Possession (38 page)

JUNE
12
TH

My dear husband writes at length; he is well and his researches flourish. I have packed all my descriptions of my busy days into his long letter, which is posted, and have no time nor inclination to note here more than those things which it is not fitting he should be troubled with. There are flaws in two of the crystal teardrops—one large one from the central crown, and a less significant one from the peripheral circle. What shall I do? I am convinced—no, that is unjust—I have a propensity to suspect—that the accidental kicking of the crystal-bath by Arthur and Georgie has shattered these two. I have said nothing to dearest R about these beaverings; I mean to surprise him with a home newly gleaming and radiant. I could attempt to replace the flawed droplets—but am convinced that could never be done in the time and would moreover be costly. I do not like to think of the thing hanging there with these cracks and chasms apparent in its surface.

I have spoken to Bertha. It is as I thought and Patience said. She cannot be brought to say who is the responsible man—but denied strenuously, in a great burst of weeping, that he could possibly be required to take care of her, either by marrying, or in any other way. She expressed no penitence, but also no defiance, asking me only over and over “What can I do?” to which I have no sufficient answer. “It all continues on whatever I will,” she strangely said. I said I should write to her mother, and she pleaded with me not to do so—“It would break her heart and set her obdurately against me forever,” she said. Where will she go? What home can she have? What should I, in Christian charity, do for her? I do not want to trouble Randolph’s work with these matters, and yet am not empowered to do much for Bertha without his assent. There is also the dreadful problem of the
replacement
to be thought of, with all the fears of drunkenness, theft, breakages and moral corruption which go with such choices. Some ladies I know seek servants far afield and in country places—Cockney
knowingness
is a thing I find difficult to confront or command as I should.

Patience says the servant classes are naturally ungrateful, lacking
education. At times like this—when they must be encountered and judged and enquired into—I am led to wonder why they do not rather feel hatred? That hatred is what some do feel I am convinced. And I do not see how a true Christian can find a world of master and man to be “natural”—
He
came even to the least, and perhaps more urgently to the least—to the mean, to the poor—in goods or spirit.

If Randolph were here I could discuss this with him. Perhaps it is as well he is not—it belongs to my sphere of influence and responsibility.

JUNE

Patience and her brood departed this morning for Dover, all smiles and fluttering handkerchiefs. I hope they had a smooth crossing. I hope they enjoy to the full their seaside pleasures. Another letter is come from Randolph, just as they had set off, full (the letter that is) of sea air and breezes and other delightful free forces. London is brassy hot and heavy—I think we may have a storm. It is unnaturally quiet and sultry. I have resolved to consult Herbert Baulk about Bertha. I felt a headache coming on, and a sense of being flustered by the sudden silence and emptiness of my house again. I retired to my room and slept for two hours, waking somewhat refreshed, though with a vestigial headache.

JUNE

Herbert Baulk came and stayed to take tea and talk. I proposed a game of chess—because I thought it might distract him from a too vehement expression of his doubts and certainties, and because I enjoy these miniature campaigns. He was pleased to tell me that I played very well for a lady—I was content to accept this, since I won handsomely.

I asked him about Bertha. He told me of an institution that makes very handsome provision for women in her position to be brought to bed and if at all possible re-established in a useful trade. He said he would inquire if she might be accepted—I was bold enough to engage myself—that is, my dearest Randolph—to contribute to her keep until her lying-in, if that might aid in securing a bed for her. He is told the dormitories are kept spotlessly clean by the exertions of the inmates themselves, and that the food is plain but nourishing, and cooked by the women themselves in the same way.

JUNE

I slept badly and as a result had a strange fragmented dream in which I was playing chess with Herbert Baulk, who had decreed that
my Queen
could move only one square, as his King did. I knew there was injustice here but could not in my dreaming folly realise that this was to do with the existence of
my King
who sat rather large and red on the back line and seemed to be incapacitated. I could see the moves She should have made, like errors in a complicated pattern of knitting or lace—but she must only lumpishly shuffle back and forth, one square at a time. Mr Baulk (always in my dream) said calmly, “You see I told you you could not win,” and I saw it was so, but was unreasonably agitated and desirous above all of moving my Queen freely across the diagonals. It is odd, when I think of it, that in chess the female may make the large runs and cross freely in all ways—in life it is much otherwise.

Mr Baulk came again in the afternoon and spoke eloquently and at length about the wickedness of imputing fraudulent motives to the New Testament miracles, most especially that of the resurrection of Lazarus. He said inquiries were going on promisingly as to the institution for Bertha. I have not told her of it, lest her hopes be raised only to be dashed. She goes slowly and dully enough about her work, with a puffed face.

JUNE

A surprise! A small package came, containing a gift from my beloved Randolph, with a poem, all for me. He has been to Whitby, a fishing-town, where, he writes, the local people have a highly-developed art of polishing and carving jet which is cast up on their beaches and made by them into useful buttons and also decorative objects and jewellery. He sends me a most exquisite brooch, carved with a wreath of Roses of Yorkshire—all with their thorny twigs entwined and leafage—it is both artistic and wonderfully truthful. It is blacker than soot, and yet every way you turn its facets, it sparkles with light and a kind of angry energy of its own—one of the qualities of jet is that if rubbed it will attract light bodies, as in animal magnetism. It is a form of
lignite
, R. writes, obviously delighted with the substance, an
organic stone
, like coal, of course. I have some jet beads, and have seen many
of course, but never any to match this for depth of darkness or brilliance of sheen.

I transcribe his poem here, for it is worth more to me than the lovely gift itself.
Despite all
We have been so happy in our life together, even our separations contribute to the trust and deep affection that is between us.

JUNE

Not a good day. I told Bertha she must go, and that Herbert Baulk would arrange for her to be received at the Magdalen Home if she consented to it. She answered me not a word but stared and stared, breathing very heavily, and a dark plum-red in colour, as though she was unable to take in what I was saying. I repeated that Mr Baulk had been very kind, and that she was very fortunate, and all I heard was this fierce sighing or panting breath, somehow filling my little sitting-room. I dismissed her, saying I expected an answer when she had thought over the offer; I should have added that I expected her to be away by the end of next week, but could not. What will become of her?

The mail brought a whole heap of letters of the kind we are increasingly in receipt of—inclosing poems or parts of poems, pressed flowers for
his
Bible or Shakespeare, requests for autographs, recommendations (impertinent) for
his
reading, and humble or sometimes peremptory requests for him to read Epic Poems or treatises or even novels, which their authors believe may interest him, or may be helped by
his
recommendation. I answer those gently enough, wishing them well, and saying how very busy He is—which is quite true. How do they expect him to continue to “astonish and delight” them with “his
recondite ideas,” as one put it, if they do not leave him free time to pursue his reading and intricate thought? Among these letters was one requesting an interview with
me personally
in a matter of great importance, the writer said, to me myself. This too is not unusual—many, especially young women—appeal to
me
in order to come into close quarters with my dear one. I replied civilly that I did not grant personal interviews to strangers, as too many were requested, but that if the writer had anything very particular to communicate I would beg her in the first instance to write to me with some indication of the matter in question. We shall see if this produces anything or nothing, pertinence, or, as I suspect, something vague and crazed.

JUNE

A worse day. The headache seized me and I lay all day in a darkened bedroom, betwixt asleep and wake. There are many bodily sensations that are indescribable yet immediately recognisable, as is the smell of baking bread or that of metal polish, which could never be conveyed to one who had no previous experience of them. Such is the way in which the preliminary dizziness or vanishing incapacitates the body and intimates the headache to come. It is curiously impossible—once entered into this state—to imagine ever issuing out of it—so that the Patience required to endure it seems to be a total eternal patience. Towards evening it lifted a little.

Another letter from the mysterious and urgent lady. A matter of life and death, she writes. She is well-educated, and if hysterical, not
frantically
so. I put the letter by, feeling too low in spirits to decide about it. The headache introduces one to a curious twilight deathly world in which life and death seem no great matter.

JUNE

Worse still. Dr Pimlott came and prescribed laudanum, which I found some relief in. During the afternoon there was a hammering at the door, and a distracted Bertha let in a strange lady who demanded to see me. I was at that time up, and sipping broth. I told her she might come back when I was recovered and she accepted this postponement briskly and nervously. I took more laudanum and went back into my dark room. No writer has written well enough of the Bliss of sleep. Coleridge wrote of the pains of sleep, and Macbeth speaks of a sleep
foregone—but not of the bliss of relaxing one’s grip of the world and warmly and motionlessly moving into another. Folded in by curtains, closed in by the warmth of blankets, without weight, it seems—

JUNE

Half a bad day, and half, as may happen, a good clear day, one might say, renewed. The furniture-cleaning has gone on well during my somnolent absence and all that—the arm-chairs, the table covers, the lamps, the screen—seems also renewed.

My importunate visitor came and we talked some time. That matter is now I hope quite at an end and wholly cleared up.

JUNE

A Poet is not a Divine being, with an angelic vision. Randolph has always denied that description. He likes to use Wm Wordsworth’s phrase, “a man speaking to men” and is, dare I say it, acquainted with more of the variety and vagaries of human nature than ever Wordsworth was, who looked customarily inward.

Herbert Baulk came and spoke with great kindness to Bertha, who, as before with me, said nothing, and stood a red-faced block.

We played chess. I won.

JULY

This morning Bertha was found to be slipped away during the night, with all her possessions and some also of Jenny’s, she claims, including a carpet-bag and a woollen shawl. Nothing belonging to this house appears to have been taken, though all the silver is out or ranged accessibly in drawers and cabinets. It may be she mistook the shawl, or that Jenny herself is mistaken.

Where can she have gone? What should best be done? Should I write to her Mother? There are arguments for and against this—she did not wish her Mother to be told of her condition, but may now simply have taken refuge there.

I gave Jenny one of my own shawls and one of our own travelling-cases. She was much pleased.

Perhaps Bertha is gone to the man who [passage crossed out illegibly]

Should we pursue her? She cannot have taken to the streets, as she
is. If we find her, shall we appear retributive? That would not be my intention.

I have done wrong in her regard. I have behaved less than well.

Herbert Baulk is not a tactful man. But I knew that when I embarked on this course.
I should have

JULY

Another bad day. I lay all day in bed with the curtains open, for I became superstitiously afraid of spending so long in a house with drawn curtains. A dull sun shone through rolling mist and fog. At even it was replaced by a smaller duller moon on an inky sky. I was motionless all day, in one position. I had a haven of painlessness and torpor and every other twist and turn was agony. How many days do we spend lying still, waiting for them to end, so that we may sleep. I lay suspended almost as Snow White lay maybe, in the glass casket, alive but out of the weather, breathing but motionless. Outside, in the weather, men suffer heat and cold and fluctuating air.

When he returns, I must be quick and lively. It must be so.

Maud said, “She could write. I didn’t immediately see what you meant by baffling. And then, I think I did. On the evidence of that part of the journal—I couldn’t form a very clear idea of what she was
like
. Or if I liked her. She tells things. Interesting things. But they don’t make a whole picture.”