Corn and swedes are all they grow.
Though I be here myself, I feel 'tis a pity for such as you to come."
"But you used to be as good a dairywoman as I."
"Yes; but I've got out o' that since I took to drink.
Lord, that's the only comfort I've got now!
If you engage, you'll be set swede-hacking.
That's what I be doing; but you won't like it."
"O-anything!
Will you speak for me?"
"You will do better by speaking for yourself."
"Very well.
Now, Marian, remember-nothing about HIM if I get the place.
I don't wish to bring his name down to the dirt."
Marian, who was really a trustworthy girl though of coarser grain than Tess, promised anything she asked.
"This is pay-night," she said, "and if you were to come with me you would know at once.
I be real sorry that you are not happy; but 'tis because he's away, I know.
You couldn't be unhappy if he were here, even if he gie'd ye no money-even if he used you like a drudge."
"That's true; I could not!"
They walked on together and soon reached the farmhouse, which was almost sublime in its dreariness.
There was not a tree within sight; there was not, at this season, a green pasture-nothing but fallow and turnips everywhere, in large fields divided by hedges plashed to unrelieved levels.
Tess waited outside the door of the farmhouse till the group of workfolk had received their wages, and then Marian introduced her.
The farmer himself, it appeared, was not at home, but his wife, who represented him this evening, made no objection to hiring Tess, on her agreeing to remain till Old Lady-Day.
Female field-labour was seldom offered now, and its cheapness made it profitable for tasks which women could perform as readily as men.
Having signed the agreement, there was nothing more for Tess to do at present than to get a lodging, and she found one in the house at whose gable-wall she had warmed herself.
It was a poor subsistence that she had ensured, but it would afford a shelter for the winter at any rate.
That night she wrote to inform her parents of her new address, in case a letter should arrive at Marlott from her husband.
But she did not tell them of the sorriness of her situation: it might have brought reproach upon him.
XLIII
There was no exaggeration in Marian's definition of Flintcomb-Ash farm as a starve-acre place.
The single fat thing on the soil was Marian herself; and she was an importation.
Of the three classes of village, the village cared for by its lord, the village cared for by itself, and the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord (in other words, the village of a resident squires's tenantry, the village of free- or copy-holders, and the absentee-owner's village, farmed with the land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the third.
But Tess set to work.
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel Clare; and it sustained her.
The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was a stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground of the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets-the outcrop of siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes.
The upper half of each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also.
Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of skin.
The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone.
So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface of the former like flies.
Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in Hessian "wroppers"-sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom, to keep their gowns from blowing about-scant skirts revealing boots that reached high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets.
The pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of the two Marys.
They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of their lot.
Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist in a dream.
In the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said that they need not work any more. But if they did not work they would not be paid; so they worked on.
It was so high a situation, this field, that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till they were wet through. Tess had not known till now what was really meant by that.
There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is called being wet through in common talk.
But to stand working slowly in a field, and feel the creep of rain-water, first in legs and shoulders, then on hips and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to work on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down, demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.
Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be supposed.
They were both young, and they were talking of the time when they lived and loved together at Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of land where summer had been liberal in her gifts; in substance to all, emotionally to these.
Tess would fain not have conversed with Marian of the man who was legally, if not actually, her husband; but the irresistible fascination of the subject betrayed her into reciprocating Marian's remarks.
And thus, as has been said, though the damp curtains of their bonnets flapped smartly into their faces, and their wrappers clung about them to wearisomeness, they lived all this afternoon in memories of green, sunny, romantic Talbothays.