THE WOODLANDERS
by
Thomas Hardy
CHAPTER I.
The rambler who, for old association or other reasons, should trace theforsaken coach-road running almost in a meridional line from Bristol tothe south shore of England, would find himself during the latter halfof his journey in the vicinity of some extensive woodlands,interspersed with apple-orchards. Here the trees, timber orfruit-bearing, as the case may be, make the wayside hedges ragged bytheir drip and shade, stretching over the road with easefulhorizontality, as if they found the unsubstantial air an adequatesupport for their limbs. At one place, where a hill is crossed, thelargest of the woods shows itself bisected by the high-way, as the headof thick hair is bisected by the white line of its parting. The spotis lonely.
The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degreethat is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-likestillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast ofwhat is with what might be probably accounts for this. To step, forinstance, at the place under notice, from the hedge of the plantationinto the adjoining pale thoroughfare, and pause amid its emptiness fora moment, was to exchange by the act of a single stride the simpleabsence of human companionship for an incubus of the forlorn.
At this spot, on the lowering evening of a by-gone winter's day, therestood a man who had entered upon the scene much in the aforesaidmanner. Alighting into the road from a stile hard by, he, though by nomeans a "chosen vessel" for impressions, was temporarily influenced bysome such feeling of being suddenly more alone than before he hademerged upon the highway.
It could be seen by a glance at his rather finical style of dress thathe did not belong to the country proper; and from his air, after awhile, that though there might be a sombre beauty in the scenery, musicin the breeze, and a wan procession of coaching ghosts in the sentimentof this old turnpike-road, he was mainly puzzled about the way. Thedead men's work that had been expended in climbing that hill, theblistered soles that had trodden it, and the tears that had wetted it,were not his concern; for fate had given him no time for any butpractical things.
He looked north and south, and mechanically prodded the ground with hiswalking-stick. A closer glance at his face corroborated the testimonyof his clothes. It was self-complacent, yet there was small apparentground for such complacence. Nothing irradiated it; to the eye of themagician in character, if not to the ordinary observer, the expressionenthroned there was absolute submission to and belief in a littleassortment of forms and habitudes.
At first not a soul appeared who could enlighten him as he desired, orseemed likely to appear that night. But presently a slight noise oflaboring wheels and the steady dig of a horse's shoe-tips becameaudible; and there loomed in the notch of the hill and plantation thatthe road formed here at the summit a carrier's van drawn by a singlehorse. When it got nearer, he said, with some relief to himself, "'TisMrs. Dollery's--this will help me."
The vehicle was half full of passengers, mostly women. He held up hisstick at its approach, and the woman who was driving drew rein.
"I've been trying to find a short way to Little Hintock this lasthalf-hour, Mrs. Dollery," he said. "But though I've been to GreatHintock and Hintock House half a dozen times I am at fault about thesmall village. You can help me, I dare say?"
She assured him that she could--that as she went to Great Hintock hervan passed near it--that it was only up the lane that branched out ofthe lane into which she was about to turn--just ahead. "Though,"continued Mrs. Dollery, "'tis such a little small place that, as a towngentleman, you'd need have a candle and lantern to find it if ye don'tknow where 'tis. Bedad! I wouldn't live there if they'd pay me to.Now at Great Hintock you do see the world a bit."
He mounted and sat beside her, with his feet outside, where they wereever and anon brushed over by the horse's tail.
This van, driven and owned by Mrs. Dollery, was rather a movableattachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who knewit well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and color ofheather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted byharness and drudgery from colthood--though if all had their rights, heought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of someEastern plain instead of tugging here--had trodden this road almostdaily for twenty years. Even his subjection was not made congruousthroughout, for the harness being too short, his tail was not drawnthrough the crupper, so that the breeching slipped awkwardly to oneside. He knew every subtle incline of the seven or eight miles ofground between Hintock and Sherton Abbas--the market-town to which hejourneyed--as accurately as any surveyor could have learned it by aDumpy level.
The vehicle had a square black tilt which nodded with the motion of thewheels, and at a point in it over the driver's head was a hook to whichthe reins were hitched at times, when they formed a catenary curve fromthe horse's shoulders. Somewhere about the axles was a loose chain,whose only known purpose was to clink as it went. Mrs. Dollery, havingto hop up and down many times in the service of her passengers, wore,especially in windy weather, short leggings under her gown formodesty's sake, and instead of a bonnet a felt hat tied down with ahandkerchief, to guard against an earache to which she was frequentlysubject. In the rear of the van was a glass window, which she cleanedwith her pocket-handkerchief every market-day before starting. Lookingat the van from the back, the spectator could thus see through itsinterior a square piece of the same sky and landscape that he sawwithout, but intruded on by the profiles of the seated passengers, who,as they rumbled onward, their lips moving and heads nodding in animatedprivate converse, remained in happy unconsciousness that theirmannerisms and facial peculiarities were sharply defined to the publiceye.
This hour of coming home from market was the happy one, if not thehappiest, of the week for them. Snugly ensconced under the tilt, theycould forget the sorrows of the world without, and survey life andrecapitulate the incidents of the day with placid smiles.
The passengers in the back part formed a group to themselves, and whilethe new-comer spoke to the proprietress, they indulged in aconfidential chat about him as about other people, which the noise ofthe van rendered inaudible to himself and Mrs. Dollery, sitting forward.
"'Tis Barber Percombe--he that's got the waxen woman in his window atthe top of Abbey Street," said one. "What business can bring him fromhis shop out here at this time and not a journeyman hair-cutter, but amaster-barber that's left off his pole because 'tis not genteel!"
They listened to his conversation, but Mr. Percombe, though he hadnodded and spoken genially, seemed indisposed to gratify the curiositywhich he had aroused; and the unrestrained flow of ideas which hadanimated the inside of the van before his arrival was checkedthenceforward.
Thus they rode on till they turned into a half-invisible little lane,whence, as it reached the verge of an eminence, could be discerned inthe dusk, about half a mile to the right, gardens and orchards sunk ina concave, and, as it were, snipped out of the woodland. From thisself-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke,which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root onquiet hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches. It wasone of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where mayusually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity thanmeditation where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results ininferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, no lessthan in other places, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophocleanare enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions andclosely knit interdependence of the lives therein.
This place was the Little Hintock of the master-barber's search. Thecoming night gradually obscured the smoke of the chimneys,
but theposition of the sequestered little world could still be distinguishedby a few faint lights, winking more or less ineffectually through theleafless boughs, and the undiscerned songsters they bore, in the formof balls of feathers, at roost among them.
Out of the lane followed by the van branched a yet smaller lane, at thecorner of which the barber alighted, Mrs. Dollery's van going on to thelarger village, whose superiority to the despised smaller one as anexemplar of the world's movements was not particularly apparent in itsmeans of approach.
"A very clever and learned young doctor, who, they say, is in leaguewith the devil, lives in the place you be going to--not because there'sanybody for'n to cure there, but because 'tis the middle of hisdistrict."
The observation was flung at the barber by one of the women at parting,as a last attempt to get at his errand that way.
But he made no reply, and without further pause the pedestrian plungedtowards the umbrageous nook, and paced cautiously over the dead leaveswhich nearly buried the road or street of the hamlet. As very fewpeople except themselves passed this way after dark, a majority of thedenizens of Little Hintock deemed window-curtains unnecessary; and onthis account Mr. Percombe made it his business to stop opposite thecasements of each cottage that he came to, with a demeanor which showedthat he was endeavoring to conjecture, from the persons and things heobserved within, the whereabouts of somebody or other who resided here.
Only the smaller dwellings interested him; one or two houses, whosesize, antiquity, and rambling appurtenances signified thatnotwithstanding their remoteness they must formerly have been, if theywere not still, inhabited by people of a certain social standing, beingneglected by him entirely. Smells of pomace, and the hiss offermenting cider, which reached him from the back quarters of othertenements, revealed the recent occupation of some of the inhabitants,and joined with the scent of decay from the perishing leaves underfoot.
Half a dozen dwellings were passed without result. The next, whichstood opposite a tall tree, was in an exceptional state of radiance,the flickering brightness from the inside shining up the chimney andmaking a luminous mist of the emerging smoke. The interior, as seenthrough the window, caused him to draw up with a terminative air andwatch. The house was rather large for a cottage, and the door, whichopened immediately into the living-room, stood ajar, so that a ribbonof light fell through the opening into the dark atmosphere without.Every now and then a moth, decrepit from the late season, would flitfor a moment across the out-coming rays and disappear again into thenight.