Brontës (143 page)

Despite everyone's efforts on her behalf, Charlotte did not get better. She had hoped to slip home from Brookroyd without informing the Haworth doctor, but someone had seen her arrive at Keighley station and told Mr Ruddock who promptly ‘came blustering in' and ‘was actually cross' that she had not written to him immediately. He tried to insist on her resuming a course of quinine tonics which she was convinced disagreed with her and then, just as suddenly, contradicted himself and prescribed something else. It was no wonder that Charlotte wrote despairingly to Ellen, ‘I wish I knew better what to think of this man's skill. He seems to stick like a leech: I thought I should have done with him when I came home.'
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Ellen tried to persuade her to come with her on an extended visit to Sussex where her friend, Mary Gorham, was about to be married, but Charlotte was adamant. ‘I tell you now that unless \want of/ health should absolutely compel me to give up work and leave home (which I trust and hope will not be the case) I
certainly shall not think of going
.' Besides, she added, somewhat bitterly, ‘You can never want me less than when in Sussex surrounded by amusement and friends.'
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Miss Wooler added her own invitation, but Charlotte was equally firm: ‘Your kind note holds out a strong temptation, but one that
must be resisted'
, she told her, adding by way of explanation,

From home I must not go unless health or some cause equally imperative render a change necessary. For nearly four months now (i.e. since I first became ill) I have not put pen to paper – my work has been lying untouched and my faculties have been rusting for want of exercise; further relaxation is out of the question and I
will not permit myself to think of it
.

It was a useful excuse but somewhat unfair to the remarkably patient George Smith to add, ‘My publisher groans over my long delays; I am sometimes provoked to check the expression of his impatience with short and crusty answers.'
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Charlotte set to with a will and by 29 March 1852, six weeks after her return from Brookroyd, she had completed her draft of the first volume of
Villette
and began to make a fair copy of it for her publishers. The manuscript bears striking evidence of her state of mind during its composition. The first three chapters, which concern the child Paulina and had been conceived possibly as long ago as January 1850, were written up with scarcely
any revision. The remainder of the volume, written in fits and starts but mainly since Charlotte's visit to London in the summer of 1851, contains an average of three emendations per page. This suggests that Charlotte had toiled over the rough drafts, working and reworking them until she was satisfied before copying them up; it confirms the slowness of her rate of composition and the fact that, unlike with
Jane Eyre
, or even sections of
Shirley
, she had not been caught up and driven by her imagination. The last chapter, describing the nightmare long vacation Lucy Snowe spends virtually alone in the school at Villette, bears evidence of considerable revision.
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Here Charlotte was drawing on her own experience of the summer vacation at the Pensionnat Heger in 1843, which, as in the novel, drove her to a Catholic church where she made a confession; but more painfully, it impressed upon her the solitude of her current existence.

My heart almost died within me; miserable longings strained its chords. How long were the September days! How silent, how lifeless! How vast and void seemed the desolate premises! How gloomy the forsaken garden – gray now with the dust of a town-summer departed. Looking forward at the commencement of those eight weeks, I hardly knew how I was to live to the end. My spirits had long been gradually sinking; now that the prop of employment was withdrawn, they went down fast. Even to look forward was not to hope: the dumb future spoke no comfort, offered no promise, gave no inducement to bear present evil in reliance on future good.
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For a while Charlotte stuck to her task. More invitations to go from home were received and declined with firmness. Mrs Gaskell was hoping for a visit to Manchester some time in the late spring or summer and Mrs Gore, the novelist who had tried so hard to meet Charlotte during her visit to London the previous June, wrote to enquire if she was coming up to Town again this year.
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Both were told that she had no intention of leaving home until her book was completed, but the summer months stretched before her like an abyss. No visits from home, at her own insistence, a reduction in contact with Ellen, who departed for Sussex at the end of May and did not return till the beginning of October, silence from India where James Taylor, nursing his rejection like a festering wound, could not resume correspondence on terms of friendship alone; worst of all, a falling off in the number of letters from Cornhill, where George Smith and William Smith Williams, overwhelmed by work, were unaware that Charlotte would interpret their
failure to write regularly as an expression of their ‘bitter disappointment … at my having no work ready for this season'.
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At home there was little to distract her. The Easter celebrations in Haworth passed her by unremarked though they must have increased her domestic duties. The Reverend William Cartman, Headmaster of the Grammar School at Skipton, came to preach two sermons on Easter Sunday which helped to raise funds for the recent improvements and repairs to the church which Patrick had carried out. In the afternoon there was an unusual funeral in the church when the brethren of the Keighley District of the Ancient Order of Foresters turned out in force to accompany the body of James Greenwood, the constable of Morton, to its final resting place in the churchyard. The following day, Easter Monday, was the fourth annual meeting of the Haworth Mechanics' Institute, held in the National School room, where, ironically, one of the greatest novelists of the day was probably one of the anonymous ladies who were thanked for providing the excellent repast.
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Try as she might Charlotte could not settle down into a regular habit of writing. As always, this had the effect of bringing on the vicious cycle of depression and consequent poor health. Mary Taylor, though far away in New Zealand and several months behind with all the news from home, nevertheless had her finger on Charlotte's pulse when she wrote that spring. ‘It is really melancholy that now, in the prime of life in the flush of your hard earned prosperity you can't be well! Did not miss Martineau improve you? If she did why not try her & her plan again? But I suppose if you had hope & energy to try, you wd be well.'
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Charlotte was indeed bereft of both hope and energy; without them, writing was a chore. While Mary was penning this letter, Charlotte was just receiving her previous one, which informed her of the death from consumption, on 27 December 1851, of Mary's cousin and close companion, Ellen, with whom she had set up shop in Wellington. Charlotte read Mary's letter with searing pain: it ‘wrung my heart so – in its simple strong, truthful emotion – I have only ventured to read it once. It ripped up half-scarred wounds with terrible force – the death-bed was just the same – breath failing &c.' Almost worse than this was Mary's voicing of one of Charlotte's greatest fears for herself, that she should ‘in her dreary solitude become “a stern, harsh, selfish woman” – this fear struck home – again and again I have felt it for myself – and what is my position – to Mary's?'
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In the end, Charlotte gave up the unequal struggle and decided to take
a short holiday away from home. She had two excuses for breaking her self-imposed prohibition. Mr Ruddock had obligingly pronounced that a trip southwards (to Sussex, for instance) might be enervating, but recommended a visit to Scarborough or Bridlington as being likely to brace and strengthen his patient; and she had persuaded herself that she had ‘a sad duty' to perform in visiting Anne's grave at Scarborough for the first time in the three years that had passed since her death.
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The idea of staying in Scarborough itself was altogether too painful to contemplate, so Charlotte decided to return to the lodgings at Filey, where she had stayed with Ellen after Anne's death. Knowing that Ellen would be annoyed that she had chosen the east Yorkshire coast in preference to Sussex, she waited till Ellen set off on her travels before making her own way to Filey, arriving within a day or two of the anniversary of Anne's death. From there she wrote defensively to Ellen. ‘I am at Filey utterly alone. Do not be angry. The step is right.'
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To her father, Charlotte wrote a long and altogether more chatty letter. He had just recovered from his annual spring bout of bronchitis and Charlotte was anxious to put on a brave front for him and write a cheerful letter to keep up his spirits. ‘On the whole I get on very well here –', she told him,

but I have not bathed yet as I am told it is much too cold and too early in the season. The Sea is very grand. Yesterday it was a somewhat unusually high tide – and I stood about an hour on the cliffs yesterday afternoon – watching the tumbling in of great tawny turbid waves – that made the whole shore white with foam and filled the air with a sound hollower and deeper than thunder. There are so very few visitors at Filey yet – that I and a few sea-birds and fishing-boats have often the whole expanse of sea, shore and cliff to ourselves – When the tide is out – the sands are wide – long and smooth and very pleasant to walk on. When the high tides are in – not a vestige of sand remains. I saw a great dog rush into the sea yesterday – and swim and bear up against the waves like a seal – I wonder what Flossy would say to that.

On Sunday afternoon I went to a church which I should like Mr Nicholls to see. It was certainly not more than thrice the length and breadth of our passage – floored with brick – the walls green with mould – the pews painted white but the paint almost all worn off with time and decay – at one end there is a little gallery for the singers – and when these personages stood up to perform – they all turned their backs upon the congregation – and the congregation turned their backs on the pulpit and parson – The effect of this manoeuvre was so
ludicrous – I could hardly help laughing – had Mr Nicholls been there – he certainly would have laughed out.
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Charlotte also made one of her exceptionally rare comments on local affairs, knowing that it was a matter that would interest her father deeply. Richard Shackleton Butterfield, a hard-nosed Liberal Free-trader from Keighley, had taken a mill in Haworth where he employed his weavers at the lowest possible rates and obliged them to work the two-loom system, whereby one weaver had to run two looms simultaneously and, though doing the work of two men, still received only single wages. On 18 May his weavers had walked out and Butterfield had taken the unusual and provocative step of applying to the magistrates' clerk at Bradford for warrants to compel them to work his system. When they refused, eight men were arrested and brought before the bench. Two of them were committed to two months' hard labour at Wakefield prison for breaking their contracts before the third, Robert Redman, announced that he could prove that Butterfield regularly lowered their wages in the middle of a warp, without notice, and that weavers had been discharged in the middle of a warp for refusing to attend a second loom. When Butterfield admitted that this was true, the bench reversed its decision, discharged all the prisoners and ordered him to pay them 3s. 6d. each for their day's wages, declaring that the contract could not be binding on the men if it was not also binding on the master. Charlotte's famous sense of justice did not exactly rejoice on the weavers' behalf. ‘I cannot help enjoying Mr Butterfield's defeat –', she told her father, ‘and yet in one sense this is a bad state of things – calculated to make working-people both discontented and insubordinate.'
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The cheerful facade of her letter to her father hid a more unhappy truth, as she freely confessed to Miss Wooler.

The first week or ten days – I greatly feared the sea-side would not suit me – for I suffered almost constantly from head-ache and other harassing ailments; the weather too was dark, stormy and excessively –
bitterly
cold; my Solitude, under such circumstances, partook of the character of Desolation; I had some dreary evening-hours and night-vigils.
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To Ellen, who took a deep interest in ailments of every kind and was – with far less reason – more of a hypochondriac than herself, Charlotte gave a still more detailed account of her sufferings. The ‘first week or ten days' had now
grown to a fortnight, during which Charlotte had ‘constantly recurring pain in the right side – the right hip – just in the middle of the chest – burning and aching between the shoulders – and sick headache into the bargain –'. The real reason for her afflictions soon became clear. ‘My spirits at the same time were cruelly depressed – prostrated sometimes – I feared the misery and the sufferings of last winter were all returning –'.
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Ellen Nussey had told her that William Wooler, Miss Wooler's eldest brother, who was a physician in Derby, recommended walking three or four hours each day for people suffering from liver complaints: ‘accordingly I have walked as much as I could since I came here, and look almost as sunburnt and weather-beaten as a fisherman or a bathing-woman with being out in the open air'. On one such occasion, she had set off to walk to Filey Brigg but had been frightened back by two cows; on another she had braved the elements and been sea-bathing – ‘it seemed to do me good'.
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Her most important task, which probably accounted for her poor spirits and health at the beginning of her holiday, was completed within a few days of her arrival. On 4 June she travelled over to Scarborough to visit Anne's grave. The trauma of the visit was somewhat lessened by her irritation on discovering that there were five errors in the inscription on the gravestone. The fact that she had to order the stone to be refaced and relettered was a justification for the unhappy pilgrimage – one that Charlotte never repeated.
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