The Mayor of Casterbridge
reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on
the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a
sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated in
at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by; and at
executions the waiting crowd stood in a meadow immediately before the
drop, out of which the cows had been temporarily driven to give the
spectators room.
The corn grown on the upland side of the borough was garnered by
farmers who lived in an eastern purlieu called Durnover. Here
wheat-ricks overhung the old Roman street, and thrust their eaves
against the church tower; green-thatched barns, with doorways as high
as the gates of Solomon’s temple, opened directly upon the main
thoroughfare. Barns indeed were so numerous as to alternate with every
half-dozen houses along the way. Here lived burgesses who daily walked
the fallow; shepherds in an intra-mural squeeze. A street of farmers’
homesteads—a street ruled by a mayor and corporation, yet echoing with
the thump of the flail, the flutter of the winnowing-fan, and the purr
of the milk into the pails—a street which had nothing urban in it
whatever—this was the Durnover end of Casterbridge.
Henchard, as was natural, dealt largely with this nursery or bed of
small farmers close at hand—and his waggons were often down that way.
One day, when arrangements were in progress for getting home corn from
one of the aforesaid farms, Elizabeth-Jane received a note by hand,
asking her to oblige the writer by coming at once to a granary on
Durnover Hill. As this was the granary whose contents Henchard was
removing, she thought the request had something to do with his
business, and proceeded thither as soon as she had put on her bonnet.
The granary was just within the farm-yard, and stood on stone staddles,
high enough for persons to walk under. The gates were open, but nobody
was within. However, she entered and waited. Presently she saw a figure
approaching the gate—that of Donald Farfrae. He looked up at the church
clock, and came in. By some unaccountable shyness, some wish not to
meet him there alone, she quickly ascended the step-ladder leading to
the granary door, and entered it before he had seen her. Farfrae
advanced, imagining himself in solitude, and a few drops of rain
beginning to fall he moved and stood under the shelter where she had
just been standing. Here he leant against one of the staddles, and gave
himself up to patience. He, too, was plainly expecting some one; could
it be herself? If so, why? In a few minutes he looked at his watch, and
then pulled out a note, a duplicate of the one she had herself
received.
This situation began to be very awkward, and the longer she waited the
more awkward it became. To emerge from a door just above his head and
descend the ladder, and show she had been in hiding there, would look
so very foolish that she still waited on. A winnowing machine stood
close beside her, and to relieve her suspense she gently moved the
handle; whereupon a cloud of wheat husks flew out into her face, and
covered her clothes and bonnet, and stuck into the fur of her
victorine. He must have heard the slight movement for he looked up, and
then ascended the steps.
“Ah—it’s Miss Newson,” he said as soon as he could see into the
granary. “I didn’t know you were there. I have kept the appointment,
and am at your service.”
“O Mr. Farfrae,” she faltered, “so have I. But I didn’t know it was you
who wished to see me, otherwise I—”
“I wished to see you? O no—at least, that is, I am afraid there may be
a mistake.”
“Didn’t you ask me to come here? Didn’t you write this?” Elizabeth held
out her note.
“No. Indeed, at no hand would I have thought of it! And for you—didn’t
you ask me? This is not your writing?” And he held up his.
“By no means.”
“And is that really so! Then it’s somebody wanting to see us both.
Perhaps we would do well to wait a little longer.”
Acting on this consideration they lingered, Elizabeth-Jane’s face being
arranged to an expression of preternatural composure, and the young
Scot, at every footstep in the street without, looking from under the
granary to see if the passer were about to enter and declare himself
their summoner. They watched individual drops of rain creeping down the
thatch of the opposite rick—straw after straw—till they reached the
bottom; but nobody came, and the granary roof began to drip.
“The person is not likely to be coming,” said Farfrae. “It’s a trick
perhaps, and if so, it’s a great pity to waste our time like this, and
so much to be done.”
“’Tis a great liberty,” said Elizabeth.
“It’s true, Miss Newson. We’ll hear news of this some day depend on’t,
and who it was that did it. I wouldn’t stand for it hindering myself;
but you, Miss Newson——”
“I don’t mind—much,” she replied.
“Neither do I.”
They lapsed again into silence. “You are anxious to get back to
Scotland, I suppose, Mr. Farfrae?” she inquired.
“O no, Miss Newson. Why would I be?”
“I only supposed you might be from the song you sang at the Three
Mariners—about Scotland and home, I mean—which you seemed to feel so
deep down in your heart; so that we all felt for you.”
“Ay—and I did sing there—I did—— But, Miss Newson”—and Donald’s voice
musically undulated between two semi-tones as it always did when he
became earnest—“it’s well you feel a song for a few minutes, and your
eyes they get quite tearful; but you finish it, and for all you felt
you don’t mind it or think of it again for a long while. O no, I don’t
want to go back! Yet I’ll sing the song to you wi’ pleasure whenever
you like. I could sing it now, and not mind at all?”
“Thank you, indeed. But I fear I must go—rain or no.”
“Ay! Then, Miss Newson, ye had better say nothing about this hoax, and
take no heed of it. And if the person should say anything to you, be
civil to him or her, as if you did not mind it—so you’ll take the
clever person’s laugh away.” In speaking his eyes became fixed upon her
dress, still sown with wheat husks. “There’s husks and dust on you.
Perhaps you don’t know it?” he said, in tones of extreme delicacy. “And
it’s very bad to let rain come upon clothes when there’s chaff on them.
It washes in and spoils them. Let me help you—blowing is the best.”
As Elizabeth neither assented nor dissented Donald Farfrae began
blowing her back hair, and her side hair, and her neck, and the crown
of her bonnet, and the fur of her victorine, Elizabeth saying, “O,
thank you,” at every puff. At last she was fairly clean, though
Farfrae, having got over his first concern at the situation, seemed in
no manner of hurry to be gone.
“Ah—now I’ll go and get ye an umbrella,” he said.
She declined the offer, stepped out and was gone. Farfrae walked slowly
after, looking thoughtfully at her diminishing figure, and whistling in
undertones, “As I came down through Cannobie.”
XV.
At first Miss Newson’s budding beauty was not regarded with much
interest by anybody in Casterbridge. Donald Farfrae’s gaze, it is true,
was now attracted by the Mayor’s so-called stepdaughter, but he was
only one. The truth is that she was but a poor illustrative instance of
the prophet Baruch’s sly definition: “The virgin that loveth to go
gay.”
When she walked abroad she seemed to be occupied with an inner chamber
of ideas, and to have slight need for visible objects. She formed
curious resolves on checking gay fancies in the matter of clothes,
because it was inconsistent with her past life to blossom gaudily the
moment she had become possessed of money. But nothing is more insidious
than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere
wishes. Henchard gave Elizabeth-Jane a box of delicately-tinted gloves
one spring day. She wanted to wear them to show her appreciation of his
kindness, but she had no bonnet that would harmonize. As an artistic
indulgence she thought she would have such a bonnet. When she had a
bonnet that would go with the gloves she had no dress that would go
with the bonnet. It was now absolutely necessary to finish; she ordered
the requisite article, and found that she had no sunshade to go with
the dress. In for a penny in for a pound; she bought the sunshade, and
the whole structure was at last complete.
Everybody was attracted, and some said that her bygone simplicity was
the art that conceals art, the “delicate imposition” of Rochefoucauld;
she had produced an effect, a contrast, and it had been done on
purpose. As a matter of fact this was not true, but it had its result;
for as soon as Casterbridge thought her artful it thought her worth
notice. “It is the first time in my life that I have been so much
admired,” she said to herself; “though perhaps it is by those whose
admiration is not worth having.”
But Donald Farfrae admired her, too; and altogether the time was an
exciting one; sex had never before asserted itself in her so strongly,
for in former days she had perhaps been too impersonally human to be
distinctively feminine. After an unprecedented success one day she came
indoors, went upstairs, and leant upon her bed face downwards quite
forgetting the possible creasing and damage. “Good Heaven,” she
whispered, “can it be? Here am I setting up as the town beauty!”
When she had thought it over, her usual fear of exaggerating
appearances engendered a deep sadness. “There is something wrong in all
this,” she mused. “If they only knew what an unfinished girl I am—that
I can’t talk Italian, or use globes, or show any of the accomplishments
they learn at boarding schools, how they would despise me! Better sell
all this finery and buy myself grammar-books and dictionaries and a
history of all the philosophies!”
She looked from the window and saw Henchard and Farfrae in the hay-yard
talking, with that impetuous cordiality on the Mayor’s part, and genial
modesty on the younger man’s, that was now so generally observable in
their intercourse. Friendship between man and man; what a rugged
strength there was in it, as evinced by these two. And yet the seed
that was to lift the foundation of this friendship was at that moment
taking root in a chink of its structure.
It was about six o’clock; the men were dropping off homeward one by
one. The last to leave was a round-shouldered, blinking young man of
nineteen or twenty, whose mouth fell ajar on the slightest provocation,
seemingly because there was no chin to support it. Henchard called
aloud to him as he went out of the gate, “Here—Abel Whittle!”
Whittle turned, and ran back a few steps. “Yes, sir,” he said, in
breathless deprecation, as if he knew what was coming next.
“Once more—be in time to-morrow morning. You see what’s to be done, and
you hear what I say, and you know I’m not going to be trifled with any
longer.”
“Yes, sir.” Then Abel Whittle left, and Henchard and Farfrae; and
Elizabeth saw no more of them.
Now there was good reason for this command on Henchard’s part. Poor
Abel, as he was called, had an inveterate habit of over-sleeping
himself and coming late to his work. His anxious will was to be among
the earliest; but if his comrades omitted to pull the string that he
always tied round his great toe and left hanging out the window for
that purpose, his will was as wind. He did not arrive in time.
As he was often second hand at the hay-weighing, or at the crane which
lifted the sacks, or was one of those who had to accompany the waggons
into the country to fetch away stacks that had been purchased, this
affliction of Abel’s was productive of much inconvenience. For two
mornings in the present week he had kept the others waiting nearly an
hour; hence Henchard’s threat. It now remained to be seen what would
happen to-morrow.