Far From the Madding Crowd
On somewhat suddenly awaking, after a sleep of whose length he had no idea, Oak found that the waggon was in motion. He was being carried along the road at a rate rather considerable for a vehicle without springs, and under circumstances of physical uneasiness, his head being dandled up and down on the bed of the waggon like a kettledrum-stick. He then distinguished voices in conversation, coming from the forepart of the waggon. His concern at this dilemma (which would have been alarm, had he been a thriving man; but misfortune is a fine opiate to personal terror) led him to peer cautiously from the hay, and the first sight he beheld was the stars above him. Charles’s Wain was getting towards a right angle with the Pole star, and Gabriel concluded that it must be about nine o’clock – in other words, that he had slept two hours. This small astronomical calculation was made without any positive effort, and whilst he was stealthily turning to discover, if possible, into whose hands he had fallen.
Two figures were dimly visible in front, sitting with their legs outside the waggon, one of whom was driving. Gabriel soon found that this was the waggoner, and it appeared they had come from Casterbridge fair, like himself.
A conversation was in progress, which continued thus: –
‘Be as ’twill, she’s a fine handsome body as far’s looks be concerned. But that’s only the skin of the woman, and these dandy cattle be as proud as a lucifer in their insides.’
‘Ay – so ’a do seem, Billy Smallbury – so ’a do seem.’ This utterance was very shaky by nature, and more so by circumstance, the jolting of the waggon not being without its effect upon the speaker’s larynx. It came from the man who held the reins.
‘She’s a very vain feymell – so ’tis said here and there.’
‘Ah, now. If so be ’tis like that, I can’t look her in the face. Lord, no: not I – heh-heh-heh! Such a shy man as I be!’
‘Yes – she’s very vain. ’Tis said that every night at going to bed she looks in the glass to put on her nightcap properly.’
‘And not a married woman. Oh, the world!’
‘And ’a can play the peanner, so ’tis said. Can play so clever that ’a can make a psalm tune sound as well as the merriest loose song a man can wish for.’
‘D’ye tell o’t! A happy time for us, and I feel quite a new man! And how do she pay?’
‘That I don’t know, Master Poorgrass.’
On hearing these and other similar remarks, a wild thought flashed into Gabriel’s mind that they might be speaking of Bathsheba. There were, however, no grounds for retaining such a supposition, for the waggon, though going in the direction of Weatherbury, might be going beyond it, and the woman alluded to seemed to be the mistress of some estate. They were now apparently close upon Weatherbury, and not to alarm the speakers unnecessarily Gabriel slipped out of the waggon unseen.
He turned to an opening in the hedge, which he found to be a gate, and mounting thereon he sat meditating whether to seek a cheap lodging in the village, or to ensure a cheaper one by lying under some hay or corn stack. The crunching jangle of the waggon died upon his ear. He was about to walk on, when he noticed on his left hand an unusual light – appearing about half a mile distant. Oak watched it, and the glow increased. Something was on fire.
Gabriel again mounted the gate, and, leaping down on the other side upon what he found to be ploughed soil, made across the field in the exact direction of the fire. The blaze, enlarging in a double ratio by his approach and its own increase, showed him as he drew nearer the outlines of ricks beside it, lighted up to great distinctness. A rick-yard was the source of the fire. His weary face now began to be painted over with a rich orange glow, and the whole front of his smock-front and gaiters was covered with a dancing shadow pattern of thorn-twigs – the light reaching him through a leafless intervening hedge – and the metallic curve of his sheep-crook shone silver-bright in the same abounding rays. He came up to the boundary fence, and stood to regain breath. It seemed as if the spot was unoccupied by a living soul.
The fire was issuing from a long straw-stack, which was so far gone as to preclude a possibility of saving it. A rick burns differently from a house. As the wind blows the fire inwards, the portion in flames completely disappears like melting sugar, and the outline is lost to the eye. However, a hay or a wheat-rick, well put together, will resist combustion for a length of time if it begins on the outside.
This before Gabriel’s eyes was a rick of straw, loosely put together, and the flames darted into it with lightning swiftness. It glowed on the windward side, rising and falling in intensity like the coal of a cigar. Then a superincumbent bundle rolled down with a whisking noise; flames elongated, and bent themselves about with a quiet roar, but no crackle. Banks of smoke went off horizontally at the back like passing clouds, and behind these burned hidden pyres, illuminating the semi-transparent sheet of smoke to a lustrous yellow uniformity. Individual straws in the foreground were consumed in a creeping movement of ruddy heat, as if they were knots of red worms, and above shone imaginary fiery faces, tongues hanging from lips, glaring eyes, and other impish forms, from which at intervals sparks flew in clusters like birds from a nest.
Oak suddenly ceased from being a mere spectator by discovering the case to be more serious than he had at first imagined. A scroll of smoke blew aside and revealed to him a wheat-rick in startling juxtaposition with the decaying one, and behind this a series of others, composing the main corn produce of the farm; so that instead of the straw-stack standing, as he had imagined, comparatively isolated, there was a regular connection between it and the remaining stacks of the group.
Gabriel leapt over the hedge, and saw that he was not alone. The first man he came to was running about in a great hurry, as if his thoughts were several yards in advance of his body, which they could never drag on fast enough.
‘O, man – fire, fire! A good master and a bad servant is fire, fire! – I mane a bad servant and a good master. O Mark Clark – come! And you, Billy Smallbury – and you, Maryann Money – and you, Jan Coggan, and Matthew there!’ Other figures now appeared behind this shouting man and among the smoke, and Gabriel found that, far from being alone, he was in a great company – whose shadows danced merrily up and down, timed by the jigging of the flames, and not at all by their owners’ movements. The assemblage – belonging to that class of society which casts its thoughts into the form of feeling, and its feelings into the form of commotion – set to work with a remarkable confusion of purpose.
‘Stop the draught under the wheat-rick!’ cried Gabriel to those nearest to him. The corn stood on stone staddles, and between these, tongues of yellow hue from the burning straw licked and darted playfully. If the fire once got under this stack, all would be lost.
‘Get a tarpaulin – quick!’ said Gabriel.
A rick-cloth was brought, and they hung it like a curtain across the channel. The flames immediately ceased to go under the bottom of the corn-stack, and stood up vertical.
‘Stand here with a bucket of water and keep the cloth wet,’ said Gabriel again.
The flames, now driven upwards, began to attack the angles of the huge roof covering the wheat-stack.
‘A ladder,’ cried Gabriel.
‘The ladder was against the straw-rick and is burnt to a cinder,’ said a spectre-like form in the smoke.
Oak seized the cut ends of the sheaves, as if he were going to engage in the operation of ‘reed-drawing’, and digging in his feet, and occasionally sticking in the stem of his sheep-crook, he clambered up the beetling face. He at once sat astride the very apex, and began with his crook to beat off the fiery fragments which had lodged thereon, shouting to the others to get him a bough and a ladder, and some water.
Billy Smallbury – one of the men who had been on the waggon – by this time had found a ladder, which Mark Clark ascended, holding on beside Oak upon the thatch. The smoke at this corner was stifling, and Clark, a nimble fellow, having been handed a bucket of water, bathed Oak’s face and sprinkled him generally, whilst Gabriel, now with a long beech-bough in one hand, in addition to his crook in the other, kept sweeping the stack and dislodging all fiery particles.
On the ground the groups of villagers were still occupied in doing all they could to keep down the conflagration, which was not much. They were all tinged orange, and backed up by shadows of varying pattern. Round the corner of the largest stack, out of the direct rays of the fire, stood a pony, bearing a young woman on its back. By her side was another woman, on foot. These two seemed to keep at a distance from the fire, that the horse might not become restive.
‘He’s a shepherd,’ said the woman on foot. ‘Yes – he is. See how his crook shines as he beats the rick with it. And his smock-frock is burnt in two holes, I declare! A fine young shepherd he is too, ma’am.’
‘Whose shepherd is he?’ said the equestrian in a clear voice.
‘Don’t know, ma’am.’
‘Don’t any of the others know?’
‘Nobody at all – I’ve asked ’em. Quite a stranger, they say.’
The young woman on the pony rode out from the shade and looked anxiously around.
‘Do you think the barn is safe?’ she said.
‘D’ye think the barn is safe, Jan Coggan?’ said the second woman, passing on the question to the nearest man in that direction.
‘Safe now – leastwise I think so. If this rick had gone the barn would have followed. ’Tis that bold shepherd up there that have done the most good – he sitting on the top o’ rick, whizzing his great long arms about like a windmill.’
‘He does work hard,’ said the young woman on horseback, looking up at Gabriel through her thick woollen veil. ‘I wish he was shepherd here. Don’t any of you know his name?’
‘Never heard the man’s name in my life, or seed his form afore.’
The fire began to get worsted, and Gabriel’s elevated position being no longer required of him, he made as if to descend.
‘Maryann,’ said the girl on horseback, ‘go to him as he comes down, and say that the farmer wishes to thank him for the great service he has done.’
Maryann stalked off towards the rick and met Oak at the foot of the ladder. She delivered her message.
‘Where is your master the farmer?’ asked Gabriel, kindling with the idea of getting employment that seemed to strike him now.
‘’Tisn’t a master; ’tis a mistress, shepherd.’
‘A woman farmer?’
‘Ay, ’a b’lieve, and a rich one too!’ said a bystander. ‘Lately ’a came here from a distance. Took on her uncle’s farm, who died suddenly. Used to measure his money in half-pint cups. They say now that she’ve business in every bank in Casterbridge, and thinks no more of playing pitch-and-toss sovereign than you and I do pitch-halfpenny – not a bit in the world, shepherd.’
‘That’s she, back there upon the pony,’ said Maryann; ‘wi’ her face a-covered up in that black cloth with holes in it.’
Oak, his features smudged, grimy, and undiscoverable from the smoke and heat, his smock-frock burnt into holes and dripping with water, the ash stem of his sheep-crook charred six inches shorter, advanced with the humility stern adversity had thrust upon him up to the slight female form in the saddle. He lifted his hat with respect, and not without gallantry: stepping close to her hanging feet he said in a hesitating voice, –
‘Do you happen to want a shepherd, ma’am?’
She lifted the wool veil tied round her face, and looked all astonishment. Gabriel and his cold-hearted darling, Bathsheba Everdene, were face to face.
Bathsheba did not speak, and he mechanically repeated in an abashed and sad voice, –
‘Do you want a shepherd, ma’am?’
Chapter 7
Recognition – A timid girl
Bathsheba withdrew into the shade. She scarcely knew whether most to be amused at the singularity of the meeting, or to be concerned at its awkwardness. There was room for a little pity, also for a very little exultation: the former at his position, the latter at her own. Embarrassed she was not, and she remembered Gabriel’s declaration of love to her at Norcombe only to think she had nearly forgotten it.
‘Yes,’ she murmured, putting on an air of dignity, and turning again to him with a little warmth of cheek; ‘I do want a shepherd. But –’
‘He’s the very man, ma’am,’ said one of the villagers, quietly. Conviction breeds conviction. ‘Ay, that ’a is,’ said a second, decisively.
‘The man, truly!’ said a third, with heartiness.
‘He’s all there!’ said number four, fervidly.
‘Then will you tell him to speak to the bailiff?’ said Bathsheba.
All was practical again now. A summer eve and loneliness would have been necessary to give the meeting its proper fulness of romance.
The bailiff was pointed out to Gabriel, who, checking the palpitation within his breast at discovering that this Ashtoreth of strange report was only a modification of Venus the well-known and admired, retired with him to talk over the necessary preliminaries of hiring.
The fire before them wasted away. ‘Men,’ said Bathsheba, ‘you shall take a little refreshment after this extra work. Will you come to the house?’
‘We could knock in a bit and a drop a good deal freer, Miss, if so be ye’d send it to Warren’s Malthouse,’ replied the spokesman.
Bathsheba then rode off into the darkness, and the men straggled on to the village in twos and threes – Oak and the bailiff being left by the rick alone.
‘And now,’ said the bailiff, finally, ‘all is settled, I think, about your coming, and I am going home-along. Good-night to ye, shepherd.’
‘Can you get me a lodging?’ inquired Gabriel.
‘That I can’t, indeed,’ he said, moving past Oak as a Christian edges past an offertory-plate when he does not mean to contribute. ‘If you follow on the road till you come to Warren’s Malthouse, where they are all gone to have their snap of victuals, I daresay some of ’em will tell you of a place. Good-night to ye, shepherd.’
The bailiff who showed this nervous dread of loving his neigh-bour as himself, went up the hill, and Oak walked on to the village, still astonished at the encounter with Bathsheba, glad of his nearness to her, and perplexed at the rapidity with which the unpractised girl of Norcombe had developed into the supervising and cool woman here. But some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one.
Obliged to some extent to forgo dreaming in order to find the way, he reached the churchyard, and passed round it under the wall where several ancient trees grew. There was a wide margin of grass along here, and Gabriel’s footsteps were deadened by its softness, even at this indurating period of the year. When abreast of a trunk which appeared to be the oldest of the old, he became aware that a figure was standing behind it. Gabriel did not pause in his walk, and in another moment he accidentally kicked a loose stone. The noise was enough to disturb the motionless stranger, who started and assumed a careless position.
It was a slim girl, rather thinly clad.
‘Good-night to you,’ said Gabriel heartily.
‘Good-night,’ said the girl to Gabriel.
The voice was unexpectedly attractive; it was the low and dulcet note suggestive of romance; common in descriptions, rare in experience.
‘I’ll thank you to tell me if I’m in the way for Warren’s Malthouse?’ Gabriel resumed, primarily to gain the information, indirectly to get more of the music.
‘Quite right. It’s at the bottom of the hill. And do you know –’ The girl hesitated and then went on again. ‘Do you know how late they keep open the Buck’s Head Inn?’ She seemed to be won by Gabriel’s heartiness, as Gabriel had been won by her modulations.
‘I don’t know where the Buck’s Head is, or anything about it. Do you think of going there to-night?’
‘Yes –’ The woman again paused. There was no necessity for any continuance of speech, and the fact that she did add more seemed to proceed from an unconscious desire to show unconcern by making a remark, which is noticeable in the ingenuous when they are acting by stealth. ‘You are not a Weatherbury man?’ she said timorously.
‘I am not. I am the new shepherd – just arrived.’
‘Only a shepherd – and you seem almost a farmer by your ways.’
‘Only a shepherd,’ Gabriel repeated, in a dull cadence of finality. His thoughts were directed to the past, his eyes to the feet of the girl; and for the first time he saw lying there a bundle of some sort. She may have perceived the direction of his face, for she said coaxingly, –
‘You won’t say anything in the parish about having seen me here, will you – at least, not for a day or two?’
‘I won’t if you wish me not to,’ said Oak.
‘Thank you, indeed,’ the other replied. ‘I am rather poor, and I don’t want people to know anything about me.’ Then she was silent and shivered.
‘You ought to have a cloak on such a cold night,’ Gabriel observed. ‘I would advise ’ee to get indoors.’
‘O no! Would you mind going on and leaving me? I thank you much for what you have told me.’
‘I will go on,’ he said; adding hesitatingly, – ‘Since you are not very well off, perhaps you would accept this trifle from me. It is only a shilling, but it is all I have to spare.’
‘Yes, I will take it,’ said the stranger gratefully.
She extended her hand; Gabriel his. In feeling for each other’s palm in the gloom before the money could be passed, a minute incident occurred which told much. Gabriel’s fingers alighted on the young woman’s wrist. It was beating with a throb of tragic intensity. He had frequently felt the same quick, hard beat in the femoral artery of his lambs when overdriven. It suggested a consumption too great of a vitality which, to judge from her figure and stature, was already too little.
‘What is the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
‘But there is?’
‘No, no, no! Let your having seen me be a secret!’
‘Very well; I will. Good-night, again.’
‘Good-night.’
The young girl remained motionless by the tree, and Gabriel descended into the village of Weatherbury, or Lower Longpuddle as it was sometimes called. He fancied that he had felt himself in the penumbra of a very deep sadness when touching that slight and fragile creature. But wisdom lies in moderating mere impressions, and Gabriel endeavoured to think little of this.
Chapter 8
The malthouse – The chat – News
Warren’s Malthouse was enclosed by an old wall inwrapped with ivy, and though not much of the exterior was visible at this hour, the character and purposes of the building were clearly enough shown by its outline upon the sky. From the walls an overhanging thatched roof sloped up to a point in the centre, upon which rose a small wooden lantern, fitted with louvre-boards on all the four sides, and from these openings a mist was dimly perceived to be escaping into the night air. There was no window in front; but a square hole in the door was glazed with a single pane, through which red, comfortable rays now stretched out upon the ivied wall in front. Voices were to be heard inside.
Oak’s hand skimmed the surface of the door with fingers extended to an Elymas-the-Sorcerer pattern, till he found a leathern strap, which he pulled. This lifted a wooden latch, and the door swung open.
The room inside was lighted only by the ruddy glow from the kiln mouth, which shone over the floor with the streaming horizontality of the setting sun, and threw upwards the shadows of all facial irregularities in those assembled around. The stone-flag floor was worn into a path from the doorway to the kiln, and into undulations everywhere. A curved settle of unplaned oak stretched along one side, and in a remote corner was a small bed and bedstead, the owner and frequent occupier of which was the maltster.
This aged man was now sitting opposite the fire, his frosty white hair and beard overgrowing his gnarled figure like the grey moss and lichen upon the leafless apple-tree. He wore breeches and the laced-up shoes called ankle-jacks; he kept his eyes fixed upon the fire.
Gabriel’s nose was greeted by an atmosphere laden with the sweet smell of new malt. The conversation (which seemed to have been concerning the origin of the fire) immediately ceased, and every one ocularly criticized him to the degree expressed by contracting the flesh of their foreheads and looking at him with narrowed eyelids, as if he had been a light too strong for their sight. Several exclaimed meditatively, after this operation had been completed: –
‘Oh, ’tis the new shepherd, ’a b’lieve.’ ‘We thought we heard a hand pawing about the door for the bobbin, but weren’t sure ’twere not a dead leaf blowed across,’ said another. ‘Come in, shepherd; sure ye be welcome, though we don’t know yer name.’
‘Gabriel Oak, that’s my name, neighbours.’
The ancient maltster sitting in the midst turned at this – his turning being as the turning of a rusty crane.
‘That’s never Gable Oak’s grandson over at Norcombe – never!’ he said, as a formula expressive of surprise, which nobody was supposed to take literally.
‘My father and my grandfather were old men of the name of Gabriel,’ said the shepherd placidly.
‘Thought I knowed the man’s face as I seed him on the rick! – thought I did! And where be ye trading o’t to now, shepherd?’
‘I’m thinking of biding here,’ said Mr Oak.
‘Knowed yer grandfather for years and years!’ continued the maltster, the words coming forth of their own accord as if the momentum previously imparted had been sufficient.
‘Ah – and did you!’
‘Knowed yer grandmother.’
‘And her too!’
‘Likewise knowed yer father when he was a child. Why, my boy Jacob there and your father were sworn brothers – that they were sure – weren’t ye Jacob?’
‘Ay, sure,’ said his son, a young man about sixty-five, with a semi-bald head and one tooth in the left centre of his upper jaw, which made much of itself by standing prominent, like a milestone in a bank. ‘But ’twas Joe had most to do with him. However, my son William must have knowed the very man afore us – didn’t ye, Billy, afore ye left Norcombe?’
‘No, ’twas Andrew,’ said Jacob’s son Billy, a child of forty, or thereabouts, who manifested the peculiarity of possessing a cheerful soul in a gloomy body, and whose whiskers were assuming a chin-chilla shade here and there.
‘I can mind Andrew,’ said Oak, ‘as being a man in the place when I was quite a child.’
‘Ay – the other day I and my youngest daughter, Liddy, were over at my grandson’s christening,’ continued Billy. ‘We were talking about this very family, and ’twas only last Purification Day in this very world, when the use-money is gied away to the second-best poor folk, you know, shepherd, and I can mind the day because they all had to traypse up to the vestry – yes, this very man’s family.’
‘Come, shepherd, and drink. ’Tis gape and swaller with us – a drap of sommit, but not of much account,’ said the maltster, removing from the fire his eyes, which were vermilion-red and bleared by gazing into it for so many years. ‘Take up the God-forgive-me, Jacob. See if ’tis warm, Jacob.’
Jacob stooped to the God-forgive-me, which was a two-handled tall mug standing in the ashes, cracked and charred with heat: it was rather furred with extraneous matter about the outside, especially in the crevices of the handles, the innermost curves of which may not have seen daylight for several years by reason of this encrustation thereon – formed of ashes accidentally wetted with cider and baked hard; but to the mind of any sensible drinker the cup was no worse for that, being incontestably clean on the inside and about the rim. It may be observed that such a class of mug is called a God-forgive-me in Weatherbury and its vicinity for uncertain reasons; probably because its size makes any given toper feel ashamed of himself when he sees its bottom in drinking it empty.