Israel Zangwill

Behold, however, Jinny—despite her sex—embarked on a learned career, and burning the midnight oil in her fat little lamp instead of curling up in her chest of drawers. Puckering her brow she sat on a squat wooden arm-chair in that dun papered living-room, imbibing virtue and information, till the Dutch clock in the outer box-room startled her with its emphatic declaration of the hour, and the cracked mirror revealed eyes heavy-lidded. Far out over the Common streamed the curtained light of that midnight oil, for the shutter could not be closed, owing to a pair of blackbirds that had set up house in the eaves. Jinny had found one of the young fallen on the grass: she had fed it with morsels of meat which it swallowed with great yellow gulps, following up the meal with a fluted grace. She had restored it to its nest—touched to mark the domestic virtue of its co-incubating parents. It had grown quite big now and flown hoppingly away with short sharp cries, but Jinny still cherished the nest and felt no need of the barring shutter. In the silence the creakings of the cottage often sounded like footsteps outside, but Jinny was not nervous, and a real footstep would rouse Nip, she knew. Sometimes, these warm May nights, she heard the cuckoo keeping hours as late as hers, sometimes the nightingales would sing passionately in the lane. There was one, she knew, that niched in a mutilated, ivy-swathed trunk bordering on the Common, and she would hear it answering the faint melancholy calls from afar with throbs and gushes of melody as well as with a series of quick, piercing notes. And sometimes when the air was clear she could hear the distant church clocks. But all these sounds, like Nip’s and the Gaffer’s snoring, were but a restful accompaniment to the acquisition of omniscience: even the nightingale, in her ignorance of literature, failed to romanticize her thoughts, painfully bent on mastering all there was to know.

Meanings, we have seen, played a great part in these studies: “Dollar—a Dutch coin”; “Engineer—an Artist”; “Gambadoes—a Sort of Boots”; “History—an Account of Things”; “Interview—Mutual Sight”; “Logarithms—Artificial Numbers”; “Mahomet—the Turkish Impostor”; “Replevin—a Writ so called”; “Stolidity—Foolishness”; “Tarantula—a Baneful Insect”; “Valentine—a Romish Festival”; “Upholsterer—an Undertaker”; “Zodiac—a Circle in the Heavens”: such were the strange vocables she kept muttering and misunderstanding: believing indeed that “Paramour” was merely a grander word for “Lover” and connecting divorce with “Schismatic—one guilty of unlawful separation.” It pained her to meet the “Sadducees—a People that Denies the Being of Angels,” slurring, as did these unimaginable heretics, the status of her own mother. Surely it was for such that “Damnation—the punishment of Hell Torments” had been designed. Punctuation too she studied, growing learned in Apostrophes, Asterisks, Carets, Crotchets, and Obelisks; other hours were devoted to Grammar, Tenses, Degrees of Comparison (always between good and better Boys), Genitives, and even Scraps of Latin. Pronunciation, however, was her great stumbling-block. How was it possible to keep one’s feet in the chaos, say, of four-syllabled words, each accented on a different syllable? Antiquary, Ambassador, Affidavit, Animadvert—it was heart-breaking and head-splitting. Her memory, so marvellous when vivified by realities, broke down before this procession of shadows.

With what relief she turned to the rich riot of “Moral and Satyric Poems”—though her sex was still distressingly ignored, and through every loophole the eternal male popped up.

He most improves who studies with Delight

And learns Sound Morals while he learns to write.

Still, where “Swearing, Gaming, and Pride” were rebuked in lashing lines, she was not sorry to find the petticoat conspicuous by its absence. It was a rare joy to come on Queen Anne in a “List of Abbreviations” under the unexpected guise of A.R.; in the list of kings, too, she appeared again, together with Mary and Elizabeth; not a large proportion, Jinny thought, rejoicing at the Victoria unforeseen by the learned author, whose “Chronological Account of Remarkable Things” stopped, like her friend Commander Dap’s, at the Battle of Trafalgar.

This table was indeed one of her favourite pages—it gave her, she felt, a bird’s-eye view of all history—and with her head for figures she never forgot that the Ten Commandments and the Ten Plagues were given in 1494 B.C., and that the sun stood still at Joshua’s word in 1454, while Daniel was in the Den of Lions in 536. She was puzzled, though, at the destruction of Troy which intervened between Joshua’s interference with the sun and Saul’s anointment. Of the twenty-two great events that preceded the Christian era, this was the only one that the Bible forbore to mention. Subsequently to Christianity things seemed to her to have moved fast, for up till the year 1600 alone, fourteen “remarkable Things” occurred—two-thirds as many as had happened in the whole previous 4007 years since the world was created—while after 1600, extraordinary events sprouted like blackberries, no less than fifty crowding to their grand climacteric in Trafalgar.

In these fifty she was glad to see included the Confutation of Popery by Martin Luther—a personage with whom Miss Gentry had made her familiar—and she thrilled almost with local pride to find “Arts and Sciences first taught at Cambridge, 1119,” for the Cambridge carriers sometimes penetrated eastwards as far as Chipstone itself. As a carrier, indeed, she was immensely excited by the “Eleven Days successive Snow” of 1674, the “Frost for thirteen Weeks” of 1684, “The Terrible high Wind of November 26, 1703,” “the great and total Eclipse of the Sun, April 22, 1713,” and the “severe Frost for nine Weeks” beginning on Christmas Eve, 1739. She could vividly sympathize with the unfortunate carriers of those days, and she did not wonder that these brumal phenomena should form so great a proportion of the few score happenings of Universal History, for frosts and winds must be terrible indeed to be recounted as on a level with the shooting of Admiral Byng, the American Declaration of Independence, the Birth of the Prince of Wales, and the “Attempted Assassination of George III at Drury Lane by Hadfield, a lunatic.”

These studious vigils were invariably wound up with a prayer from this same limitless thesaurus: on her knees by the transmogrified chest of drawers, and with her hair hanging down her back, and the lamplight falling on the coarse grey-typed page of the Spelling-Book, Jinny repeated one or other of its masculine supplications, prose or verse, and only a cynic (“Cynic—a Sour, Crabbed Fellow”) would have laughed at the solemnity with which she swallowed all those motley lucubrations, whether lay or clerical. An impromptu prayer for her grandfather was invariably slipped in, for this holy book of hers finished as terribly as the Old Testament, and what made it worse was that this awful culmination of the Spelling-Book was printed in black-letter. It was a gruesome recital of the miseries and follies of “the Seven Stages of Life”—none of which seemed worth living even with the correctest of spelling, while death seemed worth dying to escape the depravity and decrepitude of the final stadium. But although her grandfather, with all his peevish humours, could hardly be counted so steeped in sin as the old man of the text, while his infirmities were still rudimentary, yet the physical prognostication was terrifying—“for when we come to those years, that our Eyes grow dim, Ears deaf, Visage pale, Hands shaking, Knees trembling, and Feet faltering, then it is evident the Dissolution of our mortal Tabernacle is near at Hand.”

Jinny could never read those dreadful words but she would creep anxiously to the foot of the dark, twisting staircase and listen for the reassuring sound of the Tabernacle snoring. And if she bore so patiently with his whims and crotchets, not none of the credit must be given to this sanctimonious Spelling-Book.