Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous Women — Charlotte Bronte, Part 2
* * * * * As one moves out of Keighley the country becomes stony; the trees are left behind, and there rises on all sides billow on billow of purple heather.
The way is rough as the Pilgrim's Progress road to Paradise.
These hillside moors are filled with springs that high up form rills, then brooks, then cascades or "becks," and along the Haworth road, wherever one of these hurrying, scurrying, dancing becks crosses the highway, there is a factory devoted to keeping alive the name of Cardigan.
Next to the factory is a "pub.
," and publics and factories checker themselves all along the route.
Mixed in with these are long rows of tenement-houses well built of stone, with slate roofs, but with a grimy air of desolation about them that surely drives their occupants to drink.
To have a home a man must build it himself.
Forty houses in a row, all alike, are not homes at all.
I believe an observant man once wrote of the hand being subdued to what it works in.
The man who wrote that surely never tramped along the Haworth road as the bell rang for twelve o'clock.
From out the factories poured a motley mob of men, women and children, not only with hands dyed, but with clothing, faces and heads as well.
Girls with bright-green hair, and lemon-colored faces, leered and jeered at me as they hastened pellmell with hats askew, and stockings down, and dragging shawls, for home or public-house.
Red and maroon children ran, and bright-scarlet men smoked stolidly, taking their time with genuine grim Yorkshire sullen sourness.
"How far is it to Haworth?"
I asked one such specimen.
"Ef ye pay th' siller for a double pot a' 'arf and 'arf.
Hi might tell ye"; and he jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward a ginshop near by.
"Very well," said I; "I'll buy you a double pot of 'arf and 'arf, this time."
The man seemed a bit surprised, but no smile came over his spattered rainbow face as he led the way into the drink-shop.
The place was crowded with men and women scrambling for penny sandwiches and drinks fermented and spirituous.
Some of these women had babies at their breasts, the babies being brought by appointment by older children who stayed at home while the mothers worked.
And as the mothers gulped their Triple XXX, and swallowed hunks of black bread, the little innocents dined.
The mothers were rather kindly disposed, though, and occasionally allowed the youngsters to take sips out of their foaming glasses, or at least to drain them.
Suddenly a woman with purple hair spied me and called in falsetto: "Ah, Sawndy McClure has caught a gen'l'mon.
Why didn't I see 'im fust an' 'arve 'im fer a pet?"
There was a guffaw at my expense and 'arf and 'arf as well, for all the party, or else quarrel.
As it was, my stout stick probably saved me from the "personal touch."
I stayed until the factory-bells rang, and out my new-found friends scurried for fear of being the fatal five minutes late and getting locked out.
Some of them shook my hand as they went, and others pounded me on the back for luck, and several of the girls got my tag and shouted, "You're it!"
I used to think that Yorkshire folks were hopelessly dull and sublimely stupid, quarrelsome withal and pigheaded to the thirty-second degree; but I have partially come to the conclusion that their glum ways often conceal a peculiar kind of grim humor, and beneath the tough husk is considerable good nature.
The absence of large trees makes it possible to see the village of Haworth several miles away.
It seems to cling to the stony hillside as if it feared being blown into space.
There is a hurrying, rushing rill here, too, that turns a little woolen-mill.
Then there is a "Black Bull" tavern, with a stable-yard at the side and rows of houses on the one street, all very straight up and down.
One misses the climbing roses of the ideal merry England, and the soft turf and spreading yews and the flowering hedgerows where throstles and linnets play hide-and-seek the livelong day.
It is all cold gray stone, lichen-covered, and the houses do not invite you to enter, and the gardens bid no welcome, and only the great purple wastes of moorland greet you as a friend and brother.
Outside the Black Bull sits a solitary hostler, who feels it would be a weakness to show any good humor.
So he bottles his curiosity and scowls from under red, bushy eyebrows.
Turning off the main street is a narrow road leading to the church--square and gray and cold.
Next to it is the parsonage, built of the same material, and beyond is the crowded city of the dead.
I plied the knocker at the parsonage door and asked for the rector.
He was away at Kendal to attend a funeral, but his wife was at home--a pleasant, matronly woman of near sixty, with smooth, white hair.
She came to the door knitting furiously, but from her regulation smile I saw that visitors were not uncommon.
"You want to see the home of the Brontes?
That's right, come right in.
This was the study of the Reverend Patrick Bronte, Incumbent of this Parish for fifty years."
She sang her little song and knitted and shifted the needles and measured the foot, for the stocking was nearly done.
It was a blue stocking (although she wasn't) with a white toe; and all the time she led me from room to room telling me about the Brontes--how there were the father, mother and six children.
They all came together.
The mother died shortly, and then two of the little girls died.
That left three girls and Branwell the boy.
He was petted and made too much of by his father and everybody.
He was the one that always was going to do great things.
He made the girls wait on him and cuffed them if they didn't, and if they did, and all the time told of the things he was going to do.
But he never did them, for he spent most of his time at the taverns.
After a while he died--died of the tremens.
The three Bronte girls, Emily, Charlotte and Annie, wrote a novel apiece, and never showed them to their father or to any one.
They called 'emselves Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and their novels were the greatest ever written--they wrote them 'emselves with no man to help.
Their father was awful mad about it, but when the money began to come in he felt better.
Emily died when she was twenty-seven.
She was the brightest of them all;
then Annie died, and only Charlotte and the old man were left.
Charlotte married her father's curate, but old Mr. Bronte wouldn't go to the wedding: he went to the Black Bull instead.
Miss Wooler gave the bride away--some one had to give her away, you know.
The bride was thirty-eight.
She died in less them a year, and old Mr. Bronte and Charlotte's husband lived here alone together.
This was Charlotte's room; this is the desk where she wrote "Jane Eyre"--leastwise they say it is.
This is the chair she sat in, and under that framed glass are several sheets of her manuscript.
The writing is almost too small to read; and so fine and yet so perfect and neat!
She was a wonderful tidy body, very small and delicate and gentle, yet with a good deal of her father's energy.
Here are letters she wrote: you can look at them if you choose.
This footstool she made and covered herself.
It is filled with heather-blossoms--just as she left it.
Those books were hers, too--many of them given to her by great authors.
See, there is Thackeray's name written by himself, and a letter from him pasted inside the front cover.
He was a big man they say, but he wrote very small, and Charlotte wrote just like him, only better, and now there are hundreds of folks write like 'em both.
Then here's a book with Miss Martineau's name, and another from Robert Browning--do you know who he was?
Yes, the church is always open.
Go in and stay as long as you choose; at the door is a poorbox and if you wish to put something in you can do so--a sixpence most visitors put in, or a shilling if you insist upon it.
You know we are not a rich parish--the wool all goes to Manchester now, and the factory-hands are on half-pay and times are scarce.
You will come again some time, come when the heather is in bloom, won't you?
That's right.
Oh, stay!
the boxwood there in the garden was planted by Charlotte's own hands--perhaps you would like a sprig of it--there, I thought you would!
* * * * * All who write concerning the Brontes dwell on the sadness and the tragedy of their lives.
They picture Charlotte's earth-journey as one devoid of happiness, lacking all that sweetens and makes for satisfaction.
They forget that she wrote "Jane Eyre," and that no person utterly miserable ever did a great work; and I assume that they know not of the wild, splendid, intoxicating joy that follows a performance well done.
To be sure, "Jane Eyre" is a tragedy, but the author of a tragedy must be greater than the plot--greater than his puppets.
He is their creator, and his life runs through and pervades theirs, just as the life of our Creator flows through us.
In Him we live and move and have our being.
And I submit that the writer of a tragedy is not cast down or undone at the time he pictures his heroic situations and conjures forth his strutting spirits.
When the play ends and the curtain falls on the fifth act, there is still one man alive, and that is the author.
He may be gorged with crime and surfeited with blood, but there is a surging exultation in his veins as he views the ruin that his brain has wrought.
Charlotte loved the great stretch of purple moors, hill on hill fading away into eternal mist.
And the wild winds that sighed and moaned at casements or raged in sullen wrath, tugging at the roof, were her friends.
She loved them all, and thought of them as visiting spirits.
They were her properties, and no writer who ever lived has made such splendid use of winds and storm-clouds and driving rain as did Charlotte Bronte.
People who point to the chasing, angry clouds and the swish of dripping rosebushes blown against the cottage-windows as proof of Charlotte Bronte's chronic depression know not the eager joy of a storm walk.
And I am sure they never did as one I know did last night: saddle a horse at ten o'clock and gallop away into the darkness; splash, splash in the sighing, moaning, bellowing, driving November rain.
There's joy for you!
ye who toast your feet on the fender and cultivate sick headache around the base-burner--there's a life that ye never guess!
But Charlotte knew the clouds by night and the swift-sailing moon that gave just one peep out and disappeared.
She knew the rifts where the stars shone through, and out alone in the breeze that blew away her cares she lifted her voice in thankfulness for the joy of mixing with the elements, and that her spirit was one with the boisterous winds of heaven.
People who live in beautiful, quiet valleys, where roses bloom all the year through, are not necessarily happy.
Southern California--the Garden of Eden of the world--evolves just as many cases per capita of melancholia as bleak, barren Maine.
Wild, rocky, forbidding Scotland has produced more genius to the acre than beautiful England: and I have found that sailor Jack, facing the North Atlantic winter storms, year after year, is a deal jollier companion than the Florida cracker whose chief adversary is the mosquito.
Charlotte Bronte wrote three great books: "Jane Eyre," "Shirley" and "Villette."
From the lonely, bleak parsonage on that stony hillside she sent forth her swaying filament of thought and lassoed the world.
She lived to know that she had won.
Money came to her, all she needed, honors, friends and lavish praise.
She was the foremost woman author of her day.
Her name was on every tongue.
She had met the world in fair fight; without patrons, paid advocates, or influential friends she made her way to the very front.
Her genius was acknowledged.
She accomplished all that she set out to do and more--far more.
The great, the learned, the titled, the proud--all those who reverence the tender heart and far-reaching mind--acknowledged her as queen.
So why prate of her sorrows!
Did she not work them up into art?
Why weep over her troubles when these were the weapons with which she won?
Why sit in sackcloth on account of her early death, when it is appointed unto all men once to die, and with her the grave was swallowed up in victory?
