The Three Strangers, a short story by Thomas Hardy

“The Three Strangers” is one of the stories included in Thomas Hardy’s collection of “Wessex Tales”, originally published in 1888, but the story first appeared on its own in “Longman’s Magazine” and bears the date of March 1883. Its first readers in Hardy’s native Dorset would have been well aware of the hard times then being experienced in the rural areas and would therefore have related sympathetically to the conditions hinted at in the story, which was set in the 1820s during a similar period of agricultural distress.

The setting is an isolated shepherd’s cottage on the downs not far from the county town of Casterbridge (Hardy’s name for Dorchester). The house, named Higher Crowstairs, is in an exposed location and therefore bears the brunt of all the wind and rain from whatever direction it may come. The weather is bad on the March night when the events of the story take place, during a celebratory party following the christening of the shepherd’s youngest child.

The reader is introduced to the residents and guests in the cottage, who number nineteen in all. Everything is very friendly and convivial in the cramped space of the cottage’s living room, where there is just enough space for dancing to the music of a violin and serpent (a wind instrument in the shape of a snake). Meanwhile, a stranger approaches the house and waits until the music dies down before knocking on the door. He is welcomed inside by the shepherd, sits in the chimney corner to dry off, and is given tobacco and the loan of a pipe. He tells the company that he is from “further up the country”.

He has hardly had time to get settled when there is a second knock at the door and another stranger comes in. He says that he is on his way to Casterbridge but would appreciate shelter from the rain, plus a mug of mead (an alcoholic drink made from honey) which he is sure the shepherd’s wife must have as he has seen her beehives outside. She is reluctant to give him much of this, but the shepherd is more hospitable and continues to refresh the stranger’s mug, much to his wife’s displeasure.

There is then a discussion as to what the second stranger’s profession might be, given that the shepherd’s wife has become very suspicious of him. The second stranger makes a game of it by dropping clues such as “the oddity of my trade is that, instead of setting a mark upon me, it sets a mark upon my customers”. He then starts singing a song, with words of his own, that soon tell the reader (and then the assembled company), that he is the new hangman who is about to start his duties at the local jail.

People start whispering among themselves that he has come on this night because there is to be a hanging at the jail in the morning, this being of a poor man from several valleys away who, being unable to get work at his trade of clock-making, and with his family starving, had stolen a sheep and been arrested. Sheep-stealing was a capital crime before 1832, and it is clear from the conversation that the sympathy of the locals is with the man who is about to be hanged.

There is then a third knock at the door and another man enters, begins to ask the way to somewhere, but then catches sight of someone else in the room, turns deathly pale, and runs off. The firing of a gun is heard in the distance, and the second stranger, now revealed as the hangman, tells everyone that this is a signal that a prisoner has escaped from the jail, at which everyone assumes that it must be the condemned man, and that he must be the man who has just arrived and left in a hurry on seeing the hangman, although this ignores the fact that he could have had no idea as to what the hangman looked like.

One of the guests at the party is the local constable, who is called upon by the hangman to organise a search party, which he proceeds to do. All the males rush off, lanterns in hand, while the women go upstairs to attend to the baby who has started crying in distress at all the noise and hullaballoo. With the room empty, two people return, these being the first two strangers who proceed to help themselves to cake and mead before shaking hands and going their separate ways.

The search party eventually catches up with the third stranger, and there is a wonderfully comic interlude as the constable, who has clearly never been in such a situation before, proceeds to make an arrest, although the only words that come to mind for such an occasion are: “Yer money or yer life”! The man is then escorted back to the cottage, where two officers from the jail and a local magistrate have arrived. The constable presents his prisoner, only to be told that he has the wrong man.

As the reader might have guessed by now, the description of the wanted man fits the first stranger, not the third. The arrested man explains that he is the brother of the condemned man and had been on his way to visit him at the jail for the last time before his execution. On entering the cottage it had not been the sight of the hangman that had agitated him but that of his brother, and it was his fear of giving the game away and betraying the escapee that had caused him to flee the scene. Needless to say, the condemned man is never seen again, much to the relief of all concerned bar the hangman.

Hardy gives the impression that “The Three Strangers” is based on local folklore, as is evident from the concluding line: “The arrival of the three strangers … is a story as well known as ever in the country about Higher Crowstairs”. Be that as it may, it certainly has elements that fit the tradition of local myth, such as the familiar pattern of simple country folk outwitting the machinations of authority, which is a theme that has always proved popular. There are also echoes of the Christmas story, involving as it does the celebration of a birth, shepherds, the visit of three people from afar, and even a Herod character in the form of the hangman.

To a modern reader the story does not start well, due to Hardy’s convoluted prose style that produces the opening: “Among the few features of agricultural England which retain an appearance but little modified by the lapse of centuries may be reckoned the long, grassy and furzy downs, coombs, or ewe-leases, as they are called …” Hardy is more readable when giving dialogue rather than description, but the story is six pages old before the first character says anything.

However, the effort of persevering is worthwhile, because once the story gets going it flows along at considerable pace. Particularly notable are the humour surrounding the constable, mentioned above, the interplay between the shepherd and his wife over how generous they should be towards the strangers, and the characterisations of the first two strangers. The overweening pride of the hangman, who rejoices in his trade, and the contrasting coolness under pressure of the condemned man, are very well done, with the scene in which the two return to the empty cottage and then part on amicable terms being a memorable one, especially as it lets the reader into a secret that is withheld from the other characters.

Given the dramatic nature of the tale, and the reliance on a single scene for most of the action, it should not surprise anyone that Hardy later dramatized the story as “The Three Wayfarers”. It was first performed in 1893 and by was staged by professional companies several times during Hardy’s lifetime.

All in all, this is a very enjoyable story that is worth the trouble to discover and read.

© John Welford