Chapter 10

Tom and Thyrza came back from Hastings in a few days. They talked as if they had been away for weeks, and indeed it had seemed weeks to them—not that any moment had faltered or dragged, but each had held the delight of hours, and each hour had been a day of new [145] wonder. Perhaps the dazzle was brightest for Tom—Thyrza could remember an earlier honeymoon, which had held no presage of darkness to follow, and she slipped back pretty easily into the old habit of having a man about her; but for Tom even the traces of her here and there in the room, her hat thrown down, her petticoat trailing over a chair, the dim scent of clover that hung on her pillow, making her bed like a field, all joined to bind him with her enchantment, to drug him with an ecstasy which had its sweet foundation in the commonplace.

When they came back to Sunday Street the honeymoon did not end. Contrariwise, it seemed to wax fuller in the freedom of the old ways. Even sweeter than the sense of passionate holiday was the taking up of a common life together, the daily sharing of food and work and rest, the doing of things he had done a hundred times before, but never like this. Thyrza’s little cottage had been hung with new curtains, and some unknown hand—which afterwards unexpectedly proved to be Nell’s—had filled it with flowers on the evening of their return. Bunches of primroses, violets and bluebells stuffed the vases in bedroom and parlour, and the soft fugitive scent of April banks mixed with the scent of lath and plaster which haunts old cottages, and the more spicy, powdery smells of the shop.

The days were warm and drowsy, and the fields lay in a muffle of sunshine, their distances all blurred with heat. Round every farm the orchards rolled in pink-stained clouds of bloom, and the young wheat was green as a rainy sunset. The wind that brought the mutter of the guns, brought also the bleating of lambs from the pastures; scents seemed to hang and brood on the air, or drift slowly from the woods—scents of standing water and budding thorn, of hazel leaves hot in the sun, and [146] soft mixed fragrances of gorse and fern, of cows, of baking earth, of currant bushes in cottage gardens....

Towards evening Tom and Thyrza usually closed the shop, and came out—either for a stroll up to Worge to see his family, or for some more adventurous excursion to Brownbread Street, or Furnacefield, or up to the North Road and the straggle of old Dallington. They had one or two quite long walks, for a new enterprise had kindled in them both, and for the first time there was mystery and allure in some shaky signpost at the throws, or a little lane creeping off secretly. One day they walked as far as Brightling, past the obelisk, through the shuttling dimness of Pipers Wood and up Twelve Oaks Hill by strange farms to the sudden clump of Brightling among the trees. They went into the churchyard where the yews spread shadows nearly as dark as their own blackness and strange white peacocks perched on the tombstones, with shrill, unnatural cries. There was also a huge cone-shaped object, built of damp stones and thickly grown with moss, and Thyrza unaccountably took fright at this, and the peacocks, and the shadows and the trees, and walked for most of the way home with her head under Tom’s coat.

He did not often think of when this time should end, of the day that crept nearer and nearer to him over drowsing twilights and magical, green sunrises. He knew that a month hence all this delight would be a memory, that between him and the spurge-thickening fields of May would lie all the life of ugly adventure into which fate had pitched him—and Thyrza would come to him only on scraps of paper, in puffs of scent, in fugitive dreams, in a passing light in some other girl’s eyes.... But he was too simple and too happy to let thoughts of the future spoil the present, besides, his habit of disregarding the future now stood his friend. He would not see the [147] clover in bloom, but saw it in the green—deep, rippling, gleaming, like the sea—he would miss the hay, but now he could see the buttercups under the moon, so yellow that they seemed to paint the sky and turn the moon to honey; Thyrza might in a month’s time be a memory, belong to phantasy, but now she was a woman solid and close, his woman, the maker of his home, the maker of himself anew.... Once his mother had borne him, and now it seemed as if this woman had borne him again, into a new experience, a new happiness, a new wonder—so perfect and complete that sometimes he almost felt as if it did not matter whether he held it for ever or for a day.