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‘True … But there’s great strength in hope. Knowing that in four-and-twenty months’ time ye’ll be out of your bondage, and able to make up for all you’ve suffered, by partaking without stint—why, it keeps a man up, no doubt.’
‘No doubt, Christopher Coney, no doubt. And ’a must need such reflections—a lonely widow man,’ says Longways.
‘When did he lose his wife?’ asked Elizabeth.
‘I never knowed her. ’Twas afore he came to Casterbridge,’ Solomon Longways replied with terminative emphasis, as if the fact of his ignorance of Mrs Henchard were sufficient to deprive her history of all interest. ‘But I know that ’a’s a banded teetotaller, and that if any of his men be ever so little overtook by a drop he’s down upon ’em as stern as the Lord upon the jovial Jews.’
‘Has he many men, then?’ said Elizabeth-Jane.
‘Many! Why, my good maid, he’s the powerfullest member of the Town Council, and quite a principal man in the country round besides. Never a big dealing in wheat, barley, oats, hay, roots, and such-like but Henchard’s got a hand in it. Ay, and he’ll go into other things too; and that’s where he makes his mistake. He worked his way up from nothing when ’a came here; and now he’s a pillar of the town. Not but what he’s been shaken a little to-year about this bad corn he has supplied in his contracts. I’ve seen the sun rise over Durnover Moor these nine-and-sixty year, and though Mr Henchard has never cussed me unfairly ever since I’ve worked for’n, seeing I be but a little small man, I must say that I have never before tasted such rough bread as has been made from Henchard’s wheat lately. ’Tis that growed out that ye could a’most call it malt, and there’s a list at bottom o’ the loaf as thick as the sole of one’s shoe.
The band now struck up another melody, and by the time it was ended the dinner was over, and speeches began to be made. The evening being calm, and the windows still open, these orations could be distinctly heard. Henchard’s voice arose above the rest; he was telling a story of his hay-dealing experiences, in which he had outwitted a sharper who had been bent upon outwitting him.
‘Ha-ha-ha!’ responded his audience at the upshot of the story; and hilarity was general till a new voice arose with, ‘This is all very well; but how about the bad bread?’
It came from the lower end of the table, where there sat a group of minor tradesmen who, although part of the company, appeared to be a little below the social level of the others; and who seemed to nourish a certain independence of opinion and carry on discussions not quite in harmony with those at the head; just as the west end of a church is sometimes persistently found to sing out of time and tune with the leading spirits in the chancel.
This interruption about the bad bread afforded infinite satisfaction to the loungers outside, several of whom were in the mood which finds its pleasure in others’ discomfiture; and hence they echoed pretty freely, ‘Hey! How about the bad bread, Mr Mayor?’ Moreover, feeling none of the restraints of those who shared the feast, they could afford to add, ‘You rather ought to tell the story o’ that, sir!’
The interruption was sufficient to compel the Mayor to notice it.
‘Well, I admit that the wheat turned out badly,’ he said. ‘But I was taken in in buying it as much as the bakers who bought it o’ me.’
‘And the poor folk who had to eat it whether or no,’ said the inharmonious man outside the window.
Henchard’s face darkened. There was temper under the thin bland surface—the temper which, artificially intensified, had banished a wife nearly a score of years before.
‘You must make allowances for the accidents of a large business,’ he said, ‘You must bear in mind that the weather just at the harvest of that corn was worse than we have known it for years. However, I have mended my arrangements on account o’t. Since I have found my business too large to be well looked after by myself alone, I have advertised for a thorough good man as manager of the corn department. When I’ve got him you will find these mistakes will no longer occur—matters will be better looked into.’
‘But what are you going to do to repay us for the past?’ inquired the man who had before spoken, and who seemed to be a baker or miller. ‘Will you replace the grown flour we’ve still got by sound grain?’
Henchard’s face had become still more stern at these interruptions, and he drank from his tumbler of water as if to calm himself or gain time. Instead of vouchsafing a direct reply, he stiffly observed—
‘If anybody will tell me how to turn grown wheat into wholesome wheat I’ll take it back with pleasure. But it can’t be done.’
Henchard was not to be drawn again. Having said this, he sat down.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_ebf07074-363c-5a94-8e31-86bcf806ecf6)
Now the group outside the window had within the last few minutes been reinforced by new arrivals, some of them respectable shopkeepers and their assistants, who had come out for a whiff of air after putting up the shutters for the night; some of them of a lower class. Distinct from either there appeared a stranger—a young man of remarkably pleasant aspect—who carried in his hand a carpet-bag of the smart floral pattern prevalent in such articles at that time.
He was ruddy and of a fair countenance, bright-eyed, and slight in build. He might possibly have passed by without stopping at all, or at most for half a minute to glance in at the scene, had not his advent coincided with the discussion on corn and bread; in which event this history had never been enacted. But the subject seemed to arrest him, and he whispered some inquiries of the other bystanders, and remained listening.
When he heard Henchard’s closing words, ‘It can’t be done’, he smiled impulsively, drew out his pocket-book, and wrote down a few words by the aid of the light in the window. He tore out the leaf, folded and directed it, and seemed about to throw it in through the open sash upon the dining-table; but, on second thoughts, edged himself through the loiterers, till he reached the door of the hotel, where one of the waiters who had been serving inside was now idly leaning against the doorpost.
‘Give this to the Mayor at once,’ he said, handing in his hasty note.
Elizabeth-Jane had seen his movements and heard the words, which attracted her both by their subject and by their accent—a strange one for those parts. It was quaint and northerly.
The waiter took the note, while the young stranger continued—
‘And can ye tell me of a respectable hotel that’s a little more moderate than this?’
The waiter glanced indifferently up and down the street.
‘They say the Three Mariners, just below here, is a very good place,’ he languidly answered; ‘but I have never stayed there myself.’
The Scotchman, as he seemed to be, thanked him, and strolled on in the direction of the Three Mariners aforesaid, apparently more concerned about the question of an inn than about the fate of his note, now that the momentary impulse of writing it was over. While he was disappearing slowly down the street the waiter left the door, and Elizabeth-Jane saw with some interest the note brought into the dining-room and handed to the Mayor.
Henchard looked at it carelessly, unfolded it with one hand, and glanced it through. Thereupon it was curious to note an unexpected effect. The nettled, clouded aspect which had held possession of his face since the subject of his corn-dealings had been broached, changed itself into one of arrested attention. He read the note slowly, and fell into thought, not moody, but fitfully intense, as that of a man who has been captured by an idea.
By this time toasts and speeches had given place to songs, the wheat subject being quite forgotten. Men were putting their heads together in twos and threes, telling good stories, with pantomimic laughter which reached convulsive grimace. Some were beginning to look as if they did not know how they had come there, what they had come for, or how they were going to get home again; and provisionally sat on with a dazed smile. Square-built men showed a tendency to become hunchbacks; men with dignified presence lost it in a curious obliquity of figure, in which their features grew disarranged and one-sided; whilst the heads of a few who had dined with extreme thoroughness were somehow sinking into their shoulders, the corners of their mouth and eyes being bent upwards by the subsidence. Only Henchard did not conform to these flexuous changes; he remained stately and vertical, silently thinking.
The clock struck nine. Elizabeth-Jane turned to her companion. ‘The evening is drawing on, mother,’ she said. ‘What do you propose to do?’
She was surprised to find how irresolute her mother had become. ‘We must get a place to lie down in,’ she murmured. ‘I have seen—Mr Henchard; and that’s all I wanted to do.’
‘That’s enough for tonight, at any rate,’ Elizabeth-Jane replied soothingly. ‘We can think tomorrow what is best to do about him. The question now is—is it not?—how shall we find a lodging?’
As her mother did not reply Elizabeth-Jane’s mind reverted to the words of the waiter, that the Three Mariners was an inn of moderate charges. A recommendation good for one person was probably good for another. ‘Let’s go where the young man has gone to,’ she said. ‘He is respectable. What do you say?’
Her mother assented, and down the street they went.
In the meantime the Mayor’s thoughtfulness, engendered by the note as stated, continued to hold him in abstraction; till, whispering to his neighbour to take his place, he found opportunity to leave the chair. This was just after the departure of his wife and Elizabeth.
Outside the door of the assembly-room he saw the waiter, and beckoning to him asked who brought the note which had been handed in a quarter of an hour before.
‘A young man, sir—a sort of traveller. He was a Scotchman seemingly’
‘Did he say how he had got it?’
‘He wrote it himself, sir, as he stood outside the window.’
‘Oh—wrote it himself … Is the young man in the hotel?’
‘No, sir. He went to the Three Mariners, I believe.’
The Mayor walked up and down the vestibule of the hotel with his hands under his coat tails, as if he were merely seeking a cooler atmosphere than that of the room he had quitted. But there could be no doubt that he was in reality still possessed to the full by the new idea, whatever that might be. At length he went back to the door of the dining-room, paused, and found that the songs, toasts, and conversation were proceeding quite satisfactorily without his presence. The Corporation, private residents, and major and minor tradesmen had, in fact, gone in for comforting beverages to such an extent that they had quite forgotten, not only the Mayor, but all those vast political, religious, and social differences which they felt necessary to maintain in the daytime, and which separated them like iron grills. Seeing this the Mayor took his hat, and when the waiter had helped him on with a thin holland overcoat, went out and stood under the portico.
Very few persons were now in the street; and his eyes, by a sort of attraction, turned and dwelt upon a spot about a hundred yards further down. It was the house to which the writer of the note had gone—the Three Mariners—whose two prominent Elizabethan gables, bow-window, and passage-light could be seen from where he stood. Having kept his eyes on it for a while he strolled in that direction.
This ancient house of accommodation for man and beast, now, unfortunately, pulled down, was built of mellow sandstone, with mullioned windows of the same material, markedly out of perpendicular from the settlement of foundations. The bay window projecting into the street, whose interior was so popular among the frequenters of the inn, was closed with shutters, in each of which appeared a heart-shaped aperture, somewhat more attenuated in the right and left ventricles than is seen in Nature. Inside these illuminated holes, at a distance of about three inches, were ranged at this hour, as every passer knew, the ruddy polls of Billy Wills the glazier, Smart the shoe-maker, Buzzford the general dealer, and others of a secondary set of worthies, of a grade somewhat below that of the diners at the King’s Arms, each with his yard of clay.
A four-centred Tudor arch was over the entrance, and over the arch the signboard, now visible in the rays of an opposite lamp. Hereon the Mariners, who had been represented by the artist as persons of two dimensions only—in other words, flat as a shadow—were standing in a row in paralysed attitudes. Being on the sunny side of the street the three comrades had suffered largely from warping, splitting, fading, and shrinkage, so that they were but a half-invisible film upon the reality of the grain, and knots, and nails, which composed the signboard. As a matter of fact, this state of things was not so much owing to Stannidge the landlord’s neglect, as from the lack of a painter in Casterbridge who would undertake to reproduce the features of men so traditional.
A long, narrow, dimly-lit passage gave access to the inn, within which passage the horses going to their stalls at the back, and the coming and departing human guests, rubbed shoulders indiscriminately, the latter running no slight risk of having their toes trodden upon by the animals. The good stabling and the good ale of the Mariners, though somewhat difficult to reach on account of there being but this narrow way to both, were nevertheless perseveringly sought out by the sagacious old heads who knew what was what in Casterbridge.
Henchard stood without the inn for a few instants; then lowering the dignity of his presence as much as possible by buttoning the brown holland coat over his shirt-front, and in other ways toning himself down to his ordinary everyday appearance, he entered the inn door.
CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_f3c989b7-70a3-5e66-96c6-09867bbdb425)
Elizabeth-Jane and her mother had arrived some twenty minutes earlier. Outside the house they had stood and considered whether even this homely place, though recommended as moderate, might not be too serious in its prices for their light pockets. Finally, however, they had found courage to enter, and duly met Stannidge the landlord; a silent man, who drew and carried frothing measures to this room and to that, shoulder to shoulder with his waiting-maids—stately slowness, however, entering into his ministrations by contrast with theirs, as became one whose service was somewhat optional. It would have been altogether optional but for the orders of the landlady, a person who sat in the bar, corporeally motionless, but with a flitting eye and quick ear, with which she observed and heard through the open door and hatchway the pressing needs of customers whom her husband overlooked though close at hand. Elizabeth and her mother were passively accepted as sojourners, and shown to a small bedroom under one of the gables, where they sat down.
The principle of the inn seemed to be to compensate for the antique awkwardness, crookedness, and obscurity of the passages, floors, and windows, by quantities of clean linen spread about everywhere, and this had a dazzling effect upon the travellers.
‘’Tis too good for us—we can’t meet it!’ said the elder woman, looking round the apartment with misgivings as soon as they were left alone.
‘I fear it is, too,’ said Elizabeth. ‘But we must be respectable.’
‘We must pay our way even before we must be respectable,’ replied her mother. ‘Mr Henchard is too high for us to make ourselves known to him, I much fear; so we’ve only our own pockets to depend on.’
‘I know what I’ll do,’ said Elizabeth-Jane after an interval of waiting, during which their needs seemed quite forgotten under the press of business below. And leaving the room, she descended the stairs and penetrated to the bar.
If there was one good thing more than another which characterized this single-hearted girl it was a willingness to sacrifice her personal comfort and dignity to the common weal.
‘As you seem busy here tonight, and mother’s not well off, might I take out part of our accommodation by helping?’ she asked of the landlady.
The latter, who remained as fixed in the arm-chair as if she had been melted into it when in a liquid state, and could not now be unstuck, looked the girl up and down inquiringly, with her hands on the chair-arms. Such arrangements as the one Elizabeth proposed were not uncommon in country villages; but, though Casterbridge was old-fashioned, the custom was well-nigh obsolete here. The mistress of the house, however, was an easy woman to strangers, and she made no objection. Thereupon Elizabeth, being instructed by nods and motions from the taciturn landlord as to where she could find the different things, trotted up and down stairs with materials for her own and her parent’s meal.
While she was doing this the wood partition in the centre of the house thrilled to its centre with the tugging of a bell-pull upstairs. A bell below tinkled a note that was feebler in sound than the twanging of wires and cranks that had produced it.
‘’Tis the Scotch gentleman,’ said the landlady omnisciently; and turning her eyes to Elizabeth, ‘Now then, can you go and see if his supper is on the tray? If it is you can take it up to him. The front room over this.’
Elizabeth-Jane, though hungry, willingly postponed serving herself awhile, and applied to the cook in the kitchen, whence she brought forth the tray of supper viands, and proceeded with it upstairs to the apartment indicated. The accommodation of the Three Mariners was far from spacious, despite the fair area of ground it covered. The room demanded by intrusive beams and rafters, partitions, passages, staircases, disused ovens, settles, and four-posters, left comparatively small quarters for human beings. Moreover, this being at a time before home-brewing was abandoned by the smaller victuallers, and a house in which the twelve-bushel strength was still religiously adhered to by the landlord in his ale, the quality of the liquor was the chief attraction of the premises, so that everything had to make way for utensils and operations in connection therewith. Thus Elizabeth found that the Scotchman was located in a room quite close to the small one that had been allotted to herself and her mother.
When she entered nobody was present but the young man himself—the same whom she had seen lingering without the windows of the King’s Arms Hotel. He was now idly reading a copy of the local paper, and was hardly conscious of her entry, so that she looked at him quite coolly, and saw how his forehead shone where the light caught it, and how nicely his hair was cut, and the sort of velvet-pile or down that was on the skin at the back of his neck, and how his cheek was so truly curved as to be part of a globe, and how clearly drawn were the lids and lashes which hid his bent eyes.
She set down the tray, spread his supper, and went away without a word. On her arrival below the landlady, who was as kind as she was fat and lazy, saw that Elizabeth-Jane was rather tired, though in her earnestness to be useful she was waiving her own needs altogether. Mrs Stannidge thereupon said with a considerate peremptoriness that she and her mother had better take their own suppers if they meant to have any.
Elizabeth fetched their simple provisions, as she had fetched the Scotchman’s, and went up to the little chamber where she had left her mother, noiselessly pushing open the door with the edge of the tray. To her surprise her mother, instead of being reclined on the bed where she had left her, was in an erect position, with lips parted. At Elizabeth’s entry she lifted her finger.
The meaning of this was soon apparent. The room allotted to the two women had at one time served as a dressing-room to the Scotchman’s chamber, as was evidenced by signs of a door of communication between them—now screwed up and pasted over with the wall paper. But, as is frequently the case with hotels of far higher pretensions than the Three Mariners, every word spoken in either of these rooms was distinctly audible in the other. Such sounds came through now.
Thus silently conjured Elizabeth deposited the tray, and her mother whispered as she drew near, ‘’Tis he.’
‘Who?’ said the girl.
‘The Mayor.’
The tremors in Susan Henchard’s tone might have led any person but one so perfectly unsuspicious of the truth as the girl was, to surmise some closer connection than the admitted simple kinship as a means of accounting for them.
Two men were indeed talking in the adjoining chamber, the young Scotchman and Henchard, who, having entered the inn while Elizabeth-Jane was in the kitchen waiting for the supper, had been deferentially conducted upstairs by host Stannidge himself. The girl noiselessly laid out their little meal, and beckoned to her mother to join her, which Mrs Henchard mechanically did, her attention being fixed on the conversation through the door.
‘I merely strolled in on my way home to ask you a question about something that has excited my curiosity,’ said the Mayor, with careless geniality. ‘But I see you have not finished supper.’
‘Ay, but I will be done in a little! Ye needn’t go, sir. Take a seat. I’ve almost done, and it makes no difference at all.’
Henchard seemed to take the seat offered, and in a moment he resumed: ‘Well, first I should ask, did you write this?’ A rustling of paper followed.
‘Yes, I did,’ said the Scotchman.
‘Then,’ said Henchard, ‘I am under the impression that we have met by accident while waiting for the morning to keep an appointment with each other? My name is Henchard; ha’n’t you replied to an advertisement for a corn-factor’s manager that I put into the paper—ha’n’t you come here to see me about it?’
‘No,’ said the Scotchman, with some surprise.
‘Surely you are the man,’ went on Henchard insistingly, ‘who arranged to come and see me? Joshua, Joshua, Jipp—Jopp—what was his name?’
‘You’re wrong!’ said the young man. ‘My name is Donald Farfrae. It is true I am in the corren trade—but I have replied to no advairrtisment, and arranged to see no one. I am on my way to Bristol—from there to the other side of the warrld, to try my fortune in the great wheat-growing districts of the West! I have some inventions useful to the trade, and there is no scope for developing them heere.’
‘To America—well, well,’ said Henchard, in a tone of disappointment, so strong as to make itself felt like a damp atmosphere. ‘And yet I could have sworn you were the man!’
The Scotchman murmured another negative, and there was a silence, till Henchard resumed: ‘Then I am truly and sincerely obliged to you for the few words you wrote on that paper.’
‘It was nothing, sir.’
‘Well, it has a great importance for me just now. This row about my grown wheat, which I declare to Heaven I didn’t know to be bad till the people came complaining, has put me to my wits’ end. I’ve some hundreds of quarters of it on hand; and if your renovating process will make it wholesome, why, you can see what a quag ’twould get me out of. I saw in a moment there might be truth in it. But I should like to have it proved; and of course you don’t care to tell the steps of the process sufficiently for me to do that, without my paying ye well for’t first.’
The young man reflected a moment or two. ‘I don’t know that I have any objection,’ he said. ‘I’m going to another country, and curing bad corn is not the line I’ll take up there. Yes, I’ll tell ye the whole of it—you’ll make more out of it heere than I will in a foreign country. Just look heere a minute, sir. I can show ye by a sample in my carpet-bag.’
The click of a lock followed, and there was a sifting and rustling; then a discussion about so many ounces to the bushel, and drying, and refrigerating, and so on.
‘These few grains will be sufficient to show ye with,’ came in the young fellow’s voice; and after a pause, during which some operation seemed to be intently watched by them both, he exclaimed, ‘There, now, do you taste that.’
‘It’s complete!—quite restored, or—well—nearly.’
‘Quite enough restored to make good seconds out of it,’ said the Scotchman. ‘To fetch it back entirely is impossible; Nature won’t stand so much as that, but heere you go a great way towards it. Well, sir, that’s the process; I don’t value it, for it can be but of little use in countries where the weather is more settled than in ours; and I’ll be only too glad if it’s of service to you.’
‘But hearken to me,’ pleaded Henchard. ‘My business, you know, is in corn and in hay; but I was brought up as a hay-trusser simply, and hay is what I understand best, though I now do more in corn than in the other. If you’ll accept the place, you shall manage the corn branch entirely, and receive a commission in addition to salary.’
‘You’re liberal—very liberal; but no, no—I cannet!’ the young man still replied, with some distress in his accents.
‘So be it!’ said Henchard conclusively. ‘Now—to change the subject—one good turn deserves another; don’t stay to finish that miserable supper. Come to my house; I can find something better for ’ee than cold ham and ale.’
Donald Farfrae was grateful—said he feared he must decline—that he wished to leave early next day.
‘Very well,’ said Henchard quickly, ‘please yourself. But I tell you, young man, if this holds good for the bulk, as it has done for the sample, you have saved my credit, stranger though you be. What shall I pay you for this knowledge?’
‘Nothing at all, nothing at all. It may not prove necessary to ye to use if often, and I don’t value it at all. I thought I might just as well let ye know, as you were in a difficulty, and they were harrd upon ye.’
Henchard paused. ‘I shan’t soon forget this,’ he said. ‘And from a stranger! … I couldn’t believe you were not the man I had engaged! Says I to myself “He knows who I am, and recommends himself by this stroke.” And yet it turns out, after all, that you are not the man who answered my advertisement, but a stranger!’
‘Ay, ay; that’s so,’ said the young man.
Henchard again suspended his words, and then his voice came thoughtfully: ‘Your forehead, Farfrae, is something like my poor brother’s—now dead and gone; and the nose, too, isn’t unlike his. You must be, what—five foot nine, I reckon? I am six foot one and a half out of my shoes. But what of that? In my business, ’tis true that strength and bustle build up a firm. But judgement and knowledge are what keep it established. Unluckily, I am bad at science, Farfrae; bad at figures—a rule o’ thumb sort of man. You are just the reverse—I can see that. I have been looking for such as you these two year, and yet you are not for me. Well, before I go, let me ask this: Though you are not the young man I thought you were, what’s the difference? Can’t ye stay just the same: Have you really made up your mind about this American notion? I won’t mince matters. I feel you would be invaluable to me—that needn’t be said—and if you bide and be my manager, I will make it worth your while.’
‘My plans are fixed,’ said the young man, in negative tones. ‘I have formed a scheme, and so we need na say any more about it. But will you not drink with me, sir? I find this Casterbridge ale warreming to the stomach.’
‘No, no; I fain would, but I can’t,’ said Henchard gravely, the scraping of his chair informing the listeners that he was rising to leave. ‘When I was a young man I went in for that sort of thing too strong—far too strong—and was well-nigh ruined by it! I did a deed on account of it which I shall be ashamed of to my dying day. I made such an impression on me that I swore, there and then, that I’d drink nothing stronger than tea for as many years as I was old that day. I have kept my oath; and though, Farfrae, I am sometimes that dry in the dog days that I could drink a quarter-barrel to the pitching, I think o’ my oath, and touch no strong drink at all.’
