Far from the Madding Crowd

HE GURGOYLE: ITS DOINGS

The tower of Weatherbury Church was a square erection of
fourteenth-century date, having two stone gurgoyles on each of the four
faces of its parapet. Of these eight carved protuberances only two at
this time continued to serve the purpose of their erection—that of
spouting the water from the lead roof within. One mouth in each front
had been closed by bygone church-wardens as superfluous, and two others
were broken away and choked—a matter not of much consequence to the
wellbeing of the tower, for the two mouths which still remained open
and active were gaping enough to do all the work.

It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the
vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits
of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art
there is no disputing the proposition. Weatherbury tower was a somewhat
early instance of the use of an ornamental parapet in parish as
distinct from cathedral churches, and the gurgoyles, which are the
necessary correlatives of a parapet, were exceptionally prominent—of
the boldest cut that the hand could shape, and of the most original
design that a human brain could conceive. There was, so to speak, that
symmetry in their distortion which is less the characteristic of
British than of Continental grotesques of the period. All the eight
were different from each other. A beholder was convinced that nothing
on earth could be more hideous than those he saw on the north side
until he went round to the south. Of the two on this latter face, only
that at the south-eastern corner concerns the story. It was too human
to be called like a dragon, too impish to be like a man, too animal to
be like a fiend, and not enough like a bird to be called a griffin.
This horrible stone entity was fashioned as if covered with a wrinkled
hide; it had short, erect ears, eyes starting from their sockets, and
its fingers and hands were seizing the corners of its mouth, which they
thus seemed to pull open to give free passage to the water it vomited.
The lower row of teeth was quite washed away, though the upper still
remained. Here and thus, jutting a couple of feet from the wall against
which its feet rested as a support, the creature had for four hundred
years laughed at the surrounding landscape, voicelessly in dry weather,
and in wet with a gurgling and snorting sound.

Troy slept on in the porch, and the rain increased outside. Presently
the gurgoyle spat. In due time a small stream began to trickle through
the seventy feet of aerial space between its mouth and the ground,
which the water-drops smote like duckshot in their accelerated
velocity. The stream thickened in substance, and increased in power,
gradually spouting further and yet further from the side of the tower.
When the rain fell in a steady and ceaseless torrent the stream dashed
downward in volumes.

We follow its course to the ground at this point of time. The end of
the liquid parabola has come forward from the wall, has advanced over
the plinth mouldings, over a heap of stones, over the marble border,
into the midst of Fanny Robin’s grave.

The force of the stream had, until very lately, been received upon some
loose stones spread thereabout, which had acted as a shield to the soil
under the onset. These during the summer had been cleared from the
ground, and there was now nothing to resist the down-fall but the bare
earth. For several years the stream had not spouted so far from the
tower as it was doing on this night, and such a contingency had been
over-looked. Sometimes this obscure corner received no inhabitant for
the space of two or three years, and then it was usually but a pauper,
a poacher, or other sinner of undignified sins.

The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle’s jaws directed all its
vengeance into the grave. The rich tawny mould was stirred into motion,
and boiled like chocolate. The water accumulated and washed deeper
down, and the roar of the pool thus formed spread into the night as the
head and chief among other noises of the kind created by the deluging
rain. The flowers so carefully planted by Fanny’s repentant lover began
to move and writhe in their bed. The winter-violets turned slowly
upside down, and became a mere mat of mud. Soon the snowdrop and other
bulbs danced in the boiling mass like ingredients in a cauldron. Plants
of the tufted species were loosened, rose to the surface, and floated
off.

Troy did not awake from his comfortless sleep till it was broad day.
Not having been in bed for two nights his shoulders felt stiff, his
feet tender, and his head heavy. He remembered his position, arose,
shivered, took the spade, and again went out.

The rain had quite ceased, and the sun was shining through the green,
brown, and yellow leaves, now sparkling and varnished by the raindrops
to the brightness of similar effects in the landscapes of Ruysdael and
Hobbema, and full of all those infinite beauties that arise from the
union of water and colour with high lights. The air was rendered so
transparent by the heavy fall of rain that the autumn hues of the
middle distance were as rich as those near at hand, and the remote
fields intercepted by the angle of the tower appeared in the same plane
as the tower itself.

He entered the gravel path which would take him behind the tower. The
path, instead of being stony as it had been the night before, was
browned over with a thin coating of mud. At one place in the path he
saw a tuft of stringy roots washed white and clean as a bundle of
tendons. He picked it up—surely it could not be one of the primroses he
had planted? He saw a bulb, another, and another as he advanced. Beyond
doubt they were the crocuses. With a face of perplexed dismay Troy
turned the corner and then beheld the wreck the stream had made.

The pool upon the grave had soaked away into the ground, and in its
place was a hollow. The disturbed earth was washed over the grass and
pathway in the guise of the brown mud he had already seen, and it
spotted the marble tombstone with the same stains. Nearly all the
flowers were washed clean out of the ground, and they lay, roots
upwards, on the spots whither they had been splashed by the stream.

Troy’s brow became heavily contracted. He set his teeth closely, and
his compressed lips moved as those of one in great pain. This singular
accident, by a strange confluence of emotions in him, was felt as the
sharpest sting of all. Troy’s face was very expressive, and any
observer who had seen him now would hardly have believed him to be a
man who had laughed, and sung, and poured love-trifles into a woman’s
ear. To curse his miserable lot was at first his impulse, but even that
lowest stage of rebellion needed an activity whose absence was
necessarily antecedent to the existence of the morbid misery which
wrung him. The sight, coming as it did, superimposed upon the other
dark scenery of the previous days, formed a sort of climax to the whole
panorama, and it was more than he could endure. Sanguine by nature,
Troy had a power of eluding grief by simply adjourning it. He could put
off the consideration of any particular spectre till the matter had
become old and softened by time. The planting of flowers on Fanny’s
grave had been perhaps but a species of elusion of the primary grief,
and now it was as if his intention had been known and circumvented.

Almost for the first time in his life, Troy, as he stood by this
dismantled grave, wished himself another man. It is seldom that a
person with much animal spirit does not feel that the fact of his life
being his own is the one qualification which singles it out as a more
hopeful life than that of others who may actually resemble him in every
particular. Troy had felt, in his transient way, hundreds of times,
that he could not envy other people their condition, because the
possession of that condition would have necessitated a different
personality, when he desired no other than his own. He had not minded
the peculiarities of his birth, the vicissitudes of his life, the
meteor-like uncertainty of all that related to him, because these
appertained to the hero of his story, without whom there would have
been no story at all for him; and it seemed to be only in the nature of
things that matters would right themselves at some proper date and wind
up well. This very morning the illusion completed its disappearance,
and, as it were, all of a sudden, Troy hated himself. The suddenness
was probably more apparent than real. A coral reef which just comes
short of the ocean surface is no more to the horizon than if it had
never been begun, and the mere finishing stroke is what often appears
to create an event which has long been potentially an accomplished
thing.

He stood and meditated—a miserable man. Whither should he go? “He that
is accursed, let him be accursed still,” was the pitiless anathema
written in this spoliated effort of his new-born solicitousness. A man
who has spent his primal strength in journeying in one direction has
not much spirit left for reversing his course. Troy had, since
yesterday, faintly reversed his; but the merest opposition had
disheartened him. To turn about would have been hard enough under the
greatest providential encouragement; but to find that Providence, far
from helping him into a new course, or showing any wish that he might
adopt one, actually jeered his first trembling and critical attempt in
that kind, was more than nature could bear.

He slowly withdrew from the grave. He did not attempt to fill up the
hole, replace the flowers, or do anything at all. He simply threw up
his cards and forswore his game for that time and always. Going out of
the churchyard silently and unobserved—none of the villagers having yet
risen—he passed down some fields at the back, and emerged just as
secretly upon the high road. Shortly afterwards he had gone from the
village.

Meanwhile, Bathsheba remained a voluntary prisoner in the attic. The
door was kept locked, except during the entries and exits of Liddy, for
whom a bed had been arranged in a small adjoining room. The light of
Troy’s lantern in the churchyard was noticed about ten o’clock by the
maid-servant, who casually glanced from the window in that direction
whilst taking her supper, and she called Bathsheba’s attention to it.
They looked curiously at the phenomenon for a time, until Liddy was
sent to bed.

Bathsheba did not sleep very heavily that night. When her attendant was
unconscious and softly breathing in the next room, the mistress of the
house was still looking out of the window at the faint gleam spreading
from among the trees—not in a steady shine, but blinking like a
revolving coast-light, though this appearance failed to suggest to her
that a person was passing and repassing in front of it. Bathsheba sat
here till it began to rain, and the light vanished, when she withdrew
to lie restlessly in her bed and re-enact in a worn mind the lurid
scene of yesternight.

Almost before the first faint sign of dawn appeared she arose again,
and opened the window to obtain a full breathing of the new morning
air, the panes being now wet with trembling tears left by the night
rain, each one rounded with a pale lustre caught from primrose-hued
slashes through a cloud low down in the awakening sky. From the trees
came the sound of steady dripping upon the drifted leaves under them,
and from the direction of the church she could hear another
noise—peculiar, and not intermittent like the rest, the purl of water
falling into a pool.

Liddy knocked at eight o’clock, and Bathsheba unlocked the door.

“What a heavy rain we’ve had in the night, ma’am!” said Liddy, when her
inquiries about breakfast had been made.

“Yes, very heavy.”

“Did you hear the strange noise from the churchyard?”

“I heard one strange noise. I’ve been thinking it must have been the
water from the tower spouts.”

“Well, that’s what the shepherd was saying, ma’am. He’s now gone on to
see.”

“Oh! Gabriel has been here this morning!”

“Only just looked in in passing—quite in his old way, which I thought
he had left off lately. But the tower spouts used to spatter on the
stones, and we are puzzled, for this was like the boiling of a pot.”

Not being able to read, think, or work, Bathsheba asked Liddy to stay
and breakfast with her. The tongue of the more childish woman still ran
upon recent events. “Are you going across to the church, ma’am?” she
asked.

“Not that I know of,” said Bathsheba.

“I thought you might like to go and see where they have put Fanny. The
trees hide the place from your window.”

Bathsheba had all sorts of dreads about meeting her husband. “Has Mr.
Troy been in to-night?” she said.

“No, ma’am; I think he’s gone to Budmouth.”

Budmouth! The sound of the word carried with it a much diminished
perspective of him and his deeds; there were thirteen miles interval
betwixt them now. She hated questioning Liddy about her husband’s
movements, and indeed had hitherto sedulously avoided doing so; but now
all the house knew that there had been some dreadful disagreement
between them, and it was futile to attempt disguise. Bathsheba had
reached a stage at which people cease to have any appreciative regard
for public opinion.

“What makes you think he has gone there?” she said.

“Laban Tall saw him on the Budmouth road this morning before
breakfast.”

Bathsheba was momentarily relieved of that wayward heaviness of the
past twenty-four hours which had quenched the vitality of youth in her
without substituting the philosophy of maturer years, and she resolved
to go out and walk a little way. So when breakfast was over, she put on
her bonnet, and took a direction towards the church. It was nine
o’clock, and the men having returned to work again from their first
meal, she was not likely to meet many of them in the road. Knowing that
Fanny had been laid in the reprobates’ quarter of the graveyard, called
in the parish “behind church,” which was invisible from the road, it
was impossible to resist the impulse to enter and look upon a spot
which, from nameless feelings, she at the same time dreaded to see. She
had been unable to overcome an impression that some connection existed
between her rival and the light through the trees.

Bathsheba skirted the buttress, and beheld the hole and the tomb, its
delicately veined surface splashed and stained just as Troy had seen it
and left it two hours earlier. On the other side of the scene stood
Gabriel. His eyes, too, were fixed on the tomb, and her arrival having
been noiseless, she had not as yet attracted his attention. Bathsheba
did not at once perceive that the grand tomb and the disturbed grave
were Fanny’s, and she looked on both sides and around for some humbler
mound, earthed up and clodded in the usual way. Then her eye followed
Oak’s, and she read the words with which the inscription opened:—

Erected by Francis Troy
In Beloved Memory of
Fanny Robin

Oak saw her, and his first act was to gaze inquiringly and learn how
she received this knowledge of the authorship of the work, which to
himself had caused considerable astonishment. But such discoveries did
not much affect her now. Emotional convulsions seemed to have become
the commonplaces of her history, and she bade him good morning, and
asked him to fill in the hole with the spade which was standing by.
Whilst Oak was doing as she desired, Bathsheba collected the flowers,
and began planting them with that sympathetic manipulation of roots and
leaves which is so conspicuous in a woman’s gardening, and which
flowers seem to understand and thrive upon. She requested Oak to get
the churchwardens to turn the leadwork at the mouth of the gurgoyle
that hung gaping down upon them, that by this means the stream might be
directed sideways, and a repetition of the accident prevented. Finally,
with the superfluous magnanimity of a woman whose narrower instincts
have brought down bitterness upon her instead of love, she wiped the
mud spots from the tomb as if she rather liked its words than
otherwise, and went again home.[2]