Brontës (82 page)

She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty; never have given way but with life.

Monsieur Heger also believed that her imaginative powers would have been best displayed in writing history, where ‘her view of scenes and characters would have been so vivid, and so powerfully expressed, and supported by such a show of argument, that it would have dominated over the reader, whatever might have been his previous opinions, or his cooler perceptions of its truth'.
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Charlotte seems to have shared this opinion, later telling her publisher that she considered ‘Ellis Bell', her sister's pseudonym, ‘somewhat of a theorist'.

now and then he broaches ideas which strike my sense as much more daring and original than practical; his reason may be in advance of mine, but certainly it often travels a different road. I should say Ellis will not be seen in his full strength till he is seen as an essayist.
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As we are almost totally dependent on Charlotte's pen for a portrait of Emily, it is interesting to see that Monsieur Heger's assessment of her character seems to have been shared by the few people she came in contact with in Brussels. She not only seems to have set out with absolutely no intention of making friends, but was so uncompromisingly self-centred that she incurred positive dislike. For some months after their arrival in Brussels, the sisters were regularly invited to the Jenkins' house
for Sundays and half-holidays. Eventually, however, Mrs Jenkins stopped asking them as it obviously gave them more pain than pleasure to be invited. Her two sons, John and Edward, who were given the task of escorting the Brontës to the Chaussée d'Ixelles, found them awkward and shy and hardly exchanged a word with them during the journey. Once in her home, Mrs Jenkins found them equally difficult.

Emily hardly ever uttered more than a monosyllable, and Charlotte was sometimes excited sufficiently to speak eloquently and well – on certain subjects –but, before her tongue was thus loosed, she had a habit of gradually wheeling round on her chair, so as almost to conceal her face from the person to whom she was speaking.
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Charlotte, though willing enough to repay the kindness of her hosts by making an effort at conversation, was afflicted by that ‘mauvaise honte' of which she had complained to Ellen Nussey. Emily simply had no wish to please and no interest in doing so. She was quite capable of eloquence when the mood took her: when Monsieur Heger proposed his reading plan to the sisters he had to cut short Emily's protest – she ‘would have entered into an argument on the subject'.
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When her interests were threatened or excited she would defend herself with vigour, but social intercourse she considered a waste of time.

Charlotte was prepared to make other concessions for the sake of harmony. She despised her fellow pupils as much as Emily did, telling Ellen:

If the national character of the Belgians is to be measured by the character of most of the girls in this school, it is a character singularly cold, selfish, animal and inferior – they are besides very mutinous and difficult for the teachers to manage – and their principles are rotten to the core – we avoid them – which is not difficult to do – as we have the brand of Protestantism and Anglicism upon us.
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She was, however, prepared to learn from them. It was evidently in Brussels that Charlotte learnt to adapt her dress to suit her tiny figure. She abandoned her old-fashioned dresses with their high waists and large sleeves and collars and began to wear plainer clothes, neatly waisted with narrow sleeves and small, contrasting, embroidered collars. In this she was clearly imitating the Belgian girls and her future heroines, from Frances Henri to Lucy
Snowe, would all win approval for the neatness and plain simplicity of their dress even if they lacked the advantages of personal beauty. By contrast, Emily obstinately refused to abandon her old style of dress, persisting in wearing leg-of-mutton sleeves, which had long gone out of fashion and which did not suit her tall, ungainly frame. Her petticoats too, lacking fullness, made her skirts cling to her legs, accentuating her height and thinness. The oddity of her figure and dress brought taunts from her school-fellows, bringing the angry response, ‘I wish to be as God made me.'
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Despite her defiant stance, Emily made rapid progress in French, German, music and drawing at the Pensionnat Heger. ‘Monsieur & Madame Heger begin to recognize the valuable points of her character under her singularities',
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Charlotte told Ellen thankfully, so the most difficult part of Charlotte's original plan could now be put into practice. Their half year in Brussels was almost exhausted, but she seems to have persuaded Madame Heger to keep them on as pupils in return for some teaching duties. No doubt she told Patrick and Aunt Branwell, as she told Ellen, that the offer had originated from Madame Heger, but the suggestion – so neatly fulfilling her plans for extending their foreign residence – almost certainly came from Charlotte herself.

Madame Heger has made a proposal for both me and Emily to stay another half year – offering to dismiss her English master and take me as English teacher – also to employ Emily some part of each day in teaching music to a certain number of the pupils – for these services we are to be allowed to continue our \studies/ in French and German – and to have board &c without paying for it – no salaries however are offered – the proposal is kind and in a great selfish city like Brussels and a great selfish school containing nearly ninety pupils (boarders & day-pupils included) implies a degree of interest which demands gratitude in return – I am inclined to accept it –
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Charlotte can have had no real hesitation in staying. Though she was occasionally homesick, on the whole she was thoroughly happy, indulging her natural bent for acquiring knowledge to the full. How happy Emily was cannot be judged, nor whether the prospect of remaining six more months in Brussels filled her with dread or delight. She had certainly suffered at first, just as she had at Roe Head. ‘Once more she seemed sinking,' Charlotte observed, ‘but this time she rallied through the mere force of resolution: with inward remorse and shame she looked back on her former failure, and
resolved to conquer in this second ordeal. She did conquer: but the victory cost her dear.' It was not only force of character that carried Emily through. Somehow she managed to find time for her lifeline, Gondal, writing three poems whose titles and content suggest that they were part of a longer, prose Gondal story.
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Madame Heger appears to have decided to break her new teachers in gently. They took up their duties in August, at the beginning of the two month long ‘grandes vacances'. Only six or eight boarders, beside the Brontës, remained at the school, though their numbers were supplemented by the five daughters of Dr Thomas Wheelwright, an English surgeon who, when his eyesight failed, had given up his London practice to come to Brussels in July 1842. The Wheelwrights had taken up residence in a flat in the Hotel Cluysenaar, in the Rue Royale, only ten minutes' walk from the Pensionnat Heger. Being newly arrived, the doctor was anxious that his daughters, who were aged six to fourteen, should use the school holidays to prepare themselves for the forthcoming term.
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They were the Brontës' first pupils in Brussels.

Emily taught music to the three youngest girls, Fanny, Sarah Ann and Julia, thereby earning their everlasting dislike. Their eldest sister, Laetitia, who was later to become one of Charlotte's friends, shared her sisters' antipathy.

I am afraid my recollections of Emily Brontë will not aid you much. I simply disliked her from the first … She taught my three youngest sisters music for four months to my annoyance, as she would only take them in their play hours, so as not to curtail her own school hours, naturally causing many tears to small children, the eldest ten, the youngest not seven.

Again Emily displayed that self-centredness which allowed her to ride rough-shod over her young pupils' feelings. Such was the young Wheelwrights' loathing of Emily that they refused to invite the sisters to their home, even though they liked Charlotte and found her invariably kind and friendly. Nor could they invite one without the other: ‘Charlotte was so devotedly attached to her, and thought so highly of her talents' that it would only have caused offence to exclude her sister.
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Only one person seems to have had a good word to say about Emily and that was Louise de Bassompierre, a sixteen-year-old Belgian girl, who was in the first class with the Brontës. Because there were only about a dozen
pupils in this class, she got to know both of them quite well. In sharp contrast to the prevailing opinion, she preferred Emily to Charlotte, finding her more sympathetic, kinder and more approachable. That a friendship did exist between the two, however unlikely it may seem, is borne out by the fact that Emily presented her with a signed drawing, a dramatic and detailed pencil study of a storm-damaged pine tree.
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Having won the consent of their father and aunt to remain a further six months in Brussels, Charlotte and Emily seem to have settled quickly into their new teaching roles. At the end of September Mary Taylor could report quite truthfully to Ellen Nussey:

Charlotte & Emily are well; not only in health but in mind & hope. They are content with their present position & even gay & I think they do quite right not to return to England though one of them at least could earn more at the beautiful town of Bradford than she is now doing.
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While everything was going better than could have been expected for Charlotte and Emily in Brussels, affairs were proceeding less smoothly at home. Patrick had returned from the Continent to find Haworth in a very depressed condition. It was an indication of the terrible state of trade and the depth of personal suffering caused that one of the most respected cotton spinners in the township, Thomas Lister, of Hollings Mill near Stanbury committed suicide at the end of April.
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A few days later, one of Patrick's oldest friends, Thomas Andrew, who had been the Haworth surgeon for the past twenty-four years, died. His funeral, conducted by Patrick on 3 May, was a remarkable manifestation of the esteem and affection in which he was held. So many people came to pay their last respects that the corpse had to be taken out of his house and displayed in the public street: Patrick led the procession of mourners to the church and conducted the burial service. What made Andrew's loss even greater was the fact that he had been particularly skilled in treating the typhus fevers which were endemic among the poor. ‘His kindness to the poor was almost unexampled', declared one eulogist, for he had treated hundreds of people over the years, charging them a pittance for his services and often nothing at all.
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His death at the height of the worst depression in trade that anyone could remember was a particular loss to the suffering poor and it was decided that a memorial should be erected in Haworth Church to his memory. Branwell, still at home and glad to do an old friend a favour, suggested that J. B. Leyland should be
commissioned to produce the memorial. It was a good excuse to invite Leyland to dine at the parsonage and, in the evening, he appeared before the monument committee. Later Branwell felt compelled to admit:

I have not often felt more heartily ashamed than when you left the committee at Haworth; but I did not like to speak on the subject then, and I trusted that you would make that allowance which you have perhaps often ere now had to do, for gothic ignorance and ill breeding; and one or two of the persons present, afterwards felt that they had left by no means an enviable impression on your mind.

Branwell was commissioned to draw up the inscription for the monument: ‘It is not such an one as would have best pleased myself,' he told Leyland, ‘but I was compelled to frame it so as to please others; as to whose taste and judgement you will some time since have formed a tolerably correct opinion.'
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Leyland returned in July with the sculpted marble tablet which John Brown, under his watchful eye, then lettered. The inscription, which catalogued Andrew's career, ended with a generous tribute: ‘This Tablet was erected by those who knew his worth, & who feel that, while in his death the neighbourhood has lost an honourable & upright man, the poor have lost an able adviser in their calamities, & a generous friend in their need.'
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As if the problems in the township were not already overwhelming Patrick had also to face an outright battle with the vicar of Bradford. In a further effort to enforce a church rate in Haworth, which the chapelry still refused to pay, the churchwardens of Bradford applied to the Court of Queen's Bench for a writ against their fellow officers in Haworth. Fortunately, after a cliff-hanging adjournment, the judges at last decided that they could not issue the writ and the case was dropped.
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The first stage in an important battle of principle had been won.

The Reverend John Winterbotham's moment of triumph was marred by the fact that his congregation could no longer afford to pay his salary. Like many of the poor in the township, he decided to emigrate to the more promising New World, tendered his resignation and accepted a post in a Baptist chapel in Upper Canada. As a grand finale, he orchestrated the opposition at his last church rate meeting in Bradford at the beginning of July and then, laden with gifts from grateful Dissenters in the area, he, his wife and five children and two other families from Haworth set sail for
Canada on the appropriately named
Nemesis.
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Though their relations had been more cordial of late, it must still have been a relief to Patrick to see the last of this belligerent and often unpleasant man who had done so much to stir up hostility to his church.