IX
The community of fowls to which Tess had been appointed as supervisor, purveyor, nurse, surgeon, and friend made its headquarters in an old thatched cottage standing in an enclosure that had once been a garden, but was now a trampled and sanded square. The house was overrun with ivy, its chimney being enlarged by the boughs of the parasite to the aspect of a ruined tower. The lower rooms were entirely given over to the birds, who walked about them with a proprietary air, as though the place had been built by themselves, and not by certain dusty copyholders who now lay east and west in the churchyard. The descendants of these bygone owners felt it almost as a slight to their family when the house which had so much of their affection, had cost so much of their forefathers’ money, and had been in their possession for several generations before the d’Urbervilles came and built here, was indifferently turned into a fowl-house by Mrs Stoke-d’Urberville as soon as the property fell into hand according to law. “’Twas good enough for Christians in grandfather’s time,” they said.
The rooms wherein dozens of infants had wailed at their nursing now resounded with the tapping of nascent chicks. Distracted hens in coops occupied spots where formerly stood chairs supporting sedate agriculturists. The chimney-corner and once-blazing hearth was now filled with inverted beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs; while out of doors the plots that each succeeding householder had carefully shaped with his spade were torn by the cocks in wildest fashion.
The garden in which the cottage stood was surrounded by a wall, and could only be entered through a door.
When Tess had occupied herself about an hour the next morning in altering and improving the arrangements, according to her skilled ideas as the daughter of a professed poulterer, the door in the wall opened and a servant in white cap and apron entered. She had come from the manor-house.
“Mrs d’Urberville wants the fowls as usual,” she said; but perceiving that Tess did not quite understand, she explained, “Mis’ess is a old lady, and blind.”
“Blind!” said Tess.
Almost before her misgiving at the news could find time to shape itself she took, under her companion’s direction, two of the most beautiful of the Hamburghs in her arms, and followed the maid-servant, who had likewise taken two, to the adjacent mansion, which, though ornate and imposing, showed traces everywhere on this side that some occupant of its chambers could bend to the love of dumb creatures feathers floating within view of the front, and hen-coops standing on the grass.
In a sitting-room on the ground-floor, ensconced in an armchair with her back to the light, was the owner and mistress of the estate, a white-haired woman of not more than sixty, or even less, wearing a large cap. She had the mobile face frequent in those whose sight has decayed by stages, has been laboriously striven after, and reluctantly let go, rather than the stagnant mien apparent in persons long sightless or born blind. Tess walked up to this lady with her feathered charges one sitting on each arm.
“Ah, you are the young woman come to look after my birds?” said Mrs d’Urberville, recognizing a new footstep. “I hope you will be kind to them. My bailiff tells me you are quite the proper person. Well, where are they? Ah, this is Strut! But he is hardly so lively to-day, is he? He is alarmed at being handled by a stranger, I suppose. And Phena too yes, they are a little frightened aren’t you, dears? But they will soon get used to you.”
While the old lady had been speaking Tess and the other maid, in obedience to her gestures, had placed the fowls severally in her lap, and she had felt them over from head to tail, examining their beaks, their combs, the manes of the cocks, their wings, and their claws. Her touch enabled her to recognize them in a moment, and to discover if a single feather were crippled or draggled. She handled their crops, and knew what they had eaten, and if too little or too much; her face enacting a vivid pantomime of the criticisms passing in her mind.
The birds that the two girls had brought in were duly returned to the yard, and the process was repeated till all the pet cocks and hens had been submitted to the old woman Hamburghs, Bantams, Cochins, Brahmas, Dorkings, and such other sorts as were in fashion just then her perception of each visitor being seldom at fault as she received the bird upon her knees.
It reminded Tess of a Confirmation, in which Mrs d’Urberville was the bishop, the fowls the young people presented, and herself and the maid-servant the parson and curate of the parish bringing them up. At the end of the ceremony Mrs d’Urberville abruptly asked Tess, wrinkling and twitching her face into undulations, “Can you whistle?”
“Whistle, Ma’am?”
“Yes, whistle tunes.”
Tess could whistle like most other country-girls, though the accomplishment was one which she did not care to profess in genteel company. However, she blandly admitted that such was the fact.
“Then you will have to practise it every day. I had a lad who did it very well, but he has left. I want you to whistle to my bullfinches; as I cannot see them, I like to hear them, and we teach ’em airs that way. Tell her where the cages are, Elizabeth. You must begin to-morrow, or they will go back in their piping. They have been neglected these several days.”
“Mr d’Urberville whistled to ’em this morning, ma’am,” said Elizabeth.
“He! Pooh!”
The old lady’s face creased into furrows of repugnance, and she made no further reply.
Thus the reception of Tess by her fancied kinswoman terminated, and the birds were taken back to their quarters. The girl’s surprise at Mrs d’Urberville’s manner was not great; for since seeing the size of the house she had expected no more. But she was far from being aware that the old lady had never heard a word of the so-called kinship. She gathered that no great affection flowed between the blind woman and her son. But in that, too, she was mistaken. Mrs d’Urberville was not the first mother compelled to love her offspring resentfully, and to be bitterly fond.
In spite of the unpleasant initiation of the day before, Tess inclined to the freedom and novelty of her new position in the morning when the sun shone, now that she was once installed there; and she was curious to test her powers in the unexpected direction asked of her, so as to ascertain her chance of retaining her post. As soon as she was alone within the walled garden she sat herself down on a coop, and seriously screwed up her mouth for the long-neglected practice. She found her former ability to have degenerated to the production of a hollow rush of wind through the lips, and no clear note at all.
She remained fruitlessly blowing and blowing, wondering how she could have so grown out of the art which had come by nature, till she became aware of a movement among the ivy-boughs which cloaked the garden-wall no less then the cottage. Looking that way she beheld a form springing from the coping to the plot. It was Alec d’Urberville, whom she had not set eyes on since he had conducted her the day before to the door of the gardener’s cottage where she had lodgings.
“Upon my honour!” cried he, “there was never before such a beautiful thing in Nature or Art as you look, ‘Cousin’ Tess (‘Cousin’ had a faint ring of mockery). I have been watching you from over the wall sitting like Im-patience on a monument, and pouting up that pretty red mouth to whistling shape, and whooing and whooing, and privately swearing, and never being able to produce a note. Why, you are quite cross because you can’t do it.”
“I may be cross, but I didn’t swear.”
“Ah! I understand why you are trying those bullies! My mother wants you to carry on their musical education. How selfish of her! As if attending to these curst cocks and hens here were not enough work for any girl. I would flatly refuse, if I were you.”
“But she wants me particularly to do it, and to be ready by to-morrow morning.”
“Does she? Well then I’ll give you a lesson or two.”
“Oh no, you won’t!” said Tess, withdrawing towards the door.
“Nonsense; I don’t want to touch you. See I’ll stand on this side of the wire-netting, and you can keep on the other; so you may feel quite safe. Now, look here; you screw up your lips too harshly. There ’tis so.”
He suited the action to the word, and whistled a line of “Take, O take those lips away.” But the allusion was lost upon Tess.
“Now try,” said d’Urberville.
She attempted to look reserved; her face put on a sculptural severity. But he persisted in his demand, and at last, to get rid of him, she did put up her lips as directed for producing a clear note; laughing distressfully, however, and then blushing with vexation that she had laughed.
He encouraged her with “Try again!”
Tess was quite serious, painfully serious by this time; and she tried ultimately and unexpectedly emitting a real round sound. The momentary pleasure of success got the better of her; her eyes enlarged, and she involuntarily smiled in his face.
“That’s it! Now I have started you you’ll go on beautifully. There I said I would not come near you; and, in spite of such temptation as never before fell to mortal man, I’ll keep my word.... Tess, do you think my mother a queer old soul?”
“I don’t know much of her yet, sir.”
“You’ll find her so; she must be, to make you learn to whistle to her bullfinches. I am rather out of her books just now, but you will be quite in favour if you treat her live-stock well. Good morning. If you meet with any difficulties and want help here, don’t go to the bailiff, come to me.”
It was in the economy of this régime that Tess Durbeyfield had undertaken to fill a place. Her first day’s experiences were fairly typical of those which followed through many succeeding days. A familiarity with Alec d’Urberville’s presence which that young man carefully cultivated in her by playful dialogue, and by jestingly calling her his cousin when they were alone removed much of her original shyness of him, without, however, implanting any feeling which could engender shyness of a new and tenderer kind. But she was more pliable under his hands than a mere companionship would have made her, owing to her unavoidable dependence upon his mother, and, through that lady’s comparative helplessness, upon him.
She soon found that whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs d’Urberville’s room was no such onerous business when she had regained the art, for she had caught from her musical mother numerous airs that suited those songsters admirably. A far more satisfactory time than when she practised in the garden was this whistling by the cages each morning. Unrestrained by the young man’s presence she threw up her mouth, put her lips near the bars, and piped away in easeful grace to the attentive listeners.
Mrs d’Urberville slept in a large four-post bedstead hung with heavy damask curtains, and the bullfinches occupied the same apartment, where they flitted about freely at certain hours, and made little white spots on the furniture and upholstery. Once while Tess was at the window where the cages were ranged, giving her lesson as usual, she thought she heard a rustling behind the bed. The old lady was not present, and turning round the girl had an impression that the toes of a pair of boots were visible below the fringe of the curtains. Thereupon her whistling became so disjointed that the listener, if such there were, must have discovered her suspicion of his presence. She searched the curtains every morning after that, but never found anybody within them. Alec d’Urberville had evidently thought better of his freak to terrify her by an ambush of that kind.