Читать книгу Charlotte Mew: and Her Friends - Penelope Fitzgerald, Simon Callow - Страница 8

MISS BOLT had warned Lotti, from time to time, never to take lemon juice in the hope of growing thinner, because dieting would do no good – ‘what you’re made, that you will be’. Lotti did not want to believe this last remark; in any case, what she needed was something to make her stouter. She grew out of early childhood still small-boned and tiny, with her face a perfect oval, the ‘moonfaced darling of all’, but given to sudden withdrawals. She had become a reading and writing child, retreating under the nursery table and producing ‘sheets of pathetically laboured MSS’. These Elizabeth Goodman swept into her dustpan. Much of the faithful servant’s time was spent in planning small treats and great careers for the four children, but she didn’t hold with this writing rubbish. Poetry, in fact, she maintained, was ‘injurious to the brain’. Lotti turned to imagination’s refuge. Evidently, she deduced, she was misplaced and alien, her father and mother were not her real parents. ‘Never, I know, but half your child’ she wrote in The Changeling:

Times I pleased you, dear Father, dear Mother,

Learned all my lessons and liked to play,

And dearly I loved the little pale brother

Whom some other bird must have called away.

Why did They bring me here to make me

Not quite bad and not quite good,

Why, unless They’re wicked, do They want, in spite to take me

Back to Their wet, wild wood?

These are verses for children, written in 1912. Charlotte used to read them aloud, when the time came, to children of her acquaintance, giving no explanation, because she believed (quite rightly) that none would be needed. They understood her at once.

Anne was taller and prettier, but in spite of her brilliant violet-blue eyes, more usual-looking. She hadn’t Lotti’s strangely arched eyebrows, or her disconcerting look of astonishment, which might be sarcasm. Anne never wrote anything, but drew, or painted; she was the little sister, quicker to make friends than Lotti, but quite contentedly under her influence. Freda, the youngest, was the most striking of all. She was ‘like a flame’. Anna Maria took pride in this youngest, and, determined to live through her daughter, liked to take little Freda about herself, particularly to dancing classes. For these Anna Maria dressed elaborately, appearing, for example, in a pale blue boa, an awkward thing for a very short woman to wear.

Henry, four years older than Charlotte, at a time of life when four years make the most difference, was the looked-up-to elder brother. In the room reserved as an office, he worked away at his drawing-board, but with an eye, quite naturally, to his own amusements. At the age of sixteen or so he began to go out dancing, and now, apparently, Elizabeth Goodman, ‘when she was called upon to deliver the secret note or the unhallowed bouquet, would stand stiff-backed and sorrowful-eyed, holding it in her strong, beautifully-shaped rough hand to “receive instructions”, with an impressive “Very well, sir”, which was not convincing.’ Why poor Henry shouldn’t send a bouquet, which seems harmless enough, or why it should be unhallowed, is not explained. Possibly Goodman was doubtful of any form of communication between the sexes, as leading, in the end, to trouble.

In 1879 Lotti made her first venture beyond the family in Doughty Street and the cousins in the Isle of Wight. She was entered as a pupil in the Gower Street School. The school was not more than twenty minutes’ walk away up Guildford Street and past the British Museum, so that she was able to come home for her mid-day dinner, but the headmistress, Miss Lucy Harrison, made a profound impression on her, which might be described as a revelation of a kind.

Lucy Harrison left a strong mark, in fact, on several thousands of young girls who passed through her hands. It couldn’t be said of her – as it was of Miss Buss, at the North London Collegiate – that she was ‘a great educator who should never have been allowed to come into contact with children’. There are very many tributes to her good influence, intellectual and moral – she would never have distinguished between the two – but there was, in Octavia Hill’s words, ‘something Royal’ about her which perhaps exempted her from criticism. She may not always have known what she was doing.

She had been born in 1844, in Yorkshire, of Quaker parents, the youngest of eight, and grew up into a top-whipping, boat-building tomboy, such as many large mid-Victorian families produced. A good shot with a stone, she felt, when she killed her first robin, ‘after the first start of joy in the success of the action, a revulsion like the horrors of Cain’ when she held the warm body in her hands. When she threw her favourite pocketknife into the water (apparently by mistake) ‘I felt’ – she wrote – ‘as if I had thrown my heart in.’ Hers was the excess of guilt attributed to Maggie in The Mill on the Floss, or Cathy Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, or Jo in Little Women, when their behaviour was not only passionate, but masculine. Lucy Harrison had to come to terms with it in order to control her own life and those of others.

She was educated in France and Germany and at the liberal and unsectarian Bedford College. Languages came easily to her, history and poetry were her passion. Coming as she did from a broadminded Ruskinian background, she prayed to be serviceable. This meant the Octavia Hill Settlement, temperance clubs, the Suffragists, prisoners, exiles. Mazzini, when she visited him in his wretched rooms, gave her a cigar which she kept as a souvenir till it fell to pieces. There was still a wealth of undirected energy which had to be worked off in heavy carpentry and amateur dramatics. Then, when she was twenty-two, she was asked to help out at the Bedford School, then attached to the college. In 1868 the college gave up the school, and it moved to Gower Street, with Lucy Harrison as assistant.

Children adored Miss Harrison. She kept them in order because she never expected to be disobeyed. All, apparently, felt when she stood in her favourite attitude, looking upwards with her hands clasped behind her, that what she said was ‘given from above’. For these youngers ones she evolved an effective question-and-answer method, which she later published as Social Geography for Teachers and Infants.

Here is a picture of a church. Where is it standing? – ‘In the middle of a churchyard’ – Sometimes there is grass round the church, with trees and plants. How is the church separated from the street or road? – ‘By iron railings’ – When you walk up the steps or along the path, how do you get into the church? ‘Through the door’ – Sometimes when people die they are taken into the church which they attended while they were alive. How does the bell ring then? – ‘Very slowly. It is said to toll.’

In 1875 the headmistress, Miss Bolton, retired, and Lucy Harrison took over. Worshipped by all the visiting staff, men as well as women, she had no problems of organization: concentrating now on the senior girls, she made them feel what education had meant to her – an uplifting emotional experience. ‘You need not call anything a luxury that you can share.’ They were to love music and poetry. A book, even a book’s title, is a door into another mind, letting in light and fresh air, and in the pain and joy of poetry the soul has the chance to meet itself. As to what they read – and she read aloud to them untiringly – it must be what went deepest and lifted highest – Shakespeare, Dante in Cary’s translation, Blake, Wordsworth, and her own favourites, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, the Brownings, Coventry Patmore, Alice Meynell. Carlyle, describing the hero as poet, insists that we ourselves have Dante’s imagination, though with a weaker faculty, when we shudder at the Inferno. This kind of thing gives endless scope to the teacher, and can end up as something like sentimentality. There was in fact a certain confusion in Miss Harrison’s interpretations between the windswept heights which Dante and Shakespeare were then thought to share with the Authorised Version, and the indulgence of hot tears in the dark. A reading which all her pupils heard often, and never forgot, was from Alice Meynell’s Preludes of 1875 – the sonnet To a Daisy, which ends

Thou little veil for so great mystery

When shall I penetrate all things and thee,

And then look back? For this I must abide,

Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled

Literally between me and the world.

Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,

And from a poet’s side shall read his book.

O daisy mine, what will it be to look

From God’s side even on such a simple thing?

This strange double perspective, the poet’s corpse buried beneath the daisy’s roots and at the same time contemplating the earth from God’s side, wouldn’t have been strange to Ruskin (who called the last lines some of the finest in modern poetry) nor to Christina Rossetti, nor, evidently, to the Gower Street girls. With all Miss Harrison’s liberality and fresh air went a certain morbidity. But hard work was called for, because it develops intellect, and intellect forms thought, and thought forms character. In this vein Miss Harrison returned to Carlyle, and to the idea of the heroic life as a model to imitate. She would speak of Sir Philip Sidney, and the girls sat and thought of Miss Harrison.

At the end of the summer term there was an Open Day, when the reports were read and there was music, and a French or German play. Miss Harrison approved of amateur dramatics, though not of low mimicry. Lotti, a born impersonator who could ‘do’ anybody, and did mimic, perhaps in a low way, Professor Kinkel, the venerable lecturer in geography, would not have been encouraged to take part. But as a brilliant pianist with a delicate touch she was needed for the concert, and, at this stage of her life, still frankly enjoyed being told that she played well.

The trouble was that she would only learn what interested her, and a number of things, including geography, didn’t. But in spite of these failures her one motive was to please her headmistress. In her plain black jacket and waistcoat, with her short hair and calm gracious voice, Miss Harrison brought into the room ‘the sense of august things’. Dissent would be shameful, and the ‘inexpressible charm of her presence’ made it impossible. There were no rules, as such, at Gower Street, although there were many precepts, from ‘if a pudding is begun with a fork, the help of a spoon must not be called in half-way through’ to Coventry Patmore’s

Love wakes men once a lifetime each;

They lift their heavy heads and look;

And lo, what one sweet page can teach

They read with joy, then shut the book.

Lotti could not dress like Miss Harrison. She had of course, at the age of fourteen, no choice as to what she wore. She had a black-and-white checked dress, with a plain silver chain and cross, for weekdays, and a brown dress with a gold cross on Sundays. But she was allowed to keep her hair short, like Miss Harrison’s.

Her best friends were sober, hard-working girls. The three Chicks – Elsie, Margaret, and Harriet, from Ealing – seemed set to become teachers. Ethel Oliver was the daughter of Professor Daniel Oliver, the curator of Kew Herbarium, and a friend of Ruskin and the painter Arthur Hughes. Maggie Browne, also a professor’s daughter, was the dull one, always the last to be told anything, but the most faithful and stolid of friends. All these girls had good, quiet homes – the Olivers were Quakers – and were not much disposed to question things. Lotti amazed them. They saw at school her wild side, her inquisitive, flamboyant, head-tossing, parasol-snapping side. The beloved headmistress could not be disobeyed, but Lotti seemed to pass her days in a state of painful emotion, as though listening to something they could not hear.

In 1882, when Lotti was on the verge of adolescence, Miss Harrison, the undisputed centre of life in Gower Street, began to behave oddly. Her behaviour showed signs of overwork and strain. She was becoming what was then called (in reference to schoolmistresses) ‘unhappy’. It was felt by the governors that she must leave the school, and try what a rest would do. She was going, it was decided, to retire for the time being and take rooms in Hampstead, half-way up Haverstock Hill. During the daytime she would work in the British Museum, grimly persevering with her History of England, never, as it turned out, to be published.

When Charlotte heard this news, she was practising the piano. She sprang up and ‘in a wild state of grief began to bang her head against the wall’. This recollection came from a much younger girl, Amice Macdonnell, a niece of Miss Harrison’s. Amice was dismayed, and wondered whether she ought to bang her head, too.

Lotti was sick with one of the most cruel of all preparations for adolescence, the passion for a teacher, confusing intense sexual anxiety with the duty of loving the highest when we see it. Wisely or unwisely, Miss Harrison now offered to take some of the older girls from Gower Street as boarders, and to teach them English literature in the evenings, when their school day was over. Anna Maria was quite unable to face such a crisis, Lotti grieved wildly, Fred was called in to make a decision, and to put his foot down, and do something. He was frightened by his daughter’s condition. He is described as ‘going down on his knees’ to persuade Lucy Harrison to take Lotti with her.

But if he had done the best he knew for Lotti, he can hardly be said to have understood her, for he believed the move would ‘stabilize’ her. For the next two years she was separated from her elder brother and her two sisters, Anne and the baby Freda. Anne continued placidly in the Gower Street junior school, ‘good at art’, giving no trouble of any kind. Miss Harrison’s boarders, on the other hand, had to undertake, twice every day, the three-mile walk to and from Gower Street, down Haverstock Hill and Chalk Farm, through Camden High Street with its markets, down Hampstead Road to school. In the evening the walk was uphill. But Lotti’s spirits were now so high, and she was so unpredictable, so entertaining, seeming sometimes to dance rather than walk, that the way seemed short.

Two of the Gower Street assistant teachers walked in front, as chaperones. Behind came the two sixteen-year-olds, Edith Oliver and Edith Scull, the daughter of an American professor. The two Ediths, then, walked ahead; next came Lotti, in the highest spirits, with the puzzled little Amice Macdonnell. When the little party arrived at Haverstock Hill there was a gracious reception, but also plain cooking of the cold meat and rice pudding variety. Mrs Newcombe, the Gower Street housekeeper, who regarded Miss Harrison with love and reverence, had come to Hampstead to look after her.

Eighteen months later, however, the situation totally altered when Miss Harrison herself fell passionately in love with Amy Greener, the teacher who had taken over the Gower Street School. When she recognized that her nerves had given way, Lucy Harrison had bought a piece of land, Cupples Field, near Wensleydale in her native Yorkshire. She had planted trees on the site at once, but waited for the right moment to build herself a house. Now, at one stroke she realized that the house must be shared. All the strength of ‘the fairest hill and sweetest dell’, she wrote to Miss Greener, ‘without you leaves me longing’, and again, in 1886, ‘Oh, for one hour with you again!’ and ‘Dearest, I do not feel at home anywhere without you now … with the person you love comes a halo and glow over everything, however miserable and poor, and without that presence the light seems to leave the sun itself. This is a trite remark, I am afraid.’ As she drove across the rough Yorkshire moors she recalled her walks with Miss Greener in the Tottenham Court Road. ‘Dear, dear love, there is nothing in the world that could satisfy me or fill your place for me, but if separation by death had to come, I think one could fly to the hope and thought of meeting hereafter; it would, I think, be impossible to live without that hope at any rate.…’

These letters are quoted in Amy Greener’s biography of her friend, which treats a delicate subject delicately. Miss Greener had asked herself whether some people, knowing that the idea of marriage had never attracted Miss Harrison, would wonder ‘whether her life lacked the perfect rounding that love could bring’. ‘Well!’ commented a friend, who had been allowed to read the manuscript, ‘the love she needed came!’ And indeed the two of them were to live in perfect concord at Cupples Field for nearly thirty years. Lucy became the revered headmistress at the Mount School, York; Amy joined her staff. They retired together. On her deathbed Lucy asked Amy to read to her from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Catarina to Camoens, in which Catarina, ‘dying during the poet’s absence abroad’, tries to reconcile herself to the idea of his falling in love again. She wavers, but finally gives her blessing. It must have been painful for Miss Greener to read these words aloud in the whitewashed bedroom, among the plain oak furniture which her friend had knocked together.

Meanwhile the boarders at Haverstock Hill were left to face their entry into life without their headmistress. It was the end of Lotti’s schooling, and part of her education had been to know what it was to be totally obsessed by the physical presence or absence of another woman. This for her was something more than the ordinary condition of being sixteen. It can be recognized in an early sonnet, Left Behind:

I wait thy summons on a swaying floor,

Within a room half darkness and half glare.

I cannot stir – I cannot find the stair –

Thrust hands upon my heart –; it clogs my feet,

As drop by drop it drains. I stand and beat –

I stand and beat my heart against the door.

Of course, large numbers of schoolgirls all over England, at the turn of the century, felt passionately about the teacher. Schwärmerei was a calculated risk for those who educated in Lucy Harrison’s way. It passed, and was supposed to refine and ennoble. But for Lotti, the changeling, the odd one out, it proved to be an initiation into her life’s pattern. She would always be physically attracted to women rather than to men, and she would always choose wrong. She was marked out to lose, with too much courage ever to accept it. From adolescence she was one of those whom Colette called ‘restless ghosts, unrecovered from wounds sustained in the past, when they crashed headlong or sidelong against the barrier reef, mysterious and incomprehensible, the human body’.