Literary Love

by Gabrielle Vigot

  Bathsheba dropped into a silence intended to express that she had opinions on the matter too abstruse for Liddy’s comprehension, rather than that she had nothing to say.

  “Dear me — I had nearly forgotten the valentine I bought yesterday,” she exclaimed at length.

  “Valentine! who for, miss?” said Liddy. “Farmer Boldwood?”

  It was the single name among all possible wrong ones that just at this moment seemed to Bathsheba more pertinent than the right.

  “Well, no. It is only for little Teddy Coggan. I have promised him something, and this will be a pretty surprise for him. Liddy, you may as well bring me my desk and I’ll direct it at once.”

  Bathsheba took from her desk a gorgeously illuminated and embossed design in post-octavo, which had been bought on the previous market-day at the chief stationer’s in Casterbridge. In the centre was a small oval enclosure; this was left blank, that the sender might insert tender words more appropriate to the special occasion than any generalities by a printer could possibly be.

  “Here’s a place for writing,” said Bathsheba. “What shall I put?”

  “Something of this sort, I should think,” returned Liddy promptly:

  “The rose is red

  The violet blue,

  Carnation’s sweet,

  And so are you.”

  “Yes, that shall be it. It just suits itself to a chubby-faced child like him,” said Bathsheba. She inserted the words in a small though legible handwriting; enclosed the sheet in an envelope, and dipped her pen for the direction.

  “What fun it would be to send it to stupid old Boldwood, and how he would wonder!” said the irrepressible Liddy, lifting her eyebrows, and indulging in an awful mirth on the verge of fear as she thought of the moral and social magnitude of the man contemplated.

  Bathsheba paused to regard the idea at full length. Boldwood’s had begun to be a troublesome image — a species of Daniel in her kingdom who persisted in kneeling eastward when reason and common sense said that he might just as well follow suit with the rest, and afford her the official glance of admiration which cost nothing at all. She was far from being seriously concerned about his nonconformity. Still, it was faintly depressing that the most dignified and valuable man in the parish should withhold his eyes, and that a girl like Liddy should talk about it. So Liddy’s idea was at first rather harassing than piquant.

  “No, I won’t do that. He wouldn’t see any humour in it.”

  “He’d worry to death,” said the persistent Liddy.

  “Really, I don’t care particularly to send it to Teddy,” remarked her mistress. “He’s rather a naughty child sometimes.”

  “Yes — that he is.”

  “Let’s toss as men do,” said Bathsheba, idly. “Now then, heads, Boldwood; tails, Teddy. No, we won’t toss money on a Sunday; that would be tempting the devil indeed.”

  “Toss this hymn-book; there can’t be no sinfulness in that, miss.”

  “Very well. Open, Boldwood — shut, Teddy. No; it’s more likely to fall open. Open, Teddy — shut, Boldwood.”

  The book went fluttering in the air and came down shut.

  Bathsheba, a small yawn upon her mouth, took the pen, and with offhand serenity, directed the missive to Boldwood.

  “Now light a candle, Liddy. Which seal shall we use? Here’s a unicorn’s head — there’s nothing in that. What’s this? — two doves — no. It ought to be something extraordinary, ought it not, Liddy? Here’s one with a motto — I remember it is some funny one, but I can’t read it. We’ll try this, and if it doesn’t do we’ll have another.”

  A large red seal was duly affixed. Bathsheba looked closely at the hot wax to discover the words.

  “Capital!” she exclaimed, throwing down the letter frolicsomely. “’Twould upset the solemnity of a parson and clerk too.”

  Liddy looked at the words of the seal, and read —

  “Marry Me.”

  Liddy’s hand flew to her mouth.

  “Lord, miss! That might be going too far, even in jest. I wouldn’t dare.”

  “You silly goose, Liddy,” said Bathsheba, with a lightness she did not exactly feel, “how will he ever find out it was me? ‘Tis only a Valentine such as any maid might send.”

  The same evening the letter was sent, and was duly sorted in Casterbridge post-office that night, to be returned to Weatherbury again in the morning.

  So very idly and unreflectingly was this deed done. Of love as a spectacle Bathsheba had a fair knowledge; but of love subjectively, she knew nothing.

  CHAPTER XIV

  EFFECT OF THE LETTER — SUNRISE

  At dusk, on the evening of St. Valentine’s Day, Boldwood sat down to supper as usual, by a beaming fire of aged logs. Upon the mantelshelf before him was a timepiece, surmounted by a spread eagle, and upon the eagle’s wings was the letter Bathsheba had sent. Here the bachelor’s gaze was continually fastening itself, till the large red seal became as a blot of blood on the retina of his eye; and as he ate and drank he still read in fancy the words thereon, although they were too remote for his sight —

  “Marry Me.”

  The pert injunction was like those crystal substances which, colourless themselves, assume the tone of objects about them. Here, in the quiet of Boldwood’s parlour, where everything that was not grave was extraneous, and where the atmosphere was that of a Puritan Sunday lasting all the week, the letter and its dictum changed their tenor from the thoughtlessness of their origin to a deep solemnity, imbibed from their accessories now.

  Since the receipt of the missive in the morning, Boldwood had felt the symmetry of his existence to be slowly getting distorted in the direction of an ideal passion. The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus — the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great.

  The letter must have had an origin and a motive. That the latter was of the smallest magnitude compatible with its existence at all, Boldwood, of course, did not know. And such an explanation did not strike him as a possibility even. It is foreign to a mystified condition of mind to realize of the mystifier that the processes of approving a course suggested by circumstance, and of striking out a course from inner impulse, would look the same in the result. The vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent to the person confounded by the issue.

  When Boldwood went to bed he placed the valentine in the corner of the looking-glass. He was conscious of its presence, even when his back was turned upon it. It was the first time in Boldwood’s life that such an event had occurred. The same fascination that caused him to think it an act which had a deliberate motive prevented him from regarding it as an impertinence. He looked again at the direction. The mysterious influences of night invested the writing with the presence of the unknown writer. Somebody’s — some woman’s — hand had travelled softly over the paper bearing his name; her unrevealed eyes had watched every curve as she formed it; her brain had seen him in imagination the while. Why should she have imagined him? Her mouth — were the lips red or pale, plump or creased? — had curved itself to a certain expression as the pen went on — the corners had moved with all their natural tremulousness: what had been the expression?

  The vision of the woman writing, as a supplement to the words written, had no individuality. She was a misty shape, and well she might be, considering that her original was at that moment sound asleep and oblivious of all love and letter-writing under the sky. Whenever Boldwood dozed she took a form, and comparatively ceased to be a vision: when he awoke, there was the letter justifying the dream.

  The moon shone tonight, and its light was not of a customary kind. His window admitted only a reflection of its rays, and the pale sheen had that reversed direction which snow gives, coming upward and lighting up his ceiling in an unnatural way, casting shadows in strange places, and putting lights where shadows had used to be.

  The sub
stance of the epistle had occupied him but little in comparison with the fact of its arrival. He suddenly wondered if anything more might be found in the envelope than what he had withdrawn. He jumped out of bed in the weird light, took the letter, pulled out the flimsy sheet, shook the envelope — searched it. Nothing more was there. Boldwood looked, as he had a hundred times the preceding day, at the insistent red seal: “Marry me,” he said aloud.

  The solemn and reserved yeoman again closed the letter, and stuck it in the frame of the glass. In doing so he caught sight of his reflected features, wan in expression, and insubstantial in form. He saw how closely compressed was his mouth, and that his eyes were wide-spread and vacant. Feeling uneasy and dissatisfied with himself for this nervous excitability, he returned to bed.

  Much against his conscious will, he was visited with a dream; in a crowded ballroom his old flame, Josephine, appeared to him in her shimmering gown, inviting him with a supplicating gesture of her bare arms to dance with him. To further entice him to her, she untied her laces, freeing herself to slither out of her gown as a snake might shed its skin, and appeared to him in the majesty of her exquisite nudity. Holding her body close to his, he began to waltz, yet, to his horror, as they whirled and twirled upon the dance floor, his clothes mysteriously began to unbutton themselves and by degrees fall away from his body, his breeches, shirt, his combinations and all, until he was dancing entirely naked, and the company, ceasing to dance, withdrew to the edges of the ballroom to stare and wonder as Josephine bent her lovely head, opening wide her scarlet mouth, and kissed, with her full lips, his quivering member, drawing it into her softness, licking with eager tongue and sucking gently till, with a cry of mingled delight and terror, he spent himself prodigiously, losing the power to stand, sinking on his knees, unable to control himself, a man lost to all save the basest of his senses, slaking his lust amidst the laughter and jeering of a crowd.

  Then the dawn drew on. The full power of the clear heaven was not equal to that of a cloudy sky at noon, when Boldwood arose, shuddering at the memory of the night’s disturbance, and dressed himself. He glanced once more at the valentine, took it up, sniffed it, and, hardly knowing what he did, folded it into his pocket book. He descended the stairs and went out towards the gate of a field to the east, leaning over which he paused and looked around.

  It was one of the usual slow sunrises of this time of the year, and the sky, pure violet in the zenith, was leaden to the northward, and murky to the east, where, over the snowy down or ewe-lease on Weatherbury Upper Farm, and apparently resting upon the ridge, the only half of the sun yet visible burnt rayless, like a red and flameless fire shining over a white hearthstone. The whole effect resembled a sunset as childhood resembles age.

  In other directions, the fields and sky were so much of one colour by the snow, that it was difficult in a hasty glance to tell whereabouts the horizon occurred; and in general there was here, too, that before-mentioned preternatural inversion of light and shade which attends the prospect when the garish brightness commonly in the sky is found on the earth, and the shades of earth are in the sky. Over the west hung the wasting moon, now dull and greenish-yellow, like tarnished brass.

  Boldwood was listlessly noting how the frost had hardened and glazed the surface of the snow, till it shone in the red eastern light with the polish of marble; how, in some portions of the slope, withered grass-bents, encased in icicles, bristled through the smooth wan coverlet in the twisted and curved shapes of old Venetian glass; and how the footprints of a few birds, which had hopped over the snow whilst it lay in the state of a soft fleece, were now frozen to a short permanency. A half-muffled noise of light wheels interrupted him. Boldwood turned back into the road. It was the mail-cart — a crazy, two-wheeled vehicle, hardly heavy enough to resist a puff of wind. The driver held out a letter. Boldwood seized it and opened it, expecting another anonymous one — so greatly are people’s ideas of probability a mere sense that precedent will repeat itself.

  “I don’t think it is for you, sir,” said the man, when he saw Boldwood’s action. “Though there is no name, I think it is for your shepherd.”

  Boldwood looked then at the address —

  To the New Shepherd,

  Weatherbury Farm,

  Near Casterbridge.

  “Oh — what a mistake! — it is not mine. Nor is it for my shepherd. It is for Miss Everdene’s. You had better take it on to him — Gabriel Oak — and say I opened it in mistake.”

  At this moment, on the ridge, up against the blazing sky, a figure was visible, like the black snuff in the midst of a candle-flame. Then it moved and began to bustle about vigorously from place to place, carrying square skeleton masses, which were riddled by the same rays. A small figure on all fours followed behind. The tall form was that of Gabriel Oak; the small one that of George; the articles in course of transit were hurdles.

  “Wait,” said Boldwood. “That’s the man on the hill. I’ll take the letter to him myself.”

  To Boldwood it was now no longer merely a letter to another man. It was an opportunity. Exhibiting a face pregnant with intention, he entered the snowy field.

  Gabriel, at that minute, descended the hill towards the right. The glow stretched down in this direction now, and touched the distant roof of Warren’s Malthouse — whither the shepherd was apparently bent: Boldwood followed at a distance.

  CHAPTER XV

  A MORNING MEETING — THE LETTER AGAIN

  The scarlet and orange light outside the malthouse did not penetrate to its interior, which was, as usual, lighted by a rival glow of similar hue, radiating from the hearth.

  The maltster, after having lain down in his clothes for a few hours, was now sitting beside a three-legged table, breakfasting off bread and bacon. This was eaten on the plateless system, which is performed by placing a slice of bread upon the table, the meat flat upon the bread, a mustard plaster upon the meat, and a pinch of salt upon the whole, then cutting them vertically downwards with a large pocket-knife till wood is reached, when the severed lump is impaled on the knife, elevated, and sent the proper way of food.

  The maltster’s lack of teeth appeared not to sensibly diminish his powers as a mill. He had been without them for so many years that toothlessness was felt less to be a defect than hard gums an acquisition. Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line — less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.

  In the ashpit was a heap of potatoes roasting, and a boiling pipkin of charred bread, called “coffee”, for the benefit of whomsoever should call, for Warren’s was a sort of clubhouse, used as an alternative to the inn.

  “I say, says I, we get a fine day, and then down comes a snapper at night,” was a remark now suddenly heard spreading into the malthouse from the door, which had been opened the previous moment. The form of Henery Fray advanced to the fire, stamping the snow from his boots when about halfway there. The speech and entry had not seemed to be at all an abrupt beginning to the maltster, introductory matter being often omitted in this neighbourhood, both from word and deed, and the maltster having the same latitude allowed him, did not hurry to reply. He picked up a fragment of cheese, by pecking upon it with his knife, as a butcher picks up skewers.

  Henery appeared in a drab kerseymere greatcoat, buttoned over his smockfrock, the white skirts of the latter being visible to the distance of about a foot below the coat-tails, which, when you got used to the style of dress, looked natural enough, and even ornamental — it certainly was comfortable.

  Matthew Moon, Joseph Poorgrass, and other carters and waggoners followed at his heels, with great lanterns dangling from their hands, which showed that they had just come from the cart-horse stables, where they had been busily engaged since four o’clock that morning.

  “And how is she getting on without a baily?” the maltster inquired. Henery shook his head, and smiled one of the bitter smiles, dragging all the flesh of hi
s forehead into a corrugated heap in the centre.

  “She’ll rue it — surely, surely!” he said. “Benjy Pennyways were not a true man or an honest baily — as big a betrayer as Judas Iscariot himself. But to think she can carr’ on alone!” He allowed his head to swing laterally three or four times in silence. “Never in all my creeping up — never!”

  This was recognized by all as the conclusion of some gloomy speech which had been expressed in thought alone during the shake of the head; Henery meanwhile retained several marks of despair upon his face, to imply that they would be required for use again directly he should go on speaking.

  “All will be ruined, and ourselves too, or there’s no meat in gentlemen’s houses!” said Mark Clark.

  “A headstrong maid, that’s what she is — and won’t listen to no advice at all. Pride and vanity have ruined many a cobbler’s dog. Dear, dear, when I think o’ it, I sorrows like a man in travel!”

  “True, Henery, you do, I’ve heard ye,” said Joseph Poorgrass in a voice of thorough attestation, and with a wire-drawn smile of misery.

  “’Twould do a martel man no harm to have what’s under her bonnet,” said Billy Smallbury, who had just entered, bearing his one tooth before him. “She can spaik real language, and must have some sense somewhere. Do ye foller me?”

  “I do, I do; but no baily — I deserved that place,” wailed Henery, signifying wasted genius by gazing blankly at visions of a high destiny apparently visible to him on Billy Smallbury’s smockfrock. “There, ‘twas to be, I suppose. Your lot is your lot, and Scripture is nothing; for if you do good you don’t get rewarded according to your works, but be cheated in some mean way out of your recompense.”

  “No, no; I don’t agree with’ee there,” said Mark Clark. “God’s a perfect gentleman in that respect.”

  “Good works good pay, so to speak it,” attested Joseph Poorgrass.

  A short pause ensued, and as a sort of entr’acte Henery turned and blew out the lanterns, which the increase of daylight rendered no longer necessary even in the malthouse, with its one pane of glass.