Far from the Madding Crowd
flock when the other should die, but had got no further than the
rudiments as yet—still finding an insuperable difficulty in
distinguishing between doing a thing well enough and doing it too well.
So earnest and yet so wrong-headed was this young dog (he had no name
in particular, and answered with perfect readiness to any pleasant
interjection), that if sent behind the flock to help them on, he did it
so thoroughly that he would have chased them across the whole county
with the greatest pleasure if not called off or reminded when to stop
by the example of old George.
Thus much for the dogs. On the further side of Norcombe Hill was a
chalk-pit, from which chalk had been drawn for generations, and spread
over adjacent farms. Two hedges converged upon it in the form of a V,
but without quite meeting. The narrow opening left, which was
immediately over the brow of the pit, was protected by a rough railing.
One night, when Farmer Oak had returned to his house, believing there
would be no further necessity for his attendance on the down, he called
as usual to the dogs, previously to shutting them up in the outhouse
till next morning. Only one responded—old George; the other could not
be found, either in the house, lane, or garden. Gabriel then remembered
that he had left the two dogs on the hill eating a dead lamb (a kind of
meat he usually kept from them, except when other food ran short), and
concluding that the young one had not finished his meal, he went
indoors to the luxury of a bed, which latterly he had only enjoyed on
Sundays.
It was a still, moist night. Just before dawn he was assisted in waking
by the abnormal reverberation of familiar music. To the shepherd, the
note of the sheep-bell, like the ticking of the clock to other people,
is a chronic sound that only makes itself noticed by ceasing or
altering in some unusual manner from the well-known idle twinkle which
signifies to the accustomed ear, however distant, that all is well in
the fold. In the solemn calm of the awakening morn that note was heard
by Gabriel, beating with unusual violence and rapidity. This
exceptional ringing may be caused in two ways—by the rapid feeding of
the sheep bearing the bell, as when the flock breaks into new pasture,
which gives it an intermittent rapidity, or by the sheep starting off
in a run, when the sound has a regular palpitation. The experienced ear
of Oak knew the sound he now heard to be caused by the running of the
flock with great velocity.
He jumped out of bed, dressed, tore down the lane through a foggy dawn,
and ascended the hill. The forward ewes were kept apart from those
among which the fall of lambs would be later, there being two hundred
of the latter class in Gabriel’s flock. These two hundred seemed to
have absolutely vanished from the hill. There were the fifty with their
lambs, enclosed at the other end as he had left them, but the rest,
forming the bulk of the flock, were nowhere. Gabriel called at the top
of his voice the shepherd’s call:
“Ovey, ovey, ovey!”
Not a single bleat. He went to the hedge; a gap had been broken through
it, and in the gap were the footprints of the sheep. Rather surprised
to find them break fence at this season, yet putting it down instantly
to their great fondness for ivy in winter-time, of which a great deal
grew in the plantation, he followed through the hedge. They were not in
the plantation. He called again: the valleys and farthest hills
resounded as when the sailors invoked the lost Hylas on the Mysian
shore; but no sheep. He passed through the trees and along the ridge of
the hill. On the extreme summit, where the ends of the two converging
hedges of which we have spoken were stopped short by meeting the brow
of the chalk-pit, he saw the younger dog standing against the sky—dark
and motionless as Napoleon at St. Helena.
A horrible conviction darted through Oak. With a sensation of bodily
faintness he advanced: at one point the rails were broken through, and
there he saw the footprints of his ewes. The dog came up, licked his
hand, and made signs implying that he expected some great reward for
signal services rendered. Oak looked over the precipice. The ewes lay
dead and dying at its foot—a heap of two hundred mangled carcasses,
representing in their condition just now at least two hundred more.
Oak was an intensely humane man: indeed, his humanity often tore in
pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered on strategy, and
carried him on as by gravitation. A shadow in his life had always been
that his flock ended in mutton—that a day came and found every shepherd
an arrant traitor to his defenseless sheep. His first feeling now was
one of pity for the untimely fate of these gentle ewes and their unborn
lambs.
It was a second to remember another phase of the matter. The sheep were
not insured. All the savings of a frugal life had been dispersed at a
blow; his hopes of being an independent farmer were laid low—possibly
for ever. Gabriel’s energies, patience, and industry had been so
severely taxed during the years of his life between eighteen and
eight-and-twenty, to reach his present stage of progress that no more
seemed to be left in him. He leant down upon a rail, and covered his
face with his hands.
Stupors, however, do not last for ever, and Farmer Oak recovered from
his. It was as remarkable as it was characteristic that the one
sentence he uttered was in thankfulness:—
“Thank God I am not married: what would _she_ have done in the poverty
now coming upon me!”
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.
As far as could be learnt it appeared that the poor young dog, still
under the impression that since he was kept for running after sheep,
the more he ran after them the better, had at the end of his meal off
the dead lamb, which may have given him additional energy and spirits,
collected all the ewes into a corner, driven the timid creatures
through the hedge, across the upper field, and by main force of
worrying had given them momentum enough to break down a portion of the
rotten railing, and so hurled them over the edge.
George’s son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too
good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at
twelve o’clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate
which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a
train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly
consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.
Gabriel’s farm had been stocked by a dealer—on the strength of Oak’s
promising look and character—who was receiving a percentage from the
farmer till such time as the advance should be cleared off. Oak found
that the value of stock, plant, and implements which were really his
own would be about sufficient to pay his debts, leaving himself a free
man with the clothes he stood up in, and nothing more.
CHAPTER VI
THE FAIR—THE JOURNEY—THE FIRE
Two months passed away. We are brought on to a day in February, on
which was held the yearly statute or hiring fair in the county-town of
Casterbridge.
At one end of the street stood from two to three hundred blithe and
hearty labourers waiting upon Chance—all men of the stamp to whom
labour suggests nothing worse than a wrestle with gravitation, and
pleasure nothing better than a renunciation of the same. Among these,
carters and waggoners were distinguished by having a piece of whip-cord
twisted round their hats; thatchers wore a fragment of woven straw;
shepherds held their sheep-crooks in their hands; and thus the
situation required was known to the hirers at a glance.
In the crowd was an athletic young fellow of somewhat superior
appearance to the rest—in fact, his superiority was marked enough to
lead several ruddy peasants standing by to speak to him inquiringly, as
to a farmer, and to use “Sir” as a finishing word. His answer always
was,—
“I am looking for a place myself—a bailiff’s. Do ye know of anybody who
wants one?”
Gabriel was paler now. His eyes were more meditative, and his
expression was more sad. He had passed through an ordeal of
wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. He had
sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very
slime-pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he had
never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it
often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it
does not. And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the loss
gain.
In the morning a regiment of cavalry had left the town, and a sergeant
and his party had been beating up for recruits through the four
streets. As the end of the day drew on, and he found himself not hired,
Gabriel almost wished that he had joined them, and gone off to serve
his country. Weary of standing in the market-place, and not much
minding the kind of work he turned his hand to, he decided to offer
himself in some other capacity than that of bailiff.
All the farmers seemed to be wanting shepherds. Sheep-tending was
Gabriel’s speciality. Turning down an obscure street and entering an
obscurer lane, he went up to a smith’s shop.
“How long would it take you to make a shepherd’s crook?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“How much?”
“Two shillings.”
He sat on a bench and the crook was made, a stem being given him into
the bargain.
He then went to a ready-made clothes’ shop, the owner of which had a
large rural connection. As the crook had absorbed most of Gabriel’s
money, he attempted, and carried out, an exchange of his overcoat for a
shepherd’s regulation smock-frock.
This transaction having been completed, he again hurried off to the
centre of the town, and stood on the kerb of the pavement, as a
shepherd, crook in hand.
Now that Oak had turned himself into a shepherd, it seemed that
bailiffs were most in demand. However, two or three farmers noticed him
and drew near. Dialogues followed, more or less in the subjoined form:—
“Where do you come from?”
“Norcombe.”
“That’s a long way.
“Fifteen miles.”
“Who’s farm were you upon last?”
“My own.”
This reply invariably operated like a rumour of cholera. The inquiring
farmer would edge away and shake his head dubiously. Gabriel, like his
dog, was too good to be trustworthy, and he never made advance beyond
this point.
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. Gabriel wished he had not nailed up his colours as
a shepherd, but had laid himself out for anything in the whole cycle of
labour that was required in the fair. It grew dusk. Some merry men were
whistling and singing by the corn-exchange. Gabriel’s hand, which had
lain for some time idle in his smock-frock pocket, touched his flute
which he carried there. Here was an opportunity for putting his dearly
bought wisdom into practice.
He drew out his flute and began to play “Jockey to the Fair” in the
style of a man who had never known a moment’s sorrow. Oak could pipe
with Arcadian sweetness, and the sound of the well-known notes cheered
his own heart as well as those of the loungers. He played on with