‘You would not go up for me! When I was in London you would not go up – you stayed here! You said you were too old. But now you are ready to rush up to see her!’
The accusation was, he considered, less than just, for he had freely offered to accompany her to town – had been ready to put his work aside, and to reside alone in an hotel for an indeterminate number of days while she recovered. True, the offer had not been made with any great enthusiasm, and he had been greatly relieved when she had agreed that he should remain at home in order to look after Wessex, who would otherwise have been left alone. Nonetheless, he had made the offer.
‘My dear, if you remember, I stayed here on account of Wessex –’ he began.
She interrupted: ‘Did she come here?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When I was in London – did she come here?’
Momentarily he was lost for speech. She swept on:
‘She did! You had her here!’ Her face began to contort, preparatory to tears. ‘How could you? How could you?’
I have done nothing, he thought to himself. Why does she carry on so? He sighed: ‘I have done nothing, Florence. Mrs. Bugler did not come here.’
‘I am sure she did!’
‘She did not come here. All the time that you were in London, my thoughts were with you, and nowhere else.’
This too was true, at least to a great extent; he had missed Florence during her stay in the metropolis. He had been unable to work well, he disliked solitary eating, and without her reading to him the evenings had dragged interminably. On the day of her expected return, after asking Mrs. Simmons to prepare a suet jam roll for dinner (this being her favourite), he had spent two hours stationed with Wessex by the drive gate, awaiting her arrival. He hoped that when she saw him thus, devotedly greeting her after her ordeal, she would be impressed and grateful, but the journey back from London had taken longer than expected, and by the time of her return he had abandoned his lonely vigil.
Nor did she seem pleased to see him, he might have added. One of the very first things she had done was to berate the cook for the jam roll.
‘You are infatuated by her! You are infatuated! I saw you both! You and she – I – I saw! Everyone saw!’
He was now entirely baffled. ‘When?’
‘At the Corn Exchange … after the matinée. Leaning towards her … whispering in her ear … holding hands. Do you not care what people think? You will make yourself a laughing-stock.’
He gave her a wintry look. ‘As you say, I am eighty-four; I am too old to care what people think. But you mistake: there is nothing for them to think. Mrs. Bugler and I were not holding hands, and the reason why she and I were leaning towards each other is that she happens to be a little deaf. She had an ear infection as a child and it has left her a little deaf in her right ear.’
More was to come, he knew; a good deal more. From long experience he knew that these emotional fits had their own stages to complete before they came to an end. Why did she behave like this? By what peculiar throw of Fortune’s dice was it that he had come to be married to such a bag of nerves? What was the original impulse that had brought him and her to a union?
‘You have been writing poems about her. Do not deny it! I have read them! There they are!’ She extended a shaking hand at the desk. ‘“To Gertie”!’
Ah, so that was it. He did not attempt to deny the accusation; how could he have done so? The poems were there, an undeniable fact.
‘I know that I should not have read them, but they have been on your desk, I could not help it. Probably the maids have read them too. Imagine what they must think! It is plain as anything. You are thinking of eloping with her! You cannot deny it. You are infatuated!’
Her eyes, burning with pain, sought out his. He avoided them, fiddling instead with the paper-knife.
‘How could you? O, Thomas! It is so unnatural of you! She is married – married! – with a child, and you are running after her – why? I cannot believe it – I cannot,’ she repeated, with even greater vehemence. ‘I cannot. When I have given up everything to help you. I have given up everything!’
She now began to weep, as he had known from the outset she would.
‘My dear, you are over-wrought,’ he began at last, unable to conceal the resignation in his voice. ‘You will make yourself ill again. Calm yourself.’
‘How can I? How can I? When all day you sit here – thinking – only of her!’
Sinking to her knees and hiding her face in her hands, she sobbed that he had never truly loved her, that, if he loved her, he could not have written such things, and that he would not now be proposing to elope. ‘I am so alone!’
So it had come to this, that he had never truly loved her: well, well. It was not the first time that she had laid this charge at his door; every few months brought a similar outpouring of pent-up emotion. How should he answer it? By declaring his love? He could not do it, not now, under duress; it would have been too false.
He spoke, nevertheless. As gently as he could, he tried to tell her that she misunderstood; that he had written the poems as literary exercises; that they were flights of fancy addressed to an imaginary woman. ‘There is not the smallest possibility of my eloping with Mrs. Bugler.’ O, he was being more than a little disingenuous; but if it would stop her weeping it would be worth it.
‘Are you intending to publish these flights of fancy?’
‘I have not considered. Probably not.’
‘You cannot publish them. You cannot. It would be too hurtful.’
‘Florence, you must not upset yourself so much over a few small, inconsequential poems. I repeat, they are not about me and Mrs. Bugler. You read too much into them.’
‘How can you say they are inconsequential? You know how people will read them. You know what the newspapers are like. What will people in the town think? I can hear the gossip.’
‘No one there reads my poems,’ he said. This remark, although it contained a grain of truth, was not entirely true. However, what he then said was close to the truth: ‘If these poems are about any one person, I assure you, they are not about Mrs. Bugler, but about Tess d’Urberville.’
She stared wildly. ‘They are patently about Gertrude Bugler. “To Gertie”! It is plain to everyone. What has Tess to do with them?’
The old man said nothing. He had suddenly lost interest in it all; had retreated into some distant, safe region of the mind, from which he was able to see the present moment between himself and Florence as a small, insignificant ripple on the smooth face of existence. After all, the scene was such as he might have contrived for a novel many years ago: the wronged wife, her hot tears, her bitter accusations ringing about the ears of her husband … how many times, down the long centuries, had this encounter been played out, and with how many variations? Such was the thought that came to him as he sat at the desk.
He carelessly dropped a hand to touch the side of the dozing dog. The movement caught her attention; she jumped up, snatched the poems from the desk and flung them in the fire. ‘O! O! O!’ she cried. ‘How could you be so cruel!’
She gave way to fresh paroxysms.
What did she expect him to do? He might have made some attempt to retrieve the papers before they burnt, but he did not stir. He might also have made some attempt to comfort her, rising from his chair, putting an arm round her heaving shoulders, offering her a handkerchief; even, perhaps, apologising, although he had done nothing for which he considered it necessary to apologise. Arguably he ought to have been capable of some such saving gesture, but an immense indifference paralysed his limbs, rendering him incapable of action. How safe, how remote, how tedious it all seemed! How little he cared!
One of the buttons on his waistcoat, he observed – the penultimate button, viewed in order of descent – was loose, hanging by a thread. He was fond of the waistcoat, which had been knitted for him by Emma.
He watched as the papers smouldered more strongly and then burst
into flames.
She rushed out. The door opened and shut; the consequent draught blew through the room; but she was gone. A peace fell as he heard her rushing steps fade. Wessex, his slumbers interrupted, had gone too; and the atmosphere so violently disarranged by her emotion began to restore itself, to recover its former poise and composure.
The first of the poems that the old man had written to Gertie Bugler, and to which his wife seemed to have taken such violent exception, had been composed more than two months earlier. He could not now recall the spark which had brought it into existence, but there had been no deliberate decision. He had not woken up one morning and said to himself, ‘Now I shall write a poem about her!’ No; that was not how it happened, or not in his case. Perhaps it was so with certain poets, who wrote certain types of poetry; but for him a poem was generally an expression of an impulse of thought or feeling. In years gone by, especially in the dog days of August, he could remember lying on his back at night in order to watch for shooting stars. When such a meteor appeared it always did so without any warning; it burnt its way across his vision for a second, like a match lit in the darkness, and then was gone. The genesis of poetry, for him, was something like that.
So the first poem about Gertie had had its birth. It was a poem of regret, more than longing: regret that Fate had decreed that he and she, kindred spirits, were sundered by such an ocean of Time as to make their love impossible. The space of sixty long years lay betwixt them: was it that he had been born too early, or she too late?
In a second poem, they chanced to meet at a roadside inn. They talked of their love in hopeless terms. ‘And I so much older in years, and so much younger in wisdom than she …’
In a third, he had imagined her mourning at his graveside, on a day of heavy rain. Her sodden hair dripped and her face streamed, while the rain penetrated the ground and sank to the hard box in which lay his corpse; yet his spirit was that of a bird, perched on the reddish bough of the yew that grew nearby, and singing loudly. She did not heed him, though he sang for all his might and strove to communicate that, for her, still, love’s fire burnt in his crimson breast. O that, in her sorrow, she might have heard and understood!
In a fourth, they were both ghosts, lodged on some cold, astral ledge, reflecting on the distant world that they had left behind, and wishing they had known then what they knew now.
The fifth was the poem about the elopement, an idea that owed some of its inspiration to the example of Shelley. Undetected, after a surreptitious exchange of notes, he waited for her in the hour before dawn at Toller Down Gate, a lonely upland spot in the heart of Wessex. While a chill wind blew and the stars glittered in the spaces between the black masses of the clouds, the flock of ewes grazing nearby regarded him with a certain surprise, as if wondering what his business might be at such an early hour and so far from the nearest human habitation. He strained his eyes in the direction whence she would appear. Sunrise was the appointed time for their meeting. Would she come, as she had promised, or had she been prevented from doing so? Was she unwell? Was he waiting at the right spot? A dozen unhappy possibilities passed through his mind as the sky grew paler and the inky darkness began to thin by steady degrees, each minute allowing him to discern a little more than the minute before. At last, when the first tinges of pink were edging into the space above the eastern horizon, he seemed to make out the faint shape of a human form. For a moment he remained in doubt as to whether it was she or some other person, and then his uncertainties vanished. She ran panting towards him, and flung herself into his arms. Such had been the dreamt scene, such went the poem, such might have been the ends to which their thoughts and hopes had tended; but in the last lines of the poem it turned out that this scene was not the start but the end of love, for they were both married.
A sixth poem was a reflection on that lost autumn day when once she came to call, when the trees were shedding their last leaves and the light fading in the hall; there he and she sat and spoke of this and that for some short space while Time’s chariot rolled on its heedless way. What remained after her going? A smear of lipstick on the cup’s rim, a single strand of dark hair, and his overflowing heart.
In a seventh, unfinished poem, set far in the future – the poem on which he had been engaged – a man reading an old volume of Shelley’s works discovered that same strand of hair pressed between the pages of ‘The Revolt of Islam’, and fell to musing whether the hair had come to be there by chance or design, and who the woman might have been to whose head it had originally belonged.
These were but seven of the poems; in all, he had written more than twenty in a mere month. It was much faster than his usual rate of composition, although there had been periods in the past when he had been equally productive.
He got up from his chair and used a pair of tongs to extract a surviving sheet from the fire, but it smoked so much that he put it back and let it burn. If necessary he would be able to write the poems over again, though he doubted that he ever would. To rekindle the original impulses that had brought them into being did not interest him greatly; besides, to bring them back would cause Florence even more pain. Again he heard her railing at him, again he saw her anguished face. You are infatuated, you are going to elope with her! How can you write such things?
If only she understood … why were women in some things so perceptive, and in others so lacking in perception? The history of relations between the sexes was, when considered with a dispassionate eye, one beset by unhappiness. ‘Into the apple of love crawls the worm of distrust’ – uninvited, a pleasant phrase came to him, and might have drawn him back to poetry, but the precious moment for literary composition had gone. The day seemed ruined. The insubstantial shadows of branches played over the desk, the paper, his hands and head.
Something niggled at his mind. He picked up the letter, which she had dropped. What were those strange, amber-coloured butterflies found nowhere else but on Egdon? Twice he read the letter, and then a third time.
Why had he ever written thus? He was not a lepidopterist – had never had the desire, one experienced by so many of his contemporaries, to collect butterflies and moths, skewering their bodies and storing them in cabinets. Yet he knew the heath intimately; as a small boy he had spent many long summer hours exploring its furzy secrets, following thin paths that wound erratically to and fro. On such walks one readily encountered paper-pale miller moths that lived in the dried bones of the heath and flew up in weak flurries when disturbed, but scarcely any butterflies, amber or otherwise, and of the species mentioned by the letter-writer, none was conceivable. The Lulworth Skipper was never seen on the Wessex heaths but was an habitué of the coast near Lulworth, exactly as its name declared. (And, like all the skippers, it was a shy little butterfly which would never have settled on a man’s back.) The Small Copper, equally, rarely appeared on heath-land; thistles were its favourite food. As for the Fox Moth, he was not sure that he would have ever been able to identify such an insect.
Hoping for clues, he fetched a copy of the novel in question from a shelf. It was nearly the favourite of all his books, for it had been written at a happy time in his life, when he and Emma had lived in domestic harmony. He had not read it attentively for years. His eyes, rather like those of Clym Yeobright, were no longer good enough for prolonged reading, and anyway he was somewhat wary of looking too closely at his old stories, for fear that he would find phrases and sentences he might regret.
He turned the pages until he came to the appropriate passage, and at once found the answer to the mystery. This was, quite simply, that the amber-coloured butterflies did not exist, for his description of the heath had been a piece of poetical invention. He had been attempting, as it were, to conjure a jewelled vision of the rough heath, turning it into a place of magical beauty; hence the ‘glittering point’ of Clym’s hook, hence, too, the ‘emerald-green’ of the grasshoppers which leaped over his feet, falling awkwardly, like unskilful acrobats, hence, even, the ‘bright’ of
Clym’s surname. The amber butterflies were part of that vision; they did not live beyond it.
Doubtless the letter-writer would be disappointed by such information; well, but it was the truth. Just like the butterflies, Egdon itself, that vast expanse of heath described at the start of the novel, did not exist and probably never had; it was a piece of fiction that stood at a certain remove from reality. He hated these literary detectives, who failed to grasp the nature of art: that it was a shaping of reality, not reality itself.
He was agreeably impressed to see that the passage began by introducing Clym as a ‘man from Paris’. Within the novel, it was against the gaudy shows of Paris that this brilliantly jewelled heath stood. Country against city; that opposition was never far from his novels, with his implied view that happiness might more easily be found in the former than in the latter.
Yet there was something else. In those far-off days, amber had been one of Emma’s favourite stones; its warm glow, she always felt, came close to matching the colour of her hair. Thick and luxuriant, tumbling in ringlets about her shoulders, her hair had unquestionably been her best feature. For that reason, at an early point in their courtship, when they had been so much in love, he had given her an amber brooch, oval-shaped. He could remember buying it, from a jeweller in Piccadilly. She had worn it often. His adornment of the heath with amber butterflies had a deeply private meaning, or so it seemed to him now.
This brooch must be in Emma’s jewellery box, which he kept in a wardrobe in his bedroom. He wondered whether he might give it to Gertie. Slipping it out of his pocket at some suitable juncture, he would say, ‘Gertie, I thought you might like this –.’ Should he tell her that it once belonged to Emma?
It was not in doubt that he would have to act in secret. If Florence were to discover what he had done, he would never hear the last of it. But – he defended himself – it was his brooch, to dispose of as he wished. Unseen in the velvet dark of a jewellery box, it was wasted.
Might he post it to her Beaminster home? With a card: ‘To the embodiment of Tess’ –? Possibly. But if she were to write back, Florence would probably open the letter.
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