Bab Bab 36 · Chapter XXXVI

Returning from her appointment Lucetta saw a man waiting by the lamp

nearest to her own door. When she stopped to go in he came and spoke to

her. It was Jopp.

He begged her pardon for addressing her. But he had heard that Mr.

Farfrae had been applied to by a neighbouring corn-merchant to

recommend a working partner; if so he wished to offer himself. He could

give good security, and had stated as much to Mr. Farfrae in a letter;

but he would feel much obliged if Lucetta would say a word in his

favour to her husband.

“It is a thing I know nothing about,” said Lucetta coldly.

“But you can testify to my trustworthiness better than anybody, ma’am,”

said Jopp. “I was in Jersey several years, and knew you there by

sight.”

“Indeed,” she replied. “But I knew nothing of you.”

“I think, ma’am, that a word or two from you would secure for me what I

covet very much,” he persisted.

She steadily refused to have anything to do with the affair, and

cutting him short, because of her anxiety to get indoors before her

husband should miss her, left him on the pavement.

He watched her till she had vanished, and then went home. When he got

there he sat down in the fireless chimney corner looking at the iron

dogs, and the wood laid across them for heating the morning kettle. A

movement upstairs disturbed him, and Henchard came down from his

bedroom, where he seemed to have been rummaging boxes.

“I wish,” said Henchard, “you would do me a service, Jopp,

now—to-night, I mean, if you can. Leave this at Mrs. Farfrae’s for her.

I should take it myself, of course, but I don’t wish to be seen there.”

He handed a package in brown paper, sealed. Henchard had been as good

as his word. Immediately on coming indoors he had searched over his few

belongings, and every scrap of Lucetta’s writing that he possessed was

here. Jopp indifferently expressed his willingness.

“Well, how have ye got on to-day?” his lodger asked. “Any prospect of

an opening?”

“I am afraid not,” said Jopp, who had not told the other of his

application to Farfrae.

“There never will be in Casterbridge,” declared Henchard decisively.

“You must roam further afield.” He said goodnight to Jopp, and returned

to his own part of the house.

Jopp sat on till his eyes were attracted by the shadow of the

candle-snuff on the wall, and looking at the original he found that it

had formed itself into a head like a red-hot cauliflower. Henchard’s

packet next met his gaze. He knew there had been something of the

nature of wooing between Henchard and the now Mrs. Farfrae; and his

vague ideas on the subject narrowed themselves down to these: Henchard

had a parcel belonging to Mrs. Farfrae, and he had reasons for not

returning that parcel to her in person. What could be inside it? So he

went on and on till, animated by resentment at Lucetta’s haughtiness,

as he thought it, and curiosity to learn if there were any weak sides

to this transaction with Henchard, he examined the package. The pen and

all its relations being awkward tools in Henchard’s hands he had

affixed the seals without an impression, it never occurring to him that

the efficacy of such a fastening depended on this. Jopp was far less of

a tyro; he lifted one of the seals with his penknife, peeped in at the

end thus opened, saw that the bundle consisted of letters; and, having

satisfied himself thus far, sealed up the end again by simply softening

the wax with the candle, and went off with the parcel as requested.

His path was by the river-side at the foot of the town. Coming into the

light at the bridge which stood at the end of High Street he beheld

lounging thereon Mother Cuxsom and Nance Mockridge.

“We be just going down Mixen Lane way, to look into Peter’s Finger

afore creeping to bed,” said Mrs. Cuxsom. “There’s a fiddle and

tambourine going on there. Lord, what’s all the world—do ye come along

too, Jopp—’twon’t hinder ye five minutes.”

Jopp had mostly kept himself out of this company, but present

circumstances made him somewhat more reckless than usual, and without

many words he decided to go to his destination that way.

Though the upper part of Durnover was mainly composed of a curious

congeries of barns and farm-steads, there was a less picturesque side

to the parish. This was Mixen Lane, now in great part pulled down.

Mixen Lane was the Adullam of all the surrounding villages. It was the

hiding-place of those who were in distress, and in debt, and trouble of

every kind. Farm-labourers and other peasants, who combined a little

poaching with their farming, and a little brawling and bibbing with

their poaching, found themselves sooner or later in Mixen Lane. Rural

mechanics too idle to mechanize, rural servants too rebellious to

serve, drifted or were forced into Mixen Lane.

The lane and its surrounding thicket of thatched cottages stretched out

like a spit into the moist and misty lowland. Much that was sad, much

that was low, some things that were baneful, could be seen in Mixen

Lane. Vice ran freely in and out certain of the doors in the

neighbourhood; recklessness dwelt under the roof with the crooked

chimney; shame in some bow-windows; theft (in times of privation) in

the thatched and mud-walled houses by the sallows. Even slaughter had

not been altogether unknown here. In a block of cottages up an alley

there might have been erected an altar to disease in years gone by.

Such was Mixen Lane in the times when Henchard and Farfrae were Mayors.

Yet this mildewed leaf in the sturdy and flourishing Casterbridge plant

lay close to the open country; not a hundred yards from a row of noble

elms, and commanding a view across the moor of airy uplands and

corn-fields, and mansions of the great. A brook divided the moor from

the tenements, and to outward view there was no way across it—no way to

the houses but round about by the road. But under every householder’s

stairs there was kept a mysterious plank nine inches wide; which plank

was a secret bridge.

If you, as one of those refugee householders, came in from business

after dark—and this was the business time here—you stealthily crossed

the moor, approached the border of the aforesaid brook, and whistled

opposite the house to which you belonged. A shape thereupon made its

appearance on the other side bearing the bridge on end against the sky;

it was lowered; you crossed, and a hand helped you to land yourself,

together with the pheasants and hares gathered from neighbouring

manors. You sold them slily the next morning, and the day after you

stood before the magistrates with the eyes of all your sympathizing

neighbours concentrated on your back. You disappeared for a time; then

you were again found quietly living in Mixen Lane.

Walking along the lane at dusk the stranger was struck by two or three

peculiar features therein. One was an intermittent rumbling from the

back premises of the inn half-way up; this meant a skittle alley.

Another was the extensive prevalence of whistling in the various

domiciles—a piped note of some kind coming from nearly every open door.

Another was the frequency of white aprons over dingy gowns among the

women around the doorways. A white apron is a suspicious vesture in

situations where spotlessness is difficult; moreover, the industry and

cleanliness which the white apron expressed were belied by the postures

and gaits of the women who wore it—their knuckles being mostly on their

hips (an attitude which lent them the aspect of two-handled mugs), and

their shoulders against door-posts; while there was a curious alacrity

in the turn of each honest woman’s head upon her neck and in the twirl

of her honest eyes, at any noise resembling a masculine footfall along

the lane.

Yet amid so much that was bad needy respectability also found a home.

Under some of the roofs abode pure and virtuous souls whose presence

there was due to the iron hand of necessity, and to that alone.

Families from decayed villages—families of that once bulky, but now

nearly extinct, section of village society called “liviers,” or

lifeholders—copyholders and others, whose roof-trees had fallen for

some reason or other, compelling them to quit the rural spot that had

been their home for generations—came here, unless they chose to lie

under a hedge by the wayside.

The inn called Peter’s Finger was the church of Mixen Lane.

It was centrally situate, as such places should be, and bore about the

same social relation to the Three Mariners as the latter bore to the

King’s Arms. At first sight the inn was so respectable as to be

puzzling. The front door was kept shut, and the step was so clean that

evidently but few persons entered over its sanded surface. But at the

corner of the public-house was an alley, a mere slit, dividing it from

the next building. Half-way up the alley was a narrow door, shiny and

paintless from the rub of infinite hands and shoulders. This was the

actual entrance to the inn.

A pedestrian would be seen abstractedly passing along Mixen Lane; and

then, in a moment, he would vanish, causing the gazer to blink like

Ashton at the disappearance of Ravenswood. That abstracted pedestrian

had edged into the slit by the adroit fillip of his person sideways;

from the slit he edged into the tavern by a similar exercise of skill.

The company at the Three Mariners were persons of quality in comparison

with the company which gathered here; though it must be admitted that

the lowest fringe of the Mariner’s party touched the crest of Peter’s

at points. Waifs and strays of all sorts loitered about here. The

landlady was a virtuous woman who years ago had been unjustly sent to

gaol as an accessory to something or other after the fact. She

underwent her twelvemonth, and had worn a martyr’s countenance ever

since, except at times of meeting the constable who apprehended her,

when she winked her eye.

To this house Jopp and his acquaintances had arrived. The settles on

which they sat down were thin and tall, their tops being guyed by

pieces of twine to hooks in the ceiling; for when the guests grew

boisterous the settles would rock and overturn without some such

security. The thunder of bowls echoed from the backyard; swingels hung

behind the blower of the chimney; and ex-poachers and ex-gamekeepers,

whom squires had persecuted without a cause, sat elbowing each

other—men who in past times had met in fights under the moon, till

lapse of sentences on the one part, and loss of favour and expulsion

from service on the other, brought them here together to a common

level, where they sat calmly discussing old times.

“Dost mind how you could jerk a trout ashore with a bramble, and not

ruffle the stream, Charl?” a deposed keeper was saying. “’Twas at that

I caught ’ee once, if you can mind?”

“That I can. But the worst larry for me was that pheasant business at

Yalbury Wood. Your wife swore false that time, Joe—O, by Gad, she

did—there’s no denying it.”

“How was that?” asked Jopp.

“Why—Joe closed wi’ me, and we rolled down together, close to his

garden hedge. Hearing the noise, out ran his wife with the oven pyle,

and it being dark under the trees she couldn’t see which was uppermost.

‘Where beest thee, Joe, under or top?’ she screeched. ‘O—under, by

Gad!’ says he. She then began to rap down upon my skull, back, and ribs

with the pyle till we’d roll over again. ‘Where beest now, dear Joe,

under or top?’ she’d scream again. By George, ’twas through her I was

took! And then when we got up in hall she sware that the cock pheasant

was one of her rearing, when ’twas not your bird at all, Joe; ’twas

Squire Brown’s bird—that’s whose ’twas—one that we’d picked off as we

passed his wood, an hour afore. It did hurt my feelings to be so

wronged!... Ah well—’tis over now.”

“I might have had ’ee days afore that,” said the keeper. “I was within

a few yards of ’ee dozens of times, with a sight more of birds than

that poor one.”

“Yes—’tis not our greatest doings that the world gets wind of,” said

the furmity-woman, who, lately settled in this purlieu, sat among the

rest. Having travelled a great deal in her time she spoke with

cosmopolitan largeness of idea. It was she who presently asked Jopp

what was the parcel he kept so snugly under his arm.

“Ah, therein lies a grand secret,” said Jopp. “It is the passion of

love. To think that a woman should love one man so well, and hate

another so unmercifully.”

“Who’s the object of your meditation, sir?”

“One that stands high in this town. I’d like to shame her! Upon my

life, ’twould be as good as a play to read her love-letters, the proud

piece of silk and wax-work! For ’tis her love-letters that I’ve got

here.”

“Love letters? then let’s hear ’em, good soul,” said Mother Cuxsom.

“Lord, do ye mind, Richard, what fools we used to be when we were

younger? Getting a schoolboy to write ours for us; and giving him a

penny, do ye mind, not to tell other folks what he’d put inside, do ye

mind?”

By this time Jopp had pushed his finger under the seals, and unfastened

the letters, tumbling them over and picking up one here and there at

random, which he read aloud. These passages soon began to uncover the

secret which Lucetta had so earnestly hoped to keep buried, though the

epistles, being allusive only, did not make it altogether plain.

“Mrs. Farfrae wrote that!” said Nance Mockridge. “’Tis a humbling thing

for us, as respectable women, that one of the same sex could do it. And

now she’s avowed herself to another man!”

“So much the better for her,” said the aged furmity-woman. “Ah, I saved

her from a real bad marriage, and she’s never been the one to thank

me.”

“I say, what a good foundation for a skimmity-ride,” said Nance.

“True,” said Mrs. Cuxsom, reflecting. “’Tis as good a ground for a

skimmity-ride as ever I knowed; and it ought not to be wasted. The last

one seen in Casterbridge must have been ten years ago, if a day.”

At this moment there was a shrill whistle, and the landlady said to the

man who had been called Charl, “’Tis Jim coming in. Would ye go and let

down the bridge for me?”

Without replying Charl and his comrade Joe rose, and receiving a

lantern from her went out at the back door and down the garden-path,

which ended abruptly at the edge of the stream already mentioned.

Beyond the stream was the open moor, from which a clammy breeze smote

upon their faces as they advanced. Taking up the board that had lain in

readiness one of them lowered it across the water, and the instant its

further end touched the ground footsteps entered upon it, and there

appeared from the shade a stalwart man with straps round his knees, a

double-barrelled gun under his arm and some birds slung up behind him.

They asked him if he had had much luck.

“Not much,” he said indifferently. “All safe inside?”

Receiving a reply in the affirmative he went on inwards, the others

withdrawing the bridge and beginning to retreat in his rear. Before,

however, they had entered the house a cry of “Ahoy” from the moor led

them to pause.

The cry was repeated. They pushed the lantern into an outhouse, and

went back to the brink of the stream.

“Ahoy—is this the way to Casterbridge?” said some one from the other

side.

“Not in particular,” said Charl. “There’s a river afore ’ee.”

“I don’t care—here’s for through it!” said the man in the moor. “I’ve

had travelling enough for to-day.”

“Stop a minute, then,” said Charl, finding that the man was no enemy.

“Joe, bring the plank and lantern; here’s somebody that’s lost his way.

You should have kept along the turnpike road, friend, and not have

strook across here.”

“I should—as I see now. But I saw a light here, and says I to myself,

that’s an outlying house, depend on’t.”

The plank was now lowered; and the stranger’s form shaped itself from

the darkness. He was a middle-aged man, with hair and whiskers

prematurely grey, and a broad and genial face. He had crossed on the

plank without hesitation, and seemed to see nothing odd in the transit.

He thanked them, and walked between them up the garden. “What place is

this?” he asked, when they reached the door.

“A public-house.”

“Ah, perhaps it will suit me to put up at. Now then, come in and wet

your whistle at my expense for the lift over you have given me.”

They followed him into the inn, where the increased light exhibited him

as one who would stand higher in an estimate by the eye than in one by

the ear. He was dressed with a certain clumsy richness—his coat being

furred, and his head covered by a cap of seal-skin, which, though the

nights were chilly, must have been warm for the daytime, spring being

somewhat advanced. In his hand he carried a small mahogany case,

strapped, and clamped with brass.

Apparently surprised at the kind of company which confronted him

through the kitchen door, he at once abandoned his idea of putting up

at the house; but taking the situation lightly, he called for glasses

of the best, paid for them as he stood in the passage, and turned to

proceed on his way by the front door. This was barred, and while the

landlady was unfastening it the conversation about the skimmington was

continued in the sitting-room, and reached his ears.

“What do they mean by a ‘skimmity-ride’?” he asked.

“O, sir!” said the landlady, swinging her long earrings with

deprecating modesty; “’tis a’ old foolish thing they do in these parts

when a man’s wife is—well, not too particularly his own. But as a

respectable householder I don’t encourage it.

“Still, are they going to do it shortly? It is a good sight to see, I

suppose?”

“Well, sir!” she simpered. And then, bursting into naturalness, and

glancing from the corner of her eye, “’Tis the funniest thing under the

sun! And it costs money.”

“Ah! I remember hearing of some such thing. Now I shall be in

Casterbridge for two or three weeks to come, and should not mind seeing

the performance. Wait a moment.” He turned back, entered the

sitting-room, and said, “Here, good folks; I should like to see the old

custom you are talking of, and I don’t mind being something towards

it—take that.” He threw a sovereign on the table and returned to the

landlady at the door, of whom, having inquired the way into the town,

he took his leave.

“There were more where that one came from,” said Charl when the

sovereign had been taken up and handed to the landlady for safe

keeping. “By George! we ought to have got a few more while we had him

here.”

“No, no,” answered the landlady. “This is a respectable house, thank

God! And I’ll have nothing done but what’s honourable.”

“Well,” said Jopp; “now we’ll consider the business begun, and will

soon get it in train.”

“We will!” said Nance. “A good laugh warms my heart more than a

cordial, and that’s the truth on’t.”

Jopp gathered up the letters, and it being now somewhat late he did not

attempt to call at Farfrae’s with them that night. He reached home,

sealed them up as before, and delivered the parcel at its address next

morning. Within an hour its contents were reduced to ashes by Lucetta,

who, poor soul! was inclined to fall down on her knees in thankfulness

that at last no evidence remained of the unlucky episode with Henchard

in her past. For though hers had been rather the laxity of inadvertence

than of intention, that episode, if known, was not the less likely to

operate fatally between herself and her husband.