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| TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES, by Thomas Hardy (1891)
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CHAPTER XXIV
Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a
season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss
of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love
should not grow passionate. The ready bosoms existing there were
impregnated by their surroundings.
July passed over their heads, and the Thermidorean weather which came
in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state
of hearts at Talbothays Dairy. The air of the place, so fresh in the
spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now. Its heavy
scents weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying
in a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the
pastures, but there was still bright green herbage here where the
watercourses purled. And as Clare was oppressed by the outward
heats, so was he burdened inwardly by waxing fervour of passion for
the soft and silent Tess.
The rains having passed, the uplands were dry. The wheels of the
dairyman's spring-cart, as he sped home from market, licked up the
pulverized surface of the highway, and were followed by white ribands
of dust, as if they had set a thin powder-train on fire. The cows
jumped wildly over the five-barred barton-gate, maddened by the
gad-fly; Dairyman Crick kept his shirt-sleeves permanently rolled up
from Monday to Saturday; open windows had no effect in ventilation
without open doors, and in the dairy-garden the blackbirds and
thrushes crept about under the currant-bushes, rather in the manner
of quadrupeds than of winged creatures. The flies in the kitchen
were lazy, teasing, and familiar, crawling about in the unwonted
places, on the floors, into drawers, and over the backs of the
milkmaids' hands. Conversations were concerning sunstroke; while
butter-making, and still more butter-keeping, was a despair.
They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and convenience,
without driving in the cows. During the day the animals obsequiously
followed the shadow of the smallest tree as it moved round the stem
with the diurnal roll; and when the milkers came they could hardly
stand still for the flies.
On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows chanced to
stand apart from the general herd, behind the corner of a hedge,
among them being Dumpling and Old Pretty, who loved Tess's hands
above those of any other maid. When she rose from her stool under a
finished cow, Angel Clare, who had been observing her for some time,
asked her if she would take the aforesaid creatures next. She
silently assented, and with her stool at arm's length, and the pail
against her knee, went round to where they stood. Soon the sound of
Old Pretty's milk fizzing into the pail came through the hedge, and
then Angel felt inclined to go round the corner also, to finish off a
hard-yielding milcher who had strayed there, he being now as capable
of this as the dairyman himself.
All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug their foreheads
into the cows and gazed into the pail. But a few — mainly the younger
ones — rested their heads sideways. This was Tess Durbeyfield's
habit, her temple pressing the milcher's flank, her eyes fixed on
the far end of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation.
She was milking Old Pretty thus, and the sun chancing to be on the
milking-side, it shone flat upon her pink-gowned form and her white
curtain-bonnet, and upon her profile, rendering it keen as a cameo
cut from the dun background of the cow.
She did not know that Clare had followed her round, and that he sat
under his cow watching her. The stillness of her head and features
was remarkable: she might have been in a trance, her eyes open, yet
unseeing. Nothing in the picture moved but Old Pretty's tail and
Tess's pink hands, the latter so gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation
only, as if they were obeying a reflex stimulus, like a beating
heart.
How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal
about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And
it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and
speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as
arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen
nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the
least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red
top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before
seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such
persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with
snow. Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But
no — they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect
upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was
that which gave the humanity.
Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he
could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again
confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an _aura_
over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which well nigh produced
a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological
process, a prosaic sneeze.
She then became conscious that he was observing her; but she would
not show it by any change of position, though the curious dream-like
fixity disappeared, and a close eye might easily have discerned that
the rosiness of her face deepened, and then faded till only a tinge
of it was left.
The influence that had passed into Clare like an excitation from the
sky did not die down. Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears,
fell back like a defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat,
and, leaving his pail to be kicked over if the milcher had such a
mind, went quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and, kneeling down
beside her, clasped her in his arms.
Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to his embrace
with unreflecting inevitableness. Having seen that it was really her
lover who had advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she
sank upon him in her momentary joy, with something very like an
ecstatic cry.
He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting mouth, but he
checked himself, for tender conscience' sake.
"Forgive me, Tess dear!" he whispered. "I ought to have asked.
I — did not know what I was doing. I do not mean it as a liberty.
I am devoted to you, Tessy, dearest, in all sincerity!"
Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled; and seeing two
people crouching under her where, by immemorial custom, there should
have been only one, lifted her hind leg crossly.
"She is angry — she doesn't know what we mean — she'll kick over the
milk!" exclaimed Tess, gently striving to free herself, her eyes
concerned with the quadruped's actions, her heart more deeply
concerned with herself and Clare.
She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together, his arm still
encircling her. Tess's eyes, fixed on distance, began to fill.
"Why do you cry, my darling?" he said.
"O — I don't know!" she murmured.
As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in she became
agitated and tried to withdraw.
"Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last," said he, with a
curious sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart
had outrun his judgement. "That I — love you dearly and truly I need
not say. But I — it shall go no further now — it distresses you — I am
as surprised as you are. You will not think I have presumed upon
your defencelessness — been too quick and unreflecting, will you?"
"N' — I can't tell."
He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the
milking of each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of
the two into one; and when the dairyman came round by that screened
nook a few minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that
the markedly sundered pair were more to each other than mere
acquaintance. Yet in the interval since Crick's last view of them
something had occurred which changed the pivot of the universe for
their two natures; something which, had he known its quality, the
dairyman would have despised, as a practical man; yet which was based
upon a more stubborn and resistless tendency than a whole heap of
so-called practicalities. A veil had been whisked aside; the tract
of each one's outlook was to have a new horizon thenceforward — for a
short time or for a long.
END OF PHASE THE THIRD