Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1193 page)

‘October 24. A glorious day. T. and I walked across the field in front of Max Gate towards Came. We both stood on a little flat stone sunk in the path that we call our wishing stone, and I wished. T. may have done so, but he did not say.

‘On the way he gathered up some waste paper that was blowing about the lane at the side of our house and buried it in the hedge with his stick, and going up the path to Came he stopped for quite a long time to pull off the branches of a tree a heap of dead weeds that had been thrown there by some untidy labourer who had been cleaning the field. He says that a man has no public spirit who passes by any untidiness out of doors, litter of paper or similar rubbish.’

‘October 27. During the evening he spoke of an experience he had a few years ago. There were four or five people to tea at Max Gate, and he noticed a stranger standing by me most of the time. Afterwards he asked who that dark man was who stood by me. I told him that there was no stranger present, and I gave him the names of the three men who were there, all personal friends. He said that it was not one of these, and seemed to think that another person had actually been there. This afternoon he said: “I can see his face now”.

‘Later in the evening, during a terrific gale, I said that I did not wonder that some people disliked going along the dark road outside our house at night.

‘T. replied that for twelve years he walked backwards and forwards from Bockhampton to Dorchester often in the dark, and he was only frightened twice. Once was when he was going up Stinsford Hill, no habitation of any sort being in sight, and he came upon two men sitting on chairs, one on either side of the road. By the moonlight he saw that they were strangers to him; terrified, he took to his heels; he never heard who they were or anything to explain the incident.

‘The other time was when, as a small boy walking home from school, reading Pilgrim s Progress, he was so alarmed by the description of Apollyon that he hastily closed his book and went on his way trembling, thinking that Apollyon was going to spring out of a tree whose dark branches overhung the road. He remembered his terror, he said, that evening, seventy-five years afterwards.’

‘October 30. At lunch T. H. talked about Severn, speaking with admiration of his friendship towards Keats. He said that it must have been quite disinterested, as Keats was then comparatively obscure.’

‘October 31. Henry Williamson, the author of Tar ha the Otter, called.’

‘November 3. While he was having tea to-day, T. H. said that whenever he heard any music from II Trovatore, it carried him back to the first year when he was in London and when he was strong and vigorous and enjoyed his life immensely. He thought that II Trovatore was good music.’

‘November 4. We drove in the afternoon to Stinsford, to put flowers on the family graves. The tombs are very green, being covered with moss because they are under a yew-tree. T. H. scraped off most of the moss with a little wooden implement like a toy spade, six inches in length, which he made with his own hands and which he carries in his pocket when he goes to Stinsford. He remarked that Walter de la Mare had told him that he preferred to see the gravestones green.

‘Then we drove to Talbothays (his brother’s house). As we turned up Dark Hill, T. H. pointed out the place {where, as a small boy, he had left an umbrella in the hedge, having put it down while he cut a stick. He did not remember it until he reached home and his mother asked him where was his umbrella. As he went to school next morning he looked in the hedge and found it where he had left it.

‘After having been with H. H. and K. H. (the brother and sister) for half an hour we returned home.’

Thus ended a series of visits paid regularly to his family extending over forty years. While his parents were alive, Hardy went to see them at Bockhampton nearly every Sunday afternoon when he was in Dorchester, walking at first, then cycling. After his mother’s death he visited his two sisters and his brother at Bockhampton, and later at Talbothays, to which house they moved in 1912. These visits continued until the last year or two of his life, when he was unable to go very often. He cycled there in fine weather until he was over eighty, and then he walked, until the distance seemed beyond his powers. Stinsford was a favourite haunt until the last few months of his life, the walk there from Max Gate, across the water-meadows,

being a particularly beautiful one; and the churchyard, to him, the most hallowed spot on earth.

‘November 4, continued. At tea T. H. said that he had been pleased to read that day an article by the composer Miss Ethel Smyth, saying that II Trovatore was good music. He reminded me of what he said yesterday.’

‘November 11. Armistice Day. T. came downstairs from his study and listened to the broadcasting of a service at Canterbury Cathedral. We stood there for the two minutes’ silence. He said afterwards that he had been thinking of Frank George, his cousin, who was killed at Gallipoli.

‘In the afternoon we took one of our usual little walks, around “the triangle” as we call it, that is down the lane by the side of our house, and along the cinder-path beside the railway line. We stood and watched a goods train carrying away huge blocks of Portland stone as we have done so many times. He seems never tired of watching these stone-laden trucks. He said he thought that the shape of Portland would be changed in the course of years by the continual cutting away of its surface.

‘Sitting by the fire after tea he told me about various families of poachers he had known as a boy, and how, when a thatched house at Bockhampton was pulled down, a pair of swingels was found under the thatch. This was an instrument of defence used by poachers, and capable of killing a man.1

‘He said that if he had his life over again he would prefer to be a small architect in a country town, like Mr. Hicks at Dorchester, to whom he was articled.’

‘November 17. To-day T. H. was speaking, and evidently thinking a great deal, about a friend, a year or two older than himself, who was a fellow-pupil at Mr. Hicks’s office. I felt, as he talked, that he would like to meet this man again more than anyone in the world. He is in Australia now, if alive, and must be nearly ninety. His name is Henry Robert Bastow; he was a Baptist and evidently a very religious youth, and T. H. was devoted to him. I suggested that we might find out something about him by sending an advertisement to Australian newspapers, but T. H. thought that would not be wise.’

‘Sunday, November 27. The fifteenth anniversary of the death of Emma Lavinia Hardy; Thursday was the anniversary of the death 1 Poachers’ iron swingels. A strip of iron ran down three or four sides of the flail part, and the two flails were united by three or four links of chain, the keepers carrying cutlasses which would cut off the ordinary eel-skin hinge of a flail. — From T. H.’s notebook, Dec. 1884.

of Mary, his elder sister. For two or three days he has been wearing a black hat as a token of mourning, and carries a black walking-stick that belonged to his first wife, all strangely moving.

‘T. H. has been writing almost all the day, revising poems. When he came down to tea he brought one to show me, about a desolate spring morning, and a shepherd counting his sheep and not noticing the weather.’ This is the poem in Winter Words called ‘An Unkindly May’.

‘November 28. Speaking about ambition T. said to-day that he had done all that he meant to do, but he did not know whether it had been worth doing.

‘His only ambition, so far as he could remember, was to have some poem or poems in a good anthology like the Golden Treasury.

‘The model he had set before him was “Drink to me only”, by Ben Jonson.’

The earliest recollection of his childhood (as he had told me before) was that when he was four years old his father gave him a small toy concertina and wrote on it, ‘Thomas Hardy, 1844’. By this inscription he knew, in after years, his age when that happened.

Also he remembered, perhaps a little later than this, being in the garden at Bockhampton with his father on a bitterly cold winter day. They noticed a fieldfare, half-frozen, and the father took up a stone idly and threw it at the bird, possibly not meaning to hit it. The fieldfare fell dead, and the child Thomas picked it up and it was as light as a feather, all skin and bone, practically starved. He said he had never forgotten how the body of the fieldfare felt in his hand: the memory had always haunted him.

He recalled how, crossing the eweleaze when a child, he went on hands and knees and pretended to eat grass in order to see what the sheep would do. Presently he looked up and found them gathered around in a close ring, gazing at him with astonished faces.

An illness, which at the commencement did not seem to be serious, began on December 11. On the morning of that day he sat at the writing-table in his study, and felt totally unable to work. This, he said, was the first time that such a thing had happened to him.

From then his strength waned daily. He was anxious that a poem he had written, ‘Christmas in the Elgin Room’, should be copied and sent to The Times. This was done, and he asked his wife anxiously whether she had posted it with her own hands. When she assured him that she had done so he seemed content, and said he was glad that he had cleared everything up. Two days later he received a personal letter of thanks, with a warm appreciation of his work, from the editor of The Times. This gave him pleasure, and he asked that a reply should be sent.

He continued to come downstairs to sit for a few hours daily, until Christmas Day. After that he came downstairs no more.

On December 26 he said that he had been thinking of the Nativity and of the Massacre of the Innocents, and his wife read to him the gospel accounts, and also articles in the Encyclopedia Biblica. He remarked that there was not a grain of evidence that the gospel story was true in any detail.

As the year ended a window in the dressing-room adjoining his bedroom was opened that he might hear the bells, as that had always pleased him. But now he said that he could not hear them, and did not seem interested.

His strength still failed. The weather was bitterly cold, and snow had fallen heavily, being twelve inches deep in parts of the garden. In the road outside there were snow-drifts that in places would reach a man’s waist.

By desire of the local practitioner additional advice was called in, and Hardy’s friend Sir Henry Head, who was living in the neighbourhood, made invaluable suggestions and kept a watchful eye upon the case. But the weakness increased daily.

He could no longer listen to the reading of prose, though a short poem now and again interested him. In the middle of one night he asked his wife to read aloud to him ‘The Listeners’, by Walter de la Mare.

On January 10 he made a strong rally, and although he was implored not to do so he insisted upon writing a cheque for his subscription to the Pension Fund of the Society of Authors. For the first time in his life he made a slightly feeble signature, unlike his usual beautiful firm handwriting, and then he laid down his pen.

Later he was interested to learn that J. M. Barrie, his friend of many years, had arrived from London to assist in any way that might be possible. He was amused when told that this visitor had gone to the kitchen door to avoid any disturbance by ringing the front-door bell.

In the evening he asked that Robert Browning’s poem ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ should be read aloud to him. While reading it his wife glanced at his face to see whether he were tired, the poem being a long one of thirty-two stanzas, and she was struck by the look of wistful intentness with which Hardy was listening. He indicated that he wished to hear the poem to the end.

He had a better night, and in the morning of January 11 seemed so much stronger that one at least of those who watched beside him had confident hopes of his recovery, and an atmosphere of joy prevailed in the sick-room. An immense bunch of grapes arrived from London, sent by a friend, and this aroused in Hardy great interest. As a rule he disliked receiving gifts, but on this occasion he showed an almost childlike pleasure, and insisted upon the grapes being held up for the inspection of the doctor, and whoever came into the room. He ate some, and said quite gaily, ‘I’m going on with these’. Everything he had that day in the way of food or drink he seemed to appreciate keenly, though naturally he took but little. As it grew dusk, after a long musing silence, he asked his wife to repeat to him a verse from the Rubiiyit of Omar Khayydm, beginning

Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth —

She took his copy of this work from his bedside and read to him:

Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,

And ev’n with Paradise devise the Snake:

For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man Is blacken’d —

Man’s forgiveness give — and take!

He indicated that he wished no more to be read.

In the evening he had a sharp heart attack of a kind he had never had before. The doctor was summoned and came quickly, joining Mrs. Hardy at the bedside. Hardy remained conscious until a few minutes before the end. Shortly after nine he died.

An hour later one, going to his bedside yet again, saw on the death-face an expression such as she had never seen before on any being, or indeed on any presentment of the human countenance. It was a look of radiant triumph such as imagination could never have conceived. Later the first radiance passed away, but dignity and peace remained as long as eyes could see the mortal features of Thomas Hardy.

The dawn of the following day rose in almost unparalleled splendour. Flaming and magnificent the sky stretched its banners over the dark pines that stood sentinel around.

APPENDIX I

On the morning of Thursday, January 12, the Dean of Westminster readily gave his consent to a proposal that Hardy should be buried in Westminster Abbey; and news of this proposal and its acceptance was sent to Max Gate. There it was well known that Hardy’s own wish was to be buried at Stinsford, amid the graves of his ancestors and of his first wife. After much consideration a compromise was found between this definite personal wish and the nation’s claim to the ashes of the great poet. On Friday, January 13, his heart was taken out of his body and placed by itself in a casket. On Saturday, January 14, the body was sent to Woking for cremation, and thence the ashes were taken the same day to Westminster Abbey and placed in the Chapel of St. Faith to await interment. On Sunday, January 15, the casket containing the heart was taken to the church at Stinsford, where it was laid on the altar steps.