Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (731 page)

‘I am glad you are pleased with my little present,’ he said.  ‘The truth is that I brought it to propitiate ‘ee, and to get you to help me out of a mighty difficulty.’

It was inconceivable to Phyllis that this independent bachelor — whom she admired in some respects — could have a difficulty.

‘Phyllis — I’ll tell you my secret at once; for I have a monstrous secret to confide before I can ask your counsel.  The case is, then, that I am married: yes, I have privately married a dear young belle; and if you knew her, and I hope you will, you would say everything in her praise.  But she is not quite the one that my father would have chose for me — you know the paternal idea as well as I — and I have kept it secret.  There will be a terrible noise, no doubt; but I think that with your help I may get over it.  If you would only do me this good turn — when I have told my father, I mean — say that you never could have married me, you know, or something of that sort — ’pon my life it will help to smooth the way vastly.  I am so anxious to win him round to my point of view, and not to cause any estrangement.’

What Phyllis replied she scarcely knew, or how she counselled him as to his unexpected situation.  Yet the relief that his announcement brought her was perceptible.  To have confided her trouble in return was what her aching heart longed to do; and had Humphrey been a woman she would instantly have poured out her tale.  But to him she feared to confess; and there was a real reason for silence, till a sufficient time had elapsed to allow her lover and his comrade to get out of harm’s way.

As soon as she reached home again she sought a solitary place, and spent the time in half regretting that she had not gone away, and in dreaming over the meetings with Matthäus Tina from their beginning to their end.  In his own country, amongst his own countrywomen, he would possibly soon forget her, even to her very name.

Her listlessness was such that she did not go out of the house for several days.  There came a morning which broke in fog and mist, behind which the dawn could be discerned in greenish grey; and the outlines of the tents, and the rows of horses at the ropes.  The smoke from the canteen fires drooped heavily.

The spot at the bottom of the garden where she had been accustomed to climb the wall to meet Matthäus, was the only inch of English ground in which she took any interest; and in spite of the disagreeable haze prevailing she walked out there till she reached the well-known corner.  Every blade of grass was weighted with little liquid globes, and slugs and snails had crept out upon the plots.  She could hear the usual faint noises from the camp, and in the other direction the trot of farmers on the road to the town, for it was market-day.  She observed that her frequent visits to this corner had quite trodden down the grass in the angle of the wall, and left marks of garden soil on the stepping-stones by which she had mounted to look over the top.  Seldom having gone there till dusk, she had not considered that her traces might be visible by day.  Perhaps it was these which had revealed her trysts to her father.

While she paused in melancholy regard, she fancied that the customary sounds from the tents were changing their character.  Indifferent as Phyllis was to camp doings now, she mounted by the steps to the old place.  What she beheld at first awed and perplexed her; then she stood rigid, her fingers hooked to the wall, her eyes staring out of her head, and her face as if hardened to stone.

On the open green stretching before her all the regiments in the camp were drawn up in line, in the mid-front of which two empty coffins lay on the ground.  The unwonted sounds which she had noticed came from an advancing procession.  It consisted of the band of the York Hussars playing a dead march; next two soldiers of that regiment in a mourning coach, guarded on each side, and accompanied by two priests.  Behind came a crowd of rustics who had been attracted by the event.  The melancholy procession marched along the front of the line, returned to the centre, and halted beside the coffins, where the two condemned men were blindfolded, and each placed kneeling on his coffin; a few minutes pause was now given, while they prayed.

A firing-party of twenty-four men stood ready with levelled carbines.  The commanding officer, who had his sword drawn, waved it through some cuts of the sword-exercise till he reached the downward stroke, whereat the firing-party discharged their volley.  The two victims fell, one upon his face across his coffin, the other backwards.

As the volley resounded there arose a shriek from the wall of Dr. Grove’s garden, and some one fell down inside; but nobody among the spectators without noticed it at the time.  The two executed Hussars were Matthäus Tina and his friend Christoph.  The soldiers on guard placed the bodies in the coffins almost instantly; but the colonel of the regiment, an Englishman, rode up and exclaimed in a stern voice: ‘Turn them out — as an example to the men!’

The coffins were lifted endwise, and the dead Germans flung out upon their faces on the grass.  Then all the regiments wheeled in sections, and marched past the spot in slow time.  When the survey was over the corpses were again coffined, and borne away.

Meanwhile Dr. Grove, attracted by the noise of the volley, had rushed out into his garden, where he saw his wretched daughter lying motionless against the wall.  She was taken indoors, but it was long before she recovered consciousness; and for weeks they despaired of her reason.

It transpired that the luckless deserters from the York Hussars had cut the boat from her moorings in the adjacent harbour, according to their plan, and, with two other comrades who were smarting under ill-treatment from their colonel, had sailed in safety across the Channel.  But mistaking their bearings they steered into Jersey, thinking that island the French coast.  Here they were perceived to be deserters, and delivered up to the authorities.  Matthäus and Christoph interceded for the other two at the court-martial, saying that it was entirely by the former’s representations that these were induced to go.  Their sentence was accordingly commuted to flogging, the death punishment being reserved for their leaders.

The visitor to the well-known old Georgian watering-place, who may care to ramble to the neighbouring village under the hills, and examine the register of burials, will there find two entries in these words: —

‘Matth: — Tina (Corpl.) in His Majesty’s Regmt. of York Hussars, and Shot for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years.  Born in the town of Sarrbruk, Germany.

‘Christoph Bless, belonging to His Majesty’s Regmt. of York Hussars, who was Shot for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years.  Born at Lothaargen, Alsatia.’

Their graves were dug at the back of the little church, near the wall.  There is no memorial to mark the spot, but Phyllis pointed it out to me.  While she lived she used to keep their mounds neat; but now they are overgrown with nettles, and sunk nearly flat.  The older villagers, however, who know of the episode from their parents, still recollect the place where the soldiers lie.  Phyllis lies near.

October
1889.

THE FIDDLER OF THE REELS

‘Talking of Exhibitions, World’s Fairs, and what not,’ said the old gentleman, ‘I would not go round the corner to see a dozen of them nowadays.  The only exhibition that ever made, or ever will make, any impression upon my imagination was the first of the series, the parent of them all, and now a thing of old times — the Great Exhibition of 1851, in Hyde Park, London.  None of the younger generation can realise the sense of novelty it produced in us who were then in our prime.  A noun substantive went so far as to become an adjective in honour of the occasion.  It was “exhibition” hat, “exhibition” razor-strop, “exhibition” watch; nay, even “exhibition” weather, “exhibition” spirits, sweethearts, babies, wives — for the time.

‘For South Wessex, the year formed in many ways an extraordinary chronological frontier or transit-line, at which there occurred what one might call a precipice in Time.  As in a geological “fault,” we had presented to us a sudden bringing of ancient and modern into absolute contact, such as probably in no other single year since the Conquest was ever witnessed in this part of the country.’

These observations led us onward to talk of the different personages, gentle and simple, who lived and moved within our narrow and peaceful horizon at that time; and of three people in particular, whose queer little history was oddly touched at points by the Exhibition, more concerned with it than that of anybody else who dwelt in those outlying shades of the world, Stickleford, Mellstock, and Egdon.  First in prominence among these three came Wat Ollamoor — if that were his real name — whom the seniors in our party had known well.

He was a woman’s man, they said, — supremely so — externally little else.  To men be was not attractive; perhaps a little repulsive at times.  Musician, dandy, and company-man in practice; veterinary surgeon in theory, he lodged awhile in Mellstock village, coming from nobody knew where; though some said his first appearance in this neighbourhood had been as fiddle-player in a show at Greenhill Fair.

Many a worthy villager envied him his power over unsophisticated maidenhood — a power which seemed sometimes to have a touch of the weird and wizardly in it.  Personally he was not ill-favoured, though rather un-English, his complexion being a rich olive, his rank hair dark and rather clammy — made still clammier by secret ointments, which, when he came fresh to a party, caused him to smell like ‘boys’-love’ (southernwood) steeped in lamp-oil.  On occasion he wore curls — a double row — running almost horizontally around his head.  But as these were sometimes noticeably absent, it was concluded that they were not altogether of Nature’s making.  By girls whose love for him had turned to hatred he had been nicknamed ‘Mop,’ from this abundance of hair, which was long enough to rest upon his shoulders; as time passed the name more and more prevailed.

His fiddling possibly had the most to do with the fascination he exercised, for, to speak fairly, it could claim for itself a most peculiar and personal quality, like that in a moving preacher.  There were tones in it which bred the immediate conviction that indolence and averseness to systematic application were all that lay between ‘Mop’ and the career of a second Paganini.

While playing he invariably closed his eyes; using no notes, and, as it were, allowing the violin to wander on at will into the most plaintive passages ever heard by rustic man.  There was a certain lingual character in the supplicatory expressions he produced, which would well nigh have drawn an ache from the heart of a gate-post.  He could make any child in the parish, who was at all sensitive to music, burst into tears in a few minutes by simply fiddling one of the old dance-tunes he almost entirely affected — country jigs, reels, and ‘Favourite Quick Steps’ of the last century — some mutilated remains of which even now reappear as nameless phantoms in new quadrilles and gallops, where they are recognized only by the curious, or by such old-fashioned and far-between people as have been thrown with men like Wat Ollamoor in their early life.

His date was a little later than that of the old Mellstock quire-band which comprised the Dewys, Mail, and the rest — in fact, he did not rise above the horizon thereabout till those well-known musicians were disbanded as ecclesiastical functionaries.  In their honest love of thoroughness they despised the new man’s style.  Theophilus Dewy (Reuben the tranter’s younger brother) used to say there was no ‘plumness’ in it — no bowing, no solidity — it was all fantastical.  And probably this was true.  Anyhow, Mop had, very obviously, never bowed a note of church-music from his birth; he never once sat in the gallery of Mellstock church where the others had tuned their venerable psalmody so many hundreds of times; had never, in all likelihood, entered a church at all.  All were devil’s tunes in his repertory.  ‘He could no more play the Wold Hundredth to his true time than he could play the brazen serpent,’ the tranter would say.  (The brazen serpent was supposed in Mellstock to be a musical instrument particularly hard to blow.)

Occasionally Mop could produce the aforesaid moving effect upon the souls of grown-up persons, especially young women of fragile and responsive organization.  Such an one was Car’line Aspent.  Though she was already engaged to be married before she met him, Car’line, of them all, was the most influenced by Mop Ollamoor’s heart-stealing melodies, to her discomfort, nay, positive pain and ultimate injury.  She was a pretty, invocating, weak-mouthed girl, whose chief defect as a companion with her sex was a tendency to peevishness now and then.  At this time she was not a resident in Mellstock parish where Mop lodged, but lived some miles off at Stickleford, farther down the river.

How and where she first made acquaintance with him and his fiddling is not truly known, but the story was that it either began or was developed on one spring evening, when, in passing through Lower Mellstock, she chanced to pause on the bridge near his house to rest herself, and languidly leaned over the parapet.  Mop was standing on his door-step, as was his custom, spinning the insidious thread of semi- and demi-semi-quavers from the E string of his fiddle for the benefit of passers-by, and laughing as the tears rolled down the cheeks of the little children hanging around him.  Car’line pretended to be engrossed with the rippling of the stream under the arches, but in reality she was listening, as he knew.  Presently the aching of the heart seized her simultaneously with a wild desire to glide airily in the mazes of an infinite dance.  To shake off the fascination she resolved to go on, although it would be necessary to pass him as he played.  On stealthily glancing ahead at the performer, she found to her relief that his eyes were closed in abandonment to instrumentation, and she strode on boldly.  But when closer her step grew timid, her tread convulsed itself more and more accordantly with the time of the melody, till she very nearly danced along.  Gaining another glance at him when immediately opposite, she saw that
one
of his eyes was open, quizzing her as he smiled at her emotional state.  Her gait could not divest itself of its compelled capers till she had gone a long way past the house; and Car’line was unable to shake off the strange infatuation for hours.