CHAPTER XVII

IN THE MARKET-PLACE

On Saturday Boldwood was in Casterbridge market house as usual, when

the disturber of his dreams entered and became visible to him. Adam had

awakened from his deep sleep, and behold! there was Eve. The farmer

took courage, and for the first time really looked at her.

Material causes and emotional effects are not to be arranged in regular

equation. The result from capital employed in the production of any

movement of a mental nature is sometimes as tremendous as the cause

itself is absurdly minute. When women are in a freakish mood, their

usual intuition, either from carelessness or inherent defect, seemingly

fails to teach them this, and hence it was that Bathsheba was fated to

be astonished to-day.

Boldwood looked at her—not slily, critically, or understandingly, but

blankly at gaze, in the way a reaper looks up at a passing train—as

something foreign to his element, and but dimly understood. To Boldwood

women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary

complements—comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and permanence,

that whether their orbits were as geometrical, unchangeable, and as

subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely erratic as they

superficially appeared, he had not deemed it his duty to consider.

He saw her black hair, her correct facial curves and profile, and the

roundness of her chin and throat. He saw then the side of her eyelids,

eyes, and lashes, and the shape of her ear. Next he noticed her figure,

her skirt, and the very soles of her shoes.

Boldwood thought her beautiful, but wondered whether he was right in

his thought, for it seemed impossible that this romance in the flesh,

if so sweet as he imagined, could have been going on long without

creating a commotion of delight among men, and provoking more inquiry

than Bathsheba had done, even though that was not a little. To the best

of his judgement neither nature nor art could improve this perfect one

of an imperfect many. His heart began to move within him. Boldwood, it

must be remembered, though forty years of age, had never before

inspected a woman with the very centre and force of his glance; they

had struck upon all his senses at wide angles.

Was she really beautiful? He could not assure himself that his opinion

was true even now. He furtively said to a neighbour, “Is Miss Everdene

considered handsome?”

“Oh yes; she was a good deal noticed the first time she came, if you

remember. A very handsome girl indeed.”

A man is never more credulous than in receiving favourable opinions on

the beauty of a woman he is half, or quite, in love with; a mere

child’s word on the point has the weight of an R.A.’s. Boldwood was

satisfied now.

And this charming woman had in effect said to him, “Marry me.” Why

should she have done that strange thing? Boldwood’s blindness to the

difference between approving of what circumstances suggest, and

originating what they do not suggest, was well matched by Bathsheba’s

insensibility to the possibly great issues of little beginnings.

She was at this moment coolly dealing with a dashing young farmer,

adding up accounts with him as indifferently as if his face had been

the pages of a ledger. It was evident that such a nature as his had no

attraction for a woman of Bathsheba’s taste. But Boldwood grew hot down

to his hands with an incipient jealousy; he trod for the first time the

threshold of “the injured lover’s hell.” His first impulse was to go

and thrust himself between them. This could be done, but only in one

way—by asking to see a sample of her corn. Boldwood renounced the idea.

He could not make the request; it was debasing loveliness to ask it to

buy and sell, and jarred with his conceptions of her.

All this time Bathsheba was conscious of having broken into that

dignified stronghold at last. His eyes, she knew, were following her

everywhere. This was a triumph; and had it come naturally, such a

triumph would have been the sweeter to her for this piquing delay. But

it had been brought about by misdirected ingenuity, and she valued it

only as she valued an artificial flower or a wax fruit.

Being a woman with some good sense in reasoning on subjects wherein her

heart was not involved, Bathsheba genuinely repented that a freak which

had owed its existence as much to Liddy as to herself, should ever have

been undertaken, to disturb the placidity of a man she respected too

highly to deliberately tease.

She that day nearly formed the intention of begging his pardon on the

very next occasion of their meeting. The worst features of this

arrangement were that, if he thought she ridiculed him, an apology

would increase the offence by being disbelieved; and if he thought she

wanted him to woo her, it would read like additional evidence of her

forwardness.