Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
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 forever!”
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