CHAPTER XXV

THE NEW ACQUAINTANCE DESCRIBED

Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an

exceptional being.

He was a man to whom memories were an incumbrance, and anticipations a

superfluity. Simply feeling, considering, and caring for what was

before his eyes, he was vulnerable only in the present. His outlook

upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now and then: that

projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come, which makes

the past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word for

circumspection, was foreign to Troy. With him the past was yesterday;

the future, to-morrow; never, the day after.

On this account he might, in certain lights, have been regarded as one

of the most fortunate of his order. For it may be argued with great

plausibility that reminiscence is less an endowment than a disease, and

that expectation in its only comfortable form—that of absolute faith—is

practically an impossibility; whilst in the form of hope and the

secondary compounds, patience, impatience, resolve, curiosity, it is a

constant fluctuation between pleasure and pain.

Sergeant Troy, being entirely innocent of the practice of expectation,

was never disappointed. To set against this negative gain there may

have been some positive losses from a certain narrowing of the higher

tastes and sensations which it entailed. But limitation of the capacity

is never recognized as a loss by the loser therefrom: in this attribute

moral or æsthetic poverty contrasts plausibly with material, since

those who suffer do not mind it, whilst those who mind it soon cease to

suffer. It is not a denial of anything to have been always without it,

and what Troy had never enjoyed he did not miss; but, being fully

conscious that what sober people missed he enjoyed, his capacity,

though really less, seemed greater than theirs.

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a

Cretan—a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity

at the first flush of admission into lively society; and the

possibility of the favour gained being transitory had reference only to

the future.

He never passed the line which divides the spruce vices from the ugly;

and hence, though his morals had hardly been applauded, disapproval of

them had frequently been tempered with a smile. This treatment had led

to his becoming a sort of regrater of other men’s gallantries, to his

own aggrandizement as a Corinthian, rather than to the moral profit of

his hearers.

His reason and his propensities had seldom any reciprocating influence,

having separated by mutual consent long ago: thence it sometimes

happened that, while his intentions were as honourable as could be

wished, any particular deed formed a dark background which threw them

into fine relief. The sergeant’s vicious phases being the offspring of

impulse, and his virtuous phases of cool meditation, the latter had a

modest tendency to be oftener heard of than seen.

Troy was full of activity, but his activities were less of a locomotive

than a vegetative nature; and, never being based upon any original

choice of foundation or direction, they were exercised on whatever

object chance might place in their way. Hence, whilst he sometimes

reached the brilliant in speech because that was spontaneous, he fell

below the commonplace in action, from inability to guide incipient

effort. He had a quick comprehension and considerable force of

character; but, being without the power to combine them, the

comprehension became engaged with trivialities whilst waiting for the

will to direct it, and the force wasted itself in useless grooves

through unheeding the comprehension.

He was a fairly well-educated man for one of middle class—exceptionally

well educated for a common soldier. He spoke fluently and unceasingly.

He could in this way be one thing and seem another: for instance, he

could speak of love and think of dinner; call on the husband to look at

the wife; be eager to pay and intend to owe.

The wondrous power of flattery in _passados_ at woman is a perception

so universal as to be remarked upon by many people almost as

automatically as they repeat a proverb, or say that they are Christians

and the like, without thinking much of the enormous corollaries which

spring from the proposition. Still less is it acted upon for the good

of the complemental being alluded to. With the majority such an opinion

is shelved with all those trite aphorisms which require some

catastrophe to bring their tremendous meanings thoroughly home. When

expressed with some amount of reflectiveness it seems co-ordinate with

a belief that this flattery must be reasonable to be effective. It is

to the credit of men that few attempt to settle the question by

experiment, and it is for their happiness, perhaps, that accident has

never settled it for them. Nevertheless, that a male dissembler who by

deluging her with untenable fictions charms the female wisely, may

acquire powers reaching to the extremity of perdition, is a truth

taught to many by unsought and wringing occurrences. And some profess

to have attained to the same knowledge by experiment as aforesaid, and

jauntily continue their indulgence in such experiments with terrible

effect. Sergeant Troy was one.

He had been known to observe casually that in dealing with womankind

the only alternative to flattery was cursing and swearing. There was no

third method. “Treat them fairly, and you are a lost man.” he would

say.

This person’s public appearance in Weatherbury promptly followed his

arrival there. A week or two after the shearing, Bathsheba, feeling a

nameless relief of spirits on account of Boldwood’s absence, approached

her hayfields and looked over the hedge towards the haymakers. They

consisted in about equal proportions of gnarled and flexuous forms, the

former being the men, the latter the women, who wore tilt bonnets

covered with nankeen, which hung in a curtain upon their shoulders.

Coggan and Mark Clark were mowing in a less forward meadow, Clark

humming a tune to the strokes of his scythe, to which Jan made no

attempt to keep time with his. In the first mead they were already

loading hay, the women raking it into cocks and windrows, and the men

tossing it upon the waggon.

From behind the waggon a bright scarlet spot emerged, and went on

loading unconcernedly with the rest. It was the gallant sergeant, who

had come haymaking for pleasure; and nobody could deny that he was

doing the mistress of the farm real knight-service by this voluntary

contribution of his labour at a busy time.

As soon as she had entered the field Troy saw her, and sticking his

pitchfork into the ground and picking up his crop or cane, he came

forward. Bathsheba blushed with half-angry embarrassment, and adjusted

her eyes as well as her feet to the direct line of her path.