Far from the Madding Crowd

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.