These Few Lines

by Alfred Tennyson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

A Story

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I

The letter came to Wraxby with the carrier on a Friday in October, and on the Saturday Hannah Cust brought it to the school.

Daniel Peart was mending pens. He did it on Saturdays, when the forms were empty and the stove was cold, with the small knife and the window open for the light. He put the knife down and wiped his fingers on his handkerchief.

She held the letter out to him with both hands, the way a woman holds a plate that is too full. It had been folded small and sealed with a wafer. It had come a long way, and the outside showed it: three stamped marks, a smear of something brown, and the charge written large, which she had paid at the post office in Louth out of the washing money.

"It's from Tom," she said. "Nobody else would write to me."

He slit the wafer with the knife and opened the sheet on the desk. The hand was large and even, with tall loops on the l's and the d's. It was a clerk's hand. He read it to her aloud.

"'Dear Wife, I take up my pen to write these few lines, hoping they will find you in good health as they leave me at present, thanks be to God for all His mercies.'"

"Stop there," she said.

He stopped.

"Tom never said these few lines in his life. And he never took up a pen. He can't write his own name. He makes his cross, same as me."

"Somebody has written it for him," Peart said. "That beginning is what everybody puts. It's in the letter-writers' books. I could show you one."

"Then read me what he put."

He read on. She stood by the desk with her hands under her apron, and she did not sit, though he pushed the stool towards her.

Tom was in a township back of Lake Simcoe, on a lot of a hundred acres. He and a man called Ruddock had chopped four acres since June. The trees were bigger than any tree in Lincolnshire; three men could not reach round some of them. They burned the logs where they fell and saved the ash, and they boiled the lye from the ash down to potash, and Brennan at the store took the potash and gave them tea and an axe for it. He had had the ague in August, a fortnight of it, shaking in the heat, and was over it now. He had a yoke of oxen on shares, Buck and Bright. Then: "'It is a fine country for a man that will work, and I trust in the Almighty that we shall be together in it before long. I remain your affectionate husband until death, Thomas Cust, his mark.'"

There was a cross. Under it, smaller and quicker: Written for him by J. Hodder, at Brennan's store.

"Read it again," she said.

He read it again. This time she stopped him at every turn, and sorted it as she would sort washing.

The ash, the axe, the ague: "That's Tom." Ruddock: "That's Tom. He'd have a Ruddock." Buck and Bright: "That's Tom." A fine country for a man that will work: "That might be him. He'd say it to the men at the Plough." The Almighty and the affectionate husband until death: "That's Hodder."

"You can't know that," Peart said.

"I was married to him eleven years before he went. He never said affectionate in eleven years."

II

She wanted to answer it that day, so he took a clean sheet and wrote Wraxby, October 21st, 1843 at the top. Then, because his hand had written it a hundred times for other people, it went on of itself: My dear Husband, I take up my pen —

She could not read, but she could see where the writing was. "What's that you've put?"

He told her.

"I haven't got a pen. You have. Put what I say."

He laid the sheet aside and began another. She said it standing, a sentence at a time, and waited while he wrote each one.

"Tom. The pig is killed and salted. Mrs Ward gives me her washing Mondays and Thursdays, and the Rectory on Tuesdays. The thatch is bad at the back over the copper. I don't want to hear about the Almighty from Mr Hodder. I want to hear what you eat."

He lifted the pen at the fifth sentence.

"Shall I put kindly in? That I say it kindly?"

"Put what I said."

He put what she said. At the foot he wrote Hannah Cust, and left a space, and she leaned over and made her cross in it with his pen, pressing so hard that the nib spread and he had to mend it again after she had gone. He wrote her mark beside the cross.

When she had gone he sat a while with the spoiled sheet. My dear Husband, I take up my pen. He had wanted to put dear before Tom on the clean sheet as well. He had not put it. He had wanted it a good deal more than she had.

He put the sheet in the drawer, where he kept paper that could still be used on the back.

III

They came twice in a year, and some years three times. Each one came by the carrier on a Friday, and on the Saturday she brought it to the school, and he slit the wafer and read.

He came to know Hodder as you come to know a man who sits behind you in church. Hodder's loops leaned a little more each year. Hodder liked Providence, and the bosom of the family, and the Almighty has seen fit. Hodder never let a letter end without until death. Once, when the ink had run thin, Hodder had finished in pencil, and the pencil ran on to a second side where he had worked out a sum in pounds and bushels and not rubbed it out.

And under Hodder, in every letter, there was Tom. Peart learned to hear him too. Tom was in the things. A stump that would not burn and had to be dug round for three days. The second ox, his own, bought at a sale, a red one with a split ear. The neighbours who came to the raising, so that the log house went up in a day, and the whisky that came with them, and what it cost. Snow up to the window and the window only oiled paper. Twenty acres chopped. Wheat sown among the stumps and harrowed in with a thorn bush, because a harrow would have broken on the roots. A bear, once, at the pig. What he ate: salt pork, and bread, and tea when there was tea, and a fish through a hole in the lake ice, which he had never thought to see.

She sorted each letter as she had sorted the first. Peart began to sort them with her, and then before her. He would read a sentence and stop, and she would say "Tom," or "Hodder," and once or twice he got there first and said it for her, and she let him.

Her own letters he wrote plain, as she said them. It never stopped being hard. Her sentences were short and they ended where the thing ended. The thatch was mended. Mrs Ward had died and her daughter kept the washing on. Wheat was dear. The Rector had a new curate who preached too long. Each time Peart felt his hand want to round them, to put dear in, to put I hope, to let a sentence go on a little after its thing was done, as a cart runs on a yard when the horse stands. Each time he read it back to her and she heard where he had done it, and he took it out.

He began to keep his Saturdays clear.

IV

In the fourth winter the letter was thin.

There was very little in it. The winter had been severe. Providence had been merciful in the matter of their health. They were in the hands of the Almighty and must bow to His will. Hodder had found a new phrase, the sore trials of this life, and used it twice. There was no stump in it, no ox, no thing that a man had eaten. There was the cross and until death, and Hodder's name.

Peart read it through, and then read it through again without being asked.

"Where is he in it?" she said.

"I don't know."

"Read it slower."

He read it slower. It made no difference. The sentences were Hodder's from the first word to the cross.

She sat down on the stool, the first time in four years she had sat. She put her hands flat on her knees.

"I don't know his voice any more," she said. "That's the truth of it. Four years. I can't hear it. When I think of him saying a thing now, he says it like you. Or else he says it like Hodder, and I don't know what Hodder's voice is, so he says it like nobody. I had it the first winter. I had it the second. I can't get him to talk like himself."

Peart said nothing. There was a sentence in him, ready, about the letter being four months on the road, and a hard winter, and Hodder writing to fill a sheet when a man had nothing to say. It was a good sentence. It was very likely true. He looked at it and did not say it, because it would have been a comfort, and it would have come before she had finished.

"And I don't know if he's the same man," she said. "Or if he's living this minute. A letter's four months old when I have it. He could be under one of his own stumps, and Hodder writing Providence to me out of kindness. I don't know. You don't know. Nobody in this parish knows."

She was quiet a long time. The clock went on the wall.

"It's all right," she said. "You needn't say anything. I'd only hear it in your voice."

She took the letter and folded it on its old folds and went home. He sat in the cold schoolroom until the light went, with nothing on the desk.

V

The next one came at the end of February. She brought it on the Saturday, as always, and held it out in both hands.

The outside was in the same hand as always, the tall loops of the direction. But when he slit the wafer there was a second sheet folded inside the first, and the second sheet was not Hodder's.

The letters on it were big and separate, every one made on its own, as a child makes them on a slate. Someone had ruled lines in pencil across the page and the letters stood on the lines and in places fell off them. There was a blot where the pen had been held too long in one place. The spelling was wrong in most words. It was the worst writing Peart had seen from anyone over the age of eight.

He read it out exactly as it stood.

"'Hanah. I have lernt to rite of the scool master at the corners at nite. This is my own hand. The weet is in. 20 akers. The red ox is well. I eat pork and bred and fish and potatos. Come in the spring. Hodder has put the money in proper. Tom.'"

The money was in the other sheet: a draft on a bank in Hull for ten pounds, and Hodder's careful page about ships and Quebec and the steamboat up the river, and what she must bring and what she must not.

She did not say "That's Tom." She said, "Did he say God?"

"No."

"Did he say affectionate?"

"No."

"Read it again. No. Read it like he'd say it."

He had known Tom Cust a little, years back, before Tom went. A big slow man at the back of the church, who took his hat off a long time before the door. Peart tried. He could not do the voice. So he read it as badly as it was written instead. He stopped where the pencil lines stopped. He gave each word the time it must have taken a big man at a table, at night, after a day with an axe, to put it down. The weet is in. He waited after that. Twenty akers. He waited.

"That's nearer," she said.

He read it four times. On the fourth she said the last sentence with him, Come in the spring, in her own voice, under his.

VI

She was to go from Hull in April. The draft would pay for the passage, and her food at sea, and the steamboat from Quebec, and something over. Hodder's page said to be at the dock a week before sailing, because ships did not keep their day.

She came on the Saturday to answer. Peart had the paper ready and the pen mended. He wrote Wraxby, March 4th, 1848, and nothing after it, and waited.

"Tom," she said. "I have the money. I am coming in the brig Industry from Hull. They say she sails the 14th of April if the wind serves. I have sold the pig and the copper. I have told Mrs Ward's daughter to find another woman for the washing. The thatch can fall in now. I don't care. I eat bread and dripping and I shall be glad of a fish."

He wrote it. This time he wanted nothing put in it.

When it was done she did not reach for the pen to make her cross.

"I want to put my name," she said. "Not the cross. My name. You've a fortnight. Will you learn me?"

He did. On the slate first, every evening after the children had gone, the six letters of Hannah and the four of Cust, over and over, while the slate pencil squeaked. She held it like a knife for cutting bread, and he did not correct the grip, because there was no time to unlearn it. Then on the backs of the spoiled sheets from the drawer. The last of them was the first he had spoiled for her: My dear Husband, I take up my pen, on one side, and on the other side Hannah Cust, Hannah Cust, Hannah Cust, growing smaller and steadier down the page.

On the last Saturday he set the letter in front of her, the whole of it in his hand, with a space at the foot.

She wrote her name in the space. It took her a long time. The H leaned. The two n's in Hannah were not the same size, and the C of Cust was too big and nearly closed. He did not write her mark beside it. There was nothing to write.

He shook the sand over the wet ink and tipped it back into the box, and blew the last of it off. Then he folded the letter small, as Tom's had been folded, and sealed it with a wafer, and put it into her two hands.

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THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Alfrēdō Tennysone per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alfred Tennyson, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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