finished_summaries/shmoop/Far From the Madding Crowd/section_30_part_0.txt
Far From the Madding Crowd.chapter 31
chapter 31
{"name": "Chapter 31", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-31", "summary": "The night after writing Boldwood, Bathsheba decides to travel with Liddy to her sister's house. This is to make sure she won't be around when Boldwood comes knocking and demanding an explanation. Unfortunately, she runs into Boldwood while leaving. This book is full of awkward moments. Boldwood goes on a big rant about how Bathsheba has been leading him on and giving him hope where there was none. He even resorts to asking her to marry him out of pity. Yikes. Eventually, Boldwood lands on the idea that someone else must have caught Bathsheba's eye while he was out of town. He then also realizes that it must be Sergeant Troy, since he has heard the talk around town just as much as anyone else. Boldwood starts shouting about how Troy is a thief for stealing his fiancee, even though Bathsheba never actually agreed to marry him. Finally, he essentially stamps his feet in a huff and tells Bathsheba to go ahead and marry Troy. It turns out that Troy hasn't actually left town with his regiment, but had only left for a day or two to meet someone in the nearby town of Bath. Bathsheba worries that if Troy comes back and runs into Boldwood, there'll be a fight.", "analysis": ""}


BLAME--FURY


The next evening Bathsheba, with the idea of getting out of the way
of Mr. Boldwood in the event of his returning to answer her note
in person, proceeded to fulfil an engagement made with Liddy some
few hours earlier.  Bathsheba's companion, as a gauge of their
reconciliation, had been granted a week's holiday to visit her
sister, who was married to a thriving hurdler and cattle-crib-maker
living in a delightful labyrinth of hazel copse not far beyond
Yalbury.  The arrangement was that Miss Everdene should honour
them by coming there for a day or two to inspect some ingenious
contrivances which this man of the woods had introduced into his
wares.

Leaving her instructions with Gabriel and Maryann, that they were to
see everything carefully locked up for the night, she went out of the
house just at the close of a timely thunder-shower, which had refined
the air, and daintily bathed the coat of the land, though all beneath
was dry as ever.  Freshness was exhaled in an essence from the varied
contours of bank and hollow, as if the earth breathed maiden breath;
and the pleased birds were hymning to the scene.  Before her, among
the clouds, there was a contrast in the shape of lairs of fierce
light which showed themselves in the neighbourhood of a hidden sun,
lingering on to the farthest north-west corner of the heavens that
this midsummer season allowed.

She had walked nearly two miles of her journey, watching how the
day was retreating, and thinking how the time of deeds was quietly
melting into the time of thought, to give place in its turn to the
time of prayer and sleep, when she beheld advancing over Yalbury
hill the very man she sought so anxiously to elude.  Boldwood was
stepping on, not with that quiet tread of reserved strength which
was his customary gait, in which he always seemed to be balancing
two thoughts.  His manner was stunned and sluggish now.

Boldwood had for the first time been awakened to woman's privileges
in tergiversation even when it involves another person's possible
blight.  That Bathsheba was a firm and positive girl, far less
inconsequent than her fellows, had been the very lung of his hope;
for he had held that these qualities would lead her to adhere to a
straight course for consistency's sake, and accept him, though her
fancy might not flood him with the iridescent hues of uncritical
love.  But the argument now came back as sorry gleams from a broken
mirror.  The discovery was no less a scourge than a surprise.

He came on looking upon the ground, and did not see Bathsheba till
they were less than a stone's throw apart.  He looked up at the sound
of her pit-pat, and his changed appearance sufficiently denoted to
her the depth and strength of the feelings paralyzed by her letter.

"Oh; is it you, Mr. Boldwood?" she faltered, a guilty warmth pulsing
in her face.

Those who have the power of reproaching in silence may find it a
means more effective than words.  There are accents in the eye which
are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can
enter an ear.  It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter
moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.  Boldwood's look was
unanswerable.

Seeing she turned a little aside, he said, "What, are you afraid of
me?"

"Why should you say that?" said Bathsheba.

"I fancied you looked so," said he.  "And it is most strange, because
of its contrast with my feeling for you."

She regained self-possession, fixed her eyes calmly, and waited.

"You know what that feeling is," continued Boldwood, deliberately.
"A thing strong as death.  No dismissal by a hasty letter affects
that."

"I wish you did not feel so strongly about me," she murmured.  "It is
generous of you, and more than I deserve, but I must not hear it
now."

"Hear it?  What do you think I have to say, then?  I am not to marry
you, and that's enough.  Your letter was excellently plain.  I want
you to hear nothing--not I."

Bathsheba was unable to direct her will into any definite groove for
freeing herself from this fearfully awkward position.  She confusedly
said, "Good evening," and was moving on.  Boldwood walked up to her
heavily and dully.

"Bathsheba--darling--is it final indeed?"

"Indeed it is."

"Oh, Bathsheba--have pity upon me!" Boldwood burst out. "God's sake,
yes--I am come to that low, lowest stage--to ask a woman for pity!
Still, she is you--she is you."

Bathsheba commanded herself well.  But she could hardly get a clear
voice for what came instinctively to her lips: "There is little
honour to the woman in that speech."  It was only whispered, for
something unutterably mournful no less than distressing in this
spectacle of a man showing himself to be so entirely the vane of a
passion enervated the feminine instinct for punctilios.

"I am beyond myself about this, and am mad," he said.  "I am no stoic
at all to be supplicating here; but I do supplicate to you.  I wish
you knew what is in me of devotion to you; but it is impossible,
that.  In bare human mercy to a lonely man, don't throw me off now!"

"I don't throw you off--indeed, how can I?  I never had you."  In her
noon-clear sense that she had never loved him she forgot for a moment
her thoughtless angle on that day in February.

"But there was a time when you turned to me, before I thought of you!
I don't reproach you, for even now I feel that the ignorant and cold
darkness that I should have lived in if you had not attracted me by
that letter--valentine you call it--would have been worse than my
knowledge of you, though it has brought this misery.  But, I say,
there was a time when I knew nothing of you, and cared nothing
for you, and yet you drew me on.  And if you say you gave me no
encouragement, I cannot but contradict you."

"What you call encouragement was the childish game of an idle minute.
I have bitterly repented of it--ay, bitterly, and in tears.  Can you
still go on reminding me?"

"I don't accuse you of it--I deplore it.  I took for earnest what
you insist was jest, and now this that I pray to be jest you say is
awful, wretched earnest.  Our moods meet at wrong places.  I wish
your feeling was more like mine, or my feeling more like yours!  Oh,
could I but have foreseen the torture that trifling trick was going
to lead me into, how I should have cursed you; but only having been
able to see it since, I cannot do that, for I love you too well!  But
it is weak, idle drivelling to go on like this....  Bathsheba, you
are the first woman of any shade or nature that I have ever looked at
to love, and it is the having been so near claiming you for my own
that makes this denial so hard to bear.  How nearly you promised me!
But I don't speak now to move your heart, and make you grieve because
of my pain; it is no use, that.  I must bear it; my pain would get no
less by paining you."

"But I do pity you--deeply--O, so deeply!" she earnestly said.

"Do no such thing--do no such thing.  Your dear love, Bathsheba, is
such a vast thing beside your pity, that the loss of your pity as
well as your love is no great addition to my sorrow, nor does the
gain of your pity make it sensibly less.  O sweet--how dearly you
spoke to me behind the spear-bed at the washing-pool, and in the barn
at the shearing, and that dearest last time in the evening at your
home!  Where are your pleasant words all gone--your earnest hope to
be able to love me?  Where is your firm conviction that you would get
to care for me very much?  Really forgotten?--really?"

She checked emotion, looked him quietly and clearly in the face, and
said in her low, firm voice, "Mr. Boldwood, I promised you nothing.
Would you have had me a woman of clay when you paid me that furthest,
highest compliment a man can pay a woman--telling her he loves her?
I was bound to show some feeling, if I would not be a graceless
shrew.  Yet each of those pleasures was just for the day--the day
just for the pleasure.  How was I to know that what is a pastime to
all other men was death to you?  Have reason, do, and think more
kindly of me!"

"Well, never mind arguing--never mind.  One thing is sure: you
were all but mine, and now you are not nearly mine.  Everything is
changed, and that by you alone, remember.  You were nothing to me
once, and I was contented; you are now nothing to me again, and how
different the second nothing is from the first!  Would to God you
had never taken me up, since it was only to throw me down!"

Bathsheba, in spite of her mettle, began to feel unmistakable signs
that she was inherently the weaker vessel. She strove miserably
against this femininity which would insist upon supplying unbidden
emotions in stronger and stronger current.  She had tried to elude
agitation by fixing her mind on the trees, sky, any trivial object
before her eyes, whilst his reproaches fell, but ingenuity could not
save her now.

"I did not take you up--surely I did not!" she answered as heroically
as she could.  "But don't be in this mood with me.  I can endure
being told I am in the wrong, if you will only tell it me gently!
O sir, will you not kindly forgive me, and look at it cheerfully?"

"Cheerfully!  Can a man fooled to utter heart-burning find a reason
for being merry?  If I have lost, how can I be as if I had won?
Heavens you must be heartless quite!  Had I known what a fearfully
bitter sweet this was to be, how I would have avoided you, and never
seen you, and been deaf of you.  I tell you all this, but what do you
care!  You don't care."

She returned silent and weak denials to his charges, and swayed
her head desperately, as if to thrust away the words as they came
showering about her ears from the lips of the trembling man in the
climax of life, with his bronzed Roman face and fine frame.

"Dearest, dearest, I am wavering even now between the two opposites
of recklessly renouncing you, and labouring humbly for you again.
Forget that you have said No, and let it be as it was!  Say,
Bathsheba, that you only wrote that refusal to me in fun--come, say
it to me!"

"It would be untrue, and painful to both of us.  You overrate my
capacity for love.  I don't possess half the warmth of nature you
believe me to have.  An unprotected childhood in a cold world has
beaten gentleness out of me."

He immediately said with more resentment: "That may be true,
somewhat; but ah, Miss Everdene, it won't do as a reason!  You are
not the cold woman you would have me believe.  No, no!  It isn't
because you have no feeling in you that you don't love me.  You
naturally would have me think so--you would hide from me that you
have a burning heart like mine.  You have love enough, but it is
turned into a new channel. I know where."

The swift music of her heart became hubbub now, and she throbbed
to extremity.  He was coming to Troy.  He did then know what had
occurred!  And the name fell from his lips the next moment.

"Why did Troy not leave my treasure alone?" he asked, fiercely.
"When I had no thought of injuring him, why did he force himself upon
your notice!  Before he worried you your inclination was to have me;
when next I should have come to you your answer would have been Yes.
Can you deny it--I ask, can you deny it?"

She delayed the reply, but was too honest to withhold it.  "I
cannot," she whispered.

"I know you cannot.  But he stole in in my absence and robbed me.
Why didn't he win you away before, when nobody would have been
grieved?--when nobody would have been set tale-bearing.  Now the
people sneer at me--the very hills and sky seem to laugh at me till I
blush shamefully for my folly.  I have lost my respect, my good name,
my standing--lost it, never to get it again.  Go and marry your
man--go on!"

"Oh sir--Mr. Boldwood!"

"You may as well.  I have no further claim upon you.  As for me, I
had better go somewhere alone, and hide--and pray. I loved a woman
once.  I am now ashamed.  When I am dead they'll say, miserable
love-sick man that he was.  Heaven--heaven--if I had got jilted
secretly, and the dishonour not known, and my position kept!  But
no matter, it is gone, and the woman not gained.  Shame upon
him--shame!"

His unreasonable anger terrified her, and she glided from him,
without obviously moving, as she said, "I am only a girl--do not
speak to me so!"

"All the time you knew--how very well you knew--that your new freak
was my misery.  Dazzled by brass and scarlet--Oh, Bathsheba--this is
woman's folly indeed!"

She fired up at once.  "You are taking too much upon yourself!" she
said, vehemently.  "Everybody is upon me--everybody.  It is unmanly
to attack a woman so!  I have nobody in the world to fight my battles
for me; but no mercy is shown.  Yet if a thousand of you sneer and
say things against me, I WILL NOT be put down!"

"You'll chatter with him doubtless about me.  Say to him, 'Boldwood
would have died for me.'  Yes, and you have given way to him, knowing
him to be not the man for you.  He has kissed you--claimed you as
his.  Do you hear--he has kissed you.  Deny it!"

The most tragic woman is cowed by a tragic man, and although Boldwood
was, in vehemence and glow, nearly her own self rendered into another
sex, Bathsheba's cheek quivered.  She gasped, "Leave me, sir--leave
me!  I am nothing to you.  Let me go on!"

"Deny that he has kissed you."

"I shall not."

"Ha--then he has!" came hoarsely from the farmer.

"He has," she said, slowly, and, in spite of her fear, defiantly.  "I
am not ashamed to speak the truth."

"Then curse him; and curse him!" said Boldwood, breaking into a
whispered fury. "Whilst I would have given worlds to touch your hand,
you have let a rake come in without right or ceremony and--kiss you!
Heaven's mercy--kiss you! ...  Ah, a time of his life shall come
when he will have to repent, and think wretchedly of the pain he has
caused another man; and then may he ache, and wish, and curse, and
yearn--as I do now!"

"Don't, don't, oh, don't pray down evil upon him!" she implored in a
miserable cry.  "Anything but that--anything.  Oh, be kind to him,
sir, for I love him true!"

Boldwood's ideas had reached that point of fusion at which outline
and consistency entirely disappear.  The impending night appeared to
concentrate in his eye.  He did not hear her at all now.

"I'll punish him--by my soul, that will I!  I'll meet him, soldier or
no, and I'll horsewhip the untimely stripling for this reckless theft
of my one delight.  If he were a hundred men I'd horsewhip him--"
He dropped his voice suddenly and unnaturally.  "Bathsheba, sweet,
lost coquette, pardon me!  I've been blaming you, threatening you,
behaving like a churl to you, when he's the greatest sinner.  He
stole your dear heart away with his unfathomable lies! ...  It is a
fortunate thing for him that he's gone back to his regiment--that
he's away up the country, and not here!  I hope he may not return
here just yet.  I pray God he may not come into my sight, for I may
be tempted beyond myself.  Oh, Bathsheba, keep him away--yes, keep
him away from me!"

For a moment Boldwood stood so inertly after this that his soul
seemed to have been entirely exhaled with the breath of his
passionate words.  He turned his face away, and withdrew, and his
form was soon covered over by the twilight as his footsteps mixed
in with the low hiss of the leafy trees.

Bathsheba, who had been standing motionless as a model all this
latter time, flung her hands to her face, and wildly attempted to
ponder on the exhibition which had just passed away.  Such astounding
wells of fevered feeling in a still man like Mr. Boldwood were
incomprehensible, dreadful.  Instead of being a man trained to
repression he was--what she had seen him.

The force of the farmer's threats lay in their relation to a
circumstance known at present only to herself: her lover was coming
back to Weatherbury in the course of the very next day or two.  Troy
had not returned to his distant barracks as Boldwood and others
supposed, but had merely gone to visit some acquaintance in Bath,
and had yet a week or more remaining to his furlough.

She felt wretchedly certain that if he revisited her just at this
nick of time, and came into contact with Boldwood, a fierce quarrel
would be the consequence.  She panted with solicitude when she
thought of possible injury to Troy.  The least spark would kindle
the farmer's swift feelings of rage and jealousy; he would lose his
self-mastery as he had this evening; Troy's blitheness might become
aggressive; it might take the direction of derision, and Boldwood's
anger might then take the direction of revenge.

With almost a morbid dread of being thought a gushing girl, this
guileless woman too well concealed from the world under a manner of
carelessness the warm depths of her strong emotions.  But now there
was no reserve.  In her distraction, instead of advancing further she
walked up and down, beating the air with her fingers, pressing on her
brow, and sobbing brokenly to herself.  Then she sat down on a heap
of stones by the wayside to think.  There she remained long.  Above
the dark margin of the earth appeared foreshores and promontories of
coppery cloud, bounding a green and pellucid expanse in the western
sky.  Amaranthine glosses came over them then, and the unresting
world wheeled her round to a contrasting prospect eastward, in the
shape of indecisive and palpitating stars.  She gazed upon their
silent throes amid the shades of space, but realised none at all.
Her troubled spirit was far away with Troy.




Chapter 31
The night after writing Boldwood, Bathsheba decides to travel with Liddy to her sister's house. This is to make sure she won't be around when Boldwood comes knocking and demanding an explanation. Unfortunately, she runs into Boldwood while leaving. This book is full of awkward moments. Boldwood goes on a big rant about how Bathsheba has been leading him on and giving him hope where there was none. He even resorts to asking her to marry him out of pity. Yikes. Eventually, Boldwood lands on the idea that someone else must have caught Bathsheba's eye while he was out of town. He then also realizes that it must be Sergeant Troy, since he has heard the talk around town just as much as anyone else. Boldwood starts shouting about how Troy is a thief for stealing his fiancee, even though Bathsheba never actually agreed to marry him. Finally, he essentially stamps his feet in a huff and tells Bathsheba to go ahead and marry Troy. It turns out that Troy hasn't actually left town with his regiment, but had only left for a day or two to meet someone in the nearby town of Bath. Bathsheba worries that if Troy comes back and runs into Boldwood, there'll be a fight.