"But you have your indoor fears--eh?"
"Well--yes, sir."
"What of?"
"I couldn't quite say."
"The milk turning sour?"
"No."
"Life in general?"
"Yes, sir."
"Ah--so have I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather
serious, don't you think so?"
"It is--now you put it that way."
"All the same, I shouldn't have expected a young girl like you to see
it so just yet. How is it you do?"
She maintained a hesitating silence.
"Come, Tess, tell me in confidence."
She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things to her, and
replied shyly-"The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they?--that is, seem as
if they had. And the river says,--'Why do ye trouble me with your
looks?' And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a
line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting
smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem
very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of
me! Beware of me!' ... But YOU, sir, can raise up dreams with your
music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!"
He was surprised to find this young woman--who though but a milkmaid
had just that touch of rarity about her which might make her the
envied of her housemates--shaping such sad imaginings. She was
expressing in her own native phrases--assisted a little by her Sixth
Standard training--feelings which might almost have been called those
of the age--the ache of modernism. The perception arrested him less
when he reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in
great part but the latest fashion in definition--a more accurate
expression, by words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and
women have vaguely grasped for centuries.
Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so
young; more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic.
Not guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that
experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration. Tess's
passing corporeal blight had been her mental harvest.
Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family
and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a
mishap to be alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very
good reason. But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have
descended into the Valley of Humiliation, have felt with the man of
Uz--as she herself had felt two or three years ago--"My soul chooseth
strangling and death rather than my life. I loathe it; I would not
live alway." It was true that he was at present out of his class. But she knew
that was only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright's yard,
he was studying what he wanted to know. He did not milk cows because
he was obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning to be a
rich and prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder
of cattle. He would become an American or Australian Abraham,
commanding like a monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted
and his ring-straked, his men-servants and his maids. At times,
nevertheless, it did seem unaccountable to her that a decidedly
bookish, musical, thinking young man should have chosen deliberately
to be a farmer, and not a clergyman, like his father and brothers.