The Mayor of Casterbridge

Chapter 8

Thus they parted; and Elizabeth-Jane and her mother remained

each in her thoughts over their meal, the mother's face

being strangely bright since Henchard's avowal of shame for

a past action. The quivering of the partition to its core

presented denoted that Donald Farfrae had again rung his

bell, no doubt to have his supper removed; for humming a

tune, and walking up and down, he seemed to be attracted by

the lively bursts of conversation and melody from the

general company below. He sauntered out upon the landing,

and descended the staircase.

When Elizabeth-Jane had carried down his supper tray, and

also that used by her mother and herself, she found the

bustle of serving to be at its height below, as it always

was at this hour. The young woman shrank from having

anything to do with the ground-floor serving, and crept

silently about observing the scene--so new to her, fresh

from the seclusion of a seaside cottage. In the general

sitting-room, which was large, she remarked the two or three

dozen strong-backed chairs that stood round against the

wall, each fitted with its genial occupant; the sanded

floor; the black settle which, projecting endwise from the

wall within the door, permitted Elizabeth to be a spectator

of all that went on without herself being particularly seen.

The young Scotchman had just joined the guests. These, in

addition to the respectable master-tradesmen occupying the

seats of privileges in the bow-window and its neighbourhood,

included an inferior set at the unlighted end, whose seats

were mere benches against the wall, and who drank from cups

instead of from glasses. Among the latter she noticed some

of those personages who had stood outside the windows of the

King's Arms.

Behind their backs was a small window, with a wheel

ventilator in one of the panes, which would suddenly start

off spinning with a jingling sound, as suddenly stop, and as

suddenly start again.

While thus furtively making her survey the opening words of

a song greeted her ears from the front of the settle, in a

melody and accent of peculiar charm. There had been some

singing before she came down; and now the Scotchman had made

himself so soon at home that, at the request of some of the

master-tradesmen, he, too, was favouring the room with a

ditty.

Elizabeth-Jane was fond of music; she could not help pausing

to listen; and the longer she listened the more she was

enraptured. She had never heard any singing like this and

it was evident that the majority of the audience had not

heard such frequently, for they were attentive to a much

greater degree than usual. They neither whispered, nor

drank, nor dipped their pipe-stems in their ale to moisten

them, nor pushed the mug to their neighbours. The singer

himself grew emotional, till she could imagine a tear in his

eye as the words went on:--

"It's hame, and it's hame, hame fain would I be,

O hame, hame, hame to my ain countree!

There's an eye that ever weeps, and a fair face will be fain,

As I pass through Annan Water with my bonnie bands again;

When the flower is in the bud, and the leaf upon the tree,

The lark shall sing me hame to my ain countree!"

There was a burst of applause, and a deep silence which was

even more eloquent than the applause. It was of such a kind

that the snapping of a pipe-stem too long for him by old

Solomon Longways, who was one of those gathered at the shady

end of the room, seemed a harsh and irreverent act. Then

the ventilator in the window-pane spasmodically started off

for a new spin, and the pathos of Donald's song was

temporarily effaced.

"'Twas not amiss--not at all amiss!" muttered Christopher

Coney, who was also present. And removing his pipe a

finger's breadth from his lips, he said aloud, "Draw on with

the next verse, young gentleman, please."

"Yes. Let's have it again, stranger," said the glazier, a

stout, bucket-headed man, with a white apron rolled up round

his waist. "Folks don't lift up their hearts like that in

this part of the world." And turning aside, he said in

undertones, "Who is the young man?--Scotch, d'ye say?"

"Yes, straight from the mountains of Scotland, I believe,"

replied Coney.

Young Farfrae repeated the last verse. It was plain that

nothing so pathetic had been heard at the Three Mariners for

a considerable time. The difference of accent, the

excitability of the singer, the intense local feeling, and

the seriousness with which he worked himself up to a climax,

surprised this set of worthies, who were only too prone to

shut up their emotions with caustic words.

"Danged if our country down here is worth singing about like

that!" continued the glazier, as the Scotchman again

melodized with a dying fall, "My ain countree!" "When you

take away from among us the fools and the rogues, and the

lammigers, and the wanton hussies, and the slatterns, and

such like, there's cust few left to ornament a song with in

Casterbridge, or the country round."

"True," said Buzzford, the dealer, looking at the grain of

the table. "Casterbridge is a old, hoary place o'

wickedness, by all account. 'Tis recorded in history that

we rebelled against the King one or two hundred years ago,

in the time of the Romans, and that lots of us was hanged on

Gallows Hill, and quartered, and our different jints sent

about the country like butcher's meat; and for my part I can

well believe it."

"What did ye come away from yer own country for, young

maister, if ye be so wownded about it?" inquired Christopher

Coney, from the background, with the tone of a man who

preferred the original subject. "Faith, it wasn't worth

your while on our account, for as Maister Billy Wills says,

we be bruckle folk here--the best o' us hardly honest

sometimes, what with hard winters, and so many mouths to

fill, and Goda'mighty sending his little taties so terrible

small to fill 'em with. We don't think about flowers and

fair faces, not we--except in the shape o' cauliflowers and

pigs' chaps."

"But, no!" said Donald Farfrae, gazing round into their

faces with earnest concern; "the best of ye hardly honest--

not that surely? None of ye has been stealing what didn't

belong to him?"

"Lord! no, no!" said Solomon Longways, smiling grimly.

"That's only his random way o' speaking. 'A was always such

a man of underthoughts." (And reprovingly towards

Christopher): "Don't ye be so over-familiar with a gentleman

that ye know nothing of--and that's travelled a'most from

the North Pole."

Christopher Coney was silenced, and as he could get no

public sympathy, he mumbled his feelings to himself: "Be

dazed, if I loved my country half as well as the young

feller do, I'd live by claning my neighbour's pigsties afore

I'd go away! For my part I've no more love for my country

than I have for Botany Bay!"

"Come," said Longways; "let the young man draw onward with

his ballet, or we shall be here all night."

"That's all of it," said the singer apologetically.

"Soul of my body, then we'll have another!" said the general

dealer.

"Can you turn a strain to the ladies, sir?" inquired a fat

woman with a figured purple apron, the waiststring of which

was overhung so far by her sides as to be invisible.

"Let him breathe--let him breathe, Mother Cuxsom. He hain't

got his second wind yet," said the master glazier.

"Oh yes, but I have!" exclaimed the young man; and he at

once rendered "O Nannie" with faultless modulations, and

another or two of the like sentiment, winding up at their

earnest request with "Auld Lang Syne."

By this time he had completely taken possession of the

hearts of the Three Mariners' inmates, including even old

Coney. Notwithstanding an occasional odd gravity which

awoke their sense of the ludicrous for the moment, they

began to view him through a golden haze which the tone of

his mind seemed to raise around him. Casterbridge had

sentiment--Casterbridge had romance; but this stranger's

sentiment was of differing quality. Or rather, perhaps, the

difference was mainly superficial; he was to them like the

poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm;

who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what

all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.

The silent landlord came and leant over the settle while the

young man sang; and even Mrs. Stannidge managed to unstick

herself from the framework of her chair in the bar and get

as far as the door-post, which movement she accomplished by

rolling herself round, as a cask is trundled on the chine by

a drayman without losing much of its perpendicular.

"And are you going to bide in Casterbridge, sir?" she asked.

"Ah--no!" said the Scotchman, with melancholy fatality in

his voice, "I'm only passing thirrough! I am on my way to

Bristol, and on frae there to foreign parts."

"We be truly sorry to hear it," said Solomon Longways. "We

can ill afford to lose tuneful wynd-pipes like yours when

they fall among us. And verily, to mak' acquaintance with a

man a-come from so far, from the land o' perpetual snow, as

we may say, where wolves and wild boars and other dangerous

animalcules be as common as blackbirds here-about--why, 'tis

a thing we can't do every day; and there's good sound

information for bide-at-homes like we when such a man opens

his mouth."

"Nay, but ye mistake my country," said the young man,

looking round upon them with tragic fixity, till his eye

lighted up and his cheek kindled with a sudden enthusiasm to

right their errors. "There are not perpetual snow and

wolves at all in it!--except snow in winter, and--well--a

little in summer just sometimes, and a 'gaberlunzie' or two

stalking about here and there, if ye may call them

dangerous. Eh, but you should take a summer jarreny to

Edinboro', and Arthur's Seat, and all round there, and then

go on to the lochs, and all the Highland scenery--in May and

June--and you would never say 'tis the land of wolves and

perpetual snow!"

"Of course not--it stands to reason," said Buzzford. "'Tis

barren ignorance that leads to such words. He's a simple

home-spun man, that never was fit for good company--think

nothing of him, sir."

"And do ye carry your flock bed, and your quilt, and your

crock, and your bit of chiney? or do ye go in bare bones, as

I may say?" inquired Christopher Coney.

"I've sent on my luggage--though it isn't much; for the

voyage is long." Donald's eyes dropped into a remote gaze as

he added: "But I said to myself, 'Never a one of the prizes

of life will I come by unless I undertake it!' and I decided

to go."

A general sense of regret, in which Elizabeth-Jane shared

not least, made itself apparent in the company. As she

looked at Farfrae from the back of the settle she decided

that his statements showed him to be no less thoughtful than

his fascinating melodies revealed him to be cordial and

impassioned. She admired the serious light in which he

looked at serious things. He had seen no jest in

ambiguities and roguery, as the Casterbridge toss-pots had

done; and rightly not--there was none. She disliked those

wretched humours of Christopher Coney and his tribe; and he

did not appreciate them. He seemed to feel exactly as she

felt about life and its surroundings--that they were a

tragical rather than a comical thing; that though one could

be gay on occasion, moments of gaiety were interludes, and

no part of the actual drama. It was extraordinary how

similar their views were.

Though it was still early the young Scotchman expressed his

wish to retire, whereupon the landlady whispered to

Elizabeth to run upstairs and turn down his bed. She took a

candlestick and proceeded on her mission, which was the act

of a few moments only. When, candle in hand, she reached

the top of the stairs on her way down again, Mr. Farfrae was

at the foot coming up. She could not very well retreat;

they met and passed in the turn of the staircase.

She must have appeared interesting in some way--not-

withstanding her plain dress--or rather, possibly, in

consequence of it, for she was a girl characterized by

earnestness and soberness of mien, with which simple drapery

accorded well. Her face flushed, too, at the slight

awkwardness of the meeting, and she passed him with her eyes

bent on the candle-flame that she carried just below her

nose. Thus it happened that when confronting her he smiled;

and then, with the manner of a temporarily light-hearted

man, who has started himself on a flight of song whose

momentum he cannot readily check, he softly tuned an old

ditty that she seemed to suggest--

"As I came in by my bower door,

As day was waxin' wearie,

Oh wha came tripping down the stair

But bonnie Peg my dearie."

Elizabeth-Jane, rather disconcerted, hastened on; and the

Scotchman's voice died away, humming more of the same within

the closed door of his room.

Here the scene and sentiment ended for the present. When

soon after, the girl rejoined her mother, the latter was

still in thought--on quite another matter than a young man's

song.

"We've made a mistake," she whispered (that the Scotch-man

might not overhear). "On no account ought ye to have helped

serve here to-night. Not because of ourselves, but for the

sake of him. If he should befriend us, and take us up, and

then find out what you did when staying here, 'twould grieve

and wound his natural pride as Mayor of the town."

Elizabeth, who would perhaps have been more alarmed at this

than her mother had she known the real relationship, was not

much disturbed about it as things stood. Her "he" was

another man than her poor mother's. "For myself," she said,

"I didn't at all mind waiting a little upon him. He's so

respectable, and educated--far above the rest of 'em in the

inn. They thought him very simple not to know their grim

broad way of talking about themselves here. But of course

he didn't know--he was too refined in his mind to know such

things!" Thus she earnestly pleaded.

Meanwhile, the "he" of her mother was not so far away as

even they thought. After leaving the Three Mariners he had

sauntered up and down the empty High Street, passing and

repassing the inn in his promenade. When the Scotchman sang

his voice had reached Henchard's ears through the heart-

shaped holes in the window-shutters, and had led him to

pause outside them a long while.

"To be sure, to be sure, how that fellow does draw me!" he

had said to himself. "I suppose 'tis because I'm so lonely.

I'd have given him a third share in the business to have

stayed!"