CHAPTER XL

ON CASTERBRIDGE HIGHWAY

For a considerable time the woman walked on. Her steps became feebler,

and she strained her eyes to look afar upon the naked road, now

indistinct amid the penumbræ of night. At length her onward walk

dwindled to the merest totter, and she opened a gate within which was a

haystack. Underneath this she sat down and presently slept.

When the woman awoke it was to find herself in the depths of a moonless

and starless night. A heavy unbroken crust of cloud stretched across

the sky, shutting out every speck of heaven; and a distant halo which

hung over the town of Casterbridge was visible against the black

concave, the luminosity appearing the brighter by its great contrast

with the circumscribing darkness. Towards this weak, soft glow the

woman turned her eyes.

“If I could only get there!” she said. “Meet him the day after

to-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 a clock seems

to lose in breadth as much as in length, and to diminish its

sonorousness to a thin falsetto.

Afterwards a light—two lights—arose from the remote shade, and grew

larger. A carriage rolled along the road, and passed the gate. It

probably contained some late diners-out. The beams from one lamp shone

for a moment upon the crouching woman, and threw her face into vivid

relief. The face was young in the groundwork, old in the finish; the

general contours were flexuous and childlike, but the finer lineaments

had begun to be sharp and thin.

The pedestrian stood up, apparently with revived determination, and

looked around. The road appeared to be familiar to her, and she

carefully scanned the fence as she slowly walked along. Presently there

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 slight

distance she bore up bravely, afterwards flagging as before. This was

beside a lone copsewood, wherein heaps of white chips strewn upon the

leafy ground showed that woodmen had been faggoting and making hurdles

during the day. Now there was not a rustle, not a breeze, not the

faintest clash of twigs to keep her company. The woman looked over the

gate, opened it, and went in. Close to the entrance stood a row of

faggots, bound and unbound, together with stakes of all sizes.

For a few seconds the wayfarer stood with that tense stillness which

signifies itself to be not the end, but merely the suspension, of a

previous motion. Her attitude was that of a person who listens, either

to the external world of sound, or to the imagined discourse of

thought. A close criticism might have detected signs proving that she

was intent on the latter alternative. Moreover, as was shown by what

followed, she was oddly exercising the faculty of invention upon the

speciality of the clever Jacquet Droz, the designer of automatic

substitutes 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 were nearly

straight to the height of three or four feet, where each branched into

a fork like the letter Y. She sat down, snapped off the small upper

twigs, and carried the remainder with her into the road. She placed one

of these forks under each arm as a crutch, tested them, timidly threw

her whole weight upon them—so little that it was—and swung herself

forward. The girl had made for herself a material aid.

The crutches answered well. The pat of her feet, and the tap of her

sticks upon the highway, were all the sounds that came from the

traveller now. She had passed the last milestone by a good long

distance, and began to look wistfully towards the bank as if

calculating upon another milestone soon. The crutches, though so very

useful, had their limits of power. Mechanism only transfers labour,

being powerless to supersede it, and the original amount of exertion

was not cleared away; it was thrown into the body and arms. She was

exhausted, and each swing forward became fainter. At last she swayed

sideways, and fell.

Here she lay, a shapeless heap, for ten minutes and more. The morning

wind began to boom dully over the flats, and to move afresh dead leaves

which had lain still since yesterday. The woman desperately turned

round upon her knees, and next rose to her feet. Steadying herself by

the help of one crutch, she essayed a step, then another, then a third,

using the crutches now as walking-sticks only. Thus she progressed till

descending Mellstock Hill another milestone appeared, and soon the

beginning of an iron-railed fence came into view. She staggered across

to the first post, clung to it, and looked around.

The Casterbridge lights were now individually visible. It was getting

towards morning, and vehicles might be hoped for, if not expected soon.

She listened. There was not a sound of life save that acme and

sublimation of all dismal sounds, the bark of a fox, its three hollow

notes being rendered at intervals of a minute with the precision of a

funeral bell.

“Less than a mile!” the woman murmured. “No; more,” she added, after a

pause. “The mile is to the county hall, and my resting-place is on the

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—six perhaps.

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 upon the

rail, then the other, then leaning over it whilst she dragged her feet

on beneath.

This woman was not given to soliloquy; but extremity of feeling lessens

the individuality of the weak, as it increases that of the strong. She

said again in the same tone, “I’ll believe that the end lies five posts

forward, and no further, and so get strength to pass them.”

This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned

and 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 next

fifth. 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 the bridge

over the Froom was in view.

She crawled to the bridge. During the effort each breath of the woman

went into the air as if never to return again.

“Now for the truth of the matter,” she said, sitting down. “The truth

is, that I have less than half a mile.” Self-beguilement with what she

had known all the time to be false had given her strength to come over

half a mile that she would have been powerless to face in the lump. The

artifice showed that the woman, by some mysterious intuition, had

grasped the paradoxical truth that blindness may operate more

vigorously than prescience, and the short-sighted effect more 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 stolid

Juggernaut. It was an impassive King of her world. The road here ran

across Durnover Moor, open to the road on either side. She surveyed the

wide space, the lights, herself, sighed, and lay down against a

guard-stone of the bridge.

Never was ingenuity exercised so sorely as the traveller here exercised

hers. Every conceivable aid, method, stratagem, mechanism, by which

these last desperate eight hundred yards could be overpassed by 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 demanded by either of these latter two was

greater than to walk erect. The faculty 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 a portion

of shade seemed to detach itself and move into isolation upon the pale

white of the road. It glided noiselessly towards the recumbent woman.

She became conscious of something touching her hand; it was softness

and it was warmth. She opened her eyes, and the substance touched her

face. A dog was licking her cheek.

He was a huge, heavy, and quiet creature, standing darkly against the

low horizon, and at least two feet higher than the present position of

her eyes. Whether Newfoundland, mastiff, bloodhound, or what not, it

was impossible to say. He seemed to be of too strange and mysterious a

nature to belong to any variety among those of popular nomenclature.

Being thus assignable to no breed, he was the ideal embodiment of

canine greatness—a generalization from what was common to all. Night,

in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart from its stealthy and

cruel side, was personified in this form. Darkness endows 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 earlier times

she had, when standing, looked up to a man. The animal, who was as

homeless as she, respectfully withdrew a step or two when the woman

moved, and, seeing that she did not repulse him, he licked her hand

again.

A thought moved within her like lightning. “Perhaps I can make use of

him—I might do it then!”

She pointed in the direction of Casterbridge, and the dog seemed to

misunderstand: he trotted on. Then, finding she could not follow, he

came back and whined.

The ultimate and saddest singularity of woman’s effort and invention

was reached when, with a quickened breathing, she rose to a stooping

posture, and, resting her two little arms upon the shoulders of the

dog, leant firmly thereon, and murmured stimulating words. Whilst she

sorrowed in her heart she cheered with her voice, and what was stranger

than that the strong should need encouragement from the weak was that

cheerfulness should be so well stimulated by such utter dejection. Her

friend moved forward slowly, and she with small mincing steps moved

forward beside him, half her weight being thrown upon the animal.

Sometimes she sank as she had sunk from walking erect, from the

crutches, from the rails. The dog, who now thoroughly understood her

desire and her incapacity, was frantic in his distress on these

occasions; he would tug at her dress and run forward. She always called

him back, and it was now to be observed that the woman listened for

human sounds only to avoid them. It was evident that she had an object

in keeping her presence on the road and her forlorn state unknown.

Their progress was necessarily very slow. They reached the bottom of

the town, and the Casterbridge lamps lay before them like fallen

Pleiads as they turned to the left into the dense shade of a deserted

avenue of chestnuts, and so skirted the borough. Thus the town was

passed, and the goal was reached.

On this much-desired spot outside the town rose a picturesque building.

Originally it had been a mere case to hold people. The shell had been

so thin, so devoid of excrescence, and so closely drawn over the

accommodation granted, that the grim character of what was beneath

showed through it, as the shape of a body is visible under 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 the Casterbridge

chimneys, was one of the most magnificent in the county. A neighbouring

earl once said that he would give up a year’s rental to have at his own

door the view enjoyed by the inmates from theirs—and very probably the

inmates would have given up the view for his year’s rental.

This stone edifice consisted of a central mass and two wings, whereon

stood as sentinels a few slim chimneys, now gurgling sorrowfully to the

slow wind. In the wall was a gate, and by the gate a bellpull formed of

a hanging wire. The woman raised herself as high as possible upon her

knees, and could just reach the handle. She moved it and fell forwards

in a bowed attitude, her face upon her bosom.

It was getting on towards six o’clock, and sounds of movement were to

be heard inside the building which was the haven of rest to this

wearied soul. A little door by the large one was opened, and a man

appeared inside. He discerned the panting heap of clothes, went back

for a light, and came again. He entered a second time, and returned

with two women.

These lifted the prostrate figure and assisted her in through the

doorway. 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 is he

gone? He helped me.”

“I stoned him away,” said the man.

The little procession then moved forward—the man in front bearing the

light, the two bony women next, supporting between them the small and

supple one. Thus they entered the house and disappeared.