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Return of the Native
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
PREFACE
The date at which the following events are assumed to have occurred
may be set down as between 1840 and 1850, when the old watering place
herein called "Budmouth" still retained sufficient afterglow from its
Georgian gaiety and prestige to lend it an absorbing attractiveness to
the romantic and imaginative soul of a lonely dweller inland.
Under the general name of "Egdon Heath," which has been given to the
sombre scene of the story, are united or typified heaths of various
real names, to the number of at least a dozen; these being virtually
one in character and aspect, though their original unity, or partial
unity, is now somewhat disguised by intrusive strips and slices
brought under the plough with varying degrees of success, or planted
to woodland.
It is pleasant to dream that some spot in the extensive tract whose
southwestern quarter is here described, may be the heath of that
traditionary King of Wessex--Lear.
July, 1895.
"To sorrow I bade good morrow, And thought to leave her far away
behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant
to me, and so kind. I would deceive her, And so leave her, But ah! she
is so constant and so kind."
book one
THE THREE WOMEN
1 - A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight,
and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned
itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud
shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its
floor.
The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the
darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly
marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an
instalment of night which had taken up its place before its
astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived
hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a
furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down,
he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant
rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time
no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere
complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner
retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms
scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight
to a cause of shaking and dread.
In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into
darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and
nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at
such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen,
its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding
hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true
tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night
showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be
perceived in its shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds
and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure
sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens
precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in
the land closed together in a black fraternization towards which each
advanced halfway.
The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other
things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and
listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but
it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the
crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one
last crisis--the final overthrow.
It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it
with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of
flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious
only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the
present. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a
thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness,
emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The
qualifications which frequently invest the facade of a prison with far
more dignity than is found in the facade of a palace double its size
lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of
the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with
fair times; but alas, if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered
from, the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from
the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon
appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt
emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called
charming and fair.
Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox
beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe may
be a gaunt waste in Thule; human souls may find themselves in closer
and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness
distasteful to our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it
has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a
sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping
with the moods of the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately, to
the commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the
vineyards and myrtle gardens of South Europe are to him now; and
Heidelberg and Baden be passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to
the sand dunes of Scheveningen.
The most thoroughgoing ascetic could feel that he had a natural right
to wander on Egdon--he was keeping within the line of legitimate
indulgence when he laid himself open to influences such as these.
Colours and beauties so far subdued were, at least, the birthright of
all. Only in summer days of highest feather did its mood touch the
level of gaiety. Intensity was more usually reached by way of the
solemn than by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was
often arrived at during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then
Egdon was aroused to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the
wind its friend. Then it became the home of strange phantoms; and it
was found to be the hitherto unrecognized original of those wild
regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about
in midnight dreams of flight and disaster, and are never thought of
after the dream till revived by scenes like this.
It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's
nature--neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace,
unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal
singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with
some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of
its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical
possibilities.
This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday. Its
condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary
wilderness--"Bruaria." Then follows the length and breadth in
leagues; and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of
this ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area
of Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. "Turbaria
Bruaria"--the right of cutting heath-turf--occurs in charters relating
to the district. "Overgrown with heth and mosse," says Leland of the
same dark sweep of country.
Here at least were intelligible facts regarding
landscape--far-reaching proofs productive of genuine satisfaction.
The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon now was it always had
been. Civilization was its enemy; and ever since the beginning of
vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural
and invariable garment of the particular formation. In its venerable
one coat lay a certain vein of satire on human vanity in clothes. A
person on a heath in raiment of modern cut and colours has more or
less an anomalous look. We seem to want the oldest and simplest human
clothing where the clothing of the earth is so primitive.
To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between
afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the
world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the
whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around
and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the
stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and
harassed by the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an
ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a
particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the
moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea
changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people
changed, yet Egdon remained. Those surfaces were neither so steep as
to be destructible by weather, nor so flat as to be the victims of
floods and deposits. With the exception of an aged highway, and a
still more aged barrow presently to be referred to--themselves almost
crystallized to natural products by long continuance--even the
trifling irregularities were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade,
but remained as the very finger-touches of the last geological change.
The above-mentioned highway traversed the lower levels of the heath,
from one horizon to another. In many portions of its course it
overlaid an old vicinal way, which branched from the great Western
road of the Romans, the Via Iceniana, or Ikenild Street, hard by. On
the evening under consideration it would have been noticed that,
though the gloom had increased sufficiently to confuse the minor
features of the heath, the white surface of the road remained almost
as clear as ever.
2 - Humanity Appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble
Along the road walked an old man. He was white-headed as a mountain,
bowed in the shoulders, and faded in general aspect. He wore a glazed
hat, an ancient boat-cloak, and shoes; his brass buttons bearing an
anchor upon their face. In his hand was a silver-headed walking
stick, which he used as a veritable third leg, perseveringly dotting
the ground with its point at every few inches' interval. One would
have said that he had been, in his day, a naval officer of some sort
or other.
Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white.
It was quite open to the heath on each side, and bisected that vast
dark surface like the parting-line on a head of black hair,
diminishing and bending away on the furthest horizon.
The old man frequently stretched his eyes ahead to gaze over the tract
that he had yet to traverse. At length he discerned, a long distance
in front of him, a moving spot, which appeared to be a vehicle, and it
proved to be going the same way as that in which he himself was
journeying. It was the single atom of life that the scene contained,
and it only served to render the general loneliness more evident. Its
rate of advance was slow, and the old man gained upon it sensibly.
When he drew nearer he perceived it to be a spring van, ordinary in
shape, but singular in colour, this being a lurid red. The driver
walked beside it; and, like his van, he was completely red. One dye
of that tincture covered his clothes, the cap upon his head, his
boots, his face, and his hands. He was not temporarily overlaid with
the colour; it permeated him.
The old man knew the meaning of this. The traveller with the cart was
a reddleman--a person whose vocation it was to supply farmers with
redding for their sheep. He was one of a class rapidly becoming
extinct in Wessex, filling at present in the rural world the place
which, during the last century, the dodo occupied in the world of
animals. He is a curious, interesting, and nearly perished link
between obsolete forms of life and those which generally prevail.
The decayed officer, by degrees, came up alongside his
fellow-wayfarer, and wished him good evening. The reddleman turned
his head, and replied in sad and occupied tones. He was young, and his
face, if not exactly handsome, approached so near to handsome that
nobody would have contradicted an assertion that it really was so in
its natural colour. His eye, which glared so strangely through his
stain, was in itself attractive--keen as that of a bird of prey, and
blue as autumn mist. He had neither whisker nor moustache, which
allowed the soft curves of the lower part of his face to be apparent.
His lips were thin, and though, as it seemed, compressed by thought,
there was a pleasant twitch at their corners now and then. He was
clothed throughout in a tight-fitting suit of corduroy, excellent in
quality, not much worn, and well-chosen for its purpose, but deprived
of its original colour by his trade. It showed to advantage the good
shape of his figure. A certain well-to-do air about the man suggested
that he was not poor for his degree. The natural query of an observer
would have been, Why should such a promising being as this have hidden
his prepossessing exterior by adopting that singular occupation?
After replying to the old man's greeting he showed no inclination to
continue in talk, although they still walked side by side, for the
elder traveller seemed to desire company. There were no sounds but
that of the booming wind upon the stretch of tawny herbage around
them, the crackling wheels, the tread of the men, and the footsteps of
the two shaggy ponies which drew the van. They were small, hardy
animals, of a breed between Galloway and Exmoor, and were known as
"heath-croppers" here.
Now, as they thus pursued their way, the reddleman occasionally left
his companion's side, and, stepping behind the van, looked into its
interior through a small window. The look was always anxious. He
would then return to the old man, who made another remark about the
state of the country and so on, to which the reddleman again
abstractedly replied, and then again they would lapse into silence.
The silence conveyed to neither any sense of awkwardness; in these
lonely places wayfarers, after a first greeting, frequently plod on
for miles without speech; contiguity amounts to a tacit conversation
where, otherwise than in cities, such contiguity can be put an end to
on the merest inclination, and where not to put an end to it is
intercourse in itself.
Possibly these two might not have spoken again till their parting, had
it not been for the reddleman's visits to his van. When he returned
from his fifth time of looking in the old man said, "You have
something inside there besides your load?"
"Yes."
"Somebody who wants looking after?"
"Yes."
Not long after this a faint cry sounded from the interior. The
reddleman hastened to the back, looked in, and came away again.
"You have a child there, my man?"
"No, sir, I have a woman."
"The deuce you have! Why did she cry out?"
"Oh, she has fallen asleep, and not being used to traveling, she's
uneasy, and keeps dreaming."
"A young woman?"
"Yes, a young woman."
"That would have interested me forty years ago. Perhaps she's your
wife?"
"My wife!" said the other bitterly. "She's above mating with such as
I. But there's no reason why I should tell you about that."
"That's true. And there's no reason why you should not. What harm can
I do to you or to her?"
The reddleman looked in the old man's face. "Well, sir," he said at
last, "I knew her before today, though perhaps it would have been
better if I had not. But she's nothing to me, and I am nothing to
her; and she wouldn't have been in my van if any better carriage had
been there to take her."
"Where, may I ask?"
"At Anglebury."
"I know the town well. What was she doing there?"
"Oh, not much--to gossip about. However, she's tired to death now,
and not at all well, and that's what makes her so restless. She
dropped off into a nap about an hour ago, and 'twill do her good."
"A nice-looking girl, no doubt?"
"You would say so."
The other traveller turned his eyes with interest towards the van
window, and, without withdrawing them, said, "I presume I might look
in upon her?"
"No," said the reddleman abruptly. "It is getting too dark for you to
see much of her; and, more than that, I have no right to allow you.
Thank God she sleeps so well, I hope she won't wake till she's home."
"Who is she? One of the neighbourhood?"
"'Tis no matter who, excuse me."
"It is not that girl of Blooms-End, who has been talked about more or
less lately? If so, I know her; and I can guess what has happened."
"'Tis no matter....Now, sir, I am sorry to say that we shall soon have
to part company. My ponies are tired, and I have further to go, and I
am going to rest them under this bank for an hour."
The elder traveller nodded his head indifferently, and the reddleman
turned his horses and van in upon the turf, saying, "Good night." The
old man replied, and proceeded on his way as before.