Tess of the d'Urbervilles

L

She plunged into the chilly equinoctial darkness as the clock struck
ten, for her fifteen miles’ walk under the steely stars. In lonely
districts night is a protection rather than a danger to a noiseless
pedestrian, and knowing this, Tess pursued the nearest course along
by-lanes that she would almost have feared in the day-time; but
marauders were wanting now, and spectral fears were driven out of her
mind by thoughts of her mother. Thus she proceeded mile after mile,
ascending and descending till she came to Bulbarrow, and about midnight
looked from that height into the abyss of chaotic shade which was all
that revealed itself of the vale on whose further side she was born.
Having already traversed about five miles on the upland, she had now
some ten or eleven in the lowland before her journey would be finished.
The winding road downwards became just visible to her under the wan
starlight as she followed it, and soon she paced a soil so contrasting
with that above it that the difference was perceptible to the tread and
to the smell. It was the heavy clay land of Blackmoor Vale, and a part
of the Vale to which turnpike-roads had never penetrated. Superstitions
linger longest on these heavy soils. Having once been forest, at this
shadowy time it seemed to assert something of its old character, the
far and the near being blended, and every tree and tall hedge making
the most of its presence. The harts that had been hunted here, the
witches that had been pricked and ducked, the green-spangled fairies
that “whickered” at you as you passed;—the place teemed with beliefs in
them still, and they formed an impish multitude now.

At Nuttlebury she passed the village inn, whose sign creaked in
response to the greeting of her footsteps, which not a human soul heard
but herself. Under the thatched roofs her mind’s eye beheld relaxed
tendons and flaccid muscles, spread out in the darkness beneath
coverlets made of little purple patchwork squares, and undergoing a
bracing process at the hands of sleep for renewed labour on the morrow,
as soon as a hint of pink nebulosity appeared on Hambledon Hill.

At three she turned the last corner of the maze of lanes she had
threaded, and entered Marlott, passing the field in which as a
club-girl she had first seen Angel Clare, when he had not danced with
her; the sense of disappointment remained with her yet. In the
direction of her mother’s house she saw a light. It came from the
bedroom window, and a branch waved in front of it and made it wink at
her. As soon as she could discern the outline of the house—newly
thatched with her money—it had all its old effect upon Tess’s
imagination. Part of her body and life it ever seemed to be; the slope
of its dormers, the finish of its gables, the broken courses of brick
which topped the chimney, all had something in common with her personal
character. A stupefaction had come into these features, to her regard;
it meant the illness of her mother.

She opened the door so softly as to disturb nobody; the lower room was
vacant, but the neighbour who was sitting up with her mother came to
the top of the stairs, and whispered that Mrs Durbeyfield was no
better, though she was sleeping just then. Tess prepared herself a
breakfast, and then took her place as nurse in her mother’s chamber.

In the morning, when she contemplated the children, they had all a
curiously elongated look; although she had been away little more than a
year, their growth was astounding; and the necessity of applying
herself heart and soul to their needs took her out of her own cares.

Her father’s ill-health was the same indefinite kind, and he sat in his
chair as usual. But the day after her arrival he was unusually bright.
He had a rational scheme for living, and Tess asked him what it was.

“I’m thinking of sending round to all the old antiqueerians in this
part of England,” he said, “asking them to subscribe to a fund to
maintain me. I’m sure they’d see it as a romantical, artistical, and
proper thing to do. They spend lots o’ money in keeping up old ruins,
and finding the bones o’ things, and such like; and living remains must
be more interesting to ’em still, if they only knowed of me. Would that
somebody would go round and tell ’em what there is living among ’em,
and they thinking nothing of him! If Pa’son Tringham, who discovered
me, had lived, he’d ha’ done it, I’m sure.”

Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till she had grappled
with pressing matters in hand, which seemed little improved by her
remittances. When indoor necessities had been eased, she turned her
attention to external things. It was now the season for planting and
sowing; many gardens and allotments of the villagers had already
received their spring tillage; but the garden and the allotment of the
Durbeyfields were behindhand. She found, to her dismay, that this was
owing to their having eaten all the seed potatoes,—that last lapse of
the improvident. At the earliest moment she obtained what others she
could procure, and in a few days her father was well enough to see to
the garden, under Tess’s persuasive efforts: while she herself
undertook the allotment-plot which they rented in a field a couple of
hundred yards out of the village.

She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick chamber, where she
was not now required by reason of her mother’s improvement. Violent
motion relieved thought. The plot of ground was in a high, dry, open
enclosure, where there were forty or fifty such pieces, and where
labour was at its briskest when the hired labour of the day had ended.
Digging began usually at six o’clock and extended indefinitely into the
dusk or moonlight. Just now heaps of dead weeds and refuse were burning
on many of the plots, the dry weather favouring their combustion.

One fine day Tess and ’Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours
till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that
divided the plots. As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare of
the couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the
allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under
the dense smoke as wafted by the wind. When a fire glowed, banks of
smoke, blown level along the ground, would themselves become
illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one
another; and the meaning of the “pillar of a cloud”, which was a wall
by day and a light by night, could be understood.

As evening thickened, some of the gardening men and women gave over for
the night, but the greater number remained to get their planting done,
Tess being among them, though she sent her sister home. It was on one
of the couch-burning plots that she laboured with her fork, its four
shining prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods in little
clicks. Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke of her fire;
then it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the brassy glare
from the heap. She was oddly dressed to-night, and presented a somewhat
staring aspect, her attire being a gown bleached by many washings, with
a short black jacket over it, the effect of the whole being that of a
wedding and funeral guest in one. The women further back wore white
aprons, which, with their pale faces, were all that could be seen of
them in the gloom, except when at moments they caught a flash from the
flames.

Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which formed the
boundary of the field rose against the pale opalescence of the lower
sky. Above, Jupiter hung like a full-blown jonquil, so bright as almost
to throw a shade. A few small nondescript stars were appearing
elsewhere. In the distance a dog barked, and wheels occasionally
rattled along the dry road.

Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it was not late;
and though the air was fresh and keen there was a whisper of spring in
it that cheered the workers on. Something in the place, the hours, the
crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and shade, made
others as well as Tess enjoy being there. Nightfall, which in the frost
of winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of summer as a lover, came
as a tranquillizer on this March day.

Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of all were on the
soil as its turned surface was revealed by the fires. Hence as Tess
stirred the clods and sang her foolish little songs with scarce now a
hope that Clare would ever hear them, she did not for a long time
notice the person who worked nearest to her—a man in a long smockfrock
who, she found, was forking the same plot as herself, and whom she
supposed her father had sent there to advance the work. She became more
conscious of him when the direction of his digging brought him closer.
Sometimes the smoke divided them; then it swerved, and the two were
visible to each other but divided from all the rest.

Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak to her. Nor
did she think of him further than to recollect that he had not been
there when it was broad daylight, and that she did not know him as any
one of the Marlott labourers, which was no wonder, her absences having
been so long and frequent of late years. By-and-by he dug so close to
her that the fire-beams were reflected as distinctly from the steel
prongs of his fork as from her own. On going up to the fire to throw a
pitch of dead weeds upon it, she found that he did the same on the
other side. The fire flared up, and she beheld the face of
d’Urberville.

The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his appearance
in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now worn only by the most
old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled
her as to its bearing. D’Urberville emitted a low, long laugh.

“If I were inclined to joke, I should say, How much this seems like
Paradise!” he remarked whimsically, looking at her with an inclined
head.

“What do you say?” she weakly asked.

“A jester might say this is just like Paradise. You are Eve, and I am
the old Other One come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior
animal. I used to be quite up in that scene of Milton’s when I was
theological. Some of it goes—

‘Empress, the way is ready, and not long,
Beyond a row of myrtles....
... If thou accept
My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon.’
‘Lead then,’ said Eve.

“And so on. My dear Tess, I am only putting this to you as a thing that
you might have supposed or said quite untruly, because you think so
badly of me.”

“I never said you were Satan, or thought it. I don’t think of you in
that way at all. My thoughts of you are quite cold, except when you
affront me. What, did you come digging here entirely because of me?”

“Entirely. To see you; nothing more. The smockfrock, which I saw
hanging for sale as I came along, was an afterthought, that I mightn’t
be noticed. I come to protest against your working like this.”

“But I like doing it—it is for my father.”

“Your engagement at the other place is ended?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going to next? To join your dear husband?”

She could not bear the humiliating reminder.

“O—I don’t know!” she said bitterly. “I have no husband!”

“It is quite true—in the sense you mean. But you have a friend, and I
have determined that you shall be comfortable in spite of yourself.
When you get down to your house you will see what I have sent there for
you.”

“O, Alec, I wish you wouldn’t give me anything at all! I cannot take it
from you! I don’t like—it is not right!”

“It is right!” he cried lightly. “I am not going to see a woman whom
I feel so tenderly for as I do for you in trouble without trying to
help her.”

“But I am very well off! I am only in trouble about—about—not about
living at all!”

She turned, and desperately resumed her digging, tears dripping upon
the fork-handle and upon the clods.

“About the children—your brothers and sisters,” he resumed. “I’ve been
thinking of them.”

Tess’s heart quivered—he was touching her in a weak place. He had
divined her chief anxiety. Since returning home her soul had gone out
to those children with an affection that was passionate.

“If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for
them; since your father will not be able to do much, I suppose?”

“He can with my assistance. He must!”

“And with mine.”

“No, sir!”

“How damned foolish this is!” burst out d’Urberville. “Why, he thinks
we are the same family; and will be quite satisfied!”

“He don’t. I’ve undeceived him.”

“The more fool you!”

D’Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge, where he pulled
off the long smockfrock which had disguised him; and rolling it up and
pushing it into the couch-fire, went away.

Tess could not get on with her digging after this; she felt restless;
she wondered if he had gone back to her father’s house; and taking the
fork in her hand proceeded homewards.

Some twenty yards from the house she was met by one of her sisters.

“O, Tessy—what do you think! ’Liza-Lu is a-crying, and there’s a lot of
folk in the house, and mother is a good deal better, but they think
father is dead!”

The child realized the grandeur of the news; but not as yet its
sadness, and stood looking at Tess with round-eyed importance till,
beholding the effect produced upon her, she said—

“What, Tess, shan’t we talk to father never no more?”

“But father was only a little bit ill!” exclaimed Tess distractedly.

’Liza-Lu came up.

“He dropped down just now, and the doctor who was there for mother said
there was no chance for him, because his heart was growed in.”

Yes; the Durbeyfield couple had changed places; the dying one was out
of danger, and the indisposed one was dead. The news meant even more
than it sounded. Her father’s life had a value apart from his personal
achievements, or perhaps it would not have had much. It was the last of
the three lives for whose duration the house and premises were held
under a lease; and it had long been coveted by the tenant-farmer for
his regular labourers, who were stinted in cottage accommodation.
Moreover, “liviers” were disapproved of in villages almost as much as
little freeholders, because of their independence of manner, and when a
lease determined it was never renewed.

Thus the Durbeyfields, once d’Urbervilles, saw descending upon them the
destiny which, no doubt, when they were among the Olympians of the
county, they had caused to descend many a time, and severely enough,
upon the heads of such landless ones as they themselves were now. So do
flux and reflux—the rhythm of change—alternate and persist in
everything under the sky.