Chương Chương 15 · Chapter XV An Encounter and its Consequences

. Chapter XV An Encounter and its Consequences

“By experience,” says Roger Ascham, “we find out a short way by a long

wandering.” Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further

travel, and of what use is our experience to us then? Tess

Durbeyfield’s experience was of this incapacitating kind. At last she

had learned what to do; but who would now accept her doing?

If before going to the d’Urbervilles’ she had vigorously moved under

the guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to the

world in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on. But it

had not been in Tess’s power—nor is it in anybody’s power—to feel the

whole truth of golden opinions while it is possible to profit by them.

She—and how many more—might have ironically said to God with Saint

Augustine: “Thou hast counselled a better course than Thou hast

permitted.”

She remained at her father’s house during the winter months, plucking

fowls, or cramming turkeys and geese, or making clothes for her sisters

and brothers out of some finery which d’Urberville had given her, and

she had put by with contempt. Apply to him she would not. But she would

often clasp her hands behind her head and muse when she was supposed to

be working hard.

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of

the year; the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with its

dark background of The Chase; also the dates of the baby’s birth and

death; also her own birthday; and every other day individualized by

incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one

afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was

yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her

own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which

lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign

or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely

there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly

encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor’s thought

that some time in the future those who had known her would say: “It is

the ——th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died”; and there would be

nothing singular to their minds in the statement. Of that day, doomed

to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know the

place in month, week, season or year.

Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman.

Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face, and a note of tragedy

at times into her voice. Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent. She

became what would have been called a fine creature; her aspect was fair

and arresting; her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent experiences

of the last year or two had quite failed to demoralize. But for the

world’s opinion those experiences would have been simply a liberal

education.

She had held so aloof of late that her trouble, never generally known,

was nearly forgotten in Marlott. But it became evident to her that she

could never be really comfortable again in a place which had seen the

collapse of her family’s attempt to “claim kin”—and, through her, even

closer union—with the rich d’Urbervilles. At least she could not be

comfortable there till long years should have obliterated her keen

consciousness of it. Yet even now Tess felt the pulse of hopeful life

still warm within her; she might be happy in some nook which had no

memories. To escape the past and all that appertained thereto was to

annihilate it, and to do that she would have to get away.

Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? she would ask

herself. She might prove it false if she could veil bygones. The

recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not denied

to maidenhood alone.

She waited a long time without finding opportunity for a new departure.

A particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of germination was

almost audible in the buds; it moved her, as it moved the wild animals,

and made her passionate to go. At last, one day in early May, a letter

reached her from a former friend of her mother’s, to whom she had

addressed inquiries long before—a person whom she had never seen—that a

skilful milkmaid was required at a dairy-house many miles to the

southward, and that the dairyman would be glad to have her for the

summer months.

It was not quite so far off as could have been wished; but it was

probably far enough, her radius of movement and repute having been so

small. To persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical

degrees, parishes as counties, counties as provinces and kingdoms.

On one point she was resolved: there should be no more d’Urberville

air-castles in the dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be the

dairymaid Tess, and nothing more. Her mother knew Tess’s feeling on

this point so well, though no words had passed between them on the

subject, that she never alluded to the knightly ancestry now.

Yet such is human inconsistency that one of the interests of the new

place to her was the accidental virtues of its lying near her

forefathers’ country (for they were not Blakemore men, though her

mother was Blakemore to the bone). The dairy called Talbothays, for

which she was bound, stood not remotely from some of the former estates

of the d’Urbervilles, near the great family vaults of her granddames

and their powerful husbands. She would be able to look at them, and

think not only that d’Urberville, like Babylon, had fallen, but that

the individual innocence of a humble descendant could lapse as

silently. All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might

come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her

rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth,

surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope,

and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.

End of Phase the Second

Phase the Third:

The Rally