Phase the First: The Maiden, I-XI
I
On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking
homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the
adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs
that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his
gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight
line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if in
confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of
anything in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon
his arm, the nap of his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite
worn away at its brim where his thumb came in taking it off.
Presently he was met by an elderly parson astride on a gray
mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering tune.
"Good night t'ee," said the man with the basket.
"Good night, Sir John," said the parson.
The pedestrian, after another pace or two, halted, and
turned round.
"Now, sir, begging your pardon; we met last market-day on
this road about this time, and I said 'Good night,' and you
made reply 'Good night, Sir John,' as now."
"I did," said the parson.
"And once before that—near a month ago."
"I may have."
"Then what might your meaning be in calling me 'Sir John'
these different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield, the
haggler?"
The parson rode a step or two nearer.
"It was only my whim," he said; and, after a moment's
hesitation: "It was on account of a discovery I made some
little time ago, whilst I was hunting up pedigrees for the
new county history. I am Parson Tringham, the antiquary, of
Stagfoot Lane. Don't you really know, Durbeyfield, that you
are the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly
family of the d'Urbervilles, who derive their descent from
Sir Pagan d'Urberville, that renowned knight who came from
Normandy with William the Conqueror, as appears by Battle
Abbey Roll?"
"Never heard it before, sir!"
"Well it's true. Throw up your chin a moment, so that I
may catch the profile of your face better. Yes, that's the
d'Urberville nose and chin—a little debased. Your ancestor
was one of the twelve knights who assisted the Lord of
Estremavilla in Normandy in his conquest of Glamorganshire.
Branches of your family held manors over all this part of
England; their names appear in the Pipe Rolls in the time of
King Stephen. In the reign of King John one of them was rich
enough to give a manor to the Knights Hospitallers; and in
Edward the Second's time your forefather Brian was summoned
to Westminster to attend the great Council there. You
declined a little in Oliver Cromwell's time, but to no
serious extent, and in Charles the Second's reign you were
made Knights of the Royal Oak for your loyalty. Aye, there
have been generations of Sir Johns among you, and if
knighthood were hereditary, like a baronetcy, as it
practically was in old times, when men were knighted from
father to son, you would be Sir John now."
"Ye don't say so!"
"In short," concluded the parson, decisively smacking his
leg with his switch, "there's hardly such another family in
England."
"Daze my eyes, and isn't there?" said Durbeyfield. "And
here have I been knocking about, year after year, from
pillar to post, as if I was no more than the commonest
feller in the parish… And how long hev this news about me
been knowed, Pa'son Tringham?"
The clergyman explained that, as far as he was aware, it
had quite died out of knowledge, and could hardly be said to
be known at all. His own investigations had begun on a day
in the preceding spring when, having been engaged in tracing
the vicissitudes of the d'Urberville family, he had observed
Durbeyfield's name on his waggon, and had thereupon been led
to make inquiries about his father and grandfather till he
had no doubt on the subject.
"At first I resolved not to disturb you with such a
useless piece of information," said he. "However, our
impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes. I
thought you might perhaps know something of it all the
while."
"Well, I have heard once or twice, 'tis true, that my
family had seen better days afore they came to Blackmoor.
But I took no notice o't, thinking it to mean that we had
once kept two horses where we now keep only one. I've got a
wold silver spoon, and a wold graven seal at home, too; but,
Lord, what's a spoon and seal? … And to think that I and
these noble d'Urbervilles were one flesh all the time. 'Twas
said that my gr't-granfer had secrets, and didn't care to
talk of where he came from… And where do we raise our smoke,
now, parson, if I may make so bold; I mean, where do we
d'Urbervilles live?"
"You don't live anywhere. You are extinct—as a county
family."
"That's bad."
"Yes—what the mendacious family chronicles call extinct
in the male line—that is, gone down—gone under."
"Then where do we lie?"
"At Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill: rows and rows of you in your
vaults, with your effigies under Purbeck-marble canopies."
"And where be our family mansions and estates?"
"You haven't any."
"Oh? No lands neither?"
"None; though you once had 'em in abundance, as I said,
for you family consisted of numerous branches. In this
county there was a seat of yours at Kingsbere, and another
at Sherton, and another in Millpond, and another at
Lullstead, and another at Wellbridge."
"And shall we ever come into our own again?"
"Ah—that I can't tell!"
"And what had I better do about it, sir?" asked
Durbeyfield, after a pause.
"Oh—nothing, nothing; except chasten yourself with the
thought of 'how are the mighty fallen.' It is a fact of some
interest to the local historian and genealogist, nothing
more. There are several families among the cottagers of this
county of almost equal lustre. Good night."
"But you'll turn back and have a quart of beer wi' me on
the strength o't, Pa'son Tringham? There's a very pretty
brew in tap at The Pure Drop—though, to be sure, not so good
as at Rolliver's."
"No, thank you—not this evening, Durbeyfield. You've had
enough already." Concluding thus, the parson rode on his
way, with doubts as to his discretion in retailing this
curious bit of lore.
When he was gone, Durbeyfield walked a few steps in a
profound reverie, and then sat down upon the grassy bank by
the roadside, depositing his basket before him. In a few
minutes a youth appeared in the distance, walking in the
same direction as that which had been pursued by
Durbeyfield. The latter, on seeing him, held up his hand,
and the lad quickened his pace and came near.
"Boy, take up that basket! I want 'ee to go on an errand
for me."
The lath-like stripling frowned. "Who be you, then, John
Durbeyfield, to order me about and call me 'boy'? You know
my name as well as I know yours!"
"Do you, do you? That's the secret—that's the secret! Now
obey my orders, and take the message I'm going to charge 'ee
wi'… Well, Fred, I don't mind telling you that the secret is
that I'm one of a noble race—it has been just found out by
me this present afternoon, p.m."
And as he made the announcement, Durbeyfield, declining from
his sitting position, luxuriously stretched himself out upon
the bank among the daisies.
The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his
length from crown to toe.
"Sir John d'Urberville—that's who I am," continued the
prostrate man. "That is if knights were baronets—which they
be. 'Tis recorded in history all about me. Dost know of such
a place, lad, as Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill?"
"Ees. I've been there to Greenhill Fair."
"Well, under the church of that city there lie—"
"'Tisn't a city, the place I mean; leastwise 'twaddn'
when I was there—'twas a little one-eyed, blinking sort o'
place."
"Never you mind the place, boy, that's not the question
before us. Under the church of that there parish lie my
ancestors—hundreds of 'em—in coats of mail and jewels, in
gr't lead coffins weighing tons and tons. There's not a man
in the county o' South-Wessex that's got grander and nobler
skillentons in his family than I."
"Oh?"
"Now take up that basket, and goo on to Marlott, and when
you've come to The Pure Drop Inn, tell 'em to send a horse
and carriage to me immed'ately, to carry me hwome. And in
the bottom o' the carriage they be to put a noggin o' rum in
a small bottle, and chalk it up to my account. And when
you've done that goo on to my house with the basket, and
tell my wife to put away that washing, because she needn't
finish it, and wait till I come hwome, as I've news to tell
her."
As the lad stood in a dubious attitude, Durbeyfield put
his hand in his pocket, and produced a shilling, one of the
chronically few that he possessed.
"Here's for your labour, lad."
This made a difference in the young man's estimate of the
position.
"Yes, Sir John. Thank 'ee. Anything else I can do for
'ee, Sir John?"
"Tell 'em at hwome that I should like for supper,—well,
lamb's fry if they can get it; and if they can't, black-pot;
and if they can't get that, well chitterlings will do."
"Yes, Sir John."
The boy took up the basket, and as he set out the notes
of a brass band were heard from the direction of the
village.
"What's that?" said Durbeyfield. "Not on account o' I?"
"'Tis the women's club-walking, Sir John. Why, your
da'ter is one o' the members."
"To be sure—I'd quite forgot it in my thoughts of greater
things! Well, vamp on to Marlott, will ye, and order that
carriage, and maybe I'll drive round and inspect the club."
The lad departed, and Durbeyfield lay waiting on the
grass and daisies in the evening sun. Not a soul passed that
way for a long while, and the faint notes of the band were
the only human sounds audible within the rim of blue hills.
II
The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern
undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore, or
Blackmoor, aforesaid, an engirdled and secluded region, for
the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or
landscape-painter, though within a four hours' journey from
London.
It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing
it from the summits of the hills that surround it—except
perhaps during the droughts of summer. An unguided ramble
into its recesses in bad weather is apt to engender
dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways.
This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the
fields are never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded
on the south by the bold chalk ridge that embraces the
prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout,
Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. The traveller from the
coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of miles
over calcareous downs and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the
verge of one of these escarpments, is surprised and
delighted to behold, extended like a map beneath him, a
country differing absolutely from that which he has passed
through. Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down
upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to
the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and
plashed, the atmosphere colourless. Here, in the valley, the
world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more
delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced
that from this height their hedgerows appear a network of
dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the
grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so
tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance
partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of
the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited;
with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass
of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within
the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor.
The district is of historic, no less than of
topographical interest. The Vale was known in former times
as the Forest of White Hart, from a curious legend of King
Henry III's reign, in which the killing by a certain Thomas
de la Lynd of a beautiful white hart which the king had run
down and spared, was made the occasion of a heavy fine. In
those days, and till comparatively recent times, the country
was densely wooded. Even now, traces of its earlier
condition are to be found in the old oak copses and
irregular belts of timber that yet survive upon its slopes,
and the hollow-trunked trees that shade so many of its
pastures.
The forests have departed, but some old customs of their
shades remain. Many, however, linger only in a metamorphosed
or disguised form. The May-Day dance, for instance, was to
be discerned on the afternoon under notice, in the guise of
the club revel, or "club-walking," as it was there called.
It was an interesting event to the younger inhabitants of
Marlott, though its real interest was not observed by the
participators in the ceremony. Its singularity lay less in
the retention of a custom of walking in procession and
dancing on each anniversary than in the members being solely
women. In men's clubs such celebrations were, though
expiring, less uncommon; but either the natural shyness of
the softer sex, or a sarcastic attitude on the part of male
relatives, had denuded such women's clubs as remained (if
any other did) or this their glory and consummation. The
club of Marlott alone lived to uphold the local Cerealia. It
had walked for hundreds of years, if not as benefit-club, as
votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked still.
The banded ones were all dressed in white gowns—a gay
survival from Old Style days, when cheerfulness and May-time
were synonyms—days before the habit of taking long views had
reduced emotions to a monotonous average. Their first
exhibition of themselves was in a processional march of two
and two round the parish. Ideal and real clashed slightly as
the sun lit up their figures against the green hedges and
creeper-laced house-fronts; for, though the whole troop wore
white garments, no two whites were alike among them. Some
approached pure blanching; some had a bluish pallor; some
worn by the older characters (which had possibly lain by
folded for many a year) inclined to a cadaverous tint, and
to a Georgian style.
In addition to the distinction of a white frock, every
woman and girl carried in her right hand a peeled willow
wand, and in her left a bunch of white flowers. The peeling
of the former, and the selection of the latter, had been an
operation of personal care.
There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in
the train, their silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces,
scourged by time and trouble, having almost a grotesque,
certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a jaunty situation.
In a true view, perhaps, there was more to be gathered and
told of each anxious and experienced one, to whom the years
were drawing nigh when she should say, "I have no pleasure
in them," than of her juvenile comrades. But let the elder
be passed over here for those under whose bodices the life
throbbed quick and warm.
The young girls formed, indeed, the majority of the band,
and their heads of luxuriant hair reflected in the sunshine
every tone of gold, and black, and brown. Some had beautiful
eyes, others a beautiful nose, others a beautiful mouth and
figure: few, if any, had all. A difficulty of arranging
their lips in this crude exposure to public scrutiny, an
inability to balance their heads, and to dissociate
self-consciousness from their features, was apparent in
them, and showed that they were genuine country girls,
unaccustomed to many eyes.
And as each and all of them were warmed without by the
sun, so each had a private little sun for her soul to bask
in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at least some
remote and distant hope which, though perhaps starving to
nothing, still lived on, as hopes will. They were all
cheerful, and many of them merry.
They came round by The Pure Drop Inn, and were turning
out of the high road to pass through a wicket-gate into the
meadows, when one of the women said—
"The Load-a-Lord! Why, Tess Durbeyfield, if there isn't
thy father riding hwome in a carriage!"
A young member of the band turned her head at the
exclamation. She was a fine and handsome girl—not handsomer
than some others, possibly—but her mobile peony mouth and
large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape. She
wore a red ribbon in her hair, and was the only one of the
white company who could boast of such a pronounced
adornment. As she looked round Durbeyfield was seen moving
along the road in a chaise belonging to The Pure Drop,
driven by a frizzle-headed brawny damsel with her
gown-sleeves rolled above her elbows. This was the cheerful
servant of that establishment, who, in her part of factotum,
turned groom and ostler at times. Durbeyfield, leaning back,
and with his eyes closed luxuriously, was waving his hand
above his head, and singing in a slow recitative—
"I've-got-a-gr't-family-vault-at-Kingsbere—and
knighted-forefathers-in-lead-coffins-there!"
The clubbists tittered, except the girl called Tess—in
whom a slow heat seemed to rise at the sense that her father
was making himself foolish in their eyes.
"He's tired, that's all," she said hastily, "and he has
got a lift home, because our own horse has to rest to-day."
"Bless thy simplicity, Tess," said her companions. "He's
got his market-nitch. Haw-haw!"
"Look here; I won't walk another inch with you, if you
say any jokes about him!" Tess cried, and the colour upon
her cheeks spread over her face and neck. In a moment her
eyes grew moist, and her glance drooped to the ground.
Perceiving that they had really pained her they said no
more, and order again prevailed. Tess's pride would not
allow her to turn her head again, to learn what her father's
meaning was, if he had any; and thus she moved on with the
whole body to the enclosure where there was to be dancing on
the green. By the time the spot was reached she has
recovered her equanimity, and tapped her neighbour with her
wand and talked as usual.
Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere
vessel of emotion untinctured by experience. The dialect was
on her tongue to some extent, despite the village school:
the characteristic intonation of that dialect for this
district being the voicing approximately rendered by the
syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be
found in human speech. The pouted-up deep red mouth to which
this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its
definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the
middle of her top one upward, when they closed together
after a word.
Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As
she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome
womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her
cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her
fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
Yet few knew, and still fewer considered this. A small
minority, mainly strangers, would look long at her in
casually passing by, and grow momentarily fascinated by her
freshness, and wonder if they would ever see her again: but
to almost everybody she was a fine and picturesque country
girl, and no more.
Nothing was seen or heard further of Durbeyfield in his
triumphal chariot under the conduct of the ostleress, and
the club having entered the allotted space, dancing began.
As there were no men in the company, the girls danced at
first with each other, but when the hour for the close of
labour drew on, the masculine inhabitants of the village,
together with other idlers and pedestrians, gathered round
the spot, and appeared inclined to negotiate for a partner.
Among these on-lookers were three young men of a superior
class, carrying small knapsacks strapped to their shoulders,
and stout sticks in their hands. Their general likeness to
each other, and their consecutive ages, would almost have
suggested that they might be, what in fact they were,
brothers. The eldest wore the white tie, high waistcoat, and
thin-brimmed hat of the regulation curate; the second was
the normal undergraduate; the appearance of the third and
youngest would hardly have been sufficient to characterize
him; there was an uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes
and attire, implying that he had hardly as yet found the
entrance to his professional groove. That he was a desultory
tentative student of something and everything might only
have been predicted of him.
These three brethren told casual acquaintance that they
were spending their Whitsun holidays in a walking tour
through the Vale of Blackmoor, their course being
south-westerly from the town of Shaston on the north-east.
They leant over the gate by the highway, and inquired as
to the meaning of the dance and the white-frocked maids. The
two elder of the brothers were plainly not intending to
linger more than a moment, but the spectacle of a bevy of
girls dancing without male partners seemed to amuse the
third, and make him in no hurry to move on. He unstrapped
his knapsack, put it, with his stick, on the hedge-bank, and
opened the gate.
"What are you going to do, Angel?" asked the eldest.
"I am inclined to go and have a fling with them. Why not
all of us—just for a minute or two—it will not detain us
long?"
"No—no; nonsense!" said the first. "Dancing in public
with a troop of country hoydens—suppose we should be seen!
Come along, or it will be dark before we get to Stourcastle,
and there's no place we can sleep at nearer than that;
besides, we must get through another chapter of A
Counterblast to Agnosticism before we turn in, now I
have taken the trouble to bring the book."
"All right—I'll overtake you and Cuthbert in five
minutes; don't stop; I give my word that I will, Felix."
The two elder reluctantly left him and walked on, taking
their brother's knapsack to relieve him in following, and
the youngest entered the field.
"This is a thousand pities," he said gallantly, to two or
three of the girls nearest him, as soon as there was a pause
in the dance. "Where are your partners, my dears?"
"They've not left off work yet," answered one of the
boldest. "They'll be here by and by. Till then, will you be
one, sir?"
"Certainly. But what's one among so many!"
"Better than none. 'Tis melancholy work facing and
footing it to one of your own sort, and no clipsing and
colling at all. Now, pick and choose."
"'Ssh—don't be so for'ard!" said a shyer girl.
The young man, thus invited, glanced them over, and
attempted some discrimination; but, as the group were all so
new to him, he could not very well exercise it. He took
almost the first that came to hand, which was not the
speaker, as she had expected; nor did it happen to be Tess
Durbeyfield. Pedigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental
record, the d'Urberville lineaments, did not help Tess in
her life's battle as yet, even to the extent of attracting
to her a dancing-partner over the heads of the commonest
peasantry. So much for Norman blood unaided by Victorian
lucre.
The name of the eclipsing girl, whatever it was, has not
been handed down; but she was envied by all as the first who
enjoyed the luxury of a masculine partner that evening. Yet
such was the force of example that the village young men,
who had not hastened to enter the gate while no intruder was
in the way, now dropped in quickly, and soon the couples
became leavened with rustic youth to a marked extent, till
at length the plainest woman in the club was no longer
compelled to foot it on the masculine side of the figure.
The church clock struck, when suddenly the student said
that he must leave—he had been forgetting himself—he had to
join his companions. As he fell out of the dance his eyes
lighted on Tess Durbeyfield, whose own large orbs wore, to
tell the truth, the faintest aspect of reproach that he had
not chosen her. He, too, was sorry then that, owing to her
backwardness, he had not observed her; and with that in his
mind he left the pasture.
On account of his long delay he started in a flying-run
down the lane westward, and had soon passed the hollow and
mounted the next rise. He had not yet overtaken his
brothers, but he paused to get breath, and looked back. He
could see the white figures of the girls in the green
enclosure whirling about as they had whirled when he was
among them. They seemed to have quite forgotten him already.
All of them, except, perhaps, one. This white shape stood
apart by the hedge alone. From her position he knew it to be
the pretty maiden with whom he had not danced. Trifling as
the matter was, he yet instinctively felt that she was hurt
by his oversight. He wished that he had asked her; he wished
that he had inquired her name. She was so modest, so
expressive, she had looked so soft in her thin white gown
that he felt he had acted stupidly.
However, it could not be helped, and turning, and bending
himself to a rapid walk, he dismissed the subject from his
mind.
III
As for Tess Durbeyfield, she did not so easily dislodge
the incident from her consideration. She had no spirit to
dance again for a long time, though she might have had
plenty of partners; but ah! they did not speak so nicely as
the strange young man had done. It was not till the rays of
the sun had absorbed the young stranger's retreating figure
on the hill that she shook off her temporary sadness and
answered her would-be partner in the affirmative.
She remained with her comrades till dusk, and
participated with a certain zest in the dancing; though,
being heart-whole as yet, she enjoyed treading a measure
purely for its own sake; little divining when she saw "the
soft torments, the bitter sweets, the pleasing pains, and
the agreeable distresses" of those girls who had been wooed
and won, what she herself was capable of in that kind. The
struggles and wrangles of the lads for her hand in a jig
were an amusement to her—no more; and when they became
fierce she rebuked them.
She might have stayed even later, but the incident of her
father's odd appearance and manner returned upon the girl's
mind to make her anxious, and wondering what had become of
him she dropped away from the dancers and bent her steps
towards the end of the village at which the parental cottage
lay.
While yet many score yards off, other rhythmic sounds
than those she had quitted became audible to her; sounds
that she knew well—so well. They were a regular series of
thumpings from the interior of the house, occasioned by the
violent rocking of a cradle upon a stone floor, to which
movement a feminine voice kept time by singing, in a
vigorous gallopade, the favourite ditty of "The Spotted
Cow"—
I saw her lie do′-own in yon′-der green gro′-ove;
Come, love!′ and I'll tell′ you where!′
The cradle-rocking and the song would cease simultaneously for a
moment, and an exclamation at highest vocal pitch would take
the place of the melody.
"God bless thy diment eyes! And thy waxen cheeks! And thy
cherry mouth! And thy Cubit's thighs! And every bit o' thy
blessed body!"
After this invocation the rocking and the singing would
recommence, and the "Spotted Cow" proceed as before. So
matters stood when Tess opened the door and paused upon the
mat within it, surveying the scene.
The interior, in spite of the melody, struck upon the
girl's senses with an unspeakable dreariness. From the
holiday gaieties of the field—the white gowns, the nosegays,
the willow-wands, the whirling movements on the green, the
flash of gentle sentiment towards the stranger—to the yellow
melancholy of this one-candled spectacle, what a step!
Besides the jar of contrast there came to her a chill
self-reproach that she had not returned sooner, to help her
mother in these domesticities, instead of indulging herself
out-of-doors.
There stood her mother amid the group of children, as
Tess had left her, hanging over the Monday washing-tub,
which had now, as always, lingered on to the end of the
week. Out of that tub had come the day before—Tess felt it
with a dreadful sting of remorse—the very white frock upon
her back which she had so carelessly greened about the skirt
on the damping grass—which had been wrung up and ironed by
her mother's own hands.
As usual, Mrs Durbeyfield was balanced on one foot beside
the tub, the other being engaged in the aforesaid business
of rocking her youngest child. The cradle-rockers had done
hard duty for so many years, under the weight of so many
children, on that flagstone floor, that they were worn
nearly flat, in consequence of which a huge jerk accompanied
each swing of the cot, flinging the baby from side to side
like a weaver's shuttle, as Mrs Durbeyfield, excited by her
song, trod the rocker with all the spring that was left in
her after a long day's seething in the suds.
Nick-knock, nick-knock, went the cradle; the candle-flame
stretched itself tall, and began jigging up and down; the
water dribbled from the matron's elbows, and the song
galloped on to the end of the verse, Mrs Durbeyfield
regarding her daughter the while. Even now, when burdened
with a young family, Joan Durbeyfield was a passionate lover
of tune. No ditty floated into Blackmoor Vale from the outer
world but Tess's mother caught up its notation in a week.
There still faintly beamed from the woman's features
something of the freshness, and even the prettiness, of her
youth; rendering it probable that the personal charms which
Tess could boast of were in main part her mother's gift, and
therefore unknightly, unhistorical.
"I'll rock the cradle for 'ee, mother," said the daughter
gently. "Or I'll take off my best frock and help you wring
up? I thought you had finished long ago."
Her mother bore Tess no ill-will for leaving the
housework to her single-handed efforts for so long; indeed,
Joan seldom upbraided her thereon at any time, feeling but
slightly the lack of Tess's assistance whilst her
instinctive plan for relieving herself of her labours lay in
postponing them. To-night, however, she was even in a
blither mood than usual. There was a dreaminess, a
pre-occupation, an exaltation, in the maternal look which
the girl could not understand.
"Well, I'm glad you've come," her mother said, as soon as
the last note had passed out of her. "I want to go and fetch
your father; but what's more'n that, I want to tell 'ee what
have happened. Y'll be fess enough, my poppet, when th'st
know!" (Mrs Durbeyfield habitually spoke the dialect; her
daughter, who had passed the Sixth Standard in the National
School under a London-trained mistress, spoke two languages:
the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad
and to persons of quality.)
"Since I've been away?" Tess asked.
"Ay!"
"Had it anything to do with father's making such a mommet
of himself in thik carriage this afternoon? Why did 'er? I
felt inclined to sink into the ground with shame!"
"That wer all a part of the larry! We've been found to be
the greatest gentlefolk in the whole county—reaching all
back long before Oliver Grumble's time—to the days of the
Pagan Turks—with monuments, and vaults, and crests, and
'scutcheons, and the Lord knows what all. In Saint Charles's
days we was made Knights o' the Royal Oak, our real name
being d'Urberville! … Don't that make your bosom plim? 'Twas
on this account that your father rode home in the vlee; not
because he'd been drinking, as people supposed."
"I'm glad of that. Will it do us any good, mother?"
"O yes! 'Tis thoughted that great things may come o't. No
doubt a mampus of volk of our own rank will be down here in
their carriages as soon as 'tis known. Your father learnt it
on his way hwome from Shaston, and he has been telling me
the whole pedigree of the matter."
"Where is father now?" asked Tess suddenly.
Her mother gave irrelevant information by way of answer:
"He called to see the doctor to-day in Shaston. It is not
consumption at all, it seems. It is fat round his heart, 'a
says. There, it is like this." Joan Durbeyfield, as she
spoke, curved a sodden thumb and forefinger to the shape of
the letter C, and used the other forefinger as a pointer.
"'At the present moment,' he says to your father, 'your
heart is enclosed all round there, and all round there; this
space is still open,' 'a says. 'As soon as it do meet,
so,'"—Mrs Durbeyfield closed her fingers into a circle
complete—"'off you will go like a shadder, Mr Durbeyfield,'
'a says. 'You mid last ten years; you mid go off in ten
months, or ten days.'"
Tess looked alarmed. Her father possibly to go behind the
eternal cloud so soon, notwithstanding this sudden
greatness!
"But where is father?" she asked again.
Her mother put on a deprecating look. "Now don't you be
bursting out angry! The poor man—he felt so rafted after his
uplifting by the pa'son's news—that he went up to Rolliver's
half an hour ago. He do want to get up his strength for his
journey to-morrow with that load of beehives, which must be
delivered, family or no. He'll have to start shortly after
twelve to-night, as the distance is so long."
"Get up his strength!" said Tess impetuously, the tears
welling to her eyes. "O my God! Go to a public-house to get
up his strength! And you as well agreed as he, mother!"
Her rebuke and her mood seemed to fill the whole room,
and to impart a cowed look to the furniture, and candle, and
children playing about, and to her mother's face.
"No," said the latter touchily, "I be not agreed. I have
been waiting for 'ee to bide and keep house while I go fetch
him."
"I'll go."
"O no, Tess. You see, it would be no use."
Tess did not expostulate. She knew what her mother's
objection meant. Mrs Durbeyfield's jacket and bonnet were
already hanging slily upon a chair by her side, in readiness
for this contemplated jaunt, the reason for which the matron
deplored more than its necessity.
"And take the Compleat Fortune-Teller to the
outhouse," Joan continued, rapidly wiping her hands, and
donning the garments.
The Compleat Fortune-Teller was an old thick
volume, which lay on a table at her elbow, so worn by
pocketing that the margins had reached the edge of the type.
Tess took it up, and her mother started.
This going to hunt up her shiftless husband at the inn
was one of Mrs Durbeyfield's still extant enjoyments in the
muck and muddle of rearing children. To discover him at
Rolliver's, to sit there for an hour or two by his side and
dismiss all thought and care of the children during the
interval, made her happy. A sort of halo, an occidental
glow, came over life then. Troubles and other realities took
on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere
mental phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer
stood as pressing concretions which chafed body and soul.
The youngsters, not immediately within sight, seemed rather
bright and desirable appurtenances than otherwise; the
incidents of daily life were not without humorousness and
jollity in their aspect there. She felt a little as she had
used to feel when she sat by her now wedded husband in the
same spot during his wooing, shutting her eyes to his
defects of character, and regarding him only in his ideal
presentation as lover.
Tess, being left alone with the younger children, went
first to the outhouse with the fortune-telling book, and
stuffed it into the thatch. A curious fetishistic fear of
this grimy volume on the part of her mother prevented her
ever allowing it to stay in the house all night, and hither
it was brought back whenever it had been consulted. Between
the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions,
folk-lore, dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the
daughter, with her trained National teachings and Standard
knowledge under an infinitely Revised Code, there was a gap
of two hundred years as ordinarily understood. When they
were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were
juxtaposed.
Returning along the garden path Tess mused on what the
mother could have wished to ascertain from the book on this
particular day. She guessed the recent ancestral discovery
to bear upon it, but did not divine that it solely concerned
herself. Dismissing this, however, she busied herself with
sprinkling the linen dried during the day-time, in company
with her nine-year-old brother Abraham, and her sister
Eliza-Louisa of twelve and a half, called "'Liza-Lu," the
youngest ones being put to bed. There was an interval of
four years and more between Tess and the next of the family,
the two who had filled the gap having died in their infancy,
and this lent her a deputy-maternal attitude when she was
alone with her juniors. Next in juvenility to Abraham came
two more girls, Hope and Modesty; then a boy of three, and
then the baby, who had just completed his first year.
All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield
ship—entirely dependent on the judgement of the two
Durbeyfield adults for their pleasures, their necessities,
their health, even their existence. If the heads of the
Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty,
disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither
were these half-dozen little captives under hatches
compelled to sail with them—six helpless creatures, who had
never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much
less if they wished for it on such hard conditions as were
involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield.
Some people would like to know whence the poet whose
philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and
trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure, gets his
authority for speaking of "Nature's holy plan."
It grew later, and neither father nor mother reappeared.
Tess looked out of the door, and took a mental journey
through Marlott. The village was shutting its eyes. Candles
and lamps were being put out everywhere: she could inwardly
behold the extinguisher and the extended hand.
Her mother's fetching simply meant one more to fetch.
Tess began to perceive that a man in indifferent health, who
proposed to start on a journey before one in the morning,
ought not to be at an inn at this late hour celebrating his
ancient blood.
"Abraham," she said to her little brother, "do you put on
your hat—you bain't afraid?—and go up to Rolliver's, and see
what has gone wi' father and mother."
The boy jumped promptly from his seat, and opened the
door, and the night swallowed him up. Half an hour passed
yet again; neither man, woman, nor child returned. Abraham,
like his parents, seemed to have been limed and caught by
the ensnaring inn.
"I must go myself," she said.
'Liza-Lu then went to bed, and Tess, locking them all in,
started on her way up the dark and crooked lane or street
not made for hasty progress; a street laid out before inches
of land had value, and when one-handed clocks sufficiently
subdivided the day.
IV
Rolliver's inn, the single alehouse at this end of the
long and broken village, could only boast of an off-licence;
hence, as nobody could legally drink on the premises, the
amount of overt accommodation for consumers was strictly
limited to a little board about six inches wide and two
yards long, fixed to the garden palings by pieces of wire,
so as to form a ledge. On this board thirsty strangers
deposited their cups as they stood in the road and drank,
and threw the dregs on the dusty ground to the pattern of
Polynesia, and wished they could have a restful seat inside.
Thus the strangers. But there were also local customers
who felt the same wish; and where there's a will there's a
way.
In a large bedroom upstairs, the window of which was
thickly curtained with a great woollen shawl lately
discarded by the landlady, Mrs Rolliver, were gathered on
this evening nearly a dozen persons, all seeking beatitude;
all old inhabitants of the nearer end of Marlott, and
frequenters of this retreat. Not only did the distance to
the The Pure Drop, the fully-licensed tavern at the further
part of the dispersed village, render its accommodation
practically unavailable for dwellers at this end; but the
far more serious question, the quality of the liquor,
confirmed the prevalent opinion that it was better to drink
with Rolliver in a corner of the housetop than with the
other landlord in a wide house.
A gaunt four-post bedstead which stood in the room
afforded sitting-space for several persons gathered round
three of its sides; a couple more men had elevated
themselves on a chest of drawers; another rested on the
oak-carved "cwoffer"; two on the wash-stand; another on the
stool; and thus all were, somehow, seated at their ease. The
stage of mental comfort to which they had arrived at this
hour was one wherein their souls expanded beyond their
skins, and spread their personalities warmly through the
room. In this process the chamber and its furniture grew
more and more dignified and luxurious; the shawl hanging at
the window took upon itself the richness of tapestry; the
brass handles of the chest of drawers were as golden
knockers; and the carved bedposts seemed to have some
kinship with the magnificent pillars of Solomon's temple.
Mrs Durbeyfield, having quickly walked hitherward after
parting from Tess, opened the front door, crossed the
downstairs room, which was in deep gloom, and then
unfastened the stair-door like one whose fingers knew the
tricks of the latches well. Her ascent of the crooked
staircase was a slower process, and her face, as it rose
into the light above the last stair, encountered the gaze of
all the party assembled in the bedroom.
"—Being a few private friends I've asked in to keep up
club-walking at my own expense," the landlady exclaimed at
the sound of footsteps, as glibly as a child repeating the
Catechism, while she peered over the stairs. "Oh, 'tis you,
Mrs Durbeyfield—Lard—how you frightened me!—I thought it
might be some gaffer sent by Gover'ment."
Mrs Durbeyfield was welcomed with glances and nods by the
remainder of the conclave, and turned to where her husband
sat. He was humming absently to himself, in a low tone: "I
be as good as some folks here and there! I've got a great
family vault at Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill, and finer
skillentons than any man in Wessex!"
"I've something to tell 'ee that's come into my head
about that—a grand projick!" whispered his cheerful wife.
"Here, John, don't 'ee see me?" She nudged him, while he,
looking through her as through a window-pane, went on with
his recitative.
"Hush! Don't 'ee sing so loud, my good man," said the
landlady; "in case any member of the Gover'ment should be
passing, and take away my licends."
"He's told 'ee what's happened to us, I suppose?" asked
Mrs Durbeyfield.
"Yes—in a way. D'ye think there's any money hanging by
it?"
"Ah, that's the secret," said Joan Durbeyfield sagely.
"However, 'tis well to be kin to a coach, even if you don't
ride in 'en." She dropped her public voice, and continued in
a low tone to her husband: "I've been thinking since you
brought the news that there's a great rich lady out by
Trantridge, on the edge o' The Chase, of the name of
d'Urberville."
"Hey—what's that?" said Sir John.
She repeated the information. "That lady must be our
relation," she said. "And my projick is to send Tess to
claim kin."
"There is a lady of the name, now you mention it,"
said Durbeyfield. "Pa'son Tringham didn't think of that. But
she's nothing beside we—a junior branch of us, no doubt,
hailing long since King Norman's day."
While this question was being discussed neither of the
pair noticed, in their preoccupation, that little Abraham
had crept into the room, and was awaiting an opportunity of
asking them to return.
"She is rich, and she'd be sure to take notice o' the
maid," continued Mrs Durbeyfield; "and 'twill be a very good
thing. I don't see why two branches o' one family should not
be on visiting terms."
"Yes; and we'll all claim kin!" said Abraham brightly
from under the bedstead. "And we'll all go and see her when
Tess has gone to live with her; and we'll ride in her coach
and wear black clothes!"
"How do you come here, child? What nonsense be ye
talking! Go away, and play on the stairs till father and
mother be ready! … Well, Tess ought to go to this other
member of our family. She'd be sure to win the lady—Tess
would; and likely enough 'twould lead to some noble
gentleman marrying her. In short, I know it."
"How?"
"I tried her fate in the Fortune-Teller, and it
brought out that very thing! … You should ha' seen how
pretty she looked to-day; her skin is as sumple as a
duchess'."
"What says the maid herself to going?"
"I've not asked her. She don't know there is any such
lady-relation yet. But it would certainly put her in the way
of a grand marriage, and she won't say nay to going."
"Tess is queer."
"But she's tractable at bottom. Leave her to me."
Though this conversation had been private, sufficient of
its import reached the understandings of those around to
suggest to them that the Durbeyfields had weightier concerns
to talk of now than common folks had, and that Tess, their
pretty eldest daughter, had fine prospects in store.
"Tess is a fine figure o' fun, as I said to myself to-day
when I zeed her vamping round parish with the rest,"
observed one of the elderly boozers in an undertone. "But
Joan Durbeyfield must mind that she don't get green malt in
floor." It was a local phrase which had a peculiar meaning,
and there was no reply.
The conversation became inclusive, and presently other
footsteps were heard crossing the room below.
"—Being a few private friends asked in to-night to keep
up club-walking at my own expense." The landlady had rapidly
re-used the formula she kept on hand for intruders before
she recognized that the newcomer was Tess.
Even to her mother's gaze the girl's young features
looked sadly out of place amid the alcoholic vapours which
floated here as no unsuitable medium for wrinkled
middle-age; and hardly was a reproachful flash from Tess's
dark eyes needed to make her father and mother rise from
their seats, hastily finish their ale, and descend the
stairs behind her, Mrs Rolliver's caution following their
footsteps.
"No noise, please, if ye'll be so good, my dears; or I
mid lose my licends, and be summons'd, and I don't know what
all! 'Night t'ye!"
They went home together, Tess holding one arm of her
father, and Mrs Durbeyfield the other. He had, in truth,
drunk very little—not a fourth of the quantity which a
systematic tippler could carry to church on a Sunday
afternoon without a hitch in his eastings or genuflections;
but the weakness of Sir John's constitution made mountains
of his petty sins in this kind. On reaching the fresh air he
was sufficiently unsteady to incline the row of three at one
moment as if they were marching to London, and at another as
if they were marching to Bath—which produced a comical
effect, frequent enough in families on nocturnal homegoings;
and, like most comical effects, not quite so comic after
all. The two women valiantly disguised these forced
excursions and countermarches as well as they could from
Durbeyfield, their cause, and from Abraham, and from
themselves; and so they approached by degrees their own
door, the head of the family bursting suddenly into his
former refrain as he drew near, as if to fortify his soul at
sight of the smallness of his present residence—
"I've got a fam—ily vault at Kingsbere!"
"Hush—don't be so silly, Jacky," said his wife. "Yours is
not the only family that was of 'count in wold days. Look at
the Anktells, and Horseys, and the Tringhams themselves—gone
to seed a'most as much as you—though you was bigger folks
than they, that's true. Thank God, I was never of no family,
and have nothing to be ashamed of in that way!"
"Don't you be so sure o' that. From you nater 'tis my
belief you've disgraced yourselves more than any o' us, and
was kings and queens outright at one time."
Tess turned the subject by saying what was far more
prominent in her own mind at the moment than thoughts of her
ancestry—"I am afraid father won't be able to take the
journey with the beehives to-morrow so early." "I? I shall
be all right in an hour or two," said Durbeyfield.
It was eleven o'clock before the family were all in bed,
and two o'clock next morning was the latest hour for
starting with the beehives if they were to be delivered to
the retailers in Casterbridge before the Saturday market
began, the way thither lying by bad roads over a distance of
between twenty and thirty miles, and the horse and waggon
being of the slowest. At half-past one Mrs Durbeyfield came
into the large bedroom where Tess and all her little
brothers and sisters slept.
"The poor man can't go," she said to her eldest daughter,
whose great eyes had opened the moment her mother's hand
touched the door.
Tess sat up in bed, lost in a vague interspace between a
dream and this information.
"But somebody must go," she replied. "It is late for the
hives already. Swarming will soon be over for the year; and
it we put off taking 'em till next week's market the call
for 'em will be past, and they'll be thrown on our hands."
Mrs Durbeyfield looked unequal to the emergency. "Some
young feller, perhaps, would go? One of them who were so
much after dancing with 'ee yesterday," she presently
suggested.
"O no—I wouldn't have it for the world!" declared Tess
proudly. "And letting everybody know the reason—such a thing
to be ashamed of! I think I could go if Abraham could
go with me to kip me company."
Her mother at length agreed to this arrangement. Little
Abraham was aroused from his deep sleep in a corner of the
same apartment, and made to put on his clothes while still
mentally in the other world. Meanwhile Tess had hastily
dressed herself; and the twain, lighting a lantern, went out
to the stable. The rickety little waggon was already laden,
and the girl led out the horse, Prince, only a degree less
rickety than the vehicle.
The poor creature looked wonderingly round at the night,
at the lantern, at their two figures, as if he could not
believe that at that hour, when every living thing was
intended to be in shelter and at rest, he was called upon to
go out and labour. They put a stock of candle-ends into the
lantern, hung the latter to the off-side of the load, and
directed the horse onward, walking at his shoulder at first
during the uphill parts of the way, in order not to overload
an animal of so little vigour. To cheer themselves as well
as they could, they made an artificial morning with the
lantern, some bread and butter, and their own conversation,
the real morning being far from come. Abraham, as he more
fully awoke (for he had moved in a sort of trance so far),
began to talk of the strange shapes assumed by the various
dark objects against the sky; of this tree that looked like
a raging tiger springing from a lair; of that which
resembled a giant's head.
When they had passed the little town of Stourcastle,
dumbly somnolent under its thick brown thatch, they reached
higher ground. Still higher, on their left, the elevation
called Bulbarrow, or Bealbarrow, well-nigh the highest in
South Wessex, swelled into the sky, engirdled by its earthen
trenches. From hereabout the long road was fairly level for
some distance onward. They mounted in front of the waggon,
and Abraham grew reflective.
"Tess!" he said in a preparatory tone, after a silence.
"Yes, Abraham."
"Bain't you glad that we've become gentlefolk?"
"Not particular glad."
"But you be glad that you 'm going to marry a gentleman?"
"What?" said Tess, lifting her face.
"That our great relation will help 'ee to marry a
gentleman."
"I? Our great relation? We have no such relation. What
has put that into your head?"
"I heard 'em talking about it up at Rolliver's when I
went to find father. There's a rich lady of our family out
at Trantridge, and mother said that if you claimed kin with
the lady, she'd put 'ee in the way of marrying a gentleman."
His sister became abruptly still, and lapsed into a
pondering silence. Abraham talked on, rather for the
pleasure of utterance than for audition, so that his
sister's abstraction was of no account. He leant back
against the hives, and with upturned face made observations
on the stars, whose cold pulses were beating amid the black
hollows above, in serene dissociation from these two wisps
of human life. He asked how far away those twinklers were,
and whether God was on the other side of them. But ever and
anon his childish prattle recurred to what impressed his
imagination even more deeply than the wonders of creation.
If Tess were made rich by marrying a gentleman, would she
have money enough to buy a spyglass so large that it would
draw the stars as near to her as Nettlecombe-Tout?
The renewed subject, which seemed to have impregnated the
whole family, filled Tess with impatience.
"Never mind that now!" she exclaimed.
"Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be
like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid
and sound—a few blighted."
"Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?"
"A blighted one."
"'Tis very unlucky that we didn't pitch on a sound one,
when there were so many more of 'em!"
"Yes."
"Is it like that really, Tess?" said Abraham,
turning to her much impressed, on reconsideration of this
rare information. "How would it have been if we had pitched
on a sound one?"
"Well, father wouldn't have coughed and creeped about as
he does, and wouldn't have got too tipsy to go on this
journey; and mother wouldn't have been always washing, and
never getting finished."
"And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and not
have had to be made rich by marrying a gentleman?"
"O Aby, don't—don't talk of that any more!"
Left to his reflections Abraham soon grew drowsy. Tess
was not skilful in the management of a horse, but she
thought that she could take upon herself the entire conduct
of the load for the present and allow Abraham to go to sleep
if he wished to do so. She made him a sort of nest in front
of the hives, in such a manner that he could not fall, and,
taking the reins into her own hands, jogged on as before.
Prince required but slight attention, lacking energy for
superfluous movements of any sort. With no longer a
companion to distract her, Tess fell more deeply into
reverie than ever, her back leaning against the hives. The
mute procession past her shoulders of trees and hedges
became attached to fantastic scenes outside reality, and the
occasional heave of the wind became the sigh of some immense
sad soul, conterminous with the universe in space, and with
history in time.
Then, examining the mesh of events in her own life, she
seemed to see the vanity of her father's pride; the
gentlemanly suitor awaiting herself in her mother's fancy;
to see him as a grimacing personage, laughing at her poverty
and her shrouded knightly ancestry. Everything grew more and
more extravagant, and she no longer knew how time passed. A
sudden jerk shook her in her seat, and Tess awoke from the
sleep into which she, too, had fallen.
They were a long way further on than when she had lost
consciousness, and the waggon had stopped. A hollow groan,
unlike anything she had ever heard in her life, came from
the front, followed by a shout of "Hoi there!"
The lantern hanging at her waggon had gone out, but
another was shining in her face—much brighter than her own
had been. Something terrible had happened. The harness was
entangled with an object which blocked the way.
In consternation Tess jumped down, and discovered the
dreadful truth. The groan had proceeded from her father's
poor horse Prince. The morning mail-cart, with its two
noiseless wheels, speeding along these lanes like an arrow,
as it always did, had driven into her slow and unlighted
equipage. The pointed shaft of the cart had entered the
breast of the unhappy Prince like a sword, and from the
wound his life's blood was spouting in a stream, and falling
with a hiss into the road.
In her despair Tess sprang forward and put her hand upon
the hole, with the only result that she became splashed from
face to skirt with the crimson drops. Then she stood
helplessly looking on. Prince also stood firm and motionless
as long as he could; till he suddenly sank down in a heap.
By this time the mail-cart man had joined her, and began
dragging and unharnessing the hot form of Prince. But he was
already dead, and, seeing that nothing more could be done
immediately, the mail-cart man returned to his own animal,
which was uninjured.
"You was on the wrong side," he said. "I am bound to go
on with the mail-bags, so that the best thing for you to do
is bide here with your load. I'll send somebody to help you
as soon as I can. It is getting daylight, and you have
nothing to fear."
He mounted and sped on his way; while Tess stood and
waited. The atmosphere turned pale, the birds shook
themselves in the hedges, arose, and twittered; the lane
showed all its white features, and Tess showed hers, still
whiter. The huge pool of blood in front of her was already
assuming the iridescence of coagulation; and when the sun
rose a hundred prismatic hues were reflected from it. Prince
lay alongside, still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole
in his chest looking scarcely large enough to have let out
all that had animated him.
"'Tis all my doing—all mine!" the girl cried, gazing at
the spectacle. "No excuse for me—none. What will mother and
father live on now? Aby, Aby!" She shook the child, who had
slept soundly through the whole disaster. "We can't go on
with our load—Prince is killed!"
When Abraham realized all, the furrows of fifty years
were extemporized on his young face.
"Why, I danced and laughed only yesterday!" she went on
to herself. "To think that I was such a fool!"
"'Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound
one, isn't it, Tess?" murmured Abraham through his tears.
In silence they waited through an interval which seemed
endless. At length a sound, and an approaching object,
proved to them that the driver of the mail-car had been as
good as his word. A farmer's man from near Stourcastle came
up, leading a strong cob. He was harnessed to the waggon of
beehives in the place of Prince, and the load taken on
towards Casterbridge.
The evening of the same day saw the empty waggon reach
again the spot of the accident. Prince had lain there in the
ditch since the morning; but the place of the blood-pool was
still visible in the middle of the road, though scratched
and scraped over by passing vehicles. All that was left of
Prince was now hoisted into the waggon he had formerly
hauled, and with his hoofs in the air, and his shoes shining
in the setting sunlight, he retraced the eight or nine miles
to Marlott.
Tess had gone back earlier. How to break the news was
more than she could think. It was a relief to her tongue to
find from the faces of her parents that they already knew of
their loss, though this did not lessen the self-reproach
which she continued to heap upon herself for her negligence.
But the very shiftlessness of the household rendered the
misfortune a less terrifying one to them than it would have
been to a thriving family, though in the present case it
meant ruin, and in the other it would only have meant
inconvenience. In the Durbeyfield countenances there was
nothing of the red wrath that would have burnt upon the girl
from parents more ambitious for her welfare. Nobody blamed
Tess as she blamed herself.
When it was discovered that the knacker and tanner would
give only a very few shillings for Prince's carcase because
of his decrepitude, Durbeyfield rose to the occasion.
"No," said he stoically, "I won't sell his old body. When
we d'Urbervilles was knights in the land, we didn't sell our
chargers for cat's meat. Let 'em keep their shillings! He've
served me well in his lifetime, and I won't part from him
now."
He worked harder the next day in digging a grave for
Prince in the garden than he had worked for months to grow a
crop for his family. When the hole was ready, Durbeyfield
and his wife tied a rope round the horse and dragged him up
the path towards it, the children following in funeral
train. Abraham and 'Liza-Lu sobbed, Hope and Modesty
discharged their griefs in loud blares which echoed from the
walls; and when Prince was tumbled in they gathered round
the grave. The bread-winner had been taken away from them;
what would they do?
"Is he gone to heaven?" asked Abraham, between the sobs.
Then Durbeyfield began to shovel in the earth, and the
children cried anew. All except Tess. Her face was dry and
pale, as though she regarded herself in the light of a
murderess.
V
The haggling business, which had mainly depended on the
horse, became disorganized forthwith. Distress, if not
penury, loomed in the distance. Durbeyfield was what was
locally called a slack-twisted fellow; he had good strength
to work at times; but the times could not be relied on to
coincide with the hours of requirement; and, having been
unaccustomed to the regular toil of the day-labourer, he was
not particularly persistent when they did so coincide.
Tess, meanwhile, as the one who had dragged her parents
into this quagmire, was silently wondering what she could do
to help them out of it; and then her mother broached her
scheme.
"We must take the ups wi' the downs, Tess," said she;
"and never could your high blood have been found out at a
more called-for moment. You must try your friends. Do ye
know that there is a very rich Mrs d'Urberville living on
the outskirts o' The Chase, who must be our relation? You
must go to her and claim kin, and ask for some help in our
trouble."
"I shouldn't care to do that," says Tess. "If there is
such a lady, 'twould be enough for us if she were
friendly—not to expect her to give us help."
"You could win her round to do anything, my dear.
Besides, perhaps there's more in it than you know of. I've
heard what I've heard, good-now."
The oppressive sense of the harm she had done led Tess to
be more deferential than she might otherwise have been to
the maternal wish; but she could not understand why her
mother should find such satisfaction in contemplating an
enterprise of, to her, such doubtful profit. Her mother
might have made inquiries, and have discovered that this Mrs
d'Urberville was a lady of unequalled virtues and charity.
But Tess's pride made the part of poor relation one of
particular distaste to her.
"I'd rather try to get work," she murmured.
"Durbeyfield, you can settle it," said his wife, turning
to where he sat in the background. "If you say she ought to
go, she will go."
"I don't like my children going and making themselves
beholden to strange kin," murmured he. "I'm the head of the
noblest branch o' the family, and I ought to live up to it."
His reasons for staying away were worse to Tess than her
own objections to going. "Well, as I killed the horse,
mother," she said mournfully, "I suppose I ought to do
something. I don't mind going and seeing her, but you must
leave it to me about asking for help. And don't go thinking
about her making a match for me—it is silly."
"Very well said, Tess!" observed her father
sententiously.
"Who said I had such a thought?" asked Joan.
"I fancy it is in your mind, mother. But I'll go."
Rising early next day she walked to the hill-town called
Shaston, and there took advantage of a van which twice in
the week ran from Shaston eastward to Chaseborough, passing
near Trantridge, the parish in which the vague and
mysterious Mrs d'Urberville had her residence.
Tess Durbeyfield's route on this memorable morning lay
amid the north-eastern undulations of the Vale in which she
had been born, and in which her life had unfolded. The Vale
of Blackmoor was to her the world, and its inhabitants the
races thereof. From the gates and stiles of Marlott she had
looked down its length in the wondering days of infancy, and
what had been mystery to her then was not much less than
mystery to her now. She had seen daily from her
chamber-window towers, villages, faint white mansions; above
all, the town of Shaston standing majestically on its
height; its windows shining like lamps in the evening sun.
She had hardly ever visited the place, only a small tract
even of the Vale and its environs being known to her by
close inspection. Much less had she been far outside the
valley. Every contour of the surrounding hills was as
personal to her as that of her relatives' faces; but for
what lay beyond, her judgment was dependent on the teaching
of the village school, where she had held a leading place at
the time of her leaving, a year or two before this date.
In those early days she had been much loved by others of
her own sex and age, and had used to be seen about the
village as one of three—all nearly of the same year—walking
home from school side by side; Tess the middle one—in a pink
print pinafore, of a finely reticulated pattern, worn over a
stuff frock that had lost its original colour for a
nondescript tertiary—marching on upon long stalky legs, in
tight stockings which had little ladder-like holes at the
knees, torn by kneeling in the roads and banks in search of
vegetable and mineral treasures; her then earth-coloured
hair hanging like pot-hooks; the arms of the two outside
girls resting round the waist of Tess; her arms on the
shoulders of the two supporters.
As Tess grew older, and began to see how matters stood,
she felt quite a Malthusian towards her mother for
thoughtlessly giving her so many little sisters and
brothers, when it was such a trouble to nurse and provide
for them. Her mother's intelligence was that of a happy
child: Joan Durbeyfield was simply an additional one, and
that not the eldest, to her own long family of waiters on
Providence.
However, Tess became humanely beneficent towards the
small ones, and to help them as much as possible she used,
as soon as she left school, to lend a hand at haymaking or
harvesting on neighbouring farms; or, by preference, at
milking or butter-making processes, which she had learnt
when her father had owned cows; and being deft-fingered it
was a kind of work in which she excelled.
Every day seemed to throw upon her young shoulders more
of the family burdens, and that Tess should be the
representative of the Durbeyfields at the d'Urberville
mansion came as a thing of course. In this instance it must
be admitted that the Durbeyfields were putting their fairest
side outward.
She alighted from the van at Trantridge Cross, and
ascended on foot a hill in the direction of the district
known as The Chase, on the borders of which, as she had been
informed, Mrs d'Urberville's seat, The Slopes, would be
found. It was not a manorial home in the ordinary sense,
with fields, and pastures, and a grumbling farmer, out of
whom the owner had to squeeze an income for himself and his
family by hook or by crook. It was more, far more; a
country-house built for enjoyment pure and simple, with not
an acre of troublesome land attached to it beyond what was
required for residential purposes, and for a little fancy
farm kept in hand by the owner, and tended by a bailiff.
The crimson brick lodge came first in sight, up to its
eaves in dense evergreens. Tess thought this was the mansion
itself till, passing through the side wicket with some
trepidation, and onward to a point at which the drive took a
turn, the house proper stood in full view. It was of recent
erection—indeed almost new—and of the same rich red colour
that formed such a contrast with the evergreens of the
lodge. Far behind the corner of the house—which rose like a
geranium bloom against the subdued colours around—stretched
the soft azure landscape of The Chase—a truly venerable
tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in
England of undoubted primaeval date, wherein Druidical
mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous
yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man grew as they had
grown when they were pollarded for bows. All this sylvan
antiquity, however, though visible from The Slopes, was
outside the immediate boundaries of the estate.
Everything on this snug property was bright, thriving,
and well kept; acres of glass-houses stretched down the
inclines to the copses at their feet. Everything looked like
money—like the last coin issued from the Mint. The stables,
partly screened by Austrian pines and evergreen oaks, and
fitted with every late appliance, were as dignified as
Chapels-of-Ease. On the extensive lawn stood an ornamental
tent, its door being towards her.
Simple Tess Durbeyfield stood at gaze, in a half-alarmed
attitude, on the edge of the gravel sweep. Her feet had
brought her onward to this point before she had quite
realized where she was; and now all was contrary to her
expectation.
"I thought we were an old family; but this is all new!"
she said, in her artlessness. She wished that she had not
fallen in so readily with her mother's plans for "claiming
kin," and had endeavoured to gain assistance nearer home.
The d'Urbervilles—or Stoke-d'Urbervilles, as they at
first called themselves—who owned all this, were a somewhat
unusual family to find in such an old-fashioned part of the
country. Parson Tringham had spoken truly when he said that
our shambling John Durbeyfield was the only really lineal
representative of the old d'Urberville family existing in
the county, or near it; he might have added, what he knew
very well, that the Stoke-d'Urbervilles were no more
d'Urbervilles of the true tree then he was himself. Yet it
must be admitted that this family formed a very good stock
whereon to regraft a name which sadly wanted such
renovation.
When old Mr Simon Stoke, latterly deceased, had made his
fortune as an honest merchant (some said money-lender) in
the North, he decided to settle as a county man in the South
of England, out of hail of his business district; and in
doing this he felt the necessity of recommencing with a name
that would not too readily identify him with the smart
tradesman of the past, and that would be less commonplace
than the original bald, stark words. Conning for an hour in
the British Museum the pages of works devoted to extinct,
half-extinct, obscured, and ruined families appertaining to
the quarter of England in which he proposed to settle, he
considered that d'Urberville looked and sounded as
well as any of them: and d'Urberville accordingly was
annexed to his own name for himself and his heirs eternally.
Yet he was not an extravagant-minded man in this, and in
constructing his family tree on the new basis was duly
reasonable in framing his inter-marriages and aristocratic
links, never inserting a single title above a rank of strict
moderation.
Of this work of imagination poor Tess and her parents
were naturally in ignorance—much to their discomfiture;
indeed, the very possibility of such annexations was unknown
to them; who supposed that, though to be well-favoured might
be the gift of fortune, a family name came by nature.
Tess still stood hesitating like a bather about to make
his plunge, hardly knowing whether to retreat or to
persevere, when a figure came forth from the dark triangular
door of the tent. It was that of a tall young man, smoking.
He had an almost swarthy complexion, with full lips,
badly moulded, though red and smooth, above which was a
well-groomed black moustache with curled points, though his
age could not be more than three- or four-and-twenty.
Despite the touches of barbarism in his contours, there was
a singular force in the gentleman's face, and in his bold
rolling eye.
"Well, my Beauty, what can I do for you?" said he, coming
forward. And perceiving that she stood quite confounded:
"Never mind me. I am Mr d'Urberville. Have you come to see
me or my mother?"
This embodiment of a d'Urberville and a namesake differed
even more from what Tess had expected than the house and
grounds had differed. She had dreamed of an aged and
dignified face, the sublimation of all the d'Urberville
lineaments, furrowed with incarnate memories representing in
hieroglyphic the centuries of her family's and England's
history. But she screwed herself up to the work in hand,
since she could not get out of it, and answered—
"I came to see your mother, sir."
"I am afraid you cannot see her—she is an invalid,"
replied the present representative of the spurious house;
for this was Mr Alec, the only son of the lately deceased
gentleman. "Cannot I answer your purpose? What is the
business you wish to see her about?"
"It isn't business—it is—I can hardly say what!"
"Pleasure?"
"Oh no. Why, sir, if I tell you, it will seem—"
Tess's sense of a certain ludicrousness in her errand was
now so strong that, notwithstanding her awe of him, and her
general discomfort at being here, her rosy lips curved
towards a smile, much to the attraction of the swarthy
Alexander.
"It is so very foolish," she stammered; "I fear can't
tell you!"
"Never mind; I like foolish things. Try again, my dear,"
said he kindly.
"Mother asked me to come," Tess continued; "and, indeed,
I was in the mind to do so myself likewise. But I did not
think it would be like this. I came, sir, to tell you that
we are of the same family as you."
"Ho! Poor relations?"
"Yes."
"Stokes?"
"No; d'Urbervilles."
"Ay, ay; I mean d'Urbervilles."
"Our names are worn away to Durbeyfield; but we have
several proofs that we are d'Urbervilles. Antiquarians hold
we are,—and—and we have an old seal, marked with a ramping
lion on a shield, and a castle over him. And we have a very
old silver spoon, round in the bowl like a little ladle, and
marked with the same castle. But it is so worn that mother
uses it to stir the pea-soup."
"A castle argent is certainly my crest," said he blandly.
"And my arms a lion rampant."
"And so mother said we ought to make ourselves beknown to
you—as we've lost our horse by a bad accident, and are the
oldest branch o' the family."
"Very kind of your mother, I'm sure. And I, for one,
don't regret her step." Alec looked at Tess as he spoke, in
a way that made her blush a little. "And so, my pretty girl,
you've come on a friendly visit to us, as relations?"
"I suppose I have," faltered Tess, looking uncomfortable
again.
"Well—there's no harm in it. Where do you live? What are
you?"
She gave him brief particulars; and responding to further
inquiries told him that she was intending to go back by the
same carrier who had brought her.
"It is a long while before he returns past Trantridge
Cross. Supposing we walk round the grounds to pass the time,
my pretty Coz?"
Tess wished to abridge her visit as much as possible; but
the young man was pressing, and she consented to accompany
him. He conducted her about the lawns, and flower-beds, and
conservatories; and thence to the fruit-garden and
greenhouses, where he asked her if she liked strawberries.
"Yes," said Tess, "when they come."
"They are already here." D'Urberville began gathering
specimens of the fruit for her, handing them back to her as
he stooped; and, presently, selecting a specially fine
product of the "British Queen" variety, he stood up and held
it by the stem to her mouth.
"No—no!" she said quickly, putting her fingers between
his hand and her lips. "I would rather take it in my own
hand."
"Nonsense!" he insisted; and in a slight distress she
parted her lips and took it in.
They had spent some time wandering desultorily thus, Tess
eating in a half-pleased, half-reluctant state whatever
d'Urberville offered her. When she could consume no more of
the strawberries he filled her little basket with them; and
then the two passed round to the rose-trees, whence he
gathered blossoms and gave her to put in her bosom. She
obeyed like one in a dream, and when she could affix no more
he himself tucked a bud or two into her hat, and heaped her
basket with others in the prodigality of his bounty. At
last, looking at his watch, he said, "Now, by the time you
have had something to eat, it will be time for you to leave,
if you want to catch the carrier to Shaston. Come here, and
I'll see what grub I can find."
Stoke d'Urberville took her back to the lawn and into the
tent, where he left her, soon reappearing with a basket of
light luncheon, which he put before her himself. It was
evidently the gentleman's wish not to be disturbed in this
pleasant tête-à-tête by the servantry.
"Do you mind my smoking?" he asked.
"Oh, not at all, sir."
He watched her pretty and unconscious munching through
the skeins of smoke that pervaded the tent, and Tess
Durbeyfield did not divine, as she innocently looked down at
the roses in her bosom, that there behind the blue narcotic
haze was potentially the "tragic mischief" of her drama—one
who stood fair to be the blood-red ray in the spectrum of
her young life. She had an attribute which amounted to a
disadvantage just now; and it was this that caused Alec
d'Urberville's eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was a
luxuriance of aspect, a fulness of growth, which made her
appear more of a woman than she really was. She had
inherited the feature from her mother without the quality it
denoted. It had troubled her mind occasionally, till her
companions had said that it was a fault which time would
cure.
She soon had finished her lunch. "Now I am going home,
sir," she said, rising.
"And what do they call you?" he asked, as he accompanied
her along the drive till they were out of sight of the
house.
"Tess Durbeyfield, down at Marlott."
"And you say your people have lost their horse?"
"I—killed him!" she answered, her eyes filling with tears
as she gave particulars of Prince's death. "And I don't know
what to do for father on account of it!"
"I must think if I cannot do something. My mother must
find a berth for you. But, Tess, no nonsense about
'd'Urberville';—'Durbeyfield' only, you know—quite another
name."
"I wish for no better, sir," said she with something of
dignity.
For a moment—only for a moment—when they were in the
turning of the drive, between the tall rhododendrons and
conifers, before the lodge became visible, he inclined his
face towards her as if—but, no: he thought better of it, and
let her go.
Thus the thing began. Had she perceived this meeting's
import she might have asked why she was doomed to be seen
and coveted that day by the wrong man, and not by some other
man, the right and desired one in all respects—as nearly as
humanity can supply the right and desired; yet to him who
amongst her acquaintance might have approximated to this
kind, she was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of
things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love
rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not
often say "See!" to her poor creature at a time when seeing
can lead to happy doing; or reply "Here!" to a body's cry of
"Where?" till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome,
outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit
of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected
by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social
machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but
such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived
as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in
millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that
confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing
counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting
in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which
maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks,
catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.
When d'Urberville got back to the tent he sat down
astride on a chair, reflecting, with a pleased gleam in his
face. Then he broke into a loud laugh.
"Well, I'm damned! What a funny thing! Ha-ha-ha! And what
a crumby girl!"
VI
Tess went down the hill to Trantridge Cross, and
inattentively waited to take her seat in the van returning
from Chaseborough to Shaston. She did not know what the
other occupants said to her as she entered, though she
answered them; and when they had started anew she rode along
with an inward and not an outward eye.
One among her fellow-travellers addressed her more
pointedly than any had spoken before: "Why, you be quite a
posy! And such roses in early June!"
Then she became aware of the spectacle she presented to
their surprised vision: roses at her breasts; roses in her
hat; roses and strawberries in her basket to the brim. She
blushed, and said confusedly that the flowers had been given
to her. When the passengers were not looking she stealthily
removed the more prominent blooms from her hat and placed
them in the basket, where she covered them with her
handkerchief. Then she fell to reflecting again, and in
looking downwards a thorn of the rose remaining in her
breast accidentally pricked her chin. Like all the cottagers
in Blackmoor Vale, Tess was steeped in fancies and
prefigurative superstitions; she thought this an ill
omen—the first she had noticed that day.
The van travelled only so far as Shaston, and there were
several miles of pedestrian descent from that mountain-town
into the vale to Marlott. Her mother had advised her to stay
here for the night, at the house of a cottage-woman they
knew, if she should feel too tired to come on; and this Tess
did, not descending to her home till the following
afternoon.
When she entered the house she perceived in a moment from
her mother's triumphant manner that something had occurred
in the interim.
"Oh yes; I know all about it! I told 'ee it would be all
right, and now 'tis proved!"
"Since I've been away? What has?" said Tess rather
wearily.
Her mother surveyed the girl up and down with arch
approval, and went on banteringly: "So you've brought 'em
round!"
"How do you know, mother?"
"I've had a letter."
Tess then remembered that there would have been time for
this.
"They say—Mrs d'Urberville says—that she wants you to
look after a little fowl-farm which is her hobby. But this
is only her artful way of getting 'ee there without raising
your hopes. She's going to own 'ee as kin—that's the meaning
o't."
"But I didn't see her."
"You zid somebody, I suppose?"
"I saw her son."
"And did he own 'ee?"
"Well—he called me Coz."
"An' I knew it! Jacky—he called her Coz!" cried Joan to
her husband. "Well, he spoke to his mother, of course, and
she do want 'ee there."
"But I don't know that I am apt at tending fowls," said
the dubious Tess.
"Then I don't know who is apt. You've be'n born in the
business, and brought up in it. They that be born in a
business always know more about it than any 'prentice.
Besides, that's only just a show of something for you to do,
that you midn't feel beholden."
"I don't altogether think I ought to go," said Tess
thoughtfully. "Who wrote the letter? Will you let me look at
it?"
"Mrs d'Urberville wrote it. Here it is."
The letter was in the third person, and briefly informed
Mrs Durbeyfield that her daughter's services would be useful
to that lady in the management of her poultry-farm, that a
comfortable room would be provided for her if she could
come, and that the wages would be on a liberal scale if they
liked her.
"Oh—that's all!" said Tess.
"You couldn't expect her to throw her arms round 'ee, an'
to kiss and to coll 'ee all at once."
Tess looked out of the window.
"I would rather stay here with father and you," she said.
"But why?"
"I'd rather not tell you why, mother; indeed, I don't
quite know why."
A week afterwards she came in one evening from an
unavailing search for some light occupation in the immediate
neighbourhood. Her idea had been to get together sufficient
money during the summer to purchase another horse. Hardly
had she crossed the threshold before one of the children
danced across the room, saying, "The gentleman's been here!"
Her mother hastened to explain, smiles breaking from
every inch of her person. Mrs d'Urberville's son had called
on horseback, having been riding by chance in the direction
of Marlott. He had wished to know, finally, in the name of
his mother, if Tess could really come to manage the old
lady's fowl-farm or not; the lad who had hitherto
superintended the birds having proved untrustworthy. "Mr
d'Urberville says you must be a good girl if you are at all
as you appear; he knows you must be worth your weight in
gold. He is very much interested in 'ee—truth to tell."
Tess seemed for the moment really pleased to hear that
she had won such high opinion from a stranger when, in her
own esteem, she had sunk so low.
"It is very good of him to think that," she murmured;
"and if I was quite sure how it would be living there, I
would go any-when."
"He is a mighty handsome man!"
"I don't think so," said Tess coldly.
"Well, there's your chance, whether or no; and I'm sure
he wears a beautiful diamond ring!"
"Yes," said little Abraham, brightly, from the
window-bench; "and I seed it! and it did twinkle when he put
his hand up to his mistarshers. Mother, why did our grand
relation keep on putting his hand up to his mistarshers?"
"Hark at that child!" cried Mrs Durbeyfield, with
parenthetic admiration.
"Perhaps to show his diamond ring," murmured Sir John,
dreamily, from his chair.
"I'll think it over," said Tess, leaving the room.
"Well, she's made a conquest o' the younger branch of us,
straight off," continued the matron to her husband, "and
she's a fool if she don't follow it up."
"I don't quite like my children going away from home,"
said the haggler. "As the head of the family, the rest ought
to come to me."
"But do let her go, Jacky," coaxed his poor witless wife.
"He's struck wi' her—you can see that. He called her Coz!
He'll marry her, most likely, and make a lady of her; and
then she'll be what her forefathers was."
John Durbeyfield had more conceit than energy or health,
and this supposition was pleasant to him.
"Well, perhaps that's what young Mr d'Urberville means,"
he admitted; "and sure enough he mid have serious thoughts
about improving his blood by linking on to the old line.
Tess, the little rogue! And have she really paid 'em a visit
to such an end as this?"
Meanwhile Tess was walking thoughtfully among the
gooseberry-bushes in the garden, and over Prince's grave.
When she came in her mother pursued her advantage.
"Well, what be you going to do?" she asked.
"I wish I had seen Mrs d'Urberville," said Tess.
"I think you mid as well settle it. Then you'll see her
soon enough."
Her father coughed in his chair.
"I don't know what to say!" answered the girl restlessly.
"It is for you to decide. I killed the old horse, and I
suppose I ought to do something to get ye a new one.
But—but—I don't quite like Mr d'Urberville being there!"
The children, who had made use of this idea of Tess being
taken up by their wealthy kinsfolk (which they imagined the
other family to be) as a species of dolorifuge after the
death of the horse, began to cry at Tess's reluctance, and
teased and reproached her for hesitating.
"Tess won't go-o-o and be made a la-a-dy of!—no, she says
she wo-o-on't!" they wailed, with square mouths. "And we
shan't have a nice new horse, and lots o' golden money to
buy fairlings! And Tess won't look pretty in her best cloze
no mo-o-ore!"
Her mother chimed in to the same tune: a certain way she
had of making her labours in the house seem heavier than
they were by prolonging them indefinitely, also weighed in
the argument. Her father alone preserved an attitude of
neutrality.
"I will go," said Tess at last.
Her mother could not repress her consciousness of the
nuptial vision conjured up by the girl's consent.
"That's right! For such a pretty maid as 'tis, this is a
fine chance!"
Tess smiled crossly.
"I hope it is a chance for earning money. It is no other
kind of chance. You had better say nothing of that silly
sort about parish."
Mrs Durbeyfield did not promise. She was not quite sure
that she did not feel proud enough, after the visitor's
remarks, to say a good deal.
Thus it was arranged; and the young girl wrote, agreeing
to be ready to set out on any day on which she might be
required. She was duly informed that Mrs d'Urberville was
glad of her decision, and that a spring-cart should be sent
to meet her and her luggage at the top of the Vale on the
day after the morrow, when she must hold herself prepared to
start. Mrs d'Urberville's handwriting seemed rather
masculine.
"A cart?" murmured Joan Durbeyfield doubtingly. "It might
have been a carriage for her own kin!"
Having at last taken her course Tess was less restless
and abstracted, going about her business with some
self-assurance in the thought of acquiring another horse for
her father by an occupation which would not be onerous. She
had hoped to be a teacher at the school, but the fates
seemed to decide otherwise. Being mentally older than her
mother she did not regard Mrs Durbeyfield's matrimonial
hopes for her in a serious aspect for a moment. The
light-minded woman had been discovering good matches for her
daughter almost from the year of her birth.
VII
On the morning appointed for her departure Tess was awake
before dawn—at the marginal minute of the dark when the
grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings
with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the
correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if
equally convinced that he is mistaken. She remained upstairs
packing till breakfast-time, and then came down in her
ordinary week-day clothes, her Sunday apparel being
carefully folded in her box.
Her mother expostulated. "You will never set out to see
your folks without dressing up more the dand than that?"
"But I am going to work!" said Tess.
"Well, yes," said Mrs Durbeyfield; and in a private tone,
"at first there mid be a little pretence o't … But I think
it will be wiser of 'ee to put your best side outward," she
added.
"Very well; I suppose you know best," replied Tess with
calm abandonment.
And to please her parent the girl put herself quite in
Joan's hands, saying serenely—"Do what you like with me,
mother."
Mrs Durbeyfield was only too delighted at this
tractability. First she fetched a great basin, and washed
Tess's hair with such thoroughness that when dried and
brushed it looked twice as much as at other times. She tied
it with a broader pink ribbon than usual. Then she put upon
her the white frock that Tess had worn at the club-walking,
the airy fulness of which, supplementing her enlarged
coiffure, imparted to her developing figure an amplitude
which belied her age, and might cause her to be estimated as
a woman when she was not much more than a child.
"I declare there's a hole in my stocking-heel!" said
Tess.
"Never mind holes in your stockings—they don't speak!
When I was a maid, so long as I had a pretty bonnet the
devil might ha' found me in heels."
Her mother's pride in the girl's appearance led her to
step back, like a painter from his easel, and survey her
work as a whole.
"You must zee yourself!" she cried. "It is much better
than you was t'other day."
As the looking-glass was only large enough to reflect a
very small portion of Tess's person at one time, Mrs
Durbeyfield hung a black cloak outside the casement, and so
made a large reflector of the panes, as it is the wont of
bedecking cottagers to do. After this she went downstairs to
her husband, who was sitting in the lower room.
"I'll tell 'ee what 'tis, Durbeyfield," said she
exultingly; "he'll never have the heart not to love her. But
whatever you do, don't zay too much to Tess of his fancy for
her, and this chance she has got. She is such an odd maid
that it mid zet her against him, or against going there,
even now. If all goes well, I shall certainly be for making
some return to pa'son at Stagfoot Lane for telling us—dear,
good man!"
However, as the moment for the girl's setting out drew
nigh, when the first excitement of the dressing had passed
off, a slight misgiving found place in Joan Durbeyfield's
mind. It prompted the matron to say that she would walk a
little way—as far as to the point where the acclivity from
the valley began its first steep ascent to the outer world.
At the top Tess was going to be met with the spring-cart
sent by the Stoke-d'Urbervilles, and her box had already
been wheeled ahead towards this summit by a lad with trucks,
to be in readiness.
Seeing their mother put on her bonnet, the younger
children clamoured to go with her.
"I do want to walk a little-ways wi' Sissy, now she's
going to marry our gentleman-cousin, and wear fine cloze!"
"Now," said Tess, flushing and turning quickly, "I'll
hear no more o' that! Mother, how could you ever put such
stuff into their heads?"
"Going to work, my dears, for our rich relation, and help
get enough money for a new horse," said Mrs Durbeyfield
pacifically.
"Goodbye, father," said Tess, with a lumpy throat.
"Goodbye, my maid," said Sir John, raising his head from
his breast as he suspended his nap, induced by a slight
excess this morning in honour of the occasion. "Well, I hope
my young friend will like such a comely sample of his own
blood. And tell'n, Tess, that being sunk, quite, from our
former grandeur, I'll sell him the title—yes, sell it—and at
no onreasonable figure."
"Not for less than a thousand pound!" cried Lady
Durbeyfield.
"Tell'n—I'll take a thousand pound. Well, I'll take less,
when I come to think o't. He'll adorn it better than a poor
lammicken feller like myself can. Tell'n he shall hae it for
a hundred. But I won't stand upon trifles—tell'n he shall
hae it for fifty—for twenty pound! Yes, twenty pound—that's
the lowest. Dammy, family honour is family honour, and I
won't take a penny less!"
Tess's eyes were too full and her voice too choked to
utter the sentiments that were in her. She turned quickly,
and went out.
So the girls and their mother all walked together, a
child on each side of Tess, holding her hand and looking at
her meditatively from time to time, as at one who was about
to do great things; her mother just behind with the
smallest; the group forming a picture of honest beauty
flanked by innocence, and backed by simple-souled vanity.
They followed the way till they reached the beginning of the
ascent, on the crest of which the vehicle from Trantridge
was to receive her, this limit having been fixed to save the
horse the labour of the last slope. Far away behind the
first hills the cliff-like dwellings of Shaston broke the
line of the ridge. Nobody was visible in the elevated road
which skirted the ascent save the lad whom they had sent on
before them, sitting on the handle of the barrow that
contained all Tess's worldly possessions.
"Bide here a bit, and the cart will soon come, no doubt,"
said Mrs Durbeyfield. "Yes, I see it yonder!"
It had come—appearing suddenly from behind the forehead
of the nearest upland, and stopping beside the boy with the
barrow. Her mother and the children thereupon decided to go
no farther, and bidding them a hasty goodbye, Tess bent her
steps up the hill.
They saw her white shape draw near to the spring-cart, on
which her box was already placed. But before she had quite
reached it another vehicle shot out from a clump of trees on
the summit, came round the bend of the road there, passed
the luggage-cart, and halted beside Tess, who looked up as
if in great surprise.
Her mother perceived, for the first time, that the second
vehicle was not a humble conveyance like the first, but a
spick-and-span gig or dog-cart, highly varnished and
equipped. The driver was a young man of three- or
four-and-twenty, with a cigar between his teeth; wearing a
dandy cap, drab jacket, breeches of the same hue, white
neckcloth, stick-up collar, and brown driving-gloves—in
short, he was the handsome, horsey young buck who had
visited Joan a week or two before to get her answer about
Tess.
Mrs Durbeyfield clapped her hands like a child. Then she
looked down, then stared again. Could she be deceived as to
the meaning of this?
"Is dat the gentleman-kinsman who'll make Sissy a lady?"
asked the youngest child.
Meanwhile the muslined form of Tess could be seen
standing still, undecided, beside this turn-out, whose owner
was talking to her. Her seeming indecision was, in fact,
more than indecision: it was misgiving. She would have
preferred the humble cart. The young man dismounted, and
appeared to urge her to ascend. She turned her face down the
hill to her relatives, and regarded the little group.
Something seemed to quicken her to a determination; possibly
the thought that she had killed Prince. She suddenly stepped
up; he mounted beside her, and immediately whipped on the
horse. In a moment they had passed the slow cart with the
box, and disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill.
Directly Tess was out of sight, and the interest of the
matter as a drama was at an end, the little ones' eyes
filled with tears. The youngest child said, "I wish poor,
poor Tess wasn't gone away to be a lady!" and, lowering the
corners of his lips, burst out crying. The new point of view
was infectious, and the next child did likewise, and then
the next, till the whole three of them wailed loud.
There were tears also in Joan Durbeyfield's eyes as she
turned to go home. But by the time she had got back to the
village she was passively trusting to the favour of
accident. However, in bed that night she sighed, and her
husband asked her what was the matter.
"Oh, I don't know exactly," she said. "I was thinking
that perhaps it would ha' been better if Tess had not gone."
"Oughtn't ye to have thought of that before?"
"Well, 'tis a chance for the maid— Still, if 'twere the
doing again, I wouldn't let her go till I had found out
whether the gentleman is really a good-hearted young man and
choice over her as his kinswoman."
"Yes, you ought, perhaps, to ha' done that," snored Sir
John.
Joan Durbeyfield always managed to find consolation
somewhere: "Well, as one of the genuine stock, she ought to
make her way with 'en, if she plays her trump card aright.
And if he don't marry her afore he will after. For that he's
all afire wi' love for her any eye can see."
"What's her trump card? Her d'Urberville blood, you
mean?"
"No, stupid; her face—as 'twas mine."
VIII
Having mounted beside her, Alec d'Urberville drove
rapidly along the crest of the first hill, chatting
compliments to Tess as they went, the cart with her box
being left far behind. Rising still, an immense landscape
stretched around them on every side; behind, the green
valley of her birth, before, a gray country of which she
knew nothing except from her first brief visit to
Trantridge. Thus they reached the verge of an incline down
which the road stretched in a long straight descent of
nearly a mile.
Ever since the accident with her father's horse Tess
Durbeyfield, courageous as she naturally was, had been
exceedingly timid on wheels; the least irregularity of
motion startled her. She began to get uneasy at a certain
recklessness in her conductor's driving.
"You will go down slow, sir, I suppose?" she said with
attempted unconcern.
D'Urberville looked round upon her, nipped his cigar with
the tips of his large white centre-teeth, and allowed his
lips to smile slowly of themselves.
"Why, Tess," he answered, after another whiff or two, "it
isn't a brave bouncing girl like you who asks that? Why, I
always go down at full gallop. There's nothing like it for
raising your spirits."
"But perhaps you need not now?"
"Ah," he said, shaking his head, "there are two to be
reckoned with. It is not me alone. Tib has to be considered,
and she has a very queer temper."
"Who?"
"Why, this mare. I fancy she looked round at me in a very
grim way just then. Didn't you notice it?"
"Don't try to frighten me, sir," said Tess stiffly.
"Well, I don't. If any living man can manage this horse I
can: I won't say any living man can do it—but if such has
the power, I am he."
"Why do you have such a horse?"
"Ah, well may you ask it! It was my fate, I suppose. Tib
has killed one chap; and just after I bought her she nearly
killed me. And then, take my word for it, I nearly killed
her. But she's touchy still, very touchy; and one's life is
hardly safe behind her sometimes."
They were just beginning to descend; and it was evident
that the horse, whether of her own will or of his (the
latter being the more likely), knew so well the reckless
performance expected of her that she hardly required a hint
from behind.
Down, down, they sped, the wheels humming like a top, the
dog-cart rocking right and left, its axis acquiring a
slightly oblique set in relation to the line of progress;
the figure of the horse rising and falling in undulations
before them. Sometimes a wheel was off the ground, it
seemed, for many yards; sometimes a stone was sent spinning
over the hedge, and flinty sparks from the horse's hoofs
outshone the daylight. The aspect of the straight road
enlarged with their advance, the two banks dividing like a
splitting stick; one rushing past at each shoulder.
The wind blew through Tess's white muslin to her very
skin, and her washed hair flew out behind. She was
determined to show no open fear, but she clutched
d'Urberville's rein-arm.
"Don't touch my arm! We shall be thrown out if you do!
Hold on round my waist!"
She grasped his waist, and so they reached the bottom.
"Safe, thank God, in spite of your fooling!" said she,
her face on fire.
"Tess—fie! that's temper!" said d'Urberville.
"'Tis truth."
"Well, you need not let go your hold of me so thanklessly
the moment you feel yourself our of danger."
She had not considered what she had been doing; whether
he were man or woman, stick or stone, in her involuntary
hold on him. Recovering her reserve, she sat without
replying, and thus they reached the summit of another
declivity.
"Now then, again!" said d'Urberville.
"No, no!" said Tess. "Show more sense, do, please."
"But when people find themselves on one of the highest
points in the county, they must get down again," he
retorted.
He loosened rein, and away they went a second time.
D'Urberville turned his face to her as they rocked, and
said, in playful raillery: "Now then, put your arms round my
waist again, as you did before, my Beauty."
"Never!" said Tess independently, holding on as well as
she could without touching him.
"Let me put one little kiss on those holmberry lips,
Tess, or even on that warmed cheek, and I'll stop—on my
honour, I will!"
Tess, surprised beyond measure, slid farther back still
on her seat, at which he urged the horse anew, and rocked
her the more.
"Will nothing else do?" she cried at length, in
desperation, her large eyes staring at him like those of a
wild animal. This dressing her up so prettily by her mother
had apparently been to lamentable purpose.
"Nothing, dear Tess," he replied.
"Oh, I don't know—very well; I don't mind!" she panted
miserably.
He drew rein, and as they slowed he was on the point of
imprinting the desired salute, when, as if hardly yet aware
of her own modesty, she dodged aside. His arms being
occupied with the reins there was left him no power to
prevent her manœuvre.
"Now, damn it—I'll break both our necks!" swore her
capriciously passionate companion. "So you can go from your
word like that, you young witch, can you?"
"Very well," said Tess, "I'll not move since you be so
determined! But I—thought you would be kind to me, and
protect me, as my kinsman!"
"Kinsman be hanged! Now!"
"But I don't want anybody to kiss me, sir!" she implored,
a big tear beginning to roll down her face, and the corners
of her mouth trembling in her attempts not to cry. "And I
wouldn't ha' come if I had known!"
He was inexorable, and she sat still, and d'Urberville
gave her the kiss of mastery. No sooner had he done so than
she flushed with shame, took out her handkerchief, and wiped
the spot on her cheek that had been touched by his lips. His
ardour was nettled at the sight, for the act on her part had
been unconsciously done.
"You are mighty sensitive for a cottage girl!" said the
young man.
Tess made no reply to this remark, of which, indeed, she
did not quite comprehend the drift, unheeding the snub she
had administered by her instinctive rub upon her cheek. She
had, in fact, undone the kiss, as far as such a thing was
physically possible. With a dim sense that he was vexed she
looked steadily ahead as they trotted on near Melbury Down
and Wingreen, till she saw, to her consternation, that there
was yet another descent to be undergone.
"You shall be made sorry for that!" he resumed, his
injured tone still remaining, as he flourished the whip
anew. "Unless, that is, you agree willingly to let me do it
again, and no handkerchief."
She sighed. "Very well, sir!" she said. "Oh—let me get my
hat!"
At the moment of speaking her hat had blown off into the
road, their present speed on the upland being by no means
slow. D'Urberville pulled up, and said he would get it for
her, but Tess was down on the other side.
She turned back and picked up the article.
"You look prettier with it off, upon my soul, if that's
possible," he said, contemplating her over the back of the
vehicle. "Now then, up again! What's the matter?"
The hat was in place and tied, but Tess had not stepped
forward.
"No, sir," she said, revealing the red and ivory of her
mouth as her eye lit in defiant triumph; "not again, if I
know it!"
"What—you won't get up beside me?"
"No; I shall walk."
"'Tis five or six miles yet to Trantridge."
"I don't care if 'tis dozens. Besides, the cart is
behind."
"You artful hussy! Now, tell me—didn't you make that hat
blow off on purpose? I'll swear you did!"
Her strategic silence confirmed his suspicion.
Then d'Urberville cursed and swore at her, and called her
everything he could think of for the trick. Turning the
horse suddenly he tried to drive back upon her, and so hem
her in between the gig and the hedge. But he could not do
this short of injuring her.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for using such
wicked words!" cried Tess with spirit, from the top of the
hedge into which she had scrambled. "I don't like 'ee at
all! I hate and detest you! I'll go back to mother, I will!"
D'Urberville's bad temper cleared up at sight of hers;
and he laughed heartily.
"Well, I like you all the better," he said. "Come, let
there be peace. I'll never do it any more against your will.
My life upon it now!"
Still Tess could not be induced to remount. She did not,
however, object to his keeping his gig alongside her; and in
this manner, at a slow pace, they advanced towards the
village of Trantridge. From time to time d'Urberville
exhibited a sort of fierce distress at the sight of the
tramping he had driven her to undertake by his misdemeanour.
She might in truth have safely trusted him now; but he had
forfeited her confidence for the time, and she kept on the
ground progressing thoughtfully, as if wondering whether it
would be wiser to return home. Her resolve, however, had
been taken, and it seemed vacillating even to childishness
to abandon it now, unless for graver reasons. How could she
face her parents, get back her box, and disconcert the whole
scheme for the rehabilitation of her family on such
sentimental grounds?
A few minutes later the chimneys of The Slopes appeared
in view, and in a snug nook to the right the poultry-farm
and cottage of Tess' destination.
IX
The community of fowls to which Tess had been appointed
as supervisor, purveyor, nurse, surgeon, and friend made its
headquarters in an old thatched cottage standing in an
enclosure that had once been a garden, but was now a
trampled and sanded square. The house was overrun with ivy,
its chimney being enlarged by the boughs of the parasite to
the aspect of a ruined tower. The lower rooms were entirely
given over to the birds, who walked about them with a
proprietary air, as though the place had been built by
themselves, and not by certain dusty copyholders who now lay
east and west in the churchyard. The descendants of these
bygone owners felt it almost as a slight to their family
when the house which had so much of their affection, had
cost so much of their forefathers' money, and had been in
their possession for several generations before the
d'Urbervilles came and built here, was indifferently turned
into a fowl-house by Mrs Stoke-d'Urberville as soon as the
property fell into hand according to law. "'Twas good enough
for Christians in grandfather's time," they said.
The rooms wherein dozens of infants had wailed at their
nursing now resounded with the tapping of nascent chicks.
Distracted hens in coops occupied spots where formerly stood
chairs supporting sedate agriculturists. The chimney-corner
and once-blazing hearth was now filled with inverted
beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs; while out of
doors the plots that each succeeding householder had
carefully shaped with his spade were torn by the cocks in
wildest fashion.
The garden in which the cottage stood was surrounded by a
wall, and could only be entered through a door.
When Tess had occupied herself about an hour the next
morning in altering and improving the arrangements,
according to her skilled ideas as the daughter of a
professed poulterer, the door in the wall opened and a
servant in white cap and apron entered. She had come from
the manor-house.
"Mrs d'Urberville wants the fowls as usual," she said;
but perceiving that Tess did not quite understand, she
explained, "Mis'ess is a old lady, and blind."
"Blind!" said Tess.
Almost before her misgiving at the news could find time
to shape itself she took, under her companion's direction,
two of the most beautiful of the Hamburghs in her arms, and
followed the maid-servant, who had likewise taken two, to
the adjacent mansion, which, though ornate and imposing,
showed traces everywhere on this side that some occupant of
its chambers could bend to the love of dumb
creatures—feathers floating within view of the front, and
hen-coops standing on the grass.
In a sitting-room on the ground-floor, ensconced in an
armchair with her back to the light, was the owner and
mistress of the estate, a white-haired woman of not more
than sixty, or even less, wearing a large cap. She had the
mobile face frequent in those whose sight has decayed by
stages, has been laboriously striven after, and reluctantly
let go, rather than the stagnant mien apparent in persons
long sightless or born blind. Tess walked up to this lady
with her feathered charges—one sitting on each arm.
"Ah, you are the young woman come to look after my
birds?" said Mrs d'Urberville, recognizing a new footstep.
"I hope you will be kind to them. My bailiff tells me you
are quite the proper person. Well, where are they? Ah, this
is Strut! But he is hardly so lively to-day, is he? He is
alarmed at being handled by a stranger, I suppose. And Phena
too—yes, they are a little frightened—aren't you, dears? But
they will soon get used to you."
While the old lady had been speaking Tess and the other
maid, in obedience to her gestures, had placed the fowls
severally in her lap, and she had felt them over from head
to tail, examining their beaks, their combs, the manes of
the cocks, their wings, and their claws. Her touch enabled
her to recognize them in a moment, and to discover if a
single feather were crippled or draggled. She handled their
crops, and knew what they had eaten, and if too little or
too much; her face enacting a vivid pantomime of the
criticisms passing in her mind.
The birds that the two girls had brought in were duly
returned to the yard, and the process was repeated till all
the pet cocks and hens had been submitted to the old
woman—Hamburghs, Bantams, Cochins, Brahmas, Dorkings, and
such other sorts as were in fashion just then—her perception
of each visitor being seldom at fault as she received the
bird upon her knees.
It reminded Tess of a Confirmation, in which Mrs
d'Urberville was the bishop, the fowls the young people
presented, and herself and the maid-servant the parson and
curate of the parish bringing them up. At the end of the
ceremony Mrs d'Urberville abruptly asked Tess, wrinkling and
twitching her face into undulations, "Can you whistle?"
"Whistle, Ma'am?"
"Yes, whistle tunes."
Tess could whistle like most other country-girls, though
the accomplishment was one which she did not care to profess
in genteel company. However, she blandly admitted that such
was the fact.
"Then you will have to practise it every day. I had a lad
who did it very well, but he has left. I want you to whistle
to my bullfinches; as I cannot see them, I like to hear
them, and we teach 'em airs that way. Tell her where the
cages are, Elizabeth. You must begin to-morrow, or they will
go back in their piping. They have been neglected these
several days."
"Mr d'Urberville whistled to 'em this morning, ma'am,"
said Elizabeth.
"He! Pooh!"
The old lady's face creased into furrows of repugnance,
and she made no further reply.
Thus the reception of Tess by her fancied kinswoman
terminated, and the birds were taken back to their quarters.
The girl's surprise at Mrs d'Urberville's manner was not
great; for since seeing the size of the house she had
expected no more. But she was far from being aware that the
old lady had never heard a word of the so-called kinship.
She gathered that no great affection flowed between the
blind woman and her son. But in that, too, she was mistaken.
Mrs d'Urberville was not the first mother compelled to love
her offspring resentfully, and to be bitterly fond.
In spite of the unpleasant initiation of the day before,
Tess inclined to the freedom and novelty of her new position
in the morning when the sun shone, now that she was once
installed there; and she was curious to test her powers in
the unexpected direction asked of her, so as to ascertain
her chance of retaining her post. As soon as she was alone
within the walled garden she sat herself down on a coop, and
seriously screwed up her mouth for the long-neglected
practice. She found her former ability to have degenerated
to the production of a hollow rush of wind through the lips,
and no clear note at all.
She remained fruitlessly blowing and blowing, wondering
how she could have so grown out of the art which had come by
nature, till she became aware of a movement among the
ivy-boughs which cloaked the garden-wall no less then the
cottage. Looking that way she beheld a form springing from
the coping to the plot. It was Alec d'Urberville, whom she
had not set eyes on since he had conducted her the day
before to the door of the gardener's cottage where she had
lodgings.
"Upon my honour!" cried he, "there was never before such
a beautiful thing in Nature or Art as you look, 'Cousin'
Tess ('Cousin' had a faint ring of mockery). I have been
watching you from over the wall—sitting like Im-patience
on a monument, and pouting up that pretty red mouth to
whistling shape, and whooing and whooing, and privately
swearing, and never being able to produce a note. Why, you
are quite cross because you can't do it."
"I may be cross, but I didn't swear."
"Ah! I understand why you are trying—those bullies! My
mother wants you to carry on their musical education. How
selfish of her! As if attending to these curst cocks and
hens here were not enough work for any girl. I would flatly
refuse, if I were you."
"But she wants me particularly to do it, and to be ready
by to-morrow morning."
"Does she? Well then—I'll give you a lesson or two."
"Oh no, you won't!" said Tess, withdrawing towards the
door.
"Nonsense; I don't want to touch you. See—I'll stand on
this side of the wire-netting, and you can keep on the
other; so you may feel quite safe. Now, look here; you screw
up your lips too harshly. There 'tis—so."
He suited the action to the word, and whistled a line of
"Take, O take those lips away." But the allusion was lost
upon Tess.
"Now try," said d'Urberville.
She attempted to look reserved; her face put on a
sculptural severity. But he persisted in his demand, and at
last, to get rid of him, she did put up her lips as directed
for producing a clear note; laughing distressfully, however,
and then blushing with vexation that she had laughed.
He encouraged her with "Try again!"
Tess was quite serious, painfully serious by this time;
and she tried—ultimately and unexpectedly emitting a real
round sound. The momentary pleasure of success got the
better of her; her eyes enlarged, and she involuntarily
smiled in his face.
"That's it! Now I have started you—you'll go on
beautifully. There—I said I would not come near you; and, in
spite of such temptation as never before fell to mortal man,
I'll keep my word. … Tess, do you think my mother a queer
old soul?"
"I don't know much of her yet, sir."
"You'll find her so; she must be, to make you learn to
whistle to her bullfinches. I am rather out of her books
just now, but you will be quite in favour if you treat her
live-stock well. Good morning. If you meet with any
difficulties and want help here, don't go to the bailiff,
come to me."
It was in the economy of this régime that Tess
Durbeyfield had undertaken to fill a place. Her first day's
experiences were fairly typical of those which followed
through many succeeding days. A familiarity with Alec
d'Urberville's presence—which that young man carefully
cultivated in her by playful dialogue, and by jestingly
calling her his cousin when they were alone—removed much of
her original shyness of him, without, however, implanting
any feeling which could engender shyness of a new and
tenderer kind. But she was more pliable under his hands than
a mere companionship would have made her, owing to her
unavoidable dependence upon his mother, and, through that
lady's comparative helplessness, upon him.
She soon found that whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs
d'Urberville's room was no such onerous business when she
had regained the art, for she had caught from her musical
mother numerous airs that suited those songsters admirably.
A far more satisfactory time than when she practised in the
garden was this whistling by the cages each morning.
Unrestrained by the young man's presence she threw up her
mouth, put her lips near the bars, and piped away in easeful
grace to the attentive listeners.
Mrs d'Urberville slept in a large four-post bedstead hung
with heavy damask curtains, and the bullfinches occupied the
same apartment, where they flitted about freely at certain
hours, and made little white spots on the furniture and
upholstery. Once while Tess was at the window where the
cages were ranged, giving her lesson as usual, she thought
she heard a rustling behind the bed. The old lady was not
present, and turning round the girl had an impression that
the toes of a pair of boots were visible below the fringe of
the curtains. Thereupon her whistling became so disjointed
that the listener, if such there were, must have discovered
her suspicion of his presence. She searched the curtains
every morning after that, but never found anybody within
them. Alec d'Urberville had evidently thought better of his
freak to terrify her by an ambush of that kind.
X
Every village has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution,
often its own code of morality. The levity of some of the
younger women in and about Trantridge was marked, and was
perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit who ruled The
Slopes in that vicinity. The place had also a more abiding
defect; it drank hard. The staple conversation on the farms
around was on the uselessness of saving money; and
smock-frocked arithmeticians, leaning on their ploughs or
hoes, would enter into calculations of great nicety to prove
that parish relief was a fuller provision for a man in his
old age than any which could result from savings out of
their wages during a whole lifetime.
The chief pleasure of these philosophers lay in going
every Saturday night, when work was done, to Chaseborough, a
decayed market-town two or three miles distant; and,
returning in the small hours of the next morning, to spend
Sunday in sleeping off the dyspeptic effects of the curious
compounds sold to them as beer by the monopolizers of the
once-independent inns.
For a long time Tess did not join in the weekly
pilgrimages. But under pressure from matrons not much older
than herself—for a field-man's wages being as high at
twenty-one as at forty, marriage was early here—Tess at
length consented to go. Her first experience of the journey
afforded her more enjoyment than she had expected, the
hilariousness of the others being quite contagious after her
monotonous attention to the poultry-farm all the week. She
went again and again. Being graceful and interesting,
standing moreover on the momentary threshold of womanhood,
her appearance drew down upon her some sly regards from
loungers in the streets of Chaseborough; hence, though
sometimes her journey to the town was made independently,
she always searched for her fellows at nightfall, to have
the protection of their companionship homeward.
This had gone on for a month or two when there came a
Saturday in September, on which a fair and a market
coincided; and the pilgrims from Trantridge sought double
delights at the inns on that account. Tess's occupations
made her late in setting out, so that her comrades reached
the town long before her. It was a fine September evening,
just before sunset, when yellow lights struggle with blue
shades in hairlike lines, and the atmosphere itself forms a
prospect without aid from more solid objects, except the
innumerable winged insects that dance in it. Through this
low-lit mistiness Tess walked leisurely along.
She did not discover the coincidence of the market with
the fair till she had reached the place, by which time it
was close upon dusk. Her limited marketing was soon
completed; and then as usual she began to look about for
some of the Trantridge cottagers.
At first she could not find them, and she was informed
that most of them had gone to what they called a private
little jig at the house of a hay-trusser and peat-dealer who
had transactions with their farm. He lived in an
out-of-the-way nook of the townlet, and in trying to find
her course thither her eyes fell upon Mr d'Urberville
standing at a street corner.
"What—my Beauty? You here so late?" he said.
She told him that she was simply waiting for company
homeward.
"I'll see you again," said he over her shoulder as she
went on down the back lane.
Approaching the hay-trussers, she could hear the fiddled
notes of a reel proceeding from some building in the rear;
but no sound of dancing was audible—an exceptional state of
things for these parts, where as a rule the stamping drowned
the music. The front door being open she could see straight
through the house into the garden at the back as far as the
shades of night would allow; and nobody appearing to her
knock, she traversed the dwelling and went up the path to
the outhouse whence the sound had attracted her.
It was a windowless erection used for storage, and from
the open door there floated into the obscurity a mist of
yellow radiance, which at first Tess thought to be
illuminated smoke. But on drawing nearer she perceived that
it was a cloud of dust, lit by candles within the outhouse,
whose beams upon the haze carried forward the outline of the
doorway into the wide night of the garden.
When she came close and looked in she beheld indistinct
forms racing up and down to the figure of the dance, the
silence of their footfalls arising from their being overshoe
in "scroff"—that is to say, the powdery residuum from the
storage of peat and other products, the stirring of which by
their turbulent feet created the nebulosity that involved
the scene. Through this floating, fusty debris of
peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the
dancers, and forming together a sort of vegeto-human pollen,
the muted fiddles feebly pushed their notes, in marked
contrast to the spirit with which the measure was trodden
out. They coughed as they danced, and laughed as they
coughed. Of the rushing couples there could barely be
discerned more than the high lights—the indistinctness
shaping them to satyrs clasping nymphs—a multiplicity of
Pans whirling a multiplicity of Syrinxes; Lotis attempting
to elude Priapus, and always failing.
At intervals a couple would approach the doorway for air,
and the haze no longer veiling their features, the demigods
resolved themselves into the homely personalities of her own
next-door neighbours. Could Trantridge in two or three short
hours have metamorphosed itself thus madly!
Some Sileni of the throng sat on benches and hay-trusses
by the wall; and one of them recognized her.
"The maids don't think it respectable to dance at The
Flower-de-Luce," he explained. "They don't like to let
everybody see which be their fancy-men. Besides, the house
sometimes shuts up just when their jints begin to get
greased. So we come here and send out for liquor."
"But when be any of you going home?" asked Tess with some
anxiety.
"Now—a'most directly. This is all but the last jig."
She waited. The reel drew to a close, and some of the
party were in the mind of starting. But others would not,
and another dance was formed. This surely would end it,
thought Tess. But it merged in yet another. She became
restless and uneasy; yet, having waited so long, it was
necessary to wait longer; on account of the fair the roads
were dotted with roving characters of possibly ill intent;
and, though not fearful of measurable dangers, she feared
the unknown. Had she been near Marlott she would have had
less dread.
"Don't ye be nervous, my dear good soul," expostulated,
between his coughs, a young man with a wet face and his
straw hat so far back upon his head that the brim encircled
it like the nimbus of a saint. "What's yer hurry? To-morrow
is Sunday, thank God, and we can sleep it off in
church-time. Now, have a turn with me?"
She did not abhor dancing, but she was not going to dance
here. The movement grew more passionate: the fiddlers behind
the luminous pillar of cloud now and then varied the air by
playing on the wrong side of the bridge or with the back of
the bow. But it did not matter; the panting shapes spun
onwards.
They did not vary their partners if their inclination
were to stick to previous ones. Changing partners simply
meant that a satisfactory choice had not as yet been arrived
at by one or other of the pair, and by this time every
couple had been suitably matched. It was then that the
ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter
of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion
likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
Suddenly there was a dull thump on the ground: a couple
had fallen, and lay in a mixed heap. The next couple, unable
to check its progress, came toppling over the obstacle. An
inner cloud of dust rose around the prostrate figures amid
the general one of the room, in which a twitching
entanglement of arms and legs was discernible.
"You shall catch it for this, my gentleman, when you get
home!" burst in female accents from the human heap—those of
the unhappy partner of the man whose clumsiness had caused
the mishap; she happened also to be his recently married
wife, in which assortment there was nothing unusual at
Trantridge as long as any affection remained between wedded
couples; and, indeed, it was not uncustomary in their later
lives, to avoid making odd lots of the single people between
whom there might be a warm understanding.
A loud laugh from behind Tess's back, in the shade of the
garden, united with the titter within the room. She looked
round, and saw the red coal of a cigar: Alec d'Urberville
was standing there alone. He beckoned to her, and she
reluctantly retreated towards him.
"Well, my Beauty, what are you doing here?"
She was so tired after her long day and her walk that she
confided her trouble to him—that she had been waiting ever
since he saw her to have their company home, because the
road at night was strange to her. "But it seems they will
never leave off, and I really think I will wait no longer."
"Certainly do not. I have only a saddle-horse here
to-day; but come to The Flower-de-Luce, and I'll hire a
trap, and drive you home with me."
Tess, though flattered, had never quite got over her
original mistrust of him, and, despite their tardiness, she
preferred to walk home with the work-folk. So she answered
that she was much obliged to him, but would not trouble him.
"I have said that I will wait for 'em, and they will expect
me to now."
"Very well, Miss Independence. Please yourself… Then I
shall not hurry… My good Lord, what a kick-up they are
having there!"
He had not put himself forward into the light, but some
of them had perceived him, and his presence led to a slight
pause and a consideration of how the time was flying. As
soon as he had re-lit a cigar and walked away the Trantridge
people began to collect themselves from amid those who had
come in from other farms, and prepared to leave in a body.
Their bundles and baskets were gathered up, and half an hour
later, when the clock-chime sounded a quarter past eleven,
they were straggling along the lane which led up the hill
towards their homes.
It was a three-mile walk, along a dry white road, made
whiter to-night by the light of the moon.
Tess soon perceived as she walked in the flock, sometimes
with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air
was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the
men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless
women also were wandering in their gait—to wit, a dark
virago, Car Darch, dubbed Queen of Spades, till lately a
favourite of d'Urberville's; Nancy, her sister, nicknamed
the Queen of Diamonds; and the young married woman who had
already tumbled down. Yet however terrestrial and lumpy
their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to
themselves the case was different. They followed the road
with a sensation that they were soaring along in a
supporting medium, possessed of original and profound
thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an
organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously
interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon
and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent
as they.
Tess, however, had undergone such painful experiences of
this kind in her father's house that the discovery of their
condition spoilt the pleasure she was beginning to feel in
the moonlight journey. Yet she stuck to the party, for
reasons above given.
In the open highway they had progressed in scattered
order; but now their route was through a field-gate, and the
foremost finding a difficulty in opening it, they closed up
together.
This leading pedestrian was Car the Queen of Spades, who
carried a wicker-basket containing her mother's groceries,
her own draperies, and other purchases for the week. The
basket being large and heavy, Car had placed it for
convenience of porterage on the top of her head, where it
rode on in jeopardized balance as she walked with arms
akimbo.
"Well—whatever is that a-creeping down thy back, Car
Darch?" said one of the group suddenly.
All looked at Car. Her gown was a light cotton print, and
from the back of her head a kind of rope could be seen
descending to some distance below her waist, like a
Chinaman's queue.
"'Tis her hair falling down," said another.
No; it was not her hair: it was a black stream of
something oozing from her basket, and it glistened like a
slimy snake in the cold still rays of the moon.
"'Tis treacle," said an observant matron.
Treacle it was. Car's poor old grandmother had a weakness
for the sweet stuff. Honey she had in plenty out of her own
hives, but treacle was what her soul desired, and Car had
been about to give her a treat of surprise. Hastily lowering
the basket the dark girl found that the vessel containing
the syrup had been smashed within.
By this time there had arisen a shout of laughter at the
extraordinary appearance of Car's back, which irritated the
dark queen into getting rid of the disfigurement by the
first sudden means available, and independently of the help
of the scoffers. She rushed excitedly into the field they
were about to cross, and flinging herself flat on her back
upon the grass, began to wipe her gown as well as she could
by spinning horizontally on the herbage and dragging herself
over it upon her elbows.
The laughter rang louder; they clung to the gate, to the
posts, rested on their staves, in the weakness engendered by
their convulsions at the spectacle of Car. Our heroine, who
had hitherto held her peace, at this wild moment could not
help joining in with the rest.
It was a misfortune—in more ways than one. No sooner did
the dark queen hear the soberer richer note of Tess among
those of the other work-people than a long-smouldering sense
of rivalry inflamed her to madness. She sprang to her feet
and closely faced the object of her dislike.
"How darest th' laugh at me, hussy!" she cried.
"I couldn't really help it when t'others did," apologized
Tess, still tittering.
"Ah, th'st think th' beest everybody, dostn't, because
th' beest first favourite with He just now! But stop a bit,
my lady, stop a bit! I'm as good as two of such! Look
here—here's at 'ee!"
To Tess's horror the dark queen began stripping off the
bodice of her gown—which for the added reason of its
ridiculed condition she was only too glad to be free of—till
she had bared her plump neck, shoulders, and arms to the
moonshine, under which they looked as luminous and beautiful
as some Praxitelean creation, in their possession of the
faultless rotundities of a lusty country-girl. She closed
her fists and squared up at Tess.
"Indeed, then, I shall not fight!" said the latter
majestically; "and if I had know you was of that sort, I
wouldn't have so let myself down as to come with such a
whorage as this is!"
The rather too inclusive speech brought down a torrent of
vituperation from other quarters upon fair Tess's unlucky
head, particularly from the Queen of Diamonds, who having
stood in the relations to d'Urberville that Car had also
been suspected of, united with the latter against the common
enemy. Several other women also chimed in, with an animus
which none of them would have been so fatuous as to show but
for the rollicking evening they had passed. Thereupon,
finding Tess unfairly browbeaten, the husbands and lovers
tried to make peace by defending her; but the result of that
attempt was directly to increase the war.
Tess was indignant and ashamed. She no longer minded the
loneliness of the way and the lateness of the hour; her one
object was to get away from the whole crew as soon as
possible. She knew well enough that the better among them
would repent of their passion next day. They were all now
inside the field, and she was edging back to rush off alone
when a horseman emerged almost silently from the corner of
the hedge that screened the road, and Alec d'Urberville
looked round upon them.
"What the devil is all this row about, work-folk?" he
asked.
The explanation was not readily forthcoming; and, in
truth, he did not require any. Having heard their voices
while yet some way off he had ridden creepingly forward, and
learnt enough to satisfy himself.
Tess was standing apart from the rest, near the gate. He
bent over towards her. "Jump up behind me," he whispered,
"and we'll get shot of the screaming cats in a jiffy!"
She felt almost ready to faint, so vivid was her sense of
the crisis. At almost any other moment of her life she would
have refused such proffered aid and company, as she had
refused them several times before; and now the loneliness
would not of itself have forced her to do otherwise. But
coming as the invitation did at the particular juncture when
fear and indignation at these adversaries could be
transformed by a spring of the foot into a triumph over
them, she abandoned herself to her impulse, climbed the
gate, put her toe upon his instep, and scrambled into the
saddle behind him. The pair were speeding away into the
distant gray by the time that the contentious revellers
became aware of what had happened.
The Queen of Spades forgot the stain on her bodice, and
stood beside the Queen of Diamonds and the new-married,
staggering young woman—all with a gaze of fixity in the
direction in which the horse's tramp was diminishing into
silence on the road.
"What be ye looking at?" asked a man who had not observed
the incident.
"Ho-ho-ho!" laughed dark Car.
"Hee-hee-hee!" laughed the tippling bride, as she
steadied herself on the arm of her fond husband.
"Heu-heu-heu!" laughed dark Car's mother, stroking her
moustache as she explained laconically: "Out of the
frying-pan into the fire!"
Then these children of the open air, whom even excess of
alcohol could scarce injure permanently, betook themselves
to the field-path; and as they went there moved onward with
them, around the shadow of each one's head, a circle of
opalized light, formed by the moon's rays upon the
glistening sheet of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo
but his or her own, which never deserted the head-shadow,
whatever its vulgar unsteadiness might be; but adhered to
it, and persistently beautified it; till the erratic motions
seemed an inherent part of the irradiation, and the fumes of
their breathing a component of the night's mist; and the
spirit of the scene, and of the moonlight, and of Nature,
seemed harmoniously to mingle with the spirit of wine.
XI
The twain cantered along for some time without speech,
Tess as she clung to him still panting in her triumph, yet
in other respects dubious. She had perceived that the horse
was not the spirited one he sometimes rose, and felt no
alarm on that score, though her seat was precarious enough
despite her tight hold of him. She begged him to slow the
animal to a walk, which Alec accordingly did.
"Neatly done, was it not, dear Tess?" he said by and by.
"Yes!" said she. "I am sure I ought to be much obliged to
you."
"And are you?"
She did not reply.
"Tess, why do you always dislike my kissing you?"
"I suppose—because I don't love you."
"You are quite sure?"
"I am angry with you sometimes!"
"Ah, I half feared as much." Nevertheless, Alec did not
object to that confession. He knew that anything was better
then frigidity. "Why haven't you told me when I have made
you angry?"
"You know very well why. Because I cannot help myself
here."
"I haven't offended you often by love-making?"
"You have sometimes."
"How many times?"
"You know as well as I—too many times."
"Every time I have tried?"
She was silent, and the horse ambled along for a
considerable distance, till a faint luminous fog, which had
hung in the hollows all the evening, became general and
enveloped them. It seemed to hold the moonlight in
suspension, rendering it more pervasive than in clear air.
Whether on this account, or from absent-mindedness, or from
sleepiness, she did not perceive that they had long ago
passed the point at which the lane to Trantridge branched
from the highway, and that her conductor had not taken the
Trantridge track.
She was inexpressibly weary. She had risen at five
o'clock every morning of that week, had been on foot the
whole of each day, and on this evening had in addition
walked the three miles to Chaseborough, waited three hours
for her neighbours without eating or drinking, her
impatience to start them preventing either; she had then
walked a mile of the way home, and had undergone the
excitement of the quarrel, till, with the slow progress of
their steed, it was now nearly one o'clock. Only once,
however, was she overcome by actual drowsiness. In that
moment of oblivion her head sank gently against him.
D'Urberville stopped the horse, withdrew his feet from
the stirrups, turned sideways on the saddle, and enclosed
her waist with his arm to support her.
This immediately put her on the defensive, and with one
of those sudden impulses of reprisal to which she was liable
she gave him a little push from her. In his ticklish
position he nearly lost his balance and only just avoided
rolling over into the road, the horse, though a powerful
one, being fortunately the quietest he rode.
"That is devilish unkind!" he said. "I mean no harm—only
to keep you from falling."
She pondered suspiciously, till, thinking that this might
after all be true, she relented, and said quite humbly, "I
beg your pardon, sir."
"I won't pardon you unless you show some confidence in
me. Good God!" he burst out, "what am I, to be repulsed so
by a mere chit like you? For near three mortal months have
you trifled with my feelings, eluded me, and snubbed me; and
I won't stand it!"
"I'll leave you to-morrow, sir."
"No, you will not leave me to-morrow! Will you, I ask
once more, show your belief in me by letting me clasp you
with my arm? Come, between us two and nobody else, now. We
know each other well; and you know that I love you, and
think you the prettiest girl in the world, which you are.
Mayn't I treat you as a lover?"
She drew a quick pettish breath of objection, writhing
uneasily on her seat, looked far ahead, and murmured, "I
don't know—I wish—how can I say yes or no when—"
He settled the matter by clasping his arm round her as he
desired, and Tess expressed no further negative. Thus they
sidled slowly onward till it struck her they had been
advancing for an unconscionable time—far longer than was
usually occupied by the short journey from Chaseborough,
even at this walking pace, and that they were no longer on
hard road, but in a mere trackway.
"Why, where be we?" she exclaimed.
"Passing by a wood."
"A wood—what wood? Surely we are quite out of the road?"
"A bit of The Chase—the oldest wood in England. It is a
lovely night, and why should we not prolong our ride a
little?"
"How could you be so treacherous!" said Tess, between
archness and real dismay, and getting rid of his arm by
pulling open his fingers one by one, though at the risk of
slipping off herself. "Just when I've been putting such
trust in you, and obliging you to please you, because I
thought I had wronged you by that push! Please set me down,
and let me walk home."
"You cannot walk home, darling, even if the air were
clear. We are miles away from Trantridge, if I must tell
you, and in this growing fog you might wander for hours
among these trees."
"Never mind that," she coaxed. "Put me down, I beg you. I
don't mind where it is; only let me get down, sir, please!"
"Very well, then, I will—on one condition. Having brought
you here to this out-of-the-way place, I feel myself
responsible for your safe-conduct home, whatever you may
yourself feel about it. As to your getting to Trantridge
without assistance, it is quite impossible; for, to tell the
truth, dear, owing to this fog, which so disguises
everything, I don't quite know where we are myself. Now, if
you will promise to wait beside the horse while I walk
through the bushes till I come to some road or house, and
ascertain exactly our whereabouts, I'll deposit you here
willingly. When I come back I'll give you full directions,
and if you insist upon walking you may; or you may ride—at
your pleasure."
She accepted these terms, and slid off on the near side,
though not till he had stolen a cursory kiss. He sprang down
on the other side.
"I suppose I must hold the horse?" said she.
"Oh no; it's not necessary," replied Alec, patting the
panting creature. "He's had enough of it for to-night."
He turned the horse's head into the bushes, hitched him
on to a bough, and made a sort of couch or nest for her in
the deep mass of dead leaves.
"Now, you sit there," he said. "The leaves have not got
damp as yet. Just give an eye to the horse—it will be quite
sufficient."
He took a few steps away from her, but, returning, said,
"By the bye, Tess, your father has a new cob to-day.
Somebody gave it to him."
"Somebody? You!"
D'Urberville nodded.
"O how very good of you that is!" she exclaimed, with a
painful sense of the awkwardness of having to thank him just
then.
"And the children have some toys."
"I didn't know—you ever sent them anything!" she
murmured, much moved. "I almost wish you had not—yes, I
almost wish it!"
"Why, dear?"
"It—hampers me so."
"Tessy—don't you love me ever so little now?"
"I'm grateful," she reluctantly admitted. "But I fear I
do not—" The sudden vision of his passion for herself as a
factor in this result so distressed her that, beginning with
one slow tear, and then following with another, she wept
outright.
"Don't cry, dear, dear one! Now sit down here, and wait
till I come." She passively sat down amid the leaves he had
heaped, and shivered slightly. "Are you cold?" he asked.
"Not very—a little."
He touched her with his fingers, which sank into her as
into down. "You have only that puffy muslin dress on—how's
that?"
"It's my best summer one. 'Twas very warm when I started,
and I didn't know I was going to ride, and that it would be
night."
"Nights grow chilly in September. Let me see." He pulled
off a light overcoat that he had worn, and put it round her
tenderly. "That's it—now you'll feel warmer," he continued.
"Now, my pretty, rest there; I shall soon be back again."
Having buttoned the overcoat round her shoulders he
plunged into the webs of vapour which by this time formed
veils between the trees. She could hear the rustling of the
branches as he ascended the adjoining slope, till his
movements were no louder than the hopping of a bird, and
finally died away. With the setting of the moon the pale
light lessened, and Tess became invisible as she fell into
reverie upon the leaves where he had left her.
In the meantime Alec d'Urberville had pushed on up the
slope to clear his genuine doubt as to the quarter of The
Chase they were in. He had, in fact, ridden quite at random
for over an hour, taking any turning that came to hand in
order to prolong companionship with her, and giving far more
attention to Tess's moonlit person than to any wayside
object. A little rest for the jaded animal being desirable,
he did not hasten his search for landmarks. A clamber over
the hill into the adjoining vale brought him to the fence of
a highway whose contours he recognized, which settled the
question of their whereabouts. D'Urberville thereupon turned
back; but by this time the moon had quite gone down, and
partly on account of the fog The Chase was wrapped in thick
darkness, although morning was not far off. He was obliged
to advance with outstretched hands to avoid contact with the
boughs, and discovered that to hit the exact spot from which
he had started was at first entirely beyond him. Roaming up
and down, round and round, he at length heard a slight
movement of the horse close at hand; and the sleeve of his
overcoat unexpectedly caught his foot.
"Tess!" said d'Urberville.
There was no answer. The obscurity was now so great that
he could see absolutely nothing but a pale nebulousness at
his feet, which represented the white muslin figure he had
left upon the dead leaves. Everything else was blackness
alike. D'Urberville stooped; and heard a gentle regular
breathing. He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed
his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with
hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there
lingered tears.
Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above them
rose the primeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which there
poised gentle roosting birds in their last nap; and about
them stole the hopping rabbits and hares. But, might some
say, where was Tess's guardian angel? where was the
providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god
of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he
was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and
not to be awaked.
Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue,
sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet,
there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it
was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates
the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the
man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have
failed to explain to our sense of order. One may, indeed,
admit the possibility of a retribution lurking in the
present catastrophe. Doubtless some of Tess d'Urberville's
mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray had dealt the
same measure even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of
their time. But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon
the children may be a morality good enough for divinities,
it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does
not mend the matter.
As Tess's own people down in those retreats are never
tired of saying among each other in their fatalistic way:
"It was to be." There lay the pity of it. An immeasurable
social chasm was to divide our heroine's personality
thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from
her mother's door to try her fortune at Trantridge
poultry-farm.
End of Phase the First
Phase the Second: Maiden No More, XII-XV
XII
The basket was heavy and the bundle was large, but she lugged them
along like a person who did not find her especial burden in
material things. Occasionally she stopped to rest in a
mechanical way by some gate or post; and then, giving the
baggage another hitch upon her full round arm, went steadily
on again.
It was a Sunday morning in late October, about four
months after Tess Durbeyfield's arrival at Trantridge, and
some few weeks subsequent to the night ride in The Chase.
The time was not long past daybreak, and the yellow
luminosity upon the horizon behind her back lighted the
ridge towards which her face was set—the barrier of the vale
wherein she had of late been a stranger—which she would have
to climb over to reach her birthplace. The ascent was
gradual on this side, and the soil and scenery differed much
from those within Blakemore Vale. Even the character and
accent of the two peoples had shades of difference, despite
the amalgamating effects of a roundabout railway; so that,
though less than twenty miles from the place of her sojourn
at Trantridge, her native village had seemed a far-away
spot. The field-folk shut in there traded northward and
westward, travelled, courted, and married northward and
westward, thought northward and westward; those on this side
mainly directed their energies and attention to the east and
south.
The incline was the same down which d'Urberville had
driven her so wildly on that day in June. Tess went up the
remainder of its length without stopping, and on reaching
the edge of the escarpment gazed over the familiar green
world beyond, now half-veiled in mist. It was always
beautiful from here; it was terribly beautiful to Tess
to-day, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt
that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing, and her
views of life had been totally changed for her by the
lesson. Verily another girl than the simple one she had been
at home was she who, bowed by thought, stood still here, and
turned to look behind her. She could not bear to look
forward into the Vale.
Ascending by the long white road that Tess herself had
just laboured up, she saw a two-wheeled vehicle, beside
which walked a man, who held up his hand to attract her
attention.
She obeyed the signal to wait for him with unspeculative
repose, and in a few minutes man and horse stopped beside
her.
"Why did you slip away by stealth like this?" said
d'Urberville, with upbraiding breathlessness; "on a Sunday
morning, too, when people were all in bed! I only discovered
it by accident, and I have been driving like the deuce to
overtake you. Just look at the mare. Why go off like this?
You know that nobody wished to hinder your going. And how
unnecessary it has been for you to toil along on foot, and
encumber yourself with this heavy load! I have followed like
a madman, simply to drive you the rest of the distance, if
you won't come back."
"I shan't come back," said she.
"I thought you wouldn't—I said so! Well, then, put up
your basket, and let me help you on."
She listlessly placed her basket and bundle within the
dog-cart, and stepped up, and they sat side by side. She had
no fear of him now, and in the cause of her confidence her
sorrow lay.
D'Urberville mechanically lit a cigar, and the journey
was continued with broken unemotional conversation on the
commonplace objects by the wayside. He had quite forgotten
his struggle to kiss her when, in the early summer, they had
driven in the opposite direction along the same road. But
she had not, and she sat now, like a puppet, replying to his
remarks in monosyllables. After some miles they came in view
of the clump of trees beyond which the village of Marlott
stood. It was only then that her still face showed the least
emotion, a tear or two beginning to trickle down.
"What are you crying for?" he coldly asked.
"I was only thinking that I was born over there,"
murmured Tess.
"Well—we must all be born somewhere."
"I wish I had never been born—there or anywhere else!"
"Pooh! Well, if you didn't wish to come to Trantridge why
did you come?"
She did not reply.
"You didn't come for love of me, that I'll swear."
"'Tis quite true. If I had gone for love o' you, if I had
ever sincerely loved you, if I loved you still, I should not
so loathe and hate myself for my weakness as I do now! … My
eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all."
He shrugged his shoulders. She resumed—
"I didn't understand your meaning till it was too late."
"That's what every woman says."
"How can you dare to use such words!" she cried, turning
impetuously upon him, her eyes flashing as the latent spirit
(of which he was to see more some day) awoke in her. "My
God! I could knock you out of the gig! Did it never strike
your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?"
"Very well," he said, laughing; "I am sorry to wound you.
I did wrong—I admit it." He dropped into some little
bitterness as he continued: "Only you needn't be so
everlastingly flinging it in my face. I am ready to pay to
the uttermost farthing. You know you need not work in the
fields or the dairies again. You know you may clothe
yourself with the best, instead of in the bald plain way you
have lately affected, as if you couldn't get a ribbon more
than you earn."
Her lip lifted slightly, though there was little scorn,
as a rule, in her large and impulsive nature.
"I have said I will not take anything more from you, and
I will not—I cannot! I should be your creature to go
on doing that, and I won't!"
"One would think you were a princess from your manner, in
addition to a true and original d'Urberville—ha! ha! Well,
Tess, dear, I can say no more. I suppose I am a bad fellow—a
damn bad fellow. I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I
shall die bad in all probability. But, upon my lost soul, I
won't be bad towards you again, Tess. And if certain
circumstances should arise—you understand—in which you are
in the least need, the least difficulty, send me one line,
and you shall have by return whatever you require. I may not
be at Trantridge—I am going to London for a time—I can't
stand the old woman. But all letters will be forwarded."
She said that she did not wish him to drive her further,
and they stopped just under the clump of trees. D'Urberville
alighted, and lifted her down bodily in his arms, afterwards
placing her articles on the ground beside her. She bowed to
him slightly, her eye just lingering in his; and then she
turned to take the parcels for departure.
Alec d'Urberville removed his cigar, bent towards her,
and said—
"You are not going to turn away like that, dear! Come!"
"If you wish," she answered indifferently. "See how
you've mastered me!"
She thereupon turned round and lifted her face to his,
and remained like a marble term while he imprinted a kiss
upon her cheek—half perfunctorily, half as if zest had not
yet quite died out. Her eyes vaguely rested upon the
remotest trees in the lane while the kiss was given, as
though she were nearly unconscious of what he did.
"Now the other side, for old acquaintance' sake."
She turned her head in the same passive way, as one might
turn at the request of a sketcher or hairdresser, and he
kissed the other side, his lips touching cheeks that were
damp and smoothly chill as the skin of the mushrooms in the
fields around.
"You don't give me your mouth and kiss me back. You never
willingly do that—you'll never love me, I fear."
"I have said so, often. It is true. I have never really
and truly loved you, and I think I never can." She added
mournfully, "Perhaps, of all things, a lie on this thing
would do the most good to me now; but I have honour enough
left, little as 'tis, not to tell that lie. If I did love
you, I may have the best o' causes for letting you know it.
But I don't."
He emitted a laboured breath, as if the scene were
getting rather oppressive to his heart, or to his
conscience, or to his gentility.
"Well, you are absurdly melancholy, Tess. I have no
reason for flattering you now, and I can say plainly that
you need not be so sad. You can hold your own for beauty
against any woman of these parts, gentle or simple; I say it
to you as a practical man and well-wisher. If you are wise
you will show it to the world more than you do before it
fades… And yet, Tess, will you come back to me! Upon my
soul, I don't like to let you go like this!"
"Never, never! I made up my mind as soon as I saw—what I
ought to have seen sooner; and I won't come."
"Then good morning, my four months' cousin—good-bye!"
He leapt up lightly, arranged the reins, and was gone
between the tall red-berried hedges.
Tess did not look after him, but slowly wound along the
crooked lane. It was still early, and though the sun's lower
limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and
peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
There was not a human soul near. Sad October and her sadder
self seemed the only two existences haunting that lane.
As she walked, however, some footsteps approached behind
her, the footsteps of a man; and owing to the briskness of
his advance he was close at her heels and had said "Good
morning" before she had been long aware of his propinquity.
He appeared to be an artisan of some sort, and carried a tin
pot of red paint in his hand. He asked in a business-like
manner if he should take her basket, which she permitted him
to do, walking beside him.
"It is early to be astir this Sabbath morn!" he said
cheerfully.
"Yes," said Tess.
"When most people are at rest from their week's work."
She also assented to this.
"Though I do more real work to-day than all the week
besides."
"Do you?"
"All the week I work for the glory of man, and on Sunday
for the glory of God. That's more real than the other—hey? I
have a little to do here at this stile." The man turned, as
he spoke, to an opening at the roadside leading into a
pasture. "If you'll wait a moment," he added, "I shall not
be long."
As he had her basket she could not well do otherwise; and
she waited, observing him. He set down her basket and the
tin pot, and stirring the paint with the brush that was in
it began painting large square letters on the middle board
of the three composing the stile, placing a comma after each
word, as if to give pause while that word was driven well
home to the reader's heart—
THY, DAMNATION,
SLUMBERETH, NOT.
2 Pet. ii. 3.
Against the peaceful landscape, the pale, decaying tints of the copses,
the blue air of the horizon, and the lichened stile-boards,
these staring vermilion words shone forth. They seemed to
shout themselves out and make the atmosphere ring. Some
people might have cried "Alas, poor Theology!" at the
hideous defacement—the last grotesque phase of a creed which
had served mankind well in its time. But the words entered
Tess with accusatory horror. It was as if this man had known
her recent history; yet he was a total stranger.
Having finished his text he picked up her basket, and she
mechanically resumed her walk beside him.
"Do you believe what you paint?" she asked in low tones.
"Believe that tex? Do I believe in my own existence!"
"But," said she tremulously, "suppose your sin was not of
your own seeking?"
He shook his head.
"I cannot split hairs on that burning query," he said. "I
have walked hundreds of miles this past summer, painting
these texes on every wall, gate, and stile the length and
breadth of this district. I leave their application to the
hearts of the people who read 'em."
"I think they are horrible," said Tess. "Crushing!
Killing!"
"That's what they are meant to be!" he replied in a trade
voice. "But you should read my hottest ones—them I kips for
slums and seaports. They'd make ye wriggle! Not but what
this is a very good tex for rural districts. … Ah—there's a
nice bit of blank wall up by that barn standing to waste. I
must put one there—one that it will be good for dangerous
young females like yerself to heed. Will ye wait, missy?"
"No," said she; and taking her basket Tess trudged on. A
little way forward she turned her head. The old gray wall
began to advertise a similar fiery lettering to the first,
with a strange and unwonted mien, as if distressed at duties
it had never before been called upon to perform. It was with
a sudden flush that she read and realized what was to be the
inscription he was now halfway through—
THOU, SHALT, NOT,
COMMIT—
Her cheerful friend saw her looking, stopped his brush, and shouted—
"If you want to ask for edification on these things of
moment, there's a very earnest good man going to preach a
charity-sermon to-day in the parish you are going to—Mr
Clare of Emminster. I'm not of his persuasion now, but he's
a good man, and he'll expound as well as any parson I know.
'Twas he began the work in me."
But Tess did not answer; she throbbingly resumed her
walk, her eyes fixed on the ground. "Pooh—I don't believe
God said such things!" she murmured contemptuously when her
flush had died away.
A plume of smoke soared up suddenly from her father's
chimney, the sight of which made her heart ache. The aspect
of the interior, when she reached it, made her heart ache
more. Her mother, who had just come down stairs, turned to
greet her from the fireplace, where she was kindling
barked-oak twigs under the breakfast kettle. The young
children were still above, as was also her father, it being
Sunday morning, when he felt justified in lying an
additional half-hour.
"Well!—my dear Tess!" exclaimed her surprised mother,
jumping up and kissing the girl. "How be ye? I didn't see
you till you was in upon me! Have you come home to be
married?"
"No, I have not come for that, mother."
"Then for a holiday?"
"Yes—for a holiday; for a long holiday," said Tess.
"What, isn't your cousin going to do the handsome thing?"
"He's not my cousin, and he's not going to marry me."
Her mother eyed her narrowly.
"Come, you have not told me all," she said.
Then Tess went up to her mother, put her face upon Joan's
neck, and told.
"And yet th'st not got him to marry 'ee!" reiterated her
mother. "Any woman would have done it but you, after that!"
"Perhaps any woman would except me."
"It would have been something like a story to come back
with, if you had!" continued Mrs Durbeyfield, ready to burst
into tears of vexation. "After all the talk about you and
him which has reached us here, who would have expected it to
end like this! Why didn't ye think of doing some good for
your family instead o' thinking only of yourself? See how
I've got to teave and slave, and your poor weak father with
his heart clogged like a dripping-pan. I did hope for
something to come out o' this! To see what a pretty pair you
and he made that day when you drove away together four
months ago! See what he has given us—all, as we thought,
because we were his kin. But if he's not, it must have been
done because of his love for 'ee. And yet you've not got him
to marry!"
Get Alec d'Urberville in the mind to marry her! He marry
HER! On matrimony he had never once said a word. And
what if he had? How a convulsive snatching at social
salvation might have impelled her to answer him she could
not say. But her poor foolish mother little knew her present
feeling towards this man. Perhaps it was unusual in the
circumstances, unlucky, unaccountable; but there it was; and
this, as she had said, was what made her detest herself. She
had never wholly cared for him; she did not at all care for
him now. She had dreaded him, winced before him, succumbed
to adroit advantages he took of her helplessness; then,
temporarily blinded by his ardent manners, had been stirred
to confused surrender awhile: had suddenly despised and
disliked him, and had run away. That was all. Hate him she
did not quite; but he was dust and ashes to her, and even
for her name's sake she scarcely wished to marry him.
"You ought to have been more careful if you didn't mean
to get him to make you his wife!"
"O mother, my mother!" cried the agonized girl, turning
passionately upon her parent as if her poor heart would
break. "How could I be expected to know? I was a child when
I left this house four months ago. Why didn't you tell me
there was danger in men-folk? Why didn't you warn me? Ladies
know what to fend hands against, because they read novels
that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance
o' learning in that way, and you did not help me!"
Her mother was subdued.
"I thought if I spoke of his fond feelings and what they
might lead to, you would be hontish wi' him and lose your
chance," she murmured, wiping her eyes with her apron.
"Well, we must make the best of it, I suppose. 'Tis nater,
after all, and what do please God!"
XIII
The event of Tess Durbeyfield's return from the manor of
her bogus kinsfolk was rumoured abroad, if rumour be not too
large a word for a space of a square mile. In the afternoon
several young girls of Marlott, former schoolfellows and
acquaintances of Tess, called to see her, arriving dressed
in their best starched and ironed, as became visitors to a
person who had made a transcendent conquest (as they
supposed), and sat round the room looking at her with great
curiosity. For the fact that it was this said thirty-first
cousin, Mr d'Urberville, who had fallen in love with her, a
gentleman not altogether local, whose reputation as a
reckless gallant and heartbreaker was beginning to spread
beyond the immediate boundaries of Trantridge, lent Tess's
supposed position, by its fearsomeness, a far higher
fascination that it would have exercised if unhazardous.
Their interest was so deep that the younger ones
whispered when her back was turned—
"How pretty she is; and how that best frock do set her
off! I believe it cost an immense deal, and that it was a
gift from him."
Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from the
corner-cupboard, did not hear these commentaries. If she had
heard them, she might soon have set her friends right on the
matter. But her mother heard, and Joan's simple vanity,
having been denied the hope of a dashing marriage, fed
itself as well as it could upon the sensation of a dashing
flirtation. Upon the whole she felt gratified, even though
such a limited and evanescent triumph should involve her
daughter's reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and in
the warmth of her responsiveness to their admiration she
invited her visitors to stay to tea.
Their chatter, their laughter, their good-humoured
innuendoes, above all, their flashes and flickerings of
envy, revived Tess's spirits also; and, as the evening wore
on, she caught the infection of their excitement, and grew
almost gay. The marble hardness left her face, she moved
with something of her old bounding step, and flushed in all
her young beauty.
At moments, in spite of thought, she would reply to their
inquiries with a manner of superiority, as if recognizing
that her experiences in the field of courtship had, indeed,
been slightly enviable. But so far was she from being, in
the words of Robert South, "in love with her own ruin," that
the illusion was transient as lightning; cold reason came
back to mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness of her
momentary pride would convict her, and recall her to
reserved listlessness again.
And the despondency of the next morning's dawn, when it
was no longer Sunday, but Monday; and no best clothes; and
the laughing visitors were gone, and she awoke alone in her
old bed, the innocent younger children breathing softly
around her. In place of the excitement of her return, and
the interest it had inspired, she saw before her a long and
stony highway which she had to tread, without aid, and with
little sympathy. Her depression was then terrible, and she
could have hidden herself in a tomb.
In the course of a few weeks Tess revived sufficiently to
show herself so far as was necessary to get to church one
Sunday morning. She liked to hear the chanting—such as it
was—and the old Psalms, and to join in the Morning Hymn.
That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her
ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power over
her which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at
times.
To be as much out of observation as possible for reasons
of her own, and to escape the gallantries of the young men,
she set out before the chiming began, and took a back seat
under the gallery, close to the lumber, where only old men
and women came, and where the bier stood on end among the
churchyard tools.
Parishioners dropped in by twos and threes, deposited
themselves in rows before her, rested three-quarters of a
minute on their foreheads as if they were praying, though
they were not; then sat up, and looked around. When the
chants came on, one of her favourites happened to be chosen
among the rest—the old double chant "Langdon"—but she did
not know what it was called, though she would much have
liked to know. She thought, without exactly wording the
thought, how strange and god-like was a composer's power,
who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion,
which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had
never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his
personality.
The people who had turned their heads turned them again
as the service proceeded; and at last observing her, they
whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were
about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could come to
church no more.
The bedroom which she shared with some of the children
formed her retreat more continually than ever. Here, under
her few square yards of thatch, she watched winds, and
snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets, and successive moons at
their full. So close kept she that at length almost
everybody thought she had gone away.
The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after
dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she
seemed least solitary. She knew how to hit to a
hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the
darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day
and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving
absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being
alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions.
She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be
to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the
world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable,
even pitiable, in its units.
On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was
of a piece with the element she moved in. Her flexuous and
stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene. At
times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes
around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather
they became a part of it; for the world is only a
psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were.
The midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the
tightly-wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were
formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of
irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague
ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God
of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.
But this encompassment of her own characterization, based
on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices
antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of
Tess's fancy—a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was
terrified without reason. It was they that were out of
harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the
sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits
on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden
bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt
intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while
she was making a distinction where there was no difference.
Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord. She
had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law
known to the environment in which she fancied herself such
an anomaly.
XIV
It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal
vapours, attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and
shrinking into isolated fleeces within hollows and coverts,
where they waited till they should be dried away to nothing.
The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient,
personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its
adequate expression. His present aspect, coupled with the
lack of all human forms in the scene, explained the old-time
heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a saner
religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was
a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature,
gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an
earth that was brimming with interest for him.
His light, a little later, broke though chinks of cottage
shutters, throwing stripes like red-hot pokers upon
cupboards, chests of drawers, and other furniture within;
and awakening harvesters who were not already astir.
But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were
two broad arms of painted wood, which rose from the margin
of yellow cornfield hard by Marlott village. They, with two
others below, formed the revolving Maltese cross of the
reaping-machine, which had been brought to the field on the
previous evening to be ready for operations this day. The
paint with which they were smeared, intensified in hue by
the sunlight, imparted to them a look of having been dipped
in liquid fire.
The field had already been "opened"; that is to say, a
lane a few feet wide had been hand-cut through the wheat
along the whole circumference of the field for the first
passage of the horses and machine.
Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had
come down the lane just at the hour when the shadows of the
eastern hedge-top struck the west hedge midway, so that the
heads of the groups were enjoying sunrise while their feet
were still in the dawn. They disappeared from the lane
between the two stone posts which flanked the nearest
field-gate.
Presently there arose from within a ticking like the
love-making of the grasshopper. The machine had begun, and a
moving concatenation of three horses and the aforesaid long
rickety machine was visible over the gate, a driver sitting
upon one of the hauling horses, and an attendant on the seat
of the implement. Along one side of the field the whole wain
went, the arms of the mechanical reaper revolving slowly,
till it passed down the hill quite out of sight. In a minute
it came up on the other side of the field at the same
equable pace; the glistening brass star in the forehead of
the fore horse first catching the eye as it rose into view
over the stubble, then the bright arms, and then the whole
machine.
The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew
wider with each circuit, and the standing corn was reduced
to a smaller area as the morning wore on. Rabbits, hares,
snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards as into a fastness,
unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge, and of the
doom that awaited them later in the day when, their covert
shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they were
huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards
of upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring
reaper, and they were every one put to death by the sticks
and stones of the harvesters.
The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in
little heaps, each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf;
and upon these the active binders in the rear laid their
hands—mainly women, but some of them men in print shirts,
and trousers supported round their waists by leather straps,
rendering useless the two buttons behind, which twinkled and
bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each wearer, as
if they were a pair of eyes in the small of his back.
But those of the other sex were the most interesting of
this company of binders, by reason of the charm which is
acquired by woman when she becomes part and parcel of
outdoor nature, and is not merely an object set down therein
as at ordinary times. A field-man is a personality afield; a
field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost
her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and
assimilated herself with it.
The women—or rather girls, for they were mostly
young—wore drawn cotton bonnets with great flapping curtains
to keep off the sun, and gloves to prevent their hands being
wounded by the stubble. There was one wearing a pale pink
jacket, another in a cream-coloured tight-sleeved gown,
another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the
reaping-machine; and others, older, in the brown-rough
"wropper" or over-all—the old-established and most
appropriate dress of the field-woman, which the young ones
were abandoning. This morning the eye returns involuntarily
to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she being the most
flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all. But her bonnet
is pulled so far over her brow that none of her face is
disclosed while she binds, though her complexion may be
guessed from a stray twine or two of dark brown hair which
extends below the curtain of her bonnet. Perhaps one reason
why she seduces casual attention is that she never courts
it, though the other women often gaze around them.
Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the
sheaf last finished she draws a handful of ears, patting
their tips with her left palm to bring them even. Then,
stooping low, she moves forward, gathering the corn with
both hands against her knees, and pushing her left gloved
hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other side,
holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover. She
brings the ends of the bond together, and kneels on the
sheaf while she ties it, beating back her skirts now and
then when lifted by the breeze. A bit of her naked arm is
visible between the buff leather of the gauntlet and the
sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on its feminine
smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds.
At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her
disarranged apron, or to pull her bonnet straight. Then one
can see the oval face of a handsome young woman with deep
dark eyes and long heavy clinging tresses, which seem to
clasp in a beseeching way anything they fall against. The
cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular, the red lips
thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.
It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d'Urberville, somewhat
changed—the same, but not the same; at the present stage of
her existence living as a stranger and an alien here, though
it was no strange land that she was in. After a long
seclusion she had come to a resolve to undertake outdoor
work in her native village, the busiest season of the year
in the agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that
she could do within the house being so remunerative for the
time as harvesting in the fields.
The movements of the other women were more or less
similar to Tess's, the whole bevy of them drawing together
like dancers in a quadrille at the completion of a sheaf by
each, every one placing her sheaf on end against those of
the rest, till a shock, or "stitch" as it was here called,
of ten or a dozen was formed.
They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work
proceeded as before. As the hour of eleven drew near a
person watching her might have noticed that every now and
then Tess's glance flitted wistfully to the brow of the
hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing. On the verge
of the hour the heads of a group of children, of ages
ranging from six to fourteen, rose over the stubbly
convexity of the hill.
The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not
pause.
The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular
shawl, its corner draggling on the stubble, carried in her
arms what at first sight seemed to be a doll, but proved to
be an infant in long clothes. Another brought some lunch.
The harvesters ceased working, took their provisions, and
sat down against one of the shocks. Here they fell to, the
men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a cup.
Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her
labours. She sat down at the end of the shock, her face
turned somewhat away from her companions. When she had
deposited herself a man in a rabbit-skin cap, and with a red
handkerchief tucked into his belt, held the cup of ale over
the top of the shock for her to drink. But she did not
accept his offer. As soon as her lunch was spread she called
up the big girl, her sister, and took the baby of her, who,
glad to be relieved of the burden, went away to the next
shock and joined the other children playing there. Tess,
with a curiously stealthy yet courageous movement, and with
a still rising colour, unfastened her frock and began
suckling the child.
The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces
towards the other end of the field, some of them beginning
to smoke; one, with absent-minded fondness, regretfully
stroking the jar that would no longer yield a stream. All
the women but Tess fell into animated talk, and adjusted the
disarranged knots of their hair.
When the infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat
it upright in her lap, and looking into the far distance,
dandled it with a gloomy indifference that was almost
dislike; then all of a sudden she fell to violently kissing
it some dozens of times, as if she could never leave off,
the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which
strangely combined passionateness with contempt.
"She's fond of that there child, though she mid pretend
to hate en, and say she wishes the baby and her too were in
the churchyard," observed the woman in the red petticoat.
"She'll soon leave off saying that," replied the one in
buff. "Lord, 'tis wonderful what a body can get used to o'
that sort in time!"
"A little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming
o't, I reckon. There were they that heard a sobbing one
night last year in The Chase; and it mid ha' gone hard wi' a
certain party if folks had come along."
"Well, a little more, or a little less, 'twas a thousand
pities that it should have happened to she, of all others.
But 'tis always the comeliest! The plain ones be as safe as
churches—hey, Jenny?" The speaker turned to one of the group
who certainly was not ill-defined as plain.
It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for
even an enemy to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she
sat there, with her flower-like mouth and large tender eyes,
neither black nor blue nor grey nor violet; rather all those
shades together, and a hundred others, which could be seen
if one looked into their irises—shade behind shade—tint
beyond tint—around pupils that had no bottom; an almost
standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of
character inherited from her race.
A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her
into the fields this week for the first time during many
months. After wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with
every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could
devise, common sense had illuminated her. She felt that she
would do well to be useful again—to taste anew sweet
independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it
had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences,
time would close over them; they would all in a few years be
as if they had never been, and she herself grassed down and
forgotten. Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before;
the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The
familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief,
nor sickened because of her pain.
She might have seen that what had bowed her head so
profoundly—the thought of the world's concern at her
situation—was founded on an illusion. She was not an
existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of
sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind
besides, Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends
she was no more than a frequently passing thought. If she
made herself miserable the livelong night and day it was
only this much to them—"Ah, she makes herself unhappy." If
she tried to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to take
pleasure in the daylight, the flowers, the baby, she could
only be this idea to them—"Ah, she bears it very well."
Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been
wretched at what had happened to her? Not greatly. If she
could have been but just created, to discover herself as a
spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as the
parent of a nameless child, would the position have caused
her to despair? No, she would have taken it calmly, and
found pleasure therein. Most of the misery had been
generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate
sensations.
Whatever Tess's reasoning, some spirit had induced her to
dress herself up neatly as she had formerly done, and come
out into the fields, harvest-hands being greatly in demand
just then. This was why she had borne herself with dignity,
and had looked people calmly in the face at times, even when
holding the baby in her arms.
The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and
stretched their limbs, and extinguished their pipes. The
horses, which had been unharnessed and fed, were again
attached to the scarlet machine. Tess, having quickly eaten
her own meal, beckoned to her eldest sister to come and take
away the baby, fastened her dress, put on the buff gloves
again, and stooped anew to draw a bond from the last
completed sheaf for the tying of the next.
In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the
morning were continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the
body of harvesters. Then they all rode home in one of the
largest wagons, in the company of a broad tarnished moon
that had risen from the ground to the eastwards, its face
resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten
Tuscan saint. Tess's female companions sang songs, and
showed themselves very sympathetic and glad at her
reappearance out of doors, though they could not refrain
from mischievously throwing in a few verses of the ballad
about the maid who went to the merry green wood and came
back a changed state. There are counterpoises and
compensations in life; and the event which had made of her a
social warning had also for the moment made her the most
interesting personage in the village to many. Their
friendliness won her still farther away from herself, their
lively spirits were contagious, and she became almost gay.
But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh
one arose on the natural side of her which knew no social
law. When she reached home it was to learn to her grief that
the baby had been suddenly taken ill since the afternoon.
Some such collapse had been probable, so tender and puny was
its frame; but the event came as a shock nevertheless.
The baby's offence against society in coming into the
world was forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul's desire
was to continue that offence by preserving the life of the
child. However, it soon grew clear that the hour of
emancipation for that little prisoner of the flesh was to
arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured. And
when she had discovered this she was plunged into a misery
which transcended that of the child's simple loss. Her baby
had not been baptized.
Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted
passively the consideration that if she should have to burn
for what she had done, burn she must, and there was an end
of it. Like all village girls, she was well grounded in the
Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully studied the histories of
Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences to be drawn
therefrom. But when the same question arose with regard to
the baby, it had a very different colour. Her darling was
about to die, and no salvation.
It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and
asked if she might send for the parson. The moment happened
to be one at which her father's sense of the antique
nobility of his family was highest, and his sensitiveness to
the smudge which Tess had set upon that nobility most
pronounced, for he had just returned from his weekly booze
at Rolliver's Inn. No parson should come inside his door, he
declared, prying into his affairs, just then, when, by her
shame, it had become more necessary than ever to hide them.
He locked the door and put the key in his pocket.
The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond
measure, Tess retired also. She was continually waking as
she lay, and in the middle of the night found that the baby
was still worse. It was obviously dying—quietly and
painlessly, but none the less surely.
In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed. The clock
struck the solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks
outside reason, and malignant possibilities stand rock-firm
as facts. She thought of the child consigned to the
nethermost corner of hell, as its double doom for lack of
baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend tossing
it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for
heating the oven on baking days; to which picture she added
many other quaint and curious details of torment sometimes
taught the young in this Christian country. The lurid
presentment so powerfully affected her imagination in the
silence of the sleeping house that her nightgown became damp
with perspiration, and the bedstead shook with each throb of
her heart.
The infant's breathing grew more difficult, and the
mother's mental tension increased. It was useless to devour
the little thing with kisses; she could stay in bed no
longer, and walked feverishly about the room.
"O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!"
she cried. "Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and
welcome; but pity the child!"
She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured
incoherent supplications for a long while, till she suddenly
started up.
"Ah! perhaps baby can be saved! Perhaps it will be just
the same!"
She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face
might have shone in the gloom surrounding her. She lit a
candle, and went to a second and a third bed under the wall,
where she awoke her young sisters and brothers, all of whom
occupied the same room. Pulling out the washing-stand so
that she could get behind it, she poured some water from a
jug, and made them kneel around, putting their hands
together with fingers exactly vertical. While the children,
scarcely awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes
growing larger and larger, remained in this position, she
took the baby from her bed—a child's child—so immature as
scarce to seem a sufficient personality to endow its
producer with the maternal title. Tess then stood erect with
the infant on her arm beside the basin; the next sister held
the Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church held
it before the parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing
her child.
Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she
stood in her long white nightgown, a thick cable of twisted
dark hair hanging straight down her back to her waist. The
kindly dimness of the weak candle abstracted from her form
and features the little blemishes which sunlight might have
revealed—the stubble scratches upon her wrists, and the
weariness of her eyes—her high enthusiasm having a
transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her
undoing, showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a
touch of dignity which was almost regal. The little ones
kneeling round, their sleepy eyes blinking and red, awaited
her preparations full of a suspended wonder which their
physical heaviness at that hour would not allow to become
active.
The most impressed of them said:
"Be you really going to christen him, Tess?"
The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.
"What's his name going to be?"
She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a
phrase in the book of Genesis came into her head as she
proceeded with the baptismal service, and now she pronounced
it:
"SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of
the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."
She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.
"Say 'Amen,' children."
The tiny voices piped in obedient response, "Amen!"
Tess went on:
"We receive this child"—and so forth—"and do sign him
with the sign of the Cross."
Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently
drew an immense cross upon the baby with her forefinger,
continuing with the customary sentences as to his manfully
fighting against sin, the world, and the devil, and being a
faithful soldier and servant unto his life's end. She duly
went on with the Lord's Prayer, the children lisping it
after her in a thin gnat-like wail, till, at the conclusion,
raising their voices to clerk's pitch, they again piped into
silence, "Amen!"
Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the
efficacy of the sacrament, poured forth from the bottom of
her heart the thanksgiving that follows, uttering it boldly
and triumphantly in the stopt-diapason note which her voice
acquired when her heart was in her speech, and which will
never be forgotten by those who knew her. The ecstasy of
faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a
glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle
of each cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in
her eye-pupils shone like a diamond. The children gazed up
at her with more and more reverence, and no longer had a
will for questioning. She did not look like Sissy to them
now, but as a being large, towering, and awful—a divine
personage with whom they had nothing in common.
Poor Sorrow's campaign against sin, the world, and the
devil was doomed to be of limited brilliancy—luckily perhaps
for himself, considering his beginnings. In the blue of the
morning that fragile soldier and servant breathed his last,
and when the other children awoke they cried bitterly, and
begged Sissy to have another pretty baby.
The calmness which had possessed Tess since the
christening remained with her in the infant's loss. In the
daylight, indeed, she felt her terrors about his soul to
have been somewhat exaggerated; whether well founded or not,
she had no uneasiness now, reasoning that if Providence
would not ratify such an act of approximation she, for one,
did not value the kind of heaven lost by the
irregularity—either for herself or for her child.
So passed away Sorrow the Undesired—that intrusive
creature, that bastard gift of shameless Nature, who
respects not the social law; a waif to whom eternal Time had
been a matter of days merely, who knew not that such things
as years and centuries ever were; to whom the cottage
interior was the universe, the week's weather climate,
new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck
human knowledge.
Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal, wondered
if it were doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian
burial for the child. Nobody could tell this but the parson
of the parish, and he was a new-comer, and did not know her.
She went to his house after dusk, and stood by the gate, but
could not summon courage to go in. The enterprise would have
been abandoned if she had not by accident met him coming
homeward as she turned away. In the gloom she did not mind
speaking freely.
"I should like to ask you something, sir."
He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the
story of the baby's illness and the extemporized ordinance.
"And now, sir," she added earnestly, "can you tell me
this—will it be just the same for him as if you had baptized
him?"
Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding
that a job he should have been called in for had been
unskilfully botched by his customers among themselves, he
was disposed to say no. Yet the dignity of the girl, the
strange tenderness in her voice, combined to affect his
nobler impulses—or rather those that he had left in him
after ten years of endeavour to graft technical belief on
actual scepticism. The man and the ecclesiastic fought
within him, and the victory fell to the man.
"My dear girl," he said, "it will be just the same."
"Then will you give him a Christian burial?" she asked
quickly.
The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby's
illness, he had conscientiously gone to the house after
nightfall to perform the rite, and, unaware that the refusal
to admit him had come from Tess's father and not from Tess,
he could not allow the plea of necessity for its irregular
administration.
"Ah—that's another matter," he said.
"Another matter—why?" asked Tess, rather warmly.
"Well—I would willingly do so if only we two were
concerned. But I must not—for certain reasons."
"Just for once, sir!"
"Really I must not."
"O sir!" She seized his hand as she spoke.
He withdrew it, shaking his head.
"Then I don't like you!" she burst out, "and I'll never
come to your church no more!"
"Don't talk so rashly."
"Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don't? …
Will it be just the same? Don't for God's sake speak as
saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself—poor me!"
How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict
notions he supposed himself to hold on these subjects it is
beyond a layman's power to tell, though not to excuse.
Somewhat moved, he said in this case also—
"It will be just the same."
So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an
ancient woman's shawl, to the churchyard that night, and
buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling and a
pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God's
allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all
unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and
others of the conjecturally damned are laid. In spite of the
untoward surroundings, however, Tess bravely made a little
cross of two laths and a piece of string, and having bound
it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head of the grave
one evening when she could enter the churchyard without
being seen, putting at the foot also a bunch of the same
flowers in a little jar of water to keep them alive. What
matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere
observation noted the words "Keelwell's Marmalade"? The eye
of maternal affection did not see them in its vision of
higher things.
XV
"By experience," says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short
way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering
unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our
experience to us then? Tess Durbeyfield's experience was of
this incapacitating kind. At last she had learned what to
do; but who would now accept her doing?
If before going to the d'Urbervilles' she had vigorously
moved under the guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases
known to her and to the world in general, no doubt she would
never have been imposed on. But it had not been in Tess's
power—nor is it in anybody's power—to feel the whole truth
of golden opinions while it is possible to profit by them.
She—and how many more—might have ironically said to God with
Saint Augustine: "Thou hast counselled a better course than
Thou hast permitted."
She remained at her father's house during the winter
months, plucking fowls, or cramming turkeys and geese, or
making clothes for her sisters and brothers out of some
finery which d'Urberville had given her, and she had put by
with contempt. Apply to him she would not. But she would
often clasp her hands behind her head and muse when she was
supposed to be working hard.
She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the
revolution of the year; the disastrous night of her undoing
at Trantridge with its dark background of The Chase; also
the dates of the baby's birth and death; also her own
birthday; and every other day individualized by incidents in
which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one
afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that
there was yet another date, of greater importance to her
than those; that of her own death, when all these charms
would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among
all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when
she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there.
When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly
encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor's
thought that some time in the future those who had known her
would say: "It is the –––th, the day that poor Tess
Durbeyfield died"; and there would be nothing singular to
their minds in the statement. Of that day, doomed to be her
terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know the
place in month, week, season or year.
Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to
complex woman. Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her
face, and a note of tragedy at times into her voice. Her
eyes grew larger and more eloquent. She became what would
have been called a fine creature; her aspect was fair and
arresting; her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent
experiences of the last year or two had quite failed to
demoralize. But for the world's opinion those experiences
would have been simply a liberal education.
She had held so aloof of late that her trouble, never
generally known, was nearly forgotten in Marlott. But it
became evident to her that she could never be really
comfortable again in a place which had seen the collapse of
her family's attempt to "claim kin"—and, through her, even
closer union—with the rich d'Urbervilles. At least she could
not be comfortable there till long years should have
obliterated her keen consciousness of it. Yet even now Tess
felt the pulse of hopeful life still warm within her; she
might be happy in some nook which had no memories. To escape
the past and all that appertained thereto was to annihilate
it, and to do that she would have to get away.
Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? she
would ask herself. She might prove it false if she could
veil bygones. The recuperative power which pervaded organic
nature was surely not denied to maidenhood alone.
She waited a long time without finding opportunity for a
new departure. A particularly fine spring came round, and
the stir of germination was almost audible in the buds; it
moved her, as it moved the wild animals, and made her
passionate to go. At last, one day in early May, a letter
reached her from a former friend of her mother's, to whom
she had addressed inquiries long before—a person whom she
had never seen—that a skilful milkmaid was required at a
dairy-house many miles to the southward, and that the
dairyman would be glad to have her for the summer months.
It was not quite so far off as could have been wished;
but it was probably far enough, her radius of movement and
repute having been so small. To persons of limited spheres,
miles are as geographical degrees, parishes as counties,
counties as provinces and kingdoms.
On one point she was resolved: there should be no more
d'Urberville air-castles in the dreams and deeds of her new
life. She would be the dairymaid Tess, and nothing more. Her
mother knew Tess's feeling on this point so well, though no
words had passed between them on the subject, that she never
alluded to the knightly ancestry now.
Yet such is human inconsistency that one of the interests
of the new place to her was the accidental virtues of its
lying near her forefathers' country (for they were not
Blakemore men, though her mother was Blakemore to the bone).
The dairy called Talbothays, for which she was bound, stood
not remotely from some of the former estates of the
d'Urbervilles, near the great family vaults of her
granddames and their powerful husbands. She would be able to
look at them, and think not only that d'Urberville, like
Babylon, had fallen, but that the individual innocence of a
humble descendant could lapse as silently. All the while she
wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being
in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose
automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected
youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and
bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards
self-delight.
End of Phase the Second
Phase the Third: The Rally, XVI-XXIV
XVI
On a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May, between two and three
years after the return from Trantridge—silent,
reconstructive years for Tess Durbeyfield—she left her home
for the second time.
Having packed up her luggage so that it could be sent to
her later, she started in a hired trap for the little town
of Stourcastle, through which it was necessary to pass on
her journey, now in a direction almost opposite to that of
her first adventuring. On the curve of the nearest hill she
looked back regretfully at Marlott and her father's house,
although she had been so anxious to get away.
Her kindred dwelling there would probably continue their
daily lives as heretofore, with no great diminution of
pleasure in their consciousness, although she would be far
off, and they deprived of her smile. In a few days the
children would engage in their games as merrily as ever,
without the sense of any gap left by her departure. This
leaving of the younger children she had decided to be for
the best; were she to remain they would probably gain less
good by her precepts than harm by her example.
She went through Stourcastle without pausing and onward
to a junction of highways, where she could await a carrier's
van that ran to the south-west; for the railways which
engirdled this interior tract of country had never yet
struck across it. While waiting, however, there came along a
farmer in his spring cart, driving approximately in the
direction that she wished to pursue. Though he was a
stranger to her she accepted his offer of a seat beside him,
ignoring that its motive was a mere tribute to her
countenance. He was going to Weatherbury, and by
accompanying him thither she could walk the remainder of the
distance instead of travelling in the van by way of
Casterbridge.
Tess did not stop at Weatherbury, after this long drive,
further than to make a slight nondescript meal at noon at a
cottage to which the farmer recommended her. Thence she
started on foot, basket in hand, to reach the wide upland of
heath dividing this district from the low-lying meads of a
further valley in which the dairy stood that was the aim and
end of her day's pilgrimage.
Tess had never before visited this part of the country,
and yet she felt akin to the landscape. Not so very far to
the left of her she could discern a dark patch in the
scenery, which inquiry confirmed her in supposing to be
trees marking the environs of Kingsbere—in the church of
which parish the bones of her ancestors—her useless
ancestors—lay entombed.
She had no admiration for them now; she almost hated them
for the dance they had led her; not a thing of all that had
been theirs did she retain but the old seal and spoon.
"Pooh—I have as much of mother as father in me!" she said.
"All my prettiness comes from her, and she was only a
dairymaid."
The journey over the intervening uplands and lowlands of
Egdon, when she reached them, was a more troublesome walk
than she had anticipated, the distance being actually but a
few miles. It was two hours, owing to sundry wrong turnings,
ere she found herself on a summit commanding the
long-sought-for vale, the Valley of the Great Dairies, the
valley in which milk and butter grew to rankness, and were
produced more profusely, if less delicately, than at her
home—the verdant plain so well watered by the river Var or
Froom.
It was intrinsically different from the Vale of Little
Dairies, Blackmoor Vale, which, save during her disastrous
sojourn at Trantridge, she had exclusively known till now.
The world was drawn to a larger pattern here. The enclosures
numbered fifty acres instead of ten, the farmsteads were
more extended, the groups of cattle formed tribes hereabout;
there only families. These myriads of cows stretching under
her eyes from the far east to the far west outnumbered any
she had ever seen at one glance before. The green lea was
speckled as thickly with them as a canvas by Van Alsloot or
Sallaert with burghers. The ripe hue of the red and dun kine
absorbed the evening sunlight, which the white-coated
animals returned to the eye in rays almost dazzling, even at
the distant elevation on which she stood.
The bird's-eye perspective before her was not so
luxuriantly beautiful, perhaps, as that other one which she
knew so well; yet it was more cheering. It lacked the
intensely blue atmosphere of the rival vale, and its heavy
soils and scents; the new air was clear, bracing, ethereal.
The river itself, which nourished the grass and cows of
these renowned dairies, flowed not like the streams in
Blackmoor. Those were slow, silent, often turbid; flowing
over beds of mud into which the incautious wader might sink
and vanish unawares. The Froom waters were clear as the pure
River of Life shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow
of a cloud, with pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky
all day long. There the water-flower was the lily; the
crow-foot here.
Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to
light, or the sense of being amid new scenes where there
were no invidious eyes upon her, sent up her spirits
wonderfully. Her hopes mingled with the sunshine in an ideal
photosphere which surrounded her as she bounded along
against the soft south wind. She heard a pleasant voice in
every breeze, and in every bird's note seemed to lurk a joy.
Her face had latterly changed with changing states of
mind, continually fluctuating between beauty and
ordinariness, according as the thoughts were gay or grave.
One day she was pink and flawless; another pale and
tragical. When she was pink she was feeling less than when
pale; her more perfect beauty accorded with her less
elevated mood; her more intense mood with her less perfect
beauty. It was her best face physically that was now set
against the south wind.
The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find
sweet pleasure somewhere, which pervades all life, from the
meanest to the highest, had at length mastered Tess. Being
even now only a young woman of twenty, one who mentally and
sentimentally had not finished growing, it was impossible
that any event should have left upon her an impression that
was not in time capable of transmutation.
And thus her spirits, and her thankfulness, and her
hopes, rose higher and higher. She tried several ballads,
but found them inadequate; till, recollecting the psalter
that her eyes had so often wandered over of a Sunday morning
before she had eaten of the tree of knowledge, she chanted:
"O ye Sun and Moon … O ye Stars … ye Green Things upon the
Earth … ye Fowls of the Air … Beasts and Cattle … Children
of Men … bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him
forever!"
She suddenly stopped and murmured: "But perhaps I don't
quite know the Lord as yet."
And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a
Fetishistic utterance in a Monotheistic setting; women whose
chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature
retain in their souls far more of the Pagan fantasy of their
remote forefathers than of the systematized religion taught
their race at later date. However, Tess found at least
approximate expression for her feelings in the old
Benedicite that she had lisped from infancy; and it was
enough. Such high contentment with such a slight initial
performance as that of having started towards a means of
independent living was a part of the Durbeyfield
temperament. Tess really wished to walk uprightly, while her
father did nothing of the kind; but she resembled him in
being content with immediate and small achievements, and in
having no mind for laborious effort towards such petty
social advancement as could alone be effected by a family so
heavily handicapped as the once powerful d'Urbervilles were
now.
There was, it might be said, the energy of her mother's
unexpended family, as well as the natural energy of Tess's
years, rekindled after the experience which had so
overwhelmed her for the time. Let the truth be told—women do
as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their
spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye.
While there's life there's hope is a conviction not so
entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists
would have us believe.
Tess Durbeyfield, then, in good heart, and full of zest
for life, descended the Egdon slopes lower and lower towards
the dairy of her pilgrimage.
The marked difference, in the final particular, between
the rival vales now showed itself. The secret of Blackmoor
was best discovered from the heights around; to read aright
the valley before her it was necessary to descend into its
midst. When Tess had accomplished this feat she found
herself to be standing on a carpeted level, which stretched
to the east and west as far as the eye could reach.
The river had stolen from the higher tracts and brought
in particles to the vale all this horizontal land; and now,
exhausted, aged, and attenuated, lay serpentining along
through the midst of its former spoils.
Not quite sure of her direction, Tess stood still upon
the hemmed expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a
billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more
consequence to the surroundings than that fly. The sole
effect of her presence upon the placid valley so far had
been to excite the mind of a solitary heron, which, after
descending to the ground not far from her path, stood with
neck erect, looking at her.
Suddenly there arose from all parts of the lowland a
prolonged and repeated call—"Waow! waow! waow!"
From the furthest east to the furthest west the cries
spread as if by contagion, accompanied in some cases by the
barking of a dog. It was not the expression of the valley's
consciousness that beautiful Tess had arrived, but the
ordinary announcement of milking-time—half-past four
o'clock, when the dairymen set about getting in the cows.
The red and white herd nearest at hand, which had been
phlegmatically waiting for the call, now trooped towards the
steading in the background, their great bags of milk
swinging under them as they walked. Tess followed slowly in
their rear, and entered the barton by the open gate through
which they had entered before her. Long thatched sheds
stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted with
vivid green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts
rubbed to a glossy smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows
and calves of bygone years, now passed to an oblivion almost
inconceivable in its profundity. Between the post were
ranged the milchers, each exhibiting herself at the present
moment to a whimsical eye in the rear as a circle on two
stalks, down the centre of which a switch moved
pendulum-wise; while the sun, lowering itself behind this
patient row, threw their shadows accurately inwards upon the
wall. Thus it threw shadows of these obscure and homely
figures every evening with as much care over each contour as
if it had been the profile of a court beauty on a palace
wall; copied them as diligently as it had copied Olympian
shapes on marble façades long ago, or the outline of
Alexander, Caesar, and the Pharaohs.
They were the less restful cows that were stalled. Those
that would stand still of their own will were milked in the
middle of the yard, where many of such better behaved ones
stood waiting now—all prime milchers, such as were seldom
seen out of this valley, and not always within it; nourished
by the succulent feed which the water-meads supplied at this
prime season of the year. Those of them that were spotted
with white reflected the sunshine in dazzling brilliancy,
and the polished brass knobs of their horns glittered with
something of military display. Their large-veined udders
hung ponderous as sandbags, the teats sticking out like the
legs of a gipsy's crock; and as each animal lingered for her
turn to arrive the milk oozed forth and fell in drops to the
ground.
XVII
The dairymaids and men had flocked down from their
cottages and out of the dairy-house with the arrival of the
cows from the meads; the maids walking in pattens, not on
account of the weather, but to keep their shoes above the
mulch of the barton. Each girl sat down on her three-legged
stool, her face sideways, her right cheek resting against
the cow, and looked musingly along the animal's flank at
Tess as she approached. The male milkers, with hat-brims
turned down, resting flat on their foreheads and gazing on
the ground, did not observe her.
One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man—whose long
white "pinner" was somewhat finer and cleaner than the wraps
of the others, and whose jacket underneath had a presentable
marketing aspect—the master-dairyman, of whom she was in
quest, his double character as a working milker and butter
maker here during six days, and on the seventh as a man in
shining broad-cloth in his family pew at church, being so
marked as to have inspired a rhyme:
Dairyman Dick
All the week:—
On Sundays Mister Richard Crick.
Seeing Tess standing at gaze he went across to her.
The majority of dairymen have a cross manner at milking time, but it
happened that Mr Crick was glad to get a new hand—for the
days were busy ones now—and he received her warmly;
inquiring for her mother and the rest of the family—(though
this as a matter of form merely, for in reality he had not
been aware of Mrs Durbeyfield's existence till apprised of
the fact by a brief business-letter about Tess).
"Oh—ay, as a lad I knowed your part o' the country very
well," he said terminatively. "Though I've never been there
since. And a aged woman of ninety that use to live nigh
here, but is dead and gone long ago, told me that a family
of some such name as yours in Blackmoor Vale came originally
from these parts, and that 'twere a old ancient race that
had all but perished off the earth—though the new
generations didn't know it. But, Lord, I took no notice of
the old woman's ramblings, not I."
"Oh no—it is nothing," said Tess.
Then the talk was of business only.
"You can milk 'em clean, my maidy? I don't want my cows
going azew at this time o' year."
She reassured him on that point, and he surveyed her up
and down. She had been staying indoors a good deal, and her
complexion had grown delicate.
"Quite sure you can stand it? 'Tis comfortable enough
here for rough folk; but we don't live in a cowcumber
frame."
She declared that she could stand it, and her zest and
willingness seemed to win him over.
"Well, I suppose you'll want a dish o' tay, or victuals
of some sort, hey? Not yet? Well, do as ye like about it.
But faith, if 'twas I, I should be as dry as a kex wi'
travelling so far."
"I'll begin milking now, to get my hand in," said Tess.
She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment—to the
surprise—indeed, slight contempt—of Dairyman Crick, to whose
mind it had apparently never occurred that milk was good as
a beverage.
"Oh, if ye can swaller that, be it so," he said
indifferently, while holding up the pail that she sipped
from. "'Tis what I hain't touched for years—not I. Rot the
stuff; it would lie in my innerds like lead. You can try
your hand upon she," he pursued, nodding to the nearest cow.
"Not but what she do milk rather hard. We've hard ones and
we've easy ones, like other folks. However, you'll find out
that soon enough."
When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was
really on her stool under the cow, and the milk was
squirting from her fists into the pail, she appeared to feel
that she really had laid a new foundation for her future.
The conviction bred serenity, her pulse slowed, and she was
able to look about her.
The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and
maids, the men operating on the hard-teated animals, the
maids on the kindlier natures. It was a large dairy. There
were nearly a hundred milchers under Crick's management, all
told; and of the herd the master-dairyman milked six or
eight with his own hands, unless away from home. These were
the cows that milked hardest of all; for his journey-milkmen
being more or less casually hired, he would not entrust this
half-dozen to their treatment, lest, from indifference, they
should not milk them fully; nor to the maids, lest they
should fail in the same way for lack of finger-grip; with
the result that in course of time the cows would "go
azew"—that is, dry up. It was not the loss for the moment
that made slack milking so serious, but that with the
decline of demand there came decline, and ultimately
cessation, of supply.
After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a
time no talk in the barton, and not a sound interfered with
the purr of the milk-jets into the numerous pails, except a
momentary exclamation to one or other of the beasts
requesting her to turn round or stand still. The only
movements were those of the milkers' hands up and down, and
the swing of the cows' tails. Thus they all worked on,
encompassed by the vast flat mead which extended to either
slope of the valley—a level landscape compounded of old
landscapes long forgotten, and, no doubt, differing in
character very greatly from the landscape they composed now.
"To my thinking," said the dairyman, rising suddenly from
a cow he had just finished off, snatching up his
three-legged stool in one hand and the pail in the other,
and moving on to the next hard-yielder in his vicinity, "to
my thinking, the cows don't gie down their milk to-day as
usual. Upon my life, if Winker do begin keeping back like
this, she'll not be worth going under by midsummer."
"'Tis because there's a new hand come among us," said
Jonathan Kail. "I've noticed such things afore."
"To be sure. It may be so. I didn't think o't."
"I've been told that it goes up into their horns at such
times," said a dairymaid.
"Well, as to going up into their horns," replied Dairyman
Crick dubiously, as though even witchcraft might be limited
by anatomical possibilities, "I couldn't say; I certainly
could not. But as nott cows will keep it back as well as the
horned ones, I don't quite agree to it. Do ye know that
riddle about the nott cows, Jonathan? Why do nott cows give
less milk in a year than horned?"
"I don't!" interposed the milkmaid, "Why do they?"
"Because there bain't so many of 'em," said the dairyman.
"Howsomever, these gam'sters do certainly keep back their
milk to-day. Folks, we must lift up a stave or two—that's
the only cure for't."
Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an
enticement to the cows when they showed signs of withholding
their usual yield; and the band of milkers at this request
burst into melody—in purely business-like tones, it is true,
and with no great spontaneity; the result, according to
their own belief, being a decided improvement during the
song's continuance. When they had gone through fourteen or
fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was
afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain
brimstone flames around him, one of the male milkers said—
"I wish singing on the stoop didn't use up so much of a
man's wind! You should get your harp, sir; not but what a
fiddle is best."
Tess, who had given ear to this, thought the words were
addressed to the dairyman, but she was wrong. A reply, in
the shape of "Why?" came as it were out of the belly of a
dun cow in the stalls; it had been spoken by a milker behind
the animal, whom she had not hitherto perceived.
"Oh yes; there's nothing like a fiddle," said the
dairyman. "Though I do think that bulls are more moved by a
tune than cows—at least that's my experience. Once there was
an old aged man over at Mellstock—William Dewy by name—one
of the family that used to do a good deal of business as
tranters over there—Jonathan, do ye mind?—I knowed the man
by sight as well as I know my own brother, in a manner of
speaking. Well, this man was a coming home along from a
wedding, where he had been playing his fiddle, one fine
moonlight night, and for shortness' sake he took a cut
across Forty-acres, a field lying that way, where a bull was
out to grass. The bull seed William, and took after him,
horns aground, begad; and though William runned his best,
and hadn't much drink in him (considering 'twas a
wedding, and the folks well off), he found he'd never reach
the fence and get over in time to save himself. Well, as a
last thought, he pulled out his fiddle as he runned, and
struck up a jig, turning to the bull, and backing towards
the corner. The bull softened down, and stood still, looking
hard at William Dewy, who fiddled on and on; till a sort of
a smile stole over the bull's face. But no sooner did
William stop his playing and turn to get over hedge than the
bull would stop his smiling and lower his horns towards the
seat of William's breeches. Well, William had to turn about
and play on, willy-nilly; and 'twas only three o'clock in
the world, and 'a knowed that nobody would come that way for
hours, and he so leery and tired that 'a didn't know what to
do. When he had scraped till about four o'clock he felt that
he verily would have to give over soon, and he said to
himself, 'There's only this last tune between me and eternal
welfare! Heaven save me, or I'm a done man.' Well, then he
called to mind how he'd seen the cattle kneel o' Christmas
Eves in the dead o' night. It was not Christmas Eve then,
but it came into his head to play a trick upon the bull. So
he broke into the 'Tivity Hymm, just as at Christmas
carol-singing; when, lo and behold, down went the bull on
his bended knees, in his ignorance, just as if 'twere the
true 'Tivity night and hour. As soon as his horned friend
were down, William turned, clinked off like a long-dog, and
jumped safe over hedge, before the praying bull had got on
his feet again to take after him. William used to say that
he'd seen a man look a fool a good many times, but never
such a fool as that bull looked when he found his pious
feelings had been played upon, and 'twas not Christmas Eve.
ᡖ Yes, William Dewy, that was the man's name; and I can tell
you to a foot where's he a-lying in Mellstock Churchyard at
this very moment—just between the second yew-tree and the
north aisle."
"It's a curious story; it carries us back to medieval
times, when faith was a living thing!"
The remark, singular for a dairy-yard, was murmured by
the voice behind the dun cow; but as nobody understood the
reference, no notice was taken, except that the narrator
seemed to think it might imply scepticism as to his tale.
"Well, 'tis quite true, sir, whether or no. I knowed the
man well."
"Oh yes; I have no doubt of it," said the person behind
the dun cow.
Tess's attention was thus attracted to the dairyman's
interlocutor, of whom she could see but the merest patch,
owing to his burying his head so persistently in the flank
of the milcher. She could not understand why he should be
addressed as "sir" even by the dairyman himself. But no
explanation was discernible; he remained under the cow long
enough to have milked three, uttering a private ejaculation
now and then, as if he could not get on.
"Take it gentle, sir; take it gentle," said the dairyman.
"'Tis knack, not strength, that does it."
"So I find," said the other, standing up at last and
stretching his arms. "I think I have finished her, however,
though she made my fingers ache."
Tess could then see him at full length. He wore the
ordinary white pinner and leather leggings of a dairy-farmer
when milking, and his boots were clogged with the mulch of
the yard; but this was all his local livery. Beneath it was
something educated, reserved, subtle, sad, differing.
But the details of his aspect were temporarily thrust
aside by the discovery that he was one whom she had seen
before. Such vicissitudes had Tess passed through since that
time that for a moment she could not remember where she had
met him; and then it flashed upon her that he was the
pedestrian who had joined in the club-dance at Marlott—the
passing stranger who had come she knew not whence, had
danced with others but not with her, and slightingly left
her, and gone on his way with his friends.
The flood of memories brought back by this revival of an
incident anterior to her troubles produced a momentary
dismay lest, recognizing her also, he should by some means
discover her story. But it passed away when she found no
sign of remembrance in him. She saw by degrees that since
their first and only encounter his mobile face had grown
more thoughtful, and had acquired a young man's shapely
moustache and beard—the latter of the palest straw colour
where it began upon his cheeks, and deepening to a warm
brown farther from its root. Under his linen milking-pinner
he wore a dark velveteen jacket, cord breeches and gaiters,
and a starched white shirt. Without the milking-gear nobody
could have guessed what he was. He might with equal
probability have been an eccentric landowner or a
gentlemanly ploughman. That he was but a novice at dairy
work she had realized in a moment, from the time he had
spent upon the milking of one cow.
Meanwhile many of the milkmaids had said to one another
of the newcomer, "How pretty she is!" with something of real
generosity and admiration, though with a half hope that the
auditors would qualify the assertion—which, strictly
speaking, they might have done, prettiness being an inexact
definition of what struck the eye in Tess. When the milking
was finished for the evening they straggled indoors, where
Mrs Crick, the dairyman's wife—who was too respectable to go
out milking herself, and wore a hot stuff gown in warm
weather because the dairymaids wore prints—was giving an eye
to the leads and things.
Only two or three of the maids, Tess learnt, slept in the
dairy-house besides herself, most of the helpers going to
their homes. She saw nothing at supper-time of the superior
milker who had commented on the story, and asked no
questions about him, the remainder of the evening being
occupied in arranging her place in the bed-chamber. It was a
large room over the milk-house, some thirty feet long; the
sleeping-cots of the other three indoor milkmaids being in
the same apartment. They were blooming young women, and,
except one, rather older than herself. By bedtime Tess was
thoroughly tired, and fell asleep immediately.
But one of the girls, who occupied an adjoining bed, was
more wakeful than Tess, and would insist upon relating to
the latter various particulars of the homestead into which
she had just entered. The girl's whispered words mingled
with the shades, and, to Tess's drowsy mind, they seemed to
be generated by the darkness in which they floated.
"Mr Angel Clare—he that is learning milking, and that
plays the harp—never says much to us. He is a pa'son's son,
and is too much taken up wi' his own thoughts to notice
girls. He is the dairyman's pupil—learning farming in all
its branches. He has learnt sheep-farming at another place,
and he's now mastering dairy-work. … Yes, he is quite the
gentleman-born. His father is the Reverent Mr Clare at
Emminster—a good many miles from here."
"Oh—I have heard of him," said her companion, now awake.
"A very earnest clergyman, is he not?"
"Yes—that he is—the earnestest man in all Wessex, they
say—the last of the old Low Church sort, they tell me—for
all about here be what they call High. All his sons, except
our Mr Clare, be made pa'sons too."
Tess had not at this hour the curiosity to ask why the
present Mr Clare was not made a parson like his brethren,
and gradually fell asleep again, the words of her informant
coming to her along with the smell of the cheeses in the
adjoining cheeseloft, and the measured dripping of the whey
from the wrings downstairs.
XVIII
Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a
distinct figure, but as an appreciative voice, a long regard
of fixed, abstracted eyes, and a mobility of mouth somewhat
too small and delicately lined for a man's, though with an
unexpectedly firm close of the lower lip now and then;
enough to do away with any inference of indecision.
Nevertheless, something nebulous, preoccupied, vague, in his
bearing and regard, marked him as one who probably had no
very definite aim or concern about his material future. Yet
as a lad people had said of him that he was one who might do
anything if he tried.
He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at
the other end of the county, and had arrived at Talbothays
Dairy as a six months' pupil, after going the round of some
other farms, his object being to acquire a practical skill
in the various processes of farming, with a view either to
the Colonies or the tenure of a home-farm, as circumstances
might decide.
His entry into the ranks of the agriculturists and
breeders was a step in the young man's career which had been
anticipated neither by himself nor by others.
Mr Clare the elder, whose first wife had died and left
him a daughter, married a second late in life. This lady had
somewhat unexpectedly brought him three sons, so that
between Angel, the youngest, and his father the Vicar there
seemed to be almost a missing generation. Of these boys the
aforesaid Angel, the child of his old age, was the only son
who had not taken a University degree, though he was the
single one of them whose early promise might have done full
justice to an academical training.
Some two or three years before Angel's appearance at the
Marlott dance, on a day when he had left school and was
pursuing his studies at home, a parcel came to the Vicarage
from the local bookseller's, directed to the Reverend James
Clare. The Vicar having opened it and found it to contain a
book, read a few pages; whereupon he jumped up from his seat
and went straight to the shop with the book under his arm.
"Why has this been sent to my house?" he asked
peremptorily, holding up the volume.
"It was ordered, sir."
"Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to
say."
The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.
"Oh, it has been misdirected, sir," he said. "It was
ordered by Mr Angel Clare, and should have been sent to
him."
Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck. He went home
pale and dejected, and called Angel into his study.
"Look into this book, my boy," he said. "What do you know
about it?"
"I ordered it," said Angel simply.
"What for?"
"To read."
"How can you think of reading it?"
"How can I? Why—it is a system of philosophy. There is no
more moral, or even religious, work published."
"Yes—moral enough; I don't deny that. But religious!—and
for you, who intend to be a minister of the Gospel!"
"Since you have alluded to the matter, father," said the
son, with anxious thought upon his face, "I should like to
say, once for all, that I should prefer not to take Orders.
I fear I could not conscientiously do so. I love the Church
as one loves a parent. I shall always have the warmest
affection for her. There is no institution for whose history
I have a deeper admiration; but I cannot honestly be
ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while she refuses
to liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive
theolatry."
It had never occurred to the straightforward and
simple-minded Vicar that one of his own flesh and blood
could come to this! He was stultified, shocked, paralysed.
And if Angel were not going to enter the Church, what was
the use of sending him to Cambridge? The University as a
step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man of fixed
ideas, a preface without a volume. He was a man not merely
religious, but devout; a firm believer—not as the phrase is
now elusively construed by theological thimble-riggers in
the Church and out of it, but in the old and ardent sense of
the Evangelical school: one who could
Indeed opine
That the Eternal and Divine
Did, eighteen centuries ago
In very truth…
Angel's father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.
"No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four (leave
alone the rest), taking it 'in the literal and grammatical
sense' as required by the Declaration; and, therefore, I
can't be a parson in the present state of affairs," said
Angel. "My whole instinct in matters of religion is towards
reconstruction; to quote your favorite Epistle to the
Hebrews, 'the removing of those things that are shaken, as
of things that are made, that those things which cannot be
shaken may remain.'"
His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill
to see him.
"What is the good of your mother and me economizing and
stinting ourselves to give you a University education, if it
is not to be used for the honour and glory of God?" his
father repeated.
"Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of
man, father."
Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to
Cambridge like his brothers. But the Vicar's view of that
seat of learning as a stepping-stone to Orders alone was
quite a family tradition; and so rooted was the idea in his
mind that perseverance began to appear to the sensitive son
akin to an intent to misappropriate a trust, and wrong the
pious heads of the household, who had been and were, as his
father had hinted, compelled to exercise much thrift to
carry out this uniform plan of education for the three young
men.
"I will do without Cambridge," said Angel at last. "I
feel that I have no right to go there in the circumstances."
The effects of this decisive debate were not long in
showing themselves. He spent years and years in desultory
studies, undertakings, and meditations; he began to evince
considerable indifference to social forms and observances.
The material distinctions of rank and wealth he increasingly
despised. Even the "good old family" (to use a favourite
phrase of a late local worthy) had no aroma for him unless
there were good new resolutions in its representatives. As a
balance to these austerities, when he went to live in London
to see what the world was like, and with a view to
practising a profession or business there, he was carried
off his head, and nearly entrapped by a woman much older
than himself, though luckily he escaped not greatly the
worse for the experience.
Early association with country solitudes had bred in him
an unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion to
modern town life, and shut him out from such success as he
might have aspired to by following a mundane calling in the
impracticability of the spiritual one. But something had to
be done; he had wasted many valuable years; and having an
acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life as a
Colonial farmer, it occurred to Angel that this might be a
lead in the right direction. Farming, either in the
Colonies, America, or at home—farming, at any rate, after
becoming well qualified for the business by a careful
apprenticeship—that was a vocation which would probably
afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he
valued even more than a competency—intellectual liberty.
So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at
Talbothays as a student of kine, and, as there were no
houses near at hand in which he could get a comfortable
lodging, a boarder at the dairyman's.
His room was an immense attic which ran the whole length
of the dairy-house. It could only be reached by a ladder
from the cheese-loft, and had been closed up for a long time
till he arrived and selected it as his retreat. Here Clare
had plenty of space, and could often be heard by the
dairy-folk pacing up and down when the household had gone to
rest. A portion was divided off at one end by a curtain,
behind which was his bed, the outer part being furnished as
a homely sitting-room.
At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal,
and strumming upon an old harp which he had bought at a
sale, saying when in a bitter humour that he might have to
get his living by it in the streets some day. But he soon
preferred to read human nature by taking his meals
downstairs in the general dining-kitchen, with the dairyman
and his wife, and the maids and men, who all together formed
a lively assembly; for though but few milking hands slept in
the house, several joined the family at meals. The longer
Clare resided here the less objection had he to his company,
and the more did he like to share quarters with them in
common.
Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in
their companionship. The conventional farm-folk of his
imagination—personified in the newspaper-press by the
pitiable dummy known as Hodge—were obliterated after a few
days' residence. At close quarters no Hodge was to be seen.
At first, it is true, when Clare's intelligence was fresh
from a contrasting society, these friends with whom he now
hobnobbed seemed a little strange. Sitting down as a level
member of the dairyman's household seemed at the outset an
undignified proceeding. The ideas, the modes, the
surroundings, appeared retrogressive and unmeaning. But with
living on there, day after day, the acute sojourner became
conscious of a new aspect in the spectacle. Without any
objective change whatever, variety had taken the place of
monotonousness. His host and his host's household, his men
and his maids, as they became intimately known to Clare,
began to differentiate themselves as in a chemical process.
The thought of Pascal's was brought home to him: "A
mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'il y a plus
d'hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de
différence entre les hommes." The typical and unvarying
Hodge ceased to exist. He had been disintegrated into a
number of varied fellow-creatures—beings of many minds,
beings infinite in difference; some happy, many serene, a
few depressed, one here and there bright even to genius,
some stupid, others wanton, others austere; some mutely
Miltonic, some potentially Cromwellian—into men who had
private views of each other, as he had of his friends; who
could applaud or condemn each other, amuse or sadden
themselves by the contemplation of each other's foibles or
vices; men every one of whom walked in his own individual
way the road to dusty death.
Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its
own sake, and for what it brought, apart from its bearing on
his own proposed career. Considering his position he became
wonderfully free from the chronic melancholy which is taking
hold of the civilized races with the decline of belief in a
beneficent Power. For the first time of late years he could
read as his musings inclined him, without any eye to
cramming for a profession, since the few farming handbooks
which he deemed it desirable to master occupied him but
little time.
He grew away from old associations, and saw something new
in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close
acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but
darkly—the seasons in their moods, morning and evening,
night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees,
waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of
inanimate things.
The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to render
a fire acceptable in the large room wherein they
breakfasted; and, by Mrs Crick's orders, who held that he
was too genteel to mess at their table, it was Angel Clare's
custom to sit in the yawning chimney-corner during the meal,
his cup-and-saucer and plate being placed on a hinged flap
at his elbow. The light from the long, wide, mullioned
window opposite shone in upon his nook, and, assisted by a
secondary light of cold blue quality which shone down the
chimney, enabled him to read there easily whenever disposed
to do so. Between Clare and the window was the table at
which his companions sat, their munching profiles rising
sharp against the panes; while to the side was the
milk-house door, through which were visible the rectangular
leads in rows, full to the brim with the morning's milk. At
the further end the great churn could be seen revolving, and
its slip-slopping heard—the moving power being discernible
through the window in the form of a spiritless horse walking
in a circle and driven by a boy.
For several days after Tess's arrival Clare, sitting
abstractedly reading from some book, periodical, or piece of
music just come by post, hardly noticed that she was present
at table. She talked so little, and the other maids talked
so much, that the babble did not strike him as possessing a
new note, and he was ever in the habit of neglecting the
particulars of an outward scene for the general impression.
One day, however, when he had been conning one of his
music-scores, and by force of imagination was hearing the
tune in his head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the
music-sheet rolled to the hearth. He looked at the fire of
logs, with its one flame pirouetting on the top in a dying
dance after the breakfast-cooking and boiling, and it seemed
to jig to his inward tune; also at the two chimney crooks
dangling down from the cotterel, or cross-bar, plumed with
soot, which quivered to the same melody; also at the
half-empty kettle whining an accompaniment. The conversation
at the table mixed in with his phantasmal orchestra till he
thought: "What a fluty voice one of those milkmaids has! I
suppose it is the new one."
Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.
She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his
long silence, his presence in the room was almost forgotten.
"I don't know about ghosts," she was saying; "but I do
know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies
when we are alive."
The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes
charged with serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork
(breakfasts were breakfasts here) planted erect on the
table, like the beginning of a gallows.
"What—really now? And is it so, maidy?" he said.
"A very easy way to feel 'em go," continued Tess, "is to
lie on the grass at night and look straight up at some big
bright star; and, by fixing your mind upon it, you will soon
find that you are hundreds and hundreds o' miles away from
your body, which you don't seem to want at all."
The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed
it on his wife.
"Now that's a rum thing, Christianer—hey? To think o' the
miles I've vamped o' starlight nights these last thirty
year, courting, or trading, or for doctor, or for nurse, and
yet never had the least notion o' that till now, or feeled
my soul rise so much as an inch above my shirt-collar."
The general attention being drawn to her, including that
of the dairyman's pupil, Tess flushed, and remarking
evasively that it was only a fancy, resumed her breakfast.
Clare continued to observe her. She soon finished her
eating, and having a consciousness that Clare was regarding
her, began to trace imaginary patterns on the tablecloth
with her forefinger with the constraint of a domestic animal
that perceives itself to be watched.
"What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that
milkmaid is!" he said to himself.
And then he seemed to discern in her something that was
familiar, something which carried him back into a joyous and
unforeseeing past, before the necessity of taking thought
had made the heavens gray. He concluded that he had beheld
her before; where he could not tell. A casual encounter
during some country ramble it certainly had been, and he was
not greatly curious about it. But the circumstance was
sufficient to lead him to select Tess in preference to the
other pretty milkmaids when he wished to contemplate
contiguous womankind.
XIX
In general the cows were milked as they presented
themselves, without fancy or choice. But certain cows will
show a fondness for a particular pair of hands, sometimes
carrying this predilection so far as to refuse to stand at
all except to their favourite, the pail of a stranger being
unceremoniously kicked over.
It was Dairyman Crick's rule to insist on breaking down
these partialities and aversions by constant interchange,
since otherwise, in the event of a milkman or maid going
away from the dairy, he was placed in a difficulty. The
maids' private aims, however, were the reverse of the
dairyman's rule, the daily selection by each damsel of the
eight or ten cows to which she had grown accustomed
rendering the operation on their willing udders surprisingly
easy and effortless.
Tess, like her compeers, soon discovered which of the
cows had a preference for her style of manipulation, and her
fingers having become delicate from the long domiciliary
imprisonments to which she had subjected herself at
intervals during the last two or three years, she would have
been glad to meet the milchers' views in this respect. Out
of the whole ninety-five there were eight in
particular—Dumpling, Fancy, Lofty, Mist, Old Pretty, Young
Pretty, Tidy, and Loud—who, though the teats of one or two
were as hard as carrots, gave down to her with a readiness
that made her work on them a mere touch of the fingers.
Knowing, however, the dairyman's wish, she endeavoured
conscientiously to take the animals just as they came,
expecting the very hard yielders which she could not yet
manage.
But she soon found a curious correspondence between the
ostensibly chance position of the cows and her wishes in
this matter, till she felt that their order could not be the
result of accident. The dairyman's pupil had lent a hand in
getting the cows together of late, and at the fifth or sixth
time she turned her eyes, as she rested against the cow,
full of sly inquiry upon him.
"Mr Clare, you have ranged the cows!" she said, blushing;
and in making the accusation, symptoms of a smile gently
lifted her upper lip in spite of her, so as to show the tips
of her teeth, the lower lip remaining severely still.
"Well, it makes no difference," said he. "You will always
be here to milk them."
"Do you think so? I hope I shall! But I don't
know."
She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that he,
unaware of her grave reasons for liking this seclusion,
might have mistaken her meaning. She had spoken so earnestly
to him, as if his presence were somehow a factor in her
wish. Her misgiving was such that at dusk, when the milking
was over, she walked in the garden alone, to continue her
regrets that she had disclosed to him her discovery of his
considerateness.
It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere
being in such delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that
inanimate objects seemed endowed with two or three senses,
if not five. There was no distinction between the near and
the far, and an auditor felt close to everything within the
horizon. The soundlessness impressed her as a positive
entity rather than as the mere negation of noise. It was
broken by the strumming of strings.
Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head.
Dim, flattened, constrained by their confinement, they had
never appealed to her as now, when they wandered in the
still air with a stark quality like that of nudity. To speak
absolutely, both instrument and execution were poor; but the
relative is all, and as she listened Tess, like a fascinated
bird, could not leave the spot. Far from leaving she drew up
towards the performer, keeping behind the hedge that he
might not guess her presence.
The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself
had been left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp
and rank with juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a
touch; and with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive
smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a
polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She
went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth,
gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that
were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and
slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky
blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks,
made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to
Clare, still unobserved of him.
Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The
exaltation which she had described as being producible at
will by gazing at a star came now without any determination
of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of the
second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes
through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating
pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness
of the garden the weeping of the garden's sensibility.
Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed
as if they would not close for intentness, and the waves of
colour mixed with the waves of sound.
The light which still shone was derived mainly from a
large hole in the western bank of cloud; it was like a piece
of day left behind by accident, dusk having closed in
elsewhere. He concluded his plaintive melody, a very simple
performance, demanding no great skill; and she waited,
thinking another might be begun. But, tired of playing, he
had desultorily come round the fence, and was rambling up
behind her. Tess, her cheeks on fire, moved away furtively,
as if hardly moving at all.
Angel, however, saw her light summer gown, and he spoke;
his low tones reaching her, though he was some distance off.
"What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?" said he.
"Are you afraid?"
"Oh no, sir—not of outdoor things; especially just now
when the apple-blooth is falling, and everything is so
green."
"But you have your indoor fears—eh?"
"Well—yes, sir."
"What of?"
"I couldn't quite say."
"The milk turning sour?"
"No."
"Life in general?"
"Yes, sir."
"Ah—so have I, very often. This hobble of being alive is
rather serious, don't you think so?"
"It is—now you put it that way."
"All the same, I shouldn't have expected a young girl
like you to see it so just yet. How is it you do?"
She maintained a hesitating silence.
"Come, Tess, tell me in confidence."
She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things
to her, and replied shyly—
"The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they?—that is,
seem as if they had. And the river says,—'Why do ye trouble
me with your looks?' And you seem to see numbers of
to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest
and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they
stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel
and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of me! Beware of
me!' … But you, sir, can raise up dreams with your
music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!"
He was surprised to find this young woman—who though but
a milkmaid had just that touch of rarity about her which
might make her the envied of her housemates—shaping such sad
imaginings. She was expressing in her own native
phrases—assisted a little by her Sixth Standard
training—feelings which might almost have been called those
of the age—the ache of modernism. The perception arrested
him less when he reflected that what are called advanced
ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in
definition—a more accurate expression, by words in logy
and ism, of sensations which men and women have
vaguely grasped for centuries.
Still, it was strange that they should have come to her
while yet so young; more than strange; it was impressive,
interesting, pathetic. Not guessing the cause, there was
nothing to remind him that experience is as to intensity,
and not as to duration. Tess's passing corporeal blight had
been her mental harvest.
Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of
clerical family and good education, and above physical want,
should look upon it as a mishap to be alive. For the unhappy
pilgrim herself there was very good reason. But how could
this admirable and poetic man ever have descended into the
Valley of Humiliation, have felt with the man of Uz—as she
herself had felt two or three years ago—"My soul chooseth
strangling and death rather than my life. I loathe it; I
would not live alway."
It was true that he was at present out of his class. But
she knew that was only because, like Peter the Great in a
shipwright's yard, he was studying what he wanted to know.
He did not milk cows because he was obliged to milk cows,
but because he was learning to be a rich and prosperous
dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder of cattle.
He would become an American or Australian Abraham,
commanding like a monarch his flocks and his herds, his
spotted and his ring-straked, his men-servants and his
maids. At times, nevertheless, it did seem unaccountable to
her that a decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young man
should have chosen deliberately to be a farmer, and not a
clergyman, like his father and brothers.
Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they
were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited
new knowledge of each other's character and mood without
attempting to pry into each other's history.
Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little
stroke of her nature, and to her one more of his. Tess was
trying to lead a repressed life, but she little divined the
strength of her own vitality.
At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an
intelligence rather than as a man. As such she compared him
with herself; and at every discovery of the abundance of his
illuminations, of the distance between her own modest mental
standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean altitude of his, she
became quite dejected, disheartened from all further effort
on her own part whatever.
He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually
mentioned something to her about pastoral life in ancient
Greece. She was gathering the buds called "lords and ladies"
from the bank while he spoke.
"Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?" he asked.
"Oh, 'tis only—about my own self," she said, with a frail
laugh of sadness, fitfully beginning to peel "a lady"
meanwhile. "Just a sense of what might have been with me! My
life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances!
When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and
thought, I feel what a nothing I am! I'm like the poor Queen
of Sheba who lived in the Bible. There is no more spirit in
me."
"Bless my soul, don't go troubling about that! Why," he
said with some enthusiasm, "I should be only too glad, my
dear Tess, to help you to anything in the way of history, or
any line of reading you would like to take up—"
"It is a lady again," interrupted she, holding out the
bud she had peeled.
"What?"
"I meant that there are always more ladies than lords
when you come to peel them."
"Never mind about the lords and ladies. Would you like to
take up any course of study—history, for example?"
"Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more
about it than I know already."
"Why not?"
"Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a
long row only—finding out that there is set down in some old
book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only
act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to
remember that your nature and your past doings have been
just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming
life and doings 'll be like thousands's and thousands'."
"What, really, then, you don't want to learn anything?"
"I shouldn't mind learning why—why the sun do shine on
the just and the unjust alike," she answered, with a slight
quaver in her voice. "But that's what books will not tell
me."
"Tess, fie for such bitterness!" Of course he spoke with
a conventional sense of duty only, for that sort of
wondering had not been unknown to himself in bygone days.
And as he looked at the unpracticed mouth and lips, he
thought that such a daughter of the soil could only have
caught up the sentiment by rote. She went on peeling the
lords and ladies till Clare, regarding for a moment the
wave-like curl of her lashes as they dropped with her bent
gaze on her soft cheek, lingeringly went away. When he was
gone she stood awhile, thoughtfully peeling the last bud;
and then, awakening from her reverie, flung it and all the
crowd of floral nobility impatiently on the ground, in an
ebullition of displeasure with herself for her niaiserie,
and with a quickening warmth in her heart of hearts.
How stupid he must think her! In an access of hunger for
his good opinion she bethought herself of what she had
latterly endeavoured to forget, so unpleasant had been its
issues—the identity of her family with that of the knightly
d'Urbervilles. Barren attribute as it was, disastrous as its
discovery had been in many ways to her, perhaps Mr Clare, as
a gentleman and a student of history, would respect her
sufficiently to forget her childish conduct with the lords
and ladies if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and
alabaster people in Kingsbere Church really represented her
own lineal forefathers; that she was no spurious
d'Urberville, compounded of money and ambition like those at
Trantridge, but true d'Urberville to the bone.
But, before venturing to make the revelation, dubious
Tess indirectly sounded the dairyman as to its possible
effect upon Mr Clare, by asking the former if Mr Clare had
any great respect for old county families when they had lost
all their money and land.
"Mr Clare," said the dairyman emphatically, "is one of
the most rebellest rozums you ever knowed—not a bit like the
rest of his family; and if there's one thing that he do hate
more than another 'tis the notion of what's called a' old
family. He says that it stands to reason that old families
have done their spurt of work in past days, and can't have
anything left in 'em now. There's the Billets and the
Drenkhards and the Greys and the St Quintins and the Hardys
and the Goulds, who used to own the lands for miles down
this valley; you could buy 'em all up now for an old song
a'most. Why, our little Retty Priddle here, you know, is one
of the Paridelles—the old family that used to own lots o'
the lands out by King's Hintock, now owned by the Earl o'
Wessex, afore even he or his was heard of. Well, Mr Clare
found this out, and spoke quite scornful to the poor girl
for days. 'Ah!' he says to her, 'you'll never make a good
dairymaid! All your skill was used up ages ago in Palestine,
and you must lie fallow for a thousand years to git strength
for more deeds!' A boy came here t'other day asking for a
job, and said his name was Matt, and when we asked him his
surname he said he'd never heard that 'a had any surname,
and when we asked why, he said he supposed his folks hadn't
been 'stablished long enough. 'Ah! you're the very boy I
want!' says Mr Clare, jumping up and shaking hands wi'en;
'I've great hopes of you;' and gave him half-a-crown. O no!
he can't stomach old families!"
After hearing this caricature of Clare's opinion poor
Tess was glad that she had not said a word in a weak moment
about her family—even though it was so unusually old almost
to have gone round the circle and become a new one. Besides,
another diary-girl was as good as she, it seemed, in that
respect. She held her tongue about the d'Urberville vault
and the Knight of the Conqueror whose name she bore. The
insight afforded into Clare's character suggested to her
that it was largely owing to her supposed untraditional
newness that she had won interest in his eyes.
XX
The season developed and matured. Another year's
instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes,
finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their
positions where only a year ago others had stood in their
place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic
particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and
stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless
streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible
jets and breathings.
Dairyman Crick's household of maids and men lived on
comfortably, placidly, even merrily. Their position was
perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale,
being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the
line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural
feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too
little of enough.
Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be
the one thing aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare
unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge
of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it. All the
while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as
surely as two streams in one vale.
Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she
was now, possibly never would be so happy again. She was,
for one thing, physically and mentally suited among these
new surroundings. The sapling which had rooted down to a
poisonous stratum on the spot of its sowing had been
transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and Clare also,
stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and
love; where no profundities have been reached; no
reflections have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does
this new current tend to carry me? What does it mean to my
future? How does it stand towards my past?"
Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as
yet—a rosy, warming apparition which had only just acquired
the attribute of persistence in his consciousness. So he
allowed his mind to be occupied with her, deeming his
preoccupation to be no more than a philosopher's regard of
an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting specimen of
womankind.
They met continually; they could not help it. They met
daily in that strange and solemn interval, the twilight of
the morning, in the violet or pink dawn; for it was
necessary to rise early, so very early, here. Milking was
done betimes; and before the milking came the skimming,
which began at a little past three. It usually fell to the
lot of some one or other of them to wake the rest, the first
being aroused by an alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest
arrival, and they soon discovered that she could be depended
upon not to sleep though the alarm as others did, this task
was thrust most frequently upon her. No sooner had the hour
of three struck and whizzed, than she left her room and ran
to the dairyman's door; then up the ladder to Angel's,
calling him in a loud whisper; then woke her
fellow-milkmaids. By the time that Tess was dressed Clare
was downstairs and out in the humid air. The remaining maids
and the dairyman usually gave themselves another turn on the
pillow, and did not appear till a quarter of an hour later.
The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray
half-tones of the day's close, though the degree of their
shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning, light
seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening
it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the
light which is the drowsy reverse.
Being so often—possibly not always by chance—the first
two persons to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to
themselves the first persons up of all the world. In these
early days of her residence here Tess did not skim, but went
out of doors at once after rising, where he was generally
awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light
which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feeling
of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim
inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a
dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an
almost regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that
preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed in
person as she was likely to be walking in the open air
within the boundaries of his horizon; very few in all
England. Fair women are usually asleep at mid-summer dawns.
She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.
The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked
along together to the spot where the cows lay often made him
think of the Resurrection hour. He little thought that the
Magdalen might be at his side. Whilst all the landscape was
in neutral shade his companion's face, which was the focus
of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a
sort of phosphorescence upon it. She looked ghostly, as if
she were merely a soul at large. In reality her face,
without appearing to do so, had caught the cold gleam of day
from the north-east; his own face, though he did not think
of it, wore the same aspect to her.
It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him
most deeply. She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary
essence of woman—a whole sex condensed into one typical
form. He called her Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful
names half teasingly, which she did not like because she did
not understand them.
"Call me Tess," she would say askance; and he did.
Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become
simply feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity
who could confer bliss to those of a being who craved it.
At these non-human hours they could get quite close to
the waterfowl. Herons came, with a great bold noise as of
opening doors and shutters, out of the boughs of a
plantation which they frequented at the side of the mead;
or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their
standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them
by moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal,
passionless wheel, like the turn of puppets by clockwork.
They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers,
woolly, level, and apparently no thicker than counterpanes,
spread about the meadows in detached remnants of small
extent. On the gray moisture of the grass were marks where
the cows had lain through the night—dark-green islands of
dry herbage the size of their carcasses, in the general sea
of dew. From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by
which the cow had rambled away to feed after getting up, at
the end of which trail they found her; the snoring puff from
her nostrils, when she recognized them, making an intenser
little fog of her own amid the prevailing one. Then they
drove the animals back to the barton, or sat down to milk
them on the spot, as the case might require.
Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the
meadows lay like a white sea, out of which the scattered
trees rose like dangerous rocks. Birds would soar through it
into the upper radiance, and hang on the wing sunning
themselves, or alight on the wet rails subdividing the mead,
which now shone like glass rods. Minute diamonds of moisture
from the mist hung, too, upon Tess's eyelashes, and drops
upon her hair, like seed pearls. When the day grew quite
strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover, Tess
then lost her strange and ethereal beauty; her teeth, lips,
and eyes scintillated in the sunbeams and she was again the
dazzlingly fair dairymaid only, who had to hold her own
against the other women of the world.
About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick's voice,
lecturing the non-resident milkers for arriving late, and
speaking sharply to old Deborah Fyander for not washing her
hands.
"For Heaven's sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb!
Upon my soul, if the London folk only knowed of thee and thy
slovenly ways, they'd swaller their milk and butter more
mincing than they do a'ready; and that's saying a good
deal."
The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and
Clare, in common with the rest, could hear the heavy
breakfast table dragged out from the wall in the kitchen by
Mrs Crick, this being the invariable preliminary to each
meal; the same horrible scrape accompanying its return
journey when the table had been cleared.
XXI
There was a great stir in the milk-house just after
breakfast. The churn revolved as usual, but the butter would
not come. Whenever this happened the dairy was paralyzed.
Squish, squash echoed the milk in the great cylinder, but
never arose the sound they waited for.
Dairyman Crick and his wife, the milkmaids Tess, Marian,
Retty Priddle, Izz Huett, and the married ones from the
cottages; also Mr Clare, Jonathan Kail, old Deborah, and the
rest, stood gazing hopelessly at the churn; and the boy who
kept the horse going outside put on moon-like eyes to show
his sense of the situation. Even the melancholy horse
himself seemed to look in at the window in inquiring despair
at each walk round.
"'Tis years since I went to Conjuror Trendle's son in
Egdon—years!" said the dairyman bitterly. "And he was
nothing to what his father had been. I have said fifty
times, if I have said once, that I don't believe in
en; though 'a do cast folks' waters very true. But I shall
have to go to 'n if he's alive. O yes, I shall have to go to
'n, if this sort of thing continnys!"
Even Mr Clare began to feel tragical at the dairyman's
desperation.
"Conjuror Fall, t'other side of Casterbridge, that they
used to call 'Wide-O', was a very good man when I was a
boy," said Jonathan Kail. "But he's rotten as touchwood by
now."
"My grandfather used to go to Conjuror Mynterne, out at
Owlscombe, and a clever man a' were, so I've heard grandf'er
say," continued Mr Crick. "But there's no such genuine folk
about nowadays!"
Mrs Crick's mind kept nearer to the matter in hand.
"Perhaps somebody in the house is in love," she said
tentatively. "I've heard tell in my younger days that that
will cause it. Why, Crick—that maid we had years ago, do ye
mind, and how the butter didn't come then—"
"Ah yes, yes!—but that isn't the rights o't. It had
nothing to do with the love-making. I can mind all about
it—'twas the damage to the churn."
He turned to Clare.
"Jack Dollop, a 'hore's-bird of a fellow we had here as
milker at one time, sir, courted a young woman over at
Mellstock, and deceived her as he had deceived many afore.
But he had another sort o' woman to reckon wi' this time,
and it was not the girl herself. One Holy Thursday of all
days in the almanack, we was here as we mid be now, only
there was no churning in hand, when we zid the girl's mother
coming up to the door, wi' a great brass-mounted umbrella in
her hand that would ha' felled an ox, and saying 'Do Jack
Dollop work here?—because I want him! I have a big bone to
pick with he, I can assure 'n!' And some way behind her
mother walked Jack's young woman, crying bitterly into her
handkercher. 'O Lard, here's a time!' said Jack, looking out
o' winder at 'em. 'She'll murder me! Where shall I get—where
shall I—? Don't tell her where I be!' And with that he
scrambled into the churn through the trap-door, and shut
himself inside, just as the young woman's mother busted into
the milk-house. 'The villain—where is he?' says she. 'I'll
claw his face for'n, let me only catch him!' Well, she
hunted about everywhere, ballyragging Jack by side and by
seam, Jack lying a'most stifled inside the churn, and the
poor maid—or young woman rather—standing at the door crying
her eyes out. I shall never forget it, never! 'Twould have
melted a marble stone! But she couldn't find him nowhere at
all."
The dairyman paused, and one or two words of comment came
from the listeners.
Dairyman Crick's stories often seemed to be ended when
they were not really so, and strangers were betrayed into
premature interjections of finality; though old friends knew
better. The narrator went on—
"Well, how the old woman should have had the wit to guess
it I could never tell, but she found out that he was inside
that there churn. Without saying a word she took hold of the
winch (it was turned by handpower then), and round she swung
him, and Jack began to flop about inside. 'O Lard! stop the
churn! let me out!' says he, popping out his head. 'I shall
be churned into a pummy!' (He was a cowardly chap in his
heart, as such men mostly be). 'Not till ye make amends for
ravaging her virgin innocence!' says the old woman. 'Stop
the churn you old witch!' screams he. 'You call me old
witch, do ye, you deceiver!' says she, 'when ye ought to ha'
been calling me mother-law these last five months!' And on
went the churn, and Jack's bones rattled round again. Well,
none of us ventured to interfere; and at last 'a promised to
make it right wi' her. 'Yes—I'll be as good as my word!' he
said. And so it ended that day."
While the listeners were smiling their comments there was
a quick movement behind their backs, and they looked round.
Tess, pale-faced, had gone to the door.
"How warm 'tis to-day!" she said, almost inaudibly.
It was warm, and none of them connected her withdrawal
with the reminiscences of the dairyman. He went forward and
opened the door for her, saying with tender raillery—
"Why, maidy" (he frequently, with unconscious irony, gave
her this pet name), "the prettiest milker I've got in my
dairy; you mustn't get so fagged as this at the first breath
of summer weather, or we shall be finely put to for want of
'ee by dog-days, shan't we, Mr Clare?"
"I was faint—and—I think I am better out o' doors," she
said mechanically; and disappeared outside.
Fortunately for her the milk in the revolving churn at
that moment changed its squashing for a decided flick-flack.
"'Tis coming!" cried Mrs Crick, and the attention of all
was called off from Tess.
That fair sufferer soon recovered herself externally; but
she remained much depressed all the afternoon. When the
evening milking was done she did not care to be with the
rest of them, and went out of doors, wandering along she
knew not whither. She was wretched—O so wretched—at the
perception that to her companions the dairyman's story had
been rather a humorous narration than otherwise; none of
them but herself seemed to see the sorrow of it; to a
certainty, not one knew how cruelly it touched the tender
place in her experience. The evening sun was now ugly to
her, like a great inflamed wound in the sky. Only a solitary
cracked-voice reed-sparrow greeted her from the bushes by
the river, in a sad, machine-made tone, resembling that of a
past friend whose friendship she had outworn.
In these long June days the milkmaids, and, indeed, most
of the household, went to bed at sunset or sooner, the
morning work before milking being so early and heavy at a
time of full pails. Tess usually accompanied her fellows
upstairs. To-night, however, she was the first to go to
their common chamber; and she had dozed when the other girls
came in. She saw them undressing in the orange light of the
vanished sun, which flushed their forms with its colour; she
dozed again, but she was reawakened by their voices, and
quietly turned her eyes towards them.
Neither of her three chamber-companions had got into bed.
They were standing in a group, in their nightgowns,
barefooted, at the window, the last red rays of the west
still warming their faces and necks and the walls around
them. All were watching somebody in the garden with deep
interest, their three faces close together: a jovial and
round one, a pale one with dark hair, and a fair one whose
tresses were auburn.
"Don't push! You can see as well as I," said Retty, the
auburn-haired and youngest girl, without removing her eyes
from the window.
"'Tis no use for you to be in love with him any more than
me, Retty Priddle," said jolly-faced Marian, the eldest,
slily. "His thoughts be of other cheeks than thine!"
Retty Priddle still looked, and the others looked again.
"There he is again!" cried Izz Huett, the pale girl with
dark damp hair and keenly cut lips.
"You needn't say anything, Izz," answered Retty. "For I
zid you kissing his shade."
"What did you see her doing?" asked Marian.
"Why—he was standing over the whey-tub to let off the
whey, and the shade of his face came upon the wall behind,
close to Izz, who was standing there filling a vat. She put
her mouth against the wall and kissed the shade of his
mouth; I zid her, though he didn't."
"O Izz Huett!" said Marian.
A rosy spot came into the middle of Izz Huett's cheek.
"Well, there was no harm in it," she declared, with
attempted coolness. "And if I be in love wi'en, so is Retty,
too; and so be you, Marian, come to that."
Marian's full face could not blush past its chronic
pinkness.
"I!" she said. "What a tale! Ah, there he is again! Dear
eyes—dear face—dear Mr Clare!"
"There—you've owned it!"
"So have you—so have we all," said Marian, with the dry
frankness of complete indifference to opinion. "It is silly
to pretend otherwise amongst ourselves, though we need not
own it to other folks. I would just marry 'n to-morrow!"
"So would I—and more," murmured Izz Huett.
"And I too," whispered the more timid Retty.
The listener grew warm.
"We can't all marry him," said Izz.
"We shan't, either of us; which is worse still," said the
eldest. "There he is again!"
They all three blew him a silent kiss.
"Why?" asked Retty quickly.
"Because he likes Tess Durbeyfield best," said Marian,
lowering her voice. "I have watched him every day, and have
found it out."
There was a reflective silence.
"But she don't care anything for 'n?" at length breathed
Retty.
"Well—I sometimes think that too."
"But how silly all this is!" said Izz Huett impatiently.
"Of course he won't marry any one of us, or Tess either—a
gentleman's son, who's going to be a great landowner and
farmer abroad! More likely to ask us to come wi'en as
farm-hands at so much a year!"
One sighed, and another sighed, and Marian's plump figure
sighed biggest of all. Somebody in bed hard by sighed too.
Tears came into the eyes of Retty Priddle, the pretty
red-haired youngest—the last bud of the Paridelles, so
important in the county annals. They watched silently a
little longer, their three faces still close together as
before, and the triple hues of their hair mingling. But the
unconscious Mr Clare had gone indoors, and they saw him no
more; and, the shades beginning to deepen, they crept into
their beds. In a few minutes they heard him ascend the
ladder to his own room. Marian was soon snoring, but Izz did
not drop into forgetfulness for a long time. Retty Priddle
cried herself to sleep.
The deeper-passioned Tess was very far from sleeping even
then. This conversation was another of the bitter pills she
had been obliged to swallow that day. Scarce the least
feeling of jealousy arose in her breast. For that matter she
knew herself to have the preference. Being more finely
formed, better educated, and, though the youngest except
Retty, more woman than either, she perceived that only the
slightest ordinary care was necessary for holding her own in
Angel Clare's heart against these her candid friends. But
the grave question was, ought she to do this? There was, to
be sure, hardly a ghost of a chance for either of them, in a
serious sense; but there was, or had been, a chance of one
or the other inspiring him with a passing fancy for her, and
enjoying the pleasure of his attentions while he stayed
here. Such unequal attachments had led to marriage; and she
had heard from Mrs Crick that Mr Clare had one day asked, in
a laughing way, what would be the use of his marrying a fine
lady, and all the while ten thousand acres of Colonial
pasture to feed, and cattle to rear, and corn to reap. A
farm-woman would be the only sensible kind of wife for him.
But whether Mr Clare had spoken seriously or not, why should
she, who could never conscientiously allow any man to marry
her now, and who had religiously determined that she never
would be tempted to do so, draw off Mr Clare's attention
from other women, for the brief happiness of sunning herself
in his eyes while he remained at Talbothays?
XXII
They came downstairs yawning next morning; but skimming
and milking were proceeded with as usual, and they went
indoors to breakfast. Dairyman Crick was discovered stamping
about the house. He had received a letter, in which a
customer had complained that the butter had a twang.
"And begad, so 't have!" said the dairyman, who held in
his left hand a wooden slice on which a lump of butter was
stuck. "Yes—taste for yourself!"
Several of them gathered round him; and Mr Clare tasted,
Tess tasted, also the other indoor milkmaids, one or two of
the milking-men, and last of all Mrs Crick, who came out
from the waiting breakfast-table. There certainly was a
twang.
The dairyman, who had thrown himself into abstraction to
better realize the taste, and so divine the particular
species of noxious weed to which it appertained, suddenly
exclaimed—
"'Tis garlic! and I thought there wasn't a blade left in
that mead!"
Then all the old hands remembered that a certain dry
mead, into which a few of the cows had been admitted of
late, had, in years gone by, spoilt the butter in the same
way. The dairyman had not recognized the taste at that time,
and thought the butter bewitched.
"We must overhaul that mead," he resumed; "this mustn't
continny!"
All having armed themselves with old pointed knives, they
went out together. As the inimical plant could only be
present in very microscopic dimensions to have escaped
ordinary observation, to find it seemed rather a hopeless
attempt in the stretch of rich grass before them. However,
they formed themselves into line, all assisting, owing to
the importance of the search; the dairyman at the upper end
with Mr Clare, who had volunteered to help; then Tess,
Marian, Izz Huett, and Retty; then Bill Lewell, Jonathan,
and the married dairywomen—Beck Knibbs, with her wooly black
hair and rolling eyes; and flaxen Frances, consumptive from
the winter damps of the water-meads—who lived in their
respective cottages.
With eyes fixed upon the ground they crept slowly across
a strip of the field, returning a little further down in
such a manner that, when they should have finished, not a
single inch of the pasture but would have fallen under the
eye of some one of them. It was a most tedious business, not
more than half a dozen shoots of garlic being discoverable
in the whole field; yet such was the herb's pungency that
probably one bite of it by one cow had been sufficient to
season the whole dairy's produce for the day.
Differing one from another in natures and moods so
greatly as they did, they yet formed, bending, a curiously
uniform row—automatic, noiseless; and an alien observer
passing down the neighbouring lane might well have been
excused for massing them as "Hodge". As they crept along,
stooping low to discern the plant, a soft yellow gleam was
reflected from the buttercups into their shaded faces,
giving them an elfish, moonlit aspect, though the sun was
pouring upon their backs in all the strength of noon.
Angel Clare, who communistically stuck to his rule of
taking part with the rest in everything, glanced up now and
then. It was not, of course, by accident that he walked next
to Tess.
"Well, how are you?" he murmured.
"Very well, thank you, sir," she replied demurely.
As they had been discussing a score of personal matters
only half-an-hour before, the introductory style seemed a
little superfluous. But they got no further in speech just
then. They crept and crept, the hem of her petticoat just
touching his gaiter, and his elbow sometimes brushing hers.
At last the dairyman, who came next, could stand it no
longer.
"Upon my soul and body, this here stooping do fairly make
my back open and shut!" he exclaimed, straightening himself
slowly with an excruciated look till quite upright. "And
you, maidy Tess, you wasn't well a day or two ago—this will
make your head ache finely! Don't do any more, if you feel
fainty; leave the rest to finish it."
Dairyman Crick withdrew, and Tess dropped behind. Mr
Clare also stepped out of line, and began privateering about
for the weed. When she found him near her, her very tension
at what she had heard the night before made her the first to
speak.
"Don't they look pretty?" she said.
"Who?"
"Izzy Huett and Retty."
Tess had moodily decided that either of these maidens
would make a good farmer's wife, and that she ought to
recommend them, and obscure her own wretched charms.
"Pretty? Well, yes—they are pretty girls—fresh looking. I
have often thought so."
"Though, poor dears, prettiness won't last long!"
"O no, unfortunately."
"They are excellent dairywomen."
"Yes: though not better than you."
"They skim better than I."
"Do they?"
Clare remained observing them—not without their observing
him.
"She is colouring up," continued Tess heroically.
"Who?"
"Retty Priddle."
"Oh! Why it that?"
"Because you are looking at her."
Self-sacrificing as her mood might be, Tess could not
well go further and cry, "Marry one of them, if you really
do want a dairywoman and not a lady; and don't think of
marrying me!" She followed Dairyman Crick, and had the
mournful satisfaction of seeing that Clare remained behind.
From this day she forced herself to take pains to avoid
him—never allowing herself, as formerly, to remain long in
his company, even if their juxtaposition were purely
accidental. She gave the other three every chance.
Tess was woman enough to realize from their avowals to
herself that Angel Clare had the honour of all the
dairymaids in his keeping, and her perception of his care to
avoid compromising the happiness of either in the least
degree bred a tender respect in Tess for what she deemed,
rightly or wrongly, the self-controlling sense of duty shown
by him, a quality which she had never expected to find in
one of the opposite sex, and in the absence of which more
than one of the simple hearts who were his house-mates might
have gone weeping on her pilgrimage.
XXIII
The hot weather of July had crept upon them unawares, and
the atmosphere of the flat vale hung heavy as an opiate over
the dairy-folk, the cows, and the trees. Hot steaming rains
fell frequently, making the grass where the cows fed yet
more rank, and hindering the late hay-making in the other
meads.
It was Sunday morning; the milking was done; the outdoor
milkers had gone home. Tess and the other three were
dressing themselves rapidly, the whole bevy having agreed to
go together to Mellstock Church, which lay some three or
four miles distant from the dairy-house. She had now been
two months at Talbothays, and this was her first excursion.
All the preceding afternoon and night heavy thunderstorms
had hissed down upon the meads, and washed some of the hay
into the river; but this morning the sun shone out all the
more brilliantly for the deluge, and the air was balmy and
clear.
The crooked lane leading from their own parish to
Mellstock ran along the lowest levels in a portion of its
length, and when the girls reached the most depressed spot
they found that the result of the rain had been to flood the
lane over-shoe to a distance of some fifty yards. This would
have been no serious hindrance on a week-day; they would
have clicked through it in their high patterns and boots
quite unconcerned; but on this day of vanity, this
Sun's-day, when flesh went forth to coquet with flesh while
hypocritically affecting business with spiritual things; on
this occasion for wearing their white stockings and thin
shoes, and their pink, white, and lilac gowns, on which
every mud spot would be visible, the pool was an awkward
impediment. They could hear the church-bell calling—as yet
nearly a mile off.
"Who would have expected such a rise in the river in
summer-time!" said Marian, from the top of the roadside bank
on which they had climbed, and were maintaining a precarious
footing in the hope of creeping along its slope till they
were past the pool.
"We can't get there anyhow, without walking right through
it, or else going round the Turnpike way; and that would
make us so very late!" said Retty, pausing hopelessly.
"And I do colour up so hot, walking into church late, and
all the people staring round," said Marian, "that I hardly
cool down again till we get into the
That-it-may-please-Thees."
While they stood clinging to the bank they heard a
splashing round the bend of the road, and presently appeared
Angel Clare, advancing along the lane towards them through
the water.
Four hearts gave a big throb simultaneously.
His aspect was probably as un-Sabbatarian a one as a
dogmatic parson's son often presented; his attire being his
dairy clothes, long wading boots, a cabbage-leaf inside his
hat to keep his head cool, with a thistle-spud to finish him
off. "He's not going to church," said Marian.
"No—I wish he was!" murmured Tess.
Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly (to adopt the safe
phrase of evasive controversialists), preferred sermons in
stones to sermons in churches and chapels on fine summer
days. This morning, moreover, he had gone out to see if the
damage to the hay by the flood was considerable or not. On
his walk he observed the girls from a long distance, though
they had been so occupied with their difficulties of passage
as not to notice him. He knew that the water had risen at
that spot, and that it would quite check their progress. So
he had hastened on, with a dim idea of how he could help
them—one of them in particular.
The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming
in their light summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank
like pigeons on a roof-slope, that he stopped a moment to
regard them before coming close. Their gauzy skirts had
brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies
which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent
tissue as in an aviary. Angel's eye at last fell upon Tess,
the hindmost of the four; she, being full of suppressed
laughter at their dilemma, could not help meeting his glance
radiantly.
He came beneath them in the water, which did not rise
over his long boots; and stood looking at the entrapped
flies and butterflies.
"Are you trying to get to church?" he said to Marian, who
was in front, including the next two in his remark, but
avoiding Tess.
"Yes, sir; and 'tis getting late; and my colour do come
up so—"
"I'll carry you through the pool—every Jill of you."
The whole four flushed as if one heart beat through them.
"I think you can't, sir," said Marian.
"It is the only way for you to get past. Stand still.
Nonsense—you are not too heavy! I'd carry you all four
together. Now, Marian, attend," he continued, "and put your
arms round my shoulders, so. Now! Hold on. That's well
done."
Marian had lowered herself upon his arm and shoulder as
directed, and Angel strode off with her, his slim figure, as
viewed from behind, looking like the mere stem to the great
nosegay suggested by hers. They disappeared round the curve
of the road, and only his sousing footsteps and the top
ribbon of Marian's bonnet told where they were. In a few
minutes he reappeared. Izz Huett was the next in order upon
the bank.
"Here he comes," she murmured, and they could hear that
her lips were dry with emotion. "And I have to put my arms
round his neck and look into his face as Marian did."
"There's nothing in that," said Tess quickly.
"There's a time for everything," continued Izz,
unheeding. "A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from
embracing; the first is now going to be mine."
"Fie—it is Scripture, Izz!"
"Yes," said Izz, "I've always a' ear at church for pretty
verses."
Angel Clare, to whom three-quarters of this performance
was a commonplace act of kindness, now approached Izz. She
quietly and dreamily lowered herself into his arms, and
Angel methodically marched off with her. When he was heard
returning for the third time Retty's throbbing heart could
be almost seen to shake her. He went up to the red-haired
girl, and while he was seizing her he glanced at Tess. His
lips could not have pronounced more plainly, "It will soon
be you and I." Her comprehension appeared in her face; she
could not help it. There was an understanding between them.
Poor little Retty, though by far the lightest weight, was
the most troublesome of Clare's burdens. Marian had been
like a sack of meal, a dead weight of plumpness under which
he has literally staggered. Izz had ridden sensibly and
calmly. Retty was a bunch of hysterics.
However, he got through with the disquieted creature,
deposited her, and returned. Tess could see over the hedge
the distant three in a group, standing as he had placed them
on the next rising ground. It was now her turn. She was
embarrassed to discover that excitement at the proximity of
Mr Clare's breath and eyes, which she had contemned in her
companions, was intensified in herself; and as if fearful of
betraying her secret, she paltered with him at the last
moment.
"I may be able to clim' along the bank perhaps—I can
clim' better than they. You must be so tired, Mr Clare!"
"No, no, Tess," said he quickly. And almost before she
was aware, she was seated in his arms and resting against
his shoulder.
"Three Leahs to get one Rachel," he whispered.
"They are better women than I," she replied,
magnanimously sticking to her resolve.
"Not to me," said Angel.
He saw her grow warm at this; and they went some steps in
silence.
"I hope I am not too heavy?" she said timidly.
"O no. You should lift Marian! Such a lump. You are like
an undulating billow warmed by the sun. And all this fluff
of muslin about you is the froth."
"It is very pretty—if I seem like that to you."
"Do you know that I have undergone three-quarters of this
labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?"
"No."
"I did not expect such an event to-day."
"Nor I… The water came up so sudden."
That the rise in the water was what she understood him to
refer to, the state of breathing belied. Clare stood still
and inclinced his face towards hers.
"O Tessy!" he exclaimed.
The girl's cheeks burned to the breeze, and she could not
look into his eyes for her emotion. It reminded Angel that
he was somewhat unfairly taking advantage of an accidental
position; and he went no further with it. No definite words
of love had crossed their lips as yet, and suspension at
this point was desirable now. However, he walked slowly, to
make the remainder of the distance as long as possible; but
at last they came to the bend, and the rest of their
progress was in full view of the other three. The dry land
was reached, and he set her down.
Her friends were looking with round thoughtful eyes at
her and him, and she could see that they had been talking of
her. He hastily bade them farewell, and splashed back along
the stretch of submerged road.
The four moved on together as before, till Marian broke
the silence by saying—
"No—in all truth; we have no chance against her!" She
looked joylessly at Tess.
"What do you mean?" asked the latter.
"He likes 'ee best—the very best! We could see it as he
brought 'ee. He would have kissed 'ee, if you had encouraged
him to do it, ever so little."
"No, no," said she.
The gaiety with which they had set out had somehow
vanished; and yet there was no enmity or malice between
them. They were generous young souls; they had been reared
in the lonely country nooks where fatalism is a strong
sentiment, and they did not blame her. Such supplanting was
to be.
Tess's heart ached. There was no concealing from herself
the fact that she loved Angel Clare, perhaps all the more
passionately from knowing that the others had also lost
their hearts to him. There is contagion in this sentiment,
especially among women. And yet that same hungry nature had
fought against this, but too feebly, and the natural result
had followed.
"I will never stand in your way, nor in the way of either
of you!" she declared to Retty that night in the bedroom
(her tears running down). "I can't help this, my dear! I
don't think marrying is in his mind at all; but if he were
ever to ask me I should refuse him, as I should refuse any
man."
"Oh! would you? Why?" said wondering Retty.
"It cannot be! But I will be plain. Putting myself quite
on one side, I don't think he will choose either of you."
"I have never expected it—thought of it!" moaned Retty.
"But O! I wish I was dead!"
The poor child, torn by a feeling which she hardly
understood, turned to the other two girls who came upstairs
just then.
"We be friends with her again," she said to them. "She
thinks no more of his choosing her than we do."
So the reserve went off, and they were confiding and
warm.
"I don't seem to care what I do now," said Marian, whose
mood was turned to its lowest bass. "I was going to marry a
dairyman at Stickleford, who's asked me twice; but—my soul—I
would put an end to myself rather'n be his wife now! Why
don't ye speak, Izz?"
"To confess, then," murmured Izz, "I made sure to-day
that he was going to kiss me as he held me; and I lay still
against his breast, hoping and hoping, and never moved at
all. But he did not. I don't like biding here at Talbothays
any longer! I shall go hwome."
The air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with
the hopeless passion of the girls. They writhed feverishly
under the oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them by
cruel Nature's law—an emotion which they had neither
expected nor desired. The incident of the day had fanned the
flame that was burning the inside of their hearts out, and
the torture was almost more than they could endure. The
differences which distinguished them as individuals were
abstracted by this passion, and each was but portion of one
organism called sex. There was so much frankness and so
little jealousy because there was no hope. Each one was a
girl of fair common sense, and she did not delude herself
with any vain conceits, or deny her love, or give herself
airs, in the idea of outshining the others. The full
recognition of the futility of their infatuation, from a
social point of view; its purposeless beginning; its
self-bounded outlook; its lack of everything to justify its
existence in the eye of civilization (while lacking nothing
in the eye of Nature); the one fact that it did exist,
ecstasizing them to a killing joy—all this imparted to them
a resignation, a dignity, which a practical and sordid
expectation of winning him as a husband would have
destroyed.
They tossed and turned on their little beds, and the
cheese-wring dripped monotonously downstairs.
"B' you awake, Tess?" whispered one, half-an-hour later.
It was Izz Huett's voice.
Tess replied in the affirmative, whereupon also Retty and
Marian suddenly flung the bedclothes off them, and sighed—
"So be we!"
"I wonder what she is like—the lady they say his family
have looked out for him!"
"I wonder," said Izz.
"Some lady looked out for him?" gasped Tess, starting. "I
have never heard o' that!"
"O yes—'tis whispered; a young lady of his own rank,
chosen by his family; a Doctor of Divinity's daughter near
his father's parish of Emminster; he don't much care for
her, they say. But he is sure to marry her."
They had heard so very little of this; yet it was enough
to build up wretched dolorous dreams upon, there in the
shade of the night. They pictured all the details of his
being won round to consent, of the wedding preparations, of
the bride's happiness, of her dress and veil, of her
blissful home with him, when oblivion would have fallen upon
themselves as far as he and their love were concerned. Thus
they talked, and ached, and wept till sleep charmed their
sorrow away.
After this disclosure Tess nourished no further foolish
thought that there lurked any grave and deliberate import in
Clare's attentions to her. It was a passing summer love of
her face, for love's own temporary sake—nothing more. And
the thorny crown of this sad conception was that she whom he
really did prefer in a cursory way to the rest, she who knew
herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more
beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less
worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored.
XXIV
Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom
Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be
heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was impossible
that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate. The
ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by their
surroundings.
July passed over their heads, and the Thermidorean
weather which came in its wake seemed an effort on the part
of Nature to match the state of hearts at Talbothays Dairy.
The air of the place, so fresh in the spring and early
summer, was stagnant and enervating now. Its heavy scents
weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying
in a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of
the pastures, but there was still bright green herbage here
where the watercourses purled. And as Clare was oppressed by
the outward heats, so was he burdened inwardly by waxing
fervour of passion for the soft and silent Tess.
The rains having passed, the uplands were dry. The wheels
of the dairyman's spring-cart, as he sped home from market,
licked up the pulverized surface of the highway, and were
followed by white ribands of dust, as if they had set a thin
powder-train on fire. The cows jumped wildly over the
five-barred barton-gate, maddened by the gad-fly; Dairyman
Crick kept his shirt-sleeves permanently rolled up from
Monday to Saturday; open windows had no effect in
ventilation without open doors, and in the dairy-garden the
blackbirds and thrushes crept about under the
currant-bushes, rather in the manner of quadrupeds than of
winged creatures. The flies in the kitchen were lazy,
teasing, and familiar, crawling about in the unwonted
places, on the floors, into drawers, and over the backs of
the milkmaids' hands. Conversations were concerning
sunstroke; while butter-making, and still more
butter-keeping, was a despair.
They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and
convenience, without driving in the cows. During the day the
animals obsequiously followed the shadow of the smallest
tree as it moved round the stem with the diurnal roll; and
when the milkers came they could hardly stand still for the
flies.
On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows
chanced to stand apart from the general herd, behind the
corner of a hedge, among them being Dumpling and Old Pretty,
who loved Tess's hands above those of any other maid. When
she rose from her stool under a finished cow, Angel Clare,
who had been observing her for some time, asked her if she
would take the aforesaid creatures next. She silently
assented, and with her stool at arm's length, and the pail
against her knee, went round to where they stood. Soon the
sound of Old Pretty's milk fizzing into the pail came
through the hedge, and then Angel felt inclined to go round
the corner also, to finish off a hard-yielding milcher who
had strayed there, he being now as capable of this as the
dairyman himself.
All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug
their foreheads into the cows and gazed into the pail. But a
few—mainly the younger ones—rested their heads sideways.
This was Tess Durbeyfield's habit, her temple pressing the
milcher's flank, her eyes fixed on the far end of the meadow
with the quiet of one lost in meditation. She was milking
Old Pretty thus, and the sun chancing to be on the
milking-side, it shone flat upon her pink-gowned form and
her white curtain-bonnet, and upon her profile, rendering it
keen as a cameo cut from the dun background of the cow.
She did not know that Clare had followed her round, and
that he sat under his cow watching her. The stillness of her
head and features was remarkable: she might have been in a
trance, her eyes open, yet unseeing. Nothing in the picture
moved but Old Pretty's tail and Tess's pink hands, the
latter so gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation only, as if
they were obeying a reflex stimulus, like a beating heart.
How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was
nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real
warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this
culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen
before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin
and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing
to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the
least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of
her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He
had never before seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced
upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old
Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he,
as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no—they
were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon
the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was
that which gave the humanity.
Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times
that he could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as
they again confronted him, clothed with colour and life,
they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through
his nerves, which well nigh produced a qualm; and actually
produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a
prosaic sneeze.
She then became conscious that he was observing her; but
she would not show it by any change of position, though the
curious dream-like fixity disappeared, and a close eye might
easily have discerned that the rosiness of her face
deepened, and then faded till only a tinge of it was left.
The influence that had passed into Clare like an
excitation from the sky did not die down. Resolutions,
reticences, prudences, fears, fell back like a defeated
battalion. He jumped up from his seat, and, leaving his pail
to be kicked over if the milcher had such a mind, went
quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and, kneeling down
beside her, clasped her in his arms.
Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to
his embrace with unreflecting inevitableness. Having seen
that it was really her lover who had advanced, and no one
else, her lips parted, and she sank upon him in her
momentary joy, with something very like an ecstatic cry.
He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting
mouth, but he checked himself, for tender conscience' sake.
"Forgive me, Tess dear!" he whispered. "I ought to have
asked. I—did not know what I was doing. I do not mean it as
a liberty. I am devoted to you, Tessy, dearest, in all
sincerity!"
Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled; and
seeing two people crouching under her where, by immemorial
custom, there should have been only one, lifted her hind leg
crossly.
"She is angry—she doesn't know what we mean—she'll kick
over the milk!" exclaimed Tess, gently striving to free
herself, her eyes concerned with the quadruped's actions,
her heart more deeply concerned with herself and Clare.
She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together,
his arm still encircling her. Tess's eyes, fixed on
distance, began to fill.
"Why do you cry, my darling?" he said.
"O—I don't know!" she murmured.
As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in
she became agitated and tried to withdraw.
"Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last," said
he, with a curious sigh of desperation, signifying
unconsciously that his heart had outrun his judgement. "That
I—love you dearly and truly I need not say. But I—it shall
go no further now—it distresses you—I am as surprised as you
are. You will not think I have presumed upon your
defencelessness—been too quick and unreflecting, will you?"
"N'—I can't tell."
He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or
two the milking of each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the
gravitation of the two into one; and when the dairyman came
round by that screened nook a few minutes later, there was
not a sign to reveal that the markedly sundered pair were
more to each other than mere acquaintance. Yet in the
interval since Crick's last view of them something had
occurred which changed the pivot of the universe for their
two natures; something which, had he known its quality, the
dairyman would have despised, as a practical man; yet which
was based upon a more stubborn and resistless tendency than
a whole heap of so-called practicalities. A veil had been
whisked aside; the tract of each one's outlook was to have a
new horizon thenceforward—for a short time or for a long.
End of Phase the Third
