Far from the Madding Crowd

by Thomas Hardy

He had just reached the time of life at which “young” is ceasing to be the prefix of “man” in speaking of one.

In short, he was twenty-eight, and a bachelor.

Gabriel’s features adhered throughout their form so exactly to the middle line between the beauty of St. John and the ugliness of Judas Iscariot, as represented in a window of the church he attended, that not a single lineament could be selected and called worthy either of distinction or notoriety.

The poetry of motion is a phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilised mankind, who are dreamwrapt and disregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars. After such a nocturnal reconnoiter, it is hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.

In about the time a person unaccustomed to bodily labour would have decided upon which side to lie, Farmer Oak was asleep.

To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction—every kind of evidence in the logician’s list—have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.

The girl, who wore no riding-habit, looked around for a moment, as if to assure herself that all humanity was out of view, then dexterously dropped backwards flat upon the pony’s back, her head over its tail, her feet against its shoulders, and her eyes to the sky.

The left arm was extended as a balance, enough of it being shown bare to make Oak wish that the event had happened in the summer, when the whole would have been revealed.

“A large farm?” she inquired, casting her eyes round, and swinging back her hair, which was black in the shaded hollows of its mass; but it being now an hour past sunrise the rays touched its prominent curves with a colour of their own.

For, as without law there is no sin, without eyes there is no indecorum;

It was food for great regret with him; it was also a contretemps which touched into life a latent heat he had experienced in that direction.

The young girl with the remarkably pleasant lips and white teeth was beside him. More than this—astonishingly more—his head was upon her lap, his face and neck were disagreeably wet, and her fingers were unbuttoning his collar.

He was endeavouring to catch and appreciate the sensation of being thus with her, his head upon her dress, before the event passed on into the heap of bygone things. He wished she knew his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.

“I am sorry,” he said the instant after. “What for?” “Letting your hand go so quick.” “You may have it again if you like; there it is.” She gave him her hand again. Oak held it longer this time—indeed, curiously long. “How soft it is—being winter time, too—not chapped or rough or anything!” he said. “There—that’s long enough,” said she, though without pulling it away. “But I suppose you are thinking you would like to kiss it? You may if you want to.” “I wasn’t thinking of any such thing,” said Gabriel, simply; “but I will—” “That you won’t!” She snatched back her hand. Gabriel felt himself guilty of another want of tact. “Now find out my name,” she said, teasingly; and withdrew.

His dog waited for his meals in a way so like that in which Oak waited for the girl’s presence, that the farmer was quite struck with the resemblance, felt it lowering, and would not look at the dog.

He liked saying “Bathsheba” as a private enjoyment instead of whistling; turned over his taste to black hair, though he had sworn by brown ever since he was a boy, isolated himself till the space he filled in the public eye was contemptibly small. Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.

On a day which had a summer face and a winter constitution—a fine January morning, when there was just enough blue sky visible to make cheerfully-disposed people wish for more, and an occasional gleam of silvery sunshine,

“Really and truly I am glad to hear that!” said Farmer Oak, smiling one of his long special smiles, and blushing with gladness. He held out his hand to take hers, which, when she had eased her side by pressing it there, was prettily extended upon her bosom to still her loud-beating heart. Directly he seized it she put it behind her, so that it slipped through his fingers like an eel.”

I hate to be thought men’s property in that way, though possibly I shall be had some day.

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be—and whenever I look up there will be you.”

He regarded the red berries between them over and over again, to such an extent, that holly seemed in his after life to be a cypher signifying a proposal of marriage.

“Why, he’d always be there, as you say; whenever I looked up, there he’d be.”

“Never,” said Mr Oak, so earnestly that he seemed to be coming, by the force of his words, straight through the bush and into her arms. “I shall do one thing in this life—one thing certain—that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.” His voice had a genuine pathos now, and his large brown hands perceptibly trembled.

“Very well,” said Oak, firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever. “Then I’ll ask you no more.”

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.

He leant down upon a rail, and covered his face with his hands.

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.

And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the loss gain.

It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself, and extemporize a procedure to fit it, than to get a good plan matured, and wait for a chance of using it.

The road stretched through water-meadows traversed by little brooks, whose quivering surfaces were braided along their centres, and folded into creases at the sides; or, where the flow was more rapid, the stream was pied with spots of white froth, which rode on in undisturbed serenity.

So, thinking of his misfortunes, amorous and pastoral, he fell asleep, shepherds enjoying, in common with sailors, the privilege of being able to summon the god instead of having to wait for him.

Mark Clark by name, a genial and pleasant gentleman, whom to meet anywhere in your travels was to know, to know was to drink with, and to drink with was, unfortunately, to pay for.

That night at Coggan’s, Gabriel Oak, beneath the screen of closed eyelids, was busy with fancies, and full of movement, like a river flowing rapidly under its ice. Night had always been the time at which he saw Bathsheba most vividly, and through the slow hours of shadow he tenderly regarded her image now. It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness, but they possibly did with Oak to-night, for the delight of merely seeing her effaced for the time his perception of the great difference between seeing and possessing.

It was a night when sorrow may come to the brightest without causing any great sense of incongruity: when, with impressible persons, love becomes solicitousness, hope sinks to misgiving, and faith to hope: when the exercise of memory does not stir feelings of regret at opportunities for ambition that have been passed by, and anticipation does not prompt to enterprise.

The figure was stooping. Then a morsel of snow flew across the river towards the fifth window. It smacked against the wall at a point several yards from its mark. The throw was the idea of a man conjoined with the execution of a woman. No man who had ever seen bird, rabbit, or squirrel in his childhood, could possibly have thrown with such utter imbecility as was shown here.

But her eyes had a softness—invariably a softness—which, had they not been dark, would have seemed mistiness; as they were, it lowered an expression that might have been piercing to simple clearness.

The special verse in the Book of Ruth was sought out by Bathsheba, and the sublime words met her eye. They slightly thrilled and abashed her. It was Wisdom in the abstract facing Folly in the concrete. Folly in the concrete blushed, persisted in her intention, and placed the key on the book.

Somebody’s—some woman’s—hand had travelled softly over the paper bearing his name; her unrevealed eyes had watched every curve as she formed it; her brain had seen him in imagination the while. Why should she have imagined him? Her mouth—were the lips red or pale, plump or creased?—had curved itself to a certain expression as the pen went on—the corners had moved with all their natural tremulousness: what had been the expression?

She heard footsteps brushing the grass, and had a consciousness that love was encircling her like a perfume.

“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!”

Realities then returned upon him like the pain of a wound received in an excitement which eclipses it, and he, too, then went on.

“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.

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.

The “No, I won’t” of Bathsheba meant virtually, “I think I must.”

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.

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.

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.

At eight o’clock this midsummer evening, whilst the bristling ball of gold in the west still swept the tips of the ferns with its long, luxuriant rays, a soft brushing-by of garments might have been heard among them, and Bathsheba appeared in their midst, their soft, feathery arms caressing her up to her shoulders.

In an instant, the atmosphere was transformed to Bathsheba’s eyes. Beams of light caught from the low sun’s rays, above, around, in front of her, well-nigh shut out earth and heaven—all emitted in the marvellous evolutions of Troy’s reflecting blade, which seemed everywhere at once, and yet nowhere specially. These circling gleams were accompanied by a keen rush that was almost a whistling—also springing from all sides of her at once. In short, she was enclosed in a firmament of light, and of sharp hisses, resembling a sky-full of meteors close at hand.

“You know, mistress, that I love you, and shall love you always. I only mention this to bring to your mind that at any rate I would wish to do you no harm: beyond that I put it aside. I have lost in the race for money and good things, and I am not such a fool as to pretend to ’ee now I am poor, and you have got altogether above me. But Bathsheba, dear mistress, this I beg you to consider—that, both to keep yourself well honoured among the workfolk, and in common generosity to an honourable man who loves you as well as I, you should be more discreet in your bearing towards this soldier.”