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 _débris_ 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 known 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

primaeval 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

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

downstairs, 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

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. 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.