The Return of the Native

Produced by John Hamm and David Widger

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

by Thomas Hardy

PREFACE

The date at which the following events are assumed to have occurred maybe set down as between 1840 and 1850, when the old watering place hereincalled ”Budmouth” still retained sufficient afterglow from its Georgiangaiety and prestige to lend it an absorbing attractiveness to theromantic and imaginative soul of a lonely dweller inland.

Under the general name of ”Egdon Heath,” which has been given to thesombre scene of the story, are united or typified heaths of various realnames, to the number of at least a dozen; these being virtually one incharacter and aspect, though their original unity, or partial unity, isnow somewhat disguised by intrusive strips and slices brought under theplough with varying degrees of success, or planted to woodland.

It is pleasant to dream that some spot in the extensive tract whosesouthwestern quarter is here described, may be the heath of thattraditionary King of Wessex--Lear.

July, 1895.

”To sorrow I bade good morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant to me, and so kind. I would deceive her, And so leave her, But ah! she is so constant and so kind.”

BOOK ONE -- THE THREE WOMEN

1--A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight,and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowneditself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloudshutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for itsfloor.

The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth withthe darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearlymarked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalmentof night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour wascome: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stooddistinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have beeninclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided tofinish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of thefirmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division inmatter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half anhour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon,anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify theopacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll intodarkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, andnobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there atsuch a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen,its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeedinghours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its truetale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when nightshowed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could beperceived in its shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds andhollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, theheath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it.And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closedtogether in a black fraternization towards which each advanced halfway.

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when otherthings sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake andlisten. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but ithad waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crisesof so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one lastcrisis--the final overthrow.

It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved itwith an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns offlowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmoniousonly with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than thepresent. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve athing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphaticin its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications whichfrequently invest the facade of a prison with far more dignity than isfound in the facade of a palace double its size lent to this heath asublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind areutterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas,if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from, the mockery ofa place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression ofsurroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler andscarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that whichresponds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.

Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beautyis not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe may be agaunt waste in Thule; human souls may find themselves in closer andcloser harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful toour race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not actuallyarrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountainwill be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moodsof the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately, to the commonesttourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtlegardens of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg and Badenbe passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand dunes ofScheveningen.

The most thoroughgoing ascetic could feel that he had a natural right towander on Egdon--he was keeping within the line of legitimate indulgencewhen he laid himself open to influences such as these. Colours andbeauties so far subdued were, at least, the birthright of all. Only insummer days of highest feather did its mood touch the level of gaiety.Intensity was more usually reached by way of the solemn than by way ofthe brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was often arrived atduring winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then Egdon was aroused toreciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the wind its friend.Then it became the home of strange phantoms; and it was found to be thehitherto unrecognized original of those wild regions of obscurity whichare vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flightand disaster, and are never thought of after the dream till revived byscenes like this.

It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature--neitherghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame;but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal andmysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have longlived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had alonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.

This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday.Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briarywilderness--”Bruaria.” Then follows the length and breadth in leagues;and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of thisancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area ofEgdon down to the present day has but little diminished. ”TurbariaBruaria”--the right of cutting heath-turf--occurs in charters relatingto the district. ”Overgrown with heth and mosse,” says Leland of thesame dark sweep of country.

Here at least were intelligible facts regarding landscape--far-reachingproofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitishthing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilization was its enemy;and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn thesame antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of theparticular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein ofsatire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment ofmodern cut and colours has more or less an anomalous look. We seem towant the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of theearth is so primitive.

To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, betweenafternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of theworld outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled thewhole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything aroundand underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the starsoverhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by theirrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an ancient permanencewhich the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it isold? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in ayear, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, therivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained. Thosesurfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by weather, nor soflat as to be the victims of floods and deposits. With the exception ofan aged highway, and a still more aged barrow presently to be referredto--themselves almost crystallized to natural products by longcontinuance--even the trifling irregularities were not caused bypickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches ofthe last geological change.

The above-mentioned highway traversed the lower levels of the heath,from one horizon to another. In many portions of its course it overlaidan old vicinal way, which branched from the great Western road of theRomans, the Via Iceniana, or Ikenild Street, hard by. On the eveningunder consideration it would have been noticed that, though the gloomhad increased sufficiently to confuse the minor features of the heath,the white surface of the road remained almost as clear as ever.