Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
farmer himself, it appeared, was not at home, but his wife, who
represented him this evening, made no objection to hiring Tess, on her
agreeing to remain till Old Lady-Day. Female field-labour was seldom
offered now, and its cheapness made it profitable for tasks which women
could perform as readily as men.
Having signed the agreement, there was nothing more for Tess to do at
present than to get a lodging, and she found one in the house at whose
gable-wall she had warmed herself. It was a poor subsistence that she
had ensured, but it would afford a shelter for the winter at any rate.
That night she wrote to inform her parents of her new address, in case
a letter should arrive at Marlott from her husband. But she did not
tell them of the sorriness of her situation: it might have brought
reproach upon him.
XLIII
There was no exaggeration in Marian’s definition of Flintcomb-Ash farm
as a starve-acre place. The single fat thing on the soil was Marian
herself; and she was an importation. Of the three classes of village,
the village cared for by its lord, the village cared for by itself, and
the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord (in other
words, the village of a resident squire’s tenantry, the village of free
or copy-holders, and the absentee-owner’s village, farmed with the
land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the third.
But Tess set to work. Patience, that blending of moral courage with
physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel
Clare; and it sustained her.
The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was a
stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground of
the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets—the outcrop of
siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose
white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half of
each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the
business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the
root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also.
Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole
field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without
features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of
skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white
vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and
nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face
looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the
white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls
crawling over the surface of the former like flies.
Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical
regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in Hessian
“wroppers”—sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom, to keep
their gowns from blowing about—scant skirts revealing boots that
reached high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets.
The pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads
would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of
the two Marys.
They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they
bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of
their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist
in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said
that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would
not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a situation, this field,
that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally
upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till
they were wet through. Tess had not known till now what was really
meant by that. There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is
called being wet through in common talk. But to stand working slowly in
a field, and feel the creep of rain-water, first in legs and shoulders,
then on hips and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to work
on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down,
demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.
Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be supposed. They
were both young, and they were talking of the time when they lived and
loved together at Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of land
where summer had been liberal in her gifts; in substance to all,
emotionally to these. Tess would fain not have conversed with Marian of
the man who was legally, if not actually, her husband; but the
irresistible fascination of the subject betrayed her into reciprocating
Marian’s remarks. And thus, as has been said, though the damp curtains
of their bonnets flapped smartly into their faces, and their wrappers
clung about them to wearisomeness, they lived all this afternoon in
memories of green, sunny, romantic Talbothays.
“You can see a gleam of a hill within a few miles o’ Froom Valley from
here when ’tis fine,” said Marian.
“Ah! Can you?” said Tess, awake to the new value of this locality.
So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to
enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. Marian’s will had
a method of assisting itself by taking from her pocket as the afternoon
wore on a pint bottle corked with white rag, from which she invited
Tess to drink. Tess’s unassisted power of dreaming, however, being
enough for her sublimation at present, she declined except the merest
sip, and then Marian took a pull from the spirits.
“I’ve got used to it,” she said, “and can’t leave it off now. ’Tis my
only comfort—You see I lost him: you didn’t; and you can do without it
perhaps.”
Tess thought her loss as great as Marian’s, but upheld by the dignity
of being Angel’s wife, in the letter at least, she accepted Marian’s
differentiation.
Amid this scene Tess slaved in the morning frosts and in the afternoon
rains. When it was not swede-grubbing it was swede-trimming, in which
process they sliced off the earth and the fibres with a bill-hook
before storing the roots for future use. At this occupation they could
shelter themselves by a thatched hurdle if it rained; but if it was
frosty even their thick leather gloves could not prevent the frozen
masses they handled from biting their fingers. Still Tess hoped. She
had a conviction that sooner or later the magnanimity which she
persisted in reckoning as a chief ingredient of Clare’s character would
lead him to rejoin her.
Marian, primed to a humorous mood, would discover the queer-shaped
flints aforesaid, and shriek with laughter, Tess remaining severely
obtuse. They often looked across the country to where the Var or Froom
was known to stretch, even though they might not be able to see it;
and, fixing their eyes on the cloaking gray mist, imagined the old
times they had spent out there.
“Ah,” said Marian, “how I should like another or two of our old set to
come here! Then we could bring up Talbothays every day here afield, and
talk of he, and of what nice times we had there, and o’ the old things
we used to know, and make it all come back a’most, in seeming!”
Marian’s eyes softened, and her voice grew vague as the visions
returned. “I’ll write to Izz Huett,” she said. “She’s biding at home
doing nothing now, I know, and I’ll tell her we be here, and ask her to
come; and perhaps Retty is well enough now.”
Tess had nothing to say against the proposal, and the next she heard of
this plan for importing old Talbothays’ joys was two or three days
later, when Marian informed her that Izz had replied to her inquiry,
and had promised to come if she could.
There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and
measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player. One morning the few
lonely trees and the thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if they had
put off a vegetable for an animal integument. Every twig was covered
with a white nap as of fur grown from the rind during the night, giving
it four times its usual stoutness; the whole bush or tree forming a
staring sketch in white lines on the mournful gray of the sky and
horizon. Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds and walls where none
had ever been observed till brought out into visibility by the
crystallizing atmosphere, hanging like loops of white worsted from
salient points of the out-houses, posts, and gates.
After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when
strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on
the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical
eyes—eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in
inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had
ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure;
which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by
the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of
colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the
expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. These nameless
birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had seen
which humanity would never see, they brought no account. The
traveller’s ambition to tell was not theirs, and, with dumb
impassivity, they dismissed experiences which they did not value for
the immediate incidents of this homely upland—the trivial movements of
the two girls in disturbing the clods with their hackers so as to
uncover something or other that these visitants relished as food.
Then one day a peculiar quality invaded the air of this open country.
There came a moisture which was not of rain, and a cold which was not
of frost. It chilled the eyeballs of the twain, made their brows ache,
penetrated to their skeletons, affecting the surface of the body less
than its core. They knew that it meant snow, and in the night the snow
came. Tess, who continued to live at the cottage with the warm gable
that cheered any lonely pedestrian who paused beside it, awoke in the
night, and heard above the thatch noises which seemed to signify that
the roof had turned itself into a gymnasium of all the winds. When she
lit her lamp to get up in the morning she found that the snow had blown
through a chink in the casement, forming a white cone of the finest
powder against the inside, and had also come down the chimney, so that
it lay sole-deep upon the floor, on which her shoes left tracks when
she moved about. Without, the storm drove so fast as to create a
snow-mist in the kitchen; but as yet it was too dark out-of-doors to
see anything.
Tess knew that it was impossible to go on with the swedes; and by the
time she had finished breakfast beside the solitary little lamp, Marian
arrived to tell her that they were to join the rest of the women at
reed-drawing in the barn till the weather changed. As soon, therefore,
as the uniform cloak of darkness without began to turn to a disordered
medley of grays, they blew out the lamp, wrapped themselves up in their
thickest pinners, tied their woollen cravats round their necks and
across their chests, and started for the barn. The snow had followed
the birds from the polar basin as a white pillar of a cloud, and
individual flakes could not be seen. The blast smelt of icebergs,
arctic seas, whales, and white bears, carrying the snow so that it
licked the land but did not deepen on it. They trudged onwards with
slanted bodies through the flossy fields, keeping as well as they could
in the shelter of hedges, which, however, acted as strainers rather
than screens. The air, afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes
that infested it, twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an
achromatic chaos of things. But both the young women were fairly