Bathsheba Hides Among the Ferns — Far from the Madding Crowd

Bathsheba runs along the dark road with no idea where she is going, and stops at a gate into a thicket of withering fern. She pulls the fronds round herself and lies down. She wakes, or half wakes, to birdsong that Hardy gives call by call: a sparrow, a finch, a robin, a squirrel, then a ploughboy singing on the road. Her own farm horses file down to a pond to drink. Red and yellow leaves have settled on her lap and in her hair, and when she shakes her dress they rise round her like ghosts. In the morning light she sees that she has slept on the edge of a swamp full of fungi, some red as blood, and shudders at it. A dunce of a schoolboy passes the gate reciting a collect by heart, “O Lord, O Lord”, and in the middle of her trouble she is faintly amused.

Liddy finds her and crosses the swamp, which bears her weight, to reach her. Bathsheba has lost her voice in the damp air and can only whisper, so Liddy fetches a cloak, bread and butter and hot tea. They walk about the wood for nearly two hours, with Bathsheba’s mind running on one thing. When Liddy reports that the men have taken away the corpse, and have been told that her mistress is unwell, Bathsheba decides to go home. Only women with no pride in them run away from their husbands, she says, and a runaway wife is a burden to herself and a byword to everyone else. She will stand her ground, even if she is cut to pieces. Liddy asks what has happened between her and her husband. “You may ask; but I may not tell.”

Back at the house she takes over a disused attic, has a fire lit and a bed carried up, and makes Liddy her confidante. Hemming, knitting and the sampler are all refused, and she sends for her uncle’s old books. She names some gloomy ones, then laughs, refuses even Othello, and asks for Love in a Village instead. All day the two of them live in a state of barricade against Troy, who never comes near. At six o’clock, from her window, Bathsheba watches the village lads break off their game of prisoners’ base because two men from Casterbridge are putting up a grand carved tombstone in the churchyard. The lads have gone to see whose it is. Liddy, asked, does not know.