The Mayor of Casterbridge

Chapter 9

When Elizabeth-Jane opened the hinged casement next morning

the mellow air brought in the feel of imminent autumn almost

as distinctly as if she had been in the remotest hamlet.

Casterbridge was the complement of the rural life around,

not its urban opposite. Bees and butterflies in the

cornfields at the top of the town, who desired to get to the

meads at the bottom, took no circuitous course, but flew

straight down High Street without any apparent consciousness

that they were traversing strange latitudes. And in autumn

airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street,

lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains, and

innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the

pavement, and stole through people's doorways into their

passages with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the

skirts of timid visitors.

Hearing voices, one of which was close at hand, she withdrew

her head and glanced from behind the window-curtains. Mr.

Henchard--now habited no longer as a great personage, but as

a thriving man of business--was pausing on his way up the

middle of the street, and the Scotchman was looking from the

window adjoining her own. Henchard it appeared, had gone a

little way past the inn before he had noticed his

acquaintance of the previous evening. He came back a few

steps, Donald Farfrae opening the window further.

"And you are off soon, I suppose?" said Henchard upwards.

"Yes--almost this moment, sir," said the other. "Maybe I'll

walk on till the coach makes up on me."

"Which way?"

"The way ye are going."

"Then shall we walk together to the top o' town?"

"If ye'll wait a minute," said the Scotchman.

In a few minutes the latter emerged, bag in hand. Henchard

looked at the bag as at an enemy. It showed there was no

mistake about the young man's departure. "Ah, my lad," he

said, "you should have been a wise man, and have stayed with

me."

"Yes, yes--it might have been wiser," said Donald, looking

microscopically at the houses that were furthest off. "It

is only telling ye the truth when I say my plans are vague."

They had by this time passed on from the precincts of the

inn, and Elizabeth-Jane heard no more. She saw that they

continued in conversation, Henchard turning to the other

occasionally, and emphasizing some remark with a gesture.

Thus they passed the King's Arms Hotel, the Market House,

St. Peter's churchyard wall, ascending to the upper end of

the long street till they were small as two grains of corn;

when they bent suddenly to the right into the Bristol Road,

and were out of view.

"He was a good man--and he's gone," she said to herself. "I

was nothing to him, and there was no reason why he should

have wished me good-bye."

The simple thought, with its latent sense of slight, had

moulded itself out of the following little fact: when the

Scotchman came out at the door he had by accident glanced up

at her; and then he had looked away again without nodding,

or smiling, or saying a word.

"You are still thinking, mother," she said, when she turned

inwards.

"Yes; I am thinking of Mr. Henchard's sudden liking for that

young man. He was always so. Now, surely, if he takes so

warmly to people who are not related to him at all, may he

not take as warmly to his own kin?"

While they debated this question a procession of five large

waggons went past, laden with hay up to the bedroom windows.

They came in from the country, and the steaming horses had

probably been travelling a great part of the night. To the

shaft of each hung a little board, on which was painted in

white letters, "Henchard, corn-factor and hay-merchant." The

spectacle renewed his wife's conviction that, for her

daughter's sake, she should strain a point to rejoin him.

The discussion was continued during breakfast, and the end

of it was that Mrs. Henchard decided, for good or for ill,

to send Elizabeth-Jane with a message to Henchard, to the

effect that his relative Susan, a sailor's widow, was in the

town; leaving it to him to say whether or not he would

recognize her. What had brought her to this determination

were chiefly two things. He had been described as a lonely

widower; and he had expressed shame for a past transaction

of his life. There was promise in both.

"If he says no," she enjoined, as Elizabeth-Jane stood,

bonnet on, ready to depart; "if he thinks it does not become

the good position he has reached to in the town, to own--to

let us call on him as--his distant kinfolk, say, 'Then, sir,

we would rather not intrude; we will leave Casterbridge as

quietly as we have come, and go back to our own

country.'...I almost feel that I would rather he did say so,

as I have not seen him for so many years, and we are so--

little allied to him!"

"And if he say yes?" inquired the more sanguine one.

"In that case," answered Mrs. Henchard cautiously, "ask him

to write me a note, saying when and how he will see us--or ME."

Elizabeth-Jane went a few steps towards the landing. "And

tell him," continued her mother, "that I fully know I have

no claim upon him--that I am glad to find he is thriving;

that I hope his life may be long and happy--there, go." Thus

with a half-hearted willingness, a smothered reluctance, did

the poor forgiving woman start her unconscious daughter on

this errand.

It was about ten o'clock, and market-day, when Elizabeth

paced up the High Street, in no great hurry; for to herself

her position was only that of a poor relation deputed to

hunt up a rich one. The front doors of the private houses

were mostly left open at this warm autumn time, no thought

of umbrella stealers disturbing the minds of the placid

burgesses. Hence, through the long, straight, entrance

passages thus unclosed could be seen, as through tunnels,

the mossy gardens at the back, glowing with nasturtiums,

fuchsias, scarlet geraniums, "bloody warriors," snapdragons,

and dahlias, this floral blaze being backed by crusted grey

stone-work remaining from a yet remoter Casterbridge than

the venerable one visible in the street. The old-fashioned

fronts of these houses, which had older than old-fashioned

backs, rose sheer from the pavement, into which the bow

windows protruded like bastions, necessitating a pleasing

chassez-dechassez movement to the time-pressed pedestrian

at every few yards. He was bound also to evolve other

Terpsichorean figures in respect of door-steps, scrapers,

cellar-hatches, church buttresses, and the overhanging

angles of walls which, originally unobtrusive, had become

bow-legged and knock-kneed.

In addition to these fixed obstacles which spoke so

cheerfully of individual unrestraint as to boundaries,

movables occupied the path and roadway to a perplexing

extent. First the vans of the carriers in and out of

Casterbridge, who hailed from Mellstock, Weatherbury, The

Hintocks, Sherton-Abbas, Kingsbere, Overcombe, and many

other towns and villages round. Their owners were numerous

enough to be regarded as a tribe, and had almost

distinctiveness enough to be regarded as a race. Their vans

had just arrived, and were drawn up on each side of the

street in close file, so as to form at places a wall between

the pavement and the roadway. Moreover every shop pitched

out half its contents upon trestles and boxes on the kerb,

extending the display each week a little further and further

into the roadway, despite the expostulations of the two

feeble old constables, until there remained but a tortuous

defile for carriages down the centre of the street, which

afforded fine opportunities for skill with the reins. Over

the pavement on the sunny side of the way hung shopblinds so

constructed as to give the passenger's hat a smart buffet

off his head, as from the unseen hands of Cranstoun's Goblin

Page, celebrated in romantic lore.

Horses for sale were tied in rows, their forelegs on the

pavement, their hind legs in the street, in which position

they occasionally nipped little boys by the shoulder who

were passing to school. And any inviting recess in front of

a house that had been modestly kept back from the general

line was utilized by pig-dealers as a pen for their stock.

The yeomen, farmers, dairymen, and townsfolk, who came to

transact business in these ancient streets, spoke in other

ways than by articulation. Not to hear the words of your

interlocutor in metropolitan centres is to know nothing of

his meaning. Here the face, the arms, the hat, the stick,

the body throughout spoke equally with the tongue. To

express satisfaction the Casterbridge market-man added to

his utterance a broadening of the cheeks, a crevicing of the

eyes, a throwing back of the shoulders, which was

intelligible from the other end of the street. If he

wondered, though all Henchard's carts and waggons were

rattling past him, you knew it from perceiving the inside of

his crimson mouth, and a target-like circling of his eyes.

Deliberation caused sundry attacks on the moss of adjoining

walls with the end of his stick, a change of his hat from

the horizontal to the less so; a sense of tediousness

announced itself in a lowering of the person by spreading

the knees to a lozenge-shaped aperture and contorting the

arms. Chicanery, subterfuge, had hardly a place in the

streets of this honest borough to all appearance; and it was

said that the lawyers in the Court House hard by

occasionally threw in strong arguments for the other side

out of pure generosity (though apparently by mischance) when

advancing their own.

Thus Casterbridge was in most respects but the pole, focus,

or nerve-knot of the surrounding country life; differing

from the many manufacturing towns which are as foreign

bodies set down, like boulders on a plain, in a green world

with which they have nothing in common. Casterbridge lived

by agriculture at one remove further from the fountainhead

than the adjoining villages--no more. The townsfolk

understood every fluctuation in the rustic's condition, for

it affected their receipts as much as the labourer's; they

entered into the troubles and joys which moved the

aristocratic families ten miles round--for the same reason.

And even at the dinner-parties of the professional families

the subjects of discussion were corn, cattle-disease, sowing

and reaping, fencing and planting; while politics were

viewed by them less from their own standpoint of burgesses

with rights and privileges than from the standpoint of their

country neighbours.

All the venerable contrivances and confusions which

delighted the eye by their quaintness, and in a measure

reasonableness, in this rare old market-town, were

metropolitan novelties to the unpractised eyes of Elizabeth-

Jane, fresh from netting fish-seines in a seaside cottage.

Very little inquiry was necessary to guide her footsteps.

Henchard's house was one of the best, faced with dull red-

and-grey old brick. The front door was open, and, as in

other houses, she could see through the passage to the end

of the garden--nearly a quarter of a mile off.

Mr. Henchard was not in the house, but in the store-yard.

She was conducted into the mossy garden, and through a door

in the wall, which was studded with rusty nails speaking of

generations of fruit-trees that had been trained there. The

door opened upon the yard, and here she was left to find him

as she could. It was a place flanked by hay-barns, into

which tons of fodder, all in trusses, were being packed from

the waggons she had seen pass the inn that morning. On

other sides of the yard were wooden granaries on stone

staddles, to which access was given by Flemish ladders, and

a store-house several floors high. Wherever the doors of

these places were open, a closely packed throng of bursting

wheat-sacks could be seen standing inside, with the air of

awaiting a famine that would not come.

She wandered about this place, uncomfortably conscious of

the impending interview, till she was quite weary of

searching; she ventured to inquire of a boy in what quarter

Mr. Henchard could be found. He directed her to an office

which she had not seen before, and knocking at the door she

was answered by a cry of "Come in."

Elizabeth turned the handle; and there stood before her,

bending over some sample-bags on a table, not the corn-

merchant, but the young Scotchman Mr. Farfrae--in the act of

pouring some grains of wheat from one hand to the other.

His hat hung on a peg behind him, and the roses of his

carpet-bag glowed from the corner of the room.

Having toned her feelings and arranged words on her lips for

Mr. Henchard, and for him alone, she was for the moment

confounded.

"Yes, what it is?" said the Scotchman, like a man who

permanently ruled there.

She said she wanted to see Mr. Henchard.

"Ah, yes; will you wait a minute? He's engaged just now,"

said the young man, apparently not recognizing her as the

girl at the inn. He handed her a chair, bade her sit down

and turned to his sample-bags again. While Elizabeth-Jane

sits waiting in great amaze at the young man's presence we

may briefly explain how he came there.

When the two new acquaintances had passed out of sight that

morning towards the Bath and Bristol road they went on

silently, except for a few commonplaces, till they had gone

down an avenue on the town walls called the Chalk Walk,

leading to an angle where the North and West escarpments

met. From this high corner of the square earthworks a vast

extent of country could be seen. A footpath ran steeply

down the green slope, conducting from the shady promenade on

the walls to a road at the bottom of the scarp. It was by

this path the Scotchman had to descend.

"Well, here's success to 'ee," said Henchard, holding out

his right hand and leaning with his left upon the wicket

which protected the descent. In the act there was the

inelegance of one whose feelings are nipped and wishes

defeated. "I shall often think of this time, and of how you

came at the very moment to throw a light upon my

difficulty."

Still holding the young man's hand he paused, and then added

deliberately: "Now I am not the man to let a cause be lost

for want of a word. And before ye are gone for ever I'll

speak. Once more, will ye stay? There it is, flat and

plain. You can see that it isn't all selfishness that makes

me press 'ee; for my business is not quite so scientific as

to require an intellect entirely out of the common. Others

would do for the place without doubt. Some selfishness

perhaps there is, but there is more; it isn't for me to

repeat what. Come bide with me--and name your own terms.

I'll agree to 'em willingly and 'ithout a word of

gainsaying; for, hang it, Farfrae, I like thee well!"

The young man's hand remained steady in Henchard's for a

moment or two. He looked over the fertile country that

stretched beneath them, then backward along the shaded walk

reaching to the top of the town. His face flushed.

"I never expected this--I did not!" he said. "It's

Providence! Should any one go against it? No; I'll not go to

America; I'll stay and be your man!"

His hand, which had lain lifeless in Henchard's, returned

the latter's grasp.

"Done," said Henchard.

"Done," said Donald Farfrae.

The face of Mr. Henchard beamed forth a satisfaction that

was almost fierce in its strength. "Now you are my friend!"

he exclaimed. "Come back to my house; let's clinch it at

once by clear terms, so as to be comfortable in our minds."

Farfrae caught up his bag and retraced the North-West Avenue

in Henchard's company as he had come. Henchard was all

confidence now.

"I am the most distant fellow in the world when I don't care

for a man," he said. "But when a man takes my fancy he

takes it strong. Now I am sure you can eat another

breakfast? You couldn't have eaten much so early, even if

they had anything at that place to gi'e thee, which they

hadn't; so come to my house and we will have a solid,

staunch tuck-in, and settle terms in black-and-white if you

like; though my word's my bond. I can always make a good

meal in the morning. I've got a splendid cold pigeon-pie

going just now. You can have some home-brewed if you want

to, you know."

"It is too airly in the morning for that," said Farfrae with

a smile.

"Well, of course, I didn't know. I don't drink it because

of my oath, but I am obliged to brew for my work-people."

Thus talking they returned, and entered Henchard's premises

by the back way or traffic entrance. Here the matter was

settled over the breakfast, at which Henchard heaped the

young Scotchman's plate to a prodigal fulness. He would not

rest satisfied till Farfrae had written for his luggage from

Bristol, and dispatched the letter to the post-office. When

it was done this man of strong impulses declared that his

new friend should take up his abode in his house--at least

till some suitable lodgings could be found.

He then took Farfrae round and showed him the place, and the

stores of grain, and other stock; and finally entered the

offices where the younger of them has already been

discovered by Elizabeth.