finished_summaries/shmoop/Far From the Madding Crowd/section_36_part_0.txt
Far From the Madding Crowd.chapter 37
chapter 37
{"name": "Chapter 37", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-37", "summary": "Well this is just great: now there's thunder, and lighting shooting through the sky, as Gabriel Oak tries to keep the farm's hay and barley from being ruined by rain. He suddenly hears a voice from the darkness and realizes that it's Bathsheba's. She has come to help him out. They are both worried by the lightning, which seems to be striking all around them. In the heat of the moment, Bathsheba tells Gabriel that she wants him to know she travelled to Bath with the full intention of breaking off her attachment to Sergeant Troy. But one thing led to another and they got married. Eventually, Bathsheba has done everything she can, and it's time for her to go. She thanks Gabriel a thousand times over for his devotion and goes.", "analysis": ""}


THE STORM--THE TWO TOGETHER


A light flapped over the scene, as if reflected from phosphorescent
wings crossing the sky, and a rumble filled the air.  It was the
first move of the approaching storm.

The second peal was noisy, with comparatively little visible
lightning.  Gabriel saw a candle shining in Bathsheba's bedroom,
and soon a shadow swept to and fro upon the blind.

Then there came a third flash.  Manoeuvres of a most extraordinary
kind were going on in the vast firmamental hollows overhead.  The
lightning now was the colour of silver, and gleamed in the heavens
like a mailed army. Rumbles became rattles.  Gabriel from his
elevated position could see over the landscape at least half-a-dozen
miles in front.  Every hedge, bush, and tree was distinct as in a
line engraving.  In a paddock in the same direction was a herd of
heifers, and the forms of these were visible at this moment in the
act of galloping about in the wildest and maddest confusion, flinging
their heels and tails high into the air, their heads to earth.
A poplar in the immediate foreground was like an ink stroke on
burnished tin.  Then the picture vanished, leaving the darkness so
intense that Gabriel worked entirely by feeling with his hands.

He had stuck his ricking-rod, or poniard, as it was indifferently
called--a long iron lance, polished by handling--into the stack,
used to support the sheaves instead of the support called a groom
used on houses.  A blue light appeared in the zenith, and in some
indescribable manner flickered down near the top of the rod.  It
was the fourth of the larger flashes.  A moment later and there was
a smack--smart, clear, and short.  Gabriel felt his position to be
anything but a safe one, and he resolved to descend.

Not a drop of rain had fallen as yet.  He wiped his weary brow, and
looked again at the black forms of the unprotected stacks.  Was his
life so valuable to him after all?  What were his prospects that he
should be so chary of running risk, when important and urgent labour
could not be carried on without such risk?  He resolved to stick to
the stack.  However, he took a precaution.  Under the staddles was a
long tethering chain, used to prevent the escape of errant horses.
This he carried up the ladder, and sticking his rod through the clog
at one end, allowed the other end of the chain to trail upon the
ground.  The spike attached to it he drove in.  Under the shadow of
this extemporized lightning-conductor he felt himself comparatively
safe.

Before Oak had laid his hands upon his tools again out leapt the
fifth flash, with the spring of a serpent and the shout of a fiend.
It was green as an emerald, and the reverberation was stunning.  What
was this the light revealed to him?  In the open ground before him,
as he looked over the ridge of the rick, was a dark and apparently
female form.  Could it be that of the only venturesome woman in the
parish--Bathsheba?  The form moved on a step: then he could see no
more.

"Is that you, ma'am?" said Gabriel to the darkness.

"Who is there?" said the voice of Bathsheba.

"Gabriel.  I am on the rick, thatching."

"Oh, Gabriel!--and are you?  I have come about them.  The weather
awoke me, and I thought of the corn.  I am so distressed about
it--can we save it anyhow?  I cannot find my husband.  Is he with
you?"

"He is not here."

"Do you know where he is?"

"Asleep in the barn."

"He promised that the stacks should be seen to, and now they are all
neglected!  Can I do anything to help?  Liddy is afraid to come out.
Fancy finding you here at such an hour!  Surely I can do something?"

"You can bring up some reed-sheaves to me, one by one, ma'am; if you
are not afraid to come up the ladder in the dark," said Gabriel.
"Every moment is precious now, and that would save a good deal of
time.  It is not very dark when the lightning has been gone a bit."

"I'll do anything!" she said, resolutely.  She instantly took a sheaf
upon her shoulder, clambered up close to his heels, placed it behind
the rod, and descended for another.  At her third ascent the rick
suddenly brightened with the brazen glare of shining majolica--every
knot in every straw was visible.  On the slope in front of him
appeared two human shapes, black as jet.  The rick lost its
sheen--the shapes vanished.  Gabriel turned his head.  It had been
the sixth flash which had come from the east behind him, and the two
dark forms on the slope had been the shadows of himself and
Bathsheba.

Then came the peal.  It hardly was credible that such a heavenly
light could be the parent of such a diabolical sound.

"How terrible!" she exclaimed, and clutched him by the sleeve.
Gabriel turned, and steadied her on her aerial perch by holding
her arm.  At the same moment, while he was still reversed in his
attitude, there was more light, and he saw, as it were, a copy of the
tall poplar tree on the hill drawn in black on the wall of the barn.
It was the shadow of that tree, thrown across by a secondary flash
in the west.

The next flare came.  Bathsheba was on the ground now, shouldering
another sheaf, and she bore its dazzle without flinching--thunder
and all--and again ascended with the load.  There was then a silence
everywhere for four or five minutes, and the crunch of the spars, as
Gabriel hastily drove them in, could again be distinctly heard.  He
thought the crisis of the storm had passed.  But there came a burst
of light.

"Hold on!" said Gabriel, taking the sheaf from her shoulder, and
grasping her arm again.

Heaven opened then, indeed.  The flash was almost too novel for its
inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once realized, and they could
only comprehend the magnificence of its beauty.  It sprang from
east, west, north, south, and was a perfect dance of death.  The
forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for
bones--dancing, leaping, striding, racing around, and mingling
altogether in unparalleled confusion.  With these were intertwined
undulating snakes of green, and behind these was a broad mass of
lesser light.  Simultaneously came from every part of the tumbling
sky what may be called a shout; since, though no shout ever came
near it, it was more of the nature of a shout than of anything else
earthly.  In the meantime one of the grisly forms had alighted upon
the point of Gabriel's rod, to run invisibly down it, down the chain,
and into the earth.  Gabriel was almost blinded, and he could feel
Bathsheba's warm arm tremble in his hand--a sensation novel and
thrilling enough; but love, life, everything human, seemed small and
trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated universe.

Oak had hardly time to gather up these impressions into a thought,
and to see how strangely the red feather of her hat shone in this
light, when the tall tree on the hill before mentioned seemed on fire
to a white heat, and a new one among these terrible voices mingled
with the last crash of those preceding.  It was a stupefying blast,
harsh and pitiless, and it fell upon their ears in a dead, flat blow,
without that reverberation which lends the tones of a drum to more
distant thunder.  By the lustre reflected from every part of the
earth and from the wide domical scoop above it, he saw that the
tree was sliced down the whole length of its tall, straight stem, a
huge riband of bark being apparently flung off.  The other portion
remained erect, and revealed the bared surface as a strip of white
down the front.  The lightning had struck the tree.  A sulphurous
smell filled the air; then all was silent, and black as a cave in
Hinnom.

"We had a narrow escape!" said Gabriel, hurriedly.  "You had better
go down."

Bathsheba said nothing; but he could distinctly hear her rhythmical
pants, and the recurrent rustle of the sheaf beside her in response
to her frightened pulsations.  She descended the ladder, and, on
second thoughts, he followed her.  The darkness was now impenetrable
by the sharpest vision.  They both stood still at the bottom, side by
side.  Bathsheba appeared to think only of the weather--Oak thought
only of her just then.  At last he said--

"The storm seems to have passed now, at any rate."

"I think so too," said Bathsheba.  "Though there are multitudes of
gleams, look!"

The sky was now filled with an incessant light, frequent repetition
melting into complete continuity, as an unbroken sound results from
the successive strokes on a gong.

"Nothing serious," said he.  "I cannot understand no rain falling.
But Heaven be praised, it is all the better for us.  I am now going
up again."

"Gabriel, you are kinder than I deserve!  I will stay and help you
yet.  Oh, why are not some of the others here!"

"They would have been here if they could," said Oak, in a hesitating
way.

"O, I know it all--all," she said, adding slowly: "They are all
asleep in the barn, in a drunken sleep, and my husband among them.
That's it, is it not?  Don't think I am a timid woman and can't
endure things."

"I am not certain," said Gabriel.  "I will go and see."

He crossed to the barn, leaving her there alone.  He looked through
the chinks of the door.  All was in total darkness, as he had left
it, and there still arose, as at the former time, the steady buzz of
many snores.

He felt a zephyr curling about his cheek, and turned.  It was
Bathsheba's breath--she had followed him, and was looking into the
same chink.

He endeavoured to put off the immediate and painful subject of
their thoughts by remarking gently, "If you'll come back again,
miss--ma'am, and hand up a few more; it would save much time."

Then Oak went back again, ascended to the top, stepped off the ladder
for greater expedition, and went on thatching.  She followed, but
without a sheaf.

"Gabriel," she said, in a strange and impressive voice.

Oak looked up at her.  She had not spoken since he left the barn.
The soft and continual shimmer of the dying lightning showed a marble
face high against the black sky of the opposite quarter.  Bathsheba
was sitting almost on the apex of the stack, her feet gathered up
beneath her, and resting on the top round of the ladder.

"Yes, mistress," he said.

"I suppose you thought that when I galloped away to Bath that night
it was on purpose to be married?"

"I did at last--not at first," he answered, somewhat surprised at the
abruptness with which this new subject was broached.

"And others thought so, too?"

"Yes."

"And you blamed me for it?"

"Well--a little."

"I thought so.  Now, I care a little for your good opinion, and
I want to explain something--I have longed to do it ever since I
returned, and you looked so gravely at me.  For if I were to die--and
I may die soon--it would be dreadful that you should always think
mistakenly of me.  Now, listen."

Gabriel ceased his rustling.

"I went to Bath that night in the full intention of breaking off my
engagement to Mr. Troy.  It was owing to circumstances which occurred
after I got there that--that we were married.  Now, do you see the
matter in a new light?"

"I do--somewhat."

"I must, I suppose, say more, now that I have begun.  And perhaps
it's no harm, for you are certainly under no delusion that I ever
loved you, or that I can have any object in speaking, more than that
object I have mentioned.  Well, I was alone in a strange city, and
the horse was lame.  And at last I didn't know what to do.  I saw,
when it was too late, that scandal might seize hold of me for meeting
him alone in that way.  But I was coming away, when he suddenly said
he had that day seen a woman more beautiful than I, and that his
constancy could not be counted on unless I at once became his....
And I was grieved and troubled--"  She cleared her voice, and waited
a moment, as if to gather breath.  "And then, between jealousy
and distraction, I married him!" she whispered with desperate
impetuosity.

Gabriel made no reply.

"He was not to blame, for it was perfectly true about--about his
seeing somebody else," she quickly added.  "And now I don't wish for
a single remark from you upon the subject--indeed, I forbid it.  I
only wanted you to know that misunderstood bit of my history before
a time comes when you could never know it.--You want some more
sheaves?"

She went down the ladder, and the work proceeded.  Gabriel soon
perceived a languor in the movements of his mistress up and down, and
he said to her, gently as a mother--

"I think you had better go indoors now, you are tired.  I can finish
the rest alone.  If the wind does not change the rain is likely to
keep off."

"If I am useless I will go," said Bathsheba, in a flagging cadence.
"But O, if your life should be lost!"

"You are not useless; but I would rather not tire you longer.  You
have done well."

"And you better!" she said, gratefully.  "Thank you for your
devotion, a thousand times, Gabriel!  Goodnight--I know you are doing
your very best for me."

She diminished in the gloom, and vanished, and he heard the latch
of the gate fall as she passed through.  He worked in a reverie
now, musing upon her story, and upon the contradictoriness of that
feminine heart which had caused her to speak more warmly to him
to-night than she ever had done whilst unmarried and free to speak
as warmly as she chose.

He was disturbed in his meditation by a grating noise from the
coach-house.  It was the vane on the roof turning round, and this
change in the wind was the signal for a disastrous rain.




Chapter 37
Well this is just great: now there's thunder, and lighting shooting through the sky, as Gabriel Oak tries to keep the farm's hay and barley from being ruined by rain. He suddenly hears a voice from the darkness and realizes that it's Bathsheba's. She has come to help him out. They are both worried by the lightning, which seems to be striking all around them. In the heat of the moment, Bathsheba tells Gabriel that she wants him to know she travelled to Bath with the full intention of breaking off her attachment to Sergeant Troy. But one thing led to another and they got married. Eventually, Bathsheba has done everything she can, and it's time for her to go. She thanks Gabriel a thousand times over for his devotion and goes.