Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman
soon, it was best to go now everybody was moving, because there are
better chances.”
“Where are you going to?”
“Kingsbere. We have taken rooms there. Mother is so foolish about
father’s people that she will go there.”
“But your mother’s family are not fit for lodgings, and in a little
hole of a town like that. Now why not come to my garden-house at
Trantridge? There are hardly any poultry now, since my mother’s death;
but there’s the house, as you know it, and the garden. It can be
whitewashed in a day, and your mother can live there quite comfortably;
and I will put the children to a good school. Really I ought to do
something for you!”
“But we have already taken the rooms at Kingsbere!” she declared. “And
we can wait there—”
“Wait—what for? For that nice husband, no doubt. Now look here, Tess, I
know what men are, and, bearing in mind the _grounds_ of your
separation, I am quite positive he will never make it up with you. Now,
though I have been your enemy, I am your friend, even if you won’t
believe it. Come to this cottage of mine. We’ll get up a regular colony
of fowls, and your mother can attend to them excellently; and the
children can go to school.”
Tess breathed more and more quickly, and at length she said—
“How do I know that you would do all this? Your views may change—and
then—we should be—my mother would be—homeless again.”
“O no—no. I would guarantee you against such as that in writing, if
necessary. Think it over.”
Tess shook her head. But d’Urberville persisted; she had seldom seen
him so determined; he would not take a negative.
“Please just tell your mother,” he said, in emphatic tones. “It is her
business to judge—not yours. I shall get the house swept out and
whitened to-morrow morning, and fires lit; and it will be dry by the
evening, so that you can come straight there. Now mind, I shall expect
you.”
Tess again shook her head, her throat swelling with complicated
emotion. She could not look up at d’Urberville.
“I owe you something for the past, you know,” he resumed. “And you
cured me, too, of that craze; so I am glad—”
“I would rather you had kept the craze, so that you had kept the
practice which went with it!”
“I am glad of this opportunity of repaying you a little. To-morrow I
shall expect to hear your mother’s goods unloading... Give me your hand
on it now—dear, beautiful Tess!”
With the last sentence he had dropped his voice to a murmur, and put
his hand in at the half-open casement. With stormy eyes she pulled the
stay-bar quickly, and, in doing so, caught his arm between the casement
and the stone mullion.
“Damnation—you are very cruel!” he said, snatching out his arm. “No,
no!—I know you didn’t do it on purpose. Well, I shall expect you, or
your mother and children at least.”
“I shall not come—I have plenty of money!” she cried.
“Where?”
“At my father-in-law’s, if I ask for it.”
“_If_ you ask for it. But you won’t, Tess; I know you; you’ll never ask
for it—you’ll starve first!”
With these words he rode off. Just at the corner of the street he met
the man with the paint-pot, who asked him if he had deserted the
brethren.
“You go to the devil!” said d’Urberville.
Tess remained where she was a long while, till a sudden rebellious
sense of injustice caused the region of her eyes to swell with the rush
of hot tears thither. Her husband, Angel Clare himself, had, like
others, dealt out hard measure to her; surely he had! She had never
before admitted such a thought; but he had surely! Never in her
life—she could swear it from the bottom of her soul—had she ever
intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgements had come. Whatever her
sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why
should she have been punished so persistently?
She passionately seized the first piece of paper that came to hand, and
scribbled the following lines:
O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not deserve
it. I have thought it all over carefully, and I can never, never
forgive you! You know that I did not intend to wrong you—why have
you so wronged me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to
forget you. It is all injustice I have received at your hands!
T.
She watched till the postman passed by, ran out to him with her
epistle, and then again took her listless place inside the
window-panes.
It was just as well to write like that as to write tenderly. How could
he give way to entreaty? The facts had not changed: there was no new
event to alter his opinion.
It grew darker, the fire-light shining over the room. The two biggest
of the younger children had gone out with their mother; the four
smallest, their ages ranging from three-and-a-half years to eleven, all
in black frocks, were gathered round the hearth babbling their own
little subjects. Tess at length joined them, without lighting a candle.
“This is the last night that we shall sleep here, dears, in the house
where we were born,” she said quickly. “We ought to think of it,
oughtn’t we?”
They all became silent; with the impressibility of their age they were
ready to burst into tears at the picture of finality she had conjured
up, though all the day hitherto they had been rejoicing in the idea of
a new place. Tess changed the subject.
“Sing to me, dears,” she said.
“What shall we sing?”
“Anything you know; I don’t mind.”
There was a momentary pause; it was broken, first, in one little
tentative note; then a second voice strengthened it, and a third and a
fourth chimed in unison, with words they had learnt at the
Sunday-school—
Here we suffer grief and pain,
Here we meet to part again;
In Heaven we part no more.
The four sang on with the phlegmatic passivity of persons who had long
ago settled the question, and there being no mistake about it, felt
that further thought was not required. With features strained hard to
enunciate the syllables they continued to regard the centre of the
flickering fire, the notes of the youngest straying over into the
pauses of the rest.
Tess turned from them, and went to the window again. Darkness had now
fallen without, but she put her face to the pane as though to peer into
the gloom. It was really to hide her tears. If she could only believe
what the children were singing; if she were only sure, how different
all would now be; how confidently she would leave them to Providence
and their future kingdom! But, in default of that, it behoved her to do
something; to be their Providence; for to Tess, as to not a few
millions of others, there was ghastly satire in the poet’s lines—
Not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.
To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal
compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to
justify, and at best could only palliate.
In the shades of the wet road she soon discerned her mother with tall
’Liza-Lu and Abraham. Mrs Durbeyfield’s pattens clicked up to the door,
and Tess opened it.
“I see the tracks of a horse outside the window,” said Joan. “Hev
somebody called?”
“No,” said Tess.
The children by the fire looked gravely at her, and one murmured—
“Why, Tess, the gentleman a-horseback!”
“He didn’t call,” said Tess. “He spoke to me in passing.”
“Who was the gentleman?” asked the mother. “Your husband?”
“No. He’ll never, never come,” answered Tess in stony hopelessness.
“Then who was it?”
“Oh, you needn’t ask. You’ve seen him before, and so have I.”
“Ah! What did he say?” said Joan curiously.
“I will tell you when we are settled in our lodging at Kingsbere
to-morrow—every word.”
It was not her husband, she had said. Yet a consciousness that in a
physical sense this man alone was her husband seemed to weigh on her
more and more.
LII
During the small hours of the next morning, while it was still dark,
dwellers near the highways were conscious of a disturbance of their
night’s rest by rumbling noises, intermittently continuing till
daylight—noises as certain to recur in this particular first week of
the month as the voice of the cuckoo in the third week of the same.
They were the preliminaries of the general removal, the passing of the
empty waggons and teams to fetch the goods of the migrating families;
for it was always by the vehicle of the farmer who required his
services that the hired man was conveyed to his destination. That this
might be accomplished within the day was the explanation of the
reverberation occurring so soon after midnight, the aim of the carters
being to reach the door of the outgoing households by six o’clock, when
the loading of their movables at once began.
But to Tess and her mother’s household no such anxious farmer sent his
team. They were only women; they were not regular labourers; they were
not particularly required anywhere; hence they had to hire a waggon at
their own expense, and got nothing sent gratuitously.
It was a relief to Tess, when she looked out of the window that
morning, to find that though the weather was windy and louring, it did
not rain, and that the waggon had come. A wet Lady-Day was a spectre
which removing families never forgot; damp furniture, damp bedding,
damp clothing accompanied it, and left a train of ills.
Her mother, ’Liza-Lu, and Abraham were also awake, but the younger
children were let sleep on. The four breakfasted by the thin light, and
the “house-ridding” was taken in hand.
It proceeded with some cheerfulness, a friendly neighbour or two
assisting. When the large articles of furniture had been packed in
position, a circular nest was made of the beds and bedding, in which
Joan Durbeyfield and the young children were to sit through the
journey. After loading there was a long delay before the horses were
brought, these having been unharnessed during the ridding; but at
length, about two o’clock, the whole was under way, the cooking-pot
swinging from the axle of the waggon, Mrs Durbeyfield and family at the
top, the matron having in her lap, to prevent injury to its works, the
head of the clock, which, at any exceptional lurch of the waggon,
struck one, or one-and-a-half, in hurt tones. Tess and the next eldest
girl walked alongside till they were out of the village.
They had called on a few neighbours that morning and the previous
evening, and some came to see them off, all wishing them well, though,
in their secret hearts, hardly expecting welfare possible to such a
family, harmless as the Durbeyfields were to all except themselves.
Soon the equipage began to ascend to higher ground, and the wind grew
keener with the change of level and soil.
The day being the sixth of April, the Durbeyfield waggon met many other
waggons with families on the summit of the load, which was built on a
wellnigh unvarying principle, as peculiar, probably, to the rural
labourer as the hexagon to the bee. The groundwork of the arrangement
was the family dresser, which, with its shining handles, and
finger-marks, and domestic evidences thick upon it, stood importantly
in front, over the tails of the shaft-horses, in its erect and natural
position, like some Ark of the Covenant that they were bound to carry
reverently.
Some of the households were lively, some mournful; some were stopping
at the doors of wayside inns; where, in due time, the Durbeyfield
menagerie also drew up to bait horses and refresh the travellers.
During the halt Tess’s eyes fell upon a three-pint blue mug, which was
ascending and descending through the air to and from the feminine
section of a household, sitting on the summit of a load that had also
drawn up at a little distance from the same inn. She followed one of
the mug’s journeys upward, and perceived it to be clasped by hands