Tess of the D'urbervilles

revolving Maltese cross of the reaping-machine, which had been

brought to the field on the previous evening to be ready for

operations this day. The paint with which they were smeared,

intensified in hue by the sunlight, imparted to them a look of

having been dipped in liquid fire.

The field had already been "opened"; that is to say, a lane a few

feet wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole

circumference of the field for the first passage of the horses and

machine.

Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down

the lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top

struck the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were

enjoying sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn. They

disappeared from the lane between the two stone posts which flanked

the nearest field-gate.

Presently there arose from within a ticking like the love-making of

the grasshopper. The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation

of three horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible

over the gate, a driver sitting upon one of the hauling horses,

and an attendant on the seat of the implement. Along one side of

the field the whole wain went, the arms of the mechanical reaper

revolving slowly, till it passed down the hill quite out of sight.

In a minute it came up on the other side of the field at the same

equable pace; the glistening brass star in the forehead of the fore

horse first catching the eye as it rose into view over the stubble,

then the bright arms, and then the whole machine.

The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with

each circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to a smaller area as

the morning wore on. Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated

inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their

refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when,

their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they

were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of

upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and

they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the

harvesters.

The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps,

each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the

active binders in the rear laid their hands--mainly women, but some

of them men in print shirts, and trousers supported round their

waists by leather straps, rendering useless the two buttons behind,

which twinkled and bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each

wearer, as if they were a pair of eyes in the small of his back.

But those of the other sex were the most interesting of this company

of binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when

she becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely

an object set down therein as at ordinary times. A field-man is a

personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had

somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding,

and assimilated herself with it.

The women--or rather girls, for they were mostly young--wore drawn

cotton bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and

gloves to prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble. There

was one wearing a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured

tight-sleeved gown, another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the

reaping-machine; and others, older, in the brown-rough "wropper"

or over-all--the old-established and most appropriate dress of the

field-woman, which the young ones were abandoning. This morning the

eye returns involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she

being the most flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all. But

her bonnet is pulled so far over her brow that none of her face is

disclosed while she binds, though her complexion may be guessed from

a stray twine or two of dark brown hair which extends below the

curtain of her bonnet. Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual

attention is that she never courts it, though the other women often

gaze around them.

Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the sheaf last

finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her

left palm to bring them even. Then, stooping low, she moves forward,

gathering the corn with both hands against her knees, and pushing

her left gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other

side, holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover. She

brings the ends of the bond together, and kneels on the sheaf while

she ties it, beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the

breeze. A bit of her naked arm is visible between the buff leather

of the gauntlet and the sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on

its feminine smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds.

At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged

apron, or to pull her bonnet straight. Then one can see the oval

face of a handsome young woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy

clinging tresses, which seem to clasp in a beseeching way anything

they fall against. The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular,

the red lips thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.

It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d'Urberville, somewhat changed--the

same, but not the same; at the present stage of her existence living

as a stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that

she was in. After a long seclusion she had come to a resolve to

undertake outdoor work in her native village, the busiest season of

the year in the agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that

she could do within the house being so remunerative for the time as

harvesting in the fields.

The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess's,

the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille

at the completion of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on

end against those of the rest, till a shock, or "stitch" as it was

here called, of ten or a dozen was formed.

They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work proceeded as

before. As the hour of eleven drew near a person watching her might

have noticed that every now and then Tess's glance flitted wistfully

to the brow of the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing.

On the verge of the hour the heads of a group of children, of ages

ranging from six to fourteen, rose over the stubbly convexity of the

hill.

The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not pause.

The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its

corner draggling on the stubble, carried in her arms what at first

sight seemed to be a doll, but proved to be an infant in long

clothes. Another brought some lunch. The harvesters ceased working,

took their provisions, and sat down against one of the shocks. Here

they fell to, the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a

cup.

Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her labours.

She sat down at the end of the shock, her face turned somewhat away

from her companions. When she had deposited herself a man in a

rabbit-skin cap, and with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt,

held the cup of ale over the top of the shock for her to drink. But

she did not accept his offer. As soon as her lunch was spread she

called up the big girl, her sister, and took the baby of her, who,

glad to be relieved of the burden, went away to the next shock and

joined the other children playing there. Tess, with a curiously

stealthy yet courageous movement, and with a still rising colour,

unfastened her frock and began suckling the child.

The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the

other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with

absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no

longer yield a stream. All the women but Tess fell into animated

talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.

When the infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat it upright

in her lap, and looking into the far distance, dandled it with a

gloomy indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she

fell to violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could

never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which

strangely combined passionateness with contempt.

"She's fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en,

and say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard,"

observed the woman in the red petticoat.

"She'll soon leave off saying that," replied the one in buff. "Lord,

'tis wonderful what a body can get used to o' that sort in time!"

"A little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming o't, I

reckon. There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in

The Chase; and it mid ha' gone hard wi' a certain party if folks had

come along."

"Well, a little more, or a little less, 'twas a thousand pities that

it should have happened to she, of all others. But 'tis always the

comeliest! The plain ones be as safe as churches--hey, Jenny?" The

speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined

as plain.

It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy

to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her

flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor

grey nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred

others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises--shade

behind shade--tint beyond tint--around pupils that had no bottom; an

almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character

inherited from her race.

A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the

fields this week for the first time during many months. After

wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret

that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated

her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again--to taste

anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever

it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences,

time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if

they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten.

Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and

the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had

not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly--the

thought of the world's concern at her situation--was founded on an

illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a

structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind

besides, Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was

no more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself

miserable the livelong night and day it was only this much to

them--"Ah, she makes herself unhappy." If she tried to be cheerful,

to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers,

the baby, she could only be this idea to them--"Ah, she bears it

very well." Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been

wretched at what had happened to her? Not greatly. If she could

have been but just created, to discover herself as a spouseless

mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless

child, would the position have caused her to despair? No, she would

have taken it calmly, and found pleasure therein. Most of the misery

had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate

sensations.

Whatever Tess's reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress

herself up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the

fields, harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then. This was

why she had borne herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly

in the face at times, even when holding the baby in her arms.

The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and stretched their

limbs, and extinguished their pipes. The horses, which had been

unharnessed and fed, were again attached to the scarlet machine.

Tess, having quickly eaten her own meal, beckoned to her eldest

sister to come and take away the baby, fastened her dress, put on

the buff gloves again, and stooped anew to draw a bond from the last

completed sheaf for the tying of the next.

In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were

continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters.

Then they all rode home in one of the largest wagons, in the company

of a broad tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the

eastwards, its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some

worm-eaten Tuscan saint. Tess's female companions sang songs, and

showed themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out

of doors, though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing

in a few verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry

green wood and came back a changed state. There are counterpoises

and compensations in life; and the event which had made of her a

social warning had also for the moment made her the most interesting

personage in the village to many. Their friendliness won her still

farther away from herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and

she became almost gay.

But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on

the natural side of her which knew no social law. When she reached

home it was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly

taken ill since the afternoon. Some such collapse had been probable,

so tender and puny was its frame; but the event came as a shock

nevertheless.

The baby's offence against society in coming into the world was

forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul's desire was to continue that

offence by preserving the life of the child. However, it soon grew

clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the

flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured.

And when she had discovered this she was plunged into a misery which

transcended that of the child's simple loss. Her baby had not been

baptized.

Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the

consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done,

burn she must, and there was an end of it. Like all village girls,

she was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully

studied the histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences

to be drawn therefrom. But when the same question arose with regard

to the baby, it had a very different colour. Her darling was about

to die, and no salvation.

It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she

might send for the parson. The moment happened to be one at which

her father's sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest,

and his sensitiveness to the smudge which Tess had set upon that

nobility most pronounced, for he had just returned from his weekly

booze at Rolliver's Inn. No parson should come inside his door, he

declared, prying into his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it

had become more necessary than ever to hide them. He locked the door

and put the key in his pocket.

The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond measure, Tess

retired also. She was continually waking as she lay, and in the

middle of the night found that the baby was still worse. It was

obviously dying--quietly and painlessly, but none the less surely.

In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed. The clock struck the

solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and

malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts. She thought of

the child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double

doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend

tossing it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for

heating the oven on baking days; to which picture she added many

other quaint and curious details of torment sometimes taught the

young in this Christian country. The lurid presentment so powerfully

affected her imagination in the silence of the sleeping house that

her nightgown became damp with perspiration, and the bedstead shook

with each throb of her heart.

The infant's breathing grew more difficult, and the mother's mental

tension increased. It was useless to devour the little thing with

kisses; she could stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about

the room.

"O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!" she cried.

"Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the

child!"

She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured incoherent

supplications for a long while, till she suddenly started up.

"Ah! perhaps baby can be saved! Perhaps it will be just the same!"

She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have

shone in the gloom surrounding her. She lit a candle, and went to

a second and a third bed under the wall, where she awoke her young

sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied the same room. Pulling

out the washing-stand so that she could get behind it, she poured

some water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting their

hands together with fingers exactly vertical. While the children,

scarcely awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger

and larger, remained in this position, she took the baby from her

bed--a child's child--so immature as scarce to seem a sufficient

personality to endow its producer with the maternal title. Tess then

stood erect with the infant on her arm beside the basin; the next

sister held the Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church

held it before the parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her

child.

Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her

long white nightgown, a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging

straight down her back to her waist. The kindly dimness of the weak

candle abstracted from her form and features the little blemishes

which sunlight might have revealed--the stubble scratches upon her

wrists, and the weariness of her eyes--her high enthusiasm having

a transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her undoing,

showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity

which was almost regal. The little ones kneeling round, their sleepy

eyes blinking and red, awaited her preparations full of a suspended

wonder which their physical heaviness at that hour would not allow to

become active.

The most impressed of them said:

"Be you really going to christen him, Tess?"

The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.

"What's his name going to be?"

She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a phrase in

the book of Genesis came into her head as she proceeded with the

baptismal service, and now she pronounced it:

"SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son,

and of the Holy Ghost."

She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.

"Say 'Amen,' children."

The tiny voices piped in obedient response, "Amen!"

Tess went on:

"We receive this child"--and so forth--"and do sign him with the sign

of the Cross."

Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently drew an

immense cross upon the baby with her forefinger, continuing with

the customary sentences as to his manfully fighting against sin,

the world, and the devil, and being a faithful soldier and servant

unto his life's end. She duly went on with the Lord's Prayer, the

children lisping it after her in a thin gnat-like wail, till, at the

conclusion, raising their voices to clerk's pitch, they again piped

into silence, "Amen!"

Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy

of the sacrament, poured forth from the bottom of her heart the

thanksgiving that follows, uttering it boldly and triumphantly in the

stopt-diapason note which her voice acquired when her heart was in

her speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her.

The ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a

glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each

cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils

shone like a diamond. The children gazed up at her with more and

more reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning. She did

not look like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering, and

awful--a divine personage with whom they had nothing in common.

Poor Sorrow's campaign against sin, the world, and the devil was

doomed to be of limited brilliancy--luckily perhaps for himself,

considering his beginnings. In the blue of the morning that fragile

soldier and servant breathed his last, and when the other children

awoke they cried bitterly, and begged Sissy to have another pretty

baby.

The calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained

with her in the infant's loss. In the daylight, indeed, she felt her

terrors about his soul to have been somewhat exaggerated; whether

well founded or not, she had no uneasiness now, reasoning that

if Providence would not ratify such an act of approximation

she, for one, did not value the kind of heaven lost by the

irregularity--either for herself or for her child.

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired--that intrusive creature, that

bastard gift of shameless Nature, who respects not the social law;

a waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who

knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom

the cottage interior was the universe, the week's weather climate,

new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human

knowledge.

Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal, wondered if it were

doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child.

Nobody could tell this but the parson of the parish, and he was a

new-comer, and did not know her. She went to his house after dusk,

and stood by the gate, but could not summon courage to go in. The

enterprise would have been abandoned if she had not by accident met

him coming homeward as she turned away. In the gloom she did not

mind speaking freely.

"I should like to ask you something, sir."

He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the story of the

baby's illness and the extemporized ordinance. "And now, sir," she

added earnestly, "can you tell me this--will it be just the same for

him as if you had baptized him?"

Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he

should have been called in for had been unskilfully botched by his

customers among themselves, he was disposed to say no. Yet the

dignity of the girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined

to affect his nobler impulses--or rather those that he had left in

him after ten years of endeavour to graft technical belief on actual

scepticism. The man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the

victory fell to the man.

"My dear girl," he said, "it will be just the same."

"Then will you give him a Christian burial?" she asked quickly.

The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby's illness, he

had conscientiously gone to the house after nightfall to perform the

rite, and, unaware that the refusal to admit him had come from Tess's

father and not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity

for its irregular administration.

"Ah--that's another matter," he said.

"Another matter--why?" asked Tess, rather warmly.

"Well--I would willingly do so if only we two were concerned. But I

must not--for certain reasons."

"Just for once, sir!"

"Really I must not."

"O sir!" She seized his hand as she spoke.

He withdrew it, shaking his head.

"Then I don't like you!" she burst out, "and I'll never come to your

church no more!"

"Don't talk so rashly."

"Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don't? ... Will it

be just the same? Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but

as you yourself to me myself--poor me!"

How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he

supposed himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman's

power to tell, though not to excuse. Somewhat moved, he said in

this case also--

"It will be just the same."

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's

shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light,

at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that

shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow,

and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides,

and others of the conjecturally damned are laid. In spite of the

untoward surroundings, however, Tess bravely made a little cross of

two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with flowers,

she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when she could

enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot also

a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them

alive. What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of

mere observation noted the words "Keelwell's Marmalade"? The eye of

maternal affection did not see them in its vision of higher things.

XV

"By experience," says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by

a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for

further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then? Tess

Durbeyfield's experience was of this incapacitating kind. At last

she had learned what to do; but who would now accept her doing?

If before going to the d'Urbervilles' she had vigorously moved under

the guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to

the world in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on.

But it had not been in Tess's power--nor is it in anybody's power--to

feel the whole truth of golden opinions while it is possible to

profit by them. She--and how many more--might have ironically said

to God with Saint Augustine: "Thou hast counselled a better course

than Thou hast permitted."

She remained at her father's house during the winter months, plucking

fowls, or cramming turkeys and geese, or making clothes for her

sisters and brothers out of some finery which d'Urberville had given

her, and she had put by with contempt. Apply to him she would not.

But she would often clasp her hands behind her head and muse when she

was supposed to be working hard.

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution

of the year; the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with

its dark background of The Chase; also the dates of the baby's birth

and death; also her own birthday; and every other day individualized

by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought

one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there

was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that

of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day

which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving

no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less

surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each

yearly encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor's

thought that some time in the future those who had known her would

say: "It is the ----th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died"; and

there would be nothing singular to their minds in the statement. Of

that day, doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she

did not know the place in month, week, season or year.

Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman.

Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face, and a note of tragedy

at times into her voice. Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent.

She became what would have been called a fine creature; her aspect

was fair and arresting; her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent

experiences of the last year or two had quite failed to demoralize.

But for the world's opinion those experiences would have been simply

a liberal education.

She had held so aloof of late that her trouble, never generally

known, was nearly forgotten in Marlott. But it became evident to her

that she could never be really comfortable again in a place which

had seen the collapse of her family's attempt to "claim kin"--and,

through her, even closer union--with the rich d'Urbervilles. At

least she could not be comfortable there till long years should have

obliterated her keen consciousness of it. Yet even now Tess felt the

pulse of hopeful life still warm within her; she might be happy in

some nook which had no memories. To escape the past and all that

appertained thereto was to annihilate it, and to do that she would

have to get away.

Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? she would ask

herself. She might prove it false if she could veil bygones. The

recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not

denied to maidenhood alone.

She waited a long time without finding opportunity for a new

departure. A particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of

germination was almost audible in the buds; it moved her, as it moved

the wild animals, and made her passionate to go. At last, one day in

early May, a letter reached her from a former friend of her mother's,

to whom she had addressed inquiries long before--a person whom she

had never seen--that a skilful milkmaid was required at a dairy-house

many miles to the southward, and that the dairyman would be glad to

have her for the summer months.

It was not quite so far off as could have been wished; but it was

probably far enough, her radius of movement and repute having been

so small. To persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical

degrees, parishes as counties, counties as provinces and kingdoms.

On one point she was resolved: there should be no more d'Urberville

air-castles in the dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be

the dairymaid Tess, and nothing more. Her mother knew Tess's feeling

on this point so well, though no words had passed between them on the

subject, that she never alluded to the knightly ancestry now.

Yet such is human inconsistency that one of the interests of the

new place to her was the accidental virtues of its lying near her

forefathers' country (for they were not Blakemore men, though her

mother was Blakemore to the bone). The dairy called Talbothays,

for which she was bound, stood not remotely from some of the former

estates of the d'Urbervilles, near the great family vaults of her

granddames and their powerful husbands. She would be able to look at

them, and think not only that d'Urberville, like Babylon, had fallen,

but that the individual innocence of a humble descendant could lapse

as silently. All the while she wondered if any strange good thing

might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within

her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected

youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with

it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.

END OF PHASE THE SECOND

Phase the Third: The Rally

XVI

On a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May, between two and

three years after the return from Trantridge--silent, reconstructive

years for Tess Durbeyfield--she left her home for the second time.

Having packed up her luggage so that it could be sent to her later,

she started in a hired trap for the little town of Stourcastle,

through which it was necessary to pass on her journey, now in a

direction almost opposite to that of her first adventuring. On the

curve of the nearest hill she looked back regretfully at Marlott and

her father's house, although she had been so anxious to get away.

Her kindred dwelling there would probably continue their daily

lives as heretofore, with no great diminution of pleasure in their

consciousness, although she would be far off, and they deprived of

her smile. In a few days the children would engage in their games as

merrily as ever, without the sense of any gap left by her departure.

This leaving of the younger children she had decided to be for the

best; were she to remain they would probably gain less good by her

precepts than harm by her example.

She went through Stourcastle without pausing and onward to a junction

of highways, where she could await a carrier's van that ran to the

south-west; for the railways which engirdled this interior tract of

country had never yet struck across it. While waiting, however,

there came along a farmer in his spring cart, driving approximately

in the direction that she wished to pursue. Though he was a stranger

to her she accepted his offer of a seat beside him, ignoring that

its motive was a mere tribute to her countenance. He was going to

Weatherbury, and by accompanying him thither she could walk the

remainder of the distance instead of travelling in the van by way of

Casterbridge.

Tess did not stop at Weatherbury, after this long drive, further than

to make a slight nondescript meal at noon at a cottage to which the

farmer recommended her. Thence she started on foot, basket in hand,

to reach the wide upland of heath dividing this district from the

low-lying meads of a further valley in which the dairy stood that was

the aim and end of her day's pilgrimage.

Tess had never before visited this part of the country, and yet she

felt akin to the landscape. Not so very far to the left of her she

could discern a dark patch in the scenery, which inquiry confirmed

her in supposing to be trees marking the environs of Kingsbere--in

the church of which parish the bones of her ancestors--her useless

ancestors--lay entombed.

She had no admiration for them now; she almost hated them for the

dance they had led her; not a thing of all that had been theirs did

she retain but the old seal and spoon. "Pooh--I have as much of

mother as father in me!" she said. "All my prettiness comes from

her, and she was only a dairymaid."

The journey over the intervening uplands and lowlands of Egdon,

when she reached them, was a more troublesome walk than she had

anticipated, the distance being actually but a few miles. It was

two hours, owing to sundry wrong turnings, ere she found herself

on a summit commanding the long-sought-for vale, the Valley of the

Great Dairies, the valley in which milk and butter grew to rankness,

and were produced more profusely, if less delicately, than at her

home--the verdant plain so well watered by the river Var or Froom.

It was intrinsically different from the Vale of Little Dairies,

Blackmoor Vale, which, save during her disastrous sojourn at

Trantridge, she had exclusively known till now. The world was drawn

to a larger pattern here. The enclosures numbered fifty acres

instead of ten, the farmsteads were more extended, the groups of

cattle formed tribes hereabout; there only families. These myriads

of cows stretching under her eyes from the far east to the far west

outnumbered any she had ever seen at one glance before. The green

lea was speckled as thickly with them as a canvas by Van Alsloot

or Sallaert with burghers. The ripe hue of the red and dun kine

absorbed the evening sunlight, which the white-coated animals

returned to the eye in rays almost dazzling, even at the distant

elevation on which she stood.

The bird's-eye perspective before her was not so luxuriantly

beautiful, perhaps, as that other one which she knew so well; yet it

was more cheering. It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the

rival vale, and its heavy soils and scents; the new air was clear,

bracing, ethereal. The river itself, which nourished the grass

and cows of these renowned dairies, flowed not like the streams in

Blackmoor. Those were slow, silent, often turbid; flowing over

beds of mud into which the incautious wader might sink and vanish

unawares. The Froom waters were clear as the pure River of Life

shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with

pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day long. There the

water-flower was the lily; the crow-foot here.

Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to light, or

the sense of being amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes

upon her, sent up her spirits wonderfully. Her hopes mingled with

the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as she

bounded along against the soft south wind. She heard a pleasant

voice in every breeze, and in every bird's note seemed to lurk a

joy.

Her face had latterly changed with changing states of mind,

continually fluctuating between beauty and ordinariness, according as

the thoughts were gay or grave. One day she was pink and flawless;

another pale and tragical. When she was pink she was feeling less

than when pale; her more perfect beauty accorded with her less

elevated mood; her more intense mood with her less perfect beauty.

It was her best face physically that was now set against the south

wind.

The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet

pleasure somewhere, which pervades all life, from the meanest to the

highest, had at length mastered Tess. Being even now only a young

woman of twenty, one who mentally and sentimentally had not finished

growing, it was impossible that any event should have left upon her

an impression that was not in time capable of transmutation.

And thus her spirits, and her thankfulness, and her hopes, rose

higher and higher. She tried several ballads, but found them

inadequate; till, recollecting the psalter that her eyes had so often

wandered over of a Sunday morning before she had eaten of the tree

of knowledge, she chanted: "O ye Sun and Moon ... O ye Stars ... ye

Green Things upon the Earth ... ye Fowls of the Air ... Beasts and

Cattle ... Children of Men ... bless ye the Lord, praise Him and

magnify Him for ever!"

She suddenly stopped and murmured: "But perhaps I don't quite know

the Lord as yet."

And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a Fetishistic

utterance in a Monotheistic setting; women whose chief companions

are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature retain in their souls far

more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the

systematized religion taught their race at later date. However, Tess

found at least approximate expression for her feelings in the old

_Benedicite_ that she had lisped from infancy; and it was enough.

Such high contentment with such a slight initial performance as that

of having started towards a means of independent living was a part of

the Durbeyfield temperament. Tess really wished to walk uprightly,

while her father did nothing of the kind; but she resembled him in

being content with immediate and small achievements, and in having no

mind for laborious effort towards such petty social advancement as

could alone be effected by a family so heavily handicapped as the

once powerful d'Urbervilles were now.

There was, it might be said, the energy of her mother's unexpended

family, as well as the natural energy of Tess's years, rekindled

after the experience which had so overwhelmed her for the time. Let

the truth be told--women do as a rule live through such humiliations,

and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an

interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a conviction not

so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would

have us believe.

Tess Durbeyfield, then, in good heart, and full of zest for life,

descended the Egdon slopes lower and lower towards the dairy of her

pilgrimage.

The marked difference, in the final particular, between the rival

vales now showed itself. The secret of Blackmoor was best discovered

from the heights around; to read aright the valley before her it was

necessary to descend into its midst. When Tess had accomplished this

feat she found herself to be standing on a carpeted level, which

stretched to the east and west as far as the eye could reach.

The river had stolen from the higher tracts and brought in particles

to the vale all this horizontal land; and now, exhausted, aged, and

attenuated, lay serpentining along through the midst of its former

spoils.

Not quite sure of her direction, Tess stood still upon the hemmed

expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of

indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings

than that fly. The sole effect of her presence upon the placid

valley so far had been to excite the mind of a solitary heron, which,

after descending to the ground not far from her path, stood with neck

erect, looking at her.

Suddenly there arose from all parts of the lowland a prolonged and

repeated call--"Waow! waow! waow!"

From the furthest east to the furthest west the cries spread as if by

contagion, accompanied in some cases by the barking of a dog. It was

not the expression of the valley's consciousness that beautiful Tess

had arrived, but the ordinary announcement of milking-time--half-past

four o'clock, when the dairymen set about getting in the cows.

The red and white herd nearest at hand, which had been phlegmatically

waiting for the call, now trooped towards the steading in the

background, their great bags of milk swinging under them as they

walked. Tess followed slowly in their rear, and entered the barton

by the open gate through which they had entered before her. Long

thatched sheds stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted

with vivid green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts

rubbed to a glossy smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows

and calves of bygone years, now passed to an oblivion almost

inconceivable in its profundity. Between the post were ranged

the milchers, each exhibiting herself at the present moment to a

whimsical eye in the rear as a circle on two stalks, down the centre

of which a switch moved pendulum-wise; while the sun, lowering itself

behind this patient row, threw their shadows accurately inwards upon

the wall. Thus it threw shadows of these obscure and homely figures

every evening with as much care over each contour as if it had been

the profile of a court beauty on a palace wall; copied them as

diligently as it had copied Olympian shapes on marble _faзades_ long

ago, or the outline of Alexander, Caesar, and the Pharaohs.

They were the less restful cows that were stalled. Those that would

stand still of their own will were milked in the middle of the yard,

where many of such better behaved ones stood waiting now--all prime

milchers, such as were seldom seen out of this valley, and not always

within it; nourished by the succulent feed which the water-meads

supplied at this prime season of the year. Those of them that were

spotted with white reflected the sunshine in dazzling brilliancy,

and the polished brass knobs of their horns glittered with something

of military display. Their large-veined udders hung ponderous as

sandbags, the teats sticking out like the legs of a gipsy's crock;

and as each animal lingered for her turn to arrive the milk oozed

forth and fell in drops to the ground.

XVII

The dairymaids and men had flocked down from their cottages and out

of the dairy-house with the arrival of the cows from the meads; the

maids walking in pattens, not on account of the weather, but to keep

their shoes above the mulch of the barton. Each girl sat down on

her three-legged stool, her face sideways, her right cheek resting

against the cow, and looked musingly along the animal's flank at Tess

as she approached. The male milkers, with hat-brims turned down,

resting flat on their foreheads and gazing on the ground, did not

observe her.

One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man--whose long white "pinner"

was somewhat finer and cleaner than the wraps of the others, and

whose jacket underneath had a presentable marketing aspect--the

master-dairyman, of whom she was in quest, his double character as

a working milker and butter maker here during six days, and on the

seventh as a man in shining broad-cloth in his family pew at church,

being so marked as to have inspired a rhyme:

Dairyman Dick

All the week:--

On Sundays Mister Richard Crick.

Seeing Tess standing at gaze he went across to her.

The majority of dairymen have a cross manner at milking time, but it

happened that Mr Crick was glad to get a new hand--for the days were

busy ones now--and he received her warmly; inquiring for her mother

and the rest of the family--(though this as a matter of form merely,

for in reality he had not been aware of Mrs Durbeyfield's existence

till apprised of the fact by a brief business-letter about Tess).

"Oh--ay, as a lad I knowed your part o' the country very well," he

said terminatively. "Though I've never been there since. And a aged

woman of ninety that use to live nigh here, but is dead and gone long

ago, told me that a family of some such name as yours in Blackmoor

Vale came originally from these parts, and that 'twere a old ancient

race that had all but perished off the earth--though the new

generations didn't know it. But, Lord, I took no notice of the old

woman's ramblings, not I."

"Oh no--it is nothing," said Tess.

Then the talk was of business only.

"You can milk 'em clean, my maidy? I don't want my cows going azew at

this time o' year."

She reassured him on that point, and he surveyed her up and down.

She had been staying indoors a good deal, and her complexion had

grown delicate.

"Quite sure you can stand it? 'Tis comfortable enough here for rough

folk; but we don't live in a cowcumber frame."

She declared that she could stand it, and her zest and willingness

seemed to win him over.

"Well, I suppose you'll want a dish o' tay, or victuals of some sort,

hey? Not yet? Well, do as ye like about it. But faith, if 'twas I,

I should be as dry as a kex wi' travelling so far."

"I'll begin milking now, to get my hand in," said Tess.

She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment--to the

surprise--indeed, slight contempt--of Dairyman Crick, to whose mind

it had apparently never occurred that milk was good as a beverage.

"Oh, if ye can swaller that, be it so," he said indifferently, while

holding up the pail that she sipped from. "'Tis what I hain't

touched for years--not I. Rot the stuff; it would lie in my innerds

like lead. You can try your hand upon she," he pursued, nodding to

the nearest cow. "Not but what she do milk rather hard. We've hard

ones and we've easy ones, like other folks. However, you'll find out

that soon enough."

When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was really on her

stool under the cow, and the milk was squirting from her fists

into the pail, she appeared to feel that she really had laid a new

foundation for her future. The conviction bred serenity, her pulse

slowed, and she was able to look about her.

The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and maids, the

men operating on the hard-teated animals, the maids on the kindlier

natures. It was a large dairy. There were nearly a hundred

milchers under Crick's management, all told; and of the herd the

master-dairyman milked six or eight with his own hands, unless away

from home. These were the cows that milked hardest of all; for his

journey-milkmen being more or less casually hired, he would not

entrust this half-dozen to their treatment, lest, from indifference,

they should not milk them fully; nor to the maids, lest they should

fail in the same way for lack of finger-grip; with the result that in

course of time the cows would "go azew"--that is, dry up. It was not

the loss for the moment that made slack milking so serious, but that

with the decline of demand there came decline, and ultimately

cessation, of supply.

After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a time no talk

in the barton, and not a sound interfered with the purr of the

milk-jets into the numerous pails, except a momentary exclamation

to one or other of the beasts requesting her to turn round or stand

still. The only movements were those of the milkers' hands up and

down, and the swing of the cows' tails. Thus they all worked on,

encompassed by the vast flat mead which extended to either slope

of the valley--a level landscape compounded of old landscapes long

forgotten, and, no doubt, differing in character very greatly from

the landscape they composed now.

"To my thinking," said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow

he had just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in

one hand and the pail in the other, and moving on to the next

hard-yielder in his vicinity, "to my thinking, the cows don't gie

down their milk to-day as usual. Upon my life, if Winker do begin

keeping back like this, she'll not be worth going under by

midsummer."

"'Tis because there's a new hand come among us," said Jonathan Kail.

"I've noticed such things afore."

"To be sure. It may be so. I didn't think o't."

"I've been told that it goes up into their horns at such times," said

a dairymaid.

"Well, as to going up into their horns," replied Dairyman Crick

dubiously, as though even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical

possibilities, "I couldn't say; I certainly could not. But as nott

cows will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don't quite

agree to it. Do ye know that riddle about the nott cows, Jonathan?

Why do nott cows give less milk in a year than horned?"

"I don't!" interposed the milkmaid, "Why do they?"

"Because there bain't so many of 'em," said the dairyman.

"Howsomever, these gam'sters do certainly keep back their milk

to-day. Folks, we must lift up a stave or two--that's the only cure

for't."

Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement

to the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield;

and the band of milkers at this request burst into melody--in purely

business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the

result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement

during the song's continuance. When they had gone through fourteen

or fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was

afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone

flames around him, one of the male milkers said--

"I wish singing on the stoop didn't use up so much of a man's wind!

You should get your harp, sir; not but what a fiddle is best."

Tess, who had given ear to this, thought the words were addressed to

the dairyman, but she was wrong. A reply, in the shape of "Why?"

came as it were out of the belly of a dun cow in the stalls; it had

been spoken by a milker behind the animal, whom she had not hitherto

perceived.

"Oh yes; there's nothing like a fiddle," said the dairyman. "Though

I do think that bulls are more moved by a tune than cows--at least

that's my experience. Once there was an old aged man over at

Mellstock--William Dewy by name--one of the family that used to do

a good deal of business as tranters over there--Jonathan, do ye

mind?--I knowed the man by sight as well as I know my own brother, in

a manner of speaking. Well, this man was a coming home along from a

wedding, where he had been playing his fiddle, one fine moonlight

night, and for shortness' sake he took a cut across Forty-acres, a

field lying that way, where a bull was out to grass. The bull seed

William, and took after him, horns aground, begad; and though William

runned his best, and hadn't MUCH drink in him (considering 'twas a

wedding, and the folks well off), he found he'd never reach the fence

and get over in time to save himself. Well, as a last thought, he

pulled out his fiddle as he runned, and struck up a jig, turning to

the bull, and backing towards the corner. The bull softened down,

and stood still, looking hard at William Dewy, who fiddled on and on;

till a sort of a smile stole over the bull's face. But no sooner

did William stop his playing and turn to get over hedge than the

bull would stop his smiling and lower his horns towards the seat of

William's breeches. Well, William had to turn about and play on,

willy-nilly; and 'twas only three o'clock in the world, and 'a knowed

that nobody would come that way for hours, and he so leery and tired

that 'a didn't know what to do. When he had scraped till about four

o'clock he felt that he verily would have to give over soon, and he

said to himself, 'There's only this last tune between me and eternal

welfare! Heaven save me, or I'm a done man.' Well, then he called to

mind how he'd seen the cattle kneel o' Christmas Eves in the dead o'

night. It was not Christmas Eve then, but it came into his head to

play a trick upon the bull. So he broke into the 'Tivity Hymm, just

as at Christmas carol-singing; when, lo and behold, down went the

bull on his bended knees, in his ignorance, just as if 'twere the

true 'Tivity night and hour. As soon as his horned friend were down,

William turned, clinked off like a long-dog, and jumped safe over

hedge, before the praying bull had got on his feet again to take

after him. William used to say that he'd seen a man look a fool

a good many times, but never such a fool as that bull looked when

he found his pious feelings had been played upon, and 'twas not

Christmas Eve. ... Yes, William Dewy, that was the man's name; and

I can tell you to a foot where's he a-lying in Mellstock Churchyard

at this very moment--just between the second yew-tree and the north

aisle."

"It's a curious story; it carries us back to medieval times, when

faith was a living thing!"

The remark, singular for a dairy-yard, was murmured by the voice

behind the dun cow; but as nobody understood the reference, no notice

was taken, except that the narrator seemed to think it might imply

scepticism as to his tale.

"Well, 'tis quite true, sir, whether or no. I knowed the man well."

"Oh yes; I have no doubt of it," said the person behind the dun cow.

Tess's attention was thus attracted to the dairyman's interlocutor,

of whom she could see but the merest patch, owing to his burying his

head so persistently in the flank of the milcher. She could not

understand why he should be addressed as "sir" even by the dairyman

himself. But no explanation was discernible; he remained under the

cow long enough to have milked three, uttering a private ejaculation

now and then, as if he could not get on.

"Take it gentle, sir; take it gentle," said the dairyman. "'Tis

knack, not strength, that does it."

"So I find," said the other, standing up at last and stretching his

arms. "I think I have finished her, however, though she made my

fingers ache."

Tess could then see him at full length. He wore the ordinary white

pinner and leather leggings of a dairy-farmer when milking, and his

boots were clogged with the mulch of the yard; but this was all his

local livery. Beneath it was something educated, reserved, subtle,

sad, differing.

But the details of his aspect were temporarily thrust aside by

the discovery that he was one whom she had seen before. Such

vicissitudes had Tess passed through since that time that for a

moment she could not remember where she had met him; and then it

flashed upon her that he was the pedestrian who had joined in the

club-dance at Marlott--the passing stranger who had come she knew

not whence, had danced with others but not with her, and slightingly

left her, and gone on his way with his friends.

The flood of memories brought back by this revival of an incident

anterior to her troubles produced a momentary dismay lest,

recognizing her also, he should by some means discover her story.

But it passed away when she found no sign of remembrance in him. She

saw by degrees that since their first and only encounter his mobile

face had grown more thoughtful, and had acquired a young man's

shapely moustache and beard--the latter of the palest straw colour

where it began upon his cheeks, and deepening to a warm brown farther

from its root. Under his linen milking-pinner he wore a dark

velveteen jacket, cord breeches and gaiters, and a starched white

shirt. Without the milking-gear nobody could have guessed what

he was. He might with equal probability have been an eccentric

landowner or a gentlemanly ploughman. That he was but a novice at

dairy work she had realized in a moment, from the time he had spent

upon the milking of one cow.

Meanwhile many of the milkmaids had said to one another of the

newcomer, "How pretty she is!" with something of real generosity and

admiration, though with a half hope that the auditors would qualify

the assertion--which, strictly speaking, they might have done,

prettiness being an inexact definition of what struck the eye in

Tess. When the milking was finished for the evening they straggled

indoors, where Mrs Crick, the dairyman's wife--who was too

respectable to go out milking herself, and wore a hot stuff gown in

warm weather because the dairymaids wore prints--was giving an eye

to the leads and things.

Only two or three of the maids, Tess learnt, slept in the dairy-house

besides herself, most of the helpers going to their homes. She saw

nothing at supper-time of the superior milker who had commented on

the story, and asked no questions about him, the remainder of the

evening being occupied in arranging her place in the bed-chamber.

It was a large room over the milk-house, some thirty feet long; the

sleeping-cots of the other three indoor milkmaids being in the same

apartment. They were blooming young women, and, except one, rather

older than herself. By bedtime Tess was thoroughly tired, and fell

asleep immediately.

But one of the girls, who occupied an adjoining bed, was more wakeful

than Tess, and would insist upon relating to the latter various

particulars of the homestead into which she had just entered. The

girl's whispered words mingled with the shades, and, to Tess's drowsy

mind, they seemed to be generated by the darkness in which they

floated.

"Mr Angel Clare--he that is learning milking, and that plays

the harp--never says much to us. He is a pa'son's son, and is

too much taken up wi' his own thoughts to notice girls. He is

the dairyman's pupil--learning farming in all its branches. He

has learnt sheep-farming at another place, and he's now mastering

dairy-work.... Yes, he is quite the gentleman-born. His father is

the Reverent Mr Clare at Emminster--a good many miles from here."

"Oh--I have heard of him," said her companion, now awake. "A very

earnest clergyman, is he not?"

"Yes--that he is--the earnestest man in all Wessex, they say--the

last of the old Low Church sort, they tell me--for all about here be

what they call High. All his sons, except our Mr Clare, be made

pa'sons too."

Tess had not at this hour the curiosity to ask why the present Mr

Clare was not made a parson like his brethren, and gradually fell

asleep again, the words of her informant coming to her along with the

smell of the cheeses in the adjoining cheeseloft, and the measured

dripping of the whey from the wrings downstairs.

XVIII

Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct

figure, but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed,

abstracted eyes, and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and

delicately lined for a man's, though with an unexpectedly firm close

of the lower lip now and then; enough to do away with any inference

of indecision. Nevertheless, something nebulous, preoccupied, vague,

in his bearing and regard, marked him as one who probably had no very

definite aim or concern about his material future. Yet as a lad

people had said of him that he was one who might do anything if he

tried.

He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at the other end

of the county, and had arrived at Talbothays Dairy as a six months'

pupil, after going the round of some other farms, his object being

to acquire a practical skill in the various processes of farming,

with a view either to the Colonies or the tenure of a home-farm, as

circumstances might decide.

His entry into the ranks of the agriculturists and breeders was a

step in the young man's career which had been anticipated neither

by himself nor by others.

Mr Clare the elder, whose first wife had died and left him a

daughter, married a second late in life. This lady had somewhat

unexpectedly brought him three sons, so that between Angel, the

youngest, and his father the Vicar there seemed to be almost a

missing generation. Of these boys the aforesaid Angel, the child of

his old age, was the only son who had not taken a University degree,

though he was the single one of them whose early promise might have

done full justice to an academical training.

Some two or three years before Angel's appearance at the Marlott

dance, on a day when he had left school and was pursuing his studies

at home, a parcel came to the Vicarage from the local bookseller's,

directed to the Reverend James Clare. The Vicar having opened it and

found it to contain a book, read a few pages; whereupon he jumped up

from his seat and went straight to the shop with the book under his

arm.

"Why has this been sent to my house?" he asked peremptorily, holding

up the volume.

"It was ordered, sir."

"Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to say."

The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.

"Oh, it has been misdirected, sir," he said. "It was ordered by Mr

Angel Clare, and should have been sent to him."

Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck. He went home pale and

dejected, and called Angel into his study.

"Look into this book, my boy," he said. "What do you know about it?"

"I ordered it," said Angel simply.

"What for?"

"To read."

"How can you think of reading it?"

"How can I? Why--it is a system of philosophy. There is no more

moral, or even religious, work published."

"Yes--moral enough; I don't deny that. But religious!--and for YOU,

who intend to be a minister of the Gospel!"

"Since you have alluded to the matter, father," said the son, with

anxious thought upon his face, "I should like to say, once for

all, that I should prefer not to take Orders. I fear I could not

conscientiously do so. I love the Church as one loves a parent.

I shall always have the warmest affection for her. There is no

institution for whose history I have a deeper admiration; but I

cannot honestly be ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while

she refuses to liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive

theolatry."

It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded Vicar

that one of his own flesh and blood could come to this! He was

stultified, shocked, paralysed. And if Angel were not going to

enter the Church, what was the use of sending him to Cambridge? The

University as a step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man

of fixed ideas, a preface without a volume. He was a man not merely

religious, but devout; a firm believer--not as the phrase is now

elusively construed by theological thimble-riggers in the Church and

out of it, but in the old and ardent sense of the Evangelical school:

one who could

Indeed opine

That the Eternal and Divine

Did, eighteen centuries ago

In very truth...

Angel's father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.

"No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four (leave alone the rest),

taking it 'in the literal and grammatical sense' as required by the

Declaration; and, therefore, I can't be a parson in the present state

of affairs," said Angel. "My whole instinct in matters of religion

is towards reconstruction; to quote your favorite Epistle to the

Hebrews, 'the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things

that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.'"

His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill to see him.

"What is the good of your mother and me economizing and stinting

ourselves to give you a University education, if it is not to be used

for the honour and glory of God?" his father repeated.

"Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of man, father."

Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to Cambridge like

his brothers. But the Vicar's view of that seat of learning as a

stepping-stone to Orders alone was quite a family tradition; and so

rooted was the idea in his mind that perseverance began to appear to

the sensitive son akin to an intent to misappropriate a trust, and

wrong the pious heads of the household, who had been and were, as his

father had hinted, compelled to exercise much thrift to carry out

this uniform plan of education for the three young men.

"I will do without Cambridge," said Angel at last. "I feel that I

have no right to go there in the circumstances."

The effects of this decisive debate were not long in showing

themselves. He spent years and years in desultory studies,

undertakings, and meditations; he began to evince considerable

indifference to social forms and observances. The material

distinctions of rank and wealth he increasingly despised. Even the

"good old family" (to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy)

had no aroma for him unless there were good new resolutions in its

representatives. As a balance to these austerities, when he went to

live in London to see what the world was like, and with a view to

practising a profession or business there, he was carried off his

head, and nearly entrapped by a woman much older than himself, though

luckily he escaped not greatly the worse for the experience.

Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an

unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion to modern town life,

and shut him out from such success as he might have aspired to by

following a mundane calling in the impracticability of the spiritual

one. But something had to be done; he had wasted many valuable

years; and having an acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life

as a Colonial farmer, it occurred to Angel that this might be a lead

in the right direction. Farming, either in the Colonies, America, or

at home--farming, at any rate, after becoming well qualified for the

business by a careful apprenticeship--that was a vocation which would

probably afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he

valued even more than a competency--intellectual liberty.

So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at Talbothays as a

student of kine, and, as there were no houses near at hand in which

he could get a comfortable lodging, a boarder at the dairyman's.

His room was an immense attic which ran the whole length of the

dairy-house. It could only be reached by a ladder from the

cheese-loft, and had been closed up for a long time till he arrived

and selected it as his retreat. Here Clare had plenty of space, and

could often be heard by the dairy-folk pacing up and down when the

household had gone to rest. A portion was divided off at one end by

a curtain, behind which was his bed, the outer part being furnished

as a homely sitting-room.

At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal, and

strumming upon an old harp which he had bought at a sale, saying when

in a bitter humour that he might have to get his living by it in the

streets some day. But he soon preferred to read human nature by

taking his meals downstairs in the general dining-kitchen, with the

dairyman and his wife, and the maids and men, who all together formed

a lively assembly; for though but few milking hands slept in the

house, several joined the family at meals. The longer Clare resided

here the less objection had he to his company, and the more did he

like to share quarters with them in common.

Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in their

companionship. The conventional farm-folk of his imagination--

personified in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy known as

Hodge--were obliterated after a few days' residence. At close

quarters no Hodge was to be seen. At first, it is true, when Clare's

intelligence was fresh from a contrasting society, these friends with

whom he now hobnobbed seemed a little strange. Sitting down as a

level member of the dairyman's household seemed at the outset an

undignified proceeding. The ideas, the modes, the surroundings,

appeared retrogressive and unmeaning. But with living on there,

day after day, the acute sojourner became conscious of a new aspect

in the spectacle. Without any objective change whatever, variety

had taken the place of monotonousness. His host and his host's

household, his men and his maids, as they became intimately known to

Clare, began to differentiate themselves as in a chemical process.

The thought of Pascal's was brought home to him: "_A mesure qu'on a

plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. Les

gens du commun ne trouvent pas de diffйrence entre les hommes._"

The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased to exist. He had been

disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures--beings of

many minds, beings infinite in difference; some happy, many serene, a

few depressed, one here and there bright even to genius, some stupid,

others wanton, others austere; some mutely Miltonic, some potentially

Cromwellian--into men who had private views of each other, as he had

of his friends; who could applaud or condemn each other, amuse or

sadden themselves by the contemplation of each other's foibles or

vices; men every one of whom walked in his own individual way the

road to dusty death.

Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake,

and for what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed

career. Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the

chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with

the decline of belief in a beneficent Power. For the first time of

late years he could read as his musings inclined him, without any eye

to cramming for a profession, since the few farming handbooks which

he deemed it desirable to master occupied him but little time.

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and

humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena

which he had before known but darkly--the seasons in their moods,

morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different

tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices

of inanimate things.

The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to render a fire

acceptable in the large room wherein they breakfasted; and, by

Mrs Crick's orders, who held that he was too genteel to mess at

their table, it was Angel Clare's custom to sit in the yawning

chimney-corner during the meal, his cup-and-saucer and plate being

placed on a hinged flap at his elbow. The light from the long, wide,

mullioned window opposite shone in upon his nook, and, assisted by a

secondary light of cold blue quality which shone down the chimney,

enabled him to read there easily whenever disposed to do so. Between

Clare and the window was the table at which his companions sat, their

munching profiles rising sharp against the panes; while to the side

was the milk-house door, through which were visible the rectangular

leads in rows, full to the brim with the morning's milk. At the

further end the great churn could be seen revolving, and its

slip-slopping heard--the moving power being discernible through the

window in the form of a spiritless horse walking in a circle and

driven by a boy.

For several days after Tess's arrival Clare, sitting abstractedly

reading from some book, periodical, or piece of music just come by

post, hardly noticed that she was present at table. She talked so

little, and the other maids talked so much, that the babble did not

strike him as possessing a new note, and he was ever in the habit

of neglecting the particulars of an outward scene for the general

impression. One day, however, when he had been conning one of his

music-scores, and by force of imagination was hearing the tune in

his head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the music-sheet rolled

to the hearth. He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame

pirouetting on the top in a dying dance after the breakfast-cooking

and boiling, and it seemed to jig to his inward tune; also at the two

chimney crooks dangling down from the cotterel, or cross-bar, plumed

with soot, which quivered to the same melody; also at the half-empty

kettle whining an accompaniment. The conversation at the table mixed

in with his phantasmal orchestra till he thought: "What a fluty voice

one of those milkmaids has! I suppose it is the new one."

Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.

She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his long silence,

his presence in the room was almost forgotten.

"I don't know about ghosts," she was saying; "but I do know that our

souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive."

The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged

with serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were

breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of

a gallows.

"What--really now? And is it so, maidy?" he said.

"A very easy way to feel 'em go," continued Tess, "is to lie on the

grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by

fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds

and hundreds o' miles away from your body, which you don't seem to

want at all."

The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his

wife.

"Now that's a rum thing, Christianer--hey? To think o' the miles

I've vamped o' starlight nights these last thirty year, courting, or

trading, or for doctor, or for nurse, and yet never had the least

notion o' that till now, or feeled my soul rise so much as an inch

above my shirt-collar."

The general attention being drawn to her, including that of the

dairyman's pupil, Tess flushed, and remarking evasively that it was

only a fancy, resumed her breakfast.

Clare continued to observe her. She soon finished her eating, and

having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her, began to trace

imaginary patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger with the

constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.

"What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!" he

said to himself.

And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar,

something which carried him back into a joyous and unforeseeing past,

before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens gray. He

concluded that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell. A

casual encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been,

and he was not greatly curious about it. But the circumstance was

sufficient to lead him to select Tess in preference to the other

pretty milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous womankind.

XIX

In general the cows were milked as they presented themselves, without

fancy or choice. But certain cows will show a fondness for a

particular pair of hands, sometimes carrying this predilection so far

as to refuse to stand at all except to their favourite, the pail of a

stranger being unceremoniously kicked over.

It was Dairyman Crick's rule to insist on breaking down these

partialities and aversions by constant interchange, since otherwise,

in the event of a milkman or maid going away from the dairy, he was

placed in a difficulty. The maids' private aims, however, were the

reverse of the dairyman's rule, the daily selection by each damsel of

the eight or ten cows to which she had grown accustomed rendering the

operation on their willing udders surprisingly easy and effortless.

Tess, like her compeers, soon discovered which of the cows had a

preference for her style of manipulation, and her fingers having

become delicate from the long domiciliary imprisonments to which

she had subjected herself at intervals during the last two or three

years, she would have been glad to meet the milchers' views in

this respect. Out of the whole ninety-five there were eight in

particular--Dumpling, Fancy, Lofty, Mist, Old Pretty, Young Pretty,

Tidy, and Loud--who, though the teats of one or two were as hard as

carrots, gave down to her with a readiness that made her work on them

a mere touch of the fingers. Knowing, however, the dairyman's wish,

she endeavoured conscientiously to take the animals just as they

came, expecting the very hard yielders which she could not yet

manage.

But she soon found a curious correspondence between the ostensibly

chance position of the cows and her wishes in this matter, till she

felt that their order could not be the result of accident. The

dairyman's pupil had lent a hand in getting the cows together of

late, and at the fifth or sixth time she turned her eyes, as she

rested against the cow, full of sly inquiry upon him.

"Mr Clare, you have ranged the cows!" she said, blushing; and in

making the accusation, symptoms of a smile gently lifted her upper

lip in spite of her, so as to show the tips of her teeth, the lower

lip remaining severely still.

"Well, it makes no difference," said he. "You will always be here to

milk them."

"Do you think so? I HOPE I shall! But I don't KNOW."

She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that he, unaware of

her grave reasons for liking this seclusion, might have mistaken her

meaning. She had spoken so earnestly to him, as if his presence

were somehow a factor in her wish. Her misgiving was such that at

dusk, when the milking was over, she walked in the garden alone, to

continue her regrets that she had disclosed to him her discovery of

his considerateness.

It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in

such delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects

seemed endowed with two or three senses, if not five. There was no

distinction between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close

to everything within the horizon. The soundlessness impressed her as

a positive entity rather than as the mere negation of noise. It was

broken by the strumming of strings.

Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head. Dim,

flattened, constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed

to her as now, when they wandered in the still air with a stark

quality like that of nudity. To speak absolutely, both instrument

and execution were poor; but the relative is all, and as she listened

Tess, like a fascinated bird, could not leave the spot. Far from

leaving she drew up towards the performer, keeping behind the hedge

that he might not guess her presence.

The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been

left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with

juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall

blooming weeds emitting offensive smells--weeds whose red and yellow

and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated

flowers. She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of

growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that

were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime,

and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though

snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin;

thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.

Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which

she had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star

came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the

thin notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like

breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating

pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of

the garden the weeping of the garden's sensibility. Though near

nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not

close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of

sound.

The light which still shone was derived mainly from a large hole in

the western bank of cloud; it was like a piece of day left behind

by accident, dusk having closed in elsewhere. He concluded his

plaintive melody, a very simple performance, demanding no great

skill; and she waited, thinking another might be begun. But, tired

of playing, he had desultorily come round the fence, and was rambling

up behind her. Tess, her cheeks on fire, moved away furtively, as if

hardly moving at all.

Angel, however, saw her light summer gown, and he spoke; his low

tones reaching her, though he was some distance off.

"What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?" said he. "Are you

afraid?"

"Oh no, sir--not of outdoor things; especially just now when the

apple-blooth is falling, and everything is so green."

"But you have your indoor fears--eh?"

"Well--yes, sir."

"What of?"

"I couldn't quite say."

"The milk turning sour?"

"No."

"Life in general?"

"Yes, sir."

"Ah--so have I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather

serious, don't you think so?"

"It is--now you put it that way."

"All the same, I shouldn't have expected a young girl like you to see

it so just yet. How is it you do?"

She maintained a hesitating silence.

"Come, Tess, tell me in confidence."

She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things to her, and

replied shyly--

"The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they?--that is, seem as

if they had. And the river says,--'Why do ye trouble me with your

looks?' And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a

line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting

smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem

very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of

me! Beware of me!' ... But YOU, sir, can raise up dreams with your

music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!"

He was surprised to find this young woman--who though but a milkmaid

had just that touch of rarity about her which might make her the

envied of her housemates--shaping such sad imaginings. She was

expressing in her own native phrases--assisted a little by her Sixth

Standard training--feelings which might almost have been called those

of the age--the ache of modernism. The perception arrested him less

when he reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in

great part but the latest fashion in definition--a more accurate

expression, by words in _logy_ and _ism_, of sensations which men and

women have vaguely grasped for centuries.

Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so

young; more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic.

Not guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that

experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration. Tess's

passing corporeal blight had been her mental harvest.

Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family

and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a

mishap to be alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very

good reason. But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have

descended into the Valley of Humiliation, have felt with the man of

Uz--as she herself had felt two or three years ago--"My soul chooseth

strangling and death rather than my life. I loathe it; I would not

live alway."

It was true that he was at present out of his class. But she knew

that was only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright's yard,

he was studying what he wanted to know. He did not milk cows because

he was obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning to be a

rich and prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder

of cattle. He would become an American or Australian Abraham,

commanding like a monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted

and his ring-straked, his men-servants and his maids. At times,

nevertheless, it did seem unaccountable to her that a decidedly

bookish, musical, thinking young man should have chosen deliberately

to be a farmer, and not a clergyman, like his father and brothers.

Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were

respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge

of each other's character and mood without attempting to pry into

each other's history.

Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of

her nature, and to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a

repressed life, but she little divined the strength of her own

vitality.

At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather

than as a man. As such she compared him with herself; and at every

discovery of the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance

between her own modest mental standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean

altitude of his, she became quite dejected, disheartened from all

further effort on her own part whatever.

He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned

something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece. She was

gathering the buds called "lords and ladies" from the bank while he

spoke.

"Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?" he asked.

"Oh, 'tis only--about my own self," she said, with a frail laugh of

sadness, fitfully beginning to peel "a lady" meanwhile. "Just a

sense of what might have been with me! My life looks as if it had

been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you

have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am! I'm

like the poor Queen of Sheba who lived in the Bible. There is no

more spirit in me."

"Bless my soul, don't go troubling about that! Why," he said with

some enthusiasm, "I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help

you to anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you

would like to take up--"

"It is a lady again," interrupted she, holding out the bud she had

peeled.

"What?"

"I meant that there are always more ladies than lords when you come

to peel them."

"Never mind about the lords and ladies. Would you like to take up

any course of study--history, for example?"

"Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about it than I

know already."

"Why not?"

"Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row

only--finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody

just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me

sad, that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and

your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and

that your coming life and doings 'll be like thousands's and

thousands'."

"What, really, then, you don't want to learn anything?"

"I shouldn't mind learning why--why the sun do shine on the just and

the unjust alike," she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice.

"But that's what books will not tell me."

"Tess, fie for such bitterness!" Of course he spoke with a

conventional sense of duty only, for that sort of wondering had not

been unknown to himself in bygone days. And as he looked at the

unpracticed mouth and lips, he thought that such a daughter of the

soil could only have caught up the sentiment by rote. She went on

peeling the lords and ladies till Clare, regarding for a moment the

wave-like curl of her lashes as they dropped with her bent gaze on

her soft cheek, lingeringly went away. When he was gone she stood

awhile, thoughtfully peeling the last bud; and then, awakening

from her reverie, flung it and all the crowd of floral nobility

impatiently on the ground, in an ebullition of displeasure with

herself for her _niaiserie_, and with a quickening warmth in her

heart of hearts.

How stupid he must think her! In an access of hunger for his good

opinion she bethought herself of what she had latterly endeavoured to

forget, so unpleasant had been its issues--the identity of her family

with that of the knightly d'Urbervilles. Barren attribute as it was,

disastrous as its discovery had been in many ways to her, perhaps

Mr Clare, as a gentleman and a student of history, would respect

her sufficiently to forget her childish conduct with the lords and

ladies if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people in

Kingsbere Church really represented her own lineal forefathers; that

she was no spurious d'Urberville, compounded of money and ambition

like those at Trantridge, but true d'Urberville to the bone.

But, before venturing to make the revelation, dubious Tess indirectly

sounded the dairyman as to its possible effect upon Mr Clare, by

asking the former if Mr Clare had any great respect for old county

families when they had lost all their money and land.

"Mr Clare," said the dairyman emphatically, "is one of the most

rebellest rozums you ever knowed--not a bit like the rest of his

family; and if there's one thing that he do hate more than another

'tis the notion of what's called a' old family. He says that it

stands to reason that old families have done their spurt of work in

past days, and can't have anything left in 'em now. There's the

Billets and the Drenkhards and the Greys and the St Quintins and

the Hardys and the Goulds, who used to own the lands for miles down

this valley; you could buy 'em all up now for an old song a'most.

Why, our little Retty Priddle here, you know, is one of the

Paridelles--the old family that used to own lots o' the lands out by

King's Hintock, now owned by the Earl o' Wessex, afore even he or

his was heard of. Well, Mr Clare found this out, and spoke quite

scornful to the poor girl for days. 'Ah!' he says to her, 'you'll

never make a good dairymaid! All your skill was used up ages ago

in Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a thousand years to git

strength for more deeds!' A boy came here t'other day asking for

a job, and said his name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname

he said he'd never heard that 'a had any surname, and when we asked

why, he said he supposed his folks hadn't been 'stablished long

enough. 'Ah! you're the very boy I want!' says Mr Clare, jumping

up and shaking hands wi'en; 'I've great hopes of you;' and gave him

half-a-crown. O no! he can't stomach old families!"

After hearing this caricature of Clare's opinion poor Tess was glad

that she had not said a word in a weak moment about her family--even

though it was so unusually old almost to have gone round the circle

and become a new one. Besides, another diary-girl was as good as

she, it seemed, in that respect. She held her tongue about the

d'Urberville vault and the Knight of the Conqueror whose name she

bore. The insight afforded into Clare's character suggested to her

that it was largely owing to her supposed untraditional newness that

she had won interest in his eyes.

XX

The season developed and matured. Another year's instalment of

flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral

creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had

stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and

inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and

stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams,

opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and

breathings.

Dairyman Crick's household of maids and men lived on comfortably,

placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of

all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which

neediness ends, and below the line at which the _convenances_ begin

to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness

makes too little of enough.

Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one

thing aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied

each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently

keeping out of it. All the while they were converging, under an

irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.

Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now,

possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing,

physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The

sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of

its sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and

Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection

and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections

have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend

to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand

towards my past?"

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet--a rosy,

warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of

persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be

occupied with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a

philosopher's regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting

specimen of womankind.

They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily in that

strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the

violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very

early, here. Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came

the skimming, which began at a little past three. It usually fell

to the lot of some one or other of them to wake the rest, the first

being aroused by an alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival,

and they soon discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep

though the alarm as others did, this task was thrust most frequently

upon her. No sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed,

than she left her room and ran to the dairyman's door; then up the

ladder to Angel's, calling him in a loud whisper; then woke her

fellow-milkmaids. By the time that Tess was dressed Clare was

downstairs and out in the humid air. The remaining maids and the

dairyman usually gave themselves another turn on the pillow, and did

not appear till a quarter of an hour later.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the

day's close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In

the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive;

in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and

crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

Being so often--possibly not always by chance--the first two persons

to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first

persons up of all the world. In these early days of her residence

here Tess did not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising,

where he was generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded,

aqueous light which pervaded the open mead impressed them with

a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this

dim inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a

dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost

regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural

time hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to

be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his horizon; very

few in all England. Fair women are usually asleep at mid-summer

dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.

The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along

together to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the

Resurrection hour. He little thought that the Magdalen might be

at his side. Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade his

companion's face, which was the focus of his eyes, rising above the

mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence upon it. She

looked ghostly, as if she were merely a soul at large. In reality

her face, without appearing to do so, had caught the cold gleam of

day from the north-east; his own face, though he did not think of

it, wore the same aspect to her.

It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply.

She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman--a

whole sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis,

Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not

like because she did not understand them.

"Call me Tess," she would say askance; and he did.

Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply

feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer

bliss to those of a being who craved it.

At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl.

Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and

shutters, out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at

the side of the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained

their standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by

moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel,

like the turn of puppets by clockwork.

They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level,

and apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows

in detached remnants of small extent. On the gray moisture of the

grass were marks where the cows had lain through the night--dark-green

islands of dry herbage the size of their carcasses, in the general

sea of dew. From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which

the cow had rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of

which trail they found her; the snoring puff from her nostrils, when

she recognized them, making an intenser little fog of her own amid

the prevailing one. Then they drove the animals back to the barton,

or sat down to milk them on the spot, as the case might require.

Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like

a white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous

rocks. Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and

hang on the wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails

subdividing the mead, which now shone like glass rods. Minute

diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess's eyelashes,

and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls. When the day grew quite

strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover, Tess then

lost her strange and ethereal beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes

scintillated in the sunbeams and she was again the dazzlingly fair

dairymaid only, who had to hold her own against the other women of

the world.

About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick's voice, lecturing the

non-resident milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old

Deborah Fyander for not washing her hands.

"For Heaven's sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb! Upon my soul,

if the London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they'd

swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they do a'ready; and

that's saying a good deal."

The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and Clare, in

common with the rest, could hear the heavy breakfast table dragged

out from the wall in the kitchen by Mrs Crick, this being the

invariable preliminary to each meal; the same horrible scrape

accompanying its return journey when the table had been cleared.

XXI

There was a great stir in the milk-house just after breakfast. The

churn revolved as usual, but the butter would not come. Whenever

this happened the dairy was paralyzed. Squish, squash echoed the

milk in the great cylinder, but never arose the sound they waited

for.

Dairyman Crick and his wife, the milkmaids Tess, Marian, Retty

Priddle, Izz Huett, and the married ones from the cottages; also

Mr Clare, Jonathan Kail, old Deborah, and the rest, stood gazing

hopelessly at the churn; and the boy who kept the horse going outside

put on moon-like eyes to show his sense of the situation. Even the

melancholy horse himself seemed to look in at the window in inquiring

despair at each walk round.

"'Tis years since I went to Conjuror Trendle's son in Egdon--years!"

said the dairyman bitterly. "And he was nothing to what his father

had been. I have said fifty times, if I have said once, that I DON'T

believe in en; though 'a do cast folks' waters very true. But I

shall have to go to 'n if he's alive. O yes, I shall have to go to

'n, if this sort of thing continnys!"

Even Mr Clare began to feel tragical at the dairyman's desperation.

"Conjuror Fall, t'other side of Casterbridge, that they used to call

'Wide-O', was a very good man when I was a boy," said Jonathan Kail.

"But he's rotten as touchwood by now."

"My grandfather used to go to Conjuror Mynterne, out at Owlscombe,

and a clever man a' were, so I've heard grandf'er say," continued Mr

Crick. "But there's no such genuine folk about nowadays!"

Mrs Crick's mind kept nearer to the matter in hand.

"Perhaps somebody in the house is in love," she said tentatively.

"I've heard tell in my younger days that that will cause it. Why,

Crick--that maid we had years ago, do ye mind, and how the butter

didn't come then--"

"Ah yes, yes!--but that isn't the rights o't. It had nothing to do

with the love-making. I can mind all about it--'twas the damage to

the churn."

He turned to Clare.

"Jack Dollop, a 'hore's-bird of a fellow we had here as milker at one

time, sir, courted a young woman over at Mellstock, and deceived her

as he had deceived many afore. But he had another sort o' woman to

reckon wi' this time, and it was not the girl herself. One Holy

Thursday of all days in the almanack, we was here as we mid be now,

only there was no churning in hand, when we zid the girl's mother

coming up to the door, wi' a great brass-mounted umbrella in her

hand that would ha' felled an ox, and saying 'Do Jack Dollop work

here?--because I want him! I have a big bone to pick with he, I

can assure 'n!' And some way behind her mother walked Jack's young

woman, crying bitterly into her handkercher. 'O Lard, here's a

time!' said Jack, looking out o' winder at 'em. 'She'll murder me!

Where shall I get--where shall I--? Don't tell her where I be!'

And with that he scrambled into the churn through the trap-door, and

shut himself inside, just as the young woman's mother busted into

the milk-house. 'The villain--where is he?' says she. 'I'll claw

his face for'n, let me only catch him!' Well, she hunted about

everywhere, ballyragging Jack by side and by seam, Jack lying

a'most stifled inside the churn, and the poor maid--or young woman

rather--standing at the door crying her eyes out. I shall never

forget it, never! 'Twould have melted a marble stone! But she

couldn't find him nowhere at all."

The dairyman paused, and one or two words of comment came from the

listeners.

Dairyman Crick's stories often seemed to be ended when they were not

really so, and strangers were betrayed into premature interjections

of finality; though old friends knew better. The narrator went on--

"Well, how the old woman should have had the wit to guess it I could

never tell, but she found out that he was inside that there churn.

Without saying a word she took hold of the winch (it was turned by

handpower then), and round she swung him, and Jack began to flop

about inside. 'O Lard! stop the churn! let me out!' says he, popping

out his head. 'I shall be churned into a pummy!' (He was a cowardly

chap in his heart, as such men mostly be). 'Not till ye make amends

for ravaging her virgin innocence!' says the old woman. 'Stop the

churn you old witch!' screams he. 'You call me old witch, do ye, you

deceiver!' says she, 'when ye ought to ha' been calling me mother-law

these last five months!' And on went the churn, and Jack's bones

rattled round again. Well, none of us ventured to interfere; and at

last 'a promised to make it right wi' her. 'Yes--I'll be as good as

my word!' he said. And so it ended that day."

While the listeners were smiling their comments there was a

quick movement behind their backs, and they looked round. Tess,

pale-faced, had gone to the door.

"How warm 'tis to-day!" she said, almost inaudibly.

It was warm, and none of them connected her withdrawal with the

reminiscences of the dairyman. He went forward and opened the door

for her, saying with tender raillery--

"Why, maidy" (he frequently, with unconscious irony, gave her this

pet name), "the prettiest milker I've got in my dairy; you mustn't

get so fagged as this at the first breath of summer weather, or we

shall be finely put to for want of 'ee by dog-days, shan't we, Mr

Clare?"

"I was faint--and--I think I am better out o' doors," she said

mechanically; and disappeared outside.

Fortunately for her the milk in the revolving churn at that moment

changed its squashing for a decided flick-flack.

"'Tis coming!" cried Mrs Crick, and the attention of all was called

off from Tess.

That fair sufferer soon recovered herself externally; but she

remained much depressed all the afternoon. When the evening milking

was done she did not care to be with the rest of them, and went out

of doors, wandering along she knew not whither. She was wretched--O

so wretched--at the perception that to her companions the dairyman's

story had been rather a humorous narration than otherwise; none of

them but herself seemed to see the sorrow of it; to a certainty, not

one knew how cruelly it touched the tender place in her experience.

The evening sun was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in

the sky. Only a solitary cracked-voice reed-sparrow greeted her from

the bushes by the river, in a sad, machine-made tone, resembling that

of a past friend whose friendship she had outworn.

In these long June days the milkmaids, and, indeed, most of the

household, went to bed at sunset or sooner, the morning work before

milking being so early and heavy at a time of full pails. Tess

usually accompanied her fellows upstairs. To-night, however, she was

the first to go to their common chamber; and she had dozed when the

other girls came in. She saw them undressing in the orange light

of the vanished sun, which flushed their forms with its colour; she

dozed again, but she was reawakened by their voices, and quietly

turned her eyes towards them.

Neither of her three chamber-companions had got into bed. They were

standing in a group, in their nightgowns, barefooted, at the window,

the last red rays of the west still warming their faces and necks and

the walls around them. All were watching somebody in the garden with

deep interest, their three faces close together: a jovial and round

one, a pale one with dark hair, and a fair one whose tresses were

auburn.

"Don't push! You can see as well as I," said Retty, the

auburn-haired and youngest girl, without removing her eyes from the

window.

"'Tis no use for you to be in love with him any more than me, Retty

Priddle," said jolly-faced Marian, the eldest, slily. "His thoughts

be of other cheeks than thine!"

Retty Priddle still looked, and the others looked again.

"There he is again!" cried Izz Huett, the pale girl with dark damp

hair and keenly cut lips.

"You needn't say anything, Izz," answered Retty. "For I zid you

kissing his shade."

"WHAT did you see her doing?" asked Marian.

"Why--he was standing over the whey-tub to let off the whey, and the

shade of his face came upon the wall behind, close to Izz, who was

standing there filling a vat. She put her mouth against the wall and

kissed the shade of his mouth; I zid her, though he didn't."

"O Izz Huett!" said Marian.

A rosy spot came into the middle of Izz Huett's cheek.

"Well, there was no harm in it," she declared, with attempted

coolness. "And if I be in love wi'en, so is Retty, too; and so be

you, Marian, come to that."

Marian's full face could not blush past its chronic pinkness.

"I!" she said. "What a tale! Ah, there he is again! Dear

eyes--dear face--dear Mr Clare!"

"There--you've owned it!"

"So have you--so have we all," said Marian, with the dry frankness of

complete indifference to opinion. "It is silly to pretend otherwise

amongst ourselves, though we need not own it to other folks. I would

just marry 'n to-morrow!"

"So would I--and more," murmured Izz Huett.

"And I too," whispered the more timid Retty.

The listener grew warm.

"We can't all marry him," said Izz.

"We shan't, either of us; which is worse still," said the eldest.

"There he is again!"

They all three blew him a silent kiss.

"Why?" asked Retty quickly.

"Because he likes Tess Durbeyfield best," said Marian, lowering her

voice. "I have watched him every day, and have found it out."

There was a reflective silence.

"But she don't care anything for 'n?" at length breathed Retty.

"Well--I sometimes think that too."

"But how silly all this is!" said Izz Huett impatiently. "Of course

he won't marry any one of us, or Tess either--a gentleman's son,

who's going to be a great landowner and farmer abroad! More likely

to ask us to come wi'en as farm-hands at so much a year!"

One sighed, and another sighed, and Marian's plump figure sighed

biggest of all. Somebody in bed hard by sighed too. Tears came into

the eyes of Retty Priddle, the pretty red-haired youngest--the last

bud of the Paridelles, so important in the county annals. They

watched silently a little longer, their three faces still close

together as before, and the triple hues of their hair mingling. But

the unconscious Mr Clare had gone indoors, and they saw him no more;

and, the shades beginning to deepen, they crept into their beds.

In a few minutes they heard him ascend the ladder to his own room.

Marian was soon snoring, but Izz did not drop into forgetfulness for

a long time. Retty Priddle cried herself to sleep.

The deeper-passioned Tess was very far from sleeping even then. This

conversation was another of the bitter pills she had been obliged to

swallow that day. Scarce the least feeling of jealousy arose in her

breast. For that matter she knew herself to have the preference.

Being more finely formed, better educated, and, though the youngest

except Retty, more woman than either, she perceived that only the

slightest ordinary care was necessary for holding her own in Angel

Clare's heart against these her candid friends. But the grave

question was, ought she to do this? There was, to be sure, hardly a

ghost of a chance for either of them, in a serious sense; but there

was, or had been, a chance of one or the other inspiring him with a

passing fancy for her, and enjoying the pleasure of his attentions

while he stayed here. Such unequal attachments had led to marriage;

and she had heard from Mrs Crick that Mr Clare had one day asked, in

a laughing way, what would be the use of his marrying a fine lady,

and all the while ten thousand acres of Colonial pasture to feed,

and cattle to rear, and corn to reap. A farm-woman would be the

only sensible kind of wife for him. But whether Mr Clare had spoken

seriously or not, why should she, who could never conscientiously

allow any man to marry her now, and who had religiously determined

that she never would be tempted to do so, draw off Mr Clare's

attention from other women, for the brief happiness of sunning

herself in his eyes while he remained at Talbothays?

XXII

They came downstairs yawning next morning; but skimming and milking

were proceeded with as usual, and they went indoors to breakfast.

Dairyman Crick was discovered stamping about the house. He had

received a letter, in which a customer had complained that the butter

had a twang.

"And begad, so 't have!" said the dairyman, who held in his left hand

a wooden slice on which a lump of butter was stuck. "Yes--taste for

yourself!"

Several of them gathered round him; and Mr Clare tasted, Tess tasted,

also the other indoor milkmaids, one or two of the milking-men, and

last of all Mrs Crick, who came out from the waiting breakfast-table.

There certainly was a twang.

The dairyman, who had thrown himself into abstraction to better

realize the taste, and so divine the particular species of noxious

weed to which it appertained, suddenly exclaimed--

"'Tis garlic! and I thought there wasn't a blade left in that mead!"

Then all the old hands remembered that a certain dry mead, into which

a few of the cows had been admitted of late, had, in years gone by,

spoilt the butter in the same way. The dairyman had not recognized

the taste at that time, and thought the butter bewitched.

"We must overhaul that mead," he resumed; "this mustn't continny!"

All having armed themselves with old pointed knives, they went out

together. As the inimical plant could only be present in very

microscopic dimensions to have escaped ordinary observation, to

find it seemed rather a hopeless attempt in the stretch of rich

grass before them. However, they formed themselves into line, all

assisting, owing to the importance of the search; the dairyman at

the upper end with Mr Clare, who had volunteered to help; then

Tess, Marian, Izz Huett, and Retty; then Bill Lewell, Jonathan, and

the married dairywomen--Beck Knibbs, with her wooly black hair and

rolling eyes; and flaxen Frances, consumptive from the winter damps

of the water-meads--who lived in their respective cottages.

With eyes fixed upon the ground they crept slowly across a strip of

the field, returning a little further down in such a manner that,

when they should have finished, not a single inch of the pasture but

would have fallen under the eye of some one of them. It was a most

tedious business, not more than half a dozen shoots of garlic being

discoverable in the whole field; yet such was the herb's pungency

that probably one bite of it by one cow had been sufficient to season

the whole dairy's produce for the day.

Differing one from another in natures and moods so greatly as they

did, they yet formed, bending, a curiously uniform row--automatic,

noiseless; and an alien observer passing down the neighbouring lane

might well have been excused for massing them as "Hodge". As they

crept along, stooping low to discern the plant, a soft yellow gleam

was reflected from the buttercups into their shaded faces, giving

them an elfish, moonlit aspect, though the sun was pouring upon their

backs in all the strength of noon.

Angel Clare, who communistically stuck to his rule of taking part

with the rest in everything, glanced up now and then. It was not,

of course, by accident that he walked next to Tess.

"Well, how are you?" he murmured.

"Very well, thank you, sir," she replied demurely.

As they had been discussing a score of personal matters only

half-an-hour before, the introductory style seemed a little

superfluous. But they got no further in speech just then. They

crept and crept, the hem of her petticoat just touching his gaiter,

and his elbow sometimes brushing hers. At last the dairyman, who

came next, could stand it no longer.

"Upon my soul and body, this here stooping do fairly make my back

open and shut!" he exclaimed, straightening himself slowly with an

excruciated look till quite upright. "And you, maidy Tess, you

wasn't well a day or two ago--this will make your head ache finely!

Don't do any more, if you feel fainty; leave the rest to finish it."

Dairyman Crick withdrew, and Tess dropped behind. Mr Clare also

stepped out of line, and began privateering about for the weed. When

she found him near her, her very tension at what she had heard the

night before made her the first to speak.

"Don't they look pretty?" she said.

"Who?"

"Izzy Huett and Retty."

Tess had moodily decided that either of these maidens would make a

good farmer's wife, and that she ought to recommend them, and obscure

her own wretched charms.

"Pretty? Well, yes--they are pretty girls--fresh looking. I have

often thought so."

"Though, poor dears, prettiness won't last long!"

"O no, unfortunately."

"They are excellent dairywomen."

"Yes: though not better than you."

"They skim better than I."

"Do they?"

Clare remained observing them--not without their observing him.

"She is colouring up," continued Tess heroically.

"Who?"

"Retty Priddle."

"Oh! Why it that?"

"Because you are looking at her."

Self-sacrificing as her mood might be, Tess could not well go further

and cry, "Marry one of them, if you really do want a dairywoman and

not a lady; and don't think of marrying me!" She followed Dairyman

Crick, and had the mournful satisfaction of seeing that Clare

remained behind.

From this day she forced herself to take pains to avoid him--never

allowing herself, as formerly, to remain long in his company, even if

their juxtaposition were purely accidental. She gave the other three

every chance.

Tess was woman enough to realize from their avowals to herself that

Angel Clare had the honour of all the dairymaids in his keeping, and

her perception of his care to avoid compromising the happiness of

either in the least degree bred a tender respect in Tess for what she

deemed, rightly or wrongly, the self-controlling sense of duty shown

by him, a quality which she had never expected to find in one of the

opposite sex, and in the absence of which more than one of the simple

hearts who were his house-mates might have gone weeping on her

pilgrimage.

XXIII

The hot weather of July had crept upon them unawares, and the

atmosphere of the flat vale hung heavy as an opiate over the

dairy-folk, the cows, and the trees. Hot steaming rains fell

frequently, making the grass where the cows fed yet more rank, and

hindering the late hay-making in the other meads.

It was Sunday morning; the milking was done; the outdoor milkers

had gone home. Tess and the other three were dressing themselves

rapidly, the whole bevy having agreed to go together to Mellstock

Church, which lay some three or four miles distant from the

dairy-house. She had now been two months at Talbothays, and this

was her first excursion.

All the preceding afternoon and night heavy thunderstorms had hissed

down upon the meads, and washed some of the hay into the river; but

this morning the sun shone out all the more brilliantly for the

deluge, and the air was balmy and clear.

The crooked lane leading from their own parish to Mellstock ran along

the lowest levels in a portion of its length, and when the girls

reached the most depressed spot they found that the result of the

rain had been to flood the lane over-shoe to a distance of some fifty

yards. This would have been no serious hindrance on a week-day; they

would have clicked through it in their high patterns and boots quite

unconcerned; but on this day of vanity, this Sun's-day, when flesh

went forth to coquet with flesh while hypocritically affecting

business with spiritual things; on this occasion for wearing their

white stockings and thin shoes, and their pink, white, and lilac

gowns, on which every mud spot would be visible, the pool was an

awkward impediment. They could hear the church-bell calling--as yet

nearly a mile off.

"Who would have expected such a rise in the river in summer-time!"

said Marian, from the top of the roadside bank on which they had

climbed, and were maintaining a precarious footing in the hope of

creeping along its slope till they were past the pool.

"We can't get there anyhow, without walking right through it, or else

going round the Turnpike way; and that would make us so very late!"

said Retty, pausing hopelessly.

"And I do colour up so hot, walking into church late, and all the

people staring round," said Marian, "that I hardly cool down again

till we get into the That-it-may-please-Thees."

While they stood clinging to the bank they heard a splashing round

the bend of the road, and presently appeared Angel Clare, advancing

along the lane towards them through the water.

Four hearts gave a big throb simultaneously.

His aspect was probably as un-Sabbatarian a one as a dogmatic

parson's son often presented; his attire being his dairy clothes,

long wading boots, a cabbage-leaf inside his hat to keep his head

cool, with a thistle-spud to finish him off. "He's not going to

church," said Marian.

"No--I wish he was!" murmured Tess.

Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly (to adopt the safe phrase of

evasive controversialists), preferred sermons in stones to sermons in

churches and chapels on fine summer days. This morning, moreover,

he had gone out to see if the damage to the hay by the flood was

considerable or not. On his walk he observed the girls from a long

distance, though they had been so occupied with their difficulties of

passage as not to notice him. He knew that the water had risen at

that spot, and that it would quite check their progress. So he had

hastened on, with a dim idea of how he could help them--one of them

in particular.

The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their

light summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a

roof-slope, that he stopped a moment to regard them before coming

close. Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable

flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in

the transparent tissue as in an aviary. Angel's eye at last fell

upon Tess, the hindmost of the four; she, being full of suppressed

laughter at their dilemma, could not help meeting his glance

radiantly.

He came beneath them in the water, which did not rise over his long

boots; and stood looking at the entrapped flies and butterflies.

"Are you trying to get to church?" he said to Marian, who was in

front, including the next two in his remark, but avoiding Tess.

"Yes, sir; and 'tis getting late; and my colour do come up so--"

"I'll carry you through the pool--every Jill of you."

The whole four flushed as if one heart beat through them.

"I think you can't, sir," said Marian.

"It is the only way for you to get past. Stand still. Nonsense--you

are not too heavy! I'd carry you all four together. Now, Marian,

attend," he continued, "and put your arms round my shoulders, so.

Now! Hold on. That's well done."

Marian had lowered herself upon his arm and shoulder as directed, and

Angel strode off with her, his slim figure, as viewed from behind,

looking like the mere stem to the great nosegay suggested by hers.

They disappeared round the curve of the road, and only his sousing

footsteps and the top ribbon of Marian's bonnet told where they were.

In a few minutes he reappeared. Izz Huett was the next in order upon

the bank.

"Here he comes," she murmured, and they could hear that her lips were

dry with emotion. "And I have to put my arms round his neck and look

into his face as Marian did."

"There's nothing in that," said Tess quickly.

"There's a time for everything," continued Izz, unheeding. "A time

to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; the first is now

going to be mine."

"Fie--it is Scripture, Izz!"

"Yes," said Izz, "I've always a' ear at church for pretty verses."

Angel Clare, to whom three-quarters of this performance was a

commonplace act of kindness, now approached Izz. She quietly and

dreamily lowered herself into his arms, and Angel methodically

marched off with her. When he was heard returning for the third time

Retty's throbbing heart could be almost seen to shake her. He went

up to the red-haired girl, and while he was seizing her he glanced at

Tess. His lips could not have pronounced more plainly, "It will soon

be you and I." Her comprehension appeared in her face; she could not

help it. There was an understanding between them.

Poor little Retty, though by far the lightest weight, was the most

troublesome of Clare's burdens. Marian had been like a sack of meal,

a dead weight of plumpness under which he has literally staggered.

Izz had ridden sensibly and calmly. Retty was a bunch of hysterics.

However, he got through with the disquieted creature, deposited her,

and returned. Tess could see over the hedge the distant three in a

group, standing as he had placed them on the next rising ground. It

was now her turn. She was embarrassed to discover that excitement at

the proximity of Mr Clare's breath and eyes, which she had contemned

in her companions, was intensified in herself; and as if fearful of

betraying her secret, she paltered with him at the last moment.

"I may be able to clim' along the bank perhaps--I can clim' better

than they. You must be so tired, Mr Clare!"

"No, no, Tess," said he quickly. And almost before she was aware,

she was seated in his arms and resting against his shoulder.

"Three Leahs to get one Rachel," he whispered.

"They are better women than I," she replied, magnanimously sticking

to her resolve.

"Not to me," said Angel.

He saw her grow warm at this; and they went some steps in silence.

"I hope I am not too heavy?" she said timidly.

"O no. You should lift Marian! Such a lump. You are like an

undulating billow warmed by the sun. And all this fluff of muslin

about you is the froth."

"It is very pretty--if I seem like that to you."

"Do you know that I have undergone three-quarters of this labour

entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?"

"No."

"I did not expect such an event to-day."

"Nor I... The water came up so sudden."

That the rise in the water was what she understood him to refer to,

the state of breathing belied. Clare stood still and inclinced his

face towards hers.

"O Tessy!" he exclaimed.

The girl's cheeks burned to the breeze, and she could not look into

his eyes for her emotion. It reminded Angel that he was somewhat

unfairly taking advantage of an accidental position; and he went no

further with it. No definite words of love had crossed their lips

as yet, and suspension at this point was desirable now. However,

he walked slowly, to make the remainder of the distance as long as

possible; but at last they came to the bend, and the rest of their

progress was in full view of the other three. The dry land was

reached, and he set her down.

Her friends were looking with round thoughtful eyes at her and him,

and she could see that they had been talking of her. He hastily bade

them farewell, and splashed back along the stretch of submerged road.

The four moved on together as before, till Marian broke the silence

by saying--

"No--in all truth; we have no chance against her!" She looked

joylessly at Tess.

"What do you mean?" asked the latter.

"He likes 'ee best--the very best! We could see it as he brought

'ee. He would have kissed 'ee, if you had encouraged him to do it,

ever so little."

"No, no," said she.

The gaiety with which they had set out had somehow vanished; and

yet there was no enmity or malice between them. They were generous

young souls; they had been reared in the lonely country nooks where

fatalism is a strong sentiment, and they did not blame her. Such

supplanting was to be.

Tess's heart ached. There was no concealing from herself the fact

that she loved Angel Clare, perhaps all the more passionately from

knowing that the others had also lost their hearts to him. There is

contagion in this sentiment, especially among women. And yet that

same hungry nature had fought against this, but too feebly, and the

natural result had followed.

"I will never stand in your way, nor in the way of either of you!"

she declared to Retty that night in the bedroom (her tears running

down). "I can't help this, my dear! I don't think marrying is in

his mind at all; but if he were ever to ask me I should refuse him,

as I should refuse any man."

"Oh! would you? Why?" said wondering Retty.

"It cannot be! But I will be plain. Putting myself quite on one

side, I don't think he will choose either of you."

"I have never expected it--thought of it!" moaned Retty. "But O! I

wish I was dead!"

The poor child, torn by a feeling which she hardly understood, turned

to the other two girls who came upstairs just then.

"We be friends with her again," she said to them. "She thinks no

more of his choosing her than we do."

So the reserve went off, and they were confiding and warm.

"I don't seem to care what I do now," said Marian, whose mood was

turned to its lowest bass. "I was going to marry a dairyman at

Stickleford, who's asked me twice; but--my soul--I would put an end

to myself rather'n be his wife now! Why don't ye speak, Izz?"

"To confess, then," murmured Izz, "I made sure to-day that he was

going to kiss me as he held me; and I lay still against his breast,

hoping and hoping, and never moved at all. But he did not. I don't

like biding here at Talbothays any longer! I shall go hwome."

The air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with the

hopeless passion of the girls. They writhed feverishly under the

oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature's law--an

emotion which they had neither expected nor desired. The incident

of the day had fanned the flame that was burning the inside of their

hearts out, and the torture was almost more than they could endure.

The differences which distinguished them as individuals were

abstracted by this passion, and each was but portion of one organism

called sex. There was so much frankness and so little jealousy

because there was no hope. Each one was a girl of fair common sense,

and she did not delude herself with any vain conceits, or deny her

love, or give herself airs, in the idea of outshining the others.

The full recognition of the futility of their infatuation, from a

social point of view; its purposeless beginning; its self-bounded

outlook; its lack of everything to justify its existence in the eye

of civilization (while lacking nothing in the eye of Nature); the one

fact that it did exist, ecstasizing them to a killing joy--all this

imparted to them a resignation, a dignity, which a practical and

sordid expectation of winning him as a husband would have destroyed.

They tossed and turned on their little beds, and the cheese-wring

dripped monotonously downstairs.

"B' you awake, Tess?" whispered one, half-an-hour later.

It was Izz Huett's voice.

Tess replied in the affirmative, whereupon also Retty and Marian

suddenly flung the bedclothes off them, and sighed--

"So be we!"

"I wonder what she is like--the lady they say his family have looked

out for him!"

"I wonder," said Izz.

"Some lady looked out for him?" gasped Tess, starting. "I have never

heard o' that!"

"O yes--'tis whispered; a young lady of his own rank, chosen by his

family; a Doctor of Divinity's daughter near his father's parish of

Emminster; he don't much care for her, they say. But he is sure to

marry her."

They had heard so very little of this; yet it was enough to build up

wretched dolorous dreams upon, there in the shade of the night. They

pictured all the details of his being won round to consent, of the

wedding preparations, of the bride's happiness, of her dress and

veil, of her blissful home with him, when oblivion would have fallen

upon themselves as far as he and their love were concerned. Thus

they talked, and ached, and wept till sleep charmed their sorrow

away.

After this disclosure Tess nourished no further foolish thought that

there lurked any grave and deliberate import in Clare's attentions

to her. It was a passing summer love of her face, for love's own

temporary sake--nothing more. And the thorny crown of this sad

conception was that she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way

to the rest, she who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature,

cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far

less worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored.

XXIV

Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a

season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss

of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love

should not grow passionate. The ready bosoms existing there were

impregnated by their surroundings.

July passed over their heads, and the Thermidorean weather which came

in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state

of hearts at Talbothays Dairy. The air of the place, so fresh in the

spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now. Its heavy

scents weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying

in a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the

pastures, but there was still bright green herbage here where the

watercourses purled. And as Clare was oppressed by the outward

heats, so was he burdened inwardly by waxing fervour of passion for

the soft and silent Tess.

The rains having passed, the uplands were dry. The wheels of the

dairyman's spring-cart, as he sped home from market, licked up the

pulverized surface of the highway, and were followed by white ribands

of dust, as if they had set a thin powder-train on fire. The cows

jumped wildly over the five-barred barton-gate, maddened by the

gad-fly; Dairyman Crick kept his shirt-sleeves permanently rolled up

from Monday to Saturday; open windows had no effect in ventilation

without open doors, and in the dairy-garden the blackbirds and

thrushes crept about under the currant-bushes, rather in the manner

of quadrupeds than of winged creatures. The flies in the kitchen

were lazy, teasing, and familiar, crawling about in the unwonted

places, on the floors, into drawers, and over the backs of the

milkmaids' hands. Conversations were concerning sunstroke; while

butter-making, and still more butter-keeping, was a despair.

They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and convenience,

without driving in the cows. During the day the animals obsequiously

followed the shadow of the smallest tree as it moved round the stem

with the diurnal roll; and when the milkers came they could hardly

stand still for the flies.

On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows chanced to

stand apart from the general herd, behind the corner of a hedge,

among them being Dumpling and Old Pretty, who loved Tess's hands

above those of any other maid. When she rose from her stool under a

finished cow, Angel Clare, who had been observing her for some time,

asked her if she would take the aforesaid creatures next. She

silently assented, and with her stool at arm's length, and the pail

against her knee, went round to where they stood. Soon the sound of

Old Pretty's milk fizzing into the pail came through the hedge, and

then Angel felt inclined to go round the corner also, to finish off a

hard-yielding milcher who had strayed there, he being now as capable

of this as the dairyman himself.

All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug their foreheads

into the cows and gazed into the pail. But a few--mainly the younger

ones--rested their heads sideways. This was Tess Durbeyfield's

habit, her temple pressing the milcher's flank, her eyes fixed on

the far end of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation.

She was milking Old Pretty thus, and the sun chancing to be on the

milking-side, it shone flat upon her pink-gowned form and her white

curtain-bonnet, and upon her profile, rendering it keen as a cameo

cut from the dun background of the cow.

She did not know that Clare had followed her round, and that he sat

under his cow watching her. The stillness of her head and features

was remarkable: she might have been in a trance, her eyes open, yet

unseeing. Nothing in the picture moved but Old Pretty's tail and

Tess's pink hands, the latter so gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation

only, as if they were obeying a reflex stimulus, like a beating

heart.

How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal

about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And

it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and

speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as

arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen

nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the

least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red

top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before

seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such

persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with

snow. Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But

no--they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect

upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was

that which gave the humanity.

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he

could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again

confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an _aura_

over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which well nigh produced

a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological

process, a prosaic sneeze.

She then became conscious that he was observing her; but she would

not show it by any change of position, though the curious dream-like

fixity disappeared, and a close eye might easily have discerned that

the rosiness of her face deepened, and then faded till only a tinge

of it was left.

The influence that had passed into Clare like an excitation from the

sky did not die down. Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears,

fell back like a defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat,

and, leaving his pail to be kicked over if the milcher had such a

mind, went quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and, kneeling down

beside her, clasped her in his arms.

Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to his embrace

with unreflecting inevitableness. Having seen that it was really her

lover who had advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she

sank upon him in her momentary joy, with something very like an

ecstatic cry.

He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting mouth, but he

checked himself, for tender conscience' sake.

"Forgive me, Tess dear!" he whispered. "I ought to have asked.

I--did not know what I was doing. I do not mean it as a liberty.

I am devoted to you, Tessy, dearest, in all sincerity!"

Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled; and seeing two

people crouching under her where, by immemorial custom, there should

have been only one, lifted her hind leg crossly.

"She is angry--she doesn't know what we mean--she'll kick over the

milk!" exclaimed Tess, gently striving to free herself, her eyes

concerned with the quadruped's actions, her heart more deeply

concerned with herself and Clare.

She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together, his arm still

encircling her. Tess's eyes, fixed on distance, began to fill.

"Why do you cry, my darling?" he said.

"O--I don't know!" she murmured.

As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in she became

agitated and tried to withdraw.

"Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last," said he, with a

curious sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart

had outrun his judgement. "That I--love you dearly and truly I need

not say. But I--it shall go no further now--it distresses you--I am

as surprised as you are. You will not think I have presumed upon

your defencelessness--been too quick and unreflecting, will you?"

"N'--I can't tell."

He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the

milking of each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of

the two into one; and when the dairyman came round by that screened

nook a few minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that

the markedly sundered pair were more to each other than mere

acquaintance. Yet in the interval since Crick's last view of them

something had occurred which changed the pivot of the universe for

their two natures; something which, had he known its quality, the

dairyman would have despised, as a practical man; yet which was based

upon a more stubborn and resistless tendency than a whole heap of

so-called practicalities. A veil had been whisked aside; the tract

of each one's outlook was to have a new horizon thenceforward--for a

short time or for a long.

END OF PHASE THE THIRD

Phase the Fourth: The Consequence

XXV

Clare, restless, went out into the dusk when evening drew on, she who

had won him having retired to her chamber.

The night was as sultry as the day. There was no coolness after dark

unless on the grass. Roads, garden-paths, the house-fronts, the

barton-walls were warm as hearths, and reflected the noontime

temperature into the noctambulist's face.

He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not what to think

of himself. Feeling had indeed smothered judgement that day.

Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain had kept

apart. She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred,

while the novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance

disquieted him--palpitating, contemplative being that he was. He

could hardly realize their true relations to each other as yet, and

what their mutual bearing should be before third parties

thenceforward.

Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary

existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed

through and early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which

as from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world

without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman--

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,

How curious you are to me!--

resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew. But behold,

the absorbing scene had been imported hither. What had been the

engrossing world had dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show;

while here, in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place, novelty

had volcanically started up, as it had never, for him, started up

elsewhere.

Every window of the house being open, Clare could hear across the

yard each trivial sound of the retiring household. The dairy-house,

so humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained

sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance

to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the

landscape; what was it now? The aged and lichened brick gables

breathed forth "Stay!" The windows smiled, the door coaxed and

beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy. A personality within

it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make

the bricks, mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning

sensibility. Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid's.

It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the

obscure dairy had become to him. And though new love was to be held

partly responsible for this, it was not solely so. Many besides

Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their

external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The

impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life

than the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus, he found that life

was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.

Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with

a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and

dismiss; but a woman living her precious life--a life which, to

herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension

as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations

the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her

fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came into

being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which

she was born.

This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single

opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic

First Cause--her all; her every and only chance. How then should he

look upon her as of less consequence than himself; as a pretty trifle

to caress and grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest seriousness

with the affection which he knew that he had awakened in her--so

fervid and so impressionable as she was under her reserve--in order

that it might not agonize and wreck her?

To encounter her daily in the accustomed manner would be to develop

what had begun. Living in such close relations, to meet meant to

fall into endearment; flesh and blood could not resist it; and,

having arrived at no conclusion as to the issue of such a tendency,

he decided to hold aloof for the present from occupations in which

they would be mutually engaged. As yet the harm done was small.

But it was not easy to carry out the resolution never to approach

her. He was driven towards her by every heave of his pulse.

He thought he would go and see his friends. It might be possible

to sound them upon this. In less than five months his term here

would have ended, and after a few additional months spent upon other

farms he would be fully equipped in agricultural knowledge and in

a position to start on his own account. Would not a farmer want a

wife, and should a farmer's wife be a drawing-room wax-figure, or a

woman who understood farming? Notwithstanding the pleasing answer

returned to him by the silence, he resolved to go his journey.

One morning when they sat down to breakfast at Talbothays Dairy some

maid observed that she had not seen anything of Mr Clare that day.

"O no," said Dairyman Crick. "Mr Clare has gone hwome to Emminster

to spend a few days wi' his kinsfolk."

For four impassioned ones around that table the sunshine of the

morning went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled their song.

But neither girl by word or gesture revealed her blankness. "He's

getting on towards the end of his time wi' me," added the dairyman,

with a phlegm which unconsciously was brutal; "and so I suppose he

is beginning to see about his plans elsewhere."

"How much longer is he to bide here?" asked Izz Huett, the only

one of the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust her voice with the

question.

The others waited for the dairyman's answer as if their lives hung

upon it; Retty, with parted lips, gazing on the tablecloth, Marian

with heat added to her redness, Tess throbbing and looking out at

the meads.

"Well, I can't mind the exact day without looking at my

memorandum-book," replied Crick, with the same intolerable unconcern.

"And even that may be altered a bit. He'll bide to get a little

practice in the calving out at the straw-yard, for certain. He'll

hang on till the end of the year I should say."

Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society--of "pleasure

girdled about with pain". After that the blackness of unutterable

night.

At this moment of the morning Angel Clare was riding along a narrow

lane ten miles distant from the breakfasters, in the direction of

his father's Vicarage at Emminster, carrying, as well as he could,

a little basket which contained some black-puddings and a bottle of

mead, sent by Mrs Crick, with her kind respects, to his parents. The

white lane stretched before him, and his eyes were upon it; but they

were staring into next year, and not at the lane. He loved her;

ought he to marry her? Dared he to marry her? What would his mother

and his brothers say? What would he himself say a couple of years

after the event? That would depend upon whether the germs of staunch

comradeship underlay the temporary emotion, or whether it were a

sensuous joy in her form only, with no substratum of everlastingness.

His father's hill-surrounded little town, the Tudor church-tower of

red stone, the clump of trees near the Vicarage, came at last into

view beneath him, and he rode down towards the well-known gate.

Casting a glance in the direction of the church before entering his

home, he beheld standing by the vestry-door a group of girls, of

ages between twelve and sixteen, apparently awaiting the arrival of

some other one, who in a moment became visible; a figure somewhat

older than the school-girls, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and

highly-starched cambric morning-gown, with a couple of books in her

hand.

Clare knew her well. He could not be sure that she observed him; he

hoped she did not, so as to render it unnecessary that he should go

and speak to her, blameless creature that she was. An overpowering

reluctance to greet her made him decide that she had not seen him.

The young lady was Miss Mercy Chant, the only daughter of his

father's neighbour and friend, whom it was his parents' quiet hope

that he might wed some day. She was great at Antinomianism and

Bible-classes, and was plainly going to hold a class now. Clare's

mind flew to the impassioned, summer-steeped heathens in the Var

Vale, their rosy faces court-patched with cow-droppings; and to one

the most impassioned of them all.

It was on the impulse of the moment that he had resolved to trot

over to Emminster, and hence had not written to apprise his mother

and father, aiming, however, to arrive about the breakfast hour,

before they should have gone out to their parish duties. He was

a little late, and they had already sat down to the morning meal.

The group at the table jumped up to welcome him as soon as he

entered. They were his father and mother, his brother the Reverend

Felix--curate at a town in the adjoining county, home for the inside

of a fortnight--and his other brother, the Reverend Cuthbert, the

classical scholar, and Fellow and Dean of his College, down from

Cambridge for the long vacation. His mother appeared in a cap and

silver spectacles, and his father looked what in fact he was--an

earnest, God-fearing man, somewhat gaunt, in years about sixty-five,

his pale face lined with thought and purpose. Over their heads hung

the picture of Angel's sister, the eldest of the family, sixteen

years his senior, who had married a missionary and gone out to

Africa.

Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty

years, has well nigh dropped out of contemporary life. A spiritual

descendant in the direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an

Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic

simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his

mind once for all in the deeper questions of existence, and admitted

no further reasoning on them thenceforward. He was regarded even by

those of his own date and school of thinking as extreme; while, on

the other hand, those totally opposed to him were unwillingly won

to admiration for his thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he

showed in dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for

applying them. He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St John, hated St

James as much as he dared, and regarded with mixed feelings Timothy,

Titus, and Philemon. The New Testament was less a Christiad then a

Pauliad to his intelligence--less an argument than an intoxication.

His creed of determinism was such that it almost amounted to a

vice, and quite amounted, on its negative side, to a renunciative

philosophy which had cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and

Leopardi. He despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles,

and deemed himself consistent through the whole category--which in a

way he might have been. One thing he certainly was--sincere.

To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush

womanhood which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Var

Vale, his temper would have been antipathetic in a high degree, had

he either by inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it. Once

upon a time Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his father, in

a moment of irritation, that it might have resulted far better for

mankind if Greece had been the source of the religion of modern

civilization, and not Palestine; and his father's grief was of that

blank description which could not realize that there might lurk a

thousandth part of a truth, much less a half truth or a whole truth,

in such a proposition. He had simply preached austerely at Angel for

some time after. But the kindness of his heart was such that he

never resented anything for long, and welcomed his son to-day with a

smile which was as candidly sweet as a child's.

Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much

as formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there. Every

time that he returned hither he was conscious of this divergence,

and since he had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even

more distinctly foreign to his own than usual. Its transcendental

aspirations--still unconsciously based on the geocentric view of

things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell--were as foreign to his

own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet.

Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the great passionate pulse

of existence, unwarped, uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds

which futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to

regulate.

On their part they saw a great difference in him, a growing

divergence from the Angel Clare of former times. It was chiefly a

difference in his manner that they noticed just now, particularly

his brothers. He was getting to behave like a farmer; he flung his

legs about; the muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his

eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more. The

manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner

of the drawing-room young man. A prig would have said that he had

lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse. Such was the

contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs and

swains.

After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical,

well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest

fibre, such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by

the lathe of a systematic tuition. They were both somewhat

short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass

and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the

custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was

the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all

without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own

vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies;

and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on

their shelves. When Correggio's Holy Families were admired, they

admired Correggio's Holy Families; when he was decried in favour

of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal

objection.

If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed

their growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all Church;

Cuthbert all College. His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the

mainsprings of the world to the one; Cambridge to the other. Each

brother candidly recognized that there were a few unimportant score

of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were

neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated

rather than reckoned with and respected.

They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their

visits to their parents. Felix, though an offshoot from a far more

recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less

self-sacrificing and disinterested. More tolerant than his father of

a contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he

was less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own

teaching. Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded,

though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.

As they walked along the hillside Angel's former feeling revived

in him--that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself,

neither saw or set forth life as it really was lived. Perhaps, as

with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good

as their opportunities of expression. Neither had an adequate

conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and

gentle current in which they and their associates floated. Neither

saw the difference between local truth and universal truth; that what

the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite

a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.

"I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow,"

Felix was saying, among other things, to his youngest brother, as

he looked through his spectacles at the distant fields with sad

austerity. "And, therefore, we must make the best of it. But I do

entreat you to endeavour to keep as much as possible in touch with

moral ideals. Farming, of course, means roughing it externally; but

high thinking may go with plain living, nevertheless."

"Of course it may," said Angel. "Was it not proved nineteen hundred

years ago--if I may trespass upon your domain a little? Why should

you think, Felix, that I am likely to drop my high thinking and my

moral ideals?"

"Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our

conversation--it may be fancy only--that you were somehow losing

intellectual grasp. Hasn't it struck you, Cuthbert?"

"Now, Felix," said Angel drily, "we are very good friends, you

know; each of us treading our allotted circles; but if it comes to

intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had

better leave mine alone, and inquire what has become of yours."

They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed at any time at

which their father's and mother's morning work in the parish usually

concluded. Convenience as regarded afternoon callers was the last

thing to enter into the consideration of unselfish Mr and Mrs Clare;

though the three sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to

wish that their parents would conform a little to modern notions.

The walk had made them hungry, Angel in particular, who was now

an outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse _dapes inemptae_ of the

dairyman's somewhat coarsely-laden table. But neither of the old

people had arrived, and it was not till the sons were almost tired of

waiting that their parents entered. The self-denying pair had been

occupied in coaxing the appetites of some of their sick parishioners,

whom they, somewhat inconsistently, tried to keep imprisoned in the

flesh, their own appetites being quite forgotten.

The family sat down to table, and a frugal meal of cold viands

was deposited before them. Angel looked round for Mrs Crick's

black-puddings, which he had directed to be nicely grilled as they

did them at the dairy, and of which he wished his father and mother

to appreciate the marvellous herbal savours as highly as he did

himself.

"Ah! you are looking for the black-puddings, my dear boy," observed

Clare's mother. "But I am sure you will not mind doing without them

as I am sure your father and I shall not, when you know the reason.

I suggested to him that we should take Mrs Crick's kind present to

the children of the man who can earn nothing just now because of his

attacks of delirium tremens; and he agreed that it would be a great

pleasure to them; so we did."

"Of course," said Angel cheerfully, looking round for the mead.

"I found the mead so extremely alcoholic," continued his mother,

"that it was quite unfit for use as a beverage, but as valuable

as rum or brandy in an emergency; so I have put it in my

medicine-closet."

"We never drink spirits at this table, on principle," added his

father.

"But what shall I tell the dairyman's wife?" said Angel.

"The truth, of course," said his father.

"I rather wanted to say we enjoyed the mead and the black-puddings

very much. She is a kind, jolly sort of body, and is sure to ask me

directly I return."

"You cannot, if we did not," Mr Clare answered lucidly.

"Ah--no; though that mead was a drop of pretty tipple."

"A what?" said Cuthbert and Felix both.

"Oh--'tis an expression they use down at Talbothays," replied Angel,

blushing. He felt that his parents were right in their practice if

wrong in their want of sentiment, and said no more.

XXVI

It was not till the evening, after family prayers, that Angel found

opportunity of broaching to his father one or two subjects near his

heart. He had strung himself up to the purpose while kneeling behind

his brothers on the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of

their walking boots. When the service was over they went out of the

room with their mother, and Mr Clare and himself were left alone.

The young man first discussed with the elder his plans for the

attainment of his position as a farmer on an extensive scale--either

in England or in the Colonies. His father then told him that, as he

had not been put to the expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he

had felt it his duty to set by a sum of money every year towards the

purchase or lease of land for him some day, that he might not feel

himself unduly slighted.

"As far as worldly wealth goes," continued his father, "you will no

doubt stand far superior to your brothers in a few years."

This considerateness on old Mr Clare's part led Angel onward to the

other and dearer subject. He observed to his father that he was

then six-and-twenty, and that when he should start in the farming

business he would require eyes in the back of his head to see to all

matters--some one would be necessary to superintend the domestic

labours of his establishment whilst he was afield. Would it not be

well, therefore, for him to marry?

His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable; and then Angel

put the question--

"What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a thrifty

hard-working farmer?"

"A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you in

your goings-out and your comings-in. Beyond that, it really matters

little. Such an one can be found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend

and neighbour, Dr Chant--"

"But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows, churn good

butter, make immense cheeses; know how to sit hens and turkeys and

rear chickens, to direct a field of labourers in an emergency, and

estimate the value of sheep and calves?"

"Yes; a farmer's wife; yes, certainly. It would be desirable." Mr

Clare, the elder, had plainly never thought of these points before.

"I was going to add," he said, "that for a pure and saintly woman you

will not find one more to your true advantage, and certainly not more

to your mother's mind and my own, than your friend Mercy, whom you

used to show a certain interest in. It is true that my neighbour

Chant's daughter had lately caught up the fashion of the younger

clergy round about us for decorating the Communion-table--altar, as I

was shocked to hear her call it one day--with flowers and other stuff

on festival occasions. But her father, who is quite as opposed to

such flummery as I, says that can be cured. It is a mere girlish

outbreak which, I am sure, will not be permanent."

"Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know. But, father, don't you

think that a young woman equally pure and virtuous as Miss Chant,

but one who, in place of that lady's ecclesiastical accomplishments,

understands the duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself,

would suit me infinitely better?"

His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge of a farmer's

wife's duties came second to a Pauline view of humanity; and the

impulsive Angel, wishing to honour his father's feelings and to

advance the cause of his heart at the same time, grew specious.

He said that fate or Providence had thrown in his way a woman who

possessed every qualification to be the helpmate of an agriculturist,

and was decidedly of a serious turn of mind. He would not say

whether or not she had attached herself to the sound Low Church

School of his father; but she would probably be open to conviction

on that point; she was a regular church-goer of simple faith;

honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent, graceful to a degree, chaste

as a vestal, and, in personal appearance, exceptionally beautiful.

"Is she of a family such as you would care to marry into--a lady, in

short?" asked his startled mother, who had come softly into the study

during the conversation.

"She is not what in common parlance is called a lady," said Angel,

unflinchingly, "for she is a cottager's daughter, as I am proud to

say. But she IS a lady, nevertheless--in feeling and nature."

"Mercy Chant is of a very good family."

"Pooh!--what's the advantage of that, mother?" said Angel quickly.

"How is family to avail the wife of a man who has to rough it as I

have, and shall have to do?"

"Mercy is accomplished. And accomplishments have their charm,"

returned his mother, looking at him through her silver spectacles.

"As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of them in the

life I am going to lead?--while as to her reading, I can take that

in hand. She'll be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew

her. She's brim full of poetry--actualized poetry, if I may use the

expression. She LIVES what paper-poets only write... And she is an

unimpeachable Christian, I am sure; perhaps of the very tribe, genus,

and species you desire to propagate."

"O Angel, you are mocking!"

"Mother, I beg pardon. But as she really does attend Church almost

every Sunday morning, and is a good Christian girl, I am sure you

will tolerate any social shortcomings for the sake of that quality,

and feel that I may do worse than choose her." Angel waxed quite

earnest on that rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which

(never dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead) he had

been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and the other

milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality amid beliefs essentially

naturalistic.

In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself any right

whatever to the title he claimed for the unknown young woman, Mr and

Mrs Clare began to feel it as an advantage not to be overlooked that

she at least was sound in her views; especially as the conjunction of

the pair must have arisen by an act of Providence; for Angel never

would have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice. They said

finally that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that they would

not object to see her.

Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars now.

He felt that, single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents

were, there yet existed certain latent prejudices of theirs, as

middle-class people, which it would require some tact to overcome.

For though legally at liberty to do as he chose, and though their

daughter-in-law's qualifications could make no practical difference

to their lives, in the probability of her living far away from them,

he wished for affection's sake not to wound their sentiment in the

most important decision of his life.

He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in

Tess's life as if they were vital features. It was for herself that

he loved Tess; her soul, her heart, her substance--not for her skill

in the dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly not for

her simple formal faith-professions. Her unsophisticated open-air

existence required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable

to him. He held that education had as yet but little affected the

beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness depends. It

was probable that, in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral

and intellectual training would appreciably, perhaps considerably,

elevate the involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human

nature; but up to the present day, culture, as far as he could see,

might be said to have affected only the mental epiderm of those

lives which had been brought under its influence. This belief was

confirmed by his experience of women, which, having latterly been

extended from the cultivated middle-class into the rural community,

had taught him how much less was the intrinsic difference between the

good and wise woman of one social stratum and the good and wise woman

of another social stratum, than between the good and bad, the wise

and the foolish, of the same stratum or class.

It was the morning of his departure. His brothers had already left

the Vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north, whence one

was to return to his college, and the other to his curacy. Angel

might have accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweetheart

at Talbothays. He would have been an awkward member of the

party; for, though the most appreciative humanist, the most ideal

religionist, even the best-versed Christologist of the three, there

was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness

would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him. To

neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to mention Tess.

His mother made him sandwiches, and his father accompanied him,

on his own mare, a little way along the road. Having fairly well

advanced his own affairs, Angel listened in a willing silence, as

they jogged on together through the shady lanes, to his father's

account of his parish difficulties, and the coldness of brother

clergymen whom he loved, because of his strict interpretations of

the New Testament by the light of what they deemed a pernicious

Calvinistic doctrine.

"Pernicious!" said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he proceeded to

recount experiences which would show the absurdity of that idea.

He told of wondrous conversions of evil livers of which he had been

the instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and

well-to-do; and he also candidly admitted many failures.

As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young

upstart squire named d'Urberville, living some forty miles off, in

the neighbourhood of Trantridge.

"Not one of the ancient d'Urbervilles of Kingsbere and other places?"

asked his son. "That curiously historic worn-out family with its

ghostly legend of the coach-and-four?"

"O no. The original d'Urbervilles decayed and disappeared sixty

or eighty years ago--at least, I believe so. This seems to be a

new family which had taken the name; for the credit of the former

knightly line I hope they are spurious, I'm sure. But it is odd

to hear you express interest in old families. I thought you set less

store by them even than I."

"You misapprehend me, father; you often do," said Angel with a

little impatience. "Politically I am sceptical as to the virtue of

their being old. Some of the wise even among themselves 'exclaim

against their own succession,' as Hamlet puts it; but lyrically,

dramatically, and even historically, I am tenderly attached to them."

This distinction, though by no means a subtle one, was yet too

subtle for Mr Clare the elder, and he went on with the story he had

been about to relate; which was that after the death of the senior

so-called d'Urberville, the young man developed the most culpable

passions, though he had a blind mother, whose condition should have

made him know better. A knowledge of his career having come to

the ears of Mr Clare, when he was in that part of the country

preaching missionary sermons, he boldly took occasion to speak to

the delinquent on his spiritual state. Though he was a stranger,

occupying another's pulpit, he had felt this to be his duty, and

took for his text the words from St Luke: "Thou fool, this night thy

soul shall be required of thee!" The young man much resented this

directness of attack, and in the war of words which followed when

they met he did not scruple publicly to insult Mr Clare, without

respect for his gray hairs.

Angel flushed with distress.

"Dear father," he said sadly, "I wish you would not expose yourself

to such gratuitous pain from scoundrels!"

"Pain?" said his father, his rugged face shining in the ardour of

self-abnegation. "The only pain to me was pain on his account, poor,

foolish young man. Do you suppose his incensed words could give

me any pain, or even his blows? 'Being reviled we bless; being

persecuted we suffer it; being defamed we entreat; we are made as the

filth of the world, and as the offscouring of all things unto this

day.' Those ancient and noble words to the Corinthians are strictly

true at this present hour."

"Not blows, father? He did not proceed to blows?"

"No, he did not. Though I have borne blows from men in a mad state

of intoxication."

"No!"

"A dozen times, my boy. What then? I have saved them from the guilt

of murdering their own flesh and blood thereby; and they have lived

to thank me, and praise God."

"May this young man do the same!" said Angel fervently. "But I fear

otherwise, from what you say."

"We'll hope, nevertheless," said Mr Clare. "And I continue to pray

for him, though on this side of the grave we shall probably never

meet again. But, after all, one of those poor words of mine may

spring up in his heart as a good seed some day."

Now, as always, Clare's father was sanguine as a child; and though

the younger could not accept his parent's narrow dogma, he revered

his practice and recognized the hero under the pietist. Perhaps he

revered his father's practice even more now than ever, seeing that,

in the question of making Tessy his wife, his father had not once

thought of inquiring whether she were well provided or penniless.

The same unworldliness was what had necessitated Angel's getting

a living as a farmer, and would probably keep his brothers in the

position of poor parsons for the term of their activities; yet Angel

admired it none the less. Indeed, despite his own heterodoxy, Angel

often felt that he was nearer to his father on the human side than

was either of his brethren.

XXVII

An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish

mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll

a mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that

green trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or

Froom. Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat

alluvial soil below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume

of the summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein

a vast pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals,

the very bees and butterflies drowsy. Clare was now so familiar with

the spot that he knew the individual cows by their names when, a long

distance off, he saw them dotted about the meads. It was with a

sense of luxury that he recognized his power of viewing life here

from its inner side, in a way that had been quite foreign to him in

his student-days; and, much as he loved his parents, he could not

help being aware that to come here, as now, after an experience of

home-life, affected him like throwing off splints and bandages; even

the one customary curb on the humours of English rural societies

being absent in this place, Talbothays having no resident landlord.

Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy. The denizens were

all enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the

exceedingly early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity.

At the door the wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite

scrubbings, hung like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb

of an oak fixed there for that purpose; all of them ready and dry

for the evening milking. Angel entered, and went through the silent

passages of the house to the back quarters, where he listened for a

moment. Sustained snores came from the cart-house, where some of

the men were lying down; the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs

arose from the still further distance. The large-leaved rhubarb and

cabbage plants slept too, their broad limp surfaces hanging in the

sun like half-closed umbrellas.

He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the

clock struck three. Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with

the stroke, Clare heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and

then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs. It was Tess's,

who in another moment came down before his eyes.

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there.

She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it

had been a snake's. She had stretched one arm so high above her

coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above

the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung

heavy over their pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed

from her. It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than

at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself

flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.

Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness,

before the remainder of her face was well awake. With an oddly

compounded look of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed--"O

Mr Clare! How you frightened me--I--"

There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed

relations which his declaration had introduced; but the full sense of

the matter rose up in her face when she encountered Clare's tender

look as he stepped forward to the bottom stair.

"Dear, darling Tessy!" he whispered, putting his arm round her, and

his face to her flushed cheek. "Don't, for Heaven's sake, Mister me

any more. I have hastened back so soon because of you!"

Tess's excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there

they stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in

by the window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast;

upon her inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her

naked arm, and her neck, and into the depths of her hair. Having

been lying down in her clothes she was warm as a sunned cat. At

first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon

lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with