He wished she knew his impressions; but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.
She made him sit up, and then Oak began wiping his face and shaking himself like a Samson. “How can I thank ‘ee?” he said at last, gratefully, some of the natural rusty red having returned to his face.
“Oh, never mind that,” said the girl, smiling, and allowing her smile to hold good for Gabriel’s next remark, whatever that might prove to be.
“How did you find me?”
“I heard your dog howling and scratching at the door of the hut when I came to the milking (it was so lucky, Daisy’s milking is almost over for the season, and I shall not come here after this week or the next). The dog saw me, and jumped over to me, and laid hold of my skirt. I came across and looked round the hut the very first thing to see if the slides were closed. My uncle has a hut like this one, and I have heard him tell his shepherd not to go to sleep without leaving a slide open. I opened the door, and there you were like dead. I threw the milk over you, as there was no water, forgetting it was warm, and no use.”
“I wonder if I should have died?” Gabriel said, in a low voice, which was rather meant to travel back to himself than to her.
“Oh no!” the girl replied. She seemed to prefer a less tragic probability; to have saved a man from death involved talk that should harmonise with the dignity of such a deed — and she shunned it.
“I believe you saved my life, Miss — I don’t know your name. I know your aunt’s, but not yours.”
“I would just as soon not tell it — rather not. There is no reason either why I should, as you probably will never have much to do with me.”
“Still, I should like to know.”
“You can inquire at my aunt’s — she will tell you.”
“My name is Gabriel Oak.”
“And mine isn’t. You seem fond of yours in speaking it so decisively, Gabriel Oak.”
“You see, it is the only one I shall ever have, and I must make the most of it.”
“I always think mine sounds odd and disagreeable.”
“I should think you might soon get a new one — as a wife, I mean.”
“Mercy! — how many opinions you keep about you concerning other people, Gabriel Oak.”
“Well, Miss — excuse the words — I thought you would like them. But I can’t match you, I know, in mapping out my mind upon my tongue. I never was very clever in my inside. But I thank you. Come, give me your hand.”
She hesitated, somewhat disconcerted at Oak’s old-fashioned earnest conclusion to a dialogue lightly carried on. “Very well,” she said, and gave him her hand, compressing her lips to a demure impassivity. He held it but an instant, and in his fear of being too demonstrative, swerved to the opposite extreme, touching her fingers with the lightness of a small-hearted person.
“I am sorry,” he said the instant after.
“What for?”
“Letting your hand go so quick.”
“You may have it again if you like; there it is.”
She gave him her hand again.
Oak held it longer this time — indeed, curiously long. “How soft it is — being winter time, too — not chapped or rough or anything!” he said.
“There — that’s long enough,” said she, though without pulling it away. “But I suppose you are thinking you would like to kiss it? You may if you want to.”
“I wasn’t thinking of any such thing,” said Gabriel, simply; “but I will — ”
“That you won’t!” She snatched back her hand.
Gabriel felt himself guilty of another want of tact.
“Now find out my name,” she said, teasingly; and withdrew.
CHAPTER IV
GABRIEL’S RESOLVE — THE VISIT — THE MISTAKE
The only superiority in women that is tolerable to the rival sex is, as a rule, that of the unconscious kind; but a superiority which recognizes itself may sometimes please by suggesting possibilities of capture to the subordinated man.
This well-favoured and comely girl soon made appreciable inroads upon the emotional constitution of young Farmer Oak. His fantasies were no longer of a sudden encounter in the night, of purely bodily explorations, and of the satisfaction of physical lust alone; they were coupled now with an urgent desire for the loving presence of this young woman whose charms had utterly entranced him, and whose teasing looks and smiles made him long to know her better, and to have her always beside him.
Love, being an extremely exacting usurer (a sense of exorbitant profit, spiritually, by an exchange of hearts, being at the bottom of pure passions, as that of exorbitant profit, bodily or materially, is at the bottom of those of lower atmosphere), every morning Oak’s feelings were as sensitive as the money-market in calculations upon his chances. His dog waited for his meals in a way so like that in which Oak waited for the girl’s presence, that the farmer was quite struck with the resemblance, felt it lowering, and would not look at the dog. However, he continued to watch through the hedge for her regular coming, and thus his sentiments towards her were deepened without any corresponding effect being produced upon herself. Oak had nothing finished and ready to say as yet, and not being able to frame love phrases which end where they begin; passionate tales, ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ … so he said no word at all.
By making inquiries he found that the girl’s name was Bathsheba Everdene, and the cow would go dry in about seven days. He dreaded the eighth day. At last the eighth day came. The cow had ceased to give milk for that year, and Bathsheba Everdene came up the hill no more. Gabriel had reached a pitch of existence he never could have anticipated a short time before. He liked saying “Bathsheba” as a private enjoyment instead of whistling; turned over his taste to black hair, though he had sworn by brown ever since he was a boy, isolated himself till the space he filled in the public eye was contemptibly small. Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.
His transports of delight in the river, by now a daily event, now seemed to him to be less of a naturally occurring phenomenon than an all-powerful urge for connection with a divine being that had taken on her physical shape, and his frenzied fancies at his climax recreated in his mind a thousand images of this siren; Bathsheba milking in the lantern-light, leaning her head into the cow’s flank, pulling rhythmically at the udders, Bathsheba lying flat, back to back with her heaving pony beneath the trees, Bathsheba holding and stroking his head upon her open legs. How quickly his mind then raced to other, delightfully imagined scenes: Bathsheba opening his waistband, laying her small fingers gently upon his burning, swollen flesh with insistent, rhythmical caresses; Bathsheba yielding to his need, lifting her cotton work dress, opening her pantalettes, revealing her purse of velvet to him; Bathsheba taking fire from his passion, urging him to unite his body with hers, begging him to raise her to undreamt of heights of ecstasy.
Oak began now to see light in this direction, and said to himself, “I’ll make her my wife, or upon my soul I shall be good for nothing!”
All this while he was perplexing himself about an errand on which he might consistently visit the cottage of Bathsheba’s aunt.
He found his opportunity in the death of a ewe, mother of a living lamb. On a day which had a summer face and a winter constitution — a fine January morning, when there was just enough blue sky visible to make cheerfully-disposed people wish for more, and an occasional gleam of silvery sunshine, Oak put the lamb into a respectable Sunday basket, and stalked across the fields to the house of Mrs. Hurst, the aunt — George, the dog walking behind, with a countenance of great concern at the serious turn pastoral affairs seemed to be taking.
Gabriel had watched the blue wood-smoke curling from the chim
ney with strange meditation. At evening he had fancifully traced it down the chimney to the spot of its origin — seen the hearth and Bathsheba beside it — beside it in her outdoor dress; for the clothes she had worn on the hill were by association equally with her person included in the compass of his affection; they seemed at this early time of his love a necessary ingredient of the sweet mixture called Bathsheba Everdene, although to picture her in garments of a more diaphanous nature, arousing though the prospect might be, was a temptation he resisted.
He had made a toilet of a nicely-adjusted kind — of a nature between the carefully neat and the carelessly ornate — of a degree between fine-market-day and wet-Sunday selection. He thoroughly cleaned his silver watch-chain with whiting, put new lacing straps to his boots, looked to the brass eyelet-holes, went to the inmost heart of the plantation for a new walking-stick, and trimmed it vigorously on his way back; took a new handkerchief from the bottom of his clothes-box, put on the light waistcoat patterned all over with sprigs of an elegant flower uniting the beauties of both rose and lily without the defects of either, and used all the hair-oil he possessed upon his usually dry, sandy, and inextricably curly hair, till he had deepened it to a splendidly novel colour, between that of guano and Roman cement, making it stick to his head like mace round a nutmeg, or wet seaweed round a boulder after the ebb.
Nothing disturbed the stillness of the cottage save the chatter of a knot of sparrows on the eaves; one might fancy scandal and rumour to be no less the staple topic of these little coteries on roofs than of those under them. It seemed that the omen was an unpropitious one, for, as the rather untoward commencement of Oak’s overtures, just as he arrived by the garden gate, he saw a cat inside, going into various arched shapes and fiendish convulsions at the sight of his dog George. The dog took no notice, for he had arrived at an age at which all superfluous barking was cynically avoided as a waste of breath — in fact, he never barked even at the sheep except to order, when it was done with an absolutely neutral countenance, as a sort of Commination-service, which, though offensive, had to be gone through once now and then to frighten the flock for their own good.
A voice came from behind some laurel-bushes into which the cat had run:
“Poor dear! Did a nasty brute of a dog want to kill it; — did he, poor dear!”
“I beg your pardon,” said Oak to the voice, “but George was walking on behind me with a temper as mild as milk.”
Almost before he had ceased speaking, Oak was seized with a misgiving as to whose ear was the recipient of his answer. Nobody appeared, and he heard the person retreat among the bushes.
Gabriel meditated, and so deeply that he brought small furrows into his forehead by sheer force of reverie. Where the issue of an interview is as likely to be a vast change for the worse as for the better, any initial difference from expectation causes nipping sensations of failure. Oak went up to the door a little abashed: his mental rehearsal and the reality had had no common grounds of opening.
Bathsheba’s aunt was indoors. “Will you tell Miss Everdene that somebody would be glad to speak to her?” said Mr. Oak. (Calling one’s self merely Somebody, without giving a name, is not to be taken as an example of the ill-breeding of the rural world: it springs from a refined modesty, of which townspeople, with their cards and announcements, have no notion whatever.)
Bathsheba was out in the garden. The voice had evidently been hers.
“Will you come in, Mr. Oak?” said Bathsheba’s aunt.
“Oh, thank ‘ee,” said Gabriel, following her to the fireplace. “I’ve brought a lamb for Miss Everdene. I thought she might like one to rear; girls do.”
“She might,” said Mrs. Hurst, musingly; “though she’s only a visitor here. If you will wait a minute, Bathsheba will be in.”
“Yes, I will wait,” said Gabriel, sitting down. “The lamb isn’t really the business I came about, Mrs. Hurst. In short, I was going to ask her if she’d like to be married.”
“And were you indeed?”
“Yes. Because, if she would, I should be very glad to marry her. D’ye know if she’s got any other young man hanging about her at all?”
“Let me think,” said Mrs. Hurst, poking the fire superfluously … “Yes — bless you, ever so many young men. You see, Farmer Oak, she’s so good-looking, and an excellent scholar besides — she was going to be a governess once, you know, only she was too wild. Not that her young men ever come here — but, Lord, in the nature of women, she must have a dozen!”
A silence fell. Mrs. Hurst looked Gabriel up and down, as if she was judging a prize calf — and indeed, had he been on such display in a rural parade of eligible men, she would have had no hesitation in bestowing on his brow the coveted red ribbon for first prize. Her first husband, she remembered — she had married and worn out two of these useful objects — had been a similarly strong and lusty young fellow. How she had led him on, with touches, kisses, lingering looks and suddenly revealing glimpses of shoulder or ankle! And how successfully she had held him off until, in his desperation, he had promised her that golden goal of respectable young women, a wedding, a farm, and a faithful husband!
Her thoughts wandered to her wedding night, and the surprise of seeing her old swain as a new and eager husband. What a tumbling they had had in the new linen sheets she had hemmed herself! How he had kissed her breasts, in a transport of ecstasy, and how she had somehow known to place her hand just so, pressing and squeezing upon his straining cock. How surprised she had been at her own breathing becoming harder and faster, and how she had finally laid all her maidenly modesty aside as she undid her nightdress, shook her bright hair from its lace nightcap, and, impatient for his entrance into her innermost sanctum of maidenhood, had opened her legs, and pulled him into her, shuddering with a new sensation of physical joy which seemed to inhabit every nerve and cell of her body as he reached his pinnacle of pleasure within her, thanking her over and over again for this long-awaited release. Ah, these transports were yet to come for her niece — could this stammering young swain become the husband to serve and satisfy her?
“That’s unfortunate,” said Farmer Oak, breaking into her thoughts by an attempt at conversation, as he contemplated a crack in the stone floor with sorrow. “I’m only an everyday sort of man, and my only chance was in being the first comer … Well, there’s no use in my waiting, for that was all I came about: so I’ll take myself off home-along, Mrs. Hurst.”
When Gabriel had gone about two hundred yards along the down, he heard a “hoi-hoi!” uttered behind him, in a piping note of more treble quality than that in which the exclamation usually embodies itself when shouted across a field. He looked round, and saw a girl racing after him, waving a white handkerchief.
Oak stood still — and the runner drew nearer. It was Bathsheba Everdene. Gabriel’s colour deepened: hers was already deep, not, as it appeared, from emotion, but from running.
“Farmer Oak — I — ” she said, pausing for want of breath pulling up in front of him with a slanted face and putting her hand to her side.
“I have just called to see you,” said Gabriel, pending her further speech.
“Yes — I know that,” she said panting like a robin, her face red and moist from her exertions, like a peony petal before the sun dries off the dew. “I didn’t know you had come to ask to have me, or I should have come in from the garden instantly. I ran after you to say — that my aunt made a mistake in sending you away from courting me — ”
Gabriel expanded. “I’m sorry to have made you run so fast, my dear,” he said, with a grateful sense of favours to come. “Wait a bit till you’ve found your breath.”
“ — It was quite a mistake — aunt’s telling you I had a young man already,” Bathsheba went on. “I haven’t a sweetheart at all — and I never had one, and I thought that, as times go with women, it was such a pity to send you away thinking that I had several.”
“Really and truly I am glad to hear that!” said Farmer Oak,
smiling one of his long special smiles, and blushing with gladness. He held out his hand to take hers, which, when she had eased her side by pressing it there, was prettily extended upon her bosom to still her loud-beating heart. Directly he seized it she put it behind her, so that it slipped through his fingers like an eel.
“I have a nice snug little farm,” said Gabriel, with half a degree less assurance than when he had seized her hand.
“Yes; you have.”
“A man has advanced me money to begin with, but still, it will soon be paid off, and though I am only an everyday sort of man, I have got on a little since I was a boy.” Gabriel uttered “a little” in a tone to show her that it was the complacent form of “a great deal.” He continued: “When we be married, I am quite sure I can work twice as hard as I do now.”
He went forward and stretched out his arm again. Bathsheba had overtaken him at a point beside which stood a low stunted holly bush, now laden with red berries. Seeing his advance take the form of an attitude threatening a possible enclosure, if not compression, of her person, she edged off round the bush.
“Why, Farmer Oak,” she said, over the top, looking at him with rounded eyes, “I never said I was going to marry you.”
“Well — that is a tale!” said Oak, with dismay. “To run after anybody like this, and then say you don’t want him!”
“What I meant to tell you was only this,” she said eagerly, and yet half conscious of the absurdity of the position she had made for herself — “that nobody has got me yet as a sweetheart, instead of my having a dozen, as my aunt said; I hate to be thought men’s property in that way, though possibly I shall be had some day. Why, if I’d wanted you I shouldn’t have run after you like this; ‘twould have been the forwardest thing! But there was no harm in hurrying to correct a piece of false news that had been told you.”
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