Page 168
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, 1855
Margaret Hale is the daughter of a clergyman in the south of England. When her father leaves the Church, the family moves north to Milton, an industrial city full of smoke and cotton mills and people who do not speak the way she was raised to speak.
She meets John Thornton, a mill owner, self-made, blunt, older than she is. He proposes to her and she turns him down.
Then her mother dies. Then her father.
Not yet twenty, both parents gone, she is sent to London to live with her cousin. Her godfather dies and leaves her his fortune.
She has money now. Thornton does not.
His mill has failed, the business he built from nothing finished. She comes to him with papers in her hand, a financial proposal, her inheritance invested in his mill, every term drawn up so that saving him looks like a simple matter of arithmetic.
He does not look at the papers.
While she sought for this paper, her very heart-pulse was arrested by the tone in which Mr. Thornton spoke. His voice was hoarse, and trembling with tender passion, as he said:—
'Margaret!'
For an instant she looked up; and then sought to veil her luminous eyes by dropping her forehead on her hands. Again, stepping nearer, he besought her with another tremulous eager call upon her name.
'Margaret!'
Still lower went the head; more closely hidden was the face, almost resting on the table before her. He came close to her. He knelt by her side, to bring his face to a level with her ear; and whispered-panted out the words:—
'Take care.—If you do not speak—I shall claim you as my own in some strange presumptuous way.—Send me away at once, if I must go;—Margaret!—'.
At that third call she turned her face, still covered with her small white hands, towards him, and laid it on his shoulder, hiding it even there; and it was too delicious to feel her soft cheek against his, for him to wish to see either deep blushes or loving eyes. He clasped her close. But they both kept silence. At length she murmured in a broken voice:
'Oh, Mr. Thornton, I am not good enough!'
'Not good enough! Don't mock my own deep feeling of unworthiness.'
He had one word left.
Not her title, not her surname. Her name.
He had proposed once before, properly, with all his pride showing, and she sent him away. He lost his mill, he lost the work that had made him who he was, and when she walked into that room with her papers and her terms and her careful arithmetic, he did not reach for any of it.
He said Margaret.
She put her head in her hands. He said it again.
She went lower. And the third time, he knelt beside her and told her the truth: if she did not speak, he would claim her.
He used that word. Claim.
Not ask. Not hope for.
He called it presumptuous in the same breath, which is what it sounds like when someone has stopped pretending they are in control of what they feel.
Look at what she does. She does not answer with a declaration.
She does not say I love you. She says I am not good enough.
That is what wanting sounds like when you have been calling it something else for two years.
You dress it up as business. You put numbers on it.
You walk into the room with your terms drawn up and your face composed and you tell yourself this is practical, this is an investment, this is not your whole heart on the table.
And when the person you have been lying to yourself about says your name three times and kneels beside you, the thing that comes out of your mouth is not love. It is apology.
We say that. We say it about the thing we want most.
We have been told, in a hundred quiet ways, that arriving with everything we have is too much, too late, too exposed. The smart version keeps the papers between you.
She did not keep the papers between them. Neither did he.
This book is a hundred and seventy-one years old. It is free.
Most of us watched a television adaptation and thought we had the story. We did not have it.
Open it.
Underneath it I wrote
I am done pretending it is only practical.
Today. Copy the passage by hand. When you reach the third time he says her name, slow down. Then write one line underneath about the thing you have been calling practical that is not.
From an old page
I copied a line of Jane Austen into the notebook in 2005, from Sense and Sensibility. "She had an excellent heart;—her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn; and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught."
I used to think the sentence praised her composure. Elinor, the steady one, the one who held it all together while her sister wept.
I read it again this spring and the word I cannot stop seeing is strong. Her feelings were strong and she governed them anyway.
That is not composure. That is something much harder.
