Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
Clare had resolved never to kiss her until he had obtained her promise;
but somehow, as Tess stood there in her prettily tucked-up milking
gown, her hair carelessly heaped upon her head till there should be
leisure to arrange it when skimming and milking were done, he broke his
resolve, and brought his lips to her cheek for one moment. She passed
downstairs very quickly, never looking back at him or saying another
word. The other maids were already down, and the subject was not
pursued. Except Marian, they all looked wistfully and suspiciously at
the pair, in the sad yellow rays which the morning candles emitted in
contrast with the first cold signals of the dawn without.
When skimming was done—which, as the milk diminished with the approach
of autumn, was a lessening process day by day—Retty and the rest went
out. The lovers followed them.
“Our tremulous lives are so different from theirs, are they not?” he
musingly observed to her, as he regarded the three figures tripping
before him through the frigid pallor of opening day.
“Not so very different, I think,” she said.
“Why do you think that?”
“There are very few women’s lives that are not—tremulous,” Tess
replied, pausing over the new word as if it impressed her. “There’s
more in those three than you think.”
“What is in them?”
“Almost either of ’em,” she began, “would make—perhaps would make—a
properer wife than I. And perhaps they love you as well as I—almost.”
“O, Tessy!”
There were signs that it was an exquisite relief to her to hear the
impatient exclamation, though she had resolved so intrepidly to let
generosity make one bid against herself. That was now done, and she had
not the power to attempt self-immolation a second time then. They were
joined by a milker from one of the cottages, and no more was said on
that which concerned them so deeply. But Tess knew that this day would
decide it.
In the afternoon several of the dairyman’s household and assistants
went down to the meads as usual, a long way from the dairy, where many
of the cows were milked without being driven home. The supply was
getting less as the animals advanced in calf, and the supernumerary
milkers of the lush green season had been dismissed.
The work progressed leisurely. Each pailful was poured into tall cans
that stood in a large spring-waggon which had been brought upon the
scene; and when they were milked, the cows trailed away. Dairyman
Crick, who was there with the rest, his wrapper gleaming miraculously
white against a leaden evening sky, suddenly looked at his heavy watch.
“Why, ’tis later than I thought,” he said. “Begad! We shan’t be soon
enough with this milk at the station, if we don’t mind. There’s no time
to-day to take it home and mix it with the bulk afore sending off. It
must go to station straight from here. Who’ll drive it across?”
Mr Clare volunteered to do so, though it was none of his business,
asking Tess to accompany him. The evening, though sunless, had been
warm and muggy for the season, and Tess had come out with her
milking-hood only, naked-armed and jacketless; certainly not dressed
for a drive. She therefore replied by glancing over her scant
habiliments; but Clare gently urged her. She assented by relinquishing
her pail and stool to the dairyman to take home, and mounted the
spring-waggon beside Clare.
XXX
In the diminishing daylight they went along the level roadway through
the meads, which stretched away into gray miles, and were backed in the
extreme edge of distance by the swarthy and abrupt slopes of Egdon
Heath. On its summit stood clumps and stretches of fir-trees, whose
notched tips appeared like battlemented towers crowning black-fronted
castles of enchantment.
They were so absorbed in the sense of being close to each other that
they did not begin talking for a long while, the silence being broken
only by the clucking of the milk in the tall cans behind them. The lane
they followed was so solitary that the hazel nuts had remained on the
boughs till they slipped from their shells, and the blackberries hung
in heavy clusters. Every now and then Angel would fling the lash of his
whip round one of these, pluck it off, and give it to his companion.
The dull sky soon began to tell its meaning by sending down
herald-drops of rain, and the stagnant air of the day changed into a
fitful breeze which played about their faces. The quick-silvery glaze
on the rivers and pools vanished; from broad mirrors of light they
changed to lustreless sheets of lead, with a surface like a rasp. But
that spectacle did not affect her preoccupation. Her countenance, a
natural carnation slightly embrowned by the season, had deepened its
tinge with the beating of the rain-drops; and her hair, which the
pressure of the cows’ flanks had, as usual, caused to tumble down from
its fastenings and stray beyond the curtain of her calico bonnet, was
made clammy by the moisture till it hardly was better than seaweed.
“I ought not to have come, I suppose,” she murmured, looking at the
sky.
“I am sorry for the rain,” said he. “But how glad I am to have you
here!”
Remote Egdon disappeared by degree behind the liquid gauze. The evening
grew darker, and the roads being crossed by gates, it was not safe to
drive faster than at a walking pace. The air was rather chill.
“I am so afraid you will get cold, with nothing upon your arms and
shoulders,” he said. “Creep close to me, and perhaps the drizzle won’t
hurt you much. I should be sorrier still if I did not think that the
rain might be helping me.”
She imperceptibly crept closer, and he wrapped round them both a large
piece of sail-cloth, which was sometimes used to keep the sun off the
milk-cans. Tess held it from slipping off him as well as herself,
Clare’s hands being occupied.
“Now we are all right again. Ah—no we are not! It runs down into my
neck a little, and it must still more into yours. That’s better. Your
arms are like wet marble, Tess. Wipe them in the cloth. Now, if you
stay quiet, you will not get another drop. Well, dear—about that
question of mine—that long-standing question?”
The only reply that he could hear for a little while was the smack of
the horse’s hoofs on the moistening road, and the cluck of the milk in
the cans behind them.
“Do you remember what you said?”
“I do,” she replied.
“Before we get home, mind.”
“I’ll try.”
He said no more then. As they drove on, the fragment of an old manor
house of Caroline date rose against the sky, and was in due course
passed and left behind.
“That,” he observed, to entertain her, “is an interesting old place—one
of the several seats which belonged to an ancient Norman family
formerly of great influence in this county, the d’Urbervilles. I never
pass one of their residences without thinking of them. There is
something very sad in the extinction of a family of renown, even if it
was fierce, domineering, feudal renown.”
“Yes,” said Tess.
They crept along towards a point in the expanse of shade just at hand
at which a feeble light was beginning to assert its presence, a spot
where, by day, a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the
dark green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between
their secluded world and modern life. Modern life stretched out its
steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the
native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what it
touched had been uncongenial.
They reached the feeble light, which came from the smoky lamp of a
little railway station; a poor enough terrestrial star, yet in one
sense of more importance to Talbothays Dairy and mankind than the
celestial ones to which it stood in such humiliating contrast. The cans
of new milk were unladen in the rain, Tess getting a little shelter
from a neighbouring holly tree.
Then there was the hissing of a train, which drew up almost silently
upon the wet rails, and the milk was rapidly swung can by can into the
truck. The light of the engine flashed for a second upon Tess
Durbeyfield’s figure, motionless under the great holly tree. No object
could have looked more foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels than
this unsophisticated girl, with the round bare arms, the rainy face and
hair, the suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at pause, the print
gown of no date or fashion, and the cotton bonnet drooping on her brow.
She mounted again beside her lover, with a mute obedience
characteristic of impassioned natures at times, and when they had
wrapped themselves up over head and ears in the sailcloth again, they
plunged back into the now thick night. Tess was so receptive that the
few minutes of contact with the whirl of material progress lingered in
her thought.
“Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts to-morrow, won’t they?”
she asked. “Strange people that we have never seen.”
“Yes—I suppose they will. Though not as we send it. When its strength
has been lowered, so that it may not get up into their heads.”
“Noble men and noble women, ambassadors and centurions, ladies and
tradeswomen, and babies who have never seen a cow.”
“Well, yes; perhaps; particularly centurions.”
“Who don’t know anything of us, and where it comes from; or think how
we two drove miles across the moor to-night in the rain that it might
reach ’em in time?”
“We did not drive entirely on account of these precious Londoners; we
drove a little on our own—on account of that anxious matter which you
will, I am sure, set at rest, dear Tess. Now, permit me to put it in
this way. You belong to me already, you know; your heart, I mean. Does
it not?”
“You know as well as I. O yes—yes!”
“Then, if your heart does, why not your hand?”
“My only reason was on account of you—on account of a question. I have
something to tell you—”
“But suppose it to be entirely for my happiness, and my worldly
convenience also?”
“O yes; if it is for your happiness and worldly convenience. But my
life before I came here—I want—”
“Well, it is for my convenience as well as my happiness. If I have a
very large farm, either English or colonial, you will be invaluable as
a wife to me; better than a woman out of the largest mansion in the
country. So please—please, dear Tessy, disabuse your mind of the
feeling that you will stand in my way.”
“But my history. I want you to know it—you must let me tell you—you
will not like me so well!”
“Tell it if you wish to, dearest. This precious history then. Yes, I
was born at so and so, Anno Domini—”
“I was born at Marlott,” she said, catching at his words as a help,
lightly as they were spoken. “And I grew up there. And I was in the
Sixth Standard when I left school, and they said I had great aptness,
and should make a good teacher, so it was settled that I should be one.
But there was trouble in my family; father was not very industrious,
and he drank a little.”
“Yes, yes. Poor child! Nothing new.” He pressed her more closely to his
side.
“And then—there is something very unusual about it—about me. I—I was—”
Tess’s breath quickened.
“Yes, dearest. Never mind.”
“I—I—am not a Durbeyfield, but a d’Urberville—a descendant of the same
family as those that owned the old house we passed. And—we are all gone
to nothing!”
“A d’Urberville!—Indeed! And is that all the trouble, dear Tess?”
“Yes,” she answered faintly.
“Well—why should I love you less after knowing this?”
“I was told by the dairyman that you hated old families.”
He laughed.
“Well, it is true, in one sense. I do hate the aristocratic principle
of blood before everything, and do think that as reasoners the only
pedigrees we ought to respect are those spiritual ones of the wise and
virtuous, without regard to corporal paternity. But I am extremely