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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
An Omnibus of Obsession and Betrayal – 4 Classic Psychological Fiction Novels excavates the intricate landscapes of the human psyche through a rich tapestry of narrative styles and literary contexts. Carefully curated, this anthology showcases the profound talents of literary luminaries whose writings delve into themes of desire, treachery, and moral ambiguity. The compendium offers a panoramic view of psychological realism where standout narratives pull readers into the complex motivations and emotional undercurrents that drive the characters. From the quiet despair of constrained lives to the explosive manifestations of hidden passions, the anthology encapsulates the multifaceted nature of the human condition. The confluence of distinct authorial voices, including those of Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Kate Chopin, provides a dynamic exploration of psychological intricacies. These authors, rooted in both the realist and modernist traditions, bring forth a rich historical and cultural milieu that frames their works. Their collective efforts mirror the existential inquiries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, enhancing the anthology's thematic cohesiveness. Through varied literary perspectives, this collection not only illuminates past societal norms but also resonates with the perennial complexities of human emotion and interaction. This anthology offers an unparalleled experience as it weaves together diverse narratives under the unified theme of psychological exploration. It is an essential read for those who seek to navigate the labyrinthine corridors of human emotions and motivations. The volume's medley of stylistic approaches invites readers to engage deeply with its narratives, making it invaluable for both educational and reflective purposes. Delve into the compelling dialogues and intertwining themes, and discover the profound insights that emerge from this cleverly assembled literary endeavor.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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An Omnibus of Obsession and Betrayal – 4 Classic Psychological Fiction Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
These four works—Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament, Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod—are gathered for their shared excavation of obsession and betrayal at the threshold between late Victorian restraint and emergent modern sensibilities. Each probes the consequences of an inward fixation: an aesthetic ideal pursued across time, a dreaded destiny felt like an animal presence, a self newly conscious of its desires, and a quest for release embodied in a symbolic instrument. Together they disclose how private compulsions unsettle bonds, duties, and narratives of identity.
While distinct in setting and voice, the novels and novella converge on a human constant: desire’s tendency to curdle into treachery when pressed against custom, class, or fear. Hardy anatomizes idealization; James dramatizes anticipatory consciousness; Chopin contemplates awakening as both liberation and rupture; Lawrence stages a flight from suffocation toward uncertain authority. Read together, they trace the gradient from abstract fixation to embodied risk. The collection privileges psychological interiority over external spectacle, inviting recognition of how betrayal may arise not from villainy but from divided selves and competing obligations that make clarity difficult and moral action perilous.
The curatorial aim is to foreground obsession as both a creative engine and a corrosive solvent, tracing an arc from the worship of an ideal to the risks of bodily and ethical commitment. Equally, the volume maps techniques that enlarge psychological fiction: Hardy’s patterned irony and social texture, James’s concentrated focalization, Chopin’s lucid sensuality, and Lawrence’s kinetic bluntness. By juxtaposing these modes, the collection seeks to show how form bears on moral consequence: what one notices, delays, represses, or declares is inseparable from how a story is told, and from the betrayals that tale permits or prevents.
Unlike encountering each work in isolation, this gathering emphasizes crosscurrents that sharpen their stakes. The serial pursuit of an untouchable ideal in The Well-Beloved gains new implication beside James’s meditation on deferred action; The Awakening’s poise and candor refract the costs of self-assertion that Lawrence approaches through restless movement. Aligning them reveals patterns otherwise less visible: recurrent images of instruments and animals, seas and statues; recurring choices between fidelity and freedom. The collection thus proposes a sustained conversation about obsession and betrayal, not as a single thesis, but as an evolving set of problems reframed from multiple angles.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Across the volume, characters oscillate between the safety of conformity and the intoxication of desire, discovering that every pursuit entails a corresponding renunciation. Hardy’s artist clings to an imagined perfection; James’s protagonist circles an inexpressible fear; Chopin’s heroine measures inward awakening against inherited roles; Lawrence’s wanderer seeks renewal through rupture. What binds them is a moral calculus in which loyalty to a person, vocation, or self cannot be secured without the possibility of betrayal elsewhere. In this sense each narrative becomes a laboratory of choice, testing what interior freedom costs when social bonds, work, and love impose competing claims.
Motifs echo across the works, giving the collection a lexicon of signs. Hardy’s statues and recurrent faces crystallize the peril of fetishizing form; James’s animal figure condenses dread into a stalking emblem; Chopin’s water imagery registers desire’s rhythm and risk; Lawrence’s rod—at once instrument and token—concentrates questions of will, artistry, and authority. These symbols are less keys than pressure points, showing how an image can summon entire ethical worlds. They also reveal how fixation narrows vision, whether toward a carved ideal, a premonition, a sensuous element, or a cherished tool that promises, and withholds, deliverance.
The tonal spectrum spans poised restraint to insurgent candor. James compresses experience into a taut interior chamber, where irony and delay create moral vertigo. Hardy’s narrative tact and social breadth stage obsession against communal expectation, revealing the comedy and cruelty of idealization. Chopin’s prose moves with limpid directness, attentive to sensation without ornament, while maintaining clear moral intelligence. Lawrence writes with vigorous propulsion, exposing raw nerves and stripping consolation. The resulting dialogue balances introspection and movement, finesse and force. Their differences generate a counterpoint in which quiet anticipation, measured scrutiny, lyrical poise, and abrupt rupture illuminate one another.
Chronologies and resonances suggest a quiet lineage. Hardy’s analysis of idealization and its social frictions prepares a ground that Lawrence intensifies in a more corporeal register. James’s preoccupation with the cost of waiting casts a long shadow, its language of foreboding echoing in Lawrence’s attention to decisive breaks and in Chopin’s testing of commitment against desire. Chopin, in turn, reframes themes often pursued through male consciousness by articulating a woman’s interior stakes with equal psychological rigor. None of these works names the others, yet their metaphors and moral puzzles feel conversant, as if answering, disputing, or daring one another.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These narratives remain vital because they examine how desire and duty collide in ways that still structure intimate life and public belonging. Obsession here is not mere indulgence but a force that organizes attention, time, and choice; betrayal is not simply treachery but the by-product of conflicting loyalties. Hardy, James, Chopin, and Lawrence show that paralysis can injure as deeply as rashness, and that clarity often arrives too late to be painless. Their psychological acuity offers a durable grammar for thinking about freedom, responsibility, and the stories people tell themselves when desire resists accommodation.
Across generations, these books have prompted searching commentary on gender, agency, and the shapes of consciousness in fiction. The Awakening has become central to debates about autonomy and social constraint; The Beast in the Jungle often anchors discussions of interior narration and the ethics of anticipation; The Well-Beloved and Aaron’s Rod animate conversations about aesthetic idealism, masculinity, and the entanglements of art and life. Such engagement reflects not consensus but productive disagreement, a testament to how the works unsettle easy judgments while sustaining rigorous inquiry into motive, choice, and the costs of self-definition.
Beyond scholarship, the stories have circulated through performance, pedagogy, and debate, reinforcing their cultural afterlives. Dramatic adaptations and creative reimaginings have turned their concentrated psychological situations into scenes of gesture and voice, while classrooms repeatedly return to them as catalysts for discussion of autonomy, fidelity, and risk. Public conversations about artistic vocation, marital expectation, and the authority of desire often lean on images that these books supplied: the statuesque ideal, the stalking beast, the awakening pulse, the talismanic rod. Such persistence suggests that their dilemmas have not been resolved, only translated into new idioms and arenas.
Read together today, these works offer a disciplined encounter with uncertainty. They resist prescriptive answers, favoring attentiveness to motive and consequence. Their characters’ misrecognitions and breakthroughs disclose an ethics of perception: how one looks determines what one will betray or keep faith with. This omnibus invites renewed scrutiny of that ethic across four distinct imaginations. By showing obsession’s seductions and betrayals in divergent keys—ideal, anticipatory, emancipatory, insurgent—it clarifies the stakes of psychological fiction as a mode of inquiry. The result is not closure but clarified complexity, a resource for thinking through modern life’s divided promises.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
Spanning the 1890s to the early 1920s, these four works inhabit an era convulsed by industrial capitalism, empire, and the first modern war. In Britain and the United States, urban growth, mass print culture, and widening suffrage collided with entrenched hierarchies of class, race, gender, and religion. Public debates over marriage, divorce, and moral regulation framed private life as a site of national virtue or decay. The fin-de-siècle’s nervous energy—uneasy with laissez-faire markets and rigid social codes—gave way to postwar disillusionment. Against this backdrop, intimate choices in love, vocation, and loyalty felt inseparable from collective anxieties about progress, decline, and the fate of civilization.
Late-Victorian Britain supplied the social pressure-cooker for Thomas Hardy and, later, D. H. Lawrence. The expanding franchise and municipal reform coexisted with powerful establishments—church, gentry, and professional classes—that policed respectability and sexuality. Industrial profits transformed cities while rural counties confronted depopulation, enclosure legacies, and new wage relations. The law increasingly recorded private behavior through marriage settlements, custody rules, and property conveyance. Public scandals around morals prompted calls for censorship, and circulating libraries enforced prudish taste. These conditions made the interior life a political frontier: desire and conscience did not simply disturb domestic harmony; they threatened reputations, livelihoods, and the fragile social peace.
The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament is rooted in the specific micro-politics of a maritime and quarrying community, where artisanal pride, parish gossip, and family alliances shape possibility. The island setting intensifies scrutiny, making reputation a communal possession and marriage a civic arrangement. The novel’s attention to craft and the artist’s calling echoes late-century debates about vocational dignity amid mechanization. As municipal authorities and lay leaders guard stability, the protagonist’s pursuit of an ideal collides with the town’s expectations for lineage, property continuity, and respectable courtship. Hardy thus renders a local order whose moral calculus turns inwardness into a public concern.
In The Awakening, Kate Chopin situates a woman’s private reckoning within the post-Reconstruction South, where Jim Crow segregation, Creole customs, Catholic moral authority, and mercantile prosperity intersect. Louisiana’s legal frameworks around community property, custody, and marital obligations press upon personal autonomy, while the nation’s 1890s prosperity and imperial swagger heighten anxieties about domestic virtue as a proxy for national strength. Resort culture and urban salons embody a consumer modernity that both indulges and supervises pleasure. The period’s women’s clubs and suffrage campaigns open discursive space, yet conventional honor codes and punitive gossip remain potent, rendering individual desire politically charged.
Henry James’s novella unfolds within the ceremonious worlds of Anglo-American elites—drawing rooms, country houses, and cosmopolitan salons—poised between late-Victorian decorum and the perturbations of the Edwardian age. Imperial confidence cohabits with apprehension about financial speculation and social mobility. Britain faces the strains of a global empire and the stirrings of labor politics; the United States projects wealth with uncertain cultural authority. James captures an atmosphere in which refined manners mask a wider unease about contingency and catastrophe. The rituals of visiting and conversation, policed by class and gender, become theaters where fate, duty, and self-command are negotiated under the gaze of society.
Aaron’s Rod speaks from the ruin-strewn plateau after World War I. Demobilization, inflation, and labor unrest fissure Britain’s class compact, while ex-servicemen question the old moral economy of sacrifice. Continental travel brings the protagonist into contact with expatriate circles amid Italy’s volatile politics and the eclipse of liberal hopes. The novel’s itinerancy registers disrupted masculinities, the fragility of families under economic stress, and the allure of charismatic collectivities. Europe’s borders, passports, and surveillance infrastructure remind characters that movement itself is political. Lawrence channels the unsettled energies of assemblies, cafés, and salons in which art, ideology, and resentment mingle combustiblely.
Publication systems mediated what could be imagined. Serialization in respectable magazines demanded tact and deferred climaxes; circulating libraries enforced modesty; obscenity prosecutions and moral campaigns shaped tone and distribution. The Awakening met swift denunciation, constraining Chopin’s further prospects. Hardy, already embattled by hostile moralists, treated fiction warily even as he revised and republished. James wrote for a cultivated readership that tolerated ambiguity but prized decorum. Lawrence, confronting postwar suspicion and censors, pursued mobility as a strategy of survival. Across the anthology, the politics of print—reviewing, subscription, and gatekeeping—made the psychological novel a battleground for public virtue and private candor.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
These works map a passage from late realism to early modernism, as narrative authority yields to interior conflict, uncertainty, and symbolic design. New discourses of mind—clinical, sociological, and anthropological—legitimated the study of motive, repression, and habit. Visual and musical arts reoriented taste toward mood and pattern rather than moral exemplum. Technologies of speed and communication compressed time, sensitizing writers to anticipation, delay, and missed encounters. The New Woman debate reframed romance as a political theory of the self. Across the anthology, form becomes an instrument for testing conscience under pressure, turning everyday scenes into laboratories of desire and dread.
The Well-Beloved engages Aesthetic and Decadent impulses—elevating beauty as an ethical problem—while retaining Hardy’s sense of environmental determinism. Sculptural craft centers the tension between the ideal and the stubborn grain of matter, mirroring a culture oscillating between abstraction and labor. The island’s geology and folklore supply a quasi-mythic aura, yet the prose keeps returning to municipal rules and the ledger-book. The result is a hybrid: symbolic fable nested within social topography. Hardy experiments with repetition and substitution, staging perception as a habit that art both refines and distorts, an inquiry aligned with late-century fascination with typologies and temperaments.
Henry James perfects a technique of limited consciousness, where dialogue, gesture, and silence disclose more than exposition. The Beast in the Jungle renders waiting as an aesthetic structure: temporal suspense replaces melodramatic action, and fate becomes a problem of attention. Social ritual supplies props and cues, but the true stage is inward, where scruple and self-regard contest meaning. The novella’s urbane surfaces, meticulously lit, refract metaphysical inquiry without abandoning manners. In crafting ambiguity so exacting, James helped model a psychological fiction that distrusts omniscience, anticipating later experiments in interior monologue while maintaining the elegance of scene and moral nuance.
Kate Chopin blends local color with a cosmopolitan psychology, filtering Creole codes through sensuous description and musical leitmotifs. Scenes of leisure—porches, parlors, beaches—become laboratories for self-perception, while city streets and streetcars underscore modern mobility and surveillance. The Awakening’s attention to clothing, furnishings, and art situates desire within a consumer marketplace that both liberates and prescribes. Chopin’s spare narration, refusing punitive commentary, treats consciousness as an unfolding texture rather than a moral case study. The elasticity of perspective allows social law and private impulse to vibrate against one another, producing an aesthetic poise that feels radical without rhetorical manifesto.
Aaron’s Rod is saturated with postwar vitalism and a critique of mechanized life. Music figures as an antagonistic force to the machine, a current of energy opposed to bureaucratic clocks, trains, and regimented labor. Lawrence’s dialogic scenes among artists and wanderers test the politics of charisma, companionship, and utopian talk. The prose modulates between travelogue, polemic, and psychic x-ray, favoring intensity over plot mechanism. Against an exhausted liberalism, the novel probes how bodies, voices, and instruments generate authority. Its modernist impulse lies in making style itself a wager: can form conduct a new social electricity without hardening into dogma or spectacle?
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Initial receptions were uneven and revealing. The Awakening scandalized many contemporaries, who judged its frankness incompatible with civic virtue, and it briefly disappeared from polite circulation. The Well-Beloved was treated as a minor curiosity beside its author’s more controversial work, yet its experiment in obsession drew select notice. The Beast in the Jungle impressed a small, refined public attuned to its reticence. Aaron’s Rod, arriving amid war-weariness and political suspicion, seemed unruly or unpatriotic to some readers. Across cases, the charge was similar: psychological candor, if unchaperoned by moralizing, threatened social pedagogy. That accusation also ensured the books’ durable fascination.
As university study expanded mid-century, interpretive protocols shifted. Formalist methods valued Henry James’s crafted ambiguity, making The Beast in the Jungle a seminar touchstone. Archival work and new editions encouraged a reconsideration of Hardy’s late prose, with The Well-Beloved appreciated for its allegorical daring and local texture. Kate Chopin’s reputation revived in anthologies and classrooms as attention turned to women’s writing long neglected by gatekeepers. D. H. Lawrence remained polarizing, yet Aaron’s Rod gained readers interested in postwar psychic economies and itinerant communities. The academy’s professionalization, far from domesticating these works, sharpened their profile as demanding, teachable provocations.
Later theoretical movements diversified readings. Feminist criticism illuminated The Awakening’s critique of marital economics and bodily autonomy, while also interrogating race and class in its social world. Studies of masculinity and charisma reframed Aaron’s Rod as a meditation on authority, vulnerability, and performance. The Beast in the Jungle invited psychoanalytic and queer-inflected accounts of desire, fear, and the ethics of spectatorship. The Well-Beloved’s patterns of substitution encouraged analyses of the gaze, typology, and the making of “ideals.” Rather than stabilizing meaning, these approaches multiplied contexts, showing how intimate scenes encode contested histories of citizenship, labor, and identity.
Adaptation culture has kept the quartet visible beyond print. The Beast in the Jungle has inspired stage, dance, and screen interpretations that explore choreography as fate’s grammar. The Awakening’s musical and visual motifs invite operatic and cinematic transpositions, foregrounding sound and setting as ethical arguments. The Well-Beloved, with its sculptural imagination and rugged seascapes, attracts artists attentive to material process and place-making. Aaron’s Rod, centered on performance and talk, adapts to audio, radio, and chamber-theater experiment. Digital archives, audiobooks, and open-access editions expand audiences, while syllabi juxtapose these texts to trace a genealogy of psychological form.
Recent events have only sharpened their relevance. Renewed debates over reproductive rights, marriage law, and intimate surveillance cast The Awakening’s social physics in urgent light. Economic precarity and migratory lives echo through Aaron’s Rod, where mobility, charisma, and frustrated institutions collide. Heightened awareness of mental health and the costs of postponement refocus attention on The Beast in the Jungle’s ethics of waiting. Environmental unease and local identity politics resonate with The Well-Beloved’s island ecology and communal scrutiny. Across cultures negotiating polarization and fatigue, these works model how private tremors register public tectonics, and how style can disclose the politics of the soul.
An Omnibus of Obsession and Betrayal – 4 Classic Psychological Fiction Novels
Obsession, Fate, and the Unlived Life
Selfhood, Desire, and Social Transgression
Thomas Hardy
The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament
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.
PART FIRST — A YOUNG MAN OF TWENTY.
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,
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.
Between him and the lights of the ships riding at anchor in the roadstead two men passed slowly in the direction he intended to pursue. One of them recognized Jocelyn, and bade him good-night, adding, ‘Wish you joy, sir, of your choice, and hope the wedden will be soon!’
‘Thank you, Seaborn. Well—we shall see what Christmas will do towards bringing it about.’
‘My wife opened upon it this mornen: “Please God, I’ll up and see that there wedden,” says she, “knowing ‘em both from their crawling days.”’
The men moved on, and when they were out of Pierston’s hearing the one who had not spoken said to his friend, ‘Who was that young kimberlin? He don’t seem one o’ we.’
‘Oh, he is, though, every inch o’ en. He’s Mr. Jocelyn Pierston, the stwone-merchant’s only son up at East Quarriers. He’s to be married to a stylish young body; her mother, a widow woman, carries on the same business as well as she can; but their trade is not a twentieth part of Pierston’s. He’s worth thousands and thousands, they say, though ‘a do live on in the same wold way up in the same wold house. This son is doen great things in London as a’ image-carver; and I can mind when, as a boy, ‘a first took to carving soldiers out o’ bits o’ stwone from the soft-bed of his father’s quarries; and then ‘a made a set o’ stwonen chess-men, and so ‘a got on. He’s quite the gent in London, they tell me; and the wonder is that ‘a cared to come back here and pick up little Avice Caro—nice maid as she is notwithstanding.... Hullo! there’s to be a change in the weather soon.’
Meanwhile the subject of their remarks waited at the appointed place till seven o’clock, the hour named between himself and his affianced, had struck. Almost at the moment he saw a figure coming forward from the last lamp at the bottom of the hill. But the figure speedily resolved itself into that of a boy, who, advancing to Jocelyn, inquired if he were Mr. Pierston, and handed him a note.
1. IV. A LONELY PEDESTRIAN
When the boy had gone Jocelyn retraced his steps to the last lamp, and read, in Avice’s hand:
‘MY DEAREST,—I shall be sorry if I grieve you at all in what I am going to say about our arrangement to meet to-night in the Sandsfoot ruin. But I have fancied that my seeing you again and again lately is inclining your father to insist, and you as his heir to feel, that we ought to carry out Island Custom in our courting—your people being such old inhabitants in an unbroken line. Truth to say, mother supposes that your father, for natural reasons, may have hinted to you that we ought. Now, the thing is contrary to my feelings: it is nearly left off; and I do not think it good, even where there is property, as in your case, to justify it, in a measure. I would rather trust in Providence.
‘On the whole, therefore, it is best that I should not come—if only for appearances—and meet you at a time and place suggesting the custom, to others than ourselves, at least, if known.
‘I am sure that this decision will not disturb you much; that you will understand my modern feelings, and think no worse of me for them. And dear, if it were to be done, and we were unfortunate in it, we might both have enough old family feeling to think, like our forefathers, and possibly your father, that we could not marry honourably; and hence we might be made unhappy.
‘However, you will come again shortly, will you not, dear Jocelyn?—and then the time will soon draw on when no more good-byes will be required.—Always and ever yours,
‘AVICE.’
Jocelyn, having read the letter, was surprised at the naivete it showed, and at Avice and her mother’s antiquated simplicity in supposing that to be still a grave and operating principle which was a bygone barbarism to himself and other absentees from the island. His father, as a money-maker, might have practical wishes on the matter of descendants which lent plausibility to the conjecture of Avice and her mother; but to Jocelyn he had never expressed himself in favour of the ancient ways, old-fashioned as he was.
Amused therefore at her regard of herself as modern, Jocelyn was disappointed, and a little vexed, that such an unforeseen reason should have deprived him of her company. How the old ideas survived under the new education!
The reader is asked to remember that the date, though recent in the history of the Isle of Slingers, was more than forty years ago.
Finding that the evening seemed louring, yet indisposed to go back and hire a vehicle, he went on quickly alone. In such an exposed spot the night wind was gusty, and the sea behind the pebble barrier kicked and flounced in complex rhythms, which could be translated equally well as shocks of battle or shouts of thanksgiving.
Presently on the pale road before him he discerned a figure, the figure of a woman. He remembered that a woman passed him while he was reading Avice’s letter by the last lamp, and now he was overtaking her.
He did hope for a moment that it might be Avice, with a changed mind. But it was not she, nor anybody like her. It was a taller, squarer form than that of his betrothed, and although the season was only autumn she was wrapped in furs, or in thick and heavy clothing of some kind.
He soon advanced abreast of her, and could get glimpses of her profile against the roadstead lights. It was dignified, arresting, that of a very Juno. Nothing more classical had he ever seen. She walked at a swinging pace, yet with such ease and power that there was but little difference in their rate of speed for several minutes; and during this time he regarded and conjectured. However, he was about to pass her by when she suddenly turned and addressed him.
‘Mr Pierston, I think, of East Quarriers?’
He assented, and could just discern what a handsome, commanding, imperious face it was—quite of a piece with the proud tones of her voice. She was a new type altogether in his experience; and her accent was not so local as Avice’s.
‘Can you tell me the time, please?’
He looked at his watch by the aid of a light, and in telling her that it was a quarter past seven observed, by the momentary gleam of his match, that her eyes looked a little red and chafed, as if with weeping.
‘Mr. Pierston, will you forgive what will appear very strange to you, I dare say? That is, may I ask you to lend me some money for a day or two? I have been so foolish as to leave my purse on the dressing-table.’
It did appear strange: and yet there were features in the young lady’s personality which assured him in a moment that she was not an impostor. He yielded to her request, and put his hand in his pocket. Here it remained for a moment. How much did she mean by the words ‘some money’? The Junonian quality of her form and manner made him throw himself by an impulse into harmony with her, and he responded regally. He scented a romance. He handed her five pounds.
His munificence caused her no apparent surprise. ‘It is quite enough, thank you,’ she remarked quietly, as he announced the sum, lest she should be unable to see it for herself.
While overtaking and conversing with her he had not observed that the rising wind, which had proceeded from puffing to growling, and from growling to screeching, with the accustomed suddenness of its changes here, had at length brought what it promised by these vagaries—rain. The drops, which had at first hit their left cheeks like the pellets of a popgun, soon assumed the character of a raking fusillade from the bank adjoining, one shot of which was sufficiently smart to go through Jocelyn’s sleeve. The tall girl turned, and seemed to be somewhat concerned at an onset which she had plainly not foreseen before her starting.
‘We must take shelter,’ said Jocelyn.
‘But where?’ said she.
To windward was the long, monotonous bank, too obtusely piled to afford a screen, over which they could hear the canine crunching of pebbles by the sea without; on their right stretched the inner bay or roadstead, the distant riding-lights of the ships now dim and glimmering; behind them a faint spark here and there in the lower sky showed where the island rose; before there was nothing definite, and could be nothing, till they reached a precarious wood bridge, a mile further on, Henry the Eighth’s Castle being a little further still.
But just within the summit of the bank, whither it had apparently been hauled to be out of the way of the waves, was one of the local boats called lerrets, bottom upwards. As soon as they saw it the pair ran up the pebbly slope towards it by a simultaneous impulse. They then perceived that it had lain there a long time, and were comforted to find it capable of affording more protection than anybody would have expected from a distant view. It formed a shelter or store for the fishermen, the bottom of the lerret being tarred as a roof. By creeping under the bows, which overhung the bank on props to leeward, they made their way within, where, upon some thwarts, oars, and other fragmentary woodwork, lay a mass of dry netting—a whole sein. Upon this they scrambled and sat down, through inability to stand upright.
1. V. A CHARGE
The rain fell upon the keel of the old lerret like corn thrown in handfuls by some colossal sower, and darkness set in to its full shade.
They crouched so close to each other that he could feel her furs against him. Neither had spoken since they left the roadway till she said, with attempted unconcern: ‘This is unfortunate.’
He admitted that it was, and found, after a few further remarks had passed, that she certainly had been weeping, there being a suppressed gasp of passionateness in her utterance now and then.
‘It is more unfortunate for you, perhaps, than for me,’ he said, ‘and I am very sorry that it should be so.’
She replied nothing to this, and he added that it was rather a desolate place for a woman, alone and afoot. He hoped nothing serious had happened to drag her out at such an untoward time.
At first she seemed not at all disposed to show any candour on her own affairs, and he was left to conjecture as to her history and name, and how she could possibly have known him. But, as the rain gave not the least sign of cessation, he observed: ‘I think we shall have to go back.’
‘Never!’ said she, and the firmness with which she closed her lips was audible in the word.
‘Why not?’ he inquired.
‘There are good reasons.’
‘I cannot understand how you should know me, while I have no knowledge of you.’
‘Oh, but you know me—about me, at least.’
‘Indeed I don’t. How should I? You are a kimberlin.’
‘I am not. I am a real islander—or was, rather.... Haven’t you heard of the Best-Bed Stone Company?’
‘I should think so! They tried to ruin my father by getting away his trade—or, at least, the founder of the company did—old Bencomb.’
‘He’s my father!’
‘Indeed. I am sorry I should have spoken so disrespectfully of him, for I never knew him personally. After making over his large business to the company, he retired, I believe, to London?’
‘Yes. Our house, or rather his, not mine, is at South Kensington. We have lived there for years. But we have been tenants of Sylvania Castle, on the island here, this season. We took it for a month or two of the owner, who is away.’
‘Then I have been staying quite near you, Miss Bencomb. My father’s is a comparatively humble residence hard by.’
‘But he could afford a much bigger one if he chose.’
‘You have heard so? I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me much of his affairs.’
‘My father,’ she burst out suddenly, ‘is always scolding me for my extravagance! And he has been doing it to-day more than ever. He said I go shopping in town to simply a diabolical extent, and exceed my allowance!’
‘Was that this evening?’
‘Yes. And then it reached such a storm of passion between us that I pretended to retire to my room for the rest of the evening, but I slipped out; and I am never going back home again.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I shall go first to my aunt in London; and if she won’t have me, I’ll work for a living. I have left my father for ever! What I should have done if I had not met you I cannot tell—I must have walked all the way to London, I suppose. Now I shall take the train as soon as I reach the mainland.’
‘If you ever do in this hurricane.’
‘I must sit here till it stops.’
And there on the nets they sat. Pierston knew of old Bencomb as his father’s bitterest enemy, who had made a great fortune by swallowing up the small stone-merchants, but had found Jocelyn’s sire a trifle too big to digest—the latter being, in fact, the chief rival of the Best-Bed Company to that day. Jocelyn thought it strange that he should be thrown by fate into a position to play the son of the Montagues to this daughter of the Capulets.
