Far from the Madding Crowd

T >> Thomas Hardy >> Far from the Madding Crowd


This well-favoured and comely girl soon made appreciable inroads upon
the emotional constitution of young Farmer Oak.

Love, being an extremely exacting usurer (a sense of exorbitant
profit, spiritually, by an exchange of hearts, being at the bottom of
pure passions, as that of exorbitant profit, bodily or materially,
is at the bottom of those of lower atmosphere), every morning Oak's
feelings were as sensitive as the money-market in calculations upon
his chances. His dog waited for his meals in a way so like that in
which Oak waited for the girl's presence, that the farmer was quite
struck with the resemblance, felt it lowering, and would not look at
the dog. However, he continued to watch through the hedge for her
regular coming, and thus his sentiments towards her were deepened
without any corresponding effect being produced upon herself. Oak
had nothing finished and ready to say as yet, and not being able to
frame love phrases which end where they begin; passionate tales--


--Full of sound and fury
--Signifying nothing--


he said no word at all.

By making inquiries he found that the girl's name was Bathsheba
Everdene, and that the cow would go dry in about seven days. He
dreaded the eighth day.

At last the eighth day came. The cow had ceased to give milk for
that year, and Bathsheba Everdene came up the hill no more. Gabriel
had reached a pitch of existence he never could have anticipated
a short time before. He liked saying "Bathsheba" as a private
enjoyment instead of whistling; turned over his taste to black hair,
though he had sworn by brown ever since he was a boy, isolated
himself till the space he filled in the public eye was contemptibly
small. Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage
transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should
be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of
imbecility it supplants. Oak began now to see light in this
direction, and said to himself, "I'll make her my wife, or upon my
soul I shall be good for nothing!"

All this while he was perplexing himself about an errand on which he
might consistently visit the cottage of Bathsheba's aunt.

He found his opportunity in the death of a ewe, mother of a living
lamb. On a day which had a summer face and a winter constitution--a
fine January morning, when there was just enough blue sky visible
to make cheerfully-disposed people wish for more, and an occasional
gleam of silvery sunshine, Oak put the lamb into a respectable Sunday
basket, and stalked across the fields to the house of Mrs. Hurst, the
aunt--George, the dog walking behind, with a countenance of great
concern at the serious turn pastoral affairs seemed to be taking.

Gabriel had watched the blue wood-smoke curling from the chimney with
strange meditation. At evening he had fancifully traced it down the
chimney to the spot of its origin--seen the hearth and Bathsheba
beside it--beside it in her out-door dress; for the clothes she had
worn on the hill were by association equally with her person included
in the compass of his affection; they seemed at this early time of
his love a necessary ingredient of the sweet mixture called Bathsheba
Everdene.

He had made a toilet of a nicely-adjusted kind--of a nature between
the carefully neat and the carelessly ornate--of a degree between
fine-market-day and wet-Sunday selection. He thoroughly cleaned his
silver watch-chain with whiting, put new lacing straps to his boots,
looked to the brass eyelet-holes, went to the inmost heart of the
plantation for a new walking-stick, and trimmed it vigorously on his
way back; took a new handkerchief from the bottom of his clothes-box,
put on the light waistcoat patterned all over with sprigs of an
elegant flower uniting the beauties of both rose and lily without the
defects of either, and used all the hair-oil he possessed upon his
usually dry, sandy, and inextricably curly hair, till he had deepened
it to a splendidly novel colour, between that of guano and Roman
cement, making it stick to his head like mace round a nutmeg, or wet
seaweed round a boulder after the ebb.

Nothing disturbed the stillness of the cottage save the chatter of a
knot of sparrows on the eaves; one might fancy scandal and rumour to
be no less the staple topic of these little coteries on roofs than of
those under them. It seemed that the omen was an unpropitious one,
for, as the rather untoward commencement of Oak's overtures, just
as he arrived by the garden gate, he saw a cat inside, going into
various arched shapes and fiendish convulsions at the sight of his
dog George. The dog took no notice, for he had arrived at an age at
which all superfluous barking was cynically avoided as a waste of
breath--in fact, he never barked even at the sheep except to order,
when it was done with an absolutely neutral countenance, as a sort of
Commination-service, which, though offensive, had to be gone through
once now and then to frighten the flock for their own good.

A voice came from behind some laurel-bushes into which the cat had
run:

"Poor dear! Did a nasty brute of a dog want to kill it;--did he,
poor dear!"

"I beg your pardon," said Oak to the voice, "but George was walking
on behind me with a temper as mild as milk."

Almost before he had ceased speaking, Oak was seized with a misgiving
as to whose ear was the recipient of his answer. Nobody appeared, and
he heard the person retreat among the bushes.

Gabriel meditated, and so deeply that he brought small furrows into
his forehead by sheer force of reverie. Where the issue of an
interview is as likely to be a vast change for the worse as for
the better, any initial difference from expectation causes nipping
sensations of failure. Oak went up to the door a little abashed:
his mental rehearsal and the reality had had no common grounds of
opening.

Bathsheba's aunt was indoors. "Will you tell Miss Everdene that
somebody would be glad to speak to her?" said Mr. Oak. (Calling
one's self merely Somebody, without giving a name, is not to be taken
as an example of the ill-breeding of the rural world: it springs
from a refined modesty, of which townspeople, with their cards and
announcements, have no notion whatever.)

Bathsheba was out. The voice had evidently been hers.

"Will you come in, Mr. Oak?"

"Oh, thank 'ee," said Gabriel, following her to the fireplace. "I've
brought a lamb for Miss Everdene. I thought she might like one to
rear; girls do."

"She might," said Mrs. Hurst, musingly; "though she's only a visitor
here. If you will wait a minute, Bathsheba will be in."

"Yes, I will wait," said Gabriel, sitting down. "The lamb isn't
really the business I came about, Mrs. Hurst. In short, I was going
to ask her if she'd like to be married."

"And were you indeed?"

"Yes. Because if she would, I should be very glad to marry her.
D'ye know if she's got any other young man hanging about her at all?"

"Let me think," said Mrs. Hurst, poking the fire superfluously....
"Yes--bless you, ever so many young men. You see, Farmer Oak, she's
so good-looking, and an excellent scholar besides--she was going to
be a governess once, you know, only she was too wild. Not that her
young men ever come here--but, Lord, in the nature of women, she must
have a dozen!"

"That's unfortunate," said Farmer Oak, contemplating a crack in the
stone floor with sorrow. "I'm only an every-day sort of man, and my
only chance was in being the first comer ... Well, there's no use in
my waiting, for that was all I came about: so I'll take myself off
home-along, Mrs. Hurst."

When Gabriel had gone about two hundred yards along the down, he
heard a "hoi-hoi!" uttered behind him, in a piping note of more
treble quality than that in which the exclamation usually embodies
itself when shouted across a field. He looked round, and saw a girl
racing after him, waving a white handkerchief.

Oak stood still--and the runner drew nearer. It was Bathsheba
Everdene. Gabriel's colour deepened: hers was already deep, not, as
it appeared, from emotion, but from running.

"Farmer Oak--I--" she said, pausing for want of breath pulling up in
front of him with a slanted face and putting her hand to her side.

"I have just called to see you," said Gabriel, pending her further
speech.

"Yes--I know that," she said panting like a robin, her face red and
moist from her exertions, like a peony petal before the sun dries off
the dew. "I didn't know you had come to ask to have me, or I should
have come in from the garden instantly. I ran after you to say--that
my aunt made a mistake in sending you away from courting me--"

Gabriel expanded. "I'm sorry to have made you run so fast, my dear,"
he said, with a grateful sense of favours to come. "Wait a bit till
you've found your breath."

"--It was quite a mistake--aunt's telling you I had a young man
already," Bathsheba went on. "I haven't a sweetheart at all--and I
never had one, and I thought that, as times go with women, it was
SUCH a pity to send you away thinking that I had several."

"Really and truly I am glad to hear that!" said Farmer Oak, smiling
one of his long special smiles, and blushing with gladness. He held
out his hand to take hers, which, when she had eased her side by
pressing it there, was prettily extended upon her bosom to still her
loud-beating heart. Directly he seized it she put it behind her, so
that it slipped through his fingers like an eel."

"I have a nice snug little farm," said Gabriel, with half a degree
less assurance than when he had seized her hand.

"Yes; you have."

"A man has advanced me money to begin with, but still, it will soon
be paid off, and though I am only an every-day sort of man, I have
got on a little since I was a boy." Gabriel uttered "a little" in a
tone to show her that it was the complacent form of "a great deal."
He continued: "When we be married, I am quite sure I can work twice
as hard as I do now."

He went forward and stretched out his arm again. Bathsheba had
overtaken him at a point beside which stood a low stunted holly bush,
now laden with red berries. Seeing his advance take the form of an
attitude threatening a possible enclosure, if not compression, of her
person, she edged off round the bush.

"Why, Farmer Oak," she said, over the top, looking at him with
rounded eyes, "I never said I was going to marry you."

"Well--that IS a tale!" said Oak, with dismay. "To run after anybody
like this, and then say you don't want him!"

"What I meant to tell you was only this," she said eagerly, and yet
half conscious of the absurdity of the position she had made for
herself--"that nobody has got me yet as a sweetheart, instead of my
having a dozen, as my aunt said; I HATE to be thought men's property
in that way, though possibly I shall be had some day. Why, if I'd
wanted you I shouldn't have run after you like this; 'twould have
been the FORWARDEST thing! But there was no harm in hurrying to
correct a piece of false news that had been told you."

"Oh, no--no harm at all." But there is such a thing as being too
generous in expressing a judgment impulsively, and Oak added with a
more appreciative sense of all the circumstances--"Well, I am not
quite certain it was no harm."

"Indeed, I hadn't time to think before starting whether I wanted to
marry or not, for you'd have been gone over the hill."

"Come," said Gabriel, freshening again; "think a minute or two. I'll
wait a while, Miss Everdene. Will you marry me? Do, Bathsheba. I
love you far more than common!"

"I'll try to think," she observed, rather more timorously; "if I can
think out of doors; my mind spreads away so."

"But you can give a guess."

"Then give me time." Bathsheba looked thoughtfully into the
distance, away from the direction in which Gabriel stood.

"I can make you happy," said he to the back of her head, across the
bush. "You shall have a piano in a year or two--farmers' wives are
getting to have pianos now--and I'll practise up the flute right well
to play with you in the evenings."

"Yes; I should like that."

"And have one of those little ten-pound gigs for market--and nice
flowers, and birds--cocks and hens I mean, because they be useful,"
continued Gabriel, feeling balanced between poetry and practicality.

"I should like it very much."

"And a frame for cucumbers--like a gentleman and lady."

"Yes."

"And when the wedding was over, we'd have it put in the newspaper
list of marriages."

"Dearly I should like that!"

"And the babies in the births--every man jack of 'em! And at home by
the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be--and whenever I look
up there will be you."

"Wait, wait, and don't be improper!"

Her countenance fell, and she was silent awhile. He regarded the red
berries between them over and over again, to such an extent, that
holly seemed in his after life to be a cypher signifying a proposal
of marriage. Bathsheba decisively turned to him.

"No; 'tis no use," she said. "I don't want to marry you."

"Try."

"I have tried hard all the time I've been thinking; for a marriage
would be very nice in one sense. People would talk about me, and
think I had won my battle, and I should feel triumphant, and all
that, But a husband--"

"Well!"

"Why, he'd always be there, as you say; whenever I looked up, there
he'd be."

"Of course he would--I, that is."

"Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a
wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. But since a
woman can't show off in that way by herself, I shan't marry--at least
yet."

"That's a terrible wooden story!"

At this criticism of her statement Bathsheba made an addition to her
dignity by a slight sweep away from him.

"Upon my heart and soul, I don't know what a maid can say stupider
than that," said Oak. "But dearest," he continued in a palliative
voice, "don't be like it!" Oak sighed a deep honest sigh--none the
less so in that, being like the sigh of a pine plantation, it was
rather noticeable as a disturbance of the atmosphere. "Why won't you
have me?" he appealed, creeping round the holly to reach her side.

"I cannot," she said, retreating.

"But why?" he persisted, standing still at last in despair of ever
reaching her, and facing over the bush.

"Because I don't love you."

"Yes, but--"

She contracted a yawn to an inoffensive smallness, so that it was
hardly ill-mannered at all. "I don't love you," she said.

"But I love you--and, as for myself, I am content to be liked."

"Oh Mr. Oak--that's very fine! You'd get to despise me."

"Never," said Mr Oak, so earnestly that he seemed to be coming, by
the force of his words, straight through the bush and into her arms.
"I shall do one thing in this life--one thing certain--that is, love
you, and long for you, and KEEP WANTING YOU till I die." His voice
had a genuine pathos now, and his large brown hands perceptibly
trembled.

"It seems dreadfully wrong not to have you when you feel so much!"
she said with a little distress, and looking hopelessly around
for some means of escape from her moral dilemma. "How I wish I
hadn't run after you!" However she seemed to have a short cut for
getting back to cheerfulness, and set her face to signify archness.
"It wouldn't do, Mr Oak. I want somebody to tame me; I am too
independent; and you would never be able to, I know."

Oak cast his eyes down the field in a way implying that it was
useless to attempt argument.

"Mr. Oak," she said, with luminous distinctness and common sense,
"you are better off than I. I have hardly a penny in the world--I am
staying with my aunt for my bare sustenance. I am better educated
than you--and I don't love you a bit: that's my side of the case.
Now yours: you are a farmer just beginning; and you ought in common
prudence, if you marry at all (which you should certainly not think
of doing at present), to marry a woman with money, who would stock a
larger farm for you than you have now."

Gabriel looked at her with a little surprise and much admiration.

"That's the very thing I had been thinking myself!" he naively said.

Farmer Oak had one-and-a-half Christian characteristics too many to
succeed with Bathsheba: his humility, and a superfluous moiety of
honesty. Bathsheba was decidedly disconcerted.

"Well, then, why did you come and disturb me?" she said, almost
angrily, if not quite, an enlarging red spot rising in each cheek.

"I can't do what I think would be--would be--"

"Right?"

"No: wise."

"You have made an admission NOW, Mr. Oak," she exclaimed, with even
more hauteur, and rocking her head disdainfully. "After that, do you
think I could marry you? Not if I know it."

He broke in passionately. "But don't mistake me like that! Because
I am open enough to own what every man in my shoes would have thought
of, you make your colours come up your face, and get crabbed with me.
That about your not being good enough for me is nonsense. You speak
like a lady--all the parish notice it, and your uncle at Weatherbury
is, I have heerd, a large farmer--much larger than ever I shall be.
May I call in the evening, or will you walk along with me o' Sundays?
I don't want you to make-up your mind at once, if you'd rather not."

"No--no--I cannot. Don't press me any more--don't. I don't love
you--so 'twould be ridiculous," she said, with a laugh.

No man likes to see his emotions the sport of a merry-go-round of
skittishness. "Very well," said Oak, firmly, with the bearing of one
who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever.
"Then I'll ask you no more."




CHAPTER V


DEPARTURE OF BATHSHEBA--A PASTORAL TRAGEDY


The news which one day reached Gabriel, that Bathsheba Everdene
had left the neighbourhood, had an influence upon him which might
have surprised any who never suspected that the more emphatic the
renunciation the less absolute its character.

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting
out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon
marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
Separation, which was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by
Bathsheba's disappearance, though effectual with people of certain
humours, is apt to idealize the removed object with others--notably
those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep
and long. Oak belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity, and
felt the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a
finer flame now that she was gone--that was all.

His incipient friendship with her aunt had been nipped by the
failure of his suit, and all that Oak learnt of Bathsheba's
movements was done indirectly. It appeared that she had gone to
a place called Weatherbury, more than twenty miles off, but in
what capacity--whether as a visitor, or permanently, he could not
discover.

Gabriel had two dogs. George, the elder, exhibited an ebony-tipped
nose, surrounded by a narrow margin of pink flesh, and a coat marked
in random splotches approximating in colour to white and slaty
grey; but the grey, after years of sun and rain, had been scorched
and washed out of the more prominent locks, leaving them of a
reddish-brown, as if the blue component of the grey had faded, like
the indigo from the same kind of colour in Turner's pictures. In
substance it had originally been hair, but long contact with sheep
seemed to be turning it by degrees into wool of a poor quality and
staple.

This dog had originally belonged to a shepherd of inferior morals
and dreadful temper, and the result was that George knew the exact
degrees of condemnation signified by cursing and swearing of all
descriptions better than the wickedest old man in the neighbourhood.
Long experience had so precisely taught the animal the difference
between such exclamations as "Come in!" and "D---- ye, come in!" that
he knew to a hair's breadth the rate of trotting back from the ewes'
tails that each call involved, if a staggerer with the sheep crook
was to be escaped. Though old, he was clever and trustworthy still.

The young dog, George's son, might possibly have been the image
of his mother, for there was not much resemblance between him and
George. He was learning the sheep-keeping business, so as to follow
on at the flock when the other should die, but had got no further
than the rudiments as yet--still finding an insuperable difficulty
in distinguishing between doing a thing well enough and doing it too
well. So earnest and yet so wrong-headed was this young dog (he had
no name in particular, and answered with perfect readiness to any
pleasant interjection), that if sent behind the flock to help them
on, he did it so thoroughly that he would have chased them across the
whole county with the greatest pleasure if not called off or reminded
when to stop by the example of old George.

Thus much for the dogs. On the further side of Norcombe Hill was
a chalk-pit, from which chalk had been drawn for generations, and
spread over adjacent farms. Two hedges converged upon it in the form
of a V, but without quite meeting. The narrow opening left, which
was immediately over the brow of the pit, was protected by a rough
railing.

One night, when Farmer Oak had returned to his house, believing there
would be no further necessity for his attendance on the down, he
called as usual to the dogs, previously to shutting them up in the
outhouse till next morning. Only one responded--old George; the
other could not be found, either in the house, lane, or garden.
Gabriel then remembered that he had left the two dogs on the hill
eating a dead lamb (a kind of meat he usually kept from them, except
when other food ran short), and concluding that the young one had
not finished his meal, he went indoors to the luxury of a bed, which
latterly he had only enjoyed on Sundays.

It was a still, moist night. Just before dawn he was assisted in
waking by the abnormal reverberation of familiar music. To the
shepherd, the note of the sheep-bell, like the ticking of the clock
to other people, is a chronic sound that only makes itself noticed by
ceasing or altering in some unusual manner from the well-known idle
twinkle which signifies to the accustomed ear, however distant, that
all is well in the fold. In the solemn calm of the awakening morn
that note was heard by Gabriel, beating with unusual violence and
rapidity. This exceptional ringing may be caused in two ways--by
the rapid feeding of the sheep bearing the bell, as when the flock
breaks into new pasture, which gives it an intermittent rapidity,
or by the sheep starting off in a run, when the sound has a regular
palpitation. The experienced ear of Oak knew the sound he now heard
to be caused by the running of the flock with great velocity.

He jumped out of bed, dressed, tore down the lane through a foggy
dawn, and ascended the hill. The forward ewes were kept apart from
those among which the fall of lambs would be later, there being two
hundred of the latter class in Gabriel's flock. These two hundred
seemed to have absolutely vanished from the hill. There were the
fifty with their lambs, enclosed at the other end as he had left
them, but the rest, forming the bulk of the flock, were nowhere.
Gabriel called at the top of his voice the shepherd's call:

"Ovey, ovey, ovey!"

Not a single bleat. He went to the hedge; a gap had been broken
through it, and in the gap were the footprints of the sheep. Rather
surprised to find them break fence at this season, yet putting it
down instantly to their great fondness for ivy in winter-time, of
which a great deal grew in the plantation, he followed through the
hedge. They were not in the plantation. He called again: the
valleys and farthest hills resounded as when the sailors invoked the
lost Hylas on the Mysian shore; but no sheep. He passed through the
trees and along the ridge of the hill. On the extreme summit, where
the ends of the two converging hedges of which we have spoken were
stopped short by meeting the brow of the chalk-pit, he saw the
younger dog standing against the sky--dark and motionless as Napoleon
at St. Helena.

A horrible conviction darted through Oak. With a sensation of bodily
faintness he advanced: at one point the rails were broken through,
and there he saw the footprints of his ewes. The dog came up, licked
his hand, and made signs implying that he expected some great reward
for signal services rendered. Oak looked over the precipice. The
ewes lay dead and dying at its foot--a heap of two hundred mangled
carcasses, representing in their condition just now at least two
hundred more.

Oak was an intensely humane man: indeed, his humanity often tore in
pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered on strategy, and
carried him on as by gravitation. A shadow in his life had always
been that his flock ended in mutton--that a day came and found every
shepherd an arrant traitor to his defenseless sheep. His first
feeling now was one of pity for the untimely fate of these gentle
ewes and their unborn lambs.