Troy Meets Fanny on Yalbury Hill — Far from the Madding Crowd

On Yalbury Hill, one Saturday evening in October, Bathsheba sits listless in the gig while her husband walks beside it in a smart farmer’s suit, holding the reins and flicking the horse’s ear with the whip for amusement. People still call him Sergeant. He is talking about the Budmouth autumn races, where he says a wet day cost him the two hundred pounds that fine weather would have won. To him the weather is like history: wet days are the story and fine days only episodes. Bathsheba’s voice, Hardy notes, has dropped a long way since the summer. She works out that he has lost over a hundred pounds in a month, warns that they will have to leave the farm, and begs him to stay away from the next meeting. He tells her it makes no difference, since the bets are booked, and calls her chicken-hearted. If he had known, he says, he would never have, and he leaves the sentence hanging at “I know what”.

A poor woman comes over the brow of the hill, close behind them before they see her, and asks Troy, over his shoulder, when Casterbridge Union-house closes at night. He starts, but does not turn round. “I don’t know,” he says. She looks up, knows the soldier under the farmer’s clothes, cries out and falls. Bathsheba moves to climb down, but Troy throws her the reins and sends her on up the hill with the horse. Once the gig has gone on, he speaks to the woman quickly and strangely gently. He thought she was miles away, or dead. He gives her every coin he has, says it is the merest trifle, and explains that he has nothing but what his wife gives him and cannot ask her now. Fanny is to sleep at the Union, and on Monday at ten she is to meet him on Grey’s Bridge, where he will bring more. “I am a brute,” he tells her, “but good-bye!”

When he climbs back into the gig, Bathsheba asks whether he knows who the woman was. “I do,” he says, looking her in the face. Asked for the name, he says the woman is nothing to either of them and that he knows her only by sight. “How should I know her name?” “I think you do,” says Bathsheba. “Think if you will, and be,” he says, and the whip cracks across the horse’s flank before he can finish. The gig bolts forward, and no more is said.