by Thomas Hardy
This step onward had suggested to John Ivy the idea of collecting her pieces also, or at any rate of making up a book of her rhymes by adding many in manuscript to the few that had seen the light, for she had been able to get no great number into print. A ruinous charge was made for costs of publication; a few reviews noticed her poor little volume; but nobody talked of it, nobody bought it, and it fell dead in a fortnight — if it had ever been alive.
The author’s thoughts were diverted to another groove just then by the discovery that she was going to have a third child, and the collapse of her poetical venture had perhaps less effect upon her mind than it might have done if she had been domestically unoccupied. Her husband had paid the publisher’s bill with the doctor’s, and there it all had ended for the time. But, though less than a poet of her century, Ella was more than a mere multiplier of her kind, and latterly she had begun to feel the old afflatus once more. And now by an odd conjunction she found herself in the rooms of Robert Trewe.
She thoughtfully rose from her chair and searched the apartment with the interest of a fellow-tradesman. Yes, the volume of his own verse was among the rest. Though quite familiar with its contents, she read it here as if it spoke aloud to her, then called up Mrs. Hooper, the landlady, for some trivial service, and inquired again about the young man.
“Well, I’m sure you’d be interested in him, ma’am, if you could see him, only he’s so shy that I don’t suppose you will.” Mrs. Hooper seemed nothing loth to minister to her tenant’s curiosity about her predecessor. “Lived here long? Yes, nearly two years. He keeps on his rooms even when he’s not here: the soft air of this place suits his chest, and he likes to be able to come back at any time. He is mostly writing or reading, and doesn’t see many people, though, for the matter of that, he is such a good, kind young fellow that folks would only be too glad to be friendly with him if they knew him. You don’t meet kind-hearted people everyday.”
“Ah, he’s kind-hearted . . . and good.”
“Yes; he’ll oblige me in anything if I ask him. ‘Mr. Trewe,’ I say to him sometimes, you are rather out of spirits.’ ‘Well, I am, Mrs. Hooper,’ he’ll say, ‘though I don’t know how you should find it out.’ ‘Why not take a little change?’ I ask. Then in a day or two he’ll say that he will take a trip to Paris, or Norway, or somewhere; and I assure you he comes back all the better for it.”
“Ah, indeed! His is a sensitive nature, no doubt.”
“Yes. Still he’s odd in some things. Once when he had finished a poem of his composition late at night he walked up and down the room rehearsing it; and the floors being so thin — jerry-built houses, you know, though I say it myself — he kept me awake up above him till I wished him further. . . . But we get on very well.”
This was but the beginning of a series of conversations about the rising poet as the days went on. On one of these occasions Mrs. Hooper drew Ella’s attention to what she had not noticed before: minute scribblings in pencil on the wallpaper behind the curtains at the head of the bed.
“O! let me look,” said Mrs. Marchmill, unable to conceal a rush of tender curiosity as she bent her pretty face close to the wall.
“These,” said Mrs. Hooper, with the manner of a woman who knew things, “are the very beginnings and first thoughts of his verses. He has tried to rub most of them out, but you can read them still. My belief is that he wakes up in the night, you know, with some rhyme in his head, and jots it down there on the wall lest he should forget it by the morning. Some of these very lines you see here I have seen afterwards in print in the magazines. Some are newer; indeed, I have not seen that one before. It must have been done only a few days ago.”
“O, yes! . . . “ Ella Marchmill flushed without knowing why, and suddenly wished her companion would go away, now that the information was imparted. An indescribable consciousness of personal interest rather than literary made her anxious to read the inscription alone; and she accordingly waited till she could do so, with a sense that a great store of emotion would be enjoyed in the act.
Perhaps because the sea was choppy outside the Island, Ella’s husband found it much pleasanter to go sailing and steaming about without his wife, who was a bad sailor, than with her. He did not disdain to go thus alone on board the steamboats of the cheap-trippers, where there was dancing by moonlight, and where the couples would come suddenly down with a lurch into each other’s arms; for, as he blandly told her, the company was too mixed for him to take her amid such scenes. Thus, while this thriving manufacturer got a great deal of change and sea-air out of his sojourn here, the life, external at least, of Ella was monotonous enough, and mainly consisted in passing a certain number of hours each day in bathing and walking up and down a stretch of shore. But the poetic impulse having again waxed strong, she was possessed by an inner flame which left her hardly conscious of what was proceeding around her.
She had read till she knew by heart Trewe’s last little volume of verses, and spent a great deal of time in vainly attempting to rival some of them, till, in her failure, she burst into tears. The personal element in the magnetic attraction exercised by this circumambient, unapproachable master of hers was so much stronger than the intellectual and abstract that she could not understand it. To be sure, she was surrounded noon and night by his customary environment, which literally whispered of him to her at every moment; but he was a man she had never seen, and that all that moved her was the instinct to specialise a waiting emotion on the first fit thing that came to hand did not, of course, suggest itself to Ella.
In the natural way of passion under the too practical conditions which civilization has devised for its fruition, her husband’s love for her had not survived, except in the form of fitful friendship, anymore than, or even so much as, her own for him; and, being a woman of very living ardors, that required sustenance of some sort, they were beginning to feed on this chancing material, which was, indeed, of a quality far better than chance usually offers.
One day the children had been playing hide-and-seek in a closet, whence, in their excitement they pulled out some clothing. Mrs. Hooper explained that it belonged to Mr. Trewe, and hung it up in the closet again. Possessed of her fantasy, Ella went later in the afternoon, when nobody was in that part of the house, opened the closet, unhitched one of the articles, a mackintosh, and put it on, with the waterproof cap belonging to it.
“The mantle of Elijah!” she said. “Would it might inspire me to rival him, glorious genius that he is!”
Her eyes always grew wet when she thought like that, and she turned to look at herself in the glass. His heart had beat inside that coat, and his brain had worked under that hat at levels of thought she would never reach. The consciousness of her weakness beside him made her feel quite sick. Before she had got the things off her the door opened, and her husband entered the room.
“What the devil — ”
She blushed, and removed them.”I found them in the closet here,” she said, “and put them on in a freak. What have I else to do? You are always away!”
“Always away? Well. . .”
That evening she had a further talk with the landlady, who might herself have nourished a half-tender regard for the poet, so ready was she to discourse ardently about him.”You are interested in Mr. Trewe, I know, ma’am,” she said; “and he has just sent to say that he is going to call tomorrow afternoon to look up some books of his that he wants, if I’ll be in, and he may select them from your room?”
“O, yes!”
“You could very well meet Mr. Trewe then, if you’d like to be in the way!”
She promised with secret delight, and went to bed musing of him.
Next morning her husband observed: “I’ve been thinking of what you said, Ell: that I have gone about a good deal and left you without much to amuse you. Perhaps it’s true. Today, as there’s not much sea, I’ll take you with me on board the yacht.”
For the first time in her experience of such an offer Ella was not glad.
But she accepted it for the moment. The time for setting out drew near, and she went to get ready. She stood reflecting. The longing to see the poet she was now distinctly in love with overpowered all other considerations.
“I don’t want to go,” she said to herself. “I can’t bear to be away! And I won’t go.”
She told her husband that she had changed her mind about wishing to sail. He was indifferent, and went his way.For the rest of the day the house was quiet, the children having gone out upon the sands. The blinds waved in the sunshine to the soft, steady stroke of the sea beyond the wall; and the notes of the Green Silesian band, a troop of foreign gentlemen hired for the season, had drawn almost all the residents and promenaders away from the vicinity of Coburg House. A knock was audible at the door.
Mrs. Marchmill did not hear any servant go to answer it, and she became impatient. The books were in the room where she sat; but nobody came up. She rang the bell.”There is some person waiting at the door,” she said.
“O, no, ma’am’ He’s gone long ago. I answered it,” the servant replied, and Mrs. Hooper came in herself.
“So dissappointing!” she said. “Mr. Trewe not coming after all!”
“But I heard him knock, I fancy!”
“No; that was somebody inquiring for lodgings who came to the wrong house. I tell you that Mr. Trewe sent a note just before lunch to say I needn’t get any tea for him, as he should not require the books, and wouldn’t come to select them.”
Ella was miserable, and for a long time could not even reread his mournful ballad on “Severed Lives,” so aching was her erratic little heart, and so tearful her eyes. When the children came in with wet stockings, and ran up to her to tell her of their adventures, she could not feel that she cared about them half as much as usual.
“Mrs. Hooper, have you a photograph of — the gentleman who lived here?” She was getting to be curiously shy in mentioning his name.
“Why, yes. It’s in the ornamental frame on the mantelpiece in your own bedroom, ma’am.”
“No; the Royal Duke and Duchess are in that.”
“Yes, so they are; but he’s behind them. He belongs rightly to that frame, which I bought on purpose; but as he went away he said: “Cover me up from those strangers that are coming, for God’s sake. I don’t want them staring at me, and I am sure they won’t want me staring at them.” So I slipped in the Duke and Duchess temporarily in front of him, as they had no frame, and Royalties are more suitable for letting furnished than a private young man. If you take ‘em out you’ll see him under. Lord, ma’am, he wouldn’t mind if he knew it! He didn’t think the next tenant would be such an attractive lady as you, or he wouldn’t have thought of hiding himself, perhaps.”
“Is he handsome?” she asked timidly.
“I call him so. Some, perhaps, wouldn’t.”
“Should I?” she asked, with eagerness.
“I think you would, though some would say he’s more striking than handsome; a large-eyed thoughtful fellow, you know, with a very electric flash in his eye when he looks round quickly, such as you’d expect a poet to be who doesn’t get his living by it.”
“How old is he?”
“Several years older than yourself, ma’am; about thirty-one or two, I think.”
Ella was a matter of fact, a few months over thirty herself; but she did not look nearly so much. Though so immature in nature, she was entering on that tract of life in which emotional women begin to suspect that last love may be stronger than first love; and she would soon, alas, enter on the still more melancholy tract when at least the vainer ones of her sex shrink from receiving a male visitor otherwise than with their backs to the window or the blinds half down. She reflected on Mrs. Hooper’s remark, and said no more about age.
Just then a telegram was brought up. It came from her husband, who had gone down the Channel as far as Budmouth with his friends in the yacht, and would not be able to get back till next day.
After her light dinner Ella idled about the shore with the children till dusk, thinking of the yet uncovered photograph in her room, with a serene sense of in which this something ecstatic to come. For, with the subtle luxuriousness of fancy in which this young woman was an adept, on learning that her husband was to be absent that night she had refrained from incontinently rushing upstairs and, opening the picture-frame, preferring to reserve the inspection till she could be alone, and a more romantic tinge be imparted to the occasion by silence, candles, solemn sea and stars outside, than was afforded by the garish afternoon sunlight.
The children had been sent to bed, and Ella soon followed, though it was not yet ten o’clock. To gratify her passionate curiosity she now made her preparations, first getting rid of superfluous garments and putting on her dressing-gown, then arranging a chair in front of the table and reading several pages of Trewe’s tenderest utterances. Next she fetched the portrait-frame to the light, opened the back, took out the likeness, and set it up before her.
It was a striking countenance to look upon. The poet wore a luxuriant black moustache and imperial, and a slouched hat which shaded the forehead. The large dark eyes described by the landlady showed an unlimited capacity for misery, they looked out from beneath well-shaped brows as if they were reading the universe in the microcosm of the confronter’s face, and were not altogether overjoyed at what the spectacle portended.
Ella murmured in her lowest, richest, tenderest tone: “And it’s you who’ve so cruelly eclipsed me these many times!”
As she gazed long at the portrait she fell into thought, till her eyes filled with tears, and she touched the cardboard with her lips. Then she laughed with a nervous lightness, and wiped her eyes.
She thought how wicked she was, a woman having a husband and three children, to let her mind stray to a stranger in this unconscionable manner. No, he was not a stranger! She knew his thoughts and feelings as well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the self-same thoughts and feelings as hers, which her husband distinctly lacked; perhaps luckily for himself, considering that he had to provide for family expenses.
“He’s nearer my real self, he’s more intimate with the real me than Will is, after all, even though I’ve never seen him,” she said.
She laid his book and picture on the table at the bedside, and when she was reclining on the pillow she re-read those of Robert Trewe’s verses which she had marked from time to time as most touching and true. Putting these aside she set up the photograph on its edge upon the coverlet, and contemplated it as she lay. Then she scanned again by the light of the candle the half-obliterated pencillings on the wallpaper beside her head. There they were — phrases, couplets, bouts-rimes, beginnings and middles of lines, ideas in the rough, like Shelley’s scraps, and the least of them so intense, so sweet, so palpitating, that it seemed as if his very breath, warm and loving, fanned her cheeks from those walls, walls that had surrounded his head times and times as they surrounded her own now. He must often have put up his hand so — with the pencil in it. Yes, the writing was sideways, as it would be if executed by one who extended his arm thus.
These inscribed shapes of the poet’s world,
“Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality,”
were, no doubt, the thoughts and spirit-strivings which had come to him in the dead of night, when he could let himself go and have no fear of the frost of criticism. No doubt they had often been written up hastily by the light of the moon, the rays of the lamp, in the blue-gray dawn, in full daylight perhaps never. And now her hair was dragging where his arm had lain when he secured the fugitive fancies; she was sleeping on a poet’s lips, immersed in the very essence of him, permeated by his spirit as by an ether.
While she was dreaming the minutes away thus, a footstep came upon the stairs, and in a moment she heard her husband’s heavy step on the landing immediately without.
“Ell, where are you?”
What possessed her she could not have described, but,
with an instinctive objection to let her husband know what she had been doing, she slipped the photograph under the pillow just as he flung open the door with the air of a man who had dined not badly.
“O, I beg pardon,” said William Marchmill. “Have you a headache? I am afraid I have disturbed you.”
“No, I’ve not got a headache,” said she. “How is it you’ve come?”
“Well, we found we could get back in very good time after all, and I didn’t want to make another day of it, because of going somewhere else tomorrow.”
“Shall I come down again?”
“O, no. I’m as tired as a dog. I’ve had a good feed, and I shall turn in straight off. I want to get out at six o’clock tomorrow if I can. . . . I shan’t disturb you by my getting up; it will be long before you are awake.” And he came forward into the room.
While her eyes followed his movements, Ella softly pushed the photograph further out of sight.
“Sure you’re not ill?” he asked, bending over her.
“No, only wicked!”
“Never mind that.” And he stooped and kissed her. “I wanted to be with you tonight.”
Next morning Marchmill was called at six o’clock; and in waking and yawning he heard him muttering to himself. “What the deuce is this that’s been crackling under me so?” Imagining her asleep he searched round him and withdrew something. Through her half-opened eyes she perceived it to be Mr. Trewe.
“Well, I’m damned!” her husband exclaimed.
“What, dear?” said she.
“O, you are awake? Ha! ha!”
“What do you mean?”
“Some bloke’s photograph — a friend of our landlady’s, I suppose. I wonder how it came here; whisked off the mantelpiece by accident perhaps when they were making the bed.”
“I was looking at it yesterday, and it must have dropped in then.”
