Far from the Madding Crowd

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.