One fine day Tess and 'Liza-Lu worked on here with their neighbours

till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the white pegs that

divided the plots. As soon as twilight succeeded to sunset the flare

of the couch-grass and cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the

allotments fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under

the dense smoke as wafted by the wind. When a fire glowed, banks

of smoke, blown level along the ground, would themselves become

illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening the workpeople from one

another; and the meaning of the "pillar of a cloud", which was a wall

by day and a light by night, could be understood.

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As evening thickened, some of the gardening men and women gave over

for the night, but the greater number remained to get their planting

done, Tess being among them, though she sent her sister home. It was

on one of the couch-burning plots that she laboured with her fork,

its four shining prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods

in little clicks. Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke

of her fire; then it would leave her figure free, irradiated by the

brassy glare from the heap. She was oddly dressed to-night, and

presented a somewhat staring aspect, her attire being a gown bleached

by many washings, with a short black jacket over it, the effect of

the whole being that of a wedding and funeral guest in one. The

women further back wore white aprons, which, with their pale faces,

were all that could be seen of them in the gloom, except when at

moments they caught a flash from the flames.

Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which formed the

boundary of the field rose against the pale opalescence of the lower

sky. Above, Jupiter hung like a full-blown jonquil, so bright

as almost to throw a shade. A few small nondescript stars were

appearing elsewhere. In the distance a dog barked, and wheels

occasionally rattled along the dry road.

Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it was not late;

and though the air was fresh and keen there was a whisper of spring

in it that cheered the workers on. Something in the place, the

hours, the crackling fires, the fantastic mysteries of light and

shade, made others as well as Tess enjoy being there. Nightfall,

which in the frost of winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of

summer as a lover, came as a tranquillizer on this March day.

Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of all were on the

soil as its turned surface was revealed by the fires. Hence as Tess

stirred the clods and sang her foolish little songs with scarce

now a hope that Clare would ever hear them, she did not for a long

time notice the person who worked nearest to her--a man in a long

smockfrock who, she found, was forking the same plot as herself, and

whom she supposed her father had sent there to advance the work.

She became more conscious of him when the direction of his digging

brought him closer. Sometimes the smoke divided them; then it

swerved, and the two were visible to each other but divided from all

the rest. Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak to her.

Nor did she think of him further than to recollect that he had not

been there when it was broad daylight, and that she did not know

him as any one of the Marlott labourers, which was no wonder, her

absences having been so long and frequent of late years. By-and-by

he dug so close to her that the fire-beams were reflected as

distinctly from the steel prongs of his fork as from her own. On

going up to the fire to throw a pitch of dead weeds upon it, she

found that he did the same on the other side. The fire flared up,

and she beheld the face of d'Urberville.




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