Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
Marlott, former schoolfellows and acquaintances of Tess, called to see
her, arriving dressed in their best starched and ironed, as became
visitors to a person who had made a transcendent conquest (as they
supposed), and sat round the room looking at her with great curiosity.
For the fact that it was this said thirty-first cousin, Mr
d’Urberville, who had fallen in love with her, a gentleman not
altogether local, whose reputation as a reckless gallant and
heartbreaker was beginning to spread beyond the immediate boundaries of
Trantridge, lent Tess’s supposed position, by its fearsomeness, a far
higher fascination that it would have exercised if unhazardous.
Their interest was so deep that the younger ones whispered when her
back was turned—
“How pretty she is; and how that best frock do set her off! I believe
it cost an immense deal, and that it was a gift from him.”
Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from the
corner-cupboard, did not hear these commentaries. If she had heard
them, she might soon have set her friends right on the matter. But her
mother heard, and Joan’s simple vanity, having been denied the hope of
a dashing marriage, fed itself as well as it could upon the sensation
of a dashing flirtation. Upon the whole she felt gratified, even though
such a limited and evanescent triumph should involve her daughter’s
reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and in the warmth of her
responsiveness to their admiration she invited her visitors to stay to
tea.
Their chatter, their laughter, their good-humoured innuendoes, above
all, their flashes and flickerings of envy, revived Tess’s spirits
also; and, as the evening wore on, she caught the infection of their
excitement, and grew almost gay. The marble hardness left her face, she
moved with something of her old bounding step, and flushed in all her
young beauty.
At moments, in spite of thought, she would reply to their inquiries
with a manner of superiority, as if recognizing that her experiences in
the field of courtship had, indeed, been slightly enviable. But so far
was she from being, in the words of Robert South, “in love with her own
ruin,” that the illusion was transient as lightning; cold reason came
back to mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness of her momentary
pride would convict her, and recall her to reserved listlessness again.
And the despondency of the next morning’s dawn, when it was no longer
Sunday, but Monday; and no best clothes; and the laughing visitors were
gone, and she awoke alone in her old bed, the innocent younger children
breathing softly around her. In place of the excitement of her return,
and the interest it had inspired, she saw before her a long and stony
highway which she had to tread, without aid, and with little sympathy.
Her depression was then terrible, and she could have hidden herself in
a tomb.
In the course of a few weeks Tess revived sufficiently to show herself
so far as was necessary to get to church one Sunday morning. She liked
to hear the chanting—such as it was—and the old Psalms, and to join in
the Morning Hymn. That innate love of melody, which she had inherited
from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power over
her which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.
To be as much out of observation as possible for reasons of her own,
and to escape the gallantries of the young men, she set out before the
chiming began, and took a back seat under the gallery, close to the
lumber, where only old men and women came, and where the bier stood on
end among the churchyard tools.
Parishioners dropped in by twos and threes, deposited themselves in
rows before her, rested three-quarters of a minute on their foreheads
as if they were praying, though they were not; then sat up, and looked
around. When the chants came on, one of her favourites happened to be
chosen among the rest—the old double chant “Langdon”—but she did not
know what it was called, though she would much have liked to know. She
thought, without exactly wording the thought, how strange and god-like
was a composer’s power, who from the grave could lead through sequences
of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had
never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his
personality.
The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service
proceeded; and at last observing her, they whispered to each other. She
knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that
she could come to church no more.
The bedroom which she shared with some of the children formed her
retreat more continually than ever. Here, under her few square yards of
thatch, she watched winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets, and
successive moons at their full. So close kept she that at length almost
everybody thought she had gone away.
The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it
was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary. She
knew how to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the
light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of
day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute
mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes
attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the
shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold
accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so
unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.
On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with
the element she moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an
integral part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would
intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her
own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a
psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The midnight
airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of
the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the
expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some
vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of
her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.
But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of
convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a
sorry and mistaken creation of Tess’s fancy—a cloud of moral hobgoblins
by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of
harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping
birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren,
or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a
figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the
while she was making a distinction where there was no difference.
Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord. She had been
made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the
environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.
XIV
It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours, attacked
by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces
within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they should be dried
away to nothing.
The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look,
demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His
present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene,
explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a
saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a
golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in
the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with
interest for him.
His light, a little later, broke though chinks of cottage shutters,
throwing stripes like red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of drawers,
and other furniture within; and awakening harvesters who were not
already astir.
But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were two broad arms
of painted wood, which rose from the margin of yellow cornfield hard by
Marlott village. They, with two others below, formed the 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