Brontës (54 page)

Mary Taylor also observed that Charlotte ‘seemed to have no interest or pleasure beyond the feeling of duty' and it was clear to all her friends that she was making herself ill with her insistence on performing her duties to the letter.
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Even the summer holidays offered no respite from the deepening mood of gloom which gradually enveloped Charlotte at Roe Head. School broke up on 17 June but the pleasure of going straight to Haworth was deferred by an invitation to spend a week at Huddersfield Vicarage. As unwelcome as it was unexpected, Charlotte attempted to cut short the visit to a weekend, using the excuse that ‘papa I fear will scarcely be willing to dispense with us longer at home even though we should be staying with so valued a friend as yourself'.
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Unfortunately, Patrick did not take the same view and wrote to Mrs Franks countermanding his daughter's arrangements:

I esteem it, as a high privilege, that they should be under your roof, for a time – where, I am sure, they will see, and hear nothing, but what, under Providence, must necessarily tend, to their best interest, in both the worlds –
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The visit, which took up the whole of the first week of the vacation, was not a great success. The eldest child, John Firth Franks, recollected that Charlotte never spoke to him during the whole time she was there though Anne brought toys to him in the nursery.
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The sisters arrived at the vicarage to find Charlotte's old school-fellow, Amelia Walker, and her family,
waiting there to receive them. ‘They were monstrously gracious,' Charlotte sourly remarked to Ellen,

Amelia almost enthusiastic in her professions of friendship!! She is taller, thinner, paler and more delicate looking than she used to be – very pretty still, very lady-like and polished, but spoilt utterly spoilt by the most hideous affectation
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The Walkers also pressed an invitation on the reluctant Brontës, who duly travelled over to Lascelles Hall the following Tuesday. There, Charlotte was grudgingly forced to admit, they had ‘on the whole a very pleasant day'. Amelia, dispensed from having to earn a living by her family fortune, again attracted Charlotte's jaundiced comment.

Miss Amelia changed her character every half hour. now she assumed the sweet sentimentalist, now the reckless rattler. Sometimes the question was ‘Shall I look prettiest lofty?' and again ‘Would not tender familiarity suit me better?' At one moment she affected to inquire after her old school-acquaintance the next she was detailing anecdotes of High Life.
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One can only guess at the relief Charlotte and Anne felt when they were finally released from social duty and allowed to come home. Not only was the family complete again, but the old playing partnerships could be reestablished.

For once, Haworth and the restoration to her family failed to cure Charlotte's growing disillusionment with the general tenor of her life. The contrast between her own existence, toiling in the schoolroom at the beck and call of Miss Wooler and her girls, with that of Branwell and Emily, living at home and having their time at their own disposal, must have struck her forcibly. From the sheer volume of his output it is clear that Branwell had a great deal of spare time and energy. Not for him the snatched moments of solitude and the feverish scribbling of Angrian fragments; nor, most painfully, the sense of frustration and guilt which built up when imagination could not be indulged.

Emily too, released from the bondage of school life, was deep in the throes of Gondal composition. Though no Gondal prose tales are extant, some of her poems of this period are preserved, written in her minuscule print on tiny scraps of paper. They are the earliest of her fictional writings in existence and reveal a mind that, in stark contrast to her elder sister's, was
calm and content. She had already established the pattern of her future work, taking her inspiration from the beauties of nature or even simple contemplation of the weather before progressing to Gondal scenes and characters. The earliest recorded poem, probably written earlier that year, is typical.

Cold clear and blue the morning heaven

Expands its arch on high

Cold clear and blue Lake Wernas water

Reflects that winters sky

The moon has set but Venus shines

A silent silvery star
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Such tranquil moments were out of Charlotte's reach. Lacking both the incentive and the energy to write, she made only the feeblest of efforts to retain her hold on Angria. On her return from Huddersfield Vicarage, she began a prose tale, drawing on Branwell's newspaper reports about the cataclysmic events of the last few months. Either the subject failed to interest her or, more likely, the recent pace of events in Africa left her slightly bemused. The story remained unfinished and this fragment and a single Angrian poem were all she produced throughout the whole five weeks of her vacation.
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This was despite the fact that Branwell had placed her own hero, Zamorna, in the worst crisis of his career. The Verdopolitan Reform Ministry which had invaded Angria had been overthrown by a popular revolution led by the old arch-demagogue himself, Northangerland, who had established himself at the head of a Provisional Government. Zamorna had been defeated at the battle of Edwardston, captured and exiled in the company of Sdeath by Northangerland; in a scene reminiscent of Shakespeare, his eldest son Edward had also been captured, blinded and put to death. All Angria was at last completely under Northangerland's sway and he ruled with a reign of terror, supported by the Ashantee, French and Bedouin invaders. Zamorna's sole prospect of revenge lay in breaking Northangerland's heart by divorcing his wife, Percy's beloved daughter, and banishing her to Alnwick where, he knew, she would die of a broken heart.
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Such a scenario would once have provoked a sharp retort from Charlotte and a swift turning of the tables on her brother's abasement of her great hero. It is an indication of the profound lethargy which had her in its grasp
that Charlotte did not respond or react, but accepted Branwell's dictation of events. One spark of interest remained. In a long and dreary poem of 576 lines, completed on 19 July just before she returned to Roe Head, she depicted Zamorna on board the ship taking him into exile mourning the fate of his wife and son and being comforted by his mistress, Mina Laury, who had chosen to accompany him.
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Then, like her hero, she returned to her own, self-imposed exile at Roe Head.

The hopeless and bitter state of her defeated and exiled hero seems to have suited Charlotte's mood in the autumn of 1836. The reluctance with which she resumed her second year as a teacher at Roe Head soon deepened into revolt. She continued to add to the diary fragments which she had jotted down in her notebook at odd moments over the past year
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but their tone became increasingly harsh and resentful. Instead of finding relief in spending her precious leisure moments in writing reflective vignettes of Angria, her impatience and frustration were vented in splenetic outbursts against her pupils. On 11 August, a few weeks into the new term, she wrote:

All this day I have been in a dream half-miserable & half-ecstatic miserable because I could not follow it out uninterruptedly, ecstatic because it shewed almost in the vivid light of reality the ongoings of the infernal world. I had been toiling for nearly an hour with Miss Lister, Miss Marriott & Ellen Cook striving to teach them the distinction between an article and a substantive. The parsing lesson was completed, a dead silence had succeeded it in the school-room & I sat sinking from irritation & weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness the apathy and the hyperbolical & most asinine stupidity of these fatheaded oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience & assiduity?

must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned with in these four bare walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning in heaven & the year is revolving in its richest glow & declaring at the close of every summer day \the time I am losing/ will never come again? Stung to the heart with this reflection I started up & mechanically walked to the window – a sweet August morning was smiling without The dew was not yet dried off the field. the early shadows were stretching cool & dim from the hay-stack \&/ the roots of the grand old oaks & thorns scattered along the sunk fence. All was still except the murmur of the scrubs about me over their tasks, I flung up the sash. an uncertain sound of inexpressible sweetness came on a dying gale from the south, I
looked in that direction Huddersfield & the hills beyond it were all veiled in blue mist, the woods of Hopton & Heaton Lodge were clouding the waters-edge & the Calder silent but bright was shooting among them like a – silver arrow. I listened the sound sailed full & liquid down the descent. It was the bells of Huddersfield Parish church. I shut the window & went back to my seat. Then came on me rushing impetuously. all the mighty phantasm that we had conjured from nothing from nothing [sic] to a system strong as some religious creed. I felt as if I could have written gloriously – I longed to write. The Spirit of all Verdopolis – of all the mountainous North of all the woodland West of all the river-watered East came crowding into my mind. if I had had time to indulge it I felt that the vague sensations of that moment would have settled down into some narrative better at least than any thing I ever produced before. But just then a Dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited[.]
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Charlotte's own quick intellect made her unsympathetic to her slower-minded pupils, so that sometimes she would almost boil with rage and frustration at their ‘asinine stupidity'. The need to keep such feelings hidden beneath the patient demeanour of the schoolmistress simply added further tension to her already taut nerves.

In the afternoon Miss E L[ister] was trigonometrically oecumenical about her French Lessons she nearly killed me between the violence of the irritation her horrid wilfulness excited and the labour it took to subdue it to a moderate appearance of calmness. My fingers trembled as if I had had twenty four hours tooth-ache, & my spirits felt worn down to a degree of desperate despondency. Miss Wooler tried to make me talk at tea time and was exceedingly kind to me but I could not have roused if she had offered me worlds. After tea we took a long weary walk. I came back abymé to the last degree for Miss L[ister] & Miss M[arriot]t had been boring me with their vulgar familiar trash all the time we were out if those Girls knew how I loathe their company they would not seek mine as much as they do
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Angria could still provide some solace and there were moments of quiet daydreaming, even in the classroom.

I'm just going to write because I cannot help it Wiggins might indeed talk of scriblemania if he were to see me just now encompassed by the bulls (query
calves of Bashen) all wondering why I write with my eyes shut – staring, gaping hang their astonishment – A C[oo]k on one side of me E L[iste]r on the other and Miss W[oole]r in the back-ground, Stupidity the atmosphere, school-books the employment, asses the society, what in all this is there to remind me of the divine, silent, unseen land of thought.
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The sound of the wind gusting round Roe Head conjured up thoughts of home:

that wind I know is heard at this moment far away on the moors at Haworth. Branwell & Emily hear it and as it sweeps over our house down the church-yard & round the old church, they think perhaps of me & Anne – Glorious! that blast was mighty it reminded me of Northangerland … O it has wakened a feeling that I cannot satisfy – a thousand wishes rose at its call which must die with me for they will never be fulfilled. now I should be agonized if I had not the dream to repose on. its existences, its forms its scenes do fill a little of the craving vacancy[.]
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Sometimes, however, as Charlotte herself realized, the golden dream of Angria could be oppressive. One evening, lying on her bed in the school dormitory, she became so wrapt up in the scene her imagination had conjured up that she could not physically rouse herself.

I knew I was wide awake & that it was dark, & that moreover the ladies were now come into the room to get their curl-papers – they perceived me lying on the bed & I heard them talking about me. I wanted to speak – to rise – it was impossible – I felt that this was a frightful predicament – that it would not do – the weight pressed me as if some huge animal had flung itself across me. a horrid apprehension quickened every pulse I had. I must get up I thought & I did so with a start. I have had enough of morbidly vivid realizations. every advantage has its corresponding disadvantage –
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If even Angria could not bring relief, then where could Charlotte turn?

Chapter Ten

LOSING BATTLES