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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 aesthetic 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.
Content of CHAPTER XXV - THE NEW ACQUAINTANCE DESCRIBED [Thomas Hardy's novel: Far From The Madding Crowd]
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