第 十四 章 · Chapter XIV An Assault

. Chapter XIV An Assault

It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours, attacked

by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces

within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they should be dried

away to nothing.

The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look,

demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His

present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene,

explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a

saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a

golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in

the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with

interest for him.

His light, a little later, broke though chinks of cottage shutters,

throwing stripes like red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of drawers,

and other furniture within; and awakening harvesters who were not

already astir.

But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were two broad arms

of painted wood, which rose from the margin of yellow cornfield hard by

Marlott village. They, with two others below, formed the revolving

Maltese cross of the reaping-machine, which had been brought to the

field on the previous evening to be ready for operations this day. The

paint with which they were smeared, intensified in hue by the sunlight,

imparted to them a look of having been dipped in liquid fire.

The field had already been “opened”; that is to say, a lane a few feet

wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole circumference

of the field for the first passage of the horses and machine.

Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down the

lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top struck

the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were enjoying

sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn. They disappeared from

the lane between the two stone posts which flanked the nearest

field-gate.

Presently there arose from within a ticking like the love-making of the

grasshopper. The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation of three

horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible over the

gate, a driver sitting upon one of the hauling horses, and an attendant

on the seat of the implement. Along one side of the field the whole

wain went, the arms of the mechanical reaper revolving slowly, till it

passed down the hill quite out of sight. In a minute it came up on the

other side of the field at the same equable pace; the glistening brass

star in the forehead of the fore horse first catching the eye as it

rose into view over the stubble, then the bright arms, and then the

whole machine.

The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with each

circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to a smaller area as the

morning wore on. Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards

as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge,

and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when, their covert

shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they were huddled

together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of upright wheat

fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and they were every

one put to death by the sticks and stones of the harvesters.

The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps,

each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the active

binders in the rear laid their hands—mainly women, but some of them men

in print shirts, and trousers supported round their waists by leather

straps, rendering useless the two buttons behind, which twinkled and

bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each wearer, as if they

were a pair of eyes in the small of his back.

But those of the other sex were the most interesting of this company of

binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she

becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object

set down therein as at ordinary times. A field-man is a personality

afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost

her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated

herself with it.

The women—or rather girls, for they were mostly young—wore drawn cotton

bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and gloves to

prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble. There was one wearing

a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured tight-sleeved gown,

another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the reaping-machine; and

others, older, in the brown-rough “wropper” or over-all—the

old-established and most appropriate dress of the field-woman, which

the young ones were abandoning. This morning the eye returns

involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she being the most

flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all. But her bonnet is pulled

so far over her brow that none of her face is disclosed while she

binds, though her complexion may be guessed from a stray twine or two

of dark brown hair which extends below the curtain of her bonnet.

Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual attention is that she never

courts it, though the other women often gaze around them.

Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the sheaf last

finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her left

palm to bring them even. Then, stooping low, she moves forward,

gathering the corn with both hands against her knees, and pushing her

left gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other side,

holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover. She brings the

ends of the bond together, and kneels on the sheaf while she ties it,

beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the breeze. A bit

of her naked arm is visible between the buff leather of the gauntlet

and the sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on its feminine

smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds.

At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged apron,

or to pull her bonnet straight. Then one can see the oval face of a

handsome young woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy clinging

tresses, which seem to clasp in a beseeching way anything they fall

against. The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular, the red lips

thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.

It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d’Urberville, somewhat changed—the

same, but not the same; at the present stage of her existence living as

a stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that she

was in. After a long seclusion she had come to a resolve to undertake

outdoor work in her native village, the busiest season of the year in

the agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that she could do

within the house being so remunerative for the time as harvesting in

the fields.

The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess’s,

the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille at

the completion of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on end

against those of the rest, till a shock, or “stitch” as it was here

called, of ten or a dozen was formed.

They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work proceeded as

before. As the hour of eleven drew near a person watching her might

have noticed that every now and then Tess’s glance flitted wistfully to

the brow of the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing. On the

verge of the hour the heads of a group of children, of ages ranging

from six to fourteen, rose over the stubbly convexity of the hill.

The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not pause.

The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its

corner draggling on the stubble, carried in her arms what at first

sight seemed to be a doll, but proved to be an infant in long clothes.

Another brought some lunch. The harvesters ceased working, took their

provisions, and sat down against one of the shocks. Here they fell to,

the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a cup.

Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her labours. She

sat down at the end of the shock, her face turned somewhat away from

her companions. When she had deposited herself a man in a rabbit-skin

cap, and with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt, held the cup of

ale over the top of the shock for her to drink. But she did not accept

his offer. As soon as her lunch was spread she called up the big girl,

her sister, and took the baby of her, who, glad to be relieved of the

burden, went away to the next shock and joined the other children

playing there. Tess, with a curiously stealthy yet courageous movement,

and with a still rising colour, unfastened her frock and began suckling

the child.

The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the

other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with

absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no

longer yield a stream. All the women but Tess fell into animated talk,

and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.

When the infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat it upright in

her lap, and looking into the far distance, dandled it with a gloomy

indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she fell to

violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could never leave

off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which strangely

combined passionateness with contempt.

“She’s fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en, and

say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard,” observed

the woman in the red petticoat.

“She’ll soon leave off saying that,” replied the one in buff. “Lord,

’tis wonderful what a body can get used to o’ that sort in time!”

“A little more than persuading had to do wi’ the coming o’t, I reckon.

There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in The Chase;

and it mid ha’ gone hard wi’ a certain party if folks had come along.”

“Well, a little more, or a little less, ’twas a thousand pities that it

should have happened to she, of all others. But ’tis always the

comeliest! The plain ones be as safe as churches—hey, Jenny?” The

speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined as

plain.

It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy

to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her

flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor

grey nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred

others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises—shade

behind shade—tint beyond tint—around pupils that had no bottom; an

almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character

inherited from her race.

A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the

fields this week for the first time during many months. After wearing

and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that

lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated her. She

felt that she would do well to be useful again—to taste anew sweet

independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it

was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over

them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never been, and

she herself grassed down and forgotten. Meanwhile the trees were just

as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as

ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief,

nor sickened because of her pain.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly—the

thought of the world’s concern at her situation—was founded on an

illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a

structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind

besides, Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no

more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable

the livelong night and day it was only this much to them—“Ah, she makes

herself unhappy.” If she tried to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to

take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers, the baby, she could only be

this idea to them—“Ah, she bears it very well.” Moreover, alone in a

desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to her?

Not greatly. If she could have been but just created, to discover

herself as a spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as

the parent of a nameless child, would the position have caused her to

despair? No, she would have taken it calmly, and found pleasure

therein. Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional

aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

Whatever Tess’s reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress herself

up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the fields,

harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then. This was why she had

borne herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly in the face at

times, even when holding the baby in her arms.

The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and stretched their limbs,

and extinguished their pipes. The horses, which had been unharnessed

and fed, were again attached to the scarlet machine. Tess, having

quickly eaten her own meal, beckoned to her eldest sister to come and

take away the baby, fastened her dress, put on the buff gloves again,

and stooped anew to draw a bond from the last completed sheaf for the

tying of the next.

In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were

continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters. Then

they all rode home in one of the largest wagons, in the company of a

broad tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the eastwards,

its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten

Tuscan saint. Tess’s female companions sang songs, and showed

themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out of doors,

though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing in a few

verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry green wood

and came back a changed state. There are counterpoises and

compensations in life; and the event which had made of her a social

warning had also for the moment made her the most interesting personage

in the village to many. Their friendliness won her still farther away

from herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and she became

almost gay.

But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on

the natural side of her which knew no social law. When she reached home

it was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly taken ill

since the afternoon. Some such collapse had been probable, so tender

and puny was its frame; but the event came as a shock nevertheless.

The baby’s offence against society in coming into the world was

forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul’s desire was to continue that

offence by preserving the life of the child. However, it soon grew

clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the

flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured.

And when she had discovered this she was plunged into a misery which

transcended that of the child’s simple loss. Her baby had not been

baptized.

Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the

consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done,

burn she must, and there was an end of it. Like all village girls, she

was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully studied the

histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences to be drawn

therefrom. But when the same question arose with regard to the baby, it

had a very different colour. Her darling was about to die, and no

salvation.

It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she might

send for the parson. The moment happened to be one at which her

father’s sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest, and

his sensitiveness to the smudge which Tess had set upon that nobility

most pronounced, for he had just returned from his weekly booze at

Rolliver’s Inn. No parson should come inside his door, he declared,

prying into his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it had become

more necessary than ever to hide them. He locked the door and put the

key in his pocket.

The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond measure, Tess retired

also. She was continually waking as she lay, and in the middle of the

night found that the baby was still worse. It was obviously

dying—quietly and painlessly, but none the less surely.

In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed. The clock struck the

solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and

malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts. She thought of the

child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double doom

for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend tossing

it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for heating the

oven on baking days; to which picture she added many other quaint and

curious details of torment sometimes taught the young in this Christian

country. The lurid presentment so powerfully affected her imagination

in the silence of the sleeping house that her nightgown became damp

with perspiration, and the bedstead shook with each throb of her heart.

The infant’s breathing grew more difficult, and the mother’s mental

tension increased. It was useless to devour the little thing with

kisses; she could stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about

the room.

“O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!” she cried.

“Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the

child!”

She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured incoherent

supplications for a long while, till she suddenly started up.

“Ah! perhaps baby can be saved! Perhaps it will be just the same!”

She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have

shone in the gloom surrounding her. She lit a candle, and went to a

second and a third bed under the wall, where she awoke her young

sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied the same room. Pulling out

the washing-stand so that she could get behind it, she poured some

water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting their hands

together with fingers exactly vertical. While the children, scarcely

awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger and

larger, remained in this position, she took the baby from her bed—a

child’s child—so immature as scarce to seem a sufficient personality to

endow its producer with the maternal title. Tess then stood erect with

the infant on her arm beside the basin; the next sister held the

Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church held it before the

parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her child.

Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her long

white nightgown, a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging straight

down her back to her waist. The kindly dimness of the weak candle

abstracted from her form and features the little blemishes which

sunlight might have revealed—the stubble scratches upon her wrists, and

the weariness of her eyes—her high enthusiasm having a transfiguring

effect upon the face which had been her undoing, showing it as a thing

of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity which was almost regal.

The little ones kneeling round, their sleepy eyes blinking and red,

awaited her preparations full of a suspended wonder which their

physical heaviness at that hour would not allow to become active.

The most impressed of them said:

“Be you really going to christen him, Tess?”

The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.

“What’s his name going to be?”

She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a phrase in the

book of Genesis came into her head as she proceeded with the baptismal

service, and now she pronounced it:

“SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and

of the Holy Ghost.”

She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.

“Say ‘Amen,’ children.”

The tiny voices piped in obedient response, “Amen!”

Tess went on:

“We receive this child”—and so forth—“and do sign him with the sign of

the Cross.”

Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently drew an immense

cross upon the baby with her forefinger, continuing with the customary

sentences as to his manfully fighting against sin, the world, and the

devil, and being a faithful soldier and servant unto his life’s end.

She duly went on with the Lord’s Prayer, the children lisping it after

her in a thin gnat-like wail, till, at the conclusion, raising their

voices to clerk’s pitch, they again piped into silence, “Amen!”

Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy of

the sacrament, poured forth from the bottom of her heart the

thanksgiving that follows, uttering it boldly and triumphantly in the

stopt-diapason note which her voice acquired when her heart was in her

speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her. The

ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a

glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each

cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils

shone like a diamond. The children gazed up at her with more and more

reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning. She did not look

like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering, and awful—a

divine personage with whom they had nothing in common.

Poor Sorrow’s campaign against sin, the world, and the devil was doomed

to be of limited brilliancy—luckily perhaps for himself, considering

his beginnings. In the blue of the morning that fragile soldier and

servant breathed his last, and when the other children awoke they cried

bitterly, and begged Sissy to have another pretty baby.

The calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained

with her in the infant’s loss. In the daylight, indeed, she felt her

terrors about his soul to have been somewhat exaggerated; whether well

founded or not, she had no uneasiness now, reasoning that if Providence

would not ratify such an act of approximation she, for one, did not

value the kind of heaven lost by the irregularity—either for herself or

for her child.

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired—that intrusive creature, that

bastard gift of shameless Nature, who respects not the social law; a

waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew

not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom the

cottage interior was the universe, the week’s weather climate, new-born

babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human knowledge.

Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal, wondered if it were

doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child.

Nobody could tell this but the parson of the parish, and he was a

new-comer, and did not know her. She went to his house after dusk, and

stood by the gate, but could not summon courage to go in. The

enterprise would have been abandoned if she had not by accident met him

coming homeward as she turned away. In the gloom she did not mind

speaking freely.

“I should like to ask you something, sir.”

He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the story of the

baby’s illness and the extemporized ordinance. “And now, sir,” she

added earnestly, “can you tell me this—will it be just the same for him

as if you had baptized him?”

Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he

should have been called in for had been unskilfully botched by his

customers among themselves, he was disposed to say no. Yet the dignity

of the girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined to affect

his nobler impulses—or rather those that he had left in him after ten

years of endeavour to graft technical belief on actual scepticism. The

man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory fell to the

man.

“My dear girl,” he said, “it will be just the same.”

“Then will you give him a Christian burial?” she asked quickly.

The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby’s illness, he had

conscientiously gone to the house after nightfall to perform the rite,

and, unaware that the refusal to admit him had come from Tess’s father

and not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity for its

irregular administration.

“Ah—that’s another matter,” he said.

“Another matter—why?” asked Tess, rather warmly.

“Well—I would willingly do so if only we two were concerned. But I must

not—for certain reasons.”

“Just for once, sir!”

“Really I must not.”

“O sir!” She seized his hand as she spoke.

He withdrew it, shaking his head.

“Then I don’t like you!” she burst out, “and I’ll never come to your

church no more!”

“Don’t talk so rashly.”

“Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don’t?... Will it be

just the same? Don’t for God’s sake speak as saint to sinner, but as

you yourself to me myself—poor me!”

How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he supposed

himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman’s power to

tell, though not to excuse. Somewhat moved, he said in this case also—

“It will be just the same.”

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman’s

shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at

the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby

corner of God’s allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all

unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the

conjecturally damned are laid. In spite of the untoward surroundings,

however, Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a piece of

string, and having bound it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head

of the grave one evening when she could enter the churchyard without

being seen, putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in a

little jar of water to keep them alive. What matter was it that on the

outside of the jar the eye of mere observation noted the words

“Keelwell’s Marmalade”? The eye of maternal affection did not see them

in its vision of higher things.