Far from the Madding Crowd
“I heard your dog howling and scratching at the door of the hut when I
came to the milking (it was so lucky, Daisy’s milking is almost over
for the season, and I shall not come here after this week or the next).
The dog saw me, and jumped over to me, and laid hold of my skirt. I
came across and looked round the hut the very first thing to see if the
slides were closed. My uncle has a hut like this one, and I have heard
him tell his shepherd not to go to sleep without leaving a slide open.
I opened the door, and there you were like dead. I threw the milk over
you, as there was no water, forgetting it was warm, and no use.”
“I wonder if I should have died?” Gabriel said, in a low voice, which
was rather meant to travel back to himself than to her.
“Oh no!” the girl replied. She seemed to prefer a less tragic
probability; to have saved a man from death involved talk that should
harmonise with the dignity of such a deed—and she shunned it.
“I believe you saved my life, Miss—I don’t know your name. I know your
aunt’s, but not yours.”
“I would just as soon not tell it—rather not. There is no reason either
why I should, as you probably will never have much to do with me.”
“Still, I should like to know.”
“You can inquire at my aunt’s—she will tell you.”
“My name is Gabriel Oak.”
“And mine isn’t. You seem fond of yours in speaking it so decisively,
Gabriel Oak.”
“You see, it is the only one I shall ever have, and I must make the
most of it.”
“I always think mine sounds odd and disagreeable.”
“I should think you might soon get a new one.”
“Mercy!—how many opinions you keep about you concerning other people,
Gabriel Oak.”
“Well, Miss—excuse the words—I thought you would like them. But I can’t
match you, I know, in mapping out my mind upon my tongue. I never was
very clever in my inside. But I thank you. Come, give me your hand.”
She hesitated, somewhat disconcerted at Oak’s old-fashioned earnest
conclusion to a dialogue lightly carried on. “Very well,” she said, and
gave him her hand, compressing her lips to a demure impassivity. He
held it but an instant, and in his fear of being too demonstrative,
swerved to the opposite extreme, touching her fingers with the
lightness of a small-hearted person.
“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.
CHAPTER IV
GABRIEL’S RESOLVE—THE VISIT—THE MISTAKE
The only superiority in women that is tolerable to the rival sex is, as
a rule, that of the unconscious kind; but a superiority which
recognizes itself may sometimes please by suggesting possibilities of
capture to the subordinated man.
This well-favoured and comely girl soon made appreciable inroads upon
the emotional constitution of young Farmer Oak.
Love, being an extremely exacting usurer (a sense of exorbitant profit,
spiritually, by an exchange of hearts, being at the bottom of pure
passions, as that of exorbitant profit, bodily or materially, is at the
bottom of those of lower atmosphere), every morning Oak’s feelings were
as sensitive as the money-market in calculations upon his chances. 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. However,
he continued to watch through the hedge for her regular coming, and
thus his sentiments towards her were deepened without any corresponding
effect being produced upon herself. Oak had nothing finished and ready
to say as yet, and not being able to frame love phrases which end where
they begin; passionate tales—
—Full of sound and fury,
—Signifying nothing—
he said no word at all.
By making inquiries he found that the girl’s name was Bathsheba
Everdene, and that the cow would go dry in about seven days. He dreaded
the eighth day.
At last the eighth day came. The cow had ceased to give milk for that
year, and Bathsheba Everdene came up the hill no more. Gabriel had
reached a pitch of existence he never could have anticipated a short
time before. 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. Oak began
now to see light in this direction, and said to himself, “I’ll make her
my wife, or upon my soul I shall be good for nothing!”
All this while he was perplexing himself about an errand on which he
might consistently visit the cottage of Bathsheba’s aunt.
He found his opportunity in the death of a ewe, mother of a living
lamb. 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, Oak put the lamb into a respectable Sunday basket,
and stalked across the fields to the house of Mrs. Hurst, the
aunt—George, the dog walking behind, with a countenance of great
concern at the serious turn pastoral affairs seemed to be taking.
Gabriel had watched the blue wood-smoke curling from the chimney with
strange meditation. At evening he had fancifully traced it down the
chimney to the spot of its origin—seen the hearth and Bathsheba beside
it—beside it in her out-door dress; for the clothes she had worn on the
hill were by association equally with her person included in the
compass of his affection; they seemed at this early time of his love a
necessary ingredient of the sweet mixture called Bathsheba Everdene.
He had made a toilet of a nicely-adjusted kind—of a nature between the
carefully neat and the carelessly ornate—of a degree between
fine-market-day and wet-Sunday selection. He thoroughly cleaned his
silver watch-chain with whiting, put new lacing straps to his boots,
looked to the brass eyelet-holes, went to the inmost heart of the
plantation for a new walking-stick, and trimmed it vigorously on his
way back; took a new handkerchief from the bottom of his clothes-box,
put on the light waistcoat patterned all over with sprigs of an elegant
flower uniting the beauties of both rose and lily without the defects
of either, and used all the hair-oil he possessed upon his usually dry,
sandy, and inextricably curly hair, till he had deepened it to a
splendidly novel colour, between that of guano and Roman cement, making
it stick to his head like mace round a nutmeg, or wet seaweed round a
boulder after the ebb.
Nothing disturbed the stillness of the cottage save the chatter of a
knot of sparrows on the eaves; one might fancy scandal and rumour to be
no less the staple topic of these little coteries on roofs than of
those under them. It seemed that the omen was an unpropitious one, for,
as the rather untoward commencement of Oak’s overtures, just as he
arrived by the garden gate, he saw a cat inside, going into various
arched shapes and fiendish convulsions at the sight of his dog George.
The dog took no notice, for he had arrived at an age at which all
superfluous barking was cynically avoided as a waste of breath—in fact,
he never barked even at the sheep except to order, when it was done
with an absolutely neutral countenance, as a sort of
Commination-service, which, though offensive, had to be gone through
once now and then to frighten the flock for their own good.
A voice came from behind some laurel-bushes into which the cat had run:
“Poor dear! Did a nasty brute of a dog want to kill it;—did he, poor
dear!”
“I beg your pardon,” said Oak to the voice, “but George was walking on
behind me with a temper as mild as milk.”
Almost before he had ceased speaking, Oak was seized with a misgiving
as to whose ear was the recipient of his answer. Nobody appeared, and
he heard the person retreat among the bushes.
Gabriel meditated, and so deeply that he brought small furrows into his
forehead by sheer force of reverie. Where the issue of an interview is
as likely to be a vast change for the worse as for the better, any
initial difference from expectation causes nipping sensations of
failure. Oak went up to the door a little abashed: his mental rehearsal
and the reality had had no common grounds of opening.
Bathsheba’s aunt was indoors. “Will you tell Miss Everdene that
somebody would be glad to speak to her?” said Mr. Oak. (Calling one’s
self merely Somebody, without giving a name, is not to be taken as an
example of the ill-breeding of the rural world: it springs from a
refined modesty, of which townspeople, with their cards and
announcements, have no notion whatever.)
Bathsheba was out. The voice had evidently been hers.
“Will you come in, Mr. Oak?”
“Oh, thank ’ee,” said Gabriel, following her to the fireplace. “I’ve
brought a lamb for Miss Everdene. I thought she might like one to rear;
girls do.”
“She might,” said Mrs. Hurst, musingly; “though she’s only a visitor
here. If you will wait a minute, Bathsheba will be in.”
“Yes, I will wait,” said Gabriel, sitting down. “The lamb isn’t really
the business I came about, Mrs. Hurst. In short, I was going to ask her
if she’d like to be married.”
“And were you indeed?”
“Yes. Because if she would, I should be very glad to marry her. D’ye
know if she’s got any other young man hanging about her at all?”
“Let me think,” said Mrs. Hurst, poking the fire superfluously....
“Yes—bless you, ever so many young men. You see, Farmer Oak, she’s so
good-looking, and an excellent scholar besides—she was going to be a
governess once, you know, only she was too wild. Not that her young men
ever come here—but, Lord, in the nature of women, she must have a
dozen!”
“That’s unfortunate,” said Farmer Oak, contemplating a crack in the
stone floor with sorrow. “I’m only an every-day sort of man, and my
only chance was in being the first comer.... Well, there’s no use in my
waiting, for that was all I came about: so I’ll take myself off
home-along, Mrs. Hurst.”
When Gabriel had gone about two hundred yards along the down, he heard
a “hoi-hoi!” uttered behind him, in a piping note of more treble
quality than that in which the exclamation usually embodies itself when
shouted across a field. He looked round, and saw a girl racing after
him, waving a white handkerchief.
Oak stood still—and the runner drew nearer. It was Bathsheba Everdene.
Gabriel’s colour deepened: hers was already deep, not, as it appeared,
from emotion, but from running.
“Farmer Oak—I—” she said, pausing for want of breath pulling up in
front of him with a slanted face and putting her hand to her side.
“I have just called to see you,” said Gabriel, pending her further
speech.
“Yes—I know that,” she said panting like a robin, her face red and
moist from her exertions, like a peony petal before the sun dries off
the dew. “I didn’t know you had come to ask to have me, or I should