CHAPTER XL
ON CASTERBRIDGE HIGHWAY
For a considerable time the woman walked on. Her steps becamefeebler, and she strained her eyes to look afar upon the naked road,now indistinct amid the penumbrae of night. At length her onward walkdwindled to the merest totter, and she opened a gate within which wasa haystack. Underneath this she sat down and presently slept.
When the woman awoke it was to find herself in the depths of amoonless and starless night. A heavy unbroken crust of cloudstretched across the sky, shutting out every speck of heaven; and adistant halo which hung over the town of Casterbridge was visibleagainst the black concave, the luminosity appearing the brighter byits great contrast with the circumscribing darkness. Towards thisweak, soft glow the woman turned her eyes.
"If I could only get there!" she said. "Meet him the day afterto-morrow: God help me! Perhaps I shall be in my grave before then."
A manor-house clock from the far depths of shadow struck the hour,one, in a small, attenuated tone. After midnight the voice of aclock seems to lose in breadth as much as in length, and to diminishits sonorousness to a thin falsetto.
Afterwards a light--two lights--arose from the remote shade, and grewlarger. A carriage rolled along the road, and passed the gate. Itprobably contained some late diners-out. The beams from one lampshone for a moment upon the crouching woman, and threw her face intovivid relief. The face was young in the groundwork, old in thefinish; the general contours were flexuous and childlike, but thefiner lineaments had begun to be sharp and thin.
The pedestrian stood up, apparently with revived determination, andlooked around. The road appeared to be familiar to her, and shecarefully scanned the fence as she slowly walked along. Presentlythere became visible a dim white shape; it was another milestone.She drew her fingers across its face to feel the marks.
"Two more!" she said.
She leant against the stone as a means of rest for a short interval,then bestirred herself, and again pursued her way. For a slightdistance she bore up bravely, afterwards flagging as before. Thiswas beside a lone copsewood, wherein heaps of white chips strewn uponthe leafy ground showed that woodmen had been faggoting and makinghurdles during the day. Now there was not a rustle, not a breeze,not the faintest clash of twigs to keep her company. The womanlooked over the gate, opened it, and went in. Close to the entrancestood a row of faggots, bound and un-bound, together with stakes ofall sizes.
For a few seconds the wayfarer stood with that tense stillness whichsignifies itself to be not the end, but merely the suspension, ofa previous motion. Her attitude was that of a person who listens,either to the external world of sound, or to the imagined discourseof thought. A close criticism might have detected signs proving thatshe was intent on the latter alternative. Moreover, as was shown bywhat followed, she was oddly exercising the faculty of invention uponthe speciality of the clever Jacquet Droz, the designer of automaticsubstitutes for human limbs.
By the aid of the Casterbridge aurora, and by feeling with her hands,the woman selected two sticks from the heaps. These sticks werenearly straight to the height of three or four feet, where eachbranched into a fork like the letter Y. She sat down, snapped offthe small upper twigs, and carried the remainder with her into theroad. She placed one of these forks under each arm as a crutch,tested them, timidly threw her whole weight upon them--so little thatit was--and swung herself forward. The girl had made for herself amaterial aid.
The crutches answered well. The pat of her feet, and the tap ofher sticks upon the highway, were all the sounds that came fromthe traveller now. She had passed the last milestone by a goodlong distance, and began to look wistfully towards the bank as ifcalculating upon another milestone soon. The crutches, though sovery useful, had their limits of power. Mechanism only transferslabour, being powerless to supersede it, and the original amount ofexertion was not cleared away; it was thrown into the body and arms.She was exhausted, and each swing forward became fainter. At lastshe swayed sideways, and fell.
Here she lay, a shapeless heap, for ten minutes and more. Themorning wind began to boom dully over the flats, and to move afreshdead leaves which had lain still since yesterday. The womandesperately turned round upon her knees, and next rose to her feet.Steadying herself by the help of one crutch, she essayed a step, thenanother, then a third, using the crutches now as walking-sticks only.Thus she progressed till descending Mellstock Hill another milestoneappeared, and soon the beginning of an iron-railed fence came intoview. She staggered across to the first post, clung to it, andlooked around.
The Casterbridge lights were now individually visible. It was gettingtowards morning, and vehicles might be hoped for, if not expectedsoon. She listened. There was not a sound of life save that acmeand sublimation of all dismal sounds, the bark of a fox, its threehollow notes being rendered at intervals of a minute with theprecision of a funeral bell.
"Less than a mile!" the woman murmured. "No; more," she added, aftera pause. "The mile is to the county hall, and my resting-place is onthe other side Casterbridge. A little over a mile, and there I am!"After an interval she again spoke. "Five or six steps to a yard--sixperhaps. I have to go seventeen hundred yards. A hundred times six,six hundred. Seventeen times that. O pity me, Lord!"
Holding to the rails, she advanced, thrusting one hand forward uponthe rail, then the other, then leaning over it whilst she dragged herfeet on beneath.
This woman was not given to soliloquy; but extremity of feelinglessens the individuality of the weak, as it increases that of thestrong. She said again in the same tone, "I'll believe that the endlies five posts forward, and no further, and so get strength to passthem."
This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feignedand fictitious faith is better than no faith at all.
She passed five posts and held on to the fifth.
"I'll pass five more by believing my longed-for spot is at the nextfifth. I can do it."
She passed five more.
"It lies only five further."
She passed five more.
"But it is five further."
She passed them.
"That stone bridge is the end of my journey," she said, when thebridge over the Froom was in view.
She crawled to the bridge. During the effort each breath of thewoman went into the air as if never to return again.
"Now for the truth of the matter," she said, sitting down. "Thetruth is, that I have less than half a mile." Self-beguilement withwhat she had known all the time to be false had given her strength tocome over half a mile that she would have been powerless to face inthe lump. The artifice showed that the woman, by some mysteriousintuition, had grasped the paradoxical truth that blindness mayoperate more vigorously than prescience, and the short-sighted effectmore than the far-seeing; that limitation, and not comprehensiveness,is needed for striking a blow.
The half-mile stood now before the sick and weary woman like a stolidJuggernaut. It was an impassive King of her world. The road hereran across Durnover Moor, open to the road on either side. Shesurveyed the wide space, the lights, herself, sighed, and lay downagainst a guard-stone of the bridge.
Never was ingenuity exercised so sorely as the traveller hereexercised hers. Every conceivable aid, method, stratagem, mechanism,by which these last desperate eight hundred yards could be overpassedby a human being unperceived, was revolved in her busy brain,and dismissed as impracticable. She thought of sticks, wheels,crawling--she even thought of rolling. But the exertion demandedby either of these latter two was greater than to walk erect. Thefaculty of contrivance was worn out. Hopelessness had come at last.
"No further!" she whispered, and closed her eyes.
From the stripe of shadow on the opposite side of the bridge aportion of shade seemed to detach itself and move into isolationupon the pale white of the road. It glided noiselessly towards therecumbent woman.
She became conscious of something touch
ing her hand; it was softnessand it was warmth. She opened her eyes, and the substance touchedher face. A dog was licking her cheek.
He was a huge, heavy, and quiet creature, standing darkly against thelow horizon, and at least two feet higher than the present positionof her eyes. Whether Newfoundland, mastiff, bloodhound, or whatnot, it was impossible to say. He seemed to be of too strange andmysterious a nature to belong to any variety among those of popularnomenclature. Being thus assignable to no breed, he was the idealembodiment of canine greatness--a generalization from what was commonto all. Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart fromits stealthy and cruel side, was personified in this form. Darknessendows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power,and even the suffering woman threw her idea into figure.
In her reclining position she looked up to him just as in earliertimes she had, when standing, looked up to a man. The animal, whowas as homeless as she, respectfully withdrew a step or two when thewoman moved, and, seeing that she did not repulse him, he licked herhand again.
A thought moved within her like lightning. "Perhaps I can make useof him--I might do it then!"
She pointed in the direction of Casterbridge, and the dog seemed tomisunderstand: he trotted on. Then, finding she could not follow, hecame back and whined.
The ultimate and saddest singularity of woman's effort and inventionwas reached when, with a quickened breathing, she rose to a stoopingposture, and, resting her two little arms upon the shoulders of thedog, leant firmly thereon, and murmured stimulating words. Whilstshe sorrowed in her heart she cheered with her voice, and what wasstranger than that the strong should need encouragement from the weakwas that cheerfulness should be so well stimulated by such utterdejection. Her friend moved forward slowly, and she with smallmincing steps moved forward beside him, half her weight being thrownupon the animal. Sometimes she sank as she had sunk from walkingerect, from the crutches, from the rails. The dog, who nowthoroughly understood her desire and her incapacity, was frantic inhis distress on these occasions; he would tug at her dress and runforward. She always called him back, and it was now to be observedthat the woman listened for human sounds only to avoid them. It wasevident that she had an object in keeping her presence on the roadand her forlorn state unknown.
Their progress was necessarily very slow. They reached the bottomof the town, and the Casterbridge lamps lay before them like fallenPleiads as they turned to the left into the dense shade of a desertedavenue of chestnuts, and so skirted the borough. Thus the town waspassed, and the goal was reached.
On this much-desired spot outside the town rose a picturesquebuilding. Originally it had been a mere case to hold people. Theshell had been so thin, so devoid of excrescence, and so closelydrawn over the accommodation granted, that the grim character of whatwas beneath showed through it, as the shape of a body is visibleunder a winding-sheet.
Then Nature, as if offended, lent a hand. Masses of ivy grew up,completely covering the walls, till the place looked like an abbey;and it was discovered that the view from the front, over theCasterbridge chimneys, was one of the most magnificent in thecounty. A neighbouring earl once said that he would give up a year'srental to have at his own door the view enjoyed by the inmates fromtheirs--and very probably the inmates would have given up the viewfor his year's rental.
This stone edifice consisted of a central mass and two wings, whereonstood as sentinels a few slim chimneys, now gurgling sorrowfully tothe slow wind. In the wall was a gate, and by the gate a bellpullformed of a hanging wire. The woman raised herself as high aspossible upon her knees, and could just reach the handle. She movedit and fell forwards in a bowed attitude, her face upon her bosom.
It was getting on towards six o'clock, and sounds of movement wereto be heard inside the building which was the haven of rest to thiswearied soul. A little door by the large one was opened, and a manappeared inside. He discerned the panting heap of clothes, went backfor a light, and came again. He entered a second time, and returnedwith two women.
These lifted the prostrate figure and assisted her in through thedoorway. The man then closed the door.
"How did she get here?" said one of the women.
"The Lord knows," said the other.
"There is a dog outside," murmured the overcome traveller. "Where ishe gone? He helped me."
"I stoned him away," said the man.
The little procession then moved forward--the man in front bearingthe light, the two bony women next, supporting between them the smalland supple one. Thus they entered the house and disappeared.