Speaker 1: Chapter twenty. The season developed and matured another year's installment
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
secrets in invisible jets and breathings. Derriman Criek'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 convenienceancies begin to
cramp natural feeling and the stress of threadbare modishness makes
too little of enough. Thus, past the leafy time, when
arborescence seems to be the only thing aimed at out
of doors, Tess and Claire 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 Claire
also stood, as yet on the debatable land between predilection
and love, where no profundities have been reached, no reflections
of 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 Claire, 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 exceeding novel, fresh
and interesting specimen of womankind. They met continually. They could
not help it. They met daily in that strain 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 the 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 angels, calling
him in a loud whisper, then woke her fellow dairy maids.
By the time that Tess was dressed, Claire was downstairs
and out in the humid air. The remaining maids and
the dairy man usually gave themselves another turn on the pillow,
and did not appear until 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, Tests 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, Tests 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 midsummer 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
miss stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence about 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 northeast.
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 milk maid, 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 watched 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 wooly 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 a
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 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 their meadows lay like a white sea,
out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous rocks.
Words was soar through it into the upper radiance, and
hang on the wings, 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 dairy maid, 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.
Heaven's sake, pop thy hands under the pump, deb upon
my soul. If the London folk only knowed of thee
and nice, lovely ways, they'd swallow their milk and butter
more mincingly than they'd do already. And that's saying a
good deal. The milking proceeded till towards the end Tess
and Claire, in common with the rest, could hear the
heavy breakfast table dragged out from the wall in the
kitchen by Missus Crick, this being the invariable preliminary to
each meal, the same horrible scrape accompanying its return journey
when the table had been cleared. End of Chapter twenty