Short Fiction · Mrs. Brumby (1/4)

Mrs. Brumby

We think that we are justified in asserting that of all the persons with whom we have been brought in contact in the course of our editorial experiences, men or women, boys or girls, Mrs. Brumby was the most hateful and the most hated. We are sure of this⁠—that for some months she was the most feared, during which period she made life a burden to us, and more than once induced us to calculate whether it would not be well that we should abandon our public duties and retire to some private corner into which it would be impossible that Mrs. Brumby should follow us. Years have rolled on since then, and we believe that Mrs. Brumby has gone before the great Judge and been called upon to account for the injuries she did us. We know that she went from these shores to a distant land when her nefarious projects failed at home. She was then by no means a young woman. We never could find that she left relative or friend behind her, and we know of none now, except those close and dearest friends of our own who supported us in our misery, who remember even that she existed. Whether she be alive or whether she be dead, her story shall be told⁠—not in a spirit of revenge, but with strict justice.

What there was in her of good shall be set down with honesty; and indeed there was much in her that was good. She was energetic, full of resources, very brave, constant, devoted to the interests of the poor creature whose name she bore, and by no means a fool. She was utterly unscrupulous, dishonest, a liar, cruel, hard as a nether millstone to all the world except Lieutenant Brumby⁠—harder to him than to all the world besides when he made any faintest attempt at rebellion⁠—and as far as we could judge, absolutely without conscience. Had she been a man and had circumstances favoured her, she might have been a prime minister, or an archbishop, or a chief justice. We intend no silly satire on present or past holders of the great offices indicated; but we think that they have generally been achieved by such a combination of intellect, perseverance, audacity, and readiness as that which Mrs. Brumby certainly possessed. And that freedom from the weakness of scruple⁠—which in men who have risen in public life we may perhaps call adaptability to compromise⁠—was in her so strong, that had she been a man, she would have trimmed her bark to any wind that blew, and certainly have sailed into some port. But she was a woman⁠—and the ports were not open to her.

Those ports were not open to her which had she been a man would have been within her reach; but⁠—fortunately for us and for the world at large as to the general question, though so very unfortunately as regarded this special case⁠—the port of literature is open to women. It seems to be the only really desirable harbour to which a female captain can steer her vessel with much hope of success. There are the Fine Arts, no doubt. There seems to be no reason why a woman should not paint as well as Titian. But they don’t. With the pen they hold their own, and certainly run a better race against men on that course than on any other. Mrs. Brumby, who was very desirous of running a race and winning a place, and who had seen all this, put on her cap, and jacket, and boots, chose her colours, and entered her name. Why, oh why, did she select the course upon which we, wretched we, were bound by our duties to regulate the running?

We may as well say at once that though Mrs. Brumby might have made a very good prime minister, she could not write a paper for a magazine, or produce literary work of any description that was worth paper and ink. We feel sure that we may declare without hesitation that no perseverance on her part, no labour however unswerving, no training however long, would have enabled her to do in a fitting manner even a review for the Literary Curricle. There was very much in her, but that was not in her. We find it difficult to describe the special deficiency under which she laboured;⁠—but it existed and was past remedy. As a man suffering from a chronic stiff joint cannot run, and cannot hope to run, so was it with her. She could not combine words so as to make sentences, or sentences so as to make paragraphs. She did not know what style meant. We believe that had she ever read, Johnson, Gibbon, Archdeacon Coxe, Mr. Grote, and Macaulay would have been all the same to her. And yet this woman chose literature as her profession, and clung to it for awhile with a persistence which brought her nearer to the rewards of success than many come who are at all points worthy to receive them.

We have said that she was not a young woman when we knew her. We cannot fancy her to have been ever young. We cannot bring our imagination to picture to ourselves the person of Mrs. Brumby surrounded by the advantages of youth. When we knew her she may probably have been forty or forty-five, and she then possessed a rigidity of demeanour and a sternness of presence which we think must have become her better than any softer guise or more tender phase of manner could ever have done in her earlier years. There was no attempt about her to disguise or modify her sex, such as women have made since those days. She talked much about her husband, the lieutenant, and she wore a double roll of very stiff dark brown curls on each side of her face⁠—or rather over her brows⁠—which would not have been worn by a woman meaning to throw off as far as possible her femininity. Whether those curls were or were not artificial we never knew. Our male acquaintances who saw her used to swear that they were false, but a lady who once saw her, assured us that they were real. She told us that there is a kind of hair growing on the heads of some women, thick, short, crisp, and shiny, which will maintain its curl unbroken and unruffled for days. She told us, also, that women blessed with such hair are always pachydermatous and strong-minded. Such certainly was the character of Mrs. Brumby. She was a tall, thin woman, not very tall or very thin. For aught that we can remember, her figure may have been good;⁠—but we do remember well that she never seemed to us to have any charm of womanhood. There was a certain fire in her dark eyes⁠—eyes which were, we think, quite black⁠—but it was the fire of contention and not of love. Her features were well formed, her nose somewhat long, and her lips thin, and her face too narrow, perhaps, for beauty. Her chin was long, and the space from her nose to her upper lip was long. She always carried a well-wearing brown complexion;⁠—a complexion with which no man had a right to find fault, but which, to a pondering, speculative man, produced unconsciously a consideration whether, in a matter of kissing, an ordinary mahogany table did not offer a preferable surface. When we saw her she wore, we think always, a dark stuff dress⁠—a fur tippet in winter and a most ill-arranged shawl in summer⁠—and a large commanding bonnet, which grew in our eyes till it assumed all the attributes of a helmet⁠—inspiring that reverence and creating that fear which Minerva’s headgear is intended to produce. When we add our conviction that Mrs. Brumby trusted nothing to female charms, that she neither suffered nor enjoyed anything from female vanity, and that the lieutenant was perfectly safe, let her roam the world alone, as she might, in search of editors, we shall have said enough to introduce the lady to our readers.

Of her early life, or their early lives, we know nothing; but the unfortunate circumstances which brought us into contact with Mrs. Brumby, made us also acquainted with the lieutenant. The lieutenant, we think, was younger than his wife;⁠—a good deal younger we used to imagine, though his looks may have been deceptive. He was a confirmed invalid, and there are phases of ill-health which give an appearance of youthfulness rather than of age. What was his special ailing we never heard⁠—though, as we shall mention further on, we had our own idea on that subject; but he was always spoken of in our hearing as one who always had been ill, who always was ill, who always would be ill, and who never ought to think of getting well. He had been in some regiment called the Duke of Sussex’s Own, and his wife used to imagine that her claims upon the public as a woman of literature were enhanced by the royalty of her husband’s corps. We never knew her attempt to make any other use whatever of his services. He was not confined to his bed, and could walk at any rate about the house; but she never asked him, or allowed him to do anything. Whether he ever succeeded in getting his face outside the door we do not know. He wore, when we saw him, an old dressing-gown and slippers. He was a pale, slight, light-haired man, and we fancy that he took a delight in novels.

Their settled income consisted of his half-pay and some very small property which belonged to her. Together they might perhaps have possessed £150 per annum. When we knew them they had lodgings in Harpur Street, near Theobald’s Road, and she had resolved to push her way in London as a woman of literature. She had been told that she would have to deal with hard people, and that she must herself be hard;⁠—that advantage would be taken of her weakness, and that she must therefore struggle vehemently to equal the strength of those with whom she would be brought in contact;⁠—that editors, publishers, and brother authors would suck her brains and give her nothing for them, and that, therefore, she must get what she could out of them, giving them as little as possible in return. It was an evil lesson that she had learned; but she omitted nothing in the performance of the duties which that lesson imposed upon her.

She first came to us with a pressing introduction from an acquaintance of ours who was connected with a weekly publication called the Literary Curricle. The Literary Curricle was not in our estimation a strong paper, and we will own that we despised it. We did not think very much of the acquaintance by whom the strong introductory letter was written. But Mrs. Brumby forced herself into our presence with the letter in her hand, and before she left us extracted from us a promise that we would read a manuscript which she pulled out of a bag which she carried with her. Of that first interview a short account shall be given, but it must first be explained that the editor of the Literary Curricle had received Mrs. Brumby with another letter from another editor, whom she had first taken by storm without any introduction whatever. This first gentleman, whom we had not the pleasure of knowing, had, under what pressure we who knew the lady can imagine, printed three or four short paragraphs from Mrs. Brumby’s pen. Whether they reached publication we never could learn, but we saw the printed slips. He, however, passed her on to the Literary Curricle⁠—which dealt almost exclusively in the reviewing of books⁠—and our friend at the office of that influential “organ” sent her to us with an intimation that her very peculiar and well-developed talents were adapted rather for the creation of tales, or the composition of original treatises, than for reviewing. The letter was very strong, and we learned afterwards that Mrs. Brumby had consented to abandon her connection with the Literary Curricle only on the receipt of a letter in her praise that should be very strong indeed. She rejected the two first offered to her, and herself dictated the epithets with which the third was loaded. On no other terms would she leave the office of the Literary Curricle.

We cannot say that the letter, strong as it was, had much effect upon us; but this effect it had perhaps⁠—that after reading it we could not speak to the lady with that acerbity which we might have used had she come to us without it. As it was we were not very civil, and began our intercourse by assuring her that we could not avail ourselves of her services. Having said so, and observing that she still kept her seat, we rose from our chair, being well aware how potent a spell that movement is wont to exercise upon visitors who are unwilling to go. She kept her seat and argued the matter out with us. A magazine such as that which we then conducted must, she surmised, require depth of erudition, keenness of intellect, grasp of hand, force of expression, and lightness of touch. That she possessed all these gifts she had, she alleged, brought to us convincing evidence. There was the letter from the editor of the Literary Curricle, with which she had been long connected, declaring the fact! Did we mean to cast doubt upon the word of our own intimate friend? For the gentleman at the office of the Literary Curricle had written to us as “Dear ⸻,” though as far as we could remember we had never spoken half-a-dozen words to him in our life. Then she repeated the explanation, given by her godfather, of the abrupt termination of the close connection which had long existed between her and the Curricle. She could not bring herself to waste her energies in the reviewing of books. At that moment we certainly did believe that she had been long engaged on the Curricle, though there was certainly not a word in our correspondent’s letter absolutely stating that to be the fact. He declared to us her capabilities and excellences, but did not say that he had ever used them himself. Indeed, he told us that great as they were, they were hardly suited for his work. She, before she had left us on that occasion, had committed herself to positive falsehoods. She boasted of the income she had earned from two periodicals, whereas up to that moment she had never received a shilling for what she had written.

We find it difficult, even after so many years⁠—when the shame of the thing has worn off together with the hairs of our head⁠—to explain how it was that we allowed her to get, in the first instance, any hold upon us. We did not care a brass farthing for the man who had written from the Literary Curricle. His letter to us was an impertinence, and we should have stated as much to Mrs. Brumby had we cared to go into such matter with her. And our first feelings with regard to the lady herself were feelings of dislike⁠—and almost of contempt even, though we did believe that she had been a writer for the press. We disliked her nose, and her lips, and her bonnet, and the colour of her face. We didn’t want her. Though we were very much younger then than we are now, we had already learned to set our backs up against strong-minded female intruders. As we said before, we rose from our chair with the idea of banishing her, not absolutely uncivilly, but altogether unceremoniously. It never occurred to us during that meeting that she could be of any possible service to us, or that we should ever be of any slightest service to her. Nevertheless she had extracted from us a great many words, and had made a great many observations herself before she left us.