The Malthouse Circle — Far from the Madding Crowd

Gabriel Oak finds Warren's malthouse by the leather door strap and enters a kiln-lit room where Weatherbury men sit in the ruddy glow: ancient maltster Smallbury, Jan Coggan, Joseph Poorgrass, Henery Fray, Mark Clark, and others. The God-forgive-me mug passes hand to hand; Gabriel drinks without fuss, eats gritty bacon sent from the farm, and is pronounced a sensible man who does not fuss about dirt in its pure state. Through jokes about Joseph's lifelong blushes and his prayer marathon at a stuck gate, Gabriel learns the village's tone: teasing is membership, and refusing ritual hospitality would mark him proud.

Talk turns to Bathsheba's uncle Farmer Everdene, whom Coggan courted over endless ale, and to the Everdene parents: the tailor-father who went bankrupt in style, cured his wandering heart by calling his wife by her maiden name, and ended pious enough to box charity boys' ears in church. The maltster reckons his age at a hundred and seventeen by counting every place he has lived and every season he hoed turnips; Jacob tries to deduct double-counted summers and is rebuked. Henery Fray darkly insists the bailiff Baily Pennyways will lie on Sundays as readily as weekdays, and Gabriel steers the talk toward what sort of mistress Bathsheba will be.

Henery recognises Gabriel as the Casterbridge fair flute player. Pressed to perform, Gabriel plays Jockey to the Fair three times with bodily jerks and tapping foot, then Dame Durden while the men critique his strained face. Praise flows, but Gabriel resolves never to let Bathsheba see him playing; competence here is survival, not courtship. Joseph Poorgrass thanks Providence that their shepherd is not a player of bawdy songs, and the room agrees evil may hide in the cleanest shirt.

News breaks in two waves: Pennyways caught stealing barley from the granary and dismissed; then Fanny Robin missing, last seen leaving in her indoor gown with a bundle, her soldier in Casterbridge suspected. The men hurry to the farmhouse where Bathsheba appears at an upper window robed in white, orders quiet village inquiries, and confesses she knows nothing of Fanny's lover. Gabriel leaves with Jan Coggan for lodging, sleepless with tender night visions of Bathsheba, and plans to fetch from Norcombe the small library that outlived his farm: Paradise Lost, Robinson Crusoe, Walkingame's Arithmetic, and the rest of a self-educated shepherd's shelf.