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Updated: June 15, 2025
They had reached the top of School House Hill and Starkfield lay below them in the twilight. A cutter, mounting the road from the village, passed them by in a joyous flutter of bells, and they straightened themselves and looked ahead with rigid faces. Along the main street lights had begun to shine from the house-fronts and stray figures were turning in here and there at the gates.
His temples throbbed responsive to his heart. What would be the answer of Rome? The sunlight had increased and the higher districts now stood out more vigorously against the fiery background. Far away the hills became gilded and empurpled, whilst the nearer house-fronts grew very distinct and bright with their thousands of windows sharply outlined.
You follow some narrow, damp, evil-smelling street with black house-fronts and overhanging roofs, and suddenly come upon a clearing as in a forest of ancient leprous hovels. There are squares, broad footways; lofty white carved buildings yet in the rough, littered with rubbish and fenced off.
They especially forbade the use of wood in house-fronts and windows, both on account of the danger from fire, and because all the timber in the kingdom, which was needed for shipping and other purposes, was being used up in building. They even ordered the pulling down of new houses in London, Westminster, and for three miles around. But all efforts to stop the growth of the city were vain.
And, as if to help this illusion, I saw many things that were eloquent of these vanished people glimpses through shattered windows and beyond demolished house-fronts; here a table set for dinner, with plates and tarnished cutlery on a dingy cloth that stirred damp and lazily in the wind, yonder a grand piano, open and with sodden music drooping from its rest; here again chairs drawn cosily together.
Beyond a confusion of masts there crept into view a long grey line of house-fronts at the base of a crescent of cliffs the city of Saigo; and in a little while we touched a wharf of stone. There I bade farewell for a month to the Oki-Saigo. Saigo was a great surprise.
And instead the cold east wind blew round me as if I were an outcast. "I stole down the first crooked street I came to. I stared at the house-fronts, at the little square panes of the sagging window-sashes, at the dingy doors, with those short, steep flights of steps leading down to the side-walks." Julia sobered to a tentative frown.
And very pleasant it looked on this summer afternoon with the sunlight gilding the foliage of its widespreading plane trees and lighting up the warm-toned brick of the house-fronts. We walked slowly down the shady west side, near the middle of which my companion halted. "This is the house," she said.
There is more animation in the streets now: shops are opening, cabs tooting down the Avenue de l'Opera the greater part of the night; but most of the house-fronts are still shuttered and still. Tourists, pleasure-seekers, and the banalities they bring are gone every thought and energy is with the men fighting on that long line across the north.
From this tower the clock struck eight, and thereupon a bell began to toll with a peremptory clang. The curfew was still rung in Casterbridge, and it was utilized by the inhabitants as a signal for shutting their shops. No sooner did the deep notes of the bell throb between the house-fronts than a clatter of shutters arose through the whole length of the High Street.
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