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THE MAYOR
OF CASTERBRIDGE

Thomas Hardy

COPYRIGHT

Collins Classics

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith London W6 8JB

Thomas Hardy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Life & Times section © Gerard Cheshire Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from Collins English Dictionary

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Source ISBN: 9780007902118

Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780007477395

Version: 2014-09-03

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

General Preface to the Wessex Edition of 1912

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Keep Reading

Classic Literature: Words and Phrases Adapted from the Collins English Dictionary

About the Author

History of Collins

About the Publisher

GENERAL PREFACE TO THE WESSEX EDITION OF 1912

In accepting a proposal for a definite edition of these productions in prose and verse I have found an opportunity of classifying the novels under heads that show approximately the author’s aim, if not his achievement, in each book of the series at the date of its composition. Sometimes the aim was lower than at other times; sometimes, where the intention was primarily high, force of circumstances (among which the chief were the necessities of magazine publication) compelled a modification, great or slight, of the original plan. Of a few, however, of the longer novels, and of many of the shorter tales, it may be assumed that they stand today much as they would have stood if no accidents had obstructed the channel between the writer and the public. That many of them, if any, stand as they would stand if written now is not to be supposed.

In the classification of these fictitious chronicles – for which the name of ‘The Wessex Novels’ was adopted, and is still retained – the first group is called ‘Novels of Character and Environment’, and contains those which approach most nearly to uninfluenced works; also one or two which, whatever their quality in some few of their episodes, may claim a verisimilitude in general treatment and detail.

The second group is distinguished as ‘Romances and Fantasies’, a sufficiently descriptive definition. The third class – ‘Novels of Ingenuity’ – show a not infrequent disregard of the probable in the chain of events, and depend for their interest mainly on the incidents themselves. They might also be characterized as ‘Experiments’, and were written for the nonce simply; though despite the artificiality of their fable some of their scenes are not without fidelity to life.

It will not be supposed that these differences are distinctly perceptible in every page of every volume. It was inevitable that blendings and alternations should occur in all. Moreover, as it was not thought desirable in every instance to change the arrangement of the shorter stories to which readers have grown accustomed, certain of these may be found under headings to which an acute judgement might deny appropriateness.

It has sometimes been conceived of novels that evolve their action on a circumscribed scene – as do many (though not all) of these – that they cannot be so inclusive in their exhibition of human nature as novels wherein the scenes cover large extents of country, in which events figure amid towns and cities, even wander over the four quarters of the globe. I am not concerned to argue this point further than to suggest that the conception is an untrue one in respect of the elementary passions. But I would state that the geographical limits of the stage here trodden were not absolutely forced upon the writer by circumstances; he forced them upon himself from judgement. I considered that our magnificent heritage from the Greeks in dramatic literature found sufficient room for a large proportion of its action in an extent of their country not much larger than the half-dozen counties here reunited under the old name of Wessex, that the domestic emotions have throbbed in Wessex nooks with as much intensity as in the palaces of Europe, and that, anyhow, there was quite enough human nature in Wessex for one man’s literary purpose. So far was I possessed by this idea that I kept within the frontiers when it would have been easier to overlap them and give more cosmopolitan features to the narrative.

Thus, though the people in most of the novels (and in much of the shorter verse) are dwellers in a province bounded on the north by the Thames, on the south by the English Channel, on the east by a line running from Hayling Island to Windsor Forest, and on the west by the Cornish coast, they were meant to be typically and essentially those of any and every place where

Thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool

—beings in whose hearts and minds that which is apparently local should be really universal.

But whatever the success of this intention, and the value of these novels as delineations of humanity, they have at least a humble supplementary quality of which I may be justified in reminding the reader, though it is one that was quite unintentional and unforeseen. At the dates represented in the various narrations things were like that in Wessex: the inhabitants lived in certain ways, engaged in certain occupations, kept alive certain customs, just as they are shown doing in these pages. And in particularizing such I have often been reminded of Boswell’s remarks on the trouble to which he was put and the pilgrimages he was obliged to make to authenticate some detail, though the labour was one which would bring him no praise. Unlike his achievement, however, on which an error would as he says have brought discredit, if these country customs and vocations, obsolete and obsolescent, had been detailed wrongly, nobody would have discovered such errors to the end of Time. Yet I have instituted inquiries to correct tricks of memory, and striven against temptations to exaggerate, in order to preserve for my own satisfaction a fairly true record of a vanishing life.

It is advisable also to state here, in response to inquiries from readers interested in landscape, prehistoric antiquities, and especially old English architecture, that the description of these backgrounds has been done from the real—that is to say, has something real for its basis, however illusively treated. Many features of the first two kinds have been given under their existing names; for instance, the Vale of Blackmoor or Blakemore, Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe Tout, Dogbury Hill, High-Stoy, Bubb-Down Hill, The Devil’s Kitchen, Cross-in-Hand, Long-Ash Lane, Benvill Lane, Giant’s Hill, Crimmer-crock Lane, and Stonehenge. The rivers Froom, or Frome, and Stour, are, of course, well known as such. And the further idea was that large towns and points tending to mark the outline of Wessex – such as Bath, Plymouth, The Start, Portland Bill, Southampton, etc. – should be named clearly. The scheme was not greatly elaborated, but, whatever its value, the names remain still.

In respect of places described under fictitious or ancient names in the novels – for reasons that seemed good at the time of writing them – and kept up in the poems – discerning people have affirmed in print that they clearly recognize the originals: such as Shaftesbury in ‘Shaston’, Sturminster Newton in ‘Stourcastle’, Dorchester in ‘Casterbridge’, Salisbury Plain in ‘The Great Plain’, Cranbourne Chase in ‘The Chase’, Beaminster in ‘Emminster’, Bere Regis in ‘Kingsbere’, Woodbury Hill in ‘Greenhil’, Wool Bridge in ‘Wellbridge’, Harfoot or Harput Lane in ‘Stagfoot Lane’, Hazelbury in ‘Nuttlebury’, Bridport in ‘Port Bredy’, Maiden Newton in ‘Chalk Newton’, a farm near Nettlecombe Tout in ‘Flintcomb Ash’, Sherborne in ‘Sherton Abbas’, Milton Abbey in ‘Middleton Abbey’, Cerne Abbas in ‘Abbot’s Cernel’, Evershot in ‘Evershed’, Taunton in ‘Toneborough’, Bournemouth in ‘Sandbourne’, Winchester in ‘Wintoncester’, Oxford in ‘Christminster’, Reading in ‘Aldbrickham’, Newbury in ‘Kennet-bridge’, Wantage in ‘Alfredston’, Basingstoke in ‘Stoke Bare-hills’, and so on. Subject to the qualifications above given, that no detail is guaranteed – that the portraiture of fictitiously named towns and villages was only suggested by certain real places, and wontonly wanders from inventorial descriptions of them – I do not contradict these keen hunters for the real; I am satisfied with their statements as at least an indication of their interest in the scenes.

Thus much for the novels. Turning now to the verse – to myself the more individual part of my literary fruitage – I would say that, unlike some of the fiction, nothing interfered with the writer’s freedom in respect of its form or content. Several of the poems – indeed many – were produced before novel-writing had been thought of as a pursuit; but few saw the light till all the novels had been published. The limited stage to which the majority of the latter confine their exhibitions has not been adhered to here in the same proportion, the dramatic part especially having a very broad theatre of action. It may thus relieve the circumscribed areas treated in the prose, if such relief be needed. To be sure, one might argue that by surveying Europe from a celestial point of vision – as in The Dynasts – that continent becomes virtually a province – a Wessex, an Attica, even a mere garden – and hence is made to conform to the principle of the novels, however far it outmeasures their region. But that may be as it will.

The few volumes filled by the verse cover a producing of some eighteen years first and last, while the seventeen or more volumes of novels represent correspondingly about four-and-twenty years. One is reminded by this disproportion in time and result how much more concise and quintessential expression becomes when given in rhythmic form than when shaped in the language of prose.

One word on what has been called the present writer’s philosophy of life, as exhibited more particularly in the metrical section of his compositions. Positive views on the Whence and the Wherefore of things have never been advanced by this pen as a consistent philosophy. Nor is it likely, indeed, that imaginative writings extending over more than forty years would exhibit a coherent scientific theory of the universe even if it had been attempted – of that universe concerning which Spencer owns to the ‘paralyzing thought’ that possibly there exists no comprehension of it anywhere. But such objectless consistency never has been attempted, and the sentiments in the following pages have been stated truly to be mere impressions of the moment, and not convictions or arguments.

That these impressions have been condemned as ‘pessimistic’ – as if that were a very wicked adjective – shows a curious muddle-mindedness. It must be obvious that there is a higher characteristic of philosophy than pessimism, or than meliorism, or even than the optimism of these critics – which is truth. Existence is either ordered in a certain way, or it is not so ordered, and conjectures which harmonize best with experience are removed above all comparison with other conjectures which do not so harmonize. So that to say one view is worse than other views, without proving it erroneous implies the possibility of a false view being better or more expedient than a true view; and no pragmatic proppings can make that idolum specus stand on its feet, for it postulates a prescience denied to humanity.

And there is another consideration. Differing natures find their tongue in the presence of differing spectacles. Some natures become vocal at tragedy, some are made vocal by comedy, and it seems to me that to whichever of these aspects of life a writer’s instinct for expression the more readily responds, to that he should allow it to respond. That before a contrasting side of things he remains undemonstrative need not be assumed to mean that he remains unperceiving.

It was my hope to add to these volumes of verse as many more as would make a fairly comprehensive cycle of the whole. I had wished that those in dramatic, ballad, and narrative form should include most of the cardinal situations which occur in social and public life, and those in lyric form a round of emotional experiences of some completeness. But

The petty done, the undone vast!

The more written the more seems to remain to be written; and the night cometh. I realize that these hopes and plans, except possibly to the extent of a volume or two, must remain unfulfilled.

October 1911 T.H.

CHAPTER 1

One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot. They were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now.

The man was of fine figure, swarthy, and stern in aspect; and he showed in profile a facial angle so slightly inclined as to be almost perpendicular. He wore a short jacket of brown corduroy, newer than the remainder of his suit, which was a fustian waistcoat with white horn buttons, breeches of the same, tanned leggings, and a straw hat overlaid with black glazed canvas. At his back he carried by a looped strap a rush basket, from which protruded at one end the crutch of a hay-knife, a wimble for hay-bonds being also visible in the aperture. His measured, springless walk was the walk of the skilled countryman as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; while in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference personal to himself, showing its presence even in the regularly interchanging fustian folds, now in the left leg, now in the right, as he paced along.

What was really peculiar, however, in this couple’s progress, and would have attracted the attention of any casual observer otherwise disposed to overlook them, was the perfect silence they preserved. They walked side by side in such a way as to suggest afar off the low, easy, confidential chat of people full of reciprocity; but on closer view it could be discerned that the man was reading, or pretending to read, a ballad sheet which he kept before his eyes with some difficulty by the hand that was passed through the basket strap. Whether this apparent cause were the real cause, or whether it were an assumed one to escape an intercourse that would have been irksome to him, nobody but himself could have said precisely; but his taciturnity was unbroken, and the woman enjoyed no society whatever from his presence. Virtually she walked the highway alone, save for the child she bore. Sometimes the man’s bent elbow almost touched her shoulder, for she kept as close to his side as was possible without actual contact; but she seemed to have no idea of taking his arm, nor he of offering it; and far from exhibiting surprise at his ignoring silence she appeared to receive it as a natural thing. If any word at all were uttered by the little group, it was an occasional whisper of the woman to the child—a tiny girl in short clothes and blue boots of knitted yarn—and the murmured babble of the child in reply.

The chief—almost the only—attraction of the young woman’s face was its mobility. When she looked down sideways to the girl she became pretty, and even handsome, particularly that in the action her features caught slantwise the rays of the strongly coloured sun, which made transparencies of her eyelids and nostrils and set fire on her lips. When she plodded on in the shade of the hedge, silently thinking, she had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play. The first phase was the work of Nature, the second probably of civilization.

That the man and woman were husband and wife, and the parents of the girl in arms, there could be little doubt. No other than such relationship would have accounted for the atmosphere of stale familiarity which the trio carried along with them like a nimbus as they moved down the road.

The wife mostly kept her eyes fixed ahead, though with little interest—the scene for that matter being one that might have been matched at almost any spot in any county in England at this time of the year; a road neither straight nor crooked, neither level nor hilly, bordered by hedges, trees, and other vegetation, which had entered the blackened-green stage of colour that the doomed leaves pass through on their way to dingy, and yellow, and red. The grassy margin of the bank, and the nearest hedgerow boughs, were powdered by the dust that had been stirred over them by hasty vehicles, the same dust as it lay on the road deadening their footfalls like a carpet; and this, with the aforesaid total absence of conversation, allowed every extraneous sound to be heard.

For a long time there was none, beyond the voice of a weak bird singing a trite old evening song that might doubtless have been heard on the hill at the same hour, and with the self-same trills, quavers, and breves, at any sunset of that season for centuries untold. But as they approached the village sundry distant shouts and rattles reached their ears from some elevated spot in that direction, as yet screened from view by foliage. When the outlying houses of Weydon-Priors could just be descried, the family group was met by a turnip-hoer with his hoe on his shoulder, and his dinner-bag suspended from it. The reader promptly glanced up.

‘Any trade doing here?’ he asked phlegmatically, designating the village in his van by a wave of the broadsheet. And thinking the labourer did not understand him, he added, ‘Anything in the hay-trussing line?’

The turnip-hoer had already begun shaking his head. ‘Why, save the man, what wisdom’s in him that ’a should come to Weydon for a job of that sort this time o’ year?’

‘Then is there any house to let—a little small new cottage just a-builded, or such like?’ asked the other.

The pessimist still maintained a negative. ‘Pulling down is more the nater of Weydon. There were five houses cleared away last year, and three this; and the volk nowhere to go—no, not so much as a thatched hurdler; that’s the way o’ Weydon-Priors.’

The hay-trusser, which he obviously was, nodded with some superciliousness. Looking towards the village, he continued, ‘There is something going on here, however, is there not?’

Ay. ’Tis Fair Day. Though what you hear now is little more than the clatter and scurry of getting away the money o’ children and fools, for the real business is done earlier than this. I’ve been working within sound o’t all day, but I didn’t go up—not I. ’Twas no business of mine.’

The trusser and his family proceeded on their way, and soon entered the Fair-field, which showed standing-places and pens where many hundreds of horses and sheep had been exhibited and sold in the forenoon, but were now in great part taken away. At present, as their informant had observed, but little real business remained on hand, the chief being the sale by auction of a few inferior animals, that could not otherwise be disposed of, and had been absolutely refused by the better class of traders, who came and went early. Yet the crowd was denser now than during the morning hours, the frivolous contingent of visitors, including journeymen out for a holiday, a stray soldier or two home on furlough, village shopkeepers, and the like, having latterly flocked in; persons whose activities found a congenial field among the peep-shows, toy-stands, waxworks, inspired monsters, disinterested medical men who travelled for the public good, thimble-riggers, nick-nack vendors, and readers of Fate.

Neither of our pedestrians had much heart for these things, and they looked around for a refreshment tent among the many which dotted the down. Two, which stood nearest to them in the ochreous haze of expiring sunlight, seemed almost equally inviting. One was formed of new milk-hued canvas, and bore red flags on its summit; it announced ‘Good Home-brewed Beer, Ale and Cyder’. The other was less new; a little iron stove-pipe came out of it at the back, and in front appeared the placard, ‘Good Furmity Sold Hear’. The man mentally weighed the two inscriptions, and inclined to the former tent.

‘No—no—the other one,’ said the woman, ‘I always like furmity; and so does Elizabeth-Jane; and so will you. It is nourishing after a long hard day.’

‘I’ve never tasted it,’ said the man. However, he gave way to her representations, and they entered the furmity booth forthwith.

A rather numerous company appeared within, seated at the long narrow tables that ran down the tent on each side. At the upper end stood a stove, containing a charcoal fire, over which hung a large three-legged crock, sufficiently polished round the rim to show that it was made of bell-metal. A haggish creature of about fifty presided, in a white apron, which, as it threw an air of respectability over her as far as it extended, was made so wide as to reach nearly round her waist. She slowly stirred the contents of the pot. The dull scrape of her large spoon was audible throughout the tent as she thus kept from burning the mixture of corn in the grain, flour, milk, raisins, currants, and what not, that composed the antiquated slop in which she dealt. Vessels holding the separate ingredients stood on a white-clothed table of boards and trestles close by.

The young man and woman ordered a basin each of the mixture, steaming hot, and sat down to consume it at leisure. This was very well so far, for furmity, as the woman had said, was nourishing, and as proper a food as could be obtained within the four seas; though, to those not accustomed to it, the grains of wheat swollen as large as lemon-pips, which floated on its surface, might have a deterrent effect at first.

But there was more in that tent than met the cursory glance; and the man, with the instinct of a perverse character, scented it quickly. After a mincing attack on his bowl, he watched the hag’s proceedings from the corner of his eye, and saw the game she played. He winked to her, and passed up his basin in reply to her nod; when she took a bottle from under the table, slily measured out a quantity of its contents, and tipped the same into the man’s furmity. The liquor poured in was rum. The man as slily sent back money in payment.

He found the concoction, thus strongly laced, much more to his satisfaction than it had been in its natural state. His wife had observed the proceeding with much uneasiness; but he persuaded her to have hers laced also, and she agreed to a milder allowance after some misgiving.

The man finished his basin, and called for another, the rum being signalled for in yet stronger proportion. The effect of it was soon apparent in his manner, and his wife but too sadly perceived that in strenuously steering off the rocks of the licensed liquor-tent she had only got into maelstrom depths here amongst the smugglers.

The child began to prattle impatiently, and the wife more than once said to her husband, ‘Michael, how about our lodging? You know we may have trouble in getting it if we don’t go soon.’

But he turned a deaf ear to those bird-like chirpings. He talked loud to the company. The child’s black eyes, after slow, round, ruminating gazes at the candles when they were lighted, fell together; then they opened, then shut again, and she slept.

At the end of the first basin the man had risen to serenity; at the second he was jovial; at the third, argumentative; at the fourth, the qualities signified by the shape of his face, the occasional clench of his mouth, and the fiery spark of his dark eye, began to tell in his conduct; he was overbearing—even brilliantly quarrelsome.

The conversation took a high turn, as it often does on such occasions. The ruin of good men by bad wives, and, more particularly, the frustration of many a promising youth’s high aims and hopes and the extinction of his energies by an early imprudent marriage, was the theme.

‘I did for myself that way thoroughly,’ said the trusser, with a contemplative bitterness that was well-nigh resentful. ‘I married at eighteen, like the fool that I was; and this is the consequence o’t.’ He pointed at himself and family with a wave of the hand intended to bring out the penuriousness of the exhibition.

The young woman his wife, who seemed accustomed to such remarks, acted as if she did not hear them, and continued her intermittent private words on tender trifles to the sleeping and waking child, who was just big enough to be placed for a moment on the bench beside her when she wished to ease her arms. The man continued—

‘I haven’t more than fifteen shillings in the world, and yet I am a good experienced hand in my line. I’d challenge England to beat me in the fodder business; and if I were a free man again I’d be worth a thousand pound before I’d done o’t. But a fellow never knows these little things till all chance of acting upon ’em is past.’ The auctioneer selling the old horses in the field outside could be heard saying, ‘Now this is the last lot—now who’ll take the last lot for a song? Shall I say forty shillings? ’Tis a very promising brood-mare, a trifle over five years old, and nothing the matter with the hoss at all, except that she’s a little holler in the back and had her left eye knocked out by the kick of another, her own sister, coming along the road.’

‘For my part I don’t see why men who have got wives and don’t want ’em shouldn’t get rid of ’em as these gipsy fellows do their old horses,’ said the man in the tent. ‘Why shouldn’t they put ’em up and sell ’em by auction to men who are in need of such articles? Hey? Why, begad, I’d sell mine this minute if anybody would buy her!’

‘There’s them that would do that,’ some of the guests replied, looking at the woman, who was by no means ill-favoured.

‘True,’ said a smoking gentleman, whose coat had the fine polish about the collar, elbows, seams, and shoulder-blades that long-continued friction with grimy surfaces will produce, and which is usually more desired on furniture than on clothes. From his appearance he had possibly been in former time groom or coachman to some neighbouring county family. ‘I’ve had my breedings in as good circles, I may say, as any man,’ he added, ‘and I know true cultivation, or nobody do; and I can declare she’s got it—in the bone, mind ye, I say—as much as any female in the fair—though it may want a little bringing out.’ Then, crossing his legs, he resumed his pipe with a nicely-adjusted gaze at a point in the air.

The fuddled young husband stared for a few seconds at this unexpected praise of his wife, half in doubt of the wisdom of his own attitude towards the possessor of such qualities. But he speedily lapsed into his former conviction, and said harshly—

‘Well, then, now is your chance; I am open to an offer for this gem o’ creation.’

She turned to her husband and murmured, ‘Michael, you have talked this nonsense in public places before. A joke is a joke, but you may make it once too often, mind!’

‘I know I’ve said it before; I meant it. All I want is a buyer.’

At the moment a swallow, one among the last of the season, which had by chance found its way through an opening into the upper part of the tent, flew to and fro in quick curves above their heads, causing all eyes to follow it absently. In watching the bird till it made its escape the assembled company neglected to respond to the workman’s offer, and the subject dropped.

But a quarter of an hour later the man, who had gone on lacing his furmity more and more heavily, though he was either so strong-minded or such an intrepid toper that he still appeared fairly sober, recurred to the old strain, as in a musical fantasy the instrument fetches up the original theme. ‘Here—I am waiting to know about this offer of mine. The woman is no good to me. Who’ll have her?’

The company had by this time decidedly degenerated, and the renewed inquiry was received with a laugh of appreciation. The woman whispered; she was imploring and anxious: ‘Come, come, it is getting dark, and this nonsense won’t do. If you don’t come along, I shall go without you. Come!’

She waited and waited; yet he did not move. In ten minutes the man broke in upon the desultory conversation of the furmity drinkers with, ‘I asked this question, and nobody answered to ‘t. Will any Jack Rag or Tom Straw among ye buy my goods?’

The woman’s manner changed, and her face assumed the grim shape and colour of which mention has been made.

‘Mike, Mike,’ said she; ‘this is getting serious. O!—too serious!’

‘Will anybody buy her?’ said the man.

‘I wish somebody would,’ said she firmly. ‘Her present owner is not at all to her liking!’

‘Nor you to mine,’ said he. ‘So we are agreed about that. Gentlemen, you hear? It’s an agreement to part. She shall take the girl if she wants to, and go her ways. I’ll take my tools, and go my ways. ’Tis simple as Scripture history. Now then, stand up, Susan, and show yourself.’

‘Don’t, my chiel,’ whispered a buxom staylace dealer in voluminous petticoats, who sat near the woman; ‘yer good man don’t know what he’s saying.’

The woman, however, did stand up. ‘Now, who’s auctioneer?’ cried the hay-trusser.

‘I be,’ promptly answered a short man, with a nose resembling a copper knob, a damp voice, and eyes like buttonholes. ‘Who’ll make an offer for this lady?’

The woman looked on the ground, as if she maintained her position by a supreme effort of will.

‘Five shillings,’ said some one, at which there was a laugh.

‘No insults,’ said the husband. ‘Who’ll say a guinea?’

Nobody answered; and the female dealer in staylaces interposed.

‘Behave yerself moral, good man, for Heaven’s love! Ah, what a cruelty is the poor soul married to! Bed and board is dear at some figures, ’pon my ’vation ’Tis!’

‘Set it higher, auctioneer,’ said the trusser.

‘Two guineas!’ said the auctioneer; and no one replied.

‘If they don’t take her for that, in ten seconds they’ll have to give more,’ said the husband. ‘Very well. Now auctioneer, add another.’

Three guineas—going for three guineas!’ said the rheumy man.

‘No bid?’ said the husband. ‘Good Lord, why she’s cost me fifty times the money, if a penny. Go on.’

‘Four guineas!’ cried the auctioneer.

‘I’ll tell ye what—I won’t sell her for less than five,’ said the husband, bringing down his fist so that the basins danced. ‘I’ll sell her for five guineas to any man that will pay me the money, and treat her well; and he shall have her for ever, and never hear aught o’ me. But she shan’t go for less. Now then—five guineas—and she’s yours. Susan, you agree?

She bowed her head with absolute indifference.

‘Five guineas,’ said the auctioneer, ‘or she’ll be withdrawn. Do anybody give it? The last time. Yes or no?’

‘Yes,’ said a loud voice from the doorway.

All eyes were turned. Standing in the triangular opening which formed the door of the tent was a sailor, who, unobserved by the rest, had arrived there within the last two or three minutes. A dead silence followed his affirmation.

‘You say you do?’ asked the husband, staring at him.

‘I say so,’ replied the sailor.

‘Saying is one thing, and paying is another. Where’s the money?’

The sailor hesitated a moment, looked anew at the woman, came in, unfolded five crisp pieces of paper, and threw them down upon the table-cloth. They were Bank-of-England notes for five pounds. Upon the face of this he chinked down the shillings severally—one, two, three, four, five.

The sight of real money in full amount, in answer to a challenge for the same till then deemed slightly hypothetical, had a great effect upon the spectators. Their eyes became riveted upon the faces of the chief actors, and then upon the notes as they lay, weighted by the shillings, on the table.

Up to this moment it could not positively have been asserted that the man, in spite of his tantalizing declaration, was really in earnest. The spectators had indeed taken the proceedings throughout as a piece of mirthful irony carried to extremes; and had assumed that, being out of work, he was, as a consequence, out of temper with the world, and society, and his nearest kin. But with the demand and response of real cash the jovial frivolity of the scene departed. A lurid colour seemed to fill the tent, and change the aspect of all therein. The mirth-wrinkles left the listeners’ faces, and they waited with parting lips.

‘Now,’ said the woman, breaking the silence, so that her low dry voice sounded quite loud, ‘before you go further, Michael, listen to me. If you touch that money, I and this girl go with the man. Mind, it is a joke no longer.’

‘A joke? Of course it is not a joke!’ shouted her husband, his resentment rising at her suggestion. ‘I take the money: the sailor takes you. That’s plain enough. It has been done elsewhere—and why not here?’

‘’Tis quite on the understanding that the young woman is willing,’ said the sailor blandly. ‘I wouldn’t hurt her feelings for the world.’

‘Faith, nor I,’ said her husband. ‘But she is willing, provided she can have the child. She said so only the other day when I talked o’t!’

‘That you swear?’ said the sailor to her.

‘I do,’ she said, after glancing at her husband’s face and seeing no repentance there.

‘Very well, she shall have the child, and the bargain’s complete,’ said the trusser. He took the sailor’s notes and deliberately folded them, and put them with the shillings in a high remote pocket, with an air of finality.

The sailor looked at the woman and smiled. ‘Come along!’ he said kindly. The little one too—the more the merrier!’ She paused for an instant, with a close glance at him. Then dropping her eyes again, and saying nothing, she took up the child and followed him as he made towards the door. On reaching it, she turned, and pulling off her wedding-ring, flung it across the booth in the hay-trusser’s face.

‘Mike,’ she said. ‘I’ve lived with thee a couple of years, and had nothing but temper! Now I’m no more to ’ee; I’ll try my luck elsewhere. ’Twill be better for me and Elizabeth-Jane, both. So good-bye!’

Seizing the sailor’s arm with her right hand, and mounting the little girl on her left, she went out of the tent sobbing bitterly.

A stolid look of concern filled the husband’s face, as if, after all, he had not quite anticipated this ending; and some of the guests laughed.

‘Is she gone?’ he said.

‘Faith, ay; she’s gone clane enough,’ said some rustics near the door.

He rose and walked to the entrance with the careful tread of one conscious of his alcoholic load. Some others followed, and they stood looking into the twilight. The difference between the peacefulness of interior nature and the wilful hostilities of mankind was very apparent at this place. In contrast with the harshness of the act just ended within the tent was the sight of several horses crossing their necks and rubbing each other lovingly as they waited in patience to be harnessed for the homeward journey. Outside the fair, in the valleys and woods, all was quiet. The sun had recently set, and the west heaven was hung with rosy cloud, which seemed permanent, yet slowly changed. To watch it was like looking at some grand feat of stagery from a darkened auditorium. In presence of this scene after the other there was a natural instinct to abjure man as the blot on an otherwise kindly universe; till it was remembered that all terrestrial conditions were intermittent, and that mankind might some night be innocently sleeping when these quiet objects were raging loud.

‘Where do the sailor live?’ asked a spectator, when they had vainly gazed around.

‘God knows that,’ replied the man who had seen high life. ‘He’s without doubt a stranger here.’

‘He came in about five minutes ago,’ said the furmity woman, joining the rest with her hands on her hips. ‘And then ’a stepped back, and then ’a looked in again. I’m not a penny the better for him.’

‘Serves the husband well be-right,’ said the staylace vendor. ‘A comely respectable body like her—what can a man want more? I glory in the woman’s sperrit. I’d ha’ done it myself—od sent if I wouldn’t, if a husband had behaved so to me! I’d go, and ’a might call, and call, till his keacorn was raw; but I’d never come back no, not till the great trumpet, would I!’

‘Well, the woman will be better off,’ said another of a more deliberate turn. ‘For seafaring natures be very good shelter for shorn lambs, and the man do seem to have plenty of money, which is what she’s not been used to lately by all showings.’

‘Mark me—I’ll not go after her!’ said the trusser, returning doggedly to his seat. ‘Let her go! If she’s up to such vagaries she must suffer for ’em. She’d no business to take the maid—’Tis my maid; and if it were the doing again she shouldn’t have her!’

Perhaps from some little sense of having countenanced an indefensible proceeding, perhaps because it was late, the customers thinned away from the tent shortly after this episode. The man stretched his elbows forward on the table, leant his face upon his arms, and soon began to snore. The furmity seller decided to close for the night, and after seeing the rum-bottles, milk, corn, raisins, etc., that remained on hand, loaded into the cart, came to where the man reclined. She shook him, but could not wake him. As the tent was not to be struck that night, the fair continuing for two or three days, she decided to let the sleeper, who was obviously no tramp, stay where he was, and his basket with him. Extinguishing the last candle, and lowering the flap of the tent, she left it, and drove away.

CHAPTER 2

The morning sun was streaming through the crevices of the canvas when the man awoke. A warm glow pervaded the whole atmosphere of the marquee, and a single big blue fly buzzed musically round and round it. Besides the buzz of the fly there was not a sound. He looked about—at the benches—at the table supported by trestles—at his basket of tools—at the stove where the furmity had been boiled—at the empty basins—at some shed grains of wheat—at the corks which dotted the grassy floor. Among the odds and ends he discerned a little shining object, and picked it up. It was his wife’s ring.

A confused picture of the events of the previous evening seemed to come back to him, and he thrust his hand into his breast-pocket. A rustling revealed the sailor’s bank-notes thrust carelessly in.

This second verification of his dim memories was enough; he knew now they were not dreams. He remained seated, looking on the ground for some time. ‘I must get out of this as soon as I can,’ he said deliberately at last, with the air of one who could not catch his thoughts without pronouncing them. ‘She’s gone—to be sure she is—gone with that sailor who bought her, and little Elizabeth-Jane. We walked here, and I had the furmity, and rum in it—and sold her. Yes, that’s what happened, and here am I. Now, what am I to do—am I sober enough to walk, I wonder?’ He stood up, found that he was in fairly good condition for progress, unencumbered. Next he shouldered his tool basket, and found he could carry it. Then lifting the tent door he emerged into the open air.

Here the man looked around with gloomy curiosity. The freshness of the September morning inspired and braced him as he stood. He and his family had been weary when they arrived the night before, and they had observed but little of the place; so that he now beheld it as a new thing. It exhibited itself as the top of an open down, bounded on one extreme by a plantation, and approached by a winding road. At the bottom stood the village which lent its name to the upland and the annual fair that was held thereon. The spot stretched downward into valleys, and onward to other uplands, dotted with barrows, and trenched with the remains of prehistoric forts. The whole scene lay under the rays of a newly risen sun, which had not as yet dried a single blade of the heavily dewed grass, whereon the shadows of the yellow and red vans were projected far away, those thrown by the felloe of each wheel being elongated in shape to the orbit of a comet. All the gipsies and showmen who had remained on the ground lay snug within their carts and tents, or wrapped in horse-cloths under them, and were silent and still as death, with the exception of an occasional snore that revealed their presence. But the Seven Sleepers had a dog; and dogs of the mysterious breeds that vagrants own, that are as much like cats as dogs and as much like foxes as cats, also lay about here. A little one started up under one of the carts, barked as a matter of principle, and quickly lay down again. He was the only positive spectator of the hay-trusser’s exit from the Weydon Fairfield.

This seemed to accord with his desire. He went on in silent thought, unheeding the yellowhammers which flitted about the hedges with straws in their bills, the crowns of the mushrooms, and the tinkling of local sheep-bells, whose wearers had had the good fortune not to be included in the fair. When he reached a lane, a good mile from the scene of the previous evening, the man pitched his basket and leant upon a gate. A difficult problem or two occupied his mind.

‘Did I tell my name to anybody last night, or didn’t I tell my name?’ he said to himself; and at last concluded that he did not. His general demeanour was enough to show how he was surprised and nettled that his wife had taken him so literally—as much could be seen in his face, and in the way he nibbled a straw which he pulled from the hedge. He knew that she must have been somewhat excited to do this; moreover, she must have believed that there was some sort of binding force in the transaction. On this latter point he felt almost certain, knowing her freedom from levity of character, and the extreme simplicity of her intellect. There may, too, have been enough recklessness and resentment beneath her ordinary placidity to make her stifle any momentary doubts. On a previous occasion when he had declared during a fuddle that he would dispose of her as he had done, she had replied that she would not hear him say that many times more before it happened, in the resigned tones of a fatalist … ‘Yet she knows I am not in my senses when I do that!’ he exclaimed. ‘Well, I must walk about till I find her … Seize her, why didn’t she know better than bring me into this disgrace!’ he roared out. ‘She wasn’t queer if I was. ’Tis like Susan to show some idiotic simplicity. Meek—that meekness has done me more harm than the bitterest temper!’

When he was calmer he turned to his original conviction that he must somehow find her and his little Elizabeth-Jane, and put up with the shame as best he could. It was of his own making, and he ought to bear it. But first he resolved to register an oath, a greater oath than he had ever sworn before: and to do it properly he required a fit place and imagery; for there was something fetichistic in this man’s beliefs.

He shouldered his basket and moved on, casting his eyes inquisitively round upon the landscape as he walked, and at the distance of three or four miles perceived the roofs of a village and the tower of a church. He instantly made towards the latter object. The village was quite still, it being that motionless hour of rustic daily life which fills the interval between the departure of the field-labourers to their work, and the rising of their wives and daughters to prepare the breakfast for their return. Hence he reached the church without observation, and the door being only latched he entered. The hay-trusser deposited his basket by the font, went up the nave till he reached the altar-rails, and opening the gate entered the sacrarium, where he seemed to feel a sense of the strangeness for a moment; then he knelt upon the foot-pace. Dropping his head upon the clamped book which lay on the Communion-table, he said aloud—

‘I, Michael Henchard, on this morning of the sixteenth of September, do take an oath before God here in this solemn place that I will avoid all strong liquors for the space of twenty-one years to come, being a year for every year that I have lived. And this I swear upon the book before me; and may I be strook dumb, blind, and helpless, if I break this my oath!’

When he had said it and kissed the big book, the hay-trusser arose, and seemed relieved at having made a start in a new direction. While standing in the porch a moment he saw a thick jet of wood smoke suddenly start up from the red chimney of a cottage near, and knew that the occupant had just lit her fire. He went round to the door, and the housewife agreed to prepare him some breakfast for a trifling payment, which was done. Then he started on the search for his wife and child.

The perplexing nature of the undertaking became apparent soon enough. Though he examined and inquired, and walked hither and thither day after day, no such characters as those he described had anywhere been seen since the evening of the fair. To add to the difficulty he could gain no sound of the sailor’s name. As money was short with him he decided, after some hesitation, to spend the sailor’s money in the prosecution of this search; but it was equally in vain. The truth was that a certain shyness of revealing his conduct prevented Michael Henchard from following up the investigation with the loud hue-and-cry such a pursuit demanded to render it effectual; and it was probably for this reason that he obtained no clue, though everything was done by him that did not involve an explanation of the circumstances under which he had lost her.

Weeks counted up to months, and still he searched on, maintaining himself by small jobs of work in the intervals. By this time he had arrived at a seaport, and there he derived intelligence that persons answering somewhat to his description had emigrated a little time before. Then he said he would search no longer, and that he would go and settle in the district which he had had for some time in his mind. Next day he started, journeying south-westward, and did not pause, except for nights’ lodgings, till he reached the town of Casterbridge, in a far distant part of Wessex.

CHAPTER 3

The highroad into the village of Weydon-Priors was again carpeted with dust. The trees had put on as of yore their aspect of dingy green, and where the Henchard family of three had once walked along, two persons not unconnected with that family walked now.

The scene in its broad aspect had so much of its previous character, even to the voices and rattle from the neighbouring village down, that it might for that matter have been the afternoon following the previously recorded episode. Change was only to be observed in details; but here it was obvious that a long procession of years had passed by. One of the two who walked the road was she who had figured as the young wife of Henchard on the previous occasion; now her face had lost much of its rotundity; her skin had undergone a textural change; and though her hair had not lost colour it was considerably thinner than heretofore. She was dressed in the mourning clothes of a widow. Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about eighteen, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour.

A glance was sufficient to inform the eye that this was Susan Henchard’s grown-up daughter. While life’s middle summer had set its hardening mark on the mother’s face, her former spring-like specialities were transferred so dexterously by Time to the second figure, her child, that the absence of certain facts within her mother’s knowledge from the girl’s mind would have seemed for the moment, to one reflecting on those facts, to be a curious imperfection in Nature’s powers of continuity.

They walked with joined hands, and it could be perceived that this was the act of simple affection. The daughter carried in her outer hand a withy basket of old-fashioned make; the mother a blue bundle, which contrasted oddly with her black stuff gown.

Reaching the outskirts of the village they pursued the same track as formerly, and ascended to the fair. Here, too, it was evident that the years had told. Certain mechanical improvements might have been noticed in the roundabouts and high-fliers, machines for testing rustic strength and weight, and in the erections devoted to shooting for nuts. But the real business of the fair had considerably dwindled. The new periodical great markets of neighbouring towns were beginning to interfere seriously with the trade carried on here for centuries. The pens for sheep, the tie-ropes for horses, were about half as long as they had been. The stalls of tailors, hosiers, coopers, linen-drapers, and other such trades had almost disappeared, and the vehicles were far less numerous. The mother and daughter threaded the crowd for some little distance, and then stood still.

‘Why did we hinder our time by coming in here? I thought you wished to get onward?’ said the maiden.

‘Yes, my dear Elizabeth-Jane,’ exclaimed the other. ‘But I had a fancy for looking up here.’

‘Why?’

‘It was here I first met with Newson—on such a day as this.’

‘First met with father here? Yes, you have told me so before. And now he’s drowned and gone from us!’ As she spoke the girl drew a card from her pocket and looked at it with a sigh. It was edged with black, and inscribed within a design resembling a mural tablet were the words, ‘In affectionate memory of Richard Newson, mariner, who was unfortunately lost at sea, in the month of November 184-, aged forty-one years.’

‘And it was here,’ continued her mother, with more hesitation, ‘that I last saw the relation we are going to look for—Mr Michael Henchard.’

‘What is his exact kin to us, mother? I have never clearly had it told me.’

‘He is, or was—for he may be dead—a connection by marriage,’ said her mother deliberately.

‘That’s exactly what you have said a score of times before!’ replied the young woman, looking about her inattentively. ‘He’s not a near relation, I suppose?’

‘Not by any means.’

‘He was a hay-trusser, wasn’t he, when you last heard of him?’

‘He was.’

‘I suppose he never knew me?’ the girl innocently continued.

Mrs Henchard paused for a moment, and answered uneasily, ‘Of course not, Elizabeth-Jane. But come this way.’ She moved on to another part of the field.

‘It is not much use inquiring here for anybody, I should think,’ the daughter observed, as she gazed round about. ‘People at fairs change like the leaves of trees; and I daresay you are the only one here today who was here all those years ago.’

‘I am not so sure of that,’ said Mrs Newson, as she now called herself, keenly eyeing something under a green bank a little way off. ‘See there.’

The daughter looked in the direction signified. The object pointed out was a tripod of sticks stuck into the earth, from which hung a three-legged crock, kept hot by a smouldering wood fire beneath. Over the pot stooped an old woman, haggard, wrinkled, and almost in rags. She stirred the contents of the pot with a large spoon, and occasionally croaked in a broken voice, ‘Good furmity sold here!’

It was indeed the former mistress of the furmity tent—once thriving, cleanly, white-aproned, and chinking with money—now tentless, dirty, owning no tables or benches, and having scarce any customers except two small whity-brown boys, who came up and asked for ‘A ha’p’orth, please—good measure’, which she served in a couple of chipped yellow basins of commonest clay.

‘She was here at that time,’ resumed Mrs Newson, making a step as if to draw nearer.

‘Don’t speak to her—it isn’t respectable!’ urged the other.

‘I will just say a word—you, Elizabeth-Jane, can stay here.’

The girl was not loth, and turned to some stalls of coloured prints while her mother went forward. The old woman begged for the latter’s custom as soon as she saw her, and responded to Mrs Henchard-Newson’s request for a pennyworth with more alacrity than she had shown in selling sixpennyworth in her younger days. When the soi-disant widow had taken the basin of thin poor slop that stood for the rich concoction of the former time, the hag opened a little basket behind the fire, and looking up slily, whispered, ‘Just a thought o’ rum in it?—smuggled, you know—say two penn’orth—’twill make it slip down like cordial!’

Her customer smiled bitterly at this survival of the old trick, and shook her head with a meaning the old woman was far from translating. She pretended to eat a little of the furmity with the leaden spoon offered, and as she did so said blandly to the hag, ‘You’ve seen better days?’

‘Ah, ma’am—well ye may say it!’ responded the old woman, opening the sluices of her heart forthwith. ‘I’ve stood in this fairground, maid, wife, and widow, these nine-and-thirty year, and in that time have known what it was to do business with the richest stomachs in the land! Ma’am you’d hardly believe that I was once the owner of a great pavilion-tent that was the attraction of the fair. Nobody could come, nobody could go, without having a dish of Mrs Goodenough’s furmity. I knew the clergy’s taste, and the dandy gent’s taste; I knew the town’s taste, the country’s taste. I even knowed the taste of the coarse shameless females. But Lord’s my life—the world’s no memory; straightforward dealings don’t bring profit—’tis the sly and the underhand that get on in these times!’

Mrs Newson glanced round—her daughter was still bending over the distant stalls. ‘Can you call to mind,’ she said cautiously to the old woman, ‘the sale of a wife by her husband in your tent eighteen years ago today?’

The hag reflected, and half shook her head. ‘If it had been a big thing I should have minded it in a moment,’ she said. ‘I can mind every serious fight o’ married parties, every murder, every manslaughter, even every pocket-picking—leastwise large ones—that ‘t has been my lot to witness. But a selling? Was it done quiet-like?’

‘Well, yes. I think so.’

The furmity woman half shook her head again. ‘And yet,’ she said, ‘I do. At any rate, I can mind a man doing something o’ the sort—a man in a cord jacket, with a basket of tools; but, Lord bless ye, we don’t gi’e it head-room, we don’t, such as that. The only reason why I can mind that man is that he came back here to the next year’s fair, and told me quite private-like that if a woman ever asked for him I was to say he had gone to—where? Casterbridge—yes—to Casterbridge, said he. But, Lord’s my life, I shouldn’t ha’ thought of it again!’

Mrs Newson would have rewarded the old woman as far as her small means afforded had she not discreetly borne in mind that it was by that unscrupulous person’s liquor her husband had been degraded. She briefly thanked her informant, and rejoined Elizabeth, who greeted her with, ‘Mother, do let’s go on—it was hardly respectable for you to buy refreshment there. I see none but the lowest do.’

‘I have learned what I wanted, however,’ said her mother quietly. ‘The last time our relative visited this fair he said he was living at Casterbridge. It is a long, long way from here, and it was many years ago that he said it; but there I think we’ll go.’

With this they descended out of the fair, and went onward to the village, where they obtained a night’s lodging.