Oak Saves the Ricks in the Rain — Far from the Madding Crowd

Oak is still on the ladder when the dawn comes up grey and the wind turns on him. Thatch whirls off the wheat-stacks and has to be pinned down with rails, and then the rain arrives in earnest, running cold down his back and washing the dye out of his clothes into a pool at the foot of the ladder. He keeps driving in spars wherever they will go, covering what Hardy calls “this distracting impersonation of seven hundred pounds”. Eight months earlier he fought fire on this same spot, for the same woman. He starts to think of her, and then, being generous and true, he stops. At seven o’clock he climbs down, soaked and tired, and says, “It is done!”

Out of the barn comes a line of men, walking awkwardly and avoiding each other’s eyes, with Troy at the front in his red jacket, hands in his pockets, whistling. Hardy sees them as a procession of ghosts being led down to the underworld. Troy goes into the farmhouse. Not one of the men so much as glances at the ricks Oak has just covered.

Oak walks home by another route and meets Boldwood under an umbrella, going even more slowly than he is. It is Boldwood who looks ill, though he insists he is perfectly well. Oak asks, as one farmer to another, whether his ricks are covered. The big ones are not. Nor are the ones under the hedge, nor the little one by the stile. “I overlooked the ricks this year,” Boldwood says, and Oak, repeating the words to himself, sees that a greater waste has been going on in the same parish and nobody has complained of it. A few months before, Hardy says, Boldwood forgetting his husbandry would have been as unlikely as a sailor forgetting he was on a ship. Then Boldwood says what he has been holding in. There was never any engagement between him and Miss Everdene, whatever the parish says, and he had some faint belief in God’s mercy until he lost her. God gave him a gourd for shade, and then sent a worm to wither it, and he feels it is better to die than to live. The mood lasts a moment. He straightens up, claims an iron constitution, smiles with what Hardy calls the carelessness of a skull, and says he can trust Oak to repeat none of it.

Oak has got his mistress’s corn covered in time. Boldwood’s stands open to the rain, and all he asks is that nobody is told why.