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
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.