The Phantom of Thomas Hardy

by Floyd Skloot

  I shook my head and apologized. “It’s just that we stumbled onto a rehearsal for it yesterday afternoon. Our B&B is nearby.”

  “Oh? Anthony and Nan Swain’s place?” When we nodded, Jason said, “Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re at the show tonight too.” He handed over his note with details of the performance.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m glad you remembered this.”

  “Triggered by telling you about the morning Emma died. Remembered Hardy had left her the evening before so he could go into Dorchester to watch a rehearsal. A play made from one of his books. The Trumpet-Major, I think. But that led me to think of tonight’s play, you see? If you’re still in Dorchester.”

  “We’re here till midday tomorrow. Then on to London for the night, and home.”

  “So. Maybe see you tonight, then.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Beverly said, to my great relief.

  Our plan had been to stop next at Hardy’s grave in Stinsford Churchyard a mile and a half away. But now that felt wrong. As we left Max Gate and stood by the brick wall to take a last set of photos, I said, “This was like visiting a monument to the failure of love.”

  Beverly turned on the camera. “I know what you mean.”

  “And now we go to where his heart is buried? It all seems so grim and mournful.”

  “Well, is there any place you think love actually flourished for him? Where he was lighthearted and joyful?”

  Of course! We needed to backtrack to the one place where love may have succeeded for Thomas Hardy. Succeeded, at least, for a while, dark though that place might sometimes be. The heath and forest by his Bockhampton cottage. The ponds and fields, the hills. We needed to go where his deepest wishes formed, and ultimately where he began to understand what he’d missed. I needed to feel the presence of Hardy in love. Well, something like that.

  Even if only some of the story we’d heard about Hardy and Tryphena was correct, then the landscape between his cottage and Puddletown was its setting. The romance of a couple “Lit by a living love / The wilted world knew nothing of ” would have happened sometime after Hardy returned from his five-year interlude in London at the age of twenty-seven, but before he married Emma at thirty-four: 1867 to 1874.

  When we’d been at the cottage yesterday, I was focused—when I could focus at all—mostly on Hardy’s childhood, and on his writing life. But he was there when love struck, too. Cassie Pole, Tryphena Sparks, perhaps others as well. He also lived there, with occasional trips to Cornwall, for the four years it took him and Emma finally to marry after their initial meeting.

  Hardy may have been effective at containing the evidence, but we still needed to return. It would be as Hardy put it in his poem “A Spot,” in which he imagined people like us coming there to be in the presence of his great love:

  Lonely shepherd souls

  Who bask amid these knolls

  May catch a faery sound

  On sleepy noontides from the ground:

  “O not again

  Till Earth outwears

  Shall love like theirs

  Suffuse this glen!”

  Beverly gave the camera to me, and stood by the unruly hedge that overhung Hardy’s brick wall. She was dappled in shadow and wearing her charcoal-gray, thigh-length, lined parka and the creamy scarf she wove herself. And I will never forget—to paraphrase a Hardy poem—the full-souled sweetness warming her smile. She was with me on this mission, on what some might consider a wild goose chase, and ready for whatever came next.

  Tryphena Sparks was sixteen and knew what she wanted to do. Bright, vibrant, a little sassy, she’d talked since she was eleven about becoming a teacher and eventually a headmistress.

  Already she was working as a pupil-teacher in the girls’ section of Puddletown elementary school. She could be playful and charming, but she wasn’t coy, and there was little of the child left in her, especially now that her mother was dying and she was helping her sister Rebecca care for her. Through the long hours at home by the bedside, Tryphena suppressed her natural exuberance. Once outside again, she was animated and eager.

  Tryphena had dark eyes with laughter in them, had thick, bold eyebrows, ears without lobes, full lips, heaps of lustrous black hair. She was built close to the ground and moved with a straightforward nimbleness. Her voice was rich with feeling, deeper and more musical than either of her sisters’. Good friends and family called her Triffie or Phena.

  When her cousin Tom moved back from London in 1867, he seemed desolate. Her heart went out to him, a warmth and compassion he badly needed. They recognized something familiar in each other.

  Tryphena knew—because he’d told her over and over—that Hardy had felt sickened by London’s summer heat and stench from the Thames running directly beneath his window. But even before that, when the work of preparing a site for a railroad cutting required him to oversee the removal of coffins and bones from St. Pancras cemetery, he’d begun to feel weakened and depressed. For a year or more he was getting worn out by tedious drawing and recopying assignments, dull architecture work mixed with long afterhours of reading and study, theater going, making the rounds of museums and galleries, educating himself. He’d been writing poems for several years, poems no one wanted to publish, and had begun work on a novel. A romance with a neighboring servant girl fizzled. Cooped up in the office, in his apartment, in the city, he was fading for lack of light and lack of nature. He didn’t do well on his own. When John Hicks, the Dorchester architect he’d been apprenticed to as a youth, needed an assistant, Hardy seized the chance to return.

  Like all of Hardy’s friends, Tryphena was shocked by his pallor. His hair was lank, thinning. He seemed to have shrunk two inches. It was clear he needed to be home.

  Throughout the summer, Hardy walked to Hicks’s office in Dorchester and back. He also walked across the heath and scrubland to Puddletown for visits. It was just two miles, bypassing an unplowed sheep pasture, the Coomb eweleaze. Sometimes he encountered a few wild heath-ponies, and the sight of them—equal parts waking dream and living memory—filled him with joy. He loved being surrounded by the sound of rustling heather. Birds flushed at his approach. Marsh harriers circled above him. He could feel himself returning to life, feel life returning to him.

  Hardy was comfortable, secure again in the Puddletown house with the river sparkling in front, where in the past he used to visit Tryphena’s older sisters, her brothers, his aunt and uncle. It had—except for that brief banishment after the incident with his cousin Rebecca—been like a second home for him, cheerful and warm, spirited, musical, and in London he’d missed it almost as much as the cottage at Bockhampton.

  Now his visits became more frequent, full of conversation rather than youthful games. And, after paying his respects to his aunt, totally focused on Tryphena. When the nearby church’s chimes rang, he would cock his head and listen closely, hand raised to stop any further chitchat, the church architect at work. Soon Hardy noticed that he didn’t have to signal his desire for quiet. Tryphena knew, just from being close to him, what her cousin wanted.

  Tryphena was happy to talk about whatever Hardy was interested in. Or to learn French from him, since it might be useful in her teaching career. He had plans, too. Once, she remembered, he’d thought he might become a clergyman. But he’d given that up, discouraged about being able to attend the university and, apparently, losing his belief in God. Now he was devoted to writing, would earn his living as a novelist and at the same time secretly fulfill his calling as a poet. He’d grown up with stories all around him, and characters no one in London knew about, a rustic world that was beginning to vanish. As he spoke of these things, he gazed at Tryphena as though memorizing her every feature, line, gesture. Or as though not actually seeing her.

  She liked the long walks they began to take, was grateful to get away from home and her mother’s final suffering. It rained often that summer, but the weather didn’t deter them. In the woods and on the heath, Hardy’s th
oughts raced. His ideas for the novel caromed between memories of his experience in London and scenes of country life. He sprang ahead of Tryphena and turned to face her, walking backward as he told her about the main character, humble Will Strong, and his failed attempts to court a landowner’s daughter. Hardy reached out for Tryphena’s hand in his excitement about Will Strong going to London and training as an architect, enduring loneliness there, cast upon the uncaring city with nothing but his brains and his courage and his feeling of dedication so he could return worthy of Miss Allancourt’s hand. Hardy pulled Tryphena down beside him on a fallen oak and proclaimed himself in favor of radical politics. There were outbursts against the hypocrisy of the upper class, tirades about the denial of education to the working class and to women. Sitting by Rushy Pond or Green Hill Pond, resting under trees in the eweleaze, he talked about books he’d read in London and was reading now, or reminisced about hearing Charles Dickens read onstage, or recited a list of phrases and strange words he’d come across and written down in his journal, or called himself a Socialist, talking about strikes and demonstrations. Then he quieted down and said of course he wasn’t really a Socialist. But, he said, shouting to frighten a flock of blackbirds, his novel would be a Socialist Novel! A love story, too. And there would be folk in it that Tryphena would recognize. Shakespeare showed how important it was to have folk in the thing.

  Tryphena understood what was happening before Hardy did. And it was she who initiated their first kiss. They were in the eweleaze, which had become one of their favorite places to walk or to sit under the trees and talk while the sheep grazed and the thriving lambs played. It was a lush, rolling upland field, isolated and quiet except for the occasional bleating of the sheep or shift in the wind. That day, Tryphena had not let go of Hardy’s hand when he pulled her down to listen to his latest disquisition about abused servants in London homes. It had taken him a few minutes to notice. Soon she had “kindled love’s fitful ecstasies!” and Hardy was “transport-tossed.”

  By summer’s end, writing, being at home where he could eat his mother’s cooking and hear again the song of the nightingales, spending time with Tryphena (“Two fields, a wood, a tree, / Nothing now more malign / Lies between you and me”), walking to and from his old architecture office in Dorchester, working on church restorations, he felt himself restored as well.

  Beverly and I detoured into Dorchester to assemble a picnic lunch. Since the food co-op was near the Dorset County Museum, we went there too and bought a selection of Hardy’s poetry to take into the heath and forest. Then we drove to Higher Bockhampton and the Thorncombe Wood parking lot near Hardy’s cottage. Our first destination this time, I thought, should be Rushy Pond, about a ten-minute walk.

  At the lot’s far end we took a path that climbed steeply into the trees. I had the lunch and water bottles, our vests and hats, a picnic blanket Nan had lent us, maps, notebook, guidebook and Hardy’s poetry all stuffed into a backpack, and was sweaty by the time the trail leveled out. I stopped to adjust the straps and shrug the pack in place.

  The landscape was no longer Hardy’s untameable wild. But it was thriving and full of life in the late spring weather. The trail opened into a groomed glade of tall beech. Beverly identified the songs of robins and wrens, a group of warblers, chaffinch. We saw two other couples ahead of us, and a family with three kids, but they all took the path that led toward Hardy’s cottage. We followed the one toward Rushy Pond.

  Soon we came to the remnants of an old metal boundary fence. A little farther along there was a sturdy wooden gate, recently attached, and a notice board with a fading flyer announcing the Five-Year Thomas Hardy Egdon Heath Restoration Project. The famous setting of so many classic novels would be returned to its original, timeless state to be enjoyed by all! But it looked like the project had stalled after a few trees and rhododendron were cut. A gray squirrel darted under the fence.

  We stayed on the path as it led uphill. Packs of young silver birch were trying to become woodland, but mostly what we saw was bracken. When we reached Rushy Pond, at the highest part of the heath, it was both smaller and less sheltered than I’d anticipated. But it was also beautiful, open as though eager to fill itself with sky, cloud, sun, moon. The water’s surface that morning mirrored a few bordering trees and overhanging limbs, the smooth drift of clouds. It was a place of reflection, all right, as well as a watering hole for whatever came by. Dragonflies and damselflies, maybe other species if we were quiet enough.

  We sat on one of the small log benches near the pond’s edge and began unpacking our lunch. Apples, a chunk of hard Woolsery goat cheese, a small bag of greens, gluten-free herb and onion crackers, a mix of nuts, a couple of chocolate cookies. After we spread the meal out on the blanket, I figured the time had come to read “At Rushy-Pond” aloud.

  A terse, wintry poem, it opens with the image of a half moon reflected on the pond’s “frigid face.” A cold north wind sets the moon’s reflection in motion, first stretching it to an oval shape, then corkscrewing it before allowing it to settle again. Hardy, sitting where we’re sitting now, doesn’t care to look up at the real moon because the dreamy image he’s seen in the pond recalls the memory of a scene that once took place here. The poem’s heart is in this recollection, and Hardy can’t look away. “Once, in a secret year, / I had called a woman to me / from across this water, ardently.” She came to him and he “practiced to keep her near.” But their relationship broke off, “the last weak love-words had been said / And ended was her time.” Their love blanched from fiery red to white, became a “wraith,” a phantom of its feverish urgency. The remnants of it and of her beauty were, he thinks, like “the troubled orb in the pond’s sad shine”: faded, distorted, caught as in a funhouse mirror.

  It’s a sorrowful poem about love’s failure to endure, and it closes with an emphatic, hard matter-of-factness: “Her days dropped out of mine.” But that hardness feels forced, a willed display of macho bravado. It was fun while it lasted; a guy’s gotta move on. I don’t believe it, and neither does the poem because, after all, the memory endures so strongly. Her days didn’t drop out of his, only her presence did. She, at her most beloved, is still with him. Fiercely embedded in his memory.

  The poem’s—and the poet’s—heart and soul, the full force of its feeling, is in the poem’s dead center, its vision of love in bloom, of secrets and trysts when he called to her ardently and she came to him from across this water. Hardy badly wanted firm closure on his feelings, and on his poem too, so he obeyed the demands of form, the lure of a thudding, tight end. But, as with so much that of Hardy, the evidence left for readers to find within the work convinces us to doubt what’s being said. This was the love of his life, and he let it go. It was a pattern throughout his long life, falling for and tiring of women, his passion always self-consuming.

  When I’d finished reading “At Rushy-Pond,” Beverly took the book and reread the poem silently. Then she set it aside and gazed over the water.

  “I wonder when he wrote that,” she said, watching as a robin hopped near the margin of the woods.

  I picked up the book and turned to the notes in back. “Wow. Looks like it was included in the last book he published, when he was eighty-five.”

  She nodded. “That makes sense to me. He couldn’t let it go and it never lost its grip on him either. He’s looking back a long way but it feels so immediate, doesn’t it? And so full of regret.” She reached for the book. “For what, though, that’s the question.” She studied the poem for a while. “Do you think it could be inhibition he regrets? Its impact is everywhere in the poem, hedging things in, tamping them down. Look: the pond is ‘heath-hemmed,’ the moon is ‘half-grown’ and later it’s ‘weary,’ the pond has a ‘sad shine,’ their love-words are ‘weak,’ her beautiful plumage is ‘blurred.’ Everything’s stunted or exhausted. Held in, held back. And so is he. It’s like he’s cooperated in his own neutralizing or something, let himself be stopped, and he knows it.”


  “Does it seem like he feels guilty?”

  “I didn’t sense guilt so much as ongoing torment, you know? A loss of spirit from which he didn’t recover. It’s hard to look back and find yourself wanting. At fault.”

  “It’s enough to keep someone restless for all time.”

  We sat side-by-side on the bench, watching the pond and eating. Were we, as I felt we were, in one of the essential places in Hardy’s love story? The work said so, I supposed. Poems, and so much of the turbulent, feral energy among the lovers in The Return of the Native revolving right around this spot.

  There was a rustling sound from the margins of the trees in front of us but it stopped before anyone appeared. I hoped our isolation wouldn’t be interrupted yet. I felt on the verge of making a vital connection to what Hardy had missed, and why he believed nothing was as he wished it. I took back the book and read the rest of the note about “At Rushy-Pond.” It referred me to another poem, “On a Heath,” which opened with the sound of a woman’s skirt rustling through the heather. How strange that the rustling I’d just heard would overlap with the rustling I’d just read about. I was going to mention this to Beverly when she gasped.

  Slowly, like actors wandering onstage, a pair of heath-ponies emerged from the woods. The first was gray, almost white where the sunlight caught his coat and flowing mane. His head had a bit of a crest and his powerful shoulder rippled where he stood. The best adjective to describe the way he looked was the one that combined Robust and Sturdy: Hardy.

  His large eyes found us, small ears perked, long tail swishing. The second pony stopped before fully leaving the shelter of the trees. She was chestnut, stocky and broad, a strong filly, with an expression that struck me as calm, even kind.

  Without taking her eyes off them, Beverly reached for my hand and squeezed it. The chestnut pony began walking again, coming into the light. They were both about four feet tall, and the gray was waiting for her to catch up. It was clear that they’d seen us and decided we were all right, no threat. They grazed as they approached Rushy Pond.