Tess of the d'Urbervilles

“y experience,” says Roger Ascham, “we find out a short way by a long
wandering.” Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further
travel, and of what use is our experience to us then? Tess
Durbeyfield’s experience was of this incapacitating kind. At last she
had learned what to do; but who would now accept her doing?

If before going to the d’Urbervilles’ she had vigorously moved under
the guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to the
world in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on. But it
had not been in Tess’s power—nor is it in anybody’s power—to feel the
whole truth of golden opinions while it is possible to profit by them.
She—and how many more—might have ironically said to God with Saint
Augustine: “Thou hast counselled a better course than Thou hast
permitted.”

She remained at her father’s house during the winter months, plucking
fowls, or cramming turkeys and geese, or making clothes for her sisters
and brothers out of some finery which d’Urberville had given her, and
she had put by with contempt. Apply to him she would not. But she would
often clasp her hands behind her head and muse when she was supposed to
be working hard.

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of
the year; the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with its
dark background of The Chase; also the dates of the baby’s birth and
death; also her own birthday; and every other day individualized by
incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one
afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was
yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her
own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which
lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign
or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely
there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly
encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor’s thought
that some time in the future those who had known her would say: “It is
the ——th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died”; and there would be
nothing singular to their minds in the statement. Of that day, doomed
to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know the
place in month, week, season or year.

Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman.
Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face, and a note of tragedy
at times into her voice. Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent. She
became what would have been called a fine creature; her aspect was fair
and arresting; her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent experiences
of the last year or two had quite failed to demoralize. But for the
world’s opinion those experiences would have been simply a liberal
education.

She had held so aloof of late that her trouble, never generally known,
was nearly forgotten in Marlott. But it became evident to her that she
could never be really comfortable again in a place which had seen the
collapse of her family’s attempt to “claim kin”—and, through her, even
closer union—with the rich d’Urbervilles. At least she could not be
comfortable there till long years should have obliterated her keen
consciousness of it. Yet even now Tess felt the pulse of hopeful life
still warm within her; she might be happy in some nook which had no
memories. To escape the past and all that appertained thereto was to
annihilate it, and to do that she would have to get away.

Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? she would ask
herself. She might prove it false if she could veil bygones. The
recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not denied
to maidenhood alone.

She waited a long time without finding opportunity for a new departure.
A particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of germination was
almost audible in the buds; it moved her, as it moved the wild animals,
and made her passionate to go. At last, one day in early May, a letter
reached her from a former friend of her mother’s, to whom she had
addressed inquiries long before—a person whom she had never seen—that a
skilful milkmaid was required at a dairy-house many miles to the
southward, and that the dairyman would be glad to have her for the
summer months.

It was not quite so far off as could have been wished; but it was
probably far enough, her radius of movement and repute having been so
small. To persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical
degrees, parishes as counties, counties as provinces and kingdoms.

On one point she was resolved: there should be no more d’Urberville
air-castles in the dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be the
dairymaid Tess, and nothing more. Her mother knew Tess’s feeling on
this point so well, though no words had passed between them on the
subject, that she never alluded to the knightly ancestry now.

Yet such is human inconsistency that one of the interests of the new
place to her was the accidental virtues of its lying near her
forefathers’ country (for they were not Blakemore men, though her
mother was Blakemore to the bone). The dairy called Talbothays, for
which she was bound, stood not remotely from some of the former estates
of the d’Urbervilles, near the great family vaults of her granddames
and their powerful husbands. She would be able to look at them, and
think not only that d’Urberville, like Babylon, had fallen, but that
the individual innocence of a humble descendant could lapse as
silently. All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might
come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her
rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth,
surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope,
and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.

End of Phase the Second

Phase the Third:

The Rally