Tess of the d'Urbervilles

LI

From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us press on to an
October day, more than eight months subsequent to the parting of Clare
and Tess. We discover the latter in changed conditions; instead of a
bride with boxes and trunks which others bore, we see her a lonely
woman with a basket and a bundle in her own porterage, as at an earlier
time when she was no bride; instead of the ample means that were
projected by her husband for her comfort through this probationary
period, she can produce only a flattened purse.

After again leaving Marlott, her home, she had got through the spring
and summer without any great stress upon her physical powers, the time
being mainly spent in rendering light irregular service at dairy-work
near Port-Bredy to the west of the Blackmoor Valley, equally remote
from her native place and from Talbothays. She preferred this to living
on his allowance. Mentally she remained in utter stagnation, a
condition which the mechanical occupation rather fostered than checked.
Her consciousness was at that other dairy, at that other season, in the
presence of the tender lover who had confronted her there—he who, the
moment she had grasped him to keep for her own, had disappeared like a
shape in a vision.

The dairy-work lasted only till the milk began to lessen, for she had
not met with a second regular engagement as at Talbothays, but had done
duty as a supernumerary only. However, as harvest was now beginning,
she had simply to remove from the pasture to the stubble to find plenty
of further occupation, and this continued till harvest was done.

Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her of Clare’s
allowance, after deducting the other half of the fifty as a
contribution to her parents for the trouble and expense to which she
had put them, she had as yet spent but little. But there now followed
an unfortunate interval of wet weather, during which she was obliged to
fall back upon her sovereigns.

She could not bear to let them go. Angel had put them into her hand,
had obtained them bright and new from his bank for her; his touch had
consecrated them to souvenirs of himself—they appeared to have had as
yet no other history than such as was created by his and her own
experiences—and to disperse them was like giving away relics. But she
had to do it, and one by one they left her hands.

She had been compelled to send her mother her address from time to
time, but she concealed her circumstances. When her money had almost
gone a letter from her mother reached her. Joan stated that they were
in dreadful difficulty; the autumn rains had gone through the thatch of
the house, which required entire renewal; but this could not be done
because the previous thatching had never been paid for. New rafters and
a new ceiling upstairs also were required, which, with the previous
bill, would amount to a sum of twenty pounds. As her husband was a man
of means, and had doubtless returned by this time, could she not send
them the money?

Tess had thirty pounds coming to her almost immediately from Angel’s
bankers, and, the case being so deplorable, as soon as the sum was
received she sent the twenty as requested. Part of the remainder she
was obliged to expend in winter clothing, leaving only a nominal sum
for the whole inclement season at hand. When the last pound had gone, a
remark of Angel’s that whenever she required further resources she was
to apply to his father, remained to be considered.

But the more Tess thought of the step, the more reluctant was she to
take it. The same delicacy, pride, false shame, whatever it may be
called, on Clare’s account, which had led her to hide from her own
parents the prolongation of the estrangement, hindered her owning to
his that she was in want after the fair allowance he had left her. They
probably despised her already; how much more they would despise her in
the character of a mendicant! The consequence was that by no effort
could the parson’s daughter-in-law bring herself to let him know her
state.

Her reluctance to communicate with her husband’s parents might, she
thought, lessen with the lapse of time; but with her own the reverse
obtained. On her leaving their house after the short visit subsequent
to her marriage they were under the impression that she was ultimately
going to join her husband; and from that time to the present she had
done nothing to disturb their belief that she was awaiting his return
in comfort, hoping against hope that his journey to Brazil would result
in a short stay only, after which he would come to fetch her, or that
he would write for her to join him; in any case that they would soon
present a united front to their families and the world. This hope she
still fostered. To let her parents know that she was a deserted wife,
dependent, now that she had relieved their necessities, on her own
hands for a living, after the éclat of a marriage which was to
nullify the collapse of the first attempt, would be too much indeed.

The set of brilliants returned to her mind. Where Clare had deposited
them she did not know, and it mattered little, if it were true that she
could only use and not sell them. Even were they absolutely hers it
would be passing mean to enrich herself by a legal title to them which
was not essentially hers at all.

Meanwhile her husband’s days had been by no means free from trial. At
this moment he was lying ill of fever in the clay lands near Curitiba
in Brazil, having been drenched with thunder-storms and persecuted by
other hardships, in common with all the English farmers and
farm-labourers who, just at this time, were deluded into going thither
by the promises of the Brazilian Government, and by the baseless
assumption that those frames which, ploughing and sowing on English
uplands, had resisted all the weathers to whose moods they had been
born, could resist equally well all the weathers by which they were
surprised on Brazilian plains.

To return. Thus it happened that when the last of Tess’s sovereigns had
been spent she was unprovided with others to take their place, while on
account of the season she found it increasingly difficult to get
employment. Not being aware of the rarity of intelligence, energy,
health, and willingness in any sphere of life, she refrained from
seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns, large houses, people of
means and social sophistication, and of manners other than rural. From
that direction of gentility Black Care had come. Society might be
better than she supposed from her slight experience of it. But she had
no proof of this, and her instinct in the circumstances was to avoid
its purlieus.

The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in which she had
served as supernumerary milkmaid during the spring and summer required
no further aid. Room would probably have been made for her at
Talbothays, if only out of sheer compassion; but comfortable as her
life had been there, she could not go back. The anti-climax would be
too intolerable; and her return might bring reproach upon her idolized
husband. She could not have borne their pity, and their whispered
remarks to one another upon her strange situation; though she would
almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every individual
there, so long as her story had remained isolated in the mind of each.
It was the interchange of ideas about her that made her sensitiveness
wince. Tess could not account for this distinction; she simply knew
that she felt it.

She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre of the county,
to which she had been recommended by a wandering letter which had
reached her from Marian. Marian had somehow heard that Tess was
separated from her husband—probably through Izz Huett—and the
good-natured and now tippling girl, deeming Tess in trouble, had
hastened to notify to her former friend that she herself had gone to
this upland spot after leaving the dairy, and would like to see her
there, where there was room for other hands, if it was really true that
she worked again as of old.

With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her husband’s
forgiveness began to leave her; and there was something of the habitude
of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled
on—disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful past at every
step, obliterating her identity, giving no thought to accidents or
contingencies which might make a quick discovery of her whereabouts by
others of importance to her own happiness, if not to theirs.

Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the least was the
attention she excited by her appearance, a certain bearing of
distinction, which she had caught from Clare, being superadded to her
natural attractiveness. Whilst the clothes lasted which had been
prepared for her marriage, these casual glances of interest caused her
no inconvenience, but as soon as she was compelled to don the wrapper
of a fieldwoman, rude words were addressed to her more than once; but
nothing occurred to cause her bodily fear till a particular November
afternoon.

She had preferred the country west of the River Brit to the upland farm
for which she was now bound, because, for one thing, it was nearer to
the home of her husband’s father; and to hover about that region
unrecognized, with the notion that she might decide to call at the
Vicarage some day, gave her pleasure. But having once decided to try
the higher and drier levels, she pressed back eastward, marching afoot
towards the village of Chalk-Newton, where she meant to pass the night.

The lane was long and unvaried, and, owing to the rapid shortening of
the days, dusk came upon her before she was aware. She had reached the
top of a hill down which the lane stretched its serpentine length in
glimpses, when she heard footsteps behind her back, and in a few
moments she was overtaken by a man. He stepped up alongside Tess and
said—

“Good night, my pretty maid”: to which she civilly replied.

The light still remaining in the sky lit up her face, though the
landscape was nearly dark. The man turned and stared hard at her.

“Why, surely, it is the young wench who was at Trantridge awhile—young
Squire d’Urberville’s friend? I was there at that time, though I don’t
live there now.”

She recognized in him the well-to-do boor whom Angel had knocked down
at the inn for addressing her coarsely. A spasm of anguish shot through
her, and she returned him no answer.

“Be honest enough to own it, and that what I said in the town was true,
though your fancy-man was so up about it—hey, my sly one? You ought to
beg my pardon for that blow of his, considering.”

Still no answer came from Tess. There seemed only one escape for her
hunted soul. She suddenly took to her heels with the speed of the wind,
and, without looking behind her, ran along the road till she came to a
gate which opened directly into a plantation. Into this she plunged,
and did not pause till she was deep enough in its shade to be safe
against any possibility of discovery.

Under foot the leaves were dry, and the foliage of some holly bushes
which grew among the deciduous trees was dense enough to keep off
draughts. She scraped together the dead leaves till she had formed them
into a large heap, making a sort of nest in the middle. Into this Tess
crept.

Such sleep as she got was naturally fitful; she fancied she heard
strange noises, but persuaded herself that they were caused by the
breeze. She thought of her husband in some vague warm clime on the
other side of the globe, while she was here in the cold. Was there
another such a wretched being as she in the world? Tess asked herself;
and, thinking of her wasted life, said, “All is vanity.” She repeated
the words mechanically, till she reflected that this was a most
inadequate thought for modern days. Solomon had thought as far as that
more than two thousand years ago; she herself, though not in the van of
thinkers, had got much further. If all were only vanity, who would mind
it? All was, alas, worse than vanity—injustice, punishment, exaction,
death. The wife of Angel Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its
curve, and the edges of her eye-sockets perceptible under the soft
skin, and thought as she did so that a time would come when that bone
would be bare. “I wish it were now,” she said.

In the midst of these whimsical fancies she heard a new strange sound
among the leaves. It might be the wind; yet there was scarcely any
wind. Sometimes it was a palpitation, sometimes a flutter; sometimes it
was a sort of gasp or gurgle. Soon she was certain that the noises came
from wild creatures of some kind, the more so when, originating in the
boughs overhead, they were followed by the fall of a heavy body upon
the ground. Had she been ensconced here under other and more pleasant
conditions she would have become alarmed; but, outside humanity, she
had at present no fear.

Day at length broke in the sky. When it had been day aloft for some
little while it became day in the wood.

Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world’s active hours had
grown strong, she crept from under her hillock of leaves, and looked
around boldly. Then she perceived what had been going on to disturb
her. The plantation wherein she had taken shelter ran down at this spot
into a peak, which ended it hitherward, outside the hedge being arable
ground. Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage
dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some
staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some
stretched out—all of them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones
whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of nature to
bear more.

Tess guessed at once the meaning of this. The birds had been driven
down into this corner the day before by some shooting-party; and while
those that had dropped dead under the shot, or had died before
nightfall, had been searched for and carried off, many badly wounded
birds had escaped and hidden themselves away, or risen among the thick
boughs, where they had maintained their position till they grew weaker
with loss of blood in the night-time, when they had fallen one by one
as she had heard them.

She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in girlhood, looking
over hedges, or peeping through bushes, and pointing their guns,
strangely accoutred, a bloodthirsty light in their eyes. She had been
told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they were not
like this all the year round, but were, in fact, quite civil persons
save during certain weeks of autumn and winter, when, like the
inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made it their
purpose to destroy life—in this case harmless feathered creatures,
brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify these
propensities—at once so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards their
weaker fellows in Nature’s teeming family.

With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as much
as for herself, Tess’s first thought was to put the still living birds
out of their torture, and to this end with her own hands she broke the
necks of as many as she could find, leaving them to lie where she had
found them till the game-keepers should come—as they probably would
come—to look for them a second time.

“Poor darlings—to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in
the sight o’ such misery as yours!” she exclaimed, her tears running
down as she killed the birds tenderly. “And not a twinge of bodily pain
about me! I be not mangled, and I be not bleeding, and I have two hands
to feed and clothe me.” She was ashamed of herself for her gloom of the
night, based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation
under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature.