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By Root 5655 0

of Fancy Day, she is just arriving to settle in the parish. They have further meetings, exchanging teasing badinage, and it is not long before Oak is in love. He even dares propose marriage. But Bathsheba says she is too independent. She needs someone to `tame' her, and tells him he is not strong enough to do it. Shortly afterwards she disappears, to take over a farm she has inherited, and Oak is struck by disaster, when all his sheep plunge to destruction over a quarry face. He has lost his livelihood, his farm, everything. He is cast into the shadows, doomed to live `below the line' as he seeks work as a lowly shepherd. Crossing the country by night, he sees an ominous blaze of flame. It is a wheat-rick on fire, threatening to destroy others. Farmhands are rushing around in confusion, but Oak at once takes charge and the potentially disastrous fire is extinguished. Impressed by his cool common sense, the farm's owner orders that he be taken on to run the farm as manager. Only then do the two discover each other's identities, and that his new employer is Miss Everdene.

The greater part of the story is then taken up with how Gabriel, from his subservient position in the shadows, has to watch while, `above the line, his impulsive, imperious mistress makes one mistake after another. The first is her leading on of a rich, older neighbour Farmer Boldwood, when she has no intention of marrying him. So forthright is Oak in remonstrating with her for such folly that Bathsheba dismisses him. But almost immediately a crisis arises on her farm, when her sheep become fatally distended from eating clover. She has to plead with Oak to return, as again the only man with the strength of character and practical knowledge to save her.

Her next, much more catastrophic mistake comes with the arrival in the neighbourhood of the dashing philanderer Sergeant Troy. Swept off her feet by his `dark masculine' charms, Bathsheba stumbles recklessly into marriage. On the night of the great party to celebrate their wedding and the bringing in of the harvest, only Gabriel observes the approach of a storm. The entire harvest, piled in unprotected ricks, is in danger of being lost. Troy contemptuously dismisses his warnings, ordering all the womenfolk home so that he can urge on all the men into a drunken stupor. When the strange behaviour of various animals provides three successive portents that the storm is likely to be of awesome proportions, Gabriel works demonically to get the ricks covered. As the first lightning flashes appear, he is joined by Bathsheba. Together they work on through the heavenly bombardment until, in the nick of time, just as the rain arrives, the task is complete. For a third time, by the Rule of Three, Bathsheba has been saved by Gabriel showing himself in a crisis to be a whole man: strong, disciplined, intuitively aware, unselfish; the very opposite of his weak shadow lying drunkenly asleep in the barn, Bathsheba's husband.

Indeed we now see just what a dark figure Sergeant Troy truly is, in his callous treatment of Fanny Robin, the frail, unhappy village girl he has promised to marry, who has borne his child and whom he has cruelly abandoned to live off Bathsheba. This infantile anima-figure is Hardy's first `persecuted maiden'. The story moves in melodramatic crescendo towards its climax. The feckless Troy begins to gamble away his wife's money. The rejected, desperately ill Fanny crawls through the night to die, with her baby, on the steps of the workhouse. When her body is returned for burial in the village, it is brought to lie overnight in Bathsheba's house and, from looking into the coffin to see the two corpses, she discovers her husband's dreadful secret. Troy distractedly exhibits in death all the love towards the infantile anima he had failed to show in life. He disappears from home, swims out to sea and is taken to be dead. Eventually Farmer Boldwood, still dreaming in his broken state that he may one day win Bathsheba's hand, throws a Christmas party, to which she is invited as honoured guest. In the middle