When Duty Meets Temptation — Far from the Madding Crowd

At three o'clock Joseph Poorgrass backs his blue spring waggon with red wheels against the Casterbridge Union's elevated Traitor's-Gate door while Malbrook stammers from the clock. The elm coffin slides out; an attendant chalks Fanny Robin and child on the lid before Joseph drapes evergreens and laurustinus and creeps homeward into autumn's first fog, the air an eye struck blind. The waggon embeds itself in monotonous pallor; crunching wheels sound loud as drops drum the coffin in Yalbury Great Wood until the Buck's Head sign offers relief. Joseph had been told to reach the churchyard gates at a quarter to five; instead fog, ale, and theology keep Fanny waiting while Weatherbury sups unknowing. At the Buck's Head, Coggan and Mark keep him drinking; he weeps that he feels too good for England and ought to have lived in Genesis, and Coggan's repeater strikes six while the corpse waits in the yard. Gabriel Oak bursts in at dusk, calls the delay disgraceful, takes the reins when neither drunk man can drive, and brings the load through saturated mist while rumour names Fanny's Eleventh lover but not Troy thanks to Boldwood and Oak's reticence. Parson Thirdly at the farm says bearers have gone and funeral must wait till morning; Bathsheba, suspicious and perplexed with Troy still absent, first assents then insists the poor thing lie indoors not in the coach-house as unchristian. Oak argued the waggon should stay outside with its flowers, but she overruled him; Thirdly's sad cadence about God's uncovenanted mercies makes Gabriel shed an honest tear while Bathsheba seems unmoved, the coffin on two benches in the middle of the room. He dreads the ironic catastrophe for Troy's wife, reads the chalk tail and child, remembers every manoeuvre to delay scandal has led to the coffin sleeping in her parlour, and rubs out and child with his handkerchief leaving Fanny Robin only before slipping out the front door. Hardy stacks Joseph's comic negligence atop tragedy one erased word from the mistress who sent flowers for a rival not yet known as mother, while Oak's careful manœuvring fails at the threshold of revelation.