Life's Little Ironies, Thomas Hardy [reading well .txt] 📗

coming; which assurance proved to be well grounded, for late one wet evening, about a month after the calculated time, the ship was announced as at hand, and presently the slip-slop step of Shadrach as the sailor sounded in the passage, and he entered.  The boys had gone out and had missed him, and Joanna was sitting alone.

As soon as the first emotion of reunion between the couple had passed, Jolliffe explained the delay as owing to a small speculative contract, which had produced good results.

‘I was determined not to disappoint ’ee,’ he said; ‘and I think you’ll own that I haven’t!’

With this he pulled out an enormous canvas bag, full and rotund as the money-bag of the giant whom Jack slew, untied it, and shook the contents out into her lap as she sat in her low chair by the fire.  A mass of sovereigns and guineas (there were guineas on the earth in those days) fell into her lap with a sudden thud, weighing down her gown to the floor.

‘There!’ said Shadrach complacently.  ‘I told ’ee, dear, I’d do it; and have I done it or no?’

Somehow her face, after the first excitement of possession, did not retain its glory.

‘It is a lot of gold, indeed,’ she said.  ‘And—is this all?’

‘All?  Why, dear Joanna, do you know you can count to three hundred in that heap?  It is a fortune!’

‘Yes—yes.  A fortune—judged by sea; but judged by land—’

However, she banished considerations of the money for the nonce.  Soon the boys came in, and next Sunday Shadrach returned thanks to God—this time by the more ordinary channel of the italics in the General Thanksgiving.  But a few days after, when the question of investing the money arose, he remarked that she did not seem so satisfied as he had hoped.

‘Well you see, Shadrach,’ she answered, ‘we count by hundreds; they count by thousands’ (nodding towards the other side of the Street).  ‘They have set up a carriage and pair since you left.’

‘O, have they?’

‘My dear Shadrach, you don’t know how the world moves.  However, we’ll do the best we can with it.  But they are rich, and we are poor still!’

The greater part of a year was desultorily spent.  She moved sadly about the house and shop, and the boys were still occupying themselves in and around the harbour.

‘Joanna,’ he said, one day, ‘I see by your movements that it is not enough.’

‘It is not enough,’ said she.  ‘My boys will have to live by steering the ships that the Lesters own; and I was once above her!’

Jolliffe was not an argumentative man, and he only murmured that he thought he would make another voyage.

He meditated for several days, and coming home from the quay one afternoon said suddenly:

‘I could do it for ’ee, dear, in one more trip, for certain, if—if—’

‘Do what, Shadrach?’

‘Enable ’ee to count by thousands instead of hundreds.’

‘If what?’

‘If I might take the boys.’

She turned pale.

‘Don’t say that, Shadrach,’ she answered hastily.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t like to hear it!  There’s danger at sea.  I want them to be something genteel, and no danger to them.  I couldn’t let them risk their lives at sea.  O, I couldn’t ever, ever!’

‘Very well, dear, it shan’t be done.’

Next day, after a silence, she asked a question:

‘If they were to go with you it would make a great deal of difference, I suppose, to the profit?’

‘’Twould treble what I should get from the venture single-handed.  Under my eye they would be as good as two more of myself.’

Later on she said: ‘Tell me more about this.’

‘Well, the boys are almost as clever as master-mariners in handling a craft, upon my life!  There isn’t a more cranky place in the Northern Seas than about the sandbanks of this harbour, and they’ve practised here from their infancy.  And they are so steady.  I couldn’t get their steadiness and their trustworthiness in half a dozen men twice their age.’

‘And is it very dangerous at sea; now, too, there are rumours of war?’ she asked uneasily.

‘O, well, there be risks.  Still . . . ’

The idea grew and magnified, and the mother’s heart was crushed and stifled by it.  Emmy was growing too patronizing; it could not be borne.  Shadrach’s wife could not help nagging him about their comparative poverty.  The young men, amiable as their father, when spoken to on the subject of a voyage of enterprise, were quite willing to embark; and though they, like their father, had no great love for the sea, they became quite enthusiastic when the proposal was detailed.

Everything now hung upon their mother’s assent.  She withheld it long, but at last gave the word: the young men might accompany their father.  Shadrach was unusually cheerful about it: Heaven had preserved him hitherto, and he had uttered his thanks.  God would not forsake those who were faithful to him.

All that the Jolliffes possessed in the world was put into the enterprise.  The grocery stock was pared down to the least that possibly could afford a bare sustenance to Joanna during the absence, which was to last through the usual ‘New-f’nland spell.’  How she would endure the weary time she hardly knew, for the boys had been with her formerly; but she nerved herself for the trial.

The ship was laden with boots and shoes, ready-made clothing, fishing-tackle, butter, cheese, cordage, sailcloth, and many other commodities; and was to bring back oil, furs, skins, fish, cranberries, and what else came to hand.  But much trading to other ports was to be undertaken between the voyages out and homeward, and thereby much money made.

CHAPTER III

The brig sailed on a Monday morning in spring; but Joanna did not witness its departure.  She could not bear the sight that she had been the means of bringing about.  Knowing this, her husband told her overnight that they were to sail some time before noon next day hence when, awakening at five the next morning, she heard them bustling about downstairs, she did not hasten to descend, but lay trying to nerve herself for the parting, imagining they would leave about nine, as her husband had done on his previous voyage.  When she did descend she beheld words chalked upon the sloping face of the bureau; but no husband or sons.  In the hastily-scrawled lines Shadrach said they had gone off thus not to pain her by a leave-taking; and the sons had chalked under his words: ‘Good-bye, mother!’

She rushed to the quay, and looked down the harbour towards the blue rim of the sea, but she could only see the masts and bulging sails of the Joanna; no human figures.  ‘’Tis I have sent them!’ she said wildly, and burst into tears.  In the house the chalked ‘Good-bye’ nearly broke her heart.  But when she had re-entered the front room, and looked across at Emily’s, a gleam of triumph lit her thin face at her anticipated release from the thraldom of subservience.

To do Emily Lester justice, her assumption of superiority was mainly a figment of Joanna’s brain.  That the circumstances of the merchant’s wife were more luxurious than Joanna’s, the former could not conceal; though whenever the two met, which was not very often now, Emily endeavoured to subdue the difference by every means in her power.

The first summer lapsed away; and Joanna meagrely maintained herself by the shop, which now consisted of little more than a window and a counter.  Emily was, in truth, her only large customer; and Mrs. Lester’s kindly readiness to buy anything and everything without questioning the quality had a sting of bitterness in it, for it was the uncritical attitude of a patron, and almost of a donor.  The long dreary winter moved on; the face of the bureau had been turned to the wall to protect the chalked words of farewell, for Joanna could never bring herself to rub them out; and she often glanced at them with wet eyes.  Emily’s handsome boys came home for the Christmas holidays; the University was talked of for them; and still Joanna subsisted as it were with held breath, like a person submerged.  Only one summer more, and the ‘spell’ would end.  Towards the close of the time Emily called on her quondam friend.  She had heard that Joanna began to feel anxious; she had received no letter from husband or sons for some months.  Emily’s silks rustled arrogantly when, in response to Joanna’s almost dumb invitation, she squeezed through the opening of the counter and into the parlour behind the shop.

‘You are all success, and I am all the other way!’ said Joanna.

‘But why do you think so?’ said Emily.  ‘They are to bring back a fortune, I hear.’

‘Ah! will they come?  The doubt is more than a woman can bear.  All three in one ship—think of that!  And I have not heard of them for months!’

‘But the time is not up.  You should not meet misfortune half-way.’

‘Nothing will repay me for the grief of their absence!’

‘Then why did you let them go?  You were doing fairly well.’

‘I made them go!’ she said, turning vehemently upon Emily.  ‘And I’ll tell you why!  I could not bear that we should be only muddling on, and you so rich and thriving!  Now I have told you, and you may hate me if you will!’

‘I shall never hate you, Joanna.’

And she proved the truth of her words afterwards.  The end of autumn came, and the brig should have been in port; but nothing like the Joanna appeared in the channel between the sands.  It was now really time to be uneasy.  Joanna Jolliffe sat by the fire, and every gust of wind caused her a cold thrill.  She had always feared and detested the sea; to her it was a treacherous, restless, slimy creature, glorying in the griefs of women.  ‘Still,’ she said, ‘they must come!’

She recalled to her mind that Shadrach had said before starting that if they returned safe and sound, with success crowning their enterprise, he would go as he had gone after his shipwreck, and kneel with his sons in the church, and offer sincere thanks for their deliverance.  She went to church regularly morning and afternoon, and sat in the most forward pew, nearest the chancel-step.  Her eyes were mostly fixed on that step, where Shadrach had knelt in the bloom of his young manhood: she knew to an inch the spot which his knees had pressed twenty winters before; his outline as he had knelt, his hat on the step beside him.  God was good.  Surely her husband must kneel there again: a son on each side as he had said; George just here, Jim just there.  By long watching the spot as she worshipped it became as if she saw the three returned ones there kneeling; the two slim outlines of her boys, the more bulky form between them; their hands clasped, their heads shaped against the eastern wall.  The fancy grew almost to an hallucination: she could never turn her worn eyes to the step without seeing them there.

Nevertheless they did not come.  Heaven was merciful, but it was not yet pleased to relieve her soul.  This was her purgation for the sin of making them the slaves of her ambition.  But it became more than purgation soon, and her mood approached despair.  Months had passed since the brig had been due, but it had not returned.

Joanna was always hearing or seeing evidences of their arrival.  When on the hill behind the port, whence a view of the open Channel could be obtained, she felt sure that a little speck on the horizon, breaking the eternally level waste of waters southward, was the truck of the Joana’s mainmast.  Or when indoors, a shout or excitement of any kind at the corner of the Town Cellar, where the High Street joined the Quay, caused her to spring to her feet and cry: ‘’Tis they!’

But it was not.  The visionary forms knelt every Sunday afternoon on