Far from the Madding Crowd
short, he was twenty-eight, and a bachelor.
The field he was in this morning sloped to a ridge called Norcombe
Hill. Through a spur of this hill ran the highway between Emminster and
Chalk-Newton. Casually glancing over the hedge, Oak saw coming down the
incline before him an ornamental spring waggon, painted yellow and
gaily marked, drawn by two horses, a waggoner walking alongside bearing
a whip perpendicularly. The waggon was laden with household goods and
window plants, and on the apex of the whole sat a woman, young and
attractive. Gabriel had not beheld the sight for more than half a
minute, when the vehicle was brought to a standstill just beneath his
eyes.
“The tailboard of the waggon is gone, Miss,” said the waggoner.
“Then I heard it fall,” said the girl, in a soft, though not
particularly low voice. “I heard a noise I could not account for when
we were coming up the hill.”
“I’ll run back.”
“Do,” she answered.
The sensible horses stood—perfectly still, and the waggoner’s steps
sank fainter and fainter in the distance.
The girl on the summit of the load sat motionless, surrounded by tables
and chairs with their legs upwards, backed by an oak settle, and
ornamented in front by pots of geraniums, myrtles, and cactuses,
together with a caged canary—all probably from the windows of the house
just vacated. There was also a cat in a willow basket, from the
partly-opened lid of which she gazed with half-closed eyes, and
affectionately surveyed the small birds around.
The handsome girl waited for some time idly in her place, and the only
sound heard in the stillness was the hopping of the canary up and down
the perches of its prison. Then she looked attentively downwards. It
was not at the bird, nor at the cat; it was at an oblong package tied
in paper, and lying between them. She turned her head to learn if the
waggoner were coming. He was not yet in sight; and her eyes crept back
to the package, her thoughts seeming to run upon what was inside it. At
length she drew the article into her lap, and untied the paper
covering; a small swing looking-glass was disclosed, in which she
proceeded to survey herself attentively. She parted her lips and
smiled.
It was a fine morning, and the sun lighted up to a scarlet glow the
crimson jacket she wore, and painted a soft lustre upon her bright face
and dark hair. The myrtles, geraniums, and cactuses packed around her
were fresh and green, and at such a leafless season they invested the
whole concern of horses, waggon, furniture, and girl with a peculiar
vernal charm. What possessed her to indulge in such a performance in
the sight of the sparrows, blackbirds, and unperceived farmer who were
alone its spectators,—whether the smile began as a factitious one, to
test her capacity in that art,—nobody knows; it ended certainly in a
real smile. She blushed at herself, and seeing her reflection blush,
blushed the more.
The change from the customary spot and necessary occasion of such an
act—from the dressing hour in a bedroom to a time of travelling out of
doors—lent to the idle deed a novelty it did not intrinsically possess.
The picture was a delicate one. Woman’s prescriptive infirmity had
stalked into the sunlight, which had clothed it in the freshness of an
originality. A cynical inference was irresistible by Gabriel Oak as he
regarded the scene, generous though he fain would have been. There was
no necessity whatever for her looking in the glass. She did not adjust
her hat, or pat her hair, or press a dimple into shape, or do one thing
to signify that any such intention had been her motive in taking up the
glass. She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the
feminine kind, her thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely
dramas in which men would play a part—vistas of probable triumphs—the
smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined as lost
and won. Still, this was but conjecture, and the whole series of
actions was so idly put forth as to make it rash to assert that
intention had any part in them at all.
The waggoner’s steps were heard returning. She put the glass in the
paper, and the whole again into its place.
When the waggon had passed on, Gabriel withdrew from his point of
espial, and descending into the road, followed the vehicle to the
turnpike-gate some way beyond the bottom of the hill, where the object
of his contemplation now halted for the payment of toll. About twenty
steps still remained between him and the gate, when he heard a dispute.
It was a difference concerning twopence between the persons with the
waggon and the man at the toll-bar.
“Mis’ess’s niece is upon the top of the things, and she says that’s
enough that I’ve offered ye, you great miser, and she won’t pay any
more.” These were the waggoner’s words.
“Very well; then mis’ess’s niece can’t pass,” said the turnpike-keeper,
closing the gate.
Oak looked from one to the other of the disputants, and fell into a
reverie. There was something in the tone of twopence remarkably
insignificant. Threepence had a definite value as money—it was an
appreciable infringement on a day’s wages, and, as such, a higgling
matter; but twopence—“Here,” he said, stepping forward and handing
twopence to the gatekeeper; “let the young woman pass.” He looked up at
her then; she heard his words, and looked down.
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 red-jacketed and dark-haired maiden
seemed to think so too, for she carelessly glanced over him, and told
her man to drive on. She might have looked her thanks to Gabriel on a
minute scale, but she did not speak them; more probably she felt none,
for in gaining her a passage he had lost her her point, and we know how
women take a favour of that kind.
The gatekeeper surveyed the retreating vehicle. “That’s a handsome
maid,” he said to Oak.
“But she has her faults,” said Gabriel.
“True, farmer.”
“And the greatest of them is—well, what it is always.”
“Beating people down? ay, ’tis so.”
“O no.”
“What, then?”
Gabriel, perhaps a little piqued by the comely traveller’s
indifference, glanced back to where he had witnessed her performance
over the hedge, and said, “Vanity.”
CHAPTER II
NIGHT—THE FLOCK—AN INTERIOR—ANOTHER INTERIOR
It was nearly midnight on the eve of St. Thomas’s, the shortest day in
the year. A desolating wind wandered from the north over the hill
whereon Oak had watched the yellow waggon and its occupant in the
sunshine of a few days earlier.
Norcombe Hill—not far from lonely Toller-Down—was one of the spots
which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape
approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to be found on earth.
It was a featureless convexity of chalk and soil—an ordinary specimen
of those smoothly-outlined protuberances of the globe which may remain
undisturbed on some great day of confusion, when far grander heights
and dizzy granite precipices topple down.
The hill was covered on its northern side by an ancient and decaying
plantation of beeches, whose upper verge formed a line over the crest,
fringing its arched curve against the sky, like a mane. To-night these
trees sheltered the southern slope from the keenest blasts, which smote
the wood and floundered through it with a sound as of grumbling, or
gushed over its crowning boughs in a weakened moan. The dry leaves in
the ditch simmered and boiled in the same breezes, a tongue of air
occasionally ferreting out a few, and sending them spinning across the
grass. A group or two of the latest in date amongst the dead multitude
had remained till this very mid-winter time on the twigs which bore
them and in falling rattled against the trunks with smart taps.
Between this half-wooded half-naked hill, and the vague still horizon
that its summit indistinctly commanded, was a mysterious sheet of
fathomless shade—the sounds from which suggested that what it concealed
bore some reduced resemblance to features here. The thin grasses, more
or less coating the hill, were touched by the wind in breezes of
differing powers, and almost of differing natures—one rubbing the
blades heavily, another raking them piercingly, another brushing them
like a soft broom. The instinctive act of humankind was to stand and
listen, and learn how the trees on the right and the trees on the left
wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a
cathedral choir; how hedges and other shapes to leeward then caught the
note, lowering it to the tenderest sob; and how the hurrying gust then
plunged into the south, to be heard no more.
The sky was clear—remarkably clear—and the twinkling of all the stars
seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse. The North
Star was directly in the wind’s eye, and since evening the Bear had
swung round it outwardly to the east, till he was now at a right angle
with the meridian. A difference of colour in the stars—oftener read of
than seen in England—was really perceptible here. The sovereign
brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star
called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery
red.
To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as
this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. The
sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past
earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness, or
by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the wind,
or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin, the impression of
riding along is vivid and abiding. 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 reconnoitre 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.
Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this place
up against the sky. They had a clearness which was to be found nowhere
in the wind, and a sequence which was to be found nowhere in nature.
They were the notes of Farmer Oak’s flute.
The tune was not floating unhindered into the open air: it seemed
muffled in some way, and was altogether too curtailed in power to
spread high or wide. It came from the direction of a small dark object
under the plantation hedge—a shepherd’s hut—now presenting an outline
to which an uninitiated person might have been puzzled to attach either
meaning or use.
The image as a whole was that of a small Noah’s Ark on a small Ararat,
allowing the traditionary outlines and general form of the Ark which
are followed by toy-makers—and by these means are established in men’s
imaginations among their firmest, because earliest impressions—to pass
as an approximate pattern. The hut stood on little wheels, which raised
its floor about a foot from the ground. Such shepherds’ huts are
dragged into the fields when the lambing season comes on, to shelter
the shepherd in his enforced nightly attendance.
It was only latterly that people had begun to call Gabriel “Farmer”
Oak. During the twelvemonth preceding this time he had been enabled by
sustained efforts of industry and chronic good spirits to lease the