Thomas Hardy (28 page)

At last Hardy rose from his seat and looked toward his wife: she made no movement, and he walked to the door. She was still silent and unmoved: he invited her to leave us for a few minutes, for a ceremony which in accordance with his wish was to be performed without witnesses. She at once remonstrated, and Yeats and I begged that she should not be asked to leave us. But Hardy insisted and she made no further appeal but gathered up her cats and her train with perfect tranquillity and left the room.

From his summary, it is clear that Newbolt had no doubt that Emma was the subject of Hardy’s novel
A Pair of Blue Eyes
. He also indicates that Hardy’s wife was more concerned with her cats than with the presentation of the medal to Hardy. The implication is, Therefore, that Hardy asked Emma to leave the room out of fear that she would disrupt the ceremony.
⁶

In July 1912 Emma gave what was to be her last garden party, and in August she went on what would be her last visit to the theatre. On 22 November Emma felt unwell and was obliged to remain upstairs in her bedroom. On the 26th, the doctor called and pronounced that the illness was not of a serious nature. With this news, and with the assent of Emma, Hardy fulfilled a longstanding engagement that evening by attending the rehearsal of a play by local players in Dorchester. By the time he returned home at 11 p.m. Emma was asleep. The following morning, the maid informed Hardy that Emma had seemed brighter, but was now worse. Hardy immediately went to her and found her lying unconscious. By the time the doctor arrived, she was dead.

A few days before her death, Emma had been involved in a violent quarrel with Hardy, she having ventured into the study into which he had retreated. Hardy believed that this quarrel had contributed to her death and forever thereafter blamed himself.
⁷
Emma was buried in Stinsford churchyard on 30 November 1912; her tomb having been designed by Hardy himself. Rebekah Owen, Hardy’s acquaintance from New York, who attended the funeral, commented on ‘the exceeding pathos’ of the event.
⁸

Soon after Emma’s funeral, Hardy discovered in Emma’s room two ‘book-length’ manuscripts which she had written: one entitled
The Pleasures of Heaven and the Pains of Hell
, and the other,
What I Think of My Husband
. Having read them he tore out the pages, one by one, and burnt them in the fire.
⁹
Hardy also destroyed some ‘useless old MSS, entries in notebooks, and marks [footnotes] in printed books’.
¹⁰

That same year, 1912, Hardy’s siblings, Henry, Katharine and Mary Hardy, left the family home at Higher Bockhampton (which now reverted to the Kingston Maurward Estate). They moved into a large house, Talbothays Lodge – designed by Hardy in 1893 and built by Henry – situated a mile or so to the east of Max Gate.

Hardy now embarked on poetry writing on a grand scale. In March 1913 he made a nostalgic visit to Cornwall, to St Juliot and other favourite places which he had known with Emma. Calling at Plymouth on the return journey, he arranged for a memorial tablet, designed by himself, to be placed in the church where she had played the organ as a young woman. Here in the city, Hardy was particularly anxious to keep in contact with Emma’s ‘Gifford’ cousins. Subsequently, Professor (Charles) Henry Gifford (1913– 2003), Emma’s third cousin, declared: ‘There was something he wanted to put right, and her family must see that he had cared for her more deeply than they knew.’
¹¹
June found him in Cambridge receiving the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (Litt.D.). In July, in London, he met Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and his wife Margot.

On 10 February 1914, at St Andrew’s church, Enfield, Hardy married the 35-year-old Florence Emily Dugdale; the only others in attendance, apart from the vicar and an official, were Florence’s father and sister, and Hardy’s brother, Henry. After the ceremony the couple did not have a honeymoon, but returned to Max Gate. Despite the fact of having remarried, Hardy admitted that ‘the romance of S. Juliot abides none the less, & will if I live to be a hundred’. He derived consolation, however, from the fact that Florence had been ‘a great friend of my late wife’, and therefore there would be no ‘rupture of continuity’ in his life; something which he so disliked. His ghost, he said, would haunt St Juliot ‘by reason of the experiences I was there blest with before my first marriage, long before the sadness came that was a result of the slight mental aberration which occasionally afflicted my wife’s latter years.’
¹²

Hardy again refrained from blaming Emma for her mental condition. (Nevertheless, either Hardy was in denial about Emma’s condition or he prefered to cover up for it, because his writings make it quite obvious that he was aware of these ‘aberrations’ in Emma almost from the very start of his relationship with her.)

Hardy evidently regarded Florence as a kindred spirit, and hoped that ‘the union of [their] two rather melancholy temperaments may result in cheerfulness’.
¹³
It transpired that flower-gardening was a hobby of hers, at which Hardy said she worked ‘rather too hard’.Later, he was to describe her as a ‘tender companion’ who was ‘quite satisfied with the quietude of life here [at Max Gate]’. Theirs was probably not a physical relationship, because as parlour-maid Ellen Titterington states, the couple ‘occupied separate bedrooms with a common dressing-room between’.
¹⁴

In the spring of 1914 Hardy and Florence dined at the Royal Academy and met with friends, before leaving for Cambridge to be entertained by various ‘worthy Heads & Fellows’ of its university. One of these people was Charles Moule (son of the late Revd Henry Moule, vicar of Fordington), former tutor of Corpus Christi whom Hardy had known since his youth.
¹⁵

In early summer 1914 the couple motored down to the West Country; Hardy having progressed (if that is the correct word) from bicycle to car. In fact, the car, a ‘Benz’, was not owned by Hardy (who never learned to drive), but by Tilley’s Garage in Dorchester, which also provided the chauffeur, Harold Voss.
¹⁶
While in Plymouth, Hardy took the opportunity to answer questions about the Gifford family vault; an attempt to clear up what he considered to be some loose ends from the past concerning his former wife’s ancestors. In June 1914 he was again in London, at a dinner of the Royal Institute of British Architects with which he had kept in touch throughout the years.

At Max Gate Hardy enjoyed the company of ‘Wessex’, Florence’s wirehaired terrier, whom he described as ‘spoilt’, but nonetheless was ‘thriving’ and ‘fond of other dogs’. Yes, he said, it would be in order for her to bring her other dog, ‘Milner’, to Max Gate also.
¹⁷
Florence, however, worried in case Wessex’s barking, and her playing of the pianola, disturbed Hardy in his writings. As ever, Emma was always in his thoughts and in a letter to Florence Henniker in July 1914, he confessed to feeling ‘miserable, lest I had not treated her considerately in her latter life’.

Having returned from Stourhead in Wiltshire – where he and Florence had been guests of Sir Henry and Lady Hoare – Hardy wrote in his diary: ‘August 4, 11 P.M. War declared with Germany.’ Hardy had previously managed to convince himself of ‘the gradual bettering of human nature’. This news, therefore, came as a tremendous shock, and he was astonished, disillusioned and depressed at the German invasion of Belgium, which had precipitated hostilities. Dorchester would soon be ‘teeming with soldiers, mostly drunk’, he said.
¹⁸

In November 1914,
Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries
was published by Macmillan. Included in this volume was
Channel Firing
, a tirade against those who make war in the name of Christ:

All nations striving strong to make

Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters

They do no more for Christés sake

Than you do who are helpless in such matters.

In
God’s Funeral
Hardy indicates his absolute loss of faith. ‘Mangled’, he says, is ‘the Monarch of our fashioning [God], Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be’. And yet for Hardy there is no joy to be found in the loss of God, only sadness; for ‘who or what shall fill his place?’ he asks. However, the words ‘I … long had prized’ what was now ‘mourned for’ implies that he did, at one time, have a faith.

Other poems in the
Satires of Circumstance
collection relate to Emma, who despite her death was forever in his thoughts. For example,
When I Set Out For Lyonnesse
– a poem of hope, wonder and expectation – recalls his first journey to St Juliot in 1870. In
The Torn Letter
he tells of how, despite everything, his longing for Emma never ceased:

That ache for you, born long ago,

Throbs on: I never could outgrow it.

Professor C. Henry Gifford once declared that as far as Hardy was concerned, all was ‘delightful’ in Emma, ‘The free generous impulse, the daring [person] that had once clambered over the rocks and galloped down steep hills, and the zest for living – came back to possess his mind’.
¹⁹

In
The Voice
Hardy imagines that the late Emma is calling to him, to say that she has reverted to that delightful creature which he had originally perceived her to be:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.

In
Had You Wept
he regrets her lack of emotional warmth:

Had you wept; had you but neared me with a hazed uncertain ray,

Dewy as the face of the dawn, in your large and luminous eye,

Then would have come back all the joys the tidings had slain that day,

And a new beginning, a fresh fair heaven, have smoothed the things awry.

But you were less feebly human, and no passionate need for clinging

Possessed you soul to overthrow reserve when I came near;

Ay, though you suffer as much as I from storms the hours are bringing

Upon your heart and mind, I never see you shed a tear.

And the poem ends: ‘And hence our deep division, and our dark undying pain.’

In
The Going
he describes what a shock the suddenness of her death was to him:

Why did you give no hint that night

That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,

And calmly, as if indifferent quite,

You would close your term here, up and be gone.

Referring to the separate lives which they had led in their latter years at Max Gate, he asks himself why this had been so:

Why, then, latterly did we not speak,

Did we not think of those days long dead,

And ere your vanishing strive to seek

That time’s renewal? We might have said,

‘In this bright spring weather

We’ll visit together

Those places that once we visited.’

It has to be said that Hardy would in no way have wished to cut himself off from Emma – in fact, quite the reverse – but in the circumstances he was obliged to make the preservation of his own sanity an essential part of the equation. He ends the poem:

… O you could not know

That such swift fleeing

No soul forseeing –

Not even I – would undo me so!

A host of other such poems, including
Rain on the Grave
,
Lament
,
A Dream or No
,
Beeny Cliff
, and
St Launce’s Revisited
, all reveal the abject misery and remorse of the desolate Thomas Hardy. Today, these poems would be interpreted as a ‘cry for help’ on Hardy’s part.

Finally,
The Wistful Lady
features ‘A plaintive lady pale and passionless’, and
The Re-Enactment
describes how ‘in the [bed] chamber’:

So came it that our fervours

Did quite fail

Of future consummation –

Which gives yet another indication that Hardy’s marriage to Emma was never physically consummated.