Tess of the d'Urbervilles

he season developed and matured. Another year’s instalment of flowers,
leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures,
took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their
place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles.
Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long
stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked
out scents in invisible jets and breathings.

Dairyman Crick’s household of maids and men lived on comfortably,
placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all
positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness
ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp
natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too
little of enough.

Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one thing
aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other,
ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of
it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as
surely as two streams in one vale.

Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now,
possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing,
physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The
sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its
sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and Clare
also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love;
where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in,
awkwardly inquiring, “Whither does this new current tend to carry me?
What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?”

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet—a rosy,
warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of
persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be occupied
with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a philosopher’s
regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting specimen of
womankind.

They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily in that
strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the violet
or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early, here.
Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came the skimming,
which began at a little past three. It usually fell to the lot of some
one or other of them to wake the rest, the first being aroused by an
alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival, and they soon
discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep through the
alarm as others did, this task was thrust most frequently upon her. No
sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed, than she left her room
and ran to the dairyman’s door; then up the ladder to Angel’s, calling
him in a loud whisper; then woke her fellow-milkmaids. By the time that
Tess was dressed Clare was downstairs and out in the humid air. The
remaining maids and the dairyman usually gave themselves another turn
on the pillow, and did not appear till a quarter of an hour later.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the
day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the
twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the
twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent,
and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

Being so often—possibly not always by chance—the first two persons to
get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons
up of all the world. In these early days of her residence here Tess did
not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising, where he was
generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light
which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feeling of
isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim inceptive stage of
the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of
disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he
knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed
in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the
boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair women are
usually asleep at mid-summer dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest
were nowhere.

The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along together
to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the Resurrection
hour. He little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side. Whilst
all the landscape was in neutral shade his companion’s face, which was
the focus of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a
sort of phosphorescence upon it. She looked ghostly, as if she were
merely a soul at large. In reality her face, without appearing to do
so, had caught the cold gleam of day from the north-east; his own face,
though he did not think of it, wore the same aspect to her.

It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She
was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a whole
sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter,
and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because
she did not understand them.

“Call me Tess,” she would say askance; and he did.

Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply
feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer
bliss to those of a being who craved it.

At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl.
Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters,
out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at the side of
the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their standing
in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by moving their heads
round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of
puppets by clockwork.

They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level, and
apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows in
detached remnants of small extent. On the gray moisture of the grass
were marks where the cows had lain through the night—dark-green islands
of dry herbage the size of their carcasses, in the general sea of dew.
From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which the cow had
rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of which trail they
found her; the snoring puff from her nostrils, when she recognized
them, making an intenser little fog of her own amid the prevailing one.
Then they drove the animals back to the barton, or sat down to milk
them on the spot, as the case might require.

Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like a
white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous rocks.
Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and hang on the
wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails subdividing the
mead, which now shone like glass rods. Minute diamonds of moisture from
the mist hung, too, upon Tess’s eyelashes, and drops upon her hair,
like seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these
dried off her; moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal
beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes scintillated in the sunbeams and she
was again the dazzlingly fair dairymaid only, who had to hold her own
against the other women of the world.

About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick’s voice, lecturing the
non-resident milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old
Deborah Fyander for not washing her hands.

“For Heaven’s sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb! Upon my soul, if
the London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they’d
swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they do a’ready; and
that’s saying a good deal.”

The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and Clare, in common
with the rest, could hear the heavy breakfast table dragged out from
the wall in the kitchen by Mrs Crick, this being the invariable
preliminary to each meal; the same horrible scrape accompanying its
return journey when the table had been cleared.