Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891)/Chapter 10
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Every village has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution, its own code of morality. The levity of some of the younger women in and about Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had also a more abiding defect; it drank hard. The staple conversation on the farms around was on the uselessness of saving money; and smockfrocked arithmeticians, leaning on their ploughs or hoes, would enter into calculations of great nicety to prove that parish relief was a fuller provision for a man in his old age than any which could result from savings out of their wages during a whole lifetime.
The chief pleasure of these philosophers lay in going every Saturday night, when work was done, to Chaseborough, a decayed market-town two or three miles distant; and, returning in the small hours of the next morning, to spend Sunday in sleeping off the dyspeptic effects of the curious compounds sold to them as beer by the monopolizers of the once independent inns.
For a long time Tess did not join in the weekly pilgrimages. But under pressure from matrons not much older than herself—for marriage before means was the rule here as elsewhere—Tess at length consented to go. Her first experience of the journey afforded her more enjoyment than she had expected, the hilariousness of the others being quite contagious after her monotonous attention to the poultry-farm all the week. She went again and again. Being graceful and interesting, standing moreover on the momentary threshold of womanhood, her appearance drew down upon her some sly regards from loungers in the streets of Chaseborough; hence, though sometimes her journey to the town was made independently, she always searched for her fellows at nightfall, to have the protection of their companionship homeward.
This had gone on for a month or two when a Saturday came in early September, on which a fair and a market coincided; and the pilgrims from Trantridge sought double delights at the inns on that account. It was long past sunset, and Tess waited for the troop till she was quite weary. While she stood at a corner by the tavern in which they sat she heard a footstep, and looking round saw the red coal of a cigar. D’Urberville was standing there also. He beckoned to her, and she reluctantly went to him.
‘My Pretty, what are you doing here at this time of night?’
She was so tired after her long day and her walk that she confided her trouble to him.
‘I have been waiting ever so long, sir, to have their company home, because the road is rather strange to me at night. But I really think I will wait no longer.’
‘Do not. I have only a saddle-horse here to-day; but come to the “Flower-de-Luce,” and I’ll hire a trap, and drive you home with me.’
Tess had never quite got over her original mistrust of him, and, with all their tardiness, she preferred to walk home with the work-folk. So she answered that she was much obliged to him, but on second thoughts would not trouble him. ‘I have said that I will wait for ’em, and they will expect me to now.’
‘Very well, silly! Please yourself.’
As soon as he had re-lit a cigar and walked away the Trantridge villagers within began also to recollect how time was flying, and prepared to leave in a body. Their bundles and baskets were gathered up, and half an hour later, when the clock-chime sounded a quarter past eleven, they were straggling along the lane which led up the hill towards their homes.
It was a three-mile walk, along a dry white road, made whiter to-night by the light of the moon.
Tess soon perceived as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women also were wandering in their gait—to wit, a dark virago, Car Darch, dubbed Queen of Spades, till lately a favourite of D’Urberville’s; Nancy, her sister, nicknamed the Queen of Diamonds; and a young married woman who had already tumbled down. Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a knowledge that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.
Tess, however, had undergone such painful experiences in this kind in her father’s house, that the discovery of their condition spoilt the pleasure she was beginning to feel in the moonlight journey. Yet she stuck to the party, for reasons above given.
In the open highway they had progressed in scattered order; but now their route was through a field-gate, and the foremost finding a difficulty in opening it they closed up together.
This leading pedestrian was Car the Queen of Spades, who carried a wicker-basket containing her mother’s groceries, her own draperies, and other purchases for the week. The basket being large and heavy, Car had placed it for convenience of porterage on the top of her head, where it rode on in jeopardized balance as she walked with arms akimbo.
‘Well—whatever is that a-creeping down thy back, Car Darch?’ said one of the group suddenly.
All looked at Car. Her gown was a light cotton print, and from the back of her head a kind of rope could be seen descending to some distance below her waist like a Chinaman’s queue.
‘’Tis her hair falling down’, said another.
No; it was not her hair: it was a black stream of something oozing from her basket, and it glistened like a slimy snake in the cold still rays of the moon.
‘’Tis treacle’, said an observant matron.
Treacle it was. Car’s poor old grandmother had a weakness for the sweet stuff. Honey she had in plenty out of her own hives, but treacle was what her soul desired, and Car had been about to give her a treat of surprise. Hastily lowering the basket the dark girl found that the vessel containing the liquid had been smashed within.
By this time there had arisen a shout of laughter at the extraordinary appearance of Car’s back, which irritated the dark queen into getting rid of the disfigurement by the first sudden means available, and independently of the help of the scoffers. She rushed excitedly into the field they were about to cross, and flinging herself flat on her back upon the grass, began to wipe her gown as well as she could by gyrating horizontally on the herbage and dragging herself over it upon her elbows.
The laughter rang louder; they clung to the gate, to the posts, rested on their staves, in the weakness engendered by their convulsions at the spectacle of Car. Our heroine, who had hitherto held her peace, at this wild moment could not help joining in with the rest.
It was a misfortune—in more ways than one. No sooner did the dark queen hear the soberer richer note of Tess among those of the other work-people than a long smouldering sense of rivalry inflamed her to madness. She sprang to her feet and closely faced the object of her dislike.
‘How darest th’ laugh at me, hussy!’ she cried.
‘I couldn’t really help it when t’others did’, apologized Tess, still tittering.
‘Ah, th’st think th’ beest everybody, dostn’t, because th’ beest first favourite with He just now! But stop a bit, my lady, stop a bit! I’m as good as two of such! Look here—here’s at ’ee!’
To Tess’s horror the dark queen began stripping off the bodice of her gown—which for the added reason of its ridiculed condition she was only too glad to be free of—till she had bared her plump neck, shoulders, and arms to the moonshine, under which they looked as luminous and beautiful as some Praxitelean creation, in their possession of the faultless rotundities of a lusty country girl. She closed her fists and squared up at Tess.
‘Indeed, then, I shall not fight!’ said the latter majestically; ‘and if I had known you was of that sort, I wouldn’t have so let myself down as to come with such a whorage as this is!’
The rather too inclusive speech brought down torrent of vituperation from other quarters upon fair Tess’s unlucky head, particularly from the Queen of Diamonds, who having stood in the relations to D’Urberville that Car had also been suspected of, united with the latter against the common enemy. Several other women also chimed in, with an animus which none of them would have been so fatuous as to show but for the rollicking evening they had passed. Thereupon, finding Tess unfairly browbeaten, the husbands and lovers tried to make peace by defending her; but the result of that attempt was directly to increase the war.
Tess was indignant and ashamed. She no longer minded the loneliness of the way and the lateness of the hour; her one object was to get away from the whole crew as soon as possible. She knew well enough that the better among them would repent of their passion next day. They were all now inside the field, and she was edging about to rush off alone when a horseman emerged almost silently from the corner of the hedge that screened the road, and Alec D’Urberville looked round upon them.
‘What the devil is all this row about, work-folk?’ he asked.
The explanation was not readily forthcoming; and, in truth, he did not require any. Having heard their voices while yet some way off he had ridden creepingly forward, and learnt enough to satisfy himself.
Tess was standing apart from the rest, near the gate. He bent over towards her. ‘Jump up behind me, he whispered, ‘and we’ll get shot of the screaming cats in a jiffy!’
She felt almost ready to faint, so vivid was her sense of the crisis. At almost any other moment of her life she would have refused such proffered aid and company, as she had refused them several times before; and now the loneliness would not of itself have forced her to do otherwise. But coming as the invitation did at the particular juncture when fear and indignation at these adversaries could be transformed by a spring of the foot into a triumph over them, she abandoned herself to her impulse, put her toe upon his instep, and leapt into the saddle behind him. The pair were speeding away into the distant gray by the time that the contentious revellers became aware of what had happened.
The Queen of Spades forgot the stain on her bodice, and stood beside the Queen of Diamonds and the new-married, staggering young woman—all with a gaze of fixity in the direction in which the horse’s tramp was diminishing into silence on the road.
‘What be ye looking at?’ asked a man who had not observed the incident.
‘Ho-ho-ho!’ laughed dark Car.
‘Hee-hee-hee!’ laughed the tippling bride, as she steadied herself on the arm of her fond husband.
‘Heu-heu-heu!’ laughed dark Car’s mother, stroking her moustache as she explained laconically: ‘Out of the frying-pan into the fire!’
And then these children of the open air, whom even excess of alcohol could scarce injure permanently, betook themselves to the field-path; and as they went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of each one’s head, an opalized circle of glory, formed by the moon’s rays upon the glistening sheet of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo but his or her own, which never deserted the head-shadow, whatever its vulgar unsteadiness might be; but adhered to it, and persistently beautified it; till the erratic motions seemed an inherent part of the irradiation, and the fumes of their breathing a component of the night’s mist; and the spirit of the scene, and of the moonlight, and of Nature, seemed harmoniously to mingle with the spirit of wine.