The Mayor of Casterbridge

Chapter 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."

Its squareness was, indeed, the characteristic which most

struck the eye in this antiquated borough, the borough of

Casterbridge--at that time, recent as it was, untouched by

the faintest sprinkle of modernism. It was compact as a box

of dominoes. It had no suburbs--in the ordinary sense.

Country and town met at a mathematical line.

To birds of the more soaring kind Casterbridge must have

appeared on this fine evening as a mosaic-work of subdued

reds, browns, greys, and crystals, held together by a

rectangular frame of deep green. To the level eye of

humanity it stood as an indistinct mass behind a dense

stockade of limes and chestnuts, set in the midst of miles

of rotund down and concave field. The mass became gradually

dissected by the vision into towers, gables, chimneys, and

casements, the highest glazings shining bleared and

bloodshot with the coppery fire they caught from the belt of

sunlit cloud in the west.

From the centre of each side of this tree-bound square ran

avenues east, west, and south into the wide expanse of corn-

land and coomb to the distance of a mile or so. It was by

one of these avenues that the pedestrians were about to

enter. Before they had risen to proceed two men passed

outside the hedge, engaged in argumentative conversation.

"Why, surely," said Elizabeth, as they receded, "those men

mentioned the name of Henchard in their talk--the name of

our relative?"

"I thought so too," said Mrs. Newson.

"That seems a hint to us that he is still here."

"Yes."

"Shall I run after them, and ask them about him----"

"No, no, no! Not for the world just yet. He may be in the

workhouse, or in the stocks, for all we know."

"Dear me--why should you think that, mother?"

"'Twas just something to say--that's all! But we must make

private inquiries."

Having sufficiently rested they proceeded on their way at

evenfall. The dense trees of the avenue rendered the road

dark as a tunnel, though the open land on each side was

still under a faint daylight, in other words, they passed

down a midnight between two gloamings. The features of the

town had a keen interest for Elizabeth's mother, now that

the human side came to the fore. As soon as they had

wandered about they could see that the stockade of gnarled

trees which framed in Casterbridge was itself an avenue,

standing on a low green bank or escarpment, with a ditch yet

visible without. Within the avenue and bank was a wall more

or less discontinuous, and within the wall were packed the

abodes of the burghers.

Though the two women did not know it these external features

were but the ancient defences of the town, planted as a

promenade.

The lamplights now glimmered through the engirdling trees,

conveying a sense of great smugness and comfort inside, and

rendering at the same time the unlighted country without

strangely solitary and vacant in aspect, considering its

nearness to life. The difference between burgh and

champaign was increased, too, by sounds which now reached

them above others--the notes of a brass band. The

travellers returned into the High Street, where there were

timber houses with overhanging stories, whose small-paned

lattices were screened by dimity curtains on a drawing-

string, and under whose bargeboards old cobwebs waved in the

breeze. There were houses of brick-nogging, which derived

their chief support from those adjoining. There were slate

roofs patched with tiles, and tile roofs patched with slate,

with occasionally a roof of thatch.

The agricultural and pastoral character of the people upon

whom the town depended for its existence was shown by the

class of objects displayed in the shop windows. Scythes,

reap-hooks, sheep-shears, bill-hooks, spades, mattocks, and

hoes at the iron-monger's; bee-hives, butter-firkins,

churns, milking stools and pails, hay-rakes, field-flagons,

and seed-lips at the cooper's; cart-ropes and plough-harness

at the saddler's; carts, wheel-barrows, and mill-gear at the

wheelwright's and machinist's, horse-embrocations at the

chemist's; at the glover's and leather-cutter's, hedging-

gloves, thatchers' knee-caps, ploughmen's leggings,

villagers' pattens and clogs.

They came to a grizzled church, whose massive square tower

rose unbroken into the darkening sky, the lower parts being

illuminated by the nearest lamps sufficiently to show how

completely the mortar from the joints of the stonework had

been nibbled out by time and weather, which had planted in

the crevices thus made little tufts of stone-crop and grass

almost as far up as the very battlements. From this tower

the clock struck eight, and thereupon a bell began to toll

with a peremptory clang. The curfew was still rung in

Casterbridge, and it was utilized by the inhabitants as a

signal for shutting their shops. No sooner did the deep

notes of the bell throb between the house-fronts than a

clatter of shutters arose through the whole length of the

High Street. In a few minutes business at Casterbridge was

ended for the day.

Other clocks struck eight from time to time--one gloomily

from the gaol, another from the gable of an almshouse, with

a preparative creak of machinery, more audible than the note

of the bell; a row of tall, varnished case-clocks from the

interior of a clock-maker's shop joined in one after another

just as the shutters were enclosing them, like a row of

actors delivering their final speeches before the fall of

the curtain; then chimes were heard stammering out the

Sicilian Mariners' Hymn; so that chronologists of the

advanced school were appreciably on their way to the next

hour before the whole business of the old one was

satisfactorily wound up.

In an open space before the church walked a woman with her

gown-sleeves rolled up so high that the edge of her

underlinen was visible, and her skirt tucked up through her

pocket hole. She carried a load under her arm from which

she was pulling pieces of bread, and handing them to some

other women who walked with her, which pieces they nibbled

critically. The sight reminded Mrs. Henchard-Newson and her

daughter that they had an appetite; and they inquired of the

woman for the nearest baker's.

"Ye may as well look for manna-food as good bread in

Casterbridge just now," she said, after directing them.

"They can blare their trumpets and thump their drums, and

have their roaring dinners"--waving her hand towards a point

further along the street, where the brass band could be seen

standing in front of an illuminated building--"but we must

needs be put-to for want of a wholesome crust. There's less

good bread than good beer in Casterbridge now."

"And less good beer than swipes," said a man with his hands

in his pockets.

"How does it happen there's no good bread?" asked Mrs.

Henchard.

"Oh, 'tis the corn-factor--he's the man that our millers and

bakers all deal wi', and he has sold 'em growed wheat, which

they didn't know was growed, so they SAY, till the dough

ran all over the ovens like quicksilver; so that the loaves

be as fiat as toads, and like suet pudden inside. I've been

a wife, and I've been a mother, and I never see such

unprincipled bread in Casterbridge as this before.--But you

must be a real stranger here not to know what's made all the

poor volks' insides plim like blowed bladders this week?"

"I am," said Elizabeth's mother shyly.

Not wishing to be observed further till she knew more of her

future in this place, she withdrew with her daughter from

the speaker's side. Getting a couple of biscuits at the

shop indicated as a temporary substitute for a meal, they

next bent their steps instinctively to where the music was

playing.