Becoming Jane Eyre (12 page)

It was not long after this visit that on an evening walk, her heart beating lightly if not feebly—she was still not in her twenty-fifth year, after all—the idea came to her. Desperate for a moment of solitude, she had put her turbulent charges to bed and abandoned her endless sewing, left the housemaid, and gone out without even the light of the moon to guide her, letting the starlight and memory trace her solitary path. She followed it through the wood until she came to a stone wall, where she stopped. A new power seemed to come to her from the glimmering grounds, the gray cloud blown fast across the starstudded sky. She heard the autumn wind gather its stormy swell. She drew energy from the dark, from the low wind that blew her restless skirts around her ankles, and she seemed to hear a voice saying: “Leave this place and go hence.” She was filled with such a wish for wings, a desire to know, to see, to learn, driven by a consciousness of faculties unexercised, of longings unfulfilled.

She determined to take Emily with her, to leave Anne at home with their father and to go abroad.

All through the night she wrote and rewrote a letter to Aunt in her head. At first light, she put pen to paper. She asked, businesslike, for one hundred or even fifty pounds. She decided against France or Germany and chose Belgium, because the living would be cheaper, and she could improve her French and Italian and perhaps even gain a smattering of German. These, she argued, would make it easier for her and her sister to attract pupils. She dared even to compare her path to her father’s, when he left for Cambridge.

Still, her ambitions had been severely pruned, many of her countless illusions of early youth lost, the world of her juvenile fantasies cleared away. She had written no new poems for years. She now looked back on the years of her early youth and on the repeated discouragements she had received with a sort of stifled rage and impatience.

Six months later she would be traveling slowly through the flat Belgian fields, and she would feel exhausted after the sleepless night on the boat to Ostend, her stomach still queasy and her fingertips and toes cold in the early February morning. Emily had consented to this undertaking because of her urging, because a school would be a way for them all to stay together, and for that they needed languages. Her younger sister, she could see, was determined this time to do all she could for her family.

The countryside did not appeal to Charlotte: the lack of the open space she was accustomed to; the bare, flat, treeless fields; the slimy, narrow canals, lying coiled like sinister green snakes; the sky, low and gray. Yet she clutched her sister’s hand from time to time in her excitement, filled with a quiet ecstasy of freedom and enjoyment. She flattered herself that she was now going to see something of the world. She had a feeling of desolation mingled with a strong sense of the novelty of their situation. She felt whirled away by magic and dropped into an alien place.

She thought of the school she would be attending, of what she would learn, of the exquisite pictures and venerable cathedrals she would see there. Speaking another language, learning again, not teaching, she would be able to pass through these months with quiet diligence with her sister at her side. Why were such ordinary things so difficult? Why was it such an agony to be confronted by new people, new sights, new situations? She would turn to the Lord and ask for help.
God help me. Let my suffering not get the better of me.

Despite her determination, nothing prepared her for what she was to encounter on the rue d’Isabelle.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

J
ane walks into town to post a letter for the house-keeper , Mrs. Fairfax. In the gloaming she thinks she hears the Gytrash on the road, but the long-haired black-and-white dog passes her by and the horse is ridden by a man, not a ghost. Man and horse slip and fall to the ground. When the man rises, Jane notices the considerable breadth of his chest. He puts his heavy hand on her shoulder and limps as she guides him to his horse. She hands him his whip, and he proceeds. She goes on to slip the letter in the box.

Thus she describes Jane’s first meeting with her Master at Thornfield, Mr. Rochester. She has her walk with him in the garden, as she has done with Monsieur H. She lets her speak up, as Charlotte has not dared to do. She lets Jane say to her employer, who is much older than she, “I don’t think, sir, you have a right to command me merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.”

On the page she dares, like the inventors of Pamela and Rebecca before her, to invent lively exchanges for Jane and Mr. Rochester. Jane takes the moral high road, as Pamela and Rebecca have done before her.

It comes to Charlotte now: the mysterious sounds in the dark, footsteps, cries from the attic, the incomprehensible servant, an inexplicable fire in the night, a mirthless laugh, Grace Poole stolidly sewing on the rings of a curtain, and behind Grace Poole, the mad wife, locked away in the attic. And all of this within the three unities of place, time, and action, just as her professor had instructed.

She lets her Jane be happy with her Master, gratified to have this new interest in her life, her destiny expanding at Thornfield, the great house where she has come to be a governess.

It comes to her, as she sits in the half dark beside her suffering father and writes about Jane’s longing for Mr. Rochester, her Master, a married man. Jane, too, is summoned to her dying aunt by letter.

Jane has watched the fancy guests, among them Blanche Ingram, arrive at Thornfield. Blanche rides beside Mr. Rochester in her purple riding habit, her veil streaming and gleaming in the breeze with her raven ringlets, her trinkets, and all her accomplishments. She feels how the other woman fans the flame of Jane’s passion and how she is consumed with desire.

She writes these scenes of jealousy and loss, describing the guests, the game of charades, Blanche Ingram as the bride, the terrible jealousy Jane feels. But she makes Mr. Rochester leave his guests and find Jane, as she tries to slip through the shadows of the room, noting her sadness and watching as a tear trickles down her face.

Jane, too, as Charlotte did for Madame H., feels nothing but contempt for her rival, the venal Blanche Ingram, who loses interest in Mr. Rochester when, disguised as a gypsy woman, he tells her his fortune is not what she thought.

Jane leaves Thornfield, believing Mr. Rochester will wed her rival. She goes back to Gateshead, the place of her childhood, to find Mrs. Reed dying but unchanged in her sentiments toward her. Mrs. Reed, though able to see, has difficulty recognizing Jane. It is Jane who can gaze on her now, not she on Jane. After her aunt’s death, Jane returns to Thornfield and, filled with an unknown joy, she meets her Master at twilight on the stile in the glimmering light. He is sitting there with a book and pencil in his hand. She confesses her feelings for him for the first time. She tells him that where he lies is her home, her only home.

Jane is tempted once again by the bigamous Mr. Rochester’s promises of a life of ease and love, by his pleas to save him from a life of vice and lust. “Who in the world cares for you? Or who will be injured by what you do?” he asks her.

“I care for myself!” she cries.

VOLUME TWO

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

S
he lifts her pencil and looks up from her notebook, listening to the great-grandfather clock chime the hour on the stairs as the rain beats down on the house and the weather draws its breath. It has seemed to rain every day since their return home. A west wind roars round the house. She listens to its notes and feels its pressure against the house, something twisting and searching, like the crying of restless spirits. She hears her sisters’ pencils scratching, the click of the servants’ needles, something clattering on the roof. Their brother has slipped out of the house and disappeared into the fog, leaving them all to wait anxiously for his return. She attempts to continue with her tale, but she cannot see her way forward anymore. Since returning home to Haworth with her father, confined to the house, she has not written a word. After writing for weeks in Manchester with hardly a pause, she is now without an idea, an image, a thought. Now that Jane has left her Master at Thornfield, leaving behind her trunks packed for her honeymoon voyage, her string of pearls, Charlotte cannot advance, either.

She reads over the last pages again and again: the terrible tearing of the veil in the night; the two strangers straying ominously among the hillocks and headstones near the church; Mason with his sallow skin, shivering despite his heavy coat in the cold English air; the drama of the declaration in the small, empty church; the answer to the question that is never answered about there being an impediment to this marriage: a wife. But how is she to bring all of this to a satisfactory conclusion for her readers, if not in her life? Where will Jane go on her own without letters of recommendation, money, or even shelter? What will become of Mr. Rochester? What will become of his mad, violent wife?

She looks across this familiar, orderly room with its clean, scoured sandstone floor, the plain, well-polished, walnut dresser, the old-fashioned chairs, the cupboard with glass doors, containing the books, the pewter plates against the wall. She stares at the familiar painting on the wall, John Martin’s towers, the ruins of a grand palace in moonlight.

Their old servant sits up with them at the mahogany table, knitting a gray sock with four needles. Now and then she sings a familiar stanza: “Why did they send me so far and so lonely, Up where the moors spread and the gray rocks are piled?”

Charlotte’s two younger sisters assume identical postures, bent over their own books. From time to time Emily looks up at her and Anne, her expression all life and earnestness. Her large blue-gray eyes show a certain strength of character, a flash of independence, which Anne does not, perhaps, possess. They are full of humor, quickened into flame by a flash of indignation in her clear, pale face, as they mirror what she is writing.
Such a clear, honest, English face.
Anne’s violet eyes and fine eyebrows and almost transparent complexion make her the pretty one among them, appealing and vulnerable in a way that invites sympathy.