The Mayor of Casterbridge

CHAPTER 5

A few score yards brought them to the spot where the town band was now shaking the window-panes with the strains of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’.

The building before whose doors they had pitched their music-stands was the chief hotel in Casterbridge—namely, the King’s Arms. A spacious bow-window projected into the street over the main portico, and from the open sashes came the babble of voices, the jingle of glasses, and the drawing of corks. The blinds, moreover, being left unclosed, the whole interior of this room could be surveyed from the top of a flight of stone steps to the road-waggon office opposite, for which reason a knot of idlers had gathered there.

‘We might, perhaps, after all, make a few inquiries about—our relation Mr Henchard,’ whispered Mrs Newson who, since her entry into Casterbridge had seemed strangely weak and agitated. ‘And this, I think, would be a good place for trying it—just to ask, you know, how he stands in the town—if he is here, as I think he must be. You, Elizabeth-Jane, had better be the one to do it. I’m too worn out to do anything—pull down your fall first.’

She sat down upon the lowest step, and Elizabeth-Jane obeyed her directions and stood among the idlers.

‘What’s going on tonight?’ asked the girl, after singling out an old man and standing by him long enough to acquire a neighbourly right to converse.

‘Well, ye must be a stranger sure,’ said the old man, without taking his eyes from the window. ‘Why, ’tis a great public dinner of the gentle-people and such like leading volk—wi’ the Mayor in the chair. As we plainer fellows bain’t invited, they leave the winder-shutters open that we may get jist a sense o’t out here. If you mount the steps you can see ’em. That’s Mr Henchard, the Mayor, at the end of the table, a facing ye; and that’s the Council men right and left … Ah, lots of them when they begun life were no more than I be now!’

‘Henchard!’ said Elizabeth-Jane, surprised, but by no means suspecting the whole force of the revelation. She ascended to the top of the steps.

Her mother, though her head was bowed, had already caught from the inn-window tones that strangely riveted her attention before the old man’s words, ‘Mr Henchard, the Mayor’, reached her ears. She arose, and stepped up to her daughter’s side as soon as she could do so without showing exceptional eagerness.

The interior of the hotel dining-room was spread out before her, with its tables, and glass, and plate, and inmates. Facing the window, in the chair of dignity, sat a man about forty years of age; of heavy frame, large features, and commanding voice; his general build being rather coarse than compact. He had a rich complexion, which verged on swarthiness, a flashing black eye, and dark, bushy brows and hair. When he indulged in an occasional loud laugh at some remark among the guests, his large mouth parted so far back as to show to the rays of the chandelier a full score or more of the two-and-thirty sound white teeth that he obviously still could boast of.

That laugh was not encouraging to strangers; and hence it may have been well that it was rarely heard. Many theories might have been built upon it. It fell in well with conjectures of a temperament which would have no pity for weakness, but would be ready to yield ungrudging admiration to greatness, and strength. Its producer’s personal goodness, if he had any, would be of a very fitful cast—an occasional almost oppressive generosity rather than a mild and constant kindness.

Susan Henchard’s husband—in law, at least—sat before them, matured in shape, stiffened in line, exaggerated in traits; disciplined, thought-marked—in a word, older. Elizabeth, encumbered with no recollections as her mother was, regarded him with nothing more than the keen curiosity and interest which the discovery of such unexpected social standing in the long-sought relative naturally begot. He was dressed in an old-fashioned evening suit, an expanse of frilled shirt showing on his broad breast; jewelled studs, and a heavy gold chain. Three glasses stood at his right hand; but, to his wife’s surprise, the two for wine were empty, while the third, a tumbler, was half full of water.

When last she had seen him he was sitting in a corduroy jacket, fustian waistcoat and breeches, and tanned leather leggings, with a basin of hot furmity before him. Time, the magician, had wrought much here. Watching him, and thus thinking of past days, she became so moved that she shrank back against the jamb of the waggon-office doorway to which the steps gave access, the shadow from it conveniently hiding her features. She forgot her daughter till a touch from Elizabeth-Jane aroused her. ‘Have you seen him, mother?’ whispered the girl.

‘Yes, yes,’ answered her companion hastily. ‘I have seen him, and it is enough for me! Now I only want to go—pass away—die.’

‘Why—O what?’ She drew closer, and whispered in her mother’s ear, ‘Does he seem to you not likely to befriend us? I thought he looked a generous man. What a gentleman he is, isn’t he? And how his diamond studs shine! How strange that you should have said he might be in the stocks, or in the workhouse, or dead! Did ever anything go more by contraries! Why do you feel so afraid of him? I am not at all; I’ll call upon him—he can but say he don’t own such remote kin.’

‘I don’t know at all—I can’t tell what to set about. I feel so down.’

‘Don’t be that, mother, now we have got here and all! Rest there where you be a little while—I will look on and find out more about him.’

‘I don’t think I can ever meet Mr Henchard. He is not how I thought he would be—he overpowers me! I don’t wish to see him any more.’

‘But wait a little time and consider.’

Elizabeth-Jane had never been so much interested in anything in her life as in their present position, partly from the natural elation she felt at discovering herself akin to a coach; and she gazed again at the scene. The younger guests were talking and eating with animation; their elders were searching for titbits, and sniffing and grunting over their plates like sows nuzzling for acorns. Three drinks seemed to be sacred to the company—port, sherry, and rum; outside which old-established trinity few or no palates ranged.

A row of ancient rummers with ground figures on their sides, and each primed with a spoon, was now placed down the table, and these were promptly filled with grog at such high temperatures as to raise serious considerations for the articles exposed to its vapours. But Elizabeth-Jane noticed that, though this filling went on with great promptness up and down the table, nobody filled the Mayor’s glass, who still drank large quantities of water from the tumbler behind the clump of crystal vessels intended for wine and spirits.

‘They don’t fill Mr Henchard’s wine-glasses,’ she ventured to say to her elbow acquaintance, the old man.

‘Ah, no; don’t ye know him to be the celebrated abstaining worthy of that name? He scorns all tempting liquors; never touches nothing. O yes, he’ve strong qualities that way. I have heard tell that he swore a gospel oath in by-gone times, and has bode by it ever since. So they don’t press him, knowing it would be unbecoming in the face of that; for yer gospel oaths is a serious thing.’

Another elderly man, hearing this discourse, now joined in by inquiring, ‘How much longer have he got to suffer from it, Solomon Longways?’

‘Another two year, they say. I don’t know the why and the wherefore of his fixing such a time, for ’a never has told anybody. But ’tis exactly two calendar years longer, they say. A powerful mind to hold out so long!’

‘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

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

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.