finished_summaries/shmoop/Far From the Madding Crowd/section_45_part_0.txt
Far From the Madding Crowd.chapter 46
chapter 46
{"name": "Chapter 46", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-46", "summary": "Note: we're not sure why Hardy decided to spell \"gargoyle\" in a weird way in this title. Hardy spends this entire chapter talking about a stone gargoyle that's sitting on one of the ledges of the cemetery building that Sergeant Troy has just fallen asleep in. As Troy sleeps and the rain increases, water starts to shoot out of the gargoyle's mouth, since the statue is used as a rainspout. Usually, there are some stones at the bottom of the building to direct the water away from the graves. But since these stones were displaced the previous summer, there's nothing to keep the water from flowing directly over the graves. Sadly, the water totally fills up Fanny's open grave and ruins all of the flowers that Sergeant Troy has painstakingly planted over the past few hours. When Troy wakes up, he takes the ruined flowers as a sign that he should stop trying to be a nice person. As you can imagine, it doesn't take much to discourage this guy from trying to be a nice person. He decides to leave Weathbury without telling anyone. Now we look in on Bathsheba, who hasn't slept well throughout the night. Huh. We wonder why. Liddy informs Bathsheba that Troy was seen walking the road toward Budmouth early in the morning. Bathsheba gets up to go look at Fanny's grave. Sure enough, the new tombstone that's been brought to town has been for her. On the stone, Bathsheba reads, \"Erected by Francis Troy in Beloved Memory of Fanny Robin.\" At the grave, she meets up with Gabriel Oak, who now realizes that Bathsheba knows everything about Sergeant Troy and Fanny. With his help, Bathsheba starts replanting all of the nice flowers that Troy gave up on.", "analysis": ""}


THE GURGOYLE: ITS DOINGS


The tower of Weatherbury Church was a square erection of
fourteenth-century date, having two stone gurgoyles on each of the
four faces of its parapet.  Of these eight carved protuberances
only two at this time continued to serve the purpose of their
erection--that of spouting the water from the lead roof within.  One
mouth in each front had been closed by bygone church-wardens as
superfluous, and two others were broken away and choked--a matter not
of much consequence to the wellbeing of the tower, for the two mouths
which still remained open and active were gaping enough to do all the
work.

It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the
vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits
of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic
art there is no disputing the proposition.  Weatherbury tower was a
somewhat early instance of the use of an ornamental parapet in parish
as distinct from cathedral churches, and the gurgoyles, which are the
necessary correlatives of a parapet, were exceptionally prominent--of
the boldest cut that the hand could shape, and of the most original
design that a human brain could conceive.  There was, so to speak,
that symmetry in their distortion which is less the characteristic
of British than of Continental grotesques of the period.  All the
eight were different from each other.  A beholder was convinced that
nothing on earth could be more hideous than those he saw on the north
side until he went round to the south.  Of the two on this latter
face, only that at the south-eastern corner concerns the story.  It
was too human to be called like a dragon, too impish to be like a
man, too animal to be like a fiend, and not enough like a bird to be
called a griffin.  This horrible stone entity was fashioned as if
covered with a wrinkled hide; it had short, erect ears, eyes starting
from their sockets, and its fingers and hands were seizing the
corners of its mouth, which they thus seemed to pull open to give
free passage to the water it vomited.  The lower row of teeth was
quite washed away, though the upper still remained.  Here and thus,
jutting a couple of feet from the wall against which its feet rested
as a support, the creature had for four hundred years laughed at the
surrounding landscape, voicelessly in dry weather, and in wet with a
gurgling and snorting sound.

Troy slept on in the porch, and the rain increased outside. Presently
the gurgoyle spat.  In due time a small stream began to trickle
through the seventy feet of aerial space between its mouth and
the ground, which the water-drops smote like duckshot in their
accelerated velocity.  The stream thickened in substance, and
increased in power, gradually spouting further and yet further from
the side of the tower.  When the rain fell in a steady and ceaseless
torrent the stream dashed downward in volumes.

We follow its course to the ground at this point of time. The end of
the liquid parabola has come forward from the wall, has advanced over
the plinth mouldings, over a heap of stones, over the marble border,
into the midst of Fanny Robin's grave.

The force of the stream had, until very lately, been received upon
some loose stones spread thereabout, which had acted as a shield to
the soil under the onset.  These during the summer had been cleared
from the ground, and there was now nothing to resist the down-fall
but the bare earth.  For several years the stream had not spouted
so far from the tower as it was doing on this night, and such a
contingency had been over-looked.  Sometimes this obscure corner
received no inhabitant for the space of two or three years, and
then it was usually but a pauper, a poacher, or other sinner of
undignified sins.

The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle's jaws directed all its
vengeance into the grave.  The rich tawny mould was stirred into
motion, and boiled like chocolate.  The water accumulated and washed
deeper down, and the roar of the pool thus formed spread into the
night as the head and chief among other noises of the kind created
by the deluging rain.  The flowers so carefully planted by Fanny's
repentant lover began to move and writhe in their bed.  The
winter-violets turned slowly upside down, and became a mere mat of
mud.  Soon the snowdrop and other bulbs danced in the boiling mass
like ingredients in a cauldron.  Plants of the tufted species were
loosened, rose to the surface, and floated off.

Troy did not awake from his comfortless sleep till it was broad day.
Not having been in bed for two nights his shoulders felt stiff, his
feet tender, and his head heavy.  He remembered his position, arose,
shivered, took the spade, and again went out.

The rain had quite ceased, and the sun was shining through the
green, brown, and yellow leaves, now sparkling and varnished by the
raindrops to the brightness of similar effects in the landscapes of
Ruysdael and Hobbema, and full of all those infinite beauties that
arise from the union of water and colour with high lights.  The air
was rendered so transparent by the heavy fall of rain that the autumn
hues of the middle distance were as rich as those near at hand, and
the remote fields intercepted by the angle of the tower appeared in
the same plane as the tower itself.

He entered the gravel path which would take him behind the tower.
The path, instead of being stony as it had been the night before, was
browned over with a thin coating of mud.  At one place in the path
he saw a tuft of stringy roots washed white and clean as a bundle
of tendons.  He picked it up--surely it could not be one of the
primroses he had planted?  He saw a bulb, another, and another as
he advanced.  Beyond doubt they were the crocuses.  With a face of
perplexed dismay Troy turned the corner and then beheld the wreck
the stream had made.

The pool upon the grave had soaked away into the ground, and in its
place was a hollow.  The disturbed earth was washed over the grass
and pathway in the guise of the brown mud he had already seen, and it
spotted the marble tombstone with the same stains.  Nearly all the
flowers were washed clean out of the ground, and they lay, roots
upwards, on the spots whither they had been splashed by the stream.

Troy's brow became heavily contracted.  He set his teeth closely,
and his compressed lips moved as those of one in great pain.  This
singular accident, by a strange confluence of emotions in him, was
felt as the sharpest sting of all.  Troy's face was very expressive,
and any observer who had seen him now would hardly have believed him
to be a man who had laughed, and sung, and poured love-trifles into
a woman's ear.  To curse his miserable lot was at first his impulse,
but even that lowest stage of rebellion needed an activity whose
absence was necessarily antecedent to the existence of the morbid
misery which wrung him.  The sight, coming as it did, superimposed
upon the other dark scenery of the previous days, formed a sort of
climax to the whole panorama, and it was more than he could endure.
Sanguine by nature, Troy had a power of eluding grief by simply
adjourning it.  He could put off the consideration of any particular
spectre till the matter had become old and softened by time.  The
planting of flowers on Fanny's grave had been perhaps but a species
of elusion of the primary grief, and now it was as if his intention
had been known and circumvented.

Almost for the first time in his life, Troy, as he stood by this
dismantled grave, wished himself another man.  It is seldom that a
person with much animal spirit does not feel that the fact of his
life being his own is the one qualification which singles it out as a
more hopeful life than that of others who may actually resemble him
in every particular.  Troy had felt, in his transient way, hundreds
of times, that he could not envy other people their condition,
because the possession of that condition would have necessitated a
different personality, when he desired no other than his own.  He had
not minded the peculiarities of his birth, the vicissitudes of his
life, the meteor-like uncertainty of all that related to him, because
these appertained to the hero of his story, without whom there would
have been no story at all for him; and it seemed to be only in the
nature of things that matters would right themselves at some proper
date and wind up well.  This very morning the illusion completed its
disappearance, and, as it were, all of a sudden, Troy hated himself.
The suddenness was probably more apparent than real.  A coral reef
which just comes short of the ocean surface is no more to the horizon
than if it had never been begun, and the mere finishing stroke is
what often appears to create an event which has long been potentially
an accomplished thing.

He stood and meditated--a miserable man.  Whither should he
go?  "He that is accursed, let him be accursed still," was the
pitiless anathema written in this spoliated effort of his new-born
solicitousness.  A man who has spent his primal strength in
journeying in one direction has not much spirit left for reversing
his course.  Troy had, since yesterday, faintly reversed his; but the
merest opposition had disheartened him.  To turn about would have
been hard enough under the greatest providential encouragement; but
to find that Providence, far from helping him into a new course, or
showing any wish that he might adopt one, actually jeered his first
trembling and critical attempt in that kind, was more than nature
could bear.

He slowly withdrew from the grave.  He did not attempt to fill up the
hole, replace the flowers, or do anything at all.  He simply threw up
his cards and forswore his game for that time and always.  Going out
of the churchyard silently and unobserved--none of the villagers
having yet risen--he passed down some fields at the back, and emerged
just as secretly upon the high road.  Shortly afterwards he had gone
from the village.

Meanwhile, Bathsheba remained a voluntary prisoner in the attic.  The
door was kept locked, except during the entries and exits of Liddy,
for whom a bed had been arranged in a small adjoining room.  The
light of Troy's lantern in the churchyard was noticed about ten
o'clock by the maid-servant, who casually glanced from the window in
that direction whilst taking her supper, and she called Bathsheba's
attention to it.  They looked curiously at the phenomenon for a time,
until Liddy was sent to bed.

Bathsheba did not sleep very heavily that night.  When her attendant
was unconscious and softly breathing in the next room, the mistress
of the house was still looking out of the window at the faint gleam
spreading from among the trees--not in a steady shine, but blinking
like a revolving coast-light, though this appearance failed to
suggest to her that a person was passing and repassing in front
of it.  Bathsheba sat here till it began to rain, and the light
vanished, when she withdrew to lie restlessly in her bed and re-enact
in a worn mind the lurid scene of yesternight.

Almost before the first faint sign of dawn appeared she arose again,
and opened the window to obtain a full breathing of the new morning
air, the panes being now wet with trembling tears left by the night
rain, each one rounded with a pale lustre caught from primrose-hued
slashes through a cloud low down in the awakening sky.  From the
trees came the sound of steady dripping upon the drifted leaves under
them, and from the direction of the church she could hear another
noise--peculiar, and not intermittent like the rest, the purl of
water falling into a pool.

Liddy knocked at eight o'clock, and Bathsheba un-locked the door.

"What a heavy rain we've had in the night, ma'am!" said Liddy, when
her inquiries about breakfast had been made.

"Yes, very heavy."

"Did you hear the strange noise from the churchyard?"

"I heard one strange noise.  I've been thinking it must have been the
water from the tower spouts."

"Well, that's what the shepherd was saying, ma'am.  He's now gone on
to see."

"Oh!  Gabriel has been here this morning!"

"Only just looked in in passing--quite in his old way, which I
thought he had left off lately.  But the tower spouts used to spatter
on the stones, and we are puzzled, for this was like the boiling of a
pot."

Not being able to read, think, or work, Bathsheba asked Liddy to stay
and breakfast with her.  The tongue of the more childish woman still
ran upon recent events.  "Are you going across to the church, ma'am?"
she asked.

"Not that I know of," said Bathsheba.

"I thought you might like to go and see where they have put Fanny.
The trees hide the place from your window."

Bathsheba had all sorts of dreads about meeting her husband.  "Has
Mr. Troy been in to-night?" she said.

"No, ma'am; I think he's gone to Budmouth."

Budmouth!  The sound of the word carried with it a much diminished
perspective of him and his deeds; there were thirteen miles interval
betwixt them now.  She hated questioning Liddy about her husband's
movements, and indeed had hitherto sedulously avoided doing so; but
now all the house knew that there had been some dreadful disagreement
between them, and it was futile to attempt disguise.  Bathsheba had
reached a stage at which people cease to have any appreciative regard
for public opinion.

"What makes you think he has gone there?" she said.

"Laban Tall saw him on the Budmouth road this morning before
breakfast."

Bathsheba was momentarily relieved of that wayward heaviness of the
past twenty-four hours which had quenched the vitality of youth in
her without substituting the philosophy of maturer years, and she
resolved to go out and walk a little way.  So when breakfast was
over, she put on her bonnet, and took a direction towards the church.
It was nine o'clock, and the men having returned to work again from
their first meal, she was not likely to meet many of them in the
road.  Knowing that Fanny had been laid in the reprobates' quarter
of the graveyard, called in the parish "behind church," which was
invisible from the road, it was impossible to resist the impulse to
enter and look upon a spot which, from nameless feelings, she at
the same time dreaded to see.  She had been unable to overcome an
impression that some connection existed between her rival and the
light through the trees.

Bathsheba skirted the buttress, and beheld the hole and the tomb, its
delicately veined surface splashed and stained just as Troy had seen
it and left it two hours earlier.  On the other side of the scene
stood Gabriel.  His eyes, too, were fixed on the tomb, and her
arrival having been noiseless, she had not as yet attracted his
attention.  Bathsheba did not at once perceive that the grand tomb
and the disturbed grave were Fanny's, and she looked on both sides
and around for some humbler mound, earthed up and clodded in the
usual way.  Then her eye followed Oak's, and she read the words with
which the inscription opened:--


     ERECTED BY FRANCIS TROY
      IN BELOVED MEMORY OF
           FANNY ROBIN


Oak saw her, and his first act was to gaze inquiringly and learn how
she received this knowledge of the authorship of the work, which to
himself had caused considerable astonishment.  But such discoveries
did not much affect her now.  Emotional convulsions seemed to have
become the commonplaces of her history, and she bade him good
morning, and asked him to fill in the hole with the spade which
was standing by.  Whilst Oak was doing as she desired, Bathsheba
collected the flowers, and began planting them with that sympathetic
manipulation of roots and leaves which is so conspicuous in a woman's
gardening, and which flowers seem to understand and thrive upon.  She
requested Oak to get the churchwardens to turn the leadwork at the
mouth of the gurgoyle that hung gaping down upon them, that by this
means the stream might be directed sideways, and a repetition of the
accident prevented.  Finally, with the superfluous magnanimity of
a woman whose narrower instincts have brought down bitterness upon
her instead of love, she wiped the mud spots from the tomb as if she
rather liked its words than otherwise, and went again home. [2]

   [Footnote 2: The local tower and churchyard do not answer
   precisely to the foregoing description.]




Chapter 46
Note: we're not sure why Hardy decided to spell "gargoyle" in a weird way in this title. Hardy spends this entire chapter talking about a stone gargoyle that's sitting on one of the ledges of the cemetery building that Sergeant Troy has just fallen asleep in. As Troy sleeps and the rain increases, water starts to shoot out of the gargoyle's mouth, since the statue is used as a rainspout. Usually, there are some stones at the bottom of the building to direct the water away from the graves. But since these stones were displaced the previous summer, there's nothing to keep the water from flowing directly over the graves. Sadly, the water totally fills up Fanny's open grave and ruins all of the flowers that Sergeant Troy has painstakingly planted over the past few hours. When Troy wakes up, he takes the ruined flowers as a sign that he should stop trying to be a nice person. As you can imagine, it doesn't take much to discourage this guy from trying to be a nice person. He decides to leave Weathbury without telling anyone. Now we look in on Bathsheba, who hasn't slept well throughout the night. Huh. We wonder why. Liddy informs Bathsheba that Troy was seen walking the road toward Budmouth early in the morning. Bathsheba gets up to go look at Fanny's grave. Sure enough, the new tombstone that's been brought to town has been for her. On the stone, Bathsheba reads, "Erected by Francis Troy in Beloved Memory of Fanny Robin." At the grave, she meets up with Gabriel Oak, who now realizes that Bathsheba knows everything about Sergeant Troy and Fanny. With his help, Bathsheba starts replanting all of the nice flowers that Troy gave up on.