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A little later, in response to some spiritualist anecdote of, I think, Professor Murray’s, as if to prove that one sort of ghost story was as good as another, Thomas Hardy told the story of Wild Darrell. It was the most memorable tale-telling that I have ever attended.

In those days he was still sturdy, grizzled rather than white, rather small in stature, a little military in aspect and gifted by God with a naïveté that was at once the source of his talent and the secret of his immense charm. He suggested to me more than anything – as I have already said somewhere or other – one of those uncovered roots of mighty oak-trees that you will see, half bedded in deep moss in the glades of his own New Forest. Something steadfast, rough-grained, retiring, kindly – and eternal. For, surely, there is something kind and eternal about those woodlands, and woodlanders are inspired to tolerant and lasting thoughts. At any rate, in his peasant way he was the most charming man I have ever met – and I have met many. And do not believe that when I use the word ‘peasant’ I mean anything socially derogatory. There used to be a print that was very popular in English country ale-houses half a century ago. It represents a number of men in scarlet uniforms, robes and periwigs, all supported on the shoulders of one russet-clad fellow. From the respective mouths of king, priest, soldier, peer, issue labels bearing the words ‘I pray for all!’ ‘I fight for all!’ ‘I make laws for all!’ ‘I govern all!’ and the like. But from the mouth of the bearer who carries a spade issues the groan: ‘I support all!’ He is the peasant, and that is no doubt the truth of it. And he is unchanging – and so was Thomas Hardy, who might well have taken for his boast the words: ‘I think for all!’ For deep in the heart of England he kept going that sombre strain of almost Sophoclean thought that is the most English characteristic of all. Fatalistic, gloomy, darkling and determined, it accepts the dictates of fate and faces the universe erect, with the determination to keep all on going, as says the Kentish peasant, and then to keep all on. So, Thomas Hardy, poet! I am frequently told here that England is disappointing to the American visitors because it is so rapidly becoming Americanized. Well, you may Americanize me and the Tower of London, and the advertisements on the buses in London streets, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the birthplace, and the city of Stratford on Avon. But you never could have Americanized Thomas Hardy or Gallicized him, or Scotticized or Celtically influenced him. He was as unchanging as the twisted oak-roots.

The story of Wild Darrell is as follows:

Wild Darrell was the owner of Littlecote Manor House, which is the manor house of all England for ghosts, nightriders, evil deeds, treachery and ruin… Well, far from Littlecote lived a midwife who one night was retiring to bed when there came wild thunderings on her door. Without stood a great dark man holding the bridle of a huge, coalblack charger. By menaces and force he made the midwife mount before him on his horse and, having blindfolded her, galloped away through the night. They came to the postern door of an immense house and here the midwife was introduced up a priest’s staircase that was in the thick of the wall. They came into an immense chamber where there roared a great log fire, and in the chamber was a great state bed with velvet curtains, and in the bed a lady in labour. As soon as the midwife had delivered the lady Wild Darrell took the child and threw it into the middle of the blazing logs. He then conducted the midwife home again, but during her operations she had contrived to snip a small piece out of the velvet bed curtain, and this was the cause of Wild Darrell’s downfall. The midwife talked: the story came up to London, and justice, scenting a rich booty, was finally able to place the fragment into its place in the curtain. Wild Darrell lay long in jail, the Lord Chief Justice Popham tempting him with the offer of his life if Darrell would surrender his land to himself. Darrell at last consented, but he put upon Popham the curse that no eldest son of the Popham family should ever die a natural death. And that has proved the case. Wild Darrell, meanwhile, on his coalblack charger, with fire flashing from its eyes and smoke pouring from its nostrils, rides in the black nights with great bounds up and down the road leading from Littlecote to the place where the midwife’s cottage has fallen down.

That was the story, but those were, of course, not Thomas Hardy’s words. He told it as he did everything, shyly, almost deprecatingly, but he told it with a force that made it seem extraordinarily real … the house, the great raftered chamber, the immense fire, the great bed! I see it at this moment superimposed over the room that surrounds me. And when he had finished it was truly as if we had heard how the silence surged softly backward after the plunging hoofs were gone – the last words are Mr de la Mare’s. He made his ghosts in truth more visible than any spiritualistic manifestations can ever have been.

I talked a great deal with him afterwards, and the talks always seemed very long – not because of either their duration or their want of interest, but simply because of his minute attention to little things that were also essentials to whatever was the matter in hand. He seemed to have in his mind none of what I would call the ‘roughage’ of conversation by means of which most men render their conversation tiresome. In common, indeed, with most men of genius whom I have known, he seemed to view life with the fascinated interest of a bird that is on the ground and inspects minute objects, and I have often thought that genius is, in fact, a sort of fountain of youth in that its possessor retains an almost naïve interest in the simplest little things of life as well as in larger generalizations and causes.

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