Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue,
sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow
as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse
pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often
the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man
the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand
years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain
to our sense of order. One may, indeed, admit
the possibility of a retribution lurking in the present
catastrophe. Doubtless some of Tess d’Urberville’s
mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray had dealt
the same measure even more ruthlessly towards peasant
girls of their time. But though to visit the
sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality
good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average
human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter.
As Tess’s own people down in those retreats
are never tired of saying among each other in their
fatalistic way: “It was to be.”
There lay the pity of it. An immeasurable social
chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality
thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped
from her mother’s door to try her fortune at
Trantridge poultry-farm.
END OF PHASE THE FIRST
Phase the Second: Maiden No More
XII
The basket was heavy and the bundle was large, but
she lugged them along like a person who did not find
her especial burden in material things. Occasionally
she stopped to rest in a mechanical way by some gate
or post; and then, giving the baggage another hitch
upon her full round arm, went steadily on again.
It was a Sunday morning in late October, about four
months after Tess Durbeyfield’s arrival at Trantridge,
and some few weeks subsequent to the night ride in
The Chase. The time was not long past daybreak,
and the yellow luminosity upon the horizon behind her
back lighted the ridge towards which her face was
set—the barrier of the vale wherein she
had of late been a stranger—which she would
have to climb over to reach her birthplace.
The ascent was gradual on this side, and the soil
and scenery differed much from those within Blakemore
Vale. Even the character and accent of the two
peoples had shades of difference, despite the amalgamating
effects of a roundabout railway; so that, though less
than twenty miles from the place of her sojourn at
Trantridge, her native village had seemed a far-away
spot. The field-folk shut in there traded northward
and westward, travelled, courted, and married northward
and westward, thought northward and westward; those
on this side mainly directed their energies and attention
to the east and south.
