finished_summaries/cliffnotes/Far from the Madding Crowd/section_21_part_0.txt
Far from the Madding Crowd.chapter 22
chapter 22
{"name": "Chapter 22", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201101052914/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/far-from-the-madding-crowd/summary-and-analysis/chapter-22", "summary": "\"Gabriel lately, for the first time since his prostration by misfortune, had been independent in thought and vigorous in action to a marked extent. . . . But this incurable loitering beside Bathsheba Everdene stole his time ruinously.\" On this first of June, Gabriel enjoyed the blossoming countryside and, in the ecclesiastical atmosphere suggested by the architecture of the huge and ancient barn, he participated in the ritual and pageantry of the centuries-old rite of sheep-shearing. Each man played his greater or lesser role in the service. In the background, women gathered the shorn fleeces. Bathsheba made sure that the men would shear closely yet give no wounds. Carelessness was reprimanded. While Bathsheba watched, chattering constantly, Gabriel sheared a sheep in a surprisingly short time -- twenty-three and one-half minutes. Cainy brought the tar pot. The initials B. E. were stamped on the newly shorn skin, and the panting animal leaped away, joining \"the shirtless flock outside.\" Unexpectedly, Boldwood appeared and talked to Bathsheba as Gabriel continued shearing. The girl left, reappearing in her new riding habit. Distracted, Gabriel cut a sheep. Bathsheba reproved him. Superficially unmoved, Gabriel medicated the wound. The other two went off to view Boldwood's Leicesters. \"That means matrimony,\" predicted one woman, beginning the gossip. Henery, still resentful that he had not been appointed bailiff, was most talkative. Gabriel brooded. All the others looked forward to the feasting which would crown the ritual of the shearing.", "analysis": "Still another fine description of Wessex life is drawn here. The animation and motion are absorbing as we follow the careful work of the shearers. Gabriel's tension rises when Boldwood appears. \"Gabriel at this time of his life had outgrown the instinctive dislike which every Christian boy has for reading the Bible, perusing it now quite frequently, and he inwardly said, 'I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets!' This was mere exclamation -- the froth of the storm. He adored Bathsheba just the same.\" Note that this quotation follows the indirect reference in the preceding chapter to a man's using distraction by a woman as an alibi for not making progress in his profession."}


THE GREAT BARN AND THE SHEEP-SHEARERS


Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not
making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking
good spirits when they are indispensable.  Gabriel lately, for the
first time since his prostration by misfortune, had been independent
in thought and vigorous in action to a marked extent--conditions
which, powerless without an opportunity as an opportunity without
them is barren, would have given him a sure lift upwards when the
favourable conjunction should have occurred.  But this incurable
loitering beside Bathsheba Everdene stole his time ruinously.  The
spring tides were going by without floating him off, and the neap
might soon come which could not.

It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season
culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being
all health and colour.  Every green was young, every pore was
open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice.
God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone
with the world to town.  Flossy catkins of the later kinds,
fern-sprouts like bishops' croziers, the square-headed moschatel,
the odd cuckoo-pint,--like an apoplectic saint in a niche of
malachite,--snow-white ladies'-smocks, the toothwort, approximating
to human flesh, the enchanter's night-shade, and the black-petaled
doleful-bells, were among the quainter objects of the vegetable world
in and about Weatherbury at this teeming time; and of the animal,
the metamorphosed figures of Mr. Jan Coggan, the master-shearer; the
second and third shearers, who travelled in the exercise of their
calling, and do not require definition by name; Henery Fray the
fourth shearer, Susan Tall's husband the fifth, Joseph Poorgrass
the sixth, young Cain Ball as assistant-shearer, and Gabriel Oak as
general supervisor.  None of these were clothed to any extent worth
mentioning, each appearing to have hit in the matter of raiment the
decent mean between a high and low caste Hindoo.  An angularity of
lineament, and a fixity of facial machinery in general, proclaimed
that serious work was the order of the day.

They sheared in the great barn, called for the nonce the
Shearing-barn, which on ground-plan resembled a church with
transepts.  It not only emulated the form of the neighbouring church
of the parish, but vied with it in antiquity.  Whether the barn had
ever formed one of a group of conventual buildings nobody seemed to
be aware; no trace of such surroundings remained.  The vast porches
at the sides, lofty enough to admit a waggon laden to its highest
with corn in the sheaf, were spanned by heavy-pointed arches of
stone, broadly and boldly cut, whose very simplicity was the origin
of a grandeur not apparent in erections where more ornament has been
attempted.  The dusky, filmed, chestnut roof, braced and tied in
by huge collars, curves, and diagonals, was far nobler in design,
because more wealthy in material, than nine-tenths of those in our
modern churches.  Along each side wall was a range of striding
buttresses, throwing deep shadows on the spaces between them, which
were perforated by lancet openings, combining in their proportions
the precise requirements both of beauty and ventilation.

One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either
the church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the
purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with
that to which it was still applied.  Unlike and superior to either
of those two typical remnants of mediaevalism, the old barn embodied
practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time.
Here at least the spirit of the ancient builders was at one with
the spirit of the modern beholder.  Standing before this abraded
pile, the eye regarded its present usage, the mind dwelt upon its
past history, with a satisfied sense of functional continuity
throughout--a feeling almost of gratitude, and quite of pride, at the
permanence of the idea which had heaped it up.  The fact that four
centuries had neither proved it to be founded on a mistake, inspired
any hatred of its purpose, nor given rise to any reaction that had
battered it down, invested this simple grey effort of old minds with
a repose, if not a grandeur, which a too curious reflection was apt
to disturb in its ecclesiastical and military compeers.  For once
mediaevalism and modernism had a common stand-point.  The lanceolate
windows, the time-eaten archstones and chamfers, the orientation of
the axis, the misty chestnut work of the rafters, referred to no
exploded fortifying art or worn-out religious creed.  The defence and
salvation of the body by daily bread is still a study, a religion,
and a desire.

To-day the large side doors were thrown open towards the sun to admit
a bountiful light to the immediate spot of the shearers' operations,
which was the wood threshing-floor in the centre, formed of thick
oak, black with age and polished by the beating of flails for many
generations, till it had grown as slippery and as rich in hue as
the state-room floors of an Elizabethan mansion.  Here the shearers
knelt, the sun slanting in upon their bleached shirts, tanned arms,
and the polished shears they flourished, causing these to bristle
with a thousand rays strong enough to blind a weak-eyed man.  Beneath
them a captive sheep lay panting, quickening its pants as misgiving
merged in terror, till it quivered like the hot landscape outside.

This picture of to-day in its frame of four hundred years ago did
not produce that marked contrast between ancient and modern which
is implied by the contrast of date.  In comparison with cities,
Weatherbury was immutable.  The citizen's THEN is the rustic's
NOW.  In London, twenty or thirty-years ago are old times; in Paris
ten years, or five; in Weatherbury three or four score years were
included in the mere present, and nothing less than a century set a
mark on its face or tone.  Five decades hardly modified the cut of a
gaiter, the embroidery of a smock-frock, by the breadth of a hair.
Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a single phrase.  In
these Wessex nooks the busy outsider's ancient times are only old;
his old times are still new; his present is futurity.

So the barn was natural to the shearers, and the shearers were in
harmony with the barn.

The spacious ends of the building, answering ecclesiastically to nave
and chancel extremities, were fenced off with hurdles, the sheep
being all collected in a crowd within these two enclosures; and in
one angle a catching-pen was formed, in which three or four sheep
were continuously kept ready for the shearers to seize without loss
of time.  In the background, mellowed by tawny shade, were the three
women, Maryann Money, and Temperance and Soberness Miller, gathering
up the fleeces and twisting ropes of wool with a wimble for tying
them round.  They were indifferently well assisted by the old
maltster, who, when the malting season from October to April had
passed, made himself useful upon any of the bordering farmsteads.

Behind all was Bathsheba, carefully watching the men to see that
there was no cutting or wounding through carelessness, and that the
animals were shorn close.  Gabriel, who flitted and hovered under her
bright eyes like a moth, did not shear continuously, half his time
being spent in attending to the others and selecting the sheep for
them.  At the present moment he was engaged in handing round a mug of
mild liquor, supplied from a barrel in the corner, and cut pieces of
bread and cheese.

Bathsheba, after throwing a glance here, a caution there, and
lecturing one of the younger operators who had allowed his last
finished sheep to go off among the flock without re-stamping it with
her initials, came again to Gabriel, as he put down the luncheon to
drag a frightened ewe to his shear-station, flinging it over upon its
back with a dexterous twist of the arm.  He lopped off the tresses
about its head, and opened up the neck and collar, his mistress
quietly looking on.

"She blushes at the insult," murmured Bathsheba, watching the pink
flush which arose and overspread the neck and shoulders of the ewe
where they were left bare by the clicking shears--a flush which was
enviable, for its delicacy, by many queens of coteries, and would
have been creditable, for its promptness, to any woman in the world.

Poor Gabriel's soul was fed with a luxury of content by having her
over him, her eyes critically regarding his skilful shears, which
apparently were going to gather up a piece of the flesh at every
close, and yet never did so.  Like Guildenstern, Oak was happy in
that he was not over happy.  He had no wish to converse with her:
that his bright lady and himself formed one group, exclusively their
own, and containing no others in the world, was enough.

So the chatter was all on her side.  There is a loquacity that tells
nothing, which was Bathsheba's; and there is a silence which says
much: that was Gabriel's.  Full of this dim and temperate bliss, he
went on to fling the ewe over upon her other side, covering her head
with his knee, gradually running the shears line after line round her
dewlap; thence about her flank and back, and finishing over the tail.

"Well done, and done quickly!" said Bathsheba, looking at her watch
as the last snip resounded.

"How long, miss?" said Gabriel, wiping his brow.

"Three-and-twenty minutes and a half since you took the first lock
from its forehead.  It is the first time that I have ever seen one
done in less than half an hour."

The clean, sleek creature arose from its fleece--how perfectly
like Aphrodite rising from the foam should have been seen to be
realized--looking startled and shy at the loss of its garment, which
lay on the floor in one soft cloud, united throughout, the portion
visible being the inner surface only, which, never before exposed,
was white as snow, and without flaw or blemish of the minutest kind.

"Cain Ball!"

"Yes, Mister Oak; here I be!"

Cainy now runs forward with the tar-pot.  "B. E." is newly stamped
upon the shorn skin, and away the simple dam leaps, panting, over the
board into the shirtless flock outside.  Then up comes Maryann;
throws the loose locks into the middle of the fleece, rolls it up,
and carries it into the background as three-and-a-half pounds of
unadulterated warmth for the winter enjoyment of persons unknown and
far away, who will, however, never experience the superlative comfort
derivable from the wool as it here exists, new and pure--before
the unctuousness of its nature whilst in a living state has dried,
stiffened, and been washed out--rendering it just now as superior
to anything WOOLLEN as cream is superior to milk-and-water.

But heartless circumstance could not leave entire Gabriel's happiness
of this morning.  The rams, old ewes, and two-shear ewes had duly
undergone their stripping, and the men were proceeding with the
shear-lings and hogs, when Oak's belief that she was going to stand
pleasantly by and time him through another performance was painfully
interrupted by Farmer Boldwood's appearance in the extremest corner
of the barn.  Nobody seemed to have perceived his entry, but there he
certainly was.  Boldwood always carried with him a social atmosphere
of his own, which everybody felt who came near him; and the talk,
which Bathsheba's presence had somewhat suppressed, was now totally
suspended.

He crossed over towards Bathsheba, who turned to greet him with a
carriage of perfect ease.  He spoke to her in low tones, and she
instinctively modulated her own to the same pitch, and her voice
ultimately even caught the inflection of his.  She was far from
having a wish to appear mysteriously connected with him; but woman at
the impressionable age gravitates to the larger body not only in her
choice of words, which is apparent every day, but even in her shades
of tone and humour, when the influence is great.

What they conversed about was not audible to Gabriel, who was too
independent to get near, though too concerned to disregard.  The
issue of their dialogue was the taking of her hand by the courteous
farmer to help her over the spreading-board into the bright June
sunlight outside.  Standing beside the sheep already shorn, they went
on talking again.  Concerning the flock?  Apparently not. Gabriel
theorized, not without truth, that in quiet discussion of any matter
within reach of the speakers' eyes, these are usually fixed upon
it.  Bathsheba demurely regarded a contemptible straw lying upon the
ground, in a way which suggested less ovine criticism than womanly
embarrassment.  She became more or less red in the cheek, the blood
wavering in uncertain flux and reflux over the sensitive space
between ebb and flood.  Gabriel sheared on, constrained and sad.

She left Boldwood's side, and he walked up and down alone for nearly
a quarter of an hour.  Then she reappeared in her new riding-habit of
myrtle green, which fitted her to the waist as a rind fits its fruit;
and young Bob Coggan led on her mare, Boldwood fetching his own horse
from the tree under which it had been tied.

Oak's eyes could not forsake them; and in endeavouring to continue
his shearing at the same time that he watched Boldwood's manner,
he snipped the sheep in the groin.  The animal plunged; Bathsheba
instantly gazed towards it, and saw the blood.

"Oh, Gabriel!" she exclaimed, with severe remonstrance, "you who are
so strict with the other men--see what you are doing yourself!"

To an outsider there was not much to complain of in this remark; but
to Oak, who knew Bathsheba to be well aware that she herself was the
cause of the poor ewe's wound, because she had wounded the ewe's
shearer in a still more vital part, it had a sting which the abiding
sense of his inferiority to both herself and Boldwood was not
calculated to heal.  But a manly resolve to recognize boldly that he
had no longer a lover's interest in her, helped him occasionally to
conceal a feeling.

"Bottle!" he shouted, in an unmoved voice of routine.  Cainy Ball ran
up, the wound was anointed, and the shearing continued.

Boldwood gently tossed Bathsheba into the saddle, and before they
turned away she again spoke out to Oak with the same dominative and
tantalizing graciousness.

"I am going now to see Mr. Boldwood's Leicesters.  Take my place in
the barn, Gabriel, and keep the men carefully to their work."

The horses' heads were put about, and they trotted away.

Boldwood's deep attachment was a matter of great interest among all
around him; but, after having been pointed out for so many years
as the perfect exemplar of thriving bachelorship, his lapse was an
anticlimax somewhat resembling that of St. John Long's death by
consumption in the midst of his proofs that it was not a fatal
disease.

"That means matrimony," said Temperance Miller, following them out of
sight with her eyes.

"I reckon that's the size o't," said Coggan, working along without
looking up.

"Well, better wed over the mixen than over the moor," said Laban
Tall, turning his sheep.

Henery Fray spoke, exhibiting miserable eyes at the same time: "I
don't see why a maid should take a husband when she's bold enough
to fight her own battles, and don't want a home; for 'tis keeping
another woman out.  But let it be, for 'tis a pity he and she should
trouble two houses."

As usual with decided characters, Bathsheba invariably provoked the
criticism of individuals like Henery Fray.  Her emblazoned fault was
to be too pronounced in her objections, and not sufficiently overt in
her likings.  We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb,
but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are
known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their
dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no
attribute at all.

Henery continued in a more complaisant mood: "I once hinted my mind
to her on a few things, as nearly as a battered frame dared to do so
to such a froward piece.  You all know, neighbours, what a man I be,
and how I come down with my powerful words when my pride is boiling
wi' scarn?"

"We do, we do, Henery."

"So I said, 'Mistress Everdene, there's places empty, and there's
gifted men willing; but the spite'--no, not the spite--I didn't say
spite--'but the villainy of the contrarikind,' I said (meaning
womankind), 'keeps 'em out.'  That wasn't too strong for her, say?"

"Passably well put."

"Yes; and I would have said it, had death and salvation overtook me
for it.  Such is my spirit when I have a mind."

"A true man, and proud as a lucifer."

"You see the artfulness?  Why, 'twas about being baily really; but
I didn't put it so plain that she could understand my meaning, so I
could lay it on all the stronger.  That was my depth! ... However,
let her marry an she will.  Perhaps 'tis high time.  I believe Farmer
Boldwood kissed her behind the spear-bed at the sheep-washing t'other
day--that I do."

"What a lie!" said Gabriel.

"Ah, neighbour Oak--how'st know?" said, Henery, mildly.

"Because she told me all that passed," said Oak, with a pharisaical
sense that he was not as other shearers in this matter.

"Ye have a right to believe it," said Henery, with dudgeon; "a very
true right.  But I mid see a little distance into things!  To be
long-headed enough for a baily's place is a poor mere trifle--yet
a trifle more than nothing.  However, I look round upon life quite
cool.  Do you heed me, neighbours?  My words, though made as simple
as I can, mid be rather deep for some heads."

"O yes, Henery, we quite heed ye."

"A strange old piece, goodmen--whirled about from here to yonder, as
if I were nothing!  A little warped, too.  But I have my depths; ha,
and even my great depths!  I might gird at a certain shepherd, brain
to brain.  But no--O no!"

"A strange old piece, ye say!" interposed the maltster, in a
querulous voice.  "At the same time ye be no old man worth naming--no
old man at all.  Yer teeth bain't half gone yet; and what's a old
man's standing if so be his teeth bain't gone?  Weren't I stale in
wedlock afore ye were out of arms?  'Tis a poor thing to be sixty,
when there's people far past four-score--a boast weak as water."

It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink minor differences
when the maltster had to be pacified.

"Weak as water! yes," said Jan Coggan. "Malter, we feel ye to be a
wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it."

"Nobody," said Joseph Poorgrass.  "Ye be a very rare old spectacle,
malter, and we all admire ye for that gift."

"Ay, and as a young man, when my senses were in prosperity, I was
likewise liked by a good-few who knowed me," said the maltster.

"'Ithout doubt you was--'ithout doubt."

The bent and hoary man was satisfied, and so apparently was Henery
Fray.  That matters should continue pleasant Maryann spoke, who, what
with her brown complexion, and the working wrapper of rusty linsey,
had at present the mellow hue of an old sketch in oils--notably some
of Nicholas Poussin's:--

"Do anybody know of a crooked man, or a lame, or any second-hand
fellow at all that would do for poor me?" said Maryann.  "A perfect
one I don't expect to get at my time of life.  If I could hear of
such a thing twould do me more good than toast and ale."

Coggan furnished a suitable reply.  Oak went on with his shearing,
and said not another word.  Pestilent moods had come, and teased
away his quiet.  Bathsheba had shown indications of anointing him
above his fellows by installing him as the bailiff that the farm
imperatively required.  He did not covet the post relatively to the
farm: in relation to herself, as beloved by him and unmarried to
another, he had coveted it.  His readings of her seemed now to be
vapoury and indistinct.  His lecture to her was, he thought, one of
the absurdest mistakes.  Far from coquetting with Boldwood, she had
trifled with himself in thus feigning that she had trifled with
another.  He was inwardly convinced that, in accordance with the
anticipations of his easy-going and worse-educated comrades, that day
would see Boldwood the accepted husband of Miss Everdene.  Gabriel
at this time of his life had out-grown the instinctive dislike which
every Christian boy has for reading the Bible, perusing it now
quite frequently, and he inwardly said, "'I find more bitter than
death the woman whose heart is snares and nets!'" This was mere
exclamation--the froth of the storm.  He adored Bathsheba just the
same.

"We workfolk shall have some lordly junketing to-night," said Cainy
Ball, casting forth his thoughts in a new direction.  "This morning I
see 'em making the great puddens in the milking-pails--lumps of fat
as big as yer thumb, Mister Oak!  I've never seed such splendid large
knobs of fat before in the days of my life--they never used to be
bigger then a horse-bean.  And there was a great black crock upon the
brandish with his legs a-sticking out, but I don't know what was in
within."

"And there's two bushels of biffins for apple-pies," said Maryann.

"Well, I hope to do my duty by it all," said Joseph Poorgrass, in a
pleasant, masticating manner of anticipation.  "Yes; victuals and
drink is a cheerful thing, and gives nerves to the nerveless, if the
form of words may be used.  'Tis the gospel of the body, without
which we perish, so to speak it."




Chapter 22
"Gabriel lately, for the first time since his prostration by misfortune, had been independent in thought and vigorous in action to a marked extent. . . . But this incurable loitering beside Bathsheba Everdene stole his time ruinously." On this first of June, Gabriel enjoyed the blossoming countryside and, in the ecclesiastical atmosphere suggested by the architecture of the huge and ancient barn, he participated in the ritual and pageantry of the centuries-old rite of sheep-shearing. Each man played his greater or lesser role in the service. In the background, women gathered the shorn fleeces. Bathsheba made sure that the men would shear closely yet give no wounds. Carelessness was reprimanded. While Bathsheba watched, chattering constantly, Gabriel sheared a sheep in a surprisingly short time -- twenty-three and one-half minutes. Cainy brought the tar pot. The initials B. E. were stamped on the newly shorn skin, and the panting animal leaped away, joining "the shirtless flock outside." Unexpectedly, Boldwood appeared and talked to Bathsheba as Gabriel continued shearing. The girl left, reappearing in her new riding habit. Distracted, Gabriel cut a sheep. Bathsheba reproved him. Superficially unmoved, Gabriel medicated the wound. The other two went off to view Boldwood's Leicesters. "That means matrimony," predicted one woman, beginning the gossip. Henery, still resentful that he had not been appointed bailiff, was most talkative. Gabriel brooded. All the others looked forward to the feasting which would crown the ritual of the shearing.
Still another fine description of Wessex life is drawn here. The animation and motion are absorbing as we follow the careful work of the shearers. Gabriel's tension rises when Boldwood appears. "Gabriel at this time of his life had outgrown the instinctive dislike which every Christian boy has for reading the Bible, perusing it now quite frequently, and he inwardly said, 'I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets!' This was mere exclamation -- the froth of the storm. He adored Bathsheba just the same." Note that this quotation follows the indirect reference in the preceding chapter to a man's using distraction by a woman as an alibi for not making progress in his profession.