"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.

She waited a long time without finding opportunity for a new departure.

A particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of germination was almost audible

in the buds; it moved her, as it moved the wild animals, and made her passionate to

go.

At last, one day in early May, a letter reached her from a former friend of her

mother's, to whom she had addressed inquiries long before--a person whom she

had never seen--that a skilful milkmaid was

required at a dairy-house many miles to the southward, and that the dairyman would be

glad to have her for the summer months.

It was not quite so far off as could have been wished; but it was probably far

enough, her radius of movement and repute having been so small.

To persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical degrees, parishes as counties,

counties as provinces and kingdoms.

On one point she was resolved: there should be no more d'Urberville air-castles in the

dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be the dairymaid Tess, and

nothing more.

Her mother knew Tess's feeling on this point so well, though no words had passed

between them on the subject, that she never alluded to the knightly ancestry now.

Yet such is human inconsistency that one of the interests of the new place to her was

the accidental virtues of its lying near her forefathers' country (for they were not

Blakemore men, though her mother was Blakemore to the bone).

The dairy called Talbothays, for which she was bound, stood not remotely from some of

the former estates of the d'Urbervilles, near the great family vaults of her

granddames and their powerful husbands.

She would be able to look at them, and think not only that d'Urberville, like

Babylon, had fallen, but that the individual innocence of a humble descendant

could lapse as silently.

All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her

ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the

twigs.

It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing

with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.

END OF PHASE THE SECOND

>

CHAPTER XVI

On a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May, between two and three years after

the return from Trantridge--silent, reconstructive years for Tess Durbeyfield--

she left her home for the second time.

Having packed up her luggage so that it could be sent to her later, she started in

a hired trap for the little town of Stourcastle, through which it was necessary

to pass on her journey, now in a direction

almost opposite to that of her first adventuring.

On the curve of the nearest hill she looked back regretfully at Marlott and her

father's house, although she had been so anxious to get away.

Her kindred dwelling there would probably continue their daily lives as heretofore,

with no great diminution of pleasure in their consciousness, although she would be

far off, and they deprived of her smile.

In a few days the children would engage in their games as merrily as ever, without the

sense of any gap left by her departure.

This leaving of the younger children she had decided to be for the best; were she to

remain they would probably gain less good by her precepts than harm by her example.

She went through Stourcastle without pausing and onward to a junction of

highways, where she could await a carrier's van that ran to the south-west; for the

railways which engirdled this interior

tract of country had never yet struck across it.

While waiting, however, there came along a farmer in his spring cart, driving

approximately in the direction that she wished to pursue.

Though he was a stranger to her she accepted his offer of a seat beside him,

ignoring that its motive was a mere tribute to her countenance.

He was going to Weatherbury, and by accompanying him thither she could walk the

remainder of the distance instead of travelling in the van by way of

Casterbridge.

Tess did not stop at Weatherbury, after this long drive, further than to make a

slight nondescript meal at noon at a cottage to which the farmer recommended

her.

Thence she started on foot, basket in hand, to reach the wide upland of heath dividing

this district from the low-lying meads of a further valley in which the dairy stood

that was the aim and end of her day's pilgrimage.

Tess had never before visited this part of the country, and yet she felt akin to the

landscape.

Not so very far to the left of her she could discern a dark patch in the scenery,

which inquiry confirmed her in supposing to be trees marking the environs of Kingsbere-

-in the church of which parish the bones of

her ancestors--her useless ancestors--lay entombed.

She had no admiration for them now; she almost hated them for the dance they had

led her; not a thing of all that had been theirs did she retain but the old seal and

spoon.

"Pooh--I have as much of mother as father in me!" she said.

"All my prettiness comes from her, and she was only a dairymaid."

The journey over the intervening uplands and lowlands of Egdon, when she reached

them, was a more troublesome walk than she had anticipated, the distance being

actually but a few miles.

It was two hours, owing to sundry wrong turnings, ere she found herself on a summit

commanding the long-sought-for vale, the Valley of the Great Dairies, the valley in

which milk and butter grew to rankness, and

were produced more profusely, if less delicately, than at her home--the verdant

plain so well watered by the river Var or Froom.

It was intrinsically different from the Vale of Little Dairies, Blackmoor Vale,

which, save during her disastrous sojourn at Trantridge, she had exclusively known

till now.

The world was drawn to a larger pattern here.

The enclosures numbered fifty acres instead of ten, the farmsteads were more extended,

the groups of cattle formed tribes hereabout; there only families.

These myriads of cows stretching under her eyes from the far east to the far west

outnumbered any she had ever seen at one glance before.

The green lea was speckled as thickly with them as a canvas by Van Alsloot or Sallaert

with burghers.

The ripe hue of the red and dun kine absorbed the evening sunlight, which the

white-coated animals returned to the eye in rays almost dazzling, even at the distant

elevation on which she stood.

The bird's-eye perspective before her was not so luxuriantly beautiful, perhaps, as

that other one which she knew so well; yet it was more cheering.

It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the rival vale, and its heavy soils and

scents; the new air was clear, bracing, ethereal.

The river itself, which nourished the grass and cows of these renowned dairies, flowed

not like the streams in Blackmoor.

Those were slow, silent, often turbid; flowing over beds of mud into which the

incautious wader might sink and vanish unawares.

The Froom waters were clear as the pure River of Life shown to the Evangelist,

rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day

long.

There the water-flower was the lily; the crow-foot here.

Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to light, or the sense of being

amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes upon her, sent up her

spirits wonderfully.

Her hopes mingled with the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as

she bounded along against the soft south wind.

She heard a pleasant voice in every breeze, and in every bird's note seemed to lurk a

joy.

Her face had latterly changed with changing states of mind, continually fluctuating

between beauty and ordinariness, according as the thoughts were gay or grave.

One day she was pink and flawless; another pale and tragical.

When she was pink she was feeling less than when pale; her more perfect beauty accorded

with her less elevated mood; her more intense mood with her less perfect beauty.

It was her best face physically that was now set against the south wind.

The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet pleasure somewhere,

which pervades all life, from the meanest to the highest, had at length mastered

Tess.

Being even now only a young woman of twenty, one who mentally and sentimentally

had not finished growing, it was impossible that any event should have left upon her an

impression that was not in time capable of transmutation.

And thus her spirits, and her thankfulness, and her hopes, rose higher and higher.

She tried several ballads, but found them inadequate; till, recollecting the psalter

that her eyes had so often wandered over of a Sunday morning before she had eaten of

the tree of knowledge, she chanted: "O ye Sun and Moon ...

O ye Stars ... ye Green Things upon the Earth ... ye Fowls of the Air ...

Beasts and Cattle ...

Children of Men ... bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever!"

She suddenly stopped and murmured: "But perhaps I don't quite know the Lord as

yet."