Villette
city is getting its living—the West End but enjoying its pleasure. At
the West End you may be amused, but in the city you are deeply excited.
Faint, at last, and hungry (it was years since I had felt such healthy
hunger), I returned, about two o’clock, to my dark, old, and quiet inn.
I dined on two dishes—a plain joint and vegetables; both seemed
excellent: how much better than the small, dainty messes Miss
Marchmont’s cook used to send up to my kind, dead mistress and me, and
to the discussion of which we could not bring half an appetite between
us! Delightfully tired, I lay down, on three chairs for an hour (the
room did not boast a sofa). I slept, then I woke and thought for two
hours.
My state of mind, and all accompanying circumstances, were just now
such as most to favour the adoption of a new, resolute, and
daring—perhaps desperate—line of action. I had nothing to lose.
Unutterable loathing of a desolate existence past, forbade return. If I
failed in what I now designed to undertake, who, save myself, would
suffer? If I died far away from—home, I was going to say, but I had no
home—from England, then, who would weep?
I might suffer; I was inured to suffering: death itself had not, I
thought, those terrors for me which it has for the softly reared. I
had, ere this, looked on the thought of death with a quiet eye.
Prepared, then, for any consequences, I formed a project.
That same evening I obtained from my friend, the waiter, information
respecting, the sailing of vessels for a certain continental port,
Boue-Marine. No time, I found, was to be lost: that very night I must
take my berth. I might, indeed, have waited till the morning before
going on board, but would not run the risk of being too late.
“Better take your berth at once, ma’am,” counselled the waiter. I
agreed with him, and having discharged my bill, and acknowledged my
friend’s services at a rate which I now know was princely, and which in
his eyes must have seemed absurd—and indeed, while pocketing the cash,
he smiled a faint smile which intimated his opinion of the donor’s
_savoir-faire_—he proceeded to call a coach. To the driver he also
recommended me, giving at the same time an injunction about taking me,
I think, to the wharf, and not leaving me to the watermen; which that
functionary promised to observe, but failed in keeping his promise: on
the contrary, he offered me up as an oblation, served me as a dripping
roast, making me alight in the midst of a throng of watermen.
This was an uncomfortable crisis. It was a dark night. The coachman
instantly drove off as soon as he had got his fare: the watermen
commenced a struggle for me and my trunk. Their oaths I hear at this
moment: they shook my philosophy more than did the night, or the
isolation, or the strangeness of the scene. One laid hands on my trunk.
I looked on and waited quietly; but when another laid hands on me, I
spoke up, shook off his touch, stepped at once into a boat, desired
austerely that the trunk should be placed beside me—“Just there,”—which
was instantly done; for the owner of the boat I had chosen became now
an ally: I was rowed off.
Black was the river as a torrent of ink; lights glanced on it from the
piles of building round, ships rocked on its bosom. They rowed me up to
several vessels; I read by lantern-light their names painted in great
white letters on a dark ground. “The Ocean,” “The Phoenix,” “The
Consort,” “The Dolphin,” were passed in turns; but “The Vivid” was my
ship, and it seemed she lay further down.
Down the sable flood we glided, I thought of the Styx, and of Charon
rowing some solitary soul to the Land of Shades. Amidst the strange
scene, with a chilly wind blowing in my face and midnight clouds
dropping rain above my head; with two rude rowers for companions, whose
insane oaths still tortured my ear, I asked myself if I was wretched or
terrified. I was neither. Often in my life have I been far more so
under comparatively safe circumstances. “How is this?” said I.
“Methinks I am animated and alert, instead of being depressed and
apprehensive?” I could not tell how it was.
“THE VIVID” started out, white and glaring, from the black night at
last.—“Here you are!” said the waterman, and instantly demanded six
shillings.
“You ask too much,” I said. He drew off from the vessel and swore he
would not embark me till I paid it. A young man, the steward as I found
afterwards, was looking over the ship’s side; he grinned a smile in
anticipation of the coming contest; to disappoint him, I paid the
money. Three times that afternoon I had given crowns where I should
have given shillings; but I consoled myself with the reflection, “It is
the price of experience.”
“They’ve cheated you!” said the steward exultingly when I got on board.
I answered phlegmatically that “I knew it,” and went below.
A stout, handsome, and showy woman was in the ladies’ cabin. I asked to
be shown my berth; she looked hard at me, muttered something about its
being unusual for passengers to come on board at that hour, and seemed
disposed to be less than civil. What a face she had—so comely—so
insolent and so selfish!
“Now that I am on board, I shall certainly stay here,” was my answer.
“I will trouble you to show me my berth.”
She complied, but sullenly. I took off my bonnet, arranged my things,
and lay down. Some difficulties had been passed through; a sort of
victory was won: my homeless, anchorless, unsupported mind had again
leisure for a brief repose. Till the “Vivid” arrived in harbour, no
further action would be required of me; but then…. Oh! I could not look
forward. Harassed, exhausted, I lay in a half-trance.
The stewardess talked all night; not to me but to the young steward,
her son and her very picture. He passed in and out of the cabin
continually: they disputed, they quarrelled, they made it up again
twenty times in the course of the night. She professed to be writing a
letter home—she said to her father; she read passages of it aloud,
heeding me no more than a stock—perhaps she believed me asleep. Several
of these passages appeared to comprise family secrets, and bore special
reference to one “Charlotte,” a younger sister who, from the bearing of
the epistle, seemed to be on the brink of perpetrating a romantic and
imprudent match; loud was the protest of this elder lady against the
distasteful union. The dutiful son laughed his mother’s correspondence
to scorn. She defended it, and raved at him. They were a strange pair.
She might be thirty-nine or forty, and was buxom and blooming as a girl
of twenty. Hard, loud, vain and vulgar, her mind and body alike seemed
brazen and imperishable. I should think, from her childhood, she must
have lived in public stations; and in her youth might very likely have
been a barmaid.
Towards morning her discourse ran on a new theme: “the Watsons,” a
certain expected family-party of passengers, known to her, it appeared,
and by her much esteemed on account of the handsome profit realized in
their fees. She said, “It was as good as a little fortune to her
whenever this family crossed.”
At dawn all were astir, and by sunrise the passengers came on board.
Boisterous was the welcome given by the stewardess to the “Watsons,”
and great was the bustle made in their honour. They were four in
number, two males and two females. Besides them, there was but one
other passenger—a young lady, whom a gentlemanly, though
languid-looking man escorted. The two groups offered a marked contrast.
The Watsons were doubtless rich people, for they had the confidence of
conscious wealth in their bearing; the women—youthful both of them, and
one perfectly handsome, as far as physical beauty went—were dressed
richly, gaily, and absurdly out of character for the circumstances.
Their bonnets with bright flowers, their velvet cloaks and silk
dresses, seemed better suited for park or promenade than for a damp
packet deck. The men were of low stature, plain, fat, and vulgar; the
oldest, plainest, greasiest, broadest, I soon found was the husband—the
bridegroom I suppose, for she was very young—of the beautiful girl.
Deep was my amazement at this discovery; and deeper still when I
perceived that, instead of being desperately wretched in such a union,
she was gay even to giddiness. “Her laughter,” I reflected, “must be
the mere frenzy of despair.” And even while this thought was crossing
my mind, as I stood leaning quiet and solitary against the ship’s side,
she came tripping up to me, an utter stranger, with a camp-stool in her
hand, and smiling a smile of which the levity puzzled and startled me,
though it showed a perfect set of perfect teeth, she offered me the
accommodation of this piece of furniture. I declined it of course, with
all the courtesy I could put into my manner; she danced off heedless
and lightsome. She must have been good-natured; but what had made her
marry that individual, who was at least as much like an oil-barrel as a
man?
The other lady passenger, with the gentleman-companion, was quite a
girl, pretty and fair: her simple print dress, untrimmed straw-bonnet
and large shawl, gracefully worn, formed a costume plain to quakerism:
yet, for her, becoming enough. Before the gentleman quitted her, I
observed him throwing a glance of scrutiny over all the passengers, as
if to ascertain in what company his charge would be left. With a most
dissatisfied air did his eye turn from the ladies with the gay flowers;
he looked at me, and then he spoke to his daughter, niece, or whatever
she was: she also glanced in my direction, and slightly curled her
short, pretty lip. It might be myself, or it might be my homely
mourning habit, that elicited this mark of contempt; more likely, both.
A bell rang; her father (I afterwards knew that it was her father)
kissed her, and returned to land. The packet sailed.
Foreigners say that it is only English girls who can thus be trusted to
travel alone, and deep is their wonder at the daring confidence of
English parents and guardians. As for the “jeunes Meess,” by some their
intrepidity is pronounced masculine and “inconvenant,” others regard
them as the passive victims of an educational and theological system
which wantonly dispenses with proper “surveillance.” Whether this
particular young lady was of the sort that can the most safely be left
unwatched, I do not know: or, rather did not _then_ know; but it soon
appeared that the dignity of solitude was not to her taste. She paced
the deck once or twice backwards and forwards; she looked with a little
sour air of disdain at the flaunting silks and velvets, and the bears
which thereon danced attendance, and eventually she approached me and
spoke.
“Are you fond of a sea-voyage?” was her question.
I explained that my _fondness_ for a sea-voyage had yet to undergo the
test of experience; I had never made one.
“Oh, how charming!” cried she. “I quite envy you the novelty: first
impressions, you know, are so pleasant. Now I have made so many, I
quite forget the first: I am quite _blasée_ about the sea and all
that.”
I could not help smiling.
“Why do you laugh at me?” she inquired, with a frank testiness that
pleased me better than her other talk.
“Because you are so young to be _blasée_ about anything.”
“I am seventeen” (a little piqued).
“You hardly look sixteen. Do you like travelling alone?”
“Bah! I care nothing about it. I have crossed the Channel ten times,
alone; but then I take care never to be long alone: I always make
friends.”
“You will scarcely make many friends this voyage, I think” (glancing at
the Watson-group, who were now laughing and making a great deal of
noise on deck).
“Not of those odious men and women,” said she: “such people should be
steerage passengers. Are you going to school?”