Read Online Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sheila Kohler
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their fat knees and beg her pardon! Let her Master see what she can do. She will get their attention with this new book.
She hears him mumble the words of the Agnus over and over, to ward off the danger of eternal damnation.
She has heard all his stories, the different ones trotted out for different occasions in different accents. Depending on whether the listener needs to be instructed or impressed, he speaks of his early days as examples of application and diligence or of his success as a scholar, his publications of poetry, his novelettes, his letters to the press, his days at Cambridge. In his Northern Irish brogue, which sounds more Scottish than Irish to her, he stresses Carlyle’s motto: Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom. To the simple sheep farmers of his parish, he describes in detail the dreadful mush of potatoes and cornmeal he was given to eat, which gave him lingering dyspepsia. He never mentions the Irish relatives, especially not the Catholic mother, of course. Apprenticed first to a blacksmith, then a weaver, he had started his own school at fifteen, he tells his awed listeners.
Her friends from school, the local landowners, such as the Heatons, get nothing of the Irish origins, and instead receive the tales of Cambridge, St. John’s College, and Lord Palmerston, as though he had been a close friend, all in a high Tory accent.
She shares his Tory beliefs in hard work and discipline and reliance on a traditional elite. Wellington, her hero! Like her father, she was for limited emancipation of the Catholics, with their mumbo jumbo and superstitions.
“I was afraid if I didn’t send some of you off, Aunt, too, would have left. It seemed the best thing for you. The school came highly recommended, you know. Who could have predicted what would happen there?” her father says.
She feels the porousness of the paper, and an idea comes scurrying into her mind like a mouse. She knows how to continue her tale. She sees the tall, lean clergyman, all in black, erect as a column in the drawing room. He believes children should not be given a taste for finery and luxury. He would burn their colored boots, as her father once threatened to do. His name comes to her with the first three letters of her own: Bro-Bro-Brocklehurst.
That night once again she lies awake. When sleep does finally come to her, she dreams one of her recurrent dreams. She sees two strange, shadowy figures standing side by side in profile looking out the window at the gray church tower, the churchyard so crowded with tombstones that the rank weed can hardly push up between them.
They are dressed in silk gowns with high feathers in their profusion of ringlets. Half-covering their mouths, fans flutter in their gloved hands. They lean toward each other, looking out at the graveyard with a supercilious air. They have rarely had visitors of this quality in the parsonage, yet something familiar about them makes her tremble, afraid.
“You asked to see me?” she says in a quiet voice. When they turn from the window with a rustle of taffeta, lowering their fans, she realizes they are her two older sisters, dead long ago as children, and now irremediably changed. When she rushes to hold them in her arms, they stare at her as though they don’t know her. They hold her from them as they look around the familiar room disapprovingly. “What a small, dark room this is, after all, isn’t it?”
All her life she has carried the memories—more scars than memories—of her suffering those ten months, at the boarding school, Cowan Bridge. There were the long walks with wet shoes, the frequent, long church services on Sundays, the bitter cold, the sole privy for seventy girls and teachers, the lack of wholesome food, the constant hunger, and above all the humiliation and anguish of watching helplessly as her eldest sister was slowly tortured and then killed.
The reality was worse than the picture she gives of it in her book, because her
She hears him mumble the words of the Agnus over and over, to ward off the danger of eternal damnation.
She has heard all his stories, the different ones trotted out for different occasions in different accents. Depending on whether the listener needs to be instructed or impressed, he speaks of his early days as examples of application and diligence or of his success as a scholar, his publications of poetry, his novelettes, his letters to the press, his days at Cambridge. In his Northern Irish brogue, which sounds more Scottish than Irish to her, he stresses Carlyle’s motto: Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom. To the simple sheep farmers of his parish, he describes in detail the dreadful mush of potatoes and cornmeal he was given to eat, which gave him lingering dyspepsia. He never mentions the Irish relatives, especially not the Catholic mother, of course. Apprenticed first to a blacksmith, then a weaver, he had started his own school at fifteen, he tells his awed listeners.
Her friends from school, the local landowners, such as the Heatons, get nothing of the Irish origins, and instead receive the tales of Cambridge, St. John’s College, and Lord Palmerston, as though he had been a close friend, all in a high Tory accent.
She shares his Tory beliefs in hard work and discipline and reliance on a traditional elite. Wellington, her hero! Like her father, she was for limited emancipation of the Catholics, with their mumbo jumbo and superstitions.
“I was afraid if I didn’t send some of you off, Aunt, too, would have left. It seemed the best thing for you. The school came highly recommended, you know. Who could have predicted what would happen there?” her father says.
She feels the porousness of the paper, and an idea comes scurrying into her mind like a mouse. She knows how to continue her tale. She sees the tall, lean clergyman, all in black, erect as a column in the drawing room. He believes children should not be given a taste for finery and luxury. He would burn their colored boots, as her father once threatened to do. His name comes to her with the first three letters of her own: Bro-Bro-Brocklehurst.
That night once again she lies awake. When sleep does finally come to her, she dreams one of her recurrent dreams. She sees two strange, shadowy figures standing side by side in profile looking out the window at the gray church tower, the churchyard so crowded with tombstones that the rank weed can hardly push up between them.
They are dressed in silk gowns with high feathers in their profusion of ringlets. Half-covering their mouths, fans flutter in their gloved hands. They lean toward each other, looking out at the graveyard with a supercilious air. They have rarely had visitors of this quality in the parsonage, yet something familiar about them makes her tremble, afraid.
“You asked to see me?” she says in a quiet voice. When they turn from the window with a rustle of taffeta, lowering their fans, she realizes they are her two older sisters, dead long ago as children, and now irremediably changed. When she rushes to hold them in her arms, they stare at her as though they don’t know her. They hold her from them as they look around the familiar room disapprovingly. “What a small, dark room this is, after all, isn’t it?”
All her life she has carried the memories—more scars than memories—of her suffering those ten months, at the boarding school, Cowan Bridge. There were the long walks with wet shoes, the frequent, long church services on Sundays, the bitter cold, the sole privy for seventy girls and teachers, the lack of wholesome food, the constant hunger, and above all the humiliation and anguish of watching helplessly as her eldest sister was slowly tortured and then killed.
The reality was worse than the picture she gives of it in her book, because her
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