hazarded a ‘Sir!’ — w'hereat he started, looked hard at me, and seemed
to take a rapid inner decision.
‘Perhaps you had best call me Francis, M r Lockwood.’
‘Well, Francis.’ I paused, postponing any demand to see the gentleman of the house; even relieved that I had, after all, no considerable person to deal with, in my present disorder — no one deserving of a
‘M r’ and a surname. ‘It’s winter!’ I suddenly burst out, indicating the
offending garden. ‘And in the middle of the night!’
Colour leapt into the fellow’s wan, somewhat delicate face; one
hand passed in an involuntary smoothing motion over the close-
cropped dark head; he was embarking upon the apology that my
accusing tone so ridiculously demanded!
‘There was no avoiding it — a risk, I admit, but at least part of this
scene simply had to seem unaccountable. To have anything resembling it among your memories would be to create a mere unprofitable hybrid; it would mean the end of any genuine M r Lockwood.’
The m anner suggested energetic appeal — the words conveyed
nothing. Francis, seeming to perceive this, checked himself completely, only to resume in a fierce, impatient tone w'hich, from a servant, I should never normally have tolerated.
‘You remember the study, do you not? Your last waking memory —
your study at Thrushcross Grange?’
His meagre frame now' seemed to thrill with an incomprehensible
aversion towards me; his words, too, suggested an intimate
acquaintance which my own recollection was powerless to corroborate. Yet he did not seem a dangerous fellow, or even an interesting one. His strange exaggerated manner, his rapid transitions of mood, seemed a consequence of overtaxed brain and nerves. In the
morbid lustre of his eye, the flaring nostril, the trembling hand, I
seemed to read the character of his master — a reclusive eccentric (as
I fancied) who either sanctioned or commanded an excess of waking,
and an unbecoming freedom which Francis displayed in addressing
his betters.
Upon the mention of my study, its familiar det ails came distinctly
to my mind; I all but yearned towards the pot of ink there, and the
paper on w'hich I had thought to record my housekeeper’s narrative,
and a very singular dream I underwent at W uthering Heights — a
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Yvonne Rousseau
nightmare, with a wailing spectre that clutched me by the hand, and
myself quite unable to believe I was asleep. The recording of that
dream must wait now upon the present narrative; yet the thought of
it steadied me. Perhaps (I thought) Yorkshire winters produce extraordinary dreams — or perhaps I have been seriously ill, and have lost many weeks in a delirium, my powers of recollection returning more
slowly than my bodily health. Whether dreaming or awake, my course
is clear: to behave like an English gentleman.
As if divining my thought, Francis again addressed me with the
earnest civility he had used at first, and which he seemed to strive after
constantly; but the painful agitation of his spirits was always overwhelming him, whether I replied to him in words or only in looks.
‘You, M r Lockwood, are a man of quite abnormal stability. Even in
the grip of nightmare, you retain a constant image of your own relation to the rest of the world; even asleep, you respond to event s in your characteristic manner. Partly because of this — but partly from
natural sympathies, impossible to subdue — I have spent very little
anxiety upon your case, compared with my soul-searchings over the
five women in the next room.’
His gaze had been fixing ever more intently upon my face, and his
mood had subtly kindled into urgent confiding; but now his words
grew rash and wild. ‘Each of those women remembers the events of a
lifetime, and supposes that she was born, in the normal way; and yet
her life began only a few short hours ago, and all but these last few
minutes of it have been spent in the sleep my computer prescribed for
her.’ My brain refused to worry itself wdth a speech so perverse — except that I entertained a fleeting wonder that a clerk (‘his’ clerk, too!) should meddle in the prescription of sleeping draughts.
But his fancies grew more singular: ‘I can’t predict in detail how my
creations will turn out; the computer’s final version may be more flexible than my interpretation; so let’s try this — let’s think about the book in your hand, M r Lockwood.’
I started. The fellow was right; I was all this time unaccountably
clutching a volume of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, that eminently horrid romance!
‘If I chose, I could bring to life a man with all the memories and
habits and expectations that the novel gives to the lascivious Monk.
More: if one of my rooms looked just a little like an abbey cell, I could
have that room’s appearance woven into his memories too; then, at
first sight, he would hail that room as the familiar cell he had slept and
prayed in for years. The man’s existence would be owed entirely to me;
M r Lockwood’s narrative
67
without me, there would just be dead information — dead chemicals:
calcium, carbon, nitrogen, phosphates . . . ’
And more and more names of chemicals he babbled forth, and then
he raved of cells and acids, but not cells where a monk might live —
cells that lived inside our own bodies, and acids that hid inside those
cells — acids whose mark was everywhere on body and mind; I might
have fancied he meant the slow acid of the years, that burns furrows
into the aged brow, and shrivels our limbs and our sympathies alike;
but these acids were far more marvellous, less poetic — strange and
delusional. Every kind of idea he jum bled together at random: jean
and whore-moan! words such as mapping, strand, and hydrogen
bond, with strings and triggers and frames and loops; messengers and
interpreters — even hereditary computers! six generations of
sorcerers’ clerks!
I was aghast — could it be I who had run mad? But the fellow’s own
aspect reassured me: his was the derangement! In a sudden lucid interval, he grew conscious of my perturbation and perplexity; he ceased his strange effusion, and turned lividly pale. Every lineament betrayed
his shaken nerves, the prostration of his bodily strength.
Quivering and constrained, he hastened to beg my pardon: ‘I
fatigue you with my commonplace concerns, M r Lockwood. Impute
it, if you please, to my over-zealous admiration for your powers as an
observer and reporter; let me make amends with a far more interesting subject — let me talk no more about The Monk, but of the women in the next room, instead; for they are nothing so simple as characters
lifted from a novel. No, each is the distillation of a century. Each owes
her characteristics to the females represented as desirable by novelists,
playwrights (in one case, American picture-makers) over an entire
century. And I’m convinced we shall observe a degeneration: Anglo-
Saxon males have always been so greatly influenced, when they fall in
love, by those artists of the pen. They will choose mates as like as possible to the characters admired, and persuasively set forth, by artists.
‘Yet everyone admits that artists are misfits in the world, essentially
incompetent and i
mpractical, the worst possible spouses — judging
ill themselves, and attracting only unbalanced members of the normal populace; case after case instantly springs to mind. Everyone knows it; yet how do people behave?
‘Begin with the sixteenth-century composite, young Anne . . .’
(pointing to the girl in the farthingale, who now apparently cried
aloud for assistance from some invisible being — although, of course,
we could not hear a word). ‘Men marry her like, inspired by the plays
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Yvonne Rousseau
they see; women even strive to emulate her; come the seventeenth century, there’s a crop of descendants, whose character has changed accordingly — and from these in their turn the artists are choosing the
like of Bellamode . . .’ (the lady, it seemed, who had so alarmed me
with her prinking at the mirror). ‘She has her own style of descendants, among whom are the eighteenth-century artists who raise up Clarinda . . .’
I sighed sentimentally, for he had here indicated my own goddess.
‘Who could hesitate?’ I then burst out: ‘Do you pretend that writers influence me, when I prefer that divine creature above every other?
Absurd!’
I arrested myself, blushing at my own absurdity; I was behaving,
involuntarily, as if the fellow’s farrago were truth!
Francis’s eye upon me had sparkled momentarily, not with resentment, but with an inscrutable enthusiasm; now he ground his teeth.
‘It’s ridiculous to have to cope with someone looking like that,’ he muttered savagely. ‘The computer ought not to be so literal-minded about a self-image — not in a man with such all-round personal conceit.’
Again he addressed himself to me, but very abstractedly: ‘I only
hope three hours gives enough time for you to write out your report.
I dared not give more than three hours’ life after waking — not to any
of my creations. They may so easily prove violent, or desperately unhappy; they were conceived in the brains of their opposite sex, after all, and therefore very partially, all six.’
There really were only five women — four of them now upbraiding the ‘sixteenth-century’ Anne. Francis made an abrupt movement, and suddenly we could hear the lady of the gleaming nether limbs.
(‘Evadne,’ said Francis, his wits apparently returning: ‘She belongs to
the twentieth century.’)
‘They’re darn right,’ Evadne was telling Anne. ‘You talk too much,
and you don’t even make sense.’
‘Alas, Mistresses,’ cried Anne, ‘Would you have me plain and short?
Nay, I am the merriest madbrain, and the most fantastical trimm er
and tricker, that ever crisped it and frisled it from ear to ear; set my
tongue to the barest, courtless stuff, and my nimble spirit comes pricking in, and swells the egg as much beyond all hooping as the moonish sea’s brocade!’
Francis looked anxious: ‘Elizabethan playwrights didn’t care so
much for characterisation, as for their own mastery of language . . .’
Now, however, Anne was all blushes and honest penitence.
‘But pardon me, I pray you: I am a right maid, for this boyish
A ir Lockwood’s narrative
69
prating; my giddiness mistakes you, belike, for sweet Ariadne, my
lovely-hearted playfellow,’
(‘It was the fashion for Elizabethan maidens to feel sincere affection
for one another,’ Francis confirmed, correctly interpreting my glance;
I was sure that the divine Clarinda would never stoop to confidential
chatter with mere females of her own age; nor should I wish it for her.)
‘But O, and in sober earnest, when you four such seeming weird
women burst on my piteous eye — ’ (the word, ‘weird’, seemed greatly
to offend Evadne, but Anne was innocently heedless) ‘ — would that
my soft fears had bid me call on gentle Ariadne, and not upon
Antonio! ’Twas the heaviest, light break-secret babbling!’
‘Antonio is the unseen, to whom she was appealing!’ I observed.
Francis stared at me sombrely. ‘And that same Antonio has, in her
mind’s eye, exactly your own lineaments, M r Lockwood.’ I gaped.
‘Each of those women has, in her memories and expectations, an ideal
lover: the computer and I have taken the liberty of giving to each the
memory of your face — although each would remember you in different dress, different situations, and with a different name.’
I know, from experience, that I am tolerably attractive, so that
(without conceit) the choice did not appear altogether injudicious; I
was, indeed, insensibly seduced into believing Francis’s account of the
situation, for a time. It was a fascinating sensation to suppose that, unseen, I was looking at these women in the guise of the lover of each —
even that Anne’s Antonio!
Clearly, she thought herself culpable, not in her love itself, but in
her revelation of a secret. ‘And yet, sadly, ’tis out now,’ (thus she
brushed aside further concealment) ‘and so, bating my modesty, I
fondly confess that this same Antonio hath worked such mischief with
his sighs — Heigh-ho! Well, once 1 had rather sing “So” for my lute
and mine own mastery than “Me” for the sway of an husband on my
heart; but out of the first fire of meeting eyes, love is stricken — where
’twas born, there ’tis fixed for ever, and all my study bent on right
submission.’
But alas! From this temporary elevation, Anne now abruptly took
refuge in defiantly saucy wit: ‘For Antonio is a man of such excellent
good parts,’ said she, ‘that I, having partly conned his part, wot well
that ’tis well for his part to be parting those parts . . . ’
But she was interrupted; at first, rather to my relief; for, feeling myself in some respects identical with Antonio, I could not altogether avoid blushing under Francis’s satirical gaze.
‘Foh, O filthy!’ cried the straight-nosed Bellamode — for the honour
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Yvonne Rousseau
of the seventeenth century. ‘A wife’s to be all submission! Why, then,
say ’tis better to stare honestly out of one’s eyes than to tenderly languish w ith’em, a la Chinoise . .
(here she ogled extremely);‘say,
’tis as wretched to slaughter the reputation of a dear friend, as ’tis to
be seen in public squired by one’s husband: do: say any arrant
nonsense!
‘Aye, you’d have human creatures all ice, and just the one beauteous
mind and person to rouse in each o f’em the amorous designs of toads
(that’s men!) or our own soft desires; and then you’d have us cruel and
strange to our husbands only where ’twas wisdom, ’twas reason; and
then you think yourself cherished for a pretty wit, where ’tis only a
pretty tit. Lard, child, never prattle me your country megrims
yonder!’
(Francis was lividly pale once more, and gazed at this monster of
hardihood even with a ludicrous air of pity! ‘I was right,’ he was m uttering: ‘First, Anne’s genuine sense of delicacy, and then this . . .
And she’s lost Anne’s sense of trust; her trust in men has been outraged. W hat’s to be expected, but even more prurience, even greater estrangement from men, in Clarinda’s century?’ His muttering
seemed addressed to me — he cut his words short, upon catching my
glance.)
‘But I,’ Bellamode was now asserting, T m to
be a town wife: Fm to
be absolute and uncontrollable. Nay, though I strive in vain to rend
from my heart a dissembling monster, a hellish, goatish traitor — ’
(here she broke her fan, while I looked at Francis with an involuntary
question in my eye; he pointed at me, and silently nodded!) ‘ — yet 111
enslave ’em bravely, 111 be strange with my husband, 111 have ’em dote
in torments!’
‘For mercy, for pity’s sake, forbear!’ cried Clarinda, to my unspeakable relief. Stepping forward, her eyes ablaze with good sense and decorum, she approached young Anne, who was regarding the rigid
Bellamode with mingled repugnance and pity.
‘That two such pretty-bred young women should offer such a talking!’ Clarinda pursued. ‘Your amiability, your modesty; do not they shudder at your placing yourself so on a level with the men? Your very
sensibility’ (to Anne) ‘seems ignorant that it is Nature’s serious law for
a man to be your superior; it seems you have only your love to instruct
you in awe and devoted obedience. Indeed, I fear that you aim beyond
that exemption from blame which is the utmost female accomplishment; I fear you go near to being pert.’
Anne, however, seemed determined not to be improved by these
M r Lockwood’s narrative
71
most true and necessary injunctions; she returned no direct answer,
but instead began to hum, and to read in a book she had by her — a
work of Chaucer’s, as I had already observed.
‘Gemini! Is that the newest play?’ cried Bellamode, and, ‘Oh, never
be a blue-stocking, child!’ cried Clarinda.
The brightly-hued lady on the sofa now sat up: ‘A household primer
is very well,’ she said, showing one, ‘O r sermons.’ (‘T hat’s Dorothea,
of the nineteenth century,’ Francis m urmured.)
I looked across at the other — Evadne. She was draped against the
doorframe, but wearing an expression of — was it agony? absent-
mindedness? ecstasy?
‘O ur companion,’ Clarinda pursued, indicating Bellamode, ‘is
aware in men of what, so unhappily, is there. Yet the frame of a
woman’s mind should be so delicate — a woman should be so exalted
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