Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (904 page)

May 1893.

An Imaginative Woman

When William Marchmill had finished his inquiries for lodgings at the well-known watering-place of Solentsea in Upper Wessex, he returned to the hotel to find his wife. She, with the children, had rambled along the shore, and Marchmill followed in the direction indicated by the military-looking hall-porter.

“By Jove, how far you’ve gone!  I am quite out of breath,” Marchmill said, rather impatiently, when he came up with his wife, who was reading as she walked, the three children being considerably further ahead with the nurse.

Mrs. Marchmill started out of the reverie into which the book had thrown her.  “Yes,” she said, “you’ve been such a long time.  I was tired of staying in that dreary hotel.  But I am sorry if you have wanted me, Will?”

“Well I have had trouble to suit myself.  When you see the airy and comfortable rooms heard of, you find they are stuffy and uncomfortable.  Will you come and see if what I’ve fixed on will do?  There is not much room, I am afraid; but I can light on nothing better.  The town is rather full.”

The pair left the children and nurse to continue their ramble, and went back together.

In age well-balanced, in personal appearance fairly matched, and in domestic requirements conformable, in temper this couple differed, though even here they did not often clash, he being equable, if not lymphatic, and she decidedly nervous and sanguine.  It was to their tastes and fancies, those smallest, greatest particulars, that no common denominator could be applied.  Marchmill considered his wife’s likes and inclinations somewhat silly; she considered his sordid and material.  The husband’s business was that of a gunmaker in a thriving city northwards, and his soul was in that business always; the lady was best characterized by that superannuated phrase of elegance “a votary of the muse.” An impressionable, palpitating creature was Ella, shrinking humanely from detailed knowledge of her husband’s trade whenever she reflected that everything he manufactured had for its purpose the destruction of life.  She could only recover her equanimity by assuring herself that some, at least, of his weapons were sooner or later used for the extermination of horrid vermin and animals almost as cruel to their inferiors in species as human beings were to theirs.

She had never antecedently regarded this occupation of his as any objection to having him for a husband.  Indeed, the necessity of getting life-leased at all cost, a cardinal virtue which all good mothers teach, kept her from thinking of it at all till she had closed with William, had passed the honeymoon, and reached the reflecting stage. Then, like a person who has stumbled upon some object in the dark, she wondered what she had got; mentally walked round it, estimated it; whether it were rare or common; contained gold, silver, or lead; were a clog or a pedestal, everything to her or nothing.

She came to some vague conclusions, and since then had kept her heart alive by pitying her proprietor’s obtuseness and want of refinement, pitying herself, and letting off her delicate and ethereal emotions in imaginative occupations, daydreams, and night-sighs, which perhaps would not much have disturbed William if he had known of them.

Her figure was small, elegant, and slight in build, tripping, or rather bounding, in movement.  She was dark-eyed, and had that marvelously bright and liquid sparkle in each pupil which characterizes persons of Ella’s cast of soul, and is too often a cause of heartache to the possessor’s male friends, ultimately sometimes to herself.  Her husband was a tall, long-featured man, with a brown beard; he had a pondering regard; and was, it must be added, usually kind and tolerant to her.  He spoke in squarely shaped sentences, and was supremely satisfied with a condition of sublunary things which made weapons a necessity.

Husband and wife walked till they had reached the house they were in search of, which stood in a terrace facing the sea, and was fronted by a small garden of windproof and salt-proof evergreens, stone steps leading up to the porch.  It had its number in the row, but, being rather larger than the rest, was in addition sedulously distinguished as Coburg House by its landlady, though everybody else called it “Thirteen, New Parade.”  The spot was bright and lively now; but in winter it became necessary to place sandbags against the door, and to stuff up the keyhole against the wind and rain, which had worn the paint so thin that the priming and knotting showed through.

The householder, who had been watching for the gentleman’s return, met them in the passage, and showed the rooms.  She informed them that she was a professional man’s widow, left in needy circumstances by the rather sudden death of her husband, and she spoke anxiously of the conveniences of the establishment.

Mrs. Marchmill said that she liked the situation and the house; but, it being small, there would not be accommodation enough, unless she could have all the rooms.

The landlady mused with an air of disappointment.  She wanted the visitors to be her tenants very badly, she said, with obvious honesty.  But unfortunately two of the rooms were occupied permanently by a bachelor gentleman.  He did not pay season prices, it was true; but as he kept on his apartments all the year round, and was all extremely nice and interesting young man, who gave no trouble, she did not like to turn him out for a month’s “let,” even at a high figure.  “Perhaps, however,” she added, “he might offer to go for a time.”

They would not hear of this, and went back to the hotel, intending to proceed to the agent’s to inquire further.  Hardly had they sat down to tea when the landlady called. Her gentleman, she said, had been so obliging as to offer to give up his rooms three or four weeks rather than drive the newcomers away.

“It is very kind, but we won’t inconvenience him in that way,” said the Marchmills.

O, it won’t inconvenience him, I assure you!” said the landlady eloquently.  “You see, he’s a different sort of young man from most — dreamy, solitary, rather melancholy — and he cares more to be here when the south-westerly gales are beating against the door, and the sea washes over the Parade, and there’s not a soul in the place, than he does now in the season.  He’d just as soon be where, in fact, he’s going temporarily to a little cottage on the Island opposite, for a change.”  She hoped therefore that they would come.

The Marchmill family accordingly took possession of the house next day, and it seemed to suit them very well.  After luncheon Mr. Marchmill strolled out toward the pier, and Mrs. Marchmill, having despatched the children to their outdoor amusements on the sands, settled herself in more completely, examining this and that article, and testing the reflecting powers of the mirror in the wardrobe door.

In the small back sitting room, which had been the young bachelor’s, she found furniture of a more personal nature than in the rest.  Shabby books, of correct rather than rare editions, were piled up in a queerly reserved manner in corners, as if the previous occupant had not conceived the possibility that any incoming person of the season’s bringing could care to look inside them.  The landlady hovered on the threshold to rectify anything that Mrs. Marchmill might not find to her satisfaction.

“I’ll make this my own little room,” said the latter, “because the books are here. By the way, the person who has left seems to have a good many.  He won’t mind my reading some of them, Mrs. Hooper, I hope?”

“O, dear no, ma’am.  Yes, he has a good many.  You see, he is in the literary line himself somewhat.  He is a poet — yes, really a poet — and he has a little income of his own, which is enough to write verses on, but not enough for cutting a figure, even if he cared to.

“A Poet! O, I did not know that.”

Mrs. Marchmill opened one of the books, and saw the owner’s name written on the title-page.  “Dear me!” she continued; “I know his name very well — Robert Trewe — of course I do; and his writings!  And it is his rooms we have taken, and him we have turned out of his home?”

Ella Marchmill, sitting down alone a few minutes later, thought with interested surprise of Robert Trewe.  Her own latter history will best explain that interest.  Herself the only daughter of a struggling man of letters, she had during the last year or two taken to writing poems, in an endeavor to find a congenial channel in which let flow her painfully embayed emotions, whose former limpidity and sparkle seemed departing in the stagnation caused by the routine of a practical household and the gloom of bearing children to a commonplace father.  These poems, subscribed with masculine pseudonym, had appeared in various obscure magazines, and in two cases in rather prominent ones.  In the second of the latter the page which bore her effusion at the bottom, in smallish print, bore at the top, in large print, a few verses on the same subject by this very man, Robert Trewe.  Both of them, had, in fact, been struck by a tragic incident reported in the daily papers, and had used it simultaneously as an inspiration, the editor remarking in a note upon the coincidence, and that the excellence of both poems prompted him to give them together.

After that event Ella, otherwise “John Ivy,” had watched with much attention the appearance anywhere in print of verse bearing the signature of Robert Trewe, who, with a man’s unsusceptibility on the question of sex, had never once thought of passing himself off as a woman.  To be sure, Mrs. Marchmill had satisfied herself with a sort of reason for doing the contrary in her case; since nobody might believe in her inspiration if they found that the sentiments came from a pushing tradesman’s wife, from the mother of three children by a matter-of -fact small-arms manufacturer.

Trewe’s verse contrasted with that of the rank and file of recent minor poets in being impassioned rather than ingenious, luxuriant rather than finished.  Neither symboliste nor decadent, he was a pessimist in so far as that character applies to a man who looks at the worst contingencies as well as the best in the human condition.  Being little attracted by excellences of form and rhythm apart from content, he sometimes, when feeling outran his artistic speed, perpetrated sonnets in the loosely rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which every right-minded reviewer said he ought not to have done.

With sad and hopeless envy Ella Marchmill had often and often scanned the rival poet’s work, so much stronger as it always was than her own feeble lines.  She had imitated him, and her inability to touch his level would send her into fits of despondency. Months passed away thus, till she observed from the publishers’ list that Trewe had collected his fugitive pieces into a volume, which was duly issued, and was much or little praised according to chance, and had a sale quite sufficient to pay for the printing.

This step onward had suggested to John Ivy the idea of collecting her pieces also, or at any rate of making up a book of her rhymes by adding many in manuscript to the few that had seen the light, for she had been able to get no great number into print. A ruinous charge was made for costs of publication; a few reviews noticed her poor little volume; but nobody talked of it, nobody bought it, and it fell dead in a fortnight — if it had ever been alive.

The author’s thoughts were diverted to another groove just then by the discovery that she was going to have a third child, and the collapse of her poetical venture had perhaps less effect upon her mind than it might have done if she had been domestically unoccupied.  Her husband had paid the publisher’s bill with the doctor’s, and there it all had ended for the time.  But, though less than a poet of her century, Ella was more than a mere multiplier of her kind, and latterly she had begun to feel the old afflatus once more.  And now by an odd conjunction she found herself in the rooms of Robert Trewe.

She thoughtfully rose from her chair and searched the apartment with the interest of a fellow-tradesman.  Yes, the volume of his own verse was among the rest.  Though quite familiar with its contents, she read it here as if it spoke aloud to her, then called up Mrs. Hooper, the landlady, for some trivial service, and inquired again about the young man.

“Well, I’m sure you’d be interested in him, ma’am, if you could see him, only he’s so shy that I don’t suppose you will.” Mrs. Hooper seemed nothing loth to minister to her tenant’s curiosity about her predecessor.  “Lived here long? Yes, nearly two years.  He keeps on his rooms even when he’s not here: the soft air of this place suits his chest, and he likes to be able to come back at any time.  He is mostly writing or reading, and doesn’t see many people, though, for the matter of that, he is such a good, kind young fellow that folks would only be too glad to be friendly with him if they knew him.  You don’t meet kind-hearted people everyday.”