The Mayor of Casterbridge
sanguine; an excellent harvest was almost a certainty; and as a
consequence prices rushed down.
All these transformations, lovely to the outsider, to the wrong-headed
corn-dealer were terrible. He was reminded of what he had well known
before, that a man might gamble upon the square green areas of fields
as readily as upon those of a card-room.
Henchard had backed bad weather, and apparently lost. He had mistaken
the turn of the flood for the turn of the ebb. His dealings had been so
extensive that settlement could not long be postponed, and to settle he
was obliged to sell off corn that he had bought only a few weeks before
at figures higher by many shillings a quarter. Much of the corn he had
never seen; it had not even been moved from the ricks in which it lay
stacked miles away. Thus he lost heavily.
In the blaze of an early August day he met Farfrae in the market-place.
Farfrae knew of his dealings (though he did not guess their intended
bearing on himself) and commiserated him; for since their exchange of
words in the South Walk they had been on stiffly speaking terms.
Henchard for the moment appeared to resent the sympathy; but he
suddenly took a careless turn.
“Ho, no, no!—nothing serious, man!” he cried with fierce gaiety. “These
things always happen, don’t they? I know it has been said that figures
have touched me tight lately; but is that anything rare? The case is
not so bad as folk make out perhaps. And dammy, a man must be a fool to
mind the common hazards of trade!”
But he had to enter the Casterbridge Bank that day for reasons which
had never before sent him there—and to sit a long time in the partners’
room with a constrained bearing. It was rumoured soon after that much
real property as well as vast stores of produce, which had stood in
Henchard’s name in the town and neighbourhood, was actually the
possession of his bankers.
Coming down the steps of the bank he encountered Jopp. The gloomy
transactions just completed within had added fever to the original
sting of Farfrae’s sympathy that morning, which Henchard fancied might
be a satire disguised so that Jopp met with anything but a bland
reception. The latter was in the act of taking off his hat to wipe his
forehead, and saying, “A fine hot day,” to an acquaintance.
“You can wipe and wipe, and say, ‘A fine hot day,’ can ye!” cried
Henchard in a savage undertone, imprisoning Jopp between himself and
the bank wall. “If it hadn’t been for your blasted advice it might have
been a fine day enough! Why did ye let me go on, hey?—when a word of
doubt from you or anybody would have made me think twice! For you can
never be sure of weather till ’tis past.”
“My advice, sir, was to do what you thought best.”
“A useful fellow! And the sooner you help somebody else in that way the
better!” Henchard continued his address to Jopp in similar terms till
it ended in Jopp’s dismissal there and then, Henchard turning upon his
heel and leaving him.
“You shall be sorry for this, sir; sorry as a man can be!” said Jopp,
standing pale, and looking after the corn-merchant as he disappeared in
the crowd of market-men hard by.
XXVII.
It was the eve of harvest. Prices being low Farfrae was buying. As was
usual, after reckoning too surely on famine weather the local farmers
had flown to the other extreme, and (in Farfrae’s opinion) were selling
off too recklessly—calculating with just a trifle too much certainty
upon an abundant yield. So he went on buying old corn at its
comparatively ridiculous price: for the produce of the previous year,
though not large, had been of excellent quality.
When Henchard had squared his affairs in a disastrous way, and got rid
of his burdensome purchases at a monstrous loss, the harvest began.
There were three days of excellent weather, and then—“What if that
curst conjuror should be right after all!” said Henchard.
The fact was, that no sooner had the sickles begun to play than the
atmosphere suddenly felt as if cress would grow in it without other
nourishment. It rubbed people’s cheeks like damp flannel when they
walked abroad. There was a gusty, high, warm wind; isolated raindrops
starred the window-panes at remote distances: the sunlight would flap
out like a quickly opened fan, throw the pattern of the window upon the
floor of the room in a milky, colourless shine, and withdraw as
suddenly as it had appeared.
From that day and hour it was clear that there was not to be so
successful an ingathering after all. If Henchard had only waited long
enough he might at least have avoided loss though he had not made a
profit. But the momentum of his character knew no patience. At this
turn of the scales he remained silent. The movements of his mind seemed
to tend to the thought that some power was working against him.
“I wonder,” he asked himself with eerie misgiving; “I wonder if it can
be that somebody has been roasting a waxen image of me, or stirring an
unholy brew to confound me! I don’t believe in such power; and yet—what
if they should ha’ been doing it!” Even he could not admit that the
perpetrator, if any, might be Farfrae. These isolated hours of
superstition came to Henchard in time of moody depression, when all his
practical largeness of view had oozed out of him.
Meanwhile Donald Farfrae prospered. He had purchased in so depressed a
market that the present moderate stiffness of prices was sufficient to
pile for him a large heap of gold where a little one had been.
“Why, he’ll soon be Mayor!” said Henchard. It was indeed hard that the
speaker should, of all others, have to follow the triumphal chariot of
this man to the Capitol.
The rivalry of the masters was taken up by the men.
September night-shades had fallen upon Casterbridge; the clocks had
struck half-past eight, and the moon had risen. The streets of the town
were curiously silent for such a comparatively early hour. A sound of
jangling horse-bells and heavy wheels passed up the street. These were
followed by angry voices outside Lucetta’s house, which led her and
Elizabeth-Jane to run to the windows, and pull up the blinds.
The neighbouring Market House and Town Hall abutted against its next
neighbour the Church except in the lower storey, where an arched
thoroughfare gave admittance to a large square called Bull Stake. A
stone post rose in the midst, to which the oxen had formerly been tied
for baiting with dogs to make them tender before they were killed in
the adjoining shambles. In a corner stood the stocks.
The thoroughfare leading to this spot was now blocked by two four-horse
waggons and horses, one laden with hay-trusses, the leaders having
already passed each other, and become entangled head to tail. The
passage of the vehicles might have been practicable if empty; but built
up with hay to the bedroom windows as one was, it was impossible.
“You must have done it a’ purpose!” said Farfrae’s waggoner. “You can
hear my horses’ bells half-a-mile such a night as this!”
“If ye’d been minding your business instead of zwailing along in such a
gawk-hammer way, you would have zeed me!” retorted the wroth
representative of Henchard.
However, according to the strict rule of the road it appeared that
Henchard’s man was most in the wrong, he therefore attempted to back
into the High Street. In doing this the near hind-wheel rose against
the churchyard wall and the whole mountainous load went over, two of
the four wheels rising in the air, and the legs of the thill horse.
Instead of considering how to gather up the load the two men closed in
a fight with their fists. Before the first round was quite over
Henchard came upon the spot, somebody having run for him.
Henchard sent the two men staggering in contrary directions by
collaring one with each hand, turned to the horse that was down, and
extricated him after some trouble. He then inquired into the
circumstances; and seeing the state of his waggon and its load began
hotly rating Farfrae’s man.
Lucetta and Elizabeth-Jane had by this time run down to the street
corner, whence they watched the bright heap of new hay lying in the
moon’s rays, and passed and repassed by the forms of Henchard and the
waggoners. The women had witnessed what nobody else had seen—the origin
of the mishap; and Lucetta spoke.
“I saw it all, Mr. Henchard,” she cried; “and your man was most in the
wrong!”
Henchard paused in his harangue and turned. “Oh, I didn’t notice you,
Miss Templeman,” said he. “My man in the wrong? Ah, to be sure; to be
sure! But I beg your pardon notwithstanding. The other’s is the empty
waggon, and he must have been most to blame for coming on.”
“No; I saw it, too,” said Elizabeth-Jane. “And I can assure you he
couldn’t help it.”
“You can’t trust _their_ senses!” murmured Henchard’s man.
“Why not?” asked Henchard sharply.
“Why, you see, sir, all the women side with Farfrae—being a damn young
dand—of the sort that he is—one that creeps into a maid’s heart like
the giddying worm into a sheep’s brain—making crooked seem straight to
their eyes!”
“But do you know who that lady is you talk about in such a fashion? Do
you know that I pay my attentions to her, and have for some time? Just
be careful!”
“Not I. I know nothing, sir, outside eight shillings a week.”
“And that Mr. Farfrae is well aware of it? He’s sharp in trade, but he
wouldn’t do anything so underhand as what you hint at.”
Whether because Lucetta heard this low dialogue, or not her white
figure disappeared from her doorway inward, and the door was shut
before Henchard could reach it to converse with her further. This
disappointed him, for he had been sufficiently disturbed by what the
man had said to wish to speak to her more closely. While pausing the
old constable came up.
“Just see that nobody drives against that hay and waggon to-night,
Stubberd,” said the corn-merchant. “It must bide till the morning, for
all hands are in the field still. And if any coach or road-waggon wants
to come along, tell ’em they must go round by the back street, and be
hanged to ’em.... Any case tomorrow up in Hall?”
“Yes, sir. One in number, sir.”
“Oh, what’s that?”
“An old flagrant female, sir, swearing and committing a nuisance in a
horrible profane manner against the church wall, sir, as if ’twere no
more than a pot-house! That’s all, sir.”
“Oh. The Mayor’s out o’ town, isn’t he?”
“He is, sir.”
“Very well, then I’ll be there. Don’t forget to keep an eye on that
hay. Good night t’ ’ee.”
During those moments Henchard had determined to follow up Lucetta
notwithstanding her elusiveness, and he knocked for admission.
The answer he received was an expression of Miss Templeman’s sorrow at
being unable to see him again that evening because she had an
engagement to go out.
Henchard walked away from the door to the opposite side of the street,
and stood by his hay in a lonely reverie, the constable having strolled
elsewhere, and the horses being removed. Though the moon was not bright
as yet there were no lamps lighted, and he entered the shadow of one of
the projecting jambs which formed the thoroughfare to Bull Stake; here
he watched Lucetta’s door.
Candle-lights were flitting in and out of her bedroom, and it was
obvious that she was dressing for the appointment, whatever the nature
of that might be at such an hour. The lights disappeared, the clock
struck nine, and almost at the moment Farfrae came round the opposite
corner and knocked. That she had been waiting just inside for him was
certain, for she instantly opened the door herself. They went together
by the way of a back lane westward, avoiding the front street; guessing
where they were going he determined to follow.
The harvest had been so delayed by the capricious weather that whenever