





THE WOODLANDERS


by

Thomas Hardy




CHAPTER I.

The rambler who, for old association or other reasons, should trace the
forsaken coach-road running almost in a meridional line from Bristol to
the south shore of England, would find himself during the latter half
of his journey in the vicinity of some extensive woodlands,
interspersed with apple-orchards.  Here the trees, timber or
fruit-bearing, as the case may be, make the wayside hedges ragged by
their drip and shade, stretching over the road with easeful
horizontality, as if they found the unsubstantial air an adequate
support for their limbs.  At one place, where a hill is crossed, the
largest of the woods shows itself bisected by the high-way, as the head
of thick hair is bisected by the white line of its parting.  The spot
is lonely.

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree
that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like
stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of
what is with what might be probably accounts for this.  To step, for
instance, at the place under notice, from the hedge of the plantation
into the adjoining pale thoroughfare, and pause amid its emptiness for
a moment, was to exchange by the act of a single stride the simple
absence of human companionship for an incubus of the forlorn.

At this spot, on the lowering evening of a by-gone winter's day, there
stood a man who had entered upon the scene much in the aforesaid
manner.  Alighting into the road from a stile hard by, he, though by no
means a "chosen vessel" for impressions, was temporarily influenced by
some such feeling of being suddenly more alone than before he had
emerged upon the highway.

It could be seen by a glance at his rather finical style of dress that
he did not belong to the country proper; and from his air, after a
while, that though there might be a sombre beauty in the scenery, music
in the breeze, and a wan procession of coaching ghosts in the sentiment
of this old turnpike-road, he was mainly puzzled about the way.  The
dead men's work that had been expended in climbing that hill, the
blistered 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 but
practical things.

He looked north and south, and mechanically prodded the ground with his
walking-stick.  A closer glance at his face corroborated the testimony
of his clothes.  It was self-complacent, yet there was small apparent
ground for such complacence.  Nothing irradiated it; to the eye of the
magician in character, if not to the ordinary observer, the expression
enthroned there was absolute submission to and belief in a little
assortment of forms and habitudes.

At first not a soul appeared who could enlighten him as he desired, or
seemed likely to appear that night.  But presently a slight noise of
laboring wheels and the steady dig of a horse's shoe-tips became
audible; and there loomed in the notch of the hill and plantation that
the road formed here at the summit a carrier's van drawn by a single
horse.  When it got nearer, he said, with some relief to himself, "'Tis
Mrs. Dollery's--this will help me."

The vehicle was half full of passengers, mostly women.  He held up his
stick at its approach, and the woman who was driving drew rein.

"I've been trying to find a short way to Little Hintock this last
half-hour, Mrs. Dollery," he said.  "But though I've been to Great
Hintock and Hintock House half a dozen times I am at fault about the
small village.  You can help me, I dare say?"

She assured him that she could--that as she went to Great Hintock her
van passed near it--that it was only up the lane that branched out of
the lane into which she was about to turn--just ahead. "Though,"
continued Mrs. Dollery, "'tis such a little small place that, as a town
gentleman, you'd need have a candle and lantern to find it if ye don't
know 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 were
ever and anon brushed over by the horse's tail.

This van, driven and owned by Mrs. Dollery, was rather a movable
attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who knew
it well.  The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and color of
heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted by
harness and drudgery from colthood--though if all had their rights, he
ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of some
Eastern plain instead of tugging here--had trodden this road almost
daily for twenty years.  Even his subjection was not made congruous
throughout, for the harness being too short, his tail was not drawn
through the crupper, so that the breeching slipped awkwardly to one
side.  He knew every subtle incline of the seven or eight miles of
ground between Hintock and Sherton Abbas--the market-town to which he
journeyed--as accurately as any surveyor could have learned it by a
Dumpy level.

The vehicle had a square black tilt which nodded with the motion of the
wheels, and at a point in it over the driver's head was a hook to which
the reins were hitched at times, when they formed a catenary curve from
the horse's shoulders.  Somewhere about the axles was a loose chain,
whose only known purpose was to clink as it went.  Mrs. Dollery, having
to hop up and down many times in the service of her passengers, wore,
especially in windy weather, short leggings under her gown for
modesty's sake, and instead of a bonnet a felt hat tied down with a
handkerchief, to guard against an earache to which she was frequently
subject.  In the rear of the van was a glass window, which she cleaned
with her pocket-handkerchief every market-day before starting.  Looking
at the van from the back, the spectator could thus see through its
interior a square piece of the same sky and landscape that he saw
without, but intruded on by the profiles of the seated passengers, who,
as they rumbled onward, their lips moving and heads nodding in animated
private converse, remained in happy unconsciousness that their
mannerisms and facial peculiarities were sharply defined to the public
eye.

This hour of coming home from market was the happy one, if not the
happiest, of the week for them.  Snugly ensconced under the tilt, they
could forget the sorrows of the world without, and survey life and
recapitulate the incidents of the day with placid smiles.

The passengers in the back part formed a group to themselves, and while
the new-comer spoke to the proprietress, they indulged in a
confidential chat about him as about other people, which the noise of
the van rendered inaudible to himself and Mrs. Dollery, sitting forward.

"'Tis Barber Percombe--he that's got the waxen woman in his window at
the top of Abbey Street," said one.  "What business can bring him from
his shop out here at this time and not a journeyman hair-cutter, but a
master-barber that's left off his pole because 'tis not genteel!"

They listened to his conversation, but Mr. Percombe, though he had
nodded and spoken genially, seemed indisposed to gratify the curiosity
which he had aroused; and the unrestrained flow of ideas which had
animated the inside of the van before his arrival was checked
thenceforward.

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 in
the dusk, about half a mile to the right, gardens and orchards sunk in
a concave, and, as it were, snipped out of the woodland.  From this
self-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke,
which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on
quiet hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches.  It was
one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may
usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than
meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in
inferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, no less
than in other places, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean
are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and
closely knit interdependence of the lives therein.

This place was the Little Hintock of the master-barber's search. The
coming night gradually obscured the smoke of the chimneys, but the
position of the sequestered little world could still be distinguished
by a few faint lights, winking more or less ineffectually through the
leafless boughs, and the undiscerned songsters they bore, in the form
of balls of feathers, at roost among them.

Out of the lane followed by the van branched a yet smaller lane, at the
corner of which the barber alighted, Mrs. Dollery's van going on to the
larger village, whose superiority to the despised smaller one as an
exemplar of the world's movements was not particularly apparent in its
means of approach.

"A very clever and learned young doctor, who, they say, is in league
with the devil, lives in the place you be going to--not because there's
anybody for'n to cure there, but because 'tis the middle of his
district."

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 plunged
towards the umbrageous nook, and paced cautiously over the dead leaves
which nearly buried the road or street of the hamlet. As very few
people except themselves passed this way after dark, a majority of the
denizens of Little Hintock deemed window-curtains unnecessary; and on
this account Mr. Percombe made it his business to stop opposite the
casements of each cottage that he came to, with a demeanor which showed
that he was endeavoring to conjecture, from the persons and things he
observed within, the whereabouts of somebody or other who resided here.

Only the smaller dwellings interested him; one or two houses, whose
size, antiquity, and rambling appurtenances signified that
notwithstanding their remoteness they must formerly have been, if they
were not still, inhabited by people of a certain social standing, being
neglected by him entirely.  Smells of pomace, and the hiss of
fermenting cider, which reached him from the back quarters of other
tenements, 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, which
stood opposite a tall tree, was in an exceptional state of radiance,
the flickering brightness from the inside shining up the chimney and
making a luminous mist of the emerging smoke.  The interior, as seen
through the window, caused him to draw up with a terminative air and
watch.  The house was rather large for a cottage, and the door, which
opened immediately into the living-room, stood ajar, so that a ribbon
of light fell through the opening into the dark atmosphere without.
Every now and then a moth, decrepit from the late season, would flit
for a moment across the out-coming rays and disappear again into the
night.



CHAPTER II.

In the room from which this cheerful blaze proceeded, he beheld a girl
seated on a willow chair, and busily occupied by the light of the fire,
which was ample and of wood.  With a bill-hook in one hand and a
leather glove, much too large for her, on the other, she was making
spars, such as are used by thatchers, with great rapidity.  She wore a
leather apron for this purpose, which was also much too large for her
figure.  On her left hand lay a bundle of the straight, smooth sticks
called spar-gads--the raw material of her manufacture; on her right, a
heap of chips and ends--the refuse--with which the fire was maintained;
in front, a pile of the finished articles.  To produce them she took up
each gad, looked critically at it from end to end, cut it to length,
split it into four, and sharpened each of the quarters with dexterous
blows, which brought it to a triangular point precisely resembling that
of a bayonet.

Beside her, in case she might require more light, a brass candlestick
stood on a little round table, curiously formed of an old coffin-stool,
with a deal top nailed on, the white surface of the latter contrasting
oddly with the black carved oak of the substructure.  The social
position of the household in the past was almost as definitively shown
by the presence of this article as that of an esquire or nobleman by
his old helmets or shields. It had been customary for every well-to-do
villager, whose tenure was by copy of court-roll, or in any way more
permanent than that of the mere cotter, to keep a pair of these stools
for the use of his own dead; but for the last generation or two a
feeling of cui bono had led to the discontinuance of the custom, and
the stools were frequently made use of in the manner described.

The young woman laid down the bill-hook for a moment and examined the
palm of her right hand, which, unlike the other, was ungloved, and
showed little hardness or roughness about it.  The palm was red and
blistering, as if this present occupation were not frequent enough with
her to subdue it to what it worked in.  As with so many right hands
born to manual labor, there was nothing in its fundamental shape to
bear out the physiological conventionalism that gradations of birth,
gentle or mean, show themselves primarily in the form of this member.
Nothing but a cast of the die of destiny had decided that the girl
should handle the tool; and the fingers which clasped the heavy ash
haft might have skilfully guided the pencil or swept the string, had
they only been set to do it in good time.

Her face had the usual fulness of expression which is developed by a
life of solitude.  Where the eyes of a multitude beat like waves upon a
countenance they seem to wear away its individuality; but in the still
water of privacy every tentacle of feeling and sentiment shoots out in
visible luxuriance, to be interpreted as readily as a child's look by
an intruder.  In years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the
necessity of taking thought at a too early period of life had forced
the provisional curves of her childhood's face to a premature finality.
Thus she had but little pretension to beauty, save in one prominent
particular--her hair.  Its abundance made it almost unmanageable; its
color was, roughly speaking, and as seen here by firelight, brown, but
careful notice, or an observation by day, would have revealed that its
true shade was a rare and beautiful approximation to chestnut.

On this one bright gift of Time to the particular victim of his now
before us the new-comer's eyes were fixed; meanwhile the fingers of his
right hand mechanically played over something sticking up from his
waistcoat-pocket--the bows of a pair of scissors, whose polish made
them feebly responsive to the light within.  In her present beholder's
mind the scene formed by the girlish spar-maker composed itself into a
post-Raffaelite picture of extremest quality, wherein the girl's hair
alone, as the focus of observation, was depicted with intensity and
distinctness, and her face, shoulders, hands, and figure in general,
being a blurred mass of unimportant detail lost in haze and obscurity.

He hesitated no longer, but tapped at the door and entered.  The young
woman turned at the crunch of his boots on the sanded floor, and
exclaiming, "Oh, Mr. Percombe, how you frightened me!" quite lost her
color for a moment.

He replied, "You should shut your door--then you'd hear folk open it."

"I can't," she said; "the chimney smokes so.  Mr. Percombe, you look as
unnatural out of your shop as a canary in a thorn-hedge. Surely you
have not come out here on my account--for--"

"Yes--to have your answer about this." He touched her head with his
cane, and she winced.  "Do you agree?" he continued.  "It is necessary
that I should know at once, as the lady is soon going away, and it
takes time to make up."

"Don't press me--it worries me.  I was in hopes you had thought no more
of it.  I can NOT part with it--so there!"

"Now, look here, Marty," said the barber, sitting down on the
coffin-stool table.  "How much do you get for making these spars?"

"Hush--father's up-stairs awake, and he don't know that I am doing his
work."

"Well, now tell me," said the man, more softly.  "How much do you get?"

"Eighteenpence a thousand," she said, reluctantly.

"Who are you making them for?"

"Mr. Melbury, the timber-dealer, just below here."

"And how many can you make in a day?"

"In a day and half the night, three bundles--that's a thousand and a
half."

"Two and threepence." The barber paused.  "Well, look here," he
continued, with the remains of a calculation in his tone, which
calculation had been the reduction to figures of the probable monetary
magnetism necessary to overpower the resistant force of her present
purse and the woman's love of comeliness, "here's a sovereign--a gold
sovereign, almost new." He held it out between his finger and thumb.
"That's as much as you'd earn in a week and a half at that rough man's
work, and it's yours for just letting me snip off what you've got too
much of."

The girl's bosom moved a very little.  "Why can't the lady send to some
other girl who don't value her hair--not to me?" she exclaimed.

"Why, simpleton, because yours is the exact shade of her own, and 'tis
a shade you can't match by dyeing.  But you are not going to refuse me
now I've come all the way from Sherton o' purpose?"

"I say I won't sell it--to you or anybody