Chapter Chapter 4 · Chapter IV

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 cornland 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 loaf 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 flat 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.