 CHAPTER XIV It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours, attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces within hollows and covets, where they waited till they should be dried away to nothing. The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. This present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene, explained the old-time heliolateries in a moment. One could feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, god-like creature, gazing down in the vigor and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with an interest for him. His light, a little later, broke through chinks of cottage shutters, throwing stripes like red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of drawers and other furniture within, and awakening harvesters who were not already a stir. But of all ruddy things that morning, the brightest were two broad arms of painted wood which rose from the margin of a yellow cornfield hard by Marlott Village. They, with two others below, formed the revolving, mortise cross of the reaping machine which had been brought to the field on the previous evening to be ready for operations this day. The paint with which they were smeared, intensified in hue by the sunlight, imparted to them a look of having been dipped in liquid fire. The field had already been opened. That is to say, a lane a few feet wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole circumference of the field for the first passage of the horses and machine. Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down the eastern lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top struck the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were enjoying sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn. They disappeared from the lane between the two stone posts which flanked the nearest field-gate. Presently there arose from within a ticking like the love-making of the grass-hopper. The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation of three horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible over the gate, a driver sitting upon one of the hauling horses and an attendant on the seats of the implement. Along one side of the field the whole wane went, the arms of the mechanical reaper revolving slowly till it passed down the hill quite out of sight. In a minute it came up on the other side of the field at the same equable pace. The glistening brass star in the forehead of the four horse first catching the eye as it rose into view over the stubble, then the bright arms, and then the whole machine. The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with each circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to small area as the morning wore on. Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness they were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unearing reaper, and they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the harvesters. The reaping machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps, each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf, and upon these the active binders in the rear laid their hands, mainly women, but some of them men in print shirts and trousers supported round their wastes by leather straps, rendering useless the two buttons behind which twinkled and bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each wearer as if they were a pair of eyes in the small of his back. But those of the other sex were the most interesting of this company of binder by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object set down therein as in ordinary times. A field man is a personality of field, a field woman is a portion of the field. She has somehow lost her own margin imbibed the essence of her surrounding and assimilated herself with it. The women, or rather girls, for they were mostly young, wore drawn cotton bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun and gloves to prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble. There was one wearing a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured tight-sleeved gown, another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the reaping machine, and others older in the brown rough ropper all over, the old established a most appropriate dress of the field woman which the young ones were abandoning. This morning the ire returns involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she being the most flexuous and finely drawn figure of them all. But her bonnet is pulled so far over her brow that none of her face is disclosed while she binds, though her complexion may be guessed from a stray twine or two of dark brown hair which extends below the curtain of her bonnet. Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual attention is that she never courts it, though the other women often gaze around them. Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the sheaf last finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her left palm to bring them even. Then, stooping low, she moves forwards, gathering the corn with both hands against her knees and pushing her left-gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other side, holding the corn in an embrace, like that of a lover. She brings the ends of the bond together and kneels on the sheaf while she ties it, beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the breeze. A bit of her naked arm is visible between the buff leather of the gauntlet and the sleeve of her gown, and as the day wears on its feminine smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds. At interval she stands up to rest and to retire her disarranged apron, or to pull her bonnet straight. Then one can see the oval face of a handsome young woman with deep, dark eyes and long, heavy, clinging tresses, which seems to clasp in a beseeching way anything they fall against. The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular, the red lips thinner than is usual in a country bread girl. It is Tess Durberfield, otherwise Durberville, somewhat changed. The same, but not the same. At the present stage of her existence living as a stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that she was in. After a long seclusion she had come to a resolve to undertake outdoor work in her native village, the busiest season of the year in the agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that she could do within the house being so remunerative for the time as harvesting in the fields. The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess's, the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille at the completion of a sheaf by H. Everyone placing her sheaf on end against those of the rest till a shock or stitch, as it was here called, of ten or a dozen was formed. They went to breakfast and came again, and the work proceeded as before. As the hour of eleven drew near a person watching her might have noticed that every now and then Tess's glance flitted wistfully to the brow of the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing. On the verge of the hour the heads of a group of children of ages ranging from six to fourteen rose above the stubbly convexity of the hill. The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not pause. The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its corner draggling on the stubble, carried in her arms what at first sight seemed to be a doll, but proved to be an infant in long clothes. Another brought some lunch. The harvesters ceased working, took their provisions, and sat down against one of the shocks. Here they fell to, the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a cup. Tess Durbefield had been one of the last to suspend her labours. She sat down at the end of the shock. Her face turned somewhat away from her companions. When she had deposited herself, a man in a rabbit-skin cap, and with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt, held the cup of ale over the top of the shock for her to drink, but she did not accept his offer. As soon as her lunch was spread she called up the big girl, her sister, and took the baby of her, who, glad to be relieved of the burden, went away to the next shock and joined the other children playing there. Tess, with a curiously stealthy yet courageous movement, and with a still rising colour, unfarced her frock, and began suckling the child. The men who sat nearest considerably turned their faces towards the other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke, one with absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no longer yield a stream. All the women but Tess fell into animated talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair. When the infant had taken its fill the young mother sat it upright in her lap, and looking into the far distance dandled it with a gloomy indifference that was almost dislike. Then all of a sudden she fell to violently kissing it some dozens of times as if she could never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which strangely combined passionateness with contempt. She's funded that there, child, though she mid-pretend to hate him, and say she wishes the baby and her two were in the church yard, observed the woman in the red petticoat. She'll soon leave off saying that, replied the one in Bath. Lord, it is wonderful what a body can get used to at that certain time. A little more than persuading had to do with a coming-on, I reckon. There were they that had heard a sobbing one night last during the chase, and it mid-a gone hard with a certain party if folks had come along. Well, a little more or a little less, towards a thousand pitties that should have happened to she of all others, but is always the comliest, the plain ones be as safe as church is, eh, Jenny? The speaker had turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined as plain. It was a thousand pitties indeed. It was impossible for even an enemy to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there with her flower-like mouth and large, tender eyes, neither black, nor blue, nor grey, nor violet, rather all those shades together, and a hundred others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises, shade behind shade, tint beyond tint, around pupils that had no bottom, an almost standard woman, but for the slight unconsciousness of character inherited from her race. A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the fields this week for the first time during many months, after wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illumined her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again, to taste a new sweet independence at any price. The past was past. Whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over them. They would all, in a few years, be as if they had never been, and she herself grasped down and forgotten. Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before. The birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain. She might have seen that that what had bowed her head so profoundly, the thought of the world's concern at her situation, was founded on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides, Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends, she was no more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable the live-long nights and day, it was only this much to them. Ah, she makes herself unhappy. If she tried to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers, the baby, she could only be this idea to them. Ah, she bears it very well. Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to her? Not greatly. If she could have been but just created to discover herself as a spouseless mother with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless child, would the position have caused her to despair? No. She would have taken it calmly and found pleasures therein. Most of the miseries have been generated by her conventional aspect and not by her innate sensations. Whatever Tess's reasoning some spirit had induced her to dress herself up neatly as she had formally done and come out into the fields, harvest hands being greatly in demand just then. This was why she had borne herself with dignity and had looked people calmly in the face at times, even when holding the baby in her arms. The harvest men rose from the shock of corn and stretched their limbs and extinguished their pipes. The horses, which had been unharnessed and fed, were again attached to the scarlet machine. Tess, having quickly eaten her own meal, beckoned to her eldest sister to come and take away the baby, fastened her dress, put on the buff gloves again, and stooped anew to draw a bond from the last completed sheaf for the tying of the next. In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters. Then they all rode home in one of the largest wagons, in the company of a broad tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the eastwards, its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten tusk and saint. Tess's female companions sang songs, and showed themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out of doors, though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing in a few verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry Greenwood and came back in a changed state. There are counter-poises and compensations in life, and the event which had made of her a social warning had also for the moment made her the most interesting personage in the village to many. Their friendliness won her still further away from herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and she became almost gay. But now that her moral sorrows were passing away, a fresh one arose on the natural side of her which knew no social law. When she reached home it was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly taken ill since the afternoon. Some such collapse had been probable, so tender and puny was its frame, but the event came as a shock, nevertheless. The baby's offence against society in coming into the world was forgotten by the girl-mother. Her soul's desire was to continue that offence by preserving the life of the child. However, it soon grew clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgivings had conjectured. And when she had discovered this, she was plunged into a misery which transcended that of the child's simple loss. Her baby had not been baptized. Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done, burn she must, and there was an end to it. Like all village girls she was well grounded in the holy scriptures, and had dutifully studied the histories of a hola and a holibar, and knew the inferences to be drawn therefrom. But when the same question arose with regard to the baby, it had a very different colour. Her darling was about to die, and no salvation. It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she might send for the parson. The moment happened to be one at which her father's sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest, and his sensitivities to the smudge which Tess had set upon that nobility most pronounced, for he had just returned from his weekly booze at Rollover's Inn. No parson should come inside his door, he declared, prying into his affairs just then when, by her shame, it had become more necessary than ever to hide them. He locked the door, and put the key in his pocket. The household went to bed, and distressed beyond measure, Tess retired also. She was continually waking as she lay, and in the middle of the night found that the baby was still worse. It was obviously dying, quietly, and painlessly. But the baby had none the less surely. In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed. The clock struck the solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason and malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts. She thought of the child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell as its double doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy. So the arch-figure seemed tossing it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for heating the oven on baking-days, to which picture she added many other quaint and curious details of torment sometimes taught to the young in this Christian country. The lurid presentiment so powerfully affected her imagination in the silence of the sleeping house that her nightgown became damp with perspiration and the bedstead shook with each throb of her heart. The infant's breathing grew more difficult, and the mother's mental tension increased. It was useless to devour the little thing with kisses. She could stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about the room. Oh merciful God, have pity! Have pity upon my poor baby! she cried. Heep as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome, but pity the child! She lent against the chest to draws, and murmured incoherent supplications for a long while, till she suddenly started up. Ah, perhaps baby can be saved! Perhaps it will be just the same. She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have shone in the gloom surrounding her. She lit a candle, and went to a second and a third bed under the wall, where she awoke her young sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied the same room. Pulling out the washing-stand so that she could get behind it, she poured some water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting their hands together with fingers exactly vertical. While the children scarcely awoke, or stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger and larger, remained in this position, she took the baby from her bed—a child's child—so immature and scarce to seem a sufficient personality to endow its producer with the maternal title. Tess then stood erect with the infant on her arm beside the basin. The next sister held the prayer-book open before her, as the Clarkett Church held it before the parson, and thus the girl set about baptising her child. Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her long white night-gown, a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging straight down her back to her waist. The kindly dimness of the weak candle abstracted from her form and features the little blemishes which sunlight might have revealed, the stubble scratches upon her wrists, and the weariness of her eyes, her high enthusiasm having a transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her undoing, showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity which was almost regal. The little ones kneeling round, their sleepy eyes blinking and red, awaited her preparations full of a suspended wonder which their physical heaviness at that hour would not allow to become active. The most impressed of them said, "'Are you really going to christen him, Tess?' the girl mother replied in a grave affirmative. What's his name going to be?' She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a phrase in the book of Genesis came into her head as she proceeded with the baptismal service, and now she pronounced it. "'Sorrow, I baptise thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.' She sprinkled the water, and there was silence. And say, "'Amen, children!' The tiny voices piped in obedient response. "'Amen!' Tess went on. We received this child, and so forth, and do sewing him with the sewing of the cross. Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently drew an immense cross upon the baby with her forefinger, continuing with the customary sentences as to his manfully fighting against sin, the world and the devil, and being a faithful soldier and servant until his life's end. She duly went on with the Lord's prayer, and the children lisping it after her in a thin, nath-like wail, till, at the conclusion, raising their voices to Clark's pitch, they again piped into the silence. "'Amen!' Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy of the sacrament, poured forth from the bottom of her heart, the thanksgiving that follows, uttering it boldly and triumphantly, in the stopped diapason note which her voice acquired when her heart was in her speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her. The ecstasy of faith almost apotheosised her. It set upon her face a glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each cheek, while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils shone like a diamond. The children gazed up at her with more and more reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning. She did not look like sissy to them now, but as a large, towering and awful, a divine personage with whom they had nothing in common. Poor sorrow's campaign against sin, the world and the devil, was doomed to be of limited brilliancy, luckily perhaps for himself considering his beginnings. In the blue of the morning that fragile soldier and servant breathed his last, and when the other children awoke, they cried bitterly, and begged sissy to have another pretty baby. The calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained with her in the infant's loss. In the daylight, she felt her terrors about his soul to have been somewhat exaggerated. Whether well-founded or not, she had no uneasiness now, reasoning that if providence would not ratify such an act of approximation, she, for one, did not value the kind of heaven lost by the irregularity, either for self or for her child. So passed away sorrow the undesired, that inobtrusive creature, that bastard gift of shameless nature who respects not the social law, a waft to whom eternal time had been a matter of days merely, who knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were, to whom the cottage interior was the universe, the weak's weather, climate, newborn babyhood, human existence, and the instinct to suck, human knowledge. Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal, wondered if it were doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child. Nobody could tell this but the parson of the parish, and he was a newcomer, and did not know her. She went to his house after dusk, and stood by the gate, but could not summon courage to go in. The enterprise would have been abandoned if she had not by accident met him coming homeward, as she turned away. In the gloom she did not mind speaking freely. I should like to ask you something, sir. He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the story of the baby's illness, and the exemplarized ordinance. And now, sir, she added earnestly, can you tell me this? Will it be just the same for him as if you had baptised him? Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he should have been called in for had been unskillfully botched by his customers among themselves, he was disposed to say no. Yet the dignity of the girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined to affect his nobler impulses, or rather those that he had left in him after ten years of endeavour to graft technical belief on actual scepticism. The man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory fell to the man. My dear girl, he said, it will be just the same. Then you will give him a Christian burial? She asked quickly. The vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby's illness, he had conscientiously gone to the house after nightfall to perform the rite, and unaware that the refusal to admit him had come from Tess's father and not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity for its irregular administration. Ah, that's another matter, he said. Another matter? Why? asked Tess rather warmly. Well, I would willingly do so if only we too were concerned, but I must not for certain reasons. It's for once, sir. Really, I must not. Oh, sir! she seized his hand as she spoke. He withdrew it, shaking his head. Then I don't like you, she burst out, and I'll never come to your church no more. Don't talk so rashly. Will it be just the same? Don't, for God's sake, speak as saint to him, but as you yourself, to me, myself, pour me. How the vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he supposed himself to hold on the subject is beyond the layman's power to tell, though not to excuse. Somewhat moved, he said, in this case also, it will be just the same. So the baby was carried in a small deal-box under an ancient woman's shawl to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God's allotment, where he let the nettles grow, and where all unbaptised infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned were laid. In spite of the untoward surroundings, however, Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when she could enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them alive. What matter was it, that on the outside of the jar the Eye of Mere Observation noted the words Keelewell's Marmalade. The Eye of Maternal Affection did not see them in its vision of higher things. CHAPTER XV By experience, says Roger Ansham, we find out a short way by a long wandering. Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then. Tess Derbyfield's experience was of this incapacitating kind. At last she had learned what to do, but who would now accept her doing? If before going to the Derbyfields she had vigorously moved under the guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to the world in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on. But it had not been in Tess's power, nor is it in anybody's power, to feel the whole truth of golden opinions while it is possible to profit from them. Me and how many more might have ironically said to God with St. Augustine, Thou hast counseled a better course than thou hast permitted. She remained in her father's house during the winter months, plucking fowls or cramming turkeys and geese, or making clothes for her sisters and brothers out of some finery which Derbyfield had given her, and she had put by with contempt. Prior to him she would not, but she would often clasp her hands behind her head and muse when she was supposed to be working hard. She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the Revolution of the Year, the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with its dark background of the chase, also the dates of the baby's birth and death, also her own birthday and every other day individualized by events in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date of greater importance to her than these, that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared, a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it, but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor's thought that some time in the future those who had known her would say, it is the day that poor Tess Durbefield died, and there would be nothing singular in their minds in the sentiment, of that day doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages she did not know the place in month, week, season or year. Just at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman. Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face and a note of tragedy at times into her voice. Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent. She became what would have been called a fine creature. Her aspect was fair and arresting, her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent experiences of the last year or two had quite failed to demoralise, but for the world's opinion those experiences would have been simply a liberal education. She had held so aloof of late that her trouble, never generally known, was nearly forgotten in Marlott, but it became evident to her that she could never be really comfortable again in a place which had seen the collapse of her family's attempt to claim kin and through her even closer union with the rich Durbervilles. At least she could not be comfortable there till long years should have obliterated her keen consciousness of it. Yet even now Tess felt the pulse of hopeful life still warm within her. She might be happy in some nook which had no memories. She escaped the past and all that appertained there too was to annihilate it, and to do that she would have to get away. Was once lost, always lost, really true of Chastity, she would ask herself. She might prove it false if she could veil bygones. The recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not denied to Maidenhood alone. She waited a long time without finding opportunity for a new departure. A particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of germination was almost audible in the buds. It moved her as it moved the wild animals, and made her passionate to go. At last, one day in early May, a letter reached her from a former friend of her mother's to whom she had addressed inquiries long before, a person whom she had never seen, that a skillful milkmaid was required at a dairy-house many miles to the southward, and that the dairyman would be glad to have her for the summer months. It was not quite so far off as could have been wished, but it was probably far enough, her radius of movement and repute having been so small. To persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical degrees, parishes are counties, counties as provinces or kingdoms. On one point she was resolved. There should be no more Durberville air castles in the dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be the dairymaid Tess, and nothing more. Her mother knew Tess's feeling on this point so well, though no words had passed between them on the subject, that she never alluded to the nightly ancestry now. Yet such is human inconsistency, that one of the interests of the new place to her was the accidental virtue of it lying near her forefather's country, for they were not Blakemore men, though her mother was Blakemore to the bone. The dairy-called Talbotays, for which she was bound, stood not remotely from one of the former estates of the Durbervilles, near the great family vaults of her grand-dams and their powerful husbands. She would be able to look at them, and think not only that Durberville, like Babylon, had fallen, but that the individual innocence of a humble descendant could lapse as silently. All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land, and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpended youth surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope and the invincible instinct towards self-delight. CHAPTER XV FACE THE THIRD THE RALLY CHAPTER XVI On a time-centred, bird-hatching morning in May, between two and three years after the return from Trantridge, silent, reconstructive years for Tess Durbefield, she left her home for the second time. Having packed up her luggage so that it could be sent to her later, she started in a hired trap for the little town of Stour Castle, through which it was necessary to pass on her journey, now in a direction almost opposite to that of her first adventuring. On the curve of the nearest hill she looked back regretfully at Marlott and her father's house, although she had been so anxious to get away. Her kindred dwelling there would probably continue their daily lives as here to fore, with no great diminution of pleasure in their consciousness, although she would be far off and they deprived of her smile. In a few days the children would engage in their games as merrily as ever without the sense of any gap left by her departure. This leaving of the younger children she had decided to be for the best. Were she to remain, they would probably gain less good by her precepts than harm by her example. She went through Stour Castle without pausing, and onward to a junction of highways where she could await a carrier's van that ran to the south-west, for the railways which engirdled this interior tract of country had never yet struck across it. While waiting, however, they came along a farmer in his spring cart, driving approximately in the direction that she wished to pursue. Although he was a stranger to her, she accepted his offer of a seat beside him, ignoring that its motive was a mere tribute to her countenance. He was going to Weatherbury, and accompanying him thither she could walk the remainder of the distance instead of travelling in the van by way of Casterbridge. Tess did not stop at Weatherbury after this long drive further than to make a slight nondescript meal at noon at a cottage to which the farmer recommended her. Then she started on foot, basket in hand, to reach the wide upland of Heath, dividing this district from the low-lying meads of a further valley in which the dairy stood that was the aim and end of her day's pilgrimage. Tess had never before visited this part of the country, and yet she felt akin to the landscape. Not so very far to the left of her she could discern a dark patch in the scenery, which inquiry confirmed her in supposing to be trees marking the environments of Kingsbeer in the church of which perished the bones of her ancestors, her useless ancestors, lay entombed. She had no admiration for them now. She almost hated them for the dance they had led her. Not a thing at all that had been theirs did she retain but the old seal and spoon. Poo! I have as much of mother as father in me," she said, all my prettiness comes from her, and she was only a dairymaid. The journey over the intervening uplands and lowlands of Egden, when she reached them, was a more troublesome walk than she had anticipated, the distance being actually but a few miles. It was two hours, owing to sundry wrong turnings, ere she found herself on a summit commanding the long sought-for vale, the valley of the great dairies, the valley in which milk and butter grew to rankness, and were produced more profusely, if less delicately, than at her home, the verdant plain so well watered by the river Vaar, or Froome. It was intrinsically different from the Vale of Little Dairies, Blackmore Vale, which, saved during her disastrous sojourn at Trantridge, she had exclusively known till now. The world was drawn to a larger pattern here, the enclosures numbered fifty acres instead of ten, the farmsteads were more extended, the groups of cattle formed tribes here about, their only families. His myriad of cows, stretching under her eyes from the far east to the far west, outnumbered any she had ever seen at one glance before. The green lee was speckled as thickly with them as a canvas by Van Olsloot, or salart, with burgers. The ripe hue of the red and dun kind absorbed the evening sunlight, which the white-coated animals returned to the eye in rays almost dazzling, even at the distant elevation on which she stood. The bird's-eye perspective before her was not so luxuriously beautiful, perhaps, as that other one which she knew so well, yet it was more cheering. It lacked the intensively blue atmosphere of the rival Vale, and its heavy soils and scents. The new air was clear, bracing, ethereal. The river itself, which nourished the grass and cows of these renowned dairies, flowed not like the streams in Blackmore. Those were slow, silent, often turbid, flowing over beds of mud into which the unconscious waiter might sink and vanish unawares. The frume-waters were clear as the pure river of life, shown to the evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day long. There the water-flower was the lily, the crow-foot here. Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to light, or the sense of being amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes upon her, sent up her spirits wonderfully. Her hopes mingled with the sunshine in an ideal proto-sphere which surrounded her as she bounded along against the soft south wind. She heard a pleasant voice in every breeze, and in every bird's note seemed to lurk a joy. Her face had latterly changed with changing states of mind, continually fluctuating between beauty and ordinariness, according as the thoughts were gay or grave. One day she was pink and flawless, another pale and tragical. When she was pink she was feeling less than when pale, her more perfect beauty accorded with her less elevated mood, her more intense mood with her less perfect beauty. It was her best-faced physically that was now set against the south wind. The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet pleasure somewhere which pervades all life from the meanest to the highest had at length mastered Tess. Being even now only a young woman of twenty, who mentally and sentimentally had not finished growing, it was impossible that any event should have left upon her an impression that was not in time capable of transmutation, and thus her spirit and her thankfulness and her hopes rose higher and higher. She tried several ballads, but found them inadequate, till recollecting the solter that her eyes had so often wandered over over a Sunday morning before she had eaten of the tree of knowledge she chanted, O ye sun and moon, O ye stars, ye green things upon the earth, ye fowls of the air, beasts and cattle, children of men, bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him for ever. She suddenly stopped and murmured, Perhaps I don't quite know the Lord as yet. And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a fetishistic utterance in a monotheistic setting. Women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor nature retain in their souls far more of the pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematised religion taught their race at later date. However, Tess found at least approximate expression for her feelings in the old benedicte that she had list from infancy, and it was enough. Such high contentment with such a slight initial performance as that of having started towards a means of independent living was a part of the Derby Field temperament. Tess really wished to walk uprightly while her father did nothing of the kind, but she resembled him in being content with immediate and small achievements, and in having no mind for laborious effort towards such petty social advancement as could alone be affected by a family so heavily handicapped as the once powerful Derbevilles were now. There was, it might be said, the energy of her mother's unexpended family, as well as the natural energy of Tess's years rekindled after the experience which had so overwhelmed her for the time. Let the truth be told, women do, as a rule, live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life, there's hope, is a conviction not so entirely unknown to the betrayed as some amiable theorists would have us believe. Tess Derbefield then, in good heart and full of zest for life, descended the egged in slopes lower and lower toward the dairy of her pilgrimage. The marked difference in the final particular between the rival veils now showed itself. The secret of Blackmore was best discovered from the heights around. To read a rite the valley before her it was necessary to descend into its midst. When Tess had accomplished this feat she found herself to be standing on a carpeted level which stretched to the east and west as far as the eye could reach. The river had stolen from the higher tracts and brought in particles to the veil all this horizontal land, and now exhausted, aged and attenuated lay serpentining along through the midst of its former spoils. Not quite sure of her direction Tess stood still upon the hemmed expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings than that fly. The sole effect of her presence upon the placid valley so far had been to excite the mind of a solitary heron which, after descending to the ground and not far from her path, stood with neck erect, looking at her. Finally there arose from all parts of the lowland a prolonged and repeated call. From the furthest east to the furthest west the cries spread as if by contagion, accompanied in some cases by the barking of a dog. It was not the expression of the valley's consciousness that beautiful Tess had arrived, but the ordinary announcement of milking-time, half-past four o'clock, when the dairymen sat about gathering in the cows. The red-and-white herd nearest at hand, which had been flagmatically waiting for the call, now trooped towards the steading in the background, their great bags of milk swinging under them as they walked. Tess followed slowly in their rear, and entered the barton by the open gate through which they had entered before her. Long-fatched sheds stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted with livid green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts, rubbed to a glossy smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows and calves of bygone years, now passed to an oblivion almost inconceivable in its profundity. Between the posts were ranged the milchers, each exhibiting herself at the present moment to a whimsical eye in the rear as a circle on two stalks, down the centre of which a switch moved pendulum-wise, while the sun, lowering itself behind this patient row, threw their shadows accurately inward toward the wall. Thus it threw shadows of these obscure and homely figures every evening, with as much care over each contour, as if it had been the profile of a caught beauty on a palace wall. It copied them as diligently as if it had copied Olympian shapes on marble facades long ago, or the outline of Alexander, Caesar, and the pharaohs. They were the less restful cows that were stalled, those that would stand still of their own will were milked in the middle of the yard, while many of such better-behaved ones stood waiting now. All prime milchers, such as were seldom seen out of this valley, and not always within it, nourished by the succulent feed which the water-meads supplied at this prime season of the year. Those of them that were spotted with white reflected the sunshine in dazzling brilliancy, and the polished brass knobs on their horns glittered with something of military display. Their large veined udders hung ponderous as sand-vags, the teets sticking out like the legs of a gypsy's crock, and as each animal lingered for her turn to arrive, the milk oozed forth, and fell in drops to the ground. CHAPTER XVII. This is a LibriVox recording, or LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. CHAPTER XVII. The dairy-maids and men had flocked down from their cottages and out of the dairy-house with the arrival of the cows from the meads. The maids walking in patterns, not on account of the weather, but to keep their shoes above the mulch of the Barton. Each girl sat down on her three-legged stool, her face sideways, her right cheek resting against the cow, and looked musingly along the animal's flank at tess as she approached. The male milkers, with hat-brims turned down, resting flat on their foreheads and gazing on the ground, did not observe her. One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man, whose long white pinner was somewhat finer and cleaner than the wraps of the others, and whose jacket underneath had a presentable marketing aspect. The master dairy-man of whom she was in quest, his double character as a working milker and butter-maker here during six days, and on the seventh as a man in shining broad cloth in his family-puret church, being so marked as to have inspired a rhyme. Dairy-man dick all the week. On Sundays Mr. Richard Crick. Seeing Tess standing at gaze, he went across to her. The majority of dairy-men have a cross-mannered milking-time, but it happened that Mr. Crick was glad to get a new hand, for the days were busy ones now, and he received her warmly, inquiring for her mother and the rest of the family, though this, as a matter of form merely, for in reality he had not been aware of Mrs. Derbefield's existence, till appraised of the fact by a brief business-letter about Tess. "'Oh, I, as a lad, I know you're a part of the country very well,' he said terminatively, though I've never been there since. And an aged woman of ninety that used to live nigh here, but is dead and long gone, told me that a family of some such name as yours in Blackmore Vale came originally from these parts, and that were an old ancient race that had all but perished off the earth, though the new generations didn't know it. But Lord, I took no notice of the old woman's ramblings, not I.' "'Oh, no, it is nothing,' said Tess. Then the talk was of business only.' "'You can milk them clean, my matey. Oh, he don't want my cows going a zoo at this time of year.' She reassured him on that point, and he surveyed her up and down. She had been staying indoors a good deal, and her complexion had grown delicate. "'Quite sure you can stand it. Tess, comfortable enough here for rough folk, but we don't live in a cow-cumber frame.' She declared that she could stand it, and her zest and willingness seemed to win him over. "'Well, I suppose you'll want a dish of tea or victuals of some sort, hey?' Not yet. Well, do as you like about it. But faith, if to as I, I should be as dry as a kek's we've travelled so far.' "'I'll begin milking now to get my hand in,' said Tess.' She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment. To the surprise, indeed slight contempt of Dairy-Man Crick, to whose mind it had apparently never occurred that milk was good as a beverage. "'Oh, if ye can swallow that, be it so,' he said indifferently, while a milker held up the pail that she sipped from. "'Tis what I hate touch for years, not I. Rot the stuff. It would lawyer my innards like lead. You can try your hand upon she,' he pursued, nodding to the nearest cow. "'Not, but what she do milk rather hard. We've hard ones, and we've easy ones, like other folks. However, ye'll find out that soon enough.' When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was really on her stool under the cow, and the milk was squirting from her fists into the pail, she appeared to feel that she had really laid a new foundation for her future. The conviction bred serenity. Her pulse slowed, and she was able to look about her. The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and maids. The men operating on the hard-teated animals, the maids on the kindlier natures. It was a large dairy. There were nearly a hundred milkers under Crick's management all told. And of the herd, the master dairyman milked six or eight with his own hands, unless away from home. These were the cows that milked hardest of all. For his journey-milk-man being more or less casually hired, he would not entrust this half-dozen to their treatment, lest, from indifference, they should not milk them fully. Not to the maids, least they should fail in the same way for lack of finger-grip, with the result that in course of time the cows would go a zoo, that is, dry up. It was not the loss for the moment that made slack-milking so serious, but that with the decline of the demand there came a decline and ultimately cessation of supply. After Tess had settled down to her cow, there was for a time no talk in the Barton, and not a sound inferred with the purr of the milk-jets into the numerous pales, except a momentary exclamation to one or other of the beasts, requesting her to turn around or stand still. The only movements were those of the milker's hands up and down, and the swing of the cow's tails. Thus they all worked on, encompassed by the vast flat mead which extended to either slope of the valley. A level landscape, compounded of old landscapes long forgotten, and no doubt differing in character very greatly from the landscape they composed now. "'To my thinking,' said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow he had just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in one hand, and the pail in the other, and moving on to the next hard-yielder in his vicinity. To my thinking, the cows don't geed down their milk to-day, as usual. Upon my life, if Winkler do begin keeping back like this, she'll not be worth going under my Midsommar.' "'Tis because there's a new hand come among us,' said Jonathan Cale. "'I've noticed such things are far.' "'To be sure, it may be so. I didn't think on't.' "'I've been told that it goes up into their horns at such times,' said a dairymaid. "'Well, as to going up into their horns,' replied dairyman crick dubiously, as though even witchcraft may be limited by anatomical possibilities. I couldn't say. I certainly could not. But as nut-cows will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don't quite agree to it. Do you know that riddle about the nut-cows, Jonathan? Why do nut-cows give less milk in a year than horned?' "'I don't,' interposed the milkmaid. Why do they?' "'Because there have been so many of them,' said the dairyman. How some ever these game-sters do certainly keep back their milk to-day. Folks, we must lift up a stave or two. That's the only cure for it.' Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement to the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield, and the band of milkers at this request burst into melody. In purely business-like tones it is true and with no great spontaneity, the result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement during the song's continuance. When they had gone through fourteen or fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone flames around him, one of the male milkers said, "'I wish singing on the stoop didn't use up so much of a man's wind. You should get your harp, sir. Not but what a fiddle is best.' Tess, who had given an ear to this, thought the words were addressed to the dairyman, but she was wrong. I reply, in the shape of why, came as it were out of the belly of a done cow in the stalls. It had been spoken by a milker behind the animal whom she had not hitherto perceived. "'Oh, yes, there's nothing like a fiddle,' said the dairyman, though I do think the bulls are more moved by a tune than cows. At least that's my experience.' Once there was an old-aged man over at Melstock, William Dewey by name, one of the family that used to do a good deal of business as tranters over there. Jonathan, do you mind?' I knowed the man by sight as well as I knowed my own brother, in a manner of speaking. Well, this man was a coming home along from a wedding where he'd been playing his fiddle one fine moonlit night, and for shortness' sake he took a cut across forty acres, a field lowing that way, where a bull was out to grass. The bull cede William, and took after him, horns aground, begad, and though William runned his best, and hadn't much to drink in him, considering it was a wedding and the folks well off, he found he'd never reach the fence and get over in time to save himself. Well as alas, thought he pulled out his fiddle as he runned, and struck up a jig, turning to the bull, and back in toward the corner. The bull softened down, and stood up, looking hard at William Dewey, who fiddled on and on, till a sort of a smile stole over the bull's face. But no sooner did William stop his playing, and turned to get over a hedge, than the bull would stop his smiling, and lower his horns toward the seat of William's britches. Well, William had to turn about, and play on, willy-nilly, and it was only three o'clock in the world, and I knowed that nobody would come that way for hours, and he so leery and tired that I didn't know what to do. When he had scraped till about four o'clock, he felt that he verily would have to give over soon, and he said to himself, There's only this last tune between me and eternal welfare, Heaven save me, or I'm a done man. Well, then he called to mind how he'd seen cattle kneel at Christmas Eve's in the dead of night. It was not Christmas Eve then, but it came into his head to play a trick upon the bull. So he broke into the tivity him, just as at Christmas Carol singing, and, lo and behold, down went the bull on his bended knees, in his ignorance, just as if to a true tivity night and hour. As soon as his horn friend were down, William turned, clinked off like a long dog, and jumped safe over hedge, before the praying bull had got to his feet again to take after him. William used to say that he'd seen a man look a fool a good many times, but he'd never seen such a fool as that bull looked when he found his pious feelings had been played upon, and was not Christmas Eve. Yes, William Dewey, that was a man's name, and I can tell you to a foot where he's alone in Melstock Churchyard at this very moment, just between the second yew tree and the north oil. It's a curious story, it takes us back to medieval times when faith was a living thing. The remark, singular for a dairy-yard, was murmured by the voice behind the done cow, but as nobody understood the reference, no notice was taken, except that the narrator seemed to think it might imply a skepticism as to his tale. Well, it is quite true, sir, whether or no, I know the man well. Oh, yes, I have no doubt of it, said the person behind the done cow. Tess's attention was thus attracted to the dairy-man's interlocutor, of whom she could see but the mearest patch owing to his bearing his head so persistently in the flank of the milcher. She couldn't understand why he should be addressed as sir, even by the dairy-man himself. But no explanation was discernable. He remained under the cow long enough to have milked three, uttering a private ejaculation now and then, as if he could not get on. Take it gentle, sir, take it gentle, said the dairy-man, to his knack not strength that does it. So I find, said the other, standing up at last and stretching his arms. I think I have finished her, however, though she made my fingers ache. Tess could then see him at full length. He wore the ordinary white pinner and leather leggings of a dairy farmer when milking, and his boots were clogged with the mulch of the yard. But this was all his local livery. With it was something educated, reserved, subtle, sad, differing. But the details of his aspect were temporarily thrust aside by the discovery that he was the one whom she had seen before. Such vicissitudes had Tess passed through since that time that for a moment she could not remember where she had met him, and then it flashed upon her that he was the pedestrian who had joined at the club-dance at Marlott. The passing stranger who had come she knew not whence, had danced with others, but not with her, had slightly left her, and gone on his way with his friends. The flood of memories brought back by this revival of an incident anterior to her troubles produced a momentary dismay lest, recognizing her also, he should, by some means, discover her story. But it passed away when she found no sign of remembrance in him. She saw by degrees that since her first and only encounter his mobile face had grown more thoughtful, and it acquired a young man shapely moustache and beard, the latter of the palest straw-colour where it began upon his cheeks, and deepening to a warm brown further from its root. Under his linen milking-pinner he wore a dark velveteen jacket, cord breeches and gaiters, and a starched white shirt. But the milking-gear nobody could have guessed what he was. He might, with equal probability, have been an eccentric land-owner or a gentlemanly plough-man. That he was but a novice at dairy-work she had realized in a moment, from the time he had spent upon the milking of one cow. Meanwhile, many of the milk-maids had sent to one another of the newcomer, how pretty she is, with something of real generosity and admiration, though with half a hope that the auditors would qualify the assertion, which, strictly speaking, they might have done, prettiness being an inexact definition of what struck the eye in Tess. When the milking was finished for the evening they straggled in doors where Mrs. Crick, the dairy-man's wife, who was too respectable to go out milking herself, and wore a hot-stuff gown in warm weather because the dairy-maids wore prints. It was giving an eye to the leads and things. Only two or three of the maids, Tess learned, slept in the dairy-house besides herself, most of the helpers going to their homes. She saw nothing at supper-time of the superior milker who had commented on the story, and asked no questions about him, the remainder of the evening being occupied in arranging her place in the bed-chamber. It was a large room over the milk-house, some thirty feet long, the sleeping-cots of the other three indoor milk-maids being in the same apartment. They were blooming young women, and except one, rather older than herself. By bedtime Tess was thoroughly tired, and fell asleep immediately. But one of the girls who occupied an adjoining bed was more wakeful than Tess, and would insist upon relating to the latter various particulars of the homestead into which she had just entered. The girls whispered words mingled with the shades, and, to Tess's drowsy mind, they seemed to be generated by the darkness in which they floated. Mr. Angel Clare, he that is learning milking, and that plays the harp, never says much to us. He is a parson's son, and is too much taken with his own thoughts to note his girls. He is the dairyman's pupil, learning farming in all its branches. He has learned sheep farming in another place, and he is now mastering dairy-work. Yes, he is quite the gentleman born. His father is the reverent Mr. Clare M. Minster, a good many miles from here. Oh, I have heard of him, said her companion, now awake. A very earnest clergyman, is he not? Yes, that he is, the earnestest man in all Wessex, they say. The last of the low church sort, they tell me. For all about here be what they call high. All his sons, except our Mr. Clare, be made parson's too. This had not, at this hour, the curiosity to ask why the present Mr. Clare was not made a parson like his brethren, and gradually fell asleep again, the words of an informant coming to her along with the smell of the cheeses in the adjacent cheese-loft, and the measured dripping of the whey from the rings downstairs. CHAPTER XVIII. Still Clare rises out of the past, not altogether as a distinct figure, but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed, abstracted eyes, and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and delicately lined for a man's, though with an unexpectedly firm close of the lower lip now and then, enough to do away with any inference of indecision. Nevertheless something nebulous, preoccupied, vague in his bearing and regard, marked him as one who had probably had no very definite aim or concern about his material future. Yet, as a lad, people had said of him that he was one who might do anything if he tried. He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at the other end of the county, and had arrived at Tal Bothay's Dairy as a six-month pupil after going the round of some other farms, his object being to acquire a practical skill in the various processes of farming, with a view either to the colonies or the tenure of a home farm, as circumstances might decide. His entry into the ranks of the agriculturalists and breeders was a step in the young man's career which had been anticipated neither by himself nor by others. Mr. Clare the Elder, whose first wife had died and left him a daughter, married a second late in life. This lady had somewhat unexpectedly brought him three sons, so that between Angel, the youngest, and his father the vicar there seemed to be almost a missing generation. Of these boys the aforesaid Angel, the child of his old age, was the only son who had not taken a university degree, though he was the single one of them whose early promise might have done full justice to an academic training. Some two or three years before Angel's appearance at the Marlott Dance, on a day when he had left school and was pursuing his studies at home, a parcel came to the vicarage from the local book-sellers directed to the Reverend James Clare. The vicar, having opened it and found it to contain a book, read a few pages, whereupon he jumped up from his seat and went straight to the shop with the book under his arm. "'Why has this been sent to my house?' he asked preemptorily, holding up the volume. "'It was ordered, sir.' "'Not by me, not any one belonging to me, I am happy to say.' The shopkeeper looked in his order-book. "'Oh, it has been misdirected, sir,' he said. It was ordered by Mr. Angel Clare and should have been sent to him.' Mr. Clare winced as if he had been struck. He went home pale and ejected and called Angel into his study. "'Look into this book, my boy,' he said. "'What do you know about it?' "'I ordered it,' said Angel, simply. "'What for?' "'How can you think of reading it?' "'How can I? Why, it's a system of philosophy. There is no more moral or even religious work published.' "'Yes, moral enough, I don't deny that, but religious? For you, who intend to be a minister of the gospel?' "'Since you have alluded to the fact, father,' said the son, with anxious thought upon his face, I should like to say, as for all, that I should prefer not to take orders. I fear I could not conscientiously do so. I love the church as one loves a parent. I shall always have the warmest affection for her. There is no institution for whose history I have a deeper admiration. But I cannot honestly be ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while she refuses to liberate her mind from an untenable, redemptive theology.' It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded vicar that one of his own flesh and blood could come to this. He was stultified, shocked, paralyzed, and if Angel were not going to enter the church, what was the use of sending him to Cambridge? The university as a step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man of fixed ideas, a preface without a volume. He was a man not merely religious but devout, a firm believer, not as the phrase now exclusively construed by the theological thimble rigors in the church and out of it, but in the old and ardent sense of the evangelical school, one who could, indeed, opine that the eternal and divine did eighteen centuries ago in very truth. Angel's father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty. No father I cannot underwrite article four, leave alone the rest, taking it in the literal and grammatical sense as required by the declaration, and therefore I can't be a parson in the present state of affairs, said Angel. My whole instinct in matters of religion is towards reconstruction, to quote your favourite epistle to the Hebrews, the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain. His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill to see him. What is the good of your mother and me economising and stinting ourselves to give you a university education if it is not to be used for the honour and glory of God? His father repeated. Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of man, father? Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to Cambridge like his brothers, but the vicar's view of that seat of learning as a stepping stone to orders alone was quite a family tradition. And so rooted was the idea in his mind that perseverance began to appear to the sensitive son akin to an intent to misappropriate a trust and wrong the pious heads of the household who had been and were, as his father had hinted, compelled to exercise much thrift to carry out this uniform plan of education for the three young men. I will do without Cambridge, said Angel, at last. I feel that I have no right to go there in the circumstances. The effects of this decisive debate were not longing showing themselves. He spent years and years in desultory studies, undertakings and meditations. He began to evince considerable indifference to social forms and observances. The material distinctions of rank and wealth he increasingly despised. Even the good old family, to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy, had no aroma for him unless there were new good resolutions in its representatives. As a balance to these austerities, when he went to live in London to see what the world was like and with a view to practising a professional business there, he was carried off his head and nearly entrapped by a woman much older than himself, though luckily he escaped not greatly the worse for the experience. The association with country solitudes had bred in him an unconquerable and almost unreasonable aversion to modern town life, and shut him out from such success as he might have aspired to by following a mundane calling in the impractic ability of the spiritual one. But something had to be done. He had wasted many valuable years, and having an acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life as a colonial farmer, it occurred to Angel that this might be a lead in the right direction. Farming either in the colonies, America, or at home, farming at any rate, after becoming well qualified for the business by a careful apprenticeship, that was a vocation which would probably afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he valued even more than a competency, intellectual liberty. Though we find Angel Clare at six and twenty here at Talbothays as a student of kind, and as there were no houses at hand in which he could get a comfortable lodging, a border at the Dairy-mans. His room was an immense attic, which ran the whole length of the Dairy-house. It could only be reached by a ladder from the cheese loft, and had been closed up for a long time till he arrived and selected it as his retreat. Clare had plenty of space, and could often be heard by the Dairy-folk pacing up and down when the household had gone to rest. A portion was divided off at one end by a curtain, behind which was his bed, the outer part being furnished as a homely sitting-room. At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal, and strumming upon an old harp, which he had bought at a sale, saying when in a bitter humour that he might have to get his living by it in the streets some day. But he soon preferred to read human nature by taking his meals downstairs in the general dining-kitchen, with the Dairy-man and his wife, and the maids and men, who altogether formed a lively assembly, for though but few milking-hands slept in the house, several joined the family at meals. The longer Clare resided here, the less objection had he to his company, and the more did he like to share quarters with them in common. Much to his surprise he took indeed a real delight in their companionship. The conventional farm-folk of his imagination, personified by the pituitable dummy known as Hodge, were obliterated after a few days' residence. At close quarters no Hodge was to be seen. At first it is true when Clare's intelligence was fresh from a contrasting society, these friends with whom he now hobnobbed seemed a little strange. Sitting down as a level member of the Dairy-man's household seemed at the outset an undignified proceeding. The ideas, the modes, the surroundings appeared retrogressive and unmeaning. But with living on there day after day the acute sojourner became conscious of a new aspect in the spectacle. Without any objective change whatever variety had taken the place of monotonousness. His host and his host's household, his men and his maids, as they became intimately known to Clare, began to differentiate themselves as in a chemical process. The thought of Pascal's was brought home to him. The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased to exist. He had been disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures, beings of many minds, beings infinite in difference, some happy, many serene, a few depressed, one here and one there bright even to genius, some stupid, others wanton, others austere, some mutely miltonic, some poetically cromwellian, into men who had private views of each other as he had of his friends, who could applaud or condemn each other, amuse or sadden themselves by the contemplation of each other's foibles or vices, men every one of whom walked in his own individual way the road to dusty death. Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake and for what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed career. Considering his position he had become wonderfully free from the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilised races with the decline of belief in a beneficent power. For the first time of late years he could read as his musings inclined him, without any eye to cramming for a profession, since the few farming handbooks which he deemed it desirable to master occupied him but little time. He grew away from old associations and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily he made close acquaintance with a phenomena which he had known before but darkly. The seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters, and mists, shade and silence, and the voices of inanimate things. The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to render a fire acceptable in the large room wherein they breakfasted, and by Mrs. Crick's orders, who held that he was too genteel to mess at their table, it was Angel Clair's custom to sit in the yawning chimney-corner during his meal, his carp and saucer and plate being placed on a hinged flap at his elbow. The light from the long, wide mullioned window opposite shone in upon this nook, and assisted by a secondary light of cold blue quality which shone down the chimney, enabled him to read there easily whenever disposed to do so. During Clair and the window was the table at which his companions sat, their munching-profiles rising sharply against the panes, while to the side was the milk-house door through which were visible the rectangular leads in rows, full to the brim with the morning's milk. At the further end the great churn could be seen revolving and its slip-slopping heard, the moving power being discernible through the window in the form of a spiritless horse, walking in a circle and driven by a boy. For several days after Tess's arrival, Clair, sitting abstractly reading from some book, periodical or piece of music just come by post, hardly noticed that she was present at table. She talked so little, and the other maids talked so much that the babble did not strike him as possessing a new note, and he was ever in the habit of neglecting the particulars of an outward scene for the general impression. One day, however, when he had been cunning one of his music scores, and by force of imagination was hearing the tune in his head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the music sheet rolled to the half. He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame piruetting at the top of a dying dance, after the breakfast cooking and boiling, and it seemed to jig to his inward tune, also at the two chimney crooks dangling down from the cotter-rull or cross-bar, plumed with soot which quivered to the same melody, also at the half-empty kettle whining an accompaniment. The conversation at the table mixed in with his phantasmal orchestra till he thought, what a fluty voice one of those milk-maids has! I suppose it is the new one. Claire looked round upon her, seated with the others. She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his long silence, his presence in the room was almost forgotten. I don't know about ghosts, she was saying, but I do know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive. The dairy-man turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged with serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork, breakfasts were breakfasts here, planted erect on the table like the beginning of a gallows. What, really, now? And is it so madey? he said. A very easy way to feel them go, continued Tess, is to lie on the grass at night, and look straight up at some big bright star, and by fixing your mind upon it you will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds of miles away from your body, which you don't seem to want at all. The dairy-man removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his wife. No, that's a wrong thing, Christiana, hey! To think of the miles I vamped the starlet nights these last thirty years, caught in or traded or for doctor or for nurse, and never had the least notion of that till now or filled my soul rise as much as an inch above my shirt-colour. The general attention being drawn to her, including that of the dairy-man's pupil, Tess flushed, and remarking evasively that it was only a fancy, resumed her breakfast. Claire continued to observe her. She soon finished her eating, and having a consciousness that Claire was regarding her, began to trace imaginary patterns on the table-cloth with her forefinger, with the constraint of a domestic animal that perceived itself to be watched. What a fresh and virginal daughter of nature that milkmaid is, he said to himself. And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar, something which carried him back into a joyous and unforeseeing past, before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens grey. He concluded that he had beheld her before, where he could not tell. A casual encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been, and he was not greatly curious about it, but the circumstance was sufficient to lead him to select Tess, in preference to the other pretty milkmaids, when he wished to contemplate contiguous woman-kind. CHAPTER XIX In general the cows were milked as they presented themselves, without choice. But certain cows will show fondness for a particular pair of hands, sometimes carrying this predilection so far as to refuse to stand at all except to their favourite, the pale of a stranger being unceremoniously kicked over. It was Derryman Crick's rule to insist on breaking down these partialities and aversions by constant interchange since otherwise in the event of a milkman or maid going away from the Derry he was placed in a difficulty. The maid's private aims, however, were the reverse of the Derryman's rule, the daily selection by each damsel of the eight or ten cows to which she had grown accustomed, rendering the operation on their willing udders surprisingly easy and effortless. Tess, like her compiers, soon discovered which of the cows had a preference for her style of manipulation, and her fingers having become delicate from the long domiciliary imprisonments to which she had subjected herself at intervals during the last two or three years, she would have been glad to meet the milcher's views in this respect. Out of the whole ninety-five there were eight in particular, sampling, fancy, lofty, mist, old-pretty, young-pretty, tidy and loud, who, though the teats of one or two were as hard as carrots, gave down to her with a readiness that made her work on them a mere touch of the fingers. Knowing, however, the Derryman's wish, she endeavoured conscientiously to take the animals just as they came, accepting the very hard yielders, which she could not yet manage. But she soon found a curious correspondence between the ostensibly chanced position of the cows and her wishes in this matter, till she felt that their order could not be the result of accident. The Derryman's pupil had leaned to hand in getting some of the cows together of late, and at the fifth or sixth time she turned her eyes, as she rested against the cow, full of sly inquiry upon him. Mr. Clare, you have ranged the cows, she said, blushing, and in making the accusation symptoms of a smile gently lifted her upper lip in spite of her, so as to show the tips of her teeth, the lower lip remaining severely still. Well, it makes no difference, said he. You will always be here to milk them. Do you think so? I hope I shall, but I don't know. She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that he, unaware of her grave reasons for liking this seclusion, might have mistaken her meaning. She had spoken so earnestly to him, as if his presence was somehow a factor in her wish. Her misgiving was such that at dawn, when the milking was over, she walked in the garden alone to continue her regrets that she had disclosed to him her discovery of his considerateness. It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in such delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate object seemed endowed with two or three senses, if not five. There was no distinction between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to everything within the horizon. The soundlessness impressed her as a positive entity, rather than as the mere negation of noise. It was broken by the strumming of strings. Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head. Dim flattened, constrained by their confinement. They had never appealed to her as now, when they wandered in the still air, with a stark quality like that of nudity. To speak absolutely, both instrumented execution were poor. But the relative is all, and as she listened, Tess, like a fascinated bird, could not leave the spot. Far from leaving, she drew up towards the performer, keeping behind the hedge that he might not guess her presence. The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank, with juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch, and with tall, blooming weeds emitting offensive smells. Weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, those snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin. Thus she drew quite near to clear, still unobserved of him. Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exultation which she had described as being productable at will by gazing at a star came now without any determination of hers. She undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden's sensibility. Though near nightfall the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound. The light, which still shone, was derived mainly from a large hole in the western bank of Cloud. It was like a piece of day left behind by accident, dusk having closed in elsewhere. He concluded his plaintive melody, a very simple performance, demanding no great skill, and she waited, thinking another might be begun. But tired of playing, he had to sulturally come round the fence, and was rambling up behind her. Tess, her cheeks on fire, moved away furtively as if hardly moving at all. Still, however, saw her lightsome again, and he spoke, his low tones reaching her, though he was some distance off. "'What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?' said he. "'Are you afraid?' "'Oh, no, sir, none of outdoor things, especially just now when the apple-bluff is fallen, and everything so green.' "'But you have your indoor fears, eh?' "'Well, yes, sir.' "'What of?' "'I couldn't quite say.' "'The milk turning sour?' "'No.' "'Life in general.' "'Yes, sir.' "'Ah, so have I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather serious. Don't you think so?' "'It is. No, you put it that way. All the same. I shouldn't have expected a young girl like you to see it so just yet. How is it you do?' She maintained a hesitating silence. "'Come, Tess, tell me in confidence.' She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things to her, and replied shyly, "'The trees have inquisitive oyes, haven't they? That is, seems as if they had. And the river says, "'Why do ye trouble me with your looks? Can you see to see numbers of to-morrow's just all in a line? The first of them the biggest and clearest? The others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away. But they all seem very fierce and cruel. And as if they said, "'I am coming, beware of me, beware of me. And you, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and drive all such horrid fancies away.' He was surprised to find this young woman, who though but a milkmaid, had just that touch of rarity about her, which might make her the envid of her housemates, shaping such sad imagings. She was expressing in her own native phrases, assisted a little by her sixth standard training, feelings which might almost have been called those of the age, the ache of modernism. The perception arrested him less when he reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in definition. A more accurate expression, by words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries. Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so young. More than strange, it was impressive, interesting, pathetic. Not getting the cause. There was nothing to remind him that experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration. Tess's passing corporeal blight had been her mental harvest. Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a mishap to be alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very good reason. But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have descended into the valley of humiliation? Her felt with the man of Us as she had herself felt two or three years ago. My soul chewseth strangling and death rather than my life. I loathe it. I would not live all way. It was true that he was at present out of his class. But she knew that was only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright's yard, he was studying what he wanted to know. He did not milk cows because he was obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning how to be a rich and prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturalist, and breeder of cattle. He would become an American or Australian Abraham, commanding like a monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted and ring-straight, his manservants and his maids. At times, nevertheless, it did seem unaccountable to her that a decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young man should have chosen deliberately to be a farmer and not a clergyman like his father and brothers. Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other's character and moods without attempting to pry into each other's history. Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her nature, and to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a repressed life, but she little devined the strength of her own vitality. At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather than as a man. As such she compared him to herself, and at every discovery of the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance between her own modest mental standpoint and the unmeasurable Andean altitude of his, she became quite dejected, disheartened from all further effort on her own part whatever. He observed her dejection one day when he had casually mentioned something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece. She was gathering the buds called lords and ladies from the bank while he spoke. Why do you look so woe-begone all of a sudden? he asked. Oh, it is only about my own self, she said, with a frail laugh of sadness, fitfully beginning to peel a lady, meanwhile. Just a sense of what might have been with me. My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances. When I see what you know, what you have read and seen and thought, I feel what a nothing I am. I am like the poor queen of Sheba who lived in the Bible. There is no more spirit in me. Bless my soul, don't go travelling about that. Why, he said, with some enthusiasm, I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help you to anything in the way of history or any line of reading you would like to take up. It is a lady again, interrupted she, holding out the buds she had peeled. What? I mean that there are always more ladies than lords when you come to peel them. Never mind about the lords and ladies. Would you like to take up any course of study, history, for example? Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about it than I know already. Why not? Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only, finding out that there is set down in some old book, someone just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part, making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands and thousands, and that your coming life and doings will be like thousands and thousands. What? Really, then, you don't want to learn anything? Why shouldn't mine learn in why the sun do shine on the just and the unjust alike? She answered, with a slight quaver in her voice, but that's what books will not tell me. Tess, fire for such bitterness! Of course he spoke with a conversational sense of duty only, for that sort of wandering had not been unknown to himself in bygone days, and as he looked at the unpracticed mouth and lips, he thought that such a daughter of the soil could only have caught up the sentiment by rote. She went on peeling the lords and ladies till clear, regarding for a moment the wave-like curl of her lashes as they drooped with her bent gaze on her soft cheek, lingeringly went away. When he was gone she stood awhile, thought fully peeling the last bud, and then, awakening from her reverie, flung it and all the crowd of florid nobility impatiently on the ground, in an emulation of displeasure with herself for her knee-series, and with a quickening warmth in her heart of hearts. How stupid he must think her! In an excess of hunger for his good opinion she bethought herself for what she had laterally endeavored to forget, so unpleasant had been its issues. The identity of her family with that of the nightly Durberville's. Baron attribute as it was disastrous as its discovery had been in many ways to her. Perhaps Mr. Clare, as a gentleman and a student of history, would respect her sufficiently to forget her childish conduct with the lords and ladies, if he knew that those perbec marble and alabaster people in Kingsmere Church really represented her own lineal forefathers, that she was no spurious Durberville compounded of money and ambition like those at Trantridge, but true Durberville to the bone. Not before venturing to make the revelation, Dubious Tess indirectly sounded the Dairy-man as to its possible effect upon Mr. Clare by asking the former if Mr. Clare had any great respect for old county families when they had lost all their money and land. Mr. Clare, said the Dairy-man emphatically, is one of the most rebellious rosums you ever knowed, not a bit like the rest of his family, and if there's one thing that he do hate more than another, it is the notion of what's called an old family. He says that it stands to reason that old families have done their spurt of work in past days, and can't have anything left in him now. There's the billets, and the drinkards, and the grays, and the st. Quentines, and the hardies, and the ghouls, who used to own the lands for miles down this valley. You could buy them all up now for a song or most. Why, our little Retty Priddle here, you know, is one of the Paradells, the old family that used to own lots of the land out by King's Hittock, now owned by the Earl of Wessex, a far even here his was heard of. Wow, Mr. Clare found this out, and spoke quite scornful to the poor girl for days. Ah, he says to her, you'll never make a good dairy-maid, all your skill was used up ages ago in Palestine, and you must life fallow for a thousand years to get strength for more deeds. A boy came here to their day asking for a job, and said his name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname, he said he'd never heard that I had any surname, and when we asked why, he said he supposed his folks hadn't been established long enough. Ah, you're the very boy I want, said Mr. Clare, jumping up and shaking hands with him. I've great hopes of you, and gave him half a crown. Oh, no, he can't stomach old families. After hearing this caricature of Clare's opinions, poor Tess was glad that she had not said a word in a weak moment about her family, even though it was so unusually old as almost to have gone round the circle and become a new one. Besides, another dairy-girl was as good as she, it seemed, in that respect. She held her tongue about the Derbaville vault and the night of the conqueror whose name she bore. The insight afforded into Clare's character suggested to her that it was largely owing to her supposed untraditional newness that she had won interest in his eyes.