The Mayor of Casterbridge
sending for Jopp, the manager originally displaced by Farfrae’s
arrival. Henchard had frequently met this man about the streets,
observed that his clothing spoke of neediness, heard that he lived in
Mixen Lane—a back slum of the town, the _pis aller_ of Casterbridge
domiciliation—itself almost a proof that a man had reached a stage when
he would not stick at trifles.
Jopp came after dark, by the gates of the storeyard, and felt his way
through the hay and straw to the office where Henchard sat in solitude
awaiting him.
“I am again out of a foreman,” said the corn-factor. “Are you in a
place?”
“Not so much as a beggar’s, sir.”
“How much do you ask?”
Jopp named his price, which was very moderate.
“When can you come?”
“At this hour and moment, sir,” said Jopp, who, standing hands-pocketed
at the street corner till the sun had faded the shoulders of his coat
to scarecrow green, had regularly watched Henchard in the market-place,
measured him, and learnt him, by virtue of the power which the still
man has in his stillness of knowing the busy one better than he knows
himself. Jopp too, had had a convenient experience; he was the only one
in Casterbridge besides Henchard and the close-lipped Elizabeth who
knew that Lucetta came truly from Jersey, and but proximately from
Bath. “I know Jersey too, sir,” he said. “Was living there when you
used to do business that way. O yes—have often seen ye there.”
“Indeed! Very good. Then the thing is settled. The testimonials you
showed me when you first tried for’t are sufficient.”
That characters deteriorated in time of need possibly did not occur to
Henchard. Jopp said, “Thank you,” and stood more firmly, in the
consciousness that at last he officially belonged to that spot.
“Now,” said Henchard, digging his strong eyes into Jopp’s face, “one
thing is necessary to me, as the biggest corn-and-hay dealer in these
parts. The Scotchman, who’s taking the town trade so bold into his
hands, must be cut out. D’ye hear? We two can’t live side by
side—that’s clear and certain.”
“I’ve seen it all,” said Jopp.
“By fair competition I mean, of course,” Henchard continued. “But as
hard, keen, and unflinching as fair—rather more so. By such a desperate
bid against him for the farmers’ custom as will grind him into the
ground—starve him out. I’ve capital, mind ye, and I can do it.”
“I’m all that way of thinking,” said the new foreman. Jopp’s dislike of
Farfrae as the man who had once ursurped his place, while it made him a
willing tool, made him, at the same time, commercially as unsafe a
colleague as Henchard could have chosen.
“I sometimes think,” he added, “that he must have some glass that he
sees next year in. He has such a knack of making everything bring him
fortune.”
“He’s deep beyond all honest men’s discerning, but we must make him
shallower. We’ll undersell him, and over-buy him, and so snuff him
out.”
They then entered into specific details of the process by which this
would be accomplished, and parted at a late hour.
Elizabeth-Jane heard by accident that Jopp had been engaged by her
stepfather. She was so fully convinced that he was not the right man
for the place that, at the risk of making Henchard angry, she expressed
her apprehension to him when they met. But it was done to no purpose.
Henchard shut up her argument with a sharp rebuff.
The season’s weather seemed to favour their scheme. The time was in the
years immediately before foreign competition had revolutionized the
trade in grain; when still, as from the earliest ages, the wheat
quotations from month to month depended entirely upon the home harvest.
A bad harvest, or the prospect of one, would double the price of corn
in a few weeks; and the promise of a good yield would lower it as
rapidly. Prices were like the roads of the period, steep in gradient,
reflecting in their phases the local conditions, without engineering,
levellings, or averages.
The farmer’s income was ruled by the wheat-crop within his own horizon,
and the wheat-crop by the weather. Thus in person, he became a sort of
flesh-barometer, with feelers always directed to the sky and wind
around him. The local atmosphere was everything to him; the atmospheres
of other countries a matter of indifference. The people, too, who were
not farmers, the rural multitude, saw in the god of the weather a more
important personage than they do now. Indeed, the feeling of the
peasantry in this matter was so intense as to be almost unrealizable in
these equable days. Their impulse was well-nigh to prostrate themselves
in lamentation before untimely rains and tempests, which came as the
Alastor of those households whose crime it was to be poor.
After midsummer they watched the weather-cocks as men waiting in
antechambers watch the lackey. Sun elated them; quiet rain sobered
them; weeks of watery tempest stupefied them. That aspect of the sky
which they now regard as disagreeable they then beheld as maleficent.
It was June, and the weather was very unfavourable. Casterbridge, being
as it were the bell-board on which all the adjacent hamlets and
villages sounded their notes, was decidedly dull. Instead of new
articles in the shop-windows those that had been rejected in the
foregoing summer were brought out again; superseded reap-hooks,
badly-shaped rakes, shop-worn leggings, and time-stiffened water-tights
reappeared, furbished up as near to new as possible.
Henchard, backed by Jopp, read a disastrous garnering, and resolved to
base his strategy against Farfrae upon that reading. But before acting
he wished—what so many have wished—that he could know for certain what
was at present only strong probability. He was superstitious—as such
head-strong natures often are—and he nourished in his mind an idea
bearing on the matter; an idea he shrank from disclosing even to Jopp.
In a lonely hamlet a few miles from the town—so lonely that what are
called lonely villages were teeming by comparison—there lived a man of
curious repute as a forecaster or weather-prophet. The way to his house
was crooked and miry—even difficult in the present unpropitious season.
One evening when it was raining so heavily that ivy and laurel
resounded like distant musketry, and an out-door man could be excused
for shrouding himself to his ears and eyes, such a shrouded figure on
foot might have been perceived travelling in the direction of the
hazel-copse which dripped over the prophet’s cot. The turnpike-road
became a lane, the lane a cart-track, the cart-track a bridle-path, the
bridle-path a foot-way, the foot-way overgrown. The solitary walker
slipped here and there, and stumbled over the natural springes formed
by the brambles, till at length he reached the house, which, with its
garden, was surrounded with a high, dense hedge. The cottage,
comparatively a large one, had been built of mud by the occupier’s own
hands, and thatched also by himself. Here he had always lived, and here
it was assumed he would die.
He existed on unseen supplies; for it was an anomalous thing that while
there was hardly a soul in the neighbourhood but affected to laugh at
this man’s assertions, uttering the formula, “There’s nothing in ’em,”
with full assurance on the surface of their faces, very few of them
were unbelievers in their secret hearts. Whenever they consulted him
they did it “for a fancy.” When they paid him they said, “Just a trifle
for Christmas,” or “Candlemas,” as the case might be.
He would have preferred more honesty in his clients, and less sham
ridicule; but fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony. As
stated, he was enabled to live; people supported him with their backs
turned. He was sometimes astonished that men could profess so little
and believe so much at his house, when at church they professed so much
and believed so little.
Behind his back he was called “Wide-oh,” on account of his reputation;
to his face “Mr.” Fall.
The hedge of his garden formed an arch over the entrance, and a door
was inserted as in a wall. Outside the door the tall traveller stopped,
bandaged his face with a handkerchief as if he were suffering from
toothache, and went up the path. The window shutters were not closed,
and he could see the prophet within, preparing his supper.
In answer to the knock Fall came to the door, candle in hand. The
visitor stepped back a little from the light, and said, “Can I speak to
’ee?” in significant tones. The other’s invitation to come in was
responded to by the country formula, “This will do, thank ’ee,” after
which the householder had no alternative but to come out. He placed the
candle on the corner of the dresser, took his hat from a nail, and
joined the stranger in the porch, shutting the door behind him.
“I’ve long heard that you can—do things of a sort?” began the other,
repressing his individuality as much as he could.
“Maybe so, Mr. Henchard,” said the weather-caster.
“Ah—why do you call me that?” asked the visitor with a start.
“Because it’s your name. Feeling you’d come I’ve waited for ’ee; and
thinking you might be leery from your walk I laid two supper
plates—look ye here.” He threw open the door and disclosed the
supper-table, at which appeared a second chair, knife and fork, plate
and mug, as he had declared.
Henchard felt like Saul at his reception by Samuel; he remained in
silence for a few moments, then throwing off the disguise of frigidity
which he had hitherto preserved he said, “Then I have not come in
vain.... Now, for instance, can ye charm away warts?”
“Without trouble.”
“Cure the evil?”
“That I’ve done—with consideration—if they will wear the toad-bag by
night as well as by day.”
“Forecast the weather?”
“With labour and time.”
“Then take this,” said Henchard. “’Tis a crownpiece. Now, what is the
harvest fortnight to be? When can I know?’
“I’ve worked it out already, and you can know at once.” (The fact was
that five farmers had already been there on the same errand from
different parts of the country.) “By the sun, moon, and stars, by the
clouds, the winds, the trees, and grass, the candle-flame and swallows,
the smell of the herbs; likewise by the cats’ eyes, the ravens, the
leeches, the spiders, and the dungmixen, the last fortnight in August
will be—rain and tempest.”
“You are not certain, of course?”
“As one can be in a world where all’s unsure. ’Twill be more like
living in Revelations this autumn than in England. Shall I sketch it
out for ’ee in a scheme?”
“O no, no,” said Henchard. “I don’t altogether believe in forecasts,
come to second thoughts on such. But I—”
“You don’t—you don’t—’tis quite understood,” said Wide-oh, without a
sound of scorn. “You have given me a crown because you’ve one too many.
But won’t you join me at supper, now ’tis waiting and all?”
Henchard would gladly have joined; for the savour of the stew had
floated from the cottage into the porch with such appetizing
distinctness that the meat, the onions, the pepper, and the herbs could
be severally recognized by his nose. But as sitting down to hob-and-nob
there would have seemed to mark him too implicitly as the
weather-caster’s apostle, he declined, and went his way.
The next Saturday Henchard bought grain to such an enormous extent that
there was quite a talk about his purchases among his neighbours the
lawyer, the wine merchant, and the doctor; also on the next, and on all
available days. When his granaries were full to choking all the
weather-cocks of Casterbridge creaked and set their faces in another
direction, as if tired of the south-west. The weather changed; the
sunlight, which had been like tin for weeks, assumed the hues of topaz.
The temperament of the welkin passed from the phlegmatic to the