Far from the Madding Crowd
evidently seen better days.
So she could not clearly decide whether it was her opinion that he had
insulted her or not.
“Was ever anything so odd!” she at last exclaimed to herself, in her
own room. “And was ever anything so meanly done as what I did—to skulk
away like that from a man who was only civil and kind!” Clearly she did
not think his barefaced praise of her person an insult now.
It was a fatal omission of Boldwood’s that he had never once told her
she was beautiful.
CHAPTER XXV
THE NEW ACQUAINTANCE DESCRIBED
Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an
exceptional being.
He was a man to whom memories were an incumbrance, and anticipations a
superfluity. Simply feeling, considering, and caring for what was
before his eyes, he was vulnerable only in the present. His outlook
upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now and then: that
projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come, which makes
the past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word for
circumspection, was foreign to Troy. With him the past was yesterday;
the future, to-morrow; never, the day after.
On this account he might, in certain lights, have been regarded as one
of the most fortunate of his order. For it may be argued with great
plausibility that reminiscence is less an endowment than a disease, and
that expectation in its only comfortable form—that of absolute faith—is
practically an impossibility; whilst in the form of hope and the
secondary compounds, patience, impatience, resolve, curiosity, it is a
constant fluctuation between pleasure and pain.
Sergeant Troy, being entirely innocent of the practice of expectation,
was never disappointed. To set against this negative gain there may
have been some positive losses from a certain narrowing of the higher
tastes and sensations which it entailed. But limitation of the capacity
is never recognized as a loss by the loser therefrom: in this attribute
moral or æsthetic poverty contrasts plausibly with material, since
those who suffer do not mind it, whilst those who mind it soon cease to
suffer. It is not a denial of anything to have been always without it,
and what Troy had never enjoyed he did not miss; but, being fully
conscious that what sober people missed he enjoyed, his capacity,
though really less, seemed greater than theirs.
He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a
Cretan—a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity
at the first flush of admission into lively society; and the
possibility of the favour gained being transitory had reference only to
the future.
He never passed the line which divides the spruce vices from the ugly;
and hence, though his morals had hardly been applauded, disapproval of
them had frequently been tempered with a smile. This treatment had led
to his becoming a sort of regrater of other men’s gallantries, to his
own aggrandizement as a Corinthian, rather than to the moral profit of
his hearers.
His reason and his propensities had seldom any reciprocating influence,
having separated by mutual consent long ago: thence it sometimes
happened that, while his intentions were as honourable as could be
wished, any particular deed formed a dark background which threw them
into fine relief. The sergeant’s vicious phases being the offspring of
impulse, and his virtuous phases of cool meditation, the latter had a
modest tendency to be oftener heard of than seen.
Troy was full of activity, but his activities were less of a locomotive
than a vegetative nature; and, never being based upon any original
choice of foundation or direction, they were exercised on whatever
object chance might place in their way. Hence, whilst he sometimes
reached the brilliant in speech because that was spontaneous, he fell
below the commonplace in action, from inability to guide incipient
effort. He had a quick comprehension and considerable force of
character; but, being without the power to combine them, the
comprehension became engaged with trivialities whilst waiting for the
will to direct it, and the force wasted itself in useless grooves
through unheeding the comprehension.
He was a fairly well-educated man for one of middle class—exceptionally
well educated for a common soldier. He spoke fluently and unceasingly.
He could in this way be one thing and seem another: for instance, he
could speak of love and think of dinner; call on the husband to look at
the wife; be eager to pay and intend to owe.
The wondrous power of flattery in _passados_ at woman is a perception
so universal as to be remarked upon by many people almost as
automatically as they repeat a proverb, or say that they are Christians
and the like, without thinking much of the enormous corollaries which
spring from the proposition. Still less is it acted upon for the good
of the complemental being alluded to. With the majority such an opinion
is shelved with all those trite aphorisms which require some
catastrophe to bring their tremendous meanings thoroughly home. When
expressed with some amount of reflectiveness it seems co-ordinate with
a belief that this flattery must be reasonable to be effective. It is
to the credit of men that few attempt to settle the question by
experiment, and it is for their happiness, perhaps, that accident has
never settled it for them. Nevertheless, that a male dissembler who by
deluging her with untenable fictions charms the female wisely, may
acquire powers reaching to the extremity of perdition, is a truth
taught to many by unsought and wringing occurrences. And some profess
to have attained to the same knowledge by experiment as aforesaid, and
jauntily continue their indulgence in such experiments with terrible
effect. Sergeant Troy was one.
He had been known to observe casually that in dealing with womankind
the only alternative to flattery was cursing and swearing. There was no
third method. “Treat them fairly, and you are a lost man.” he would
say.
This person’s public appearance in Weatherbury promptly followed his
arrival there. A week or two after the shearing, Bathsheba, feeling a
nameless relief of spirits on account of Boldwood’s absence, approached
her hayfields and looked over the hedge towards the haymakers. They
consisted in about equal proportions of gnarled and flexuous forms, the
former being the men, the latter the women, who wore tilt bonnets
covered with nankeen, which hung in a curtain upon their shoulders.
Coggan and Mark Clark were mowing in a less forward meadow, Clark
humming a tune to the strokes of his scythe, to which Jan made no
attempt to keep time with his. In the first mead they were already
loading hay, the women raking it into cocks and windrows, and the men
tossing it upon the waggon.
From behind the waggon a bright scarlet spot emerged, and went on
loading unconcernedly with the rest. It was the gallant sergeant, who
had come haymaking for pleasure; and nobody could deny that he was
doing the mistress of the farm real knight-service by this voluntary
contribution of his labour at a busy time.
As soon as she had entered the field Troy saw her, and sticking his
pitchfork into the ground and picking up his crop or cane, he came
forward. Bathsheba blushed with half-angry embarrassment, and adjusted
her eyes as well as her feet to the direct line of her path.
CHAPTER XXVI
SCENE ON THE VERGE OF THE HAY-MEAD
“Ah, Miss Everdene!” said the sergeant, touching his diminutive cap.
“Little did I think it was you I was speaking to the other night. And
yet, if I had reflected, the ‘Queen of the Corn-market’ (truth is truth
at any hour of the day or night, and I heard you so named in
Casterbridge yesterday), the ‘Queen of the Corn-market.’ I say, could
be no other woman. I step across now to beg your forgiveness a thousand
times for having been led by my feelings to express myself too strongly
for a stranger. To be sure I am no stranger to the place—I am Sergeant
Troy, as I told you, and I have assisted your uncle in these fields no
end of times when I was a lad. I have been doing the same for you
to-day.”
“I suppose I must thank you for that, Sergeant Troy,” said the Queen of
the Corn-market, in an indifferently grateful tone.
The sergeant looked hurt and sad. “Indeed you must not, Miss Everdene,”
he said. “Why could you think such a thing necessary?”
“I am glad it is not.”
“Why? if I may ask without offence.”
“Because I don’t much want to thank you for anything.”
“I am afraid I have made a hole with my tongue that my heart will never
mend. O these intolerable times: that ill-luck should follow a man for
honestly telling a woman she is beautiful! ’Twas the most I said—you
must own that; and the least I could say—that I own myself.”
“There is some talk I could do without more easily than money.”
“Indeed. That remark is a sort of digression.”
“No. It means that I would rather have your room than your company.”
“And I would rather have curses from you than kisses from any other
woman; so I’ll stay here.”
Bathsheba was absolutely speechless. And yet she could not help feeling
that the assistance he was rendering forbade a harsh repulse.
“Well,” continued Troy, “I suppose there is a praise which is rudeness,
and that may be mine. At the same time there is a treatment which is
injustice, and that may be yours. Because a plain blunt man, who has
never been taught concealment, speaks out his mind without exactly
intending it, he’s to be snapped off like the son of a sinner.”
“Indeed there’s no such case between us,” she said, turning away. “I
don’t allow strangers to be bold and impudent—even in praise of me.”
“Ah—it is not the fact but the method which offends you,” he said,
carelessly. “But I have the sad satisfaction of knowing that my words,
whether pleasing or offensive, are unmistakably true. Would you have
had me look at you, and tell my acquaintance that you are quite a
common-place woman, to save you the embarrassment of being stared at if
they come near you? Not I. I couldn’t tell any such ridiculous lie
about a beauty to encourage a single woman in England in too excessive
a modesty.”
“It is all pretence—what you are saying!” exclaimed Bathsheba, laughing
in spite of herself at the sly method. “You have a rare invention,
Sergeant Troy. Why couldn’t you have passed by me that night, and said
nothing?—that was all I meant to reproach you for.”
“Because I wasn’t going to. Half the pleasure of a feeling lies in
being able to express it on the spur of the moment, and I let out mine.
It would have been just the same if you had been the reverse
person—ugly and old—I should have exclaimed about it in the same way.”
“How long is it since you have been so afflicted with strong feeling,
then?”
“Oh, ever since I was big enough to know loveliness from deformity.”
“’Tis to be hoped your sense of the difference you speak of doesn’t
stop at faces, but extends to morals as well.”
“I won’t speak of morals or religion—my own or anybody else’s. Though
perhaps I should have been a very good Christian if you pretty women
hadn’t made me an idolater.”
Bathsheba moved on to hide the irrepressible dimplings of merriment.
Troy followed, whirling his crop.
“But—Miss Everdene—you do forgive me?”
“Hardly.”
“Why?”
“You say such things.”
“I said you were beautiful, and I’ll say so still; for, by G—— so you
are! The most beautiful ever I saw, or may I fall dead this instant!
Why, upon my ——”
“Don’t—don’t! I won’t listen to you—you are so profane!” she said, in a
restless state between distress at hearing him and a _penchant_ to hear
more.
“I again say you are a most fascinating woman. There’s nothing
remarkable in my saying so, is there? I’m sure the fact is evident