The Mayor of Casterbridge

“What – give it to me for nothing?” said Henchard. “But you paid the creditors for it!”

“Ah, yes; but maybe it’s worth more to you than it is to me.”

Henchard was a little moved. “I – sometimes think I’ve wronged ‘ee!” he said, in tones which showed the disquietude that the night shades hid in his face. He shook Farfrae abruptly by the hand, and hastened away as if unwilling to betray himself further. Farfrae saw him turn through the thoroughfare into Bull Stake and vanish down towards the Priory Mill.

Meanwhile Elizabeth-Jane, in an upper room no larger than the Prophet’s chamber, and with the silk attire of her palmy days packed away in a box, was netting with great industry between the hours which she devoted to studying such books as she could get hold of.

Her lodgings being nearly opposite her stepfather’s former residence, now Farfrae’s, she could see Donald and Lucetta speeding in and out of their door with all the bounding enthusiasm of their situation. She avoided looking that way as much as possible, but it was hardly in human nature to keep the eyes averted when the door slammed.

While living on thus quietly she heard the news that Henchard had caught cold and was confined to his room – possibly a result of standing about the meads in damp weather. She went off to his house at once. This time she was determined not to be denied admittance, and made her way upstairs. He was sitting up in the bed with a greatcoat round him, and at first resented her intrusion. “Go away – go away,” he said. “I don’t like to see ‘ee!”

“But, father – ”

“I don’t like to see ‘ee,” he repeated.

However, the ice was broken, and she remained. She made the room more comfortable, gave directions to the people below, and by the time she went away had reconciled her stepfather to her visiting him.

The effect, either of her ministrations or of her mere presence, was a rapid recovery. He soon was well enough to go out; and now things seemed to wear a new colour in his eyes. He no longer thought of emigration, and thought more of Elizabeth. The having nothing to do made him more dreary than any other circumstance; and one day, with better views of Farfrae than he had held for some time, and a sense that honest work was not a thing to be ashamed of, he stoically went down to Farfrae’s yard and asked to be taken on as a journeyman hay-trusser. He was engaged at once. This hiring of Henchard was done through a foreman, Farfrae feeling that it was undesirable to come personally in contact with the ex-corn-factor more than was absolutely necessary. While anxious to help him he was well aware by this time of his uncertain temper, and thought reserved relations best. For the same reason his orders to Henchard to proceed to this and that country farm trussing in the usual way were always given through a third person.

For a time these arrangements worked well, it being the custom to truss in the respective stack-yards, before bringing it away, the hay bought at the different farms about the neighbourhood; so that Henchard was often absent at such places the whole week long. When this was all done, and Henchard had become in a measure broken in, he came to work daily on the home premises like the rest. And thus the once flourishing merchant and Mayor and what not stood as a day-labourer in the barns and granaries he formerly had owned.

“I have worked as a journeyman before now, ha’n’t I?” he would say in his defiant way; “and why shouldn’t I do it again?” But he looked a far different journeyman from the one he had been in his earlier days. Then he had worn clean, suitable clothes, light and cheerful in hue; leggings yellow as marigolds, corduroys immaculate as new flax, and a neckerchief like a flower-garden. Now he wore the remains of an old blue cloth suit of his gentlemanly times, a rusty silk hat, and a once black satin stock, soiled and shabby. Clad thus he went to and fro, still comparatively an active man – for he was not much over forty – and saw with the other men in the yard Donald Farfrae going in and out the green door that led to the garden, and the big house, and Lucetta.

At the beginning of the winter it was rumoured about Casterbridge that Mr. Farfrae, already in the Town Council, was to be proposed for Mayor in a year or two.

“Yes, she was wise, she was wise in her generation!” said Henchard to himself when he heard of this one day on his way to Farfrae’s hay-barn. He thought it over as he wimbled his bonds, and the piece of news acted as a reviviscent breath to that old view of his – of Donald Farfrae as his triumphant rival who rode rough-shod over him.

“A fellow of his age going to be Mayor, indeed!” he murmured with a corner-drawn smile on his mouth. “But ‘tis her money that floats en upward. Ha-ha – how cust odd it is! Here be I, his former master, working for him as man, and he the man standing as master, with my house and my furniture and my what-you-may-call wife all his own.”

He repeated these things a hundred times a day. During the whole period of his acquaintance with Lucetta he had never wished to claim her as his own so desperately as he now regretted her loss. It was no mercenary hankering after her fortune that moved him, though that fortune had been the means of making her so much the more desired by giving her the air of independence and sauciness which attracts men of his composition. It had given her servants, house, and fine clothing – a setting that invested Lucetta with a startling novelty in the eyes of him who had known her in her narrow days.

He accordingly lapsed into moodiness, and at every allusion to the possibility of Farfrae’s near election to the municipal chair his former hatred of the Scotchman returned. Concurrently with this he underwent a moral change. It resulted in his significantly saying every now and then, in tones of recklessness, “Only a fortnight more!” – “Only a dozen days!” and so forth, lessening his figures day by day.

“Why d’ye say only a dozen days?” asked Solomon Longways as he worked beside Henchard in the granary weighing oats.

“Because in twelve days I shall be released from my oath.”

“What oath?”

“The oath to drink no spirituous liquid. In twelve days it will be twenty-one years since I swore it, and then I mean to enjoy myself, please God!”

Elizabeth-Jane sat at her window one Sunday, and while there she heard in the street below a conversation which introduced Henchard’s name. She was wondering what was the matter, when a third person who was passing by asked the question in her mind.

“Michael Henchard have busted out drinking after taking nothing for twenty-one years!”

Elizabeth-Jane jumped up, put on her things, and went out.

33

At this date there prevailed in Casterbridge a convivial custom – scarcely recognized as such, yet none the less established. On the afternoon of every Sunday a large contingent of the Casterbridge journeymen – steady churchgoers and sedate characters – having attended service, filed from the church doors across the way to the Three Mariners Inn. The rear was usually brought up by the choir, with their bass-viols, fiddles, and flutes under their arms.

The great point, the point of honour, on these sacred occasions was for each man to strictly limit himself to half-a-pint of liquor. This scrupulosity was so well understood by the landlord that the whole company was served in cups of that measure. They were all exactly alike – straight-sided, with two leafless lime-trees done in eel-brown on the sides – one towards the drinker’s lips, the other confronting his comrade. To wonder how many of these cups the landlord possessed altogether was a favourite exercise of children in the marvellous. Forty at least might have been seen at these times in the large room, forming a ring round the margin of the great sixteen-legged oak table, like the monolithic circle of Stonehenge in its pristine days. Outside and above the forty cups came a circle of forty smoke-jets from forty clay pipes; outside the pipes the countenances of the forty church-goers, supported at the back by a circle of forty chairs.

The conversation was not the conversation of week-days, but a thing altogether finer in point and higher in tone. They invariably discussed the sermon, dissecting it, weighing it, as above or below the average – the general tendency being to regard it as a scientific feat or performance which had no relation to their own lives, except as between critics and the thing criticized. The bass-viol player and the clerk usually spoke with more authority than the rest on account of their official connection with the preacher.

Now the Three Mariners was the inn chosen by Henchard as the place for closing his long term of dramless years. He had so timed his entry as to be well established in the large room by the time the forty church-goers entered to their customary cups. The flush upon his face proclaimed at once that the vow of twenty-one years had lapsed, and the era of recklessness begun anew. He was seated on a small table, drawn up to the side of the massive oak board reserved for the churchmen, a few of whom nodded to him as they took their places and said, “How be ye, Mr. Henchard? Quite a stranger here.”

Henchard did not take the trouble to reply for a few moments, and his eyes rested on his stretched-out legs and boots. “Yes,” he said at length; “that’s true. I’ve been down in spirit for weeks; some of ye know the cause. I am better now, but not quite serene. I want you fellows of the choir to strike up a tune; and what with that and this brew of Stannidge’s, I am in hopes of getting altogether out of my minor key.”

“With all my heart,” said the first fiddle. “We’ve let back our strings, that’s true, but we can soon pull ‘em up again. Sound A, neighbours, and give the man a stave.”

“I don’t care a curse what the words be,” said Henchard. “Hymns, ballets, or rantipole rubbish; the Rogue’s March or the cherubim’s warble – ‘tis all the same to me if ‘tis good harmony, and well put out.”

“Well – heh, heh – it may be we can do that, and not a man among us that have sat in the gallery less than twenty year,” said the leader of the band. “As ‘tis Sunday, neighbours, suppose we raise the Fourth Psa’am, to Samuel Wakely’s tune, as improved by me?”

“Hang Samuel Wakely’s tune, as improved by thee!” said Henchard. “Chuck across one of your psalters – old Wiltshire is the only tune worth singing – the psalm-tune that would make my blood ebb and flow like the sea when I was a steady chap. I’ll find some words to fit en.” He took one of the psalters and began turning over the leaves.

Chancing to look out of the window at that moment he saw a flock of people passing by, and perceived them to be the congregation of the upper church, now just dismissed, their sermon having been a longer one than that the lower parish was favoured with. Among the rest of the leading inhabitants walked Mr. Councillor Farfrae with Lucetta upon his arm, the observed and imitated of all the smaller tradesmen’s womankind. Henchard’s mouth changed a little, and he continued to turn over the leaves.

“Now then,” he said, “Psalm the Hundred-and-Ninth, to the tune of Wiltshire: verses ten to fifteen. I gi’e ye the words:

“His seed shall orphans be, his wife
A widow plunged in grief;
His vagrant children beg their bread
Where none can give relief.

His ill-got riches shall be made
To usurers a prey;
The fruit of all his toil shall be
By strangers borne away.

None shall be found that to his wants
Their mercy will extend,
Or to his helpless orphan seed
The least assistance lend.

A swift destruction soon shall seize
On his unhappy race;
And the next age his hated name
Shall utterly deface.”

“I know the Psa’am – I know the Psa’am!” said the leader hastily; “but I would as lief not sing it. ‘Twasn’t made for singing. We chose it once when the gipsy stole the pa’son’s mare, thinking to please him, but pa’son were quite upset. Whatever Servant David were thinking about when he made a Psalm that nobody can sing without disgracing himself, I can’t fathom! Now then, the Fourth Psalm, to Samuel Wakely’s tune, as improved by me.”

“‘Od seize your sauce – I tell ye to sing the Hundred-and-Ninth to Wiltshire, and sing it you shall!” roared Henchard. “Not a single one of all the droning crew of ye goes out of this room till that Psalm is sung!” He slipped off the table, seized the poker, and going to the door placed his back against it. “Now then, go ahead, if you don’t wish to have your cust pates broke!”

“Don’t ‘ee, don’t’ee take on so! – As ‘tis the Sabbath-day, and ‘tis Servant David’s words and not ours, perhaps we don’t mind for once, hey?” said one of the terrified choir, looking round upon the rest. So the instruments were tuned and the comminatory verses sung.

“Thank ye, thank ye,” said Henchard in a softened voice, his eyes growing downcast, and his manner that of a man much moved by the strains. “Don’t you blame David,” he went on in low tones, shaking his head without raising his eyes. “He knew what he was about when he wrote that!.. If I could afford it, be hanged if I wouldn’t keep a church choir at my own expense to play and sing to me at these low, dark times of my life. But the bitter thing is, that when I was rich I didn’t need what I could have, and now I be poor I can’t have what I need!”