Far from the Madding Crowd

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
nature whilst in a living state has dried, stiffened, and been washed
out—rendering it just now as superior to anything woollen as cream is
superior to milk-and-water.

But heartless circumstance could not leave entire Gabriel’s happiness
of this morning. The rams, old ewes, and two-shear ewes had duly
undergone their stripping, and the men were proceeding with the
shearlings and hogs, when Oak’s belief that she was going to stand
pleasantly by and time him through another performance was painfully
interrupted by Farmer Boldwood’s appearance in the extremest corner of
the barn. Nobody seemed to have perceived his entry, but there he
certainly was. Boldwood always carried with him a social atmosphere of
his own, which everybody felt who came near him; and the talk, which
Bathsheba’s presence had somewhat suppressed, was now totally
suspended.

He crossed over towards Bathsheba, who turned to greet him with a
carriage of perfect ease. He spoke to her in low tones, and she
instinctively modulated her own to the same pitch, and her voice
ultimately even caught the inflection of his. She was far from having a
wish to appear mysteriously connected with him; but woman at the
impressionable age gravitates to the larger body not only in her choice
of words, which is apparent every day, but even in her shades of tone
and humour, when the influence is great.

What they conversed about was not audible to Gabriel, who was too
independent to get near, though too concerned to disregard. The issue
of their dialogue was the taking of her hand by the courteous farmer to
help her over the spreading-board into the bright June sunlight
outside. Standing beside the sheep already shorn, they went on talking
again. Concerning the flock? Apparently not. Gabriel theorized, not
without truth, that in quiet discussion of any matter within reach of
the speakers’ eyes, these are usually fixed upon it. Bathsheba demurely
regarded a contemptible straw lying upon the ground, in a way which
suggested less ovine criticism than womanly embarrassment. She became
more or less red in the cheek, the blood wavering in uncertain flux and
reflux over the sensitive space between ebb and flood. Gabriel sheared
on, constrained and sad.

She left Boldwood’s side, and he walked up and down alone for nearly a
quarter of an hour. Then she reappeared in her new riding-habit of
myrtle green, which fitted her to the waist as a rind fits its fruit;
and young Bob Coggan led on her mare, Boldwood fetching his own horse
from the tree under which it had been tied.

Oak’s eyes could not forsake them; and in endeavouring to continue his
shearing at the same time that he watched Boldwood’s manner, he snipped
the sheep in the groin. The animal plunged; Bathsheba instantly gazed
towards it, and saw the blood.

“Oh, Gabriel!” she exclaimed, with severe remonstrance, “you who are so
strict with the other men—see what you are doing yourself!”

To an outsider there was not much to complain of in this remark; but to
Oak, who knew Bathsheba to be well aware that she herself was the cause
of the poor ewe’s wound, because she had wounded the ewe’s shearer in a
still more vital part, it had a sting which the abiding sense of his
inferiority to both herself and Boldwood was not calculated to heal.
But a manly resolve to recognize boldly that he had no longer a lover’s
interest in her, helped him occasionally to conceal a feeling.

“Bottle!” he shouted, in an unmoved voice of routine. Cainy Ball ran
up, the wound was anointed, and the shearing continued.

Boldwood gently tossed Bathsheba into the saddle, and before they
turned away she again spoke out to Oak with the same dominative and
tantalizing graciousness.

“I am going now to see Mr. Boldwood’s Leicesters. Take my place in the
barn, Gabriel, and keep the men carefully to their work.”

The horses’ heads were put about, and they trotted away.

Boldwood’s deep attachment was a matter of great interest among all
around him; but, after having been pointed out for so many years as the
perfect exemplar of thriving bachelorship, his lapse was an anticlimax
somewhat resembling that of St. John Long’s death by consumption in the
midst of his proofs that it was not a fatal disease.

“That means matrimony,” said Temperance Miller, following them out of
sight with her eyes.

“I reckon that’s the size o’t,” said Coggan, working along without
looking up.

“Well, better wed over the mixen than over the moor,” said Laban Tall,
turning his sheep.

Henery Fray spoke, exhibiting miserable eyes at the same time: “I don’t
see why a maid should take a husband when she’s bold enough to fight
her own battles, and don’t want a home; for ’tis keeping another woman
out. But let it be, for ’tis a pity he and she should trouble two
houses.”

As usual with decided characters, Bathsheba invariably provoked the
criticism of individuals like Henery Fray. Her emblazoned fault was to
be too pronounced in her objections, and not sufficiently overt in her
likings. We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but
those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by;
and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and
antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at
all.

Henery continued in a more complaisant mood: “I once hinted my mind to
her on a few things, as nearly as a battered frame dared to do so to
such a froward piece. You all know, neighbours, what a man I be, and
how I come down with my powerful words when my pride is boiling wi’
scarn?”

“We do, we do, Henery.”

“So I said, ‘Mistress Everdene, there’s places empty, and there’s
gifted men willing; but the spite’—no, not the spite—I didn’t say
spite—‘but the villainy of the contrarikind,’ I said (meaning
womankind), ‘keeps ’em out.’ That wasn’t too strong for her, say?”

“Passably well put.”

“Yes; and I would have said it, had death and salvation overtook me for
it. Such is my spirit when I have a mind.”

“A true man, and proud as a lucifer.”

“You see the artfulness? Why, ’twas about being baily really; but I
didn’t put it so plain that she could understand my meaning, so I could
lay it on all the stronger. That was my depth!... However, let her
marry an she will. Perhaps ’tis high time. I believe Farmer Boldwood
kissed her behind the spear-bed at the sheep-washing t’other day—that I
do.”

“What a lie!” said Gabriel.

“Ah, neighbour Oak—how’st know?” said, Henery, mildly.

“Because she told me all that passed,” said Oak, with a pharisaical
sense that he was not as other shearers in this matter.

“Ye have a right to believe it,” said Henery, with dudgeon; “a very
true right. But I mid see a little distance into things! To be
long-headed enough for a baily’s place is a poor mere trifle—yet a
trifle more than nothing. However, I look round upon life quite cool.
Do you heed me, neighbours? My words, though made as simple as I can,
mid be rather deep for some heads.”

“O yes, Henery, we quite heed ye.”

“A strange old piece, goodmen—whirled about from here to yonder, as if
I were nothing! A little warped, too. But I have my depths; ha, and
even my great depths! I might gird at a certain shepherd, brain to
brain. But no—O no!”

“A strange old piece, ye say!” interposed the maltster, in a querulous
voice. “At the same time ye be no old man worth naming—no old man at
all. Yer teeth bain’t half gone yet; and what’s a old man’s standing if
so be his teeth bain’t gone? Weren’t I stale in wedlock afore ye were
out of arms? ’Tis a poor thing to be sixty, when there’s people far
past four-score—a boast weak as water.”

It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink minor differences
when the maltster had to be pacified.

“Weak as water! yes,” said Jan Coggan. “Malter, we feel ye to be a
wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.”

“Nobody,” said Joseph Poorgrass. “Ye be a very rare old spectacle,
malter, and we all admire ye for that gift.”

“Ay, and as a young man, when my senses were in prosperity, I was
likewise liked by a good-few who knowed me,” said the maltster.

“’Ithout doubt you was—’ithout doubt.”

The bent and hoary man was satisfied, and so apparently was Henery
Fray. That matters should continue pleasant Maryann spoke, who, what
with her brown complexion, and the working wrapper of rusty linsey, had
at present the mellow hue of an old sketch in oils—notably some of
Nicholas Poussin’s:—

“Do anybody know of a crooked man, or a lame, or any second-hand fellow
at all that would do for poor me?” said Maryann. “A perfect one I don’t
expect to get at my time of life. If I could hear of such a thing
’twould do me more good than toast and ale.”

Coggan furnished a suitable reply. Oak went on with his shearing, and
said not another word. Pestilent moods had come, and teased away his
quiet. Bathsheba had shown indications of anointing him above his
fellows by installing him as the bailiff that the farm imperatively
required. He did not covet the post relatively to the farm: in relation
to herself, as beloved by him and unmarried to another, he had coveted
it. His readings of her seemed now to be vapoury and indistinct. His
lecture to her was, he thought, one of the absurdest mistakes. Far from
coquetting with Boldwood, she had trifled with himself in thus feigning
that she had trifled with another. He was inwardly convinced that, in
accordance with the anticipations of his easy-going and worse-educated
comrades, that day would see Boldwood the accepted husband of Miss
Everdene. Gabriel at this time of his life had out-grown the
instinctive dislike which every Christian boy has for reading the
Bible, perusing it now quite frequently, and he inwardly said, “‘I find
more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets!’” This
was mere exclamation—the froth of the storm. He adored Bathsheba just
the same.

“We workfolk shall have some lordly junketing to-night,” said Cainy
Ball, casting forth his thoughts in a new direction. “This morning I
see ’em making the great puddens in the milking-pails—lumps of fat as
big as yer thumb, Mister Oak! I’ve never seed such splendid large knobs
of fat before in the days of my life—they never used to be bigger then
a horse-bean. And there was a great black crock upon the brandish with
his legs a-sticking out, but I don’t know what was in within.”

“And there’s two bushels of biffins for apple-pies,” said Maryann.

“Well, I hope to do my duty by it all,” said Joseph Poorgrass, in a
pleasant, masticating manner of anticipation. “Yes; victuals and drink
is a cheerful thing, and gives nerves to the nerveless, if the form of
words may be used. ’Tis the gospel of the body, without which we
perish, so to speak it.”