Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
cheerful; such weather on a dry upland is not in itself dispiriting.
“Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was coming,” said Marian.
“Depend upon’t, they keep just in front o’t all the way from the North
Star. Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching
weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now!
Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all—in fact, it rather does
it good.”
“You mustn’t talk about him to me, Marian,” said Tess severely.
“Well, but—surely you care for ’n! Do you?”
Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes, impulsively faced
in the direction in which she imagined South America to lie, and,
putting up her lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.
“Well, well, I know you do. But ’pon my body, it is a rum life for a
married couple! There—I won’t say another word! Well, as for the
weather, it won’t hurt us in the wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is
fearful hard work—worse than swede-hacking. I can stand it because I’m
stout; but you be slimmer than I. I can’t think why maister should have
set ’ee at it.”
They reached the wheat-barn and entered it. One end of the long
structure was full of corn; the middle was where the reed-drawing was
carried on, and there had already been placed in the reed-press the
evening before as many sheaves of wheat as would be sufficient for the
women to draw from during the day.
“Why, here’s Izz!” said Marian.
Izz it was, and she came forward. She had walked all the way from her
mother’s home on the previous afternoon, and, not deeming the distance
so great, had been belated, arriving, however, just before the snow
began, and sleeping at the alehouse. The farmer had agreed with her
mother at market to take her on if she came to-day, and she had been
afraid to disappoint him by delay.
In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two women from a
neighbouring village; two Amazonian sisters, whom Tess with a start
remembered as Dark Car, the Queen of Spades, and her junior, the Queen
of Diamonds—those who had tried to fight with her in the midnight
quarrel at Trantridge. They showed no recognition of her, and possibly
had none, for they had been under the influence of liquor on that
occasion, and were only temporary sojourners there as here. They did
all kinds of men’s work by preference, including well-sinking, hedging,
ditching, and excavating, without any sense of fatigue. Noted
reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon the other three with
some superciliousness.
Putting on their gloves, all set to work in a row in front of the
press, an erection formed of two posts connected by a cross-beam, under
which the sheaves to be drawn from were laid ears outward, the beam
being pegged down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the sheaves
diminished.
The day hardened in colour, the light coming in at the barndoors
upwards from the snow instead of downwards from the sky. The girls
pulled handful after handful from the press; but by reason of the
presence of the strange women, who were recounting scandals, Marian and
Izz could not at first talk of old times as they wished to do.
Presently they heard the muffled tread of a horse, and the farmer rode
up to the barndoor. When he had dismounted he came close to Tess, and
remained looking musingly at the side of her face. She had not turned
at first, but his fixed attitude led her to look round, when she
perceived that her employer was the native of Trantridge from whom she
had taken flight on the high-road because of his allusion to her
history.
He waited till she had carried the drawn bundles to the pile outside,
when he said, “So you be the young woman who took my civility in such
ill part? Be drowned if I didn’t think you might be as soon as I heard
of your being hired! Well, you thought you had got the better of me the
first time at the inn with your fancy-man, and the second time on the
road, when you bolted; but now I think I’ve got the better of you.” He
concluded with a hard laugh.
Tess, between the Amazons and the farmer, like a bird caught in a
clap-net, returned no answer, continuing to pull the straw. She could
read character sufficiently well to know by this time that she had
nothing to fear from her employer’s gallantry; it was rather the
tyranny induced by his mortification at Clare’s treatment of him. Upon
the whole she preferred that sentiment in man and felt brave enough to
endure it.
“You thought I was in love with ’ee I suppose? Some women are such
fools, to take every look as serious earnest. But there’s nothing like
a winter afield for taking that nonsense out o’ young wenches’ heads;
and you’ve signed and agreed till Lady-Day. Now, are you going to beg
my pardon?”
“I think you ought to beg mine.”
“Very well—as you like. But we’ll see which is master here. Be they all
the sheaves you’ve done to-day?”
“Yes, sir.”
“’Tis a very poor show. Just see what they’ve done over there”
(pointing to the two stalwart women). “The rest, too, have done better
than you.”
“They’ve all practised it before, and I have not. And I thought it made
no difference to you as it is task work, and we are only paid for what
we do.”
“Oh, but it does. I want the barn cleared.”
“I am going to work all the afternoon instead of leaving at two as the
others will do.”
He looked sullenly at her and went away. Tess felt that she could not
have come to a much worse place; but anything was better than
gallantry. When two o’clock arrived the professional reed-drawers
tossed off the last half-pint in their flagon, put down their hooks,
tied their last sheaves, and went away. Marian and Izz would have done
likewise, but on hearing that Tess meant to stay, to make up by longer
hours for her lack of skill, they would not leave her. Looking out at
the snow, which still fell, Marian exclaimed, “Now, we’ve got it all to
ourselves.” And so at last the conversation turned to their old
experiences at the dairy; and, of course, the incidents of their
affection for Angel Clare.
“Izz and Marian,” said Mrs Angel Clare, with a dignity which was
extremely touching, seeing how very little of a wife she was: “I can’t
join in talk with you now, as I used to do, about Mr Clare; you will
see that I cannot; because, although he is gone away from me for the
present, he is my husband.”
Izz was by nature the sauciest and most caustic of all the four girls
who had loved Clare. “He was a very splendid lover, no doubt,” she
said; “but I don’t think he is a too fond husband to go away from you
so soon.”
“He had to go—he was obliged to go, to see about the land over there!”
pleaded Tess.
“He might have tided ’ee over the winter.”
“Ah—that’s owing to an accident—a misunderstanding; and we won’t argue
it,” Tess answered, with tearfulness in her words. “Perhaps there’s a
good deal to be said for him! He did not go away, like some husbands,
without telling me; and I can always find out where he is.”
After this they continued for some long time in a reverie, as they went
on seizing the ears of corn, drawing out the straw, gathering it under
their arms, and cutting off the ears with their bill-hooks, nothing
sounding in the barn but the swish of the straw and the crunch of the
hook. Then Tess suddenly flagged, and sank down upon the heap of
wheat-ears at her feet.
“I knew you wouldn’t be able to stand it!” cried Marian. “It wants
harder flesh than yours for this work.”
Just then the farmer entered. “Oh, that’s how you get on when I am
away,” he said to her.
“But it is my own loss,” she pleaded. “Not yours.”
“I want it finished,” he said doggedly, as he crossed the barn and went
out at the other door.
“Don’t ’ee mind him, there’s a dear,” said Marian. “I’ve worked here
before. Now you go and lie down there, and Izz and I will make up your
number.”
“I don’t like to let you do that. I’m taller than you, too.”
However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie down awhile, and
reclined on a heap of pull-tails—the refuse after the straight straw
had been drawn—thrown up at the further side of the barn. Her
succumbing had been as largely owning to agitation at the re-opening
the subject of her separation from her husband as to the hard work. She
lay in a state of percipience without volition, and the rustle of the
straw and the cutting of the ears by the others had the weight of
bodily touches.
She could hear from her corner, in addition to these noises, the murmur
of their voices. She felt certain that they were continuing the subject
already broached, but their voices were so low that she could not catch
the words. At last Tess grew more and more anxious to know what they
were saying, and, persuading herself that she felt better, she got up
and resumed work.
Then Izz Huett broke down. She had walked more than a dozen miles the
previous evening, had gone to bed at midnight, and had risen again at
five o’clock. Marian alone, thanks to her bottle of liquor and her
stoutness of build, stood the strain upon back and arms without
suffering. Tess urged Izz to leave off, agreeing, as she felt better,
to finish the day without her, and make equal division of the number of
sheaves.
Izz accepted the offer gratefully, and disappeared through the great
door into the snowy track to her lodging. Marian, as was the case every
afternoon at this time on account of the bottle, began to feel in a
romantic vein.
“I should not have thought it of him—never!” she said in a dreamy tone.
“And I loved him so! I didn’t mind his having _you_. But this about Izz
is too bad!”
Tess, in her start at the words, narrowly missed cutting off a finger
with the bill-hook.
“Is it about my husband?” she stammered.
“Well, yes. Izz said, ‘Don’t ’ee tell her’; but I am sure I can’t help
it! It was what he wanted Izz to do. He wanted her to go off to Brazil
with him.”
Tess’s face faded as white as the scene without, and its curves
straightened. “And did Izz refuse to go?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Anyhow he changed his mind.”
“Pooh—then he didn’t mean it! ’Twas just a man’s jest!”
“Yes he did; for he drove her a good-ways towards the station.”
“He didn’t take her!”
They pulled on in silence till Tess, without any premonitory symptoms,
burst out crying.
“There!” said Marian. “Now I wish I hadn’t told ’ee!”
“No. It is a very good thing that you have done! I have been living on
in a thirtover, lackaday way, and have not seen what it may lead to! I
ought to have sent him a letter oftener. He said I could not go to him,
but he didn’t say I was not to write as often as I liked. I won’t dally
like this any longer! I have been very wrong and neglectful in leaving
everything to be done by him!”
The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and they could see to work no
longer. When Tess had reached home that evening, and had entered into
the privacy of her little white-washed chamber, she began impetuously
writing a letter to Clare. But falling into doubt, she could not finish
it. Afterwards she took the ring from the ribbon on which she wore it
next her heart, and retained it on her finger all night, as if to
fortify herself in the sensation that she was really the wife of this
elusive lover of hers, who could propose that Izz should go with him
abroad, so shortly after he had left her. Knowing that, how could she
write entreaties to him, or show that she cared for him any more?
XLIV
By the disclosure in the barn her thoughts were led anew in the
direction which they had taken more than once of late—to the distant
Emminster Vicarage. It was through her husband’s parents that she had
been charged to send a letter to Clare if she desired; and to write to
them direct if in difficulty. But that sense of her having morally no