Tess of the D'Urbervilles

  Despite her not-inviolate past, what still abode in such a woman as Tess outvalued the freshness of her fellows. Was not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage of Abiezer?

  So spoke love renascent, preparing the way for Tess’s devoted outpouring, which was then just being forwarded to him by his father; though owing to his distance inland, it was to be a long time in reaching him.

  Meanwhile the writer’s expectation that Angel would come in response to the entreaty was alternately great and small. What lessened it was that the facts of her life which had led to the parting had not changed—could never change; and that if her presence had not attenuated them, her absence could not. Nevertheless she addressed her mind to the tender question of what she could do to please him best if he should arrive. Sighs were expended on the wish that she had taken more notice of the tunes he played on his harp, that she had inquired more curiously of him which were his favourite ballads among those the country-girls sang. She indirectly inquired of Amby Seedling, who had followed Izz from Talbothays, and by chance Amby remembered that amongst the snatches of melody in which they had indulged at the dairyman’s to induce the cows to let down their milk, Clare had seemed to like “Cupid’s Gardens,” “I Have Parks, I Have Hounds,” and “The Break o’ the Day”; and had seemed not to care for “The Tailor’s Breeches” and “Such a Beauty I Did Grow,” excellent ditties as they were.

  To perfect the ballads was now her whimsical desire. She practised them privately at odd moments, especially “The Break o’ the Day”:Arise, arise, arise!

  And pick your love a posy,

  All o’ the sweetest flowers

  That in the garden grow.

  The turtle-doves and sma’ birds

  In every bough a-building,

  So early in the May-time

  At the break o’ the day!

  It would have melted the heart of a stone to hear her singing these ditties whenever she worked apart from the rest of the girls in this cold dry time; the tears running down her cheeks all the while at the thought that perhaps he would not, after all, come to hear her, and the simple silly words of the songs resounding in painful mockery of the aching heart of the singer.

  Tess was so wrapt up in this fanciful dream that she seemed not to know how the season was advancing; that the days had lengthened, that Lady-Day was at hand, and would soon be followed by Old Lady-Day, the end of her term here.

  But before the quarter-day had quite come, something happened which made Tess think of far different matters. She was at her lodging as usual one evening, sitting in the downstairs room with the rest of the family, when somebody knocked at the door and inquired for Tess. Through the doorway she saw against the declining light a figure with the height of a woman and the breadth of a child, a tall, thin, girlish creature whom she did not recognize in the twilight till the girl said, “Tess!”

  “What—is it, Liza-Lu?” asked Tess in startled accents. Her sister, whom a little over a year ago she had left at home as a child, had sprung up by a sudden shoot to a form of this presentation, of which as yet Lu seemed herself scarce able to understand the meaning. Her thin legs, visible below her once-long frock, now short by her growing, and her uncomfortable hands and arms revealed her youth and inexperience.

  “Yes, I have been traipsing about all day, Tess,” said Lu with unemotional gravity, “a-trying to find‘ee; and I’m very tired.”

  “What is the matter at home?”

  “Mother is took very bad, and the doctor says she’s dying, and as Father is not very well neither, and says ‘tis wrong for a man of such a high family as his to slave and drave at common labouring work, we don’t know what to do.”

  Tess stood in reverie a long time before she thought of asking Liza-Lu to come in and sit down. When she had done so, and Liza-Lu was having some tea, she came to a decision. It was imperative that she should go home. Her agreement did not end till Old Lady-Day, the sixth of April, but as the interval thereto was not a long one, she resolved to run the risk of starting at once.

  To go that night would be a gain of twelve hours, but her sister was too tired to undertake such a distance till the morrow. Tess ran down to where Marian and Izz lived, informed them of what had happened, and begged them to make the best of her case to the farmer. Returning, she got Lu a supper and, after that, having tucked the younger into her own bed, packed up as many of her belongings as would go into a withy basket and started, directing Lu to follow her next morning.

  50

  SHE PLUNGED into the chilly equinoctial darkness as the clock struck ten, for her fifteen miles’ walk under the steely stars. In lonely districts night is a protection rather than a danger to a noiseless pedestrian, and knowing this, Tess pursued the nearest course along by-lanes that she would almost have feared in the day-time; but marauders were wanting now, and spectral fears were driven out of her mind by thoughts of her mother. Thus she proceeded mile after mile, ascending and descending till she came to Bulbarrow and, about midnight, looked from that height into the abyss of chaotic shade which was all that revealed itself of the vale on whose further side she was born. Having already traversed about five miles on the upland, she had now some ten or eleven in the lowland before her journey would be finished. The winding road downwards became just visible to her under the wan starlight as she followed it, and soon she paced a soil so contrasting with that above it that the difference was perceptible to the tread and to the smell. It was the heavy clay-land of Blackmoor Vale, and a part of the vale to which turnpike-roads had never penetrated. Superstitions linger longest on these heavy soils. Having once been forest, at this shadowy time it seemed to assert something of its old character, the far and the near being blended and every tree and tall hedge making the most of its presence. The harts that had been hunted here, the witches that had been pricked and ducked, the green-spangled fairies that “whickered” at you as you passed—the place teemed with beliefs in them still, and they formed an impish multitude now.

  At Nuttlebury she passed the village inn, whose sign creaked in response to the greeting of her footsteps, which not a human soul heard but herself. Under the thatched roofs her mind’s eye beheld relaxed tendons and flaccid muscles, spread out in the darkness beneath coverlets made of little purple patchwork squares, and undergoing a bracing process at the hands of sleep for renewed labour on the morrow as soon as a hint of pink nebulosity appeared on Hambledon Hill.

  At three she turned the last corner of the maze of lanes she had threaded and entered Marlott, passing the field in which as a club-girl she had first seen Angel Clare, when he had not danced with her; the sense of disappointment remained with her yet. In the direction of her mother’s house she saw a light. It came from the bedroom window, and a branch waved in front of it and made it wink at her. As soon as she could discern the outline of the house—newly thatched with her money—it had all its old effect upon Tess’s imagination. Part of her body and life it ever seemed to be; the slope of its dormers, the finish of its gables, the broken courses of brick which topped the chimney—all had something in common with her personal character. A stupefaction had come into these features, to her regard; it meant the illness of her mother.

  She opened the door so softly as to disturb nobody; the lower room was vacant, but the neighbour who was sitting up with her mother came to the top of the stairs and whispered that Mrs. Durbeyfield was no better, though she was sleeping just then. Tess prepared herself a breakfast and then took her place as nurse in her mother’s chamber.

  In the morning, when she contemplated the children, they had all a curiously elongated look; although she had been away little more than a year, their growth was astounding; and the necessity of applying herself heart and soul to their needs took her out of her own cares.

  Her father’s ill health was of the same indefinite kind, and he sat in his chair as usual. But the day after her arrival he was unusually bright. He had a rational scheme for living, and Tess asked
him what it was.

  “I’m thinking of sending round to all the old anti-queerians in this part of England,” he said, “asking them to subscribe to a fund to maintain me. I’m sure they’d see it as a romantical, ar tistical, and proper thing to do. They spend lots o’ money in keeping up old ruins, and finding the bones o’ things, and such like; and living remains must be more interesting to ‘em still, if they only knowed of me. Would that somebody would go round and tell ’em what there is living among ‘em, and they thinking nothing of him! If Pa’son Tringham, who discovered me, had lived, he’d ha’ done it, I’m sure.”

  Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till she had grappled with pressing matters in hand, which seemed little improved by her remittances. When indoor necessities had been eased, she turned her attention to external things. It was now the season for planting and sowing; many gardens and allotments of the villagers had already received their spring tillage; but the garden and the allotment of the Durbeyfields were behindhand. She found to her dismay that this was owing to their having eaten all the seed potatoes—that last lapse of the improvident. At the earliest moment she obtained what others she could procure, and in a few days her father was well enough to see to the garden, under Tess’s persuasive efforts; while she herself undertook the allotment-plot which they rented in a field a couple of hundred yards out of the village.

  She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick-chamber, where she was not now required by reason of her mother’s improvement. Violent motion relieved thought. The plot of ground was in a high, dry, open enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces, and where labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the day had ended. Digging began usually at six o‘clock and extended indefinitely into the dusk or moonlight. Just now heaps of dead weeds and refuse were burning on many of the plots, the dry weather favouring their combustion.

  One fine day Tess and Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that divided the plots. As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare of the couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under the dense smoke as wafted by the wind. When a fire glowed, banks of smoke blown level along the ground would themselves become illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the work-people from one another; and the meaning of the “pillar of a cloud,” which was a wall by day and a light by night, could be understood.

  As evening thickened, some of the gardening men and women gave over for the night, but the greater number remained to get their planting done, Tess being among them, though she sent her sister home. It was on one of the couch-burning plots that she laboured with her fork, its four shining prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods in little clicks. Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke of her fire; then it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the brassy glare from the heap. She was oddly dressed to-night and presented a somewhat staring aspect, her attire being a gown bleached by many washings, with a short black jacket over it, the effect of the whole being that of a wedding and funeral guest in one. The women further back wore white aprons, which with their pale faces were all that could be seen of them in the gloom except when at moments they caught a flash from the flames.

  Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn-hedge, which formed the boundary of the field, rose against the pale opalescence of the lower sky. Above, Jupiter hung like a full-blown jonquil, so bright as almost to throw a shade. A few small, nondescript stars were appearing elsewhere. In the distance a dog barked, and wheels occasionally rattled along the dry road.

  Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it was not late; and though the air was fresh and keen, there was a whisper of spring in it that cheered the workers on. Something in the place, the hour, the crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and shade, made others as well as Tess enjoy being there. Nightfall, which in the frost of winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of summer as a lover, came as a tranquillizer on this March day.

  Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of all were on the soil as its turned surface was revealed by the fires. Hence as Tess stirred the clods and sang her foolish little songs, with scarce now a hope that Clare would ever hear them, she did not for a long time notice the person who worked nearest to her—a man in a long smock-frock who, she found, was forking the same plot as herself, and whom she supposed her father had sent there to advance the work. She became more conscious of him when the direction of his digging brought him closer. Sometimes the smoke divided them; then it swerved, and the two were visible to each other but divided from all the rest.

  Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak to her. Nor did she think of him further than to recollect that he had not been there when it was broad daylight and that she did not know him as any one of the Marlott labourers, which was no wonder, her absences having been so long and frequent of late years. By and by he dug so close to her that the fire-beams were reflected as distinctly from the steel prongs of his fork as from her own. On going up to the fire to throw a pitch of dead weeds upon it, she found that he did the same on the other side. The fire flared up, and she beheld the face of d‘Urberville.

  The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his appearance in a gathered smock-frock, such as was now worn only by the most old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled her as to its bearing. D‘Urber ville emitted a low, long laugh.

  “If I were inclined to joke, I should say, ‘How much this seems like Paradise!’ ” he remarked whimsically, looking at her with an inclined head.

  “What do you say?” she weakly asked.

  “A jester might say this is just like Paradise. You are Eve, and I am the old Other One come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior animal. I used to be quite up in that scene of Mil ton’s when I was theological. Some of it goes:“ ‘Empress, the way is ready, and not long,

  Beyond a row of myrtles....

  ... If thou accept

  My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon.’ ”

  “ ‘Lead then,’ ” said Eve.

  And so on. My dear, dear Tess, I am only putting this to you as a thing that you might have supposed or said quite untruly, because you think so badly of me.“

  “I never said you were Satan or thought it. I don’t think of you in that way at all. My thoughts of you are quite cold except when you affront me. What, did you come digging here entirely because of me?”

  “Entirely. To see you; nothing more. The smock-frock, which I saw hanging for sale as I came along, was an afterthought, that I mightn’t be noticed. I come to protest against your working like this.”

  “But I like doing it—it is for my father.”

  “Your engagement at the other place is ended?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you going to next? To join your dear husband?”

  She could not bear the humiliating reminder.

  “Oh—I don’t know!” she said bitterly. “I have no husband!”

  “It is quite true—in the sense you mean. But you have a friend, and I have determined that you shall be comfortable in spite of yourself. When you get down to your house you will see what I have sent there for you.”

  “Oh, Alec, I wish you wouldn’t give me anything at all! I cannot take it from you! I don’t like—it is not right!”

  “It is right!” he cried lightly. “I am not going to see a woman whom I feel so tenderly for as I do for you in trouble without trying to help her.”

  “But I am very well off! I am only in trouble about—about—not about living at all!”

  She turned and desperately resumed her digging, tears dripping upon the fork-handle and upon the clods.

  “About the children—your brothers and sisters,” he resumed. “I’ve been thinking of them.”

  Tess’s heart quivered—he was touching her
in a weak place. He had divined her chief anxiety. Since returning home, her soul had gone out to those children with an affection that was passionate.

  “If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for them; since your father will not be able to do much, I suppose?”

  “He can with my assistance. He must!”

  “And with mine.”

  “No, sir!”

  “How damned foolish this is!” burst out d‘Urberville. “Why, he thinks we are the same family, and will be quite satisfied!”

  “He don’t. I’ve undeceived him.”

  “The more fool you!”

  D‘Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge, where he pulled off the long smock-frock which had disguised him, and rolling it up and pushing it into the couch-fire, went away.

  Tess could not get on with her digging after this; she felt restless; she wondered if he had gone back to her father’s house, and taking the fork in her hand, proceeded homewards.

  Some twenty yards from the house she was met by one of her sisters.

  “Oh, Tessy—what do you think! Liza-Lu is a-crying, and there’s a lot of folk in the house, and Mother is a good deal better, but they think Father is dead!”

  The child realized the grandeur of the news, but not as yet its sadness, and stood looking at Tess with round-eyed importance till, beholding the effect produced upon her, she said, “What Tess, shan’t we talk to Father never no more?”

  “But Father was only a little bit ill!” exclaimed Tess distractedly.