Books: Life\'s Little Ironies and a Few Crusted Characters
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Thomas Hardy >> Life\'s Little Ironies and a Few Crusted Characters
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18 LIFE'S LITTLE IRONIES
Contents:
The Son's Veto
For Conscience' Sake
A Tragedy of Two Ambitions
On the Western Circuit
To Please his Wife
The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion
A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four
A Few Crusted Characters
THE SON'S VETO
CHAPTER I
To the eyes of a man viewing it from behind, the nut-brown hair was a
wonder and a mystery. Under the black beaver hat, surmounted by its
tuft of black feathers, the long locks, braided and twisted and
coiled like the rushes of a basket, composed a rare, if somewhat
barbaric, example of ingenious art. One could understand such
weavings and coilings being wrought to last intact for a year, or
even a calendar month; but that they should be all demolished
regularly at bedtime, after a single day of permanence, seemed a
reckless waste of successful fabrication.
And she had done it all herself, poor thing. She had no maid, and it
was almost the only accomplishment she could boast of. Hence the
unstinted pains.
She was a young invalid lady--not so very much of an invalid--sitting
in a wheeled chair, which had been pulled up in the front part of a
green enclosure, close to a bandstand, where a concert was going on,
during a warm June afternoon. It had place in one of the minor parks
or private gardens that are to be found in the suburbs of London, and
was the effort of a local association to raise money for some
charity. There are worlds within worlds in the great city, and
though nobody outside the immediate district had ever heard of the
charity, or the band, or the garden, the enclosure was filled with an
interested audience sufficiently informed on all these.
As the strains proceeded many of the listeners observed the chaired
lady, whose back hair, by reason of her prominent position, so
challenged inspection. Her face was not easily discernible, but the
aforesaid cunning tress-weavings, the white ear and poll, and the
curve of a cheek which was neither flaccid nor sallow, were signals
that led to the expectation of good beauty in front. Such
expectations are not infrequently disappointed as soon as the
disclosure comes; and in the present case, when the lady, by a turn
of the head, at length revealed herself, she was not so handsome as
the people behind her had supposed, and even hoped--they did not know
why.
For one thing (alas! the commonness of this complaint), she was less
young than they had fancied her to be. Yet attractive her face
unquestionably was, and not at all sickly. The revelation of its
details came each time she turned to talk to a boy of twelve or
thirteen who stood beside her, and the shape of whose hat and jacket
implied that he belonged to a well-known public school. The
immediate bystanders could hear that he called her 'Mother.'
When the end of the recital was reached, and the audience withdrew,
many chose to find their way out by passing at her elbow. Almost all
turned their heads to take a full and near look at the interesting
woman, who remained stationary in the chair till the way should be
clear enough for her to be wheeled out without obstruction. As if
she expected their glances, and did not mind gratifying their
curiosity, she met the eyes of several of her observers by lifting
her own, showing these to be soft, brown, and affectionate orbs, a
little plaintive in their regard.
She was conducted out of the gardens, and passed along the pavement
till she disappeared from view, the schoolboy walking beside her. To
inquiries made by some persons who watched her away, the answer came
that she was the second wife of the incumbent of a neighbouring
parish, and that she was lame. She was generally believed to be a
woman with a story--an innocent one, but a story of some sort or
other.
In conversing with her on their way home the boy who walked at her
elbow said that he hoped his father had not missed them.
'He have been so comfortable these last few hours that I am sure he
cannot have missed us,' she replied.
'HAS, dear mother--not HAVE!' exclaimed the public-school boy, with
an impatient fastidiousness that was almost harsh. 'Surely you know
that by this time!'
His mother hastily adopted the correction, and did not resent his
making it, or retaliate, as she might well have done, by bidding him
to wipe that crumby mouth of his, whose condition had been caused by
surreptitious attempts to eat a piece of cake without taking it out
of the pocket wherein it lay concealed. After this the pretty woman
and the boy went onward in silence.
That question of grammar bore upon her history, and she fell into
reverie, of a somewhat sad kind to all appearance. It might have
been assumed that she was wondering if she had done wisely in shaping
her life as she had shaped it, to bring out such a result as this.
In a remote nook in North Wessex, forty miles from London, near the
thriving county-town of Aldbrickham, there stood a pretty village
with its church and parsonage, which she knew well enough, but her
son had never seen. It was her native village, Gaymead, and the
first event bearing upon her present situation had occurred at that
place when she was only a girl of nineteen.
How well she remembered it, that first act in her little tragi-
comedy, the death of her reverend husband's first wife. It happened
on a spring evening, and she who now and for many years had filled
that first wife's place was then parlour-maid in the parson's house.
When everything had been done that could be done, and the death was
announced, she had gone out in the dusk to visit her parents, who
were living in the same village, to tell them the sad news. As she
opened the white swing-gate and looked towards the trees which rose
westward, shutting out the pale light of the evening sky, she
discerned, without much surprise, the figure of a man standing in the
hedge, though she roguishly exclaimed as a matter of form, 'Oh, Sam,
how you frightened me!'
He was a young gardener of her acquaintance. She told him the
particulars of the late event, and they stood silent, these two young
people, in that elevated, calmly philosophic mind which is engendered
when a tragedy has happened close at hand, and has not happened to
the philosophers themselves. But it had its bearing upon their
relations.
'And will you stay on now at the Vicarage, just the same?' asked he.
She had hardly thought of that. 'Oh, yes--I suppose!' she said.
'Everything will be just as usual, I imagine?'
He walked beside her towards her mother's. Presently his arm stole
round her waist. She gently removed it; but he placed it there
again, and she yielded the point. 'You see, dear Sophy, you don't
know that you'll stay on; you may want a home; and I shall be ready
to offer one some day, though I may not be ready just yet.
'Why, Sam, how can you be so fast! I've never even said I liked 'ee;
and it is all your own doing, coming after me!'
'Still, it is nonsense to say I am not to have a try at you like the
rest.' He stooped to kiss her a farewell, for they had reached her
mother's door.
'No, Sam; you sha'n't!' she cried, putting her hand over his mouth.
'You ought to be more serious on such a night as this.' And she bade
him adieu without allowing him to kiss her or to come indoors.
The vicar just left a widower was at this time a man about forty
years of age, of good family, and childless. He had led a secluded
existence in this college living, partly because there were no
resident landowners; and his loss now intensified his habit of
withdrawal from outward observation. He was still less seen than
heretofore, kept himself still less in time with the rhythm and
racket of the movements called progress in the world without. For
many months after his wife's decease the economy of his household
remained as before; the cook, the housemaid, the parlour-maid, and
the man out-of-doors performed their duties or left them undone, just
as Nature prompted them--the vicar knew not which. It was then
represented to him that his servants seemed to have nothing to do in
his small family of one. He was struck with the truth of this
representation, and decided to cut down his establishment. But he
was forestalled by Sophy, the parlour-maid, who said one evening that
she wished to leave him.
'And why?' said the parson.
'Sam Hobson has asked me to marry him, sir.'
'Well--do you want to marry?'
'Not much. But it would be a home for me. And we have heard that
one of us will have to leave.'
A day or two after she said: 'I don't want to leave just yet, sir,
if you don't wish it. Sam and I have quarrelled.'
He looked up at her. He had hardly ever observed her before, though
he had been frequently conscious of her soft presence in the room.
What a kitten-like, flexuous, tender creature she was! She was the
only one of the servants with whom he came into immediate and
continuous relation. What should he do if Sophy were gone?
Sophy did not go, but one of the others did, and things went on
quietly again.
When Mr. Twycott, the vicar, was ill, Sophy brought up his meals to
him, and she had no sooner left the room one day than he heard a
noise on the stairs. She had slipped down with the tray, and so
twisted her foot that she could not stand. The village surgeon was
called in; the vicar got better, but Sophy was incapacitated for a
long time; and she was informed that she must never again walk much
or engage in any occupation which required her to stand long on her
feet. As soon as she was comparatively well she spoke to him alone.
Since she was forbidden to walk and bustle about, and, indeed, could
not do so, it became her duty to leave. She could very well work at
something sitting down, and she had an aunt a seamstress.
The parson had been very greatly moved by what she had suffered on
his account, and he exclaimed, 'No, Sophy; lame or not lame, I cannot
let you go. You must never leave me again!'
He came close to her, and, though she could never exactly tell how it
happened, she became conscious of his lips upon her cheek. He then
asked her to marry him. Sophy did not exactly love him, but she had
a respect for him which almost amounted to veneration. Even if she
had wished to get away from him she hardly dared refuse a personage
so reverend and august in her eyes, and she assented forthwith to be
his wife.
Thus it happened that one fine morning, when the doors of the church
were naturally open for ventilation, and the singing birds fluttered
in and alighted on the tie-beams of the roof, there was a marriage-
service at the communion-rails, which hardly a soul knew of. The
parson and a neighbouring curate had entered at one door, and Sophy
at another, followed by two necessary persons, whereupon in a short
time there emerged a newly-made husband and wife.
Mr. Twycott knew perfectly well that he had committed social suicide
by this step, despite Sophy's spotless character, and he had taken
his measures accordingly. An exchange of livings had been arranged
with an acquaintance who was incumbent of a church in the south of
London, and as soon as possible the couple removed thither,
abandoning their pretty country home, with trees and shrubs and
glebe, for a narrow, dusty house in a long, straight street, and
their fine peal of bells for the wretchedest one-tongued clangour
that ever tortured mortal ears. It was all on her account. They
were, however, away from every one who had known her former position;
and also under less observation from without than they would have had
to put up with in any country parish.
Sophy the woman was as charming a partner as a man could possess,
though Sophy the lady had her deficiencies. She showed a natural
aptitude for little domestic refinements, so far as related to things
and manners; but in what is called culture she was less intuitive.
She had now been married more than fourteen years, and her husband
had taken much trouble with her education; but she still held
confused ideas on the use of 'was' and 'were,' which did not beget a
respect for her among the few acquaintances she made. Her great
grief in this relation was that her only child, on whose education no
expense had been and would be spared, was now old enough to perceive
these deficiencies in his mother, and not only to see them but to
feel irritated at their existence.
Thus she lived on in the city, and wasted hours in braiding her
beautiful hair, till her once apple cheeks waned to pink of the very
faintest. Her foot had never regained its natural strength after the
accident, and she was mostly obliged to avoid walking altogether.
Her husband had grown to like London for its freedom and its domestic
privacy; but he was twenty years his Sophy's senior, and had latterly
been seized with a serious illness. On this day, however, he had
seemed to be well enough to justify her accompanying her son Randolph
to the concert.
CHAPTER II
The next time we get a glimpse of her is when she appears in the
mournful attire of a widow.
Mr. Twycott had never rallied, and now lay in a well-packed cemetery
to the south of the great city, where, if all the dead it contained
had stood erect and alive, not one would have known him or recognized
his name. The boy had dutifully followed him to the grave, and was
now again at school.
Throughout these changes Sophy had been treated like the child she
was in nature though not in years. She was left with no control over
anything that had been her husband's beyond her modest personal
income. In his anxiety lest her inexperience should be overreached
he had safeguarded with trustees all he possibly could. The
completion of the boy's course at the public school, to be followed
in due time by Oxford and ordination, had been all previsioned and
arranged, and she really had nothing to occupy her in the world but
to eat and drink, and make a business of indolence, and go on weaving
and coiling the nut-brown hair, merely keeping a home open for the
son whenever he came to her during vacations.
Foreseeing his probable decease long years before her, her husband in
his lifetime had purchased for her use a semi-detached villa in the
same long, straight road whereon the church and parsonage faced,
which was to be hers as long as she chose to live in it. Here she
now resided, looking out upon the fragment of lawn in front, and
through the railings at the ever-flowing traffic; or, bending forward
over the window-sill on the first floor, stretching her eyes far up
and down the vista of sooty trees, hazy air, and drab house-facades,
along which echoed the noises common to a suburban main thoroughfare.
Somehow, her boy, with his aristocratic school-knowledge, his
grammars, and his aversions, was losing those wide infantine
sympathies, extending as far as to the sun and moon themselves, with
which he, like other children, had been born, and which his mother, a
child of nature herself, had loved in him; he was reducing their
compass to a population of a few thousand wealthy and titled people,
the mere veneer of a thousand million or so of others who did not
interest him at all. He drifted further and further away from her.
Sophy's milieu being a suburb of minor tradesmen and under-clerks,
and her almost only companions the two servants of her own house, it
was not surprising that after her husband's death she soon lost the
little artificial tastes she had acquired from him, and became--in
her son's eyes--a mother whose mistakes and origin it was his painful
lot as a gentleman to blush for. As yet he was far from being man
enough--if he ever would be--to rate these sins of hers at their true
infinitesimal value beside the yearning fondness that welled up and
remained penned in her heart till it should be more fully accepted by
him, or by some other person or thing. If he had lived at home with
her he would have had all of it; but he seemed to require so very
little in present circumstances, and it remained stored.
Her life became insupportably dreary; she could not take walks, and
had no interest in going for drives, or, indeed, in travelling
anywhere. Nearly two years passed without an event, and still she
looked on that suburban road, thinking of the village in which she
had been born, and whither she would have gone back--O how gladly!--
even to work in the fields.
Taking no exercise, she often could not sleep, and would rise in the
night or early morning and look out upon the then vacant
thoroughfare, where the lamps stood like sentinels waiting for some
procession to go by. An approximation to such a procession was
indeed made early every morning about one o'clock, when the country
vehicles passed up with loads of vegetables for Covent Garden market.
She often saw them creeping along at this silent and dusky hour--
waggon after waggon, bearing green bastions of cabbages nodding to
their fall, yet never falling, walls of baskets enclosing masses of
beans and peas, pyramids of snow-white turnips, swaying howdahs of
mixed produce--creeping along behind aged night-horses, who seemed
ever patiently wondering between their hollow coughs why they had
always to work at that still hour when all other sentient creatures
were privileged to rest. Wrapped in a cloak, it was soothing to
watch and sympathize with them when depression and nervousness
hindered sleep, and to see how the fresh green-stuff brightened to
life as it came opposite the lamp, and how the sweating animals
steamed and shone with their miles of travel.
They had an interest, almost a charm, for Sophy, these semirural
people and vehicles moving in an urban atmosphere, leading a life
quite distinct from that of the daytime toilers on the same road.
One morning a man who accompanied a waggon-load of potatoes gazed
rather hard at the house-fronts as he passed, and with a curious
emotion she thought his form was familiar to her. She looked out for
him again. His being an old-fashioned conveyance, with a yellow
front, it was easily recognizable, and on the third night after she
saw it a second time. The man alongside was, as she had fancied, Sam
Hobson, formerly gardener at Gaymead, who would at one time have
married her.
She had occasionally thought of him, and wondered if life in a
cottage with him would not have been a happier lot than the life she
had accepted. She had not thought of him passionately, but her now
dismal situation lent an interest to his resurrection--a tender
interest which it is impossible to exaggerate. She went back to bed,
and began thinking. When did these market-gardeners, who travelled
up to town so regularly at one or two in the morning, come back? She
dimly recollected seeing their empty waggons, hardly noticeable amid
the ordinary day-traffic, passing down at some hour before noon.
It was only April, but that morning, after breakfast, she had the
window opened, and sat looking out, the feeble sun shining full upon
her. She affected to sew, but her eyes never left the street.
Between ten and eleven the desired waggon, now unladen, reappeared on
its return journey. But Sam was not looking round him then, and
drove on in a reverie.
'Sam!' cried she.
Turning with a start, his face lighted up. He called to him a little
boy to hold the horse, alighted, and came and stood under her window.
'I can't come down easily, Sam, or I would!' she said. 'Did you know
I lived here?'
'Well, Mrs. Twycott, I knew you lived along here somewhere. I have
often looked out for 'ee.'
He briefly explained his own presence on the scene. He had long
since given up his gardening in the village near Aldbrickham, and was
now manager at a market-gardener's on the south side of London, it
being part of his duty to go up to Covent Garden with waggon-loads of
produce two or three times a week. In answer to her curious inquiry,
he admitted that he had come to this particular district because he
had seen in the Aldbrickham paper, a year or two before, the
announcement of the death in South London of the aforetime vicar of
Gaymead, which had revived an interest in her dwelling-place that he
could not extinguish, leading him to hover about the locality till
his present post had been secured.
They spoke of their native village in dear old North Wessex, the
spots in which they had played together as children. She tried to
feel that she was a dignified personage now, that she must not be too
confidential with Sam. But she could not keep it up, and the tears
hanging in her eyes were indicated in her voice.
'You are not happy, Mrs. Twycott, I'm afraid?' he said.
'O, of course not! I lost my husband only the year before last.'
'Ah! I meant in another way. You'd like to be home again?'
'This is my home--for life. The house belongs to me. But I
understand'--She let it out then. 'Yes, Sam. I long for home--OUR
home! I SHOULD like to be there, and never leave it, and die there.'
But she remembered herself. 'That's only a momentary feeling. I
have a son, you know, a dear boy. He's at school now.'
'Somewhere handy, I suppose? I see there's lots on 'em along this
road.'
'O no! Not in one of these wretched holes! At a public school--one
of the most distinguished in England.'
'Chok' it all! of course! I forget, ma'am, that you've been a lady
for so many years.'
'No, I am not a lady,' she said sadly. 'I never shall be. But he's
a gentleman, and that--makes it--O how difficult for me!'
CHAPTER III
The acquaintance thus oddly reopened proceeded apace. She often
looked out to get a few words with him, by night or by day. Her
sorrow was that she could not accompany her one old friend on foot a
little way, and talk more freely than she could do while he paused
before the house. One night, at the beginning of June, when she was
again on the watch after an absence of some days from the window, he
entered the gate and said softly, 'Now, wouldn't some air do you
good? I've only half a load this morning. Why not ride up to Covent
Garden with me? There's a nice seat on the cabbages, where I've
spread a sack. You can be home again in a cab before anybody is up.'
She refused at first, and then, trembling with excitement, hastily
finished her dressing, and wrapped herself up in cloak and veil,
afterwards sidling downstairs by the aid of the handrail, in a way
she could adopt on an emergency. When she had opened the door she
found Sam on the step, and he lifted her bodily on his strong arm
across the little forecourt into his vehicle. Not a soul was visible
or audible in the infinite length of the straight, flat highway, with
its ever-waiting lamps converging to points in each direction. The
air was fresh as country air at this hour, and the stars shone,
except to the north-eastward, where there was a whitish light--the
dawn. Sam carefully placed her in the seat, and drove on.
They talked as they had talked in old days, Sam pulling himself up
now and then, when he thought himself too familiar. More than once
she said with misgiving that she wondered if she ought to have
indulged in the freak. 'But I am so lonely in my house,' she added,
'and this makes me so happy!'
'You must come again, dear Mrs. Twycott. There is no time o' day for
taking the air like this.'
It grew lighter and lighter. The sparrows became busy in the
streets, and the city waxed denser around them. When they approached
the river it was day, and on the bridge they beheld the full blaze of
morning sunlight in the direction of St. Paul's, the river glistening
towards it, and not a craft stirring.
Near Covent Garden he put her into a cab, and they parted, looking
into each other's faces like the very old friends they were. She
reached home without adventure, limped to the door, and let herself
in with her latch-key unseen.
The air and Sam's presence had revived her: her cheeks were quite
pink--almost beautiful. She had something to live for in addition to
her son. A woman of pure instincts, she knew there had been nothing
really wrong in the journey, but supposed it conventionally to be
very wrong indeed.
Soon, however, she gave way to the temptation of going with him
again, and on this occasion their conversation was distinctly tender,
and Sam said he never should forget her, notwithstanding that she had
served him rather badly at one time. After much hesitation he told
her of a plan it was in his power to carry out, and one he should
like to take in hand, since he did not care for London work: it was
to set up as a master greengrocer down at Aldbrickham, the county-
town of their native place. He knew of an opening--a shop kept by
aged people who wished to retire.
'And why don't you do it, then, Sam?' she asked with a slight
heartsinking.
'Because I'm not sure if--you'd join me. I know you wouldn't--
couldn't! Such a lady as ye've been so long, you couldn't be a wife
to a man like me.'
'I hardly suppose I could!' she assented, also frightened at the
idea.
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