finished_summaries/shmoop/Far From the Madding Crowd/section_4_part_0.txt
Far From the Madding Crowd.chapter 5
chapter 5
{"name": "Chapter 5", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201219162644/https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary/chapter-5", "summary": "Gabriel Oak receives news that Bathsheba Everdene has left the neighborhood. Oak knows all about falling in love. He's a pro. But he has a tough time learning how to get out of love. He's uber-depressed at this point and probably is listening to breakup music. If that weren't enough, a really bad thing happens on top of his rejection. One of his dogs, feeling a little too eager, starts chasing his sheep around a field while Oak is asleep. And wouldn't you know it, the dog chases all the sheep right off a cliff into a nearby chalk pit. Nearly every sheep Oak owns is killed. Financially speaking, the guy is toast. Everything he has worked hard for is gone. Oak's eager dog is taken out and shot the next day. At the end of it all, Oak has enough belongings to pay off his debts. But that's it. He comes out of the situation without a dollar to his name. Ugh.", "analysis": ""}


DEPARTURE OF BATHSHEBA--A PASTORAL TRAGEDY


The news which one day reached Gabriel, that Bathsheba Everdene
had left the neighbourhood, had an influence upon him which might
have surprised any who never suspected that the more emphatic the
renunciation the less absolute its character.

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting
out of love as there is for getting in.  Some people look upon
marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
Separation, which was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by
Bathsheba's disappearance, though effectual with people of certain
humours, is apt to idealize the removed object with others--notably
those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep
and long.  Oak belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity, and
felt the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a
finer flame now that she was gone--that was all.

His incipient friendship with her aunt had been nipped by the
failure of his suit, and all that Oak learnt of Bathsheba's
movements was done indirectly.  It appeared that she had gone to
a place called Weatherbury, more than twenty miles off, but in
what capacity--whether as a visitor, or permanently, he could not
discover.

Gabriel had two dogs.  George, the elder, exhibited an ebony-tipped
nose, surrounded by a narrow margin of pink flesh, and a coat marked
in random splotches approximating in colour to white and slaty
grey; but the grey, after years of sun and rain, had been scorched
and washed out of the more prominent locks, leaving them of a
reddish-brown, as if the blue component of the grey had faded, like
the indigo from the same kind of colour in Turner's pictures.  In
substance it had originally been hair, but long contact with sheep
seemed to be turning it by degrees into wool of a poor quality and
staple.

This dog had originally belonged to a shepherd of inferior morals
and dreadful temper, and the result was that George knew the exact
degrees of condemnation signified by cursing and swearing of all
descriptions better than the wickedest old man in the neighbourhood.
Long experience had so precisely taught the animal the difference
between such exclamations as "Come in!" and "D---- ye, come in!" that
he knew to a hair's breadth the rate of trotting back from the ewes'
tails that each call involved, if a staggerer with the sheep crook
was to be escaped.  Though old, he was clever and trustworthy still.

The young dog, George's son, might possibly have been the image
of his mother, for there was not much resemblance between him and
George.  He was learning the sheep-keeping business, so as to follow
on at the flock when the other should die, but had got no further
than the rudiments as yet--still finding an insuperable difficulty
in distinguishing between doing a thing well enough and doing it too
well.  So earnest and yet so wrong-headed was this young dog (he had
no name in particular, and answered with perfect readiness to any
pleasant interjection), that if sent behind the flock to help them
on, he did it so thoroughly that he would have chased them across the
whole county with the greatest pleasure if not called off or reminded
when to stop by the example of old George.

Thus much for the dogs.  On the further side of Norcombe Hill was
a chalk-pit, from which chalk had been drawn for generations, and
spread over adjacent farms.  Two hedges converged upon it in the form
of a V, but without quite meeting.  The narrow opening left, which
was immediately over the brow of the pit, was protected by a rough
railing.

One night, when Farmer Oak had returned to his house, believing there
would be no further necessity for his attendance on the down, he
called as usual to the dogs, previously to shutting them up in the
outhouse till next morning.  Only one responded--old George; the
other could not be found, either in the house, lane, or garden.
Gabriel then remembered that he had left the two dogs on the hill
eating a dead lamb (a kind of meat he usually kept from them, except
when other food ran short), and concluding that the young one had
not finished his meal, he went indoors to the luxury of a bed, which
latterly he had only enjoyed on Sundays.

It was a still, moist night.  Just before dawn he was assisted in
waking by the abnormal reverberation of familiar music.  To the
shepherd, the note of the sheep-bell, like the ticking of the clock
to other people, is a chronic sound that only makes itself noticed by
ceasing or altering in some unusual manner from the well-known idle
twinkle which signifies to the accustomed ear, however distant, that
all is well in the fold.  In the solemn calm of the awakening morn
that note was heard by Gabriel, beating with unusual violence and
rapidity.  This exceptional ringing may be caused in two ways--by
the rapid feeding of the sheep bearing the bell, as when the flock
breaks into new pasture, which gives it an intermittent rapidity,
or by the sheep starting off in a run, when the sound has a regular
palpitation.  The experienced ear of Oak knew the sound he now heard
to be caused by the running of the flock with great velocity.

He jumped out of bed, dressed, tore down the lane through a foggy
dawn, and ascended the hill.  The forward ewes were kept apart from
those among which the fall of lambs would be later, there being two
hundred of the latter class in Gabriel's flock.  These two hundred
seemed to have absolutely vanished from the hill.  There were the
fifty with their lambs, enclosed at the other end as he had left
them, but the rest, forming the bulk of the flock, were nowhere.
Gabriel called at the top of his voice the shepherd's call:

"Ovey, ovey, ovey!"

Not a single bleat.  He went to the hedge; a gap had been broken
through it, and in the gap were the footprints of the sheep.  Rather
surprised to find them break fence at this season, yet putting it
down instantly to their great fondness for ivy in winter-time, of
which a great deal grew in the plantation, he followed through the
hedge.  They were not in the plantation.  He called again: the
valleys and farthest hills resounded as when the sailors invoked the
lost Hylas on the Mysian shore; but no sheep.  He passed through the
trees and along the ridge of the hill.  On the extreme summit, where
the ends of the two converging hedges of which we have spoken were
stopped short by meeting the brow of the chalk-pit, he saw the
younger dog standing against the sky--dark and motionless as Napoleon
at St. Helena.

A horrible conviction darted through Oak.  With a sensation of bodily
faintness he advanced: at one point the rails were broken through,
and there he saw the footprints of his ewes.  The dog came up, licked
his hand, and made signs implying that he expected some great reward
for signal services rendered.  Oak looked over the precipice.  The
ewes lay dead and dying at its foot--a heap of two hundred mangled
carcasses, representing in their condition just now at least two
hundred more.

Oak was an intensely humane man: indeed, his humanity often tore in
pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered on strategy, and
carried him on as by gravitation.  A shadow in his life had always
been that his flock ended in mutton--that a day came and found every
shepherd an arrant traitor to his defenseless sheep.  His first
feeling now was one of pity for the untimely fate of these gentle
ewes and their unborn lambs.

It was a second to remember another phase of the matter.  The
sheep were not insured.  All the savings of a frugal life had been
dispersed at a blow; his hopes of being an independent farmer were
laid low--possibly for ever.  Gabriel's energies, patience, and
industry had been so severely taxed during the years of his life
between eighteen and eight-and-twenty, to reach his present stage of
progress that no more seemed to be left in him.  He leant down upon a
rail, and covered his face with his hands.

Stupors, however, do not last for ever, and Farmer Oak recovered from
his.  It was as remarkable as it was characteristic that the one
sentence he uttered was in thankfulness:--

"Thank God I am not married: what would SHE have done in the poverty
now coming upon me!"

Oak raised his head, and wondering what he could do, listlessly
surveyed the scene.  By the outer margin of the Pit was an oval pond,
and over it hung the attenuated skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon
which had only a few days to last--the morning star dogging her on
the left hand.  The pool glittered like a dead man's eye, and as the
world awoke a breeze blew, shaking and elongating the reflection of
the moon without breaking it, and turning the image of the star to a
phosphoric streak upon the water.  All this Oak saw and remembered.

As far as could be learnt it appeared that the poor young dog, still
under the impression that since he was kept for running after sheep,
the more he ran after them the better, had at the end of his meal
off the dead lamb, which may have given him additional energy and
spirits, collected all the ewes into a corner, driven the timid
creatures through the hedge, across the upper field, and by main
force of worrying had given them momentum enough to break down a
portion of the rotten railing, and so hurled them over the edge.

George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered
too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically
shot at twelve o'clock that same day--another instance of the
untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers
who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and
attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely
of compromise.

Gabriel's farm had been stocked by a dealer--on the strength of Oak's
promising look and character--who was receiving a percentage from the
farmer till such time as the advance should be cleared off. Oak found
that the value of stock, plant, and implements which were really his
own would be about sufficient to pay his debts, leaving himself a
free man with the clothes he stood up in, and nothing more.




Chapter 5
Gabriel Oak receives news that Bathsheba Everdene has left the neighborhood. Oak knows all about falling in love. He's a pro. But he has a tough time learning how to get out of love. He's uber-depressed at this point and probably is listening to breakup music. If that weren't enough, a really bad thing happens on top of his rejection. One of his dogs, feeling a little too eager, starts chasing his sheep around a field while Oak is asleep. And wouldn't you know it, the dog chases all the sheep right off a cliff into a nearby chalk pit. Nearly every sheep Oak owns is killed. Financially speaking, the guy is toast. Everything he has worked hard for is gone. Oak's eager dog is taken out and shot the next day. At the end of it all, Oak has enough belongings to pay off his debts. But that's it. He comes out of the situation without a dollar to his name. Ugh.