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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 way-
side 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."

"Now listen," and he drew up a little closer beside her. "The
lady is very rich, and won't be particular to a few shillings; so
I will advance to this on my own responsibility--I'll make the one
sovereign two, rather than go back empty-handed."

"No, no, no!" she cried, beginning to be much agitated. "You are
a-tempting me, Mr. Percombe. You go on like the Devil to Dr.
Faustus in the penny book. But I don't want your money, and won't
agree. Why did you come? I said when you got me into your shop
and urged me so much, that I didn't mean to sell my hair!" The
speaker was hot and stern.

"Marty, now hearken. The lady that wants it wants it badly. And,
between you and me, you'd better let her have it. 'Twill be bad
for you if you don't."

"Bad for me? Who is she, then?"

The barber held his tongue, and the girl repeated the question.

"I am not at liberty to tell you. And as she is going abroad soon
it makes no difference who she is at all."

"She wants it to go abroad wi'?"

Percombe assented by a nod. The girl regarded him reflectively.
"Barber Percombe," she said, "I know who 'tis. 'Tis she at the
House--Mrs. Charmond!"

"That's my secret. However, if you agree to let me have it, I'll
tell you in confidence."

"I'll certainly not let you have it unless you tell me the truth.
It is Mrs. Charmond."

The barber dropped his voice. "Well--it is. You sat in front of
her in church the other day, and she noticed how exactly your hair
matched her own. Ever since then she's been hankering for it, and
at last decided to get it. As she won't wear it till she goes off
abroad, she knows nobody will recognize the change. I'm
commissioned to get it for her, and then it is to be made up. I
shouldn't have vamped all these miles for any less important
employer. Now, mind--'tis as much as my business with her is
worth if it should be known that I've let out her name; but honor
between us two, Marty, and you'll say nothing that would injure
me?"

"I don't wish to tell upon her," said Marty, coolly. "But my hair
is my own, and I'm going to keep it."

"Now, that's not fair, after what I've told you," said the nettled
barber. "You see, Marty, as you are in the same parish, and in
one of her cottages, and your father is ill, and wouldn't like to
turn out, it would be as well to oblige her. I say that as a
friend. But I won't press you to make up your mind to-night.
You'll be coming to market to-morrow, I dare say, and you can call
then. If you think it over you'll be inclined to bring what I
want, I know."

"I've nothing more to say," she answered.

Her companion saw from her manner that it was useless to urge her
further by speech. "As you are a trusty young woman," he said,
"I'll put these sovereigns up here for ornament, that you may see
how handsome they are. Bring the hair to-morrow, or return the
sovereigns." He stuck them edgewise into the frame of a small
mantle looking-glass. "I hope you'll bring it, for your sake and
mine. I should have thought she could have suited herself
elsewhere; but as it's her fancy it must be indulged if possible.
If you cut it off yourself, mind how you do it so as to keep all
the locks one way." He showed her how this was to be done.

"But I sha'nt," she replied, with laconic indifference. "I value
my looks too much to spoil 'em. She wants my hair to get another
lover with; though if stories are true she's broke the heart of
many a noble gentleman already."

"Lord, it's wonderful how you guess things, Marty," said the
barber. "I've had it from them that know that there certainly is
some foreign gentleman in her eye. However, mind what I ask."

"She's not going to get him through me."

Percombe had retired as far as the door; he came back, planted his
cane on the coffin-stool, and looked her in the face. "Marty
South," he said, with deliberate emphasis, "YOU'VE GOT A LOVER
YOURSELF, and that's why you won't let it go!"

She reddened so intensely as to pass the mild blush that suffices
to heighten beauty; she put the yellow leather glove on one hand,
took up the hook with the other, and sat down doggedly to her work
without turning her face to him again. He regarded her head for a
moment, went to the door, and with one look back at her, departed
on his way homeward.

Marty pursued her occupation for a few minutes, then suddenly
laying down the bill-hook, she jumped up and went to the back of
the room, where she opened a door which disclosed a staircase so
whitely scrubbed that the grain of the wood was wellnigh sodden
away by such cleansing. At the top she gently approached a
bedroom, and without entering, said, "Father, do you want
anything?"

A weak voice inside answered in the negative; adding, "I should be
all right by to-morrow if it were not for the tree!"

"The tree again--always the tree! Oh, father, don't worry so about
that. You know it can do you no harm."

"Who have ye had talking to ye down-stairs?"

"A Sherton man called--nothing to trouble about," she said,
soothingly. "Father," she went on, "can Mrs. Charmond turn us out
of our house if she's minded to?"

"Turn us out? No. Nobody can turn us out till my poor soul is
turned out of my body. 'Tis life-hold, like Ambrose
Winterborne's. But when my life drops 'twill be hers--not till
then." His words on this subject so far had been rational and firm
enough. But now he lapsed into his moaning strain: "And the tree
will do it--that tree will soon be the death of me."

"Nonsense, you know better. How can it be?" She refrained from
further speech, and descended to the ground-floor again.

"Thank Heaven, then," she said to herself, "what belongs to me I
keep."



CHAPTER III.


The lights in the village went out, house after house, till there
only remained two in the darkness. One of these came from a
residence on the hill-side, of which there is nothing to say at
present; the other shone from the window of Marty South.
Precisely the same outward effect was produced here, however, by
her rising when the clock struck ten and hanging up a thick cloth
curtain. The door it was necessary to keep ajar in hers, as in
most cottages, because of the smoke; but she obviated the effect
of the ribbon of light through the chink by hanging a cloth over
that also. She was one of those people who, if they have to work
harder than their neighbors, prefer to keep the necessity a secret
as far as possible; and but for the slight sounds of wood-
splintering which came from within, no wayfarer would have
perceived that here the cottager did not sleep as elsewhere.

Eleven, twelve, one o'clock struck; the heap of spars grew higher,
and the pile of chips and ends more bulky. Even the light on the
hill had now been extinguished; but still she worked on. When the
temperature of the night without had fallen so low as to make her
chilly, she opened a large blue umbrella to ward off the draught
from the door. The two sovereigns confronted her from the
looking-glass in such a manner as to suggest a pair of jaundiced
eyes on the watch for an opportunity. Whenever she sighed for
weariness she lifted her gaze towards them, but withdrew it
quickly, stroking her tresses with her fingers for a moment, as if
to assure herself that they were still secure. When the clock
struck three she arose and tied up the spars she had last made in
a bundle resembling those that lay against the wall.

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