Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (199 page)

‘You do that well, I’ll warrant.’

‘Well, no; for what between continually wanting to love, to escape the blank lives of those who do not, and wanting not to love, to keep out of the miseries of those who do, I get foolishly warm and foolishly cold by turns.’

‘Yes — and I am like you as far as the “foolishly” goes.  I wish we poor girls could contrive to bring a little wisdom into our love by way of a change!’

‘That’s the very thing that leading minds in town have begun to do, but there are difficulties.  It is easy to love wisely, but the rich man may not marry you; and it is not very hard to reject wisely, but the poor man doesn’t care.  Altogether it is a precious problem.  But shall we clamber out upon those shining blocks of rock, and find some of the little yellow shells that are in the crevices?  I have ten minutes longer, and then I must go.’

CHAPTER 7.

THE DINING-ROOM OF A TOWN HOUSE — THE BUTLER’S PANTRY

A few weeks later there was a friendly dinner-party at the house of a gentleman called Doncastle, who lived in a moderately fashionable square of west London.  All the friends and relatives present were nice people, who exhibited becoming signs of pleasure and gaiety at being there; but as regards the vigour with which these emotions were expressed, it may be stated that a slight laugh from far down the throat and a slight narrowing of the eye were equivalent as indices of the degree of mirth felt to a Ha-ha-ha! and a shaking of the shoulders among the minor traders of the kingdom; and to a Ho-ho-ho! contorted features, purple face, and stamping foot among the gentlemen in corduroy and fustian who adorn the remoter provinces.

The conversation was chiefly about a volume of musical, tender, and humorous rhapsodies lately issued to the world in the guise of verse, which had been reviewed and talked about everywhere.  This topic, beginning as a private dialogue between a young painter named Ladywell and the lady on his right hand, had enlarged its ground by degrees, as a subject will extend on those rare occasions when it happens to be one about which each person has thought something beforehand, instead of, as in the natural order of things, one to which the oblivious listener replies mechanically, with earnest features, but with thoughts far away.  And so the whole table made the matter a thing to inquire or reply upon at once, and isolated rills of other chat died out like a river in the sands.

‘Witty things, and occasionally Anacreontic: and they have the originality which such a style must naturally possess when carried out by a feminine hand,’ said Ladywell.

‘If it is a feminine hand,’ said a man near.

Ladywell looked as if he sometimes knew secrets, though he did not wish to boast.

‘Written, I presume you mean, in the Anacreontic measure of three feet and a half — spondees and iambics?’ said a gentleman in spectacles, glancing round, and giving emphasis to his inquiry by causing bland glares of a circular shape to proceed from his glasses towards the person interrogated.

The company appeared willing to give consideration to the words of a man who knew such things as that, and hung forward to listen.  But Ladywell stopped the whole current of affairs in that direction by saying —

‘O no; I was speaking rather of the matter and tone.  In fact, the
Seven Days’ Review
said they were Anacreontic, you know; and so they are — any one may feel they are.’

The general look then implied a false encouragement, and the man in spectacles looked down again, being a nervous person, who never had time to show his merits because he was so much occupied in hiding his faults.

‘Do you know the authoress, Mr. Neigh?’ continued Ladywell.

‘Can’t say that I do,’ he replied.

Neigh was a man who never disturbed the flesh upon his face except when he was obliged to do so, and paused ten seconds where other people only paused one; as he moved his chin in speaking, motes of light from under the candle-shade caught, lost, and caught again the outlying threads of his burnished beard.

‘She will be famous some day; and you ought at any rate to read her book.’

‘Yes, I ought, I know.  In fact, some years ago I should have done it immediately, because I had a reason for pushing on that way just then.’

‘Ah, what was that?’

‘Well, I thought of going in for Westminster Abbey myself at that time; but a fellow has so much to do, and — ’

‘What a pity that you didn’t follow it up.  A man of your powers, Mr. Neigh — ’

‘Afterwards I found I was too steady for it, and had too much of the respectable householder in me.  Besides, so many other men are on the same tack; and then I didn’t care about it, somehow.’

‘I don’t understand high art, and am utterly in the dark on what are the true laws of criticism,’ a plain married lady, who wore archaeological jewellery, was saying at this time.  ‘But I know that I have derived an unusual amount of amusement from those verses, and I am heartily thankful to “E.” for them.’

‘I am afraid,’ said a gentleman who was suffering from a bad shirt-front, ‘that an estimate which depends upon feeling in that way is not to be trusted as permanent opinion.’

The subject now flitted to the other end.

‘Somebody has it that when the heart flies out before the understanding, it saves the judgment a world of pains,’ came from a voice in that quarter.

‘I, for my part, like something merry,’ said an elderly woman, whose face was bisected by the edge of a shadow, which toned her forehead and eyelids to a livid neutral tint, and left her cheeks and mouth like metal at a white heat in the uninterrupted light.  ‘I think the liveliness of those ballads as great a recommendation as any.  After all, enough misery is known to us by our experiences and those of our friends, and what we see in the newspapers, for all purposes of chastening, without having gratuitous grief inflicted upon us.’

‘But you would not have wished that “Romeo and Juliet” should have ended happily, or that Othello should have discovered the perfidy of his Ancient in time to prevent all fatal consequences?’

‘I am not afraid to go so far as that,’ said the old lady.  ‘Shakespeare is not everybody, and I am sure that thousands of people who have seen those plays would have driven home more cheerfully afterwards if by some contrivance the characters could all have been joined together respectively.  I uphold our anonymous author on the general ground of her levity.’

‘Well, it is an old and worn argument — that about the inexpedience of tragedy — and much may be said on both sides.  It is not to be denied that the anonymous Sappho’s verses — for it seems that she is really a woman — are clever.’

‘Clever!’ said Ladywell — the young man who had been one of the shooting-party at Sandbourne — ’they are marvellously brilliant.’

‘She is rather warm in her assumed character.’

‘That’s a sign of her actual coldness; she lets off her feeling in theoretic grooves, and there is sure to be none left for practical ones.  Whatever seems to be the most prominent vice, or the most prominent virtue in anybody’s writing is the one thing you are safest from in personal dealings with the writer.’

‘O, I don’t mean to call her warmth of feeling a vice or virtue exactly — ’

‘I agree with you,’ said Neigh to the last speaker but one, in tones as emphatic as they possibly could be without losing their proper character of indifference to the whole matter.  ‘Warm sentiment of any sort, whenever we have it, disturbs us too much to leave us repose enough for writing it down.’

‘I am sure, when I was at the ardent age,’ said the mistress of the house, in a tone of pleasantly agreeing with every one, particularly those who were diametrically opposed to each other, ‘I could no more have printed such emotions and made them public than I — could have helped privately feeling them.’

‘I wonder if she has gone through half she says?  If so, what an experience!’

‘O no — not at all likely,’ said Mr. Neigh.  ‘It is as risky to calculate people’s ways of living from their writings as their incomes from their way of living.’

‘She is as true to nature as fashion is false,’ said the painter, in his warmth becoming scarcely complimentary, as sometimes happens with young persons.  ‘I don’t think that she has written a word more than what every woman would deny feeling in a society where no woman says what she means or does what she says.  And can any praise be greater than that?’

‘Ha-ha!  Capital!’

‘All her verses seem to me,’ said a rather stupid person, ‘to be simply —

“Tral’-la-la-lal’-la-la-la’,

Tral’-la-la-lal’-la-la-lu’,

Tral’-la-la-lal’-la-la-lalla’,

Tral’-la-la-lu’.”

When you take away the music there is nothing left.  Yet she is plainly a woman of great culture.’

‘Have you seen what the
London Light
says about them — one of the finest things I have ever read in the way of admiration?’ continued Ladywell, paying no attention to the previous speaker.  He lingered for a reply, and then impulsively quoted several lines from the periodical he had named, without aid or hesitation.  ‘Good, is it not?’ added Ladywell.

They assented, but in such an unqualified manner that half as much readiness would have meant more.  But Ladywell, though not experienced enough to be quite free from enthusiasm, was too experienced to mind indifference for more than a minute or two.  When the ladies had withdrawn, the young man went on —

‘Colonel Staff said a funny thing to me yesterday about these very poems.  He asked me if I knew her, and — ’

‘Her?  Why, he knows that it is a lady all the time, and we were only just now doubting whether the sex of the writer could be really what it seems.  Shame, Ladywell!’ said his friend Neigh.

‘Ah, Mr. Ladywell,’ said another, ‘now we have found you out.  You know her!’

‘Now — I say — ha-ha!’ continued the painter, with a face expressing that he had not at all tried to be found out as the man possessing incomparably superior knowledge of the poetess.  ‘I beg pardon really, but don’t press me on the matter.  Upon my word the secret is not my own.  As I was saying, the Colonel said, “Do you know her?” — but you don’t care to hear?’

‘We shall be delighted!’

‘So the Colonel said, “Do you know her?” adding, in a most comic way, “Between U. and E., Ladywell, I believe there is a close affinity” — meaning me, you know, by U.  Just like the Colonel — ha-ha-ha!’

The older men did not oblige Ladywell a second time with any attempt at appreciation; but a weird silence ensued, during which the smile upon Ladywell’s face became frozen to painful permanence.

‘Meaning by E., you know, the “E” of the poems — heh-heh!’ he added.

‘It was a very humorous incident certainly,’ said his friend Neigh, at which there was a laugh — not from anything connected with what he said, but simply because it was the right thing to laugh when Neigh meant you to do so.

‘Now don’t, Neigh — you are too hard upon me.  But, seriously, two or three fellows were there when I said it, and they all began laughing — but, then, the Colonel said it in such a queer way, you know.  But you were asking me about her?  Well, the fact is, between ourselves, I do know that she is a lady; and I don’t mind telling a word — ’

‘But we would not for the world be the means of making you betray her confidence — would we, Jones?’

‘No, indeed; we would not.’

‘No, no; it is not that at all — this is really too bad! — you must listen just for a moment — ’

‘Ladywell, don’t betray anybody on our account.’

‘Whoever the illustrious young lady may be she has seen a great deal of the world,’ said Mr. Doncastle blandly, ‘and puts her experience of the comedy of its emotions, and of its method of showing them, in a very vivid light.’

‘I heard a man say that the novelty with which the ideas are presented is more noticeable than the originality of the ideas themselves,’ observed Neigh.  ‘The woman has made a great talk about herself; and I am quite weary of people asking of her condition, place of abode, has she a father, has she a mother, or dearer one yet than all other.’

‘I would have burlesque quotation put down by Act of Parliament, and all who dabble in it placed with him who can cite Scripture for his purposes,’ said Ladywell, in retaliation.

After a pause Neigh remarked half-privately to their host, who was his uncle: ‘Your butler Chickerel is a very intelligent man, as I have heard.’

‘Yes, he does very well,’ said Mr. Doncastle.

‘But is he not a — very extraordinary man?’

‘Not to my knowledge,’ said Doncastle, looking up surprised.  ‘Why do you think that, Alfred?’

‘Well, perhaps it was not a matter to mention.  He reads a great deal, I dare say?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I noticed how wonderfully his face kindled when we began talking about the poems during dinner.  Perhaps he is a poet himself in disguise.  Did you observe it?’

‘No.  To the best of my belief he is a very trustworthy and honourable man.  He has been with us — let me see, how long? — five months, I think, and he was fifteen years in his last place.  It certainly is a new side to his character if he publicly showed any interest in the conversation, whatever he might have felt.’

‘Since the matter has been mentioned,’ said Mr. Jones, ‘I may say that I too noticed the singularity of it.’

‘If you had not said otherwise,’ replied Doncastle somewhat warmly, ‘I should have asserted him to be the last man-servant in London to infringe such an elementary rule.  If he did so this evening, it is certainly for the first time, and I sincerely hope that no annoyance was caused — ’

‘O no, no — not at all — it might have been a mistake of mine,’ said Jones.  ‘I should quite have forgotten the circumstance if Mr. Neigh’s words had not brought it to my mind.  It was really nothing to notice, and I beg that you will not say a word to him about it on my account.’

‘He has a taste that way, my dear uncle, nothing more, depend upon it,’ said Neigh.  ‘If I had such a man belonging to me I should only be too proud.  Certainly do not mention it.’