Tess of the d'Urbervilles

very 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.