Thomas Hardy (29 page)

In December 1914 Hardy reported that Wessex had ‘developed a tendency to fight other dogs, quite to our surprise. We fancy he will get a nip from a big dog who lives near here, which will make him less bumptious!’
²⁰

In 1915 Hardy decided not to have his customary ‘season’ in London, ‘owing to the war & other circumstances’.
²¹
In September he learned that a relative of his, a Lieutenant Frank George, had been killed at Gallipoli, bringing the tragedy of war home to him in even sharper relief. The following month, in a letter to Charles Edwin Gifford, his late wife Emma’s first cousin, Hardy appealed for help in trying to piece together Emma’s full, genealogical family tree.

Hardy’s elder sister, Mary, died on 24 November 1915; she died at their brother Henry’s house at Talbothays. A school teacher by profession, her hobbies had been portrait painting and playing the organ at local churches, where she was much in demand. Hardy described her as ‘almost my only companion in childhood’.
²²
She was buried in Stinsford churchyard.

In June 1916 Hardy fulfilled his duty as grand juror at the Assizes, and attended rehearsals of scenes from
The Dynasts
by Dorchester’s Hardy Players. In the same month he made a nostalgic visit to Sturminster Newton, where he had written
The Return of the Native
. That September saw Hardy and Florence at St Juliot, revisiting the sites of his youthful romance with his late wife Emma. Florence appears to have taken this in good part; at any rate disguising any feelings of jealousy or annoyance which she may have had. By autumn, according to Hardy, the number of German prisoners of war at Dorchester had risen to 5,000. He went to see them and also visited wounded English servicemen in the local hospital.

In February 1917 the commandant of the local prisoner-of-war camp sent some prisoners to Max Gate to root up some trees so that the kitchen garden could be enlarged. ‘Nothing has made me feel more sad about the war than the sight of these amiable young Germans, in such a position through the machinations of some vile war-gang or other,’said Hardy.
²³
In March Hardy could not contain his indignation at the ‘Good-God’ theory, which ‘after some thousands of years of trial, [had] produced the present infamous and disgraceful state of Europe … that most Christian Continent!’ As for the ‘fifty meanings [which] attach to the word “God”,’ he said, the only reasonable one was the ‘
Cause of Things
, whatever that cause may be’. His own theory of God as both ‘Goodless-and-Badless’ (as portrayed by him in
The Dynasts
), might, he said, ‘perhaps be given a trial with advantage’.
²⁴

In May 1917 Hardy confessed that (owing to poor eyesight, possibly occasioned by the presence of cataracts) he was ‘compelled to write by machinery nowadays’ – a reference to the typewriter.
²⁵
In October Hardy and Florence visited Plymouth, doubtless with the object of exploring the late Emma’s former haunts.

One of the most intriguing poems in Hardy’s
Satires of Circumstance
collection is entitled
The Face at the Casement
, which begins:

If ever joy leave

An abiding sting of sorrow,

So befell it on the morrow

Of that May eve …

The travelled sun dropped

To the north-west, low and lower,

The pony’s trot grew slower,

Until we stopped.

‘This cosy house just by

I must call at for a minute,

A sick man lies within it

Who soon will die.

‘He wished – to marry me,

So I am bound, when I drive near him,

To inquire, if but to cheer him,

How he may be.’

A message was sent in,

And wordlessly we waited,

Till some one came and stated

The bulletin.

And that the sufferer said,

For her call no words could thank her;

As his angel he must rank her

Till life’s spark fled.

Slowly we drove away,

When I turned my head, although not

Called to: why I turned I know not

Even to this day:

And lo, there in my view

Pressed against an upper lattice

Was a white face, gazing at us

As we withdrew.

And well I did divine

It to be the man’s there dying,

Who but lately had been sighing

For her pledged mine.

At this, the author of the poem (Hardy) puts his arm around his ‘plighted love’ (Emma) in order to make their position clear to the person at the window. In effect, he is saying: ‘She is mine, and not yours.’ However, for this action he afterwards confesses, in the poem, that he feels ashamed.

Who was this man who had wished to marry Emma but had fallen ill? A clue is given in the penultimate verse of the poem:

Long long years has he lain

In thy garth, O Sad Saint Cleather …

By ‘garth’ Hardy means ‘churchyard’, and ‘Saint Cleather’ is a reference to Cornwall’s small village of St Clether (sic), which, as already mentioned, is situated only 7 miles from St Juliot.
¹
Also, the ‘May eve’ must refer to 1871 (which was the year after Hardy had first met Emma), when he paid another visit to her at St Juliot.

In order to identify the person to whom Hardy is referring in this poem, it is necessary to peruse the burial register of the parish of St Clether for a period of, say, four years, from May 1871
²
(the assumption being that a dying man is unlikely to have survived for longer than this period). In doing this, if all the males older or younger than Emma by a period of ten years are eliminated, then this leaves only one possible candidate, namely William Henry Serjeant.
³

William, a draper by trade, was the elder son of the Revd Henry Matthias Atwood Serjeant, curate of St Clether from 1869–79
⁴
(where his uncle, the Revd James Serjeant, had been curate before him, from 1840–53). The Revd Henry’s wife was Betsy (
née
Clemens of St Keyne, Cornwall), whom he married in 1847. (St Clether’s rector (1837–80), the Revd Henry Morshead, lived elsewhere.)

Born in 1849, William was at least eight years Emma’s junior. An unmarried man, he died aged 23 at the vicarage, St Clether, on 20 January 1872, ‘after a long and painful illness’.
⁵
He was buried in the churchyard six days later. Whereas his father, the Revd Henry, normally conducted St Clether’s burial services, on this occasion the service was conducted by a colleague, the Revd John King Lethbridge. William’s death certificate gives his occupation as ‘draper’ and the cause of his death as ‘phthisis pulmonalis – 18 months’.
⁶
(‘Phthisis’ means ‘wasting disease’ – the most likely cause in this case being pulmonary tuberculosis.) The certificate also records that in attendance on William at his death was Hugh Pearse of Higher Bassils, aged 58, who had a 400-acre farm at North Petherwin, 5 miles to the north-east of St Clether. This suggests that when he died, William was visiting Pearse, either at his home or at his farm.
⁷

How did Emma and William come to meet one another? The Revd Henry Serjeant of St Clether, and Emma’s brother-in-law, the Revd Cadell Holder of St Juliot, were both Anglican clergymen whose parishes lay within the diocese of Truro, separated by only a handful of miles. Undoubtedly, therefore, soon after the Serjeants arrived at St Clether in November 1868,
⁸
the two men and their families, Emma included, would have become acquainted. It is likely that by the time Hardy first arrived on the scene in March 1870, Emma had known William for a year or even longer.
⁹
(In fact, Emma may have known the Serjeant family from the time when she and her parents were living at Kirland House, Bodmin. This is because Emma’s friend, Captain Charles Eldon Serjeant of St Benet’s Abbey, Lanivet, near Bodmin, and the Revd Henry M. A. Serjeant were first cousins.)
¹⁰

It may, therefore, be assumed that the Serjeants’ home – the seventeenth-century rectory at St Clether – was the place at which Emma asked Hardy to stop at sunset on that ‘May eve’; this being situated, as already mentioned, a mere 7 miles from St Juliot, and well within range for Emma’s pony and trap. It may also be assumed that it was from one of the casement windows of the rectory that the dying man’s face could be seen looking out.

So why did Emma not marry William Serjeant, a draper from a respectable family, of whom her father could scarcely have disapproved? Was it because of William’s serious chest complaint which (according to his death certificate) had commenced in July 1870, four months after Hardy’s first meeting with her at St Juliot? Or was there another reason altogether?

From the poem, it is clear that Hardy was convinced that Emma was in love with William Serjeant and he with her, but was this really the case? In 1921 French psychiatrist Gaëtan de Clérambault published a paper entitled ‘Les Psychoses Passionelles’, in which he described a condition which now bears his name. De Clérambault’s syndrome (or ‘erotomania’) is a type of delusion (which can co-exist with other delusions) in which a person believes that another person, and sometimes a number of other people, are in love with himself or herself. The disorder is almost entirely confined to single women, who believe that their ‘supposed lover’ is more in love with them than they are with him.
¹¹
Also, this ‘supposed lover’ is ‘usually inaccessible’, perhaps because he is a person of exalted position.

This description fits with that of Emma and William; he being out of reach by virtue of the disparity in their ages, and also, more latterly, by virtue of his terminal illness. However, William could hardly claim to be an ‘exalted’ person. His paternal grandfather, John Serjeant, had been a lieutenant in the Royal Marines with a large family to support both from his first and his second marriages.
¹²
His father, the Revd Henry Serjeant, who as yet was only a curate,
¹³
had commenced his studies at Queens’ College, Cambridge (to which he was admitted for the Michaelmas term, 1943), as a ‘sizar’ – a poor student who acted as a servant in return for free tuition;
¹⁴
his mother Betsy (
née
Blake) was the daughter of a farmer from St Keyne, near Liskeard.
¹⁵
But in order to gain entry to such a prestigious institution as Cambridge University, the Revd Henry must have had influential connections.

Whether Emma’s delusion was of the ‘de Clérambault’ type or not is open to question. But what seems likely is that her love affair with William Serjeant was the product of her deluded mind rather than a reality. Additionally, it will not go unnoticed that the description of the deluded woman which de Clérambault describes is reminiscent of Sue Bridehead in
Jude the Obscure
(in reality, Emma), who derives pleasure from the fact that her lover is more in love with her than she is with him.

Hardy’s poem
The Telegram
(also to be found in the
Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries
collection), also relates to a sick man who was evidently loved by Emma:

‘O he’s suffering – maybe dying – and I not there to aid,

And smooth his bed and whisper to him! Can I nohow go?

Only the nurse’s brief twelve words thus hurriedly conveyed,

As by stealth, to let me know.

‘He was the best and brightest! – candour shone upon his brow,

And I shall never meet again a soldier such as he,

And I loved him ere I knew it, and perhaps he’s sinking now,

Far, far removed from me!’

The yachts ride mute at anchor and the fulling moon is fair,

And the giddy folk are strutting up and down the smooth parade,

And in her wild distraction she seems not to be aware

That she lives no more a maid.

But has vowed and wived herself to one who blessed the ground she trod

To and from his scene of ministry, and thought her history known

In its last particular to him – aye, almost as to God,

And believed her quite his own.

So rapt her mind’s far off regard she droops as in a swoon,

And a movement of aversion mars her recent spousal grace,

And in silence we two sit here in our waning honeymoon

At this idle watering-place …

What now I see before me is a long lane overhung

With lovelessness, and stretching from the present to the grave.

And would I were away from this, with friends I knew when young,

Ere a woman held me slave.

One might assume that
The Telegram
relates to a real-life telegram, which apparently arrived when Hardy was on his ‘waning honeymoon’ with Emma at an ‘idle watering-place’ (Brighton, where he and Emma spent Sunday 20 September and Monday 21 September 1874, the couple having married on 17 September). One might also assume that Emma had left word with her former lover’s nurse, that if the sick man’s condition were to deteriorate further, then she wished to be kept informed, but ‘by stealth’ in order to conceal the matter from Hardy. And his condition did deteriorate, hence the arrival of the telegram. On learning that her former lover was now desperately ill, Emma is distraught, knowing that she cannot be ‘there to aid’ the man whom she loved and who is now dying.