Tess of the d'Urbervilles

n general the cows were milked as they presented themselves, without
fancy or choice. But certain cows will show a fondness for a particular
pair of hands, sometimes carrying this predilection so far as to refuse
to stand at all except to their favourite, the pail of a stranger being
unceremoniously kicked over.

It was Dairyman Crick’s rule to insist on breaking down these
partialities and aversions by constant interchange, since otherwise, in
the event of a milkman or maid going away from the dairy, he was placed
in a difficulty. The maids’ private aims, however, were the reverse of
the dairyman’s rule, the daily selection by each damsel of the eight or
ten cows to which she had grown accustomed rendering the operation on
their willing udders surprisingly easy and effortless.

Tess, like her compeers, soon discovered which of the cows had a
preference for her style of manipulation, and her fingers having become
delicate from the long domiciliary imprisonments to which she had
subjected herself at intervals during the last two or three years, she
would have been glad to meet the milchers’ views in this respect. Out
of the whole ninety-five there were eight in particular—Dumpling,
Fancy, Lofty, Mist, Old Pretty, Young Pretty, Tidy, and Loud—who,
though the teats of one or two were as hard as carrots, gave down to
her with a readiness that made her work on them a mere touch of the
fingers. Knowing, however, the dairyman’s wish, she endeavoured
conscientiously to take the animals just as they came, excepting the
very hard yielders which she could not yet manage.

But she soon found a curious correspondence between the ostensibly
chance position of the cows and her wishes in this matter, till she
felt that their order could not be the result of accident. The
dairyman’s pupil had lent a hand in getting the cows together of late,
and at the fifth or sixth time she turned her eyes, as she rested
against the cow, full of sly inquiry upon him.

“Mr Clare, you have ranged the cows!” she said, blushing; and in making
the accusation, symptoms of a smile gently lifted her upper lip in
spite of her, so as to show the tips of her teeth, the lower lip
remaining severely still.

“Well, it makes no difference,” said he. “You will always be here to
milk them.”

“Do you think so? I hope I shall! But I don’t know.”

She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that he, unaware of her
grave reasons for liking this seclusion, might have mistaken her
meaning. She had spoken so earnestly to him, as if his presence were
somehow a factor in her wish. Her misgiving was such that at dusk, when
the milking was over, she walked in the garden alone, to continue her
regrets that she had disclosed to him her discovery of his
considerateness.

It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in such
delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects seemed
endowed with two or three senses, if not five. There was no distinction
between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to everything
within the horizon. The soundlessness impressed her as a positive
entity rather than as the mere negation of noise. It was broken by the
strumming of strings.

Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head. Dim, flattened,
constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed to her as
now, when they wandered in the still air with a stark quality like that
of nudity. To speak absolutely, both instrument and execution were
poor; but the relative is all, and as she listened Tess, like a
fascinated bird, could not leave the spot. Far from leaving she drew up
towards the performer, keeping behind the hedge that he might not guess
her presence.

The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left
uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass
which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds
emitting offensive smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues
formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went
stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering
cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot,
staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off
upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the
apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite
near to Clare, still unobserved of him.

Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she
had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star came now
without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of
the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through
her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his
notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the
garden’s sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling
weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the
waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound.

The light which still shone was derived mainly from a large hole in the
western bank of cloud; it was like a piece of day left behind by
accident, dusk having closed in elsewhere. He concluded his plaintive
melody, a very simple performance, demanding no great skill; and she
waited, thinking another might be begun. But, tired of playing, he had
desultorily come round the fence, and was rambling up behind her. Tess,
her cheeks on fire, moved away furtively, as if hardly moving at all.

Angel, however, saw her light summer gown, and he spoke; his low tones
reaching her, though he was some distance off.

“What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?” said he. “Are you afraid?”

“Oh no, sir—not of outdoor things; especially just now when the
apple-blooth is falling, and everything is so green.”

“But you have your indoor fears—eh?”

“Well—yes, sir.”

“What of?”

“I couldn’t quite say.”

“The milk turning sour?”

“No.”

“Life in general?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ah—so have I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather
serious, don’t you think so?”

“It is—now you put it that way.”

“All the same, I shouldn’t have expected a young girl like you to see
it so just yet. How is it you do?”

She maintained a hesitating silence.

“Come, Tess, tell me in confidence.”

She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things to her, and
replied shyly—

“The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they?—that is, seem as if
they had. And the river says,—‘Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’
And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first
of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and
smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and
cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!’
... But you, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and drive all
such horrid fancies away!”

He was surprised to find this young woman—who though but a milkmaid had
just that touch of rarity about her which might make her the envied of
her housemates—shaping such sad imaginings. She was expressing in her
own native phrases—assisted a little by her Sixth Standard
training—feelings which might almost have been called those of the
age—the ache of modernism. The perception arrested him less when he
reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in great part
but the latest fashion in definition—a more accurate expression, by
words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and women have
vaguely grasped for centuries.

Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so
young; more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic. Not
guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is
as to intensity, and not as to duration. Tess’s passing corporeal
blight had been her mental harvest.

Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family
and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a
mishap to be alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very good
reason. But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have descended
into the Valley of Humiliation, have felt with the man of Uz—as she
herself had felt two or three years ago—“My soul chooseth strangling
and death rather than my life. I loathe it; I would not live alway.”

It was true that he was at present out of his class. But she knew that
was only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright’s yard, he was
studying what he wanted to know. He did not milk cows because he was
obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning to be a rich and
prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder of cattle.
He would become an American or Australian Abraham, commanding like a
monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted and his ring-straked, his
men-servants and his maids. At times, nevertheless, it did seem
unaccountable to her that a decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young
man should have chosen deliberately to be a farmer, and not a
clergyman, like his father and brothers.

Thus, neither having the clue to the other’s secret, they were
respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge
of each other’s character and mood without attempting to pry into each
other’s history.

Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her
nature, and to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a repressed
life, but she little divined the strength of her own vitality.

At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather
than as a man. As such she compared him with herself; and at every
discovery of the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance
between her own modest mental standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean
altitude of his, she became quite dejected, disheartened from all
further effort on her own part whatever.

He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned
something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece. She was
gathering the buds called “lords and ladies” from the bank while he
spoke.

“Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?” he asked.

“Oh, ’tis only—about my own self,” she said, with a frail laugh of
sadness, fitfully beginning to peel “a lady” meanwhile. “Just a sense
of what might have been with me! My life looks as if it had been wasted
for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and
seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am! I’m like the poor Queen
of Sheba who lived in the Bible. There is no more spirit in me.”

“Bless my soul, don’t go troubling about that! Why,” he said with some
enthusiasm, “I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help you to
anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you would like
to take up—”

“It is a lady again,” interrupted she, holding out the bud she had
peeled.

“What?”

“I meant that there are always more ladies than lords when you come to
peel them.”

“Never mind about the lords and ladies. Would you like to take up any
course of study—history, for example?”

“Sometimes I feel I don’t want to know anything more about it than I
know already.”

“Why not?”

“Because what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row
only—finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just
like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad,
that’s all. The best is not to remember that your nature and your past
doings have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your
coming life and doings ’ll be like thousands’ and thousands’.”

“What, really, then, you don’t want to learn anything?”

“I shouldn’t mind learning why—why the sun do shine on the just and the
unjust alike,” she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice. “But
that’s what books will not tell me.”

“Tess, fie for such bitterness!” Of course he spoke with a conventional
sense of duty only, for that sort of wondering had not been unknown to
himself in bygone days. And as he looked at the unpracticed mouth and
lips, he thought that such a daughter of the soil could only have
caught up the sentiment by rote. She went on peeling the lords and
ladies till Clare, regarding for a moment the wave-like curl of her
lashes as they dropped with her bent gaze on her soft cheek,
lingeringly went away. When he was gone she stood awhile, thoughtfully
peeling the last bud; and then, awakening from her reverie, flung it
and all the crowd of floral nobility impatiently on the ground, in an
ebullition of displeasure with herself for her niaiseries, and with a
quickening warmth in her heart of hearts.

How stupid he must think her! In an access of hunger for his good
opinion she bethought herself of what she had latterly endeavoured to
forget, so unpleasant had been its issues—the identity of her family
with that of the knightly d’Urbervilles. Barren attribute as it was,
disastrous as its discovery had been in many ways to her, perhaps Mr
Clare, as a gentleman and a student of history, would respect her
sufficiently to forget her childish conduct with the lords and ladies
if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people in Kingsbere
Church really represented her own lineal forefathers; that she was no
spurious d’Urberville, compounded of money and ambition like those at
Trantridge, but true d’Urberville to the bone.

But, before venturing to make the revelation, dubious Tess indirectly
sounded the dairyman as to its possible effect upon Mr Clare, by asking
the former if Mr Clare had any great respect for old county families
when they had lost all their money and land.

“Mr Clare,” said the dairyman emphatically, “is one of the most
rebellest rozums you ever knowed—not a bit like the rest of his family;
and if there’s one thing that he do hate more than another ’tis the
notion of what’s called a’ old family. He says that it stands to reason
that old families have done their spurt of work in past days, and can’t
have anything left in ’em now. There’s the Billets and the Drenkhards
and the Greys and the St Quintins and the Hardys and the Goulds, who
used to own the lands for miles down this valley; you could buy ’em all
up now for an old song a’most. Why, our little Retty Priddle here, you
know, is one of the Paridelles—the old family that used to own lots o’
the lands out by King’s Hintock, now owned by the Earl o’ Wessex, afore
even he or his was heard of. Well, Mr Clare found this out, and spoke
quite scornful to the poor girl for days. ‘Ah!’ he says to her, ‘you’ll
never make a good dairymaid! All your skill was used up ages ago in
Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a thousand years to git strength
for more deeds!’ A boy came here t’other day asking for a job, and said
his name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname he said he’d never
heard that ’a had any surname, and when we asked why, he said he
supposed his folks hadn’t been ’stablished long enough. ‘Ah! you’re the
very boy I want!’ says Mr Clare, jumping up and shaking hands wi’en;
‘I’ve great hopes of you;’ and gave him half-a-crown. O no! he can’t
stomach old families!”

After hearing this caricature of Clare’s opinion poor Tess was glad
that she had not said a word in a weak moment about her family—even
though it was so unusually old almost to have gone round the circle and
become a new one. Besides, another diary-girl was as good as she, it
seemed, in that respect. She held her tongue about the d’Urberville
vault and the Knight of the Conqueror whose name she bore. The insight
afforded into Clare’s character suggested to her that it was largely
owing to her supposed untraditional newness that she had won interest
in his eyes.