Chapter Chapter 20 · Chapter XX Persistence

. Chapter XX Persistence

The season developed and matured. Another year’s instalment of flowers,

leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures,

took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their

place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles.

Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long

stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked

out scents in invisible jets and breathings.

Dairyman Crick’s household of maids and men lived on comfortably,

placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all

positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness

ends, and below the line at which the _convenances_ begin to cramp

natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too

little of enough.

Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one thing

aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other,

ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of

it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as

surely as two streams in one vale.

Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now,

possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing,

physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The

sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its

sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and Clare

also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love;

where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in,

awkwardly inquiring, “Whither does this new current tend to carry me?

What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?”

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet—a rosy,

warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of

persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be occupied

with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a philosopher’s

regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting specimen of

womankind.

They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily in that

strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the violet

or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early, here.

Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came the skimming,

which began at a little past three. It usually fell to the lot of some

one or other of them to wake the rest, the first being aroused by an

alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival, and they soon

discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep through the

alarm as others did, this task was thrust most frequently upon her. No

sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed, than she left her room

and ran to the dairyman’s door; then up the ladder to Angel’s, calling

him in a loud whisper; then woke her fellow-milkmaids. By the time that

Tess was dressed Clare was downstairs and out in the humid air. The

remaining maids and the dairyman usually gave themselves another turn

on the pillow, and did not appear till a quarter of an hour later.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the

day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the

twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the

twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent,

and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

Being so often—possibly not always by chance—the first two persons to

get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons

up of all the world. In these early days of her residence here Tess did

not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising, where he was

generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light

which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feeling of

isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim inceptive stage of

the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of

disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he

knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed

in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the

boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair women are

usually asleep at mid-summer dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest

were nowhere.

The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along together

to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the Resurrection

hour. He little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side. Whilst

all the landscape was in neutral shade his companion’s face, which was

the focus of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a

sort of phosphorescence upon it. She looked ghostly, as if she were

merely a soul at large. In reality her face, without appearing to do

so, had caught the cold gleam of day from the north-east; his own face,

though he did not think of it, wore the same aspect to her.

It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She

was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a whole

sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter,

and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because

she did not understand them.

“Call me Tess,” she would say askance; and he did.

Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply

feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer

bliss to those of a being who craved it.

At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl.

Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters,

out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at the side of

the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their standing

in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by moving their heads

round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of

puppets by clockwork.

They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level, and

apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows in

detached remnants of small extent. On the gray moisture of the grass

were marks where the cows had lain through the night—dark-green islands

of dry herbage the size of their carcasses, in the general sea of dew.

From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which the cow had

rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of which trail they

found her; the snoring puff from her nostrils, when she recognized

them, making an intenser little fog of her own amid the prevailing one.

Then they drove the animals back to the barton, or sat down to milk

them on the spot, as the case might require.

Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like a

white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous rocks.

Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and hang on the

wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails subdividing the

mead, which now shone like glass rods. Minute diamonds of moisture from

the mist hung, too, upon Tess’s eyelashes, and drops upon her hair,

like seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these

dried off her; moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal

beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes scintillated in the sunbeams and she

was again the dazzlingly fair dairymaid only, who had to hold her own

against the other women of the world.

About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick’s voice, lecturing the

non-resident milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old

Deborah Fyander for not washing her hands.

“For Heaven’s sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb! Upon my soul, if

the London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they’d

swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they do a’ready; and

that’s saying a good deal.”

The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and Clare, in common

with the rest, could hear the heavy breakfast table dragged out from

the wall in the kitchen by Mrs Crick, this being the invariable

preliminary to each meal; the same horrible scrape accompanying its

return journey when the table had been cleared.