finished_summaries/sparknotes/Far from the Madding Crowd/section_3_part_0.txt
Far from the Madding Crowd.chapters 16-23
chapters 16-23
{"name": "", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210225000853/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/maddingcrowd/section4/", "summary": "In the interior of a church, several women watch a soldier enter and realize that a wedding is about to occur. As he waits for his bride to arrive, the clock strikes the quarter hour, and the women titter. Finally, after a full hour of waiting, the soldier leaves the church humiliated; just at that moment his bride runs across the square to meet him. She has been waiting at All Souls' rather than at All Saints' and has just realized her mistake. The two are Fanny Robin and Sergeant Troy. She asks him when they can reschedule their wedding, but he refuses to set a date. In the market place again, Boldwood sees Bathsheba Everdene as if for the first time. He finds her unbelievably beautiful and asks someone nearby whether she is generally considered handsome. Bathsheba notices his attention and regrets having sent the valentine. She decides to explain and apologize, but she realizes that he might misread her initiation of conversation as a sign of romantic interest. Chapter 18 gives us a little background about Boldwood. He is a confirmed bachelor, wealthy and well established at the neighboring farm. Hardy warns us that Boldwood's is not an \"ordinary nature\": the \"positives and negatives\" in his character balance only precariously, and he plunges easily into extreme emotions. The narrative focuses in on Bathsheba and Gabriel as they watch Boldwood from afar; Gabriel sees Bathsheba blush, and, remembering the valentine, he begins to suspect something between the pair. At a village-wide sheep-washing, Boldwood approaches Bathsheba, who tries to avoid him. He follows her off toward the river, and when they are alone, he proposes to her. She refuses, and he continues to try to persuade her, finally getting her to permit him to propose again later. Chapter 20 charts Bathsheba's reaction to Boldwood's offer. Hardy tells us that Bathsheba feels no \"wish whatever for the married state in the abstract.\" She also enjoys the independence of running a farm on her own. As she is considering the possibility, she approaches Gabriel and begins to ask him about what the farm workers had thought of her appearing together with Boldwood. The two of them quarrel when she asks his opinion of her conduct concerning the bachelor, and he tells her \"it is unworthy of any thoughtful, comely woman.\" She then accuses him of being jealous, but he tells her that he has long ago given up all thoughts marrying her. Finally, she orders him to leave the farm, and he agrees. Only one day after Gabriel's departure, the farm workers announce that another disaster has occurred--the sheep have eaten young clover, and their stomachs are expanding fatally. Only Gabriel knows how to perform the operation that can save them. Bathsheba sends him an order to come back. He replies by messenger that she will have to ask him properly, and she does so, writing, \"Do not desert me, Gabriel!\" He returns and saves all the sheep but one. Bathsheba regrets firing him, and he agrees to come back to the farm. During the annual sheep-shearing, the workers discuss Bathsheba and Boldwood, wondering if they will marry, and at the sheep-shearing supper, Bathsheba allows Boldwood to sit with her inside the house. At the very end of the supper, they are left alone together, and Bathsheba tells him that she will try to love him. She finally almost promises herself to him, saying that she may feel ready to marry by harvest-time.", "analysis": "Commentary This section of the novel sets up a number of different couples--Fanny and Troy, Bathsheba and Boldwood, and Bathsheba and Gabriel--and analyzes the dynamics of each. Many parallels can be drawn; for instance, much as a chance circumstance of Bathsheba deciding to send the valentine to Boldwood changes his life forever, Fanny's simple mistake about the church means that Troy refuses to marry her. By setting up several sets of relationships, Hardy explores the way chance generates a variety of fates from what were initially parallel circumstances. Hardy plays upon the traditional novel by choosing a heroine who has no abstract desire to get married. In some ways, Far From the Madding Crowd is a traditional novel of marriage in that a heroine is given a choice of two or more suitors, and at the end of the novel, she makes the \"correct\" choice. Yet a novel such as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility focuses on a character who wants to find a husband; in contrast, Bathsheba's economic and emotional independence allow her the choice of not marrying, and she has an interest in maintaining the farm and preserving her freedom. Many of Hardy's female characters show similar independence and interest in work or scholarship. The scenes of sheep-shearing and sheep-washing present the farm workers as a kind of Greek chorus and also help to create a sense of the rituals built around the seasons of the farm."}


ALL SAINTS' AND ALL SOULS'


On a week-day morning a small congregation, consisting mainly of
women and girls, rose from its knees in the mouldy nave of a church
called All Saints', in the distant barrack-town before-mentioned, at
the end of a service without a sermon.  They were about to disperse,
when a smart footstep, entering the porch and coming up the central
passage, arrested their attention.  The step echoed with a ring
unusual in a church; it was the clink of spurs.  Everybody looked.  A
young cavalry soldier in a red uniform, with the three chevrons of a
sergeant upon his sleeve, strode up the aisle, with an embarrassment
which was only the more marked by the intense vigour of his step, and
by the determination upon his face to show none.  A slight flush had
mounted his cheek by the time he had run the gauntlet between these
women; but, passing on through the chancel arch, he never paused till
he came close to the altar railing.  Here for a moment he stood
alone.

The officiating curate, who had not yet doffed his surplice,
perceived the new-comer, and followed him to the communion-space.  He
whispered to the soldier, and then beckoned to the clerk, who in his
turn whispered to an elderly woman, apparently his wife, and they
also went up the chancel steps.

"'Tis a wedding!" murmured some of the women, brightening.  "Let's
wait!"

The majority again sat down.

There was a creaking of machinery behind, and some of the young ones
turned their heads.  From the interior face of the west wall of the
tower projected a little canopy with a quarter-jack and small bell
beneath it, the automaton being driven by the same clock machinery
that struck the large bell in the tower.  Between the tower and the
church was a close screen, the door of which was kept shut during
services, hiding this grotesque clockwork from sight.  At present,
however, the door was open, and the egress of the jack, the blows on
the bell, and the mannikin's retreat into the nook again, were
visible to many, and audible throughout the church.

The jack had struck half-past eleven.

"Where's the woman?" whispered some of the spectators.

The young sergeant stood still with the abnormal rigidity of the old
pillars around.  He faced the south-east, and was as silent as he was
still.

The silence grew to be a noticeable thing as the minutes went on,
and nobody else appeared, and not a soul moved.  The rattle of the
quarter-jack again from its niche, its blows for three-quarters, its
fussy retreat, were almost painfully abrupt, and caused many of the
congregation to start palpably.

"I wonder where the woman is!" a voice whispered again.

There began now that slight shifting of feet, that artificial
coughing among several, which betrays a nervous suspense.  At length
there was a titter.  But the soldier never moved.  There he stood,
his face to the south-east, upright as a column, his cap in his hand.

The clock ticked on.  The women threw off their nervousness, and
titters and giggling became more frequent.  Then came a dead silence.
Every one was waiting for the end.  Some persons may have noticed how
extraordinarily the striking of quarters seems to quicken the flight
of time.  It was hardly credible that the jack had not got wrong with
the minutes when the rattle began again, the puppet emerged, and the
four quarters were struck fitfully as before.  One could almost be
positive that there was a malicious leer upon the hideous creature's
face, and a mischievous delight in its twitchings.  Then followed the
dull and remote resonance of the twelve heavy strokes in the tower
above.  The women were impressed, and there was no giggle this time.

The clergyman glided into the vestry, and the clerk vanished.  The
sergeant had not yet turned; every woman in the church was waiting to
see his face, and he appeared to know it.  At last he did turn, and
stalked resolutely down the nave, braving them all, with a compressed
lip.  Two bowed and toothless old almsmen then looked at each other
and chuckled, innocently enough; but the sound had a strange weird
effect in that place.

Opposite to the church was a paved square, around which several
overhanging wood buildings of old time cast a picturesque shade.  The
young man on leaving the door went to cross the square, when, in the
middle, he met a little woman.  The expression of her face, which had
been one of intense anxiety, sank at the sight of his nearly to
terror.

"Well?" he said, in a suppressed passion, fixedly looking at her.

"Oh, Frank--I made a mistake!--I thought that church with the spire
was All Saints', and I was at the door at half-past eleven to a
minute as you said.  I waited till a quarter to twelve, and found
then that I was in All Souls'.  But I wasn't much frightened, for
I thought it could be to-morrow as well."

"You fool, for so fooling me!  But say no more."

"Shall it be to-morrow, Frank?" she asked blankly.

"To-morrow!" and he gave vent to a hoarse laugh.  "I don't go through
that experience again for some time, I warrant you!"

"But after all," she expostulated in a trembling voice, "the mistake
was not such a terrible thing!  Now, dear Frank, when shall it be?"

"Ah, when?  God knows!" he said, with a light irony, and turning from
her walked rapidly away.





IN THE MARKET-PLACE


On Saturday Boldwood was in Casterbridge market house as usual, when
the disturber of his dreams entered and became visible to him.  Adam
had awakened from his deep sleep, and behold! there was Eve.  The
farmer took courage, and for the first time really looked at her.

Material causes and emotional effects are not to be arranged in
regular equation.  The result from capital employed in the production
of any movement of a mental nature is sometimes as tremendous as the
cause itself is absurdly minute.  When women are in a freakish mood,
their usual intuition, either from carelessness or inherent defect,
seemingly fails to teach them this, and hence it was that Bathsheba
was fated to be astonished to-day.

Boldwood looked at her--not slily, critically, or understandingly,
but blankly at gaze, in the way a reaper looks up at a passing
train--as something foreign to his element, and but dimly understood.
To Boldwood women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary
complements--comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and
permanence, that whether their orbits were as geometrical,
unchangeable, and as subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely
erratic as they superficially appeared, he had not deemed it his duty
to consider.

He saw her black hair, her correct facial curves and profile, and
the roundness of her chin and throat.  He saw then the side of her
eyelids, eyes, and lashes, and the shape of her ear.  Next he noticed
her figure, her skirt, and the very soles of her shoes.

Boldwood thought her beautiful, but wondered whether he was right in
his thought, for it seemed impossible that this romance in the flesh,
if so sweet as he imagined, could have been going on long without
creating a commotion of delight among men, and provoking more inquiry
than Bathsheba had done, even though that was not a little.  To the
best of his judgement neither nature nor art could improve this
perfect one of an imperfect many.  His heart began to move within
him.  Boldwood, it must be remembered, though forty years of age, had
never before inspected a woman with the very centre and force of his
glance; they had struck upon all his senses at wide angles.

Was she really beautiful?  He could not assure himself that his
opinion was true even now.  He furtively said to a neighbour, "Is
Miss Everdene considered handsome?"

"Oh yes; she was a good deal noticed the first time she came, if you
remember.  A very handsome girl indeed."

A man is never more credulous than in receiving favourable opinions
on the beauty of a woman he is half, or quite, in love with; a mere
child's word on the point has the weight of an R.A.'s.  Boldwood was
satisfied now.

And this charming woman had in effect said to him, "Marry me."  Why
should she have done that strange thing?  Boldwood's blindness to
the difference between approving of what circumstances suggest, and
originating what they do not suggest, was well matched by Bathsheba's
insensibility to the possibly great issues of little beginnings.

She was at this moment coolly dealing with a dashing young farmer,
adding up accounts with him as indifferently as if his face had been
the pages of a ledger.  It was evident that such a nature as his had
no attraction for a woman of Bathsheba's taste.  But Boldwood grew
hot down to his hands with an incipient jealousy; he trod for the
first time the threshold of "the injured lover's hell."  His first
impulse was to go and thrust himself between them.  This could be
done, but only in one way--by asking to see a sample of her corn.
Boldwood renounced the idea.  He could not make the request; it was
debasing loveliness to ask it to buy and sell, and jarred with his
conceptions of her.

All this time Bathsheba was conscious of having broken into that
dignified stronghold at last.  His eyes, she knew, were following her
everywhere.  This was a triumph; and had it come naturally, such a
triumph would have been the sweeter to her for this piquing delay.
But it had been brought about by misdirected ingenuity, and she
valued it only as she valued an artificial flower or a wax fruit.

Being a woman with some good sense in reasoning on subjects wherein
her heart was not involved, Bathsheba genuinely repented that a freak
which had owed its existence as much to Liddy as to herself, should
ever have been undertaken, to disturb the placidity of a man she
respected too highly to deliberately tease.

She that day nearly formed the intention of begging his pardon on
the very next occasion of their meeting.  The worst features of this
arrangement were that, if he thought she ridiculed him, an apology
would increase the offence by being disbelieved; and if he thought
she wanted him to woo her, it would read like additional evidence of
her forwardness.





BOLDWOOD IN MEDITATION--REGRET


Boldwood was tenant of what was called Little Weatherbury Farm, and
his person was the nearest approach to aristocracy that this remoter
quarter of the parish could boast of.  Genteel strangers, whose god
was their town, who might happen to be compelled to linger about this
nook for a day, heard the sound of light wheels, and prayed to see
good society, to the degree of a solitary lord, or squire at the very
least, but it was only Mr. Boldwood going out for the day.  They
heard the sound of wheels yet once more, and were re-animated to
expectancy: it was only Mr. Boldwood coming home again.

His house stood recessed from the road, and the stables, which are
to a farm what a fireplace is to a room, were behind, their lower
portions being lost amid bushes of laurel.  Inside the blue door,
open half-way down, were to be seen at this time the backs and tails
of half-a-dozen warm and contented horses standing in their stalls;
and as thus viewed, they presented alternations of roan and bay,
in shapes like a Moorish arch, the tail being a streak down the
midst of each.  Over these, and lost to the eye gazing in from the
outer light, the mouths of the same animals could be heard busily
sustaining the above-named warmth and plumpness by quantities of oats
and hay.  The restless and shadowy figure of a colt wandered about a
loose-box at the end, whilst the steady grind of all the eaters was
occasionally diversified by the rattle of a rope or the stamp of a
foot.

Pacing up and down at the heels of the animals was Farmer Boldwood
himself.  This place was his almonry and cloister in one: here, after
looking to the feeding of his four-footed dependants, the celibate
would walk and meditate of an evening till the moon's rays streamed
in through the cobwebbed windows, or total darkness enveloped the
scene.

His square-framed perpendicularity showed more fully now than in the
crowd and bustle of the market-house.  In this meditative walk his
foot met the floor with heel and toe simultaneously, and his fine
reddish-fleshed face was bent downwards just enough to render obscure
the still mouth and the well-rounded though rather prominent and
broad chin.  A few clear and thread-like horizontal lines were the
only interruption to the otherwise smooth surface of his large
forehead.

The phases of Boldwood's life were ordinary enough, but his was not
an ordinary nature.  That stillness, which struck casual observers
more than anything else in his character and habit, and seemed so
precisely like the rest of inanition, may have been the perfect
balance of enormous antagonistic forces--positives and negatives in
fine adjustment.  His equilibrium disturbed, he was in extremity at
once.  If an emotion possessed him at all, it ruled him; a feeling
not mastering him was entirely latent.  Stagnant or rapid, it was
never slow.  He was always hit mortally, or he was missed.

He had no light and careless touches in his constitution, either
for good or for evil.  Stern in the outlines of action, mild in the
details, he was serious throughout all.  He saw no absurd sides to
the follies of life, and thus, though not quite companionable in the
eyes of merry men and scoffers, and those to whom all things show
life as a jest, he was not intolerable to the earnest and those
acquainted with grief.  Being a man who read all the dramas of life
seriously, if he failed to please when they were comedies, there was
no frivolous treatment to reproach him for when they chanced to end
tragically.

Bathsheba was far from dreaming that the dark and silent shape upon
which she had so carelessly thrown a seed was a hotbed of tropic
intensity.  Had she known Boldwood's moods, her blame would have
been fearful, and the stain upon her heart ineradicable.  Moreover,
had she known her present power for good or evil over this man, she
would have trembled at her responsibility.  Luckily for her present,
unluckily for her future tranquillity, her understanding had not yet
told her what Boldwood was.  Nobody knew entirely; for though it was
possible to form guesses concerning his wild capabilities from old
floodmarks faintly visible, he had never been seen at the high tides
which caused them.

Farmer Boldwood came to the stable-door and looked forth across the
level fields.  Beyond the first enclosure was a hedge, and on the
other side of this a meadow belonging to Bathsheba's farm.

It was now early spring--the time of going to grass with the sheep,
when they have the first feed of the meadows, before these are laid
up for mowing.  The wind, which had been blowing east for several
weeks, had veered to the southward, and the middle of spring had come
abruptly--almost without a beginning.  It was that period in the
vernal quarter when we may suppose the Dryads to be waking for the
season.  The vegetable world begins to move and swell and the saps to
rise, till in the completest silence of lone gardens and trackless
plantations, where everything seems helpless and still after the
bond and slavery of frost, there are bustlings, strainings, united
thrusts, and pulls-all-together, in comparison with which the
powerful tugs of cranes and pulleys in a noisy city are but pigmy
efforts.

Boldwood, looking into the distant meadows, saw there three figures.
They were those of Miss Everdene, Shepherd Oak, and Cainy Ball.

When Bathsheba's figure shone upon the farmer's eyes it lighted him
up as the moon lights up a great tower.  A man's body is as the
shell, or the tablet, of his soul, as he is reserved or ingenuous,
overflowing or self-contained.  There was a change in Boldwood's
exterior from its former impassibleness; and his face showed that he
was now living outside his defences for the first time, and with a
fearful sense of exposure.  It is the usual experience of strong
natures when they love.

At last he arrived at a conclusion.  It was to go across and inquire
boldly of her.

The insulation of his heart by reserve during these many years,
without a channel of any kind for disposable emotion, had worked its
effect.  It has been observed more than once that the causes of love
are chiefly subjective, and Boldwood was a living testimony to the
truth of the proposition.  No mother existed to absorb his devotion,
no sister for his tenderness, no idle ties for sense.  He became
surcharged with the compound, which was genuine lover's love.

He approached the gate of the meadow.  Beyond it the ground was
melodious with ripples, and the sky with larks; the low bleating of
the flock mingling with both.  Mistress and man were engaged in the
operation of making a lamb "take," which is performed whenever an ewe
has lost her own offspring, one of the twins of another ewe being
given her as a substitute.  Gabriel had skinned the dead lamb, and
was tying the skin over the body of the live lamb, in the customary
manner, whilst Bathsheba was holding open a little pen of four
hurdles, into which the Mother and foisted lamb were driven, where
they would remain till the old sheep conceived an affection for the
young one.

Bathsheba looked up at the completion of the manoeuvre and saw the
farmer by the gate, where he was overhung by a willow tree in full
bloom.  Gabriel, to whom her face was as the uncertain glory of an
April day, was ever regardful of its faintest changes, and instantly
discerned thereon the mark of some influence from without, in the
form of a keenly self-conscious reddening.  He also turned and beheld
Boldwood.

At once connecting these signs with the letter Boldwood had shown
him, Gabriel suspected her of some coquettish procedure begun by that
means, and carried on since, he knew not how.

Farmer Boldwood had read the pantomime denoting that they were aware
of his presence, and the perception was as too much light turned upon
his new sensibility.  He was still in the road, and by moving on he
hoped that neither would recognize that he had originally intended
to enter the field.  He passed by with an utter and overwhelming
sensation of ignorance, shyness, and doubt.  Perhaps in her manner
there were signs that she wished to see him--perhaps not--he could
not read a woman.  The cabala of this erotic philosophy seemed to
consist of the subtlest meanings expressed in misleading ways.  Every
turn, look, word, and accent contained a mystery quite distinct from
its obvious import, and not one had ever been pondered by him until
now.

As for Bathsheba, she was not deceived into the belief that Farmer
Boldwood had walked by on business or in idleness.  She collected
the probabilities of the case, and concluded that she was herself
responsible for Boldwood's appearance there.  It troubled her much
to see what a great flame a little wildfire was likely to kindle.
Bathsheba was no schemer for marriage, nor was she deliberately a
trifler with the affections of men, and a censor's experience on
seeing an actual flirt after observing her would have been a feeling
of surprise that Bathsheba could be so different from such a one,
and yet so like what a flirt is supposed to be.

She resolved never again, by look or by sign, to interrupt the steady
flow of this man's life.  But a resolution to avoid an evil is
seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance
impossible.





THE SHEEP-WASHING--THE OFFER


Boldwood did eventually call upon her.  She was not at home.  "Of
course not," he murmured.  In contemplating Bathsheba as a woman, he
had forgotten the accidents of her position as an agriculturist--that
being as much of a farmer, and as extensive a farmer, as himself,
her probable whereabouts was out-of-doors at this time of the year.
This, and the other oversights Boldwood was guilty of, were natural
to the mood, and still more natural to the circumstances.  The
great aids to idealization in love were present here: occasional
observation of her from a distance, and the absence of social
intercourse with her--visual familiarity, oral strangeness.  The
smaller human elements were kept out of sight; the pettinesses that
enter so largely into all earthly living and doing were disguised by
the accident of lover and loved-one not being on visiting terms; and
there was hardly awakened a thought in Boldwood that sorry household
realities appertained to her, or that she, like all others, had
moments of commonplace, when to be least plainly seen was to be most
prettily remembered.  Thus a mild sort of apotheosis took place
in his fancy, whilst she still lived and breathed within his own
horizon, a troubled creature like himself.

It was the end of May when the farmer determined to be no longer
repulsed by trivialities or distracted by suspense.  He had by this
time grown used to being in love; the passion now startled him less
even when it tortured him more, and he felt himself adequate to the
situation.  On inquiring for her at her house they had told him she
was at the sheep-washing, and he went off to seek her there.

The sheep-washing pool was a perfectly circular basin of brickwork in
the meadows, full of the clearest water.  To birds on the wing its
glassy surface, reflecting the light sky, must have been visible for
miles around as a glistening Cyclops' eye in a green face.  The grass
about the margin at this season was a sight to remember long--in a
minor sort of way.  Its activity in sucking the moisture from the
rich damp sod was almost a process observable by the eye.  The
outskirts of this level water-meadow were diversified by rounded and
hollow pastures, where just now every flower that was not a buttercup
was a daisy.  The river slid along noiselessly as a shade, the
swelling reeds and sedge forming a flexible palisade upon its moist
brink.  To the north of the mead were trees, the leaves of which
were new, soft, and moist, not yet having stiffened and darkened
under summer sun and drought, their colour being yellow beside a
green--green beside a yellow.  From the recesses of this knot of
foliage the loud notes of three cuckoos were resounding through the
still air.

Boldwood went meditating down the slopes with his eyes on his boots,
which the yellow pollen from the buttercups had bronzed in artistic
gradations.  A tributary of the main stream flowed through the
basin of the pool by an inlet and outlet at opposite points of its
diameter.  Shepherd Oak, Jan Coggan, Moon, Poorgrass, Cain Ball,
and several others were assembled here, all dripping wet to the
very roots of their hair, and Bathsheba was standing by in a new
riding-habit--the most elegant she had ever worn--the reins of her
horse being looped over her arm.  Flagons of cider were rolling about
upon the green.  The meek sheep were pushed into the pool by Coggan
and Matthew Moon, who stood by the lower hatch, immersed to their
waists; then Gabriel, who stood on the brink, thrust them under as
they swam along, with an instrument like a crutch, formed for the
purpose, and also for assisting the exhausted animals when the wool
became saturated and they began to sink.  They were let out against
the stream, and through the upper opening, all impurities flowing
away below.  Cainy Ball and Joseph, who performed this latter
operation, were if possible wetter than the rest; they resembled
dolphins under a fountain, every protuberance and angle of their
clothes dribbling forth a small rill.

Boldwood came close and bade her good morning, with such constraint
that she could not but think he had stepped across to the washing for
its own sake, hoping not to find her there; more, she fancied his
brow severe and his eye slighting.  Bathsheba immediately contrived
to withdraw, and glided along by the river till she was a stone's
throw off.  She heard footsteps brushing the grass, and had a
consciousness that love was encircling her like a perfume.  Instead
of turning or waiting, Bathsheba went further among the high sedges,
but Boldwood seemed determined, and pressed on till they were
completely past the bend of the river. Here, without being seen,
they could hear the splashing and shouts of the washers above.

"Miss Everdene!" said the farmer.

She trembled, turned, and said "Good morning."  His tone was so
utterly removed from all she had expected as a beginning.  It was
lowness and quiet accentuated: an emphasis of deep meanings, their
form, at the same time, being scarcely expressed.  Silence has
sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied
soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more
impressive than speech.  In the same way, to say a little is often to
tell more than to say a great deal.  Boldwood told everything in that
word.

As the consciousness expands on learning that what was fancied to
be the rumble of wheels is the reverberation of thunder, so did
Bathsheba's at her intuitive conviction.

"I feel--almost too much--to think," he said, with a solemn
simplicity.  "I have come to speak to you without preface.  My life
is not my own since I have beheld you clearly, Miss Everdene--I come
to make you an offer of marriage."

Bathsheba tried to preserve an absolutely neutral countenance, and
all the motion she made was that of closing lips which had previously
been a little parted.

"I am now forty-one years old," he went on.  "I may have been called
a confirmed bachelor, and I was a confirmed bachelor.  I had never
any views of myself as a husband in my earlier days, nor have I made
any calculation on the subject since I have been older.  But we all
change, and my change, in this matter, came with seeing you.  I have
felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in
every respect.  Beyond all things, I want you as my wife."

"I feel, Mr. Boldwood, that though I respect you much, I do not
feel--what would justify me to--in accepting your offer," she
stammered.

This giving back of dignity for dignity seemed to open the sluices of
feeling that Boldwood had as yet kept closed.

"My life is a burden without you," he exclaimed, in a low voice.  "I
want you--I want you to let me say I love you again and again!"

Bathsheba answered nothing, and the horse upon her arm seemed so
impressed that instead of cropping the herbage she looked up.

"I think and hope you care enough for me to listen to what I have to
tell!"

Bathsheba's momentary impulse at hearing this was to ask why he
thought that, till she remembered that, far from being a conceited
assumption on Boldwood's part, it was but the natural conclusion of
serious reflection based on deceptive premises of her own offering.

"I wish I could say courteous flatteries to you," the farmer
continued in an easier tone, "and put my rugged feeling into a
graceful shape: but I have neither power nor patience to learn such
things.  I want you for my wife--so wildly that no other feeling can
abide in me; but I should not have spoken out had I not been led to
hope."

"The valentine again!  O that valentine!" she said to herself, but
not a word to him.

"If you can love me say so, Miss Everdene.  If not--don't say no!"

"Mr. Boldwood, it is painful to have to say I am surprised, so that
I don't know how to answer you with propriety and respect--but am
only just able to speak out my feeling--I mean my meaning; that I am
afraid I can't marry you, much as I respect you.  You are too
dignified for me to suit you, sir."

"But, Miss Everdene!"

"I--I didn't--I know I ought never to have dreamt of sending that
valentine--forgive me, sir--it was a wanton thing which no woman with
any self-respect should have done.  If you will only pardon my
thoughtlessness, I promise never to--"

"No, no, no.  Don't say thoughtlessness!  Make me think it was
something more--that it was a sort of prophetic instinct--the
beginning of a feeling that you would like me.  You torture me to say
it was done in thoughtlessness--I never thought of it in that light,
and I can't endure it. Ah!  I wish I knew how to win you! but that I
can't do--I can only ask if I have already got you.  If I have not,
and it is not true that you have come unwittingly to me as I have to
you, I can say no more."

"I have not fallen in love with you, Mr. Boldwood--certainly I must
say that."  She allowed a very small smile to creep for the first
time over her serious face in saying this, and the white row of upper
teeth, and keenly-cut lips already noticed, suggested an idea of
heartlessness, which was immediately contradicted by the pleasant
eyes.

"But you will just think--in kindness and condescension think--if you
cannot bear with me as a husband!  I fear I am too old for you, but
believe me I will take more care of you than would many a man of your
own age.  I will protect and cherish you with all my strength--I will
indeed!  You shall have no cares--be worried by no household affairs,
and live quite at ease, Miss Everdene.  The dairy superintendence
shall be done by a man--I can afford it well--you shall never have
so much as to look out of doors at haymaking time, or to think of
weather in the harvest.  I rather cling to the chaise, because it is
the same my poor father and mother drove, but if you don't like it
I will sell it, and you shall have a pony-carriage of your own.  I
cannot say how far above every other idea and object on earth you
seem to me--nobody knows--God only knows--how much you are to me!"

Bathsheba's heart was young, and it swelled with sympathy for the
deep-natured man who spoke so simply.

"Don't say it! don't!  I cannot bear you to feel so much, and me to
feel nothing.  And I am afraid they will notice us, Mr. Boldwood.
Will you let the matter rest now?  I cannot think collectedly.  I did
not know you were going to say this to me.  Oh, I am wicked to have
made you suffer so!"  She was frightened as well as agitated at his
vehemence.

"Say then, that you don't absolutely refuse.  Do not quite refuse?"

"I can do nothing.  I cannot answer."

"I may speak to you again on the subject?"

"Yes."

"I may think of you?"

"Yes, I suppose you may think of me."

"And hope to obtain you?"

"No--do not hope!  Let us go on."

"I will call upon you again to-morrow."

"No--please not.  Give me time."

"Yes--I will give you any time," he said earnestly and gratefully.
"I am happier now."

"No--I beg you!  Don't be happier if happiness only comes from my
agreeing.  Be neutral, Mr. Boldwood!  I must think."

"I will wait," he said.

And then she turned away.  Boldwood dropped his gaze to the ground,
and stood long like a man who did not know where he was.  Realities
then returned upon him like the pain of a wound received in an
excitement which eclipses it, and he, too, then went on.





PERPLEXITY--GRINDING THE SHEARS--A QUARREL


"He is so disinterested and kind to offer me all that I can desire,"
Bathsheba mused.

Yet Farmer Boldwood, whether by nature kind or the reverse to kind,
did not exercise kindness, here.  The rarest offerings of the purest
loves are but a self-indulgence, and no generosity at all.

Bathsheba, not being the least in love with him, was eventually able
to look calmly at his offer.  It was one which many women of her own
station in the neighbourhood, and not a few of higher rank, would
have been wild to accept and proud to publish.  In every point of
view, ranging from politic to passionate, it was desirable that she,
a lonely girl, should marry, and marry this earnest, well-to-do,
and respected man.  He was close to her doors: his standing was
sufficient: his qualities were even supererogatory.  Had she felt,
which she did not, any wish whatever for the married state in the
abstract, she could not reasonably have rejected him, being a woman
who frequently appealed to her understanding for deliverance from
her whims.  Boldwood as a means to marriage was unexceptionable: she
esteemed and liked him, yet she did not want him.  It appears that
ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without
marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage
is not possible without possession; with totally differing aims the
method is the same on both sides.  But the understood incentive on
the woman's part was wanting here.  Besides, Bathsheba's position
as absolute mistress of a farm and house was a novel one, and the
novelty had not yet begun to wear off.

But a disquiet filled her which was somewhat to her credit, for it
would have affected few.  Beyond the mentioned reasons with which
she combated her objections, she had a strong feeling that, having
been the one who began the game, she ought in honesty to accept the
consequences.  Still the reluctance remained.  She said in the same
breath that it would be ungenerous not to marry Boldwood, and that
she couldn't do it to save her life.

Bathsheba's was an impulsive nature under a deliberative aspect.  An
Elizabeth in brain and a Mary Stuart in spirit, she often performed
actions of the greatest temerity with a manner of extreme discretion.
Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always
remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but,
unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into
deeds.

The next day to that of the declaration she found Gabriel Oak at the
bottom of her garden, grinding his shears for the sheep-shearing.
All the surrounding cottages were more or less scenes of the same
operation; the scurr of whetting spread into the sky from all parts
of the village as from an armoury previous to a campaign.  Peace and
war kiss each other at their hours of preparation--sickles, scythes,
shears, and pruning-hooks, ranking with swords, bayonets, and lances,
in their common necessity for point and edge.

Cainy Ball turned the handle of Gabriel's grindstone, his head
performing a melancholy see-saw up and down with each turn of the
wheel.  Oak stood somewhat as Eros is represented when in the act of
sharpening his arrows: his figure slightly bent, the weight of his
body thrown over on the shears, and his head balanced side-ways, with
a critical compression of the lips and contraction of the eyelids to
crown the attitude.

His mistress came up and looked upon them in silence for a minute or
two; then she said--

"Cain, go to the lower mead and catch the bay mare.  I'll turn the
winch of the grindstone.  I want to speak to you, Gabriel."

Cain departed, and Bathsheba took the handle.  Gabriel had glanced up
in intense surprise, quelled its expression, and looked down again.
Bathsheba turned the winch, and Gabriel applied the shears.

The peculiar motion involved in turning a wheel has a wonderful
tendency to benumb the mind.  It is a sort of attenuated variety of
Ixion's punishment, and contributes a dismal chapter to the history
of gaols.  The brain gets muddled, the head grows heavy, and the
body's centre of gravity seems to settle by degrees in a leaden lump
somewhere between the eyebrows and the crown.  Bathsheba felt the
unpleasant symptoms after two or three dozen turns.

"Will you turn, Gabriel, and let me hold the shears?" she said.  "My
head is in a whirl, and I can't talk."

Gabriel turned.  Bathsheba then began, with some awkwardness,
allowing her thoughts to stray occasionally from her story to attend
to the shears, which required a little nicety in sharpening.

"I wanted to ask you if the men made any observations on my going
behind the sedge with Mr. Boldwood yesterday?"

"Yes, they did," said Gabriel.  "You don't hold the shears right,
miss--I knew you wouldn't know the way--hold like this."

He relinquished the winch, and inclosing her two hands completely in
his own (taking each as we sometimes slap a child's hand in teaching
him to write), grasped the shears with her.  "Incline the edge so,"
he said.

Hands and shears were inclined to suit the words, and held thus for a
peculiarly long time by the instructor as he spoke.

"That will do," exclaimed Bathsheba.  "Loose my hands.  I won't have
them held!  Turn the winch."

Gabriel freed her hands quietly, retired to his handle, and the
grinding went on.

"Did the men think it odd?" she said again.

"Odd was not the idea, miss."

"What did they say?"

"That Farmer Boldwood's name and your own were likely to be flung
over pulpit together before the year was out."

"I thought so by the look of them!  Why, there's nothing in it.  A
more foolish remark was never made, and I want you to contradict it!
that's what I came for."

Gabriel looked incredulous and sad, but between his moments of
incredulity, relieved.

"They must have heard our conversation," she continued.

"Well, then, Bathsheba!" said Oak, stopping the handle, and gazing
into her face with astonishment.

"Miss Everdene, you mean," she said, with dignity.

"I mean this, that if Mr. Boldwood really spoke of marriage, I bain't
going to tell a story and say he didn't to please you.  I have
already tried to please you too much for my own good!"

Bathsheba regarded him with round-eyed perplexity.  She did not know
whether to pity him for disappointed love of her, or to be angry with
him for having got over it--his tone being ambiguous.

"I said I wanted you just to mention that it was not true I was going
to be married to him," she murmured, with a slight decline in her
assurance.

"I can say that to them if you wish, Miss Everdene.  And I could
likewise give an opinion to 'ee on what you have done."

"I daresay.  But I don't want your opinion."

"I suppose not," said Gabriel bitterly, and going on with his
turning, his words rising and falling in a regular swell and cadence
as he stooped or rose with the winch, which directed them, according
to his position, perpendicularly into the earth, or horizontally
along the garden, his eyes being fixed on a leaf upon the ground.

With Bathsheba a hastened act was a rash act; but, as does not always
happen, time gained was prudence insured.  It must be added, however,
that time was very seldom gained.  At this period the single opinion
in the parish on herself and her doings that she valued as sounder
than her own was Gabriel Oak's.  And the outspoken honesty of his
character was such that on any subject, even that of her love for,
or marriage with, another man, the same disinterestedness of opinion
might be calculated on, and be had for the asking.  Thoroughly
convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve
constrained him not to injure that of another.  This is a lover's
most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin.
Knowing he would reply truly she asked the question, painful as
she must have known the subject would be.  Such is the selfishness
of some charming women.  Perhaps it was some excuse for her thus
torturing honesty to her own advantage, that she had absolutely no
other sound judgment within easy reach.

"Well, what is your opinion of my conduct," she said, quietly.

"That it is unworthy of any thoughtful, and meek, and comely woman."

In an instant Bathsheba's face coloured with the angry crimson of
a Danby sunset.  But she forbore to utter this feeling, and the
reticence of her tongue only made the loquacity of her face the more
noticeable.

The next thing Gabriel did was to make a mistake.

"Perhaps you don't like the rudeness of my reprimanding you, for I
know it is rudeness; but I thought it would do good."

She instantly replied sarcastically--

"On the contrary, my opinion of you is so low, that I see in your
abuse the praise of discerning people!"

"I am glad you don't mind it, for I said it honestly and with every
serious meaning."

"I see.  But, unfortunately, when you try not to speak in jest you
are amusing--just as when you wish to avoid seriousness you sometimes
say a sensible word."

It was a hard hit, but Bathsheba had unmistakably lost her temper,
and on that account Gabriel had never in his life kept his own
better.  He said nothing.  She then broke out--

"I may ask, I suppose, where in particular my unworthiness lies?  In
my not marrying you, perhaps!"

"Not by any means," said Gabriel quietly.  "I have long given up
thinking of that matter."

"Or wishing it, I suppose," she said; and it was apparent that she
expected an unhesitating denial of this supposition.

Whatever Gabriel felt, he coolly echoed her words--

"Or wishing it either."

A woman may be treated with a bitterness which is sweet to her,
and with a rudeness which is not offensive.  Bathsheba would have
submitted to an indignant chastisement for her levity had Gabriel
protested that he was loving her at the same time; the impetuosity
of passion unrequited is bearable, even if it stings and
anathematizes--there is a triumph in the humiliation, and a
tenderness in the strife.  This was what she had been expecting,
and what she had not got.  To be lectured because the lecturer saw
her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was
exasperating.  He had not finished, either.  He continued in a more
agitated voice:--

"My opinion is (since you ask it) that you are greatly to blame for
playing pranks upon a man like Mr. Boldwood, merely as a pastime.
Leading on a man you don't care for is not a praiseworthy action.
And even, Miss Everdene, if you seriously inclined towards him, you
might have let him find it out in some way of true loving-kindness,
and not by sending him a valentine's letter."

Bathsheba laid down the shears.

"I cannot allow any man to--to criticise my private conduct!" she
exclaimed.  "Nor will I for a minute.  So you'll please leave the
farm at the end of the week!"

It may have been a peculiarity--at any rate it was a fact--that when
Bathsheba was swayed by an emotion of an earthly sort her lower lip
trembled: when by a refined emotion, her upper or heavenward one.
Her nether lip quivered now.

"Very well, so I will," said Gabriel calmly.  He had been held to
her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking,
rather than by a chain he could not break.  "I should be even better
pleased to go at once," he added.

"Go at once then, in Heaven's name!" said she, her eyes flashing at
his, though never meeting them.  "Don't let me see your face any
more."

"Very well, Miss Everdene--so it shall be."

And he took his shears and went away from her in placid dignity, as
Moses left the presence of Pharaoh.





TROUBLES IN THE FOLD--A MESSAGE


Gabriel Oak had ceased to feed the Weatherbury flock for about
four-and-twenty hours, when on Sunday afternoon the elderly gentlemen
Joseph Poorgrass, Matthew Moon, Fray, and half-a-dozen others, came
running up to the house of the mistress of the Upper Farm.

"Whatever IS the matter, men?" she said, meeting them at the door
just as she was coming out on her way to church, and ceasing in a
moment from the close compression of her two red lips, with which
she had accompanied the exertion of pulling on a tight glove.

"Sixty!" said Joseph Poorgrass.

"Seventy!" said Moon.

"Fifty-nine!" said Susan Tall's husband.

"--Sheep have broke fence," said Fray.

"--And got into a field of young clover," said Tall.

"--Young clover!" said Moon.

"--Clover!" said Joseph Poorgrass.

"And they be getting blasted," said Henery Fray.

"That they be," said Joseph.

"And will all die as dead as nits, if they bain't got out and cured!"
said Tall.

Joseph's countenance was drawn into lines and puckers by his concern.
Fray's forehead was wrinkled both perpendicularly and crosswise,
after the pattern of a portcullis, expressive of a double despair.
Laban Tall's lips were thin, and his face was rigid.  Matthew's jaws
sank, and his eyes turned whichever way the strongest muscle happened
to pull them.

"Yes," said Joseph, "and I was sitting at home, looking for
Ephesians, and says I to myself, ''Tis nothing but Corinthians and
Thessalonians in this danged Testament,' when who should come in but
Henery there: 'Joseph,' he said, 'the sheep have blasted
theirselves--'"

With Bathsheba it was a moment when thought was speech and speech
exclamation.  Moreover, she had hardly recovered her equanimity since
the disturbance which she had suffered from Oak's remarks.

"That's enough--that's enough!--oh, you fools!" she cried, throwing
the parasol and Prayer-book into the passage, and running out of
doors in the direction signified.  "To come to me, and not go and get
them out directly!  Oh, the stupid numskulls!"

Her eyes were at their darkest and brightest now.  Bathsheba's beauty
belonging rather to the demonian than to the angelic school, she
never looked so well as when she was angry--and particularly when the
effect was heightened by a rather dashing velvet dress, carefully put
on before a glass.

All the ancient men ran in a jumbled throng after her to the
clover-field, Joseph sinking down in the midst when about half-way,
like an individual withering in a world which was more and more
insupportable.  Having once received the stimulus that her presence
always gave them they went round among the sheep with a will.  The
majority of the afflicted animals were lying down, and could not be
stirred.  These were bodily lifted out, and the others driven into
the adjoining field.  Here, after the lapse of a few minutes, several
more fell down, and lay helpless and livid as the rest.

Bathsheba, with a sad, bursting heart, looked at these primest
specimens of her prime flock as they rolled there--


   Swoln with wind and the rank mist they drew.


Many of them foamed at the mouth, their breathing being quick and
short, whilst the bodies of all were fearfully distended.

"Oh, what can I do, what can I do!" said Bathsheba, helplessly.
"Sheep are such unfortunate animals!--there's always something
happening to them!  I never knew a flock pass a year without getting
into some scrape or other."

"There's only one way of saving them," said Tall.

"What way?  Tell me quick!"

"They must be pierced in the side with a thing made on purpose."

"Can you do it?  Can I?"

"No, ma'am.  We can't, nor you neither.  It must be done in a
particular spot.  If ye go to the right or left but an inch you stab
the ewe and kill her.  Not even a shepherd can do it, as a rule."

"Then they must die," she said, in a resigned tone.

"Only one man in the neighbourhood knows the way," said Joseph, now
just come up.  "He could cure 'em all if he were here."

"Who is he?  Let's get him!"

"Shepherd Oak," said Matthew.  "Ah, he's a clever man in talents!"

"Ah, that he is so!" said Joseph Poorgrass.

"True--he's the man," said Laban Tall.

"How dare you name that man in my presence!" she said excitedly.  "I
told you never to allude to him, nor shall you if you stay with me.
Ah!" she added, brightening, "Farmer Boldwood knows!"

"O no, ma'am" said Matthew.  "Two of his store ewes got into some
vetches t'other day, and were just like these.  He sent a man on
horseback here post-haste for Gable, and Gable went and saved 'em.
Farmer Boldwood hev got the thing they do it with.  'Tis a holler
pipe, with a sharp pricker inside.  Isn't it, Joseph?"

"Ay--a holler pipe," echoed Joseph.  "That's what 'tis."

"Ay, sure--that's the machine," chimed in Henery Fray, reflectively,
with an Oriental indifference to the flight of time.

"Well," burst out Bathsheba, "don't stand there with your 'ayes'
and your 'sures' talking at me!  Get somebody to cure the sheep
instantly!"

All then stalked off in consternation, to get somebody as directed,
without any idea of who it was to be.  In a minute they had vanished
through the gate, and she stood alone with the dying flock.

"Never will I send for him--never!" she said firmly.

One of the ewes here contracted its muscles horribly, extended
itself, and jumped high into the air.  The leap was an astonishing
one.  The ewe fell heavily, and lay still.

Bathsheba went up to it.  The sheep was dead.

"Oh, what shall I do--what shall I do!" she again exclaimed, wringing
her hands.  "I won't send for him.  No, I won't!"

The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide
with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself.  It is often flung
out as a sort of prop to support a decaying conviction which, whilst
strong, required no enunciation to prove it so.  The "No, I won't" of
Bathsheba meant virtually, "I think I must."

She followed her assistants through the gate, and lifted her hand to
one of them.  Laban answered to her signal.

"Where is Oak staying?"

"Across the valley at Nest Cottage!"

"Jump on the bay mare, and ride across, and say he must return
instantly--that I say so."

Tall scrambled off to the field, and in two minutes was on Poll,
the bay, bare-backed, and with only a halter by way of rein.  He
diminished down the hill.

Bathsheba watched.  So did all the rest.  Tall cantered along the
bridle-path through Sixteen Acres, Sheeplands, Middle Field, The
Flats, Cappel's Piece, shrank almost to a point, crossed the bridge,
and ascended from the valley through Springmead and Whitepits on the
other side.  The cottage to which Gabriel had retired before taking
his final departure from the locality was visible as a white spot on
the opposite hill, backed by blue firs.  Bathsheba walked up and
down.  The men entered the field and endeavoured to ease the anguish
of the dumb creatures by rubbing them.  Nothing availed.

Bathsheba continued walking.  The horse was seen descending the
hill, and the wearisome series had to be repeated in reverse order:
Whitepits, Springmead, Cappel's Piece, The Flats, Middle Field,
Sheeplands, Sixteen Acres.  She hoped Tall had had presence of mind
enough to give the mare up to Gabriel, and return himself on foot.
The rider neared them.  It was Tall.

"Oh, what folly!" said Bathsheba.

Gabriel was not visible anywhere.

"Perhaps he is already gone!" she said.

Tall came into the inclosure, and leapt off, his face tragic as
Morton's after the battle of Shrewsbury.

"Well?" said Bathsheba, unwilling to believe that her verbal
_lettre-de-cachet_ could possibly have miscarried.

"He says BEGGARS MUSTN'T BE CHOOSERS," replied Laban.

"What!" said the young farmer, opening her eyes and drawing in her
breath for an outburst.  Joseph Poorgrass retired a few steps behind
a hurdle.

"He says he shall not come onless you request en to come civilly and
in a proper manner, as becomes any 'ooman begging a favour."

"Oh, oh, that's his answer!  Where does he get his airs?  Who am I,
then, to be treated like that?  Shall I beg to a man who has begged
to me?"

Another of the flock sprang into the air, and fell dead.

The men looked grave, as if they suppressed opinion.

Bathsheba turned aside, her eyes full of tears.  The strait she was
in through pride and shrewishness could not be disguised longer: she
burst out crying bitterly; they all saw it; and she attempted no
further concealment.

"I wouldn't cry about it, miss," said William Smallbury,
compassionately.  "Why not ask him softer like?  I'm sure he'd come
then.  Gable is a true man in that way."

Bathsheba checked her grief and wiped her eyes.  "Oh, it is a wicked
cruelty to me--it is--it is!" she murmured.  "And he drives me to do
what I wouldn't; yes, he does!--Tall, come indoors."

After this collapse, not very dignified for the head of an
establishment, she went into the house, Tall at her heels.  Here she
sat down and hastily scribbled a note between the small convulsive
sobs of convalescence which follow a fit of crying as a ground-swell
follows a storm.  The note was none the less polite for being written
in a hurry.  She held it at a distance, was about to fold it, then
added these words at the bottom:--


   "DO NOT DESERT ME, GABRIEL!"


She looked a little redder in refolding it, and closed her lips,
as if thereby to suspend till too late the action of conscience in
examining whether such strategy were justifiable.  The note was
despatched as the message had been, and Bathsheba waited indoors
for the result.

It was an anxious quarter of an hour that intervened between the
messenger's departure and the sound of the horse's tramp again
outside.  She could not watch this time, but, leaning over the old
bureau at which she had written the letter, closed her eyes, as if
to keep out both hope and fear.

The case, however, was a promising one.  Gabriel was not angry: he
was simply neutral, although her first command had been so haughty.
Such imperiousness would have damned a little less beauty; and
on the other hand, such beauty would have redeemed a little less
imperiousness.

She went out when the horse was heard, and looked up.  A mounted
figure passed between her and the sky, and drew on towards the field
of sheep, the rider turning his face in receding.  Gabriel looked at
her.  It was a moment when a woman's eyes and tongue tell distinctly
opposite tales. Bathsheba looked full of gratitude, and she said:--

"Oh, Gabriel, how could you serve me so unkindly!"

Such a tenderly-shaped reproach for his previous delay was the
one speech in the language that he could pardon for not being
commendation of his readiness now.

Gabriel murmured a confused reply, and hastened on.  She knew from
the look which sentence in her note had brought him.  Bathsheba
followed to the field.

Gabriel was already among the turgid, prostrate forms.  He had flung
off his coat, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and taken from his pocket
the instrument of salvation.  It was a small tube or trochar, with
a lance passing down the inside; and Gabriel began to use it with a
dexterity that would have graced a hospital surgeon.  Passing his
hand over the sheep's left flank, and selecting the proper point, he
punctured the skin and rumen with the lance as it stood in the tube;
then he suddenly withdrew the lance, retaining the tube in its place.
A current of air rushed up the tube, forcible enough to have
extinguished a candle held at the orifice.

It has been said that mere ease after torment is delight for a time;
and the countenances of these poor creatures expressed it now.
Forty-nine operations were successfully performed.  Owing to the
great hurry necessitated by the far-gone state of some of the flock,
Gabriel missed his aim in one case, and in one only--striking wide
of the mark, and inflicting a mortal blow at once upon the suffering
ewe.  Four had died; three recovered without an operation.  The total
number of sheep which had thus strayed and injured themselves so
dangerously was fifty-seven.

When the love-led man had ceased from his labours, Bathsheba came and
looked him in the face.

"Gabriel, will you stay on with me?" she said, smiling winningly,
and not troubling to bring her lips quite together again at the end,
because there was going to be another smile soon.

"I will," said Gabriel.

And she smiled on him again.





THE GREAT BARN AND THE SHEEP-SHEARERS


Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not
making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking
good spirits when they are indispensable.  Gabriel lately, for the
first time since his prostration by misfortune, had been independent
in thought and vigorous in action to a marked extent--conditions
which, powerless without an opportunity as an opportunity without
them is barren, would have given him a sure lift upwards when the
favourable conjunction should have occurred.  But this incurable
loitering beside Bathsheba Everdene stole his time ruinously.  The
spring tides were going by without floating him off, and the neap
might soon come which could not.

It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season
culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being
all health and colour.  Every green was young, every pore was
open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice.
God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone
with the world to town.  Flossy catkins of the later kinds,
fern-sprouts like bishops' croziers, the square-headed moschatel,
the odd cuckoo-pint,--like an apoplectic saint in a niche of
malachite,--snow-white ladies'-smocks, the toothwort, approximating
to human flesh, the enchanter's night-shade, and the black-petaled
doleful-bells, were among the quainter objects of the vegetable world
in and about Weatherbury at this teeming time; and of the animal,
the metamorphosed figures of Mr. Jan Coggan, the master-shearer; the
second and third shearers, who travelled in the exercise of their
calling, and do not require definition by name; Henery Fray the
fourth shearer, Susan Tall's husband the fifth, Joseph Poorgrass
the sixth, young Cain Ball as assistant-shearer, and Gabriel Oak as
general supervisor.  None of these were clothed to any extent worth
mentioning, each appearing to have hit in the matter of raiment the
decent mean between a high and low caste Hindoo.  An angularity of
lineament, and a fixity of facial machinery in general, proclaimed
that serious work was the order of the day.

They sheared in the great barn, called for the nonce the
Shearing-barn, which on ground-plan resembled a church with
transepts.  It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church
of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity.  Whether the barn had
ever formed one of a group of conventual buildings nobody seemed to
be aware; no trace of such surroundings remained.  The vast porches
at the sides, lofty enough to admit a waggon laden to its highest
with corn in the sheaf, were spanned by heavy-pointed arches of
stone, broadly and boldly cut, whose very simplicity was the origin
of a grandeur not apparent in erections where more ornament has been
attempted.  The dusky, filmed, chestnut roof, braced and tied in
by huge collars, curves, and diagonals, was far nobler in design,
because more wealthy in material, than nine-tenths of those in our
modern churches.  Along each side wall was a range of striding
buttresses, throwing deep shadows on the spaces between them, which
were perforated by lancet openings, combining in their proportions
the precise requirements both of beauty and ventilation.

One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either
the church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the
purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with
that to which it was still applied.  Unlike and superior to either
of those two typical remnants of mediaevalism, the old barn embodied
practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time.
Here at least the spirit of the ancient builders was at one with
the spirit of the modern beholder.  Standing before this abraded
pile, the eye regarded its present usage, the mind dwelt upon its
past history, with a satisfied sense of functional continuity
throughout--a feeling almost of gratitude, and quite of pride, at the
permanence of the idea which had heaped it up.  The fact that four
centuries had neither proved it to be founded on a mistake, inspired
any hatred of its purpose, nor given rise to any reaction that had
battered it down, invested this simple grey effort of old minds with
a repose, if not a grandeur, which a too curious reflection was apt
to disturb in its ecclesiastical and military compeers.  For once
mediaevalism and modernism had a common stand-point.  The lanceolate
windows, the time-eaten archstones and chamfers, the orientation of
the axis, the misty chestnut work of the rafters, referred to no
exploded fortifying art or worn-out religious creed.  The defence and
salvation of the body by daily bread is still a study, a religion,
and a desire.

To-day the large side doors were thrown open towards the sun to admit
a bountiful light to the immediate spot of the shearers' operations,
which was the wood threshing-floor in the centre, formed of thick
oak, black with age and polished by the beating of flails for many
generations, till it had grown as slippery and as rich in hue as
the state-room floors of an Elizabethan mansion.  Here the shearers
knelt, the sun slanting in upon their bleached shirts, tanned arms,
and the polished shears they flourished, causing these to bristle
with a thousand rays strong enough to blind a weak-eyed man.  Beneath
them a captive sheep lay panting, quickening its pants as misgiving
merged in terror, till it quivered like the hot landscape outside.

This picture of to-day in its frame of four hundred years ago did
not produce that marked contrast between ancient and modern which
is implied by the contrast of date.  In comparison with cities,
Weatherbury was immutable.  The citizen's THEN is the rustic's
NOW.  In London, twenty or thirty-years ago are old times; in Paris
ten years, or five; in Weatherbury three or four score years were
included in the mere present, and nothing less than a century set a
mark on its face or tone.  Five decades hardly modified the cut of a
gaiter, the embroidery of a smock-frock, by the breadth of a hair.
Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a single phrase.  In
these Wessex nooks the busy outsider's ancient times are only old;
his old times are still new; his present is futurity.

So the barn was natural to the shearers, and the shearers were in
harmony with the barn.

The spacious ends of the building, answering ecclesiastically to nave
and chancel extremities, were fenced off with hurdles, the sheep
being all collected in a crowd within these two enclosures; and in
one angle a catching-pen was formed, in which three or four sheep
were continuously kept ready for the shearers to seize without loss
of time.  In the background, mellowed by tawny shade, were the three
women, Maryann Money, and Temperance and Soberness Miller, gathering
up the fleeces and twisting ropes of wool with a wimble for tying
them round.  They were indifferently well assisted by the old
maltster, who, when the malting season from October to April had
passed, made himself useful upon any of the bordering farmsteads.

Behind all was Bathsheba, carefully watching the men to see that
there was no cutting or wounding through carelessness, and that the
animals were shorn close.  Gabriel, who flitted and hovered under her
bright eyes like a moth, did not shear continuously, half his time
being spent in attending to the others and selecting the sheep for
them.  At the present moment he was engaged in handing round a mug of
mild liquor, supplied from a barrel in the corner, and cut pieces of
bread and cheese.

Bathsheba, after throwing a glance here, a caution there, and
lecturing one of the younger operators who had allowed his last
finished sheep to go off among the flock without re-stamping it with
her initials, came again to Gabriel, as he put down the luncheon to
drag a frightened ewe to his shear-station, flinging it over upon its
back with a dexterous twist of the arm.  He lopped off the tresses
about its head, and opened up the neck and collar, his mistress
quietly looking on.

"She blushes at the insult," murmured Bathsheba, watching the pink
flush which arose and overspread the neck and shoulders of the ewe
where they were left bare by the clicking shears--a flush which was
enviable, for its delicacy, by many queens of coteries, and would
have been creditable, for its promptness, to any woman in the world.

Poor Gabriel's soul was fed with a luxury of content by having her
over him, her eyes critically regarding his skilful shears, which
apparently were going to gather up a piece of the flesh at every
close, and yet never did so.  Like Guildenstern, Oak was happy in
that he was not over happy.  He had no wish to converse with her:
that his bright lady and himself formed one group, exclusively their
own, and containing no others in the world, was enough.

So the chatter was all on her side.  There is a loquacity that tells
nothing, which was Bathsheba's; and there is a silence which says
much: that was Gabriel's.  Full of this dim and temperate bliss, he
went on to fling the ewe over upon her other side, covering her head
with his knee, gradually running the shears line after line round her
dewlap; thence about her flank and back, and finishing over the tail.

"Well done, and done quickly!" said Bathsheba, looking at her watch
as the last snip resounded.

"How long, miss?" said Gabriel, wiping his brow.

"Three-and-twenty minutes and a half since you took the first lock
from its forehead.  It is the first time that I have ever seen one
done in less than half an hour."

The clean, sleek creature arose from its fleece--how perfectly
like Aphrodite rising from the foam should have been seen to be
realized--looking startled and shy at the loss of its garment, which
lay on the floor in one soft cloud, united throughout, the portion
visible being the inner surface only, which, never before exposed,
was white as snow, and without flaw or blemish of the minutest kind.

"Cain Ball!"

"Yes, Mister Oak; here I be!"

Cainy now runs forward with the tar-pot.  "B. E." is newly stamped
upon the shorn skin, and away the simple dam leaps, panting, over the
board into the shirtless flock outside.  Then up comes Maryann;
throws the loose locks into the middle of the fleece, rolls it up,
and carries it into the background as three-and-a-half pounds of
unadulterated warmth for the winter enjoyment of persons unknown and
far away, who will, however, never experience the superlative comfort
derivable from the wool as it here exists, new and pure--before
the unctuousness of its nature whilst in a living state has dried,
stiffened, and been washed out--rendering it just now as superior
to anything WOOLLEN as cream is superior to milk-and-water.

But heartless circumstance could not leave entire Gabriel's happiness
of this morning.  The rams, old ewes, and two-shear ewes had duly
undergone their stripping, and the men were proceeding with the
shear-lings and hogs, when Oak's belief that she was going to stand
pleasantly by and time him through another performance was painfully
interrupted by Farmer Boldwood's appearance in the extremest corner
of the barn.  Nobody seemed to have perceived his entry, but there he
certainly was.  Boldwood always carried with him a social atmosphere
of his own, which everybody felt who came near him; and the talk,
which Bathsheba's presence had somewhat suppressed, was now totally
suspended.

He crossed over towards Bathsheba, who turned to greet him with a
carriage of perfect ease.  He spoke to her in low tones, and she
instinctively modulated her own to the same pitch, and her voice
ultimately even caught the inflection of his.  She was far from
having a wish to appear mysteriously connected with him; but woman at
the impressionable age gravitates to the larger body not only in her
choice of words, which is apparent every day, but even in her shades
of tone and humour, when the influence is great.

What they conversed about was not audible to Gabriel, who was too
independent to get near, though too concerned to disregard.  The
issue of their dialogue was the taking of her hand by the courteous
farmer to help her over the spreading-board into the bright June
sunlight outside.  Standing beside the sheep already shorn, they went
on talking again.  Concerning the flock?  Apparently not. Gabriel
theorized, not without truth, that in quiet discussion of any matter
within reach of the speakers' eyes, these are usually fixed upon
it.  Bathsheba demurely regarded a contemptible straw lying upon the
ground, in a way which suggested less ovine criticism than womanly
embarrassment.  She became more or less red in the cheek, the blood
wavering in uncertain flux and reflux over the sensitive space
between ebb and flood.  Gabriel sheared on, constrained and sad.

She left Boldwood's side, and he walked up and down alone for nearly
a quarter of an hour.  Then she reappeared in her new riding-habit of
myrtle green, which fitted her to the waist as a rind fits its fruit;
and young Bob Coggan led on her mare, Boldwood fetching his own horse
from the tree under which it had been tied.

Oak's eyes could not forsake them; and in endeavouring to continue
his shearing at the same time that he watched Boldwood's manner,
he snipped the sheep in the groin.  The animal plunged; Bathsheba
instantly gazed towards it, and saw the blood.

"Oh, Gabriel!" she exclaimed, with severe remonstrance, "you who are
so strict with the other men--see what you are doing yourself!"

To an outsider there was not much to complain of in this remark; but
to Oak, who knew Bathsheba to be well aware that she herself was the
cause of the poor ewe's wound, because she had wounded the ewe's
shearer in a still more vital part, it had a sting which the abiding
sense of his inferiority to both herself and Boldwood was not
calculated to heal.  But a manly resolve to recognize boldly that he
had no longer a lover's interest in her, helped him occasionally to
conceal a feeling.

"Bottle!" he shouted, in an unmoved voice of routine.  Cainy Ball ran
up, the wound was anointed, and the shearing continued.

Boldwood gently tossed Bathsheba into the saddle, and before they
turned away she again spoke out to Oak with the same dominative and
tantalizing graciousness.

"I am going now to see Mr. Boldwood's Leicesters.  Take my place in
the barn, Gabriel, and keep the men carefully to their work."

The horses' heads were put about, and they trotted away.

Boldwood's deep attachment was a matter of great interest among all
around him; but, after having been pointed out for so many years
as the perfect exemplar of thriving bachelorship, his lapse was an
anticlimax somewhat resembling that of St. John Long's death by
consumption in the midst of his proofs that it was not a fatal
disease.

"That means matrimony," said Temperance Miller, following them out of
sight with her eyes.

"I reckon that's the size o't," said Coggan, working along without
looking up.

"Well, better wed over the mixen than over the moor," said Laban
Tall, turning his sheep.

Henery Fray spoke, exhibiting miserable eyes at the same time: "I
don't see why a maid should take a husband when she's bold enough
to fight her own battles, and don't want a home; for 'tis keeping
another woman out.  But let it be, for 'tis a pity he and she should
trouble two houses."

As usual with decided characters, Bathsheba invariably provoked the
criticism of individuals like Henery Fray.  Her emblazoned fault was
to be too pronounced in her objections, and not sufficiently overt in
her likings.  We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb,
but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are
known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their
dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no
attribute at all.

Henery continued in a more complaisant mood: "I once hinted my mind
to her on a few things, as nearly as a battered frame dared to do so
to such a froward piece.  You all know, neighbours, what a man I be,
and how I come down with my powerful words when my pride is boiling
wi' scarn?"

"We do, we do, Henery."

"So I said, 'Mistress Everdene, there's places empty, and there's
gifted men willing; but the spite'--no, not the spite--I didn't say
spite--'but the villainy of the contrarikind,' I said (meaning
womankind), 'keeps 'em out.'  That wasn't too strong for her, say?"

"Passably well put."

"Yes; and I would have said it, had death and salvation overtook me
for it.  Such is my spirit when I have a mind."

"A true man, and proud as a lucifer."

"You see the artfulness?  Why, 'twas about being baily really; but
I didn't put it so plain that she could understand my meaning, so I
could lay it on all the stronger.  That was my depth! ... However,
let her marry an she will.  Perhaps 'tis high time.  I believe Farmer
Boldwood kissed her behind the spear-bed at the sheep-washing t'other
day--that I do."

"What a lie!" said Gabriel.

"Ah, neighbour Oak--how'st know?" said, Henery, mildly.

"Because she told me all that passed," said Oak, with a pharisaical
sense that he was not as other shearers in this matter.

"Ye have a right to believe it," said Henery, with dudgeon; "a very
true right.  But I mid see a little distance into things!  To be
long-headed enough for a baily's place is a poor mere trifle--yet
a trifle more than nothing.  However, I look round upon life quite
cool.  Do you heed me, neighbours?  My words, though made as simple
as I can, mid be rather deep for some heads."

"O yes, Henery, we quite heed ye."

"A strange old piece, goodmen--whirled about from here to yonder, as
if I were nothing!  A little warped, too.  But I have my depths; ha,
and even my great depths!  I might gird at a certain shepherd, brain
to brain.  But no--O no!"

"A strange old piece, ye say!" interposed the maltster, in a
querulous voice.  "At the same time ye be no old man worth naming--no
old man at all.  Yer teeth bain't half gone yet; and what's a old
man's standing if so be his teeth bain't gone?  Weren't I stale in
wedlock afore ye were out of arms?  'Tis a poor thing to be sixty,
when there's people far past four-score--a boast weak as water."

It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink minor differences
when the maltster had to be pacified.

"Weak as water! yes," said Jan Coggan. "Malter, we feel ye to be a
wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it."

"Nobody," said Joseph Poorgrass.  "Ye be a very rare old spectacle,
malter, and we all admire ye for that gift."

"Ay, and as a young man, when my senses were in prosperity, I was
likewise liked by a good-few who knowed me," said the maltster.

"'Ithout doubt you was--'ithout doubt."

The bent and hoary man was satisfied, and so apparently was Henery
Fray.  That matters should continue pleasant Maryann spoke, who, what
with her brown complexion, and the working wrapper of rusty linsey,
had at present the mellow hue of an old sketch in oils--notably some
of Nicholas Poussin's:--

"Do anybody know of a crooked man, or a lame, or any second-hand
fellow at all that would do for poor me?" said Maryann.  "A perfect
one I don't expect to get at my time of life.  If I could hear of
such a thing twould do me more good than toast and ale."

Coggan furnished a suitable reply.  Oak went on with his shearing,
and said not another word.  Pestilent moods had come, and teased
away his quiet.  Bathsheba had shown indications of anointing him
above his fellows by installing him as the bailiff that the farm
imperatively required.  He did not covet the post relatively to the
farm: in relation to herself, as beloved by him and unmarried to
another, he had coveted it.  His readings of her seemed now to be
vapoury and indistinct.  His lecture to her was, he thought, one of
the absurdest mistakes.  Far from coquetting with Boldwood, she had
trifled with himself in thus feigning that she had trifled with
another.  He was inwardly convinced that, in accordance with the
anticipations of his easy-going and worse-educated comrades, that day
would see Boldwood the accepted husband of Miss Everdene.  Gabriel
at this time of his life had out-grown the instinctive dislike which
every Christian boy has for reading the Bible, perusing it now
quite frequently, and he inwardly said, "'I find more bitter than
death the woman whose heart is snares and nets!'" This was mere
exclamation--the froth of the storm.  He adored Bathsheba just the
same.

"We workfolk shall have some lordly junketing to-night," said Cainy
Ball, casting forth his thoughts in a new direction.  "This morning I
see 'em making the great puddens in the milking-pails--lumps of fat
as big as yer thumb, Mister Oak!  I've never seed such splendid large
knobs of fat before in the days of my life--they never used to be
bigger then a horse-bean.  And there was a great black crock upon the
brandish with his legs a-sticking out, but I don't know what was in
within."

"And there's two bushels of biffins for apple-pies," said Maryann.

"Well, I hope to do my duty by it all," said Joseph Poorgrass, in a
pleasant, masticating manner of anticipation.  "Yes; victuals and
drink is a cheerful thing, and gives nerves to the nerveless, if the
form of words may be used.  'Tis the gospel of the body, without
which we perish, so to speak it."





EVENTIDE--A SECOND DECLARATION


For the shearing-supper a long table was placed on the grass-plot
beside the house, the end of the table being thrust over the sill
of the wide parlour window and a foot or two into the room.  Miss
Everdene sat inside the window, facing down the table.  She was
thus at the head without mingling with the men.

This evening Bathsheba was unusually excited, her red cheeks and lips
contrasting lustrously with the mazy skeins of her shadowy hair.  She
seemed to expect assistance, and the seat at the bottom of the table
was at her request left vacant until after they had begun the meal.
She then asked Gabriel to take the place and the duties appertaining
to that end, which he did with great readiness.

At this moment Mr. Boldwood came in at the gate, and crossed the
green to Bathsheba at the window.  He apologized for his lateness:
his arrival was evidently by arrangement.

"Gabriel," said she, "will you move again, please, and let Mr.
Boldwood come there?"

Oak moved in silence back to his original seat.

The gentleman-farmer was dressed in cheerful style, in a new coat
and white waistcoat, quite contrasting with his usual sober suits of
grey.  Inwardy, too, he was blithe, and consequently chatty to an
exceptional degree.  So also was Bathsheba now that he had come,
though the uninvited presence of Pennyways, the bailiff who had been
dismissed for theft, disturbed her equanimity for a while.

Supper being ended, Coggan began on his own private account, without
reference to listeners:--


   I've lost my love, and I care not,
   I've lost my love, and I care not;
     I shall soon have another
     That's better than t'other;
   I've lost my love, and I care not.


This lyric, when concluded, was received with a silently appreciative
gaze at the table, implying that the performance, like a work by
those established authors who are independent of notices in the
papers, was a well-known delight which required no applause.

"Now, Master Poorgrass, your song!" said Coggan.

"I be all but in liquor, and the gift is wanting in me," said Joseph,
diminishing himself.

"Nonsense; wou'st never be so ungrateful, Joseph--never!" said
Coggan, expressing hurt feelings by an inflection of voice.  "And
mistress is looking hard at ye, as much as to say, 'Sing at once,
Joseph Poorgrass.'"

"Faith, so she is; well, I must suffer it! ... Just eye my features,
and see if the tell-tale blood overheats me much, neighbours?"

"No, yer blushes be quite reasonable," said Coggan.

"I always tries to keep my colours from rising when a beauty's eyes
get fixed on me," said Joseph, differently; "but if so be 'tis willed
they do, they must."

"Now, Joseph, your song, please," said Bathsheba, from the window.

"Well, really, ma'am," he replied, in a yielding tone, "I don't know
what to say.  It would be a poor plain ballet of my own composure."

"Hear, hear!" said the supper-party.

Poorgrass, thus assured, trilled forth a flickering yet commendable
piece of sentiment, the tune of which consisted of the key-note and
another, the latter being the sound chiefly dwelt upon.  This was so
successful that he rashly plunged into a second in the same breath,
after a few false starts:--


   I sow'-ed th'-e .....
   I sow'-ed .....
   I sow'-ed th'-e seeds' of' love',
      I-it was' all' i'-in the'-e spring',
   I-in A'-pril', Ma'-ay, a'-nd sun'-ny' June',
      When sma'-all bi'-irds they' do' sing.


"Well put out of hand," said Coggan, at the end of the verse.  "'They
do sing' was a very taking paragraph."

"Ay; and there was a pretty place at 'seeds of love.' and 'twas well
heaved out.  Though 'love' is a nasty high corner when a man's voice
is getting crazed.  Next verse, Master Poorgrass."

But during this rendering young Bob Coggan exhibited one of those
anomalies which will afflict little people when other persons are
particularly serious: in trying to check his laughter, he pushed down
his throat as much of the tablecloth as he could get hold of, when,
after continuing hermetically sealed for a short time, his mirth
burst out through his nose.  Joseph perceived it, and with hectic
cheeks of indignation instantly ceased singing.  Coggan boxed Bob's
ears immediately.

"Go on, Joseph--go on, and never mind the young scamp," said Coggan.
"'Tis a very catching ballet.  Now then again--the next bar; I'll
help ye to flourish up the shrill notes where yer wind is rather
wheezy:--


   "Oh the wi'-il-lo'-ow tree' will' twist',
   And the wil'-low' tre'-ee wi'-ill twine'."


But the singer could not be set going again.  Bob Coggan was sent
home for his ill manners, and tranquility was restored by Jacob
Smallbury, who volunteered a ballad as inclusive and interminable
as that with which the worthy toper old Silenus amused on a similar
occasion the swains Chromis and Mnasylus, and other jolly dogs of
his day.

It was still the beaming time of evening, though night was stealthily
making itself visible low down upon the ground, the western lines of
light raking the earth without alighting upon it to any extent, or
illuminating the dead levels at all.  The sun had crept round the
tree as a last effort before death, and then began to sink, the
shearers' lower parts becoming steeped in embrowning twilight, whilst
their heads and shoulders were still enjoying day, touched with a
yellow of self-sustained brilliancy that seemed inherent rather than
acquired.

The sun went down in an ochreous mist; but they sat, and talked on,
and grew as merry as the gods in Homer's heaven.  Bathsheba still
remained enthroned inside the window, and occupied herself in
knitting, from which she sometimes looked up to view the fading scene
outside.  The slow twilight expanded and enveloped them completely
before the signs of moving were shown.

Gabriel suddenly missed Farmer Boldwood from his place at the bottom
of the table.  How long he had been gone Oak did not know; but he
had apparently withdrawn into the encircling dusk.  Whilst he was
thinking of this, Liddy brought candles into the back part of the
room overlooking the shearers, and their lively new flames shone down
the table and over the men, and dispersed among the green shadows
behind.  Bathsheba's form, still in its original position, was now
again distinct between their eyes and the light, which revealed that
Boldwood had gone inside the room, and was sitting near her.

Next came the question of the evening.  Would Miss Everdene sing to
them the song she always sang so charmingly--"The Banks of Allan
Water"--before they went home?

After a moment's consideration Bathsheba assented, beckoning to
Gabriel, who hastened up into the coveted atmosphere.

"Have you brought your flute?" she whispered.

"Yes, miss."

"Play to my singing, then."

She stood up in the window-opening, facing the men, the candles
behind her, Gabriel on her right hand, immediately outside the
sash-frame.  Boldwood had drawn up on her left, within the room.
Her singing was soft and rather tremulous at first, but it soon
swelled to a steady clearness.  Subsequent events caused one of the
verses to be remembered for many months, and even years, by more
than one of those who were gathered there:--


   For his bride a soldier sought her,
     And a winning tongue had he:
   On the banks of Allan Water
     None was gay as she!


In addition to the dulcet piping of Gabriel's flute, Boldwood
supplied a bass in his customary profound voice, uttering his notes
so softly, however, as to abstain entirely from making anything like
an ordinary duet of the song; they rather formed a rich unexplored
shadow, which threw her tones into relief.  The shearers reclined
against each other as at suppers in the early ages of the world, and
so silent and absorbed were they that her breathing could almost be
heard between the bars; and at the end of the ballad, when the last
tone loitered on to an inexpressible close, there arose that buzz of
pleasure which is the attar of applause.

It is scarcely necessary to state that Gabriel could not avoid noting
the farmer's bearing to-night towards their entertainer.  Yet there
was nothing exceptional in his actions beyond what appertained to
his time of performing them.  It was when the rest were all looking
away that Boldwood observed her; when they regarded her he turned
aside; when they thanked or praised he was silent; when they
were inattentive he murmured his thanks.  The meaning lay in the
difference between actions, none of which had any meaning of itself;
and the necessity of being jealous, which lovers are troubled with,
did not lead Oak to underestimate these signs.

Bathsheba then wished them good-night, withdrew from the window, and
retired to the back part of the room, Boldwood thereupon closing the
sash and the shutters, and remaining inside with her.  Oak wandered
away under the quiet and scented trees.  Recovering from the softer
impressions produced by Bathsheba's voice, the shearers rose to
leave, Coggan turning to Pennyways as he pushed back the bench to
pass out:--

"I like to give praise where praise is due, and the man deserves
it--that 'a do so," he remarked, looking at the worthy thief, as if
he were the masterpiece of some world-renowned artist.

"I'm sure I should never have believed it if we hadn't proved it, so
to allude," hiccupped Joseph Poorgrass, "that every cup, every one of
the best knives and forks, and every empty bottle be in their place
as perfect now as at the beginning, and not one stole at all."

"I'm sure I don't deserve half the praise you give me," said the
virtuous thief, grimly.

"Well, I'll say this for Pennyways," added Coggan, "that whenever he
do really make up his mind to do a noble thing in the shape of a good
action, as I could see by his face he did to-night afore sitting
down, he's generally able to carry it out.  Yes, I'm proud to say,
neighbours, that he's stole nothing at all."

"Well, 'tis an honest deed, and we thank ye for it, Pennyways," said
Joseph; to which opinion the remainder of the company subscribed
unanimously.

At this time of departure, when nothing more was visible of the
inside of the parlour than a thin and still chink of light between
the shutters, a passionate scene was in course of enactment there.

Miss Everdene and Boldwood were alone.  Her cheeks had lost a
great deal of their healthful fire from the very seriousness of
her position; but her eye was bright with the excitement of a
triumph--though it was a triumph which had rather been contemplated
than desired.

She was standing behind a low arm-chair, from which she had just
risen, and he was kneeling in it--inclining himself over its back
towards her, and holding her hand in both his own.  His body moved
restlessly, and it was with what Keats daintily calls a too happy
happiness.  This unwonted abstraction by love of all dignity from
a man of whom it had ever seemed the chief component, was, in its
distressing incongruity, a pain to her which quenched much of the
pleasure she derived from the proof that she was idolized.

"I will try to love you," she was saying, in a trembling voice quite
unlike her usual self-confidence.  "And if I can believe in any way
that I shall make you a good wife I shall indeed be willing to marry
you.  But, Mr. Boldwood, hesitation on so high a matter is honourable
in any woman, and I don't want to give a solemn promise to-night.  I
would rather ask you to wait a few weeks till I can see my situation
better.

"But you have every reason to believe that THEN--"

"I have every reason to hope that at the end of the five or six
weeks, between this time and harvest, that you say you are going to
be away from home, I shall be able to promise to be your wife," she
said, firmly.  "But remember this distinctly, I don't promise yet."

"It is enough; I don't ask more.  I can wait on those dear words.
And now, Miss Everdene, good-night!"

"Good-night," she said, graciously--almost tenderly; and Boldwood
withdrew with a serene smile.

Bathsheba knew more of him now; he had entirely bared his heart
before her, even until he had almost worn in her eyes the sorry look
of a grand bird without the feathers that make it grand.  She had
been awe-struck at her past temerity, and was struggling to make
amends without thinking whether the sin quite deserved the penalty
she was schooling herself to pay.  To have brought all this about her
ears was terrible; but after a while the situation was not without
a fearful joy.  The facility with which even the most timid women
sometimes acquire a relish for the dreadful when that is amalgamated
with a little triumph, is marvellous.




In the interior of a church, several women watch a soldier enter and realize that a wedding is about to occur. As he waits for his bride to arrive, the clock strikes the quarter hour, and the women titter. Finally, after a full hour of waiting, the soldier leaves the church humiliated; just at that moment his bride runs across the square to meet him. She has been waiting at All Souls' rather than at All Saints' and has just realized her mistake. The two are Fanny Robin and Sergeant Troy. She asks him when they can reschedule their wedding, but he refuses to set a date. In the market place again, Boldwood sees Bathsheba Everdene as if for the first time. He finds her unbelievably beautiful and asks someone nearby whether she is generally considered handsome. Bathsheba notices his attention and regrets having sent the valentine. She decides to explain and apologize, but she realizes that he might misread her initiation of conversation as a sign of romantic interest. Chapter 18 gives us a little background about Boldwood. He is a confirmed bachelor, wealthy and well established at the neighboring farm. Hardy warns us that Boldwood's is not an "ordinary nature": the "positives and negatives" in his character balance only precariously, and he plunges easily into extreme emotions. The narrative focuses in on Bathsheba and Gabriel as they watch Boldwood from afar; Gabriel sees Bathsheba blush, and, remembering the valentine, he begins to suspect something between the pair. At a village-wide sheep-washing, Boldwood approaches Bathsheba, who tries to avoid him. He follows her off toward the river, and when they are alone, he proposes to her. She refuses, and he continues to try to persuade her, finally getting her to permit him to propose again later. Chapter 20 charts Bathsheba's reaction to Boldwood's offer. Hardy tells us that Bathsheba feels no "wish whatever for the married state in the abstract." She also enjoys the independence of running a farm on her own. As she is considering the possibility, she approaches Gabriel and begins to ask him about what the farm workers had thought of her appearing together with Boldwood. The two of them quarrel when she asks his opinion of her conduct concerning the bachelor, and he tells her "it is unworthy of any thoughtful, comely woman." She then accuses him of being jealous, but he tells her that he has long ago given up all thoughts marrying her. Finally, she orders him to leave the farm, and he agrees. Only one day after Gabriel's departure, the farm workers announce that another disaster has occurred--the sheep have eaten young clover, and their stomachs are expanding fatally. Only Gabriel knows how to perform the operation that can save them. Bathsheba sends him an order to come back. He replies by messenger that she will have to ask him properly, and she does so, writing, "Do not desert me, Gabriel!" He returns and saves all the sheep but one. Bathsheba regrets firing him, and he agrees to come back to the farm. During the annual sheep-shearing, the workers discuss Bathsheba and Boldwood, wondering if they will marry, and at the sheep-shearing supper, Bathsheba allows Boldwood to sit with her inside the house. At the very end of the supper, they are left alone together, and Bathsheba tells him that she will try to love him. She finally almost promises herself to him, saying that she may feel ready to marry by harvest-time.
Commentary This section of the novel sets up a number of different couples--Fanny and Troy, Bathsheba and Boldwood, and Bathsheba and Gabriel--and analyzes the dynamics of each. Many parallels can be drawn; for instance, much as a chance circumstance of Bathsheba deciding to send the valentine to Boldwood changes his life forever, Fanny's simple mistake about the church means that Troy refuses to marry her. By setting up several sets of relationships, Hardy explores the way chance generates a variety of fates from what were initially parallel circumstances. Hardy plays upon the traditional novel by choosing a heroine who has no abstract desire to get married. In some ways, Far From the Madding Crowd is a traditional novel of marriage in that a heroine is given a choice of two or more suitors, and at the end of the novel, she makes the "correct" choice. Yet a novel such as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility focuses on a character who wants to find a husband; in contrast, Bathsheba's economic and emotional independence allow her the choice of not marrying, and she has an interest in maintaining the farm and preserving her freedom. Many of Hardy's female characters show similar independence and interest in work or scholarship. The scenes of sheep-shearing and sheep-washing present the farm workers as a kind of Greek chorus and also help to create a sense of the rituals built around the seasons of the farm.