While they uncovered the sheaves he stood apathetic beside his portable repository of force, round whose hot blackness the morning air quivered. He had nothing to do with preparatory labour. His fire was waiting incandescent, his steam was at high pressure, in a few seconds he could make the long strap move at an invisible velocity. Beyond its extent the environment might be corn, straw, or chaos; it was all the same to him. If any of the autochthonous idlers asked him what he called himself, he replied shortly, “An engineer.”
The rick was unhaled by full daylight; the men then took their places, the women mounted, and the work began. Farmer Groby—or, as they called him, “he”—had arrived ere this, and by his orders Tess was placed on the platform of the machine, close to the man who fed. it, her business being to untie every sheaf of corn handed on to her by Izz Huett, who stood next, but on the rick; so that the feeder could seize it and spread it over the revolving drum, which whisked out every grain in one moment.
They were soon in full progress after a preparatory hitch or two, which rejoiced the hearts of those who hated machinery. The work sped on till breakfast-time, when the thresher was stopped for half an hour; and on starting again after the meal, the whole supplementary strength of the farm was thrown into the labour of constructing the straw-rick, which began to grow beside the stack of corn. A hasty lunch was eaten as they stood, without leaving their positions, and then another couple of hours brought them near to dinner-time; the inexorable wheels continuing to spin and the penetrating hum of the thresher to thrill to the very narrow all who were near the revolving wire-cage.
The old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past days when they had been accustomed to thresh with flails on the oaken barn-floor; when everything, even to winnowing, was effected by hand-labour, which, to their thinking, though slow, produced better results. Those, too, on the corn-rick talked a little; but the perspiring ones at the machine, including Tess, could not lighten their duties by the exchange of many words. It was the ceaselessness of the work which tried her so severely and began to make her wish that she had never come to Flintcomb-Ash. The women on the com-rick—Marian, who was one of them, in particular—could stop to drink ale or cold tea from the flagon now and then, or to exchange a few gossiping remarks while they wiped their faces or cleared the fragments of straw and husk from their clothing; but for Tess there was no respite; for as the drum never stopped, the man who fed it could not stop, and she, who had to supply the man with untied sheaves, could not stop either unless Marian changed places with her, which she sometimes did for half an hour in spite of Groby’s objection that she was too slowhanded for a feeder.
For some probably economical reason it was usually a woman who was chosen for this particular duty, and Groby gave as his motive in selecting Tess that she was one of those who best combined strength with quickness in untying, and both with staying power, and this may have been true. The hum of the thresher, which prevented speech, increased to a raving whenever the supply of corn fell short of the regular quantity. As Tess and the man who fed could never turn their heads, she did not know that just before the dinner-hour a person had come silently into the field by the gate and had been standing under a second rick, watching the scene and Tess in particular. He was dressed in a tweed suit of fashionable pattern, and he twirled a gay walking-cane.
“Who is that?” said Izz Huett to Marian. She had at first addressed the inquiry to Tess, but the latter could not hear it.
“Somebody’s fancy-man, I s‘pose,” said Marian laconically.
“I’ll lay a guinea he’s after Tess.”
“Oh no. ‘Tis a ranter pa’son who’s been sniffing after her lately; not a dandy like this.”
“Well—this is the same man.”
“The same man as the preacher? But he’s quite different!”
“He hev left off his black coat and white neckercher, and hev cut off his whiskers; but he’s the same man for all that.”
“D‘ye really think so? Then I’ll tell her,” said Marian.
“Don’t. She’ll see him soon enough, good now.”
“Well, I don’t think it at all right for him to join his preaching to courting a married woman, even though her husband mid be abroad and she, in a sense, a widow.”
“Oh—he can do her no harm,” said Izz dryly. “Her mind can no more be heaved from that one place where it do bide than a stooded waggon from the hole he’s in. Lord love ‘ee, neither court-paying, nor, preaching, nor the seven thunders themselves can wean a woman when ’twould be better for her that she should be weaned.”
Dinner-time came, and the whirling ceased; whereupon Tess left her post, her knees trembling so wretchedly with the shaking of the machine that she could scarcely walk.
“You ought to het a quart o’ drink into ‘ee, as I’ve done,” said Marian. “You wouldn’t look so white then. Why, souls above us, your face is as if you’d been hagrode!”
It occurred to the good-natured Marian that as Tess was so tired, her discovery of her visitor’s presence might have the bad effect of taking away her appetite; and Marian was thinking of inducing Tess to descend by a ladder on the further side of the stack when the gentleman came forward and looked up.
Tess uttered a short little “Oh!” And a moment after, she said quickly, “I shall eat my dinner here—right on the rick.”
Sometimes, when they were so far from their cottages, they all did this; but as there was rather a keen wind going to-day, Marian and the rest descended and sat under the straw-stack.
The new-comer was, indeed, Alec d‘Urberville, the late evangelist, despite his changed attire and aspect. It was obvious at a glance that the original Weltlust had come back; that he had restored himself, as nearly as a man could do who had grown three or four years older, to the old jaunty, slap-dash guise under which Tess had first known her admirer, and cousin so-called. Having decided to remain where she was, Tess sat down among the bundles, out of sight of the ground, and began her meal; till, by and by, she heard footsteps on the ladder, and immediately after, Alec appeared upon the stack—now an oblong and level platform of sheaves. He strode across them and sat down opposite to her without a word.
Tess continued to eat her modest dinner, a slice of thick pancake, which she had brought with her. The other work-folk were by this time all gathered under the rick, where the loose straw formed a comfortable retreat.
“I am here again, as you see,” said d‘Urberville.
“Why do you trouble me so!” she cried, reproach flashing from her very finger-ends.
“I trouble you? I think I may ask, why do you trouble me?”
“Sure, I don’t trouble you anywhen!”
“You say you don’t. But you do! You haunt me. Those very eyes that you turned upon me with such a bitter flash a moment ago, they come to me just as you showed them then, in the night and in the day! Tess, ever since you told me of that child of ours, it is just as if my feelings, which have been flowing in a strong puritanical stream, had suddenly found a way open in the direction of you and had all at once gushed through. The religious channel is left dry forthwith, and it is you who have done it!”
She gazed in silence.
“What—you have given up your preaching entirely?” she asked.
She had gathered from Angel sufficient of the incredulity of modem thought to despise flash enthusiasms; but as a woman she was somewhat appalled.
In affected severity d‘Urberville continued: “Entirely. I have broken every engagement since that afternoon I was to address the drunkards at Casterbridge Fair. The deuce only knows what I am thought of by the brethren. Ah-ha! The brethren! No doubt they pray for me—weep for me; for they are kind people in their way. But what do I care? How could I go on with the thing when I had lost my faith in it? It would have been hypocrisy of the basest kind! Among them I should have stood like Hy menaeus and Alexander, who were delivered over to Satan that they might learn not to blaspheme. What a grand revenge you have tak
en! I saw you innocent, and I deceived you. Four years after, you find me a Christian enthusiast; you then work upon me, perhaps to my complete perdition! But, Tess, my coz, as I used to call you, this is only my way of talking, and you must not look so horribly concerned. Of course you have done nothing except retain your pretty face and shapely figure. I saw it on the rick before you saw me—that tight pinafore thing sets it off, and that wing-bonnet—you field-girls should never wear those bonnets if you wish to keep out of danger.” He regarded her silently for a few moments, and with a short cynical laugh resumed: “I believe that if the bachelor-apostle, whose deputy I thought I was, had been tempted by such a pretty face, he would have let go the plough for her sake as I do!”
Tess attempted to expostulate, but at this juncture all her fluency failed her, and without heeding he added: “Well, this paradise that you supply is perhaps as good as any other, after all. But to speak seriously, Tess.” D‘Urberville rose and came nearer, reclining sideways amid the sheaves and resting upon his elbow. “Since I last saw you, I have been thinking of what you said that he said. I have come to the conclusion that there does seem rather a want of common sense in these threadbare old propositions; how I could have been so fired by poor Parson Clare’s enthusiasm and have gone so madly to work, transcending even him, I cannot make out! As for what you said last time, on the strength of your wonderful husband’s intelligence—whose name you have never told me—about having what they call an ethical system without any dogma, I don’t see my way to that at all.”
“Why, you can have the religion of loving-kindness and purity, at least, if you can’t have—what do you call it—dogma.”
“Oh no! I’m a different sort of fellow from that! If there’s nobody to say, ‘Do this, and it will be a good thing for you after you are dead; do that, and it will be a bad thing for you,’ I can’t warm up. Hang it, I am not going to feel responsible for my deeds and passions if there’s nobody to be responsible to; and if I were you, my dear, I wouldn’t either!”
She tried to argue and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct. But owing to Angel Clare’s reticence, to her absolute want of training, and to her being a vessel of emotions rather than reasons, she could not get on.
“Well, never mind,” he resumed. “Here I am, my love, as in the old times!”
“Not as then—never as then—‘tis different!” she entreated. “And there was never warmth with me! Oh, why didn’t you keep your faith, if the loss of it has brought you to speak to me like this!”
“Because you’ve knocked it out of me; so the evil be upon your sweet head! Your husband little thought how his teaching would recoil upon him! Ha-ha—I’m awfully glad you have made an apostate of me all the same! Tess, I am more taken with you than ever, and I pity you too. For all your closeness, I see you are in a bad way—neglected by one who ought to cherish you.”
She could not get her morsels of food down her throat; her lips were dry, and she was ready to choke. The voices and laughs of the work-folk eating and drinking under the rick came to her as if they were a quarter of a mile off.
“It is cruelty to me!” she said. “How—how can you treat me to this talk if you care ever so little for me?”
“True, true,” he said, wincing a little. “I did not come to reproach you for my deeds. I came, Tess, to say that I don’t like you to be working like this, and I have come on purpose for you. You say you have a husband who is not I. Well, perhaps you have; but I’ve never seen him, and you’ve not told me his name; and altogether he seems rather a mythological personage. However, even if you have one, I think I am nearer to you than he is. I, at any rate, try to help you out of trouble, but he does not, bless his invisible face! The words of the stern prophet Hosea that I used to read come back to me. Don’t you know them, Tess? ‘And she shall follow after her lover, but she shall not overtake him; and she shall seek him, but shall not find him: then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now!’... Tess, my trap is waiting just under the hill, and—darling mine, not his!—you know the rest.”
Her face had been rising to a dull crimson fire while he spoke, but she did not answer.
“You have been the cause of my backsliding,” he continued, stretching his arm towards her waist; “you should be willing to share it and leave that mule you call husband forever.”
One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to eat her skimmer-cake, lay in her lap, and without the slightest warning she passionately swung the glove by the gauntlet directly in his face. It was heavy and thick as a warrior‘s, and it struck him flat on the mouth. Fancy might have regarded the act as the recrudescence of a trick in which her armed progenitors were not unpractised. Alec fiercely started up from his reclining position. A scarlet oozing appeared where her blow had alighted, and in a moment the blood began dropping from his mouth upon the straw. But he soon controlled himself, calmly drew his handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped his bleeding lips.
She too had sprung up, but she sank down again.
“Now, punish me!” she said, turning up her eyes to him with the hopeless defiance of the sparrow’s gaze before its captor twists its neck. “Whip me, crush me; you need not mind those people under the rick! I shall not cry out. Once victim, always victim—that’s the law!”
“Oh no, no, Tess,” he said blandly. “I can make full allowance for this. Yet you most unjustly forget one thing: that I would have married you if you had not put it out of my power to do so. Did I not ask you flatly to be my wife—hey? Answer me.”
“You did.”
“And you cannot be. But remember one thing!” His voice hardened as his temper got the better of him with the recollection of his sincerity in asking her and her present ingratitude, and he stepped across to her side and held her by the shoulders, so that she shook under his grasp. “Remember, my lady, I was your master once! I will be your master again. If you are any man’s wife, you are mine!”
The threshers now began to stir below.
“So much for our quarrel,” he said, letting her go. “Now I shall leave you and shall come again for your answer during the afternoon. You don’t know me yet! But I know you.”
She had not spoken again, remaining as if stunned. D‘Urber ville retreated over the sheaves and descended the ladder, while the workers below rose and stretched their arms and shook down the beer they had drunk. Then the threshing-machine started afresh; and amid the renewed rustle of the straw Tess resumed her position by the buzzing drum as one in a dream, untying sheaf after sheaf in endless succession.
48
IN THE AFTERNOON the farmer made it known that the rick was to be finished that night, since there was a moon by which they could see to work and the man with the engine was engaged for another farm on the morrow. Hence the twanging and humming and rustling proceeded with even less intermission than usual.
It was not till “nammet”-time, about three o‘clock, that Tess raised her eyes and gave a momentary glance round. She felt but little surprise at seeing that Alec d’Urberville had come back and was standing under the hedge by the gate. He had seen her lift her eyes, and waved his hand urbanely to her while he blew her a kiss. It meant that their quarrel was over. Tess looked down again and carefully abstained from gazing in that direction.
Thus the afternoon dragged on. The wheat-rick shrank lower, and the straw-rick grew higher, and the corn-sacks were carted away. At six o‘clock the wheat-rick was about shoulder-high from the ground. But the unthreshed sheaves remaining untouched seemed countless still, notwithstanding the enormous numbers that had been gulped down by the insatiable swal lower, fed by the man and Tess, through whose two young hands the greater part of them had passed. And the immense stack of straw where in the morning there had been nothing appeared as the faeces of the same buzzing red glutton. From the west sky a wrathful shine—all tha
t wild March could afford in the way of sunset—had burst forth after the cloudy day, flooding the tired and sticky faces of the threshers and dyeing them with a coppery light, as also the flapping garments of the women, which clung to them like dull flames.
A panting ache ran through the rick. The man who fed was weary, and Tess could see that the red nape of his neck was encrusted with dirt and husks. She still stood at her post, her flushed and perspiring face coated with the corn-dust and her white bonnet embrowned by it. She was the only woman whose place was upon the machine so as to be shaken bodily by its spinning, and the decrease of the stack now separated her from Marian and Izz and prevented their changing duties with her as they had done. The incessant quivering, in which every fibre of her frame participated, had thrown her into a stupefied reverie in which her arms worked on independently of her consciousness. She hardly knew where she was and did not hear Izz Huett tell her from below that her hair was tumbling down.
By degrees the freshest among them began to grow cadaverous and saucer-eyed. Whenever Tess lifted her head, she beheld always the great, upgrown straw-stack, with the men in shirt-sleeves upon it, against the grey north sky; in front of it the long red elevator like a Jacob’s ladder, on which a perpetual stream of threshed straw ascended, a yellow river running uphill and spouting out on the top of the rick.
She knew that Alec d‘Urberville was still on the scene, observing her from some point or other, though she could not say where. There was an excuse for his remaining, for when the threshed rick drew near its final sheaves, a little ratting was always done, and men unconnected with the threshing sometimes dropped in for that performance—sporting characters of all descriptions, gents with terriers and facetious pipes, roughs with sticks and stones.