The man who fed was weary, and

Tess could see that the red nape of his neck was encrusted with dirt

and husks. She still stood at her post, her flushed and perspiring

face coated with the corndust, and her white bonnet embrowned by it.

She was the only woman whose place was upon the machine so as to be

shaken bodily by its spinning, and the decrease of the stack now

separated her from Marian and Izz, and prevented their changing

duties with her as they had done. The incessant quivering, in

which every fibre of her frame participated, had thrown her into a

stupefied reverie in which her arms worked on independently of her

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consciousness. She hardly knew where she was, and did not hear Izz

Huett tell her from below that her hair was tumbling down.

By degrees the freshest among them began to grow cadaverous and

saucer-eyed. Whenever Tess lifted her head she beheld always the

great upgrown straw-stack, with the men in shirt-sleeves upon it,

against the gray north sky; in front of it the long red elevator

like a Jacob's ladder, on which a perpetual stream of threshed straw

ascended, a yellow river running uphill, and spouting out on the top

of the rick. She knew that Alec d'Urberville was still on the scene, observing

her from some point or other, though she could not say where. There

was an excuse for his remaining, for when the threshed rick drew

near its final sheaves a little ratting was always done, and men

unconnected with the threshing sometimes dropped in for that

performance--sporting characters of all descriptions, gents with

terriers and facetious pipes, roughs with sticks and stones.

But there was another hour's work before the layer of live rats at

the base of the stack would be reached; and as the evening light in

the direction of the Giant's Hill by Abbot's-Cernel dissolved away,

the white-faced moon of the season arose from the horizon that lay

towards Middleton Abbey and Shottsford on the other side. For the

last hour or two Marian had felt uneasy about Tess, whom she could

not get near enough to speak to, the other women having kept up their

strength by drinking ale, and Tess having done without it through

traditionary dread, owing to its results at her home in childhood.

But Tess still kept going: if she could not fill her part she would

have to leave; and this contingency, which she would have regarded

with equanimity and even with relief a month or two earlier, had

become a terror since d'Urberville had begun to hover round her.




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