The Mayor of Casterbridge

T >> Thomas Hardy >> The Mayor of Casterbridge





2.


The morning sun was streaming through the crevices of the canvas when
the man awoke. A warm glow pervaded the whole atmosphere of the marquee,
and a single big blue fly buzzed musically round and round it. Besides
the buzz of the fly there was not a sound. He looked about--at the
benches--at the table supported by trestles--at his basket of tools--at
the stove where the furmity had been boiled--at the empty basins--at
some shed grains of wheat--at the corks which dotted the grassy floor.
Among the odds and ends he discerned a little shining object, and picked
it up. It was his wife's ring.

A confused picture of the events of the previous evening seemed to come
back to him, and he thrust his hand into his breast-pocket. A rustling
revealed the sailor's bank-notes thrust carelessly in.

This second verification of his dim memories was enough; he knew now
they were not dreams. He remained seated, looking on the ground for some
time. "I must get out of this as soon as I can," he said deliberately
at last, with the air of one who could not catch his thoughts without
pronouncing them. "She's gone--to be sure she is--gone with that sailor
who bought her, and little Elizabeth-Jane. We walked here, and I had the
furmity, and rum in it--and sold her. Yes, that's what's happened and
here am I. Now, what am I to do--am I sober enough to walk, I wonder?"
He stood up, found that he was in fairly good condition for progress,
unencumbered. Next he shouldered his tool basket, and found he could
carry it. Then lifting the tent door he emerged into the open air.

Here the man looked around with gloomy curiosity. The freshness of the
September morning inspired and braced him as he stood. He and his family
had been weary when they arrived the night before, and they had observed
but little of the place; so that he now beheld it as a new thing. It
exhibited itself as the top of an open down, bounded on one extreme by
a plantation, and approached by a winding road. At the bottom stood the
village which lent its name to the upland and the annual fair that was
held thereon. The spot stretched downward into valleys, and onward to
other uplands, dotted with barrows, and trenched with the remains of
prehistoric forts. The whole scene lay under the rays of a newly risen
sun, which had not as yet dried a single blade of the heavily dewed
grass, whereon the shadows of the yellow and red vans were projected far
away, those thrown by the felloe of each wheel being elongated in shape
to the orbit of a comet. All the gipsies and showmen who had remained
on the ground lay snug within their carts and tents or wrapped in
horse-cloths under them, and were silent and still as death, with the
exception of an occasional snore that revealed their presence. But
the Seven Sleepers had a dog; and dogs of the mysterious breeds that
vagrants own, that are as much like cats as dogs and as much like foxes
as cats also lay about here. A little one started up under one of the
carts, barked as a matter of principle, and quickly lay down again.
He was the only positive spectator of the hay-trusser's exit from the
Weydon Fair-field.

This seemed to accord with his desire. He went on in silent thought,
unheeding the yellowhammers which flitted about the hedges with straws
in their bills, the crowns of the mushrooms, and the tinkling of local
sheep-bells, whose wearer had had the good fortune not to be included
in the fair. When he reached a lane, a good mile from the scene of the
previous evening, the man pitched his basket and leant upon a gate. A
difficult problem or two occupied his mind.

"Did I tell my name to anybody last night, or didn't I tell my name?"
he said to himself; and at last concluded that he did not. His general
demeanour was enough to show how he was surprised and nettled that his
wife had taken him so literally--as much could be seen in his face, and
in the way he nibbled a straw which he pulled from the hedge. He knew
that she must have been somewhat excited to do this; moreover, she
must have believed that there was some sort of binding force in the
transaction. On this latter point he felt almost certain, knowing her
freedom from levity of character, and the extreme simplicity of her
intellect. There may, too, have been enough recklessness and resentment
beneath her ordinary placidity to make her stifle any momentary doubts.
On a previous occasion when he had declared during a fuddle that he
would dispose of her as he had done, she had replied that she would not
hear him say that many times more before it happened, in the resigned
tones of a fatalist.... "Yet she knows I am not in my senses when I do
that!" he exclaimed. "Well, I must walk about till I find her....Seize
her, why didn't she know better than bring me into this disgrace!" he
roared out. "She wasn't queer if I was. 'Tis like Susan to show such
idiotic simplicity. Meek--that meekness has done me more harm than the
bitterest temper!"

When he was calmer he turned to his original conviction that he must
somehow find her and his little Elizabeth-Jane, and put up with the
shame as best he could. It was of his own making, and he ought to bear
it. But first he resolved to register an oath, a greater oath than he
had ever sworn before: and to do it properly he required a fit place and
imagery; for there was something fetichistic in this man's beliefs.

He shouldered his basket and moved on, casting his eyes inquisitively
round upon the landscape as he walked, and at the distance of three or
four miles perceived the roofs of a village and the tower of a church.
He instantly made towards the latter object. The village was quite
still, it being that motionless hour of rustic daily life which fills
the interval between the departure of the field-labourers to their work,
and the rising of their wives and daughters to prepare the breakfast for
their return. Hence he reached the church without observation, and the
door being only latched he entered. The hay-trusser deposited his basket
by the font, went up the nave till he reached the altar-rails, and
opening the gate entered the sacrarium, where he seemed to feel a
sense of the strangeness for a moment; then he knelt upon the
footpace. Dropping his head upon the clamped book which lay on the
Communion-table, he said aloud--

"I, Michael Henchard, on this morning of the sixteenth of September, do
take an oath before God here in this solemn place that I will avoid all
strong liquors for the space of twenty-one years to come, being a year
for every year that I have lived. And this I swear upon the book before
me; and may I be strook dumb, blind, and helpless, if I break this my
oath!"

When he had said it and kissed the big book, the hay-trusser arose,
and seemed relieved at having made a start in a new direction. While
standing in the porch a moment he saw a thick jet of wood smoke suddenly
start up from the red chimney of a cottage near, and knew that the
occupant had just lit her fire. He went round to the door, and the
housewife agreed to prepare him some breakfast for a trifling payment,
which was done. Then he started on the search for his wife and child.

The perplexing nature of the undertaking became apparent soon enough.
Though he examined and inquired, and walked hither and thither day after
day, no such characters as those he described had anywhere been seen
since the evening of the fair. To add to the difficulty he could gain
no sound of the sailor's name. As money was short with him he decided,
after some hesitation, to spend the sailor's money in the prosecution
of this search; but it was equally in vain. The truth was that a
certain shyness of revealing his conduct prevented Michael Henchard from
following up the investigation with the loud hue-and-cry such a pursuit
demanded to render it effectual; and it was probably for this reason
that he obtained no clue, though everything was done by him that did not
involve an explanation of the circumstances under which he had lost her.

Weeks counted up to months, and still he searched on, maintaining
himself by small jobs of work in the intervals. By this time he had
arrived at a seaport, and there he derived intelligence that persons
answering somewhat to his description had emigrated a little time
before. Then he said he would search no longer, and that he would go and
settle in the district which he had had for some time in his mind.

Next day he started, journeying south-westward, and did not pause,
except for nights' lodgings, till he reached the town of Casterbridge,
in a far distant part of Wessex.




3.


The highroad into the village of Weydon-Priors was again carpeted with
dust. The trees had put on as of yore their aspect of dingy green, and
where the Henchard family of three had once walked along, two persons
not unconnected with the family walked now.

The scene in its broad aspect had so much of its previous character,
even to the voices and rattle from the neighbouring village down,
that it might for that matter have been the afternoon following the
previously recorded episode. Change was only to be observed in details;
but here it was obvious that a long procession of years had passed by.
One of the two who walked the road was she who had figured as the young
wife of Henchard on the previous occasion; now her face had lost much of
its rotundity; her skin had undergone a textural change; and though her
hair had not lost colour it was considerably thinner than heretofore.
She was dressed in the mourning clothes of a widow. Her companion,
also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about eighteen,
completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is
itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour.

A glance was sufficient to inform the eye that this was Susan Henchard's
grown-up daughter. While life's middle summer had set its hardening
mark on the mother's face, her former spring-like specialities were
transferred so dexterously by Time to the second figure, her child,
that the absence of certain facts within her mother's knowledge from the
girl's mind would have seemed for the moment, to one reflecting on those
facts, to be a curious imperfection in Nature's powers of continuity.

They walked with joined hands, and it could be perceived that this was
the act of simple affection. The daughter carried in her outer hand
a withy basket of old-fashioned make; the mother a blue bundle, which
contrasted oddly with her black stuff gown.

Reaching the outskirts of the village they pursued the same track as
formerly, and ascended to the fair. Here, too it was evident that the
years had told. Certain mechanical improvements might have been noticed
in the roundabouts and high-fliers, machines for testing rustic strength
and weight, and in the erections devoted to shooting for nuts. But the
real business of the fair had considerably dwindled. The new periodical
great markets of neighbouring towns were beginning to interfere
seriously with the trade carried on here for centuries. The pens for
sheep, the tie-ropes for horses, were about half as long as they had
been. The stalls of tailors, hosiers, coopers, linen-drapers, and other
such trades had almost disappeared, and the vehicles were far less
numerous. The mother and daughter threaded the crowd for some little
distance, and then stood still.

"Why did we hinder our time by coming in here? I thought you wished to
get onward?" said the maiden.

"Yes, my dear Elizabeth-Jane," explained the other. "But I had a fancy
for looking up here."

"Why?"

"It was here I first met with Newson--on such a day as this."

"First met with father here? Yes, you have told me so before. And now
he's drowned and gone from us!" As she spoke the girl drew a card from
her pocket and looked at it with a sigh. It was edged with black, and
inscribed within a design resembling a mural tablet were the words, "In
affectionate memory of Richard Newson, mariner, who was unfortunately
lost at sea, in the month of November 184--, aged forty-one years."

"And it was here," continued her mother, with more hesitation, "that I
last saw the relation we are going to look for--Mr. Michael Henchard."

"What is his exact kin to us, mother? I have never clearly had it told
me."

"He is, or was--for he may be dead--a connection by marriage," said her
mother deliberately.

"That's exactly what you have said a score of times before!" replied the
young woman, looking about her inattentively. "He's not a near relation,
I suppose?"

"Not by any means."

"He was a hay-trusser, wasn't he, when you last heard of him?

"He was."

"I suppose he never knew me?" the girl innocently continued.

Mrs. Henchard paused for a moment, and answered un-easily, "Of course
not, Elizabeth-Jane. But come this way." She moved on to another part of
the field.

"It is not much use inquiring here for anybody, I should think," the
daughter observed, as she gazed round about. "People at fairs change
like the leaves of trees; and I daresay you are the only one here to-day
who was here all those years ago."

"I am not so sure of that," said Mrs. Newson, as she now called herself,
keenly eyeing something under a green bank a little way off. "See
there."

The daughter looked in the direction signified. The object pointed
out was a tripod of sticks stuck into the earth, from which hung a
three-legged crock, kept hot by a smouldering wood fire beneath. Over
the pot stooped an old woman haggard, wrinkled, and almost in rags. She
stirred the contents of the pot with a large spoon, and occasionally
croaked in a broken voice, "Good furmity sold here!"

It was indeed the former mistress of the furmity tent--once thriving,
cleanly, white-aproned, and chinking with money--now tentless, dirty,
owning no tables or benches, and having scarce any customers except
two small whity-brown boys, who came up and asked for "A ha'p'orth,
please--good measure," which she served in a couple of chipped yellow
basins of commonest clay.

"She was here at that time," resumed Mrs. Newson, making a step as if to
draw nearer.

"Don't speak to her--it isn't respectable!" urged the other.

"I will just say a word--you, Elizabeth-Jane, can stay here."

The girl was not loth, and turned to some stalls of coloured prints
while her mother went forward. The old woman begged for the latter's
custom as soon as she saw her, and responded to Mrs. Henchard-Newson's
request for a pennyworth with more alacrity than she had shown in
selling six-pennyworths in her younger days. When the soi-disant widow
had taken the basin of thin poor slop that stood for the rich concoction
of the former time, the hag opened a little basket behind the fire, and
looking up slily, whispered, "Just a thought o' rum in it?--smuggled,
you know--say two penn'orth--'twill make it slip down like cordial!"

Her customer smiled bitterly at this survival of the old trick, and
shook her head with a meaning the old woman was far from translating.
She pretended to eat a little of the furmity with the leaden spoon
offered, and as she did so said blandly to the hag, "You've seen better
days?"

"Ah, ma'am--well ye may say it!" responded the old woman, opening the
sluices of her heart forthwith. "I've stood in this fair-ground, maid,
wife, and widow, these nine-and-thirty years, and in that time have
known what it was to do business with the richest stomachs in the
land! Ma'am you'd hardly believe that I was once the owner of a great
pavilion-tent that was the attraction of the fair. Nobody could come,
nobody could go, without having a dish of Mrs. Goodenough's furmity.
I knew the clergy's taste, the dandy gent's taste; I knew the town's
taste, the country's taste. I even knowed the taste of the coarse
shameless females. But Lord's my life--the world's no memory;
straightforward dealings don't bring profit--'tis the sly and the
underhand that get on in these times!"

Mrs. Newson glanced round--her daughter was still bending over the
distant stalls. "Can you call to mind," she said cautiously to the old
woman, "the sale of a wife by her husband in your tent eighteen years
ago to-day?"

The hag reflected, and half shook her head. "If it had been a big
thing I should have minded it in a moment," she said. "I can mind every
serious fight o' married parties, every murder, every manslaughter, even
every pocket-picking--leastwise large ones--that 't has been my lot to
witness. But a selling? Was it done quiet-like?"

"Well, yes. I think so."

The furmity woman half shook her head again. "And yet," she said, "I do.
At any rate, I can mind a man doing something o' the sort--a man in a
cord jacket, with a basket of tools; but, Lord bless ye, we don't gi'e
it head-room, we don't, such as that. The only reason why I can mind the
man is that he came back here to the next year's fair, and told me quite
private-like that if a woman ever asked for him I was to say he had gone
to--where?--Casterbridge--yes--to Casterbridge, said he. But, Lord's my
life, I shouldn't ha' thought of it again!"

Mrs. Newson would have rewarded the old woman as far as her small
means afforded had she not discreetly borne in mind that it was by that
unscrupulous person's liquor her husband had been degraded. She briefly
thanked her informant, and rejoined Elizabeth, who greeted her with,
"Mother, do let's get on--it was hardly respectable for you to buy
refreshments there. I see none but the lowest do."

"I have learned what I wanted, however," said her mother quietly.
"The last time our relative visited this fair he said he was living at
Casterbridge. It is a long, long way from here, and it was many years
ago that he said it, but there I think we'll go."

With this they descended out of the fair, and went onward to the
village, where they obtained a night's lodging.




4.


Henchard's wife acted for the best, but she had involved herself in
difficulties. A hundred times she had been upon the point of telling her
daughter Elizabeth-Jane the true story of her life, the tragical crisis
of which had been the transaction at Weydon Fair, when she was not much
older than the girl now beside her. But she had refrained. An innocent
maiden had thus grown up in the belief that the relations between the
genial sailor and her mother were the ordinary ones that they had always
appeared to be. The risk of endangering a child's strong affection by
disturbing ideas which had grown with her growth was to Mrs. Henchard
too fearful a thing to contemplate. It had seemed, indeed folly to think
of making Elizabeth-Jane wise.

But Susan Henchard's fear of losing her dearly loved daughter's heart by
a revelation had little to do with any sense of wrong-doing on her own
part. Her simplicity--the original ground of Henchard's contempt for
her--had allowed her to live on in the conviction that Newson
had acquired a morally real and justifiable right to her by his
purchase--though the exact bearings and legal limits of that right were
vague. It may seem strange to sophisticated minds that a sane young
matron could believe in the seriousness of such a transfer; and were
there not numerous other instances of the same belief the thing might
scarcely be credited. But she was by no means the first or last peasant
woman who had religiously adhered to her purchaser, as too many rural
records show.

The history of Susan Henchard's adventures in the interim can be told
in two or three sentences. Absolutely helpless she had been taken off
to Canada where they had lived several years without any great worldly
success, though she worked as hard as any woman could to keep their
cottage cheerful and well-provided. When Elizabeth-Jane was about twelve
years old the three returned to England, and settled at Falmouth,
where Newson made a living for a few years as boatman and general handy
shoreman.

He then engaged in the Newfoundland trade, and it was during this period
that Susan had an awakening. A friend to whom she confided her history
ridiculed her grave acceptance of her position; and all was over with
her peace of mind. When Newson came home at the end of one winter he saw
that the delusion he had so carefully sustained had vanished for ever.

There was then a time of sadness, in which she told him her doubts
if she could live with him longer. Newson left home again on the
Newfoundland trade when the season came round. The vague news of his
loss at sea a little later on solved a problem which had become torture
to her meek conscience. She saw him no more.

Of Henchard they heard nothing. To the liege subjects of Labour, the
England of those days was a continent, and a mile a geographical degree.

Elizabeth-Jane developed early into womanliness. One day a month or
so after receiving intelligence of Newson's death off the Bank of
Newfoundland, when the girl was about eighteen, she was sitting on a
willow chair in the cottage they still occupied, working twine nets for
the fishermen. Her mother was in a back corner of the same room engaged
in the same labour, and dropping the heavy wood needle she was filling
she surveyed her daughter thoughtfully. The sun shone in at the door
upon the young woman's head and hair, which was worn loose, so that the
rays streamed into its depths as into a hazel copse. Her face, though
somewhat wan and incomplete, possessed the raw materials of beauty in a
promising degree. There was an under-handsomeness in it, struggling
to reveal itself through the provisional curves of immaturity, and the
casual disfigurements that resulted from the straitened circumstances of
their lives. She was handsome in the bone, hardly as yet handsome in the
flesh. She possibly might never be fully handsome, unless the carking
accidents of her daily existence could be evaded before the mobile parts
of her countenance had settled to their final mould.

The sight of the girl made her mother sad--not vaguely but by logical
inference. They both were still in that strait-waistcoat of poverty from
which she had tried so many times to be delivered for the girl's sake.
The woman had long perceived how zealously and constantly the young mind
of her companion was struggling for enlargement; and yet now, in
her eighteenth year, it still remained but little unfolded. The
desire--sober and repressed--of Elizabeth-Jane's heart was indeed to
see, to hear, and to understand. How could she become a woman of wider
knowledge, higher repute--"better," as she termed it--this was her
constant inquiry of her mother. She sought further into things than
other girls in her position ever did, and her mother groaned as she felt
she could not aid in the search.

The sailor, drowned or no, was probably now lost to them; and Susan's
staunch, religious adherence to him as her husband in principle, till
her views had been disturbed by enlightenment, was demanded no more. She
asked herself whether the present moment, now that she was a free woman
again, were not as opportune a one as she would find in a world where
everything had been so inopportune, for making a desperate effort to
advance Elizabeth. To pocket her pride and search for the first husband
seemed, wisely or not, the best initiatory step. He had possibly drunk
himself into his tomb. But he might, on the other hand, have had too
much sense to do so; for in her time with him he had been given to bouts
only, and was not a habitual drunkard.

At any rate, the propriety of returning to him, if he lived, was
unquestionable. The awkwardness of searching for him lay in enlightening
Elizabeth, a proceeding which her mother could not endure to
contemplate. She finally resolved to undertake the search without
confiding to the girl her former relations with Henchard, leaving it to
him if they found him to take what steps he might choose to that
end. This will account for their conversation at the fair and the
half-informed state at which Elizabeth was led onward.

In this attitude they proceeded on their journey, trusting solely to the
dim light afforded of Henchard's whereabouts by the furmity woman. The
strictest economy was indispensable. Sometimes they might have been seen
on foot, sometimes on farmers' waggons, sometimes in carriers' vans; and
thus they drew near to Casterbridge. Elizabeth-Jane discovered to her
alarm that her mother's health was not what it once had been, and there
was ever and anon in her talk that renunciatory tone which showed that,
but for the girl, she would not be very sorry to quit a life she was
growing thoroughly weary of.

It was on a Friday evening, near the middle of September and just before
dusk, that they reached the summit of a hill within a mile of the place
they sought. There were high banked hedges to the coach-road here,
and they mounted upon the green turf within, and sat down. The spot
commanded a full view of the town and its environs.

"What an old-fashioned place it seems to be!" said Elizabeth-Jane, while
her silent mother mused on other things than topography. "It is huddled
all together; and it is shut in by a square wall of trees, like a plot
of garden ground by a box-edging."