Tess of the d'Urbervilles

LVIII

In the afternoon the farmer made it known that the rick was to be
finished that night, since there was a moon by which they could see to
work, and the man with the engine was engaged for another farm on the
morrow. Hence the twanging and humming and rustling proceeded with even
less intermission than usual.

It was not till “nammet”-time, about three o’clock, that Tess raised
her eyes and gave a momentary glance round. She felt but little
surprise at seeing that Alec d’Urberville had come back, and was
standing under the hedge by the gate. He had seen her lift her eyes,
and waved his hand urbanely to her, while he blew her a kiss. It meant
that their quarrel was over. Tess looked down again, and carefully
abstained from gazing in that direction.

Thus the afternoon dragged on. The wheat-rick shrank lower, and the
straw-rick grew higher, and the corn-sacks were carted away. At six
o’clock the wheat-rick was about shoulder-high from the ground. But the
unthreshed sheaves remaining untouched seemed countless still,
notwithstanding the enormous numbers that had been gulped down by the
insatiable swallower, fed by the man and Tess, through whose two young
hands the greater part of them had passed. And the immense stack of
straw where in the morning there had been nothing, appeared as the
faeces of the same buzzing red glutton. From the west sky a wrathful
shine—all that wild March could afford in the way of sunset—had burst
forth after the cloudy day, flooding the tired and sticky faces of the
threshers, and dyeing them with a coppery light, as also the flapping
garments of the women, which clung to them like dull flames.

A panting ache ran through the rick. The man who fed was weary, and
Tess could see that the red nape of his neck was encrusted with dirt
and husks. She still stood at her post, her flushed and perspiring face
coated with the corndust, and her white bonnet embrowned by it. She was
the only woman whose place was upon the machine so as to be shaken
bodily by its spinning, and the decrease of the stack now separated her
from Marian and Izz, and prevented their changing duties with her as
they had done. The incessant quivering, in which every fibre of her
frame participated, had thrown her into a stupefied reverie in which
her arms worked on independently of her consciousness. She hardly knew
where she was, and did not hear Izz Huett tell her from below that her
hair was tumbling down.

By degrees the freshest among them began to grow cadaverous and
saucer-eyed. Whenever Tess lifted her head she beheld always the great
upgrown straw-stack, with the men in shirt-sleeves upon it, against the
gray north sky; in front of it the long red elevator like a Jacob’s
ladder, on which a perpetual stream of threshed straw ascended, a
yellow river running uphill, and spouting out on the top of the rick.

She knew that Alec d’Urberville was still on the scene, observing her
from some point or other, though she could not say where. There was an
excuse for his remaining, for when the threshed rick drew near its
final sheaves a little ratting was always done, and men unconnected
with the threshing sometimes dropped in for that performance—sporting
characters of all descriptions, gents with terriers and facetious
pipes, roughs with sticks and stones.

But there was another hour’s work before the layer of live rats at the
base of the stack would be reached; and as the evening light in the
direction of the Giant’s Hill by Abbot’s-Cernel dissolved away, the
white-faced moon of the season arose from the horizon that lay towards
Middleton Abbey and Shottsford on the other side. For the last hour or
two Marian had felt uneasy about Tess, whom she could not get near
enough to speak to, the other women having kept up their strength by
drinking ale, and Tess having done without it through traditionary
dread, owing to its results at her home in childhood. But Tess still
kept going: if she could not fill her part she would have to leave; and
this contingency, which she would have regarded with equanimity and
even with relief a month or two earlier, had become a terror since
d’Urberville had begun to hover round her.

The sheaf-pitchers and feeders had now worked the rick so low that
people on the ground could talk to them. To Tess’s surprise Farmer
Groby came up on the machine to her, and said that if she desired to
join her friend he did not wish her to keep on any longer, and would
send somebody else to take her place. The “friend” was d’Urberville,
she knew, and also that this concession had been granted in obedience
to the request of that friend, or enemy. She shook her head and toiled
on.

The time for the rat-catching arrived at last, and the hunt began. The
creatures had crept downwards with the subsidence of the rick till they
were all together at the bottom, and being now uncovered from their
last refuge, they ran across the open ground in all directions, a loud
shriek from the by-this-time half-tipsy Marian informing her companions
that one of the rats had invaded her person—a terror which the rest of
the women had guarded against by various schemes of skirt-tucking and
self-elevation. The rat was at last dislodged, and, amid the barking of
dogs, masculine shouts, feminine screams, oaths, stampings, and
confusion as of Pandemonium, Tess untied her last sheaf; the drum
slowed, the whizzing ceased, and she stepped from the machine to the
ground.

Her lover, who had only looked on at the rat-catching, was promptly at
her side.

“What—after all—my insulting slap, too!” said she in an underbreath.
She was so utterly exhausted that she had not strength to speak louder.

“I should indeed be foolish to feel offended at anything you say or
do,” he answered, in the seductive voice of the Trantridge time. “How
the little limbs tremble! You are as weak as a bled calf, you know you
are; and yet you need have done nothing since I arrived. How could you
be so obstinate? However, I have told the farmer that he has no right
to employ women at steam-threshing. It is not proper work for them; and
on all the better class of farms it has been given up, as he knows very
well. I will walk with you as far as your home.”

“O yes,” she answered with a jaded gait. “Walk wi’ me if you will! I do
bear in mind that you came to marry me before you knew o’ my state.
Perhaps—perhaps you are a little better and kinder than I have been
thinking you were. Whatever is meant as kindness I am grateful for;
whatever is meant in any other way I am angered at. I cannot sense your
meaning sometimes.”

“If I cannot legitimize our former relations at least I can assist you.
And I will do it with much more regard for your feelings than I
formerly showed. My religious mania, or whatever it was, is over. But I
retain a little good nature; I hope I do. Now, Tess, by all that’s
tender and strong between man and woman, trust me! I have enough and
more than enough to put you out of anxiety, both for yourself and your
parents and sisters. I can make them all comfortable if you will only
show confidence in me.”

“Have you seen ’em lately?” she quickly inquired.

“Yes. They didn’t know where you were. It was only by chance that I
found you here.”

The cold moon looked aslant upon Tess’s fagged face between the twigs
of the garden-hedge as she paused outside the cottage which was her
temporary home, d’Urberville pausing beside her.

“Don’t mention my little brothers and sisters—don’t make me break down
quite!” she said. “If you want to help them—God knows they need it—do
it without telling me. But no, no!” she cried. “I will take nothing
from you, either for them or for me!”

He did not accompany her further, since, as she lived with the
household, all was public indoors. No sooner had she herself entered,
laved herself in a washing-tub, and shared supper with the family than
she fell into thought, and withdrawing to the table under the wall, by
the light of her own little lamp wrote in a passionate mood—

My own Husband,

Let me call you so—I must—even if it makes you angry to think of
such an unworthy wife as I. I must cry to you in my trouble—I have
no one else! I am so exposed to temptation, Angel. I fear to say
who it is, and I do not like to write about it at all. But I cling
to you in a way you cannot think! Can you not come to me now, at
once, before anything terrible happens? O, I know you cannot,
because you are so far away! I think I must die if you do not come
soon, or tell me to come to you. The punishment you have measured
out to me is deserved—I do know that—well deserved—and you are
right and just to be angry with me. But, Angel, please, please, not
to be just—only a little kind to me, even if I do not deserve it,
and come to me! If you would come, I could die in your arms! I
would be well content to do that if so be you had forgiven me!

Angel, I live entirely for you. I love you too much to blame you
for going away, and I know it was necessary you should find a farm.
Do not think I shall say a word of sting or bitterness. Only come
back to me. I am desolate without you, my darling, O, so desolate!
I do not mind having to work: but if you will send me one little
line, and say, “I am coming soon”, I will bide on, Angel—O, so
cheerfully!

It has been so much my religion ever since we were married to be
faithful to you in every thought and look, that even when a man
speaks a compliment to me before I am aware, it seems wronging you.
Have you never felt one little bit of what you used to feel when we
were at the dairy? If you have, how can you keep away from me? I am
the same woman, Angel, as you fell in love with; yes, the very
same!—not the one you disliked but never saw. What was the past to
me as soon as I met you? It was a dead thing altogether. I became
another woman, filled full of new life from you. How could I be the
early one? Why do you not see this? Dear, if you would only be a
little more conceited, and believe in yourself so far as to see
that you were strong enough to work this change in me, you would
perhaps be in a mind to come to me, your poor wife.

How silly I was in my happiness when I thought I could trust you
always to love me! I ought to have known that such as that was not
for poor me. But I am sick at heart, not only for old times, but
for the present. Think—think how it do hurt my heart not to see you
ever—ever! Ah, if I could only make your dear heart ache one little
minute of each day as mine does every day and all day long, it
might lead you to show pity to your poor lonely one.

People still say that I am rather pretty, Angel (handsome is the
word they use, since I wish to be truthful). Perhaps I am what they
say. But I do not value my good looks; I only like to have them
because they belong to you, my dear, and that there may be at least
one thing about me worth your having. So much have I felt this,
that when I met with annoyance on account of the same, I tied up my
face in a bandage as long as people would believe in it. O Angel, I
tell you all this not from vanity—you will certainly know I do
not—but only that you may come to me!

If you really cannot come to me, will you let me come to you? I am,
as I say, worried, pressed to do what I will not do. It cannot be
that I shall yield one inch, yet I am in terror as to what an
accident might lead to, and I so defenceless on account of my first
error. I cannot say more about this—it makes me too miserable. But
if I break down by falling into some fearful snare, my last state
will be worse than my first. O God, I cannot think of it! Let me
come at once, or at once come to me!

I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as your servant, if
I may not as your wife; so that I could only be near you, and get
glimpses of you, and think of you as mine.

The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not here, and I
don’t like to see the rooks and starlings in the field, because I
grieve and grieve to miss you who used to see them with me. I long
for only one thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet
you, my own dear! Come to me—come to me, and save me from what
threatens me!—

Your faithful heartbroken
Tess