XV

"By experience," says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by

a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for

further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then? Tess

Durbeyfield's experience was of this incapacitating kind. At last

she had learned what to do; but who would now accept her doing?

If before going to the d'Urbervilles' she had vigorously moved under

the guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to

the world in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on.

But it had not been in Tess's power--nor is it in anybody's power--to

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feel the whole truth of golden opinions while it is possible to

profit by them. She--and how many more--might have ironically said

to God with Saint Augustine: "Thou hast counselled a better course

than Thou hast permitted."

She remained at her father's house during the winter months, plucking

fowls, or cramming turkeys and geese, or making clothes for her

sisters and brothers out of some finery which d'Urberville had given

her, and she had put by with contempt. Apply to him she would not.

But she would often clasp her hands behind her head and muse when she

was supposed to be working hard.

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution

of the year; the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with

its dark background of The Chase; also the dates of the baby's birth

and death; also her own birthday; and every other day individualized

by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought

one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there

was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that

of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day

which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving

no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less

surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each

yearly encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor's

thought that some time in the future those who had known her would

say: "It is the ----th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died"; and

there would be nothing singular to their minds in the statement. Of

that day, doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she

did not know the place in month, week, season or year.

Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman.

Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face, and a note of tragedy

at times into her voice. Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent.

She became what would have been called a fine creature; her aspect

was fair and arresting; her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent

experiences of the last year or two had quite failed to demoralize.

But for the world's opinion those experiences would have been simply

a liberal education. She had held so aloof of late that her trouble, never generally

known, was nearly forgotten in Marlott. But it became evident to her

that she could never be really comfortable again in a place which

had seen the collapse of her family's attempt to "claim kin"--and,

through her, even closer union--with the rich d'Urbervilles. At

least she could not be comfortable there till long years should have

obliterated her keen consciousness of it. Yet even now Tess felt the

pulse of hopeful life still warm within her; she might be happy in

some nook which had no memories. To escape the past and all that

appertained thereto was to annihilate it, and to do that she would

have to get away. Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? she would ask

herself. She might prove it false if she could veil bygones. The

recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not

denied to maidenhood alone.




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