Far from the Madding Crowd

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FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

by

THOMAS HARDY







CONTENTS

Preface
I. Description of Farmer Oak--An Incident
II. Night--The Flock--An Interior--Another Interior
III. A Girl on Horseback--Conversation
IV. Gabriel's Resolve--The Visit--The Mistake
V. Departure of Bathsheba--A Pastoral Tragedy
VI. The Fair--The Journey--The Fire
VII. Recognition--A Timid Girl
VIII. The Malthouse--The Chat--News
IX. The Homestead--A Visitor--Half-Confidences
X. Mistress and Men
XI. Outside the Barracks--Snow--A Meeting
XII. Farmers--A Rule--An Exception
XIII. Sortes Sanctorum--The Valentine
XIV. Effect of the Letter--Sunrise
XV. A Morning Meeting--The Letter Again
XVI. All Saints' and All Souls'
XVII. In the Market-Place
XVIII. Boldwood in Meditation--Regret
XIX. The Sheep-Washing--The Offer
XX. Perplexity--Grinding the Shears--A Quarrel
XXI. Troubles in the Fold--A Message
XXII. The Great Barn and the Sheep-Shearers
XXIII. Eventide--A Second Declaration
XXIV. The Same Night--The Fir Plantation
XXV. The New Acquaintance Described
XXVI. Scene on the Verge of the Hay-Mead
XXVII. Hiving the Bees
XXVIII. The Hollow Amid the Ferns
XXIX. Particulars of a Twilight Walk
XXX. Hot Cheeks and Tearful Eyes
XXXI. Blame--Fury
XXXII. Night--Horses Tramping
XXXIII. In the Sun--A Harbinger
XXXIV. Home Again--A Trickster
XXXV. At an Upper Window
XXXVI. Wealth in Jeopardy--The Revel
XXXVII. The Storm--The Two Together
XXXVIII. Rain--One Solitary Meets Another
XXXIX. Coming Home--A Cry
XL. On Casterbridge Highway
XLI. Suspicion--Fanny Is Sent For
XLII. Joseph and His Burden--Buck's Head
XLIII. Fanny's Revenge
XLIV. Under a Tree--Reaction
XLV. Troy's Romanticism
XLVI. The Gurgoyle: Its Doings
XLVII. Adventures by the Shore
XLVIII. Doubts Arise--Doubts Linger
XLIX. Oak's Advancement--A Great Hope
L. The Sheep Fair--Troy Touches His Wife's Hand
LI. Bathsheba Talks with Her Outrider
LII. Converging Courses
LIII. Concurritur--Horae Momento
LIV. After the Shock
LV. The March Following--"Bathsheba Boldwood"
LVI. Beauty in Loneliness--After All
LVII. A Foggy Night and Morning--Conclusion





PREFACE

In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was
in the chapters of "Far from the Madding Crowd," as they appeared
month by month in a popular magazine, that I first ventured to adopt
the word "Wessex" from the pages of early English history, and give
it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district
once included in that extinct kingdom. The series of novels I
projected being mainly of the kind called local, they seemed to
require a territorial definition of some sort to lend unity to their
scene. Finding that the area of a single county did not afford a
canvas large enough for this purpose, and that there were objections
to an invented name, I disinterred the old one. The press and the
public were kind enough to welcome the fanciful plan, and willingly
joined me in the anachronism of imagining a Wessex population living
under Queen Victoria;--a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post,
mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches,
labourers who could read and write, and National school children.
But I believe I am correct in stating that, until the existence of
this contemporaneous Wessex was announced in the present story, in
1874, it had never been heard of, and that the expression, "a Wessex
peasant," or "a Wessex custom," would theretofore have been taken to
refer to nothing later in date than the Norman Conquest.

I did not anticipate that this application of the word to a modern
use would extend outside the chapters of my own chronicles. But the
name was soon taken up elsewhere as a local designation. The first
to do so was the now defunct _Examiner_, which, in the impression
bearing date July 15, 1876, entitled one of its articles "The Wessex
Labourer," the article turning out to be no dissertation on farming
during the Heptarchy, but on the modern peasant of the south-west
counties, and his presentation in these stories.

Since then the appellation which I had thought to reserve to the
horizons and landscapes of a merely realistic dream-country, has
become more and more popular as a practical definition; and the
dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region
which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers
from. But I ask all good and gentle readers to be so kind as to
forget this, and to refuse steadfastly to believe that there are any
inhabitants of a Victorian Wessex outside the pages of this and the
companion volumes in which they were first discovered.

Moreover, the village called Weatherbury, wherein the scenes of the
present story of the series are for the most part laid, would perhaps
be hardly discernible by the explorer, without help, in any existing
place nowadays; though at the time, comparatively recent, at which
the tale was written, a sufficient reality to meet the descriptions,
both of backgrounds and personages, might have been traced easily
enough. The church remains, by great good fortune, unrestored and
intact, and a few of the old houses; but the ancient malt-house,
which was formerly so characteristic of the parish, has been pulled
down these twenty years; also most of the thatched and dormered
cottages that were once lifeholds. The game of prisoner's base,
which not so long ago seemed to enjoy a perennial vitality in front
of the worn-out stocks, may, so far as I can say, be entirely unknown
to the rising generation of schoolboys there. The practice of
divination by Bible and key, the regarding of valentines as things of
serious import, the shearing-supper, and the harvest-home, have, too,
nearly disappeared in the wake of the old houses; and with them have
gone, it is said, much of that love of fuddling to which the village
at one time was notoriously prone. The change at the root of this
has been the recent supplanting of the class of stationary cottagers,
who carried on the local traditions and humours, by a population
of more or less migratory labourers, which has led to a break of
continuity in local history, more fatal than any other thing to the
preservation of legend, folk-lore, close inter-social relations, and
eccentric individualities. For these the indispensable conditions
of existence are attachment to the soil of one particular spot by
generation after generation.

T.H.

February 1895




CHAPTER I


DESCRIPTION OF FARMER OAK--AN INCIDENT


When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they
were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were
reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them,
extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch
of the rising sun.

His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young
man of sound judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and general good
character. On Sundays he was a man of misty views, rather given to
postponing, and hampered by his best clothes and umbrella: upon the
whole, one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space
of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of
the parish and the drunken section,--that is, he went to church, but
yawned privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene
creed, and thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to
be listening to the sermon. Or, to state his character as it stood
in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in
tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased,
he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose
moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.

Since he lived six times as many working-days as Sundays, Oak's
appearance in his old clothes was most peculiarly his own--the mental
picture formed by his neighbours in imagining him being always
dressed in that way. He wore a low-crowned felt hat, spread out at
the base by tight jamming upon the head for security in high winds,
and a coat like Dr. Johnson's; his lower extremities being encased
in ordinary leather leggings and boots emphatically large, affording
to each foot a roomy apartment so constructed that any wearer might
stand in a river all day long and know nothing of damp--their maker
being a conscientious man who endeavoured to compensate for any
weakness in his cut by unstinted dimension and solidity.

Mr. Oak carried about him, by way of watch, what may be called a
small silver clock; in other words, it was a watch as to shape and
intention, and a small clock as to size. This instrument being
several years older than Oak's grandfather, had the peculiarity of
going either too fast or not at all. The smaller of its hands, too,
occasionally slipped round on the pivot, and thus, though the minutes
were told with precision, nobody could be quite certain of the hour
they belonged to. The stopping peculiarity of his watch Oak remedied
by thumps and shakes, and he escaped any evil consequences from the
other two defects by constant comparisons with and observations of
the sun and stars, and by pressing his face close to the glass of his
neighbours' windows, till he could discern the hour marked by the
green-faced timekeepers within. It may be mentioned that Oak's fob
being difficult of access, by reason of its somewhat high situation
in the waistband of his trousers (which also lay at a remote height
under his waistcoat), the watch was as a necessity pulled out by
throwing the body to one side, compressing the mouth and face to a
mere mass of ruddy flesh on account of the exertion required, and
drawing up the watch by its chain, like a bucket from a well.

But some thoughtful persons, who had seen him walking across one
of his fields on a certain December morning--sunny and exceedingly
mild--might have regarded Gabriel Oak in other aspects than these.
In his face one might notice that many of the hues and curves of
youth had tarried on to manhood: there even remained in his remoter
crannies some relics of the boy. His height and breadth would
have been sufficient to make his presence imposing, had they been
exhibited with due consideration. But there is a way some men have,
rural and urban alike, for which the mind is more responsible than
flesh and sinew: it is a way of curtailing their dimensions by their
manner of showing them. And from a quiet modesty that would have
become a vestal, which seemed continually to impress upon him that he
had no great claim on the world's room, Oak walked unassumingly and
with a faintly perceptible bend, yet distinct from a bowing of the
shoulders. This may be said to be a defect in an individual if he
depends for his valuation more upon his appearance than upon his
capacity to wear well, which Oak did not.

He had just reached the time of life at which "young" is ceasing to
be the prefix of "man" in speaking of one. He was at the brightest
period of masculine growth, for his intellect and his emotions were
clearly separated: he had passed the time during which the influence
of youth indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse,
and he had not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become united
again, in the character of prejudice, by the influence of a wife and
family. In short, he was twenty-eight, and a bachelor.

The field he was in this morning sloped to a ridge called Norcombe
Hill. Through a spur of this hill ran the highway between Emminster
and Chalk-Newton. Casually glancing over the hedge, Oak saw coming
down the incline before him an ornamental spring waggon, painted
yellow and gaily marked, drawn by two horses, a waggoner walking
alongside bearing a whip perpendicularly. The waggon was laden with
household goods and window plants, and on the apex of the whole sat
a woman, young and attractive. Gabriel had not beheld the sight for
more than half a minute, when the vehicle was brought to a standstill
just beneath his eyes.

"The tailboard of the waggon is gone, Miss," said the waggoner.

"Then I heard it fall," said the girl, in a soft, though not
particularly low voice. "I heard a noise I could not account for
when we were coming up the hill."

"I'll run back."

"Do," she answered.

The sensible horses stood--perfectly still, and the waggoner's steps
sank fainter and fainter in the distance.

The girl on the summit of the load sat motionless, surrounded by
tables and chairs with their legs upwards, backed by an oak settle,
and ornamented in front by pots of geraniums, myrtles, and cactuses,
together with a caged canary--all probably from the windows of the
house just vacated. There was also a cat in a willow basket, from
the partly-opened lid of which she gazed with half-closed eyes, and
affectionately surveyed the small birds around.

The handsome girl waited for some time idly in her place, and the
only sound heard in the stillness was the hopping of the canary up
and down the perches of its prison. Then she looked attentively
downwards. It was not at the bird, nor at the cat; it was at an
oblong package tied in paper, and lying between them. She turned her
head to learn if the waggoner were coming. He was not yet in sight;
and her eyes crept back to the package, her thoughts seeming to run
upon what was inside it. At length she drew the article into her
lap, and untied the paper covering; a small swing looking-glass was
disclosed, in which she proceeded to survey herself attentively. She
parted her lips and smiled.

It was a fine morning, and the sun lighted up to a scarlet glow the
crimson jacket she wore, and painted a soft lustre upon her bright
face and dark hair. The myrtles, geraniums, and cactuses packed
around her were fresh and green, and at such a leafless season they
invested the whole concern of horses, waggon, furniture, and girl
with a peculiar vernal charm. What possessed her to indulge in
such a performance in the sight of the sparrows, blackbirds, and
unperceived farmer who were alone its spectators,--whether the smile
began as a factitious one, to test her capacity in that art,--nobody
knows; it ended certainly in a real smile. She blushed at herself,
and seeing her reflection blush, blushed the more.

The change from the customary spot and necessary occasion of such an
act--from the dressing hour in a bedroom to a time of travelling out
of doors--lent to the idle deed a novelty it did not intrinsically
possess. The picture was a delicate one. Woman's prescriptive
infirmity had stalked into the sunlight, which had clothed it in the
freshness of an originality. A cynical inference was irresistible by
Gabriel Oak as he regarded the scene, generous though he fain would
have been. There was no necessity whatever for her looking in the
glass. She did not adjust her hat, or pat her hair, or press a
dimple into shape, or do one thing to signify that any such intention
had been her motive in taking up the glass. She simply observed
herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind, her
thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which
men would play a part--vistas of probable triumphs--the smiles being
of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined as lost and won.
Still, this was but conjecture, and the whole series of actions was
so idly put forth as to make it rash to assert that intention had any
part in them at all.

The waggoner's steps were heard returning. She put the glass in the
paper, and the whole again into its place.

When the waggon had passed on, Gabriel withdrew from his point of
espial, and descending into the road, followed the vehicle to the
turnpike-gate some way beyond the bottom of the hill, where the
object of his contemplation now halted for the payment of toll.
About twenty steps still remained between him and the gate, when he
heard a dispute. It was a difference concerning twopence between the
persons with the waggon and the man at the toll-bar.

"Mis'ess's niece is upon the top of the things, and she says that's
enough that I've offered ye, you great miser, and she won't pay any
more." These were the waggoner's words.

"Very well; then mis'ess's niece can't pass," said the turnpike-keeper,
closing the gate.

Oak looked from one to the other of the disputants, and fell into
a reverie. There was something in the tone of twopence remarkably
insignificant. Threepence had a definite value as money--it was an
appreciable infringement on a day's wages, and, as such, a higgling
matter; but twopence--"Here," he said, stepping forward and handing
twopence to the gatekeeper; "let the young woman pass." He looked up
at her then; she heard his words, and looked down.

Gabriel's features adhered throughout their form so exactly to the
middle line between the beauty of St. John and the ugliness of Judas
Iscariot, as represented in a window of the church he attended, that
not a single lineament could be selected and called worthy either of
distinction or notoriety. The red-jacketed and dark-haired maiden
seemed to think so too, for she carelessly glanced over him, and told
her man to drive on. She might have looked her thanks to Gabriel on
a minute scale, but she did not speak them; more probably she felt
none, for in gaining her a passage he had lost her her point, and we
know how women take a favour of that kind.

The gatekeeper surveyed the retreating vehicle. "That's a
handsome maid," he said to Oak.

"But she has her faults," said Gabriel.

"True, farmer."

"And the greatest of them is--well, what it is always."

"Beating people down? ay, 'tis so."

"O no."

"What, then?"

Gabriel, perhaps a little piqued by the comely traveller's
indifference, glanced back to where he had witnessed her performance
over the hedge, and said, "Vanity."




CHAPTER II


NIGHT--THE FLOCK--AN INTERIOR--ANOTHER INTERIOR


It was nearly midnight on the eve of St. Thomas's, the shortest day
in the year. A desolating wind wandered from the north over the hill
whereon Oak had watched the yellow waggon and its occupant in the
sunshine of a few days earlier.

Norcombe Hill--not far from lonely Toller-Down--was one of the spots
which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape
approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to be found on
earth. It was a featureless convexity of chalk and soil--an ordinary
specimen of those smoothly-outlined protuberances of the globe which
may remain undisturbed on some great day of confusion, when far
grander heights and dizzy granite precipices topple down.

The hill was covered on its northern side by an ancient and decaying
plantation of beeches, whose upper verge formed a line over the
crest, fringing its arched curve against the sky, like a mane.
To-night these trees sheltered the southern slope from the keenest
blasts, which smote the wood and floundered through it with a sound
as of grumbling, or gushed over its crowning boughs in a weakened
moan. The dry leaves in the ditch simmered and boiled in the same
breezes, a tongue of air occasionally ferreting out a few, and
sending them spinning across the grass. A group or two of the latest
in date amongst the dead multitude had remained till this very
mid-winter time on the twigs which bore them and in falling rattled
against the trunks with smart taps.

Between this half-wooded half-naked hill, and the vague still horizon
that its summit indistinctly commanded, was a mysterious sheet of
fathomless shade--the sounds from which suggested that what it
concealed bore some reduced resemblance to features here. The thin
grasses, more or less coating the hill, were touched by the wind in
breezes of differing powers, and almost of differing natures--one
rubbing the blades heavily, another raking them piercingly, another
brushing them like a soft broom. The instinctive act of humankind
was to stand and listen, and learn how the trees on the right and the
trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular
antiphonies of a cathedral choir; how hedges and other shapes to
leeward then caught the note, lowering it to the tenderest sob; and
how the hurrying gust then plunged into the south, to be heard no
more.

The sky was clear--remarkably clear--and the twinkling of all the
stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.
The North Star was directly in the wind's eye, and since evening the
Bear had swung round it outwardly to the east, till he was now at
a right angle with the meridian. A difference of colour in the
stars--oftener read of than seen in England--was really perceptible
here. The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a
steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and
Betelgueux shone with a fiery red.

To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as
this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement.
The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past
earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness,
or by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the
wind, or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin, the impression
of riding along is vivid and abiding. The poetry of motion is a
phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that gratification
it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night,
and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass
of civilised mankind, who are dreamwrapt and disregardful of all
such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately
progress through the stars. After such a nocturnal reconnoitre it is
hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of
such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.

Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this
place up against the sky. They had a clearness which was to be found
nowhere in the wind, and a sequence which was to be found nowhere in
nature. They were the notes of Farmer Oak's flute.

The tune was not floating unhindered into the open air: it seemed
muffled in some way, and was altogether too curtailed in power to
spread high or wide. It came from the direction of a small dark
object under the plantation hedge--a shepherd's hut--now presenting
an outline to which an uninitiated person might have been puzzled
to attach either meaning or use.

The image as a whole was that of a small Noah's Ark on a small
Ararat, allowing the traditionary outlines and general form of
the Ark which are followed by toy-makers--and by these means are
established in men's imaginations among their firmest, because
earliest impressions--to pass as an approximate pattern. The hut
stood on little wheels, which raised its floor about a foot from the
ground. Such shepherds' huts are dragged into the fields when the
lambing season comes on, to shelter the shepherd in his enforced
nightly attendance.

It was only latterly that people had begun to call Gabriel "Farmer"
Oak. During the twelvemonth preceding this time he had been enabled
by sustained efforts of industry and chronic good spirits to lease
the small sheep-farm of which Norcombe Hill was a portion, and stock
it with two hundred sheep. Previously he had been a bailiff for a
short time, and earlier still a shepherd only, having from his
childhood assisted his father in tending the flocks of large
proprietors, till old Gabriel sank to rest.

This venture, unaided and alone, into the paths of farming as master
and not as man, with an advance of sheep not yet paid for, was a
critical juncture with Gabriel Oak, and he recognised his position
clearly. The first movement in his new progress was the lambing of
his ewes, and sheep having been his speciality from his youth, he
wisely refrained from deputing the task of tending them at this
season to a hireling or a novice.

The wind continued to beat about the corners of the hut, but the
flute-playing ceased. A rectangular space of light appeared in the
side of the hut, and in the opening the outline of Farmer Oak's
figure. He carried a lantern in his hand, and closing the door
behind him, came forward and busied himself about this nook of the
field for nearly twenty minutes, the lantern light appearing and
disappearing here and there, and brightening him or darkening him
as he stood before or behind it.

Oak's motions, though they had a quiet-energy, were slow, and their
deliberateness accorded well with his occupation. Fitness being the
basis of beauty, nobody could have denied that his steady swings and
turns in and about the flock had elements of grace. Yet, although if
occasion demanded he could do or think a thing with as mercurial a
dash as can the men of towns who are more to the manner born, his
special power, morally, physically, and mentally, was static, owing
little or nothing to momentum as a rule.