Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
of the world, are again entangled therein and overcome’—whose latter
end is worse than their beginning?” He laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Tess, my girl, I was on the way to, at least, social salvation till I
saw you again!” he said freakishly shaking her, as if she were a child.
“And why then have you tempted me? I was firm as a man could be till I
saw those eyes and that mouth again—surely there never was such a
maddening mouth since Eve’s!” His voice sank, and a hot archness shot
from his own black eyes. “You temptress, Tess; you dear damned witch of
Babylon—I could not resist you as soon as I met you again!”
“I couldn’t help your seeing me again!” said Tess, recoiling.
“I know it—I repeat that I do not blame you. But the fact remains. When
I saw you ill-used on the farm that day I was nearly mad to think that
I had no legal right to protect you—that I could not have it; whilst he
who has it seems to neglect you utterly!”
“Don’t speak against him—he is absent!” she cried in much excitement.
“Treat him honourably—he has never wronged you! O leave his wife before
any scandal spreads that may do harm to his honest name!”
“I will—I will,” he said, like a man awakening from a luring dream. “I
have broken my engagement to preach to those poor drunken boobies at
the fair—it is the first time I have played such a practical joke. A
month ago I should have been horrified at such a possibility. I’ll go
away—to swear—and—ah, can I! to keep away.” Then, suddenly: “One clasp,
Tessy—one! Only for old friendship—”
“I am without defence. Alec! A good man’s honour is in my
keeping—think—be ashamed!”
“Pooh! Well, yes—yes!”
He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his weakness. His eyes
were equally barren of worldly and religious faith. The corpses of
those old fitful passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines of
his face ever since his reformation seemed to wake and come together as
in a resurrection. He went out indeterminately.
Though d’Urberville had declared that this breach of his engagement
to-day was the simple backsliding of a believer, Tess’s words, as
echoed from Angel Clare, had made a deep impression upon him, and
continued to do so after he had left her. He moved on in silence, as if
his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility that
his position was untenable. Reason had had nothing to do with his
whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere freak of a careless
man in search of a new sensation, and temporarily impressed by his
mother’s death.
The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm
served to chill its effervescence to stagnation. He said to himself, as
he pondered again and again over the crystallized phrases that she had
handed on to him, “That clever fellow little thought that, by telling
her those things, he might be paving my way back to her!”
XLVII
It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at Flintcomb-Ash farm. The
dawn of the March morning is singularly inexpressive, and there is
nothing to show where the eastern horizon lies. Against the twilight
rises the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly here
through the washing and bleaching of the wintry weather.
When Izz Huett and Tess arrived at the scene of operations only a
rustling denoted that others had preceded them; to which, as the light
increased, there were presently added the silhouettes of two men on the
summit. They were busily “unhaling” the rick, that is, stripping off
the thatch before beginning to throw down the sheaves; and while this
was in progress Izz and Tess, with the other women-workers, in their
whitey-brown pinners, stood waiting and shivering, Farmer Groby having
insisted upon their being on the spot thus early to get the job over if
possible by the end of the day. Close under the eaves of the stack, and
as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to
serve—a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels
appertaining—the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up
a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.
A little way off there was another indistinct figure; this one black,
with a sustained hiss that spoke of strength very much in reserve. The
long chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth which
radiated from the spot, explained without the necessity of much
daylight that here was the engine which was to act as the _primum
mobile_ of this little world. By the engine stood a dark, motionless
being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance,
with a heap of coals by his side: it was the engine-man. The isolation
of his manner and colour lent him the appearance of a creature from
Tophet, who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region
of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had nothing in common, to
amaze and to discompose its aborigines.
What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world, but not of
it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served
vegetation, weather, frost, and sun. He travelled with his engine from
farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam
threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex. He spoke in a
strange northern accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon
himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes
around him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly
necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom
compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his
Plutonic master. The long strap which ran from the driving-wheel of his
engine to the red thresher under the rick was the sole tie-line between
agriculture and him.
While they uncovered the sheaves he stood apathetic beside his portable
repository of force, round whose hot blackness the morning air
quivered. He had nothing to do with preparatory labour. His fire was
waiting incandescent, his steam was at high pressure, in a few seconds
he could make the long strap move at an invisible velocity. Beyond its
extent the environment might be corn, straw, or chaos; it was all the
same to him. If any of the autochthonous idlers asked him what he
called himself, he replied shortly, “an engineer.”
The rick was unhaled by full daylight; the men then took their places,
the women mounted, and the work began. Farmer Groby—or, as they called
him, “he”—had arrived ere this, and by his orders Tess was placed on
the platform of the machine, close to the man who fed it, her business
being to untie every sheaf of corn handed on to her by Izz Huett, who
stood next, but on the rick; so that the feeder could seize it and
spread it over the revolving drum, which whisked out every grain in one
moment.
They were soon in full progress, after a preparatory hitch or two,
which rejoiced the hearts of those who hated machinery. The work sped
on till breakfast time, when the thresher was stopped for half an hour;
and on starting again after the meal the whole supplementary strength
of the farm was thrown into the labour of constructing the straw-rick,
which began to grow beside the stack of corn. A hasty lunch was eaten
as they stood, without leaving their positions, and then another couple
of hours brought them near to dinner-time; the inexorable wheel
continuing to spin, and the penetrating hum of the thresher to thrill
to the very marrow all who were near the revolving wire-cage.
The old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past days when they
had been accustomed to thresh with flails on the oaken barn-floor; when
everything, even to winnowing, was effected by hand-labour, which, to
their thinking, though slow, produced better results. Those, too, on
the corn-rick talked a little; but the perspiring ones at the machine,
including Tess, could not lighten their duties by the exchange of many
words. It was the ceaselessness of the work which tried her so
severely, and began to make her wish that she had never come to
Flintcomb-Ash. The women on the corn-rick—Marian, who was one of them,
in particular—could stop to drink ale or cold tea from the flagon now
and then, or to exchange a few gossiping remarks while they wiped their
faces or cleared the fragments of straw and husk from their clothing;
but for Tess there was no respite; for, as the drum never stopped, the
man who fed it could not stop, and she, who had to supply the man with
untied sheaves, could not stop either, unless Marian changed places
with her, which she sometimes did for half an hour in spite of Groby’s
objections that she was too slow-handed for a feeder.
For some probably economical reason it was usually a woman who was
chosen for this particular duty, and Groby gave as his motive in
selecting Tess that she was one of those who best combined strength
with quickness in untying, and both with staying power, and this may
have been true. The hum of the thresher, which prevented speech,
increased to a raving whenever the supply of corn fell short of the
regular quantity. As Tess and the man who fed could never turn their
heads she did not know that just before the dinner-hour a person had
come silently into the field by the gate, and had been standing under a
second rick watching the scene and Tess in particular. He was dressed
in a tweed suit of fashionable pattern, and he twirled a gay
walking-cane.
“Who is that?” said Izz Huett to Marian. She had at first addressed the
inquiry to Tess, but the latter could not hear it.
“Somebody’s fancy-man, I s’pose,” said Marian laconically.
“I’ll lay a guinea he’s after Tess.”
“O no. ’Tis a ranter pa’son who’s been sniffing after her lately; not a
dandy like this.”
“Well—this is the same man.”
“The same man as the preacher? But he’s quite different!”
“He hev left off his black coat and white neckercher, and hev cut off
his whiskers; but he’s the same man for all that.”
“D’ye really think so? Then I’ll tell her,” said Marian.
“Don’t. She’ll see him soon enough, good-now.”
“Well, I don’t think it at all right for him to join his preaching to
courting a married woman, even though her husband mid be abroad, and
she, in a sense, a widow.”
“Oh—he can do her no harm,” said Izz drily. “Her mind can no more be
heaved from that one place where it do bide than a stooded waggon from
the hole he’s in. Lord love ’ee, neither court-paying, nor preaching,
nor the seven thunders themselves, can wean a woman when ’twould be
better for her that she should be weaned.”
Dinner-time came, and the whirling ceased; whereupon Tess left her
post, her knees trembling so wretchedly with the shaking of the machine
that she could scarcely walk.
“You ought to het a quart o’ drink into ’ee, as I’ve done,” said
Marian. “You wouldn’t look so white then. Why, souls above us, your
face is as if you’d been hagrode!”
It occurred to the good-natured Marian that, as Tess was so tired, her
discovery of her visitor’s presence might have the bad effect of taking
away her appetite; and Marian was thinking of inducing Tess to descend
by a ladder on the further side of the stack when the gentleman came
forward and looked up.
Tess uttered a short little “Oh!” And a moment after she said, quickly,
“I shall eat my dinner here—right on the rick.”
Sometimes, when they were so far from their cottages, they all did
this; but as there was rather a keen wind going to-day, Marian and the
rest descended, and sat under the straw-stack.
The newcomer was, indeed, Alec d’Urberville, the late Evangelist,
despite his changed attire and aspect. It was obvious at a glance that
the original _Weltlust_ had come back; that he had restored himself, as
nearly as a man could do who had grown three or four years older, to