Kabanata Kabanata 26 · Chapter XXVI

It chanced that on a fine spring morning Henchard and Farfrae met in

the chestnut-walk which ran along the south wall of the town. Each had

just come out from his early breakfast, and there was not another soul

near. Henchard was reading a letter from Lucetta, sent in answer to a

note from him, in which she made some excuse for not immediately

granting him a second interview that he had desired.

Donald had no wish to enter into conversation with his former friend on

their present constrained terms; neither would he pass him in scowling

silence. He nodded, and Henchard did the same. They receded from each

other several paces when a voice cried “Farfrae!” It was Henchard’s,

who stood regarding him.

“Do you remember,” said Henchard, as if it were the presence of the

thought and not of the man which made him speak, “do you remember my

story of that second woman—who suffered for her thoughtless intimacy

with me?”

“I do,” said Farfrae.

“Do you remember my telling ’ee how it all began and how it ended?

“Yes.”

“Well, I have offered to marry her now that I can; but she won’t marry

me. Now what would you think of her—I put it to you?”

“Well, ye owe her nothing more now,” said Farfrae heartily.

“It is true,” said Henchard, and went on.

That he had looked up from a letter to ask his questions completely

shut out from Farfrae’s mind all vision of Lucetta as the culprit.

Indeed, her present position was so different from that of the young

woman of Henchard’s story as of itself to be sufficient to blind him

absolutely to her identity. As for Henchard, he was reassured by

Farfrae’s words and manner against a suspicion which had crossed his

mind. They were not those of a conscious rival.

Yet that there was rivalry by some one he was firmly persuaded. He

could feel it in the air around Lucetta, see it in the turn of her pen.

There was an antagonistic force in exercise, so that when he had tried

to hang near her he seemed standing in a refluent current. That it was

not innate caprice he was more and more certain. Her windows gleamed as

if they did not want him; her curtains seem to hang slily, as if they

screened an ousting presence. To discover whose presence that

was—whether really Farfrae’s after all, or another’s—he exerted himself

to the utmost to see her again; and at length succeeded.

At the interview, when she offered him tea, he made it a point to

launch a cautious inquiry if she knew Mr. Farfrae.

O yes, she knew him, she declared; she could not help knowing almost

everybody in Casterbridge, living in such a gazebo over the centre and

arena of the town.

“Pleasant young fellow,” said Henchard.

“Yes,” said Lucetta.

“We both know him,” said kind Elizabeth-Jane, to relieve her

companion’s divined embarrassment.

There was a knock at the door; literally, three full knocks and a

little one at the end.

“That kind of knock means half-and-half—somebody between gentle and

simple,” said the corn-merchant to himself. “I shouldn’t wonder

therefore if it is he.” In a few seconds surely enough Donald walked

in.

Lucetta was full of little fidgets and flutters, which increased

Henchard’s suspicions without affording any special proof of their

correctness. He was well-nigh ferocious at the sense of the queer

situation in which he stood towards this woman. One who had reproached

him for deserting her when calumniated, who had urged claims upon his

consideration on that account, who had lived waiting for him, who at

the first decent opportunity had come to ask him to rectify, by making

her his, the false position into which she had placed herself for his

sake; such she had been. And now he sat at her tea-table eager to gain

her attention, and in his amatory rage feeling the other man present to

be a villain, just as any young fool of a lover might feel.

They sat stiffly side by side at the darkening table, like some Tuscan

painting of the two disciples supping at Emmaus. Lucetta, forming the

third and haloed figure, was opposite them; Elizabeth-Jane, being out

of the game, and out of the group, could observe all from afar, like

the evangelist who had to write it down: that there were long spaces of

taciturnity, when all exterior circumstances were subdued to the touch

of spoons and china, the click of a heel on the pavement under the

window, the passing of a wheelbarrow or cart, the whistling of the

carter, the gush of water into householders’ buckets at the town-pump

opposite, the exchange of greetings among their neighbours, and the

rattle of the yokes by which they carried off their evening supply.

“More bread-and-butter?” said Lucetta to Henchard and Farfrae equally,

holding out between them a plateful of long slices. Henchard took a

slice by one end and Donald by the other; each feeling certain he was

the man meant; neither let go, and the slice came in two.

“Oh—I am so sorry!” cried Lucetta, with a nervous titter. Farfrae tried

to laugh; but he was too much in love to see the incident in any but a

tragic light.

“How ridiculous of all three of them!” said Elizabeth to herself.

Henchard left the house with a ton of conjecture, though without a

grain of proof, that the counterattraction was Farfrae; and therefore

he would not make up his mind. Yet to Elizabeth-Jane it was plain as

the town-pump that Donald and Lucetta were incipient lovers. More than

once, in spite of her care, Lucetta had been unable to restrain her

glance from flitting across into Farfrae’s eyes like a bird to its

nest. But Henchard was constructed upon too large a scale to discern

such minutiæ as these by an evening light, which to him were as the

notes of an insect that lie above the compass of the human ear.

But he was disturbed. And the sense of occult rivalry in suitorship was

so much superadded to the palpable rivalry of their business lives. To

the coarse materiality of that rivalry it added an inflaming soul.

The thus vitalized antagonism took the form of action by Henchard

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

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.