Yeobright loved his kind. He had a conviction that the want of most
men was knowledge of a sort which brings wisdom rather than affluence.
He wished to raise the class at the expense of individuals rather than
individuals at the expense of the class. What was more, he was ready
at once to be the first unit sacrificed.
In passing from the bucolic to the intellectual life the intermediate
stages are usually two at least, frequently many more; and one of
those stages is almost sure to be worldly advance. We can hardly
imagine bucolic placidity quickening to intellectual aims without
imagining social aims as the transitional phase. Yeobright's local
peculiarity was that in striving at high thinking he still cleaved
to plain living--nay, wild and meagre living in many respects, and
brotherliness with clowns.
He was a John the Baptist who took ennoblement rather than repentance
for his text. Mentally he was in a provincial future, that is, he was
in many points abreast with the central town thinkers of his date.
Much of this development he may have owed to his studious life in
Paris, where he had become acquainted with ethical systems popular at
the time.
In consequence of this relatively advanced position, Yeobright might
have been called unfortunate. The rural world was not ripe for him.
A man should be only partially before his time: to be completely to
the vanward in aspirations is fatal to fame. Had Philip's warlike son
been intellectually so far ahead as to have attempted civilization
without bloodshed, he would have been twice the godlike hero that he
seemed, but nobody would have heard of an Alexander.
In the interests of renown the forwardness should lie chiefly in the
capacity to handle things. Successful propagandists have succeeded
because the doctrine they bring into form is that which their
listeners have for some time felt without being able to shape. A man
who advocates aesthetic effort and deprecates social effort is only
likely to be understood by a class to which social effort has become a
stale matter. To argue upon the possibility of culture before luxury
to the bucolic world may be to argue truly, but it is an attempt
to disturb a sequence to which humanity has been long accustomed.
Yeobright preaching to the Egdon eremites that they might rise to
a serene comprehensiveness without going through the process of
enriching themselves, was not unlike arguing to ancient Chaldeans that
in ascending from earth to the pure empyrean it was not necessary to
pass first into the intervening heaven of ether.
Was Yeobright's mind well-proportioned? No. A well-proportioned mind
is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely
say that it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman,
tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the
other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet,
revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are
happiness and mediocrity. It produces the poetry of Rogers, the
paintings of West, the statecraft of North, the spiritual guidance
of Tomline; enabling its possessors to find their way to wealth, to
wind up well, to step with dignity off the stage, to die comfortably
in their beds, and to get the decent monument which, in many
cases, they deserve. It never would have allowed Yeobright to do
such a ridiculous thing as throw up his business to benefit his
fellow-creatures.
He walked along towards home without attending to paths. If anyone
knew the heath well it was Clym. He was permeated with its scenes,
with its substance, and with its odours. He might be said to be its
product. His eyes had first opened thereon; with its appearance all
the first images of his memory were mingled; his estimate of life
had been coloured by it: his toys had been the flint knives and
arrow-heads which he found there, wondering why stones should "grow"
to such odd shapes; his flowers, the purple bells and yellow furze;
his animal kingdom, the snakes and croppers; his society, its human
haunters. Take all the varying hates felt by Eustacia Vye towards the
heath, and translate them into loves, and you have the heart of Clym.
He gazed upon the wide prospect as he walked, and was glad.
To many persons this Egdon was a place which had slipped out of its
century generations ago, to intrude as an uncouth object into this.
It was an obsolete thing, and few cared to study it. How could this
be otherwise in the days of square fields, plashed hedges, and meadows
watered on a plan so rectangular that on a fine day they looked
like silver gridirons? The farmer, in his ride, who could smile at
artificial grasses, look with solicitude at the coming corn, and sigh
with sadness at the fly-eaten turnips, bestowed upon the distant
upland of heath nothing better than a frown. But as for Yeobright,
when he looked from the heights on his way he could not help indulging
in a barbarous satisfaction at observing that, in some of the attempts
at reclamation from the waste, tillage, after holding on for a year
or two, had receded again in despair, the ferns and furze-tufts
stubbornly reasserting themselves.
He descended into the valley, and soon reached his home at Blooms-End.
His mother was snipping dead leaves from the window-plants. She looked
up at him as if she did not understand the meaning of his long stay
with her; her face had worn that look for several days. He could
perceive that the curiosity which had been shown by the hair-cutting
group amounted in his mother to concern. But she had asked no question
with her lips, even when the arrival of his trunk suggested that he
was not going to leave her soon. Her silence besought an explanation
of him more loudly than words.
"I am not going back to Paris again, mother," he said. "At least, in
my old capacity. I have given up the business."
Mrs. Yeobright turned in pained surprise. "I thought something was
amiss, because of the boxes. I wonder you did not tell me sooner."
"I ought to have done it. But I have been in doubt whether you would
be pleased with my plan. I was not quite clear on a few points
myself. I am going to take an entirely new course."
"I am astonished, Clym. How can you want to do better than you've
been doing?"
"Very easily. But I shall not do better in the way you mean; I
suppose it will be called doing worse. But I hate that business of
mine, and I want to do some worthy thing before I die. As a
schoolmaster I think to do it--a school-master to the poor and
ignorant, to teach them what nobody else will."
"After all the trouble that has been taken to give you a start, and
when there is nothing to do but to keep straight on towards affluence,
you say you will be a poor man's schoolmaster. Your fancies will be
your ruin, Clym."
Mrs. Yeobright spoke calmly, but the force of feeling behind the words
was but too apparent to one who knew her as well as her son did. He
did not answer. There was in his face that hopelessness of being
understood which comes when the objector is constitutionally beyond
the reach of a logic that, even under favouring conditions, is almost
too coarse a vehicle for the subtlety of the argument.
No more was said on the subject till the end of dinner. His mother
then began, as if there had been no interval since the morning. "It
disturbs me, Clym, to find that you have come home with such thoughts
as those. I hadn't the least idea that you meant to go backward in
the world by your own free choice. Of course, I have always supposed
you were going to push straight on, as other men do--all who deserve
the name--when they have been put in a good way of doing well."
"I cannot help it," said Clym, in a troubled tone. "Mother, I hate
the flashy business. Talk about men who deserve the name, can any man
deserving the name waste his time in that effeminate way, when he sees
half the world going to ruin for want of somebody to buckle to and
teach them how to breast the misery they are born to? I get up every
morning and see the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain,
as St. Paul says, and yet there am I, trafficking in glittering
splendours with wealthy women and titled libertines, and pandering
to the meanest vanities--I, who have health and strength enough for
anything. I have been troubled in my mind about it all the year, and
the end is that I cannot do it any more."
"Why can't you do it as well as others?"
"I don't know, except that there are many things other people care
for which I don't; and that's partly why I think I ought to do this.
For one thing, my body does not require much of me. I cannot enjoy
delicacies; good things are wasted upon me. Well, I ought to turn
that defect to advantage, and by being able to do without what other
people require I can spend what such things cost upon anybody else."
Now, Yeobright, having inherited some of these very instincts from
the woman before him, could not fail to awaken a reciprocity in her
through her feelings, if not by arguments, disguise it as she might
for his good. She spoke with less assurance. "And yet you might have
been a wealthy man if you had only persevered. Manager to that large
diamond establishment--what better can a man wish for? What a post of
trust and respect! I suppose you will be like your father; like him,
you are getting weary of doing well."
"No," said her son, "I am not weary of that, though I am weary of what
you mean by it. Mother, what is doing well?"
Mrs. Yeobright was far too thoughtful a woman to be content with ready
definitions, and, like the "What is wisdom?" of Plato's Socrates, and
the "What is truth?" of Pontius Pilate, Yeobright's burning question
received no answer.
The silence was broken by the clash of the garden gate, a tap at the
door, and its opening. Christian Cantle appeared in the room in his
Sunday clothes.
It was the custom on Egdon to begin the preface to a story before
absolutely entering the house, so as to be well in for the body of
the narrative by the time visitor and visited stood face to face.
Christian had been saying to them while the door was leaving its
latch, "To think that I, who go from home but once in a while, and
hardly then, should have been there this morning!"
"'Tis news you have brought us, then, Christian?" said Mrs. Yeobright.
"Ay, sure, about a witch, and ye must overlook my time o' day; for,
says I, 'I must go and tell 'em, though they won't have half done
dinner.' I assure ye it made me shake like a driven leaf. Do ye think
any harm will come o't?"
"Well--what?"
"This morning at church we was all standing up, and the pa'son said,
'Let us pray.' 'Well,' thinks I, 'one may as well kneel as stand';
so down I went; and, more than that, all the rest were as willing to
oblige the man as I. We hadn't been hard at it for more than a minute
when a most terrible screech sounded through church, as if somebody
had just gied up their heart's blood. All the folk jumped up and
then we found that Susan Nunsuch had pricked Miss Vye with a long
stocking-needle, as she had threatened to do as soon as ever she could
get the young lady to church, where she don't come very often. She've
waited for this chance for weeks, so as to draw her blood and put an
end to the bewitching of Susan's children that has been carried on so
long. Sue followed her into church, sat next to her, and as soon as
she could find a chance in went the stocking-needle into my lady's
arm."
"Good heaven, how horrid!" said Mrs. Yeobright.
"Sue pricked her that deep that the maid fainted away; and as I was
afeard there might be some tumult among us, I got behind the bass-viol
and didn't see no more. But they carried her out into the air, 'tis
said; but when they looked round for Sue she was gone. What a scream
that girl gied, poor thing! There were the pa'son in his surplice
holding up his hand and saying, 'Sit down, my good people, sit down!'
But the deuce a bit would they sit down. O, and what d'ye think I
found out, Mrs. Yeobright? The pa'son wears a suit of clothes under
his surplice!--I could see his black sleeves when he held up his arm."
"'Tis a cruel thing," said Yeobright.
"Yes," said his mother.
"The nation ought to look into it," said Christian. "Here's Humphrey
coming, I think."
In came Humphrey. "Well, have ye heard the news? But I see you have.
'Tis a very strange thing that whenever one of Egdon folk goes to
church some rum job or other is sure to be doing. The last time one
of us was there was when neighbour Fairway went in the fall; and that
was the day you forbad the banns, Mrs. Yeobright."
"Has this cruelly treated girl been able to walk home?" said Clym.
"They say she got better, and went home very well. And now I've told
it I must be moving homeward myself."
"And I," said Humphrey. "Truly now we shall see if there's anything
in what folks say about her."
When they were gone into the heath again Yeobright said quietly to his
mother, "Do you think I have turned teacher too soon?"
"It is right that there should be schoolmasters, and missionaries, and
all such men," she replied. "But it is right, too, that I should try
to lift you out of this life into something richer, and that you
should not come back again, and be as if I had not tried at all."
Later in the day Sam, the turf-cutter, entered. "I've come
a-borrowing, Mrs. Yeobright. I suppose you have heard what's been
happening to the beauty on the hill?"
"Yes, Sam: half a dozen have been telling us."
"Beauty?" said Clym.
"Yes, tolerably well-favoured," Sam replied. "Lord! all the country
owns that 'tis one of the strangest things in the world that such a
woman should have come to live up there."
"Dark or fair?"
"Now, though I've seen her twenty times, that's a thing I cannot call
to mind."
"Darker than Tamsin," murmured Mrs. Yeobright.
"A woman who seems to care for nothing at all, as you may say."
"She is melancholy, then?" inquired Clym.
"She mopes about by herself, and don't mix in with the people."
"Is she a young lady inclined for adventures?"
"Not to my knowledge."
"Doesn't join in with the lads in their games, to get some sort of
excitement in this lonely place?"
"No."
"Mumming, for instance?"
"No. Her notions be different. I should rather say her thoughts were
far away from here, with lords and ladies she'll never know, and
mansions she'll never see again."
Observing that Clym appeared singularly interested Mrs. Yeobright said
rather uneasily to Sam, "You see more in her than most of us do. Miss
Vye is to my mind too idle to be charming. I have never heard that
she is of any use to herself or to other people. Good girls don't get
treated as witches even on Egdon."
"Nonsense--that proves nothing either way," said Yeobright.
"Well, of course I don't understand such niceties," said Sam,
withdrawing from a possibly unpleasant argument; "and what she is we
must wait for time to tell us. The business that I have really called
about is this, to borrow the longest and strongest rope you have. The
captain's bucket has dropped into the well, and they are in want of
water; and as all the chaps are at home today we think we can get it
out for him. We have three cart-ropes already, but they won't reach
to the bottom."
Mrs. Yeobright told him that he might have whatever ropes he could
find in the outhouse, and Sam went out to search. When he passed by
the door Clym joined him, and accompanied him to the gate.
"Is this young witch-lady going to stay long at Mistover?" he asked.
"I should say so."
"What a cruel shame to ill-use her, She must have suffered
greatly--more in mind than in body."
"'Twas a graceless trick--such a handsome girl, too. You ought to see
her, Mr. Yeobright, being a young man come from far, and with a little
more to show for your years than most of us."
"Do you think she would like to teach children?" said Clym.
Sam shook his head. "Quite a different sort of body from that, I
reckon."
"O, it was merely something which occurred to me. It would of course
be necessary to see her and talk it over--not an easy thing, by the
way, for my family and hers are not very friendly."
"I'll tell you how you mid see her, Mr. Yeobright," said Sam. "We are
going to grapple for the bucket at six o'clock tonight at her house,
and you could lend a hand. There's five or six coming, but the well is
deep, and another might be useful, if you don't mind appearing in that
shape. She's sure to be walking round."
"I'll think of it," said Yeobright; and they parted.
He thought of it a good deal; but nothing more was said about Eustacia
inside the house at that time. Whether this romantic martyr to
superstition and the melancholy mummer he had conversed with under the
full moon were one and the same person remained as yet a problem.