Tess of the d'Urbervilles

olliver’s inn, the single alehouse at this end of the long and broken
village, could only boast of an off-licence; hence, as nobody could
legally drink on the premises, the amount of overt accommodation for
consumers was strictly limited to a little board about six inches wide
and two yards long, fixed to the garden palings by pieces of wire, so
as to form a ledge. On this board thirsty strangers deposited their
cups as they stood in the road and drank, and threw the dregs on the
dusty ground to the pattern of Polynesia, and wished they could have a
restful seat inside.

Thus the strangers. But there were also local customers who felt the
same wish; and where there’s a will there’s a way.

In a large bedroom upstairs, the window of which was thickly curtained
with a great woollen shawl lately discarded by the landlady, Mrs
Rolliver, were gathered on this evening nearly a dozen persons, all
seeking beatitude; all old inhabitants of the nearer end of Marlott,
and frequenters of this retreat. Not only did the distance to the The
Pure Drop, the fully-licensed tavern at the further part of the
dispersed village, render its accommodation practically unavailable for
dwellers at this end; but the far more serious question, the quality of
the liquor, confirmed the prevalent opinion that it was better to drink
with Rolliver in a corner of the housetop than with the other landlord
in a wide house.

A gaunt four-post bedstead which stood in the room afforded
sitting-space for several persons gathered round three of its sides; a
couple more men had elevated themselves on a chest of drawers; another
rested on the oak-carved “cwoffer”; two on the wash-stand; another on
the stool; and thus all were, somehow, seated at their ease. The stage
of mental comfort to which they had arrived at this hour was one
wherein their souls expanded beyond their skins, and spread their
personalities warmly through the room. In this process the chamber and
its furniture grew more and more dignified and luxurious; the shawl
hanging at the window took upon itself the richness of tapestry; the
brass handles of the chest of drawers were as golden knockers; and the
carved bedposts seemed to have some kinship with the magnificent
pillars of Solomon’s temple.

Mrs Durbeyfield, having quickly walked hitherward after parting from
Tess, opened the front door, crossed the downstairs room, which was in
deep gloom, and then unfastened the stair-door like one whose fingers
knew the tricks of the latches well. Her ascent of the crooked
staircase was a slower process, and her face, as it rose into the light
above the last stair, encountered the gaze of all the party assembled
in the bedroom.

“—Being a few private friends I’ve asked in to keep up club-walking at
my own expense,” the landlady exclaimed at the sound of footsteps, as
glibly as a child repeating the Catechism, while she peered over the
stairs. “Oh, ’tis you, Mrs Durbeyfield—Lard—how you frightened me!—I
thought it might be some gaffer sent by Gover’ment.”

Mrs Durbeyfield was welcomed with glances and nods by the remainder of
the conclave, and turned to where her husband sat. He was humming
absently to himself, in a low tone: “I be as good as some folks here
and there! I’ve got a great family vault at Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,
and finer skillentons than any man in Wessex!”

“I’ve something to tell ’ee that’s come into my head about that—a grand
projick!” whispered his cheerful wife. “Here, John, don’t ’ee see me?”
She nudged him, while he, looking through her as through a window-pane,
went on with his recitative.

“Hush! Don’t ’ee sing so loud, my good man,” said the landlady; “in
case any member of the Gover’ment should be passing, and take away my
licends.”

“He’s told ’ee what’s happened to us, I suppose?” asked Mrs
Durbeyfield.

“Yes—in a way. D’ye think there’s any money hanging by it?”

“Ah, that’s the secret,” said Joan Durbeyfield sagely. “However, ’tis
well to be kin to a coach, even if you don’t ride in ’en.” She dropped
her public voice, and continued in a low tone to her husband: “I’ve
been thinking since you brought the news that there’s a great rich lady
out by Trantridge, on the edge o’ The Chase, of the name of
d’Urberville.”

“Hey—what’s that?” said Sir John.

She repeated the information. “That lady must be our relation,” she
said. “And my projick is to send Tess to claim kin.”

“There is a lady of the name, now you mention it,” said Durbeyfield.
“Pa’son Tringham didn’t think of that. But she’s nothing beside we—a
junior branch of us, no doubt, hailing long since King Norman’s day.”

While this question was being discussed neither of the pair noticed, in
their preoccupation, that little Abraham had crept into the room, and
was awaiting an opportunity of asking them to return.

“She is rich, and she’d be sure to take notice o’ the maid,” continued
Mrs Durbeyfield; “and ’twill be a very good thing. I don’t see why two
branches o’ one family should not be on visiting terms.”

“Yes; and we’ll all claim kin!” said Abraham brightly from under the
bedstead. “And we’ll all go and see her when Tess has gone to live with
her; and we’ll ride in her coach and wear black clothes!”

“How do you come here, child? What nonsense be ye talking! Go away, and
play on the stairs till father and mother be ready!... Well, Tess ought
to go to this other member of our family. She’d be sure to win the
lady—Tess would; and likely enough ’twould lead to some noble gentleman
marrying her. In short, I know it.”

“How?”

“I tried her fate in the Fortune-Teller, and it brought out that very
thing!... You should ha’ seen how pretty she looked to-day; her skin is
as sumple as a duchess’.”

“What says the maid herself to going?”

“I’ve not asked her. She don’t know there is any such lady-relation
yet. But it would certainly put her in the way of a grand marriage, and
she won’t say nay to going.”

“Tess is queer.”

“But she’s tractable at bottom. Leave her to me.”

Though this conversation had been private, sufficient of its import
reached the understandings of those around to suggest to them that the
Durbeyfields had weightier concerns to talk of now than common folks
had, and that Tess, their pretty eldest daughter, had fine prospects in
store.

“Tess is a fine figure o’ fun, as I said to myself to-day when I zeed
her vamping round parish with the rest,” observed one of the elderly
boozers in an undertone. “But Joan Durbeyfield must mind that she don’t
get green malt in floor.” It was a local phrase which had a peculiar
meaning, and there was no reply.

The conversation became inclusive, and presently other footsteps were
heard crossing the room below.

“—Being a few private friends asked in to-night to keep up club-walking
at my own expense.” The landlady had rapidly re-used the formula she
kept on hand for intruders before she recognized that the newcomer was
Tess.

Even to her mother’s gaze the girl’s young features looked sadly out of
place amid the alcoholic vapours which floated here as no unsuitable
medium for wrinkled middle-age; and hardly was a reproachful flash from
Tess’s dark eyes needed to make her father and mother rise from their
seats, hastily finish their ale, and descend the stairs behind her, Mrs
Rolliver’s caution following their footsteps.

“No noise, please, if ye’ll be so good, my dears; or I mid lose my
licends, and be summons’d, and I don’t know what all! ’Night t’ye!”

They went home together, Tess holding one arm of her father, and Mrs
Durbeyfield the other. He had, in truth, drunk very little—not a fourth
of the quantity which a systematic tippler could carry to church on a
Sunday afternoon without a hitch in his eastings or genuflections; but
the weakness of Sir John’s constitution made mountains of his petty
sins in this kind. On reaching the fresh air he was sufficiently
unsteady to incline the row of three at one moment as if they were
marching to London, and at another as if they were marching to
Bath—which produced a comical effect, frequent enough in families on
nocturnal homegoings; and, like most comical effects, not quite so
comic after all. The two women valiantly disguised these forced
excursions and countermarches as well as they could from Durbeyfield,
their cause, and from Abraham, and from themselves; and so they
approached by degrees their own door, the head of the family bursting
suddenly into his former refrain as he drew near, as if to fortify his
soul at sight of the smallness of his present residence—

“I’ve got a fam—ily vault at Kingsbere!”

“Hush—don’t be so silly, Jacky,” said his wife. “Yours is not the only
family that was of ’count in wold days. Look at the Anktells, and
Horseys, and the Tringhams themselves—gone to seed a’most as much as
you—though you was bigger folks than they, that’s true. Thank God, I
was never of no family, and have nothing to be ashamed of in that way!”

“Don’t you be so sure o’ that. From your nater ’tis my belief you’ve
disgraced yourselves more than any o’ us, and was kings and queens
outright at one time.”

Tess turned the subject by saying what was far more prominent in her
own mind at the moment than thoughts of her ancestry—“I am afraid
father won’t be able to take the journey with the beehives to-morrow so
early.”

“I? I shall be all right in an hour or two,” said Durbeyfield.

It was eleven o’clock before the family were all in bed, and two
o’clock next morning was the latest hour for starting with the beehives
if they were to be delivered to the retailers in Casterbridge before
the Saturday market began, the way thither lying by bad roads over a
distance of between twenty and thirty miles, and the horse and waggon
being of the slowest. At half-past one Mrs Durbeyfield came into the
large bedroom where Tess and all her little brothers and sisters slept.

“The poor man can’t go,” she said to her eldest daughter, whose great
eyes had opened the moment her mother’s hand touched the door.

Tess sat up in bed, lost in a vague interspace between a dream and this
information.

“But somebody must go,” she replied. “It is late for the hives already.
Swarming will soon be over for the year; and it we put off taking ’em
till next week’s market the call for ’em will be past, and they’ll be
thrown on our hands.”

Mrs Durbeyfield looked unequal to the emergency. “Some young feller,
perhaps, would go? One of them who were so much after dancing with ’ee
yesterday,” she presently suggested.

“O no—I wouldn’t have it for the world!” declared Tess proudly. “And
letting everybody know the reason—such a thing to be ashamed of! I
think I could go if Abraham could go with me to kip me company.”

Her mother at length agreed to this arrangement. Little Abraham was
aroused from his deep sleep in a corner of the same apartment, and made
to put on his clothes while still mentally in the other world.
Meanwhile Tess had hastily dressed herself; and the twain, lighting a
lantern, went out to the stable. The rickety little waggon was already
laden, and the girl led out the horse, Prince, only a degree less
rickety than the vehicle.

The poor creature looked wonderingly round at the night, at the
lantern, at their two figures, as if he could not believe that at that
hour, when every living thing was intended to be in shelter and at
rest, he was called upon to go out and labour. They put a stock of
candle-ends into the lantern, hung the latter to the off-side of the
load, and directed the horse onward, walking at his shoulder at first
during the uphill parts of the way, in order not to overload an animal
of so little vigour. To cheer themselves as well as they could, they
made an artificial morning with the lantern, some bread and butter, and
their own conversation, the real morning being far from come. Abraham,
as he more fully awoke (for he had moved in a sort of trance so far),
began to talk of the strange shapes assumed by the various dark objects
against the sky; of this tree that looked like a raging tiger springing
from a lair; of that which resembled a giant’s head.

When they had passed the little town of Stourcastle, dumbly somnolent
under its thick brown thatch, they reached higher ground. Still higher,
on their left, the elevation called Bulbarrow, or Bealbarrow, well-nigh
the highest in South Wessex, swelled into the sky, engirdled by its
earthen trenches. From hereabout the long road was fairly level for
some distance onward. They mounted in front of the waggon, and Abraham
grew reflective.

“Tess!” he said in a preparatory tone, after a silence.

“Yes, Abraham.”

“Bain’t you glad that we’ve become gentlefolk?”

“Not particular glad.”

“But you be glad that you ’m going to marry a gentleman?”

“What?” said Tess, lifting her face.

“That our great relation will help ’ee to marry a gentleman.”

“I? Our great relation? We have no such relation. What has put that
into your head?”

“I heard ’em talking about it up at Rolliver’s when I went to find
father. There’s a rich lady of our family out at Trantridge, and mother
said that if you claimed kin with the lady, she’d put ’ee in the way of
marrying a gentleman.”

His sister became abruptly still, and lapsed into a pondering silence.
Abraham talked on, rather for the pleasure of utterance than for
audition, so that his sister’s abstraction was of no account. He leant
back against the hives, and with upturned face made observations on the
stars, whose cold pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, in
serene dissociation from these two wisps of human life. He asked how
far away those twinklers were, and whether God was on the other side of
them. But ever and anon his childish prattle recurred to what impressed
his imagination even more deeply than the wonders of creation. If Tess
were made rich by marrying a gentleman, would she have money enough to
buy a spyglass so large that it would draw the stars as near to her as
Nettlecombe-Tout?

The renewed subject, which seemed to have impregnated the whole family,
filled Tess with impatience.

“Never mind that now!” she exclaimed.

“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”

“Yes.”

“All like ours?”

“I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the
apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few
blighted.”

“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”

“A blighted one.”

“’Tis very unlucky that we didn’t pitch on a sound one, when there were
so many more of ’em!”

“Yes.”

“Is it like that really, Tess?” said Abraham, turning to her much
impressed, on reconsideration of this rare information. “How would it
have been if we had pitched on a sound one?”

“Well, father wouldn’t have coughed and creeped about as he does, and
wouldn’t have got too tipsy to go on this journey; and mother wouldn’t
have been always washing, and never getting finished.”

“And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and not have had to be
made rich by marrying a gentleman?”

“O Aby, don’t—don’t talk of that any more!”

Left to his reflections Abraham soon grew drowsy. Tess was not skilful
in the management of a horse, but she thought that she could take upon
herself the entire conduct of the load for the present and allow
Abraham to go to sleep if he wished to do so. She made him a sort of
nest in front of the hives, in such a manner that he could not fall,
and, taking the reins into her own hands, jogged on as before.

Prince required but slight attention, lacking energy for superfluous
movements of any sort. With no longer a companion to distract her, Tess
fell more deeply into reverie than ever, her back leaning against the
hives. The mute procession past her shoulders of trees and hedges
became attached to fantastic scenes outside reality, and the occasional
heave of the wind became the sigh of some immense sad soul,
conterminous with the universe in space, and with history in time.

Then, examining the mesh of events in her own life, she seemed to see
the vanity of her father’s pride; the gentlemanly suitor awaiting
herself in her mother’s fancy; to see him as a grimacing personage,
laughing at her poverty and her shrouded knightly ancestry. Everything
grew more and more extravagant, and she no longer knew how time passed.
A sudden jerk shook her in her seat, and Tess awoke from the sleep into
which she, too, had fallen.

They were a long way further on than when she had lost consciousness,
and the waggon had stopped. A hollow groan, unlike anything she had
ever heard in her life, came from the front, followed by a shout of
“Hoi there!”

The lantern hanging at her waggon had gone out, but another was shining
in her face—much brighter than her own had been. Something terrible had
happened. The harness was entangled with an object which blocked the
way.

In consternation Tess jumped down, and discovered the dreadful truth.
The groan had proceeded from her father’s poor horse Prince. The
morning mail-cart, with its two noiseless wheels, speeding along these
lanes like an arrow, as it always did, had driven into her slow and
unlighted equipage. The pointed shaft of the cart had entered the
breast of the unhappy Prince like a sword, and from the wound his
life’s blood was spouting in a stream, and falling with a hiss into the
road.

In her despair Tess sprang forward and put her hand upon the hole, with
the only result that she became splashed from face to skirt with the
crimson drops. Then she stood helplessly looking on. Prince also stood
firm and motionless as long as he could; till he suddenly sank down in
a heap.

By this time the mail-cart man had joined her, and began dragging and
unharnessing the hot form of Prince. But he was already dead, and,
seeing that nothing more could be done immediately, the mail-cart man
returned to his own animal, which was uninjured.

“You was on the wrong side,” he said. “I am bound to go on with the
mail-bags, so that the best thing for you to do is bide here with your
load. I’ll send somebody to help you as soon as I can. It is getting
daylight, and you have nothing to fear.”

He mounted and sped on his way; while Tess stood and waited. The
atmosphere turned pale, the birds shook themselves in the hedges,
arose, and twittered; the lane showed all its white features, and Tess
showed hers, still whiter. The huge pool of blood in front of her was
already assuming the iridescence of coagulation; and when the sun rose
a hundred prismatic hues were reflected from it. Prince lay alongside,
still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest looking
scarcely large enough to have let out all that had animated him.

“’Tis all my doing—all mine!” the girl cried, gazing at the spectacle.
“No excuse for me—none. What will mother and father live on now? Aby,
Aby!” She shook the child, who had slept soundly through the whole
disaster. “We can’t go on with our load—Prince is killed!”

When Abraham realized all, the furrows of fifty years were extemporized
on his young face.

“Why, I danced and laughed only yesterday!” she went on to herself. “To
think that I was such a fool!”

“’Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn’t it,
Tess?” murmured Abraham through his tears.

In silence they waited through an interval which seemed endless. At
length a sound, and an approaching object, proved to them that the
driver of the mail-car had been as good as his word. A farmer’s man
from near Stourcastle came up, leading a strong cob. He was harnessed
to the waggon of beehives in the place of Prince, and the load taken on
towards Casterbridge.

The evening of the same day saw the empty waggon reach again the spot
of the accident. Prince had lain there in the ditch since the morning;
but the place of the blood-pool was still visible in the middle of the
road, though scratched and scraped over by passing vehicles. All that
was left of Prince was now hoisted into the waggon he had formerly
hauled, and with his hoofs in the air, and his shoes shining in the
setting sunlight, he retraced the eight or nine miles to Marlott.

Tess had gone back earlier. How to break the news was more than she
could think. It was a relief to her tongue to find from the faces of
her parents that they already knew of their loss, though this did not
lessen the self-reproach which she continued to heap upon herself for
her negligence.

But the very shiftlessness of the household rendered the misfortune a
less terrifying one to them than it would have been to a thriving
family, though in the present case it meant ruin, and in the other it
would only have meant inconvenience. In the Durbeyfield countenances
there was nothing of the red wrath that would have burnt upon the girl
from parents more ambitious for her welfare. Nobody blamed Tess as she
blamed herself.

When it was discovered that the knacker and tanner would give only a
very few shillings for Prince’s carcase because of his decrepitude,
Durbeyfield rose to the occasion.

“No,” said he stoically, “I won’t sell his old body. When we
d’Urbervilles was knights in the land, we didn’t sell our chargers for
cat’s meat. Let ’em keep their shillings! He’ve served me well in his
lifetime, and I won’t part from him now.”

He worked harder the next day in digging a grave for Prince in the
garden than he had worked for months to grow a crop for his family.
When the hole was ready, Durbeyfield and his wife tied a rope round the
horse and dragged him up the path towards it, the children following in
funeral train. Abraham and ’Liza-Lu sobbed, Hope and Modesty discharged
their griefs in loud blares which echoed from the walls; and when
Prince was tumbled in they gathered round the grave. The bread-winner
had been taken away from them; what would they do?

“Is he gone to heaven?” asked Abraham, between the sobs.

Then Durbeyfield began to shovel in the earth, and the children cried
anew. All except Tess. Her face was dry and pale, as though she
regarded herself in the light of a murderess.