Science Fiction Discoveries

by Carol

  The cottage was at its best in June, when the lane and road swam with the odors of privet and roses. Anthea had removed some of the nettles and weeds; she had had the house repainted; she had worked in the garden.

  She couldn't remember buying the house or when she had come to live in it.

  The fault of course lay with Little Brother. He knew after he made his John Sun doll that the brain part was wrong; he had thought himself into his creation. It seemed to cause unhappiness, and he didnt want that to happen because he knew that among these creatures unhappiness led to unkindness, hostility, wars, plagues and bad manners. So he broke into a box labeled “Omnibus” and withdrew at random a lovely bunch of memory-flowers and intelligence-plusses, as well as some minor flaws, which he had learned from Dix were absolutely essential to the well-being of the creatures. Little Brother used the same physical model (Type A-Star) for his female. She resembled John closely, save that her body was a perfect female form. She was a smaller, more rounded edition of John, with the same enormous blue eyes and golden aspect. But instead of having an earth-intelligence of about six years ... which was a touchy matter to Little Brother, who was infinitely more wise than his doll; but the mind of a creature always had to be adjusted to the antennae of the other pets ... Anthea was a mulligatawny of impossible thoughts and memories of all experience past age 16 of a file marked Jane Baillie Welsh Carlyle.

  She was about four present-days-old in Earth time when John Sun came to London. She was a collage of bright and sad bits of history centering around England, because Little Brother had learned “English” in pre-play school and found it easier to understand than the other tiny, tinny voices on the receiver. Dix could understand over four hundred languages, but Dix was not the proud Parent of these two exquisite beings. Little Brother had been particularly careful about one thing: there was not an ounce of meanness in either John Sun or Anthea Evan. Soon Dix's teacher would become aware of these two new dolls and would then undoubtedly forgive Dix for all the miseries that had taken over his project.

  This was the odd thing. The present small house near Taplow, Berks., contained no memories for Anthea whatever. Then why, why was it so easy for her to remember this: going past a churchyard to reach a large comfortable house some eight miles from the station. White painted floors in the nursery, with a willow tree outside the window. Under the window a row of hedges, high and secret ... waking up mornings because Nurse was shaking Anthea and the (shadowy) other children ... a mantelpiece with an ormolu clock in its middle, vases holding spills for lighting the fire. Four-poster beds in the grownups' rooms. April with lilacs (followed by a memory of T. S. Eliot as a young man; how did she know that he worked in a publishing house?) and greenhouses from which cuttings would be brought to the house. Learning French; indeed, having to read aloud from “La Neuvaine de Colette” or “Pecheur d'Island.” Going to picnics in a horse-drawn wagon and watching, from the safety of the wagon, the horrors of the exhibitionist poor. Drunken men, painted women ... they had just as surely been part of the country as the town, where they were generally romanticized. Visiting one’s own poor, in cottages ... the paper-thin woman, so old she could not lift the soup bowl, who kept a quince tree in the garden. She had once been Anthea’s parents’ servant, and there were servants everywhere, whenever they were needed for comfort and for making one eat rice pudding and for dispensing doses of senna-pods.

  The new house had a bathroom, but there was never a bathroom in the house or houses that Anthea remembered. Instead, there were pails of heated water, and outhouses for those who did not insist on a constantly full smelly chamberpot. Cupboards under staircases with the same mysterious smell-of-ages that now pervaded the shed near Anthea’s house ... but the stair cupboard smells were sweeter and more real.

  If you went to the kitchen in that old house—and the kitchen was a perilously long way from the nursery, through a winding corridor lined with dim pictures of ancestors, not the vaunted oil-painting kind but, simply, dim daguerreotypes, there was a long walk out to the world. (From the upstairs windows when there was no mist you could see the world; almost all of England.) The long walk was a rutted little lane that led to other lanes, and no one had ever fully explored them. (Later, Anthea would dream or think or half-remember that some of the walks would end in clearings near the Thames or be called the something-or-other View). But none of the children, and there were many other children, some her brothers, her sisters, some visitors, some the relatives’ children ... all horrible ... were afraid of the follies, the places that looked like the kind of structure now used for outdated band concerts. There was a garden that contained only topiary work and—yes, parterre. Many open lawns with marble surprises: busts of famous Englishmen pitted and scarred by wind and rain into look-alikes ... a water garden with beautiful pond-lilies, and stones that children could step along if no one caught them. Flower beds that said something ... dates and names done in parterre ... Anthea could not visualize the names or the dates. She only knew they did exist in the real place that had been her home. A little structure in a wood was a theater for impromptu performances by children. Christmas pantomimes ... figures of Eros and Psyche—garlands— carvings. A curving walk that in spring was so heavy with rhododendron that it hurt to be there; she had always hurried from the pressure of the scent and the color and the beauty. An orangerie, where sometimes the children would steal blooms or fruit for their own treasure-hideries.

  No one shopped in London then. Dressmakers came to the house. The other children stole the fruit from the trees: the medlars, the gooseberries, the apples.

  But there was another lane, near another, earlier house in a much earlier time in Scotland, a lane that wound off stubbornly by itself in sinuousities. People were assigned work in the fields near it, bending over newly-plowed furrows and dropping beans into little holes. And violets everywhere, the dark blue-purple and the white; primroses, and cowslips from which cowslip balls were made. (Peaceful brooks, peaceful meadows ... the land on the other side of the brooks reached by throwing planks across) ... to make the cowslip ball, the tuft of flowerets is nipped off just below the top of the stalk. Each cluster is balanced across a bit of ribbon until there is a long garland. Then the clusters are pressed together and tied. Sometimes Anthea’s full basket of them would be upset and she would start again. Often the children would be caught by a shower; home they would run through the winding lane and the glistening fields to the fireside, then bread-and-milk and bed. The snug-room was packed with chairs, sofas, tables; on the tables were the truest beauties of the world, lilacs, roses, peonies, tulips, stock . . .

  School was dull; nothing was learned except playing games and whispering about the other girls. Nothing was learned ... then why did Anthea know all she knew, and why was she now being offered a job at a new branch of an American store as Public Relations Director?

  Part III

  Jenny kiss'd me when we met

  Jumping from the chair she sat in;

  Time, you thief, who love to get

  Sweets into your list, put that in!

  Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,

  Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,

  Say I’m growing old, but add,

  Jenny kiss'd me.

  No, there arent many plain women who have been so pleasingly celebrated, or, for that matter, many beautiful women. Leigh Hunt was one of our best friends, and his lovely verse justified a good deal of the cold gray mornings when my husband and I would exchange, over the breakfast table at Number 5 Cheyne Row, our daily rota of complaints: insomnia, dyspepsia, nervous disorder, irritability and (at least on my part) frustration.

  I remember that as a girl I thought of Mr. Carlyle as the very Phoenix of a Friend. Yes, but some mornings, at home à deux, the ashes did not produce a bird of prime quality.

  My greatest joy now, in the latter part of the twentieth century, is the body I occupy. It is not only beautiful, it works perfectly in every detail, so unl
ike the shell occupied by Jane Baillie Welsh Carlyle, or by the child I was, before my sixteenth year, when I was suddenly moved backward in time and space as though by some great extraterrestrial phenomenon from a peaceful existence in a country house in the 1890’s to London s Chelsea in the 1820’s. It has taught me a certain unwilling patience in the twentieth century with stalled commuter trains or telephones out of order. None of it matters, time is a made-up, impractical word.

  I was Jane Baillie Welsh. I lived in another comer of the prism (Socrates wrote, “Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison ... and take his own life . . . [he meant, prism!]), I did marry Thomas Carlyle, and we did decide to live in London.

  It was difficult for me to acknowledge, particularly to my finicky self, that I had never really been in a public place until Carlyle took me to the Drury Lane theatre, where we saw a silly play peopled with ugly women. But the house in the play! It is the kind of house I hope to have when we move from Ampton Street to Number 5 Cheyne Row.

  I have recently seen Dr. Allan, a Scotsman who has a place for lunatics in the middle of Epping Forest. This seems to me a rather marvelous way to dispose of oneself, lunatic or not, because the place is overhung with roses and grapes, with miles of shrubbery and garden ponds. It is not nearly so much Bedlam as a house we know in London where people “speak in tongues,” which is to say shrieking and howling in no tongue. The only person who seems not to speak in tongues is, like my husband, a self-named Mystic. He is John Stuart Miff; yes, I remember now, but did not know then, the part he was to play in our domestic life through an accident of servants. The year we moved into Cheyne Row was the year my husband was writing the History of the French Revolution. In March he lent the manuscript to Mill. At this time a maidservant, a friend of a friend of a friend of the cook, decided it was part of the day's rubbish and deposited all but a few pages of it into the fireplace.

  It has amused me to read collections of my letters. They are indeed my letters, but there is no letter describing what happened after this incident:

  First, you must try to visualize Mr. Carlyle. Handsome, with light magnetic eyes and a dour cast of perfect feature ... an angel in many ways and the Hound of Heaven, in the least flattering sense of the phrase, when things went wrong. And what, what in all the world, could go more wrong for an author (who has been called “Genius” by people of title!) than to have the only copy of his Great Work destroyed in flames.

  Do you know how long it took, in 1835 to copy out a manuscript from fragments of notes? Five months. At least. Mr. Carlyle and I both worked on it, using our pens and our poor fingers and wrists (I think my later, rather famous, bout with a neuralgic arm may have had its birth at this time). It was tedious, tedious, tedious. My husband thinks that the second manuscript is “less vivacious” than the first, burnt version. Perhaps I am less vivacious, perhaps he is, but I think the manuscript fared better than we did.

  Luckily, there was a hamper of wine sent us by a dear friend to celebrate the end of our manual labor.

  But there is a difference between Mr. Carlyle and me. When the great task is finished, he goes off to Scotland for a holiday. I stay here and, exhausted from the superhuman task of penmanship, do not sleep. One’s wit and spirit cannot be used up daily without eventual expense; my payment is that I cannot sleep afterward.

  As for John Mill, which started me off on an old score (perhaps in another two hundred years I can forgive everyone concerned; not just yet), he is a rather absurd man. He is so very susceptible to Ladies, as he thinks of anyone dressed in silks and waving a fan—and is confidential—or, as I think of it, loving to them. But then he also considers Robespierre the greatest man who ever lived ...

  Leigh Hunt lives a few doors away, Dickens visits us often, so does Tennyson. I am in many ways a very fortunate woman for knowing so many spirited people. I do manage to overhear them occasionally, discussing Mr. Carlyle and me ... "It is lucky,” said Tennyson, “that Thomas and Jane found each other, or else each would have married another person, and then there would have been four miserable people in this comer of the world.”

  One of the un-blessings of a mind like mine, thrice-told or eternal, I don’t know which, is counterpoint-memories. Much, much later, Mr. Frank Harris, an extremely foolish and vain little man, wrote at length about my marriage. He seemed to have peeped through keyholes, particularly on the night of our wedding, for he wrote in Saturday Review that the Carlyle marriage was never consummated.

  I wonder what that means. Everybody knows that Frank Harris was preternaturally occupied with the sexual behavior of anything. But from the point of view of the me that was once Jane Welsh Carlyle, I cannot be sure that this is a fair statement. My marriage was devoutly consummated in matters of the spirit; never were husband and wife so close in some ways; never were they so apart in others. For instance, Mr. Carlyle never really understood how important servants were to me. I could not manage without them, and if I seemed to make too much of their nicenesses or villainies, it is because they become part of the life of a woman living in town. I think of them as my friend Geraldine thinks of her lovers, but I think my servants are more necessary to me. Mr. Carlyle could not see this. I have always been so very personal in all my relationships (in all my ages, apparently), that it must have seemed unusual, to say the least, to my maids and footmen. You see, my "dear little nieces,” as sometimes I thought of maids, were so very kind—like Ellen, who mislaid no lobsters, or even the wretched Ann, who slept all one night at a stick-woman's—often, indeed, kinder to me than my husband.

  No, in the sense that the absurd Mr. Harris meant his phrase, the marriage was not consummated. I died as I had lived, a virgin. And yet, no woman was ever more married than I when it came to any other aspect of a shared life: the illnesses, the unkindnesses of others, the small joys, the frequent sorrows, the successes, the tragedies: all Carlyle's and mine together. That is indeed a consummation, and the only true one, Mr. Harris, wherever you are.

  Much has been written about my "jealousy” of Lady Ashburton. It is true that Carlyle saw a great deal of her, often, indeed, preferring her company to mine. But my resentment—and that is the proper word, not "jealousy”—was platonic, if it is possible to use this concept when no physical relationship exists to render the situation negative! Do you know, after her death, I was actually offered some of her old clothes by her husband. I was a good deal daintier in figure than she and wouldn't have worn them anywhere!

  We saw a good bit of the Darwins, Charles and Erasmus. I was told by Miss Wedgwood that Charles could not summon up any great admiration for me; he considered a woman of wit and spirit "unnatural.” Now as far back as Elizabeth's reign, women were beginning to play a part in life aside from that assigned to them: In 1642 some lively petitioners presented a paper to the Commons concerning the great want that was upon them through the decay of trade. “We had rather bring our children and leave them at the Lords' door than have them starve at home," they declared, and prayed that “bishops with their whole who usurped Government ... may be extinguished and abolished ... that popish lords may be sequestered the House ... incendiaries and delinquents brought to tryal and punishment." Cheapside and other large streets had been filled with benches and some waspish members of my sex were said to have poured boiling water on the heads of Royalist marauders. Some women apologized for petitioning, explaining that it was not done out of self-conceit or pride of heart, nor seeking to equal ourselves with men either in Authority or Wisdom. (I reserve comment, as no doubt does Mr. Darwin.) But the women marching to Westminster during this period of civil war were anticipations of the future. Mr. Darwin may have found my own poor health and pale complexion not in keeping with his as yet unpolished ideas of survival of the fittest!

  Erasmus Darwin was kinder, I thought. All Darwins were preoccupied with their health; I forget which of them had a woolly gray beard and an equally woolly gray shawl. At best, it was difficult to see just where the b
eard left off and the shawl began, for the Darwin who wore the shawl was never without it, even through the lovely summers at Cambridge. Or so I have heard. Mr. Charles Darwin heard my cherished friend Mazzini telling me the other day that I must really wear a shawl in the house (as I wrote my dear sister Babbie); at the moment Mr. Darwin seemed quite unconcerned as to whether I wore a shawl or just a shift.

  But this is the joy of people: they are so unpredictable. In spite of his dislike for women of spirit, and in spite of his announced indifference to my wardrobe, Mr. Darwin actually brought with him, on his next visit to our house, an immense gauze-looking shawl of white lambswool. Now this is what makes life interesting, not shawls but unexpected turns of character. This was supplemented on Friday morning, August 18, when Darwin came after my meal. He was talking about the difficulties of tire smells at Newnham Grange, then suddenly switched mid-smell to remark, “Jane, you look as if you need to go to Gunter’s and have an ice!” I am still trying to recall what sort of look my rather sedate face could have worn to make him say such a thing. But he was proved absolutely right in at least one of his theories, as I can testify, for we did drive to Gunters and he did buy me an ice, and I felt much, much better.

  It made him feel better, too. He is off to Shrewsbury for three weeks, but insisted on taking me for a drive to Parson’s Green yesterday. And he began to talk in a way that made me wonder about the change in his attitude toward me; what gem of wisdom could I have dropped to bring such a reversal of opinion?

  “I wonder,” said Mr. Darwin, “if Carlyle gives you enough admiration for all you do. Your needlework, for example. I fear not. But I have no doubt that Carlyle manages to derive a great deal of comfort from all you do for him.” I tried to defend my husband, but Mr. Darwin was expounding, not listening. He is coming close to the heart of things, whether he knows it or not, for I am swamped in sewing. I bought a small sofa, and found out that it needs to be covered (how inanimate things make slaves of all of us!). Carlyle was, I confess, not pleased at the cost. I could see him thinking in illuminated letters, “What? A sofa, now, when there is so much else to pay for! The little woman is falling away from her thrifty character and become extravagant.” But he did not understand. This is a sofa I have known about for at least a year and the man who asked nearly five pounds for it was willing to accept two pounds if I took it without mattress or cushion. I had my own mattress and cushion, and even then, found two pounds a great deal of money. I did a stroke of trade with him. The downstairs curtains were dirty and I didn't need them, so he accepted them for thirty shillings, after an hour's lively higgling. What small, small things make up our daily lives and form the core of our existence. Books are written or destroyed or re-copied, nations fall, women petition, lovers quarrel, wars begin and end, but so long as the earth stays the earth, there will always be a woman arguing with a tradesman over the cost of curtains.