Tess of the d'Urbervilles

t 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.