He became aware of social differences, but re-mained for a long time surprised at the bare pov-erty of the churches among so much wealth. He couldn't understand either why they were kept shut up on week days. There was nothing to steal in them. Was it to keep people from praying too often? The rectory took much notice of him about that time, and I believe the young ladies attempted to prepare the ground for his conversion. They could not, however, break him of his habit of cross-ing himself, but he went so far as to take off the string with a couple of brass medals the size of a sixpence, a tiny metal cross, and a square sort of scapulary which he wore round his neck. He hung them on the wall by the side of his bed, and he was still to be heard every evening reciting the Lord's Prayer, in incomprehensible words and in a slow, fervent tone, as he had heard his old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, big and little, on every evening of his life. And though he wore corduroys at work, and a slop-made pepper-and-salt suit on Sundays, strangers would turn round to look after him on the road. His foreignness had a peculiar and indelible stamp. At last people be-came used to see him. But they never became used to him. His rapid, skimming walk; his swarthy complexion; his hat cocked on the left ear; his hab-it, on warm evenings, of wearing his coat over one shoulder, like a hussar's dolman; his manner of leaping over the stiles, not as a feat of agility, but in the ordinary course of progression--all these peculiarities were, as one may say, so many causes of scorn and offence to the inhabitants of the vil-lage. <i>They</i> wouldn't in their dinner hour lie flat on their backs on the grass to stare at the sky.
Neither did they go about the fields screaming dis-mal tunes. Many times have I heard his high-pitched voice from behind the ridge of some slop-ing sheep-walk, a voice light and soaring, like a lark's, but with a melancholy human note, over our fields that hear only the song of birds. And Ishould be startled myself. Ah! He was different:
innocent of heart, and full of good will, which no-body wanted, this castaway, that, like a man trans-planted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future. His quick, fervent ut-terance positively shocked everybody. 'An excit-able devil,' they called him. One evening, in the tap-room of the Coach and Horses (having drunk some whisky), he upset them all by singing a love song of his country. They hooted him down, and he was pained; but Preble, the lame wheelwright, and Vincent, the fat blacksmith, and the other nota-bles too, wanted to drink their evening beer in peace. On another occasion he tried to show them how to dance. The dust rose in clouds from the sanded floor; he leaped straight up amongst the deal tables, struck his heels together, squatted on one heel in front of old Preble, shooting out the other leg, uttered wild and exulting cries, jumped up to whirl on one foot, snapping his fingers above his head--and a strange carter who was having a drink in there began to swear, and cleared out with his half-pint in his hand into the bar. But when sud-denly he sprang upon a table and continued to dance among the glasses, the landlord interfered.
He didn't want any 'acrobat tricks in the tap-room.' They laid their hands on him. Having had a glass or two, Mr. Swaffer's foreigner tried to expostulate: was ejected forcibly: got a black eye.
"I believe he felt the hostility of his human sur-roundings. But he was tough--tough in spirit, too, as well as in body. Only the memory of the sea frightened him, with that vague terror that is left by a bad dream. His home was far away; and he did not want now to go to America. I had often explained to him that there is no place on earth where true gold can be found lying ready and to be got for the trouble of the picking up. How then, he asked, could he ever return home with empty hands when there had been sold a cow, two ponies, and a bit of land to pay for his going? His eyes would fill with tears, and, averting them from the immense shimmer of the sea, he would throw him-self face down on the grass. But sometimes, cock-ing his hat with a little conquering air, he would defy my wisdom. He had found his bit of true gold. That was Amy Foster's heart; which was 'a golden heart, and soft to people's misery,' he would say in the accents of overwhelming convic-tion.
"He was called Yanko. He had explained that this meant little John; but as he would also repeat very often that he was a mountaineer (some word sounding in the dialect of his country like Goorall)he got it for his surname. And this is the only trace of him that the succeeding ages may find in the marriage register of the parish. There it stands--Yanko Goorall--in the rector's handwrit-ing. The crooked cross made by the castaway, a cross whose tracing no doubt seemed to him the most solemn part of the whole ceremony, is all that remains now to perpetuate the memory of his name.
"His courtship had lasted some time--ever since he got his precarious footing in the community. It began by his buying for Amy Foster a green satin ribbon in Darnford. This was what you did in his country. You bought a ribbon at a Jew's stall on a fair-day. I don't suppose the girl knew what to do with it, but he seemed to think that his honoura-ble intentions could not be mistaken.
"It was only when he declared his purpose to get married that I fully understood how, for a hun-dred futile and inappreciable reasons, how--shall I say odious?--he was to all the countryside.
Every old woman in the village was up in arms.