BOLDWOOD IN MEDITATION—A VISIT
Boldwood was tenant of what was called the Lower Farm, and his person
was the nearest approach to aristocracy that this remoter quarter of
Weatherbury could boast of. Genteel strangers, whose god was their
town, who might happen to be compelled to linger about this nook for a
day, heard the sound of light wheels, and prayed to see good society,
to the degree of a solitary lord, or squire at the very least, but it
was only Mr. Boldwood going out for the day. They heard the sound of
wheels yet once more, and were re-animated to expectancy: it was only
Mr. Boldwood coming home again.
His house stood recessed from the road, and the stables, which are to a
farm what a fireplace is to a house, were behind, their lower portions
being lost amid bushes of laurel. Inside the blue door, open half-way
down, were to be seen at this time the backs and tails of half-a-dozen
warm and contented horses standing in their stalls; and as thus viewed,
presenting alternations of roan and bay, in shapes like a Moorish arch,
the tail being a streak down the midst of each. Over these, and lost to
the eye gazing in from the outer light, the mouths of the same animals
could be heard busily sustaining the above-named warmth and plumpness
by quantities of oats and hay. The restless and shadowy figure of a
colt wandered up and down a loose-box at the end, whilst the steady
grind of all the eaters was occasionally diversified by the rattle of a
rope or the stamp of a foot.
Pacing up and down at the heels of the animals was Farmer Boldwood
himself. This place was his almonry and cloister in one: here, after
looking to the feeding of his four-footed dependants, the celibate
would walk and meditate of an evening till the moon’s rays streamed in
through the cobwebbed windows, or total darkness enveloped the scene.
His square-framed perpendicularity showed more fully now than in the
crowd and bustle of the market-house. In this meditative walk his foot
met the floor with heel and toe simultaneously, and his fine,
reddish-fleshed face was bent downwards just enough to render obscure
the still mouth and the well-rounded though rather prominent and broad
chin. A few clear and thread-like horizontal lines were the only
interruption to the otherwise smooth surface of his large forehead.
The phases of Boldwood’s life were ordinary enough, but his was not an
ordinary nature. Spiritually and mentally, no less than socially, a
commonplace general condition is no conclusive proof that a man has not
potentialities above that level.
In all cases this state may be either the mediocrity of inadequacy, as
was Oak’s, or what we will venture to call the mediocrity of
counterpoise, as was Boldwood’s. The quiet mean to which we originally
found him adhering, and in which, with few exceptions, he had
continually moved, was that of neutralization: it was not structural at
all. That stillness, which struck casual observers more than anything
else in his character and habit, and seemed so precisely like the rest
of inanition, may have been the perfect balance of enormous
antagonistic forces—positives and negatives in fine adjustment. His
equilibrium disturbed, he was in extremity at once.
Boldwood was thus either hot or cold. If an emotion possessed him at
all, it ruled him; a feeling not mastering him was entirely latent.
Stagnant or rapid, it was never slow. He was always hit mortally, or ho
was missed. The shallows in the characters of ordinary men were sterile
strands in his, but his depths were so profound as to be practically
bottomless.
He had no light and careless touches in his constitution, either for
good or for evil. Stern in the outlines of action, mild in the details,
he was serious throughout all. He saw no absurd sides to the follies of
life, and thus, though not quite companionable in the eyes of merry men
and scoffers, and those to whom all things show life as a jest, he was
not intolerable to the earnest and those acquainted with grief. Being a
man who read all the dramas of life seriously, if he failed to please
when they were comedies, there was no frivolous treatment to reproach
him for when they chanced to end tragically.
Bathsheba was far from dreaming that the dark and silent shape upon
which she had so carelessly thrown a seed was a hotbed of tropic
intensity. Had she known Boldwood’s moods, her blame would have been
fearful, and the stain upon her heart ineradicable. Moreover, had she
known her present power for good or evil over this man, she would have
trembled at her responsibility. Luckily for her present, unluckily for
her future tranquillity, her understanding had not yet told her what
Boldwood was. Nobody knew entirely; for though it was possible to form
guesses concerning his spirited capabilities from old floodmarks
faintly visible, he had never been seen at the high tides which caused
them.
Farmer Boldwood came to the stable-door, and looked forth across the
level fields. Beyond the first enclosure was a hedge, and on the other
side of this a meadow, belonging to Bathsheba’s farm.
It was now early spring—the time of going to grass with the sheep, when
they have the first feed of the meadows, before these are laid up for
mowing. The wind, which had been blowing east for several weeks, had
veered to the southward, and the middle of spring had come
abruptly—almost without a beginning. It was that period in the vernal
quarter when we may suppose the Dryads to be waking for the season. The
vegetable world begins to move and swell and the saps to rise, till in
the completest silence of lone gardens and trackless plantations, where
everything seems helpless and still after the bond and slavery of
frost, there are bustlings, strainings, united thrusts, and
pulls-all-together, in comparison with which the powerful tugs of
cranes and pulleys in a noisy city are but pigmy efforts.
Boldwood, looking into the distant meadows, saw there three figures.
They were those of Miss Everdene, Shepherd Oak, and Cainy Ball.
When Bathsheba’s figure shone upon the farmer’s eyes, it lighted him up
as the moon lights up a great tower. A man’s body is as the shell, or
the tablet, of his soul, as he is reserved or ingenuous, overflowing or
self-contained. There was a change in Boldwood’s exterior from its
former impassibleness; and his face showed that he was now living
outside his defences for the first time, and with a fearful sense of
exposure. It is the usual experience of strong natures when they love.
At last he arrived at a conclusion. It was to go across and inquire
boldly of her.
The insulation of his heart by reserve during these many years, without
a duct of any kind for disposable emotion, had worked its effect. It
has been observed more than once that the causes of love are chiefly
subjective, and Boldwood was a living testimony to the truth of the
proposition. No mother existed to absorb his devotion, no sister for
his tenderness, no idle ties for sense. He became surcharged with the
compound, which was genuine lover’s love.
He approached the gate of the meadow. Beyond it the ground was
melodious with ripples, and the sky with larks; the low bleating of the
flock mingling with both. Mistress and man were engaged in the
operation of making a lamb “take,” which is performed whenever an ewe
has lost her own offspring, one of the twins of another ewe being given
her as a substitute. Gabriel had skinned the dead lamb, and was tying
the skin over the body of the live lamb, in the customary manner,
whilst Bathsheba was holding open a little pen of four hurdles, into
which the mother and foisted lamb were driven, where they would remain
till the old sheep conceived an affection for the young one.
Bathsheba looked up at the completion of the manœuvre, and saw the
farmer by the gate, where he was overhung by a willow tree in full
bloom. Gabriel, to whom her face was as the uncertain glory of an April
day, was ever regardful of its faintest changes, and instantly
discerned thereon the mark of some influence from without, in the form
of a keenly self-conscious reddening. He also turned and beheld
Boldwood.
At once connecting these signs with the letter Boldwood had shown him,
Gabriel suspected her of some coquettish procedure begun by that means,
and carried on since he knew not how.
Farmer Boldwood had read the pantomime denoting that they were
conscious of his presence, and the perception was as too much light
turned upon his new sensibility. He was still in the road, and by
moving on he hoped that neither would recognize that he had originally
intended to enter the field. He passed by with an utter and
overwhelming sensation of ignorance, shyness, and doubt. Perhaps in her
manner there were signs that she wished to see him—perhaps not—he could
not read a woman. The cabala of this erotic philosophy seemed to
consist of the subtlest meanings expressed in misleading ways. Every
turn, look, word, and accent contained a mystery quite distinct from
its obvious import, and not one had ever been pondered by him until
now.
As for Bathsheba, she was not deceived into the belief that Farmer
Boldwood had walked by on business or in idleness. She collected the
probabilities of the case, and concluded that she was herself
responsible for Boldwood’s appearance there. It troubled her much to
see what a great flame a little wildfire was likely to kindle.
Bathsheba was no schemer for marriage, nor was she deliberately a
trifler with the affections of men, and a censor’s experience on seeing
an actual flirt after observing her would have been a feeling of
surprise that Bathsheba could be so different from such a one, and yet
so like what a flirt is supposed to be.
She resolved never again, by look or by sign, to interrupt the steady
flow of this man’s life. But a resolution to avoid an evil is seldom
framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance
impossible.