She felt the petite mort at this unexpectedly
gruesome information, and left the solitary man behind
her. It was dusk when she drew near to Flintcomb-Ash,
and in the lane at the entrance to the hamlet she
approached a girl and her lover without their observing
her. They were talking no secrets, and the clear
unconcerned voice of the young woman, in response
to the warmer accents of the man, spread into the
chilly air as the one soothing thing within the dusky
horizon, full of a stagnant obscurity upon which nothing
else intruded. For a moment the voices cheered
the heart of Tess, till she reasoned that this interview
had its origin, on one side or the other, in the same
attraction which had been the prelude to her own tribulation.
When she came close, the girl turned serenely and
recognized her, the young man walking off in embarrassment.
The woman was Izz Huett, whose interest in Tess’s
excursion immediately superseded her own proceedings.
Tess did not explain very clearly its results, and
Izz, who was a girl of tact, began to speak of her
own little affair, a phase of which Tess had just
witnessed.
“He is Amby Seedling, the chap who used to sometimes
come and help at Talbothays,” she explained
indifferently. “He actually inquired and
found out that I had come here, and has followed me.
He says he’s been in love wi’ me these
two years. But I’ve hardly answered him.”
XLVI
Several days had passed since her futile journey,
and Tess was afield. The dry winter wind still
blew, but a screen of thatched hurdles erected in
the eye of the blast kept its force away from her.
On the sheltered side was a turnip-slicing machine,
whose bright blue hue of new paint seemed almost vocal
in the otherwise subdued scene. Opposite its
front was a long mound or “grave”, in which
the roots had been preserved since early winter.
Tess was standing at the uncovered end, chopping
off with a bill-hook the fibres and earth from each
root, and throwing it after the operation into the
slicer. A man was turning the handle of the machine,
and from its trough came the newly-cut swedes, the
fresh smell of whose yellow chips was accompanied
by the sounds of the snuffling wind, the smart swish
of the slicing-blades, and the choppings of the hook
in Tess’s leather-gloved hand.
The wide acreage of blank agricultural brownness,
apparent where the swedes had been pulled, was beginning
to be striped in wales of darker brown, gradually
broadening to ribands. Along the edge of each
of these something crept upon ten legs, moving without
haste and without rest up and down the whole length
of the field; it was two horses and a man, the plough
going between them, turning up the cleared ground
for a spring sowing.
