Chapter Chapter 43 · Chapter XLIII The Boundary Past

. Chapter XLIII The Boundary Past

There was no exaggeration in Marian’s definition of Flintcomb-Ash farm

as a starve-acre place. The single fat thing on the soil was Marian

herself; and she was an importation. Of the three classes of village,

the village cared for by its lord, the village cared for by itself, and

the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord (in other

words, the village of a resident squire’s tenantry, the village of free

or copy-holders, and the absentee-owner’s village, farmed with the

land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the third.

But Tess set to work. Patience, that blending of moral courage with

physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel

Clare; and it sustained her.

The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was a

stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground of

the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets—the outcrop of

siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose

white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half of

each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the

business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the

root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also.

Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole

field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without

features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of

skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white

vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and

nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face

looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the

white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls

crawling over the surface of the former like flies.

Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical

regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in Hessian

“wroppers”—sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom, to keep

their gowns from blowing about—scant skirts revealing boots that

reached high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets.

The pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads

would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of

the two Marys.

They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they

bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of

their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist

in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said

that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would

not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a situation, this field,

that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally

upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till

they were wet through. Tess had not known till now what was really

meant by that. There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is

called being wet through in common talk. But to stand working slowly in

a field, and feel the creep of rain-water, first in legs and shoulders,

then on hips and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to work

on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down,

demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.

Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be supposed. They

were both young, and they were talking of the time when they lived and

loved together at Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of land

where summer had been liberal in her gifts; in substance to all,

emotionally to these. Tess would fain not have conversed with Marian of

the man who was legally, if not actually, her husband; but the

irresistible fascination of the subject betrayed her into reciprocating

Marian’s remarks. And thus, as has been said, though the damp curtains

of their bonnets flapped smartly into their faces, and their wrappers

clung about them to wearisomeness, they lived all this afternoon in

memories of green, sunny, romantic Talbothays.

“You can see a gleam of a hill within a few miles o’ Froom Valley from

here when ’tis fine,” said Marian.

“Ah! Can you?” said Tess, awake to the new value of this locality.

So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to

enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. Marian’s will had

a method of assisting itself by taking from her pocket as the afternoon

wore on a pint bottle corked with white rag, from which she invited

Tess to drink. Tess’s unassisted power of dreaming, however, being

enough for her sublimation at present, she declined except the merest

sip, and then Marian took a pull from the spirits.

“I’ve got used to it,” she said, “and can’t leave it off now. ’Tis my

only comfort—You see I lost him: you didn’t; and you can do without it

perhaps.”

Tess thought her loss as great as Marian’s, but upheld by the dignity

of being Angel’s wife, in the letter at least, she accepted Marian’s

differentiation.

Amid this scene Tess slaved in the morning frosts and in the afternoon

rains. When it was not swede-grubbing it was swede-trimming, in which

process they sliced off the earth and the fibres with a bill-hook

before storing the roots for future use. At this occupation they could

shelter themselves by a thatched hurdle if it rained; but if it was

frosty even their thick leather gloves could not prevent the frozen

masses they handled from biting their fingers. Still Tess hoped. She

had a conviction that sooner or later the magnanimity which she

persisted in reckoning as a chief ingredient of Clare’s character would

lead him to rejoin her.

Marian, primed to a humorous mood, would discover the queer-shaped

flints aforesaid, and shriek with laughter, Tess remaining severely

obtuse. They often looked across the country to where the Var or Froom

was known to stretch, even though they might not be able to see it;

and, fixing their eyes on the cloaking gray mist, imagined the old

times they had spent out there.

“Ah,” said Marian, “how I should like another or two of our old set to

come here! Then we could bring up Talbothays every day here afield, and

talk of he, and of what nice times we had there, and o’ the old things

we used to know, and make it all come back a’most, in seeming!”

Marian’s eyes softened, and her voice grew vague as the visions

returned. “I’ll write to Izz Huett,” she said. “She’s biding at home

doing nothing now, I know, and I’ll tell her we be here, and ask her to

come; and perhaps Retty is well enough now.”

Tess had nothing to say against the proposal, and the next she heard of

this plan for importing old Talbothays’ joys was two or three days

later, when Marian informed her that Izz had replied to her inquiry,

and had promised to come if she could.

There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in stealthy and

measured glides, like the moves of a chess-player. One morning the few

lonely trees and the thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if they had

put off a vegetable for an animal integument. Every twig was covered

with a white nap as of fur grown from the rind during the night, giving

it four times its usual stoutness; the whole bush or tree forming a

staring sketch in white lines on the mournful gray of the sky and

horizon. Cobwebs revealed their presence on sheds and walls where none

had ever been observed till brought out into visibility by the

crystallizing atmosphere, hanging like loops of white worsted from

salient points of the out-houses, posts, and gates.

After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when

strange birds from behind the North Pole began to arrive silently on

the upland of Flintcomb-Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical

eyes—eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in

inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had

ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure;

which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by

the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of

colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the

expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. These nameless

birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had seen

which humanity would never see, they brought no account. The

traveller’s ambition to tell was not theirs, and, with dumb

impassivity, they dismissed experiences which they did not value for

the immediate incidents of this homely upland—the trivial movements of

the two girls in disturbing the clods with their hackers so as to

uncover something or other that these visitants relished as food.

Then one day a peculiar quality invaded the air of this open country.

There came a moisture which was not of rain, and a cold which was not

of frost. It chilled the eyeballs of the twain, made their brows ache,

penetrated to their skeletons, affecting the surface of the body less

than its core. They knew that it meant snow, and in the night the snow

came. Tess, who continued to live at the cottage with the warm gable

that cheered any lonely pedestrian who paused beside it, awoke in the

night, and heard above the thatch noises which seemed to signify that

the roof had turned itself into a gymnasium of all the winds. When she

lit her lamp to get up in the morning she found that the snow had blown

through a chink in the casement, forming a white cone of the finest

powder against the inside, and had also come down the chimney, so that

it lay sole-deep upon the floor, on which her shoes left tracks when

she moved about. Without, the storm drove so fast as to create a

snow-mist in the kitchen; but as yet it was too dark out-of-doors to

see anything.

Tess knew that it was impossible to go on with the swedes; and by the

time she had finished breakfast beside the solitary little lamp, Marian

arrived to tell her that they were to join the rest of the women at

reed-drawing in the barn till the weather changed. As soon, therefore,

as the uniform cloak of darkness without began to turn to a disordered

medley of grays, they blew out the lamp, wrapped themselves up in their

thickest pinners, tied their woollen cravats round their necks and

across their chests, and started for the barn. The snow had followed

the birds from the polar basin as a white pillar of a cloud, and

individual flakes could not be seen. The blast smelt of icebergs,

arctic seas, whales, and white bears, carrying the snow so that it

licked the land but did not deepen on it. They trudged onwards with

slanted bodies through the flossy fields, keeping as well as they could

in the shelter of hedges, which, however, acted as strainers rather

than screens. The air, afflicted to pallor with the hoary multitudes

that infested it, twisted and spun them eccentrically, suggesting an

achromatic chaos of things. But both the young women were fairly

cheerful; such weather on a dry upland is not in itself dispiriting.

“Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was coming,” said Marian.

“Depend upon’t, they keep just in front o’t all the way from the North

Star. Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching

weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now!

Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all—in fact, it rather does

it good.”

“You mustn’t talk about him to me, Marian,” said Tess severely.

“Well, but—surely you care for ’n! Do you?”

Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes, impulsively faced

in the direction in which she imagined South America to lie, and,

putting up her lips, blew out a passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.

“Well, well, I know you do. But ’pon my body, it is a rum life for a

married couple! There—I won’t say another word! Well, as for the

weather, it won’t hurt us in the wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is

fearful hard work—worse than swede-hacking. I can stand it because I’m

stout; but you be slimmer than I. I can’t think why maister should have

set ’ee at it.”

They reached the wheat-barn and entered it. One end of the long

structure was full of corn; the middle was where the reed-drawing was

carried on, and there had already been placed in the reed-press the

evening before as many sheaves of wheat as would be sufficient for the

women to draw from during the day.

“Why, here’s Izz!” said Marian.

Izz it was, and she came forward. She had walked all the way from her

mother’s home on the previous afternoon, and, not deeming the distance

so great, had been belated, arriving, however, just before the snow

began, and sleeping at the alehouse. The farmer had agreed with her

mother at market to take her on if she came to-day, and she had been

afraid to disappoint him by delay.

In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two women from a

neighbouring village; two Amazonian sisters, whom Tess with a start

remembered as Dark Car, the Queen of Spades, and her junior, the Queen

of Diamonds—those who had tried to fight with her in the midnight

quarrel at Trantridge. They showed no recognition of her, and possibly

had none, for they had been under the influence of liquor on that

occasion, and were only temporary sojourners there as here. They did

all kinds of men’s work by preference, including well-sinking, hedging,

ditching, and excavating, without any sense of fatigue. Noted

reed-drawers were they too, and looked round upon the other three with

some superciliousness.

Putting on their gloves, all set to work in a row in front of the

press, an erection formed of two posts connected by a cross-beam, under

which the sheaves to be drawn from were laid ears outward, the beam

being pegged down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the sheaves

diminished.

The day hardened in colour, the light coming in at the barndoors

upwards from the snow instead of downwards from the sky. The girls

pulled handful after handful from the press; but by reason of the

presence of the strange women, who were recounting scandals, Marian and

Izz could not at first talk of old times as they wished to do.

Presently they heard the muffled tread of a horse, and the farmer rode

up to the barndoor. When he had dismounted he came close to Tess, and

remained looking musingly at the side of her face. She had not turned

at first, but his fixed attitude led her to look round, when she

perceived that her employer was the native of Trantridge from whom she

had taken flight on the high-road because of his allusion to her

history.

He waited till she had carried the drawn bundles to the pile outside,

when he said, “So you be the young woman who took my civility in such

ill part? Be drowned if I didn’t think you might be as soon as I heard

of your being hired! Well, you thought you had got the better of me the

first time at the inn with your fancy-man, and the second time on the

road, when you bolted; but now I think I’ve got the better of you.” He

concluded with a hard laugh.

Tess, between the Amazons and the farmer, like a bird caught in a

clap-net, returned no answer, continuing to pull the straw. She could

read character sufficiently well to know by this time that she had

nothing to fear from her employer’s gallantry; it was rather the

tyranny induced by his mortification at Clare’s treatment of him. Upon

the whole she preferred that sentiment in man and felt brave enough to

endure it.

“You thought I was in love with ’ee I suppose? Some women are such

fools, to take every look as serious earnest. But there’s nothing like

a winter afield for taking that nonsense out o’ young wenches’ heads;

and you’ve signed and agreed till Lady-Day. Now, are you going to beg

my pardon?”

“I think you ought to beg mine.”

“Very well—as you like. But we’ll see which is master here. Be they all

the sheaves you’ve done to-day?”

“Yes, sir.”

“’Tis a very poor show. Just see what they’ve done over there”

(pointing to the two stalwart women). “The rest, too, have done better

than you.”

“They’ve all practised it before, and I have not. And I thought it made

no difference to you as it is task work, and we are only paid for what

we do.”

“Oh, but it does. I want the barn cleared.”

“I am going to work all the afternoon instead of leaving at two as the

others will do.”

He looked sullenly at her and went away. Tess felt that she could not

have come to a much worse place; but anything was better than

gallantry. When two o’clock arrived the professional reed-drawers

tossed off the last half-pint in their flagon, put down their hooks,

tied their last sheaves, and went away. Marian and Izz would have done

likewise, but on hearing that Tess meant to stay, to make up by longer

hours for her lack of skill, they would not leave her. Looking out at

the snow, which still fell, Marian exclaimed, “Now, we’ve got it all to

ourselves.” And so at last the conversation turned to their old

experiences at the dairy; and, of course, the incidents of their

affection for Angel Clare.

“Izz and Marian,” said Mrs Angel Clare, with a dignity which was

extremely touching, seeing how very little of a wife she was: “I can’t

join in talk with you now, as I used to do, about Mr Clare; you will

see that I cannot; because, although he is gone away from me for the

present, he is my husband.”

Izz was by nature the sauciest and most caustic of all the four girls

who had loved Clare. “He was a very splendid lover, no doubt,” she

said; “but I don’t think he is a too fond husband to go away from you

so soon.”

“He had to go—he was obliged to go, to see about the land over there!”

pleaded Tess.

“He might have tided ’ee over the winter.”

“Ah—that’s owing to an accident—a misunderstanding; and we won’t argue

it,” Tess answered, with tearfulness in her words. “Perhaps there’s a

good deal to be said for him! He did not go away, like some husbands,

without telling me; and I can always find out where he is.”

After this they continued for some long time in a reverie, as they went

on seizing the ears of corn, drawing out the straw, gathering it under

their arms, and cutting off the ears with their bill-hooks, nothing

sounding in the barn but the swish of the straw and the crunch of the

hook. Then Tess suddenly flagged, and sank down upon the heap of

wheat-ears at her feet.

“I knew you wouldn’t be able to stand it!” cried Marian. “It wants

harder flesh than yours for this work.”

Just then the farmer entered. “Oh, that’s how you get on when I am

away,” he said to her.

“But it is my own loss,” she pleaded. “Not yours.”

“I want it finished,” he said doggedly, as he crossed the barn and went

out at the other door.

“Don’t ’ee mind him, there’s a dear,” said Marian. “I’ve worked here

before. Now you go and lie down there, and Izz and I will make up your

number.”

“I don’t like to let you do that. I’m taller than you, too.”

However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie down awhile, and

reclined on a heap of pull-tails—the refuse after the straight straw

had been drawn—thrown up at the further side of the barn. Her

succumbing had been as largely owning to agitation at the re-opening

the subject of her separation from her husband as to the hard work. She

lay in a state of percipience without volition, and the rustle of the

straw and the cutting of the ears by the others had the weight of

bodily touches.

She could hear from her corner, in addition to these noises, the murmur

of their voices. She felt certain that they were continuing the subject

already broached, but their voices were so low that she could not catch

the words. At last Tess grew more and more anxious to know what they

were saying, and, persuading herself that she felt better, she got up

and resumed work.

Then Izz Huett broke down. She had walked more than a dozen miles the

previous evening, had gone to bed at midnight, and had risen again at

five o’clock. Marian alone, thanks to her bottle of liquor and her

stoutness of build, stood the strain upon back and arms without

suffering. Tess urged Izz to leave off, agreeing, as she felt better,

to finish the day without her, and make equal division of the number of

sheaves.

Izz accepted the offer gratefully, and disappeared through the great

door into the snowy track to her lodging. Marian, as was the case every

afternoon at this time on account of the bottle, began to feel in a

romantic vein.

“I should not have thought it of him—never!” she said in a dreamy tone.

“And I loved him so! I didn’t mind his having _you_. But this about Izz

is too bad!”

Tess, in her start at the words, narrowly missed cutting off a finger

with the bill-hook.

“Is it about my husband?” she stammered.

“Well, yes. Izz said, ‘Don’t ’ee tell her’; but I am sure I can’t help

it! It was what he wanted Izz to do. He wanted her to go off to Brazil

with him.”

Tess’s face faded as white as the scene without, and its curves

straightened. “And did Izz refuse to go?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Anyhow he changed his mind.”

“Pooh—then he didn’t mean it! ’Twas just a man’s jest!”

“Yes he did; for he drove her a good-ways towards the station.”

“He didn’t take her!”

They pulled on in silence till Tess, without any premonitory symptoms,

burst out crying.

“There!” said Marian. “Now I wish I hadn’t told ’ee!”

“No. It is a very good thing that you have done! I have been living on

in a thirtover, lackaday way, and have not seen what it may lead to! I

ought to have sent him a letter oftener. He said I could not go to him,

but he didn’t say I was not to write as often as I liked. I won’t dally

like this any longer! I have been very wrong and neglectful in leaving

everything to be done by him!”

The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and they could see to work no

longer. When Tess had reached home that evening, and had entered into

the privacy of her little white-washed chamber, she began impetuously

writing a letter to Clare. But falling into doubt, she could not finish

it. Afterwards she took the ring from the ribbon on which she wore it

next her heart, and retained it on her finger all night, as if to

fortify herself in the sensation that she was really the wife of this

elusive lover of hers, who could propose that Izz should go with him

abroad, so shortly after he had left her. Knowing that, how could she

write entreaties to him, or show that she cared for him any more?