Far from the Madding Crowd

escription of Farmer Oak—An Incident

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were
within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to
chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his
countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.

His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man
of sound judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and general good
character. On Sundays he was a man of misty views, rather given to
postponing, and hampered by his best clothes and umbrella: upon the
whole, one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of
Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the
parish and the drunken section,—that is, he went to church, but yawned
privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed, and
thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to be listening
to the sermon. Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of
public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was
considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a
good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a
kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.

Since he lived six times as many working-days as Sundays, Oak’s
appearance in his old clothes was most peculiarly his own—the mental
picture formed by his neighbours in imagining him being always dressed
in that way. He wore a low-crowned felt hat, spread out at the base by
tight jamming upon the head for security in high winds, and a coat like
Dr. Johnson’s; his lower extremities being encased in ordinary leather
leggings and boots emphatically large, affording to each foot a roomy
apartment so constructed that any wearer might stand in a river all day
long and know nothing of damp—their maker being a conscientious man who
endeavoured to compensate for any weakness in his cut by unstinted
dimension and solidity.

Mr. Oak carried about him, by way of watch, what may be called a small
silver clock; in other words, it was a watch as to shape and intention,
and a small clock as to size. This instrument being several years older
than Oak’s grandfather, had the peculiarity of going either too fast or
not at all. The smaller of its hands, too, occasionally slipped round
on the pivot, and thus, though the minutes were told with precision,
nobody could be quite certain of the hour they belonged to. The
stopping peculiarity of his watch Oak remedied by thumps and shakes,
and he escaped any evil consequences from the other two defects by
constant comparisons with and observations of the sun and stars, and by
pressing his face close to the glass of his neighbours’ windows, till
he could discern the hour marked by the green-faced timekeepers within.
It may be mentioned that Oak’s fob being difficult of access, by reason
of its somewhat high situation in the waistband of his trousers (which
also lay at a remote height under his waistcoat), the watch was as a
necessity pulled out by throwing the body to one side, compressing the
mouth and face to a mere mass of ruddy flesh on account of the exertion
required, and drawing up the watch by its chain, like a bucket from a
well.

But some thoughtful persons, who had seen him walking across one of his
fields on a certain December morning—sunny and exceedingly mild—might
have regarded Gabriel Oak in other aspects than these. In his face one
might notice that many of the hues and curves of youth had tarried on
to manhood: there even remained in his remoter crannies some relics of
the boy. His height and breadth would have been sufficient to make his
presence imposing, had they been exhibited with due consideration. But
there is a way some men have, rural and urban alike, for which the mind
is more responsible than flesh and sinew: it is a way of curtailing
their dimensions by their manner of showing them. And from a quiet
modesty that would have become a vestal, which seemed continually to
impress upon him that he had no great claim on the world’s room, Oak
walked unassumingly and with a faintly perceptible bend, yet distinct
from a bowing of the shoulders. This may be said to be a defect in an
individual if he depends for his valuation more upon his appearance
than upon his capacity to wear well, which Oak did not.

He had just reached the time of life at which “young” is ceasing to be
the prefix of “man” in speaking of one. He was at the brightest period
of masculine growth, for his intellect and his emotions were clearly
separated: he had passed the time during which the influence of youth
indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had
not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become united again, in the
character of prejudice, by the influence of a wife and family. In
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.”