Chapter: <CHAPTER>
BOOK THREE -- THE FASCINATION
1--"My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is"


In Clym Yeobright's face could be dimly seen the typical countenance
of the future. Should there be a classic period to art hereafter, its
Pheidias may produce such faces. The view of life as a thing to be put
up with, replacing that zest for existence which was so intense in early
civilizations, must ultimately enter so thoroughly into the constitution
of the advanced races that its facial expression will become accepted
as a new artistic departure. People already feel that a man who lives
without disturbing a curve of feature, or setting a mark of mental
concern anywhere upon himself, is too far removed from modern
perceptiveness to be a modern type. Physically beautiful men--the glory
of the race when it was young--are almost an anachronism now; and we may
wonder whether, at some time or other, physically beautiful women may
not be an anachronism likewise.

The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive centuries has
permanently displaced the Hellenic idea of life, or whatever it may
be called. What the Greeks only suspected we know well; what their
Aeschylus imagined our nursery children feel. That old-fashioned
revelling in the general situation grows less and less possible as we
uncover the defects of natural laws, and see the quandary that man is in
by their operation.

The lineaments which will get embodied in ideals based upon this new
recognition will probably be akin to those of Yeobright. The observer's
eye was arrested, not by his face as a picture, but by his face as a
page; not by what it was, but by what it recorded. His features were
attractive in the light of symbols, as sounds intrinsically common
become attractive in language, and as shapes intrinsically simple become
interesting in writing.

He had been a lad of whom something was expected. Beyond this all had
been chaos. That he would be successful in an original way, or that he
would go to the dogs in an original way, seemed equally probable. The
only absolute certainty about him was that he would not stand still in
the circumstances amid which he was born.

Hence, when his name was casually mentioned by neighbouring yeomen,
the listener said, "Ah, Clym Yeobright--what is he doing now?" When the
instinctive question about a person is, What is he doing? it is
felt that he will be found to be, like most of us, doing nothing in
particular. There is an indefinite sense that he must be invading some
region of singularity, good or bad. The devout hope is that he is doing
well. The secret faith is that he is making a mess of it. Half a dozen
comfortable market-men, who were habitual callers at the Quiet Woman
as they passed by in their carts, were partial to the topic. In fact,
though they were not Egdon men, they could hardly avoid it while they
sucked their long clay tubes and regarded the heath through the window.
Clym had been so inwoven with the heath in his boyhood that hardly
anybody could look upon it without thinking of him. So the subject
recurred: if he were making a fortune and a name, so much the better
for him; if he were making a tragical figure in the world, so much the
better for a narrative.

The fact was that Yeobright's fame had spread to an awkward extent
before he left home. "It is bad when your fame outruns your means," said
the Spanish Jesuit Gracian. At the age of six he had asked a Scripture
riddle: "Who was the first man known to wear breeches?" and applause
had resounded from the very verge of the heath. At seven he painted the
Battle of Waterloo with tiger-lily pollen and black-currant juice, in
the absence of water-colours. By the time he reached twelve he had in
this manner been heard of as artist and scholar for at least two miles
round. An individual whose fame spreads three or four thousand yards in
the time taken by the fame of others similarly situated to travel six or
eight hundred, must of necessity have something in him. Possibly Clym's
fame, like Homer's, owed something to the accidents of his situation;
nevertheless famous he was.

He grew up and was helped out in life. That waggery of fate which
started Clive as a writing clerk, Gay as a linen-draper, Keats as a
surgeon, and a thousand others in a thousand other odd ways, banished
the wild and ascetic heath lad to a trade whose sole concern was with
the especial symbols of self-indulgence and vainglory.

The details of this choice of a business for him it is not necessary
to give. At the death of his father a neighbouring gentleman had kindly
undertaken to give the boy a start, and this assumed the form of sending
him to Budmouth. Yeobright did not wish to go there, but it was the only
feasible opening. Thence he went to London; and thence, shortly after,
to Paris, where he had remained till now.

Something being expected of him, he had not been at home many days
before a great curiosity as to why he stayed on so long began to arise
in the heath. The natural term of a holiday had passed, yet he still
remained. On the Sunday morning following the week of Thomasin's
marriage a discussion on this subject was in progress at a hair-cutting
before Fairway's house. Here the local barbering was always done at
this hour on this day, to be followed by the great Sunday wash of the
inhabitants at noon, which in its turn was followed by the great Sunday
dressing an hour later. On Egdon Heath Sunday proper did not begin till
dinner-time, and even then it was a somewhat battered specimen of the
day.

These Sunday-morning hair-cuttings were performed by Fairway; the victim
sitting on a chopping-block in front of the house, without a coat, and
the neighbours gossiping around, idly observing the locks of hair as
they rose upon the wind after the snip, and flew away out of sight to
the four quarters of the heavens. Summer and winter the scene was the
same, unless the wind were more than usually blusterous, when the stool
was shifted a few feet round the corner. To complain of cold in sitting
out of doors, hatless and coatless, while Fairway told true stories
between the cuts of the scissors, would have been to pronounce yourself
no man at once. To flinch, exclaim, or move a muscle of the face at
the small stabs under the ear received from those instruments, or at
scarifications of the neck by the comb, would have been thought a gross
breach of good manners, considering that Fairway did it all for nothing.
A bleeding about the poll on Sunday afternoons was amply accounted for
by the explanation. "I have had my hair cut, you know."

The conversation on Yeobright had been started by a distant view of the
young man rambling leisurely across the heath before them.

"A man who is doing well elsewhere wouldn't bide here two or three weeks
for nothing," said Fairway. "He's got some project in 's head--depend
upon that."

"Well, 'a can't keep a diment shop here," said Sam.

"I don't see why he should have had them two heavy boxes home if he had
not been going to bide; and what there is for him to do here the Lord in
heaven knows."

Before many more surmises could be indulged in Yeobright had come near;
and seeing the hair-cutting group he turned aside to join them. Marching
up, and looking critically at their faces for a moment, he said, without
introduction, "Now, folks, let me guess what you have been talking
about."

"Ay, sure, if you will," said Sam.

"About me."

"Now, it is a thing I shouldn't have dreamed of doing, otherwise," said
Fairway in a tone of integrity; "but since you have named it, Master
Yeobright, I'll own that we was talking about 'ee. We were wondering
what could keep you home here mollyhorning about when you have made such
a world-wide name for yourself in the nick-nack trade--now, that's the
truth o't."

"I'll tell you," said Yeobright with unexpected earnestness. "I am
not sorry to have the opportunity. I've come home because, all things
considered, I can be a trifle less useless here than anywhere else. But
I have only lately found this out. When I first got away from home I
thought this place was not worth troubling about. I thought our life
here was contemptible. To oil your boots instead of blacking them, to
dust your coat with a switch instead of a brush--was there ever anything
more ridiculous? I said."

"So 'tis; so 'tis!"

"No, no--you are wrong; it isn't."

"Beg your pardon, we thought that was your meaning?"

"Well, as my views changed my course became very depressing. I found
that I was trying to be like people who had hardly anything in common
with myself. I was endeavouring to put off one sort of life for another
sort of life, which was not better than the life I had known before. It
was simply different."

"True; a sight different," said Fairway.

"Yes, Paris must be a taking place," said Humphrey. "Grand shop-winders,
trumpets, and drums; and here be we out of doors in all winds and
weathers--"

"But you mistake me," pleaded Clym. "All this was very depressing. But
not so depressing as something I next perceived--that my business was
the idlest, vainest, most effeminate business that ever a man could
be put to. That decided me--I would give it up and try to follow some
rational occupation among the people I knew best, and to whom I could
be of most use. I have come home; and this is how I mean to carry out
my plan. I shall keep a school as near to Egdon as possible, so as to be
able to walk over here and have a night-school in my mother's house.
But I must study a little at first, to get properly qualified. Now,
neighbours, I must go."

And Clym resumed his walk across the heath.

"He'll never carry it out in the world," said Fairway. "In a few weeks
he'll learn to see things otherwise."

"'Tis good-hearted of the young man," said another. "But, for my part, I
think he had better mind his business."


</CHAPTER>
<CHAPTER>
2--The New Course Causes Disappointment


Yeobright loved his kind. He had a conviction that the want of most men
was knowledge of a sort which brings wisdom rather than affluence. He
wished to raise the class at the expense of individuals rather than
individuals at the expense of the class. What was more, he was ready at
once to be the first unit sacrificed.

In passing from the bucolic to the intellectual life the intermediate
stages are usually two at least, frequently many more; and one of those
stages is almost sure to be worldly advanced. We can hardly imagine
bucolic placidity quickening to intellectual aims without imagining
social aims as the transitional phase. Yeobright's local peculiarity was
that in striving at high thinking he still cleaved to plain living--nay,
wild and meagre living in many respects, and brotherliness with clowns.

He was a John the Baptist who took ennoblement rather than repentance
for his text. Mentally he was in a provincial future, that is, he was in
many points abreast with the central town thinkers of his date. Much of
this development he may have owed to his studious life in Paris, where
he had become acquainted with ethical systems popular at the time.

In consequence of this relatively advanced position, Yeobright might
have been called unfortunate. The rural world was not ripe for him. A
man should be only partially before his time--to be completely to the
vanward in aspirations is fatal to fame. Had Philip's warlike son been
intellectually so far ahead as to have attempted civilization without
bloodshed, he would have been twice the godlike hero that he seemed, but
nobody would have heard of an Alexander.

In the interests of renown the forwardness should lie chiefly in the
capacity to handle things. Successful propagandists have succeeded
because the doctrine they bring into form is that which their listeners
have for some time felt without being able to shape. A man who advocates
aesthetic effort and deprecates social effort is only likely to be
understood by a class to which social effort has become a stale matter.
To argue upon the possibility of culture before luxury to the bucolic
world may be to argue truly, but it is an attempt to disturb a sequence
to which humanity has been long accustomed. Yeobright preaching to
the Egdon eremites that they might rise to a serene comprehensiveness
without going through the process of enriching themselves was not unlike
arguing to ancient Chaldeans that in ascending from earth to the pure
empyrean it was not necessary to pass first into the intervening heaven
of ether.

Was Yeobright's mind well-proportioned? No. A well proportioned mind is
one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that
it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a
heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it
will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest,
or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity.
It produces the poetry of Rogers, the paintings of West, the statecraft
of North, the spiritual guidance of Tomline; enabling its possessors to
find their way to wealth, to wind up well, to step with dignity off the
stage, to die comfortably in their beds, and to get the decent monument
which, in many cases, they deserve. It never would have allowed
Yeobright to do such a ridiculous thing as throw up his business to
benefit his fellow-creatures.

He walked along towards home without attending to paths. If anyone knew
the heath well it was Clym. He was permeated with its scenes, with its
substance, and with its odours. He might be said to be its product. His
eyes had first opened thereon; with its appearance all the first images
of his memory were mingled, his estimate of life had been coloured by
it: his toys had been the flint knives and arrow-heads which he found
there, wondering why stones should "grow" to such odd shapes; his
flowers, the purple bells and yellow furze: his animal kingdom, the
snakes and croppers; his society, its human haunters. Take all the
varying hates felt by Eustacia Vye towards the heath, and translate
them into loves, and you have the heart of Clym. He gazed upon the wide
prospect as he walked, and was glad.

To many persons this Egdon was a place which had slipped out of its
century generations ago, to intrude as an uncouth object into this.
It was an obsolete thing, and few cared to study it. How could this
be otherwise in the days of square fields, plashed hedges, and meadows
watered on a plan so rectangular that on a fine day they looked like
silver gridirons? The farmer, in his ride, who could smile at artificial
grasses, look with solicitude at the coming corn, and sigh with sadness
at the fly-eaten turnips, bestowed upon the distant upland of heath
nothing better than a frown. But as for Yeobright, when he looked
from the heights on his way he could not help indulging in a barbarous
satisfaction at observing that, in some of the attempts at reclamation
from the waste, tillage, after holding on for a year or two, had receded
again in despair, the ferns and furze-tufts stubbornly reasserting
themselves.

He descended into the valley, and soon reached his home at Blooms-End.
His mother was snipping dead leaves from the window-plants. She looked
up at him as if she did not understand the meaning of his long stay with
her; her face had worn that look for several days. He could perceive
that the curiosity which had been shown by the hair-cutting group
amounted in his mother to concern. But she had asked no question with
her lips, even when the arrival of his trunk suggested that he was not
going to leave her soon. Her silence besought an explanation of him more
loudly than words.

"I am not going back to Paris again, Mother," he said. "At least, in my
old capacity. I have given up the business."

Mrs. Yeobright turned in pained surprise. "I thought something was
amiss, because of the boxes. I wonder you did not tell me sooner."

"I ought to have done it. But I have been in doubt whether you would be
pleased with my plan. I was not quite clear on a few points myself. I am
going to take an entirely new course."

"I am astonished, Clym. How can you want to do better than you've been
doing?"

"Very easily. But I shall not do better in the way you mean; I suppose
it will be called doing worse. But I hate that business of mine, and I
want to do some worthy thing before I die. As a schoolmaster I think
to do it--a school-master to the poor and ignorant, to teach them what
nobody else will."

"After all the trouble that has been taken to give you a start, and when
there is nothing to do but to keep straight on towards affluence, you
say you will be a poor man's schoolmaster. Your fancies will be your
ruin, Clym."

Mrs. Yeobright spoke calmly, but the force of feeling behind the words
was but too apparent to one who knew her as well as her son did. He did
not answer. There was in his face that hopelessness of being understood
which comes when the objector is constitutionally beyond the reach of
a logic that, even under favouring conditions, is almost too coarse a
vehicle for the subtlety of the argument.

No more was said on the subject till the end of dinner. His mother then
began, as if there had been no interval since the morning. "It disturbs
me, Clym, to find that you have come home with such thoughts as those. I
hadn't the least idea that you meant to go backward in the world by your
own free choice. Of course, I have always supposed you were going to
push straight on, as other men do--all who deserve the name--when they
have been put in a good way of doing well."

"I cannot help it," said Clym, in a troubled tone. "Mother, I hate
the flashy business. Talk about men who deserve the name, can any man
deserving the name waste his time in that effeminate way, when he sees
half the world going to ruin for want of somebody to buckle to and teach
them how to breast the misery they are born to? I get up every morning
and see the whole creation groaning and travailing in pain, as St. Paul
says, and yet there am I, trafficking in glittering splendours with
wealthy women and titled libertines, and pandering to the meanest
vanities--I, who have health and strength enough for anything. I have
been troubled in my mind about it all the year, and the end is that I
cannot do it any more."

"Why can't you do it as well as others?"

"I don't know, except that there are many things other people care for
which I don't; and that's partly why I think I ought to do this. For one
thing, my body does not require much of me. I cannot enjoy delicacies;
good things are wasted upon me. Well, I ought to turn that defect to
advantage, and by being able to do without what other people require I
can spend what such things cost upon anybody else."

Now, Yeobright, having inherited some of these very instincts from the
woman before him, could not fail to awaken a reciprocity in her through
her feelings, if not by arguments, disguise it as she might for his
good. She spoke with less assurance. "And yet you might have been a
wealthy man if you had only persevered. Manager to that large diamond
establishment--what better can a man wish for? What a post of trust
and respect! I suppose you will be like your father; like him, you are
getting weary of doing well."

"No," said her son, "I am not weary of that, though I am weary of what
you mean by it. Mother, what is doing well?"

Mrs. Yeobright was far too thoughtful a woman to be content with ready
definitions, and, like the "What is wisdom?" of Plato's Socrates, and
the "What is truth?" of Pontius Pilate, Yeobright's burning question
received no answer.

The silence was broken by the clash of the garden gate, a tap at the
door, and its opening. Christian Cantle appeared in the room in his
Sunday clothes.

It was the custom on Egdon to begin the preface to a story before
absolutely entering the house, so as to be well in for the body of the
narrative by the time visitor and visited stood face to face. Christian
had been saying to them while the door was leaving its latch, "To think
that I, who go from home but once in a while, and hardly then, should
have been there this morning!"

"'Tis news you have brought us, then, Christian?" said Mrs. Yeobright.

"Ay, sure, about a witch, and ye must overlook my time o' day; for, says
I, 'I must go and tell 'em, though they won't have half done dinner.' I
assure ye it made me shake like a driven leaf. Do ye think any harm will
come o't?"

"Well--what?"

"This morning at church we was all standing up, and the pa'son said,
'Let us pray.' 'Well,' thinks I, 'one may as well kneel as stand'; so
down I went; and, more than that, all the rest were as willing to oblige
the man as I. We hadn't been hard at it for more than a minute when a
most terrible screech sounded through church, as if somebody had just
gied up their heart's blood. All the folk jumped up and then we found
that Susan Nunsuch had pricked Miss Vye with a long stocking-needle, as
she had threatened to do as soon as ever she could get the young lady to
church, where she don't come very often. She've waited for this chance
for weeks, so as to draw her blood and put an end to the bewitching of
Susan's children that has been carried on so long. Sue followed her into
church, sat next to her, and as soon as she could find a chance in went
the stocking-needle into my lady's arm."

"Good heaven, how horrid!" said Mrs. Yeobright.

"Sue pricked her that deep that the maid fainted away; and as I was
afeard there might be some tumult among us, I got behind the bass viol
and didn't see no more. But they carried her out into the air, 'tis
said; but when they looked round for Sue she was gone. What a scream
that girl gied, poor thing! There were the pa'son in his surplice
holding up his hand and saying, 'Sit down, my good people, sit down!'
But the deuce a bit would they sit down. O, and what d'ye think I
found out, Mrs. Yeobright? The pa'son wears a suit of clothes under his
surplice!--I could see his black sleeves when he held up his arm."

"'Tis a cruel thing," said Yeobright.

"Yes," said his mother.

"The nation ought to look into it," said Christian. "Here's Humphrey
coming, I think."

In came Humphrey. "Well, have ye heard the news? But I see you have.
'Tis a very strange thing that whenever one of Egdon folk goes to church
some rum job or other is sure to be doing. The last time one of us was
there was when neighbour Fairway went in the fall; and that was the day
you forbad the banns, Mrs. Yeobright."

"Has this cruelly treated girl been able to walk home?" said Clym.

"They say she got better, and went home very well. And now I've told it
I must be moving homeward myself."

"And I," said Humphrey. "Truly now we shall see if there's anything in
what folks say about her."

When they were gone into the heath again Yeobright said quietly to his
mother, "Do you think I have turned teacher too soon?"

"It is right that there should be schoolmasters, and missionaries, and
all such men," she replied. "But it is right, too, that I should try to
lift you out of this life into something richer, and that you should not
come back again, and be as if I had not tried at all."


Later in the day Sam, the turf-cutter, entered. "I've come a-borrowing,
Mrs. Yeobright. I suppose you have heard what's been happening to the
beauty on the hill?"

"Yes, Sam: half a dozen have been telling us."

"Beauty?" said Clym.

"Yes, tolerably well-favoured," Sam replied. "Lord! all the country owns
that 'tis one of the strangest things in the world that such a woman
should have come to live up there."

"Dark or fair?"

"Now, though I've seen her twenty times, that's a thing I cannot call to
mind."

"Darker than Tamsin," murmured Mrs. Yeobright.

"A woman who seems to care for nothing at all, as you may say."

"She is melancholy, then?" inquired Clym.

"She mopes about by herself, and don't mix in with the people."

"Is she a young lady inclined for adventures?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Doesn't join in with the lads in their games, to get some sort of
excitement in this lonely place?"

"No."

"Mumming, for instance?"

"No. Her notions be different. I should rather say her thoughts were far
away from here, with lords and ladies she'll never know, and mansions
she'll never see again."

Observing that Clym appeared singularly interested Mrs. Yeobright said
rather uneasily to Sam, "You see more in her than most of us do. Miss
Vye is to my mind too idle to be charming. I have never heard that
she is of any use to herself or to other people. Good girls don't get
treated as witches even on Egdon."

"Nonsense--that proves nothing either way," said Yeobright.

"Well, of course I don't understand such niceties," said Sam,
withdrawing from a possibly unpleasant argument; "and what she is we
must wait for time to tell us. The business that I have really called
about is this, to borrow the longest and strongest rope you have. The
captain's bucket has dropped into the well, and they are in want of
water; and as all the chaps are at home today we think we can get it out
for him. We have three cart-ropes already, but they won't reach to the
bottom."

Mrs. Yeobright told him that he might have whatever ropes he could find
in the outhouse, and Sam went out to search. When he passed by the door
Clym joined him, and accompanied him to the gate.

"Is this young witch-lady going to stay long at Mistover?" he asked.

"I should say so."

"What a cruel shame to ill-use her, She must have suffered greatly--more
in mind than in body."

"'Twas a graceless trick--such a handsome girl, too. You ought to see
her, Mr. Yeobright, being a young man come from far, and with a little
more to show for your years than most of us."

"Do you think she would like to teach children?" said Clym.

Sam shook his head. "Quite a different sort of body from that, I
reckon."

"O, it was merely something which occurred to me. It would of course be
necessary to see her and talk it over--not an easy thing, by the way,
for my family and hers are not very friendly."

"I'll tell you how you mid see her, Mr. Yeobright," said Sam. "We are
going to grapple for the bucket at six o'clock tonight at her house, and
you could lend a hand. There's five or six coming, but the well is deep,
and another might be useful, if you don't mind appearing in that shape.
She's sure to be walking round."

"I'll think of it," said Yeobright; and they parted.

He thought of it a good deal; but nothing more was said about Eustacia
inside the house at that time. Whether this romantic martyr to
superstition and the melancholy mummer he had conversed with under the
full moon were one and the same person remained as yet a problem.



</CHAPTER>

 Clym is seen by the heath dwellers as a rather special person not only because of his unusual reputation as a boy but also because of his position in the diamond business in far-off Paris. Therefore, when he tells the group at the haircutting at Fairway's that he has come home to make himself into a schoolteacher, they do not believe him. Mrs. Yeobright does not believe him either, but in her case it is because she does not want to. The conversation between them in which he tries to explain why he is giving up his job is interrupted by Christian Cantle, who relates the tale of Eustacia's being pricked in the arm with a stocking needle by Susan Nunsuch. This is a revenge Susan planned because she is convinced that Eustacia has bewitched her children. Later, Clym questions Sam about Eustacia, wondering if she is the young woman who was disguised as a mummer at this mother's party. Sam suggests Clym can see Eustacia by coming to join several of the men who are trying to retrieve the bucket from Captain Vye's well.

