Tess of the D’Urbervilles

This had gone on for a month or two when there came a Saturday in September, on which a fair and a market coincided; and the pilgrims from Trantridge sought double delights at the inns on that account. Tess’s occupations made her late in setting out, so that her comrades reached the town long before her. It was a fine September evening, just before sunset, when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines, and the atmosphere itself forms a prospect without aid from more solid objects, except the innumerable winged insects that dance in it. Through this low-lit mistiness Tess walked leisurely along.

She did not discover the coincidence of the market with the fair till she had reached the place, by which time it was close upon dusk. Her limited marketing was soon completed; and then as usual she began to look about for some of the Trantridge cottagers.

At first she could not find them, and she was informed that most of them had gone to what they called a private little jig at the house of a hay-trusser and peat-dealer who had transactions with their farm. He lived in an out-of-the-way nook of the townlet, and in trying to find her course thither her eyes fell upon Mr. d’Urberville standing at a street corner.

‘What—my Beauty? You here so late?’ he said.

She told him that she was simply waiting for company homeward.

‘I’ll see you again,’ said he over her shoulder as she went on down the back lane.

Approaching the hay-trussers she could hear the fiddled notes of a reel proceeding from some building in the rear; but no sound of dancing was audible—an exceptional state of things for these parts, where as a rule the stamping drowned the music. The front door being open she could see straight through the house into the garden at the back as far as the shades of night would allow; and nobody appearing to her knock she traversed the dwelling and went up the path to the outhouse whence the sound had attracted her.

It was a windowless erection used for storage, and from the open door there floated into the obscurity a mist of yellow radiance, which at first Tess thought to be illuminated smoke. But on drawing nearer she perceived that it was a cloud of dust, lit by candles within the outhouse, whose beams upon the haze carried forward the outline of the doorway into the wide night of the garden.

When she came close and looked in she beheld indistinct forms racing up and down to the figure of the dance, the silence of their footfalls arising from their being overshoe in ‘scroff’—that is to say, the powdery residuum from the storage of peat and other products, the stirring of which by their turbulent feet created the nebulosity that involved the scene. Through this floating, fusty debris of peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers, and forming together a sort of vegeto-human pollen, the muted fiddles feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the spirit with which the measure was trodden out. They coughed as they danced, and laughed as they coughed. Of the rushing couples there could barely be discerned more than the high lights—the indistinctness shaping them to satyrs clasping nymphs—a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity of Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing.

At intervals a couple would approach the doorway for air, and the haze no longer veiling their features, the demigods resolved themselves into the homely personalities of her own next-door neighbours. Could Trantridge in two or three short hours have metamorphosed itself thus madly!

Some Sileni of the throng sat on benches and hay-trusses by the wall; and one of them recognized her.

‘The maids don’t think it respectable to dance at “The Flower-de-Luce,”’ he explained. ‘They don’t like to let everybody see which be their fancy-men. Besides, the house sometimes shuts up just when their jints begin to get greased. So we come here and send out for liquor.’

‘But when be any of you going home?’ asked Tess with some anxiety.

‘Now—a’most directly. This is all but the last jig.’

She waited. The reel drew to a close, and some of the party were in the mind of starting. But others would not, and another dance was formed. This surely would end it, thought Tess. But it merged in yet another. She became restless and uneasy; yet, having waited so long, it was necessary to wait longer; on account of the fair the roads were dotted with roving characters of possibly ill intent; and, though not fearful of measurable dangers, she feared the unknown. Had she been near Marlott she would have had less dread.

‘Don’t ye be nervous, my dear good soul,’ expostulated, between his coughs, a young man with a wet face, and his straw hat so far back upon his head that the brim encircled it like the nimbus of a saint. ‘What’s yer hurry? Tomorrow is Sunday, thank God, and we can sleep it off in church-time. Now, have a turn with me?’

She did not abhor dancing, but she was not going to dance here. The movement grew more passionate: the fiddlers behind the luminous pillar of cloud now and then varied the air by playing on the wrong side of the bridge or with the back of the bow. But it did not matter; the panting shapes spun onwards.

They did not vary their partners if their inclination were to stick to previous ones. Changing partners simply meant that a satisfactory choice had not as yet been arrived at by one or other of the pair, and by this time every couple had been suitably matched. It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.

Suddenly there was a dull thump on the ground: a couple had fallen, and lay in a mixed heap. The next couple, unable to check its progress, came toppling over the obstacle. An inner cloud of dust rose around the prostrate figures amid the general one of the room, in which a twitching entanglement of arms and legs was discernible.

‘You shall catch it for this, my gentleman, when you get home!’ burst in female accents from the human heap—those of the unhappy partner of the man whose clumsiness had caused the mishap; she happened also to be his recently married wife, in which assortment there was nothing unusual at Trantridge as long as any affection remained between wedded couples; and, indeed, it was not uncustomary in their later lives, to avoid making odd lots of the single people between whom there might be a warm understanding.

A loud laugh from behind Tess’s back, in the shade of the garden, united with the titter within the room. She looked round, and saw the red coal of a cigar: Alec d’Urberville was standing there alone. He beckoned to her, and she reluctantly retreated towards him.

‘Well, my Beauty, what are you doing here?’

She was so tired after her long day and her walk that she confided her trouble to him—that she had been waiting ever since he saw her to have their company home, because the road at night was strange to her. ‘But it seems they will never leave off, and I really think I will wait no longer.’

‘Certainly do not. I have only a saddle-horse here to-day; but come to “The Flower-de-Luce,” and I’ll hire a trap, and drive you home with me.’

Tess, though flattered, had never quite got over her original mistrust of him, and, despite their tardiness, she preferred to walk home with the work-folk. So she answered that she was much obliged to him, but would not trouble him. ‘I have said that I will wait for ’em, and they will expect me to now.’

‘Very well, Miss Independence. Please yourself…Then I shall not hurry…My good Lord, what a kick-up they are having there!’

He had not put himself forward into the light, but some of them had perceived him, and his presence led to a slight pause and a consideration of how the time was flying. As soon as he had re-lit a cigar and walked away the Trantridge people began to collect themselves from amid those who had come in from other farms, and prepared to leave in a body. Their bundles and baskets were gathered up, and half an hour later, when the clock-chime sounded a quarter past eleven, they were straggling along the lane which led up the hill towards their homes.

It was a three-mile walk, along a dry white road, made whiter to-night by the light of the moon.

Tess soon perceived as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women also were wandering in their gait—to wit, a dark virago, Car Darch, dubbed Queen of Spades, till lately a favourite of d’Urberville’s; Nancy, her sister, nicknamed the Queen of Diamonds; and the young married woman who had already tumbled down. Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.

Tess, however, had undergone such painful experiences of this kind in her father’s house, that the discovery of their condition spoilt the pleasure she was beginning to feel in the moonlight journey. Yet she stuck to the party, for reasons above given.

In the open highway they had progressed in scattered order; but now their route was through a field-gate, and the foremost finding a difficulty in opening it they closed up together.

This leading pedestrian was Car the Queen of Spades, who carried a wicker-basket containing her mother’s groceries, her own draperies, and other purchases for the week. The basket being large and heavy, Car had placed it for convenience of porterage on the top of her head, where it rode on in jeopardized balance as she walked with arms akimbo.

‘Well—whatever is that a-creeping down thy back, Car Darch?’ said one of the group suddenly.

All looked at Car. Her gown was a light cotton print, and from the back of her head a kind of rope could be seen descending to some distance below her waist, like a Chinaman’s queue.

‘’Tis her hair falling down,’ said another.

No; it was not her hair: it was a black stream of something oozing from her basket, and it glistened like a slimy snake in the cold still rays of the moon.

‘’Tis treacle,’ said an observant matron.

Treacle it was. Car’s poor old grandmother had a weakness for the sweet stuff. Honey she had in plenty out of her own hives, but treacle was what her soul desired, and Car had been about to give her a treat of surprise. Hastily lowering the basket the dark girl found that the vessel containing the syrup had been smashed within.

By this time there had arisen a shout of laughter at the extraordinary appearance of Car’s back, which irritated the dark queen into getting rid of the disfigurement by the first sudden means available, and independently of the help of the scoffers. She rushed excitedly into the field they were about to cross, and flinging herself flat on her back upon the grass, began to wipe her gown as well as she could by spinning horizontally on the herbage and dragging herself over it upon her elbows.

The laughter rang louder; they clung to the gate, to the posts, rested on their staves, in the weakness engendered by their convulsions at the spectacle of Car. Our heroine, who had hitherto held her peace, at this wild moment could not help joining in with the rest.

It was a misfortune—in more ways than one. No sooner did the dark queen hear the soberer richer note of Tess among those of the other work-people than a long smouldering sense of rivalry inflamed her to madness. She sprang to her feet and closely faced the object of her dislike.

‘How darest th’ laugh at me, hussy!’ she cried.

‘I couldn’t really help it when t’others did,’ apologized Tess, still tittering.

‘Ah, th’st think th’ beest everybody, dostn’t, because th’ beest first favourite with He just now! But stop a bit, my lady, stop a bit! I’m as good as two of such! Look here—here’s at ’ee!’

To Tess’s horror the dark queen began stripping off the bodice of her gown—which for the added reason of its ridiculed condition she was only too glad to be free of—till she had bared her plump neck, shoulders, and arms to the moonshine, under which they looked as luminous and beautiful as some Praxitelean creation, in their possession of the faultless rotundities of a lusty country girl. She closed her fists and squared up at Tess.

‘Indeed, then, I shall not fight!’ said the latter majestically; ‘and if I had known you was of that sort, I wouldn’t have so let myself down as to come with such a whorage as this is!’

The rather too inclusive speech brought down a torrent of vituperation from other quarters upon fair Tess’s unlucky head, particularly from the Queen of Diamonds, who having stood in the relations to d’Urberville that Car had also been suspected of, united with the latter against the common enemy. Several other women also chimed in, with an animus which none of them would have been so fatuous as to show but for the rollicking evening they had passed. Thereupon, finding Tess unfairly browbeaten, the husbands and lovers tried to make peace by defending her; but the result of that attempt was directly to increase the war.

Tess was indignant and ashamed. She no longer minded the loneliness of the way and the lateness of the hour; her one object was to get away from the whole crew as soon as possible. She knew well enough that the better among them would repent of their passion next day. They were all now inside the field, and she was edging back to rush off alone when a horseman emerged almost silently from the corner of the hedge that screened the road, and Alec d’Urberville looked round upon them.

‘What the devil is all this row about, work-folk?’ he asked.

The explanation was not readily forthcoming; and, in truth, he did not require any. Having heard their voices while yet some way off he had ridden creepingly forward, and learnt enough to satisfy himself.

Tess was standing apart from the rest, near the gate. He bent over towards her. ‘Jump up behind me,’ he whispered, ‘and we’ll get shot of the screaming cats in a jiffy!’

She felt almost ready to faint, so vivid was her sense of the crisis. At almost any other moment of her life she would have refused such proffered aid and company, as she had refused them several times before; and now the loneliness would not of itself have forced her to do otherwise. But coming as the invitation did at the particular juncture when fear and indignation at these adversaries could be transformed by a spring of the foot into a triumph over them, she abandoned herself to her impulse, climbed the gate, put her toe upon his instep, and scrambled into the saddle behind him. The pair were speeding away into the distant gray by the time that the contentious revellers became aware of what had happened.

The Queen of Spades forgot the stain on her bodice, and stood beside the Queen of Diamonds and the new-married, staggering young woman—all with a gaze of fixity in the direction in which the horse’s tramp was diminishing into silence on the road.

‘What be ye looking at?’ asked a man who had not observed the incident.

‘Ho-ho-ho!’ laughed dark Car.

‘Hee-hee-hee!’ laughed the tippling bride, as she steadied herself on the arm of her fond husband.

‘Heu-heu-heu!’ laughed dark Car’s mother, stroking her moustache as she explained laconically: ‘Out of the frying-pan into the fire!’

Then these children of the open air, whom even excess of alcohol could scarce injure permanently, betook themselves to the field-path; and as they went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of each one’s head, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon’s rays upon the glistening sheet of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo but his or her own, which never deserted the head-shadow, whatever its vulgar unsteadiness might be; but adhered to it, and persistently beautified it; till the erratic motions seemed an inherent part of the irradiation, and the fumes of their breathing a component of the night’s mist; and the spirit of the scene, and of the moonlight, and of Nature, seemed harmoniously to mingle with the spirit of wine.

CHAPTER 11

The twain cantered along for some time without speech, Tess as she clung to him still panting in her triumph, yet in other respects dubious. She had perceived that the horse was not the spirited one he sometimes rode, and felt no alarm on that score, though her seat was precarious enough despite her tight hold of him. She begged him to slow the animal to a walk, which Alec accordingly did.

‘Neatly done, was it not, dear Tess?’ he said by and by.

‘Yes!’ said she. ‘I am sure I ought to be much obliged to you.’

‘And are you?’

She did not reply.

‘Tess, why do you always dislike my kissing you

‘I suppose—because I don’t love you.’

‘You are quite sure?’

‘I am angry with you sometimes!’

‘Ah, I half feared as much.’ Nevertheless, Alec did not object to that confession. He knew that anything was better than frigidity. ‘Why haven’t you told me when I have made you angry?’

‘You know very well why. Because I cannot help myself here.’

‘I haven’t offended you often by love-making?’

‘You have sometimes.’

‘How many times?’

‘You know as well as I—too many times.’

‘Every time I have tried?’

She was silent, and the horse ambled along for a considerable distance, till a faint luminous fog, which had hung in the hollows all the evening, became general and enveloped them. It seemed to hold the moonlight in suspension, rendering it more pervasive than in clear air. Whether on this account, or from absent-mindedness, or from sleepiness, she did not perceive that they had long ago passed the point at which the lane to Trantridge branched from the highway, and that her conductor had not taken the Trantridge track.

She was inexpressibly weary. She had risen at five o’clock every morning of that week, had been on foot the whole of each day, and on this evening had in addition walked the three miles to Chaseborough, waited three hours for her neighbours without eating or drinking, her impatience to start them preventing either; she had then walked a mile of the way home, and had undergone the excitement of the quarrel, till, with the slow progress of their steed, it was now nearly one o’clock. Only once, however, was she overcome by actual drowsiness. In that moment of oblivion her head sank gently against him.

D’Urberville stopped the horse, withdrew his feet from the stirrups, turned sideways on the saddle, and enclosed her waist with his arm to support her.

This immediately put her on the defensive, and with one of those sudden impulses of reprisal to which she was liable she gave him a little push from her. In his ticklish position he nearly lost his balance and only just avoided rolling over into the road, the horse, though a powerful one, being fortunately the quietest he rode.

‘That is devilish unkind!’ he said. ‘I mean no harm—only to keep you from falling.’

She pondered suspiciously; till, thinking that this might after all be true, she relented, and said quite humbly, ‘I beg your pardon, sir.’

‘I won’t pardon you unless you show some confidence in me. Good God!’ he burst out, ‘what am I, to be repulsed so by a mere chit like you? For near three mortal months have you trifled with my feelings, eluded me, and snubbed me; and I won’t stand it!’

‘I’ll leave you to-morrow, sir.’

‘No, you will not leave me to-morrow! Will you, I ask once more, show your belief in me by letting me clasp you with my arm? Come, between us two and nobody else, now. We know each other well; and you know that I love you, and think you the prettiest girl in the world, which you are. Mayn’t I treat you as a lover?’

She drew a quick pettish breath of objection, writhing uneasily on her seat, looked far ahead, and murmured, ‘I don’t know—I wish-how can I say yes or no when—’

He settled the matter by clasping his arm round her as he desired, and Tess expressed no further negative. Thus they sidled slowly onward till it struck her they had been advancing for an unconscionable time—far longer than was usually occupied by the short journey from Chase-borough, even at this walking pace, and that they were no longer on hard road, but in a mere trackway.

‘Why, where be we?’ she exclaimed.

‘Passing by a wood.’

‘A wood—what wood? Surely we are quite out of the road?’

‘A bit of The Chase—the oldest wood in England. It is a lovely night, and why should we not prolong our ride a little?’

‘How could you be so treacherous!’ said Tess, between archness and real dismay, and getting rid of his arm by pulling open his fingers one by one, though at the risk of slipping off herself. ‘Just when I’ve been putting such trust in you, and obliging you to please you, because I thought I had wronged you by that push! Please set me down, and let me walk home.’

‘You cannot walk home, darling, even if the air were clear. We are miles away from Trantridge, if I must tell you, and in this growing fog you might wander for hours among these trees.’

‘Never mind that,’ she coaxed. ‘Put me down, I beg you. I don’t mind where it is; only let me get down, sir, please!’

‘Very well, then, I will—on one condition. Having brought you here to this out-of-the-way place, I feel myself responsible for your safe-conduct home, whatever you may yourself feel about it. As to your getting to Trantridge without assistance, it is quite impossible; for, to tell the truth, dear, owing to this fog, which so disguises everything, I don’t quite know where we are myself. Now, if you will promise to wait beside the horse while I walk through the bushes till I come to some road or house, and ascertain exactly our whereabouts, I’ll deposit you here willingly. When I come back I’ll give you full directions, and if you insist upon walking you may; or you may ride—at your pleasure.’

She accepted these terms, and slid off on the near side, though not till he had stolen a cursory kiss. He sprang down on the other side.

‘I suppose I must hold the horse?’ said she.

‘Oh no; it’s not necessary,’ replied Alec, patting the panting creature. ‘He’s had enough of it for to-night.’

He turned the horse’s head into the bushes, hitched him on to a bough, and made a sort of couch or nest for her in the deep mass of dead leaves.

‘Now, you sit there,’ he said. ‘The leaves have not got damp as yet. Just give an eye to the horse—it will be quite sufficient.’

He took a few steps away from her, but, returning, said, ‘By the bye, Tess, your father has a new cob to-day. Somebody gave it to him.’

‘Somebody? You!’

D’Urberville nodded.

‘O how very good of you that is!’ she exclaimed, with a painful sense of the awkwardness of having to thank him just then.

‘And the children have some toys.’

‘I didn’t know—you ever sent them anything!’ she murmured, much moved. ‘I almost wish you had not—yes, I almost wish it!’

‘Why, dear?’

‘It—hampers me so.’

‘Tessy—don’t you love me ever so little now?’

‘I’m grateful,’ she reluctantly admitted. ‘But I fear I do not—’ The sudden vision of his passion for herself as a factor in this result so distressed her that, beginning with one slow tear, and then following with another, she wept outright.

‘Don’t cry, dear, dear one! Now sit down here, and wait till I come.’ She passively sat down amid the leaves he had heaped, and shivered slightly. ‘Are you cold?’ he asked.

‘Not very—a little.’

He touched her with his fingers, which sank into her as into down. ‘You have only that puffy muslin dress on—how’s that?’