A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy

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'COMING to tell! Why hadn't he already told? I object as much, if
not more, to his underhand concealment of this, than I do to the
fact itself. It looks very much like his making a fool of me, and
of you too. You and he have been about together, and
corresponding together, in a way I don't at all approve of--in a
most unseemly way. You should have known how improper such
conduct is. A woman can't be too careful not to be seen alone
with I-don't-know-whom.'

'You saw us, papa, and have never said a word.'

'My fault, of course; my fault. What the deuce could I be
thinking of! He, a villager's son; and we, Swancourts, connections
of the Luxellians. We have been coming to nothing for centuries,
and now I believe we have got there. What shall I next invite
here, I wonder!'

Elfride began to cry at this very unpropitious aspect of affairs.
'O papa, papa, forgive me and him! We care so much for one
another, papa--O, so much! And what he was going to ask you is, if
you will allow of an engagement between us till he is a gentleman
as good as you. We are not in a hurry, dear papa; we don't want
in the least to marry now; not until he is richer. Only will you
let us be engaged, because I love him so, and he loves me?'

Mr. Swancourt's feelings were a little touched by this appeal, and
he was annoyed that such should be the case. 'Certainly not!' he
replied. He pronounced the inhibition lengthily and sonorously,
so that the 'not' sounded like 'n-o-o-o-t!'

'No, no, no; don't say it!'

'Foh! A fine story. It is not enough that I have been deluded and
disgraced by having him here,--the son of one of my village
peasants,--but now I am to make him my son-in-law! Heavens above
us, are you mad, Elfride?'

'You have seen his letters come to me ever since his first visit,
papa, and you knew they were a sort of--love-letters; and since he
has been here you have let him be alone with me almost entirely;
and you guessed, you must have guessed, what we were thinking of,
and doing, and you didn't stop him. Next to love-making comes
love-winning, and you knew it would come to that, papa.'

The vicar parried this common-sense thrust. 'I know--since you
press me so--I know I did guess some childish attachment might
arise between you; I own I did not take much trouble to prevent
it; but I have not particularly countenanced it; and, Elfride, how
can you expect that I should now? It is impossible; no father in
England would hear of such a thing.'

'But he is the same man, papa; the same in every particular; and
how can he be less fit for me than he was before?'

'He appeared a young man with well-to-do friends, and a little
property; but having neither, he is another man.'

'You inquired nothing about him?'

'I went by Hewby's introduction. He should have told me. So
should the young man himself; of course he should. I consider it
a most dishonourable thing to come into a man's house like a
treacherous I-don't-know-what.'

'But he was afraid to tell you, and so should I have been. He
loved me too well to like to run the risk. And as to speaking of
his friends on his first visit, I don't see why he should have
done so at all. He came here on business: it was no affair of
ours who his parents were. And then he knew that if he told you
he would never be asked here, and would perhaps never see me
again. And he wanted to see me. Who can blame him for trying, by
any means, to stay near me--the girl he loves? All is fair in
love. I have heard you say so yourself, papa; and you yourself
would have done just as he has--so would any man.'

'And any man, on discovering what I have discovered, would also do
as I do, and mend my mistake; that is, get shot of him again, as
soon as the laws of hospitality will allow.' But Mr. Swancourt
then remembered that he was a Christian. 'I would not, for the
world, seem to turn him out of doors,' he added; 'but I think he
will have the tact to see that he cannot stay long after this,
with good taste.'

'He will, because he's a gentleman. See how graceful his manners
are,' Elfride went on; though perhaps Stephen's manners, like the
feats of Euryalus, owed their attractiveness in her eyes rather to
the attractiveness of his person than to their own excellence.

'Ay; anybody can be what you call graceful, if he lives a little
time in a city, and keeps his eyes open. And he might have picked
up his gentlemanliness by going to the galleries of theatres, and
watching stage drawing-room manners. He reminds me of one of the
worst stories I ever heard in my life.'

'What story was that?'

'Oh no, thank you! I wouldn't tell you such an improper matter for
the world!'

'If his father and mother had lived in the north or east of
England,' gallantly persisted Elfride, though her sobs began to
interrupt her articulation, 'anywhere but here--you--would have--
only regarded--HIM, and not THEM! His station--would have--been
what--his profession makes it,--and not fixed by--his father's
humble position--at all; whom he never lives with--now. Though
John Smith has saved lots of money, and is better off than we are,
they say, or he couldn't have put his son to such an expensive
profession. And it is clever and--honourable--of Stephen, to be
the best of his family.'

'Yes. "Let a beast be lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at
the king's mess."'

'You insult me, papa!' she burst out. 'You do, you do! He is my
own Stephen, he is!'

'That may or may not be true, Elfride,' returned her father, again
uncomfortably agitated in spite of himself 'You confuse future
probabilities with present facts,--what the young man may be with
what he is. We must look at what he is, not what an improbable
degree of success in his profession may make him. The case is
this: the son of a working-man in my parish who may or may not be
able to buy me up--a youth who has not yet advanced so far into
life as to have any income of his own deserving the name, and
therefore of his father's degree as regards station--wants to be
engaged to you. His family are living in precisely the same spot
in England as yours, so throughout this county--which is the world
to us--you would always be known as the wife of Jack Smith the
mason's son, and not under any circumstances as the wife of a
London professional man. It is the drawback, not the compensating
fact, that is talked of always. There, say no more. You may
argue all night, and prove what you will; I'll stick to my words.'

Elfride looked silently and hopelessly out of the window with
large heavy eyes and wet cheeks.

'I call it great temerity--and long to call it audacity--in
Hewby,' resumed her father. 'I never heard such a thing--giving
such a hobbledehoy native of this place such an introduction to me
as he did. Naturally you were deceived as well as I was. I don't
blame you at all, so far.' He went and searched for Mr. Hewby's
original letter. 'Here's what he said to me: "Dear Sir,--
Agreeably to your request of the 18th instant, I have arranged to
survey and make drawings," et cetera. "My assistant, Mr. Stephen
Smith"--assistant, you see he called him, and naturally I
understood him to mean a sort of partner. Why didn't he say
"clerk"?'

'They never call them clerks in that profession, because they do
not write. Stephen--Mr. Smith--told me so. So that Mr. Hewby
simply used the accepted word.'

'Let me speak, please, Elfride! "My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith,
will leave London by the early train to-morrow morning...MANY
THANKS FOR YOUR PROPOSAL TO ACCOMMODATE HIM...YOU MAY PUT EVERY
CONFIDENCE IN HIM, and may rely upon his discernment in the matter
of church architecture." Well, I repeat that Hewby ought to be
ashamed of himself for making so much of a poor lad of that sort.'

'Professional men in London,' Elfride argued, 'don't know anything
about their clerks' fathers and mothers. They have assistants who
come to their offices and shops for years, and hardly even know
where they live. What they can do--what profits they can bring
the firm--that's all London men care about. And that is helped in
him by his faculty of being uniformly pleasant.'

'Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows
that a man hasn't sense enough to know whom to despise.'

'It shows that he acts by faith and not by sight, as those you
claim succession from directed.'

'That's some more of what he's been telling you, I suppose! Yes, I
was inclined to suspect him, because he didn't care about sauces
of any kind. I always did doubt a man's being a gentleman if his
palate had no acquired tastes. An unedified palate is the
irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart. The idea of my bringing
out a bottle of my '40 Martinez--only eleven of them left now--to
a man who didn't know it from eighteenpenny! Then the Latin line
he gave to my quotation; it was very cut-and-dried, very; or I,
who haven't looked into a classical author for the last eighteen
years, shouldn't have remembered it. Well, Elfride, you had
better go to your room; you'll get over this bit of tomfoolery in
time.'

'No, no, no, papa,' she moaned. For of all the miseries attaching
to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the
passion which is the cause of them all may cease.

'Elfride,' said her father with rough friendliness, 'I have an
excellent scheme on hand, which I cannot tell you of now. A
scheme to benefit you and me. It has been thrust upon me for some
little time--yes, thrust upon me--but I didn't dream of its value
till this afternoon, when the revelation came. I should be most
unwise to refuse to entertain it.'

'I don't like that word,' she returned wearily. 'You have lost so
much already by schemes. Is it those wretched mines again?'

'No; not a mining scheme.'

'Railways?'

'Nor railways. It is like those mysterious offers we see
advertised, by which any gentleman with no brains at all may make
so much a week without risk, trouble, or soiling his fingers.
However, I am intending to say nothing till it is settled, though
I will just say this much, that you soon may have other fish to
fry than to think of Stephen Smith. Remember, I wish, not to be
angry, but friendly, to the young man; for your sake I'll regard
him as a friend in a certain sense. But this is enough; in a few
days you will be quite my way of thinking. There, now, go to your
bedroom. Unity shall bring you up some supper. I wish you not to
be here when he comes back.'

Chapter X

'Beneath the shelter of an aged tree.'

Stephen retraced his steps towards the cottage he had visited only
two or three hours previously. He drew near and under the rich
foliage growing about the outskirts of Endelstow Park, the spotty
lights and shades from the shining moon maintaining a race over
his head and down his back in an endless gambol. When he crossed
the plank bridge and entered the garden-gate, he saw an
illuminated figure coming from the enclosed plot towards the house
on the other side. It was his father, with his hand in a sling,
taking a general moonlight view of the garden, and particularly of
a plot of the youngest of young turnips, previous to closing the
cottage for the night.

He saluted his son with customary force. 'Hallo, Stephen! We
should ha' been in bed in another ten minutes. Come to see what's
the matter wi' me, I suppose, my lad?'

The doctor had come and gone, and the hand had been pronounced as
injured but slightly, though it might possibly have been
considered a far more serious case if Mr. Smith had been a more
important man. Stephen's anxious inquiry drew from his father
words of regret at the inconvenience to the world of his doing
nothing for the next two days, rather than of concern for the pain
of the accident. Together they entered the house.

John Smith--brown as autumn as to skin, white as winter as to
clothes--was a satisfactory specimen of the village artificer in
stone. In common with most rural mechanics, he had too much
individuality to be a typical 'working-man'--a resultant of that
beach-pebble attrition with his kind only to be experienced in
large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Self into a fraction of
the unit Class.

There was not the speciality in his labour which distinguishes the
handicraftsmen of towns. Though only a mason, strictly speaking,
he was not above handling a brick, if bricks were the order of the
day; or a slate or tile, if a roof had to be covered before the
wet weather set in, and nobody was near who could do it better.
Indeed, on one or two occasions in the depth of winter, when frost
peremptorily forbids all use of the trowel, making foundations to
settle, stones to fly, and mortar to crumble, he had taken to
felling and sawing trees. Moreover, he had practised gardening in
his own plot for so many years that, on an emergency, he might
have made a living by that calling.

Probably our countryman was not such an accomplished artificer in
a particular direction as his town brethren in the trades. But he
was, in truth, like that clumsy pin-maker who made the whole pin,
and who was despised by Adam Smith on that account and respected
by Macaulay, much more the artist nevertheless.

Appearing now, indoors, by the light of the candle, his stalwart
healthiness was a sight to see. His beard was close and knotted
as that of a chiselled Hercules; his shirt sleeves were partly
rolled up, his waistcoat unbuttoned; the difference in hue between
the snowy linen and the ruddy arms and face contrasting like the
white of an egg and its yolk. Mrs. Smith, on hearing them enter,
advanced from the pantry.

Mrs. Smith was a matron whose countenance addressed itself to the
mind rather than to the eye, though not exclusively. She retained
her personal freshness even now, in the prosy afternoon-time of
her life; but what her features were primarily indicative of was a
sound common sense behind them; as a whole, appearing to carry
with them a sort of argumentative commentary on the world in
general.

The details of the accident were then rehearsed by Stephen's
father, in the dramatic manner also common to Martin Cannister,
other individuals of the neighbourhood, and the rural world
generally. Mrs. Smith threw in her sentiments between the acts,
as Coryphaeus of the tragedy, to make the description complete.
The story at last came to an end, as the longest will, and Stephen
directed the conversation into another channel.

'Well, mother, they know everything about me now,' he said
quietly.

'Well done!' replied his father; 'now my mind's at peace.'

'I blame myself--I never shall forgive myself--for not telling
them before,' continued the young man.

Mrs. Smith at this point abstracted her mind from the former
subject. 'I don't see what you have to grieve about, Stephen,'
she said. 'People who accidentally get friends don't, as a first
stroke, tell the history of their families.'

'Ye've done no wrong, certainly,' said his father.

'No; but I should have spoken sooner. There's more in this visit
of mine than you think--a good deal more.'

'Not more than I think,' Mrs. Smith replied, looking
contemplatively at him. Stephen blushed; and his father looked
from one to the other in a state of utter incomprehension.

'She's a pretty piece enough,' Mrs. Smith continued, 'and very
lady-like and clever too. But though she's very well fit for you
as far as that is, why, mercy 'pon me, what ever do you want any
woman at all for yet?'

John made his naturally short mouth a long one, and wrinkled his
forehead, 'That's the way the wind d'blow, is it?' he said.

'Mother,' exclaimed Stephen, 'how absurdly you speak! Criticizing
whether she's fit for me or no, as if there were room for doubt on
the matter! Why, to marry her would be the great blessing of my
life--socially and practically, as well as in other respects. No
such good fortune as that, I'm afraid; she's too far above me.
Her family doesn't want such country lads as I in it.'

'Then if they don't want you, I'd see them dead corpses before I'd
want them, and go to better families who do want you.'

'Ah, yes; but I could never put up with the distaste of being
welcomed among such people as you mean, whilst I could get
indifference among such people as hers.'

'What crazy twist o' thinking will enter your head next?' said his
mother. 'And come to that, she's not a bit too high for you, or
you too low for her. See how careful I be to keep myself up. I'm
sure I never stop for more than a minute together to talk to any
journeymen people; and I never invite anybody to our party o'
Christmases who are not in business for themselves. And I talk to
several toppermost carriage people that come to my lord's without
saying ma'am or sir to 'em, and they take it as quiet as lambs.'

'You curtseyed to the vicar, mother; and I wish you hadn't.'

'But it was before he called me by my Christian name, or he would
have got very little curtseying from me!' said Mrs. Smith,
bridling and sparkling with vexation. 'You go on at me, Stephen,
as if I were your worst enemy! What else could I do with the man
to get rid of him, banging it into me and your father by side and
by seam, about his greatness, and what happened when he was a
young fellow at college, and I don't know what-all; the tongue o'
en flopping round his mouth like a mop-rag round a dairy. That 'a
did, didn't he, John?'

'That's about the size o't,' replied her husband.

'Every woman now-a-days,' resumed Mrs. Smith, 'if she marry at
all, must expect a father-in-law of a rank lower than her father.
The men have gone up so, and the women have stood still. Every
man you meet is more the dand than his father; and you are just
level wi' her.'

'That's what she thinks herself.'

'It only shows her sense. I knew she was after 'ee, Stephen--I
knew it.'

'After me! Good Lord, what next!'

'And I really must say again that you ought not to be in such a
hurry, and wait for a few years. You might go higher than a
bankrupt pa'son's girl then.'

'The fact is, mother,' said Stephen impatiently, 'you don't know
anything about it. I shall never go higher, because I don't want
to, nor should I if I lived to be a hundred. As to you saying
that she's after me, I don't like such a remark about her, for it
implies a scheming woman, and a man worth scheming for, both of
which are not only untrue, but ludicrously untrue, of this case.
Isn't it so, father?'

'I'm afraid I don't understand the matter well enough to gie my
opinion,' said his father, in the tone of the fox who had a cold
and could not smell.

'She couldn't have been very backward anyhow, considering the
short time you have known her,' said his mother. 'Well I think
that five years hence you'll be plenty young enough to think of
such things. And really she can very well afford to wait, and
will too, take my word. Living down in an out-step place like
this, I am sure she ought to be very thankful that you took notice
of her. She'd most likely have died an old maid if you hadn't
turned up.'

'All nonsense,' said Stephen, but not aloud.

'A nice little thing she is,' Mrs. Smith went on in a more
complacent tone now that Stephen had been talked down; 'there's
not a word to say against her, I'll own. I see her sometimes
decked out like a horse going to fair, and I admire her for't. A
perfect little lady. But people can't help their thoughts, and if
she'd learnt to make figures instead of letters when she was at
school 'twould have been better for her pocket; for as I said,
there never were worse times for such as she than now.'

'Now, now, mother!' said Stephen with smiling deprecation.

'But I will!' said his mother with asperity. 'I don't read the
papers for nothing, and I know men all move up a stage by
marriage. Men of her class, that is, parsons, marry squires'
daughters; squires marry lords' daughters; lords marry dukes'
daughters; dukes marry queens' daughters. All stages of gentlemen
mate a stage higher; and the lowest stage of gentlewomen are left
single, or marry out of their class.'

'But you said just now, dear mother----' retorted Stephen, unable
to resist the temptation of showing his mother her inconsistency.
Then he paused.

'Well, what did I say?' And Mrs. Smith prepared her lips for a new
campaign.

Stephen, regretting that he had begun, since a volcano might be
the consequence, was obliged to go on.

'You said I wasn't out of her class just before.'

'Yes, there, there! That's you; that's my own flesh and blood.
I'll warrant that you'll pick holes in everything your mother
says, if you can, Stephen. You are just like your father for
that; take anybody's part but mine. Whilst I am speaking and
talking and trying and slaving away for your good, you are waiting
to catch me out in that way. So you are in her class, but 'tis
what HER people would CALL marrying out of her class. Don't be so
quarrelsome, Stephen!'

Stephen preserved a discreet silence, in which he was imitated by
his father, and for several minutes nothing was heard but the
ticking of the green-faced case-clock against the wall.

'I'm sure,' added Mrs. Smith in a more philosophic tone, and as a
terminative speech, 'if there'd been so much trouble to get a
husband in my time as there is in these days--when you must make a
god-almighty of a man to get en to hae ye--I'd have trod clay for
bricks before I'd ever have lowered my dignity to marry, or
there's no bread in nine loaves.'

The discussion now dropped, and as it was getting late, Stephen
bade his parents farewell for the evening, his mother none the
less warmly for their sparring; for although Mrs. Smith and
Stephen were always contending, they were never at enmity.

'And possibly,' said Stephen, 'I may leave here altogether to-
morrow; I don't know. So that if I shouldn't call again before
returning to London, don't be alarmed, will you?'

'But didn't you come for a fortnight?' said his mother. 'And
haven't you a month's holiday altogether? They are going to turn
you out, then?'

'Not at all. I may stay longer; I may go. If I go, you had
better say nothing about my having been here, for her sake. At
what time of the morning does the carrier pass Endelstow lane?'

'Seven o'clock.'

And then he left them. His thoughts were, that should the vicar
permit him to become engaged, to hope for an engagement, or in any
way to think of his beloved Elfride, he might stay longer. Should
he be forbidden to think of any such thing, he resolved to go at
once. And the latter, even to young hopefulness, seemed the more
probable alternative.

Stephen walked back to the vicarage through the meadows, as he had
come, surrounded by the soft musical purl of the water through
little weirs, the modest light of the moon, the freshening smell
of the dews out-spread around. It was a time when mere seeing is
meditation, and meditation peace. Stephen was hardly philosopher
enough to avail himself of Nature's offer. His constitution was
made up of very simple particulars; was one which, rare in the
spring-time of civilizations, seems to grow abundant as a nation
gets older, individuality fades, and education spreads; that is,
his brain had extraordinary receptive powers, and no great
creativeness. Quickly acquiring any kind of knowledge he saw
around him, and having a plastic adaptability more common in woman
than in man, he changed colour like a chameleon as the society he
found himself in assumed a higher and more artificial tone. He
had not many original ideas, and yet there was scarcely an idea to
which, under proper training, he could not have added a
respectable co-ordinate.

He saw nothing outside himself to-night; and what he saw within
was a weariness to his flesh. Yet to a dispassionate observer,
his pretensions to Elfride, though rather premature, were far from
absurd as marriages go, unless the accidental proximity of simple
but honest parents could be said to make them so.

The clock struck eleven when he entered the house. Elfride had
been waiting with scarcely a movement since he departed. Before
he had spoken to her she caught sight of him passing into the
study with her father. She saw that he had by some means obtained
the private interview he desired.

A nervous headache had been growing on the excitable girl during
the absence of Stephen, and now she could do nothing beyond going
up again to her room as she had done before. Instead of lying
down she sat again in the darkness without closing the door, and
listened with a beating heart to every sound from downstairs. The
servants had gone to bed. She ultimately heard the two men come
from the study and cross to the dining-room, where supper had been
lingering for more than an hour. The door was left open, and she
found that the meal, such as it was, passed off between her father
and her lover without any remark, save commonplaces as to
cucumbers and melons, their wholesomeness and culture, uttered in
a stiff and formal way. It seemed to prefigure failure.

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