Two More Irony Selections

“A Wife in London”  by Thomas Hardy

I--The Tragedy 

She sits in the tawny vapour
   That the City lanes have uprolled,
   Behind whose webby fold on fold
Like a waning taper
   The street-lamp glimmers cold.

A messenger's knock cracks smartly,
   Flashed news is in her hand
   Of meaning it dazes to understand
Though shaped so shortly:
   He--has fallen--in the far South Land . . .

II--The Irony

'Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker,
   The postman nears and goes:
   A letter is brought whose lines disclose
By the firelight flicker
   His hand, whom the worm now knows:

Fresh--firm--penned in highest feather -
   Page-full of his hoped return,
   And of home-planned jaunts by brake and burn
In the summer weather,
   And of new love that they would learn.

The Cough Aldous Huxley.  Daily News “Little Tales”, 20 June 1922.

Mr. Panton lived for music. A good chamber concert, like the one he was listening to tonight, was all, indeed, that he had to live for now. They had begun the slow movement of the G. minor Quintet. All the sadness of Mozart's life was being evoked in quiet beauty from the past. Mr. Panton leaned back and shut his eyes. He felt positively happy. The melody drooped and climbed. The live parts threatened their separate ways, chased one another, joined in rich chords, broke apart. Mr. Panton listened. Suddenly he opened his eyes, sat up. A look of apprehension crossed his face. From beatific ecstasy he had plunged back into the depths; he was going to cough.

That cough — it had been with him now for years. One cold, wet January it came; it had never left him since. It was a habit now, a part of him. The tickling in the throat was becoming unbearable. The desire to cough grew and swelled. It was like a river in spate thrusting against a dam; in a moment the flimsy barrier would go down before it. Mr. Panton held his breath, swallowed, set his teeth. It was no good. The dam broke.

Mr. Panton's cough was like the noise of a falling tree — a violent tearing, a final stupendous crash. People started, scared faces turned round, indignant voices said "Hush!" Buried in his handkerchief, Mr. Panton was agonizingly trying to choke back a second outburst. The music drooped and climbed. Tear and crash, tear and crash — it was as though a forest of trees were falling. Red in the face, Mr. Panton coughed and coughed. Hush! Hush! A hundred angry eyes were turned towards him. The players scraped away, but it was only in rare snatches that Mozart's lovely melancholy reached the audience. Tear and crash, tear and crash — Mr. Panton had never known a more frightful paroxysm.

An attendant touched him on the shoulder: the management much regretted, but they must ask the gentleman to leave the building. Meekly, and in a dumb despair, Mr. Panton put on his hat and walked out into the night. The last of the three things that had made life worth living had been taken away from him. First his wife had gone. He remembered her farewell letter: "After listening to your cough for six years I have two alternatives before me, either to leave you and remain sane, or to stay with you and go mad, probably homicidally." She had left. Loneliness drove Mr. Panton to the Club. A year after his wife's departure he had had that letter from the secretary; his distressing affliction disturbed the other members; reluctantly, the committee must ask him to resign; they returned him his entrance fee. And now his music had been taken from him. Life was no longer worth living; he would put an end to it.

Mr. Panton leaned over the parapet of Westminster Bridge. It would all be over in a moment, he reflected; he couldn't swim. He had only to make the decisive movement, and there he'd be in the water — struggling, gone....

A series of violent explosive noises attracted the attention of a policeman standing by the Boadicea statue. He walked quickly onto the bridge. A small, middle-aged man was hanging, doubled up, over the parapet, coughing with incredible violence. The policeman took him by the arm.

"You’ll be falling over if you're not careful," he said. "I ‘eard you coughin’ a mile off."

Mr. Panton suffered himself to be led away. The cough had been too much for him again.