Science Fiction Discoveries

by Carol

  I did not see Darwin again until November, when he came to Chelsea with Mr. Wedgwood. They picked an odd day, for a Yankee gentleman had come to call. My maid Helen was nervous, for she had left him alone in the library while my watch was on the table—unguarded. I proceeded to the library to inspect this unauthorised settler: a tall, lean, red-herring looking man. He had actually been sitting at Carlyle's own writing table, peering at all the private papers. “Oh, you are Mrs. Carlyle, are you,'' he said, when I came in. Do you keep your health pretty well?

  “I have come a great way out of my road," he went on, having received no reply from me but two small separate inclinations of my head, “to congratulate Mr. Carlyle on his increasing reputation, and if he does not come while I am still here, I am going to leave him a letter in my own handwriting written at his own table." I turned on my heel and left the room to this idiot and bumped straight into Darwin and Wedgwood. We three said not one word to the Yankee. It was necessary that we return to the library in spite of the unwelcome presence, for there was no fire in the room below. After two hours, with none of us addressing the Yankee at all, he kept up a barrage of silly questions to which I made almost no reply.

  Then he inquired about my husband’s ‘late hours” (“He does not work by the clock,” I said severely in my lengthiest response to him) and about the habits of omnibuses. Off he went, leaving Darwin and Wedgwood ready to expire of laughter. I have met only one Yankee, Dr. Russel, whom I did not feel tempted to take the poker to.

  Mr. Darwin was still choking with laughter when I told him that if Mr. Carlyle’s “increasing reputation” bore no other fruits but congratulatory lunatic Yankees, I should vote for the diminishing of the reputation with all possible despatch. Carlyle is now, of course, head over ears in Cromwell, and is lost to me and the rest of the world, even to the Yankees: a small blessing.

  I have often wished that Carlyle and I could do something about diminishing supplies of money, if not reputation, as Mr. Dickens seems always to do. Every time he is strapped for cash he makes a trip abroad and lectures to the Yankees and other strange beasts about his own work, then comes back refreshed in pocketbook and spirit alike. He is a great one for amateur theatricals. But why does he always choose September? No one is really left in London then, and he and his friend Mr. Willkie Collins need five hundred friends to fill the audience. Collins has indicated that Dickens is envious of the tales of mystery that Collins does so handily. If I know Dickens, he will write one of his own one day, if he dies before it is through. Still, I often wish that we had a way of refreshing our purses and selves as readily as he. Carlyle and I would be a fine pair of travellers ... always ill and unable to speak and no doubt put off by the foreign foods. I have made a list of our expenses, including debts to be cleared: water-rates, church-rates, rent, money for Helen. It comes to more than 24 pounds, which is about twenty more than we have at hand. I am glad Carlyle received a letter from Mr. Ralph W. Emerson admiring our poverty! Poverty is so much more creditable when it is someone else’s. We are better off now than when Mr. Emerson was moved to inspiration by our need, but my income from Craigenputtock is still not enough to keep our noses out of the sea-of-the-poor. Meat dinners at home are nearly as impossible as can be, and one sleeps ill on tea-dinners. I ate at Verey’s today, a beautiful little mutton chop and a glass of bitter ale, for one-and-fivepence. And I know a clean shop in the Strand where a half of roast chicken, a large slice of ham and three new potatoes cost one shilling! It may not be proper for women to dine alone (an outrage, if you will remember Mr. Darwin’s words, to "delicate femaleism”) but I see many single women like myself at Verey’s, and not necessarily improper ... many governesses and the like. Besides, I am beyond all such considerations.

  I have mentioned the constantly rising and falling of our illnesses, Carlyle’s and mine, mostly of the dull, listless variety that bear no repetition out of house. My own particular crosses were insomnia and a tendency to blinding headaches, when I could not speak, so cruel was the pain. But there was another disease, more insidious and deadly, which haunted me always: being alone. And alone I was for a good part of the time, for Mr. Carlyle’s work came before all else. A friend wrote this little verse; I think it was for me, it must have been:

  How much I loved that way you had

  Of smiling most, when very sad,

  A smile which carried tender hints

  Of sun and spring,

  And yet, more than all other thing,

  Of weariness beyond all words.

  This describes me as I must have seemed to some, on days when I could not even summon that small smile. Henry Larkin told us that when he first met me, during the late 1840’s, I had "a patiently hopeless look, like a mourner standing by an unclosed grave.”

  Of course I realized that this was due to a combination of things: first, of course, the eroding loneliness, for Carlyle was not often with me; I would go to the post office and find nothing from him. Why, I wondered, why? Was he so ill that he could not write? Would he not write? In the summer of 1846 I recall thinking that being hindered from sleeping is quite another thing from not being able to sleep.

  There was a constant fear underlying this melancholy, the fear that comes to most women. It is never discussed, in fact I do not know of one who has mentioned it to me or to her physician; yet it is a community of terror. It is the fear of going mad during that time that occurs to women in their middle years, when nothing but old age and its miseries lies ahead, and the present is a gray painful mist. I suffered from spells of heat, dreadful seizures that filled me with fright and new fright-bred-from-fear. Each day, for how many years I cannot recall, would bring its waves of heat and melancholia, enriched by the ever-present fear of madness. I found it difficult even to write letters to my husband. I could not seem to concentrate on any one thing. My mind splintered and shivered into many ways at once. I could not speak of it but I thought of it constantly, for to be mad was the prospect most appalling, perhaps one day a patient of the very Dr. Allan whose estate I so admired. But it is quite different to look upon lunatics with the mantle of a visitor than to be one so looked upon. The days and weeks and months and years went by in aching fear. There was no one to tell.

  Harriet Martineau used to say of me, “Jane Carlyle has eight Influenzas annually. I wonder how she survives it.” That was when I was fairly young, when I (the entity that somehow remains “I”) became Mrs. Thomas Carlyle. Now it is getting to be one influenza lasting all year round. It is worsened by the thought that my little sister, my heart’s Babbie, is no longer that, for she is married and has her own life as Mrs. Andrew Chrystal.

  I begin to think about God and a possible hereafter. The one thing no one can doubt is Death. One may go a far way in scepticism, may get to disbelieve in God and the devil, or in virtue and vice, in Love, in one’s own soul, in the Progress of the Species, in Rights of Women, in the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number, in "isms” world without end—everything, in short, that the human mind ever believed in; only not in death. The most outrageous sceptic— myself, after two nights without sleep—cannot let go of that one fact: a cheering one, on the whole. Death will smooth all difficulties, and one shall have a try again at existing under new conditions. This I know as a certainty, for my childhood was at variance with my girlhood and womanhood, and I shall probably have still another set of lives to live. Or perhaps I shall sleep through eternity, which used to be a horrible thought, but no longer. I am weary, weary, weary to a point of moral exhaustion that any anchorage is welcome, even the stillest, coldest, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary be at rest, understanding, both by the wicked and the weary, myself.

  I try to keep from crying. Like a small child, who must cry every day, I devote, each twelve hours, a time in tears.

  Sometimes I recognize the hateful self-pity, sometimes I say it is the unbearable heat, but I cannot stop from crying.

  Then a little package arrives in the pos
t, a cameo-brooch from Carlyle. I cannot tell why it is, I cannot ask myself such a thing, but his gifts always distress me more than a scold from him would do.

  On a Thursday in November 1847, when the heat had stopped and the chill had set in and I was still a wreck of heat spells and fears of lunacy, I was appointed to go to Notting Hill to see a bust of my husband. I could not keep the appointment, unfeeling as it may have seemed to be, for it was more unfeeling—I thought—to risk an inflammation in my husband’s wife’s chest.

  But I cannot put this all to my husband’s dark moods, when he is “a fearful, fiend-like creature.” Like any man of genius, he is absorbed in his work. I am his sometime-solace.

  I wrote to my husband in January about my feeling about Emerson, that he had no ideas except mad ones that did not derive from Carlyle. When I mentioned this to our friend Espinasse, he replied, “But, pray, Mrs. Carlyle, who has?”

  Feeling somewhat improved, I went to several parties. One of them was a dinner at the Dickenses’. Such getting up of the steam is unbecoming to a literary man, who ought to have his base elsewhere than “ornament and grandeur.” The dinner was served up in the new fashion, not placed on the table at all, but handed round 1 Only the dessert was on the table, and also on the table—dear God—artificial flowers. And such an overloaded dessert as it was: pyramids of figs, raisins, oranges. Quite unlike the Ashburton dinner, when the table held just four cowslips in china pots. It reminded me of the cowslips I fashioned into balls when I was a child and yet another person ...

  Mrs. Gaskell, the author, was there, and heard a silly old man ask me if my husband “was as much infatuated as ever with Lady Ashburton.” “Of course,” I replied, coolly. He got no satisfaction from me. I told Mrs. Gaskell I admired her work so much, as I do. Cranford will, I know, outlast much of what is being written.

  But still I am weary. I read the new Copperfield, being up to nothing else. Had awakened with a headache (the penalty of all that cleverness), but cold water and coffee staved it off. And a small quantity of laudanum, which I try not to take often, as well as morphia. It creates new evils and does not deal well enough with the existing ones.

  We have been visited by a most charming young lady who is to be envied, or, considering the caprices of the lady, pitied, for she is the original of the character “Blanche Amory” in Thackeray’s Pendennis. It is hard for me to see how anyone prefers Dickens to Thackeray; it is my opinion that Vanity Fair surpasses anything Dickens ever wrote. The young lady who stopped here—with lady’s maid and infinite fine baggage—has gone, but Thackeray most certainly captured her “manners, the wiles, the larmes.” The child is called Theresa Revis, or Tizzy, and a year after she was with us, in January of 1851, I received an account from her about a passage to India at that time, which no one I think can imagine ...

  ... “the ship was small; we were all together but I did not mind. We played shuffleboard and there was a plentitude of little Pekingese dogs. The ship went as far as Alexandria, after our train to Marseilles, then a tiny paddle-steamer carried us to Cairo.

  “I crossed the desert to Suez by camel, which was the least convenient way, but my two male guardians (appointed by Lady Buller, and wishing nothing so much as to wash their hands of me) advised this mode of travel. I would guess that cost had something to do with it. Of course, I saw some friends travelling by waggon, and they told me later it was made for midgets. No one could sit upright in the caravans, much like The Little Ease in which prisoners could not sit, lie or stand with comfort. The horses that drew these caravans of the wealthy were Arabian mongrels. My friends said they were thoroughbreds, but could not restrain their wildness, so that they were not inclined to act as a team, but pulled in individual ways. The people in the waggons, in embarrassing physical contact one moment with their neighbors, would at the next moment be besieged by fantasies of perishing on the hot, white sands with no other Englishman present, all countrymen having been pulled in twenty other directions.

  “Our sea voyage took many weeks. We were going to visit friends of Lady Buffer who had been living for some while in India, and the prospect was dismal for me, with my elegant tastes and my delicate health! There were no trunks, only large crates made up by one’s box-man. The cases were lined with tin so that the rats and mice couldn’t get to them. Somehow, the rats and mice always did manage to get at the clothes. No one can imagine what it was like to find eternal traces of vermin-droppings upon fine linen.

  “We were each allowed one case in the cabins we occupied, but the case was a bit of calculated dash. What really had to be supplied has never been mentioned in romantic stories of passage to India: furniture, washing pitchers, candles, pier glasses, rugs. Many establishments in London provided everything for passengers from corsets to sponge-bags to heavy wooden chairs. Going on board ship—even though so many other means of travel were eventually involved—meant the same thing in a way, as moving house.

  “You have never suffered if you have not been aboard a P & O Steamer on the Cape Route. Insects crawled out of every space. We used all sorts of bad smells to frighten them with; it turned out we were much more frightened by those fat black beetles who wallowed in camphorated spirits and sneered. We had brought our own soap and towels, but had to throw all away when we reached our destination. All our clothing, from undergarments to riding clothes, were lined with silk, supposedly to keep She damp out but more likely to keep the sweat in! No sooner was I there than I was ordered by several doctors back to England and arrived with my health perfectly restored. Moreover, to the great relief of Lady Buller, I am engaged to a Capt. Neale from Ayrshire, who came back on the ship with me. I did not know whether to go on the stage, marry him, or drown myself, but I have taken your advice, Mrs. Carlyle, and shall marry the Capt. How lovely it will be to be rich!”

  And how lovely for me, and for Lady Buller, to be rid of this troublesome baggage, living or leather.

  “.. and on a P & O Steamer on the Cape Route in the middle of your eighteen hundred group of years, or whatever you call something that happened a few moments ago, a shower of stones, perfectly round, fell on board near a young person named Theresa Revis. She had no idea what they were, fortunately for you, and did not mention them as she was being serenaded by a suitor. He was struck by one, thought she had thrown it playfully, and went on singing. May I ask what that occurence was about? It was carried by newspapers in the Northwestern Provinces of India, and corresponds to many other falls of stones and similar objects. I am waiting, Dix”

  “My marbles fell,” said Dix sullenly. They had been rather beautiful marbles and he resented very much having them wasted on his pets. “I let them slip through the shield, and they became about ten times smaller than they really are, which shows I was paying attention, because if I hadn't made them, so tiny they would have killed everybody near that little ocean.”

  “I should scarcely call that paying attention,” said the Teacher and began to look at some more reports, as Dix fidgeted.

  “Of course, the world of your pets is severely limited by your having had to create them in your own flawed image. Dix ... a deity! Dix, someone's feast, someone?s reason, or someone's king! It is unfair to the pets, as they scurry about in their mock-society quite purposelessly, and it is unfair to you to take them so casually because unless there is marked improvement this project will fail.”

  “Babe Ruth, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Einstein, da Vinci, Beethoven, Jesus Christ and others,” muttered Dix. It was his usual defense; sometimes he changed the order—added or subtracted—or chose representative “nationalities”

  The Teacher had stopped listening.

  The other evening I met Jane Eyre—Miss Bronte— at Thackeray’s. She is not much of a woman for looks. In fact, she is extremely unimpressive to look at. But I am always over-critical when my husband is away for such long periods. Our friend Mrs. Taylor told me my husband was to return shortly; I had no wish to hear it from her, but was glad. Still, I am as cl
ever as she any day of the year. When all is ironed out, Carlyle may someday tell me whether he prefers to be here or to accept Lady Ashburton’s invitations. I am going out now to walk off my headache and to cry it away. I have found that giving way to tears—a six year old child with a grown woman’s mind, that is what I am these days—is helpful to my aches.