Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Useless: and Charlotte drew up to the table and wrote to Ellen. Emily, she said, was daily weaker; there was no word of hope to give. She herself had written some days before to Dr. Epps, recommended by Mr. Williams, a statement of Emily’s symptoms; she had received but a vague answer with some medicine, which Emily would not take. This letter can hardly have been finished and sent to the post when the last struggle began. Emily fought for life then; she whispered that she would see a doctor now if he were sent for. But before he could come the cage was empty, and the wild hawk flown.

  Those three years and a half, from that day in July 1845, when Charlotte came home and learned for what reason Branwell would go back no more to his tutorship, down to the winter day in December 1848 when Keeper followed Emily’s coffin to the church and then to the grave beside her brother, comprise the most tragic act in the domestic drama of the thrice tragic family. But now those tipsy bawlings, those opium dreams, those silent animosities, those ruthlessnesses were over, and over were the agonised questions to which no answer was given, for Branwell and Emily both lay in the quiet earth, where she, at any rate, could not imagine for herself and him unquiet slumbers. Yet from blighted days and broken nights there had come forth the supreme felicity of the genius and of the talent of those two sisters of whom one alone remained. Never from stonier ground had there sprung so lordly a harvest, for Wuthering Heights was its fruit and so too was Jane Eyre. On that central act of this unique drama the curtain was now rung down, and there were left out of the five who had enacted it, three only. Mr. Nicholls, who was to fill so large a part in the final scene, bringing brief happiness to one who had never known it before, had as yet no share in it.

  It was Charlotte who, torn with anguish for the silences of the past and the seal that was now for ever set on them, kept the domestic stability firm; without her the very pillars of the home must have crumbled. Her work on Shirley, discontinued when Emily fell ill, was still unhandled, for there was no energy to spare for anything but the daily duties. ‘My father,’ so she wrote on Christmas Day to Mr. Williams, ‘says to me almost hourly, “Charlotte, you must bear up. I shall sink if you fail me.”’ Branwell’s death was still recent, and he mourned his Absalom; the very fact that Charlotte could give him no true sympathy there made her task the heavier. But she shouldered it all, and with that stern faith which carried her through these deep waters of the soul she recorded her thankfulness that she was equal to it.

  God has hitherto most graciously sustained me, [she wrote] so far I have felt adequate to bear my own burden and even to offer a little help to others. I am not ill, I can get through the daily duties and do something towards keeping hope and energy alive in our mourning household.

  It was well indeed that she found in herself this power of firm constancy, for now a second tragedy (Branwell’s death being confessedly nothing of the sort to her) began to threaten. Emily was scarcely in her grave when it became clear that Anne was suffering from the same dread malady as she. But here there was no such fruitless agonising as over Emily: Anne was patient and docile, and the doctors who were called in met with no contemptuous refusals of the aid they sought to bring. There was weakness, there was wasting, there were the nightly fevers and the persistent coughing which all told their tale, but Anne took her cod-liver oil and her carbonate of iron and wore the blisters which were ordered, and, according to the medical wisdom of the day, was pent in a room from which all fresh air was excluded, and hoped to wear the respirator that Ellen sent, when the weather permitted her to go out.

  She sat in Emily’s chair, unable to work and scarcely able to read, and when the specialist came from Leeds, his stethoscope but confirmed the worst fears. And for Charlotte below the intolerable daily burden, the heart-sickening fears, the glimpses of hope extinguished as soon as lit, the consciousness that, in spite of brief rallies and betterments, Anne was steadily losing ground, there was always the thought of Emily.

  The feeling of Emily’s loss [she wrote] does not diminish as time wears on; it often makes itself most acutely recognised. It brings too an inexpressible sorrow with it, and then the future is dark.

  Again she wrote:

  I cannot forget Emily’s death-day: it becomes a more fixed, a darker, a more frequently recurring idea in my mind than ever. It was very terrible. She was torn, conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life. But it will not do to dwell on such things.

  There spoke, with God knows what secret and incommunicable burden, that undefeated spirit as resolute as Emily’s own, which refused to let itself be debilitated by despair, but turned with all its energy to the ministries which the situation demanded. She put from her all thought of her own work, her own feelings, so that the monstrous article on Jane Eyre which appeared in the Quarterly this winter, in which the author, Miss Rigby, knowing or guessing she was a woman, spoke of her as one ‘who had long forfeited the society of her sex,’ was read by her without a pang; ordinarily her sensitiveness would have writhed under so infamous an attack. But now she felt no personal resentment, and only regretted for Thackeray’s sake that the old innuendo that in Jane Eyre she had reproduced the circumstances of his domestic tragedy was circulated again. Her own work on Shirley she abandoned altogether, sending the first volume of it to her publishers, so that, when she could tackle the story again, she might have the benefit of their views, and devoted herself entirely to Anne and her father, an unwearied nurse to her and to him an unfailing stay when he feared that his eyes were threatened again. For herself, she circumscribed the moment according to the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius; each could be borne and profitably used if she refused to contemplate anything but its immediate exigencies. ‘I must not look forward,’ she wrote, ‘nor must I look backward. Too often I feel like one crossing an abyss on a narrow plank — a glance round might quite unnerve.’ She found her solace in the sense of God’s omnipotence. ‘Fortitude is good,’ she wrote, ‘but fortitude itself must be shaken under us to teach how weak we are.’ Then came the support of the everlasting arms: ‘in sua Voluntade e nostra Pace.’

  Throughout the spring of 1849 Anne grew steadily weaker, but the thought of her death brought no wild anguish of regret to Charlotte, nor to herself any horror.

  I wish it would please God to spare me, [Anne wrote to Ellen] not only for papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes, but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practice, humble and limited indeed, but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose. But God’s will be done....

  A change to some seaside place had been recommended, and in this letter Anne proposed that Ellen should accompany her. But Charlotte would not permit that: if Anne, while they were away, got suddenly worse, it would be terrible for her friend to be alone with her, and though it might be difficult for her to leave her father alone, she must certainly come too.

  Finally this plan was adopted, and in the last week of May the two sisters, joined by Ellen, started for Scarborough, which Anne already knew, having stayed there with the Robinson family when she was governess to the girls. The expense would be met out of a legacy of £200 which her godmother had left her. They spent the night at York, where Anne managed to see the Minster, and on the day after their arrival at Scarborough she drove in a donkey-chair on the sands; she thought the donkey was being overtaxed and took the reins herself. Next day, being Sunday, she wanted to go to church, but was dissuaded; she had a walk in the afternoon. On Monday, like Emily on the last day of her life, she rose at seven, dressed herself and came downstairs. During the morning she felt that death was near, and wanted to leave for Haworth immediately if there was a chance that she could get home alive. A doctor was sent for, and in answer to her direct question said that her time had come. Then she wholly and serenely surrendered herself, commending Charlotte to her friend, and thanking them for their kindness to her. There was a little restlessness, and she wa
s carried from her chair to the sofa. She said to Charlotte, ‘Take courage, Charlotte, take courage,’ and then, without an uneven breath, she passed away, dying at just the hour when Emily had died.

  Charlotte stayed on at Scarborough with Ellen for a couple of weeks, and then went back alone to the Parsonage. Her father and Tabby and Martha were well; the dogs seemed in a strange ecstasy. ‘I am certain they regarded me as the harbinger of others,’ she wrote to Ellen. But the light died from their eyes, for there were none but Charlotte to return.

  Having seen her father, she went alone into the dining-room and shut herself in.

  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 more 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.... The great trial 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. I cannot help thinking of their last days, remembering their sufferings, and what they said and did, and how they looked in mortal affliction.

  The clock ticked loud in the still house, Keeper lay outside Emily’s door; her desk and Anne’s must some time be gone through to find what papers they had left, and none now would resent such intrusions. The air whispered with voices of the past and trembled with memories. ‘But crushed I am not yet,’ she wrote, ‘nor robbed of elasticity, nor of hope, nor quite of endeavour.’ She took up her book again, abandoned since last October when Emily fell ill. Since then her hours had been full with other ministries, now they were empty and must be filled. Rather more than half of it had been written, now she began on the chapter called ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death.’ It was finished by the end of August, and she knew that work had been her salvation, and she wrote to Mr. Williams:

  The faculty of imagination lifted me when I was sinking three months ago: its active exercise has kept my head above water since: its results cheer me now, for I feel they have enabled me to give pleasure to others. I am thankful to God who gave me the faculty, and it is for me a part of my religion to defend this gift and to profit by its possession.

  There was never a more magnificent fortitude in the face of so great tribulations, and she had to bear as well a load of those minor ones which can be taken lightly by an unburdened spirit, but which can so easily prove the last straw, when the weight of affliction is already accumulated to breaking point. She was in ill-health, she was sorely troubled with headaches and bilious sickness, and on the top of all these minor troubles came domestic trials. Of the two servants at the Parsonage, Martha Brown was ill and in bed, Mr. Brontë declaring that she was in imminent danger, and Tabby, now over eighty, fell as she got up from her chair with her head under the grate. Charlotte’s frayed nerves for once gave way, she simply sat and cried for ten minutes; then called herself a fool and got Martha’s sister in to help her with the housework. She was always at her best when things were worst: hers was one of those unflinching natures which trouble seems to anneal. Some are broken by it, but she would have scorned to be of such brittle stuff; some are softened by it, but she was not one of them. Even the death of her sisters, the loss, as she said, of the only two people in the world who understood her, had been as impotent to weaken essentially the iron confidence in which she met such bereavement, as the sufferings of her brother had been impotent, while he lived, to rouse her compassion. Life was a fight, and she was not going to be beaten.

  2

  As was her nature, so necessarily was her religion, and they both emerged from these tragic years unshaken and unsoftened. Gone utterly, burned out of her by searing experience, were those emotional, half-hysterical aspirations of which in her adolescence Ellen had really been the source; she no longer sought that water of Life, of which once drinking she should never more thirst. She looked for no easy yoke or light burden, nor expected rest for her soul, but travail. Nor was her conception of the Omnipotence on which she leaned and to the decrees of which she gave obedience any sort of mystic ecstasy; it was the very antipodes of Emily’s ‘Strange Power,’ that fiercely tender pagan force which set the moorland heath abloom and the lapwings mating, and so kindled the love of Catherine for the sheer beauty of the savage earth and for Heathcliff’s savage adoration that, dreaming she was dead, she broke her heart with weeping to escape from the conventional tameness of heaven, ‘and the angels were so angry that they flung me into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I awoke sobbing for joy.’ Not less antipodal to Charlotte’s God was Anne’s conception of the loving and sustaining hand which led her, lacking nothing, so gently through the valley of the shadow, that far from fearing the death of the body, she rejoiced in the accomplishment of her serene journey. While here, she had her work to do for Him, and it was in His service that she had used the degradation of her brother to warn others of the disaster that attends evil courses. God was her loving Shepherd, and she, mild as Flossie, must bark at the wolves which threatened His flock.

  But to Charlotte both such conceptions were incomprehensible: to her God was no pagan Pan who fluted in the ‘livid hollows’ of the moor, nor yet a compassionate Redeemer, but the lawgiver revealed on Sinai, who had written His commandments very distinctly on stone tables, and was powerful to save and infinite in mercy. That decalogue did not enjoin loving indulgence of the weak, nor the duty of judging not, and the charity that suffered long and was kind had no place in it. She was as unsparing in her severity to herself as she was to others; she claimed from herself, even as God claimed from her, a full account of the talents He had given her, and never did she shirk the demands of duty nor complain of the sternness of that lawgiver, but she never eased the burden with the lighter yoke of love. She suffered much, she was ready to acquiesce always in personal sacrifice, but she neither looked for nor found in self-abnegation any particle of joy. Undeviatingly through the wilderness she followed the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, and she never expected to find therein any oasis for her rest and refreshment. It was an arid journey, for on all sides she saw so much of what she felt herself bound to disapprove; but as long as she followed the gleam, smoky though it often was, she knew she was doing God’s will, and to that she referred every decision she had to make, and every pang she had to bear. She was in constant ill-health, and it was to God’s help she looked that she would not break down, and that steeled her will; the same strength enabled her firmly to face the inevitable end of Anne’s illness when ‘reason unsupported by religion’ would have failed her.

  Belief in God’s guidance gave her resignation to His accomplished Will, but (not exactly in opposition to it, but trying to range herself with it) she put forth all her force in order to accomplish her own. Thus, when in the last years of her life, in consequence of Mr. Brontë’s violent objections to her marriage with Mr. Nicholls, the latter left Haworth, and all seemed over, Charlotte believed that ‘Providence is over all: that is the only consolation.’ But she successfully set to work to get Mr. Nicholls back, and when her father’s opposition was withdrawn and the marriage permitted, she equally believed that this was ‘the destiny which Providence in His goodness and wisdom seems to offer me.’ Again, when there was pleasure to be thankful for instead of trouble to be resigned to, she blended, with a childlike simplicity, her human satisfaction with her gratitude for the Divine favour bestowed. When, for instance, she received favourable reviews of Villette, she wrote: ‘The import of all these notices is such as to make my heart swell with thankfulness to Him who takes note both of my suffering and work and motives. Papa is pleased too.’

  3

  Shirley, then, was finished in August 1849, and now after ten years there came to Charlotte another offer, the third, of marriage; for the sake of continuity it will be better to dissect this odd episode out of her letters during these years, and give it for the first t
ime a connected outline.

  Mr. James Taylor was in her publisher’s firm, and he had read and criticised the portion of her book which she had sent to Smith, Elder in the spring of this year; possibly Charlotte had met him when she and Anne had gone to London to disclose their identities. He was soon to pass through Leeds on his return to London from his holiday, and Mr. Williams suggested that he should come to Haworth and take the newly-finished manuscript back with him. Charlotte, as serious as a judge, wrote just the letter that Jane Austen’s eyes would have twinkled over, elaborately explaining why she could not offer the ‘homely hospitalities’ of the Parsonage for a few days. Her father was not strong enough to take walks with a visitor on the moors, and

  the peculiar retirement of papa’s habits is such as to render it irksome to him to give much of his society to a stranger, even in the house. Without being in the least misanthropical, or sour-natured, papa habitually prefers solitude to society, and custom is a tyrant whose fetters it would now be impossible for him to break. Papa, I know, would receive any friend of Mr. Smith’s with perfect kindness and goodwill but I likewise know that unless greatly put out of his way, he could not give a guest much of his company.