Tess of the d'Urbervilles

s for Tess Durbeyfield, she did not so easily dislodge the incident
from her consideration. She had no spirit to dance again for a long
time, though she might have had plenty of partners; but ah! they did
not speak so nicely as the strange young man had done. It was not till
the rays of the sun had absorbed the young stranger’s retreating figure
on the hill that she shook off her temporary sadness and answered her
would-be partner in the affirmative.

She remained with her comrades till dusk, and participated with a
certain zest in the dancing; though, being heart-whole as yet, she
enjoyed treading a measure purely for its own sake; little divining
when she saw “the soft torments, the bitter sweets, the pleasing pains,
and the agreeable distresses” of those girls who had been wooed and
won, what she herself was capable of in that kind. The struggles and
wrangles of the lads for her hand in a jig were an amusement to her—no
more; and when they became fierce she rebuked them.

She might have stayed even later, but the incident of her father’s odd
appearance and manner returned upon the girl’s mind to make her
anxious, and wondering what had become of him she dropped away from the
dancers and bent her steps towards the end of the village at which the
parental cottage lay.

While yet many score yards off, other rhythmic sounds than those she
had quitted became audible to her; sounds that she knew well—so well.
They were a regular series of thumpings from the interior of the house,
occasioned by the violent rocking of a cradle upon a stone floor, to
which movement a feminine voice kept time by singing, in a vigorous
gallopade, the favourite ditty of “The Spotted Cow”—

I saw her lie do′-own in yon′-der green gro′-ove;
Come, love!′ and I'll tell′ you where!′

The cradle-rocking and the song would cease simultaneously for a
moment, and an exclamation at highest vocal pitch would take the place
of the melody.

“God bless thy diment eyes! And thy waxen cheeks! And thy cherry mouth!
And thy Cubit’s thighs! And every bit o’ thy blessed body!”

After this invocation the rocking and the singing would recommence, and
the “Spotted Cow” proceed as before. So matters stood when Tess opened
the door and paused upon the mat within it, surveying the scene.

The interior, in spite of the melody, struck upon the girl’s senses
with an unspeakable dreariness. From the holiday gaieties of the
field—the white gowns, the nosegays, the willow-wands, the whirling
movements on the green, the flash of gentle sentiment towards the
stranger—to the yellow melancholy of this one-candled spectacle, what a
step! Besides the jar of contrast there came to her a chill
self-reproach that she had not returned sooner, to help her mother in
these domesticities, instead of indulging herself out-of-doors.

There stood her mother amid the group of children, as Tess had left
her, hanging over the Monday washing-tub, which had now, as always,
lingered on to the end of the week. Out of that tub had come the day
before—Tess felt it with a dreadful sting of remorse—the very white
frock upon her back which she had so carelessly greened about the skirt
on the damping grass—which had been wrung up and ironed by her mother’s
own hands.

As usual, Mrs Durbeyfield was balanced on one foot beside the tub, the
other being engaged in the aforesaid business of rocking her youngest
child. The cradle-rockers had done hard duty for so many years, under
the weight of so many children, on that flagstone floor, that they were
worn nearly flat, in consequence of which a huge jerk accompanied each
swing of the cot, flinging the baby from side to side like a weaver’s
shuttle, as Mrs Durbeyfield, excited by her song, trod the rocker with
all the spring that was left in her after a long day’s seething in the
suds.

Nick-knock, nick-knock, went the cradle; the candle-flame stretched
itself tall, and began jigging up and down; the water dribbled from the
matron’s elbows, and the song galloped on to the end of the verse, Mrs
Durbeyfield regarding her daughter the while. Even now, when burdened
with a young family, Joan Durbeyfield was a passionate lover of tune.
No ditty floated into Blackmoor Vale from the outer world but Tess’s
mother caught up its notation in a week.

There still faintly beamed from the woman’s features something of the
freshness, and even the prettiness, of her youth; rendering it probable
that the personal charms which Tess could boast of were in main part
her mother’s gift, and therefore unknightly, unhistorical.

“I’ll rock the cradle for ’ee, mother,” said the daughter gently. “Or
I’ll take off my best frock and help you wring up? I thought you had
finished long ago.”

Her mother bore Tess no ill-will for leaving the housework to her
single-handed efforts for so long; indeed, Joan seldom upbraided her
thereon at any time, feeling but slightly the lack of Tess’s assistance
whilst her instinctive plan for relieving herself of her labours lay in
postponing them. To-night, however, she was even in a blither mood than
usual. There was a dreaminess, a pre-occupation, an exaltation, in the
maternal look which the girl could not understand.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve come,” her mother said, as soon as the last note
had passed out of her. “I want to go and fetch your father; but what’s
more’n that, I want to tell ’ee what have happened. Y’ll be fess
enough, my poppet, when th’st know!” (Mrs Durbeyfield habitually spoke
the dialect; her daughter, who had passed the Sixth Standard in the
National School under a London-trained mistress, spoke two languages:
the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad and to
persons of quality.)

“Since I’ve been away?” Tess asked.

“Ay!”

“Had it anything to do with father’s making such a mommet of himself in
thik carriage this afternoon? Why did ’er? I felt inclined to sink into
the ground with shame!”

“That wer all a part of the larry! We’ve been found to be the greatest
gentlefolk in the whole county—reaching all back long before Oliver
Grumble’s time—to the days of the Pagan Turks—with monuments, and
vaults, and crests, and ’scutcheons, and the Lord knows what all. In
Saint Charles’s days we was made Knights o’ the Royal Oak, our real
name being d’Urberville!... Don’t that make your bosom plim? ’Twas on
this account that your father rode home in the vlee; not because he’d
been drinking, as people supposed.”

“I’m glad of that. Will it do us any good, mother?”

“O yes! ’Tis thoughted that great things may come o’t. No doubt a
mampus of volk of our own rank will be down here in their carriages as
soon as ’tis known. Your father learnt it on his way hwome from
Shaston, and he has been telling me the whole pedigree of the matter.”

“Where is father now?” asked Tess suddenly.

Her mother gave irrelevant information by way of answer: “He called to
see the doctor to-day in Shaston. It is not consumption at all, it
seems. It is fat round his heart, ’a says. There, it is like this.”
Joan Durbeyfield, as she spoke, curved a sodden thumb and forefinger to
the shape of the letter C, and used the other forefinger as a pointer.
“‘At the present moment,’ he says to your father, ‘your heart is
enclosed all round there, and all round there; this space is still
open,’ ’a says. ‘As soon as it do meet, so,’”—Mrs Durbeyfield closed
her fingers into a circle complete—“‘off you will go like a shadder, Mr
Durbeyfield,’ ’a says. ‘You mid last ten years; you mid go off in ten
months, or ten days.’”

Tess looked alarmed. Her father possibly to go behind the eternal cloud
so soon, notwithstanding this sudden greatness!

“But where is father?” she asked again.

Her mother put on a deprecating look. “Now don’t you be bursting out
angry! The poor man—he felt so rafted after his uplifting by the
pa’son’s news—that he went up to Rolliver’s half an hour ago. He do
want to get up his strength for his journey to-morrow with that load of
beehives, which must be delivered, family or no. He’ll have to start
shortly after twelve to-night, as the distance is so long.”

“Get up his strength!” said Tess impetuously, the tears welling to her
eyes. “O my God! Go to a public-house to get up his strength! And you
as well agreed as he, mother!”

Her rebuke and her mood seemed to fill the whole room, and to impart a
cowed look to the furniture, and candle, and children playing about,
and to her mother’s face.

“No,” said the latter touchily, “I be not agreed. I have been waiting
for ’ee to bide and keep house while I go fetch him.”

“I’ll go.”

“O no, Tess. You see, it would be no use.”

Tess did not expostulate. She knew what her mother’s objection meant.
Mrs Durbeyfield’s jacket and bonnet were already hanging slily upon a
chair by her side, in readiness for this contemplated jaunt, the reason
for which the matron deplored more than its necessity.

“And take the Compleat Fortune-Teller to the outhouse,” Joan
continued, rapidly wiping her hands, and donning the garments.

The Compleat Fortune-Teller was an old thick volume, which lay on a
table at her elbow, so worn by pocketing that the margins had reached
the edge of the type. Tess took it up, and her mother started.

This going to hunt up her shiftless husband at the inn was one of Mrs
Durbeyfield’s still extant enjoyments in the muck and muddle of rearing
children. To discover him at Rolliver’s, to sit there for an hour or
two by his side and dismiss all thought and care of the children during
the interval, made her happy. A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came
over life then. Troubles and other realities took on themselves a
metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene
contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed
body and soul. The youngsters, not immediately within sight, seemed
rather bright and desirable appurtenances than otherwise; the incidents
of daily life were not without humorousness and jollity in their aspect
there. She felt a little as she had used to feel when she sat by her
now wedded husband in the same spot during his wooing, shutting her
eyes to his defects of character, and regarding him only in his ideal
presentation as lover.

Tess, being left alone with the younger children, went first to the
outhouse with the fortune-telling book, and stuffed it into the thatch.
A curious fetishistic fear of this grimy volume on the part of her
mother prevented her ever allowing it to stay in the house all night,
and hither it was brought back whenever it had been consulted. Between
the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore,
dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter, with her
trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an infinitely
Revised Code, there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily
understood. When they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages
were juxtaposed.

Returning along the garden path Tess mused on what the mother could
have wished to ascertain from the book on this particular day. She
guessed the recent ancestral discovery to bear upon it, but did not
divine that it solely concerned herself. Dismissing this, however, she
busied herself with sprinkling the linen dried during the day-time, in
company with her nine-year-old brother Abraham, and her sister
Eliza-Louisa of twelve and a half, called “’Liza-Lu,” the youngest ones
being put to bed. There was an interval of four years and more between
Tess and the next of the family, the two who had filled the gap having
died in their infancy, and this lent her a deputy-maternal attitude
when she was alone with her juniors. Next in juvenility to Abraham came
two more girls, Hope and Modesty; then a boy of three, and then the
baby, who had just completed his first year.

All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship—entirely
dependent on the judgement of the two Durbeyfield adults for their
pleasures, their necessities, their health, even their existence. If
the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty,
disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these
half-dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with
them—six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished
for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard
conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of
Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know whence the poet whose
philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his
song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of “Nature’s
holy plan.”

It grew later, and neither father nor mother reappeared. Tess looked
out of the door, and took a mental journey through Marlott. The village
was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere:
she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand.

Her mother’s fetching simply meant one more to fetch. Tess began to
perceive that a man in indifferent health, who proposed to start on a
journey before one in the morning, ought not to be at an inn at this
late hour celebrating his ancient blood.

“Abraham,” she said to her little brother, “do you put on your hat—you
bain’t afraid?—and go up to Rolliver’s, and see what has gone wi’
father and mother.”

The boy jumped promptly from his seat, and opened the door, and the
night swallowed him up. Half an hour passed yet again; neither man,
woman, nor child returned. Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have
been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.

“I must go myself,” she said.

’Liza-Lu then went to bed, and Tess, locking them all in, started on
her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty
progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when
one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.