Far from the Madding Crowd
sheep’s left flank, and selecting the proper point, he punctured the
skin and rumen with the lance as it stood in the tube; then he suddenly
withdrew the lance, retaining the tube in its place. A current of air
rushed up the tube, forcible enough to have extinguished a candle held
at the orifice.
It has been said that mere ease after torment is delight for a time;
and the countenances of these poor creatures expressed it now.
Forty-nine operations were successfully performed. Owing to the great
hurry necessitated by the far-gone state of some of the flock, Gabriel
missed his aim in one case, and in one only—striking wide of the mark,
and inflicting a mortal blow at once upon the suffering ewe. Four had
died; three recovered without an operation. The total number of sheep
which had thus strayed and injured themselves so dangerously was
fifty-seven.
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.
CHAPTER XXII
THE GREAT BARN AND THE SHEEP-SHEARERS
Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not
making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good
spirits when they are indispensable. Gabriel lately, for the first time
since his prostration by misfortune, had been independent in thought
and vigorous in action to a marked extent—conditions which, powerless
without an opportunity as an opportunity without them is barren, would
have given him a sure lift upwards when the favourable conjunction
should have occurred. But this incurable loitering beside Bathsheba
Everdene stole his time ruinously. The spring tides were going by
without floating him off, and the neap might soon come which could not.
It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season culminated,
the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being all health and
colour. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was
swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the
country, and the devil had gone with the world to town. Flossy catkins
of the later kinds, fern-sprouts like bishops’ croziers, the
square-headed moschatel, the odd cuckoo-pint,—like an apoplectic saint
in a niche of malachite,—snow-white ladies’-smocks, the toothwort,
approximating to human flesh, the enchanter’s night-shade, and the
black-petaled doleful-bells, were among the quainter objects of the
vegetable world in and about Weatherbury at this teeming time; and of
the animal, the metamorphosed figures of Mr. Jan Coggan, the
master-shearer; the second and third shearers, who travelled in the
exercise of their calling, and do not require definition by name;
Henery Fray the fourth shearer, Susan Tall’s husband the fifth, Joseph
Poorgrass the sixth, young Cain Ball as assistant-shearer, and Gabriel
Oak as general supervisor. None of these were clothed to any extent
worth mentioning, each appearing to have hit in the matter of raiment
the decent mean between a high and low caste Hindoo. An angularity of
lineament, and a fixity of facial machinery in general, proclaimed that
serious work was the order of the day.
They sheared in the great barn, called for the nonce the Shearing-barn,
which on ground-plan resembled a church with transepts. It not only
emulated the form of the neighbouring church of the parish, but vied
with it in antiquity. Whether the barn had ever formed one of a group
of conventual buildings nobody seemed to be aware; no trace of such
surroundings remained. The vast porches at the sides, lofty enough to
admit a waggon laden to its highest with corn in the sheaf, were
spanned by heavy-pointed arches of stone, broadly and boldly cut, whose
very simplicity was the origin of a grandeur not apparent in erections
where more ornament has been attempted. The dusky, filmed, chestnut
roof, braced and tied in by huge collars, curves, and diagonals, was
far nobler in design, because more wealthy in material, than
nine-tenths of those in our modern churches. Along each side wall was a
range of striding buttresses, throwing deep shadows on the spaces
between them, which were perforated by lancet openings, combining in
their proportions the precise requirements both of beauty and
ventilation.
One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the
church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the purpose
which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to
which it was still applied. Unlike and superior to either of those two
typical remnants of mediævalism, the old barn embodied practices which
had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time. Here at least the
spirit of the ancient builders was at one with the spirit of the modern
beholder. Standing before this abraded pile, the eye regarded its
present usage, the mind dwelt upon its past history, with a satisfied
sense of functional continuity throughout—a feeling almost of
gratitude, and quite of pride, at the permanence of the idea which had
heaped it up. The fact that four centuries had neither proved it to be
founded on a mistake, inspired any hatred of its purpose, nor given
rise to any reaction that had battered it down, invested this simple
grey effort of old minds with a repose, if not a grandeur, which a too
curious reflection was apt to disturb in its ecclesiastical and
military compeers. For once mediævalism and modernism had a common
stand-point. The lanceolate windows, the time-eaten archstones and
chamfers, the orientation of the axis, the misty chestnut work of the
rafters, referred to no exploded fortifying art or worn-out religious
creed. The defence and salvation of the body by daily bread is still a
study, a religion, and a desire.
To-day the large side doors were thrown open towards the sun to admit a
bountiful light to the immediate spot of the shearers’ operations,
which was the wood threshing-floor in the centre, formed of thick oak,
black with age and polished by the beating of flails for many
generations, till it had grown as slippery and as rich in hue as the
state-room floors of an Elizabethan mansion. Here the shearers knelt,
the sun slanting in upon their bleached shirts, tanned arms, and the
polished shears they flourished, causing these to bristle with a
thousand rays strong enough to blind a weak-eyed man. Beneath them a
captive sheep lay panting, quickening its pants as misgiving merged in
terror, till it quivered like the hot landscape outside.
This picture of to-day in its frame of four hundred years ago did not
produce that marked contrast between ancient and modern which is
implied by the contrast of date. In comparison with cities, Weatherbury
was immutable. The citizen’s _Then_ is the rustic’s _Now_. In London,
twenty or thirty-years ago are old times; in Paris ten years, or five;
in Weatherbury three or four score years were included in the mere
present, and nothing less than a century set a mark on its face or
tone. Five decades hardly modified the cut of a gaiter, the embroidery
of a smock-frock, by the breadth of a hair. Ten generations failed to
alter the turn of a single phrase. In these Wessex nooks the busy
outsider’s ancient times are only old; his old times are still new; his
present is futurity.
So the barn was natural to the shearers, and the shearers were in
harmony with the barn.
The spacious ends of the building, answering ecclesiastically to nave
and chancel extremities, were fenced off with hurdles, the sheep being
all collected in a crowd within these two enclosures; and in one angle
a catching-pen was formed, in which three or four sheep were
continuously kept ready for the shearers to seize without loss of time.
In the background, mellowed by tawny shade, were the three women,
Maryann Money, and Temperance and Soberness Miller, gathering up the
fleeces and twisting ropes of wool with a wimble for tying them round.
They were indifferently well assisted by the old maltster, who, when
the malting season from October to April had passed, made himself
useful upon any of the bordering farmsteads.
Behind all was Bathsheba, carefully watching the men to see that there
was no cutting or wounding through carelessness, and that the animals
were shorn close. Gabriel, who flitted and hovered under her bright
eyes like a moth, did not shear continuously, half his time being spent
in attending to the others and selecting the sheep for them. At the
present moment he was engaged in handing round a mug of mild liquor,
supplied from a barrel in the corner, and cut pieces of bread and
cheese.
Bathsheba, after throwing a glance here, a caution there, and lecturing
one of the younger operators who had allowed his last finished sheep to
go off among the flock without re-stamping it with her initials, came
again to Gabriel, as he put down the luncheon to drag a frightened ewe
to his shear-station, flinging it over upon its back with a dexterous
twist of the arm. He lopped off the tresses about its head, and opened
up the neck and collar, his mistress quietly looking on.
“She blushes at the insult,” murmured Bathsheba, watching the pink
flush which arose and overspread the neck and shoulders of the ewe
where they were left bare by the clicking shears—a flush which was
enviable, for its delicacy, by many queens of coteries, and would have
been creditable, for its promptness, to any woman in the world.
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.
So the chatter was all on her side. There is a loquacity that tells
nothing, which was Bathsheba’s; and there is a silence which says much:
that was Gabriel’s. Full of this dim and temperate bliss, he went on to
fling the ewe over upon her other side, covering her head with his
knee, gradually running the shears line after line round her dewlap;
thence about her flank and back, and finishing over the tail.
“Well done, and done quickly!” said Bathsheba, looking at her watch as
the last snip resounded.
“How long, miss?” said Gabriel, wiping his brow.
“Three-and-twenty minutes and a half since you took the first lock from
its forehead. It is the first time that I have ever seen one done in
less than half an hour.”
The clean, sleek creature arose from its fleece—how perfectly like
Aphrodite rising from the foam should have been seen to be
realized—looking startled and shy at the loss of its garment, which lay
on the floor in one soft cloud, united throughout, the portion visible
being the inner surface only, which, never before exposed, was white as
snow, and without flaw or blemish of the minutest kind.
“Cain Ball!”
“Yes, Mister Oak; here I be!”
Cainy now runs forward with the tar-pot. “B. E.” is newly stamped upon
the shorn skin, and away the simple dam leaps, panting, over the board
into the shirtless flock outside. Then up comes Maryann; throws the
loose locks into the middle of the fleece, rolls it up, and carries it
into the background as three-and-a-half pounds of unadulterated warmth
for the winter enjoyment of persons unknown and far away, who will,
however, never experience the superlative comfort derivable from the
wool as it here exists, new and pure—before the unctuousness of its