Tess of the d'Urbervilles

mid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a
season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of
fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not
grow passionate. The ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by
their surroundings.

July passed over their heads, and the Thermidorean weather which came
in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state
of hearts at Talbothays Dairy. The air of the place, so fresh in the
spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now. Its heavy
scents weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying in
a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the pastures,
but there was still bright green herbage here where the watercourses
purled. And as Clare was oppressed by the outward heats, so was he
burdened inwardly by waxing fervour of passion for the soft and silent
Tess.

The rains having passed, the uplands were dry. The wheels of the
dairyman’s spring-cart, as he sped home from market, licked up the
pulverized surface of the highway, and were followed by white ribands
of dust, as if they had set a thin powder-train on fire. The cows
jumped wildly over the five-barred barton-gate, maddened by the
gad-fly; Dairyman Crick kept his shirt-sleeves permanently rolled up
from Monday to Saturday; open windows had no effect in ventilation
without open doors, and in the dairy-garden the blackbirds and thrushes
crept about under the currant-bushes, rather in the manner of
quadrupeds than of winged creatures. The flies in the kitchen were
lazy, teasing, and familiar, crawling about in the unwonted places, on
the floors, into drawers, and over the backs of the milkmaids’ hands.
Conversations were concerning sunstroke; while butter-making, and still
more butter-keeping, was a despair.

They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and convenience, without
driving in the cows. During the day the animals obsequiously followed
the shadow of the smallest tree as it moved round the stem with the
diurnal roll; and when the milkers came they could hardly stand still
for the flies.

On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows chanced to stand
apart from the general herd, behind the corner of a hedge, among them
being Dumpling and Old Pretty, who loved Tess’s hands above those of
any other maid. When she rose from her stool under a finished cow,
Angel Clare, who had been observing her for some time, asked her if she
would take the aforesaid creatures next. She silently assented, and
with her stool at arm’s length, and the pail against her knee, went
round to where they stood. Soon the sound of Old Pretty’s milk fizzing
into the pail came through the hedge, and then Angel felt inclined to
go round the corner also, to finish off a hard-yielding milcher who had
strayed there, he being now as capable of this as the dairyman himself.

All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug their foreheads
into the cows and gazed into the pail. But a few—mainly the younger
ones—rested their heads sideways. This was Tess Durbeyfield’s habit,
her temple pressing the milcher’s flank, her eyes fixed on the far end
of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation. She was milking
Old Pretty thus, and the sun chancing to be on the milking-side, it
shone flat upon her pink-gowned form and her white curtain-bonnet, and
upon her profile, rendering it keen as a cameo cut from the dun
background of the cow.

She did not know that Clare had followed her round, and that he sat
under his cow watching her. The stillness of her head and features was
remarkable: she might have been in a trance, her eyes open, yet
unseeing. Nothing in the picture moved but Old Pretty’s tail and Tess’s
pink hands, the latter so gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation only, as
if they were obeying a reflex stimulus, like a beating heart.

How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal
about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it
was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking
he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin
and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on
the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that
little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting,
infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman’s lips and
teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old
Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover,
might have called them off-hand. But no—they were not perfect. And it
was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the
sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could
reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted
him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh,
a breeze through his nerves, which well nigh produced a qualm; and
actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic
sneeze.

She then became conscious that he was observing her; but she would not
show it by any change of position, though the curious dream-like fixity
disappeared, and a close eye might easily have discerned that the
rosiness of her face deepened, and then faded till only a tinge of it
was left.

The influence that had passed into Clare like an excitation from the
sky did not die down. Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears, fell
back like a defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat, and,
leaving his pail to be kicked over if the milcher had such a mind, went
quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and, kneeling down beside her,
clasped her in his arms.

Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to his embrace
with unreflecting inevitableness. Having seen that it was really her
lover who had advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she sank
upon him in her momentary joy, with something very like an ecstatic
cry.

He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting mouth, but he
checked himself, for tender conscience’ sake.

“Forgive me, Tess dear!” he whispered. “I ought to have asked. I—did
not know what I was doing. I do not mean it as a liberty. I am devoted
to you, Tessy, dearest, in all sincerity!”

Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled; and seeing two
people crouching under her where, by immemorial custom, there should
have been only one, lifted her hind leg crossly.

“She is angry—she doesn’t know what we mean—she’ll kick over the milk!”
exclaimed Tess, gently striving to free herself, her eyes concerned
with the quadruped’s actions, her heart more deeply concerned with
herself and Clare.

She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together, his arm still
encircling her. Tess’s eyes, fixed on distance, began to fill.

“Why do you cry, my darling?” he said.

“O—I don’t know!” she murmured.

As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in she became
agitated and tried to withdraw.

“Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last,” said he, with a
curious sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart
had outrun his judgement. “That I—love you dearly and truly I need not
say. But I—it shall go no further now—it distresses you—I am as
surprised as you are. You will not think I have presumed upon your
defencelessness—been too quick and unreflecting, will you?”

“N’—I can’t tell.”

He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the milking
of each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into
one; and when the dairyman came round by that screened nook a few
minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that the markedly
sundered pair were more to each other than mere acquaintance. Yet in
the interval since Crick’s last view of them something had occurred
which changed the pivot of the universe for their two natures;
something which, had he known its quality, the dairyman would have
despised, as a practical man; yet which was based upon a more stubborn
and resistless tendency than a whole heap of so-called practicalities.
A veil had been whisked aside; the tract of each one’s outlook was to
have a new horizon thenceforward—for a short time or for a long.

End of Phase the Third

Phase the Fourth:

The Consequence