The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

The twentieth century's novels may be divided roughly into three main sub- periods: high modernism through the 1920s, celebrating personal and textual inwardness, complexity, and difficulty; the reaction against modernism, involving a return to social realism, moralism, and assorted documentary endeavors, in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s; and the period after the collapse of the British Empire (especially from the time of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s), in which the fictional claims of various realisms�urban, proletarian, provincial English (e.g., northern), regional (e.g., Scottish and Irish), immigrant, postcolonial, feminist, gay�are asserted alongside, but also through, a continuing self-consciousness about language and form and meaning that is, in effect, the enduring legacy of modernism. By the end of the century, modernism had given way to the striking pluralism of postmodernism and post- colonialism. Yet the roots of the late-century panoramic mix of voices and styles lay in the early part of the century, when writers on the margins of "Englishness"�a Pole, Joseph Conrad; an Irishman, James Joyce; an American, Henry James; an Englishwoman, Virginia Woolf; and a working-class Englishman, D. H. Lawrence�were the most instrumental inventors of the modernist "English" novel.

The high modernists wrote in the wake of the shattering of confidence in the old certainties about the deity and the Christian faith, about the person, knowledge, materialism, history, the old grand narratives, which had, more or less, sustained the Western novel through the nineteenth century. They boldly ventured into this general shaking of belief in the novel's founding assumptions� that the world, things, and selves were knowable, that language was a reliably revelatory instrument, that the author's story gave history meaning and moral shape, that narratives should fall into ethically instructive beginnings, middles, and endings. Trying to be true to the new skepticisms and hesitations, the modernists also attempted to construct credible new alternatives to the old belief systems.

The once-prevailing nineteenth-century notions of ordinary reality came under serious attack. In her famous 1919 essay "Modern Fiction," Virginia Woolf explicitly assaulted the "materialism" of the realistic Edwardian heirs of Victorian naturalist confidence, Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy. For Woolf, as for other modernists, what was knowable, and thus representable, was not out there as some given, fixed, transcribable essence. Reality existed, rather, only as it was perceived. Hence the introduction of the impressionistic, flawed, even utterly unreliable narrator�a substitute for the classic nineteenth-century authoritative narrating voice, usually the voice of the author or some close substitute. Even a relatively reliable narrator, such

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as Conrad's Marlow, the main narrating voice of Heart of Darkness, as of Lord Jim, dramatized the struggle to know, penetrate, and interpret reality, with his large rhetoric of the invisible, inaudible, impossible, unintelligible, and so unsayable. The real was offered, thus, as refracted and reflected in the novel's representative consciousness. "Look within," Woolf urged the novelist. Reality and its truth had gone inward.

Woolf's subject would be "an ordinary mind on an ordinary day." The life that mattered most would now be mental life. And so the modernist novel turned resolutely inward, its concern being now with consciousness�a flow of reflections, momentary impressions, disjunctive bits of recall and half- memory, simultaneously revealing both the past and the way the past is repressed. Psychoanalysis partly enabled this concentration: to narrate the reality of persons as the life of the mind in all its complexity and inner tumult� consciousness, unconsciousness, id, libido, and so on. And the apparent truths of this inward life were, of course, utterly tricky, scattered, fragmentary, spotty, now illuminated, now twilit, now quite occluded. For Woolf, Joyce's Ulysses was a prime expression of this desired impressionistic agenda: "he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain."

The characters of Joyce and Woolf are caught, then, as they are immersed in the so-called stream of consciousness; and some version of an interior flow of thought becomes the main modernist access to "character." The reader overhears the characters speaking, so to say, from within their particular consciousnesses, but not always directly. The modernists felt free also to enter their characters' minds, to speak as it were on their behalf, in the technique known as "free indirect style" (style indirect libre in French).

A marked feature of the new fictional selfhood was a fraught condition of existential loneliness. Conrad's Lord Jim, Joyce's Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Lawrence's Paul Morel and Rirkin, and Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway were people on their own, individuals bereft of the old props, Church, Rible, ideological consensus, and so doomed to make their own puzzled way through life's labyrinths without much confidence in belief, in the knowable solidity of the world, above all in language as a tool of knowledge about self and other. Jacob of Woolf's Jacob's Room remains stubbornly unknowable to his closest friends and loved ones, above all to his novelist. The walls and cupboards of Rhoda's room in The Waves, also by Woolf, bend disconcertingly around her bed; she tries in vain to restore her sense of the solidity of things by touching the bottom bed rail with her toes; her mind "pours" out of her; the very boundaries of her self soften, slip, dissolve. The old conclusive plots�everything resolved on the novel's last page, on the model of the detective story�gave place to irresolute open endings: the unending vista of the last paragraph in Lawrence's Sons and Lovers; the circularity by which the last sentence of Joyce's Finnegans Wake hooks back to be completed in the novel's first word, so that reading simply starts over.

Novelists built modern myths on the dry bones of the old Christian ones.

In his review of Ulysses ("Ulysses, Order, and Myth," 1923), T. S. Eliot famously

praised the novel for replacing the old "narrative method" by a new "mythical

method": Joyce's Irish Jew, Bloom, is mythicized as a modern Ulysses, his day's

odyssey often ironically reviving episodes in Homer's Odyssey. This manipu

lation of "a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" was,

Eliot thought, "a step toward making the modern world possible for art," much

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in keeping with the new anthropology and psychology as well as with what Yeats was doing in verse. Such private myth-making could, of course, take worrying turns. The "religion of the blood" that D. H. Lawrence celebrated led directly to the fascist sympathies of his Aaron's Rod and the revived Aztec blood cult of The Plumed Serpent.

Language and textuality, reading and writing were now central to these highly metafictional novels, which are often about writers and artists, and surrogates for artists, such as Woolf's Mrs. Ramsay with her dinners and Mrs. Dalloway with her party, producers of what Woolf called the "unpublished works of women." But this self-reflexivity was not necessarily consoling�Mrs. Flanders's vision blurs and an inkblot spreads across the postcard we find her writing in the opening page of Jacob's Room. Perhaps the greatest modernist example of language gone rampant, Finnegans Wake taxes even its most dedicated readers and verges on unreadability for others.

The skeptical modernist linguistic turn, the rejection of materialist externality and of the Victorians' realist project, left ineradicable traces on later fiction, but modernism's revolutions were not absolute or permanent. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were influential but unrepeatable. And even within the greatest modernist fictions the worldly and the material, political and moral questions never dried up. Woolf and Joyce, for example, celebrate the perplexities of urban life in London and Dublin, and, indeed, modernist fiction is largely an art of the great city. Lawrence was preoccupied with the condition of England, industrialism, provincial life. Satire was one of modernism's recurrent notes. So it was not odd for the right-wing novelists who came through in the 1920s, such as Wyndham Lewis and Evelyn Waugh, to resort to the social subject and the satiric stance, nor for their left-leaning contemporaries� who came to be seen as even more characteristic of the red decade of the 1930s�such as Graham Greene and George Orwell, to engage with the human condition in ways that Dickens or Balzac, let alone Bennett-Wells- Galsworthy, would have recognized as not all that distant from their own spirit.

Despite the turn to documentary realism in the 1930s, the modernist emphasis on linguistic self-consciousness did not disappear. Instead the new writers politicized the modern novel's linguistic self-consciousness: they deployed the discourse of the unemployed or of the West Midlands' proletariat, for example, for political ends. The comically chaotic meeting of English and German languages in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories is central to the fiction's dire warning about Anglo-German politics; Newspeak in George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four is the culmination of the author's nearly two decades of politically motivated engagement with the ways of English speakers at home and abroad. In this politicized aftermath of the modernist experiment, novelists such as Aldous Huxley in Brave New World satirically engage the socio-politico-moral matter of the 1930s in part through reflections on the corruptions of language.

Where World War I was a great engine of modernism, endorsing the chaos of shattered belief, the fragility of language and of the human subject, the Spanish Civil War and then World War II confirmed the English novel in its return to registering the social scene and the historical event. World War II provoked whole series of more or less realist fictions, including Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, as well as powerful singletons such as Graham Greene's Ministry of Fear and Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. The new fictions of the post�World War II period speak with the satirical energies of

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the young demobilized officer class (Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim set the disgruntled tone), and of the ordinary provincial citizen finding a fictional voice yet again in the new Welfare State atmosphere of the 1950s, as in Alan Sillitoe's proletarian Nottingham novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Questing for new moral bases for the post-Holocaust nuclear age, William Golding published the first of many intense post-Christian moral fables with The Lord of the Flies, and Iris Murdoch the first of many novels of moral philosophy with Under the Net, both in 1954. Murdoch espoused the "sovereignty of good" and the importance of the novel's loving devotion to "the otherness of the other person." Murdoch and Golding were consciously retrospective (as were the contemporary Roman Catholic novelists Greene, Waugh, and Muriel Spark) in their investment in moral form. But even such firmly grounded determinations could not calm the anxieties of belatedness. As the century drew on, British fiction struggled with a disconcertingly pervasive sense of posteriority-�postwar flatness, postimperial diminutions of power and influence, and the sense of the grand narratives now losing their force as never before.

Some younger novelists, such as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis (son of Kingsley), became obsessed with Germany (the now accusingly prosperous old foe), and with the still haunting ghosts of the Hitlerzeit�and not least after 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and wartime European horrors stirred into vivid focus. The dereliction of the once-grand imperial center, London, became a main topic for McEwan and for Amis, as well as for the later Kingsley Amis and the ex-Bhodesian Doris Lessing. Whereas Conrad, E. M. Forster (A Passage to India), and Jean Bhys (Wide Sargasso Sea) had been harshly accusatory about Britain's overseas behavior, now nostalgia for old imperial days shrouded the pages of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and Paul Scott's Raj Quartet and Staying On. Observers of English fiction worried that the only tasks left for it were to ruminate over past history and rehash old stories. The modernist Joycean strategy of resurrecting ancient narratives to revitalize present consciousness had given way to a fear that the postmodern novelist was condemned to a disabled career of parroting old stuff. On est parle, "one is spoken," rather than speaking for oneself, thinks the main character of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, reflecting in some dismay on this dilemma. Ventriloquial reproduction of old voices became Peter Ackroyd's trademark. Worries about being merely possessed by the past came to seem central to latetwentieth- century English fiction, as in A. S. Byatt's Possession, which is about the magnetism of past (Victorian) writers and writings.

Yet this was also a time for the spectacular emergence of many robust new voices, particularly from assorted margins�writers for whom the enervation at the English center represented an opportunity for telling their untold stories. After a sensational trial in 1960, the ban on D. H. Lawrence's erotically explicit Lady Chatterley's Lover was finally lifted, ensuring greater freedom in the narrative exploration of sexuality. Relaxing views on gender roles, the influx of women into the workplace, and the collapse of the grand patriarchal narratives also gave impetus to feminist revisionary narratives of history, and the remaking of narrative technique as more fluid and free. In the 1980s and 1990s prominent and inventive women's voices included those of Jeanette Winterson, celebrator of women's arts and bodiliness, and Angela Carter, feminist neomythographer, reviser of fairy tales, rewriter of the Marquis de Sade, espouser of raucous and rebellious heroines. Among the chorus of voices seek

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ing to express with new intimacy and vividness experiences once held taboo were those of uncloseted gay writers, such as Alan Hollinghurst, pioneer of the openly male-homosexual literary novel of the post�World War II period, and Adam Mars-Jones, short-story chronicler of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The literary counterpart for political decolonization and devolution within the British Isles was the emergence of a multitude of regional and national voices outside the south of England, many deploying a vigorously local idiom, such as the Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh and the Irish writer Roddy Doyle, who reached mass international audiences through 1990s film versions of their novels Trainspotting (Welsh) and The Commitments (Doyle).

While postimperial anxieties and exhaustion seemed to beset many postwar English writers, postcolonial novelists were energetically claiming for literature in English untold histories, hybrid identities, and vibrantly creolized vocabularies. A major phase in the huge geographic shift in the center of gravity of English-language fiction occurred during the postwar decolonization of much of South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, when Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) was published, just two years before Nigerian independence. Retelling the story of colonial incursion from an indigenous viewpoint, Achebe's influential novel intricately represents an African community before and after the arrival of whites, in a language made up of English and Igbo words, encompassed by a narrative that enmeshes African proverbs and oral tales with English realism and modernist reflexivity. A few years later and on the eve of his natal island's independence, the Trinidad-born writer V. S. Naipaul published his first major novel, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), one of many works that brilliantly develop the potential of a translucent realist fiction to explore issues such as migrant identities, cross-cultural mimicry, and the spaces of colonialism. The Indian-born Salman Rushdie, more restive than Naipaul in relation to Englishness and English literary traditions, has exuberantly championed hybrid narrative forms made out of the fresh convergence of modern European fiction and "Third World" orality, magical realism, and polyglossia, his novels, such as Midnight's Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988), wryly offering a "chutnification of history" in South Asia and in an Asianized England. The colonies where English literature had once been used to impose imperial models of "civilization" now gave rise to novelists who, ironically, outstripped in imaginative freshness, cultural energy, and narrative inventiveness their counterparts from the seat of the empire.

White fiction writers from the colonies and dominions, many of them women, and many of them resident in England, such as Katherine Mansfield, Doris Lessing, and Jean Rhys, had long brought fresh perspectives to the novel from the outposts of empire, each of these eminent writers sharply etching a feminist critique of women's lives diminished by subordination to the colonial order. South Africa, not least because of its fraught racial and political history, can count among its progeny some of the most celebrated fiction writers of the late twentieth century. Nadine Gordimer has extended the potential of an ethical narrative realism to probe the fierce moral challenges of apartheid and its aftermath, whereas J. M. Coetzee has used self-reflexively postmodern and allegorical forms to inquire into the tangled complexities and vexed complicities of white South African experience.

Late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century "English" fiction would have looked startlingly thin and poverty-stricken were it not for the large presence in Britain of writers of non-European origin. Like the first modern

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INTRODUCTION / 184 3

novelists, many of the novelists who have most enriched English-language fiction in recent decades are migrants, emigres, and expatriates, such as Naipaul and Rushdie, and such as the delicately ironic realist Kazuo Ishiguro, from Japan, and the postsurreal fabulist Wilson Harris, from Guyana. Still others are the sons and daughters of non-European immigrants to Rritain, such as two of the most visible exemplars of the often comically cross-cultural fiction of a new multiracial England, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith, both born on the peripheries of London, Kureishi to a Pakistani father and English mother, Smith to a Jamaican mother and English father. These and other "Rritish" novelists of color, giving voice to new and emergent experiences of immigration, hybridization, and cross-racial encounter, take advantage of the novel's fecund polymorphousness with little anxiety about belatedness, no fright over parroting, and no neomodernist worries about attempting realistic encounters with the world.

DRAMA

Late Victorians from one perspective, Oscar Wilde and Rernard Shaw can also be seen as early moderns, forerunners of the twentieth century's renovators of dramatic form. The wit of Wilde's drawing-room comedies is combative and generative of paradoxes, but beneath the glitter of his verbal play are serious� if heavily coded�reflections on social, political, and feminist issues. Shaw brought still another kind of wit into drama�not Wilde's lighthearted sparkle but the provocative paradox that was meant to tease and disturb, to challenge the complacency of the audience. Over time the desire to unsettle, to shock, even to alienate the audience became one hallmark of modern drama.

Wilde and Shaw were both born in Ireland, and it was in Dublin that the century's first major theatrical movement originated. To nourish Irish poetic drama and foster the Irish literary renaissance, Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory founded the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, with Yeats's early nationalist play The Countess Cathleen as its first production. In 1902 the Irish Literary Theatre was able to maintain a permanent all-Irish company and changed its name to the Irish National Theatre, which moved in 1904 to the Abbey Theatre, by which name it has been known ever since. J. M. Synge brought the speech and imagination of Irish country people into theater, but the Abbey's 1907 staging of his play The Playboy of the Western World so offended orthodox religious and nationalist sentiment that the audience rioted. While defending Synge and other pioneers of Irish drama, Yeats also continued to write his own plays, which drew themes from old Irish legend and which, after 1913, stylized and ritualized theatrical performance on the model of Japanese Noh drama. In the 1920s Sean O'Casey brought new vitality to the Abbey Theatre, using the Easter Rising and Irish civil war as a background for controversial plays (one of which again sparked riots) that combined tragic melodrama, humor of character, and irony of circumstance. In England T. S. Eliot attempted with considerable success to revive a ritual poetic drama with his Murder in the Cathedral (1935), though his later attempts to combine religious symbolism with the chatter of entertaining society comedy, as in The Cocktail Party (1950), were uneven.

Despite the achievements of Yeats, Synge, O'Casey, and Eliot, it cannot be said of Irish and British drama, as it can of poetry and fiction in the first half of the century, that a technical revolution changed the whole course of literary

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history. The major innovations in the first half of the twentieth century were on the Continent. German expressionist drama developed out of the dark, psychological focus of the later plays of the Swedish dramatist August Strindberg (1849�1912). Another worldwide influence was the "epic" drama of the leftist German dramatist Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956): to foster ideological awareness, he rejected the idea that the audience should identify with a play's characters and become engrossed in its plot; the playwright should break the illusion of reality through the alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt) and foreground the play's theatrical constructedness and historical specificity. The French dramatist Antonin Artaud (1896� 1948) also defied realism and rationalism, but unlike Brecht, his theory of the theater of cruelty sought a trans- formative, mystical communion with the audience through incantations and sounds, physical gestures and strange scenery. Another French dramatist, the Romanian-born Eugene Ionesco (1909�1994), helped inaugurate the theater of the absurd just after World War II, in plays that enact people's hopeless efforts to communicate and that comically intimate a tragic vision of life devoid of meaning or purpose. In such Continental drama the influences of symbolism (on the later Strindberg), Marxism (on Brecht), and surrealism (on Artaud and Ionesco) contributed to the shattering of naturalistic convention in drama, making the theater a space where linear plot gave way to fractured scenes and circular action, transparent conversation was displaced by misunderstanding and verbal opacity, a predictable and knowable universe was unsettled by eruptions of the irrational and the absurd.

In Britain the impact of these Continental innovations was delayed by a conservative theater establishment until the late 1950s and 1960s, when they converged with the countercultural revolution to transform the nature of English-language theater. Meanwhile the person who played the most significant role in the anglophone absorption of modernist experiment was the Irishman Samuel Beckett. He changed the history of drama with his first produced play, written in French in 1948 and translated by the author as Waiting for Godot (premiered in Paris in 1953, in London in 1955). The play astonishingly did away with plot ("Nothing happens�twice," as one critic put it), as did Endgame (1958) and Beckett's later plays, such as Not I (1973) and That Time (1976). In the shadow of the mass death of World War II, the plotlessness, the minimal characterization and setting, the absurdist intimation of an existential darkness without redemption, the tragicomic melding of anxiety, circular wordplay, and slapstick action in Beckett's plays gave impetus to a seismic shift in British writing for the theater.

The epicenter of the new developments in British drama was the Royal Court Theatre, symbolically located a little away from London's West End "theater land" (the rough equivalent of Broadway in New York). From 1956 the Royal Court was the home of the English Stage Company. Together they provided a venue and a vision that provoked and enabled a new wave of writers. John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956), the hit of the ESC's first season (significantly helped by the play's television broadcast), offered the audience "lessons in feeling" through a searing depiction of class-based indignation, emotional cruelty, and directionless angst, all in a surprisingly nonmetropolitan setting. At the Royal Court the working-class naturalism of the so-called "kitchen sink" dramatists and other "angry young men" of the 1950s, such as Arnold Wesker, author of the trilogy Chicken Sou-p with Barley (1958), also broke with the genteel proprieties and narrowly upper-class set designs that,

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in one unadventurous drawing-room comedy after another, had dominated the British stage for decades. The political consciousness of the new theater was still more evident in John Arden's plays produced for the Royal Court, such as Sergeant Musgrave's Dance (1959), which explores colonial oppression, communal guilt for wartime atrocities, and pacifism in the stylized setting of an isolated mining town. By the later 1960s the influence of the counterculture on British theater was unavoidable. Joe Orton challenged bourgeois sentiment in a series of classically precise, blackly comic, and sexually ambiguous parodies, such as his farce What the Butler Saw (1969).

While plays of social and political critique were one response to the postwar period, Beckett and the theater of the absurd inspired another group of Boyal Court writers to refocus theater on language, symbolism, and existential realities. Informed by kitchen-sink naturalism and absurdism, Harold Pinter's "comedies of menace" map out a social trajectory from his early study of working-class stress and inarticulate anxiety, 71le Room (1957), through the film-noirish black farce of The Dumb Waiter (1960) and the emotional power plays of The Caretaker (1960), to the savagely comic study of middle-class escape from working-class mores in The Homecoming (1965). Later plays reflect on patrician suspicion and betrayal, though in the 1980s his work acquired a more overtly political voice. Though less bleak than Pinter, Tom Stoppard is no less indebted to Beckett's wordplay, skewed conversations, and theatrical technique, as evidenced by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) and other plays, many of which embed within themselves earlier literary works (such as Godot and Hamlet) and thus offer virtuoso postmodernist reflections on art, language, and performance. This enjoyment and exploitation of self-conscious theatricality arises partly out of the desire to show theater as different from film and television and is also apparent in the 1970s productions of another playwright: the liturgical stylization of Peter Shaffer's Equus (1973) and the bleak mental landscape of his Antonio Salieri in Amadeus (1979) emphasize the stage as battleground and site of struggle (an effect lost in their naturalistic film versions). Stoppard's time shifts and memory lapses in Travesties (1974) allow a nonnaturalistic study of the role of memory and imagination in the creative process, a theme he returns to in Arcadia (1993), a stunning double-exposure account of a Bomantic poet and his modern critical commentators occupying the same physical space but never reaching intellectual common ground.

Legal reform intensified the postwar ferment in British theater. Since the Theatres Act of 1843, writers for the public stage had been required to submit their playscripts to the Lord Chamberlain's office for state censorship, but in 1968 a new Theatres Act abolished that office. With this new freedom from conservative mores and taste, Howard Brenton, Howard Barker, Edward Bond, and David Hare were able to write challenging studies of violence, social deprivation, and political and sexual aggression, often using mythical settings and epic stories to construct austere tableaux of power and oppression. Bond's Lear (1971) typifies his ambitious combination of soaring lyrical language and alienatingly realistic violence. Directors such as Peter Brook took advantage of the new freedom in plays that emphasized, as had Artaud's theater of cruelty, physical gesture, bodily movement, and ritualized spectacle. The post1968 liberalization also encouraged the emergence of new theater groups addressing specific political agendas, many of them inspired by Brecht's "epic" theater's distancing, discontinuous, and socially critical style. Companies such

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as Monstrous Regiment, Gay Sweatshop, Joint Stock, and John McGrath's 7: 84 worked collaboratively with dramatists who were invited to help devise and develop shows. Increasingly in the 1970s published plays were either transcriptions of the first production or "blueprints for the alchemy of live performance" (Micheline Wandor). In Ireland the founding of the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 by the well-established playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea had similar motives of collaborative cultural catalysis. Their first production, Friel's Translations (1980), exploring linguistic colonialism and the fragility of cultural identity in nineteenth-century Ireland, achieved huge international success.

This ethos of collaboration and group development helped foster the first major cohort of women dramatists to break through onto mainstream stages. Working with Joint Stock and Monstrous Regiment in the late 1970s on plays such as the gender-bending anticolonial Cloud. Nine (1979), Caryl Churchill developed plays out of workshops exploring gender, class, and colonialism. She carefully transcribes and overlaps the speech of her characters to create a seamlessly interlocking web of discourse, a streamlined version of the ebb and flow of normal speech. In Top Girls (1982) and Serious Money (1987), plays that anatomize the market-driven ethos of the 1980s, she explores modern society with the wit and detachment of Restoration comedy. Pam Gems studies the social and sexual politics of misogyny and feminism in her campy theatrical explorations of strong women�Queen Cristina (1977), Piaf( 1978), Camille (1984)�while Sarah Daniels reinterprets the naturalism of kitchen- sink drama by adding to it the linguistic stylization of Churchill.

Massive strides in the diversification of English-language theater occurred during the era of decolonization, when two eminent poets, Derek Walcott and Wole Soyinka, helped breathe new life into anglophone drama. As early as the 1950s Derek Walcott was writing and directing plays about Caribbean history and experience, re-creating in his drama a West Indian "oral culture, of chants, jokes, folk-songs, and fables," at a time when theater in the Caribbean tended to imitate European themes and styles. After moving to Trinidad in 1958, he founded what came to be known as the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, and for much of the next twenty years devoted himself to directing and writing plays that included Dream on Monkey Mountain, first produced in 1967, in which Eurocentric and Afrocentric visions of Caribbean identity collide. Since then, a notable breakthrough in Caribbean theater has been the collaborative work of the Sistren Theatre Collective in Jamaica, which, following the lead of Louise Bennett and other West Indian poets, draws on women's personal histories in dramatic performances that make vivid use of Jamaican speech, expression, and rhythm. Meanwhile in Africa, Wole Soyinka, who had been involved with the Royal Court Theatre in the late 1950s when Rrecht's influence was first being absorbed, returned to Nigeria in the year of its independence to write and direct plays that fused Euromodernist dramatic techniques with conventions from Yoruba popular and traditional drama. His play Death and the King's Horseman, premiered in Nigeria in 1976, represents a tragic confrontation between colonial officials and the guardians of Yoruba rituals and beliefs. While Soyinka has been a towering presence in sub-Saharan Africa, other playwrights, such as the fellow Nigerian Femi Osofisan and the South African Athol Fugard, have used the stage to probe issues of class, race, and the often violent legacy of colonialism. In England playwrights of Caribbean, African, and Asian origin or descent, such as Mustapha Matura, Caryl

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Phillips, and Hanif Kureishi, the latter of whom is best-known internationally for his screenplays for My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988), My Son the Fanatic (1998), and The Mother (2004), have revitalized British drama with a host of new vocabularies, new techniques, new visions of identity in an increasingly cross-ethnic and transnational world. The century that began with its first great dramatic movement in Ireland was followed by a century that began with English-language drama more diverse in its accents and styles, more international in its bearings and vision than ever before.

Additional information about the Twentieth Century and After, including primary texts and images, is available at Norton Literature Online (www .wwnorton.literature). Online topics are

� Representing the Great War � Modernist Experiment � Imagining Ireland

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THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND AFTER

CONTEXTS

TEXTS

1899, 1902 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

1900 Max Planck, quantum theory

1901 First wireless communication across the Atlantic 1901-10 Reign of Edward VII 1902 End of the Anglo-Boer War 1903 Henry Ford introduces the first mass-

produced car. Wright Brothers make the

first successful airplane flight 1905 Albert Einstein, theory of special relativity. Impressionist exhibition, London

1910 Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

1910 Postimpressionist exhibition, London

1910-36 Reign of George V 1913 Ezra Pound, "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste"

1914 James Joyce, Dubliners. Thomas

1914-18 World War I Hardy, Satires of Circumstance

1914-15 Blast

1916 Easter Rising in Dublin

1916 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man

1917 T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of

J. Alfred Prufrock" 1918 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems 1918 Armistice. Franchise Act grants vote to women thirty and over 1920 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love.

1920 Treaty of Versailles. League of Wilfred Owen, Poems

Nations formed 1921 William Butler Yeats, Michael

1921�22 Formation of Irish Free State

with Northern Ireland (Ulster) remaining

part of Great Britain 1922 Katherine Mansfield, Tlte Garden Party and Other Stories. Joyce, Ulysses. Eliot, The Waste Land.

Robartes and the Dancer

1924 Forster, A Passage to India

1927 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

1928 Women twenty-one and over granted voting rights 1929 Woolf, A Room of One's Own.

1928 Yeats, The Tower

1929 Stock market crash; Great Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

Depression begins 1933 Hitler comes to power in Germany 1935 Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

1848

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CONTEXTS

TEXTS

1936-39 Spanish Civil War 1936 Edward VIII succeeds George V, but abdicates in favor of his brother, crowned as George VI 1937 David Jones, In Parenthesis

1939-45 World War II

1939 Joyce, Finnegans Wake. Yeats, Last

Poems and Two Plays

1940 Fall of France. Battle of Britain 1941-45 The Holocaust 1943 Eliot, Four Quartets

1940 W. H. Auden, Another Time

1945 First atomic bombs dropped, on Orwell, Animal Farm

1945 Auden, Collected Poems. George

Japan 1946 Dylan Thomas, Deaths and Entrances

1947 India and Pakistan become

independent nations 1948 Empire Windrush brings West Indians to U.K.

1949 Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty-Four 1950 Apartheid laws passed in South Africa 1953 Premiere of Samuel Beckett's

Waiting for Godot

1956 Suez Crisis 1957 Ghana becomes independent

1958 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart 1960 Nigeria becomes independent 1961 Berlin Wall erected

1962 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

1962 Cuban missile crisis. Uganda, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago become

1964 Philip Larkin, The Whitsun

independent

Weddings

1965 U.S. troops land in South Vietnam 1966 Nadine Gordimer, The Late

1966 Barbados and Guyana become Bourgeois World. Tom Stoppard,

independent

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea 1969 Apollo moon landing 1971 V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State

1971 Indo-Pakistan War, leading to

creation of Bangladesh 1972 Britain enters European Common Market

1973 U.S. troops leave Vietnam 1975 Seamus Heaney, North

1849

.

CONTEXTS

TEXTS

1979 Caryl Churchill, Cloud 9

1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran; the Shah

flees. Soviets invade Afghanistan 1979-90 Margaret Thatcher is British prime minister

1980 J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the

1980-88 Iran-Iraq War

Barbarians

1981 Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children. Brian Friel, Translations 1982 Falklands War 1985 Production of Hanif Kureishi's My

Beautiful Laundrette

1988 Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall. Tiananmen

1989 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the

Square, Beijing, demonstration and massacre

Day

1990 Derek Walcott, Omeros 1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union 1992 Thorn Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats

1993 Tom Stoppard, Arcadia 1994 Democracy comes to South Africa 1997 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small

1997 Labour Party victory in the U.K.

ends eighteen years of Conservative

government 1998 British handover of Hong Kong to China. Northern Ireland Assembly established

1999 Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife

Things

2000 Zadie Smith, White Teeth 2001 September 11 attacks destroy World Trade Center 2002 Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and

2002 Euro becomes sole currency in most

of European Union 2003 Invasion of Iraq led by U.S. and

Gravel

U.K. 1850

.

1851

THOMAS HARDY 1840-1928

Thomas Hardy was born near Dorchester, in that area of southwest England that he was to make the "Wessex" of his novels. He attended local schools until the age of fifteen, when he was apprenticed to a Dorchester architect with whom he worked for six years. In 1861 he went to London to continue his studies and to practice as an architect. Meanwhile he was completing his general education informally through his own erratic reading and was becoming more and more interested in both fiction and poetry. After some early attempts at writing both short stories and poems, he decided to concentrate on fiction. His first novel was rejected by the publishers in 1868 on the recommendation of George Meredith, who nevertheless advised Hardy to write another. The result was Desperate Remedies, published anonymously in 1871, followed the next year by his first real success (also published anonymously), Under the Greenwood Tree. His career as a novelist was now well launched; Hardy gave up his architectural work and produced a series of novels that ended with Jude the Obscure in 1895. The hostile reception of this novel�lambasted as Jude the Obscene�sent him back to poetry. Straddling the Victorian and modern periods, he published all his novels in the nineteenth century, all but the first of his poetry collections, Wessex and Other Verses (1898), in the twentieth. His remarkable epic-drama of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts, came out in three parts between 1903 and

1908; after this he wrote mostly lyric poetry.

Hardy's novels, set in a predominantly rural "Wessex," show the forces of nature outside and inside individuals combining to shape human destiny. Against a background of immemorial agricultural labor, with ancient monuments such as Stonehenge or an old Roman amphitheater reminding us of the human past, he presents characters at the mercy of their own passions or finding temporary salvation in the age-old rhythms of rural work or rural recreation. Men and women in Hardy's fiction are not masters of their fates; they are at the mercy of the indifferent forces that manipulate their behavior and their relations with others, but they can achieve dignity through endurance, heroism, or simple strength of character. The characteristic Victorian novelist�e.g., Dickens or Thackeray�was concerned with the behavior and problems of people in a given social milieu, which were described in detail; Hardy preferred to go directly for the elemental in human behavior with a minimum of contemporary social detail. Most of his novels are tragic, exploring the bitter ironies of life with an almost malevolent staging of coincidence to emphasize the disparity between human desire and ambition on the one hand and what fate has in store for the characters on the other. But fate is not a wholly external force. Men and women are driven by the demands of their own nature as much as by anything outside them. Perhaps the darkest of Hardy's novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) is the story of an intelligent and sensitive young woman, daughter of a poor family, driven to murder and so to death by hanging, by a painfully ironic concatenation of events and circumstances. Published in the same year as Tess, the story anthologized here, "On the Western Circuit," similarly has at its center a young country woman seduced by a sophisticated city man; her "ruin" (see also Hardy's poem "The Buined Maid") leads� contrary to the good intentions of the three protagonists, and again as the result of bitter irony�to his ruin and a lifetime of misery for all concerned.

Hardy denied that he was a pessimist, calling himself a "meliorist"�that is, one who believes that the world can be made better by human effort. But there is little sign of meliorism in either his most important novels or his lyric poetry. A number of his poems, such as the one he wrote about the Titanic disaster, "The Convergence of the Twain," illustrate the perversity of fate, the disastrous or ironic coincidence. Other poems go beyond this mood to present with quiet gravity and a carefully controlled elegiac feeling some aspect of human sorrow or loss or frustration or regret,

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185 2 / THOMAS HARDY

always grounded in a particular, fully realized situation. "Hap" shows Hardy in the characteristic mood of complaining about the irony of human destiny in a universe ruled by chance, but a poem such as "The Walk" (one of a group of poems written after the death of his first wife in 1912) gives, with remarkable power, concrete embodiment to a sense of loss.

Hardy's poetry, like his prose, often has a self-taught air about it; both can seem, on first reading, roughly hewn. He said he wanted to avoid "the jewelled line," and like many modern and contemporary poets, he sought instead what he called "dissonances, and other irregularities" in his art, because these convey more authenticity and spontaneity. "Art is a disproportioning .. . of realities," he declared. Though he adheres to the metered line, Hardy roughens prosody and contorts syntax, and he creates irregular and complex stanza forms. His diction includes archaisms and deliberately awkward coinages (e.g., "Powerfuller" and "unblooms" in "Hap"). He distorts many conventions of traditional genres such as the sonnet, the love poem, the war poem, and the elegy. Though rooted in the Victorian period, Hardy thus looks ahead to the dislocations of poetic form carried out by subsequent poets of the twentieth century.

The sadness in Hardy�his inability to believe in the government of the world by a benevolent God, his sense of the waste and frustration involved in human life, his insistent irony when faced with moral or metaphysical questions�is part of the late- Victorian mood, found also, say, in A. E. Housman's poetry and, earlier, in Edward FitzGerald's Rubdiyat of Omar Khayyam, published when Hardy was nineteen. What has been termed "the disappearance of God" affected him more deeply than it did many of his contemporaries, because until he was twenty-five he seriously considered becoming an Anglican priest. Yet his characteristic themes and attitudes cannot be related simply to the reaction to new scientific and philosophical ideas (Darwin's theory of evolution, for example) that we see in many forms in late-nineteenth-century literature. The favorite poetic mood of both Tennyson and Arnold was also an elegiac one (e.g., in Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" and Arnold's "Dover Beach"), but the mood of Hardy's poetry differs from Victorian sorrow; it is sterner, more skeptical, as though braced by a long look at the worst. It is this sternness, this ruggedness of his poetry, together with its verbal and emotional integrity, its formal variety and tonal complexity, its quietly searching individual accent, that helped bring about the steady rise in Hardy's reputation as a poet. Ezra Pound remarked in a 1934 letter: "Nobody has taught me anything about writing since Thomas Hardy died." W. H. Auden begins an essay with this testament to the effect of Hardy's verse: "I cannot write objectively about Thomas Hardy because I was once in love with him." And Hardy appears as the major figure�with more poems than either Yeats or Eliot�in Philip Larkin's influential Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973).

On the Western Circuit1

I

The man who played the disturbing part in the two quiet feminine lives hereunder depicted�no great man, in any sense, by the way�first had knowledge of them on an October evening, in the city of Melchester. He had been standing in the Close,2 vainly endeavouring to gain amid the darkness a

1. When first published in magazine form in (1894), he restored it to its original form. The England and America in 1891, "On the Western Western Circuit was the subdivision of England's

Circuit" was altered to minimize its illicit sexuality. High Court of Justice with jurisdiction over the

References to Anna's seduction and pregnancy southwestern counties. In Hardy's literary land-

were eliminated, and Mrs. Harnham was made a scape Melchester is Salisbury, which has a partic

widow rather than a wife. When Hardy published ularly beautiful cathedral.

the story in his collection Life's Little Ironies 2. Closed yard surrounding a church.

.

ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT / 1853

glimpse of the most homogeneous pile of mediaeval architecture in England, which towered and tapered from the damp and level sward' in front of him. While he stood the presence of the Cathedral walls was revealed rather by the ear than by the eyes; he could not see them, but they reflected sharply a roar of sound which entered the Close by a street leading from the city square, and, falling upon the building, was flung back upon him.

He postponed till the morrow his attempt to examine the deserted edifice, and turned his attention to the noise. It was compounded of steam barrel- organs, the clanging of gongs, the ringing of hand-bells, the clack of rattles, and the undistinguishable shouts of men. A lurid light hung in the air in the direction of the tumult. Thitherward he went, passing under the arched gateway, along a straight street, and into the square.

He might have searched Europe over for a greater contrast between juxtaposed scenes. The spectacle was that of the eighth chasm of the Inferno as to colour and flame, and, as to mirth, a development of the Homeric heaven. A smoky glare, of the complexion of brass-filings, ascended from the fiery tongues of innumerable naphtha lamps affixed to booths, stalls, and other temporary erections which crowded the spacious market-square. In front of this irradiation scores of human figures, more or less in profile, were darting athwart and across, up, down, and around, like gnats against a sunset.

Their motions were so rhythmical that they seemed to be moved by machinery. And it presently appeared that they were moved by machinery indeed; the figures being those of the patrons of swings, see-saws, flying-leaps, above all of the three steam roundabouts4 which occupied the centre of the position. It was from the latter that the din of steam-organs came.

Throbbing humanity in full light was, on second thoughts, better than architecture in the dark. The young man, lighting a short pipe, and putting his hat on one side and one hand in his pocket, to throw himself into harmony with his new environment, drew near to the largest and most patronized of the steam circuses, as the roundabouts were called by their owners. This was one of brilliant finish, and it was now in full revolution. The musical instrument around which and to whose tones the riders revolved, directed its trumpet- mouths of brass upon the young man, and the long plate-glass mirrors set at angles, which revolved with the machine, flashed the gyrating personages and hobby-horses kaleidoscopically into his eyes.

It could now be seen that he was unlike the majority of the crowd. A gentlemanly young fellow, one of the species found in large towns only, and London particularly, built on delicate lines, well, though not fashionably dressed, he appeared to belong to the professional class; he had nothing square or practical about his look, much that was curvilinear and sensuous. Indeed, some would have called him a man not altogether typical of the middle-class male of a century wherein sordid ambition is the master-passion that seems to be taking the time-honoured place of love.

The revolving figures passed before his eyes with an unexpected and quiet grace in a throng whose natural movements did not suggest gracefulness or quietude as a rule. By some contrivance there was imparted to each of the hobby-horses a motion which was really the triumph and perfection of roundabout inventiveness�a galloping rise and fall, so timed that, of each pair of steeds, one was on the spring while the other was on the pitch. The riders were quite fascinated by these equine undulations in this most delightful

3. Grassy surface of ground. 4. Carousels.

.

185 4 / THOMAS HARDY

holiday-game of our times. There were riders as young as six, and as old as sixty years, with every age between. At first it was difficult to catch a personality, but by and by the observer's eyes centred on the prettiest girl out of the several pretty ones revolving.

It was not that one with the light frock and light hat whom he had been at first attracted by; no, it was the one with the black cape, grey skirt, light gloves and�no, not even she, but the one behind her; she with the crimson skirt, dark jacket, brown hat and brown gloves. Unmistakably that was the prettiest

girl-

Having finally selected her, this idle spectator studied her as well as he was able during each of her brief transits across his visual field. She was absolutely unconscious of everything save the act of riding: her features were rapt in an ecstatic dreaminess; for the moment she did not know her age or her history or her lineaments, much less her troubles. He himself was full of vague latter- day glooms and popular melancholies, and it was a refreshing sensation to behold this young thing then and there, absolutely as happy as if she were in a Paradise.

Dreading the moment when the inexorable stoker, grimily lurking behind the glittering rococo-work,5 should decide that this set of riders had had their pennyworth, and bring the whole concern of steam-engine, horses, mirrors, trumpets, drums, cymbals, and such-like to pause and silence, he waited for her every reappearance, glancing indifferently over the intervening forms, including the two plainer girls, the old woman and child, the two youngsters, the newly-married couple, the old man with a clay pipe, the sparkish youth with a ring, the young ladies in the chariot, the pair of journeyman6-carpenters, and others, till his select country beauty followed on again in her place. He had never seen a fairer product of nature, and at each round she made a deeper mark in his sentiments. The stoppage then came, and the sighs of the riders were audible.

He moved round to the place at which he reckoned she would alight; but she retained her seat. The empty saddles began to refill, and she plainly was deciding to have another turn. The young man drew up to the side of her steed, and pleasantly asked her if she had enjoyed her ride.

'O yes!' she said, with dancing eyes. 'It has been quite unlike anything I have ever felt in my life before!'

It was not difficult to fall into conversation with her. Unreserved�too unreserved� by nature, she was not experienced enough to be reserved by art, and after a little coaxing she answered his remarks readily. She had come to live in Melchester from a village on the Great Plain,7 and this was the first time that she had ever seen a steam-circus; she could not understand how such wonderful machines were made. She had come to the city on the invitation of Mrs Harnham, who had taken her into her household to train her as a servant, if she showed any aptitude. Mrs Harnham was a young lady who before she married had been Miss Edith White, living in the country near the speaker's cottage; she was now very kind to her through knowing her in childhood so well. She was even taking the trouble to educate her. Mrs Harnham was the only friend she had in the world, and being without children had wished to

5. Florid ornamentation. "Stoker": man who guild. stokes the furnace powering the "steam circus." 7. In Hardy's Wessex the Salisbury Plain, a large

6. Craftsman who has completed an apprentice-plateau on which stands Stonehenge. ship but not yet attained mastership of his craft or

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ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT / 185 5

have her near her in preference to anybody else, though she had only lately come; allowed her to do almost as she liked, and to have a holiday whenever she asked for it. The husband of this kind young lady was a rich wine-merchant of the town, but Mrs Harnham did not care much about him. In the daytime you could see the house from where they were talking. She, the speaker, liked Melchester better than the lonely country, and she was going to have a new hat for next Sunday that was to cost fifteen and ninepence.8

Then she inquired of her acquaintance where he lived, and he told her in London, that ancient and smoky city, where everybody lived who lived at all, and died because they could not live there. He came into Wessex two or three times a year for professional reasons; he had arrived from Wintoncester yesterday, and was going on into the next county in a day or two. For one thing he did like the country better than the town, and it was because it contained such girls as herself.

Then the pleasure-machine started again, and, to the light-hearted girl, the figure of the handsome young man, the market-square with its lights and crowd, the houses beyond, and the world at large, began moving round as before, countermoving in the revolving mirrors on her right hand, she being as it were the fixed point in an undulating, dazzling, lurid universe, in which loomed forward most prominently of all the form of her late interlocutor. Each time that she approached the half of her orbit that lay nearest him they gazed at each other with smiles, and with that unmistakable expression which means so little at the moment, yet so often leads up to passion, heart-ache, union, disunion, devotion, overpopulation, drudgery, content, resignation, despair.

When the horses slowed anew he stepped to her side and proposed another heat. 'Hang the expense for once,' he said. 'I'll pay!'

She laughed till the tears came.

Why do you laugh, dear?' said he.

'Because�you are so genteel that you must have plenty of money, and only say that for fun!' she returned. 'Ha-ha!' laughed the young man in unison, and gallantly producing his money she was enabled to whirl on again.

As he stood smiling there in the motley crowd, with his pipe in his hand, and clad in the rough pea-jacket and wideawake9 that he had put on for his stroll, who would have supposed him to be Charles Bradford Raye, Esquire, stuff-gownsman,1 educated at Wintoncester, called to the Bar at Lincoln'sInn, 2 now going the Western Circuit, merely detained in Melchester by a small arbitration after his brethren had moved on to the next county-town?

II

The square was overlooked from its remoter corner by the house of which the young girl had spoken, a dignified residence of considerable size, having several windows on each floor. Inside one of these, on the first floor, the apartment being a large drawing-room, sat a lady, in appearance from twenty

8. Approximately one dollar. lawyers must be trained to qualify for the bar and 9. Soft felt hat. to which they afterward must belong to practice 1. A junior counsel, who wears a gown of "stuff' law. "Wintoncester": Winchester College, the old- rather than silk; qualified to plead cases in court est English public school (the equivalent in the

but not appointed to a senior position. American system of an elite private secondary

2. One of the four London Inns of Court, at which boarding school).

.

1 85 6 / THOMAS HARDY

eight to thirty years of age. The blinds were still undrawn, and the lady was absently surveying the weird scene without, her cheek resting on her hand. The room was unlit from within, but enough of the glare from the marketplace entered it to reveal the lady's face. She was what is called an interesting creature rather than a handsome woman; dark-eyed, thoughtful, and with sensitive lips.

A man sauntered into the room from behind and came forward.

'O, Edith, I didn't see you,' he said. 'Why are you sitting here in the dark?'

'I am looking at the fair,' replied the lady in a languid voice.

'Oh? Horrid nuisance every year! I wish it could be put a stop to.'

'I like it.'

'H'm. There's no accounting for taste.'

For a moment he gazed from the window with her, for politeness sake, and then went out again. In a few minutes she rang. 'Hasn't Anna come in?' asked Mrs Harnham. 'No m'm.' 'She ought to be in by this time. I meant her to go for ten minutes only.' 'Shall I go and look for her, m'm?' said the house-maid alertly. 'No. It is not necessary: she is a good girl and will come soon.' However, when the servant had gone Mrs Harnham arose, went up to her

room, cloaked and bonneted herself, and proceeded downstairs, where she found her husband.

'I want to see the fair,' she said; 'and I am going to look for Anna. I have made myself responsible for her, and must see she comes to no harm. She ought to be indoors. Will you come with me?'

'Oh, she's all right. I saw her on one of those whirligig things, talking to her young man as I came in. But I'll go if you wish, though I'd rather go a hundred miles the other way.'

'Then please do so. I shall come to no harm alone.'

She left the house and entered the crowd which thronged the market-place, where she soon discovered Anna, seated on the revolving horse. As soon as it stopped Mrs Harnham advanced and said severely, 'Anna, how can you be such a wild girl? You were only to be out for ten minutes.'

Anna looked blank, and the young man, who had dropped into the background, came to help her alight.

'Please don't blame her,' he said politely. 'It is my fault that she has stayed. She looked so graceful on the horse that I induced her to go round again. I assure you that she has been quite safe.'

'In that case I'll leave her in your hands,' said Mrs Harnham, turning to retrace her steps.

But this for the moment it was not so easy to do. Something had attracted the crowd to a spot in their rear, and the wine-merchant's wife, caught by its sway, found herself pressed against Anna's acquaintance without power to move away. Their faces were within a few inches of each other, his breath fanned her cheek as well as Anna's. They could do no other than smile at the accident; but neither spoke, and each waited passively. Mrs Harnham then felt a man's hand clasping her fingers, and from the look of consciousness on the young fellow's face she knew the hand to be his: she also knew that from the position of the girl he had no other thought than that the imprisoned hand was Anna's. What prompted her to refrain from undeceiving him she could

.

ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT / 1857

hardly tell. Not content with holding the hand, he playfully slipped two of his fingers inside her glove, against her palm. Thus matters continued till the pressure lessened; but several minutes passed before the crowd thinned sufficiently to allow Mrs Harnham to withdraw.

'How did they get to know each other, I wonder?' she mused as she retreated. 'Anna is really very forward�and he very wicked and nice.'

She was so gently stirred with the stranger's manner and voice, with the tenderness of his idle touch, that instead of re-entering the house she turned back again and observed the pair from a screened nook. Really she argued (being little less impulsive than Anna herself) it was very excusable in Anna to encourage him, however she might have contrived to make his acquaintance; he was so gentlemanly, so fascinating, had such beautiful eyes. The thought that he was several years her junior produced a reasonless sigh.

At length the couple turned from the roundabout towards the door of Mrs Harnham's house, and the young man could be heard saying that he would accompany her home. Anna, then, had found a lover, apparently a very devoted one. Mrs Harnham was quite interested in him. When they drew near the door of the wine-merchant's house, a comparatively deserted spot by this time, they stood invisible for a little while in the shadow of a wall, where they separated, Anna going on to the entrance, and her acquaintance returning across the square.

'Anna,' said Mrs Harnham, coming up. 'I've been looking at you! That young man kissed you at parting, I am almost sure.' 'Well,' stammered Anna; 'he said, if I didn't mind�it would do me no harm, and, and, him a great deal of good!'

'Ah, I thought so! And he was a stranger till tonight?'

'Yes ma'am.'

'Yet I warrant you told him your name and everything about yourself?'

'He asked me.'

'But he didn't tell you his?'

'Yes ma'am, he did!' cried Anna victoriously. 'It is Charles Bradford, of London.'

'Well, if he's respectable, of course I've nothing to say against your knowing him,' remarked her mistress, prepossessed, in spite of general principles, in the young man's favour. 'But I must reconsider all that, if he attempts to renew your acquaintance. A country-bred girl like you, who has never lived in Melchester till this month, who had hardly ever seen a black-coated man till you came here, to be so sharp as to capture a young Londoner like him!'

'I didn't capture him. I didn't do anything,' said Anna, in confusion.

When she was indoors and alone Mrs Harnham thought what a well-bred and chivalrous young man Anna's companion had seemed. There had been a magic in his wooing touch of her hand; and she wondered how he had come to be attracted by the girl.

The next morning the emotional Edith Harnham went to the usual weekday service in Melchester cathedral. In crossing the Close through the fog she again perceived him who had interested her the previous evening, gazing up thoughtfully at the high-piled architecture of the nave: and as soon as she had taken her seat he entered and sat down in a stall opposite hers.

He did not particularly heed her; but Mrs Harnham was continually occupying her eyes with him, and wondered more than ever what had attracted him in her unfledged maid-servant. The mistress was almost as unaccustomed

.

1 85 8 / THOMAS HARDY

as the maiden herself to the end-of-the-age young man, or she might have wondered less. Raye, having looked about him awhile, left abruptly, without regard to the service that was proceeding; and Mrs Harnham�lonely, impressionable creature that she was�took no further interest in praising the Lord. She wished she had married a London man who knew the subtleties of lovemaking as they were evidently known to him who had mistakenly caressed her hand.

Ill

The calendar at Melchester had been light, occupying the court only a few hours; and the assizes3 at Casterbridge, the next county-town on the Western Circuit, having no business for Raye, he had not gone thither. At the next town after that they did not open till the following Monday, trials to begin on Tuesday morning. In the natural order of things Raye would have arrived at the latter place on Monday afternoon; but it was not till the middle of Wednesday that his gown and grey wig, curled in tiers, in the best fashion of Assyrian bas- reliefs, were seen blowing and bobbing behind him as he hastily walked up the High Street from his lodgings. But though he entered the assize building there was nothing for him to do, and sitting at the blue baize table in the well of the court, he mended pens with a mind far away from the case in progress. Thoughts of unpremeditated conduct, of which a week earlier he would not have believed himself capable, threw him into a mood of dissatisfied depression.

He had contrived to see again the pretty rural maiden Anna, the day after the fair, had walked out of the city with her to the earthworks4 of Old Melchester, and feeling a violent fancy for her, had remained in Melchester all Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday; by persuasion obtaining walks and meetings with the girl six or seven times during the interval; had in brief won her, body and soul.

He supposed it must have been owing to the seclusion in which he had lived of late in town that he had given way so unrestrainedly to a passion for an artless creature whose inexperience had, from the first, led her to place herself unreservedly in his hands. Much he deplored trifling with her feelings for the sake of a passing desire; and he could only hope that she might not live to suffer on his account.

She had begged him to come to her again; entreated him; wept. He had promised that he would do so, and he meant to carry out that promise. He could not desert her now. Awkward as such unintentional connections were, the interspace of a hundred miles�which to a girl of her limited capabilities was like a thousand�would effectually hinder this summer fancy from greatly encumbering his life; while thought of her simple love might do him the negative good of keeping him from idle pleasures in town when he wished to work hard. His circuit journeys would take him to Melchester three or four times a year; and then he could always see her.

The pseudonym, or rather partial name, that he had given her as his before knowing how far the acquaintance was going to carry him, had been spoken

3. Sessions of the superior court. "Calendar": list 4. Banks of earth constructed as fortifications in of cases to be tried. ancient times.

.

ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT / 1859

on the spur of the moment, without any ulterior intention whatever. He had not afterwards disturbed Anna's error, but on leaving her he had felt bound to give her an address at a stationer's not far from his chambers, at which she might write to him under the initials 'C. B'.

In due time Raye returned to his London abode, having called at Melchester on his way and spent a few additional hours with his fascinating child of nature. In town he lived monotonously every day. Often he and his rooms were enclosed by a tawny fog from all the world besides, and when he lighted the gas to read or write by, his situation seemed so unnatural that he would look into the fire and think of that trusting girl at Melchester again and again. Often, oppressed by absurd fondness for her, he would enter the dim religious nave of the Law Courts by the north door, elbow other juniors habited like himself, and like him unretained; edge himself into this or that crowded court where a sensational case was going on, just as if he were in it, though the police officers at the door knew as well as he knew himself that he had no more concern with the business in hand than the patient idlers at the gallery- door outside, who had waited to enter since eight in the morning because, like him, they belonged to the classes that live on expectation. But he would do these things to no purpose, and think how greatly the characters in such scenes contrasted with the pink and breezy Anna.

An unexpected feature in that peasant maiden's conduct was that she had not as yet written to him, though he had told her she might do so if she wished. Surely a young creature had never before been so reticent in such circumstances. At length he sent her a brief line, positively requesting her to write. There was no answer by the return post, but the day after a letter in a neat feminine hand, and bearing the Melchester post-mark, was handed to him by the stationer.

The fact alone of its arrival was sufficient to satisfy his imaginative sentiment. He was not anxious to open the epistle, and in truth did not begin to read it for nearly half-an-hour, anticipating readily its terms of passionate retrospect and tender adjuration. When at last he turned his feet to the fireplace and unfolded the sheet, he was surprised and pleased to find that neither extravagance nor vulgarity was there. It was the most charming little missive he had ever received from woman. To be sure the language was simple and the ideas were slight; but it was so self-possessed; so purely that of a young girl who felt her womanhood to be enough for her dignity that he read it through twice. Four sides were filled, and a few lines written across, after the fashion of former days; the paper, too, was common, and not of the latest shade and surface. But what of those things? He had received letters from women who were fairly called ladies, but never so sensible, so human a letter as this. He could not single out any one sentence and say it was at all remarkable or clever; the ensemble of the letter it was which won him; and beyond the one request that he would write or come to her again soon there was nothing to show her sense of a claim upon him.

To write again and develop a correspondence was the last thing Raye would have preconceived as his conduct in such a situation; yet he did send a short, encouraging line or two, signed with his pseudonym, in which he asked for another letter, and cheeringly promised that he would try to see her again on some near day, and would never forget how much they had been to each other during their short acquaintance.

.

186 0 / THOMAS HARDY

IV

To return now to the moment at which Anna, at Melchester, had received Raye's letter.

It had been put into her own hand by the postman on his morning rounds. She flushed down to her neck on receipt of it, and turned it over and over. 'It is mine?' she said.

'Why, yes, can't you see it is?' said the postman, smiling as he guessed the nature of the document and the cause of the confusion.

'O yes, of course!' replied Anna, looking at the letter, forcedly tittering, and blushing still more.

Her look of embarrassment did not leave her with the postman's departure. She opened the envelope, kissed its contents, put away the letter in her pocket, and remained musing till her eyes filled with tears.

A few minutes later she carried up a cup of tea to Mrs Harnham in her bedchamber. Anna's mistress looked at her, and said: 'How dismal you seem this morning, Anna. What's the matter?'

'I'm not dismal, I'm glad; only I�' She stopped to stifle a sob.

'Well?'

'I've got a letter�and what good is it to me, if I can't read a word in it!'

'Why, I'll read it, child, if necessary.'

'But this is from somebody�I don't want anybody to read it but myself!' Anna murmured.

'I shall not tell anybody. Is it from that young man?'

'I think so.' Anna slowly produced the letter, saying: 'Then will you read it to me, ma'am?'

This was the secret of Anna's embarrassment and flutterings. She could neither read nor write. She had grown up under the care of an aunt by marriage, at one of the lonely hamlets on the Great Mid-Wessex Plain where, even in days of national education, there had been no school within a distance of two miles. Her aunt was an ignorant woman; there had been nobody to investigate Anna's circumstances, nobody to care about her learning the rudiments; though, as often in such cases, she had been well fed and clothed and not unkindly treated. Since she had come to live at Melchester with Mrs Harnham, the latter, who took a kindly interest in the girl, had taught her to speak correctly, in which accomplishment Anna showed considerable readiness, as is not unusual with the illiterate; and soon became quite fluent in the use of her mistress's phraseology. Mrs Harnham also insisted upon her getting a spelling and copy book, and beginning to practise in these. Anna was slower in this branch of her education, and meanwhile here was the letter.

Edith Harnham's large dark eyes expressed some interest in the contents, though, in her character of mere interpreter, she threw into her tone as much as she could of mechanical passiveness. She read the short epistle on to its concluding sentence, which idly requested Anna to send him a tender answer.

'Now�you'll do it for me, won't you, dear mistress?' said Anna eagerly. 'And you'll do it as well as ever you can, please? Because I couldn't bear him to think I am not able to do it myself. I should sink into the earth with shame if he knew that!'

From some words in the letter Mrs Harnham was led to ask questions, and the answers she received confirmed her suspicions. Deep concern filled Edith's heart at perceiving how the girl had committed her happiness to the

.

ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT / 1861

issue of this new-sprung attachment. She blamed herself for not interfering in a flirtation which had resulted so seriously for the poor little creature in her charge; though at the time of seeing the pair together she had a feeling that it was hardly within her province to nip young affection in the bud. However, what was done could not be undone, and it behoved her now, as Anna's only protector, to help her as much as she could. To Anna's eager request that she, Mrs Harnham, should compose and write the answer to this young London man's letter, she felt bound to accede, to keep alive his attachment to the girl if possible; though in other circumstances she might have suggested the cook as an amanuensis.5

A tender reply was thereupon concocted, and set down in Edith Harnham's hand. This letter it had been which Raye had received and delighted in. Written in the presence of Anna it certainly was, and on Anna's humble notepaper, and in a measure indited by the young girl; but the life, the spirit, the individuality, were Edith Harnham's.

'Won't you at least put your name yourself?' she said. 'You can manage to write that by this time?' 'No, no,' said Anna, shrinking back. 'I should do it so bad. He'd be ashamed of me, and never see me again!'

The note, so prettily requesting another from him, had, as we have seen, power enough in its pages to bring one. He declared it to be such a pleasure to hear from her that she must write every week. The same process of manufacture was accordingly repeated by Anna and her mistress, and continued for several weeks in succession; each letter being penned and suggested by Edith, the girl standing by; the answer read and commented on by Edith, Anna standing by and listening again.

Late on a winter evening, after the dispatch of the sixth letter, Mrs Harnham was sitting alone by the remains of her fire. Her husband had retired to bed, and she had fallen into that fixity of musing which takes no count of hour or temperature. The state of mind had been brought about in Edith by a strange thing which she had done that day. For the first time since Raye's visit Anna had gone to stay over a night or two with her cottage friends on the Plain, and in her absence had arrived, out of its time, a letter from Raye. To this Edith had replied on her own responsibility, from the depths of her own heart, without waiting for her maid's collaboration. The luxury of writing to him what would be known to no consciousness but his was great, and she had indulged herself therein.

Why was it a luxury?

Edith Harnham led a lonely fife. Influenced by the belief of the British parent that a bad marriage with its aversions is better than free womanhood with its interests, dignity, and leisure, she had consented to marry the elderly wine-merchant as a pis aller,b at the age of seven-and-twenty�some three years before this date�to find afterwards that she had made a mistake. That contract had left her still a woman whose deeper nature had never been stirred.

She was now clearly realising that she had become possessed to the bottom of her soul with the image of a man to whom she was hardly so much as a name. From the first he had attracted her by his looks and voice; by his tender touch; and, with these as generators, the writing of letter after letter and the reading of their soft answers had insensibly developed on her side an emotion

5. Secretary. 6. Last resort (French).

.

186 2 / THOMAS HARDY

which fanned his; till there had resulted a magnetic reciprocity between the correspondents, notwithstanding that one of them wrote in a character not her own. That he had been able to seduce another woman in two days was his crowning though unrecognised fascination for her as the she-animal.

They were her own impassioned and pent-up ideas�lowered to monosyllabic phraseology in order to keep up the disguise�that Edith put into letters signed with another name, much to the shallow Anna's delight, who, unassisted, could not for the world have conceived such pretty fancies for winning him, even had she been able to write them. Edith found that it was these, her own foisted-in sentiments, to which the young barrister mainly responded. The few sentences occasionally added from Anna's own lips made apparently no impression upon him.

The letter-writing in her absence Anna never discovered; but on her return the next morning she declared she wished to see her lover about something at once, and begged Mrs Harnham to ask him to come.

There was a strange anxiety in her manner which did not escape Mrs Harnham, and ultimately resolved itself into a flood of tears. Sinking down at Edith's knees, she made confession that the result of her relations with her lover it would soon become necessary to disclose.

Edith Harnham was generous enough to be very far from inclined to cast Anna adrift at this conjuncture. No true woman ever is so inclined from her own personal point of view, however prompt she may be in taking such steps to safeguard those dear to her. Although she had written to Raye so short a time previously, she instantly penned another Anna-note hinting clearly though delicately the state of affairs.

Raye replied by a hasty line to say how much he was concerned at her news: he felt that he must run down to see her almost immediately.

But a week later the girl came to her mistress's room with another note, which on being read informed her that after all he could not find time for the journey. Anna was broken with grief; but by Mrs Harnham's counsel strictly refrained from hurling at him the reproaches and bitterness customary from young women so situated. One thing was imperative: to keep the young man's romantic interest in her alive. Rather therefore did Edith, in the name of her protegee, request him on no account to be distressed about the looming event, and not to inconvenience himself to hasten down. She desired above everything to be no weight upon him in his career, no clog upon his high activities. She had wished him to know what had befallen: he was to dismiss it again from his mind. Only he must write tenderly as ever, and when he should come again on the spring circuit it would be soon enough to discuss what had better be done.

It may well be supposed that Anna's own feelings had not been quite in accord with these generous expressions; but the mistress's judgment had ruled, and Anna had acquiesced. 'All I want is that niceness you can so well put into your letters, my dear, dear mistress, and that I can't for the life o' me make up out of my own head; though I mean the same thing and feel it exactly when you've written it down!'

When the letter had been sent off, and Edith Harnham was left alone, she bowed herself on the back of her chair and wept. 'I wish his child was mine�I wish it was!' she murmured. 'Yet how can I say such a wicked thing!'

.

ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT / 1863

V

The letter moved Raye considerably when it reached him. The intelligence itself had affected him less than her unexpected manner of treating him in relation to it. The absence of any word of reproach, the devotion to his interests, the self-sacrifice apparent in every line, all made up a nobility of character that he had never dreamt of finding in womankind.

'God forgive me!' he said tremulously. 'I have been a wicked wretch. I did not know she was such a treasure as this!'

He reassured her instantly; declaring that he would not of course desert her, that he would provide a home for her somewhere. Meanwhile she was to stay where she was as long as her mistress would allow her.

But a misfortune supervened in this direction. Whether an inkling of Anna's circumstances reached the knowledge of Mrs Harnham's husband or not cannot be said, but the girl was compelled, in spite of Edith's entreaties, to leave the house. By her own choice she decided to go back for a while to the cottage on the Plain. This arrangement led to a consultation as to how the correspondence should be carried on; and in the girl's inability to continue personally what had been begun in her name, and in the difficulty of their acting in concert as heretofore, she requested Mrs Harnham�the only well-to-do friend she had in the world�to receive the letters and reply to them off-hand, sending them on afterwards to herself on the Plain, where she might at least get some neighbour to read them to her, if a trustworthy one could be met with. Anna and her box then departed for the Plain.

Thus it befell that Edith Harnham found herself in the strange position of having to correspond, under no supervision by the real woman, with a man not her husband, in terms which were virtually those of a wife, concerning a corporeal condition that was not Edith's at all; the man being one for whom, mainly through the sympathies involved in playing this part, she secretly cherished a predilection, subtle and imaginative truly, but strong and absorbing. She opened each letter, read it as if intended for herself, and replied from the promptings of her own heart and no other.

Throughout this correspondence, carried on in the girl's absence, the high- strung Edith Harnham lived in the ecstasy of fancy; the vicarious intimacy engendered such a flow of passionateness as was never exceeded. For conscience' sake Edith at first sent on each of his letters to Anna, and even rough copies of her replies; but later on these so-called copies were much abridged, and many letters on both sides were not sent on at all.

Though sensuous, and, superficially at least, infested with the self-indulgent vices of artificial society, there was a substratum of honesty and fairness in Raye's character. He had really a tender regard for the country girl, and it grew more tender than ever when he found her apparently capable of expressing the deepest sensibilities in the simplest words. He meditated, he wavered; and finally resolved to consult his sister, a maiden lady much older than himself, of lively sympathies and good intent. In making this confidence he showed her some of the letters.

'She seems fairly educated,' Miss Raye observed. 'And bright in ideas. She expresses herself with a taste that must be innate.' 'Yes. She writes very prettily, doesn't she, thanks to these elementary schools?'

.

186 4 / THOMAS HARDY

'One is drawn out towards her, in spite of one's self, poor thing.'

The upshot of the discussion was that though he had not been directly advised to do it, Raye wrote, in his real name, what he would never have decided to write on his own responsibility; namely that he could not live without her, and would come down in the spring and shelve her looming difficulty by marrying her.

This bold acceptance of the situation was made known to Anna by Mrs Harnham driving out immediately to the cottage on the Plain. Anna jumped for joy like a little child. And poor, crude directions for answering appropriately were given to Edith Harnham, who on her return to the city carried them out with warm intensifications.

'O!' she groaned, as she threw down the pen. 'Anna�poor good little fool� hasn't intelligence enough to appreciate him! How should she? While I�don't bear his child!'

It was now February. The correspondence had continued altogether for four months; and the next letter from Raye contained incidentally a statement of his position and prospects. He said that in offering to wed her he had, at first, contemplated the step of retiring from a profession which hitherto had brought him very slight emolument, and which, to speak plainly, he had thought might be difficult of practice after his union with her. But the unexpected mines of brightness and warmth that her letters had disclosed to be lurking in her sweet nature had led him to abandon that somewhat sad prospect. He felt sure that, with her powers of development, after a little private training in the social forms of London under his supervision, and a little help from a governess if necessary, she would make as good a professional man's wife as could be desired, even if he should rise to the woolsack.7 Many a Lord Chancellor's wife had been less intuitively a lady than she had shown herself to be in her lines to him.

'O�poor fellow, poor fellow!' mourned Edith Harnham.

Her distress now raged as high as her infatuation. It was she who had wrought him to this pitch�to a marriage which meant his ruin; yet she could not, in mercy to her maid, do anything to hinder his plan. Anna was coming to Melchester that week, but she could hardly show the girl this last reply from the young man; it told too much of the second individuality that had usurped the place of the first.

Anna came, and her mistress took her into her own room for privacy. Anna began by saying with some anxiety that she was glad the wedding was so near.

'O Anna!' replied Mrs Harnham. 'I think we must tell him all�that I have been doing your writing for you?�lest he should not know it till after you become his wife, and it might lead to dissension and recriminations�'

'O mis'ess, dear mis'ess�please don't tell him now!' cried Anna in distress. 'If you were to do it, perhaps he would not marry me; and what should I do then? It would be terrible what would come to me! And I am getting on with my writing, too. I have brought with me the copybook you were so good as to give me, and I practise every day, and though it is so, so hard, I shall do it well at last, I believe, if I keep on trying.'

Edith looked at the copybook. The copies had been set by herself, and such progress as the girl had made was in the way of grotesque facsimile of her

7. Seat ol the Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords, formerly made of a sack of wool.

.

ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT / 1865

mistress's hand. But even if Edith's flowing calligraphy were reproduced the inspiration would be another thing.

'You do it so beautifully,' continued Anna, 'and say all that I want to say so much better than I could say it, that I do hope you won't leave me in the lurch just now!'

'Very well,' replied the other. 'But I�but I thought I ought not to go on!'

'Why?'

Her strong desire to confide her sentiments led Edith to answer truly:

'Because of its effect upon me.'

'But it can't have any!'

'Why, child?'

'Because you are married already!' said Anna with lucid simplicity.

'Of course it can't,' said her mistress hastily; yet glad, despite her conscience,

that two or three out-pourings still remained to her. 'But you must concentrate your attention on writing your name as I write it here.'

VI

Soon Raye wrote about the wedding. Having decided to make the best of what he feared was a piece of romantic folly, he had acquired more zest for the grand experiment. He wished the ceremony to be in London, for greater privacy. Edith Harnham would have preferred it at Melchester; Anna was passive. His reasoning prevailed, and Mrs Harnham threw herself with mournful zeal into the preparations for Anna's departure. In a last desperate feeling that she must at every hazard be in at the death of her dream, and see once again the man who by a species of telepathy had exercised such an influence on her, she offered to go up with Anna and be with her through the ceremony�' to see the end of her,' as her mistress put it with forced gaiety; an offer which the girl gratefully accepted; for she had no other friend capable of playing the part of companion and witness, in the presence of a gentlemanly bridegroom, in such a way as not to hasten an opinion that he had made an irremediable social blunder.

It was a muddy morning in March when Raye alighted from a four-wheel cab at the door of a registry-office in the S.W. district of London, and carefully handed down Anna and her companion Mrs Harnham. Anna looked attractive in the somewhat fashionable clothes which Mrs Harnham had helped her to buy, though not quite so attractive as, an innocent child, she had appeared in her country gown on the back of the wooden horse at Melchester Fair.

Mrs Harnham had come up this morning by an early train, and a young

man�a friend of Raye's�having met them at the door, all four entered the

registry-office together. Till an hour before this time Raye had never known

the wine-merchant's wife, except at that first casual encounter, and in the

flutter of the performance before them he had little opportunity for more than

a brief acquaintance. The contract of marriage at a registry is soon got through;

but somehow, during its progress, Raye discovered a strange and secret grav

itation between himself and Anna's friend.

The formalities of the wedding�or rather ratification of a previous union� being concluded, the four went in one cab to Raye's lodgings, newly taken in a new suburb in preference to a house, the rent of which he could ill afford just then. Here Anna cut the little cake which Raye had bought at a pastry

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186 6 / THOMAS HARDY

cook's on his way home from Lincoln's Inn the night before. But she did not do much besides. Raye's friend was obliged to depart almost immediately, and when he had left the only ones virtually present were Edith and Raye, who exchanged ideas with much animation. The conversation was indeed theirs only, Anna being as a domestic animal who humbly heard but understood not. Raye seemed startled in awakening to this fact, and began to feel dissatisfied with her inadequacy.

At last, more disappointed than he cared to own, he said, 'Mrs Harnham, my darling is so flurried that she doesn't know what she is doing or saying. I see that after this event a little quietude will be necessary before she gives tongue to that tender philosophy which she used to treat me to in her letters.'

They had planned to start early that afternoon for Knollsea, to spend the few opening days of their married life there, and as the hour for departure was drawing near Raye asked his wife if she would go to the writing-desk in the next room and scribble a little note to his sister, who had been unable to attend through indisposition, informing her that the ceremony was over, thanking her for her little present, and hoping to know her well now that she was the writer's sister as well as Charles's.

'Say it in the pretty poetical way you know so well how to adopt,' he added, 'for I want you particularly to win her, and both of you to be dear friends.'

Anna looked uneasy, but departed to her task, Raye remaining to talk to their guest. Anna was a long while absent, and her husband suddenly rose and went to her.

He found her still bending over the writing-table, with tears brimming up in her eyes; and he looked down upon the sheet of note-paper with some interest, to discover with what tact she had expressed her good-will in the delicate circumstances. To his surprise she had progressed but a few lines, in the characters and spelling of a child of eight, and with the ideas of a goose.

'Anna,' he said, staring; 'what's this?'

'It only means�that I can't do it any better!' she answered, through her tears. 'Eh? Nonsense!' 'I can't!' she insisted, with miserable, sobbing hardihood. 'I�I�didn't write

those letters, Charles! I only told her what to write! And not always that! But I am learning, O so fast, my dear, dear husband! And you'll forgive me, won't you, for not telling you before?' She slid to her knees, abjectly clasped his waist and laid her face against him.

He stood a few moments, raised her, abruptly turned, and shut the door upon her, rejoining Edith in the drawing-room. She saw that something untoward had been discovered, and their eyes remained fixed on each other.

'Do I guess rightly?' he asked, with wan quietude. 'You were her scribe through all this?'

'It was necessary,' said Edith.

'Did she dictate every word you ever wrote to me?'

'Not every word.'

'In fact, very little?'

'Very little.'

'You wrote a great part of those pages every week from your own conceptions, though in her name!' 'Yes.'

.

ON THE WESTERN CIRCUIT / 1867

Perhaps you wrote many of the letters when you were alone, without communication with her?'

'I did.'

He turned to the bookcase, and leant with his hand over his face; and Edith, seeing his distress, became white as a sheet.

'You have deceived me�ruined me!' he murmured.

'O, don't say it!' she cried in her anguish, jumping up and putting her hand on his shoulder. 'I can't bear that!' 'Delighting me deceptively! Why did you do it�why did you!' 'I began doing it in kindness to her! How could I do otherwise than try to

save such a simple girl from misery? But I admit that I continued it for pleasure to myself.'

Raye looked up. 'Why did it give you pleasure?' he asked.

'I must not tell,' said she.

He continued to regard her, and saw that her lips suddenly began to quiver under his scrutiny, and her eyes to fill and droop. She started aside, and said that she must go to the station to catch the return train: could a cab be called immediately?

But Raye went up to her, and took her unresisting hand. 'Well, to think of such a thing as this!' he said. 'Why, you and I are friends�lovers�devoted lovers�by correspondence!'

'Yes; I suppose.'

'More.'

'More?'

'Plainly more. It is no use blinking that. Legally I have married her�God help us both!�in soul and spirit I have married you, and no other woman in the world!'

'Hush!'

'But I will not hush! Why should you try to disguise the full truth, when you have already owned half of it? Yes, it is between you and me that the bond is�not between me and her! Now I'll say no more. But, O my cruel one, I think I have one claim upon you!'

She did not say what, and he drew her towards him, and bent over her. 'If it was all pure invention in those letters,' he said emphatically, 'give me your cheek only. If you meant what you said, let it be lips. It is for the first and last time, remember!'

She put up her mouth, and he kissed her long. 'You forgive me?' she said, crying.

'Yes.'

'But you are ruined!'

'What matter!' he said, shrugging his shoulders. 'It serves me right!'

She withdrew, wiped her eyes, entered and bade good-bye to Anna, who had not expected her to go so soon, and was still wrestling with the letter. Baye followed Edith downstairs, and in three minutes she was in a hansom driving to the Waterloo station.

He went back to his wife. 'Never mind the letter, Anna, to-day,' he said gently. 'Put on your things. We, too, must be off shortly.'

The simple girl, upheld by the sense that she was indeed married, showed her delight at finding that he was as kind as ever after the disclosure. She did not know that before his eyes he beheld as it were a galley, in which he, the

.

1 86 8 / THOMAS HARDY

fastidious urban, was chained to work for the remainder of his life, with her, the unlettered peasant, chained to his side.

Edith travelled back to Melchester that day with a face that showed the very stupor of grief, her lips still tingling from the desperate pressure of his kiss. The end of her impassioned dream had come. When at dusk she reached the Melchester station her husband was there to meet her, but in his perfunctoriness and her preoccupation they did not see each other, and she went out of the station alone.

She walked mechanically homewards without calling a fly.8 Entering, she could not bear the silence of the house, and went up in the dark to where Anna had slept, where she remained thinking awhile. She then returned to the drawing-room, and not knowing what she did, crouched down upon the floor.

'I have ruined him!' she kept repeating. 'I have ruined him; because I would not deal treacherously towards her!'

In the course of half an hour a figure opened the door of the apartment.

'Ah�who's that?' she said, starting up, for it was dark.

"Your husband�who should it be?' said the worthy merchant.

'Ah�my husband!�I forgot I had a husband!' she whispered to herself.

'I missed you at the station,' he continued. 'Did you see Anna safely tied up? I hope so, for 'twas time.' 'Yes�Anna is married.' Simultaneously with Edith's journey home Anna and her husband were sit

ting at the opposite windows of a second-class carriage which sped along to Knollsea. In his hand was a pocket-book full of creased sheets closely written over. Unfolding them one after another he read them in silence, and sighed.

'What are you doing, dear Charles?' she said timidly from the other window, and drew nearer to him as if he were a god. 'Reading over all those sweet letters to me signed "Anna," ' he replied with dreary resignation.

1891

Hap1

If but some vengeful god would call to me From up the sky, and laugh: 'Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!'

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,

Steeled by the sense of ire� unmerited; anger

Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I

Had willed and meted� me the tears I shed. allotted, given

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,

And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?

�Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,

10

8. Carriage. 1. I.e., chance (as also "Casualty," line 11).

.

I LOOK INTO MY GLASS / 1869

And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . These purblind Doomsters2 had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

1866 1898

Neutral Tones We stood by a pond that winter day, And the sun was white, as though chidden of� God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;� �They had fallen from an ash, and were gray. rebuked, by turf 5 Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove Over tedious riddles of years ago; And some words played between us to and fro On which lost the more by our love. ioThe smile on your mouth was the deadest thing Alive enough to have strength to die; And a grin of bitterness swept thereby Like an ominous bird a-wing . . . 15Since then, keen lessons that love deceives, And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, And a pond edged with grayish leaves. 1867 1898

I Look into My Glass1

I look into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say, 'Would God it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!'

5 For then, I, undistrest By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,

io Part steals, lets part abide; And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide.

2. Half-blind judges. 1. Mirror.

.

187 0 / THOMAS HARDY

A Broken Appointment

You did not come. And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.� Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make

5 That high compassion which can overbear Reluctance for pure lovingkindness' sake Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,

You did not come.

You love not me,

io And love alone can lend you loyalty; �I know and knew it. But, unto the store Of human deeds divine in all but name, Was it not worth a little hour or more To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came

15 To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be You love not me?

1901

Drummer Hodge

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest Uncoffined�just as found: His landmark is a kopje-crest That breaks the veldt1 around; 5 And foreign constellations2 west0 set Each night above his mound.

2

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew� Fresh from his Wessex home� The meaning of the broad Karoo,1 io The Rush,4 the dusty loam, And why uprose to nightly view Strange stars amid the gloam.

3

Yet portion of that unknown plain Will Hodge for ever be; 15 His homely Northern breast and brain

1. South African Dutch (Afrikaans) word for a 3. A dry tableland region in South Africa (usually plain or prairie. "Kopje-crest": Afrikaans for a small spelled "Karroo").

hill. The poem is a lament for an English soldier 4. British colonial word for an uncleared area of

killed in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). land.

2. Those visible only in the Southern Hemisphere.

.

THE DARKLING THRUSH / 1871

Grow to some Southern tree,

And strange-eyed constellations reign

His stars eternally.

1899,1901

The Darkling1 Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate2

When Frost was spectre-gray,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

5 The tangled bine-stems3 scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh0 near Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

io The Century's corpse outleant,4

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

is And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

20 Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom. 25 So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

30 His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

1900, 1901

In the dark. 4. Leaning out (of its coffin); i.e., the 19th century

Gate leading to a small wood or thicket. was dead. This poem was dated December 31,

Twining stems of shrubs. 1900.

.

187 2 / THOMAS HARDY

The Ruined Maid 'O 'Melia,1 my dear, this does everything crown!

Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?

And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?'�

'O didn't you know I'd been ruined?' said she. 5 �'You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,

Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;2

And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!'�

'Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined,' said she. �'At home in the barton0 you said "thee" and "thou", farmyard

10 And "thik oon", and "theas oon", and "t'other"; but now

Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!'�

'Some polish is gained with one's ruin,' said she. �'Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak

But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,

is And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!'�

'We never do work when we're ruined,' said she. �'You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,

And you'd sigh, and you'd sock;� but at present you seem sighTo know not of megrims0 or melancho-ly!'� low spirits

20 'True. One's pretty lively when ruined,' said she. �'I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,

And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!'�

'My dear�a raw country girl, such as you be,

Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined,' said she.

1866 1901

A Trampwoman's Tragedy

(18 2-)

From Wynyard's Gap1 the livelong day,

The livelong day,

We beat afoot the northward way

We had travelled times before.

5 The sun-blaze burning on our backs,

Our shoulders sticking to our packs,

1. Diminutive form of Amelia. Hardy called "Wessex" and of which his native 2. Digging up a species of thick-rooted weed. Dorset, the county south and southwest of Somer1. The places named are in Somerset, in south-set, reaching to the English Channel, was the west England on the northern edge of the area that major part.

.

A TRAMPWOMAN'S TRAGEDY / 187 3

By fosseway,2 fields, and turnpike tracks We skirted sad Sedge-Moor.3

2

Full twenty miles we jaunted on, 10

We jaunted on,� My fancy-man, and jeering John,

And Mother Lee, and I. And, as the sun drew down to west, We climbed the toilsome Poldon crest,

15 And saw, of landskip0 sights the best, landscape The inn that beamed thereby.

3

For months we had padded side by side, Ay, side by side Through the Great Forest, Blackmoor wide,

20 And where the Parret ran, We'd faced the gusts on Mendip ridge, Had crossed the Yeo unhelped by bridge, Been stung by every Marshwood midge,

I and my fancy-man.

4

25 Lone inns we loved, my man and I, My man and I; 'King's Stag', 'Windwhistle'4 high and dry, 'The Horse' on Hintock Green, The cozy house at Wynyard's Gap, 30 'The Hut' renowned on Bredy Knap, And many another wayside tap� taproom, inn Where folk might sit unseen.

5

Now as we trudged�O deadly day, O deadly day!� 35 I teased my fancy-man in play

And wanton idleness. I walked alongside jeering John, I laid his hand my waist upon; I would not bend my glances on

40 My lover's dark distress.

6 Thus Poldon top at last we won, At last we won,

2. Path running along a ditch. beautiful spot near which it stands and entering 3. Sad because of the Battle of Sedgemoor (1685), the inn for tea, he was informed by the landlady when the rebellion of the duke of Monmouth that none could be had, unless he would fetch

against James II was crushed with excessive cru-water from a valley half a mile off, the house con

elty. taining not a drop, owing to its situation. However,

4. The highness and dryness of Windwhistle Inn a tantalizing row of full barrels behind her back was impressed upon the writer two or three years testified to a wetness of a certain sort, which was

ago, when, after climbing on a hot afternoon to the not at that time desired [Hardy's note].

.

187 4 / THOMAS HARDY

And gained the inn at sink of sun

Far-famed as 'Marshal's Elm'.5

45 Beneath us figured tor and lea,6

From Mendip to the western sea�

I doubt if finer sight there be

Within this royal realm. 7

Inside the settle all a-row�

50 All four a-row

We sat, I next to John, to show

That he had wooed and won.

And then he took me on his knee,

And swore it was his turn to be

55 My favoured mate, and Mother Lee

Passed to my former one.

8 Then in a voice I had never heard,

I had never heard,

My only Love to me: 'One word,

60 My lady, if you please!

Whose is the child you are like to bear?�

His? After all my months o' care?'

God knows 'twas not! But, O despair!

I nodded�still to tease. 9

65 Then up he sprung, and with his knife�

And with his knife

He let out jeering Johnny's life,

Yes; there, at set of sun.

The slant ray through the window nigh

70 Gilded John's blood and glazing eye,

Ere scarcely Mother Lee and I

Knew that the deed was done.

10 The taverns tell the gloomy tale,

The gloomy tale,

75 How that at Ivel-chester jail

My Love, my sweetheart swung;

Though stained till now by no misdeed

Save one horse ta'en in time o' need;

(Blue Jimmy stole right many a steed

so Ere his last fling he flung).7

11 Thereaft I walked the world alone,

Alone, alone!

5. "Marshal's Elm," so picturesquely situated, is 7. "Blue Jimmy" was a notorious horse stealer of no longer an inn, though the house, or part of it, Wessex in those days, who appropriated more than

still remains. It used to exhibit a fine old swinging a hundred horses before he was caught, among

sign [Hardy's note]. others one belonging to a neighbor of the writer's

6. Rocky hill and tract of open ground. grandfather. He was hanged at the now demol

.

ONE WE KNEW / 1875

On his death-day I gave my groan And dropt his dead-born child,

as 'Twas nigh� the jail, beneath a tree, near None tending me; for Mother Lee Had died at Glaston, leaving me

Unfriended on the wild.

12

And in the night as I lay weak, 90 As I lay weak, The leaves a-falling on my cheek,

The red moon low declined� The ghost of him I'd die to kiss Rose up and said: 'Ah, tell me this!

95 Was the child mine, or was it his? Speak, that I rest may find!'

'3

O doubt not but I told him then, I told him then, That I had kept me from all men

IOO Since we joined lips and swore. Whereat he smiled, and thinned away As the wind stirred to call up day . . . �'Tis past! And here alone I stray

Haunting the Western Moor.

Apr. 1902 1909

One We Knew

(M. H.1 1772-1857) She told how they used to form for the country dances� 'The Triumph,' 'The New-rigged Ship'� To the light of the guttering wax in the panelled manses, And in cots to the blink of a dip.2

5 She spoke of the wild 'poussetting' and 'allemanding'3 On carpet, on oak, and on sod;� turf And the two long rows of ladies and gentlemen standing, And the figures the couples trod.

She showed us the spot where the maypole was yearly planted, io And where the bandsmen stood While breeched and kerchiefed partners whirled, and panted To choose each other for good.4

ished Ivel-chester or Ilchester jail above men-3. Allemande is the name of a dance originating

tioned�that building formerly of so many sinister in Germany. To pousette is to dance round with

associations in the minds of the local peasantry, hands joined.

and the continual haunt of fever, which at last led 4. A tall pole, gaily painted and decorated with to its condemnation. Its site is now an innocent-flowers and ribbons ("the maypole"), was danced looking green meadow [Hardy's note). around on May 1 by men (wearing "breeches," or

1. Hardy's grandmother. trousers) and women (wearing "kerchiefs," or 2. I.e., in cottages by the light of a candle. headscarves).

.

187 6 / THOMAS HARDY

She told of that far-back day when they learnt astounded Of the death of the King of France: 15 Of the Terror; and then of Bonaparte's unbounded Ambition and arrogance.

Of how his threats woke warlike preparations Along the southern strand, And how each night brought tremors and trepidations 20 Lest morning should see him land.

She said she had often heard the gibbet creaking As it swayed in the lightning flash, Had caught from the neighbouring town a small child's shrieking At the cart-tail under the lash. . . .

25 With cap-framed face and long gaze into the embers� We seated around her knees� She would dwell on such dead themes, not as one who remembers, But rather as one who sees.

She seemed one left behind of a band gone distant 30 So far that no tongue could hail: Past things retold were to her as things existent, Things present but as a tale.

May 20, 1902 1909

She Hears the Storm

There was a time in former years� While my roof-tree was his� When I should have been distressed by fears At such a night as this.

5 I should have murmured anxiously, 'The pricking rain strikes cold; His road is bare of hedge or tree, And he is getting old.'

But now the fitful chimney-roar, io The drone of Thorncombe trees, The Froom in flood upon the moor, The mud of Mellstock Leaze,1

The candle slanting sooty wick'd, The thuds upon the thatch, 15 The eaves-drops on the window flicked, The clacking garden-hatch,0 gate

1. The place-names in Hardy's fictional "Wessex" tions, as in "A Trampwoman's Tragedy." "The were often invented ("Thorncombe," "Mellstock Froom" is presumably the river Frome, flowing

Leaze"), but he also used the names of real loca-through Dorset and Somerset.

.

CHANNE L FIRIN G / 187 7 And what they mean to wayfarers, I scarcely heed or mind; He has won that storm-tight roof of hers 20 Which Earth grants all her kind. 1909

Channel Firing1

That night your great guns, unawares,

Shook all our coffins as we lay,

And broke the chancel2 window-squares,

We thought it was the Judgement-day 5 And sat upright. While drearisome

Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

The worms drew back into the mounds, The glebe cow3 drooled. Till God called, 'No;

io It's gunnery practise out at sea

Just as before you went below;

The world is as it used to be: 'All nations striving strong to make

Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters4

15 They do no more for Christes5 sake

Than you who are helpless in such matters. 'That this is not the judgement-hour

For some of them's a blessed thing,

For if it were they'd have to scour

20 Hell's floor for so much threatening. . . . 'Ha, ha. It will be warmer when

I blow the trumpet (if indeed

I ever do; for you are men,

And rest eternal sorely need).' 25 So down we lay again. 'I wonder,

Will the world ever saner be,'

Said one, 'than when He sent us under

In our indifferent century!' And many a skeleton shook his head.

30 'Instead of preaching forty year,'

1. Written in April 1914, when Anglo-German 3. I.e., cow on a small plot of land belonging to a naval rivalry was growing steadily more acute; the church (a "glebe" is a small field).

title refers to gunnery practice in the English 4. Cf. the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll's Alice's

Channel. Four months later (August 4), World Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

War I broke out. 5. The archaic spelling and pronunciation suggest

2. Part of church nearest to the altar. a ballad note of doom.

.

187 8 / THOMAS HARDY

My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, 'I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.'

Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, 35 As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.6

1914 1914

The Convergence of the Twain

(Lines on the loss of the Titanic)1

In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

2

Steel chambers, late the pyres 5 Of her salamandrine2 fires, Cold currents thrid,3 and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

3 Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent

The sea-worm crawls�grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

4 io Jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

5 Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gear

15 And query: 'What does this vaingloriousness down here?' . . .

6 Well: while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will4 that stirs and urges everything

6. The sound of guns preparing for war across the the ship's maiden voyage, from Southampton to Channel reaches Alfred's ("Stourton") Tower (near the United States, after colliding with an iceberg.

Stourton in Dorset), commemorating King Alfred's "Twain"; two.

defeat of a Danish invasion in 878; also the site of 2. I.e., destructive. The salamander was supposed

King Arthur's court at Camelot (supposedly near to be able to survive fire.

Glastonbury) and the famous prehistoric stone cir-3. A variant form of the verb thread.

cle of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. 4. The force (blind, but slowly gaining conscious

1. The Titanic was the largest and most luxurious ness throughout history) that drives the world, ocean liner of the day. Considered unsinkable, it according to Hardy's philosophy.

sank with great loss of life on April 15, 1912, on

.

AH, ARE You DIGGING ON MY GRAVE ? / 1879

7 Prepared a sinister mate For her�so gaily great�

A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

9 Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history,

Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident 30 On being anon" twin halves of one august0 event, soon I important

II

Till the Spinner of the Years Said 'Now!' And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

1912 1912,1914

Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?

'Ah, are you digging on my grave

My loved one?�planting rue?'1 �'No: yesterday he went to wed One of the brightest wealth has bred.

5 'It cannot hurt her now,' he said, "That I should not be true." '

'Then who is digging on my grave? My nearest dearest kin?' �'Ah, no; they sit and think, "What use! io What good will planting flowers produce? No tendance of her mound can loose Her spirit from Death's gin." trap

'But some one digs upon my grave? My enemy?�prodding sly?'

is �'Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate That shuts on all flesh soon or late, She thought you no more worth her hate,

And cares not where you lie.'

I. A yellow-flowered herb, traditionally an emblem of sorrow (rue is also an archaic word for "sorrow").

.

188 0 / THOMA S HARD Y 20'Then, who is digging on my grave? Say�since I have not guessed!' �'O it is I, my mistress dear, Your little dog, who still lives near, And much I hope my movements here Have not disturbed your rest?' 25 'Ah, yes! YOM dig upon my grave . . . Why flashed it not on me That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find To equal among human kind 30 A dog's fidelity!' 'Mistress, I dug upon your grave To bury a bone, in case I should be hungry near this spot When passing on my daily trot. 35 I am sorry, but I quite forgot It was your resting-place.' 1914 Under the Waterfall 5io15'Whenever I plunge my arm, like this, In a basin of water, I never miss The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day Fetched back from its thickening shroud of gray. Hence the only prime And real love-rhyme That I know by heart, And that leaves no smart, Is the purl� of a little valley fall rippling About three spans wide and two spans tall Over a table of solid rock, And into a scoop of the self-same block; The purl of a runlet that never ceases In stir of kingdoms, in wars, in peaces; With a hollow boiling voice it speaks And has spoken since hills were turfless peaks.' flmv 'And why gives this the only prime Idea to you of a real love-rhyme? And why does plunging your arm in a bowl 20 Full of spring water, bring throbs to your soul?' 25'Well, under the fall, in a crease of the stone, Though where precisely none ever has known, Jammed darkly, nothing to show how prized, And by now with its smoothness opalized, Is a drinking-glass:

.

THE WALK / 1881

For, down that pass

My lover and I

Walked under a sky

Of blue with a leaf-wove awning of green,

30 In the burn of August, to paint the scene,

And we placed our basket of fruit and wine

By the runlet's rim, where we sat to dine;

And when we had drunk from the glass together,

Arched by the oak-copse from the weather,

35 I held the vessel to rinse in the fall, Where it slipped, and sank, and was past recall,

Though we stooped and plumbed the little abyss

With long bared arms. There the glass still is.

And, as said, if I thrust my arm below

40 Cold water in basin or bowl, a throe0 violent pang From the past awakens a sense of that time,

And the glass we used, and the cascade's rhyme.

The basin seems the pool, and its edge

The hard smooth face of the brook-side ledge,

45 And the leafy pattern of china-ware

The hanging plants that were bathing there.

'By night, by day, when it shines or lours,

There lies intact that chalice of ours,

And its presence adds to the rhyme of love

50 Persistently sung by the fall above.

No lip has touched it since his and mine

In turns therefrom sipped lovers' wine.'

1914

The Walk

You did not walk with me

Of late to the hill-top tree

By the gated ways,

As in earlier days;

5 You were weak and lame,

So you never came,

And I went alone, and I did not mind,

Not thinking of you as left behind. I walked up there to-day

io Just in the former way:

Surveyed around

The familiar ground

By myself again:

What difference, then?

15 Only that underlying sense Of the look of a room on returning thence.

1912-13 1914

.

1882 / THOMAS HARDY

The Voice

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. s Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown! Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness 10 Travelling across the wet mead� to me here, You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,0Heard no more again far or near? meadow inattention Thus I; faltering forward, Leaves around me falling, 15 Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,0 northward And the woman calling. Dec. 1912 1914

The Workbox

'See, here's the workbox, little wife, That I made of polished oak.' He was a joiner,0 of village life; carpenter She came of borough folk.0 townspeople

5 He holds the present up to her

As with a smile she nears And answers to the profferer, ' 'Twill last all my sewing years!'

'I warrant it will. And longer too. io 'Tis a scantling0 that I got small piece of wood Off poor John Wayward's coffin, who Died of they knew not what.

'The shingled pattern that seems to cease Against your box's rim 15 Continues right on in the piece That's underground with him.

'And while I worked it made me think Of timber's varied doom; One inch where people eat and drink, 20

The next inch in a tomb.

.

DURING WIND AND RAIN / 188 3

'But why do you look so white, my dear,

And turn aside your face?

You knew not that good lad, I fear,

Though he came from your native place?' 25 'How could I know that good young man,

Though he came from my native town,

When he must have left far earlier than

I was a woman grown?' 'Ah, no. I should have understood!

30 It shocked you that I gave

To you one end of a piece of wood

Whose other is in a grave?' 'Don't, dear, despise my intellect,

Mere accidental things

35 Of that sort never have effect

On my imaginings.' Yet still her lips were limp and wan,

Her face still held aside,

As if she had known not only John,

40 But known of what he died.

1914

During Wind and Rain

They sing their dearest songs�

He, she, all of them�yea,

Treble and tenor and bass,

And one to play; 5 With the candles mooning0 each face. . . . lighting

Ah, no; the years O!

How the sick leaves reel down in throngs! They clear the creeping moss�

Elders and juniors�aye,

io Making the pathways neat

And the garden gay;

And they build a shady seat. . . .

Ah, no; the years, the years;

See, the white storm-birds wing across. 15 They are blithely breakfasting all�

Men and maidens�yea,

Under the summer tree,

With a glimpse of the bay,

While pet fowl come to the knee. . . .

.

188 4 / THOMAS HARDY

20

Ah, no; the years O! And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

They change to a high new house, He, she, all of them�aye, Clocks and carpets and chairs

25

On the lawn all day, And brightest things that are theirs. . . . Ah, no; the years, the years; Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

1917

In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'1

i Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. 2 5 Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass. io3 Yonder a maid and her wight0 Come whispering by: War's annals will cloud into night Ere their story die. man 1915 1916,1917

He Never Expected Much [or]

A CONSIDERATION

(A reflection) On my Eighty-Sixth Birthday

Well, World, you have kept faith with me, Kept faith with me; Upon the whole you have proved to be Much as you said you were. 5

Since as a child I used to lie Upon the leaze� and watch the sky, pasture Never, I own, expected I

That life would all be fair.

1. Cf. "Thou art my battle axe and weapon of war: for with thee will 1 break in pieces the nations" (leremiah 51.20). The poem was written during World War I.

.

JOSEP H CONRA D / 188 5 Twas then you said, and since have said, 10 Times since have said, In that mysterious voice you shed From clouds and hills around: 'Many have loved me desperately, Many with smooth serenity, 15 While some have shown contempt of me Till they dropped underground. 20'I do not promise overmuch, Child; overmuch; Just neutral-tinted haps� and such,' You said to minds like mine. Wise warning for your credit's sake! Which I for one failed not to take, And hence could stem such strain and ache As each year might assign. happenings 1926 1928

JOSEPH CONRAD 1857-1924

Joseph Conrad was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Poland (then under Russian rule), son of a Polish patriot who suffered exile in Russia for his Polish nationalist activities and died in 1869, leaving Conrad to be brought up by a maternal uncle. At the age of fifteen he amazed his family and friends by announcing his passionate desire to go to sea; he was eventually allowed to go to Marseilles, France, in 1874, and from there he made a number of voyages on French merchant ships to Martinique and other islands in the Caribbean. In 1878 he signed on an English ship that brought him to the east coast English port of Lowestoft, where (still as an ordinary seaman) he joined the crew of a small coasting vessel plying between Lowestoft and Newcastle. In six voyages between these two ports he learned English. Thus launched on a career in the British merchant service, Conrad sailed on a variety of British ships to East Asia, Australia, India, South America, and Africa, eventually gaining his master's certificate in 1886, the year he became a naturalized British subject. He received his first command in 1888, and in 1890 took a steamboat up the Congo River in nightmarish circumstances (described in Heart of Darkness, 1899) that permanently afflicted his health and his imagination.

In the early 1890s he was already thinking of turning some of his Malayan experiences into English fiction, and in 1892�93, when serving as first mate on the Torrens sailing from London to Adelaide, he revealed to a sympathetic passenger that he had begun a novel (Almayer's Folly), while on the return journey he impressed the young novelist John Galsworthy, who was on board, with his conversation. Conrad found it difficult to obtain a command, and this difficulty, together with the interest aroused by Almayer's Folly when it was published in 1895, helped turn him away from the sea to a career as a writer. He settled in London and in 1896 married an Englishwoman. This son of a Polish patriot turned merchant seaman turned writer was henceforth� after twenty years at sea�an English novelist.

In his travels through Asian, African, and Caribbean landscapes that eventually made their way into his fiction, Conrad witnessed at close range the workings of

.

188 6 / JOSEPH CONRAD

European empires, including the British, French, Belgian, Dutch, and German, that at the time controlled most of the earth's surface and were extracting from it vast quantities of raw materials and profiting from forced or cheap labor. In the essay "Geography and Some Explorers," Conrad describes the imperial exploitation he observed in Africa as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration." What he saw of the uses and abuses of imperial power helped make him deeply skeptical. Marlow, the intermediate narrator of Heart of Darkness, reflects: "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it. . . ." And yet in this novella, the ideas at the back of colonialism's ruthless greed and violence are hardly shown to redeem anything at all.

Conrad's questioning of the ethics of empire, perhaps harkening back to his childhood experience as a Pole under Russian occupation, is part of his many-faceted exploration of the ethical ambiguities in human experience. In his great novel Lord Jim (1900), which like Heart of Darkness uses the device of an intermediate narrator, he probes the meaning of a gross failure of duty on the part of a romantic and idealistic young sailor, and by presenting the hero's history from a series of different points of view sustains the ethical questioning to the end. By deploying intermediate narrators and multiple points of view in his fiction, he suggests the complexity of experience and the difficulty of judging human actions.

Although Conrad's plots and exotic settings recall imperial romance and Victorian tales of adventure, he helped develop modern narrative strategies�frame narration, fragmented perspective, flashbacks and flash-forwards, psychologically laden symbolism� that disrupt chronology, render meaning indeterminate, reveal unconscious drives, blur boundaries between civilization and barbarism, and radically cast in doubt epistemological and ethical certainties. Another indication of Conrad's modernist proclivities is the alienation of his characters. Many of his works expose the difficulty of true communion, while also paradoxically exposing how communion is sometimes unexpectedly forced on us, often with someone who may be on the surface our moral opposite, so that we are compelled into a mysterious recognition of our opposite as our true self. Other stories and novels�and Conrad wrote prolifically despite his late start�explore the ways in which the codes we live by are tested in moments of crisis, revealing either their inadequacy or our own. Imagination can corrupt (as with Lord Jim) or save (as in The Shadoiv-Line, 1917), and a total lack of it can either see a person through (Captain MacWhirr in Typhoon, 1902) or render a person comically ridiculous (Captain Mitchell in Nostromo, 1904). Set in an imaginary Latin American republic, Nostromo subtly studies the corrupting effects of politics and "material interests" on personal relationships. Conrad wrote two other political novels�The Secret Agent (1906) and Under Western Eyes (1911). The latter is a story of Dostoyevskian power about a Russian student who becomes involuntarily associated with antigovernment violence in czarist Russia and is maneuvered by circumstances into a position where, although a government spy, he has to pretend to be a revolutionary among revolutionaries. Having to pretend consistently to be the opposite of what he is, this character, like others in Conrad's fiction, is alienated, trapped, unable to communicate. Conrad was as much a pessimist as Hardy, but Conrad aesthetically embodied his pessimism in subtler ways.

He was also a great master of English prose, an astonishing fact given that English was his third language after Polish and French, that he was twenty-one before he learned English, and that to the end of his life he spoke English with a strong foreign accent. He approached English's linguistic and literary conventions aslant, but the seeming handicap of his foreignness helped him bring to the English novel a fresh geopolitical understanding, a formal seriousness, and a psychological depth, all of which opened up new possibilities for imaginative literature in English, as indicated

.

PREFACE TO THE NIGGER OF THE "NARCISSUS" / 1887

by his profound, if vexed, influence on later writers as different from himself as the Nigerian Chinua Achebe and the Anglo-Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul.

Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus"1

[THE TASK OF THE ARTIST]

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential�their one illuminating and convincing quality�the very truth of their existence. The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the world the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts�whence, presently, emerging they make their appeal to those qualities of our being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living. They speak authoritatively to our common-sense, to our intelligence, to our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism�but always to our credulity. And their words are heard with reverence, for their concern is with weighty matters: with the cultivation of our minds and the proper care of our bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions, with the perfection of the means and the glorification of our precious aims.

It is otherwise with the artist.

Confronted by the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities�like the vulnerable body within a steel armour. His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring�and sooner forgotten. Yet its effect endures forever. The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition�and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation�and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity�the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.

1. Conrad wrote The Nigger of the "Narcissus" in called it "the story by which, as a creative artist, I 1896�97, shortly after his marriage; it was pub-stand or fall." A few months after finishing it, feel

lished first in The New Revieiv, August�December ing that he was now wholly dedicated to writing

1897, and then in book form in 1898. Conrad took and had "done with the sea," he wrote this preface,

particular pleasure in writing the novel and later which first appeared in the 1898 edition.

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188 8 / JOSEPH CONRAD

It is only some such train of thought, or rather of feeling, that can in a measure explain the aim of the attempt, made in the tale which follows,2 to present an unrestful episode in the obscure lives of a few individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple and the voiceless. For, if any part of truth dwells in the belief confessed above, it becomes evident that there is not a place of splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only a passing glance of wonder and pity. The motive then, may be held to justify the matter of the work; but this preface, which is simply an avowal of endeavour, cannot end here�for the avowal is not yet complete.

Fiction�if it at all aspires to be art�appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time. Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music�which is the art of arts. And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.

The sincere endeavour to accomplish that creative task, to go as far on that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering, weariness or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in prose. And if his conscience is clear, his answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus:�My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel�it is, before all, to make you see. That�and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm�all you demand�and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth�disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the

2. The Nigger of the "Narcissus."

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PREFACE TO THE NIGGER OF THE "NARCISSUS" / 1889

beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.

It is evident that he who, rightly or wrongly, holds by the convictions expressed above cannot be faithful to any one of the temporary formulas of his craft. The enduring part of them�the truth which each only imperfectly veils�should abide with him as the most precious of his possessions, but they all: Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, even the unofficial sentimentalism (which like the poor, is exceedingly difficult to get rid of),3 all these gods must, after a short period of fellowship, abandon him�even on the very threshold of the temple�to the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the difficulties of his work. In that uneasy solitude the supreme cry of Art for Art itself, loses the exciting ring of its apparent immorality. It sounds far off. It has ceased to be a cry, and is heard only as a whisper, often incomprehensible, but at times and faintly encouraging.

Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch the motions of a labourer in a distant field, and after a time, begin to wonder languidly as to what the fellow may be at. We watch the movements of his body, the waving of his arms, we see him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour to be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he is trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real interest at his efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape; and even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may bring ourselves to forgive his failure. We understood his object, and, after all, the fellow has tried, and perhaps he had not the strength�and perhaps he had not the knowledge. We forgive, go on our way�and forget.

And so it is with the workman of art. Art is long and life is short,"1 and success is very far off. And thus, doubtful of strength to travel so far, we talk a little about the aim�the aim of art, which, like life itself, is inspiring, difficult� obscured by mists. It is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion; it is not in the unveiling of one of those heartless secrets which are called the Laws of Nature. It is not less great, but only more difficult.

To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile�such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished�behold!�all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile�and the return to an eternal rest.

1897 1898

3. "For the poor always ye have with you" (John 4. Ars longci, vita brevis: a Latin proverb, deriving 12.8). from a dictum of the Greek physician Hippocrates.

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189 0 / JOSEPH CONRAD

Heart of Darkness This story is derived from Conrad's experience in the Congo in 1890. Like Marlow, the narrator of the story, Conrad had as a child determined one day to visit the heart of Africa. "It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa at the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: 'When I grow up I shall go there' " (A Personal Record, 1912).

Conrad was promised a job as a Congo River pilot through the influence of his distant cousin Marguerite Poradowska, who lived in Brussels and knew important officials of the Belgian company that exploited the Congo. At this time the Congo, although nominally an independent state, the Congo Free State (Etat Independent du Congo), was virtually the personal property of Leopold II, king of Belgium, who made a fortune out of it. Later, the appalling abuses involved in the naked colonial exploitation that went on in the Congo were exposed to public view, and international criticism compelled the setting up of a committee of inquiry in 1904. From 1885 to 1908 masses of Congolese men were worked to death, women were raped, hands were cut off, villages were looted and burned. What Conrad saw in 1890 shocked him profoundly and shook his view of the moral basis of colonialism, of exploration and trade in newly discovered countries, indeed of civilization in general. "Heart of Darkness is experience, too," Conrad wrote in his 1917 "Author's Note," "but it is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers." And later he told Edward Garnett: "Before the Congo I was just a mere animal."

Conrad arrived in Africa in May 1890 and made his way up the Congo River very much as described in Heart of Darkness. At Kinshasa (which Conrad spells Kinchassa) on Stanley Pool, which he reached after an exhausting two-hundred-mile trek from Matadi, near the mouth of the river, Conrad was taken aback to learn that the steamer of which he was to be captain had been damaged and was undergoing repairs. He was sent as supernumerary on another steamer to learn the river. This steamer was sent to Stanley Falls to collect and bring back to Kinshasa one Georges Antoine Klein, an agent of the company who had fallen so gravely ill that he died on board. Conrad then fell seriously ill and eventually returned to London in January 1891 without ever having served as a Congo River pilot. The Congo experience permanently impaired his health; it also permanently haunted his imagination. The nightmare atmosphere of Heart of Darkness is an accurate reflection of Conrad's response to his traumatic experience.

The theme of the story is partly the "choice of nightmares" facing whites in the Congo�either to become like the commercially minded manager, who sees Africa, its people, and its resources solely as instruments of financial gain, or to become like Kurtz, the self-tortured and corrupted idealist (inspired by Klein). The manager is a "hollow man" (T. S. Eliot used a quotation from this story as one epigraph for his poem "The Hollow Men"); his only objections to Kurtz are commercial, not moral: Kurtz's methods are "unsound" and would therefore lose the company money. At the last Kurtz seems to recognize the moral horror of his having succumbed to the dark temptations that African life posed for the European. "He had summed up�he had judged." But the story also has other levels of meaning, and the counterpointing of Western civilization in Europe with what that civilization has done in Africa (see the concluding interview between Marlow and Kurtz's "intended"�based on an interview between Conrad and the dead Klein's fiancee) throws out several of these. The story first appeared in Blackivood's Magazine in 1899 and was revised for book publication in 1902 as part of Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories. See also the extract from Chinua Achebe's essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" (p. 2709).

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HEART OF DARKNESS / 1891

Heart of Darkness

1

The Nellie, a cruising yawl,1 swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, 2 and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. We four affectionately watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. On the whole river there was nothing that looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified. It was difficult to realise his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom.

Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea. Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of making us tolerant of each other's yarns�and even convictions. The Lawyer�the best of old fellows�had, because of his many years and many virtues, the only cushion on deck, and was lying on the only rug. The Accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones. Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzenmast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol. The Director, satisfied the anchor had good hold, made his way aft and sat down amongst us. We exchanged a few words lazily. Afterwards there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason or other we did not begin that game of dominoes. We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun.

And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.

Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled

1. Two-masted boat. 2. River port on the south bank of the Thames twenty-four miles east (downriver) of London.

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189 2 / JOSEPH CONRAD

at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, "followed the sea" with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it has borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin,3 knights all, titled and untitled�the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests� and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith�the adventurers and the settlers; kings' ships and the ships of men on 'Change; captains, admirals, the dark "interlopers""1 of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned "generals" of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway5�a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."

He was the only man of us who still "followed the sea." The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them�the ship; and so is their country�the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For

3. Sir John Franklin (1786-1847), Arctic explorer who in 1845 commanded an expedition consisting of the ships Erebus and Terror in search of the Northwest Passage. The ships never returned. Sir Francis Drake (ca. 1 540-1 596), Elizabethan nava! hero and explorer, sailed around the world on his ship The Golden Hind. Queen Elizabeth knighted Drake aboard his ship, loaded with captured Spanish treasure, on his return. 4. Private ships muscling in on the monopoly of the East India Company, which was founded in 1600, lost its trading monopoly in 1813, and transferred its governmental functions to the Crown in 1858. Deptford, on the south bank of the Thames, on the eastern edge of London, was once an important dockyard. Greenwich is on the south bank of the Thames immediately east of Deptford. Erith is eight miles farther east. " 'Change": the Stock Exchange.

5. Navigable part of a river, through which ships enter and depart.

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HEART OF DARKNESS / 1893

the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

His remark did not seem at all surprising. It was just like Marlow. It was accepted in silence. No one took the trouble to grunt even; and presently he said, very slow:

"I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago�the other day. . . . Light came out of this river since�you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker�may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine�what d'ye call 'em?�trireme6 in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries�a wonderful lot of handy men they must have been too�used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here�the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina�and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages�precious little to eat fit for a civilised man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine7 here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay�cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death�death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here. Oh yes�he did it. Did it very well, too, no doubt, and without thinking much about it either, except afterwards to brag of what he had gone through in his time, perhaps. They were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he was cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna8 by and by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga� perhaps too much dice, you know�coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader, even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him�all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination�you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."

He paused.

"Mind," he began again, lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the

6. Ancient Greek and Roman galley with three 8. A city in northern Italy once directly on the ranks of oars. Adriatic Sea and an important naval station in

7. Wine from a famed wine-making district in Roman times. It is now about six miles from the Campania (Italy). sea, connected with it by a canal.

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189 4 / JOSEPH CONRAD

hand outwards, so that, with his legs folded before him, he had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-flower�"Mind, none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency�the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force� nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind�as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea�something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . . ."

He broke off. Flames glided in the river, small green flames, red flames, white flames, pursuing, overtaking, joining, crossing each other�then separating slowly or hastily. The traffic of the great city went on in the deepening night upon the sleepless river. We looked on, waiting patiently�there was nothing else to do till the end of the flood; but it was only after a long silence, when he said, in a hesitating voice, "I suppose you fellows remember I did once turn fresh-water sailor for a bit," that we knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences.

"I don't want to bother you much with what happened to me personally," he began, showing in this remark the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear; "yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me�and into my thoughts. It was sombre enough too�and pitiful�not extraordinary in any way�not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.

"I had then, as you remember, just returned to London after a lot of Indian Ocean, Pacific, China Seas�a regular dose of the East�six years or so, and I was loafing about, hindering you fellows in your work and invading your homes, just as though I had got a heavenly mission to civilise you. It was very fine for a time, but after a bit I did get tired of resting. Then I began to look for a ship�I should think the hardest work on earth. But the ships wouldn't even look at me. And I got tired of that game too.

"Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there. The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven't been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour's off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and . . . well, we won't talk about that. But there was one yet�the biggest, the most blank, so to speak�that I had a hankering after.

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HEART OF DARKNESS / 1895

"True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery�a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird�a silly little bird. Then I remembered there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river. Dash it all! I thought to myself, they can't trade without using some kind of craft on that lot of fresh water�steamboats! Why shouldn't I try to get charge of one? I went on along Fleet Street,9 but could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me.

"You understand it was a Continental concern, that Trading Society; but I have a lot of relations living on the Continent, because it's cheap and not so nasty as it looks, they say.

"I am sorry to own I began to worry them. This was already a fresh departure for me. I was not used to get things that way, you know. I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go. I wouldn't have believed it of myself; but, then�you see�I felt somehow I must get there by hook or by crook. So I worried them. The men said, 'My dear fellow,' and did nothing. Then�would you believe it?�I tried the women. I, Charlie Marlow, set the women to work�to get a job. Heavens! Well, you see, the notion drove me. I had an aunt, a dear enthusiastic soul. She wrote: 'It will be delightful. I am ready to do anything, anything for you. It is a glorious idea. I know the wife of a very high personage in the Administration, and also a man who has lots of influence with,' etc. etc. She was determined to make no end of fuss to get me appointed skipper of a river steamboat, if such was my fancy.

"I got my appointment�of course; and I got it very quick. It appears the Company had received news that one of their captains had been killed in a scuffle with the natives. This was my chance, and it made me the more anxious to go. It was only months and months afterwards, when I made the attempt to recover what was left of the body, that I heard the original quarrel arose from a misunderstanding about some hens. Yes, two black hens. Fresleven� that was the fellow's name, a Dane�thought himself wronged somehow in the bargain, so he went ashore and started to hammer the chief of the village with a stick. Oh, it didn't surprise me in the least to hear this, and at the same time to be told that Fresleven was the gentlest, quietest creature that ever walked on two legs. No doubt he was; but he had been a couple of years already out there engaged in the noble cause, you know, and he probably felt the need at last of asserting his self-respect in some way. Therefore he whacked the old nigger mercilessly, while a big crowd of his people watched him, thunderstruck, till some man�I was told the chief s son�in desperation at hearing the old chap yell, made a tentative jab with a spear at the white man�and of course it went quite easy between the shoulder-blades. Then the whole population cleared into the forest, expecting all kinds of calamities to happen, while, on the other hand, the steamer Fresleven commanded left also in a bad panic, in charge of the engineer, I believe. Afterwards nobody seemed to trouble much about Fresleven's remains, till I got out and stepped into his shoes. I couldn't let it rest, though; but when an opportunity offered at last to meet

9. Street in central London.

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189 6 / JOSEPH CONRAD

my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones. They were all there. The supernatural being had not been touched after he fell. And the village was deserted, the huts gaped black, rotting, all askew within the fallen enclosures. A calamity had come to it, sure enough. The people had vanished. Mad terror had scattered them, men, women, and children, through the bush, and they had never returned. What became of the hens I don't know either. I should think the cause of progress got them, anyhow. However, through this glorious affair I got my appointment, before I had fairly begun to hope for it.

"I flew around like mad to get ready, and before forty-eight hours I was crossing the Channel to show myself to my employers, and sign the contract. In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre. Prejudice no doubt. I had no difficulty in finding the Company's offices. It was the biggest thing in the town, and everybody I met was full of it. They were going to run an over-sea empire, and make no end of coin by trade.

"A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable windows with Venetian blinds, a dead silence, grass sprouting between the stones, imposing carriage archways right and left, immense double doors standing ponderously ajar. I slipped through one of these cracks, went up a swept and ungarnished staircase, as arid as a desert, and opened the first door I came to. Two women, one fat and the other slim, sat on straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black wool. The slim one got up and walked straight at me� still knitting with downcast eyes�and only just as I began to think of getting out of her way, as you would for a somnambulist, stood still, and looked up. Her dress was as plain as an umbrella-cover, and she turned round without a word and preceded me into a waiting-room. I gave my name, and looked about. Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red�good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn't going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre. And the river was there� fascinating�deadly�like a snake. Ough! A door opened, a white-haired secretarial head, but wearing a compassionate expression, appeared, and a skinny forefinger beckoned me into the sanctuary. Its light was dim, and a heavy writing desk squatted in the middle. From behind that structure came out an impression of pale plumpness in a frockcoat. The great man himself. He was five feet six, I should judge, and had his grip on the handle-end of ever so many millions. He shook hands, I fancy, murmured vaguely, was satisfied with my French. Bon voyage.

"In about forty-five seconds I found myself again in the waiting-room with the compassionate secretary, who, full of desolation and sympathy, made me sign some document. I believe I undertook amongst other things not to disclose any trade secrets. Well, I am not going to.

"I began to feel slightly uneasy. You know I am not used to such ceremonies, and there was something ominous in the atmosphere. It was just as though I had been let into some conspiracy�I don't know�something not quite right; and I was glad to get out. In the outer room the two women knitted black wool feverishly. People were arriving, and the younger one was walking back and

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HEART OF DARKNESS / 189 7

forth introducing them. The old one sat on her chair. Her flat cloth slippers were propped up on a foot-warmer, and a cat reposed on her lap. She wore a starched white affair on her head, had a wart on one cheek, and silver-rimmed spectacles hung on the tip of her nose. She glanced at me above the glasses. The swift and indifferent placidity of that look troubled me. Two youths with foolish and cheery countenances were being piloted over, and she threw at them the same quick glance of unconcerned wisdom. She seemed to know all about them and about me too. An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinising the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Ave! Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant.1 Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again� not half, by a long way.

"There was yet a visit to the doctor. 'A simple formality,' assured me the secretary, with an air of taking an immense part in all my sorrows. Accordingly a young chap wearing his hat over the left eyebrow, some clerk I suppose� there must have been clerks in the business, though the house was as still as a house in a city of the dead�came from somewhere upstairs, and led me forth. He was shabby and careless, with ink-stains on the sleeves of his jacket, and his cravat was large and billowy, under a chin shaped like the toe of an old boot. It was a little too early for the doctor, so I proposed a drink, and thereupon he developed a vein of joviality. As we sat over our vermuths he glorified the Company's business, and by and by I expressed casually my surprise at him not going out there. He became very cool and collected all at once. 'I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples,' he said sententiously, emptied his glass with great resolution, and we rose.

"The old doctor felt my pulse, evidently thinking of something else the while. 'Good, good for there,' he mumbled, and then with a certain eagerness asked me whether I would let him measure my head. Rather surprised, I said Yes, when he produced a thing like callipers and got the dimensions back and front and every way, taking notes carefully. He was an unshaven little man in a threadbare coat like a gaberdine, with his feet in slippers, and I thought him a harmless fool. 'I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out there,' he said. 'And when they come back too?' I asked. 'Oh, I never see them,' he remarked; 'and, moreover, the changes take place inside, you know.' He smiled, as if at some quiet joke. 'So you are going out there. Famous. Interesting too.' He gave me a searching glance, and made another note. 'Ever any madness in your family?' he asked, in a matter-of-fact tone. I felt very annoyed. 'Is that question in the interests of science too?' 'It would be,' he said, without taking notice of my irritation, 'interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot, but . . . ' 'Are you an alienist?'2 I interrupted. 'Every doctor should be�a little,' answered that original3 imperturbably. 'I have a little theory which you Messieurs who go out there must help me to prove. This is my share in the advantages my country shall reap from the possession of such a magnificent dependency. The mere wealth I leave to others. Pardon my questions, but you are the first

1. "Hail! . . . Those who are about to die salute 2. Doctor who treats mental diseases. (The term you" (Latin). The Roman gladiators' salute to the has now been replaced by psychiatrist.)

emperor on entering the arena. 3. Eccentric person.

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189 8 / JOSEPH CONRAD

Englishman coming under my observation ... " I hastened to assure him I was not in the least typical. 'If I were,' said I, 'I wouldn't be talking like this with you.' 'What you say is rather profound, and probably erroneous,' he said, with a laugh. 'Avoid irritation more than exposure to the sun. Adieu. How do you English say, eh? Good-bye. Ah! Good-bye. Adieu. In the tropics one must before everything keep calm.' . . . He lifted a warning forefinger. . . . 'Du calme, du calme. Adieu.'

"One thing more remained to do�say good-bye to my excellent aunt. I found her triumphant. I had a cup of tea�the last decent cup of tea for many days�and in a room that most soothingly looked just as you would expect a lady's drawing-room to look, we had a long quiet chat by the fireside. In the course of these confidences it became quite plain to me I had been represented to the wife of the high dignitary, and goodness knows to how many more people besides, as an exceptional and gifted creature�a piece of good fortune for the Company�a man you don't get hold of every day. Good heavens! and I was going to take charge of a two-penny-halfpenny river-steamboat with a penny whistle attached! It appeared, however, I was also one of the Workers, with a capital�you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about 'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,' till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit.

" 'You forget, dear Charlie, that the labourer is worthy of his hire,' she said brightly. It's queer how out of touch with truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there had never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset. Some confounded fact we men have been living contentedly with ever since the day of creation would start up and knock the whole thing over.

"After this I got embraced, told to wear flannel, be sure to write often, and so on�and I left. In the street�I don't know why�a queer feeling came to me that I was an impostor. Odd thing that I, who used to clear out for any part of the world at twenty-four hours' notice, with less thought than most men give to the crossing of a street, had a moment�I won't say of hesitation, but of startled pause, before this commonplace affair. The best way I can explain it to you is by saying that, for a second or two, I felt as though, instead of going to the centre of a continent, I were about to set off for the centre of the earth.

"I left in a French steamer, and she called in every blamed port they have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you�smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out. This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. Here and there greyish-whitish specks showed up clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above them perhaps�settlements some

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HEART OF DARKNESS / 189 9

centuries old, and still no bigger than pin-heads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers�to take care of the custom-house clerks presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed various places�trading places�with names like Gran' Bassam, Little Popo; names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister back-cloth. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform sombreness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning. Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks�these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at. For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away. Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech�and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives�he called them enemies!�hidden out

of sight somewhere.

"We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves,4 that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair. Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularised impression, but the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.

"It was upward of thirty days before I saw the mouth of the big river. We

4. Tropical evergreen trees or shrubs with roots and stems forming dense thickets.

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190 0 / JOSEPH CONRAD

anchored off the seat of the government. But my work would not begin till some two hundred miles farther on. So as soon as I could I made a start for a place thirty miles higher up.

"I had my passage on a little sea-going steamer. Her captain was a Swede, and knowing me for a seaman, invited me on the bridge. He was a young man, lean, fair, and morose, with lanky hair and a shuffling gait. As we left the miserable little wharf, he tossed his head contemptuously at the shore. 'Been living there?' he asked. I said, 'Yes.' 'Fine lot these government chaps�are they not?' he went on, speaking English with great precision and considerable bitterness. 'It is funny what some people will do for a few francs a month. I wonder what becomes of that kind when it goes up country?' I said to him I expected to see that soon. 'So-o-o!' he exclaimed. He shuffled athwart, keeping one eye ahead vigilantly. 'Don't be too sure,' he continued. 'The other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too.' 'Hanged himself! Why, in God's name?' I cried. He kept on looking out watchfully. 'Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the country perhaps.'

"At last we opened a reach. A rocky cliff appeared, mounds of turned-up earth by the shore, houses on a hill, others with iron roofs, amongst a waste of excavations, or hanging to the declivity. A continuous noise of the rapids above hovered over this scene of inhabited devastation. A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants. A jetty5 projected into the river. A blinding sunlight drowned all this at times in a sudden recrudescence of glare. 'There's your Company's station,' said the Swede, pointing to three wooden barrack-like structures on the rocky slope. 'I will send your things up. Four boxes did you say? So. Farewell.'