finished_summaries/shmoop/Far From the Madding Crowd/section_39_part_0.txt
Far From the Madding Crowd.chapter 40
chapter 40
{"name": "Chapter 40", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-40", "summary": "We stay with Fanny Robin, the raggedy-looking woman who just bumped into Sergeant Troy and Bathsheba. The woman's steps are feeble and she has a lot of trouble walking. She finally collapses and wakes up hours later in the middle of the night. She knows that she still has miles to go until she reaches Casterbridge. Eventually, she can't go any further and falls again. This time, though, a wandering dog comes over and licks her face until she starts moving again. By some miracle of strength, she eventually reaches the Casterbridge shelter. There are people there to greet her, and she collapses in their arms. Before she passes out, she asks about the dog that helped her along the road. The man from the shelter tells her that he threw rocks at the dog until it went away. How's that for thankfulness?", "analysis": ""}


ON CASTERBRIDGE HIGHWAY


For a considerable time the woman walked on.  Her steps became
feebler, and she strained her eyes to look afar upon the naked road,
now indistinct amid the penumbrae of night.  At length her onward walk
dwindled to the merest totter, and she opened a gate within which was
a haystack.  Underneath this she sat down and presently slept.

When the woman awoke it was to find herself in the depths of a
moonless and starless night.  A heavy unbroken crust of cloud
stretched across the sky, shutting out every speck of heaven; and a
distant halo which hung over the town of Casterbridge was visible
against the black concave, the luminosity appearing the brighter by
its great contrast with the circumscribing darkness.  Towards this
weak, soft glow the woman turned her eyes.

"If I could only get there!" she said.  "Meet him the day after
to-morrow: God help me!  Perhaps I shall be in my grave before then."

A manor-house clock from the far depths of shadow struck the hour,
one, in a small, attenuated tone.  After midnight the voice of a
clock seems to lose in breadth as much as in length, and to diminish
its sonorousness to a thin falsetto.

Afterwards a light--two lights--arose from the remote shade, and grew
larger.  A carriage rolled along the road, and passed the gate.  It
probably contained some late diners-out.  The beams from one lamp
shone for a moment upon the crouching woman, and threw her face into
vivid relief.  The face was young in the groundwork, old in the
finish; the general contours were flexuous and childlike, but the
finer lineaments had begun to be sharp and thin.

The pedestrian stood up, apparently with revived determination, and
looked around.  The road appeared to be familiar to her, and she
carefully scanned the fence as she slowly walked along.  Presently
there became visible a dim white shape; it was another milestone.
She drew her fingers across its face to feel the marks.

"Two more!" she said.

She leant against the stone as a means of rest for a short interval,
then bestirred herself, and again pursued her way.  For a slight
distance she bore up bravely, afterwards flagging as before.  This
was beside a lone copsewood, wherein heaps of white chips strewn upon
the leafy ground showed that woodmen had been faggoting and making
hurdles during the day.  Now there was not a rustle, not a breeze,
not the faintest clash of twigs to keep her company.  The woman
looked over the gate, opened it, and went in.  Close to the entrance
stood a row of faggots, bound and un-bound, together with stakes of
all sizes.

For a few seconds the wayfarer stood with that tense stillness which
signifies itself to be not the end, but merely the suspension, of
a previous motion.  Her attitude was that of a person who listens,
either to the external world of sound, or to the imagined discourse
of thought.  A close criticism might have detected signs proving that
she was intent on the latter alternative.  Moreover, as was shown by
what followed, she was oddly exercising the faculty of invention upon
the speciality of the clever Jacquet Droz, the designer of automatic
substitutes for human limbs.

By the aid of the Casterbridge aurora, and by feeling with her hands,
the woman selected two sticks from the heaps.  These sticks were
nearly straight to the height of three or four feet, where each
branched into a fork like the letter Y.  She sat down, snapped off
the small upper twigs, and carried the remainder with her into the
road.  She placed one of these forks under each arm as a crutch,
tested them, timidly threw her whole weight upon them--so little that
it was--and swung herself forward.  The girl had made for herself a
material aid.

The crutches answered well.  The pat of her feet, and the tap of
her sticks upon the highway, were all the sounds that came from
the traveller now.  She had passed the last milestone by a good
long distance, and began to look wistfully towards the bank as if
calculating upon another milestone soon.  The crutches, though so
very useful, had their limits of power.  Mechanism only transfers
labour, being powerless to supersede it, and the original amount of
exertion was not cleared away; it was thrown into the body and arms.
She was exhausted, and each swing forward became fainter.  At last
she swayed sideways, and fell.

Here she lay, a shapeless heap, for ten minutes and more.  The
morning wind began to boom dully over the flats, and to move afresh
dead leaves which had lain still since yesterday.  The woman
desperately turned round upon her knees, and next rose to her feet.
Steadying herself by the help of one crutch, she essayed a step, then
another, then a third, using the crutches now as walking-sticks only.
Thus she progressed till descending Mellstock Hill another milestone
appeared, and soon the beginning of an iron-railed fence came into
view.  She staggered across to the first post, clung to it, and
looked around.

The Casterbridge lights were now individually visible. It was getting
towards morning, and vehicles might be hoped for, if not expected
soon.  She listened.  There was not a sound of life save that acme
and sublimation of all dismal sounds, the bark of a fox, its three
hollow notes being rendered at intervals of a minute with the
precision of a funeral bell.

"Less than a mile!" the woman murmured.  "No; more," she added, after
a pause.  "The mile is to the county hall, and my resting-place is on
the other side Casterbridge.  A little over a mile, and there I am!"
After an interval she again spoke.  "Five or six steps to a yard--six
perhaps.  I have to go seventeen hundred yards.  A hundred times six,
six hundred.  Seventeen times that.  O pity me, Lord!"

Holding to the rails, she advanced, thrusting one hand forward upon
the rail, then the other, then leaning over it whilst she dragged her
feet on beneath.

This woman was not given to soliloquy; but extremity of feeling
lessens the individuality of the weak, as it increases that of the
strong.  She said again in the same tone, "I'll believe that the end
lies five posts forward, and no further, and so get strength to pass
them."

This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned
and fictitious faith is better than no faith at all.

She passed five posts and held on to the fifth.

"I'll pass five more by believing my longed-for spot is at the next
fifth.  I can do it."

She passed five more.

"It lies only five further."

She passed five more.

"But it is five further."

She passed them.

"That stone bridge is the end of my journey," she said, when the
bridge over the Froom was in view.

She crawled to the bridge.  During the effort each breath of the
woman went into the air as if never to return again.

"Now for the truth of the matter," she said, sitting down.  "The
truth is, that I have less than half a mile."  Self-beguilement with
what she had known all the time to be false had given her strength to
come over half a mile that she would have been powerless to face in
the lump.  The artifice showed that the woman, by some mysterious
intuition, had grasped the paradoxical truth that blindness may
operate more vigorously than prescience, and the short-sighted effect
more than the far-seeing; that limitation, and not comprehensiveness,
is needed for striking a blow.

The half-mile stood now before the sick and weary woman like a stolid
Juggernaut.  It was an impassive King of her world.  The road here
ran across Durnover Moor, open to the road on either side.  She
surveyed the wide space, the lights, herself, sighed, and lay down
against a guard-stone of the bridge.

Never was ingenuity exercised so sorely as the traveller here
exercised hers.  Every conceivable aid, method, stratagem, mechanism,
by which these last desperate eight hundred yards could be overpassed
by a human being unperceived, was revolved in her busy brain,
and dismissed as impracticable.  She thought of sticks, wheels,
crawling--she even thought of rolling.  But the exertion demanded
by either of these latter two was greater than to walk erect.  The
faculty of contrivance was worn out.  Hopelessness had come at last.

"No further!" she whispered, and closed her eyes.

From the stripe of shadow on the opposite side of the bridge a
portion of shade seemed to detach itself and move into isolation
upon the pale white of the road.  It glided noiselessly towards the
recumbent woman.

She became conscious of something touching her hand; it was softness
and it was warmth.  She opened her eyes, and the substance touched
her face.  A dog was licking her cheek.

He was a huge, heavy, and quiet creature, standing darkly against the
low horizon, and at least two feet higher than the present position
of her eyes.  Whether Newfoundland, mastiff, bloodhound, or what
not, it was impossible to say.  He seemed to be of too strange and
mysterious a nature to belong to any variety among those of popular
nomenclature.  Being thus assignable to no breed, he was the ideal
embodiment of canine greatness--a generalization from what was common
to all.  Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart from
its stealthy and cruel side, was personified in this form.  Darkness
endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power,
and even the suffering woman threw her idea into figure.

In her reclining position she looked up to him just as in earlier
times she had, when standing, looked up to a man.  The animal, who
was as homeless as she, respectfully withdrew a step or two when the
woman moved, and, seeing that she did not repulse him, he licked her
hand again.

A thought moved within her like lightning.  "Perhaps I can make use
of him--I might do it then!"

She pointed in the direction of Casterbridge, and the dog seemed to
misunderstand: he trotted on.  Then, finding she could not follow, he
came back and whined.

The ultimate and saddest singularity of woman's effort and invention
was reached when, with a quickened breathing, she rose to a stooping
posture, and, resting her two little arms upon the shoulders of the
dog, leant firmly thereon, and murmured stimulating words.  Whilst
she sorrowed in her heart she cheered with her voice, and what was
stranger than that the strong should need encouragement from the weak
was that cheerfulness should be so well stimulated by such utter
dejection.  Her friend moved forward slowly, and she with small
mincing steps moved forward beside him, half her weight being thrown
upon the animal.  Sometimes she sank as she had sunk from walking
erect, from the crutches, from the rails.  The dog, who now
thoroughly understood her desire and her incapacity, was frantic in
his distress on these occasions; he would tug at her dress and run
forward.  She always called him back, and it was now to be observed
that the woman listened for human sounds only to avoid them.  It was
evident that she had an object in keeping her presence on the road
and her forlorn state unknown.

Their progress was necessarily very slow.  They reached the bottom
of the town, and the Casterbridge lamps lay before them like fallen
Pleiads as they turned to the left into the dense shade of a deserted
avenue of chestnuts, and so skirted the borough.  Thus the town was
passed, and the goal was reached.

On this much-desired spot outside the town rose a picturesque
building.  Originally it had been a mere case to hold people.  The
shell had been so thin, so devoid of excrescence, and so closely
drawn over the accommodation granted, that the grim character of what
was beneath showed through it, as the shape of a body is visible
under a winding-sheet.

Then Nature, as if offended, lent a hand.  Masses of ivy grew up,
completely covering the walls, till the place looked like an abbey;
and it was discovered that the view from the front, over the
Casterbridge chimneys, was one of the most magnificent in the
county. A neighbouring earl once said that he would give up a year's
rental to have at his own door the view enjoyed by the inmates from
theirs--and very probably the inmates would have given up the view
for his year's rental.

This stone edifice consisted of a central mass and two wings, whereon
stood as sentinels a few slim chimneys, now gurgling sorrowfully to
the slow wind.  In the wall was a gate, and by the gate a bellpull
formed of a hanging wire.  The woman raised herself as high as
possible upon her knees, and could just reach the handle.  She moved
it and fell forwards in a bowed attitude, her face upon her bosom.

It was getting on towards six o'clock, and sounds of movement were
to be heard inside the building which was the haven of rest to this
wearied soul.  A little door by the large one was opened, and a man
appeared inside.  He discerned the panting heap of clothes, went back
for a light, and came again.  He entered a second time, and returned
with two women.

These lifted the prostrate figure and assisted her in through the
doorway.  The man then closed the door.

"How did she get here?" said one of the women.

"The Lord knows," said the other.

"There is a dog outside," murmured the overcome traveller.  "Where is
he gone?  He helped me."

"I stoned him away," said the man.

The little procession then moved forward--the man in front bearing
the light, the two bony women next, supporting between them the small
and supple one.  Thus they entered the house and disappeared.




Chapter 40
We stay with Fanny Robin, the raggedy-looking woman who just bumped into Sergeant Troy and Bathsheba. The woman's steps are feeble and she has a lot of trouble walking. She finally collapses and wakes up hours later in the middle of the night. She knows that she still has miles to go until she reaches Casterbridge. Eventually, she can't go any further and falls again. This time, though, a wandering dog comes over and licks her face until she starts moving again. By some miracle of strength, she eventually reaches the Casterbridge shelter. There are people there to greet her, and she collapses in their arms. Before she passes out, she asks about the dog that helped her along the road. The man from the shelter tells her that he threw rocks at the dog until it went away. How's that for thankfulness?