GOING TO SCHOOL.
Emily was now sixteen years old, and though the people in the village
called her "t' cleverest o' t' Bronte childer," she had little to show
of her cleverness. Her education was as home-made as her gowns, not such
as would give distinction to a governess; and a governess Emily would
have to be. The Bronte sisters were too severe and noble in their
theories of life ever to contemplate marriage as a means of livelihood;
but even worldly sisters would have owned that there was little chance
of impatient Emily marrying at all. She was almost violent in her
dislike of strangers. The first time that Ellen stayed at Haworth,
Charlotte was ill one day and could not go out with her friend. To their
surprise Emily volunteered to take the stranger a walk over the moors.
Charlotte waited anxiously for their return, fearing some outbreak of
impatience or disdain on the part of her untamable sister. The two girls
at last came home. "How did Emily behave?" asked Charlotte, eagerly,
drawing her friend aside. She had behaved well; she had shown her true
self, her noble, energetic, truthful soul, and from that day there was a
real friendship between the gentle Ellen and the intractable Emily; but
none the less does Charlotte's question reveal in how different a manner
the girl regarded strangers as a rule. In after days when the curates,
looking for Mr. Bronte in his study, occasionally found Emily there
instead, they used to beat such a hasty retreat that it was quite an
established joke at the Parsonage that Emily appeared to the outer world
in the likeness of an old bear. She hated strange faces and strange
places. Her sisters must have seen that such a temperament, if it made
her unlikely to attract a husband or to wish to attract one, also
rendered her lamentably unfit to earn her living as a governess. In
those days they could not tell that the defect was incurable, a
congenital infirmity of nature; and doubtless Charlotte, the wise elder
sister, thought she had found a cure for both the narrow education and
the narrow sympathies when she suggested that Emily should go to school.
She writes to her friend in July, 1835:--
"I had hoped to have had the extreme pleasure of seeing you
at Haworth this summer, but human affairs are mutable, and
human resolutions must bend to the course of events. We are
all about to divide, break up, separate. Emily is going to
school, Branwell is going to London, and I am going to be a
governess. This last determination I formed myself, knowing
I should have to take the step sometime, and 'better sune as
syne,' to use a Scotch proverb; and knowing well that Papa
would have enough to do with his limited income, should
Branwell be placed at the Royal Academy and Emily at Roe
Head. Where am I going to reside? you will ask. Within four
miles of you, at a place neither of us are unacquainted
with, being no other than the identical Roe Head mentioned
above. Yes! I am going to teach in the very school where I
was myself taught. Miss Wooler made me the offer, and I
preferred it to one or two proposals of private
governess-ship which I had before received. I am sad--very
sad--at the thoughts of leaving home; but
duty--necessity--these are stern mistresses, who will not be
disobeyed. Did I not once say you ought to be thankful for
your independence? I felt what I said at the time, and I
repeat it now with double earnestness; if anything would
cheer me it is the idea of being so near you. Surely you and
Polly will come and see me; it would be wrong in me to doubt
it; you were never unkind yet. Emily and I leave home on the
27th of this month; the idea of being together consoles us
both somewhat, and, truth, since I must enter a situation,
'My lines have fallen in pleasant places.' I both love and
respect Miss Wooler."[4]
The wrench of leaving home, so much dreaded by Charlotte, was yet
sharper to her younger sister, morbidly fearful of strangers, eccentric,
unable to live without wide liberty. To go to school; it must have had a
dreadful sound to that untamable, free creature, happiest alone with the
dogs on the moors, with little sentiment or instinct for friendship; no
desire to meet her fellows. Emily was perfectly happy at Haworth cooking
the dinner, ironing the linen, writing poems at the Waterfall, taking
her dog for miles over the moors, pacing round the parlour with her arm
round gentle Anne's waist. Now she would have to leave all this, to
separate from her dear little sister. But she was reasonable and just,
and, feeling the attempt should be made, she packed up her scanty
wardrobe, and, without repining, set out with Charlotte for Roe Head.
Charlotte knew where she was going. She loved and respected Miss Wooler;
but with what anxiety must Emily have looked for the house where she was
to live and not to be at home. At last she saw it, a cheerful, roomy,
country house, standing a little apart in a field. There was a wide and
pleasant view of fields and woods; but the green prospect was sullied
and marred by the smoke from the frequent mills. Green fields, grey
mills, all told of industry, labour, occupation. There was no wild
stretch of moorland here, no possibility of solitude. I think when Emily
Bronte saw the place, she must have known very well she would not be
happy there.
"My sister Emily loved the moors," says Charlotte, writing of these days
in the latter solitude--"flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the
blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid
hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude
many and dear delights; and not the least and best-loved was liberty.
Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils; without it she perished. The
change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless,
very secluded, but unrestricted and unartificial mode of life to one of
disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices) was what she
failed in enduring. Her nature was here too strong for her fortitude.
Every morning, when she woke, the visions of home and the moors rushed
on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody
knew what ailed her but me. I knew only too well. In this struggle her
health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form, and failing
strength threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die if
she did not go home."
Thus looking on, Charlotte grew alarmed. She remembered the death of
Maria and Elizabeth, and feared, feared with anguish, lest this
best-beloved sister should follow them. She told Miss Wooler of her
fear, and the schoolmistress, conscious of her own kindness and a little
resentful at Emily's distress, consented that the girl should be sent
home without delay. She did not care for Emily, and was not sorry to
lose her. So in October she returned to Haworth, to the only place where
she was happy and well. She returned to harder work and plainer living
than she had known at school; but also to home, liberty, comprehension,
her animals, and her flowers. In her native atmosphere she very soon
recovered the health and strength that seemed so natural to her swift
spirit; that were, alas, so easily endangered. She had only been at
school three months.
Even so short an absence may very grievously alter the aspect of
familiar things. Haworth itself was the same; prim, tidy Miss Branwell
still pattered about in her huge caps and tiny clogs; the Vicar still
told his horrible stories at breakfast, still fought vain battles with
the parishioners who would not drain the village, and the women who
would dry their linen on the tombstones. Anne was still as transparently
pretty, as pensive and pious as of old; but over the hope of the house,
the dashing, clever Branwell, who was to make the name of Bronte famous
in art, a dim, tarnishing change had come. Emily must have seen it with
fresh eyes, left more and more in Branwell's company, when, after the
Christmas holidays, Anne returned with Charlotte to Roe Head.
There is in none of Charlotte's letters any further talk of sending
Branwell to the Royal Academy. He earnestly desired to go, and for him,
the only son, any sacrifice had willingly been made. But there were
reasons why that brilliant unprincipled lad should not be trusted now,
alone in London. Too frequent had been those visits to the "Black Bull,"
undertaken, at first, to amuse the travellers from London, Leeds and
Manchester, who found their evenings dull. The Vicar's lad was following
the proverbial fate of parsons' sons. Little as they foreboded the end
in store, greatly as they hoped all his errors were a mere necessary
attribute of manliness, the sisters must have read in his shaken nerves
the dissipation for which their clever Branwell was already remarkable
in Haworth. It is true that to be sometimes the worse for drink was no
uncommon fault fifty years ago in Yorkshire; but the gradual coarsening
of Branwell's nature, the growing flippancy, the altered health, must
have given a cruel awakening to his sisters' dreams for his career. In
1836 this deterioration was at the beginning; a weed in bud that could
only bear a bitter and poisonous fruit. Emily hoped the best; his father
did not seem to see his danger; Miss Branwell spoiled the lad; and the
village thought him a mighty pleasant young gentleman with a smile and a
bow for every one, fond of a glass and a chat in the pleasant parlour of
the "Black Bull" at nights; a gay, feckless, red-haired, smiling young
fellow, full of ready courtesies to all his friends in the village; yet,
none the less as full of thoughtless cruelties to his friends at home.
For the rest, he had nothing to do, and was scarcely to blame if he
could not devote sixteen hours a day to writing verses for the _Leeds
Mercury_, his only ostensible occupation. It seems incredible that Mr.
Bronte, who well understood the peculiar temptations to which his son
lay open, could have suffered him to loaf about the village, doing
nothing, month after month, lured into ill by no set purpose, but by a
weak social temper and foolish friends. Yet so it was, and with such
training, little hope of salvation could there be for that vain,
somewhat clever, untruthful, fascinating boy.
So things went on, drearily enough in reality, though perhaps more
pleasantly in seeming--for Branwell, with his love of approbation and
ready affectionateness, took all trouble consistent with self-indulgence
to avoid the noise of his misdemeanours reaching home. Thus things went
on till Charlotte returned from Miss Wooler's with little Anne in the
midsummer holidays of 1836.
An interval of happiness to lonely Emily; Charlotte's friend came to the
grey cold-looking Parsonage, enlivening that sombre place with her gay
youth and sweet looks. Home with four young girls in it was more
attractive to Branwell than the alluring parlour of the "Black Bull."
The harvest moon that year can have looked on no happier meeting. "It
would not be right," says the survivor of those eager spirits, "to pass
over one record which should be made of the sisters' lives together,
after their school-days, and before they were broken in health by their
efforts to support themselves, that at this time they had all a taste of
happiness and enjoyment. They were beginning to feel conscious of their
powers, they were rich in each other's companionship, their health was
good, their spirits were high, there was often joyousness and mirth;
they commented on what they read; analysed articles and their writers
also; the perfection of unrestrained talk and intelligence brightened
the close of the days which were passing all too swiftly. The evening
march in the sitting-room, a constant habit learned at school, kept time
with their thoughts and feelings, it was free and rapid; they marched in
pairs, Emily and Anne, Charlotte and her friend, with arms twined round
each other in child-like fashion, except when Charlotte, in an
exuberance of spirit, would for a moment start away, make a graceful
pirouette (though she had never learned to dance) and return to her
march."
So the evenings passed and the days, in happy fashion for a little
while. Then Charlotte and Anne went back to Miss Wooler's, and Emily,
too, took up the gauntlet against necessity. She was not of a character
to let the distastefulness of any duty hinder her from undertaking it.
She was very stern in her dealings with herself, though tender to the
erring, and anxious to bear the burdens of the weak. She allowed no one
but herself to decide what it behoved her to do. She could not see
Charlotte labour, and not work herself. At home she worked, it is true,
harder than servants; but she felt it right not only to work, but to
earn. So, having recovered her natural strength, she left Haworth in
September, and Charlotte writes from school to her friend: "My sister
Emily has gone into a situation as teacher in a large school near
Halifax. I have had one letter from her since her departure; it gives an
appalling account of her duties; hard labour from six in the morning to
eleven at night, with only one half-hour of exercise between. This is
slavery. I fear she can never stand it."
She stood it, however, all that term; came back to Haworth for a brief
rest at Christmas, and again left it for the hated life she led,
drudging among strangers. But when spring came back, with its feverish
weakness, with its beauty and memories, to that stern place of exile,
she failed. Her health broke down, shattered by long-resisted
homesickness. Weary and mortified at heart, Emily again went back to
seek life and happiness on the wild moors of Haworth.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 4: Mrs. Gaskell.]