In May, Hardy escorted Emma to a party in London, telling Mrs Henniker, ‘Emma wants me to take her to the reception at the Foreign Office… so I suppose I must.’ 24 He declined his invitation to the coronation of George V. He spent the day of his seventy-first birthday at Bockhampton with Florence and his family, and then took her to the Lake District with Henry and Kate and with the addition of Mr Dugdale, who seems to have accepted the absence of Mrs Hardy from the party without question. In July, Hardy went to Somerset with Florence and Kate. Then it was Emma’s turn to be with Florence. The two women spent a fortnight in a hotel beside the sea at Worthing. This seems to have been the last time they were together: or at any rate there is no record of Florence being at Max Gate again, and Emma made no more visits to London.
Florence was typing Hardy’s revised prefaces to the novels for the new Wessex Edition in preparation with Macmillan. She may also have helped Emma with advice on putting out two privately printed booklets with a Dorchester printer: one of her prose meditations, the other of her pathetically unskilled poems, although there is no written record of this. There was the usual Aldeburgh visit in October, and then Florence sometimes stayed in Weymouth, where Hardy could easily visit her, and did so. While she was there, Alfred Hyatt died suddenly of a haemorrhage of the lung. He was forty, and Florence was now thirty-two. This is when she told Clodd that he had been more to her than anything else in the world since she was twenty. 25
In February 1912 Mrs Henniker’s husband, the Major-General, who had survived the Boer War, was kicked by a horse and died of heart failure. Florence went to help her in London, and the two women produced a small memorial book, to which Hardy contributed some verses, written at Florence’s request. From now on Mrs Henniker regarded Florence as a friend, and Florence became genuinely devoted to her. She suffered a second loss when Sir Thornley Stoker died. Generous to the last, he left her a bequest of £2,000, enough to give her a degree of independence.
In Dorset, Hardy wrote his great poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ in response to the sinking of the Titanic – and he wrote it to order. 26 It stands apart from his other work in its superb simplicity, and marks an advance in power and extension of his range as a poet – with it he moves into the twentieth century. Donald Davie compared it to the ship that is half its subject: ‘The poem itself is an engine, a sleek and powerful machine; its rhymes slide home like pistons inside cylinders.’ 27 He might have added that the poem stays afloat to the end. It is grim and exuberant at the same time, as Hardy conjures up the simultaneous shaping of the ship and its ‘sinister mate’ the iceberg, seeing their conjunction as a working of the mysterious power behind the universe:
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too…
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres. 28
Hardy and Florence enjoyed four days together in Aldeburgh in May. On Hardy’s birthday, on 2 June, Yeats and Henry Newbolt travelled to Max Gate to present him with the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature. Newbolt, just back from Italy, described what turned out to be an occasion ‘beyond all others unusual and anxious’. Over lunch,
Hardy, an exquisitely remote figure… asked me a hundred questions about my impressions of the architecture of Rome and Venice… Through his conversation I could hear and see Mrs Hardy giving Yeats much curious information about the two very fine cats, who sat to right and left of her plate on the table itself… At last Hardy rose from his seat and looked towards his wife: she made no movement, and he walked to the door. She was still silent and unmoved: he invited her to leave us for a few minutes, for a ceremony which in accordance with his wishes was to be performed without witnesses. She at once remonstrated, and Yeats and I begged that she should not be asked to leave us. But Hardy insisted and she made no further appeal but gathered up her cats and her train with perfect simplicity and left the room. 29
Emma must have exasperated Hardy beyond endurance for him to have treated her as he did on that occasion, in the presence of two eminent visitors. What was worse was that her presence made him so uneasy that all his considerable charm took flight, and he appeared nervous and uneasy with his guests as well as cold and unkind to his wife. He insisted on reading out his speech of acceptance to Yeats and Newbolt at the dining table. It began with a personal allusion, half jocular, half melancholy, as he said that he was ‘rather an old boy to get a medal, and that, unfortunately, he had no boy of his own to whom to pass it on’.
There was another visit from literary dignitaries in early September, this time Gosse, bringing with him Arthur Benson, agog with curiosity. Benson was a poet himself and had sent Hardy a volume of his verse in 1892, getting a polite, if cautious, note of thanks: ‘I am much struck with the poems so far, but I have not yet reached a critical estimate.’ 30 Benson had also walked past Max Gate in 1905 as he toured Dorset and judged it a ‘feeble, ugly house’. ‘It is walled in, and thickly planted with firs &c, so that it looks like a house in a tray of vegetation.’ 31 He was the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, with all the advantages and disadvantages that brought. He had taught at Eton and was now a Fellow of Magdalene in Cambridge. He was a gifted as well as a privileged man, and a repressed, and depressed, homosexual. Like other members of his family, he suffered periods of mental breakdown. As well as being snobbish and quarrelsome, he kept a vast, detailed diary. His entry for 5 September 1912 gives his impressions of Max Gate, Hardy and Mrs Hardy, with much carefully observed detail and feline condescension.
We made our way out among the neat villas and suburbs – at the very end of the town where it melts into the country, there appeared a little hedged and walled plantation – Max Gate – with a red house dimly visible, bordered by turnip-fields. We descended at the gate and made our way by a winding little drive to a small gravel sweep, all ill-kept, to the door of the house. It is a structure at once mean and pretentious, with no grace of design or detail, and with two hideous low flanking turrets with pointed roofs of blue slate. In the vestibule a frightful ornament of alabaster, three foliated basins tiara-wise with doves drinking… There was a smell of cooking all about. A tiny maid took us into a rather nice drawing room with a bow window, with many pictures and ornaments and a large portrait of Hardy. Here was a small, pretty, rather mincing elderly lady with hair curiously puffed and padded rather fantastically dressed. Gosse took her by both hands and talked to her in a strain of exaggerated gallantry which was deeply appreciated. A solid plebeian overdressed niece was presented. Then Hardy came in – very small and lean and faintly browned. His features are curiously worn and blurred and ruinous. He has a big rather long head, bald, with thin longish hair at the back, fine expressive brows and rather lustreless dark eyes. One would take him for a retired half-pay officer, from a not very smart regiment. He greeted Gosse very warmly and me cordially, and enquired sedulously after our health, complimenting us on our books, as if discharging a natural courtesy. Presently we went in to lunch. It was hard to talk to Mrs H who rambled along in a very inconsequential way, with a bird-like sort of wit, looking sideways and treating one’s remarks as amiable interruptions.
Lunch was long and plentiful – rather coarse fare. We were served first with odd little cakes of mincemeat, one for each, a little high perhaps. The solid niece regarded hers stolidly with an air of knowing too much about its composition but didn’t taste. Hardy offered claret, and rose on each occasion to pour it in my glass. Mrs H struggled with and chipped at a great chicken, stuffed, with an odd little dish of bits of cold bacon beside it. She stood to carve, and treated the chicken as if she were engaged in some curious handicraft – after which she devoted herself in a serious silence to her meal. Hardy filled my plate with odd thin slices of lamb, and sluiced his own plate of cold lamb with hot gravy. Then came a great apple tart. It was a meal
such as one might have got at a big farmhouse – two tiny youthful maids waited, bursting with zeal and interest. The room was a dull one, rather slatternly. It was distempered in purple, much streaked and stained… Mrs H produced cigarettes, and Hardy said he never smoked; but Gosse playfully insisted that Mrs H should have one. She said she had never smoked, but lit a cigarette and coughed cruelly at intervals, every now and then laying it down and saying, ‘There that will be enough’ but always resuming it, till I feared disaster. Hardy looked at her so fiercely and scornfully that I made haste to say that I had persuaded my mother to smoke.
Benson goes on for many more pages, describing the garden with its lumpy grass and weedy trees planted too close together. He thought Hardy was ‘not agreeable’ to his wife, but saw that his patience was tried by one so odd who yet had to be treated as rational. He decided there was ‘something secret and inscrutable’ in him. He added that ‘their kindness and courtesy were great’. 32
We know that by now Emma was ill with an undiagnosed condition, and often in pain. Sometimes she felt that her usual bicycle ride to church at Fordington on Sunday was too much for her and had herself pushed in a bath chair by the gardener. Still, she summoned her energy to entertain, and she was friendly with the vicar there, Mr Bartelot, and with his wife. She gave a late-summer garden party and took a group of children from Fordington for a beach picnic, bringing all of them back to Max Gate afterwards for presents and tea. As Benson noted, she also had her niece Lilian to stay, although she found her so trying she sent her home again soon after his visit. It seems that her friendship with Florence was at an end. Possibly she had understood how blind she had been to the relationship between Florence and her husband.
Emma’s new maid Dolly, only fourteen years old, was the kindest presence in her life now. Dolly’s tasks included brushing her mistress’s hair to soothe the eczema on her head and fetching her large doses of painkiller from the chemist in Dorchester. She carried her breakfast and lunch upstairs. Emma usually came down for dinner. Hardy said later that she sometimes complained of her heart during the autumn, but she would not have the doctor. He was always busy. In late October he was sitting on a Grand Jury at the Dorchester Assizes. But he did notice that one day she sat down at the piano and played through her repertoire of favourite songs, then closed the instrument and announced she would never play again. It suggests she had some idea that her life had not long to run. 33 Knowing your own death is approaching is a test of character under any circumstances. To be in her position, with no one you feel you can talk to, no sister or child, and no one to comfort you or show you affection, must have been bitter beyond most people’s endurance. Emma had many faults, but her courage was unflinching and she remained stoic.
On 19 November the Dorchester Dramatic Society was opening a staged version of The Trumpet-Major. Rebekah Owen and her sister had travelled from their house in the Lake District to Dorchester to be present, and Florence, avoiding Max Gate, was in Weymouth for the same purpose. Emma does not appear to have attended any performance. She hired a car one day around this date to visit friends, the Wood Homers, who lived at Bardolf Manor near Puddletown. The car was draughty and uncomfortable, and on her return she felt very ill with back ache. She refused to call the doctor, but stopped eating and kept entirely to her room. There she was writing poetry. One poem, ‘Winter’, was in praise of moss, which survives all weathers with its ‘happy lowly ways’. Another looked back to her childhood:
Oh! would I were a dancing child!
Oh! would I were again
Dancing in the grass of Spring,
Dancing in the rain.
Leaping with the birds a-wing
Singing with the birds that sing. 34
Her birthday on Sunday, 24 November, passed without notice or incident, but the following day the Owen sisters called and sent messages upstairs in their peremptory way, insisting that she should come down for tea. She did so with obvious difficulty. They were sympathetic, but decided she was suffering from nerves and depression. She was still unwilling to see a doctor. On the 26th she at last allowed the doctor to visit but not to examine her, and he thought she might be making herself ill by her fasting. She made her way slowly and painfully upstairs, and Hardy went out to see the play performed in Dorchester in the evening. On the morning of the 27th her maid Dolly went to her room as usual at eight and found her dying. Although she did not remember doing so, Dolly may have called the cook before fetching the master, because, according to Rebekah Owen’s letter written that day, Emma died ‘in the Cook’s arms, who was trying to lift her’. 35 But none of those who crowded up the narrow stairs and into the small room could do anything for Emma by then.
The doctor gave the cause of death as heart failure and impacted gallstones, and told Hardy he suspected some ‘internal perforation’. The back pain suggests an enlarged and leaking aortic artery as the cause of death. 36 ‘Poor thing, poor thing. I am crying for her now,’ Miss Owen went on. ‘They had been married 38 years. It must be a great shock to him. I believe his fidelity to her to have been perfect.’
21. Satires of Circumstance
This is the point at which this book began, with a grieving Hardy inspired by Emma’s death to begin his incomparable series of elegiac poems. No one who knew him expected it, or could have expected it without understanding the width of the gap between his imaginative life and the day-to-day events going on around him. He considered taking Emma’s body to Cornwall but decided that, since he wished to be buried in the same grave, it was more sensible to make it at Stinsford. That meant putting her alongside his mother, her old enemy: no matter. Mary explained to friends that the grave ‘is deep as Tom would like to rest on her there. Poor dear soul she was very trying to live with, but perhaps she could not help it, and she did her best to prepare for the life to come.’ 1 The funeral took place three days after Emma’s death, and Mary did not attend it. Emma’s niece Lilian arrived after the ceremony, and Florence kept away. Henry and Kate Hardy were there, and so was Rebekah Owen, who was touched by the scene, ‘the lonely Churchyard, the pale November sunlight, the very few who were there –; Mr Hardy, his brother and sister, a deputation from some Dorchester society, a very few villagers’. 2 Hardy laid a wreath inscribed‘From her Lonely Husband, with the Old Affection’. 3
The practical matters of the funeral were not the only ones to be dealt with. Who was to run Max Gate and give orders to the cook, the maids and the gardener? Three women with conflicting agendas were soon in the house. Kate Hardy moved in to take charge until a housekeeper could be found; she and Mary knew of a possible one, the daughter of a Lower Bockhampton bootmaker, who had experience of being in service, and they thought she would be most suitable. 4 Hardy had other ideas. He had written immediately to Florence, asking her to come, and she did. Lilian Gifford invited herself, gathered up her late aunt’s clothes and took them to London to sell, then returned, declaring her intention of remaining to look after her ‘daddy-uncle’. Kate was the oldest of the three women and had no wish to leave her own comfortable home, whereas Florence and Lilian, both in their mid thirties, faced dismal prospects. Kate and Florence were united in their detestation of Lilian, who insulted Florence to her face: ‘I don’t think a day ever passes but I get some gibe or sneer’ or a reminder that while her Aunt Emma had been a lady, Florence was not. But she pleased Hardy by talking to him about Emma. Emma’s cook Jane, who had respected her late mistress, remained in charge of the kitchen and also despised Florence for not being a lady. 5 Hardy worried that Dorchester would gossip about Florence’s position in his house, with reason, the gossip being fuelled by Lilian’s and the servants’ tales. He told Florence not to go out and decreed that they could not visit Aldeburgh together. At the same time, when she went home to Enfield after Christmas he wrote to her, ‘If I once get you here again won’t I clutch you tight: you shall stay till spring.’ Florence was back with him early in February, and the Max Gate circus continued, no one ce
rtain of the outcome. 6
Mary Hardy wrote to her cousin Nat Sparks in February about Emma’s death: ‘She was strange in her head and did not improve as she grew older. A niece of hers who was brought up at Max Gate lives with Tom as he feels he can’t have a stranger there now he is old. She and her brother will have what he has to give I suppose when his end comes.’ 7 Nobody expected the end of a widower in his seventies to be very distant. In the spring both Lilian and Gordon were duly at Max Gate, Gordon for the Easter weekend and Lilian showing every sign of installing herself for good. They believed that they were to inherit the house.
Meanwhile Hardy had found Emma’s diaries, with their angry and contemptuous accounts of his behaviour. Sensibly enough, he decided they were largely the product of a mind subject to delusions and refused to allow them to spoil his renewed vision of her as the love of his life. Some of her accusations may even have seemed justified. None of this in any way diminished his present need for Florence, but in March he left her at Max Gate while he travelled to Cornwall, a journey he had not made for forty years, to revisit the scenes of his first meeting with Emma and their courtship. Here there was fresh inspiration for poems. The intensity of the experience exhilarated him. His brother Henry, least troubling or intrusive of companions, went with him to Cornwall, and while they were there Hardy made arrangements for a memorial tablet to Emma to be prepared for the church at St Juliot. Then he returned to the problems at Max Gate. In his absence Florence had been keeping a loaded revolver in her bedroom, presumably intended for intruders rather than Giffords, but in any case a sign of her overwrought state. 8 When Mrs Henniker invited her to stay with her in April at Southwold, she accepted eagerly, Aldeburgh now being forbidden to her.
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