Chapter 12
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 with 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 toll 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 baskets,
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
lust 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 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 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 in 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 half-way 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!'
Chapter 13
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 heart-breaker
was beginning to spread beyond the immediate boundaries of Trantridge,
lent Tess's supposed position, by its fearsomeness, a far higher fascination
than 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 godlike 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.
Chapter 14
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 through 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 a 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 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 has 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 above 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 church-yard,' 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 gray 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 illumined 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 pleasures
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 waggons, in the company of a broad tarnished
moon that had risen from the ground to the eastwards, its face resembling
the outworn goldleaf 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
misgivings 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 fact
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 gnatlike wail, till, at the conclusion, raising their voices to clerk's
pitch, they again piped into the silence, `Amen!'
Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy of
this 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.
Chapter 15
`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 in 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 virtue 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 unexpended
youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it
hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.
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