Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
“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’ 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 _niaiseries_, 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 through 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