by Thomas Hardy
‘Anna,’ he said, staring; ‘what’s this?’
‘It only means — that I can’t do it any better!’ she answered, through her tears.
‘Eh? Nonsense!’
‘I can’t!’ she insisted, with miserable, sobbing hardihood. ‘I — I — didn’t write those letters, Charles! I only told her what to write! And not always that! But I am learning, O so fast, my dear, dear husband! And you’ll forgive me, won’t you, for not telling you before?’ She slid to her knees, abjectly clasped his waist and laid her face against him.
He stood a few moments, raised her, abruptly turned, and shut the door upon her, rejoining Edith in the drawing-room. She saw that something untoward had been discovered, and their eyes remained fixed on each other.
‘Do I guess rightly?’ he asked, with wan quietude. ‘You were her scribe through all this?’
‘It was necessary,’ said Edith.
‘Did she dictate every word you ever wrote to me?’
‘Not every word.’
‘In fact, very little?’
‘Very little.’
‘You wrote a great part of those pages every week from your own conceptions, though in her name!’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps you wrote many of the letters when you were alone, without communication with her?’
‘I did.’
He turned to the bookcase, and leant with his hand over his face; and Edith, seeing his distress, became white as a sheet.
‘You have deceived me — ruined me!’ he murmured.
‘O, don’t say it!’ she cried in her anguish, jumping up and putting her hand on his shoulder. ‘I can’t bear that!’
‘Delighting me deceptively! Why did you do it — why did you!’
‘I began doing it in kindness to her! How could I do otherwise than try to save such a simple girl from misery? But I admit that I continued it for pleasure to myself.’
Raye looked up. ‘Why did it give you pleasure?’ he asked.
‘I must not tell,’ said she.
He continued to regard her, and saw that her lips suddenly began to quiver under his scrutiny, and her eyes to fill and droop. She started aside, and said that she must go to the station to catch the return train: could a cab be called immediately?
But Raye went up to her, and took her unresisting hand. ‘Well, to think of such a thing as this!’ he said. ‘Why, you and I are friends — lovers — devoted lovers — by correspondence!’
‘Yes; I suppose.’
‘More.’
‘More?’
‘Plainly more. It is no use blinking that. Legally I have married her — God help us both! — in soul and spirit I have married you, and no other woman in the world!’
‘Hush!’
‘But I will not hush! Why should you try to disguise the full truth, when you have already owned half of it? Yes, it is between you and me that the bond is — not between me and her! Now I’ll say no more. But, O my cruel one, I think I have one claim upon you!’
She did not say what, and he drew her towards him, and bent over her. ‘If it was all pure invention in those letters,’ he said emphatically, ‘give me your cheek only. If you meant what you said, let it be lips. It is for the first and last time, remember!’
She put up her mouth, and he kissed her long. ‘You forgive me?’ she said crying.
‘Yes.’
‘But you are ruined!’
‘What matter!’ he said shrugging his shoulders. ‘It serves me right!’
She withdrew, wiped her eyes, entered and bade good-bye to Anna, who had not expected her to go so soon, and was still wrestling with the letter. Raye followed Edith downstairs, and in three minutes she was in a hansom driving to the Waterloo station.
He went back to his wife. ‘Never mind the letter, Anna, to-day,’ he said gently. ‘Put on your things. We, too, must be off shortly.’
The simple girl, upheld by the sense that she was indeed married, showed her delight at finding that he was as kind as ever after the disclosure. She did not know that before his eyes he beheld as it were a galley, in which he, the fastidious urban, was chained to work for the remainder of his life, with her, the unlettered peasant, chained to his side.
Edith travelled back to Melchester that day with a face that showed the very stupor of grief; her lips still tingling from the desperate pressure of his kiss. The end of her impassioned dream had come. When at dusk she reached the Melchester station her husband was there to meet her, but in his perfunctoriness and her preoccupation they did not see each other, and she went out of the station alone.
She walked mechanically homewards without calling a fly. Entering, she could not bear the silence of the house, and went up in the dark to where Anna had slept, where she remained thinking awhile. She then returned to the drawing-room, and not knowing what she did, crouched down upon the floor.
‘I have ruined him!’ she kept repeating. ‘I have ruined him; because I would not deal treacherously towards her!’
In the course of half an hour a figure opened the door of the apartment.
‘Ah — who’s that?’ she said, starting up, for it was dark.
‘Your husband — who should it be?’ said the worthy merchant.
‘Ah — my husband! — I forgot I had a husband!’ she whispered to herself.
‘I missed you at the station,’ he continued. ‘Did you see Anna safely tied up? I hope so, for ‘twas time.’
‘Yes — Anna is married.’
Simultaneously with Edith’s journey home Anna and her husband were sitting at the opposite windows of a second-class carriage which sped along to Knollsea. In his hand was a pocket-book full of creased sheets closely written over. Unfolding them one after another he read them in silence, and sighed.
‘What are you doing, dear Charles?’ she said timidly from the other window, and drew nearer to him as if he were a god.
‘Reading over all those sweet letters to me signed “Anna,”‘ he replied with dreary resignation.
Autumn 1891.
A Few Crusted Characters
Introduction
It is a Saturday afternoon of blue and yellow autumn-time, and the scene is the High Street of a well-known market-town. A large carrier’s van stands in the quadrangular fore-court of the White Hart Inn, upon the sides of its spacious tilt being painted, in weather-beaten letters: ‘Burthen, Carrier to Longpuddle.’ These vans, so numerous hereabout, are a respectable, if somewhat lumbering, class of conveyance, much resorted to by decent travellers not overstocked with money, the better among them roughly corresponding to the old French diligences.
The present one is timed to leave the town at four in the afternoon precisely, and it is now half-past three by the clock in the turret at the top of the street. In a few seconds errand-boys from the shops begin to arrive with packages, which they fling into the vehicle, and turn away whistling and care for the packages no more. At twenty minutes to four an elderly woman places her basket upon the shafts, slowly mounts, takes p a seat inside, and folds her hands and her lips. She has secured her corner for the journey, though there is as yet no sign of a horse being put in, nor of a carrier. At the three-quarters, two other women arrive, in whom the first recognizes the postmistress of Upper Longpuddle and the registrar’s wife, they recognizing her as the aged groceress of the same village. At five minutes to the hour there approach Mr. Profitt, the schoolmaster, in a soft felt hat, and Christopher Twink, the master-thatcher; and as the hour strikes there rapidly drop in the parish clerk and his wife, the seedsman and his aged father, the registrar; also Mr. Day, the world-ignored local landscape-painter, an elderly man who resides in his native place, and has never sold a picture outside it, though his pretensions to art have been nobly supported by his fellow-villagers, whose confidence in his genius has been as remarkable as the outer neglect of it, leading them to buy his paintings so extensively (at a price of a few shillings each, it is true) that every dwelling in the parish exhibits thr
ee or four of those admired productions on its walls.
Burthen, the carrier, is by this time seen bustling round the vehicle; the horses are put in, the proprietor arranges the reins and springs up into his seat as if he were used to it — which he is.
‘Is everybody here?’ he asks preparatorily over his shoulder to the passengers within.
As those who were not there did not reply in the negative the muster was assumed to be complete, and after a few hitches and hindrances the van with its human freight was got under way. It jogged on at an easy pace till it reached the bridge which formed the last outpost of the town. The carrier pulled up suddenly.
‘Bless my soul!’ he said, ‘I’ve forgot the curate!’
All who could do so gazed from the little back window of the van, but the curate was not in sight.
‘Now I wonder where that there man is?’ continued the carrier.
‘Poor man, he ought to have a living at his time of life.’
‘And he ought to be punctual,’ said the carrier.
‘“Four O’clock sharp is my time for starting,” I said to ‘en. And he said, “ I’ll be there.” Now he’s not here; and as a serious old church-minister he ought to be as good as his word. Perhaps Mr. Flaxton knows, being in the same line of life?’ He turned to the parish clerk.
‘I was talking an immense deal with him, that’s true, half an hour ago,’ replied that ecclesiastic, as one of whom it was no erroneous supposition that he should be on intimate terms with another of the cloth. ‘But he didn’t say he would be late.’
The discussion was cut off by the appearance round the corner of the van of rays from the curate’s spectacles, followed hastily by his face and a few white whiskers, and the swinging tails of his long gaunt coat. Nobody reproached him, seeing how he was reproaching himself; and he entered breathlessly and took his seat.
‘Now be we all here?’ said the carrier again. They started a second time, and moved on till they were about three hundred yards out of the town, and had nearly reached the second bridge, behind which, as every native remembers, the road takes a turn, and travellers by this highway disappear finally from the view of gazing burghers.
‘Well, as I’m alive!’ cried the postmistress from the interior of the conveyance, peering through the little square back-window along the road townward.
‘What?’ said the carrier.
‘A man hailing us!’
Another sudden stoppage. ‘Somebody else?’ the carrier asked.
‘Ay, sure!’ All waited silently, while those who could gaze out did so.
‘Now, who can that be?’ Burthen continued. ‘I just put it to ye, neighbours, can any man keep time with such hindrances? Bain’t we full a’ready? Who in the world can the man be?’
‘He’s a sort of gentleman,’ said the schoolmaster, his position commanding the road more comfortably than that of his comrades.
The stranger, who had been holding up his umbrella to attract their notice, was walking forward leisurely enough, now that he found, by their stopping that it had been secured. His clothes were decidedly not of a local cut, though it was difficult to point out any particular mark of difference. In his left hand he carried a small leather travelling bag. As soon as he had overtaken the van he glanced at the inscription on its side, as if to assure himself that he had hailed the right conveyance, and asked if they had room.
The carrier replied that though they were pretty well laden he supposed they could carry one more, whereupon the stranger mounted, and took the seat cleared for him within. And then the horses made another move, this time for good, and swung along with their burden of fourteen souls all told.
‘You bain’t one of these parts, sir?’ said the carrier. ‘I could tell that as far as I could see ‘ee.’
‘Yes, I am one of these parts,’ said the stranger.
‘Oh? H’m.’
The silence which followed seemed to imply a doubt of the truth of the new-comer’s assertion. (I was speaking of Upper Longpuddle more particular,’ continued the carrier hardily, ‘and I think I know most faces of that valley.’
‘I was born at Longpuddle, and nursed at Longpuddle, and my father and grandfather before me,’ said the passenger quietly
‘Why, to be sure,’ said the aged groceress in the background, ‘it isn’t John Lackland’s son — never — it can’t be he who went to foreign parts five-and-thirty years ago with his wife and family? — Yet — what do I hear? — that’s his father’s voice!’
‘That’s the man,’ replied the stranger. ‘John Lackland was my father, and I am John Lackland’s son. Five-and-thirty years ago, when I was a boy of eleven, my parents emigrated across the seas, taking me and my sister with them. Kytes’s boy Tony was the one who drove us and our belongings to Casterbridge on the morning we left; and his was the last Longpuddle face I saw. We sailed the same week across the ocean, and there we’ve been ever since, and there I’ve left those I went with — all three.’
‘Alive or dead?’
‘Dead,’ he replied in a low voice. ‘And I have come back to the old place, having nourished a thought — not a definite intention, but just a thought — that I should like to return here in a year or two, to spend the remainder of my days.’
‘Married man, Mr. Lackland?’
‘No.’
‘And have the world used ‘ee well, sir — or rather John, knowing ‘ee as a child? In these rich new countries that we hear of so much, you’ve got rich with the rest?’
‘I am not very rich,’ Mr. Lackland said. ‘Even in new countries, you know, there are failures. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; and even if it sometimes is, you may be neither swift nor strong. However, that’s enough about me. Now, having answered your inquiries, you must answer mine; for being in London, I have come down here entirely to discover what Longpuddle is looking like, and who are living there. That was why I preferred a seat in your van to hiring a carriage for driving across.
‘Well, as for Longpuddle, we rub on there much as usual. Old figures have dropped out o’ their frames, so to speak it, and new ones have been put in their places. You mentioned Tony Kytes as having been the one to drive your family and your goods to Casterbridge in his father’s wagon when you left. Tony is, I believe, living still, but not at Longpuddle. He went away and settled at Lewgate, near, Mellstock after his marriage. Ah, Tony was a sort o man!’
‘His character had hardly come out when I knew him.’
‘No. But ‘twas well enough, as far as that goes — except as to women. I shall never forget his courting — never!’
The returned villager waited silently, and the carrier went on: —
The Superstitious Man’s Story
‘William, as you may know, was a curious, silent man; you could feel when he came near ‘ee; and if he was in the house or anywhere behind your back without your seeing him, there seemed to be something clammy in the air, as if a cellar door was opened close by your elbow. Well, one Sunday, at a time that William was in very good health to all appearance, the bell that was ringing for church went very heavy all of a sudden; the sexton, who told me o’t, said he’d not known the bell to go so heavy in his hand for years – and he feared it meant a death in the parish. That was on the Sunday, as I say. During the week after, it chanced that William’s wife was staying up late one night to finish her ironing, she doing the washing for Mr. and Mrs. Hardcome. Her husband had finished his supper and gone to bed as usual some hour or two before. While she ironed she heard him coming down stairs; he stopped to put on his boots at the stair-foot, where he always left them, and then came on into the living-room where she was ironing, passing through it towards the door, this being the only way from the staircase to the outside of the house. No word was said on either side, William not being a man given to much speaking, and his wife being occupied with her work. He went out and closed the door behind him. As her husband had now and then gone out in this way at night before wh
en unwell, or unable to sleep for want of a pipe, she took no particular notice, and continued at her ironing. This she finished shortly after, and as he had not come in she waited awhile for him putting away the irons and things, and preparing the table for his breakfast in the morning. Still he did not return, and supposing him not far off, and wanting to get to bed herself, tired as she was, she left the door unbarred and went to the stairs, after writing on the back of the door with chalk: Mind and do the door (because he was a forgetful man).
‘To her great surprise, and I might say alarm, on reaching the foot of the stairs his boots were standing there as they always stood when he had gone to rest; going up to their chamber she found him in bed sleeping as sound as a rock. How he could have got back again without her seeing or hearing him was beyond her comprehension. It could only have been bypassing behind her very quietly while she was bumping with the iron. But this notion did not satisfy her: it was surely impossible that she should not have seen him come in through a room so small. She could not unravel the mystery, and felt very queer and uncomfortable about it. However, she would not disturb him to question him then, and went to bed herself.
‘He rose and left for his work very early the next morning, before she was awake, and she waited his return to breakfast with much anxiety for an explanation, for thinking over the matter by daylight made it seem only the more startling. When he came in to the meal he said, before she could put her question, “What’s the meaning of them words chalked on the door?”
‘She told him, and asked him about his going out the night before. William declared that he had never left the bedroom after entering it, having in fact undressed, lain down, and fallen asleep directly, never once waking till the clock struck five, and he rose up to go to his labour.