“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
Interesting. I've got to look for a copy and read.
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