The only exercise that Tess took at this time was
after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods,
that she seemed least solitary. She knew how
to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening
when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced
that the constraint of day and the suspense of night
neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.
It is then that the plight of being alive becomes
attenuated to its least possible dimensions.
She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed
to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold
accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the
mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.
On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide
was of a piece with the element she moved in.
Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral
part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy
would intensify natural processes around her till they
seemed a part of her own story. Rather they
became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological
phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The
midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped
buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of
bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression
of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind
of some vague ethical being whom she could not class
definitely as the God of her childhood, and could
not comprehend as any other.
But this encompassment of her own characterization,
based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms
and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken
creation of Tess’s fancy—a cloud of
moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without
reason. It was they that were out of harmony
with the actual world, not she. Walking among
the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping
rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden
bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt
intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But
all the while she was making a distinction where there
was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism,
she was quite in accord. She had been made to
break an accepted social law, but no law known to
the environment in which she fancied herself such
an anomaly.
XIV
It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser
nocturnal vapours, attacked by the warm beams, were
dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces within
hollows and coverts, where they waited till they should
be dried away to nothing.
The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient,
personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for
its adequate expression. His present aspect,
coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene,
explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment.
One could feel that a saner religion had never prevailed
under the sky. The luminary was a golden-haired,
beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down
in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth
that was brimming with interest for him.
