Tess of the D'Urbervilles Page 4

  As usual, Mrs. Durbeyfield was balanced on one foot beside the tub, the other being engaged in the aforesaid business of rocking her youngest child. The cradle-rockers had done hard duty for so many years, under the weight of so many children, on that flagstone floor, that they were worn nearly flat, in consequence of which a huge jerk accompanied each swing of the cot, flinging the baby from side to side like a weaver’s shuttle, as Mrs. Durbeyfield, excited by her song, trod the rocker with all the spring that was left in her after a long day’s seething in the suds.

  Nick-knock, nick-knock, went the cradle; the candle-flame stretched itself tall and began jigging up and down; the water dribbled from the matron’s elbows, and the song galloped on to the end of the verse, Mrs. Durbeyfield regarding her daughter the while. Even now, when burdened with a young family, Joan Durbeyfield was a passionate lover of tune. No ditty floated into Blackmoor Vale from the outer world but Tess’s mother caught up its notation in a week.

  There still faintly beamed from the woman’s features something of the freshness, and even the prettiness, of her youth; rendering it probable that the personal charms which Tess could boast of were in main part her mother’s gift, and therefore unknightly, unhistorical.

  “I’ll rock the cradle for ‘ee, Mother,” said the daughter gently. “Or I’ll take off my best frock and help you wring up? I thought you had finished long ago.”

  Her mother bore Tess no ill-will for leaving the housework to her single-handed efforts for so long; indeed, Joan seldom upbraided her thereon at any time, feeling but slightly the lack of Tess’s assistance whilst her instinctive plan for relieving herself of her labours lay in postponing them. To-night, however, she was even in a blither mood than usual. There was a dreaminess, a preoccupation, an exaltation, in the maternal look which the girl could not understand.

  “Well, I’m glad you’ve come,” her mother said as soon as the last note had passed out of her. “I want to go and fetch your father; but what’s more’n that, I want to tell ‘ee what have happened. Y’ll be fess enough, my poppet, when th’st know!” (Mrs. Durbeyfield habitually spoke the dialect; her daughter, who had passed the Sixth Standard in the National School under a London-trained mistress, spoke two languages; the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad and to persons of quality.)

  “Since I’ve been away?” Tess asked.

  “Aye!”

  “Had it anything to do with Father’s making such a mommet of himself in thik carriage this afternoon? Why did ‘er? I felt inclined to sink into the ground with shame!”

  “That wer all a part of the larry! We’ve been found to be the greatest gentlefolk in the whole county—reaching all back long before Oliver Grumble’s time—to the days of the Pagan Turks—with monuments, and vaults, and crests, and ‘scutcheons, and the Lord knows what all. In Saint Charles’s days we was made Knights o’ the Royal Oak, our real name being d’Urberville! ... Don’t that make your bosom plim? ‘Twas on this account that your father rode home in the vlee; not because he’d been drinking, as people supposed.”

  “I’m glad of that. Will it do us any good, Mother?”

  “Oh yes! ‘Tis thoughted that great things may come o’t. No doubt a mampus of volk of our own rank will be down here in their carriages as soon as ’tis known. Your father learnt it on his way hwome from Shaston, and he has been telling me the whole pedigree of the matter.”

  “Where is Father now?” asked Tess suddenly.

  Her mother gave irrelevant information by way of answer: “He called to see the doctor to-day in Shaston. It is not consumption at all, it seems. It is fat round his heart, ‘a says. There, it is like this.” Joan Durbeyfield, as she spoke, curved a sodden thumb and forefinger to the shape of the letter C and used the other forefinger as a pointer. “ ’At the present moment,‘ he says to your father, ’your heart is enclosed all round there and all round there; this space is still open,‘ ’a says. ‘As soon as it do meet, so’ ”—Mrs. Durbeyfield closed her fingers into a circle complete—“ ’off you will go like a shadder, Mr. Durbeyfield,‘ ’a says. ‘You mid last ten years; you mid go off in ten months or ten days.’ ”

  Tess looked alarmed. Her father possibly to go behind the eternal cloud so soon, notwithstanding this sudden greatness!

  “But where is Father?” she asked again.

  Her mother put on a deprecating look. “Now, don’t you be bursting out angry! The poor man—he felt so rafted after his uplifting by the pa‘son’s news that he went up to Rolliver’s half an hour ago. He do want to get up his strength for his journey to-morrow with that load of beehives, which must be delivered, family or no. He’ll have to start shortly after twelve to-night as the distance is so long.”

  “Get up his strength!” said Tess impetuously, the tears welling to her eyes. “Oh, my God! Go to a public-house to get up his strength! And you as well agreed as he, Mother!”

  Her rebuke and her mood seemed to fill the whole room and to impart a cowed look to the furniture, and candle, and children playing about, and to her mother’s face.

  “No,” said the latter touchily, “I be not agreed. I have been waiting for ‘ee to bide and keep house while I go to fetch him.”

  “I’ll go.”

  “Oh no, Tess. You see, it would be no use.”

  Tess did not expostulate. She knew what her mother’s objection meant. Mrs. Durbeyfield’s jacket and bonnet were already hanging slyly upon a chair by her side, in readiness for this contemplated jaunt, the reason for which the matron deplored more than its necessity.

  “And take the Compleat Fortune-Teller to the outhouse,” Joan continued, rapidly wiping her hands and donning the garments.

  The Compleat Fortune-Teller was an old thick volume, which lay on a table at her elbow, so worn by pocketing that the margins had reached the edge of the type. Tess took it up, and her mother started.

  This going to hunt up her shiftless husband at the inn was one of Mrs. Durbeyfield’s still-extant enjoyments in the muck and muddle of rearing children. To discover him at Rolliver‘s, to sit there for an hour or two by his side and dismiss all thought and care of the children during the interval, made her happy. A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came over life then. Troubles and other realities took on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed body and soul. The youngsters, not immediately within sight, seemed rather bright and desirable appurtenances than otherwise; the incidents of daily life were not without hu morousness and jollity in their aspect there. She felt a little as she had used to feel when she sat by her now-wedded husband in the same spot during his wooing, shutting her eyes to his defects of character and regarding him only in his ideal presentation as lover.

  Tess, being left alone with the younger children, went first to the outhouse with the fortune-telling book and stuffed it into the thatch. A curious fetishistic fear of this grimy volume on the part of her mother prevented her ever allowing it to stay in the house all night, and hither it was brought back whenever it had been consulted. Between the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore, dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter, with her trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an infinitely Revised Code, there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily understood. When they were together, the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed.

  Returning along the garden-path, Tess mused on what the mother could have wished to ascertain from the book on this particular day. She guessed the recent ancestral discovery to bear upon it, but did not divine that it solely concerned herself. Dismissing this, however, she busied herself with sprinkling the linen dried during the daytime, in company with her nine-year-old brother Abraham and her sister Eliza-Louisa of twelve and a half, called “Liza-Lu,” the youngest ones being put to bed. There was an interval of four years and more between Tess and the next of the family, the two wh
o had filled the gap having died in their infancy, and this lent her a deputy-maternal attitude when she was alone with her juniors. Next in juvenility to Abraham came two more girls, Hope and Modesty; then a boy of three, and then the baby, who had just completed his first year.

  All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship—entirely dependent on the judgement of the two Durbeyfield adults for their pleasures, their necessities, their health, even their existence. If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these half-dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with them—six helpless creatures who had never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure gets his authority for speaking of “Nature’s holy plan.”

  It grew later, and neither father nor mother reappeared. Tess looked out of the door and took a mental journey through Marlott. The village was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere: she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand.

  Her mother’s fetching simply meant one more to fetch. Tess began to perceive that a man in indifferent health who proposed to start on a journey before one in the morning ought not to be at an inn at this late hour, celebrating his ancient blood.

  “Abraham,” she said to her little brother, “do you put on your hat—you bain’t afraid?—and go up to Rolliver’s and see what has gone wi’ Father and Mother.”

  The boy jumped promptly from his seat and opened the door, and the night swallowed him up. Half an hour passed yet again; neither man, woman, nor child returned. Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.

  “I must go myself,” she said.

  Liza-Lu then went to bed, and Tess, locking them all in, started on her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.

  4

  ROLLIVER’S INN, the single alehouse at this end of the long and broken village, could only boast of an off-licence; hence, as nobody could legally drink on the premises, the amount of overt accommodation for consumers was strictly limited to a little board about six inches wide and two yards long, fixed to the garden palings by pieces of wire, so as to form a ledge. On this board thirsty strangers deposited their cups as they stood in the road and drank, and threw the dregs on the dusty ground to the pattern of Polynesia, and wished they could have a restful seat inside.

  Thus the strangers. But there were also local customers who felt the same wish; and where there’s a will there’s a way.

  In a large bedroom upstairs, the window of which was thickly curtained with a great woollen shawl lately discarded by the landlady, Mrs. Rolliver, were gathered on this evening nearly a dozen persons, all seeking beatitude; all old inhabitants of the nearer end of Marlott and frequenters of this retreat. Not only did the distance to The Pure Drop, the fully licensed tavern at the further part of the dispersed village, render its accommodation practically unavailable for dwellers at this end, but the far more serious question, the quality of the liquor, confirmed the prevalent opinion that it was better to drink with Rolliver in a corner of the housetop than with the other landlord in a wide house.

  A gaunt four-post bedstead which stood in the room afforded sitting-space for several persons gathered round three of its sides; a couple more men had elevated themselves on a chest of drawers; another rested on the oak-carved “cwoffer”; two on the wash-stand; another on the stool; and thus all were, somehow, seated at their ease. The stage of mental comfort to which they had arrived at this hour was one wherein their souls expanded beyond their skins and spread their personalities warmly through the room. In this process the chamber and its furniture grew more and more dignified and luxurious; the shawl hanging at the window took upon itself the richness of tapestry; the brass handles of the chest of drawers were as golden knockers; and the carved bed-posts seemed to have some kinship with the magnificent pillars of Solomon’s temple.

  Mrs. Durbeyfield, having quickly walked hitherward after parting from Tess, opened the front door, crossed the downstairs room, which was in deep gloom, and then unfastened the stair-door like one whose fingers knew the tricks of the latches well. Her ascent of the crooked staircase was a slower process, and her face, as it rose into the light above the last stair, encountered the gaze of all the party assembled in the bedroom.

  “—Being a few private friends I’ve asked in to keep up club-walking at my own expense,” the landlady exclaimed at the sound of footsteps, as glibly as a child repeating the catechism, while she peered over the stairs. “Oh, ‘tis you, Mrs. Durbeyfield—Lard—how you frightened me! I thought it might be some gaffer sent by Gover’ment.”

  Mrs. Durbeyfield was welcomed with glances and nods by the remainder of the conclave, and turned to where her husband sat. He was humming absently to himself in a low tone: “I be as good as some folks here and there! I’ve got a great family vault at Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill and finer skillentons than any man in Wessex!”

  “I’ve something to tell ‘ee that’s come into my head about that—a grand projick!” whispered his cheerful wife. “Here, John, don’t‘ee see me?” She nudged him while he, looking through her as through a window-pane, went on with his recitative.

  “Hush! Don’t ‘ee sing so loud, my good man,” said the landlady ; “in case any member of the Gover’ment should be passing, and take away my licends.”

  “He’s told ‘ee what’s happened to us, I suppose?” asked Mrs. Durbeyfield.

  “Yes—in a way. D‘ye think there’s any money hanging by it?”

  “Ah, that’s the secret,” said Joan Durbeyfield sagely. “However, ‘tis well to be kin to a coach even if you don’t ride in en.” She dropped her public voice and continued in a low tone to her husband: “I’ve been thinking since you brought the news that there’s a great rich lady out by Trantridge, on the edge o’ The Chase, of the name of d’Urberville.”

  “Hey—what’s that?” said Sir John.

  She repeated the information. “That lady must be our relation,” she said. “And my projick is to send Tess to claim kin.”

  “There is a lady of the name, now you mention it,” said Durbeyfield. “Pa‘son Tringham didn’t think of that. But she’s nothing beside we—a junior branch of us, no doubt, hailing long since King Norman’s day.”

  While this question was being discussed neither of the pair noticed, in their preoccupation, that little Abraham had crept into the room and was awaiting an opportunity of asking them to return.

  “She is rich, and she’d be sure to take notice o’ the maid,” continued Mrs. Durbeyfield; “and ‘twill be a very good thing. I don’t see why two branches o’ one family should not be on visiting terms.”

  “Yes, and we’ll all claim kin!” said Abraham brightly from under the bedstead. “And we’ll all go and see her when Tess has gone to live with her; and we’ll ride in her coach and wear black clothes!”

  “How do you come here, child? What nonsense be ye talking! Go away and play on the stairs till Father and Mother be ready! ... Well, Tess ought to go to this other member of our family. She’d be sure to win the lady—Tess would; and likely enough ‘twould lead to some noble gentleman marrying her. In short, I know it.”

  “How?”

  “I tried her fate in the Fortune-Teller, and it brought out that very thing! ... You should ha’ seen how pretty she looked today ; her skin is as sumple as a duchess‘.”

  “What says the maid herself to going?”

  “I’ve not asked her. She don’t know there is any such lady relation yet. But it would certainly put her in the way of a grand marr
iage, and she won’t say nay to going.”

  “Tess is queer.”

  “But she’s tractable at bottom. Leave her to me.”

  Though this conversation had been private, sufficient of its import reached the understandings of those around to suggest to them that the Durbeyfields had weightier concerns to talk of now than common folks had, and that Tess, their pretty eldest daughter, had fine prospects in store.

  “Tess is a fine figure o’ fun, as I said to myself to-day when I zeed her vamping round parish with the rest,” observed one of the elderly boozers in an undertone. “But Joan Durbeyfield must mind that she don’t get green malt in floor.” It was a local phrase which had a peculiar meaning, and there was no reply.

  The conversation became inclusive, and presently other footsteps were heard crossing the room below.

  “—Being a few private friends asked in to-night to keep up club-walking at my own expense.” The landlady had rapidly reused the formula she kept on hand for intruders before she recognized that the new-comer was Tess.

  Even to her mother’s gaze the girl’s young features looked sadly out of place amid the alcoholic vapours which floated here as no unsuitable medium for wrinkled middle age; and hardly was a reproachful flash from Tess’s dark eyes needed to make her father and mother rise from their seats, hastily finish their ale, and descend the stairs behind her, Mrs. Rolliver’s caution following their footsteps.

  “No noise, please, if ye’ll be so good, my dears; or I mid lose my licends, and be summons‘d, and I don’t know what all! Night t’ye!”

  They went home together, Tess holding one arm of her father, and Mrs. Durbeyfield the other. He had, in truth, drunk very little—not a fourth of the quantity which a systematic tippler could carry to church on a Sunday afternoon without a hitch in his eastings or genuflexions; but the weakness of Sir John’s constitution made mountains of his petty sins in this kind. On reaching the fresh air, he was sufficiently unsteady to incline the row of three at one moment as if they were marching to London and at another as if they were marching to Bath—which produced a comical effect, frequent enough in families on nocturnal home-goings, and, like most comical effects, not quite so comic after all. The two women valiantly disguised these forced excursions and countermarches as well as they could from Durbeyfield, their cause, and from Abraham, and from themselves; and so they approached by degrees their own door, the head of the family bursting suddenly into his former refrain as he drew near, as if to fortify his soul at sight of the smallness of his present residence: “I’ve got a fam—ily vault at Kingsbere!”