Wessex Tales | Page 7

you will.' Mrs. Hooper seemed
nothing loth to minister to her tenant's curiosity about her predecessor.
'Lived here long? Yes, nearly two years. He keeps on his rooms even
when he's not here: the soft air of this place suits his chest, and he likes
to be able to come back at any time. He is mostly writing or reading,
and doesn't see many people, though, for the matter of that, he is such a
good, kind young fellow that folks would only be too glad to be
friendly with him if they knew him. You don't meet kind-hearted
people every day.'
'Ah, he's kind-hearted . . . and good.'
'Yes; he'll oblige me in anything if I ask him. "Mr. Trewe," I say to him

sometimes, "you are rather out of spirits." "Well, I am, Mrs. Hooper,"
he'll say, "though I don't know how you should find it out." "Why not
take a little change?" I ask. Then in a day or two he'll say that he will
take a trip to Paris, or Norway, or somewhere; and I assure you he
comes back all the better for it.'
'Ah, indeed! His is a sensitive nature, no doubt.'
'Yes. Still he's odd in some things. Once when he had finished a poem
of his composition late at night he walked up and down the room
rehearsing it; and the floors being so thin--jerry-built houses, you know,
though I say it myself--he kept me awake up above him till I wished
him further . . . But we get on very well.'
This was but the beginning of a series of conversations about the rising
poet as the days went on. On one of these occasions Mrs. Hooper drew
Ella's attention to what she had not noticed before: minute scribblings
in pencil on the wall-paper behind the curtains at the head of the bed.
'O! let me look,' said Mrs. Marchmill, unable to conceal a rush of
tender curiosity as she bent her pretty face close to the wall.
'These,' said Mrs. Hooper, with the manner of a woman who knew
things, 'are the very beginnings and first thoughts of his verses. He has
tried to rub most of them out, but you can read them still. My belief is
that he wakes up in the night, you know, with some rhyme in his head,
and jots it down there on the wall lest he should forget it by the
morning. Some of these very lines you see here I have seen afterwards
in print in the magazines. Some are newer; indeed, I have not seen that
one before. It must have been done only a few days ago.'
'O yes! . . . '
Ella Marchmill flushed without knowing why, and suddenly wished her
companion would go away, now that the information was imparted. An
indescribable consciousness of personal interest rather than literary
made her anxious to read the inscription alone; and she accordingly
waited till she could do so, with a sense that a great store of emotion
would be enjoyed in the act.
Perhaps because the sea was choppy outside the Island, Ella's husband
found it much pleasanter to go sailing and steaming about without his
wife, who was a bad sailor, than with her. He did not disdain to go thus
alone on board the steamboats of the cheap- trippers, where there was
dancing by moonlight, and where the couples would come suddenly

down with a lurch into each other's arms; for, as he blandly told her, the
company was too mixed for him to take her amid such scenes. Thus,
while this thriving manufacturer got a great deal of change and sea-air
out of his sojourn here, the life, external at least, of Ella was
monotonous enough, and mainly consisted in passing a certain number
of hours each day in bathing and walking up and down a stretch of
shore. But the poetic impulse having again waxed strong, she was
possessed by an inner flame which left her hardly conscious of what
was proceeding around her.
She had read till she knew by heart Trewe's last little volume of verses,
and spent a great deal of time in vainly attempting to rival some of
them, till, in her failure, she burst into tears. The personal element in
the magnetic attraction exercised by this circumambient,
unapproachable master of hers was so much stronger than the
intellectual and abstract that she could not understand it. To be sure,
she was surrounded noon and night by his customary environment,
which literally whispered of him to her at every moment; but he was a
man she had never seen, and that all that moved her was the instinct to
specialize a waiting emotion on the first fit thing that came to