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CHAPTER V - 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 regulal 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.
His incipient friendship with her aunt had been nipped by
the failure of his suit, and all that Oak learnt of
Bathsheba's movements was done indirectly. It appeared that
she had gone to a place called Weatherbury, more than twenty
miles off, but in what capacity -- whether as a visitor, or
permanently, he could not discover.
Gabriel had two dogs. George, the elder, exhibited an
ebony-tipped nose, surrounded by a narrow margin of pink
flesh, and a coat marked in random splotches approximating
in colour to white and slaty grey; but the grey, after years
of sun and rain, had been scorched and washed out of the
more prominent locks, leaving them of a reddish-brown, as if
the blue component of the grey had faded, like the indigo
from the same kind of colour in Turner's pictures. In
substance it had originally been hair, but long contact with
sheep seemed to be turning it by degrees into wool of a poor
quality and staple.
This dog had originally belonged to a shepherd of inferior
morals and dreadful temper, and the result was that George
knew the exact degrees of condemnation signified by cursing
and swearing of all descriptions better than the wickedest
old man in the neighbourhood. Long experience had so
precisely taught the animal the difference between such
exclamations as "Come in!" and "D ---- ye, come in!" that he
knew to a hair's breadth the rate of trotting back from the
ewes' tails that each call involved, if a staggerer with the
sheep crook was to be escaped. Though old, he was clever
and trustworthy still.
The young dog, George's son, might possibly have been the
image of his mother, for there was not much resemblance
between him and George. He was learning the sheep-keeping
business, so as to follow on at the flock when the other
should die, but had got no further than the rudiments as yet
-- still finding an insuperable difficulty in distinguishing
between doing a thing well enough and doing it too well. So
earnest and yet so wrong-headed was this young dog (he had
no name in particular, and answered with perfect readiness
to any pleasant interjection), that if sent behind the flock
to help them on, he did it so thoroughly that he would have
chased them across the whole county with the greatest
pleasure if not called off or reminded when to stop by the
example of old George.
Thus much for the dogs. On the further side of Norcombe
Hill was a chalk-pit, from which chalk had been drawn for
generations, and spread over adjacent farms. Two hedges
converged upon it in the form of a V, but without quite
meeting. The narrow opening left, which was immediately
over the brow of the pit, was protected by a rough railing.
One night, when Farmer Oak had returned to his house,
believing there would be no further necessity for his
attendance on the down, he called as usual to the dogs,
previously to shutting them up in the outhouse till next
morning. Only one responded -- old George; the other could
not be found, either in the house, lane, or garden. Gabriel
then remembered that he had left the two dogs on the hill
eating a dead lamb (a kind of meat he usually kept from
them, except when other food ran short), and concluding that
the young one had not finished his meal, he went indoors to
the luxury of a bed, which latterly he had only enjoyed on
Sundays.
It was a still, moist night. Just before dawn he was
assisted in waking by the abnormal reverberation of familiar
music. To the shepherd, the note of the sheep-bell, like
the ticking of the clock to other people, is a chronic sound
that only makes itself noticed by ceasing or altering in
some unusual manner from the well-known idle twinkle which
signifies to the accustomed ear, however distant, that all
is well in the fold. In the solemn calm of the awakening
morn that note was heard by Gabriel, beating with unusual
violence and rapidity. This exceptional ringing may be
caused in two ways -- by the rapid feeding of the sheep
bearing the bell, as when the flock breaks into new pasture,
which gives it an intermittent rapidity, or by the sheep
starting off in a run, when the sound has a regular
palpitation. The experienced ear of Oak knew the sound he
now heard to be caused by the running of the flock with
great velocity.
He jumped out of bed, dressed, tore down the lane through a
foggy dawn, and ascended the hill. The forward ewes were
kept apart from those among which the fall of lambs would be
later, there being two hundred of the latter class in
Gabriel's flock. These two hundred seemed to have
absolutely vanished from the hill. There were the fifty
with their lambs, enclosed at the other end as he had left
them, but the rest, forming the bulk of the flock, were
nowhere. Gabriel called at the top of his voice the
shepherd's call.
"Ovey, ovey, ovey!"
Not a single bleat. He went to the hedge; a gap had been
broken through it, and in the gap were the footprints of the
sheep. Rather surprised to find them break fence at this
season, yet putting it down instantly to their great
fondness for ivy in winter-time, of which a great deal grew
in the plantation, he followed through the hedge. They were
not in the plantation. He called again: the valleys and
farthest hills resounded as when the sailors invoked the
lost Hylas on the Mysian shore; but no sheep. He passed
through the trees and along the ridge of the hill. On the
extreme summit, where the ends of the two converging hedges
of which we have spoken were stopped short by meeting the
brow of the chalk-pit, he saw the younger dog standing
against the sky -- dark and motionless as Napoleon at St.
Helena.
A horrible conviction darted through Oak. With a sensation
of bodily faintness he advanced: at one point the rails
were broken through, and there he saw the footprints of his
ewes. The dog came up, licked his hand, and made signs
implying that he expected some great reward for signal
services rendered. Oak looked over the precipice. The ewes
lay dead and dying at its foot -- a heap of two hundred
mangled carcasses, representing in their condition just now
at least two hundred more.
Oak was an intensely humane man: indeed, his humanity often
tore in pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered
on strategy, and carried him on as by gravitation. A shadow
in his life had always been that his flock ended in mutton --
that a day came and found every shepherd an arrant traitor
to his defenseless sheep. His first feeling now was one of
pity for the untimely fate of these gentle ewes and their
unborn lambs.
It was a second to remember another phase of the matter.
The sheep were not insured. All the savings of a frugal
life had been dispersed at a blow; his hopes of being an
independent farmer were laid low -- possibly for ever.
Gabriel's energies, patience, and industry had been so
severely taxed during the years of his life between eighteen
and eight-and-twenty, to reach his present stage of progress
that no more seemed to be left in him. He leant down upon a
rail, and covered his face with his hands.
Stupors, however, do not last for ever, and Farmer Oak
recovered from his. It was as remarkable as it was
characteristic that the one sentence he uttered was in
thankfulness: --
"Thank God I am not married: what would she have done in
the poverty now coming upon me!"
Oak raised his head, and wondering what he could do,
listlessly surveyed the scene. By the outer margin of the
Pit was an oval pond, and over it hung the attenuated
skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon which had only a few days
to last -- the morning star dogging her on the left hand.
The pool glittered like a dead man's eye, and as the world
awoke a breeze blew, shaking and elongating the reflection
of the moon without breaking it, and turning the image of
the star to a phosphoric streak upon the water. All this
Oak saw and remembered.
As far as could be learnt it appeared that the poor young
dog, still under the impression that since he was kept for
running after sheep, the more he ran after them the better,
had at the end of his meal off the dead lamb, which may have
given him additional energy and spirits, collected all the
ewes into a corner, driven the timid creatures through the
hedge, across the upper field, and by main force of worrying
had given them momentum enough to break down a portion of
the rotten railing, and so hurled them over the edge.
George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was
considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact,
taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day --
another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends
dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of
reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly
consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of
compromise.
Gabriel's farm had been stocked by a dealer -- on the
strength of Oak's promising look and character -- who was
receiving a percentage from the farmer till such time as the
advance should be cleared off. Oak found that the value of
stock, plant, and implements which were really his own would
be about sufficient to pay his debts, leaving himself a free
man with the clothes he stood up in, and nothing more.
Content of CHAPTER V - DEPARTURE OF BATHSHEBA -- A PASTORAL TRAGEDY [Thomas Hardy's novel: Far From The Madding Crowd]
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Read next: CHAPTER VI - THE FAIR -- THE JOURNEY -- THE FIRE
Read previous: CHAPTER IV - GABRIEL'S RESOLVE -- THE VISIT -- THE MISTAKE
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