Chapter Chapter 13 · Chapter XIII A Return to Duty

. Chapter XIII A Return to Duty

The event of Tess Durbeyfield’s return from the manor of her bogus

kinsfolk was rumoured abroad, if rumour be not too large a word for a

space of a square mile. In the afternoon several young girls of

Marlott, former schoolfellows and acquaintances of Tess, called to see

her, arriving dressed in their best starched and ironed, as became

visitors to a person who had made a transcendent conquest (as they

supposed), and sat round the room looking at her with great curiosity.

For the fact that it was this said thirty-first cousin, Mr

d’Urberville, who had fallen in love with her, a gentleman not

altogether local, whose reputation as a reckless gallant and

heartbreaker was beginning to spread beyond the immediate boundaries of

Trantridge, lent Tess’s supposed position, by its fearsomeness, a far

higher fascination that it would have exercised if unhazardous.

Their interest was so deep that the younger ones whispered when her

back was turned—

“How pretty she is; and how that best frock do set her off! I believe

it cost an immense deal, and that it was a gift from him.”

Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from the

corner-cupboard, did not hear these commentaries. If she had heard

them, she might soon have set her friends right on the matter. But her

mother heard, and Joan’s simple vanity, having been denied the hope of

a dashing marriage, fed itself as well as it could upon the sensation

of a dashing flirtation. Upon the whole she felt gratified, even though

such a limited and evanescent triumph should involve her daughter’s

reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and in the warmth of her

responsiveness to their admiration she invited her visitors to stay to

tea.

Their chatter, their laughter, their good-humoured innuendoes, above

all, their flashes and flickerings of envy, revived Tess’s spirits

also; and, as the evening wore on, she caught the infection of their

excitement, and grew almost gay. The marble hardness left her face, she

moved with something of her old bounding step, and flushed in all her

young beauty.

At moments, in spite of thought, she would reply to their inquiries

with a manner of superiority, as if recognizing that her experiences in

the field of courtship had, indeed, been slightly enviable. But so far

was she from being, in the words of Robert South, “in love with her own

ruin,” that the illusion was transient as lightning; cold reason came

back to mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness of her momentary

pride would convict her, and recall her to reserved listlessness again.

And the despondency of the next morning’s dawn, when it was no longer

Sunday, but Monday; and no best clothes; and the laughing visitors were

gone, and she awoke alone in her old bed, the innocent younger children

breathing softly around her. In place of the excitement of her return,

and the interest it had inspired, she saw before her a long and stony

highway which she had to tread, without aid, and with little sympathy.

Her depression was then terrible, and she could have hidden herself in

a tomb.

In the course of a few weeks Tess revived sufficiently to show herself

so far as was necessary to get to church one Sunday morning. She liked

to hear the chanting—such as it was—and the old Psalms, and to join in

the Morning Hymn. That innate love of melody, which she had inherited

from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power over

her which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.

To be as much out of observation as possible for reasons of her own,

and to escape the gallantries of the young men, she set out before the

chiming began, and took a back seat under the gallery, close to the

lumber, where only old men and women came, and where the bier stood on

end among the churchyard tools.

Parishioners dropped in by twos and threes, deposited themselves in

rows before her, rested three-quarters of a minute on their foreheads

as if they were praying, though they were not; then sat up, and looked

around. When the chants came on, one of her favourites happened to be

chosen among the rest—the old double chant “Langdon”—but she did not

know what it was called, though she would much have liked to know. She

thought, without exactly wording the thought, how strange and god-like

was a composer’s power, who from the grave could lead through sequences

of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had

never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his

personality.

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service

proceeded; and at last observing her, they whispered to each other. She

knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that

she could come to church no more.

The bedroom which she shared with some of the children formed her

retreat more continually than ever. Here, under her few square yards of

thatch, she watched winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets, and

successive moons at their full. So close kept she that at length almost

everybody thought she had gone away.

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it

was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary. She

knew how to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the

light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of

day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute

mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes

attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the

shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold

accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so

unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with

the element she moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an

integral part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would

intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her

own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a

psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The midnight

airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of

the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the

expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some

vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of

her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of

convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a

sorry and mistaken creation of Tess’s fancy—a cloud of moral hobgoblins

by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of

harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping

birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren,

or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a

figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the

while she was making a distinction where there was no difference.

Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord. She had been

made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the

environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.