by Thomas Hardy
In the course of ten minutes he adored her.
And how about little Avice Caro? He did not think of her as before.
He was not sure that he had ever seen the real Beloved in that friend of his youth, solicitous as he was for her welfare. But, loving her or not, he perceived that the spirit, emanation, idealism, which called itself his Love was flitting stealthily from some remoter figure to the near one in the chamber overhead.
Avice had not kept her engagement to meet him in the lonely ruin, fearing her own imaginings. But he, in fact, more than she, had been educated out of the island innocence that had upheld old manners; and this was the strange consequence of Avice’s misapprehension.
CHAPTER VI.
ON THE BRINK
Miss Bencomb was leaving the hotel for the railway, which was quite near at hand, and had only recently been opened, as if on purpose for this event. At Jocelyn’s suggestion she wrote a message to inform her father that she had gone to her aunt’s, with a view to allaying anxiety and deterring pursuit. They walked together to the platform and bade each other good-bye; each obtained a ticket independently, and Jocelyn got his luggage from the cloak-room.
On the platform they encountered each other again, and there was a light in their glances at each other which said, as by a flash-telegraph: ‘We are bound for the same town, why not enter the same compartment?’
They did.
She took a corner seat, with her back to the engine; he sat opposite. The guard looked in, thought they were lovers, and did not show other travellers into that compartment. They talked on strictly ordinary matters; what she thought he did not know, but at every stopping station he dreaded intrusion. Before they were halfway to London the event he had just begun to realise was a patent fact. The Beloved was again embodied; she filled every fibre and curve of this woman’s form.
Drawing near the great London station was like drawing near Doomsday. How should he leave her in the turmoil of a crowded city street? She seemed quite unprepared for the rattle of the scene. He asked her where her aunt lived.
‘Bayswater,’ said Miss Bencomb.
He called a cab, and proposed that she should share it till they arrived at her aunt’s, whose residence lay not much out of the way to his own. Try as he would he could not ascertain if she understood his feelings, but she assented to his offer and entered the vehicle.
‘We are old friends,’ he said, as they drove onward.
‘Indeed, we are,’ she answered, without smiling.
‘But hereditarily we are mortal enemies, dear Juliet.’
‘Yes — What did you say?’
‘I said Juliet.’
She laughed in a half-proud way, and murmured: ‘Your father is my father’s enemy, and my father is mine. Yes, it is so.’ And then their eyes caught each other’s glance. ‘My queenly darling!’ he burst out; ‘instead of going to your aunt’s, will you come and marry me?’
A flush covered her over, which seemed akin to a flush of rage. It was not exactly that, but she was excited. She did not answer, and he feared he had mortally offended her dignity. Perhaps she had only made use of him as a convenient aid to her intentions. However, he went on — ‘Your father would not be able to reclaim you then! After all, this is not so precipitate as it seems. You know all about me, my history, my prospects. I know all about you. Our families have been neighbours on that isle for hundreds of years, though you are now such a London product.’
‘Will you ever be a Royal Academician?’ she asked musingly, her excitement having calmed down.
‘I hope to be — I WILL be, if you will be my wife.’
His companion looked at him long.
‘Think what a short way out of your difficulty this would be,’ he continued. ‘No bother about aunts, no fetching home by an angry father.’
It seemed to decide her. She yielded to his embrace.
‘How long will it take to marry?’ Miss Bencomb asked by-and-by, with obvious self-repression.
‘We could do it to-morrow. I could get to Doctors’ Commons by noon to-day, and the licence would be ready by to-morrow morning.’
‘I won’t go to my aunt’s, I will be an independent woman! I have been reprimanded as if I were a child of six. I’ll be your wife if it is as easy as you say.’
They stopped the cab while they held a consultation. Pierston had rooms and a studio in the neighbourhood of Campden Hill; but it would be hardly desirable to take her thither till they were married. They decided to go to an hotel.
Changing their direction, therefore, they went back to the Strand, and soon ensconced themselves in one of the venerable old taverns of Covent Garden, a precinct which in those days was frequented by West-country people. Jocelyn then left her and proceeded on his errand eastward.
It was about three o’clock when, having arranged all preliminaries necessitated by this sudden change of front, he began strolling slowly back; he felt bewildered, and to walk was a relief. Gazing occasionally into this shop window and that, he called a hansom as by an inspiration, and directed the driver to ‘Mellstock Gardens.’ Arrived here, he rang the bell of a studio, and in a minute or two it was answered by a young man in shirt-sleeves, about his own age, with a great smeared palette on his left thumb.
‘O, you, Pierston! I thought you were in the country. Come in. I’m awfully glad of this. I am here in town finishing off a painting for an American, who wants to take it back with him.’
Pierston followed his friend into the painting-room, where a pretty young woman was sitting sewing. At a signal from the painter she disappeared without speaking.
‘I can see from your face you have something to say; so we’ll have it all to ourselves. You are in some trouble? What’ll you drink?’
‘Oh! it doesn’t matter what, so that it is alcohol in some shape or form.... Now, Somers, you must just listen to me, for I HAVE something to tell.’
Pierston had sat down in an arm-chair, and Somers had resumed his painting. When a servant had brought in brandy to soothe Pierston’s nerves, and soda to take off the injurious effects of the brandy, and milk to take off the depleting effects of the soda, Jocelyn began his narrative, addressing it rather to Somers’s Gothic chimneypiece, and Somers’s Gothic clock, and Somers’s Gothic rugs, than to Somers himself, who stood at his picture a little behind his friend.
‘Before I tell you what has happened to me,’ Pierston said, ‘I want to let you know the manner of man I am.’
‘Lord — I know already.’
‘No, you don’t. It is a sort of thing one doesn’t like to talk of. I lie awake at night thinking about it.’
‘No!’ said Somers, with more sympathy, seeing that his friend was really troubled.
‘I am under a curious curse, or influence. I am posed, puzzled and perplexed by the legerdemain of a creature — a deity rather; by Aphrodite, as a poet would put it, as I should put it myself in marble. ... But I forget — this is not to be a deprecatory wail, but a defence — a sort of Apologia pro vita mea.’
‘That’s better. Fire away!’
CHAPTER VII.
HER EARLIER INCARNATIONS
‘You, Somers, are not, I know, one of those who continue to indulge in the world-wide, fond superstition that the Beloved One of any man always, or even usually, cares to remain in one corporeal nook or shell for any great length of time, however much he may wish her to do so. If I am wrong, and you do still hold to that ancient error — well, my story will seem rather queer.’
‘Suppose you say the Beloved of some men, not of any man.’
‘All right — I’ll say one man, this man only, if you are so particular. We are a strange, visionary race down where I come from, and perhaps that accounts for it. The Beloved of this one man, then, has had many incarnations — too many to describe in detail. Each shape, or embodiment, has been a temporary residence only, which she has entered, lived in awhile, and made her exit from, leaving the substance, so far as I have been concerned, a co
rpse, worse luck! Now, there is no spiritualistic nonsense in this — it is simple fact, put in the plain form that the conventional public are afraid of. So much for the principle.’
‘Good. Go on.’
‘Well; the first embodiment of her occurred, so nearly as I can recollect, when I was about the age of nine. Her vehicle was a little blue-eyed girl of eight or so, one of a family of eleven, with flaxen hair about her shoulders, which attempted to curl, but ignominiously failed, hanging like chimney-crooks only. This defect used rather to trouble me; and was, I believe, one of the main reasons of my Beloved’s departure from that tenement. I cannot remember with any exactness when the departure occurred. I know it was after I had kissed my little friend in a garden-seat on a hot noontide, under a blue gingham umbrella, which we had opened over us as we sat, that passers through East Quarriers might not observe our marks of affection, forgetting that our screen must attract more attention than our persons.
‘When the whole dream came to an end through her father leaving the island, I thought my Well-Beloved had gone for ever (being then in the unpractised condition of Adam at sight of the first sunset). But she had not. Laura had gone for ever, but not my Beloved.
‘For some months after I had done crying for the flaxen-haired edition of her, my Love did not reappear. Then she came suddenly, unexpectedly, in a situation I should never have predicted. I was standing on the kerbstone of the pavement in Budmouth-Regis, outside the Preparatory School, looking across towards the sea, when a middle-aged gentleman on horseback, and beside him a young lady, also mounted, passed down the street. The girl turned her head, and — possibly because I was gaping at her in awkward admiration, or smiling myself — smiled at me. Having ridden a few paces, she looked round again and smiled.
‘It was enough, more than enough, to set me on fire. I understood in a moment the information conveyed to me by my emotion — the Well-Beloved had reappeared. This second form in which it had pleased her to take up her abode was quite a grown young woman’s, darker in complexion than the first. Her hair, also worn in a knot, was of an ordinary brown, and so, I think, were her eyes, but the niceties of her features were not to be gathered so cursorily. However, there sat my coveted one, re-embodied; and, bidding my schoolmates a hasty farewell as soon as I could do so without suspicion, I hurried along the Esplanade in the direction she and her father had ridden. But they had put their horses to a canter, and I could not see which way they had gone. In the greatest misery I turned down a side street, but was soon elevated to a state of excitement by seeing the same pair galloping towards me. Flushing up to my hair, I stopped and heroically faced her as she passed. She smiled again, but, alas! upon my Love’s cheek there was no blush of passion for me.’
Pierston paused, and drank from his glass, as he lived for a brief moment in the scene he had conjured up. Somers reserved his comments, and Jocelyn continued —
‘That afternoon I idled about the streets, looking for her in vain. When I next saw one of the boys who had been with me at her first passing I stealthily reminded him of the incident, and asked if he knew the riders.
‘“O yes,” he said. “That was Colonel Targe and his daughter Elsie.”
‘“How old do you think she is?” said I, a sense of disparity in our ages disturbing my mind.
‘“O — nineteen, I think they say. She’s going to be married the day after to-morrow to Captain Popp, of the 501st, and they are ordered off to India at once.”
‘The grief which I experienced at this intelligence was such that at dusk I went away to the edge of the harbour, intending to put an end to myself there and then. But I had been told that crabs had been found clinging to the dead faces of persons who had fallen in thereabout, leisurely eating them, and the idea of such an unpleasant contingency deterred me. I should state that the marriage of my Beloved concerned me little; it was her departure that broke my heart. I never saw her again.
‘Though I had already learnt that the absence of the corporeal matter did not involve the absence of the informing spirit, I could scarce bring myself to believe that in this case it was possible for her to return to my view without the form she had last inhabited.
‘But she did.
‘It was not, however, till after a good space of time, during which I passed through that bearish age in boys, their early teens, when girls are their especial contempt. I was about seventeen, and was sitting one evening over a cup of tea in a confectioner’s at the very same watering-place, when opposite me a lady took her seat with a little girl. We looked at each other awhile, the child made advances, till I said: “She’s a good little thing.”
‘The lady assented, and made a further remark.
‘“She has the soft fine eyes of her mother,” said I.
‘“Do you think her eyes are good?” asks the lady, as if she had not heard what she had heard most — the last three words of my opinion.
‘“Yes — for copies,” said I, regarding her.
‘After this we got on very well. She informed me that her husband had gone out in a yacht, and I said it was a pity he didn’t take her with him for the airing. She gradually disclosed herself in the character of a deserted young wife, and later on I met her in the street without the child. She was going to the landing-stage to meet her husband, so she told me; but she did not know the way.
‘I offered to show her, and did so. I will not go into particulars, but I afterwards saw her several times, and soon discovered that the Beloved (as to whose whereabouts I had been at fault so long) lurked here. Though why she had chosen this tantalising situation of an inaccessible matron’s form when so many others offered, it was beyond me to discover. The whole affair ended innocently enough, when the lady left the town with her husband and child: she seemed to regard our acquaintance as a flirtation; yet it was anything but a flirtation for me!
* * *
‘Why should I tell the rest of the tantalising tale! After this, the Well-Beloved put herself in evidence with greater and greater frequency, and it would be impossible for me to give you details of her various incarnations. She came nine times in the course of the two or three ensuing years. Four times she masqueraded as a brunette, twice as a pale-haired creature, and two or three times under a complexion neither light nor dark. Sometimes she was a tall, fine girl, but more often, I think, she preferred to slip into the skin of a lithe airy being, of no great stature. I grew so accustomed to these exits and entrances that I resigned myself to them quite passively, talked to her, kissed her, corresponded with her, ached for her, in each of her several guises. So it went on until a month ago. And then for the first time I was puzzled. She either had, or she had not, entered the person of Avice Caro, a young girl I had known from infancy. Upon the whole, I have decided that, after all, she did not enter the form of Avice Caro, because I retain so great a respect for her still.’
Pierston here gave in brief the history of his revived comradeship with Avice, the verge of the engagement to which they had reached, and its unexpected rupture by him, merely through his meeting with a woman into whom the Well-Beloved unmistakably moved under his very eyes — by name Miss Marcia Bencomb. He described their spontaneous decision to marry offhand; and then he put it to Somers whether he ought to marry or not — her or anybody else — in such circumstances.
‘Certainly not,’ said Somers. ‘Though, if anybody, little Avice. But not even her. You are like other men, only rather worse. Essentially, all men are fickle, like you; but not with such perceptiveness.’
‘Surely fickle is not the word? Fickleness means getting weary of a thing while the thing remains the same. But I have always been faithful to the elusive creature whom I have never been able to get a firm hold of, unless I have done so now. And let me tell you that her flitting from each to each individual has been anything but a pleasure for me — certainly not a wanton game of my instigation. To see the creature who has hitherto been perfect, divine, lose under your very gaze the divinity which has inf
ormed her, grow commonplace, turn from flame to ashes, from a radiant vitality to a relic, is anything but a pleasure for any man, and has been nothing less than a racking spectacle to my sight. Each mournful emptied shape stands ever after like the nest of some beautiful bird from which the inhabitant has departed and left it to fill with snow. I have been absolutely miserable when I have looked in a face for her I used to see there, and could see her there no more.’
‘You ought not to marry,’ repeated Somers.
‘Perhaps I oughtn’t to! Though poor Marcia will be compromised, I’m afraid, if I don’t.... Was I not right in saying I am accursed in this thing? Fortunately nobody but myself has suffered on account of it till now. Knowing what to expect, I have seldom ventured on a close acquaintance with any woman, in fear of prematurely driving away the dear one in her; who, however, has in time gone off just the same.’
Pierston soon after took his leave. A friend’s advice on such a subject weighs little. He quickly returned to Miss Bencomb.
She was different now. Anxiety had visibly brought her down a notch or two, undone a few degrees of that haughty curl which her lip could occasionally assume. ‘How long you have been away!’ she said with a show of impatience.
‘Never mind, darling. It is all arranged,’ said he. ‘We shall be able to marry in a few days.’
‘Not to-morrow?’
‘We can’t to-morrow. We have not been here quite long enough.’
‘But how did the people at Doctors’ Commons know that?’
‘Well — I forgot that residence, real or assumed, was necessary, and unfortunately admitted that we had only just arrived.’
‘O how stupid! But it can’t be helped now. I think, dear, I should have known better, however!’
CHAPTER VIII.
‘TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING’
They lived on at the hotel some days longer, eyed curiously by the chambermaids, and burst in upon every now and then by the waiters as if accidentally. When they were walking together, mostly in back streets for fear of being recognized, Marcia was often silent, and her imperious face looked gloomy.