The Mayor of Casterbridge

‘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.’

‘I’ll no’ press ye, sir—I’ll no’ press ye. I respect your vow.’

‘Well, I shall get a manager somewhere, no doubt,’ said Henchard, with strong feeling in his tones. ‘But it will be long before I see one that would suit me so well!’

The young man appeared much moved by Henchard’s warm convictions of his value. He was silent till they reached the door. ‘I wish I could stay—sincerely I would like to,’ he replied. ‘But no—it cannet be! it cannet! I want to see the warrld.’

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 presently 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 burst 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 privilege 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 its’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 the next verse, young gentlemen, 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 sect 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 he 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 God-a’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 under-thoughts.’ (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 onwards 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 waist-string 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.

‘O 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 dimly 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 hereabout—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 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.