Читать книгу This Shining Woman - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 8

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In the little house next door to that rented by the Wollstonecrafts lived a curious couple who had the reputation in the village of being eccentric, if not insane. The man was a retired Anglican clergyman, deformed and in very poor health. Lovingly attended by his devoted wife, he lived in seclusion, rarely leaving the books that were his abiding solace. Indifferent to the world, and possessed of means small indeed but sufficient for his modest wants, the invalid scholar lived contentedly among his mental exercises and his spiritual adventures.

The Clares made the acquaintance of the Wollstonecrafts. The old clergyman soon singled out the eldest girl as a child of exceptional ability. She paid him long visits, during which she read to him or he read to her, and the deformed old man and the bright maiden, both equally unworldly, discussed eagerly abstract questions of philosophy, religion and general knowledge. Mr. Clare gave Mary lessons in English, in French and history, corrected her essays and exercises and allowed her the run of his large miscellaneous library. By this means the child was able to create for herself an inner life that made her almost independent of the misery of her home. She also increased notably in strength of mind and boldness of character; she no longer trembled before her father as excessively as did her sisters, but often fearlessly defied him and stood between her mother or the other children and his violent drunken furies.

Mrs. Wollstonecraft sometimes looked at her eldest daughter with an amazement tinged with respect; her younger sisters began to regard her as a protectress and useful friend, while the brothers admired her and confided to her their wild and hopeless schemes of escape and self-advancement.

While Mary was at Hoxton, Mrs. Clare took her on a visit to some friends of hers who lived on the south side of London at the village of Newington Butts. This family, named Blood, consisted of the parents and several children; Frances and George, the two eldest, were about Mary's own age. Mr. Blood was a hosier in a small way, and it was in the little parlour behind the shop that Mrs. Clare introduced Mary Wollstonecraft to the modest interior. Fanny Blood was setting the table for her young brothers' and sisters' meal. She was a delicate little girl, of a gentle, winning expression and a peculiar softness in voice and looks.

Mary noticed at once the stark poverty of the room that was nevertheless most precisely kept. She understood then that Fanny Blood's position was much the same as her own. The little girl was the mainstay of a family that her father would not, and her mother could not, support. She soon learnt, indeed, that the hosier was another Edward Wollstonecraft for drunkenness, violence, idleness and unscrupulous self-indulgence.

Mary was instantly attracted to Fanny, for whom she felt a tender sympathy and a warm admiration. As she sat by Mrs. Clare's side in the coach that drove them across London to Hoxton, she learnt the unfortunate girl's history. Fanny, it seemed, was clever, and contrived somehow to obtain an education. Not only was she well read, she could play and sing very pleasingly, and had a marked talent for drawing; she was also an exquisite needlewoman and an accomplished housewife.

Mrs. Blood was ailing, dispirited and crushed by the tyranny of her husband, so on Fanny had fallen almost the entire burden of the family. By her designs for embroidery, her little drawings and paintings, she earned enough, supplemented by Mrs. Blood's needlework, to support the penurious household.

On hearing this tale, Mary at once wished to emulate the girl whom she so admired, and before she had reached home she was considering eagerly some means of making money, for it seemed to her, from whatever angle she viewed her problem, that poverty was at the bottom of it. She observed that all her family's countless discomforts, humiliations, privations and miseries had their root in lack of money. It was the grind of sour poverty that was ruining their lives, their characters, and that, as far as she could see, would ruin their futures, and in her eager inexperience she foresaw all the family troubles disappearing if only she could earn money, if only she could make her mother, her sisters and brothers independent of their father's wretched fortune.

Edward had already achieved this independency. He was established as assistant to an attorney with offices on Tower Hill, and an assured career seemed to lie before him; but Mary knew that he showed no interest in his family's difficulties, and that, though he was his mother's favourite and had always escaped her sternest severities, he made no offer to help her with the burden under which she was slowly succumbing.

Mary had no desire to earn money for her own benefit; her warm and generous nature, so easily moved to pity, was only eager to obtain relief for her family. How could she do this? She had not, like Fanny Blood, any talent for either music or painting, nor had she any opportunity of being instructed in these arts. All that she could hope for in the way of education must be obtained from the rambling instructions of Mr. Clare and from the confusion of ill-arranged books that weighed down his dusty shelves.

The eager child had no experience of anything save the vicissitudes of poverty. From her mother she had heard tales of another world where life was easy and pleasant, where men were kind and women respected, where well-paid servants did the menial work and creditors never knocked at the door. Mrs. Wollstonecraft had been bred in such a world, and considered that by right she belonged to it. She inculcated this belief in her children: they were gentlepeople, and it was only by some extraordinary misfortune that they had lost their rightful heritage.

Mary believed her mother's stories in the same way as a child may believe a fairy tale—such things may have happened, but they are not to be counted as part of usual experience. Mary was willing to credit her mother's statements that she had once worn silk dresses, ridden in her own carriage, had a comfortable house, been to theatres and concerts, had money in her pocket and a soft bed to sleep on, but she did not believe that any of these luxuries would ever come her own way. The hope that she did cherish was that she might earn somehow sufficient money to ease that incessant, gnawing poverty which to her was as intolerable as it had hitherto been unescapable.

Yet the companionship of the Clares, her new friendship with Fanny Blood and her vague though ardent hope for the future gave Mary a certain happiness during her second stay in Hoxton. This was shattered by Mr. Wollstonecraft's sudden resolve to depart to his small property in Pembrokeshire, and in Wales to try once more his hand at farming.

Such uprooting had been frequent during Mary's childhood; every few years there had been the misery and discomfort of changing house, of travelling considerable distances over rough roads and in the humblest conditions. Mr. Wollstonecraft went on horseback or by coach, but his family had to jolt along in rude wagons with the luggage, often in bad weather and with no money in their pockets with which to buy food. Each sudden and capricious move had meant the abandonment of familiar places, pleasant acquaintances, then strange places and people to be faced, some agreeable habits to be broken, some cherished objects to be discarded. But no change of residence had caused Mary such a pang as this; not only did she have to give up the friendship of Mr. Clare and all the hopes she had placed on it, but she had to relinquish every chance of seeing Fanny Blood. Even when she lived at Hoxton it had not been possible for her to see her new friend often: she never herself had the money for the coach fare to Newington Butts, and it was only occasionally that Mrs. Clare could take her to that village; but what had been just possible in Hoxton would be quite impossible in Wales. Pembrokeshire sounded desperately far off, a place of exile, indeed, and Mary had the intelligence to see how hopeless it was to suppose that her father, with every month more ruined in reputation, prospects, health and character, would succeed in anything anywhere.