The Return of the Native

by Thomas Hardy

The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of men when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery, and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.*

Persons with any weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits;

Eustacia sighed: it was no fragile maiden sigh, but a sigh which shook her like a shiver. Whenever a flash of reason darted like an electric light upon her lover—as it sometimes would—and showed his imperfections, she shivered thus. But it was over in a second, and she loved on. She knew that he trifled with her; but she loved on.

To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow. It closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow.

To be loved to madness—such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.

To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.

Don’t you offer me tame love, or away you go.”

To be conscious that the end of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious situations along the whole course between the beginning of a passion and its end.

She had undoubtedly begun to love him. She loved him partly because he was exceptional in this scene, partly because she had from the first instinctively determined to love him, chiefly because she was in desperate need of loving somebody.

What a strange sort of love, to be entirely free from that quality of selfishness which is frequently the chief constituent of the passion, and sometimes its only one.

Yeobright and Eustacia looked at each other for one instant, as if each had in mind those few moments during which a certain moonlit scene was common to both. With the glance the calm fixity of her features sublimated itself to an expression of refinement and warmth; it was like garish noon rising to the dignity of sunset in a couple of seconds.

“Well, whatever I may have thought one thing is certain—I do love you—past all compass and description. I love you to oppressiveness —I, who have never before felt more than a pleasant passing fancy for any woman I have ever seen. Let me look right into your moon-lit face, and dwell on every line and curve in it. Only a few hair-breadths make the difference between this face and faces I have seen many times before I knew you; yet what a difference—the difference between everything and nothing at all. One touch on that mouth again; there, and there, and there.—Your eyes seem heavy, Eustacia.”

Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

They were enclosed in a sort of luminous mist which hid from them surroundings of any inharmonious colour, and gave to all things the character of light. When it rained they were charmed because they could remain indoors together all day with such a show of reason: when it was fine they were charmed because they could sit together on the hills. They were like those double stars which revolve round and round each other, and from a distance appear to be one. The absolute solitude in which they lived intensified their reciprocal thoughts; yet some might have said that it had the disadvantage of consuming their mutual affections at a fearfully prodigal rate.

But do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life—music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that is going on in the great arteries of the world. That was the shape of my youthful dream; but I did not get it.

What’s the moon to a man like me? Let it shine—let anything be, so that I never see another day… Eustacia, I don’t know where to look: my thoughts go through me like swords. O if any man wants to make himself immortal by painting a picture of wretchedness, let him come here!”

Eustacia; you have held my happiness in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down.”

Why have you not come before? Do you think I will not listen to you?—Surely not, when you remember the kisses and vows we exchanged under the summer moon.

The moon and stars were closed up by cloud and rain to the degree of extinction. It was a night which led the traveller’s thoughts instinctively to dwell on nocturnal scenes of disaster in the chronicles of the world, on all that is terrible and dark in history and legend—the last plague of Egypt, the destruction of Sennacherib’s host, the agony in Gethsemane.

The fire soon flared up the chimney, giving the room an appearance of comfort that was doubled by contrast with the drumming of the storm without, which snapped at the window-panes and breathed into the chimney strange low utterances that seemed to be the prologue to some tragedy.

They stood silently looking upon Eustacia, who as she lay there still in death eclipsed all her living phases. Pallor did not include all the quality of her complexion, which seemed more than whiteness; it was almost light.

Misfortune had struck them gracefully, cutting off their erratic histories with a catastrophic dash, instead of, as with many, attenuating each life to an uninteresting meagreness through long years of wrinkles, neglect, and decay.