mercies were the friendship of Ellen and Williams, both of whom wrote continually to her to buoy up her spirits. The latter even had a practical suggestion to make – why not get a cheerful young companion to ease her loneliness? Charlotte acknowledged that it was a good idea in some respects,

but there are two people whom it would not suit – and not the least incommoded of these would be the young person whom I might request to come and bury herself in the hills of Haworth – to take a church and stony churchyard for her prospect – the dead silence of a village parsonage – in which the tick of the clock is heard all day long – for her atmosphere – and a grave, silent spinster for her companion. I should not like to see youth thus immured.

Echoing the words of one of her most damning notices, in the
Quarterly Review
, and thereby revealing how much the barbed comments had festered in her mind, she added:

For society – long seclusion has in a great measure unfitted me – I doubt whether I should enjoy it if I might have it. Sometimes I think I should, and I thirst for it – but at other times I doubt my capability of pleasing or deriving pleasure. The
prisoner in solitary confinement – the toad in the block of marble – all in time shape themselves to their lot.
¹⁰⁸

There was, as Charlotte recognized, only one cure for her grief and loneliness. Recalling Shakespeare's lines from
Macbeth
, Charlotte took her courage in both hands and declared to Williams, ‘Labour must be the cure, not sympathy – Labour is the only radical cure for rooted Sorrow.'
¹⁰⁹
‘The fact is,' she later confided, rather less grandiloquently, ‘my work is my best companion – hereafter I look for no great earthly comfort except what congenial occupation can give –.'
¹¹⁰

Chapter Twenty-One

NO LONGER INVISIBLE

Charlotte's ‘radical cure for rooted Sorrow' was to return to
Shirley
, the book she had begun with such high hopes when her brother and sisters were still alive. She had written almost two-thirds of it when Branwell had been struck down; since then she had lost both Emily and Anne and the manuscript had been laid aside, virtually forgotten. Now, in unaccustomed isolation, she began to write again, but her mood had changed irrevocably. Her loss permeated the remainder of the novel. She opened the third volume with a chapter entitled ‘The Valley of the Shadow' and with words that were wrung from her own heart.

The future sometimes seems to sob a low warning of the events it is bringing us, like some gathering though yet remote storm, which, in tones of the wind, in flushings of the firmament, in clouds strangely torn, announces a blast strong to strew the sea with wrecks … At other times this Future bursts suddenly, as if a rock had rent, and in it a grave had opened, whence issues the body of one
that slept. Ere you are aware, you stand face to face with a shrouded and unthought-of Calamity – a new Lazarus.
¹

Over that future, Charlotte had had no control, but in her book she wielded the powers of life and death over her characters, just like the Genius Tallii of long ago. In her first chapter since her sisters' deaths, she felled Caroline Helstone with a sudden fever and brought her to the very threshold of death. Kinder than God had been in her own life, Charlotte saved her heroine and miraculously restored her to health through the discovery that her nurse was actually her long-lost mother. The plot was as improbable as Charlotte's juvenile efforts at resurrection, but her descriptions of the mother's sufferings as she ‘wrestled with God in earnest prayer' at the bedside of her dying daughter were as real and searing as anything she had written.

Not always do those who dare such divine conflict prevail. Night after night the sweat of agony may burst dark on the forehead; the supplicant may cry for mercy with that soundless voice the soul utters when its appeal is to the Invisible. ‘Spare my beloved,' it may implore. ‘Heal my life's life. Rend not from me what long affection entwines with my whole nature. God of heaven – bend – hear – be clement!' And after this cry and strife, the sun may rise and see him worsted … Then the watcher approaches the patient's pillow, and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at once that the insufferable moment draws nigh, knows that it is God's will his idol shall be broken, and bends his head, and subdues his soul to the sentence he cannot avert, and scarce can bear.
²

Reading these lines before she knew anything about Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell, who had recently lost her own beloved baby son, recognized and empathized with the suffering which had inspired them.
³
For Charlotte there was a catharsis in living through her characters and allowing them a gentler fate than her own; even so, she never lost sight of the fact that her writing was now her profession. Taking up what she had developed as one of the main themes of
Shirley
, she passionately defended the right of women to work in a letter to Williams.

Lonely as I am – how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career – perseverance to plead through two long, weary years with
publishers till they admitted me? – How should I be with youth past – sisters lost – a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family? In that case I should have no world at all: the raven, weary of surveying the deluge and without an ark to return to, would be my type. As it is, something like a hope and motive sustains me still. I wish all your daughters – I wish every woman in England had also a hope and motive: Alas! there are many old maids who have neither.
⁴

Williams' daughter, Louisa, was attempting to secure a place at the Queen's College, an establishment connected with the Governess Institution which offered four years of training to potential governesses. Charlotte had had her reservations about the Governess Institution from the start. It seemed to her ‘both absurd and cruel' to raise the standard of governesses' acquirements still higher, when they were already not half nor a quarter paid for what they taught and, in most instances, not a half nor a quarter of their attainments were required by their pupils. ‘It is true the world demands a brilliant list of accomplishments; for £20 per ann. it expects in one woman the attainments of several professors', but, Charlotte had argued, good health, steady unimpressionable nerves and an ability to impart information rather than acquire it, were far more important qualities in a governess.
⁵
Now, however, when she had been forced by the events of the last year to realize that her mind and her work were her only resources, Charlotte urged Williams to consider the priceless advantage of the education his daughter would gain.

Come what may – it is a step towards independency – and one great curse of a single female life is its dependency … Believe me – teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid and despised – but the girl who stays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought and worst-paid drudge of a school. Whenever I have seen, not merely in humble, but in affluent homes – families of daughters sitting waiting to be married, I have pitied them from my heart. It is doubtless well – very well – if Fate decrees them a happy marriage – but if otherwise – give their existence some object – their time some occupation – or the peevishness of disappointment and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly degrade their nature.
⁶