2--Humanity Appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble
Along the road walked an old man. He was white-headed as a mountain,bowed in the shoulders, and faded in general aspect. He wore a glazedhat, an ancient boat-cloak, and shoes; his brass buttons bearing ananchor upon their face. In his hand was a silver-headed walking stick,which he used as a veritable third leg, perseveringly dotting the groundwith its point at every few inches' interval. One would have said thathe had been, in his day, a naval officer of some sort or other.
Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white.It was quite open to the heath on each side, and bisected that vast darksurface like the parting-line on a head of black hair, diminishing andbending away on the furthest horizon.
The old man frequently stretched his eyes ahead to gaze over the tractthat he had yet to traverse. At length he discerned, a long distancein front of him, a moving spot, which appeared to be a vehicle, andit proved to be going the same way as that in which he himself wasjourneying. It was the single atom of life that the scene contained, andit only served to render the general loneliness more evident. Its rateof advance was slow, and the old man gained upon it sensibly.
When he drew nearer he perceived it to be a spring van, ordinary inshape, but singular in colour, this being a lurid red. The driver walkedbeside it; and, like his van, he was completely red. One dye of thattincture covered his clothes, the cap upon his head, his boots, hisface, and his hands. He was not temporarily overlaid with the colour; itpermeated him.
The old man knew the meaning of this. The traveller with the cart was areddleman--a person whose vocation it was to supply farmers with reddingfor their sheep. He was one of a class rapidly becoming extinct inWessex, filling at present in the rural world the place which, duringthe last century, the dodo occupied in the world of animals. He is acurious, interesting, and nearly perished link between obsolete forms oflife and those which generally prevail.
The decayed officer, by degrees, came up alongside his fellow-wayfarer,and wished him good evening. The reddleman turned his head, and repliedin sad and occupied tones. He was young, and his face, if not exactlyhandsome, approached so near to handsome that nobody would havecontradicted an assertion that it really was so in its natural colour.His eye, which glared so strangely through his stain, was in itselfattractive--keen as that of a bird of prey, and blue as autumn mist. Hehad neither whisker nor moustache, which allowed the soft curves of thelower part of his face to be apparent. His lips were thin, and though,as it seemed, compressed by thought, there was a pleasant twitch attheir corners now and then. He was clothed throughout in a tight-fittingsuit of corduroy, excellent in quality, not much worn, and well-chosenfor its purpose, but deprived of its original colour by his trade. Itshowed to advantage the good shape of his figure. A certain well-to-doair about the man suggested that he was not poor for his degree.The natural query of an observer would have been, Why should sucha promising being as this have hidden his prepossessing exterior byadopting that singular occupation?
After replying to the old man's greeting he showed no inclination tocontinue in talk, although they still walked side by side, for the eldertraveller seemed to desire company. There were no sounds but that ofthe booming wind upon the stretch of tawny herbage around them, thecrackling wheels, the tread of the men, and the footsteps of the twoshaggy ponies which drew the van. They were small, hardy animals, of abreed between Galloway and Exmoor, and were known as ”heath-croppers”here.
Now, as they thus pursued their way, the reddleman occasionally left hiscompanion's side, and, stepping behind the van, looked into its interiorthrough a small window. The look was always anxious. He would thenreturn to the old man, who made another remark about the state of thecountry and so on, to which the reddleman again abstractedly replied,and then again they would lapse into silence. The silence conveyed toneither any sense of awkwardness; in these lonely places wayfarers,after a first greeting, frequently plod on for miles without speech;contiguity amounts to a tacit conversation where, otherwise than incities, such contiguity can be put an end to on the merest inclination,and where not to put an end to it is intercourse in itself.
Possibly these two might not have spoken again till their parting, hadit not been for the reddleman's visits to his van. When he returnedfrom his fifth time of looking in the old man said, ”You have somethinginside there besides your load?”
”Yes.”
”Somebody who wants looking after?”
”Yes.”
Not long after this a faint cry sounded from the interior. The reddlemanhastened to the back, looked in, and came away again.
”You have a child there, my man?”
”No, sir, I have a woman.”
”The deuce you have! Why did she cry out?”
”Oh, she has fallen asleep, and not being used to traveling, she'suneasy, and keeps dreaming.”
”A young woman?”
”Yes, a young woman.”
”That would have interested me forty years ago. Perhaps she's yourwife?”
”My wife!” said the other bitterly. ”She's above mating with such as I.But there's no reason why I should tell you about that.”
”That's true. And there's no reason why you should not. What harm can Ido to you or to her?”
The reddleman looked in the old man's face. ”Well, sir,” he said atlast, ”I knew her before today, though perhaps it would have been betterif I had not. But she's nothing to me, and I am nothing to her; and shewouldn't have been in my van if any better carriage had been there totake her.”
”Where, may I ask?”
”At Anglebury.”
”I know the town well. What was she doing there?”
”Oh, not much--to gossip about. However, she's tired to death now, andnot at all well, and that's what makes her so restless. She dropped offinto a nap about an hour ago, and 'twill do her good.”
”A nice-looking girl, no doubt?”
”You would say so.”
The other traveller turned his eyes with interest towards the vanwindow, and, without withdrawing them, said, ”I presume I might look inupon her?”
”No,” said the reddleman abruptly. ”It is getting too dark for you tosee much of her; and, more than that, I have no right to allow you.Thank God she sleeps so well, I hope she won't wake till she's home.”
”Who is she? One of the neighbourhood?”
”'Tis no matter who, excuse me.”
”It is not that girl of Blooms-End, who has been talked about more orless lately? If so, I know her; and I can guess what has happened.”
”'Tis no matter.... Now, sir, I am sorry to say that we shall soon haveto part company. My ponies are tired, and I have further to go, and I amgoing to rest them under this bank for an hour.”
The elder traveller nodded his head indifferently, and the reddlemanturned his horses and van in upon the turf, saying, ”Good night.” Theold man replied, and proceeded on his way as before.
The reddleman watched his form as it diminished to a speck on the roadand became absorbed in the thickening films of night. He then tooksome hay from a truss which was slung up under the van, and, throwing aportion of it in front of the horses, made a pad of the rest, which helaid on the ground beside his vehicle. Upon this he sat down, leaninghis back against the wheel. From the interior a low soft breathing cameto his ear. It appeared to satisfy him, and he musingly surveyed thescene, as if considering the next step that he should take.
To do things musingly, and by small degrees, seemed, indeed, to be aduty in the Egdon valleys at this transitional hour, for there was thatin the condition of the heath itself which resembled protracted andhalting dubiousness. It was the quality of the repose appertainingto the scene. This was not the repose of actual stagnation, but theapparent repose of incredible slowness. A condition of healthy life sonearly resembling the torpor of death is a noticeable thing of itssort; to exhibit the inertness of the desert, and at the same time to beexercising powers akin to those of the meadow, and even of the forest,awakened in those who thought of it the attentiveness usually engenderedby understatement and reserve.
The scene before the reddleman's eyes was a gradual series of ascentsfrom the level of the road backward into the heart of the heath. Itembraced hillocks, pits, ridges, acclivities, one behind the other, tillall was finished by a high hill cutting against the still light sky.The traveller's eye hovered about these things for a time, and finallysettled upon one noteworthy object up there. It was a barrow. This bossyprojection of earth above its natural level occupied the loftiest groundof the loneliest height that the heath contained. Although from thevale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean brow, its actual bulk wasgreat. It formed the pole and axis of this heathery world.
As the resting man looked at the barrow he became aware that its summit,hitherto the highest object in the whole prospect round, was surmountedby something higher. It rose from the semiglobular mound like a spikefrom a helmet. The first instinct of an imaginative stranger might havebeen to suppose it the person of one of the Celts who built the barrow,so far had all of modern date withdrawn from the scene. It seemed a sortof last man among them, musing for a moment before dropping into eternalnight with the rest of his race.
There the form stood, motionless as the hill beneath. Above the plainrose the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow rosethe figure. Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped elsewherethan on a celestial globe.
Such a perfect, delicate, and necessary finish did the figure giveto the dark pile of hills that it seemed to be the only obviousjustification of their outline. Without it, there was the dome withoutthe lantern; with it the architectural demands of the mass weresatisfied. The scene was strangely homogeneous, in that the vale, theupland, the barrow, and the figure above it amounted only to unity.Looking at this or that member of the group was not observing a completething, but a fraction of a thing.
The form was so much like an organic part of the entire motionlessstructure that to see it move would have impressed the mind as a strangephenomenon. Immobility being the chief characteristic of that wholewhich the person formed portion of, the discontinuance of immobility inany quarter suggested confusion.
Yet that is what happened. The figure perceptibly gave up its fixity,shifted a step or two, and turned round. As if alarmed, it descended onthe right side of the barrow, with the glide of a water-drop down a bud,and then vanished. The movement had been sufficient to show more clearlythe characteristics of the figure, and that it was a woman's.
The reason of her sudden displacement now appeared. With her droppingout of sight on the right side, a newcomer, bearing a burden, protrudedinto the sky on the left side, ascended the tumulus, and deposited theburden on the top. A second followed, then a third, a fourth, a fifth,and ultimately the whole barrow was peopled with burdened figures.
The only intelligible meaning in this sky-backed pantomime ofsilhouettes was that the woman had no relation to the forms who hadtaken her place, was sedulously avoiding these, and had come thitherfor another object than theirs. The imagination of the observer clungby preference to that vanished, solitary figure, as to something moreinteresting, more important, more likely to have a history worth knowingthan these newcomers, and unconsciously regarded them as intruders. Butthey remained, and established themselves; and the lonely person whohitherto had been queen of the solitude did not at present seem likelyto return.