Tess of the d'Urbervilles

LIII

There was no exaggeration in Marian’s definition of Flintcomb-Ash farm
as a starve-acre place. The single fat thing on the soil was Marian
herself; and she was an importation. Of the three classes of village,
the village cared for by its lord, the village cared for by itself, and
the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord (in other
words, the village of a resident squire’s tenantry, the village of free
or copy-holders, and the absentee-owner’s village, farmed with the
land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the third.

But Tess set to work. Patience, that blending of moral courage with
physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel
Clare; and it sustained her.

The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was a
stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground of
the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets—the outcrop of
siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose
white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half of
each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the
business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the
root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also.
Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole
field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without
features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of
skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white
vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and
nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face
looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the
white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls
crawling over the surface of the former like flies.

Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical
regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in Hessian
“wroppers”—sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom, to keep
their gowns from blowing about—scant skirts revealing boots that
reached high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets.
The pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads
would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of
the two Marys.

They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they
bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of
their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist
in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said
that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would
not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a situation, this field,
that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally
upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till
they were wet through. Tess had not known till now what was really
meant by that. There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is
called being wet through in common talk. But to stand working slowly in
a field, and feel the creep of rain-water, first in legs and shoulders,
then on hips and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to work
on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down,
demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.

Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be supposed. They
were both young, and they were talking of the time when they lived and
loved together at Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of land
where summer had been liberal in her gifts; in substance to all,
emotionally to these. Tess would fain not have conversed with Marian of
the man who was legally, if not actually, her husband; but the
irresistible fascination of the subject betrayed her into reciprocating
Marian’s remarks. And thus, as has been said, though the damp curtains
of their bonnets flapped smartly into their faces, and their wrappers
clung about them to wearisomeness, they lived all this afternoon in
memories of green, sunny, romantic Talbothays.

“You can see a gleam of a hill within a few miles o’ Froom Valley from
here when ’tis fine,” said Marian.

“Ah! Can you?” said Tess, awake to the new value of this locality.

So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to
enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. Marian’s will had
a method of assisting itself by taking from her pocket as the afternoon
wore on a pint bottle corked with white rag, from which she invited
Tess to drink. Tess’s unassisted power of dreaming, however, being
enough for her sublimation at present, she declined except the merest
sip, and then Marian took a pull from the spirits.

“I’ve got used to it,” she said, “and can’t leave it off now. ’Tis my
only comfort—You see I lost him: you didn’t; and you can do without it
perhaps.”

Tess thought her loss as great as Marian’s, but upheld by the dignity
of being Angel’s wife, in the letter at least, she accepted Marian’s
differentiation.

Amid this scene Tess slaved in the morning frosts and in the afternoon
rains. When it was not swede-grubbing it was swede-trimming, in which
process they sliced off the earth and the fibres with a bill-hook
before storing the roots for future use. At this occupation they could
shelter themselves by a thatched hurdle if it rained; but if it was
frosty even their thick leather gloves could not prevent the frozen
masses they handled from biting their fingers. Still Tess hoped. She
had a conviction that sooner or later the magnanimity which she
persisted in reckoning as a chief ingredient of Clare’s character would
lead him to rejoin her.

Marian, primed to a humorous mood, would discover the queer-shaped
flints aforesaid, and shriek with laughter, Tess remaining severely
obtuse. They often looked across the country to where the Var or Froom
was known to stretch, even though they might not be able to see it;
and, fixing their eyes on the cloaking gray mist, imagined the old
times they had spent out there.

“Ah,” said Marian, “how I should like another or two of our old set to
come here! Then we could bring up Talbothays every day here afield, and
talk of he, and of what nice times we had there, and o’ the old things
we used to know, and make it all come back a’most, in seeming!”
Marian’s eyes softened, and her voice grew vague as the visions
returned. “I’ll write to Izz Huett,” she said. “She’s biding at home
doing nothing now, I know, and I’ll tell her we be here, and ask her to
come; and perhaps Retty is well enough now.”

Tess had nothing to say against the proposal, and the next she heard of
this plan for importing old Talbothays’ joys was two or three days
later, when Marian informed her that Izz had replied to her inquiry,
and had promised to come if she could.

There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and
measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player. One morning the few
lonely trees and the thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if they had
put off a vegetable for an animal integument. Every twig was covered
with a white nap as of fur grown from the rind during the night, giving
it four times its usual stoutness; the whole bush or tree forming a
staring sketch in white lines on the mournful gray of the sky and
horizon. Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds and walls where none
had ever been observed till brought out into visibility by the
crystallizing atmosphere, hanging like loops of white worsted from
salient points of the out-houses, posts, and gates.

After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when
strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on
the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical
eyes—eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in
inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had
ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure;
which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by
the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of
colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the
expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. These nameless
birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had seen
which humanity would never see, they brought no account. The
traveller’s ambition to tell was not theirs, and, with dumb
impassivity, they dismissed experiences which they did not value for
the immediate incidents of this homely upland—the trivial movements of
the two girls in disturbing the clods with their hackers so as to
uncover something or other that these visitants relished as food.

Then one day a peculiar quality invaded the air of this open country.
There came a moisture which was not of rain, and a cold which was not
of frost. It chilled the eyeballs of the twain, made their brows ache,
penetrated to their skeletons, affecting the surface of the body less
than its core. They knew that it meant snow, and in the night the snow
came. Tess, who continued to live at the cottage with the warm gable
that cheered any lonely pedestrian who paused beside it, awoke in the
night, and heard above the thatch noises which seemed to signify that
the roof had turned itself into a gymnasium of all the winds. When she
lit her lamp to get up in the morning she found that the snow had blown
through a chink in the casement, forming a white cone of the finest
powder against the inside, and had also come down the chimney, so that
it lay sole-deep upon the floor, on which her shoes left tracks when
she moved about. Without, the storm drove so fast as to create a
snow-mist in the kitchen; but as yet it was too dark out-of-doors to
see anything.

Tess knew that it was impossible to go on with the swedes; and by the
time she had finished breakfast beside the solitary little lamp, Marian
arrived to tell her that they were to join the rest of the women at
reed-drawing in the barn till the weather changed. As soon, therefore,
as the uniform cloak of darkness without began to turn to a disordered
medley of grays, they blew out the lamp, wrapped themselves up in their
thickest pinners, tied their woollen cravats round their necks and
across their chests, and started for the barn. The snow had followed
the birds from the polar basin as a white pillar of a cloud, and
individual flakes could not be seen. The blast smelt of icebergs,
arctic seas, whales, and white bears, carrying the snow so that it
licked the land but did not deepen on it. They trudged onwards with
slanted bodies through the flossy fields, keeping as well as they could
in the shelter of hedges, which, however, acted as strainers rather
than screens. The air, afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes
that infested it, twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an
achromatic chaos of things. But both the young women were fairly
cheerful; such weather on a dry upland is not in itself dispiriting.

“Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was coming,” said Marian.
“Depend upon’t, they keep just in front o’t all the way from the North
Star. Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching
weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now!
Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all—in fact, it rather does
it good.”

“You mustn’t talk about him to me, Marian,” said Tess severely.

“Well, but—surely you care for ’n! Do you?”

Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes, impulsively faced
in the direction in which she imagined South America to lie, and,
putting up her lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.

“Well, well, I know you do. But ’pon my body, it is a rum life for a
married couple! There—I won’t say another word! Well, as for the
weather, it won’t hurt us in the wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is
fearful hard work—worse than swede-hacking. I can stand it because I’m
stout; but you be slimmer than I. I can’t think why maister should have
set ’ee at it.”

They reached the wheat-barn and entered it. One end of the long
structure was full of corn; the middle was where the reed-drawing was
carried on, and there had already been placed in the reed-press the
evening before as many sheaves of wheat as would be sufficient for the
women to draw from during the day.

“Why, here’s Izz!” said Marian.

Izz it was, and she came forward. She had walked all the way from her
mother’s home on the previous afternoon, and, not deeming the distance
so great, had been belated, arriving, however, just before the snow
began, and sleeping at the alehouse. The farmer had agreed with her
mother at market to take her on if she came to-day, and she had been
afraid to disappoint him by delay.

In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two women from a
neighbouring village; two Amazonian sisters, whom Tess with a start
remembered as Dark Car, the Queen of Spades, and her junior, the Queen
of Diamonds—those who had tried to fight with her in the midnight
quarrel at Trantridge. They showed no recognition of her, and possibly
had none, for they had been under the influence of liquor on that
occasion, and were only temporary sojourners there as here. They did
all kinds of men’s work by preference, including well-sinking, hedging,
ditching, and excavating, without any sense of fatigue. Noted
reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon the other three with
some superciliousness.

Putting on their gloves, all set to work in a row in front of the
press, an erection formed of two posts connected by a cross-beam, under
which the sheaves to be drawn from were laid ears outward, the beam
being pegged down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the sheaves
diminished.

The day hardened in colour, the light coming in at the barndoors
upwards from the snow instead of downwards from the sky. The girls
pulled handful after handful from the press; but by reason of the
presence of the strange women, who were recounting scandals, Marian and
Izz could not at first talk of old times as they wished to do.
Presently they heard the muffled tread of a horse, and the farmer rode
up to the barndoor. When he had dismounted he came close to Tess, and
remained looking musingly at the side of her face. She had not turned
at first, but his fixed attitude led her to look round, when she
perceived that her employer was the native of Trantridge from whom she
had taken flight on the high-road because of his allusion to her
history.

He waited till she had carried the drawn bundles to the pile outside,
when he said, “So you be the young woman who took my civility in such
ill part? Be drowned if I didn’t think you might be as soon as I heard
of your being hired! Well, you thought you had got the better of me the
first time at the inn with your fancy-man, and the second time on the
road, when you bolted; but now I think I’ve got the better of you.” He
concluded with a hard laugh.

Tess, between the Amazons and the farmer, like a bird caught in a
clap-net, returned no answer, continuing to pull the straw. She could
read character sufficiently well to know by this time that she had
nothing to fear from her employer’s gallantry; it was rather the
tyranny induced by his mortification at Clare’s treatment of him. Upon
the whole she preferred that sentiment in man and felt brave enough to
endure it.

“You thought I was in love with ’ee I suppose? Some women are such
fools, to take every look as serious earnest. But there’s nothing like
a winter afield for taking that nonsense out o’ young wenches’ heads;
and you’ve signed and agreed till Lady-Day. Now, are you going to beg
my pardon?”

“I think you ought to beg mine.”

“Very well—as you like. But we’ll see which is master here. Be they all
the sheaves you’ve done to-day?”

“Yes, sir.”

“’Tis a very poor show. Just see what they’ve done over there”
(pointing to the two stalwart women). “The rest, too, have done better
than you.”

“They’ve all practised it before, and I have not. And I thought it made
no difference to you as it is task work, and we are only paid for what
we do.”

“Oh, but it does. I want the barn cleared.”

“I am going to work all the afternoon instead of leaving at two as the
others will do.”

He looked sullenly at her and went away. Tess felt that she could not
have come to a much worse place; but anything was better than
gallantry. When two o’clock arrived the professional reed-drawers
tossed off the last half-pint in their flagon, put down their hooks,
tied their last sheaves, and went away. Marian and Izz would have done
likewise, but on hearing that Tess meant to stay, to make up by longer
hours for her lack of skill, they would not leave her. Looking out at
the snow, which still fell, Marian exclaimed, “Now, we’ve got it all to
ourselves.” And so at last the conversation turned to their old
experiences at the dairy; and, of course, the incidents of their
affection for Angel Clare.

“Izz and Marian,” said Mrs Angel Clare, with a dignity which was
extremely touching, seeing how very little of a wife she was: “I can’t
join in talk with you now, as I used to do, about Mr Clare; you will
see that I cannot; because, although he is gone away from me for the
present, he is my husband.”

Izz was by nature the sauciest and most caustic of all the four girls
who had loved Clare. “He was a very splendid lover, no doubt,” she
said; “but I don’t think he is a too fond husband to go away from you
so soon.”

“He had to go—he was obliged to go, to see about the land over there!”
pleaded Tess.

“He might have tided ’ee over the winter.”

“Ah—that’s owing to an accident—a misunderstanding; and we won’t argue
it,” Tess answered, with tearfulness in her words. “Perhaps there’s a
good deal to be said for him! He did not go away, like some husbands,
without telling me; and I can always find out where he is.”

After this they continued for some long time in a reverie, as they went
on seizing the ears of corn, drawing out the straw, gathering it under
their arms, and cutting off the ears with their bill-hooks, nothing
sounding in the barn but the swish of the straw and the crunch of the
hook. Then Tess suddenly flagged, and sank down upon the heap of
wheat-ears at her feet.

“I knew you wouldn’t be able to stand it!” cried Marian. “It wants
harder flesh than yours for this work.”

Just then the farmer entered. “Oh, that’s how you get on when I am
away,” he said to her.

“But it is my own loss,” she pleaded. “Not yours.”

“I want it finished,” he said doggedly, as he crossed the barn and went
out at the other door.

“Don’t ’ee mind him, there’s a dear,” said Marian. “I’ve worked here
before. Now you go and lie down there, and Izz and I will make up your
number.”

“I don’t like to let you do that. I’m taller than you, too.”

However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie down awhile, and
reclined on a heap of pull-tails—the refuse after the straight straw
had been drawn—thrown up at the further side of the barn. Her
succumbing had been as largely owning to agitation at the re-opening
the subject of her separation from her husband as to the hard work. She
lay in a state of percipience without volition, and the rustle of the
straw and the cutting of the ears by the others had the weight of
bodily touches.

She could hear from her corner, in addition to these noises, the murmur
of their voices. She felt certain that they were continuing the subject
already broached, but their voices were so low that she could not catch
the words. At last Tess grew more and more anxious to know what they
were saying, and, persuading herself that she felt better, she got up
and resumed work.

Then Izz Huett broke down. She had walked more than a dozen miles the
previous evening, had gone to bed at midnight, and had risen again at
five o’clock. Marian alone, thanks to her bottle of liquor and her
stoutness of build, stood the strain upon back and arms without
suffering. Tess urged Izz to leave off, agreeing, as she felt better,
to finish the day without her, and make equal division of the number of
sheaves.

Izz accepted the offer gratefully, and disappeared through the great
door into the snowy track to her lodging. Marian, as was the case every
afternoon at this time on account of the bottle, began to feel in a
romantic vein.

“I should not have thought it of him—never!” she said in a dreamy tone.
“And I loved him so! I didn’t mind his having you. But this about Izz
is too bad!”

Tess, in her start at the words, narrowly missed cutting off a finger
with the bill-hook.

“Is it about my husband?” she stammered.

“Well, yes. Izz said, ‘Don’t ’ee tell her’; but I am sure I can’t help
it! It was what he wanted Izz to do. He wanted her to go off to Brazil
with him.”

Tess’s face faded as white as the scene without, and its curves
straightened. “And did Izz refuse to go?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Anyhow he changed his mind.”

“Pooh—then he didn’t mean it! ’Twas just a man’s jest!”

“Yes he did; for he drove her a good-ways towards the station.”

“He didn’t take her!”

They pulled on in silence till Tess, without any premonitory symptoms,
burst out crying.

“There!” said Marian. “Now I wish I hadn’t told ’ee!”

“No. It is a very good thing that you have done! I have been living on
in a thirtover, lackaday way, and have not seen what it may lead to! I
ought to have sent him a letter oftener. He said I could not go to him,
but he didn’t say I was not to write as often as I liked. I won’t dally
like this any longer! I have been very wrong and neglectful in leaving
everything to be done by him!”

The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and they could see to work no
longer. When Tess had reached home that evening, and had entered into
the privacy of her little white-washed chamber, she began impetuously
writing a letter to Clare. But falling into doubt, she could not finish
it. Afterwards she took the ring from the ribbon on which she wore it
next her heart, and retained it on her finger all night, as if to
fortify herself in the sensation that she was really the wife of this
elusive lover of hers, who could propose that Izz should go with him
abroad, so shortly after he had left her. Knowing that, how could she
write entreaties to him, or show that she cared for him any more?