IV

Whatever part of the world Tess came from, it was plain enough by the

look of her--and more and more plain as she grew up into a tall and

lanky girl, and then into a tall slim woman--that Suffolk was a long

way off from the land where she was born.

Our Suffolk folk, for the most part, are shortish and thickset and fair

and blue eyed. We men--being whipped about by the wind and weather,

and the sea-salt tanned into us--lose our fairness early and go a

bun-brown; but our women--having no salt spray in their faces, and only

their just allowance of sunshine--have their blue eyes matched with the

red and white cheeks that they were born with; and their hair, though

sometimes it goes darkish, usually is a bright chestnut or a bright

brown. Also, our women are steady-going and sensible; though I must say

that now and then they are a bit hard to get along with: being given

to doing their thinking slowly, and to being mighty fast set in their

own notions when once they have made their minds up--the same as we

men. As for Tess--with her black eyes and her black hair, and her face

all a cream white with not a touch of red in it--she was like none of

them; and she could think more out-of-the-way things and be more sorts

of a girl in five minutes than any Suffolk lass that ever I came across

could think or be in a whole year!

Tess was unlike our girls in another matter: she had a mighty hot

spit-fire temper of her own. Our girls, the same as our men, are

easy-going and anger slowly; but when they do anger they are glowing

hot to their very finger-tips, and a long while it takes them to cool

off. But Tess would blaze up all in a minute--and as often as not with

no real reason for it--and be for a while such an out-and-out little

fury that she would send everything scudding before her; and then would

pull up suddenly in the thick of it, and seem to forget all about it,

and like enough laugh at the people around her looking scared! Somehow,

though, it was seldom that she let me have a turn of her tantrums; and

when she did they'd be over in no time, and she'd have her arms around

me and be begging me to kiss her and to tell her that I didn't mind.

I suppose that she was that way with me because for my part--having

from the very first so loved her that quarreling with her was clean

impossible--I used just to stand and stare at her in her passions; and

like enough be showing by the look in my eyes the puzzled sorrow that I

was feeling in my inside. As to answering her anger with my anger, it

never once crossed my mind.

With John Heath things went differently. He would go ugly when she

flew out at him--and would keep his anger by him after hers long was

over and done with, and would show it by putting some hurt upon her

in a dirty way. A good many thrashings I gave John Heath, at one

time or another, for that sort of thing; and the greatest piece of

unreasonableness that Tess ever put on me, which is saying much for it,

was on that score: she being then ten years old, or thereabouts, and

John and I well turned of sixteen.

Some trick that he played on her--I don't know what it was--set her

in a rage against him, and he made her worse by laughing at her, and

she ended by throwing sand in his eyes. Then his anger got up, and he

caught her--being twice the size of her--and boxed her ears. I came

along just then, and I can see the look of her now. She was not crying,

as any ordinary child would have been--John having meant to hurt her,

and hit hard. She was standing straight in front of him with her little

hands gripped into fists as if she meant to fight him, that cream white

face of hers gone a real dead white, a perfect blaze of passion in her

big black eyes. In another second or so she'd have been flying at him

if I'd given her the chance. But I didn't--I sailed right in and myself

gave him what he needed; and when I had finished with him I had so well

blackened the two eyes of him that he forgot about the sand. But after

it all was over, so far from being obliged to me, what did Tess do but

fall to crying because I'd hurt him, and to saying that he'd only given

her what she deserved! For a week and more she would not speak to me,

and all that time she was trotting about sorrowfully at John's heels.

It seemed as though all of a sudden she had got to loving him because

he had played the man and the master to her; and I'm sure that his love

for her had its beginning then too.

John's folks and my folks, as I have said, lived up at the north end

of the village, a bit apart, and that made us three keep most together

while we were little; but Tess never had much to do with the other

children, even when she got big enough to be with them at school. They

did not get along with her, being puzzled by her whims and fancies and

set against her by her spit-fire ways. And she did not get along with

them because she was quick about everything and all of them were slow.

When she began to grow up, though, matters changed a good deal. The

boys--she being like nobody else in the village--picked her out to make

love to, and that set the girls by the ears. Tess liked the love-making

a deal more than I liked her to like it; and she didn't mind what the

girls said to her because her wits were nimbler than their wits and

she always could give them better than they could send.

So things went while the years went till Tess was turned of seventeen,

and was shot up into a tall slim woman in all ways so beautiful as to

be, I do believe, the most beautiful woman that God ever made. And then

it was that Grace Gryce, damn her for it, found a whip that served to

lash her; and so cruel a whip that she was near to lashing the life out

of her with it at a single blow.

V

According to our Suffolk notions, Grace Gryce was a beauty: being

strongly set up and full built and well rounded, with cheeks as red as

strawberries, and blue eyes that for any good looking man had a smile

in them, and over all a head of bright-brown hair. Had Tess been out

of the way she'd have had things all as she wanted them, not another

girl in the village for looks coming near her; and so it was only human

nature, I suppose, that she hated Tess for crossing her--making her

always go second, and a bad second, with the men.

It was about John Heath, though, that the heart of the matter was.

All the village knew that Grace fancied him, and that he half fancied

her--and would have fancied her altogether had Tess been out of

the way. Making up his mind between them--John always was a thick

thinker--did not seem to come easy to him. The whims and the ways

of Tess--that made a dozen different sorts of girl of her in five

minutes--seemed to set him off from her a-most as much as they set him

on: being a sort of puzzle, I'm free to say, that other men beside John

couldn't well understand. With Grace it was different. She might blow

hot or she might blow cold with him; or she might show her temper--she

had a-plenty of it--and give him the rough side of her tongue: but what

she meant and what she wanted always was plain and clear. To be sure,

this is only my guess why he hung in the wind between them. Maybe he

set too little store on Tess's love because it came to him too easily;

maybe he thought that by seeming to love her lightly he best could hold

her fast.

Hold her fast he did, and that is certain. In spite of all her

whimsies, he had her love; and it was his, as I have said, from the

time when he man-mastered her by boxing the little ears of her--she

being only ten years old. Always after that, even when she was at her

sauciest and her airiest, he had only to speak short and sharp to her

and she'd come to heel to him like a dog. Sometimes, seeing her taking

orders from him that way was close to setting me wild: I having my

whole heart fixed on her, and ready to give the very hands of me to

have from her the half of what she gave him. Not but what she loved me

too, in her own fashion, and dearly. She showed that by the way that

she used to come to me in all her little hurts and troubles; and the

sweetness and the comfortingness of her to me and to my mother always,

but most when my poor father was drowned, was beyond any words that I

have to put it in. But my pain was that the love which she had for me

was of the same sort that she had for my mother--and I was not wanting

from her love of that kind. And so it cut to the quick of me--I who

would have kissed her shoe-soles--to see her so ready always to be meek

and humble at a word from John. There were times, and a good many of

them--seeing her so dog-faithful to him, and he almost as careless of

her as if she had been no more than a dog to him--that I saw red as I

looked at him, and got burning hot in the insides of me, and was as

close to murdering him as I well could be and he still go on alive.

Like enough Grace Gryce--being of the same stock that I was, and made

much as I was--had the same feeling for Tess that I had for John; and

Grace, being a woman, had nothing to stop her from murdering Tess in a

woman's way. She would have done it sooner had her wits been quicker.

Time and again they had had their word-fights together, and Tess always

getting the better of her because Grace's wits, like the rest of her,

were heavy and slow.

It was down by the boats, under the Gun Hill, that they fought the

round out in which Grace drew blood at last. A lot of the girls were

together there and Tess, for a wonder, happened to be with them. They

all were saying to her what hard things they could think of; and she,

in her quick way, was hitting back at them and scoring off them all.

Poor sort of stuff it was that they were giving her: calling her "Miss

Fine-Airs" and "Miss Maypole," and scorning the black eyes and the pale

face of her, and girding at her the best they could because in no way

was she like themselves.

"It's a pity I'm so many kinds of ugliness!" says Tess in her saucy

way, and making it worse by laughing. "It's a true pity that I'm not

pretty, like all the rest of you, and so am left lonely. If only I'd

some of your good looks, you see, I might have, as the rest of you

have, a lot of men at my heels."

That was a shot that hit all of them, but it hit Grace the hardest

and she answered it. "It's better," said she, "to go your whole life

without a man at your heels than it is to spend your whole life

dog-tagging at the heels of a man."

The girls laughed at that, knowing well what Grace was driving at. But

Tess was ready with her answer and whipped back with it: "Well, it's

better to tag at a man's heels and he pleased with it than it is to

want to tag there and he not letting you--liking a may-pole, maybe,

better than a butter-tub, and caring more, maybe, for grace by nature

than for Grace by name."

That turned the joke--only it was no joke--on Grace again; and as the

girls had not much more liking for her than they had for Tess, seeing

that she spoiled what few man-chances Tess left them, they laughed at

her as hard as they could laugh.

Grace's slow anger had been getting hotter and hotter in her. That shot

of Tess's, and the girls all laughing at her, brought it to a boil.

"Who be'st thou, to open thy ugly mouth to me?" she jerked out, with

a squeak in her voice and her blue eyes blazing. "Who be'st thou,

anyway? Who knows the father or the mother of thee? Who knows what foul

folk in what foul land bore thee? Dog-tag thou may'st, but--mark my

words--naught will come of it: because thou'rt not fit for John Heath

or for any other honest man to have dealings with--thou rotten upcast

of the sea!"

Tess was holding her head high and was scornful-looking when this

speech began; but the ending of it, so Mary Benacre told my mother,

seemed like a knife in her heart. Her face went a sort of a pasty

white, so Mary said; and she seemed to choke, somehow, and put her hand

up to her throat in a fluttering kind of way as if her throat hurt her.

And then she sort of staggered, and made a grab at the boat she was

standing by and leaned against it--looking, so Mary said, as if she was

like to die.

"Mayhap now thou'lt keep quiet a bit," Grace said, with her hands on

her fat hips and her elbows out; and with that, and a flounce at her,

turned away. The other girls, all except Mary, went along with Grace;

but not talking, and most of them scared-looking: feeling, like

enough, as men would feel standing by at the end of a knife-fight, when

one man is down with a cut that has done for him and there is a smell

of blood in the air.

Mary staid behind--she was a good sort, was Mary Benacre--and went to

Tess and tried to comfort her. Tess didn't answer her, but just looked

at her with a pitiful sort of stare out of her black eyes that Mary

said was like the look of some poor dumb thing that had no other way of

telling how bad its hurt was. And then, rousing herself up, Tess pushed

Mary away from her and started for home on a run. Mary did not follow

her, but later on she came and told my mother just what had happened

and gave her Grace Gryce's words.

It was well that Mary came, that way, and told a clear story about it

all. What Tess told--when she came flying into the house and caught

my mother around the neck and put her poor head on my mother's breast

and went off into a passion of crying there--was such a muddle that my

mother knew only that Grace Gryce had said something to her that was

wickedly cruel. Tess cried and cried, as if she'd cry the very life out

of her; and kept sobbing out that she was a sea upcast, and a nobody's

daughter, and that the sea would have done better by her had it

drowned her, and that she hoped she'd die soon and be forgotten--until

she drove my mother almost wild.

And so it went for a long while with her, my mother petting her and

crying over her, until at last--the feel, I suppose, of my mother's

warm love for her getting into her poor hurt heart and comforting

her--she began to quiet down. Then my mother got her to bed--she

was as weak as water--and made a pot of bone-set tea for her; and

pretty soon after she'd drunk a cup or two of it she dropped off to

sleep. She still was sleeping when Mary Benacre came and told the

whole story; and so stirred up my mother's anger--and she was a very

gentle-natured woman, my mother was--that it was all she could do, she

said afterwards, not to go straight off to Grace Gryce and give her a

beating with her own hands.