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
glazed hat, an ancient boat-cloak, and shoes; his brass buttons
bearing an anchor upon their face. In his hand was a silver-headed
walking-stick, which he used as a veritable third leg, perseveringly
dotting the ground with its point at every few inches' interval. One
would have said that he 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 dark surface like the parting-line on a head of black hair,
diminishing and bending away on the furthest horizon.
The old man frequently stretched his eyes ahead to gaze over the tract
that he had yet to traverse. At length he discerned, a long distance
in front of him, a moving spot, which appeared to be a vehicle, and
it proved to be going the same way as that in which he himself was
journeying. It was the single atom of life that the scene contained,
and it only served to render the general loneliness more evident. Its
rate of advance was slow, and the old man gained upon it sensibly.
When he drew nearer he perceived it to be a spring van, ordinary in
shape, but singular in colour, this being a lurid red. The driver
walked beside it; and, like his van, he was completely red. One dye
of that tincture covered his clothes, the cap upon his head, his
boots, his face, and his hands. He was not temporarily overlaid with
the colour; it permeated him.
The old man knew the meaning of this. The traveller with the cart
was a reddleman--a person whose vocation it was to supply farmers
with redding for their sheep. He was one of a class rapidly becoming
extinct in Wessex, filling at present in the rural world the place
which, during the last century, the dodo occupied in the world of
animals. He is a curious, interesting, and nearly perished link
between obsolete forms of life 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 replied in sad and occupied tones. He was young, and
his face, if not exactly handsome, approached so near to handsome that
nobody would have contradicted an assertion that it really was so in
its natural colour. His eye, which glared so strangely through his
stain, was in itself attractive--keen as that of a bird of prey, and
blue as autumn mist. He had neither whisker nor moustache, which
allowed the soft curves of the lower part of his face to be apparent.
His lips were thin, and though, as it seemed, compressed by thought,
there was a pleasant twitch at their corners now and then. He was
clothed throughout in a tight-fitting suit of corduroy, excellent in
quality, not much worn, and well-chosen for its purpose, but deprived
of its original colour by his trade. It showed to advantage the good
shape of his figure. A certain well-to-do air about the man suggested
that he was not poor for his degree. The natural query of an observer
would have been, Why should such a promising being as this have hidden
his prepossessing exterior by adopting that singular occupation?
After replying to the old man's greeting he showed no inclination to
continue in talk, although they still walked side by side, for the
elder traveller seemed to desire company. There were no sounds but
that of the booming wind upon the stretch of tawny herbage around
them, the crackling wheels, the tread of the men, and the footsteps
of the two shaggy ponies which drew the van. They were small, hardy
animals, of a breed between Galloway and Exmoor, and were known as
"heath-croppers" here.
Now, as they thus pursued their way, the reddleman occasionally left
his companion's side, and, stepping behind the van, looked into its
interior through a small window. The look was always anxious. He
would then return to the old man, who made another remark about
the state of the country and so on, to which the reddleman again
abstractedly replied, and then again they would lapse into silence.
The silence conveyed to neither 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 in cities, 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, had
it not been for the reddleman's visits to his van. When he returned
from his fifth time of looking in the old man said, "You have
something inside there besides your load?"
"Yes."
"Somebody who wants looking after?"
"Yes."
Not long after this a faint cry sounded from the interior. The
reddleman hastened 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's
uneasy, and keeps dreaming."
"A young woman?"
"Yes, a young woman."
"That would have interested me forty years ago. Perhaps she's your
wife?"
"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 I do to you or to her?"
The reddleman looked in the old man's face. "Well, sir," he said at
last, "I knew her before today, though perhaps it would have been
better if I had not. But she's nothing to me, and I am nothing to
her; and she wouldn't have been in my van if any better carriage had
been there to take 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,
and not at all well, and that's what makes her so restless. She
dropped off into 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 van
window, and, without withdrawing them, said, "I presume I might look
in upon her?"
"No," said the reddleman abruptly. "It is getting too dark for you to
see 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 or
less 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 have
to part company. My ponies are tired, and I have further to go, and I
am going to rest them under this bank for an hour."
The elder traveller nodded his head indifferently, and the reddleman
turned his horses and van in upon the turf, saying, "Good night." The
old man replied, and proceeded on his way as before.
The reddleman watched his form as it diminished to a speck on the road
and became absorbed in the thickening films of night. He then took
some hay from a truss which was slung up under the van, and, throwing
a portion of it in front of the horses, made a pad of the rest,
which he laid on the ground beside his vehicle. Upon this he sat
down, leaning his back against the wheel. From the interior a low
soft breathing came to his ear. It appeared to satisfy him, and he
musingly surveyed the scene, as if considering the next step that he
should take.
To do things musingly, and by small degrees, seemed, indeed, to be
a duty in the Egdon valleys at this transitional hour, for there
was that in the condition of the heath itself which resembled
protracted and halting dubiousness. It was the quality of the repose
appertaining to the scene. This was not the repose of actual
stagnation, but the apparent repose of incredible slowness. A
condition of healthy life so nearly resembling the torpor of death
is a noticeable thing of its sort; to exhibit the inertness of the
desert, and at the same time to be exercising powers akin to those of
the meadow, and even of the forest, awakened in those who thought of
it the attentiveness usually engendered by understatement and reserve.
The scene before the reddleman's eyes was a gradual series of ascents
from the level of the road backward into the heart of the heath. It
embraced hillocks, pits, ridges, acclivities, one behind the other,
till all was finished by a high hill cutting against the still light
sky. The traveller's eye hovered about these things for a time, and
finally settled upon one noteworthy object up there. It was a barrow.
This bossy projection of earth above its natural level occupied the
loftiest ground of the loneliest height that the heath contained.
Although from the vale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean
brow, its actual bulk was great. 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
surmounted by something higher. It rose from the semi-globular mound
like a spike from a helmet. The first instinct of an imaginative
stranger might have been 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 sort of last man among them, musing for a moment
before dropping into eternal night with the rest of his race.
There the form stood, motionless as the hill beneath. Above the plain
rose the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow
rose the figure. Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped
elsewhere than on a celestial globe.
Such a perfect, delicate, and necessary finish did the figure give
to the dark pile of hills that it seemed to be the only obvious
justification of their outline. Without it, there was the dome
without the lantern; with it the architectural demands of the mass
were satisfied. The scene was strangely homogeneous, in that the
vale, the upland, the barrow, and the figure above it amounted only to
unity. Looking at this or that member of the group was not observing
a complete thing, but a fraction of a thing.
The form was so much like an organic part of the entire motionless
structure that to see it move would have impressed the mind as a
strange phenomenon. Immobility being the chief characteristic of
that whole which the person formed portion of, the discontinuance of
immobility in any 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
on the 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
clearly the characteristics of the figure, and that it was a woman's.
The reason of her sudden displacement now appeared. With her dropping
out of sight on the right side, a new-comer, bearing a burden,
protruded into the sky on the left side, ascended the tumulus, and
deposited the burden 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 of
silhouettes was that the woman had no relation to the forms who had
taken her place, was sedulously avoiding these, and had come thither
for another object than theirs. The imagination of the observer clung
by preference to that vanished, solitary figure, as to something more
interesting, more important, more likely to have a history worth
knowing than these new-comers, and unconsciously regarded them as
intruders. But they remained, and established themselves; and the
lonely person who hitherto had been queen of the solitude did not at
present seem likely to return.