Fanny's Coffin Waits at the Buck's Head — Far from the Madding Crowd

At five minutes to three, Joseph Poorgrass backs his blue waggon against a small high door in the ivy-covered gable of Casterbridge Union. A plain elm coffin is pushed out. One of the men chalks a name and a few other words across the lid, covers it with a threadbare black cloth, and hands Joseph a certificate. Their connection with her, short as it was, is over for ever, and Hardy adds in brackets that he believes such things are done more tenderly now. Joseph heaps the flowers and evergreens Bathsheba ordered until the waggon looks like a rather pleasing funeral car, and sets off for Weatherbury. Then the first fog of autumn rolls in from the sea. In Yalbury Great Wood the air goes quiet and white, a heavy drop of water falls through the evergreens and raps on the coffin, and Joseph, who would give a good deal for the company of a child or a dog, is relieved to see the signboard of the Buck’s Head.

He stops for a mug of ale. In the kitchen sit Jan Coggan and Mark Clark, who tell him there is no hurry, as the poor woman is dead and cannot be brought back to life. Joseph says he must be at the churchyard gate by a quarter to five, drinks again, frets aloud about his weak moments lately, and sits down. Talk drifts to whether Church or chapel has the better chance of heaven. The minutes go by uncounted until Coggan’s watch strikes six.

Then Gabriel Oak walks in and is ashamed of all three. Coggan’s answer is that nobody can hurt a dead woman and that time spent on her is thrown away, and he starts to sing about tomorrow. Joseph, sure he sees double only because of a “multiplying eye”, weeps that he is too good for England and ought to have lived in Genesis. Oak, seeing that none of them is fit to drive, shuts the door on them, pulls the horse’s head from the patch of turf it has eaten bare, and takes the waggon on through the fog himself. He has Bathsheba on his mind. The village has begun to hear that this is Fanny Robin, who followed the Eleventh from Casterbridge, but thanks to Boldwood’s silence and his own, the soldier she followed has never been named as Troy. Gabriel hopes the truth can wait until she has been some days in her grave.

At the manor-house the parson, Mr Thirdly, meets him in the dark. Gabriel has not got the registrar’s certificate, which Joseph still has at the inn, so the funeral cannot be done decently tonight and is put off to the morning. Oak would rather leave the coffin in the waggon in the coach-house. Bathsheba, who agreed with a show of indifference a moment before, now insists that it is unkind and unchristian to leave the poor thing there, and has it carried into the sitting-room next the hall. When everyone else has gone, Gabriel lingers beside the lid. Chalked on it are the words “Fanny Robin and child”. He takes out his handkerchief, rubs out the last two words, and goes quietly out by the front door.