第46章

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 how 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-stroked, 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.

Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other's character and moods without attempting to pry into each other's history.

Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her nature, and to her one more of his.Tess was trying to lead a repressed life, but she little divined the strength of her own vitality.

At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather than as a man.As such she compared him with herself; and at every discovery of the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance between her own modest mental standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean altitude of his, she became quite dejected, disheartened from all further effort on her own part whatever.

He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece.She was gathering the buds called `lords and ladies' from the bank while he spoke.

`Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?' he asked.

`Oh, 'tis only - about my own self,' she said, with a frail laugh of sadness, fitfully beginning to peel `a lady' meanwhile.`Just a sense of what might have been with me! My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am! I'm like the poor Queen of Sheba who lived in the Bible.There is no more spirit in me.'

`Bless my soul, don't go troubling about that! Why,' he said with some enthusiasm, `I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help you to anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you would like to take up--'

`It is a lady again,' interrupted she, holding out the bud she had peeled.

`What?'

`I meant that there are always more ladies than lords when you come to peel them.'

`Never mind about the lords and ladies.Would you like to take up any course of study - history, for example?'

`Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about it than Iknow already.'

`Why not?'

`Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only - finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all.

The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings `I'll be like thousands' and thousands'.'

`What, really, then, you don't want to learn anything?'

`I shouldn't mind learning why - why the sun do shine on the just and the unjust alike,' she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice.`But that's what books will not tell me.'