Far From the Madding Crowd

‘I’ll try to think,’ she observed rather more timorously; ‘if I can think out of doors; my mind spreads away so.’

‘But you can give a guess.’

‘Then give me time.’ Bathsheba looked thoughtfully into the distance, away from the direction in which Gabriel stood.

‘I can make you happy,’ said he to the back of her head, across the bush. ‘You shall have a piano in a year or two – farmers’ wives are getting to have pianos now – and I’ll practise up the flute right well to play with you in the evening.’

‘Yes; I should like that.’

‘And have one of those little ten-pound gigs for market – and nice flowers, and birds – cocks and hens I mean, because they be useful,’ continued Gabriel, feeling balanced between poetry and practicality.

‘I should like it very much.’

‘And a frame for cucumbers – like a gentleman and lady.’

‘Yes.’

‘And when the wedding was over, we’d have it put in the newspaper list of marriages.’

‘Dearly I should like that!’

‘And the babies in the births – every man jack of ’em! And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be – and whenever I look up, there will be you.’

‘Wait, wait, and don’t be improper!’

Her countenance fell, and she was silent awhile. He regarded the red berries between them over and over again, to such an extent that holly seemed in his after life to be a cypher signifying a proposal of marriage. Bathsheba decisively turned to him.

‘No; ’tis no use,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to marry you.’

‘Try.’

‘I’ve tried hard all the time I’ve been thinking; for a marriage would be very nice in one sense. People would talk about me and think I had won my battle, and I should feel triumphant, and all that. But a husband –’

‘Well!’

‘Why, he’d always be there, as you say; whenever I looked up, there he’d be.’

‘Of course he would – I, that is.’

‘Well, what I mean is that I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can’t show off in that way by herself, I shan’t marry – at least yet.’

‘That’s a terrible wooden story!’

At this criticism of her statement Bathsheba made an addition to her dignity by a slight sweep away from him.

‘Upon my heart and soul I don’t know what a maid can say stupider than that,’ said Oak. ‘But dearest,’ he continued in a palliative voice, ‘don’t be like it!’ Oak sighed a deep honest sigh – none the less so in that, being like the sigh of a pine plantation, it was rather noticeable as a disturbance of the atmosphere. ‘Why won’t you have me?’ he appealed, creeping round the holly to reach her side.

‘I cannot,’ she said, retreating.

‘But why?’ he persisted, standing still at last in despair of ever reaching her, and facing over the bush.

‘Because I don’t love you.’

‘Yes, but –’

She contracted a yawn to an inoffensive smallness, so that it was hardly ill-mannered at all. ‘I don’t love you,’ she said.

‘But I love you – and, as for myself, I am content to be liked.’

‘O Mr Oak – that’s very fine! You’d get to despise me.’

‘Never,’ said Mr Oak, so earnestly that he seemed to be coming, by the force of his words, straight through the bush and into her arms. ‘I shall do one thing in this life – one thing certain – that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.’ His voice had a genuine pathos now, and his large brown hands perceptibly trembled.

‘It seems dreadfully wrong not to have you when you feel so much!’ she said with a little distress, and looking hopelessly around for some means of escape from her moral dilemma. ‘How I wish I hadn’t run after you!’ However, she seemed to have a short cut for getting back to cheerfulness and set her face to signify archness. ‘It wouldn’t do, Mr Oak. I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent; and you would never be able to, I know.’

Oak cast his eyes down the field in a way implying that it was useless to attempt argument.

‘Mr Oak,’ she said, with luminous distinctness and common sense, ‘you are better off than I. I have hardly a penny in the world – I am staying with my aunt for my bare sustenance. I am better educated than you – and I don’t love you a bit: that’s my side of the case. Now yours: you are a farmer just beginning, and you ought in common prudence, if you marry at all (which you should certainly not think of doing at present), to marry a woman with money, who would stock a larger farm for you than you have now.’

Gabriel looked at her with a little surprise and much admiration.

‘That’s the very thing I had been thinking myself!’ he naively said.

Farmer Oak had one-and-a-half Christian characteristics too many to succeed with Bathsheba: his humility, and a superfluous moiety of honesty. Bathsheba was decidedly disconcerted.

‘Well, then, why did you come and disturb me?’ she said, almost angrily, if not quite, an enlarging red spot rising in each cheek.

‘I can’t do what I think would be – would be –’

‘Right?’

‘No: wise.’

‘You have made an admission now, Mr Oak,’ she exclaimed with even more hauteur, and rocking her head disdainfully. ‘After that, do you think I could marry you? Not if I know it.’

He broke in passionately: ‘But don’t mistake me like that! Because I am open enough to own what every man in my shoes would have thought of, you make your colours come up your face and get crabbed with me. That about you not being good enough for me is nonsense. You speak like a lady – all the parish notice it, and your uncle at Weatherbury is, I’ve heard, a large farmer – much larger than ever I shall be. May I call in the evening, or will you walk along with me o’ Sundays? I don’t want you to make up your mind at once, if you’d rather not.’

‘No – no – I cannot. Don’t press me any more – don’t. I don’t love you – so ’twould be ridiculous,’ she said, with a laugh.

No man likes to see his emotions the sport of a merry-go-round of skittishness. ‘Very well,’ said Oak firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever. ‘Then I’ll ask you no more.’

Chapter 5

Departure of Bathsheba – A pastoral tragedy

The news which one day reached Gabriel that Bathsheba Everdene had left the neighbourhood, had an influence upon him which might have surprised any who never suspected that the more emphatic the renunciation the less absolute its character.

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail. Separation, which was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by Bathsheba’s disappearance, though effectual with people of certain humours, is apt to idealize the removed object with others – notably those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep and long. Oak belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity, and felt the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a finer flame now that she was gone – that was all.