The Well Beloved

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This etext was produced by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.

THE WELL-BELOVED -- A SKETCH OF A TEMPERAMENT

BY THOMAS HARDY

PREFACE

The peninsula carved by Time out of a single stone, whereon most of the
following scenes are laid, has been for centuries immemorial the home
of a curious and well-nigh distinct people, cherishing strange beliefs
and singular customs, now for the most part obsolescent. Fancies, like
certain soft-wooded plants which cannot bear the silent inland frosts,
but thrive by the sea in the roughest of weather, seem to grow up
naturally here, in particular amongst those natives who have no active
concern in the labours of the 'Isle.' Hence it is a spot apt to
generate a type of personage like the character imperfectly sketched in
these pages--a native of natives--whom some may choose to call a
fantast (if they honour him with their consideration so far), but whom
others may see only as one that gave objective continuity and a name to
a delicate dream which in a vaguer form is more or less common to all
men, and is by no means new to Platonic philosophers.

To those who know the rocky coign of England here depicted--overlooking
the great Channel Highway with all its suggestiveness, and standing out
so far into mid-sea that touches of the Gulf Stream soften the air till
February--it is matter of surprise that the place has not been more
frequently chosen as the retreat of artists and poets in search of
inspiration--for at least a month or two in the year, the tempestuous
rather than the fine seasons by preference. To be sure, one nook
therein is the retreat, at their country's expense, of other geniuses
from a distance; but their presence is hardly discoverable. Yet
perhaps it is as well that the artistic visitors do not come, or no
more would be heard of little freehold houses being bought and sold
there for a couple of hundred pounds--built of solid stone, and dating
from the sixteenth century and earlier, with mullions, copings, and
corbels complete. These transactions, by the way, are carried out and
covenanted, or were till lately, in the parish church, in the face of
the congregation, such being the ancient custom of the Isle.

As for the story itself, it may be worth while to remark that,
differing from all or most others of the series in that the interest
aimed at is of an ideal or subjective nature, and frankly imaginative,
verisimilitude in the sequence of events has been subordinated to the
said aim.

The first publication of this tale in an independent form was in 1897;
but it had appeared in the periodical press in 1892, under the title of
'The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved.' A few chapters of that experimental
issue were rewritten for the present and final form of the narrative.

T. H.
August 1912.

CONTENTS

PART FIRST -- A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY.

I. A SUPPOSITITIOUS PRESENTMENT OF HER
II. THE INCARNATION IS ASSUMED TO BE TRUE
III. THE APPOINTMENT
IV. A LONELY PEDESTRIAN
V. A CHARGE
VI. ON THE BRINK
VII. HER EARLIER INCARNATIONS
VIII. 'TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING'
IX. FAMILIAR PHENOMENA IN THE DISTANCE

PART SECOND -- A YOUNG MAN OF FORTY.

I. THE OLD PHANTOM BECOMES DISTINCT
II. SHE DRAWS CLOSE AND SATISFIES
III. SHE BECOMES AN INACCESSIBLE GHOST
IV. SHE THREATENS TO RESUME CORPOREAL SUBSTANCE
V. THE RESUMPTION TAKES PLACE
VI. THE PAST SHINES IN THE PRESENT
VII. THE NEW BECOMES ESTABLISHED
VIII. HIS OWN SOUL CONFRONTS HIM
IX. JUXTAPOSITIONS
X. SHE FAILS TO VANISH STILL
XI. THE IMAGE PERSISTS
XII. A GRILLE DESCENDS BETWEEN
XIII. SHE IS ENSHROUDED FROM SIGHT

PART THIRD -- A YOUNG MAN OF SIXTY.

I. SHE RETURNS FOR THE NEW SEASON
II. MISGIVINGS ON THE RE-EMBODIMENT
III. THE RENEWED IMAGE BURNS ITSELF IN
IV. A DASH FOR THE LAST INCARNATION
V. ON THE VERGE OF POSSESSION
VI. THE WELL-BELOVED IS--WHERE?
VII. AN OLD TABERNACLE IN A NEW ASPECT
VIII. 'ALAS FOR THIS GREY SHADOW, ONCE A MAN!'

PART FIRST -- A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY.

--'Now, if Time knows
That Her, whose radiant brows
Weave them a garland of my vows;

Her that dares be
What these lines wish to see:
I seek no further, it is She.'
--R. CRASHAW.

1. I. A SUPPOSITITIOUS PRESENTMENT OF HER

A person who differed from the local wayfarers was climbing the steep
road which leads through the sea-skirted townlet definable as the
Street of Wells, and forms a pass into that Gibraltar of Wessex, the
singular peninsula once an island, and still called such, that
stretches out like the head of a bird into the English Channel. It is
connected with the mainland by a long thin neck of pebbles 'cast up by
rages of the se,' and unparalleled in its kind in Europe.

The pedestrian was what he looked like--a young man from London and the
cities of the Continent. Nobody could see at present that his urbanism
sat upon him only as a garment. He was just recollecting with
something of self-reproach that a whole three years and eight months
had flown since he paid his last visit to his father at this lonely
rock of his birthplace, the intervening time having been spent amid
many contrasting societies, peoples, manners, and scenes.

What had seemed usual in the isle when he lived there always looked
quaint and odd after his later impressions. More than ever the spot
seemed what it was said once to have been, the ancient Vindilia Island,
and the Home of the Slingers. The towering rock, the houses above
houses, one man's doorstep rising behind his neighbour's chimney, the
gardens hung up by one edge to the sky, the vegetables growing on
apparently almost vertical planes, the unity of the whole island as a
solid and single block of limestone four miles long, were no longer
familiar and commonplace ideas. All now stood dazzlingly unique and
white against the tinted sea, and the sun flashed on infinitely
stratified walls of oolite,

The melancholy ruins
Of cancelled cycles, . . .

with a distinctiveness that called the eyes to it as strongly as any
spectacle he had beheld afar.

After a laborious clamber he reached the top, and walked along the
plateau towards the eastern village. The time being about two o'clock,
in the middle of the summer season, the road was glaring and dusty, and
drawing near to his father's house he sat down in the sun.

He stretched out his hand upon the rock beside him. It felt warm.
That was the island's personal temperature when in its afternoon sleep
as now. He listened, and heard sounds: whirr-whirr, saw-saw-saw.
Those were the island's snores--the noises of the quarrymen and stone-
sawyers.

Opposite to the spot on which he sat was a roomy cottage or homestead.
Like the island it was all of stone, not only in walls but in window-
frames, roof, chimneys, fence, stile, pigsty and stable, almost door.

He remembered who had used to live there--and probably lived there now-
-the Caro family; the 'roan-mare' Caros, as they were called to
distinguish them from other branches of the same pedigree, there being
but half-a-dozen Christian and surnames in the whole island. He
crossed the road and looked in at the open doorway. Yes, there they
were still.

Mrs. Caro, who had seen him from the window, met him in the entry, and
an old-fashioned greeting took place between them. A moment after a
door leading from the back rooms was thrown open, and a young girl
about seventeen or eighteen came bounding in.

'Why, 'TIS dear Joce!' she burst out joyfully. And running up to the
young man, she kissed him.

The demonstration was sweet enough from the owner of such an
affectionate pair of bright hazel eyes and brown tresses of hair. But
it was so sudden, so unexpected by a man fresh from towns, that he
winced for a moment quite involuntarily; and there was some constraint
in the manner in which he returned her kiss, and said, 'My pretty
little Avice, how do you do after so long?'

For a few seconds her impulsive innocence hardly noticed his start of
surprise; but Mrs. Caro, the girl's mother, had observed it instantly.
With a pained flush she turned to her daughter.

'Avice--my dear Avice! Why--what are you doing? Don't you know that
you've grown up to be a woman since Jocelyn--Mr. Pierston--was last
down here? Of course you mustn't do now as you used to do three or
four years ago!'

The awkwardness which had arisen was hardly removed by Pierston's
assurance that he quite expected her to keep up the practice of her
childhood, followed by several minutes of conversation on general
subjects. He was vexed from his soul that his unaware movement should
so have betrayed him. At his leaving he repeated that if Avice
regarded him otherwise than as she used to do he would never forgive
her; but though they parted good friends her regret at the incident was
visible in her face. Jocelyn passed out into the road and onward to
his father's house hard by. The mother and daughter were left alone.

'I was quite amazed at 'ee, my child!' exclaimed the elder. 'A young
man from London and foreign cities, used now to the strictest company
manners, and ladies who almost think it vulgar to smile broad! How
could ye do it, Avice?'

'I--I didn't think about how I was altered!' said the conscience-
stricken girl. 'I used to kiss him, and he used to kiss me before he
went away.'

'But that was years ago, my dear!'

'O yes, and for the moment I forgot! He seemed just the same to me as
he used to be.'

'Well, it can't be helped now. You must be careful in the future.
He's got lots of young women, I'll warrant, and has few thoughts left
for you. He's what they call a sculptor, and he means to be a great
genius in that line some day, they do say.'

'Well, I've done it; and it can't be mended!' moaned the girl.

Meanwhile Jocelyn Pierston, the sculptor of budding fame, had gone
onward to the house of his father, an inartistic man of trade and
commerce merely, from whom, nevertheless, Jocelyn condescended to
accept a yearly allowance pending the famous days to come. But the
elder, having received no warning of his son's intended visit, was not
at home to receive him. Jocelyn looked round the familiar premises,
glanced across the Common at the great yards within which eternal saws
were going to and fro upon eternal blocks of stone--the very same saws
and the very same blocks that he had seen there when last in the
island, so it seemed to him--and then passed through the dwelling into
the back garden.

Like all the gardens in the isle it was surrounded by a wall of dry-
jointed spawls, and at its further extremity it ran out into a corner,
which adjoined the garden of the Caros. He had no sooner reached this
spot than he became aware of a murmuring and sobbing on the other side
of the wall. The voice he recognized in a moment as Avice's, and she
seemed to be confiding her trouble to some young friend of her own sex.

'Oh, what shall I DO! what SHALL I do!' she was saying bitterly. 'So
bold as it was--so shameless! How could I think of such a thing! He
will never forgive me--never, never like me again! He'll think me a
forward hussy, and yet--and yet I quite forgot how much I had grown.
But that he'll never believe!' The accents were those of one who had
for the first time become conscious of her womanhood, as an unwonted
possession which shamed and frightened her.

'Did he seem angry at it?' inquired the friend.

'O no--not angry! Worse. Cold and haughty. O, he's such a
fashionable person now--not at all an island man. But there's no use
in talking of it. I wish I was dead!'

Pierston retreated as quickly as he could. He grieved at the incident
which had brought such pain to this innocent soul; and yet it was
beginning to be a source of vague pleasure to him. He returned to the
house, and when his father had come back and welcomed him, and they had
shared a meal together, Jocelyn again went out, full of an earnest
desire to soothe his young neighbour's sorrow in a way she little
expected; though, to tell the truth, his affection for her was rather
that of a friend than of a lover, and he felt by no means sure that the
migratory, elusive idealization he called his Love who, ever since his
boyhood, had flitted from human shell to human shell an indefinite
number of times, was going to take up her abode in the body of Avice
Caro.

1. II. THE INCARNATION IS ASSUMED TO BE TRUE

It was difficult to meet her again, even though on this lump of rock
the difficulty lay as a rule rather in avoidance than in meeting. But
Avice had been transformed into a very different kind of young woman by
the self-consciousness engendered of her impulsive greeting, and,
notwithstanding their near neighbourhood, he could not encounter her,
try as he would. No sooner did he appear an inch beyond his father's
door than she was to earth like a fox; she bolted upstairs to her room.

Anxious to soothe her after his unintentional slight he could not stand
these evasions long. The manners of the isle were primitive and
straightforward, even among the well-to-do, and noting her
disappearance one day he followed her into the house and onward to the
foot of the stairs.

'Avice!' he called.

'Yes, Mr. Pierston.'

'Why do you run upstairs like that?'

'Oh--only because I wanted to come up for something.'

'Well, if you've got it, can't you come down again?'

'No, I can't very well.'

'Come, DEAR Avice. That's what you are, you know.'

There was no response.

'Well, if you won't, you won't!' he continued. 'I don't want to bother
you.' And Pierston went away.

He was stopping to look at the old-fashioned flowers under the garden
walls when he heard a voice behind him.

'Mr. Pierston--I wasn't angry with you. When you were gone I thought--
you might mistake me, and I felt I could do no less than come and
assure you of my friendship still.'

Turning he saw the blushing Avice immediately behind him.

'You are a good, dear girl!' said he, and, seizing her hand, set upon
her cheek the kind of kiss that should have been the response to hers
on the day of his coming.

'Darling Avice, forgive me for the slight that day! Say you do. Come,
now! And then I'll say to you what I have never said to any other
woman, living or dead: "Will you have me as your husband?"'

'Ah!--mother says I am only one of many!'

'You are not, dear. You knew me when I was young, and others didn't.'

Somehow or other her objections were got over, and though she did not
give an immediate assent, she agreed to meet him later in the
afternoon, when she walked with him to the southern point of the island
called the Beal, or, by strangers, the Bill, pausing over the
treacherous cavern known as Cave Hole, into which the sea roared and
splashed now as it had done when they visited it together as children.
To steady herself while looking in he offered her his arm, and she took
it, for the first time as a woman, for the hundredth time as his
companion.

They rambled on to the lighthouse, where they would have lingered
longer if Avice had not suddenly remembered an engagement to recite
poetry from a platform that very evening at the Street of Wells, the
village commanding the entrance to the island--the village that has now
advanced to be a town.

'Recite!' said he. 'Who'd have thought anybody or anything could
recite down here except the reciter we hear away there--the never
speechless sea.'

'O but we are quite intellectual now. In the winter particularly.
But, Jocelyn--don't come to the recitation, will you? It would spoil
my performance if you were there, and I want to be as good as the
rest.'

'I won't if you really wish me not to. But I shall meet you at the
door and bring you home.'

'Yes!' she said, looking up into his face. Avice was perfectly happy
now; she could never have believed on that mortifying day of his coming
that she would be so happy with him. When they reached the east side
of the isle they parted, that she might be soon enough to take her
place on the platform. Pierston went home, and after dark, when it was
about the hour for accompanying her back, he went along the middle road
northward to the Street of Wells.

He was full of misgiving. He had known Avice Caro so well of old that
his feeling for her now was rather comradeship than love; and what he
had said to her in a moment of impulse that morning rather appalled him
in its consequences. Not that any of the more sophisticated and
accomplished women who had attracted him successively would be likely
to rise inconveniently between them. For he had quite disabused his
mind of the assumption that the idol of his fancy was an integral part
of the personality in which it had sojourned for a long or a short
while.

* * *

To his Well-Beloved he had always been faithful; but she had had many
embodiments. Each individuality known as Lucy, Jane, Flora,
Evangeline, or what-not, had been merely a transient condition of her.
He did not recognize this as an excuse or as a defence, but as a fact
simply. Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a
spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a
light of the eye, a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really
was; Pierston did not. She was indescribable.

Never much considering that she was a subjective phenomenon vivified by
the weird influences of his descent and birthplace, the discovery of
her ghostliness, of her independence of physical laws and failings, had
occasionally given him a sense of fear. He never knew where she next
would be, whither she would lead him, having herself instant access to
all ranks and classes, to every abode of men. Sometimes at night he
dreamt that she was 'the wile-weaving Daughter of high Zeus' in person,
bent on tormenting him for his sins against her beauty in his art--the
implacable Aphrodite herself indeed. He knew that he loved the
masquerading creature wherever he found her, whether with blue eyes,
black eyes, or brown; whether presenting herself as tall, fragile, or
plump. She was never in two places at once; but hitherto she had never
been in one place long.

By making this clear to his mind some time before to-day, he had
escaped a good deal of ugly self-reproach. It was simply that she who
always attracted him, and led him whither she would as by a silken
thread, had not remained the occupant of the same fleshly tabernacle in
her career so far. Whether she would ultimately settle down to one he
could not say.

Had he felt that she was becoming manifest in Avice, he would have
tried to believe that this was the terminal spot of her migrations, and
have been content to abide by his words. But did he see the Well-
Beloved in Avice at all? The question was somewhat disturbing.

He had reached the brow of the hill, and descended towards the village,
where in the long straight Roman street he soon found the lighted hall.
The performance was not yet over; and by going round to the side of the
building and standing on a mound he could see the interior as far down
as the platform level. Avice's turn, or second turn, came on almost
immediately. Her pretty embarrassment on facing the audience rather
won him away from his doubts. She was, in truth, what is called a
'nice' girl; attractive, certainly, but above all things nice--one of
the class with whom the risks of matrimony approximate most nearly to
zero. Her intelligent eyes, her broad forehead, her thoughtful
carriage, ensured one thing, that of all the girls he had known he had
never met one with more charming and solid qualities than Avice Caro's.
This was not a mere conjecture--he had known her long and thoroughly;
her every mood and temper.

A heavy wagon passing without drowned her small soft voice for him; but
the audience were pleased, and she blushed at their applause. He now
took his station at the door, and when the people had done pouring out
he found her within awaiting him.

They climbed homeward slowly by the Old Road, Pierston dragging himself
up the steep by the wayside hand-rail and pulling Avice after him upon
his arm. At the top they turned and stood still. To the left of them
the sky was streaked like a fan with the lighthouse rays, and under
their front, at periods of a quarter of a minute, there arose a deep,
hollow stroke like the single beat of a drum, the intervals being
filled with a long-drawn rattling, as of bones between huge canine
jaws. It came from the vast concave of Deadman's Bay, rising and
falling against the pebble dyke.

The evening and night winds here were, to Pierston's mind, charged with
a something that did not burden them elsewhere. They brought it up
from that sinister Bay to the west, whose movement she and he were
hearing now. It was a presence--an imaginary shape or essence from the
human multitude lying below: those who had gone down in vessels of
war, East Indiamen, barges, brigs, and ships of the Armada--select
people, common, and debased, whose interests and hopes had been as wide
asunder as the poles, but who had rolled each other to oneness on that
restless sea-bed. There could almost be felt the brush of their huge
composite ghost as it ran a shapeless figure over the isle, shrieking
for some good god who would disunite it again.

The twain wandered a long way that night amid these influences--so far
as to the old Hope Churchyard, which lay in a ravine formed by a
landslip ages ago. The church had slipped down with the rest of the
cliff, and had long been a ruin. It seemed to say that in this last
local stronghold of the Pagan divinities, where Pagan customs lingered
yet, Christianity had established itself precariously at best. In that
solemn spot Pierston kissed her.

The kiss was by no means on Avice's initiative this time. Her former
demonstrativeness seemed to have increased her present reserve.

* * *

That day was the beginning of a pleasant month passed mainly in each
other's society. He found that she could not only recite poetry at
intellectual gatherings, but play the piano fairly, and sing to her own
accompaniment.

He observed that every aim of those who had brought her up had been to
get her away mentally as far as possible from her natural and
individual life as an inhabitant of a peculiar island: to make her an
exact copy of tens of thousands of other people, in whose circumstances
there was nothing special, distinctive, or picturesque; to teach her to
forget all the experiences of her ancestors; to drown the local ballads
by songs purchased at the Budmouth fashionable music-sellers', and the
local vocabulary by a governess-tongue of no country at all. She lived
in a house that would have been the fortune of an artist, and learnt to
draw London suburban villas from printed copies.

Avice had seen all this before he pointed it out, but, with a girl's
tractability, had acquiesced. By constitution she was local to the
bone, but she could not escape the tendency of the age.

The time for Jocelyn's departure drew near, and she looked forward to
it sadly, but serenely, their engagement being now a settled thing.
Pierston thought of the native custom on such occasions, which had
prevailed in his and her family for centuries, both being of the old
stock of the isle. The influx of 'kimberlins,' or 'foreigners' (as
strangers from the mainland of Wessex were called), had led in a large
measure to its discontinuance; but underneath the veneer of Avice's
education many an old-fashioned idea lay slumbering, and he wondered
if, in her natural melancholy at his leaving, she regretted the
changing manners which made unpopular the formal ratification of a
betrothal, according to the precedent of their sires and grandsires.

1. III. THE APPOINTMENT

'Well,' said he, 'here we are, arrived at the fag-end of my holiday.
What a pleasant surprise my old home, which I have not thought worth
coming to see for three or four years, had in store for me!'

'You must go to-morrow?' she asked uneasily.

'Yes.'

Something seemed to overweigh them; something more than the natural
sadness of a parting which was not to be long; and he decided that
instead of leaving in the daytime as he had intended, he would defer
his departure till night, and go by the mail-train from Budmouth. This
would give him time to look into his father's quarries, and enable her,
if she chose, to walk with him along the beach as far as to Henry the
Eighth's Castle above the sands, where they could linger and watch the
moon rise over the sea. She said she thought she could come.

So after spending the next day with his father in the quarries Jocelyn
prepared to leave, and at the time appointed set out from the stone
house of his birth in this stone isle to walk to Budmouth-Regis by the
path along the beach, Avice having some time earlier gone down to see
some friends in the Street of Wells, which was halfway towards the spot
of their tryst. The descent soon brought him to the pebble bank, and
leaving behind him the last houses of the isle, and the ruins of the
village destroyed by the November gale of 1824, he struck out along the
narrow thread of land. When he had walked a hundred yards he stopped,
turned aside to the pebble ridge which walled out the sea, and sat down
to wait for her.

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